Bartimaeus

The Diary of Anne Frank (1959). It was one of my favorite books when I read it as a child in...4th grade?, and it was interesting to re-visit it all these years later. It's a good production, though with a few relatively minor issues. I can't believe they bothered to have Millie Perkins (Anne) complain about how she's too ugly in comparison to her sister. I know that was in the book, but like, just don't include it here, you literally cast Millie Perkins as Anne Frank, it makes no sense at all. Not to mention that she's completely the wrong age (Anne went into hiding at age 13, Perkins...may be very petite and baby-faced, but she was 22 at the time of filming - able to pull off 18, sure...maybe even 16, but not 13). Oh well, it's fine, it's tough to fine good dramatic child actors, especially at that time. Anyways, the film is some good food for thought in these trying times.

@majestic The original show does actually have a pretty feel bad ending, for what I think is perhaps an interesting lesson grounded in reality, and you could apply much of what you said about the OVA ending to it: Now the stuff about familial ruin and addiction and suicide...um, not so much. Especially because her parents are bakers and weren't getting anything from Mai performing magic in the first place - they were just letting her go off and hang out with the family troupe for fun, basically. So yeah, you're not entirely off the mark with your more serious ideas, .

Fear the Spotlight. Over the last few years, I've really grown to hate surreal/dream-like atmospheres and horror in both movies and games, and this is no exception. You're a goody-two-shoes breaking into the school with your goth friend so you can play around with a oujia board in the library, stuff goes sideways, and the game immediately segues into a dream sequence where nothing is connected to reality or really matters anymore, the game very thickly lays on a "there was a terrible fire that killed a bunch of students years ago" story that's told by picking up a pile of random notes throughout the environments*, which probably has something to do with the "there was this girl that was being bullied by the girl she was jealous of" stuff that was also going on at the time, but I didn't actually stick around to find out because this crappy 2 and a half hour-long game was at least an hour and a half too long for me to bother. Presumably, given the title of the game mentioning "the spotlight", it's one of the those two girls that set the fire, and maybe it comes back to connect to the two girls in present day, but whatever, I really don't care. Probably the nicest thing I can say about is that I liked the in-game visuals, which were low-fi pseudo-PS1-like, which seems to have really taken off as a relatively cheap to make and run but stylish look, particularly for indie horror games. Now if there could just be some actually fun games making use of it... *This particular approach to storytelling has become so commonplace to gaming, both AAA and indie, and I can't really understate how dull I find it. There's an appropriate time and place to use readable notes to flesh out your world/lore, but the extent to which games effectively use them as a crutch has become way too extreme...and it's especially bad when it's the only way of learning whatever garbage the story is supposed to be. Hey idiots, do you remember when fun or intriguing characters that the player/viewer likes or at least is curious about used to drive stories? Ugh. Though at the end of the day, if you're really into a game and its characters, world, and story, you're much more inclined to actually be excited to go find and read any information you can find in-game about all of it, which I clearly was not here. Now if this were like, Undertale or something, with actually fun and interesting writing, I'd keep my mouth firmly closed.

The 2002 OVA art style is...not completely horrible, but I find the character designs to be very off-putting and lizard people-like, which doesn't help with what already seems like creepy direction. The animation and background designs shown off in the outro in particular are really not all that bad on the whole except for that, especially for a random 1-episode OVA made in 2002 of a decades-dead show. Uh, kind of? Not necessarily how I wanted to leave the show off on, but I suppose it was easily the most memorable bit of that episode...

Magical Emi, the End of Magic. Okay, people...hear me out, I would appreciate all your guys' input on something: You basically can't even tell the difference between the art styles, right? But anyways, here's the actually important bit that I would like to hear other people's opinions on...here is the outro of the original show: https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/scl/fi/qz3show7ypdvrn8fxslfl/mpc-hc64_m2U1NwAqnJ.mp4?rlkey=f1skdz9oy685rrpdlhkad9ypn&dl=0 Harmless enough, right? No big deal, it's a silly little shoujo show made for girls, whatever. And now here is the outro of the single-episode 2002 OVA, the last bit of Magical Emi that there ever was, that...I suppose, was trying to pay some kind of homage to it and the show in general, even going so far as to play the original show's music a whole seventeen years later: https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/scl/fi/spqnfkbb1polvhgaihc28/mpc-hc64_JgaRdgtv0p.mp4?rlkey=glgskpxcz111ngns59ua9c7ns&dl=0 Please tell me if I'm crazy: was this OVA ending inexplicably creepy as hell, or what? I was getting nearly Perfect Blue-esque vibes, and I have no clue why it was like that, but it really skeeved me out and made me question what was happening as I watching it. Between the sudden disconcerting and traumatized looks Mai (the main character, she's both the orange-haired girl and the teal-haired lady) kept shifting into, the weird and surreal imagery, Mai watching her own older self appearing in the rainbow, the fact that this is all occurring in what seems to be old photos, the whole minute of silence* in a dark room while the credits play with...what appears to be an older teenaged version of Mai that I've never even seen at any point in either the show or the OVA, but it's her room from when she's a child in the show and I'm pretty sure it's supposed to be her... It's super weird, right? It all felt like I was watching a psychological short that was really actually a memorial for someone who was murdered or something. Can anybody else watch this and tell me if if I'm reading way too much into it or not? I mean, I definitely am, but like...unjustifiably so? *Actually, it's not quite silence: I think you can hear some vaguely ominous environmental sounds like the wind rustling, car brakes, a passing train...

I'm honestly surprised any website or online service operates without rate limiting these days. Not that it really fixes the problem, just makes it less worse. Things have been alright on my end, still the rare "service is unavailable", but generally responsive and generally working fine.

Uh, maybe? The fact that there is/was a Hello Kitty goth line just makes me like Hello Kitty even more... Although I tend to be a little picky about my goth, as I've always been much fonder of classical or minimalist goth rather than...let's say, punk or emo goth. When I google "goth hello kitty", I feel like I'm just seeing a lot of random fan art rather than any actual products.

Thank goodness for refunds...

Zelda: Breath of the Wild had 395 different bugs, animals, monsters, and items that you needed to take pictures of to fill out your knowledge compendium thingy. Or you could just pay an obscene amount of money to have the game automatically fill them out with pictures the devs took for you. I took exactly one picture during my whole playthrough of that game.

When I was young and in grade school, my younger sister had a Hello Kitty backpack that I wanted. I should've known then that my life was destined to end in ruin. e: I want to say that I remember it not being particularly girly outside of obviously being Hello Kitty-branded. I think it was mostly black with some pretty striking patterns on it, probably either purple or pink highlights. It looked cool!

I might've said this before, but I was always of the opinion that characters/creatures should be the very last thing that should have their level of detail decreased relative to everything else, and that quality settings that don't take this into account are dumb.

Some friends wanted me to play PoE2 with them, but I've been taking a stronger and stronger stance against roguelikes and games with any significant amount of procedural generation as of late. Just can't be bothered to play games that don't have well-defined endings these days.

In similar cases that I've seen, if it ends up being the RAM that has spontaneously become defective (which is a pretty rare occurrence in of itself after years of problem-free service), it often seems to get worse (i.e. it might start happening again even on the lower performance settings) over time, but if it's the motherboard not being able to power the RAM correctly...well, it's a lot easier to replace RAM than it is to replace a motherboard, so hopefully it's the RAM.

Thanks to term limits, DeSantis is out of the governor's mansion in Florida in 2026 regardless, so what is theoretically a 4 year position in the cabinet might look attractive...

Happy-Go-Lucky (2008). British film about a young woman who's a naturally carefree and positive person trying to live her life in the moment without thinking too hard about any of it...and unfortunately, how that can offend or mislead others. Very little of traditional dramatic importance happens in this film, and I think if you watch the first ten minutes and don't like the style or the main character which the film focuses so fixedly upon, you shouldn't keep watching, because it's more or less two hours of that. I think I tend to like these kinds of slow and seemingly pointless character dramas that contrarily have little to no drama, a collection of scenes from the lives of people you like or at least find interesting which form a loose but rather poignant narrative about the kind of lives we lead or at least could lead.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_people_granted_executive_clemency_by_Donald_Trump It's gonna be a few negative legacy points for Biden for sure, but it's small potatoes in the grand scheme of things, especially with regards to what's to come shortly.

Was about to reply to LadyCrimson about jalapenos on pizza being the best, but when I clicked on "Reply", this was already sitting in there as something I'd previously written like four or five days ago that I hadn't ended up posting but which the forum helpfully restored: "hCaptcha makes me want to become a terrorist." I'd tried to pay for a Christmas present with PayPal and got effectively temp-banned by them several times for failing their captcha too many times. I ended up searching how in the world I could possibly be failing their captchas over and over, and stuff said that if you do the hCaptcha captchas too quickly or too precisely, you'll automatically fail even if you get them right. You're apparently supposed to slowly move your mouse over each possible answer like you're a hundred years old before you select anything, which is what I ended up doing and PayPal finally let me pay. Get me off this stupid planet.

Esper Mami: Dancing Dolls in the Starlit Sky (1988). It's a movie to a series...which, like Azuki-chan, has also not been subtitled. Tsk, tsk. Anyways, it's about this girl named Mami who has...voodoo powers? I think she's supposed to be psychokinetic (hence "Esper" in the title), but the way it's shown when she's using it on people or objects makes it seem more like voodoo, especially because she's always making devil horns with her hands. Her bizarre teleportation power at least seems fairly benign. Anyways, it's clearly a shoujo-type film along the lines of Secret of Akko-chan or Chibi Maruko-chan: Mami helps local puppeteers entertain a large group of children when they run short of the staff needed to perform the show, a young girl whose mother recently died loses the precious doll that her mom gave her, Mami tries to go find it but discovers it was already destroyed at the local garbage dump, so then we tie it all together with the group of puppeteers that help put on a very special show just for the little girl to...basically help her realize that it's not the doll that's important, it's the memory of her mother and the other people still around her that she cares about that are important. It's cute and it's done pretty well. What felt like a complete episode of a show takes a sudden left turn when the puppeteers have their building partially bulldozed by some nasty real estate developers that apparently bought out the land from the guy they were renting from - everyone basically throws their hands up and goes "well, that was fun while it lasted, but we can't deal with this and have real lives we need to get back to, bye!"...except for the lady and the guy who are clearly very close to each other but were maybe too focused on their work to realize it. Some stuff and things happen, Mami uses a little of her psychic powers combined with her girly thoughtfulness to encourage them to not give up and things are - more or less - eventually made right. Now, I know nobody really much cares about this, but I say all of this because really, this movie could all have been a Cardcaptor Sakura episode or two, and yet, there's something that is very confusing to me. I went to Wikipedia to read more about the series, and...what is that? Shonen? Shonen? This is shonen? I'm sorry, what? Either this movie and/or the anime series it belongs to is very different from the manga or I must have lost my mind. Wait, wait, stop, hold on just a second...what was that last bit? "And who also poses nude for her own father"? Now, I'm no great linguist, but the way I read that line would seem to suggest that...Mami, the very same one from Esper Mami, the young girl in the movie that I just watched that is pictured above...poses nude for her father? Uh, why? Even if three's some kind of in-universe explanation for it that is innocent enough, why would that even be a thing? Dad makes his young teenaged daughter regularly pose nude for his paintings? Um, yuck? Oh, here's a comment I just read on the apparently botched Japanese DVD release of the main series: Oh, oookay. Well, you know what? As far as my brain is concerned, only the non-canonical movie exists, and it's officially a shoujo movie, and a fairly decent one at that, and I think that's just where we're going to have to leave it.

I am not transgender, and I don't personally know well anyone who is (or if I do, they have not informed me). My interactions with people who have made it immediately known that they are transgender have been consistently unpleasant and unwelcome, but it's not exclusive to them, that's always the case with those who immediately make whatever their identity is known to everyone and anyone right off the bat, no matter what it may be: an identity is never adequate substitute for personality. I don't really even believe in assigning meaning to "he", "she", or "they" beyond it being a useful tool of language to make clear as to whom is being referred to in conversation, and I have said as much to others in real life conversation, to people both ardently pro-transgenderism and vehemently against it, where a not untypical retort from the latter group is to mockingly refer to me as she/her, but again, as I really don't care, it's always quickly dropped because of how little it actually impacts reality in any meaningful way beyond confusing others when someone uses the wrong ones. The former group will usually just be happy if you're willing to try to use the right ones, which I do, because again, it really doesn't matter to me, it's just arbitrary connotations of language, which itself is made-up, so why not try to respect others if you can, especially when it seems to matter a great deal to them even if it doesn't to you? But the option in these games to switch from one to the other is always the absolute barest lip service, with zero content or mechanics designed behind it, it's just a simple flag that is checked to say "the player picked a male/female character, swap any said pronouns to the opposite option that we've already designed to account for (or a neutral/third option that they've defined)". That's it, it probably took all of half an hour to an hour for one person to implement, maybe a little more to integrate it into the character creation UI. Wow, so woke...get a grip.

I can quote Lexx's post and that doesn't work for me: it just will not let me. I've had it happen on my own posts, the whole box becomes non-responsive no matter how many times I refresh the page or re-open editing the post, it's like it's become one whole element unto itself. The only thing it will let me do is delete the entire thing.

Just skipping past the part of character creation that lets you change your pronouns or going into your game settings to disable the game from letting you change them is effectively the exact same thing (and I would find any suggestion of the contrary to be quite hilarious: I'd genuinely love to see someone explain how the game asking you about it on one page is to-o-otally different from being asked about it on another page), but if it makes the mouth-foaming troglodytes mad that they can't do the latter, I'm against including it as an option.

As someone not particularly familiar or up-to-date with ongoing modern web development, I actually did some searching a while back about it, and it turns out that posts are now natively written and rendered via HTML, i.e. it's not that we've been denied access to the old BBCode source mode, it's that it just doesn't exist at all anymore. The backend can try to parse and convert old bbcode tags and the like into HTML, of course, but it's basically just a one-way cheat and not particularly practical to reverse to and from on the fly. That being said, I've at least made basic HTML websites and pages before and have some passing familiarity with it, so I'd still like to have an HTML source mode so that I can fix crap when I really need to. Or at least try, because the only current option for when something really goes wrong with a post is that you just delete all of the broken parts and start over.

I'm officially on team red again, because I just bought a 7800 XT for $400. I figured that I'm going to need the 16 GB of VRAM in order to weather out the Trump administration, so I'd best get it now before prices go crazy. If it doesn't play Bloodborne, it's going straight into the nearest dumpster, I won't even return it. Though $400 is relatively 'cheap' for GPUs by today's standards, it is the most I've ever spent on a GPU even adjusted for inflation - it's just never been something I've spent all that much on, historically speaking*. And since the price-comparable nvidia offerings come with a much more paltry offering of VRAM, worse rasterization performance, and only offer 'better' AI upscaling and frame generation features that I wouldn't touch with a ten-foot pole anyways in return, there really wasn't that much reason to go with nvidia this time around...unless there are compatibility issues, which I will be checking thoroughly once again just like the last time I had an AMD card. That last AMD card (a Vega, I believe) was immediately launched into the sun, so let's hope this time goes a little better. *Even now, I still spent more on the CPU for my current build - at the time of purchase, anyways.

This week, page load times have gone back to being generally respectable, but I've been somewhat frequently getting errors that say "service unavailable" where the page won't load at all. I prefer either the paging loading quickly or giving an error after just a few seconds over it taking a minute just to not load, at least. What LadyCrimson describes above sounds more like how it was for me last week and the week before, though.