Also I don't understand why Sakuma would buy a Mac if she only uses it for writing. I mean, at current exchange prices what she bought is about nine hundred euros, or just over a thousand dollars: you can get a computer for writing for much cheaper than that.

Totally agreed. I mean, I understand there are some things, video-ish things for instance, where there are solid reasons to want a Mac--but writing? Not so much.
But there you go . . . there are sections of the creative community that sort of assume you have to have a Mac because reasons.

Meanwhile, I keep most of what I write on the USB I carry around with me, and back it up when I remember. Not optimum, but it hasn't bitten me yet.

last edited at Nov 28, 2021 1:31AM

You know, nobody's mentioned it the whole time because it's so obvious . . . but it's really rather interesting and quite bizarre the way this mangaka has reimagined angels with the little wings coming out of their frigging heads plus the main wings down around waist level sticking out the sides instead of the traditional out-the-back-around-shoulder-level gig.

Not a fan of Oni being translated as Ogre (personal pet peeve, lol), but otherwise this looks great!

Gotta say I'm with you there. Ogres and Oni are not the same thing. Let me put it this way: If I was reading a Western fantasy book written in English, with a Japanese setting, and it had Oni, they'd call them Oni. I know because I've read several such and that's what they do.
For that matter, I've read at least one manga that did have at least one ogre girl who was in fact a Western ogre (along with an elf girl, an orc girl, a werewolf girl etc) so when I saw "Ogre girl" I was glumly expecting an actual ogre girl.

Ogre is the closest Western mythological analogue, though, and while depictions of either aren't exactly what you'd call rigorously consistent they share a lot of traits and themes.

Another question entirely is why the term should be translated in the first place. Basically anyone who's had any meaningful amount of contact with Japanese popular culture knows what it means after all...

Well, exactly. Sure, if you're going to translate it at all, I guess ogre is what you've got (although I've seen demon, but that has problems too). But why translate it? As I say, an English language book, not translated at all, would almost certainly use the Japanese term.

Hang on, wait, wait, wait. I've sat still for a lot of perversion around Dynasty, but that's just wrong. You don't do strawberries in whisky! Brandy, certainly. Rum maybe. Grand Marnier, absolutely. Vodka if you have nothing better. NOT whisky. Whisky is not a "strawberries" kind of alcohol.

Not a fan of Oni being translated as Ogre (personal pet peeve, lol), but otherwise this looks great!

Gotta say I'm with you there. Ogres and Oni are not the same thing. Let me put it this way: If I was reading a Western fantasy book written in English, with a Japanese setting, and it had Oni, they'd call them Oni. I know because I've read several such and that's what they do.
For that matter, I've read at least one manga that did have at least one ogre girl who was in fact a Western ogre (along with an elf girl, an orc girl, a werewolf girl etc) so when I saw "Ogre girl" I was glumly expecting an actual ogre girl.

"Failure" is so rude. Nowadays we call them "Differently Vampirized".

When I saw the title I was expecting it to be dumber than it is. This is really quite nice so far.

I really wish I could read this but after the first chapter I just can't tell some of these girls apart, as someone said, it took way too much effort to even realize there's multiple :P

C’mon, folks—pay attention:

• Ami-chan: dark hair, just reaches her shoulders, front fringe blocked straight across.

• Ran-san: dark hair, comes somewhat past her shoulders, irregular front fringe.

• Akari-chan: short light hair.

• Yuu-chan: long light hair, eyes droop down.

[Feel free to cut out this post for future reference as you read along.]

And gods forbid we ever get a scene where they all have their hair up. Or we see them from angles where their hair length isn’t obvious.

Kinda contrasts with that gothic lolita fashion one we also just got ch 1 of. Very distinctive, individual character designs there.

That's not quite how I remember the "pocky game" going, but I approve.

Yummy.

She made the quill pen disappear . . . good thing it wasn't a pencil.

Very interesting.. I wonder to what extent a mangaka knows specific named staging and other techniques and plans them, or if it just comes naturally with experience and they dont even think about it.

Probably varies. I wouldn't be surprised if the terms come out more when talking to editors.

On the translation note, "your highness" is a term pretty specifically used for royalty. I might suggest "your ladyship", which is a more general upper class/nobility kind of address.

I have had in mind for quite some time a story about a sexbot who starts off having no free will or agency, just pure programming. She is basically a super advanced toaster with tremendous acting skills who is programmed to behave like the ideal sex mate for her owner. But that's all it is: An act. She has zero emotions of her own, zero free will. It's all a pretense.

And then something happens after she meets her owner. A confluence of circumstance and happenstance. And she becomes sentient and sapient. And falls in love with her owner. At that point, although she is still compelled by her programming to be attracted to her owner and is compelled by her programming to want to have sex with her owner, she has free will and agency within those constraints.

As someone who has read a lot of manga and a lot of Western science fiction . . . I hate to tell you, but you've just reinvented half of all stories about robots. This is an amazingly common trope. One might even argue that Talky Toaster in Red Dwarf goes through this arc. There are good reasons it's common, it's very powerful.

last edited at Nov 15, 2021 2:17PM

I can’t help but wonder about the extent to which Nadeshiko actually has a free will and/or personality. I do feel like the moral implications of sex bots having humanoid intelligence is really fucked up, because the power differential between the human owner and the robot sex object is too much.

It would probably just be needlessly cruel to give a sex bot full humanoid intelligence, so that leads me to think that Nadeshiko merely has an imitation of true intelligence that only functions so far as to make the owner have a more pleasurable experience. So does Akane treating Nadeshiko as a human actually achieve anything? Or is Nadeshiko’s “intelligence” merely a means for sex with no real capacity for self reflection or decision making?

It's a manga. There is no such thing as a robot without full human intelligence, quasi-free will, and the potential for emotion once they've interacted with the right human for a while.

This is tough. I mean, telling your mom "I'm not interested in an omiai because I'm into a woman" is hard enough. Telling your mom "I'm not interested in an omiai because I'm interested in this ten year old girl" is, um.

Squickness aside, there is a recurring theme on shows like this: the longing for human contact.
This one in particular shows it more properly than most manga.
Live the live others et up for you, be successful according to the stablished. Wonder if you have actually lived at all.
A sad truth of Japan, and must people actually, but very heavy in Asia in current times.

So, it makes sense that this stories start with an competent Office Worker feeling down on their life and been suddenly lifted up by an estranger. However, I found it a bit sad, how these characters are confounding their need for companionship (not necessarily romantic/sexual) with love and attraction.

A sad mirrors on a reality on the country, specially considering how this genre(?) is getting popular. But still, these shows doesn't seem to center on the squick, but rather on how the OW reconnects with the rest of the world outside of their work environment. So hopefully, these stories can become something more than just a trend.

Good points. Hmmm . . . seems like a very small variant on the appeal of the Manic Pixie Dream Girl (tm)

I too miss the comments section at MangaDex. The good news is that in the most recent MD announcement, their next item of focus is on getting comments and view statistics back up and running again. So hopefully, Soon™.

Comments are the number one thing I want back. The only other thing is I wish they would go back to the old tag names rather than trying to come up with a bland English equivalent for everything.

I'm of two minds about the comments thing. On one hand, I did enjoy them and couldn't resist running my mouth in the comments section. On the other hand, time sink. I finish reading a few chapters a lot faster now.

As far as relationships go, this one hasn't been healthy since they got married, and IRL, I doubt they'd still be together.

There's nothing particularly wrong with the basic nature of the relationship, if it was what they actually wanted. The tension comes from the increasing suspicion that they both want something different, specifically something more, and haven't been able to admit it. This crisis triggered by a seemingly minor thing hopefully will bring them towards a resolution where they admit to, and thereby get, what they actually want (and we get to see them being heartwarmingly lovey-dovey, yay!).

IRL they might actually have a pleasant friendly relationship with no implied romance that was stable and fine as what it was.

last edited at Nov 10, 2021 5:08PM

Countries have different ways of handling universal health care. Some make sure that almost everything's paid for by socialized medicine (UK NHS) or socialized insurance (Canadian or Australian Medicare).

Just for the record, while public insurance with private doctors and clinics is how things work in Canada, actual HOSPITALS are also public facilities. Nobody pays money when they have to go to the hospital.
On the other hand, there's no pharmacare, so drug costs are mostly private and often privately insured, and various side or new things aren't covered by medicare--so, blood tests may cost, the rise of physiotherapy happened too late to get it included in the legislation (and American insurance companies lobby to keep it that way), and so on.

As to France, when my wife got injured in France and we were whisked away in an ambulance, they helped her quickly and charged very little even to us foreigners not hooked into the system. We had travel insurance but I think we never bothered messing about making a claim because it just wasn't worth it.

last edited at Nov 10, 2021 5:01PM

No I wasn't thinking that. That would have been against the rules.

Well, exactly! Breaking the rules would be quite unthinkable.

Ngl, I think this is too good to ever be adapted into an anime. It just couldn't be done enough justice I think.
Probably my favourite yuri manga of all time.

I can't disagree . . . but at the same time, I'd really love to see a clip or two of certain characters in action. For instance, I gotta feel Mahi-Mahi would be even more of a force of nature if they were moving and making noise.

So the repetitive structure of Zanka's works becomes an implied critique of the way that the intersection of capitalism and patriarchy serves to repress sexual desire between the classes. That's my story, and I'm sticking to it.

And once more you have made my day.
DOWN WITH THE BOURGEOISIE! FRIEDE DEN HÜTTEN, KRIEG DEN PALÄSTEN!

Awesome!
When Adam delved and Eve span, who was then the gentleman?

last edited at Nov 7, 2021 2:22AM

It's feeling like there's not much continuity? With this author's previous thing, each chapter had a new couple starting at like, 5/10. Here, it's the same couple, starting at 8/10. But she was like, clearly going to finger her already?? Are we jumping back to kissing now?

That's because, see, the maid is charmingly shy and demure, and so while she might do lewd things in the heat of the moment, afterwards there's a partial reset to charming reluctance and oh-no-we-mustn't. That's my story and I'm sticking to it.

I notice the dietary advice here is going the "no fat" route. I mean, counting calories isn't wrong, exactly, but all the oils that are very good for you and that help make the Mediterranean diet healthy and stuff . . . have plenty calories in them.

Glycemic index is important. A big question is, how fast does it hit your bloodstream? Processed starches and sugars are amazingly easy to digest, and hit very fast indeed, leading to a spike of so much blood sugar that your body can't use it all. So it stores some away to use later. Where does it store some away? Why, in the body's designated storage area: FAT CELLS. Then, since it's done that, you don't get to actually use all that you've eaten and you quickly get hungry again.
But oils, while they contain a LOT of energy, are harder/slower to digest. Also starches that aren't processed so much, like a bowl of oatmeal. The body processes them gradually, releasing a trickle of blood sugar that your body can use all of. There isn't enough all at once to force storing some away, and the slower trickle lasts longer, so you're not hungry again in half an hour. That's why a bowl of oatmeal "sticks to your ribs".
So avoiding fat, especially if it pushes you to eat empty carbs like, say, rice cakes, is often not the best policy. And before I bought any low fat mayonnaise, I'd take a good squint at the ingredients to see what was in there instead.