Bartimaeus

I haven't touched the original Game Boy games, which are presumably at least decent for this garbage franchise to have lasted this long, but I've played some of Sword and Shield on the Switch with my niece, and I can't even... This is the best a trillion dollar franchise has to offer? Really?

I'm gonna kill you. Yeah, bet you didn't expect your first death threat to come from me - you're welcome. I haven't been exposed to too much of the Pokemon anime(s), because it's not something I can really stomach to watch. But the entire franchise, from the shows, cards, video games, and general merchandise, just reeks of cheap addictive garbage meant to prey on children. If any of it was at least half-decent, I'd at least be a little more tolerant of it... Well, she's 8 years old now, so I guess it's time I have her watch Neon Genesis Evangelion instead. Hopefully, that'll break her out of her Pokemon habit, .

I've watched some of MLP because my niece (note: different niece from "my nieces") was super into it for a few years and I used to babysit her 2-3 hours a few times a week for a couple of years - before she was in school. It's alright as far as children's entertainment goes (certainly a lot better than a lot of other garbage I've been subjected to), but I don't think I could quite qualify as a "brony", especially seeing as I didn't turn into either a girl or a nazi. It was so much better than what came next, which was...ugh, Pokemon. I hate Pokemon. She's unfortunately still on Pokemon.

Gall Force 3: Stardust War. The title comes from the two sides of the war that's been dominating every second of this series having reduced each other to stardust, since neither side has any inhabited planets remaining and thus no way to replenish diminishing manpower and resources. Guess that's what happens when your weapons are infinitely stronger than any kind of defense you can put up - suppose that's pretty realistic, given that we face the same situation here on Earth. Anyways, the series ends with our group of main characters not being able to do much to stop the annihilation of either sides, and decide to create a capsule that would pass on all the scientific and historical knowledge that their race had amassed for some future race hundreds of millions of years into the future. Pretty dour ending - pretty much an allegory for what will probably happen to us given our propensity for becoming irrationally set on no-win courses that will inevitably bring our doom. However, it is my opinion that this series lacked the necessary tension and gravitas to really pull off such a heavy subject, and the series would've almost definitely been better if it had been sillier and more focused on fun character-driven adventures. It's not bad, but you need some serious creative chops to make something like this really work as well as it should, and this just wasn't quite it. Still, I suppose it ranks as one of the better anime sci-fi things I've seen - no, it's not Crusher Joe, much less Magnetic Rose or Neon Genesis Evangelion, but it was fine-ish.

Yes, for sure better and more tolerable than most everything I see from...well, I'm sure that I don't need to repeat myself here. It did the job well enough without looking out of place or distracting, and that was what was important.

I thought it looked...odd. If I'm recalling correctly, the backgrounds generally looked nice and fitting, but the character models and animations weren't exactly what I would have expected for a film of this type...but it was within acceptable parameters to at least get the job done. Still, it was strange looking to me - I especially remember that dumb look on the main character's face that they kept drawing over and over being a bit of an aggravation for me...but that might partially just be my dislike for the character speaking, . The pre-2000s era of animation we shall never return to...sigh.

Ah, but you see, as I've said so many times...for me, characters trump all. I won't care about your allegory, your themes, your plot if I don't like your characters, and I did not like that main character, the character which the entire film is framed around. I really, really did not like Suzu. So, in a sense, it's a credit to the film that I thought it was okay even given that I strongly disliked the singular protagonist...and that it was an anime film made in 2016, especially seeing as it is a drama. All of those put together should really spell out me hating this film, but I didn't, because it had other good qualities that made it so I watched the entire thing and didn't come out disliking it - I just thought my experience with it was was overall "okay" and that I wished the main character was...someone else. In other words, it was a good film hamstrung by issues of it failing to personally appeal to me, that's all. I have my reasons for not liking this particular kind of character - let's just say I had spent entirely too much time around someone who I would say is painfully similar to Suzu, and I unfortunately find that personality type incredibly grating as a result.

Yeah, I saw that one a couple years back, it was alright. Big problem for me was that I really disliked the main character from beginning to ending, and...it's a movie that's entirely through her perspective, so not liking her is a pretty big problem. Slow* main characters are apparently a tough one for me. If I had liked her, it probably would've been a great movie instead of just an alright one. *I don't mean stupid, I actually mean...just slow. As an example, Minako may be pretty dumb, but she has sharp reflexes, her mouth runs faster than she can think, she makes decisions quickly, and sometimes even starts acting before those already too quickly-made decisions have been decided in the first place...and so she is not slow in the sense that I mean - in fact, if she was slow, she'd probably be effectively smarter because she'd have more time to think what she's going to say or do through. Being slow in all of those areas tends to be very...frustrating to me, and she was as extreme as I've ever seen in a main character in a cinematic film. It didn't help that she also had great difficulty finding stuff to be useful at.

Speaking of Netflix doing weird stuff: Netflix has some sort of thumbnail-picking AI that tries to pick the best thumbnail to appeal specifically to you. This is apparently the one that they thought was best for me, immediately after finishing an episode of Gilmore Girls. Yeah, okay, Netflix. ... *starts watching Seinfeld*

I see someone did a search (and anybody wondering who is not going to do a search, no, I did not name him, nor did I pick him out because of the name...as I did not really pick him out in the first place). And also, it's been longer than I thought...man, summer of 2018. Yeah, I don't really mind non-feral rodents, but I'm also the type that doesn't mind spiders, so... Also, capybaras look kinda like llamas head-on... ...but they look like about as scary as beavers when they show their teeth:

I feel like one is fine if there's almost always somebody at home, two is the right number so they can play and not be lonely when someone isn't around (if people are at work/school a lot), three is the absolute limit before things start going haywire, and twenty means you're the opposite of a serial killer. I say "the opposite", because I'm not exactly sure what that would be, but it's the same level of intensity and frightening that the serial killer would have, just on the opposite side of the spectrum and without the actual killing. You're a pretty scary dude, Azdeus. I have an ancient one on what are probably her last legs right now - I used to have two, but the other one passed away within the last couple of years after an extended bout of declining health. I probably won't have another after this one for some time to come due to changing life circumstances making it difficult.

I think this is the part where I remember "wait, I dislike most music and especially most singers", . At the very least, the Deine Lakaien song was listenable (if very silly looking because I made the mistake of looking at the music video...whoops), whereas the next song...was not. I just can't into most metal - HOWEVER... Funnily, terrible power metal is one of the very few forms of metal that I actually like instrumentally to a degree - well, not specifically "terrible" power metal, but you get what I mean. Like, I can actually listen to nonsense like DragonForce...and I was able to listen to this silly Hammerfall song alright as well. The problem is that the combination of music, lyrics, and vocal style is all just so patently silly that I can never take it seriously. The end result is that I prefer to just listen to "video game metal", which tends to have a similar sound to power metal without quite so much of the absurdity. I don't really have anything that I would ever feel comfortable to claim as being the best of anything...I just like what I like, usually as a function of some combination of liking the vocalist and lyrical style and not being annoyed by the instrumentals, and that's fine. I also don't think I have anything that I grew so much out of where I was like "man, I'm embarrassed to have liked THAT!" either, though. Admittedly, some of that gothier darkwave 90s stuff wouldn't be anywhere close to the first thing I'd ever show or tell anybody about, but I still occasionally listen to it when the mood strikes, and it's fine. On the other hand, I don't have much I like that is distinctly either "the 80s" or "the 00s", which, from what I can tell, seems to be the two main decades of "well, that was embarrassing and I can't believe I was into that". Overall, I didn't "like" anything you linked, but the Deine L (I am not going to go look how to spell his last name again when I already had to Google it earlier) and Hammerfall songs were tolerated, Moonspell and Sirenia were not even slightly tolerated, and the Apocalyptica was "I don't like this, but I feel like if it was used in the proper context, I could", . Hello, dad-rock. Funny how we're all products of our respective environments. Sometimes how our specific environment was formed doesn't make a whole lot of intuitive sense (i.e. me), but our specific sensibilities by which we can be appealed through are still so much determined by that formative time.

I would settle for at least understanding *how* they organize it. It's not alphabetical, it's not by date, it's not in the order that I added them in... I'm once again thankful that streaming is not really my primary method of watching things (and I usually only have 20 items on my own personal Netflix list at any one time anyways), but if it were, I would be very annoyed with it. Progress is progress, I suppose... You know, it might be possible that if you waited long enough (like, say, years), whatever company is responsible for running this show (I know it's been mentioned many times before, but it's slipping my mind right now) might realize how terrible and embarrassing it all was and take it off the air and rob you of the opportunity to ever be able to finish it. Just a thought...

Did you count the time it took to write the post? Because I don't think you counted the time it took to write the post. Remember what I said about "insidious forms of trolling" that cause us to write paragraphs for naught? You are being trolled by Alex Kurtzman, . Although this week it appears he was a lot less successful than usual, so at least there's that!

And now, in the interest of actually correctly posting in regards to the thread's intended purpose..:

Ah - VNV Nation was the very first musical artist I truly liked as a young teen in the mid-ish 2000s, so their early "sound signature" is pretty ingrained in my brain. That particular music scene changed a lot as the 2010s approached, though, and it's never really gotten back to what I liked. In other words:

Man, even if I hadn't seen "VNV Nation" in the title, I would've thought for sure that it was their instrumental - could not sound more like them circa late 90s.

I vaguely remember playing the first one eons ago, but I didn't know there was a second one. ...No, there isn't a second one, so they're just doing a thing, I guess. I've had that installed for like...6 months, but I haven't even booted it up once. I'll get around to it...someday...maybe. No guarantees. I haven't been in a "gameplay" mood for a while now, so a number of games that I installed and intended to play a long while back never even got tried. (e): Uh, oops - how did I reply to a post from the "what're you playing" thread in here? "Special" talent from a "special" person...

Gall Force 2: Destruction. Something I apparently didn't pick up on in the first movie, because I am not very smart, is that our crew was not simply all women because "why not", but apparently, all these ladies come from an alien species that *is* all women - there are no men. This makes the main story make so much more sense now that I know this, as I couldn't figure out why the movie was...well, it doesn't really matter to the rest of you, but there's a baby boy that the movie was basically treating like the most precious thing this side of the galaxy, and now all that makes a lot more sense. This series is still wigging me out that it's so much more serious than I ever expected. Look at this poster, they're...well, actually, now that I look at this one in particular again, they do look a bit more severe than my initial impression would have suggested: Poor Catty on the left there looks like she's practically about to have a mental breakdown...which, uh, I guess is pretty understandable given the circumstances of the first movie. Okay, so maybe I just didn't look close enough before actually watching it - also, holy crap I wish these films were in HD. The art is fine at DVD quality, but...ugh, stuff like this being lost peeves me so. But anyways, I really did think it was just going to be silly space adventures - girl space commandos sounds fun, right? Nope - anyone not doing their part is gonna get killed. Well...at least it's better than some alternatives I can think of (hello, Plastic Little). Anyhow, while this was a continuation of the first, it wasn't quite as much to my tastes - a little too focused on space battles instead of the characters, which was a better strength in the first one. Actually, that was a little weird, because ostensibly, this film was about protecting a few important characters from the first film...but we never even saw them until literally right at the very end, so there felt like a bit of an odd disconnect between what was said to be being accomplished and what you're actually seeing. Still, I'll watch the third one and see how it ends (...and whether I should watch the couple of side-entries to the series).

Yeah, but she never actually hurt anybody, so really, it was all just a big misunderstanding. ...Though I am now reminded that she was murdered - as president of the Sailor Iron Mouse Super Fan Club (population: 1), I'm not exactly thrilled about remembering this, so thanks a lot, .

Oh, thank goodness. They're certainly good enough for us getting the idea, but I shuddered at the thought of you watching it like that. Carry on in that case. Not sure if I should bring out the little girl that doesn't have fingernails from Cardcaptor Sakura to confirm your theory, or Sailor Iron Mouse to deny it. Well, I certainly wouldn't ever make screengrabs if I was watching stuff on a TV from a DVD/BD player, that's for sure. On desktop, it takes roughly one second to make and upload a screenshot because I have a program that can take any given area and immediately upload it to my Dropbox for linking. Like so: https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/s/ewek0zuw14niit6/firefox_78crvf0n0H.mp4

(Giant Sandra picture here) I think that's enough Space Cobra for one lifetime. Although maybe the next lady that comes around won't be nearly so frightening... ...I have to tell you, I did a cursory search, and the BDs look so much nicer than whatever you're watching on: The prons and cons of bluray vs. random streaming service, I suppose...

Neil Breen movies make extensive use of seemingly needless greenscreened scenes...turns out, it's a lot easier and cheaper to find an image of a background that you can use than to go out and find actual locations...assuming you don't care at all about how it looks, which Neil Breen does not. @Keyrock I get not loving the CDC: there is a history of the institution being politicized, especially recently. I get not trusting the corporations: there are certainly many issues of their impartiality and them lying and being negligent in the past. I'm trying to understand your point of view, but you made vocal posts about how you won't get the vaccine in the future, you don't trust the CDC, and you don't trust the corporations...so where exactly does that leave all of us if we're like you and trying to figure out how to make potentially life-altering choices about our health? Because that's literally what we, as individuals, are all doing - trying to make the decisions best for ourselves. Saying "nope" to sources X, Y, and Z is easy and something we can all do for any reason or another, but at the end of the day, we're still making decisions based off of something. Anecdotally, I know a few people who have died from this thing since it started. Heck, my nieces' grandfather died just last month from omicron. He was a loud and proud anti-vaxxer - so proud, in fact, that he refused to tell anyone that he was sick or go to the hospital even once it got really bad, and he died alone at home without having told a single soul he was ill. Took his daughter not being able to contact him for a week for her to call police to do a wellness check and have them find his body. I also talk pretty regularly to two people who work at hospitals, and they have both been pretty vociferous about anti-vaxxers and how they're 95% the ones taking up all of their hospitals' resources during these surges, which makes it impossible for other vaccinated people to get non-covid-related life-saving treatments and surgeries and causing unnecessary pain and death because of those "personal" decisions - not to mention the amount of abuse all these doctors and nurses get from the anti-vaxxers when they do come in and "inexplicably" need treatment after all. Having said all that, I guess you could say I was pretty likely to always be biased and pro-anything that doesn't make the lives of people that I know utterly miserable or end up with people dead. So...what's your story?