majestic

Well, that puts you above any suspicion. I only noticed today, guess I really wasn’t browsing through anything else this week.

Also, I need to reiterate this, there's nothing to be done about the issue itself, so if you want to change avatars at any given point, just do it. Don't think twice on my account.

Yeah, a couple of months back, I changed my avatar to Kyubey, not only did I have to manually edit the base image because the editing and uploading process didn't work as it should, I also needed to switch browsers to make it work, only to then notice that I can't stand looking at a new avatar (much less Kyubey, of all things) and switched back, only to notice that it was impossible to make good old Blue Hair look like he did before. Bad forum software is bad. Wee. No Mari in each thread improves things a lot, so thanks.

Obligatory joke: Once past thirty you lose your ability to enunciate words?

It's okay, really. This is just what happens when after a really long and highly annoying workday I can't keep up appearances any more. Welcome to the real me. Or at least, a part of it. The last couple of weeks really threw me for a loop for a lot of reasons, and there's no end in sight for now.

Yeah, I know. I re-worded that post a good amount of times to take the edge out of it, if you feel like it's still in there, that was only semi-intentional. I'm also not expecting anyone to be considerate towards my weird sensitivities. That's entirely unreasonable. It just is what it is. It's not like I can help it, weird hardwiring is weird. Okay, I think I need to edit my post. That seems to come across as much crasser than it was supposed to.

I would like to preface this post by saying that some of you guys inadvertently shot yourself in the foot trying to be funny, but before I'm beginning to excessively talk about my second most favorite topic besides Sailor Moon, namely myself*, let me agree with @Bartimaeus here, and he can feel left out by any "you"s in the following paragraphs. @Amentep can do that too, because his avatar change happened in parallel and not in response to this thread (or at least I will give him the benefit of the doubt). I'll do my best and try to take your trolling as good natured fun, and not as mean spirited, however I expected more of you. No, scratch that, after the past few pages of Faris GIF spam, I didn't. Cretins, the lot of you. Fie! FIE! Disclaimer: The above is a good natured joke. Like your avatars. At least you guys don't feel a weird brain itch, probably just some twang of remorse. Sumimasen! So and now for the part that you can probably gloss over because it could potentially get into TL;DR territory. I'll put it in spoiler tags for formatting (and for the off-chance that Bruno clicks on the thread, I doubt he could be bothered to look through any spoilers). TL;DR: Nice try, but it's not doing what you thought it would. @Sarex' avatar is offensive on a whole different level, so he's the only one of you who managed to troll me in some way. Good job, I guess. *According to the hokum that my birth horoscope is, I should try to not talk about myself too much. Reading this thread one could actually get the idea that I'm actually doing that, but it's just something that readily comes up, not something sought out. Astrology is still hokum. What a surprise.

Would you like fries with that?

I want to officially log a protest against your avatar change. Not that I don't appreciate Miyu, but avatar changes are bad for my mind. It'll be a few days until it's no longer weird, circular or not.

You know, without having watched the others, yeah, I would readily agree that Blood-C is borderline bad, but in this day and age "It could be worse!" is sadly a mark of quality on its own. How depressing. I think I need to watch something that looks good soon. edit: Out of the examples that aren't Blood-C, Girls' Last Tour is the only one I really enjoyed, and that is very much in spite of its looks.

Feels like a forced perspective change, you know. I mean... it could look like: Yeah Honoka, your face is really similar to mine when I look at this. Or... Hello, I'm Tomoyo, and I once was a real character in a much better looking show. Nice to meet you. Or... Chii, why do I look like a melon? Or... (and I apologize for that one profusely): I'm sure the Amikoto shippers loved this scene. Compare... Really. Blood-C looks fine. This is fine. Really. It's fine. At least the backgrounds are kind of nice!

Blood-C turns out to have a couple of (for me ) recognizable voice actors. The cafe guy is Tuxedo Mask from Sailor Moon Crystal. Saya is Rue from Princess Tutu. Saya's father is AC/DC Esidisi from JoJo's (among other things), the twin girls from Saya's class are Chibiusa/Black Lady from Sailor Moon Crystal. In terms of the episode I can't say much more than @Bartimaeus already did. Curiously weird introduction sequence with pretty terrible ENGRISH in the song. Not sure the teacher should show up dressed like that in front of teenagers, but hey, I guess some concessions are in order here and there. Aside from the opening scene that looked a bit uncanny, the art isn't half bad. I mean, for something that is from 2011, this looks nice. Even if the character models are a little giraffe-ish. It's also already noticably CLAMPy in certain things. All in all it's off to a good start. It might turn sour a ways down, but so far so good.

I traded a couple times in Path of Exile. Way way back when the game was a beta and it had like two or three acts with difficulties instead of ten acts with a sliding increase in enemy damage (and decrease in resistances), all it had was an overspammed trade channel. It's still all the game has, but trading works by looking at one of the larger trading sites, ruffle through the listings, find what you want and click on "copy" which copies a /whisper into your clipboard to post in game. Then you wait for the guy to invite you, pick the item from the stash and coordinate indicated in the whisper, then you need to join his hideout, complete the trade, say bye bye and leave. It's as clean as an interaction in the game can get, but it's still incredibly tiresome. Simply because you have to join the other party in his personal instance. Why can't we just have action houses like in MMORPGs. A trade waste my time, and the other party's time, because they have to interrupt whatever they are doing. Or just ignore a potential sale. Never felt any excitement for the ladder race. Trying my best to do the impossible with just self-found gear on the other hand, that was always a draw. Took a bug and some Mephisto drop luck to work, but work it did. I mean, aside from conveniently bypassing the worst part of the D2 online experience. Obviously never tried anything with d2jsp. Yep, that was in 1.09. I almost said feels like ages ago, but... that's because it was. Ages ago.

That reminds me of an old LOTR-GIF: I've finished Hell difficulty once so far (killed Baal, that is, this was before the Ubers or Pandemonium), and that was early in Lord of Destruction with the absolutely fantastic Guided Arrow bug. While I put a lot of hours into Diablo 2, mostly it was more of a theoretical exercise for me. I knew all about builds, the items necessary to play them, all that stuff. But I never really played anything but self-found. I'd join random games for the better drop rates, but interactions were limited, and trading? Yeah, no... not at the time, anyway. Things would be different nowadays, except my interest in ARPGs kind of died away too. For the record, I just downloaded D2, then got supremely annoyed at having to download an installer to download the installers to install D2, then LoD separately, had to manually download the newest patch after a non-descript error message from the game, created an account and finally be greeted by a "realm unavailable" message (might just have been something else, but I really don't want to bother checking right now) and then played a character to level 6 in single player, only to find out that the feeling of "been there, done that" is surprisingly overwhelming.

The biggest slow the Necromancer has since the introduction of syngeries is the clay golem. Taking most synergies will make him really sturdy, it can be readily recast (decidedly less so without +mana gear, but still possible) and whenver it hits an enemy or is hit by an enemy it slows them by upwards of 85% when combined with Decrepify. I don't know if there was a bit of nerfing applied in the past patches but bosses, for instance, you can slow down so much you can almost see the individual frames of their attacks. The biggest problem is getting a summoner's retinue to deal damage. Most skeletons survive when you can reliably slow enemies, but it gets really ugly against teleporting enemies with elemental attacks (burning souls just trounce you unless you have good enough gear to resist them), or in small, enclosed spaces where the summons can't swarm enough (similar to a Hammerdin's issues in Act 2). Boss kill speed is fine, could be better, but also really safe. Duriel is a joke when he can't move. It's trying to get your summons to do what they're supposed to that makes it a lot less fun than it could be. Artillery Necros are theoretically fun to play, but those you can't play without having the gear for it first. Well, at least not while having any fun, at any rate. Hm, now I want to fire up some D2. Yay...

Well, that is a cup that passed by me, lucky me that went with the Japanese original. I don't know if the German dub as as many versions as the English one. Par for the course for our Freedom Party. They also really like making racist slogans, like Heimatliebe statt Marokkanerdiebe (lit. "Patriotism instead of Moroccan thieves!") - the German one rhymes, of course. They had a party leader who openly thought the employment policy under Hitler was great, and a whole bunch of other nasty stuff that really is no wonder once you look at their history. They were founded by the leftovers of the Austrian NSDAP after the end of World War 2, tolerated (more like backed) by the US in order to draw votes away from the communist party and had more than a couple of former SS officers in their ranks.

I just looked it up, and yeah, it has the director's cut. But yeah, I know what you mean. The English dub of Rebuild was impossible to endure for me after getting used to the original. Heh. One of our members of parilament just said: "Congo isn't in Africa, it's in here!" Yeah, nothing like open racism from our far right.

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.