majestic

Strange, huh? I once spent two hours or so coming up with a totally crazy post about that particular ship that I now tried to find but can't, because the forum software refuses to find it, and I've tried Makoto, Ami, shipper and shippers as well as subtle as search terms, and that should suffice to make it appear. It really didn't. I'm 100% certain the post contains at least one of these words (if not all of them). For what its worth, I really hope they don't make a Stars adaptation. Hopefully Eternal bombed hard enough. I did find my post complaining about the Eternal films, by the way, those were funny, but really... nice to be reminded that Artemis isn't really just a cat. Yikes. I also paused Magical Girl Lyrical Nanoha Vivid at 11:38 into the fifth episode. Because it's the fith episode, and Lutecia just invited all the girls to the hot springs. I should just skip ahead, really, but I can't. Please don't let this be as bad as the original hot springs scene. Please.

It seems like the same sort of silly fun you fairly consistently rejected before, so no, I'm not sure you should like it either. Must be some really good garbage then, hence my curiosity. Funny how that went in stages. After the first four episodes I thought "Okay, so the transformation sequences were made by and for perverts, but that's something I can tell myself is a genre convention and leave it at that." After the fifth episode, I was regretting every life decision I ever made, but then decided to pretend it doesn't exist and actually enjoyed the rest of the season. Ended up liking A's and - that's kind of the weird thing now - loving (probably more than I should) StrikerS. I complained about certain elements, like the turn based feel of the battles and the action not being all too interesting and too plentiful, but overall, and that's something that Vivid made me realize, I actually like Nanoha, Fate, Hayate and the gang. I like Fate in spite of her being set up as this woobie who gets abused by her mother and the ridiculous shipping fuel "sort of, maybe" romance she has with Nanoha. They'd be a nice couple and one of the variety where nobody ever complains or comments on and where they'd just be, like, a normal couple, but the problem is that StrikerS waffles around being intentionally non-commital in an effort to encourage shipper discussions. So instead they're head-canon lesbians of people who post things like "Hey, they have sex with each other!", and I know I already complained about that. Vivid has them living together in a house, so that I can take as confirmation, probably, but Vivid is about an alien copy of the characters I used to like. They vaguely look like them (but really only vaguely, there's better fan art than this), but their behaviour is a mere approximation. I guess you haven't seen the Voyager episode where a copy of the holographic doctor is turned on 700 years in the future of a planet Voyager visited and is confronted with a completely warped view of what his crewmates and friends were (and for him, no time has passed, obviously), but Vivid makes me feel how the good doctor must have. Vivid was made by people who had only incomplete access to very degraded copies of the original show, and they crafted a replica of what they thought Nanoha was like. That must be it, yes. Magical Girl Lyrical NANOHA The MOVIE 1st made me want to pause the series, but 2nd A's was pretty decent, if still not providing a reason to watch it over the series. With Vivid now, the answer to that question becomes: Oh boy, am I ever. All it took were four episodes. It took SuperS a good deal longer to make me want to delete everything Sailor Moon from my brain, but Sailor Moon was a good deal better than the Nanoha franchise as a whole, even though that's tough to compare. They're both a magical girl series, but they're worlds apart in the same way Columbo and X-Files are. Both are about solving crimes, right? Eh, and StrikerS is pretty much its own thing. It's closer to a superhero TV show in a futuristic sci-fi setting than a magical girl show. That is what I meant with it's more comparable to Agents of SHIELD than any other anime I've watched.

She reminded me a bit of the Tactics mod encounters Weimar came up with back in the days of Baldur's Gate 2, but those, ridiculous as they were, stuck with the rules that the player played by, and they also were modifications, not something the game's designers added. This fight, on the other hand, puts you up against a level 16 neutral evil mage who transforms into a fighter, with permanent haste and true seeing just to make sure that pretty much all of your defensive options that otherwise would allow you to potentially withstand melee with such an enemy don't work, i.e. Mirror Image, Blur and Displacement. With more than one stack of Dark Sacrifice (Rule of Cool #1: Everything is more evil when it's called DARK, right?) she has an armor class you can only hit with natural 20ies, saves so high you can't make anything stick and an attack bonus that will make her hit you even if she somehow could roll a negative 20 - and that's with powergamed and prebuffed characters a new player isn't very likely to have. There aren't many enemies who are not immune to poison, but whenever you run into them - mostly humanoids - it really pays off to have a Stinking Cloud memorized. If you're making a conjuration and crowd control Ember, she's the perfect candidate. If not, sacrifice one of Nenio's spell slots. Without any Dark Sacrifice stacks, she still hits like a truck, but your characters are likely to survive more than half a round's worth of attacks. I don't think I need to mention it, but the encounter design doesn't change, these ridiculous roadblock style battles keep happening. The game more or less expects you not only to know what you're doing with the rules, but also to abuse them as best you can, in order to stand a chance.

One of these instances that might leave you wondering what the hell you're supposed to do if you don't beat him down before the buffs go off. The optional fight where you interrupt the summoning ritual earlier in the dungeon is also pretty terrible. You either win without any issues at all if you have a copy of Stinking Cloud lying around, or you end up on the chopping block, at least on Core and above, and it's one instance where RTwP is far easier to handle than TB. Those sacrifices really pop off if your crowd control character has a bad initiative roll in turn based.

StrikerS does very little of the former (the girls are aged up in StrikerS, I mean... fanservice is still there, of course) and has none of the latter, but who am I to argue when it comes to starting in the middle and stopping. Yeah, not gonna lie, those transformation scenes are really borderline, and episode five is beyond that.

Not all of it. Episode five of the first season was worse than anything in Steins;Gate, however the other episodes were all right. StrikerS, when it wasn't doing fanservice or falling apart at the end, I'd even call fantastic - for what it was, a military sci-fi mahou shoujo show with a decent balance between character moments (most of which were not slice of life character moments, make no mistake here, they're all living on the military base and mostly concerns the teambuilding) and action. It was fun, in an entertaining way, not in a comedic way, fast paced and not nearly as melancholic as the two preceeding seasons, and was pretty well written*, at least for 20 of its 26 episodes. The ending does a Sailor Moon / JRPG bit where it suddenly expands in scope to ridiculous end of the world levels, but even then there's only one episode I would say was below average, and that only because it dumped a lot of exposition that could have been worked into the episodes a little more naturally. There's much more to complain about in Vivid than the increasingly creepy transformation sequences or the shounen moments, these were just the primary focus because it's easy to explain them without prior knowlede of the series. Vivid really is the SuperS of the franchise. The old recurring characters are behaving differently than before, are speaking so noticably different than before that I have a hard time believing they're still the same voice cast (I only know for Vivio because I looked it up, haven't checked for the others), Vivio's narration is still ear piercing (she does that every now and then, it was gone for a bit, then came back). Everyone is also kind of the same, energetic, loud, childish, even Nanoha who was for the first three seasons the wise beyond her years sort of girl that always makes sensible choices. Where the first season and A's leaned a bit too hard into feeling melancholic, Vivid is trying too hard to be funny. Even the character moments that are there every now and then feel phony with that terrible voice direction. It's not just bad, it's awful, and was directed by someone else and very noticably animated by a different studio, and apparently it'll get even worse, because... Emphasis is mine. I wondered for a bit now where this is going, because at four episodes in, there's no plot yet. I mean, really, nothing. Except Einhart having attacked combat specialists on the street to see who is stronger, and that stopped in the second episode after Nove hurt her enough to collapse. Since then we're more or less focussing on Einahrt and Vivio growing closer and occassionally punching each other, which sounds fine on paper but really is just bad. Bad. Bad, bad! And if Wikipedia is right, and why wouldn't it be, it'll cap the show off with a magical martial arts tournament. Good thing there's only one season left after this, and that's a spinoff focusing on someone else, a martial artist fighting to... become stronger. *In the sense that the plot, for the most part, did not feel completely ridiculous, the characters behaved consistently and within their established personalities, when changes happen they make sense, the exposition happens - by far and large - naturally in a way that makes sense, nothing it too stupid which is quite a feat given the ridiculous setting, a lot of time is spent on building the team and everything they achieve feels earned, plus there was a good deal of care taken to establish the setting and think about how things should work, what makes sense and why things are the way they are. The story promises more than it can keep, in the end, but that's something else.

Yeah, well... I don't think Steins;Gate Zero can be any worse than Magical Girl Lyrical Nanoha Vivid. I'm at a loss here, really. Episode four sends the new cast to an uninhabited planet one of the antagonists of the last season exiled herself to. The entire time during StrikerS she was a calm and collected young girl with powerful summoning abilities who always spoke softly and somewhat quietly. Not unable or afraid to speak, just quiet. Sure did a full 180° and is the liveliest, high pitched screaming at the top of her lungs, character on the show, and totally happy people are coming to visit her. I'd buy her disposition being improved after Fate saved her mother last season, but really, that's just ridiculous. She even, ahem, completely remodelled open air hot springs for them. You know, on the formerly uninhabited planet she's just living in exile on. Remodelled hot springs, as if the planet was a holiday resort. The real reason there are suddenly hot springs is of course to have her naked in the water, and the scene is paused right now so I can make this post, because I'm "predicting" that everyone else will be naked and in the hot springs before long too. I can only hope not. This series and hot springs are a bad combination. According to IMBD, this was written by the same person that wrote two episodes of the first season, all of A's, and all of StrikerS. That can't be right, can it? So, time to see how many of them get naked and in the hot springs. Yay! edit: Well, so far they just went into the river to punch water. That's... better than anticipated. But the episodes ended and they're still on the planet, so plenty of time left.

I think I'll have to check that anime out eventually. Sounds like it's fun, plus it's really short. Third episode of Nanoha Vivid isn't so bad. Almost all of the Numbers (at least all who took the offer of rehabilitation instead of imprisonment, so Quattro is thankfully absent) showed up to observe the meeting between Einhart and Vivio. Einhart has the memories of former Hegemon Claus Ingvald (eh, okay), who wasn't so much in love with or married to Vivio (Queen Olivie, of whom Vivio is a clone) as much as they grew up together, with Olivie being a political hostage at the time. Great, so this sort of maybe romance between the two isn't weird in the sense that one is an ancient descendant of the other, but it's still weird. No, scratch that, this episode isn't "not so bad", that's just moments that aren't terrible. So far there are two things this show is about. The first: Understanding new people you meet, one punch at a time! And the other: Sure, the other seasons had their share of useless fanservice, including a terrible boob rub and loli-moments in a changing room, but the series were never this bad in addition to being fanservicey. On the bright side, and that's not much, Vivio's voice no longer feels like someone pounding down my eardrums. I don't know if something was wrong with the audio of the first episode or if that is because she stopped narrating in this incredibly toad-like voice or if I just got used to it. The audio quality of this isn't so great in general. Everything about the production quality of this series is bad. Let's see how much worse it can get, huh? edit: Einhart's adult transformation is worse than Vivio's, and that really took some doing. Who let the perv gang animate this?

Looks like I can't. While there's still 30 minutes left until the planned delivery window runs out, we're not that far down on the regular delivery route. Should have been delivered about an hour ago, give or take a few minutes. Sigh.

Dunno, he also claimed there's mercury in vaccinations (I always get a good laugh out of people claiming that organic mercury compounds like Thiomersal are dangerous BECAUSE MERCURY OH MA GAWD!), so at the very least he's been treading dangerously close to the abyss a while ago. Would not be surprised if he jumped off the deep end at some point. Yeah, fun thing that stuff with compounds, huh. Sodium is corrosive and highly flammable, and chlorine is pretty dangerous stuff when it's not used as miracle cure against every illness on the planet, and yet, ever tried living without sodium chloride? No? Yeah, thought so too. *sigh*

Not going to lie, I hoped for an actual hardware upgrade that leads to more stable frame rates* and I never would have upgraded to the OLED Switch if I still had my old one. The new dock has a LAN port now that I can't use (no cables anywhere near the TV, that wasn't a thing way back when), not even that is helpful. Emulation... yeah, for that I would need to emulate a hardware upgrade, so that's sorta out of the question. *Well, maybe they are. It's nominally the same hardware, but it is more efficient, so core temperatures should be lower. There's a chance the little hickups in games like Celeste are gone or at least lessened in docked mode - if they come from hardware issues at all. While I love Celeste, that game has no right to stutter and frame drop even on something as weak as the Switch. I can probably find out by tonight, but I'm more likely to try SMT V than Celeste. I've been sitting on that game for a while, unable to play. Heh.

I went with Einhard since I misread what was on the character chart that Mr. Tiddies used (there it's not very helpfully Einhalt and a bit small, so my brain made Einhard out of it), but in the show it's really Einhart, but I also edited that in at some point. I edited that post like fifteen times. edit: The episode title has her full name: So technically, that's Ainharuto Sutoratosu, Japanese being what it is.

I caved and ordered an OLED Switch for myself, my mother can keep my old Switch. It should arrive today. Not an upgrade I expect to get much use out of since I play docked most of the time, but hey, no point in buying a new old Switch when the price difference is this small. I'm also kind of hoping that the WLAN module in the new Switch is better, because the WiFi on the old one is a bit spotty.

Well... Nove has a fight with Heidi who so totally is not the adult form of future Vivio girlfriend Einhard. Not something I figured out by guessing though. There are not a lot of characters with heterochromia on the show, and "Heidi" is one of them, and Einhard from the chart has the same eye color. Heidi is looking for Ixveria, Flame King of Hades. Sure. Works for me. This is Nove's combat form in StrikerS: I'm a Dr. Light type robot. Well, cyborg, in StrikerS, but yeah, I used to be friends with Mega Man and Zero! ViVid turns her into this: Hello, I'm Nove, and I'll be your waitress at Hooter's today. Are you ready to order? Nothing can excuse Pegasus. Nothing. Absolutely nothing. Speaking of Pegasus, YouTube suggested I watch a "Sailor Moon Iceberg" video. Curious, I started watching, then I got lucky, the guy said "Haruka and Michiru are the second best power couple of Sailor Moon, after Pegasus and Chibi-Usa.", so I turned off the video and removed it from my YouTube history so I never accidentially run into an incomplete progress bar that makes me click back into it. This is going to bother me for a while, but I'm not watching that. No way. Come at me, brain, you'll not win this time I hope. Back to ViVid:

I kind of got lucky, becase the second half of the episode was okay, except for Vivio's voice direction. It's also never going to change the transformation sequence, I guess, so the only hope is that they didn't use it that often. Last season's cyborg villain squad have taken up various jobs, and some are serving at the Heiliger Kaiser Church. Vivio visits a character that everyone is apparently familiar with but is new, someone called Ixy, who is either in a magical whatever sleep or in a coma. Thanks, Nanoha wiki. Yeah, I don't really want to listen to a Japanese audio drama. Not that I could. Not even sure I ever will, to be honest, but that's neither here nor there. The episode helpfully ends with a cliffhanger as Nove is ambushed by a mysterious figure. Well, next episode will finally have some action, I guess.

Oh boy. The actual transformation sequence is even worse. Back in StrikerS, Vivio transformed into a Black Lady (the character) version so Nanoha can have a final boss battle at the end. Yeah, that part of StrikerS is from the final two episodes where I mentioned the season kind of fell apart writing wise. Turns out her magical transformation in ViVid turns her into Adult!Vivio, and she seems to have gotten the same boobjob that the actual Black Lady (the character) got from DEATH PHANTOM in Crystal. To her credit, Fate reacts the same way to that nonsense. Hello writers, it doesn't make terrible ideas great if you lampshade them. That you feel the need to lampshade them should give you a hint, really. That's something that can work, but not like this. It's too late to pretend I didn't start watching this, isn't it? Hey look, half the episode is over and suicide feels like a decent way out. If that could have gone any worse I don't know how, not counting brining back the loli-moments. But hey, eleven and a half episodes left, there's still time for this to get worse. Yay? #notmynanoha

I was kidding, mostly, I actually wanted to catch that in the theater with a friend of mine because it looked like really entertaining trash, but then things just shut down forever and ever. Doesn't sound like it was entertaining trash, though. The Game (1997): Michael Douglas plays an **** investment banker, which is a role he's pretty good at. Read the blurb, if that sounds at all interesting stop, because it's a bit like The Usual Suspects and relies heavily on not knowing what's going on. Any spoilers would be really detrimental for a first experience. David Fincher knows how to make movies, even if Alien³ turned out to be a little on the weaker side. Came out after Se7en.

Boy do I ever. I hope that intro did not contain a part of Vivio's actual transformation sequence, because that was some really, really bad stuff. Bend over so the camera gets a nice view of your butt during the transformation level of bad, really. Ten seconds into the first episode Vivio wakes up, and starts to speak. Nails on chalkboard. Nails on... chalkboard. Yikes. I can't believe that's the same voice actress that voiced Yuuno. Eh, and Mami in Madoka. Hello, I'm Vivio, and if I continue to talk like this, I'm going to make @majestic's eardrums explode. There's also... kind of everything woefully wrong with the art. Man, guys, really, I wouldn't call the first three seasons beautiful, but they sure look good compared to this trash.

I have only one question: Why? Did you at least get a nice t-shirt out of it? Like this one: Just with, uhm, forced to watch Sonic the Hedgehog?

Being an anti-vaxxer is the only thing that makes Nazis, Johova's Witnesses and left-leaning esoteric progressives find common ground. These times make for strange bedfellows, huh?

I was going to post that your first line here has potential to replace your quote in @KP on top of ZA WARUDO's signature, and then go went and edited it with some helpful explanation. Ah, what a missed opportunity. Considering the spelling of the name: ミャオ, yes very much meow. Heh. It's not that bad with Nanoha. Yet. You're thinking of Pretty Cure, I guess. 1000 episodes and 40 movies, yeah, that's a lifetime project. Still, sometimes I wonder what makes a series go that long, and if that's like a daily soap or something. The Bold and The Magical Girls, maybe? Kinda wish I could look into an episode here and there, but man, what... nope. Nanoha is "just" 3 seasons, four movies and two spin off series with 12 episodes each, at least when not counting mangas and video games and other material, which I pretty much don't. Magical Girl Lyrical Nanoha ViVid is up next, then ViVid Strike! which drops Nanoha from the title because the old cast is apparently no longer in it, or just with some brief cameos. Just reading up on it annoys me to no end because that character relationship chart had a helpful pink line (aka "romance" because what else would be pink, amirite?) between Vivio and a character named Einhard who is, oh what surprise, also a girl. Guess you really do catch the gay from having two moms, right? Shipping fanservice must go on, I guess. I'm willing to eat my comments if this ends up being tastefully done, but somehow I doubt that (in spite of it not really coming up as fanservice outside of that one picture I posted in StrikerS - and even that was ambivalent - it was really in full force in the movies, and those were more recent, so they take precedence). Also Vivio is like ten years old in ViVid, so that's about as stupid as that ship tease scene from the second Nanoha film. Not to mention that apparently Vivio is a clone of Einhard's great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-grandmother (give or take a couple of generations), what with her being a descendant of the royal family from the days of yore. The one that built the Doomsday device Dr. Scaglietti found. I'm probably overanalyzing already.

Yeah, so, this is your version of StrikerS. Speaking of which. Magical Girl Lyrical NANOHA The MOVIE 2nd A's You might notice that there's no struck out REBUILD in the title. That's mostly because this film was, shipping fuel aside, a lot better than the first one. Not to make any mistake, it's still not nearly as - ahem - good (in contrast) as the second season was, but the extra half an hour of runtime and dropping the pointless Tuxedo Mask subplot made the film much better than it could have been. It's still full of really bad CGI, and changes that aren't necessary and add nothing, but it works as a film, and I can see it working as a standalone version of the second season. Provided one likes extended, CGI enhanced action scenes. The fun critcisms that I had of the combat in this series looking a lot like turn based JRPG battles is gone. The movie budget was clearly spent on making the battles flashier and much less static, which on one hand is actually a nice change over the series, but on the other hand makes Hayate's divine caster outfit and magic a lot more ridiculous, and I don't even want to talk about how stupid Fate's giant Cloud Strife style plasma sword is in the light of hyper fast moving action combat. I already thought the second season had too much combat going on, and the film just upped that, but it also took out the edge and the opressive feeling of lingering on Hayate's disability and Nanoha's Weltschmerz narration about not having the peaceful days with Fate that she imagined and having to fight for peace once more. As such that leaves me somewhat conflicted, on the one hand, it eases the melancholic atmosphere a little, on the other hand, it also removes a few of the character scenes that made the second season reasonably decent in my book. The film rushes through Hayate's condition and the way it deteriorates where the series has more time to breathe, has more time to show the slowly developing respect Fate and Signum have for each other, the way the "villains" don't want to fight but feel like they have to in order to protect the only good life they ever had. Anyway, with how the film went, I'll probably look into the next one instead of pausing for a bit. Still no reason to recommend this over the series. There's some more Fate fanservice in this and the girls get ridiculously long transformation sequences, but no anime tiddies worth their money, to be honest, even with the Tome of the Night Sky being all nude in one scene. Tiddies! 'S funny, as good as I thought the third season was, all in all, the second had the best antagonists. It ends with fate of the world boss fight, of course, but it's by far and large something that arises from a defect in Hayate's magical device, not like StrikerS' manic scientist plays 60ies Bond villain JRPG stuff. Ah, well, can't have everything, right?

I thought about nitpicking your comment earlier, but you also pretended other shows end after one episode or so, I figured it wasn't too interesting and you're not going to do more than three. edit: At one hour and ten minutes runtime left of the film, the Book of Darkness begins to absorb the Belkan Knights to complete itself. In the show, this is what summoned the final boss fight. This is going to be at least forty five minutes of supremely stupid action, isn't it? Looks like the movie drops Tuxedo Mask completely. Huh.

I really need to go to bed so this'll be a quick reply (no, I mean it this time) but I always wonder what and whom those manurestorms are for. It's certainly not for the people that are meant to be represented, or at least none that I know of and interact with. I know this is just anectodal, but, hey, does anyone know someone who feels as if their cause is being propery championed by the Twatteria when they unload on something or someone? Although, need to be careful here, lest I summone of those those storms myself. It's kind of sad, really. Now I'll sound like Bruce (oh dear, what this thread does to me, oh woe) but as white cis-male I'm not really supposed to have an opinion on this (even though I would argue that my personal history makes me uniquely suited to talk about marginalization - at the very least more than any of those buttholes on Twatter that complain endlessly when something's not PC enough, or someone makes a jest in bad taste), or at least shut up about it. I'd rather see myself represented as a regular character without virtue signalling or overly woke PC-ish focus, and I'm sure I'm not alone with that. Oh boy. Good night guys. This really was more fun than the Nanoha movie, I watched some 20 minutes and yikes, 5 minutes of those were transformation sequences and 15 minutes of boring action. Man... Haruka-papa (snicker) just doesn't like popular men! edit: In some ways, Sailor Moon is still a product of its time. It could be better in some ways, sure, but for a early 90ies offering, combined with the fact that today's offerings kind of are consistently much, much worse than that, it's easy to gloss over a mistake or two. Haruka's and Seiya's sort of shouneny conflict in Sailor Stars is one of these things, by far and large.