Totally agree. I will copy/paste over the relevant portion of what I wrote in the discussion thread over there:

It's amazing how much chemistry the main pair of characters can have when you have them actually recognize their own feelings and communicate with one another. These two just blew right through half a dozen different romcom will they/won't they tropes in one episode:

• Ayase wouldn't let Okarun ignore her at the school gate
• they both recognize that they couldn't wait to talk to the other during school
• they shared the briefest of accidental (and painful) kisses
• they told each other how much they wanted to find the other to talk during lunch
• Okarun dumped out his heart about how he wanted to talk to her in front of her friends
• Ayase reconciled with him and dished out a wash basin of revenge on somebody playing with Okarun
• finally, they were back to normal (minus some balls) by the end of the episode

Step aside every other romcom out there. Dan Da Dan doesn't have the time to deal with this tropey trash. It's got bigger balls to find.

People are allowed to like the things they like. That being said, if regular foot posts are going to be a thing, then keeping it to one day a week (Foot Friday) would be great instead of more often than that. If you could pass that on to your friend, that would be great.

I plan on letting this post stay pinned for at least a couple days as the season gets going. If you have any questions, feel free to ask me here. I do just want to draw people's attention to the flow chart I made for this post as it took me way longer to make than I thought it would.

One thing I really like about Akane's backstory here is that up until this point in the story I had assumed that she got deep into psychology in order to better understand her characters to help her acting. However, what we really find out is that she studied up so much in order to better understand her idol, Kana, lashing out at her in what became an extremely formative moment for the young Akane. The fact that it helps her with her acting (and Aqua-sleuthing) is merely a coincidental side benefit.

Her years of experience and psychoanalysis have led to this moment with Kana. It is like Akane has come out of her acting hyperbolic time chamber ready to fight the big boss...only to find out that they gave up already. I can understand how immensely underwhelming and disappointing that would be. @rikka@ani.social

There were so many great visuals this episode. Practically all of the Akane/Kana showdown is told either via flashback or visual metaphor. We don't really see what the audience sees here, we see things like the moment that led these two toward this path:

Or, we hear their inner monologue as their out-of-character personas act out their feelings:

This show has been a visual feast from start to finish, and I cannot wait to see what this play's final act is going to look like.

What an incredible adaptation of Melt's big moment. I went back and checked out the manga to remind myself of how this was handled in the source material (chapters 57-58) and the anime takes this sequence to a whole new level. Melt had his own shonen protagonist climax moment.

Up to this point, this whole arc has been about the difficulty of adapting media from one form to another. Then, they bust out this episode that adapts the source manga in a way that utilizes animation that could never have been done in manga form. They even hand painted some of that sequence with actual oil paints (this is one of the animators' accounts)!

This season had a bit of a slow start, but this episode has given me tons of confidence that the rest of this arc is going to deliver. My only complaint is that I really wish that Ruby and Mem weren't relegated to being completely off screen through it all.

As somebody that doesn't really follow VTubers at all, I thought this was going to be about Oshi no Ko based on the title.

a university student with a large debt

Finally an anime protagonist I can relate with!

Agreed. I loved the first season and am really looking forward to another.

This episode had a lot of heavy lifting to do. It had to introduce the story of the play they are adapting, a whole lot of new characters, and fill us in on the motivations behind the characters that we already know. Overall, I think it handled all that quite well, though there were times where just too much was happening on screen at any given time with subtitles over subtitles, I had to rewatch certain portions to pick it up. We also didn't get much Ruby and no Memcho this episode, but I am sure they will be coming soon.

My favorite sequence through all of this episode is how they depicted Kana's acting limiter being removed. Her and Himekawa had such a fantastic sequence together in rehearsal. @rikka@ani.social

When I watched this episode, I wasn't consciously making this kind of connection (instead I was just craving a good loaf of sourdough), but this is a good reminder of how important bread (and grain) have been and continue to be to a large portion of the globe.

Bread and grain have been in the headlines a lot in recent conflicts. From the shocks to the global grain markets due to the Russian invasion of Ukraine and then the subsequent rise and fall of the grain export deal, culminating in a grain export corridor. The resulting price shocks led to unrest in countries for which a small increase in a staple food has dramatic impacts on affordability (Ukraine's grain largely went to Africa and the Middle East during peacetime). The effects of the Ukrainian grain has also had dramatic effects on politics within the EU, leading to farmer-led political movements in nearby nations (especially Poland). Another example is Egypt (mentioned in your article), a country which, just in the past month, has quadrupled the price of bread for its poorest residents.

Thanks for the contribution! Just as an aside, I wanted to read more about the reserved occupations, but baker wasn't listed in the source you linked. However, I found a baker-specific article here that scratched the itch.

I highly recommend watching the trailer for this one (it even has English subs). This looks like the most absurd, over-the-top, random thing I have ever seen and I cannot wait to see more.

So, as somebody that hasn't used an anime tracker for anything other than a database to look up information about shows, is the intention to make something like Bookwyrm, but for anime? If so, then you might want to check out how they implement the population and federation of titles/reviews/comments/etc. I haven't used it before, so I am not sure how it all works.

As for populating your database of shows to begin with, the only anime database api I have interacted with before is AniList (this api is what @rikka@ani.social uses). I just pulled up their api TOS and it does say this:

Prohibited from use within competing noncomplementary services of the same nature, including but not limited to Anime/Manga list/tracker services. Competing services may be authorized on request if they provide significant and sustained integration/syncing with the AniList API and AniList user accounts.

Something tells me they are not about to authorize a fediverse alternative to their own site, but you can always try.

I don't know all the legalities around things like image usage and whatnot, but I do know that Sonarr uses cover images and posters that it fetches from tvdb. Their api is also completely free to use for non-commercial purposes as far as I can tell.

As for feature requests, I would say that the most important thing (other than base functionality) would be to enable easy migration from the existing trackers. I am not a dev, but perhaps some way to migrate over existing reviews/watched status/etc. from MAL or AniList. Those sites have been around long enough that people have a lot of history saved up on them. They aren't about to manually re-enter all that again.

Good luck!