Bartimaeus

Do you really feel like Rei is too mean to Usagi in the show? Honestly, I never really thought much of it - outside of when she's initially introduced in the first season when she's openly questioning Usagi's intelligence and her capability to be a Sailor Guardian, most of the things I can think of where she's 'mean' to Usagi seem to be out of a place of exasperation as a result of them (Rei and the other three) having to put up with Usagi's constant silliness and melodrama. As TV viewers, we're mostly insulated from it, but if Usagi were a real person I knew and saw on a regular basis, I could very easily see being pretty annoyed with her a lot, so it makes sense to me.

My sweet little old grandma (late 70s) is in the ER this morning, after waking up being unable to breathe. She refused to get vaccine thanks to the persuasion of one of her idiot daughters (not my mom, thankfully - my mom has been doggedly trying to change her mind to get it, and my mom was one of the very first). Alas, it wasn't meant to be. We'll see if she makes it - given the extremely rapid onset of severe symptoms, I'm not optimistic. I guess here's my reminder that there are still about a thousand people dying a day from this in the U.S.

Yeah, I played just a little of EQ1 when I was about six - basically impossible to play at that age for a variety of reasons, though. The raid guilds in that game were insane - basically an entire extra job in your life to be able to do it. EQ2 I played for some dozens of hours a few years later and could at least figure that one out since a lot of things had been simplified and I was a little older, but I remember it basically being impossible to do most of the interesting content without a group - but at least the game was manageably playable otherwise. Only got to mid-levels before I ended up quitting, though. A few more years later and I tried out WoW, and a few hours into playing, I think it was my troll magess, all by myself and I realized that MMOs just weren't for me anymore, because that game's gameplay was *beyond* boring, . Social element REQUIRED, it seemed. Voyager: I actually meant Kes, but now that I look up who Seska is, I remember her as well...and the fact that I didn't like her either. Though really, I only liked the Doctor and B'Elanna on that show - not that I've seen all of it, but like the other Star Treks, I've seen a lot of bits and pieces from throughout the entire show. Paris was a borderline psychopath that seemed to always be learning the lesson of "don't be completely anti-social all the time", Janeway is basically Qui-Gon Gin (sic - insane people who aren't being treated as being insane by the framing of the show or its characters even though they clearly are), Kim and Tuvon were mostly just flat and boring, Neelix...was on and off both great and terrible, and Kes and Chakotay always made me want to shoot myself in the face - refused to sit through any of their focus episodes. Rei: Ah, I didn't realize one of her parent(s) was still around and wealthy - with her occupation at the shrine alongside her grandfather and generally wearing odder clothes than the rest while never really paying for anything (also being very possessive over the things she DOES own, like her manga), I kind of got the impression that she was less well-off than the rest of the girls - maybe not poor, but probably not quite middle-class. Weird. Matoki: Figures that Umino basically isn't even in the manga - I actually wondered if he might be an anime invention entirely! So yeah, all my homies hate how Naoko Takeuchi writes boys. Take a note from Steven Universe* and please start writing only girls from now on, Ms. Takeuchi! Although...now that I think about it, the manga stinks for the girls, too, so maybe she just can't write all that well in general. Thank goodness for the TV adapters! *Who, ironically, of course took a ton of notes from Sailor Moon...and seemed to figure out most of the boy problem, if Steven's dad was any indication.

Episode 9 (much shorter, thankfully): Episode 10:

@majestic MMOs: That explanation I can at least understand. Though an MMO would probably be my absolute last choice of genre for it being the place to socialize with others, but that's just me. I guess the one positive about MMOs in that regard is there's a lot of downtime so you have *time* and focus to talk to others, which isn't often true of a lot of other games. Voyager: Chakotay and that one brain lady from the first few seasons (...Nes...sa?) are the worst on that show. Janeway is insane, but at least she's not a complete drag. Matoki: No, no he wasn't...didn't he once say that he considered all of the girls to be more like little sisters? I'm pretty sure he said that at some point in the anime. Naoko Takeuchi seems to have some unresolved problems with boys. Was Umino a huge creep in the manga too? He was of course, a weirdo with some bad ideas on manliness in the anime, but besides those couple of times he was possessed by The Dark Kingdom, he wasn't a creep. Episode 8, fantastic episode, sorry for the wall of text, I even cut out some stuff because it was getting too long:

That's my problem with "grindy" games like multiplayer ARPGs and MMOs as well. I've heard from people who habitually play them that they either play it to "relax" or because they're "attached" to their """characters""" (???) and don't want the game to end after all that time invested. If "relaxing" is the same as "mind-numbing", then sure, I guess I find those games relaxing, too.

Diablo 2 is, of course, the ARPG that basically every AA or AAA-developed multiplayer ARPG copied for ten to fifteen years after it released - both its good points, as well as some of its (retrospectively) not so good points. Put hundreds of hours into it when I was younger, and I've occasionally revisited over the years when a new ladder has started on Battle.Net, though usually only for a week at most - I could probably still say what most every unique is just by the item type, and I still remember some of the most useful runeword combinations like Tal-Thul-Ort-Amn = Spirit, Ral-Tir-Tal-Sol = Insight, Eth-Lum = Splendor, Ort-Sol = Lore, Tal-Eth = Stealth...too much time put into that game, . Diablo 1, on the other hand, was one of the first games I ever played - played it in church on my aunt's terrible laptop back when I was 4 or 5. Good thing I knew how to keep my mouth shut - there could've been quite an outcry in our ultra-evangelical church otherwise. Uh, I'm not sure about exploits - while I knew all the exploits in Diablo 2, I never played Diablo 1 religiously enough to figure those out or hear about them from other players, . But I am playing a sorcerer on Hellfire, and I actually just got Apocalypse as a learned spell after slaying the Hellfire end boss - a bit more difficult to use casting it properly, given it costs 90 mana every freaking cast as opposed to free with the staff charges. Need to get an Arch-Angel's Staff of the Apocalypse, I guess! I'm pretty much totally off of ARPGs - can't do the constant clicking or grinding anymore, which is what I like about Diablo 1, particularly given that I can now competently play it with a controller. I'm into shorter, more novel experiences these days, . Though years back, I played through the main campaign of PoE (well, whatever the main campaign of PoE was back then - I believe the length has changed a number of times since then) on a hardcore character, got to the end, died from a lagspike on the final boss, and thought "yeah, that was a decent game", and felt absolutely no urge to keep playing. Grim Dawn I think I tried for like 5 minutes before I realized that no, I don't really want to play these types of games anymore, haha. SU:

If Chibi-Usa can shoot Usagi in the face with a gun, I don't see why she can't do the same to Helios - you just need some kind of wacky episode plot where her gun somehow gets switched with one that fires actual bullets.

Felt like I got smacked with a crowbar in my arm for a couple of days afterwards, but then it was suddenly completely gone afterwards. I hear that the second one, which I've yet to get (couple more weeks), is usually a lot worse.

I metaphorically turn off my brain when reading spoilers. It's a 'power' that I have, I guess: right now, I'm literally trying my best to remember any of the spoilers that you or InsaneCommander have mentioned for this season, and I honestly don't remember a single thing from any of it except for when I mentioned the thing about the plane. Unless I'm spoiled something that makes my brain immediately snap to attention upon reading it to re-evaluate or re-frame how I feel about a character or story, I will not remember it unless I'm actively committing it to memory. It's not a thing I guess that most people can do, and it's why I'm generally not ever bothered by most spoilers unless it's actually very important, and for Sailor Moon, the story and characters are what they are, so there's basically nothing that can make my brain snap to attention if I don't want it to. If you start just making crap up like "and then Usagi literally ****ing cut this dude's head off with her new giant meteorite axe" or "Chibi-Usa pulled out her gun and blew Helios' brains out all over the walls and everyone clapped", that would probably get my attention - silly stuff or relatively inconsequential plot points, not so much, . So don't worry about it! @majestic If you ever are looking to play it again, look into DevilutionX - contrary to the cheesiness of its name, it's a shockingly competent engine update that changes almost literally nothing about the gameplay, and makes the game run and work so much better while having miscellaneous features like letting you turn the speed of the game up and down on the fly (playing at even a modest speed boost is seriously such a godsend after having put some time into other ARPGs like Diablo II and Path of Exile - the very slow pace of the game was always the biggest problem I had with it, and no more is that an issue). I have a great appreciation for D1 given that it seems to have been designed as a relatively tight and compact singleplayer game instead of an endless grind like almost every other ARPG that's come out in the last 15 years. That, and the gameplay still holds up relatively well. SU:

@Musical: I just can't do it. Live-action musicals are death - I just can't do it, . @ArtistFormerlyKnownasKP

1. How does Kaolinite know SAILOR Neptune and SAILOR Uranus are "cousins"? Wouldn't that require knowing their secret identities? 2. Why does Haruka say "really?" like that? She sounds almost hopeful that Michiru will get killed. YouTube comments for more weird or niche videos like the Sailor Moon English dub can be great, but they're pretty universally terrible on anything more normal - they attract all the worst kinds of mouth-breathers...and literal children. Meanwhile, I see that Cartoon Network made the wise decision of disabling comments entirely - given that the show is also nominally for kids and how retarded a good portion of the adult audience is, that's probably for the best.

It's actually pretty good, too! Thank you, Prosper, very cool.

Episode 7, a pile of new people:

Does anyone remember @Prosper's modeling madness from years back? You know, this stuff: https://forums.obsidian.net/topic/64924-sorry-i-was-gone-so-long-2/?tab=comments#comment-1405156 https://forums.obsidian.net/topic/64924-sorry-i-was-gone-so-long-2/?tab=comments#comment-1408877 I'm pretty sure I found an EarthBound-esque RPG that was actually made by him or someone as similarly demented as him.

Hey, maybe that's why Michiru was trying to set up Rei with Usagi, . Episode 6:

I'm pretty sure Ami, Rei, Makoto, and Minako are somehow doomed to never fall in love, even after a millennium - such is the life of a Sailor Guardian that is either not gay or not named Usagi, .

@ArtistFormerlyKnownasKP That happens on desktop as well, except it's inconsistent as hell, and when the forum decides to eat your post, it seems to not save it for some reason. For example, I just wrote this post and then refreshed the page and...oh, it was gone. Well, that's not very helpful, forum - glad I copied it again, . Man, what the hell - I know I've seen it happen plenty of times before that it saves my post as a draft, including several times when I haven't wanted it to, but it doesn't want to do it here for some reason even though I keep trying over and over.

Seriously, don't ever write more than a couple of paragraphs without always CTRL+C-ing it - you're rolling the dice with erasing what you just spent the last half an hour-plus writing. I can't even imagine how incredibly mad I would've been I had just lost that huge spoiler that I wrote - it's literally like 7-8 paragraphs worth of text, and it's impossible to re-write all that while covering all of the same points/ideas that you originally did.

@majestic : I hate to tell you, but whatever PM you sent me was eaten by the forum software, . Any time I write a lot for an online post, I almost always CTRL+A CTRL+C all of it just in case...it's saved my hide a number of times over the years. Glad you loved the show, even though things did get a little wacky. I'd like to note for anyone else considering this show that majestic watched literally 3 seasons of this show in about 4 days - it wasn't perfect all the way through (not at all!), but boy, that is some positively fiendish show-binging, . SU mega-spoiler: lmao wow, speaking of the forum eating stuff, the forum literally actually just ate this entire giant post for me, but I actually practiced what I preached and made a copy right before trying to hit submit, thank goodness. I wonder if greater length ever plays a part into what is or isn't eaten...

Yeah, Nehellenia is actually not half-bad in Sailor Stars. She even...talks and emotes differently, even though in the English dub, it's the same voice actress. She's always using deep menacing tones in Sailor Stars and actually doing stuff, while in SuperS, she was just always screaming and yelling and making empty threats and...just seemed more or less completely infantile. It was kind of pathetic. @majestic I can kind of forgive it for being a bit of a retread...especially after SuperS. A return to normalcy is welcome after the nightmare that was SuperS. It just has to make characters act like themselves instead of angry alien shapeshifters that have taken their place while also having some funny and/or heartwarming character bits...and NO PEOPLE GETTING HORRIFICALLY VIOLATED BY WEIRDO CREEPS DELIBERATELY FRAMING IT AS SEXUAL ASSAULT WHILE AN EVEN WEIRDER CREEP HORSE GROOMS A TWELVE YEAR OLD. @Animation: Yeah, aesthetic is a matter of taste...but it goes without saying that you're either with me, or you're against me, .

Yeah, if I'm going to try to play a base-building, resource-gathering, crafting-heavy game of this type, atmosphere and tension are *required* for me to bother (it's like the main draw of these sorts of games for me...really, the only draw - I would never have in a million years bothered with Subnautica if not for its atmosphere and tension, it's what makes the core gameplay compelling), and the game is like deliberately sabotaging both from happening, so I really just can't get into it. Disco Elysium: I still need to play that. I bought it on Steam, played an hour of it and was like "wow, this seems really cool and well-written", and for some reason (I don't remember specifically why - something in real life most likely) dropped it and never picked it back up again. I'll get to it eventually...

The style of the animation for the new intro for Sailor Stars is, quite frankly, terrible. I went back and re-watched season 1's intro, and I'm immediately remembering why I literally always sat through the intro in season 1 and was able to fall in love with the art style of this show - it's just such a lovely-looking aesthetic, in general, that's mostly carried over to R and S...but not SuperS, and not Sailor Stars. The visual clarity or maybe the smoothness of the animation of the first three seasons (and especially the first) may or may not be quite as up to par as SuperS or Sailor Stars, but the aesthetic...the aesthetic, I tell you! Softer colors and outlines, more surreal-looking backgrounds/environments, more detailed expressions (or better simplified ones for farther away character models), less weird character proportions, some lovely film grain that only adds to the surreal look... These are not even comparable for me - which ones belong to which are immediately obvious, and the differences are stark. And these aren't meant to be hand-picked or anything - with the exception of that horrendous Sailor Stars intro frame, I just opened a few random episodes and jumped to random timestamps and only had to wait for a few seconds for some non-motion closer-up character shots, and this is what I was immediately greeted with. Sailor Stars (and SuperS) looks so...amateurish and less stylish in comparison to season 1, it's kind of sad. I remember thinking SuperS looked significantly worse than S, but actually going back and checking out season 1 again has made me realize what an incredible disparity it actually was. As for the new theme song...I actually like the new theme song - for a relatively more modern-sounding jpop song, it's relatively subdued and pleasant. Sailor Stars episodes 4 & 5:

A couple of hours of Breathedge. A constant barrage of toilet, meta, and absurdist humor unnecessarily taking me out of what should be an atmospheric game. I thought I would like the space setting, but there hasn't been any tension and everything feels really static, which I didn't feel at all with Subnautica...something's just not clicking for me.