Hello, all! Kate here.

In the latest episode of the podcast I mentioned some of my favorite things from 2022: Only Murders in the Building, The Glass Onion, and You Must Remember This: Erotic 80s. I decided to add a few more things to the list looking back on on the year:

I was glued to the Winter Olympics and enjoyed hours of figure skating.

Our Flag Means Death delighted me with its humor and originality. I’m so glad it is coming back for a second season.

Finding a work life balance has been tough lately, but Severence took it to the next most-unsettling level. WHAT. A. SEASON. FINALE.

I’m sad to say I don’t have any novels to add to the list this year. I have been reading at a fairly steady pace but nothing has grabbed me enough to say I really loved it.

And if you’re wondering why there is no anime and manga on this list, never fear those will be featured in our January podcast episode!

Join us on Discord and let me know some of your favorite non-anime and non-manga things from 2022.

-Kate

Hello, all! Kate here.

In a strange turn of events, neither Al or I ended up attending AnimeNYC 2022 despite it being our backyard convention. A combination of pandemic, work, and holiday plans, plus for me a less than stellar experience last year all conspired together to keep us away. I honestly don’t know if I’ll be attending any AnimeNYC in the future. I could say it because of their lack of coordination every year despite being a for-profit con with a premium ticket price. But I’m not so delusional to believe if they happened to get something I was really interested in that I wouldn’t go back. However, it is a lot easier for me to say no to AnimeNYC despite the relative ease of location since I’m lucky enough to be able to attend Otakon to get my anime convention fix every year.

Join us on Discord and tell me what are your priorities when attending a con!

-Kate

Hello, all! Kate here.

This last month, I have been down a rabbit hole of my favorite American soap opera, revisiting stories and my all-time favorite couple (from any media) and even catching up on the latest plotlines. It got me thinking about the art form of telling a continuous narrative for decades. It is pretty inevitable that stories so long will become complex and convoluted, the cast will balloon, storylines will be added and dropped at a moments notice, plots will be retconned, characters who were once thought dead will turn out not be, we’ll find out someone was being mind-controlled when they did that very bad thing, and so on and so forth. I’m not lamenting these things; there’s something magical and satisfying about it. Just ask any pro wrestling fan or superhero comic reader. The anime equivalent is probably Detective Conan, which is a series with a cast a mile long and where seasons and holidays come and go regularly without actual time passing.

Productions that go on this long are rare, and each has unique and fascinating behind-the-scenes ways of working to create these stories. I fear that the weekday soap opera format will disappear in my lifetime. Thanks to the Internet and a concerted effort at media preservation, I know it won’t be forgotten. But it is not typical to find media you can dip in and out of, come back to after years and feel as if you never stopped watching.

Join us on Discord and let me know if you watch any long-form stories!

-Kate