I have managed to check out a couple of the new shows, though I have been staying clear of the leaked series so far. Some quick thoughts:

• Bartender - Really enjoyed the first episode. Seems like it is going to be a quality iyashikei.
• 7th Prince - Interesting first episode. Lots of fan service as expected, I am hoping that the magic/combat visuals can hold up. The first episode was promising in that regard.
• Spice and Wolf - I never watched the original, so I am looking forward to seeing this one. First episode was slow, but promising.
• GO! GO! Loser Ranger! - Had fun with this one. I hope the production stays nice through the season with an unproven studio.
• Appraisal Aristocrat - Decent start so far. I had forgotten some details from the manga in this early part of the story. Looking forward to more.

Shows continuing from last season:

• Delicious in Dungeon - Great stuff. The mysteries deepen as the show becomes darker in tone.
• Tsukimichi - New OP is chock full of spoilers and promises that the story is going to progress a lot over the second cour.
• Metallic Rouge - The finale aired this past week. What an incredible disappointment of a show. If the synopsis sounds interesting to you, just watch the OP instead, which is the high point of the show by far.

Some quick meta updates from me this week. First, I pushed a couple quick updates to the bot:

• Posting delay - The bot will now post an episode 1 hour after the episode start time. This is to fix issues where the api reports a 0 minute duration of an episode so the bot ended up posting the thread early.
• Nicer messages - I tweaked some of the bot’s responses to pm’s.

I have taken some of the downtime between seasons to try to create some more clips of shows. I have a handful I made (first one was here), and I will be posting those over the next week or two. I am hoping to try to do this more regularly going forward. If anybody wants to make clips but doesn’t know how, I have honed my ffmpeg skills to a fine edge at this point and can help you out.

You might have noticed the bot was quiet all day today until just a couple minutes ago. Turns out that in trying to fix an edge case I had introduced a breaking bug. I quickly patched it and things are working again. The fix is a bit janky since I was editing python code in the github app on my phone, but it seems to be working.

If you run into any issues, let me know. There is a chance that an episode could have been dropped from the database.

I started watching the following so far:

1. Hibike! Euphonium S3: great first ep. So good to see new material and see the characters again.
2. Spice & Wolf remake: decent start. Very similar, though closer to the original novels (though that did throw me for a loop at first, since the original anime version was what I recently rewatched). I could’ve sworn Holo had a new VA, but she doesn’t. I didn’t recognise it. I really like it. Much more youthful and playful.
3. Jellyfish Can’t Swim At Night: great first ep. Really fun.
4. Gods’ Games We Play: meh so far. Male MC is boring, the female MC is fun and the world is intriguing.
5. Arch Demon and Elf Bride: not sure how I feel about the premise, but it’s been alright.
6. Astro Note: this one’s wild, but in a good way. I think.
7. Delicious in Dungeon: continuing from last season. Good stuff.

Will probably check out more at some point, but that’s what I’ve seen so far.

As for non-seasonal stuff: I rewatched Avatar (close enough to anime, so I’m sharing it here) last week. Still really good. 1st season is quite fast paced, but luckily they slow down in the other seasons.

I’ve also finally continued with JoJo. After Part 4 I never really bothered to watch the new ones for some reason, but now I’ve started with Golden Wind. I’m enjoying it, but not as much as Part 4 or Part 2. It’s closer to Part 3 right now, but definitely has the potential.

Hello! Y’all may have seen me around in every new anime thread, lol. Each season I watch the first episode of every anime as blind as I can so that I don’t miss all the weird little gems and also because it makes every new show a little surprise of wildly varying content and quality. I give every premiere a first-impressions rating, based on how much promise I think it has, though I’ll admit I can be pretty off at times. I also have a group of friends I put together an anime tasting menu for when all the shows are out, and we pick out a few to watch together.

For returning shows, this season I only have Dungeon Meshi (which I’m watching with friends), and I’m really eager to see what it has in store for us, since I’ve heard we’re entering the “what the fuck” section of the plot.

For new shows, I’ve got a lot of maybes, but I’m really excited to see more from Wind Breaker and Astro Note, both of which really impressed me.

I came back to the community a bit late for the end-of-season discussions, but I still want to shout out a couple of (imo) underrated shows that just ended:

• Cherry Magic: A lovely adult-oriented romance focused on healthy communication and personal growth. It uses its mind reading premise to tell a story about the desire to know others and be known by them, and the tension between wanting to be loved for your true self and wanting to be seen as the best possible version of yourself. And the anime community would have easily called it an aoty contender if Kurosawa had been a woman.

• Delusional Monthly Magazine: Maybe it’s just my weird taste, but this was a blast, start to finish. The adventures were wacky and fun. The plot twists were nuts. One episode had an unexplained dance number. Absolutely phenomenal.

Edit: All synced back up

Hey all, bit of a meta update. Currently there are ongoing issues with federation between lemmy.world and ani.social (as well as a bunch of other instances that are falling behind .world). Currently, ani.social is about 9 hours behind world in federation activities. However, the reverse isn’t true. Activities on ani.social are federating out to world promptly like normal. So, it is entirely possible that community members on lemmy.world might see things like duplicate posts that no other members of the community might see.

Going forward, this issue should resolve itself. The root cause actually comes down to a couple different bugs combining for a worst-case scenario. The flood of activity that world is federating out is being caused by a bug in kbin in which some users’ actions are being repeatedly performed over and over again, much faster than instances can process those actions. Combining this flood of activity with a bug in lemmy in which federation activities are sensitive to small increases in latency between servers yields an issue in which instances that are not geographically close to lemmy.world (in Finland), are unable to keep up.

I am not a dev by trade, but have been lurking in the matrix channels where these issues have been discussed. The good news is that lemmy.world has temporarily blocked traffic from kbin.social in order to stem the tide. However, this essentially prevents kbin users from interacting with the largest lemmy instance which is not ideal.

In any case, just wanted to update people on why some weird things have been happening the past day or so.

Is anyone else on the “0 comments” watch?

A couple of shows are so bad, that I hope they get 0 comments that week so rikka can drop their next episode discussion thread.

Other shows, that I’m rooting for, and I haven’t had a chance to watch yet, I’m going “C’mon, someone make a comment!”