Mid-Season Impressions: Birdie Wing and Sachiku-san and Blogging Fustrations

With spring being halfway over and since this week’s episode of Machikado Mazoku 2-Choume is delayed until next week due to golf for some reason, I want to share my short mid-season impressions of the other two shows I’m currently not covering. They are Birdie Wing and Shachiku-san wa Youjo Yuurei ni Iyasaretai. Also, I will be sharing some thoughts on the state of the blog, which has been a bit rough.

Birdie Wing

As expected, Birdie Wing is probably the craziest golf anime. It makes Sorairo Utility look normal. Eve eventually takes Aoi’s offer to do a match, which I expected. However, Eve brutes force it by going through the forest and failing. Meanwhile, Aoi managed to do the curve and beat Eve by successfully getting an Eagle. Yep, it’s evident that she is pure, and she plays golf as a sport, not for betting.

Of course, Aoi seems to have won over Eve’s heart that Eve wants to challenge her to a match. So with that, she made a deal with the devil so she could play in the same tournament. Yes, as an unofficial player. But, in the end, she doesn’t seem satisfied that Aoi made a mistake on the last stroke.

With Eve getting involved with the mafia, this is where Birdie Wing gets a bit wacky. To uphold her part of the bargain, she plays in a high-stakes match over land rights. Her opponent, Vipère, is based on a snake but looks more like a vampire. I have to admit that she is an amusing character, although her perfume hindered Eve until she managed to win.

Sadly, she missed her early morning match promise with Aoi, which upset her. Of course, Eve couldn’t stop thinking about Aoi after that. Thankfully, they eventually made up in VR Golf. Aoi made a promise to meet again to play golf. Before Eve could make an answer, she suddenly disconnected.

Yep, Eve witnesses the consequences of getting involved with the mafia as their home is in danger to clear land for a casino. But, I find it funny how Catherine’s plan gets ruined. The owner of the land, who is also a part of a different mafia, fires a rocket launcher at municipal officials to stop a meeting. Yes, the thing that would allow Catherine, a mafia boss, to get what she wants.

While the golf is good, I find Eve’s backstory tragic. She only knows her first name and someone that taught her how to golf. Still, I wonder what her origins are. Either way, it should be interesting how the story ends or whether Eve can meet Aoi again. We’ll see.

Shachiku-san wa Youjo Yuurei ni Iyasaretai

As expected, Shachiku remains an endearing and cute show. Eventually, Shachiku brings Yuurei to her apartment. She even cleaned up her apartment as Sachiku attempted to finish her work at home.

Eventually, they bought a kitten that someone abandoned. The kitten is, in fact, a bakeneko that can transform into a catgirl. The bakeneko’s name was Miyako, and she had a familiar voice to a cute demon girl. In fact, Miyako has the same voice actress as Shamiko, Kohara Konomi.

Since these two characters have similar voices adds the context to Yuurei and Miyako fighting over Sachiku’s dress shirt. Moreover, they improperly washed it. This scene gives a whole new meaning. Yep, they fight over smelling it before tearing one of the sleeves. This scene provides that meme, “It’s Shamiko’s fault,” a whole new meaning. Seeing them have trouble with the photocopy machine and photocopying themselves was also hilarious and cute. Sachiku got some cute pictures out of that too.

There is not much to say as this show is a good iyashikei. Of course, there are some sad moments with Yuurei getting lost and Miyako’s backstory, but it ends in a heartwarming way. Overall, while the show is not groundbreaking, it’s definitely cute and refreshing.

State of the Blog and Blogging Frustrations

I must admit that my blog isn’t faring as I hoped. The first part of the year began roughly in terms of comments. I kind of expected this since winter anime season was somewhat lackluster. I expected this given the selection of shows. However, now we are falling behind compared to last year at the same point. In recent weeks, it has gotten worse that I voiced my frustrations and that the lack of comments is hurting my motivation to blog.

Believe it or not, given how toxic social media is now these days, I rely on the anime blogging community for socialization. Unfortunately, Elon Musk is trying to make Twitter into a worse cesspool than now.

Sure, he shares his desire to make Twitter a platform with unfettered free speech. However, this means allowing things like harassment, death threats, hate speech, incitement of violence, and misinformation that give the opposite effect of allowing free speech but hinder it. Not to mention, Musk had several instances of silencing his critics. Therefore, I find his support for free speech very hypocritical.

That makes blogs and other user-controlled communities like internet forums and Discord communities better. Corporations or some egotistical millionaire can’t control user-created communities and control the narrative they seem fit. Sure, you have some hate-filled communities, but it’s easy to ignore them simply.

Therefore, I emphasize comments. For the most part, Likes are useless since I have seen Like-spammers abuse them to promote their blogs. It does not add to a sense of community either since the person isn’t responding. Not only does it show that not only people are reading my posts, but a sense of community. With the lack of comments, I feel left out of the community and gives me the impression that the content I am putting out isn’t good.

Of course, complaining about the issue isn’t going to solve things. My goal is to encourage people to comment in the comment sections. To accomplish this, I need to improve the content’s quality even more. To do that, simply relying on Microsoft Word’s grammar check isn’t going to cut it. So, I decided to pay for Grammarly to improve my writing style. Since I work in IT, writing is usually not the most vital point. Hopefully, the new grammar and style check will improve the quality of my content and motivate readers to respond or at least promote them.

The second change I plan to make is the blog’s overall look. I changed the theme in 2019, but I was still not satisfied with how it behaved on mobile. Unfortunately, WPTouch Pro isn’t receiving fixes for the last two years, so it’s time to move on.

Believe it or not, I played around with Mai Theme from BizBudding. I decided to go with this due to the customizability, although it relies significantly on Gutenburg. With the amount of customizability, I can get rid of WPTouch Pro once and for all. In other words, I can rely more on caching, which will improve SEO.

I must admit that I hate Gutenburg for blogging since it’s too complicated and breaks my workflow with Microsoft Word. However, Gutenburg is suitable for complex pages and things like widgets. I achieved close to the same functionality as WPTouch while keeping a similar appearance to the old theme. That is without making many CSS customizations.

The only problem I am having is that it excludes the captioned image above the excerpt tag for Classic Editor posts. I discovered this problem while attempting to deploy the new theme. I am still waiting for the developers to answer and resolve this issue. In short, it will be a while before I can deploy it.

Once I get the new theme up and running, I plan to finalize the character design for my mascot character. Then I will look for someone to commission artwork that I will use as the blog header’s image. Hopefully, I can complete this part by the fall of this year.

With that, I hope you understand why comments are critical. I want to participate more in the blogging community, but this can only happen if more people leave comments. Please consider leaving a comment for those using WordPress Likes instead of using the reaction system. Given my issues with WordPress Likes in the past with spammers abusing it, I just don’t find that system legitimate. Automattic is unwilling to do anything to allow creators to remove spam likes and prevent them.