Bartimaeus

I am sorry, but there's just nothing quite so beautiful in this world as that particular shade of red.

It was something my sister watched when I was younger (her as well as a few friends of mine's consistently terrible tastes in anime is what originally drove me to believe I absolutely despised anime wholesale for many years), and it happened to be this month's pick for animes to watch by/for a community I'm technically but not really a part of because I'm not on speaking terms with 99.9% of the people who watch anime these days. Though with that said, they've still picked some things that I do like...like Cardcaptor Sakura, where I saw several people complaining that the show didn't follow the manga closely enough, to which my response was "die, pond scum". From what I can see, there's no overlap between animation studios, directors, or the character designers, plus there's ten years in between when they were made, so it is a bit odd that there's so much similarity in the character designs, but maybe you could just chalk it up to Tsukikage Ran deliberately trying to look throwback-ish (there's nothing else released in 2000 or even from a few years before that looks like it, after all). The overall art direction of The Hakkenden is quite a bit darker and grimier overall compared to Tsukikage Ran, but that makes sense, given the totally different tones and one releasing in 1990 vs the other in 2000. Also, The Hakkenden was more experimental with its art style, and actually changed between different art styles for different kinds of scenes. And apparently, I didn't look closely enough, because the series actually has a Wikipedia article which also says that there's apparently a second season (i.e. seven more episodes) that I apparently did not notice. I'm not sure that my heart is really in for another seven episodes given that I think the second half of the show is likely to be more plot drama and action-y than the first half: literally all of the supporting characters that made the first half of the second interesting to me are dead now, which is why I wasn't too upset that the show just suddenly ended what seemed right smack in the middle of the overall plot (which it evidently was).

Episode 1 of Hellsing Ultimate. This might be my least favorite thing that I've ever seen in my whole life. I know I've said that about a few different things in this thread over the years, but I genuinely mean it every time. I think I'd rather watch ten more episodes of Dandandan than even one more of Hellsing Ultimate. The Hakkenden (1990) AKA The Legend of the Dog Warriors, I guess? Weird historical series about a cursed family trying to deliver a legendary sword to...uh, someone or another. I watched the whole thing through because it was actually halfway decent for me, but at the same time, I didn't really care that much about the plot proper, and then it ended six episodes in, which seemed to be only about half of the story. You know this is historical because everyone kills themselves for one reason or another. Your dog is accused of biting someone? Kill yourself. Your parents arrange a marriage for you when you already have a boyfriend? Kill yourself. Family gets magic curse from some lady dog-spirit thing? Kill yourself. Accidentally present the wrong sword to your lord? Kill yourself. Killing yourself really is the solution to all life's problems, you just can't go wrong with a little injection of suicide in your life. Now, accidentally murdering your own sister that you were separated from when you were young and whom you've been searching for your whole life right after you finally find her? Welcome to Shrugsville, that's not really that big of a deal, let's get on with the show. Anyways, it's an O.K. OVA but not really recommended, not that anyone here would watch it anyways - I mainly am posting about it because the amount of suicide started to become amusing after a while. I don't know how the Japanese ever survived when it seems like suicide was the first and last resort for every problem or offense, real or imagined. And on a side-note to @majestic, the leading lady pictured above looks suspiciously exactly like all the damsels-in-distress that kept popping up over and over in Carried by the Wind, to the point where I remember being confused if it was actually supposed to be the same girl or not even across multiple different towns and eventually realizing that it wasn't. Well, they always turned out just fine in that show, but this one got butchered, which was unfortunate, because I liked her.

As soon as Trump won, I committed to not reading the news until at least the midterms, and I've made good on of it so far outside of occasionally peaking in this thread. I just don't think it's going to be healthy for me to even glance at headlines, and the very little that's been posted in here sure is proving that. Coincidentally, I set my current avatar on the day that Biden dropped out, and it's proved very appropriate so far. Please pull the wool over my eyes...or put flowers in front of them...or something, I don't know.

@LadyCrimson 1. I was always kind of the opposite, in that I can't become attached or assign meaning to randomly/procedurally generated areas, so whenever I'm playing a game where that's the case, it's very difficult to make myself care and I pretty much immediately lose any interest when there's no static/human-designed option. But I also don't usually play games like 7 Days, much less play them to death, so... True to my word, I played like 15 hours of 7 Days with some friends years ago, and as soon as they lost interest, so did I. 2. I have a handful of games on my Steam wishlist that...*checks* I put on there back in 2018, and which never even got to the Early Access phase. I think they must be vaporware at this point. But yeah, most of the time, the "we're only going to in early access for a short time" is foolishly optimistic, if not a flat-out lie - and some games never get out of it, ever.

When a game doesn't have the options I like, I usually stick with whatever is the default so I don't have to make any choices. If none of my choices are good, then I might as well not make any. Meanwhile, Dark Souls:

I always play exactly what I am in real life, which is a paranoid schizophrenic goth girl that likes to sneak up behind people and either gnaw off their heads or repeatedly stab them in the back. Sometimes, you just have to stick with what you're best at.

Hey, I can't let a movie I didn't like ruin things I do, otherwise there would very quickly be nothing left to enjoy in this universe.

The Substance (2024). The perception and treatment of aging women (including by themselves and towards each other!) in the United States is something I've long talked about as being a sad indictment upon our society, and playing off of it with addiction, self-harm, self-loathing, and other neurotic and self-destructive behaviors does make for a natural pairing...but I really just don't like anything about this as a movie, and that became very apparent to me as soon as maybe two minutes in. It's one of those things where you can sit and nitpick all the little minor things that bothered you, but no matter what you could say, it still just wouldn't really touch upon the base issue, which is that you sat through a 2 hour-plus movie where it was perfectly obvious right off the bat that some combination of the direction, editing, tone, visuals, cast et al. was conspiring to make certain that the film wasn't ever going to click with you, so there was no reality where you'd ever enjoy it even if all the themes and ideas should in theory appeal to you. If the same film were made by a different director whose style and film sensibilities I actually like, I think I could've loved this movie...but as it was, I mostly just sat there irritated the whole way through, occasionally wishing I were watching something else a little less obnoxious. Like, I'm sitting here watching probably some of the grossest body horror you'll ever see in a film, and I'm just sighing at all of it, wishing that I was into the film enough for it to have some kind of effect beyond annoying me.

Until just now, I've never really appreciated how verbally powerful stopping exactly one word short of criticality can be, especially when you just let that stand as the final word on something. I'll have to remember to keep that one in my back pocket.

It's officially over, Pennsylvania has been called for Trump. We probably won't know who won the House for at least a few days or maybe more, depending on how close some of the races get.

To my surprise, it's still quite possible that Democrats will control the House, though most likely by a narrow margin (maybe as much as 5...but also they might still lose it by 5 as well). Not certain yet, but it doesn't look too terrible to at least prevent lasting legislation. Judiciary will still be completely hosed, of course, and many of the different agencies run through the executive are likely to be completely gutted (and in fact, I suspect the federal administration will be emboldened to withhold funding for anything it doesn't like even if it is actually mandated by legislation), but I guess it might be something. Though honestly, it might be more fun to see Republicans try to live with a, like, +1 margin in the House...but really, I'd rather not give this particular administration trifecta control.

His platform is a little different this election than it was the last two times. I guess we'll see what happens and just how strong our institutions are: I do not think nearly strong enough in the face of re-electing someone who has run specifically on revenge and breaking those institutions, especially if all three branches of the government are completely captured. May it be that he just decides to go back to tweeting every day while basking in adoration rather than doing what he has said he would do. Good luck to all of us, I suppose - both here at home and abroad as well.

Unless there's something a bunch of election/vote analysts that I've been following for the election don't know something about PA, WI, and MI (the same ones that I followed in 2020 that helped inform me everything was looking rather promising), it would seem that we can now be fairly confident that Donald Trump will be the next president of the United States of America. Not absolutely certain, but fairly confident. There's still some legit hope of Democrats retaining the House to limit damage, but I don't know that I'd exactly say they are favored. (e): Also, it goes without saying that the Senate has also been lost. Very bad news for the already broken judiciary, but it is what it is at this point.

I feel like it wouldn't have changed that much: the biggest issue to voters this cycle is "the economy", and historically speaking, the incumbent party loses when that's the case, no matter if it's justified or not.

No, it does not: like the last election, when I was in here repeatedly calling for calm because things actually looked pretty good for Biden early on despite how nasty the initial tallies looked, I am looking at individual county level shifts to determine whether or not she is running behind or ahead of Biden, and it does not look great so far. It's not out of reach with Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin yet by any means, but the initial shifts do not favor her, especially in Pennsylvania: I will post again when things either look determinedly either grimmer or rosier. So far, North Carolina has been lost outside of some unforeseen hail mary (like different countries not dropping election day vs. early vote dumps in a consistent/predictable manner) - the margins are just too terrible.

The initial prognosis tonight looks poor for Kamala Harris. Still early, but looks poor.

"All pizzas have been prepared following the cooking instructions on the back of their packaging" I'm surprised any of them turned out alright, following the cooking instructions seems to pretty much always lead to terrible breads when baking pre-made doughs. The third guy was straight up like "c'mon, these all need to actually be cooked" at one point.

"Fun" video with the Gamers Nexus guy if you hadn't seen it: Windows (and most other always online products, services, and features) is adversarial, by design, and it is always getting worse. On the latest patched version of the official Windows 11 multi-installer from Microsoft.com (including Home and Pro editions, along with some others, IDK, I wasn't paying that much attention to the list of options you get, I just chose Pro), found and freely downloadable here: https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/software-download/windows11 It is admittedly not straightforward to discern what you need to click on in order to not have to do the SHIFT+F10 OOBE stuff, but it is still possible: https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/scl/fi/psttyrild3n998fzlhnx0/vmware_wFvbyAGVMu.mp4?rlkey=zi9bw7xlkiohwzzzjl4o8ookg&dl=0

What edition, specifically? IIRC, later updates of Windows 10 Home behaved similar as well, but I thought the Pro and Enterprise variants were unaffected.

You can't feasibly buy either the Enterprise or LTSC editions of Windows 10/11 (subscription-based volume licensing), but both of them sure are easy to obtain the official installers for and use without issue. Don't ask me how I know...or maybe do, depending on how interested you are, . It's pretty much the same situation as it was for most editions/versions of the Windows 10 installer: unplug/disable your internet as you start the installation process and when you get to creating an account, it'll try to make you connect, it won't work because you don't have internet and then you can say "nope, as you can see, I am a poor soul that doesn't have internet", Windows will go "very well, you filthy peasant", and now you can proceed with creating a local account. The whole presentation of Windows 11 feels like a MacOS facade that you have to immediately hammer and drill back into its proper shape before you can use it. Stupid.

It's overblown in the sense that It's just more stuff to disable. A disable is just a click away if you use Shut Up Windows... ...which I can't recommend enough alongside Winaero Tweaker for fixing and/or reverting a bunch of Windows 10/11 annoyances/intrusions.

I feel like there's untapped potential for reverse ragebaiting people into buying your game by getting everyone mad at how stupid the people talking about the game are. For Veilguard, you've already got one side effectively covered, so now you just need to manufacture some SJW ("social justice woker", of course) getting upset about how the game is in fact really anti-LGBT and made only for incels and white men, and I think you'll probably have manipulated just about everyone who cares into buying your game.

Anecdotal and I don't live in Michigan, but I personally know several people who are ardently pro-Israel and who I have repeatedly heard say that Palestine is little more than a terrorist state which has consistently burned bridges with just about every country that has ever tried to extend them an olive branch and which no other country in the world would ever put up with if they were right on their doorstep. They are currently content with Harris' fence-walking on the issue and will be voting for her, at least for this cycle in order to defeat Trump, so I will once again personally affirm what Zoraptor has said multiple times this year in that it's really a no-win issue for Biden/Harris and that basically being non-committal does seem likely (though perhaps not certain) to be the best approach to try to capture as many votes in the face of Donald Trump's "we're going to finally let Israel put this to rest" stance, weak-willed and lacking moral fiber it may be. Polling on the issue seems to suggest that older Democratic-leaning voters still support Israel over Palestine, while the younger Democratic-leaning voters, uh, don't, so it just doesn't seem to be something that Democrats can even bring up (much less try to address) without it immediately biting them in the butt, especially seeing as the politicians themselves seem to be divided on the issue. There's also the issue of younger voters barely showing up to vote for any level of government in the first place: if they want their beliefs to inform policy, they would need to actually start consistently showing up, which election after election (be it presidential or midterms), they really just don't. Of course, you could also say the inverse, that politicians should be pro-active in trying to win younger voters over with policies suited towards them specifically, which could make them more reliable...but I already saw how that went for Bernie Sanders in both 2016 and 2020, so I don't think that strategy is going to work.

Pretty similar story for me: spent maybe five or six hours with the game, beat it once, was fine with that, didn't really want to play it anymore...go look online that you have to beat it a few dozen more times or whatever to actually beat it, thought "that's nice, I already played and 100%ed the Binding of Isaac years ago", immediately uninstalled it. Into the trash it goes.