I did not expect to find other Taiga dorks in here!

For the curious: Taiga dramas are very slow-paced (50-hour seasons) and on the dry side, but man are they excellent. The sets and costumes are beautiful, the characters and plots are compelling, and they're quite educational (as far as dramas go).

Most are in feudal settings, but they aren't constrained to one time period. There's even one about the split loyalties of Japanese Americans in WWII. Really hard-hitting stuff.

If 50 hours of mostly people taking to each other isn't a turn-off, I'd recommend starting with Hideyoshi. The lead from Samurai Gourmet plays one of the most pivotal figures of Japan's unification, covering his entire adult life from peasant farmer to supreme ruler. There's an atypical injection of contemporary salaryman comedy that makes the whole thing more approachable.

Taigas can be a pain to track down; anybody who's interested can DM me.

It's complicated.

Bah, they'll never have my precious -march=native!

It's funny that a desire for biome diversity has led in a small way to a kind of sameyness. Not so much a criticism as an amusing little irony.

Semiconductor tech is super cool though!

I used to use last.fm religiously. I still love being able to go back and look at what I was listening to, or when I discovered something I still love.

I eventually got too lazy to keep all my listening sources scrobbled, but I miss it.