Bartimaeus

Viconia has 18 wisdom compared to Anomen's 12 (or 16 if he passed the knighthood quest): give me them bonus spellcasting slots and I'll give her a girdle of strength.

Discussion of anime should stay strictly quarantined to the anime thread, as per the authorities; I believe it is you who has been naughty, . ...What if I have a problem with a quote in your signature that isn't of something that I wrote? Okay, good: I thought you'd taken complete leave of your senses.

@Amentep Yeah, I remember liking the second part/episode a lot more than the first, motorcycles flying out of the helicopter notwithstanding. Seamless, . Somehow, I get the feeling that I might not so appreciate the supposed "rich and interesting friendships" element from a 2022 fantasy isekai anime with a male protagonist(s?), particularly one where just looking at the art style and how scenes are framed makes me want to tear out my eyeballs, . Luckily, I don't have an issue with any of the things you've put of me in your signature. I think majestic currently has a pretty raw deal in comparison.

Is that the one with the old dude and his daughter...and the million or so motorcyclists who just come pouring out of a flying helicopter right at the end? If it's the one I'm thinking of, I'm pretty sure that's the episode that broke me, but in an unexpected way: I thought the episode was largely ho-hum, but all the motorcyclists dropping out of the sky and bouncing off mountains and stuff was so mind-breakingly absurd that I just started laughing maniacally for the rest of the episode and for some minutes after it had ended. That was kind of the beauty of Speed Racer for me: the goofy weird stuff that it (and no other show) would do had the effect of befuddling and amusing me into enjoying it in a way that few other shows could.

I'm pretty sure the first party I had in BG2 was Bard PC (ten year old me: "they can fight, have some thieving abilities, and can do arcane magic - what more could you want?!"), Minsc, Jaheira, Nalia, Jan Jansen, and Valygar...and then Valygar got thrown out for Imoen. I was apparently a very stupid ten year old, as not only did I play as a bard, I also apparently did not recognize that having three freaking thieves was probably three thieves too many. I remember the final battles of SoA being very not fun because my party balance was total crap...on top of being a very stupid ten year old that didn't know how to play very well in the first place. I always do, don't I? I would settle for a game where you have to play as an unwitting villain where everyone inexplicably treats you like you're the absolute worst while they have rich and interesting friendships with each other. I don't know how that would really work in an actual game (i.e. with gameplay) in practice, but...

No, that's why I said they're better off that way: it'd be weird if they were supposed to be all lovey-dovey or whatever. The thought of Jaheira being anything but the grumpy old lady that she is seems pretty weird to me...but really, it all goes hand-in-hand with the last sentence of your second paragraph: I don't want to romance anyone at all. Player romances in video games are universally bad(?) - certainly BioWare ones are, at least. Always playing female protagonists* mercifully saved me here, I suppose. *Technically, I first played BG2 when I was like ten or so and initially selected a male protagonist...buuut I'm pretty sure Aerie joined my party and tried to romance me and I summarily threw her out of the party and that was that, . Wow. Haer'Dalis was the next option? Really? ...I'm not a girl, so my opinion on such things is eminently worthless, but...I mean, I guess he's better than the second worst option after Anomen, which would have to be stupid baby man Cernd. That creep gives druids a bad name. So at least it wasn't intended to be him, I suppose.

I've played Baldur's Gate II quite a number of times, and I've never consciously realized that the human trashcan known as Anomen is your only option as a female character. While I always play as a female protagonist, I've never had Anomen in my party because I throw his bloated corpse into the nearest dumpster the moment I get to the Copper Coronet, and I guess I really just thought about none of the other characters attempting to initiate a romance. Well, it's just as well anyways - Aerie is almost as much of a trashcan as Anomen is, and Jaheira and Viconia are both better as bitter and mean respectively, .

Lmao, into the trash it goes if so. They got a little better this generation compared to the complete jokes that were the last handful, but it seems like they're back to their old tricks...

Fantastic Planet (1973). Most of the posters for this film look something like this: But more importantly right now, I would like to draw everyone's attention to this man in particular: Really, what more needs to be said about this film?

Apparently, older builds of Windows 10 don't work for this game; this was kind of the risk I took being on Windows 10 LTSC (specifically LTSC 2019, which is built on 1809 and cannot change). I'd have to reformat or try to do an upgrade with LTSC 2021 in order to try it, which...seems less than optimal to me at this time.

I ended up reading summaries of episodes for seasons 2-4. While I'm sure I would've enjoyed a bit of the Villanelle stuff, it felt like it would be a huge mistake to repeat the mistake of watching it for too long...and from what I read, it seemed to be pretty much exactly what I expected minus Carolyne apparently continuing to be important (honestly, I thought she was exiting the show at the end of season 1, and good riddance - apparently not). Bullet dodged I guess, as I definitely don't want anything to do with where it went overall, which seemed to be mostly around in circles. Bleh. Well, guess that's that for a promising albeit flawed first season.

I was thinking "man, that cloak looks really ridiculous". Then I googled her and, well, the cloak is gone. Not...sure...if improvement. Yeah, I don't like it either, but I guess she'll have a chance to win me over.

The other three seasons are really that bad? I tend to be way more harsh and down on these types of dark dramas than other people, so if other people think the additional seasons are bad, that must mean...either a slim possibility that I'd think they're great, or much more likely that they're really bad - depends on why they're not good, I guess. The end of season 1 seemed like a pretty clear "let's randomly do a soft reset so we can really stretch this out instead of telling the nice, concise story that we could've" to me, and I just...don't want that, like, at all? Honestly, I really just don't care about the incredibly lame investigative half of the show, and it's the heavy focus on the psychopathic thriller half of the show that makes it interesting and different to the other millions of police/investigation shows out there. That should really be a show in of itself: watching Villanelle enjoy life while finding new spins to eviscerating and disembowelling people in various kinds of situations both personal and impersonal, all the while weaving some kind of slow-burn narrative and theme around her...not this embarrassing Sherlock* nonsense. *Again, speaking specifically of the show with Martin Freeman and Benedict Cumberbatch, not Sherlock Holmes in general - it's an important distinction, especially seeing as the two are practically complete opposites stylistically.

Killing Eve. I thought this was an 8-episode miniseries (in my defense, I think I watched two minutes of the first episode when the first season originally came out before saying "maybe later" while just assuming it was a miniseries), but apparently it's a whole 4 season thing. Anyways, this is an investigative thriller show told from the perspective of two characters: Eve, the investigator, and Villanelle, the psychopath being investigated. I rather enjoy the psychopath's half of the show, but much less so Eve's investigative half, which takes a little too much in style from that awful Sherlock show from some years back. There's just too much of a focus on her being painfully dumb and obstinate while hand-waving away a lot of the actual investigative work that she's supposed to be doing...just like Sherlock. Being offhandedly told that character x, y, or z found and did some things off-screen so that we can now proceed with the plot is such a laughably bad convention in these fast-paced investigative dramas, and it happens danged near constantly. Gee, it's so cool when you have the computer nerd hack into whatever to get the critical information you need, what amazing storytelling, . Anyways, I don't know if I'll continue with the second season or not, four seasons of this seems like it'd be a lot of really bad investigation work. Maybe I should Stranger Things it by only watching Villanelle's bits. ...This is normally the part where I post a poster of the show, but all the posters for this show are uncharacteristically somewhere between bleh and terrible, so forget about it.

Kind of clunky title for a Zelda game. Very much looks like BotW 2 still, though...eh. Should very much excite @majestic, our resident BotW superfan, .

Gave Steelrising a try, and the game doesn't launch because of the same no "DirectX12 rendering device" that Hawke had. Updated my drivers because they were relatively ancient as well as Visual C++ and DirectX...still no go. Google gives nothing useful. Hmm, well, alrighty. Right, time to finally try Control after having it installed for like a year and a half. ...Half an hour later, I've uninstalled Control: gotta keeping it moving, boys, ain't got no time for these terrible games. Hopefully the issue with Steelrising will be figured out, as it has to be better than whatever that was.

Took almost the entire length of the show, though! Boy, that'd be terribly lame. I mean, probably. I'm more open to religiously-inspired stuff than most, but Battlestar Galactica-ing it in completely tacking it on at the last second is pretty unacceptable to me, . (e): Also, I didn't mean to say Miyu and Noir were similar in content per se - just that their intended demographic would seem to be similar, I think.

Maybe I'm slightly unusual in that I have full over-the-ear active noise cancelling headphones, and even while playing music, I can still hear through them pretty well unless I really turn them up. Well, the active noise cancelling is good at cancelling out stable white noise like fans (and AC...kind of), but stuff like people talking, stuff clanging, TV sounds et al. just sounds marginally more distant. It's enough to take a little of the edge off of external noise, which can be valuable, but drowning them out to the point of not realizing somebody is talking to you? Uh...not so much for me. Haven't seen the film in question, but I did just watch the scene: pretty absurd. Never shot a suppressed gun before, but just the action (ammunition firing, discharging, feeding mechanism) of a firearm can be pretty noticeable, never mind the actual combustion from a round being discharged. If someone dry fired (no round in the chamber) a gun next to you, you should pretty easily notice that telltale metal-against-metal sound from just the action...though I'm sure there are some firearms out there with particularly quiet action, maybe quiet enough that you wouldn't notice in a mall full of people talking. That'd still be pretending that there's no combustion, though. Supposedly, a silenced .22 can be about as quiet as ~100db, which is still really freaking loud even if you only hear it for a split-second.

Aren't the headphones like $10 hunks of garbage that would be physically incapable of muting outside noise unless you can turn them up to like 110db? Visible full ear-covering headphones would probably make it a lot more clear to someone not familiar with the idea (...and it would be at least a little more realistic). Still, it's a silly movie cliche that I'm surprised anyone would have trouble picking up. Cellphones are pretty terrible for dramatic cinema and atmosphere, in all fairness. That's why whenever I wander the streets late at night, I make sure to not have my phone on me...you know, for the suspense, .

I'm through 5 episodes (of 10) now. My impression so far is that it's functionally Samurai Jack but prehistoric and way more violent and gruesome...and basically no dialogue.

It's probably more or less the same intended demographic as Vampire Princess Miyu, which is...what, young teenaged girls who want at least a little thought and feeling infused into their action and mystery? Neither Vampire Princess Miyu or Noir are the deepest of shows, but they are tonally serious and at least are trying. From the way you described the beach scene, I was expecting it to be questionable; I thought it was perfectly tasteful and served a pretty clear purpose in illustrating some differences between them. Yeah, it's a swimsuit, but there was pretty clearly very little male gaze with how they presented her. P.S. After four episodes, I've begun to look forward to the intro song, .

Two more episodes of Noir. This show is strange: the best way to describe how watching it feels is...that it's like a "serious" and "artsy"/highbrow romance novel made for women, but the romance is completely replaced with assassin action stuff while being treated with the same level of seriousness. Does that make any sense, @majestic? It's not necessarily a bad thing (again, it's certainly much better than slapstick shonen crap), but I'm really struck by how many scenes there are where the focus seems to be making our two leads look like they're really thinking or feeling something as they're doing "cool" stuff (like staring someone down or literally being engaged in a firefight...there's pretty frequently not much heed for what they're physically doing or what they're saying making complete sense when it might get in the way of the style and tone). It's perhaps a little too much gravity at this stage in the show given how little we know about what's going on, either with the plot or with our characters. Overall, I'm still enjoying it, but it remains difficult to fully grasp how I feel about it. Also, it's been like a week since I watched the first two episodes, and I have no idea what our two characters' names are. I feel like I've been spoiled with other shows like Neon Genesis Evangelion and Sailor Moon, where main characters' names are said almost constantly in normal conversation and also even when they're fighting together. Girls, it wouldn't hurt to be slightly more conversational with each other when you're not in stealth mode blowing people's brains out so that I can learn more about you, .

There are those "slenderman-esque faces" I was talking about earlier,

Was the second post of the thread and what at least some of us were already responding to, .

Yeah, that exposition dump at the end is really pretty bad, but maybe necessary for audiences in 1960.