majestic

I sort of am, but if given the choice I'd still either take the rather neutral children's anime/world masterpiece theater style of the late 70ies/early 80ies (Heidi, Anne of Green Gables, Dog of Flanders, etc.) or late 80ies to late 90ies anime style over the alternatives. I have a soft spot for certain 60ies character designs from liking Attack No. 1, but that's as far as I would go. There are certain modern animes that grew on me after a fashion, like Violet Evergarden (outside of some of the CGI used) and especially K-On! which... honestly isn't something I would have thought I'd ever enjoy, aesthetic wise, but somehow ended up doing. For K-On! at least, I think it's something like form following function, I suppose. The art style works perfectly fine for what it is. I will, eventually. "Fun" fact, almost all the sexual assault I've seen in anime recently was girl on girl (I don't now if that is supposed to lessen its impact or increase it's appeal*, or both), but yes, that's pretty much what I was talking about, in addition to putting the characters in embarrassing and revealing situations for no real reason. I mean, there's no way Plastic Little wasn't made with the male gaze in mind, but it was noticably more mature about it than ecchi elements in general tend to be. I have, to this date, watched four shounen shows. Two at a time when they were on TV and I just watched anything that was on TV, and two that were an adaptation of the same manga, that last one based on the recommendation of friend a couple of years ago, in between the time from finishing Sailor Moon's original run and reviving my interest in anime - in one of life's little and strange coincidences by rewatching Sailor Moon. The first two are Bismark and Robin Hood, the latter of which lessend the impact of the shounen dolting there is (and that isn't entirely a whole lot, but that's filtered through nostalgic memories from a long while ago) by placing it into medieval Europe where some of it makes more sense, what with the feudal system at the time, but I've talked about Robin Hood at length. Bismark is fun 80ies sci-fi trash, atlhough it does feature an initially fairly stupid shonen dolt frenemyship between the lead character and an American called Bill that may only have been a part of the dub. Not sure, the series was apparently changed a good deal in dialogue. There's every chance I'd actually hate the original. Still looks pretty good though, but follows the anime sci-fi trash formula of having mech fights until the main characters just whoop out the main cannon and obliterate the enemy in one blast to the T. Ever since I was a kid I've wondered what stops these people from simply employing their enemy one-shot mechanism immediately - if all your dramatic mech combat momentum hinges on an unexplained contrivance, you're bound to lose me, and indeed, the mech fights are the least interesting parts of this. Really, that makes no sense at all. As did the change in the dub that the enemies they kill don't stay dead, but just get teleported back to their home dimension, leaving me to wonder how they'll ever be defeated. The other two are Fullmetal Alchemist and Fullmetal Alchemist: Brotherhood, and while I liked them well enough in spite of what they are, I'm generally "that guy" when it comes to preferences. I like the slow burn of the original adaptation more, but prefer Brotherhood's less metaphysical ending. Needless to say I watched it more for Al and Winny than caring about Ed... overall not a complete loss, but I certainly don't understand how this won every "most bestest favoritest anime of the year" awards during its original run. No, that's not it, because people who are young in body and old in heart generally are either fanatic Christian young earth flerfers or young poster boy conservatives that swallowed Ayn Rand's nonsense hook, line and sinker, and you don't strike me as either. You're just a person of taste, and entertainment's gone down the crapper in recent years. The first TV show I can't answer because it's one of those that were on TV, and I really don't remember what the first one was. There were always at least four or five animes running. As for movies, that's a tough nut, for all the anime I've watched, there weren't a whole lot of anime films on TV and unless we count OVAs like Legend of Lemnear or Plastic Little (which we should not, I think) then the answer to that is actually MD Geist. I was going to say it was the Sailor Moon R movie, but it wasn't. MD Geist and Akira were before that... Can fully recommend MD Geist for every fan of 80ies sci-fi trash, but keep in mind, it pretty much is trash. *This is what Miyazaki talked about, in part. People in the anime industry not observing the real world in any meaningful way, and ending up making scenes like that. There's a pervasive schism between the depiction (and acceptence, actually) of lesbians in entertainment (adult or otherwise) and the real world, and it's especially bad in anime and in, well, adult entertainment. In my experience, so that's just an anecdote, heterosexual men in particular seem to react with a certain amount of disappointment and disdain when real life lesbians don't turn out to be like the ones they like to watch in films. Which is like all the time. *sigh*

I blame digital coloring, and to a lesser degree scanning the animations, i.e. the outlines drawn on paper, scanned and animated digitally by stringing the frames together instead of using cels - at least for Japanese anime. Western cartoons didn't suffer as much from this, like, when you look at Infinity Train it looks fine, but it too was animated on paper and colored digitally. There are some physical properties you'll just never get from digitally coloring scanned outlines, no matter how hard you try. Like having an actual coat of paint with not always evenly distributed amounts of color (perhaps intentional, to boot), colors on top of each other and colors according to what we can observe in reality (where else would go get colors from). I don't want to say digital coloring feels so soulless, but it's pretty much like the difference between the original Star Wars and Attack of the Clones. Star Wars, for all its being sci-fi, looks like the real world because it was shot in the real world, Attack of the Clones wasn't. Everything is shiny, bright and just feels wrong*. That's why you have modern anime where the backgrounds look fantastic and the character models don't, because the backgrounds were painted and then scanned, not vice versa - but they're also by far and large static, so the extra work pays off by making them look better and not causing a whole lot more effort. I'm guessing you could apply some digital trickery to simulate color thickness and layering and whatnot, but looking at the screenshots, that's just not done, and even then... that's never going to be the same. This is a lot like this stock picture here: Now, this has someone with a ball, a broken window, and someone angry. I think this is supposed to mean that the guy believes the other guy damaged the window, but my reaction to that is, given the perspective on this, there's no way that ball could have made that small a hole. Whatever the ball is, it sure wasn't used to break the window. *edit: At the end of the day, a painting has a structure and an actual uneven surface that breaks light differently than the inherently flat surface of a digital plane of color. That's why painting and scanning the background beats digitally created backgrounds every time, even if a little bit is lost without cel transfers. At least, I think that's what is bothering me, but I might be wrong, I'm by no means an expert on the subject of animation.

Maybe, but I by far and large hated much of The Mandalorian and very vocally stated so here on the forums, so while I too haven't watched The Book of Boba Fett (yet, that is), I can still be rather vocal about absolutely hating the design and the idea of a cyberpunk biker gang riding colorful vespas in a gritty Star Wars setting on Tatooine.

Wrapping up Carried by the Wind: Episode 12: Myao self-inserts into a scene without knowing what is going on, and as honorable as her intentions were, as per usual, she and by extension Ran are now stuck in a silly adventure where all isn't exactly as it seems and Myao ends up smuggling stolen goods... also, damn Myao is retarded and lacks any ability to read the room. Well, or the wind, as the Japanese would say. And, as per usual, leave it to her to not learn anything from it either. Episode 13: Myao and Ran fight. Over what? Doesn't matter, and therefore isn't shown - Ran realizes that she can't get smashed without money. Money Myao supplies from somewhere. It's quite baffling. By the way, did you know that making Sake probably started out by shinto monks chewing rice and spitting it out? The enzymes in their saliva started fermentation, the result was a slightly alcoholic pulp. I find that disgusting, really. Sake is, by the way, the reading for two Kanji: 酒 and 鮭. One means alcohol, the other salmon, I'll leave you to figure out which is which, and the same readings are why sake sushi has nothing to do with alcohol. Since 酒 just means alcohol, if your context makes it hard to distinguish one from the other, it's probably better to use 日本酒 when it is about the ricewine from Japan, although adding the word beautification prefex o- is also often used: お酒 (o-sake). Syllable stress is supposed ot be different between the two words, stress on the sa means salmon, and on the ke... well, you get the idea, and guess what the reason is why salmon is by far and large called sāmon (サーモン ) in Japan nowadays? Back to the episode... Ran is trying to buy cheap sake while Myao suddenly shows up being somewhat rich after helping a jeweler, being carried by four identical slaves, or servants, or whatever, and suddenly Ran wants to make up. Strange how that goes. Myao even realizes that she's so retarded that it's going to work, and lo, it does. Ran also meets someone from her past, and it gets really confusing for a bit when the owner of a dojo buys out a geisha who is in love with Mr. Someone from Ran's past (mentor, fellow drunk and probably romantic interest) and... it ends up being Ran's finest moment, I think. Fantastic final episode, by the way. The anime is well worth the time investment of 13 episodes, there are a few ups and downs along the way, but overall this was pretty enjoyable. I, uhm, while I'm no longer have as negative an outlook on how modern animation looks as I had one year ago, this still looks pretty bad to me, in addition to being excessively cringeworthy by the nature of its, uhm, content.

Boba Fett's cybernetically enhanced space vespa gang.

Maybe there are better sources, I was just looking for a quick way to make screencaps because strangely enough, there aren't many to find. Well, usable ones, at least. I thought the button was hilarious, and the caption with the spelling mistake is just gold. As for looking underwater, two of them are, and one is in a steamy bathing area, so it's not entirely wrong, but clicking through the rest of this, it looks like a VHS transfer blown up to 480p. It supposedly comes from a DVD though. Who knows. Maybe there's a Laserdisc original somewhere. Reading the first line I was a little surprised, but hey, you clarified that. Lack of experience and foreknowledge explains that. Way back when, i.e. the mid nineties after this came out, Plastic Little was one of the OVAs "to have" because it was cool, actiony anime with perky breasts. Why? Well, because we were all fifteen or sixteen and not supposed to have that stuff in the first place. Plus, exhibit A: Although admittedly, the fanservice in Plastic Little isn't as problematic as in some other animes, but that is also a little weird. For one, when looking at Satoshi Urushihara's work one does know what to expect (unless you're new to this stuff and stumble into it by accident like you did), and then there's the matter of the really weird framing. The nudity in this isn't carrying any comedic undertones, not even the silly nosebleed, and the scenes with the perky jiggles (infamously there are subtitle tracks by ADV that carry a boob jiggle counter for Plastic Little and two other of their works - not kidding, that thing is real) aren't giving off the usual creepy vibe of sexualized playfulness. Not entirely sure what to make of that. I think the scene with the peeking, the shock and the nosebleed were supposed to be funny, but that was so tone deaf it wasn't even properly offensive, while everything else was framed in a strange way. Dunno, maybe that's just me, but it helps that everything else is framed as properly "adult" entertainment, not in the sexual sense but in the sense that the target audience for this was actual adults, not 12-year-olds in adult bodies, if that makes any sense? Or else I'm just a hypocrite who wants to defend liking this more than he should, which is probably also due to a large portion of nostalgia (edit - clarification: Liking this for being 90ies trash sci-fi, not because it has animated boobs, that I really couldn't care less about). That works too. His character designs are fairly unique, and they look more like a hybrid between 60ies and an 80ies style than what was usually seen in the 90ies. Also very distinct from the angular 70ies aesthetic. I don't get any strange or uncanny vibes from the designs, but that's pretty subjective anyway. Supposedly there were people who liked the 70ies character designs too, and I rather prefer the others. I grew up with 60ies and 80ies anime on TV (and some 70ies children's anime mixed in, but those have their own distinct looks) so maybe it's just a matter of being used to them from early on.

No, worse. Well, and there's this bit:

There have always been trigger warnings on 1984. How can you claim they were added?

Makes sense, you’d need to put the text close to fix the cylindrical issue and further away for the spherical one, so focusing doesn’t work, right? I‘m pretty myopic, and I’d have to actually look up my cylindrical value… it’s pretty insignificant in comparison though. As for options there’s also surgery but that depends on your insurance and all, so guess that’s out. As for the numbers, starting at an absolute value of 1.5 you need glasses (roughly), and I think at -15 for myopia at least you’re legally blind here, not 100% sure on that though.

Welcome to the club, one value is the cylindrical (shape of your cornea, the larger this this the more it looks like ovoid than a sphere and therefore shifts the focal point of the light entering your eye to some point behind the retina, causing blurry vision) and the other the spherical diopters, the measurement used to describe astigmatism. My spherical diopters on both eyes currently sit at a very nice -8.0, which pretty much means that without glasses, I'm half-blind. Guess you could use a contact lense for that, although really... that depends on whether you can actually put some foreign object on your eyes or not (I can't). They also have the nasty habit of scratching your cornea, although that's pretty secondary. No way I'm putting a lens on my eyes. Ugh.

Very well, so instead of finishing anything and probably to the detriment of my eye, I followed @Sarex recommendation and watched... プラスチックリトル - Plastic Little (1994, OVA) 50 minute runtime DVD Cover: From left to right, Mei, the ship's doctor, Tita and Elysse, who cares about the guys on the crew, right? First the really weird thing, this was supposed to be a 13 episode series and about limited lifespan androids, but it's about a ship captain called Tita, her crew and a blonde girl called Elysse that her father saved at the expense of his own life in absolutely dramatic, if somewhat hackneyed opening. As you can probably guess just by looking at that DVD cover, there's some mild fanservice in this OVA. The first thing Tita does after picking up Elysse is going to a bathing area with her where we find out that the now nude girls are 17 and 16, and Tita is impressed by Elysse's bust size, and I'm pretty impressed by the smooth jiggling animation. So are two of the male crewmembers who put on diving gear to take a peek... or two... resulting in the most impressive underwater nosebleed ever. Well, who said anime was better in the 90ies? Anyone? Hello, guys? *Crickets Chirping* Tita notices the two peeking at them and employs a defense system that was apparently only made to give peekers an electric shock. No, really, I'm serious. It's a button with a skull on it and it zaps the two, exactly where they are, and only that area. Hilariously placed button that apparently is really DANGARous to use! Can't argue with the result of this particular contrivance, huh? Anyway, once the crew figures out what's going on with the military and the evil commander (TM), they're off on an insane mission to stop him before he finds the password to a superweapon hidden in Elysse's DNA. The animation is fantastic, but the image quality is hampered by this being a terrible DVD transfer from a Never The Same Colors (TM) Laserdisc source, the analog color television standard that Satan (hopefully!) still tortures Walter Ransom Gail Baker for. At any rate, Tita picks up Elysse after she runs into her and a group of absolutely inconspicuous soldiers in purplish-black combat armor that doesn't at all scream evil goons tries to pick her up. The voice acting is, as it is wont for the time it was made, fairly good in terms of direction, and somewhat bad in terms of audio quality. Himemia Anthy from Utena supplies the lead's voice, so that is someone we all know. The fan-service is... not nearly as offensive as I thought it would be (it still has plenty of jiggling breasts, make no mistake), but thanks to this being an OVA much more explicit than usual. I guess there's a censored version of this for broadcast too. The storyline waffles from implausible (a civilian group of hunters is taking on the military for a girl they don't even know) to hackneyed (hiding passwords to superweapons in a girl's DNA, how 90ies can you get? ) and is fairly run-off-the-mill 90ies sci-fi schlock with an absolutely fantastic trash ending that will most likely leave you dumbfounded by its ludicrousness: The character models are great, the music is a little on the bland side but not terrible, and the sound effects are pretty good, even if the audio quality leaves a lot to be desired. Overall this isn't at all what I expected it would be. Very much recommended for any fan of 90ies sci-fi schlock and lovers of perfectly animated, perfectly jiggly and perfectly perky boobies. As a special bonus for @Bartimaeus, in the English dub, Tita is voiced by Amanda Winn. I'm sure that'll tide you over any misgivings regarding the absolutely pants storyline, the silly contrivances and the, uhm, questionable content there is. This isn't a spoiler:

In case you're interested enough after all these years.

The funniest part is when they yell about how everyone has an agenda, but Malone is the poster boy of having one. He just feels cheated out of his glory and money, and lashes out accordingly.

Name the bridge crew, please. Fun discussion topic time. Order nuTrek by level of terribadness. Picard >> Discovery S4 > Discovery S2 > Discovery S3 > Into Derpness = Star Trek: Beyond Bad = Discovery S1 > Star Trek 2009 > being waterboarded. First place is pretty cemented, regardless of how bad Discovery season four is going to get. That can't be beaten. Nope.

Organics made them to stop organics from making more synthetics that would inevitably wipe out all organics. No, wait, wrong franchise. Sorry. No, there is no explanation. Mecha-Cthulhu and its tentacles just hover somewhere in space, waiting for synthetics to make the call to come and free them from organic oppression.

How's Discovery going for you?

We always break our word, this what we do!

Woke up with pink eye, so sitting in front of the sceen is somewhat painful. Cancelled today's meetings and going to take a day of sickleave, let's see if it is better tomorrow, if not, then it's time to venture forth and visit my GP. Yay, nothing like going to a place where sick people gather in the middle of a pandemic.

Minor update: My wife's sister and her daughter seem to be fine, apparently they got lucky and only have mild symptoms (although given how quickly that can go bad, who knows). Her brother on the other hand, who had the false positive before Christmas now has a hard, dry and somewhat persistent cough. We all think he got COVID-19, but he isn't doing any testing since he got his "recovered from COVID-19" medical certificate from last time. That buffon is still going to work, which isn't problematic at all. It also must be a whole lot worse than he lets on because he usually doesn't take any medication at all (doctors are just there to make you sicker, not healthy, bla bla, conspiracy, blargh, blah) but apparently his meditation and Sufi practices don't help, so he started to take pain medication. The guy is an idiot, but he's tough as nails normally, so yeah... stupid. Just stupid. Fits, though. Morons, the lot of them. Meanwhile my mother was in close contact with an infected person yesterday, so now it's time to wait and see what happens. Luckily she recently had her booster shot, so she should be good. Yeah, no, wait until you catch a cold from someone the next time. That'll be hell. I haven't had a cold either for two years ever since this started, and near the end of last year was knocked out for three days and was pretty down for a week from a silly sniffle (wasn't COVID though, just really, really bad case of the common cold). Respiratory infections suck without constant immune system training. That nobody got the flu is pretty understandable, it's a lot less infectious than SARS-CoV-2 and spread in the same way, so all the anti-corona measures killed that spread pretty quickly.

Obviously. Caught a nice, reddish pink eye. Looks like I'm not going to watch a whole lot of stuff either for the time being.

Yikes, hopefully that'll get better soon. I've been... no, wait, that's the wrong way around, everything about this show has been breaking my brain in unintended ways as I watch episodes for clues about when exactly this is supposed to play and whether or not anything at all is period appropriate. The actual samurai on the show carrying a katana and a wakizashi really implies Edo period, the knowledge of electricity late Edo at that, on the other hand there's plenty of people carrying tantō too - not only was having those really limited to samurai, actual forging of the short swords (more like daggers, really) was severely reduced during the Edo period due to samurai essentially switching from tachi/tantō to a katana/wakizashi combination. The latter sword wasn't just limited to samurai (unlike katanas), but were als allowed to be carried by higher standing members of other castes. Either way, assuming for a moment Ms. Moonlit Ran the Windborne was a samurai regardless of being a woman (who of the appropriate cast were allowed special, shorter tantō for self-defense, if I remember correctly), her lack of having a wakizashi could be the reason she's wandering around. Losing one of your blades was a decently quick way to get dishonored. Would fit her character to forgo commiting seppuku and take off. Either way, I'm overthinking this way too hard.

Carried by the Wind: Tsukikage Ran, episode 11. It seems like almost each of these can be summed up by stating that Myao is retarded, but oh boy is she ever. You'd think that'd get old after a while, but somehow it just doesn't. It keeps being funny, even though something at the back of my head tells me that laughing at the antics of the mentally handicapped is kind of wrong, but hey, she's fictional... edit: Right, forgot to mention, the rest of the episode was about how vengeance killing is stupid and Bushido is stupid, both things I can agree with.

To be honest, there's also this misconception that Austrians are unfriendly to foreigners because they're foreigners. Not always true, especially in the eastern parts of Austria. People are just unfriendly, period, and even when they're nice they're unfriendly. There's a joke that's going to lose a whole lot in translation, but I'll try. A German accidentially walks over a piece of private property in Vienna. The owner yells at him: "Hey sh1thead, wanna get off my lawn? Hurry up or I'll punch you out." The German apologizes profusely for trespassing and the owner replies: "Yeah, don't sweat it, that's why I'm telling you off nicely." There's a Facebook group (called something like "Everyday Poetry") where people send in conversations they pick up on the streets or in shops, the best ones get published. Like: Customer enters a flower shop and asks "Do you sell flowers?" The owner replies with: "Lady, we sure ain't selling sandwiches." Well, you get the general idea, I guess. It's much funnier in the original language and when you're familiar with the culture.

I'll just post one more thing before going to bed, and that's about the misquoted Miyazaki meme, because I usually don't like to use it. What he really did talk about was the sorry state the anime industry is in compared to how it was in the past, and that's something I can easily get behind. He blamed that on the prevalence of otakus amongst anime and managa artists (at least, I think that is what he really meant by it), creating an industry that produces what they want without having any perspective for the real world. That sounds harsh, and it probably is, but really, what else can you say when you're putting so much effort into creating your visions and then see the trash that's thrown out left and right? It's probably not enough to explain what's going on, because there's a definite trend in entertainment to producing "safe" trash all the time. Films, TV shows, video games... why would anime be any different, and apparently that trash does well enough to perpetuate its existence - but so does dime a dozen shovelware. I grew up prefering anime (without even knowing that it was anime) because it was more artistic than Western cartoons and didn't operate from what seemed to be the assumption that all its viewers are retarded. I know not all cartoons are like that, but the ones we had on TV were, by far and large, unless they were from the 60ies, like early Tom & Jerry or Bugs Bunny. It's just sad that everything's mostly trash now.

It's an empty threat on my end as well, but hey... I mean... I don't know what I've done that made this pop up in my feed. There's a world of a difference between looking for the Magic User's Club lullaby and getting a trailer for this... trash.