Translation:
Glad you liked the show!
It’s one of my favorites. I love me a good chuuni character and Rikka is one of the best out there. Rikka somehow is able to be an utterly ridiculous chuuni character while also having a really compelling and touching story that is exceedingly human and grounded in reality.
I am ready at a moment’s notice to spread the good word of the Mystery Research Club!
Big fan of Ika Musume (I read the manga before watching the anime). I look forward to the day that the author’s other big work, Assemble! Mysterious Research Club, is granted an anime adaptation. I prefer it to Ika Musume in manga form, but they are both great.
It’s more that the West has just recently discovered Uma Musume. The show and the game it is based on has been enormously popular in Japan since its inception. I guess it just takes some time for a general audience to acclimate to the idea of racing horse girls.
As for the show itself, I haven’t watched it. However, I have seen it praised highly and seen some really, really well animated clips. They really put that gacha game money to use when they are animating this. @Endmaker@ani.social has had really great things to say about the story as well, and I have seen elsewhere that it is a great example of a sports anime (if that’s your thing).
Despite it being a short, holiday week this past week here in the US, I have been absolutely slammed with work. Unfortunately, I haven’t been able to watch any anime for the past two weeks now. So, I thought I might as well provide a bit of a meta update here in the comments.
I think that for this year I am going to move the 2025 Anime and Manga year-end awards into January (probably late Jan). One of the main points of feedback I got from that process last year is that it felt weird to vote on the awards while the Fall season was still airing. So, we can fix that! I think late January might work better since the beginning of a new season is always busy, so let’s give it a couple weeks to settle down first.
I just caught up on this show and I agree that the meat looked really, really good this week.
I have used this salt baking method once before to cook a large roast, and it works really well. In my case, we did it on an open fire, so the salt casing helps protect the meat from the variable temperatures of the open fire as flames/coals ebb and flow through the hours it takes to bake. The salt really does harden into a shell as it bakes thanks to mixing in the moisture (egg whites). This traps in the moisture from the meat as it cooks, essentially steaming it. It takes a lot of salt to do this well, so I imagine you would only see this in the traditional food of maritime locales where salt would have been readily available. The salt is not reusable afterwards.
In a restaurant setting, I would imagine they could achieve much of the same effect through commercial steam ovens. This lets them bake a roast while injecting steam into the oven, keeping it just as moist (and cooking it faster without having to heat the meat through the shell). They might wrap it in something else that helps keep the juices in while also allowing better heat conduction.