Bartimaeus

Man, I think the Bucks would've had a pretty good chance of repeating if Khris Middleton hadn't slipped on a banana peel in the first round and/or the roleplayers hadn't decided they were going to be the absolute worst over a 7 game series. Stupid sports.

The post-Princess Tutu show pick: Dennou Coil, episodes 2 and 3. This show is...I don't know, kind of like the tone and cast of My Neighbor Totoro meets the setting of Ghost in the Shell, I guess is how I'd put it. That doesn't really sound like it should be a good combination, but the show has been putting the appropriate amount of time into having the characters (all five of the important ones who have been girls/women so far, although I think it's likely a younger boy will eventually join them) have nicer, calmer moments of silliness and fun while also having them run for their lives from the government(?) machines trying to hunt and clean up after them in their very strange tech city, so it's been really good so far. It's a shorter series at twenty-six episodes. I'm having to watch this one in English instead of Japanese because I'm not watching it alone, but the English dub is also good (although, in my opinion, not quite as good as the Japanese, but it's good enough that I don't mind). I still haven't decided which show to focus on next on my own. I would like to once again implore that Madhouse stop making shows that I have to watch all the way through - it's very bad news when I enjoy something from even 2007 that they made. It's also a lot more lighthearted and normal show compared to Texhnolyze, which I'm pretty happy about. Texhnolyze was good, but I need something a little more straightforward and fun. The summary of the premise I read about this show sure went somewhere: I'm guessing the orange girl pictured above is this Raphtalia?

It's not a perfect analogy, but keep in mind that the Patriots were arguably even worse than the Warriors were during the 60s-90s, and they were "the Patriots" as we know them by the end of the 2000s after having won 3 titles. Golden State went to five straight and won 3, so it's not particularly different to me - they came out of nowhere to dominate the 2010s, and now they look to want to establish a second leg of dominance just like the Patriots did. Yeah, I'm gonna be cheering against Golden State. Well...I would be, except I like Boston even less, while I still haven't made up my mind about how I feel about Miami in relation to the other two options. Which is precisely why basketball will feel dead to me after Dallas is eliminated here, .

Oh, so it's not ever going to change either. Well, that's just unfortunate, especially what with the team actually being good (and having a two-straight bonafide MVP player - I'm sure we'd all love to forget terrible injuries having derailed two Nuggets post-seasons, but that's a different matter entirely). And that's for a home market: the whole American sports TV model of making it very difficult or outright impossible to watch games for out-of-market teams is incredibly annoying if you're not in the home market for your specific team. Yeah, I think I'll save my money and tears for smaller companies and creators, not the huge sports leagues that are already ridiculously flush with cash.

Nope, I don't have cable, but I have access to free over-the-air channels that has stuff like Fox and CBS Sports, which would cover the majority of NFL games. NBA is a bit more spotty because like half of the games are on channels that aren't free over-the-air and also the NBA doesn't seem to have a good national TV deal like the NFL does (for example, AFAIK @ShadySands's Denver Nuggets are basically never on TV in Colorado at all because some incredibly garbage service bought the home market rights and so unless you happen to have the very specific service, it's not really possible to watch most of their games legally - correct me if I'm wrong about this Shady).

Hey, it's a form of...I was going to say "civil disobedience", but it's more "corporate disobedience", I guess, since it doesn't really impact anyone besides the particular corporation. Well, I don't think the U.S. will be greatly impacted by whether the NBA or NFL lives or dies, but maybe I'm wrong and it is a small form of the former after all.

I deliberately pirate all of my sports streams precisely because I don't want to support these sports organizations even when I literally could watch stuff over the air in HD legitimately. I cannot understate how much I do not care what's "good" for the business side of things - I watch football and basketball because I want to enjoy watching the sport, and seeing a Boston/Warriors match-up would be like seeing a Patriots/Packers match-up to me (ignore that I am a Packers fan, I am talking from a more general view where seeing the same teams continue to be great for too long is awful and boring). Admittedly, I like to see athletes get paid for their ridiculous talent and hard work, but that's just about inversely offset by the brazillionaires getting even more as a percentage of whatever the sport earns as a whole. Do you want the Patriots to win another Super Bowl next year? Even though Tom Brady's no longer on the team, kind of difficult for me to particularly want that. The rotten stink of Kevin Durant probably won't fade for me until that entire team is dismantled and rebuilt from the ground up.

basketball's just about dead, folks

Kind of reminds me when my buddy had a fan spontaneously shatter while the PC was running and pieces went flying into the video card and it immediately died. Hope yours turns out okay.

Depends on whether you trust majestic or Lexx's and Sarex's tastes in anime better, . majestic thought the visuals were mostly bad but liked the characters and story, .

The End of Texhnolyzelion: Uh...this sure went somewhere. So I'm gonna need a multi-page majestic plot and thematic analysis of this one, stat. One thing I really appreciate about shorter shows is that...er, well, they're short. Okay, so that's not exactly groundbreaking news, but it's doubly true for dark, violent, and/or difficult to follow shows like this where you, quite frankly, would get exhausted by the show over time. I'm sure that Breaking Bad is an excellent show with many objectively good qualities, but it's literally 60 hours long - about thirty long movies worth. That's a really long time to be wallowing in gritty violence and nihilistic misery, and it tends to make it so I lose interest in them because I just don't want to do that at such a ridiculous length. 60 hours of Sailor Moon I can do, 60 hours of Breaking Bad I cannot. Anyways, that's all to say that I can appreciate it when a show like Texhnolyze clocks in at like 6 to 8 hours instead - it makes all the difference in the world for me being able to complete it. Spy x Family: I almost want to try it out myself, and then I remember that I'm me.

Stories Untold. I don't know how this got into my Steam library (did one of the TGGG people give it to me?), but it's basically a game that mixes text adventure with external puzzle mechanics and storytelling. It's actually pretty cool and a lot of fun (though probably not terribly challenging for people who actually played text adventures...but I'm okay with that, seeing as I'm not such as a person).

At least Merle is in the Escaflowne movie. The twenty or so minutes I watched of the 1986 film was "spontaneously cease to exist" levels of drab and boring, as is often the case for me with 80s action stuff. It didn't help that I had a misleading impression of what the series was going to be about from the outset, as I somehow thought that it was going to be the adventures of a muscle god and a little girl, which sounded like it could be an interesting dynamic in what looked to be a brutal violence setting - if it was done right. Then I actually started to watch the film and quickly realized that I had made a terrible mistake and it wasn't even like 5% of what I imagined it would be like. Well, it's certainly there to appeal to boys, albeit in a very different manner.

Hopefully, one day, there'll come a time where it's O.K. for an older American Hollywood actress to age gracefully. I know I am not the only one who is at least a little horrified by what some of these poor women do to themselves for the sake of their careers, yet the phenomenon persists. There were some scenes (usually the farther away ones) where she looked relatively normal, but there were others where she looked quite strange. The landscapes looked nice, as did the costumes and such. All the more puzzling that a number of scenes looked kind of bad to me...particularly after having seen Eggers' The Lighthouse, which was visually sublime. Very different styles of film that require different types of scenes, of course, but still.

The Northman (2022). Um...I really liked both The Lighthouse and The Witch, but this just wasn't it for me. Some things looked or sounded pretty off stylistically (a few too many scenes that were just kind of ugly or cheap looking), Anya-Taylor Joy seemed like a very bad miscast (which is weird, since I've very much liked her in a number of other roles)...but really, the movie just felt very silly instead of tense or engaging. Maybe if you're more interested in the premise and dark fantasy action than I am.

It's been a hot minute, but finally a few more episodes of Texhnolyze. Not sure if it's because it has been a week, but I don't seem to have much grasp over what's happening with the plot anymore. Well, there's not that much left, so either I'll find the thread again somewhere along the way or I won't.

You're right - the non-Japanese version is also halfway through the album, and if that's the version used for the film, it's probably the 2006 film. Good luck, .

I went ahead and decided to track down the singer on VGMDB, and the song in question is on this soundtrack. Issue is, this soundtrack is for both the 2006 and 2007 films. The fact that it's the very last track of the album makes me think it's actually in the 2007 film, but I don't know for sure, especially because what I had previously seen suggested it was on the 2006 film instead. There are a couple of entries to this franchise:

From what I can determine, it's very likely the 2006 film "Shin Kyuuseishu Densetsu Hokuto no Ken Raou-den Jun'ai no Shou". I once tried the 1986 film, and that's all I have to say about that. Princess Tutu: I didn't hate it either, but it was certainly highly frustrating and not exactly to my taste. Closer than most other anime, sure, but not enough that it felt like a good time. I regret watching the entire first season given that it clearly wasn't working for me, but not too terribly. I don't have an issue with that explanation, it just doesn't shift the needle for me - I require my characters to be justified through them being characters, not through abstract plot and theme stuff. It's just how it is, . At the very least, that needs to be the case for the important characters that the viewer spends a lot of time with. I'm not offended by Edel's role in the story, after all, seeing as she only appears in the show for probably a grand total of 5 minutes of its run-time. I guess the difference is that it's a show where they easily could have done a lot more with the run-time it was given - Disney's Sleeping Beauty is an hour and fifteen minutes, this was close to 4 and a half hours. Yet going from a show to a shorter movie conversely would've probably just made for a Madoka situation for me, where the tighter focus on the elements I don't like necessitated by the shorter run time strip it entirely of the things that I did like. On the other hand, it would've been over a lot sooner. They had a highly specialized skill-set of adapting bad material when given the creative license to just make up whatever they wanted to fill in the blanks between the main story parts. Too specific a set of circumstances for it to apply to other shows, .

Holy crap, and I thought we/the Bucks had it bad. RIP Suns, and just at the half too. I mean, theoretically, the Suns could make up this ridiculous deficit, but it sure doesn't seem likely. (e): Somehow, it got worse.

I have come away from this with a much worse opinion of Wil Wheaton, and my opinion of Wil Wheaton was already pretty bad.

Bucks' shooting has been...difficult to watch outside of Giannis this Celtics series. Probably going to go home because of none of the roleplayers being able to ever hit any open 3s. (e): That'll do it. Inconsistent teams don't win championships, last year's aberration aside, and boy, the Bucks have been horribly inconsistent in the playoffs over the last five years. Guess I'm cheering for...Dallas?

You're looking at it from the point of view of the story and what it has declared to be important and true, while I am looking at it from the point of view of the characters and what I've seen to be actually motivating Ahiru from the very beginning of the show - what she herself feels is important to her. With no Mytho, there is no Ahiru becoming a human or doing anything else in this story, because Mytho is the thing that she has staked her entire existence on. The problem is that while I know Mytho is important to her, as she tells me approximately a billion times over the course of the show, I still have as little understanding of why now as I did when I started the show, and that is just...not very compelling to me when it's the central character axis for Ahiru and practically the only thing that allows for this story to exist and move forward in the first place. In other words, he's basically Anthy from Utena, who was also the "thing" motivating all the other characters. At least those characters had other underlying psychological issues that the show spent time on, even if it did a less than satisfactory job of connecting all of it together...whereas in this show, it's "Mytho is important because he's important because he's important". Coincidentally (NOT!), Anthy was probably the biggest source of story and character frustration in Utena for me as well - I never really got to the point of truly understanding what it was motivating everyone else to jostle and fight for her from the point of view of the characters themselves, how their personal issues actually connected them to Anthy in a real sense...which made them fundamentally weak and unsatisfying characters. I meant since starting it in earnest. Understandable, really, . In The Lord of the Rings, the Ring of Power provides motivation for our heroes to go on their adventure (both the initial one to Rivendell and the actual Fellowship quest after) because there is a clear and present promise of death to our characters and everyone/everything that they know if they are not successful in dealing with it, which they find out all too well on their way to Rivendell. It's not a terribly personal motivation at first (though there are other smaller motivations also helping drive along Frodo and Sam initially), but it does make sense for our characters to be invested in resolving that, and it also becomes more personal as the story goes on with how the Ring affects each of them. So what is the equivalent for our characters in Princess Tutu? Mytho is life-and-death important to all of Ahiru, Fakir, and Rue because...um, well, Fakir decided he couldn't let the story continue for fear of what it might do to Mytho, and Rue and Ahiru love him. I guess those are fine as very quick and basic motivations...but the show never does anything more to explain or expand upon those motivations as far as I could tell. There seems to be no underlying cause for any of it, no connective tissue to pull these characters together. No, from beginning to end, it feels like the story is telling what the characters to feel, think and do instead of the characters organically driving what happens in the story, and so it effectively becomes the very worst main story bits of Sailor Moon - all the moments in that show where it feels like the characters aren't being their natural selves because the story demands that they be something else until the story is resolved, leading to all sorts of unnatural and arguably meaningless (yet conversely overly-grandiose!) dialogue and actions that don't feel connected to our characters personally. For the most part, you could just as well switch who is saying and doing what with any other character, or put entirely new characters in their place, and it would not really change how scenes go or how the story ends up getting resolved. I have trouble connecting to much (though not all) of the main story of Sailor Moon for that reason - very little of the Naoko Takeuchi-written main story material feels like it's driven by our characters, while the non-canon filler stuff ironically does a bit of a better job (seriously, the non-canon stuff even gives some meaningful motivation to the villains, like Nehellenia at the start of Sailor Stars, or the two aliens in the Magic Tree Arc of R, so that we can at least care a little about them as well, whereas the canon story...doesn't really try by and large). It's also why the main story in Steven Universe works for me even when the plot itself is not always entirely well-told or constructed: everyone is individually and very personally motivated to feel and behave the way they do, the characters very keenly feel the effects of all the different things that have happened to each of them, and their experiences in trauma and just as friends together push them all to - in their own ways - love, trust, and depend upon each other. It all feels very personal and naturally character-driven while still allowing for the story to move forward with how it unfolds and impacts the characters (who also all have their own reasons to see the story get resolved!). Meanwhile, I've been sitting here throughout Princess Tutu wondering why the heck anyone feels or does anything that happens in this story, and I don't really feel like I ever got any kind of explanation. Whether it's a person or an object or a person-as-an-object, I just needed more than what Princess Tutu gave me. And yes in regards to the question of your previous post, . Okay, now this is actually a love story I can get behind.

Episodes 12 and 13 of Princess Tutu. It's over! It's been a bit like the Grim Reaper hanging overhead for a couple of months now. Worst character award goes to Mytho, who started off as an utterly mindless pawn for the story and its themes while literally never deviating from being exactly that for the entire duration of the show; the best character award goes to his brother Fakir, who ironically started off as the very worst and a completely two-dimensional character at the start of the show and turned out to be the only character capable of character development and enjoyable dialogue with Ahiru by the end. Speaking of, on the whole Ahiru was fairly close behind him while Rue was in a similar situation to Mytho in their respective categories, and would somebody please ram a pike up Drosselmeyer's butt so I can never hear that "LET ME EXPLAIN THE STORY FOR YOU" show-interrupting exposition-dumping non-character piece of garbage ever again? No, now that you ask, it turns out that I will not be watching the second season. I did laugh at the end when Edel said she was a mindless puppet mimicking a human, because I couldn't help but be reminded of Quest 64 where the puppet helper lady in that game says the exact same thing right at the end of the game, and somehow that felt hilarious to me given how atrociously terrible story-telling Quest 64 had. The best parts of this show were when characters actually talked to each other like normal characters (like Fakir and Ahiru started to over the last handful of episodes - a number of genuinely nice moments between those two that I really liked!), but it was sadly never near enough to offset the constant theme/plot babbling that would make my brain shutdown every time it happened. I don't think I will ever be able to accept a show that requires you to accept its themes as being more dominant than the other elements - everyone quickly starts to sound less like characters and more like artificial constructs trying to hammer in some message that I simply do not care about, and the more they do it, the more I am annoyed. I should care about Ahiru's part in the story, because I do like her, but her primary objective (the reason for her entire existence inside the story, really!) is to save and restore Mytho, and Mytho is proven over and over to be a non-thing that does not matter whatsoever, so it is incredibly difficult to care about that. Ahiru and Fakir working together was instantly so much more compelling because Fakir was an actual character I'd seen change and grow a little over the course of the show. ...Okay, now that I have all the mental violence about this show expelled from my mind, am I correct in assuming that season 2 is primarily about Rue and resolving her side of the story?