Bartimaeus

Eh, I usually only stick with the Hepburn title if it's the title it's more known by even for English audiences. You don't see me ever calling Perfect Blue "Pafekuto Buru", Whisper of the Heart "Mimi wo Sumaseba", or Sailor Moon "Bishoujo Senshi". I edited the quoted text because I figured that name was more useful. I don't much like comedians myself, but I wouldn't call Bob Hope's act that bad. I guess. It's the dual-edged blade of modern anime: you're very occasionally able to get some odder and more interesting ideas produced that would've probably strayed too far from what was considered "safe" to make way back in the day, but then they shove in annoying crap and do little things wrong all the time because it's a modern anime and it drives me up a wall.

I know that Whoopi Goldberg has had some controversial opinions in recent years, but I don't know that she's quite Kissinger levels of bad. I kind of liked it too. There were some issues. I don't really think it would be KP's thing, though.

I think they did finally end up fixing that...months later, since more recent re-tests I just searched for seem to suggest much more reasonable numbers only mildly higher compared to their Nvidia equivalents. But, well, obviously the MTT's entire suite of issues is driver-related, so...I guess since they're a new player, instead of several months of leniency, probably several years would be fairer. If they ever get competitive, we'll surely hear about it.

114W idle power draw u wot

i wonder how they clinically prove which species have the most/least deadly venoms Some people just love certain animals so much they can't help but be deeply involved and surround themselves with them. The passionate lunacy is what makes them tick, and presumably how we learn so much about these things in the first place. Completely insane people putting their interests and talents to good use is what makes the world go round! I don't really care too much about snakes so I'm not terribly tempted to follow this guy beyond the odd video majestic posts in here, but if there was a YouTuber whose presentation that I liked that covered spiders in much the same way, I'd probably keep up with it.

Malleus. The key turning point here for me was when Eisenhorn was accused of heresy and taken into custody by his own order, something that had been set up by both the introduction and by what I believe was the very first scene of the book, when at the end of a battle some witch hunter just Kool-Aid Man-ed his way into the book while yelling "HERESY!!" for no apparent reason before then immediately disappearing with nothing much coming of it. I thought that was pretty weird, but figured we'd get back to it - rightly so, as it turns out. So finally, we're given the full basis for the suspicion of heresy: it's the scene that played in the introduction, the same demon just saying that he knows him. There's some fluff about how Eisenhorn managed to not get killed during the whole triumph disaster, but that's really all it is: fluff. After spending literal months of being interrogated, Eisenhorn is going to be granted a proper trial, Eisenhorn is all "I'll be glad to prove my innocence", and...Fischig just breaks him out and they go on the run, robbing of us of that entire sequence so we can have more hour-long fights? Why does Eisenhorn even go along with this? It's not like there's anything absolutely pressing that he needs to deal with, he's literally been imprisoned for months, so whatever trails he had been doing should've long gone cold by then. But really, the realization that the Inquisition's entire basis of argument for arresting the guy is that some demon, an entity known for the trickery and manipulation that Eisenhorn is precisely being accused of, just saying that he knows the guy, and the entire Inquisition immediately being all "alright, cut his head off" is just...bleh. Him being arrested was the point I was most interested in the book, particularly after most everything else prior feeling similar to the first book: I wanted to see how it would all play out, I wanted to see the Inquisitorial procedure...but instead, it was the whole house of cards collapsing and me realizing that it's all just a big joke, that the Inquisition is a bunch of baloney, that these are fundamentally just kind of dumb action books with a decent but not particularly remarkable coat of paint (and that if most other books in the 40K series are written significantly worse, must be truly deplorable). I don't think I'll be returning for the third book: as predicted from what @melkathi mentioned, these just don't seem to quite agree with me.

Just how bad can a Harlem Globetrotter really be?

I don't know if there's a single thing in the entire universe that I hate more than anime.

what is dead may never die

Dark Cat (1991). What an incredibly bizarre little romance/horror OVA. I was half-expecting Miyu to make an appearance at some point just to put everyone out of their misery, especially what with the weird (although somewhat competently foreshadowed) twist... Happy Birthday Inochi Kagayaku Toki! (1999). An hour and ten minutes long film that's basically an anti-bullying/suicide PSA for children. Kind of goes into the whole "cycle of abuse" with the main character's family and other students at school treating her horribly but eventually works its way around to explaining how they were victims themselves and trying to deal with it in something approaching a constructive manner...and with a good helping of trying to be kind to and patient with those less able than you. The "happy birthday" message in the title refers to a special needs child that has serious health issues that the main character befriends and appreciates in the face of the bullies. It has stretches that are very effective, but also stretches that aren't so much that feel less grounded and as though the film is treating the viewer like a child - probably because it's literally aimed at children, but it definitely feels like it would've been better off taking the more realistic and mature approach all the way through. I can't recommend it exactly, but it was an interesting novelty for covering some undercovered subjects.

yeah, I tried real hard to like it, but the whole show feels very clunky and awkward in terms of writing and how scenes flow, makes it super difficult to get into - made it about 5 epiosdes before I couldn't take any more

but why would she in the first place, she was much cuter and certainly more approachable as a spider oh yes, just the cutest and exactly like how I remember her

i'm confused, where's the cute spider? i expected shelob, but all i get is some lady? sorry but a half-dressed bint with pale skin, black hair, and full-on uncanny valley just doesn't make a spider (e): Lmao, I did a reverse image search and apparently this literally is Shelob. Alright, whoever designed this atrocity gets thrown out the nearest window.

If I had more disposable income, I'd buy a lot of hellfire missiles that immediately target and blow up anybody setting off fireworks past 11.

Basil II > Basil the Second

Whisper of the Heart (2022). The basic premise is that Shizuki, our protagonist who was so driven and full of her dreams and ambitions of writing by the end of the original film, is now ten years older: she is a failure who cannot get anything she's written herself published, and she is being left behind by friends who are moving on with their personal and professional lives while she wilts away. She works as an editor at a podunk children's books publisher, in an uncaring industry that cannot really afford to approach writing in the way that she dreamed of when she was a child - she is even micro-managed into pushing the writers she's managing into directions she does not agree with, which only kills her even more. And her guy, Seiji, has been training to become a professional cellist in Italy...for ten damned years, and it has understandably taken its toll on both of them. It's a weird phenomenon to take a child's pure, hopeful, and beautiful perspective of their life and the world...and then flash forward ten years into the future where they've effectively been ground up into a fine paste - a nervous wreck that feels like they can't possibly accomplish anything with their life, that they're just...stuck at best, doing everything wrong at worst, and in the way of others. To a degree, it's kind of what happens to a lot of people in reality: sooner or later, most everyone gets eaten up one way or another by life, including and especially the wonderful, driven, and talented. Okay, as for the movie itself. There are some pretty good ideas here, but it's such a hot mess. I'm just imagining how this might've been tackled if it were instead a Studio Ghibli-animated film made right after the first, and I think using the same core but cleaning and tightening it up, it would actually probably be great. But in 2022, in live-action, made by a mediocre director in what feels like a made-for-TV production, with all of its different ugly warts and awkward compromises...it's definitely less than. Still, the idea is there, just deeply buried.

Only tangentially related, and I don't know if they still do this now, but many years back, they would once or twice a year send one of their manly man reps to try to recruit people straight out of high school. Never understood why people seemed to gravitate towards them - always thought they were right nasty creeps, so I avoided them like the plague. I remember the very last one I ever saw before graduating had apparently been told specifically to look out for me and ended up following me around and hounded me into filling out and signing some kind of form. Don't remember exactly what it was for, but he tried to sell it to me as some kind of "we have an active interest in you and we would very much like for you to reciprocate that interest". I did and returned it to him, but he didn't notice that I had printed and signed a completely bogus name, . As if I would ever do well in any kind of military setting...don't know what the bloody school staff (or whoever responsible) was telling them for him to have specifically sought out me, but the whole idea was utterly ludicrous.

The longest I ever went without sleeping was just a little over 80 hours. No special occasion, my brain just decided it didn't want to be in anything but a very wakeful state anymore, and I just couldn't do much about it. At about 30 hours, I already felt like a total zombie and it was completely awful, so you have my sympathies - but at 70 hours, the walls and ceilings started to spontaneously manifest writing upon their surfaces, so that was pretty cool. I don't think I'd do it again if given the choice, though.

Not only that, but the alternative backends that fix many of twitter's most annoying problems (e.g. my favorite, unofficialbird.com) seem to be broken right now no matter what profile or post I go to, which means I cannot see anything twitter-related at all. It's really dumb for me too, because I actually tried to register years ago, but every time I make an account, they immediately ban me within seconds. I mean, I can't blame them, it is me after all, but why, what did I do? I had never even posted/commented/liked/favorited anything, and I even registered from my home connection. Twitter is the worst, to be sure, but I still get occasionally linked something to there and now literally I can't even check out a basic post.

i watched the first episode that was something it was not bad, but it was something kind of like if zero punctuation wrote a show, but with some interesting character writing

Bartimaeus is known to be, and has been called, much worse than that, . If I'm already bothered by these things in the first book, guarantee I'll be positively seething about it by the end of the third book if it doesn't get any better.

See, that's exactly what I didn't want to hear. Characters with weaknesses (their unwise way of approaching situations, bizarre idiosyncrasies that can blow up in their face, strict limitations that they're never going to get past but will find smart ways of working around as necessary, explicit vulnerabilities that they can feasibly be exploited or felled by, potentially fatal character flaws that make them unsuited for their environment - all of these and more!) are almost always far more interesting and memorable than the "I am awesome at everything" types...especially if you can really work those quirks and details into strong character writing that actually matters for your story. You know, characters should be...well, characters! Particularly for books, where there's so much more opportunity to flesh them out in comparison to a movie or miniseries. Heck, if you're clever, you'll find ways to turn what are usually weaknesses into key strengths in appropriate situations. I thought Bequin's introduction was great, it really made her seem like she would be very different from everyone else...but no, she kind just gets moulded into the same amorphous tough dude blob that everyone else already started out as. Hmph. Given my tastes in film, perhaps reading books rather explicitly made for men about men is not the best idea on my part. We'll see if I ever get around to it. melkathi's words do not fill with great anticipation.

Warhammer 40,000: Xenos by Dan Abnett. I don't know whether to post this in the reading thread or here. It was pretty decent, but a little rough around the edges in a couple of ways. For an introduction to Warhammer 40,000, you could do so much worse. The book stayed quite focused on the story local to our characters rather than doing any big world/setting dumps, which would be the absolute worst thing you could do to someone new to a truly gargantuan series like Warhammer. My biggest complaint: characters that weren't Gregory Eisenhorn started to feel a bit...telegraphed and perfunctory. When Bequin was introduced, I was like "oh sweet, this lady's awesome, she should be great for the rest of the series!"...but then she almost entirely disappears from the book except for when she's going to be used for her abilities. Every time she was mentioned, I started to think "guess they're going to need her for something pretty soon here...aaand yep, there it is". Hey, this isn't a video game: if you're going to introduce a character (especially one that I like), you need to take the time to actually write out and include them! I started noticing what felt like similar patterns with other characters like Betancore and Aemos. I'm also not so sure that everyone in the core group really needs to be written so similarly as Toughdudes McStrongmans. Hell, by the end of the book, even Bequin was apparently an ace shooter, and that's absolutely absurd given the relatively short timeframe and everyone else having spent decades (or more!) honing their craft. But otherwise, I thought it was a fairly enjoyable romp.

Oh, right, the Tulsi Gabbard approach. Yes, that would make an unfortunate amount of sense: despicable creatures abound everywhere, it seems.

Yeah, I initially wrote the question in a much different manner, but I decided it'd be best to be as least toxic/snippy as possible. You know, in the hopes that it gets answered! Making an actually funny/clever meme would've been difficult enough even before you constrained it to such a basic/cookie-cutter template, so that surely did not help. I could see maybe children/young teens who are excited for upcoming games deciding to do some in that vein, but the fact that literally nobody has kind of ties in to my question of us just being too old for this silliness.