last night i finally finished my rewatch/reread of the cardcaptor sakura franchise. i was on netflix last month when i saw that the original anime was leaving at the end of the month, and it had been a decade or so since i last watched it, so i figured i was due for a rewatch. i ended up watching it in japanese and thought it was pretty easy for the most part. i also played the playstation 1 game animetic story game 1: cardcaptor sakura, which loosely covers the first season of the anime. it doesn't really feel right to say i played it since there's like five minigames in the whole game, the rest is just watching scenes, but the sprite work is SO cute and the whole game only took me like 3 hours to finish so i can't really complain. i tried to rip the sprites using jpsxdec since i want to turn some into gifs for my toybox page but was unsuccessful. i might mess around with using frame advancing and screenshots to manually cut and gif some sprites in the future though.

i also read and watched the sequel cardcaptor sakura: clear card. even though i loved ccs as a kid i never read the sequel, probably because i was in college when the series started and wasn't into animanga at the time. luckily though the manga is finished now and i was able to binge read the whole thing ^^ i didn't really have high hopes since i don't usually care for series reboots, but i enjoyed it a lot more than i thought i would. i liked that sakura was better able to take charge of situations and leap into action, and syaoran got some moments to show off too. tomoyo and kero were just as adorable as always of course. while i think the main new character, akiho, was a little underutilized and i would've liked her more if she had a personality that wasn't the same as sakura's (i also could've used more touya and yukito tbh), i think the main mystery of clear card was more interesting than the original series and i like how it expanded upon some of the lore (especially around sakura's parents). i read that last year CLAMP announced a sequel to the first season after 5 years but i couldn't find any follow up. the anime had some major changes from the manga that i'm not sure how they're going to deal with in the sequel, but tbh i know i'll be happy as long as i get to see sakura and syaoran animated together again (i may have teared up when they flew together towards the end of the first season...). here are some of my favorite panels (spoiler warning):

my friends just got back from japan! this is what they brought back for me. now i've gotten my fair share of grow-in-a-cup sets that are always too small to germinate all the seeds they supply but this is by far the most egregious lmao. there's gotta be more than 20 seeds in this bag. did the manufacturer expect me to germinate each seed individually or something? the cup is cute and i've never eaten the plant, 三つ葉 or japanese wild parsley, before so i'm quite excited to try it out... but i'll definitely be sowing it in a real planter tomorrow. i was also quite surprised by how much of the packaging and instructions i could read. last week i got some japanese stationary (a pilot kakuno fountain pen and a kokuyo campus notebook and paper) whose instructions i could read a fair bit too. maybe i have actually learned something in the last eight months i've been studying japanese?!