Bartimaeus

I could be wrong, but I don't think majestic is suddenly finding enjoyment in all the things that he normally despises (e.g. fan service, lowbrow humor, overly tropey writing et al.) insomuch as the show in question is walking a line that makes its elements actually justifiably work...in direct contrast to so many other shows that have similar elements, where they are instead employed in a much more pained and/or pathetic manner. Sold.

I'm sure you would feel the same way about RT, . (e): Oops, it quoted Malcador instead of kanisatha...well, that happened for a pretty obvious reason, actually.

Foo Fighters drummer Taylor Hawkins, currently unknown cause (they were apparently scheduled to perform an hour before his sudden death).

I like the deal for the Chiefs as well (the value of which is a little better than what the Packers got for Davante Adams, which is surprising to me given that the Packers had very little leverage given that whole situation), but the Chiefs don't have anyone in waiting that can really be even 75% of what he gave them, which is why I would say it's a year too early. Still, Mahomes' career with the Chiefs figures to be long and he'll be able to weather situations like this, so "one year too early" is infinitely superior to "one year too late"...whereas the Dolphins are presumably hoping Tua looks like a better version of the guy we saw win 8 out of his last 9 games the previous season to be able to take advantage of that rookie contract. He's getting too old for a team that's had a losing record the last 4 years with no real prospect of changing it in the near future (especially repeatedly going 7-9/10 like they have been...), and they seemed to have prioritized sending him where he wanted to go rather than trying to max out compensation.

It's probably a year too early for the Chiefs to get rid of him, but better that than a year too late.

I said the "True Moonies", not the general fandom. The True Moonies, of course, are a secret sect of Sailor Moon fans who...um, well, they're the fine cultured folks that...well, you know what I mean! (...Yes, someone made a partial backup of the Sailor Moon Says channel.)

Whenever I re-watch Sailor Moon, which will eventually happen, I'm not certain whether I want to re-watch the Viz dub, try the Japanese, or become one with the True Moonies by watching the original English. It will be quite the dilemma to decide when the time comes. On one hand, that's gratitude for you; on the other, I'm sure Cobra was acting like a moron. ...Again, I've never actually heard Cobra talk, but I just get the feeling from the perpetual 'not particularly intelligent' look on his face that I have a pretty good idea of what his personality is like, . Gesundheit. Pearl would've been a great name, thank you very much. "Purrrrrrl" where they draw out the first syllable every time they say it, not so much.

Yeah, so that wasn't how I expected that post to end. I was gearing up to write my monthly "why the hell do you keep trying to watch shows that you should obviously leave to someone else that doesn't have your particular OCD, good lord - don't you have enough endless trash on your plate?". Please tell me that this "Merle" doesn't pronounce her name as "Earl" with an M. Also, please tell me that the show looks a lot better on the streaming service (Amazon?) you're watching it on than those screenshots you presumably pulled from Google, because I've seen screenshots of the BDs previously, and I know they looked a lot nicer than that. This was not the one I was going to link because it's obviously not a key frame, but the visual combined with the subtitle was hilarious and it got the point across.

Some months ago, I gave the first episode like ten minutes of my time before I said "maybe next year". Don't know if that one will ever work out for me, though. Weird, I'm not sure then. Maybe she's just a firebug and this is her way of harmlessly acting out.

Does anyone know what the heck Mai's mom is doing with this...whatever it is? Mai came home from school and her mom was sitting with this broom next to this burning pile of leaves or whatever literally in the middle of the street, and Mai didn't seem to take any notice of it, but I have no idea what she's doing or what this is supposed to be. To me, it looks like she swept up some leaves and set it on fire...but, uh, why?

I don't understand quantum mechanics, so I'm obviously not going to address it from that angle although it seems there's a pretty serious argument for it just there, but for me, the entire issue starts from the moment of conception. You are a package of genetic material that you had no will in deciding, genetic material that plays a huge deterministic role in many of your earliest base traits, which then set the tone for your development. Speaking of your development, it is shaped by environments and other people you have little to no control over until you are an adult - and what little power you do have in said environments you are still simply a walking, talking underveloped manifestation of your genetic material and its environmental influences, with virtually no ability to intelligently make conscious changes. Finally, at some point, you are an adult and gain some measure of independence...by which time the vast majority of your personality, mannerisms, thinking processes, behaviors et al. have already been by and large decided as a result of your childhood, and the changes that occur to them after that are generally not the result of any "decisions" you will make, but rather a variety of chance environmental interactions that you will or will not pursue or be receptive towards dependent upon...what, exactly? I didn't decide my personality or the environment I was in that made it so one idea would heavily appeal to me while another wouldn't - I am a slave to my "natural" inclinations that I never had a hand in deciding. Sure, I can force myself to do something that I would not naturally be inclined to do, but the very act of doing that simply to resist my nature is some part of my nature and another distinct inclination to do something different in of itself. Once I start thinking about "what makes one person naturally have the ability to be self-aware and be able to 'choose' to do something contrary to their nature while another cannot", my head starts to hurt and existentialism dread starts to set in again. Ultimately, I agree with rjshae, though - it really doesn't matter in terms of actually living out our lives, and while I think determinism really does make the most sense, I would not use it to excuse anyone's behaviors, thoughts, or actions. Bad music aside, boy howdy indeed if that's the case - I do not want to watch her early videos if this is "much better".

I know it shouldn't really matter for an attempt at a heartfelt message (assuming that's actually the idea and it's not really a deliberate attempt at psyops...note the keyword "deliberate" before any of y'all start @ing me), but it gives the message such a...phony manufactured feel to the entire video the moment I noticed it, which was roughly the second time it happened...and then it kept happening, repeatedly. I know you're not as young and beautiful as you used to be, but really, it's O.K. to just have the camera be on your face the entire time when delivering this kind of message.

I got through the first video and half of the second before I decided that this lady was a terrible writer for and presenter of her ideas - assuming the idea of her videos is to make your layperson convert to her way of thinking...and I think I support her positions. The amount of samey, repetitive sentences that are also enunciated in the exact same way over and over combined with rapidly switching between low level analogies and high level concepts that she doesn't even slightly try to explain further combined with the generally haughty "you better believe what I'm saying because you're literally completely wrong otherwise" mannerisms pretty much guarantees that nobody that doesn't already agree with her is going to spend more than a minute or two watching these videos, . Not the best bit of persuasive writing/speaking that I've heard, that's for sure...and I've been pretty skeptical of the idea of free will most of my entire life, .

He was my governor for some years, and the impression I always got from him was that...he was kind of all over the place? Definitely not just your average party hack - there was stuff he clearly deeply cared about and would reach across party lines for to try to make progress on, and stuff he changed his mind on that didn't fit with the rest of his party as his tenure continued. His administration was pretty terrible for the economy IIRC, though...and there was the matter of his, erm, "indiscretions". ...Was it just me that was inordinately bothered by the multiple camera angles cutting back and forth like it was on a timer in this video?

I think when a few of us (myself, majestic, and KP) all watched it fairly close to each other a while back, we pretty much agreed with you re: "how has literally nobody heard of [this thing that everybody knows about]", and that the ending wasn't necessarily the strongest narrative-wise, but was strong thematically. It can be tough to do both, especially for something like this - endings are hard even in the best of circumstances. Great show, but certainly not perfect by any means.

The 5800X was the worst value out of the 5000 series' desktop lineup, and it's about the same CPU at the same launch price but with seemingly slightly faster cores (...though binned at lower clock speeds than the original 5800X). Doesn't seem terribly interesting to me unless there's more to the cache stack than it seems.

Would be quite the pickle if you happened to be using one of the now unsupported CPUs and updated for some reason - you need a newer CPU in order to fix your motherboard for the old CPU, . It's likely to happen at least once somewhere in the world to someone, right?

@Amentep Yep, you figured it out, that's exactly what was going on in that episode. Mai's little brother kept dumping bottles of water into the poor thing anytime she wasn't looking. @majestic 38...guess I got halfway through pretty quickly here - I'd be more upset about it if I didn't also have the insane Ririka waiting afterwards. And yes, Pretty Cure doesn't look...horrible, but there's just a certain kind of charm and atmosphere that comes through with a lot of these 80s-90s series that you simply will never find in anything past the year 2000 - it's precisely why I have gone through so much trouble to investigate all this old garbage, . It's a pretty lousy job, but someone's gotta do it...preferably someone without your particular brand of OCD, . Seriously makes me the big sad that so much of this stuff will only ever be on DVDs...sometimes pretty bad looking DVDs at that, too - the quality this show is available in is pretty bit-starved unfortunately, but there's nothing outstandingly wrong with the transfer it came from, so the colors and shapes and all of that do look alright, so at least it's not distracting to me...except for when I pause or take screenshots and subsequently cringe at the fine noise and lines that I know should be there that have instead become either blurs or blocks.

Dinosaurs with headlights aside, doesn't sound like the most interesting of episodes, . Episode 19 of Emi. What a lovely doll - truly, any little girl would be very envious. Uh...now, I'm not exactly a doll expert, but I'm pretty sure that dolls aren't supposed to cry. Nothing weird going on here, folks - just your average everyday creepy creep doll, that's all... Yep, everything's cool...

It's common wisdom that the Souls games (and really Souls-like games in general) are unfortunately pretty much unplayable without a gamepad, so I would say do not bother with any of them.

Schindler's List (1993). It's my first time seeing it, and it was pretty good as entertainment, but I felt somewhat...frustrated with the second and critical half due to some seemingly needless Hollywoodisms. I'd be lying if I said it wasn't still powerful, though, and I suppose that's what counts most. Portrait of a Lady on Fire (2019). French film that had an obscenely high rating everywhere that I checked. The short of it is that it is a period piece (early 19th century?) about a woman who has been hired to paint the portrait of another young woman - the latter of which who does not realize that she is being painted, for she has refused the idea altogether for complicated personal reasons. The last portraitist was able to complete everything but her face, and so our main character must befriend the woman and do the best she can in between seeing her. Now that I've written all that out, the entire idea sounds horribly contrived. It's also terribly slow, basically nothing happens...and yet, it was pretty good - the final act kinda got a little off-kilter compared to the rest of the film, but I can mostly forgive it. Don't think I'd necessarily rate it as the #72 best film of all time, though.

Emi, episode 8...the beach episode. Of course, no anime can be complete without a beach episode, can it? Well, sort of: it was really just an excuse for Mai and her family to visit a different city so that she could become friends with a local group of boys...without those boys having to join the cast, presumably. It was a nice episode, especially because it culminated in those boys wanting Mai, and not her alter-ego Emi, to do magic - the first time something like that's ever happened. Didn't that already happen with the first guy? If they're mindlessly ripping off Sailor Moon wherein Jadeite refused to stand and actually fight when Usagi started off so weak and pathetic, I think it worked in Sailor Moon better because Jadeite never seemed too interested in direct combat - he preferred to use magic to make other stuff fight for him, so once whatever/whoever he was using was defeated, he usually retreated. It's a pretty different kind of situation when you have villains actually winning and then just...stopping for no reason.

I hated the idea of Q for much the same reasons, but he himself sure beat the pants off of a few other TNG characters in terms of having fun, which I think is more important, so eh. That has to be joke - that can't be real. ...Google says it's real, folks. At this juncture, please imagine a Dr. Phil seizure. Please stop watching Star Trick/Dreck/Ick/Blech and start watching...literally anything decent, .

Lmao, I didn't not understand your original post to mean that. Incredible - that's so much worse!

Ah, the George Lucas method. Always a good idea to follow in the footsteps of the great pioneers...no matter how abjectly terrible the results were.