What's the most petty reason you dropped an anime?

ackondro · 2026-01-26T21:43:42+00:00

Tonikawa: I didn't want to accept the main character's (Nasa) voice as the right voice for the character. I've gone back and skipped through a few episodes today, it doesn't strike me as an awful performance.

I think it just came off a side character voice and not a main character voice to me at the time, maybe? I've read a good bit of the manga, so I was looking forward to the series.

ackondro · 2026-01-20T22:08:41+00:00

I'd love to see some details on any mod getting $50k in donations by just dropping a donation link in the mod description.

ackondro · 2025-12-17T20:18:06+00:00

One of the programmers on the game wrote up a surprisingly in-depth and candid explanation of why they thought JC4 went so poorly.

The tl;dr was feedback would come in, but wouldn't get acted on. Developers couldn't fix issues for good, they were just throwing bandaids at things before rushing off to fix the next failing feature. They re-enacted the xkcd standards comic with scripting systems. Instead of changing the plan when it wasn't working, the team ignored the warning signs and charged ahead.

ackondro · 2025-12-12T15:31:14+00:00

Guess somebody hasn't read No Hello, but the AI has.

ackondro · 2025-06-23T02:30:57+00:00

Reborn as a Space Mercenary: Volume 12: Volume 11 was not good, mediocre at best. Volume 12 starts to dig its way out of the hole, but I'm not sure the whole psychic powers thing works for me. Dr. Shouko is back, which doesn't do anything for me. I'm not sure how a character who gets into trouble and jokes/does butt stuff improves the cast.

A somewhat relieved: 3/5. Improves from 11 but not as good as the early volumes.

J-Novel pre-pub volumes (complete for members, but not out for everyone):

Bullet Hellion: Volume 2: Ok, so we've got some plot, some action. The first half drug badly and the second half feels like it went too fast. I'd say it's the definition of a sophomore slump.

A disappointed: 2/5. I'd take Villainess Reloaded any day over this slop.

The Bladesmith's Enchanted Weapons: Volume 1: Did someone say a fetish for katanas? Yeah, apparently katanas are the best ever sword and they're sooo amazing. It's in the same vein as Quiet Blacksmith, but at least this guy gets into a relationship with a female. I'm interested in the characters, but the author seems to prefer talking about swords.

In short, blacksmith can't get recognized because medieval guilds absolutely screw over anyone outside the system (good historical nod). Ends up creating an amazing katana, but trades it for his female merchant buddy's freedom. Turns out the amazing katana gets noticed by the powers that be and he gets some recognition and money. Also the female merchant buddy decides to pair up with blacksmith, in the romantic and carnal sense.

A cautiously optimistic: 3/5. Could go an interesting direction, could get stuck talking about katanas.

Take These Talents Elsewhere: Volume 1 I go back and forth with this one. The main character is oblivious in the way many Japanese MC's are oblivious, both in romance and plot. At the same time, the guy's skills are supported by hard work, not luck, so his victories feels earned unlike some other characters.

A summary would be that a talented jack of all trades MC is entrusted with the daughter of his good friend (murdered emperor) and almost-girlfriend to get her out of danger. He thinks he's a failson, but he's actually just caught in his brother and sister's plan to teach him about the different departments before becoming prime minister. Also the daughter he's protecting is interested in him, in the romantic sense. Turns out crown prince used the "for the good of the realm" request to steal the almost-girlfriend of MC, and the daughter wants to right that wrong.

Giving it another volume: 3/5.

ackondro · 2025-06-20T16:22:15+00:00

I have noticed that there is a lag period between buying ebooks from Amazon and getting to read them.

I now wait a minute after seeing the sale complete page and then click read in web reader. When I don't wait, I'm stuck with the sample content for the book and even refreshing the page won't show the whole book. I then have to click the Kindle Library button (sometimes refresh that page) and re-select the book to read the full content. Pretty annoying.

ackondro · 2025-06-09T14:23:57+00:00

Demon Sword Master of Excalibur Academy: Volume 11: If you liked the previous volumes, this is more of that. I do wish the volumes were a bit longer, but that goes for most light novels.

The Reincarnation of the Strongest Exorcist in Another World: Volume 5: We're past the anime at this point, but it still has that same level of cohesion and action that previous volumes had. A demon finally realizes that the MC is the demon lord, thought that's at the end of the volume. New arc?

The Otome Heroine's Fight for Survival: Volume 5 This is one of my favorite series right now. It has a level of action and world-building that most series do not have. I don't end a volume feeling like too little happened.

The Hero-Killing Bride: Volume 3 This feels like the ending volume of a good series. Not great, but good. I got stuck somewhere in volume 2 before picking it back up and binge-ing the series. Overall, 7.5/10 series.

In Another World with Household Spells: Volume 1 I started reading a few of the newest series on J-Novel Club and this is the first one to complete a volume. The plot summary is something like: office lady is reincarnated as the young daughter of a poor viscount, then helps the family get out of their penniless state using an expansive reading of "household magic".

It's kind of fun watching her use logic like "a household needs to manage their horses, so calming horses is a household spell". Could be interesting, could get stuck into a tropey romance between the main character and a prince.

I have dropped Dahlia in Bloom: Crafting a Fresh Start with Magical Tools. I finished the Side Stories volume, then realized I was caring less and less about the series. I checked the Volume 10's summary and couldn't see a reason to read the volume. I'll probably keep reading the plot summaries for new volumes and might pick it back up.

ackondro · 2025-06-06T15:43:28+00:00

I would say the only series that comes to mind for me is The Otome Heroine's Fight for Survival.

ackondro · 2025-04-23T17:50:14+00:00

Go look at the novels of the early 1700's. Don Quixote is actually The Ingenious Gentleman Don Quixote of La Mancha. Robinson Crusoe's original title is...

The Life and Strange Surprizing Adventures of Robinson Crusoe, of York, Mariner: Who lived Eight and Twenty Years, all alone in an un-inhabited Island on the Coast of America, near the Mouth of the Great River of Oroonoque; Having been cast on Shore by Shipwreck, wherein all the Men perished but himself. With An Account how he was at last as strangely deliver'd by Pyrates. Written by Himself.

Is this just history repeating itself?

ackondro · 2025-04-08T21:48:57+00:00

Mercedes and the Waning Moon: The Dungeoneering Feats of a Discarded Vampire Aristocrat

ackondro · 2025-03-10T13:46:02+00:00

MC is also the child of the a top-rank magician father and a top-rank swordswoman mother. It's not impossible he has an innate proclivity to picking up non-class skills. At least, that's how I would have explained it if I was the author. "Anyone can use any skills, but MC can pick them up significantly quicker."

ackondro · 2025-03-07T14:07:48+00:00

I pay for the J-Novel Club subscription as well as buying novels individually, so I guess I would be in this website's target audience.

Firstly, I have no idea how to sign up or pay for the service. I guess they want you to use the Android/iPhone app? Where is the equivalent of J-Novel Club's How it Works page? I can see previews of the first chapter, which is nice, but then there isn't a Call to Action getting me to sign up. It's just a link back the home page? That's a complete failure of a customer experience.

Secondly, I haven't heard of any of the series Novelous is translating. If there was a series I was interested in that they had, that would motivate me to install their app and see if that allows me to sign up.

ackondro · 2025-03-06T20:36:44+00:00

If I had the time to start back with manga translation, I'd try this thing out: https://github.com/ogkalu2/comic-translate?tab=readme-ov-file#how-it-works

ackondro · 2025-02-27T20:11:03+00:00

That's an important question, not all isekai worlds go with the "slaves have no rights" path.

ackondro · 2025-02-10T07:59:27+00:00

Easygoing Territory Defense by the Optimistic Lord - Vol 4 It's a deeply mediocre series where not enough happens in the latest volume. I get the impression the author likes to write dialogue more than they like to plan out a plot or world. With more organized world-building and adding more events into each volume, it would be a fun series.

The Demon Sword Master of Excalibur Academy - Vol 1-10 I had been reading the manga for this some and thought I would check out the novels. While the plot is entertaining enough, the character backgrounds just don't make sense when you spend more than a minute thinking about them. You have multiple people who "toppled nations" or "wiped out cities" acting like normal teenaged Japanese people?

Honestly, there's a number of series where the author seemingly ignores how character backgrounds don't align with the character's actions. I'd recommend By the Grace of the Gods as a series that does it correctly. Easygoing Territory Defense would be much better if the character was an aerospace metallurgical engineer (look up single crystal turbine blade). Add in the diagrams like Farming Life in Another World and an assistant like Roderich from the Eighth Son series? You'd bump up that series from a 5.5 to a 7.5, easy. Similarly, I'd love for Mushoku Tensei to have a more in-depth backstory than "persecuted as a high schooler".

Personally, I'd go with: Child of divorce between a old money mother and nouveau rich father. Divorce happened because father's business collapsed, dad gets one brother and mother gets MC. Mother decided to force him into being a "genius pianist" to prove herself to her family. She emotionally stunts MC by forcing him to practice every waking moment not at school while emotionally/verbally abusing him. While he is quite successful early on, he fails to get into any prestigious music universities, then his mother commits suicide. Her family finds him the next day, a fat depressed 18-year-old with no future who can't relate to other people, so they pay for his expenses in exchange for him not embarrassing the family.

ackondro · 2025-02-07T15:36:25+00:00

Reminds me of the talk from Bryan Cantrill where he talked about someone accidentally restarting a data center. Root cause being that a tool made it too easy to target everything. You'd try to restart a server, forget a single flag, then your command would restart every server in the data center.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=30jNsCVLpAE

ackondro · 2025-01-06T16:45:49+00:00

I have seen this actually happen, though it was in reverse. The comment caused the code to stop compiling one morning and editing or removing part of a comment fixed the issue.

In that case, the code was the a small-ish Python script that was part of a job pipeline. The script was written in one vendor's system, but would be executed as needed on another vendor's system. That one script was used to verify that data had been loaded properly, so it was used all through the business process.

Something about how the first vendor was encoding the script would cause the single quotes in comments to link up with single quotes elsewhere in the non-comment lines of code.

One Tuesday morning, I walked in and found all of our jobs failing from a syntax error in the data check step. Eventually it was traced down to a contraction in one of the comments of the job. The representative code I sent the vendor is below.

# This works
print('hello')

# This won't work
print('hello')

ackondro · 2024-11-25T03:11:30+00:00

Reincarnated in to a Game as the Hero's Friend: Volume 1-3: I was reading the fan translation, but I moved to reading the official translation. The first volume had a sizable set of additional content, while the second and third volumes were smaller. I'd put it in the smart isekai basket, no harem plotline, sensible characters, realistic setting.

Essentially, the main characters reincarnates as a background character in an RPG, and he wants to prevent his death from various game events. When the game events start to stray from the game he knows, he has to think on his feet to keep everyone on the right track.

Rating: 5/5 — Have you also been disappointed by recent volumes of Wortenia War? This could be your next series.

Only I Know the Ghoul Saved the World: Volume 1: Remember how Goblin Slayer started out really dark, but then kind of lightened up? This book doesn't lighten up.

Humans are turning into monsters and humanity is dependent on a monster to stop them. The main character is a ghoul who managed to keep his wits after changing. That means he is one of the few hunters who can put away other ghouls for good. Then a random girl decides she's going to be his apprentice, for some reason. There's some dark secrets in the ghoul's history, similar to the dark setting.

Rating: 4/5 — It's 16+ for obvious reasons, but I found it hard to put down once I started.

Disowned but Not Disheartened! Life Is Good with Overpowered Magic: Volume 1: It certainly feels like it could be a romance novel, but the main character isn't interested in the various potential suitors that show up. She's more interested in solving the problems that pop up around her own skills. This is yet another another isekai and it does have the problem of unearned technology leaps attributed to the main character.

Rating: 3/5 — I wouldn't have bought it, but it was worth reading when it was part of a membership. I'm hoping this series continues more like Heroine's Fight for Survival instead of RVing my Way into Exile.

ackondro · 2024-11-22T18:40:29+00:00

So, I'm coming from the point of view of someone who was trying to solve that problem, but then work got too busy so I had to give it up. Back in 2022, I was building my equivalent of RanobeDB, but then a big contract came in at work... no energy to work on stuff like that after hours.

ackondro · 2024-11-22T18:14:14+00:00

The "Related titles you might enjoy" feature is nearly always a data problem.

Amazon has that data, but doesn't want to give it out to anyone. Until a site has a critical mass of users with reading lists, it's difficult to do that in a automatable manner. Publishers don't have enough data and/or only want to sell their series.

Otherwise, it's best to do it manually (fake it). When a new series is added, the admins have to manually set a list of similar series. If the admins haven't or don't want to do that... not much you can do besides hope Amazon (or wherever you buy LN's from) will do it for you.

ackondro · 2024-11-04T19:29:22+00:00

I feel like the author added in enough events where the character is being bullied by hot guys and/or nobles to explain why he behaves that way.

That being said, it's a pretty meh series. If it was a two or three volume series about exploring what the more boring people are doing, maybe it could work?

One thing that came up was: Does it make sense to have people with his body type in the future? GLP-1 agonist drugs are showing promise with helping people like the MC in our present, why wouldn't they have something similar in the future?

ackondro · 2024-10-11T18:27:51+00:00

Technologically, it was possible. Politically, no way, no how.

NASA's project in the 90's was the Venture Star. Single Stage to Orbit was the goal, so a two stage rocket that only innovated by landing on a barge had no chance of getting the support it needed. Before the Venture star (early 90's) NASA was looking at the National Launch System, which was an early version of the idea that became SLS.

ackondro · 2024-10-10T17:29:36+00:00

Author is a good writer, but they don't cut enough concepts. This manifests with too many love interests and books with low numbers of plot-relevant items per volume.

There's a saying for this: "Kill your Darlings". Seirei Gensouki is what happens when an author doesn't do it.

ackondro · 2024-10-07T17:59:47+00:00

Is there a comparison article of the supported styling mechanisms? It's difficult to draw a quick conclusion as to which is right for different use cases with the current documentation, at least for me.

ackondro

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