Bartimaeus

My cat acts like she's received a mortal wound and is on the verge of expiring when you put a sock on her back. I imagine her brain would immediately cease all function if I ever put a collar on her.

I hated it the first time I listened to it, but I liked it by the time I got to the end of the show. The power using something appropriately for something you like, I guess.

What I recognized: SpyxFamily (because of InsaneCommander's posts in this thread) My Hero Academia (I think) because a specific character I read about (before having ever seen the show) sold me on trying it out and then it was the worst show I'd ever seen in my entire life (but I say that a lot, so). Neon Genesis Evangelion One Punch Man Dragon Ball Z Somehow, I didn't notice Madoka Magica (e: or JoJo? How did I miss that too? ) which majestic says was in it. I suppose that's just as well, really.

Dark, up to episode 4 of season 2. I feel like this season isn't working quite as well as the previous. We went from season 1 which was primarily about characters whose motivations and goals we mostly understood even if the viewer didn't always necessarily agree with how they went about it (generally relationship issues, looking for loved ones, and trying to glean what little they can of what happened while dealing with their lives) to instead focusing on more mercurial and nebulous characters where it is not quite so clear and I'm pretty frequently asking myself questions such as "what exactly is this person trying to accomplish by doing this", "how do they know this information", and "why are they hiding or not doing anything with what they do know". Not only that, but the show feels a lot more hyper-focused on the "big story" stuff, which is not my preference; I value understanding my characters more than understanding the story. Still four episodes left to change my mind, but so far, it's definitely not as enjoyable to me as the first. Though it's not "I wouldn't want to watch the third season" bad...yet, .

Dark, season 1. Not entirely sure what happened at the end there, but it sure was provocative.

Didn't a current Ravens linebacker just OD and pass away as well?

I got roped into watching the first couple episodes of Dark. It basically seems like German Stranger Things so far. By "German Stranger Things", I mean that instead of there being any silly fun, it's just slow, dark, and austere all the time...and instead of inter-dimensional monsters eating people, it's time travel experiments getting kids killed - in other words, German Stranger Things. It's not bad, though.

If it's the actual 2D drawn stuff, it's most likely just the result of the entire process being digital. There are actually people (and sometimes studios*!) out there who try to take the wonderfully soft and noisy traditional animation of older movies and shows and blast it with various filters until it looks "digital". Generally, it's a matter of blurring everything, removing and evening out noise, and then super sharpening lines/edges, all to result in what I call a very plastic looking effect. It's hideous to me. Probably last month, I was doing a source comparison for 1995 film Ghost in the Shell, and for HD sources, there is effectively one scan used by the blurays (although that scan has been tinkered with a few times between the different bluray releases over the years) and also a very distinct scan that was instead used for a rare TV broadcast. The TV broadcast, bizarrely, pretty much blows the bluray scan out of the water in terms of clarity, level of detail, and film grain (and also has a larger matte** to boot)...but the person who made the recording lost the original file (with only some screenshots still remaining of it) while re-encoding it after having plasticized it through filters so that it looks atrocious. Just a terrible human being on the whole really, . *Terminator 2, which isn't even animation, got destroyed in a recent 4K bluray release because of whatever studio was responsible for handling it deciding they didn't like noise and filtering it to high hell - the original 1080p bluray consequently looks more detailed and less gross. **That is, more of the frame is visible and not cut-off arbitrarily like in the bluray release. See, for a very clear-cut example, Watership Down in its original bluray release vs. the recent Criterion "remaster". Screw you and whatever the original aspect ratio was (if that's even the case), give me the complete frame if they actually drew it and there aren't any obvious problems with it.

I typed into Google "wil wheaton no beard" and looked for about 30 seconds, truly I am losing my touch anyways, his face actually does look more normal with the beard I think, but at the same time some cleaning up and trimming would help it not look so neckbeardy

RLM only gave it literally about a thirty second review because of how much they didn't care. Probably could've saved yourself some time, . It's a little confusing that there are two Pinocchio films literally called "Pinocchio" coming out in 2022 - this del Toro stop-motion one (December) and also the Walt Disney live action one (September). Well, I know which one is bound to at least be a lot more interesting...

He suffers from a pretty unfortunate case of the neck beard on top of the uncomfortable over-grinning stuff. This is apparently the only photo on the internet of him as an adult(-ish?) without the beard:

It's perfectly fine to like this sort of thing, truly and honestly. I am by no means the ultimate arbitrator of what is and isn't O.K. to do in film, animated or otherwise. There's plenty of proof of that in this thread alone, where most everyone else here cannot even begin to understand what it is exactly that catches my eye and delights me in the various things that I've enjoyed that does absolutely nothing for the rest of you, while what individually appeals to and excites everyone else equally does nothing for me. It's pretty much exactly what I was talking about two pages ago when I said there is something inherently offensive to me in films like this and A Silent Voice. Their style and sensibilities in how they attempt to present characters, dialogue, and tone, how they try to convey ideas and plot is so quickly and so intensely wrong to me that I don't think we are reconcilable. It's setting something off in my brain that causes the same sort of extreme resentment for @majestic that makes it impossible for him to enjoy any aspect of nu-Star Trek, even the parts that are actually similar to the old Star Trek shows that he does enjoy...but the thing is, I also have a way lower tolerance for what I hate than majestic does, and so I can't keep watching something that violates my sense of how things should be done to its very core like he is able to. The most I can do is take a few minutes of it at a time if it's between other stuff that I do actually like. It seems like a very remote chance that if I were to watch another half hour that it's all going to start to click, or that I'm going to suddenly like the style and characters of the film when I so strongly did not for the first twenty minutes.

Wolf Children (2012). @Sarex, look away - I could not even finish it. It's so extreme that I couldn't even get out of the prologue. I am now going to go on a completely insane and unhinged rant about anime drama films and why they almost never seem to work for me. Please do not take it personally, or better yet, don't even read it in the first place.

Himitsu no Akko-chan aka The Secrets of Akko-chan, a post almost certainly only of interest to @majestic: Wikipedia seems to suggest that this is the very first shoujo manga(?), originally published in 1962...but not the first shoujo anime, as it came out in 1969 after a few others had already premiered. The premise is pretty simple: Akko is a young girl obsessed with mirrors, but accidentally breaks her favorite one. After giving it a proper burial, the goddess of mirrors descends from the heavens to give Akko a magical compact that allows her to transform into any creature or person when she looks into it. There were three different series of it made, but only a tiny bit of this franchise is available with English subtitles - the first episode of the 1969 show, the first episode of the 1998 show, and two short "films" (~25 minutes each) of the 1988 show, and I watched them all.

I found him pretty amusing for the first ~10 or so episodes because it seemed like just about literally every time he ever tried to do anything, everyone else would just summarily dump on him. But I definitely can agree that it's not the best, .

Yeah, that's literally what I thought of as I was writing that. I only have to shovel a foot of snow a few dozen times each winter to make up for it... Still, it's very nice to have 10% of the entire world's fresh water supply right next to you.

It was 50-60 F for most of the day today...a bit warm for my tastes. Lake Superior not pulling its weight, .

CoP always felt really...sterile to me. Like I'm inside a playpen where I could screw around with all my toys to my heart's content, but nothing too exciting could ever happen because I'm still inside of the playpen. I think it's because none of the levels connected to each other (thus not feeling like an actual game world like SHoC did), the game's A-Life (what determined where NPCs and monsters could go on their own) was in its most neutered state out of all three games which lead to nothing much ever happening unless you personally caused it to happen (also nothing insane like being randomly swarmed by a veritable horde of different types of mutants in e.g. Agroprom or getting caught in some huge fight between different factions or mutants or both could ever happen), a lot of the quests and story were way over scripted (and also...just really not all that good for the most part), levels were super wide open and seemed to have an almost circus-like feel to them ("come look at this weird thing...okay, now go look at THAT weird thing!")... CoP got away from most of what I would consider to be SHoC's strengths - clearly, some people love those changes and that's O.K., but yeah, never really did it for me.

Gaming is very established in its fundamentals, conventions, and style at this point, and there's not a lot of deviation from it. Myself and others that I know feel the same discontent and/or fatigue that you do - you pick up a game that you think looks nice, you start playing it, and within a half hour you feel like you pretty much grasp the game in its entirety. Maybe you don't know every gameplay mechanic yet, but the ones you do know are pretty much the exact same ones found in a dozen other games that you've played and already mastered, while the ones that you'd figure out later wouldn't be much of a surprise or fundamentally change how you play the game; maybe you don't know exactly how the story will go or what will happen to the characters, but you get a general feel for all of it and what it's going for...you feel like you've seen it all executed so many times before, and much better in your favorite works. You more or less know what playing the rest of the game will be like and there's no delight in any of it, so continuing to play feels much like going through the motions - depending on how extreme the feeling for the particular game is, you're usually somewhere between simply occupying yourself with something that is "fine"...or outright numbing your brain by mindlessly shambling forward. Indie games have more experimentation than AAA games, but if you look at the top indie games of any given genre, it's largely going to be stuff that doesn't really depart from their given niches much more than the tired AAA offerings. On top of already feeling a kind of general gaming depression, these storefronts where you're trying to find something (anything!) that's different to enjoy instead bury you under endless tidal waves of samey stuff in a sickeningly over-saturated market that makes it all feel rather impossible. Everything culminates in the general feeling that either gaming has changed or you have (and it's probably a bit of both on top of getting older and having experienced it all already)...and maybe it would be better if you just find something better to do with your time. There are exceptions where something in particular magically hooks you, but it is rare and fleeting. Unfortunately, these sorts of problems pretty much also apply to every other medium of entertainment (...and possibly every source of entertainment in life in general - everything starts to get tired when you've seen or done it too many times). tl;dr: I recommend taking up dance again, .

I think it has pretty general appeal for the most part - strong and distinctive characters, a bit of stylized action, good humor, serialized storytelling, and it's only 26 episodes long. Everyone that has watched it here (which is probably around five people) seems to have liked or loved it. I finally watched Barefoot Gen (1983). It's that movie...I'm sure at least a couple of you have seen the famous clip. All of them on YouTube are in SD, while I got the joy of seeing it in HD (albeit not great HD).

I don't really mind biblical references or allegory at all, but it needed to do something a little more interesting and grounded with it for me to get it on some level - a film can't be 95% symbolism and work for me. I'd joke about it being @majestic's turn, but he has a stated (and understandable) dislike for this sort of thing, so while the film is pretty, that's gonna be a no for him. I might someday re-watch the film to see if I get more out of it a second time, I'm not sure yet. It was kind of hilarious to go read the plot on Wikipedia - I thought it might cover what happened in broader strokes, but no, instead whoever made that section painstakingly wrote out literally just about every little thing that happened throughout its hour and fifteen minute or so run time. Apparently, a little more background for the film is that the creator lost his faith (in Christianity) before making this film.

That sounds about accurate: I read that the director doesn't fully know what the movie is about either (although obviously he intended for some ideas and themes to come through even so). It felt like the anime equivalent of Eraserhead (though a lot less crude). It's not bad exactly, but I don't get it.

Oh yes, I recommend this film to everyone, if only because I'm curious to see everyone's reaction to it and/or whether I'm the big dumb in not being able to appreciate it enough.