majestic

See, that reminds me, I never saw the original cut, only the Director's Cut. At least I read that was the one available on Netflix, or am I mixing things up? I didn't get to watch much recently. A combination of a lot of work and having to watch live feeds from our parliament. It's pretty fun at the moment.

I just realized how easy it is for any given sci-fi piece of entertainment to run into something that is my personal version of irrational dislike for a topic that can't quite be explained in any logical fashion and it's pretty bad because it's really... not even consistent. When Doctor Who, for instance, has these fixed points in time that will always happen regardless of what action is taken by any given time traveller (or other agent), then that doesn't bother me at all. It fits Doctor Who, where time travel always just does what it needs to do. In Steins;Gate, based on the many worlds time travel plot, the idea of a fixed point in time that is as harmless as what is going on right now is quite a bother. It's silly and kills my immersion. The anime is dangerously close to breaking through my suspension of disbelief here, and the story is the only thing that makes me like it so far. Doctor Who in total doesn't do the many worlds thing though. Just a single timeline that can be changed with certain limits. And a super stupid episode about time guardians that eat the universe when there's been too much change (whatever that was). It's the same - and that we talked about before here, or in the TV thread - when sci-fi shows elect to make higher powers "real", like in the new Battlestar Galactica where at the end they ran out of ideas and with no better explanation possible they made Head!Baltar and Head!Six actual real angels of God. Why? What? Way to go. Leave actual gods out of my sci-fi stuff, please. I mean "God" gods, not Asgardians or something. Or the ascended Ancients of Stargate, which for no particular reason don't bother me either, even though they are literal gods. See? That makes no sense.

Heh. I paused the episode to post like 30 seconds before they explain that. Great. Anime is working hard on squandering my last bits of good will.

Okarin is a grade A moron. He is doing everything to protect Mayuri except asking the one person who handily defeated all of the attackers alone to set up an ambush. This sub plot is already going on too long, and it’s been only one and a half episodes.

Yeah, his glorious lordship Sebastian I, Arch-Dollfuß of Austria, is my favorite politician. I hope this misunderstanding clears up really soon so he can get back to steer our great nation through the rough and muddied waters of these uncertain times. I got a good chuckle out of his butt boy messaging him telling him that "they" (Kurz' inner circle) are his Praetorian Guard. Should have paid more attention in school, I guess. They often made emperors, yes, but they also very readily disposed of them. It's going to be interesting, there are like ten people accused of embezzlement, bribery, incitement of both and, less interesting, perjury, and heaps and heaps of evidence. Yeah, guys, let this be a lesson: Don't play Praetorian Guard on iMessage. Doubly hilarious because the ÖVP was alwasy the first party to try and undermine privacy. Nothing to fear if you got nothing to hide, huh? Well didn't that bite you in the ass. Hopefully, someone's going to sing to save their own hide, and if it's just that ridiculous asshat of the "newspaper" they bought fake polls and articles in. Well, but the Greens, morons that they are, passed up on a chance to free us of the yoke of the ÖVP for a while in favor of continuing the current coalition. A pity, what would I have given to see the rest of the parties trying to work together, just like in Israel.

I know, that was the point of stopping at 11 to make a post about it. There weren't that many. The speculations about the agent were wrong, unless there's more than one. It's funny, I thought about all the candidates and ruled out most of them, and the speculations became reall wild (like the landord or Daru). I just... really didn't think of the one who it turned out to be. Slipped my mind. I mean, I actually didn't think of the character when going through the list. Heh. Ah, damn. If nothing else, that's pretty impressive without feeling completely random. Anyway, spoiler post for 12: Not bad, I might not like the characters or some of the things they do (except Mayuri when she's not forcing Ruka into cosplay), but the story is interesting enough. The identity of the agent was a bit surprising, assuming it's the only one, and SERN is really the only player on the field, which Suzuha's presence in the show sort of disagrees with, and I'm not entirely convinced that the threatening text messages that Okarin received were really from SERN.

You didn't. KP insinuated that with his "I did not expect that." So what are they going to mess up, are they turning Japan into a post-apocalyptic wasteland somehow?

Yeah, he also walks in on Mayuri and Kurisu taking a shower (albeit out of concern for their safety, but seriously, try asking before walking in what's clearly audible as a running shower?), and while he gets yelled at and Mayuri tells him that she's disappointed and embarrassed seemingly nothing comes of it. That entire scene, they send him shopping so they can shower without being afraid of being spied on, hey girls, how about you re-think your relationship with Okarin? The hell... never mind Daru having a key and being able to show up willy nilly anyway, and he's the self-styled Lord of Perverts... So, I'm done with 11 and have to admit that I don't really have any idea what the big reveal or twist that's coming up in 12. Which means it was either really well hidden or never properly set up. With the way the show is going I'm not going to give it the benefit of the doubt and it's probably the latter. However, there are some random things that could or could not be: Nothing of that is worthy of an "I did not expect that." though. So, time for a shower and the mythical twelth episode. I, uhm, also get the feeling that this would work much better as the visual novel it started out as. I wonder if that game also has branches where Ruka gets assaulted by Okarin. What the hell, Tiger's-Eye? You suck.

With 1.10 the Necromancer got a bit of a revival. Synergies make it possible to reliably spam slows on enemies that almost stop them dead in their tracks. Without gear to back it up, the only thing you can do though is rely on your summons, and that makes certain parts of the game a tad, say, tedious. Especially when you're trying to catch teleporting enemies with elemental attacks with your skeletons. Still makes a nice co-op partner. One to bind everything, and one to kill everything. Eh, unless that was nerfed. I haven't played Diablo 2 in... ten years.

Maybe, I don't know, but just like many prequels it answered questions nobody asked.

I stopped using tags myself because the software is so uncooprative. I'd love to be able to do proper post quotes again, because copy/pasting a link to the old post in a locked thread isn't the same. Alas, this forum software has usability that would make the developers of Frontpage 98 blush in shame, and that takes some doing. I just noticed today after trying to look up something about Mayuri. Main writing (or rather, series composition) credits for Love Live! and two of its spin-offs, Steins;Gate, Steins;Gate 0 and Bloom Into You, among other things. Also a scriptwriter on K-On! who consistently made the less appealing episodes. Except for the one with the Romeo and Juliet play and the wonderful final episode of the first season (not the last episode of the season, there was a bonus episode and an OVA afterwards).

I thought The Thing was kind of lame, and what has that got to do with John Carpenter, that was directed by Matthijs van Heijningen...

Half of episode 11 talk: Also... now everything makes sense, Steins;Gate was written by the same guy that made Love Live!. Eh...

Managed to get some episodes in. E10:

Plus that guy with one l has no humor.

Are you spreading misinformation on behalf of them? Heh. I won’t be able to get much viewing done this weekend so whatever the surprise is for episode 12 it will have to wait. I will leave a prediction after 11 though.

Tell me one thing, is Faris a part of the nefarious organization that is after Okarin? Or is that going to be Mayuri? That would suck.

His actual name is Ruka, I think. -ko is just a suffix here, meaning girl. That is why Mamoru calls Usagi “Usako” and the Japanese word for girl with glasses is meganekko (megane = glasses). Not to be confused with neko which is what Faris pretends to be. Nyan...

Well, have you seen any teenage girls here? No? Guess why...

Sakuuuuuuuraaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa! *yell*

Up until that scene it wasn't as bad as I made it out to be, but Okarin really grinds my gears, but that just exploded into something I had to use expletives for. Holy crap. I had the good sense to drop the u but forgot about sh*t being censored too.

I spoilered the pictures for brevity. The secene wasn't over yet. You might not be able to imagine it, but it GETS WORSE. SO MUCH WORSE. Why? Why. Why can't you just have Roku as a normal character... Seriously. Sailor Moon did this better and that's near 30 years old. I wonder how they'll try to change his gender by sending a message to the past. How should that work? Do I even want to know?

The costume Mayuri puts on Ruki is a mini-dress so short it doesn't even cover his butt. He is super embarrassed to wear it, and I am too! Yes, that's it. Mayuri wasn't all there, but she was likeable, but that's just... why? Seriously, why. Why is that even a thing in this anime? Kurisu comes in and stares hard at Ruka. Daru and Okarin call her perverted, but stare equally at him. Mayuri thinks he's cute. Seriously, what's next? Not sure, I think Okarin has a gay panic attack. Please make it stop.

The "Skip Intro" feature on Netflix is completely broken for Steins;Gate. It either doesn't show up at all during the intro, or late, or it's too early, and more often than not it doesn't put you at the end of the intro, but either a few seconds before the end, a few seconds after (which is the worst), or just like with episode nine here, it does nothing at all. I wonder if that's a meta joke. I also noticed that I am now on episode eight, the last one I talked about was apparently episode seven. Or maybe I shifted to a different world line, ey? edit: Hey, Moeka was time-shifted out of the show. I guess it's too much to hope that stays permanent, right? edit 2: Now Mayuri forces Ruka-ko (he's actually a boy) to undress and put on some cosplaying costume, and she's apparently really... uhm... kind of going to far behind the curtain there. Okay, so... nope. I really don't want to read "Don't touch me there!" and "Stop undressing me." even when it's in reply to Mayuri and probably meant to be more harmless than it sounds. Jesus Christ in a handbasket, WHY?