I just watched Sanji and Zeff on the island and the desk scene at Arlong Park. Both of those moments really hooked me into the story reading the manga.
The story is seeming to do a great job mixing funny, serious, and sad moments in the right amounts to always keep you feeling something for the characters. It never stays one way for too long.
I'm in the Water 7 arc in the manga. They're chasing NR on the train.
In the anime I'm where Buggy met up with Alvida. I feel that's the first filler, but it was still fun. I think it was all the chapter title substory stuff.
I did see One Pace, but I've been taking my time with watching it so I don't catch up to my reading. I'll probably do that if I rewatch.
I'm fairly new to One Piece as well although I've watched anime for about 20 years. I generally avoid super long things because DBZ just made me feel anything that big had to have tons of filler, plus it's just a heck of a commitment. One of the guys at my work has read it and watched it all more than once and he says it's coming to an end in the near future, and he said as much of an anime fan as you are, you aren't curious to know what the One Piece is?
I looked at it, and the art didn't look great, and what bits I saw on Toonami just looked ridiculous and childish. I kept putting it off and putting it off. But I found a colored version of the manga and started reading from the beginning. It takes a good minute to get up to speed, but the characters are fun and you care about them, the world building is good. The battles have weight to them. It's really been a ton of fun. I'm excited to finish out this epic journey now, and I totally get why this is a classic.
I've seen a few sources saying she's been dealing with lung cancer the last few years and that's she died of complications from that, but I've never heard of any of the sites before, so I won't vouch for how reliable that info is, but that's all I can turn up.
I don't block too many things, because there can occasionally be news related to a topic I have no interest in that is still interesting. Like I have no interest in sports, but if there's something big like a scandal or arrest or some great play it mistakes, it's fun to catch that stuff.
The main things I outright block are anything NSFW that is definitely not for me, but mostly it's just about all of the meme communities. The amount of material those groups churn out is overwhelming and so many just seem so low effort. Things like programming humor generally don't bother me much, but most are just meh.
Dang, with her and Bob Barker, my inner child is taking a beating this week. The premiere of The Animated Series is one of my clearest childhood memories, waiting for it to start and that theme kicks in. It always amazes me she was meant to be a that character and now she's such a big part of DC.
I'm gonna agree with the other comments so far. They're just healthier things to distract you than you'd get with drugs or alcohol or self abuse. I'm going through a rough patch right now that is a little worse than my meds can level out for me. I'm going over to someone's house today and I'm looking forward to playing with their puppies. I'm expecting that will relax me for a bit, but tomorrow my situation isn't really changed. But it gets me through one day.
I feel this is one of those things that is the end of an era. The Price is Right with Bob Barker always reminds me of afternoons at my grandparents' house, and I'm sure it does for a lot of people in my age bracket. He also seemed to be a genuinely nice person. It was always good to hear her was still alive and doing things, and it helped keep that little slice of childhood alive.
That's just because right now used coffee is trash and sand isn't. If you remember back when bio diesel started getting popular, all of a sudden people were stealing fryer oil from restaurants. If you see a smelly looking black dumpster behind a restaurant, that is the used fry oil.
I wish they had a bit about that in the article itself, but they did link another article about biochar creation and its byproducts. I linked it in another comment here.
I feel there's a lot of assumptions here that no one actually reads articles.
The article they link about pyrolysis is worth a read too. The main source of CO2 emissions from cement production is cooking down limestone into lime IIRC. I was curious how much energy is used to turn the biomass into the end product and what waste is generated. It's a bit too detailed for me to understand, but the process ends up with 15-25% biochar (the stuff they're promoting in this article), some potentially useful byproducts, and some regular combustion pollution.
I'm glad to see research into this. Sand for concrete is a specific type of sand (nice and bumpy so it likes to lock together like a jigsaw puzzle) and people get killed by what are basically sand cartels. This was the "legitimate" mob business in the last season of Barry.
Portland cement is about 2/5 sand, so we'll need to start drinking more coffee! I was glad to see they're testing other organic matter since coffee is very susceptible to climate change, ironically caused in a large part by cement production. Unless you believe the reader comment on the article begging people to realize climate change is a hoax...
I don't totally blame them because money is needed for research. But if pricing control is done across the board, nobody in particular is being targeted. It doesn't seem anticompetitive if they are all subject to the same rules. Society needs medicine, but it needs to be affordable. Is it really a cure if people can't afford it?
A single payer system seems the only way to leverage prices to a point where they are available to everyone. There will be bullying by business, but it's what we need. If they slow walk something, another company can beat them to it. Let them be merciless to themselves.
Honestly it was better than I expected. If Ramaswamy wasn't there, I really wouldn't have minded it that much. He just came off so sleazy to me. Christy said something along the lines of he was the ChatGPT candidate. If you had an AI make a young, slick, influencer-looking MAGA Republican, it probably would look a lot like him. He was very Trump-like in behavior, talking over people and saying purposely ignorant things. The rest were plain vanilla Republicans closer to what we used to get, except Desantis, and Scott to a lesser extent.
If either the Bush presidents seem bearable at this point to you, the rest of the candidates were as tolerable as Reps get. More just Crap Original Strength instead of Crap Ulta Plus Xtreme.
I just watched Sanji and Zeff on the island and the desk scene at Arlong Park. Both of those moments really hooked me into the story reading the manga.
The story is seeming to do a great job mixing funny, serious, and sad moments in the right amounts to always keep you feeling something for the characters. It never stays one way for too long.