Bartimaeus

Based on what I know you like, it's difficult for me to recommend it to you. If something is not to your taste, it's not to your taste, and that's not going to change no matter how many people claim it's a "great" or "classic" work - I would know, I am certainly chief among those who contemptuously dismiss widely and strongly held opinions when they run contrary to what I plainly see before me, . If I didn't have a soft spot for the particular subject material, I probably would not have returned to it. Good music, animation, and atmosphere wouldn't change the fact that the film is an oddball mix of heavy violence and very slow philosophical meandering, which doesn't really seem like your thing. It really depends on the specific work for me. I guess there's a difference between "I hated this", "this unfortunately simply doesn't interest/appeal to me", and "this just didn't work for me". The last group is the group I'm most likely to give another shot at some point, whereas I'm not likely to ever give the first kind another try ever again...and the second will probably take my interests changing before I would ever consider it.

Ghost in the Shell (1995). In January of 2018, I watched my very first anime film, Nausicaa of the Valley of the Wind, and it would be followed up with a number of other Ghibli films over the next few months. Wedged between those Ghibli films however, was Ghost in the Shell, a film I'd heard called a classic for many years yet had never had much of an inclination to try until then. Fifteen minutes into the film, I was getting a bit tired of this damned lady's gross naked butt/chest being repeatedly shoved into my face every couple of minutes without there being enough in the way of character or thematic justification for it...which combined with the number of action sequences, I was beginning to remember why I had never much cared for anime. I continued to soldier on through the film and most of that stopped after the initial deluge, and instead suffered through characters that were...monotone, flat, and going on and on about some sort of too-big-for-its-britches theme-heavy narrative that just wasn't connecting for me - I must have just about lost the plot completely by the time I was halfway through the film. I got to the end of the film and it just kind of awkwardly ends in a strange sequence of events that doesn't really feel much like a proper ending, and...well, I didn't hate the film, but I just didn't like it - it didn't help that I was listening to the English dub of the film, which isn't bad, but isn't good either...I was still several years off of watching Cardcaptor Sakura by this time, the show instrumental for finally acclimating me to Japanese voice-acting to a degree. I still dislike the direction of a lot of voice-acting, of course, but it's now an issue that really applies equally to both Japanese and English dubs for anime, and so I'm able to listen to quality, non-caricaturized Japanese dubs. I always thought that I'd maybe return to Ghost in the Shell one day - I adored the soundtrack, and I've always had a love for androids and artificial intelligence ever since I was a kid and read through a number of fictional android-related books. Watching something a second time allows you to focus more on what a film like Ghost in the Shell actually is, instead of what you think it might or should be - you don't generally strain yourself trying to figure something out on a second watch like you might on the first, and that can change your perspective on it. Anyways, all that's to say, I had an impulse to re-watch Ghost in the Shell early this morning, so I did. This time, I was able to actually follow the plot and themes to their conclusions, I was not hampered by a mediocre English dub, and having also sat through a number of other much worse works since the first time I watched the movie, I can say Ghost in the Shell is...good. It's good, if a little frustrating at times: it all makes sense and it doesn't feel like the film implodes because of over-extending itself or trying to make its ideas or scale much bigger than they really are (hello Akira!), which I appreciate...and I was even touched by a few particular moments and themes throughout the film, which was important to me for something dealing with sentient life and artificiality - issues I've mused over many times myself. Plus, I just liked the main characters more with their Japanese performances over the English. Overall, it wasn't a bad idea to re-watch it, and I apologize to @Sarex for calling it very mediocre - it's definitely better than that, even if it still doesn't quite rise to the level of great to me. It's...probably earned a place in my media library as a result of this re-watch.

My fond memory of The Witcher is that I was gifted it by a friend on Steam, I played about 3 hours of it, realized I hated almost literally every single aspect of the game (whether it was gameplay, characters, storytelling, whatever), and proceeded to feel terrible that a friend gifted me a game that I loathed. That was the beginning and end of my Witcher experiences.

Fish/seafood is always the thing that sticks the most for me as well. I don't like scrubbing stuff clean though (not because I don't want them clean, but because I don't want to ruin and/or eat the coating!), so I tend to underclean. With the particular pan I'm using, I went a bit too far with that, because now there's like...a coating of animal and plant matter death covering the entire thing, which is another reason I've been wanting to replace it. Non-stick is known to be bad, but the health ramifications of that can't be good either. I'm not strictly against buying a new pan every year for every day frying while having specialty pots/pans for more occasional uses, so ceramic isn't necessarily out of the question...but I think I'm going to try the Made In stainless steel to see how that goes before trying cast iron/ceramic given that I only need medium heat for what I'm frying. @Gfted1 Negative, and nobody I know seems to know much about the different materials available and their ideal use cases, hence why I was asking here. Most people I know cook, but they don't seem to know why they cook with what they do for the type of food they make - a whole lot of "well, it's just what I've always used and it seems to work!"s when I tried asking.

It seems like there's a disturbing trend of them coming up with new formulas that aren't proven to be harmful...until they are and then they come up with a new formula that also isn't yet proven to be harmful. Makes me that it's probably best to just stay away from these novel chemical coatings, or at least use them sparingly. I don't want to have to donate all of my blood to get those forever chemicals out of me. For what I cook for myself and not really needing anything beyond medium heat, I would think I'd be O.K. with any number of options, yet I keep coming back to the piece of crap non-stick pan I've been using for one reason or another. It's also specifically for myself in this case, because I'm more particular in how I want to a pot or pan to perform when it's my food than most other people seem to be. I'm sure that specific piece of information is a huge surprise to everyone here, given that I have such an established history of not really being particular about anything, .

I've used non-stick for general use - as I understand it, non-stick is considered to to be generally safe up to medium heat, but it would be nice to have a pan not made out of distilled dementia that also won't warp or fall apart immediately. The recent pan I purchased was some cheapo carbon steel that I seasoned and then actually tried to use for the first time this morning and found that it was completely useless past low heat due to a ridiculous level of warping...but it may well be just because it was a cheapo than anything else. Guess that's what I get for trying to cheaply test out carbon steel - if you're gonna do something, do it right I suppose. Thanks everyone.

Does anyone know a quality brand(s) for pots and pans? Willing to pay a premium for ones that don't immediately warp because of medium heat - can't stand a pan that slides around with the slightest touch because only 25% of the bottom actually touches the burner...and never mind only cooking half of what's in it.

That Bucks-Celtics game was bad for my health.

Two minute Photoshop just for you: I will say that her appearance suits her character.

You're Under Arrest: The Movie (1999). Somehow, when I watched the four episode OVA, I completely overlooked this - probably because I tried to watch an episode of the show and immediately noped out. The OVA is cute and sincere character-driven fun with a pretty light amount of not particularly dangerous action - it's really about the two main characters with their mostly non-police related issues, and I liked that. The fifteen minutes or whatever I watched of the show was just unceasing moronic slapstick and low-brow humor with flanderized doppelgangers of the characters that quickly enraged me enough to not spend another minute on it. In contrast to both of those, the movie is a dead serious crime/action flick - it does not have any of the patheticness of the show, but it doesn't really do much with the characters either because everything is so hyper-focused on the plot and action. It was your classic "a criminal mastermind is staging attacks from multiple angles across the city, and we have to figure it out before it's too late!" kind of police/crime movie. All three of these (the OVA, the show, and the movie) are set in the same location with the same characters, and yet none of them really feel much at all alike as a whole. At least the movie was a pretty good action flick (in actual HD too!), but...action flicks aren't really particularly my thing, so it was kind of handicapped in how much I could like it - it needed to do a better job of really using its characters. It's possible for action films/shows (see Samurai Champloo), but it's pretty rare. Bonus points: the soundtrack was by Kenji Kawai (Miyu/Ghost in the Shell/other stuff), and it was kind of like listening to the Miyu soundtrack fused with something else, which while kind of weird for a film like this, was nice, so at least there was that. Texhnolyze to be resumed tomorrow.

Did it match your expectations of the show after you watched the intro? And...did you actually watch the first episode of that other show, and if so...why?

I'm still waiting for the sub group to do the last handful of episodes of a shoujo show I was watching, Emi. It'll probably be a year or two before they finish. Not exactly super happy with that myself, . Apparently, Texhnolyze is only on AppleTV to stream from...and it costs $31 to buy the 22 episode season, which is, uh, well, that's pretty expensive as far as streaming short DVD quality 2003 animes go. Also, just giving out a warning...first episode was pretty freaking weird, hence the "wat" I posted after I watched it, when I was very much unsure whether I liked it or not. May or may not be an issue for you others deciding whether or not to watch it - by the time the second episode ended, I was pretty sure I was getting into it, though. Top comment on that video: "The image of Donald Trump watching a David Lynch movie seems like a scene out of a David Lynch movie."

If it at all possible, try to make sure whatever you watch comes from the Japanese region DVD - apparently, the non-Japanese ones have a problem with crushed blacks that makes it hard to see what's going on in certain scenes, and not in a good way.

Oh wow, that's...surprising. At that point, why not just make the quest drops the default? That might mean the Duriel one is still around as well...which, while almost nobody else ever used it, was very important to my triple glitched boss rush strategy, and is how I would make thousands of FG on d2jsp every early ladder, selling the SoJs and Tal's Amulets I would find within the first few days to a week. Honestly, magic finding in that game gets a little miserable even with all the exploits that made it significantly more wortwhile...

When I played, I employed a strategy of using additional characters to generate socket quests (especially useful for creating early runeword bases...think Spirit, Insight, Heart of the Oak) and Hellforge runes (two Guls become a Vex, which isn't bad when you can get Guls from Hellforge - very useful early on into a ladder if you play like an absolute fiend and can manage to quest kill normal/nightmare Baal with just one garbage-equipped sorceress while a bunch of other accounts get glitched into the next difficulty when you kill Baal for the quest with that one sorceress). Additionally, Diablo II also has the stupid no-drop mechanic wherein an arbitrary 62.5% of all drops are eliminated before they're dropped when you're playing in a one-player game - going up even just a few players drastically reduces that amount, effectively making your drops better than any amount of magic find can add. You can either use your own secondary accounts for that or join e.g. public Baal run games to get the benefit of that (if you can successfully boss-rush with 8 players in the game all by yourself, that is...which I used to have down to an art even with just trash for gear on Nightmare and Hell). Combine all that with getting glitched quest drops from Andariel/Duriel/Mephisto, and magic finding isn't quite as terrible as it would be if you're in a single player game just mindlessly killing bosses over and over...and the ticking time element in killing all three bosses before the Baal run ends so you can join the next without missing anything was a little bit of a thrill in of itself. I used to have a really weird hybrid sorceress build using Fire Wall (bosses) and I think it was Frozen Orb (non-bosses) specifically for early Ladder...combined with a Life Tap wand that I would use to make it so the mercenary could tank bosses. It now occurs to me that they probably fixed all the glitches and exploits that I used to use as well, which also makes me not want to play. Quest Duriel drops are awesome for SoJs and Tal Rasha's amulet in Nightmare (and some other stuff like Rainbow Facets in Hell), but non-quest Duriel is probably the most worthless boss to kill in the entire game because all he drops are potions and scrolls (...which he literally can't when it's Quest Duriel). There were exploits for both Andariel and Duriel to make it so your character would always get the quest drops instead, the former of which was well-known and used by almost everyone, but hardly anyone ever knew about or used the one for Duriel.

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, .