Bartimaeus

Like the Clouds, Like the Wind (1990). A cute and fun albeit pretty ridiculous film about the death of Japan's China's emperor and the women fated to become the new emperor's wives. Hmm. My only real complaint was that it was too short at about an hour fifteen - it could've easily been half an hour to an entire hour longer to really flesh out the story and more of the colorful characters (especially considering the final act, which just suddenly arrives and takes a...different turn from the rest of the film). Recommended well enough to @majestic, I enjoyed it. Episode 3 of stupid dumb Weiss Kreuz: the first six or seven minutes of this episode were a "masterclass" in storytelling. I've debated trying both Gundams and Macross, but every time I really start to consider it, I can't help but feel that it will be totally boring to me given that I need certain kinds of characters to be able to watch long shows that the 80s just don't typically have. @Sarex All the screenshots I see for this look like this: How obnoxious! That, or the people posting screenshots of it are obnoxious by trying to wow me with stupid particle spam. @majestic In the past, I have had cases of me thinking that I didn't like a singer because their instrumentals were so bad that I couldn't get a good feel for the singer by themselves. While I may forgive instrumentals I don't love, instrumentals that actually hurt my ears/brain make it so it doesn't really matter, sadly. Also, screw trumpets.

Feel bad for the Nuggets - pretty terrible how certain injuries to key players can ruin two entire seasons. Also, that comment about offensive fouls being called didn't age particularly well, and it seems like they went back to calling them like they used to be after a couple of months.

I'm normally cool with spiders, but if it's going to eventually grow into that big one, uh...yeah, I don't know, that's less than ideal.

Yeah, I took the presence of the tag to more mean "there are pretty boys in this show that are supposed to appeal to teenage girls". Combine it with the show putting the flower boys in DANGEROUS SITUATIONS where they have to RESCUE STRONG BUT VULNERABLE DAMSELS IN DISTRESS, and I do believe that is the idea, . Whereas in CCS, that's obviously not really the intent or situation...although it arguably kind of is to a degree in Escaflowne. I'll watch at least a couple more episodes to see if it continues to be inexplicably enjoyable to me. No, actually, it's just the style of music. I don't know how to explain it exactly because this is not really an area of forte for me since I've never liked it, but a whole lot of electric guitar-driven rock has a tendency to make my brain go numb - it sounds ear-thrashingly flat and dissonant to me. I weirdly don't have this particular instrumental issue with metal (although I don't like the vast majority of metal for other reasons), and I can jam out to Chuck Berry about as well as anybody, but more modern stuff just never really goes down well with me, I guess. We are all bioshounen on this blessed day.

This show is really bad, but hilarious because of strange animation/writing/scene timing decisions. I should not be laughing at people being horrifically maimed or straight up killed, but I've done it two episodes in a row now (heck, I did it several times in this second episode alone!). A little blind girl named Miyu lost her parents in an accident, and all she has left is her older brother...only, he's mysteriously stopped coming to visit her at the hospital as of late, and it's been distressing/depressing her. Meanwhile, one of the flower boys is at the same hospital because his younger sister was just crippled in a hit and run, and he happens to run into little Miyu while she's wandering around the hospital with only the feeling of the walls to guide her.

Enjoyed the first one, but the characters and story in Last Light made me quit because of how stupid and annoying everyone was. How does Exodus compare? I played through Everhood, a game that takes a number of major stylistic cues from Undertale while also doing its own thing in terms of gameplay. Very good game, but I didn't quite connect with the story or themes, not like I did with Undertale.

Weiss Kreuz, episode 1. This is probably the worst anime I've ever enjoyed watching the entire first episode of. Not in terms of art/animation, although the animation is quite poor on top of the DVD being a pretty bad scan as well...and it has one of the worst intro songs/videos I've heard. It starts off with some guys in a van being attacked intercut with our main character, one computer programmer Michiru, and her boyfriend having a short conversation... You know what, why don't I just post the clip? https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/s/0nvsf4ugqivymf3/mpc-hc64_uxY2RkGOZe.mp4 Okay, the unintentional comedy of that aside, Michiru absentmindedly picks up a data disk from the scene of the accident, and since it's the only thing she has to go off of, decides she has to figure out what's on it. But first, she has to spend some time being depressed about the death of her boyfriend, and visits a flower shop with her friend that is also a girl. The flower shop is run by...a group of four hotshot boys that a ton of other teenage girls are fangirling about? Huh, what's going on here? This is really weird. Oh, oh no... Tags: adventure, drama, shoujo, bishounen It gets better...the premise: So, from what I gather, this show seems like it's going to introduce a new main character that happens to be a girl each episode, a girl that this silly group of flower "assassins" will just happen to meet or be around so that she can rescued by them from perilous circumstances! I feel embarrassed for watching this to begin with, but I feel even more embarrassed that I actually enjoyed the episode. @majestic You really should've reversed those videos. I didn't like the first song, but then I started watching the second and I thought "actually, the previous one was a masterpiece". Also, I'm never going to watch that show, .

I'm using a left hand-only mouse for my right hand, so I'm not going to be throwing any stones about controls. Whatever works for somebody works, . I also can't play anything first person with a controller in the first place, because for some reason my brain breaks whenever I'm trying to operate two analogue sticks to do movement and aiming at the same time in first person. Joystick on the back of the head a la Sarex's image also makes sense, but really, it's more like I am the camera itself. In a sense, I'm actually controlling two characters at once: Interestingly, Super Mario 64's camera controls were always inverted with no option of changing it. It was one of the earliest games I played, so there's a good chance it's literally Mario's fault, .

I've heard of a small minority of people swearing by this, but I've never known exactly what it is that they played early on in their lives that caused them to do this (in your case, it's apparently flight sim games!). I play 3rd person games (e.g. Dark Souls) with both sticks inverted, but that's because my brain is, for whatever reason, attuned to think that I'm directly move the camera itself. Moving the camera left actually moves the camera left i.e. you can see more to the right, while non-inverted 3rd person controls are instead about what you can see, i.e. moving left makes the camera go right so you can see more to the left. That at least makes sense to me why some people prefer one over the other, but switching just the vertical axis in a first person game seems like madness to me - I'd prefer switching both over just one, I think.

No, it's just a little less annoying and heavy-handed than the other two hundred anime films that follow this particular formula. Guys, I don't know if you know this or not, but we don't need to start out every film with a barrage of flat expressions and piano music - I'm telling you, there's more to slice of life films than that! If Grave of the Fireflies could figure out how to do it, I'm sure the rest of you can as well.

A Letter to Momo (2011). It's one of those films - teen girl with an absent father that she told off right before he was tragically killed, but don't worry, she found a letter addressed to her that he intended to give to her...except that he was only able to write the address and none of the actual contents. Whoops. Well, time for her and her mom to go move back with the grandparents in a small town on an island, and...cue the flat expressions and piano music! Eh, except the movie actually doesn't lay it on too thick, and in fact, most of the movie is scoreless and fairly lighthearted...and also, for some reason some creatures from Spirited Away start to harass her. All in all, not too shabby as far as 2011 anime films go. It did enough to make me watch the entire thing, anyways.

Man, it wasn't even remotely close. Not that I wanted LePen to win in any way, but that is really lopsided.

Short but salacious article about Mike Pence during the election certification process on the day of the insurrection. Interestingly, it was reported via multiple news outlets on 2021 January 5th (one day before the insurrection) that Republican Senator Chuck Grassley had declared that he and not Pence would be the one presiding over the election process, because "we don't expect him to be there", and that he hadn't made up his mind about if he would certify the results. https://politicalwire.com/2021/01/05/grassley-says-pence-will-skip-electoral-vote-certification/ If a greater attempt at a coup was ultimately aborted because of Mike Pence refusing to evacuate during an insurrection while knowing that he had to certify the election...well, uh, hats off to you, Vice President.

Monitors: I don't know what other people are like, but at my own desk, I just used a tape measure to see that my eyes are 30-31 inches away from my monitors. That's about where I'm comfortable with general usage - sometimes I might get a little closer if I'm trying to look at something only a pixel or two in size, sometimes I sit back an entire additional foot if I'm playing something with a controller. I'm not sure of the exact real life size that I want each pixel to effectively be, but it seems like you need a pretty good-sized monitor to take advantage of 2160p as it is unless you like sitting very close to your screens...but conversely, I don't really enjoy a screen enveloping my entire field of field like other people seem to, so I'm pretty loathe to even consider 2160p - the panels get too big and the pixel density too extreme for it to be comfortable for me, and messing around with resolution and scaling settings for different uses also kind of sucks. TVs: Here, I can perhaps see a better application, but gaming tends to be less than stellar on modern TVs due to bad input delay anyways, so it's not really a key focus for me...and yeah, you either need a very large TV or to be sitting uncomfortably close to it to really appreciate the level of detail increasing. My own TV is 4K, but it's the same size as Keyrock's and so unless I'm sitting right in front of it and directly flipping between 1080p and 2160p sources, the difference is literally unobservable. For cinema, there's honestly a much bigger difference in quality between cable vs. streaming vs. blurays than there is between 1080p and 2160p IMO. I haven't had cable for a few years now since I now obtain all of my live sports streams and that was literally the only thing that ever made cable even remotely worthwhile, but I remember being pretty stunned when I actually stopped to do some proper image quality comparisons between all the different sources - cable was by far the worst source and looked like complete junk in comparison to even just streaming, and never mind BDs.

IIRC, many of the early pioneers of computers were actually women. Once it became a "serious" field with lots of research and money going into it, it very "suddenly" became male-dominated to a pretty unhealthy degree. While yes, there are inherent biological differences between men and women that may make them more naturally inclined to go certain directions than others, it's hard not to think that the extreme disparity in many fields that are either male or female-dominated is more cultural and institutional than anything else. There seems to have been a little bit of a shift towards women in computer-related fields as of late, but I'd say it's still not nearly enough.

Is Melenchon the French equivalent of Bernie Sanders or something?

Hey, I've beaten Demon's Souls, Dark Souls 1, Dark Souls 2, Dark Souls 3, and Bloodborne, and I never had to parry in any of those games...though I guess there's something to be said for perfectly timed rolls, so I suppose the point stands. I also can't include Sekiro here, since a few of bosses did pretty much actually require parrying to feasibly defeat unless you wanted the battle to last an hour for a single try. Judging by the Steam reviews, it seems like a number of people sadly agreed with you on the game in question.

I've been using Windows 10 for a while now, and I still think the start menu on it is garbage compared to Windows 7. Feel free to take a bet on whether I'll "get used to it pretty quick" when/if I ever upgrade to Windows 11, .

No idea re: the two of them actually meeting - just know I read that they both worked with G. W. Pabst, and I watched both Pandora's Box and Diary of a Lost Girl not too long ago. Like I said, I don't know nothing about nothing, .

Regular Blood Donations Can Reduce Toxic Forever Chemicals in the Bloodstream Forever chemicals has long been a concern of mine - bloodletting's not exactly my ideal method of figuring a way to get them out of the body, but at least it's there as a possible way to reduce them.

@Amentep I came across Triumph of the Will because of Leni Riefenstahl, the director of the film, whose name was mentioned alongside Louise Brooks' as they apparently shared an early director, whereupon I saw that she was a Nazi collaborator and became a director. It was difficult not to be interested in what an apparently famous female Nazi director cooked up in the 1930s for the party. It sure was an experience. I don't really know anything about the silent film era or thereabouts - I was mostly just interested in Louise Brooks' work, of which there isn't much. I may or may not check out F.P.1 at some point, although it seems like the longer German version of the film was received better than the English...and they certainly got the better movie poster, which is often the ultimate arbiter of quality, .

I moved away from gmail to protonmail since the incident where gmail unilaterally decided I was no longer lord of my own email address. I imagine it'll work for Thunderbird just as well - don't think I've ever had a problem with transferring settings/account information from a local application like that.

And yet here you are, not only repeating utterances of its existence to yourself, but also sharing it with the rest of us. Honestly, I'm all for re-accepting some lost forms of masculinity as being completely normal even if they're not for me, but certainly not in the name of fascism. If Tolkien was able to write about how close eight different guys all became over the course of a traumatic war-time adventure, and most of the modern audience was able to accept it without immediately thinking "that's gay", and it didn't require invoking fascist ideas...well by golly, I think we're ready to move on as a society. Yeah, so as it turns out, I did a little online searching, and Tolkien's a little bit of an unwilling fascist icon. Who knew? Not that I don't see how a few particular details of the LotR books could be considered problematic with a modern eye analyzing them, but come on.

@KP wants Blue Velvet There was actually literally like a ten or fifteen minute segment that the film pivoted to where piles of young men in Hitler Youth camps were doing weird stuff together pretty much on the level of that video. Once again, I couldn't help but feel that I'm not exactly the target audience for this sort of thing, . @Gromnir I've never felt the kind of loyalty or inspiration or whatever it is it takes to feel that kind of civic "virtue"...about anyone or anything, really, so it's a little hard for me to really "get it". Perhaps the calamitous times of the future will give me an opportunity to change that, .

Alternatively, just install Firefox on the new system, then replace the AppData\Local\Mozilla and AppData\Roaming\Mozilla folders with the originals from your old system. I've done this a number of times when I haven't wanted to re-setup settings and extensions on a new system or VM, and then I just clear the personal data...but you don't have to clear the personal data, . As for Windows, I've seen that happen to other people before too. Well, to myself a few times as well, but um...well, that's usually a two minute fix for my personal devices, .