Bartimaeus

Twelve Kingdoms, episode 1. Main character is an emotional stammerer that can't finish sentences and says "w-what?" and "b-but..." to just about everything said to her - ah, yes, my favorite kind of anime character. Given the type of show that this is, she will presumably improve over time, but holy crap is it annoying throughout this episode. Main character ignores a bullied girl that tries to say hello to her, then a couple of scenes later lectures said girl about being sure to put in effort to make friends. What a jerk. Some monotone fantasy dude suddenly appears in the middle of her classroom talking about "the enemy" and "protecting her" in front of all her classmates and teacher, and then everyone besides those two starts getting whacked by some big bird that causes the windows and walls of her school to collapse merely by flying near them. The fantasy dude tells her that she has to fight the big bird, but obviously our main character has no idea how to use the sword handed to her, and the bullied girl (who happens to be nearby) asks him why he doesn't fight the thing himself...and he says he doesn't want to shed blood. So, let's recap: he swore to protect her, says she is his lord and he must get her back safely to "her world", but then refuses to protect her from an imminent threat and says she has to fight it herself? Look, I get this is the first episode and this stuff probably won't ultimately matter in the long run, but this kind of cloddy writing really gives off the impression that this was written by an imbecile. Anyways, while she's sitting there stammering, crying, and screaming about how she can't do anything, a magical force just takes control of her body and slays the bird for her. Um, okay. How...empowering - and resume crying. Nah man, you know what, I think I'm good. However, if I were forced to pick between this and most any other anime, I would pick this. This first episode was like...maybe a 5/10 - pretty bad, but not disastrously bad like I would regard almost every other anime show you could throw at me, and it could certainly get better once some of the clumsy setup is out of the way and it finds its groove. But with about a hundred other pre-2000 shows on my "to check out" list that have a much better chance of appealing to me in style, writing, characters, and art, it doesn't really seem worth my time.

If I don't become ill within the next couple of days, it'll be a minor miracle. My nieces went from minor cold-like symptoms at the beginning of this week to full-on flu symptoms suddenly as of yesterday and today. I've spent many hours being right next to them while they've been coughing and sneezing on me since they've staying home from school, and now it's Easter break. Prognosis seems...uh, less than great.

It's kind of the exact opposite way around for me in terms of creating characters - I determine what my character will look like first, and then I can see what roles it looks like they could fulfill and choose from there. Escaflowne: The Movie. First five minutes was Van inexplicably dropping out of the sky onto a ship and violently murdering everyone on board in unironic shonen action fashion. The next five minutes then cut to Hitomi and her "best friend" Yukari talking. The scene culminates in Yukari finding the suicide note Hitomi wrote, which she reads against Hitomi's wishes because Hitomi wasn't actually ready to give it to her yet, and then Yukari subsequently mocks Hitomi for it. Oh yeah, this is gonna be good.

Title of the article is "Why the Past 10 Years of American Life Have Been Uniquely Stupid", but a better title would perhaps be "Social Media, A Modern Age Tower of Babel", a long read from The Atlantic about the internet and social media and how the two of them seem to be breaking down the binding forces of society.

I guess I wouldn't want to be lumped in with the pro-hate reactionaries either, I suppose. Thing is, I feel like you could just...cover different shows if you actually don't like it, . Maybe that's what the critics who have any sense do, leaving just the people who actually like the show to review it and thus giving a falsely positive aggregate impression. Yep, it's pretty easy to tell what you're getting into, and if you want to watch sleaze or smut, fine, whatever. With anime, it's hardly ever clear where the line will be when you're getting into a show, and you can go from "it's perfectly clean" to "this is filth" with the drop of a hat. There just isn't a strong or transparent delineation like there is with most other mediums. At least Utena didn't have fan service...I think. Does Nanami turning into a literal cow count as fan service? Also, you say "4 episode OVA", but there's also the two twelve episode sequels and the movie... I do better with something like that, because a portrait essentially the equivalent of a "preset" for a game like Baldur's Gate, and I have a better idea of what I want to be represented by when given a very finite amount of choices. Although the specific example of Baldur's Gate is not great, particularly BG2, whose portraits were pretty universally terrible. Stop using professional models for character designs, BioWare - the results have been very bad. But if decoration of something is ever left up to me, you can bet it's going to be incredibly spartan, .

Beggars of Life (1928). First two minutes of the film, a man wanders into a house to ask for a place to stay for the night, only to find the master of the house keeled over with a bullet through his skull. Cue Lulu entering the scene and anxiously explaining that yeah, she killed him - he was her adoptive father and he had been sexually abusing her ever since he adopted her, and she had finally had enough and shot him dead this morning when he attempted to rape her. Uh...yeah, so are there any starring roles that this poor woman played where she was not sexually abused? Good lord, this is a ridiculous level of typecasting. Would it be so difficult for her to be generic happy protagonist girl, just once?

Have had a couple of funky monitors that would seem like they were dead for a bit, would suddenly resurrect because of something strange like switching the cable, then months later would suddenly "die" again, and rinse and repeat. It's really annoying when it happens. My assumption is something somewhere in it is getting rattled/unrattled because of using and messing around with the monitor, leading to seemingly random life and death.

Queen Beryl is literally what I thought of every time it happened. Yeah, you just keep spinning your Life Day orb while doin' absolutely nothing of use, queenie... It's difficult for me to even imagine anybody who didn't watch the original show starting with and somehow enjoying the films for them to be able to go back and check out the show. I guess you might be right in regards to the popularity/"you have to watch and like this" factor, though. Live-action is also different because...well, how often do you see shots in live-action shows where the camera zooms in or cuts away to just a character's chest or butt? In anime shows, it's not a totally irregular occurrence, and it's really freaking disruptive, particularly when it lingers for several seconds at a time and particularly when there's no in-show justification for it. Sure, it might happen in certain types of lower budget movies that I've never seen (...as well as Transformers, where it really is just as bad or even worse than any anime), but shows that actually aired on television? A live-action show with "fan service" might have a lady wearing a ridiculous and overly sexualized outfit, but if the scene at least keeps trucking along like it should... A momentary glimpse of unitard during a fight in Sailor Moon versus mashed potatoes Miranda and her barf-worthy butt being inexplicably placed directly in front of the camera in the middle of an important conversation in Mass Effect 2 feels like all the difference in the world. I still don't love the former, but at least it's not getting my face caved in with a sledgehammer like the latter. There are different levels to these things, and anime has a history of casually going to an extreme that I remain very uncomfortable with. I must admit, I've never known exactly how to feel about that sentiment regarding MMOs and female characters - obviously, the troglodyte way in which it is expressed is pretty reprehensible, but then I have to consider the case of my own self. I always play as a female character in games where you have to design your own character. Why? I usually don't even design my character: in games like Dark Souls, I always go with one of the available presets while just changing the hair style/color, and that's it. If there isn't a preset to choose from, I either sit there and agonize or I just straight up uninstall the game. I don't "sit there and agonize" because I'm going back and forth on what I want, or because I'm testing out stuff. No sir, I so utterly loathe making those kinds of decisions entirely that it inhibits me from doing anything at all, because nothing about the visual or creative design of a character really comes to me naturally and I don't have any kind of idea of what I even want, so I don't even know where or how to start. So why always female if I don't even really care what my character looks like? I'm not entirely sure. I know I was mad when I played Dark Souls 2 and they got rid of the particular passive character voice (grunts/yells/screams/yelps) that I used for DS1...and I was happy when they actually brought back that voice for DS3. On some level, I feel more comfortable playing (or identifying with?) a girl than I do a guy, but I don't understand the specifics...though it's certainly not because "I want to look at a girl's butt the entire game", I can tell you that. My biggest issue with the look of Escaflowne is the generic-ish anime fantasy aesthetic, particularly in relation to Gaea and its characters. Obviously, I made my peace with it to some degree, but boy, there were some scenes where I would pause it and be like "...how can I like this when I've immediately spurned so many other anime fantasy shows?" purely because of the way the show looked, . Funnily, HoonDing said Hitomi was unbearably ugly, but it was actually pretty much everyone else that this problem applied to for me because she and the other Earth characters had a little bit of a different style going on in comparison to the Gaea world/characters.

I'm all about that journey, and the journey sure is a lot sweeter when you take a little time to have nice character moments, flesh everything out, and just give everybody some room to breathe rather than rush full speed through a plot. All those nice little Hitomi + Merle moments and such woulda never happened otherwise. Ironically, as you said, the show was actually a bit too fast from that perspective, but knowing that...one, this was originally supposed to be a full-on shonen, and two, they lost 13 episodes after the story had been finalized and had to rush to try to make it work, both sure make it easier to forgive, particularly since...you know, the show is still pretty great, . Yes...or the sheer amount of times that silly emperor repeated himself about his ridiculous perfect future and being able or not able to see it or whatever... We have a very limited run-time here, we don't need you to spend a minute of every episode giving us extremely vague updates about what you can or cannot see, okay? Stuff that would annoy me if the show didn't have a bunch of other things that I like going for it...but like you/Jay said - when something's working for you, it's working, and never mind the details. Good question, I'm really not sure. HoonDing had a whole rant about how Hitomi was unbearably ugly. Maybe it's less "the show is tediously slow" and more "the show is tediously slow...given that I do not much like or care about the characters and their interactions". Why one does/doesn't like or care about any given character can be pretty complicated - visual appeal is certainly one factor, although how it applies in all of its different facets from one person to the next, especially in regards to an inherently artistic medium like animation, is very difficult to pin down. I'm certainly no exception in that I'm drawn to certain art styles and character types/styles a lot more than others*, so I get it. I mean, I don't really get how one can look at Twelve Kingdoms and somehow think literally any single element of it looks more visually appealing on any level than Escaflowne, but I at least get it in the sense that I understand that some people clearly prefer that over Escaflowne for equally arbitrary preferences as my own, . Legitimately one of the best parts of Wings of Honneamise for me was Manna mean-mugging everything and everyone the entire film. That's a pretty bizarre and arbitrary thing to enjoy on a visual level, but for some reason, I really did - I genuinely got great delight out of it, and it'll be something I remember for some time. For a whole lot of other people (well, particularly men/boys), it's all about women's chests and such instead...meanwhile, @Amentep and I had a whole discussion about how that was the most horrifying and unnecessary part of the film. Some of us pretty clearly speak in different film language from one another, even if we all happen to be able to use English to try to convey the specific film language that we use and prefer, . *Seriously, trying to use your generic male gaze sex appeal has pretty much the complete opposite intended effect 99% of the time for me - I'll almost always hate and be grossed out by it, and there's a high probability of it greatly taking away from what I'm watching. Some love it for reasons I'll never be able to get, while others are somehow able to just pay it little heed and enjoy the rest of whatever they're watching without hardly thinking about it. Alas, not I.

The forum software updated, and the software got rid of it with the update. It happened to a pile of different places that were using Invision all at once. Well, there was a transition period where you could switch to BBCode mode for a bit, but then it was just...gone with another update. What I do these days is always highlight a part of a person's post, like this, and it just goes wherever your cursor currently is in the box. Using the actual quote button is the path to madness: https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/s/onlwdqqg7j7mlmd/firefox_XAYVSnPJW3.mp4 (e): Ninja-ed by Amenpoop, .

Hey, I wasn't going to name names, . I know this sort of stuff certainly has its audience, but this is majestic we're talking about here - the guy that almost exclusively watches shoujo, hates all things toxic masculine, and pretty much never cares for mindless action? It would genuinely be pretty shocking if he enjoyed Redline or anything like it.

I hate to be the bearer of bad news directly in the face of others recommending something, but someone has to be the voice of reason here. It's a very strong anti-recommendation for Redline to at least @majestic due to the film being about as dumb as it looks - if you like fast-paced mindless 2000s action/racing machismo-laden seinen (IIRC, with some barf-worthy fan service to boot), I'm sure it earns high marks, but in what universe would that ever be the case for majestic? My intervention here is almost certainly unnecessary though, because taking even a glance at the film should make him run for the hills, which is what I should've done when someone already made the recommendation in one of these threads a year or two ago. Classic of classics mode, activate! I'll get back to the Escaflowne post later.

i still haven't decided if i'm ever going to play it, though

The extension says .gifv, but it's actually a .webp, that relatively new-ish format that's suddenly become very en vogue as of the last few years for cheap and quick downscaled/cached images, animated or not. I didn't think of using that...but on the other hand, I don't have anything that can convert to that either, so I guess it still doesn't help, .

.gifvs don't automatically embed and play, afaik, and literally the entire point is to make the rest of your guys' eyeballs be forced to see what I'm posting because I know clicking a link is too much trouble for somebody just casually scrolling by,

Now We're in the Air (1927). A 27 minute-long fragment of an originally longer slapstick silent comedy. It was really terrible and...slapstick is just the worst. My curiosity only goes so far here, I'm afraid. .gifs are not a great medium for high resolution and high quality video recordings...but they take seconds to make with the screenshot/video/gif-maker tool I have and I can force the rest of you to see them because they automatically play, unlike linking an .mp4 or something. On the other hand, when I try to upload the .gif to Dropbox and it tells me that is has vastly exceeded the maximum file size limit for like a 6 second gif, I should maybe possibly potentially consider a different approach.

I escaped once and immediately uninstalled the game. I was later told by someone else that there was still more content, but I'd had my fill. I think playing and 100%ing The Binding of Isaac like a decade ago has forever made me wary of ever trying to 100% a roguelike ever again.

Diary of a Lost Girl (1929). It's always good when a film starts off with a huge text dump like this one did: You could've just said "this was hacked together from ten different surviving versions of the film". There are some scenes (just some - presumably from one of the more inferior masters that they used) that look like this, so if fidelity of ancient film is a requirement of yours, beware: Turns out, the six or seven second .gif I made was over 200 MB and nothing will host and play it as a .gif - a huge amount of noise makes for very large gifs, particularly at 1080p. Okay, here we go, 54 MB @ 540p is a little more manageable: A couple of oddities, but nothing too distracting, really... I can't understate how cruelly unfair it is that so relatively little of the 20s were filmed and especially how little of it was filmed with sound, and never mind any of it being in the least bit interesting. Anyways, the last film was basically Lulu is a clueless/self-destructive womanizer*, and this film was instead Lulu is not a womanizer...but everyone treats her like she is, so then she - surprise! - becomes one. I have to say, big improvement: didn't think I'd ever even sort of really like a silent film, but this was oddly mesmerizing and at least a little brilliant. Strangely, it's literally the same director, lead actress, and year of release as Pandora's Box, but I don't know, I enjoyed it a lot more. The style of everything was different, and I think the weirdly intense soundtrack helped a bit, too - it's amazing what a good soundtrack can sometimes do.

That game was delayed some number of years, which greatly annoyed my young niece because she loves those Lego games...and then it finally came out and apparently the game is like 75% cutscenes. She's not a happy camper.

I've been setting up a network logger/filter on my home network, and I just forced the Roku to go through it (although it took some some router hackery because of course it did). It has sent over 16k "call home" user activity logging attempts in less than 24 hours, which is absolutely dwarfing all other devices combined. What the hell? Though I don't have an Alexa/Google Home or any other such device like that - all of these kinds of "smart" devices presumably do stuff like that.

gifs unrelated, I just felt like posting empress nanami

Something about the dialogue of the characters that are not Ahiru feels...artificial, almost like everyone except for her is just a weird set-piece caricature. It's probably because nobody except for her speaks naturally or acts like an actual character (i.e. somebody with thoughts, feelings, goals, agency...). I know I'm still only four episodes in, but her two friends are basically exaggerated Tomoyos that do not exist except as an extension of Ahiru (as far as I can tell, they could be figments of her imagination and nobody would notice except for her if they suddenly vanished into thin air), Mytho is a zombie (albeit a slowly recovering one), Fakir is pure "possessive sibling" without anything else going on, new characters are introduced for an episode before being dumped unceremoniously in typical magical girl fashion...Rue is probably the closest thing to feeling like another character, and even her, when she talks to like Fakir, it's like they're both mysteriously trying to avoid talking about something obvious that the audience should know, but which the show has declared is off-limits for the time being...which would be fine, except that it's making their conversations sound really strange. It all creates a weird feeling where every time I think I'm starting to get into the show, the general weirdness of how it's doing everything quickly jolts me back out of it. "Okay, we need to have the two sisters, who have only ever had each other to rely upon their entire lives, have a sad conversation about how no-one else will ever love the either of them because of what they are, while also intercutting with flashbacks to when their parents were horrifically murdered when they were small children. We don't have enough time to animate all it from scratch, so let's just cleverly and not jarringly at all re-use some of the animation we made of them from the incestuous ecchi scene they were going to have back when this was a shonen and before we decided they were going to be actual characters. Sound good to everyone? Great!" What's funny is that I still think there are certain things about it that should annoy or dissatisfy me, that definitely would with other shows...but for some reason, they don't here. When you're a special exception, you just are, even if the reasons aren't perfectly understood, . Though I can definitely see the show not being for everyone, and I think that's okay - focusing too much on characters and their thoughts and feelings instead of the "epic" world-building and plot and action and really just all the stuff that I normally don't care that much about unless I already like the characters... Honestly, it makes perfect sense that if we really like it, a lot of other people wouldn't - isn't that usually the case? I'll also forgive a few things not being set up quite as well as they should've been - poor Allen and his family kind of got the short end of the stick all throughout the show in that regard, but ultimately, it was in favor of Hitomi, Van, and Folken, all of who were simply more important, so I can't really fault them too badly given that they lost 13 episodes' worth of runtime. It is funny that the show being tediously slow seems to be a common complaint - if your main point of interest is the plot, I can see that being an issue, because the plot generally does move pretty slowly outside of a few occasions, but it is certainly not what I care most about. The reason why something like this or Evangelion works at all for me is because there was such a heavy and meaningful focus on the characters that makes the plot and world worth caring about - without the former, I won't stick around for the latter. It seems like a lot of other people are wired to be the other way around, . I can only assume that this comment I read about it was written by HoonDing. I'm gonna have to try an episode of this Twelve Kingdoms just so I can predictably hate it.

If I put every single poster in here besides myself on the forums on my super ignore list, I can make myself have like 20 posts in a row...although they'll still be inexplicably separated by pages. I actually remember that part even without re-watching it, but this singing part never happened according to my brain, . You better be watching this crap at max speed. (e); butt on the other hand, its uh shoujo classick of classix

Oh, you've seen double posts, maybe even triple posts...but a quadruple post? We're in uncharted territory here...what the hell, KP? I was working on something great here. Now I have to start all over! Episodes 25 and 26: Was kind of the opposite for me - the longer the story went on, the more disinterested I was in it. By the end of it, I was actively yelling at Utena to drop Anthy off the ledge and was disappointed when she didn't, . Blue Velvet: I recognize a lot of these characters, but I have literally zero memory of this scene even after re-watching it just now. I don't know what to say.