This week I finished Showa Genroku Rakugo Shinju. It was great! The perfect show for any sad old man enjoyers, and those who prefer young dumbasses get their fill as well! Maybe it would be best to watch some Akane Banashi real quick if you don't already know what Rakugo is and how it works though; I'm guessing it makes some assumptions of knowledge that the average westerner will not have. For example, familiarity with stories like "shinigami" which show up a lot in bits and pieces but (as far as I can remember) not in their entirety. Anyways, definitely worth the watch.
I then started watching Joshiraku. I'll reserve most of my thoughts for when I finish it, but boy was that show made in the "LOL RANDOM" era of the internet.
I also watched a couple of movies! The first was Belle (2021). If I'm being honest, it was kinda mediocre. My wife stopped even paying attention a quarter of the way through the movie and I can't blame her at all. It felt like it took in all of the worst parts of Summer Wars, but without all of the charming parts of Summer Wars. This director seems obsessed with the idea of a metaverse, but also doesn't seem to have spent any time in places like VR Chat or MMOs to find out how people actually act in that sort of place, or how those sorts of places are constructed.
Cosmic Princess Kaguya was a much better movie, and watching them back-to-back did Belle no favors. Both of them featured main characters who were popular singers online. Both of them featured fights in a sort of game world. Only one of them did a good job of either of those things. I think Cosmic Princess Kaguya benefited a lot from that modern fairy tell feeling you get when one of the characters finds the other in an RGB telephone pole at the beginning of the movie. I feel like this primed my brain to be more willing to suspend disbelief, but at the same time Cosmic Princess Kaguya is just fundamentally a more well-written movie than Bell is, so I didn't find myself actually needing to do so nearly as often. The characters are better, the relationships between the characters are better, and the overall plot is better.