Bartimaeus

If it was real camera shake, it'd probably be fine. Maybe unnecessary, but not worthy of the comment. But it's so obviously looks like the worst After Effects or equivalent artificial shake that they could use - I feel like I've seen the same exact camera shake profile used by a number of amateur VFX for creating "realistic" composite shots, except here it's not even used for the purpose of trying to make a composite shot look more natural...it was just added because camera go shake = more tense scene, apparently. It's such a...tiny little thing to be bothered by, and yet I can't help but understand the point of view of being "welp I'm out" because of it, .

It's a better way to live anyways.

https://twitter.com/JayBauman1/status/1530239905032437762 Somehow, it's worse than I expected. It's like...so clearly artificial camera shake. Just a technical flaw that some people probably won't even notice, but it feels appropriate considering the legacy of the prequels and the cheap/lazy way George Lucas filmed them.

The few screenshots I saw of this...surprisingly really make me want to watch this, but it's a 2022 show and I feel like I'm being fooled by someone that just happened to make really appealing-looking screenshots. . . . I just watched what has got to be the strangest single-episode magical girl OVAs I've ever seen or heard of: Harbor Light Story - Pile of Shame Tonally and stylistically speaking, it feels more or less like almost any other magical girl show from this era...until you start thinking about what's happening. This part of the story isn't quite complete - the terrorist boy (who lives in a literal giant pirate ship, by the way) that is blowing buildings and people up, who is arguably the secondary protagonist of the story, is feuding with his father because it is strongly implied that the father is raping the terrorist boy's sister...aka, that guy's daughter, and the father is only hosting the dance contest to identify more girls to take advantage of. The main character's family seems to hate her (to the point of openly mocking and destroying her creations purely out of spite...and also doing the whole Cinderella "let's leave her locked in her room while we go have fun at the party!"), the terrorist boy implies that he's going to kill her unless she (a literal elementary-age girl) leaves town, people get shot and blown up...but don't worry, everything is fixed because some magical fairy dinosaurs make her older and able to dance real well within the last couple of minutes. Then she wakes up and the entire show was apparently all a dream: the end. Um...so all that messed up crap was just manifestations of her subconscious? What in the hell is going on in her real life that that happened? We don't know, because the show ends literally about 15 seconds after she finally wakes up.

ight imma head out

Google has excellent search operators that I can't seem to find elsewhere that make it the only option for highly precise/specialized searches - searches that only yield a total of 1-100 results. That is my primary use for Google searches and why I have to stick with it for the time being. Stuff like "history of the Roman Empire" or "best ways to fry and season chicken thighs" can be looked up on any search engine, but particular program/OS errors written in a very specific way, exact checksums, media catalogue numbers et al. that you're trying to look up online all get the most relevant results on Google, whereas for the life of me I can't seem to make DDG behave when I try to make similar searches there. Man, I was hoping that was going to result in DDG doing the search and serving the results - I created a Google search that only had 6 total results, and then did the same search on DDG and got garbage, then prefixed it with "!g" and it literally just sent me to Google, .

Yeah, not advocating for/against DDG* or the necessity of privacy for searches like that...just that people should be aware that there still isn't any from just using DDG. For browsing, pay for a reputable no-logging VPN or use Tor while also maintaining a separate sandbox with agent/fingerprint spoofing to probably reclaim some semblance of privacy. That should certainly be enough for non-illegal activities, since nobody's going to try to put together a complete picture of what happened where and when to be able to connect it to you if the activity wasn't Serious Business levels of illegal to begin with. And if it was...well, that's probably beyond my level to provide useful advice for (and I wouldn't want to anyways - for me, it's a strong "yes" to a reasonable degree of privacy, but an equally strong "no" to platforms that sell drugs, weapons, confidential information, and/or people). *Though if DDG's search operators and results weren't hot garbage, it sure would be easier to advocate for them. Their horrible, no good, very bad Bing-derived results are...well, just that.

duckduckgo doesn't prevent your ISP and government from seeing what you searched for - the search you made is literally included in the URL that you're accessing when you make the search. DDG is just promising they're not tracking and selling what they could figure out about you to third parties. Which is better from a "these corporations are trying to track and/or advertise to you" standpoint, but certainly not much privacy in the grand scheme of things.

Eh, we already saw enough of him and his family in the Holiday Special IMO.

Man, I think the Bucks would've had a pretty good chance of repeating if Khris Middleton hadn't slipped on a banana peel in the first round and/or the roleplayers hadn't decided they were going to be the absolute worst over a 7 game series. Stupid sports.

The post-Princess Tutu show pick: Dennou Coil, episodes 2 and 3. This show is...I don't know, kind of like the tone and cast of My Neighbor Totoro meets the setting of Ghost in the Shell, I guess is how I'd put it. That doesn't really sound like it should be a good combination, but the show has been putting the appropriate amount of time into having the characters (all five of the important ones who have been girls/women so far, although I think it's likely a younger boy will eventually join them) have nicer, calmer moments of silliness and fun while also having them run for their lives from the government(?) machines trying to hunt and clean up after them in their very strange tech city, so it's been really good so far. It's a shorter series at twenty-six episodes. I'm having to watch this one in English instead of Japanese because I'm not watching it alone, but the English dub is also good (although, in my opinion, not quite as good as the Japanese, but it's good enough that I don't mind). I still haven't decided which show to focus on next on my own. I would like to once again implore that Madhouse stop making shows that I have to watch all the way through - it's very bad news when I enjoy something from even 2007 that they made. It's also a lot more lighthearted and normal show compared to Texhnolyze, which I'm pretty happy about. Texhnolyze was good, but I need something a little more straightforward and fun. The summary of the premise I read about this show sure went somewhere: I'm guessing the orange girl pictured above is this Raphtalia?

It's not a perfect analogy, but keep in mind that the Patriots were arguably even worse than the Warriors were during the 60s-90s, and they were "the Patriots" as we know them by the end of the 2000s after having won 3 titles. Golden State went to five straight and won 3, so it's not particularly different to me - they came out of nowhere to dominate the 2010s, and now they look to want to establish a second leg of dominance just like the Patriots did. Yeah, I'm gonna be cheering against Golden State. Well...I would be, except I like Boston even less, while I still haven't made up my mind about how I feel about Miami in relation to the other two options. Which is precisely why basketball will feel dead to me after Dallas is eliminated here, .

Oh, so it's not ever going to change either. Well, that's just unfortunate, especially what with the team actually being good (and having a two-straight bonafide MVP player - I'm sure we'd all love to forget terrible injuries having derailed two Nuggets post-seasons, but that's a different matter entirely). And that's for a home market: the whole American sports TV model of making it very difficult or outright impossible to watch games for out-of-market teams is incredibly annoying if you're not in the home market for your specific team. Yeah, I think I'll save my money and tears for smaller companies and creators, not the huge sports leagues that are already ridiculously flush with cash.

Nope, I don't have cable, but I have access to free over-the-air channels that has stuff like Fox and CBS Sports, which would cover the majority of NFL games. NBA is a bit more spotty because like half of the games are on channels that aren't free over-the-air and also the NBA doesn't seem to have a good national TV deal like the NFL does (for example, AFAIK @ShadySands's Denver Nuggets are basically never on TV in Colorado at all because some incredibly garbage service bought the home market rights and so unless you happen to have the very specific service, it's not really possible to watch most of their games legally - correct me if I'm wrong about this Shady).

Hey, it's a form of...I was going to say "civil disobedience", but it's more "corporate disobedience", I guess, since it doesn't really impact anyone besides the particular corporation. Well, I don't think the U.S. will be greatly impacted by whether the NBA or NFL lives or dies, but maybe I'm wrong and it is a small form of the former after all.

I deliberately pirate all of my sports streams precisely because I don't want to support these sports organizations even when I literally could watch stuff over the air in HD legitimately. I cannot understate how much I do not care what's "good" for the business side of things - I watch football and basketball because I want to enjoy watching the sport, and seeing a Boston/Warriors match-up would be like seeing a Patriots/Packers match-up to me (ignore that I am a Packers fan, I am talking from a more general view where seeing the same teams continue to be great for too long is awful and boring). Admittedly, I like to see athletes get paid for their ridiculous talent and hard work, but that's just about inversely offset by the brazillionaires getting even more as a percentage of whatever the sport earns as a whole. Do you want the Patriots to win another Super Bowl next year? Even though Tom Brady's no longer on the team, kind of difficult for me to particularly want that. The rotten stink of Kevin Durant probably won't fade for me until that entire team is dismantled and rebuilt from the ground up.

basketball's just about dead, folks

Kind of reminds me when my buddy had a fan spontaneously shatter while the PC was running and pieces went flying into the video card and it immediately died. Hope yours turns out okay.

Depends on whether you trust majestic or Lexx's and Sarex's tastes in anime better, . majestic thought the visuals were mostly bad but liked the characters and story, .

The End of Texhnolyzelion: Uh...this sure went somewhere. So I'm gonna need a multi-page majestic plot and thematic analysis of this one, stat. One thing I really appreciate about shorter shows is that...er, well, they're short. Okay, so that's not exactly groundbreaking news, but it's doubly true for dark, violent, and/or difficult to follow shows like this where you, quite frankly, would get exhausted by the show over time. I'm sure that Breaking Bad is an excellent show with many objectively good qualities, but it's literally 60 hours long - about thirty long movies worth. That's a really long time to be wallowing in gritty violence and nihilistic misery, and it tends to make it so I lose interest in them because I just don't want to do that at such a ridiculous length. 60 hours of Sailor Moon I can do, 60 hours of Breaking Bad I cannot. Anyways, that's all to say that I can appreciate it when a show like Texhnolyze clocks in at like 6 to 8 hours instead - it makes all the difference in the world for me being able to complete it. Spy x Family: I almost want to try it out myself, and then I remember that I'm me.

Stories Untold. I don't know how this got into my Steam library (did one of the TGGG people give it to me?), but it's basically a game that mixes text adventure with external puzzle mechanics and storytelling. It's actually pretty cool and a lot of fun (though probably not terribly challenging for people who actually played text adventures...but I'm okay with that, seeing as I'm not such as a person).

At least Merle is in the Escaflowne movie. The twenty or so minutes I watched of the 1986 film was "spontaneously cease to exist" levels of drab and boring, as is often the case for me with 80s action stuff. It didn't help that I had a misleading impression of what the series was going to be about from the outset, as I somehow thought that it was going to be the adventures of a muscle god and a little girl, which sounded like it could be an interesting dynamic in what looked to be a brutal violence setting - if it was done right. Then I actually started to watch the film and quickly realized that I had made a terrible mistake and it wasn't even like 5% of what I imagined it would be like. Well, it's certainly there to appeal to boys, albeit in a very different manner.

Hopefully, one day, there'll come a time where it's O.K. for an older American Hollywood actress to age gracefully. I know I am not the only one who is at least a little horrified by what some of these poor women do to themselves for the sake of their careers, yet the phenomenon persists. There were some scenes (usually the farther away ones) where she looked relatively normal, but there were others where she looked quite strange. The landscapes looked nice, as did the costumes and such. All the more puzzling that a number of scenes looked kind of bad to me...particularly after having seen Eggers' The Lighthouse, which was visually sublime. Very different styles of film that require different types of scenes, of course, but still.

The Northman (2022). Um...I really liked both The Lighthouse and The Witch, but this just wasn't it for me. Some things looked or sounded pretty off stylistically (a few too many scenes that were just kind of ugly or cheap looking), Anya-Taylor Joy seemed like a very bad miscast (which is weird, since I've very much liked her in a number of other roles)...but really, the movie just felt very silly instead of tense or engaging. Maybe if you're more interested in the premise and dark fantasy action than I am.