alchemicink

Feeling better this week, but still in pain. Hopefully the doctor figures it out soon because I'm very tired of this 😩

But on the bright side, I was able to enjoy a few more things this week. Let's dive in:

Spent two days marathoning through the new live action One Piece with my brother! We both really enjoyed it (even though my brother said beforehand that he was just gonna hate-watch it lol. It was so good, he couldn't even be mad about it.)

My previous experience with One Piece was the terrible 4kids version back in 2006-ish? I don't remember the exact years now lol. So I am familiar with all the characters but I definitely did not remember the details of the earliest story arcs. So it was fun to watch the live action version without knowing exactly how everything was going to play out.

There are a lot of things to love about this version of One Piece. The casting, obviously, was stellar all around. Iñaki Godoy is extremely charming as Luffy, and I felt like everyone else did an excellent job bringing their characters to life too.

I really enjoyed the costuming and designs as well. Plenty of live action adaptations will change character designs to be more muted and realistic. But I'm glad this show kept all the weird hair colors and didn't shy away from colorful outfits. Maybe some people will say it's a little campy, but I thought it was the right choice. And I appreciated that the fishmen were in physical makeup instead of CGI. I'm old-fashioned and wish more productions would use less CGI.

Lastly, I thought the fight scenes were coordinated well. I feel like a lot of big Hollywood action movies in recent years have been terrible at staging fights in any sort of coherent way. But the fights here were easy to follow and quite entertaining.

All in all, it was an engaging first season. I'm ready for more as soon as possible! (Fingers crossed for a renewal from Netflix and that the strikes end soon.)

(If I get a chance to rewatch the series, I may write a more in-depth spoilery review sometime)

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Haven't been able to focus much on writing lately, but I did manage to finish an ochamina fic that's been sitting in my gdocs for over a year. It was like 99 percent done, so all I did was write the last two paragraphs and slap a title on it to post 😅

Here it is if anyone's interested in this rarepair: Facade

I'm trying to work on some other WIPs this week too, but I may be too tired to focus. We'll see how it goes.

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A couple of music recs this week:

HSJ's weekly video is another concert performance. This is 切なさひかえるに which is a nice little ballad from one of their older albums.

There's nothing really exciting about this performance unless you're like me and enjoy looking at the details of their outfits 😅 but the song is really lovely at least.

Gacharic Spin is also promoting one of their recent concerts with this really fun performance of A LALA

Who's having the most fun in this video? Trick question. The answer is all of them! I've watched this video so many times in the past two days. It's just a lot of fun positive energy. I wish they had included subtitles!

Lastly, following the trend this week, Nemophilia also shared a concert performance of Seize the Fate. It's a great performance, though not nearly as energetic as Gacharic Spin (but who is? 😂). The bass and guitar solos are fantastic ♡

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That's a wrap for this week! I've been on a break from watching stuff to catch up on reading, but I might have time to jump back into things soon. I'm currently stuck in the procrastination phase of "I'm really enjoying this so much that I have to stop watching because I'll be sad if I finish it and then have no episodes left to watch" 😂

Wishing everyone an excellent week ahead!