Bartimaeus

WARNING to non-@majestic people of this thread: the following post is a love-letter to one show in particular. It's difficult to envision a show in Cardcaptor Sakura's vein (a combination of cute, sweet, simple, heartfelt, girly in all the right ways) somehow ever being better than it - as much as I love Sailor Moon, it's impossible to deny just how positively sublime this show is in everything it chooses to do...and it's especially powerful when you're so strictly rationing out episodes like I've been doing: every half hour episode of this show feels like it's own wonderful little movie. The sheer attention to detail and the always appropriate callbacks, consistently being completely overloaded with cuteness that somehow never gets repetitive or tired, the intelligent but perfectly age-appropriate dialogue and character writing, all the different yet sincere and meaningful or funny ways our characters somehow manage to interact with each other, and never wasting your time with anything that ever feels unnecessary... Even the art style: I sometimes wonder why I like the art so much, especially because whenever I pause the show on an individual frame, it somehow doesn't appeal to me quite nearly so much...and yet when I unpause it and see it all in motion, it somehow looks so perfect for what the show is, and everything feels framed just exactly as it should be. No, it's not Ghibli level of detail, but it still feels perfect for it in just the same way I feel Sailor Moon's art style is perfect for what that show is. The individual parts are great, but somehow the sum of them are even more so: if the show had ended right here, right now on this Sakura-has-the-flu episode, I think it would be difficult to deny Cardcaptor Sakura as being a perfect show, something I've never, ever said about any show or movie ever. @majestic says the final arc of the show, which I have not quite reached but am getting close to starting, is a little weaker than the first two arcs, so perhaps I will have to downgrade this evaluation by the end of it...or maybe not, if I keep watching it slowly and take time to appreciate each and every episode, .

Which one of them literally drowns kittens because they get in the way of her voracious love for and obsession with her own freaking brother? I'm not talking "kind of crazy" or "a bit neurotic", I'm talking "this person is legitimately mentally disturbed and should not be in or around the general populace", . I think part of the reason she's more likeable to me than she should be is that up until THAT episode, all the episodes she had a major part in were absolute silly nonsense, so even though she's being terrible in them, it came across as more fun and ridiculous than it perhaps should have. Your Name: I actually had like 4 specific complaints about it that I came up within the first five minutes that annoyed me and nearly made me turn it off...buuut one, they're things I've already complained about in other movies, and two, a couple of them weren't really problems beyond those first five minutes. It's...fine. Other people that aren't as particular as me would probably love it. Really, it's fine. There were some ideas and implementations of those ideas that I rather liked even given how ridiculous they were. It's fine.

Third Xbox One Controller? I think I'm on my sixth or seventh from since when the Xbox One released, and I don't even play very many games, much less intense ones that often...but I do admittedly use them regularly for non-gaming purposes. At one point, I saw a good sale and I got a handful for $20 each, but I literally only have one unopened one left, and I'm about to cycle back to one that only has one minor problem, which is that the right analogue doesn't work (and actually, it came out of the box that way). Every single one, either a trigger or an analogue stick goes nuts - my current one (that I've been about ready to chuck out of a window for a few weeks now) the left analogue stick can't go left without it going up-left and it can't go right without it going right-down. But you're not wrong re: Microsoft/Nintendo. I don't know how anybody uses a Playstation-type controller as their main controller, the form of those things are intolerable. In regards to wireless stuff, if I was playing something like Hollow Knight or Dark Souls, I definitely would not want wireless input...but most of the time, I'm playing more slow-paced stuff, so it doesn't really matter.

...Also, I just realized that my favorite character in a show like this is YET AGAIN the crazy obsessive one - bonus points that they're legitimately sick in the head this time around. I'm starting to think that I'm the crazy one. Your Name (2016). It was fine. Plot was kind of pants and needed a lot of of really arbitrary ridiculous stuff for anything to really work, and dialogue could be a little...wacky in modern anime dialogue fashion, but it was mostly cute. There was even a scene like 2/3rds of the way through that got me to tear up and made me remember some lost feelings from many years ago. It was fine, .

Looks interesting as basically a Switch-but-a-PC dedicated mobile gaming machine (although obviously it will also have the option to stream video and stuff), but boy, the close-ups I saw of people actually playing it, the ergonomics of the controller part of it look like it'd unbearable for me...but I do have notable hand problems and need very specific ergonomics.

The first season of Ranma 1/2 also ended with a clip show in between some other stuff, so that's weird. Thought that was strange at the time unless they knew they were being cancelled (since they had planned a bunch more episodes) and needed to do just one last episode and fill it up with like half of stuff they'd already done. (e): Man, Nanami is so terribly mentally ill, .

Thanks for the context. I'm not big on anthropomorphized animals at all, so I kiiinda woulda preferred they weren't cats, especially because I think that would've necessitated that the two main characters be at least slightly more expressive than they were (I think if I had really liked the protagonists, this film could've been less "weird and interesting" and more "legitimately great"...but they were just mostly kind of stoic and inoffensive; it really would help to have characters you're more invested in to steer the ship in something like this). And I had a real brain situation going on when humans suddenly walked into the movie out of the blue halfway through, and then sat down and talked to our main characters as if it were the most perfectly normal thing in the world - no note of it made at all. Real weird film.

I've heard that a number of times before and I used to agree, but I'm not sure that I do as much anymore, especially as I've moved almost entirely into watching only either smaller (and usually more independent) films that make little to literally no use of CGI...or straight-up purely animated stuff. I'm usually not watching anything these days that would really have much of a budget for CGI in live-action...but I guess occasionally I do watch something that makes some use of it for odd and ends in a more low-key manner, like The Lighthouse, so there is that.

Yeah...but it was incredibly ugly and sloppy, not to mention horridly officiated. Neither team looked like they had any business in being in the Finals, in a series plenty of people are already putting an asterisk next to...

Have not been able to come up with any semi-intelligent theories on that yet. Weird show does weird things is all I've got so far, . Well, he certainly had the right idea, especially with what he was given to work with in Mamoru, .

I already used my Dr. Phil seizure gif, which is a shame, because what I just watched now deserved it a lot more than Utena: Night on the Galactic Railroad (1985). Some sort of extremely theme-heavy, incredibly slow-paced, deliberately plot-thin metaphysical space journey about eternity, time, death, and being left behind with lots of strange philosophizing kind of movie. As slow-paced as it was, I have no clue what the hell happened in this film or really what it was trying to say in the slightest. I don't regret watching it, because the art's quite nice and it was weird and interesting, but it was not entirely dissimilar to watching The Tragedy of Man (2011)... ...but more Japanese and in anime format. If you want a sample of the kind of scenes and dialogues you can expect out of this (although this particular scene doesn't really have any of the more interesting-looking backgrounds or compositions throughout the film, of which there are a number of), I made a clip: https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/s/nrg2e94izop6w5y/xrAvhHikai.mp4 Your guess is as good as mine on what any of it's supposed to mean, because I have no clue. Nope, not even why the guy at the end just disapparated suddenly. Very much a "what you make of it" kind of film...not sure if I was ready for this at 5 AM in the morning. I think if this had been faster-paced and a little more extreme instead of the slow-paced plodding kind of style it had, it might've been able to melt my brain trying to keep up and make sense of anything that was happening. The sheer amount of interesting or weird anime I can find in just the 80s is a little bit much to grapple at times...

Utena, the curry episode: Narrator: He was not.

I cannot believe the Bucks won that. Dear lord.

I'm trying to think what the last "big" live-action blockbuster movie that I've seen was, since I literally never watch stuff like that anymore. I was forced to watch the horrid live action Beauty and the Beast a few years back? ...But that still came out in like 2017, so even that's still some time ago. Emma Watson in a singing role when she can't sing, what brilliant decision-making on the part of Disney. ...Most of The Force Awakens? Oh my, that was in 2015 - hard to believe that was that long ago already. Yeah, I don't think I'm going to go back to watching that kind of crap anytime soon.

From the RLM review of it, it sounds like the big action CGI snoozefest crap in Black Window was somehow WORSE than usual. And she's supposed to be a martial artist, but she doesn't actually do any martial arts? That's like having Spiderman not sling any webs...how lazy can can the movie get?

That boy ain't right.

It will be episode 7 + 8 tonight...probably! I'm reliably unreliable about these things, plus my team is playing in the Super Basketbowl tonight as well, so we'll see, . It's happened once or twice already, and those interactions have been very different and really good (e.g. relatively early on when Sakura and Meiling were discussing what kinds of gifts they should give, when Meiling thought for sure Sakura was going to more or less literally kidnap and murder her, ). Although I like Kero, him treating Meiling like garbage all of the time makes natural and pleasant interactions with her difficult and needlessly antagonistic.

That's probably a good way to describe it. Yeah, it was like...the B-movie equivalent of a semi-magical girl semi-parody anime that's surprisingly not half-bad. Nothing groundbreaking by any means, but it was fun and I don't feel completely embarrassed to talk about it, . It's only available on DVD from what I was able to discern. The intro song bit for both parts has more action in it than probably the rest of the entire show combined, weirdly. Really, when I saw this (and similar stuff) in the intro, I figured it was going to be all or at least mostly action, and then it wasn't: I should be watching Utena regularly until I'm finished with it, because I'm not watching it alone which means I actually have to put effort into maintaining a schedule of watching it or risk the wrath of my other party (who is the opposite of me and needs to regularly watch shows at more or less pre-determined times), so prepare to be quickly outpaced unless you immediately drop everything else to binge watch it, . It is a seriously sad state of affairs that Clear Card has disappointed you so much that Love Live continues to be more fun, .

Yeah, I called out her oedipus-except-for-her-brother complex literally the first scene they appeared together because of the weird way she was acting towards him and said that was going to get real uncomfortable...and so far, it's been REAL WEIRD, but I guess not exactly uncomfortable yet even though it really should be. There's a lot of strange thematic stuff going on in this show that I'm just going to ignore and take at face value instead because trying to follow it all is just too difficult. I also watched a two-part OVA from 1989 called Assemble Insert. I expected to watch this for literally about one minute before turning it off (that's usually how experiments in random animes like these go), but it was decently funny, cute, surprisingly not embarrassing or fan service-y, and just overall competent in a goofy 80s anime kind of way, so I watched the entire thing. Basically, the gist is that there's a small-time super-villain group with powerful mech suits called the Demon Seed (named for reasons I was unable to discern, since the name didn't seem to have any obvious meaning related to what they do or even look like) terrorizing Tokyo, and the government has no idea how to deal with them. They don't really do anything except rob places to make money, though, so it's not really the government's highest of priorities to deal with what is basically just a really strong group of undefeatable bandits. A certain branch of basically reject/failure police that the government seemingly just wants to fire are tasked with finding out how to deal with the Demon Seed, and they come up with the crazy idea of finding an idol that will "fight" the Demon Seed publicly - not with the intent of actually defeating them, but just to make it so that the public feels better about the whole thing, since having a cute face be their public protector will necessarily make it so that people will be less upset with the government not being able to fix the actual problem. Typical government stuff, really.

A couple more episodes of Utena. Though the show is not really very much at all like Steven Universe, this show is basically Pearl: The Origins Show - very obviously where so much of her overall design (personality, themes, the way some of her movement is animated, even her music and expressions to a degree) are inspired from. Pretty weird stuff. (e): Another two - Nanami's a riot. Ikuhara's weird surrealism and self-memes are already out in full force...

Well, good luck with that - that's one bridge too many for me to ever cross, . Speaking of Utena, coincidentally watched the first two episodes of that yesterday. Seems pretty solid and interesting, if kind of bizarre and full of symbology I'm probably not ever gonna get. Already noticed a few distinct Steven Universe influences within just those first two episodes too.

I assume the distinction is the race of men - as opposed to elves, dwarves, etc. A little odd that they're not just called "humans", now that I think about it. Perhaps in order to suggest that the other races weren't inhuman?

...So would this be a bad time to tell you that those semi-hack fraud CLAMP people made a spin-off series where Sakura and Xiaolang are apparently the main characters in some kind of weird alternative crossover universe or something, called Tsubasa: Reservoir Chronicle? No, I am not making this up, I accidentally stumbled across it a while ago and my brain nearly broke and I pretended it didn't exist. Because I feel like it might be a bad time to mention this, given your OCD need to complete everything in a series and all. Here's an interesting screenshot I saw from it with zero context because I don't know anything about it:

I still have a bunch of IDE cables in a box somewhere that I'm keeping for who knows what reason...I guess I ought to go through some stuff.

Are you sure?