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Bartimaeus

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Everything posted by Bartimaeus

  1. Bartimaeus
    Starting back in like 2011, I went through a period of about five years where I had the flu every year. Unusual for me, since I hardly ever got sick before then - a couple of colds and I think two bouts of flu my entire childhood, which isn't too bad. Now over the last 5 years, I've only had like one fairly minor cold the entire time (extra surprising to believe the last two years, what with the constant exposure to my nieces, who have been sick with colds about three times, the flu once, and something flu-like recently that didn't test positive as covid but also mysteriously didn't test as positive for anything else either). Pretty happy to take that. Well, as we all know, none our actions affect anyone else, so he's well within his rights to do as he pleases.
  2. Bartimaeus
    ...Snow Gorilla, or Snow Guerrilla? I feel like the latter would make more sense...but then again, this is the 80s. First KP's eye, now yours, who's next?
  3. Bartimaeus
    "The dumb girls make the dumb laugh" was the start and end of my analysis of the show. Yeah, we're pretty much on the same level of depth of thought here, .
  4. Bartimaeus
    Yep: Speaking of samurai, I have been taking a short detour from anime in favor of finishing up the last two seasons of Samurai Jack. Though, my neck imploded this morning, so I'm probably not really much doing anything at all for the next couple of days until it heals at least a little.
  5. Bartimaeus
    That was actually already on my watch list - I saw the first episode a while back and surprisingly thought it was pretty decent and was going to watch more at some point. I don't have an anime folder - favorite shows go into the same "Television" folder that every other normal show goes into. So I guess I can't ever threaten to delete it in an off-hand fashion, .
  6. Bartimaeus
  7. Bartimaeus
    Hah, wow, I literally had Alien in mind when I was writing my previous post, because Alien is...exactly what I wrote there - dark/atmospheric/moody/oppressive sci-fi, aka my jam. Mind you, they're pretty different kinds of films by most measures, but they give a similar kind of feeling. I was pretty blown away by it the second time I watched it. I liked it on the first watch, but the second watch was way more powerful - that sometimes happens to me, and actually, that was true of Kon's Millennium Actress for me as well (which turned from a film that I 'liked' into easily one of my all-time favorites on a second viewing). I'll re-watch Perfect Blue, Tokyo Godfathers, and maybe Paprika someday as well - maybe they'll be better for me on a second watch as well.
  8. Bartimaeus
    Oh boy, no wonder you're a Cowboys fan then...and also, you definitely had it best early on - been rapidly switching between regular season incompetence and post-season gut-punches since then, . Can't say you ain't been loyal... As for myself, I think I'll be content with basketball for the time being - at least nobody on the Bucks gives me a headache whenever I think about them.
  9. Bartimaeus
    Eh...it's probably not very easy to search for just "memories" in the off-topic section, to be fair - easier for me when I can make it search for just my own posts because I knew I mentioned it a few times, . Actually, I pretty much refuse to ever search for anything unless I know whose post I'm searching for - the search results are way too chaotic if you don't enter a post author. Kon's Tokyo Godfathers, Perfect Blue, and Millennium Actress are even better than his Magnetic Rose, IMO...but I still love Magnetic Rose - dark and atmospheric/moody/oppressive sci-fi is really my ideal sci-fi.
  10. Bartimaeus
    Seeing as it's a Satoshi Kon film that I've more or less recommended a couple of different times in this thread series, why yes, I suppose I would rather like it! Yeah, it is really good, though it took me until the second watch to fully appreciate just how much - artwork, music, themes, animation, setting, atmosphere...it all came together ever so sweetly. I quite like the second part of Memories (Stink Bomb) as well - I imagine it'll be up your alley...maybe even more than Magnetic Rose?
  11. Bartimaeus
    I wasn't born into football - it's a relatively new thing for me (2013 season). Probably a lot easier for me to ignore it for a time than people that have been following it for decades. We'll see how I feel in September.
  12. Bartimaeus
    Too many painful playoff losses combined with too much stupid off the field crap has made me empathize even more with @ShadySands' point of view on the NFL, I think. More than anything, I'm just relieved that it's finished - don't have to worry about it any longer, it's done and over with. This season, I at least had the vestigial excitement from early on into the year to just barely keep me going, but I'm not going to have that next year, even if Rodgers were to return and keep playing at an MVP level - I just don't have it in me to be excited about this team anymore. I think I need a long, multi-year break from the NFL. Maybe by the time I want to come back, the Packers will be terrible and there'll be no point in caring at all anyways.
  13. Bartimaeus
    I'd prefer one out of the Bills/Bengals, but Rams are okay too...49ers are not great, and Chiefs and Buccaneers would suck. Talk about an egg-on-your-face ending, especially what with Aaron Rodgers having gone on another 30 minute crazy rant to ESPN a couple of days ago.
  14. Bartimaeus
    Lmao, end of an era in GB to go out like that, methinks.
  15. Bartimaeus
    Okay, maybe it's better for them to stay non-canon.
  16. Bartimaeus
    An ungoshly amount of filler battles that takes so long to get through. The BG series had hundreds of filler battles...but they usually only took literally maybe 30 to 60 seconds to get through. In PoE, they still take just about as much time and consideration as a "real" battle, and it's such a danged drag when it just keeps happening endlessly. You would really have to enjoy the core combat mechanics in order for that not to be an issue, and I just...don't.
  17. Bartimaeus
    Post-2000 anime was so incredibly off-putting and insulting to me for all the reasons you said and more that I wrote the entire medium off until the past couple of years. Style, framing, and direction all offended me to my very core in the popular animes so it felt very difficult to draw any other conclusion. There are certain to be exceptions here and there, but they're so buried under waves of stuff that isn't that it was impossible to find them without doing a research project. Personally, I've become more of a late 80s to late 90s guy (I'm finding 70s and early 80s to be consistently too weak on characterization and writing to be able to enjoy them, unfortunately), but otherwise, I'm about in the same boat as you - Samurai Champloo is currently the sole exception to my "no post-2000 anime can be good" rule, . Yeah, we've had some discussions on how fandoms pretty consistently suck. They tend to highlight the absolute worst parts of anything and everything - they make great shows and games that I personally love (like Undertale or Steven Universe or Sailor Moon or...) look and sound like complete garbage, and it's no different for majestic or probably anyone else here. ...Probably, . ...The author of Sailor Moon wrote a non-canon story about Sailor Moon? Alright.
  18. Bartimaeus
    Unrelated to the discussion: I finished the first season of One Punch Man. It was...uh, alright, I guess? It's kind of funny to contrast it to K-On, in the sense that One Punch Man isn't really a show that appeals to me at all but is okay-ish because it doesn't do anything particularly wrong and has a few things I like about it...and it's ridiculously easy to go straight through because there's basically nothing about it to mentally digest. I mean, really, I just kept hitting the next episode button and didn't feel like the show was ever asking anything of my brain except to occasionally read the subtitles during some of the dialog-y bits...and there were a lot of action bits that I didn't need to pay attention to at all to because it was obvious how all of them would be resolved and the show didn't really do anything to try to get me interested in them. In contrast, K-On is a show that on the surface does appeal to me a lot more, but it constantly demands my attention to watch and understand it, and it does a few things so clearly very wrongly which makes it frustrating...and so the show kind of just drains my energy whenever I watch it. I probably won't watch the second of One Punch Man - I feel like I got all I could get out of it. Meanwhile, I'll probably eventually try the second season of K-On in the hope that majestic isn't a hack fraud and that it is actually less inconsistent and frustrating compared to the first season. Thanks for the link, much more interesting and fair than I expected. Yep, and what I said absolutely applies to all people too. It's just not healthy for anyone...except Minako in Sailor Moon, because apparently it's canon that she and the other three will never be given the opportunity to have boyfriends due to being Sailor Guardians - they can do as they please.
  19. Bartimaeus
    I think Theoden and Eowyn were my favorite characters of the movie trilogy - I'm trying to think of anyone I like better than those two, and I'm coming up pretty blank. Odd that it'd be father and daughter NIECE out of a pretty large cast of characters, and not even one of the main characters - especially odd because neither of those characters appear in Fellowship of the Ring, which I think is easily the best film out of the three. Out of the main cast, my favorite characters were probably Merry, Pippin...and Gandalf? I'm not sure, but I do know Legolas is easily the worst out of everyone - his entire character is half saying really obvious or over-dramatic things and half cartoony comic relief and not much else, . I'm seeing a lot of "movie was beautiful but utterly daft, do not watch" and "masterpiece, you must watch"-type ratings for this one.
  20. Bartimaeus
    Planescape: Torment also has the benefit of taking place in an already established setting. A lot of the basics of the world don't need to be explained in-game because of that, plus you can play more heavily into the setting because it's already at least a little familiar to some degree for most of your likely players. Quite the opposite with PoE - brand new setting, new races and creatures, new rules, strange names and phrases, and just way too much of all of it. Planescape: Torment was able to engross me with its writing, but PoE wasn't - not even close. Unfortunate.
  21. Bartimaeus
    What ShadySands said in my case. Was very excited for another BG-esque isometric party-based game that was supposed to be a spiritual successor to BG2...BG2, after all, is one of my top ten favorite games of all time and I still enjoy it - and then I actually played it. They had tried to "improve" on so many different things over BG2 that it felt like they'd miss something critical: BG2 was fun...and PoE was not. I couldn't get into PoE's new setting, I couldn't get into the writing style, I couldn't get into the voice direction, and most importantly, the gameplay made me want to curl up and die because of how annoying and demanding every single battle was, no matter how minor. I didn't even consider buying the second game - not unless it had a completely different set of creative leads at the helm. But I do wish it did better, since people clearly loved the series and got something out of it that I didn't, and I obviously want the isometric CRPG genre to not be completely dead.
  22. Bartimaeus
    I thought I had absolutely nothing to contribute to the discussion as it all kind of falls outside of my domain, but majestic raised an issue I've had a thought on for many years: I really don't think there is much any difference in the way "jocks" and "nerds" (and the other groups that loosely fall into those two labels respectively) view people - women, people of different culture/race, ideology, whatever. Specifically in regards to women, if anything, I think the "nerds" might be even worse than the "jocks", because it seems like the nerds idealize, fantasize, and objectify in all sorts of manners the subjects of their affection which very often seems to create all sorts of really demeaning or even outright possessive views towards them...and never mind not ever being able to form normal boundaries and behaviors towards them. The jocks that "get the girls", on the other hand, at least actually have to try and manage their relationships with those girls to some degree, and that theoretically should help see women as real people...sometimes, eventually? It really depends on how far gone an individual is regardless of which side they happen to fall in - you definitely don't want to be on the extreme fringe either way you go. For this sort of thing (not limited to just the way men see women), interacting with others that aren't like you and being empathetic towards them is probably the best cure-all for just seeing everyone for what they are...normal people. You might still hate dealing with most of them, but you should at least realize that the majority of them are really not much different from each other regardless of which groups any given individual might fall in. In contrast, parasocial relationships, whether about real or fictional people, would not seem to ever really be healthy when taken to such an extreme, IMO.
  23. Bartimaeus
    Four and a half thousand year old board game uncovered and played. I have a fondness for board and card games, so it was a lot of fun to watch.
  24. Bartimaeus
    Have always hated giant swords...but at the very least, if you're going to have them and want me to treat it even sort of seriously, you're gonna have to make them appropriately weighty a la Asuka and the fake Spears of Longinus. Do that, and I'll probably mostly forgive it - fly around with and use them like they're the same thing as a normal sword (which should already be appropriately weighty as it is!), and my eyes are gonna roll into the back of my skull. Two more episodes of One Punch Man. It doesn't feel like entertainment made for me exactly, but I am being entertained well enough - it's decently fun. I have to assume that Mr. Satan will eventually meet his match, though, because it's been patently and immediately clear that nothing that's tried to attack him has been even remotely as strong as him. I do appreciate that he has no patience for silly long-winded shonen or villain speeches - his "apprentice" nearly gave him an aneurysm when he tried to give the whole "shonen origin story" schpiel, and "explain the gist of the story in 20 words or less" was an appropriate response, .
  25. Bartimaeus
    Good point in comparing it to superhero comics - further makes me think it's not really a Japanese thing, and its extreme and disproportionate representation in anime is more of a subculture thing...probably as a natural result of the limitations and also freedoms of the medium as per the explanations you mentioned. It also doesn't hurt that most of the subcultures (not limited to Japan!) where it appears in its most extreme are predominantly aimed at teenage boys, I'm sure - anime, comic books, video games... What does it say about the type of person you are if you dislike all of these things? Guess I didn't get the memo from old Freud...
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