Bartimaeus

Yeah, egg prices have gotten pretty crazy. I think I've mentioned it here before: no eggs means Bart starts eating people. Protein is the only worthwhile food, and eggs are the king of easy, flexible protein that can be used in a wide variety of ways.

I wasn't allowed to read The Golden Compass as a small child, as my mom apparently thought/heard it was too anti-Christian. Of all places to draw the line, she chose the weirdest ones. Ten years later, she somehow ended up reading it and told me it was actually really good. Thanks, mom. Well, to be fair, she had pretty much given up the entire idea of organized religion and didn't want much to do with other American Christians by that point, so I guess it's understandable her stance had changed during the same time.

Man, I don't like the show, but that's ridiculous. It is folly to ever get attached to any Netflix show ever: always assume there won't be a second season.

Yes, it's better to not post anything more than a few sentences long at this point...which is kind of limiting for discussion.

EU4 was by far the most I've liked a game of that type, but the more mechanics they added to it, the less I liked it, . Did they ever add a way to just...disable stuff in a modular way? Any (predominantly singleplayer) game that has had so much feature creep over such a long period of time should have that, at least for some of the more hot-button issues. There's a few things that I would absolutely have to cut out of the game before I would ever consider picking it back up again because they annoy me too much.

Simply typing...uh, quotations-period-space (the actual characters) just about literally anywhere in a post appears to make a post unpostable. I can insert those characters into any post of mine anywhere (with the exception of immediately before a line break, because said line break culls the space) and it stops working. Truly, the most dastardly of characters. This was probably the cause of some of my other failed posts, since I do like them quotations-period-space combos. AP style quotations are trash. Edit: It also happens with apostrophe-period-space combos.

Image reply because the forums will not let me post it as text for some reason without breaking: Have fun figuring this one out, @majestic. The apostrophes in the first sentence were originally quotation marks, and the brackets in the second sentence were originally parentheses, but it still doesn't post even after changing them.

Nah, glass cannon always and forever in every game. If everything you attack immediately dies, there's less opportunity for you to get hit in the first place and also you mow through the game much faster to boot, . Many years ago, I intended to play through the Dooms, but at this point, I'd be lucky if I ever make it through just the original. Signalis (2022). Genre-wise, it's basically the same as one of my favorite games Yuppie Psycho (2D isometric atmospheric horror exploration), but you play as a Soviet Russian lady android technician that crash landed on a colonized frozen planet where some kind of virus has apparently driven most of the other androids to a zombie-like state, and you need to find your counterpart that you arrived with, your human pilot. I've played a few hours of it and have quite enjoyed it and its many little details, but I don't have a good grasp for where the story is going yet.

@majestic identified one set of circumstances regarding parentheses that causes it to happen, but I had it happen with another post recently that didn't have any and couldn't figure out what was causing it, and it was too late at night to want to bother to diagnose it so I just deleted a big chunk of the post instead and it finally went through.

Escaflowne...the movie, again. Last time I watched this, it was fresh off of having watched the show. I thought I'd try again, now having put a significant amount of time in between. Nope: with the exception of maybe two sequences, it's difficult not to feel like practically everything in this film is either lame, rushed, or botched in some manner. The two sequences that are alright are when Hitomi meets Merle in the stable and we have two characters talk like actual human beings for the first time in the film, and then when Hitomi and Van go to the tavern and talk about the cat sisters and the ancient song...and the latter one really only works if you remember the poor cat sisters from the show. Besides that, this movie's a big fat lotta nothing. O.K., I will also give a pass to Van very offhandedly carving a rock mouse for Merle as well as Merle singing with the other cat children, but that's it.

I largely didn't give about the mystery in Dark, I ain't gonna give about the mystery in a show that's a complete stylistic clone of Dark. All the characters who are belligerent and crappy to each other, the long pauses and vacant looks they give each other before they deliberately withhold information or lie to each other ad nauseum, the same annoying musical cues, THE BIG MYSTERY (which is probably simple in the overall idea but ultra-convoluted in execution)...come on, I already watched this show and more importantly, I didn't care for it, so I'm not watching it again. If someone here watches 1899 and likes it but you haven't seen Dark, go watch it, it's the same thing. Now, as has been well-documented, I don't really usually care for THE BIG MYSTERY in shows/movies/games/books, but I click on a crappy looking teen drama show... ...and the very first scene is of the same character having apparently recently bathed head to toe in someone else's blood while running on the streets. Now that's a mystery I'm curious to learn more about.

1899, episode 1: it's Dark but on a boat, or rather two boats into the trash it goes

Cowboy Bebop, episodes 3 and 4. Faye is introduced...and the show immediately gets better. As you might expect, I'm not super keep on her design, but her personality/mannerisms kind of remind me of an older version of Fuu from Samurai Champloo (albeit more intelligent/wacky/skilled...so maybe not like Fuu at all, but somehow the thought still entered my brain), and she's fun to listen to. We'll see how long that impression lasts.

That's what keeps breaking my posts lately...need to cut those nasty parentheses out of my life, I guess.

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.