Bartimaeus

Happy-Go-Lucky (2008). British film about a young woman who's a naturally carefree and positive person trying to live her life in the moment without thinking too hard about any of it...and unfortunately, how that can offend or mislead others. Very little of traditional dramatic importance happens in this film, and I think if you watch the first ten minutes and don't like the style or the main character which the film focuses so fixedly upon, you shouldn't keep watching, because it's more or less two hours of that. I think I tend to like these kinds of slow and seemingly pointless character dramas that contrarily have little to no drama, a collection of scenes from the lives of people you like or at least find interesting which form a loose but rather poignant narrative about the kind of lives we lead or at least could lead.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_people_granted_executive_clemency_by_Donald_Trump It's gonna be a few negative legacy points for Biden for sure, but it's small potatoes in the grand scheme of things, especially with regards to what's to come shortly.

Was about to reply to LadyCrimson about jalapenos on pizza being the best, but when I clicked on "Reply", this was already sitting in there as something I'd previously written like four or five days ago that I hadn't ended up posting but which the forum helpfully restored: "hCaptcha makes me want to become a terrorist." I'd tried to pay for a Christmas present with PayPal and got effectively temp-banned by them several times for failing their captcha too many times. I ended up searching how in the world I could possibly be failing their captchas over and over, and stuff said that if you do the hCaptcha captchas too quickly or too precisely, you'll automatically fail even if you get them right. You're apparently supposed to slowly move your mouse over each possible answer like you're a hundred years old before you select anything, which is what I ended up doing and PayPal finally let me pay. Get me off this stupid planet.

Esper Mami: Dancing Dolls in the Starlit Sky (1988). It's a movie to a series...which, like Azuki-chan, has also not been subtitled. Tsk, tsk. Anyways, it's about this girl named Mami who has...voodoo powers? I think she's supposed to be psychokinetic (hence "Esper" in the title), but the way it's shown when she's using it on people or objects makes it seem more like voodoo, especially because she's always making devil horns with her hands. Her bizarre teleportation power at least seems fairly benign. Anyways, it's clearly a shoujo-type film along the lines of Secret of Akko-chan or Chibi Maruko-chan: Mami helps local puppeteers entertain a large group of children when they run short of the staff needed to perform the show, a young girl whose mother recently died loses the precious doll that her mom gave her, Mami tries to go find it but discovers it was already destroyed at the local garbage dump, so then we tie it all together with the group of puppeteers that help put on a very special show just for the little girl to...basically help her realize that it's not the doll that's important, it's the memory of her mother and the other people still around her that she cares about that are important. It's cute and it's done pretty well. What felt like a complete episode of a show takes a sudden left turn when the puppeteers have their building partially bulldozed by some nasty real estate developers that apparently bought out the land from the guy they were renting from - everyone basically throws their hands up and goes "well, that was fun while it lasted, but we can't deal with this and have real lives we need to get back to, bye!"...except for the lady and the guy who are clearly very close to each other but were maybe too focused on their work to realize it. Some stuff and things happen, Mami uses a little of her psychic powers combined with her girly thoughtfulness to encourage them to not give up and things are - more or less - eventually made right. Now, I know nobody really much cares about this, but I say all of this because really, this movie could all have been a Cardcaptor Sakura episode or two, and yet, there's something that is very confusing to me. I went to Wikipedia to read more about the series, and...what is that? Shonen? Shonen? This is shonen? I'm sorry, what? Either this movie and/or the anime series it belongs to is very different from the manga or I must have lost my mind. Wait, wait, stop, hold on just a second...what was that last bit? "And who also poses nude for her own father"? Now, I'm no great linguist, but the way I read that line would seem to suggest that...Mami, the very same one from Esper Mami, the young girl in the movie that I just watched that is pictured above...poses nude for her father? Uh, why? Even if three's some kind of in-universe explanation for it that is innocent enough, why would that even be a thing? Dad makes his young teenaged daughter regularly pose nude for his paintings? Um, yuck? Oh, here's a comment I just read on the apparently botched Japanese DVD release of the main series: Oh, oookay. Well, you know what? As far as my brain is concerned, only the non-canonical movie exists, and it's officially a shoujo movie, and a fairly decent one at that, and I think that's just where we're going to have to leave it.

I am not transgender, and I don't personally know well anyone who is (or if I do, they have not informed me). My interactions with people who have made it immediately known that they are transgender have been consistently unpleasant and unwelcome, but it's not exclusive to them, that's always the case with those who immediately make whatever their identity is known to everyone and anyone right off the bat, no matter what it may be: an identity is never adequate substitute for personality. I don't really even believe in assigning meaning to "he", "she", or "they" beyond it being a useful tool of language to make clear as to whom is being referred to in conversation, and I have said as much to others in real life conversation, to people both ardently pro-transgenderism and vehemently against it, where a not untypical retort from the latter group is to mockingly refer to me as she/her, but again, as I really don't care, it's always quickly dropped because of how little it actually impacts reality in any meaningful way beyond confusing others when someone uses the wrong ones. The former group will usually just be happy if you're willing to try to use the right ones, which I do, because again, it really doesn't matter to me, it's just arbitrary connotations of language, which itself is made-up, so why not try to respect others if you can, especially when it seems to matter a great deal to them even if it doesn't to you? But the option in these games to switch from one to the other is always the absolute barest lip service, with zero content or mechanics designed behind it, it's just a simple flag that is checked to say "the player picked a male/female character, swap any said pronouns to the opposite option that we've already designed to account for (or a neutral/third option that they've defined)". That's it, it probably took all of half an hour to an hour for one person to implement, maybe a little more to integrate it into the character creation UI. Wow, so woke...get a grip.

I can quote Lexx's post and that doesn't work for me: it just will not let me. I've had it happen on my own posts, the whole box becomes non-responsive no matter how many times I refresh the page or re-open editing the post, it's like it's become one whole element unto itself. The only thing it will let me do is delete the entire thing.

Just skipping past the part of character creation that lets you change your pronouns or going into your game settings to disable the game from letting you change them is effectively the exact same thing (and I would find any suggestion of the contrary to be quite hilarious: I'd genuinely love to see someone explain how the game asking you about it on one page is to-o-otally different from being asked about it on another page), but if it makes the mouth-foaming troglodytes mad that they can't do the latter, I'm against including it as an option.

As someone not particularly familiar or up-to-date with ongoing modern web development, I actually did some searching a while back about it, and it turns out that posts are now natively written and rendered via HTML, i.e. it's not that we've been denied access to the old BBCode source mode, it's that it just doesn't exist at all anymore. The backend can try to parse and convert old bbcode tags and the like into HTML, of course, but it's basically just a one-way cheat and not particularly practical to reverse to and from on the fly. That being said, I've at least made basic HTML websites and pages before and have some passing familiarity with it, so I'd still like to have an HTML source mode so that I can fix crap when I really need to. Or at least try, because the only current option for when something really goes wrong with a post is that you just delete all of the broken parts and start over.

I'm officially on team red again, because I just bought a 7800 XT for $400. I figured that I'm going to need the 16 GB of VRAM in order to weather out the Trump administration, so I'd best get it now before prices go crazy. If it doesn't play Bloodborne, it's going straight into the nearest dumpster, I won't even return it. Though $400 is relatively 'cheap' for GPUs by today's standards, it is the most I've ever spent on a GPU even adjusted for inflation - it's just never been something I've spent all that much on, historically speaking*. And since the price-comparable nvidia offerings come with a much more paltry offering of VRAM, worse rasterization performance, and only offer 'better' AI upscaling and frame generation features that I wouldn't touch with a ten-foot pole anyways in return, there really wasn't that much reason to go with nvidia this time around...unless there are compatibility issues, which I will be checking thoroughly once again just like the last time I had an AMD card. That last AMD card (a Vega, I believe) was immediately launched into the sun, so let's hope this time goes a little better. *Even now, I still spent more on the CPU for my current build - at the time of purchase, anyways.

This week, page load times have gone back to being generally respectable, but I've been somewhat frequently getting errors that say "service unavailable" where the page won't load at all. I prefer either the paging loading quickly or giving an error after just a few seconds over it taking a minute just to not load, at least. What LadyCrimson describes above sounds more like how it was for me last week and the week before, though.

I have to imagine you'll like it a lot better than I did. There's a lot that can be forgiven and I genuinely wanted to be more generous towards it, but...um, I just couldn't, .

Experiencing something in a different time and place has always been one of my little musings of life: how would you feel about something (or even someone) if you experienced it right when and where you were supposed to? What might be some of your favorite things if they were given the perfect opportunity to impress themselves upon you? Alas.

The Primevals (2023). Filmed in 1994, but only released last year, was mentioned on RedLetterMedia, and my interest was piqued. Our characters and the story are...unfortunately dross, it's pretty much my least favorite kind of guy protagonist dude story, where our main character has an unhealthy obsession with something - yeti, for this particular movie - and is angry at a world that doesn't share his singular interest or irrational beliefs around them because he's a big dumb dip**** that can't let it go, and he ends up getting rewarded for it because surprise, it turns out that yeti are real, and that the garbage thesis he wrote in university (which was so bad that it actually caused him to fail and get kicked out of his program) about how yetis are totally real despite no evidence combined with his continued obsession on them makes him uniquely qualified to go investigate just how real they are! I genuinely loathe this kind of basis for characters being involved with a story, so the movie and I got off on the wrong foot immediately, and it didn't really get any better from there. Let's just say that while the stop-motion visual effects for the yeti are neat, the rest of the movie is kind of a dumb pile of crap, though I might be biased.

I never played the DLC in Bloodborne, didn't have a PS4 by the time the DLC came out. Looking forward to that...uh, kind of - playing those bosses for the first time on a no-level-up run should prove...interesting. On release, Shadow of Chernobyl had bizarre difficulty settings where choosing the lower difficulty settings made everything much harder because the majority of attacks by both the player and enemies would be "nulled" (i.e. not actually do any damage), while playing on the hardest difficulty would make them count. This sounds fair in theory (albeit making for arguably bad gameplay where people are just blasting each other in the face from point blank range and yet nothing would happen), but I think most who experienced it would say that it ended up favoring the AI because the player only has one gun that they can fire at any time while you can be fighting many AI characters/creatures, which means that if you're in a big fight with multiple enemies that you're trying to take down before you get outflanked and riddled with bullets from multiple angles, shooting one guy in the head ten times and having none of them count while everyone else continues to close in on and shoot you is disproportionately disadvantageous to the player. Hopefully they didn't do that again.

I haven't had much time to play, but I've been committing to an SL4 (lowest level you can be via choosing Waste of Skin as your class) run, and as far as second bosses go, I gotta say that Father Gascoigne is no Taurus Demon, he was legitimately pretty difficult. Out of DS1, DS3, and DeS (all of which I've beaten without levelling up, though I didn't do the DLC bosses in DS3 whereas I did for DS1), I think Bloodborne could turn out to be the toughest - though in fairness, I'd say that DeS was really not that difficult at level 1, Dark Souls 1 was mostly pretty difficult outside of a few particularly challenging spots and bosses, and DS3 was generally very to super difficult, so it really only has DS3 to compare against. No love for DS2, that game is straight poopy and I'll never play it again.

Told a friend that if the game wasn't crashing every 30 seconds, HoC's launch is still better than SHoC's. They told me they couldn't even get past pre-compiling shaders, the game kept crashing, so okay, maybe it is worse than SHoC's.

The old animated series from the 1970s, presumably, which I just remembered I've actually seen a few episodes of.

what the hell did we re-elect trump for if he isn't IMMEDIATELY DEPORTING these ILLEGAL GUESTS they're eating the posts and edits!

I obviously adore Cardcaptor Sakura, that hasn't changed with re-watching it...but I did try to take a little more of a critical eye this time around, and it was interesting to compare against my viewing of Sailor Moon, which was, after all, my very first anime show. For both of them being magical girl shows with nominally many of the same qualities, they have very different strengths...and very different weaknesses. It'll be interesting to re-visit Sailor Moon once the outstanding issues I have with the current offerings resolve themselves, which could unfortunately still be years away at this point. I think Cardcaptor Sakura will always be the more complete experience (probably further aided by the fact that it's a tigther 70 episodes and 2 movies instead of 250 episodes and 3 movies), but that doesn't necessarily mean you'll enjoy it more. And on the subject of Madhouse animated shows, I truly hope that Madhouse's Azuki-chan will someday get English subtitles for the complete series. That's one that will seriously continue to perturb me until it happens, as I'm 99.9 percent confident that I will at least really like it, and there is very precious little of anything across any medium of entertainment that I feel 99.9% confident about really liking.

Yeah, I thought Little Nemo was pretty good...a little weaker with narrative and characters than you'd probably prefer for such a big and well-animated title, but it's basically an attempt to be a Disney movie, and if someone watched it as a child, I could definitely see it being a very lovely (albeit maybe confusing) trip down nostalgia lane. Didn't know all the surrounding story about it though - thanks for that. I do remember Miyazaki famously saying it was the worst experience he ever had making a film, but in all fairness, it sounded a bit like developmental hell along with there being way too many cooks in the kitchen while trying to collaborate across the ocean and through a language barrier - none of which would be trivial now, much less then. I thought I'd actually written about watching Little Nemo last summer, but it appears I did not. Whoops, wouldn't be the first time.

The forum has been seriously wigging out for me like the last fifteen minutes - don't know how an earlier version of that post got re-posted like ten minutes after the first. I reported it for deletion. There's a 1995 movie, but it's not made by Madhouse and I don't think it has too much resemblance or relevance to the 1990 OVA, at least from what I can tell at a glance. And to my surprise, I apparently already tried the 3-episode 1996 OVA...which I rated even lower at 4.5/10. Whoops. I rather liked Vampire Hunter D - the original, that is. Bloodlust was...more hit and miss for me. Should probably re-watch the original to solidify my feelings about it at some point, though.

Hey, somebody else in here got it figured out. Sadly, my GPU is...uh, not up to Bloodborne's standards, so I'm playing through at, erm, 360p, but otherwise, it works pretty well. I'm waiting for them to fix a few outstanding issues before I really dig into it (like...lootable items in the world and items dropped by enemies are invisible last I checked, so you have to find everything unaided) before I dig into it, but I've managed to get to Father Gascoigne so far.

I wanted to like it more, especially as it's one of the very few titles I listed there that is both longer and presented in a nice high definition transfer (contrast that to the "Darkness of the Moon, Shadow of the Sea" OVA that I mentioned liking in the previous post, which was only available on a fairly miserable VHS transfer), but I just didn't really find it clicking for me. Characters weren't very interesting or likeable, and I found myself pretty checked out on the seemingly generic fantasy story from pretty much episode 1. But at least it's finally off my list now after years of being stuck there. Also was good to confirm that the Tenchi Muyou series certainly isn't for me either, so I can strike all of that as well.

Not directed at anything in particular, but... I've been on a bit of a watch spree in getting through a pile of random OVAs and movies from mostly the 80s and 90s over the last few weeks, and one thing that I am appreciating right now is when anime has editing that doesn't waste the viewer's time. I'd much rather see 20 minutes that don't keep the viewer for too long thanks to punchier pacing and not pointlessly lingering on shots or unnaturally slow dialogue compared to 25 minutes that feel like it they were edited specifically to hit a particular run time. There are times when being extra slow is cinematically appropriate, but a lot of older anime makes a bad habit of doing it when it is really just not. It's one of the things that I think Sailor Moon in particular usually got right outside of when the show was being more dramatic: when our characters are having just casual conversation between each other, the editing of conversation is appropriately quick and natural, like a live action conversation would be. It's one of the show's better qualities over even something like Cardcaptor Sakura, where dialogue is, a lot of the time, quite a bit slower than it probably should be. It seems like newer anime does not generally suffer from this problem quite as much, at least from the little that I've seen...though there are other problems that drive me even crazier aplenty, of course. Stuff I've watched over the last few weeks:

Baoh the Visitor (1989). I think this would have actually been pretty decent as far as stupid 80s action OVAs go if not for the atrocious writing. Frustrating to see fairly good direction and animation go to waste because the writer is total pants and insists upon inserting themselves constantly by writing out the dumbest things possible. Who wrote this, anyways? Oh, well, uh...true to form, I suppose?