Bartimaeus

Some co-workers bought a box of different organic peppers ripe from the end of growing season for me, since I'm the "spicy food" guy (I'm not really that much of a hothead, but I do cook with and eat stuff like bird's eye, habaneros, and scotch bonnets, don't usually go much higher than stuff like that). I wasn't sure what would actually be in the box or how hot the peppers would be, and I ended up eating this lumpy and misshapen pale pepper called a "jay's peach ghost scorpion". Suffice to say, I suddenly remembered why I normally stick with the peppers that I do.

This is what I wrote out in Notepad++ before looking at the answer: I sort of remember how to do 6th grade (ages 11-12) algebra, which I guess qualifies you as a kind of genius compared to most YouTube commenters, . Just using the inverse fraction (i.e. 4/3) is an admittedly much smarter and more efficient way to get there that I should've also thought of, but hey, at least I eventually got there!

That's how I initially read it and I was like "he's not dead, why does everyone always think he's dead?", but then I realized Azdeus meant the C&C series.

7800X3D: The beatings will continue until morale improves. The prices will continue to get higher until Intel improves.

Assuming it's not close and that Trump wins. Could be a bit longer to settle some states like Nevada (who count incredibly slowly) if it's really close, and if Trump loses, there'll be least weeks of shenanigans - at a minimum - to come. Of course, it'll be a lot less concerning this time around, since he's not already in office, so probably a lot easier to tune it out unless it turns into violent insurrection again. From what I remember, when Democrats achieved a state trifecta in Michigan within the past couple of years, they changed their voting laws to allow pre-election day tabulation of absentee/early votes, so Michigan should in theory be known on election night. If Harris loses Michigan (or conversely, if Trump inexplicably loses Florida, another state that counts quickly), we'll know who's won on election night, since there's not really a path for Harris to win without Michigan (nor Trump without Florida...or more likely, North Carolina, but I don't know offhand whether North Carolina tabulates all of its votes quickly or not - I feel like it doesn't, but I don't know for sure). Early voting of states like Pennsylvania point to another election with a big early vs. election day split between the two parties, so everyone should prepare themselves for Red Mirage 2: Electric Boogaloo. I remember being (I think) the primary person on here four years ago cheering up everyone else who was dooming on election night that Biden was actually doing just fine despite how horrific the election day results looked, and kept repeating over the next day or two that Biden was probably even favored to win despite still being behind in most of the deciding states. It will likely happen again with most of the same problem child states that have stupid vote tabulation laws, so be prepared for lots of early doom and gloom and it getting dragged out for as long as possible. Of the toss-up/swing states this cycle (Michigan, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, Arizona, Nevada, Georgia, North Carolina, and maybe Nebraska 2 - there hasn't really been much quality polling of Nebraska 2 to determine whether or not it's in play for Trump or not, so let's not count our money early just because everyone seems to think it'll easily go blue), if Kamala wins Michigan, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin (the traditional Blue Wall states that Trump managed to win by a hair that Biden was able to just barely claw back in 2020), and Nebraska 2, she has won the election.

Shoplifters (2018). An impoverished and too big family with questionable morals live in a small shack of a home while taking in a 5 year old girl that is being neglected by her parents. It's the very first live-action Japanese film I can say that I liked without any reservations, with some very interesting ideas on family and being socially isolated from the rest of the world even as it lives all around you. The film apparently won a lot of awards domestically, and I can appreciate why.

Was also trying to rescue a spider out of a bath tub once, accidentally killed it instead. Felt terrible, it did the death curl and everything. Left it on the piece of paper I was trying to rescue it with, checked back an hour later...yep, still very much dead. I started to move the paper and then it suddenly sprang back to life and wandered off. That little rat bastard made me feel terrible for a whole hour. I mean, I probably still hurt or scared it (I read online later that spiders doing a false "death curl" can sometimes just be a stress and/or self-protection thing, basically trying to cover their body with their legs to protect themselves as much as possible), so I guess I deserved it. I saved a fly a few weeks back. It was desperately trying to phase through a window, and I grabbed the fly swatter and took aim and...I don't know, I just couldn't do it for some reason. A fly. It must've been because it seemed like it just wanted to get out, and I could oblige it instead of smashing its guts all over a window. So I grabbed a cup and a piece of paper and it strangely let me catch it easily, which seemed very at odds with it frantically trying to get through the window. I put it outside...it's what it wanted, and after all, only spiders are allowed to roam through my domain freely.

The Shape of Water (2017) by Guillermo del Toro. (poster would go here, but literally every single copy of it that I can find online looks like mashed jpegos) It was a cute romantic comedy. Well, it's not exactly a romantic comedy...but the fun parts were. The rest of the movie was just kind of there. Guillermo del Toro's films never really fully convince me, but at least there was enough to enjoy here. I think it's the fantastical tone, the perhaps even childish writing in its caricatures and cliches...intersected with also being very dark and brutal. I'd say I'd like to see him try his hand at an animated film because I feel like his style would work better for that medium, but uh, his Pinocchio film was my least favorite thing that I've seen from his so far, so maybe not. That might be more an issue of the specific material than the general idea, though.

My understanding of Dark Souls is that the flow of time is not really, er...linear? Insofar as characters from different times and places pop in and out of existence as you go along your quest, which is also kind of handwavey for the player connecting with other players to go through areas and see characters or defeat bosses which they may have already defeated or interacted with. Like, I don't know that the player's tromping around of Anor Londo is really meant to represent what Anor Londo would look like hundreds of years after its fall or whatever...buuut I guess I don't know that it isn't, either. Also, on a side-note, I'm pretty sure the Warriors of Sunlight do not worship Gwyn but rather the disgraced and forgotten son (who, officially, actually turned out to be...someone else from Dark Souls 3, despite the fact that Dark Souls III would necessarily have to take place even later than the events of Dark Souls 1, so never mind Solaire and how old he might've been). I know people also liked to read into the placement of corpses of certain characters (e.g. Lautrec after you defeat him in his own world) and also how they like, instantly become ancient petrified corpses that seem like they must've always been there despite the fact that they weren't just moments ago, as if this also plays into the non-linear flow of time rather than the fact that making custom corpses for each important character would be wasted dev effort on a game where a hundred stationary dragon butts were copy and pasted in an otherwise empty giant lava pit. Maybe all that nonsense was actually a real thing deliberately designed that way, but I don't care: characters are what draw me to stories, but the motley crew of mostly passive and background-y characters a fully compelling world and story do not exactly make. The combination of jankiness and unfairness is a big part of the fun...but then again, one of my favorite things in DS1 PvP was invading someone and being faced with a team of three or four because they'd summoned gold and white spirits and had set themselves up specifically to murder invaders like me (and kept using the Dried Finger in order to draw more invaders in rather than suffer the usual ten or maybe fifteen minute invasion pause that would normally happen after you were invaded). The ensuing back alley knife fight to survive that ambush and take out the host using any means I could despite the long odds made it worth all the while. Or on the other extreme end of the spectrum, invading someone, realizing they're basically helpless, and just playing with them by trying to land a successful grab-and-kiss animation with the Dark Hand heavy attack before White Crystalling out... It doesn't even do any damage, it's just cute and funny. I suppose it does steal a Humanity if they've got any, but I usually dropped them a Soul of a Great Hero or something while I was doing an emote before leaving anyways. Yeah, I think I disabled my network adapter every time I played Dark Souls 2. I hated the movement in the game too much and just wanted it to be over with, getting randomly ganked by other players wasn't going to make it any better. Now I've been using simplewall for like five or six years on all of my personal Windows devices, which makes application and service white/blacklisting via Windows' built-in filtering only take like literally three or four seconds, so it would be super easy to just turn off Dark Souls' internet connectivity. Windows' default firewall controls are super tedious to deal with on an application-by-application basis, I'll never go back to it for my own devices when I just want most programs to automatically have their connectivity blocked (which simplewall enables you to do with a whitelist & notify system - you start up a program for the first time, simplewall automatically pops you a notification asking whether or not you want to add it to the whitelist, click yes or no, it'll remember your choice and not prompt you the next time, done...go into the UI and checkmark the box next to it if you change your mind; if for some reason you don't hit yes or no, it defaults to no, so everything is automatically blocked when you run it for the first time).

Another right-wing terrorist assassination attempt on Trump... Showed up armed to his rally in California, didn't get very far before being arrested. They might hate Trump, but they're still deranged morons, I suppose.

I've never had shrimp I don't like... Maybe shrimp I don't want quite as much of as other shrimp, but never shrimp that I'd turn my nose at wholesale. Does your family just not care that much for shrimp, or did you prepare them in a way that didn't agree with them?

I'm genuinely at a loss for what Professor Tomoe was trying to accomplish in season 3/S as well. Find the Pure Crystal Hearts...and...uh, something something, Hotaru turns into Black Lady, which he wants because...I don't even know? I think he was possessed by either demons or aliens that probably wanted to take over the world, because that's pretty much always the main plot outside of the filler arcs. Also, wait, not Black Lady, because Black Lady was Chibi-Usa's evil form... My knowledge of Sailor Moon's main story mostly revolves around remembering some of the minions and the stupid macguffins they were always after. I think Chibi-Usa and the baddies were after Usagi's Silver Crystal thingy in season 2, the Pure Heart Crystals (which probably lead to something else but who cares what) in season 3, and the...beautiful dreams in season 4? Which also probably lead to something else, but I have no idea what. Like, I remember the Amazoness Quartet turning against Nehellenia in SuperS, the cat lady (Roan, Koan?) & company turning against the phantom guy in R, or Naru losing her dream king guy...because those are things that actually happened and had character moments attached to their occurrences, but I have no idea what anyone was really trying to do. Except for Ail and An in the filler season 2 arc, I guess: they were just confused, because their demon tree from the netherworld apparently ran exclusively on love, trust, and good feelings, contrary to what you (and apparently they) would expect, so trying to feed it humans just wasn't really going to work out. Whoops.

I guess this is what I deserve for trying to be polite for the folk currently enjoying the show instead of going "this is the worst thing I've ever seen in my whole life" as would typically be more my style, so let me be a little more clear: I liked what I saw of Frieren a bit more than the first episode I saw of Dandadan, and I rather disliked Frieren. If it in any way proves helpful, here is a short and simple rating system of a number of modern anime shows I've seen thanks to some of the fine folk on the Obsidian forums: Season 1 of Spy x Family: 7/10 Vampire in the Garden: 6.5/10 Girls' Last Tour: 6.5/10 Season 1 of One Punch Man: 6/10 Season 1 of K-ON!: 5.5/10 Some episodes of Frieren: 4.5/10 Mostly fast-forwarded Devilman Crybaby: 4/10 Episode 1 of Dandadan: 3.5/10 Don't mistake me not acting a petulant bastard as feeling in any way positive towards something, some things just merit stronger words on my part more than others, .

Bigger worlds in video games inevitably means lower content density and more walking around with not much to see or do... ...But given that it's a Bethesda game, I'm not certain that it's necessarily a bad thing to put more space between the player and the game's writing/design.

Dandadan (or Dan Da Dan?), episode 1, The End of Dandadan. Because there's currently only one episode, which I am certain will remain true for the foreseeable future. I wonder what percentage of this episode was taken up by either of the main characters screaming, yelling, babbling, or whining, because I watched the whole episode, and it sure felt like a lot. I'm just never going to jive with shows that endeavour to be all-out assaults on my senses, even if they have other good qualities - I now have a headache after watching this, and that kind of makes most everything else meaningless.

No, the music in Bubblegum Crisis is super lame. Not, like, offensive or anything, but...I think the style of music is just not for me. My impression of our Four Riders of the Apocalypse was that it was more to do with the riders being of very different tastes rather than there just being four. Like, if you, Amentep, myself, and Gorth all really liked something, I think that'd be sufficient to initiate the apocalypse. Maybe this would qualify, but I'm not sure.

Did you try to defeat the Asylum Demon with a broken sword hilt, out of curiosity?

Wrong. Boy, arguing on the internet is easy. Okay, but really, I'm reading your reply here, and all I'm hearing is "you have to do what players consider to be the worst and what might objectively be the least-played content that nobody wanted to do even once multiple times...but you have to do it in more complicated and time-consuming ways". Great, fantastic, that's exactly what I want to do with my life, . If I want to play and beat Dark Souls at level 1, I can go decide to do that of my own free will, and there's nobody that has to award me some "congratulations, you are a total dip**** for doing this" award in order for me to feel rather pleased with myself for doing so. Nor for doing any other number of arbitrary goals that I might decide I want to do, because if I actually love the game and there's something like that which I actually want to do, I can just...go decide to do it. With achievements that I cannot disable tied to an always online account like Steam, there has been a non-zero number of times where I've got through the first area or tutorial or something of a game, had an achievement pop up for completing that or for something else completely minute, I go look at the achievements and see that there are seventy distinct achievements for this stupid ass game that I'm playing, I immediately think that I'm probably not even going to finish the game - much less get all the achievements! - so I close the game, I use the Steam Achievement Manager hack program to reset the achievement that just unlocked, I uninstall the game on Steam, and then I go download the game from elsewhere and play my downloaded copy instead - blissfully free of any thought for achievements or stat-tracking or time-tracking or any other unnecessary meta garbage that's not really actually part of just playing the damned bastard ass game that I'm supposed to be enjoying. No, I'm now able to just play without thinking about any of that, just like I used to be able to do when I was a kid and put a video game into an SNES or an N64 or when I loaded up a Baldur's Gate or Age of Empires save game. Just let me play my video games exactly how I want to play them, it's all I ask. What are they going to come up with next, achievements for watching the entirety of a 10 season show at half-speed with French audio and Chinese subtitles - on top of all the progress-tracking and "MAKE SURE YOU BINGE THE ENTIRE SHOW IN A DAY OR TWO OR WE'LL CANCEL/REMOVE IT"-itis that streaming services already do? Get me out of this hellhole. I've had this .gif that I once found on the internet saved to my imgur for years and years But I decided I needed to make my own higher quality version to mark this occasion, and the ability to record and make good quality 100 MB gifs that even play at the correct frame rate in under a minute is one I don't abuse nearly as much as I should Feel free to use as appropriate, @ShadySands I never found even one weapon that I liked in Dark Souls 2, so I ended up using the Lost Sinner's Sword for most of the game. It comes with this lovely unique ability where it slowly kills you as you use it, which I thought, if I'm going to be stuck using some crappy greatsword because I can't find even ONE weapon in this entire game with a good balance between speed, damage, and move set...well, at least the fact that my own weapon is literally killing my character feels thematically appropriate. Some of my fondest memories of Dark Souls were with the PVP - both being invaded and as an invader. Especially with some of the weirder places I got invaded, like in the Abyss right before Manus in the DLC. Impossible to see more than like ten feet, big area that you normally only explore once, and where the hell do invaders even spawn in this area? Ended up being some jerk dual-wielding electric Avelyns (the unique repeating crossbow) taking burst-fire potshots at me from in the dark, ended up murdering him with my trusty Great Scythe. I loved the Great Scythe in DS1. Yeah, some people like thinking about that sort of things and trying to connect dots, basically fan theorizing. The original theory for a long time was that Solaire is the disgraced son of war, who's on his rather inexplicable quest to "find the sun", whatever that actually means. Though it never directly plays into the plot, he interestingly happens to be the one who is summonable for challenging Gwyn if you use the Chaos Servant shortcut to prevent him from going hollow. Always being explicitly told everything can get a bit boring, and though I never really got into it myself for Dark Souls, that stuff really reminds me a bit of my younger days when I'd get excited thinking and talking about games (or movies or books) with other people who were super into whatever I was into, even when it was over relatively minor details, so it made sense to me that people would do so for something that caught on like wildfire like Dark Souls did. But online communities and fandoms for even the things I love are always ultra-toxic these days, so I never have much desire to go out of my way to interact with them personally. Like I said, I never got super into either the story, lore, or characters of Dark Souls personally...I think it's because while I find a few of the characters charming enough and I don't mind some more indirect storytelling and world-building, the connections between the world and its characters and its story all feel way too loosey goosey for me, and it doesn't end up feeling quite like a properly constructed universe/world that I can really project my brain into. I tend to do better with real world settings, even relatively extreme alternative reality ones (like SU, or Undertale...or even NGE, the latter of which has some very tenuous plot and world-building itself, which probably plays into why I really don't much care about the world-ending plot stuff of that series except insofar as it affects the characters and plays into the themes), as I have a better frame of reference to work with so that I can try to make sense of everything. But I have gotten into other things before, especially when I was younger, and even though Dark Souls doesn't fit that way into my brain, I think I can at least understand how it did for a younger generation of gamers experiencing something new and different that they clearly fell in love with.

I believe it actually can heal its own limbs once they're crippled, but it's hard to make out because 1. most of the lighting/visual effects are currently broken, 2. there's no sound, so you can't hear its violent bloody murder screaming as it casts the healing spell (see dog video), and 3. it doesn't actually restore any of its overall health when it heals the limbs. In-game lore says the Cleric Beast was a member of the city clergy but drank too much blood and turned into a great rampaging monster, which is pretty much what happens to everyone in Bloodborne.

Bloodborne...on the PS4, and definitely not on PC. For real this time. Yes, I know I already did this that one time a couple years back, but it's for real this time. You know, I could swear the atmosphere of this fight felt...different somehow the first time I played it nine years ago, but I can't put my finger exactly on what the difference is. It's like there's some mysterious kind of...audiovisual component missing or something. I just can't put my finger on... Oh, yeah, that's it. Huh, weird...guess he didn't feel like chatting today. (I had to play the game at literally 360p, which is what you're seeing in that video stretched up to 1080p, because my damned GPU doesn't have enough VRAM for anything higher and running on even 480p kept causing the game to explode...I guess I shouldn't have cheaped out on my GPU after all, although maybe by the time the emulator isn't completely broken i.e. sound works, it won't need quite so much? IDK: for rendering at 360p, it still looks pretty alright all things considered...).

In my defense, re-watching Cardcaptor Sakura was not exactly my decision and nor was I the one deciding when episodes were going to be watched. I could've said something about it to encourage you to re-start it, but there was the distinct possibility that my re-watch could've effectively just...died five, ten episodes in for reasons outside of my control, and that wouldn't have been awesome. Happily, that did not happen, but that makes it a bit of a lost opportunity for you. It's been recent enough that I would think I'm still more than prepared to talk about any episodes you watch and might want to talk about (and indeed, I did actually have a number of thoughts about things). I go through phases of wanting to experience new things (be it in real life or movies, books, games...) but then I also go through phases of being like "wait, almost all of the new things aren't as good as the things I already love, let's try some of those instead". For that reason, I wouldn't be opposed to an Escaflowne re-watch, I think it'd hold up just fine. I enjoyed the OVA more on the second watch than I did on the first, but I think the things which most attracted me to the show as a whole aren't going to be very affected by the course of the main story. But I understand the perspective. Speaking of Steven Universe, I've been re-watching the whole series with my nieces and we've been having a great time...in the middle of season 4 now, and though the main story is great and all, the show as a whole is starting to get a bit off-kilter just as I thought it would. Seasons 1 and 2 are by far the most cohesive and consistent from episode to episode. I confess to have yoinked 2-3 episodes out of each season, though - no Onion Trade or Rocknaldo or Onion Gang or Rising Tides, Crashing Skies for us. Too bad, so sad, GOODBYE ONION AND RONALDO! Kazuo Umezu(?): I apparently tried something called "Orochi", but I remember literally nothing about it, so I'm guessing I didn't get very far. From Junji, I also tried "Tombs", "Venus in the Blind Spot", "Deserter", and "Soichi", and I bounced off all of them pretty quickly as well, so I'm fairly confident that his writing just isn't for me, no matter the cool concepts and art. I'm the worst, I know: it's inexplicable the things that do just randomly click for me versus the ones that don't...even I am surprised sometimes.

Uh, I may or may not have just made it to the end of the first arc recently (i.e. episode 46/70...also, the first movie). I guess I should've said something. Whoops, that's my bad. I wasn't necessarily planning on continuing to watch into the second arc any time soon, but maybe by the time you catch up? Well, I'll make sure to let you know when I re-watch Carried by the Wind. ...I also recently re-watched Carried by the Wind. Sorry, it was because I got a bee in my bonnet and went out and actually bought the physical DVDs a while back, and I just started the first episode to compare the quality of the full DVDs against what I had before, and...well, Myao is hilarious and the best and it's a pretty short show! Vampire Princess Miyu, maybe? I mean, I already re-watched the OVA a while back, but I didn't start the show proper yet... I'll definitely tell you if I ever restart Sailor Moon, I promise. I'm pretty sure you'd literally kill me if I ever started re-watching Sailor Moon and didn't say anything to you. It's only with anime that I ever hear about shows being grouped by season, though...

In theory, so am I, but in practice...well, if the writing consistently just doesn't click for me, it can become increasingly difficult to see the forest for the trees. Though in all fairness, almost all manga I've tried I've really struggled to stick with because I find the writing to not work for me, and the few exceptions are...generally quite silly. Is there any particular reason anime goes by seasons of the year? On the site I use to track what anime shows/movies I've seen, I actually setup a custom filter on my adblock that automatically blocks any announcements mentioning the seasons because I really don't care about new shows or when they're going to air. I would have enjoyed them more if only I had enjoyed them more.

MADHOUSE A-Girl - OVA - 1993 Azuki-chan - Movie - 1995 Barefoot Gen - Movie - 1983 Bio Hunter - OVA - 1995 Cardcaptor Sakura - TV Series - 1998 Cardcaptor Sakura the Movie - Movie - 1999 Cardcaptor Sakura the Sealed Card - Movie - 2000 Carried by the Wind: Tsukikage Ran - TV Series - 2000 Clover - OVA - 1999 Devil Hunter Yohko - OVA - 1990 Doomed Megalopolis - OVA - 1991 Genma Taisen: Harmagedon - Movie - 1983 Hiroshima ni Ichiban Densha ga Hashitta - TV Special - 1993 Kiss Me on the Apple of My Eye - OVA - 1993 Mai Mai Miracle - Movie - 2009 Memories - Movie - 1995 Mermaid's Scar - OVA - 1993 Metropolis - Movie - 2001 Millennium Actress - Movie - 2001 Neo Tokyo - Movie - 1987 Ninja Scroll - Movie - 1993 ONE PUNCH MAN - TV Series - 2015 Okko's Inn - Movie - 2018 Paprika - Movie - 2006 Paranoia Agent - TV Series - 2004 Perfect Blue - Movie - 1998 REDLINE - Movie - 2009 Tetsuwan Birdy - OVA - 1996 Texhnolyze - TV Series - 2003 The Animatrix - OVA - 2003 The Cockpit - OVA - 1993 The Diary of Anne Frank - Movie - 1995 The Fantastic Adventures of Unico - Movie - 1981 The Girl Who Leapt Through Time - Movie - 2006 Time Stranger - Movie - 1986 Tokyo Godfathers - Movie - 2003 Twilight of the Cockroaches - Movie - 1987 Unico in the Island of Magic - Movie - 1983 Vampire Hunter D Bloodlust - Movie - 2001 Madhouse is the studio from which I've watched the most distinct movies/shows. Though I like or love around 70% of these, not everything was a winner...and though I wish I could say Frieren was my least favorite among all of them, that honor still goes to Redline, followed very closely by Ninja Scroll.