majestic

Would you like to know more? Yikes, looks like the jig is up, folks.

Yeah, Madhouse used to make quite good-looking shows. Azuki-chan looks interesting, but yeah, there's really nothing in terms of subtitles, and no German dub either that I could try. Guess that's as goood a motivation as any to continue with the Japanese learning thing, but the way how it is going right now I'm more likely to be able to read the language at some point than listen and understand. Geez. In the interest of not making my brain explode I'll skip the 30 minute movie for the time being and just take your word for it.

Not since 1945...

The forum software inexplicably dropped the spoiler wrapping for your part of the quote, and I cannot for the life of me edit it back in. The WYSIWIG editor simply doesn't work. Maybe I got banned in the meantime, who knows?

If you do that you'll probably terminate the forum software for good. I'm struggling with her pretty much any time...she does or says anything, really. The other three I can kind of get behind in that they're sort of like sticking Usagi, Kero, and Tomoyo in a school club together, but she doesn't fit a mould of any character that I already like and in fact does just the opposite. Unfortunately, in addition to her character being...tough for me, the show is also insisting on placing undue negative attention on her in a number of other ways that aren't really her fault but are nevertheless unpleasant. But, anyway, you're further along now than I thought you'd get. Must be doing something right, at least. Who knows, if you actually get to season two, you might like the episode that focuses on Ritsu and Mugi spending time together, which I didn't really think worked out. *shrug* Something was off about that episode for me. Maybe it was the placement, or the fact that it once again did the "Hey, Toya and Yukito are here for no reason!" joke again. The episode was fine, really, it just felt... well, off. Kind of out of place for season two, and like a leftover script from season one.

Huh, so how did I miss this? Not sure. Interesting because that was one of my least favorite episodes in the entire first arc, next to the one with Shot and the ice skating one. Still says a lot about the overall quality of the arc when one of the episodes you liked the least ends up in a top episode list of someone else...

Yum yum...

So, like, what's with the spoiler tags, do you think anyone else is interested in K-On!? As far as beach episodes go the one in K-On! are mostly harmless fun. The short focus on Mio's cleavage is the most fanservice this'll get actually, not counting that Christmas episode where, uhm,... In case the first season squanders the last remaining goodwill, just abort it, watch the last two episodes and the OVA and continue with K-On!!. It's a constant up and down with season one and not worth souring yourself on the rest. The tail end of the first season and the second season are night and day compared to the rougher nonsense that happens every now and then in the earlier episodes. Also, not gonna lie, K-On! is totally going to have another beach episode.

Ah, a side effect I had not considered. That's true, but I didn't spend a whole lot of effort or time writing the post, to be honest. I could have put up helpful links to read through regarding the debates around what is and isn't fascism as the term moves more and more towards what you've mentioned, i.e. any sort of law and order type of police state or a nation more run by corporate interests than those of its people (often both, for somewhat obvious reasons). In the more expanded sense, we have a good deal more fascists on the board than just him, even though they've been curiously quiet in the past weeks. I could have looked up some of the many articles about Snowden or Assange, and linked those, put in more of a structure, anything really. What I should have done though is differentiate a little in the legal system part of the post before Gromnir swoops in and counter-rants. No, of course the US legal system is better than that of many nations, because by far and large it is functional. It does, however, have a number of downsides, and when you read that someone in Missouri has been wrongfully imprisoned for 42 years and isn't pardonned immediately after realizing that fact because "he's probably guilty of something" and "his pardon is not a priority" then that's just ludicrous and not worth emulating. An anecdote? Perhaps. What's not one is the horrible state the US prisons are in, including the systematic violence, or the fact that no other Western nation has more inmates per capita, which is really not something that is readily explained away by way of saying "the US is different than other places on the planet", which might hold true for gun related violence or th sheer, easily underestimated size of absolutely nothing in between the coasts (re: posts about a first world nation with third world infrastructure), but not for the fact that there are too many people imprisoned over crimes that should not carry any prison sentence in the first place and that the courts seem to get mired in dealing with little things that should be done with a slap on the wrist. I think that's something that could use some reform. It also has a couple of upsides. Class action lawsuits are something that I'd love to see here too. VW, having bought Germany's CDU, was more than just slapped on the wrist for their manipulated exhaust tests in the US, while in Germany and by extension the rest of the EU they got off way too easily - but yeah, that's Germany for you. Where one can get the idea that big oil and the military-industrial complex owns the United States government, the automobile companies certainly own Germany's. Of course, for any of the points, we could argue that somewhere else is worse. Of course, there almost always is a place where things are worse, but that can't be the standard we're holding everything to. "It's worse somewhere else" as the basis for not trying to improve seems like the perfect way for things to deteriorate until the barbarian hordes (not talking about the illegal immigrant issue here) are at the gate and it is too late.

You know, @Gorth, I keep reading your posts about these animes, and I keep finding myself slightly interested, but then I watch the trailers or look at the pictures you post and I'm like "Nah, thanks, I'm good."

I originally just wanted to ignore this, but I can't sleep, so why not. See, at the core of fascism, and that is pretty much the only thing academia can agree on when it comes to defining the word in this day and age (and not even that, in some cases, I guess), you'll find what Adolf Hitler later called the Führerprinzip. The glorious leader and the leader's cult of personality. For you though, that doesn't mean following an actual person, just your glorified image of the United States government, of all things, as this glorious, infallible defender of freedom, virtue and justice in the world. The avatar and your own projections, essentially, that can do no wrong and very much rests above the law and justice it deigns to mete out in the world. The glorious leader that should never be criticised, because everywhere else is worse. That train of thought follows through many of your postings and points of view. Snowden is a traitor, Assange is a terrorist. If someone from Russia and China would leak documents detailing their global espionage programs or human rights violations, or actual war crimes, you'd be at the forefront, leading the vanguard in arguing against them and calling these people heroes. Rightly so, actually. In turn though, when your glorious leader commits war crimes, the one leaking the information is not a hero, but a criminal. So you argue against China violently stopping protests in Hong Kong because China is the enemy, not because you're convinced or believe that protests should not be stopped violently. As long as those protests are at the home front, and heaven forbid, threaten business interests, it suddenly becomes an acceptable train of thought to carpet bomb them with pepper spray, or to send in the police to violently beat miners back to work, because they're hurting the bottom line of stakeholders - and because they shouldn't complain about their lot, miners in China have it worse still. Russia isn't supposed to support Assad in Syria because Assad is a terrible person. True. But so is Mohammed bin Salman, but he's buying sweet, sweet hardware from your glorious leader, so therefore that cooperation can't be bad. Never mind that having enemies chopped up and dissolved in acid, or locking them up without trial, or beheading them is... well, is that actually any better at all than using chemical weaponry on your own population? Saudia Arabia is one of the biggest destablizing factors in the Middle East, a topic you love to comment on, except in your glorious leader given worldview, it's actually Iran who is the biggest threat to stability in the Middle East, not the nation that's bankrolling terrorist groups left and right. The Iranians are simply the enemy from a while back because eh, nobody liked Khomeini (and nobody should), especially not when he leads revolutions agains the puppets of the glorious leader. You look at proof of systemic racism in the United States, and defend it by saying that it's not that bad, after all, it was - maybe still is - way worse in South Africa. As if two wrongs make a right. You look at companies and other nations buying Huawei hardware and argue against it, and when presented with proof - undeniable, hard proof at that, which, remember, does not exist for the opposite claim (although it would be naive to think that there are no backdoors in Huawei hardware, mind) - you default back to "but they wouldn't do the bad things China is going to do with that data", more or less ignoring that Snowden detailed how intelligence agents kept emailing each other with intercepted nude pictures of college students to either make fun of them or whack off to, and tell me, in what way should people of such moral turpitude be trusted to take more care with intelligence they gather than anyone else on the planet? Hint: They shouldn't. Finally, let's go back to how Assange should trust the United States legal system. I do not know how bad the legal system in South Africa is, to be honest, but it must be pretty terrible if you look at the US and see a model legal system for everyone to emulate. I mean, you actually do believe that Assange is going to get a fair trial in the US. Something which not even a UK court was convinced of, and the UK is, these days, in a hilarious inversion of history, nothing but a colony of the United States. Hell, even their current prime minister is a ludicrous little copy of the former Tangerine in Chief of the United States. So, no, you're incredibly biased towards your glorious leader, incapable of seeing the flaws where they are, unable to entertain the idea that there are any. You criticise one course of action only to turn around and cheer exactly the same, just because the glorious leader does it. You try to feign neutrality, but in reality love any and all draconian and autocratic measures you can think of, just as long as they're democratically legitimized, because it would look bad if they weren't. Caesar can do no wrong, after all. When Big Brother decides that Eurasia is now an ally, and Eastasia the enemy, then it was always thus, never any different, because who are we to argue, right? There are five fingers, and we all love Big Brother. We could argue a technicality here and say that actual fascism requires an actual glorious leader as a person, not an idealized symbol of something that either never existed in the first place or is long gone. Perhaps that is the case. If so, then you're not a facist, just a cult member drinking the kool aid. I don't know if that is any better. Probably not. At any rate, that's just semantics. At the end of the day, you're exactly the sort of person who would read Brave New World and wonder why it's a dystopian vision of the future. *sigh* I already regret posting this before the fact. Alas, now that I've spent time on this, what am I to do but press Submit Reply. Perhaps the forum will eat the post. Oh, should I only be so lucky...

It's really too bad that Joseph Hannesschläger died.

How utterly unrealistic.

Did you fight the Demon of Hatred?

Uhm. I've seen the argument that the US is run by the Joos pretty often in neo-nazi circles, but that's certainly new. Am I reading this wrong is or Trump lamenting that a foreign nation no longer runs the US Congress? That seems... odd, to say the least.

She shows up every now and then and is basically only there to dutifully cover the club’s arse whenever Ritsu did a Minako and forgot to properly organize something for the club, and because… it would have been weird for Yui to not have a friend prior to meeting the other girls. She eventually is turned into a BFINO like Naru (BF in name only just in case it wasn’t obvious ;)). It does the next best thing though, but admittedly I ended up liking Mugi’s attempts to be more like regular girls charming. The only downside is that she doesn’t work on her own. There is an episode or two in season two that tries but it ends up being a try and nothing more. Ritsu imagining Yui studying in the same way she would was hilarious and she’ll get Mio-slapped an awful lot. Not gonna lie though, season one keeps being rough at times (especially after Sawako shows up to mentor the club) but thankfully it’s short. The Christmas episode is probably the worst and you could just skip it (in theory), even though it shows that Yui sees more in her sister than just a way to have everything done for her. Just saying this because it looks like you’re giving this more of a chance or trying harder than usual to not hate it. Your reaction to the first three episodes kind of mirrored my own. I don’t know, the voice acting was okayish, except when it wasn’t. If Yui is an Usagi type then Ritsu is a Minako. Sort of. There both is and isn’t a big difference between the two.

Oh dear, oh dear. The second season opens with that chipmunk hyper song and I now everything makes more sense including you finding the voice direction not irksome. Hahaha. I never liked the chipmunk song. It was the first intro I liked. And the rice one that you’re a good deal less likely to see as it was meant to. Ah, well… uhm… So much for the bright side. The bad side is if your reaction to season two was lukewarm then uh… uh… this will not end well, will it? Ok season two opens with the expectation that you know the characters already and all (and ideally like them) and that can’t have made a whole lot of sense. On the other hand you now know it’ll not stay a brain peeler…

When I think back to watching K-On! the only thing I really liked about the first episode was the ending. That Yui will end up joining the club was a forgone conclusion, but they played for her and after that just perfectly timed pause said: “You guys really aren’t good, huh?” and it was really funny. The second episode convinced me that there is some potential in it, and the third has the first real laugh out loud moment. Hmmm. The girls take up a really boring part time job in the second episode, and it has this really funny moment when Mugi goes to haggle with the store clerk who ends up selling her the guitar for half the asking price.

Will be posting from my phone until tomorrow at least so I’ll not bother quoting too much, but let me allay one fear. It’s not too much about the cakes, they’re often just eating cake and drinking tea while talking… instead of practicing their instruments. Well, except when someone steals Yui’s strawberry. Kind of anti-Japanese in a way. They’re lazy and don’t just give their best like they’re supposed to. What else can I say. It leaves most of its issues behind at the end of season one and I thought the rest of the first season was uneven but generally still funny and nice overall. I’m not sure there are any direct panel adaptations because the basis for this was a four panel joke comic, but the not so fun weird jokes in between are probably based on the comics.

Indeed, not necessarily for its content, because that is mostly fine (some exceptions in season one), but the presentation takes some getting used to, from the animation to the semi-chibi style of the characters, and the first season has some rough edges where the showrunners still had manga panels to work with, but more on that as a reply to the actual post. Wee! Fun, random fact: Games of chance have a state monopoly here, which means that only the state is allowed to run casinos or paid, large scale lotteries. Betting on the other hand doesn't fall under that regulation, because it's considered a game of, uhm, skill, because indeed, it's entirely possible to place your bets in a way that will make you win money regardless of the outcome, you just need to find it. That's also the reason why there are private poker tournaments as long as they play Hold 'Em, because that's arguably more about being able to calculate your chances than random chance as a whole. Black Jack, on the other hand, is only played in casinos. Not that I like either, to be honest. I enjoy card games, but it's mostly either Schnapsen or Tarock, and in the case of the latter specifically a locally enjoyed variant that makes for much tighter gameplay. I thought you'd switch the moment Yui says something because that voice direction is just weird, but if adding honorifics in the dub did that, okay, at least the predicted result is fine the same. No, they're all semi-chibi for some reason. I actually ended up liking the first song on repeat listens, but that's the only one. Well, and the silly rice song, but that's more because of the underlying scene than the song itself. It's hard to hate a song out of a soundtrack that's like the culmination of half a season of character growth and preparation, regardless of how much I'm not into the music style (which is I don't know what, exactly, I keep calling that ska because that's what I think ska is, but hell if I know). That'll stick, beause Yui is such an Usagi at times... wait for her to flunk an exam. That's better than I thought the first episode would get, and yeah, it's rough. Yui won't drop paper sheets from now on, and won't be unable to talk, among a few other things (being Sakura and afraid of ghosts and scary things is shifted to Mio). The first season keeps having these randomly extreme moments that I'm assuming come from the manga, they're not entirely gone in the second season but toned down. Episode two has the girls buy a guitar for Yui (or try to, at least), that was... much better, and the third episode has genuinely funny moments when Mio tries to, uhm, prepare Yui for her makeup exam. Outside of the random extreme moments that seemingly don't fit into it, it's more of a matter of presentation than content, by far and large. At least, I think. The show is mostly silly girly stuff. And cake. Lots of cake. Man, Yui eats more than Usagi. Well, no, but eh...

I don't think I'll hate it from what you've posted about it, but let's make a deal, I won't hold that against you, and if you end up not liking K-On! (which I maintain is on the table, regardless of prognostications and that best of video) it's not going to be my fault either. I'm not taking any bets here. I'm weird, not insane. Heh, the things we did at school were pretty fun too. I already posted two essay style posts about it, one of them led Malcador to call me a sociopath, that was when I faked having had my school account hacked because I didn't do my homework, or when we started to acquire passwords by creating fake login screens. Simpler times, to be honest, much more fun. Decidedly more problematic too, so it wasn't all roses, or however that saying goes. You know, sometimes I wonder if the magic is gone from many activities I enjoyed back then because I'm older now, or if that is simply a product of experience. I can't recall the last time I felt about a game the same way I did when looking at games from the nineties. Sure, it's easier to enjoy things when you're younger and more carefree, right, but that can't be all of it. I've tried a bunch of MMORPGs, but none ever were as magical as EverQuest (or Ultima Online, which I played more in my mind than on my screen, what with dial up being unable to handle it by far and large). Me loving Cardcaptor Sakura so much seems to confirm that it's not just nostalgia and being younger. Eh, the hell, I'll stop rambling.

ViVid Strike!, episode two. Huh, I might have to drop this back to regular playback speed. The episode focused on Fuu(ka)'s new work and life schedule, she spends time talking to Einhart and Nove, cleans the gym, works the reception, and at the end the girls convince her to try and make up with Rinne. I guess this will take the form of her beating Rinne, because why wouldn't it, but overall that was actually a nice episode, except for the transformation bits, and Einhart is in the shower for a bit. The girls transformed for the first time, and Fuu doesn't have a techno-mage thingmajig yet, so the others helpfully use their magic to transform her into an adult. It works, except... for her clothes, which promptly disappear. Cue red-faced Fuu running off. The other transformations aren't as bad as the ones from Magical Girl Lyrical Nanoha ViVid, but they're still a bit too long. The scene with her running off wasn't meant as fanservice (the other transformations, as always, are... as was Einhart in the shower, although that was thanfully short), it was clearly comedic in nature, except, yeah, as always, ha ha, I laffed. Not. Your milage may vary. Still, there's no reason to recommend watching this, and I don't think it will ever be "worth" watching outside of not being bad (assuming it keeps up being all right and doesn't fall apart). Feels a bit like the first season of Magical Girl Lyrical Nanoha, which is probably sort-of needed to establish the characters of A's and StrikerS, but is otherwise somewhat unremarkable, but I've commented on that at length. Ah, I see. I've cheated plenty at school, does that count? Looking forward to trying Carried by the Wind.

Yeah, me too, and the rate was like a dollar a minute for calls and 50 cent per text message, and the phones had a single line, characters only display and were large and heavy enough to double as an emergency baton. Good old times.

Huh, reading these last few comments I realized I still have the mobile phone number from '97. Same network provider too (slightly different mobile plan though ). I'm using a first generation iPhone SE (i.e. the miniature version of the iPhone 6S).