majestic

I have a hard time explaining it because the parallels I could draw would perhaps raise undue expectations. So far, it's a sci-fi version of the Sailor Stars filler arc, just with a teambuilding and training part attached to it. That's not entirely correct because the first episode of the filler arc, and part of the second at least still had more slice of life elements than this. Sure, the team goes to the mess to eat and talk, they bond, spend some time in the bunk or relaxing outside, but that's here and there - and even all of that is spent on the Space Cop compound. The characters also aren't nearly as well defined as the main cast of Sailor Moon was at the time of the arc - that was some 166 episodes into the series after all. The animation isn't good enough to give the action the more visceral feel it would need to become really entertaining, but at least I'm not 100% certain that everyone is going to pull through, so it feels as if something is at stake. Storywise they're trying to apprehend a criminal conducting some illegal research for so far unknown purposes. He sure looks more like a villain than the villains of the past two season (save for Fate's mother, but she was looking for a way to revive her lost daughter, not to destroy the world or summon Pharao 90, or something). Time to watch some more, maybe they'll just mess it up. That would make it easier to talk about.

So, when are you finally watching that third Madoka film? Nanoha talk:

Not so bad news for a change. Antivaxxer brother-in-law's test result looks like a false positive*. He's been on a pretty strict testing regiment in the past weeks because of his work, so all his prior testing results before the one on Sunday were negative, and two separate PCR tests since Sunday (one on Tuesday, and one on Thursday) came back negative, including the official quarantine confirmation test. That's going to be some hassle later because he's paranoid as hell and probably thinks the government/state/deep state/illuminati/aliens have it out for him, but eh... at least there's a chance that he didn't infect his high risk patient sister during an absolutely unnecessary family outing. *Not necessarily a false positive, if you test with a ct-value of >30 then you're still quarantined until confirmation, although that can just as well mean you've successfully fought off infection after exposure, but given incubation times and him not being vaccinated, that... yeah. Shucks.

In winter, it's cold outside, so they don't want to go outside anyway. This really is just about lush spring and summer evenings. I've always hated DST for as long as I can remember. Particularily in summer, because who wants sunlight until eleven when you're a kid and have to go to bed early?

The usual line of defense I hear for daylight savings time goes like: "I want to be able to sit outside and enjoy the sun for an hour longer after work." Don't look at me, I don't get it. I'm as pale as a white axolotl. Totally, in the same way buying backing the limited signed collector's edition of Torment: Tides of Numenerea was a "reasonable" expense.

Yeah, to be honest, I just complained about the bill because I'm a regular miser who agonizes over everything. The only things I regularily buy without thinking too much are silly tech gadgets and games. I sit here complaining about having to buy a new boiler but I do have a 300€ floating lava rock here that serves absolutely no purpose. Except for floating. It's supposedly stable enough to hold a bonsai tree, but I'm not going to try that, and one power outage is liable to produce quite a mess when it comes tumbling down. Still fun to look at though. Really powerful magnetic field too. Looks like this, except with a lava stone: I could power an electric tankless heater or my electric oven, but certainly not both at once.

That's for an 80l stainless steel tank boiler. Tankless would only make sense if I switch to gas heating (even with gas prices being what they are), and that's a whole lot of upfront cost for barely any gain, as I don't heat my apartment with it. I mean, we do have a gas powered central heating system, but it's not running off my warm water supply.

Magical Girl Lyrical Nanoha StrikerS, episode 9:

Depends on what you need. There's like one company left making boilers of the size I had with the same form factor, and they're making you pay through the nose for them, so a cheaper one with less capacity it was, which necessitated some installation work that I neither wanted to nor actually could do myself. Still, the bill ended up being half of what the other boiler would have cost (as in, just the hardware). Talking about 400€ in terms of pure hardware costs, but that is a quality product that'll last for a while. Could find some for half of that, but you get what you pay for, and all that.

Magical Girl Lyrical Nanoha StrikerS, episode 8. The one thing this needs is being sent back in time to the late 80ies or early to mid 90ies period to have better animators work on the show. It's definitely a magical girl show for people who usually don't like magical girl shows, it's pretty different, very sci-fi-ish and so far successfully toeing a very fine line between fun action, serious character development and a somewhat interesting storyline (caveat: that is me loving the setup, your milage may vary) without feeling as opressively melancholic as the first two seasons. Could do with a little less fanservice, there's no need for Tia's gun holsters to wrap around her breasts, but seinen's gonna seinen, and it's really better this way than what came before, so please, by all means, focus on Subaru's hot pants and Tia's holsters as much as you want.

Just after I complained it had one of these great Komi and Tadano have a quiet conversation moments, but then the Bokukko and the insane Stalker Girl showed up and it was over pretty quickly. The episode doing a 24-style clock insert was semi-funny, meaning I appreciated the idea of the joke, even if it didn't cause any reaction. Still, ugh. Stalker Girl made me want to gauge my eyes out and pierce my eardrums .

Well, the bill for the new heater and its installation arrived in the mail today. There goes the money I would usually just waste on booze, hookers and coke. Still, having warm water in winter beats some fun on the side, right? *shrug*

Komi Can’t Communicate… episode something. This is gradually getting worse. If I stop posting it is because I decided to become an ascetic hermit free from the shackles of modern technology or I killed myself to escape my OCD.

This is a '91 Japanese comic, so chances are it originally read as something like new-half or worse, but yeah, modern translations should be a bit, uhm, different. Yes you did, and I find myself agreeing...

Lann is a Crusader archetype cleric, he just doesn't know it yet when he starts the game. Sure beats Sosiel and his 10 DEX with Medium Armor feat, and giving him a mount adds a nice early game tank and some extra party carry weight. Sure you can do all that with Sosiel too, but Lann actually can hit things from the backline, and eat the ocassional attack that comes his way. Daeran isn't a cleric, because cleric get domain powers. Especially Nobility and Community... worth taking mythic feats for. Well, in my opinion. Daeron makes a decent divine blaster if you give him Bones as extra Mystery, but I'd still rather bring Ember for hexes and some burning hellfire. There's only so many classes you can take before the bonuses start cutting into your character progression, and I haven't checked yet what happens when you take Paladin and become a Lich, with the new patch that apparently locks your alignment to neutral evil. Not an issue for an existing monk level, but I think an issue for... well, Paladins, although with the homecooked mechanics of this game, I don't really know. There's also only so much you really need. With Archmage Armor, the Scaled Fist CHA to AC, the bonuses from being undead, the extra Lich spells, the bonus stats from Dragon Disciple and an almost endless supply of Mirror Image, Blur and Greater Invisibility casts, yeah well, sorry, what do I need a mutagen for? Not that playing Vivisectionist in general is a bad thing, the game doesn't really track how many sneak dice you can actually have, so you can load that... end up with something like 15d6 sneak attack. Add a monk level for some fun scaling (and easy crane style access) and some Arcane Slayer for mage armor and you should be good. Motherless Tiefling for that natural attack, feral mutagen... pairs somewhat well with Trickster since you can skill mule a bit anyway. *shrug* Then there's the extra added cheese if you make mercenaries. Ever tried a Brown-Fur Transmuter casting an empowered Frightful Aspect on someone else? Or even early on, +6 DEX Cat's Grace is not to be sneered at. *shrug* So, anime! I, uhm... haven't talked about last week's Komi Can't Communicate episode, which I should do before watching this week's. Like @KP Cross Split Attack (lol name change) alread said, it was nothing remarkable. However, I thik Komi's "Help I can't speak" face is up there with the best emoting of anime characters ever. Certainly one of my favorites, together with Sakura's faceplanting and Usagi's hilarious faces in Sailor Moon. And that's taken pretty much from the manga, so it's hard to credit the anime with the look...

Yeah, you win.

They're nigh-useless in most AD&D 2nd edition cRPGs unless multi or dual classed too, but they're usually in heavy armor and at least in theory field a weapon that can hurt enemies in melee combat. White Mages in JRPG on the other hand can heal undead to... erm, their second death, but other than that, nope. They really are just mages with buffs and healing spells. WotR you either make a Crusader or an Oracle with the Angel mythic path and go "lol, did I just step on a demon lord?" and make enemies go KERPOW with Arbitrament and your funky Angel spells that are all not subject to saves or spell resistance. Making your main character a cleric even takes care of hauling one along. Which means being able to leave Lann at home. Overall probably the best main character to play, unless you want to do something silly like a Sorcerer/Monk/Dragon Disciple/Eldritch Knight/Lore Master 80+ AC 2-handed Fauchard crit machine with a merged Lich spellbook. In IWD2 clerics arguably make the better frontliners than pure fighters, but that's 3E for you. Fighter(4)/Cleric of Helm(X), have fun. Anyway, my point being that the cleric class conjures up an image that's not really a mage with healing spells. What was the topic of this thread again? Oh, right, anime... anyone seen the new Komi episode yet?

Yeah, to consistently hit the harder enemies later in the game you'll have to aim for a 65+ attack bonus after buffs (more for unfair difficulty, but at least that is self-admittedly meant to be unfair). The entire game is set up so you need to load the dice in your favor to even stand a chance, unless you happen to have a main character Angel with spellbook merging, because in that case you're blessed with spells neither subject to saves nor spell resistance and a whole lot of casts per day.

White Mage is a character class/job originally from Final Fantasy, I think. A healer and support type spellcaster that's pretty much in every JRPG ever. Classical turn based JRPGs, that is. In something like Secret of Mana you just have the girl character with her support and healing magic, and nothing of the sort in Terranigma or Illusion of Gaia. This is a White Mage from Bravely Default 2, a swordmaster and an, uhm, what was that guy again, some divine caster (Spiritmaster). More like a priest from World of Warcraft, just without a damage skill tree. Western styled RPG clerics are usually not complete wet noodles in combat and don't just wear decorative night gowns in battle.

By the way, I'll just shamelessly post the promotional poster hosted on TV Tropes for the third season to make a point about how much this anime looks like a JRPG: Hayate (top center, white hat, largest character on the poster) in particular is a poster boy girl white mage. Robes, white hat, giant staff with a cross on it... ticks off tropes like there's no tomorrow in general. Giant hammer, giant sword, spears, a summoned mini-dragon.

inb4 @Keyrock : Steamworld Dig 2 is absolutely fantastic.

I suppose it's liable to not do that, what with the setting. I also imagine real samurai weren't always smelling like sunflowers. It's really heartwarming to see StrikerS continuing A's excessive use of weird German. One of the characters working for the villain of this season just summoned an "Insektzug" which the subtitles helpfully translated as insect platoon. Technically it is not exactly wrong to just combine insect and plattoon, but since a platoon is more than one insect it should be Insektenzug and even that is... odd, to say the least. Zug is a common military term that's barely ever used outside of the military to talk about a group of soldiers and the word Zug has a whole lot of meanings depending on the context, just as long as something moves or pulls (to pull / ziehen, Zug is essentially the substantive of ziehen, literally also the pull) something it can probably be a Zug - e.g. trains, a chess move would be a Schachzug (Schach = Chess), a draft is a Luftzug, the rifling in a, uhm, rifle, is also a Zug, and so on. Migratory birds are Zugvögel. Moving from one place to the other is an Umzug. Weird use of words is weird, I mean, and that's not even touching the other potential uses for Zug - a mountain range is a Gebirgszug for instance, and a character trait is a Charakterzug. Picking Kompanie (company) isn't the same because a Kompanie is at least two Züge, however... really, like, easier to understand the intention behind it. Insektzug sounds like a bad way to say Ameisenstraße (ant trail), really. Magical Girl Lyrical Nanoha StrikerS episode 7 So far it looks like there'll be actual character development. I thought the extra runtime would be dedicated to stupid action and fanservice, but that's only part of it. I thought the first two seasons were okay to likeable, by far and large (except when the first one wasn't). This is currenlty on its way to being actually good. I just hope they don't mess it up.

I don't think wimmin were allowed to be samurai.

Naoko loves telling scary stories because Sakura flips out immediately.