Bartimaeus

Bigger worlds in video games inevitably means lower content density and more walking around with not much to see or do... ...But given that it's a Bethesda game, I'm not certain that it's necessarily a bad thing to put more space between the player and the game's writing/design.

Dandadan (or Dan Da Dan?), episode 1, The End of Dandadan. Because there's currently only one episode, which I am certain will remain true for the foreseeable future. I wonder what percentage of this episode was taken up by either of the main characters screaming, yelling, babbling, or whining, because I watched the whole episode, and it sure felt like a lot. I'm just never going to jive with shows that endeavour to be all-out assaults on my senses, even if they have other good qualities - I now have a headache after watching this, and that kind of makes most everything else meaningless.

No, the music in Bubblegum Crisis is super lame. Not, like, offensive or anything, but...I think the style of music is just not for me. My impression of our Four Riders of the Apocalypse was that it was more to do with the riders being of very different tastes rather than there just being four. Like, if you, Amentep, myself, and Gorth all really liked something, I think that'd be sufficient to initiate the apocalypse. Maybe this would qualify, but I'm not sure.

Did you try to defeat the Asylum Demon with a broken sword hilt, out of curiosity?

Wrong. Boy, arguing on the internet is easy. Okay, but really, I'm reading your reply here, and all I'm hearing is "you have to do what players consider to be the worst and what might objectively be the least-played content that nobody wanted to do even once multiple times...but you have to do it in more complicated and time-consuming ways". Great, fantastic, that's exactly what I want to do with my life, . If I want to play and beat Dark Souls at level 1, I can go decide to do that of my own free will, and there's nobody that has to award me some "congratulations, you are a total dip**** for doing this" award in order for me to feel rather pleased with myself for doing so. Nor for doing any other number of arbitrary goals that I might decide I want to do, because if I actually love the game and there's something like that which I actually want to do, I can just...go decide to do it. With achievements that I cannot disable tied to an always online account like Steam, there has been a non-zero number of times where I've got through the first area or tutorial or something of a game, had an achievement pop up for completing that or for something else completely minute, I go look at the achievements and see that there are seventy distinct achievements for this stupid ass game that I'm playing, I immediately think that I'm probably not even going to finish the game - much less get all the achievements! - so I close the game, I use the Steam Achievement Manager hack program to reset the achievement that just unlocked, I uninstall the game on Steam, and then I go download the game from elsewhere and play my downloaded copy instead - blissfully free of any thought for achievements or stat-tracking or time-tracking or any other unnecessary meta garbage that's not really actually part of just playing the damned bastard ass game that I'm supposed to be enjoying. No, I'm now able to just play without thinking about any of that, just like I used to be able to do when I was a kid and put a video game into an SNES or an N64 or when I loaded up a Baldur's Gate or Age of Empires save game. Just let me play my video games exactly how I want to play them, it's all I ask. What are they going to come up with next, achievements for watching the entirety of a 10 season show at half-speed with French audio and Chinese subtitles - on top of all the progress-tracking and "MAKE SURE YOU BINGE THE ENTIRE SHOW IN A DAY OR TWO OR WE'LL CANCEL/REMOVE IT"-itis that streaming services already do? Get me out of this hellhole. I've had this .gif that I once found on the internet saved to my imgur for years and years But I decided I needed to make my own higher quality version to mark this occasion, and the ability to record and make good quality 100 MB gifs that even play at the correct frame rate in under a minute is one I don't abuse nearly as much as I should Feel free to use as appropriate, @ShadySands I never found even one weapon that I liked in Dark Souls 2, so I ended up using the Lost Sinner's Sword for most of the game. It comes with this lovely unique ability where it slowly kills you as you use it, which I thought, if I'm going to be stuck using some crappy greatsword because I can't find even ONE weapon in this entire game with a good balance between speed, damage, and move set...well, at least the fact that my own weapon is literally killing my character feels thematically appropriate. Some of my fondest memories of Dark Souls were with the PVP - both being invaded and as an invader. Especially with some of the weirder places I got invaded, like in the Abyss right before Manus in the DLC. Impossible to see more than like ten feet, big area that you normally only explore once, and where the hell do invaders even spawn in this area? Ended up being some jerk dual-wielding electric Avelyns (the unique repeating crossbow) taking burst-fire potshots at me from in the dark, ended up murdering him with my trusty Great Scythe. I loved the Great Scythe in DS1. Yeah, some people like thinking about that sort of things and trying to connect dots, basically fan theorizing. The original theory for a long time was that Solaire is the disgraced son of war, who's on his rather inexplicable quest to "find the sun", whatever that actually means. Though it never directly plays into the plot, he interestingly happens to be the one who is summonable for challenging Gwyn if you use the Chaos Servant shortcut to prevent him from going hollow. Always being explicitly told everything can get a bit boring, and though I never really got into it myself for Dark Souls, that stuff really reminds me a bit of my younger days when I'd get excited thinking and talking about games (or movies or books) with other people who were super into whatever I was into, even when it was over relatively minor details, so it made sense to me that people would do so for something that caught on like wildfire like Dark Souls did. But online communities and fandoms for even the things I love are always ultra-toxic these days, so I never have much desire to go out of my way to interact with them personally. Like I said, I never got super into either the story, lore, or characters of Dark Souls personally...I think it's because while I find a few of the characters charming enough and I don't mind some more indirect storytelling and world-building, the connections between the world and its characters and its story all feel way too loosey goosey for me, and it doesn't end up feeling quite like a properly constructed universe/world that I can really project my brain into. I tend to do better with real world settings, even relatively extreme alternative reality ones (like SU, or Undertale...or even NGE, the latter of which has some very tenuous plot and world-building itself, which probably plays into why I really don't much care about the world-ending plot stuff of that series except insofar as it affects the characters and plays into the themes), as I have a better frame of reference to work with so that I can try to make sense of everything. But I have gotten into other things before, especially when I was younger, and even though Dark Souls doesn't fit that way into my brain, I think I can at least understand how it did for a younger generation of gamers experiencing something new and different that they clearly fell in love with.

I believe it actually can heal its own limbs once they're crippled, but it's hard to make out because 1. most of the lighting/visual effects are currently broken, 2. there's no sound, so you can't hear its violent bloody murder screaming as it casts the healing spell (see dog video), and 3. it doesn't actually restore any of its overall health when it heals the limbs. In-game lore says the Cleric Beast was a member of the city clergy but drank too much blood and turned into a great rampaging monster, which is pretty much what happens to everyone in Bloodborne.

Bloodborne...on the PS4, and definitely not on PC. For real this time. Yes, I know I already did this that one time a couple years back, but it's for real this time. You know, I could swear the atmosphere of this fight felt...different somehow the first time I played it nine years ago, but I can't put my finger exactly on what the difference is. It's like there's some mysterious kind of...audiovisual component missing or something. I just can't put my finger on... Oh, yeah, that's it. Huh, weird...guess he didn't feel like chatting today. (I had to play the game at literally 360p, which is what you're seeing in that video stretched up to 1080p, because my damned GPU doesn't have enough VRAM for anything higher and running on even 480p kept causing the game to explode...I guess I shouldn't have cheaped out on my GPU after all, although maybe by the time the emulator isn't completely broken i.e. sound works, it won't need quite so much? IDK: for rendering at 360p, it still looks pretty alright all things considered...).

In my defense, re-watching Cardcaptor Sakura was not exactly my decision and nor was I the one deciding when episodes were going to be watched. I could've said something about it to encourage you to re-start it, but there was the distinct possibility that my re-watch could've effectively just...died five, ten episodes in for reasons outside of my control, and that wouldn't have been awesome. Happily, that did not happen, but that makes it a bit of a lost opportunity for you. It's been recent enough that I would think I'm still more than prepared to talk about any episodes you watch and might want to talk about (and indeed, I did actually have a number of thoughts about things). I go through phases of wanting to experience new things (be it in real life or movies, books, games...) but then I also go through phases of being like "wait, almost all of the new things aren't as good as the things I already love, let's try some of those instead". For that reason, I wouldn't be opposed to an Escaflowne re-watch, I think it'd hold up just fine. I enjoyed the OVA more on the second watch than I did on the first, but I think the things which most attracted me to the show as a whole aren't going to be very affected by the course of the main story. But I understand the perspective. Speaking of Steven Universe, I've been re-watching the whole series with my nieces and we've been having a great time...in the middle of season 4 now, and though the main story is great and all, the show as a whole is starting to get a bit off-kilter just as I thought it would. Seasons 1 and 2 are by far the most cohesive and consistent from episode to episode. I confess to have yoinked 2-3 episodes out of each season, though - no Onion Trade or Rocknaldo or Onion Gang or Rising Tides, Crashing Skies for us. Too bad, so sad, GOODBYE ONION AND RONALDO! Kazuo Umezu(?): I apparently tried something called "Orochi", but I remember literally nothing about it, so I'm guessing I didn't get very far. From Junji, I also tried "Tombs", "Venus in the Blind Spot", "Deserter", and "Soichi", and I bounced off all of them pretty quickly as well, so I'm fairly confident that his writing just isn't for me, no matter the cool concepts and art. I'm the worst, I know: it's inexplicable the things that do just randomly click for me versus the ones that don't...even I am surprised sometimes.

Uh, I may or may not have just made it to the end of the first arc recently (i.e. episode 46/70...also, the first movie). I guess I should've said something. Whoops, that's my bad. I wasn't necessarily planning on continuing to watch into the second arc any time soon, but maybe by the time you catch up? Well, I'll make sure to let you know when I re-watch Carried by the Wind. ...I also recently re-watched Carried by the Wind. Sorry, it was because I got a bee in my bonnet and went out and actually bought the physical DVDs a while back, and I just started the first episode to compare the quality of the full DVDs against what I had before, and...well, Myao is hilarious and the best and it's a pretty short show! Vampire Princess Miyu, maybe? I mean, I already re-watched the OVA a while back, but I didn't start the show proper yet... I'll definitely tell you if I ever restart Sailor Moon, I promise. I'm pretty sure you'd literally kill me if I ever started re-watching Sailor Moon and didn't say anything to you. It's only with anime that I ever hear about shows being grouped by season, though...

In theory, so am I, but in practice...well, if the writing consistently just doesn't click for me, it can become increasingly difficult to see the forest for the trees. Though in all fairness, almost all manga I've tried I've really struggled to stick with because I find the writing to not work for me, and the few exceptions are...generally quite silly. Is there any particular reason anime goes by seasons of the year? On the site I use to track what anime shows/movies I've seen, I actually setup a custom filter on my adblock that automatically blocks any announcements mentioning the seasons because I really don't care about new shows or when they're going to air. I would have enjoyed them more if only I had enjoyed them more.

MADHOUSE A-Girl - OVA - 1993 Azuki-chan - Movie - 1995 Barefoot Gen - Movie - 1983 Bio Hunter - OVA - 1995 Cardcaptor Sakura - TV Series - 1998 Cardcaptor Sakura the Movie - Movie - 1999 Cardcaptor Sakura the Sealed Card - Movie - 2000 Carried by the Wind: Tsukikage Ran - TV Series - 2000 Clover - OVA - 1999 Devil Hunter Yohko - OVA - 1990 Doomed Megalopolis - OVA - 1991 Genma Taisen: Harmagedon - Movie - 1983 Hiroshima ni Ichiban Densha ga Hashitta - TV Special - 1993 Kiss Me on the Apple of My Eye - OVA - 1993 Mai Mai Miracle - Movie - 2009 Memories - Movie - 1995 Mermaid's Scar - OVA - 1993 Metropolis - Movie - 2001 Millennium Actress - Movie - 2001 Neo Tokyo - Movie - 1987 Ninja Scroll - Movie - 1993 ONE PUNCH MAN - TV Series - 2015 Okko's Inn - Movie - 2018 Paprika - Movie - 2006 Paranoia Agent - TV Series - 2004 Perfect Blue - Movie - 1998 REDLINE - Movie - 2009 Tetsuwan Birdy - OVA - 1996 Texhnolyze - TV Series - 2003 The Animatrix - OVA - 2003 The Cockpit - OVA - 1993 The Diary of Anne Frank - Movie - 1995 The Fantastic Adventures of Unico - Movie - 1981 The Girl Who Leapt Through Time - Movie - 2006 Time Stranger - Movie - 1986 Tokyo Godfathers - Movie - 2003 Twilight of the Cockroaches - Movie - 1987 Unico in the Island of Magic - Movie - 1983 Vampire Hunter D Bloodlust - Movie - 2001 Madhouse is the studio from which I've watched the most distinct movies/shows. Though I like or love around 70% of these, not everything was a winner...and though I wish I could say Frieren was my least favorite among all of them, that honor still goes to Redline, followed very closely by Ninja Scroll.

these five hundred guests are outta control, who said they could browse my obsidian forums and make the whole thing lag? this is outrageous, it's unfair

Wrong. *laughs in Demon's Souls* Never mind all the "must obtain every spell, weapon, armor, and ring" achievements, it sure would suck if one of the weapon materials necessary to get the "Obtained Best Weapon by [Upgrade Material]" only has a sub-1% chance of spawning on exactly one type of enemy. I have a friend that farmed this enemy for about eight hours and never got one...their Demon's Souls achievements are still not 100% to this day. Not just for being able to move/roll: do a light attack in DS2 and try to follow it up with a heavy attack (or reverse the order, or try to cast a spell instead, or use an item, or...), then try the same in DS1. It's atrocious in DS2. In theory, DS1 has the slower, weightier, and more limited movement between the two games, but it didn't actually feel like it at all to me in practice because of all the inexplicable delays they added in between different types of actions for DS2 (not to mention the harsher directional limitations to prevent you from turning between attacks too quickly, which feel like they were designed specifically to help the noobs who never learned to turn off camera targeting while kneecapping those of us who did). You can either chain light attacks or chain heavy attacks, but not one off of the other, and don't try to do anything else because **** you. As I said before, I could forgive most everything that was wrong with Dark Souls 2 (and boy was there a lot that was wrong) except for the fact that the controls made me want to strangle someone. Dark Souls 3 mercifully reverts back to being a bit more like Dark Souls 1, thankfully. Yeah, it sure would suck if you were a player where you generally try to stay out of reach of a boss until you have some time to look at and comprehend a boss' move set before you try to take them on and tried to fight Gwyn that way...yep, it sure would suck. It would suck even more if you had defeated most bosses on your first try due to that strategy having successfully worked up until that point and then being unprepared on what to do when a boss just won't give you the opportunity to stay back and figure out how they work. I remember my first time with Gwyn not being very fun because of his sword being too long and his move set being too erratic - not to mention his inclination to suddenly fly at you when you're out of range. It wasn't until I actually tried to take him on properly - after dying a bunch of times while not really trying to fight him - that I realized that his bark was a lot worse than his bite, and that trying to not die to him was having the opposite effect intended. And then as soon as you learn you can parry him, it's basically impossible to lose. The infamous "we ran out of time and money" half of Dark Souls 1. Truly gaming at its finest. I kind of wonder if the love for Dark Souls' passive/environmental storytelling seemed a breath of fresh air compared to the long cutscenes, bloated exposition dumps, and "standing around" sequences of yesteryear. You don't have to engage with Dark Souls' world or storytelling at all...if you don't want to. Clearly, you didn't want to, so you did not, and that's fine...but a lot of people did, and they seemed to get a lot out of Dark Souls in that way specifically. I especially think of it in comparison to Half-Life 2, which was hailed for moving the medium forward in terms of characters having dialogue and the game telling a story while not jamming the player into unskippable cutscenes...contrasted with the fact that I personally much prefer to replay Half-Life 1 (or even better, S.T.A.L.K.E.R.!) precisely because I find Half-Life 2's style of telling its story to you (or maybe more accurately, around you) while you have to just impatiently stand around waiting for conversations that don't really involve you to end before you can get back to playing the game. I think Dark Souls is similar to S.T.A.L.K.E.R. in the sense that it's kind of what you make of it, and some people will make nothing of it because they're not interested and some people will make a great deal of it because they are, but at the end of the day, if you're one of the people that don't want to make anything of it, at least it's not being constantly shoved down your throat at the expense of everything else: I maintain that there is nothing worse than a game/movie/book/show that has a terrible story that just won't get out of the way of whatever you do like that is making you keep engaging with it, whether it's characters, atmosphere, music, or gameplay.

The key with Rebuild is to just repress your traumatic memories: that way, you'll remember...maybe only 5% of it.

Maggie Smith

(The joke was that this "scene" is part of the preview for the next episode, but what they thought was going to be in the next Rebuild film kept wildly changing so all the stuff that appeared in those previews never actually happened, so that picture is just nonsense.) IIRC, @majestic's favorite bit was the tea party(?) Rei threw in the second Rebuild film, while my favorite bit...was when it was over. Okay, not including that, and not including the funny misleading/erroneous previews, my favorite part was when they were all just chilling in that post-apocalypse village in...I think the fourth film - it didn't even feel like I was really watching Evangelion during that section, which was a welcome reprieve from everything before and after. Just a sudden departure to a totally different tone and style, no yelling and screaming or seizure-inducing animation. So my favorite part might also be your favorite part based on what you said, though I'm not 100% sure because I'm not sure if that section happened in the third or the fourth movie.

Truly my favorite part of Rebuild:

Brewster McCloud (1970). It's the third Robert Altman movie I've seen (3 Women and Popeye), and it's three for three so far. The man makes the most inexplicable but nevertheless entertaining films: he is a psychotic director, and I have no idea how he kept getting funding for his weirdo films (also why he was selected for making Popeye in the first place given his history of work...). I also just read that he's the one that discovered Shelley Duvall as an actress and insisted upon her appearing and starring in his films, which explains why she's been a major part in all three of the Altman films I've seen.

From what I can find out online, for the most part, but there are some specific exceptions carved out for certain states. For example, I just read that there is a law in Illinois specifically allowing chiropractors to be able to advertise themselves as offering "physical therapy" despite having no degree-holding licensed physical therapists on staff. I'm not sure exactly why Illinois is giving a bigger platform to chiropractor hacks, but yeah, I guess it'll depend from state to state.

For what it's worth, I've worked with...nine different PTs over the past six years or so, and I'd say six of them were somewhere between bad and terrible at their jobs and only made my injuries worse. But the other three were good at diagnosing the root issues of injuries and how best to work with and through them, understanding personal limitations and what was too much (or sometimes too little!), gave very personalized care that wasn't just rote nonsense from what they studied, usually had a very hands-on approach as warranted (as opposed to the types who just...stand back and tell you what to do while chattering on and on until your session is over), and ultimately were genuinely helpful. They didn't cure my chronic pains, but they did help make them better and life a bit more tolerable. If you or someone you know tries PT and you're not feeling like you're making any progress over a month or two, just...try out a different one - the level of knowledge, specific skills and abilities, overall approach to your care, and even just the ability to notice what's working and what's not can vary wildly from one to the next.

The most experimental part of that video was when they randomly used an Age of Empires sheep sound effect. It may be a stock sound effect, but A. I've never heard it anywhere else unlike a whole host of other random stock sounds that I've recognized between many different games, movies, and TV shows, and B. it sounded just as low quality in the video as it did back in 1999.

I haven't been getting ads, but have been getting inexplicable 30 second pauses every few minutes where nothing happens and I have to just sit there...syke, ain't nobody got time for that, in those 30 seconds I open yt-dlp and download the video to watch it locally. Suck it, Google.

I always love it that whenever Trump has a very rare moment in public decency, his crowds are always there to immediately tell him "no, don't do that". Trump and the hate-filled right are an interesting chicken-or-the-egg situation: on one hand, the latter definitely existed before Trump came along, but usually a lot quieter and more on the fringes of political discussion; on the other hand, without Trump legitimizing and bringing them to the mainstream, they may have well kept to the shadows and never reared their ugly head in public to be able to convert 40% of the population to their way of thinking; on the third hand, moments like quoted above make it pretty clear that despite everything, Trump is just a symptom, a manifestation of these people's hate and rage, and now that they're fully out of the closet, it seems quite certain they're going to be legion for a long time to come.

Didn't get any shots off...more a concept of an assassination, really.

Despite being someone who dislikes her voice and who especially dislikes her lyrics most every time I listen to a new song of hers, I've contrarily had the misfortune of having to be the one to defend her a number of times over the years. It's become especially bad recently as of the last year because of her new fandom and subsequent media presence with regards to American football and how much impotent rage there is directed towards her because she merely exists and the TV networks want to capitalize on showing her off. It's not a position that I love being in, but I guess at least she's tried to be helpful with recent elections.