Bartimaeus

Sakura in Hong Kong: The Movie*! Fun fact: the English dub of this movie did the Sailor Moon English dub thing and replaced all of the music with new trash. What's up with animes doing that? Happened in Dragon Ball as well and that U.S. score is...well, it could be worse, but it could also be a lot better. ...No, I didn't watch the English dub, but I did switch to it for a few seconds and had to switch immediately back. I happened to catch Tomoyo's voice during the few seconds I had switched and she may as well have been a completely different character because I didn't know who the heck that was, but that was not Tomoyo. I'm very sensitive to voices (...and everything else), don't you know? Mega...no, giga-spoiler: I did it!

Portal to hell opened in the Gulf of Mexico earlier today:

Got about two minutes into the Sakura movie, realized I have the wrong subtitles that are overly literal that I didn't really like the writing of, . I could just deal, but I've waited this long, I can wait until I can fix it tomorrow. So I'm going to just watch another Jojo's or two instead. Sorry majestic, . That's fair. Wish I could love it, wish I could love a great many deal of things actually, but we all have our tastes and sensibilities that make certain things more or less likely to work than others... Yeah, I get that hyper-awake thing as well. It's such a "funny" thing to be able to be exhausted all day to the point where I could fall asleep just about anywhere if only I could sit or lay down for a moment...then actually getting through the day (or at least most of it), deciding it's time to go to bed, and then realizing I can't because my sleepometer is completely off and now I'm going to be wide awake for at least the next few hours. Rinse and repeat the next day, and the next day... Once in a blue moon, I'll be hit with a sudden wave of fatigue and sleepiness at an actually appropriate time and I will literally just drop everything I'm doing or was supposed to do and immediately go to sleep right then and there just to be able to take advantage of it. It's a good life. Get well soon; should hopefully wear off by whatever's your tomorrow. Funnily, one of the very few things I like in abundance from just the genre/style seems to be a lot of 80s and early/mid-90s j-pop. It's like literally the only thing I can think of where I can listen to other people's playlists of random stuff and be like "yeah, I like most of this". And that's not a new development - I've known that for a number of years, and I've never understood why that of all things, especially seeing as it's not like I ever listened to anything Japanese growing up. Something about the types of voices used during that era combined with mostly fun, pleasant, easy-listening instrumentals... Someone who knows their stuff about voices should do a real quick analysis of my favorite vocalists so I can better understand what I like, .

I wish there was like...some sort of AI system that could analyze vocalists for timbre, tones, inflections, accents, etc., and be able to come up with other vocalists you like depending on what ones you already know you like. A number of people have recommended so many different artists to me over the years, and only exactly one have I ever genuinely liked...though there have been a number of "yeah, I guess they're okay"s - i.e. tolerable but not something I'd probably deliberately choose to listen to. It is the crappiest feeling having someone take the time and thought to think of you and what they think you like and dislike in order to determine a recommendation only to hear the vocalist and and be all "I'm so sorry, but I just can't listen to this". That's all to say that that lady is sadly not even one of those "they're ok" situations - I hate her voice and I am sorry, . When you like Malon the midi instrument from Ocarina of Time better than 99% of actual vocalists, you know you have some pretty serious brain problem situations. I wish I was more knowledgeable about voices so that I could like...more accurately understand and break down their different components and determine the exact parts of them that are causing me to either like or dislike them. That'd be very helpful...but at the same time, actually trying to gain the knowledge and experience to do that would probably drive me utterly mad in the process, . Music doesn't really work for me for relaxing - even music that I like that is supposed to be soothing and relaxing hypes me up instead, so that's just a total lost cause. As for nerve pain...yeah, it can be difficult. Like I said, it's better than it used to be, but there are still nights where I know that it's going to be one of THOSE days, and I'm better off served by not trying to sleep at all until I'm so brain-dead that I'll fall asleep within a minute or two of sitting or laying down. Sometimes, I really wish there were more like 25 or 26 hours in a day so I could just do that every day...sadly, I'm pretty sure that would do a number on everyone else! Yeah, but to be fair, I read Hitchhiker's when I was in 5th 6th grade (upon reflection, I realized it must've been a little bit older, because I was into Harry Turtledove stuff when I was in 5th grade and I'm pretty sure I didn't read Hitchhiker's that same year but rather the year after) and I first watched Holy Grail when I was literally about 6 or 7 (my mom was real good with those totally age-appropriate movies ...), so really only Weird Al stands out as something of an exception as something I liked and got into when I was a bit older, .

It was, actually: @Sleeping problems: Have you tried like...a fan or equivalent or something? Preferably something a little larger so that its hum is more deep or at least neutral compared to high-pitched small ones?

It's unbelievable that THEY let this guy run both Star Trek and Star Wars straight into the ground directly into the abyss. Isn't just the fact that they obviously have worked together for a while and have used their individual strengths to make it through thick and thin good enough of an explanation for why some people could easily be friends despite their differences? Gosh...what a freaking hack fraud. Those are bigger details than probably the kind of absolute garbage majestic and I are thinking of - more like the utter insanity such as the "woodoo hide" crap I linked in the image. Or any other completely inane details at the same level of stuff you'd find in RedLetterMedia's "TOP TEN THINGS YOU DIDN'T KNOW ABOUT DARTH VADER'S SUIT!". Who writes this crap? Man, is that what that is? It's perfectly okay to have characters that already have established history and friendships and such while letting the viewer figure out the dynamics through context clues and clearer explanations when necessary...

Part of why it's easier for me to start a new series I have no investment on as opposed to continuing Sakura - my brain is the bad right now, and it's difficult to give it the attention it needs/deserves. As I always say, if you don't have a consistent, logical, and interesting explanation for something, it's almost always better to never answer it. And why bother explain such incredibly irrelevant details about such terrible nothings when you could be focusing on actual characters, plots, and themes instead? Yep, just like that - you super duper got it, Star Wars. I get that as well, makes it utterly futile to try to sleep before I know my body/brain is ready to. But not only do I have severe difficulties falling asleep, once I get into a "cycle" of not sleeping well, I can't stay asleep either. That's what's currently happening right now - taking a couple of hours to fall asleep, then waking up after only being asleep for 1-3 hours and not being able to go back to sleep. Between chronic pain and chronic sleeping problems (and by the way, the former has a definite tendency of making the latter worse, although thankfully it's not quite as bad as it used to be), I'm probably gonna get dementia so young!

The only thing I know about Lil' Wayne is that he's a Packers fan, as I've once or twice seen his incredibly bizarre person at Packers-related events, .

Cardcaptor Sakura!

Pat Bev appears to agree with you, . As for me, I haven't been following basketball long enough (only the past 5 years or so) to know why I should hate CP3...please give me the basic deets so I can join you and then be mad when the Suns win the Super Basketbowl, .

It's there, but it looks so abject and like something that I'd get one minute into before I closed my eyes and covered up my ears to try to prevent myself from seeing or hearing anything of it to avoid physical pain. What? I was just posting an unrelated Tomoyo! Maybe you don't like the art style? Shame! ...But for real, I'm PROBABLY ACTUALLY REALLY going to watch that movie tomorrow morning, especially considering I've been awake just about around the clock for a few days here while being unable to sleep. If nothing else, that makes for a good time for getting through some stuff like I've been doing, . Hopefully there won't be anything weird about jumping into it from there after being away from it for...three, four weeks now?

Unlike the others I listed, I don't yet have it. ...And also it might be a while before I do. I think it's on Netflix, but uh, I'm not sure if I'll watch it on there unless I like the first episode more than I expect to, . This may shock you, but while I was posting on here, I was also watching...

Yeah, I'm done with Ranma, preeetty sure. At least for the time being - maybe I'll return someday in the future after memories of what I particularly liked about the first season have faded a little and if I'm in the mood for some insane 80s shonen that I liked at one point, . So that just means I have...Cardcaptor Sakura, Cowbop Bebop, Cardcaptor Sakura, Future Boy Conan, Cardcaptor Sakura, One Punch Man, Cardcaptor Sakura, Revolutionary Girl Utena, Cardcaptor Sakura, Gunbuster, Cardcaptor Sakura, Nadia: The Secret of Blue Water, Cardcaptor Sakura, Adventures of Gamba, Cardcaptor Sakura, Jojo's Bizarre Adventure, Cardcaptor Sakura, Heidi: Girl of the Alps, Cardcaptor Sakura, Cardcaptor Sakura, Cardcaptor Sakura, Cardcaptor Sakura. ... And now I will be starting Love Live! Wow, I really hate this - wish I had something better to watch!

I've only seen a couple of Mads Mikkelsen films (The Hunt and...something else?), and my opinion of him and the kinds of roles he can play (especially with his particular kind of presence) is already significantly higher than that of Leonardo DiCaprio. Do not want. Thanks for the recommendation.

Actually somewhat miraculously, Giannis has apparently escaped relatively unscathed after the initial reports of a torn ACL - all his ligaments are perfectly in tact. Unsure if he will be able to play for the rest of the playoffs at this point, but that news in of itself is quite wonderful.

I'm trying to think of a single thing that I like that doesn't treat itself at least somewhat seriously. There are things that I like that very occasionally poke fun at themselves or are meta or are fourth wall-breaking or stuff along those lines, but something that does any of that frequently? Monty Python and the Holy Grail...Weird Al Yankovich...and Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy are about all I can think of across all of media (movies, television, music, video games, books...) that I enjoy, . P.S. I also watched the second episode of the OVA, and it was decently enjoyable.

Ranma...six more episodes. I think those are the final episodes I'll watch. One of the episodes, some new character trait of Ranma was suddenly introduced where apparently... Ugh, this just isn't working for me - there are elements of the show that feel similar, but things just feel noticeably off and it's annoying me too much. Before, it was like situations were being organically created and driven by characters and their interactions with one another; these episodes instead feel like it was reversed, with the wacky premises instead determining what stupid stuff characters are going to say and do, filled out with non-stop action, and...yeah, obviously, the other way is better if you care about good, consistent characters. However, I found out that three episodes in the second season were apparently produced during the original show but never aired, and instead got shuffled later into the new season. I decided to watch those and what do you know, they formed a short little arc by suddenly picking up an old plot thread from the original show and the character dynamics suddenly felt right - it actually almost kind of worked as a sort of finale to the show for me, because... The end; oh well, c'est la vie.

Yeah, sounds like Giannis tore or at least damaged his ACL. Ah well, there's always never year. Go Suns! (e): Although if any team BUT the Suns won the championship now, it would be extremely well-earned after the major injuries to all three teams that aren't the Suns (and while the Suns have had their own problems, they now stand alone in being relatively unaffected in comparison to everyone else).

Um...now Trae Young is out for game 4 against the Bucks after having apparently suffered a "deep bone bruise" in his right foot from stepping on that ref's foot two nights ago. If the Bucks end up winning the NBA Super Bowl (whatever the heck it's actually called), it's going to be one of the flukiest wins thanks to literally every other team having suffered horrible injuries on their way there.

Okay, so I lied, and I had to try another episode of "new" Ranma. They...got rid of the intro video/song entirely - with nothing to replace it. I repeat: there is no music intro of any kind. Code freaking red, guys. Now, each episode has just a short like 30 second "here's the premise of the show"...and, oh gosh, it's basically "Ranma and Akane hate each other...and Ranma can turn into a girl, and look how lolzy and ridiculous it is!". I cannot understate how bad of a first impression this is - just from that tiny little recap, it's like every character was completely flanderized. Still...I have to actually watch the episode to tell for sure how much they messed it up. Maybe it's just the intro...oh lord please be just the intro! Here we go... The animation...looks different. Not...necessarily bad different, but definitely different. Very bright and kind of washed out...and exaggerated? I'll wait and see: the more important thing is the writing. ...Well, guys, it seems like Ranma was actually only 18 episodes long. That was not good. The entire episode was constant (and mostly dumb, non-character-driven) action, characters were behaving bizarrely... Ranma's father sold him for literally a fish, then pretended to be a woman to...enter a ramen contest? This is just...it's not how Ranma's father should act... Ranma refused to save Akane on account of it requiring that he turn into a girl - in the original series, he literally turns into a girl just to buy ice cream, he literally already did that multiple times to help other people, both girls AND boys, including people that had been attacking him that he felt a sudden spark of empathy for when he realized their situations were crappy, I... ERGH, WHY DOES EVERYTHING FEEL SO WRONG?! It's like everything that had been happening, all the character development has just been completely reverted, and all the character dynamics screwed up... And then I read this post on reddit regarding the original series vs. the "new" series..: "So the original TV series has 18 episodes, and everything after that is the second series, called Nettou-hen. The first series is slower, yes, and honestly that's something I really, really enjoy about it. After that, the show does become quite fast, with most story arcs wrapping up in one or two episodes, three at the most. There are very few new permanent characters introduced (Ukyou being the main one). The animation quality drops considerably, and, as was mentioned elsewhere, there are lots of filler episodes, some of which are really, really bad." I don't even... Probably explains why a bunch of ongoing plot threads feel like they were just completely dropped in between the original series and this new episode - guess we won't be having any long-running plots and character development anymore, . Gosh, it was going so freaking well, too... I'm legitimately sad about this. And...mad! Really mad, actually! What an unmitigated disaster. This must be how @majestic feels about Clear Card vs. the original Sakura, except more extreme because it's me. I don't like it, it feels bad! I'm gonna give it two more episodes for it to show at least show a little more promise. I'm not expecting it to help any, especially because all of the enthusiasm I had just a little while ago has completely and utterly evaporated after that clown fiesta, and that's difficult to bring back once it's happened.

Ranma 1/2: It's over! It was pretty great while it lasted...and it got increasingly more and more insane as it went on. Some of the things that happened over such a short time...well, I didn't expect them to go there. But the way the "season" "ended" was very strange and...almost like they must've known they were being cancelled? Can't really understand why it would've ended the way it did otherwise. I'll have to come back to the second season at some point in the future to figure out what's what there. But now...Sakura: The Movie waits. And the next episode of the Jojo OVA too, I guess.

Heh, this is the type of stuff I'm expressly trying to avoid (not specifically in Jojo's, but in everything, and it definitely applies here), and is why I can enjoy this more toned down OVA at least a little more instead, . While I don't mind a little self-aware humor poking fun of itself every now and then, what I don't care for is stuff that is like...self-knowingly over-absurd or over-dramatic to the point of insincerity, and that's kind of the problem I run into with stuff like this (beyond just not caring for the style, that is). No humans could ever make something like this and NOT think it was all some kind of big silly joke...and when you keep doing it over and over, I get this weird sort of...disconnect where it feels like the work has completely deconstructed itself and the entire thing falls apart in my brain like a house of cards. Gotta walk the fence between sincerity and absurdity closer, otherwise I can no longer invest into characters or care about plots or the setting, and I'd be just watching for empty absurdism-based laughs. A single 2-hour movie I can maybe do that if the humor is at least right for me, tens of hours for an entire television show or video game not so much. I...probably am not going to be able to get into Jojo's as a whole, . That's like literally the total opposite of me. Hunt down everything, discard that which I definitively dislike (unless it's rare with a real possibility of not being obtainable again in the future, in which case it instead goes into cloud storage), eliminate all that which is not archivable. The vast majority of games (particularly anything post-2010, which will be the ones that take up the most space) can be easily redownloaded in the exact same format in which they were prior to being uninstalled - there is no point at all in keeping them unless I'm actually playing them, so they are deleted. A rare album or an album which I have fixed all the tags and/or the album cover to my liking, not so much - archive it. My patience would last approximately two seconds if I were to ever attempt to treat honorifics seriously, .

Question: what did the word "meme" mean to Japanese people in the 80s? Because there's a girl in this show that's reading a magazine that just says..."meme". What does it all mean, Basil? (e): Never mind, I think it's the name of a specific manga? At least, that's what it seemed like when she showed it off for a moment here. Also, this was unironically the best "martial arts tournament" (big freaking quotation marks there) I've ever seen in a show ever.

Yeah...I already have the single for this song, among others: https://vgmdb.net/album/24263 Comes with a version that's sung by Sakura herself! I have a serious music collection problem/addiction, . Freaking RIP about the song barely lasting, since it's so good. But anyways, it's the opposite for me - listening to the intro song helps me get into the proper mood for shows, it's an important part of setting the stage. ...If I watch two or more episodes in a row, I watch it on the second one just because I like the song and I'm in the mood seeing as I'm already watching the show, I guess. Animes that I like also usually have good outros, so I usually watch those as well - though Sailor Moon was more mixed on that, because some of its outros songs weren't...as good as others. Luck, .

It's surprisingly fun. Here's the real proof of how much I like the show - this is the intro that has played at the beginning of every episode: https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/s/m3x25rf5ivfqetc/94xP8kTeJT.mp4 It's unreasonably long...but I've sat through each one and I can't imagine not doing so in the future unless the intro changes for the (much) worse for the second season or I don't like the second season. Being willing to sit through the intro of every episode is a pretty good measurement of how much I like a show, I think, . Similarly, after watching the intro of every episode of Sailor Moon up until SuperS, I started skipping SuperS's intros after only watching a handful of episodes of it since I was already having significant problems with it...and then I watched the intro of every Sailor Stars episode. I'm sure it'll be just great and not at all unnecessary or weird or stupid, . (e): @majestic lmao, this twelfth episode, just a little snippet of the plot at the very start of it: