Bartimaeus

Sailor Moon... Just when I thought I was out, they pull me back in!

I couldn't understand the song, but it didn't sound half-bad to me for being completely outside of my tastes, .

1800 year old Greek-Egyptian family medallion: Thought the art style was pretty rad in comparison to a lot of ancient art.

Grave of the Fireflies has weird licensing differences from all(?) of the rest of Ghibli's stuff due to some oddities in how it was initially funded/distributed, I believe. No kidding. While you may attempt to make your peace with it, I certainly won't - yet another reason almost everything I look into and am interested in is invariably pre-2000s, .

Was okay for the first day - woke up like I had gotten run over the next day, though. Seems like most people I know that got their Pfizer/Moderna second shot have a similar story.

what the actual **** lol (also, this is not a good way to be introduced to her character, but still, lol) unrelated, someone I know that knows I'm a sailor moon fan sent me this today:

Oh man, I knew I was missing someone major when I listed the handful of examples I had: Grey DeLisle. If you ever watch Avatar: The Last Airbender, her role in that is...woof. Let's just say that you'll never be able to hear her voice ever again and NOT think of her character in that show and be immediately suspicious as a result. ...Well, that's not entirely true, because she's actually super talented and plays a number of characters I didn't recognize her as, but any character where she plays a similar sort of voice to the one she played in Airbender, . (e): Speaking of BG characters... Agreed. The English isn't...bad per se, and it's nice to be able to actually understand the lyrics directly, but otherwise it's impossible to argue against the Japanese. @LittleArmadillo0 What's your rough impression of the show so far?

The art style and design does look better. Too bad that was by no means the biggest problem with the show. I'm sure you'll love it, majestic, .

More PB: I don't mind Jennifer Hale, but I wouldn't - I love her Fall-from-Grace/Mazzy voice, so whenever I hear her pop up in something, it's like seeing an old friend again. I didn't remember Keith David being in Pitch Black, but that makes sense, since I haven't seen that movie in forever. My mom was a big Vin Diesel fan when I was growing up, so I watched that when I was fairly young. As I remember it, the way that movie ends is a little traumatic for a kid... But hey, at least it's a better movie than the sequel which I also watched as a kid...

Somehow, I get the feeling that I wouldn't enjoy that one. Maybe another time...or an entirely different life, .

Well, then I'm not sure what else I can say to PB's defense, except that both I and majestic seem to have 'loved' it. I recall that when I brought it up in the movie thread when I first watched it a while back, another commenter, maybe algroth, said something along the lines of that he thought PB was okay, he guessed - he'd already seen and loved Aronofsky's films before watching it, though, so it just wasn't very special in comparison to, you know, those. ...Might be that you like one or the other, . (e): Although if you already read all of our spoilers, I think some of the mystique would be lost on you anyways probably...probably.

Did you read my spoiler about Black Swan? Not sure, since it was contained within my mega-spoiler. Here it is again if you didn't:

Like I said, I only saw the poster directly before watching the movie. The poster didn't give me a definitive impression for what kind of movie it was going to be - though I did have some vague ideas - but it did give me the impression that it was a movie I absolutely had to see, that I would not be able to not see it, which is what contributed to me immediately watching it. It was...the first non-Ghibli anime movie I watched, I believe? Kon's Millennium Actress (which I liked less but still liked) would soon follow, IIRC...and then sometime later by Tokyo Godfathers and Memories, the former of which is also one of my absolute favorite films (and Memories is fun enough as well). Oh yeah, Paprika was in there as well at some point. Actual movie spoilers: I often connect different voice actor "personas" as well. They're not really personas, just different jobs from the perspective of the VA, but in my head, they're connected personas. There are a few different VAs, like Sarevok's from BG1*, Mr. Krabs from SpongeBob, Princess Bubblegum from Adventure Time, Fall-from-Grace from Planescape: Torment, and some others whose voices are so emblazoned in my brain as one or two specific characters AND YET THEY KEEP GETTING MORE JOBS AS OTHER CHARACTERS that eventually I start looking at their biggest (to me) roles as being sort of fusions of themselves. There was a really weird example of this in Adventure Time when Amethyst from SU showed up as a character that I knew I recognized the voice of, but somehow bizarrely and mystifyingly couldn't initially place it, and I didn't really like the character at first...but when I finally placed it as being Amethyst, it was like a flip instantly switched in my brain and I suddenly loved him (she was playing a young boy character) because I knew it was her. Weird stuff. *Boy, he sure gets type-casted into a million different villain role.

I'd be putting anything that does that in a VM so quick...

Schefter admits Rodgers and his camp not the source of any of the leaks, was not even breaking news but an "accumulation of information" he'd heard over the off-season that he decided to call breaking news on the day of the draft. Hmm. ESPN and football/sports media in general, folks. It's almost like Rodgers would not want a giant dramastorm to happen right as he was going to be out in public with his teammates on day one of the NFL Draft. It's almost like Rodgers says the mainstream media is garbage and he prefers to kill them with indifference by refusing to engage for a reason. Not saying there isn't any tension/conflict - there is certain to be...but holy crap, the amount of character assassination that was going on this past week. I was pretty skeptic that if half of what was reported true that Rodgers was going to not be on the team this coming September...feeling a little more optimistic now.

If I love the game, then I'll do everything I want to do in it anyways - why would I need achievements to provide its own set of random goals and tasks? The whole achievement system just feeds into the OCD need to check everything off of a list instead of just playing the game how you want to play it in an organic fashion. The best situation is playing something for an hour, earning a couple of "achievements", realizing you don't much care for the game or didn't want to play anymore for whatever reason, seeing you have achievements for it already, and then being forced to be okay with having just like 2 achievements for the rest of eternity. I've refunded games on Steam before just because of that. In conclusion, screw achievements - thanks for coming to my TED Talk. I'll see what I'll see...sometime soon-ish, . Oh? Oh. It should be illegal for characters to share names.

Thanks for the context. After a month+ of testing my system in various circumstances, it turns that it doesn't seem to be a particularly good idea to run the standard ECO modes anyways - can't recommend it, as it created stability problems in my experience. Weirdly, not at 100% usage - at 100% usage in like full threaded benchmarks, my system seemed to be perfectly stable, but it was instead at smaller utilization, like 10-20%, that was causing the instability. I ended up putting some smaller, less meaningful caps on my system instead. On the other hand, the power curve was a much better use of my time - gained a little power efficiency *and* some performance for it (my score in Cinebench R23 went up just about a thousand points with the stable limits of the power curve). I got a couple of additional Scythe case fans that were apparently well-recommended (up until I saw the FUMA 2 for sale, I'd never even heard of Scythe...now suddenly it seems like they're recommended everywhere for surprisingly good performance at great pricepoints), but the shipping seems to have been delayed. Once I have those, I'll try re-doing the cooler and reporting back to see if my system fares any better. I seriously have never got why the numbering scheme is a whole implied generation ahead for mobile CPUs and APUs - pretty annoying. What do you use/plan on using this system for?

I made an edit to that previous post for a little more information. Also, I had no idea it was free to watch - that's good to know. ...I prefer my blurays, but that's certainly useful for almost everyone else, .

Eek! As a big Satoshi Kon guy (see my avatar!), Paranoia Agent is on my to-do list, please make sure to use spoilers for anything plot/character-relevant! I believe KP has already seen Paranoia Agent? Not sure about majestic. Sounds like SM had a good first impression!

No, it was just on my mind because I'd just talked to them about it yesterday. And I utterly despise how everything about the show looks, but I am trying very hard not to hate the show for it going into it. If it was a longer show, I would have ruled it out already because I would not be able to stick with a show that looks the way Madoka does, but I can try to tolerate it for a very short show, particularly if the art style is deliberately clashing with the style of show that it actually is. Yeah, I despise achievements, and I wish I could disable achievements for all my games on Steam. I make do with getting indie games, which is 99% of what I ever play on PC anymore, from GOG where I can instead, . Artificial stat and milestone tracking immediately demotivates and annoys me - let me play how I want, thank you very much. Years later, they ended up introducing infinite respeccing in D2, and my relief was immense: no need to always be perfectly min-maxing everything all the time anymore.

I'm the opposite: I only look stuff up online after I've played through it. I'm also an extremely exhaustive searcher/explorer/interacter, so I usually end up finding/experiencing most things organically anyways. The only exception is when I'm at my absolute wit's end with something after trying just about everything I can think of, . Interesting how different people can approach games... I get what they were trying to do with BotW and having breakable weapons, encouraging you to handle problems in different and novel (to the player) ways, and it's really not the worst idea, but it certainly needed some refinement - or at least some improvement after some point through the game. When I get the top Lynel sword, I...stick it in my inventory and literally never use it unless I happen to find another because I like keeping it as a sort of trophy and don't want to damage it. Don't think that was how Nintendo intended me to treat rare weapons, but it's what ended up happening, . Kind of similar mindset, except I don't have any "I have to do it myself" limitation like you do - I'm more looking simply at "potential of what's possible". For example, taking the previous BotW example with Korok Seeds: I could memory edit the amount of Korok Seeds I have to 99999 or whatever - it would take literally like 60 seconds to do that, and I'd have all of the gameplay benefits of them and...literally nobody in the entire universe but me would care. But...there's a limit of...what was it, 900? So okay, I'm OCD, and so naturally it has to be the correct game maximum of 900, right? Wrong. Because if you just set it to 900, well, you can still collect other Korok Seeds out in the game world - every single one has a specific location, there's a finite amount, there's supposed to be exactly 900. If I just set my Korok Seeds to 900, therein lies the possibility to collect more than 900, because I could just go out and actually find another and get the 901th, so I cannot do that. If it was an infinitely renewable resource like rupees or other collectables, that'd be different. Someone else was just as OCD as I was, though, and made a save game editor where it would correctly set the unique flag for every single last Korok seed, and so, when I set it to 900 through that save game editor, every Korok is correctly marked as complete, and there is no possibility of ever obtaining more than 900. It's exactly as if I had actually collected every single one myself. This...I can do, and I will happily do for such an absurdly tedious and completionist task. Generally speaking, the only self-imposed limitations I generally place upon myself is to not exploit/cheat genuine challenges/tests of skill. I would never, ever play Baldur's Gate and abuse the "talk to character then attack them while they're in the frozen talk state" exploit to beat a difficult enemy, for example. I also wouldn't ever use anything like CTRL+Y, of course (...especially because CTRL+Y doesn't give you credit for the kill, giving you no experience experience nor entering your characters' kill statistics). CTRL+J or CLUAConsole:MoveToArea() or ExploreArea(), on the other hand... However, the SL1 run is one of my favorite limitations - I would've probably done it even if it hadn't been a thing in the community already. Why? You don't have to make any choices. I'm such a ridiculous min-maxer in games...when it comes to permanent stat changes. So in Souls games, I have to figure out all of the exact numbers of every stat I eventually want to have, and then stop exactly there - I'll never go any further, because if you keep going...well, where does it end? Am I really going to go all the way up to level 700 or whatever the max level is? Of course not...plus, that's terrible for the PVP mechanics if you're into that - I can't gank anyone at max level! So I figure out exact the numbers where I want my character to stop, usually either at level 100 or level 120 because that's around where the level meta used to be, and I have each stat planned out exactly. Except when I do a SL1 character, I don't need to do any planning or decision-making at all and can just play the game, and in fact, because I never level it up and just gain massive experience over the course of the game, after completing everything but the final boss, I can make a backup of the character and have it serve as a template to make *any* kind of character that I want. And the great thing about specifically Demon's Souls and Dark Souls 1 is that the games are balanced in such a way that SL1 characters are perfectly competent in terms of damage output - you just can't get hit. Well, I don't plan on doing that anyways, so no problem - bonus points that I don't have to make any decisions and can just play the game. I ended up completing both of those games on NG7 (the max) with SL1 characters. So SL1 is one of my favorite ever self-imposed challenge, because only not does it actually work and still have the game play well with just some additional but still fun challenge, but it also creates a perfectly pure character free from any limitations of choices you might have made...and with the character file backed up, you're then free to make those choices for specific character builds you want to try, . But...yes, it's not for everyone. Still planning on watching Madoka Magica, but it might be longer than I expected - I persuaded my show-watching partner to watch it with me, so it'll have to wait until after we're done with Speed Racer at the very least (which shouldn't take long, given how few episodes we have left), and who knows, there might be other confounding factors that delay it, but it's gonna happen sooner or later.

If you get too caught up with how many different things you "have" to do to 100% the game, then it is indeed miserable. I found about two hundred of them while completing the game, contemplated actually properly finding them all after having done most everything else I wanted to do, said "screw this", and then used a save game editor that gives you each and very single one (while also properly setting the collected flags for each Korok, as if you had actually collected each one). Don't feel even a little bit bad about it either, . But...you're the type of person that *has* to watch every second of a TV show you're watching, even if it's pointless or unenjoyable to you; I'm the type of person where so long as I *have* every second of that TV show, then I don't actually need to watch it - simply properly having it all is good enough for me. So I'm betting that you would feel the need to collect every single Korok Seed manually, right? And yeah, there are definitely a few obtuse points in Zelda II - there's that one dude you need to find in a completely unmarked, random section of the overworld forest in order to progress, and I always forget that he exists, . Glad I took the extra effort to be vague, since I wasn't sure what, if anything, you actually know about the movie. Literally the only thing I knew about the movie before watching it was having seen the main official poster for it, which was so intriguing that I had no choice but to try it out immediately. I still love OoT, but YMMV, . I actually own a Wii U and ended up dumping my console, then played BotW on my PC. For the most part, a much better experience than playing it on the actual console, especially since there are patches/hacks you can enable to reduce some annoyances as well as even make the game look and run better. 60 FPS patch? Don't mind if I do! Want to move faster? I'll just temporarily set the game speed to to 2x or 3x. Don't feel like chopping down a thousand trees for some random sidequest? Think I'll just set my collected wood to a thousand, thanks. I get absolutely no sense of accomplishment or enjoyment out of utterly skill-less repetitions, so I don't really bother anymore whenever I can. Some people call it cheating, I call it not wasting the precious time I have being alive doing completely pointless and unfun parts of games that are supposed to be fun. I'll get my sense of accomplishment from tasks that actually require some skill, like playing and beating Dark Souls at soul level 1...and not from freaking chopping down trees for a few hours.

@majestic

I'm always intrigued by attractive concept art, and then the song immediately is on the attack. Not cool!

Okay, to be fair, this one happened in the original show every once in a while too, and it was hilarious every time. That, and Usagi turning into a 1930s toon skeleton.