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.

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.

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.

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, .

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...

One Punch Man, episode 1. I was planning on watching this years ago, but I put it off like a bazillion times. First episode was alright, I'll probably watch another episode or two at least - basic premise is the main character is a hero that became too strong for his own good and is not only bored to death with it all due to it being repetitive and unchallenging and meaningless, but is also finding himself to be losing his humanity as a result. Is it even a Japanese thing, or is it an anime thing? I get that anime is reflective of Japan to a degree, but it seems more like an uncomfortable anime sub-culture thing than something affecting Japan at large...otherwise, wouldn't like, all of their pop-stars and actors and models also be affected? ...I just Googled "japanese female pop-stars" because I was pretty sure the vast majority of their women pop-stars are like...very petite and in their early 20s and who all have to try to look as pristine as possible at all times lest they be replaced, and I'm treated to a pile of assault and abuse stories that popped up. Wonderful - that's enough Googling for today.

Not just like it either, but actually kind of love it! This is why I still sometimes leave my comfort zone to try things I reasonably shouldn't. Surprises sometimes do happen - hey, again, that's why we're all here after all, isn't it? Me taking a big leap of faith in watching Nausicaa based purely off a fleeting feeling I got from looking at a single solitary poster...and probably an even bigger one again for Sailor Moon, and starting to post about it here and resurrecting a like 5 year old thread. I could've super easily ignored that feeling - indeed, why wouldn't I? I'd hated anime all my life, and I'd never seen anything from it to dissuade me from that notion...until I was struck by that poster. Guess that's exactly why I didn't, but it was still a pretty big leap of faith that ran counter to all my pre-conceived notions. A little beauty of life, learning, and chance occurrences right there (...especially because there was also no reason for me to start posting about it here!). Now specifically for Warlord Ran and Mountain King Myao, obviously there are some qualities that I can see myself liking it for...but the whole picture together doesn't make a lot of sense based on what we know of myself...but there's obviously something there - it's just difficult for me to pinpoint exactly what does it to make it work for me so well. Maybe it's just a combination of different factors - a specific style of humor that I like (many a facepalm were had in the watching this show, but all of them accompanied by laughs or at least good-natured groans!), characters that somehow didn't annoy me right off the bat, art style and animation that I liked, even liking the little musical and sound effect touches...really, maybe it is just a matter of all those little things being right for me that makes it work, as opposed to immediately wrong as is so often the case with things I try.

Not the fabric of reality, just my brain.

Yeah, but normally, that kind of stuff would not really work for me, but for some reason with this show, it didn't. Right off the bat, too - I called it trash from the very first episode, and yet, before I even liked the characters, it felt like it was working for me. Why this but not for so many other things like it? I don't know. It's doing something(s) right that I can't quite pinpoint that I wish I could. Jesus-freak Myao was hilarious. Indeed, . This is how I knew right off the bat before you started watching it that it would be...trouble at its best.

Never seen or heard of this game before - each battle ends with them seemingly not finishing off their opponent, right up until the one dude straight up decapitates his opponent. That was brutal.

Episode 8 of Martial Artist Myao: Yeah, I wasn't entirely sure how you would take that one because of how utterly stupid and absurd it all was, but it seems Myao makes all things good for the both of us, . Speaking of Myao, I look forward to your thoughts on episode 9... Yeah, feel free to take a guess as to what the viewers of this show like to upload screenshots of for it, .

Final three episodes of Samurai Champloo: Much better than the previous two...but boy, what a bad day for everyone. Everyone's gonna have to take some time to sleep this one off... Great show, pretty good conclusion that thankfully didn't do anything too dumb, which I was kind of worried about going into it - they played it straight while sticking to the show's strengths, and that's a good thing. Future Boy Conan verdict: Yep, it's exactly what it presents itself as, so if that strikes your fancy, you should like it. Wish I'd liked it a bit more myself, but while the show doesn't do anything in particular to annoy me, it also just didn't do that much to ever really grab or retain my interest either. The characters that I thought were most likeable were actually three off/on minor antagonists, strangely...while I had trouble with most of the main cast, particularly the titular character and the most other important character, Lana. I should re-watch Laputa, I feel like I liked that a little bit more at least than Future Boy Conan, even if it's not particularly one of my favorite Ghibli films. I've actually looked at this show multiple times specifically because every time I see the character designs, I think that it has to be at least decent. Then I see the random screenshots users have uploaded and nope right out - that's not going to happen.

If you feel anything starting to go wrong with your lungs, that's pretty much your bellwether to go in and get checked out if you can. Sudden lung failure has snuck up on many a covid victim...hope everything rights itself sooner rather than later.

How are you doing so far, and how long has it been since symptoms?

Outer Wilds. Finished it, kind of a lame ending, but I guess I'm not sure where they could've gone exactly that would've been better - pretty good game overall, exploring new stuff like that is fun.

Good lord, I just got done talking about the AAA gaming industry being a snake eating its own tail, and there we go again... Admittedly, there's no way Microsoft is as bad managerial-wise as Activision, but still. Someone should buy the toxic sludge that is Ubisoft so they can stop making the world's worst AAA games - that'd be doing all of us a favor, at least.

@Amentep Why is it when I try to look up pictures of the Psychogun, all I get are goofy-looking space-age screwdrivers?

You're walking the fence between legitimate insanity and silly cartoon villainy here, so I'm not sure whether Heath Ledger or The Animated Series Joker is more appropriate here.

I definitely have not considered myself a gamer for at least a handful of years now. But it's not anything against the games I do play or really the gaming industry* at large by any means (I still find and play ones I like!), but it used to be one of my primary hobbies - now it's secondary or even tertiary, something I only do when something strikes my fancy. So it doesn't really feel right to label myself as one anymore. That probably won't ever change, it's just something that's passed me by in most ways, and I think that's okay. *Well, actually, I really think AAA gaming is pretty broken outside of Nintendo and some occasional exceptions outside of them, but I'm pretty okay with that. Endlessly chasing the dollar at the behest of the brightest and best MBAs whose endless ingenuity seems to have convinced everyone who's anyone to mimic the snake eating its own tail. So die a pathetic death, o' corpulent and corporate AAA gaming industry - the same fate as the games you make.

Thankfully, I don't get that crazy about my non-storage drives. My C drive is a bit of a disaster (by my standards anyways), but I view C drives as being temporary, and therefore not worth worrying about. Eventually, it'll be reformatted sooner or later anyways, so why be concerned with it at all? My storage drives, on the other hand, are meant for permanent (possibly life-long!) storage, and so that's what I put my effort into - anything that's temporary means it doesn't matter, anything that's permanent means it does. At the very least, it's a good distinction so I never go too crazy with some of my obsessive compulsive behavior, . There's a limit to my insanity!

I played some shooters pretty young (Counter-Strike, Quake III, Turok, America's Army all before the age of 10!), but most pertinently I played a lot of S.T.A.L.K.E.R. a little later, which has some of the most extreme head-bobbing you'll ever see in any game plus plenty of weapon swaying to boot, so I guess I avoided those two issues. Field of view, on the other hand...what is with so many first-person games setting it so low that even I get sick from them? Seriously, stop it! Thankfully, I've played about ten hours of Outer Wilds and I've almost totally conquered that one...almost. There's still a rare occasion that I lose my bearings because of suddenly teleporting or gravity turning sideways that gets me...I imagine you wouldn't fare too well with that?

Yeah, I wouldn't be able to survive on that. My own favorite movies and shows take up close to 3 TB in of themselves, which was the limit I was running up against and was what required the upgrade...especially because I also have half a terabyte of music, so I literally was just about out of room with my two 4 TB drives - mirrored drives, since I'm unwilling to accept any kind of data loss, . But then, I also had about 10 TB of movies and shows for other people (e.g. my nieces) across three other 4 TB drives (that I don't mirror, since I - selfishly - care significantly less about them, ). So space was becoming a bit of a problem...and I rather hate splitting up the contents of my own drives arbitrarily due to space constrictions (I have a bit of an OCD for hard drive organization - nothing gets put on those HDDs unless I'm "archiving" it, i.e. I do not plan to touch those files ever again...barring unforeseen circumstances), hence why I went straight for the 14 TB drives when I saw them on sale for $200 each. Difficult to turn that price down. Even with mirroring them, the 14 TBs should hold me over for some time to come given how rarely I add new shows or movies to them. Though it doesn't help that I keep everything at absurd quality for myself...I have 51 favorite movies, and they take up just about 1 terabyte. This is, presumably, utterly ridiculous by most people's standards - there are plenty of people out there who encode standard length films down to 1-2 GB each at 1080p using the ultra-efficient (but definitely image quality-lossy) x265 encoder, meanwhile I sometimes don't encode my movies at all and leave them in the raw bluray state because I desire utterly perfect image quality. A single pixel changed in a nearly unobservable manner? No, I say!

I ordered 4x14 TB like...8 or 9 months ago, and they finally just arrived about two weeks ago. It's nice to have space.

Is it better to be curbstomped from beginning to end with no chance of ever winning a la the Cardinals, Footballs, or Patriots...or is better to get down big and come back only to be most foully slain at the last moment a la the Cowboys? The latter seems more heart-breaking, but at least you cared and you were invested and it felt like it had meaning and you could've kept going if not for the clock running out...whereas the former is more like "oh, we didn't deserve to be here to begin with, this has all been some kind of great big joke". I guess neither of them feel very good, but in different ways.

About that... Admittedly, it didn't end up working out anyways, but extra points here that it's against the Cowboys, . I think people in the stadium were mad at the refs in general - generally speaking, the home team is penalized less than the away team...whether it's because of home-cooking or just because the away team has more trouble operating when they're not at home and suffering from the crowd noise, it's unusual that the home team was penalized in a number of 49ers drive-extending or Cowboys drive-ending penalties. Howerver, like half of those were completely needless pre-snap penalties... Don't think it's a wise idea for Dak Prescott to be advocating fans throw stuff at the referees...