Bartimaeus

The Diary of Anne Frank (1959). It was one of my favorite books when I read it as a child in...4th grade?, and it was interesting to re-visit it all these years later. It's a good production, though with a few relatively minor issues. I can't believe they bothered to have Millie Perkins (Anne) complain about how she's too ugly in comparison to her sister. I know that was in the book, but like, just don't include it here, you literally cast Millie Perkins as Anne Frank, it makes no sense at all. Not to mention that she's completely the wrong age (Anne went into hiding at age 13, Perkins...may be very petite and baby-faced, but she was 22 at the time of filming - able to pull off 18, sure...maybe even 16, but not 13). Oh well, it's fine, it's tough to fine good dramatic child actors, especially at that time. Anyways, the film is some good food for thought in these trying times.

@majestic The original show does actually have a pretty feel bad ending, for what I think is perhaps an interesting lesson grounded in reality, and you could apply much of what you said about the OVA ending to it: Now the stuff about familial ruin and addiction and suicide...um, not so much. Especially because her parents are bakers and weren't getting anything from Mai performing magic in the first place - they were just letting her go off and hang out with the family troupe for fun, basically. So yeah, you're not entirely off the mark with your more serious ideas, .

Fear the Spotlight. Over the last few years, I've really grown to hate surreal/dream-like atmospheres and horror in both movies and games, and this is no exception. You're a goody-two-shoes breaking into the school with your goth friend so you can play around with a oujia board in the library, stuff goes sideways, and the game immediately segues into a dream sequence where nothing is connected to reality or really matters anymore, the game very thickly lays on a "there was a terrible fire that killed a bunch of students years ago" story that's told by picking up a pile of random notes throughout the environments*, which probably has something to do with the "there was this girl that was being bullied by the girl she was jealous of" stuff that was also going on at the time, but I didn't actually stick around to find out because this crappy 2 and a half hour-long game was at least an hour and a half too long for me to bother. Presumably, given the title of the game mentioning "the spotlight", it's one of the those two girls that set the fire, and maybe it comes back to connect to the two girls in present day, but whatever, I really don't care. Probably the nicest thing I can say about is that I liked the in-game visuals, which were low-fi pseudo-PS1-like, which seems to have really taken off as a relatively cheap to make and run but stylish look, particularly for indie horror games. Now if there could just be some actually fun games making use of it... *This particular approach to storytelling has become so commonplace to gaming, both AAA and indie, and I can't really understate how dull I find it. There's an appropriate time and place to use readable notes to flesh out your world/lore, but the extent to which games effectively use them as a crutch has become way too extreme...and it's especially bad when it's the only way of learning whatever garbage the story is supposed to be. Hey idiots, do you remember when fun or intriguing characters that the player/viewer likes or at least is curious about used to drive stories? Ugh. Though at the end of the day, if you're really into a game and its characters, world, and story, you're much more inclined to actually be excited to go find and read any information you can find in-game about all of it, which I clearly was not here. Now if this were like, Undertale or something, with actually fun and interesting writing, I'd keep my mouth firmly closed.

The 2002 OVA art style is...not completely horrible, but I find the character designs to be very off-putting and lizard people-like, which doesn't help with what already seems like creepy direction. The animation and background designs shown off in the outro in particular are really not all that bad on the whole except for that, especially for a random 1-episode OVA made in 2002 of a decades-dead show. Uh, kind of? Not necessarily how I wanted to leave the show off on, but I suppose it was easily the most memorable bit of that episode...

Magical Emi, the End of Magic. Okay, people...hear me out, I would appreciate all your guys' input on something: You basically can't even tell the difference between the art styles, right? But anyways, here's the actually important bit that I would like to hear other people's opinions on...here is the outro of the original show: https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/scl/fi/qz3show7ypdvrn8fxslfl/mpc-hc64_m2U1NwAqnJ.mp4?rlkey=f1skdz9oy685rrpdlhkad9ypn&dl=0 Harmless enough, right? No big deal, it's a silly little shoujo show made for girls, whatever. And now here is the outro of the single-episode 2002 OVA, the last bit of Magical Emi that there ever was, that...I suppose, was trying to pay some kind of homage to it and the show in general, even going so far as to play the original show's music a whole seventeen years later: https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/scl/fi/spqnfkbb1polvhgaihc28/mpc-hc64_JgaRdgtv0p.mp4?rlkey=glgskpxcz111ngns59ua9c7ns&dl=0 Please tell me if I'm crazy: was this OVA ending inexplicably creepy as hell, or what? I was getting nearly Perfect Blue-esque vibes, and I have no clue why it was like that, but it really skeeved me out and made me question what was happening as I watching it. Between the sudden disconcerting and traumatized looks Mai (the main character, she's both the orange-haired girl and the teal-haired lady) kept shifting into, the weird and surreal imagery, Mai watching her own older self appearing in the rainbow, the fact that this is all occurring in what seems to be old photos, the whole minute of silence* in a dark room while the credits play with...what appears to be an older teenaged version of Mai that I've never even seen at any point in either the show or the OVA, but it's her room from when she's a child in the show and I'm pretty sure it's supposed to be her... It's super weird, right? It all felt like I was watching a psychological short that was really actually a memorial for someone who was murdered or something. Can anybody else watch this and tell me if if I'm reading way too much into it or not? I mean, I definitely am, but like...unjustifiably so? *Actually, it's not quite silence: I think you can hear some vaguely ominous environmental sounds like the wind rustling, car brakes, a passing train...

I'm honestly surprised any website or online service operates without rate limiting these days. Not that it really fixes the problem, just makes it less worse. Things have been alright on my end, still the rare "service is unavailable", but generally responsive and generally working fine.

Uh, maybe? The fact that there is/was a Hello Kitty goth line just makes me like Hello Kitty even more... Although I tend to be a little picky about my goth, as I've always been much fonder of classical or minimalist goth rather than...let's say, punk or emo goth. When I google "goth hello kitty", I feel like I'm just seeing a lot of random fan art rather than any actual products.

Thank goodness for refunds...

Zelda: Breath of the Wild had 395 different bugs, animals, monsters, and items that you needed to take pictures of to fill out your knowledge compendium thingy. Or you could just pay an obscene amount of money to have the game automatically fill them out with pictures the devs took for you. I took exactly one picture during my whole playthrough of that game.

When I was young and in grade school, my younger sister had a Hello Kitty backpack that I wanted. I should've known then that my life was destined to end in ruin. e: I want to say that I remember it not being particularly girly outside of obviously being Hello Kitty-branded. I think it was mostly black with some pretty striking patterns on it, probably either purple or pink highlights. It looked cool!

I might've said this before, but I was always of the opinion that characters/creatures should be the very last thing that should have their level of detail decreased relative to everything else, and that quality settings that don't take this into account are dumb.

Some friends wanted me to play PoE2 with them, but I've been taking a stronger and stronger stance against roguelikes and games with any significant amount of procedural generation as of late. Just can't be bothered to play games that don't have well-defined endings these days.

In similar cases that I've seen, if it ends up being the RAM that has spontaneously become defective (which is a pretty rare occurrence in of itself after years of problem-free service), it often seems to get worse (i.e. it might start happening again even on the lower performance settings) over time, but if it's the motherboard not being able to power the RAM correctly...well, it's a lot easier to replace RAM than it is to replace a motherboard, so hopefully it's the RAM.

Thanks to term limits, DeSantis is out of the governor's mansion in Florida in 2026 regardless, so what is theoretically a 4 year position in the cabinet might look attractive...