Bartimaeus

I'm fairly certain it is "topics that you have posted at least one reply in". I'd be curious to see if LadyCrimson could show an example of it not being there for at least one thread that she has for sure posted in.

Chainsaw Man, season 1 and the Reze movie. Now...I know what you're thinking. Bartimaeus...Chainsaw Man...shounen action? Yes, it's difficult to believe... Why would Bartimaeus subject himself to Chainsaw Man? The answer is actually surprisingly simple: I was forced to watch this at proverbial gunpoint. Chainsaw Man is...very important to somebody I know, they have very strong feelings and emotions about the show, and it was basically a "hey, you can either sit down with me and give this an honest to god shot, or...you can find out what will happen to you if you don't" sort of situation. So...did I like Chainsaw Man? Well, funny, that's just what this person asked right after we finished watching the movie, except they phrased it more like, "So you like Chainsaw Man, right? And you're not going to say yes just because it's me and I happen to be tapping my fingers on this dangerous unseen metal object behind my back, right?". Um... So in short, yes, I really liked Chainsaw Man, it's probably the best show I've seen in the past ten years. T.O.R.T.U.R.E.

Reversal of normal for me this year: I didn't watch hardly anything of the game (though I was rooting for and felt the Seahawks should win), but I did watch the half-time show: I'd agree that it was a good vibe.

i'm just waiting for them to kiss

BBCode has not existed on this forum software for a long time, it was just hack-y one way parsing and conversion to HTML (hence why even if you did previously use BBCode, as soon as you pressed reply, it would convert and be gone for forever). I'm not very surprised that they've now phased out even bothering to convert it, they've been trying to kill it for a very long time. In theory, a browser userscript by way of e.g. Tampermonkey could parse and convert your BBCode tags just like how the forum used to, but...honestly, I've just gotten used to highlighting and hitting CTRL+b and CTRL+i and CTRL+u for the three basic font modifiers. Strikethrough, with no hotkey for it, is the annoying one.

Why is there an anime movie song in RLM's Revenge of the Sith video? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bYWAHuFbLoc&t=1319s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GIyrnk9hy7M&t=26 ...Has Mike been a secret weeb all along?

I'd be a lot more curious if we hadn't already heard from him a handful of months ago and he was still pulling the old "it'd be just as bad under Kamala" nonsense...

I think my older brother had this thing, it instantly flashed ancient vague memories in my brain.

That would be classic Trump "negotiating" at work: rip up the agreement we had, bluster and threaten, get the same deal or a little better or maybe even a little worse (at the cost of a lot of good will), announce to the world how brilliant he is and that he got what he wanted.

Fun fact for those perhaps not caught up on all of their history: Adolf Hitler became the leader of his party (German Workers' Party, later renamed National Socialist German Workers' Party) in 1921, he was arrested and imprisoned for an attempted coup in 1923, he ran for president and came second to Hindenburg in 1932, he was appointed chancellor by that same Hindenberg in 1933, and he became dictator later in the same year with the Enabling Act of 1933 that effectively suspended all civil rights in favor of supreme government authority and discretion. It took 12 years from the time Adolf Hitler became the leader of his - at the time - little podunk party until he became chancellor and then dictator. None of us lived through those times, but 12 years can be a very long time in politics, especially in that particular era, and it doesn't take a lot of googling to determine that the Nazi party was incompetent, corrupt, ineffective, drunk, drug-using, chaotic, and very backstabby during pretty much its entire existence. They had fancy and well-organized ceremonies to be certain, but they were power-mad maniacs who didn't really know what they were doing, and none of that really mattered or prevented the totality of their evil once they controlled all the levers of power.

Love Serenade (1996). Australian cinema is so...very strange every time I watch any. Each time, it's like stepping onto an alien planet that more or less looks like ours but doesn't really act like ours. It's weird in the land down under... Miranda Otto is such a funny lady.

I could be misremembering (as it's been a few years), but I believe ShadySands was more of a Packers fan than a Broncos, but he's also more or less stopped watching the NFL. This was probably the least I've been interested in the NFL in the past decade (I only caught about half of the Packers games and really didn't watch much else), but it's probably less to do with the NFL itself for me, and more to do with sports just not being a super compelling method of escapism for me this year.

Stranger Things season 5... Just kidding, I ain't watching that crap. Nope, I watched Neon Genesis Pluribus. Really great. Kind of fantastic, actually. Final episode smashed it out of the park so good that I almost don't want them to make a second season, I'd be perfectly fine with them just leaving it how it is, despite it being a massive cliffhanger. I feel like you can really only go down from here, but I suppose if they got us this far, you have to at least give them a chance. The incredibly high-stakes scenario is contrarily married to a low-key, character-driven, and incredibly personal story, it was really just kind of beautiful and exactly what I want out of high-minded sci-fi or fantasy concepts, which for TV so often just gets bogged down with...all the normal yucks of a million different characters and increasingly complex plotting and set pieces. None of that was necessary here, I did not miss it at all, it stayed true to its colors all the way through. Will that be the case for season 2? We'll have to wait and see.