Anime on Jackson Taylor

April Update 2026

jackson@jacksontaylor.xyz (Jackson Taylor) — Thu, 30 Apr 2026 11:01:06 -0400

Bull City Big Cubes NC 2026

That’s kind of a long name for a comp now that I’m writing it out.

I’m going up to Durham this weekend to compete and I’m not prepared like at all for it. I’ve been meaning to grind 6x6 all month, but it’s really only been about the past week that I’ve done any meaningful practice. I want to be able to qualify for NAC in 6x6 and 7x7 and I figure with 7x7 there’s at least a larger chance that I’ll luck into a sub 3:20 mean because I have a sub 3:20 single, so I know I could do it if I got lucky. But with 6x6 I’ve never gotten close to a sub-2 single. I’ve practiced a little bit of 3x3, but everything else I’m kinda winging it. Hopefully 6x6 and 3x3 practice extends to other stuff.

I’m hoping for at least 1 PB to keep my streak going, but if I don’t get it then that’s my fault. Maybe I can squeeze out a slightly faster 3x3 single or average. I broke my main 3x3 about a month ago and haven’t gotten totally used to my new main. I was using a Dayan Guhong Pro, but now I’m using a Pro+ I think? It’s got some minor upgrades and more magnets, but I didn’t mean to buy it originally. I meant to get 2 of the same cube I had so that way I could immediately fix my old one and have a backup in case. I dropped and broke the core one night. Hopefully I do well.

New Animes

Last month I talked about finishing up Attack On Titan (amazing story).

This month I started 2 new animes with my friend Hunter. We started watching Daemons of the Shadow Realm and Akane-Banashi.

DOTSR is cool because it’s by the same author of Full Metal Alchemist which I loved. It’s a little tropey right now, but not too bad. I haven’t watched the latest 2 or 3 episodes, but the first 2 did have me interested enough to want to keep watching. Spoilers for the first episode: These twins are born and they’re super important to fulfill the prophecy or whatever, and they grow up in this small village in what seems like hundreds of years ago. But then they’re attacked one day and we come to find out that the girl twin isn’t actually in the village and she’s been off in the modern world (they’re actually in modern times, but the village has ways of hiding from the rest of the world). Then the boy twin is given these 2 demons who protect the village and he’s got to figure out what’s going on. That’s kind of a bad explanation, but it’s decent, go give it a watch.

Akane-Banashi is super interesting, and not something I would’ve thought they’d make an anime about. It’s about this girl whose father is a Rakugo artist (similar to a stand up comic in America). Spoilers for the first episode: She loves watching his shows, and he’s been working hard to become a master in it. He does really well at this one show which is basically his exam, and everyone loves it, but the head of the school/training program he’s attending expels him and the rest of his class for mostly no reason (he mentioned how bad he thought the show was, but everyone in the audience seemed to love it). His daughter (the main character) then decides to become a Rakugo artist and “avenge” her father. Apparently the manga for it is like 300 chapters long, which is kinda crazy. If it had ended with him becoming a master Rakugo artist, I think it could’ve been a standalone movie. We’ll see how it is as it keeps going.

One Piece

Spoilers For Up To Chapter 1181

Elbaf keeps getting crazier and crazier. The Imu reveal was so insane to read live. I know there have been other signs of the series coming to an end, but this is like for real a huge sign that we are absolutely in the final saga, and I don’t think it’s gonna slow down at all.

I’m not gonna say we won’t make a detour or anything, because we could go back to Impel Down or we go to Whitebeard’s hometown of Sphynx (fingers crossed). But realistically, the number of places we could go is dwindling. It all depends on how we leave Elbaf. People are saying this seems like a Sabaody 2.0, which I kind of agree with. We haven’t seen Luffy go fully against Imu yet, so maybe there’s something specific to his fruit that would work way better against him than, but if not then I think we do “lose” Elbaf. I just really hope Usopp doesn’t die. I don’t want anyone in the crew to die, but I worry for him the most and Sanji 2nd most.

I feel like a full Joy Boy reveal might not be too far off. Whether or not that’s in a Void Century flashback I’m not sure. Absolutely wonderful time to be reading this great story.

That’s it for this month, thanks for reading!

March Update 2026

jackson@jacksontaylor.xyz (Jackson Taylor) — Mon, 30 Mar 2026 11:00:35 -0400

It’s pretty close to the end of the month so I’m going to keep this short and sweet and talk about “Attack On Titan” (AOT) really quickly.

SPOILERS FOR ATTACK ON TTIAN

I apologize for thinking for so long that anyone who watched Attack On Titan was a dork. I still think owning a jacket all the way back in 2013 based on a single season of the show was a little overkill, but I get it now.

AOT is such an amazing story and I enjoyed it very much. Learning the secrets about the walls did make me worry a little bit because it was such a major shift from the original premise of the show, but I think season 4 is actually a 9.5.

I watched it with my friend who hated the ending to the manga when he first read it, and he said for years that the ending was what kept it from it being the best anime of the 2010’s for him. I think he came around after watching the changes in the anime. I’m still sorta ingesting the ending and every sort of philosophy that was included in the show from the anti-natalism and nihilism. It’s an immensely deep show and it’s insane how much detail was put into it.

I don’t think Eren was justified at all. I don’t understand how people hate Gabi but love Eren either. I’m getting caught up on all these memes and stuff after all these years, it’s so much fun lol

There were a few misconceptions about spoilers that I had before I knew anything about the show.

I think I knew that Eren was not a good guy for the whole show, but I don’t think I knew he was the main character. I think I thought that maybe Levi was the main character at some point in my life, but I’m not sure.
I knew the “on your feet, dad” quote, and I figured it was Eren telling his dad and he was going to kill him while he was standing instead of laying down/on his knees. But then I found out that he was dead so I was confused on who it could be. Then it ended up being him and his dad, but in a very different way lol
I have seen memes of Reiner’s near-suicide scene, and his uniform reminded me of Nazis, so I thought that there were going to be Nazis at some point. I was sorta right? I also didn’t know who Reiner was or that it was him, so once Zeke was introduced I thought maybe it was him.

One funny thing that happened while we were watching was that I guessed that the walls were “made of titan” as a joke. My friend had to mute his mic to keep from me hearing him laugh. I guessed it like 2 or 3 episodes before they revealed it, so it’s not like I guessed anything crazy, but it was a total off the wall comment I made. I’m not even sure what made me say it.

My 3 favorite characters are probably Reiner, Levi and Erwin. They’re all pretty equal, but I think Reiner does edge it out slightly.

Reiner had death flags for like ever, I did not expect him at all to survive the series. I think if he died in this crazy redemption scene he would’ve been far and away my favorite character, but I don’t know if there’s really one thing he could’ve done to redeem him breaking the wall with Bertholdt, and he himself knew that. He was my favorite in season 1, I’m not even sure why, I just kinda latched to him.

Once Levi and Erwin started getting more and more screen time they passed Reiner for a bit, but by season 4 I still ended up liking Reiner more. Levi beats out Erwin a little because he’s around longer, but Erwin is fantastic. The speeches he gave were insanely good, and the part where he loses his arm is so insanely hype. Levi going to town on Zeke’s arm was another hype ass moment too, oh my gosh. I wish Erwin had gotten to see beyond the walls, but I’m glad that Levi chose to save Armin over Erwin. Armin was also an amazing character, he’s probably my favorite of the original 3.

I think my least favorite characters were Floch and Yelena. They’re important for the story, but damn were they annoying.

January Update 2026

jackson@jacksontaylor.xyz (Jackson Taylor) — Mon, 26 Jan 2026 00:00:00 -0400

Happy New Year! I did really badly on my resolutions last year lol, let’s see how I did.

The big one that I’m hoping to achieve is to lose a bunch of weight. Ideally, if I could snap my fingers and make sure that by the end of the year I was a specific weight, I’d be around 160 or 170.

I didn’t come anywhere near to 200lbs haha

But, to start small and manageable, I want to get below 210. The last time I weighed, which was a few days ago, I was 227.5, so it’s around 20lbs to lose. By the end of the year, this should be manageable.

Manageable for some people, but I did not do that. I’m a little heavier in fact.

If I only lost a pound a week I could get to around my dream goal weight, but that’s incredibly consistent progress. I’m not saying it couldn’t or won’t happen, but I doubt I’ll make that happen. Under 220 should be fine though.

I haven’t weighed myself yet, but I’m positive I’m still somewhere between 230 and 240.

I don’t think this year was a total waste as far as health is concerned though. I’ve started taking my sleep a little more seriously by taking supplements before bed and trying to get a little more sleep. I sleep talk pretty regularly and sometimes have night terrors, but they seem to have slowed a little bit. I try to limit my caffeine intake a little more. I did a bunch of walking, not as much as I should, but I got a smart watch and am more aware of the amount of steps I take in a day.

I think maybe if I plan out things I want to read or watch, in the order I want to watch them, I am more able/likely to do that. So here’s a few things I want to consume this year, in the approximate order I plan to watch/read them.

Oh boy. I don’t even remember writing this so let’s see what all I wanted consume.

Books

Believe In Yourself: The Lee Priest Story - Lee Priest (I’m pretty far into this one already since it was a Christmas present. Hoping to finish it in January.)

Tao Te Ching - Lao Tzu (This is for PewDiePie’s book club that he’s doing. I’m closing into halfway done with it, but I’m not understanding a lot.)

Notes From Underground - Fyodor Dostoevsky

Tremendous: The Life of a Comedy Savage - Joey Diaz

Demons - Fyodor Dostoevsky

Sherlock Holmes Collection - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle

Greatest Beer Run Ever - John “Chick” Donohue

Master and Margarita - Mikhail Bulgakov

The Brothers Karamazov - Fyodor Dostoevsky

Poor Folk - Fyodor Dostoevsky

Tuesdays with Morrie - Mitch Albom

I didn’t read anywhere near as much as I thought I was going to. This probably would’ve taken some people like 6 months to do. I don’t make time for this like I should.

I did read the Lee Priest book, and I think I did finish it in late January. It was pretty good, I like him and I was bored at a cubing competition one day so I got it done pretty easy. I kind of got it on a whim, because I didn’t know THAT much about Lee, but I did get to learn a lot about what he’d been through. I hadn’t even heard about his racing career or his time in rehab (not that it’s something you really go around proud about). I liked hearing about the late 90’s and early 00’s bodybuilding stories.

I don’t think I ever finished the Tao Te Ching. I may have, but I don’t remember it if I did. If you haven’t seen, there’s a bunch of monks who are walking as a form of prayer up the east coast (they’re actually by me about a week ago) and I got to thinking about this book, but I cannot remember a single lesson from it. I did not do well with the PewDiePie book club lol, I failed on the first book.

I’ve tried reading Notes From Underground a hundred times and I just struggle so much with the first part. It’s not that it’s boring, it’s just so rambly and I can’t keep up with what he’s trying to say. I get that’s part of the point he’s rambling to us to try to justify his behavior, but I don’t think I’m keeping up with it like I should be able to. I may try this one again soon, I got a couple pages in on a hard cover and it was making a little more sense. I really want to get to the 2nd part where I think there’s more characters than just the underground man rambling. I even went so far as to try the audiobook to see if that would help, but I’ve almost Pavlov trained myself into falling asleep to it as soon as it starts because I would listen to it when I was going to sleep. I didn’t even attempt Demons, The Brothers Karamazov, or Poor Folk (I’ve started this one a few times though). I like Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment and White Nights, and I think about them often, these others are just really tough for some reason.

The Joey Diaz book would probably be an easy one to knock out. I’ll listen to whatever Joey Diaz has to say so if I imagine he’s the one talking I might be able to get through it quicker.

I re-watched the “Knives Out” movies around the time that the new “Wake Up Dead Man” came out and that got interested in more mysteries, so I did get through the “Study in Scarlet” Sherlock Holmes story. It was pretty good. It wasn’t really what I expected though. It was less mystery than what I had wanted. The facts of the case were presented to me, but it wasn’t something that I think you could solve yourself. Especially not the motive. Slight spoilers, but when it swapped to talking about the Mormons in Utah halfway through I had to check to make sure I didn’t get a bad printing and started reading a different book. Very dramatic shift. I got through half of the next story. I don’t think I really stopped for any reason, I just stopped and haven’t picked it back up. This wasn’t really the kind of mystery I was hoping for. Knives-Out is more my style, you see exactly what happens it just gets re-contextualized later, so you have most things you need to solve the case. Sherlock feels like you’re doing 1 thing, but then in the back of your mind you know that he’s just going to go out and check something and come up with his own solution that you never would’ve been able to because of extra clues or something. I guess there’s a lot of shows and media that do this though. I’m not sure which is easier or harder to write. If you have all the clues at the beginning, it might be too obvious, but then if you wait to show the killer later then you’ll need to do something else to make it interesting.

Anime

Sakamoto Days- Season 1 Part 1 (Fun so far. Not as enjoyable as DanDaDan or Ranma 1/2 yet but I like it.)

Wotakoi - Season 1 (The romance animes finally got me. Already started season 1, just have to find time to finish it. It’s fine so far, but not as grabbing as MDD or Horimiya.)

DanDaDan - Season 2 (I’m so excited for DanDaDan Thursdays again.)

Ranma 1/2 - Season 2

The only thing out of this list that I finished was Wotakoi, and apparently I might’ve missed a big event in an OVA or something.

Sakamoto Days got a little boring, it’s less romance and slice of life and more shonen/fights. Which the fights are pretty good, especially when Sakamoto loses the weight. I don’t like secret societies/groups of people. I’m also not terribly into fighting stuff anymore.

DanDaDan I just kinda lost interest in the last 2 or 3 episodes, but I want to go back and finish the season. I like the romance between Ayase and Okarun a lot. There’s some more characters who I haven’t been introduced to either, so I know I’m missing out.

Ranma 1/2 I started the manga and already knew what was going to happen in season 2 so I lost some interest. I want to pick this back up, or maybe start the 1988 anime at some point.

Manga

Ranma 1/2 - Rumiko Takahashi (I loved the remade anime so I decided to pick up all the 2-in-1s. I’m about 4 volumes in (2 physical books out of 19), but it’s been a bit since I’ve read any.)

My Dress-Up Darling - Shinichi Fukuda (This is a cute story, and the first season of the anime was really fun. I watched it in a few days and I’m excited for the next season that I think is coming out this year.)

Heavenly Delusions - Masakazu Ishiguro (The anime got me HOOKED on this story. I need to rewatch the first season, cuz there was a lot that I missed and now I’d be so tuned into what I should pay attention to. Go watch it if you haven’t seen it, it’s dark and interesting as all get out.)

Goodnight Punpun - Inio Asano (I have this physically, but it was kind of boring and depressing so I haven’t finished it. I’ll need to re-read most of it.)

Wotakoi - Fujita (Probably will read this, but it’s kinda low on my list.)

I think I got through maybe 3 of the 2-in-1 books of Ranma, but it’s such a long story. It’s good, it’s just incredibly long for what it is. I’ll try to finish it eventually.

I got caught up to My Dress-Up Darling exactly 1 chapter before it ended. I read the latest chapter and then I saw a tweet the following day that the next chapter would be the last. I was so sad. It was a great story, I loved all of the characters and the situations they go into. The ending was incredibly cute too. I haven’t finished the 2nd season of the anime yet, but it looks amazing and it’s animated really really well.

I thought I could maybe find the physical editions of Heavenly Delusions easily, but I couldn’t at the time. I never tried to read it online either. I want to go rewatch the anime soon. Still one that I recommend to people because of how hooked I got on it.

Goodnight Punpun is still sitting on my shelf untouched. I haven’t been in the right mood for that much depressing stuff. It’s drawn incredibly well, but it’s a downer for sure. Also the physical copies kinda give me a headache with how much ink is on the pages. It gives off a very strong smell.

I didn’t read Wotakoi either. Overall my manga reading has been way down from what it was at one point, I have so many half finished series. I still read One Piece weekly, but that’s about it. I started a new one though called “Smoking Behind The Supermarket With You” that’s good. I’m about halfway through that, and I’ll hopefully finish that soon. I’m really enjoying it.

TV

Wayne - Season 1 (I’m 6/10 episodes in. Pretty good so far. It reminds me of “End of the Fcking World” on Netflix.)

Squid Games - Season 3 (I just finished Season 2 yesterday, and supposedly season 3 is gonna be the last and it’s coming out later this year. Fun little thriller.)

Stranger Things - Season 5 (If we don’t get it this year, I’ll be super pissed. I understand it’s a graphically intense show, but damn. Surely it’s not 1 editor for all the episodes.)

Wow, I actually finished everything here. I didn’t finish Stranger Things in 2025 though, I was out at a friend’s house for New Years Eve when the final episode came out so I watched it on the 2nd.

Wayne was really good. It definitely had “End of the F*cking World” vibes. Unfortunately it hasn’t been finished yet, and I don’t think that it will. It’s at a point where it’s a fine sorta ambiguous ending, but there’s some other stuff I’d like to see wrapped up. I’ll be pleasantly surprised if it does get finished.

Squid Games was ok. The first season was very good. The 2nd season had some good moments and some interesting characters and dynamics. The 3rd season I remember not really liking the ending that much. It’s been a while since I watched it though to remember specific details. I liked Thanos in season 2 a good bit. I forget the actor’s name who played him but I went out and learned about him and I’m glad he’s making a comeback (long story short, he used to be in a boyband and he got caught with drugs and everyone kinda looked down on him from there I think, don’t quote me on that though I think that’s huge simplification).

Stranger Things was pretty rough. I really didn’t like the last season. Like at all. The acting, the story, the release schedule, the ending. I’ve heard people say “they had the entire story planned from the beginning” and that’s just incredibly false. There’s so many inconsistencies with that it just can’t be true. Up to season 3 it was a great show, maybe there were some inconsistencies that I can’t remember, but I think it really peaked at season 3. The dialogue has always been a little cringey, and the delivery isn’t the best, but it was incredibly bad in season 5. The more I think about characters, plot points, or details the more it’s like “wow that doesn’t make any sense” and I can almost bet that the Duffer Brothers don’t have a reason for it either.

As far as movies go, I watched over 100 this year. I really started exploring some stuff too. I watched some low hanging fruit like the Harry Potter series, I watched all of the marvel movies up until End Game except for 2 or 3. There were a number of old school Japanese movies I watched like High and Low, Ikiru and Harakiri that were fantastic to see. I watched a ton of horror movies with my friends during October too, I tried doing a 31 days of Halloween thing but it ended up only being 16 planned, and I watched a couple by myself and missed some others. I might try to mirror my letterboxd on here eventually. If you want to follow me, then my account is jtaylorxyz I think. I’m not sure if

2026 Resolutions

I don’t have any specific goals this year. I want to read more, I want to cube more, I want to lose weight. Setting specific goals hasn’t worked, so maybe having less specific goals will be better.

Gonna go ahead and wrap it up for this month. If I think of something new, I’ll post about it. Happy New Year, hope you guys reach all your goals!

November Update 2025

jackson@jacksontaylor.xyz (Jackson Taylor) — Thu, 27 Nov 2025 00:00:00 -0400

I don’t actually have that much that to talk about this month. I don’t know if it’s the weather or what, but I’ve just been down the past few weeks. Sleep has been kinda hit or miss, I’m not enjoying things I used to. I have done some cool things that I might blog about once they’re totally done though (virtualized TrueNAS in proxmox). Thanksgiving was pretty good, my family came over and we deep fried a turkey, and we all had a good time. I hope you guys had a great Thanksgiving day too!

One Piece

I guess I’ll talk a little about what’s going on with One Piece because it’s been crazy.

SPOILERS FOR UP TO 1166

We’re actually going to have 4 chapters this month which is cool. I know Oda usually takes it easy in December (totally understandable) so we gotta enjoy it while we can.

Apart from when I first read Marineford, this has been the best month I’ve ever had as a major Whitebeard fanboy. It was a little sketch there when Whitebeard ran away from Garp, but it was just strategy, not out of fear lol. I love the guy, so anytime he’s in a chapter I’m locked in.

Quick rundown of all the major things that have happened:

1164

Rocks reveals Davy D. Jones was the former king of the world, and mentions Joy Boy to Imu
Rocks gets Domi Reversi’d
Imu reveals that he’s after Elbaf for soldiers
Imu forces Rocks to kill the other Davy family members on the island
Whitebeard tanks a shot from Domi Reversi’d rocks with his bare arm and causes God Valley’s mountain to start falling*
Everyone starts trying to flee the island
Dragon lost track of baby Shanks
Kuma (one of the GOATs) is trying to save as many people as he can
Kuma jumps just in front of Rocks to save Eris and baby Teech, and also presumably teleports away himself
Rocks, facing Roger and Garp presumably uses the Voice of All Things to ask them to kill him

*Only moderately important, mostly included because of the Whitebeard fanboy thing and this is another feat I will be using in my own power-scaling/agenda-piece

1165

One of the coolest panels of all of One Piece is where Rocks is in his Domi Reversi’d form and about to attack at Roger and Garp while he’s asking them to “Please kill me”
Roger and Garp realize Rocks isn’t himself
Garp and Roger decide to temporarily team up, but their attacks aren’t working
They want to try to figure out a way to undo the curse, but they can’t seem to think of anything
Big Mom claims she’s gonna come back for Kaido to get what he owes from him stealing the azure dragon fruit
Polo Graham is introduced
Dragon threatens a navy ship to be able to save more people on the island and bring them along
Saturn (or maybe Imu in Saturn’s body) declares that God Valley never existed, and that it will be erased
The narrator interrupts and declares that all the records of God Valley were purged and the number of people killed is still unknown
Roger invites Garp to his crew, but Garp declines because he wants to protect the Marines
Garp and Roger talk about creating a “mass” of Haki to be able to beat Rocks, basically pouring everything they have into the attack
Roger cries for Rocks as they give the final blow

1166

The attack seemed to work, and even broke the Domi Reversi curse
Roger and Garp are sapped of energy
Rocks is unable to move and thanks Roger and Garp before Garling stabs him, finally killing him
Rayleigh and Gaban take Roger and Garp off of God Valley
God Valley crumbles and seems to sink to the bottom of the sea
The narrator interrupts to highlight the importance of this event on the world and the pirates and players in the following generation
Roger and his crew find Shanks among the treasure they stole from God Valley
Garp is upset over what they’re saying about him in the papers (Hero of the Marines)
Sengoku and Garp have an argument over differing brands of Justice and what they should do in the marines
Garp declares he wants to help the people at the “bottom of the cliff”
Loki learns of Rocks’ death and has a flashback where he told Rocks he thought he was Nika
Rocks didn’t know who Nika was, but said that if anyone had that kind of power it would be Harald
Rocks mentions the Galera (maybe Galley-La depending on translation I think)
Harald has a breakdown and beats a giant who was being mean and cruel to humans
Harald’s desire to join the World Government was the only reason he didn’t help Rocks out
Dragon has been imprisoned for what happened on God Valley, but Garp seemingly breaks him out by giving him a key
Harald declares that Loki and Hajruddin are both his sons and that he wants them to get along
Harald breaks off his horns as a symbol of loyalty and as a pledge to the World Government

Technically I could wait until 1167 comes out since it should be in the next day or so, but I’m gonna go ahead and get this done and out. This God Valley flashback is without a doubt in my mind the most important and probably the best flashback in all of One Piece. So many big names together all in one place, everything in the world of One Piece can be traced back to this single event. Amazing, peak fiction, absolute cinema, Oda is the GOAT. There’s a chance that the void century flashback is more important and introduces some cool characters, but I really don’t know if it’ll top this. (That’s a challenge Oda, please prove me wrong).

Davy D. Jones being the former king of the world was crazy. I need to go back and look at the Harley texts and the mural again to understand how that could fit into it. If he’s the one that started the Davy Back fights, I wonder how that plays into Joy Boy? Could Joy Boy have lost a crew member to a Davy Back fight? Could Joy Boy have been related somehow? Could Joy Boy have been trying to take down Davy D. Jones as king of the world and somehow Imu overcame both of them to get the throne? Lots of questions to be answered still. One Piece is all about misdirection and misinformation so I wonder who the good guys really are. Does Imu serve some higher power beyond themself even? I highly doubt that one though, I hope that isn’t the case.

All of the attacks this flashback have been crazy too, I hope they do well in the anime. I’m super excited for these episodes. I need to watch from Egghead onward to get Kuma’s backstory and this when it comes out. Everyone’s stocks rose these few chapters.

The only disappointment I have is with Harald. For him to go directly to the people who killed basically his best friend and mutilate himself, he really killed my opinion of him. I loved his introduction, but he’s playing right into the government’s hands. I understand his reasoning for wanting to have Giants be seen as less aggressive and nicer. I understand too that public opinion favors the world government associated countries, especially more docile ones compared to Elbaf. But it’s still just disappointing. Garp and Harald have ideals I don’t totally understand or agree with.

Garp I understand a lot better after 1166, I think I finally am starting to understand why he’s so focused on young marines like Koby. I think he’s basically thinking that if he can be an example for great marines who will go to high places someday that they’ll be able to fix the world instead of him fixing it himself now. Some readers think that he’s wrong for not fixing it himself, which is fair and valid, but I think Garp himself knows that’s not a good idea because of how hot-blooded he is. Which is the same reason he doesn’t become an admiral or fleet admiral, he COULDN’T work under celestial dragons. He’d be executed or have to leave the marines at the first sign of them doing anything he doesn’t agree with, which is counter productive to his ideals. He still believes in the system he’s in, so he figures it’s better to try to aid those in the system than to leave it. Which I guess also means he believes that having celestial dragons is better? That’s where it starts getting weird. I guess a small amount of pure evil is the price to pay for world peace? I suppose that’s basically got to be true if people in One Piece are anything like humans in real life, there will always be some evil.

Rocks has climbed my favorite characters list super fast. He has had some of the sickest panels in the whole manga. I hate he wasn’t around for long, he’s like everyone in flashbacks though, they’re incredibly badass and then they die lol. He was Teech’s father, and Teech has done some crazy things so… Rocks’ full introduction and main backstory (potentially/probably his only backstory) has made me question Teech’s motives even more now. Originally Rocks was shown to be kind of an asshole, to go as far as stabbing Loki as a child (although he didn’t seem to mind I guess), but overall he ended up being a guy who just wanted to save what was left of his lineage. Teech I guess just has nothing left to hold on to and wants to watch the world burn. Killing Whitebeard and Ace though, one of your father’s incredibly loyal crew members that stayed and fought against a literal demon (Imu) and your father’s rival’s son (a rival who Rocks related to and respected). I have to wonder how much Teech knows about his lineage and the void century.

September Update 2025

jackson@jacksontaylor.xyz (Jackson Taylor) — Tue, 30 Sep 2025 00:00:00 -0400

Happy September guys! It’s been a heavy few weeks this month. I’m not gonna talk about the stuff that’s been going on in the news, or the supposed rapture that didn’t happen, I know all of your feeds have been filled with that stuff.

Quick Cubing Update

ZBLL

Well, I haven’t learned anymore zblls since last month. I know, I know, “Jackson you said you were gonna do it this time”. I still want to, but I’ve been a little busy, and also the site I was using for my trainer was out of commission for a little while. I think it’s moved domains. Instead of bestsiteever.ru, it’s now bestsiteever.net. I just found it last night and got all my subsets put back in. I’ve been doing a few hundred solves per week, so I didn’t think I lost that many algs, and I didn’t really, but I did lose some of the more basic cases I had absolutely nailed down. This week I’ll probably end up doing major refresh sessions and move on to the rest of the H set.

New PB

I don’t really keep up with PBs anymore, because I hardly break them. I do know my best 5x5 solve is about 57 seconds, and I’ve gotten about 5 sub 1 minute solves now which is awesome. I hope I can do that in competition soon.

For 3x3, my best time was 5.80 for like 3 or 4 years. I think maybe I had 2 or 3 sub 6 times in total. A few months ago I broke through and got a 5.51 solve, which was stupid easy. I think it had an OLL or PLL skip along with at least an x-cross. This month I ended up breaking it again by a huge amount. My new PB is all the way down to 5.04. Again, this one was a pretty easy solve. It was something like R D2 for an x-cross with the slot in the back left filled, R U R’ for the first pair, L’ U’ L for the 2nd pair, inverse sexy from the back right for the last pair, then sune into a G Perm. Not the best PLL, but it’s one of my better algs. I’m a little annoyed I didn’t get sub-5, because it was so close and after trying it another time I got 4.13 no problem. Oh well, it’s a home PB anyway and I’m still happy to have gotten it.

One Piece Happenings

I’ve been severely lacking on writing up my thoughts on what’s going on in One Piece. There’s been some insane reveals in Elbaf that I want to talk about.

WARNING: SPOILERS UP UNTIL CHAPTER 1161

The big thing going on at the moment is the flashback/story that Loki is telling us. Here’s a rapid-fire list of events that have happened so far:

Harald goes to sea to explore and pillage, ends up falling in love with a normal giant (he was an ancient giant) and calms down a lot.
Harald works to make peace with other nations to be able to join the World Government.
Hajruddin is born from Harald and this normal giant, but the elder giants and royal council don’t like it so they set him up with another ancient giant woman.
Ancient giant woman births Loki, but his eyes are disfigured/ugly/demonic so she casts him out to the bottom layer of Elbaf. THEN DAY 1 LOKI CLIMBS HIS WAY OUT OF THAT (one of the absolute coolest feats so far, I love Loki).
Rocks comes to Elbaf to try to recruit Harald for his crew, it’s revealed he’s the father of Marshall D. Teach
Rocks’ crew is full of members who were obtained via Davyback fights.
Before Rocks came to Elbaf, Harald went to a reverie to discuss Elbaf’s standings. Rocks D. Goat (Xebec) is there.
Rocks kills an Admiral and enters Imu’s flower room, tells Imu he’s a Davy Jonesian pirate and that he’ll be back soon.
Rocks and Harald end up having to escape together, this is the event that makes Rocks want to recruit Harald.
We get introduced to the young members of Rocks’ crew, and we also get to see the young Roger and Kuja pirates.
Shakky is beautiful and basically the whole world simps for her. Roger and Whitebeard included.
Rocks takes over pirate island (Hachinosu, beehive island), and Shakky decides to open her bar there.
Shakky is in love with Rayleigh and tells him she’s his whenever he wants, he’s apprehensive because he knows Roger likes her too.
Shakky is kidnapped by the World Government for use in the bi-annual hunting games (the games that basically cause what will be known as the God Valley Incident).
The Rocks and Roger pirates are informed that Shakky is going to be there and they head to God Valley, Garp hears that Roger and the Rocks Pirates are going to be there so he heads there as well.
Garling has a “family” consisting of a woman with 2 twin boys (Shanks and Shamrock) who live on God Valley.
It turns out Rocks is going for a very different reason, God Valley is his homeland and his wife and son are there. He knows they’re going to be in danger because they carry his real name. Davy D. Xebec.
The Davy family is seemingly hated more than those that only carry the initial of D.
Garling wounds the mother of his sons, and claims that he will win the tournament to take Shakky as his wife.
Dragon is on God Valley as a young marine and tries to save Shanks and Shamrock at their mother’s request. Shooting a Celestial Dragon with a tranquilizer dart.
One of the children is taken from Dragon (presumably Shamrock) by the God Knight Maffey. But it seems that Maffey is under the impression there is only the 1 child.
Prime Garp shows off his insane abilities by taking a full blown sun attack from Prime Big Mom and then making a joke about it. Garp’s actions in this event are something I’m incredibly excited to see.
Whitebeard technically runs away from Garp (I say technically because I’m kind of annoyed at the hate he’s been getting, it was a strategic escape, not because he was afraid it would’ve taken too long to fight Garp. He would’ve stayed and fought if he absolutely had to.).
Rayleigh saves Shakky from the God Knight Summers, and they have a super cute embrace at the end of 1161. Gabin and Roger cry in reluctant acceptance.

This flashback has been one of the greatest, and we’re assuming we’re only about halfway through it. I guess this is THE God Valley flashback though, and anything else we get about God Valley will either come from a movie in the future (speaking that into the universe), or maybe small mentions later on in the story. I’m super hyped for the continuance of it, and what happens once we’re out. We’ve still got to figure out what happened to Harald and what Loki’s fruit is. I am so grateful every day that I got caught up to the story when I did. I think the 1st best time to have caught up was before Water 7/Enies Lobby, then Marine Ford, then 1043 with Luffy’s real fruit reveal, and then before the end of Egghead where I got caught up. I’m going to get to experience the absolute peaks of the story in real time. This is potentially the greatest story of my lifetime, and I’m so glad I’m going to be able to witness the end of it.

Whitecastle Challenge

I’ve been watching a lot of movies recently, mostly the Marvel moves, but some comedies scattered here and there. I ended up watching Harold and Kumar go to Whitecastle for the first time, so my friends and I decided to see how many Whitecastle sliders we could eat out of 30. My buddy Vaughn and I were the only ones to actually try. I ended up eating 10, and he ended up eating 21. Mine were frozen and I had had a big lunch, but I don’t think I could’ve eaten anymore than 15-17. I love doing these kind of stupid challenges and stuff with friends just for fun.

This blog is the closest one I think I’ve been to the end of the month, so I’m hauling ass this afternoon to get it out. Hope you guys have a great October!

January Update 2025

jackson@jacksontaylor.xyz (Jackson Taylor) — Tue, 28 Jan 2025 00:00:00 -0400

Happy New Year! I hope everyone is having a good year so far, and I hope you all get to do what you set out to do. I’m gonna go over some of my resolutions and plans for the year, the first quarter is already turning out to be crazy.

Resolutions

The big one that I’m hoping to achieve is to lose a bunch of weight. Ideally, if I could snap my fingers and make sure that by the end of the year I was a specific weight, I’d be around 160 or 170. But, to start small and manageable, I want to get below 210. The last time I weighed, which was a few days ago, I was 227.5, so it’s around 20lbs to lose. By the end of the year, this should be manageable. If I only lost a pound a week I could get to around my dream goal weight, but that’s incredibly consistent progress. I’m not saying it couldn’t or won’t happen, but I doubt I’ll make that happen. Under 220 should be fine though. The holidays killed my diet and motivation for the gym, I was over at my friends house all the time and his mom makes amazing food and they’ve always got candy and sodas stocked. I came home and was weighing 230 one day. I knew it was bloat, but I was like “alright, somethings gotta change”.

The other big resolution I have is that I want to read a lot more. With TikTok probably getting banned at some point this year, I will have a lot more time to do outside of it. I don’t think I’ll go to Instagram Reels or Youtube Shorts, though I might spend more time on both of the platforms.

Media I Want To Watch/Read

I think maybe if I plan out things I want to read or watch, in the order I want to watch them, I am more able/likely to do that. So here’s a few things I want to consume this year, in the approximate order I plan to watch/read them.

Books

Believe In Yourself: The Lee Priest Story - Lee Priest (I’m pretty far into this one already since it was a Christmas present. Hoping to finish it in January.)
Tao Te Ching - Lao Tzu (This is for PewDiePie’s book club that he’s doing. I’m closing into halfway done with it, but I’m not understanding a lot.)
Notes From Underground - Fyodor Dostoevsky
Tremendous: The Life of a Comedy Savage - Joey Diaz
Demons - Fyodor Dostoevsky
Sherlock Holmes Collection - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
Greatest Beer Run Ever - John “Chick” Donohue
Master and Margarita - Mikhail Bulgakov
The Brothers Karamazov - Fyodor Dostoevsky
Poor Folk - Fyodor Dostoevsky
Tuesdays with Morrie - Mitch Albom

Anime

Sakamoto Days- Season 1 Part 1 (Fun so far. Not as enjoyable as DanDaDan or Ranma 1/2 yet but I like it.)
Wotakoi - Season 1 (The romance animes finally got me. Already started season 1, just have to find time to finish it. It’s fine so far, but not as grabbing as MDD or Horimiya.)
DanDaDan - Season 2 (I’m so excited for DanDaDan Thursdays again.)
Ranma 1/2 - Season 2

Manga

Ranma 1/2 - Rumiko Takahashi (I loved the remade anime so I decided to pick up all the 2-in-1s. I’m about 4 volumes in (2 physical books out of 19), but it’s been a bit since I’ve read any.)
My Dress-Up Darling - Shinichi Fukuda (This is a cute story, and the first season of the anime was really fun. I watched it in a few days and I’m excited for the next season that I think is coming out this year.)
Heavenly Delusions - Masakazu Ishiguro (The anime got me HOOKED on this story. I need to rewatch the first season, cuz there was a lot that I missed and now I’d be so tuned into what I should pay attention to. Go watch it if you haven’t seen it, it’s dark and interesting as all get out.)
Goodnight Punpun - Inio Asano (I have this physically, but it was kind of boring and depressing so I haven’t finished it. I’ll need to re-read most of it.)
Wotakoi - Fujita (Probably will read this, but it’s kinda low on my list.)

Television

Wayne - Season 1 (I’m 6/10 episodes in. Pretty good so far. It reminds me of “End of the Fcking World” on Netflix.)
Squid Games - Season 3 (I just finished Season 2 yesterday, and supposedly season 3 is gonna be the last and it’s coming out later this year. Fun little thriller.)
Stranger Things - Season 5 (If we don’t get it this year, I’ll be super pissed. I understand it’s a graphically intense show, but damn. Surely it’s not 1 editor for all the episodes.)

Charlotte Winter 2025

Getting pretty close to the end of the month as I’m writing this, so I might push more about this competition into a different blog post just so I can get this one out, but I went to Charlotte Winter 2025 and did way better than I expected.

If you want to see my solves, I recorded them all and posted them here. I didn’t do as well as I was hoping for 5x5, and it took all day for me to get any PBs but I finally got some for 3x3 and kept my pb streak going.

That’s gonna be it for this month, I don’t trust myself to come back and fill out anymore before January is over. See you guys next month!

December Update 2024

jackson@jacksontaylor.xyz (Jackson Taylor) — Mon, 23 Dec 2024 00:00:00 -0400

Merry Christmas everyone! I hope you all have a great time with your families this year and have a safe New Year! This will probably be my last blog post for the year. I’m writing this the day before Christmas Eve which is when my family celebrates a lot of our festivities, so I won’t have much time tomorrow to write.

Charlotte Winter 2025

I’m excited to annouce that I will be going to the Charlotte Winter 2025 competition on January 25th! I’ve written elsewhere on my site about how I used to compete in Rubik’s Cube competitions, but it’s been over 5 years since I’ve competed. With covid, my back issues, and having a full time job I haven’t been able to go to one since 2019.

I’ll be competiting in 3x3, OH, 5x5 and Skewb. Which happen to be some of my favorite events. 5x5 being my absolute favorite event, and the one I’m best at. I don’t expect to break any state records, I think those days are for sure over at this point, but I hope to keep my PB streak of 15 going to 16. A sub 10 average for 3x3 may not be out of the question either. I’ll need to be in the zone though for all of the events if I want to get some PBs. I’m nervous for the actual competing part, but I’m confident I’ll do alright. I got over the nerves of competiting a long time ago, but this time is a little different, so I’ll have to try to calm down.

Since there’s only about a month until the competition, I won’t be learning any new algorithms probably. I’ve been looking for a competition for the past few months and practicing in the mean time, so I’m not really rusty anymore, but I don’t want to add too many new things in case I get tripped up. There’s a few COLLs I’ve learned that I could probably execute, but I might just skip them if I come across them since I’m not super comfortable with them still.

I use CFOP and I know full OLL and full PLL, I know a good portion of COLL, I do some edge manipulation and WV cases, and a handful of ZBLLs. I’ve thought about trying to learn ZBLL before, but I haven’t found a great way to practice a set and remember it for longer than a few days since they don’t show up that often. Depending on how I do and how much I enjoy this competition I might try to dedicate myself to learning 2GLL.

There’s a few of my old friends going too so it’ll be nice to catch up with them. If you are reading this and are planning on going, look for me and say hi!

Real Quick One Piece Recap

WARNING: MAJOR SPOILERS FOR THE ONE PIECE MANGA UNTIL CHAPTER 1134

Last month I did my blog post kind of early, before the unexpected break we got due to Oda’s health, so a few things have happened since. We did get the chapter on December 1st as expected and we haven’t heard much else out of Oda about the break. I’m hoping he’s doing much better. He had been going to South Africa to help with the live action filming and stuff, so that probably worsened some of his blood pressure issues. December has had a few other breaks for Oda as well as Shonen Jump the magazine. I’m still confused on a lot of the schedules and how that all works, but most of the time I just get a notification when a new chapter drops and then I read it. You’re never disappointed when a chapter doesn’t come out if you don’t know when it’s supposed to come out anyway ;)

Chapters 1133 and 1134 have caused a lot of discussion, like often times new chapters do.

After it was pretty much confirmed that Saul was sill alive during Egghead, we finally saw the reuninon between Saul and Robin in chapter 1133. Some people are unsure about Saul being “brought back to life”, arguing that it’s technically “bad writing”. I’m fine with it I think. I do understand the reasons for it being considered bad writing, but I’m not a stickler for that kind of stuff. As long as this is used very sparingly, and someone like Ace or Corazon doesn’t come back I’m fine with it. Morj compared “fake-out deaths” to “false deaths” in this video if you want to see more about the reasons it’s considered bad.

Chapter 1134 recently came out and adds more to the theory that Shanks has a twin brother who is a part of the Holy Knights. This stems mostly from the appearance of the person who we were lead to believe was Shanks in 907 and this new chapter, as well as a few feats that could possibly be attributed to this new character. In chapter 907 we see “Shanks” meeting with the Gorosei (Five Elders) about a specific pirate during the Reverie. This started many jokes and memes about how Shanks is a rat and has the “rat-rat no mi model: snitch”, because why would a pirate, let alone one of the Yonko (Four Emperors), be talking directly to the Gorosei? And about what pirate? Could it have been Luffy? A lot of people believed it was Shanks keeping the world in balance, which was my belief too at the time. However, many people noticed that Shanks’ scar was not visible in the panel even though we’ve seen his scar in very similar positions before. This was believed to be a mistake originally and that it actually was Shanks, because Oda has been known to miss small details like that (no hate, they really are small, I typically haven’t noticed them when I first read the chapters). But the anime also omitted the scar for that episode as well where it would most likely had fixed the issue if it was actually an issue.

As the story went on, we learned more about Shanks’ lineage and how he is almost definitely the son of Figarland Garling, the (now former) leader of the Holy Knights of Marijoa. We figured that the ability to get a meeting with the Gorosei was due to his connection to Garling. Which leads us to chapter 1134, and the appearance of “Shanks” in a summoning circle that the Gorosei used on Egghead. “Shanks” appears in Elbaf in a flash of lightning with an unidentified woman. However, the scar on “Shanks” face is again omitted in the same position that we saw in chapter 907! Which leads us to believe that there is a case of twins here and we the readers have been duped for YEARS. There’s plenty of videos on youtube to explain this more in depth than I can and that give more examples. I’m not totally convinced, but it’s looking more and more to be true. With the cloning processes we’ve seen in the story so far, it’s possible that this isn’t a twin at all, but a direct clone.

Anyway, that’s pretty much all I wanted to talk about this month. I’ll try to do a 2024 recap and yearly goals in January. See you then!

November Update 2024

jackson@jacksontaylor.xyz (Jackson Taylor) — Wed, 13 Nov 2024 00:00:00 -0400

I’m gonna try to get this one out early this month. Thanksgiving and stuff going on, so I’ll probably be pretty busy at the end of the month to be able to get it done.

Fitness Updates

Sorta going along with my back updates, I figured I’d start talking about general fitness stuff that I’m doing. I recently started watching more of what I eat and going back to the gym to try to lose some weight and building back some of the (albeit little) muscle that I had before I hurt my back.

I’ve always been heavier, even when I was a kid I was heaver than people who were taller than me. When I was around 17 or 18 I think I was about the best shape I’ve ever been. I wasn’t skinny, but my belly was much less pronounced and I was a lot stronger. I think I was around 170lbs at 5’ 9", I was eating McDonald’s about every day working construction. When I stopped doing construction and started my current job as a developer, my activity went way down but my fast food eating stayed about the same. I got all the way up to about 210lbs which was my heaviest at the time. Then when I started going to the gym I got down to about 190 going like 3 times a week and I was happy with the progress I was making.

Then I hurt my back, and basically all activity stopped. I was literally on my back for about 11 months, from October 2022 to maybe August/September 2023 I could barely walk and doing anything was really challenging and painful. I’ve talked about it in other posts, so I won’t talk much about it here. A good thing about this was my fast food eating slowed down a lot too because I wouldn’t go out to eat as much or go to the drive thru. I still gained back all that I had lost, so I was around 210 again, but it wasn’t horrible. Now that I’m back to walking and doing things, I feel better, but the fast food intake went up again while the activity stayed non-existent to low. So I got all the way up to about 230lbs.

So, here we are now in November 2024, and I’m finally trying to get back to going to the gym at least twice a week. I’m down to about 224lbs in the mornings when I wake up, so I’m losing a little bit of weight. I’m currently doing a Push/Pull/Legs split (PPL) because that’s what I was doing before. My split probably doesn’t matter so much right now since I’m probably going to have those dormant muscle/noobie kinda gains where your muscles will come back easier after having been away, unless I’ve atrophied so much. But, I think I’m going to switch to doing a full body split 3x a week so I train every muscle more. I could try to do more days, but since I’m easing into it still I want to do 3 days for at least a few months consistently before I up it I think I’m going to try a full body split.

According to some TDEE calculators, my daily expenditure is somewhere between 2100-2700 calories depending on the activity level and the website I use. I am sorta counting calories and protein, I should be a lot more strict about it. I still make some

Unexpected One Piece Break

If you guys didn’t see online, One Piece might be going on an unexpected break for about 2 weeks. This originally spawned from Manga Plus having the next chapter dropping on December 1st, and not November 17th like it was meant to. User pewpiece on twitter (a user I usually have blocked due to twitter consistently showing me his spoilers summary in my notifications) first reported this change on Manga Plus. Many people were worried for Oda’s health as this is very unusual for Oda to not have his breaks planned, and with the rumors around his blood pressure issues. It was actually exactly a year to the date that Oda was unable to finish chapter 1098. I’m not sure if the reason for that was ever disclosed, I’ve heard that it was due to Oda just missing the deadline, I’ve heard health issues, and I’ve heard that he was crying so hard while drawing that chapter that he couldn’t finish it. In any case, I got pretty worried about the unexpected break too, I’m not going to lie. It kinda ruined my Tuesday afternoon.

Other users started to notice that on Manga Plus their dates still said November 17th as planned. Shonen Jump’s website also had not reflected the changes. I’m not sure about how all these sites play a role into the release schedule, and what should be considered official news, but it seemed to be isolated to just the English version of Manga Plus that the date was changed. Within about 12 hours of me first seeing the announcement of a potential break, I checked the English version of Manga Plus and their date had gone back to November 17th and none of the other sources I saw had changed. So, I thought it was a simple mistake and someone had not entered a date correctly or something. Which is reasonable to think, if I flipped the month and date and I entered 17 for the month maybe it would default back to December, and if I missed the 2nd 1 in 11 then I’d end up with December 1st as a date. So we’re all good right? New chapter this weekend? Maybe not

After Manga Plus had fixed their website and people believed it was a mistake, one of the official translators for One Piece has posted on Blue Sky that there is in NOT going to be a chapter this weekend. Stephen Paul is on the official translation team and posted that Shueisha is “fumbling” and that there will be no chapter this week. Unfortunately, this seems like the most official statement we’ve gotten so far. Unless he’s trolling, it’s probably that we won’t be getting a chapter this week. According to several tweets I’ve seen, we should get something official-official from Shonen Jump tomorrow (the 14th). I’m hopeful that it’s untrue, and this is simply just a data entry issue.

Although we’re at a really good place in the manga and I’m excited for each new release, I am totally fine with another break as long as Oda is healthy. I’m not trying to fuel any rumors, but there have been some people speculating around the reason that Oda could be taking the break. The reason for the 2 week break that we just got off of was due to Oda flying out to South Africa in order to help out with the filming of the live action. Some people believe he’s just especially tired from the traveling, some think he may have gotten sick. I’m personally hopeful that he just enjoyed the trip and hanging out with the crew so much that he decided to go back and do it again to ensure the next season is better than the first. But, we’ll see tomorrow I guess.

Reading Update

I finished “Tomie” by Junji Ito at the start of this month. The more I read from this story, the more I enjoyed it. I believe I read this was largely made during his time as a dental assistant. So, as the story went on you could tell he was getting better at drawing and writing plot lines and dialogue. I highly recommend picking it up, I think this one is one that’s on sale pretty frequently. I think it’d be a good starter for people who are looking to get into horror manga. It’s not my favorite manga I’ve read, but I enjoyed it a lot and will look out for more from him. I plan on reading Uzumaki from him next.

I don’t know if I mentioned reading “The Unfettered Mind” by Takuan Soho, but I finally finished that at the start of the month. That one had been on my list for a little while. Takuan Soho was this Japanese Buddhist priest in the 1500-1600s, and he would write letters back and forth to these different samurai. This book is basically excerpts from the letters about Zen Buddhism and how it relates to martial arts. I started reading it in early October when I went on a trip to the Outer Banks. The first part was really good, it was stuff that I could understand pretty well. It was talking about doing things mindlessly and how you shouldn’t keep your mind in one place. It was digestible and I understood most of what it was talking about. The other 2 thirds of the book just did NOT stick. I don’t think this was the best intro to Zen philosophy like I thought it was going to be. The 2nd part was talking about how you interact with your lord as a retainer, or how you interact with your retainers as a lord. It was kind of how you interact with those around you too. I can’t even begin to explain what was going on in the 3rd part. That was super in depth with some Japanese stories I’m not familiar with. One part actually said something like “you’re not gonna understand this unless you study for 30 years”. It was a short read, it wasn’t even a hundred pages I don’t think, but it was hard and took me like a month to get through.

That’s gonna be it for this month’s post. I want to get this out before tomorrow when we find out officially about the break and potentially a reason for why. I might do another post at the end of the month because I’m getting in to watching more anime movies and stuff so I want to give short reviews on them when I have more time.

October Update 2024

jackson@jacksontaylor.xyz (Jackson Taylor) — Thu, 31 Oct 2024 00:00:00 -0400

Happy Halloween! Bunch of news around One Piece, and I’ve got a tin-foil hat theory for you today regarding One Piece, and some small updates with things I’m doing.

Horror Books and Movies

Since it’s getting close to Halloween, I’ve been watching and reading a little bit of horror media. Right now I’m in the middle of “Tomie” by Junji Ito. I bought Uzumaki and Tomie a few months ago and I started Tomie pretty soon after buying it, but I wasn’t really enjoying it. The art was fine, it was really well drawn in some spots, but others it was really strange and almost bad looking. And the story was just kinda meh. Once I started re-reading it though I started to enjoy and appreciate it a lot more. It’s not something that gets me scared, like movies will, but it is a really cool series and I see why Junji Ito is known as one of the greats of horror manga. The artwork improved a lot as the story went on. There were just a few really rough panels to begin with.

I’ll read Uzumaki at some point soon probably. The anime for it came out recently, and the first episode was animated really well, but from what I’ve been seeing the rest of the show is really bad. It has something to do with the budget or the deadline. I’m not sure, I’ve heard it was a lot of management’s fault though and not the artists. Which is unfortunate because I was really hyped for it, and I wish they had at the very least kept the quality consistent (I think consistently bad is better than having a great first episode and a bad rest of the season). Junji Ito’s work is kind of hard to get the same feeling in an anime that you get from the manga. Which is true for a lot of artists, but I feel like Junji Ito is especially true.

I’m not the biggest horror movie enjoyer. I’ll find one every now and again that interests me, but I’m kind of a wimp so I avoid them a lot of the time lol. My older brother and sister love horror movies and are constantly looking for new ones to watch. They’ve actually gotten to meet a ton of actors from their favorite horror movies. I got to meet a few of the actors who played Jason Voorhees myself.

Anyway, I try to find something around Halloween to watch when it comes around. I watched “Longlegs” towards the start of the month because I thought it would be funny. Nicholas Cage dressed up as an androgynous person who sings? Sounds pretty silly to me. But this movie was actually super sinister, and way less funny than what I thought. It was good, but it was super evil and satanic. It was super suspenseful and not very jump-scary which stresses me out while I’m watching it lol. It was good though, I recommend watching it.

I also watched a Japanese horror movie called “House” from 1977. I hadn’t heard much about it, but I saw a few clips and it looked interesting. Japanese horror movies also kind of have a reputation for being pretty scary, so I was excited to watch it. I just didn’t enjoy it though. With 1970’s and 1980’s American horror/slasher type movies, you can tell at one point they might’ve been scary. With this, I don’t know if anyone would’ve ever found it scary. The visuals remind me of a really weird commercial. I guess that’s part of the appeal, but I just don’t get it. I was bored throughout a lot of it and was wanting it to be over. I think I’d still recommend you watching it, because maybe you’ll get it and enjoy it. It is silly, and I think it’s cool to watch older foreign movies because you get to see how the world was in that part of the world during that time.

One Piece Anime Hiatus

In case you guys haven’t seen, the One Piece anime is going on hiatus. The first video I saw almost gave me a heart attack by saying “ONE PIECE IS GOING ON HIATUS FOR 6 MONTHS!!!” and not mentioning that it was the anime and not the manga. I know it’s for clickbait, but it’s a little aggravating lol.

My understanding is that this is partly due to the upgrade in quality in more recent episodes. I don’t watch it weekly, but I will watch some scenes every now and again and the new animation style look fantastic, so I’m glad they’re gonna sacrifice the amount of time in between episodes in favor of quality. I believe this will also effect the pacing of the anime in a good way.

We’re also supposed to be getting a pseudo-remaster of the anime in the following months where they’re redoing a few arcs with better visuals, and removing some of the filler within the fights (making them faster and more concise). They’re going to be re-airing the Fishman Island arc soon in Japan with the new fixes. It’s going from like 57 episodes down to just 21, which is crazy. Fishman Island is an arc that a lot of people struggle to get through, so this should help with that immensely.

We’re still also going to be getting the new remake soon, so One Piece is literally getting so huge it’ll have 3 different versions of an anime all coming out at the same time.

One Piece Fan Letter

There was a new special episode released called “One Piece Fan Letter” that follows this girl who is trying to deliver a fan letter to Nami on the Straw Hat crews return to Sabaody after she figures out the meaning behind “3D2Y”. It also follows some other fans of the Straw Hat Pirates, including some people in the marines. It was directed by Megumi Ishitani and is about 30 minutes long.

This was such a warm and fuzzy kind of an episode. It was so much fun to watch, the animation was great, the story was simple but had some really impactful moments. It fits One Piece so well in that it expands the world and characters without having to change anything or do anything too crazy. I’m not sure if it’s canon or not, but it’s absolutely worth a watch. I’m going to rewatch it soon.

One Piece 1130

SPOILERS: This contains spoilers for Chapter 1130

This chapter was super good and gives me chills thinking about. This sets the stage for Elbaf and shows off how the Giants perceive Elbaf. The biggest thing to happen in this chapter is the reveal of Loki and his absolutely sinister character design. The other very small detail, but I believe important drop was Vivi potentially having left a sign for the Straw Hats.

On the ship with the rest of the Straw Hat crew and the giants, the newer giant pirates explain how Hajrudin is the king’s son and how he is the rightful heir to the throne of Elbaf. But there was another prince, Loki, who killed King Harald in order to obtain the devil fruit that was passed down through the royal line. It took all the giant warriors to subdue him and trap him, and how if he escaped it could mean the end of Elbaf.

Luffy separates from his group to go look for this power source he’d been sensing all the way inside of Rodo’s room. He knew it was absolutely massive. He comes across this giant with a devilish smile who is chained up and blindfolded. He claims he is the “Sun God” who will destroy the world.

There’s been a lot of discussion around what he means by him being the Sun god. There’s a few people who are called the Sun God, or call themselves the Sun God. Nika, Joy Boy, Luffy, the dragon in Skypeia, Rodo and now Loki all are called Sun God in different ways. People think that maybe his devil fruit is actually the Sun-Sun fruit and he can literally turn into a mini sun, which would be an insane power. Other people think maybe it has something to do with the sun, like radiation or maybe heat. My friend brought up the idea that maybe it’s the rubber-rubber fruit and they thought it was the gum-gum fruit. Like what if the giants have been passing down a fruit they think is the human-human fruit model Nika thinking it’s super hard to awaken, but they actually just have the wrong fruit. I’m not sure what I think yet. He is blindfolded, so I’m wondering if maybe this has something to do with his fruit at all. Like does he need to be able to see to use it? Or does he have some ability that requires sight, like maybe Saturn’s death stare.

Based on some certain dialogue from Rodo and Loki (separately, not together), it seems as though they both don’t hold Elbaf as highly as others might. Rodo is upset that the new giant pirates joined up with the Straw Hat Grand Fleet and are serving humans, and Loki says that Elbaf “once lived and breathed warfare”. So reading into that, my conclusion is that some giants probably do not think as highly of Elbaf as they once did. Especially now with King Harald having been killed, Elbaf is probably in a state of political disarray and a civil war may be brewing. Nothing new for the Straw Hats though, this is like the 10th war they’ve been a part of.

While on the ship, Robin points out that Luffy has an x on his arm that isn’t normally there. It’s also not as blurry as the rest of his body in the photo. She says it looks familiar but she can’t place it. The x is significant because this is part of the secret sign that the Straw Hats used in Alabasta to keep track of eachother. It’s also what the crew showed to Vivi as they were leaving to signal goodbye, but keep Vivi’s affiliation with the crew a secret. It makes sense why no one who is looking at the picture understands the meaning behind it, because none of them were on the crew during Alabasta. Robin joined right after the events of Alabasta and would probably recognize it, but not know the meaning or that it was tied to Vivi. Brook, Franky and Jimbei have never seen it before.

Since the sign is in the newspaper, it’s almost guaranteed to be a sign from Vivi and Big News Morgans. What this sign means is yet to be determined. I’m sure it’s probably her trying to let them know that she’s ok, and to potentially come help her out. Because as we know, the Nefeltari family is in hot water with the world government and Imu specifically. So is Wapol for that matter. We’ll just have to see when we cut back to her what is going on.

Tin-Foil Hat One Piece Theory on the Origin of Devil Fruits

SPOILERS: This includes spoilers up to the end of Egghead. I thought I could get away with chapter 1044 and episode 1071, but there’s some medium sized spoilers in Egghead that I have to mention.

This isn’t going to be a total shot in the dark, but it is really big stretch (lol, you’ll get that joke in a minute, that’s kind of a slow burn). I’ve never heard anyone mention a theory like this, and it has to be a newer one since we only learned about Nika around 3 years ago. I think it’s an interesting idea, even if it doesn’t turn out to be true.

We’re probably going to learn a lot more about Joyboy, Nika, and the ancient kingdom in Elbaf, considering they have most of the work that was written in Ohara and saved by Saul. They also seemingly worship Nika, so the lore behind him might be common knowledge on their island. What if we also learn the origin or cause of devil fruits?

There’s 3 important trees in the world (The Adam Tree, Sunlight Tree Eve, and Yggdrasil). Since we know that devil fruits grow like normal fruits on trees and bushes, could the trees be important to the origin? Some people believe that Yggdrasil could be a potential origin for them having been brought into the world. I think that’s a more likely answer than what I’m about to propose.

What if it wasn’t any of the trees? What if the fruits aren’t really fruits at all? What if all devil fruits are actually pieces of the original Nika’s body?

Don’t get the straight jacket yet, let me explain a little. It’s an insane theory and has a huge likelihood of being proven false, but it’s something I thought up the other day and have a few pieces of evidence that point towards it being possible. My general idea is that Nika’s body was split up and turned into these fruits with great power, be it to spite someone, because he was bored, or maybe he was forced to. The main points of evidence I’m going to bring up are the almost bookkeeping like nature of them, the taste of them, and then some of the folklore surrounding them being apart of imagination.

We learned a little bit about devil fruits and the ability to recreate their powers in Egghead from Vegapunk, we know that they change you at the DNA level to have these powers. So Vegapunk was able to recreate a fruit such that 2 nearly identical fruits existed at the same time (Kaido’s Fish-Fish model Azure Dragon). Why did it take this kind of science to achieve this effect? Why aren’t there huge fields of devil fruits that all have the same abilities? They have a sort of bookkeeping nature to them where 1 fruit can exist until the user dies. How can fruits keep up with this sort of thing? What if Nika decided his own rules for them and split himself up and keeps track of that himself. He realized that certain fruits could cause mass destruction, so he decided to keep it as a limit to 1 fruit each. This could also be some run of the mill limitation of the magic or system that was used to create devil fruits, but I have yet to hear a theory surrounding this particular aspect of the devil fruits.

All we know about the tastes of devil fruits are that they taste horrible. It’s never been really described what the taste is apart from bad, but could it be that they taste like rubber? Or a rubber/human mixture? Again, this is a reach, but what purpose is served by them tasting bad? Normally, plants or fruits will taste bitter to make animals avoid eating them. But devil fruits can only be eaten the 1 time, so the taste wouldn’t really make animals avoid eating them. They’re also super rare, so animals would probably rarely get the chance to eat them anyway.

Nika is a being that embodies imagination and freedom, as we’ve seen from Gear 5. Luffy is able to do most everything that Luffy wants. Partially (in my opinion) because Luffy has such a big imagination, he was able to awaken his fruit. What if Luffy’s imagination wasn’t as great? Well then he might not have been able to awaken it. What if what we know about devil fruits also follows the same rules? What if they work on a belief system. We’ve heard that if you were to eat 2 devil fruits you would explode, but what if that’s just what everyone believes? What if the key to having multiple fruits is simply believing that you can eat them. Blackbeard is a character that believes in dreams and may have just believed that he could eat multiple fruits. This is probably going to be disproved so hard when it comes out that Blackbeard is actually 3 people.

Most of this is sorta half finished, but I want to get this post out before the month is up. I haven’t thought through my theory in its entirety, but I think it’d be cool if I called the theory that turns out to be so vital to the story of One Piece. I hope you guys have a fun and safe evening trick-or-treating!

September Update 2024

jackson@jacksontaylor.xyz (Jackson Taylor) — Mon, 16 Sep 2024 00:27:23 -0400

Happy September! I can sorta feel that this is gonna cut it close to the end of the month, even though I’m starting this on the 16th (I finished it on the 26th, so not too bad).

Back Update/Small lesson

Small lesson I got reminded of these past few weeks: If you know you should do something and it takes literally 20 minutes to do, go ahead and get it done.

I hadn’t done my MB3 exercises for a few weeks. I’ve been sort of busy and my friend has been really busy so we haven’t gotten together to do them. He goes to the gym pretty regularly, and he’ll do some sets of them between his other sets of exercises, so he’s a lot better about doing them than I am. I, on the other hand, am relatively lazy and don’t do much outside of what I have planned for a day, and that unfortunately includes my exercises (I’ve been trying to go back to the gym regularly though, but haven’t succeeded yet). I started feeling some sciatica pain this past weekend and was like “here we go”. Thank goodness it hasn’t progressed to anything major. I did a quick half workout on Sunday and probably will do another half today. There’s no good reason for me to skip them. They’re easy enough to do, you don’t need much space, you don’t need equipment (except for a pillow or a soft surface), and I feel great after doing them. Don’t be like me, just do the thing you know you should do.

Reading

I’ve been trying to read more this year, and I think I’ve honestly read more this year than the 6 years since I left high school. It’s fun, it’s a good hobby.

This month I finished “At the Mountains of Madness” by H.P. Lovecraft. I’ve had this books for years but have never read it or tried to read it. It’s tiny, my copy is only 84 pages long. But I’m pretty sure it’s his longest work, so that’s why it’s its own book (at least the copy I have is its own book). I read this so that way I could read the manga version by Gou Tanabe, since I bought the deluxe version. I really should’ve waited to buy the deluxe edition instead of pre-ordering it, because as soon as it came out it dropped like $10. I also realized I’m not the biggest fan of the story. I’m horrible with having scenes described to me, especially when they’re as intricate as some of Lovecraft’s. I wish I liked cosmic horror too, but I guess I just don’t get it. I’ll still read the manga version, but I may sell it or give it to my friend. It’s about as thick as a Berserk deluxe edition, so it might just be taking up space.

I’m also starting to read some Kafka, I bought a book of a compilation of his stories that I plan to read that include ones like “Description of a Struggle”, “The Metamorphosis” and “The Judgment”. I’ve only read the first 2 introductory parables in the book called “Before the Law” and “An Imperial Message”. Kafka is kind of known as a sad man, and a lot of absurdist/existentialist authors (Camus) have read and enjoyed. So I figured I’d pick it up and try it. I’d like to read “The Trial” as well, that one sounds very interesting and reminds me of “The Stranger” by Camus which is one of my favorite books. I’m kind of all over the place when I read though, I’m technically in the middle of like 5 books, but I don’t recommend that.

Grave of the Fireflies

I’ve been on a little bit of a Studio Ghibli kick the past few months. I’ve always heard they were super good, but until this year I had only seen “Spirited Away”, “Ponyo”, and “My Neighbor Totoro”. I’ve been really enjoying watching them all though, they’re so much fun. So far I’ve watched:

Spirited Away
Ponyo
My Neighbor Totoro
Howl’s Moving Castle
Princess Mononoke
The Boy and the Heron
Kiki’s Delivery Service

I’d heard that “Grave of the Fireflies” was really good, and really sad, so I’d been kinda pushing it off. I was actually planning on watching it towards the end of the list, but it recently came out on Netflix and I decided that it was time. I was going to watch it with someone, but Netflix didn’t have the English dubbing and they won’t watch stuff where they have to read subtitles so they didn’t watch it. I had already mentally committed, so I watched it by myself. Which I think was probably a good thing, I’m not normally picky about subbed vs dubbed except for a very few select movies/shows, but I don’t know if the English version would’ve hit as hard as the Japanese one did.

With a lot of confidence, I can say this is the saddest movie I’ve ever seen. It beats “Boy in the Striped Pajamas”, “The Cure”, “Christmas Shoes”, and “Marley and Me” in my opinion. From the start to the end I was on the edge of crying my eyes out. The story follows a boy named Seita and his little sister Setsuko in Japan in the 1940’s during WWII. Their home is bombed and they have to move around to be able to eat and survive. This movie shows off the effects of war in a way I’ve never really seen before in a movie (though I haven’t watched many war, or war-adjacent, movies). Please, set aside some time to watch this movie and some time afterwards to cry.

One Piece Chapters 1124-1127

Spoilers: This will have spoilers for chapters 1124-1127 of the One Piece manga

Some crazy stuff has happened the past few chapters. I’ve been incredibly slack with writing about the chapters coming out. I don’t necessarily want to write about every chapter that comes out, but this set has been insane and we’re on our way to the next island.

Chapter 1124

This chapter wasn’t too too crazy in terms of events, but it did give us a glimpse into the thoughts and emotions of Kizaru that we haven’t seen before. We knew that Vegapunk was a good friend of his, and he wasn’t super happy with having to kill him. Most of his time in the arc he seemed hesitant and less enthusiastic about his mission. In Sabaody for example, he was sorta making jokes when he was trying to capture/kill the Straw Hats, but in Egghead he was much more somber.

This chapter also shows some of the relation between Kizaru and Akainu. We don’t have a lot to go off of in terms of how the admirals get along. Akainu and Aokiji obviously went head to head during the time skip to decide who was going to be fleet admiral. But, in my opinion, we have no idea if they were enemies/rivals before that. Obviously they had differing ideas, otherwise there may not have been a need for the battle, but as for how they acted towards each other on a daily basis I’m not sure if we’ve ever seen that. In this chapter, Akainu being fleet admiral and very mission-oriented snapped at Kizaru telling him he better not have screwed up. Kizaru snapped back at him because he’s really hurting in this moment and couldn’t care less about Saturn or anyone else’s well being. And in maybe a moment of empathy or sympathy that I don’t think we’ve ever seen from him, Akainu apologizes. Being that this is in relation to Kizaru having killed a friend, this could be the start of the buildup for Akainu’s backstory. We know that he has a deep hatred for pirates and everyone who helps or sympathizes with them. Exciting little development.

A slightly unexpected bit of dialogue was Zoro complaining about Luffy crying over not having been able to save Vegapunk. He doesn’t think it’s very emperor like. At first, this seems sort of uncharacteristically heartless of Zoro. He has to know that Luffy is very sensitive, right? Yes, but Zoro has always been incredibly careful and aware about how a crew/captain should act. One of the best and most well known examples of this is when Usopp left the crew in Water 7. Zoro wasn’t going to let Usopp back on board if he didn’t apologize for going against what Luffy said. Zoro knows how a crew should act and how letting a crew mate disrespect the captain would look and what it could evolve into. This is just a similar situation. To be an emperor in the New World means that you have to be ruthless to an extent. If Luffy is going to be the Pirate King, he can’t care about “some old scientist”. I don’t think this is Zoro being totally heartless, but he realizes that it could make them look weak. Especially in front of the giants who are close with Shanks. Luffy’s despair doesn’t last for very long before Lilith explains that Vegapunk is actually still alive. At the time this was believed to be some technological trickery, where Vegapunk uploaded his consciousness to a computer or something. This is enough for Luffy to get out of his slump and start partying.

At the end of the chapter we get a small glimpse of a silhouette that’s caused some talk online about who it could be. One theory that I really like is that this silhouette is the same person that Crocus was talking to on the cover of chapter 631. All we know about this person is that they know Crocus, in a decently familiar/friendly way, they drink, and they would also have to have the ability to go up reverse mountain. This doesn’t narrow it down a lot, but it could potentially point to a former member of Roger’s crew. With the way the hair looks, it could be Scopper Gaban who was potentially the 2nd mate on Roger’s crew (given the order of the colors/metal theme that they had going on with Gold Roger, Silvers Rayleigh, Scopper Gaban). For a long time now it’s been theorized that Scopper would be either at the final island (very doubtful though), or Lodestar which was thought to be the final island before Roger found Laugh Tale. However, not knowing how much longer we have in the story, this could be Oda bringing Scopper in earlier than we thought and we just skip Lodestar all together.

Another theory is that this silhouette isn’t the same person from chapter 630 at all, and instead this is Loki the prince of Elbaf. We know that this silhouette is of someone on Elbaf, so it being Loki isn’t totally out of the question. The top of his head could be cut off to hide his crown, because that would definitely give it away. It would make sense if Loki was intentionally waiting for the Straw Hats to come and it’s more of an impatient “Come on”. I’m not totally sure. Hopefully we find out soon. I’d love for it to be Scopper.

Chapter 1125

This chapter had everyone going crazy. This one has one of the biggest events of Egghead for sure, and it’s one that the general world of One Piece don’t know of.

To start with, Lucci tells the government that he has killed Stussy. Whether or not this is true is to be determined. It could be that Kaku has lied to Lucci and said she succumbed to some injuries. Or that Lucci lied himself to protect Stussy. Or it could be that during some unseen scene, he actually did kill her. Everything is to be determined at this point. The Stussy stuff is something I haven’t paid enough attention to this arc. I have been needing to do a big re-read of Egghead because there’s a lot of details I personally missed because I was so concerned with trying to catch up. There isn’t much I can say on this point, but there’s a lot this could mean for Cipher Pol.

Here’s where stuff starts picking up a ton of speed very quickly. During a status check of what’s happened and how the navy is meant to proceed, in a flash back it’s confirmed that Saturn was alive 200 years ago and told the scientists then NOT to trash Emeth and to instead research him. This is a huge drop because we’ve been wondering about the life cycle of elders forever. Especially since the information regarding the God Valley incident was revealed during this arc. Saturn looked identical 38 years ago, so we assumed they had a longer life span. It wasn’t clear (and still isn’t 100% clear) if the elders were normal humans and would be replaced when they died, or if they were immortal or near-immortal beings who have been around since the void century, or maybe something in between. This at least confirms that Saturn had an extended life and was around since 200 years ago. It heavily leans into the idea that they’ve always been by Imu’s side.

Saturn tells the vice admirals not to chase the Straw Hats for now, and instead clean up the resulting chaos from Vegapunk’s message. After this status check, Doberman asks Saturn “Since this was considered a failure, does that mean Vegapunk was telling the truth?”. Saturn then uses his death ray vision (unknown ability) to incapacitate and maybe even kill Doberman.

The Vegapunk satellites who were killed during this arc are then shown to orchestrate an effort to move Vegapunk’s brain, aka Punk Records. Lilith was telling the truth and Vegapunk is still alive at least inside the computer systems in Punk Records, and they are able to then rebuild themselves into a frankensteined version of themselves using spare parts on the piece of Punk Records they stole. York will still have access, but not physical access. This is very vague in what it means, but I think this gives York a reason to at least stay alive for a while longer. Punk Records then heads to Weatheria which is where Nami trained during the time skip. Weatheria is also the first instance of us seeing that knots could be used for more than just tying things, right before the time skip the wizards show Nami a rope that stored wind and would be useful for navigating. This could be where we learn how Joy Boy was able to store all that haki in the rope inside of Emeth.

Now for the huge reveal. We cut to Marijoa and see Figarland Garling, former leader of the Holy Knights, take a seat with the rest of the elders who were transported back after Joy Boy’s haki was released (an ability we aren’t sure is central to Imu or if it’s something to do with the elders). The rest of the elders are confused and shocked that Garling would have the gall to approach them like this. He then reveals he’s been promoted to be the head of science and defense. The title that Saturn held. We cut back to Egghead shows Saturn in pain and rapidly aging while the vice admirals freak out and call for medics. Saturn asks for mercy from Imu, but it’s too late and he falls over as only bones.

This bit was WILD. To see Saturn perish after having done all the evil things he did to Kuma and Vegapunk was very cathartic in a way. I’m a little sad it wasn’t at the hands of Luffy, Kuma, or Bonney. But it’s not surprising that Imu would want to kill him after what happened. Garling replacing Saturn was sort of out of left field, I was super surprised about that. This shows off a little more about the hierarchy of celestial dragons and Marijoa. It also gives us an idea of how strong Garling potentially is, to be next in line to the elders means that he’s either very well respected or he’s super strong. Could it be that Saturn was the head of the Holy Knights before? Were all the elders some higher up in their class system before they became elders? All very interesting questions. This means that the spot of Supreme Commander of the Holy Knights is open, so who will take over that position? Could this be the setup for another Garling son reveal (meaning that Shanks has a brother, potentially a twin)?

Lastly, we see the Revolutionaries reaction to the message and their resolve to finally make their move. Finally, Dragon is gonna do something besides looking to the east and saying “…”. Seeing that the world is about to go nuts and many more people are going to be looking for the One Piece with malicious intent, they presumably decide to go after it themselves. It’s not 100% clear that they’re going to go after it, and it wouldn’t surprise me if they only had a small task force attempt to go after it. Or maybe even only try to stop people from going after it. There’s a lot they could do in this situation. I think the surefire way to keep the weapons out of other hands would be to get it themselves. But, we’ll see.

Chapter 1126

Again, this is a chapter filled with a ton of stuff that’s very important to the story and how it will move forward. This is potentially the catalyst for what leads to a Davy-back fight between Luffy and Shanks. Something about this chapter had a different feel to it. I’m not sure what it is, but out of my friends I’ve been the only one to feel this way. I’m not sure, I’m probably just being weird. I really enjoyed this chapter though, this isn’t a bad feeling. It felt new, but old at the same time.

It starts out on the Giants’ ship where everyone is still partying and catching up. Dorry and Brogy’s battle never finished, their weapons just broke and they didn’t want to keep fighting each other with their fists. So, eventually they will return to Little Garden to continue the fight. I personally think it’ll be after the story is concluded, but it could very well be in the next few chapters and we just don’t see them again.

Everyone is having a great time right now, they’re drinking, they’re dancing, they’re singing. Robin is smiling (my bby girl), Franky and Chopper are dancing to Brook playing music, and Bonney and Kuma are catching up a little bit. Kuma is still smiling which is wonderful. With Vegapunk still being around in a sense, I wonder if the satellites will be able to reverse his cyborg surgery. I can’t remember the specifics about it, if Vegapunk said it was irreversible or not. Really, Vegapunk could have put a reverse switch in without Saturn’s knowledge and just not told Kuma or anyone. That might be too wishful of thinking. In any case, right now they’re chilling and they’re happy.

One of the giants mentions that they’re drinking absinthe. I don’t know much about alcohol, but I’ve heard that absinthe is pretty crazy stuff and will make you hallucinate, which is mentioned in this chapter. This is 100% an example of Chekhov’s gun. It wouldn’t be mentioned that it was a hallucinogenic unless someone will hallucinate from it. I think this may come in to play later on in the chapter, so I’ll explain that in a bit.

Now for the precursor to the Davy-back fight that I mentioned. A hundred chapters ago or so in a cover story, we saw Bartolomeo burn down a Red-hair pirates flag in one of Shanks’ territories and replace it with a Straw Hat flag. This was obviously going to cause some issues because emperors can’t let other emperors stroll in and steal their territory, so Shanks was forced to retaliate. He did this by beating up the Barto club and giving them the task of poisoning Luffy. Barto was to give Luffy this bottle of poison within 1 month and that would be considered the payback. But, this wasn’t really poison, it was a test to see what Bartolomeo would do and test Luffy’s allies. Bartolomeo, being the absolute chad that he is, drinks it without a second thought. Feeling a huge sense of responsibility for what happened he drank the poison, but then feels despair over never being able to see Luffy become the Pirate King. But, it turns out it was fake and they’re sent on their way…except not really.

Bartolomeo is a huge Straw Hat pirates and Luffy fan, and with him being a part of the Straw Hat Grand Fleet (SHGF) he’s gonna be proud of Luffy. For him to go and “claim” one of Shanks’ territories, I honestly don’t think he realized what he was doing. Bartolomeo is a HUGE fan, so he’s just a giddy guy and wanted to show off his loyalty. He’s a pirate, so he knows the significance of the jolly roger, but I think he was seeing it more like a poster of his favorite captain. Like Shanks’ said in the chapter though, he can’t just let that kind of behavior slide. It puts his friends in danger. Shanks and Luffy are very similar in that regard, they don’t put up with people hurting their friends. Literally in the very first chapter of One Piece, Shanks had beer spilled on him and was made fun of, but he didn’t bat an eye. But as soon as Higuma and his men started messing with Luffy, it was on. Even though what Bartolomeo did wasn’t a direct attack on Shanks’ friends, it could easily lead to one. I doubt it would come to it, but it technically could lead to a lot worse. Some pirate could just start destroying all of Shanks’ territories. Bartolomeo realized what he had done was wrong, but was immediately ready to face the consequences.

Once he was given the task to poison Luffy, his idol, his hero, he immediately decided to take the poison himself. I don’t think many people in universe know that Luffy’s immune to most poisons after what Magellan did to him in Impel Down. Since it wasn’t actually poison, it didn’t matter, but I figured I’d bring that up. After Bartolomeo is set “free”, Shanks and Beckman have this short conversations where Shanks reveals he’s thrilled that Luffy has people who care for him that much. We see moments like this every now and again where Shanks is super proud of Luffy and how far he’s come and how he’s on his way to becoming a great pirate. It always makes me smile. Then the biggest bum of a father has to come and ruin it.

All we’ve seen Yasopp do up until now in the story is be a horrible father to Usopp, a great uncle/father figure to Luffy, and be worried to see Usopp because he knows how crappy of a human he is. I didn’t really believe/feed into the whole Yasopp being a horrible dad thing, because there could be a bunch of reasons he didn’t go back to get or see Usopp. Him being on a emperor’s crew means that he’s a high profile target for both the navy and potentially other pirates, and he may not have wanted to put Usopp into danger by taking him on the ship with him or frequently visiting the home town. These are very similar reasons for Dragon not being a very good father to Luffy. Given these legitimate arguments for Yasopp not being a good father out of necessity, I hate him and want him to bite the curb.

Kidd had already challenged Shanks and lost before for very similar reasons. Kidd has always been hard-headed and has tried on 3 separate occasions to try to take Shanks down. The first time he lost an arm, the 2nd time he formed an alliance with Hawkins and Apoo and they got thwarted by Kaido. The last time his ship was destroyed with 1 attack by Shanks after directing an attack at Shanks and his friends, the 2nd time he directly attacked. Now he may not be alive, he probably is but there’s a chance he is gone for good, but it took him 3 times to get injured that seriously. 3 distinct attacks against Shanks. Bartolomeo on the other hand, got a little careless and too gung-ho and made a mistake. One which he was immediately apologizing for and ready to take responsibility for. I don’t think the 2 cases are very equal. Out of the 2 I think that Bartolomeo should’ve been given the leeway that Kidd was given. Not saying that I want Bartolomeo to lose an arm, but I think that’s a much more fitting punishment compared to his ship being sunk.

Now, if Shanks were to have given the order to take down the Barto club ship, I’d probably be mad at him, but it would make sense being a message for Luffy and all the other worst generation pirates to stop screwing around with an emperor’s territories and friends. Yasopp could’ve also acted in this way because it was coming from an emperor, and not just any one of the worst generation. Since Yasopp did it though, seemingly because he wanted to (or at the very least because he thought he had to), I’m not sure what to think.

Chapter 1127

When I first read this chapter I thought to myself “ok, this is a pretty easy intro to Elbaf chapter, I won’t write about this for the September blog”. But then people started noticing some inconsistencies in the chapter and it could be super interesting in what it means for the direction of Elbaf. There ere so many issues it’s made people start to question Oda and his editors. So many inconsistencies that it has to be intentional, or the One Piece team is being held up at gunpoint and are trying to send a message.

If it weren’t for the weirdness of the chapter, this would be pretty standard introduction to an arc. A slightly boring/slow chapter that’s getting us acclimated to the island, and splitting up the Straw Hats. The callbacks to Alabasta were cool. A pretty simple chapter with a little bit of what’s going on in Elbaf being shown off as well. The Yggdrasil, or the World Tree, is shown to be very important to the people of Elbaf and may be on fire currently (due to the Straw Hats or not). Lots of people in Elbaf live in what actually seem to be Lego houses. At the end of the last chapter it kinda looked like Nami was in a Lego house, and people were extrapolating that this was a reference to the country of origin of Lego, Denmark. Denmark has some ties to vikings, so it makes sense that there would be some ties to it, but Lego is a bit of an odd choice.

People started noticing that there were a few inconsistencies with what the characters were wearing, and how they acted. A few times someone would be wearing a sword on their back and in the next panel it was an axe, or it was totally gone. Nami’s tattoo was missing, thought it could be that it was supposed to be covered up by her clothing. Luffy isn’t wearing his straw hat that we can see, he called Gear 3 Gear 4, and HE TURNED DOWN FOOD. Now, all of these in isolation are minor things that could have been overlooked. Oda has made mistakes in the past. But, the fact that they all happened in the same chapter after having landed on a new island and after having mentioned the potential hallucinogenic effects of the booze they were drinking seems very intentional and some mind trickery Oda would try to pull. If this is intentional, a lot of people are wondering if it is the absinthe or if it’s potentially Loki, the prince of Elbaf. Loki in Norse mythology is known to be a half giant as well as a trickster, so it would be fitting that the prince of Elbaf (the land of giants) was a trickster. I personally like the idea of it being Loki more than it being absinthe, though I do think absinthe would have to come into play at some point later on during the story. Or at least some hallucinogenic situations.

Lot’s of cool implications for it.

July Update 2024

jackson@jacksontaylor.xyz (Jackson Taylor) — Thu, 25 Jul 2024 00:00:00 -0400

Slam Dunk Review

TLDR: Read Slam Dunk, it’s great, it’s so hype. Even if you don’t like sports, give it a try.

I finished reading the Slam Dunk manga on the 14th of this month. I thoroughly enjoyed the series and I give it a 9/10. I think it’s underrated and should be talked about way more. Takehiko Inoue’s art and ability to make you care about all the characters is superb. I think this is probably my favorite finished manga as of now.

I have yet to find a story that made me as hyped to read the next panel as Slam Dunk did. One Piece has its moments, and I think it is my overall favorite story, but Slam Dunk had me grinning like an idiot when Shohoku would pull off a good play.

I really wasn’t sure if I was going to like a sports manga; the pictures aren’t moving, I don’t like sports, and how can high school basketball games be deep. I mostly wanted it to have something from Inoue in my collection. I was gladly proven wrong, I loved every minute of it. The entire story is great. It starts out being about a dumb guy who picks up basketball to impress a girl, and it morphs into a story about the entire team and their struggles, their strengths and weaknesses, learning to play effectively as a team all for this single goal that they share for different reasons. It’s a really beautiful story. Don’t let the fact that it’s a sports manga turn you off to it, I think it’s a genre that more people should try.

WARNING: SPOILERS FOR THE ENDING

I think my biggest issue with Slam Dunk is the ending. This is mostly because it ended way sooner than I thought it could’ve and it didn’t end how I wanted it to lol

As I was reading and getting closer to volume 31 I realized the Sannoh game was probably going to be the last game we saw in full. Before I finished, I was on youtube and saw a video that was titled “Why Slam Dunk was canceled” (or something to that effect) which scared me because I really wanted to see how it ended. I realized there were going to be a few different ways this could end.

The series just ends on a cliffhanger never having been fully finished. (Super doubtful, I hadn’t heard of Slam Dunk never having been finished.)
They win this game against Sannoh and they ride that high to win the national championship. (Doubted it. Although Sannoh won the title last year, I didn’t think they’d have an easy ride for the rest of nationals. You can’t not show the last game.)
They lose the game, but they’re happy with their progress and go on about their lives. (Not horrible, but I’d prefer they win)

The real ending is kind of a mix of 2 and 3. They win a very heated match against Sannoh, but because they literally gave everything they had to win it, they then lose the next match and are sent home from nationals. It wraps up by showing a little bit of everyone’s lives afterwards.

Sakuragi is pretty badly injured in the game against Sannoh when he goes for a loose ball and crashes into a table. His back is so badly injured he ends up doing rehab after the story is finished. You guys know I relate to that with my back issues lol, I didn’t think it was “cool” that he got hurt, but having something real like that in the story was cool to see. Sakuragi’s injury wasn’t explicitly explained, but it didn’t seem entirely serious because he wasn’t paralyzed, unlike another character in Takehiko Inoue’s series “REAL” who has his spinal cord severely damaged/severed.

I really wish they would’ve won nationals. They tried so hard and there were so many people who were beaten by Shohoku, I think it would’ve been nice to see them show up to the final game supporting them and their progress. I honestly could’ve read another 30 volumes just of nationals to finish it up. But, I read somewhere that Takehiko Inoue didn’t think he could draw another game that was as good as the one against Sannoh, which makes sense. They struggled so much in the games leading up to the game against Sannoh, they hit a wall. Akagi really wanted to win nationals, but making it to nationals and beating a team that had won it before was amazing to see.

I think I would’ve liked to see what happened in the year following Sakuragi’s first year. Akagi, Kogure and Mitsui wouldn’t have been at Shohoku anymore, but that could’ve been a new opportunity for more characters with their own struggles. I basically wish there was a Slam Dunk 2. I’m highly doubtful of that ever happening though since it’s almost been 30 years since the series finished. Haruko and Sakuragi never got together either. They were friends and she was writing him letters while he was in physical therapy, but that wasn’t what I wanted :'(

Overall the ending was fine and to be expected. I’ll just keep my own head canon about what should’ve happened. Very good series.

My Next Series

I’m not 100% sure what series I’m going to read next. I’m only 2/3 of the way through Goodnight Punpun, I got the Monster perfect edition volumes this month, I just got Vinland Saga 1-7, there’s a few different things I could pick up.

I got Monster spoiled like crazy by reading an amazon description of the perfect edition set. So, be careful reading descriptions on amazon I guess. My buddy says that it doesn’t totally ruin the story, so hopefully I still enjoy it.

I really need to slow down on my manga collecting. I checked my savings account the other day and it’s lower than what I thought it was going to be lol. Nothing major, I’m not bankrupt, but just kind of had a reality check. The past few months have been a little expensive outside of manga collecting.

I bought the last volumes of One Piece I need and I got a really good deal on volumes 1-7 of Vinland Saga, but overall that was pretty close to $350. I’m going to Galaxy Con Raleigh this weekend, which has a lot of manga and collectibles. I’m just going to have to exercise some self-restraint and not spend a ton of money.

Anyway, this blog post ended up being a little weird with its contents and structure. I’m going to end it here though. I want to make sure it gets out in July, and if I wait until next week there’s a chance it won’t. See you guys in August!

June Update 2024

jackson@jacksontaylor.xyz (Jackson Taylor) — Thu, 27 Jun 2024 13:05:59 -0400

Not too much going on in my personal life this month, thankfully. It’s nice to have a few calm weeks every now and again. My family has a lot of birthdays next month, so that’ll be a crazy time for us.

I guess this month I’ll just talk a little bit about the stuff I’m reading and watching.

Slam Dunk

I am still enjoying Slam Dunk tremendously. I don’t see why it’s not talked about more, to be honest. I think this is a really good anime/manga to recommend to people who are just getting started with it. If you’re reading this and you haven’t read it or watched it before, go watch an episode or 2 or read some of the manga and see what you think. I think it’s very good for beginners because it’s a straight forward story that is centered around something very popular in American culture. Dragon Ball and One Piece are great, and I do recommend them, but they have whole new worlds to learn and understand. It’s nice to turn on something and understand most everything that’s being shown. Most shonen are also very long. Slam Dunk’s anime doesn’t cover the whole story I believe but it’s only 101 episodes, compared to Dragon Ball’s almost 600 (for DB, DBZ and DBS, it’s more if you count the movies and GT) and One Piece’s 1118 and growing. The only bad thing is the anime is kind of old and it doesn’t have a very good English dub from what I’m seeing.

SPOILERS: The rest of this section contains spoilers for up to volume 21 of the manga, not sure about where that is in the anime.

I just finished up the Shohoku vs Ryonan game for the 2nd nationals spot. It was so hype, I was very excited the whole time I was reading it. This game was so bittersweet because you wanted so badly for Shohoku to win so Akagi and Kogure could go to nationals, but then they showed Uozomi’s backstory and his drive to want to go to nationals too so you wish they both could’ve won. The parallel of Sakuragi going up to Akagi when he was crying happy tears at the end of the game and the time Akagi told Sakuragi to stop crying when they lost to Kainan because of a bad pass was so amazing, I almost shed a tear. I love this series. They’ll be going to nationals next and have already been teasing some of the teams and aces for the tournament.

I’m going to take a little bit of a break from reading now, maybe a few days, just to kind of digest it all and watch some more of the anime. I have all the volumes collected now, so I can finish it whenever I want, which is really nice. The volumes are super nice, the covers have really nice art that changes from volume to volume. A lot of them are done in what looks like water color. They don’t reveal too much about the story either, which I love.

I’ve put REAL on a little bit of a hold too. Partly because keeping up with it and Slam Dunk was a little tough, REAL is much more depressing and a little more dense. I also don’t have volumes 4 and beyond, they sell out on amazon kinda frequently so I haven’t had a chance to get them. I’m going to buy some new bookshelves soon, so I’ll have the room for more and might collect the rest of the volumes.

One Piece

SPOILERS: This contains spoilers for up to chapter 1118 in the manga

These chapters with Vegapunk’s message have been crazy. Unfortunately, in true Oda fashion, it was cut short before he could finish it. There’s a few theories going around about what he was going to say based on the word that was cut off, but I don’t know how much that really helps. Obviously it was about the “D.” clan, but was he going to reveal the full initial? Was he going to explain why they’re called demons? So much mystery around 1 letter. And it has been like that for 20 years! But that’s what makes it fun, I’m happy to be reading at a time we are going to be finding that out. I wish I had started reading back before Whole Cake like my friend did, but I think I got in just in the nick of time to see the best mysteries being revealed.

In 1118 we also see Bonney use her powers to essentially unlock a gear 5 transformation. This has SPLIT the community, and many people are mad that this happened. I’m personally not mad at it. I think it’s been built up pretty well, and I don’t think it’s as powerful a transformation as people might be thinking. Saturn said that her powers will diminish in strength as she ages and her future is more set in stone, so it’s not like this transformation will get much stronger if at all. I think it’s just a nice thing to include, having a child born of a slave become liberated by THE king of liberation, Nika/Joy Boy/Luffy, and become as free as him.

I think everyone will just have to wait for 1119 or maybe even 1120 to see how it plays out. If her transformation continues to grow and be strong, maybe it’ll be better explained as to why that’s possible. If it’s short and weak, then hopefully a lot of people will stop complaining lol.

Monster

No spoilers in this section. I just wanted to say that I’m starting to watch the Monster anime. One of my friend’s favorite authors is Naoki Urasawa, and he’s told me several times about how he wants to collect his works (Monster, Pluto and 20th century boys specifically). I finally got curious enough to start watching it. It’s ok so far, I’m not very far in. The art is definitely unique, but it does have that 2000’s kind of animation style to it (not a bad thing). I think I’m gonna give it about 15 episodes (about 20%) and if I still like it I might start collecting the manga.

Relatively short and sweet post this month. I’ll see you guys in July!

May Update 2024

jackson@jacksontaylor.xyz (Jackson Taylor) — Tue, 28 May 2024 00:00:00 -0400

Back to regularly scheduled programming

The past few posts have been kinda bummers, so I’ll keep this one cheerful.

I’m going to talk about what’s been going on in One Piece, and a few of the things I’ve been watching and reading.

Movies

WARNING: These do have spoilers, so please be careful.

Smokey and the Bandit 1 and 2

These are some movies I didn’t really think I’d like, but really ended up enjoying a lot.

The general premise of both of them is Bo, aka Bandit, played by Burt Reynolds, has to drive some far distance in a ridiculous amount of time. The first one he has to take a truck load of beer from Texarkana to a party in Atlanta across state lines (which is illegal bootlegging), and in the 2nd movie he has to take an elephant to the GOP national convention. Both times they are chased by Sherrif Buford T. Justice and son, among other law enforcement.

These movies are silly in a good way. They’re cartoonish situations, but funny because they’re funny, not because they’re trying too hard to be. I had a lot of fun watching them, they are very quotable. I think my favorite one is the first one. The 2nd one is still pretty good, it’s more silly than the first because of the elephant.

I’m just now finding out there’s actually a 3rd one that I have to watch at some point.

Rocky I - V

Again, these are some movies I didn’t think I’d like. I saw the first one for the first time a few years ago, and it was ok. I wasn’t crazy about it like some people are. I’m decently fond of Sylvester Stallone. I love First Blood, and I really liked his new show Tulsa King. I just didn’t like the first Rocky the first time I watched it for whatever reason. I was reading David Goggins’ book “Cant Hurt Me” and he talked about how he used Rocky as fuel during his navy seal training, so I figured I’d give it another try.

Overall, I think these movies are pretty good and if you haven’t watched at least the first one you’re doing yourself a disservice. I wondered how they were able to keep making them, because “it’s just Rocky boxing right?”, but they aren’t as simple as that. Each of the movies have shown Rocky going through different situations, be it financial troubles, self esteem issues, growing old. They’re much more different from each other than I originally thought. It’s not just “Rocky gets beat, does a training montage, and then he wins” (except for the 2nd and 3rd one, but they’re not even 100% like that).

My older brother and sister, and a few of my friends say say that the 4th movie (the one with the Russian, Ivan Drago) is their favorite. So I was pretty hyped by the time I got to that one. I was a little disappointed in it though, I’m not sure what people see in it. Apart from Apollo, I think that Drago is the coolest antagonist that Rocky fights in the ring. But, it just wasn’t my favorite, it seemed the most unrealistic. Which, that might be the reason that some people call it their favorite because it is a little over the top.

I think Rocky II is my favorite, because most of the movie is just Rocky being goofy and buying a bunch of stuff, and I just think it’s funny. Rocky III was also really good, that one was probably the best all around one. It had the best montage in my opinion, some funny bits, and the emotional side with Mickey. But that one also seemed kinda long with the Thunder lips fight near the start. Rocky V is probably my least favorite so far, because it shows Rocky at his worst, and it was all so preventable. Paulie is such a jackass in that one.

I plan to watch “Rocky Balboa” and the 3 Creed movies soon, I’ve heard all of those are really good.

Manga/Anime

WARNING: These do have minor spoilers, so please be careful.

This isn’t going to include One Piece spoilers, that will be the last section.

Slam Dunk

I mentioned in a different post that I’ve been starting to collect manga (and that I’m going a little crazy with it). A series that I’ve wanted to collect but been super hesitant about is “Vagabond” by Takehiko Inoue. It’s about a swordsman/artist/philosopher from 17th century Japan, Miyamoto Musashi. I’m very interested in Musashi’s legacy, and have read a little bit about him before. Vagabond is incredibly well drawn and incredibly popular. But, Inoue has had it on hiatus for almost 10 years now I think. Vagabond is a pretty philosophy-heavy work, so the reasoning I’ve heard from online is that Inoue wants to go live more of his life and learn more. Which, I understand, but I have been burned on series not getting finished before. So I’m hesitant to start it or collect it. Although the story up to this point can probably stand on its own. I may end up collecting it, but who knows.

Anyway, I still wanted something of Takehiko Inoue’s work so I thought I would try out “Slam Dunk” and “REAL” that he’s authored. Slam Dunk is about a guy named Sakuragi Hanamichi, who’s around 6’ 2" tall, a first year in high school, and has just asked out and been rejected by a girl for the 50th time. Totally dejected going into high school, he’s heartbroken and moody. Until a girl in his class, Haruko, shows introduces herself and asks if he plays basketball. He lies and says “of course I do”. Then the story goes from there where he ends up joining the team and becomes a “genius basketball man”.

I don’t watch much basketball (the Timberwolves game 7 win recently was cool to watch though, shame they’re doing bad against Dallas right now though), sports have never really been my thing. But this manga was interesting because its popularity is known as one of the causes for basketball becoming so popular in Japan, leading it to become one of the top watched sports there. Inoue played basketball in high school and wanted people to experience it as well, and he himself was a fan of a baseball manga when he was younger.

I bought the first 3 volumes of Real and Slam Dunk, but they were taking a little while to get here so I ended up watching the first few episodes of Slam Dunk’s anime. It’s incredibly 90’s lol, it’s animated pretty well but it has those old techniques that make me nostalgic. After the first few episodes I was hooked on this series. I think it’s hilarious. I’m currently on volume 9, but I have up to volume 15 already waiting for me to read. The art switches from very serious and very detailed, to very silly and much less detailed, and I love that so much. You can tell when things are serious and when Sakuragi is being a goof.

Where I’m at in the story it’s getting more serious, and it’s going beyond just Sakuragi’s growth at playing basketball. There are some deep themes that you can tell it’ll go into later. It’s also starting to get more violent, so more of Inoue’s artistic abilities are coming through, which is awesome.

Another reason I thought to try this one is that it’s the Omnibus Collector’s favorite series of all time. My buddy thinks very highly of his opinions, and I think very highly of his, so I figured I’d like it too. As of right now, I’m loving it and I see why he likes it so much.

REAL

Real is another one of Inoue’s works, and is still being published. Very slowly though, it’s been being written since 1999, and it also goes on lengthy breaks (Yeah, I know I said I wasn’t going to collect Vagabond for that very reason, I’m a complicated man).

Real is about wheelchair basketball. I’m not sure about Inoue’s ties to wheelchair basketball specifically, if he has any ties, but it’s a neat concept that lends itself to deep subjects. I’m only finished with the first 2 volumes so far, but there are 3 main characters essentially. Nomiya Tomomi who is a high school dropout that was in a motorcycle accident that caused his passenger to lose her ability to walk and talk, Togawa Kiyoharu who lost a leg when he was younger due to cancer, and then Takahashi Hisanobu who was hit by a truck while on his bike and turned into a paraplegic.

This one is way less funny than Slam Dunk, so reading them both concurrently is kind of jarring. But, that’s just how I’ve been perceiving it since I’ve been reading both. Real is incredibly good so far, and you can see the progression in Inoue’s art style.

Real is a little more dense than Slam Dunk, and I feel like I more often read back panels a few times before I totally understand them. I’m probably going to keep collecting this, but I might wait until I’m done with Slam Dunk so that I’m not getting jarred as easily.

Funny side note, in Real there’s a scene where these kids are watching an anime and it’s actually Slam Dunk. Neat little easter egg.

Undead Unluck

This is a new anime that I picked up after my buddy showed me the first few episodes. It’s ok, I’m kinda losing interest in it the more it goes on. The first few episodes were very good and very funny, and they’re very interesting. Essentially, this girl, Fuuko, has a power that whenever she touches someone they experience bad luck (in varying degrees). She meets this man, Andy (kinda sounds like undead), who is hundreds of years old and cannot die, because he can regenerate. Everyone who has powers in this series has the ability to “negate” something. So, the 2 main characters have the powers of “Unluck” and “Undead” because they negate luck and death. They are on a quest to kill Andy because he wants to die, and he feels like she’s the only one whose powers would be strong enough to kill him.

The first few episodes were great and they did get me hooked; it was funny and cute, and it seemed like a cool plot (one that I could guess the end of maybe, but still cool). But as it’s gone on the powers have gotten strange and much more abstract. There’s also a secret agency, and there’s like a video-game/quest type aspect, so I’m just not enjoying it as much as I was originally. I dislike the secret agency trope for some reason. Chainsaw man was ok, but I didn’t like it there, and I’m not crazy about JJK for the same reason.

I think I’ll try to finish the first season eventually, but it’s just kinda been meh. The animation is very good, and I can see why people would like the story, but it’s not my cup of tea.

One Piece

WARNING: This section has spoilers up until Chapter 1115, so please be careful.

It’s been a minute since I’ve written about the One Piece manga. I try to write and have an opinion, but it ends up just being a recap more than anything. Which, you could just as easily go and watch a review if you wanted. But, these past 2 or 3 chapters have been pretty significant (most of Egghead has been, but these few specifically). Several characters have made a return, including Saul which was nice confirmation that he is indeed alive, and the GOAT Foxy.

Vegapunk has confirmed that the sea levels are rising (through man-made means), he’s confirmed that Joy Boy was the first pirate to go out to sea, he’s confirmed that Joy Boy’s defeat was the end of the void century, and he’s confirmed that the war that Joy Boy fought is still going on. We even got the very first silhouette of Joy Boy ever!

There’s been so much evidence pointing to the water levels rising: Long Ring Long Land, Water Seven, the old Wano, and the destruction of Lulusia causing water levels to rise by a meter. This was really no surprise, but it’s great that we at least have a scientific mind to confirm that they are indeed rising. This potentially opens the idea to a time limit on the One Piece world. I’m not sure if Oda would use it like that (think like the comet from Avatar the last airbender), but maybe? The fish men would be safe regardless lol

All the Joy Boy drops have been totally insane. This is the most we’ve ever really learned about him, until now we’ve just known that he lived during the void century and was tied to the ponegliffs. He was the last person to awaken the powers of Luffy’s fruit (that we know of at least). We also got confirmation finally that Joy Boy and Nika are not the same person, it’s kinda like the holy trinity going on. Luffy is not Nika, Joy Boy is not Nika, and Luffy is not Joy Boy. But Luffy is the new Joy Boy? I’m still not 100% sure if Joy Boy was a title or his name. Maybe it’s similar to how Luffy is called “Straw Hat Luffy”, maybe he is “Joy Boy…something”. He was the first pirate after all, so maybe that’s what his crew went by.

Him being the first pirate is super cool, because that’s one more piece of evidence towards the ancient kingdom being named something related to “pirate”. The theory goes that since Professor Clover was killed for almost saying the name of the ancient kingdom during the destruction of Ohara, the general public might understand the name and some things might start to make sense to them. Tekking talked about it in this video, and he explains it better. Because the word “pirate” had to come from somewhere, Joy Boy being called one could be related to where he came from. Just a cool thought I think.

The silhouette of Joy Boy raises some questions for me. I think up until now I believed that Joy Boy was going to be a Buccaneer, but now I’m not 100% sure. The Buccaneers believe in and pray to Nika, and that’s one of the reasons that they are persecuted and nearly extinct (also they committed a great sin, which I believe is them having built the Noah). Since we know now that Joy Boy is not Nika, that doesn’t mean that Joy Boy has to be Buccaneer. He never really had to be, but it made sense that he could’ve been. He still could have been a Buccaneer, but his silhouette doesn’t fit that same body shape that Kuma and his father, Clapp, have. Some people have the theory that he was a Mink, which could be true, but I’m not as convinced on that one.

Those are the biggest things I can think of that have happened recently as far as lore goes since I last talked about One Piece in depth. I’m really excited for 1116 this week, maybe we get a little more of Joy Boy, or maybe we even begin the final exodus from Egghead.

See you guys next month!

March Update 2024

jackson@jacksontaylor.xyz (Jackson Taylor) — Tue, 19 Mar 2024 00:00:00 -0400

Galaxycon Richmond 2024

This is probably the most Karen-ish I’m going to sound on my blog. I’m going to be constructive with my criticism and not expect unreasonable things. This was my experience from what I saw and have heard from several sources who attended the con, and things that I think could’ve improved the experience.

My brother, his 2 friends and I all went to Galaxycon Richmond on Saturday March 16th. My brother has been to a few different conventions across the US, and I’ve been to the Galaxycon in Raleigh a few times, but I think this was all of our first times in Richmond for one. It honestly ended up being a pretty bad time for our group. It took about an hour to find a decent parking space and about 3 hours just to get into the building. Then, by the time we got in my brother and his friends had missed all their photo ops which was really aggravating and disappointing. My photo op was later in the day, so I was lucky to be able to still get it, but it wasn’t as enjoyable since they didn’t get theirs.

I’ve never waited for more than an hour at any of the Galaxycon conventions in Raleigh, even when they were checking our bags. My best guess as to why it was so hard to get in is that they overestimated how many people they could handle. There were very few registration booths for what I heard was a sold out convention center (I’ve heard numbers like 30k-50k people showed up), and there was only 1 door to come in to get your badge, and I think 1 or 2 more doors you could come in if you already had your badge.

They focused very heavily on where the lines needed to be going outside instead of having that planned beforehand and working on getting people through the line faster. Maybe the path the line was meant to take was planned beforehand and it just wasn’t communicated well enough to the people showing up, so they were having to fix it as they went. Or they didn’t realize how much space would be taken up by all the people and they had to rearrange it on the fly to get us all to fit into the 1x1 city block by snaking us up and down. There were very few signs indicating where the door even was, you basically just had to look at where the people who were dressed up were going. The people who were guiding the lines probably could’ve/should’ve been inside checking people in instead of having to organize the line. They also probably should’ve had a louder and more commanding tone, it seemed like the person that was directing us was kinda timid and had to call out the directions several times. I understand that due to city ordinances and rules they probably couldn’t block traffic or anything without getting shut down, but the line situation seemed like it could’ve been a lot better prepared for.

I found a reddit post where someone was complaining about the lines from 2023 also taking around 3 hours to get in, so maybe this is just the usual experience. It was pretty quick to check in once you got up to the desk. I’d say it took at most a minute or 2 to get your badge and be able to go where you wanted, unless you had questions or some special circumstance. If they had more spots for people to check people in, or even mailed out badges beforehand, then it could’ve been significantly faster.

The food lines I don’t totally blame them for because there’s only so many spots to get food in the venue, they were going to be crowded anyway after waiting in line for a few hours near lunchtime. I feel like there could’ve been better organization around the lines for the food though. There were lines that stretched 50-100 people long that blocked some areas of the convention. I’m disappointed that I didn’t get to try a Korean corn dog, they looked really good and I’ve wanted to try one for a while. I’m sure it was all pretty expensive, but that’s something I expected.

The lack of wifi was really annoying, but that’s because I couldn’t mindlessly scroll social media while I waited in the lines. I’ve heard the vendors wifi was acting up so people couldn’t pay by card, which made the ATM lines incredibly long. Then due to the long lines of the ATMs the machines were getting bogged down and started acting up or ran out of money. I’ve seen a few people on reddit complaining that they were double charged for things they paid for. I guess because they’d try with their card first, realize it probably wasn’t going to work and switched to paying with cash, and then when the vendors systems reconnected it would make the charge again. We were lucky not to have ran into any of those issues because we brought cash.

My brother emailed the organizing staff about how disappointed we were about missing the photo ops, the speed of the lines, the lack of wifi and the general poor experience, and they kinda turned it on him saying that he could’ve gotten his time slots switched once he got into the venue and how the food/lines/wifi weren’t their fault because that’s handled by the convention center themselves. It seemed sort of unprofessional and like they were just passing the buck instead of owning up to their shortcomings and coming up with a plan for the following years. Just sucks to hear their response. I’ve also seen on reddit that several people have had their comments deleted on social media after complaining. If that’s true, that’s really bad.

Overall, I think having a much lower cap of attendance and probably twice as many people working would’ve solved most of the issues and made the experience much more enjoyable. I understand they have to pay their expenses and make some money, but there’s gotta be a better way to handle an event this large. I probably won’t be going to another Galaxycon Richmond for a very long time, unless there is someone I’m really interested in seeing, in which case I’ll be waking up at 5am to get good parking and a spot in line. But even then, I’ll check the Raleigh Galaxycon site first to see if they’re going to be there lol.

Emily Rudd was the saving grace for my experience, if I hadn’t gotten to meet her I would’ve called the entire trip a bust. I was super excited to meet her and she was every bit as nice as I’d hoped she’d be and more. I was really nervous, tired, I hadn’t eaten or drank anything all day, I probably smelled really bad from sweating in line, and I was ready to go home. But she was incredibly sweet, shook my hand and introduced herself. She was like that with everyone I saw her interact with, it was so great to see that she was nice in person. I highly recommend getting a photo op with her, or stopping by her booth to get an autograph if you get the chance. If she’s coming to another con around me in the future I might get another photo op or an autograph to redeem myself. Here’s my photo op with her.

Back Update

After talking about walking and standing for 3 hours, you might be wondering how my back held up. I actually did WAY better than I thought I would.

I’m not gonna say it was comfortable the entire time, there were several points where I was bent over in a weird way to get the stress off my back, but I did stand the whole time. I only started sitting down once we were in the venue.

The ride there and back was about 6 hours total, and that was a little rough. On the way home I wanted to cross my leg but some muscle in my leg didn’t like that and started cramping. It wasn’t the same as nerve pain but I’m not sure if that’s related to the sciatica or if it was just because I was working muscles that hadn’t been worked recently.

I’ve gotten really slack about doing the MGB3, I only do it about once per week now when I go to my friends house. Thankfully I haven’t felt too much pain from not doing it as much, but I should probably get back to doing it 2 or 3 times a week.

Manga Collecting

My friend has gotten me hooked on collecting manga, specifically box sets. I never thought I would try to collect them because it’s expensive, I don’t have a lot of room in my house anyway and I can read a lot of them online for free. But, it’s been super addicting. I already had a few volumes like Dragon Ball Z volume 1 (I got this 10+ years ago, RIP Akira Toriyama) and the Berserk deluxe editions 1 and 5. But, he pointed out a few really good deals on box sets that I couldn’t pass up. A Silent Voice was like $50 for the entire series, the 4th One Piece box set was $100, Assassination Classroom was $100. I also got Goodnight Punpun for $160, but that’s about retail. I just wanted to read it badly (it’s really good so far).

I’m going to have to buy another bookcase or something soon, I actually have no more room on the shelf that I bought last month. I’m looking into getting the 1st One Piece box set soon (when it goes on sale) and maybe Fullmetal Alchemist if this ebay listing I’m looking at pans out. I like knowing that I kinda like the series before I actually buy it so I read a few chapters online and look at reviews. I also hate getting spoiled, so I have to be really careful about where I look things up. I’ve been burned by looking up certain series on social media and then having a spoiler come up in my feed.

I might make a new page on my site for a collection showcase or something. I’m experimenting with images in Hugo, and it’s a little bit of a pain. I’m probably just being dumb.

RIP Baxter and Thievin

I scroll tik tok a lot more than I should, but you find a lot of interesting creators on there. Two of which were Baxter Hosley and Garret MacDonagh. They both had fitness accounts that they would post on almost daily. They both lost a significant amount of weight, documented their journeys, made fitness content and worked with a supplement company called Ekkovision. I hadn’t really watched either of them consistently in a few months, but, I was still incredibly sad to see that they both had passed away on March 10th. They were both slightly younger than I am, which breaks my heart.

They were very loved by their friends and fans. To hear some of the stories that their friends from Ekkovision are telling is really sweet. So many people are pouring out support for them, it’s bittersweet. Ekkovision’s owner, Em, has come out and said that Ekkovision will be taking care of their funerals in full which is really really awesome to hear. I know it won’t replace the hole that they left, but I hope they stay close with the guys from Ekkovision and are able to hear all the stories they have with them.

This is not something that I would normally talk about, but I liked these guys and it struck pretty close to home in a lot of ways so I wanted to pay my respects to them. Last month was really busy and I was complaining a lot and not having a good time. This month has been pretty busy and sad, but very eye opening and I’ve been a lot more thankful for what I have and the experiences I’ve gotten. It can all be ripped away from you in an instant. Tell your friends and family that you love them, because they’ll be gone one day, and more importantly because they’re here now and it never hurts to let them know you care.

February Update 2024

jackson@jacksontaylor.xyz (Jackson Taylor) — Fri, 23 Feb 2024 00:00:00 -0400

I really thought about skipping this month because it has just been one thing after another, and I didn’t want to deal with writing a blog post. But, I have a good streak going so I’m going to keep at it. I’m also not going to half-ass it.

Reading

It’s kinda weeb-adjacent, but this month I’ve been off and on reading “The Lone Samurai: The Life of Miyamoto Musashi” by William Scott Wilson. I have a bunch of samurai books I got from a humble bundle deal, and I’ve read 1 or 2 of them and this one stood out to me. I’ve been interested in Miyamoto Musashi for a while because I’ve heard he was a little bit of a troll in his duels. He would use wooden swords and he would show up late to make his opponent mad. The book is a little hard to read because a lot of it is the history of this person or that shogunate, so the names are a little hard to keep up with. Same with the locations. I may or may not finish this one. I have attempted “The Book Of Five Rings” by Musashi himself, but never got super far into it. Eastern philosophy and concepts are difficult for me to understand.

I’ve also sorta started reading “Goodnight Pun Pun” which as far as I can tell is about this little bird creature in school. I haven’t finished the first chapter yet, but I might do that after I finish this post.

It was my birthday a few weeks ago and I got a bunch of One Piece volumes as presents. I bought a bookshelf to store them and it’s already about half full. I got all of Water 7 and Enies Lobby for my birthday, and about a week later I saw a deal on the 4th box set for about $100 so I nabbed that too. That box set includes all of Dressrosa, Zou, Whole Cake Island and the Reverie (70-90 I think).

Tech Troubles

Computers have not been agreeing with me this month.

With my back being hurt for a lot of last year, I stopped using my x220 laptop and started using a different one. With it not being used for so long the battery wouldn’t hold a charge anymore, and it became super out of date (it would still work, but it’s arch so literally every package had an update). I tried updating it and the power cord came uplugged in the middle of a kernel update. It wiped out the important parts of my boot partition. To fix this in the past I would copy the kernel and initramfs from my t420 (same settings) and that would at least let me boot and finish the updates. But that didn’t work because I think it wiped out a lot of my root partition’s executables, which was weird. I couldn’t chroot to do anything because it had a format error, which usually means you’re running x32 on an x64 system or vice versa. But I eventually saw that my /bin/bash file was empty. I had my home partition separate from root, so I still have all my data I’ve just been trying to install the base arch system back to the root partition.

I had to reinstall ubuntu on my work machine in the middle of the work week, which was a pain in the ass and cost me a lot of time on this project I’m working on. I actually got back to a working dwm build pretty quick and painless, comparatively speaking though. But it won’t be totally right for another few weeks.

Back Update

Not much to update here. I’ve been doing the MB3 exercises at least 1x a week for the past month. I like to do them 3x a week, but I’ve been super busy this past week or 2 and haven’t done them. I’m hurting a little right now, so I need to get that going again.

One Piece Chapter 1108 mini-review

Obviously this is going to contain spoilers for 1108, so pleas skip this if you aren’t caught up.

Holy. Shit.

This chapter has gotten me so hyped it’s unreal. It felt like a shorter chapter, but it contained HUGE things.

Saturn is looking so menacing, his eyes are super expressive and have been getting crazier as the arc has gone on. His new eyes look non-human now, which makes sense being that he’s turning more into his demon form. They don’t even look like they’re expressing human emotions anymore. They used to express apathy, and then with Kuma’s punch they looked absolutely terrified. I really like this aspect.

Kizaru killing Vegapunk wasn’t something I really expected. I don’t think I expected Vegapunk to get off of the island, but this was really quick. I feel sorry for Kizaru in a way still, but this was pretty bad. I hope that Luffy continues to whoop his ass.

I’m not sure what the message that Vegapunk is releasing is going to be. The way the unofficial translation was phrased makes me think it’s something about the geography, or the science of the world. Meaning that we could get confirmation that the Red Line is artificial and the sea-levels are super high compared to what they are naturally. Once the official comes out, maybe it’ll be more clear. Because it could be that Vegapunk knows all about the void century. I don’t know which is more likely. I feel as though it could go either way, but knowing Oda there’s another way that’s been hidden in plain sight the whole time.

January Update 2024

jackson@jacksontaylor.xyz (Jackson Taylor) — Sat, 20 Jan 2024 23:17:15 -0500

Happy New year everyone! Like I said last month I’m going to try to keep that 1 post a month going into 2024 as well.

One Piece and Monsters

Spoilers: This has some minor spoilers up to Thriller Bark. Both about one of the villains of Thriller Bark, and the “gimmick” of the island. Nothing major. There is some more that is revealed with him in the Wano arc, so DON’T go to any wikis to look him up if you’re not caught up because it’s like the first thing that appears. What I will talk about is only from what happens in Thriller Bark and Monsters.

My blog is pretty much turning into One Piece updates, but I don’t have that much going on apart from it haha.

This month is actually pretty exciting for a story that isn’t One Piece, but is related. Before Oda wrote One Piece he wrote a few one-shots, one of which is called “Monsters”. Monsters is the story of a man named Ryuma who fights a dragon, and it is getting an anime adaptation on Netflix tomorrow actually (in a few hours).

You might recognize this name and description if you’re caught up to the Thriller Bark arc as the samurai that Brook and Zoro fight. Without spoiling anymore than that about the One Piece side of Ryuma, Monsters is the story where he becomes the well known samurai that he is in One Piece. I think a lot of people have it wrong where they think that this story is canon to One Piece, and only parts of it are. The character Ryuma is canon in One Piece, the fact that he fought a dragon is canon in One Piece, but the exact details that are going to be shown may not be canon. It looks like some things are actually changed from the original Monsters to be a little closer to One Piece (notable what sword he uses). I’m excited for it. I have a replica Shusui sword that I plan on holding while watching it lol.

I think I might wait for a few more chapters to talk about what’s going on with Egghead. It’s getting hella spicy right now. If you’re not caught up, you need to get caught up soon, you’re missing out on peak fiction and vengeance plots.

I’ll see you guys next month!

November Update 2023

jackson@jacksontaylor.xyz (Jackson Taylor) — Wed, 29 Nov 2023 17:47:26 -0400

General Updates

My kindle is actually making me read a little bit more, like I had hoped. I finished up David Goggin’s first book “Can’t Hurt Me” after having started it a few months ago. It’s incredibly interesting and full of good motivation and advice. His life as a whole has been filled with hardships and pain and he doesn’t sugar coat it at all. His dad beat him, he was bullied, he went through a lot of physical pain during his 3 hell weeks, etc. It’s a really good mix of biography and self help, because it’s not just “look at what all I’ve done and what’s happened to me” and he’s also not just preaching lessons at you. He’s using those experiences and taking you through his thought process during them, where he failed and what he learned and how he’s applied it moving forward. I highly recommend it. I will be reading his 2nd book “Never Finished” at some point.

Right now, I’m reading “Clean Architecture” by Robert (Uncle Bob) Martin for work. I’ve read most of “Clean Coder” before, and have followed his advice and teachings for a while. I don’t totally practice TDD like I should, but I’m getting better at it. I’m already able to put some of the things I’ve learned into practice which is awesome.

I’m also trying to finish “Crime and Punishment” by Dostoevsky. I got through about 2/3rds of it earlier this year, but fell off reading it. Now I’m about caught back up to where I was originally, where Raskolnikov is talking with Sonya in her apartment.

Back Update

I beat 2 of my goals for this year and I am very ecstatic and excited to share them. I went to work every day for a week, one of those days was also a whole day. The McGill big 3 has been so incredibly helpful and I am so grateful for the progress I’ve been making. I feel so much better, my leg doesn’t hurt all of the time now (and when it does hurt it’s much more minor), I sleep much better. My quality of life has improved so much. Mentally I’m doing a lot better now too. I still struggle sometimes where I think of all the time I lost because of the stupid mistakes that caused this problem, and I still have that fear where one day I’ll wake up and be in the same shape I was a year ago. There’s nothing I can do about the time lost, but I know I can rehab myself much easier out of it if it happens again and I hope I’m smart enough not to do anything stupid again. So, I’m doing much, much better.

I’m even planning a trip for the spring to go visit my friend in Minnesota. I missed out on our “boys trip” to Dallas this year, and also a trip to Hawaii. This will be my 3rd trip to Minnesota, but I’ll be meeting some new people and will be out of my town for a while so I’m incredibly excited.

One Piece Chapters 1096 - 1099

Now for the weeb stuff. Spoilers are imminent.

1096

These chapters are still going incredibly strong with Kuma’s backstory, like we’ve expected. This chapter, however, did not show as much of the Rocks’ pirates or the incident at God Valley as I would’ve hoped, but it was a strong chapter regardless.

We got to see all of the Rocks’ members, except for Rocks (bummer). We even got knowledge of a character who we met ~600 chapters ago being on the Rocks’ crew, Gloriosa. She is the former empress of Amazon Lily, 3rd empresses before Boa Hancock, 2nd before Shakky. I’m not sure how much this really effects the story, but it’s a nice inclusion and leads to some cool theories. If Gloriosa was with the Rocks’ pirates during this time, who was taking care of Amazon Lily? Was there no empress at this time, or was the unknown empress there? Stuff like that.

Another HUGE event in my eyes is finding out how Kuma got his devil fruit. Ivankov and Kuma rushed the prizes for the human cleansing event that was happening on the island, and they seemingly grabbed their fruits at random. Ivankov grabbed the Fish-Fish fruit model Azure Dragon and Kuma grabbed the Paw-Paw fruit. Ivankov was not able to eat his before Big Mom stole it, and we know that later on Big Mom would feed this fruit to Kaido to save his life, but Kuma was able to eat his. This opens up a lot of really fun ideas to wonder “what if”. Since Ivankov and Kuma grabbed the fruits at random, they could’ve easily been switched. Which means that Kuma could’ve had the Azure Dragon fruit and Kaido could’ve had the Paw-Paw fruit. There’s also the scenario that Kuma was the one attacked by Big Mom instead of Ivankov in which case Ivankov could’ve had the Paw-Paw fruit or the Azure Dragon fruit. Or perhaps they both were able to eat the fruits before Big Mom got to either one of them, then 2 of the top Revolutionary Army members would’ve had the most broken fruits (provided they went on to join the Revolutionary Army) and Kaido possibly would’ve died. This was only a few panels, but it was so much fun thinking about these possibilities.

Like I said before we don’t get to see much of what happened at God Valley. But, we do find out that Kuma, at only 9 years old, was the GOAT and resolved to save as many people as he could so he could be like Nika. He saved over 500 in total, but still prayed and regretted not being able to save more. This really shows off Kuma’s selflessness and sense of duty as a child. Looking back it makes me tear up a bit, for a kid who already had been through so much he still just wanted to help people. Kuma and Ginny then continued living together in a church in Kuma’s home of Sorbet Kingdom.

1097

Overall I’ve been incredibly fortunate about the spoilers I saw while reading One Piece. I generally knew about the arcs to come, the time skip and some of the villains that we already met. This trend has continued pretty well while I’ve been reading weekly. Except for 1097, I got totally spoiled for 1097, like the entire plot and the “big” reveal. I thought I was reading a theory on why Dragon could’ve been in the navy, but it was actually just a 1097 summary and Dragon explicitly said he was in the navy in the chapter. So that was a bummer.

That’s been a theory for a long long time, and it’s always made perfect sense. The one thing we’re still not sure of when it comes to Dragon being in the navy is what he saw that made him want to quit. In 1096 we thought it was going to be the God Valley incident, but we still haven’t gotten confirmation on if he was there or not.

Back to the start of the chapter though, because Dragon’s navy reveal was the 2nd to last page. This chapter shows off a lot of Kuma’s life after God Valley and makes you love him even more.

Kuma and Ginny are shown to have aged and become really influential within their community. Kuma’s been taking the pain from everyone and then secretly taking it on himself, so that way he can see everyone in his village happy. This is another show of Kuma’s selfless nature and how much he sacrifices for others.

Kuma and Ginny’s relationship also gets furthered. Ginny is obviously in love with Kuma, they’ve been living together for almost 15 years at this point and they both understand the struggles the other has been through. Kuma is afraid of imposing the burden of his bloodline on anyone though. He doesn’t want more of his loved ones to be enslaved or killed because of their relationship to him. He’s seen this happen first hand because it happened to him and his family in chapter 1095. Kuma still holds a lot of baggage from his time as a slave, but he still holds his virtues and ideals close to his heart.

The rest of the chapter is showing how Sorbet Kingdom was changed by the current King Bekori and people from the southern part of the island are able to be enslaved. Kuma, Ginny and their friends fight back but are jailed for their crimes. Ivankov and Dragon then arrive to break them out, and that’s how they join the Revolutionary Army. During their time in the Revolutionary Army, perhaps right after they got out of prison, King Bekori was overthrown and removed from power.

The last few pages of the chapter show how Kuma and Ginny are doing as Revolutionary Army members. Then the chapter ends with Ginny being captured by an unknown person. At the time of reading this there were many theories floating in my head about who it could be. I thought perhaps it was a famous pirate or the navy. There wasn’t much to go off of so the time between this chapter and the next were agonizing. In the current time (on Egghead island) we hadn’t heard anything about Ginny so we could assume the worst and that she was already dead during the timeline of the story.

1098

When I tell you that this chapter is tough to read, I mean it. This is absolutely the saddest I’ve ever been while reading anything. This chapter already had high expectations going in because we were going to find out who kidnapped Ginny. There was also disappointment and fear because this is supposedly the first chapter that Oda was unable to finish by the deadline (I haven’t confirmed that, however). People thought Oda was losing his touch, that he was getting old or getting bored with One Piece. After reading the chapter this is totally understandable, because Oda was probably crying his eyes out drawing it. He has answered in SBSs that he does occasionally cry while drawing emotion heavy chapters (Robin’s “I WANT TO LIVE!” I’m pretty sure was one he’s said he cried at).

Ginny was captured by a Celestial Dragon, which was not in my mind at all of who would’ve taken her but it totally makes sense. Many people of Sorbet Kingdom had a crush on her, and she’s known as one of the prettiest women any of them have ever seen. She was taken to be the Celestial Dragon’s wife.

A lot of people were angry with Dragon immediately with this chapter because there’s been a 2 year time skip and Ginny is still captured. People see this as Dragon failing to keep his people safe and being lazy or not a good leader by not going after her. This has had a lot of talk in the community since this chapter’s debut, and one take I really like is that people are incorrectly comparing the Revolutionary Army to that of a pirate crew and being upset that they don’t act the same. I’m not going to spend too much time on this because there’s more to talk about in this chapter, but revolutions are much different than a family/crew in that they’re all working towards a goal and that’s the end all be all of the army. Doing things that directly jeopardize the goal of the army, like attacking a Celestial Dragon or Marijoa too early, is a great way to ruin everything they’ve been working towards. Dragon loves Kuma and Ginny, but he knows the things that are at stake by going after her and chose not to. Kuma is upset at her kidnapping, but it’s been shown to me that he understands and trusts Dragon and doesn’t run gungho after her.

After 2 years Ginny is finally “freed” and comes back to Sorbet Kingdom with her child, Bonney. She was let go as a slave because she was incredibly sick and pregnant, she served no purpose for them anymore. Once she made it back to Sorbet Kingdom she called the revolutionaries to say her final goodbye. Kuma knows exactly where she is, so with his powers he immediately rushes back to see her, but in doing this he misses her final words to him which were “I’ll always love you”. When he gets to the church he finds that she’s covered in these blue sapphire stones and he finds little Bonney and resolves to raise her for Ginny.

This entire sequence is horribly sad, and I cannot wait until it’s animated, it’s gonna be so great. This entire backstory is one of the most tragic stories of any character in One Piece, and in fact all of the fiction I have read or seen myself. Kuma has been through so much in his life, he’s been a slave, he lost his family, now he’s lost his best friend and we still aren’t even to where he gets turned into a cyborg and then becomes a slave again. I can only imagine the feelings of regret he has that he wasn’t able to help Ginny and how he never got to truly say goodbye.

For the first 5 years of Bonney’s life they live a normal life and she does normal kid things. Kuma is reminded of Ginny because of Bonney’s large appetite which is really sweet. They do normal dad/daughter things. Bonney has to sleep in an iron cage while in Kuma’s bed so he doesn’t squish her which is a nice touch and made me giggle a little. Then tragedy strikes again and Bonney is found to have the same disease that killed Ginny. Kuma quits the revolutionaries and begins his search for a doctor to be able to identify and cure the disease. During this time Bonney has to live a life of seclusion from the outside world. She’s allowed to see people, but a lot of her peers bully her for being a “vampire”. Kuma is really protective of her for obvious reasons.

During these panels we get a few callbacks to certain things. Kuma asks Bonney “If we went on a trip where would you want to go”, which is what he asked Perona before he swatted her away in the Thriller Bark arc. Kuma also learns about Sky islands from Bonney, and she says that maybe Nika is on one. Bonney would obviously know about Nika since Kuma is a pastor for a church that is, presumably, for the religion Nika is the figurehead.

This chapter ends off with King Bekori making his return to take the crown back in a non-peaceful manner.

1099

Overall Kuma’s backstory has rocketed Kuma to being one of my top 10 favorite characters. The sorrow that Oda has made me feel for this character on a page is nearly unforgivable. But I’m going to keep reading week to week because I’m addicted. This chapter was a little disappointing at first read, but that’s because it was following 1098. Overall it’s a really strong chapter, and much lighter in tone which is a nice break from the melancholy.

This chapter starts out showing Kuma at his most badass yet (in my opinion) by fighting through the flames that were started in Sorbet Kingdom by Bekori, a technique that was inspired by what happened with the Grey Terminal in Goa Kingdom (where Luffy grew up). Kuma enacted his own solo revolution of Sorbet Kingdom and overthrew Bekori for the 2nd time. I’m getting goosebumps re-reading this chapter. Kuma is “elected” as king of Sorbet, although he doesn’t want the title and the king before Bekori is really the one in power.

Bonney is then shown using the powers of her Age-Age fruit, not knowing that she’s even using them. This has caused a bunch of discussion on where she got her powers. Could it be that she unknowingly ate a fruit? Was she fed one as a baby while she was with the Celestial Dragons? Is this somehow Saturn’s doing? One theory that I’m not sure I 100% agree with yet, but is worth discussing is the idea that fruits have their own wills and they choose their users more than we think. Randy Troy is better at explaining it, so here is the video for that idea. I think my favorite theory is that she was fed her fruit as a baby by Celestial Dragons, but I see issues with that. Surely Ginny would’ve told someone if she had known/seen it happen, but maybe she didn’t. Bonney wouldn’t do well in baths because of the water, but that could have just been missed. I’m not sure if we will learn where she got her fruit, I’m not sure how much it really matters.

Kuma’s epithet from his first introduction is the “Tyrant King”, and now we know that this was just a hit piece from Bekori lying and trying to regain control of Sorbet Kingdom. This dude will NOT accept defeat, so Kuma decides to sink his and the navy’s ships that are coming to attack Kuma. This is where he gets his bounty of 296 million berries.

Apparently Kuma’s fruit powers were foreshadowed via his bounty amount because the numbers 2 and 9 can be read as “ni” and “kyu” in Japanese, and his fruit’s name in Japanese is the “Nikyu-Nikyu”. I haven’t confirmed if it was foreshadowing, or if it’s just a pun. I think maybe his bounty was revealed in one of the data books, because his bounty was not revealed when he first debuted in 233 or on Thriller Bark in 472/473. Oda likes playing with numbers though, so I’m pretty sure that this is not a coincidence.

Another mystery finally solved is how Kuma knew about the islands that he sent the Straw Hats to during the Sabaody arc. In this chapter Kuma goes to all of those islands in an attempt to find a doctor who could cure Bonney. I’m not 100% sure/convinced that based on what Kuma knew about the islands he could accurately pick where the Straw Hats should go. I don’t think he would’ve known enough about each of the crew members to make that decision. Maybe it was fate, maybe he knew more than I think he did, maybe it was a total accident (doubt that though).

While traveling, Kuma happens to come across Dragon and Dragon tells him about Vegapunk and how he could potentially cure Bonney. During this conversation we also learn that Ivankov and Inazuma were imprisoned in Impel Down during this time (that’s where they still were in the Impel Down arc). Belo Betty also reveals that Dragon has not yet reassigned Ginny’s old position and will only do so once Kuma approves it. This, I think, is Dragon trying to show that he did care about Ginny in case there were any doubts in Kuma’s mind. I’m not personally a Dragon-hater, and never thought he just forgot about Ginny like many people probably think, so this is kind of nice to confirm that Dragon does care about those closest to him, even if he’s not the best at showing it. Though, he is also shown drinking and talking about the new recruits, which is also nice to see because he’s opening up a bit.

Once Kuma reaches Egghead, Vegapunk explains that he can cure Bonney by a process using stem cells. However, since the process is so expensive, in exchange Kuma will have to allow Vegapunk to clone him. Kuma is somewhat apprehensive to begin with, but ultimately is willing to do anything to ensure Bonney is cured.

There’s a lot of really nice little small things and “easter eggs” you can find throughout the chapter. It’s getting really close to the end of the month though, so I’ll leave this as what it is. Chapter 1100 came out today, and there is not going to be a break next week, so I will write more about the flashback as a whole in my next blog post. Chapter 1101 is supposedly going to be very big.

Happy belated Thanksgiving!

October Update 2023

jackson@jacksontaylor.xyz (Jackson Taylor) — Mon, 23 Oct 2023 17:47:26 -0400

My internet is down at the time of writing this (Saturday), so I figured I’d go ahead and try to knock out this month’s blog post.

General Updates

Not too much going on with my back. I’ve been back to work once, I kinda want to start going back a more frequently. I’ve been pushing myself to sit up more at home. It’s rough at the end of the day, but it’s not too bad while I’m doing it. The “McGill Big 3” is really helping, if you are having any sort of back issues I would highly recommend trying it if you can.

I started reading “Atomic Habits” by James Clear, which talks about making good habits and getting rid of bad ones, and reading consistently is one that I want to start. I had set a timer to read for about 5-15 minutes every night at 7pm so that way I would get used to reading at a specific time, instead of doom-scrolling on social media. It was going well until I got sick, I’m not sure if it was Covid or what but it was rough. I had been going about a week or 2 strong, but I felt so bad I stopped. Which isn’t really a good reason, but what’re you gonna do. I bought a kindle and loaded it with a bunch of books so I will hopefully start reading more on it.

One Piece Chapter 1094 and 1095

This is the part of the blog post where I start talking about One Piece, so if you’re not caught up with the manga I’d stop reading. Some major things are happening right now.

Egghead is very quickly rising to become one of my favorite arcs in One Piece.

A real quick note about the terms I use. I sometimes switch between the official translations and the versions that are more common in the online communities. So in case you don’t know what I’m talking about and I use one word or the other this is what I mean:

Official	Alternate	Example sentence
Five Elders	Gorosei	“Jay-Garcia Saturn is one of the Five Elders” or “Jay-Garcia Saturn is one of the Gorosei”
Emperor of the Sea	Yonko	“Shanks is an Emperor” or “Shanks is a Yonko”
Marijoa	Mary-Geoise	“Marijoa is on top of the Red Line” or “Mary-Geoise is on top of the Red Line”
Supreme King Haki	Conquerer’s Haki	“He has Supreme King Haki” or “He has Conquerer’s Haki”

If you’re caught up to 1094 or 1095 you probably already know these words and their variations, but sometimes I use them interchangeably. I will typically use the alternate versions because they’re shorter. Except for “Mary-Geoise”, I do use “Marijoa”.

I also use the following names for the (former) Navy Admirals: “Akainu”, “Kizaru”, “Aokiji”, “Fujitora” “Greenbull”. I think that’s pretty common, except for maybe Aokiji also being known as Kuzan. Greenbull’s real name (Ryokugu) is hard to remember how to spell and say, so “Greenbull” is how I’ll mention him.

Anyway, on to the discussions.

Chapter 1094

This chapter was INSANE. We finally got shown in detail one of the Gorosei’s alternate forms, and got to see Luffy WHOOP Kizaru. We’ve known for a while that the Gorosei all had alternate forms (since Sabo went up against them when Cobra was killed), and for even longer I think we’ve all questioned if they had devil fruits or haki. This chapter doesn’t really answer if this transformation is devil fruit powers, or something new entirely, which is what makes it so interesting.

One theory a lot of people have is that it’s a mythical/ancient zoan devil fruit transformation, because he matches a certain demon (that I can’t think of the name of) from Japanese folklore. I think this is entirely plausible and probably closest to the truth. From what we know, the Gorosei seem to be immortal/eternally young based on flashbacks from many years ago and their appearances looking identical, so it’s entirely possible all the Gorosei have insanely powerful mythical/ancient zoan fruits.

Another theory that I like is that he himself is 100% a demon. He shows off a fraction of his power by killing a low rank Navy man by just looking at him. This could potentially be haki and his skills with haki are at a level we haven’t seen before, it could be a part of his devil fruit abilities and specific to Saturn, or it could be a new form of demon power entirely. During the time skip when Brook was sent away by Kuma, he was sent to an island that happened to be holding a satanic summoning event where they then believed Brook to be king of the demons. So, we know that demons exist in at least folklore of the One Piece world. I personally like the idea that he’s a demon, but I think it’s more probable that all of the Gorosei are devil fruit users with the eternal youth surgery having been performed on them by the previous Op-Op fruit users.

Kizaru getting punched was really satisfying to me. I don’t dislike Kizaru, but he got a good beat down from Luffy. It was a little touch and go, but Luffy punched him so hard he made him see stars and that was really awesome. I don’t know if Kizaru will walk away from this fight like he’s done before. Right now he’s knocked pretty much cold for a little bit.

Chapter 1095

It’s very possible that I don’t finish this blog post before chapter 1096 comes out, or I see spoilers. So this section is written as though I haven’t seen chapter 1096 (because as I’m writing it, I haven’t).

Chapter 1094 was already insane with the reveal of Jay-Garcia Saturn’s transformation. Now in chapter 1095 we got some of Kuma’s backstory, and he was someone who was on God Valley 38 years ago. Which matches up with the God Valley incident. These next probably 5-10 chapters are going to be so incredibly important and show off the history of the modern era in the One Piece world, and I am so hyped for it.

Originally it was thought that God Valley was where the celestial dragons lived, given the name. We know now that God Valley was the island that they chose to host their “native cleansing” game that year. It seems similar to other popular stories, think Squid Games except there’s probably no monetary prize for the ones being hunted.

There’s so many theories this is going to prove/disprove, this may go down as the most important flashback apart from any Void Century reveals. The God Valley incident has so much mystery surrounding it. It’s only been known about for 4 IRL years, and we’re already getting more information on it. We’re most likely going to see the following:

Rocks D. Xebec in full (for the first time).
The Rocks pirates’ motives and goals for being on God Valley.
Garp in his prime.
A rookie Roger.
Shanks’ relation to Figarland Garling and the other celestial dragons on the island.
How Shanks came into Roger’s care.
Ivankov’s backstory.
More about the Buccaneer race.

The theories surrounding the next chapter are so much fun to think about. There was a break this past week so lots of people have had time to discuss their ideas. Most of them surround what the prize of the native cleansing was going to be. We saw there were 6 small chests, so a lot of people think this is where many of the characters, who are confirmed to be on God Valley at the time, got their fruits.

From Boa’s time as a slave for the celestial dragons we know they like to feed their slaves devil fruits for fun (I think that’s really odd to give slaves powerful abilities, but to each their own), so this could be where they got the fruits to feed their slaves. We also already know from a conversation between Big Mom and Kaido that she gave him the Fish-Fish Model Azure Dragon devil fruit on that day, so that could’ve been 1 of the prizes. Kuma did not have his bear ears or paw pads (from what I could see) so he probably didn’t have his fruit that day, which means that could’ve been another. Ivankov was on God Valley but we don’t have any confirmation on if he had his fruit or not, so his Hormone-Hormone fruit may have been one. Whitebeard’s Tremor-Tremor fruit, Marco’s Bird-Bird Model Phoenix fruit, Dragon’s unknown fruit, the list goes on. I think that devil fruits being the prizes is the most probable theory as of right now, but I doubt that certain people got their fruits that day (Whitebeard specifically).

Since Kuma and Ivankov, 2 of the 3 founding members of the Revolutionary Army, have been shown to be on God Valley, another prominent theory is that Dragon will also show up in some capacity. The treatment that Kuma has experienced (and Ivankov has probably experienced) is surely the driving forces behind their decision to revolt against the government and celestial dragons. Surely the leader of the army also has seen terrible incidents involving the celestial dragons to make him want to go against them too, this would be an incredible time to expose that. One of the biggest theories right now, that I don’t disagree with, is that Dragon was at one point a part of the Navy and after serving for some time became a revolutionary. There’s at least a few pieces of evidence to support that idea. But there’s a few bits of information we still don’t know. Dragon created the Revolutionary army after the Ohara incident, but before that he was a part of a team called the “freedom fighters” for an undisclosed length of time, so we have no idea when he left the Navy (if he was a part of it).

It’s now Monday morning as I write this, so sometime this week we’ll see 1096 drop and hopefully some of this will be answered. I’m so incredibly excited and I hope it keeps going up from here. Egghead is amazing, and One Piece is one of the greatest stories around.

We get to keep struggling!

jackson@jacksontaylor.xyz (Jackson Taylor) — Tue, 07 Jun 2022 00:00:00 -0400

The team behind Berserk just announced that they are going to continue the serialization, we get to keep struggling along with Guts!

According to the “berserk_project” twitter page, a close friend of Miura had been told the ending of Berserk and a lot of the major plot points that were to occur to get us there.

Link to twitter post

This is really cool timing for me, considering I just got caught up a literal week ago.

Kouji Mori had been friends with Kentaro Miura since they were in high school. They both worked on various manga and anime projects over the years, and would frequently consult each other on their works and get feedback. Miura told Moji that he was the only one to know the ending of Berserk. I think this shows how good of friends they actually were. Based on the statement given from both Moji and Young Animal Studios, I think this is going to be the best shot at doing what Miura would have intended. I know it’s going to be a project filled with love and respect for Miura, and they are going to try to stay as true to the material that Miura had left, and told Moji. Miura’s apprentices are going to be working on it as well.

Though it might not be exactly what Miura had planned, I don’t think anyone else would be qualified to work on this and continue it than the ones that have stepped forward for this monumental task. I am very excited to see more.

Even though I have caught up, and was beginning to write my review, I am going to hold off on until it’s finished. I’m sure I’ll still really like it, and I definitely already respect what they’re doing. But I will probably break it down between Miura and Moji portions just to compare the 2 to see if they are able to keep that same feeling.

Happy Tuesday!

I'm Reading Berserk

jackson@jacksontaylor.xyz (Jackson Taylor) — Tue, 10 May 2022 00:00:00 -0400

Despite my better judgement, I decided to start reading the manga “Berserk” by Kentaro Miura, and I am loving it.

I don’t read very many mangas (Is the plural of manga, mangas? Or is it like moose, and it’s still just manga?). When I do read, which isn’t that often, I am usually reading non-fiction philosophy, or some programming/tech book or something. The only manga I’ve actually ended up reading was like the first volume of Dragon Ball Z, and JoJo’s Bizarre Adventure - Stone Ocean. I enjoyed both of them. I had already seen a little past the Raditz arc in the DBZ anime at the time so I knew what happened. Stone Ocean is really the only one I’ve read and it’s been all new.

It’s not that I’m against reading manga really, I’m just bad at committing to reading or watching long running pieces of media. Dragon Ball is the longest thing I can think of that I’ve watched, which is 567 episodes and like 15 movies, and that took around a year or 2 to finish completely.

Berserk is (currently) 374 chapters, each around 20 pages with some exceptions at the beginning, so 7480 pages roughly. It’s a chunk of books to read. So why did I decide to start reading it?

Berserk is pretty well known as a really good series, and has been running for over 30 years. It has inspired a ton of other projects, such as the Dark Souls series. I felt like I was missing out on some references. I’ve heard the Dark Souls games are pretty fun too, so I may end up playing them at some point.

Ok, if it’s so good, why were you against reading it?

Unfortunately, last year Kenato Miura suddenly passed away due to an aortic dissection at the age of 54. This is very unfortunate for his family and friends, from what I can tell he was a very good person and loved by many.

That being said, Berserk is currently unfinished. The editors would like to be able to continue the series, from what I’ve read, but I’m not sure if Miura had any concrete plans on where it was going. I’m only about halfway through, so I have no idea where they left off. I hope that more content come out for Berserk in some fashion.

I’m probably going to be really sad once it’s over, if they don’t make anymore. For now though, I’m really enjoying it, and am planning on writing a review once it I’m finished.

Something that I do frequently with manga and anime/TV, is I try to finish them too quickly. I’ve sorta gotten to that point with Berserk, and am probably going to have to go back about 5-10 just to make sure I’m understanding everything that’s going on. I’m on chapter 176 I think (depending on where you read it, the numbers can change it seems). I may start writing notes about individual chapters just to keep everything in my mind.

This also opens the door to me potentially trying to read One Piece. My friend has tried and tried to get me to read it for years now, but I’ve always been against it due to the length. I might finally give it a shot, not sure yet.

Stone Ocean delayed

jackson@jacksontaylor.xyz (Jackson Taylor) — Mon, 28 Mar 2022 00:00:00 -0400

I’ve talked a lot about Cowboy Bebop on my site, but I have watched some other animes. JoJo’s Bizarre Adventure is probably my second favorite.

Netflix worked with David Studios on part 6, Stone Ocean, and they were going to release it in sets of episodes over a course of unknown time. The first set was 12 episodes long, and probably like many other people I had it finished in less than a week. This past week, Netflix announched that the next set of episodes will be releasing in the fall of this year…

This is pretty dissapointing. I’ve already read the manga for part 6, so I know what happens, it’s just unfortunate for those who haven’t/don’t want to. This is almost an entire year for 12 episodes.

From what I’ve seen so far, it looks pretty up to par with the rest of the animated parts though, so I hope they are able to keep the same quality throughout. Towards the end, this part was hard to follow (at least for me), so I hope the anime is able to help with that and make it more clear.

People on twitter have started making petitions for Netflix to release episodes weekly, which would be cool I think. I’m not sure why they wouldn’t, unless it could effect their watch times or something.

Funny Reddit Comment

jackson@jacksontaylor.xyz (Jackson Taylor) — Thu, 03 Feb 2022 00:00:00 -0400

I tried really hard to not look at too many people’s opinions on the live action Cowboy Bebop remake, that way my opinion was more my own and I wouldn’t be parroting the same things thousands of others have said.

But I started browsing r/CowboyBebop today just seeing what was top rated, and found this really funny comment regarding Gren that I wanted to share.

‘Gynecomastia doesn’t really jive with the Twitter crowd, and Netflix really wanted to tick that box’. - Eternal_Indifference

This was in response to a joke about a headline from an article where Mason Alexander was talking about how the live action was “fixing the problems in the anime”.

It made me laugh pretty hard. This is a good joking way to explain my thoughts on the Gren situation (sorta). If you want to read my full opinion, it is linked on the home page of my website.

Reviews Section

jackson@jacksontaylor.xyz (Jackson Taylor) — Sun, 30 Jan 2022 00:00:00 -0400

I’ve decided to add a “reviews” section to my website, for general overviews over things I like and want to talk about.

The first thing I’ve decided to review is the live action Cowboy Bebop series. So go feel free to read it.

I’m not going to link it in this post because I’m thinking of moving some stuff around, and I don’t want to have too many broken links in my RSS feed. It’s just on the home page.