Bartimaeus

From what I recall, the protagonist in particular was lambasted for coming across as both whiny and ineffectual but also borderline sociopathic in presentation, and a lot of people hating their main character is something that shouldn't - cannot - happen. Also, the usual contingent of "she's uggo" gamers for people wanting to play the default female Ryder, but I personally thought many of the human faces in the Mass Effect games, especially in 2 and 3, looked like science experiments that had gone wrong already (probably because of BioWare going way farther to model and map real life people's faces onto characters' to, uh, varying degrees of success), so you know, it is what it is. I'd be pretty far down on the list of people trying to argue for all conventionally attractive characters in movies, shows, or video games, but I do prefer it when my brain doesn't keep screaming at me that a supposedly human character that looks like an alien wearing someone else's skin must be destroyed.

It was worth watching for Nanami, at least. Those are fond/traumatic memories that are never going to leave me.

I found Utena to be frustrating specifically because of the story and its awful presentation. The sillier episodes were good fun (who among us doesn't love Nanami drowning kittens, or Nanami transforming into a cow, or Nanami trying to lay literal eggs like a bird/reptile, or Nanami going on an African safari to find some super special curry only to get trampled by elephants and for it to be revealed they had some on hand in the school all along?), but the story episodes were awkward, boring, repetitive, yucky, completely disconnected from any sense of reality, and just generally hot garbage. I also don't really remember most of them, whereas I do remember Nanami! She was a good one. Well, no, she was pretty horrible for like 3/4ths of the show, but she did work pretty hard to make it fun, which is what counts in my books. From what I remember, you've yet to watch the movie, no? I think @majestic at least implied you might find how much more ridiculous it gets to be more fun than the show, which is also just way too long for its story and much more concisely told via the movie. I think: I hated the movie, so I've purged most of it from my brain...but that doesn't mean you will. Also, it looks like Bartimeus was already destroyed about ten years ago, so I think we're okay. There is somebody around here who I tried to @ one time that actually does for real have a doppelganger, with just like one different letter and who even went so far as to use the same avatar as the real member, but I can't remember who it is. It's possible they've been since removed, since I think I saw them like a year or two ago.

They serve different purposes: the "first" outro that's used in the show is just the generic outro at the end of all 38 episodes of the show, whereas the "second" outro is specifically tailor-made for that 2002 OVA. The 2002 OVA is a short little prequel to the show that happens well before she ever receives magic powers (and in my opinion, the outro was by far the most interesting part of it - despite the fact that it has very little to do with what was actually shown in the episode). The first outro, although not particularly interesting or exciting, is really more appropriate for the show as a whole (which is largely upbeat, pleasant, and sincere), while the second outro...I still don't really fully understand exactly what it is they were trying to do. Especially now, because after my previous posts in this thread, I learned that I had previously overlooked that there's actually a 1986 movie (give me a break, this is a fairly obscure show and it can be difficult to find things...), which I just watched a couple of days ago. The context given in 1986 for 2002's creepy outro and end credits was this: Emi's looking back at and reminiscing of when she could turn into Magical Emi...and at the end of it all, her old broken magical mirror gives a little flash of power, the camera switches to her face, and she smiles. See? It's simple, but now I know everything turned out alright and that she didn't get murdered or kill herself or something, and heck, maybe she can even still do magic...if she wants to. Phew, thank goodness writers and directors back in 1986 knew how to properly convey ideas instead of just being creepy and off-putting for no particularly good reason. After all, it's a magical girl show aimed at, like, 6-10 year old girls, not a David Lynch movie/television series. Why they tried to re-create this 1986 scene in 2002 without any of the surrounding context (and when the original audience would be long gone), I'm not sure, but if nothing else, it helped get me to notice that there was a 1986 version and receive better resolution from it. Not that much better resolution, since this movie was also quite strange in of itself and with the exception of the "looking back" scene partially shown above was neither a prequel nor a sequel to the show but rather took place right square in the middle of it with no apparent purpose, but better. I still don't know whether she ever accomplished becoming a magician like she dreamed of, but even if not, I think it's okay. All of that is probably quite a bit more boring sounding than some anime director/writer randomly channelling their inner David Lynch for an early magical girl series, but hey, that's life. There can only be one...

Isn't the only "good" choice for a top end gaming PC the 9800X3D right now? Kinda doubt anyone will be regretting buying a X3D part anytime soon - anyone who's bought one going back to the 5000 series seems to always be pretty loathe to upgrade because of how long their legs are, and it's been repeatedly emphasized by Gamer's Nexus over the past year or two in their CPU reviews how good even the oldest ones continue to be.

https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/scl/fi/gbc8x8xtzwdmpglvinoya/explorer_8uDDuh2Ob1.mp4?rlkey=y0ufob3bd0xs4ff7u0zw0bcr9&dl=0 I didn't even update yt-dlp.exe, my copy is a year out of date! e: I just realized you said "converter", not "downloader"...so, uh, I guess it depends on what you're converting it to? Video audio -> just audio can be done locally via foobar2000, which is a free music player...so yt-dlp + foobar2000 will get the job done if that's what you're trying to do.

Yeah, I was going to say that that it's probably too little, too late if past bad launches by AMD were any indication. Though AMD has obviously had bad launches for other reasons, they seem to especially love to shoot themselves in the foot by launching with inexplicably poor pricing and then dropping their prices to be more competitive...usually about a week after all the reviews trashing them for having bad price-to-performance have released. Completely needless, but they never seem to learn.

The Wallace and Gromit films are being re-released in 4K! The history of home releases of Wallace and Gromit have consistently been riddled with issues - between wrong aspect ratios, missing lines of dialogue, original music missing/replaced with other pieces because of licensing issues, wrong playback speeds, incorrectly pitched audio...so it'd be nice if... if they just used AI to puke out these new 4K discs while also not fixing any of the other problems, all just to make a quick buck on a $120 collection set. **** you, James Cameron.

Yes, I do suppose it was peculiarly Lynchian in its presentation, even down to the bizarre credits...luckily for me, I already watched the entire show preceding it, so I didn't get the big mad like I might've otherwise, . Who's Left Behind? AKA Kayako's Diary (1991). You know, I always had one big complaint about Grave of the Fireflies: I don't like it when movies start out miserable. End miserably? Sure, great! But starting out when things are already terrible, before you ever even have a chance to get to know and like your characters and see what their normal lives were like before everything goes completely sideways, always makes it a bit difficult for me to care about and engage with the movie in earnest. I've mentioned...upon occasion...that I usually only make it a maybe a couple of minutes whenever I try any of those lousy modern anime drama films where the movie immediately starts out with playing sappy piano music, it's raining, and some sad sack I don't and won't care about is immediately laying into me with some pathetically whiny monologue. Grrr, I really hate the bozos who make those movies...but, uh, anyways, all of that is to say, Grave of the Fireflies succeeded for me despite that major issue, but it would've been nice to see an alternative film where there was a preceding, oh, let's say...30-40 minutes of cute and fun daily life where some bad things are kind of, you know, just vaguely happening in the background but not directly affecting our characters, before things really start to deteriorate. Well...thanks to this film, which so desperately needs a blu-ray or even just a good DVD instead of an awful LaserDisc transfer, I really don't need that anymore. Despite the quality being just terrible, Who's Left Behind? immediately shoots up to one my very favorite anime films. Actually, I was initially - supposed to be - working while watching this, and I just wanted to check it out real quick on my third monitor to see if it would even be worth watching at all, and I kind of just let it keep running for maybe fifteen minutes before I realized I was either going to have to stop working or stop watching the movie, and I decided to stop working. I feel it was a wise decision.

The Diary of Anne Frank (1959). It was one of my favorite books when I read it as a child in...4th grade?, and it was interesting to re-visit it all these years later. It's a good production, though with a few relatively minor issues. I can't believe they bothered to have Millie Perkins (Anne) complain about how she's too ugly in comparison to her sister. I know that was in the book, but like, just don't include it here, you literally cast Millie Perkins as Anne Frank, it makes no sense at all. Not to mention that she's completely the wrong age (Anne went into hiding at age 13, Perkins...may be very petite and baby-faced, but she was 22 at the time of filming - able to pull off 18, sure...maybe even 16, but not 13). Oh well, it's fine, it's tough to fine good dramatic child actors, especially at that time. Anyways, the film is some good food for thought in these trying times.

@majestic The original show does actually have a pretty feel bad ending, for what I think is perhaps an interesting lesson grounded in reality, and you could apply much of what you said about the OVA ending to it: Now the stuff about familial ruin and addiction and suicide...um, not so much. Especially because her parents are bakers and weren't getting anything from Mai performing magic in the first place - they were just letting her go off and hang out with the family troupe for fun, basically. So yeah, you're not entirely off the mark with your more serious ideas, .

Fear the Spotlight. Over the last few years, I've really grown to hate surreal/dream-like atmospheres and horror in both movies and games, and this is no exception. You're a goody-two-shoes breaking into the school with your goth friend so you can play around with a oujia board in the library, stuff goes sideways, and the game immediately segues into a dream sequence where nothing is connected to reality or really matters anymore, the game very thickly lays on a "there was a terrible fire that killed a bunch of students years ago" story that's told by picking up a pile of random notes throughout the environments*, which probably has something to do with the "there was this girl that was being bullied by the girl she was jealous of" stuff that was also going on at the time, but I didn't actually stick around to find out because this crappy 2 and a half hour-long game was at least an hour and a half too long for me to bother. Presumably, given the title of the game mentioning "the spotlight", it's one of the those two girls that set the fire, and maybe it comes back to connect to the two girls in present day, but whatever, I really don't care. Probably the nicest thing I can say about is that I liked the in-game visuals, which were low-fi pseudo-PS1-like, which seems to have really taken off as a relatively cheap to make and run but stylish look, particularly for indie horror games. Now if there could just be some actually fun games making use of it... *This particular approach to storytelling has become so commonplace to gaming, both AAA and indie, and I can't really understate how dull I find it. There's an appropriate time and place to use readable notes to flesh out your world/lore, but the extent to which games effectively use them as a crutch has become way too extreme...and it's especially bad when it's the only way of learning whatever garbage the story is supposed to be. Hey idiots, do you remember when fun or intriguing characters that the player/viewer likes or at least is curious about used to drive stories? Ugh. Though at the end of the day, if you're really into a game and its characters, world, and story, you're much more inclined to actually be excited to go find and read any information you can find in-game about all of it, which I clearly was not here. Now if this were like, Undertale or something, with actually fun and interesting writing, I'd keep my mouth firmly closed.

The 2002 OVA art style is...not completely horrible, but I find the character designs to be very off-putting and lizard people-like, which doesn't help with what already seems like creepy direction. The animation and background designs shown off in the outro in particular are really not all that bad on the whole except for that, especially for a random 1-episode OVA made in 2002 of a decades-dead show. Uh, kind of? Not necessarily how I wanted to leave the show off on, but I suppose it was easily the most memorable bit of that episode...

Magical Emi, the End of Magic. Okay, people...hear me out, I would appreciate all your guys' input on something: You basically can't even tell the difference between the art styles, right? But anyways, here's the actually important bit that I would like to hear other people's opinions on...here is the outro of the original show: https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/scl/fi/qz3show7ypdvrn8fxslfl/mpc-hc64_m2U1NwAqnJ.mp4?rlkey=f1skdz9oy685rrpdlhkad9ypn&dl=0 Harmless enough, right? No big deal, it's a silly little shoujo show made for girls, whatever. And now here is the outro of the single-episode 2002 OVA, the last bit of Magical Emi that there ever was, that...I suppose, was trying to pay some kind of homage to it and the show in general, even going so far as to play the original show's music a whole seventeen years later: https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/scl/fi/spqnfkbb1polvhgaihc28/mpc-hc64_JgaRdgtv0p.mp4?rlkey=glgskpxcz111ngns59ua9c7ns&dl=0 Please tell me if I'm crazy: was this OVA ending inexplicably creepy as hell, or what? I was getting nearly Perfect Blue-esque vibes, and I have no clue why it was like that, but it really skeeved me out and made me question what was happening as I watching it. Between the sudden disconcerting and traumatized looks Mai (the main character, she's both the orange-haired girl and the teal-haired lady) kept shifting into, the weird and surreal imagery, Mai watching her own older self appearing in the rainbow, the fact that this is all occurring in what seems to be old photos, the whole minute of silence* in a dark room while the credits play with...what appears to be an older teenaged version of Mai that I've never even seen at any point in either the show or the OVA, but it's her room from when she's a child in the show and I'm pretty sure it's supposed to be her... It's super weird, right? It all felt like I was watching a psychological short that was really actually a memorial for someone who was murdered or something. Can anybody else watch this and tell me if if I'm reading way too much into it or not? I mean, I definitely am, but like...unjustifiably so? *Actually, it's not quite silence: I think you can hear some vaguely ominous environmental sounds like the wind rustling, car brakes, a passing train...

I'm honestly surprised any website or online service operates without rate limiting these days. Not that it really fixes the problem, just makes it less worse. Things have been alright on my end, still the rare "service is unavailable", but generally responsive and generally working fine.

Uh, maybe? The fact that there is/was a Hello Kitty goth line just makes me like Hello Kitty even more... Although I tend to be a little picky about my goth, as I've always been much fonder of classical or minimalist goth rather than...let's say, punk or emo goth. When I google "goth hello kitty", I feel like I'm just seeing a lot of random fan art rather than any actual products.

Thank goodness for refunds...

Zelda: Breath of the Wild had 395 different bugs, animals, monsters, and items that you needed to take pictures of to fill out your knowledge compendium thingy. Or you could just pay an obscene amount of money to have the game automatically fill them out with pictures the devs took for you. I took exactly one picture during my whole playthrough of that game.

When I was young and in grade school, my younger sister had a Hello Kitty backpack that I wanted. I should've known then that my life was destined to end in ruin. e: I want to say that I remember it not being particularly girly outside of obviously being Hello Kitty-branded. I think it was mostly black with some pretty striking patterns on it, probably either purple or pink highlights. It looked cool!

I might've said this before, but I was always of the opinion that characters/creatures should be the very last thing that should have their level of detail decreased relative to everything else, and that quality settings that don't take this into account are dumb.

Some friends wanted me to play PoE2 with them, but I've been taking a stronger and stronger stance against roguelikes and games with any significant amount of procedural generation as of late. Just can't be bothered to play games that don't have well-defined endings these days.

In similar cases that I've seen, if it ends up being the RAM that has spontaneously become defective (which is a pretty rare occurrence in of itself after years of problem-free service), it often seems to get worse (i.e. it might start happening again even on the lower performance settings) over time, but if it's the motherboard not being able to power the RAM correctly...well, it's a lot easier to replace RAM than it is to replace a motherboard, so hopefully it's the RAM.

Thanks to term limits, DeSantis is out of the governor's mansion in Florida in 2026 regardless, so what is theoretically a 4 year position in the cabinet might look attractive...