Bartimaeus

Perfect Blue (1997). Speaking of Madhouse productions, it's been...six, seven years since I first saw it? One of the very first anime movies I'd ever seen...I THINK possibly the first non-Ghibli period. Boy, time flies by, doesn't it? I watched the new 4K restoration, which is actually a real restoration and not a fake upscale (AI or otherwise) like Millennium Actress or Paprika or... It was a bit of a different kind of atmosphere watching it this time, as the reason I was re-watching it was because a friend wanted to watch it for her first time...and then we also had another four other people watching with us. Yep, just six totally normal people watching Perfect Blue, a cute little idol anime movie, together. Probably the funniest thing that happened (at least to me) was my friend calling me out by making this observation...: more stuff, spoilers All in all...it lived up to my Horrible, No Good, Very Bad memories of it. Great movie, little odd to re-watch it for the first time in forever with a bunch of other people for their first time and who don't watch pre-digital anime, but it went well!!

Since Denuvo changed their licensing model a while back, I'm not really bothered nearly as much by its inclusion. Denuvo works orders of magnitude better than any other DRM that came before it, and most games protected by it do not get cracked or at least do not get meaningfully cracked - i.e., maybe one version of the game, usually one close to release, might get cracked, but then nothing after that: it's just too difficult and too time-consuming for cracking groups to really handle. However...while Denuvo used to sell perpetual licenses, they are now a real proper money-gouging "service" (and this is one of the only times I'll ever celebrate that) in that publishers must pay quite a hefty sum to continue to protect their games with Denuvo on an ongoing basis, and this means that even very big games eventually lose Denuvo - at the very least, the singleplayer ones that aren't earning the cash to continue to warrant it. Way I see it, this means games get protected for 6-24 months, which strongly encourages the people who really want to play them to actually buy them (which is good for the prospects of bigger singleplayer-only titles in particular, which have always been at higher risk of being pirated en masse relative to multiplayer titles), but it also means publishers will eventually push clean builds through Steam et al. somewhere down the road...which is good for those of us who either don't want anything to do with (or straight up can't play with) Denuvo, OR for those of us who would be waiting to buy something at a lower price point anyways. I think this is a fair compromise, and a much better and sustainable situation than those nasty perpetual licenses Denuvo was selling previously. Now that they've pretty reliably proven their DRM works and many publishers use it and will want to continue to do so, it makes sense they'd change their pricing model to take advantage of that, and the rest of us can luckily benefit from it.

"Evangelion 30th Anniversary Special Commemorative Showing", or "Asuka + Asuka, Episode 26 + Episode 1", or... I was skeptical for the first few minutes, but I liked it, even with Mari showing up for a few seconds.

Now she has more time to murder her dogs and goats for no reason...

I'm reading/playing Umineko: When the Seagulls Cry, I'm about a chapter and a half through (out of 8). I made this stupid, awful meme after I finished chapter 1. It will make absolutely no sense to anyone here...I think, but here you go anyways. bad meme

KPop Demon Hunters (2025). Despite not liking a single one of the songs (really, more an issue of the choice of vocalists than anything else, I think - it was a truly ghastly collection of singing voices, I'm afraid, though I'm obviously not into kpop which certainly has to play into that issue), I did enjoy the movie overall. Did it feel like I was re-watching what was essentially a dressed-up and restructured version of a certain Disney film released 13 years ago? ...Yes, yes it did. But I like Frozen, so I think that's okay. Also, the above image is surprisingly not from Frozen, it's actually from KPop Demon Hunters but it came like halfway through the film when I was already feeling like I was watching Frozen and, look, they heard my brain, because there's Frozen!

AP NewsSupreme Court rules the Postal Service can't be sued, eve...A divided Supreme Court has ruled that Americans can’t sue the U.S. Postal Service, even when employees deliberately refuse to deliver mail.Shouldn't be using mail-in voting anymore: your post office would seem to be allowed to steal or destroy your mail without repercussion now.

"The final program of the "EVANGELION:30+; 30th ANNIVERSARY OF EVANGELION" event held in Yokohama today announced that a brand-new anime series in the Evangelion franchise is in production at Studio Khara and CloverWorks. Kazuya Tsurumaki, director of the Rebuild films and Mobile Suit Gundam GQuuuuuuX, helms the project alongside Toko Yatabe, who was an assistant director on Evangelion: 3.0+1.0 Thrice Upon a Time. NieR creator Yoko Taro is penning the script and series composition, and NieR composer Keiichi Okabe is providing the music." Written by Yoko Taro...perhaps a slightly lower chance of it being horrible than if it were written by Hideaki Anno? I'm not sure.

Oh, you did mean the Himeno one. Yeah, I mean...it was gross, I guess, but I wasn't super engaged by that scene in general. A bunch of people drinking is always a good time to check out for a minute...or an hour, depending.

Correction to my previous post: in the spoiler at the bottom, I said "while everything I said above is true", this did not apply to the "best show I've seen in the past 10 years" bit. I forgot I wrote that. The show is fine, but it was obviously not best in the last 10 years good, haha. ...The kiss scene? Uh...oh, do you mean Himeno in the show, or the one in the movie? Probably in the movie? Movie

I'm fairly certain it is "topics that you have posted at least one reply in". I'd be curious to see if LadyCrimson could show an example of it not being there for at least one thread that she has for sure posted in.

Chainsaw Man, season 1 and the Reze movie. Now...I know what you're thinking. Bartimaeus...Chainsaw Man...shounen action? Yes, it's difficult to believe... Why would Bartimaeus subject himself to Chainsaw Man? The answer is actually surprisingly simple: I was forced to watch this at proverbial gunpoint. Chainsaw Man is...very important to somebody I know, they have very strong feelings and emotions about the show, and it was basically a "hey, you can either sit down with me and give this an honest to god shot, or...you can find out what will happen to you if you don't" sort of situation. So...did I like Chainsaw Man? Well, funny, that's just what this person asked right after we finished watching the movie, except they phrased it more like, "So you like Chainsaw Man, right? And you're not going to say yes just because it's me and I happen to be tapping my fingers on this dangerous unseen metal object behind my back, right?". Um... So in short, yes, I really liked Chainsaw Man, it's probably the best show I've seen in the past ten years. T.O.R.T.U.R.E.

Reversal of normal for me this year: I didn't watch hardly anything of the game (though I was rooting for and felt the Seahawks should win), but I did watch the half-time show: I'd agree that it was a good vibe.

i'm just waiting for them to kiss

BBCode has not existed on this forum software for a long time, it was just hack-y one way parsing and conversion to HTML (hence why even if you did previously use BBCode, as soon as you pressed reply, it would convert and be gone for forever). I'm not very surprised that they've now phased out even bothering to convert it, they've been trying to kill it for a very long time. In theory, a browser userscript by way of e.g. Tampermonkey could parse and convert your BBCode tags just like how the forum used to, but...honestly, I've just gotten used to highlighting and hitting CTRL+b and CTRL+i and CTRL+u for the three basic font modifiers. Strikethrough, with no hotkey for it, is the annoying one.

Why is there an anime movie song in RLM's Revenge of the Sith video? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bYWAHuFbLoc&t=1319s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GIyrnk9hy7M&t=26 ...Has Mike been a secret weeb all along?

I'd be a lot more curious if we hadn't already heard from him a handful of months ago and he was still pulling the old "it'd be just as bad under Kamala" nonsense...

I think my older brother had this thing, it instantly flashed ancient vague memories in my brain.

That would be classic Trump "negotiating" at work: rip up the agreement we had, bluster and threaten, get the same deal or a little better or maybe even a little worse (at the cost of a lot of good will), announce to the world how brilliant he is and that he got what he wanted.

Fun fact for those perhaps not caught up on all of their history: Adolf Hitler became the leader of his party (German Workers' Party, later renamed National Socialist German Workers' Party) in 1921, he was arrested and imprisoned for an attempted coup in 1923, he ran for president and came second to Hindenburg in 1932, he was appointed chancellor by that same Hindenberg in 1933, and he became dictator later in the same year with the Enabling Act of 1933 that effectively suspended all civil rights in favor of supreme government authority and discretion. It took 12 years from the time Adolf Hitler became the leader of his - at the time - little podunk party until he became chancellor and then dictator. None of us lived through those times, but 12 years can be a very long time in politics, especially in that particular era, and it doesn't take a lot of googling to determine that the Nazi party was incompetent, corrupt, ineffective, drunk, drug-using, chaotic, and very backstabby during pretty much its entire existence. They had fancy and well-organized ceremonies to be certain, but they were power-mad maniacs who didn't really know what they were doing, and none of that really mattered or prevented the totality of their evil once they controlled all the levers of power.

Love Serenade (1996). Australian cinema is so...very strange every time I watch any. Each time, it's like stepping onto an alien planet that more or less looks like ours but doesn't really act like ours. It's weird in the land down under... Miranda Otto is such a funny lady.

I could be misremembering (as it's been a few years), but I believe ShadySands was more of a Packers fan than a Broncos, but he's also more or less stopped watching the NFL. This was probably the least I've been interested in the NFL in the past decade (I only caught about half of the Packers games and really didn't watch much else), but it's probably less to do with the NFL itself for me, and more to do with sports just not being a super compelling method of escapism for me this year.

Stranger Things season 5... Just kidding, I ain't watching that crap. Nope, I watched Neon Genesis Pluribus. Really great. Kind of fantastic, actually. Final episode smashed it out of the park so good that I almost don't want them to make a second season, I'd be perfectly fine with them just leaving it how it is, despite it being a massive cliffhanger. I feel like you can really only go down from here, but I suppose if they got us this far, you have to at least give them a chance. The incredibly high-stakes scenario is contrarily married to a low-key, character-driven, and incredibly personal story, it was really just kind of beautiful and exactly what I want out of high-minded sci-fi or fantasy concepts, which for TV so often just gets bogged down with...all the normal yucks of a million different characters and increasingly complex plotting and set pieces. None of that was necessary here, I did not miss it at all, it stayed true to its colors all the way through. Will that be the case for season 2? We'll have to wait and see.