Game Review: ‘Burn Your Fat With Me!’

And now for something completely different.

My habit, until recently, was to run to the gym in the morning before setting off for work. Of course, once Corona-chan appeared, my trips to the gymnasium had to stop, and I had to find alternate ways of getting a daily workout. My gym is open again as of this writing, but it still requires members to wear a mask while exercising. That’s a no-go for me, so I’m still working out at home.

I had trouble at first getting adequate exercise while cooped up in an apartment, but I discovered two phone apps that greatly helped me out: One is the Nike Training Club app (free to all at least for the duration of the pandemic), and the other is Burn Your Fat with Me!!, a combination dating sim and workout app that was briefly a sensation when it first appeared. The former is a wealth of creative aerobic and strength-building workouts that demonstrate it really is possible to reduce yourself to a quivering pool of sweat in the middle of your kitchen with no equipment … but due to the themes of this blog, I’m going to review the latter.

Created by the Japanese company Creative Freaks, Burn Your Fat with Me!!, or Nensho, first appeared in 2013 and was briefly the most downloaded anime-themed app on Google’s app store, an oddly specific achievement. Designed mostly for sedentary otaku and weeaboos in an effort to get them off the couch, it is (barely) a dating sim game that requires the player to complete fitness goals to advance the story. The idea, which the creators call … sigh … “moe-vation,” is that weebs will be inspired to work out if it means continuing in a visual novel and getting simulated encouragement from a waifu.

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Patroness of the Blog

I’m Catholic, in case you didn’t know. Someone on Twitter recently reminded me that my old blog (now defunct) was dedicated to St. Philomena, a curious Catholic saint—curious because she is the only canonized saint discovered by archaeologists rather than known through tradition. Since I was an archaeologist before I switched careers and became a librarian, this endeared her to me.

She was apparently around thirteen years of age when she died. Although the interpretation has been disputed, some artifacts in her tomb indicate a Christian virgin and martyr.

Also, she was the special patroness of St. John Vianny, who is himself the patron saint of diocesan priests. It happens that I spent two years in seminary discerning the priesthood; although that discernment ultimately led me to leave the seminary and find my vocation in marriage, the time I spent there was extremely beneficial and taught me a love of philosophy.

St. Philomena is still dear to me. This is a picture of what sits beside my desk:

Religious icons next to my desk.That’s an image of the Blessed Virgin referencing the Miraculous Medal, which I habitually wear around my neck. Next to her is an icon of St. Philomena. Behind those is one of the innumerable bottles of holy water that have been gifted to me by priests and which I’m not sure what to do with. In front of those is Rainbow Dash.

If that last seems incongruous, let me explain: I keep Rainbow Dash next to my desk because, in the book Heaven Is for Real, the four-year-old who claims to have viewed heaven while on the operating table states that he met Jesus riding a rainbow-colored horse. I view that book with some skepticism because we do not normally, for good reason, consider four-year-olds to be reliable witnesses. Nonetheless, I found this claim charming, so I keep a rainbow-colored horse beside my desk alongside more traditional icons.

Sorry, Maintenance Day …

I’m behind on some reviews, but I’m also behind on some site maintenance, so I’m working on cleaning out dead links, deleting superfluous plugins, that kind of thing. I’m also making sure that the pages with essays and posts are up to date.

Thanks to my real job, I’ve learned a lot about HTML over the last couple of years and can now see a lot of things I’ve done wrong, so I’m going back and repairing mistakes and improving the internal links.

I do have some reviews coming up. I was unable to get to them over the weekend, and a lightning storm shut me down early yesterday. Should have some interesting stuff up in the near future, though.

One thing I’m trying to figure out: Every time I link Crunchyroll, WordPress thinks the link is broken and strikes it out. I don’t know what’s causing this, and since I link that site frequently (considering my blog’s focus and all), it’s kind of annoying. Crunchyroll is pretty good about keeping its pages live even when it removes content, so pretty much none of those links should actually be dead, but go figure. Anyway, if you see me link Crunchyroll and the link has a strikethrough, it’s probably actually a good link. Just FYI.

‘Cleopatra in Space’ Final Volume and Television Series

A few years ago, I was reading and reviewing Cleopatra in Space, a junior graphic novel from Mike Maihack. I lost track of the series after I last changed jobs and towns, but since I reviewed volume 4, Maihack has released two subsequent volumes. The most recent volume, Queen of the Nile, is apparently the finale.

Also, there is a new animated series based on it, streaming on a service called Peacock. I can say nothing about it because I had not heard of Peacock, or this show, before just now.

I admit the clunky animation and pop music in the preview don’t give me high hopes:

Progress

Made some good progress on my next novel today, and I think I should have another review up sometime tomorrow … but for now, good night!

Art: ‘Magical Girl She-ra’ by Weremole

Featured art: Magical Girl She-ra by Weremole. Check out the rest of his artwork.

Amazon Disappears Light Novels and Manga

Some time back, I mentioned that Amazon had developed a draconian new policy for its advertisements, forbidding ads for any books that feature firing guns or guns held by children on the cover. At the time, I said this was clearly an attempt to go after indie creators, and that Amazon would never enforce such a policy against, say, Japanese manga.

I was wrong.

In fact, it’s worse than that: Amazon isn’t just removing ads but removing books. Whole light-novel and manga series have been deleted from the platform silently and without explanation.

Several outlets have now reported on this, including Crunchyroll, Anime News Network, AniTAY, and Comicbook.com. Several translator-publishers have likewise announced the removal of their books.

This is apparently not limited to the U.S. Amazon but affects all Amazon portals outside Japan. Some of the publishers affected are fairly big players, too, including Yen Press and Darkhorse.

As Crunchyroll reports, publishers have tried to get in contact with Amazon to get the reasons for delisting, and Amazon has been less than forthcoming:

Pinansky said that despite multiple attempts over the last few months to get in contact with anyone on a review team at Kindle through email, they rang the support phone line and requested support tickets, doing so 10 or 12 times. “Phone support has no power to override or obtain any further information from Kindle Content Review.” Though all J-Novel Club got in response from Amazon after multiple nine-day waits are a generic email …

Because Amazon is not being transparent, we are left to speculate. The most likely reason is that Amazon is going after lolicon, and while such a purge would include a few of the titles that have been removed, some other, considerably tamer books are being removed as well. Someone in my mentions (no doubt with some exaggeration) said they were removing most anything that has a cute girl on the cover.

Most of what’s being purged, being light novels, is isekai, and while I personally dislike isekai, this censorship is still troubling: If they can throw these off the platform, they can start removing content for considerably more tenuous reasons.

“They came for the lolicons, and I did not speak out because I was not a child molestor,” and so forth.

Book Review: ‘The Philosopher’s Stone’

The Philosopher’s Stone by Colin Wilson. Wingbow Press, 1969. 268 pages. ISBN 0-914728-28-8.

Colin Wilson was a weird character. Prolific and obviously intelligent, he wrote one well-respected work of literary criticism and also wrote less influential works in other fields before he mostly turned to parapsychology and became a crank. At one point, he made disparaging comments about the work of H. P. Lovecraft, which brought him to the attention of Lovecraft’s biggest fanboy, August Derleth.

Derleth is not well-liked by Lovecraft’s admirers, ironically, because he is largely responsible for creating what we now call the “Cthulhu mythos.” Lovecraft, though he borrowed from himself frequently, never envisioned a unified, overarching “mythos” for his work (though he came close in At the Mountains of Madness). It was Derleth who went back over Lovecraft’s work and tried to harmonize it, though he in the process rejected Lovecraft’s misanthropy and Nietzscheanism and replaced them with a more conventional good-and-evil battle. Today’s Lovecraft fans disparage Derleth for this and have largely jettisoned his contributions, but like it or not, he founded the publishing company Arkham House, which is largely responsible for preserving Lovecraft’s work and making it generally well known.

Derleth took offense at Wilson’s dismissal of Lovecraft and challenged him to write his own Lovecraftian fiction. Wilson obliged, first producing The Mind Parasites and following it up with the novel before us, The Philosopher’s Stone.

Wilson, as he explains in his foreword, sincerely believed he could do Lovecraft better than Lovecraft did. However, there is a reason you’ve heard of Lovecraft and (in all likelihood) haven’t heard of Wilson.

The reason is, this book sucks.

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Anime Review: ‘Uzaki-chan Wants to Hang Out!’

This show is everything that’s wrong with anime today, but not for the reasons you’ve been told.

Uzaki-chan Wants to Hang Out!, directed by Kazuya Miura. Studio ENGI. 4 episodes (at time of writing) of 22 minutes (approx. 88 minutes). Ongoing. Rated TV-14.

Available on Funimation.

This show annoys me.

Mind you, its existence doesn’t annoy me, and its content doesn’t particularly annoy me; what annoys me is that this plotless, generic, milquetoast series is the most talked-about anime of the season. That’s how far this medium has fallen over the last two decades.

Granted, it might not be getting so much attention if some busybodies hadn’t had a conniption over it. In 2019, before the anime appeared but while the manga was enjoying some popularity, the Japanese Red Cross did a blood drive using the titular heroine, Uzaki-chan, as a mascot. The poster features her playfully goading you into giving blood by asking if you’re a wimp afraid of needles.

Uzaki-chan Red Cross Poster
The infamous poster, shamelessly borrowed from Baudattitude.com.

A blogger known as Unseen Japan criticized this poster and proceeded to bother lots of people about it. Here are his own sanctimonious words on the subject:

Uzaki, in other words, is explicitly appealing to heterosexual men via her sex appeal. And she’s goading them into giving blood by bringing their manhood into question. (“You’re not afraid of a little shot, are ya, ya wimp?”)

My first reaction—and my wife’s to boot—was that this wasn’t an appropriate image for the Japanese Red Cross to use.

After hiding behind his wife’s skirt, he goes on to claim victimhood status because he got pushback for being an irritant. Perhaps the strangest comment in his lengthy essay on the fallout from this is his assurance, “… I have absolutely no grip [sic] with ecchi anime, or with sexualized depictions of men and women ….”

In other words, he has no ethical ground to stand on; were he a Puritan with an actual moral code, his busybodiness would be tolerable or at least self-consistent, but by his own admission, he made a nuisance of himself simply for the sake of being a nuisance.

Also, LOL at “heterosexual men,” as if that’s some unique or special category. Newsflash: Men are attracted to large breasts; follow Unseen Japan for more groundbreaking discoveries.

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Update on My Projects

I won’t deny that I’ve been struggling with the third volume of Jake and the Dynamo. For this volume, I had a lot of clear vignettes in my mind but no idea how they related to one another. So I’ve been writing disconnected scenes without really knowing what I was doing.

Fortunately, I finally had a breakthrough: I had a single plot point come to me that tied everything together, so I’m working on the book tonight and it’s flowing reasonably well.

On that note, I have no update on publishing. I haven’t heard back from any publishers to which I’ve submitted, so I will probably, in the next few months, give them up and submit to other places.