Bartimaeus

Bucks' shooting has been...difficult to watch outside of Giannis this Celtics series. Probably going to go home because of none of the roleplayers being able to ever hit any open 3s. (e): That'll do it. Inconsistent teams don't win championships, last year's aberration aside, and boy, the Bucks have been horribly inconsistent in the playoffs over the last five years. Guess I'm cheering for...Dallas?

You're looking at it from the point of view of the story and what it has declared to be important and true, while I am looking at it from the point of view of the characters and what I've seen to be actually motivating Ahiru from the very beginning of the show - what she herself feels is important to her. With no Mytho, there is no Ahiru becoming a human or doing anything else in this story, because Mytho is the thing that she has staked her entire existence on. The problem is that while I know Mytho is important to her, as she tells me approximately a billion times over the course of the show, I still have as little understanding of why now as I did when I started the show, and that is just...not very compelling to me when it's the central character axis for Ahiru and practically the only thing that allows for this story to exist and move forward in the first place. In other words, he's basically Anthy from Utena, who was also the "thing" motivating all the other characters. At least those characters had other underlying psychological issues that the show spent time on, even if it did a less than satisfactory job of connecting all of it together...whereas in this show, it's "Mytho is important because he's important because he's important". Coincidentally (NOT!), Anthy was probably the biggest source of story and character frustration in Utena for me as well - I never really got to the point of truly understanding what it was motivating everyone else to jostle and fight for her from the point of view of the characters themselves, how their personal issues actually connected them to Anthy in a real sense...which made them fundamentally weak and unsatisfying characters. I meant since starting it in earnest. Understandable, really, . In The Lord of the Rings, the Ring of Power provides motivation for our heroes to go on their adventure (both the initial one to Rivendell and the actual Fellowship quest after) because there is a clear and present promise of death to our characters and everyone/everything that they know if they are not successful in dealing with it, which they find out all too well on their way to Rivendell. It's not a terribly personal motivation at first (though there are other smaller motivations also helping drive along Frodo and Sam initially), but it does make sense for our characters to be invested in resolving that, and it also becomes more personal as the story goes on with how the Ring affects each of them. So what is the equivalent for our characters in Princess Tutu? Mytho is life-and-death important to all of Ahiru, Fakir, and Rue because...um, well, Fakir decided he couldn't let the story continue for fear of what it might do to Mytho, and Rue and Ahiru love him. I guess those are fine as very quick and basic motivations...but the show never does anything more to explain or expand upon those motivations as far as I could tell. There seems to be no underlying cause for any of it, no connective tissue to pull these characters together. No, from beginning to end, it feels like the story is telling what the characters to feel, think and do instead of the characters organically driving what happens in the story, and so it effectively becomes the very worst main story bits of Sailor Moon - all the moments in that show where it feels like the characters aren't being their natural selves because the story demands that they be something else until the story is resolved, leading to all sorts of unnatural and arguably meaningless (yet conversely overly-grandiose!) dialogue and actions that don't feel connected to our characters personally. For the most part, you could just as well switch who is saying and doing what with any other character, or put entirely new characters in their place, and it would not really change how scenes go or how the story ends up getting resolved. I have trouble connecting to much (though not all) of the main story of Sailor Moon for that reason - very little of the Naoko Takeuchi-written main story material feels like it's driven by our characters, while the non-canon filler stuff ironically does a bit of a better job (seriously, the non-canon stuff even gives some meaningful motivation to the villains, like Nehellenia at the start of Sailor Stars, or the two aliens in the Magic Tree Arc of R, so that we can at least care a little about them as well, whereas the canon story...doesn't really try by and large). It's also why the main story in Steven Universe works for me even when the plot itself is not always entirely well-told or constructed: everyone is individually and very personally motivated to feel and behave the way they do, the characters very keenly feel the effects of all the different things that have happened to each of them, and their experiences in trauma and just as friends together push them all to - in their own ways - love, trust, and depend upon each other. It all feels very personal and naturally character-driven while still allowing for the story to move forward with how it unfolds and impacts the characters (who also all have their own reasons to see the story get resolved!). Meanwhile, I've been sitting here throughout Princess Tutu wondering why the heck anyone feels or does anything that happens in this story, and I don't really feel like I ever got any kind of explanation. Whether it's a person or an object or a person-as-an-object, I just needed more than what Princess Tutu gave me. And yes in regards to the question of your previous post, . Okay, now this is actually a love story I can get behind.

Episodes 12 and 13 of Princess Tutu. It's over! It's been a bit like the Grim Reaper hanging overhead for a couple of months now. Worst character award goes to Mytho, who started off as an utterly mindless pawn for the story and its themes while literally never deviating from being exactly that for the entire duration of the show; the best character award goes to his brother Fakir, who ironically started off as the very worst and a completely two-dimensional character at the start of the show and turned out to be the only character capable of character development and enjoyable dialogue with Ahiru by the end. Speaking of, on the whole Ahiru was fairly close behind him while Rue was in a similar situation to Mytho in their respective categories, and would somebody please ram a pike up Drosselmeyer's butt so I can never hear that "LET ME EXPLAIN THE STORY FOR YOU" show-interrupting exposition-dumping non-character piece of garbage ever again? No, now that you ask, it turns out that I will not be watching the second season. I did laugh at the end when Edel said she was a mindless puppet mimicking a human, because I couldn't help but be reminded of Quest 64 where the puppet helper lady in that game says the exact same thing right at the end of the game, and somehow that felt hilarious to me given how atrociously terrible story-telling Quest 64 had. The best parts of this show were when characters actually talked to each other like normal characters (like Fakir and Ahiru started to over the last handful of episodes - a number of genuinely nice moments between those two that I really liked!), but it was sadly never near enough to offset the constant theme/plot babbling that would make my brain shutdown every time it happened. I don't think I will ever be able to accept a show that requires you to accept its themes as being more dominant than the other elements - everyone quickly starts to sound less like characters and more like artificial constructs trying to hammer in some message that I simply do not care about, and the more they do it, the more I am annoyed. I should care about Ahiru's part in the story, because I do like her, but her primary objective (the reason for her entire existence inside the story, really!) is to save and restore Mytho, and Mytho is proven over and over to be a non-thing that does not matter whatsoever, so it is incredibly difficult to care about that. Ahiru and Fakir working together was instantly so much more compelling because Fakir was an actual character I'd seen change and grow a little over the course of the show. ...Okay, now that I have all the mental violence about this show expelled from my mind, am I correct in assuming that season 2 is primarily about Rue and resolving her side of the story?

That was immediately after the Milwaukee Bucks (basketball team) losing a playoff game. Don't know if it was literally a result of people being that upset about it or not, though.

White nationalist terrorist went into a black neighborhood supermarket and and shot ten people to death with an assault rifle while streaming it on twitch.tv. Reportedly had a 100-page anti-black and anti-Semite manifesto of some sort published beforehand that law enforcement was aware of.

What really annoys me with Paradox's EU4 was the inability to disable certain new gameplay features that were force enabled with their major patches. Some of them were just so lousy and I don't want to deal with them and I wish I could just disable them for myself as well as the AI. It's been years since I played EU4, so maybe they have added a way to do that by now...but probably not.

Atrocious game on the whole by everyone not named Giannis. Could've easily had this game if a couple of players could've just had an average game. Glad that the Bucks won last year already, because this team has been so consistently inconsistent that it's pretty remarkable they were able to earn a title - rare for inconsistent teams to win it all in sports.

Way back when I played BG2 the first few times 15-20 years ago, I used Mordenkainen's Sword like a fiend. I can certainly understand the attraction, . Undoubtedly, part of my Baldur's Gate-specific issues in why I avoid certain options is because I played the game too many times and spamming certain options got...well, not very fun once I realized how catch-all abuseable they were.

Yes, but with the disclaimer that I usually play an arcane-heavy party (usually one sorcerer and two mages) that I use to quickly overwhelm single enemy fights like liches - it's usually pretty difficult for them to withstand concentrated anti-magical attacks constantly stripping away their magical and physical protections). Kangaxx's stupid Soul Trap (basically Imprisonment, but subject to a save vs. spell at -4 for the imprisonment effect) can be pretty annoying if it lands, but at least it's better than the real Imprisonment that doesn't give a save. The worst fights in an SCS game for me tend to be the many powerful enemies ones (e.g. Twisted Rune or the guardians leading up to Demigorgon) where your attention is split between way too many enemies and you're basically asked to throw everything you've got in order to outlast them...particularly because I also happen to hate using summons. That one's not as hard of a rule as the consumable one, but I do like to be very light with the summons. Suffice to say, I have weird rules for how I like to play games, and I undoubtedly make use of certain power gaming (although not outright exploity) strategies for the specific kind of party builds I go for - you have to if you're being retarded and trying not to use consumables or summonables like me.

Tom Brady is going to be semi-regularly announcing Packers games once he retires. Will no-one rid me of this meddlesome quarterback?

I still haven't seen the first. I'm sure I'll get around to it soon.

I played it probably in about 2010 is the thing, though. I also received New Vegas a gift from the same friend around the same time and I also couldn't make myself play through that (better writing doesn't suddenly make the horrid Fallout 3 gameplay go away...), so really, probably people just shouldn't ever gift me any kind of media because I am the worst. Witcher was probably the last ARPG I tried before Dark Souls, and that was obviously a bit of a crossing the rubicon moment for ARPGs - difficult to go back to the really janky/unrefined stuff after that. Not that Dark Souls wasn't also pretty janky, but it made the "action RPG" part of the game compelling in of itself for me, which was new. I also despise using one-use consumables/abilities in pretty much all genres of gaming, and apparently that was a big part in making the combat workable in Witcher 1, so once I learned that, I pretty much immediately uninstalled the game. I don't use e.g. potions in games like Baldur's Gate, which is fine in that because they're not in any way necessary even for the extra difficult content in those games, so I'm certainly not going to use them in an action RPG.

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."