Bartimaeus

Al Franken? ...Crappy part is, Al Franken was one of the better senators around (in terms of actually doing their job).

so this is basically doki doki iliterature club but in tv format

All I'll say is that...............I'm glad that I can watch a few more episodes now that you've gotten a little farther in, . Though season 1 is more lowkey as I said, there are definitely details (both direct and subtext) to pay attention to.

Do you actually want me to answer those questions?

I wouldn't go that far - objectively speaking, most everything everyone does is a stupid waste of time, and I'm more inclined to believe the the main reason is sociological (after all, the idea of truly trying to achieve male-female equality becoming actually widespread throughout society is a relatively new one, and the effects of such inequality, same as in the case of e.g. institutional racism, are still heavily baked into and felt by our society, as they will be for decades and decades to come...and Chess, after all, has been a male-centric game for most of its existence). The first episode was my favorite episode - I thought it had a right mix of some funner (albeit small) character stuff while offsetting the more serious themes it was hinting at to come. But then again, I don't hate Chess (in fact I was little annoyed that they didn't spend a little more time showing the actual games at times, at least for the most important ones - there's only so many hours of looking at Anya Taylor-Joy's expressions that I can take!), and I have a positive predisposition towards some of the premise elements of the show. Ah well.

The article doesn't say and I can't seem to figure it out - what's the exact significance of it being abbreviated to "SAP"? All this whining and complaining from both the left and the right about DINOs and RINOs is kind of hilarious. Very often, these types of politicians are where they are because they are the only ones who can win given their locale. Joe Manchin is a conservative Democrat, and sure, that sucks right now for passing a progressive agenda...but he's the only kind of Democrat that can win in West Virginia at all. He might be literally the only Democrat who can win there at all given his long family history with the state. So if it wasn't him or someone just like him, the Senate would still be 51-49 Republican right now. Same with a few Republicans like Susan Collins of Maine. I bring this up because Trump is whining and screaming about RINOs in that linked article - whether you're Republican or Democrat, those compromise candidates are critical to being able to control the Senate - if you instead nominate a crappy full MAGA or full Bernie Sanders candidate in an area that isn't receptive towards them, congratulations on automatically losing any shot of winning that seat and instead handing it over to the opposite party. Though I bet it felt great for a while to be utterly deluded and nominate someone who was predictably and inevitably going to walloped, right?

Finished the final episode of The Queen's Gambit this morning. Bleh. Final thoughts on the series, some general but not particularly specific spoilers:

Okay, so yeah, seems very similar in setup, style, and tone to the original Dragon Ball. Also seems to have been made around the same time. Guess it makes sense I was moderately entertained by it. @majestic Takahata: Now that you mention it, most of his stuff does seem to be more grounded and bittersweet if not outright dark and depressing. I think I tend to favor his work over Miyazaki's - I like my fantastical stuff to be a little more low-key and grounded, which he seem to be all too happy to oblige with when he bothers with fantasy at all. Also, it helps that Takahata can write satisfying endings to his works, which I think tends to be Miyazaki's greatest flaw. That show looks to be *so* not my thing outside of the fact that it's an inversion of the genre, but...you did say it was only 12 episodes, which is nice. I guess I can give it a try!

Write up on some anime thingies I've watched over the past week or two during my break of Sailor Moon: Horus, Prince of the Sun (1968). Isao Takahata's first film... I had a lot of trouble getting into this one. Extremely stilted, has a very generic sort of boy adventure story with very standard and kind of uncharming characters, and wasn't funny or entertaining in some other kind of way to really make it worthwhile. Congratulations on finally making something I explicitly didn't like, Mr. Takahata - the closest things to it before this were My Neighbor the Yamadas (which wasn't...bad, just the vignette format didn't really work for a long movie) and Panda! Go Panda! (which at least was weird enough to make it sort of entertaining). Ranma 1/2: The Movie, Big Trouble in Nekonron, China (1991). I knew I was in for some trouble when they introduced literally what felt like two dozen characters who all seemed to be part of what felt like an ensemble a la Dragon Ball Z within like the first 5 minutes, especially in the way that they did it. Hoo boy...and lots of other confusing stuff I had trouble catching on to for a while as well (like why are there grandma and grandpa characters that literally look exactly the same with opposite personalities...why does this lady suddenly transform into a cat out of the blue...wait, is the main character a boy or a girl - or are they both, what's going on!?). ...This movie wasn't necessarily great, but it was at least pretty funny and kept me entertained, so good job, movie. Still watching an episode of Heidi every once in a while (it's enjoyable and I like this sort of laid back natural world experience Heidi is going through...but it is a show that you probably don't want to watch too much of at a time), and I'm about halfway through gosh-danged stupid Speed Racer because I keep getting roped into watching it. Speed Racer is bizarre in that like 1/3rd of the episodes are surprisingly competent and actually decent entertainment, 1/3rd of the episodes are hilarious memes, and then 1/3rd are just inexplicably bewildering and terrible. If I wasn't actually watching this with someone else, there's no way I would've stuck with this, but as far as absolute pants shows go, it's decently entertaining. (e): Also, no, I've never heard of that show, and I don't recognize anything from it, but that would make sense.

Something to note with no-trade clauses is that they only matter if the player doesn't want to move; so if the player agrees to a trade, then the no-trade clause is irrelevant. I see Cowboys' situation being pretty similar to the Seahawks once Wilson got paid - unless your team manages to get very lucky and draft great over a couple of years while retaining all the right players and not spending on the wrong ones, you'll be forever doomed to make the playoffs most years, but not ever get much further. A lot of teams these days are going all-in on winning a Super Bowl when they get a good QB on a rookie deal while they can, and the Cowboys did take a crack at it, but for some reason mostly underachieved (probably coaching!).

Very high (higher than anyone not named Patrick Mahomes*), a lot of guarantees (just about 60% of the entire contract is guaranteed, higher than the percentage of Rodgers' last contract!), and it's of a totally average length which is generally much more beneficial to the player than the team. And this last point is the difference with Patrick Mahomes and the reason I put an asterisk, because Patrick Mahomes' average is higher right now, but will almost definitely balance out when a guy like Dak re-signs in another 4 years, and will be a significant deal for the team by the end of it assuming he stays a top 5 quarterback the entire time. This Dak Prescott deal...you get the worst of all worlds for a guy who just broke his foot. *That Patrick Mahomes deal is additionally dumb because it has like no guarantees - everyone wow-ed at the half a billion mark, but he was quite generous to his team.

I was a little peeved that I couldn't think of any historical women that ever served as any kind of role model for me...but then I realized I didn't have any historical men as role models either, so it's all fair.

First they came for J.K. Rowling, and I did not speak out, because I was not a Harry Potter fan. Then they came for Dr. Seuss, and I did not speak out, because I was not a Green Eggs & Ham fan. Then they came for me [a person with a cartoon avatar], and there was no one left to speak for me. When will this vicious cycle end, KaineParker?

Joan of Arc. This one should not need much said about it, though the details of her life have almost definitely been revised or embellished in some parts because the 'known history' of her would seem to put her as being right up on the level of Jesus between her supposed perfection, her prophecies, and her wrongful execution - nevertheless, she's always been one of my favorite historical female figures. For only a few years of activity/notoriety, she managed to become quite the legend. Empress Theodora of the Eastern Roman Empire. Her background is not clear, as multiple conflicting contemporary histories were written about her and her husband's lives, but it is clear that she was of very humble origins (controversially so for the time). She is sometimes touted as a co-regnant (a regnant is the opposite of a regent) alongside Justinian the Great due to her unusual and intense involvement with stately affairs (her husband called her his "partner" in all deliberations, and while this almost sounds a little insulting in a modern context, it was a great compliment and quite unheard of at the time), and is perhaps best known for saving her and her husband's rule during the Nika riots in the capital. She was also a great proponent of women's freedom and rights during this particular period of Antiquity, having pushed her husband to create a number of pro-women laws in regards to legal guardianship of children, divorce, land ownership, prostitution, and for the harsher punishments of crimes against women. Theodora and Marozia, a mother and daughter who were purportedly the lords of Rome during its darkest days post-fall. They were not particularly noble or admirable women - quite the opposite, actually - but there's something about their history and its sordid intertwining with the Papacy (seven different popes in their line!) that's always made me remember them...that, and I love both of their names. I'm also fond of Hypatia, a noted (for the time) Greek-Roman mathematician and philosopher, who is best known for her resistance to converting to Christianity and yet continuing to freely teach both pagans and Christians and being loved by both during a particularly contentious time of religious turmoil, eventually leading to her horrific murder by extreme Christian partisans. I'm forgetting some others that I know that I particularly like, but oh well. You can probably tell that Roman and Greek history is my favorite area of history, . (e): Also, something that's under-known - many of the world's earliest and most notable computer engineers/scientists were actually women, something lost on most given greater male dominance in this field post-World War II and then especially so by the end of the Cold War and continuing up until now.

Sold the 5700 XT for about $700 to someone I was reasonably sure wouldn't scam me - back on my GTX 1060 for the time being. Apparently, it's a bad, terrible, no good idea to sell GPUs on eBay right now due to the amount of scammers and eBay/PayPal almost always taking the buyer's side, so I found a place to sell it where I could select a buyer myself instead of being at the mercy of whoever clicks the buy button first. Less money for it, but that's not a huge deal to me to avoid getting scammed entirely. Did lots of different benchmarking and testing of my undervolted CPU. In Curve Optimizer, most cores are around -20: one that's -15, one that's -10, one that's -30, and a couple that are -25, and these seem to be quite stable while reducing both reducing power draw a small amount and increasing performance seemingly. As I understand it, each -1 is about 3 to 5 millivolts, so that's about close to -0.1 on some of the most reduced ones - not too shabby. And finally, I ended up getting a Mushkin Pilot-E 2TB for my SSD needs. Even with the 1 TB I have right now, I've generally been very strapped for space (and has made a transfer over to the new PC difficult), so it'll be a welcome respite. Case: Fractal Design Meshify C Blackout PSU: SuperFlower Leadex III Gold 750W MB: MSI X470 Gaming Plus Max CPU: AMD Ryzen 7 5800x Cooler: Scythe FUMA 2 RAM: G.Skill 32GB 3600 GPU: Gigabyte GTX 1060 Windforce OC SSD: Mushkin Pilot-E 2TB If nothing else, it's a great time to not need a particularly good GPU, .

You're forgetting the massive asterisk on the non-Democratic side of our election, though... So I know Bolsonaro is...well, the worst, but what's the deal with this Lula guy?

I'll most likely start SuperS not this coming week, but rather the next. Won't have much time to watch anything this upcoming week (and actually, I might not be on here as much either), but it'll be better after that.

At the rate he's going, he might finish the entire show before I even start SuperS...goodness gracious. I had a month or two headstart at least on the lot of you, but I'm going to be the last to finish by far, .

Well, let's not get crazy here, . The road to becoming Neo-Queen Serenity is a long one...it's a thousand years into the future, as a matter of fact. Flunking some grades in the 20th century did slow down her ascension by a few hundred years, but she still eventually got there, and that's what matters.

Well, of course I did - it goes without saying that being turned into a giant tennis ball was obviously a highly traumatic yet meaningful experience critical to the growth of Usagi's character. Indeed, her turning into a giant tennis ball was really symbolic of the fact that she lacked her own agency early on in the show, not really having a clue what she was doing or was supposed to be doing and instead being entirely subject to the fortunes of deadly situations that were completely out of her control, while the greater players and shadowy puppet masters made her and the other Sailor Guardians dance along to their every whim...like a tennis ball being hit back and forth on a tennis court. It's quite profound, really. (e): In fact, I'd really say that it tells you a lot about Crystal that they wouldn't have the courage - nay, the GUMPTION - to turn its protagonist into a giant tennis ball like the original show did. It's all "Mamo" this, and "Usako" that - it's actually rather pathetic. How could they have so completely failed to identify what was truly important and made the original show work?

That's definitely true in regards to "most anything isn't good". Sailor Moon has my "preferred" version of time travel, which is the 'dumb'-but-less-annoying single timeline kind (...as far as I can tell anyways). The main plot of Sailor Moon barely registers in my brain, though, so they probably could've had a hundred different timelines and it wouldn't have really mattered too much as long as the characters didn't get messed up. I'm looking 'forward' to experiencing SuperS in the near future to see just bad it is, though! Crappy story incoming (although the ending's not all bad): A handful of years back, I was already having trouble with specifically my right hand and wrist on account of some hereditary crap, then I was in a extraordinarily stupid accident and had a bad neck injury that I've never really quite fully recovered from but am mostly functional with - constant neck and shoulder pain that never goes away, though. The real bad part of that was that the hand pain multiplied and it was becoming non-functional, so I forced myself to be left-handed and do everything, including using a computer mouse, left-handed. Unfortunately, I learned that it was not just my right hand that was afflicted, as I pretty quickly started having the same kinds of pain and malfunctions in my left hand. It's difficult to impress upon others how difficult and utterly maddening it is to actually have hands, but to not be able to use them for hardly anything because they're in a constant state of searing pain - pain to the point where it's frequently not possible to even sleep because of that pain. Ended up doing a lot of physical therapy over a two year period, had a surgery on one of them to try to clean up some physical problems, and developed a routine of frequent stretching, icing, and reinforcing via some elbow and wrist straps, and had to stop using any kind of computer mouse for a couple of years. Went all keyboard + bound some controls, including mouse, to a gosh danged gamepad because I could not grab a mouse without uncontrollable pain - and I do mean uncontrollable, because there frequently were times I tried to work through the pain and discovered that my hands would simply no longer listen to what I was trying to tell them to do (which is scary and also infuriating in of itself), and instead would just get stuck. Nevertheless, all that effort has culminated in having hands that are still almost always between hurting some and simply sore, but...they're actually hands that don't usually actively make me want to kill myself. That's not a joke, either - there were many very dark days during that time, more than at any other time in my already not-so-bright life (though some other personal tragedies that occurred around the same time undoubtedly did not help, but I don't need to go into that again). It is constant upkeep, though, and it's a risky proposition to try to play anything for too long...so by and large, when I do play something, I stick to short and more novel indie games - my days of playing pretty much anything for more than a couple of hours in a day - at most! - are long behind me. Once in a while, I make an exception...but really only when I actually can without too much risk. But hey, relative to a few years back, things are a lot better, so it's not all bad. And I've got other things going on that keep me busy anyways, so the loss of gaming as a primary hobby doesn't feel as bad as it used to. (e): Oh yeah, also: since I forced myself to be left-handed, I actually discovered that...I can really actually do most things equally well left-handed and right-handed, which I guess means I'm at least sort of ambidextrous? Not entirely sure on that one, but it seems to be a lot more than most people can do. I would've thought I was only right-handed my entire life without being forced to switch... Silver linings!

Alternative/multiple timelines is one of my huge pet peeves in fictional universes. Whenever that happens, it's basically an "oh, so nothing of what I've [read/watched/played] mattered in the slightest even in-universe, and might as well just not have happened? alright, okay, yeah, cool, sayonara" kind of moment. And on a similar note, if you're gonna have time travel, it's gotta be the really dumb immutable, one timeline kind - even though singular timelines with time travel make absolutely no sense because the circumstances that would make one travel back in time to change something in the past would necessarily change the future that would make it so you wouldn't go back in time...but then that would result in needing to again...which would result in them not needing to...and so on and so forth. It's always an instant dumb paradox that's easily avoidable by just...not using time travel garbage, but at least it doesn't completely cheapen the series and its story/characters with multiple timelines/universes nonsense. Never heard of Kaine Parker outside of you using it, so congratulations on me solely associating it with you. For many years, I didn't watch any television and just occasionally watched a movie here and there, and only played video games and read books - but I'm currently mostly off books right now, and I had to stop playing video games outside of the odd short indie game that gets my interest because of chronic pain reasons...which is why I started getting into movie-watching, which eventually lead to me seeing a poster of Nausicaa that caught my interest and then seeing the rest of the Studio Ghibli films, which eventually relaxed my attitudes toward anime a little because up until a few years ago I'd basically been totally all... ...my entire life, so that marked change is now how we find ourselves here, watching Sailor Moon. What a journey it's been, folks. Mind you, the weeaboos who like all of the generic trash being put out today are basically still aliens to me, but at least I can find a little ground with the slightly more refined people, .

Well, isn't that convenient? In regards to the "the original show was on the edge of a knife": it really is crazy how some stuff happens totally as a product of lucky happenstance - or the opposite, completely fails because of it. Pour one out for all the millions of great ideas, whether in entertainment or science or anything else, that people have had that didn't turn out because of some absolute random garbage happening that made it fail or be not even given a chance to happen at all. Sailor Moon made it for the most part, but was effectively the weird amalgamation of ideas, compromises, and redesigns between a pile of different people. Sometimes collaboration and compromises between different creative minds, particularly ones that would otherwise be limited in their particular fields of vision (e.g. Naoko Takeuchi), can be surprisingly better than just one person being given the reins. X-Files: I've seen all of the first season, and a bit of the later seasons (including the not so good 7, 8, and 9 seasons). My mom was a fan...up to a point, so I saw a lot of it. There were some absolutely great episodes that I still have fond memories of...but on the whole, when I sat down and watched the entirety of season 1 some years back, I found that this was the type of show that while it would have good episodes, it would also bore me to death half of the time. I've always said that I experience the negative parts of entertainment a lot more strongly than I enjoy the positive parts, and so I have a very tough time sticking with shows with a more rocky up-and-down nature like that. A little inconsistency is one thing, but that was unfortunately too much for me to stick with.