Bartimaeus

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.

@majestic SU:

Yeah, I'm generally (GENERALLY) never able to watch that much at a time - my brain kind of goes numb and I stop being able to effectively absorb or sort information, . ~2-3 hours is pretty much my limit for TV/movies in a day.

Yep, that is it (silly, I know!), but more pertinently...did you actually watch close to two entire seasons in just two days? You're putting me to absolute shame here, . (e): I should be able to watch a few Sailor Stars episodes tomorrow.

Listened to the new Demon's Souls soundtrack this morning. The original game didn't have the greatest soundtrack or anything, but it was solid enough and had some more interesting bits interspersed with some kind of generic stuff, but the new version is shockingly bad - just loud, slow, and bombastic 'epic' re-imaginations of what were originally pretty subdued tracks that had a lot more personality. Poor Maiden Astraea in particular got butchered, who originally had a really oddball and yet very distinctive song for an actually quite sad and strange boss battle that I wouldn't have ever expected out of a Souls game. I hate it when orchestral covers just absolutely destroy how the music was supposed to sound - probably my biggest complaint with the rise of complex orchestral soundtracks in the past 15 years, so many of them are just...bland and boring. I guess if you have a sweet sound system, you can probably get your ears blown off if that's your kind of thing, but it ain't mine. I do think there have been some better ones in recent history than there were in the late 2000s/early 2010s, so I'm not writing them off completely...but it seems to take a special kind of composer to do it right, and this definitely was not one of them.

@majestic

SU:

That's what we have 8-8-1 for. Also, anyone want to take any bets on whether Deshaun Watson, between his seemingly massive legal problems and saying that he won't play for the Texans anyway, will or won't play this upcoming season?

She compared the structure of the latest Disney movie, whose name escapes me at the moment, to Avatar: The Last Airbender's (the show, not the movie - by the way, great show if you haven't seen it...Legend of Korra, unfortunately not so much) in a sort of off-the-cuff tweet, and apparently Twitter immediately mobbed her for being racist and anti-Asian, especially when she initially refused to apologize...and then only begrudgingly did so before shutting the whole thing down because people were trying to dox her. Nothing good ever seems to come of being heavily active on social media. Yeah, I know, but you're making it so I have no time to watch it - all of my free-time is going directly towards keeping up with you! SU: