majestic

You always funny Gromnir, but you agree all must watch this movie ? It is entertaining, and their are hot vampires, surly that's great

The way I see it you can do two things with Ember that justify her party slot. You give her Red Salamander, go full Spell Penetration and Improved Criticals: Ray line of feats, complete with Ascendant Element: Fire, throw her a Cross-Blooded Sorcerer level with Gold and Brass dragon bloodlines, one Loremaster level for an extra feat (use the Sorcerer level for the needed Skill Focus) and top it off with a Second Bloodline: Red mythic feat. Spell Focus: Enchantment and copy it to Evocation through Expanded Arsenal: Evocation. Or the other way around, whatever you fancy. That leaves you doing acceptable damage (all those bloodlines provide a nice fire damage bonus per die roll) and you can fill the metamagic gaps through rods, while still going what you'd take her into the party for - hexes and crowd control. Evil Eye is a nice debuff, Restless Slumber amounts to a spammable instakill against mook level enemies and Protective Luck and Fortune are also not the worst things to have, and with the setup you can get the occasional Feeblemind to stick against annoying casters. That leaves you with a few feats to play around, you could take Selective Spell for an easier early game (Web) and easier AoE crowd control. The other is dropping the occasional fire damage in favor of Spell Focus: Conjuration/Enchantment and focus on more crowd control and augmented summoning (Swap Gold and Brass for Fey and Undead, don't bother with the Loremaster level). Selective Spell also gives you a decent milage out of a lot of spells that would otherwise not just crowd control your enemies.

To be honest, I sometimes fall into that trap myself, although more often the inverse of it: My initial reaction to watching Fellowship was "Thanks, but I hate all the changes" and I said so directly to an audience of otherwise enraptured watchers. Taking a step back and realizing that some changes were necessary to make a good movie wasn't easy, and I still don't like Arwen's expanded role. There's nothing inherently wrong with it, except it smells of token romantic interest and token female protagonist, and the book already has one of the latter in the form of Eowyn, although arguably the idea of a token woman role in books and films didn't exist when Tolkien wrote it, so this is a modern interpretation of a more classic work. One might want to argue that Lord of the Rings is not old enough to be a true classic yet, but it's steadily creeping towards being a hundred years old now and it was written with that as the intent - to be the mythology Tolkien thought the UK was sorely lacking. Part of that might also just be bias against Liv Tyler, but I don't want to turn this thread into a debate about the Lord of the Rings movies. There's also something else, and it bears repeating: Comedy very, very rarely works for me. As such, finding the original Sailor Moon supremely funny or liking K-On! is an outlier for me. It's not that I prefer serious drama over comedy as a matter of course, because I really enjoy the rare comedy that I can heartily laugh to, it's just extremely easy to lose me, or never get me in the first place. I didn't get a single smile (never mind laughing) out of the first episode, to be perfecly honest - and they tried. It's like that Seinfeld clip that Bruno and Guard Dog talked about a couple of days back. I watched that after the two talked about how epicly funny the scene is, and my only reaction to it was: Please make it stop, this is so painfully unfunny. I despise Seinfeld. Well, that's unfair to the show, I more often than not despise sitcoms, and when I don't, it's usually for the episodes and seasons that everyone else hates. We'll see how the other episodes go. For the time being, it seems like an adaptation made primarily for fans of the manga, and that's fine, and I certainly don't begrudge you enjoying the episode. Hell, I like Dark Star and Masters of the Universe, who am I to judge people? Yeah, timing I guess matters too. When I started reading it, it didn't feel so fresh any more, and it just asked me to be entertained based on a whole lot of nothing. I'm still not done reading the series beause the second book managed to break my interest and need to fill out progress bars so hard I actually stopped for a long while, but I'm reading bits and pieces here and there - and that doesn't help much. I pretty much dropped out of my intensive reading phase with rewatching Sailor Moon. It'll be back at some point though.

Yeah, you know, I'm pretty sure Komi Can't Communicate works much better as a manga than the current anime adaptation works as an anime. It's the same with the Sailor Moon manga (although that one isn't really good in my opinion) and the old vs. the new anime adaptation. Crystal is far too literal and almost everything is taken straight from the panels instead of spending one iota of creative energy on planning something ahead or thinking it through. That's the real baffling thing about Crystal, they were sitting on a manga 20 years finished and adapted it as if going on the fly through the material. The original anime had outlines to go with and a manga issue here and there to serve as drafts, but that comes across as less disjointed and messy. The narration of the episode is a good thing to demonstrate this by, both this and Sailor Moon Crystal have scenes where you can see what is going on, while the narrator tells you the same. Of course you need narration without motion in comics whenever a frame might not be perfectly clear, but there's no real need for that when you can see what's going on. There's a scene in the third season of Crystal that perfectly exemplifies that when Sailor Neptune narrates a sequence where you can see a stormy and and stirred up ocean with "The sea is restless" - yeah no kidding there, Michiru. I would not have known without you telling me that, watching the waves and the wind and the, pardon, restless ebbing and flowing of the ocean. One could argue that the animation of Crystal is so terrible it needs explaining, but that's not the case. It looks bad, but it still shows what's going on accurately enough. It's not that I mind narration as a whole actually, you can look at the opening of Fellowship of the Ring where Galadriel tells you a whole lot of things, and the narration enhances what's on the screen, and vice versa. That opening scene is an adaptational necessity, and it works, just imagine if that entire sequence was made by way of Gandalf telling Frodo about the rings. Works in a book, doesn't work so much in a movie, right? Back when everyone complained about Roz the Exposition Whore in Game of Thrones, I just accepted that as necessity. Leaving her out of the show would have been a detriment to understanding what's going on. You can of course create your entire universe entirely without exposition and expect the reader or watcher to follow along without being able to put the elements together right from the start, like Steven Erikson did with Malazan Book of the Fallen, but that has a whole host of other issues (that not even the author was able to resolve without on the fly retconning), the biggest of which is asking your audience to become engaged in something based on a whole lot of things you don't - and can't - understand. That's a though sell, even for me, and Malazan Book of the Fallen asks a bit too much, and I am a quick reader with an uncanny ability to retain information. I don't even want to know how reading the books is for a regular person. That said I understand why an avid reader of the manga would like such an adaptation. I'm not, however, and with only the anime to judge things by, well, it was a nice try, it had one absolutely brilliant scene (that by no coincidence dropped the entire voice acting for a few minutes), but I'm not too hopeful for the other episodes. See, that scene alone makes me think this works much better as a manga, because by dropping everything but the sound of Komi and Tadano writing on the chalkboard, the anime went and not just adapted, but became its source material: A slightly more animated manga. It worked. It was great, really, but unlike the still movies of yore, why would I watch what could be more easily read? TL;DR: No matter how good the source material might or might not be, that was a bad episode in terms of being an anime. That's the fault of the direction, the disjointed nature is the fault of the writing team (assuming there was one, and this isn't 1:1 just the first issue) and the terrible voice acting delivery is the fault of the voice direction. *sigh* I already feel like I do whenever I get out of a theater with my friends. Except they get an essay like that in talking form. Which is probably even less interesting or endearing. It's a wonder they still drag me along all the time. I mean, when we're not in lockdown, that is.

Yeah, probably the latter, although at the moment I can't really laugh, because our politics are barely better right now. It's all a farce. Of course it would.

I was going to post: "What about my post looked like a suggestion to watch this?" Ah, I see. Well, don't blame me then... I did no such thing as stated above, and never would have. The cat ears come out while she is listening to something intently, so their meaning is, eh, I think pretty much that. She's just perking up her ears, and she likes cats, however there could be something more behind it. So, about the time when I was tempted to post that I hate this. Heh. Anyway, Back Street Girls, Episode 1: No, just kidding, not going to watch that dumpster fire.

Uhm. Okay. I watched the first episode of Komi Can't Communicate. Immediately after it was over, Netflix suggested I continue with... Back Street Girls: Gokudols. Here's what Wikipedia has to say: I'm uncertain what is more offensive, the fact that this is a thing that apparently exists, or the fact that Netflix thinks I would like to watch this, let alone perhaps enjoy it. Well, there's one nice thing, I no longer feel so bad about liking Magical Girl Lyrical Nanoha even though I'm not sure what's that worth, lolicon still frames aren't a lot better than suggesting sepukku and sex reassignment are a similar level of punishment for a real Japanese yakuza (or men, in general). I don't think I need to say it, but I'm not liking Magical Girl Lyrical Nanoha for its lolicon content, and it thankfully was short and hopefully will never come back again. The really disgusting part about this is that it sounds like the classic racist defense, hey, I'm not racist, but... sigh. Ah, well, we all have our moments like these, right? Also, in case you don't know what lolicon anime is, then, uhm, don't look it up. Let's just say that it would put Pedosus to shame, or rather, make him really hor... erm, happy. As always with first episodes of a new anime, this post will contain somewhat unmarked spoilers and a general outline of the first episode (unless something imporant and twisty happens in the first episode, which it doesn't in this case). Komi Can't Communicate, Episode 1: The beginning of a beautiful friendship (if you can stand the animation, voice acting and direction of this, which is a tough sell, really) This pretty accurately portraits my face while watching the episode, for the most part. Not sure where to start. This... doesn't look good, but thankfully I sat through 39 episodes and two movies of Sailor Moon Crystal and now have a different perspective on what bad looking animation is, so I no longer mind animes like this. Or rather, it's no longer enough to dismiss it out of hand. Alas, I'm not entirely certain that's entirely a good thing, but it was in the case of K-On!, and that was good enough to stay a net positive for a while though. With that out of the way, we can proceed to the direction and it's adaptational quality. Or lack thereof. This has a very similar problem as Sailor Moon Crystal insofar as that it feels like a manga with animated frames, not an animated show that makes good use of the change in medium. It's filled to the brim with frames that would work as stills in a manga, but don't in an anime, and to make matters worse, a narrator lady and Hitohito take turns narrating what we can see anyway. Please don't run away, Erica edition. The show can't know that I won't run even though I would like to. Curiously enough the best scene in the episode, because there is absolutely no talking. Our two protagonists are Shouko Komi, who managed to get into an elite private high school in spite of not being able to talk to anyone at all, and Hitohito Tadano, a very literal average boy who by all means doesn't even have the grades to be accepted. He even narrates this himself. In good anime tradition, the character name are puns, or at least meaningful. Tada no hito really means "just a guy", as in - well - average dude. If you write Shouko's name in its correct Japanese myoji, then namae form, Komi Shouko, it turns into punny spelling of Komyushou-ko. Communication disorder girl (as mentioned earlier in this thread, "ko" means girl). Hitohito wants nothing more than to not be noticed and average, and Shouko... wants to find friends. Clearly, fate decrees that the join forces to overcome their problems. Being a coward for Hitohito which is an unbearbale trait for any shounen protagonist to have, and Komi really suffers under her crippling shyness. Every now and then Komi grows cat ears for no reason. Maybe she tries to hear the narrator lady. Hitohito brutally overacts his narration, by the way. Shouko says a handful of words, but only when she's alone in the classroom with him while he's asleep. In spite of her not being able to talk, she immediately becomes the most popular girl in the class - maybe even the entire school. Mr. Average Guy is the only person on the planet to notice that Komi is cripplingly shy and comes up with the idea of writing to communicate with her, instead of talking, in a scene which is, not going to lie, absolutely stunning in its brilliance. For a moment, the framing and direction no longer matter, and nobody talks at all, and all of the dialogue plays out by Komi and Tadano writing a heap of kanji at each other on the classroom's chalkboard. It's hard to describe how great this scene really is, and I mean that. Sadly it also leads to Komi eventually running off, and it ends, and the anime goes back to being animated manga frames with a supremely weird outro and a bonus scene after the credits (literally called bonus scene). Tadano asks Komi what her dream is, and she writes down having a hundred friends. He replies that he's going to help her find another 99 then. Yes, by all means, go ahead and help the girl find more friends. Don't bother suggesting she might go to a specialist with her disability. Well, we wouldn't have something to watch then. At this point it goes back to being weird, because the narration suddenly kicks in and tells everyone that this private elite high school only accepts eccentric weirdos, so Tadano is going to have to work really hard to find 99 friends for Komi, who - as I mentioned already - has an enitre school full of people who want to be friends with her, because she's mysterious and beautiful. She doesn't even get yelled at by a teacher when asked to read a page of a book, because that teacher thinks it's a statment that reading is meant to be a quiet and contemplative activity, not a loud one. You might wonder why this post is more chaotic than usual - that's because it's a reflection of the episode. It's total chaos, most of the time the framing and direction doesn't work, the voice actors overact to the point where you could take the dialogue and transplant it to JoJo's Bizarre Adventure without it being weird and the artstyle takes some getting used to. However, at least I didn't totally hate it*, and if the nice scene about the two finding a common ground to start from is any indication, it might get better in the future. It also just might stay that way. We'll see. Assuming it stops trying to be funny, because it really wasn't. I can't explain why this falls flat while something like K-On! works for me. Probably because K-On! made sure that I liked the characters before it made them do funny things or end up in embarrassing situations. I really hope they're going to drop the cat ears thing. Really. It's... it was bordeline not funny in K-On! when Azusa was forced to wear a headband with cat ears (although it made for an immensely funny scene much, much later in the anime), but it's really, uhm, dumb here. *I almost made a post after the first five minutes stating: "I hate this already!", just so you get an idea how much that one scene salvaged this. Things work like that for me sometimes, you can take a sea of terrible and give it one brilliant moment, and that'll be enough. It is, in this case, but it remains a big if for future episodes.

Thanks guys. We'll see what's what once the next round of chemo is done.

Heh, I... uhm, was trying to make a joke about the tech unsavvy politicians asking Zuckerberg how Facebook makes mone if their service is free, but that works too. I suddenly got more interested in watching it, to be honest. I can deal with 25 added minutes per week even if it turns out to be another Lady Asuka. Humm...

If being a passenger on this spaceship is free, how do you make money?

A while back a friend of our family was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer. It is too large and located too close to the aorta to be operable, so he underwent a rather long and hefty chemo therapy to bring the size down. Or at least, that's what he told us. Turns out that wasn't the entire truth, not only is the tumor in its current state inoperable and the chemo did nothing to reduce its size, it had already metastasized and spread to his lungs. They're now changing the treatment approach to - again - try to reduce the size of the tumor to make it operable. The lung cancer is currently in remission, so that's at least something, I guess. It's not much though. The five year survival rate of cases like that is... zero, or near enough to make no real difference for anything but the faintest of hopes for a miracle, and between you and me guys, I haven't seen one of those ever since I stopped believing in Santa and the Tooth Fairy, and that was a long, long time ago.

Magical Girl Lyrical Nanoha, Episode 7. Well, I'll say this for Magical Girl Lyrical Nanoha, you never know what you'll get out of an episode. The atmosphere and mood of the episodes swing so widely that schizophrenic doesn't even properly describe it, but still, to my dismay, I actually quite like the anime. It would be easier if it all was hot garbage so that episode at the hot springs wouldn't be such a detriment to it. I guess at this point I'm hoping that there'll be no more bathing scenes. Made the mistake of googling around to see if there's a made for TV version that drops the iffy parts, but apparently not only there isn't, but the internet is full of debates about Magical Girl Lyrical Nanoha where people praise Nanoha and talk about what a good shounen protagonist she would make if she piloted EVA-01 instead of Shinji. Guys, have you missed the part where Nanoha has been trying to talk to Fate instead of punching her silly for the last, oh, I don't know, four episodes? Please go back to ogling Mari. Just go. Go. Away. Well, I might not be able to hate the anime, but I can hate the fandumb all right. That's at least something. Also, not very surpsingly, shippers. Ugh.

I'm really amused by the folder names we've used for rollouts. "Veryveryawesomesetupfiles" "Sadlynolongerveryawesomesetupfiles" "Stupidupdatefiles" "Exceptionallyawesomefonts" I guess we're exceptionally professional, huh?

Back in my crib, sippin' on the bubbles, chillin' in my pool, doin' time with my models Bitches in the tube in oil and lube, it's the D-51 with aluminum tubes Erm. Perhaps not. Currenty looks an awful lot like work, i.e. rolling out a new production server.

I recommend you guys try some Thomas Bernhard. The translation is probably not as much of an experience as the original language, but it should be pretty good.

That sounds like a fantastic way for @Bartimaeus' to take one more step on his journey to appreciate modern anime. Erica: The series. xD Disclaimer: Have not checked out anything about it yet. Just musing about, trying to be funny.

That's even from the same episode, if we're thinking about the same thing. The alien probe comes and wants to examine her... with its tentacle sensors.

Yes... I once thought this was embarrassingly bad... oh, joy. Happier times.

Yeah, really. Mods are all NAZIS, even the ones that aren't, because only NAZIS can be MODS. Or something. I'm bad at being Volo.

Well, that was terrible. Time to clear my mind with some of Love Life!'s wonderful J-POP!

It was weird watching the next episode of Magical Girl Lyrical Nanoha after last night's fiasco of an episode, but except for the presence of Aleph who bought herself a whole lot of dog food to w... wo... sorry, I have to, to wolf down, there wasn't much fanservicing. Except the transformation. The girls are having a fight at school because Nanoha is often lost in thought and troubled by something, and her friends are worried but can't get Nanoha to talk about anything. While Suzuka and Arisa are talking about how they met and only became friends through Nanoha, Nanoha is off wandering through the city to clear her head, before running into Fate to again fight over a Jewel Seed. Things to really wrong this time. Cue cliffhanger, end of episode. The series still moves within the traditional parameters of a Magical Girl series when it doesn't have an episode trying to be a friday late night softcore erotic film (or a ridiculous slightly more animated eroge visual novel). Nanoha is trying to talk to Fate and almost got through to her. This... was probably the best episode yet. It was legitimately good, except I feel bad for liking it now. Overall, and it seems ridiculous to complain about it in light of the other issues, it relies a bit too much on talking exposition, perhaps. No, I haven't read much of anything in terms of comics (web or otherwise) outside of Clay's depraved work. The Noob Comic and Order of the Stick are the only others, with the occasional xkcd strip in between. I might check it out though, so thanks.

I guess he's worried that if BLM succeeds it will give South Africans the wrong ideas and they'll come knocking at his door with pitchforks and torches, demanding their wealth back.

Heh. Either Gorth or Amentep really removed the link to the image. So guys, let that tell you how bad that got then. Just in case you didn't catch it before it went buh byesies. The Wolf Girl (her name is Alph, or ARUFU in Romaji ) I was prepared for, and it was the least offensive means of fanservice in the episode. She shows up in the intro for a brief moment with a crop top and hot pants. *shrug* However... I'd honestly rather continue Magical Girl Lyrical Nanoha than go back to Lady Asuka. While that episode really threw me off and it's actually really offensive considering the characters, the anime outside of the fanservice is quite decent. Lady Asuka on the other hand is death by boredom. That's what makes this even more jarring. Love Live! was pretty bad right from the start, and when they made Nozomi assault every character on the show by rubbing their breasts that was "eh, okay, I hate this for making light of sexual assault, but seinen's gonna seinen..." but this is really a new dimension. That's what I get for trying anime based on a short story spin-off of an eroge visual novel. I played exactly one of these, Kana Imouto (Little sister Kana), which has a similar problem as Nanoha. It's really a nice, if sad, story about a girl with chronic renal failure, until it stops being that and goes full otaku nutjob. Yes, indeed. If Love Live! had a scene like that it would still be awkward and weird, but they're at least all old enough to not dip way too far into Pedosus territory. Funny how quickly one can start to aprpeciate the restraint shown by Love Live!. Like, really, I'm not expecting any seinen anime to pass up a chance at a bathhouse/beach scene for some fanservice, but please, for the love of god, leave the elementary school kids out of it. Your evil alter ego might enjoy K-On!'s second season, unless he already tried that and found it wanting without letting us know. Otherwise... it doesn't really look good, no. Samurai Champloo talk: It's a matter of convenience and cost reduction, so for me that was a no-brainer. I all but stopped buying Blu Rays. The best value is Amazon Prime Video, because I have Prime anyway for the free shipping. I don't need the free shipping, but I added my parent's account to the family sharing option and that saves more money than it costs. A lot more. Quality wise it's not nearly as good in terms of image and sound fidelity, but hey, you get what you pay for, in the end. Just as long as I watch a movie per month, it's money well spent, and I do watch a lot more. I get the least value out of Kindle Unlimited, so I'm really toying with the idea of just cancelling that subscription. Let me know what you think. If the first few strips aren't to your liking, at least work your way up to Shinji and the Suicide Girl. That one is REALLY offensive and twisted.

Well, that episode is over, and it contained all the fanservice the other four didn't and then some. The cat/fox girl is actually a wolf girl and Fate's (the antagonist that showed up last episode) familiar. She also gets copious amounts of fanservice for all teh furries... or, whoever else might be into girls with wolf ears. She went to bathe too, her boobs jiggled a bit, her wolf ears rose and she said: Woops they came out. Wow. This... has like five movies and as many spinoff series. At this point I can only hope that it'll get a little tamer in time, and this was a one time accident someone got fired for. Or perhaps jailed. Ideally both. Hm. So, today, I managed to watch one episode, complain about it copiously, I've also watched the first 5 minutes of episode 15 of Steins;Gate (guess I should have finished that episode and gone to bed), and I watched the first 20 minutes of the Violet Evergarden movie now that I can watch it with decent sound. Time to sleep. On the bright side, I guess I won't be complaining about Love Live! Sunshine!! as much as I would have once I get to that.

Ah, I see, so you haven't looked at Nanoha's transformation yet. See, silly me, I thought that transformation was as far as the show would go. @Amentep please don't ban me, just delete the link if you deem it too much (there's a fair warning attached, I think). It's the contrast that makes this even crasser than it really is. I mean, like I mentioned once or twice (or a hundred times before) I read Sexy Losers when it still came out regularily, and that was frequently really bad, often downright pornographic, but always really funny on top of being really offensive - and currently has 288 strips. See, that reminds me, @Gorth you said you like your humor dark and offensive, if you don't mind dark, offensive and blatantly sexual, then check out Sexy Losers. Just google it, not risking a real ban here by linking. I'm not bothered by content like that unless it is really just meant as masturbatory fantasy for otakus (or rather, more generally, any part of nerddom, i.e. exactly the people I wish wouldn't be associated with a group I otherwise feel a strong personal connection to) hiding in an otherwise normal and - while derivative - fun show. 10 minutes ago, if someone would have asked, I'd almost recommend Magical Girl Lyrical Nanoha, with the caveat that it's probably more worthwhile to spend time on Sailor Moon and Cardcaptor Sakura instead of a lesser knockoff. Framing matters. The content of Devilman Crybaby didn't bother me at all, and you've watched that too and know how graphic that got. Devilman Crybaby also wasn't about a magical nine year old. I just need to reiterate that. Nanoha is a third grader in elementary school. Description of the image, also spoilered, for anyone who doesn't want to click on the link: What the hell, Japan? The only saving grace is that Yuuno wants out and is highly embarrassed by everything. If Pedosus were here, he'd have a field day. I wouldn't go that far, and I googled around a bit, that scene isn't in any of the search results unless you dig really, really deep and deal with a whole lot of actual Nanoha porn (no, don't ask) while trying to find it. There's no way you could have noticed that without anyone posting about it online. Which I also didn't check. Anyway, the rest of the anime isn't bad by any means, really. Like I said, I was close to say "Check this out when you have time to kill, it's nice enough, all things considered." until a couple of minutes ago. Guess I always knew that a show like that wouldn't be seinen if it wasn't up to something, but I was hoping for some hardcore violence. Not that... am I glad my wife doesn't watch anime with me, at all. That would have taken some doing to explain. Not the nudity per se, but the nine year olds, given her personal... history. Yeah. edit: This is so schizophrenic. The scene seamlessly switches to Nanoha's parents taking a walk near a nice looking pond, sharing a tender moment of togetherness, peace and quiet that could come straight from a Cardcaptor Sakura flashback.