Bartimaeus

Also, Kaine, I have a friend on Steam that uses literally your exact avatar, has a drinking problem, is incredibly cynical, and is disappointed by everything. His name even starts with a K - it's very weird and disconcerting. He hates anime (although I think he watched and enjoyed Death Note), though, so you can't be the same people. (e): @majestic This Ami episode... (e): Wait, why did I spoiler it? You and Kaine have already seen this...

RE art styles: I have the same issue/make the same kind of excuse. Art style shouldn't matter. It shouldn't. It should not! It has no bearing on writing, characters, themes, or anything else important. But so often when I'm considering a new show (or game: note that I almost exclusively play smaller, shorter indie games, often 2D - lots of different art styles), that's what I'm looking at first. I don't have to love it (especially not immediately - I certainly didn't for Sailor Moon or Evangelion or...Steven Universe or plenty of others), but I do have to at least not immediately hate it. There's a certain level of prognostication involved when talking about art styles - your example of South Park and Bojack Horseman are good, because their art style very well matches their show's personality. They might not be the style I want (or can even tolerate), but they make perfect sense for what they're representing. I'm very much of the opinion that while you can't *always* judge a book by its cover...with art styles, I think you at least usually can, because the art style in the vast majority of cases will be intentionally married to the kind of media that it is, giving you a decent feel for how the media will operate as a whole. And if it's not a good marriage, then it's probably not going to be great to begin with - outside of rare exceptions (particularly ones that are deliberately designed to mislead, like...say, Doki Doki Literature Club or something). So when media presents to me its art style, I tend to believe that it is representing itself well - for better, for worse. Of course, I'm not the most familiar with anime styles in particular, so it's been more difficult for me to prognosticate from just a glance. I decided to give Sailor Moon a try because I accidentally landed on this video from a only semi-related video a friend sent me: ...and it somehow appealed to me enough that I decided to give it a try. I don't know why, I really don't, since this just by itself is just nonsense that meant absolutely nothing to me and I shouldn't have gotten anything out of it, but somehow I did. Also, I'm a moron because this was the first video I ever saw of Sailor Moon and it still took me like a third to maybe half of the first season for me to consciously realize that Mamoru must be Tuxedo Mask - I'm not saying I didn't have suspicions before that, but that was when I was like "ok, yeah it has to be him". I blame it on the show making me laugh too hard to think straight. I think I once read that the art style of Sailor Moon is the strange minimalistic result of an absolute shoestring budget with terrible deadlines that they gave the show, thinking it would only be a one-off one-season thing as air filler for whatever Japanese channel it debuted on. I'm just glad they didn't screw around with the art style after it actually became a success. I can't say the same for SM Crystal - that art style is straight-up revolting for me, .

Exactly how I felt starting out. Supremely stupid, but also hilarious and nice (and also specifically the first season gets funnier as it goes on right up until the end, as it gets more and more ridiculous and almost starts becoming a meme of itself).

So it's the final remnants of the old Evil Empire versus the new Evil Empire. Joy. Earlier today, I told my buddy "either everything will go well and it'll be Packers-Bills...or everything will go badly and it'll be Buccaneers-Chiefs". Phooey.

He played pretty great this season, but the team around him has been great as well (although all of them have been kind of inconsistent together).

Offensive line, which was so magnificent the entire season, had two really bad games this season. One was in week 6 against the Buccaneers, the other was while hosting the NFCCG against the Buccaneers. It was the difference between winning and losing multiple times in this game, and those last few drives by the Packers showed it very clearly. Don't know what the Buccaneers are doing that nobody else did, but we couldn't do much about it. Tom Brady goes to his tenth Super Bowl, and is the first to host one in his own stadium.

Yeah, so this is going literally exactly how I thought it would go. Absolutely dog**** Packers' defense against Tom Brady that has made a career of destroying our type of soft, finesse defense combined with our offensive line having a bad day and not being able to get the easy plays. Gee, it's almost like I said exactly this would happen like 5 days ago. We always lose to the team in the playoffs that we got destroyed by in the regular season.

Packers and Bills for me, both by a hair. Will not be even kind of surprised if either game goes the other way.

Eh, to be fair, I hate like 99% of vocalists' voices...and she's no exception. It was included. It was fine - definitely total filler (kind of had DBZ filler vibes going on), not as wacky or ridiculous as the beach episode from season 1 (um, somehow - with dinosaurs and a volcano exploding with zero relevancy to the plot of the show), but it was fine, haha.

Now that you mention it, I do recall you saying before that your DVDs had two video tracks. I didn't really think about it at the time, but DVDs for TV shows are already usually so bit-starved to try to pack as much as possible on them, that *had* to have had a terrible effect indeed upon them, so that starts to make more sense. I have health problems with my hands (which also makes it so I can barely game at this point - actually what has made me more open in experimenting with random movies and shows like Sailor Moon, since I've never been a big TV/movie watcher!), so I actually have a left-handed mouse...for my left-hand, and also I have a different left-handed mouse...for my right-hand (for some reason, I find this particular left-handed mouse more comfortable for my right-hand than actual right-handed mouses). I switch between them, they're both on my desk at the same time. Furthermore, when I *really* can't use either mouse, I also have a controller that has mouse + some keyboard controls bound to it so I can use that instead. Then, I also have a special keyboard that instead of being tilted normally where the farther-away keys are tilted upwards while the nearest keys are down, it's instead the opposite with the first row of keys being tilted up and the back keys being down. I have gotten a lot of funny comments about my setup, but it's unfortunately necessary. And kind of similar to you, I prefer 16:10 over 16:9, but sadly, that aspect ratio is virtually dead. So yeah, I guess we're peculiar people, . This song is totally on brand and pretty much exactly what I expected for a Sailor Moon-themed German eurodance group, .

They are the Italian DVDs, but I've also looked at the Japanese and Australian DVDs and both of them seemed a lot better than that YouTube video. I can only assume that Germany(?) got completely hosed with their DVDs...but also I should also note that the US DVDs are supposedly a lot worse than either the Italian, Japanese, or Australian DVDs, but I've never taken a look at the US DVDs personally because everyone seems to ignore their existence due to their badness, so maybe you're not alone, . I've also never read anything about the German DVDs - usually not a good sign for their quality if there's nothing much mentioned about them. I find it super annoying that such vast differences in quality can be found between different regions and even different countries within the same regions for shows, especially when released simultaneously. I should clarify that with the exception of Netflix stuff, I literally never *not* watch things from a PC, since even my TV has an HTPC that I play stuff from (I have a decent 16 TB of non-SSD HDD space for media playing, which I'm almost at the limits for), and I don't have cable. This is also why I need a PC upgrade sometime in the near future - encoding stuff with my generations-old i7 is getting to be a hassle, and for a few shows I've just started leaving them in a raw unencoded format. I refuse to mess around with physical discs (and also it's absolutely no good for over-the-network and Plex streaming, which is a must for me), so that's why I keep everything on the HDDs. So yeah, very different kinds of setups between us, .

I'm really not seeing what you're seeing - the level of detail looks quite bad. It is a YouTube video, but here're two screenshots upscaled (so you can easily compare them them at equal resolution via tab-switching). Yours: Mine: Alternatively, yours upscaled via the same video renderer (MadVR) as mine: To me, it's not even close, the level of detail on the DVD is undeniably superior (it seems obvious to me even from the smaller previews on here, but if you open up each image and look at them full size, it becomes even more apparent). The BD has been very poorly upscaled and blurred to all hell, and so many of the small details have been lost completely (some of that may, again, be because it's a YouTube video, but these are the same things the experts were saying, and I'd say they were right on the money) . Additionally, I often times prefer watching DVDs at their native resolution for the intended level of visual clarity since I'm usually (although not always) watching on a computer monitor anyways, which you can't do with bad 1080p upscales.

I watched the Artemis one. I've been noticing that the poor thing's just been getting dunked on and ignored a lot this season, but that episode took it to a whole new level, . In regards to Ami and her episode...that's kind of funny - although I still like her, she's definitely the Sailor Guardian I like the least (Minako and Usagi are definitely my two favorites, but both Rei and Matoko are awesome as well, which leaves poor Ami...suffering in comparison). The episode central to her earlier in the season (S2E16. A Guardian's Friendship: Goodbye, Ami) was the first...and still the only episode I did not care for. Naturally, Ami is the Sailor Guardian I identify the most with - which is usually a bad sign for likability for me, . So yeah, don't necessarily expect me to love that episode, haha. I actually have less of a problem with Chibi-Usa this season than I do Mamoru. Man, that boy has just been like a dark and depressing deadweight on the show since this arc started. It's been brutal with him. Hoping it resolves itself sometime soon (although his character will sadly probably never be quite what it was in S1 and the Makai Tree arc in S2 - he used to be such an oddly sharp yet ridiculous and comical character, and that seems to have gone completely away in favor of him just being like a serious and brooding anti-hero instead). As for Usagi slapping Chibi-Usa...didn't seem that out-of-character to me, actually. Didn't Usagi spank the hell out of her in an earlier episode? Usagi's an emotionally unstable teenaged dummy that doesn't know to deal with children and upon a few occasions has resorted to physical violence (or threats of) to try to discipline/control them (I'm decently sure there were a couple of occasions even in S1 involving her threatening other children), and her job requiring her to be a fighter really probably only feeds into that - pretty sure she would've done it even more often if Mamoru and the other Sailor Guardians weren't there most of the time!

That nurse episode was the episode I last watched, and it was indeed awesome, and also the last few episodes in general have been a nice breath of fresh air compared to the Chibi-Usa-dominated episodes that have been constant for a while. Chibi-Usa is perfectly good as a supporting character, but some of the episodes where she is the main character have been a bit less enjoyable than the others - her personality just isn't the best for seeing events through her eyes. Now that you mention it, all four other Sailor Guardians do have their special talents even untransformed (Rei being the most obvious with psychic/anti-witchcraft[?] stuff). It was still kind of shocking to see Minako literally just effortlessly jump straight to a second floor, though. Also, her being the OG explains why Minako seemed to have like a...competing-yet-unmentioned backstory to Usagi (given that she was active as a Sailor Guardian before Usagi ever was, plus she had Artemis all along who was giving commands/information to Luna and Usagi throughout the first season).

@majestic Is there like...any official information on how the Sailor Guardians' powers work? I always assumed that their powers only worked when they transformed, hence why they always need to, and hence why they can never really do anything special when untransformed...but I just saw Minako jump up roughly 15 feet into the air from the ground into a second story balcony untransformed which is the first I can recall a non-transformed character doing something like that, so what the heck was that? She just an NBA player or something? Also, I wish Minako would get more episodes focused on her, she'd have made just as good of a protagonist as Usagi.

It was pretty awesome to hear the Star Locket one used the way it was.

The spoiler sounds hilarious, that's the Sailor Moon stuff I want. My favorite episode from season 1 is probably episode 29, the ridiculous episode where Usagi and Makoto are fighting over the arcade boy, and that nonsense sounds right in line with that. I'm curious to see what I think of the other yet-to-be-introduced Sailor Guardians... The attack/transformation sequences do get to be hella long at times, but I love the music used in them so I don't particularly mind. Actually, I love the music of this show overall and have been collecting the individual season and movie soundtracks. Sadly, none of the credits songs have been nearly as good as the one used for the first half of season 1, though, which I listened to all the way through every time, .

No, I'm just mad that we didn't get the Saints (whom I would've easily picked the Packers over), and am preparing to be very sad this Sunday. Packers have fallen, collapsed, and imploded at the final hurdle due to very bad matchups like this repeatedly over the last decade, and I don't really see any reason to expect any different this time.

I don't see how anyone can easily pick the Packers. The Buccaneers' offensive line has largely stood up to better defensive fronts than what the Packers have, the Buccaneers have three #1 wide receivers and we only have one really good corner, our run defense has been suspect on and off and the Buccaneers also have a great RB stable, and of course, Tom Brady has absolutely destroyed bend-don't-break defenses like ours by simply taking what the defense gives you for literal decades. And that's not even talking about the Buccaneers' defense, which annihilated the Packers' offense earlier this season. All across the board, the Buccaneers have a good defensive line, good cornerbacks, good safeties, and worst of all, great and speedy linebackers that take away the Packers' easy schemed-open plays. Literally anytime that I can think over the last decade that the Packers have faced an across-the-board-good defense that lacks a weak point to exploit like this, Rodgers has mightily struggled. And if you think, "Well, the Packers just demolished the Rams, the #1 defense!"...the Rams have terrible linebackers and only an above average defensive line *with* Aaron Donald - without him, I have to imagine they're below average at best. And what did our offense take advantage of against the Rams? Dominating the defensive front to firstly get our RBs to the second level against weak LBs who gave up lots of yards, and secondly give Rodgers a whole hell of a lot of time to find open receivers or wait for the TE/RB to get open underneath against undisciplined LB play for easy yards and first downs. This is the Packers' nightmare opponent on both ends of the ball, and I will be extremely pleasantly surprised and impressed if the Packers get past them.

What an absolute implosion by the Saints following that Jared Cook fumble. I felt really good about facing the Saints at Lambeau - I do not feel good about facing the Buccaneers at all. They just have that type of defense where they're at least pretty good at all levels which makes it hard for our offense to find the weak points to exploit, and that's what Rodgers has historically struggled the most against in his career. Ugh. Also went 2-2 - got both of Saturday's games right, both of Sunday's games wrong, .

Browns should've won that after Mahomes went out, but they couldn't stop repeatedly shooting themselves in the foot. Will be a long week to see if Mahomes can play Sunday.

I shouldn't have picked the Browns,

I straight up will not watch weekly shows until the season is fully released. I'm not usually in the mood to watch a show over several months' worth of time these days, especially because I'm the type of person that likes to watch only like 1-2 shows at a time to begin with - also sometimes my free time is limited so not being able to watch something when I do have the free time because of artificial time barriers is greatly annoying. Sometimes I *really* want to watch several episodes consecutively, particularly because shows have ups and downs and letting a show sit sourly on one of the downs for an entire week can get me disinterested in continuing it entirely, especially with the plethora of other shows out there. Some shows just straight up work better being able to see multiple episodes in a row or otherwise at your own pace. I'm also not the type to get into the whole social media aspect of watching a show "together" as its released - with only a very few exceptions, I really don't care if I'm watching a show years after everyone else did.

There's no point in engaging those arguing in clear bad faith - they're not interested in alternative viewpoints or counterarguments or your opinions or anything of the sort, they're just here to spread their misinformation and confuse the issues, and getting engagement from and annoying you is no doubt just the cherry on top of it all. There will never be a big light bulb moment where they suddenly start considering things from different angles or from others' values. There are posters whom I emphatically disagree with most every time they post in a thread like this, but whom I can understand to a degree when I consider their values, the time and place they grew up in, their critical life experiences, etc. I might not ever see things the same way they do, but I can see where they come from. I cannot say the same for the strangers among us who doggedly, persistently stick to the same script week after week with absolutely zero consideration of any kind for anyone else.