Bartimaeus

Well, I definitely did not tell majestic to watch this so I would not have to because I had a feeling I would not like it no matter how intrigued I was by the art style. That was definitely not me. I was not involved here. I was just sitting over here innocently watching random 90s trash, so I certainly cannot be blamed for this. It wasn't me.

About four episodes of...uh, Akazukin Chacha? Red Riding Hood Chacha is apparently its English name. Marin the mermaid is a bit of hoot, though - but even so, I do not plan on watching any more. One episode of something called Nurse Angel Ririka SOS. Uh... Four episodes of Magical Star Emi. It's a veritable magical girl extravaganza, folks...and by "folks", I mean @majestic, because I know he's the only one that cares even slightly about this silliness.

Bandcamp is bought by Epic Games Store.

Madhouse's The Diary of Anne Frank (1995). Believe it or not, it's...The Diary of Anne Frank. It wouldn't be a bad way to learn the material by any means, but if you've already read the book and seen another film of it like I have, it's...not the most interesting - just a solid and appropriate enough cover of it. The backgrounds, lighting, and general style are great looking for this kind of work - dark, dingy, and detailed. Sometimes doesn't even really look that much like anime in the traditional sense, actually. But...The Diary of Anne Frank it still is. See? Literally the diary of Anne Frank. ...Yep, spoiler alert: it's the Diary of Anne Frank, alright. (e): I'm determined to finish everything Madhouse I was ever even slightly interested in: Mermaid's Scar, a 45-minute single episode OVA. Don't watch it - it's not terrible, but it's just not very good either...kind of felt like a bad Miyu episode. Gist of the story was that eating the flesh of a mermaid either gives you a kind of immortality...or turns you into a monster, and there's not really any clear reason as to which will happen (or why either one happens to begin with). Who the hell cares?

Toki no Tabibito: Time Stranger (1986). The first fifteen minutes: some 80s Japanese teens get their bus hijacked by some time traveller on the run from the future and accidentally end up in World War II while it's being firebombed and nearly get executed by jingoistic Japanese soldiers that think they're weird and possibly spies. Their time machine, um, unfortunately only goes backwards, so they're pretty much completely screwed and can only keep going more and more back in time. This is one wacky Magic School Bus episode. Madhouse animated, so it looks pretty good by my estimation, although sadly not preserved in HD. The good thing about bookmarking a million things is that I have no idea what the hell to expect when I try to watch them like a year later because I don't remember the first thing about them. Anyways, that was a pretty wacked out but enjoyable film - recommended if you want to watch...I don't even know, man. Time travel, world wars, alien abductions, terminators...what more could you want? Uh... Ethically, any kind of positive attention is better than...well, what's happened historically. Entertainment value is a different matter, though...

Lmao, their faces are making a vicious mockery of the scene just by themselves. I like to use the "thanks" emoticon sarcastically on a rare occasion - guess this is kind of what I'm envisioning when I do so, . JoJo: Yeah, it doesn't take much...and as I and majestic have said, Sailor Moon in the 90s shockingly still does it better than the vast majority of current Western crap, and Sailor Moon doesn't even do it that well - the standard is just so abysmally low that it looks pretty good in comparison to what we've seen elsewhere, particularly with respect to when it was released. Present them in a variety of ways with different kinds of personalities and traits and appearances (and not just the same annoying tropey garbage over and over) just like you would any other character. Professional, outrageous, selfless, narcissistic, quiet, over-expressive, loving, cold, comedic, serious, flamboyant, understated, rational, impulsive...do anything and everything as is appropriate to make interesting, fun, and varied characters. Not all behaviorisms or personality traits show up in every situation, either - Pearl is super omega mondo gay, but you definitely do not know that right off the bat because Steven Universe wasn't written by a bunch of hack frauds trying to show how woke they are; and she has plenty of both traditionally motherly as well as warrior-like traits, and those manifest themselves very differently depending upon the occasion. Normalize and treat them like real characters, and more people will like instead of being annoyed by them. Excerpt from the article: If actual non-binary folks dislike the shameful displays in Western media e.g. as above, I think they really need to start being very vocal about it if they want it to change, because right now, the most vocal voices against it are people that despise the non-binary, and that sucks. Problem is, it seems like a lot of pro-tolerance Western folks love this kind of pathetic virtue signalling, no matter how badly it comes across to anyone with a lick of sense or taste.

Well, that's the art of it, isn't it? If your themes and social commentary are more important than characters, structure, plot, or any kind of logical sense, I'm not likely to think too well of it.

I'd be curious to know whether military leadership of NATO and China agree with that... I've seen the 1984 film - liked "When the Wind Blows" more, .

That seems like a pretty slick mountain road to be going down. Nobody's gone that far before, and probably for good reason - what starts as a "limited tactical nuclear strike" will almost certainly demand an immediate response that demands an immediate response that demands... (e): Ninja-ed by @Zoraptor.

Yeah, I hate it when that happens. I like low-key character-driven stuff - ham-fisted meta social commentary and artificially inflated stakes can both be pretty annoying when they transform the direction of a show.

Is that Anne with an E you're talking about? Feel like I heard that the first season was pretty good, but subsequent ones were kind of...not so good. Although now that I'm thinking about it, I feel like I heard that from the Obsidian forums...and possibly literally you?

I've watched a few episodes of Takahata's Anne of Green Gables - it was basically the same as Heidi for me. Nice and enjoyable enough to casually watch, but not particularly the most interesting, which kind of just makes me want to watch something else...particularly knowing that it's like 40 episodes or something long. That kind of content works better at movie-length for me.

Gauche the Cellist (1982). Man can't play a danged cello, and it's dragging the whole band down. I expected this to be really drab and boring based off the premise (this is really not something I'd ever think I'd enjoy), but this opening scene sold me: https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/s/284rqhnriqbw98z/mpc-hc64_Y0VxznSPgD.mp4 Doesn't this face just say it all? Odd but quite enjoyable little film. Helps if you like classical music...and can appreciate the animation. (e): Director: Isao Takahata. Well, I guess that explains that - that guy has done a remarkably awful job of making movies that I dislike. He should really get with the program of making junk that I hate like everything else!

Ugh, I made the same mistake by playing the entire series on insanity, and that no doubt played into how incredibly bored I was of the combat by even the second game - it's tediously difficult with how quickly you can eat it. If I were to ever even consider replaying them, it would either be on normal or even easy, and I wouldn't really even think twice about it, especially because I'd no doubt want to be Cheat Engine-ing that sucker up to 2-3x speed for much of the game. Don't want to die to stupid crap and replay any of the combat, that's for sure. But I don't really see myself ever trying to replay them - shooters just aren't really my thing anymore for obvious reasons and the games are so long and they probably haven't aged very well... I like (and believe in*) D&D as a general setting, even if it's the very overplayed Forgotten Realms, so that's something it immediately has over Dragon Age, where I simply could not care less about anything to do with the setting or world. I don't really know why they went with such a by-the-numbers set of party members, though...and the whole main plot was pretty boring - a literally mindless corrupted guardian is passively destroying the world, oh how terribly exciting. However, I would wager that if you disliked just almost everything about the original game, you prooobably wouldn't love MotB either. *Believing in a non-Earth world/setting is something that is difficult for me to do regardless of whether it's books, games, or film - does a lot to help sell a sense of investment. I am generally way more amenable to fantasy/sci-fi that has at least a tenuous connection to Earth/the real universe than ones that don't, so it's notable when there's an exception. I hate party AI, so having to program my party to not make the combat the worst pile of garbage in the world because the controls and such are so gosh-awful is extremely off-putting to me. Even outside of that starting dungeon, a lot of stuff in MotB was immune to sneak attacks. Lots of elementals (immune), undead (immune), machinery (immune), and spirits (immune).

He really is the worst. I actually just had a false memory right now where I thought I remembered the player decapitating him close to the end of the game, but I just looked it up and it's an incredibly lame omnitool stab instead. Figures my brain would make up a much more vicious and brutal end for him than he actually got. Any time games try to have "deep" "meaningful" "choices" like that (yes, I am putting air quotes around each word individually), that's pretty much always how it turns out, especially if it's not right at the end of a game/series (which is where the least amount of branched off/exclusive content would be necessary for actually significantly different outcomes), so I wasn't even the slightest bit surprised that that happened - it's the nature of AAA game development with how expensive everything is to make that they don't want to spend more than the minimum amount of development time on something that only a minority of players will see.

Yeah, it was a very simple plot, but it wasn't pulled off too badly and I liked the more lower-stakes nature of it compared to the first and especially the third game...combined with the greater quantity AND quality character stuff, yeah, it worked well. Dragon Age: Origins, on the other hand, I got halfway through when I suddenly realized I despised pretty much everything about it. I hated all the characters, I did not care at all about the main plot or the world, and the 3D isometric tactical combat made me want to die - just as NWN2 before it did. Only difference was that I at least mildly liked most of the other elements of NWN2, and I actually really quite liked Mask of the Betrayer. I turned the game off and uninstalled it, and never shall I return.

Poor Chakotay - the most boring and lame character possible compounded by writers who clearly did not give a crap about said character. Didn't know they tried to do that, though.

Seriously can't even begin to imagine what B'Elana saw in that moron - guess it was her Klingon side telling her to fall for the closest angsty human version of a Klingon substitute possible.

...Are you saying this villain caused a slave girl to violently explode in a bloody cloud of gore merely as a demonstration? Also, that ending kind of came out of nowhere, or so it seems to me. Although I haven't actually heard him talk or anything, it sure seems like he's basically an overgrown kid at times, . NGE: I'd seen the King of the Hill one before and thought it was great, but the Arthur one is pretty good too.

There's also the Gell-Mann amnesia effect to consider: "You open the newspaper to an article on some subject you know well. You read the article and see the journalist has absolutely no understanding of either the facts or the issues. Often, the article is so wrong it actually presents the story backward—reversing cause and effect. I call these the "wet streets cause rain" stories. Paper's full of them. In any case, you read with exasperation or amusement the multiple errors in a story, and then turn the page to national or international affairs, and read as if the rest of the newspaper was somehow more accurate about Palestine than the baloney you just read. You turn the page, and forget what you know."

Isn't that the thing where, if one were to ever strike Earth, would directly destroy a good amount of life on Earth...and indirectly finish off the rest? Seems like an inappropriate usage of it to use it so willy-nilly...I guess that's the least of that show's crimes, though.

I feel like this is an oxymoron. Any halfway decent active community on that trash bin, outside of older niche interests perhaps, unfortunately seem to always eventually attract the childish simpletons that spam the same awful memes and caveman thoughts ad nauseam. I'm to the point where I can't even use it for sports because of how repetitively obnoxious it's all become...much less actual serious matters.

See, this is stuff I didn't really want to think about, because once you do, you start thinking other stuff like...well, wait, Eriol said he's the reincarnated version of Clow...which means Clow really did pass away. And if Clow really did pass away, why does his reincarnated version have all of his past memories and magical abilities...and so specifically Eriol really is like 13 years old, but doesn't act like it? Why? None of it really makes sense. In the original show, it doesn't feel that important, especially because the show more or less ends right as you discover some of this information, but that's not the case here. And when you're not enjoying something, your mind has a tendency to start over-analyzing the details because it doesn't have much else to focus on, so that's a bit of a double whammy... Okay, so it is essentially some sort of ridiculous plot to make her stronger by Eriol and Xiaolang (except that I guess she was "getting stronger" already without their help...the ridiculous plot by them remains, and also, didn't she literally say she hadn't had to use he powers in a long while in that episode - how do they know she's getting stronger, and why would she be getting stronger if she isn't ever even using her powers?), and I more or less guessed it in literally the first episode. They maybe shouldn't have telegraphed that quite so heavily. Don't think so, not unless it was at the beginning of the first episode. Kero had some sort of short re-cap at the beginning of episode 1, but he only got like halfway through it before saying "screw it" and just started the episode, . To be honest, this...doesn't really feel like it's worth watching - I think I'd rather watch Princess Tutu instead, .

Because nobody played it, as Wormerine said, . Origin-only + bad launch if you happened to blindly put your faith into EA and pre-order it + poor reviews made it so basically nobody I know that played the original trilogy even bothered to check this one out. I haven't watched much PreRecorded, but I'm pretty sure I have watched this one. ...Yep, 20 minutes of sitting in silence, that's the one, .

Can't say I blame you for that approach - Ashley did deserve to die, and I hope she burns in hell. ...Okay, maybe she didn't quite rise to the level of that particular Samuel L. Jackson rant, but I sure didn't feel the least bit bad about sending her to her clearly telegraphed death. I was...the Infiltrator in the first game, and boy, did that stink between not having disables and also because of the insane scope sway; switched to a Sentinel in the second game. Turns out, biotics are more fun and useful than whatever the hell I was trying to do before.