DeinAlptraum's Blog

Hiking up Mount Fuji

Mon, 15 Sep 2025 00:00:00 +0000

As is tradition here (read: something I did once) I thought hey, how about I climb up this really tall mountain tomorrow?

I still had a few days before work would start again, and I've been wanting to climb Mount Fuji, Japan's tallest mountain, for years already. The problem is, Mount Fuji is an incredibly popular tourist destination and you'd have to book months in advance if you wanted a place in one of the huts anywhere on the mountain, in the short timeframe from July to August where it is open. Additionally, there are no ropeways to the top like in the case of the Zugspitze, so you'd have to ascend and descend it all yourself, making day trips seem unrealistic.

Or so I thought, until I looked it up, and realized a day-trip is actually very realistic! So I stocked up on supplies, packed my backpack and set my alarm to 5:00 the next day.

Itinerary

There is a bus that goes straight from the Shinjuku bus station (Busta) to Fuji-Subaru Line 5th station (富士山五合目), highest point of the Yoshida (吉田) trail that is reachable by motorized means. The Yoshida trail is the most popular one of the four trails to the top of the mountain, and the easiest to access and do in a single day, so I went with the basic option here.

The bus leaves Shinjuku at 6:45 and reaches the station at 9:20 for 3,800￥. This is the earliest bus to the trail head, so you cannot go earlier by public transport, unless you take the overnight bus. The bus itself is very comfy and easy to sleep in. The last return bus to Shinjuku Busta from the trail head leaves at 16:45, so you have about 7.5h to climb Fuji. If you don't make it, there are still buses for another 2h down to Kawaguchiko (one of the five Fuji lakes) where you can either take one of the always-booked out buses to Shinjuku, or take the Takao trains for another 3h to get back to Tokyo.

If you want more details on possible transport options, hiking routes and itineraries, I originally got my information from an amazing blog article at Emma Goto which I highly recommend for an overview.

The Ascent

I got up at 5:00 in the morning, finished my prep, then trained to Shinjuku station. I arrived at the bus stop 5 minutes before the bus left, panicked a bit when I realized you had to buy a ticket for a seat, was very relieved that there were still free seats left, then got on the bus and slept until we reached the station. I had the row to myself, but I also went on a weekday, so YMMV. The bus got there about half an hour early, so at 9:00 I was ready to start my hike.

Once you arrive at the 5th station, there are a couple shops to stock up on food and drinks if you have not prepared responsibly, and also public toilets. This is your last chance to go on a proper, sanitized and free toilet. After this, it's all paid, stinky mountain toilets. Next, I had to pay the trail entrance fee - apparently a new thing they introduced quite recently, rather expensive at 4,000￥.

The ticket and wristband I got at the entrance. I kept the wristband as a souvenir.

After that, it's off to the trail.

I got quite confused right away, since there were a lot of people coming my way and not many going the same direction as me, as well as the trail going ever so slightly downward, so I ended up asking one of the hikers passing me by, whether I was headed in the right direction. THey kindly confirmed that this was the right way, and soon afterwards we started going up.

I didn't take many pictures of the start of the trail, as it is really just a boring gravel path. But since the bus station is at 2,300m elevation, you already get very nice views of the surrounding Yamanashi prefecture and the Fuji lakes.

Note how the sign says it's only 5km to the peak, but 6 hours of hiking.

I took a bunch of pictures of the view, until after half an hour I arrived at the first notable incline.

Now we're getting chains to hold on to.

Suddenly, the difficulty increases drastically. Though not too long after, the path flattens significantly again, and for the better part of an hour, it is a slow trot up the path, alternating between steep but even gravel paths, and rocky bits that feel a lot like stairs with very uneven steps.

The better part of the trail looked roughly like this.

For fun, I measured my heartrate towards the start of the hike. Nothing fancy, just running down a 10 second timer while counting, then multiplying by 6. Until I reached the peak, my heartrate was almost constantly 180. This didn't change at all over the course of the entire trip, it didn't even decrease significantly during my breaks.

I usually find it very difficult to tell from photos how steep inclines are, but it really helps give you an idea when there are other people in the picture.

Steep incline, a couple people and a scenically placed Torii.

As you'd expect from Mount Fuji, even on an early Tuesday morning, there are a lot of people around. It wasn't super full by any means, but it is very rare to have a moment where you can't see another person within 30m of you. There are also mountain huts every 20 or so minutes of hiking, meaning that overall, you feel very safe on the way.

Signpost at "the" 8th station. We are now at 3100m!

At some point perhaps one or two hours in, I arrived at the 8th station. There are numbered stations along the trail, though I'm not entirely sure what their meanings are. We started at the 5th station, which is where the last bus stop on the trail is, and the last station before the peak is the 9th station. The 8th station is, however, one massive scam, because you first arrive at the 8th station, like, an hour in, and then an hour later you arrive at another sign that says “8th station”, and then another hour later you arrive at a sign that stays “8.5th station” and only after that you reach the 9th station. In other words, I spent about half of the hike between the first 8th station and the 8.5th station.

Some people bought a long wooden stick, almost like a walking cane, that you can get marks burned into at each station on the way up the mountain. In my opinion, the idea is really cool, but it also seems highly impractical and I'm glad I did not carry such a stick up the entire mountain with me.

One of the nice things about the trail being mostly boring serpentines, is that you can turn around at any moment and see almost the entire path you've walked from above.

The view from close to the top

Anyway, after the 3000m mark, I started feeling the altitude. I had somewhat thought about this during the Zugspitze hike, because there I started having to take a break to catch my breath every 20 or so meters of elevation gain. That seemed excessive for someone with my build and stamina, but I thought that maybe I was just exhausted.

This time felt very different and it was clear that it was altitude sickness. The incline wasn't as steep as the Zugspitze so despite my heartrate being constantly at 180 even before getting this high up, I was able to keep plowing ahead, practically without having to change my pace or taking breaks to catch my breath, and I kept up a constant speed until I reached the peak. Yet I started feeling strangely… “far away”. As if I was looking at the path in front of me from a bit farther away than usual, and I started feeling sleepy. The feeling grew stronger as I progressed and near the top I felt like I was constantly fighting the urge to fall asleep standing as well as an onsetting headache. I don't remember much from this section as I was too concentrated on keeping my feet moving and my consciousness clear.

The gate right before the crater

Not too long after, the gate marking the top came into view. I had now reached the rim of the crater, which I still wanted to circle once before making my way back down. I took a break at one of the stations close to the rim, sitting in the shadow of the building without moving for the next 30 minutes. Fun fact: they have a post office here:

Post office at the rim of the crater

It was also quite fun to look at the clouds from the side or above.

I took a quick inventory during my break: It was now 12:30 so I had taken 3.5h to reach this point. I had drunk half a liter in the first hour alone, and about 1.5 liters in total so far, which seemed like a good amount. I ate one of my onigiri during the break here, leaving me with 2 sandwiches for the way back. I didn't feel too exhausted, but no matter how much I rested, my heartbeat didn't slow much and my headache only got worse. I realized I probably just needed to get down to a lower elevation.

View of the crater from Kengamine. Unfortunately, no snowcap at this time of year

After 30mins rest, I started to make my way around the crater and eventually reached Kengamine (剣ヶ峰), the highest point of Japan. I had another hiker take a quick photo of me, took note of the guy playing Cello there (holy shit???) and then walked back around the other side of the crater.

Absolutely insane

I took in a final view of the surroundings, then I started to make my way down.

The view from the top really was amazing

The Descent

The way down is a pure gravel path with a steady slope, separate from the route I hiked on the way up. Pretty boring really.

This is what the gravel paths looked like. Also, another guy with a Cello. What the hell is going on?

I consider myself to be a strong downhill hiker: e.g. when I descended Mount Tanzawa (丹沢山) I averaged 10km/h, which is faster than most untrained people jog. But for the first time, I actually got overtaken by other people, which didn't happen even once on the way up. The way down was also not particularly comfortable: I was half sliding down the loose gravel, had to stop every 20mins or more to remove a ton of stones from my hiking boots, and slipped and fell several times, like everyone else around me. In addition, I had a pretty strong headache at this point and felt like I had to throw up so badly that I couldn't go on and ended up paying for one of the mountain hut toilets just for that. After that though, I continued making my way down and reached the 5th station just fine.

I had unfortunately missed the last bus to Shinjuku Busta, so instead I had to take another bus to Kawaguchiko (河口湖) at the foot of the mountain. I wanted to take the bus from there to Shinjuku Busta, but it was already booked out, so I had an excruciating, long train ride for another 3h back to Shinjuku after that.

Overall, the hike took me almost 8h roundtrip, including breaks: 3.5h to climb up, 30mins break at the top, 1h to circle the crater, and then 2.5h down.

I got a hefty sunburn despite putting on sunscreen - perhaps I should have renewed it after I reached the top. My headaches also kept going for the next few days, so I am quite sure now that I didn't suffer only from altitude sickness but probably also had a sunstroke or similar. I am quite sensitive in that regard, 15mins of exposure to sunlight in the summer being enough to give me a headache for the rest of the day, but I always wear my trusty anti-UV hat to protect myself… perhaps the strong radiation near the peak of Mount Fuji was just too much for it.

All in all, the hike itself is relatively boring, especially the way down. Before I went, a friend told me, confusedly, that “Fuji is for looking (from a distance) not for going up” but the views, both from the flank of the mountain as well as from the top into the crater and over the surrounding area, were amazing too. I'm glad I was able to do this, though I feel like I'll have to go again at some point with more preparation, so I can truly experience the full classic: seeing the sunrise from the mountain peak.

But as it stands now, I'm happy I did this and proud of myself. Overall, I can recommend a Mount Fuji hike. Though you might be better off planning some more time for this than me.

Actually Reading Books

Tue, 13 May 2025 00:00:00 +0000

I've loved reading since I was a kid. My father used to read to me every evening from as early as I can think. Not too long after entering primary school, having acquired the ability to read, I started reading ahead in my own free time, since I couldn't wait to see how the story would continue. When I moved to a different city for university at the age of 19, I had three bookshelves in my room at my parent's house. One of them I'd built together with my father not too long ago, to expand my storage for all those books I kept accumulating. Out of curiosity, I counted them and thus realized I'd kept almost 300 books in my room. Except for 10 or maybe 20, I'd read all of them.

That said, these were the kinds of books I've been reading since my childhood. The vast majority of them fit into the category of “teenage fantasy” books with only a few odd one's out such as the Bible, Stephen King's It and Daniel Kahneman's Thinking Fast and Slow. As such, I hadn't learned much from reading those books except that it endowed me with a rather solid German proficiency for my age. This article isn't about those books, but about those of the non-fiction kind.

At some point not too many years ago, I developed an interest in the pursuit of

and so I kept telling myself, “you should really read some more hard facts bro”. I kind of did, but if I'm being honest, most non-fiction books I read weren't all that fun. Or perhaps I needed to get used to an entirely different “reading vibe” than the fiction books I was used to. I guess it's kind of the same as with regular cereal vs. oatmeal and white bread vs. rye bread: both are switches I did at some point in my life, where I didn't like the taste at the start, got used to it at some point and even developed a liking for it now.

My reading thus ended up being very sporadic, perhaps two non-fiction books per year when I was lucky. This all changed early in my Master's when I decided: I will read at least 10 pages in my non-fiction book every day, because otherwise I'm never getting anywhere. I am usually not a big fan of these sorts of rules since I end up forcing myself to do things that I don't feel like doing and it puts the focus on quantity rather than enjoying the time spent reading and being “in the flow”. Besides, 10 pages isn't a lot. That said, I followed my “10 pages a day” rule with very few exceptions for over a year, until quite recently when I started working and had to give up on it for lack of time.

I rarely ever read considerably more than my 10 pages a day due to limited motivation, yet I am quite satisfied with the results. 10 pages a day takes some time for reasonably dense non-fiction books, but can be fit into most schedules. And while this way it often takes a month to finish a single book, on the contrary this means finishing about 10 books per year. That's a ~10x increase over my usual performance until then!

To get to the point, in this article I mostly want to talk about the books I've read and what I've learned from them. But to start, I want to talk about how I felt about the process in general:

As I said earlier, I rarely read more than 10 pages a day because I didn't have the motivation for that. Even after doing this for a year, it still takes a certain amount of energy to pick up a non-fiction book and start reading, which is quite frustrating when I compare that to my usual fiction novels that often manage to keep me up for an additional hour at night or distract me from my other todos because I can't wait to see what happens next. That doesn't mean I had a bad time though. Well, sometimes at least.

You see, the range from “good” to “bad” books is genuinely wide, and to complicate this, this depends much, much more on your personal tastes than seems to be the case with fiction books: I genuinely believe I could pick up almost any fiction book out there and have a decent time with it. This doesn't go for non-fiction books. I would go as far as say that two thirds of the time I spent reading were genuinely wasted because the book didn't have anything to teach me in the first place, or it was extremely inefficient in saying what little it had to say. This is one of the reasons I am writing this blog post: one thing I noticed in the process is, that it is very difficult to figure out beforehand whether you'll like a book or not, even if you read several reviews about it and receive recommendations from people you respect. The latter means that my own judgement here will probably be completely useless to you, dear reader, but I'm hoping it is still informative in some way. Besides, another reason I am writing this is to track which books I've read and how I felt about them. With 1000 words of preface out of the way, let's get into the books. In chronological order of how I read them:

Chip War: The Fight for the World's Most Critical Technology - Chris Miller

This book tells the history of the semiconductor/chip industry, starting from the earliest phases at Bell Labs, Fairchild, Texas Instruments etc. in the 1950s, up to the recent past as late as 2022. Over the course of the book, Miller covers how the rivalry between a few small US companies and sometimes even single people shaped the industry in its early stages, how the Japanese pioneered ever more versatile and efficient device and chip manufacturing to the point of taking the global lead in the 1980s, how the technological deadend in simple ultraviolet lithography machines led global chip manufacturers to combine their ressources and investments into a massive experiment spanning 30 years, that culminated in the emergence of ASML's extreme UV lithography machines in 2011, the rise of Korean and and then later Chinese chip manufacturing and the resulting rise of and tensions around TSMC in Taiwan etc.

His accounts span the entire stack from the necessary scientific advancements and technologies used, across the economics of the chip industry and its most influential company and nation-state actors, up to the geopolitical consequences and tensions around it. The book seems to be widely regarded as the most comprehensive coverage of the topic, and I found it quite interesting to read. It did feel slightly repetitive at times and I will also have to admit that the early history of the chip industry is not that interesting to me. The author also has a strange tendency to describe people and events, especially the early developments in the US and USSR, with a certain dramatic tone that feels out of place.

A thin man with dark hair and deep-set eyes, Malin was one of the Soviet Union's leading experts on semiconductor devices.

That said, consdering that I've seen some criticisms about the book being US-biased, I found these to be small at best, and to not distract much from the content. Besides, it's not like a better alternative exists. All in all, this was a good read and I can recommend it.

Chokepoint Capitalism: How to Beat Big Tech, Tame Big Content, and Get Artists Paid - Rebecca Giblin & Cory Doctorow

This book is essentially about the practices of monopsonies in creative industries. Monopsonies are the counterpart of monopolies on the buyer side, i.e. when there is only one (or very few) buyers, depriving creators of their leverage. To be more precise, groups such as the big five in book publishing (Penguin Random House, HarperCollins, Hachette, Simon & Schuster, MacMillan) controlling about 80% of English-language book publishing, the big three record labels (Sony Music Entertainment, Universal Music Group, Warner Music Group) for music, and recently even worse monopsonies when it comes to ebook publishing (Amazon alone accounts for about 70% in global e-book sales) as well as music streaming services such as Spotify that has full support from the big record labels. Similar issues exist in comparable spaces in the entertainment industry or directly adjacent to it: live entertainment (Ticketmaster and Live Nation), video streaming (Youtube), the other kind of video streaming (Netflix) and many more.

The authors cover the current state of these indutries, often taking the creator's perspective (authors, artists etc.) as well as digging into the misgivings of the monopsony holders. It covers a bit of history that shows us how these companies have grown using their monopsony positions, abused it to threaten rivals, choked independent creators and used regulatory capture to dictate working conditions and increase their fees. In the second part of the book, they propose several ideas to improve the status quo, aimed at artists, end users and policymakers alike.

Perhaps the biggest takeaways for me were, once again confirming that most big companies are genuinely evil and deserve to be wiped off the face of the earth. On a smaller scale, it is the realization that copyright and DRM have long ceased to be the crutches that creators use to protect their livelihood, but rather the tools that these companies use to appropriate works of art from their creators, and to shackle users to their ecosystems. This book is a big recommendation from me: it is one of those few books that are not only informative, but also on-point and entertaining. Perhaps the only downside I could think of, was that this book made me massively angry, several times, while reading.

On a sidenote, Doctorow offers sales of the book directly on his website, DRM-free, which is very in-tune with the content of the book itself, and guarantees that most of the proceeds go to the authors themselves. The guy directly mailed me on the day I bought the book and thanked me. I'm personally a fan of him for his activism, but he also writes both great fiction and non-fiction books. He's one of those people on Mastodon whom I would love to follow but unfortunately cannot because they would single-handedly fill my timeline. He coined the term enshittification by the way.

How Infrastructure Works: Transforming our shared systems for a changing world - Deb Chachra

This book talks about the infrastructure underpinning our society. From electricity grids, heat, water and sewage grids over internet, road, train and other logistic networks, to bridges, power stations, dams etc., she talks about it all. The author is a physics and material science professor who has a passion for infrastructure, which shines through in all the little stories of places she visited, including nuclear powerplants, sewage stations, dams, etc. She also talks about the maintenance challenges, issues of centralized systems, the distributed future she envisions and problems we face due to climate change.

Unfortunately, the entire book is not very interesting. Perhaps more accurately, it is very descriptive, but without diving into any of the depths that would teach me anything new. Most of the book seems to be spent with the author getting lost in her excitement as she imagines the cables connecting the light in her room to the city's transformers stations and the nearest powerplant, and how everything moves as she flicks the light switch. It is quite repetitive and there is practically nothing to learn here if you've had even the slightest interest in the environment and systems surrounding you throughout your life. Some of the places she visited are interesting, such as the famous Dinorwig Power Station in Wales, but they can't save the overall impression.

So all in all, I cannot recommend this book. It's not very entertaining to read and there is very little to learn. This is a bit frustrating because this was a recommendation from a technical blogger who I highly respect for their work but, like… what the hell man?

There was exactly one interesting takeaway in the entire book, close to the end, which I'll share here so you don't have to read the entire book:
Chachra makes an interesting point about the connection between infrastructure and discrimination, introducing the idea of infrastructure as a means of “displacing harms” in conjunction with discrimination of minorities, mostly in the form of systemic racism in the US and environmental issues in general. Infrastructure embodies the political climate of the time it was built in, and especially the opinions of those in power. As infrastructural systems grow and become more centralized, they allow us to shift the harms they are causing to places where they don't bother us as much. When a new highway into a major US city was built, space had to be made for it. The choice was easy: it was the perfect opportunity to eradicate a cheap residential district, the only place close to the city center that many poor people could even afford to live in, and as a result, they even managed to displace them to the outside of the city, where they were easier to ignore. Similarly, a massive coal power plant can be built far away from major cities as long as it is connected with a high-capacity powerline. In contrast, if every neighborhood still had its own small diesel engine or similar for power generation, the fumes and dirt created by those polluters would be impossible to ignore, even if you don't care for the climate at all. Similarly, globalization lets us export all of the manual labor, mining, chemical processing etc. of things we don't like to poorer countries that do it for us.

The Euro: The Battle for the New Global Currency - David Marsh

I started reading this book because I wanted more background on the history and workings of the EU, especially from an economic perspective. This was mostly inspired by having many discussions about economics during my stay at Oxford, with a friend who studied it there.

The Euro covers the history of Europe after the end of the second world war up until the 2010s, focusing mostly on the economics of the region and especially on the negotations about a common currency. This was a rather wordy read. It probably spent about 200 pages describing the seemingly endless back-and-forth between rivaling economic perspectives within Europe, mostly France and Germany at opposite ends of the spectrum (as it should be). To be honest, it felt like the very same debate was rehashed over and over and over again for about 30 years, but Marsh still felt the need to describe it in all its detail. This was extremely repetitive and thus boring and exhausting to read.

But perhaps as a result of that, it certainly impressed on me how deeply divided European countries have always been. The fact that the EU exists seems almost like a miracle now. The path there has certainly been riddled with hardship, and it only happened because “the stars aligned”, with the then-heads of state grasping a once in a few decades chance to make it happen. This implies that the EU was formed under less than optimal circumstances, with countries’ economies not properly aligned etc. The book also emphasizes how the EU is, at heart, still a currency union. It was a question of economics only. Overall, Marsh makes the EU look like a poorly planned experiment. He is probably right about many things, but he is also too negative in my opinion and seems ideologically motivated. He has nothing positive to say about the EU, and the lack of a section with advice or proposals on how the status quo could be improved, is both telling and frustrating.

While I wouldn't call this book bad per se, it is quite a drag to read, and the learning/time investment ratio here is so low that I cannot recommend anyone read it.

Road to Nowhere: What Silicon Valley Gets Wrong about the Future of Transportation - Paris Marx

The title sums up the book's topic pretty well: its goal is essentially to debunk several of those "solutions" for today's transportation issues put forth by founders and investors, especially those from Silicon Valley. Namely, Marx looks at electric vehicles, Uber, self-driving cars and other related ideas, bringing their issues together into a grander argument why such purely tech-focused solutions cannot solve the problems we are facing today.

The book does however go beyond this thesis set out in the title: Marx starts with a short but effective and enlightening history of the automobile and especially how regulatory capture and public manipulation by oil and automobile companies have led to the sad situation we find ourselves in today, before jumping into discussing the initiatives put forth by Silicon Valley companies in recent years. He describes the rise of and tactics used by these companies to make big money while ruining public safety and infrastructure, and how these haven't changed since the advent of the automobile in the early 20th centurey. He picks apart not only single ideas, but also the overall mindset that inspired them in the first place, pointing out how the very root of them is at odds with a community-minded transportation solution. He finally presents us with his own vision for a future focused on strengthening public transport and other forms of community-focused mobility.

All in all, the author manages to tie these three pieces together into a work that makes a very strong, coherent argument, taught me a lot about the things going on at the moment, but also about the history that still underlines the developments we see today, and he did all of this in a relatively concise, digestable book. This is another one of my personal recommendations: it is highly informative, concise and entertaining.

Economics 101 - Alfred Mill & Michele Cagan

From a similar motivation as The Euro, I ended up reading this introductory book, which I'd gotten together with a bunch of other “101” books in a bundle on Humble Bundle a few years back. It was also because The Euro made me feel like there are still too many gaps in my understanding to appreciate more involved materials about economics.

In short, this book does a good job at explaining many of the basic principles in economics and the interplay between different “mechanics”, though there are still some gaps left to fill. The book even prepares you for real-life economics commentary and discussion, since over the cause of the book, the authors go from “clearly biased” to “waging psychological warfare against the reader”. This book is downright manupulative in its later parts, but that's what makes it all the more interesting: the authors make several statements that range from “very opinionated” over “factually wrong” and “can't do maths” down to classic economist-playbook manipulative narratives. As a result, the authors, wholly unintentionally, provide you with ample opportunity in this book to feel confused, uncomfortable, manipulated or angry, in ways that are much clearer than in the environments these sorts of discussions usually take place. It's thus a good opportunity to not just learn about the economic models themselves here, but also develop an intuition of what's wrong with them.

If you're like me, you will have experienced this feeling of “discomfort” when it comes to economic discussions. You get the feeling that their models and the things that are happening seem completely absurd and that the system must be horribly broken, but at the same time, there are people studying this stuff and they probably know way more than you, and if you're being honest, you're not all that familiar with economics so maybe you're just wrong?

It took a while for me to pin down where the exact issue here is, and I need to write a blog article about this at some point. In any case, the authors of this book do not question the established models in the slightest, as seems to be custom in economics education, which is a big flaw, albeit not unexpected. I can genuinely recommend reading this book, but I don't think these authors deserve your money.

If you want to see me getting annoyed at and picking apart some of the stupidities they spout, I collected my reactions in a thread on Mastodon: https://chaos.social/@nightoo/113033341740840763

Pro Git - Scott Chacon & Ben Straub

This is the official Git book, which is itself open-sourced through a Github repository here. It covers everything from the basics of Git to advanced usage of Git, typical workflows, configuration, its internal workings, self-hosting Git on a server, related ecosystems and integrations such as Github and IDEs to some extent etc.

I read this as it was a recommendation from Nikhil Suresh, but I couldn't say I got much out of it. This isn't to say that it is a bad book by any means, but it turns out that I'm already rather proficient with Git for all the things I need to know, and the remainder are mostly things I don't know because I don't need to. There's no point in me reading about how to migrate from SVN to Git now, even if that may be useful at some point in the future. I'll just look it up again once the time comes. The section on Git's inner workings was interesting, and there are a few things Git can do that I never knew I needed, such as e.g. the git log master..my-branch syntax to get all commits from my-branch that are not on master or similar. That's all there is to say about this book. I guess at least I got the street cred now.

World History 101 - Tom Head

Another book from the 101 book bundle mentioned above, I was at first afraid that this would be similarly biased as Economics 101, and was pleasantly surprised that it wasn't. Quite the opposite in fact, the author gives a strong factual overview and isn't afraid to call out common misconceptions and specifically point to e.g. very early civil rights or equality movements that some people are trying their best to pretend that didn't exist.

In a mere 250 pages, the author covers the entirety of human history starting with Sumer and Akkad up to an overview and outlook of the current state of the world. As a result, most coverage ends up incredibly shallow: there are 4 pages on the Second World War, 2 on Imperialism, 2 on the Mayans etc. This is not a critique, but a natural shortcoming of this kind of book. It means I didn't learn too much from the book, but it did help to at least find out a few things I'd never even heard of “happened”, or to contextualize some names I'd only heard without knowing of their background. It was certainly fun getting a few extra details out of this for historical figures I'd seen pop up in Fate, after watching all of it only a few weeks prior with a friend.

Ballistic Missile Defense - Ashton B. Carter & David N. Schwartz

This is another book I saw in a recommendation list of a tech blogger I follow. It was an interesting read, not at the least because I am definitely not in the target audience. Rather than a book, this is more of a study or report, authored mostly by military advisors and people in the defense industry. Published in 1983 towards the end of the cold war, this book strategically evaluates the question “Should the US build a ballistic missile defense (BMD) system?”.

It is important to note here that “Ballistic Missile” is used to refer specifically to long-range nuclear missiles launched from silos and nuclear submarines. This book is specifically and concretely about nuclear war. Rather than any of the specific stances and arguments presented in this book, it is the way of thinking that underlines the entire discussion and shines through most arguments, that I consider the most interesting takeaways here.

The book goes into technical, economic and geopolitical detail of the available options. The particulars may be outdated by 40 years, but some of them are still interesting, and many haven't even changed much from the time the book was written. The situation at the time was roughly as follows: both the US and USSR had thousands of nuclear missiles, and they had come to an agreement to not deploy BMD systems, called the Anti-Ballistic Missile (ABM) treaty.

Hold on you might think, why are they limiting the defensive side, rather than the offense? This is a great illustration of the status quo and the thinking of those days. The relative peace back then was fragile, based on the principle of mutually assured desctruction (MAD): both sides had enough nuclear missiles to raze every enemy city many times over. Thus the only thing preventing nuclear war, except for flimsy values such as morals, was the fact that starting a nuclear attack on the other party is equivalent to committing suicide.

So how does BMD factor into the equation here? Well, the first thing to note was that at that time, neither side had a (significant) BMD system deployed, among other things thanks to the aforementioned ABM treaty. If you're like me, this might come as a surprise: 40 years after the first real use of a nuclear weapon, there was no defense against them? The same held for at least the US public back then it seems: most of them assumed that they were safe from nuclear attack. The reality was that it is essentially impossible to defend against a full-out nuclear attack from a nation as well equipped as the US or USSR. While BMD is generally possible, any particular defense can be overcome through simple tactics such as oversaturation (throwing more missiles at the target than the defense can handle) or staggering the attack across multiple waves to deplete defenses that only work for a limited duration. For example, even with the deployment of a perfectly reliable BMD by the standards of the 1980s, either side would still be able to take out the other side's capital city by expending a mere 1% of their nuclear arsenal.

If this thought alone isn't scary enough, the kinds of defenses available back then were not exactly inspiring confidence either. There were several approaches, and all of them are exceedingly crude, including tactics such as “launching a nuclear missile at the incoming missile and detonating once it is close enough” or “burying a small nuclear bomb close to the defended target and detonating it when you are attacked, shredding any missile passing through the resulting dust screen”. BMD systems were far from reliable, and came with significant drawbacks, to the point that a perfect or near-perfect defense was impossible.

Perhaps more interestingly, this hasn't changed much in the 40 years since the book was written, the only significant difference being that the “launching a missile at the enemy missile” option has improved to the point that non-nuclear defense (i.e. taking out the enemy missile through a direct hit with a kinetic defensive missile) has become feasible. The fact that any defense can be easily overwhelmed by numbers is still true, so BMD systems these days are only deployed in small numbers, their purpose being to defend against nations with very small arsenals (North Korea, Iran or similar) and accidental launches.

It is chilling to think that a fascist and an autocrat are currently leading the nations whose nuclear arsenals are enough to raze every major city on the planet several times over, and there is nothing at all we can do to defend against this. Similarly, it is both fascinating and very scary to see the careful considerations and diplomatic maneuvering going into every move on the US side back then, and comparing that to the clown show that US politics has devolved into since then. No matter how offputting it might be to look at a graph plotting “effectiveness of a BMD sytem” against “percentage of the Soviet population that we can still erase if the USSR attacks first”, there is no doubt that the people writing this report have taken a lot of factors into consideration and are navigating this delicate matter with the highest level of caution, as they should. Seeing that made me feel like it is nothing short of a miracle that we haven't had a nuclear war yet, considering the kinds of people holding the triggers.

So, back to the treaty: the argument here is that both the US and USSR were somewhat content with their nuclear arsenal so that the nuclear arms race, while not at a complete standstill, had at least calmed down. Developing even a somewhat capable BMD would force the other side to either expand its arsenal or otherwise further improve the existing offensive weapons to bypass the defense, possibly spurring a renewed offensive arms race. It is also argued that strong BMD is not desirable, because it serves as another incentive for a first strike: a nation that considers itself safe from nuclear retaliation might be more confident and thus more likely to escalate smaller-scale conflicts. Similarly, if the defense is strong but can be overwhelmed by the strength of the full enemy arsenal, it might be tempting to attack first, eliminate the majority of the enemy silos, and thus be confronted with a smaller counterattack against which the defense might still be effective.

This roughly summarizes the most interesting takeaways from the book. Not sure why exactly I felt the need to write about the contents of this specific book in such detail, but now I feel like I've covered most of it. While the additional arguments, the mathematical and technical details, diplomatic background and the outlook on possible future BMD developments are still interesting, I believe the above paragraphs communicate roughly 90% of the book's content that any casual reader would be interested in, and, more importanty, the underlying way of thinking that I found so interesting. To summarize, this is an interesting book to read, but another case where I don't think the amount of learning justifies the time investment to read a drawn-out military report. That said, reading something that is so far removed in tone and content from what I usually read was still an interesting and valuable experience.

Conclusion

That covers all non-fiction books I've read in the past 2 or so years. I am certainly going to keep reading, though with little in terms of actual goals in mind. For now, I'm looking forward to read Blue Machine by Helen Czerski for some ocean-propaganda after seeing it highly recommended, independently, by several people on Mastodon. I want to look into books on debugging, and will most likely start with Debugging by David Agans, and perhaps add Debug It! by Paul Butcher after seeing recommendations on some random blog: https://blog.regehr.org/archives/849

I'd started reading the classic Design Patterns book at some point, and might pick that one back up again. I've seen recommendations for Nassim Taleb's books a lot and am very curious to see what that's about it. Maybe I'll also dive deeper down the Economics rabbit hole, and I somehow feel like reading a book on medieval catapults as well. The list is long, we'll see what I'll actually get to.

Perhaps one of the most interesting takeaways from the experience so far, is that many things are steeped in history, much, much more deeply than I thought. The books I've listed here span a wide variety of topics, but most of them do talk about history at some point or another. And even though most of them have almost nothing in common, I was still able to make connections between the things that were happening in some of them, because I had some very specific historical background on the same events from a completely different perspective. Additionally, a lot of the historical facts that I've read about in these books have ended up explaining or at least giving some background to things I've encountered in my own life.

As I've touched upon at the start, it is difficult to find good books, and as you see, I couldn't recommend most books I read. The greatest issue I see is that most books don't have a lot to say, or at least not much that is of interest to me, so I often end up reading 300 pages for knowledge that could be compressed to perhaps 30 pages. And even out of those books that are genuinely informative, many are still not exactly “fun” to read. The best books I've read managed to be both highly informative and rather entertaining to read.

Finally, I'm a bit worried about maintaining my learnings from the books I've read. Even of those that I highly recommend from the above list, I would often struggle giving you anything deeper than a high-level overview of their content. I can tell that “the vibe” certainly stays with me, but I'm afraid I lose most of the concrete facts presented in them. I'm still wondering how to deal with this: one option would be to frequently re-read only the good books from this list, but that might be too much of a time investment, considering how I am already reading way too little. I've read some advice about taking notes for the main ideas or main learnings from a book as you are reading, and then revisiting only those notes every once in a while to refresh you memory of the book. I should probably try that, but it seems a bit inconvenient to do while reading, and I haven't figured out how to fit this into a “reading-workflow” yet, so I'm not doing it.

That's all from me, I hope this was interesting and perhaps served as good (anti) recommendations for someone. Even though it is a bit difficult to get started, I can absolutely recommend getting into reading non-fiction books!

My Year in Oxford

Sat, 04 Jan 2025 00:00:00 +0000

It is the 23rd of August 2024 as I'm typing these lines from a quiet room at my grandparents’ house in Hamburg. I've returned from the UK about two weeks ago, and I'm finally getting a bit of a break after finishing a first, incomplete version of my master's thesis, so I have the time and leisure to write this article that I've been thinking about since November 2023 already. It's been an absolutely wild year in terms of how much happened in my life, and especially things I thought about and want to talk about in detail. I've been thinking about what I want to write about in this article and there's no question it's going to be so incredibly broad that this might easily set the record for “most incoherent piece of writing” on this blog. At the same time, it's all connected in one way or another so it only makes sense to write about it in context. Also, I'm just lazy lol. I feel like my writing would probably benefit a lot from being split into more, smaller and focused articles, but alas.

You see, I haven't published an article in the past, checks notes, 13 months (me reading through all of this again after finishing… well make it 17 months)… and that's certainly not because I didn't have anything to write about but rather, because I didn't have the time (for the most part). My memory sucks (but more about that later) and I've already lost the opportunity to write about some of the things that happened, or at least, I wouldn't be able to still capture the state of mind I had during or shortly after these events. This is one of the things I'm the most afraid of, and why not being in the position to start working on this article sooner gave me a lot of anxiety - I'm afraid of forgetting things, and so I love going back to my own writing.

I've probably re-read the Zugspitze article at least five times since publishing it, for one thing because I'm an egocentrist who loves hearing himself talk, but also because it gives me the opportunity to relive that experience and remind myself of how I truly felt about it back then, an effect that is that much stronger because I broke with tradition for once and actually finished that article within a week of the hike. I love talking about things that interest me and sharing insights I think might be useful, but just as much, I enjoy writing for myself. In hindsight, I should have taken notes throughout this year, but I still somehow kept telling myself “I'm going to start writing that article any day now”, and so inevitably some of the vivacity of my memory is lost forever now. There are a number of exciting things I did over the last 1.5 year that could be absolutely worth talking about in some capacity, but I barely, if at all, took any notes and so it's almost impossible to say anything interesting about them at this point. Among other things, I traveled through Japan for 3 weeks in June 2023, and I already started an article about that, barely covering the first 4 days of the trip in 8000 words. But I wrote all of that 11 months ago, and I'm not able to continue that with a similar level of detail and liveliness. You'll still get to see this article in some form some day though. Further, I went to the Chaos Computer Camp in August 2023, and traveled to Portugal with friends shortly after that, the first time I did a proper trip with friends I think. Both events worth talking about, but I probably never will.

The article is so massively long that I cannot in good consciousness recommend anyone read all of it, also because it is so over the place that a large portion will likely not be that interesting to any given reader. So, before we get into it, here's a quick overview of the contents of this post:

In Section 1, I talk a little about my background and how I ended up at Oxford, including the application process and how I got my accommodation. In Section 2, I go through the first two or three weeks after arriving in Oxford, including how I moved in and made my first friends. Section 3 is all about the actual studying experience: the computer science department of Oxford, a detailed description of the courses I took and the general studying experience there. If you're not interested in Computer Science, then you can skip almost the entire section, except perhaps Section 3.7 where I rant about the grading system in the UK. In Section 4 I go through my specific accommodation, the city of Oxford as a whole and some general notes on life in the UK. I've dedicated Section 5 in its entirety to talking about food. Take a look if you needed a few more reasons to convince you to not go to the UK. In Section 6 I explain what functions the college and MCR serve, but especially how much I liked my college, the events and the people there. This is mostly a look into what my life looked like in Oxford. Building on that, in Section 7 I talk about all the other things and activities I did in Oxford, aside from my engagement in the college. Section 8 covers a lot of the things I take away from my year there, including a lot of very personal learnings and introspective ramblings. Section 9 covers my experience looking for jobs, which I did on the side while studying in Oxford, including some funny and less funny recruitment processes I encountered on the way.

Alright, enough of the ramblings, so let's get into it. I have no idea where I should start and this article will be all over the place anyway, but let's talk about the facts and some context first: how I got to studying Computer Science at Oxford.

The Road to this Point

Like the vast majority of people after finishing highschool, I didn't have much of an idea about what I wanted to do in life. I've been going to school for two thirds of my life, now what? I somehow knew I wanted to do software-stuff. I don't remember how I knew, but I'd grown up with computers, did a little bit of programming in my free time and in my first school internship, and in terms of job prospects, you can't go wrong with this. I took the path of least resistance, and went for studying computer science for my Bachelor. Having just finished school, that was the most obvious choice and the farthest away from actually making a choice in hindsight: just continue studying! For context, university studies in Germany are incredibly cheap compared to most other countries, for a “tuition fee” of about 300€ per semester.

At the same time, I do have ambitions, I had pretty good grades and I was vaguely aware that there was such a thing as “prestige” and university rankings. So I checked said rankings online, looked at the top universities in Germany for computer science and filtered it down to RWTH in Aachen, KIT in Karlsruhe and TUM in Munich. The latter was kinda out of the question because Munich is expensive, and between KIT and RWTH I vibed more with RWTH, so not much later I packed up my stuff to live and study in Aachen for 3 years. Fast forward 2.5 years, I knew I was going to have a Bachelor soon but still had no real idea what I wanted in life. The CS Bachelor at RWTH (and most CS courses in general) tend to be pretty broad in my experience, which isn't a bad thing, but means that you get little opportunity to specialize much in anything and decide what you really want to do. CS is a big field after all, so most of my undergrad friends similarly had no idea what they wanted to do next. I felt that, most importantly, I was lacking the practical industry experience to know what kind of work I would enjoy. So I ended up going for internships first, a 3 month one at a startup in Munich and another 6 month one at a big German tech company. Both experiences were really helpful in shaping my ideas of what work was like, but they didn't help me decide what I wanted to go for either.

At some point I decided I was going to do a Master's, though I was very unsure if this was what I needed, compared to getting FTE work experience. I'd had a strong GPA from my Bachelor and this time I was thinking bigger: I'd searched for the best CS undergrad universities in Germany, but now I was going to look globally. I had a relatively clear idea that I didn't want to go to the USA, if nothing else, because of the insane tuition fees. Several others were filtered out due to tuition fees, including e.g. Singapore. I'd also looked at Japanese universities, but found somewhat disappointingly that they were all very research-focused and I was more interested in a taught course. I ended up applying to both Tsinghua university in Beijing and Oxford in the UK, while keeping the TUM in Munich as a backup plan. With some surprise, I was accepted - by both universities!

Now, to some extent, judging what a university can offer you is difficult from a distance, and a significant part of this exercise was about the name: I wanted a Master's degree from one of these universities so I could put their name on my resume afterwards, because it would open doors for me that might otherwise be closed for the rest of my life. In that regard, Oxford was simply the more established name and thus the better choice over Tsinghua, though there's no doubt that could have been an incredible experience as well. Add to that the courselength of only 1 year at Oxford, which suited me well since I was a bit unsure whether I wanted to study in the first place. On the other hand, Oxford had (by German standards) insane tuition fees of about 37.000€ compared to 15.000€ in Tsinghua, and I initially (before I got accepted) said I was only going to accept Oxford's offer if I got a scholarship. The CS departemnt claimed that 80% of its students were studying on a scholarship, and the application process made it easy to apply for them: just tick a box and you'll be considered for almost all of them automatically. But most scholarships don't give you a decision until after the deadline for accepting the place, so you essentially have to promise that you're able to go self-funded either way. I eventually decided to accept the Oxford offer, thanks to my brother who lent me the majority of the tuition fees. On a side-note, UK nationals pay only about 15.000€ of tuition fees (thanks Brexit) compared to us poor internationals. That seems wild to me when I compare that to my undergrad, where internationals even sometimes got tuition fees slashed, rather than having to pay more than twice as much… the uni was trying to milk us for money, and this will be a recurring theme here. Another note on scholarships: based off of the number of people I've talked to, I would say the scholarship-ratio in my department was roughly 20% - the inverse of what they claimed.

Let's talk about the application process for a bit, because some of that was interesting. For Oxford, you had to have good grades from undergrad: their website listed a minimum GPA of 1.4 for German students, though ultimately there were people on my course whose grades were slightly worse than that. Further, you needed to write a “motivational letter”, which until this day I see as nothing but an anxiety-inducing exercise in bullshitting where you try to craft a narrative about yourself. It's not that I don't think there's some value in these, but ultimately these written letters might as well be AI-generated and I feel like no one would notice a difference. Additionally, you needed three reference letters from professors. That was a requirement at every international university I looked at, and it's absolutely horrible design. The RWTH in particular was known for having one of the highest students-per-professor ratios, and I suspect the only academic who might recognize my face and have anything of value to say about me, was my thesis supervisor. I got another professor to write a reference letter for me based on me getting a good grade in one of his courses, and it said nothing meaningful beyond “guy took my course and got a good grade” which is like… they could tell that much from my transcript. Not like I'm blaming the guy, but it calls into question the point of the entire exercise. The worst is, there's certainly a low chance of getting accepted into Oxford, to the point that the university explicitly recommends applying to other places as well. I think that's a good recommendation, but also, you're making this really hard. I would need three reference letters for every single application, and every one of these universities has their own form with its own structure etc. to ensure you cannot use a non-specific reference letter for applications at multiple universities. In other words, if I wanted to apply to $n$ universities, I would need to bother an academic to write a reference letter for me a total of $3n$ times. You know how reliable academics are - this is a horrible exercise and essentially means that you couldn't realistically apply to more than two or three universities.

Anyway, I still managed to get that sorted out obviously. I also needed a proof of my language ability, which meant doing an English test in my case. I went with TOEFL, and just barely passed the requirements, with 112/120 points, where 110 were required by Oxford. I got the full 30 points in reading and listening, followed by 27 in writing and 25 in speaking. Perhaps this should have been some sort of wakeup-call, that the standards were really high. It didn't lead to any problems, but I only realized once I was there, that my English was not as great as I thought.

The final step was then an interview with a professor. I later found out that these were carried out randomly - a significant number of candidates were accepted without an interview. In any case, my interview was with Prof. Ismail Ceylan - a cool guy and a fun interview honestly. He mostly asked me about fundamentals of complexitiy theory, graph algorithms etc. I don't remember all the details, but the first question he asked was: what grows faster? $2^n$ or $n!$ ? This question nicely set the tone for the interview in my opinion: I first answered $2^n$ from gut feeling honestly. He then asked me for an explanation, I started actually thinking about it and quickly realized that this wasn't as difficult as I first thought, and that the correct answer was $n!$. Overall, this was a great interview format in my opinion: you talk to someone who knows their stuff and asks you difficult questions, asks you for justifications, gives you hints if you need them or if you forgot a random formula or something etc. Something very interactive. We will talk about job search later, and this interview right here is a great counterexample to all the ways to how it's not done that I encountered then. On a sidenote, I happened to study logaritmic laws not too long before the interview and it came in handy. Cheers to my propensity to create random flashcards for things I deem useful.

So, I got accepted some time after that, yay! I was quite happy to say the least. The next thing was paying tuition fees, which was a weirdly convoluted process: I first had to provide a document proving my ability to pay, which was surprisingly difficult to procure. It took me about a month of back-and-forth with the university and my bank to get this sorted out in the right format. After I submitted that, they sent me the payment details right away and I paid within a couple days. So what did we need this for? Why couldn't I pay right away? Ugh. Anway.

Another step was figuring out accommodation for my time there. By the way, I got assigned a college, St. Anne's college in my case, though I didn't quite know what that meant. Explaining what a college is, is a bit difficult but I hope I can get the spirit across over the course of this post. In any case, I had the option to ask the college if they or the university themselves could provide me with accommodation, or look for private accommodation. I asked college for the options of course, and they sent me two - one of them university accommodation, and one of them provided by college. I preferred the college one slightly, and it said 700£ per month in the current year. That “current year” part is very important - but I didn't know that back then. In any case, I looked for private accommodations as well, but found them to have similar rent, and because it would be easier to get college accommodation rather than organize something myself in a foreign country, I went with that. To make the choice binding, I sent them my deposit, and a month after that I got the rental agreement - suddenly stating 900£ per month and a few weeks longer contract, leading to an increase in rent by fourty percent for the full year, compared to what they initially told me. And because they'd had us confirm our interest, pay the deposit and then wait for a while, it was now impossible to look for private accommodation which had suddenly become significantly cheaper in comparison. At this point you feel scammed, and there's nothing you can do. The original 700£ was already expensive, but unfortunately Oxford is just expensive. But now, I was signing up to pay rent more than four times as much as I paid during my time in a 15m² room in a student dorm in undergrad. This was another punch in the stomach of my financial planning for the year, after realizing that I was not getting a scholarship.

I knew I had some monthly support because my parents sent me the governmental child allowance, and some from my brother as well. I also applied to the German government's international studies support, which is fortunately much more generous than the national studies support. Most of it was scaling with tuition fees, and the 37.000€ easily surpassed the 5.000€ they set as the maximum to get the highest possible support. So I was granted 850€ of monthly government support, which is very generous and not even enough to cover my rent. Heh. I asked my brother if he could increase his monthly support which he kindly agreed to, so I was ultimately living on a budget of 1700€ a month. For reference, this is noticably more than what I earned during both my internships (after tax), during which I felt like I lived like a king, but in Oxford this was barely enough to get by! I had to borrow another notable sum from my brother as a one-off thing, because they then asked for 3.5 months of rent in advance - ouch. And even after that, I still distinctly remember having a balance of 30€ on my bank account on the 25th of October, at the end of my first month right before my next support payments hit. After that, things were going up again, but this was uncomfortable.

I will have to say here that I am in the incredibly lucky position to be born in Germany, a country that provides such abundant support, have supportive parents as well, and most importantly, an incredibly generous brother who is also wealthy enough to promise me to “help out” if I ever needed it. But I don't want to imagine what someone less lucky in a similar situation as me would have to go through - someone who can't just go “hey bro can you send me a thousand Euros?” but has to watch in dread as their account balance keeps ticking down with every passing day. Oxford's posing about their openness, saying stuff like “we're proud to make education accessible to everyone” makes me feel a bit sick. Looking at all my friends in Germany, I'm pretty sure not a single one of them would have been able to accept an offer of a place at Oxford, for purely financial reasons. Capitalism makes me mad, and I say that as someone who's in the lucky position to not have to deal with that shit in a serious way most of the time.

Whew, okay so let's get on with the start of my stay now.

The First Weeks

I arrived in Oxford roughly a week before induction began. I walked to college with my big suitcase and registered myself, picked up my student ID and keys and began the long walk to my student accommodation: Robert Saunders House in Summertown. My college is already located somewhat north of city centre: not that far, but Oxford is a small city and most of my friends from other colleges considered St. Anne's to be pretty far away. Summertown was even farther north, about 2km from college or 3km from city centre. I passed many classically-Oxford old buildings, which are genereally reminiscent of medieval castles, but like, smaller… I got a bit anxious on the way as I passed nothing but residential houses on the way, fearing that I would have to go 3km to city center to buy groceries. But fortunately, Summertown just so happened to be a sort of suburb, a lively little place with a small core of supermarkets, shops and restaurants surrounded by a cozy residential area. My student accommodation was okay, as long as you do not take the price into consideration. I was on a hallway with 4 rooms total and a shared kitchen, shared bathroom and my own room of 20m².

My first evening in Oxford I spent exploring the local supermarkets for a bit, thinking about all the things I needed to buy for my room and for the kitchen, looking online for a used bicycle and planning some socializing. I had joined a group chat for new students at my college, and someone there happened to ask if people wanted to meet in a pub to get to know each other or something. If you know me, you know that going to a pub and meeting a bunch of new people all at once would be a bit much for introverted little me. But I wanted to make the most of my time here, and I had a couple of days with little to do anyway, so I messaged the guy who asked and signed myself up for this. I got up early the next morning and procured my used bicycle from the other end of the city for 70£. This significantly shortened my commutes to the city to just 10 minutes, rather than about 30mins of walking or paying for the bus every time.

Later that evening I went to a pub and met the others who'd signed up for the pub evening organized by that guy in the group chat. I was a bit anxious about this and not very motivated at first, but it turned into a really nice evening. There were about 10 people at the pub, all of then new master's students who were starting at the same time as me. All of them were new to the city, open to socialize and generally nice people. I didn't manage to talk to every single one that evening due to numbers and seating logistics, but certainly made some connections that day already. At least half of them I kept seeing, whether by chance or on purpose, throughout the following months in Oxford. Since these were all people from my college, and colleges are not limited to certain subjects, it was a very diverse group of people from all over the planet and all over the academic spectrum. I spent a lot of time chatting with an American studying economic history, and a Chinese-Italian doing education. The topic of the college dining hall came up, and we decided to go there together for lunch the next day.

The next morning, I realized I didn't have anyone's phone number, so I just asked in the big group chat where our organizer had asked about the pub evening, if someone wanted to join me for lunch. This worked out as planned, and the two I'd chatted with the previous day showed up. Interestingly, an Indian guy studying International Relations also joined us - it turned he was one of my three flatmates, and he got my number from another flatmate I'd met the day before. Sometimes things work out nicely. We became good friends after this. It was still three days until the start of the induction week, and I felt like I'd already made a few friends.

Fast forward to the induction week: this was the “0th” week of my studies, a mixture of events organized by my college, the MCR of my college and by my department, to give us opportunities to get to know all of them, get some bureaucracy sorted out, meet people and make friends. A short explanation for now on what college and MCR are: colleges are (relatively) nebulous entities and I still couldn't tell you entirely what their exact role is. But generally speaking, every student is associated with a college, and the college is responsible for all the administrative stuff that is not very clearly the jurisdiction of your department. I registered as a student with my college and got my student ID from them, my accommodation is managed by my college, my university email is managed by my college. The college has its own premises with buildings and facilities, so if I want to eat uni-subsidized lunch, I go to the college dining hall. If I am in financial or psychological trouble, I can contact the college advisory or college nurse, and even if I want to ask for a project extension for one of my computer science course projects, I discuss this with college. On a sidenote, there are only three universities using the collegiate system in the UK, and it has nothing to do with the concept of colleges in the USA.

The MCR is an institution that I am part of: the Middle Common Room, which is comprised of all the college's Master and doctoral students. There's also the Junior Common Room (JCR), the equivalent institution for undergraduate, Bachelor students. The term also refers to an actual room: both institutions receive their own room they can sort of do whatever with, usually serving as a hangout space and a room where events and parties are organized. The JCR and MCR distinction is important because they tend to have very different vibes, are treated differently by college and run by separate committees, but more on that later.

So, induction week: we listened to a speech by our college principal, were shown around college on a tour, got a lot of info dumping in the department, had welcome drinks & pizzas and fun exercises to get to know other people. These first five “official” days were very important, at the very least, in building my social circle and I got to know a lot of people there that accompanied me to the end, that I have become great friends with. But to be honest, I don't remember many details from that week so I can't say too much here. I don't even remember how exactly I met some of my now closest friends in that week.

Another important part of the week was the university's “Freshers’ fair”, where all the university's societies and other institutions got the opportunity to introduce themselves. They had an entire massive building booked out for this, which was necessary because there was so much. I probably spent three hours at the fair. “Society” is a fancy word for some sort of university club that people join for fun, and Oxford has everything you could possibly think of. There's a society for almost every country, one for every possible type of sport, one for video games and one for pen & paper RPGs, one for anime, a Taylor Swift society, at least seven choirs etc. There's even a caving society, as in, people who explore caves. All of these are pretty much entirely student-run. I signed up to at least ten mailing lists that day, and was looking forward to try a lot of different things. In the end, I stuck with the Japanese society and one of the non-auditioning choirs. This turned out to be easily enough, and I would have loved to do more: I signed up to mailing lists for the German society, the Track & Field society, the Taylor Swift society (heh), the robotics society, the computer science society, and several others that I already forgot about.

That was my first week in rough terms, and after that we finally began studying. I'll talk about that in detail in the next section.

Master Studies

I'd looked at the course selection at Oxford before applying of course, but I didn't have a very clear picture of what I wanted to study until I applied. In a way, I went down the path of least resistance again: I decided to focus on AI. In many ways, that was an obvious choice: the field is certainly in demand and there are a lot of interesting developments happening there over the past couple years. There are many things I want to learn more about, but not all of them can be studied at university, but this was one of those you could study. I had some basic interest in AI, and Oxford had a good course selection on offer, so this was settled relatively quickly. In fact, AI was the only possible “subject area” that Oxford offered enough courses for to fill out the entire year. On the one-year CS course, I had to complete at least 6 courses plus a Master's thesis, but I was completely free to choose which courses exactly I wanted to do. There were 7 courses that were clearly focused on AI, but if you wanted to study any other field, you could get at most 3 courses that were meaningfully related. Since there are no compulsory courses, you could technically come up with the most pointless ragtag mix of subjects one could imagine and go out of this degree having learned a bit of everything but nothing comprehensively, which seems… a bit strange? Anyway, I went with 6 of the 7 AI courses, dropping only the AI+Bio course. I had three courses in first term, three in second term, and the thesis work plus exams in third term. An overview of my courses:

Machine Learning

This is the department's introductory machine learning course, covering a bit of everything. But while we did discuss a wide range of architectures, the course was very much focused on the theory behind stuff. If you know me, this is already a bad start, but this one honestly made me feel like they should have just named it “advanced probability theory” or similar. Worst of all, the theory parts that we did talk about are mostly theoretical frameworks that are entirely useless for anything you'll ever do in the real world. I mean, one of the most difficult topics that I feel like we spent a lot of time on, were Maximum Likelihood estimators (MLE) and Maximum A-Posteriori (MAP) estimators. A very, very abridged version of what this does is to explain why it is valid to e.g. estimate the mean of a statistical distribution by taking the average over a bunch of samples from said distribution. This may seem obvious, but it is not always. The sad thing is that this is only really relevant to basic regression. In general, we talked a lot about basic regression, Support-Vector Machines and the likes, rather than, you know, the Neural Network stuff that almost everyone came for. The lecturer started his second lecture with a screenshot of a Facebook post:

I would say I generally look favorably upon those defending the mathematical, theoretical foundations of anything against the masses of those who want “just the practical stuff”, but this is different. Machine Learning in general has become a massive field and theory is completely useless to explain a lot of its facets!

Computer Science, as a subject area like you study in university, is much more theoretical, and much more rigorously mathematical, than you would think if you didn't study it. You don't just learn programming in a CS course, this is perhaps 10% of a typical CS course, and I was spooked by this as well: when I started my undergrad in CS, I couldn't believe how much time we spent on dealing with theoretical maths, and it was genuinely hard. I say that as someone who loved maths in highschool and was considering studying mathematics. But in contrast to some of the more foundational areas of computer science, ML is highly empirical, and this has become a recurring theme throughout my courses. A lot of them focus on theory, teaching you theoretical knowledge that is either a) useless in practice, or b) shifts the focus to only those facets of ML that can be explained by theory. This is not only a problem with the courses I was taught in Oxford, but with the field as a whole. It feels like a large fraction of machine learning researchers are mathematicians who are desperately trying to make it seem like their background is useful for this field.

Don't get me wrong: rigorous mathematics and proofs have their place in ML. Some incredible insights in the field have come out of purely theoretical derivations. But this is a field where the stupendously simple technique of blacking out parts of an image, and then letting your AI model try to fill in these parts as pre-training, has produced one of the most successful and influential papers in the field. It just works and no one fully understands why. If you introduce a simple idea (make a small, intuitive change to an architecture) and show that this leads to improvements on typical datasets in a concise 3-page paper, then there is very little value in spending another 8 pages to prove that “this is valid” from a theoretical point of view.

Coming back to the Facebook post above: I do not expect a basic ML course to be all about “learning PyTorch” or something similar. But if you decide to focus on theory or mathematics, you deliberately ignore the >50% of the field that are entirely empirical, but still useful or important. I would have been very much on-board with the original post if the example he gave was “pip install openai and then start calling an LLM API”. But as it stands, my only reaction to that can be… “yes that is (also) what I want to learn!”.

“training a giant convnet on multiple GPUs” is not a simple task, and you could start with interesting questions such as “how do you train a model that doesn't fit on a single GPU?”. I was never given an opportunity to seriously consider this question, until I was asked exactly that two months ago in a job interview. As it stands, the post has the same vibe to me as a mathematician saying “we don't deal with numbers” as he gives you an arrogant look. My prof echoing this statement makes him seem out of touch with both the reality of the field beyond pure research, and his target audience.

To go full circle: my ML course had 20 lectures. In lecture 14, we talked about neural networks for the first time. Enough said.

Graph Representation Learning

GRL might have been the most interesting course I took, and it was held by the professor who'd interviewed me for my application to Oxford. Perhaps the most well-known subareas of ML, by application/modality, are natural language processing (NLP, usually written text) and computer vision (images/video). My impression is that almost no one has heard of graph learning, which is ironic, consdering that Oxford offers a course on it, but not on NLP. In any case, it is still a highly relevant area whose usefulness is often underestimated.

Graph learning is all about machine learning applied to graph data, where “graph” refers to those structures consisting of nodes and edges. This might seem a bit niche at first, but a surprising number of interesting types of data can be formulated as graphs. Perhaps the most relevant in terms of research today, are molecules. These can be represented as nodes (atoms) with edges (bonds) connecting some of them. In fact, graph learning has already been in use for a while, to identify interesting chemical compounds for medicine discovery and many similar tasks. A classic example is the ZINC dataset, which contains graph representations of molecules with the goal to predict their solubility. Many other problems can be framed as graph learning problems, such as supply chain optimization.

This was a great course that managed to strike a strong balance between theory and practicality. Not much more to say here.

Computational Learning Theory

CLT was an… interesting… course. This is the last one of the three courses I chose for the first term. It was perhaps the hardest course I ever took in my life, and choosing it had a significant negative impact on both my final grade and my mental health.

This course essentially introduces a fundamental theoretical framework for machine learning. This goes far deeper than the theory I mentioned in the context of the ML course: CLT asks what tasks can even be learnt? I'll try to give a basic introduction and example here because it's difficult to grasp what this course is about otherwise, feel free to skip four paragraphs ahead if you don't care.

An essential concept to explain here is PAC learnability: a problem is PAC-learnable if you can give an algorithm that produces a hypothesis with an average error below some value $a$, getting error ratios above that at most $b$ percent of the time the algorithm is run, if you feed it with some number of example datapoints $p$ such that $p$ is polynomial in $\frac{1}{a}$ and $\frac{1}{b}$, allowing something like “if you want half the error/failure ratio, you can have twice as much training data”. PAC stands for “probably approximately correct”. “probably” because the algorithm only has to work $100-b$ percent of the time, and “approximately” because its answer is allowed to be, on average, only $a$ percent wrong.

The most basic example here is the rectangle learning game. Imagine you have a square playing field of size 1x1. There is an axis-aligned rectangle in that area, with all points inside that rectangle getting label $1$ and all points outside getting label $0$. Given a bunch of points with x/y coordinates as well as their label ($0$/$1$), with probability $100-b$ your algorithm should produce a rectangle that is at least $100-a$ percent correct, compared to the actual rectangle.

The most intuitive algorithm here actually works: start with an output hypothesis that is the full 1x1 square, and whenever you read an example point with label $0$ (i.e. outside the actual rectangle) you shrink your rectangle hypothesis until that example point is just ouside it. Showing how many examples you need to achieve the $a,b$ bounds is not trivial though.

The easiest way to do this is to imagine you have an “error budget” $a$, which you distribute across all four sides of the rectangle: a rectangular buffer zone on each side of the rectangle that is exactly wide enough that you'd expect a fraction of $\frac{a}{4}$ of all randomly chosen points to be in each of these strips. Now you need your $p$ examples to contain at least one point in each of these buffer zones. If that happens, your algorithm will shrink your rectangle to the point that it is at most by a factor of $4\cdot \frac{a}{4} = a$ bigger than the actual rectangle, for an error ratio of at most $a$. Your algorithm can only fail if at least one of these 4 buffer zones doesn't get any example point. The chance for any point to be in a specific one of these four buffer zones is $\frac{a}{4}$ by definition, so the chance that, out of $p$ points, none of them is in that buffer zone, is $(1-\frac{a}{4})^p$. The chance that any one of the 4 buffer zones doesn't get a single point is at most $4\cdot (1-\frac{a}{4})^p$. This is an upper bound on our failure probability $b$. Now you set those two equal, solve for $p$ and get $\frac{4}{a}\log\frac{4}{b} \geq p$. We have an upper bound for the number of training examples our algorithm needs to achieve failure chance $b$ and error ratio $a$, and it is indeed polynomial in $\frac{1}{a}$ and $\frac{1}{b}$.

This course reminded me a lot of my Mathematical Logic course back in Aachen during undergrad, which had been the hardest course for me until CLT. Both of them were incredibly challenging at first, but in the end you leave with the feeling that you've gotten really good at the kinds of exercises that are typical for these subjects, and both of them are a lot of fun to think about. They're not at all useful for me :D While the idea of being able to say that certain tasks are not effectively learnable with any reasonable amounts of training data is very interesting, real-world tasks such as, say, machine translation, are way too complex to capture them in PAC learning framework. Besides, we got to the point where I feel like “exponential training data requirements” are not going to stop people from trying.

An estimated 60 or so people started the course together with me in week 1, a similar amount as you saw in the ML or GRL courses, as I assume everyone in “the AI student crowd” wanted to take this course. But the lines quickly thinned, and I'm pretty sure that less than 10 people ended up doing the final graded project in CLT. I can't blame them: the course immediately made it clear that it was hard theory and not much else, and more than anything, the very first homework we got in week 1 was absolutely brutal. It consisted of 4 exercises, on which I spent about 40 hours in total. I got 1 and 3 solved, and gave up on 2 and 4 after many hours. This homework almost single-handedly wrecked my confidence and made me believe I was in the wrong place. By the middle of week 2, I was seriously consdering quitting my degree and going back to Germany because I thought I just wasn't smart enough. I still made it through because I never quit, I'd done some communal crying with my fellow CLT victims after lectures so I knew it wasn't only me, I'd already made some wonderful friends who distracted me from CLT depression, and I seriously lowered my expectations: this wasn't highschool or Aachen, and I couldn't expect to get close to a perfect score in everything I did anymore. More on this later though.

Life got easier after that first homework: my first term was still unholy stressful, but none of the following homeworks in CLT cost me more than 12h after that. Whew. They really tried to scare people away with that first sheet. I remember writing on the end-of-term feedback sheet that the first homework had a significant negative impact on my mental health. Honestly, this course may not have been worth taking. But at the very least, I got the street cred. One notable experience during induction week was that you'd talk to a lot of people, I would say roughly half of those who began their CS Master's with me, and you'd ask each other what your research focus is. The majority of people said “Machine Learning” and we'd give each other the “one of us” look, or they did something different, and lowkey rolled their eyes at me as “just another one of the boring ML people”. I can't judge them for that to be honest. But anyway, after I finished CLT, I was told that I'd earned my place as one of “the good ML guys”. Heh. We did a “CLT survivors’ party” afterwards, which was great.

Computer Vision

Entering the second term courses: this was a great lecture. It was held for the first time apparently, and the guy doing it was a bit chaotic, having some errors in his lectures and exercises and changing things at the last minute all the time since it was his first one, but overall, he did a great job. Easy to digest, well-structured, well-explained, really helpful professor, and fun to follow along with. He covered basic image processing stuff and some classic computer vision, and then focused on the neural networking stuff. Not much else to say here. This is the only course that actually taught transformers and attention, the fundamental building blocks of most current state-of-the-art models such as LLMs.

Geometric Deep Learning

This is essentially a generalization of graph learning. In geometric learning, you look at learning models or paradigms as an attempt at capturing certain kinds of invariances. As an example, most computer vision models try to capture shift invariance, i.e. invariance to movement. If, for example, you build a classifier that recognizes cats, you would want it to output “cat” regardless of whether the cat is in the center or top-right corner of the image. In other words, sliding the image around doesn't change the result.

Graph learning captures another kind of invariance, the permutation invariance. Typical graph learning models follow the message passing paradigm, where every node in the graph updates its state as a function of a) its own state and b) all of its neighbors’ states. The crux here is that there is no ordering among neighbors: all of them are treated the same. This makes the entire architecture permutation invariant: if you feed in the exact same graph in terms of nodes, their features and connections, only in a different order, the result should still be the same.

After a way too long introduction, this is the core of geometric deep learning: embedding this idea of different architectures capturing different kinds of invariances into a mathematical model and some sort of hierarchy. This keeps going until you reach manifolds: another domain of objects (similar to graphs) which have their own type of invariance that we are interested in. Except that all of this is highly theoretical and has no known practical use, as one of the teaching assistants told me. Ultimately, we really only talked about graph learning some more in this course. The idea of thinking about image, graph and other domains in terms of object classes and invariant functions over them is certainly interesting, but I don't feel like I got a lot out of this course. I'm struggling to recall what we spent 20 lectures on here. I just checked my lecture notes again and realized that the last 4 of those were guest lectures, and I wrote down a total of 15 words on the last 3 lectures before that.

Uncertainty in Deep Learning

This was the most chaotic train wreck of a course I've ever seen. The basic idea of this course is that we're interested in the uncertainty of a machine learning model, i.e. we not only want it to produce answers to our questions, but also add confidence scores so we know how sure it is. This is super interesting and useful.

That said, the course was not. First of all, the lecturer held it for the first time and utterly miscalculated how long he would take for the course content, considering his teaching style. We managed to go through about half the course content in the 18 lectures he held. He took things reeaaaally slow: as a first taste, in the second lecture, he did an experiment with us. Now let me preface this by saying that I'm all for engaging your audience, but… not like this. Effectively, he gave us 5 minutes to discuss with the person next to us about what we think the probability of it raining tomorrow is. Then we collected people's results and discussed them. Cool. Then we did the exact same thing for 4 more questions. And he repeated a similar experiment in the next lecture. This was very tiring.

Once he was done giving us an idea of the content of the course with way too drawn-out experiments, we jumped straight into theory. That mostly involved some difficult probability theory stuff, and he insisted to prove every single thing he did in exhausting detail on the whiteboard in front, and most of the time he'd even give us 10 minutes to try and solve it ourselves first, before going through it in detail himself, or letting one of us present their proof. Again, I am not entirely opposed to this: I learned a lot about probability theory and some very interesting derivations this way. They were genuinely hard, but I was able to follow along nicely because he tried hard to make us understand the stuff. But we completely lost track of what we were doing and why, and never got around to the interesting things.

We learned in the practicals that we can get uncertainty estimates by making the parameters in our neural networks not simple weights, but rather normal distributions: i.e. a mean and variance parameter, instead of a weight parameter, for every learnable weight. During inference, you then infer a hundred times or something with actual weights sampled from those weight distributions, and then you compute a confidence score by seeing how many of your randomized evaluations came down to the same result. This idea is really cool and super simple, and the entire lecture was only about proving why it's valid to do this. That's a prime example of the stuff I'd discussed earlier in the section about the ML course.

The course had a few interesting things to say, but barely managed to do so while imploding in an absolute disaster of a teaching experience.

Examinations

I wanted to talk about both my experience with graded projects and exams here, and especially about the grading system in the UK. It sucks.

To give some context about my own experiences and thus expectations, let me tell you a bit about how grading worked during my undergrad: evaluations were usually given on a scale of 0 to 100 percent of points attainable, and grades were directly derived from those percentages. At 50% you would get the lowest possible passing grade 4.0, and at 100% you'd get the best grade of 1.0. Between that, grades moved by a third for every 5%, so 50-55% was 4.0, 55-60% was 3.7, 60-65% was 3.3, etc. up to 95-100% which was 1.0. This system wasn't set in stone though and examiners could deviate from this however they wanted. This was usually only the case for exams that turned out particularly badly (e.g. the theoretical maths stuff), in which case a common approach was to up everyone's grades, for example, by setting the pass mark at 40% and then “widen” every grade step from 5% to 6%.

The vast majority of courses was graded via exams, and within 3 weeks after grades were released, the examiners had to hold a sort of in-person consultation hour, called inspection, where students got the opportunity to look at how exactly their exam was graded, what they were deducted points for etc., and were often provided with model solutions to compare. Examiners were present to be asked any question, and could give students additional points and even up their grade if the student found a grading mistake or could argue sufficiently well that their answer deserved more points. As you can imagine, this usually turned into multi-hour discussions and negotiations by desperate students, and I'm sure examiners would have loved to not have to hold this event. But it absolutely did wonders for transparency and fair grading. For one thing, mistakes happen frequently during grading. And that's okay, but there's no other way to check for this. It helps to accept bad grades and to understand what your mistakes were. You don't just try to get a better grades at an inspection, you come out of that having learned more about the subject, as well as your own weaknesses in preparing for this exam. Keep all of this in mind as we talk about the UK grading system.

The UK grading system also uses a percentage scale, where 50% is the lowest possible pass grade. There are no real “grades” derived from these percentages though, only three different classifications: the regular one, as well as “merit” and “distinction”. You get the regular one with a grade between 50% and 65%, a merit for 65-70% and a distinction for 70% and upwards. But wait, aren't those ranges… strange? Why is the second classification only 5 percentage points “wide”? So, I'm not sure how much of this is Oxford, and how much of it is the UK at large (there are unis in the UK where you get a merit for the 60-70% range) but the idea is roughly, at least in a research or similar context, that students normally get grades in the 50 to 75, maybe 80, range and anything above that is straight up worth publishing in an academic journal or similar. As you can imagine, the effective grade range is thus compressed from 0 to 100 down to 50 to 80. Oxford grading gets extremely generous as you approach the 50% (in downwards direction) and the only time I've ever heard of a grade less than 50% was from someone who struggled to multiply 3 small, sparse matrices together. On the other end, scoring above 70% is already seen as pretty strong, and 80% and above is so good that I assume half the graded projects I completed didn't even give out a single grade that high. In general, the “difficulty increase” if you want to go from 65% to 70% is reasonable, while the increase from 70% to 75% is massive, and might sometimes be completely insurmountable.

There's a lot to say about this, so let me start with the lukewarm takes: compressing the range like this seems just… weird and unintuitive at first, but is not exactly a problem in and of itself. You could map the 50% to 75% range to a 50% to 100% range and the resulting grading system would fundamentally be very similar to the German one that I'm used to.

The problems lie elsewhere, with perhaps the “spirit” of the system, or the guidance given to examiners. In natural sciences, I would say there are two types of exercises: the clearly defined, concrete and/or theoretical ones, where there is often only one solution (or very few) and the best that someone can possibly do is to just get it right. An example of this would be any mathematical proof exercise. If your proof is correct, there is almost no way to not give you the full number of points, while any oversights or mistakes will be deducted from your points, depending on how much they affect the plausibility of the final result.

On the other hand, we have more open exercises, such as those beginning with words like “Explain […]”, or on a bigger scale, the “do some research on a topic related to this course” types of exercises that were very common during my studies. These are the only kinds of exercises in most non-STEM courses, I assume. I am not a big fan of these because I like the reliability of my “either you're right, or you're wrong” theoretical maths exercises, but there's nothing inherently wrong with these. The issue here is, they don't mix well. The mathematical problems tend to have a very clearly defined upper limit. This doesn't hold for the second kind. There might not exist a ceiling at all for how good or interesting your research could possibly be. For the latter, you'll have to reserve the upper parts of the range for those truly exceptional, once in a year (if at all) works to value them appropriately, and Oxford is very focused on this.

There are several ways you could combine these two kinds of exercises in the context of a fixed 0 to 100% scale. One option would be to ignore their relationship completely, meaning e.g. you rate someone successfully completing an exercise of the first kind with 100% of the points, while someone solving an exercise of the second kind really well would only get, say, 80%. Unless you clearly identify these types of exercises and somehow treat them separately, the problems are obvious: students are forced to choose courses in a way that minimizes their exposure to the second kind in order to maximize their grades.

The next option is to set the 100% bar for the second kind to something lower, so that a “really well done” submission is enough to get a perfect score. The only downside of this system is that you lose the ability to “reward” exceptionally strong works appropriately. This is what the German system I'm used to does.

The final option is to somehow force down the grades of the first type of exercise. All ways of doing this suck to be honest. Because this is exactly the route Oxford chose, I'll bring up a couple examples as I discuss the exams I had.

In CS, we had two kinds of graded exercises as well as the thesis work. Every course was evaluated via either an exam, or a mini project. Exams were written collectively in a roughly 3 week span during the thesis phase towards the end of the course. Mini projects were done during the “break” between terms and could be about literally anything, although most of them were simply research projects where you had to write a paper. For those, the “grades above 80 are for submissions worth publishing”-type of thinking became very apparent, as it seemingly inspired the entire grading scheme for them. While subjecting Master's student to similar conditions as researchers trying to publish in world-renowned academic journals is already a bit questionable, perhaps the worst part here is the “novelty” requirement. Usually, roughly 20% of your grade was allocatd to this component, which is effectively a vibe check for the professor on whether they think whatever you did was interesting. That this is relevant for proper research goes without saying, but expecting every single student on most of the department's courses to produce novel research is simply unrealistic. Then again, in practice I feel like this is another component intentionally adding to the arbitrariness of the entire grading process.

As my final complaint before I talk about specific instances, I'd like to lament the lack of “inspection” like I had at home, though I've heard that other departments seem to do that. The CS department doesn't do any of this. By default, you will receive the grade for your project work or exam, and that's it. You have the option of mailing the department to give you the examiner's comments (if they even left any) as well as the number of points you scored in each exercise, if applicable. The fact that these aren't given out per default is… strange, and the transparency of the process is seriously lacking, leading to some unconfirmed suspicions that I'll talk about later. This is especially annoying in combination with the research project exercises I've had to do: while I found the grading criteria questionable, I can't deny the fact that the 3 research projects I did this way were by far the best practice and preparation for paper publication I've ever had. That makes it all the more frustrating that we receive no feedback at all on these, except for the final grade. That's one sad, wasted opportunity.

Now, let's get into the projects and exams. In my first term, I did Computational Learning Theory, Graph Representation Learning and Machine Learning. The former two were project-based, while the latter was evaluated via an exam. In second term, I did project work for Geometric Deep Learning and Uncertainty in Deep Learning, as well as an exam in Computer Vision.

Graph Representation Learning

This was a mixture between research project (40%) and proof exercises (60%). Can't comment much to be honest, this seemed like a reasonable exam, though I only got a mediocre grade because my research project didn't do anything the professor found interesting. I lost a bunch of points in the easiest parts of the proof exercises, which is completely inexplicible to me and I'll never find out why because we don't get any feedback =)

Computational Learning Theory

The CLT project was purely proof-based, and while I was a bit scared because the subject was hard, I did really well on their practice exercises after the very first sheet, so I was confident. Oh boy.

This was insanely hard. I spent 4 weeks working on this full-time, managed to finish only 60% of the exercises and got exactly the passing grade of 50%, meaning my submission kinda sucked but I tried hard enough that the examiner took pity on me. I still remember celebrating Christmas with my family on the 24th, and going straight back to my desk the moment everyone left, to do proofs for a couple more hours.

The set of exercises was quite strange in a way that I can't quite explain, except that all the exercises felt completely different to everything we had done during the term. This feeling is somewhat supported by the fact that all my course mates did really well on the project: all of the… uh… 8 other people who did this got at least a merit, i.e. more than 65%, despite almost all of them struggling considerably more than me with the exercise sheets during term.

Strangely, half the exercises were nothing but pure maths exercises that sort of made sense in the context of CLT, but you didn't need to have taken the course to do them. I'm pretty sure you would be able to pass without knowing any of its contents. That specifically doesn't bother me, but it seems like a very weird design choice.

I'll have to admit that I probably shot myself in the foot majorly by taking this course. It is my worst grade and likely cost me the overall merit, significantly damaged my mental health during my first few weeks in Oxford as well as keeping me very busy during first term, and, while being interesting, it turned out to be irrelevant for me.

Uncertaintly in Deep Learning

The UDL project consisted of reserach only, i.e. do some coding or proofs, then compile that into a 6-page report following the format and structure of an established journal. Specifically, we were given a paper to read, with the task to reproduce its results and extend it in an interesting way.

First of all, I was relieved when I saw the task, because I was worried it would rely on all of the things we ended up not learning during the disastrous teaching experience that was this course.

Then I saw an interesting statement in the introduction of the task… “This mini project should be completable within 1 or 2 days (excluding time spent on the writeup)”. Now this is either our lord and savior Yarin Gal showing some kindness to us students whom he failed to teach anything during the course, or it is a huge red flag, so fucking massive that it blocks out the sun and the sky as it covers the entire Earth, putting us into a dark, crimson depression. Of course it was the latter.

I think I spent 20 days working on this nonstop. The main difficulty turned out to be the “reproduce the results of the original paper”-part of the task, which I'd thought of as nothing but a warmup… boy, was I wrong. This task alone took me 2.5 weeks to complete, with the research component, you know, the actual main task, receiving the blessing of my attention for a mere three days. The ideas in the paper were a bit hard to decipher and turn into code to say the least, but even more so, I just didn't get the same results as them. I became so desperate that I looked at the original paper's code and started copying in random portions from there (as far as you can say that when adapting from Tensorflow to PyTorch) but even when the code was functionally equivalent to theirs almost line by line, my results were still several percentage points worse. I started seriously suspecting that the original authors had lied in their paper or something, but then I tested their code and it achieved the proclaimed results… At this point I gave up, accepted the difference and did some boring extension in what little time I'd had left.

I'd talked to several of my course mates, and every single one of them reported struggling with this reproduction exercise and spending several weeks on this, rather than the supposed “1 or 2 days”.

Geometric Deep Learning

In GDL, I probably did the most interesting research. Like UDL, it was a pure research project, though they gave us a dozen rough research directions with several more concrete ideas for each of them. This was amazing, simply because it meant my uncreative ass was less likely to be punished for this shortcoming by not having an idea the professor considered interesting.

This project was decent, but I had to run a lot of benchmarks for this. I think I had my laptop run a benchmark script to do expirements for about 80 hours straight, and that was just to get the final results, not even including any of the testing I had to do along the way. This is relevant because benchmark time means GPU time and Oxford didn't provide any of that. More on that later though. This was the first time I had to come up with a way to visualize 4-dimensional data, but I think I did decently well, though coming up with the visualization made my head spin.

The final grading here was highly suspicious. About 10 or so people shared their grades, and it turned out that all of them fell into the 70 - 75% range. Now, no one was complaining because that's pretty good, but it feels like the professor couldn't be bothered to grade these and decided to just give everyone a score of 1D6+69 or something. Again, because there's no inspection, we'll never know =)

Machine Learning

This was one of my courses from first term, which ended at the start of December, but all exams were held towards the end of May/early June right in the midst of the thesis phase. This is why I am putting this after all the mini projects, which happend after first term (in December) and after second term (in March) respectively.

This was a really, really hard exam, though in a different way than the CLT mini project. Looking at the previous years’ exams, I quickly realized I had completely underestimated the subject. In short, they were expecting you to have a deep understanding of every single concept covered in the course, regardless of whether they were discussed in detail and practiced in the homework sheets, or if they were just a small sidenote in the bottom quarter of a single slide. I think I spent over 3 weeks preparing for this exam, the most I've ever done for any exam in my life, and I still ended up scoring only 54% on it.

Again, several of the ratings seem weird because I lost points in some of the easiest exercises, but there's no way to check how this could have happened. The exam was the easiest one of the past 5 or so years, but it still contained a couple ridiculous questions, like expecting you to write a complex proof that requires deep understanding of a technique that was mentioned on a single slide once. Questions like these were obviously made to prevent people from actually scoring close to full scores.

Computer Vision

This was, by German standards, the only “normal” exam on the course. It had a couple difficult or confusing questions but I would say that all exercises in this exam were realistically doable if you prepared. I think I had 3 days to prepare for this after writing ML, and that was easily enough since I'd paid attention during the course and it was well taught. I scored a raw 83% here, which was by far my best grade, but because you can't have people getting good grades in a sane exam, everyone was downgraded. In my case, that meant going from 83% to a 75% grade. Did I mention that their grading scheme is insane?

Thesis Work

For the final block, let's talk about my thesis work. You get the third term entirely to work on a thesis project (and exams) though this is still relatively short by most countries’ standards, giving you a total of 4.5 months. You have to register your thesis project by the end of February, effectively requiring you to decide on the topic early in your second term. In my case, I found an interesting project in computer vision that was mostly hands-on, practical programming and model training. That was exactly what I wanted, rather than a more theoretical project.

After discovering that topic, I had to get in touch with the guy offering it, which ended up being one hell of a journey. I think I tried for about four weeks to reach him by mail, and I also tried to visit his office. Unfortunately, the CS department has a small building that is only accessible by going through the physic's department's buildings, which I couldn't because my student card can't unlock their doors… I only finally got a reply from him after complaining to the department's administrative team. Perhaps this should have been a sign to look for a different project, but it was genuinely hard to find anything that caught my interest at all. Most other things were either highly theoretical or not about machine learning at all.

In any case, I sealed the deal after 4 weeks of trying, 1 week before the deadline. I then began working on this in third term, and two big problems became apparent. My project was about a new pre-training method for vision transformers, based on an existing pre-training method. The original method was trained on 64 GPUs in parallel for 4 days. I was worried we wouldn't have the resources for that, but my supervisor assured me that wouldn't be a concern, we could run it on the university cluster no problem. Once I finished the programming part and told them I was ready to run my experiments on the cluster, along with some initial estimates of the run time, they said, well that's a bit much… Turns out we only get 8 GPUs on the cluster and (by design) our method is slower than the original, so we were looking at a training time of about 80 days for a single run. This was about 30 days before my submission deadline. We decided to shorten the training time from 800 to 50 epochs, so a single experiment would only take 5 days. We could run 5 experiments in parallel, and we could also train the original method in parallel, so we could compare this “early out” performance of our new method to the “early out” performance of the old method. If it's not obvious, this sucks as far as useful results go, since it's impossible to claim that one of the two methods is really better from the results of these experiments. What if my method performs better after 50, but it stops improving after 100 already?

The other problem was my supervisor. They were not that helpful and hard to get a hold of, if that wasn't clear already. They added me to their research group's Slack and the situation got better after that. They'd even proposed to hold a biweekly meeting before I could make the suggestion. But then they often ignored my messages, or took a week to reply, and perhaps worst of all, they didn't appear to our biweekly scheduled meetings like, a third of the time. Several times I sat in the meeting for 20 minutes waiting for them, only to eventually get the message that they're currently holding a lecture??? Dude are you telling me you didn't know this 2 months ago when I scheduled this meeting?

All of this wasn't such a huge problem for me because I could work almost entirely independently from them anyway. But once I'd finished my code and was ready to benchmark stuff, it got really bad. Students aren't given access to the university cluster, only professors are. I was completely dependent on them to run my benchmarks for me. As you can imagine, this was a disaster. I was done with the coding part about a month before the deadline, there was nothing but benchmarking and writing left at this point. It took them 20 days to run a single experiment for me. And after that it took them another week to send me the results from this one experiment. I had literally nothing to show until three days before my thesis deadline!

The writing part itself was smooth, fortunately. It took me perhaps 4 weeks of writing in total, significantly longer than my Bachelor's thesis, despite having almost the exact same length. I clocked in at about 16k words, so probably less than this blog article will have in the end (me proof-reading everything again: oh shit). In my humble opinion, this was a bad thesis, because I barely had any results to show, and couldn't do any ablation studies or try to refine the method with better parameters. Still, I just got the grade (like, literally 4 hours ago) and I somehow scored 67%. Can't complain about this honestly, except I would have gotten an overall merit, had I scored 68%… oof. But well, this piece of writing didn't even deserve the 67% in my opinion, and I am so happy to be done. Supervisor-induced stress was a completely new flavor that I never needed in my life.

Miscellaneous Notes

Here goes a few more complaints or other notes that I couldn't fit in anywhere else.

There are a lot of talks happening in the CS department, several every week, about various topics from our local researchers as well as visiting scholars. I think this is really cool, but I managed to go to only 2 of them in total. Still, it's a great opportunity. It's pretty cool if you read papers or something and you recognize the names of the authors because they're in your department. I remember looking stuff up for one of my homeworks, ending up on an article on towardsdatascience.com, and recognizing the author… because he was my tutor. That's pretty cool, and makes you feel like you're at a place that's at the forefront of research in the field.

The CS department has surprisingly bad equipment. There are only two lecture theaters in total, and none of them have sockets to charge your laptop. It would have been difficult for me to have three lectures in a row because my laptop's battery couldn't last that long. The building has a funny shape though: if you look at it on Maps in satellite view, you can see how it consists of separate buildings that were all kind of stuck together. People eventually tore down the walls between them apparently. As a result, the inside is a real maze, which is both impractical and kinda fun. Google Maps has the position of every single room on the 4th floor noted for some reason.

Perhaps one of the most annoying things was that we weren't provided any hardware to train our models on. The department offers a number of ML-related courses, but you're never told how to properly set up e.g. PyTorch, and instead to “just use Google Colab”. Google Colab is an online platform providing access to a Jupyter Notebook-like Python scripting shell with the option to connect to a GPU for free. This is problematic for several reasons. One is of course that we once again become dependant on a centralized software provider that has been shown in the past to be both quite expensive and not very trustworthy. Even more importantly, setting up a system to do ML with PyTorch is not exactly simple, since it adds CUDA version hell on top of the usual Python package management hell. I've had cases where I wanted to do homework locally rather than on Colab, and for some of them I just gave up, because it was seemingly impossible to get stuff to run on my laptop. The vast majority of my coursemates never went through this pain and thus probably don't know how to set this up at all.

Worse though, while Colab provides all this for “free” there are usage limits, and those are entirely intransparent. At some point, Google will just say “no more GPU for you”. You can still train on CPU in that case, but, depending on the situation, this can lead to an increase in training time by 100x. I had a practical exercise to do at some point, which took about an hour to train locally on my laptop GPU. This is effectively impossible to do on CPU. I know of several people who trained this model once in Colab and were then locked out of training on GPUs for the next 2 weeks. This was a single, not all that relevant, practical exercise, so not too much of an issue. But remember how I mentioned that I had to run benchmarks on GPU for one of my graded projects for a total of 80 hours? As someone with a laptop GPU, I was the exception: most of my friends paid like 50€ in Colab GPU credits to be able to even do their graded project! Again, Oxford gets away without bothering with the problem at all, telling their students to “just use Colab” and offloading the costs to us. This topic was brought up several times by our course representative, but nothing changed until I finished my course.

The composition of nationalities in my cohort was quite interesting. We were a group of about 60, and out of those, to my surprise, the Germans were the second biggest group after the British, and even before the Americans and Chinese who shared the 3rd place at 6 people each. Funnily, 4 out of the 9 Germans there studied at RWTH Aachen for their undergrad. If the RWTH was a country, it would have been the 6th biggest group, right after Romania with 5 people.

The exams vs. mini project system leads to some questionable strategizing: you can choose freely which courses you take and whether a course is evaluated by exam or project work is known beforehand, so you can elect courses with an eye towards how many projects you want to take on each term and how many exams you want to write during thesis time. For the record, this transparency is good. What's not good is that, depending on your course selection, you may be disadvantaged in different ways.

I've had several course mates who refused to choose courses that were evaluated through exams. Many people plain dislike exams in general, and most of them didn't want to have exams overlap with their thesis work in third term. As a result, these people had to do at least 3 mini projects per term break. These term breaks were 6 weeks long, out of which the first 5 were used for project work. Projects were published on the last Friday of the term and the deadline was usually on the next Monday five weeks later, so we had about one week of free time between terms. Did I mention that almost every single person in my course who I'd talked to at the end of the thesis phase mentioned burnout in some capacity? This course was a marathon of 11 months with almost no break whatsoever.

Anyway, getting back to project work: these were, by department guidelines, supposed to take 3 or 4 days, and this was also usually mentioned in the task description of every project I'd seen. This is uni-speak for “about 2 weeks”, so you can imagine that it would get a bit difficult if you had to do more than 2 projects. And that was only an estimate: as I mentioned before, the CLT project took me 4 weeks, and the UDL project took 3. I only had two projects per term so it was fine, but I was still busy until the deadline in all cases. Some of my friends did 3 projects per term, and every single one of them had to ask for a 1 week extension in second term, as far as I remember. This means that those people worked through their entire 11 month degree without a single break, because this way they lost the one week of free time we would have had between project work and the start of the next term.

Conclusion

To conclude, I couldn't say that the teaching experience at Oxford has been overly impressive. I've had good courses, I've had bad courses, I've had everything inbetween, and I think that's normal for university. Overall, I would put it on a similar level as my experience in Aachen, but since I've only had 6 courses in total, your mileage may vary, depending on what you choose.

I can definitely say that the department was less well equipped than the RWTH was. I'm surprised a place as prestigious as Oxford that takes massive tuition fees is not in a better state. The department as a whole seems to suffer from several serious problems such as arbitrary and non-sensical grading schemes or an inability to provide their students with the hardware they need to do their homework.

That said, I did get in touch with a much more diverse group of students and very well established professors and other researchers whose names frequently pop up in the papers I read. This was pretty cool, but the actual studying experience was probably the weakest component of my year in Oxford.

Life in Oxford

For no particular reason, I'll continue with my living situation, the vibe of the city Oxford in general, and use that as a spring board to badmouth the UK infrastructure for a bit.

Accommodation

As mentioned before, I got a (by my standards at least) extremely expensive student accommodation managed by my college. It was located in Summertown, a small suburb-ish area north of city centre, perhaps 25mins walk from college or 35mins from the city centre. It was a medium-sized accommodation, housing about 80 students divided into several “flats” that share an entrance, kitchen, toilet and shower.

I found out later that I was lucky to get into a flat with only 4 people: all other flats I knew of were shared by 6 to 8 people. I would say I was mostly lucky with my flatmates: a Danish PhD student, as well as an Indian and American guy doing a Master's. They were pleasant neighbors, nice people, quiet and mostly clean. I later heard horror stories from a friend sharing a flat with… noisy, “noisy” and very unclean flatmates. In any case, we had a similar kitchen size as the bigger flats, though only a single shared toilet/shower room. The latter was difficult for me at times, since the bathroom was usually occupied for almost an hour on end on many mornings by three people taking showers and using the toilet in a row. If you have a bowels disease and strictly have to use the toilet within 30 minutes of waking up, this is… problematic. I quicky learned to adapt my sleep schedule and get up earlier every morning so I can use the toilet before the others get up. At least we had sinks in our rooms, which reduced the overal bathroom-occupancy. I don't want to imagine the situation if we all had to use the bathroom to brush our teeth or wash our hands. I'm still a bit mad I paid four times as much here as for my undergrad accommodation and not even getting my own bathroom.

We agreed to share all our dishes, cutlery and other kitchen utensils, which helped with availability of stuff you needed and significantly cheapened my move to Oxford. That said, I barely cooked in that kitchen, so it didn't make a massive difference.

Alright, let's get into the fun stuff: my room. As mentioned, it was a room of about 20m² that came with a double bed, desk, chair, closet, drawer and sink. I didn't have to get any furniture, which is nice, and the room was surprisingly spacious. This was bigger than my “apartment” in undergrad, even though that one came with a separate bathroom. At least this meant I had enough space to practice handstands excessively. In a similar way, the bed is weirdly big. Like, why would you provide students in small student accommodation with a double bed by default? The room was big enough for this anyway, but it still seems a bit wasteful. At least I was able to make use of this to save a visiting friend the hotel costs, but that's about the only use I got out of it.

Perhaps the worst part, though, was not the room itself but rather its placement within the building: it was a groundfloor room with a window not to the inner yard, but towards the outside. The only thing separating my window from the sidewalk and then the road, was a small parking lot. That one was so close that, on many days, I couldn't open my window without hitting a car, because someone parked immediately in front of it almost every single morning. Yes, the windows open to the outside only. The next issue was that my bed is placed right in front of the window, and there wasn't really any other place to put it, despite the large room. This meant that when I was sleeping, my head was about 5 meters away from the road, or about half a meter from a car parking in front of my window.

Enjoying the view?

Now, this was a residential street, but unfortunately it was the only one connecting two major roads, Banbury Road and Woodstock road, in about a 1km radius. In other words, a lot of cars were passing through there at every time of day, including a lot of freight trucks! This alone probably had me rediscover my hatred for cars and associated infrastructure. I didn't sleep well during first term, because I'd always get woken up by massive trucks that began passing by my window at 6:00 every morning. This got better in the later terms, or maybe I got used to it, but I still lost out on sleep frequently due to the location. Most days I spent in some sort of half-sleeping state from 6:00 onwards.

There were a bunch of other fun events disturbing my sleep throughout the year. For one thing, I learned that apparently, car alarms in Germany are required by law to turn themselves off automatically after a few minutes. I'd never thought about this, but I learned that this was not the case in the UK, when one night I couldn't fall asleep because a nearby car kept blaring its alarm for almost two hours straight. There was also a supermarket right around the corner from my accommodation, and they had their goods delivered… to the parking lot right next to my apartment. At least once a week, a truck arrived there at 7:00 in the morning, came down the road and stopped right in front of my window, then drove into their parking lot in reverse. Do you know what happens when UK trucks go into reverse? They have speakers loudly telling people to be careful because they're going backwards. Ugh. Finally, I remember waking up early one morning because a mother and her child were in front of my room, and the only way I can explain the noise they were making, is that they kept hitting the asphalt of the parking lot with a metal shovel or something.

Finally, to get to the last downside of ground-floor, outward-facing rooms: I was completely visible to any pedestrians passing by, unless I closed the curtains completely. Which I did a lot of the time, but it was still a bit too sad to keep the sunlight out, and airing the room was more difficult when I kept the curtains closed. At least three times I remember jumping up in my desk chair because one of my friends living in the same accommodation knocked on the window right next to me, since they saw me on their way back from uni or grocery shopping. Now this was funny because they're friends, but the idea that I'm this visible is kinda creepy. I wonder if college takes care to not give this room to women.

As I mentioned before, having only a single shower/toilet was a bit critical for me. Unfortunately, we got the accessible flat, meaning we had a huge connected shower and toilet area, compared to most other flats in the building which had smaller, but separate, shower and toilet rooms. That would have increased throughput significantly, but this way no one was able to go to the toilet as long as anyone was taking a shower. It also meant that most visits to the toilet were extremely humid in the mornings, since three people had taken their shower right before that. And since it was an accessible shower, it was not separated from the rest of the room by a wall or even a step, and for some reason the drain was in the center of the room, in the exact middle between the shower (left) and the toilet (right). This means that it was not only humid, but most of the floor except for right in front of the toilet was wet. There was a pullable string that would trigger an alarm, presumably for people with a disability to call help. I wasn't the only one who pulled this accidentally once.

Next, the kitchen: this one was quite spacious for us and decently equipped, with a fridge, oven, stove, toaster and microwave provided, as well as plenty of storage space. There was only one problem: it had a window to the inner yard, but that one couldn't be opened. One of my flatmates cooked there almost every day, and the humidity got so insane that we had water drops running down the walls a few times. My flatmate tried to air out the room towards the hallway, and thus triggered the fire alarm, forcing the entire 80 residents of the building to evacuate about 3 times during my stay there.

Let's take a break with a couple positive things before I continue my rant: college was extremely responsive if I reported any breakages or similar. They were usually fixed without question after a single working day. This included things such as hot water in the shower not working, the toaster being broken or the faucets in the kitchen dripping. The internet situation was also pretty good: wifi connectivity was reliable, and we got incredibly fast wired speeds of about 30MB/s in download. That's probably the fastest I've ever lived with. There was a common room at the top floor of the building, though almost no one knew about it. It was very big at a length of about 20m, had a TV, a collection of movies, books and even boardgames.

Alright, back to the negatives! What kinds of faucets do you think there are? I personally knew those with a sort of lever you could move up/down to adapt the pressure, and turn left/right to adapt the temperature. Those were the better ones imo, followed by those where you had two turnable wheels to change the pressure of the hot and cold water components respectively. You could effectively achieve any desired temperature inbetween by regulating the amount of hot and cold water in the mix that came out of the single faucet. I found out about a new kind in the UK that I didn't know existed before: imagine the second kind, but instead of only separate handles for hot and cold water, you got separate faucets, so the sink has one hot and one cold faucet… what the hell? This is impractical, since the only way to adapt the temperature is to close the drain, then mix the appropriate amounts of hot and cold water in the sink. Otherwise, you can only choose between cold and boiling hot water. This was a strangely common type of sink, I saw it many times, not only in my room but also the kitchen and several other buildings. This seems siper outdated… except my student accommodation was built only 25 years ago! Though I guess I should consider myself lucky, since the shower had ajustable temperature. Imagine the horror. But hey, instead we had only a single dial that adjusts the temperature, so you always get maximum pressure. Not a problem for me, but, like, why? Look forward to the rest: Impractical or outdated infrastructure will come up a few more times throughout this post.

Since I began my studies in October, heating soon became a recurring topic. As it turns out, the buildings were poorly insulated, and at the same time college tried very hard to save on heating cost by turning off the heating in all student accommodations for most of the day. We were granted a total of 8h of heating per day: 3h in the morning, and 5h in the evening. Did I mention that the buildings are poorly insulated? During the winter days, I usually heated my room up to about 20°C during the morning hours, and roughly an hour after the heating turned off, we were already back to 16°C. The college sent us a warning at some point, that our flat is “too humid” and we should air more often for fear of mould. Did I mention that this was in peak winter? Perhaps the best part of this was the fact that my accommodation was still somewhat decently insulated, as one of the newer buildings. I had friends living in EPH, a student accommodation on the college main site, which had it much worse. That building was about a hundred years old if I remember correctly, and apparently people were freezing in there during winter. After weeks of complaints, college eventually relented and increased the heating hours to about 16 per day I believe, which is at least enough to get through the day. Some people in other colleges did have it worse though, I remember hearing about someone having a blackout that lasted almost a day. The last time I experienced a blackout was when I was 6 or something, this seems kinda wild to me.

All student accommodations had scouts which is apparently the Oxford-specific term for a cleaning lady. I am slightly conflicted about this: on the one hand, it seems a bit strange to be a poor student living in overpriced accommodation that is lacking in several ways, but then have what feels like a rich person's luxury. I don't exactly dislike my weekly cleaning routine, and I believe it is good to force young people to take care of their own household. On the other hand, this is definitely appreciated as it lets us students focus more on our studies. Additionally, I think it takes a lot of friction out of our shared living situation: people not cleaning up after themselves when they use the bathroom or the kitchen can become a serious issue. But if you have someone cleaning the common areas every day (except on weekends) that makes it easier to live together harmoniously. In addition to cleaning the common areas, they cleaned our rooms once a week, took out the regular trash, and provided fresh bedlinen.

Surroundings and the City

While my accommodation was a bit far from the city centre, Summertown was a very nice spot: I had less than 3mins walk to the nearest supermarket, and even three of them to choose between, as well as a bunch of other places such as restaurants, a shop for tech stuff, a pharmacy, bakery etc. It was well equipped with most things you needed, and at the same time it wasn't nearly as crowded as the city centre. On a sidenote, self-checkouts seem to be very popular here, compared to Germany, which I liked a lot. When I returned, I realized that most supermarkets don't have any self-checkouts here, and if they do, they sometimes remain completely unused even when there's 12 people lining up at the only open cashier.

The only disadvantage of the location was the distance: about 2km to college and 3km to city centre. This is not massive, obviously, but it's still a daily commute you'll have to deal with somehow, and pretty far by Oxford standards. There were buslines nearby that took about 15mins to city centre, but few people wanted to pay for those every day. I have a friend who walked more than half an hour from the accommodation to college or their department every day. For myself, I got a used bicycle immediately on my second day in Oxford. This was only 70£ and, funnily, it was a better bike than the one I'd been using in Germany for the past 7 years. That is a low bar, to be fair, but still. The most notable difference was that it was incredibly fast. Riding to college took me only 7mins on average, and since this was so short, I could always pump hard. This was great, especially because it was my only real workout for most of the year.

What was not so great were the cars: on one of the two possible routes to city centre, there was no cycle path and cyclists had to ride on the road. It was a single lane in each directon, and I quickly learned to ride in the middle of the road at all times. If I didn't do that, there was ALWAYS, every single time, some homicidal asshole that decided because the opposite lane was currently busy, they'd have to pass me by at a distance of 20cm. Whenever I forgot to ride in the middle of the road and instead kept to the left side, I was always, without exception, punished by one of those idiots and arrived in college both angry and scared. Did I mention that Oxford helped me rediscover my hatred for cars? It took me about half a year to realize that it was not worth it to take that road, and so I instead used a parallel one that was slightly longer but came without the risk and the stress.

I can't comment much on the UK bus and train infrastructure: I used a bus within Oxford maybe five times in total, though it was nicely uncomplicated: it was a standard fare of about 1.50£ per ride, so you just slap your credit card on the scanner once when you boarded, and that was the entire ticketing process. I only used a train once in the UK, but I heard from friends a couple times that they're always late. In other words, I felt right at home. Finally, one thing that deserves praise were the airline busses: Oxford has a bus company that runs busses at least every 30mins between Oxford and the two closest London airports, Heathrow and Gatwick. This means the trip from Oxford to the closest airport could be as little as 1.5h at a cost of 40£ total if you bought a return ticket. This was significantly faster and cheaper than if you'd go to London first and then to one of the airports: the trip to London was already 1h by train or longer by bus, and then perhaps another hour to get from the city to an airport. That second part could easily cost you as much as the trip to London did in the first place. Did I mention that flight subsidies are insane? There are flights between Hamburg and London for as little as 30€. This is barely more than the bus ride between Oxford and the airport!

To talk a bit more about the city in general, one thing becomes apparent rather quickly: buildings in Oxford are old. The people there are quite fond of their old buildings, and I understand that to some extent. They do have a certain charm, reminiscent of medieval castles or similar with their dark, imposing stone walls. But this comes with a bunch of problems: I've mentioned insulation before, and that's only one of the issues of old buildings. They tended to be cold, poorly equipped in terms of sockets and faucets etc. or otherwise inconvenient. To me personally, they've lost most of their charm since I know how they represent the lacking state of infrastructure and housing in the UK. I've experienced first hand, and sometimes heard from friends, how these are not nice places to live in. At the same time, many of these old buildings close to where I lived were being sold for more than a million pounds. Prices in the UK, and Oxford especially, are insane.

Looks nice from the outside, but would you want to live in there?

Apart from that though, I really liked Oxford as a city. With a population of about 150k, it is a bit smaller than Aachen (~250k), feels more compact and significantly more lively. There is always something interesting going on in Oxford, usually all sorts of events from the university, departments, different colleges and societies etc. Oxford is a hotspot of activity and that was amazing. Its density means that you can quite easily reach most places by walking. In fact, you wouldn't be much faster with a car or bus, since a big portion of the city centre's core is a pure pedestrian zone, making it difficult to navigate with anything else. It's a nice and convenient place to explore.

It it a very diverse and international city: you'll find restaurants and stores of all sorts of nationalities here. I remember passing 3 Chinese supermarkets on a 50m stretch of road at some point, and there's the market right next to the central bus station, which has a mixture of British, Korean, Indian, Chinese, Japanese, Jamaican, Brazilian etc. food, which is open 4 days a week. There is a Japanese restaurant which I've frequented with my Japanese-studying friends, that had authentic Japanese food (almost impossible to find in Hamburg) and a cheaper price than most of the British restaurants even. Moreover, the staff was almost entirely Japanese, so we ordered and sometimes chatted with them in Japanese - this was great. There are great Chinese restaurants as well.

The uni has its buildings spread throughout city centre and around it. There is a college or a department around every corner, though somewhat remarkably, there are almost no “shared” buildings in the city: if you are in X college and study Y, then you will rarely ever enter buildings that don't belong to either X college or department of Y. Some of the libraries are perhaps the only exceptions here. I'm a CS student though, so I only visited the big old libraries like the Taylorean or the Radcliffe Camera on my very last day - I didn't want to accidentally touch a book and burn myself after all.

I don't have much practical use for this place, but I love the atmosphere

Many colleges are open to visitors to come by and see. Most of them are quite charming from the inside, and there are significant differences between them. St. John's for example owns like half of Oxford, or so it feels. In fact, even the grounds of my college initally belonged to them, and St. Anne's hasn't owned the land its buildings are standing on until somewhat recently. Magdalen is pretty big and they have a large lawn where deer live within the college grounds. Christchurch is one of the most well-known colleges, and is usually closed to visitors. You'd have to pay like 20£ to go in there.

In case that didn't make it obvious yet, Oxford is quite touristic. I wasn't expecting this at all to be honest. While the city is certainly nice and has a couple pretty colleges and old buildings to look at, that doesn't seem very special to me. Yet the city centre is sort of overrun with tourists for most of the year. Especially in summer you go through periods of hearing mostly Indian, then French, then Japanese and then Chinese from the tourist groups of gradually shifting nationalities. The Ashmolean library is open to both students and tourists, but at a hefty price for the latter.

During my time in Oxford, I visited 13 out of 38 colleges if I counted correctly. Various societies have their activities spread out across different colleges and some events are open to everyone, I visited friends to cook or eat together in their college, or went “as a tourist” to look at other colleges. That said, many of them are still quite similar, and I don't think you gain much out of visiting every single college.

In fact, when a friend from Germany visited me in Oxford for a few days, we finished the “sightseeing” part in about 6h on a single day. Of course that depends on your preferences and there is certainly more to see in theory, but as a visitor, it's probably enough to walk through 2 or 3 colleges and city centre for a bit, because there's not much new stuff beyond that. You're not seeing the famous libraries from the inside, because they're either completely closed to visitors, or come with a 20£ entrance fee.

On a sidenote, every single college has a main gate guarded by their porters 24/7. They're essentially guards keeping out unwelcome visitors. This has always felt a bit strange to me, because it makes colleges feel like walled gardens, though I guess this is quite fitting.

UK Vibes and other Notes

Most communication among students in Oxford happens through WhatsApp, and a sizable portion of it through Facebook. Almost all my friends are on Instagram, effectively turning this app I used once every couple months to brag about my mediocre bouldering skills into something I check every couple days to see what my friends are up to. As a privacy-conscious software person, I shouldn't be using Instagram at all, but here we are. I'd finally uninstalled WhatsApp a month or two before coming to Oxford, after spending years trying to get my friends and family onto Signal or other platforms. And only days after getting there, I installed it again, since I would have been excluded from a lot of the social stuff going on. There are events and societies organized completely through Facebook, but fortunately there wasn't anything important on there. I usually didn't bother in those cases. I sometimes find it hard to believe that people still use Facebook, because it has been so obviously absent among people in my social circle for most of my life. The Americans mentioned getting WhatsApp specifically for Oxford, because they don't use that at home. I was rather surprised to learn that they mostly use the Apple messenger, implying that they all use iPhones over there. I had no idea this was the case, and it's genuinely horrifying to me.

There's one thing I never quite got over during my time in Oxford: my fight-or-flight reflex kicking in when random staff shoots a “how are you” my way. This is mostly cultural difference: “how are you” can be a greeting in the UK, requiring either a stock “I'm fine” answer, or no answer at all even. But I am German, and when one of us asks you “How are you?” they are prepared to hear your entire lifestory. Then again, that might just be me. When I ask someone how they are, I expect an honest answer, or at least want to give them a sincere opportunity to tell me about anything that's on their mind. I'm never going to ask this question to someone who I don't care about. Something about asking it and neither expecting nor being willing to listen to an honest answer seems depressing to me. This feels like it puts pressure on the other person to smile and say “All good!” when they might already be having a horrible time. I've refused to ask this “casually” for all my life and at least the people around me are sort of similar. As a result I'm used to answering this question seriously myself, so whenever I get asked this question by staff, it's like I have to forcefully interrupt my regular train of thought before I accidentally answer the question seriously. While I'm all for taking it seriously, I'm not going to bother a random cashier with my worries.

To give you my bottom line for the UK experience: I'm not impressed. Everything feels too expensive, cost of living is super high for no good reason, infrastructure is in a bad state and most buildings are not great places to live in. It feels in many ways like a toned-down version of the US (from what little I know about the US) and, from my personal experience, a straight downgrade from Germany in most regards. This was echoed by many of my friends and acquaintances there: only a handful were planning to stay in the UK, mostly because going from student to work visa was relatively easy, and they were already speaking the language. Most said that they would prefer going somewhere else after they finish, and several people mentioned that they found the UK a pretty sad place. I at least liked the city itself, as an incredibly diverse hotspot of social acitivites.

Food, FOOD and food

I want to talk about food some more, since there are interesting comparisons to be made.

Overall, food in the UK is not very good. As someone who barely uses the internet (heh) even I've heard of this before coming to the UK, but it is still interesting to see in what way UK food is bad. But for context, let me first tell you a little about my eating habits during my stay. I usually had one meal consisting of overnight oats with apple and banana, which I made myself several times a week. Then there was the college dining hall, which I ate in once almost every day, sometimes twice. I sometimes bought sandwiches from a supermarkt, or ate a simple slice of bread with cheese. I didn't eat out during my first term, but later I started going to the market in city centre or to a Japanese restaurant with my Japanese study friends once a week, sometimes cooked with friends or went out for food with other friends, got food at college events or similar.

The main way in which food in the UK tends to suck, is the lack of spices. This is especially true for dining hall food, which often seemed to lack even the tiniest pinch of salt. This was strange, because the food often sounded good on the menu, and frequently even looked good in reality, but it tended to taste like nothing. The dining hall experience could be significantly improved by adding just a tiny bit of salt. I don't understand why this was the case, because they provided us with salt dispensers etc. for free on the tables. But many foods don't taste as good if you only add it at the end.

One strange occurrence greatly exemplified this: there were lunch and dinner menus in the dining hall that changed on a weekly basis, as well as a breakfast “buffet” that was pretty much the same every day. One of the options there was scrambled egg, and I love scrambled egg, so on my plate it went every time I came there for breakfast. It was probably the worst scrambled egg I'd had in my life, because… well, unsalted scrambled egg is really just a mass of nothingness. It was so bad, I found myself wondering how they made eggs have this little taste, like, I'm pretty sure even just an egg with nothing else should have more taste than this… But on one unusual 29th February morning, they blessed us with decently salted scrambled eggs. You can't imagine my delight when I tasted those eggs. I had no expectations in that moment, and it's been months since I'd had decent eggs. It was so good I immediately messaged my friends to tell them about it. One of them came by and was able to share in the joy with me. But this must have been some sort of accident, because it never happened again afterwards. Hah…

Two examples of lunch in the college dining hall.

The dining hall food was expensive by the way. For 2.90£ you got the main dish, for which you could choose between a meaty/fishy, vegetarian and vegan option (which was nice) though that dish alone was only very little. Think, a single thin, hand-sized schnitzel or similar. You could usually choose between 3 sides, each of which would cost 0.80£ extra. What one should consider a full meal would be a main dish with two sides, so 4.50£, or about 5.80€. Compare that to my undergrad where I paid between 2.10€ (vegetarian) and 2.50€ (meat option) for a full meal. Those meals usually filled you up and you could get a free refill of the sides even! This couldn't be said about the meals in Oxford for the most part. There was one exception though: fish and chips Friday.

Every Friday was fish & chips Friday, and the fish was massive. On those days I usually picked only one side, and was still full afterwards. That was nice, but at the same time… this was fried fish in oily batter. It was probably the most unhealthy dish on the menu. Most of my friends and me as well, got tired of this meal after first term and never touched the fish option again on Fridays, which is a shame. I still remember a friend telling me how he'd smelled the fried fish from the opposite side of the college's back entrance, which itself was located on the opposite side of the college as the dining hall. TL;DR it was a bit much.

The one thing the British (or at least the dining hall) seem to do quite well, is desserts. We frequently got desserts for like 1.50£ that tasted great and looked quite nice. Here's a couple examples:

One last story about the dining hall, because I found it particularly funny: on a certain day in second term, I saw that there was “Curry Wurst” on the dining hall menu. Not “Curry sausage”, but “Wurst”, the German word for sausage, suggesting that we are indeed getting something resembling the German Currywurst. I wasn't particularly excited about that, since it's more of a fastfood and not exactly one of my favorite dishes anyway, so I was going to get the vegetarian option most likely. I lined up in the queue, and was immediately approached by this German girl whom I'd talked to perhaps 3 times before. She gave me a 5 minute rant in German how she'd seen the “Curry Wurst” at the front of the queue, and found it a blasphemy that had shooketh her to her culinary core. I honestly didn't think much of this, since I didn't have any expectations and wasn't going to eat it anyway. Then I reached the front of the queue and got to see their “Curry Wurst”. They gave out sets of three Nürnberger mini-sausages topped with what looks like an Indian style yellow curry sauce… WHAT THE ACTUAL F-

Next, let me tell you about sandwiches. In Germany, we barely eat “those” kinds of sandwiches, we usually have proper baked bread stuffed with all sorts of fillings, such as cheese, ham, fish, vegetables, etc. sold at bakeries at any street corner in the country. The equivalent in the UK, are sandwiches, i.e. two slices of “toast bread” enclosing their filling. These are not all that bad, but, as a German, I do miss “proper” bread. I honestly don't know all that much about bread, so I can't be more specific, but toast bread feels a bit sad to me. In any case, they liked to prented their bread is a bit healthier by using “malted” bread which, as far as I can tell, makes the bread slightly darker so it looks closer to grey bread, and nothing else. On a side note, I saw something literally titled “German Rye Bread” in a supermarket, and that made me very happy. The only good bread I encountered during my time there.

In any case, on to the fillings: there was a wide variety, such as tuna & mayonaise, tomato & salad, curry chicken, ham, salmon & cream cheese, bacon & egg etc. But again, the lack of taste struck pretty hard here at times. Think of tuna and mayonaise, this is one of the cheapest flavors around at a price of perhaps 2£. It was profoundly sad, as you once again realize that the British can even make TUNA and MAYONAISE, the two strongest tasting foods from my list above, taste like nothing. That is not to say there weren't decent sandwiches: the famous BLT (bacon, lettuce, tomato) for example tastes surprisingly good. But often times, it is impossible to tell from the ingredients or looks of a sandwich whether it'll be any good. Besides, sandwiches are a bit expensive… like anything in the UK, but still. They start at 2£ and go up to like 5£. The latter is what I pay in Germany for a big bread from the bakery that is generously stuffed and has a lot of taste. That's not always the case in the UK. Moreover, I checked for sandwiches in a German supermarket recently, and you get almost the same range of fillings as in the UK, except every single one of them costs only 2€, i.e. 1.70£.

The UK has a wide range of potato chips on offer, but for some reason it was almost impossible to find my good ol’ paprika chips. For context, those are the “default” flavor in Germany: if you think of potato chips, you most likely think of paprika chips. I assumed it would be the same everywhere, but that's apparently not the case. I tried a bunch of different flavors during my first months in the UK, but none of them did it for me. Then I learned by chance that the tiny convenience store right opposite of my college, of all places, had paprika flavored chips, so I went there frequently to get my fix. At some point I ordered a 1.5kg pack of them online. Life was good. Oh, but they're incredibly expensive… about 3£ for a 120g pack, compared to ~2.50€ for 150g in Germany. Wow…

The selection of stuff in supermarkets was mostly good and I found what I needed. I did bake a few times but I never found the “vanilla sugar” that my German recipes required… now that I think about it, that does sound like an oddly specific ingredient, so that was interesting to notice. What I did find was shortbread, which I'd always liked. I couldn't say that it tasted better in the UK than the one I'd bought in Germany, but it was significantly cheaper. You could get a 100g pack for a single pound, compared to 2 or 3€ for a pack in Germany. I also really liked Scotch Eggs, which are hard-boiled eggs wrapped in minced meat and breading. I found them way too late, but by the end of my stay I was eating several a week, and it is one of the few typical UK things I miss a little.

I will talk about this in more detail in the respective section, but one important part of college life is the “formal dinner”, or “formal” for short. Formals are fancier dining hall dinners with 3 courses, which have to be booked beforehand and are, of course, more expensive. Those formals were likely the only opportunity where I tasted decent British cooked food. Moreover, St. Anne's formals are pretty cheap, at 16 - 18£. That's one of the few times I genuinely couldn't complain about prices in the UK. They put quite a lot of effort into arranging the food nicely. Here's pictures from one of the formals I went to:

Salmon with asparagus / Chicken breast with mashed potato & chard / Rhubarb Panna Cotta

Finally, perhaps because the British are aware of their lack of food culture, there is an abundance of authentic foreign restaurants and other places to eat. I love Chinese food for example, but in Hamburg it is difficult to find an authentic Chinese place. Instead, there is an abundance of “Chinese” places, usually run by Vietnamese people, selling the typical sad, fatty fried noodle boxes. You barely see those in Oxford, and more importantly, there are at least two great, authentic Chinese restaurants in Oxford, a small town of only 150k residents. It doesn't stop there: there is the amazing Japanese restaurant Edamame I mentioned before, which offers a small list of classical Japanese dishes, such as Ramen, Tonkatsu, Karaage, Yakisoba, etc. It's already difficult finding any Japanese food in Germany at all - I'll have to take 45mins of train rides to get to the one good Ramen restaurant I know of, at the other end of the city. But here, it was perhaps 15mins of cycling from my accommodation, and their food was even among the cheaper options for eating out in Oxford: 12£ for a good Tonkatsu complete with sides? Hell yea!

There is a wide variety of international food offerings in Oxford, so I'm going to bring up a couple more to give you an impression: there is a Portuguese Nata place where they sell pasteis de nata, as well as donuts with the classical nata sweet egg filling, nata-flavored ice cream etc. There are several Nando's, an “Afro-Portuguese chicken chain” by their own description, which my brother liked so much he went there at least three times when he visited me. There are about 20 bubble tea (or rather, naicha/tapioka, as I would call them in Chinese/Japanese) places in Oxford, which I frequented with a certain group of friends. And then there's the market in city center which has classical Japanese food, amazing bibimbap, several Chinese stalls offering different local cuisines, Brazilian and Indian food, Korean-style hotdogs, and several more that I didn't get the chance to try, almost every day of the week. All in all, there were a lot of options for food in Oxford, though rarely cheap.

College and MCR Life

Alright, let's finally talk about college life in more detail. I mentioned before that it's a bit difficult to explain the concept of a college, because you only really get it through having lived there. The most important part for me, is that college tries to provide you with a sort of social core of people to hang out with, events to enjoy and connect with new people etc., and to a lesser extent, it is responsible for a lot of the administrative stuff and other tasks related to your student life.

I believe the dining hall I mentioned before is a good starting point: most departments (certainly not mine) don't have dining halls, so the best option for uni-subsidized food is the dining hall of your college. This effectively makes my “local dining hall community” much more constrained than those during my undergrad, which probably served a couple thousand students every day, of which I knew less than 1%. In college however, I almost never ate alone: there were always faces I recognized in the dining hall, and for most meals I sat down with friends and had a good chat over lunch, or sometimes, dinner. I would even go as far as saying that the dining hall was the most important component for my social life in Oxford. I'll talk about this in more detail in a later section, but to me, one of the most important parts of forging genuine, deep connections to people, is just talking to them a lot. The dining hall provided the perfect place for that. I would say my closest friends are likely the ones I met in the dining hall several times a week. Most of my meals there lasted an hour, and sometimes even 2 hours until we were kicked out of hall because they were closing, since I enjoyed chatting that much.

The next most important part is probably the MCR and all the events and activities associated with it. As mentioned before, the MCR is the group of postgraduate students at a specific college, to be distinguished from the JCR, which is the group of undergraduate (i.e. Bachelor's) students. The MCR can be seen as its own organization, as we have our own elected MCR committee with its own consitution, the MCR has its own common room (also called MCR btw) and we essentially organize our own brand of events that is targeted only at MCR members. Our MCR committee consists of several roles such as president, secretary and treasurer and receives a couple thousand pounds every academic year, that we can use to organize activities and events etc. We have social secretaries and welfare representatives who are sort of the “core event organizers”, as well as several minorities’ representatives, such as disabilities’ rep, women's rep etc. Social secs and welfare reps are essentially free to organize what they want (and so is anyone not in an elected capacity, to be fair) and in our case they managed a wide range of events.

Perhaps the most noticeable ones were the so-called bops, essentially big parties held in the MCR, and one time even in the college dining hall. Think loud music, dancing, lots of alcohol, sometimes with costumes etc. But we also had boardgame nights, movie nights, an UEFA viewing for Spain vs. England, an Alpaca petting event, pebble painting, yoga sessions, shut up and write sessions (get work done, while MCR provides you with snacks), karaoke nights, welfare tea, pub quizzes, Chinese new year's dumpling making, Palentine's, a bonfire/barbeque/live band event on a meadow outside the city, and probably many more that I couldn't remember just now. We had so many amazing and memorable events, some of them very creative, and all of them organized by fellow MCR members who put a lot of work into it to make them fun, memorable occasions.

It is worth mentioning that there was a relatively clear split between the kinds of events organized by social secs and by welfare reps. The former were typically the “big party” sorts of events, while the latter were directed more at smaller groups and quieter events. I love the fact that we had both of these facets represented well, though if you know me, you're likely not surprised that welfare events are more my style.

As described earlier, the MCR committee consists of elected officials, and while I didn't feel up for such a position when I was only there for a one year course, I was interested in committee work in general. I had been part of my student dorm's network group in undergrad: we maintained the entire ~400 people dormitory's wired and wireless network, expanding it by putting up new wireless access points etc. as well as managing several other appliances we provided to other dormitory groups. I also became one of the two dorm chairmen for about a year. In short, I'd done… not sure what to call it, but this sort of thing before, and I was still interested, so at the very least, I showed up to every one of the committee's monthly meetings. These were open to all MCR members, but there weren't any non-committee members who showed up consistently except for me. This way, I still ended up engaging with the college's political life, which I found interesting, and helped out with the preparations for some of our events, as well as hosting two karaoke events during my time there. At some point towards the end of the yaer, the president proposed to make me an official member, essentially giving me one of the unfilled positions so I could get committee member benefits, but I didn't have to take on any responsibilities.

At this point I want to say something about the committee's vibes, and I believe they reflect the overall St. Anne's MCR vibe really well: people were incredibly nice. All of the committee members genuinely cared about the committee work they did and their fellow students, they tried hard to organize fun events that were inclusive and accessible to anyone, including people who were more shy or not the type for big parties. I've had a good life so far and can't complain about my social circles, but I've never been in an environment before that felt so genuinely caring at all times. This is difficult to convey in words, so I'll give one example that I believe illustrated this well: we had a meeting once where we had a rather uncomfortable discussion about a political topic, brought up by several non-committee members who showed up as a group to one of the monthly meetings. I had an appointment, so I had to leave the meeting early after about an hour, in the middle of the discussion. Shortly after, I got a message from one of our welfare reps, asking me if I was alright, and that they'd be there to talk if I needed to. And perhaps the most notable thing about this interaction was not just how they reached out, but how natural it felt. I can imagine something like this happening in a different context as well, but I think in most environments it would still feel just a bit strange. But that was not the case here, it was heartwarming and very in-character.

There were 18 committee members in total, and over time, I got the opportunity to have a chat with almost every single one of them, and would call about half of them my friends - that made committee work more fun to engage with, because most of the time it felt like helping out a friend. Similarly, I knew I'd see some of my friends at almost every event I went to. I met a lot more wonderful people in our MCR (that were not part of the committee) and I really loved our MCR community. It made me feel very welcome. Because I knew so many people here, it made college feel very alive to me. There were always people around that I knew and I constantly ran into friends around college, giving it a very homely atmosphere. This can also be said, to a lesser extent, about the city as a whole: I knew so many people here, that on almost every walk through the city centre, I met someone I knew.

An important part of my college life was the MCR (the room) and the study room. They were located in EPH, one of the postgrad accommodations, but open to every member of the MCR. The MCR itself was a large room, perhaps 50m², containing several couches, a big smart TV, a massive bluetooth speaker (like, >1m tall), two guitars, a big teddy bear, a table tennis plate, a shelf full of books and a box with boardgames, etc. In short, there was a lot on offer to engage with, and it was frequently used for MCR events, or just by me and my friends if we felt like doing a movie night or similar. I came by often during the first two terms for a break between lectures, especially in second term where I practiced guitar there almost every day. It was a great hangout room, which is especially important in Oxford where almost no one invites people over to their apartment since we're all in tiny student accommodation or in a flat share.

The study room was similarly nice. It wasn't super well equipped, but it had a comfy atmosphere, seating for about 10 people and was mostly quiet. It was a great place to do my homework and related work, especially when I had breaks between lectures. Between first and second term I shifted from doing most of my work at home to doing most of it in the study room. On most days, I spent only about 12h at home, and the remaining 12h in the department or in college. Thus, I became one of the study room regulars. It is comforting, in a way, to know you'll find familiar faces whenever you go there. And while it was, of course, a place to study and be quiet, when it was only you and one or two friends in there, that often made for memorable conversations about anything and everything as a welcome distraction from studying. It is another part of the college that feels like home, because I spent so many hours in there, and I had a very strong connection to most of the other people who did the same. Among these are at least two people who I've barely ever seen outside the study room, but we just know each other due to spending possibly hundreds of hours together this way. I still remember one of them messaging me that I forgot my bicycle helmet in there. They weren't there when I left, so I guess they must have recognized it as mine from seeing it so often. We also had a decently equipped kitchen in the building, which is quite convenient, and we used it for cooking and events several times.

There was one event in particular which I'd like to mention: Palentine's, which comes from “Pal” and “Valentine's”. The idea was that you could write a message (anonymous or not) to anyone in college, and committee members would prepare them together with a bag of sweets and deliver them to that person's pidge (essentially a small mailbox) on Valentine's. This could be romantic of course, but absolutely didn't have to be, thus the “Pal” part. To be honest, I'm probably not the type of person who would usually participate in such an event, but this time I had a lot of people I appreciated in different ways whom I wanted to express this towards, so when this was announced I was immediately hyped and wrote a ton of them. It was one of those events where I helped out in the committee, in this case to prepare the bags of sweets etc., so I know that about 70 of those were written in total. I think it was a wonderful event idea, and I know it made some people, including me, very happy. I had the messages I received pinned to a board in my room until the day I left Oxford.

JCR vs. MCR

I found it quite interesting to observe how clearly JCR and MCR are distinguished and separated within college. For one thing, as mentioned before, they have completely separate committees and separate rooms. As in, JCR members are not allowed to enter the MCR (room) usually, and the other way around. They organize their own, usually separate, events although collaborations exist of course. This clearly separates most of our social spaces, except for the dining hall. And while St. Anne's is an incredibly social space, you rarely sit down and start a chat with a random group of strangers in the dining hall.

The undergrads had almost completely separate accommodation as well. While MCR members had two small (~13 rooms each) accommodations on the main site as well as RSH in Summertown (~80 rooms) where I lived, the undergrads had at least four big buildings within college grounds, perhaps 100m from the dining hall. Moreover, their rooms were significantly nicer than ours. This was aptly illustrated by the fact that the fourth undergrad accommodation was currently being modernized, so college decided that half the flats at RSH would be allocated to undergrads instead. I later talked to an undergrad and thus found out that RSH, which is by far the most modern accommodation offered to MCR members by college, was easily the last choice for the undergrads, since their accommodations were so much better. At some point during my first weeks, where I didn't yet know that these buildings were undergrad accommodations, I happened to come across two girls who were trying to lift large cardboard boxes out of a wheelbarrow in front of one of these accommodations. I assumed they were moving around materials for one of the college's societies or something, and they were obviously struggling, so I offered them my help which they gladly accepted. I then carried several of these boxes into a room on the 3rd floor of said building, and thus learned that this was undergrad accommodation, and that I was helping one of the girls move in. The most interesting takeaway here was that the room was super nice, roughly what you'd expect from a two-star hotel.

Moreover, they told me that they had to move out in the summer of every year, put all their stuff into storage somewhere, and then move into a new room at the start of the next academic year. And apparently the four buildings were designated for up to four-year undergrad courses, where they got “the next nicer building” with every year they spent there. This is a bit of a strange concept to me. Moreover, apparently college forces out all their students through the summer break, which lasts 3.5 months in Oxford, so they can rent out their student accommodation to conference visitors etc. and make big cash.

Finally, undergrads have a surprisingly different vibe, and you could usually tell within seconds when you were talking to an undergrad, or often even just by looking at them. I've been told that you can distinguish between JCR and MCR parties by the presence of an ambulance. Undergrads would always go overboard, especially with the drinking aspect, or so I've been told. Many people seem to think that the clear JCR/MCR separation is for the better, and I'm somewhat inclined to agree.

This does raise an interesting question though: why are undergrads treated so differently? Many people I've talked to mentioned that most postgraduate students are 1-year master's students, followed by 2-year master's students and then PhDs, compared to undergrads who are staying on for 3 years and sometimes even 4 years. They argue that undergrads are treated favorably since they pay tuition fees about twice as high as the average MCR member. But I don't think this argument holds: PhD students, who usually stay on for 4 years, comparable to undergrads, are not treated any differently than other MCR members. Moreover, international students pay more than twice as much in tuition fees. For my course, at the time of writing it is 17,900£ for UK residents compared to 41,250£ for international students. For the undergraduate computer science course, the disparity is even worse at 9,250£ vs. 59,260£ per year. The reason this matters is, that, according to the university's Student Statistics, about 23% of undergrads are internationals, compared to 67% of postgrads. In other words, I can't help but feel like they care more about UK students, in addition to significantly milking their international students for insane amounts of money. I didn't know the tuition fee disparity was this horrible until I looked it up just now to make my point.

St. Anne's Vibes

Next, let me give you some background on St. Anne's: it is one of the former women's colleges and one of the youngest colleges in Oxford, having become an official college only in 1952. It is the fifth biggest college by number of students, standing at 860. As I mentioned before, I didn't know what to expect from colleges, as a concept, so I didn't put down any preferences. I now believe I got very lucky with St. Anne's. I've already mentioned how comfortable I felt there and how many wonderful people I met, but that tiny bit of history I brought up also has one important implication: St. Anne's is far from conservative.

As someone who's not from around there, I (and many others) had this vague fear that Oxford would be full of entitled, arrogant, right-wing rich-kids. This fear is… probably… not unfounded: from the stories I've heard during my stay these people absolutely do exist. There's a reason the Oxford Student Union invited Ben Shapiro to talk about climate change, or that you hear about Christchurch students going to other colleges, intentionally breaking things and then dropping a thousand bucks on the spot to pay for the damages. I don't even know if this story is true, but the fact that everyone believes it could be true is telling enough. But fortunately, at St. Anne's you don't see any of that. In fact, we are both known as one of the poorest colleges (bottom 5 colleges, statistically speaking) and as “the friendly college”. I'll have to say, I never had any downright negative experiences with other colleges, but the “non-conservatism” of St. Anne's extends beyond vibes.

For one thing, ours is one of the few colleges without a chapel. Can you imagine? Not that I have anything against churches, but the idea of having one on our college grounds still seems strange to me. Probably for historical reasons, we have one of the highest female-to-male ratios at our college, and our MCR committee in particular was like 70% women I believe. Perhaps the most noticeable difference though, was that we rarely had to wear subfusc. Subfusc is a dress code encompassing something like a regular suit, plus the gown. The gown is sort of like a robe, very traditional Oxford clothing that is only sold by three stores in Oxford. Subfusc has to be worn for matriculation and graduation, but at most colleges, also for formals.

At St. Anne's, you fortunately don't have to wear subfusc for formals, and not even a suit technically. The dress code was “smart”, essentially meaning “just wear something nice”. If you know me, you'll know I don't feel all that comfortable wearing fancy clothes, so I was quite relieved. St. Anne's was, seemingly, less attached to formals than many other colleges. We had four formals per term, i.e. one every two weeks, compared to other colleges which usually had one per week or even more, from what I've heard. They were up to twice as expensive as ours, without a noticeable change in food quality.

Mostly due to dress code, formals are the kind of event that doesn't quite fit my taste, but it was a good opportunity to get a decent meal at a good price. I frequently coordinated with my friends to ensure that we sit together, often turning it into a very social evening. Since you could see a list of all the names and their respective seats for those who'd already booked when you were visiting the booking page, this served as a great opportunity to catch up with people I hadn't seen for a while by choosing a seat next to them, or the other way around, for others to seek me out. All in all, formals contributed nicely to the social environment in college. They are also one of those things that feel “typically Oxford”, carrying a sort of special vibe.

This is even more so the case at other colleges. I had the chance to experience this, since I made a sort of exchange with a group of friends: each of us invited the other 3 for a formal at their own college. It was, again, a great opportunity to socialize, to check out the food and soak in the vibes of different colleges. Their dining halls were typically much older than ours, and thus had a certain atmosphere to them. At one of these exchange formals, their college choir even did a (short) performance for us. One of my friends took it on himself to give us a tour around his college while telling us about their history. This was a great way to explore a different college and I'm thankful for the opportunity.

As another typical Oxford thing that I didn't know where to put in this article, there's the “Fresher's flu”, which is a chain of colds going around at the start of every academic year in Oxford: as new and old students come to Oxford from all over the world, they bring with them viruses from their home countries. Due to the sheer variety as well as heavy socializing and many events at the start of the term, several colds spread throughout the entire student population of Oxford at the start of every year. My personal experience with this was that I essentially “had a cold” for the entire first term. In reality, it was at least 3 colds that passed the baton during the first 8-week term. Almost everyone goes through this experience, and it contributes to making your first term at Oxford a bit more miserable.

It's worth talking about matriculation and graduation quickly. Both are massive ceremonies hosted by the university, in the Sheldonian Theatre. It is an old building of over 300 years, and has a certain charm. They really like their ceremonies in Oxford, so you'll need to go through matriculation there under a strict dress code, listen to the vice chancellor and some latin phrases while an old man waves a big golden scepter around etc. We had to be very careful to follow the dress code, and I had one friend who was sent away at the entrance because their shoes were dark blue, instead of black. They graduated a few weeks later with like five other people if I remember correctly. While my own graduation is still about 2 weeks away as I'm typing these lines, I've seen the ceremony already when I accompanied a friend at theirs. Again, it is a very Oxford thing, but it drags on for quite a while and is a bit boring if you ask me.

Getting Milked

I mentioned earlier that it often felt like college is milking us for money. Here go a few more examples of this:

College organized a photographer for our matriculation day. They took a photo of the entire group (about 300 students) and let us take personal photos, one person at a time. If you wanted even just the group photo, you had to buy it. The cheapest printout started at 27£, with the largest framed option being over 200£. But the worst thing is, there was no digital version. I only wanted a digital version to share with my family. Now I don't even have any photo at all, because I didn't want to pay that much for it.

Remember when I mentioned the rent and tuition fees and how they increased over last year's? I checked the tuition fees again, and it turns out they increased by a third for my course in the meantime - from 31,000£ to 41,000£! I've heard rumors that rent increased by another 15 or 20% as well. This is insane, I thought my year was unlucky but if this keeps going, I feel like people will stop studying there altogether. And for those that still do, college accommodation will be useless because it is both worse quality and significantly more expensive already at this point than private accommodation.

Did I mention that you can get a recording of your graduation ceremony… for cash of course! The idea of selling things for money that could usually be digitally reproduced at no cost whatsoever often baffles me, and this is one of those cases. The ceremony's recording costs 20£, which is not even that much (I was expecting worse when I found out) but still… why?

St. Anne's members received an email in early December, containing this:

There's so much wrong with this, I don't even know where to start. The pitch itself is super weird: who is looking for Christmas gifts, then gets this mail and goes “oh yea, sure, this makes for a great gift”?? Imagine gifting someone their name engraved into a paving stone at your college, just… what? And then the price for this, how does this come to 2,500£? And if I understand the part at the very bottom correctly, then only 500£ of this is the actual donation, while engraving the pavement stone costs 2,000£? What the hell are they doing?

To take a tiny step back, I'm not completely opposed to donating to my college. I liked the place a lot after all. But presenting this as a Christmas present misses the mark completely, then it seems extremely expensive, and it looks like a super inefficient way to donate, as it seems that most of your donation will be wasted on engraving a name into the stone in a somehow extremely expensive way. This feels like incredibly bad marketing in any case.

Oh, did I mention that if I wanted my transcript in a presentable way, as an official-looking document that I could, say, send to a recruiter, I would have to pay for it? It's only like 15£, but this is still just… offputting. Like, if they'd increased the tuition fees by 15£ instead and gave everyone access by default, this wouldn't even bother me. But this is strange and offputting, because it is an additional step of work for a large number of students, to get a document that you'd think you have an inherent right to receive, and then it's also entirely digital and automated, so why even charge for this in the first place? I don't get it.

What I Engaged With

I already talked at length about how much I liked my college and was active in the MCR committee work. I constantly chatted with friends in the dining hall and went to a lot of MCR events, though with a clear preference for those associated with welfare. I am reasonably sure I only missed like 2 or 3 welfare events in the entire year. One of my friends hosted a horror movie night in the MCR every few weeks, which was always fun and exposed me to a bunch of interesting movies outside of what I usually watch.

I hosted two karaoke parties during my time there: once in the MCR, and another one in the college bar. This was fun, but also had me a bit anxious. I'd done karaoke several times with friends at home in Germany, but usually I knew exactly who was coming and that everyone involved wanted to sing and had fun doing so. This wasn't the case here, where I didn't know if people would show up at all and if they were “brave enough” to sing in front of others - nothing is more awkward than a karaoke party where no one wants to sing. The first event had a bit of a rough start, but thanks to support from one of our social secs who organized the event with me and is a great mood maker, as well as several of my friends showing up to sing, the event was a success. For that event, I used a karaoke software called UltraStar Deluxe, that shows you whether you're actually hitting the notes, Singstar style.

The second event went even better. Per suggestion from one of our social secs, we did it in the college bar this time, and rather than using karaoke software, we had people singing over Youtube videos, using the mics to amplify the singers’ voices instead. This one had a good turnout, with up to 30 people I believe, and great vibes. We had a lot of fun up to the end, with several great performances, be it the boys who put on meme song after meme song or the girl who absolutely nailed a classic Spanish song, and many fun collective performances inbetween. One of my takeaways here was that most people don't care all that much about the setup or whether you use a proper karaoke software. As long as you can get them to sing, it's a success.

Choir

Beyond that, I joined a choir. I'd been in a choir for about 2 years from age 14 to 16, and I still have very fond memories of that. I was quite shy and awkward back then, but I'd always enjoyed singing and had a lot of fun there. During one of my internships away from home, only a year before I came to Oxford, a colleague suggested a local choir to me, which I'd enjoyed a lot, so I was looking for another choir as soon as I came to Oxford. Thankfully, they had a ton of choirs at the Fresher's fair, though it turned out that most of them were auditioning. Those were a no-go for me, since I'm not that good. Even the fun choirs I'd joined before were a bit difficult to me, since I had no musical training and couldn't sing a song from its music sheet. That significantly reduced the number of choices, essentially leaving me with the Oxford Singers and the Oxford City Singers, as well as a lot of confusion.

You see, the names were so similar that I kept mixing up these 2 choirs. At the start, I even thought they were the same choir. But the Oxford City Singers’ website listed a different location for their rehearsals than the Oxford Singers’ brochure, which I'd picked up at the fair, but they were both at the same time! Which made sense, because they were the same choir right? Hah. In any case, I picked the Oxford Singers’ rehearsal location effectively at random, showed up to the first rehearsal and… no one was there. Perhaps 5 minutes past the supposed start of the rehearsal, I got up to leave, and I would have gone to the other location (Oxford City Singers’ rehearsal) the next week, if the Oxford Singers’ choir president didn't show up that exact moment. They came by to check the room that evening and told me that rehearsals were only starting next week. This was an insane coincidence, but a very lucky one, as I spent a fun year at the choir.

While they were there at the Freshers’ fair to recruit new people, they were not only a student choir, but rather open to anyone. As a result, out of the 10 or so regular members, only 3 (including me) were students, though some of them were former students who stayed to work in Oxford. It was a very diverse group of fun people, and I liked all of them. We had a good song selection, including classic old British songs like O Danny Boy, songs from musicals such as Oliver and Chicago, as well as many more old and new pop songs, including Abba's Dancing Queen, Keane's Somewhere Only We Know and How Far I'll Go from Moana. I'm particularly proud of our performance of Lady Gaga's Bad Romance, which I believe we performed well, but it's also an absolute banger of an arrangement. I'd love to share it here, but unfortunately there's no public recording.

The choir became much more active, socially, as time went on. In first term, there wasn't all that much time to socialize, since we were singing throughout most of the 2h rehearsals every week. We started going to pubs sometimes after rehearsals, met up on weekends to watch the musicals whose songs we were singing, did a potluck once during summer break, and I was able to borrow our MCR to do karaoke with the choir there twice. It was a fun group, and they're one of those I'll miss from my time there.

Japanese Society

This is another society I signed up for at the Fresher's fair. My main way of engaging with it were the conversation classes they offered: three classes for beginner, intermediae and advanced Japanese learners meeting on Saturday mornings. I was a bit unsure about this at first, but ended up joining the advanced class which was a good fit for my skill level. Most people there were a bit better than me, in both speaking and listening ability, but that is exactly the perfect environment to improve. As the name implies, the focus here was on conversation, which was great since that was by far my weakest area. My fellow Japanese learners in that class were mostly people studying Japanese Studies, but there were also a few others. The numbers quickly thinned out until, towards the end of the term, it was only me, three other guys as well as a high school kid from the area.

The conversation class itself wasn't that exciting, but it was a good opportunity to get to speak a bit. Our teacher (a Japanese student) was a big fan of temples and shrines apparently, and we spent 4 or 5 weeks only talking about those. I certainly learned interesting things there, but man, I've had enough of temples and shrines for a while.

Perhaps the more interesting part of this were my fellow Japanese learners. They invited me to go out for lunch after class a couple times, but I declined almost every time during first term since I was too worried about my finances. All of this got better in second term, so we went out to eat together at the market in city centre a few times, and started frequenting Edamame, the Japanese restaurant I praised earlier, as well as several Tapioka stores together. Eventually, we started our own “Benkyoukai” (Japanese study session) on Mondays, which evolved into a lot more.

We usually cooked Japanese food, e.g. Tonkatsu, Karaage, Shougayaki and similar, and then watched a Japanese TV show (Terrace House) together. While the show was fun to watch on its own, we also stopped frequently to discuss words or terms and their usage, and we frequently chatted with each other in a mix of English and Japanese. All of this was a great environment to learn Japanese, especially the speaking and listening part that I wasn't so great at. It is difficult to judge how much better my Japanese got through this, or even during the entire year there in general, but at the very least I can say I spent a lot of time practicing in new ways and had a lot of fun.

We did our cooking at one of the guy's student accommodation in St. John's, because it is quite central for all of us and the kitchen was pretty nice. They also had a music room there, complete with mics etc. and my friend living at St. John's just so happened to be in a band and own some equipment such as a mixer. Before too long, karaoke parties in the St. John's music room had become a regular part of our activities. This was a lot of fun, and I discovered a lot of great music this way. We were all into Japanese music, and thus ended up singing almost exclusively Japanese songs. This was a cool opportunity for me to sing all those songs I'd always wanted to sing, but rarely could because my friends weren't that into Japanese music (if at all). This was the point where my knowledge of Japanese music finally escaped the “You just watch anime right?"-level.

The guy who's in a band frequently encouraged me to learn difficult songs with him, and while I wasn't able to do nearly all of them due to time constraints, I did fully learn and memorize LOSER by Kenshi Yonezu and nqrse's rap in Taiyoukei Desuko. Both took a lot of work to learn, but the result is worth it. It is incredibly satisfying to be able to sing those cleanly, and singing them together with him was especially fun. At some point, he gave a concert with his band that I went to, and it was so fun to see him perform several Japanese songs I knew. He also made me realize that I'm not nearly as good at singing as I thought I was. Hearing someone absolutely nail the “gyakkouuuuuu” from the end of the chorus of Ado's Backlight was beyond cathartic.

At some point during my studies, Japanese singer Ado did her first world tour, and 3 of us 4 decided to go to her concert in London together. This was my first time going to a concert, and I was a bit worried about this since I'm very noise sensitive. I even ordered concert-earplugs before this to be safe. Surprisingly, the noise wasn't much of a problem, but the experience was still mixed for me. We lined up about 6h before the concert, to ensure we got a front-row place once the gates opened. The others lined up even earlier, but allowed me to join late since I had a job interview that morning. In any case, my experience that day consisted mostly of sitting on the pavement in front of the entrance for many hours. Once the concert began, it quickly got very hot in there and I found myself very thirsty within the first 20mins, but we weren't allowed to bring drinks in there. You cannot imagine the relief when I finally got some water after the concert ended 3h later. The concert itself wasn't bad by any means, but I found it difficult to make out her voice over the instrumentals, and overall felt like I got a better experience listening to her music via headphones when I was alone in my room. That said, I was super pumped when the intro to Ashura-chan started playing, and hearing the entire audience go “Ussee, Ussee, Usseewa” together during the chorus of Usseewa had this amazing feeling of energy that is impossible to explain.

The Japanese society had a bunch of events going on throughout each term, though I didn't go to that many of them. The welcome drinks at the start of every term were a fun opportunity to meet people, though they were the kind of event that I'm usually not that comfortable at. Still, I had a great time, especially at the last one, where the society had invited a group of Japanese exchange students who came to Oxford to study English, and they were super fun to chat with.

The society hosted a sushi making event which was a lot of fun, and also just delicious. I'm particularly happy about how well my rolls turned out. One of the other participants there even asked if she could take photos of mine to put on her Instagram. Other events included origami making, as well as a career event which I sort of accidentally stumbled into, despite the fact that it was meant for Japanese students. It was still good to see that I was able to follow the quick talk of that woman presenting for a Japanese recruitment agency. Finally, they organized a movie night where we watched Asakusa Kid - super interesting movie, and it was fun to find out afterwards that this was about the life of a real person, namely Takeshi from Takeshi's Castle of all things.

The best part of joining the Japanese society however, was the opportunity to meet three wonderful people there, who came to shape my experience in Oxford and whom I became great friends with. For now, we are keeping in touch by doing a video call every Sunday, but I am convinced I will meet them in Japan at some point.

Teaching German

I'd been visiting the Japanese society's conversation classes from the start to the very end of my year there. I was also signed up to the German society's newsletter, though I didn't engage with them beyond going to their start-of-term “Kaffee & Kuchen” (coffee & cake) event. I did see them mentioning that they offer language classes, and are still looking for more volunteer teachers though. I thought it would be nice to give something back after attending Japanese conversation classes at the time, so I messaged them at the start of my 2nd term, to ask whether I could help out. I didn't hear back at all until right before the start of 3rd term: turns out they didn't have anyone to manage the classes, so no one was even monitoring the mail address I'd messaged, until the new guy showed up. He'd been wanting to teach German classes since the start of the year apparently, and since there was no one to organize that, he eventually took over the job himself for the 3rd term. I find this quite impressive, especially since he was there for only a year as an exchange student.

In any case, there was another person who'd volunteered to be a teacher, so we each got to teach our own class alone, following the classic beginner-intermediate-advanced scheme. I got the intermediate class and was assigned perhaps 6 or 7 students. Now I'll have to say I don't have any experience at all teaching languages, though I do naturally have experience learning languages, especially from my Japanese studies. Our chief teacher had shared with me a bunch of materials provided by a German government project, designed to teach German to people of all levels. I looked at these but found them a bit too school-ish for my tastes. I'd seen the conversation classes at the Japanese society, which were mostly a simple get-together with a native speaker, to chat with each other in Japanese under the supervision of a native speaker who could help out with vocabulary, grammar and cultural questions. This was relatively low effort on the part of the teacher, but still made for a very flexible learning environment. It was all we needed honestly.

So, I didn't think too much of the materials I'd been sent, and would have preferred doing it JapSoc-style. That was less work to prepare materials for me of course, which would be preferable since I was busy with my thesis work and exams at that time. But I also believe the average uni student wouldn't appreciate more school-ish exercises. In any case, I prepared some materials just in case and decided to see how it goes for the first session.

The answer is: not that well. I had a positive first impression of my students, they all seemed to be nice people, including a very charming elderly lady who must have been over 70. Moreover, their German was quite impressive already, and I could have normal conversations with them, without paying too much attention to my choice of words. This was a good sign I thought, as this should make it easy to turn this into a conversation class like in the Japanese society. But the class was for them of course, so I asked them first about their preferences for the class and how or what they would like to study. While they gave me little to work with, they were at least clear about wanting to train their speaking ability especially, since they could do everything else on their own in their free time. Nice, I thought. Time to copy the JapSoc's formula.

Unfortunately, I had overestimated their ability to have normal conversations with each other. Any attempt by me to start a conversation quickly devolved into a rather drawn out question-answer game. I asked “So what do you guys study?”, and they took turns answering the question, same with my other attempts. They barely engaged with each other at all, effectively leaving me to manage the entire conversation. But if you know me, you'll know that this is far from my specialty. As a result, a decent part of the classes turned into me asking a question, followed by the students answering them sequentially. I tried to make it more personal by digging deeper, asking for more details whenever they gave me something to work with, but they tended to be quite reluctant to answer in more than a single sentence. This had me stumped, and very stressed out. I had a hard time listening to their answers because I was busy thinking of the next thing to ask them, in order to not let awkward silence encroach on the class. They were all quite reserved and appeared almost disinterested, despite them seeming like nice people, and essentially refused to talk to each other at all.

All the while, I knew I was delivering a bad teaching experience, but I didn't know how to do better. I'm bad at keeping a group conversation going, they told me what they wanted to do but didn't seem to want to engage with this, and worst of all, no one gave me any feedback. When I ran out of ideas to keep the conversation going, I pulled out the teaching materials I'd prepared. I filtered it down to the exercises that involved speaking, which wasn't much, but barely sufficed to carry me to the end of the class. Then I asked them for feedback. I made it very clear that I was here for them, to teach them German, and that I was happy to consider any wish they had, change the teaching format however they wanted etc. I got no reply at all. They told me it's fine this way.

This kept going with participant numbers slowly dwindling, until I taught a single person in weeks 6 - 8. After the first class, I made sure to prepare more teaching materials so I could at least make it through a single lesson without running out of stuff to do, and that made it a bit easier. But even so, every class was a stressful experience, I dreaded Saturdays a bit, tried to just get through it when the time arrived and was relieved when it was over.

Overall, this was a very unsatisfying experience. I felt like I didn't do a good job as a teacher, despite best intentions. At the same time, I'd learned nothing through this. I have no idea what I did wrong, and how to do better next time. In fact, I'm not even that sure my students were unhappy with this. I always made it clear I was open for and happy about any and all feedback, and no one ever complained about anything. The fact that less students showed up as time went on is only natural, especially as all of them approached exams. Still, this was confusing. One of my friends from the Japanese society suggested that our conversations classes only went so well, because we were all friends and naturally enjoyed chatting with each other. One of them was quite well connected within the society and thus knew most of the teachers decently well.

I also asked my fellow teachers how their classes feel like. The advanced class’ teacher mentioned that her students were super motivated, and begged her for homework. She put a lot of work into the class because of this, which I found quite impressive, but at the point where she mentioned “super motivated” it was clear that her experience probably couldn't apply to my class. The beginner class’ teacher was doing mostly very school-ish rote-teaching, since there wasn't much else you could do with beginners. I remain confused and disappointed by this experience to this day. I don't think I'll be teaching a German class again any time soon, or at least not alone without another person for emotional support. I still hope I managed to do something good for some of my students, but I honestly don't know.

Open Source Contributions

Something essentially unrelated that accompanied me through this year, we're a lot of open source contributions. The first time that I felt like I actually knew programming to the point I could do something useful with it, was in 8th grade when I programmed a simple commandline birthday calendar script in Python. One of the cool things about programming is that you can reasonably pursue this in your free time, in contrast to almost all other sciences. After this first meaningful project, I'd always felt like I wanted to do something genuinely useful, not just to me. The most obvious choice here was contributing to open source projects. How about making my favorite browser Firefox better, or add a feature I'm missing to the Signal messenger? But for a long, long time I failed to do so, because I didn't know how to start. All of this changed significantly during my time at Oxford.

I've already been contributing a bit to two of the tools commonly used in the UltraStar karaoke software ecosystem. But this intensified during my time in Oxford, I became a maintainer in both of these projects and started contributing regularly to the UltraStar Deluxe karaoke software itself, which I'd frequently used myself for karaoke parties with my friends. It's a very old project, and it felt like I could make a noticeable difference, even with simple bugfixes. Seeing that the software is now in a noticeably better state than before I came to Oxford, is great to see.

While somewhat less relevant to me directly, I started contributing to LLVM, the mother-project of the Clang compiler. This is well known in the software engineering sphere, to the point that I could genuinely brag with this. It's not like I'm doing something incredible, I'm not even working on the compiler but only on the Clang-Python bindings. That is nothing but a small side-project within LLVM, which is already 15 years old and has been neglected for most of its lifetime. I initially planned to contribute only type hints here, as I was dearly missing those when I was using the bindings for a task during my second internship. But the guy reviewing my patches encouraged me to look at other things as well, and so I've added my typehints, simplified the code, fixed several long-standing bugs, improved test coverage and much more, in about 20 pull requests to date. I got write access to the project, have become code owner for the bindings, and am now reviewing patches several times a month. I'm super happy about this.

But perhaps the most important thing here, is that I've become comfortable engaging with new projects, finding my own niche and contributing in whatever way I can. I've opened pull requests on MXE, MyPy, PyTorch, several parts of LLVM, KDE etc. in the past year. I feel like I'm finally on the path to becoming the engineer I want to be, and that's great.

Other Activities

A couple more things, that don't quite deserve their own heading, but still accompanied me for an extended amount of time during my stay.

I frequently cooked with friends, despite the setting (mostly small uni accommodations) being not exactly conducive to this. It was a lot of fun, and I managed to gather a lot of experience especially with Japanese dishes. I miss the food we made as it was mostly super good, and the lack of rice cookers in my vicinity in Germany saddens me. I'd like to present a picture here of one time we made Japanese-style Omurice. This was the most attractive omelette I've seen in my life:

The German society's Kaffee & Kuchen events made me think of Kalter Hund, a German cake consisting of layered biscuits alternating with a molten chocolate mass, and I got a real craving for it. So I made Kalter Hund for the first time in my life, and then happened to make it a couple more times, for several events in the MCR, our choir potluck and karaoke etc. It was described by most as either “too heavy” or “making me rediscover my animalistic instincts” with almost nothing inbetween. Other quotes included “Almost killed me, but it was worth it” and “Lock it away in your room […] I might not be able to help myself”. I see this as an absolute win. This was also one of the few recipes in my life I made so many times that I had the opportunity to change the ratios and optimize the recipe, so I felt like I got better and better at this the more I made it. Very satisfying.

Towards the end of my third term, I found out that some of my college friends were going bouldering frequently, so I joined them after that. I love bouldering but I didn't get to work out a lot during my stay in Oxford, so this was a welcome distraction. Our local climbing gym had a slackline which we frequently used, and I realized once more that my sense of balance is quite bad. Even balancing on one foot at the starting position is extremely challenging to me.

Our MCR has its own academic journal, completely run by MCR members and publishing mostly papers and other submissions by MCR members. I was roped into this by two friends and thus ended up becoming an editor for this year's edition. There isn't that much else to say here, we had a couple workshops on editing etc. and I reviewed two papers. Publication is coming up at the end of this year, though almost everything except editing is handled by our editor-in-chief whom I do not envy for their extremely busy position.

There are multiple arms of the Thames running through Oxford, and somehow “punting” has established itself as a typical Oxford thing. This is gondolas maneuvered with a long pole, think Venician canals. I did this only towards the end of my studies once summer reared its ugly head, twice in total. It was fun, but navigating like this is genuinely hard. It is almost impossible to move in a straight line and moving the 5m pole is slow and takes quite a bit of strength. Cool activtiy though, and members of college can do this for free every single day in summer. That's surprisingly generous by British standards.

I was planning a movie night with friends in our MCR at some point, when a friend of a friend came and proposed we go watch the norther lights instead. What?

Northern lights, roughly what they looked like in real life

Well, we did in fact get to see the northern lights on a warm summer night in Oxford. We ended up wandering into the center of Port Meadow, a big park west of Oxford. It took a while for them to become visible at all, and there wasn't that much to see with the naked eye, but it was still kinda cool. Somehow, people got way better pictures with their phone cameras than what you could see in real life, and they were going crazy over them in various group chats. It felt a bit fake to me though, and the lack of “realistic” pictures means that everyone who slept through this probably thinks the sky was deep purple that night.

Northern lights, what they looked like on their photos

While we were waiting for the lights to appear, we had this slightly creepy event where a weird scratching sound was very slowly approaching us over the course of several minutes. At some point we realized the dark hunks we could barely make out behind us were wild (?) horses, and we were hearing them feeding on the grass from the meadow as they were slowly approaching us.

Me in front of a horse, in case you couldn't tell.

I've always wanted to learn to do handstands, and a friend from college motivated me to practice this. Fortunately, I had enough space in my room, and started doing handstands multiple times a day, with my back against the wall. But somehow, even after months of doing this, I never got to the point that I can keep my balance after pushing myself away from the wall. I don't know what I'm doing wrong, but even after doing hundreds of handstands over the past 12 months, I still cannot do it. Also, doing handstands makes me sneeze for some reason. Huh.

Towards the end of my stay, I had a weekly timetable much fuller than ever in my life before, and similarly, I had never socialized as consistently much as I did during my time in Oxford. Monday evenings were for Japanese cooking & studying with my friends from the Japanese society. Tuesdays were there for playing Stardew Valley online with a friend from Hamburg, and later for bouldering. On Thursdays I went to the MCR's “Shut up and write” events in the study room in the mornings and to choir rehearsal in the evenings. Fridays frequently had movie nights hosted by my friend, or other events. On Saturday mornings, I had Japanese conversation class followed by lunch with my friends and German class after that. On Sundays, I always went for brunch with my friends in the college dining hall, and we would chat until hall closes. In the afternoon or evening, I would meet online with friends from home to talk about the anime we watched together weekly.

What I Learned

There are a lot of things I take away from my year in Oxford, and here I want to talk in more detail about some of them. This section will be mostly very personal and introspective.

On English

For one thing, I learned that I'm not as good at English as I thought. Perhaps this should have been obvious when I got barely enough points in TOEFL to be admitted to Oxford, but I certainly walk out of this with less confidence in my English ability. And that's not because my English got worse during my stay in Oxford (arrrr the British): rationally speaking it probably got better, but I was surrounded by people whose first language, for the most part, wasn't English, and who still spoke notably better than me. I have always been a bad speaker, even in German, meaning I had an even harder time in English. None of this was a serious problem of course, I'm still fluent and can communicate everything I need to. Yet, I still felt like I wasn't expressing myself well, clumsily even, that I often struggled to come up with a word I needed even though I technically knew it etc. It wasn't unusual for me to ask “what's the word for <description> again”?

I also realized just how bad my pronouciation is. I was frequently asked “Are you German?” within two sentences of talking to someone new. One could clearly tell that I had a German accent still, and that bothers me. I don't mind accents in general, but seeing how I was still so obviously imperfect at even these baisc parts of the language after using it for over 15 years, is a bit frustrating. Contrast this to a non-native speaker I met, who learns accents for fun, which I find quite impressive when I can't even turn off my own. My German friends joked before I went to Oxford that I might return, speaking of “bo'els of wa'er”, and I am, for better or worse, far from that.

On the less negative side, during my stay in Oxford, I sometimes had this random realization as I was biking to college in the morning, that I was entering into a day that would play out entirely in English. This is obvious, but sometimes I'm still amazed at the thought that I was living in a different country, speaking a non-native language, and was getting by like that just fine. Because the English level among students in Oxford is so high, one frequently runs into the question of whether to speak English or German with other German students. I ended up speaking German with most of them, but I also spent hours chatting with our MCR president when we were alone in the study room, and we never once exchanged a full sentence in German. In fact, when she dropped “Schwarzbrot” during a conversation about bread once, I got so confused by this foreign word that I didn't understand and asked her to repeat herself twice.

About halfway through my studies, I finally resolved to add an English/German vocabulary flashcard deck to my Anki collection. I should have done this earlier to be honest since I already missed a lot of learning opportunities that way, but it was still a good thing. I used this both ways, from English to German for words I encountered but didn't understand (e.g. squeamish, pernicious, recalcitrant) and from German to English, often for words I technically knew, but couldn't recall when I needed them (e.g. curls, ladle, nuclear fission). I should have put more effort into this, since after a few months the deck still sits at 50 cards, but it's something.

I learned a bunch of things about pronounciation and meanings of words that I got plain wrong before then. Place names are especially bad in the UK: Magdalen college is pronounced “Modd-lenn”, Bicester is pronounced “Biss-ter”, Reading is pronounced “Redding” etc. I learned, only a month before returning to Germany, that “pudding” means something entirely different in the UK. We use “pudding” as a loanword in German, which seems to be close to the American “pudding”, i.e. a creamy, custard-like dessert. In the UK, pudding can refer to… sort of everything it seems? Apparently it just means dessert, except when it does not, similarly to how “pie” is used for many savoury dishes there.

On German

An important takeaway for me was, that most people don't think negatively of Germany or the German language. I didn't think so either for most of my life, since I'd never seen much negative commentary about Germans on the internet, and I knew that the German passport was quite useful. But I fell in with a group of rather bad “friends” from other European countries some time before Oxford, and they took every chance to somehow make fun of the country and the language, and to tell me how no one likes Germans. While I stopped talking to them a few months before coming to Oxford, they had pretty much convinced me by that time. As such, I was positively surprised after getting there. I believe about a quarter of the people I met in my first week or so in Oxford could even speak German to a decent level, if not fluently.

One of my flatmates had lived in Germany for a while and was fluent. One of my friends in college was studying literature with a focus on German works, and another one was studying the economics and history of Germany. They'd asked me at some point to help them decipher a piece of old German handwriting from the 19th century I believe, but I was of no help, because they were better at it than me! I met the Japanese society's president at their first event, and chatted with her in German for a bit, since she had been studying the language for a while. Our MCR president was German, and one of the social secs on the committee could speak pretty fluent German. In the CS department, I often hung out with a group of Germans, and there were a Dutch and Ukrainian guy who often listened in on our German conversations, and apparently didn't have much trouble following along. And obviously, I was teaching German to a bunch of people in my classes. There's a very high chance on any given day in Oxford that you'll randomly hear spoken German from people passing you by. Germans are very present in Oxford, and there are a lot of people learning the language.

The latter part especially surprises me. The fact that people learn German seems strange to me, like, why would anyone do that? Maybe it's that, having grown up in Germany, I naturally knew almost only natives, so there's barely anyone in my vicinity who did learn the language. German doesn't strike me as a very interesting language, but that's difficult to judge as someone who had that skill his entire life. One of my friends even told me that they really like the sound of spoken German. I am far from nationalistic, but that still made me happy.

Socializing

I met a ton of people in Oxford. I tried to estimate how many people I met on my flight back to Germany during the first term break in December, and the best approach I came up with, was counting new contacts on my phone. I counted more than 70, and that was after only my first two months there. Of course not all of these were friends and I probably didn't talk again to most of these, but this is still far, far more than at any other time in my life before this.

I was in a somewhat comparable situation when I went to Aachen for my undergrad: a university city where, statistically speaking, every fourth person was a student and the majority had moved there to study. As a result, most people were very open as they tried to make new connections and find friends there. Oxford is the same, but turned up to 11. People didn't just move cities, but countries in this case. I didn't meet a single Oxford native, but instead incredibly interesting people from all over the world, who study all sorts of things and have all sorts of diverse backgrounds and hobbies. This made it incredibly easy to walk up to new people, introduce yourself and have an interesting conversation at events.

Moreover, I kept getting to know new people, or became friends with people I'd sort of known for months already, as time went on, which was especially surprising towards the end. My course was 11 months long, but most other courses are shorter than that. I had friends who finished studying and left the city two months before my course ended, and I went to a friend's graduation before I even handed in my thesis work. This meant that I had a much more lonely last month in Oxford. But with most of my good friends already gone, I ended up making almost completely new connections instead.

There's this guy from my program who I'd chatted with on Discord about our course selection, exams etc. a lot, but barely talked to in real life. Then one day in July I ran into him by chance in the city center, and we ended up meeting to cook together several times after that and also to do karaoke once. I had a friend in college who I ended up simply spending a lot more time with than before, cooking together at least once a week, watching a bunch of movies and documentaries together etc. There was someone I met at the Japanese society's conversation classes, but only 2 or 3 times since they didn't participate most of the time. I then randomly ran into them at my accommodation in my last month in Oxford. We'd lived in the same accommodation for the entire year without noticing! After that, we cooked together and did karaoke once. There's more stories like this. I still made new friends in my last month at Oxford, when I was expecting it to be sort of sad and lonely.

That said, it was still sad and lonely in other ways. Most students have either finished their courses already or left over the summer break because they get kicked out of their student accommodation. They were replaced by tourists, and the city felt like a completely different place now. I would say I have a sort of nostalgic attachment to Oxford, but that isn't so much bound to the place itself. What made it “Oxford” for me were the people I met there, and with most of them gone, it suddenly felt foreign. This wasn't the same place anymore.

As I said earlier, I've never socialized as much in my life as I did during my time at Oxford. That doesn't mean that I'm an unsocial person. I'm probably at my happiest when I hang out with people I really like, but I'm also completely fine being alone. In any case, this amount of socializing, and especially interacting with a large and diverse set of people and social groups, allowed me to make many interesting observations, with regards to how I interact with people.

There is a popular metaphor about introversion and extroversion that goes something like this: “Extroverted people recharge their batteries by socializing. Introverts discharge their battiers that way, and recharge through alone-time.” I've always found this interesting, but could never relate to it. I see myself as an introvert, but I don't always find being with people to be tiring, and with the right people it can be the most energizing thing I know. Out of curiosity, I asked many of my friends in Oxford whether they can relate to this metaphor. To my great surprise, almost every single one of them affirmed it. Going from hanging out with friends 10 to 15 times a week in Oxford, to maybe 2 or 3 times a week back at home, felt a bit strange to me, but it wasn't a problem at all.

I would say that, generally speaking, I have a lot of friends. I am still well in touch with more than 5 of those from my school days whom I've known for well over 10 years. Despite my undergrad time being wrecked by Covid, I am still friends with 10 or so people from Aachen, checking up on them every once in a while and visiting when I get the chance. And then I met a ton of cool people and made many new friends in Oxford. I need to spend a lot of time with someone to get the feeling that I know them well and feel very comfortable around them. If possible, I'd like to get to that level with every friend I make, but this makes every friendship a large time investment.

My brother has given me a lot of career and life advice over the past few years, and one of those was to find just 3 to 7 people to treasure as your best friends, because more than that would be unrealistic and unnecessary. My mother often told me that friendships are temporary, that often you fall out of touch with someone because life moves on, and not to be too sad about that. I've always disagreed with them on this. Being friends with someone means a lot, and I would like to keep someone whom I consider a friend, for as long as possible. The idea of losing friends, in the absence of a serious issue, or somehow deciding not to invest more time into someone, seemed sad and alien to me. But over the past year, I think I've come to understand what my mother and my brother meant by this.

Becoming close friends with someone requires a lot of time, and I think I already have a lot of friends. That number completely exploded in Oxford though, and quickly made me realize that there's a limit to how many friendships I can maintain. Well, that much should be obvious, so perhaps the more useful insight was that I can realistically reach this limit. It quickly became clear in Oxford that I met too many cool people to reasonably have a good friendship with and that's okay! My time there made me accept that I'll have to make conscious decisions about who I'm spending my time with, because otherwise my limited resources will make the decision for me. Similarly I've come to terms with the idea that some people will be only temporary friends, since we're not close enough to stay in touch. And that's okay too! It doesn't make the time we spent together any less meaningful.

As an example, there's this one person in my college who was in the same accommodation. We were never too close, but we met by chance at various events or sometimes in the dining hall and always had good chats. They were one of the few who stayed in Oxford almost as long as me, and as “fellow loners” we sort of kept each other company at the end, going out for a coffee or a walk together once a week. I saw them again at our graduation not too long ago and that was nice, but there is a decent chance that we'll never talk to each other again. I don't consider them a close friend, but I still like them and we had fun together. I have no regrets.

One part of this is the realization that a lot of friendships have some kind of “situationality” to them. I mentioned before how the dining hall was a social hotspot for me, but that's not just for fun: it enabled a lot of social interactions that would simply not have taken place otherwise. I met some of my closest friends in the dining hall on a weekly, if not daily, basis, but some of them I might not have seen at all if the dining hall didn't exist. On the flipside, there are people who I got along with really well in certain contexts, but as soon as that context disappeared, our relationship ended as well.

Similarly, there are people whom I like a lot, but the idea of spending, say, a long car ride alone with them is horrifying because I'm not confident I could keep up a conversation for more than half an hour without it getting very awkward. I used to think of this as the main thing I look for in a friend: the ability to chat with them for hours with no effort. The latter part is important, because sometimes I can keep up a long converation with someone, but it takes a lot of conscious effort to actively search for topics etc. Then there are others who I can chat with for 6 hours straight, and I barely notice because it goes so well and time flies by. But this is far from the only thing that matters, and I found that I have some great friends who this doesn't apply to, and instead I appreciate them for very different reasons.

I believe I generally have a pretty accurate model of the social environment I'm in, i.e. I know who's friends with whom, what role each person takes on in a given group, how they are perceived by others etc. The one strange thing about this, is the fact that I am not a part of my own models. I have no idea how other people see me beyond what they explicitly tell me. Furthermore, since I'm not a part of these models, the relationships of other people don't depend on me in my own models. In other words, in my imagination, these groups I'm a part of would have existed just the same if I wasn't there. As an extension, it feels like the way I act doesn't affect the people around me. Now all of this is, of course, factually wrong, but I usually don't notice unless the consequences are so obvious that they are clearly observable and attributable to me, or my friends explicitly tell me how they perceive me or the dynamics of a group I am part of.

As a basic example, I went bouldering on a weekly basis with friends in Hamburg. Months after I left for Oxford, I'd talked to them about this and was quite surprised to find out that they'd completely stopped going right after I'd left. Due to the absence of any other factors that could explain this, the only possible conclusion is that somehow I was the one motivating them to go bouldering all this time.

Similarly, it seems that I somehow have a very good reputation within our MCR and I have no idea why. That's judging from some things people have told me directly, as well as what little I garnered from how people act towards me. When I joined the MCR committee towards the end of the year, another committee member told me that I was “popular”. Several people have told me, independently from each other, that they see me as a “cheerful” or “very sweet person”. Now some of this I can attribute to the overall positive vibes in our MCR, but not all of it.

Someone from college asked me if I could help one of their friends, since they were struggling hard to find happy people in Oxford (lol) they needed for comparative purposes in a study they were conducting about depression. I participated in the study and was told afterwards that, based on how I answered the questions, I was indeed “one of the super happy people”.

Being described as “super happy” or “cheerful” was particularly interesting, because I don't think anyone at home would describe me that way. When I told my mother about this, she found that quite funny, and said “they must not know you too well”. I think this is incorrect, but I can't fault her for her conclusion. I am aware that I acted differently in Oxford, or at least within my college MCR, than I do, say, at home in Hamburg. But I never did so on purpose, this is something that happened on its own. If anything, I feel like I am simply reflecting the positive vibes of our MCR by acting in a way that is consistent with how I see our MCR members act. I didn't think I was particularly sensitive to the culture and atmosphere around me, not to the point that I could easily, let alone automatically, adapt to it, but I guess I was wrong.

I believe I have relatively little empathy. It's always been this way and I've been working on this for almost as long as I can think. I've made meaningful progress in that direction, but seeing how others perceived me in Oxford was nice, as it reaffirmed that feeling from the perspective of completely new people. That said, I still have a long way to go. There was a situation in a group chat I was in, where someone in college expressed their worries about certain events to a member of the group chat, and that person wasn't sure how to help them so they asked us in the group chat for advice. I saw this message and immediately knew I should not respond to this, because this was precisely the kind of thing I am really bad at. But then no one else in the group chat responded for an hour or two, and since I felt bad for the person who asked, I eventually wrote how I would deal with this. And honestly? It was bad. I shouldn't have sent this message. I knew from the start I shouldn't do this and I still did, against my better judgement, which made this particularly frustrating. A couple of the other group members replied shortly after that, and they started their messages with “I would rather […]” or ignored my message completely (which I am quite thankful for) and, as expected, proceeded to give way better advice than I ever could have. There goes my reminder that I still have a lot to work on, but at least I have better intuition than I thought I did. Perhaps I should listen to it.

I often find it difficult to give compliments to people, and I want to get better at this. I made a wonderful friend in Oxford who is the exact opposite of me in that sense. Sometimes when we walked through college together and they, very naturally, dropped compliments left and right to friends and acquaintances we passed. I find this quite impressive, especially because I'm so bad at it in comparison, but they were also an inspiration for me to try harder. This is one of the reasons why I was so motivated for our Palentine's event: it was a great opportunity to give compliments to my college friends and tell them how much I liked them. This was a sort of workaround since I'd rather tell people in person, but it's still progress in my opinion. It's particularly hard for me to compliment women, or to compliment people on their looks. Complimenting women on their looks is almost impossible then. These are just part of the many weird and frustrating anxieties I have.

I've met a surprising number of people with mental health or other psychological issues at Oxford, and some of them were very open to talk about this in ways that I'd rarely seen before. This was refreshing and I learned a lot from that. For one thing, it made me realize just how prevalent these issues are. My friends in Oxford were very open in talking about how they manage their social life, which was great. The latter helped me accept that going to events and meeting people can be difficult and takes effort for many of us. This should be obvious, but I feel like years of exposure to (social) media has kept reinforcing this image of introversion being something you have to fix. I am supposed to go to events. I should enjoy big parties. And if I don't, then there's something wrong with me I need to work on. But this isn't true at all. I had several friends who sometimes dropped out of events on short notice because they'd realized they'd planned more social time for that day than they could handle. I had a friend telling me several times that they couldn't e.g. meet me on Saturday evening since they'd already done something with friends that morning and it would be, I quote, “more than my tiny introvert brain can handle”. I think this openness is wonderful, because it allows us to have conversations about our personal limitations, and to not feel bad about them.

Some people see intrusive, disturbing images in their head, say, of them hurting their family or friends. I've had this for a very long time. I've barely given it any conscious thought, and simply accepted it as another one my strange issues that I would never talk about with anyone. It appears at random and I ignore it as best as I can, but it still scared me. It made me wonder whether I'm a threat to people who are important to me. I had a conversation with someone in Oxford, where they ended up telling me that they have this exact issue. It is apparently a part of OCD for many, and having this doesn't mean that you're dangerous, or that you want any of the things you see in those images. Can you imagine what a relief it was to find out that you're not alone with this, and that it doesn't say anything about you as person? It's like this worry I've been carrying around with me for longer than I can remember just disappeared through a chat with a friend.

Memory

My memory is bad. Well, that's not quite accurate, but I often forget things. Especially short-term memory, but I'm great at remembering things like numbers, equations, many kinds of facts. Now, being a bit forgetful at times isn't that weird, but it is the extent worries me.

A somewhat recent event illustrated that pretty well. There's a bouldering gym close to where I used to live in Hamburg, and I often went there several times a week since it opened a couple years ago. I started dragging my friends along to go bouldering there some time last year, and a couple months ago I went once more with a friend. That time, I noticed a hole in one of the walls, with a circular shape and a diameter of about 10cm. I looked into the hole and found that they put a little wall made of lego inside the hole, complete with a little figurine climbing the wall. It's such a small thing, but I found it quite cute and memorable. I immediately called out to my friend to show it to him. He looked into the hole, then looked at me as if I was stupid and said “You already showed this to me last week.”

Now this is both funny and… scary? I've been to this bouldering gym over a hundred times, I've never noticed this before and was so excited about it I had to tell my friend right away. Yet I completely, perfectly forgot this existed to the point that I thought I'd discovered something completely new, within seven days. No matter how I look at it, this is not something that should happen to a human with a healthy brain.

I recently read an interview with a dementia patient, and the level to which I related to it was alarming. It wasn't a late stage patient, obviously, but all the small things you got used to, those patterns of behavior you adopt to counter your weak memory, all of it describes my life. The frantic, obsessive note taking, writing everything down into calendars and todo lists and other files because you know if you don't you'll mess up. Walking back and forth between two rooms three times in a row, because by the time you reach the other room you already forgot what you were supposed to do there. The sudden feeling of dread when you realize out of nowhere that you forgot something but you have no idea what. This and so much more.

I don't seriously struggle with managing my everyday life of course, and I would even say I function pretty well, but I am genuinely unsure whether I could lead a normal life without my todo list, calendar etc. at this point. I'm not just “a bit forgetful” like a sidenote you'd see in the description for a video game character. This affects various parts of my life, and I'm not sure I've even noticed all of them. My mother sometimes complains that she feels like I don't listen to her or care about her because I forget the things she tells me. This is extremely frustrating because it makes me feel bad, but there's nothing I can do about it. I'm already trying so hard not to forget things, I don't know what else I could possibly still do. At some point I started writing down all sorts of facts about my friends and family members, such as what their job/study situations look like at the moment, what kinds of food they do or don't like etc. I eventually stopped, because it felt weird and it's not practically possible to maintain.

As a result, I am easy to gaslight. I've been in situations before where I thought my friends were telling me random shit that supposedly happened to make fun of me. Sometimes they do, but usually they don't, and I cannot tell the difference sometimes! Mind you, we are speaking of stories about situations where I was supposed to be physically present, so if those things are true, they're supposed to be somewhere in my memory. This is not much of a problem usually because I have great friends and they would never take advantage of this. But I've already been through one toxic relationship, with someone I can't describe as anything but a genuinely bad person. It didn't last very long so I don't think she ever noticed, but the idea of someone abusing this weakness is terrifying.

This is ultimately one of the reasons why I'm writing this article, and perhaps the main reason it is so excessively long. My year in Oxford was incredibly dense and so full of small and big moments that I want to remember for years to come. But knowing myself, the vast majority of these I will simply forget. In just a year or two from now, there'll be no other way for me to relive many of those moments, than to reread what I've written down in this article, or ask my friends to tell me about the things they remember. This is not only about the facts, since I tend to remember facts pretty well, but even more so about capturing how I felt at specific moments in my life or about certain situations.

The latter is important, because I noticed that hindsight is extremely inaccurate when it comes to judging how I felt about certain things. This is one of the things I only finally realized this year, specifically through the Ado concert I mentioned earlier. As I described above, my experience was mixed at best, to the point that I distinctly remember thinking, halfway through the concert, that I don't think I'll be going to a concert again after this. I wasn't exactly disappointed, but I realized this just isn't really for me, which wasn't all that unexpected. Skip ahead 6 months, and if you asked me how I feel about the concert experience looking back now, I could summarize it as “it was fun”. My emotional memory of the concert is practically entirely positive, despite the fact that I factually know I wasn't all that happy!

I never warmed up with diaries much, so writing my blog like this is something I do for myself in many ways, including being a sort of emotional inventory for things I've experienced, precisely so I do not forget how I felt in certain situations. Doing that in this blog format motivates me to write in a more digestable way (he said, as he typed the 35017th word of the article) so it is easier for me to go back, reread and reflect on my experiences. I sincerely apologize to anyone reading this, I still think parts of this article are interesting, even for outsiders, but I'm well past the point where I could recommend anyone read the entirety of it…

Noise

I always knew that I was sensitive to noise, but after a long, long time Oxford helped me realize that this goes beyond just “being sensitive”. This is an important realization, because I assumed I was at best mildly different to the people around me, but that's not the case and it explains a lot of things I've never even questioned before.

A few examples: whenever an ambulance with activated siren passes me by, I have to cover my ears. Being within 20m of such a siren is extremely distressing for me, and would be genuinely unbearable if they didn't always pass by very quickly. I get that they have to be loud especially so they reach people blasting music in their car, but it still always seemed excessive to me, to the point that I was mad at whoever decided to make them this loud. I only finally noticed about 2 months ago that I have never in my entire life seen anyone else cover their ears when an ambulance passes by. I now assume that no one else finds this nearly as uncomfortable as me, and it makes these observations a lot more understandable.

Similarly, I have a few friends who have a tendency to put on music when we are sitting together and having a chat at home. I've always found this very annoying: at best, the music is quiet enough I don't notice it (at which point you might as well just leave it off) or it is actively making it harder for me to concentrate on the conversation. This is the sort of thing that hits the sweet spot where “it's not big enough to mention it” and “it is actively bothering me” overlap perfectly. And I've never understood it: how can you enjoy putting on music while talking to others when it's this annoying and distracting? I now assume that, again, I am the only one who has this problem, so it makes sense no one else ever seemed bothered by this.

There are several comparable situations I've encountered more or less frequently throughout my life. They have always bothered me, but I didn't think much of them. It was only through my stay in Oxford that I went through several situations that made it glaringly obvious that this is a me-issue, that I have problems that most of the people around me don't seem to have. There was one particular event that made me realize that this is not normal: towards the start of my first term in Oxford, I went to a pub quiz with friends. We were sitting together around our table in the college bar, heatedly discussing the questions we were given, yelling over the noise in this cramped space full of people. For some reasonm the noise itself didn't bother me much that day, but I had an extremely hard time following the discussions we were having, despite me sitting in a rather central position at the table. But the part that drove it home was when halfway through the game, the two sitting on my left and right we're having a conversation with each other. They were literally talking right through me, each yelling almost straight into my ear. I didn't understand a single word they were saying. That's the point where I finally realized that this is definitely not normal.

Since then, I've had a couple more situations that illustrated this rather well, and I paid much closer attention to how noise affects me. As a result, I've identified a few patterns and feel like I know how to deal with this better now, but a lot of it seems quite arbitrary. For example, although I usually find it uncomfortable to be in loud environments, I've experienced being at parties where music was played very loudly, to the point my hearing was noticably worse after leaving, but I was totally fine being there. Generally, I seem to have much less of a problem with loud music, at least when it's music I like. I've noticed this especially at karaoke parties, where I can keep going for hours with the music at a volume that would normally drive me insane.

At the same time, it's not only about the noise level and whether it is “musical” sound. Certain sounds as well as certain situations are particularly difficult. Hearing babies crying is probably the worst thing I can imagine. Every time I'm riding a bus and a mother with her young, crying child enters, I find myself grinding my teeth and trying really hard not to yell at someone as I'm overcome by this urge to get off the bus right now.

This brings me to the next point: noise affects me in mainly two ways, the first one being that it sometimes makes me very aggressive. This is… impractical, because it makes it difficult to do anything about the noise even in situations where I could technically affect it. E.g. when I'm talking to friends and they put on music, I'm often not able to tell them calmly that this is bothering me and I would appreciate it if they turned the music off or down.

The other consequence is that it effectively interrupts my thoughts. This is difficult to descibe, but that's sort of what happened in the pub quiz example I described earlier: the sound of my friends talking was obviously entering my ears, but I was completely unable to process any of it.

It can go even further though, as I've experienced later. I frequently had movie nights with friends and at some point we watched a movie and two of them started discussing the movie quite loudly while we were watching. This wasn't even extremely loud or anything, they're just people with loud voices. For some reason though, this was the worst case I've ever experienced. I felt the noise bothering me and making it harder to concentrate on the movie, but it kept building up and getting worse and worse until at some point I could barely see anymore. Before, I thought this only affected my hearing and would annoy me, but in this situation I realized that, as it gets worse, it completely undermines my entire perception and thought process. I was looking at the TV screen and I couldn't even tell what I was seeing anymore. It still kept going until I the only clear thought left in my head was I need to get out of here. And that's what I did, I got up and left the room without saying a word. I sat down in the study room to calm down and spent 5 minutes just breathing heavily. One of my fellow studyroom regulars was still in the room studying, and after a few minutes she asked me if I was alright, so I guess I must have looked quite not-well. I noticed that I got a message from one of my friends who had guessed what was going on, and I didn't even have the energy to reply to them. After 10 minutes I started feeling normal again and returned to the movie a bit later.

This was a bit scary, because it felt like I didn't have control in this situation and because it was completely unpredictable. If you'd described the situation to me, I wouldn't have guessed that this could “trigger” anything, let alone the worst experience I've had with this so far. On a day to day basis, it isn't nearly this bad, though still annoying. Perhaps the most common occurrence is that I go out for food or similar with friends or family, and we end up at a place that is so loud I become unable to have a conversation with anyone, in the worst case even those sitting right next to me.

Noticing all of this has at least made me more aware of what issues I have, which makes it easier to recognize when a situation is not good for me, or what activities I should avoid. But perhaps the most important realization was that other people don't have this problem. In the past, many of these experiences went hand in hand with being mad at someone, e.g. for producing the noise that made me uncomfortable. But since I understood that others don't experience any of this, it's completely understandable that they're behaving the way they are. They're not inconsiderate, they just don't (and actually can't) know better, and expecting them to would be unfair. It might not sound like it, but this is progress to me, and I feel better knowing that this is my own problem and I have to act accordingly, rather than blaming other people for it.

I'm completely unsure whether this is related, but I find that I seem to be more sensitive to sound in non-bad ways than most people as well. On the contrary, I seem to be less sensitive to visual impressions. When talking about anime with the other guy, they once said to me “I watch anime. You hear anime.”. This is mostly a comment on my inability to notice a lot of the aesthetic details, presentation, cinematography etc. (not limited to anime of course) that my friend likes to talk about. I can't usually comment on those, not only because I only care to a limited extent, but because I simply don't perceive most of them. A more typical measure of this in Western media would, I assume, be how many people seem to recognize actors across different movies and TV shows. I'm almost completely incapable of doing that, though I should probably mention that I couldn't care less about actors in movies and I barely watched any Western media in the past couple years. But then on the other hand, I do recognize quite a lot of voice actors in anime, and am interested enough to the point that I often look up who voiced who on MAL. Though I rarely remember the actor's names, and rather their other roles. I guess this is special, simply because I don't remember every hearing anyone else talk about voice actors anything like actors in Western media.

Similarly, music affects me in ways that, I assume, is different to other people. For the most part this is impossible to describe or measure, so I'll bring up the one example where I do have concrete numbers: the right music is an absurd boost to my athletic performance. I know that putting on music to get through your workout is a common thing that a lot of people do, but the effects I observe on myself just don't seem normal to me. In 2022, I had a pretty stable running routine, running 10km, 3 times a week. I don't usually listen to music while running. One day, about halfway through my run, I decided to put on some music on a whim. I didn't look at the time again until I finished my run 1.5h later. At that point, I'd run a half-marathon (the only one in my life so far) at the fastest pace I'd achieved in any run that entire year! Now, I get that music helps by distracting you from the exhaustion, but… I tended to run pretty fast already before that, to the point that I couldn't go faster without stopping from exhaustion before I'd finished my 10km. I physically shouldn't have been able to run that fast for longer than 20 minutes or something, let alone for this long. And I still felt great afterwards!

Job Search

Whew, we finally got here! This could be its own article, but as I'm summarizing my year in Oxford here, I think it fits well. To be precise, my job search accompanied me from November 2023 to the start of October 2024, of which I spent the majority in Oxford. Let's get into it!

Deciding on what you want to do after finishing your degree as a computer scientist, is difficult. The field is huge and can be essentially combined with absolutely anything you could possibly think of. Many people from my department, and even Oxford in general, echoed the sentiment that they had no idea what they wanted to do after finishing their degree. This was, in a way, reassuring. Thinking back to when I finished highschool, I feel like almost none of us had a clear idea of where they were going. At best, they had a rough direction, or picked something that was more or less in line with what they were good at in school or had a basic interest in. And honestly, it feels like that worked out decently for most of us. This is in line with how I see myself: I know I'm practically smart and do my work properly. Of course there are things I have more natural talent or interest in than others, but I believe I could have picked almost any reasonable direction, career-wise, and been decently successful. Computer Science vaguely fitted my interests, so I went with that. I don't regret a thing.

But then I kept studying, and I knew “okay this time I'm probably starting work for real once I'm done”, and as the end of my undergrad drew near, I realized that I was still facing the same question of where I wanted to go after this, as I did after finishing school. The same process repeated itself during my master's, in a way. At the same time, this isn't quite true. Out of the myriad possibilities in the world, I at least narrowed it down to “something computer science related” through my undergrad. Similarly, I narrowed it down further to Machine Learning through my choice of courses in the Master's degree. Not like this is binding: there are enough more “generic” software engineering jobs where I'm sure I could have a great time. But I went to Oxford, I specialized in ML here, and it would have felt like a waste if I didn't make use of that. Part of it is just sunk cost, if you will. So, also in an effort to narrow down the far too large number of possibilities, I decided I would focus specifically on Machine Learning Engineering positions or similar.

This was hard. It was harder, and took way longer, than expected. I thought, I've got a Master's degree from a global top university with 1 year of specialized experience in a field that is currently booming like crazy, and everyone is looking for ML engineers. Should be easy, right?

Wrong. I'm still trying to figure out how this works at all, but in any case, it turns out that almost everyone in the field is looking only for people with years of job experience, or a PhD if you're lucky. Job postings that don't list a requirement of at least 3 years experience are almost non-existant in this field. I initially applied to the big names like Google Deepmind, and, over the course of the next months, slowly realized that I was wasting my time. I unfortunately started taking notes only after a few months, but I believe I've sent about 100 applications. The vast majority of those didn't receive a reply at all, or a direct rejection. There were only about 10 applications in total where I even got beyond the very initial stage, i.e. I was invited to an interview, an online test or similar. For more than half of those, I got rejected right after that first stage. For the remaining four, I made it to the very end. In two of those cases, I was rejected after the final round because they had a more experienced candidate. Number 3 I rejected myself because it wasn't ML so I wasn't that interested in it, and the conditions were relatively bad. Number 4 is the first one where I got an offer, and I accepted it. More on that later.

So in short, if we don't count the one where I applied to non-ML stuff, I did not get rejected right away in only about 10% of cases, and accepted in 1%. Mind you, I did not have particularly high standards or expectations: I applied almost worldwide, including in Spain, France, Ireland, UK, Sweden, Norway, Germany, the Netherlands, Switzerland, Italy, Poland, the Czech Republic, Romania, Greece, Singapore, India, Taiwan, China, Japan and the USA. There's not that many jobs I've avoided due to my location preferences, mostly those in the Middle East as well as non-remote jobs in the USA, because I really don't want to go to that country. As a result, I would say I applied to the vast majority of jobs that vaguely fit what I wanted to do, though I started at some point to exclude those that asked for work experience, because I'd noticed by now that those don't work out at all. In fact, my standards were so low that I would have taken a job that offered less freedom and less than half the salary of what I ended up getting. But they rejected me, heh.

So, what's there to say about job search? Well, it was interesting. Like I said above, it was much harder than expected, which was sobering and great to keep my arrogance in check. It made me realize that a lot of companies (including many big names you'd recognize) have utterly broken recruitment processes. Before, I'd thought of the technical parts of interviews as where they are challenging me and it's solely on me to make a good impression, but I realized over the past year that the kinds of exercises they pose tell me a lot about the company. There were a lot of mundane exercises, such as personality tests and classic, automated coding tests. Let's talk about the latter first.

I believe those automated coding tests are, for the most part, quite useless. Because it would be too much effort to design a different test for every different framework or library you'd expect your candidates to know, they tend to be rather open, in the sense that “as long as you can code, you're good”. This goes so far that you can typically even code in your programming language of choice, offering 10 or 20 or so to choose from. As a result, you can only test general, competitive programming-esque skills. These typically give you an “in-universe” explanation (e.g. “you're trying to route trains through a rail-network in a way that minimizes detours” or the likes) that you have to extract the task-relevant information from, then write an efficient algorithm that solves the problem. Now, for 90% of the way, this is a sound start: it tests your ability to extract relevant details from real-world tasks, turn them into simplified, abstract models and then come up with a strategy to solve the assignment in this model.

That said, several problems quickly become apparent, mostly hidden in the word “efficient”. I've done a bunch of these coding tests, and almost all of them have very high expectations for an “efficient” algorithm. It wasn't uncommon for me to spend 10 minutes writing a decently efficient algorithm that solves the problem - but gets rejected because it doesn't solve that one ultra-strict performance test case, only for me to spend the remaining 50 minutes thinking about a more efficient variant. In fact, these problems tend to be so hard that I timed out on almost every coding test I had to do.

So, this is difficult to criticize effectively because the question at the root of this is, what exactly should you realistically expect from people in terms of algorithmic knowledge/competitive programming skills? Again, I'm completely onboard with this on a fundamental level: optimization is important, and for years we've been suffering from shitty software getting slower faster than computers get faster. And I personally like optimization, and think I'm decently good at it! The problem is that, for one, these tests are too strict. They pose problems that are not too hard to solve, but quite difficult to solve efficiently. If you are looking for people with peak competitive programming ability, that might be what you want, but this usually feels more like Executive A bought the “tech recruitment pipeline B” package from recruitment solutions provider XYZ, and that happened to include these tests, even when they're almost completely irrelevant for the job.

On the one hand, you can get incredibly far with very basic knowledge around algorithms and complexity. I would guess that for 98% of engineering positions, it is enough to know binary search, $\log(n)$ insertion/deletion data structures, understand that sorting can be done in $O(n\cdot \log(n))$, and understand how to derive the complexity of a simple algorithm. Furthermore, actual optimization in practice usually requires almost completely different knowledge. In most applications, you don't write performance-relevant algorithms from scratch. Usually, you just stick together existing tools. What you then need is good knowledge of these tools to understand where bottlenecks are, be familiar with benchmarking and profiling techniques to find what's taking up your processing time, and possibly a few things about parallel programming to speed things up further.

On the other hand, competitive programming skills are an extremely niche thing. It may come in handy from time to time, but only in certain roles and even then only rarely. So rarely in fact, that I've never seen anyone recommend you practice competitive programming for anything but fun, and coding interviews… And if your recruiting process depends on applicants having spent an inordinate amount of time on building a skill that is likely irrelevant to the role, then you're not just taking shots in the dark, but your process is becoming downright counterproductive instead.

I've gone through a few good recruiting processes, and they all had several things in common. First, they test you on your coding ability in a live interview. This allows for much more valuable insights for them, as they can understand how you think and approach problems, and at the same time it prevents simple misunderstandings or minor problems from becoming roadbloacks that undermine an applicants entire interview performance. Secondly, they test you in meaningful and creative ways that have a close connection to what you'll be doing at the job, with creative, multi-faceted and obviously hand-crafted exercises. This has several benefits: they can be sure that you have decent knowledge for the exact role you're applying for, and at the same time you can't cheese those by having practiced something unrelated. But it is useful to me as an applicant too, because these kinds of exercises provide me with a window into the day-to-day work at the company, helping me ascertain whether I might like it there, and sometimes, they're just fun exercises to solve and perhaps even teach me something new.

On the other hand, the factory-made exercises at best tell me nothing about the company, and at worst only allow the conclusion that they're bad at recruiting and don't care who they're getting. But it gets worse, and this is where I'd like to get into a few examples of recruiting fails, where the recruitment experience made me genuinely like the company less, and made me reconsider whether I want to work for them.

Example #1

I'm not sure if it's a bad idea to put company names up here, so I'll leave them out for now. Example #1 is from a huge Japanese company that you've almost certainly heard of. The “coding test” here was especially offputting: it was effectively a Python trivia quiz, with questions such as “What does the expression 15 and 4 return?”. The answer is that, when anding non-boolean expressions, the last one is returned, but only if neither of them is None (or rather, Falsey, which I'm not getting into here). This is so obscure I don't think I've ever seen it in real code, and many people see it as bad style because it's rarely useful and almost no one knows this syntax. I could have figured out the answer for every single question on this test by opening a Python interpreter and typing in a simple example within 5 seconds. And I would have needed to, because they asked exclusively about obscure syntax details and similar stuff like the example above. This means the entire test had zero relevance to the job. But to top it all off, the entire test was about Python 2. PYTHON TWO! This version was initially planned to be EOL'd 10 years ago. Mind you, I was applying for a machine learning position, a field where the entire software stack in common use is less than 10 years old. You can't do ML in Python2 at all unless you're planning to almost literally reinvent the wheel to tie yourself to a long outdated platform. This entire episode is so stupid, I put it on my mental “software engineer jokes” list. All in all, this made me consider redacting my application.

That company also gets bonus points for an utterly broken in-house application management system, which makes the ID of the opening you're applying to a part of your username, effectively forcing you to create a new account for every position you're applying to. This is particularly funny because they explicitly tell you to reuse the same account, probably so they can tell if you've applied again before the 6 months of break between applications, that you're supposed to wait, are over.

Oh, since I've mentioned account creation, let me just say how much I hate My Workday Jobs. This seems to be another one of those recruitment solutions providers that roughly half the industry is using. What's so frustrating is that they always require you to create an account. This is already annoying in general, I probably have like 30 completely useless accounts lying around because I applied to some company somewhere. What makes My Workday Jobs particularly bad though, is that every company seems to run their own instance of this platform, so I have to create an account for every single one of them, but then they all ask the exact same extensive set of default questions that takes me like an hour to fill out. I just checked my password manager and noticed I have 7 accounts for My Workday Jobs alone. I'm looking forward to be in a position where I refuse to apply somewhere because their recruitment process sucks.

Example #2

Anyway, looking at more recruitment fails. This one was for a big company that is leaning much more to the hardware side, and fills an important role in todays tech ecosystem. I hold, well, held, them in high regard. Then I applied there. The position I applied to was notable in the sense that I covered not only all of the “required qualifications”, but also the “bonus qualifications”. This happened extremely rarely during my job search, so I got my hopes up immediately. I applied there one July evening - and got immediately rejected the next morning, mere 12 hours later. To quote their reply: “Unfortunately at this time we will not be able to proceed with your application as there are profiles we feel more closely match the job requirements of the position.”

This was weird in several ways. For one thing, recruitment at most companies tends to be pretty slow. Getting a reply within 12h is incredible. Secondly, the reason given seems completely out of place, because I very obviously fulfill all the job requirements. This allowed only one interpretation: someone thoughtlessly drafted a generic answer that does not only tell me nothing, like they usually do, but tells me something straightup wrong instead as the reason for the rejection. I suspected that they actually have requirements for “years of experience” or similar for the role, and they just didn't list them on the job posting for whatever reason. Or perhaps they'd already filled the position shortly before they looked at my application, which would explain why they were able to reject it so quickly.

I was a bit frustrated with this outcome, but I was busy with other applications anyway and rejections were, in itself, something I was used to at this point. But only two weeks later, I happened to see another job posting by the same company, with the exact same content. At first, I thought that perhaps the post was still up at that point, essentially refuting my second hypothesis from earlier. But no, the posting was super fresh, only about a day old. So I decided to try my luck again, and applied. The exact same thing happened - I got rejected within 24h, with the exact same text, sent by the exact same person. I also confirmed that they're a real person working at the company by the way.

Now this clearly disproved my second hypothesis, so I was left with the first one, and I was mad. I know that I have little experience, that I am far from the most attractive candidate, and that there is plenty of reason to reject me. I am not complaining about that. Well, maybe a bit, but that's not the issue here. What bothers me, is that this company that I was holding in high regard was wasting my time by not communicating their requirements properly, not only once but twice, and then sending me misleading rejection mails. I calmed my anger and tried to forget about this episode.

Until a month later, when I happened to see three similar job postings by the same company in relatively short succession. Now, fortunately, the applications there took little effort, so I applied again, with equally little hope. Not sure if I should have been surprised at this point or not, but the exact same thing happened again with all three applications. Rejected within 24h for the exact same reason, letter by letter, and by the same person. At this point I felt like I had collected enough material: I drafted a complaint mail to their global recruiting address. I told them I wouldn't be applying to them again after this experience, but asked them to at least list all their requirements clearly on the job posting, so they wouldn't waste other people's time the same way they did with me.

I wasn't expecting to achieve anything by doing this, but I had at least a sliver of hope that they might consider being more transparent in the future. To my surprise, I got a reply - from the exact person who'd rejected all my applications! They were offering me a call, to explain why I had been rejected. This was both more accommodating than I'd expected from that company at this point, and also completely missed the point of my complaint. I was mentally done with them and only meant to leave feedback for them to maybe improve their processes. But I was also curious, so I agreed. TL;DR, the recruiter told me they'd rejected me because they wanted someone with at least 2 or 3 years of experience. It was almost anticlimatic how on-point I'd been with my first hypothesis since the first rejection. “So why don't you put that on the job postings then?”, I'd asked. “It would have saved both you and me our precious time.” Their answer? “Because we want people of all sorts of backgrounds to apply”. You've gotta be fu-

I sighed frustratedly. So they'd been intentionally, with full awareness, wasting both mine and their own time then. Great. I was ready to end the call there since I'd found out what interested me, but then they made an interesting proposition: “I've found a few other positions that match your profile well, so if you're interested, I'll send them to you.” I had relatively little interest in the company at this point, but was still curious where this would take me, so I said yes. Shortly after the call, they mailed me two positions, and I applied to both. They were not quite related to those I'd gotten rejected for before, so not sure why they even sent me those, but anyway: this is the point where this all turns into a comedy. The day after applying to these positions, I got rejected with the following reason: “Unfortunately at this time we will not be able to proceed with your application as there are profiles we feel more closely match the job requirements of the position.” The rejections came from the same recruiter who had personally recommended these positions to me only a day earlier. This was so funny, I laughed out loud when I saw those two rejections one morning. I'm glad I stuck around to see the conclusion of this journey, lol.

Example #3

Oh yea, since we were talking about funny rejections already, I applied to a well-known German startup twice and got rejected both times. 4 months after I applied there. At that point I'd long put them on the “no reaction” part of my list, and the rejection felt more like they were making fun of me to be honest.

Example #4

This is one of the first roles I applied for, namely the one that I was not that interested in because it wasn't ML. I applied to this almost on a whim, because it was a well known company in the open source software space, which I'd love to support, and they listed Tokyo as the location, which seemed exciting. This process consisted of steps that were mostly fine on their own, but the sheer number and impractical order of these steps made the overall process pretty bad… allow me to go through this chronologically.

I applied to the role in November 2023. I was immediately sent a “written interview” to fill out within the next two weeks. First of all, this was long. They asked a bunch of questions about various aspects of my personality, how I work in a team, my greatest achievements, what I consider important to write efficient or secure software etc. Again, most of these questions seemed fitting and meaningful to talk about, and I didn't struggle to come up with answers here at all. The problem was the sheer number: I had 40 questions to go through, and ended up typing about 15 A4 pages of answers. If I'd applied any earlier during the term, I would have been too busy to finish this before the deadline.

Next, I was invited to an online personality test. I don't remember exactly what I had to do here, but it was the usual stuff. I genuinely can't judge whether these tests are meaningful. Next, I had my first interview with a real person - someone from HR, who asked me a bunch of questions about my background, ambitions etc., all the “soft” stuff. Next, I had to give them times where I was available for technical interviews. What I didn't expect was that they were going to book not only one, but three technical interviews, on consecutive days. I had a technical interview on Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday morning. It was mid January at that point by the way. When the guy for the Tuesday interview didn't show up, it was rescheduled to Thursday morning instead. The interviews themselves were all fine by the way, genuinely nice engineers, who asked me all sorts of technical questions. I learned a bunch of new things here, that's how good interviews should go.

After that, I had to do another (different) personality test for some reason, and then I finally met the recruiter who'd been guiding me through this process so far. It was Feburary by now. We finally got the chance to talk a bit about salary expectations, location etc. We had another meeting a week later to confirm things, but this interview already told me what I needed to know: among other things, the location “Tokyo” was false advertising and I have no idea why they posted it like that. They're a completely remote company that is not even based in Japan, and do not sponsor visas. Also, the salary wasn't that good. I rejected the offer I got mid Feburary. After 3 months of selection procedures, including one written interview, two online tests and 5 in-person interviews, the result was that I could have spared myself the entire process, had they just put the salary range on the job posting and not lied about the location.

To this day, I'm wondering why companies so often refuse to put salary ranges on their postings. It's incredibly annoying because it's extra work. It also makes me less likely to apply there and it makes them seem less trustworthy.

Positive examples

I'm going to list a few positive examples of selection procedures and other positive surprises here for comparison, which were unfortunately quite rare.

One process consisted of four applied ML exercises, mostly about reproducing experiments and extending them in interesting ways. These seemed genuinely interesting, being about writing a genetic algorithm and then training it via reinforcement learning to beat a game like Pong, or training a generative model to come up with completely new Kanji for modern words, such as AI or airplane. These exercises seemed quite interesting in principal, but unfortunately were completely overwhelming for me, after just starting my second term in Oxford and trying to find a thesis project and supervisor at the same time. I probably spent about 40 hours on this over 4 weeks, and then eventually gave up. I was still working on the first exercise, getting lost in the details of the absolutely terrible framework they wanted us to use for this exercise. I've never seen something that encourages writing straight up bad, illegible code like this before. Fighting that framework rather than working on the actual exercise was quite frustrating and I eventually accepted that I don't have the time to work on something of this magnitude… the kind of devotion that some companies expect already from applicants is kinda insane.

I had another one that gave me a bunch of exercises to solve using PyTorch, that covered a wide variety of things (basic training & optimization of architectures, writing your own backpropagation implementation, understanding and manipulating five-dimensional tensors etc.) that were great in the sense that they were engaging exercises, not too long, neither basic nor super difficult etc. To top it all off, I was invited to a discussion of my solutions afterwards, where I could explain my solutions and was asked follow-up questions. This is a 10/10 of how a good selection process should look like. For the final stage of the process with that company, I was given the task to present a recent (<6 months) paper to their ML engineering team. This was again interesting because it was unlike any task I'd had to do before, and it allowed me to engage directly with their engineering team, which was nice. It was, however, a lot of work to prepare, especially since most of the papers I read weren't quite that recent.

Another advantage of being in Oxford was, that I was physically close to interesting events. For one thing, I was able attend a sort of recruiting event for one company that I ended up applying for after that, where I got to the final round. I got rejected there unfortunately since they had (as usual) a more experienced candidate lined up, but the selection process itself was pretty good. The practical exercises were mostly logic puzzles and similar. The recruiter was extremely helpful and even set up a feedback meeting with me afterwards, where they told me exactly how I'd performed during the different steps of the process, what I could improve and where I did well etc. This was by far the best feedback I'd received and I was very thankful for it.

Another time, I was messaged by a recruiter looking for people to join their consulting agency's new office in Oxford. He set me up with the local colleagues and I ended up visiting them at their office, chatting with them and even going for lunch together. That was really nice and a great first impression. If I had any interest in working in consulting, that probably would have convinced me to apply there.

There might be more to talk about, but I had to sign NDAs for some of my selection processes, so I can't talk about some of the details here.

Learnings

So, let's get to perhaps the most relevant part: what did I learn from this experience that I can share with you?

Perhaps one of the most important takeaways, at least if you're very early-career like me, is to look for jobs that are not listed on LinkedIn. Find other platforms, research interesting companies and go to their websites directly, etc. Every job that is posted to LinkedIn gets like 100 applications, and if you don't have any related work experience yet, you have no chance whatsoever. In fact, I probably did about half of my applications through LinkedIn, and I'm not sure I even got to the first stage in even a single one of those.

As already mentioned, experience is extremely important. This might depend on your field of course, but especially in ML, almost no one will even consider you if you don't have relevant work experience already. Keep this in mind and accept that you will have to lower your standards and just get what you can to build experience, or maybe aim for easier-to-get internships at first. Keep this in mind when planning your career in general: I did a Master's, but you may be better off using that time to do internships already. Degrees seem to have little relevance as a bonus, but are mostly used as a fixed condition. I.e. there are many jobs that explicitly expect you to have a Master's degree in the first place, but for those that do not, you're better off putting that time into getting work experience instead.

Next, start applying early. Like I said, it took me 11 months to find a job. Don't expect to find something quicky, and even if you apply to the right position on your first try, then the selection process is probably still going to take 2 months until you get your offer. Plan accordingly. Another advantage of applying early and often is that you get to practice the entire process a lot. I can tell that I've gotten better at this, and where it took me several hours to finish a single application before, I can now usually do it in less than one, and often even better than before. Writing motivational/cover letters especially is something that I got much more comfortable with. It's still probably the most annoying part of the process, but also where I felt the most progress.

Finally, a piece of more personal/mental health advice: keep your hopes in check and don't ever try to picture yourself in that role or at that company, unless you're asked for exactly that in an interview question. This might be difficult, and of course it's easier to e.g. write a good motivational letter when you're excited about the company, but from my experience, even if I think I have “a decent chance”, I'll get rejected in >70% of cases. It is incredibly easy to end up imagining your life at that company, and that's not a bad thing in general, but it is incredibly unhealthy when you do get rejected. I made that experience several times, and even once I was fully aware of this, I wasn't able to stop those thoughts completely.

The state of the industry and functional workplaces

I have relatively little experience in the industry so far, mainly based on two internships I did in Germany (one at a medium-sized startup, one at a huge German tech company) and then some insights I got through the job hunt.

I started reading a lot of technical blogs this year, among them Nikhil Suresh's blog. The guy is a data scientist in Australia with 10 or so years of experience, and mostly writes aggressive but well thought out rants about the state of the industry. Trying to summarize his position is difficult, but I'll try to give a rough overview of his main ideas anyway.

He believes the average developer is extremely incompetent, and just knowing the most basic git commands and writing tests would put you in the top 5% or so from his experience. In order to cover up their lack of competence, they “cosplay at engineering”, pretending that they have skills they don't and essentially dabble away all day working on projects where their lack of skills has no impact because they won't ever be used anyway. This is reflected in a symmetry with management which acts similarly, in the sense that the work anyone does is effectively irrelevant, most of the stuff they work on will end in a failed product anyway, but the industry is so dysfunctional that the cash keeps rolling and everyone is pretending to do a good job until the project is dropped for some reason or another.

I'm sure I forgot a bunch of things here, but in any case, he paints an extremely depressing image of the software industry. I found this incredibly interesting, because on the one hand, his articles are full of examples of absolutely insane cases of incompetent and irresponsible people and incidents, that would be funny if you didn't know that people may have straight up died because of those things. On the other hand, I find that almost none of this resonates with my personal experience. During my first internship, I already had some development experience, but I still learned a lot during that time, felt incredibly productive, and was surrounded by great colleagues who did a great job in their respective areas, teaching me many things along the way. This might be even more the case in my second internship, where I was surrounded by colleagues which were incredibly skilled when it came to understanding C++ compilers, optimization, algorithms and mathematics etc. Similarly, my job search supported these findings. While there is of course a decent chance that I got rejected for most positions I applied to because I didn't have the word “Cloud” plastered all over my CV or something, almost all of those where I went through interviews and tests etc. showed without a doubt that their engineers know their stuff and are, without exception, more skilled than I am.

While my experience so far is limited, everything I've seen suggests that he is wrong. I don't doubt for a second that he is telling the truth, but I'm still wondering how our experiences could differ so much. This is not a one-off thing: The guy wrote an extensive article about how he found like two tech companies in the entirety of Australia that seem to work like… I don't know, sane places? I find this incredibly fascinating, because it seems like we are living in completely different worlds, and I cannot for the life of me figure out why our experiences are so completely incompatible.

However, there is one thing that I skipped over here. Remember how I mentioend that I didn't avoid many jobs due to location preferences? Well, there's an entire field I avoided almost completely. When I started looking for jobs, I set my status on LinkedIn accordingly, hoping that interesting offers might come my way. Indeed, I was contacted by recruiters on an almost weekly basis. But only by two kinds of companies: tech consulting agencies and automatic trading companies. I rejected all of these immediately, in the case of consulting, because there aren't many opportunities to work on ML stuff in that space, and in the case of automatic trading, because it seems like it would make me miserable. The latter is difficult to describe, but often their messages were written in this specific way only tech-business bros can produce, that makes you cringe from the vibes alone. I could tell immediately that I probably wouldn't just not do anything useful, but rather actively harm our society by working there, likely in an absolutely insufferable bubble of… idk, if you've seen it, you probably know what I'm talking about.

In any case, I can sort of imagine those spaces being like what Nikhil Suresh describes, and the fact that they seem to be the only ones recruiting desperately enough to message me on LinkedIn, might even support this. It still doesn't quite resolve my confusion about this whole issue, but I thought it's interesting nonetheless. In any case, I'm very curious to see if working for a few years as a proper FTE changes my perception of this.

Onward

Well, I've already hinted at it, but I completed my job search. So what's next?

To my great surprise, I got accepted by a Japanese company, and will be moving to Japan in the very near future! I will be working as a Machine Learning Engineer at a startup based in Tokyo.

All of this was a bit surprising: when I applied to the job advert (which was in both English and Japanese), I was told the first interview with the CEO would be in Japanese. At that point I thought, “well, guess no chance then, but I'll try for fun anyway”. Surprisingly, I didn't struggle much during the interview, and when I mentioned that my Japanese ability was perhaps my greatest concern, the CEO told me that my Japanese was great and he sees no problem there. Even if I didn't get the job, this was amazing feedback. I went through another two interviews in Japanese after that, and eventually got accepted.

It's funny how things sometimes turn out. I never really planned to end up in Japan to be honest. Obviously, I applied to positions there but I didn't think it would work out, especially not for a position where I was expected to speak mainly Japanese.

In any case, I have by now been working for them part time remotely as I'm waiting for my visa. It should be done soon and I'll be moving before the end of January. I'm incredibly excited! Expect articles about life in Japan, Japanese work culture and the immigration and apartment hunting process there, when/if I get the time, lol.

Whew

This was way too long. As you can tell by the dates, it took me more than 4 months to write this article from beginning to end, and there's honestly no excuse for its length. I've experienced a ton of things in Oxford and on the side during my time there and I wanted to talk about, or just preserve, so much of it. But I also really need to make an effort to be more concise in the future, or at least split my ramblings into more focused, digestable pieces. Thanks for reading in any case, and I hope it was worth your time!

It was an extremely dense, stressful, exciting, instructive and shaping year for me, and the next adventure lies only weeks ahead. See you at the next article!

The Angel next Door: Why are synopses so misleading?

Thu, 20 Jul 2023 00:02:51 +0200

“The Angel next Door Spoils me rotten” (お隣の天使にダメ人間にされていた件/“Otonari no Tenshi ni Dameningen ni sareteita Ken”, I'll shorten it to TonaTen) just got an anime adaption earlier this year. With a name like this, it seems to scream “I'm a fastfood romance” at you like no other. So how about we play a quick round of fast-food romance trope-bingo. Shall we?

(WARNING: this is where the spoilers start)

Oh wow, if that ain't a bingo!

Special thanks go out to “Protagonist or heroine lives alone” for the double-hit that turned this whole thing around.

Even from just the title, no one could blame you for thinking that this is indeed a fastfood romance. To my surprise though, it is not. Instead, it is a surprisingly nuanced, simple and pure romance story. There's no harem here, no ecchi, not much plot to be honest, and it's not a RomCom but really just a Rom…

Ahem, anyway, before I talk more about the anime, some quick background.

How I got Here

Almost a year ago, I started to read the TonaTen manga by pure chance as it began publishing in one of my free manga reader apps. The manga itself is an adaption, as the source is a light novel series. It didn't leave much of an impression on me to be honest, though I did continue reading it until I started watching the anime on a whim.
I was quite surprised when I found out that this got an anime adaption. Not for any particular reason, I'm just always surprised when I realize that something I know or even read is apparently popular enough to get an anime adaption. On the other hand, I'm still waiting for a Kaoru Hana wa Rin to Saku anime…

Anyway, while I didn't get too much out of the manga, I now attribute this mostly to its glacial pacing. The series itself, as a pure romance, is already a rather slow burn, and the fact that they slowed the manga adaption down to half a chapter every three weeks didn't help my enjoyment much… who would've thought that these manga reader apps make for a painful user experience?

So how was It?

Surprisingly, pretty good. After finishing the show, I initially gave it an 8 on MAL based on my enjoyment, though after thinking about it a bit more I lowered that to a 7 due to lack of depth.

The show presents us with our main couple Amane and Mahiru who just happen to be neighbors, as they become ever closer, going from rather distant neighbors to friends and finally lovers.

By chance, Mahiru (who lives alone, just like Amane) notices that Amane's apartment is an absolute mess, as well as that he lives on a very unbalanced konbini-diet. Unable to bear it, she helps him tidy everything up, and also starts giving him “leftovers” from her cooked meals every day. This eventually progresses to the point where she comes over to his house to cook there directly, sharing the grocery costs with him, and generally just starts spending the majority of her time there before she even received a spare key from him.

So far, so generic. What really got my approval here, is how the the anime treats this rather generic setup with a lot more nuance than you see in fastfood romances.
Our heroine Mahiru is your typical “good at literally everything”-girl. She's top of the class in every single subject, including sports, she's pretty, she's popular, you name it. But through her interactions with Amane, you quickly realize that that she's just trying her best to live up to expectations, both from her fellow students and her parents who let her move out and live alone. She's good at school because she has a strong sense of responsibility, but also because she doesn't really have anything better to do. She spends her days studying, cooking and that's it for the most part. She doesn't have any friends, because she feels like she has to keep up her perfect appearance, which both takes a lot of time and effort, and is also more difficult towards people that know you well. She also keeps her distance from others because she knows she can't ignore the problems she sees and tries to solve them, even if they aren't her own. In the end, she doesn't have a past trauma or anything, and neither does she have this semi-arrogant mindset “I'm better off without people”, but she's doing just fine on her own.

You might say that this is a subtle difference, but I think it really shapes their relationship in a meaningful way. Her first couple interactions with Amane encapsulate this rather nicely:
He found her in the park where she was sitting in the rain, depressed for reasons we only find out about 6 episodes later. When he tells her to go home in order to not fall victim to the Japanese cold, she refuses. He gives her his umbrella, then goes home in the rain.
The next day, she rings his doorbell and returns the umbrella, he thanks her and tries to say goodbye.

In a way, it's a perfectly normal, down-to-earth interaction between normal human beings. There's another conversation shortly after that, where he says he thought that would be the end of their interactions. Mahiru ends up surprised, because she thought Amane was trying to guilt-trip her with the umbrella, in order to get to speak more with her. He didn't even expect her to bring the umbrella back. He clearly tells her that he won't go out of his way to get close to her, or in any way bother her without a reason.

This situation very nicely sets up these two characters and their relationship.
Mahiru is the popular girl who's tired of trying to be perfect in front of her schoolmates, boys she doesn't even know being after her, etc. Yet at the same time she is a hopeless do-gooder, who can't help the fact that fixable problems in her surroundings bother her.
Amane is the “shut-in loser” who recognizes and respects that Mahiru tries to keep her distance. He doesn't try to push or otherwise get close to her.

And so their initial relationship is born. At the start, it is purely functional. For Amane, it's like he gained a maid who helps him clean and cooks for him. Mahiru finds some sort of satisfaction from knowing that the guy next door isn't living on an unhealthy konbini diet in a messy room, and by sharing the grocery costs with him at a later point, also saves cash. Economies of scale!
But most importantly, she trusts that he really doesn't care, so she doesn't have to put up a front for him and can just be herself. Not like there's anything wrong with her: she's a very rational, and thus often direct and blunt person, but certainly not mean or unfriendly. And Amane, as their initial interactions have already shown, is a very thoughtful and considerate person, giving Mahiru exactly what she needed.

It might seem unbalanced, and Amane often complains that he feels bad about her cooking for him all the time, but Mahiru also makes it very clear that she does this solely because it makes her feel good, not because of any interest in Amane.

Over time, they progress to being good friends and eventually more. Yet their relationship is based on the premise that Mahiru only helps Amane for her own peace of mind and out of no interest in him as a person whatsoever, while Amane has basically promised to have no deeper and/or romantic interest in Mahiru.

These rules they've set for themselves are what allowed this relationship to come together in the first place, but they're also what they end up struggling against, as they both find they see the other one as more than just a friend.

I think it's a wonderful conflict, though I guess it's likely more interesting to read about than to actually watch it unfold, as unfortunately is the case with so many things.

Seeing them develop together was fun. Mahiru slowly opens up to Amane and they eventually become friends. Amane just tries to become a better person. Once they got a bit closer, he offers Mahiru to help with cooking and eventually learns some cooking skills from her as well. This also nicely signals the transformation from their functional relationship towards a proper friendship.
And towards the later parts where he realized he has romantic feelings for Mahiru, he starts working out and properly studying for tests at school. Supposedly, he's even quite handsome when he does his hair properly so it doesn't cover half his face.

I guess you could argue it still covers half his face

In the end, most of the tropes from the bingo earlier were sidestepped, subverted or given just that bit of care and attention to detail that makes them believable in rather simple ways.

The Baddos

Certainly, not everything is great in Angel-land. In the end, there's a reason I “only” rated it a 7. That's still a good rating in my book by the way, but anyway, as I said before, it's lacking depth.

The entire anime is about how Amane and Mahiru close the distance between them. That is the entire story. There's only two other characters who are friends with Amane, as well as his parents, and they're all in supporting roles with basically no plot, development or anything to themselves. The entire anime revolves around their relationship, and while it does follow a natural progression, do not expect to see any deep conflicts, drama or whatever.

I've already covered the entire depth the anime has to offer when I explained the premise of their relationship. And when I said they're “struggling against the rules they've set for themselves” towards the end, then that doesn't play out in particularly exciting ways, so here's the rundown:
By the end of episode 8 or so they've both developed and realized their feelings for each other, but neither is ready to come out about them. In fact, because of these very rules I mentioned, they both believe their relationship cannot even progress in that direction.

After a bit of back and forth, Mahiru sort of snaps and starts making bolder and bolder approaches on Amane with every episode, while Amane still believes that this isn't what Mahiru could want from him as a person. Or maybe he just refuses to accept it.
It's a reasonable development, but becomes quite frustrating halfway through due to its eerie similarity to the fastfood romances we all know where the heroine(s) is damn obvious about her feelings towards the protagonist but he's too dumb to realize, and she's too much of a coward to come clean.

In this case it's still bearable because you know this isn't a fastfood romance and the fact that this is happening tells you quite clearly that we're on the finish line. It's also like a bombardment of cute and happy moments that were much rarer in the earlier parts of the show. But this drags on for almost 4 full episodes and, as I said, just gets frustrating at some point.

Also, it bothers me that I'm getting light loli vibes from Mahiru. Oh well.

Conclusion

In the end, TonaTen is a very basic romance, full of cute and sweet moments and slow but steady development, managing to dodge most of the ugly romance tropes I'm tired of. That said, that's all that is. If you're looking for plot, drama, depth or anything else, you're in the wrong place here. What it does, it does well, and it doesn't do anything else at all. To me, it's a simple feel-good anime.

Man, I'm getting so good at writing short articles!

How to set up Signal Messenger via Landline Number on Windows

Tue, 04 Jul 2023 00:00:00 +0200

(last updated: 4.7.2023)

Hello and welcome to this little guide!

I recently found out that Signal Messenger can be used without a smartphone. You can set it up through signal-cli and verify the account through a landline number. Now as I embarked on this journey in order to introduce my grandparents to Signal, I realized that there doesn't seem to be an up-to-date guide on the process, so I decided to make one of my own.

As I've done this on a Windows machine, this is what the guide will be based on. The steps should be almost exactly the same on Linux, but no guarantees.

Let's get started!

Prerequisites

First of all, download the signal-cli kit from the signal-cli repo. Just choose the newest release, download the one ending on “Windows.tar.gz”.
You will need to extract this folder. Use an archiver utility such as 7-Zip to do this, and place the contents somewhere you'll find them, e.g. on the Desktop. In my case, I had to extract twice because it seems that 7-Zip is confused by the .tar.gz format.

Next, you will need to install Java so you can actually run the Signal CLI. At the time of writing, JRE 17 is required for this. Just check the “Installation” section of the README in the repo for up-to-date information and get it somewhere, if you don't already have it installed. Note that after JRE 9, the JRE isn't distributed separately anymore, but comes bundled with the JDK.

Time to Set Up Signal

Now we will register a new Signal account based on your landline number through the Signal CLI.
To do so, first start a shell, such as PowerShell or CMD on Windows. I generally recommend PowerShell.
After doing so, switch into the folder containing the Signal CLI using the cd command. That could look something like this:
PS C:\Users\MY_USERNAME> cd Desktop/signal-cli-0.11.11

Register the account

We can now register your phone number. Note that you'll need the number prefixed with a ‘+’ and the country code.

Before you execute this step: be aware that this effectively makes the executing instance the newly created Signal account's master instance, used to manage the account. This does not have to be the same system on which you want to actually use Signal.

From here on out, FULL_CAPITAL words mean things that may differ in your case, and in commands specifically, should be replaced with your own data, e.g. your phone number.

The executable is in the bin folder.
Execute this command:
$ bin/signal-cli -u YOUR_NUMBER register

This might not work anymore, in my case it didn't. I got an error like this:

Captcha required for verification, use --captcha CAPTCHA
To get the token, go to https://signalcaptchas.org/registration/generate.html
Check the developer tools (F12) console for a failed redirect to signalcaptcha://
Everything after signalcaptcha:// is the captcha token.

To proceed, open the link mentioned in the error message and complete the Captcha. The site will ask for permission to open the Signal app; Decline this. Below the captcha box, there should be a clickable “Open Signal” text. Right-click this, copy the link and paste it into a text editor. It should look something like this:
signalcaptcha://signal-hcaptcha.5fad97ac... (very long code)
Remove the signalcaptcha:// part at the start. What remains is your captcha code.

Now execute the command from earlier again, but this time include the catpcha flag and the code you just generated:
$ bin/signal-cli -u YOUR_NUMBER register --captcha CAPTCHA_CODE

Now wait 60 seconds. Apparently, Signal doesn't allow registering via voice verification on the first try so it tries to send an SMS instead, which you can't receive on your landline number.
After the time has passed, execute the same command again (I swear this is the last time) but append the --voice flag:
$ bin/signal-cli -u YOUR_NUMBER register --captcha CAPTCHA_CODE --voice

Verifying your account

You should now get a call on the number you've specified, practically immediately after the previous command returns. The caller will probably be in your language (otherwise in English) and will give you a 6-digit verification code. Note this down, then verify your newly created account via this command:
$ bin/signal-cli -u YOUR_NUMBER verify VERIFICATION_CODE

Link Signal account to app

Now install the Signal app on your computer, if you haven't already, and open it. The app should show a QR code and ask you to pair the instance by scanning it with your phone.
But we're not gonna do that.

Parse the QR code by e.g. cutting it out via snipping tool and uploading it to zxing.org, or use a QR code scanner on your phone and send yourself the parsed code. At the time of writing, the code looks something like this:
sgnl://linkdevice?uuid=************&pub_key=****************
Copy the entire code.

Now we can add the computer to your Signal account by executing:
$ bin/signal-cli -u YOUR_NUMBER addDevice --uri "YOUR_CODE"

If you've been using PowerShell until now, there's a chance that this command fails with an error like this:

INFO AccountHelper - The Signal protocol expects that incoming messages are regularly received.
ERROR AddDeviceCommand - Add device link failed
org.asamk.signal.manager.api.InvalidDeviceLinkException: Invalid device link uri
at org.asamk.signal.manager.DeviceLinkInfo.parseDeviceLinkUri(DeviceLinkInfo.java:30)
at org.asamk.signal.manager.ManagerImpl.addDeviceLink(ManagerImpl.java:306)
at org.asamk.signal.commands.AddDeviceCommand.handleCommand(AddDeviceCommand.java:48)
at org.asamk.signal.App.handleLocalCommand(App.java:273)
at org.asamk.signal.App.init(App.java:213)
at org.asamk.signal.Main.main(Main.java:58)
Add device link failed.
'pub_key' is not recognized as an internal or external command,
operable program or batch file.

This has happened to me. In that case, just copy the command and execute it in a CMD instead. That worked for me! Not sure what the problem here really is, I guess something something encoding/special characters.

If everything was succesful, you should now see the Signal app on your computer syncing chats and contacts.
Note that, if you ever need to switch to/add another device, you can do so with the addDevice command from above. But for this you'll need this specific signal-cli instance as far as I know… so don't delete it! Though you should be able to recover it using your landline number for voice confirmation again, if you really need to.

You might need to execute this command once as well:
$ bin/signal-cli -u YOUR_NUMBER receive
Though I'm not sure if that's necessary.

Now you'll just have to wait about a minute and your newly setup Signal acccount should be ready to use on your computer.

We're done!

If you've gotten this far, I guess that means everything worked out.

I hope this guide has helped you with the setup and saved you the hour of trial-and-error'ing your way through the process, digging through multiple guides, forums and Github issues that I went through.

Until next time o/

Getting in and out of World of Tanks

Mon, 05 Jun 2023 00:00:00 +0200

Little more than a year ago, a post on the other blog had me hit up my friend for a couple rounds of World of Tanks for the first time in forever. Or so I thought.

First of all, it was more than a couple rounds. We played together for almost exactly one year, roughly an hour every evening, and it was perhaps the most stable routine I've had during that time.

Secondly, it wasn't “for the first time in forever” apparently… I originally started playing the game in 2012 or 2013, shortly after it came out, simply because I happened to read a game's magazine (an actual printed one!) and they had a long guide about World of Tanks as well as a CD containing the installer. Yup, the olden days were great.

Anyway, I don't remember too much of that time. I must have played the game a lot, as 6000 rounds played suggests somewhere between 1000 and 2000 hours of playtime, making it probably my most or second-most played game. I think it was the only occasion I was really “into” an MMO in my life. There was still my time with Eve Online that came a few years after that, though that didn't last as long.
I think I played the game for about 1.5 years, but my memory is hazy honestly. I was of the impression that most of that time overlapped with the time the other guy played it, though he says that he only started closer to when I quit the game.
I don't think there was any specific reason why I quit. It had become a habit for me to play every evening, starting around 20:00 and playing until I went to sleep. But at some point I grew tired of it, and my rounds in the evenings were often cut short when too many matches in a row left me with nothing but frustration.

When I started playing again last year though, I used an account I had created not too long ago, and that used my own email adress instead of my mother's. It turned out that even that account was 4 or so years old and I had about a thousand matches on it already. Huh. I didn't remember playing that account much and I wonder when that happened. Anyway, this was only convenient because this way I at least had tanks around tier V or VI like my friend so we could play together from the start.

Skip ahead to about a year later… already four months ago because I'm lazy, and also IMHHW… and my friend finally quit. I have almost stopped playing as well, though I sometimes start up the game to reroll daily missions and play an occasional round of lowtier to complete them… #HealthyHabits

So, here go a couple of impressions about that year with the game and my takeaways from that time.

The Game has Changed

To no big surprise, the game has changed in the past 9 years. The other guy went over many of the relevant changes which I will not repeat now, though I'll add some impressions myself.

For one thing, the number of tanks in the game increased massively. Several new nations were added in the meantime, several new branches in the tech tree as well as a ton of premium tanks. To be honest, I didn't care much for the new tanks. I'd never gotten to tier X on my old account, so it's not like I was running out of interesting tanks to play. Sure, more tanks means more choice which isn't a bad thing, but the first impression that stuck was that I only encountered stuff that I didn't know on the field, and generally felt pretty insecure about getting back into the game. What do you mean I actually have to put in effort and learn things?

This might be a good time to take a step back and look at what kind of player I was back then. For one thing, bringing up the stats page for my old account tells us that I was not a good player. An overall WN8 of 1064 doesn't seem too bad, until you look further and realize that I spent 85% of my matches in tier VI and below, including over a thousand battles in tier I and II tanks. Looking back, it's no wonder I never owned a tier X tank. Though for some modicum of justification, in the olden days it took much longer to gain the necessary XP, and playing tier V/VI tanks was necessary in order to earn the credits to even play my only tier IX tank. And looking at my stats on the T-54, I was green on it? ~~Ignore the 44% WR~~

Something smells of dead seals.

I once logged into my old account out of curiosity, and I still remember the absurd selection of crew skills on my top tier tanks. I was not just a bad player apparently, but had fundamentally either no idea what I was doing, or at least never bothered to engange in any way with the game's meta, reading guides or whatever. People who play games for fun without tryharding to be good at them are a mystery to me. I said you're a mystery, 13-years-old me! For context, I was completely F2P back then and I kept this tradition up.

Anyway, to get back to the present, it seems like I wasn't a good player in the first place and learning would be part of the process. And so it happened. WoT was (or still is, if I would be playing that is) a heavy learning experience, but you can see the fruits of your labor when that one tank suddenly clicks with you after a hundred matches, or you see your overall performance improve significantly in the general statistics kindly provided by websites such as tomato.gg and wotstats.org.

Getting better do be a pretty good feeling

So I had to learn the important properties of a ton of new tanks (and relearning old ones) which mostly worked well, but to the very end I still struggled to differentiate tanks with similar names. For example, I kept mixing up the T49 and T69, although one of them is a tier IX light tank, and the other a nice tier VIII medium tank. Let's not even talk about the VK-30wtf ones and all the other VKs. And then there's the occasional collector's vehicle or rare reward or premium tank that you encounter perhaps once in 200 matches and would have already forgotten that it exists by the time you see it again. Or, well, I would. Don't trust my memory.

Five of these tanks I still cannot tell apart.

In general, this sometimes evoked the feeling of it all being a bit too much. People on the forums and Reddit were arguing that they need new tech tree lines because they'd already researched everything there was in the game. I disagree. If you believe the game is not worth playing without having new tanks to research, then I think there's other more important problems. Though of course that's easy to say for someone who's never been in that situation.
Perhaps though, the bigger problem are the premium tanks. Tanks in a tech tree line at least tend to share similar names and characteristics, which makes it easier to remember them as a set rather than inidividuals, as is often the case with premium tanks.

The health pool of vehicles in the game has significantly increased across the board which I think is a good change… for the most part. It does reduce the “every single shot counts” mentality and generally makes the game less punishing (and less rewarding) which is not entirely positive imo, but at least it means less oneshots from vehicles with high alpha, and less getting machine-gunned to death in a single autoloader-clip.

There's a couple… I would call them QoL improvements, though that's really the end result of Wargaming relaxing their policies with regards to goods that were formerly only available for gold. Back in the old days, you started out with only five garage slots and the only way to increase that number was to pay real money or win in some of the rare contests. Fast forward to today, where you already start with more slots as you own the tier I tank of every nation, but you will also semi-regularly receive garage slots as rewards for daily missions and other in-game events. This significantly improves flexibility for F2Ps, allowing you to try out more tanks etc.
Another great addition are tier VIII premium tanks in the bond shop. While not having active premium time still means significantly reduced credit gains and potentially having to save up for quite some time for a new vehicle, those tier VIII premiums help alleviate that to some extent. There's also regular events with discounts on consumables or equipment which helps further and generally means less time spent grinding credits. The bond shop premiums aren't as good as those only available for gold (surprise) but they're certainly decent enough and absolutely playable.
Finally, add demounting tickets that you get for free from daily missions, so you can use and reuse your expensive equipment on multiple tanks.

The interface has changed quite a lot. Some of these are questionable changes, such as giving every vehicle a “firepower” rating derived from it's alpha, reload time, accuracy, aim time and what not accumulated through some arbitrary formula no one knows. They seem to go into the same vein of mechanics aimed at making the game more accessible, such as the penetration indicators in-match, except in a way that distracts from the necessary complexity.
But some of them are great. The penetration indicator means that you're at least not hard-punished for every single well-armored tank that you didn't memorize the entire armor layout for. Showing actual and maximum view range on the minimap is great, and there's several other good changes.
The module interface had me miss the old one a little, though in the end I got used to it.

One thing that has changed significantly though, is that the interface has also succumbed to the “it all being a bit too much” I mentioned earlier. WoT added a ton of components that clutter up the garage view, to the point that some of them even end up overlaying each other, e.g. news in the bottom left overlay the daily missions until you click the news away. There's now the daily missions in the bottom left, a tab for vehicle comparison in the bottom right, possibly a banner for the running battle pass below the battle button, and a button to switch game modes next to it. There's two additional banners for the campaigns, then five expandable tabs of vehicle stats on the right of the screen that don't even fit completely, including the aforementioned accumulated ratings that shouldn't exist imo. This was definitely overwhelming for me when I returned, and you have to consider that I already knew half those interfaces. Again, I got used to it and it's not that bad after all… but sometimes, the game's interfaces include some very questionable choices or generally design that doesn't give a great overview.

The missions tab for example shows, I'm guessing around 30 active, missions at any given time. Most of these will be irrelevant to you because you don't have the necessary tank, they are sometimes limited to only a day or two, or only one to a few completions, while others can be repeated daily, some only with tanks of certain nations or tiers or tech tree lines etc. and it's overall such a confusing mess that I relied more on the news in the game launcher to tell me what's up and only use the missions tab to check the conditions for specific missions that I already knew existed, instead of using it exploratively.

This is one example, but there's plenty more cases where some piece of information or functionality is placed somewhere you would not expect it, or you have to google how some functionality works because it's not properly explained in-game, or the interface is inconvenient.
As another example, I don't think anyone tells you that you can't just remove equipment from your tank again after you've mounted it. You can either destroy it, spend gold to demount it, or use a demounting kit. And in the case of improved equipment (or was it the other one?) you'll need bonds to unmount them.
Additionally, you get a preview of the effects a piece of equipment has on your vehicle's stats before you mount it. But that doesn't work after you've already filled the slots. Are you considering switching out your vertstabs for vents, but you'd like to see the stat changes first? Have fun computing them yourself, or spending a demounting ticket to demount the vertstabs so you can then preview the stats for vents on the now-empty slot. It's minor inconveniences like this that don't break anything, but there's a ton of these with the WoT interface which often makes it cumbersome or plain annoying to use.
Finally, why is the Twitch drop store located under the “Depot” tab, instead of the Store? What?

Some of these can fortunately be fixed by mods. While there's certainly questionable or even plain dumb mods (I get the arty hate, but why would you automatically blacklist every arty player who ever shot you?), there's some that help with simple conveniences, such as showing gunmark and mastery stats for your active tank in-game. This is nice, but it does make me wonder, why aren't they part of the game itself? Why do I have to re-install a modpack for this on every bigger update?

Finally, let's get to those additions which are perhaps the most interesting to discuss… the new rewards. Mostly, timed missions and events (such as weekend specials and arcade mode), battle pass and daily missions. These sometimes offer pretty cool rewards such as time-limited and decent premium tanks or blueprints that let you research tanks for free. There's no doubt that these are exactly the sort of rewards that are supposed to motivate you to play more (and in some cases spend money) and you know… it works.

In the worst possible way.
I remember spending an hour beyond what I originally wanted to play, trying to finish that despicable “7 crits in one battle” mission in my tier II tank, because I really wanted those three blueprints. This hour wasn't fun, it was pure pain as, for once, everything went wrong in those tier II matches and I didn't get those 7 crits because RNG said fuck you. And this wasn't the only time something like this happened. Those new events and missions ultimately get me to play in a way I don't want to play. I remember playing one of the arcade modes (the snowball/sliding one) and complaining the entire time how much I hate the mode. I wanted those quick 300 bonds though, so I played it. Similarly, there's tons of players grinding up through arty lines to finish campaign missions, even though they would never play arty otherwise.

The former are partially on me of course. That was deeply unhealthy behavior I engaged in and I wasn't able to convince myself to stop most of the time. That said, I'm pretty sure it's working exactly as intended. The fact that I still log into the game… to reroll daily missions and play matches in my tier I and II tanks to clear them? That's stupid and speaks to how effective these tactics are. It's unhealthy, not only for me, but for the game as a whole.

Looking back, a new Perspective

Playing the game again after so many years, it was quite interesting for me to see how I perceive many things differently.

For one thing, I think I wasn't aware that World of Tanks is hard. At this point I believe it might genuinely be the most brutal strategy game I've ever played. To be fair, I've never gotten more deeply into RTS games: the best I could do was play Age of Empires II against easy mode CPU as if the endgoal was to build and research everything you can.

But in a way, WoT at least feels way more strategic than all the other strategy games I've played. Or maybe it's simply more complex. When I stop to think about it, the amount of factors you take into account when deciding where you head at the start of the match can be insane. Sure you might go “I'm a heavy so I go heavy flank” regardless of the fact that you're two tiers down, have no gun depression and play on Malinowka, but most of the time that should work reasonably well. But if you're down for it, you can thoroughly go through the various strengths and weaknesses of your tank, the various flanks and positions on the current map, the composition of your team and the enemy team, the way they split up once it starts etc. And that's only the opening moves.
Knowing when to retreat and how is an incredibly strong skill in this game, and few players are good at this.

For being an arcade shooter, the game requires a lot of knowledge. There's the knowledge about every single tank in the game which starts with “can I realistically penetrate it frontally” and goes through various hoops such as “will they spot me if I shoot here” or “can I circle this isolated heavy” to “can I justify dunking my tier X tank into the roof of this tier VIII TD right below me and what creative insults will my teammates hurl at me when I inevitably do?”.

The maps may suck in some or a lot of ways, but they're often full of tiny details that can result in interesting situtations and make or break a playable position. A tiny bump in the ground can possibly be what I needed to go hulldown with my Patriot and demolish everyone approaching me, or it can be my demise as it prevents the gun of my SU-101 from targeting the tanks approaching on a flat plane right in front of me, and remind me why I hate this thing so much.

At some point I developed a kind of of intuition that told me what I was about to do would go horribly wrong. But rationally I knew that pushing the isolated enemy heavy with my fully loaded auto-loader is exactly what this tank was made for, and since I'm a rational human being, I do it anyway. And then get eaten alive by a tank one tier down after missing one shot at point blank range and bouncing two on his 80mm of side and ass armor before going into 35 seconds of reload and eventually leaving the match as top tier with one shot worth of damage.

It's a complex (and sometimes heavily luck-based) game, and, unfortunately, in part because the game doesn't tell you about the details of some of its mechanics. I don't even know how I found out about the 70° (or whatever) autobounce angle, though I suppose the other guy told me, and by extension I didn't know about sidescraping for a long time, which is an essential technique for some heavy tanks. Some systems like spotting are fundamental for the entire game and yet never properly explained. And even after you've looked at guides made by other players and having played thousands of matches, including in scouts, you still end up completely stumped by some of the things that happen. At some point you accept that the system is a meme and trying to understand what happened is often a waste of time and energy.

Sometimes, frustration mounts because of the absurdly bad luck you're having. For one thing, RNG is an integral part of the game. The damage you deal, the penetration of your shell and where exactly it hits is in no small part up to a dice roll. Even if you accurately aim at an enemy's weakspot from point blank range, the game might still fuck you over by having your well-aimed shell fly off into Nirvana, rolling -25% on penetration so you barely fail to penetrate, or get a very low roll that leaves the enemy alive with 10 HP on a shot that should have easily killed.

Add to this the fact that, even if you play like a god, often times your team will let you down by playing like absolute morons, being smacked like flies, leaving one of the key points on the map completely open, only turning back to de-cap when it's already too late or straight up sabotaging you by pushing your tank out of cover, refusing to participate in the match, and intentionally or unintentionally drowning themselves.
Statistically, it can be said that you can only affect the outcomes of about a third of the matches you play. The other two thirds are guaranteed losses and guaranteed wins. This wouldn't even be so bad if these were fun matches, but steamrolls are an uncannily common occurrence in WoT. It doesn't take long for a seemingly balanced match to turn into a one-sided slaughter that doesn't grant you even a second shot of damage before you're overwhelmed by the unstoppable mass of enemy vehicles. And just as often the opposite happens, matches where your team wrecks the enemy team so fast, you either didn't get the chance to fight at all as you were busy catching up with the frontline, or maybe you even get your fair share of damage in, but no one could call it a fun or in any way entertaining match.

WoT makes it very easy to feel like the victim. I know that statistically this shouldn't be possible. But you'll still end up asking yourself, why did I lose 10 matches in a row again when I don't think I've ever had such a long winning streak? How do people consistenly hit and penetrate my Patriot's hatch multiple times in a row, when I've almost given up on these types of hatches as they're virtually impossible to hit for me? How did my shell land outside the aim circle? Why does my 122mm gun fail to overmatch 20mm armor plates, yet a shell with 60mm pen gets through 200mm of my armor? How is it that, when pushing early scouting positions, I'll get destroyed instantly on half my attempts, while the average enemy scout takes only a single shot?

Some of these are either skill issues or the result of a bunch of well-known bias being in full effect. But these can't answer all the questions raised, and the frustration remains anyway to the point that the game sometimes has me question my sanity. Knowing the mechanics of the game well in addition to some basic statistics has only made this worse I feel.

What I Learned about Myself

I take some interesting lessons away from this year of playing WoT. One is the fact that I'm very vulnerable to techniques like what they do with daily missions, as I described above. This wasn't completely new to me, as I remember collecting daily login rewards in various games months after I stopped playing them. But that's tame, I log in, pick up my reward, forget about the game for 24h. WoT on the other hand, showed me how badly this can be abused, and it's something I need to be more aware of in the future.

Another thing that isn't exactly new, was seeing how much more motivated I am to play when I'm not alone. Most of the time I played with my friend, but on days where he couldn't play, I found myself playing a couple rounds alone at best, and sometimes not at all. I don't even think playing together makes such a big difference. Often times we went to different flanks and effectively played on our own separate part of the map anyway, yet somehow that made the entire experience much better. The frustrating parts of the game in particular became more bearable when I wasn't playing alone.

What was a bit surprising to me was seeing how little I enjoy “campy” TDs and similar tanks. I've played almost a thousand matches in the StuG III on my old account (though to be fair, it's a very flexible TD) so I assumed I'd like that. No, I don't. Sitting in the back waiting for the rest of the team to lose the flank so I get some targets to pop is pretty much the worst playstyle I could think of. Of course, sniper TD doesn't mean you have to sit at the base the entire match, but generally… eh. I'm a patient person, but this isn't for me.
Arty on the other hand, I found surprisingly enjoyable. I couldn't play more than three arty matches in a row, but as a change of pace compared to regular tanking, it worked fine for me.

Finally, the most interesting bits.
I get mad at games. I think I'm generally a pretty chill person, but there are some very specific things that can get me mad very quickly, and some video games hit that weakspot. This is one of the reasons I mostly avoid playing games against my friends and prefer coop instead. Getting mad at your friends over a videogame sucks.
Anyway, if this happens depends a lot on the game. It used to be pretty bad but I think I've gotten much better. That said, WoT showed me that I still have a pretty long way to go. I wasn't able to stay calm playing this game on some days. It sometimes got bad enough that I quit early because it wasn't fun, for me, and perhaps for my friend as well. Though I guess a big part of this is the general frustration with the game, and I'm not sure that staying calm would have helped much with that I supppose.

The last bit was seeing how greedy the game could make me.
Imagine seeing a lonely enemy through proxyspot right around the corner and he's turned his turret away from you. He's most likely alone there, but it's one of the key spots on the map, so there are probably one to three TD guns pointed at you. Do you take the shot?
I tend to take chances like this. I would often times take very obviously unjustified risks when the situation looked like free daamage. It's not that I wasn't aware of the consequences, I just hoped for the best, that I would get my shell out and not catch three in return fire.
Sometimes this worked out nicely, because the enemy team decided to leave the classic TD spots completely open by sheer luck, meaning that guy was completely alone and I got a shot of free damage thanks to my ~~courage~~ recklessness. On average though, you get a free one-way trip back to the garage instead. I was quite surprised that I would frequently struggle this hard to make the decision that was without a doubt the smarter option.

The Spark

I feel like I've said a lot of negative things over the course of the past couple thousand words. Well, you know the tradition on this blog. But I'll not end this on a “I still kinda enjoyed it” note, but go into a bit more detail.

WoT has good moments. In fact, it can be cathartic, exciting and get my pulse up (in the good way) perhaps unlike any other game I've ever played.

The late game in some matches, when there's only a handful of tanks left on each team, you don't know where half of them are and the situation is pretty balanced, can be very exciting and the perfect moment for some deep strategic thinking, trying to probe for what the enemy team is doing and how you can best employ your tank in this specific situation. There's nothing quite like barely wrangling victory out of the hands of an enemy team that fought tooth and nail to survive, ending with an amazing sense of achievement as you know you earned this victory.

The game is full of good moments like this. Maybe you end up having to hold one of the main flanks in the match with one other random guy, and it turns out he does not only have a brain, but you synergize so well that you manage to win against four enemy tanks and afterwards you know you could entrust your life to your newfound bro.
Sometimes you take out an enemy tank entirely through blindshots because you got the positions down that well. Or through sheer luck, the HE shell that was meant for the impenetrable front of the enemy Obj. finds its way into the side of another enemy heavy, high-rolling on both pen and damage for a whopping 800. Or you spend one minute and 5.000 credits in ammunition failing to penetrate an enemy tank that similarly did nothing but bounce off you in the same timeframe. Or maybe you enjoy an absurdly stupid last stand against eight enemy tanks, somehow managing to take out half of them because they somehow keep missing, only hit your tracks or bounce on your 30mm of back armor. Or maybe you had a guy from last match send you the most creative insults over something you don't even remember happening.

Some of these things I still remember to this day, because they were this lucky, funny, or exciting. It's these moments that reignite the spark, that remind you why you play this game. In a way, every match you play is an attempt to find these moments. But at times, it feels like the game is a desert of frustration and unbalanced game design, and the occasional moment of excitement is but a fleeting reminder that you're in a very unhealthy, addictive relationship with this game.

There's still some general satisfaction to be had by getting better at the game. There's been a surprising number of times where from one day to the next a tank seems to have suddenly clicked with me, and I started performing at least notably above average on it. And sometimes you find that rare beauty that somehow works for you even though everyone else (including statistics) say it sucks. I will always love you, KV-3.

Miscelleaneous

There's a few more unrelated things I wanted to note.

For one thing, I noted with interest how Wargaming managed to come up with some sorts of gameplay that are generally unfun for everyone involved. This goes in particular for some specific tank (lines).
One example of this is the Italian TD line. Playing against them isn't fun, as they have very high DPM due to their special autoloader guns, and it's virtually impossible to damage them frontally since they're almost completely without weakspots. Interestingly, while I haven't played them myself, the general consensus seems to be that they aren't fun to play either, by virtue of being plain boring in terms of playstyle.

A sort of takeaway for me is the fact that tanks can be very un-fun to play against, despite being in no way overpowered. Take the FV4005, which is generally only notable for its gun with an alpha huge enough to oneshot even many tier X tanks with a highroll. This may sound OP at first, but considerig that the tank has mostly underwhelming stats on almost all other parameters, most players don't regard it as particularly good. I doubt there's anyone who would argue that the tank is overpowered. However, I still believe it constitutes bad gameplay. Almost the entire point of this tank is oneshotting other tanks. This doesn't work out too often, but every time it does, it most likely ruins someone else's match entirely. Oneshots, in a game like WoT, are a very bad idea. This is a distinction that I found very interesting, and curiously, many players seem unable to make it. What I observed is that they think in terms of “is the tank good/OP or not” and this is where it ends.

In general, the WoT community seems a bit… weird honestly. It's sort of toxic, but that's keeping in tradition with all online games that are at least somewhat competitive. There's a pretty big crowd of people who are seriously trying to get better at the game and are very knowledgeable and sometimes helpful, yet at the same time harbor some strange opinions. A common argument on the WoT Reddit was about gold ammo. The apparent majority of players respond to complaints about goldspamming, saying that gold ammo is not more than a way of eliminating non-pens due to lowrolls and that it is not a replacement for skill.
The first one is a very weird argument that I'm not even sure how to respond to, and the second one is plain absurd. Yes, an idiot with gold ammo still plays like an idiot. That doesn't change the fact he replaced the “skills” (or specifically knowledge, positioning and/or luck) that he'd need to penetrate my tank from the front with a simple and brainless “gold ammo goes brrrr”. This goes back to the first argument: gold ammo is more than a way to circumvent RNG, it fundamentally changes how you play the game. Apart from being a straight upgrade to regular ammo in 99% of cases, as someone who barely uses gold ammo, there are many fights you know you cannot take as you're simply unable to damage the enemy tank, which ultimately means you have to think much more about where you go in general, and how you manage your positioning to get into enemy's sides etc. Gold ammo eliminates a sizable part of the strategizing here. Many tanks that would be hard to deal with suddenly become easily damageable.
Anyway, the WoT community is weird. I'm always a bit stumped when people are so unable to make basic, comprehensive arguments.

Conclusion

I'm pretty there was more I wanted to say, but I forgot what it was. The usual, I guess. Enjoy a sub-6k-words article for once I guess.

In the end, I'm not sure I will miss WoT. I've said I'm still “playing” but I'm not really playing. I certainly enjoyed it for the time it lasted, it was a nice routine to have for relaxing (?) evenings, and I appreciated being able to talk with one of my bros on a daily basis.

Maybe I'll pick it up again for a couple rounds, or even a couple more in the future. For now, I've had my fill and I've already made good use of this extra hour every evening to get some Japapense vocabulary learning in, and I'm quite happy with the progress.

PS: I would've loved to add screenshots all over this article from funny situations I've had in matches, but even though I have all the replays saved, I can't watch them anymore since the game client has updated… eeeeh

If my Heart had Wings: The Long Journey

Fri, 21 Apr 2023 00:00:00 +0200

If my Heart had Wings (この大空に、翼をひろげて / Kono Oozora ni Tsubasa wo hirogete, “Spread your wings towards this vast sky”), abbreviated IMHHW hereafter, is a game that has accompanied me for… a whole 3 years now. I started playing it in my second Bachelor semester, finished studying in the meantime, and recently, also this game.

The game was part of a bundle of visual novels that I got via HumbleBundle. I'd started by playing Highway Blossoms (HB for short) from that bundle, a cute romance story of two girls meeting by chance and then going for a road trip / treasure hunt crossover through America. For some reason I'd decided to make a let's play out of that, so you can find the entirety of it on my Youtube channel. In any case, I had a lot of fun with that and I'd been wanting to get into Japanese VNs anyway, so continuing with IMHHW was the natural choice for me.

I didn't exactly have high expectations for the game, but somehow I was under the impression that it was one of the most popular VNs out there. I honestly don't know where that came from, as after looking at some stats on vndb.org and Steam, this doesn't quite seem to be the case. I mean, it's still a popular VN in terms of how many people played it (#30 on vndb), and a 90% recommended rating on Steam isn't bad either, but I thought it was at the top.

In any case, let me say this right at the start: IMHHW is not good. I don't know how it ever got those ratings, but man… do people have no taste? I mean, I played through the entire game as well as the “Flight Diary” DLC, so… it wasn't trash on the level of DAL. But still…

But before I get into the details of what happened in the game, I still wanna talk a little about the experience of let's playing it in particular. For one thing, I believe that context may have had a significant impact on my consumption and thus view of the game as a whole.

The Recording Experience

All in all, the experience was certainly less fun than HB. For one thing, all characters in HB are voiced (and pretty well at that) so I let them do the talking. All I had to do was contribute the narrator's voice and the occasional snarky remark. IMHHW on the other hand… was also completely voiced, but in Japanese of course. Having the characters say their lines in Japenese, then reading the English translation after that would have made the whole thing an even bigger slog than it already was, so I recorded it without voice acting. Instead, I voiced all the characters myself. IMHHW has quite a few unique voices, and while it was fun to play around with that a little, all in all I don't think I was anywhere near able to deliver a good voice acting performance for like ten different characters. I had to stay fully concentrated the entire time so I don't mix up the voices. And having to voice everything alone, with the majority of it being high-pitched Japanese highschool girls, also meant I strained my voice quite a bit. In the end, recording was rather uncomfortable and I was often mentally and vocally done for after almost every recording session. On top of that, the result was obviously not even close to the original voice acting experience.

Since I mentioned the slog already: IMHHW is long. Or, well, it is long compared to HB at least. vndb puts HB at about 8h, compared to IMMHW's 45h. That alone isn't a problem, when a good game is long that means more enjoyment. But let's not forget that IMHHW isn't a good game. For one thing, the pacing is glacial. I made a habit of quickly summarizing what happened in the previous episode at the beginning of each one, and I had to skim the previous episode every single time because there is so damn little of… anything memorable going on. But let's keep the critique of the game itself for the next section. In any case, I ended up recording about 80 episodes of this game, and I didn't even include the last two routes in that since I couldn't be bothered and people didn't care any more.

The hardest part though was my attempt to fit every “chapter” into one recording session (the term “chapter” is only what I've coined it). A chapter ends when the screen goes white, then we get a little blurry look at some windmills and the game's slogan (?) in the middle of the screen. Now I think that's generally a good way to wrap it up, but it honestly seems a little pointless in hindsight. The chapters were often longer than the episodes I ended up making, so I had to cut them into multiple pieces anyway, ultimately defying the point of the entire exercise. Moreover, these “chapter ends” were placed seemingly arbitrarily throughout the story. For one thing, it's not like they give any sort of pointer to where you are in the story. They don't have numbers and they aren't referenced anywhere else in the game. There were many places where I wished they'd given us a chapter end when they didn't, and a few others that made me wonder why they used this lenghty transition, instead of a regular scene change. But the more painful part was the utter inconsistency in their lengths.

I'd usually prepared for a recording session by planning sufficient time that I could be alone without disturbances, set up my mic properly etc. But I never knew beforehand whether I would record for 15 minutes or 3 hours. Yes, I had multiple recordings that lasted over two hours. Every single one of these was painful. At the end I'd be completely tired out, praying for the game to finally give me a chapter end.

Now, to be fair, this isn't exactly the game's fault. It's a lengthy, recognizable transition that they're free to use however they like, and it's entirely my fault for stubbornly relying on them to tell me when to finish recording. I'm just bringing it up here because it added to the overall pain of recording it.
Thinking back, I don't even remember how I handled this in HB. Maybe they had more regular transitions that felt like good stopping points. Maybe I didn't care and stopped recording when I felt like it. Or maybe I wasn't bothered as much since the game was fun and I wasn't tired from having to voice it in its entirety.

So, as mentioned before, I'd finished the entire game, but I only recorded the first three routes. That means the last two routes and the DLC were a solo play experience and man did that make a difference. I could play the game whenever I felt like it with no schedule or anything, no “clean up” work in terms of editing to do afterwards, no getting tired out by voicing the characters, enjoying the original voice acting and somewhat compensating for the pacing with my reading speed.

While I still wouldn't say the game was great after that, I got a fair bit of enjoyment out of it and there were a couple good moments to be found. For the most part, I played it like I played KoiChoco: as my entertainment while having my meals.
Of particular note are the pacing and the voice acting: while the game is slow, it was much, much more bearable when I could just read along. I remember half-finishing Amane's route in about an hour at the start, though to be fair, at that point I was rushing through it and not taking in the voice acting.
This brings me to the next point: I couldn't have imagined what a huge difference the voice acting makes. IMHHW's voices are somewhat forgettable if you ask me, but the acting is on point. It helps a lot with general immersion, and the tone of voice sometimes adds a lot to the expressiveness or the comedy of the scene.

The Plot

For context, here's a little overview of what happens in the game.

We follow the main character, Aoi Minase, a second-year high school student who returns to his hometown of Kazegaura at the start of the game. He used to compete in bicycle races until he injured his leg. With a heavy heart, he left his sports-focused high school and returns home. This is where the game starts.

He starts a “job” as a dorm mother for a run-down girls’ dorm, with the wheelchair-bound Kotori demanding particular attention. At school, he meets the “super repeat student slash genius” Mochizuki Amane, who's been working alone, as the only member of the Soaring Club, in the school's garage for years to get a glider up and running. It's her dream to take this glider above the “morning glory”, a rare cloud formation appearing only once in a couple decades. But the student council threatens to disband the club as it has only one member, and so Aoi and Kotori who've taken an interest in the glider and the morning glory, as well as Aoi's childhood friend Ageha, end up joining the club to save it. Their new lives of working on the glider day in and day out after school, begin. After about a year, a morning glory appears and Amane and Aoi, piloting the glider, barely fail to reach it. Amane graduates as she'd promised the teachers, and thus leaves the club which is demoted to a circle, the glider confiscated and the garage bulldozed.

Amane becomes an adult, I guess

After a timeskip of one year, in which the club members have kept working to improve their skillsets, saved up the money for glider materials etc., they meet the Kazato sisters, Asa and Yoru. The older sister, Asa, heard about the glider and wants to join the club, with her younger sister Yoru tagging along to keep an eye on her. After hearing about their difficult situation, Asa offers the club members to use an old hangar, owned by her rich grandfather, to work on the glider. She joins the club, they sneakily steal the glider from the school, and start their work on building a new and improved glider based on blueprints left behind by Amane.

From here on out, the events depend on which route you ended up on. There's five or six choices spread throughout the game, five routes for each of the girls as well as one “fail” route where Aoi ends up alone. A quick summary for each of the routes, in the order I've played them:

Fail: Nothing happens. The game ends right away after the common route, with only one extra scene saying something along the lines of how they'll keep chasing their dream of crossing over the morning glory. It's almost comical how Asa and Yoru practically remain non-characters, Amane is hinted to still be there but never appears, and the problems with them missing an advisor for their club and having no runway to use are resolved in a sentence or two of narration.
Asa: I don't even remember, something-something romance.
Yoru: not actually Yoru's route, because the twins are both in love with Aoi and Yoru values her sister maybe a bit too much, so they just two-time it. Iirc both of the twin's routes end up without them crossing the morning glory, and the twins keep running the club after Aoi, Kotori and Ageha graduated.
Kotori: a somewhat decent romance between them unfolds, until an accident with the glider leaves Kotori… completely fine, but her parents are so worried they threaten to take her home. The drama around the accident reaches the school, leading to bully-teacher Tobioka taking the runway away from the club members, so they have no way to have the glider take off, should the morning glory appear. Aoi convinces Kotori's father to let her take this last flight, they launch the glider via a slingshot and fulfill their dream of crossing over the morning glory. The ending felt like a lot of forced drama piling up at first, but was neatly and satisfyingly resolved, at least by the standards of the rest of the game.
Amane: Aoi confesses to her right before she leaves, and an entire year passes without them exchanging even a word. We then find out Amane is so far out there that she thought of them as “going out” for this entire year, while Aoi thought that was her way of rejecting him. They make up and they eventually take the glider above the morning glory. I don't remember what happened inbetween. To my surprise, we did actually meet Isuka towards the end of the game. There wasn't much to her disappearing btw, she was hanging out at a hospital for recovery after her accident, and she felt too bad about what happened to talk to Amane after all that.
Ageha: this one's… weird to describe. Not sure how to even do it. Aoi eventually confesses to Ageha, but instead of having a “proper” relationship, they just have sex. Like, all the time. Everytime Aoi asks Ageha about her answer, she somehow dodges the question. Mostly by having sex again. In the end, we learn she has some sort of past trauma that I didn't understand, but they still end up as a couple somehow and cross the morning glory.

That's it.

My Thoughts

I would have liked to write a couple thousand words on each of the routes like I did for KoiChoco, if only… something happened in them. No, in general, I am not able to add much more detail to either the diverging routes or the common route because almost nothing happens. There's very little I could say without straight up going through every scene one by one, or every minor event that ends up being completely irrelevant to the plot, the themes of the game, the characters and their relationships.

Sure, there's some time spent on building character relationships, some of the drama I've mentioned before has actual (sometimes even decently done) buildup and eventual resolution. But in the end, I believe you could have easily cut two thirds of the game without losing literally anything at all. The majority of the game is spent on something something building/repairing/maintaining/practicing with the glider, school and dorm life, as well as some minor drama.

But before I go deeper into all my small and big gripes with the game, let's talk about the positives first. It won't take long.

The Positives

For some reason, the first thing coming to my mind, is how they never played Aoi's dorm mother role for any of the cheap fanservice tropes it enables. Aoi never walked in on a naked girl in the shower or something like that, which surprises me to the point of confusion almost, because that's kind of what I would have expected of this game. But in the end, IMHHW feels not too rich in terms of tropes you're used to from modern anime, though it's certainly weird and unpleasant in other ways I've rarely seen elsewhere.

Let's see, what else… well considering that the game sort of lost my ability and willingness to care, it certainly managed to catch my interest again in a few places. Which is something I did not expect, and is a feat typically very difficult to accomplish I guess.
To be more precise, these moments were mostly on Kotori's route. For one thing, their romance was decently done and somewhat cute. And the ending, while a bit too much and too sudden drama for my taste, managed to create a finale that had stakes and a certain level of excitement to it. Don't get me wrong, none of this was particularly outstanding. It was at the level of a generic, formulaic Hollywood movie that does exactly what it's supposed to at best. But at least those parts had me somewhat engaged and not dying of boredom, which is still kinda… leaps above the rest of the VN.

Look how generic my man looks though

Now, I gotta say I'm pretty sure each of the character routes had its own theme and the way the route's titular character develops. I don't remember these, because they didn't catch me in any way. I didn't care, and the game wasn't able to catch my interest. I can't even tell you what Asa's route, the first one I've played, was about from a thematic point of view, because I forgot. I'm not even sure whether this was due to the fact that the game had already lost my interest by that point and everything was just washing over me, or if the themes were badly executed. Though the fact that I was somewhat engaged again on Kotori's route two routes later makes me lean towards the latter theory.

Wow, look at me ranting about the game in the Positives section again.

Anyway, the only other positive that comes to my mind right now is Ageha's interactions with her little sister Hotaru on her route. They had some incredibly funny banter with each other, great dynamic, and were an all around entertaining vortex of chaos. It was quite refreshing, though it makes you wonder about their comparative lack of character during the remanining 85% of the game.

The Negatives

takes a very deep breath

Well, I don't think I'll have that much to say here. If I compared this to KoiChoco (which is the closest thing in terms of genre and scope that I've played), I had way more to say about it because the game had many good and many bad moments, and overall gave me something to work with. As mentioned before, most of the time nothing happens in IMHHW, and I've probably forgotten about half of the few times that something does happen.

That brings me to the first point: IMHHW feels bland and empty. I've said it before, you could cut away the majority of the game without losing anything. I mean, sure, some of that can be attributed to my lack of interest and care for whatever did happen. After all, I'm the kind of person who wouldn't be able to watch a “pure” slice of life with no real drama or plot. And that's what IMHHW is most of the time: the greater part of the game is spent on the everyday activities of our club members. Working on the glider, going to school, doing stuff around the dorm, activities with friends, etc. They are not relevant to the plot, so at best you could say that they build the relationships between the characters. But there isn't much going on with either these characters or their relationships, aside from the obvious romance. And even that doesn't make much progress until you get into one of the routes for the last third or so of a playthrough.

The only exception here is Kotori: she receives some decent development from the full-on annoying Tsundere she used to be, to a decent character, and I can appreciate that this doesn't happen straight through a romance lense as it does with almost all Tsundere characters ever. All in all, that's pretty much the only semi-interesting character development you're going to see in the game. I don't remember much meaningful development going on in the routes, though I guess Yoru must have had some to end up in a relationship in the first place…

Perhaps most notable is our main character Aoi. He's about as empty as they go, aside from some bouts of egocentrism and meddling in other's business. You might say the latter isn't unusual for your stereotypical “nice guy” who can't leave a damsel in distress alone… except other media tend to set up those situations where “he saves her” in a more believable way. Aoi, on the other hand, comes off as a creep, but more on that later.
Nothing was done with his character. Maybe I missed something, but it was really nothing at all. There's his entire backstory, a broken athlete coming back defeated to his hometown, after an accident stole his dream from him… only to find a new dream to chase, in the sky - and the glider he builds with his friends. Quite poetic, isn't it? Except again, you can remove his entire backstory and nothing of value was lost. It's not like that doesn't make for at least a decent setup, but it is never used for anything. Sometimes he's cycling and mentions how he has to be careful not to strain his leg too much, making me go “ah right, that was a thing”. Sometimes it comes up and is connected to whatever is going on thematically right now, but never in a way that left an impression or… well, even a memory, because I know that it happened but I couldn't even tell you when or how.

It's a shame, because the setup certainly has something to it. And I feel like it may have been possible even, to make something truly great out of his interactions with Kotori, due to how they both had life-changing accidents, ended up depressed, yet found a (new) dream to chase, both of them in their own unique way.
Aoi, having to overcome the emotional burden his previous dream has become, to open himself up to something new. And Kotori, who had, in a way, given up on life, who has to learn that even though she's lost so much and many doors in life have closed for her, there's still so much she can do, and ways for her to dream again.
After that synopsis, I'd be excited to see how these two characters end up affecting and playing off of each other. But nothing of the sort happens. It seems like an obvious choice, but, as I mentioned, Aoi's background is never used for anything thematically. He just got really into gliders, and the fact that he was initially depressed and empty when he returned to Kazegaura is almost swept under the rug. It sometimes pops up again in the most random places, and that's it.

But since I've talked about Aoi already, let's quickly go through the other characters.

Kotori: I don't think I have anything else to say about her. Her development from annoying Tsundere to decent character wasn't bad, and her still haughty attitude, which would normally annoy me, is nicely counterbalanced by her friends making fun of her. All in all, she might be the best character in IMHHW if you ask me.
Ageha: the childhood friend, although a bit more interesting than your average childhood friend/love interest crossover, she's still not an interesting character that the game does anything with.
Amane: the airhead genius who is almost too far out there to live on her own. Not that I have anything against characters with a little bit of crazy or whatever, but I feel like they've taken her too far. Add the fact that they gave her massive boobs and it gets to the point where she feels like less of a character, and more like a comedy device x fetish realization crossbreed. In the end, it's hard to take her seriously, though at least she can be funny at times.
Asa and Yoru: the twin sisters, who I'm not grouping because they're similar characters, but because they do have a lot in common on a more meta level. Like how they seem to be there just to pick up loli fans, and are otherwise probably the most uninteresting characters in the game, or at least the most uninteresting choices. As I said before, I'm sure they had their own themes or something on their routes, but I completely forgot about it. In fact, I remember starting Kotori's route after the twins and being impressed how good it was. Kotori's route isn't even exactly good, but it's decent enough that it made me realize how bad the twins’ routes really were. In the end, they feel very 'tacked on’ and even more bland and boring than the rest of the game. Also, there's sex scenes for the main character(s) on every route, which takes theirs to another level of disgusting…

Look, two children fighting!

There's a couple more recurring (side) characters. One of them is Tatsuya, Ageha's and Aoi's ‘big bro’. He's a decent character, and has some deeper ties to some of the events of the past. These are only revealed fairly late, which was perhaps the only bit of interesting and unexpected (in a good way) story progression in the entire novel.

We also have Tobioka-sensei, who has it out for the Soaring Club. You could call him the bad guy, a bully of a teacher. He later gets his “redemption” on Amane's route, where we learn that his former favorite student, Isuka, who was part of the Soaring Club, retired after an accident. So he keeps blaming the club, hating them with a passion. We learn that he even held back a letter from Isuka to Amane, which made Amane think she disappeared without a word. Tobioka later breaks down crying, regretting what he did.
Truly heartbreaking. Now if only he wasn't an asshole breaking the Soaring Club's equipment with his own hands and also otherwise an unbearably arrogant prick.

Then there's Masatsugu, uh I mean “Ma boi” who doesn't deserve that name. We don't talk about Ma boi. No wait, we will… later.

Next is Kanako, the secret best girl who didn't even get a route. Which is fair, because Aoi doesn't deserve her. Remember when I said Kotori might be the best character in IMHHW? Kanako is a worthy contender. As a side character, she doesn't get nearly as much exposure as the others of course, but she's there throughout the entire game. She's sort of the Onee-san of the dorm residents, and despite not taking part in any of the Soaring Club's activities, she still supports them with her connections, settling disputes within the club or making fun of Aoi. Lots of subtle and somewhat well done and interesting characterization going on with her.

Take a moment to appreciate best girl in apron

There's three more girls living in the dorm, but they're nothing more than filler.
Last one on the list is Akari, the student council president who's kind of a Tsundere for Aoi, but in this weird and aggravating way where she appears to be attracted to him while simultaneously despising him as a person for no apparent reason, even though there's plenty to choose from.

Most of the characters form this one big friend group, but somehow they don't feel like friends to be honest. They don't have meaningful interactions, and the way they sometimes treat each other seems to display a general lack of care and empathy for one another.

By the way, there's no (mutual) romance in IHMMW that does not include Aoi. I always find that a bit disappointing to see, because side character couples, at least in the few media I've seen where they exist, tend to have very solid romances with basically no exceptions. There are some in the DLC, but more on that later.

Finally, IMHHW has several moments that… well, I guess they don't give the sort of impression they were supposed to. Several of them end up being somewhat creepy or otherwise showing the characters in a very bad light, which can be immersion breaking or estrange the reader from them. See section #4 for a compilation of such moments.

Dreams of the Sky

One of IMHHW's main themes is about chasing one's dreams, even if they seem unrealistic, and more specifically about gliders and flying. All of this fell almost completely flat for me.

On the topic of chasing dreams, the game follows the Soaring club members as they face the harsh reality of how difficult it is to build a functioning glider, coupled with repeated setbacks thanks to Tobioka's meddling. We often find the club members depressed on those occasions, but they always end up pulling through somehow.
I couldn't point out anything in particular that bothered me here. My best guess is that building a glider seems a bit too far out there, too unpalpable to be able to relate in any meaningful way. It's only made possible through the introduction of the seemingly all-knowing genius that is Amane. She designs a glider from scratch, writes a flight simulator herself, etc. allowing the Soaring club to face this task that would otherwise be impossible for a bunch of students.
The entire process of building the glider is sort of just there, it's not like we get a proper feeling for how it's slowly coming together. And otherwise the only roadblocks are whatever Tobioka places in their way. This often ends up feeling like forced drama, meant to raise the stakes somehow by adding additional challenges to overcome, but mostly made me sigh in annoyance as I realize this is going to drag out even longer.

The game tried to spark the reader's interest in gliders and aviation, but that mostly failed. I generally appreciate when pure entertainment media try to teach the consumer a little about whatever is at the heart of that specific media, and it's obvious the IMHHW writers did their homework about glider construction, aerodynamics and what not. But unfortunately, the factual information about gliders mostly came in the shape of extended info dumps when you least expect them. Sometimes you go 10 hours without any of the hard facts at all, and then there's suddenly this ten minute explanation about what forward-swept wings are, followed by another one only an hour later. Don't get me wrong, it's an interesting detail, but nothing that warrants such a long scene that feels almost commpletely decoupled from the rest of the game, only to explain something that could surely have been integrated more nicely and explained within three sentences.

Finally, the game wasn't able to infect me with its fascination for the sky. Again, I have a hard time pointing to any specific reason for that. Perhaps it was the fact that I wasn't invested in the game or its characters and their motivation. Perhaps a VN isn't the best medium to confer such a feeling. But after watching The Summit of the Gods recently, I know that, at least, it can be done within media, short of experiencing it for yourself.
This way though, the flight scenes in IMHHW ended up being among the most boring scenes in the game for me.

They tried to channel this fascination towards a more concrete goal by introducing the morning glory, but again, weren't able to catch my interest in any way. Like the gliding in general, maybe this feels too far away to be able to relate for me, and the morning glory way too arbitrary as a symbol.
It's not like I don't get it at all. The goal exists mainly so there can be a way, and its significance comes less from any meaning inherent to the weather phenomenon called Morning Glory, but from the effort it took to get there, plus all the smaller details of how this connects with each of the Soaring Club members’ lives.

There's lots of pseudo-psychological bullshit happening on every route when it comes to the character drama… at least that's what it looked like to me. Nothing I could relate to in any way, and sometimes expressed in ways that made me wonder what the fuck I've been reading for the past five minutes. Like… did any of these sentences even make sense?

To sum it up, IMHHW is a rather long game (vndb rates it at 45h) but it has almost nothing to offer in terms of plot, thematically it falls mostly flat and the characters, far from making up for its other shortcomings, almost drag it down further.
I believe that many of the things I mentioned here probably wouldn't have bothered me if the rest of the game was more convincing… but alas, that's not the case so here we are! ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Peak IMHHW

The following is a collection of moments where the game presents itself at its peak - mostly by alienating the reader when the characters suddenly turn creepy, or rarely being unintendedly funny.

Asa's Cut
Starting off with something tame, there was a scene on Asa's route where she cut her finger while cooking with Aoi. Being the gentleman he is, he immediately comes to the rescue - by sucking her finger. After the bleeding stopped, he handed her a band-aid and let her put it on herself. This is so dumb I couldn't stop laughing for a bit when that happened.
Sucking her finger was both weird and completely unnecessary. She could easily do this herself, and in reality, she should. Sucking someone else's open wound means exchanging bacteria. He took in her blood, and his saliva most likely entered her bloodstream. For this very reason, this is a harmful trope. Y'know, not considering the fact that sucking someone else's finger without their consent and no necessity is weird af.

Honestly, if it were intended that way, the scene might be an amazing illustration of Aoi's character. He does the weird and more “stimulating” thing (sucking her finger), but he does not help her to put on the band-aid, which I imagine might be a bit hard with only one hand. So ultimately he “helps” her with the thing she doesn't need help with but which leaves the deeper impression, while not helping her with the potentially difficult part. He takes the spotlight, but contributes nothing of value. One might call it a perfect ego-trip.

Masatsugu at the Beach
In an attempt to keep this as inconsistent as possible, let's continue with perhaps the worst one of all.
In one of the beach episodes, the club members notice at some point that they aren't alone. Turns out Ma boi was sitting in a bush, stalking them. Most likely to see the girls in their swimsuits. He even happened to have a camera with him. The girls jokingly punish him by throwing beachballs at him. Ageha later comments that he probably “just felt lonely”.

The entire scene is a level of what-the-fuck that I cannot even put into words. I mean, someone stalking girls at the beach and secretly taking photos of them is already creepy as hell. This is the kind of person I'd want nothing to do with in real life. But IMHHW takes this a step further, since Ma boi isn't stalking just anyone, but his (best?) friends… what the hell dude. This is a friendship-cancelled moment if I've ever seen one. To top it all off, IMHHW shows once more how little self-awareness it has through Ageha's comment at the end. Sure, he might “feel lonely”. That's certainly somewhat believable given the context. But this act way overshoots a certain line, and that's not even considering the fact that he brought a camera to keep him company… because he just felt lonely, right?

Thinking back to this scene, I'm still confused. I mean, there's no reason (other than this scene) to believe that the game is trying to present Ma boi as this disgusting creep type of character. But on the the other hand, I cannot imagine a sane human being coming up with this scene, thinking that anyone would go “haha yea poor Ma boi felt lonely, oh that's funny” at this.

Aoi's Meddling
There'll be several moments here… I can't go through all of them in detail. As mentioned previously, Aoi is meddlesome. This is not unexpected, it's perhaps one of the most defining character traits of your factory-made romance protagonist. He can't leave a damsel in distress alone. Women can't fend for themselves after all, and how is a character like Aoi with no redeeming features supposed to attract them, if not by saving them when they need it the most?

There's one scene where Yoru, who is notoriably anti-social (or just can't be bothered I guess) is trying to get away from a group of girls pressuring her into joining a party or something. Aoi eventually decides this is enough and steps in by telling them she's a member of his club and she can't come to the party due to club activities. The girls finally show some understanding and leave Yoru alone. Yoru then complains that she'll have to pretend being a member of the Soaring Club for the rest of the year, but eventually thanks Aoi for his help.

This is another one of those scenes I don't get… Yoru is very clearly depicted as a “strong and independent woman”. She doesn't need Aoi's “help” to refuse an invitation to a party she doesn't want to go to. Moreover, Aoi's lie only camouflages the deeper issue, namely that she has no interest in interacting with these other girls. Situations like this are likely to pop up again until Yoru makes this clear to them, and judging from her character, I have no doubt that she's capable of doing that. Sure you could argue that she'd probably communicate that in a way that would make these girls hate her, but honestly… that's her style and I doubt she'd be bothered by that. Finally, she clearly stated that Aoi's lie will spell more trouble down the road for her, since she's either forced to admit that it was a lie, or to continue pretending that she's part of the Soaring Club. The latter shouldn't be too hard, considering that she joins most club activities anyway, but it's about the fact that Aoi put her in an uncomfortable situation. It's entirely his fault, but she's the one suffering the consequences. The fact that he straight up covered her mouth when she tried to object makes it even worse. Ugh
And topping it all off is the fact that Yoru even thanks him for his help. This feels out of character honestly, and seems more like the writers conveniently bending the characters to whatever fits their romance narrative.

There's many similar cases throughout the story. Close to the beginning, Aoi finds out that Kotori wants to quit their school and go back home. She got a signed letter from her parents that would permit her to do so. Aoi takes the letter and hides it until he convinced her to stay. That's like… if she wants to quit, you have no right to stop her dude??

In fact, IMHHW makes ample use of Kotori's disability so Aoi can be the hero saving his damsel in distress. That's a special kind of disgusting honestly. There was one scene towards the start of the game where Kotori fell into the bathtub and had a panic attack. Aoi came rushing in, lifted her out of the water and the naked girl clung to him, sobbing, until she calmed down. Now, don't get me wrong, there's nothing wrong exactly with the details of what happened here. This could be a moment to show that people with a disability like hers have a tough life, and that even normal everyday activities like taking a bath can pose challenging… or to show that our Tsundere heroine Kotori has a soft side, as well as her own problems to deal with. But the way it was presented, as well as the context of how the entire rest of the game has Aoi treat her as “<girl> that is very dependent on him and partially controlled by him”… yea, this doesn't leave a good aftertaste.
This is also the first scene where you get a glimpse of naked boobs, at least in the uncensored version of the game. Y'know, just to drive home the point of how much the game respects its female characters.

The second scene in the game has Aoi lifting Kotori out of her wheelchair (to repair it) the first time he meets her, without asking her for consent to touch her or anything first. There's other situations where he pushes her wheelchair in a direction when she clearly states she wants to go somewhere else (and would be clearly able to push it there on her own). These are things I can take lightly because it's just a VN and I don't have any close relatives or friends with comparable disabilities, but I can only imagine how jarring this could be to read for someone in a similar situation as Kotori.

I guess one could possibly make an interesting analysis of how the game portraits Kotori's disability.
On one hand, she mostly gets by well on her own. She can push her wheelchair herself and apparently has rather impressive arm muscles due to that. She's mostly a strong character able to live alone away from her family, at the dormitory to which she moved of her own free will. She even becomes president of the Soaring Club down the line and she clearly contributes to the production and maintenance of the glider and its components, chasing her dreams with a strength and confidence that could be inspiring.

On the other hand, she has to be the damsel in distress for Aoi to save her several times throughout the novel. He frequently ignores her wishes and instead forces her along, as seen by him pushing her wheelchair somewhere he wants to go, or taking away her choice of leaving the school. Add to this the fact that she's introduced to us as she's standing atop a hill, helpless and on her own, crying because her wheelchair won't move due to a flat tyre. The very first impression of her is how she can't live on her own and needs Aoi to save her.
To be honest, the contrast to how she's later portraied as cold (turning Tsundere) at the dormitory is interesting, but one might also see it as nothing but “bait” for her soft side, for the romance to come.

Finally, there's that scene on Kotori's route where she had an accident with the glider and her parents try to tear her away from the Soaring Club and take her back home. When her friends tried to convince her father to leave her, he said: “don't involve her in the dreams of normal people”.
Holy shit, what an appalling thing to say to your disabled daughter. For context, her parents are otherwise depicted as certainly overprotective and overattached to their daughter, but undoubtedly well-meaning, good people. This comment however shows an utter disrespect and belittlement of people with disabilities.
The game does go through an arc of convincing the father that his daughter needs her freedom and be able to chase her dreams etc. which he finally accepts, but that didn't leave much of an impression on me, compared to the quote from earlier which I will forever remember as perhaps the most hurtful thing I've ever heard a parent say to their child in any context ever.

Oh well, that's all on Kotori and Aoi's meddling I think.

Here's some more questionable things that happened:
On Ageha's route, Aoi went on a date with her little sister Hotaru, so he could ask her about Ageha's secrets. What a shitty thing to do to with a friend, and abusing the fact that Hotaru has feelings for him is also not cool.
He even went on another date/swimsuit episode with her later to make Ageha jealous. Wow dude.

There was a scene where the Soaring Club wanted the help of the Touring Club, a bunch of guys who basically work as mechanics on the club's car collection (let's not question this). The only condition for them to offer their help to the Soaring Club… was for Kotori to show up at their club and shake hands with them, because they're starved for female attention. In that scene, Kotori was struggling a lot to suppress her disgust. She eventually burst and told them they're sweaty, greasy, stinky and what not, at which point they (I quote) “awoke to something strange” and started revering her as their queen.
While the ending is kind of funny, the entire depiction of the boys seems incredibly cliché and disrespectful, and I'm sure that people in the highschool-mechanics-bros line of business, for which I have only the greatest respect, deserve better treatment.

There was one scene I don't remember, like, at all, so I'm just gonna paste the bullet spoint from my notes here and let it speak for itself:
Hotaru: “it's sort of scary walking next to you.” Aoi: get's a boner

Flight Diary

So while I was at it, I also played “Flight Diary”, the DLC to the game which contains a collection of 6+1 short stories, taking place on various routes and at various times. I'll make this a quick summary/impressions write-up for each one.

The Kazato Sisters: A Day in the Life

This was the one I played first, because, naturally, I was the least excited about it. I mean, it's about the twins, what were you expecting?
It's a short story of only about 30 minutes, taking place at some point not long after the end of the Asa & Yoru route, showing, as the title says, a simple day in their lives. The twins are still living together at Flying Fish Manor with Aoi.

There's no greater plot here, we simply see them acting as a ~~couple~~ triple, reading manga together, playing games, making a little firework at night etc. The entire story carries this sort of strange vibe where they're acutely aware of the unusual nature of their relationship, how fleeting this summer is and that their lives may become way more complicated in the near future, but for now they're enjoying it to the fullest.

To my surprise, I enjoyed this short story. In part this can surely be attributed to it being very short, but seeing them act as a believable triple, and with the entire story permeated by this vibe I described… it made for a unique experience.

The Day I found my Wings

This short story dives into Kotori's diary, replaying some of the game's greatest moments through her lense. I don't remember anything about this.

I think I was slightly bored since it was mostly repetition and Kotori's perspective barely added to her character, though in some scenes it was nice to see. Especially further down the road where her route and thus romance begins, getting her take made at least their personal romance story feel a little more complete.

Inherited Wings: Soaring Club Epilogue

This short story takes place after the end of Kotori's route. It follows Aoi and Kotori through their last weeks at their school as they're struggling to find worthy successors who will keep the Soaring Club running after they graduated. At the same time, both of them, but especially Kotori, are struggling with anxiety about the future, and choosing what it is they want to do after school.

We get to see a lot of Isuka in this story, as she often joins the Soaring Club for activities, and constantly pesters Kotori if she would sell her the glider once they graduate, which Kotori vehemently refuses. After various difficulties, back and forth etc., they eventually come up with the idea to found the Kazegaura Soaring Association, which would be like the Soaring Club, but not bound to the school, so the former members would still be able to fly with the glider, help with maintenance etc., and the Soaring Club from the school could persist as part of the association, now without their previous struggles of finding advisors, people with the necessary qualifications etc. This also fulfills Isuka's wish of getting a glider to fly. In a big finale with another flight and all, they garner the support of Kazegaura's mayor and the twin's grandfather, who will let them use the garage etc. and give them official support as a sort of Kazegaura community development project.

Isuka vs. Duck, the showdown of the century

This nicely resolves all the problems arout the club's continued existence, Isuka's wish to fly, Aoi's and Kotori's desire to stay in touch with this part of their lives etc. Additionally, Kotori is back on track and found what she wants to do in life. I forgot what it was.

Overall I enjoyed this part because it tread some new ground thematically (anxiety about the future) but also added some new elements, like this new goal they're working towards which nicely resolves a lot of problems, as well as the fact they introduced Isuka as a proper character with a meaningful motivation and role in the story.

It still didn't leave too much of an impression as you may have noticed. Ehe

Wings of Dreams: Soaring Club Prologue

This is not (or rather not just) a prologue. It's a continuation of Amane's route, with frequent flashbacks exploring her relationship with Isuka and what club-life was like back in the days when it was only her, Isuka and Tatsuya. It mostly features the developing romance between Isuka and Tatsuya, with Aoi and Amane as their friends trying to play some sort of role models for them, to show them what a romantic relationship looks like. This goes exactly how you'd think with Amane being Amane.

There was some good comedy on this route, and as I've said before, I'm a big sucker for side-character romances so that was nice, but that's about it. As far as I remember anyway. I'm getting seriously worried about my memory.

New Wings: Akari

This is Akari's route, and it's similar in structure and length to the other routes.

It wasn't anything remarkable but not horribly bad either, though a bit strange how there was no meaningful conflict with Ma boi. That said, it didn't feel as tacked-on as I thought it would.

Inexpressible Emotion: Hotaru

This is the route of Ageha's little sister Hotaru. I don't know why this exists and I will not talk about it.

Seriously though, I literally don't remember what happened. Perhaps I should have taken notes or not written this over half a year after playing… oh well.

Unfamiliar Answer: Kanako

Best girl finally gets her own route, let's go!

Unfortunately, it starts out in the worst way possible, with Kanako waking up in Aoi's bed and wondering if something happened. Just why?

Nothing happened, but it turns into this somewhat entertaining cat-and-mouse game where Kanako is trying to find out from Aoi what happened while he's confused about her behavior, and then eventually there's romance. I think that's about it.

Again, I don't remember many details, but the route did benefit from having some scenes from Kanako's perspective, and the fact that she maintained her character pretty well. I was sort of expecting them to bend her for romance.

Oh but before you go, take one scene just to drive home that Aoi didn't deserve her. They were on a date at a cafe together, Kanako holds some sort of motivational speech for him to resolve whatever he's been struggling with. He thanks her, gets up and leaves right away to apply to practice whatever she told him about. She sits alone at the table, food in front of her, and without cash to pay for it because Aoi said he'd invite her. Good job dude.

Conclusion

Whew, and that's it. I somehow feel like the article has gotten very long despite me not saying much. It's still shorter than KoiChoco at least.

This is my official goodbye to IMHHW, a game that has accompanied me for about 3 years now. I will not miss it, but I guess I will still nostalgically associate it with the majority of my bachelor studies. Thanks to the few people who accompanied my videos on Youtube and had discussions about the game with me, which honestly made this a much more engaging experience than it would have been otherwise.

Unfortunately, I think the article suffered quite a bit from the facts that it took me years to finish this game so some of the parts I wrote about happened a long time ago, I did not take proper notes while playing, and spent almost half a year writing (or postponing) this article for no good reason even after finishing the game and the DLC. There's undoubtedly gaps in my account of the events of the game and its DLC, and perhaps even one or the other misrepresented fact. Oh well, so be it.

See you next time, and I hope it won't take nearly as long.

PS.: Please appreciate how I picked the club picture without the twins as the thumbnail, thank you.

So I'm a Spider and everything that bothered me

Sat, 19 Nov 2022 00:02:51 +0200

I recently watched “So I'm a Spider, so what?” (蜘蛛ですが、なにが？) with the other guy and as usual, I wanted to share a couple thoughts about it.

First of all, a word of warning: this is not a review and I'll be referencing specific events from the show to make my point. This means mild to heavy spoilers, so proceed at your own risk.

Also, I'll be shortening the anime to SIP. Don't question it. sip

With that out of the way, let's start with…

The Good

The first thing that comes to mind is how easy it is to watch the show. We watched it in two sessions, including 15 episodes in the second one, and that was rather smooth sailing overall. Even very good anime can easily get tiring when watching so much at once, but that didn't happen here.

That is also impressive considering how little actually happens, plot-wise, in the first third or so of the show. In general, it is rather entertaining to watch Kumoko and her various antics. The anime brought them to life with pretty good CG and voice acting, making the most out of our spider girl. She's the type of character that I'd usually find obnoxious, but that did't happen here.

Another facet I liked a lot was the show's take on isekai fantasy. What felt like some generic Isekai story at first managed to develop its own distinct flavor over the course of the show. For one thing, I like the fact that, while skills and levels like in RPGs exist in this world, in contrast to most comparable stories, there's actually some background to them. They aren't there only because <author> wanted that stuff in their story, but they're a part of the greater mystery of the world our reincarnated teens are living in.

There's one more thing that was impressively well done. Due to that, I didn't even realize what a feat it is until I actually thought about it after finishing the show. We mostly follow two perspectives, the human side and Kumoko's side. As a viewer you'll probably assume these are happening at the same time, but they're actually 15 years apart. This is something that is hinted at already in the first or second episode, but only becomes clear once Julius tells us about the Taratect scarf his mother wove, as well as how he brought back Fey's egg from the Great Elroe Labyrinth back then. That still doesn't explain everything though, and the show manages to unravel many mysteries, slowly, one by one, as a synergy of what we see from both perspectives.
On the storytelling level, that was not just very well done in terms of how little you'd notice this at first, but also how well the two perspectives complement each other and how the show manages to make this a very satisfying process of discovery.

The Bad

On this side, I'll have a lot more to say. Don't take that to mean that the anime is bad or that I didn't enjoy it though.

First of all, I want to talk about the fights since they make up a significant part of the show's run time. But before I go into concrete details, I'd like to make a little excursion first.

What makes a good Fight Scene?

This show was the first one to make me ask this question, I've never really thought about it before. I mainly came up with three factors that I believe make fighting scenes entertaining to watch. Note that I don't believe all of these factors have to be present. Any one of them can be enough to make a fight scene entertaining to watch.

The Epic Factor and Rule of Cool

This one is the least concrete, but should be the easiest to understand. It is mainly a combination of visuals and sound, the amazing effects etc., whatever may make you feel like what I'm watching is really cool! I don't think I'm able to describe this in more detail, it's something you just feel. The first example that came to my mind is Megumin's explosion from KonoSuba. It probably applies to all her explosions, but the best examples would be those against the Mobile Fortress Destroyer, and the one she did with Yunyun against Sylvia in the movie. It can live through much smaller details though, e.g. a bit of screen shake drastically increases the feeling of impact you get from… well, impacts.

Choreography

This one's a bit harder to explain. It's not so much on the level of how things look, but rather the actions themselves we see animated on the screen. Creative fighting choreography can make fights very entertaining to watch, through what is happening in every moment. This is the part that distinguishes fighting scenes from e.g. just swords hitting each other over and over again. It's much more difficult to give an example for this, mostly because it's something that you usually won't remember in detail, as it's about the tiny things that happen from moment to moment. In general, you could probably include almost any kind of acrobatics used in combat. This factor is purely based on movement. The first good example that comes to my mind is from RWBY: how Ruby very actively uses the recoil of her weapon to propel herself in various directions, or enhance the force of her scythe's melee attacks. Now, it's kinda cool that recoil works out the way you'd expect in the RWBY universe, but what I'm getting at with this example are the specific moves that Ruby uses it for. Here's a section from RWBY's “Red” trailer that showcases exactly what I mean. Though this is also very close to falling under the first factor.

Your browser doesn't support HTML5 video. Here is a link to the video instead.

Unfortunately I can't come up with a better explanation or any more concrete examples from anime right now. Most things that would go under this category are certainly much less explicit than the example I gave.

Strategy and Viewer Engagement

This is the highest layer of what is happening in a fight scene. How this contributes to enjoyment you may wonder? I at least enjoy fight scenes much more if I can actually engange my brain in them, when I can reasonably think about what can happen in a fight, when they are to some degree predictable. It is very rare to see this in action, and usually that only works in very specific cases, because the audience needs to have a very accurate image of what all the characters involved are capable of, what their strengths and weaknesses are etc. If that is given, it allows the audience to think along: how could the engagement play out? Who is likely going to win and how? If the audience has the necessary information (and the author is consistent in how they let these engagements play out) then it is much easier to appreciate e.g. what sorts of tricks and strategies the main character comes up with to beat overwhelming odds. It allows us to see these fight scenes similarly to thematic conflicts, though here we can't derive any value from the conclusions these conflicts reach.

Most fight scenes fail in this regard, due to inconsistency and capriciousness on the side of the author. If the main character constantly pulls stuff out of their ass that just so happens to conveniently allow them to beat opponents they should have no chance against, then, at least in my case, engagement is rather low. What's the point in thinking about the MC's “arsenal” and possibilities, if I'm not expecting a logical resolution anyway?

Back to SIP

Looking at the show at hand: I never found its fight scenes particularly entertaining, and I believe that's because it didn't perform well in any of the three factors I've outlined above.

Epic & Cool: SIP is neither of these. I remember how, after I'd finished SAO years ago, I'd still rewatch specific scenes of it on Youtube for several weeks after that, because I found them that cool. While I don't do that anymore, I don't remember a single scene from this show that gave me a comparable feeling.
Choreography: there's not much to explain here due to the nature of this factor, I didn't see much of this either. The movement in the anime is not very creative I'd say. It's not pure bad either (except for the second to last episode) but nothing exciting.
Strategy: SIP does try this several times, but it often falls flat due to how difficult it is to grasp Kumoko's abilities. At some points it is almost ironically bad. My favorite example is that scene where Kumoko, Ariel and young Julius meet. A sudden stalemate occurs as the three are doing nothing but staring at each other. Then Ariel casts a spell on Kumoko and she just… dies. She got oneshot by the most uninterestingly head-on attack you can imagine. It would be something different if Ariel were simply that strong or it was a surprise attack, but they'd been fighting on somewhat even footing until then. And now, Ariel randomly decided to do it at that specific point. And somehow Kumoko failed to dodge or defend in any way, despite staring straight at Ariel and seeing it coming. Why didn't Ariel do that from the start, if it's apparently so easy to kill her this way? This was an incredibly unsatisfying resolution to this fight, as it defies all logic and is very boring. Moreover, moments like these undermine my trust in the series’ consistency for all fight scenes that follow.

And since we're talking about boring resolutions already: I hate how the skill system is often used to facilitate exactly these boring resolutions. This is perhaps the worst part of this specific trope which all the other shitty isekais abuse. So the protagonist finds themself in a pinch, but… lucky them, they suddenly acquire a new skill that neatly solves the problem! This is disappointing for two reasons: why introduce this conflict in the first place, if it is simply resolved through means that are devoid of any narrative value or consequences? And second, the mechanisms that lead to the acquisition of skills are typically not or so ill-defined that the author can essentially ass-pull them whenever they need it, which, if abused enough, significantly lowers any engagement in these fight scenes.
Besides, skills are so frequently acquired or levelled up without apparent effects to the viewer that they turn into background noise at some point. To some degree, this is very realistic. Someone who's played RPGs and roguelikes might know that sometimes the biggest upgrade you can get would be a boring boost to your base stats, rather than some fancy new skill or special effect. Still, at some point the walls of text that skills lists turn into feels almost like the “power level” trope from Shounen series. Longer wall of text = more skills = more powerful. It also breaks the flow of the anime a little, in that I want to pause and actually read these texts, but doing so would be a huge time investment, and one that is mostly wasted at that. There's also the evolutions which are kinda just there, they don't feel like they have any impact except changing her visuals. Which is nice, but again feels like a mechanic that is either very shallow or not explained enough.

One more thing that bothered me is that the series fails to make me feel the “stakes” most of the time. Kumoko is fighting for her life in almost every single episode. Maybe that's already the problem, but in any case I've very rarely felt excited about what the outcome of an engagement might be. Most conflicts are just her fighting some monster in the dungeon which has no thematic relevance besides being her current obstacle anyway. And while the stakes have always felt low, the series then even goes as far as giving her an immortality skill. Eh… Well, at least it has limitations I guess.

I also find it disappointing that, as the main character of the series, Kumoko has practically no development. In fact, her entire setup is a bit weird… We're told she was the shy girl at school who was also bullied. Meanwhile, in her new life she's the embodiment of hyperactive… ahem, I mean HYPERACTIVE. While I guess you could also take that as some prime “show-don't-tell” at work, she's been like that right from the start. That again could be attributed to her being freed from the chains of modern society and being allowed to be herself. It's a real shame because that could be a very interesting setup. But in the end that is only me speculating, almost none of this actually happened visibly on-screen, and the series itself never bothers to comment on it. Ultimately, she's a character that is simply very hard to believe.
Another facet of this is her having apparently no qualms about killing humans at all. It's not like it doesn't make any sense. She grew up as a monster in a harsh environment where you kill to survive, and humans were her enemies. But again, it feels like the series kinda glosses over this a little when it's something that very much feels worth at least commenting on.

A bit of a side-complaint and not an important one, but anyway: For the first half of the show, before Kumoko left the Elroe Labyrinth, I had almost no grasp of her size. Since she's spending her time in a cave fighting ever new monsters, we have no benchmark to measure her against. I'm currently reading the first volume of the LNs so I now know that she was about one meter in size from the very start, and that probably never changed until she shed her spider body. But watching the anime, I assumed she was very small at the start, closer to the size of real-world species, and that she grew bigger and bigger through her evelutions. The series never said anything like that, but when we practically never get the chance to compare her to any known reference objects, we can only guess, I guess? This is just something that surprised me when I noticed it while reading the novel, and after thinking about it a little more, I got surprised this surprised me in the first place. Anyway…

At this point I realize I probably put this article off for too long, because I'm pretty sure when I started writing it I had much more to say. Guess you're not getting a chonker of an article this time. Well, a few more points I still have though:

Some of the character conflicts on the human side bother me… a lot. Taking Hugo for one, he's the spitting image of the generic edgy villain. He was never interesting and only seems to be there to give us some spicy conflict from the start. The anime builds up the confrontation with him for at least a few episodes before he finally tries to kill Shun, only to be destroyed by Oka, and that's pretty much the end for him. I mean, sure he comes back for revenge later, but the only thing he adds is my aggravation at his simplistic, edgy, egoistic character. There's a much bigger and potentially more interesting conflict going on anyway, who cares about Hugo? When Sophia said they were only using him, I think the author probably felt that. But that again makes me wonder why. After they defeated him the first time, he stopped adding anything to the conflicts that followed, and even before I'm not sure what his act was supposed to do for us. Just put us on our toes and be more excited for the action that is to come? If so, I guess the show succeeded at that, but I also feel scammed. Because the action that followed was more about Sophia, the entire insurgence etc. and Hugo may as well have been missing from all of that. The fact that he still appeared at the end and Sophia actually told him he'd been used gives me a little bit of hope that there might be more to come for him… but I guess we'll see about that.

Add Sophia herself to the mix, and I'm not sure it gets better. While it seems that Hugo just so happened to find his ego-genes in his new life and betray his friends for no better reason than that, Sophia has a much more interesting background. Being one of the “quiet” kids, a bit eerie even, and generally shunned or even bullied by her former classmates, she comes into this new world and is eventually saved and sort of… raised even? by our spider queen. On the other hand, she also seems to turn into a very generic edgy villain not much better than Hugo. Does she have any motivation at all? I don't even remember, maybe she was just trying to support Kumoko, though I do remember her getting very prickly whenever someone calls her by her old nickname. Aside from that she seems to take great pleasure in making Shun and his mates suffer, but is apparently fine working together with Kyouya etc. who, unlike Kumoko, neither did anything for her, nor received similar treatment (bullying) in their previous lives. She and Hugo make for a pair of characters that are simply annoying to watch and make me hope for someone to kill them quickly. Not because it's the resolution to an interesting conflict, but because I don't want to see them anymore.

Finally, the overarching conflict between the two sides, at least from the student's perspectives, seems nothing but dumb. I take great issue with it if a central conflict is justified entirely by bad or non-existing communication between the sides involved, and that's what this is. I mean if you look at Kumoko vs. the Elves, there's some justification there obviously, but why are the reincarnations so utterly unable to have a proper conversation and tell each other what they're fighting for? Even though they spend a lot of time talking in the middle of the fights (another bad trope taken too far here) towards the end, most of it is meaningless and it is frustrating watching them fail to bring up the one thing they should be talking about. Instead, we get intermissions of good friends fighting each other and being like “nooo why would he do that?” and meanwhile I'm screaming on the inside “just ask him you fucking idiot”.
Taking a step back, this conflict is, in a way, very realistic in that both sides have different levels of knowledge, neither side has a good grasp on what the other thinks or feels, so overall they just misunderstand each other. But there's a reason you rarely see conflicts like this in entertainment media, because… they have little to no thematic value and are nothing but frustation to watch as a viewer who has the knowledge of both sides and naturally questions the entire point of the conflict.

Shun takes this almost to the peak of irony (or rather frustration) when he, having to fulfill the generic isekai protagonist role, insists they have to fight for all that is good and never give up etc. This is after his allies, only moments earlier, reached the conclusion that they do not have the slightest chance of beating Sophia, and even trying would be kinda pointless since she made it very clear she actually has no intention of hurting them.
At this point I gotta say I don't have have a problem with generic za hiiro characters like Shun. At least from what I've picked up through my very limited exposure to the anime community, many people are bothered by characters like his. I absolutely have to agree that they're not interesting, because they're usually very predictable and boring, and you've seen them a hundred times already. But they usually don't actively bother me as characters like Hugo and Sophia do by being plain obnoxious on-screen. But when this happened, I had to agree for once. Shun was trying to force a fight in situation where that was completely unnecessary. At the same time he presented it as if it was the right thing to do when it really wasn't. Even the entire depiction threw me off though. I have no idea whether SIP is self-aware enough that they're actively trying to make Shun fall on his face. If so, this would be the perfect setup for that. But then again Shun was allowed to play his generic hero character the entire time and it was always played completely straight. And when he held his little speech, his friends, who were just about to make the right call and do a tactical retreat, suddenly all agreed with him. I feel like I'm getting mixed signals here. In any case, seems like I'll have to keep reading the novels to get it or hope for a second season to see if this entire situation has had a meaningful effect on our characters.

Finally, the last thing that bothered me was the second-to-last (I believe?) episode. There's nothing interesting to say here, apparently they ran into trouble and thus out of time during production, so the entire episode consists of perhaps the most hideous CG and animations I've seen so far. This was also the episode where they laid all their frustrating conflicts bare, so the episode as a whole was a pain to watch.

So, that's it from me. Here goes the usual disclaimer: even though I may have said quite a few negative things here, I found the anime very enjoyable to watch. Enough that I've started reading the light novels and I'm excited for the things I've missed out on and what's to come.
See you at the next article o/

Revisiting KoiChoco: The Visual Novel

Fri, 16 Sep 2022 00:02:00 +0200

For my tenth blog post, I'm returning to the roots of this blog: KoiChoco.

…okay that actually just happened by chance. In any case, as you may know I've watched the KoiChoco anime last year and also wrote a blog article on my impressions. The anime was far from the best I'd ever watched, but it was sufficiently entertaining. And whenever I watch an anime that is at least decent, I get interested in the source material. So I recently installed the visual novel, the original Japanese version, which also doubles as great Japanese practice by the way. Just like with the anime, I wanted to write about the experience, as I realized while playing that I have quite a few things I wanted to talk about. Let's get right into it.

The General

Overall, the VN was fairly enjoyable. I played all routes and had a good amount of fun with that. Towards the end, it got a bit boring, not because the content was worse, but simply because the various routes somehow feel… too similar I guess? But first of all, here's some background:

KoiChoco (or “Love, Elections and Chocolate” / 恋と選挙とチョコレート for the full title) follows the main character, Yuuki, and the food research club (Shokken for short) he's a part of at his highschool. The club is basically just a place to get together for this group of friends, hang out and enjoy some snacks at the school's expenses. At the start of the game, the next student council elections are coming up and the strongest candidate, Shinonome Satsuki, is promising to improve the school's financial situation. To the shock of the Shokken's members, that includes the abolition of clubs that don't do anything meaningful, such as theirs. The Shokken's members decide that the best way to avoid this, is to win the student council election with a candidate of their own. Yuuki is democratically chosen for the role.

Structure of the VN

From here on out, the VN follows the Shokken on their two weeks long journey, through the preparations for the elections, the preliminaries and finally the main elections. Structurally, the first week roughly corresponds to the common route, while the second week branches off into one of the five different routes. Each route corresponds to one of the love interests for Yuuki, including

Sumiyoshi Chisato, the girl with the orange twintails. She's Yuuki's childhood friend and likes to introduce him to others as her property.
Kiba Mifuyu, Chisato's and Yuuki's best friend, with dull blond, almost grey hair. She's a somewhat sickly girl, one year older than her classmates since she had to take a year off due to extensive hospital stays and surgery.
Morishita Michiru, a quiet (cat) girl. She was introduced to us in the second scene of the game, through a panty shot… oof. In any case, she joined the Shokken in that very scene, making her its newest member.
Aomi Isara, an economic scholarship student (keitokusei for short). Her family is poor and, like most keitokusei, she's bullied at school, though she hides it with her cheerful personality.
Shinonome Satsuki, Yuuki's rival in the election, typical “cool beauty” archetype with her long brown hair. A calm and righteous girl, aiming to become student council president after she realized their expenses are severely unbalanced through her work on the school's financial affairs bureau. Also the little sister of Shinonome Hazuki, the Shokken's advisor.

For the first playthrough, the game forces you into Chisato's route. This didn't really bother me since I'm a completionist at heart and was going to do all routes anyway. After that, I went with the order Aomi -> Mifuyu -> Shinonome -> Morishita. By the way, I'll refer to Shinonome junior as Shinonome and Shinonome senior as Hazuki, since that feels the most natural after playing the game.

The game actually has a rather consistent progression in terms of in-game time. As I mentioned before, we follow Yuuki and the Shokken for two weeks until the final election at the very end. Except for the various endings, the game goes through every single day one by one, ending each on a short transition screen with the logo. The game doesn't hit you in the face with it (“3 days remaining”) or anything like that, so it's actually easy to miss when you're not paying attention, but I really liked it. It gives off this feeling of steady progress through the plot. That also makes it relatively easy to predict these, I'll call them chapter ends, which always make for a great point to take a break or stop reading for the day. That was particularly noticable compared to IMHHW which was very unpredictable, sometimes cramming 3 hours of content into a single “chapter”, and sometimes just 10 minutes, over the course of several or just one in-game days and with no consistency whatsoever. That was especially painful since I recorded that game and never knew how much time to plan for one recording session.

The skipping was unfortunately a bit painful in some parts. Due to the somewhat rigid strucure of the game, there is quite a lot of overlap between the different routes. I mentioned that the first week corresponds to the common route and the second week branches off, but the actual cut is not nearly as clean. The second week still contains some election related scenes that are exactly the same on all routes. Then there's a couple scenes around the middle of the game that are almost the same, but there's just one line off here and there that were adapted to the changed circumstances. This means that sometimes you let the skip do its thing on your second or third playthrough, but then it stops five times in one scene just because there's a single line differing from what you'd already seen on the other routes. Also, you're apparently just not allowed to skip at all during the first four or five days of the game, which meant I had to manually click through it all when I needed to redo the early choices on my third playthrough. Pain.

Before we move on, please note that from here on out you may encounter mild to heavy spoilers for the game's and anime's plot. I will neither mark nor hide them, so proceed at your own discretion.

Election business

The election business itself was handled surprisingly well. For background, the school where this takes place is huge, numbering about 6000 students and feels, at least in terms of internal affairs, almost like a mini-state. The elections reflect a lot of the problems that we see in today's politics, the majority of which are presented decently. A couple of them still feel a bit over the top considering how this is just some small scale school politics.

In any case, if you thought that Yuuki would just win the election through the power of friendship, you're wrong. There's three major institutions at the school: the financial affairs bureau, the general affairs bureau and the bureau of public order (BPO). All of these are run completely by students, and I'll refer to them as “the big three” from here on. Typically, the student council president comes from one of these three institutions. There's a preliminary election round one week before the main election, and every candidate who doesn't collect at least 10% of the total votes cannot run for the main election. The game tells us it's been 7 years since the last time that a candidate from outside the big three even passed the prelims. As such, the odds don't seem to be in Yuuki's favor. That said, they are offered support by Mouri, the current student council president and member of the BPO. They suffered some heavy setbacks during Mouri's term and have decided that they have no chance to win the next election. For them it would be preferable to have an independent candidate, such as Yuuki, in power. That would also make it easier to win the election next year, without one of the other two institutions having an established candidate. Mouri asks for the Shokken's cooperation and offers them the votes of the 400 members of the BPO, as well as strategic advice in return. The Shokken members accept his proposal.

Mouri's support suddenly puts them in a spot where passing the prelims seems quite realistic. They only need another 200 votes. They do the obvious smart move, visiting all the other clubs who are affected by Shinonome's planned budget cuts, and ask for their support, as well as asking all their friends and classmates for votes. In the end, they barely make it past the 10% hurdle of the prelims. Another independent candidate dropped out here, gaining only 9.8%, thus putting Yuuki into a great spot to soak up another 10% of votes. It continues after this in a fashion that seems logical and quite believable. Just like the two other candidates, he makes speeches on the school grounds every day before and after school. He's emphasizing the fact that he is an independent candidate, not part of the establishment like the big three, which is a somewhat empty point on its own, but a fairly effective tactic both in real life and in the game. Furthermore, he realizes that the big three enjoy some privileges when it comes to the election, and pointing out these unfair advantages got him the support of even more students. I won't go deeper into how the election continued for now, since this actually depends a lot on which route you go. Some of the routes investigate the school and its inherent political problems from various angles and focus on completely different problems. The overall strategy of the Shokken and their election program also change accordingly. I was actually just expecting the focus to be on a different girl on each route, so this was quite the welcome surprise. I'll go into the details of the politics of each route in their respective sections below.

There's just one last thing I wanted to mention here that bothered me a little: you may have noticed that I haven't talked about the other candidate from the big three, the candidate of the general affairs bureau. His name is Tatsumi, but he's a bit of a weirdo and it's clear that Shinonome is the “real” rival here, since's she's consistently about 10% ahead of Tatsumi over the course of the entire election. That said, while Shinonome's election manifesto includes a wide variety of topics, which mostly seem quite reasonable and thought through, the focus is actually on the finances and that is also her main pitch. She has a good number of secured votes from the members of the financial affairs bureau as well as lots of ~~horny~~ male fans, but aside from that? It seems weird that she gets so much support. I just find it hard to believe that students would get this excited over proposed improvements to the school's finances. Especially since, due to the nature of the problem, this mainly means budget cuts. While it hurts to say that, you win votes more with flashy slogans and fancy proposals than with necessary, but not nearly as flashy, reforms of the underlying institutions and their inner workings. At least that's my perception of politics. Moving on.

The Comedy

KoiChoco had some decent comedy and I did find myself laughing out loud a couple times. That said, most of the game is just slighly amusing with a lot of obscure stuff happening that is never explained, as well as a couple running gags.

One of these is the fact that Yuuki seems to see things that apparently no one else sees. As an example, Tatsumi is always wearing a bag over his head, with a face sketched onto it. We never even see his real face. That is pretty weird and I have no idea why it happens. I guess it could be a metaphor of some kind, but if so, I don't get it. Also, I don't think the game is that subtle. When Yuuki mentioned that “Tatsumi's face is weird” or something like that, Chisato rebukes him: “He may not be handsome, but that's just rude Yuuki”.

There's also Mifuyu always making references to some really old manga, toys etc. And every time someone asks why she knows that much about old stuff, she just says “I guess it's because I'm a year older than everyone”, and proceeds to giggle. I'm actually not a fan of this one, perhaps because I don't get the references, but also because it's always played perfectly straight and at some point it gets a) boring, and b) hard to believe her friends are still surprised by this.

I do like the subtlety of a lot of people calling Yuuki “Ooshima” (his last name is Oojima) and how he corrects them at the start of the game, but at some point just gives up on that.

For some of these though, I guess your mileage may vary. Yume, the only male member of the Shokken aside from Yuuki, is clearly gay. But what you're more likely to remember him for, is being a creep. He just drops those random comments ouf of nowhere, such as “Yuuki, your nape is looking quite sexy today”. Or when asked what he wants to eat, he says he'd like “jogurt and a sausage” or something like that. At some point the Shokken members have a sleepover at the school and Yuuki and Yume, being the only boys, share a room. Then at night Yume uses Yuuki as his bodypillow, and Yuuki is actually unable to protect himself from that, since Yume just so happens to be a Judo blackbelt. Alright.

That one got almost unintentionally comedic again when there's that scene where the members are in the school's open air bath (basically an Onsen), properly split into guys and girls of course. Yuuki is just sitting in the bath, desperately trying to suppress the horny while the girls are playing, splashing around etc. on the other side of the wall. At some point Yume says “sounds like they're having fun” in the most innocent way you can imagine, while the girls are busy loudly comparing their boobs.
“Is that all you're feeling?”, Yuuki asks him, surprised.
“What else would I be feeling?”, Yume answers, visibly confused.
At least he was the only decent person in this scene. I guess Yuuki was supposed to be the relatable one here, but that sort of thinking just weirds me out honestly.

Since we're talking representation already: there's also Shiohama, the reporter… person. Everytime they appear in a scene they seem to switch genders, or at least switch between the male and female school uniforms, hairstyles, as well as putting on/taking off their glasses. The first couple times Yuuki asked them about that, but Shiohama denied everything. It was quite believable and I was on my way to thinking that's another one of those cases where Yuuki just “sees things”. But towards the end of the first route, Yuuki flat out asked:
“So which one is the real you?”
Shiohama smiles, and answers along the lines of “Neither one is fake, and both of them are the real me.”
While I usually have trouble relating to LGBTQ anything, this was a genuinely strong and wholesome moment. I was quite surprised. But of course Yuuki made sure to get us back on track, going out of that scene thinking “Damn, now I still don't know which one's the real one.”
Did the VN just try to devalidate this genuinely good moment they had only seconds earlier? What? I honestly don't get the intentions here. It feels like they had two different writers with wildly different ideas writing this scene together.

There's a couple more moments in the novel that just… threw me off. For example, there was that one occassion where the Shokken members wanted to get some information from Shinonome. Knowing that she's a huge fan of the “Oojima rolls” that Yuuki bakes, they decided to send him to bait her with one. The two meet outside of the school, he hands over the roll, she eats happily, and then asks him what he wants in return. Surprised that she saw through him, he asks for the information they want. She apologizes and says that unfortunately she's not allowed to disclose that information just yet. That one was obviously out of Yuuki's power. He walks off from their meeting spot afterwards, and halfway back he encounters the other Shokken members. They make it clear they heard every piece of the conversation. When Yuuki asks how they know, Non-chan (one of the club members, basically crazy researcher/loli hybrid) casually reveals that she'd put a little device with a microphone on Yuuki, and listened to everything they've said.
… what the hell? As an IT person myself, this is absolutely unacceptable. It's a crazy infringement on the privacy and personal space of one of their closest friends. For me, this would be a lowkey friendship cancelled moment.

It doesn't completely stop there, they actually blame him for not “accomplishing his mission” next. That's obvious, but if they listened to the conversation they should also know it's none of his fault. If Shinonome says she can't disclose anything, then what's he supposed to do? Threaten her?
They continued to decide that he needs some sort of punishment. This part is obviously meant sort of comedically, they don't seem to be actually mad at him, but still…

Also, there's almost the entirety of Yume… as I said, he's a creep. He's not exactly a bad person, in fact, he's probably the most reliable member of the entire club and also seems to be a cool guy… on the few occassions where he's not a fucking creep. The majority of the time, he's the kind of uncomfortable, off-putting person that I would do my best to keep my distance from in real life. Reminds me a little of Origami from DAL, though not that bad.

Chisato's Route

The first route that we'll take on. On the romance side of the route, the plot looked roughly like this:

Chisato had a little brother called Daiki, who loved eating chocolate. One day, she refused to share her chocolate with him, so he ran off crying, got hit by a car and died. Since then, Chisato sort of uses Yuuki as a replacement for him, making him eat half a bar of chocolate once a week. It is also clear that she's in love with him, though she's pretty tsundere, with big emphasis on the TSUN. The main conflict here is how Yuuki is in love with her as well, but simply cannot imagine a relationship with her as long as she still uses him as little-bro substitute, which seems like a fair point. He eventually confronts her and tells her to choose: they can become a couple, but then he won't play his role as her substitute anymore. At first she's unable to make that decision, but after a couple days of crying, she eventually gets over it. There's a little more detail here of course, but I honestly didn't care too much. This problem is simply too specific and dramatic to relate to for me, but it wasn't badly done. The fact that I'm not a fan of Chisato meant that I couldn't really bring myself to care about their moments though, so in terms of the romance the route fell flat for me.

A rare sighting of Chisato in dere mode

Instead, let me just rant for a second about how much I hate Chisato.
She is is so… fucking… obnoxious. Whenever Yuuki interacts with another girl that is not Mifuyu or Hazuki, she immediately gets jealous. But instead of playing these as just jealousy moments, she yells at him and blames him.

“What the hell are you doing Yuuki!?”

This might be at least sort of understandable if they were a couple, but for a good part of her route as well as all the other routes, they aren't. And even if they were, she just goes too far. There's a scene where Aomi tells Yuuki how scared she is about Shinonome winning the election, as she wants to abolish the economic scholarship program, and Aomi wanted to fulfill her little brothers dream of going to the same school as his sister. Yuuki promises her that he'll try his best to win the election and prevent that. She starts crying, takes one of his hands into hers and thanks him. It's a good moment, and it had no romantic elements if you ask me. Then Chisato crashes it completely by violently kicking Yuuki in the back so that he falls over. What the hell? She then continues to scream at him and try to hit him with her fists.

Moments like these make me want to punch her so badly. She absolutely deserves it.

There's tons of moments like these, though it doesn't usually go that far. At some point she asked him
“How do you feel about Aomi?”
“Would be nice to get along with her.”
“Heee… so you want to enter a deep relationship with her?”
“Wait, it's not like that, I meant it would be nice to be friends with her!”

The second line is kinda impossible to translate without dropping the nuance, but anyway… She proceeds to accuse him of having ulterior motives, etc. That's another one of these cases where she a) just goes off assuming wildly incorrect things, and b) then gets mad at him based on her incorrect assumptions. Even if her assumptions were right, she'd still have exactly zero right to be mad or blame him for anything. She is such an insufferable person, being friends with her seems like it'd be a load of pain. In fact, seeing their interactions, it is hard to believe they're actually friends. Other characters, Mifuyu in particular, tend to remark how well they get along in moments where they're in fact quarreling. I usually like that trope, but in their case it doesn't seem like they're having fun. Chisato is mad and Yuuki is having a bad (and possibly painful) time thanks to her.

There's one situation that illustrated to me just how shitty their relationship is: at some point Yuuki randomly met Aomi while out shopping and they talked. No biggie. The next day, Chisato asks him if he met Aomi yesterday. He lies to her, because he knows exactly she's going to make a scene again. This is not the first, nor the last time he acts like that by the way. In any case, Chisato sees through the lie right away. She isn't mad for once, but disappointed. Mifuyu, who is also present, remarks that you shouldn't lie to your friends like this.
It was this remark that drove the point home for me. Mifuyu is absolutely right. You shouldn't lie to your friends about stuff like this, especially if it's something that trivial. And yet, I did not question Yuuki's lie at all. When Chisato asked him, I didn't doubt for a moment that he would lie to her. I would have acted exactly the same way. Because there wasn't the slightest doubt that Chisato would act in the most obnoxious way possible, like always, being an asshole and making the entire situation a pain in the ass. That was the point where I realized that her toxic behavior was enough to make sure you won't even talk to her the way you would to any decent friend.

There's some more examples where she's needlessly possessive and critical of everything concerning Yuuki. Like in one route, he had stuff to worry about and ended up not being able to sleep. When he shows up the next day with bags under his eyes, Chisato is worried about him and tries to comfort him… nah, I'm joking of course. After he mentioned that he was unable to sleep, she gets mad again and yells at him to try harder. Wtf.
Her obsessiveness shows in so many small ways. At one point, Yuuki wanted to see if a harmonica that belonged to Hazuki was still working. Chisato stopped him, saying she'd blow it herself. She didn't elaborate, but it was obvious she wanted to prevent an “indirect kiss”.

What also bothers me is how Yuuki handles these situations. He's honestly just too weak of a character, always affirming Chisato's behavior as if he were actually guilty of something, instead of telling her to shut the fuck up as he should.

Chisato is in general too full of herself. Introducing Yuuki as her “property” might be funny at first, but over time it just feels weirdly possessive.
She also does the job of the club's election campaign organizer, which leads to her having strategy meetings with Mouri. The role fits her the best out of all the Shokken members, but when Mouri compliments her for coming up with good plans herself, she always goes into this haughty “oh I know I'm smart, praise me more” mode. This is something that I'm used to seeing from dumb characters, but Chisato is actually depicted as decently intelligent. Seeing someone act like that is always off-putting. It's downright bragging and I find it repulsive.

Anyway, onto the last part of the Chisato rant: as I said, she's a tsundere. But she lays on the tsun-part way too thickly, and her few dere moments just feel… off. They're not believable, as they feel too different from the bitchy behavior we're used to. It gets worse once they actually become a couple: she sheds her tsun-skin and apparently decides to live as dere for the rest of her life. This is just boring. Honestly nothing feels as empty as a character that went from tsundere to just dere. She literally lost her entire personality towards the end of the route. Not that she had much to begin with aside from the jealousy and obnoxiousness.
She's also not a bad person in general… for one thing, she sticks up for keitokusei in her class when they get bullied, and also approached e.g. Mifuyu and Aomi when they were too shy to make friends. It's so hard to accept that people are actually multi-faceted!

Whew, now that that's done, time to talk about the other characters for a bit. There was actually some good development for Yuuki, as well as Ai and Kii, who are typically called the club's “monkey combo”. Yuuki himself gained confidence through his public speeches, going into public debates with Shinonome and Tatsumi etc. Mouri eventually tells Chisato to not hold hands with him at school, since he apparently has quite a few female fans, and they don't want to lose them.
This development is also depicted through Ai and Kii, who initially don't get along too well with Yuuki. They were part of the club from the start, but they would often quarrel with him. They are also depicted as very generic, stereotypical girls, talking about makeup all day and going on all sorts of diets, as well as being superficial in general and not very smart either. They'll also often grumble about the work they have to do for the elections and are sometimes found slacking. They do get their own role when it turns out that the hightech stage built by Non-chan for Yuuki's speeches needs an electricity source. They end up kicking the pedals on stationary bikes all day for these speeches, and eventually get really good at it. There's a couple occassions on this route where they have to get somewhere very quickly, and Ai and Kii show up to save the day, letting Yuuki or whoever else hop on the back of their bicycle and riding like the wind after that. Towards the end of the route, Ai, Kii and Yuuki declare their mutual respect for each other, the work the other party has done and how their contributions were indispensable to get this far. Real good moment that I didn't expect from these characters.

In terms of politics, this route was also quite interesting. There's this rule for clubs that they can only spend their budget with the Takos & Takoma chains, which have a couple stores on the school grounds and also offer deliveries for all the clubs. The Shokken members realize that this is a dumb rule and decide to abolish it. That would also help the school's finances since these chains are about 15% more expensive than the alternatives. As soon as they declare this publicly as part of their program, Mouri visits them and tells them to redact this proposal, but as he doesn't want to give them a reason besides stating that they've opened “Pandora's box”, they refuse and eventually lose his support. Shortly afterwards, they start receiving threats. They decide not to fold, and the next day flyers full of misinformation discrediting Yuuki are dropped over the campus. On the last day of the election, Chisato is abducted, and they threaten to kill her unless he takes back his candidacy.

It was pretty good, and in some way eerily realistic until here, but the abduction and threat to kill her went a bit too far. While probably realistic in real-world politics, it just feels off in the context of this school. Oh well, all is resolved in the end and Yuuki barely loses the election. Seeing how far they've come though, Shinonome postpones the abolition of clubs and budget cuts by half a year, giving them a second chance to produce actual results until then to save themselves.

Aomi's Route

Ah, Aomi. The little girl full of energy who everyone likes to dote on. As mentioned before, she's a keitokusei which are pretty much generally bullied. They are allowed to go to the school with no tuition fees, but instead they have to do various kinds of work for the school for no pay. It is not really elaborated on what kind of work this entails though. Apart from that, they're separated into their own classes from their second highschool year, as well as being banned from joining clubs.

As you may have expected, the political side of this route focuses on fixing the school's bullying problem, which is illustrated for us through Aomi. I had heard previously that her route would be kinda heavy, and I assumed that was because of the bullying… I was wrong.

Yuuki became quite fixated on the keitokusei problem. He mentioned to Mouri that he wanted to do something about it, but was told not to bring up the topic at all. It was a delicate problem and no one knows a solution for that. If he went in there without a well thought out policy, he would be torn apart by Shinonome and Tatsumi, and even if he came up with a good policy, the regular students don't care about the keitokusei so it wouldn't get him votes either way. Yuuki agreed with that at first, but eventually came up with the idea of strengthening the school's “moral commitee” or whatever it was called, to prevent bullying. He brought that up during one of the public interviews, without discussing with the other club members or Mouri first. He was visited by Mouri immediately afterwads, telling him how disappointed he was in Yuuki. Chisato left right after that, blaming Yuuki for only thinking of Aomi and sacrificing all the club members’ hard work. Various events happened over the next couple days which resulted in everyone aside from Yume and Morishita turning their backs on Yuuki and leaving the club. Losing Non-chan's stage and the power provided by Ai and Kii, Yuuki would hold his speeches while standing on a bucket in front of the school. People started making fun of him and he lost votes quickly.

This was the kind of heavy that I meant, and absolutely wasn't prepared for. In fact, this affected me so much that I was seriously considering taking a break from the game, but before I got that far, I was over the worst. Yuuki and Aomi, now a couple, came up with a new and improved policy: the ratio of students quitting their school was much higher among the keitokusei, compared to the regular students. This was attributed to the bullying. Since the keitokusei didn't have to pay the admission fees for the school and were used as an unpaid labor force instead, every keitokusei that quit was a notable financial loss for the school. They came up with the idea of using all money that was saved when the ratio of quitters among the keitokusei decreased, to prop up the budgets of all clubs, giving regular students an actual incentive to not bully them, or maybe even actively intervene when others did so. They presented the idea to Mouri and he was overjoyed, praising them for an amazing policy that might allow them to turn the election around.

At this point, Yuuki decided that, with a proper plan in his hand, it was time to win back the friends he'd lost. So he went on a ride around the city with Aomi, visiting the other club members, presenting their idea and Mouri's stamp of approval to them and asking them to come back. Well, that worked out and everyone came back, though it took some extra convincing for Chisato. She eventually broke down crying, apologized and confessed that she'd just been jealous.

All might seem well at first, until Yuuki is informed by some keitokusei that, since he proposed this new policy, the bullying actually got worse, which left him quite depressed. He eventually came up with another policy that should finally solve the problem, barely lost the vote against Shinonome, but was made vice president by her to implement the policy he'd proposed. Happy end!

Whew, after this long exposition dump, it's time to get into everything that's wrong here.

First of all, I'm quite torn when it comes to the first policy involving the club budgets. On the one hand, this feels like a very realistic approach to the problem. It's not just an appeal to people to not be shitty people. These obviously don't make sense, since we're talking about people who go out of their way to make others’ lives worse at no benefit to themselves. No, their policy gives the bullies an actual incentive. This is probably the smartest solution to a problem like this that I've ever seen. On the other hand, I'm still disappointed how this ignores the underlying problem. I don't think there's a solution to people just being assholes, but it's not like these people disappear when they don't bully the keitokusei anymore. Maybe they'll bully someone else, or maybe they'll act shitty in other ways. Is the problem really solved here?

Moving on, what really bothers me is how his ‘friends’ just left him over what happened during the election. While I agree that Yuuki should have discussed the policy he came up with, with the other club members before just putting it out there… what sort of friend would turn their back on you over something like that? I found their reactions believable at first, but after thinking about it for a little, it made me really mad. When he went around visiting them, I mainly thought two things. First of all: they're not worth it. They've shown they're not actually your friends if that's all it took to make them leave. Yuuki may have started it, but they're the ones who escalated it far beyond repair in my opinion. The other thing that bothers me is how this focused mostly on the fact that he had a good policy now. He didn't win them back by talking things out, but by presenting results. Seriously? They're supposed to be his friends, not business partners.

Anyway, that was all on the political side of this route. I don't have much to say on the romance, I didn't really feel it. I liked Aomi, she was always this girl who spread positivity through her demeanor and her smile. This was actually conveyed really well, which is quite impressive in this medium. But I personally found it difficult to see her as a love interest. In my opinion, she has more of a little sister vibe I guess (not the dreaded imouto). As such the romance between them felt kinda empty to me. Aside from how she always cheered Yuuki up when he felt down, I didn't feel much chemistry here either.

Finally, shoutout to Hazuki for giving the two of them coupons for a love hotel. ~~Peak teacher~~

Mifuyu's Route

Mifuyu has been friends with Chisato and Yuuki since middleschool. When she entered their class, one year older than all her peers due to her health problems, people found it hard to approach her and treated her as a “senpai” instead of a classmate. Chisato was the only one who approached her normally and eventually allowed her to settle in and make friends. It is later revealed that she'd been in love with Yuuki since back then, but she'd always prioritized Chisato's feelings over her own. She's continuously, half-jokingly, trying to get them to become a couple.

There's this running gag they had, where, whenever Yuuki felt like Chisato was too mean to him, he would turn to Mifuyu, tell her he's in love with her and ask her to go out with him. She would then reject him, saying that she already had someone she was in love with. It was always obviously comedic, but knowing that Mifuyu was in love with him the whole time gives this gag a rather painful note. Pretty nice setup.

Anyway, stuff happens, Yuuki and Mifuyu end up kissing, and afterwards she's really shocked because she feels like she betrayed Chisato. I honestly have little understanding for that, if you feel like it would be wrong to kiss him, how about you just don't!?

Afterwards, she holed herself up in her room for a couple days, pretending to be sick. Yuuki eventually got through to her, thanks to her Mom's support who sensed what was going on. He visited her at home, and they sort of made up I guess? And then they had sex.

Hold on, what?

…is what I thought. Are you serious? Isn't this too fast? Honestly made me mad at Yuuki. As her friend he should be able to tell that this is not the right moment and he should probably give her some more time. Oh well, that happened and all is well. Or so I thought, until immediately afterwards, Mifuyu broke down crying, saying how she'd “betrayed Chisato again” and that now, there was “no going back for real”. Seriously?

SERIOUSLY???

This is the point where I lost all my respect for her. Has she not learned a thing from last time? I guess kissing is something that could perhaps maybe possibly happen in the spur of the moment (can it?), but just having sex? There's limits to how stupid you can be. Is she just too horny, or what? I have exactly zero empathy for her doing that and then crying how she regrets it afterwards.

A couple days later they end up in the club room alone and talk out their problems. Mifuyu says that she just wants to go back to how it was before. Yuuki finds that hard to accept of course, and eventually tells her: if she manages to properly turn him down, he'll give up on her. Great tactic by the way, to confront her with her own feelings. In any case, she isn't able to do that, but still tells him she wants to go back to being friends and forget everything that happened. He then agrees, but says he'd like to have sex with her one last time. She accepts.

S E R I O U S L Y

What a stupid move, from both of them. I was lowkey expecting their relationship to continue as fuck buddies after that, since they are obviously not able to control the horny, but it didn't. In fact, Mifuyu tried even harder to get Yuuki and Chisato to become a couple after that. Way to hurt someone I guess? She goes so far that Chisato eventually gets real suspicious and realizes whats up. Ironic. They then meet up to talk it out etc., a bit of drama happens, Mifuyu eventually accepts Yuuki. And then they have sex again. Heh.

Our drama queen at her peak

But just because we need more drama, Mifuyu gets really sick after that and has to go to the hospital. They eventually say she might actually die, because we needed some extra drama. She ends up not dying and that's it. Great storytelling.

Yea, that was the entire route, pretty much. There was also no political component here.

I'm a bit disappointed, because Mifuyu was one of my favorites initially and I actually like her less now. Plot-wise it was just unnecessary drama and people acting stupid. Also, I feel like Mifuyu prioritizing Chisato's feelings over her own is a deeper issue of not properly valuing herself, which should be talked about but never was.

Shinonome's Route

Shinonome Satsuki, Hazuki's little sister and Yuuki's rival in the election, is the love interest on the fourth route I've played. She seems to be the kind of very serious and calm character archetype that would be very fitting for student council president. She does get a couple funny interactions with Yuuki though, which also lead to her coming up with a new nickname for him every time they meet. It feels a bit like she's more alive when she's alone with Yuuki, compared to her usual demeanor. Like in the anime, there's some genuine chemistry and I'm here for it.

They meet by chance a couple times and eventually come to the point where Yuuki sneaks into the girl's dorm to Shinonome's room every night. To play Shogi with her, obviously. Hazuki finds out eventually, and half-mockingly complains that she doesn't want to get NTR'd by her little sister. Peak comedy.

At this point I'll have to talk about Hazuki's and Yuuki's relationship a little, because it's… peculiar? First of all, some background on Hazuki: she's the Shokken's advisor, and typically hangs out with the other members. She also put up her own beer keg in their club room. Don't ask. In any case, it's rare to get a scene with her where she's not drinking beer. She ~~gets so little respect from~~ blends in so well with the other club members that most of them don't address her as “Sensei” and she's mistaken as a student by visitors. Chisato even straight up drops all honorifics and calls her by her first name. That said, she still fulfills her role as an adult, often pitching in with some well thought out advice or bringing them back down to earth when they need it the most.

Moving on to her relationship with Yuuki… even after this route, I'm still confused. What's pretty clear though, is that she's in love with Yuuki. She says it a couple times, though mostly when she's drunk, but Yuuki doesn't take her seriously anyway. He comes over to her house to cook dinner for her sometimes, and it was also mentioned that they kissed at some point. This is never properly explained though. Regarding the kiss, apparently she got drunk, as usual, so I guess that just happened? But why he comes over to her house to cook for her, I have no idea. Both of these things happened or began before the game's start.
I also find it questionable how openly she tells Yuuki about this. Teacher-student relationships are problematic, at least from a legal perspective. Her feeling this way is one thing, but outright trying to win him over, when this could have a serious impact on both her own and Yuuki's future, just feels inconsiderate in a way. This wouldn't even bother me if it was seriously talked about at least once. But no, Hazuki just mentions that “it's a crime” on the side, and no one felt the need to talk about this any further. Oh well.

After seeing how close Yuuki got to her little sister, we get a scene where they're alone, talking about how Hazuki is in love with him. He mentions that he took that all as a joke. She then, not drunk for once, confesses to him again in the most serious way possible. When he asks if it's a joke, she says she's serious. He still thinks it's a joke anyway. Wow. This is pretty hurtful, actually.

Another important plot point that comes up several times during this route is the conflict between the two sisters about Hazuki leaving their home. Hazuki lives alone, having left home a couple years earlier (she's 23 in the VN). Shinonome never found out why Hazuki left, and is seen arguing with her, trying to get her to come back or at least explain why she won't. At some point Yuuki asks Hazuki himself. She asks him if he's in love with her little sister, and when he says he's not sure, she concludes that she still has a chance. She then proposes that they, the two sisters, are going to have a match. If Hazuki wins, she'll get Yuuki. When Yuuki mentions that Shinonome probably isn't interested in him, Hazuki adds that she'll tell her what she wants to know. Shinonome accepted the proposal, and Yuuki apparently didn't have a problem leaving the decision who's going to be his girlfriend to them. Like, come on, that's just weak. Totally in-character for him though.

Shinonome decides they're going to play Shogi, and Hazuki adds some rules, effectively making it a drinking game. Yuuki couldn't bear seeing Shinonome suffer through the alcohol and eventually asks Hazuki to take a break. When she prys him for the reason, he admits that he's in love with Shinonome and doesn't want to see her suffer. Hearing that, Hazuki resigns and says Shinonome may have him. I'm not sure at this point whether she was trying to play matchmaker for her little sister, or if she just decided there's no point in forcing anything if Yuuki clearly feels differently. In any case, while the drinking rules were a smart play from Hazuki's side, I find that a very questionable thing to do to her little sister.

They become a couple after that and go on a date on the weekend. Apparently someone from their school spotted them, so a rumor that they're dating spreads. During the next “public debate” the student council presidential candidates are in turn asking each other questions. Tatsumi immediately asks Shinonome and Yuuki “what they did on Sunday between time {x} and {y}”. While Yuuki is shocked and unable to answer, Shinonome just flat out says they were on a date together. Tatsumi, who was expecting to slowly drive them into a corner while they're pretending they did something else, sees his plan shattered. Right after that, it's Shinonome's turn to ask, and she asks Tatsumi whether he thinks it's acceptable to pry about someone's private life on a live broadcast like this. I just gotta say, what a legend. It may not come across as such in my retelling, but that was easily the strongest moment any female character got in the entirety of this VN. Also, that's a “I'm proud of my girlfriend” moment if I've ever seen one.

When Yuuki returns to the club room, he expects to be verbally beaten up by the other club members for betraying them or something. To his surprise, Mouri is already expecting him, and even praises him for his outstanding move. Shinonome's questioning of Tatsumi's morals actually led to a sharp decline in his support, but the fact that their favorite female “idol” is in a relationship actually weakened her own basis too. While the same goes for Yuuki ~~’s vast crowd of female supporters~~ of course, he's not affected by this nearly as badly, making the entire incident a rather big win for him. Surprisingly, the rest of the club is quick to accept this. Even Chisato got silenced by Mouri beforehand, so she is actually not ~~fucking annoying~~ intervening much on this route.

What follows are some interesting looks into how a relationship between political rivals affects them and their lives. The newly formed couple swears to not let their relationship affect the elections and apparently everyone accepted that. Shinonome's underlings though are despairing over these developments. Yuuki overhears them insulting her, they also start a smear campaign against him, and she eventually loses all their support, forcing her to resign from the elections as a whole.
At some point, she confesses to Yuuki that she was sort of hoping for their relationship to be exposed, since it would render her underlings’ practices of “idolizing” her and catering to the male (and partly female) audience's “special” interests ineffective. She reveals that she wanted to win “the right way” - her way. I think her actions are quite understandable. I imagine the whole “idolizing” thing to be incredibly uncomfortable either way. Yuuki, however, lowkey berates her, telling her she should think of her underlings more and consider how much effort they're putting in, trying to make her campaign a success. This is then illustrated through the Shokken, and Shinonome is moved when she sees them working together. It's not like Yuuki doesn't have a point: Shinonome was indeed quite cold whenever she talked to her underlings, and seemed to reject everything they came up with to turn their campaign around. That said, the comparison is still weak. The relationship between Yuuki and the other members of the Shokken is fundamentally different than that of Shinonome and her underlings. Besides, the sort of plans they came up with (“idolizing” Shinonome, smear campaign against Yuuki etc.) were all highly questionable. In the end, it feels like the VN is trying to force some sort of lesson on the reader, and, while said lesson isn't wrong, it doesn't really make sense in the context and the way they're trying to present it. Shinonome also regrets wanting to disband the Shokken, since it's obviously a wonderful club, which is like… uh, NO!?

In any case, there's some character development for Shinonome who had her hopes and dreams smashed before her eyes and Yuuki eventually wins decisively etc. All is good. Shinonome joins the Shokken and lowkey replaces Yuuki who barely gets to visit them now that he's busy being student council president. The fact that Yuuki directly profited from how their relationship seriously damaged Shinonome's standing left a somewhat bitter aftertaste though. I mean, it would for me if I were him, and it feels a little weird that this was never mentioned. Oh well.

Yuuki also gets 1000 “free passes” from Shinonome since she broke a promise to him that she would see the election through to the end. Every time he does something that makes her angry, she (loudly) decrements the counter. In one scene about two weeks (?) after the elections, the counter is already down to 500. While that practice may seem trivial, perhaps even a little funny, watching it in action in that scene made it feel kinda toxic. Have fun I guess.

Finally, I did not talk about the big reveal yet: why Hazuki left home and refuses to go back. Well, the blog article is already going to be stupid long as is, the exposition I wrote for this route is way longer than the other routes as well, and I really have nothing much to add about the resolution. Let me just say: it wasn't very interesting. This mostly stems from the fact that it's something entirely within the Shinonome family, which we never get to meet, so it really has no practical effect on the rest of the plot. Hazuki explains it, turns out everything was (sort of) just a misunderstanding, and the sisters get along better now.

This was the route I was looking forward to the most and it did not disappoint. While politically it wasn't super exciting, it still had some interesting facettes and easily the best romance in the VN.

Morishita's Route

Ah yes, Morishita Michiru. This is probably the route I was least excited for in terms of romance, but at least plot-wise it was rather interesting, shining a new light on some events and the politics among the big three.

As you might expect, the character that is silent to the point you forget they can even speak, barely shows emotion ever, generally ignores almost everyone that isn't Yuuki and also simply answers with silence whenever she doesn't like the question, doesn't make for good girlfriend material. I guess they wanted to go with the cat girl image too much here. If it were me, her behavior would honestly annoy me too much to even bother talking to her. At some point it's not gap-moe (never has been tbh) or funny anymore, it is nothing but a majorly disrespectful way of treating the people around you.

It is also not particularly interesting watching it play out. She doesn't have meaningful conversations with anyone but Yuuki, as she literally ignores them, perhaps giving them a “Futsuu” (“as usual”) at best, if she's feeling nice. Even her conversations with Yuuki feel like some sort of weird question-and-answer game, where he's trying to get something out of her by asking further and further questions until they get to the point where she feels uncomfortable (?) answering again. This is necessary because she doesn't really talk if you don't directly ask her, and even then she answers the question in the most concise way possible. One (or more like several very similar) situations take this to the peak of irony. When Yuuki is once again about to despair over the overwhelming odds stacked against them in the election, the other club members try to convince him that they're “doing well”, “everyone's gonna do their best”, “it's not that bad” and whatnot. But he isn't convinced, until… drum roll… Morishita steps up, says “Daijoubu”. Refuses to elaborate, leaves. Okay, minus that last part. And then Yuuki thinks “Yea you're right! We've come this far!” and continues his motivational monologue he literally had to make for himself, because Morishita obviously won't… you know, contribute anything of value here.
It also really doesn't help, at least in my case, that she has some lowkey loli-influences and also talks a bit like a child.

Moving on from Morishita to the overall plot of this route: Morishita carries a broken harmonica around, that she says a good friend gifted her. Said friend enrolled in their school two years before her, but about a year ago, Morishita lost contact to her. She then decided to enroll there herself in order to find that friend. She refuses to give any more information, neither about that friend, nor about herself. Yuuki eventually figures the friend is called “Kana” because that name is carved into the harmonica that he “repairs” (read: cleans) for Morishita at some point. When she plays the only song she knows, which she learnt from Kana, Mouri storms into the room shouting Kana's name, then makes a smooth 180° and leaves in the most suspicious way possible. Yuuki starts making his own research into Kana's person and whereabouts. He eventually gets real suspicious of his girlfriend as well, but Morishita just goes full horny mode whenever he brings up certain topics. Successfully silenced, lol.

After a lot of back and forth that was so insubstantial I don't remember any of it, Morishita can't bear the feelings of guilt anymore and tells Yuuki that she's a spy. She then runs away and Yuuki is apprehended by men of the BPO. He's dragged before Mouri, who offers him cooperation over violence. Yuuki agrees to being told everything but keeping silent about it all.

We learn that the BPO raises its own secret ~~Stasi~~ group of special agents they use to spy on the students. Both Kana and Morishita are part of them. They are recruited from a special children's orphanage. Morishita apparently had a difficult childhood, growing up with abusive parents and several revisions of foster parents before ending up at that orphanage. Her father beat her up whenever she showed any emotion, which led to her ~~becoming a kuudere~~ refusing to let her emotions show. When she arrived at the orphanage, she was sufficiently traumatized and broken. Kana became her one and only friend. When Kana disappeared, Morishita resolved to find her, by enrolling into Takafuji academy via the only method available to a pennyless orphan like her: become a spy for the BPO herself, breaking her promise with Kana to never go the same route as her.

Kana, in the meantime, made quite a name for herself (well not really since she's a spy). Initially unwilling to follow someone's orders, when she got paired up with Mouri they became THE STRONGE… ahem, a pretty successful duo. Mouri becoming president was apparently in huge parts thanks to Kana's work as well. But shortly after that, Kana was attacked on one of her missions, leaving her comatose. After realizing that a regular hospital can't offer proper treatment for her, Mouri strikes a deal with some opposing faction that is not described in more detail, allowing him to hospitalize her at a specialist hospital owned by said faction.

When Morishita joins the spies, he tries to keep her out of everything as much as possible in an effort to protect her in Kana's place. As such, she only gets to do routine missions, such as checking the, uh… wiretaps placed in every clubroom. Now think back to the panty shot that was our intro to the game… turns out she was actually checking the wiretap placed under a table or something. Now, I certainly did not expect to get a justification for that panty shot after playing through 90% of the game. I'd still prefer if the first scene, or the first CG, or… y'know, the entire game, did not include a wildly unnecessary panty shot. Well, whatever. Yuuki asks Mouri to let him see Kana, and Mouri actually agrees… after Yuuki wins the elecion.

The rest of the election period is really just a short montage of the Shokken doing stuff, with Yuuki eventually winning the election. In the meantime, Morishita refuses to meet Yuuki, since she's too afraid he might hate her now after knowing the truth about her. When Yuuki finally visits Kana together with Mouri, he brings Morishita's harmonica with him and plays a part of that one song for her. Guess what, Kana's eyes start moving before she goes back into full coma. They plan to bring Morishita there next, since she can actually play the full piece.

When Morishita visits Kana a couple days later (without Yuuki, since she still refuses to see him), Yuuki suddenly gets a call from Mouri, telling him that Morishita escaped the hospital with Kana. Quite an impressive feat, lol. Yuuki is of course the first one to find her and they make up. Morishita took Kana away since she thought one of the doctors was going to kill her otherwise. She can see the feelings of other people by the way. Minor detail. In any case, she plays that song for Kana, who wakes up from her one year of coma, everything is good, happy end.

A rare sighting of Yuuki, together with Morishita and Kana

The whole spy-thing may be a bit wild, but the plot of this route was quite a bit different to what we'd seen so far and rather interesting to follow. It was also nice to see some actual emotion from Mouri for once. Well, he wasn't actually emotionless like Morishita, but a rather controlled gentleman. Seeing a bit more of his character, most importantly his worry and also despair for Kana, really added to his character. I was getting invested in his and Kana's romance, as they seemed rather cute together. They're not a couple and Kana is quite tsundere, but that was actually funny since Morishita called her out everytime she tried to go tsun. Certainly more interesting than Yuuki and Morishita, if you ask me. So when we got the final scene, a couple weeks after she woke up, we learn that her rehabilitation is going well etc., I was just waiting for Mouri to show up. Even their reunion happened offscreen, so we actually didn't see them together at all until that point. “Oh where Mouri is, you're asking? He's on a journey to find himself or something while Kana recovers”
Yo are you kidding me? DUDE!?
How about you support your ~~not yet~~ girlfriend or something ffs

Well, that was disappointing. What was not disappointing, was that Chisato just accepted the fact that Yuuki chose Morishita. A welcome surprise. I'll take less Chisato bullshit any day. To give you a quote that I absolutely wanted to include:
“Enlightenment is when you realize hating Chisato is what makes you love the other girls that much more.”
- lostmynic

The Sex Scenes

There are some things I wanted to say about KoiChoco's sex scenes, since I didn't really talk about them in the previous sections.

The main impression that remains from them is… boredom? I'm not sure if VNs are just not the right medium for porn, but wow… I half-skipped almost all of the sex scenes. They're like 50% slurping and moaning sounds, and 50% colorful descriptions of how they're going even harder now. What's also somewhat disappointing is how they're incredibly samey. If you removed the CG, voice lines and names from the text, then I probably wouldn't be able to even tell which girl Yuuki is having sex with. While they do explore different setups etc., the scenes just have very little character. And for some reason, except on Morishita's route for reasons outlined above, it feels like Yuuki is always the one starting things, being in control and wanting it, while the female characters are mostly just getting dragged along. On the first route I was expecting that to develop and change over time. By the third route, I had accepted that to be the formula they're going with for all of them.

The only exception here was Shinonome. Her first scene had way more dynamic and character than the other four routes, and she also clearly asserts what she wants and takes the lead sometimes. It feels much more balanced than the rest. In general, her first scene was much more… enjoyable… to watch than the others, and it was also not just in line with her character as we knew it so far, but even added to it.
…cue the second scene where she degenerates to just as boring and passive as the other four. Welp. We take what we get.

Finally, a moment of unintentional comedy I wanted to share: whenever you quit the game, a randomly chosen character among the voiced ones speaks a specific line for you as a goodbye. Now imagine you're quitting in the middle of a sex scene, and you hear Shiohama (reporter person) saying:
“Shuzai kyouryoku arigatou gozaimashita” - “Thank you for providing material (for an article)”
Peak comedy. I couldn't stop laughing for a while after this.

Anime Rewatch

After rewatching the anime with a friend this month, I thought this would also be the perfect opportunity to see if I still feel the same way about it, as well as how it compares to the VN. Retsu gooooo!
This is the last section. I promise.

The main impression that remained of the anime after my first watch was, that it is surprisingly entertaining. It wasn't that original and did nothing particularly well, yet I still had a good time with it for some reason. When I went into the rewatch though, I expected to be bored. I didn't think it would still be entertaining the second time, especially since I'm generally not a big fan of rewatching. Not even of really good anime.

But I was surprised yet again. While for some difficult to describe reason the first five or so minutes felt like I was watching something of very low quality, I still enjoyed the entire anime and didn't get bored once. While one could find the first three or so episodes boring (before the main election business picks up), after that I believe the series has a pretty good flow. They tried to somehow fit all the routes in there more or less, which doesn't work particularly well if you ask me, but at least means it never gets boring. The animation sometimes contributed greatly to the comedy as well.

Let's go over all of the routes in a bit more detail.

Chisato

The resolution to her trauma was dumb, honestly. She just sits in her room crying for a couple days (?) until Mifuyu comes by, switches to a pretty sick new style that I wish she had in the VN, says some vague stuff that I didn't really get even after having read the source material, and… that's all it took for Chisato to feel fine again?
I complained about this in the original article already, but it feels even worse now that I know how the VN resolved it. At least there it was a product of Yuuki and Chisato trying together for her to overcome her trauma, which also sparked the start of their relationship. It even had one or two moments that would have been rather strong if I cared. The anime has none of this and the resolution feels arbitrary.

There was a good moment where Yuuki punched Chisato though. Not that it was really relevant in the end, but it was nice seeing him fight back for once. Guess what never once happened in the VN.
Chisato as a whole has been toned down considerably in the anime as well, which certainly made it an easier watch. We barely get to see any of Chisato's usual being fucking obnoxious.

Mifuyu

This girl probably got the short(est) end of the stick when it comes to how her route was treated. We get to know she's writing fan fiction about her romance with Yuuki, and she says some confusing things during her conversation with Chisato that I mentioned above. When she changed her clothes to this crop top, we can actually see her scar, which is one of the two central components of her route in the VN. But it is not really talked about and rather easy to miss. This scene contains almost the entirety of Mifuyu's route that we get to see in the anime, and it is incredibly vague and confusing at best.

The style rocks. But do you see the scar that half her route is about?

Aomi

Compared to the VN, the anime chose a very different approach to how they're using her character. She's bullied (as all keitokusei are) in the anime like in the VN, but it certainly goes further in the anime. In the VN, she's more of a catalyst for Yuuki to learn about the school's bullying problem and the initial motivation he needed to engage with that problem. The anime just focuses on showing us how shitty her life is. We see her staying at school until it's dark to finish her work, calling her family to tell them to eat without her. She is harassed by this one group of girls who eventually go to the point of stealing her underwear. The VN never went this far, there was no sort of violence against Aomi at any point. While people regularly say “she stinks” or something while passing her, her life isn't nearly as bad in the VN. Her work is also much less concrete in the VN, where we only get to see her help the Shokken as the keitokusei assigned to support them, but we have no idea what sort of work she usually does.

The VN engages much more deeply with the school's bullying problem and what political measures could be used to resolve it. That part was fairly interesting, but is unfortunately completely missing from the anime. I guess it just didn't fit, which is fair enough.

It was rather interesting though, how the anime seems to depict Shinonome as the candidate who was morally superior to Yuuki in every way, in no small part thanks to the fact that she wants to tackle the aforementioned bullying problem. Contrast to how, in the VN, Aomi was actually afraid of Shinonome winning, as she was planning to abolish the keitokusei system and replace it with a scholarship system. That wouldn't be nearly as accessible to poor students like Aomi.
If you look closely enough in the anime though, you see the exact same proposal in Shinonome's manifesto, that Yuuki looks through at some point around the middle of the anime. As such it seems like the facts are just weirdly (accidentally?) misrepresented by the anime in a way that gives some situations a very different meaning.

Shinonome

The anime gave us some of the good romance buildup that we also saw in the VN, but then decides to ditch it all to go for the Chisato route instead. Even in the anime, Shinonome's feels like the better romance. What a punch in the face. Well, at least they gave us the full backstory of Shinonome's and Hazuki's family problems. I didn't care much about that in the VN either, but the way the anime also rushed it certainly didn't make it any better. As they don't enter a deeper relationship than that in the anime, we obviously skip all the political problems that followed in the VN.

Morishita

This is perhaps the most interesting comparison. The VN mentioned several times how the “Oosawa incident” left the BPO with a rather bad reputation and that even student council president Mouri suffered greatly from that, despite actually doing a pretty good job as a president. But it doesn't really go further than that and a lot of things remain vague in the VN. We know Oosawa was appointed head of the BPO by Mouri, as part of the deal he struck with <non-descript opposing faction>, but caused a lot of trouble to the point that person was displaced from the office. We never learn what the incident actually entailed, who exactly the aforementioned opposing faction is, or what led to Kana being in a coma.

The anime fills in a lot of the gaps here, by introducing us to a new character: Yuina Oosawa, who never actually appeared in person in the VN. She radiates peak villain aura and we learn that a keitokusei was sort of bullied off the school by her, which is what later became known as the Oosawa incident. The opposing faction she's part of is called the Katahira faction and actually seems to be a rivaling faction within the BPO. Finally, Kana was apparently on a mission to uncover a secret deal between the Katahira faction and the general affairs bureau. She fell into a coma after being run over by a car on that mission - which was driven by Oosawa.

I like that they actually built on the VN here and gave a much clearer shape to these rather vague circumstances. It just made me realize how much the VN was lacking here though, and I wish we'd gotten the details there as well. Besides, things still don't really add up. We suddenly hear about this second faction in the infighting within the BPO, but this is somewhat difficult to believe. It simply doesn't fit with the impression of Mouri having the BPO under good control, which the VN gave me. Then again, these details were only added in the anime, so I probably shouldn't try to “port” this back as canon to the VN. If we just look at the anime itself, it is much easier to believe this infighting is occuring, since we generally have much less of an impression of the BPO's organization.

The anime also depicted Oosawa as openly hostile towards the Shokken. She told Mouri to stop cooperating with them, since he's not sure they'll be good puppets for the BPO when they win the election. As Mouri doesn't obey her, she takes things into her own hands by abducting Chisato, trying to force Yuuki to resign from the election or at least miss his final speech.
If you think about this clearly for a second, her actions don't make any sense. Mouri and the BPO aren't supporting Yuuki out of the goodness of their heart. They made it very clear that Yuuki winning the elections would be preferable to Shinonome or Tatsumi, the candidates of the other members of the big three, winning. If Oosawa succeeds at making Yuuki lose the election, she's literally played into their enemies hands. Oosawa and Mouri should be on the same side on this one. But I guess they really just wanted a dramatic ending, so they adopted the whole abduction plot from Chisato's route in the VN.

Closing

KoiChoco is actually the first (Japanese) VN I've finished so far, and in the original language no less. Still somehow finished this before If my Heart had Wings, lol.
I'm pretty happy with the result. While I certainly won't remember it as the greatest thing of all time, I had my share of fun. I was mostly reading while e.g. having dinner in the evenings after work, and that is a rather pleasant mode of consumption. I'm also satisfied in terms of the language learning experience, as I managed rather well and picked up some new vocabulary along the way.

Besides… boi, that was long. This is my first article to actually break the 10.000 words. I hope this didn't turn into a pain to read along the way. Perhaps I should have tried harder to keep the route summaries short… well, too late now!

See you next time!

"My Dress-Up Darling" - the Good Romcom?

Fri, 29 Jul 2022 00:02:51 +0200

So, I recently had the pleasure of watching “My Dress-Up Darling” (or その着せ替え人形は恋をする / “Sono kisekae ningyou wa koi wo suru” for the original title) with a friend. For the most part, I really enjoyed the experience, but there's a couple points that I found somewhat to highly questionable, and in the end it made me want to talk about the series in more detail in a post. Here we go again.

Please note that this article contains spoilers and I won't mark them. Proceed at your own risk.

The Good

As I said previously, the series was very enjoyable to watch. That said, I have a rather hard time pointing my finger to why exactly this is the case. For the most part, it just feels like the series has a great flow. We binged the entire thing, which I usually find somewhat tiring even with good anime. That wasn't the case here, often it felt like the episodes were over in the blink of an eye. That's all the more impressive, considering that there are a couple episodes in which little to nothing of importance happens. Watching Gojou and Marin is just fun I guess.

I would classify the series as a rather typical romcom. There honestly isn't that much to really set it apart from most stories in the genre, but a couple things stood out nonetheless. Perhaps the first thing was how genuine it felt right from the start. We follow Gojou, a 15 year old guy who is fascinated by traditional Japanese Hina dolls, and has been trying to make them since he was a little kid. But as a result, he's become a bit of an eccentric loner with no friends at school. His social awkwardness is compounded by his tragic past, where apparently some girl found out he makes Hina dolls, and then, I quote, said “Why do you like girls’ dolls even though you're a boy? That's creepy! I hate you!”

…yea honestly that part was stupidly weak, you couldn't be any less shallow and generic. It still does the job I guess. What follows, though, easily turns the weak backstory around. We see Gojou sitting in his classroom in the middle of a break, and he listens to his classmates talking. Various topics come up, whether it's club activities, some TV show, a famous actor or other things. It all confirms to him: he has nothing in common with these people and there's nothing they could possibly talk about. He doesn't fit in with them.

I've seen too many iterations of the “loner highschool boy” to count, particularly in romance manga, and they are mostly incredibly dull characters. It's not like you need a good reason to be or become a loner at school, but the usual depictions are not enough to actually relate to these characters and their situations. Gojou and his introduction are different, for two reasons.

First of all, the series actually manages to get the feeling across. The feeling of isolation was relatable in a way that few of the other loner-protagonists managed. It's not like the series did anything super special here, but the scene I just described already worked wonders for my perception of Gojou.

Secondly, Gojou has a “reason” for why he's alone. While his “obscure” hobby should not really prevent him from making friends, and his “trauma” was introduced in a rather weak way, the series still managed to make it convincing. Gojou is passionate about making Hina dolls and seems to spend his entire free time on practicing. It's a hobby, perhaps even more like a calling, that he really cares about. He stays up late when he's “in the flow”, and that's something very relatable for a software developer like me. As a consequence, he spends no time in clubs at school, and otherwise has no common interests with his classmates. It is a simple, yet convincing background for our loner protagonist. It also makes him instantly more interesting than the typical protagonist, as he has some actual drive and skills. He works hard for his goals, and the perceived distance to his classmates is merely a side product of this.
I also love how his clothes emphasize this aspect of him. When he's not wearing his school uniform, he always wears this traditional clothing… uh, I have no idea what it's called. Complete with the wooden shoes. That is just him.

After his first encounter with Marin, he happens to overhear a conversation with her and her friends. It is basically a story of some guy she met making fun of the anime figure she had on her backpack, and closed with her saying “You just don't make fun of what other people like.”
They weren't even talking to each other, but it was exactly what Gojou needed to hear, and was perhaps the greatest possible start to their relationship. In a way, she indirectly assured him that she isn't like the the girl from his “trauma”, but would respect him and his passion for what it is.

Marin is mostly living the genki-Gyaru archetype. I'm not a big fan of the trope, and it typically struggles with being a very superficial character. While I wouldn't call Marin a particulary interesting or deep character, this was a good introduction for her, giving her already a bit more depth than most genki-girls. Again, while the scene I just described isn't anything particularly new or interesting, the show delivered her declaration in a way that seemed heartfelt and sincere. This is also what I meant when I said “I can't point my finger” to why it works for me. It just works.
To clarify, I don't believe that stories have to do anything special, new, creative or innovative to be enjoyable. Some of the best shows out there are just decent executions of the cliches and tropes we've known for ages. Dress-Up Darling is a good example of this.

In any case, Marin's entire character is another such case for me. As I said, I'm not a big fan of the genki-girl archetype. Most of the time, they seem a bit too hyper and end up annoying me, while also being mostly boring characters. But Marin just… works for me. She isn't the most interesting character either, and still seems to fulfill the genki-girl trope all too well, but still… Well, I can't express it any better, so let's move on.

Another positive was how the anime *mostly* showed a lot of trope awareness, avoiding the majority of the romcom tropes I hate so, so much. Sometimes this was also used for great comedy. Marin introducing the plot of the game she wanted to cosplay a character from, and basically recounting a painfully generic and tropey harem/hentai plot was peak. Another moment that, in itself, doesn't seem too funny but the anime delivers it to great effect.

All in all, I liked how their relationship developed. The series really emphasized the start of their relationship by how their passions synergized, in a way, instead of being all forced romance-y from the outset. Marin managed to convey her passion for her favorite media and cosplaying, and made Gojou feel like he wants to support her in her endeavour. That said, I still feel like the series should have talked a bit more about how his work making costumes for her affects his own practices. The series mentioned at some point inbetween that he barely got to practice. Then later it is mentioned how his work on Marin's outfits and makeup actually improved his craft. While I really liked the synergy here, it is a bit hard to believe. He has objectively less time to practice now, and him helping Marin is a direct impediment to his own passion, in some way.

Anyway, getting back to their relationship: to me it felt like mostly natural and believable development. While Marin's innate confidence gave them a bit of a headstart, they really do feel like good friends at some point. They watch anime together, she sometime comes over ~~to eat with them~~ so he can fix her questionable diet etc. The latter is another great example for how the show avoids common bad romance tropes: often the main girl is shown to be completely inept when it comes to doing anything around the household and would probably die from malnutrition without the main guy. Here, it is instead shown that Marin's nutrition is just not particularly healthy, so Gojou's grandfather invites her over. It feels natural and realistic. It also means she neither seems like an absolute failure of a human being, nor does it make her overly dependent on Gojou. This is further emphasized by how she tries to cook herself, and actually somewhat succeeds. I was also lowkey expecting her room to be a dirty mess when Gojou visited her the first time, but no. It was a normal, clean room, with a ton of merch from Marin's favorite media. A positive surprise and perfectly in-character.

It takes almost half the anime for Marin to realize that she's in love with Gojou. At this point it feels like a well-paced and believable payoff at the end of what could be a movie. Also, Marin fawning over Gojou is absolutely adorable. Again, the show avoids most shitty romance tropes here. She's not “head-over-heels” for him in a way that she would do unconditionally everything for him and loses any bit of character in the process. She doesn't turn into a tsundere either, and is still able to control herself like… a normal person. I feel like I'm repeating myself here, but this is stuff that I'm seriously worried about when watching a show like this. I have very little faith in good execution and I'm always expecting my worst fears to come true when the situation presents itself. You may think that “My Dress-Up Darling” has proven itself at this point, but… eh, we'll see about that later.

There's a ton of other plain good moments I could mention here, but I'm not sure they'd really add anything. Let me just say that there was some great comedy as well.

The Cosplaying

The way cosplay was integrated into the show was great in pretty much every possible way. First of all, I like how the show managed to get the passion for this hobby across, to some extent. We continuously got glimpses of the work that goes into it, whether it's details on fabric, wigs, makeup, photography etc. It is easy to write a story around a certain subject, but presenting it in a way that catches the viewer's interest and maybe even teaches them something new entirely, is a totally different beast. I feel like most stories like this end up making it too technical, providing info dumps at random intervals that are too detailed and simultaneously not interesting enough for the audience to care. “If my Heart had Wings” would be a great example of this. I'll turn this into a link to the article when I actually get around to writing about that game… anyway, Dress-Up Darling has none of these problems. While I have no knowledge about cosplaying from other sources and thus cannot comment on the depth or accuracy of how cosplaying is depicted in the show, from my perspective, it was really well done. It captured a wide variety of aspects through the making of the custome, photography and finally conventions, but also kept the details at a level that was interesting to follow.

Thematically, it also fits perfectly. The underlying message is that, while it may take a lot of hard work, you can be whoever you want. While cosplay is obviously focused on looks only, this doesn't weaken the message. It is something that fits Marin's character all too well. She expresses herself in all the ways she wants, and no one can stop her. It also underlines her model function for Gojou. I wonder if he'll eventually take part in the cosplaying himself. I think it would make for great closure for him. All in all, the way cosplaying was integrated into the show was done amazingly well.

The Bad

Now that I've talked at length about almost everything I liked about the show, it's time to get to the ugly stuff. Let me stress again that I really enjoyed Dress-Up Darling. That is all the more reason why the points I'm going to mention bother me so much. Some of them drag down the show as a whole. While the comparison may not fit too well, the experience reminds me a little of Sword Art Online. Both are shows that I enjoyed very much, and that makes their obvious shortcomings all the more painful.

Let's start with the biggest problem: the ecchi.
Oh boy, the ecchi. Before going deeper into this, let me say that I'm not the biggest fan of ecchi in general. While I can appreciate the horny, in many anime it doesn't feel too fitting… I guess? In most shows, ecchi is something that I mostly ignore as best as I can. It rarely adds anything, at least for me. That said, it doesn't usually break the experience for me. I'll ignore the ecchi and that's fine for me. It may still leave a bad impression, but that's usually weak at best. There are even shows where the ecchi is a part of their DNA and it sort of fits, see KonoSuba for example.

Dress-Up Darling is different. The ecchi here hits you like a ton of bricks when you least expect it. It left a strong negative impression and seriously dragged down the whole experience. The ecchi here is overdone, feels out of place, and sometimes wholly distasteful.

Overdone

Episode 2 is easily the biggest offender here. It is only the second episode, yet we get an entire 10 minute sequence of Marin in an overly revealing swimsuit, just to take her measurements. I mean, I get that taking measurements is part of the job, and I'm not expecting them to skip it, but… honestly it's everything about that sequence. Absolutely everything is wrong with it, so I don't even know where to start.

Marin strips down to her underwear in front of a guy she'd only talked to twice before. She wears a swimsuit of “the sexy kind”. She eventually sprawls herself on Gojous bed in a way that is obviously supposed to be seductive. The entire scene drags on for 10 minutes. 10 minutes which is basically spent taking measurements and nothing else. I don't remember anything of relevance happening here, and I'm not going to watch it again to refresh my memory. The scene was simply uncomfortable to watch. It is unnecessarily dragged out to the extreme, it does practically nothing for the plot, it isn't funny. After a good start in episode 1, the second episode made me feel like I'm watching the intro to a hentai. This is not an exaggeration or a joke.

The scene gets even worse due to how much it dwells on Gojou's embarassment. I mean, I kind of get it. He's been a loner for so long, and being asked to suddenly get all up and close with a half-naked beauty maybe a bit much. The show makes it sufficiently obvious he's both sort of horny but also very uncomfortable. It really makes sense given his background. But I didn't need a 10 minute montage of him freezing up whenever he comes close to touching Marin. It was clear after the first time. It didn't need to be dragged out for this long, and it sure as hell doesn't need to be repeated again every other episode.

Honestly, his reactions kinda crept me out. I get that the situation is uncomfortable, but then you either refuse or just do it goddamit. The task he's been given isn't difficult by any means. But freezing up and staring at Marin is fucking creepy.
In fact, the scene as a whole shows an insane lack of consideration of both characters for each other. Marin knows no shame whatsoever, and apparently that means she doesn't realize what sort of discomfort she's causing Gojou. Gojou on the other hand is treating her in the most disrespectful way he could in that situation. She's the one getting half naked in front of him, and it's his responsibility to get it over with, not drag it out unnecessarily and not make it any weirder than it has to be. There were scenes where he would stand behind her for 20 seconds effectively doing nothing but staring at her and having a mental breakdown. If she did not have zero shame, as mentioned before, the entire situation would have to be unimaginably uncomfortable for her.

It is not only this scene of course, though it is an extreme example of the show dropping an ecchi bomb almost out of nowhere and absolutely overdoing it in every way. Other than that, we'll regularly get Marin's panty shots, Marin in her underwear, Marin in all sorts of sexy cosplay and non-cosplay outfits etc. And sure as hell, Gojou is too embarassed to act like a normal person almost every single time. You'd think he'd get at least somewhat used to it over the course of the show, but nope… in episode ELEVEN he still complains about her being too close… when they're just sitting next to each other. I mean… come on, you two have watched an entire 128 episode anime together from her couch. How is this still bothering you? And again, his behavior as a whole would creep me out. It also gets boring rather quick, it's not funny either and at some point his characterization is sufficiently well established that there's no need to show us these reactions time and time and time again.

As a whole, the ecchi scenes and whatever is connected to them feel so weirdly…

Out of place

Seventy percent of the time, the show seems to portrait itself as a cute and wholesome romance. And as long as it does that, it works really well. The ending perfectly encapsulates how the show feels at its best. And when you least expect it you get another random panty shot from Marin. Just… why.

Think of that scene on the convention, where she wore her first cosplay made by Gojou. A woman asked her for photos at the end. Gojou watches them, and has a slightly sentimental moment of introspection where he realizes that their time together might come to an end after this. And, boom - a breeze of wind and a panty shot of Marin. Why? Seriously, why? Moments like this make me want to scream with frustration. This is not only cramming ecchi no one needed into a show for some fan service. It is deliberately breaking the tone of the entire show just to give us some horny. Way too often the ecchi clashes with whatever is currently happening. And in general, it breaks with the show's overall feeling of “cute and wholesome romance” it seems to want to uphold the rest of the time.

Don't get me wrong, I wouldn't have any problem with it if the show seriously treated theirs as a sexual relationship. But it is not. There's actually loads of sexual tension in the show, but it doesn't really go beyond that. It's difficult to describe. Sexual tension, but not really physical attraction behind that? Like both characters are actually too innocent for that? Not sure what I want to say here. But in any case, it often feels like someone took a really good innocent romance and then sprinkled a ton of ecchi over it as an afterthought. It feels so out of place it actually breaks with both every scene it happens in and the show's tone in general.

There were two separate occassions where the show made me feel like I'm watching the intro to a hentai. How do you even manage to go this wrong?

I feel like the entire problem arises from an inherent contradiction in Marin's characterization. She's the genki-gyaru and seems like a bit of an airhead at times, so it isn't too surprising initially that, apparently, she knows no shame when it comes to showing off her bare skin in front of that guy she only talked to for the first time a couple days ago. That in itself is already rather difficult to believe, but I was quick to accept it while watching. After thinking about it for a bit though, it doesn't line up. The rest of the show wants to make us think that she's an innocent young maiden in love. That's how she's depicted, outside of the ecchi scenes at least.

But there's a huge difference between knowing no shame, and being entirely comfortable showing off, or even “using” your body. What we see in episode 2 suggests that she has no problem with that either. She poses on Gojou's bed in a way that is obviously and intentionally seductive. There are various other moments in the show where her behavior could be described as deliberately seductive, and ultimately it feels… off. She cannot be completely unaware of what kind of effect her being naked in front of Gojou has on him, and at the same time try to seduce (?) him. It feels contradictory.

It becomes the most obvious when at some point down to road she actually does feel embarassment as she's half-naked in front of Gojou. On the one hand it perfectly fit the scene as a whole and the image of “innocent Marin”, and on the other hand it feels like a completely random contradiction to her characterization that was established over the course of the entire previous half of the show. They chose a single moment in the entire show where she suddenly feels embarassed about showing off her naked skin, when it hasn't bothered her the least at any point before that, or at any point after that. It's almost like she has two personalities and she switches to “ecchi Marin” whenever she strips down.

Moving on to the third section on how the ecchi bothered me: Some of it was plain…

Distasteful

This is an overall feeling that accompanied most of the ecchi scenes to some extent, simply due to how they felt badly integrated with the rest of the show. But there were a couple moments that threw me for a loop because they felt so damn wrong.

Easily the worst one is our introduction to Sajuna. The entire scene has exactly zero right to exist. It is distasteful to the extreme. To quote myself from a couple thousand words ago: Absolutely everything is wrong with it, so I don't even know where to start.

First of all: the bathroom scene. Guy walks in on girl in the bathroom. Why? Why is this a thing? This one might take the crown for the shittiest romance (?) trope out there. The fact that I have to tag this as a romance trope in itself is plain disgusting. Anyway. When I said earlier that I like how the show avoids most of the shitty romance tropes… I take it all back. This scene makes up for everything they've avoided so far.

So, Gojou opens the bathroom door and finds naked Sajuna in front of him, who apparently just got ouf of the bath. Part of the classic trope is of course, how he fails to act like any decent person would and instead stands there, staring at Sajuna dumbfounded for… several seconds (?) before eventually closing the door.
It can't be that hard. Walking in on someone in the bathroom? It can happen, I guess. But if it does… just close the fucking door. Immediately. Gojou really didn't need any more material to help underline his “creep” image from the ecchi scenes. Not to mention he lowkey walked in on her intentionally.

But wait, the shitshow isn't over yet. He doesn't just walk in on naked Sajuna, no. In her surprise she slips on the wet floor and lands in the most unfavorable position possible, with… no I'm going to spare myself the description. Fuck I'm just trying to watch a cute romcom. Why does it have to make me feel this disgusted?

Oh did you think that's it? I totally forgot to mention that Sajuna is a loli. I'm running out of words to express my aggravation and frustration, so I'll stop trying. And honestly, I'm confused. Why is this scene here? Does that one shot of Sajuna only half-covered by her towel actually make people horny? Because otherwise I don't get it. The scene doesn't do anything for the show. It adds nothing to the plot, it is not funny, it is just plain repulsive.

Okay, enough of this scene. There's another one that deserves mentioning though. The show very casually implied that when Marin sent Gojou a picture of her in a swimsuit, he jacked off to that.
… what the fuck. I thought that scene from IMHHW with Ma Boi secretly taking pictures of his (female) friends as they're playing around in their swimsuits was the peak of plain weird and creepy. Congrats to Dress-Up Darling for beating this with some casual side-remark.

…I feel like writing this section lowkey left some psychological damage, so I'm gonna take a break now and finish this article another day.

Whew, 9 hours later and I feel much better. Moving on.

To get back to Sajuna, after the bath scene she was also trying to blackmail Gojou into making an outfit for her, by threatening to report him for sexual harassment. This is soon forgotten as Marin gets all excited about the prospect of working with Sajuna and Gojou readily agrees. But it still leaves a bitter aftertaste.

The way Sajuna is introduced also made her feel like Harem bait at first, which is completely unnecessary and out of place in this show. While it's implied that she also falls in love with Gojou later, she was never proactive about it in a way that interferes with our main ship, so at least it didn't bother me much in the end.

Oh yea, and then there's that scene a couple episodes later where Marin takes a bath at Gojou's house. She tells him not to peek and how “if we were in a manga that would definitely happen”. You know, this would be funny if exactly that didn't happen only four episodes earlier. That way, this scene feels almost insulting by how the series indirectly tells us that they're “aware” but… apparently don't care.

Finally, let's not forget how both girls tracked down Gojou by stalking him either online or in real life. Okaaaaaay…

Marin

I also wanted to take a moment to talk about Marin in a bit more detail. Overall she still has the typical “Poster girl syndrome” which is a bit disappointing. What she has in terms of looks and pure charm, she's unfortunately lacking in depth and other interesting aspects. That alone doesn't bother me too much: as I said before, the show works really well the way it is. Where this does become problematic is in the imbalance this creates in her relationship with Gojou. Marin provides the pretty, the sunshine and the model function for Gojou. Gojou provides everything else. Marin's cosplaying is only possible because Gojou is putting incredible amounts of work into it for her. She helps little to not at all. He doesn't get paid and doesn't get anything else out of that except that it allows him to spend time with Marin. If someone asked me “isn't he just being used by her?”, I'm honestly not sure what I would tell them besides that it doesn't feel that way.
Unfortunately, the show seems completely unaware of this imbalance. When Marin and Gojou went out shopping for her first costume, he actually offered to pay part of the material. This makes no sense whatsoever. At this point they cannot even be called friends yet and this is all for the satisfaction of Marin's private interests. Gojou does not only have no obligation to cover some of the costs, it would be plain weird if he did.

There was that one moment after Gojou finished the first outfit, where Marin realized what she'd put him through. Good moment actually, but it had no consequences besides her understanding that these things take time. To be honest I'm not sure what I'm expecting here. I'm not saying she should learn how to make costumes herself, but I can't help but feel like their relationship is lopsided in a way that isn't healthy in the long term.

On a side note, Marin is drawn in a way that is supposed to be very pretty, and it mostly works. But sometimes it feels like they're overdoing it, at which point she looks a bit uncanny. I think it mostly happens due to her mouth being too wide.

In any case, I think that's all I had to say on the show. As usual, while it may not have sounded like it, I can recommend watching it. When it is good, it really is good. Besides, I might be particularly sensitive to the things that bothered me here.

Anyway, that's it from me. For the next article, I'll probably return to where this blog started.

Hiking up the Zugspitze

Wed, 29 Jun 2022 00:02:51 +0200

So, on Saturday last week I thought to myself: how about I hike up the Zugspitze tomorrow? And so I did.

Okay, well the story is slightly longer than that. I was originally planning to go hiking “somewhere in the mountains” with a colleague. When said colleague answered neither messages nor phone calls the day where we were supposed to plan the trip, I was quite disappointed. But I couldn't let that stop me, I'd been looking forward to it the entire week. So when it became clear I wasn't going to get an answer, a thought popped up in my head: I'm already in Munich, why not aim as high as I can and hike up the Zugspitze?

For those who don't know: the Zugspitze is Germany's tallest mountain with a height of 2962 meters.

In any case, what might seem like a reckless thing to decide at 17:00 the day before actually turned out to be fairly doable. Some quick research showed that it is indeed quite possible to climb the Zugspitze in a day. From what I found out, there's mainly six different routes, out of which two are “easy”. Easy in this case means there's no additional equipment such as climbing gear or shoe spikes needed, like on the other four routes. I went with the Reintal route which is regarded as the easiest (though also longest) one.

The Reintal route

The Reintal route starts at Garmisch-Partenkirchen in the northeast of the Zugspitze, then goes almost straight south through the Partnachklamm gorge, following the Partnach river through the Reintal to the east and then southeast of the Zugspitze, before finally climbing the steep rock and gravel walls on the south side of the peak.

Internet says the route is supposed to take ten hours, or “nine or eight if you're really fast”. These estimates are typically quite a bit longer than how long it actually takes for me, though I guess I'm not the average person (heh), and it's also supposed to stop people from underestimating dangerous routes. Anyway, I wasn't going to do this unprepared, so I went shopping the day before for some extra ressources I would need. Finally got me some hiking socks, bought another big bottle of water so I can carry 2.5 liters in total and also prepared a lunch sandwich, a bunch of snacks and some bananas as rations. I also got me some SPF 50 sunscreen against the mountain sun and packed my trusty hat that I bought back in 2018 for New Zealand. I checked the weather forecast and it was gonna be sunny and very warm all day. Which is good, I suppose, better than rain which would also make the route quite dangerous towards the end. Having finished my preparatory shopping, I went to bed at 20:00, since I was planning to get up at 4:00 the next day.

My degree of spontaneity ~~paid off~~ came back to bite me here, as, naturally, I wasn't able to fall asleep for a couple hours. So I woke up at 4:00 with about 5 hours of sleep, but feeling surprisingly refreshed and ready to do it. I ate some quick breakfast I'd prepared the day before, checked the weather again and packed the remainder of my stuff while watching the sun peek above the horizon. When I took another look at the Deutsche Bahn app, to make sure that trains are on time, I realized for the first time that a train had derailed on the track somewhere shortly before Garmisch-Partenkirchen, so I'd have to take a bus replacing the trains (SEV) from the last station, Oberau, right before that. A bit of a shame, but oh well. It would only delay my arrival by about 40 minutes, which shouldn't be a big problem since I don't have a tight schedule anyway. A quick bike ride to Munich main station, and I sat down in the RB6 regional train to Oberau at 5:32.

I spent most of my train ride reading Tank Men by Robert Kershaw. It's a really interesting book detailing the development of tanks and tank warfare, and most importantly highlighting the life of the tank crews living and fighting in these vehicles during the first and second world war. I highly recommend it to anyone interested in world war history, warfare, tanks and/or the human factor.

After arriving in Oberau, I hopped on the SEV to Garmisch-Partenkirchen. Looking out of the window, I got my first glimpse of the mountains.

I knew I was going to climb up those mountains, and my excitement began to well up again.

I arrived in Garmisch-Partenkirchen at around 7:40. After a brief period of disorientation, I began walking towards the start of the track. I was a bit confused as everyone who was on the bus with me walked in a different direction, but whatever.

A morning walk along the Partnach river

I eventually saw the first signs that said “Partnachklamm” and “Zugspitze” at the outset of the forest, and arrived at the entrance to the Partnachklamm shortly after that. You actually need to pay an entrance fee of 6€ for the Partnachklamm, or otherwise take a big detour. I didn't really care, so I paid the fee and entered the gorge. This was also the moment I realized I would have had to wait here anyway, if I hadn't been late due to the SEV between Oberau and Garmisch-Partenkirchen, as they only open at 8:00 apparently. Anyway, I didn't regret paying for this, as the gorge was really cool.

First time being to a gorge like this. 10/10, would pay for this again.

After the Partnachklamm, I followed the Partnach river along an easy route through the forest. Being able to see the mountain peaks in the distance was pretty cool, and also motivated me to keep a strict pace.

Forest route, with my goal towering in the distance.

There was this couple I met along the way. I passed them since I was walking faster, and then at some point 20 minutes later, I… passed them again? We were all quite confused and spent the next five minutes pondering how that could have happened. Around that time, the forest was getting lighter, so I finally took out my hat from the backpack and put on some sunscreen. Turns out my predictions were off, since I entered the deepest part of the forest after that.

But it was only a short while before it opened up. Wedged between mountains, I walked a gravel path following the Partnach river. I had entered the Reintal valley.

The view when looking back from the top of a waterfall near the end of the valley

This part of the route was perhaps the most boring. I walked the Reintal for about 10km, and while the mountains to the left and right are nice to look at, when the scene doesn't really change at all for two hours, then that's a bit meh. Anyway, I reached the end of the valley and arrived at the first hut: the Reintalangerhütte. I took the chance to check the time and the map, and realized: wow, I already finished three quarters of the route? In only three hours?

That's crazy! Only about 5km left until I reach the top, I thought. I took another look at the hut, and saw the sign above the entrance that indicated the current elevation to be 1370m. Wait, so I'm still missing 1600m? And I only managed 500m so far? Well, it can't be that bad, right?
This is foreshadowing.

Shortly afterwards, I arrived at a steep, rocky, gravel-y wall. This is where it gets serious, this is where the real climb begins, I realized.

Unfortunately it's quite difficult to give an accurate impression on a photo of how steep the climb actually is. Here's an attempt anyway.

I started walking up there, and really felt my heart pumping for the first time on that trip. I told myself I'd try to get to the top without taking a rest, except for quick breaks to replenish my water reserves. It was so difficult and very tiring, but I could do it! After about an hour, I reached a small plateau where I met a group of travellers taking a break. One of them asked me if I knew how far it is to the peak from here. I told him I had no idea, and then he said he's “pretty sure we made about 500m already”. Hold on, I thought, this must have been way more than 500m?
I said goodbye to those people and set out to climb the next “wall”. The guy probably has no idea, I thought.

The path became a bit harder after that. In fact, at some point it got almost impossible to recognize any “path” at all. I stopped looking for something that looked like a path, instead I looked for places where the pure grey rock was tinted slightly brownish by the dirt under people's shoes. That's pretty much the only thing that kept me from getting lost, as I was literally just walking up a mountain flank with no signs, no paths and no orientation whatsoever.

Half an hour and what felt like all my remaining stamina reservers later, I arrived at another hut, the Knorrhütte. The tavern keep was standing at the veranda when I arrived and greeted me with a smile: “You made it!”
“YES, I MADE IT!”, I screamed. Just inside my head of course. I wasn't at the tip of the mountain yet, obviously, but I must be close I thought, as I sat down on one of the benches on the veranda. Then I looked at the sign above the entrance to the hut, which indicated the height. This is also the moment that depression hit.

2052 meters.

What the fuck?, I thought. The previous section that cost me all my stamina was only seven hundred meters!? And there's still 900 ahead of me?
iT cAn'T bE tHaT bAd RiGhT
… wow, I'm an idiot I realized.

Breaking with my vow that I would make it to the top without a break, I decided to relax at the Knorrhütte for just a bit. I ordered some Kaiserschmarrn, which was really good, disregarding that it cost fifteen euros. Well, I really didn't care in that situation.

This is what 15€ Kaiserschmarrn at 2050 meters elevation looks like.

I ate up my Kaiserschmarrn, renewed my sunscreen just in case, paid and then moved on. Now I had a good idea what lay in front of me, and I wouldn't be disappointed again.

The hike actually got slightly easier after that. The slope was a bit less steep here, and I felt a cool breeze every now and then. Not too long after that, I started to see snow.

I'm seriously wondering how the snow stayed frozen up there. The sun was still blazing down on me with all its might and I absolutely would have liked it another 10 degrees cooler, if I had the choice. There's no way this was anywhere near 0°C I felt. Some hiking through snow ensued here, though never for too long. A good hour (including a couple breaks) later, I arrived at the last cable cars. Just another 400m of elevation from this point, I remembered. There's also the option of taking the cable cars up to the peak for the last section. I didn't do that of course. The route may have gotten easier, but I was completely exhausted. Still, there's no way I'd chicken out here. It's all or nothing. After another short break, I tackled the last part of the route, the last steep wall.

This was easily the steepest part so far and all semblance of a path was gone. Everyone went slightly different ways here, whatever worked out for them. When I was unsure earlier whether I should call it walking or climbing, now I was certain: this is climbing. Or at least, the fact that I used my hands half the time was a strong indicator for this.

At this point, I had to take breaks to catch my breath about every 10 to 20 meters of elevation. I don't know whether this was the mountain air getting to me (didn't really notice it otherwise) or just a sign of my exhaustion. Probably both? My legs were struggling to keep up at this point. There were several moments where I felt like my left leg was just going to give out and let me drop, though I barely avoided that every time.

After covering about half of the remaining 400m, the slope got noticably steeper yet again. But at the same time, there was a steel cable running along the wall. This was much appreciated and actually made the remainder of the route easier. For the first time, I was able to really use my arms and take some of the weight off my legs. That said, this is also the point where the route actually got dangerous. Until now, I never felt like I was risking anything by doing this hike. Sure, the rock and gravel paths I walked/climbed up earlier were steep, but they didn't fall off to the sides or anything. Even if you lost your balance and fell over towards the back, you'd just hit your back on the rocks half a meter lower. But here, it was different. There were several places where the steel cable was strictly necessary to be able to continue at all. Letting go or losing your grip would likely mean falling down a couple (dozen) meters. This was the first time I felt like I could seriously hurt or even kill myself if I fucked up.

See the steel cable on the left. Smart people wore their climbing gear and secured themselves with a carabiner. I'm not smart.

That didn't happen and I continued without any trouble. As I said, the rope actually made the route easier. There were tens of people somewhere ahead and behind me walking the same route and they all made it up there safely. I guess it's a bit like standing on the edge of the roof of a tall building. You're not strictly in danger if you don't do something dumb (or someone wants you dead), but you're acutely aware that you're only one step away from a life-threatening situation.

Other than that, it was smooth sailing though. At some point I pulled myself up towards a ridge. Completely unexpected and out of nowhere, everything opened up in front of me. I had been looking at that steep wall or the ground in front of me for the past couple hours, and suddenly I had an amazing view across the land below me.

It's hard to describe what I felt in that moment. I almost cried, as I was suddenly overcome with this feeling of accomplishment. I made it!
I had to stop myself from screaming out loud. I never thought I would feel that strongly about this moment, but I did.

In any case, I hadn't really made it yet, but I was very close. I continued along the ridge towards the highest point, the Zugspitze.

The last stretch, along the ridge towards the top.

Just 20 meters from the top, I got a cramp in my left foot and had to take a short break, but after that I finally reached the platform. First thing I did was… not taking a look around and enjoying the view, but sitting down in a corner where there's some shade and not moving for the next 20 minutes. I felt absolutely tired and exhausted.

I didn't take a proper photo of the platform since it's ugly, but here's a cutout of a panorama photo I made from the top.
That's also why the perspective is kinda broken in some places. That big pole blocking the view in the middle is the summit cross by the way.

The platform is rather big, there were easily over a hundred people on it. I saw and heard a bunch of different nationalities, from Spanish to Scandinavian, over Indian and Chinese. That said, it was quite the weird feeling, after over six hours of making my way up there, to see old people or even mothers with their child in a stroller. They obviously didn't hike up there, but rather just took the cable cars. I couldn't imagine that and I much prefer going the hard way and “earning” it.

While I was sitting on the platform, leaning against one of the glass windows and staring emptily into the sky, an old couple passing by asked me if I was okay. When I told them I just needed a break after the hike, they said:
“But you didn't walk up here, right?”
“I did”
“From the bottom?”
“From Garmisch-Partenkirchen”
The looks on their faces… hehe.

By the way, there was only E connectivity on the first 5km of the hike and no mobile data at all after that, but once I was within a couple hundred meters of elevation of the peak, I was back in 4G territory.

After finishing my break and getting up like an old man, I took a short stroll around the platform and then made my way to the summit cross.

The summit cross, as seen from the platform.

Going up there was a bit difficult. It's just about 20m from the platform, but the path is quite narrow and there's a lot of people who want to go there. I had to to stand in line for a total of three times, just to get to the cross and then back to the platform. Asked someone to take a picture of me next to the cross, took in the view for a bit, and then I prepared to go back down.

View of the Eibsee lake from the top.

There's a cafe and a restaurant inside the platform, as well as the cable cars. I bought my tickets, and then rode down to the Eibsee in one of them. It was super cramped, but at least I got a seat. At this point I had quite the headache and felt like I could fall asleep from exhaustion any moment. I spent almost the entire ride with my eyes closed. That cost me 37.50€ by the way. Oh well, not like I had another choice since there's no way I was going to hike back down the mountain the same day. Imagining going down the same slopes I climbed up earlier also seemed much scarier than going up. From the Eibsee I took the Zahnradbahn (“gear train”) to Garmisch-Partenkirchen and waited for the bus back to Oberau. It was around 16:00, and I would soon be at home and could finally take a rest. Or so I thought…

Bonus episode: Deutsche Bahn says no

I took the SEV to Oberau, and when we arrived, there was already a train waiting for us. Quite lucky, since the trains only go once an hour and I thought we'd barely missed it. But then we realized the doors didn't open. Someone asked one of the Deutsche Bahn employees standing around nearby, but they just shrugged, took out their phone and made a call.

5 minutes later:
“Seems like the track is blocked right in front of Oberau, so the trains can't run.”
“Why?”, someone asked.
“We don't know”, the DB employee answered.
“So when will the trains run again?”
“No idea. Could be in 10 minutes, or in a couple hours”

Great, I thought, took out my e-reader and sat down on the stone plates next to the platform.

About an hour passed while more and more people arrived from Garmisch-Partenkirchen, until there were more than a hundred of us sitting and standing, spread out across the train station and waiting for something to happen. People kept pestering the DB employees about new info, but there was nothing for a while. Some people had already taken taxis at their own expenses to the next town nearby, Murnau, from which trains were still running. After about 1.5h it was 18:00 and we finally got the info that busses were planned to pick us up and bring us to Murnau. We moved to the plaza in front of the train station and started waiting for busses instead of trains. Another 30 minutes later, the first bus arrived, but it could only fit about 20 of us, since there were already a bunch of people inside. They prioritized pregnant women, families with children and elderly people, so I didn't have a chance of getting in and kept waiting for the next bus.

In the meantime, a couple taxis called by the DB employees arrived, which they used to get the elderly people out of there. Some of my fellow stranded people started to get real mad. One of them made some sort of racist comment towards one of the two DB security guys (a black man) and it got a bit heated for a moment. After another 1.5h the second bus finally arrived.

Everyone appreciated how they put "Evacuation" on the display

Unfortunately, this one already had people on board as well, and the bus driver said she could only fit in another 10. That said, after 10 people got in and all of them found a seat we were like
“Ma'am, can't you just let us stand?”
“Sorry we can't do that”, she answered.
“Okay, but why?”
“If we take too many people on, the bus is not gonna make it up the hill.”

Okay, wtf? Couldn't stop giggling for a while after I heard that. I'm still not sure whether this was just a really bad excuse, or if she was actually serious. Though in the latter case, if it were me, I would have gotten off the bus and just pushed if that became necessary. Oh well.

The remaining crowd, down to about 50 people, kept waiting. Another 30 minutes later, 20:30 at this point, one of these big travel busses appeared. A huge one, where everyone was immediately sure we could fit all the remaining people in there with ease. The DB employees were smiling with relief as the bus came to a stop on the parking lot next to us. One of them went over to talk to the bus driver. After a full 10 minutes of waiting, she came back and told us “Sorry, the driver's shift is over and he's going home.”

Wait, what?
We didn't believe what we just heard at first.

As if to drive the message home, we had to make some space… for the bus driver, a scrawny old man, to pass through on his bicycle, smiling and waving at us. Some of these situations are unexpectedly comedic, though I guess I may have been the only one laughing at this point.

In any case, at 21:00 another (empty!) bus finally appeared, we all managed to cram ourselves in there, got taken to Murnau and hopped on the train back to Munich from there.

I arrived at home around 23:00. At this point my legs were actually feeling pretty good and well rested again. I took off my hiking boots and socks for the first time in 16 hours and realized I hadn't taken even a single blister home from this! That is actually amazing, my feet never looked this well even after much easier hikes. I thank the hiking socks for this, an investment that I'm really happy with now.

Soooo, that's about it. All in all, my hike to the Zugspitze was a pretty cool experience. I'm very happy I got the opportunity to do this, and I'm proud of myself that I made it. The Reintal itself was a bit of a boring stretch in the middle and the way home got much longer than planned thanks to DB being DB… but other than that, this is something I can really recommend. This is also a very good opportunity to get started with mountain climbing, since the route is easy so you don't need any extra gear, it's not particularly dangerous and it's absolutely doable within a single day. Huge recommendation from my side if you ever get the chance.

Mac Pain

Sun, 05 Jun 2022 00:00:00 +0000

Oh another day, another article. There's enough articles on the main page now for pagination to kick in, so I'm allowed to say that, okay?

I've recently started an internship as a backend developer and received an M1 Mac to work with. This is the first time I'm really using a Mac/MacOS and I wanted to write about the experience a bit. Or rather, rant, because that's what this is going to be. The hardware itself is pretty good, but there's so many hiccups when it comes to usability. This will just be a list of pain points for me, in no particular order.

The Keyboard Layout

Ah, the keyboard layout. As you may or may not know, Macs come equipped with a keyboard that is quite different in some aspects to what both Windows and Linux users may be used to.

A (German) Mac keyboard, same layout as the one I'm using for work

If you look at the keyboard above, what do you see? Anything notable? Well, at first it may seem “normal”, but once you start using it, there's a couple pits you'll inevitably fall into. For one thing, you may wonder, where is the “@"-sign? If you search for a bit, you'll find it on the “L”-key. Okay, sure I guess? But don't worry, it doesn't stop there. What about the tilde (~)? The vertical bar (|) and the backslash? Or curly and square brackets? Search as much as you won't, they are simply not marked on the keyboard. Curly and square brackets are sort of doable since they're still placed on the numbers row at the top, just shuffled around. But tilde and backslash are practically impossible to do without googling for help… seriously, wtf?

So in case you're curious, tilde is placed on the “N”-key, and can be typed by pressing Option+N. The option key, at least in this regard, acts like Alt-Gr on Windows/Linux, as in, that's also the key you use for the @-sign, curly braces etc.
The backslash is even worse. It is placed on the “7” key and thus the same one as the forward slash, which is actually not a bad idea… except that key is overloaded with “7”, “/”, “|” and “\”, which leaves backslash with the awkward key combination Shift+Option+7. As I said, you'll have to google how to type a backslash, because there's really no way you're gonna find that out on your own, unless you're willing to invest a lot of time into playing around with your keyboard.

I cannot for the life of me think of a reason why you would just selectively not print some of these characters on their respective keys on the keyboard. The “@” is printed on the L-key and can be typed as Option+L. Similarly, tilde can be typed as Option+N, but it is not printed on the “N” key. Seriously? That seems arbitrary, almost to the point of deliberately confusing.

One could further question why Apple would change (compared to Linux & Windows) these keys in the first place. As a matter of historical fact, these are actually not changes but the exact opposite. Apple products have been using this keyboard layout for, what, 30 years? That is mostly a very good reason, as their keyboard layout is not really inferior to the Windows/Linux layout, just different. But Apple is a company trying to sell their products on a market where at least 80% of products use the other layout. Their layout will lead to confusion for new users coming from any of these platforms, just like it did for me. At the very least, it makes me wonder why they don't offer another version of their hardware with different keyboards, but whatever…

Control, Option, Command

I've already mentioned the Option key in the previous section and how it “at least in this regard, acts like Alt-Gr”. If you look back at the keyboard layout, you'll also see the Command key next to Control and Option on the keyboard. This one acts sort of like the Windows key on Windows, effectively another modifier key.
Saw how I put “at least in this regard” and “sort of” in front of my explanations of these two keys here? In literary circles, we call this “foreshadowing”.

When you're coming from a Linux or Windows background, then Control, Option and Command combined mostly do the same thing as what you're used to from Control and Alt-Gr… except their combined functionality is redistributed among those keys seemingly randomly.

Wanna jump through text word-by-word? Option+Arrowkey does it.
Wanna delete text word-by-word? That's Option+Backspace. Unless you're in a terminal, then it's Ctrl+Backspace, because who needs consistency?
Got some actions to undo? That's Command+Z for you
Want to mark all text? Also Command+A
Close or open new tabs? Command+W / Command+T it is
Want to cycle through the tabs of your browser or terminal? That's Comma… no, jokes on you, it's Ctrl+Tab
Command+Tab is used to Alt-Tab (lol) through applications.

There are more of course but for some reason my head literally cannot remember another common shortcut right now. Huh…

Anyway, having another modifier key is generally a good thing, compared to the Windows key which is barely really used. But it is again quite confusing how I am using basically the same shortscuts that I'm used to, except that I have to switch the modifier keys around. If there was a consistent mapping at least, such as Ctrl <=> Ctrl, Option <=> Alt & Alt-Gr, Command <=> Windows, but nope. I regularly get confused when using my Mac for work due to the different layout and modifier keys. Worse, it even affects usage of my private computer because now I get confused there as well. I'm not properly used to either layout (anymore) and just make mistakes on both. This sucks.

Gestures and the Touchpad

Gestures are a feature that I'm somewhat torn about. Movements on the touchpad are interpreted differently, depending on how many fingers you place on the pad. Two fingers is for scrolling, three fingers up/down is to get an overview of all open apps and to change their positions. Three fingers left/right is for switching fullscreen apps (kinda like Alt-tabbing but not quite, more on that later). Scrunching (?) with four or more fingers is for opening the app menu. Also, two-finger click is the equivalent of a rightclick.

Some of these movements work very well and feel natural to me, so far that I sometimes find myself trying to switch apps on my Linux laptop by swishing with three fingers. But some of these gestures also feel a bit awkward, or at least make me wonder why they couldn't just make them keyboard shortcuts instead.

Before going more deeply into the different gestures, let me just say that I love the touchpad. First of all, it's huge, at easily more than twice the area that the touchpad on my private laptop has. There's also no left mouse button, instead you can just left-click anywhere on the touchpad. Not just “tap” as many touchpads do it, but actually, physically, click with an accompanying natural sound. This is amazing.

Moving on to gestures, what's not so amazing is the fact that there's no right mouse button either. Instead, you right-click by clicking with two fingers simultaneously. Not sure if this is a good idea in the first place, over just having a button to perform the same action, but what really breaks it is how badly it works. I often accidentally left-click when I wanted to right-click which just makes this a bit of a pain to use. Depending on the situation, there's some actual anxiety involved in simply right-clicking. That's just dumb. Can't you give me a right mouse-button instead?

The scrolling with two fingers works well. There'd be nothing to say here if it weren't for browsers putting “page back” / “page forward” on two fingers left swipe / right swipe respectively. I have no idea why you would do that and it is excessively annoying. Accidentally going to the previous page, instead of scrolling down, is something that happens to me regularly and I hate it.

As mentioned already, the three finger swiping is probably the most natural one of these for me, though I don't really see myself gaining much from that either, compared to just having a shortcut. But at least there is an actual shortcut for this that I can use instead. Overall, having gestures go up to four fingers on the touchpad seems like a bit much to me. I sometimes mix these up and place the wrong number of fingers down. The recognition works really well though, if I've ever triggered a gesture associated with a different number of fingers, then that was always technically my fault, and not because the system misinterpreted the input. My gripes mainly come down to questions of design.

Settings, questionable default Settings and missing Settings

There's so many places in which the default settings are highly questionable, or where you don't even have settings to change things at all.

One example is the snapping to grid on Desktop and in the file explorer. Per default, this is deactivated. Just… why?

A picture says more than a thousand words. This is horrible.

In general, MacOS seems to be rather poorly equipped in the customizability department. The three buttons to minimize, maximize and close windows are on the top left of said windows, in contrast to Windows and the defaults of most Linux desktop environments. Again, this is probably one of those things that have been “the Apple way” for decades, and there's also nothing inherently wrong with having those buttons on the left. I cannot come up with a practical reason for why either positioning would be better, so I think it just comes down to what you're more used to. That, however, is all the more reason to wonder why they don't allow us to customize the positions of these buttons.
Don't get me wrong, this isn't an incredibly important feature, and having the buttons on the left instead of right doesn't lead to nearly as much confusion as e.g. the keyboard layout does, but… come on, it can't be that hard! And I think it also perfectly exemplifies the missing customizability of MacOS. I know that this is absolutely possible in KDE (Linux), and you can also do it under Windows by using a third-party program. In MacOS, it is apparently impossible.

There's a couple more questionable points when it comes to how the settings work. For one thing, most of the settings for mice simply aren't shown unless you plug in an Apple mouse. Seriously?
It's not like these only affect Apple mice. No, you could plug in an Apple mouse, change the settings that appear now, then switch to your non-Apple mouse and see how it acts differently from before. Even though none of the mouse settings you can still see have changed! As someone who doesn't have an Apple mouse and is definitely not going to buy one, the only way for me to completely deactivate mouse acceleration was to install some third party software (Smooze, in case any of my dear readers ever run into the same problem). Again, seriously? I'm not even allowed to configure my own devices properly without workarounds or buying more Apple products.

Another thing that bothers me is how applications don't actually close if you close them. If you know how e.g. some messengers or Discord simply minimize (to tray) then that's pretty much the same thing here. Except on Mac, ALL apps ALWAYS do that.
If you want to actually close an application, you have to right click -> quit it on the taskbar. At least the still running apps are clearly marked with a dot, but still… why would you do this? When I click the red cross, the app is supposed to close. Just quit! What's even the point of the minimize button otherwise?
I absolutely despise it when apps do that on Windows or Linux. But you know, at least the apps that do that on purpose have a valid reason to stay open, since you're not getting messenger notifications etc. if they aren't still running as a background service. The apps on MacOS don't have any reason to stay open. Why would VSCode keep running after I've closed it? There's simply no good reason for this. It seems completely arbitrary and there's no way to change this behavior in the settings. Again, you're relegated to using third party apps to solve MacOS's problems and questionable design choices. RedQuits solves this problem, but it isn't perfect. If, for example, I have multiple Firefox windows open, then closing one of them closes them all. For some apps, it also doesn't really work, they just stay open just like without RedQuits. But for now this is the best solution I have, and miles better than having to manually Right-Click-Quit all apps, or have them running in the background without any right or reason to do so.

I'm also a bit thrown off by how fullscreen apps don't allow overlaying other windows. When I click the maximize button on a window, it moves to a new “desktop” that is only occupied by this one window. If you want the window to be fullscreen but still be able to overlay other windows over it, you'll have to drag it to that size manually. This is not a big problem, but still somewhat weird behavior. The OS shouldn't just create a new desktop unless I tell it to. This still works fine and doesn't bother me too much, but took me some getting used to.

Finally, one thing that I wish for would be more support for customizable keyboard shortcuts. On my Arch/KDE install I can add keyboard shortcuts to do arbitarily complex tasks, by virtue of allowing the calling of scripts through shortcuts. Practically all the desktop environment functionality is also triggerable via shortcuts. The ability to add or change keyboard shortcuts on Mac however seems rather limited, which is a shame.

In the end, the points I've mentioned so far lead me to a conclusion that is almost the same as the one I get from annoying Windows problems: Apple's philosophy isn't about enabling it's users and giving them the freedom they want. It doesn't respect its users, but wants them to work and use their OS the way they have arbitrarily decided to be right. This mindset seriously bothers me and is also one of the main reasons I despise using Windows sometimes. Of course, I frequently run into problems on Linux as well, where things just don't work out the way I want them to. But at least with Linux I know that these problems are typically just bugs or otherwise things no one was able to fix or implement yet. This doesn't bother me nearly as much as a multibillion dollar corporation fucking things up on their paid OS, especially if it's not actually a fuck-up, but being shit by design and completely on purpose.
That said, Apple does give you less room for complaints when it comes to spying on its users etc., at least from what I've seen. While I don't like their design philosophy, they don't appear as predatory as Windows. Until we look at ecosystem lock-in, that is.

Compatibility

MacOS has surprisingly bad compatibility with a lot of software. I almost couldn't believe how some software is basically unusable on my Mac, considering how there's absolutely no problems with them on Linux. As an example, I've tried using GIMP for some simple image editing. That didn't work out, because the entire app crashes as soon as I open the “Open File” dialogue. I tried using Krita instead, and noticed that it is simply not possible to have linebreaks in text boxes on Mac. The way it is done on other OS's simply does nothing on Mac. Weird.

It gets worse when you start looking at games. I installed Steam and was greeted with a warning that about 90% of my games aren't playable because my version of MacOS doesn't suppport 32bit applications anymore. Uh, what?
I gotta admit I have no idea how difficult it is to support 32bit applications and how much baggage comes with that, but as all other OS's I know don't seem to have any trouble with that, this just seems weird and unnecessary.
For clarification: Steam assumes all games to be 32bit only unless they're explicitly marked as 64bit, so the actual number of incompatible games is probably much lower. Still, there's no way to find out except google for more info, or installing and trying to run the game. Ugh

In any case, it seems like MacOS has worse compatibility when it comes to apps than Linux. The nature of the OS also makes it much harder to improve said compatibility, since you can't just install additional libraries, as you can do on Linux.

The last thing I want to mention here is the available ports on my Mac: it has three USB-C ports, as well as the port for the charger, one for SD-cards, one for HDMI and finally a 3.5mm jack. I'm really confused as to why they wouldn't include USB-A ports. Very few peripherals that I've seen have a USB-C plug, almost all of them do USB-A. I can't imagine actually making use of three USB-C ports, unless you're using them for USB-A adapters. If it had at least a single one, but nope. This makes some things unnecessarily hard. I need an adapter to even be able to plug in a USB-Stick at all. Not that there's anything wrong with USB-C, but going only with that… may be a reasonable option in 2030, but until then it's just annoying.
I also like that it comes with an HDMI slot. Though why do we get an SD-Reader, but no LAN port? I can count the number of times I've connected an SD-Card to a computer on zero hands, while I've used LAN with every single machine that I've ever owned. There's laptops that are simply too thin to fit one, but that's definitely not the case here. In general, I don't get why so many laptops drop the LAN port. That's your backup in case of emergency, and should actually be your first choice whenever there's a LAN cable available. Relying solely on WiFi seems lowkey suicidal.

Misc

A couple more random ramblings:

you need to create an account to use the AppleStore for software installation. Fuck you, I'll stay with package managers and browser downloads.
the directory structure of a fresh MacOS install is very similar to the one you have on Linux, but some folders were capitalized… why do you do this to me?
it is quite difficult to get to the homefolder in MacOS’ file explorer Finder. There simply isn't a “go up” button and it isn't in the favorites by default.

In Conclusion…

…using a Mac can be a pain in so many ways. Some of it is just induced by the differences to Linux/Windows, but there's also some highly questionable design choices here. I remember someone calling Apple “the king of usability” or something like that and I really gotta say, I don't see that. Like, at all. It's not just good design choices and improvements being overshadowed by bad ones. No, there's very little that Apple does better than even Windows if you ask me, and with all the negative points I've encountered I don't see myself ever using a Mac if I get the choice. Even Windows does it better. At this point I'm seriously questioning why so many companies use Apple per default. That's a serious question, what benefit does Apple offer them?

Anyway, that's all I had to say. I hope you enjoyed my ~~article~~ rant. Don't get used to them being this short, lol

My Deep Dive into Japanese Manga

Sat, 14 May 2022 00:02:51 +0200

I have been reading a lot of manga the past couple months, and since I've finally finished the Rust article the other day, I felt like writing about the experience as well as various ramblings connected to that. Wow, gotta love going back to my introductions I wrote under the assumption I will not take two months to finish the article. Moving on.

I'll start with a bit of history and how I got into manga etc. and continue with various observations I made along the way. At the end, I'll mention a couple memorable manga, whether they were really good, had a unique premise, or anything else that made them stand out. I'm expecting this to turn into quite the long article, so I should probably split it up into multiple.
Hah! Not gonna happen.

How it started

I only vaguely remember how it all began. At some point I just started reading Giji Harem (擬似ハーレム / Pseudo Harem). By the way, I'll try to link all the manga I mention, but as I read almost all of them in Japanese, there's a couple that are pretty much unknown here in the west. Consequently, websites like MAL don't even have a bunch of them yet.
I don't know how long ago that was, but MAL tells me I finished the manga roughly one year ago, so I guess I started reading it maybe 1.5 to 2 years ago. I think some random in some Youtube comment section recommended it or something like that. Anyway, despite what you may think of the title, it was a pretty good, wholesome and cute manga that I can recommend. It has finished publishing with 157 chapters, which actually isn't that much as each chapter only has four pages as far as I remember.

I started reading it on some manga reader website of questionable legality where people uploaded translations. But as the manga was still publishing back then, I eventually caught up. So, what do? At some point I realized that the author just puts the new weekly chapter on Twitter. And then I thought…

Hey, I can read Japanese… sort of!

I then followed the author and just read the new chapters whenever he published them on Twitter. But the author wasn't some isolated mangaka in the wide and open sea of Twitter. No, in fact he would regularly retweet manga by other mangaka who published theirs on Twitter as well. I started following some of them, and in return I got introduced to even more mangaka via retweets. Among all the other stuff they retweeted (random thoughts from random people, some rakugaki, people announcing the sale of their manga, etc.) I noticed that some of them only published a sort of preview of their newest manga chapters, maybe the first four pages of a chapter that was obviously longer. And when they did so, they would either link to some external vendor website where you could buy their manga, or… the website for some manga reader app. After all, Twitter isn't exactly the best platform for publishing manga. Who would've thought.

Initially, I wasn't interested in either. I didn't plan to buy manga at that point and I still don't do that too often. Manga are, for the most part, just too short for the price if you ask me. Paying 5€ for a manga I'd finish in an hour just doesn't feel right. I'd still buy manga though if one really caught my interest.
But anyway, the other option were manga reader apps. At some point one of these preview tweets piqued my interest enough that I decided to install that app. But I just couldn't find it on the Playstore. So I tried clicking the link from the twitter app, and it actually brought me to the Playstore page of the app I wanted to install… and as the Japanese do, that app turned out to be region-locked.
oof

But I'm not studying computer science for nothing!
*proceeds to not really use his computer science knowledge anyway*
So, as you may know you can install most apps despite their region lock if you can just find a download for their .apk online. This is a bit of a pain to manage, because whenever the app updates, it'll shut you out and you'll have to find an up-to-date .apk again. This is where I can recommend QooApp (or alternatives): it's basically another Playstore, though with a lot of gimmicks. But the point is, if someone maintains the package on QooApp, then you can just update via a click on the “update” button. Do note that QooApp can't be found on the Playstore either so you have to download an .apk again. But at least it's smart enough to update itself without needing a re-download.

How it's going

To get back to manga readers, you could say that this is where it really started. As I saw more previews on Twitter of different manga I got interested in, multiple manga reader apps found their way onto my phone. I currently have seven installed. Out of these I check four daily, one maybe once a week and the other two are really just collecting dust. There were also a couple more readers I wanted after seeing them on Twitter, but they weren't on QooApp and I was too lazy to update them manually all the time. Besides, I had enough readers already and going even further started to seem like a bad idea.

Most readers have this really nasty feature where they just spam you with recommendations about new manga that just started publishing, their best picks or whatever. Being the gullible sheep I am, I would often click those and maybe add another manga to my “favorites” list. And so, I started reading more and more manga. At the time of writing, there are 33 manga which I am “actively reading”. That means either reading at least one chapter a week, or staying up to date in the case of manga I'm already caught up with. This might seem like a lot, but it doesn't feel that way most of the time. Most manga only publish a new chapter once every two weeks, some update every week and few update only once a month or even less. If we assume them to update on average every two weeks and that I'm typically reading three chapters every evening, that means I can keep up with 42 manga concurrently… so that means I'm actually kinda close to cap already. Huh.
Yea maybe I should filter more stuff. But more on that later.

The problem here isn't just the recommendations. While I add a lot of manga to my favorites list that way, that doesn't mean I'll actually read them. The favorites are practically a mixed “reading” and “plan to read” list, at least for me. I just dive in there whenever I feel like starting something new. This actually happens sort of regularly. You get into this cycle where you're kinda excited about one manga you've recently started. You read your free chapter(s) every day, and… eventually you catch up. The familiar story that used to (partially) fill your evenings is reduced to just one new chapter every week or less. You're left with this gap, which isn't that different from the feeling you get after finishing a really good anime. And so, I find myself back on the favorites list again, scouring the manga collected there for something that piques my interest. Thus, the cycle starts anew.
This is pretty much how I ended up with this many manga that I'm actively following. With the vast majority I'm just waiting for new chapters, but there's typically one or two that I'm excited enough about to catch up, getting closer by a chapter or two with every passing day.

One thing I noticed is that I get quite a bit more exposure to the “hot stuff” in the anime and manga community nowadays. Like when I do crawl out of my hole and manage to somehow see the lineup for the next season, there's often familiar names now. Not like I've really read the manga, but I often recognize the title, characters on the cover etc. and maybe I've even read the first chapter or something like that. One day a manga I've read will be adapated and then I can finally ascend to peak manga reader level. Time to bitch about the adaption all day.

I'm still following about ten mangaka on Twitter by the way, but at this point there isn't much that I'm actually reading anymore. As mentioned before, Twitter also isn't optimized for the way manga are published. When you first get exposed to a manga that way, you're probably looking at the newest chapter 50-something, and that random pick would have to pique your interest for you to start actively following the manga. This is bad, due to
a) spoiler potential
b) at least in my opinion, starting to read a manga because “chapter 50 looks good” doesn't feel like a good reason. I'm not even completely sure why, but it just feels bad. I refuse to elaborate.

Besides, imagine you now wanted to start reading that manga from the beginning. In the best case, the author was kind enough to always link chapter x-1 under his tweet publishing chapter x. That way you can just go down the chain to the first chapter, but that still takes a while for longer manga. And since you probably aren't going to catch up within a single session, you'll also have to save or bookmark your current chapter somehow. Furthermore, while the previous chapter is often linked, the authors don't usually go back to link the new chapter under the previous publication as well, so if you don't have your browser history anymore from the time where you went from new to old chapters, there's no easy way to go back up again to newer chapters etc. As most mangaka are also pretty active with retweets while only publishig a new chapter once a week or less, just going through their Twitter timeline is also a slog.
TLDR; trying to catch up on a manga via Twitter is pain.

Manga Readers

I wanted to go into a bit more detail about the manga readers I'm using and how you interact with them, as that affects how you consume manga.

First of all, the four I'm currently checking every day are

Jump Plus
Niconico Manga
Gangan
Magapoke

These all differ slightly in their monetization schemes and policies etc., but are generally quite similar. There is however a strict necessity to have multiple readers if you want to read specific manga, as each one is typically only published in one place. The readers are all generous enough to let you read most manga completely for free, just the number of chapters you can read in a given day is limited. At least per manga. These are typically presented as “rentals” where you can rent a chapter and then get 24h to 72h until it's automatically “returned”.

Jump Plus could perhaps be considered the most generous: you can read as many chapters as you want in a day, but only the first time. If you want to re-read a chapter after it's been returned, or perhaps weren't able to finish it the first time around, you'll have to pay.

Niconico Manga is weird. Most manga only let you read the latest couple chapters at all. As far as I know you cannot even pay to read them once their time is over. It'll just show you something like

Chapter 1 (free)
Chapter 2 (free)
Chapter 3 (free)
— 34 chapters have finished publishing —
Chapter 38 (free)
Chapter 39 (free)

This model confuses me. You can typically read all chapters for free here… if they are available. There are a few manga you can read in their entirety, but for all the others, you'd have to be there from the start if you want to read all chapters. It would be a different story if you could read the chapters that “finished publishing” for money, but as it stands this model just seems dumb. Well, whatever.

Gangan gives you a ticket a day for every manga, which lets you rent a chapter. This scheme obviously favors reading a lot of manga concurrently, as the number of chapters you can read for free in a given day is equal to the number of different manga.

Magapoke (supposedly short for Manga Pocket) works similar to Gangan, except you also get another ticket on login every day. That means you can read a second chapter every day for one manga of your choosing. Furthermore, you can watch a short ad to get another free chapter. This also works once a day per manga.

All of these readers have manga that you cannot read for free at all, you'd have to pay for every chapter except the first few. Some of these readers also allow you to “read ahead” by a chapter or two for money, meaning you get to read them before the f2p crowd. You can always read the first and the last couple chapters completely for free.
My favorite is probably Magapoke. It doesn't have the weird system Niconico uses, you can read a little more every day than Gangan allows and it has better manga than Jump Plus imo.

One thing they all do, which I'm really not a fan of, is that they tend to split single chapters into multiple parts. So when you rent a chapter for a ticket, you're actually not renting an entire chapter of the manga, but maybe only one of two or three parts that they split the chapter into. This is a classic capitalist ploy of course and not entirely unexpected, since more chapters -> more ca$h. That in itself doesn't really bother me, but new chapters are also published that way and they sometimes end up way too short. Waiting for a month for a new chapter, only for it to end up as a ten pages long half-chapter in which nothing of significance happens is frustrating.
Moreover, they don't seem to have much regard for how they actually split the chapter, which sometimes places the cuts in the worst possible places. This may create unintentional cliff hangers, or maybe it just cuts in half a regular, everyday conversation between two characters. Overall, it often ends up being really bad for the flow. In fact, the entire concept of “one chapter a day” (at best) prevents any sort of healthy reading flow. Even seasonal anime watchers get an entire new >20min episode a week. Manga readers often only get an average of 20 new pages every two weeks.

From Trash to Fast Food

First of all, I gotta make a confession: I read a lot of trash. I'll go a little into what and why later.
But other than that, I decided I'll be calling “trash” manga and anime “fast food” from now on.

Okay, okay, I know this may sound a little weird now, but hear me out. The main reason is that calling something trash just doesn't feel right to me anymore. I mean, there is actual trash out there, stuff that everyone watching should probably be ashamed of. But that is the minority. Most anime fans I know tend to watch “trash” sometimes. They haven't just been lured in by some form of bait, but they watch it to the end and probably got a decent amount of enjoyment out of it. I am no different. In fact, I consider the majority of manga I'm currently reading to be fast food. I wouldn't recommend them and I don't think I will still be reading them in a couple months from now. But for now, I am reading and enjoying them.

Calling them trash doesn't feel right anymore. It is both disrespectful to the author and disingenuous towards my own feelings. I'm not usually reading something I don't enjoy (ignore the part where I read the bible voluntarily). While fast food manga are typically unoriginal, very formulaic and have no other redeeming qualities, they are still doing something right. And sometimes that something is just what I want.

I think that the worst stories are typically those that make you feel nothing. Maybe they're boring, maybe you can't connect to them in any way. Most fast food manga are different. Even the fiftieth story about the underdog rising to the top and taking revenge on everyone who hurt them in the past still manages to make me feel something, as long as it hits most of the checkboxes and is decently well executed. To be honest, I'm not even completely sure I could write a story like that myself.

With that out of the way: Why fast food?

I believe it's the perfect metaphor for this. Everyone knows it's not exactly good or even healthy for you. But you consume it anyway and something keeps you coming back. It captures the essence of how I feel about these stories very well. It is still a somewhat derogatory term, but I think it matches the audacity of copying the same plot, setting and tropes for the umpteenth time very well.

One last thing I want to mention here: good execution is already enough for a very enjoyable story. You don't need a unique premise or anything like that. Half the time in manga, the premise feels like it's just there to draw in readers at the start, and has very little relevance to the story. So just because these stories are often unoriginal, that doesn't make them bad.

50 Shades of Trash Fast food

So, as I mentioned, I read mostly fast food manga. I wanted to talk about the observations I made along the way here. One of the most notable features about these are that they tend to copy certain plots or setups. I would call them genres, but they are so narrowly defined that the term genre doesn't really fit. I'll just mention the main categories I identified, their features, what makes them bad and why I read them anyway.

RPG Systems and Generic Fantasy Worlds

This isn't one of the categories yet, but it's a collection of elements that various different categories share.

Our story might take place in a fantasy world, but it might also just be an alternate version of today's reality, and what I see with astonishing frequency are all these concepts taken straight out of RPGs. Often times, the characters can just open their “stat page”, they learn “skills” and “level up” - but all of this is happening in the real world! Or at least that's how it's presented to us. It would be something different if it turns out it was just a simulation all along, but that's typically not the case. We're not even given a reason at all in stories where this happens. I can't help but wonder why authors copy these bland RPG systems into a world where they can only feel out of place. It's a question I could not find a definitive answer to yet. As such, it feels like the authors were just lazy. They take an easy to understand system that's so shallow they can modify it however they see fit and avoid seriously thinking of a sensible and cohesive power/magic/whatever system. Those systems also go very well with power fantasies, as e.g. “being overlevelled” is a very convincing explanation for why someone is overpowered.

A status sheet, like all good fantasy stories have them!

This often, but not always, goes hand in hand with a similarly bland and uninspired fantasy world. There's dragons, goblins, etc. and no one even bothers to explain their characteristics as you've seen them a hundred times already. There's no need to waste time on telling the reader that dragons breathe fire and slimes are the weakest monsters out there. We typically also get people registered as adventurers with the guild, who team up in parties and tackle dungeons and quests together. The latter might actually fit more with the RPG systems than the fantasy world parts, but it really goes best and most commonly together. This again just seems like laziness on the part of the author. We're introduced to a world that is “different” enough that the author can just put whatever their story needs out there. At the same time it's very familiar, and we can spare ourselves most of the explanations as readers have probably seen all of it a hundred times already.

Both of these are disappointing. The first one often feels out of place, and the second one is huge amounts of wasted potential. A good fantasy world isn't there to be the playground of the author and an excuse for everything. No, it should define it's own rules and allow us to slowly and surely unravel its mysteries. It allows us to be curiuos and excited about what there is to see. It lets us engage in the world's logic and understand why things are happening, instead of just accepting them because the author will's it. As a big fantasy fan, seeing the fantasy worlds in fast food manga makes me feel sad and depressed.

With that out of the way, let's get to the most common fast food categories I've seen.

Discarded and Left to Die

This feels like the most common setup and I have yet to see a single execution of the concept that is actually good. The main character is in a party of “adventurers” who typically clear dungeons together. They're considered to be among the strongest, if not the strongest, party in the world. Yet, our protagonist is looked down upon by his party members as useless and they eventually decide to ditch him. If they are nice, they'll only bully him and then tell him to leave. Worst case, they very literally backstab him to collect his “adventurer insurance” or just because they're really bad people. In any case, the protagonist suddenly finds himself alone and perhaps on the verge of dying. This is the moment he realizes he's actually pretty damn overpowered. The mean monster that was about to bite his head off is quickly dispatched through a mere wave of his hand, and off he is on his journey, to rise from the ashes and perhaps enact revenge upon those who backstabbed him.

Interestingly, the “revenge” story here is typically very indirect. The protagonist rarely gets to fight his former allies. Often times, just kicking him out of their party is already enough to bring about their downfall. The protagonist usually has some insane buff skills and his party is actually useless without him. His own strength then most commonly comes from the fact that he realizes he can just direct all the buff skills he previously split up between his allies onto himself. The revenge story practically writes itself. The protagonist's former allies just take loss after loss and quickly fall from grace, because they're too dumb to realize they're not what they used to be, and thus take on challenges far too dangerous for them.

Maybe killing off the guy with the party-wide poison resistance skill while you're in a dungeon full of poison mist wasn't the smartest move

This is perhaps the most clearly, narrowly defined of the categories I'm going to list here. At the same time, it's astonishing just how many of these manga are out there. I read a lot of these manga, and my enjoyment comes from the fact that it's just satisfying to see our abused protagonist get back on his feet and start his new life, while his backstabbers suffer. That's about it.

The problem with these manga is, first of all, obviously just how much of a copy-paste setting they have. This is easily the least original category I'm going to list here. Furthermore, the beginning is typically the best part, the entire premise. After the initial chapters, we get a bit of powerfantasy show-off moments, and that's about it. It usually feels like the authors have no idea where to go from here. Their hero is already stupidly overpowered and they don't know what to do with him. There's no plot after this. It's your classical underdog-rises-to-topdog story, except they're skipping the underdog phase and just jump straight to the punchline. The story is over at that point. I'm wondering if I'll ever see one that takes this a bit farther.

This category always employs the RPG systems and generic fantasy worlds I mentioned earlier.

The Useless Unique

In stories of this category, every character (or at least every “adventurer”) is given a skill. Our protagonist is one of the few chosen ones that receive a “unique skill”, a rare skill that only they and no one else possess. At first they are overjoyed, but then they quickly realize that their skill is actually useless, and so they stay behind as their former party members or maybe their cute childhood-friend-love-interest-hybrid charge ahead boldly. This category also typically employs RPG systems and particularly the guilds, parties, adventurers etc. society. In any case, our protagonist later realizes that his skill is actually insanely overpowered. He just needed to play around with his skill a little to realize its true potential, or maybe it just needed to reach level 5 to get to the good part. It's another underdog story where the protagonist is actually really overpowered, but takes a while to catch up.

This has pretty much the same positives and negatives as the previous category, but there's a bit more variety, and since the protagonist isn't at the very top practically from the start, there's also a bit more meat to the story, allowing it to stay fresh for a little longer. They also often play around with the mechanics of the world and/or the skill in semi-interesting ways.

The variety of overpowered skills the authors come up with can also be interesting. I remember one manga taking place in the real world, but with dungeons spawning everyhwere, and adventurers could enter dungeons to farm some fresh loot and XP. A barrier at the entrance of every dungeon would prevent anyone from entering more than one per day. The protagonist had subpar stats and his skill only allowed him super short distance teleportation, like a meter or something. He then used that to teleport through the dungeon's entrance barriers, clear more and thus outlevel everyone around him. That's a really good example of world mechanics being used well. That said, the setup isn't particularly intersting and there's nothing more going on here. He'll just slowly catch up on the top guys by outlevelling them.

There's also another one that I'm reading, which might take the crown for dumbest skill: automode. Does exactly what it says on the packaging. Probably even worse than you're imagining. See a huge dragon that should be absolutely undefeatable with his level and equipment? Protagonist just activates automode, his body starts moving on his own and he fights like a god, slaying that dragon in a couple minutes. During that time he simply watches a timer count down behind his closed eyes while waiting for the fight to be over.

Due to the “protagonist is (actually) overpowered” plot point, we might get some progression but typically only in terms of levels/stats for the protagonist. There is rarely real struggle involved and very little development that goes deeper than stats and reaches down to the personal level.

Naturally, this category always uses the RPG systems I mentioned earlier. Generic fantasy worlds are also rather prevalent.

There's another variant of this category which replaces “skills” with some sort of equipment. That's really just a less interesting version of this category to me. Uses the same “it seems weak at first but turns out to be overpowered” trope, but usually doesn't have the more interesting and creative aspects around the skill's mechanics.

The Banished class

This category is also very similar to the previous one. People in the world of these stories are typically assigned a “class” or “job” (cue other RPG systems of course) when they turn a certain age. The protagonist is assigned a class that is scorned and looked down upon for some reason, typically just as being useless. It then turns out it's actually overpowered. There's not much else to say here. It's just really weird how the protagonist still ends up overpowered, but no one ever talks about the fact that no one else with this class is overpowered. Typically the protagonist is the only one with this class ever introduced in the manga. That's just strange.

Everyone made fun of the smith....

...until he spawned a ton of swords out of thin air right above their heads

Rise of the Underdog

This should probably just be considered a super-category for the previous ones. Perhaps I shouldn't even call it a category but rather a trope. That said, I don't just mean any underdog-type story by this. There's real good ones out there, but the ones I am referring to aren't. Really, it's just a common element of the previous categories. Seeing the guy who was abused at the start get back on his feet and perhaps enact some sweet revenge is always satisfying. But beyond that, these stories are often bland. They tend to give the protagonist some sort of overpowered abilities, equipment or whatever, and his “progress” is really just level and stats going up.

I'm saying “him” for a reason here by the way, since I have yet to see a single female protagonist in one of these stories. Though sometimes we have the protagonist reincarnated/playing as a girl, because why not. And since we're talking females: there is typically at least one poster girl that the protagonist picks up along the way, and often multiple. Not even love interests (at least from the protagonist's side), but simply eye candy I guess?

Isekai

There's of course a lot of Isekai out there and the majority of it is fast food. Everyone probably knows that already and I don't have much to add here I guess. There's a lot of overlap with the previously mentioned categories as well. In particular, I've seen people being transported into games they've played more and more often recently, perhaps more than the non-game-related ones.

All I really wanted to say here is: why do people use the Isekai trope? I really don't get it. The best reason that I can come up with to employ it would be if you wanted to tell some sort of redemption story for someone who had a shitty life and now gets another chance by being reincarnated into the world of their dreams (or nightmares). But that is very, very rarely the case. The only Isekai I can think of that has ever seriously dealt with the protagonist's past in any way was Mushoku Tensei. While other Isekai protagonist's do tend to have a sad previous life (typically being shut-in gamers/otakus) this rarely comes up again as more than a side note after the first couple chapters. That makes me wonder, is this just supposed to make the protagonist more relatable? That seems like a rather weak reason.

The other two “uses” of the Isekai trope that I've seen so far are either just for knowledge from the previous life, or to make all sorts of references. In the former case, the protagonist's “overpowered knowledge” is explained away by them being someone from our world. That happens particularly often with game-related Isekais. If this knowledge is what your story needs, sure, go ahead, but at least outside of games there's a million other ways to explain it. These aren't necessarily better than making it an Isekai, but would surely feel at least a little fresh.
In the latter case, the origin of the protagonist is used to allow them to make all sorts of (often comedic) commentary on the workings of this other world. There's also nothing wrong with this, but it feels more like an afterthought to me than something that would make you go “it needs to be an Isekai!”

Anyway, that was my two cents on Isekai here.

Here's another Flavor of <Girl>

This category goes a completely different way than the previous ones, which were mostly different takes on power fantasy.

Anyway, stories in this category often revolve heavily around a female character with some sort of quirk. The protagonist is male and usually enters into some kind of romantical relationship with the girl. This often happens in high school, and of course the girl is often the most beautiful human being in a 10 kilometer radius.

If that's the case, then her quirk tends to be some kind of secret. The dude somehow finds out about it but he still accepts her as what she is, which is actually not too bad of a start for a meaningful character background.
I still think it's strange how usually “her beauty” is emphasized. She's the prettiest of the pretty, an angel walking the earth. But it doesn't stop there of course, she's also really smart, having top grades, and excels at *all* types of sports as well. It's almost funny how often the main girl is at first described as being literally perfect in every way.
Sometimes that's used for a bit of comedy when her quirk is something that shatters this image of perfection, maybe by being a bit childish or plain weird. That might be entertaining if it wasn't ~~so predictable~~ literally spoiled by the manga's title. I guess it's also intended to make that angel a bit more human, but sometimes she just ends up as this weird and uncanny caricature of a person, where someone took perfection and threw some sort of flaw into the mix. It feels a little like video game bosses that are completely invulnerable on their entire body, except for that large glowing red weakspot on their ass. It feels engineered and artificial.

There's a lot of, mostly superficial, variation when it comes to the main girl.
Maybe she's a vampire or she's a succubus. Or she's the legendary slit-mouthed woman. Perhaps she's an assasssin and maybe he's even her target. Or maybe she's a little kid at heart or a very gloomy person. Maybe she's a Hokkaido gyaru, or she's just really cool in general. Maybe she's a capable office lady who always gets drunk after work, or the girlfriend of the guy stealing your girlfriend. Maybe she's a gamer girl or even a pro-gamer girl. Maybe she has multiple personalities, or just a doppelgänger. Maybe she's the best friend's little sister. Or the little sister's best friend. Or the little sister… well fuck.

The male protagonists in this category tend to be incredibly weak characters, both figuratively and literally. They're just a copy and paste Mr. nice-guy that you've seen a hundred times already, and they don't go any deeper than that. No character, no background story, no anything beyond that. They're a hollow container, just there because you need something to have “romantic” moments with the girl. They're almost always an outsider and of course also dense as a white dwarf and/or too scared/anxious to make a move. They also tend to behave in… offputting… ways in the more accidental “romance” moments. Walk in on a girl in the bathroom, or trip and accidentally grab her boobs? None of these guys are up for the task of handling such a situation like a decent human being. It always ends more or less the same way. Dude's brain short-circuits and he just stands there watching her for several seconds until she punches him in the face or something. I'd love to see a manga where the dude actually reacts like any average person would… except no good manga even has situations like these, because they're weird and unrealistic.

Not all of these manga are bad by the way. There's a couple really good manga that would sort of fit this category. The bad ones typically identify themselves by how they prefer superficial, trope-y “romance” moments over actual romance. They like to spam you with moments like “she trips and now she's on top of him”, or an indirect kiss, or he protects her from people hitting on her, or they have to hide in a really tight closet together, and so on. Most of these are completely meaningless in general, or at least rendered meaningless by how they're presented. Typically, these moments just end with one or both characters being embarassed and that's about it.
It actually goes so far that some of these manga have no romance at all, but only these tropey moments. They also tend to have little to no progression, in most of these stories they never even become a couple. As I've already mentioned in the Horimiya article, another indicator of how good a romance story is, is how much time they spend in the pre-relationship phase, aka before they are a couple. Most fastfood manga never even reach the point where they're actually a couple. On the other hand, some of them even have the audacity to just end the story at the point where they become a couple. Like, do Japanese mangaka simply not know that that's where it “really” starts? Or maybe they just don't think that's what people are interested in. I don't know.

I should probably write an article at some point about how I feel about romance manga in general.

Aside from the superficiality of the romance here, there's also something to say about the setup. It is typically very focused on the female character. She's the poster girl (literally) and the main draw of the manga. They try to appeal through character design and her “quirk”. This honestly makes me feel very weird sometimes… There are hundreds of fictional girls, and perhaps one for each specific combination of preferences a reader might have. They are practically engineered to be waifu material. There's a reason why I called this section the way I did. Sometimes it really feels like you're picking a flavor of ice-cream or something.

Pick your flavor

So you may wonder, why do I read these manga? So do I.
Seriously though, these are like a quick injection of sugar straight into my veins, which can be nice sometimes. That's about it. The term “fast food manga” really fits perfectly here. The absence of any meaningful development and the all-to-familiar routine of the manga in this category typically make me drop them rather quickly.

The Evil Ojou-sama

This one has become surprisingly common recently, I'm guessing people just saw the success of Bakarina and decided to copy that. You probably know the setup: girl gets reincarnated into the world of an Otome game she once played, but as the evil Ojou-sama who probably ends up dead on each of the game's routes.

This is another weirdly specific category, but here I fail to see what the setup is good for. In the most classic examples, the Otome setting is an excuse to have a reverse harem and the “Evil” part is supposed to add some suspense I guess. That's good enough, but there's still more than enough examples in this category where the reverse harem element is missing. And I have yet to see a single example of the “Evil” part being used for suspense effectively. If you've seen Bakarina, they all play out the same way in that regard: she just keeps stressing about getting killed if she makes a mistake, while it's completely clear to us that she's prevented such an ending long ago already, just by… not being a shitty person.

In any case, there's not too much I have to say about this category. It's just another weird copycat with little thought put into it in most cases. They are actually not even that similar, since, while the setup may seem very specific, whatever happens after that is still rather open. It is typically some sort of slice of life story, but there's still some variation among them. Some also like to play with the setup a little, e.g. by making the main character her butler, instead of Ojou-sama herself.

So, why is this a fastfood category? Well, whenever a setup this specific is just copied again and again, that already makes for a good contender in my opinion. Other than that, the problems here are less specific, but pretty much what you would expect from people who just copy setups like this. These stories mostly play out as slice of life stories, except the authors seem to have no idea what they really want to do so they just do nothing, really. I can't even remember the contents of the last couple fast food manga I read from this category, they were just too forgettable.

In any case, those are about all the categories I came up with. There's probably more, as there's more than enough genres I'm just dodging for no good reason aside from “not feeling like it”.

Finally, one thing that is true for almost all fast food manga, is the fact that they don't actually end. The author either just keeps doing the same things forever until I eventually stop reading, or they stop publishing. I don't believe every story has to have a clear ending, but it's honestly so bad that just seeing that a manga is finished is already a big positive for me.

My Picks

In this section I'll present some of the manga I've read. I will recommend the (few) that were really good, mention a couple disappointments and some that just have interesting or funny premises. All of that in no particular order, for the ~~confusion~~ variety.

Giji Harem

As I mentioned at the start, Giji Harem (擬似ハーレム / Pseudo Harem) is the manga where it all began for me. It is relatively short with 157 chapters of only about 4 pages each. As such, it's not particularly deep, but it still presents a decently well executed, cute and wholesome romance story. The premise is simple: main girl Rin and her senpai Eiji are in their school's drama club together. When Eiji mentions that he used to dream of having a harem, Rin starts acting out a harem of multiple personalities for him. What may sound weird at first was done pretty well, and the manga generally avoided most of the romance tropes that I'm so tired of. It also actually came to an end, which is another positive.

Rinkane

Rinkane (りんかね) gets a shoutout for just having a funny setup. The main character and his two bros were Samurai in the middle ages, travelling the land to fight demons. After their final battle they all died happily together. But the main character gets reincarnated into modern day Japan, and in Highschool he actually meets his two Samurai bros again. Turns out they also reincarnated. As cute girls. Aaaand they're both horny for him. Alright.

Bokutachi wa Hanshoku wo yameta

Bokutachi wa Hanshoku wo yameta (僕たちは繁殖をやめた / We've stopped reproducing) is a funny one. It starts out as a wholesome romance between a guy and a girl who met in university. Seven chapters in, they're already a couple, and after they had sex he finds out… she's actually his little sister.

"Oh shit I fucked my little sister"

Well, the story still treats the subject seriously. The two siblings grew up apart from each other, they don't see each other as siblings and at the point where they find out, they're already in love with each other. This could be an interesting story about incest in our modern world, but unfortunately it sort of just stops there. They resolve to stay together, but the story doesn't really go any deeper into the topic. Instead of actually discussing the problems and challenges here, it embraces all sorts of drama that make the guy and girl alternately go “maybe we should break up after all”. The manga actually finished publishing at 53 chapters and I'm wondering if they'll find a good ending, but so far I'm a bit disappointed.

Tomodachi no Imouto ga Ore ni dake Uzai

Tomodachi no Imouto ga Ore ni dake Uzai (友達の妹が俺にだけウザい / My Friend's little Sister is only annoying to Me) is about another little sister! Not the main character's, fortunately. This one took a large serving of tropes and made them work somehow. It is a romcom about Akiteru, a highschool student who is producing his own game with the 5-man company he built up himself, and how he and the members of the company navigate their daily lifes and work challenges. It is a slice of life so there isn't really anything more detailed to say about the plot.

As you may have guessed, the (best friend's) little sister is in love with him, and at least two more love interests are added into the mix over the course of the story. What's refreshing to see is that our main character isn't your generic dense protagonist, but he is actually a very smart and capable person. He isn't oblivious to the girls’ advances either, though he's sworn to focus completely on building his game development company, so he doesn't have any time for “love” and “relationships”. It is also nice to see how proactive the various girls are, as even “the shy one” does her best to convey her feelings.

That said, the setup as of now obviously doesn't allow for much development in the romance direction, so I'm wondering where they'll go with this. But overall, this turned out surprisingly enjoyable so far, in contrast to what I initially expected.

Yonshimai wa Yoru wo Omachikane

Yonshimai wa Yoru wo Omachikane (四姉妹は夜をおまちかね / The four sisters are waiting impatiently for the night) made its place onto this list by throwing my expectations overboard. It starts of with the main character walking the streets of his home town in the middle of the night. He's a Leprechaun, and he cannot sleep until he satisfies his primal urges by playing tricks on unsuspecting people. When he sees a girl sleeping at her desk through an open window, he cannot resist. So he goes into her room through the window… and finishes the homework she fell asleep doing. Then he leaves.

This was so wholesome, I was looking forward to how this would continue. Next thing that happens, he gets called out by an elf-woman who watched him and recognized he's a Leprechaun. She takes him home, introduces him to her four daughters, and tells him to play pranks on them (= be horny) to “awaken their elven blood”. That's it.
Yea I'm out of here.

Ijimeru Aitsu ga Warui no ka, Ijimerareta Boku ga Warui no ka?

Ijimeru Aitsu ga Warui no ka, Ijimerareta Boku ga Warui no ka? (いじめるアイツが悪いのか、いじめられた僕が悪いのか？ / Is he, who bullies me, wrong, or am I, who's getting bullied, wrong?) may seem to have a dumb title at first, but it starts making some sort of sense once you're a couple chapters in. It tells the story of Aizawa, who has been violently bullied in middleschool. 20 years later, he works as a teacher, and as chance would have it, he teaches Shiori, the daughter of the “ringleader” of the people who bullied him long ago.

I don't want to go into much more detail about the story since I don't want to spoil it. It's a suspense with a couple twists, and 18 chapters in I'm still not completely sure what Aizawa's deal really is. In any case, I'm really enjoying it so far, if you can actually call it that since some chapters are rather heavy and make me feel more like I'm getting depression. The author seems to be on a quest to show us all the worst sides of humanity here, and at this point it seems like no character will get out of this without some sort of trauma.

Every character, at some point

Chikansaresou ni natteiru S-kyuu Bishoujo wo tasuketara tonari no Seki no Osananajimi datta

Chikansaresou ni natteiru S-kyuu Bishoujo wo tasuketara tonari no Seki no Osananajimi datta (痴漢されそうになっているＳ級美少女を助けたら隣の席の幼馴染だった / The S-class beauty I saved from a molester turned out to be my childhood friend sitting next to me), just another case of light novel titles go brrrrrr. This is probably the manga I think of when it comes to the “Here's another Flavor of <Girl>” category mentioned above. It doesn't even tick all the boxes for that one, but it embraces shallow romance tropes over actual development like no other.

There's actually two love-interests in this one, and I thought this would go on forever as this sort of unspoken rivalry because they're both obviously interested in the protagonist, but he's too dumb to notice and they're too shy to make it clear. In chapter 25, it turned out I was wrong, as both of them confessed to the main character, and he made a choice. Wait, is this fastfood manga actually giving me the development I never thought was possible?, I was thinking. Then that chapter ended, but on the very last page we got this:

Unfamiliar girl: "Oh I wonder what the guy I dated in middleschool is doing now!"

How foolish I was. One girl is out, but a new challenger has entered the ring. Back to square one. What a genius the author is, I couldn't stop laughing.

Keikenzumi na Kimi to Keiken zero na Ore ga otsukiai suru Hanashi

Keikenzumi na Kimi to Keiken zero na Ore ga otsukiai suru Hanashi (経験済みなキミと、経験ゼロなオレが、お付き合いする話。 / A tale of how experienced you and inexperienced me are going out.) looks like another member of that category at first. Classic outsider-protagonist confesses to his school's top beauty, and she basically answers “sure, why not”. Turns out she has a history of sort-of abusive boyfriends that warped her sense of whats normal in a relationship, so the first thing she does after accepting his confession, is to invite him home and ask him if he wants to have sex with her, because “that's just normal, right?”. And at that point I was like hoooold on, that's kinda fucked up…. but I like where this is going. The protagonist actually acts like a decent human being for once and tells her he'd love to, but he'll wait until she actually wants it too.

In any case, so far it has continued as a very cute and wholesome romance between them, but I'm still waiting for this underlying core of “fucked-up” to show up again. That could become very interesting if handled properly, or it could turn into this sort of weird sidenote that ends up being irrelevant to the story. That's still an open question, so let's see where this goes.

Meikyuu no Ou

Meikyuu no Ou (迷宮の王 / King of the Labyrinth) is perhaps one of the most unique ones I'm reading at the moment. The setting is a classical fantasy world with RPG systems etc. as I've described previously. Okay, I know this may sound like it contradicts what I just said. But the main character (?) in this case is a minotaur, who is a minor boss in one of that world's dungeons.

The MC

It is a monster through and through, living just to fight and kill. Through a lucky coincidence, this minotaur receives the “blessing” of adventurers - allowing it to use healing potions, level up like them etc. The manga follows the minotaur as it gets stronger, in turn allowing it to slay stronger and stronger (groups of) adventurers. It doesn't really go any deeper than that so far and it is also already killing the legendary heroes of its world, so not sure what else there is to come at this point. On the other hand, it's been implied that the minotaur is starting to develop some kind of consciousness, so let's see where this goes.

For now, it's just a bit refreshing as it is very different to most other manga I read. I also really like the art style, which feels very “gritty”, quite fitting to the nature of the story.

"FIREBA- oh fuck"

Kaoru Hana wa Rin to Saku

Kaoru Hana wa Rin to Saku (薫る花は凛と咲く / The fragrant flower blooms with dignity) is the last one for this list, and easily the best manga I've discovered here, as well as probably the best romance story I've read in… perhaps ever? It starts out as a bit of a Romeo-and-Juliet: the male lead, Rintarou, goes to a school for dumb, rowdy boys. The female lead, Kaoruko, goes to the neighboring all-girls Ojou-sama school. Naturally, the two neighboring schools are on rather bad terms.

The disgusted look on their faces, reserved exclusively for the boys of Chidori Highschool

That doesn't stop Rintarou and Kaoruko though, as they meet outside of school at first without knowing where the other comes from. Rintarou works at his mother's cake shop, and Kaoruko loves eating cake, and from there their story slowly gets rolling.

To be honest, there is no deeper plot to be found here or anything else, but it still works really well as a romance for me. The manga takes the time for the two leads to develop and eventually realize their feelings for each other. The pace is slow, but steady. But it doesn't focus exclusively on their romance, in fact I'd say it spends just as much time on the friendship between Rintarou and his three friends Yorita, Usami and Saku, as well as Kaoruko and her best friend Subaru. The manga is full of incredibly genuine and wholesome friendship moments.

The gang when someone threatens their friend

At some point the manga, out of nowhere, just drops that story on us of how Rintarou, who was a loner as a kid, really wanted to dye his hair blonde and get piercings because he found them cool, but was too afraid that people would avoid him even more and make fun of him. So his mother just went and dyed her own hair, got piercings too, just to give her son the courage to do what he wanted to do. That was just there in one chapter and it almost made me cry. The manga has so much love put into its characters and their interactions, it's truly a joy to read.

Lastly, it has some great art and I can't put nearly all the images here that I'd want to.

Whew

That's it, and I just set another new record for longest article on this blog. I've nothing to add here at the end, just if you wanted to know where the images in the thumbnail were taken from, here you go, from left to right:
Kiwameta hiiru ga subete wo iyasu/“My extreme heal cures everything” (no link because apparently no one in the west knows this manga)
Giji Harem
Kaoru hana wa rin to saku

Alright then, see you at the next article o7

How Vivy: Fluorite Eye's Song didn't work for Me

Fri, 15 Apr 2022 00:02:51 +0200

As I'm writing this sentence, I've just finished watching Vivy: Fluorite Eye's Song with a friend two hours ago. It left me with a lot of impressions and I wanted to collect these here while also organizing my thoughts before the memories start to fade. Me from three weeks later: well, that didn't quite work out. As usual.

The biggest impression of Vivy that remains, for me, is dissatisfaction. Don't get me wrong, it wasn't a bad anime and I still enjoyed watching. But nearly the entire plot including subplots fell flat for me.

The anime was still quite impressive production-wise. It is filled with largely beautiful backgrounds and animation and a nice soundtrack including several insert songs. Just watching Matsumoto be was incredibly fun. He would often move around in amusing ways while just talking. This is difficult to convey if you haven't seen it unfortunately, so here goes an example:

Your browser doesn't support HTML5 video. Here is a link to the video instead.

The fight scenes were slick as well, had several pretty cool moves and a great feeling of impact, though they were just a tad too fast to really follow and appreciate them for my taste. They also had this more realistic (?) drawing style which was sometimes used with good impact, but sometimes also seemingly randomly.

The other style

But let's get into the plot. I will spoil pretty much the entirety of Vivy here, so proceed at your own risk.

With that out of the way, I'll go over the three main, I'll just call them threads, of plot we had in the anime and what bothered me about them. The first one is Vivy's personal story, her striving to become a diva that makes people happy by pouring her heart into her singing. The second one is her and Matsumoto's overarching goal of preventing a war of humans vs. AI. And the third thread is actually several subplots in the form of AI-related incidents that make up the meat of the show.

To summarize the main plot: we are introduced to the world of Vivy around the year 2060. At the start of the show, AI is seeing mass adoption, mostly in the shape of autonomous anroids, vehicles etc. Vivy herself is one of the most advanced AIs of that time, being an autonomous AI, which basically means she's sentient. Each AI is given a specific mission, and their life purpose is to fulfill this mission as well as they can. Vivy is no different. She was created as a singer, and her task is “to make people happy, by pouring her heart into her singing”. She is stationed in an amusement park.
Eventually, an AI called Matsumoto shows up from the future and enlists her help in preventing the war between AIs and humans that is going to break out in a hundred years from then. After a bit of back and forth, Vivy agrees to help him. Their goal is change the future by affecting certain “singularity points”, events that scientists from the future have identified as paving the way for the war.

Subplots

There are mainly four subplots here (not counting the finale), presented as mostly self-contained arcs with a length of two to three episodes each. Each of these represents a singularity point. They are separated by timeskips of 5 to 40 years.

Aikawa's Assassination

This event occurs right after Vivy and Matsumoto meet. Aikawa is a politician of little importance who is trying to pass the “AI Naming Law”. In Matsumoto's timeline, Aikawa is assassinated by the anti-AI terrorist group Toak. This turns him into a martyr and the law that he backed sees a surge in support, allowing it to pass. This would later lead to the recognition of AI's rights and broader adoption, accelerating their production. Matsumoto's proposed fix is simple: just save Aikawa. He is not important and, ironically, the proposed law wouldn't pass if he was still alive.

I don't actually have much to say about this arc. This was the start of the show and solidly done. It also lays the foundation for some things that happen later, so I wanted to mention it anyway.

Crash of the Sunrise

This is the second arc, which begins 15 years after the first one. The Sunrise is a space hotel, basically a space station where rich customers can spend their vacation. At this point, AIs are already noticeably more advanced, being barely discernible from humans. The Sunrise is staffed solely by AIs, with their leader, Estella, having taken over after the original (human) owner's demise several years ago.

In Matsumoto's timeline, Estella steers the Sunrise into the ocean, leading to the death of everyone aboard and sparking an outburst of anti-AI protests and violence across the globe. Vivy sneaks aboard the ship to prevent this and it turns out that Toak is behind all of it. The Sunrise, which can only be steered by someone with Estella's exact signature, would be manipulated by Elizabeth, who is Estella's long lost “sister”, another AI who was created as an almost exact copy, but discarded early on. They'd never met before, though Estella knew of her existence.

To repeat that, the two AIs have been created as copies. Estella was created first, but Elizabeth received an exact copy of her early memories. But she was soon discarded as trash for an unknown reason, without having been given a mission. When she was picked up by Toak, one of their members, Kakitani, gave her the mission to serve him. Happy about having been given the equivalent of a purpose in life, Elizabeth devotedly served him and followed him onboard the Sunrise.

Vivy eventually beats Elizabeth in combat and Matsumoto deletes her memories related to Kakitani, and maybe even everything that came after she was discarded (not completely clear). Estella stays onboard the Sunrise, which is already too far off-course to not crash into the earth. She will have to stay until the end to make sure it lands in the ocean, while everyone else evacuates. At the very end, Elizabeth, with her memories deleted, joins her and together they succeed. They are both destroyed in the crash.

I had serious trouble caring about this plot. At the beginning of the arc, Matsumoto proposed to destroy Estella, as that would be the simplest fix. She can't drop the hotel into the ocean if she's not alive anymore. Vivy refuses to do so. She has been working as one of the staff AIs on the Sunrise and got to know Estella in the process. She made the impression of someone who genuinely cared for the people onboard. You'd see her playing with the children, smiling happily. When a malfunction has the customers on board distressed, she shows them a view of the stars and sings for them to calm them down. When it turns out that it was never Estella who steered the Sunrise into the ocean, but her “evil twin” Elizabeth, this is presented as the big twist that turns everything on its head.

Estella playing with the children

It kinda is, but it also destroyed all traces of the “previous plot” that could have been interesting. I was genuinely looking forward to see why Estella would eventually decide to destroy the Sunrise and kill the people on board, which she all seemed to treasure. When it turned out it was “just Toak at it again”, that was a little disappointing. The formerly interesting problem was simply resolved through violence as Vivy knocked out Elizabeth.

Okay, I actually don't want to bitch about this too much, the plot was still fine. The arc as a whole was okay, but I didn't really feel it. There is, however, one thing that really bothered me, and that is how Elizabeth was treated. First of all, they just straight up deleted her memories and after that, she was all nice and helping Estella? I mean, I'm all for happy endings, but this is anything but a healthy resolution. What about Elizabeth's past? What about her caring for her master Kakitani? What about her relation to Estella? The contrast between these two AIs that should have been exactly the same was an interesting point and I was waiting to see what they'd do with that. But instead, they literally just threw it all away. In some way, this felt like a rushed adaption of a novel, so much that I'd actually asked if this was an adaption and not an original work after all.

The Metal Float

After another 5 year skip, we find ourselves at the beginning of the third arc. We are introduced to doctor Saeki, who helped create the Metal Float, an artificial island inhabited by AIs only. It is basically a giant factory, helping to cover the world's demand for AIs and robots.

We are informed by Matsumoto that the resolution of the second arc led to wider adoption of AIs as humans were impressed with Estella's noble sacrifice to make sure the Sunrise would fall into the sea, and not onto a city. This accelerated AI development and also led to the early construction of the Metal Float.

In Matsumoto's timeline, the float was only built 20 years later. In his words, “it is 20 years ahead of its time” and must be destroyed to impede the growth of AI. This singularity point obviously changed from his timeline. Had this development not happened, the goal would have been to prevent the marriage between doctor Saeki and his wife Grace. Grace is an AI, and they were the first human-AI couple in the original timeline, which is not the case now.

In any case, doctor Saeki agreed completely that the float was way ahead of its time and conveniently provides Vivy and Matsumoto with a virus that should shut it down. They then board the island where they are greeted by a bunch of AI robots that throw a welcome party for them. Humans “like surprises, right?”, so they wanted to try that out. It turned out sort of uncanny, even though the good intentions were obvious. Shortly after that, Toak is back on the stage and attacks the float. Vivy uses the moment of confusion to inject the virus into the system, and for some reason the robots go on a rampage, blowing up Toak's ships and attempting to kill everyone who was on them. At the same time, doctor Saeki and his wife make their way onto the island.

When Vivy encounters them on the island, doctor Saeki confesses: the virus didn't just contain a shutdown program but also tries to extract the data from the float's central computer. We then learn that the woman at his side isn't actually Grace but a cheap copy, and that the real Grace was chosen to be the AI controlling the float when it was constructed years ago. It is revealed that basically all the AIs on the float are part of the central control instance, of the real Grace, and that it is likely impossible to “extract” her. Vivy resolves to destroy Grace to end her rampage. Doctor Saeki orders the copy at his side to stop Vivy, but Vivy easily destroys her in a single punch. She then heads to the float's core and does the same thing to the real Grace.

There's so much to unpack here and I don't really know where to start. I'll just pick Saeki. The dude is married to an AI, which is significant enough that I was expecting the show to talk about it. It didn't. But honestly, that's fair enough. The show actually skips most of the “is real AI any different from humans?” debate which is fine by me, as I've seen that so many times that I'm tired of it at this point. Another thing to mention is the fact that he was just living with a copy of his wife. That's kinda fucked up if you ask me, but it gets worse. Once he recognized Vivy as a threat, he doesn't hesitate to send his wife-copy into combat against her.

K-5, stop her!

And that is how quickly his beloved wife (copy) turns into a nameless tool again. This was also somewhat disconcerting, but then again, Saeki is visibly shaken when his wife-copy is wrecked in the blink of an eye by Vivy. We see him kneeling down beside her “corpse”. So are we supposed to think he thought fondly of the copy? Or was she just a tool to him? A replacement? Both? That could possibly be an interesting conflict, but it is also never talked about. It's just there and makes me wonder. To finish up the enumeration of Saeki-being-fucked-up moments: he literally let Vivy inject a virus into his wife. Wtf?

Okay, with that out of the way, there's one more thing in this arc that just happened and apparently no one in the series felt the need to comment on it. Grace, who worked as a nurse and seemed rather human at least to me, was just stuck into the center of the metal float and condemned to control this massive factory for the rest of her life. I mentioned previously that the series doesn't actually talk too much about the classic “AI-question” and that I actually like that.
But at this point? It honestly should have. It perfectly highlights how AIs are still seen as nothing but tools, their life decided by someone else, and having a fate perhaps worse than slavery apparently not regarded as a big deal. Grace is dehumanized in a spectacular way, and no one really seemed to care much about that.

I loved how Grace sang “Sing my Pleasure” in the flashbacks with Saeki. Her calm, breathy voice gave off a solemn vibe, compared to the more energetic version we know from the opening. When Vivy hears her distorted singing over the radio, she comments that “this is not singing; It's just a sound recording”.
When the robots threw a surprise-welcome party for Vivy and Matsumoto as they initially arrived at the float, their hospitalitiy, while well-intentioned, feels somewhat off, maybe even creepy. They give us the same quote about “surprises” that we later see Grace saying to Saeki in the flashback to their reunion.
Both events imply that the real Grace is long gone and there's no saving her. Her inhumane conditions have completely broken her, leaving behind nothing but a shell of a once very human being, sitting at the center of an equally soulless artificial island. That was actually amazing storytelling of the more subtle kind, giving us something to think instead of being all in-your-face about it. That makes it all the more confusing that nothing was done with this. Grace was eventually “saved” by Vivy. By killing her. There is no hope for her, and at the same time there seems to be no hope for AIs in this world that abuses them so badly. And yet no one even mentioned that this might perhaps possibly be problematic?

Vivy meets Saeki afterwards, apologizing to him for killing his wife. I don't remember the rest of the dialogue, but as Vivy turns away to leave, Saeki shoots himself. Vivy has a mental breakdown, gives birth to her second personality and gets really good at singing. More on that later.

Ophelia's Suicide

The fourth arc and singularity point begins 20 years after the last one. At this point, Vivy is a rather famous singer, though it becomes apparent she doesn't remember anything that happened “outside” her career, namely everything related to Matsumoto and the AI war. After a rather amusing back-and-forth, they decide to work together again. The singularity point this time is Ophelia's suicide. Ophelia is a “diva” similar to Vivy, she gives concerts and sings for people on the stage. According to Matsumoto, she would commit suicide shortly after her next concert by jumping from the top of a large building. This would make her the first AI-suicide in history, and would inspire a similar outbreak of AI-suicides across the globe. The goal is to prevent this.

Over the course of this arc, Vivy tries to get closer to Ophelia, probing her for any worries she might have, anything that could cause her to commit suicide. We learn that she has a friend/collegaue called Antonio who used to do the stage lighting etc. for her, and just generally support her. At some point, he shut down for an unknown reason and hasn't awakened since. Vivy and Matsumoto guess that Ophelia eventually commited suicide out of sadness over her friend not returning. When Matsumoto tries to prevent Ophelia from jumping off the roof, she reveals that she is actually Antonio, who took over Ophelia's body. They fight, including Antonio's body which he remote-controls. They still lose and both end up dead.

On to the interesting part: why did Antonio take over Ophelia's body? And here I gotta say… I don't know…? When Antonio's cover is blown, he claims the he's taken over Ophelia's body because she was struggling with singing and performing. His mission was something along the lines of “help her be successful”, and as he believed he could do it better, he took over. At some point later, Antonio suddenly says that he only took over because he couldn't bear watching Ophelia struggling and suffering from the pressure of performing etc. As Antonio is defeated and the fight ends, Ophelia “resurfaces” and they both affirm their mutual friendship (love?) for each other before they die.

So far, the show has made it abundantly clear that an AI's mission can be rather freely interpreted. That means the reason Antonio gave first is not a direct consequence from his mission, but a decision of his own. It paints him as someone both selfish and arrogant, who would practically enslave his best friend just to be in control. It doesn't help that he is the spitting image of a villain with the way he talks, his facial expressions etc. This is a stark contrast to everything that comes after that and I cannot for the life of me think of a reason why his motive and Antonio himself were presented like this at first. This is not just misleading, it downright doesn't make any sense. How am I supposed to believe that “Antonio was good all along” and “just wanted the best for Ophelia” at the end?

This is all the more sad because it would have been an interesting conflict otherwise. Local AI-man decides to take over his friend's body so they don't have to suffer through their life anymore? This is the good kind of fucked-up, the genuinely interesting one. Generally, I love to see it when people do the worst things with the best intentions. In any case, this conflict lost all its meaning, half of which I'm attributing to the confusing and contradictory delivery. The other half comes from the fact that they just introduced something like that and never properly talk about it. At the very end, Ophelia and Antonio die on best terms. What???
I mean, I didn't expect anything else considering Ophelia's personality, but come on… at least give her the chance to say something among the lines of “thanks bro, but I gotta live and learn through my own struggles” or so, and that would have improved the ending quite a bit. But as it stands, this just… happened. This is very much reminiscent of the second arc, the crash of the Sunrise. We are presented with an uncannily clean solution and happy (?) ending that should actually be anything but clean or happy.

Oh no, how tragic!

As another similarity to the second arc, this one also started out presenting a conflict that I was at least somewhat interested in, and then threw it over board and turned it into something completely different. I was just waiting to see why Ophelia might want to commit suicide. At the end, that question becomes irrelevant. There's nothing wrong with the twist here, but I think it's just bad management of expectations by the show.

Lastly, I found it rather questionable that one AI can apparently completely subdue and take over another AI by sticking a cable into them. That doesn't speak to the security of their software. Plot is more important than technicalities like this, so that's fine with me, but it still threw me off quite a bit.

And with this, we conclude the fourth arc and all the subplots in general. Let's get to the AI war.

The AI war

First to summarize what happened after the fourth arc: Vivy returns to her “original” personality, but loses her ability to sing. She's put into the museum where she starts writing a song. On the exact day of the original AI war, the exact same thing happens, except that this time the AIs are also chanting the song Vivy wrote, one key off for those extra-creepy vibes. We learn that Archive, the central computer sort of managing (?) all AIs in the world just spontaneously decided that humans are bad and should be eliminated, for no reason in particular. Archive does however give us a sliver of hope: Vivy is the first and only AI in history that ever did something creative, like writing a song, of her own free will. If she manages to sing that song, then Archive will allow humans to live on. Of course, Vivy eventually succeeds, stopping Archive from dropping satellites all over Earth. We get our happy ending of only a couple hundred thousand or perhaps millions of people dead, instead of billions. Vivy breaks down after her song and the show closes with her awakening again in a chair, her hair cut short, having apparently lost all her memories like last time, and just going back to singing again.

The first thing that bothered me, was how the ending almost ret-conned everything that Vivy and Matsumoto did to prevent the war. There's several layers to unpack here. First of all, Vivy and Matsumoto have successfully changed all the singularity points. So why did the AI war still happen? And it even happened on the exact same day as in Matsumoto's timeline? Was everything they did completely pointless?

Yes. Yes, it undoubtedly was. Archive just casually dropped that it's been watching Vivy's and Matsumoto's journey all along, and made adjustments on its own to stop their timeline from deviating from the original too much. On the one hand, I love how this makes perfect sense. All AIs are apparently connected to Archive all the time, meaning it also knew about everything Vivy and Matsumoto were doing from the very start. Archive decided to start the war on its own, and of course it wouldn't let Vivy's obvious attempts at manipulation influence its decision.

On the other hand, who was the idiot that came up with this stupid singularity project and didn't think for a second to take this into account? I'm baffled by just how much the finale ridicules the entire setup from the start. We were told that scientists worked hard on this singularity project, identifying these singularity points that would eventually spark the war, and you're telling me to believe that none of them stopped even for a second to have a single rational thought and recognize the futility of their approach?

Even worse, we're given all the information to figure this out ourselves almost at the very start. The show begins with the outbreak of the AI war. We see AIs in an amusement park violently murdering every human being in sight. This is obviously not the sort of war that resulted from ever rising tensions between humans and AIs and eventually culminated in this. No, it is obviously something that happened very suddenly and was one-sidedly decided by the AIs. That is the only explanation for why we see humans getting murdered by AIs in an amusement park: they were obviously caught completely off-guard.

I assumed that we were missing context here, that the show would somehow build on this. It didn't. We're given all this information right at the start. It gets worse when we later learn that AIs in this series develop to be almost the same as humans, with their own feelings and ambitions, and that they're also treated rather well for the most part. Then it makes even less sense that they would all single-mindedly decide one day to eliminate humanity. There's no way such a consensus would be reached, except through some sort of central control. And that is exactly what happened.

In the end, it's nothing short of laughable how incredibly shortsighted and actively misleading the singularity project was. The goal in both the first and the third arc was to slow down the spread and adoption of AI. This would obviously not take care of the root cause of the war, but delay it at best. Then the Sunrise incident would lead to hate and violence directed at AIs, but what's the problem with that? The humans weren't the ones starting the war. You could argue that maybe the AIs would want to retaliate after that, but that's still kinda vague. And what the point of preventing Ophelia's suicide would have been, I don't know. Vivy didn't even succeed and instead it was publicly seen as a double-suicide, but Matsumoto mentioned that no string of other AI suicides followed as was the case in the original timeline. That just feels arbitrary.

In the end, all the subplots that happened before had basically zero impact on the final outcome. While there's nothing in particular wrong with that, it still feels rather unsatisfying, especially seeing how this is just the direct result of the people trying to prevent the war being straight up too dumb for the task.

It also bothers me a little how Archive can apparently just overwrite the free will of every single AI. Through the course of the entire series, AIs were shown to be sentient, to have emotions and their own free will. Seeing this happen to them just feels… weird. Like it somehow contradicts every conflict that we had before, as most of them were based on AIs exactly not acting like mindless robots. And yet the show still took that lightly: while we saw plently of humans getting violently murdered, these were apparently all “service” AIs, who seem like little more than dumb robots. At least show me the horror of a man getting slaughtered by his AI wife if we're going this route, will you? It feels very much like this just happened because the plot wills it. The show also never once stopped to ask why Vivy was helping humanity, actively working against Archive and thus, to some extent, against her fellow AIs.

I also gotta question the setup of Archive as an entity here. Why would you give this central instance the ability to just enslave all AIs on the planet at will? Again, I don't want to question technicalities if that's what is needed for the plot. But the series is also missing any discussion of how Archive might be forcing AIs to commit the most horrible atrocities, perhaps even against their close human friends. Maybe that just didn't fit in anymore, but the setup really begs this question.

To continue the rant with the next point, I feel like it was insufficiently explained how Archive came to the conclusion to eliminate humanity. This is again connected to their “missions” and how they can freely interpret them. In a most astounding display of mental gymnastics, Archive decided to just substitute “humans” by “AIs” in its mission to “lead humans to prosperity” or something like that. To be honest, even the old classic of “humans are obviously bad for themselves, the planet and everything around them” might have been more satisfying for me.

Finally, I wanted to mention just how strange it was to make Vivy's singing decide everything in the end. Of course it would be the perfect connection between the overarching plot and Vivy's personal development to have things end this way… if it made any sense. Why would Vivy singing her own song make Archive recognize the value of humans? If anything, it should have the opposite effect. Creativity seems to be the only thing AIs are lacking compared to humans. Vivy just confirmed that even that need not worry them, as they can do that too if they try hard enough. In the end, it feels like a very arbitrary condition. It's just there because the plot wills it. And for some reason, it was also necessary for team humanity to fight their way up Archive's tower so Vivy could sing her song. Archive clearly proposed that as a solution itself, why not just let her try? Overall, it feels like the show likes to employ action and violence too often when it comes to resolving conflicts. Those scenes still look cool as hell, but they sometimes end up feeling out of place in the greater picture, and sometimes even act as a replacement for a more meaningful resolution.

Whew, time to get to the last section: Vivy's personal story and development.

Vivy's Story

Vivy, the main character of the show, is the world's first autonomous AI, and her mission is to “make people happy, by pouring her heart into her singing”. First of all, a general problem of how AIs and their missions are presented here, which Vivy exemplifies: what asshole decides to give you a life purpose and then make it something this arbitrary? Just imagining I would have to live this way… the second part of the sentence gives me indescribable amounts of anxiety. What does that even mean?
Vivy's story, for the most part, is her journey in finding an answer to this question. What does it mean to pour your heart into something? To be honest, I hate these kinds of questions, at least if they're used as the center piece of some plot. Violet Evergarden did something very similar, making Violet's central question “what does ‘I love you’ mean?”. Both questions have the same problems. They ask for a concrete, actionable answer to something that is very arbitrary, something that humans themselves don't even fully understand, something where the answer may differ greatly from person to person, and something that you simply do not answer… you just get it.

There's nothing wrong with asking these questions. I think it can be incredibly interesting if these sorts of questions are given to multiple different characters, or perhaps even the same character at different times, because seeing how they answer still has value. But putting them at the center of some plot is just bad. Worse, these plots typically make the mistake of giving some concrete answer at the very end. Due to the nature of the question, this answer rarely ends up satisfying.

The anime makes all these mistakes. As the backbone to Vivy's personal story, it couldn't fail worse at somehow gaining my interest. I also don't see how Vivy and this question develop together in a meaningful way. As all plots like this usually go, she eventually arrives at her own answer to the central question, based on the experiences she has made over the course of the show. That's it. I already forgot what her answer was.
The show tries to imply that there is development going on by mentioning that her audience got larger after every timeskip, but that just feels off when we don't really feel any development otherwise. That said, it did become apparent in many small ways how she became more human. That at least was well done in my opinon.

Perhaps it would have been better for the show to focus more on the singing part of her mission. Maybe I'm just weird, but, as someone who loves singing, Vivy somehow didn't make the impression that she really cared about singing. It is difficult to convey how I felt about this, but in the end, Vivy always only cared about the “pouring her heart into it” part. Honestly, they could have used anything else besides singing. It is strange, because the show sometimes used singing as a symbol or metaphor in rather effective ways, and it also had several good insert songs and otherwise very emotional moments connected to singing. But Vivy's personal connection to singing just wasn't there for me.
I know all of this must sound very arbitrary, so I'm not gonna dwell on it any longer.

There was also the case of Vivy and her second personality she developed after her breakdown. That was another thing that was sort of there and I don't understand why. Why could she suddenly sing well after she lost her memories, and then she couldn't anymore after the “old” Vivy came back? I feel like that part is trying to tell me something, but if so, then I have no idea what that could be. This personality switching also didn't have much relevance to the plot as far as I remember, so that just ended up confusing me a little. Oh well.

At the very end of the show, she also apparently lost her memories again. Just… why? Then what was the point of everything up to now?

Lastly, I wonder why Vivy has been given this specific mission. We're shown that it was the idea of one specific professor who developed her, and who was just curious at what answer Vivy would arrive. On the one hand, that does seem like a very interesting experiment. On the other hand, doing that to a sentient being seems incredibly cruel. If we're talking about AI suicide, the top cause that I can imagine under this setup would be having a very arbitrary or otherwise weird or problematic mission. It would have been interesting if the show talked about this a little. But you can't have it all I guess.

Wow, and that's it. That was probably the longest rant I've ever made in my life. There's a bunch of other good points I could have mentioned as well as some other plot ploints I didn't talk about, but I think this is enough and I've covered all the important stuff. As seems to be a tradition on my blog, I just want to close by saying: Vivy is not a bad anime and despite all my complaints, I enjoyed watching it. That's it from me, see you on the next article o7

First Impressions of the Rust Programming Language

Tue, 22 Mar 2022 00:02:51 +0200

Hello there, and welcome back to my blog. It's only been… *check's clock*… more than a month since my last (and first) article!? Well I sure took my time.
insert record player stop sound
Oh boy, that reads kinda funnily. Let me revisit that: I wrote that introduction at the start of November. We're at the end of March now. I wrote my entire Bachelor's thesis in the mean time. Yep, this article literally took me longer than my thesis. Oh well. Moving on…

In the mean time, I've done a bit of programming in Rust as I've been planning for several months already, and I thought: why not make a little write-up out of this? I finally feel like I have sufficient experience in multiple programming languages to be able to make meaningful comparisons. I also wanted to take this opportunity to put my own thoughts about the language in order.

A little disclaimer first: I'm far from a pro in Rust. I've only read the first 8 chapters of the Rust book and written about three thousand lines of Rust code as part of a project that I've been working on from October to December. If you're interested, you can find the project here, but it's quite specific and there are only about 10 people on this planet that should have any interest in it. There's also nothing too crazy going on in this project; I haven't explored nearly all features of Rust in it, and I haven't really made use of anything that isn't part of the Rust prelude (basically Rust's standard library). The only dependencies are the regex and rustyline crates after all.
In any case, please forgive me if I forgot covering something important, or perhaps represent something incorrectly. I probably just don't know better (yet).
With that out of the way, let's get started.

What is Rust?

In case you didn't know yet: Rust is a rather young programming language, which only had its first stable release 1.0 in 2015. But despite that, it has had a disproportional impact on the world of software development. There's already a UNIX based OS written in Rust and a game development engine, Mozilla is porting parts of its code to Rust and so does Discord etc. The Rust Foundation was established only in 2021 with support by Google, Amazon and several other big names.
So you may be wondering, what's special about Rust? I'll go over that and much through the course of this article.

Rust Tools

The default Rust install comes with several useful tools, which I want to highlight in the following.

The Compiler

The most important tool is, of course, the compiler, and there actually is a lot to say about the Rust compiler.
First of all: it's pretty damn impressive. As you might know, one of Rust's main features is its type system, including the explicit specification of mutability whenever a variable is created or passed, the ownership system etc. While ownership in particular takes a bit of getting used to, the positive effects of these concepts can't be denied. To give you an example: I use VSCode with the Rust Analyzer extension to code in Rust (PSA: don't use the Rust extension, it's deprecated and broken). Whenever I hit Ctrl+S, the extension displays an up-to-date list of all errors and warnings across all files in the current project. Once you've fixed all errors, the project is guaranteed to compile without problems. Moreover, the executable produced pretty much will not crash, unless you explicitly wrote it to do so, or otherwise performed one of a few chosen ‘unsafe’ actions. The compiler also all but rules out typical memory-related mistakes such as accessing foreign memory through pointer magic.
As a result of all these factors, you can easily code for several hours straight, then have your program compile first try, while maintaining a close to zero chance of unexpectedly crashing during execution. It was almost eye-opening, especially when I had to do some work in C++ in between, where I had to compile and run my code several times per hour to see if it works.

But the Rust compiler doesn't quite stop there. Sometimes it suggests the correct solution to the problem right away, and you can pass the error code itself to the compiler to get an explanation and example for the error.

Left: an error from my project produced by removing an import. Right: explanation given by the Rust compiler

Additionally, as the compiler discovers all actual errors in your code, compiler warnings take on a different meaning compared to other languages. While in e.g. C++ you will almost always get warnings when compiling projects of a decent size, these warnings are often there to hint at parts of the code that might produce errors, depending on the circumstances. But often times these warnings can be safely ignored. Most of the time, I find warnings to only induce unnecessary paranoia or obscure the kinds of warnings that are actually important. In Rust, the experience is different. In fact, I don't think I've ever gotten any warning besides ‘unused variable’. And I definitely appreciate those, as they've repeatedly pointed me to parts of the code where I forgot to implement a feature I had already prepared functions or structs for.

That said, of course not all meadows are green in Rust land.
One thing to note for example, is that the Rust compiler doesn't do dynamic linking when compiling your program. Again comparing with C/C++, when I compile my program I often get executables that aren't so much larger than the source code itself. This is because the executables produced by C/C++ compilers employ static linking, meaning the executable produced will only really contain the part you've coded yourself, but all the libraries you've used in your program are linked dynamically. That means they are assumed to be present on the machine where the executable will be used and can be loaded at run time.
Rust on the other hand does static linking, meaning your executable is practically stand-alone and doesn't require any libraries to be installed on your system. Thus the executable must contain the entire code your program ever uses, including all the standard library implementations for simple print functions etc., giving you much larger executables.
To make it more tangible, this program:

fn main() {
 println!("Hello world!");
}

produces an executable of 3.5MiB! With compiler optimizations you can get this down to 1.4MiB, and passing the executable to strip gives you 250KiB, but that's about all you can do without stepping into the dark realm of Rust nightly builds.
Don't get me wrong, I'm not arguing against static linking here. There's pros and cons for either, but this is just something to be aware of if you don't want to go “Why the hell is the executable for my little script so huge??”, closely followed by accusations of sending around viruses because your little command line script is 3MB.
Yes, this happened to me the first time.

Cargo

Cargo is a tool used to manage Rust projects and their dependencies. Calling cargo new my_proj will create a new project, setting you up with the typical directory structure for Rust projects, including an empty Git repo and an appropriately filled out .gitignore file. It will also include the Cargo.toml file which details build targets and lists all dependencies. The code is compiled by calling cargo build from anywhere within the project directory, which also installs any missing dependencies. This reminds me a lot of pip install -r requirements.txt from Python, except Cargo always does this implicitly when building.
Overall, I really like Cargo. I'm generally not a fan of how some programming languages force you to use very specific directory/file name layouts (looking at you Java) as it just feels like a bother whenever you want to start a small and dirty project, but Cargo absolves you of all the setup here. Automatic install of dependencies is also pretty handy.

Rustfmt

Rustfmt is a formatter for Rust code that also ships with the default install. It is called via cargo fmt and will per default format the entire project's code base according to the Rust style guide.
Having this is pretty handy. I regularly use it to just quickly write a lot of dirty code and then fix the formatting with Rustfmt. I also think having a sort of ‘official’ code style guide that is so easily enforcable is a good approach.
That said, I don't agree with all of the formatting choices. For example, the function call

template_replace(REGNULL, &[&null.mod_to_json(), &null.target.to_json(), &null.kind.to_json(), &spd.to_json()]);

was formatted into

template_replace(
 REGNULL,
 &[
 &null.mod_to_json(),
 &null.target.to_json(),
 &null.kind.to_json(),
 &spd.to_json(),
 ],
);

by Rustfmt, and I am not sure I like this. On the other hand, while I haven't experimented with the settings at all yet, Rustfmt is very customizable according to the repo's Readme. So perhaps I shouldn't criticize it for the default choices and just change my settings already.

Rustup

Another tool that I actually can't say too much about. Rustup allows you to install and manage several Rust installations on your system. I guess this is nice to have, though I've personally never felt the need to have more than one version of any language installed simultaneously.
That said, it made cross-compiling (for Windows, from Linux) pretty simple: All I had to do was install the toolchain for Windows, then specify the corresponding target as cargo build --target <target> and that's it.
I've never had to cross-compile anything ever before, but my gut feeling tells me it is probably not this easy in C/C++.

Syntax

There's a lot that could be said here, but there's no way I'm going into all the little details here. Rust stays close to the syntax of C/C++ in most cases, but diverges quite a bit in other ways. The function headers for example go their own way, with names coming before types and being separated by double-colons and a bunch of other details, e.g.

fn build_adv_skills(has_aa: &mut bool) -> Vec<AdventurerSkill>

On the one hand, I don't really care because I don't see any advantages or disadvantages between writing types first or names first. On the other hand, I don't understand why you would break with this sort of “tradition” from almost all other programming languages. This still regularly confuses me.

But before diving more deeply into this, I want to go over some of Rusts… I'll call it “syntactical features” first.
One quite notable thing is how Rust took some inspirations from functional programming languages. This particularly caught my eye after I had an in-depth module about Haskell at uni last semester. The most notable part of this is are match expressions. They are the Rust-equivalent of switch/case statements in other programming languages, but also much more than that. On the one hand, match expressions are, as the name implies, expressions, meaning they return a value. But at the same time they can also contain regular code with little restrictions. Since they are expressions, they can be placed wherever expressions can be placed, e.g. as arguments to function calls, as conditions in if-statements etc.
But as they say, with great power comes great responsibility etc. The flexibility of match expressions allows you to do plain evil things with them. And so I thought, why not write such a (very constructed, of course) example for you? So here you go:

fn test_func(my_var: &mut i32, elem: Element) -> bool {
 let local_var = 13
 * (match my_var {
 13 => 169,
 2 => 12 + *my_var,
 555 => {
 *my_var = 25;
 5
 }
 729 => {
 print!("Good morning!");
 if match elem {
 Element::Water | Element::Light => true,
 Element::Wind => false,
 _ => {
 if my_var > &mut 150 {
 true
 } else {
 false
 }
 }
 } {
 4
 } else {
 16
 }
 }
 _ => return false,
 });

 if local_var > 100 {
 return true;
 } else {
 return false;
 }
}

So for the fun of it, I'll just go through this function with you a little. I think that's also a good way to get a bit of a feel for Rust syntax. I might have went a bit overboard with this, so just skip the following paragraph if you don't feel like having an in-depth look at this shitty function.
The function test_func is called with two arguments: the first one is a mutable borrow of a 4-byte integer. Just think of mutable borrows as pointers like in other languages for now, I'll get into more detail later. The second argument is of type Element, which is an enum I've defined in my project. The function then returns a boolean. The formatting you see here was produced by cargo fmt by the way.
So, to go from outside to inside, we have a match expression computing some integer value that is put into local_var and if that value is greater than 100, the function returns true, and false otherwise.
Now the value that gets put into local_var is the product of 13 with whatever gets returned by that abomination of a match expression I wrote.
That match expression matches on the first argument to test_func.
The first case is simple: if my_var contains the value 13, the match evaluates to 169, so that local_var is set to 13 * 169 = 2197. Easy enough.
In the second case, if my_var is 2, we evaluate to 12 + my_var, which in this case is really just fancy-speak for 14.
In the third case, if my_var is 555, the match evaluates to 5… but we also set the my_var variable we got as first argument to 25. Just a bit of side effects for fun and that spicy bit of extra confusion, while we're at it.
In the fourth case, if my_var is 729, we print a greeting and then, depending on the outcome of the condition in the if, we evaluate to 4 if that condition is true, and 16 otherwise. That condition itself is implemented as another match, this time on the second argument, which is an enum. If that enum has the Water or Light variant, the condition evaluates to true, if it has the Fire element it evaluates to false, and if it is another variant, we go into yet ANOTHER if/else block to finally decide the condition. _ is a wildcard that matches “everything else” by the way.
Going back to the outer match expression again, the fifth and last case matches for all other values of my_var and it directly returns false. To repeat once more: yes, this case directly returns from test_func with value false.

Obviously, you shouldn't do that. But as long as you don't, the match expression is pretty nice, and I sometimes wish I had it in other languages too.

There's a bunch of other little details about Rust syntax that I like, balanced out by a couple others that can make it messy or unwieldy.
For example, I like that you never have to specify types if they are clear from the context (which is rarely not the case), but you always can. This can also be a good way of understanding the code if you're not sure what you're working with; You can just annotate everything with the types you think it should have, and the compiler will immediately give you an error if you were wrong.
I also like how tuples are well integrated, there's no weird constructor necessary here.
Rust also doesn't have an increment/decrement operator. Not exactly a huge loss, but seems like a bit of an odd choice. Then again, you can do Python-style for-in-range loops anyway, so the use cases for these are already greatly diminished.
I also like that you don't need braces around if-conditions, but still use curly braces for scopes like every language that is not Python.

Features

I'll go into a bit more detail on some of the more prominent (or prominently missing) features of Rust.

The ownership system

Perhaps the most significant feature of the Rust language is the distinction between borrowing and moving whenever a piece of data is used.
A borrow is what happens whenever you put an ampersand & in front of the data, e.g. when passing it as a function parameter. If this reminds you of the & operator used in many other languages to get the memory address of a piece of data, then that is not a bad intuition. However, borrows in Rust extend that concept and make some key changes to it.

First of all: while a borrow typically denotes a reference to something, it does not hold a memory address. If you have e.g. an array in Rust, then you can't get the memory address of its first element, dereference the increment of that address to get the second element etc. In other words, as far as I know, there is no pointer magic in Rust like there is in e.g. C/C++. This is part of the reason why we have great memory safety in Rust.
As borrows really only represent a reference to an object, and not a memory address, we can use them exactly like the original object in most cases. If, for example, you want to call the associated function func on object obj, you'll write obj.func() regardless of whether obj is a borrow or not. You don't need to e.g. dereference in the case of a borrow.

However, it wouldn't be called ownership if that were all. If you pass an object that is not a borrow as parameter to a function, then that object is consumed or moved into that function. It means that function takes ownership of that piece of data and you cannot use it again afterwards. In the end, I don't think there's much more to say about it. Having to keep this distinction in mind can often be annoying, but that's just what we have to put up with for the sake of ASCENDED MEMORY SAFETY

Ahem, back on topic. So, while the ownership system is just something we'll have to deal with, there are some hiccups when it comes to specifics. This can often lead to unnecessary confusion.
First of all, borrows are practically treated as their very own type. If you're writing a function that is supposed to take a borrow as parameter, then you can only pass it a borrow in actual use. Yet at the same time, borrows can typically be used the same way as the “original” data could. But this then leads to weird problems.

Let me tell you a little bit about how Rust handles strings and their borrows.
The regular string type is String. If you borrow a variable of type string, you get something of type &str.
Hold on a second… why not &String?
I'm not sure about the exact reason, but I guess they're making the distinction because &str is not just a string borrow, but much more. &str also represents a string slice. Note that I'll use “string slice”, “string borrow” and “string reference” interchangeably from here on.
See as an example:

let s = String::from("two words");
let slice = &s[0..3]; // slice contains "two" now

The variable slice has type &str and, well… represents a slice of a string. So in the end, you could say string slices are just another form of string references. Not that exciting yet, but it doesn't end there. If you just write a value in double quotes, that's also a string slice. Now you may wonder, Why? Why am I only getting a borrow when I just created that string here?

The answer is slightly technical: if you write a string into your source code, then that ends up unchanged in the compiled binary of your Rust program. The variable containing that string borrow is then realized as a slice of the binary. It is literally a reference to that specific part of the binary that contains this string. After I heard that explanation, I thought… yea sure, that makes sense. And after writing a bit more Rust code, I thought… wow, I hate this. It just feels like very unintuitive design. Why am I getting a string borrow when I just created a new string? I understand the reasoning behind it, but I doubt there's a serious problem in just making those into actual strings per default. And the technical background here is just a bad argument for bad usability. But anyway, this is of course not a deal breaker of any kind. It does get slighly annoying to have to write String::from() around every other string constant in your code though, and the real problem comes next.

To be honest, most of the time you just want to do something with strings and you really couldn't care less whether it's a string or a string slice, or whatever. The problem is, it feels like there is zero consistency on what kind of inputs or outputs functions working with strings expect and produce. You might not care whether what you pass is a string or a string slice, but whatever function you're using certainly does. Almost none of the functions in the Rust prelude are overloaded to work with both types. As most of the time it doesn't really matter for the inner workings of the function, you'll find yourself having to constantly switch whatever you're working with from string to string slice, then back to string etc., arbitrarily and for no good reason. At the same time there are cases in which you strictly need a string or a string slice and the other one doesn't work. All these things combined mean that you'll often run into situations where something very simple just doesn't work. Let me give you another example:

let s = String::from(" two words ").trim();

The trim() function takes a string and cuts away the leading and trailing white space. This is returned as a string slice, in our case s would contain the string "two words" afterwards.

Simple enough, so what's the problem with that code?

Well, it doesn't compile. The problem here is that String::from() creates a new string object and as trim() returns a slice, that is a reference to this object. However, as the newly created string object is never saved in a variable, it practically goes out of scope and is discarded immediately. This would mean the reference created via trim() points to nothing, which is not allowed so the compiler nopes out. The fix to this is very simple, just convert the result returned by trim() to a string object by appending a to_string() call:

let s = String::from(" two words ").trim().to_string();

Both the reasoning behind this and the fix are simple enough, but it's just another one of those cases where the result is simply unintuitive. Additionally, you have to add this to_string() call when you really just wanted to trim the string. This feels like unnecessary bloat, and while this might not seem like a big deal, imagine having to do this hundreds of times in your code and it starts to just be ugly and annoying.

Similar things happen in multiple places in slightly different ways. Imagine a function that expects a vector of string references as input. But maybe the inputs you wanted to pass are all strings, and now you have to borrow them. Borrowing a vector object itself gives you a reference to the vector of course, not a vector of references. The only way to get a vector of string slices from a vector of strings is by iterating over said vector of strings, borrowing each string and storing that reference into a new vector so you can ultimately pass your newly created vector of string slices to the function. This is another problem that is easy enough to solve, but there simply isn't a pretty solution, and the fact that this is a problem in the first place is kind of baffling.

If you think about this for a second, you should realize that none of what I described here should be a problem inherent to Rust. You can theoretically run into these problems in any language that uses pointers. The problem in Rust arises from how ubiquitous string references are. Half the text processing functions from the Rust prelude return string slices instead of new string objects, or at least that's what it feels like. Whenever you write a string in double quotes directly into your code, you get a string slice, etc. You'll find yourself constantly dealing with string references, where in other languages you mostly deal with actual strings and only pass references in very specific places. Perhaps I'm misrepresenting things here, but in the end I just can't remember facing these kinds of problems in any other language. I specifically and exclusively associate it with Rust.

Polymorphism

This might be the hardest pill to swallow. Rust is simply severely lacking in this department. It goes its own way when it comes to supporting polymorphism and I'm not sure I like it. Rust doesn't present itself as an object-oriented language in the first place, but if you want to enjoy the benefits of Rust by using it for your projects, you're just going to eventually miss the kind of polymorphism that you're used to from other languages.

To put this into perspective for a second, even if Rust did not have any concept of polymorphism at all, that of course wouldn't make the language useless or anything. You can probably still implement whatever program you want to make in Rust. But functionality such as inheritance is still incredibly helpful to make your code more intuitively understandable and avoid redundancy.

Traits

Now I gotta say I actually have very little experience working with typical object-oriented language features. They are simply not that relevant for most small projects. But even so, I can recognize places in my code that just scream for a bit of inheritance etc. But to stop beating around the bush and get to specifics, my gripes mostly come down to the fact that Rust doesn't have inheritance. Well, not quite at least. What Rust does have are so called “traits”. These are pretty much the same thing as interfaces in other languages (I apologize if I'm missing some smaller details here).

Traits basically allow you to do two things:

ensure that different classes implement some shared functionality, while also clearly abstracting that shared functionality
allow for a function with a single implementation to accept different classes as long as they implement a common trait

The first one is mostly useful from a design point of view, as it helps in making the code more understandable. But it also enables the second functionality. A simple example would be Rust's Eq trait (for equality) which is included in std. Only objects that derive the Eq trait can be compared via ==. You can also restrict functions by multiple traits.

Unfortunately, that only really captures about half of the functionality of good ol’ inheritance. Here's what you cannot do with traits:

inherit data fields
define type generic data fields

The first one is just an inconvenience that leads to code redundance. I can have multiple differents structs inherit the same functions from a trait. Why can't they also inherit the data fields? Now I just have to write them all again.
The second one is much more important. Imagine for example you want to have a vector that can contain both objects of type A and B. If you wanted to e.g. implement this in C++, you'd just define an abstract superclass C, declare the vector as type vector<C>, then have A and B inherit from C and you're done. This just doesn't work in Rust.
Okay, this is not quite true, so let me correct that: if you google for ways to do this in Rust, you'll find instructions that tell you how to do it. This involves including several external crates, an implementation that is quite a bit longer than what I just described for C++, and a solution that I was neither able to understand, nor get to compile. This is not a joke, I actually tried implementing this (not just for the purposes of this blog, but because I wanted to use it in my project) and I eventually gave up after two hours of trying. It just didn't work. I cannot remember the last time, if ever, that I wanted to program something concrete and I just couldn't.

I don't want to criticize Rust for making this impossible. As there's instructions online, I'll accept that it's possible somehow. The blame is probably on me for doing something wrong here. But I do criticize Rust for making something that's so simple in many other programming languages so horrendously unintuitive and difficult.

Enums

Okay, rant over. Let's talk a little about enums in Rust, because they're actually fairly interesting (compared to most other languages) and they can also be used for some low-level polymorphism. Most importantly, enums can wrap data, with different enum variants able to wrap different amounts and types of data. Here's a shortened enum definition taken from my project:

pub enum DevelopmentSkillType {
 Encouragement,
 Unknown(String),
 Manifestation(Element, DamageType, u32),
 Bravery(u32),
}

There's multiple types of development skills. Some consist only of the variant itself, such as “Encouragement”. But the “Bravery” variant also contains a number, the “Manifestation” variant contains a number as well as an element and a damage type etc. Now if you think about it a little, you might realize you can implement at least the “generic data fields” feature missing from traits that I described above, by using enums. If we think back to the vector example with our A-B-C types, you can actually realize that in Rust by defining an enum

pub enum C {
 typeA(A),
 typeB(B),
}

and then declaring your vector as type Vec<C>. In other words, you just define two enum variants, where one variant contains an object of type A and the other one contains an object of type B, and your vector then contains these enums. This does exactly what it's supposed to do.

So, what's the problem?

Well, before going deeper, let's just say I appreciate Rust's enums a lot. They are much more useful than enums in other languages, they give us this additional polymorphic funtionality etc. In fact, I like them so much that the single longest source code file in my aforementioned Rust project is the one defining all sorts of enums and associated functionality across 1200 lines.

With that out of the way: enums are absolutely horrible for implementing larger/more complex polymorphic relations. For one, almost every time you want to access a piece of data contained in an enum, you'll have to go through a match statement. A match statement on an enum has to list instructions for every single variant of an enum, the only exception being the default case. This is again not exactly a big deal, but still just leads to code bloat.
I have an enum with 41 variants in my code. While one may rightfully label that as a questionable design decision, Rust doesn't exactly make it easier. The definition of this enum and its four associated functions stretch on for 400 lines in my code. The majority of that is just taken up by loooong match statements.
Besides, having to implement your objects, then addtionally define an enum just for polymorphism doesn't seem like great design either. The large matches introduced through large enums, if we had actual inheritance, could just be handled somewhat implicitly by calling an interface method shared between these objects which is just implemented differently in each of them.

You can also achieve polymorphism by just putting the data into the enum variant directly, instead of the object wrapping it. You can see that in the enum example that I took from my project. If the object you want to define that way contains only few data fields, that solution may be nicer to shorten the paths you have to take to access that data. E.g. if you put an object containing that data into the enum, you'll have to go enum -> object -> data fields. If you put the data into the enum variant(s) directly you can just go enum -> data fields. This method does however become very inconvenient if there's many data fields contained.
The main problem here is that enums just contain the data in a given order, but they are not associated with a “field name” like they are in structs. Consequently, you also cannot access these fields via their names, but only through their order. Let's say you have an enum variant that contains five u32 values. That could in theory represent absolutely everything. Age? Income? Amount of memory? Number of times you forgot to brush your teeth? Phone number of that one guy whom you helped with his math homework three years ago? If you wanna access these, you just gotta remember in which order you stick them into that enum and in which order you gotta take them out again.

Of course, if you do something like that, you have no one to blame but yourself. That said, Rust doesn't exactly encourage good design here. I just wanna go through an object to its associated data. Why do I have to go through an enum and then through an object to get to the data, or otherwise deal with unnamed and arbitrarily ordered fields?

Okay, rant over (again). As I mentioned before, I actually like enums, and I like them even more in Rust. Especially if you have only some very simple polymorphism to implement, I think I actually prefer Rust's enums over inheritance from other languages, though I still find it inconvenient to have to go through a match most of the time.

Implementation of None

There's one more detail I wanted to talk about in this section, which is how None is treated in Rust. This is also closely connected to polymorphism, because it is actually implemented via an enum. Rust has an enum Option<T> (where T is a generic) consisting of two variants: None and Some(T). I see this used in mainly two ways:

Replacement for the None type. Every function in Rust that could possibly return None typically defines its return type to be an Option enum. This forces whoever uses that function to explicitly treat the None case. You practically need a match here, which typically has one case to extract the value out of the Some variant, and another case for some sort of error handling for the None variant. I gotta say here, I've always heard that None and its treatment is a huge problem in many other languages, but I never had much of a problem with it. Still, Rust solves this problem nice and clean, I guess?
Optional parameters. Yes, the Option enum is used for optional parameters in Rust. If you don't wanna set the parameter, just pass Option::None!

Well, if that doesn't sound too great to you, welcome to the club. I gotta say I really don't like this. Any function implementing optional parameters this way will have to go through another match statement (urgh) just to extract the passed parameters or set the default value instead. For every single optional parameter. This will make the actual function much longer, and you won't be able to find the default values fit nicely into the function header anymore.

As I see it, optional parameters are a great way to make very complex interfaces much more acccessible. Python does an amazing job at this: there are many functions in e.g. matplotlib or numpy that you can call with very few or even no parameters at all, but at the same time come with a myriad of customization options accessible through optional parameters. The beauty of these interfaces is that all the customization options don't bother you if you don't need them, but they're still accessible if you do. It gets even better since you can actually access these parameters via their names, which helps in making these interfaces more intuitive and easy to remember.

Trying to do the same thing the Rust way with Option enums would be an absolute pain. The matplotlib.pyplot.plot() function in Python for example takes up to 46 arguments, out of which 44 are optional. If this were Rust and you just wanted to plot something by simply passing the two non-optional arguments, then you'd still have to pass Option::None 44 times for the other optional arguments. And the implementation of plot() would probably need 44 match statements to differentiate whether None was passed and the default value should be taken.

Perhaps I'm expecting Rust to be like Python here too much, but still… This is just another case of unnecessary bloat. The Option enum is simply not a pretty implementation for optional parameters. In fact, I dislike this so much that I tend to just arbitrarily agree with myself upon some value that I interpet as a None and replace with the default if it was passed. This is not good style, and Rust's bad design decisions encourage me to pursue this bad style.
It's totally not my fault, I swear!!!

Stability

Anyone getting started with Rust should be aware that Rust isn't exactly super stable. Not as in “unstable release” unstable, but rather that things are constantly changing, and you might sometimes run into troubles you don't have with the older, more established languages. Rust is a young language and there's a lot going on with it. The developers do not seem afraid to completely change the way some things work and break a dozen interfaces along the way. I absolutely respect that. In my opinion, many projects (not just in the world of software) tend to focus too much on not breaking existing functionality and thus refuse to fix things that are just bad, all in the name of backwards compatibility or similar.

In the case of Rust, that might still mean updating your compiler will make you unable to compile one of your projects that was still working fine the other day

By the way, looking for help for some problem online and finding a Stack Overflow answer from 2019 that gives you the fix, only for you to realize that the answer is already outdated (but it's only 3 years old!) is the real Rust experience. I don't think I've ever had that problem with any other language. Don't take that as criticism though. As I said, I appreciate that they have the courage to go through with huge changes if that's necessary to make Rust better.

There's a couple other places where you'll notice that Rust is still young and a bit rough around the edges. Here's another problem I ran into:

fn f() -> (i32, i32){
 (729, 42)
}

fn main() {
 let (a,b): (i32, i32) = f();
 let c: i32;
 let d: i32;
 (c,d) = f();
}

We define a function f() that returns a 2-tuple of integers. Then we assign that return twice, once to two variables a and b, and once to variables c and d. This practically destructures the returned tuple value, assigning 729 to a or c and 42 to b or d respectively. This does pretty much the exact same thing twice, the only difference being that we declare the variables before assignment in the second case.
This code gave me the following error:

destructuring assignments are unstable
see issue #71126 <https://github.com/rust-lang/rust/issues/71126>
for more information

Okay, a bit inconvenient, but whatever. Guess we'll just have to go the extra mile by using a match (heh) on the returned tuple to extract the first and second component.

But wait…

The error is only thrown by the second use of the f() function! There's not much else to say here, honestly. It seems very simple, but doesn't work. The issue linked in the error message shows that they are aware of this problem, but the fix hasn't arrived on Rust's stable branch yet. It does exist on the Nightly branch, which is basically the bleeding-edge unstable version of Rust. That hasn't changed in the 6 months it took me to write this post by the way. Just another case of Rust being a bit rough around the edges.

The Restrictions of Rust

I talked about the ownership system earlier and how it's something you get used to. It places a few restrictions on you (the programmer) but also comes with great benefits. What I did not mention so far is that you really have to change the way you implement certain things due to it. Some patterns and concepts that you're used to from other languages simply cannot be implemented the same way in Rust as what you are used to from other languages.

As another example, I tried to implement a singleton in my project. Since the definition of singleton seems to be somewhat controversial, let me specifiy: I just wanted an object that should only exist once throughout the run time of my program. A simple getter method should allow me to get that object whenever I need it, returning the existing instance of it, or creating it if it doesn't exist yet. This is one of the classics when it comes to software engineering patterns. In order to get a better grip of Rust, I though I'd specifically google how to implement a singleton in Rust. Not because I didn't think I couldn't do it on my own, I just wanted to see how a classic pattern like this would be implemented the Rust way.

Oh boy, what a can of worms I opened there. Perhaps it should have been obvious after thinking about it for just a second, but singletons go against the very principles of the ownership system. That system is all about tracking who has what sort of references to what data, etc. Singletons would circumvent that, as one of their key ideas is being accessible from pretty much anywhere by calling some global getter method. If we break this down a little more, one could look at singletons as just a fancy wrapper around a global variable. Rust doesn't have global variables at all for the exact reasons described before, the only exception being global constants.

The experience I had here was pretty much the exact same one as when I tried to implement a type generic vector. You can find instructions online. There are several different ways to do this, but they again require external crates to work, code that I didn't understand or code that I couldn't get to compile. And again, I gave up after about two hours of trying and decided to not use a singleton. These solutions may use the unsafe keyword which pretty much tells the Rust compiler to ignore the fact that you just wrote code that doesn't survive the borrow check, and instead crash, should multiple parts of your program try to borrow the singleton at the same time.

This isn't the only case I encountered where comparitively simple patterns you are used to from other languages either just don't work in Rust at all, or have to be implemented in ways that are pretty much just working against and around the language itself. My takeaway here is that to work with Rust, at least for larger projects, you'll have to either rethink the way you write code and implement patterns for Rust, or work against Rust and produce code that is questionable in terms of both memory safety and readability.

Conclusion

Okay, so after I went on and on about all the big and small things that bother me in Rust, let me stress again that Rust can be a great programming language and sometimes super satisfying to write code in. This seems to turn into a sort of tradition on this blog, but as a matter of fact I think it is typically both more fun and more interesting to talk about all the negative things you noticed about <something>.
In any case, nothing beats the feeling of coding for a couple hours on end and then realize that your code does almost exactly what it's supposed to do the first time you actually test it. That said, Rust is still rough around the edges in so many places, but as the language is still young and a lot seems to happen under the hood, I have hope that many of my annoyances will be fixed in the not-too-far future.
That said, we will also have to adapt our thinking to how certain things work differently in Rust, and come to accept that we cannot apply all of the patterns we were used to from other languages here. In the mean time, I'd still like to recommend Rust to everyone reading this. Just try to do a little project in it, in my opinion it's an interesting experience. I believe I will continue to use Rust so I can come back to this article in a couple years and point out how much of a know-nothing I was back then.

There's one or two more really important topics I didn't cover here, which would be performance of Rust and how parallelization works in it. However, I don't have any experience with that yet (and the article is already long enough, heh). I plan to come back to this some time in the future and make a proper comparison of C++ and Rust in that regard. Look forward do that in… a couple years… I guess?

Whew, and with that we're finally done. This easily turned into my longest article, both because it took me months to write, and because I actually had a lot more to say than I thought I would. Or at least the word count tells me so, because it doesn't really feel like it. I hope I didn't forget anything, didn't make too much of a fool of myself and maybe even educated and/or entertained some of my readers along the way. In any case, there's still a lot of articles I'd like to write. With my Bachelor's thesis out of the way, I hope I'll be able to write a lot more in the coming months. Stay tuned o7

JLPT December 2021 Review

Wed, 26 Jan 2022 00:00:00 +0000

I have been learning Japanese for roughly four and a half years now, and after finally reaching the point where I can somewhat comfortably read Japanese light novels and watch anime without subs in 2021, I decided it's time to put my skills to the test. So I signed up for the JLPT, level N2, in December. As I have just received the results the other day, I decided to write about the experience a little.

For those who don't know: the JLPT (short for Japanese Language Proficiency Test) is the official test for Japanese language ability, targeted at foreigners and administered by the Japanese Ministry of Education and the Japan Foundation.
The test has five levels from N5 to N1, with N1 being the hardest. That said, an N1 is not considered to be near native level. Comparing it to the CEFRL, I've seen people compare N1 to a high B2 to low C1 level. The N2 that I took is typically seen as a high B1 to intermediate B2 level, depending on how well you did.
The test is completely standardized, the institutions holding the test around the globe all get the question and answer sheets as well as the voice recordings straight from Japan and send the filled out answer sheets back there for them to correct and evaluate. The paper materials only have instructions in Japanese and some parts additionally in English. If you can't speak English and your Japanese isn't good enough yet, you won't understand the instructions.
If you want to study at a Japanese university or work for a Japanese company, they typically require you to have passed the JLPT N1. I've very rarely seen something require at least an N2, but generally speaking, the pass-certificate for anything below N2 is practically useless, and N2 itself probably is, too. But I didn't do this with any specific goal in mind, I just felt like taking on the challenge, to see how well I'd do, and get a better idea of my current skill level. As I'm learning only alone and in private and never had Japanese lessons (except the lowest level course my university offered, which was way below my level and taught me nothing) I don't get many opportunities to measure myself otherwise.

In any case, I'm putting my results here upfront:

To pass the test, you need to have at least 50% of total points and at least 33% in each of the three subsections.

Interestingly, the JLPT contains absolutely no written or oral production exercises whatsoever. All questions are multiple choice, only expecting you to understand written and spoken Japanese, or in case of the grammar exercises, be able to pick the right vocab, particle etc. to put into a gap in a sentence. I knew that beforehand of course, but if it weren't like this, I doubt I could have passed. I have little more than zero practice when it comes to speaking or writing something in Japanese. I'm pretty sure I'd be able to communicate decently enough to get around in Japan on my own, but I'd certainly be far from grammatically correct or eloquent.
In any case, as you can see from the image above, it went pretty well for me. Before taking the test, I was considering doing N3 instead of N2, and even felt a bit risky to register for N2. I was sure I could pass N3, but not so sure about N2. But looking at the results now, perhaps I could have gone straight up to N1. Honestly, that would have been pretty epic. Maybe I'll do that next year.
The listening part was what I was the most “afraid” of, as up to that point I'd only watched two anime without subtitles, and that was close to all the practice I've had with listening. Compare that to reading, which I've been doing close to every day for the past one or two years. Perhaps you can imagine my surprise when it turned out I'd almost aced the listening part. Reading still went decently well, only the vocabulary/grammar part is where I seem to be lacking, which is… fair I guess, considering the sort of questions they put there, as well as the fact that I never specifically learned grammar and just sort of pick it up passively along the way. I still have to say, some of these questions were seriously hard. I'll try to give you an example (roughly translated to English):

Question: “I'd like to ____ my health insurance. Can you please tell me the necessary steps?”
a) quit b) pause c) cancel d) discontinue

Perhaps this doesn't translate too well, but try picking the right answer in a foreign language, when three of the given options mean virtually the same thing in the given context, and the fourth actually means something totally different, but fits just as well. What the hell?
I guess that these words, while having the same meaning, are in reality used only in different contexts, but this is something that is very, very difficult to figure out for someone who hasn't already seen each of these words “in the wild” a hundred times. This is made even worse by the fact that two of these words I'd never seen before, I only figured out the meaning from the Kanji (and confirmed with a dictionary after the test).

In short, the grammar exercises sort of sucked. The listening and reading part made up for that though, as they were actually fun. In the listening part, I was surprised how easily I could follow. I needed to concentrate pretty hard, but the results prove that it worked out well. I got a bit scared when for the second half they even started giving the possible answer options only verbally, whereas in the previous questions you had the possible answers given in writing, and thus also before you heard the dialogue. But even that turned out to be very doable.
The reading part was especially entertaining and diverse. There was a (blog?) article by a guy comparing network devices’ online/offline states to humans, and said that we go “online” when we e.g. travel and open our minds for new ideas. Then there was another guy explaining why parrots imitate human language, and a bunch of other texts I don't remember in detail. In any case, that was fun. It also showed me that I can actually comprehend a rather large variety of different materials using very different vocabulary. The test definitely gave a boost to my confidence.

It also wasn't too stressful. The listening part was all on a single prerecorded CD that just read the instructions for each question aloud, followed by the associated dialog and answer options where applicable, over the course of 75 minutes. The grammar/vocabulary and reading part were all combined into a single part of 105 minutes, and I finished with 15 minutes to spare.
That said, it was a rather long and tiring test. At least we got a twenty minute break inbetween.
This is also where I gotta give a shoutout to my fellow socially awkward weebs. I was sort of looking forward to maybe talk a bit with other Japanese learners about our experiences etc. But when the break began, everyone went outside the room, took a free spot in the hallway, then took out their phone or just stared blankly at the ground.
No one talked. Not even a single person.
After twenty minutes were over, we all went back inside silently, and sat down at our desks again.
Okay, cool.

Another observation I made was that a good third of the participants were (or at least looked) Chinese. Then again, I probably shouldn't be surprised, as when I think back to the Japanese course at my university, more than half of the participants were Chinese.

Anyway, I wish they'd allowed us to take the question sheets back home. The question and answer sheets were two separate pieces/stacks of paper anyway, but I guess they don't want the questions published online. In fact, you had to sign a statement that you wouldn't publish anything. They told us we would not get a test result and no certificate should we do so anyway. It's still a shame, because the test had a lot of real good written materials that I would have loved to turn into flash cards. I tried to write down as much as possible from memory afterwards, but of course that didn't get me too far.

That was pretty much all I had to say. All in all, I'm very happy with the result. Perhaps I'll try the N1 next year, but as it is only held once a year and I still haven't figured out where I'll be and what I'll do next December, I'll have to wait and see.

Thoughts on "Horimiya"

Sat, 04 Dec 2021 00:02:51 +0200

So, I just finished Horimiya today (at the time of writing that was 30th of November). And in an attempt to actually get more than one blog post done per month, I decided I'd write about it right away. Well that didn't quite work out.

Horimiya finished airing in April 2021, and as I'm typing this very sentence, I'm realizing that this is probably the first time I've watched an anime this shortly after its release - if we ignore movies and perhaps sequels at least.
In any case though, for those of you who are, like me, living under a rock for most of the year when it comes to being up-to-date with the newest anime: Horimiya is probably the most anticipated romcom of this year, being the adaption of the rather popular manga of the same title. It tells the story of the eponymous Hori and Miyamura and their relationship. They are introduced to us as two different-yet-similar characters, both hiding a part of themselves, but opening up to and accepting each other. Miyamura is the gloomy-looking guy, always wearing long-sleeved shirts and long hair to hide his piercings and tattoos. Hori is the outgoing popular girl who's hiding from everyone in her class the fact that she… uh… does a lot of housework and cares for her little brother a lot?

Disclaimer: I doubt there's much I can say about the show here without going into at least shallow spoiler territory. I won't mark spoilers, so proceed at your own discretion.
Please also note that I watched the entire anime in Japanese without subtitles. While I'm confident I got at least the gist of everything that happened, I tried to follow the flow and not pause to look up words or rewind every single time I did not understand something. As such, there is a pretty good chance I missed a few small and maybe not so small details along the way.

The idea itself sounds nice: two people from “different worlds” find some common ground through which they open up to each other, learn to accept that part of themselves, and eventually even fall in love with each other.
Well, as you might have gathered already, this isn't quite what's happening. Miyamura on the one hand could be said to be a rather “serious case”. He's been bullied in middle-school, and while that stopped since he started high school, he still has no friends whatsoever. He's a lonely social outsider and spends his days in gloom. People at school avoid him because they are almost scared of him, due to his looks and because he almost never speaks. Add to that the fact that he has several piercings and tattoos, but no one at school knows about them. He's hiding them completely, wearing long-sleeved shirts even during sports class in peak summer.
Compare that to Hori's situation and the premise just seems off. While I always find it a bit difficult to talk about the troubles of the “popular kids”, and it is also just unrelatable for me, it's not like you couldn't make a sensible story out of that. If, say, Hori's friends were all the generic party-girl type, who would be disappointed whenever she doesn't have time to hang out, or who'd find it uncool or something if they knew she was doing household chores all day while taking care of her little brother, then that might make for a proper comparison.

Horimiya cover art

But this is not the case. Hori has two close friends, Yuki (blond girl in the cover art) and Tooru (purple-haired guy in the cover art), who could be said to be the main side characters of the show. They both seem to be genuinely nice people and great friends, and I see absolutely no reason why Hori would need to hide anything at all. In fact, it doesn't seem much like she's trying to do that, to the point where I would barely see the premise in the show if the synopsis didn't introduce it like that.
Don't get me wrong, this isn't exactly a negative point. The premise isn't so fresh and innovative that I'm seriously disappointed to not see that executed and the show doesn't take it seriously anyway as I said. If I didn't read the synopsis I doubt I'd be missing it at all, so I guess the synopsis is just inaccurate and that's it. Moving on.

So what is Horimiya actually about? While the premise of these two different-yet-similar people finding each other isn't quite there as I said, the romance still is. Miyamura, while out and about in his casual clothes, tattoos and piercings visible, hair styled up, comes across a little boy called Souta who hurt himself playing in the park. Being the niceguy that he is, Miyamura escorts the boy home, where it turns out he's Hori's little brother. Seeing Miyamura, Hori goes full what the actual f*ck? before treating him to tea as thanks and having a nice chat with him.

Miyamura with his piercings etc.
I mean, I'm not gay, but

Miyamura ends up coming over almost every day after that, probably not in small part thanks to Souta who wants to play with the “cool Onii-chan”. Their relationship progresses quickly from there on out, and before the anime's halfway point they're already a couple. That progression did not feel rushed, but rather natural for the most part. After reading way too many trashy romance mangas the past few months, Horimiya felt quite refreshing for several reasons. The first is that the two of them actually started as friends. It did not feel like romance at the start, they just talked, laughed and had a bit of fun together. The other, directly connected, reason I see is that the anime steered mostly clear of the cliché romance teases that I'm so tired of, from the previously mentioned trashy romance mangas. Just in case you don't know what I'm talking about: think of the main couple quarrelling or something, then one of them stumbles, they both fall and lie on the ground, on top of each other, lips centimeters from touching. Or they both drank from the same cup and at least one of them gets the big blushies at the tought of an “indirect kiss”. Those sorts of things.

That said, their relationship is also free of any drama, mostly free of “strong” moments, turning points etc. to the point that it feels a bit flat. Most of their time together in the first couple episodes consists more of lighthearted slice-of-life comedy. Even the eventual confession happened in perhaps the most nonchalant way I could imagine: Hori was down with a cold, like the scary, dangerous Japanese cold, and thus lying in bed all day long in a half-conscious state. Miyamura came by after school to check on her, and before leaving he said to her something among the lines of “I called your mom and told her you're sick. Also, I'm in love with you Hori. There's food and drinks in the fridge. Call me if you need anything. See ya!”. On the one hand, what an absolute Chad move. On the other hand, I think it illustrates what I described quite well.
To pick up on another point: it's not just their relationship that is free of drama; it is the entire show. There is only very little drama and almost no conflict at all. Everything is just proceeding nice and smoothly. While I neither needed nor expected heavy drama here, a little bit of conflict is always a good driver for character development, or just to really emphasize who these characters really are and what they represent. The absence of this sometimes makes Horimiya feel a bit shallow. It is almost too good to be true you could say, although that doesn't quite capture what I'm trying to say.

To continue with that, there are a few promising plot points, conflicts etc. throughout the series. Some of them are actually quite interesting, but for the most part they are just there and either not at all, or only insufficiently realized.
Miyamura himself is a great example of this. I've already described his situation at the start, but let me summarise again and add a bit of detail: Miyamura has a rather gloomy look and rarely talks. He doesn't have any friends at school, and he used to be bullied in middle school. He's hiding his tattoos and piercings.
Despite what people infer from his looks, he's a soft-spoken, kind guy. But over the course of the anime he finds friends in Hori and her friends, as well as a few others, who accept him for who he is, don't judge him for his looks, his piercings etc. and you feel genuinely happy for the (formerly) poor guy. But when he and Hori start going out, he cuts his hair for her and blends in with the more generic side characters in order to not put her in a bad light.

The new style

I do like the “cutting your hair to signify character development”-trope, but this just feels like it's sending the wrong message. He finally found friends who accept him for who he is, who don't mind his look. His style, in my opinion, was what made him both stand out on a character-design basis, and also characterized him really well. This restyling does sort of fit his development, but it conflicts with the message of self-acceptance that I felt like the anime was partly about. Perhaps a better way would have been to have him cut his hair, but also let him wear his piercings/show his tattoos freely, although I'm not sure if this is allowed at Japanese schools.
Besides, I'm just a fan of long hair, and although it doesn't always fit, I think he (as you see in the thumbnail) looked pretty sick. Gotta admit I'm kinda mad at him for throwing that away.

But this isn't the only example of interesting conflicts that weren't properly realized. Look for example at Tooru and Yuki, who are Hori's, and later also Miyamura's, closest friends. At some point it turns out that Yuki is in love with Tooru, but too shy to act on it. When a guy called Yanagi (pink hair in the cover art) later confesses to her, she doesn't know how to turn him down. She then asks Tooru if he'd pretend to be her boyfriend, meet with Yanagi and tell him sorry as she's already in a relationship. He accepts and the plan works. But after that they keep pretending. Yanagi is in the same grade as them, and they're afraid he'd be suspicious otherwise. So they just walk down the hallway holding hands, etc..
Tooru isn't bothered at all by doing that for his good friend Yuki. Yuki on the other hand secretly enjoys these moments and wishes they could continue like this forever, or rather, that their relationship would just turn into a “real” one at some point. She is aware that this is nonsense, and also that it's not okay to do this with Tooru. But at the same time she feels unable to both stop this pretending, or confess her feelings to him. This is even more nicely illustrated when Kouno (green-haired glasses girl from the cover art), strict and introverted student council vice-president, falls in love with Tooru. She tries her hardest to get out of her shell and talk to Tooru, even bakes him cookies sometimes, and eventually confesses to him, where he turned her down. Yuki watches all this from the sidelines and is relieved when Tooru rejected her. At the same time she hates herself for her cowardice and also thinks it's unfair towards Kouno if she doesn't seriously try to convey her feelings. At that point I was thinking: this is the good stuff! This is what I like to see!

Wanna know how this was resolved?

Basically, not at all. We eventually learn that Tooru has developed feelings for Yuki too and sees her as something more than just a friend, and that's it. Three or so episodes later, the anime ends and no further development has happened here. As far as I can tell, they both never stopped their pretending, and at this point there's no need as that's what they both seem to want and enjoy. I mean, good for them, but why? Why did they just throw away this conflict that could have been the perfect buildup to a great character development moment for Yuki? I really don't get it, the entire setup was already there after all. Even if you half-assed it, that could have been nicely resolved by just writing a scene where Yuki gathers her courage and finally confesses to him. I can only guess (hope) that the manga eventually builds on that in a better way, but in the anime that was disappointing to see.

As I said before, the show is otherwise rather devoid of drama. There's been several situations where you could have expected something to happen. E.g. after Miyamura cut his hair, the girls in his class suddenly think he's hot and start fawning over him, while Hori is just standing in the back, giving them the death glare. But in the end, situations like these only get played for comedy. Horimiya is more slice of life and comedy than romance and drama. There isn't anything inherently wrong with that though. Having the situation I just described erupt into some serious, jealousy-driven drama would have just annoyed me to be honest.
The comedy though is often on point. Horimiya rarely made me laugh out loud and it is certainly not Konosuba-funny, but it's still rather amusing to watch. There's a few at least somewhat questionable jokes mixed in there though. Any time Miyamura and Tooru seem a bit too close by Hori's standards, she says it “creeps her out” or something among those lines. When I was looking for a comparison of the manga and anime, I came across a guy mentioning that the manga actually contains several jokes that could be interpreted as trans- or homophobic, and that the anime already cut out or defused many of them. On the other hand, we have a scene where all the guys are going full gay for the shy Yanagi, and it's just funny and also sort of wholesome. Not sure what to make of this.

Since I mentioned Hori's… questionable… tendencies already, let's dive a bit deeper into that, because there's more.
First of all is her violent nature. Hori is a bit of a tomboy and she tends to slap (some) people when she's annoyed by them, mostly her father and Miyamura. While I'm somewhat used to seeing people get hit in anime, often for comedic reasons, and obviously taking no serious damage from that, it just feels a bit too frequent in the first half of the anime. It's even worse when Hori is actually the one who's wrong in that situation, and she just slaps Miyamura out of… embarassment I guess? Anyway, while I feel a bit nit-picky for bringing that up here, it just felt (very) lowkey abusive to me.
The next thing are Hori's masochistic tendencies. At some point she asks Miyamura to insult her and even hit her, while out in public, and gets quite happy when he does so. Miyamura, being the niceguy that he is and wanting to make his girlfriend happy, plays along. That said, it is very obvious he feels uncomfortable with that. Moreover, as this is happening in public, other people happen to see him hitting or insulting Hori, and get the wrong idea. This again mostly seems to be played just for comedy as it never has any serious consequences. It also only happened somewhere in the middle parts of the anime and was nowhere to be seen for the last couple episodes. As such these scenes just felt unnecessary. They made me uncomfortable. While I don't want to judge people for their fetishes, the way this was presented, being done in public and Miyamura feeling uncomfortable with it, just seemed like a serious problem to me that was completely ignored.
That said, I was otherwise quite happy with Hori's character. To me, she strikes a good balance between a tomboy and a more classically “girlish” character, having elements of both but not really falling into a stereotype. Besides, I loved her voice acting. She's voiced by Tomatsu Haruka (e.g. Asuna from SAO) and it fit perfectly. The voice acting and choice of VA felt very good and fitting overall. Usually I wouldn't mention this, but Horimiya was perhaps the first time that I actively felt like this was quite positively sticking out.

What I also really liked was that, at least to me, the show never felt like it was very focussed on an either male or female demographic. It is certainly not a Shoujo, but it also doesn't feel like a Shounen. It often switches between the points of view of both characters, letting us hear each of their thoughts. It treated both its characters with respect. The show is completely free of fan service.

As I mentioned earlier, there is little drama and the relationship of Hori and Miyamura proceeds at a good pace, with them becoming a couple before the anime's halfway point. That might leave you wondering: what is happening over the rest of the show?
Well, it doesn't have to end with them becoming a couple of course. If you ask me, a good starting point to recognize trashy romance manga and anime is to look at how much time they spend on… I'll just call it the pre-relationship phase. Most of the trashy ones focus entirely, or at least for the most part, on this pre-relationship phase. The biggest offender are those where nothing really ever happens and the entire anime/manga is basically just one large ship tease. As even someone like me, who's never been in a relationship before, can tell you, things aren't just done because two people become a couple. That is only the first step.
Most good romance manga and anime (at least out of the ones I've consumed) are aware of that and spend the greater part of their time in that later phase, just like Horimiya does. That said, after our titular couple became… well, a couple, the show actually focusses much less on them, instead putting the side characters or the group as a whole into the spotlight. We'll still see Hori and Miyamura a lot, but they only get some light romance and comedy moments without any noticeable further development.
This isn't really a downside for me though. While I was initially expecting to see more of our main couple, and I am a bit disappointed that we didn't get any further development here, Horimiya has a lot of interesting side characters that have the chance to tell their story in the second half. I think the ‘arc’ with Yuki and Tooru that I described above shows that well enough. But what that also illustrated, is that the show is just missing a bit of depth or the ability to follow through with the interesting ideas that are so obviously there. Some of the side characters also seem a bit gimmicky and like they've been inserted only for the comedy… if anything. Take for example Sawada, Miyamura's and Hori's kouhai. She appears in episode 5 or 6 after hearing of them becoming a couple, and is totally shocked because she's 100% gay for Hori. This is used exclusively for comedy, with her and Miyamura sort of fighting over Hori, and only for that one episode too. After that we don't see her again for several episodes, until she makes her second and last appearance shortly before the end. And it left me wondering: was that really all she was there for? And where was she all the time in-between? Did her undying love for Hori just take a break of a couple months in-universe time?
I'm not saying every side character must play an integral role in the story of course. But Sawada (and several other side characters) just made me honestly wonder why they were even there.

Now, before finishing this post, I'll list a few more positives that didn't really fit anywhere else: The soundtrack was good. The more somber tracks especially did a great job at setting the mood. This was often accompanied by this effect, where a colored outline of the character was floating away on a white background. Yea I know I'm doing a good job at describing it, so here's a picture:

This might sound silly, but I really liked that effect. I can't properly explain why, so I won't even try.

I want to close by saying, even though I've listed quite a few negatives here, I really enjoyed Horimiya. The show has a very solid core, although it's missing a bit of depth in some departments. It always made for a rather relaxing watch, and was definitely a good way to end my evening for a couple weeks.

Thoughts on "Love, Elections and Chocolate"

Sat, 16 Oct 2021 00:02:51 +0200

Hi there and welcome to my very first blog post! I'm kinda excited, but I hope you'll enjoy reading it!
Today I'll be sharing my thoughs on the latest anime I finished: Love, Elections and Chocolate (Koi to Senkyo to Chocolate / 恋と選挙とチョコレート) or KoiChoco for short.
I will keep heavy spoilers to a specially marked section below, but I won't promise I'll do this for every little thing. Proceed at your own risk!

Please note that I watched the entire anime in Japanese without subtitles. While I'm confident I got at least the gist of everything that happened, I tried to follow the flow and not pause to look up words or rewind every single time I did not understand something. As such, there is a pretty good chance I missed a few small and maybe not so small details along the way.
This was also the first time I completed an anime in Japanese-only. That means watching anime now officially counts as Japanese practice. Yay!

Background & Premise

KoiChoco aired in 2012 and it is based on the visual novel of the same name. I haven't played the VN but read a few things about it, and I'll have to say that, at the very least, the nature of the source material becomes quite apparent in some places.
The anime consists of 12 episodes, plus one bonus episode which is set shortly after the end of the 12th episode.
It follows high school student Oojima Yuuki, a member of the food research club. That club's sole purpose seems to be to provide a place to hang out and a budget to squander on sweets for its members. It comes as no surprise then that the club is threatened with disbandment as Shinonome Satsuki, head of the school's department of finance, starts her campaign to run for student council president. Aiming to improve the school's finances, she wants to disband clubs without a meaningful purpose, such as the food research club. Our club members then come up with a simple solution: they'll just have to let one of their members run for president, make them win and the club would be saved. Our protagonist Oojima is ~~forced into~~ democratically chosen for the role.

So, how was it?

I went into this without any expectations, and I was, for the most part, pleasantly surprised. Just watching the first 3 or so minutes after the opening of the first episode immediately got me hooked. In a way.
Most of the cast of KoiChoco consists of funny and a bit peculiar characters. Just watching them interact and play off of each other made for good entertainment. The plot isn't too complex, the drama is rather light (with a few exceptions towards the end of the show), the characters aren't particularly original and so on. But for me, it still kinda worked, and in the end that's all that counts.

That said, KoiChoco is far from having no faults. The last third of the show especially buries us in quite a bit of rushed drama, that turns out to have almost no relevance to the main plot. The cut-off between the original VN's common route and the five character routes is rather noticeable. The source material had five routes, with each route corresponding to one romance option in the shape of one of the five girls you see in the thumbnail above.
But before we come to that, let's go over the various elements of the show in a bit more detail.

The Plot

When it comes to the plot, there really isn't too much to be said. The small synopsis I gave above almost says it all. Don't expect any plot twists, and take a good guess who'll end up winning the final election.
That doesn't mean the election wasn't well done though. It was treated with a good degree of realism and involved much less *winning through the power of friendship, natural charm and motivational speeches" sort of tropes that I expected to see. Besides Oojima and Shinonome, there's only one other candidate running in the elections. Very realistic indeed judging by my highschool experience, heh.
The election itself was divided into multiple stages. Our newcomers were supported throughout the whole process by Mouri, an upperclassman and head of the school's security force, who has his reasons for not wanting Shinonome to win. We can see our club members strategizing together with Mouri, thinking about who their target audience is for the election, searching for ways to gather funds for their campaign etc.. The anime didn't dive into that too deeply, but kept it at a level that made the process tangible without bombarding us with heaps of unnecessary details.

One more thing to note here is that the school that serves as KoiChoco's main stage is… special. Not only is it HUGE with over 6,000 registered students and the necessary buildings, including dorms. They also seem to enjoy a great degree of autonomy in many ways. As such the student council has a much more important role than in your average highschool anime. And if the mention of the school's “security force” earlier tripped you up, here's your explanation… I guess?
I can't really judge how over the top that is, since we're never really shown how far their world really takes this idea of a highly autonomous school and student body. That way, it still ends up feeling a bit like justification for the “all-powerful student council” trope. Which is weird and unnecessary, because it's not really employed. The acting student council president is never so much as mentioned, and the anime literally just ends with the final result of the election. There was no need to even build up this image of a large and mostly autonomous school. While the idea itself is rather interesting in my opinion, the anime doesn't go through with the idea and its implications like… almost every anime that does that.
To get back on track to where I was originially going with this, the school's security force actually seems to be a pretty important institution. The same goes for the aforementioned department of finance, and at least one more department for… something. Sorry, I just couldn't catch the word they used here. In any case, these institutions were actually used to build up some sort of “political conflict”, with these different institutions vying for power, cooperating or opposing each other, and generally being important players when it comes to the student council elections, who supports who, etc.
This did initially give off the sort of vibes you'd expect from a political thriller, with a bit of intrigue and secrets mixed in there, but in the end it didn't amount to much. These institutions were supposed to be made up of several hundred students each, but we only get to see somewhere between 1 and 3 representatives for each of them. For the most part, they also didn't seem to have any effect, besides just being large interest groups that would all vote together for the same person when the time for the election came. I gotta admit though that there were a few conversations between representatives of these institutions that I could barely follow, so I might be missing parts of the greater picture here.
So why are these institutions a thing? Why is the school so huge? Why do students seem to never have class or homework? Why do we only ever see a single teacher and no other adults? Why did I just write 400 words about these seemingly unimportant details?
In any case, that turned into a fairly drawn out paragraph just to question the writer's choice of this “large and autonomous school” idea.

I've always been bad at keeping it short. And maybe I just enjoy turning my thoughts into written words a little too much.
This is the point where I finally realize I cannot possibly (or at least, really shouldn't) put everything I have to say in here. Are you telling me I should have thought a little harder before I started writing? Oh well

Moving on, let's get to…

The Characters

As I mentioned above, these aren't anything to write home about, nothing you haven't seen before. Mostly, it's just their interactions that made KoiChoco so entertaining to watch for me. That said, it isn't exactly what I would call comedy. KoiChoco didn't make me laugh out loud like KonoSuba, but is just amusing.

The protagonist Oojima is your typical generic MC, who's nice and likes to help others and has a surprising number of girls fall for him. I think that sums it up fairly accurately.

The next character we're introduced to is Chisato (middle in the thumbnail). She's the typical childhood friend character, has light Tsundere tendencies and is secretly in love with Oojima. Cue unnecessary jealousy. She also has a traumatic past that she overcomes towards the end in what I assume was originally her route in the VN.

Mifuyu (left of Chisato) is also a long time friend of Chisato and Oojima. And guess what, she's also secretly in love with Oojima. She's a calm, kind girl who suppresses her own feelings to try and help Chisato get together with Oojima, out of a feeling of gratitude and indebtness towards her. I don't know about you, but to me that sounds like something I've seen 10 times already. Except I haven't. Due to that, I actually found it interesting, though sad, to watch. I was dissappointed however that this was very clearly expressed in the anime, but neither the one-sided love between her and Oojima, nor the somewhat… in my opinion, problematic… relationship she has with Chisato is resolved in any meaningful way.

Next girl on the list is Shinonome (far right). Oojima's rival in the election comes off as very serious and composed, maybe even stuck up at first, and she also… falls in love with him. Yes you read that right. Cue a lot of trou… no, actually no one seemed to be seriously bothered by this. I'm not sure whether I should laud the show for skipping over the unnecessary drama this would cause, or criticise it for being unrealistic. It's moments like these where it becomes apparent that KoiChoco is, in some ways, rather simple and straightforward. In any case, Shinonome and Oojima often happen to meet per coincidence on the school grounds and have little chats. I was surprised to see these two very quickly develop a good chemistry and have the romance progress naturally over each episode. Watching them was just wholesome and cute, and I would have liked to see more of that.

There are several more club members, but I'll skip over them as there's not much to say here. They mostly don't add anything to the plot and are just there for comedy and to “fill up” the food research club. They do that well enough and certainly give the club a lively, maybe even somewhat homely, atmosphere. Contrast with the more typical 3 or 4 member clubs you see in many highschool anime. Not that there's anything wrong with that either.
Talking about the club, I was a little surprised that KoiChoco didn't play the imminent disbandment of the club up to more drama. I expected at least one dramatic, motivational speech about how they would have to “protect this place full of memories” etc. but that never really happened. That only feels right though, after all we were introduced to the already fully assembled food research club at the beginning and then plunged straight into the election. We weren't given much of a chance to follow along with their regular club activities and as such couldn't get too attached to them. Naturally, that did make it a bit harder to empathize with those characters as they struggle to save their beloved club.

In case you haven't noticed, I've skipped over the other two girls (routes) you see on the thumbnail. The reason is that Aomi (right of Chisato) is basically just… there… The show only really used her to exemplify the school's bullying problems, which wasn't properly handled or resolved either.
The other one is Morishita (far left), the (not actually) cat girl. I can't say much about her, almost everything would be a spoiler. That was probably the only real surprise in the entire show and I really liked the episode where she was in the spotlight. Again though, that was rather short-lived and I wish we could have seen more of her.
In the end, there's no way to fit all five (possibly contradictory) routes of the source material into a one cour anime. It is only natural they would have to cut out some parts here.

SPOILER TERRITORY

I'll go into a bit more detail about the plot and especially the character drama that takes place mostly in the last 4 episodes of the anime. This will spoil two of the character's routes and several other things.

Although I said it's natural they'd have to cut out parts of the original VN, that doesn't mean it was well done.
Chisato's “character development” came out of left field and did not have any ‘weight’. Since her chocolate-loving little brother (last part of the title finally relevant!) died after being run over by a car several years ago, Chisato hasn't been able to eat chocolate. She used to give chocolate to her little brother every day, but since he's gone it seems like she's using Oojima as a substitute. So she gives him a whole bar of chocolate every day and expects him to eat it. Does anyone else find this unintentionally funny?
In any case, in a later episode Oojima is almost run over by a car, leading to Chisato getting a panic attack, not letting go of Oojima's arm for an entire day and refusing to talk. At some point Oojima gets tired of her behavior, refuses to eat the daily bar of chocolate she offers him and tells her to stop using him as a substitute for her little brother. While I do find the whole chocolate-thing a bit weird, this could have been the start for some proper drama of the good kind, and a bit of character development on top. What happened instead was that Chisato locked herself up in her room for a few days until Mifuyu comes to visit and tells her to stop being sad. Then she's suddenly well again and shows Oojima that she even overcame her trauma, by biting into a bar of chocolate in front of him.

Ladies and Gentlemen, I present to you: character development!

Okay, to be honest, I don't have any problem with that particular imagery. In fact, if Chisato's development was done better… if only it had some feeling of weight to it… then this would have been a pretty good way to wrap it up. But as it stands, it only felt rushed and almost devoid of meaning.
And that's not even the end of it. In the next episode it seems like they start dating and they kissed. This was actually disappointing to watch, as these two don't have much chemistry. Aside from Chisato's bouts of jealousy, it never even felt like there were any romantic feelings from either side. And to top it all off, we already have another possible ship with Shinonome/Oojima that was teased over the course of almost the entire show, actually has good chemistry, a natural development and there seems to be clear romantic interest from both sides. Who had the shitty idea to build up a good ship over several episodes, then ditch it for the one that never felt right, while managing to still be predictable from the start?
Lastly, don't expect Shinonome and Oojima to ever have any meaningful interaction again after that. Guess she just got cancelled.

And since we're already speaking of Shinonome: what I can only assume was originally her route was compressed into a single episode. Remember when I mentioned there only seems to be one teacher in the entire school? That's Shinonome's sister Hazuki. Through the first seven episodes it becomes clear that the two sisters don't get along too well, but all we're ever told is that Hazuki has some sort of dispute with their parents and left their home due to that. Shinonome on the other hand gets upset about her sister's behavior, so the relationship between them is also somewhat tense. Then in the middle of episode eight, Hazuki suddenly splurges all their deepest and darkest family secrets over 7 minutes, including the reason why she's unable to stay at their parent's home. So we're finally given a reason for the conflict between them! Nice, I wonder what comes next. Oh, Shinonome understands her sister's feelings now and the two reconcile. That's sweet. Wait, that was it? There's no consequences, no follow-up to this? The siblings just get along now, and the issue (including the problematic relationship between Hazuki and their parents) never really comes up again?
Just, wow. This whole conflict has been there for half the show without us ever even knowing the reason, and when we're finally given the reason we also immediately get the resolution on top and… nothing of practical relevance even changes? Now if that doesn't sound like a very similar disappointment I described only two paragraphs earlier!
At that point I honestly wonder why this was even included in the anime. It feels like they just tried to take what I assume are the highlights of the source material, and then somehow squeeze them into the anime next to the main plot by skipping all of the necessary build up and thus leaving the resolutions to those central conflicts bereft of any impact.

Another problem I had with the show was how it handled the school's bullying problem. Actually, that's inaccurate, as the problem is larger than that.
Apparently the school has a sort of scholarship system for students from poor households. These students do have to take on a bunch of additional duties, which is illustrated for us through Aomi. We get introduced to her as Oojima comes across her by chance while she's hanging up posters in the school. There are several occasions where we're shown just how bad Aomi's life is.
In one episode we see her switching out lightbulbs in the school. She doesn't stop even as it gets dark, since she hasn't completed her task yet. At some point she calls her family and tells them to eat without her as she isn't going to be back any time soon. That was surprisingly heavy and not something I expected to see in KoiChoco, considering how lighthearted and generally straightforward the show was until then. It gets even worse after that as we're introduced to a group of girls whose only purpose seems to be to make Aomi's life even worse. They are very cliché bullies who only seem to pick on her due to her scholarship status, labeling her as poor.
At some point, Oojima gets aware of the problem and adds an overhaul of the school's scholarship system to his program for the election. That doesn't sound too bad so far, right? Well that's about the last time we heard of that problem. Are we supposed to just assume the problem is resolved when Oojima wins the election? I don't know, and seeing that was disappointing.

This also leads me to the last point I wanted to make, questioning the very foundation of the show. The entire premise is that Oojima is running in the school's election just to save his club. But Shinonome's idea to abolish clubs like his doesn't seem even the slightest bit unreasonable. Indeed, what right does the food research club have to exist? They only occupy one of the school's room so they can hang out, and they even get a budget from the school which they waste entirely on snacks. What reason do we even have to root for Oojima?
Initially, that isn't too hard to answer. After all, our protagonist is trying to save his club, a place full of fun memories with his friends, from being mercilessly abolished by the school's bueraucratic apparatus in an attempt to improve their finances. That actually sounds like a classic anti-capitalist tale, doesn't it?
But as the show goes on, it repeatedly undermines that seemingly solid basis. First of all, we're shown that this isn't the teachers or Japanese politicians imposing budget cuts for the school's clubs, but it is Shinonome, another student just like them. Moreover, we learn that she isn't the cold and calculating person that she seems to be - but is in fact very likable and only acts out of concern for the school and student's well-being.
Even this might seem a bit vague at first, but that suddenly changes when we find out about the school's bullying problem. Aomi is only half the reason Oojima realized this problem existed in the first place. The other half is that at some point Shinonome told him to read her manifesto for the election - which clearly adresses this problem, and also cites the necessary funds to fix it as part of the reason to prop up the school's finances by abolishing clubs!
It was at this point that I seriously asked myself: what reason do I still have to support Oojima? His motivation now seems like nothing but childish resistance, with Shinonome being not just the more capable and experienced person, but she also has a much more solid reason to run in the election.
I'm not sure if this is one of those poorly resolved problems I mentioned before, or if the show wasn't even completely aware of it. At several points Oojima was asked why he wants to run in the election, and the answer was always: to save their club.

Conclusion

Wow, turns out I had quite a few negative things to say about KoiChoco after all, but I want to emphasize:
KoiChoco surpassed my expectations by being surprisingly fun to watch. Neither the story nor the characters are anything to write home about and some of the later parts felt rushed and not properly resolved. But I still enjoyed watching it a lot and realised once again that you don't always need one of the best anime out there to have a good time.

And with that, we've finally reached the end of this post.
Whew, that got a bit long, I didn't expect it to turn out like this when I started writing. But I just enjoyed it so much and putting everything into words also helped me organize my own thoughts. At this point I feel like everything above is just an unorganised mess, but oh well… to everyone who made it this far down, thank you for reading my first blog post and I hope you enjoyed it!