Bartimaeus

No, it's just a little less annoying and heavy-handed than the other two hundred anime films that follow this particular formula. Guys, I don't know if you know this or not, but we don't need to start out every film with a barrage of flat expressions and piano music - I'm telling you, there's more to slice of life films than that! If Grave of the Fireflies could figure out how to do it, I'm sure the rest of you can as well.

A Letter to Momo (2011). It's one of those films - teen girl with an absent father that she told off right before he was tragically killed, but don't worry, she found a letter addressed to her that he intended to give to her...except that he was only able to write the address and none of the actual contents. Whoops. Well, time for her and her mom to go move back with the grandparents in a small town on an island, and...cue the flat expressions and piano music! Eh, except the movie actually doesn't lay it on too thick, and in fact, most of the movie is scoreless and fairly lighthearted...and also, for some reason some creatures from Spirited Away start to harass her. All in all, not too shabby as far as 2011 anime films go. It did enough to make me watch the entire thing, anyways.

Man, it wasn't even remotely close. Not that I wanted LePen to win in any way, but that is really lopsided.

Short but salacious article about Mike Pence during the election certification process on the day of the insurrection. Interestingly, it was reported via multiple news outlets on 2021 January 5th (one day before the insurrection) that Republican Senator Chuck Grassley had declared that he and not Pence would be the one presiding over the election process, because "we don't expect him to be there", and that he hadn't made up his mind about if he would certify the results. https://politicalwire.com/2021/01/05/grassley-says-pence-will-skip-electoral-vote-certification/ If a greater attempt at a coup was ultimately aborted because of Mike Pence refusing to evacuate during an insurrection while knowing that he had to certify the election...well, uh, hats off to you, Vice President.

Monitors: I don't know what other people are like, but at my own desk, I just used a tape measure to see that my eyes are 30-31 inches away from my monitors. That's about where I'm comfortable with general usage - sometimes I might get a little closer if I'm trying to look at something only a pixel or two in size, sometimes I sit back an entire additional foot if I'm playing something with a controller. I'm not sure of the exact real life size that I want each pixel to effectively be, but it seems like you need a pretty good-sized monitor to take advantage of 2160p as it is unless you like sitting very close to your screens...but conversely, I don't really enjoy a screen enveloping my entire field of field like other people seem to, so I'm pretty loathe to even consider 2160p - the panels get too big and the pixel density too extreme for it to be comfortable for me, and messing around with resolution and scaling settings for different uses also kind of sucks. TVs: Here, I can perhaps see a better application, but gaming tends to be less than stellar on modern TVs due to bad input delay anyways, so it's not really a key focus for me...and yeah, you either need a very large TV or to be sitting uncomfortably close to it to really appreciate the level of detail increasing. My own TV is 4K, but it's the same size as Keyrock's and so unless I'm sitting right in front of it and directly flipping between 1080p and 2160p sources, the difference is literally unobservable. For cinema, there's honestly a much bigger difference in quality between cable vs. streaming vs. blurays than there is between 1080p and 2160p IMO. I haven't had cable for a few years now since I now obtain all of my live sports streams and that was literally the only thing that ever made cable even remotely worthwhile, but I remember being pretty stunned when I actually stopped to do some proper image quality comparisons between all the different sources - cable was by far the worst source and looked like complete junk in comparison to even just streaming, and never mind BDs.

IIRC, many of the early pioneers of computers were actually women. Once it became a "serious" field with lots of research and money going into it, it very "suddenly" became male-dominated to a pretty unhealthy degree. While yes, there are inherent biological differences between men and women that may make them more naturally inclined to go certain directions than others, it's hard not to think that the extreme disparity in many fields that are either male or female-dominated is more cultural and institutional than anything else. There seems to have been a little bit of a shift towards women in computer-related fields as of late, but I'd say it's still not nearly enough.

Is Melenchon the French equivalent of Bernie Sanders or something?

Hey, I've beaten Demon's Souls, Dark Souls 1, Dark Souls 2, Dark Souls 3, and Bloodborne, and I never had to parry in any of those games...though I guess there's something to be said for perfectly timed rolls, so I suppose the point stands. I also can't include Sekiro here, since a few of bosses did pretty much actually require parrying to feasibly defeat unless you wanted the battle to last an hour for a single try. Judging by the Steam reviews, it seems like a number of people sadly agreed with you on the game in question.

I've been using Windows 10 for a while now, and I still think the start menu on it is garbage compared to Windows 7. Feel free to take a bet on whether I'll "get used to it pretty quick" when/if I ever upgrade to Windows 11, .

No idea re: the two of them actually meeting - just know I read that they both worked with G. W. Pabst, and I watched both Pandora's Box and Diary of a Lost Girl not too long ago. Like I said, I don't know nothing about nothing, .

Regular Blood Donations Can Reduce Toxic Forever Chemicals in the Bloodstream Forever chemicals has long been a concern of mine - bloodletting's not exactly my ideal method of figuring a way to get them out of the body, but at least it's there as a possible way to reduce them.

@Amentep I came across Triumph of the Will because of Leni Riefenstahl, the director of the film, whose name was mentioned alongside Louise Brooks' as they apparently shared an early director, whereupon I saw that she was a Nazi collaborator and became a director. It was difficult not to be interested in what an apparently famous female Nazi director cooked up in the 1930s for the party. It sure was an experience. I don't really know anything about the silent film era or thereabouts - I was mostly just interested in Louise Brooks' work, of which there isn't much. I may or may not check out F.P.1 at some point, although it seems like the longer German version of the film was received better than the English...and they certainly got the better movie poster, which is often the ultimate arbiter of quality, .

I moved away from gmail to protonmail since the incident where gmail unilaterally decided I was no longer lord of my own email address. I imagine it'll work for Thunderbird just as well - don't think I've ever had a problem with transferring settings/account information from a local application like that.

And yet here you are, not only repeating utterances of its existence to yourself, but also sharing it with the rest of us. Honestly, I'm all for re-accepting some lost forms of masculinity as being completely normal even if they're not for me, but certainly not in the name of fascism. If Tolkien was able to write about how close eight different guys all became over the course of a traumatic war-time adventure, and most of the modern audience was able to accept it without immediately thinking "that's gay", and it didn't require invoking fascist ideas...well by golly, I think we're ready to move on as a society. Yeah, so as it turns out, I did a little online searching, and Tolkien's a little bit of an unwilling fascist icon. Who knew? Not that I don't see how a few particular details of the LotR books could be considered problematic with a modern eye analyzing them, but come on.

@KP wants Blue Velvet There was actually literally like a ten or fifteen minute segment that the film pivoted to where piles of young men in Hitler Youth camps were doing weird stuff together pretty much on the level of that video. Once again, I couldn't help but feel that I'm not exactly the target audience for this sort of thing, . @Gromnir I've never felt the kind of loyalty or inspiration or whatever it is it takes to feel that kind of civic "virtue"...about anyone or anything, really, so it's a little hard for me to really "get it". Perhaps the calamitous times of the future will give me an opportunity to change that, .

Alternatively, just install Firefox on the new system, then replace the AppData\Local\Mozilla and AppData\Roaming\Mozilla folders with the originals from your old system. I've done this a number of times when I haven't wanted to re-setup settings and extensions on a new system or VM, and then I just clear the personal data...but you don't have to clear the personal data, . As for Windows, I've seen that happen to other people before too. Well, to myself a few times as well, but um...well, that's usually a two minute fix for my personal devices, .

Triumph of the Will (1935). "The infamous propaganda film of the 1934 Nazi Party rally in Nuremberg, Germany." It was about the time Hitler smiled at me and looked into my soul that I realized that I may have made a mistake in sating my morbid curiosity as to what a Nazi rally propaganda film would look like. What's up with fascists and their outrageously flamboyant theatrics and pageantry, anyways? I basically just watched two hours of Nazis marching in a parade, except instead of being for entertainment, it's supposed to instill some kind of wonderful sense of national pride. Obviously, I'm not the correct target audience for this seeing as I hate Nazis, but man, I just don't get it.

Yeah, she's pretty much "the girl" for being "the girl"'s sake, which I do not generally view very positively. Perhaps not as bad as an actual terrible or annoying character I wish would be completely cut out of something (Mari from Rebuild who is both says hello!), but still not my cup of tea. I see that a Japanese BD was already released a few years ago, but no U.S. version. Although people already spliced together four different English dubs into the Japanese BD, which can be a bit of a time-consuming technical process to do with just one, never mind multiple (English dubs: "2003 Pioneer", "1996 Manga UK", "1995 Streamline", "1979 Toho", ). I once considered trying out the Lupin show until I saw how many entries into the series there were, plus the second TV show is very long... Don't think I've seen Hotel Transylvania, though I did hear at one point that my good man Tartakovsky worked on it...guess he's the director and everything. Hmm.

How about when you do actually invest a good chunk of change into a decent sound system...only to discover that you straight up still do not like having the volume high enough where you can hear all the dialogue due to excessive volume in other parts of the film? I sure love either having to manually raise and lower volume constantly or just enable subtitles on all-English films in order to not get headaches. It's part of the reason why if I'm going to watch a film by myself, I really have zero qualms about just putting on my headphones and watching it at my PC instead (hell, even a tablet with headphones is better if it means being able to hear everything while not getting a headache...).

That was the worst part in the one Lupin-related thing I've seen as well, The Castle of Cagliostro - the girl felt pathetically underdeveloped and like she was there just to be "the girl". I'll check it out. I can't decide if I like or hate the 3D character models and animation from stills, so I suppose the only way to know for sure is to watch it. I appreciate that they're not just amorphous blobs like so much of Disney and Pixar, at least, and the influence of the old style still looks to be there. Yeah, I had a huge snort of derision from reading the subtitle - that's how he got into this mess in the first place! Sounds like a pretty solid ending to the adventure. Eh, I think stylistic comparisons are always valid, even if it's between something that's good and something that's bad. Doesn't have too much bearing on how novel or well-executed it was, . I'll watch one or a few someday and get back to you on Escaflowne, except that I'll have completely voided any memories of the Escaflowne movie by then. Honestly, my brain has already forgotten a lot of it, just like I did with Rebuild immediately. Oh well. When I think about how freaking long Rebuild was, that is certainly an inhibiting factor. I guess I'd probably rather watch a highly abridged version of Rebuild where I'm skipping all the crap I don't care about (75% of it all?) than watch a highly abridged Escaflowne because there's really nothing much for me to care about in Escaflowne in the first place, but from beginning to end, yeah, I suppose you're right.

Princess Tutu, episodes 6 and 7. We're back to shrug city, folks. It's just not quite there for me in terms of characters and how it's trying to tell its story. In a vacuum, it probably would've earned...maybe a 6/10 from me - it did not have the things that I require for something to be "good" to me, but it did do enough right to be more interesting and visually enjoyable than most all the other dreck. As it is, it's feeling more like a 3/10...I might be more charitable later when I start comparing it to the Rebuild films, although their situations are not totally dissimilar for me, really. Characters, plot, and themes were all neatly gathered up and dumped into the nearest garbage bin. At least Escaflowne didn't literally give me headaches because of its horrific animation, unlike Rebuild and its stupendously bad action scenes...but on the other hand, I think there were more parts in the Rebuild films that were good, even if it was conversely drowned out by even more that was terrible. Haven't seen The Seven Samurai, and I get zero feeling for what you mean by looking at a bunch of random screenshots of it, .

Man, that's my thing, I can't believe I didn't think of it, . Yeah, it's not exactly bad in a vacuum...but it is pretty bad as Escaflowne. As you said, who the hell is this made for? Certainly not fans of the original show, and people who didn't like the show might enjoy this...but if they didn't like the show, they probably wouldn't want to check this out anyways - even if they did, they're still not going to want to go back and watch the show. So what's the point? I heard someone describe it as a "gaidan" (alternative/side story) film in the vein of (coincidentally) The End of Evangelion, because apparently those kinds of films were popular around that time period. So not exactly a retelling nor a continuation - only thing is, The End of Evangelion was...um, you know, a little more true to NGE than Escaflowne was to TVoE (and also, while The End of Evangelion doesn't continue from the end of the show, it does at least serve as a direct ending to the show as an alternative to episodes 25 and 26). The Hitomi/Merle scenes (and there weren't very many) were about the only part of the movie that I liked. The art style was pretty out there - lots of influences, and I can see what you mean by saying it looked a little Perfect Blue-ish. I'd be willing to forgive it if the movie was better...but instead, it just becomes part of a long laundry list of Picard facepalm-worthy inexplicabilities in the decision-making for this film. Ergh.

Princess Tutu, episode 5. It was the best one so far! Not sure if I'm getting more into it or if it just happened to be more of what I wanted out of this show.