Bartimaeus

Eh, as I've said before, this is why I continue to try weird things that absolutely nobody, including myself, would think that I'd ever like - sometimes, you find something that does things just a little differently from the other shows of the same type that you didn't like, and it clicks for whatever reason. Can't just spend all yours days watching the exact same kind of shoujo, after all...you try the other weird stuff so the shoujo always stays fresh, . Episode 10 of Texhnolyze: act one of the show appears to be over. It ended as suddenly and brutally as it began. I'm starting to get the feeling that this might not turn out to be a lovey dovey happy nappy show after all. The guy that I initially thought was going to the villain turned out to be the closest thing to a "hero" that this show will probably have, and I spent the last few episodes telling the show to please not kill him because it sure looked like the show was going to kill him.

I'm both sad and glad D2:R exists, because it's kind of killed any motivation for me to ever play a new ladder. If people are now playing D2:R, then it makes it hard to want to go back to the original...but conversely, I used to run a pile of accounts at once, and the thought of trying to play without that is...unappealing. Maybe I could do that with D2:R as well, but I don't feel like paying a hundred plus dollars for multiple keys just for it to be ye olde Diablo II timesink - I'd get to level 80 within a couple of days, then burn out within a week or two.

Did you see him "generate" an offensive foul against the Mavericks by pinning one of their player's arms into himself last night? I'm not sure if I'd prefer the Suns or Golden State to represent the West at this point.

Texhnolyze, episode 6. Okay, I think I'm officially recommending this to @KP wants Blue Velvet, because this show, content and stylistically speaking, seems like something that would be much more up his alley than anything I'd ever watch myself...and yet, even though that's absolutely true, I'm still very much enjoying it, and that tells me it needs to be recommended to somebody...particularly seeing as it's a 2003 show. 2003, people! Only issue is, I guess I'm not exactly sure how to sell this. I guess the best way to describe it would be a dark and violent dystopian thriller that also has some rather interesting themes and characters*...and though I haven't really been able to capture it in screenshots, it also a nice art style and even better animation, plus some genuinely nice writing. I'm sometimes very surprised by the stuff that I only very begrudgingly check out (usually with only the intent to do so for a minute or two on just the off-chance that it's able to quickly capture my attention), and this was one of them. In fact, I told majestic that this show was going to be terrible - well, I think my prognostication days are over. *

Texhnolyze, episode 2. Alright, so this is what I can figure from the first two episodes: This dude's hair, which we see unfortunately little of, is like he couldn't decide between a bob and an afro, so he did both: Hah. With most any traditionally-animated work, it can be pretty amusing to resist watching what is clearly supposed to be the focus character that is actually moving around in favor of someone in the background staying completely still. Something I occasionally do with just about every show where it applies, which is the vast majority of them.

After 27 years, this year is the Grizzlies' first year ever winning their division. Kind of difficult to not want them to succeed over a team that has had entirely too much success in recent history.

Texhnolyze, episode 1: We go an entire ten minutes (actually for real ten minutes, I checked) without a single spoken word of dialogue or action...finally broken by a couple of lines from a side-character, followed by another seven minutes or so of silence, and then a little dialogue and a small burst of brutal violence right at the end. Nevertheless, I was drawn in by the extra-strange Madhouse animation and visuals (even the violence shown was more thoughtful than most)...but I have no idea what this show is supposed to be. Didn't match my expectations of what I thought the show would be like at all after I watched the intro.

Princess Tutu, episode 9. We follow up the second best episode with the very worst episode. I finally know what to call this kind of storytelling: talking to the camera. If you love characters just talking straight to the camera about silly plot/theme stuff or random dumps of thoughts/motivations to the complete detriment of them being actual characters, this might be the episode for you, because that's all they did this episode. For me, that's always been the very worst part of the show, where the show can't figure out how to make the the plot (either the individual episode's or the overarching) move without having characters just talk at the camera endlessly - when there are nice character interactions that work in of themselves is when it is at its strongest, but the show seems to vastly prefer navel-gazing with its own story. Episode 10 was better, thankfully. Ahiru and Fakir's interactions have probably been high point of the past few episodes, and this one had a lot of it. Episode 11 was fine as far as story-heavy episodes go - the story happened more in between characters, as opposed to them just constantly repeating "I think/feel this", "I have to do something", "that must not come to pass", et cetera, to themselves like episode 9. They talked to both Mytho and the teacher a little bit these past couples of episodes, which surprised me. Up until then, they were figments of Ahiru's imagination. @Amentep There's something kind of funny about the horribly gangly-looking Cobra standing right next to Lady in that first image. Not his most flattering look, particularly next to ridiculous Lady. Guess that's the 80s for you. The parkour running/jumping is precisely what I thought looked horrid, . "Stupid" is probably too harsh, but I can see how I implied that with the video I sent - I mostly just find it annoying on a visceral level. Cardcaptor Sakura got me to be a little more O.K. with it (what with Sakura doing her affirmatives), but certainly not to that level.

Yeah, it's pretty easy to think of all sorts of ways it would easily be terrible if you assume it's going to be aimed at the lowest common denominator for a given set of genres/a demographic. And maybe I'm part of the lowest common denominator for shoujo, but if so, that's a badge I'd wear pretty proudly in comparison to the alternatives. If I liked the characters, themes, and storytelling just a little bit more, it might not be so glaring, but I just don't have much love for any of it. Tomoyo are probably the two that I like the most, and that's pretty much just because they're Tomoyo...and they aren't even around that much. Hell, I don't even know their names, I'm literally just calling the two of them Tomoyo!

Bubble. The heck kind of screwed up nightmare hellscape are these people living in? The CGI is horrific, so right off the bat, I can't agree with majestic there - of course, I'm famously more sensitive about these things than even he is to begin with. Even the 2D character animation is pretty choppy...and for the love of all that is holy, please stop doing the terrifying close-ups. They go to a pretty different art style when they do closeups that makes everyone start looking like Handsome Squidward. You really don't want to look like Handsome Squidward, okay? My biggest complaint about Uta is the mouth sounds. Oh, how I hate the mouth sounds, even when the VAs aren't breathing into their microphones like they were during that 12 minutes or so of Steins;gate that I watched. Anyways, I got through a third of the film before being "eh, I just realized I don't care that much", but hey, still better than the two latter Rebuild films, but unlike those, I'm not being compelled to watch this, .

The wonderful difference is that Sinema can be replaced, while Manchin absolutely cannot be. No other Democrat in West Virginia has a chance of winning a senatorial seat, so Democrats should thank their stars that they have him so they could at least be able to appoint federal judges. Sinema, on the other hand...we'll see what happens - not sure whether she's on track to getting successfully primaried in 2024 or not.

I do absolutely want to see the filibuster reformed - it's only in pretty recent history that this silly "I declare filibuster" system has been around, and I think it's high time we at least go back to when you actually had to filibuster. The country didn't burn down back then, and it won't now...probably. I also do not in any way share your apparently ironclad optimism regarding who would or wouldn't vote for it - abortion is a very powerful wedge issue that I can't see any Republicans besides maybe Susan Collins doing anything but possibly abstaining about.

And it doesn't matter so long as they hold that the filibuster shouldn't be eliminated/reformed - it'll never come to a vote in the first place until that happens, and there's no reason to expect that it will at this point.

If Congress had 60 Democratic senators that could all agree to do that, I suppose they could. Or they could get about 52 and eliminate or at least reform the filibuster and do it, but I'm not sure how many people want that. The chances of Democrats ever having the senators required to do that, particularly at the same time they hold the presidency and House of Representatives...is not great.

I think we could agree that the top ten or so, which are generally the rare combinations of elite athletes and proven football talent that teams bank on being guaranteed good players (and yet, still surprisingly sometimes are not), are a little different from the ensuing ~250 dart throws that is the rest of the draft. The fact that Vegas has a good pulse on those doesn't really invalidate the rest of the draft being a series of unpredictable unknowns. I actually went ahead and went searching for team brass' reactions about Cole Strange being drafted where he was - the GM and head coach of the Rams openly laughed at the Patriots and thought Mr. Strange might still be there in the third or fourth round; the head coach of their divisional rival the 49ers said (while sitting right beside the GM) that they viewed him as being a first-rounder and that it was an example of the media not being in sync with the reality of what the actual teams were thinking. It only takes exactly one GM that thinks the same way as you to swoop in and take the guy you think will be great for you to lose that opportunity forever - all the thumb-twiddling in being concerned about "value" and what you "expected" other teams to do but didn't won't ever change that. It'd be awesome if we had the actual draft boards of teams after the fact - certainly much more interesting than what we get. As it is, the entire process is effectively a nebulous pile of baloney because we're never given enough information to reach informed conclusions about what happened. Teams probably don't want any part of their evaluation process to be revealed to other teams though, so it'll probably never change.

Mike's speech towards the end of the Picard episode 6/7/8/9 video about the show basically being the dead body in Stand by Me was pretty sad.

Something a friend linked me: With an emphasis on shoujo-y characters instead of seinen-y action, it could be great. Unfortunately, my bet is that with actual adult characters, it would probably go the latter's way... (e): Princess Tutu, episode 8 finally. Probably my second favorite episode so far, and it seemed like we finally moved the story along in a way that wasn't essentially a repeat of an earlier episode. I don't hate repetition, but since I'm still not exactly in love with the show, it's more noticeable here that most of the episodes have been structured the exact same way over and over.

It's difficult for me to see it that way when the goals and draft boards of the other GMs are completely unknown. It may be declared by the media that a guy should go in the fourth round, and so you may have "over drafted" him by getting him in the second, but there may have well been ten other GMs that would've picked him between the time you chose him and your draft pick in the next round. The inverse of this situation happens probably even more, where guys that were supposed to go much higher per the media inexplicably went several rounds lower - they immediately declare "WHAT A GREAT VALUE FOR [TEAM]!". What, because none of the actual GMs valued him as much as you guys did? With no way to determine what the GMs were going to do, it's all a load of nonsense to try to figure out whether a guy was under or over drafted. The media will have their fun with it and declare winners and losers, and that's fine, but again, really, the only draft grade that matters is three years later when you have to look back and see what that draft actually ended up giving you, . Of course, that approach is probably too results-driven - it may not be the GM's fault that freak injuries and/or bad coaching ruined prospects, but ultimately, it is the benchmark by which these guys are judged.

Although again, I didn't follow this draft whatsoever, I remember from years past that there are always at least a few media-declared "reach" or "bad value" choices in each draft - always because the particular guy drafted was placed much lower through the media-declared "consensus". Oof, you drafted a guy in the first round that we all placed in the third or fourth at best...what a bunch of bozos you all are! The most famous examples of these are probably a couple of the Seahawks' early 2010s drafts...which were dunked on by pretty much everyone in the media at the time, but they ended up being decent in hindsight, seeing as a number of those players (e.g. Russell Wilson, Bruce Irvin, Bobby Wagner, KJ Wright, and Richard Sherman) were pretty key guys that got them to two Super Bowls. There's also something to be said for the fact that while the media may have universally drafted a guy only within a certain range, GMs' livelihoods actually depend on them making the correct decisions, while nobody will remember what any of the draft mocking media clowns put which guy where a week later because nothing that they think matters. Without knowing where all 32 GMs would have drafted a player, it's pretty much impossible to tell whether they were "overdrafted" or not - maybe that guy would've actually lasted to the third or fourth round, maybe he would've gone in another handful of picks to another team that also thought surprisingly highly of him. As always, the best time to judge a draft is three seasons later after it's occurred - it's usually pretty easy to score worthless victories right after the draft has happened, but for some reason, there's a lot less teams able to claim they did great three years later.

My previous PC only had 16 GB for many years until I found and installed a dupe of its memory kit, but before then I remember my PC basically imploding when I would use Photoshop on high resolution images combined with having a browser open. Admittedly, I've had my pagefile disabled for nearly a decade now, which definitely played into it (that's a real "for better and for worse" kind of tweak...), but still - stuff can be pretty memory hungry.

Not quite the right shades of purple or (to a lesser extent) green, even if you assume this is for Rebuild, but I guess it's not the worst thing in the world. (e): That or the pictures aren't right - that's certainly possible too, but the green is a little too neon and the purple is pretty clearly too deep and vibrant. Looks like a very slightly off-brand Unit-01. Someone might've just jacked up the contrast and vibrancy on the photos, though.

You're just afraid of a repeat of Madoka, aren't ya?

From what I saw, it seemed like there were also no QBs this year, which probably also put a dent in interest.

I remember playing Last Light and right off the bat, Khan was some preachy crack-smoking hippie instead of the thoughtful old man he was in the first game and thinking "well, this isn't going to go well". Then Anna was introduced and I thought "this is going to be the worst forced love interest in gaming history"...and a few hours of playing later, it pretty much was, and that's when I quit. Glad to hear Exodus is maybe better, .

I didn't watch any of the draft, I didn't read any pre/post-draft analysis, I didn't engage with anyone while the draft was going on outside of liking Keyrock's post about it. It's a new me this year...well, it's a new me that will still probably end up watching games via illegal streaming, but still, it's a new me.