Bartimaeus

The English subtitles translated it as "jerk", even though it is the word for idiot. I suppose "jerk" is sometimes more accurate than "idiot", just as sometimes "dummy" is more accurate as well, depending on tone and context. Very much looked like he became Major Slappo for it as well. Yeah, so rug ball does not look like a game I want to play. I have literally zero recollection of that scene, and I saw Blue Velvet only a few years ago. Then again, I didn't like it, so I suppose it got ejected from my brain as such things tend to do. Black Rose arc was pretty bad, but I didn't think any of the story arcs were really any good - way too much repetition and it was borderline impossible to care or be interested in what was happening in the story itself. A number of good individual episodes and moments, mind you, but the main story was decidedly not for me.

Episode 4 of Princess Tutu: On a side-note, I think I would recommend against Princess Tutu for KP, at least based on what I've seen so far. It's actually really difficult for me to envision him not being mostly bored with it. It's very slow and nothing much happens outside of characters just talking for 90% of the episodes, it has your traditional magical girl "ok time to wrap up the episode" mechanic, and the general type of "crazy" that it has is really more of the "events are weirdly inexplicable and hard to comprehend the meaning of" Utena variety than of the "events are genuinely difficult to predict" Lynch type that KP seems to prefer. This show is not hard to predict (all the episodes I've seen have pretty steadily followed a formula!), and to my knowledge, KP tends to hate predictable formulas. "Difficult to understand" is a very different matter from "difficult to predict": you don't need to understand why things are the way they are to know where they're going, after all.

Up to episode 16 of Escaflowne now. One: holy story dump, Batman! Two: gosh dang, it is so difficult to not watch the next episode. Three: man, is there really only ten episodes left? I'll get back to your post once I've seen 17; okay, now I've seen 17. I only have one question...

I just noticed this emote was a cat - I previously thought it was The Scream with horns. Thank you, Shouji Kawamori, for creating and then leaving the project, and thank you, Akane Kazuki, for shoujo-fying it - very cool. If there could be, like, other shonen series that do that, I would be a whole lot more receptive to the idea of shonen, that's for sure. One negative thing I've heard about the show is that it was originally intended to be like ten episodes longer, so it may get suddenly wrapped up or abruptly end. Still won't take away from it being very good show for most of its run, though. It's a little difficult to believe there isn't at least a little Evangelion influence, though... It did, and ultimately, it wasn't that important, just...felt weird next to all of the pretty grounded storytelling and world-building the series has done outside of that moment. It is pretty ridiculous. I think episode 2 is still the only episode where I didn't want to immediately watch the next one, which is...uh, how watching episodes 3-8 all at once happened, . Difficult not to be okay with the cheap option when it results in a better show, .

Holy crap, no kidding. The moment I saw the skies, I was like "welp, this is hopeless"...and then they also had ground forces as well. Freid doesn't look like a very large kingdom...if this doesn't end either diplomatically (i.e. surrender) or a complete slaughter, it won't make any sense. That said...I'm going to now watch episode 13. Well, I see you also saw the obvious Evangelion/Shinji comparisons that I did, . I feel like we reached the happy medium for his character a handful of episodes ago, yet we may still be falling...

it was the worst three hours of not just my life, but also the person that I watched it with's life ok not really but it was pretty close Princess Tutu: I don't think I'll have nearly as positive feelings towards it as you did, considering my current state of soft ambivalence towards it, but I'm hoping I'll eventually be won over at least a little. It's currently a very weird state of near perfect neutrality, which isn't really something I experience basically ever. Escaflowne: The CD being at the market was definitely weird, but could be used for multiple thematic purposes, I guess. Have to wait and see, .

No further progress - I am a fickle god. I did watch another episode of Princess Tutu, though. I still don't have concrete feelings about it...hopefully I will by the end of the first 13 episodes. As for Dilandau, stuff I have at least tried that I might recognize her from: major Ranma 1/2 character (Nabiki Tendo), the protagonist of Starship Girl Yamamoto Yohko, and the protagonist of Kiki's Delivery Service. She's also apparently Nataku and Kasumizuki from Tsubasa Reservoir Chronicles, whomever they are. And yes, I am glad that the show doesn't do the whole DBZ or Naruto or Yu Yu Hakusho or other shonen thing with pointlessly wasting our time with silly non-essential and time-wasty fighting. @KP wants Blue Velvet Yeah, I am very particular about the kind of surrealism that I like. Well, I am very particular about the [everything] that I like, but yes. I have a pretty ridiculous list of shows that I am supposed to watch as it is, anyways, so I don't really need to use time on something that almost definitely did not seem to be for me. (e): Okay, I lied, I've watched up to 10 now.

I once watched the French film "Jeanne Dielman, 23, quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles", which was nearly three and a half hours long and yet whose plot could be fully described in but a handful of sentences because it was 95% performing mundane tasks and routine (albeit beautifully shot!), while the other 5% could perhaps be considered to be part of some kind of narrative. It was an oddly enjoyable film, but I don't think it would fly for most audiences. Pandora's Box was a pretty normal film in comparison to that, but it was also enjoyable enough...though perhaps not without a little bit of cheating. I don't have as much appreciation for the "great works" as film aficionados do - culturally significant they may have been, if I can't really find them significant or at least enjoyable now myself, I'm not going to twist myself into knots trying to change that.

I got about twenty minutes into Sean Baker's Red Rocket (2021), who also made one of my favorite movies of all time, The Florida Project...but I started getting really skeeved out with it and didn't really want to watch it anymore. I had skipped RLM's video about it because I was looking forward to it, but I now just decided to watch RLM's video about it...and yeah, I guess I now understand why I was getting so uncomfortable with it, even though nothing much had materially happened yet. Looks like a brilliant movie, but it was probably a good decision for me not to finish it. Gross, stressful misery has its limits for me.

I still don't know what the big deal is. Although... Well, okay, that is pretty screwed up, but it's hardly reflected in anime, considering ridiculously-colored hair has been around in anime since...basically forever, . Heck, maybe that's exactly why insane hair colors are so common - artist expression defying cultural norms. Considering that I disliked both Eraserhead and Blue Velvet, I think that means no for me as well. That and you think I wouldn't like it anyways...and the fact that I already tried it and didn't care for it. I had a big "hoo boy" reaction to that guy when he appeared. Then his snake got brutally decapitated and he fell off a ledge and appeared to have died from hitting his head on a small rock. With that wacky character design, thought for sure he was gonna be around for a few episodes, not a few minutes, but okay, fine by me, .

The evidence speaks for itself, Prime Minister. At least you're doing your country proud!

I've heard some not so great things about bosses being pretty wack...between ridiculous attack wind-ups and combos that are even worse than DS3's, and some boss encounter design borderline requiring you to get help. Which I hate, because boss AI is very clearly never equipped to deal with changing aggro mid-fight. Only game I used summons was DS2, and only because I was hate-playing that cruddy game. Also, a friend sent me this a few days ago.

i know this was from a dream sequence, but it still sent me to the moon

I really felt like DeS and DS1 were the ideal length. Certainly long enough to be a grand adventure, but not so long that I get halfway through the game before I'm completely exhausted and desperately want it to be over like I did with DS3 and its DLC. Whenever/if I play Elden Ring, I can't see the size of the game feeling good to me.

I noticed his mentor thanking Hitomi for saving him without her having ever said anything to him, which would imply Van talked her up in private at least, . On a side-note, I'm refusing to consider this to be isekai until completely proven otherwise. Just because the Gaea is an inexplicably existing planet in the shadow of the moon or whatever (all of which is horribly out of scale in the same way it is in Outer Wilds) doesn't mean this is an isekai anime, okay? Yeah, animals learning weird behaviors from not having their parents around or other unfortunate circumstances can be an experience - having had two rescue dogs, a rescue cat, and finally a cat that was taken away from her mother within like the first few days of her life (this is the last one still around, and no, that was certainly not my decision!) has been proof enough of that.

The poster actually appears in the movie itself: Pandora's Box (1929). German silent films are sort of like delving into an alien culture that inexplicably decided to take up film-making. I mean, that might be all silent films, but I've only seen two, and they were both German, so obviously I can only generalize about the German ones. Anyways, from what I could tell, the gist of the movie is that women, especially those of a certain variety, are the root of all evil in the world. What particular variety of women would that be? Well...I'll let you, the viewer that did not watch the film, guess.

"Merle" is indeed pronounced "Earl" with an M in both of the English dubs, which I had to hear. I've otherwise been listening to the Japanese dub. Also, did this general dude really just say...that even if the dragon were to rip off the prince's [redacted], he wouldn't run away? Didn't think I'd ever hear something like that in a shoujo(?), that's for sure, . Although, I guess by the time I saw about the third or fourth guy bleed out of his eyes when the demons attacked, I probably should've realized that it would be difficult to qualify this show as simply being a "shoujo". Poor dude was crowned king and literally minutes later, his entire city was destroyed - rough first day of his reign, I'd say. Catgirl was okay in the first episode, which is good enough for now...there's room to grow, certainly. Indeed, the second episode as a whole wasn't as much fun as the first, but it was still solid enough, and that's fine. Guess I'm watching Escaflowne. The thing about action is that...you need something more than just itself to entice me with it. Whether it's our characters learning to work together, one of the characters involved being emotionally motivated to fight for a good reason, or the fight being actually plot-important to some degree beyond just rote "fight happens here because the script says it does"...you know, it just has to be something. I will even accept action if just the way it looks is cool, because yeah, looking cool is a form of mental engagement...of course, what kind of action looks cool to me is evidently very different from what looks cool to other people, particularly because I especially value the weight of action, which is very difficult to capture. Anyways, if you can hit at least one or preferably multiple areas of properly framing and motivating action, action will usually sit pretty good in my eyes - something like Asuka's fight with the Mass Production Evas hits pretty much every single box I can even vaguely imagine, which is probably why that sequence literally brings tears to my eyes. I'll try not to make comparisons to Evangelion over the course of the show, . My old lady cat is probably in the final stages of her life, and up until recently, she's always been kind of the opposite of that. Standoffish, flighty from any kind of movement or contact, and very solitary. Now in her old age, she's suddenly become super clingy, she constantly wants to lay on and be pet by people, and she whines a ton for no particular reason when used to not ever. Yes, I've been feeling the "HEY I'M HERE TOO" factor of the cat owner life lately, .

Nanami is probably the most disturbed character in Revolutionary Girl (and that's saying something, because there are a whole lot of very disturbed people in that show), with a whole "I will literally drown kittens to monopolize my brother's love" complex (no really, that happened)...and even she eventually took a step back before she went over the precipice and adjusted her behavior before it truly went critical. Thing is, the framing of the show makes it pretty clear she's a messed up fruit basket of a person from the very beginning, which is why the show remains watchable even with that going on. If, on the other hand, a show were to have such elements and not make it clear that it's super weird/gross/wrong, well...that'd be a much more difficult sell, that's for sure.

Escaflowne, episode 1. The aesthetic of this show is a bit strange - feels very in between eras to me. Parts of it look almost Evangelion-esque, but others...not so much. Some weird combination of the early 2000s/very late 90s and Utena that confuses my brain. The most recent remastered BDs are quite fine looking in terms of detail, and I went to go check Amazon for a comparison, since I'm pretty sure majestic mentioned that he started watching it on Amazon, but it's not available here in the states on Amazon. The dragon was one of the more odd looking things I've seen crawl out of an anime - not that it looked bad, not at all, but more like a different team of animators animated it in its own distinct style from the rest of the show. Outside of the aesthetic, the animation is also fairly impressive...well, suffice to say, I certainly can't really complain about how the show looks. The music also works better than I expected given that I listened to that soundtrack of it when we were previously talking about the music. Well, except for the outro music, . I'll take Utena's "Truth", Evangelion's "Fly Me to the Moon", or literally any of Sailor Moon's outros compared to that, thanks. But enough about all that - how's the actual show? Well, the same moron that recommended Lady Asuka also recommended this, so you know, it went about as expected. Wait...no, it seems like somebody got something mixed up here, because that was a pretty great first episode in most every respect I can think of. I had to go back and check to see who exactly recommended this to me (context for people that aren't majestic: I went and asked some people who I thought might have good ideas on pre-2000s shoujo recommendations in the context of finishing Cardcaptor, and Escaflowne was one of them along with a pile of other stuff, hence why it was something we were vaguely aware of before majestic actually tried it), and it turns out, I made an error. The person that recommended Escaflowne was a different person entirely - they recommended just Escaflowne, Sailor Moon, Ojamajo Doremi, Kamikaze Kaitou Jeanne, and Gokinjo Monogatari. They overlooked that I had already said I'd watched Sailor Moon, but I'll forgive them for seemingly getting at least one of their other recommendations right. Also, I'm pretty curious to see what my impression of the catgirl will be - the initial look at her in the intro, where she appears for just a moment, shows her solemnly contemplating the stars from the window of a room, and okay, wow, I'm already on board with the catgirl because of that little piece of framing. Guess we'll see when she appears proper.

Mai, episode 32. This is the "final" episode, so to speak - there are technically six episodes left, but they are not, as of yet, subbed...however, it seems as though the latest episode released somewhat recently, so I don't see any reason to expect that it won't be finished. On the other hand, it might be a year based on the current rate of progress, so I guess I'll just have to wait a bit. Episode 32 was an interesting one to end on, as it was about an unfortunate misunderstanding leading to Mai accidentally getting seen nude by her...older brother figure/best friend/semi-crush (it's complicated because she's both Mai, a twelve year old girl, and Emi, a sixteen year old girl...and he's close to both of them but in different ways). The audience doesn't see anything, and it's certainly not for laughs, because it takes the entire episode for Mai to forgive the poor boy, and it really was not his fault whatsoever that it happened in the first place. It was kind of interesting as a counterpoint to shows like Magic User's Club where embarrassing nudity or other ecchi moments would just be ignored or forgotten almost immediately after they happen, because the entirety of this episode was taken up with him trying to make it up to her, her struggling to get over the embarrassment, and really just how things could get back to normal after something like that happening. It was especially confusing for him because he doesn't know that Mai and Emi are the same person, and he gets the cold shoulder from both of them without a clear way to appease either, . Overall, it was a good but not great shoujo show. There were a few episodes that were great, but there were also a few episodes that were somewhat more mediocre, but mostly the show was just...good. Better than Eriko, but not as good as Miyu by my estimation. And now, I have to decide whether to one, try Escaflowne; two, continue Ririka; three, start Serial Experiments Lain (which I've been meaning to get back to for a while now); or four, watch Hideaki Anno's crazy looking shoujo. I suppose I should probably try Escaflowne first, seeing as majestic is currently watching it...

That's what I don't like the thought of either, especially because it doesn't really seem particularly likely that the EU will let them in given the complications of letting them join, although I could be wrong. I'm not really sure what the ideal outcome here is - well, besides Ukraine just straight up magically winning and throwing Russia out of its territory and Russia inexplicably not escalating any further.

Did you say...Big the Big? Somehow, he doesn't look as big as his name would imply.

Brandolini's Law: The DailyMail is tabloid and has a stupendously terrible track record - it is no surprise nobody else wants to even read it, much less try to determine whether the particular article's contents have any connection to reality. Fool me once, shame on you...and so on.

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.