Bartimaeus

Downfall (2004). That one German film where the funny Hitler meme videos come from. It's been about fifteen years since I last watched it, and it doesn't hold up quite as well as I thought it would; there's way too many very pointed "how could we have known this would happen"-type inserts that feel clumsy and out of place throughout the film. When the film is just proceeding along without the overbearing moralizations is when it's good, but there are too many such detours that awkwardly feel somewhere between either self-apologist or revisionist.

Dark, the end. If you didn't like season 2, I don't recommend coming back for season 3 because it's just more of the same. It's a neat and unique narrative, but the amount of times where our main characters are basically told "[person] was wrong/lying, now listen to me and you'll finally get out of this mess..." just for them to do the same exact thing with the next person they see was pretty ridiculous - it was like they would always do whatever the last person they talked to told them to do, no matter how insane it was. I think I tend to like the first seasons of dark serialized dramas more than the ensuing ones because the first ones are simpler and have more time for the character stuff, while later seasons are all about moving the increasingly complex narrative forward. It's more admirable than wheel-spinning (see: Stranger Things), but it's still not exactly my cup of tea when it goes on for too long, and this one did feel like it was for a bit too long. I guess I should be thankful there wasn't also a fourth or fifth season as well... @Lexx Definitely thought it should've been the other way around as well re: Max and Eddie. Whatever, .

I'm glad to have had the good fortune to watch some that I did like before being subjected to a bunch that I thought were somewhere between lacking and embarrassing. Most of the older "greatest anime movies of all time" fall in the former (lacking) category, while most of the newer ones fall in the latter (embarrassing). I didn't think about that, but maybe that's why I hate him. Too strong, too right, and too little personality...and he also makes everyone else come across as patently stupid because he thinks and does what everyone else seems unable or unwilling to, which only draws more attention to how dumb and shortsighted they all are (while also coming across as being kind of unreasonable himself - more on this later!). I guess it's not as bad as your slapstick or ecchi shonen protagonist, but those kinds of crap-tier protagonists aren't found in films of Princess Mononoke's calibre in the first place. I don't know if you've played Half-Life 2 (I think you have?), but it comes to mind as a comparison because of Alyx Vance. Everyone who's ever played that game always loves her, but I've always disliked her because she feels like she was designed specifically to stroke the player's ego for doing everything and anything throughout the course of all three HL2 games, and it's always felt kind of weird and gross to me. Although accomplished in a different manner, that's more or less what Ashitaka seems like as well: he's clearly supposed to be a stand-in for the viewer, and he says and does everything that the viewer would ideally do if they were as strong as him while in his position with the same lack of personal perspective that he displays (after all, the only reason he doesn't belong to any side and can thus be "the reasonable one" constantly shouting "why can't we all get along?" to everybody is because he doesn't have any strong ties to any of the different groups, same as the viewer - if it were his own people/family at stake, he would immediately choose the relevant side and become unreasonable the same as everyone else). It's like the movie is constantly telling us "yes, you the viewer are right for thinking the way you do!", and I kind of hate it. I don't want protagonists that would be like the ideal version of myself if I were dropped into this story with no personal stakes in order to solve it - that would be awful. My favorite protagonists tend to be well-meaning but totally divergent characters that do things in a completely different fashion than I would (sometimes more effectively, sometimes less!)...while actually having some kind of personality combined with their own motivations that makes them different and interesting. I think you could pretty easily consider San to be literally mentally disabled to a degree as a result of her wolf upbringing, but I still would've much rather seen her be the protagonist than Ashitaka. Plus, then we would've seen her grow independently without being totally dependent upon Ashitaka as the shonen protagonist crutch that solves and makes everything better - see what I mean in that he makes everyone around him look stupid while not being interesting or fun himself?

Yeah, I watched it, it was pretty whatever, I didn't pay attention to anything that wasn't the main group (i.e. Steve, Nancy, Dustin et al.). Stranger Things started out as such a good blend of tension, intrigue, characters with actual development and arcs, fun and smooth dialogue/action, and some heartfelt resolutions...and what is the show now? It has lost all of that except for the "fun and smooth dialogue/action" because the show clearly had zero idea on what to do with its characters and became much more pre-occupied with the TV equivalent of wheel-spinning (i.e. staying in the same place doing the same thing over and over again). I guess it's what most people expect and want, but it all feels kind of rather hollow and pathetic to me. Lot of different paths they could've gone down with this show, but they chose this one.

You're barking up the wrong tree regarding cheeses - with the exception of when used for Mexican food, I don't like or eat cheese, .

Hey, it could be worse: you could also have some atrocious-looking manga to read as well, .

My current system is an M2 500 GB Hynix P31 Gold (system drive) and an M2 2 TB Mushkin Pilot-E...it's nice having them right on the motherboard instead of having to fiddle with SATA stuff. Plus, well, the case I have only allows for two HDDs anyways (which are occupied by two 14 TBs). Meanwhile, my GPU (a GTX 1060) is quite literally the cheapest component of my system because I don't play games...

My primary concerns with SSDs are reliability/longevity and random reads/writes. The difference between 2000 MB/s and 3000 MB/s sustained reads/writes is pretty meaningless in the grand scheme of things when random reads and writes are much greater determiners of real world performance (unless you genuinely have some specialized use case). My personal experiences with SSDs thus far have been: three Samsung, four HP, one Hynix, two Sabrent, three PNY, and one Mushkin. So far, the only bad experiences were with the PNY drives, all of which had immediate problems right off the bat and of which two catastrophically failed within twelve months. Otherwise, everything else has been fine. All the others are still in use and work somewhere between well and superbly. Really, for most purposes, any SSD is more than adequate, so I don't usually stress out about the numbers as much as I do knowing that it's a decent brand (or a decent rebrand).

International leagues without competitive balance at least make a kind of sense, since they're pitting the top-end players of each nation against each other, but intranational leagues that don't have it feel like a joke to me. I would agree for the most part - don't hate the player, hate the game. But there are particular players like Durant that are pretty much impossible not to hate because of how far they take it. If he goes to Pheonix or something, it's going to be difficult to be happy about it.

No, I think the "championships above all else" mentality is pretty silly*. I want some competitive balance to make the sport interesting (see: me hating college football), and taken to its logical extreme, championship-chasing undermines that (on top of devaluing championships period). Both the NBA and NFL thankfully have a salary cap that makes it so things don't usually get too extreme, but I'd actually like to see them become even more stringent than they are. I'm pretty happy when guys like Jokic take a trillion dollars and stay with the team that made them instead of going to whatever's the current hot destination. Somewhat conversely to me wanting more stringent salary caps, I'd also like to see stronger benefits in the NBA and especially the NFL for teams that draft players to be able to then retain their own players - for the NFL, something like a 10% cap discount if you drafted them would be pretty cool for encouraging homegrown talent to stay where they are, since the cap savings can then be passed on to pay those players more than competing outside offers. I like teams having consistent faces and identities over a long period of time, it makes them unique and memorable...as a opposed to the circus clown crap that happens too much in the NBA, where teams are made and then implode in the span of a couple of years. *I mean really, even right after the Bucks won the championship two years ago, I said the journey was more fun than the destination, didn't I? Sticking to my guns here...

If the cost of blowing up what seems to be a failed superteam is actually making another (and presumably more successful) superteam elsewhere, it'd be bittersweet at best, wouldn't it? Situation could easily be worse and not better once he's traded - we'll see where he goes. On a side-note, considering the Brooklyn Nets' historical lack of success and the fact that this "superteam" obviously didn't work out, I guess my ire is more reserved at the offending players in question and less the team in this particular instance.

The 970 EVO is considered to be the superior drive, AFAIK. Has actual DRAM instead of using HMB. HMB is fine for budgety stuff, but pay the extra $10 for the DRAM if you can - it was the key distinguishing feature that I waited for so long when I finally got my 2 TB SSD like a year and a half ago.

He might actually win games on another team, so not particularly, .

Tutu predates BGT; BGT allows you to play both within the same game and provides a bridge of sorts between the two. EET is the equivalent on the Enhanced Editions (but also requires Siege of Dragonspear).

It's about a difference of $30 here in the U.S., but Malcador's in Canada, so I don't know.

Hey, I provided three different explanations...one of which didn't apply (you know I checked out the English, we talked about it), but that still leaves me possibly just forgetting about it. But I didn't, I just didn't enjoy K-On enough to mention it - had to be a 6/10 or better show, and K-On was a "solid" 5/10, . K-On's English voice direction was pretty bad. Literally has the Sailor Moon VA as the main character, but somehow the direction is off and everyone sounds wrong. At least the Japanese was mostly fine. Sawako, go directly into the dumpster, do not pass go. Just seven more seasons of that, and you'll finally be free, .

Of the shows that I have watched and enjoyed(-ish), I really like the Sailor Moon, Ranma, Neon Genesis Evangelion, and Revolutionary Girl Utena English dubs; The Vision of Escaflowne's is fine as well. In contrast, I'd say that the English dubs for Nadia: The Secret of Blue Water, Paranoia Agent, Samurai Champloo, Cardcaptor Sakura, Princess Tutu, and Girls' Last Tour were all between poor and terrible. If I'm forgetting anything in this list, it's either because I forgot them, didn't notice they had an English option, or because I didn't really enjoy the show in question, . The few modern shows I've watched and have checked the English dubs out for have had pretty terrible English dubs - Girls' Last Tour and Madoka, for example. Unlike 90s and earlier stuff, that doesn't seem to be the fault of casting or production values but instead just deliberately atrocious direction. I don't know why they do that, but you can usually tell pretty fast when a bunch of VAs are putting on what are clearly "false" voices that make them sound unnaturally anime-esque.

It kind of looks like they lifted Broken Age's art style.

I don't really care what language something's if it's good. Madoka Magica's and Steins;Gate's Japanese dubs both made me want to fill my earholes in with cement, while I am a big supporter of NGE's original English dub; contrarily, watching Cardcaptor Sakura in English would merit your execution, and Sailor Moon is good in either. All about direction and how well it's pulled off. In specifically Princess Mononoke's case, I actually like the direction of it for the most part (lot of really good voice cast choices...besides Jada Pinkett Smith), but the writing in that film comes across as sounding so dumb that it's still difficult to listen to in my own tongue at times. If characters weren't constantly saying stupid stuff all the time, it'd probably be fine.

Princess Mononoke (1997), but in Japanese this time. Hearing stuff like "I was prepared the moment I let my arrow fly" or "it's your fate so you can see with eyes unclouded by hate" sounds way more dumb when you hear it out loud in comparison to when you just read it, so I thoroughly endorse the Japanese version over the English. Having to listen to Jada Pinkett Smith play as an angry Japanese lady was an especially atrocious casting decision by Disney even back when I watched this film the first time. Still not my favorite Ghibli film (in fact, I still can't say that I really particularly like it), but at least it was better.

I guess that's what I don't like about this season. The first one kept the viewer in the loop on what the main characters were learning as the show went along, whereas in this one I only have a much vaguer grasp on what's happening with everyone because they've decided that the secret of the big mystery plot is more important than the character writing. Also, I just realized I called Claudia "Sandra", whoops. Same thing, .

Dark, season 2, episode 6: somebody who's already watched the show please make this make sense to me.

This brings back to mind a film I've mentioned a few times over the years, Jeanne Dielman (1975), which based on your description of and subsequent reaction to Memoria, I don't think I could recommend to you. Jeanne Dielman is a 3 hour and 22 minute Belgian-French film about a lady that speaks to no-one and does chores. I thought it was neat and interesting, but also that it would be the most painfully long and boring film in the entire history of cinema for the vast majority of movie-watchers. Just imagine: a minute longer than the theatrical version of The Return of the King (and really, more than that because of how much time is taken up by the credits of TRotK!), but almost literally nothing of note happens the entire length of the film. So I'm going to watch Memoria to see how it compares to that. Right, the first 45 seconds of the film (I actually checked) are taken up by this frame: A bit indulgent already for my tastes. The next three and a half minutes are Tilda Swanson comically shambling out of bed. Somehow, this already feels much worse right off the bat than Jeanne Dielman did to me. ...Alright, I'm twenty minutes in, and I think I have to call it quits. This is deathly boring. I don't know what Jeanne Dielman did exactly that made it feel a little different and more interesting than this, but this just isn't working for me. Maybe it's because I felt some sort of human connection to the character in Jeanne Dielman and I very much don't to Tilda Swanson here.

can we replace "" with this instead