Hope everyone is staying cool. I don’t know entirely what happened, but there’s a kind of absurd pile of new media on the server this month. This is a result partly of my finally making some progress sorting and transcoding a bunch of files I had sitting around, and also because a member of the server very graciously came by with a selection of stuff from his own library to contribute. Check below for details.

Server Updates

• Hey look new newsletter provider! Hopefully this email is finding you all well. Let me know if, uh, anything looks off? idk

New Additions

Cardcaptor Sakura (1998) 1080p HEVC, stereo Opus audio (Japanese, English), PGS subtitles (English)

Cardcaptor Sakura: The Movie (1999) 1080p HEVC, 5.1 Opus audio (Japanese, English), PGS subtitles (English)

Cardcaptor Sakura: The Sealed Card (2000) 1080p HEVC, 5.1 Opus audio (Japanese, English), PGS subtitles (English)

Outlander (seasons 1-2) (2014) 1080p HEVC, 5.1 AC3 audio (English), SRT subtitles (English)

The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya (2006) SD HEVC, stereo Opus audio (Japanese), ASS subtitles (English)

Emma. (2020) SD HEVC, 5.1 AC3 audio (English), SRT subtitles (English)

Kids on the Slope (2012) 1080p HEVC, stereo AAC audio (Japanese, English), ASS subtitles (English)

Jujutsu Kaisen (2020) 1080p HEVC, stereo AAC audio (Japanese), ASS subtitles (lots)

Mushi-shi (2005) 1080p HEVC, stereo Opus audio (Japanese), ASS subtitles (English)

Perfect Blue (1997) 1080p HEVC, 5.1 EAC3 audio (Japanese), SRT subtitles (English)

Paradise Kiss (2005) 720p HEVC, stereo AAC audio (Japanese, English), PGS subtitles (English)

Welcome to the NHK (2006) SD HEVC, stereo AAC audio (Japanese), 5.1 AAC audio (English), VobSub subtitles (English, Japanese)

Oldboy (2003) 1080p HEVC, 5.1 AAC audio (Korean), SRT subtitles (English)

Oppenheimer (2023) 1080p HEVC, 5.1 AC3 audio (English), PGS subtitles (English)

Ocean Waves (1993) SD HEVC, stereo HE-AAC audio (Japanese), SRT subtitles (English)

The Apartment (1960) 1080p HEVC, 5.1 AAC audio (English), SRT subtitles (English)

Royal Space Force: The Wings of Honneamise (1987) 720p HEVC, 5.1 FLAC audio (Japanese), stereo FLAC audio (English), PGS subtitles (English)

Gunsmith Cats (1995) 1080p HEVC, stereo FLAC audio (Japanese), 5.1 AC3 audio (English), stereo AC3 audio (various commentary tracks), ASS subtitles (English), PGS subtitles (commentary)

Haibane Renmei (2002) SD HEVC, stereo VORBIS audio (Japanese), ASS subtitles (English)

Pitch Black (2000) 1080p HEVC, 5.1 EAC5 audio (English), SRT subtitles (English)

Nostalgia (1983) 1080p HEVC, Mono EAC3 audio (Italian/Russian), SRT subtitles (English)

Picnic at Hanging Rock (1975) 1080p HEVC, 5.1 AC3 audio (English), SRT subtitles (English)

The Wheel of Time (season 1) (2021) 1080p HEVC, 5.1 AC3 audio (Japanese, English), SRT subtitles (English, SDH)

Skinamarink (2022) 1080p HEVC, stereo AAC audio (English), SRT subtitles (English)

Predator: Killer of Killers (2025) 4K HEVC, 5.1 AAC audio (English), SRT subtitles (English)

Paranoia Agent (2004) 1080p HEVC, stereo AAC audio (Japanese, English), SRT subtitles (English)

Wolf’s Rain (2003) 1080p HEVC, stereo AAC audio (Japanese, English), PGS subtitles (English)

Changes

• None

Deletion Proposals

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What’ve I Watched?

Andor (season 2) (2025)

What a goddamned television show. I don’t think season 2 of Andor hits quite as consistently as the first season does, (partly a necessary artifact of trying to bridge the gap to Rogue One) but it also contains some incredible series highs. Star Wars has always contained within it a critique of American Imperialism, from the original trilogy’s aesthetic foundations in Southeast Asian guerrilla armies to the prequels’ disillusioned critique of neoliberal government and the War on Terror. These themes are at play in season 1 of Andor as well (though arguably in that case it is the British Empire that is more in the crosshairs), but season 2 arrives wielding plot devices that feel uncomfortably close to home in the USA of 2025.

Andor’s version of the Galactic Empire doesn’t concern itself particularly much with the Emperor himself, but with the wider machine of empire. The various cogs it fits into itself to maintain its project of extraction, accumulation, and integration, those cogs often ignorant of the ends themselves or even of their roles within the machine. Its weapons, likewise, are familiar: police violence, propaganda, the insidious inanity of bureaucracy and an organizational structure that maintains its agents’ alienation from the people they ostensibly serve, as well as a plausibly deniable distance from the horrors they facilitate in the name of that service. And of course, it’s a show about just how difficult such a machine is to fight, about the paranoia, the strategic disagreements, the logistical frustrations, and all the bodies left in the wake of the struggle for, one has to believe, a better future. Star Wars has the benefit of its future having already been written; we know the outcome of their revolution, but its extremely compelling to see it rendered in such detail and intimacy. This is a height I didn’t realize, but hoped, Star Wars could reach. And now, unfortunately, it’s over, but its existence stands as a hopeful testament to the kind of creative bravery that is possible even within the most ideologically bankrupt of media machines.

Rogue One: A Star Wars Story (2016)

It's somewhat bittersweet when the followup to a work surpasses it as thoroughly as in this case. In 2016, Rogue One was an electrifying new kind of Star Wars story, one that focused not on the mythopoetic struggle of light against dark, but on the material and political reality inhabited by the non-Jedi of the Star Wars universe. The foregrounding of the moral and political compromises required for the survival of the Rebel Alliance; the loud, messy portrayal of insurgent violence against the Empire; the desperate, brutal two-front battle on Scarif evoking a more frantic, more desperate reprise of the Battle of Endor; all of this and more made the movie hit very hard on a first viewing, suggesting a new tonal landscape for Star Wars to explore that had not until then been visible on the screen, another kind of story that this universe could tell.

Eventually, this was borne out: screenplay contributor and second unit director Tony Gilroy and several members of the cast returned to this period of Star Wars with the first season of Andor in 2022, realizing the promise of Rogue One and then some. A harrowing thriller and bureaucratic horror story of resistance against an ascendant fascist power, Andor eschewed most of the memetic and iconographic stylization of Star Wars storytelling, narrowing in instead on a deeply critical, deeply grounded story of spies, saboteurs, and secret police in the final years before the Galactic Civil War. Andor not only keeps the mystical power of Darth Vader off screen, it goes for most of the first season before even showing us a stormtrooper, one of the most iconic symbols of the Star Wars franchise but, crucially, not a symbol a real empire of this kind would rush to deploy when there are easier, cheaper, less incendiary and less obvious ways of enforcing compliance. It is a show that freights a meeting between two rebel agents over coffee with more narrative weight and sense of threat than a pitched battle between capital ships in other films.

In the aftermath, with season 2 of Andor depositing us just at the threshold of Rogue One's opening mission, it's hard to return to the film and not see the seams much more clearly. It's still a thrilling movie. It still tells a compelling story and the final act is still an excellent action sequence. But its compromised and troubled production becomes much more obvious, a work of several creators with different approaches to telling the story that don't end up sitting entirely comfortably within one film. The pacing of the film, despite its very reasonable runtime, feels rushed and lacking in connecting action, resulting in a somewhat jarring first few scenes and on occasion forcing Felicity Jones' protagonist Jyn Erso to take seemingly uncharacteristic positions in order to force the plot back on track. The ragtag crew of rebels that make up its core cast feels, despite their clear characterization, underdeveloped, verging on trope-y. Compared to the frightening, unstable charisma Forest Whitaker would bring to the character of Saw Gerrera in Andor, his brief appearance here comes off as almost comically unhinged and paranoid, not to mention largely without context for his role in the story unless you've read the prequel novel that further explores his earlier relationship with Jyn and her parents (which, in 2016, I had, and was therefore willing to forgive a lot more). The flippant insertion of Peter Cushing and Carrie Fisher's 1970s-appropriate likenesses over the bodies of Guy Henry and Ingvild Deila, uncomfortably surreal at the time, seems even more fraught now that AI-generated media has become an ever more concerning labor issue, against the backdrop of a Disney Corporation that has clearly decided they'd rather snatch recognizable faces out of the grave than recast a character with a living, working actor (having, perhaps unsurprisingly, learned entirely the wrong lesson from the backlash to Alden Ehrenreich's casting as Han Solo in 2018's Solo).

Am I criticizing a fantasy action film for not being a two season spy thriller mini-series? A little bit, yes. Is that fair? Probably not. Maybe I'm now over-correcting for my earlier rosy impression of the film. Finished is, after all, worth more than perfect, and despite how far from perfect it is Rogue One is still required viewing for Star Wars fans and likely fans of blockbuster sci-fi action broadly. Uneven, yes, but certainly in the upper half of Star Wars films in terms of quality and arguably the best since the Disney acquisition. Your mileage may vary in terms of how high you think that bar is. But, if nothing else, Rogue One stumbled so that Andor could soar, and I'm glad it did.

Eureka Seven (2005)

I had never heard of this show until it was announced as the companion show for the latest season of the Great Gundam Project. I was not initially impressed by the premise being, as far as I could tell, surfing robots. It turns out this is actually just one of the best mecha shows. Eureka Seven doesn’t aim for the kind of grand political commentary that the Gundam franchise has been flailing haplessly around since the 90s, and instead focuses on a much more personal story with some of the best rendered character writing I’ve seen in shonen. Into, frankly, the stock plot that every mecha show uses, it injects a real concern for the interiority of its characters and their relationships with each other; the internalized and often gendered norms that dictate their interactions with each other; the way trauma and abuse, unresolved, become reproduced through a family; and the ways that, likewise, those traumas can be addressed in a way that provides space for healing and realization. It also does all of this in a fascinating science fiction setting that unrolls its premise and core (military) conflict with an agonizingly measured pace. It’s the kind of show where you will be asking “what do any of those words mean?” a lot for a pretty good chunk of the show, which would be a problem if the drama of the show weren’t so focused on the characters for its first act. Trust me that, by the time its important for you to understand any of the world building technobabble, you will.

Eureka Seven owes a lot to Neon Genesis Evangelion, which invites some pretty fraught comparisons. Both took the more grounded, “real robot”–style mecha genre that had rocketed to ascendance with Gundam and injected a good deal of the bizarre and the magic into it, in some ways drawing into sharper focus the metaphor of mech-as-body. Both coupled that metaphor with a primary focus on the emotional struggles of their child protagonists. Even visually, Eureka’s character design clearly draws from Evangelion’s Rei. Eureka Seven is however a much less depressive, much less Freudian take on the themes, where the human potential for communication, though imperfect, does provide an avenue toward understanding and growth, and where the already-traumatized adult (by anime standards) characters are not fixed points in the firmament, but people with their own evolving relationships who are, in their own ways, capable of growth. This creates a story that, despite all its travail, feels broadly sunnier and more hopeful. In Eureka Seven, it’s not clear if love can literally conquer all, but it will get you a lot further than a stubborn reliance on social norms.

Skinamarink (2023)

In Skinamarink, two young children find themselves alone in their suburban home as the doors, windows, and eventually more and more of its contents begin to gradually disappear and it slowly becomes clear that in their parents' absence something else is now sharing the house with them. This is an accurate description of the events that take place within the film Skinamarink, but not a particularly accurate expression of the experience of watching the movie. Where a lot of horror builds tension by placing the viewer in a similar perspective to the character encountering the horror, or intermittently providing flashes of a broader perspective in order to build dramatic tension, Skinamarink does something else, with its slow pacing, off-kilter shot composition, and mostly-invisible cast serving to alienate the viewer from almost all of the literal action of the film and gradually producing in my a feeling that the horror movie I was watching was not actually the one these kids were actually in. Instead, I feel in the film a meditation on childhood trauma not in an immediate sense, but in reflection, removed by years or decades as detailed memories break down and the experience of childhood becomes a series of iconic tableaux: a favorite cartoon, a pile of legos on the living room floor, a familiar view up the stairs to the second floor. This is the material that Skinamarink uses and twists into a thing of horror as memory becomes, in real time, an unreliable narrator. Time slips loosely about with the hazy understanding of a young child. Conversations are raised without any end point and dissolve into static. The intense film grain and color distortion causes the everpresent darkness to swim in a fascinating, disorienting way, producing shots that can for extended stretches feel more like a color field painting than a view of any place in a real house. It is a film that aesthetically draws the viewer in but always maintains a distance, because that distance is itself the very source of horror, the thing that could not be understood in childhood and that now, in its absence, can no longer be reckoned with.

Mobile Suit Gundam AGE (2011)

AGE is a weird artifact. Ostensibly the story of a war for the fate of the Earth Sphere taking place across several generations, it does ultimately succeed at feeling expansive, in that here at the end of the series the beginning certainly feels very far away. It does not, however, feel as if it really measures up to the epicness of its own scope. Of course, another way to read the premise is that they’ve basically attempted to squeeze the entire original Tomino trilogy of Gundam shows into one, and the pacing holds up about like you’d expect. Interestingly though, and despite this show’s seemingly abysmal reputation among the fandom, this is a rare instance of a Gundam show that doesn’t fall apart as it reaches its conclusion, and in fact in a lot of ways gets better as it goes on, beginning from the near incoherence of its first arc, becoming gradually more watchable if still frequently bizarre in its plotting until, in the second half, it becomes actually pretty good for a while. The ending arc felt like a lot of nothing, but that’s because it ends up rehashing the same warmed over tropes that have been the mainstay of Gundam shows since 2003, and compared to several of them AGE honestly executes it much more competently.

Now, a lot of that competence is due to the fact that the show identifies its target audience as being children around the ages of 10-12, and writing at a level appropriate to their understanding of the moral issues. So this isn’t a recommendation exactly, but it’s far from the worst the franchise has to offer.

Miscellany

• Can't think of anything for this month, it's quite late