majestic

Magical Girl Lyrical Nanoha A's, Episode 11: The beginning of this drives home the difference between other magical girl shows (except subversions like Puella Magi Madoka Magica). Fate, who has been absorbed by the Book of Darkness, has a dream where her every wish was granted - a happy family, a loving mother, a good life. While other shows put the protagonists into terrible situations to make them fight to keep the good life they have (particularily true for Sakura, but also for Sailor Moon, even with some of the girls' problems), this just gives Fate everything she wants, and she has to try and break through the illusion to go back to having a miserable past, no family and one situation of having to fight just to survive after the other. Meanwhile, Nanoha deploys Raising Heart in Excelion Mode. It... really just adds fins to Raising Heart's Glaive-like appearance, making it look more like a spear. Talk about underwhelming. The Book of Darkness copies one of Fate's attacks and enhances it by adding "Genocide" as extension. PHOTON LANCER GENOCIDE. Whoever came up with that magic system wasn't entirely right in the head, and if you think Sailor Moon's called attacks are ridiculous, this one's worse... Sailor Moon's attacks were at least colorful and ridiculous, here you get emo stuff like SCHWARZE WIRKUNG (translated as Black Impact). Oy, Fate now has rid herself of the dream, and activates Bardiche's variant of the Excelion Mode - Zander form. Which turns it into one giant anime style two handed sword with a laser blade. Yeah, if this wasn't based on a short visual novel, it could just come out of any JRPG, but at least it delivered, unlike Nanoha's spear.

That's certainly true for the act of adapting the source material, but while animation has its own set of logistical challenges, I was also thinking of actor casting, contract management, budgetary concerns, logicists, set design, location scouting, all that stuff. Animation itslef is created, by far and large, by readily exploited office workers. Live action sets, even ridiculously cheap ones, have a lot more moving parts that need to function, and the more intricate the setting of your comic/managa is to adapt, the more the live action version would suffer from increased difficulty with these issues than giving your animators and artists more time to draw, more or less. Unless you do your entire live action film in front of a greenscreen, in which case you end with the Star Wars prequels. I also pretty much agree, there's no magical recipe to make everyone happy, and as far as the unicorns go, what really is there? Harry Potter and Fellowship of the Ring, and the former is a case where having an adaptational writing pass improved the source material. Hey, like with Sailor Moon. And Lord of the Rings sort of ends being an adaptational unicorn with The Two Towers and doesn't really make up with Return of the King. Although, what do I really know, I'm one of them weirdos who enjoyed the Silmarillion and like it more than Lord of the Rings. Don't give them any ideas, now I'm afraid some magic will turn Nanoha into a super hot 20 year old trying to seduce her father in a scene that's crappily graphic and even more sexualized than BRACK RADY ever was. Ugh.

Well, the Book of Darkness is complete and transforms Hotaru into Mistress 9 Hayate into Sailor Saturn, who immediately proceeds to bring about The Silence, just with a book, not a glaive. I'm more emo than Hotaru ever was, and that's quite a mean feat, huh? She, uhm, also absorbs Fate into the book. That went to hell in a hanbasket really quickly. Guess it's time for Nanoha to activate the Super Pursuit mode of her magical device. I mean, Excelion mode, I think, is what they called it. Plus a nice warning to not ever try to use it because Raising Heart's frame isn't build to withstand the unleashed power. Arisa and Suzuka were trapped with Fate and Nanoha, so they kind of find out that they're magical girls. Assuming Fate isn't entirely dead at this point, that'll make for a fun final wrap up character episode. I'm kind of hoping A's will have one, it was more or less the highlight of last season.

Magical Girl Lyrical Nanoha A's, episode 10: Uhm, wow.

Indeed, and I would heartily recommend Dark Matter as a live action sci-fi show that goes balls to the wall with these tropes. I would, if it had not been cancelled. It was totally awesome in the way they played everything straight. That's just most writers writing uninteresting things, female, male or otherwise, and you won't get any argument from me. 50 Shades of Grey was writen by a woman, for women, after all. It was widely successful for a reason I won't ever be able to fathom. Part of what I liked about Sailor Moon so much is that the character concerns are easily relatable. Not for all, but like someone once said, there's a Guardian for everyone. I guess people will eventually get bored of me talking about it, but even though it's almost thirty years old it does so many thing so much better than even the "wokest" of current entertainment that it's beginning to be slightly ridiculous, and it never stops being relatable in certain ways, even though its characters are teenagers and the target audience were girls roughly the same age. Every now and then something that's so wildely successful deserved to be it. Not that it's without issues, the storyline is... eh, enough about that now. I found more sucess in finding interesting interactions and relationships - in anime, at least - in shoujo anime. Shoujo specifically, because josei looks like it's an insane mess that puts most seinen to shame, but that's only a general rule of thumb. For every CCS or Sailor Moon, there's also a, uhm, X or Rose of Versailles. I liked X, but that's me liking bastard hybrids that should never have seen the light of day. Remakes make a certain amount of sense when something in any given medium changed in a significant manner that would allow expansion of core concepts. I think that's also partially why some 80ies and earlier remakes are really good, especially for earlier sci-fi and horror works. The The Fly remake with Jeff Golblum beats the original, but a lot improved in the time in between. Technology got a lot better, budgets were different, acting changed - but such improvements in films have been minute in the past thirty or so years, except CGI, which is a tool that in theory is a great addition, and in practice almost always terrible. Not counting 3D here because that's been showing up every 20 years only to fade away eventually. Sure, polarized filter glasses 3D beats out the red/blue filter from the past, but even that is a slightly improved version of a 60ies technology, and I don't see shutter tech improving to the point where it's not annoying to use, so current 3D tech is the best it'll be, and yeah, that can go take a hike. Sure, Avatar showed what would be possible if used properly, but Avatar wasn't a great movie, it was a great three hour tech demo that took ages to make, just not really feasible. On medium switches: "Travel distance" matters a good deal, as I've mentioned before, just in a different context - like why Cardcaptor Sakura: Clear Card feels so much worse than it probably is from a more objective point of view. Going from manga to animation is much less of a step than from animation to live action. Arguably, it's also a larger step to go from comic to live action adaptation, but it's a gap that got smaller in recent years, mostly due to CGI. As much as I prefer practical effects, for superhero comic adaptations it was a way to make them happen in a better manner than in the past, albeit at the loss of grounding an already silly medium in a more realistic context - what happens at its worst is seen in Avengers: Endgame, one of the movies everyone I know loved but I didn't like. Particularily not when compared to the first part, which was not only much better but also really good, and ranks very high on my list of Marvel films. It's like Mike and Jay said in their Half in the Bag, Infinity War is better than it has any right to be. I just did, so feel free to agree. I don't find that determination difficult to make at all. I won't, however, touch the subject of book adaptations. The biggest criticism I often hear is that the adaptation doesn't look like what the reader imagined, which is a complete non-factor for me. I wish it wasn't, but there's nothing to be done about that. I often annoy people when I do that while talking about films and actors. I don't even do that on purpose, but I tend to call Malcom McDowell just Admiral Tolwyn and Mark Hamill is Colonel Blair, which is kind of funny, seeing how often I've seen Star Wars (and at the very least I watched Star Wars movies with Mark Hamill more often than I played Wing Commander 3 to 5 by a factor of a hundred). It's not the first role, just my favorite one, I guess. Depends a bit on the mood, there are times when Malcom McDowell is His Divine Shadow. Heh. Never is Alex for me though (in spite of it probably being his best film). I don't think I could come up with a single transition from animation to live action that I really liked. I mean, not counting Masters of the Universe, because that film was, is and always will be absolutely fantastic, but... I don't think that counts, objectively speaking. Or am I missing something obvious? There are the terrible Transformer movies, the terrible new Disney live action films, there are the Teenage Mutant Hero Turtles dumpster fires, uhm, that epic Fullmetal Alchemist film... yeah. It wasn't for me either. When I saw it, I did not go in blind because I already knew how it would end. That probably proved to be a slight detriment to the film experience, but not the the overall atmosphere of the film. Well, sort of, yeah. Now imagine Takahata made children's TV earlier in his carreer.

Magical Girl Lyrical Nanoha A's: Ah, now isn't that interesting, everyone's befriended Hayate and they show up to give he a Christmas present. With the entire Belkan Knight gang present in her room. That'll stir up a hornet's nest or two. Last episode had a strong hint at Tuxedo Mask really being Chrono's father, someone who was familiar with Space Cop technology and their security codes hacked into their network to cover up their activities by taking down surveillance capabilities. It's really too bad none of these characters have seen enough anime to recognize that. The Book of the Night Sky, as the Book of Darkness was called before software corruption turned it to evil (uhm, yeah), is almost complete. So far this season is better than the first. It's pretty good even. Still nothing that would be a must watch, but I like it, in spite of all the shortcomings. Anyway, Suzuka and Arisa have of course no idea what Nanoha and Fate are up to when they're not at school, and are giving Hayate her presents. The scene is great, there's this agressive basic mood between the Belkan Knights and Nanoha and Fate, the background music is brooding and moody while Arisa, Suzuka and Hayata talking all happily about their presents. Vita looks like she's going to strangle Nanoha. edit: Umh, two Tuxedo Masks show up, bind everyone and proceed to absorb the Linker Cores of the Belkan Knights. Odd, I thought that would not work like that. Also, two? Eh, well... that's a little harder to reconcile with the idea that he's Chrono's father. edit 2: Oh, it's not absorbing their Linker Cores, it's absorbing them entirely. Woops. Bye guys, I doubt Hayate will be every happy with this turn of event. edit 3: Ah, so Tuxedo Mask can fake appearances. Perhaps he's Chrono's father after all, assuming he got absorbed into the book at some point. Hmm...

I'm down there too for not liking From Dusk 'Til Dawn, so the company isn't half-bad, I'd say. It's not an issue of gender in my case, but it appears as such because what I like in characters is not very readily found in male protagonists - and also usually not in female protagonists of shounen animes. They're more often than not just the same character stereotype just with breasts and a more shapely butt for pathetic incels/outakus to be happy about when looking at them, which is why I usually - well, almost always - despise fanservice that has no point but being fanservice, in spite of being generally very relaxed about nudity or any other sort of sexual content except humor based on the concept of anything sexuality related being embarassing (mostly films that were made primarily to torture me, like American Pie or There's Something About Mary). I also mentioned it before, I'm also a lot less picky about cast "choices" in anime than in live action films. While I loved Cardcaptor Sakura, I would certainly not watch a live action version. I don't like most stuff, actually, this thread just makes me look a lot less picky than I am (and there's the contrast to @Bartimaeus who is a good deal pickier), and... it's still more than picky enough. I think I've complained enough about the new Evangelion films and Steins;Gate. I'm in the funny position of having seen a ton of anime, but almost nothing of what an anime watcher in this day and age would consider a classic (for better or worse). That leads to really fun conversations at times, mention to someone you like anime and they often immediately presume that means DBZ, Naruto, Bleach, Pokemon or any other suchs things I never bothered with. *shrug* Most cartoons on TV in my childhood were animes, and most of those that weren't were at least animated in Japan, just written by European writers. There were American cartoons too - some, at least - but I almost universally hated them. At that age I had no idea what came from where, of course.

Is 2019 scarier than the 2009 of K-On!, or does that make no difference?

That's something that is or was keeping me from trying. There's nothing inherently appealing for me about Edo-era Japan and hip hop culture, much less a fusion of both (and there is a very, very high chance I'll despise the music to the point where it will be a detriment to the enjoyment of the show). However, since the last anime that was universally liked like this was Sailor Moon* - and technically Steven Universe, if we want to call it anime, I guess anime inspired is better - I am quite willing to look past initial misgivings. At 26 episodes it's also not the longest series I could potentially end up not liking but watching. I'd still like to lock up that dolt who recommended Lady Asuka to you. Seriously. Ugh. I think two years of waterboarding in Guantanamo would be fine. I always have a hard time defining a starting point, since I grew up with anime on TV. The children's books adaptations that ran on TV were all fantastic, but they're not that interesting when you're an adult and looking for a bit more than they are, and even if I would try to rewatch them, I'd be incapable of separating them from my nostalgia. I'm quite certain that Dog of Flanders for instance would still hold some appeal (it was, if my memory serves, relatively critical and still relevant in showing the contrast between the rich and the poor, particularily later in the art contest), but ultimately, it has an even younger target audience than Cardcaptor Sakura. It's something parents can watch with their children without being driven insane because they treat their audience in an age appropriate manner but without assuming they're utterly stupid, but probably not much more than that. Other anime of that time and target audience are most likely similar, e.g. Anne of Green Gables, Heidi (which @Bartimaeus watched not that long ago, at least partially) or even animes like Calimero. If we go beyond that I "started" with Attack No. 1 and Sailor Moon (and the Robin Hood anime, but that I could not follow through, TV schedules being what they were), both of which turned out** to be watershed moments in anime history that transcended genres, created new ideas and had very lasting effects on the entire industry, and are often ranked amongst the best/most influential animes of all time - whether you loved them or hated them or didn't care at all for either sports anime or magical girls, they too were a pretty tough act to follow. Attack No. 1 grew a bit old, or, let's say, doesn't hold up as well when viewed through modern eyes, but Sailor Moon pretty much did. *Not entirely true because Madoka and Violet Evergarden were also pretty much universally enjoyed, but it says something, uhm, more when you an KP agree on something than it does when it's either KP and me or just me and you. **Well, when I watched Attack No. 1 it already was a watershed moment in anime history, Sailor Moon actually really turned into one before my very eyes, so to speak.

The magical McGuffin the Book of Darkness absorbs from mages to power itself - well, to fill its 666 pages. Every mage has a linker core (presumably regular people don't), and Nanoha's took all but one episode to regenerate, and so I figured it would be easier to just capture one mage and absorb the core from them over and over, but no, the book only takes one core per mage. Not sure why it is picky like that, but uhm, like, whatever. edit: The cat-girls from last episode are used extensively for fanservice. Since they're not doing anything else except some minor exposition that could have been handled in some other manner, I think that is all they're going to be good for. A pity, so many things you could do with cat-girls... who am I kidding. At least they're not fanservice minors.

In all fairness, shoujo sport anime isn't free of power creep either, Attack No. 1 which is pretty much the ur-example of shoujo sports anime starts featuring super powers pretty early even. Well, early it's just moves with martial arts names like "Falling Leaf" (which is a serve that completely changes or loses momentum in mid air) but eventually reach funny things like hitting the volleyballs in a way that makes them invisible or do instant 90° directional changes. Actually, I don't think I've watched any sports anime that didn't eventually turn completely ridiculous, although my experience is fairly limited. How much I enjoyed them is a function of what's going on outside of the sports part, and Attack No. 1 was pretty good, but that was a long, long time ago when I watched it, and it sure feels dated in this day and age. Funny to see the girls slapping each other at every turn, and all the coaches firmly believing in the school of hard knocks. My rewatch is sort of hanging around episode 20 right now. I'm going to hold you personally responsible if he shows up in my mirror...

It's a good thing this doesn't work like summoning Bloody Mary, with all the mentions Bruno would otherwise really show up here and we'd have to start looking for a new thread.

Magical Girl Lyrical Nanoha A's, episode 7: I think I know who Tuxedo Mask is, or, let's say, who this anime's Tuxedo Mask is. It's Chrono's father and Commodore Mercury's late husband who supposedly perished in the last incident with the Book of Darkness by going down with his ship. There's no real hint so far, but it seems like the logical course of action for a plot twist, would provide context for his showing up just now, explain his powers and make him a meaningful addition to the cast, rather than just a random stranger. Well, time will tell, I guess. It's also a good thing these fights are all turn based, because Vita (one of the book's constructs) just hovered there in the air while Nanoha prepared a 20 second long range blast that she could have avoided by changing her altitude in the meantime. Good thing Tuxedo Mask shows up, because that blast would have otherwise pretty much knocked her out. Or worse. Oh, and he steals Fate's Linker Core. There's a one-liner explanation by Vita that the book can only absorb one Linker Core per mage, "neatly" closing the final plothole in the basic setup in a concise but not entirely satisfying manner.

Just for context: He's look at a naked nine year old here... no, not joking, wish I were.

Edited. Also (finally?) removed Pegasus from the thread title. Yeah, no. I know they mean our not at all fun, dour northern neighbors the actual Germans. They just happen to speak a similar language. Or, as we like to put it: Was Deutschland und Österreich trennt, ist die gemeinsame Sprache. Loosely translated: The difference between Germany and Austria is their common language (more literally: What separates Germany and Austria is their common language). So guys, are you ready for existence to end, should I give Samurai Champloo a try? You know, if I don't enjoy it then we'll have the same situation as in Dogma and we'll all just disappear in an instant.

Look at Magical Girl Lyrical Nanoha answering the question why they don't siphon their own energy for the Book of Darkness. Hayate's little squadron of friends and fighters are actually magical constructs made by the book. The book has 666 pages, by the way. Guess talking German and being called the Book of Darkness is not enough to drive home what a terrible evil power that is. To her credit, Hayate wants nothing of its power. The book is also the reason why she's in a wheelchair, it constantly saps her energy. Nanoha got really lucky there. They're also holding back because Hayate ordered them not to fight, but they can't just let her die. Yeah, this will really end with the Specter Sisters opening a makeup shop. I hope. Or they all end up dying horrible deaths to fuel Hayate's healing, it's hard to tell with this one. I was going to say this episode is pretty good too, then suddenly two twin cat girls show up, grab Chrono and rub his face on their chest. Well, at least one of them does. Why? No idea, but what else would you do with twin cat girls with wagging tails. At least they don't go NYAAAAAAAAAAAN at the end of each sentence. In a way this is more frustrating than Love Live! and Steins;Gate, because Magical Girl Lyrical Nanoha's shortcomings are more obvious in contrast with the rest of the show. The silly fanservice and the extended action sequences interrupt an otherwise usually quite good, of perhaps too serious at times, anime. Still feel like I'm liking it more than I should, but eh, I don't care. I might eat my words soon enough, especially since the next season expands the episode count to 26, so plenty more time for fanservice and ridiculous Final Fantasy combat.

Yeah... uhm... I liked Steins;Gate more than Love Live!, but that's not saying much (I'll take a bad sci-fi plot over a nine piece shool idol band and their struggles to impersonate KISS any time). Whenever Okarin and Kurisu were alone and they both behaved like human beings instead of morons the character interactions were really good. Didn't care much for the art or music, and the colors were really weird. Most of the time the characters spent in totally ridiculous overdrive anime mode, which was often the point and had commentary attached, but really, nah. That was just too much. I liked Mayuri the most, but even she went and forced Ruka into a super skimpy costume that he clearly didn't want to wear. *sigh* edit: The most frustrating part is that you can see decent things in both Love Live! and Steins;Gate, and it leaves the feeling that all it would have taken to reign it in was someone else at the helm. Wasted potential, really.

In terms of having an installation at home I had every consumer operating system and consumer Windows since, uhm, DOS 5.0, which came out in 1991. I removed Windows ME really quickly after trying it for a short time. Windows 95 I had installed, but barely ever used it, the amount of games that required it were pretty small at first, and then came the much better running Windows 98. That had nothing at all to do with the major hardware upgrade in between and everything with Windows 98 having much better performance. Even the things I needed for school ran purely on DOS, like various Borland C compiler versions and a DOS based COBOL compiler (yeah, don't ask), so why bother starting it. That was before DirectX was a thing, even. Post-consumer Windows I switched to XP when it came out, then went to 7 and later 10. At school, then later work and through giving out support I pretty much came in contact with everything else in terms of Windows except pre-4.0 NT. A few things outside of MS too, like System 7 (well that was awful), and Linux (early 2.0 kernel versions back in '96). There was a time when the biggest quality of live improvement for me was the increased floppy disk copy speed from having a VGA graphics card, because someone came up with the brilliant idea of using the super fast (comparatively, at the time) graphics memory as a buffer to store the entire floppy disk content, circumventing allocation size problems and having to swap source and target discs multiple times. I feel old talking about this, but I'm not that old. I just started really, really early. Heh.

I don't want to know how Okarin convinced Kurisu to do anything. Ugh. It wouldn't have been so bad if they didn't spend like 20 episodes making a point out of Okabe being the only one with that power, and giving it a ridiculous name like READING STEINER. A new character? Demo... nande...? *shakes head*

Well if we're being that specific, 95/98/ME are out for not being operating systems but fancy GUIs on a DOS platform. Don't really have anything negative to say about NT4 and 2000 though, never used NT 3.1 or 3.5. *shrug*

Depends on what you wanted to do. Playing games at the time, no. Everything else: Yes, probably.

It is a bit of a paradigm in software engineering to skip every other generation, because whenever you add something or change something from a stable version, there's a chance it goes wrong. That's why Windows Vista is remembered as a terrible version. The UAC was overboard, the performance was bad, drivers didn't work properly - and the last part isn't even entirely Microsoft's fault. The actual changes from Vista to 7 weren't even that large, when you look a the version numbers it becomes clear. Windows Vista was Windows 6.0, and Windows 7 was 6.1 - Microsoft just gave it a new name because the Vista brand was burned. Yeah, well, I agree with you here. Setting 10 to bad immediately breaks the pattern, because that would mean 8 was good. So, dear god, nope. Windows 10 arguably got a good deal of bad press (still gets that, actually) because updates seem to fail for people, but I never had any issues with it. Then again, I also never had any real issues with Windows 8 and 8.1 when I had to deal with it (my parents had it). I skipped it of course because I'm not going to deal with a completely different start menu unless I really have to, thanks. Granted, I never really had any major problems with my Windows installations, but I am also super picky about my hardware.

Sakura talk: I'm kind of envious, to be honest. I wish I could watch the upcoming episodes for the first time too.

Hm, there is a definite pattern of better skipping every other major Windows generation, but I don't think setting Windows 95 to "good" is right. Windows 95 (1995): Never had any problems with it, but a LOT of people did, but I did not like it and barely ever started it Windows 98 (1998): Pretty good overall, especially Win 98 SE Windows Me (2000): Terribad Windows XP (2001): Good Windows Vista (2007): Bad Windows 7 (2009): Good Windows 8 (2012): Bad Windows 10 (2015): Good (compared to 8 and 8.1, at least, not as good as 7) Windows 11 (2021): Should be bad, with the pattern.

Indeed, I think the "worst" (not that it ever is really bad) of the second arc is over by now, but that could also be just me being happy that the average episode quality improved a lot. There's going to be a few things going on now. Sakura spoilers (as if anyone else would watch, but hey):