Bartimaeus

Post with images, people - it's the way of the future!

is the site still broken Y/N

I'm pretty sure that I watched like 30 seconds of that show once upon a time years ago. Let's go look at the user screenshots...oh, isn't that perfect? The very first row of screenshots I see, we have one with a character wearing a gym shirt that's too tight, a nude shower scene, a nude chest-grabbing scene, and an upshot featuring underwear - all with the (presumable) main characters in the very banner image that you just posted. Anime and its current core audience are both just sooo great and definitely don't make me want to axe-murder the lot of them at all! Are you at all starting to feel like maybe Violet Evergarden being enjoyable to you was probably an accident not intended by the creators of the show?

My mom didn't believe in doing the whole Santa thing because she felt it...didn't foster the proper respect and appreciation that the whole event should have. On one hand, I guess I get it, especially during childhood where the behaviors you learn can determine how you perceive and treat others for the rest of your life, but on the other hand...growing up poor and not having money or much in the way of gifts throughout the rest of the year, I can't help but think maybe Christmas is the one time an exception could have been made - the single time of the year where the kids don't have to worry so much about the ugly problems they can do nothing about. Would a little magic during one's childhood be so bad? There's arguments for and against it...

H̶ ̶A̴ ̴P̷ ̴P̶ ̶Y̵ H̸ ̸O̸ ̴L̶ ̸I̷ ̷D̵ ̶A̴ ̴Y̶ ̸S̴

Oh yeah, that never made sense to me. Weird design, basically just rewards you for already being too good at the game. It's like a much more extreme version of cutting off tails of Dark Souls bosses for special weapons.

May be up to the input mode as well. You're presumably using the USB cable, which should default to XInput, but the controller is capable of more than that and some games are sensitive and others aren't.

I watched the second episode, which I thought was better on the whole, but if that episode is anything like the rest... We'll be having a scene where a character is running, it cuts to a different angle and it'll be a terrible-looking digital shot, then switch right back to normal like nothing happened. It's pretty distracting, especially when quickly switching back and forth like that. Gunsmith Cats wins again... I was thinking more of the non-TEoE parts, yeah - nobody seems to much like it, as it's confusing to both those who watched the entire show and certainly to those who haven't. The narrative is hacked apart and then stitched back together in a way that doesn't really give you much if any sense of what has actually happened up to that point, especially since it's presented at an utterly break-neck speed. The anime industry has a weird thing for abridged, quick-cut versions of shows that don't really work...and thinking out-loud here, Gainax had one for Neon Genesis Evangelion, Nadia: The Secret of Blue Water, and even Gunbuster - yes, the six episode OVA had a shortened movie version that cut out like a third of the show. Eh.

cowboys

Cowboy Bebop, episode 1. There's room to grow, but a kind of up-and-down bleh-ish first episode.

If Evangelion can have a nigh pointless recap movie (Death and Rebirth / Death(True)^2) that doesn't work for literally anybody regardless of whether they have or have not seen the show, I don't see why Violet Evergarden can't.

Even in the original, I tried to do as little base-building as possible (in fact, I deconstructed the literal singular room I had built the moment I got the big ship that served as a mobile base), which is probably why I only play an hour or two of Below Zero every couple of weeks: unlike the original game, there's really not much that feels like it's driving me to keep playing it. A kind of awkward and uninteresting story and no great depths to explore (or at least not any that I've found), it's O.K. but not nearly as compelling. As far as video game experiences go, taking the Prawn all the way down the Lost River in the original while not having any clue where I was going but being inexorably pulled deeper in while trying to avoid leviathans and crabsquids to be able to solve the story was pretty top tier - dinking around decorating rooms has never been my thing and never will be.

My patience for metroidvania is pretty low, but the Momodora games are an exception as short and simple examples of the genre - I've played them all (except for the side-game Minoria, which was pretty horrible from like the hour or two I played of it), and I think they're making another one. This reminds me that I should finish Below Zero...I seem to only play like an hour or two every couple of weeks...

This is what I initially wrote after seeing that trailer: However, upon further reflection, I remembered that I hate roughly 99% of trailers and think they're generally a horrible way to be introduced to a film, including even my all-time favorites, so I'm thinking that I should maybe just forget what I've seen and stop watching trailers or commenting upon them. Slumberland (2022). The core premise of this film (child suddenly loses their only parent upon which their world revolved around, would go to any length to see them again) is pretty tired...but somehow a Jason Mamoa film is actually kind of fun and not embarrassing. Probably better watched with children. I don't quite get why this got such bad reviews with critics (but conversely maybe a little too great reviews with audiences), as it just seems like a generally well-executed family adventure film with a little love and heart to it.

The National Weather Service has been blowing up my phone with warnings about snow squalls several times today, alert sounds and all...and today's been the less severe of the three days. Where've you been at the last two days, NWS?

I prefer the old stuff, because looking at...well, this, hurts my brain: Sigh. Movie-quality animation just isn't what it used to be, is it? And never mind writing... I'm usually happy with most anything that isn't needles into my brain, and the old stuff is certainly very formulaic, but it's not needles, and that makes it alright in my book. The equivalent voice actor for me is Frank Welker, who has been voicing Fred since literally the show's inception and continuing up to this day...along with a number of other memorable roles like the doppelganger from BG1. Okay, his voice isn't "music to my ears", but still, .

Well, have you seen the films - the many, many films? There are literally like 50 of them*, and most of them are somewhere between "really terrible" and "very mediocre". I have a healthy amount of respect for the original 1969-1970 series and watched all of it with my nieces. But like many things for me, as you dial the clock hand forward, I seem to start having more and more problems with the series... Funny thing about Zombie Island is that it was just a direct-to-DVD adaptation that Warner Bros. evidently didn't give too much of a crap about, and it's apparently pretty widely considered to be the absolute best film or close to it - glad they were able to make a 1080p scan of it. *Literally literally. 59 different film entries on imdb, although at least a handful of them are not Scooby-Doo proper but related documentaries or other nonsense.

Right, what anime do we have in the queue for today? Let's see here...*squints* ...Scooby-Doo on Zombie Island, directed by Hiroshi Aoyama, Kazumi Fukushima, and Jim Stenstrum, animated by Japanese studio Mook Animation? Have to say, "anime" Scooby-Doo looks fairly spiffy, all in all...and it was actually pretty good overall, certainly the best Scooby-Doo film I've watched. I've been subjected to a number of them, and...I would've rather not have been for the most part.

Right, I guess it's about time to go recycle all my useless junk before it joins the other fossils.

There have been movies critically panned that were hits with audiences, or eventually gained insane cult followings after being ignored initially, since practically the dawn of film-making, don't think much has changed recently. At different times and according to one's own tastes, the individual will inevitably feel that the critics are morons or that the audience must be brain dead for viewing [whatever] the way they do, all completely dependent on which side you happen to agree with. For my part, it is likely that I would feel all of it is bad because no matter the changes they made between the first and second season, it still isn't doing anything to appeal to me. Doesn't make my opinion "right", it's just another garbage opinion in an endless sea of them.

It's really a shame that a lot of these old slice-of-life shoujos aren't available: between this (Maruko-chan), Azuki-chan, and Akko-chan (hey guys, are you noticing any kind of pattern with these titles here?), I've really enjoyed their movies, but I can't watch the shows from which they were for. I guess I'm a weirdo for enjoying old as dirt shoujo that apparently attracted no Western attention of any kind. 245 GB for all 142 episodes of Maruko-chan in 1080p, but I can't understand a lick of Japanese: life is so unfair. ...Wait, hold on a second, I'm getting something now: that's just the first season? There are more than 142 episodes? Well, just how many episodes are there then? What the hell did I stumble onto? I guess this is the One Piece of shoujo...except this has 300 more episodes than even One Piece - it's even still going to present day, although the art style...the art style is admittedly not what it used to be. Still, I'd like to be able to watch the "first season" (note: the first season spanned three years, as you might expect a 142 episode season would do), especially seeing as this film was practically a miracle.

They do at that, now that you mention it...though it wasn't raining, and I was wrong about other people not wearing them, it seems roughly half the school was: Unrelated:

does anyone know what these hats are? they look like hardhats, but I can't figure out why two girls in school would randomly decide to wear hardhats while nobody else does

When he left The Witcher, the word on the street was that he had been constantly fighting Netflix and its Witcher production team to try to keep the show and character close to the source material, as he apparently happened to be a fan of it even before signing on. No idea if it's true, it's just what I remember hearing.

It's the worst kind of snow, too: that ultra wet, heavy crap that not only turns everything slick and slippery as it melts and freezes repeatedly, but also is a royal pain in the butt to move. No school yesterday or today as a result. Fortunately, Texas has had an excellent track record of handling freezing weather in recent history...