majestic

Well, perhaps after your evil alter ego tried K-On! you could just jump right in and enjoy Love Live! for the ten or seconds it takes to turn it off and delete everything. Heh. I'll most likely focus on Steins;Gate now, with the occasional detour to finish Stardust Crusaders. Well, I'll find the time... eventually. I hope. That I have no idea. I don't even know what modern CGI animation costs compared to regular 2D animation, or the most commonly employed hybrid models (i.e. digital coloring of hand drawn outlines). I wonder sometimes, because CGI-heavy shows and films have like ten shousand people in the credits. Is it really that much cheaper, or is exploitable labour just much more readily found? edit: That NY scene is one of the better ones, you should see the final one the closed the movie with. Or better, don't... only madness and terror that way lies.

Ah, okay, then it's the other way around. Just watched episode four, and here's a quick prediction before I'm off to bed:

The video just made me think of applying it to something animated that isn't interactive. I've played pixel art games, if course, but the idea of using a style like that for a music video was something novel for me. The animation and art style in the video could be better (not to mention the fanservice), but what else would you expect from Beast in Black. Heh. A pity, I'd take it over the CGI abominations that are all too common any day. I think I actually have that game, I just didn't get around to playing it yet. It sure looks nice. Speaking of CGI abominations, that was one of the worst things about the Love Live! movie, they wasted their budget not on improved character animation, but on CGI making the all too frequent musical numbers sparkle with vomit-inducing uncanny computer generated visual effects, and as a result the animation as a whole turned out to be incredibly choppy. Sometimes the dancing looked like it was strung together key frames with no in-betweens. In-universe, this is what they flew to New York for. Seriously. That's... that is all the came up with. In K-On!, the girls went on a graduation trip. That's something I did, too. Not to London, but to Bodrum in Turkey. It also focused way too much on what it had as a story. The best part was the girls in New York, but that was really short and ended with a terrible sequence that was their concert - the clip they went to shoot in New York because why not shoot it back home for a lot less money. Never mind. It even reduced the amount of fanservice by only focussing a bit on Eri's behind during the running sequence, and a meeting between A-RISE and Honoka in A-RISE's luxury limousine, but then just liberally sprinkled the silly subtext and flirting scenes in there for no reason other than creepy obsessed shippers fantasizing about hot girl on girl action, and to increase body pillow sales. I'm sure there are Love Live! body pillows. Or at least that's what I imagine subtext like this is for in a film like that. It's ridiculous that this was handled a lot better in the show proper, where it really was Nozomi and Eri (well, technically Eli, but Eri looks a lot better, and a lot less stupid than "Eli", and she's always called Eri in the show anyway). There are no canon relationships in this but... wait, why am I even still takling about this. Right, because this film was one of the most unpleasant watching experiences I've had, and it makes the show look good in retrospect (not the actual looks, but the general "quality" of everything relative to the film). I've also watched two more episode of Steins;Gate. I have to keep pausing to read the subtitles. Not because they're too fast or anything, but because they're excessively hard to read over the bright whites in the anime on Netflix and the show just keeps name dropping ten thousand things per minute and I can't shake the feeling that it's mostly going to be important later, and I can't for the life of me remember any of the character names besides Okarin, and that's not even his real name. Tuturu!

Today's fun YouTube suggestion would probably also be appropriate for the music thread, because it's a music video. A new song by Beast in Black, a metal/80ies synth pop group that redefines what cheesy music is (can I have heavy metal eurodance please, this is pretty close but not quite it). However, it's not the music this is about, but look for yourself: Scantly clad wimmins aside, anyone else ready for pixel art anime?

20 mintus left on the Love Live! movie. I never needed as long as this to get through a 90 minute film. Seriously. Ever since the flight back from New York there's been a dramatic increase in lesbian subtext, something that was understated and by far and large only concerned Nozomi and Eri in the regular show. Things like Honoka leaning meaningfully over Kotori and talking about the "memories" made in New York while looking out of the airplane's window. Now one of the A-RISE girls (Anju) talks to Kotori about having high-maintenance partners. Then Tsubasa (left) is... composing a song with Maki. Yes. That's... composing. I don't really have the energy to make more pictures, but it ends with Maki blushing. I guess the song's really emotional, eh? Just in case it's not obvious from the picture, they're composing a new song here. "TsubaMaki" has an entry on the shipping wiki. Please, for the love of god, make it end. Please. Eh, can we go back to Nozomi fondling boobs now? Please? Anything, really. Anything is better than this, constantly interrupted by horrenduous musical interludes. edit: Movie just copied the "mama" running gag from K-On!. In K-On!, Mio always calls her mother mama, which usually is limited to very little children. Whenever Mio talks about her mother, everyone else is kind of amused by her saying mama. Maki says mama, the others are like "mama?". Yeah, how original. Really, ugh. 17 minutes left. edit 2: Honoka told everyone that Muse will disband after their final show. Next scene the girls talk about that they're glad they "came out" and never expected Honoka to "come out like that" - now that might just be the "humor" of the translator, but really, go to hell film. edit 3: It's over! OVER! *dances*

Wha...t. Wat? Nah. @Bartimaeus' evil alter ego might like K-On! assuming the first few episodes don't scare him off, but that's just going to be a statistical outlier, not a trend. Also... what? Since when did Bruno get a last name? Did I miss something? Skoop's been pretty annoying lately though.

The film suddenly decides to have a Honoka go through a psychotic episode, or some other surreal fantasy of hers. Back in New York she met someone after getting lost, a Japanese singer that managed to find the hotel they were staying at based on Honoka saying "It's a big hotel near a big subway station" - said woman immediately disappeared after bringing her back to her friends, with nobody seeing her. She talked to Honoka about leaving her friends behind. I thought that was eerily similar to one of these ghost story setups from Beyond Belief: Fact or Fiction, but then dismissed that idea as too ludicrous for this film. The same woman now guides Honoka through her surrealist episode, and she knows things about the childhood flashback from early. So yeah, I guess this really is going to be a Beyond Belief: Fact or Fiction episode. Nani?

I see you agree with me. Anyway, I'm still not finished with the Love Live! movie. It really doubled down on the musical interludes, and now that they're back from New York they're suddenly hugely popular idols. As if winning a national competition in the show proper wasn't enough for that, but a single overseas concert is. Yeah, makes sense. They also just had a whole scene where the dialogue was nothing but OOOOOOOH AAAAAAAAAH WEEEEEEEEEEEE WHOOOOOOOOOOOOO OOOOOOOOOOOOOOH EEEEEEEEEEEEEEH WAAAAAAAAAA LAAAAAAAAAAA OEEEEEEEEE? with the girls looking at all the µ's flyers and broadcasts and whatnot. Sure. Well, I guess that's it, I complained about Love Live! not nearly being as bad as I thought it would be, but this is it. This is terrible. Umi is sitting in a corner and crying, saying this is too embarrassing and that she can't deal with everything. I hear you, my dear Umi. I hear you. You and me both, you and me... both. It's hard to believe this was written by the same person that made the Rome and Juliet episode of K-On!. Sigh. 53 minutes left. edit: One minute later they're kidnapping Honoka to force µ's to not disband. Wow. edit 2: Scene lasts all of 20 seconds. Such funny. Much laugh.

Still, one can't help but to feel like the Q who killed himself on Voyager every now and then when posting in this thread. You end up realizing that everything is a pointless rehash of something said before, and you just delete everything. This thread is probably not causing stars to spontaneously go nova and John de Lancie trying to have a baby with Kate Mulgrew any time soon.

I initially thought this person was a troll, but the rest of what they posted made it pretty clear that they just needed to get their pants in the proper place - firmly secured on their head. They're saying that "unironically" because Studio Trigger was founded by the director of several later Gainiax animes. I guess for some people Trigger is the "real" Gainax these days, and the ludicrous thing is that Kill la Kill is a 25 episode long parody, and when I read posts like that I'm guessing they don't really get that. They probably all watched Kill la Kill "unironically" and liked it. Can't really throw away the tape, but it would probably be a good idea. It's not even earning me likes to post about it right now, so what's the point. Oh, right, finishing it because I have to. Eh. There's a certain artistry that went into K-On! regardless of how the show ended up looking that makes it much easier to appreciate than Love Live!. We could of course debate the (de)merits of modern anime, but in that sea of mediocrity, Kyoto Animation sticks out, and not just because they make really beautiful shows (except maybe for close-ups of Violet, you might not like the anime based on the characters, but the shot composition, framing and detail in it is top notch). Modern moe and chibi looks might never really fully work for me, but K-On! got pretty close to me liking it. At the very least I didn't hate it, and I mellowed a little over the course of the show. Unlike, say, Girls' Last Tour, where the looks stuck out like a sore thumb until the very end, and I really liked it in spite of the animation. That... would be interesting to put to the test. I didn't mean that to say that I didn't like the first episode, just that it was exceedingly difficult to watch for me. Well, Okarin is... sort of annoying. edit: Wow, the movie does the "Honoka gets lost on the train" thing again. Except this time on the subway in NY. Good job recycling your own jokes. At this rate, I'll be done watchin this next week or so.

I don't. I feel compelled by this having even the most tenuous of links to NGE. Well, isn't that a nice thing. Normally when you go poking about opinions like that, you end up with essays called "In defense of SuperS" which sadly is no longer available, I would've liked to read what pathetic excuses one can make for that mess. I guess I'll see soon enough if it can replace SuperS as the worst episodes of a show ever. Hey, don't ruin my complaining about the film here, but you're right. However it really neatly proves Miyazaki's point. All of the show does, with all the unnatural movements and poses the girls do for the benefit of the boys watching it. I've stopped watching the movie after a couple more minutes today. It suddenly burst into a musical after the first 25 minutes or so, with Rin jumping out into the rain and having a costume change, singing at the others. That seems like an odd complaint about a film based on a show that was largely about girls singing in a competition, but it was never like that. The end of the first episode was, in a way, with Honoka deciding to do the idol thing and jumping down the street singing and dancing, but that was also the outro of the episode. This is different, it's just so out of place. Plus Rin isn't exactly the best of the singers in the group (editor's note: this is probably putting it mildly). Rin isn't even a real character (editor's note: this is actually hyperbole, but she's one of the lesser defined characters, a downside of having a nine piece cast), all she does is meow and wear pyjamas with cat ears. There even is an ad hoc costume change and her pretending to be a cat all the time. It's... impossible to convey just how much of a failure this is, so watch it in its full glory: Nyan! Nyan! Nyaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaan! I'm a cat you guys, a CAT! It was funny in K-On! because it was used like once in a while, it isn't in this... Before that the girls go sightseeing in New York and they stay at the hotel over night. Ericchi talks in her sleep, Kotori and Umi play cards all night, Rin and Hanayo have a friendship moment. From talking about it you'd think all of that stuff was actually good, and it would have been... in the way Love Live! is occasionally good (i.e. in spite of everything that's bad about it). It just all falls so flat after watching K-On! doing exactly the same stuff two years earlier and better. It's a time travel story, just a minor heads up. The way the first episode is set up and animated broke my brain in some way, I couldn't watch more than five minute spurts of it. I'm hoping the other episodes will be different because otherwise this is going to take a while to finish, even at a rather low episode count.

Oh noes, now I really have to watch it.

I already watched the first episode, so... just need to wrap some other stuff up first. Umi is afraid of going into Central Park. Why not. Nicocchi is greeted by a random woman of color with a terrible pronounced "konnichiwa" on their morning run and is a little weirded out*. Yeah. Uhm. Good job there, animators and writers. Morning runs are also the perfect moment to finally get some fanservice in, we almost went 20 minutes without closeups of butts and breasts. Anyway, enough for now, time to rest a bit. edit: Rin and Kotori go running in their mini-skirts. Yeah, none of the people involved in this ever walked or ran any sort of appreciable distance, did they? Kek. *There's a chance she was just surprised that the woman said konnichiwa, when ohayo would be more appropriate in the morning, right? I mean... yeah, I guess that's it. Also, help me, I'm turning into a weeb here, I think some of the subtitles are wong. Eri talks about how beautiful the scenery is, and the subtitles read "It's so calming" - not that it makes much of a difference here, but what? I mean, unless you can use utsukushii as "pretty" and I missed something else (as in "pretty calming"), but she just said nanka utsukushii which is "like, beautiful" in a more direct translation. Eh... weeb on!

Will you look at that, in the Love Live! movie the girls all go to London New York. While Ho-Kago Tea Time (that's the name of the girls' band in K-On!, by the way) accidentially stumbles into giving a concert and is later invited for one at a pop culture festival, they're going there to give a concert. So yes, they're going to New York to get a broadcast going to increase their popularity in Japan. If that seems nonsensical to you, then that's because it is. The only reason the girls go abroad is to copy the K-On! movie as much as possible. Honoka behaves like a Ritsu/Yui combination expy and Umi does her best Mio impression right off the bat. Eh, and the girls are really impressed by the skyscrapers in New York. While it's never stated where their school is, it was modelled after one in the greater Tokyo metropolitan area. One would think Honoka has seen a skyscraper before, but... apparently not. She really wants to go to that "pencil shaped" one which I suppose means she wants to visit the Chrysler Building. Honoka writes down the hotel name, gets it wrong and the taxi driver drops Umi, Rin and Kotori in front of an either condemned or otherwise close to falling apart building in the middle of... dunno, some ghettoish district with mostly black and hispanic people in the background (best guess, probably supposed to be the Bronx?), and once in the real hotel Umi is terrified and doesn't want to go outside. Yeah, I guess that ended up being unintentionally racist, huh? No Umi, you weren't close to being murdered in broad daylight.

The Love Live! movie begins with a dazzling display of a very young Honoka running towards an equally young (well, duh) Kotori through a golden park with incredibly uncanny CGI camera movement and motion sickness inducing attempts to create depth in the shot. CGI depth of field effects look fake, but CGI moving backgrounds with different speeds relative to each other without blurring effect is even worse. One terrible closeup of Honoka later, you kind of realize that these childhood flashbacks aren't so bad. The character designs of the girls work better as little children. Anyway, I hope the rest doesn't turn out to be such a CGI fest. I'm also very unlikely to finish the film now, it's close to midnight. Eh.

What a wonderful endorsement. You know, you already said that when you said it was like SuperS. To be honest, Love Live! isn't nearly as embarrassing as I thought it would be. Which is a "positive" surprise I guess, but lessend how bad it is, and made it worse. It's really hard to explain, but everything about his is neither here nor there. By the way, should your alter ego really give K-On! a try, I youtubed some scenes of the early episodes and it's really... wow, the difference to the end of the first season and the second season is immense. Yes, that's pretty much it. The bad parts are either jokes that don't work or whenever the show thinks it's sexy. Which just doesn't work. It wouldn't work for me either way because I don't really care about that, however even if I did, the looks of the characters aren't good enough to be interesting in any way. There's how the show looks and sounds, and that's just there to seal the deal. Considering all the downsides, the upsides must be pretty good at times to average it out. Huh. Well, I'm probably overrating it because some of the character interactions reminded me of much better animes. Many classic bad endings among those here. What comes to mind immediately is the new Devilman, although you generally didn't like it. Outside of anime, well... Mass Effect 3? That would be X for me. Although if my subjective enjoyment is higher than the average it actually is, then, well, I'd probably rate it higher. For myself, at least. ...and that's Lady Asuka. There's nothing wrong with it. Yep. Nothing really good either. Yeah, we could make an entire huge post about how the show looks. Sometimes Honoka looks like a baby. I mean, one of these stylized babies that you'd find in emojis. Any closeups are horrible. Then there's the CGI. <-- Honoka, at times. When I watched K-On! I complained about the looks of the character, but the animation is leaps and bounds ahead of what Love Live! is.

Well, that's it for Love Live!, at least the original. The amount of spin-off series this anime has actually went up by one since I started to watch, and the spin-off before that is set to receive another season, apparently. There's not much to say than what I've said before. Ultimately, the final episode of the second season (and first series) didn't do what series endings do when I enjoyed a show: There's no sense of loss, no sadness, nothing. I'm not going to miss watching Love Live!, but that was pretty much a given right from the start. I just started to watch this because the name came up and it looked terrible, because... yeah, who knows at this point why I did that. As a dare? Much to the show's detriment, it did not turn out to be wholly terrible. It has decent moments strewn in between, and sometimes it was actually good enough to make me laugh and feel something for the characters, and while that sounds like praise, it's not, embedded in the otherwise - outrageous at times - mediocrity of the rest, sprinkled with way too much fanservice and yes, let's mention it one last time, Nozomi assaulting the other girls. As such, all the good moments do for me is not make me appreciate it more, but less. They're an infrequent reminder that you could be watching something better. They're an infrequent reminder that the series could be something a lot better, and lastly, these infrequent moments all too frequently feel like they were taken from better shows. That is something I did not realize before watching K-On!, but it's painfully obvious now. I've said that before, something being utterly terrible is better than being average, and on the average, averaged out over everything, so as to say, on the averge, Love Live! is perfectly forgettable with a helping of bad character design meant to entice boys, young men and probably old creeps, and music made to please the average music taste of the average j-pop listener who likes average j-pop. I'm sure the other spin-offs are similar. As bad as Sailor Moon Crystal is, at least it's really god damned awful. We had a lot to talk about and make fun of, and I'm sure I'll never forget watching it. This here? Not so much. It bears repeating: I do not understand its popularity. Other films or TV shows that are hugely popular that I don't care for, at least I can understand on some level. Say, like NCIS, or Friends, Seinfeld and a whole bunch of romantic films or comedies. Not so much here: There's better fanservice in other animes, there's better characterization and character fun in other animes, and there's better music in other animes. The sum of its parts is also not greater than the whole. Perhaps there's an answer to be found in the spin-off series. I'm sure I'll eventually wind up watching them, but for now there's the movie left, and other things to finish. Final verdict: Watch K-On! instead for something much better overall. Watch some 80ies schlock for better fanservice with scantly clad women. Watch Sailor Moon for a much better mixture of comedy and character drama. Really. There's nothing in this that's remarkable. Hell, Magic User's Club is more entertaining, and I've only seen two episodes of the OVA so far.

Didn't get any chance to watch yesterday. I might be able to finish Love Live! except for the movie tonight though. That depends on how the last two episodes are, if the second to last one is terrible I'll probably do something else afterwards. Anyway, season two, episode eleven has this gem: Just in case that's not obvious, that's Nicocchi running into Nozomi's ample bosom during their cardio training. It's kind of funny (the "what the hell is wrong with you" kind of funny) that Honoka and Hanayo were the ones on a diet a couple of episodes back while nobody once complained about the weight and body type of Nozomi the boob grabber girl*. She's the only one of them not drawn with nigh-perfect body proportions in an attempt to appeal to watchers who like their girls more buxom. That I can say this about the anime is actually the most damning thing of it all, isn't it? The animation, yeah, that's not good, the music ranges from barely tolerable to downright terrible, but this... this is what makes this really bad. Plus the boob grabbing assaults. On the bright side, nobody would ever tell Nozomi to exercise more and eat less for fear of being assaulted to hell and back. That counts for, uhm, something. Not sure what though. Back to that scene. It ruins an episode where they talk about the future of µ's after the seniors graduate. Otherwise the episode was fine. There's no singing, and no dancing, they all decide to have a day of fun and are off the the amusement park, an arcade and a zoo. Even though there's too many characters, each of them picks something they want to do with the others, and everything is kind of in character, even though outside of the core group and Nozomi/Ericchi the characterization is a little bare-bones. The way these past few episodes since the weight loss and KISS nonsense went, if you'd knock the idol thing down a notch to something less outrageous, remove the fanservice and the borderline sexual assault nonsense and focus a little more on character stuff over music or practice for live performances you'd actually get a fine series out of it. But then it would no longer be Love Live! but K-On!... *Please don't misunderstand, I don't care about Nozomi's body type, really. She'd be a genuinely nice character if it weren't for her fondling. I just feel like further highlighting how ridiculous that entire episode really was, and how all of the setup is really just to look at whatever animated girls you like. Instead of a token minority, she's the token buxom big breast girl. Just like Rin's entire spiel is to say "nyan" (meow) after every other sentence and make cat-like faces.

Re is the Reynolds number. I think. The fifth one looks like it's related to the Stefan–Boltzmann law, that contains a temperature to the fourth power (hence it is here known colloquially as the "T to the fourth power law", just about the only reason I know about it).

They didn't complain about three pages of autobiographical posts as long as they were mixed with Sailor Moon postings, so eh... Like any good moderator should. I always hated it when mods locked threads or warned people for going off topic, there's a reason why you can split and merge threads. It's called doing your job.

Black and white film allowed for and required some color-trickery too. Look at the set of the original Addam's Family: That's pretty wizard!

Eh, he'd probably die to a random Ferocious Smilodon somewhere.

No, but I'm not that far in yet. The encounter design is beginning to delete my fun though. I just picked "normal" and figured I could faceroll my way through and built a more role-playing appropriate character, which is by far and large a first time for me anyway, and... well, that escalated quickly. Still playing on normal, but I've made adjustments to my dear companions. Poor Ember is no longer a saintly healer type but a mean fire based whirlwind of annihilation that can kill people by making them fall asleep. Seelah got a wolf to ride into battle because the only other alternative would have been to make a bard out of her. Instead, the wolf sort of tanks while she's on it pretending to be more than a semi-decent buff bot (she still doesn't do much whenever she's not smiting someone). Is it really that hard to come up with decent companions? I mean, decent is all that should be needed for "normal", but eh, whatever. It's okay, I'm back to min-maxing. Can't help my choice of Mythic Path and main character, but meh, maybe next time. Looks like it didn't. The last episode ended with them performing at the final preliminaries, the next episode is new year's celebrations and they won the prelims, but we didn't get to see any of that. We're also back to some serious stretching during idol practice, that makes sure to accentuate the... attributes of everyone. Yay. What? Why would you skip the vote for the preliminaries? That's instant tension. I'm honestly baffled by the creative choice here, never mind the dip in quality and the comeback of that sweet, sweet fanservice.

Indeed.

Uhm, the EU is the third largest buyer of US liquid natural gas, and both Juncker and Trump were working hard on increasing the volume a ways back. There's no landing terminal for cargo ships carrying liquified natural gas in Germany, but there are several close by, so they're used instead. NS2 is just far more economically feasible since it takes a rather large amount of energy to liquify natural gas and it is not subject to the problem that caused LNG imports to surge as alternative (i.e. the Ukranian/Russian dispute over prices, among other things, like gas being stolen by the Ukraine). Or was the question about how the gas actually comes to Europe, well, cargo ships. Which explains why US gas prices simply aren't competitive compared to a pipeline. Most rooms have more than one corner, there's plenty of space around. Germany had a political initiative to build liquid natural gas landing terminals a while back after the first time tensions between Ukraine and Russia killed their gas deliveries in the middle of the winter. I'm not entirely certain how far along that is, or if it hasn't been benched yet. A lot was placating Trump until someone with a little more sense becomes president. Not that I doubt that Juncker meant what he said, he was probably drunk out of his mind and high on the money in his pockets, but that's the sad reality of the political landscape these days.