Bartimaeus

USA wins basketball gold medal against France, but just barely. Avenged their sole loss to France that happened in their very first game of the tournament, but did not really look too much better than they did the first time around...but it was enough. For a team made up of All-NBAs and All-Stars, it never really played like it should've...but it got the gold, and that's what counts.

Part 1 of 2 of Crusher Joe (1989). Man, 1980s anime sci-fi in HD...a great transfer too. But unlike that trash Iczer One, this actually had good writing and dialogue, a solid cast of characters (that it only spent a couple of minutes introducing before getting right into letting them do their thing in the movie proper - a good choice, and one that I wish more modern entertainment would take heed of sometimes), good VAs, great animation (note: not art style, which is also good but distinct from the animation, the actual animation itself is great)...and I was actually really into the plot and action, which is rare for something like this. Just really all around good. Actually, outside of the first few minutes where I wasn't sure what I would be watching (since I don't really investigate random stuff I try very much beyond looking at a handful of screenshots to get a basic feeling for it, maybe a very quick glance at the genres), I was rather reminded a bit of... ...and in a good way. Basic premise is that "Crushers" are space-faring crack-teams that take care of...well, space problems that need immediate and expert response. Our team, lead by one Crusher Joe, is hired to rescue a small asteroid-moon whose course is going to terminate into its host planet, a dictatorship planet that has been using the asteroid-moon as a prisoner colony for political dissidents. ...Okay, is it just me, or is the box art for this inexplicably a little terrifying? (e): Part 2 was just about as good as part 1. Good stuff.

For a different kind of "scientific discovery"...: Scientists spot warning signs of Gulf Stream collapse

I have a ridiculous amount of shows I've bookmarked that will probably take me literally a decade-plus to get around to trying all of, which I've bookmarked on the basis of few different criteria important to me. Luluco was a "okay I'm probably gonna hate this, but it does match my criteria and you never know" try-out. Well, I actually didn't hate it, it was decent enough, I think - kind of like Kill la Kill, really. Also, because I have so many things bookmarked, I kind of feel a pressing need to steadily try them out purely for the sake of clearing them out - though because I'm already watching a few other shows as it is, I am focusing on trying out that which I most strongly believe I won't like. The risk I run when I do that is I might end up trying something which I actually do like and only adds to the current logjam of shows I'm watching... Though at least I'm usually watching one or two of them with my other party, which helps make steady progress with at least one of them (Miyu is that one right now, and unsurprisingly will be the first I finish out of everything). Xiaolang/Sakura: It felt very right, especially after he's given her a couple that really rightfully belonged to him. Nice to see that reciprocated, . He tried to play it off all cold, of course, but it's a little difficult to believe when he's the one that started it, . Hope you enjoy your deserved vacation!

Season 1 of Uchuu Patrol Luluco. "Season 1", which is about 20 minutes long. Tonally, it's basically a completely irreverent OK K.O. that's also on the speediest of speed. "Normal" high school girl wakes up one morning and...

I've heard legends of a rare kind of boss that can genuinely understand, appreciate, and even eventually reward those who go above and beyond...but they're only legends, . Hey, speaking of Cardcaptor Sakura...more Eriko! A few more episodes of Miyu, including a two-parter...

Not inaccurate - think I told KP that it was a bit wacky and all over the place. The final part is probably the most straightforward (and certainly my favorite part). @Work: Example #523,785,129,816 proving that it basically never pays to overperform or reveal aptitude or talent for something outside of your job description... What a fall for grace for Sakura, . It's always amazing what incredibly talented people are able to make...and then subsequently miss the mark so badly on when they try to continue it.

Perhaps...but if I were like you in that specific regard, I'd most likely never start any new show ever again out of abject fear of being forced to sit through the entire thing. Nothing longer than maybe ten episodes, anyways, . Hope you like Miyu - I imagine it'll be primarily dependent on whether you like the titular character herself, . Will you be starting with the OVA or the show first? (I'd...probably recommend the show first, OVA second? The show is a bit more conventional.)

Iczer One (1985). Watched the first part (of three) purely on the basis of seeing some HD shots from the bluray - 1980s anime in HD is always nice. Really mediocre to outright terrible everything else, though: do not recommend. Pretty bad writing, poor Japanese voice-casting, bad plot, really bad characters, uninteresting action sequences...and it doesn't even culminate in "it's so bad it's funny" - it was just boring. There are much more deserving works to get an HD transfer than this...of course, that's more dependent on which companies actually saved their original materials to be able to do so. Anyways, glad I'm not majestic, because I have no intent of ever finishing that. A few more episodes of Miyu. Solid except for one, where some new guy became the protagonist for the episode and Miyu was barely in it...and he kind of came across as unintentionally borderline mentally handicapped on top of being completely unlikable to me.

https://www.si.com/nfl/vikings/news/geography-red-flags-character-vikings-risk-jeff-gladney "I always think it’s interesting to look into why teams take risks. Which brings me to the second of the Vikings’ first-round picks, Jeff Gladney. The Vikings were able to pick up an extra fourth-rounder to move down from 25 to 31, which better positioned them to roll the dice on Gladney, who’d had some issues (failed drug tests were part of it) at TCU. One reason they felt OK? Geography. The hope is that getting Gladney (who they believe is a good kid) out of Texas and bringing him to Minneapolis will force him to grow up a little bit, the same way such a move from Florida led Dalvin Cook getting past some of the trouble around him at Florida State. Will it work? We’ll see. But it’s clear the Vikings believe they can create the right kind of environment for guys like Gladney." ... "Jeff Gladney was indicted by a Texas grand jury and charged with domestic violence by impeding breathing, for “intentionally, knowingly, and recklessly“ causing bodily injury and applying pressure to a woman’s neck and throat. If convicted, he could serve up to 10 years in prison" "The #Vikings have released Jeff Gladney following his indictment." The hits just keep on coming for the Vikings, who were also just announced to have the worst vaccination percentage in the league with head coach Zimmer being absolutely apoplectic about it and the dummies setting his team back. Their vaccination percentage is lower than the general adult population of Minnesota somehow.

The twisties are no joke - good way to become a paraplegic if you try to perform with it. Glad she managed to escape uninjured.

Don't need the Bucks to win again or nothing, but these garbage superteams are so boring - hope both the Lakers and Nets get knocked out of the first round next year.

"It's not real until it affects me." -Collective humanity 2021, seconds before Chicxulub-class asteroid ends humanity (P.S. Last I heard, the league was sitting at around 85% vaccination? Really not too terrible, and it's been going up...could be worse, and it of course could be even better.)

Just waiting for news that Rodgers isn't vaccinated... He runs with some pretty wacky people and is pretty independently minded, really wouldn't surprise me. Hope not, though... (e): Apparently, Packers are making non-vaccinated players wear their masks during practice and pressers, and he hasn't, ergo I guess I can assume he is vaccinated. Hooray!

Also, I don't watch any "anime today", because "anime today" looks...well, the way it does - i.e. literally revolting to me or simply trash, or a combination of both. Virtually all of the anime I watch is 90s or earlier, and while GitS's art is good and I like it well enough, it doesn't really...like, scream outstanding or anything. For more "realistic" art styles, Satoshi Kon's Perfect Blue or Millennium Actress are more my speed, . #NotMyAndroids: I don't need this lousy Blade Runner knockoff, .

As always, I'm a characters kind of guy first and foremost, and those characters fell really flat for me and it was difficult to care about anything else as a result. Characters first, themes and plot second, thank you very much. Great soundtrack, though.

The Ghost in the Shell anime was really mediocre. Sorry, not sorry: I'm still out there looking for my perfect android-related media, GitS ain't it. @KP the meanie zucchini Fair enough, .

I think I talked about this before when ratings last came up in here, but I really think ratings only make sense when you have the context of a person's entire list of ratings to compare again. Me saying Cardcaptor Sakura is a 9.5/10 doesn't mean a danged thing unless you can look at my other ratings and see hey, he's only given literally one other thing out of literal hundreds of other things he's rated a 9.5 or greater before, so that must really mean something. Meanwhile, other people give out 10/10s constantly just because they thought something was good and they're used to giving perfect scores for literally anything that they think is just good. Not me - like I said, my average score is 61%, and out of the hundreds of movies I've watched, I've only given an 8/10 (what I consider to be "great") or higher a total of 26 times, so that rating really means something within my rating system. But you can't see all of my ratings since they're on a private site, hence why I was trying to give some quick context with the list I made, . As for what an 8/10 means...like I said, it means "great" - how it gets there is irrelevant. Some might just be consistently great but never go beyond that for whatever reason, others might be utterly perfect in some aspects (e.g. Steven Universe's main cast are my idea of "perfection") but fall short in other ways (e.g. average to poor filler episodes that feel kind of irrelevant and inexplicably drag down later seasons). Earlier, I said I rate stuff roughly 75% subjectively (how much everything appeals to me specifically in terms of characters, themes, plot, setting, world-building, style et al.) and 25% objectively (how well-constructed all the elements are, attention to detail, competent writing, acting, and so on). For movies, I don't usually give out anything more than a 7.5/10 if a work has what I would consider to be some kind of large bugbear or hangup that markedly took away from its enjoyment unless it really truly was consistently great except for that - I'm a little kinder towards longer TV shows like Sailor Moon purely because of their length and the quantity of good times given outside of that, so I don't usually penalize e.g. something like SuperS quite as much as if the equivalent were to happen in a movie. That's usually not an issue for me either, especially considering a lot of my favorite stuff (including anime) is often quite aged, so clearly I have some kind of appreciation and fascination for older stuff. It's just that...I'm a really tough person to appeal to, and I usually have excellent (but by no means perfect) intuition for what will appeal to me based on how a film/show is communicating to me right off the bat. How themes are being communicated, the types of characters used (and even the way characters just look, talk, or express themselves), art or filming style, setting - everything like that has a sort of unconscious language to it. My intuition for anime is still admittedly a work-in-progress, since it's not a medium I've had extensive experience with and so I'm still forming heuristics for it, but it feels like it's getting better, and when I take just even a super quick look at Akira, it seems like a very masculine (in the worst sense) main character that I'm probably going to hate, an edgy almost cyberpunk-ish setting that I'm probably not going to care for, looks way too action-oriented for my tastes... It just doesn't look like it's going to appeal to me. I'm very particular about what I like, and these are already setting off red flags for me - I'm still going to give it a chance eventually, but that's my perspective going into it. lmao - while I'm usually a bit of a proponent for darker stuff (up to a limit, of course, and given the right kind of kid who can handle it) being suitable for younger audiences because of how meaningful and formative such works can be at that age, I think that's a bit much...

I noticed you didn't include Sailor Moon Crystal in your list of ratings. Care to revise your statement that nothing could really be worse than a 5/10 here? Don't expect to like Akira either, though I'll eventually try it just to try it because of how apparently important and great it is. Doesn't really seem like it'll appeal to me in any way. All your other ratings make sense to me. I didn't think to include movies, but that list would be a whole 'nother thing, especially if I were to include Ghibli movies. I wouldn't mind having a similar rating/time-keeping mechanism for both music and video games, but it's a lot of work to get started and keep up with...especially for music, where I have a ton of music and tastes are more subject to change over time than most other stuff. She's not really the type to suck the blood of randos, especially because her bloodsucking effectively ends her victims' lives by permanently placing them into a kind of catatonic zombified state, which she uses somewhat liberally to mercy-kill those whom she deems too hurt or damaged by the demons she hunts. Not a hundred percent sure why it works like that, but it's been the case in both the OVA and show.

Taiwan wins badminton gold medal for the first time over Mainland Taiwan in championship game, .

More Miyu. Last episode opened with Miyu's best friend Chisato asking Miyu if she could stay over night at Miyu's place, and Miyu not being able to accept because she's homeless and usually waits out her nights under the moon at the top of an unspecified shrine. Cut to nighttime and her doing exactly that while discussing with her pet demon their choice of locale...cue some woman screaming far off into the distance, Miyu tensing up and trying to spot the cause...and then seeing some guy killing himself by jumping off from a balcony many floors up in an apartment complex. Miyu looks slightly disappointed, then smiles - all is right in the world, . That's the kind of show this is, . ...Also, probably my two favorite episodes so far were the last two - moving on up towards a 7.5 if it keeps it up, .

In the event that it may help you, this is how I would rate a number of anime/cartoon shows I've seen thus far, movies included where applicable (...and using notes from the site where I rate stuff): Legendary Idol Eriko is currently teetering between a 7 and a 7.5, I think; the OVA Miyu was a 6.5, this anti-magical girl TV show Miyu is sitting at about a 7 as well six episodes in. A 6/10 is "fair", 7/10 "good", an 8/10 "great", and a 9/10 "fantastic"; I've never given out a 10/10. On my movie site, it says I have rated 324 movies with an average rating of 61%, so being a 7/10 is actually legitimately supposed to be "good". Anyways, hopefully this provides some greater context for how I feel about the shows I'm seeing/have seen, . *NOTE: My ratings are...I'd estimate roughly 75% subjective, 25% objective; I'm not about to give a show or film that was objectively well-made but very unappealing to me a 1/10 just because of that, and the inverse is true as well; so just because I place Cardcaptor Sakura higher does not necessarily mean it is my all-time favorite show over Steven Universe...just that its objective qualities are so good on top of being subjectively fantastic. Meant to reply to this at some point, but forgot. Well, first of all...it was the opposite for me, everything felt even dumber and more fraudulent because of both of those, but whatever, more importantly...

More Miyu: this show so far is functionally basically a not-as-good (in either senses of the word) horror version of Cardcaptor Sakura...but a horror version of Sakura is still pretty interesting.

If it makes you feel any better, I used to pretty regularly call you Skarpen_One before I used my adblocker to strip your existence from these forums via some custom filters, but...wait, why am I in here again? Oh, right, because I disabled my adblock a couple of days ago and forgot to re-enable it.