majestic

Uhm, yeah, that... they looked a bit like the Serbian Kardashians.

Currently streaming the ESC finals 2021. \o/

How did you like Harukito's performance? First good morning and I was like "Ohayo to you too, Haruka!" Now imagine that being Shinji... The takes the anime a few episodes to become more than just a Sailor Moon ripoff. Or, maybe not "more" but something else. It's the first thing I thought when Sakura sleeps too long and hurries to school: "Hey that's a younger Usagi with roller blades." Having Ami and Haruka as VAs in it didn't help that initial impression. I actually really like Sakura's voice acting (her VA is also named Sakura... Sakura Tange), or rather, I've grown to like it. It ends up being a completely adorable combination with her animation in a way that I can't imagine liking any other voice actor for her (especially in scenes where she's embarrassed by something), but indeed, she's not entirely convincing as a young girl. The only character I find annoying when it comes to the voice acting is Meilin (if you see me writing Meiling at times... go figure, but that's wrong), and I think that's sort of on purpose. She's meant to be annoying. She is annoying, but it gets better after a while. Dramatic effect spoiler! I also figured out why Cardcaptor Sakura: Clear Card looks so bad. It was made in 2018. No wonder.

I never realized how much that Robin Hood anime influenced the way I imagine fighting scenes to look like when I'm reading them, or how much of that imagery is still around in more modern anime. Time coded to Robin's second run in with Sir Gilbert, Knight of the Black Rose. Audio is bad and in German, but it'll serve for demonstration purposes... it might be a Robin Hood adaptation, but it's so Japanese at heart. Give them katanas and the scene would fit into any samurai themed anime. Make them girls and give them transformations and you'd have something not out of place in Madoka (or even Sailor Moon scenes like when Makoto fights Haruka in her first Sailor Moon S focus episode) Gilbert's scar is from the first episode where Robin fires an arrow at him that grazes his face. He initially plans to kill Robin, but he can't use Robin's bow (because magic) and simply ends up humiliating him. Gilbert plays the Dark Knight with Honor character type for a while before having the obligatory change of heart. Looks pretty good for a 1990 made for TV anime series. Robin also sounds nothing like a teenage boy in the dub, but hey, at least Gilbert is pretty decent. Ah, the good old times when A-list voice actors still dubbed TV too. That'll work, at least for Toya, Yukito, Sakura and Tomoyo, and her father. The others show up a little later. At least in the original. The DiC level English dub changed all the names as far as I know. Else I could just make a post about the characters.

Maybe I'm missing something here but why would a real Soviet lighter have English safety instructions on the inside case? *checks comments* Yep, fake lighter, but still, nice job.

And now for something completely different. In between Attack No. 1 and Sailor Moon something else aired that I watched way back when: Robin Fuddo no Daibōken (Robin Hood's Great Adventure or The Great Adventure of Robin Hood), a 1990 version of Robin Hood. Unlike Attack No. 1 and Sailor Moon, this is... one of the rare pieces of shōnen anime that I've watched, not just seen an episode or two in between. As such, Robin Hood and his merry gang are young boys, and the storylines revolve around virtue, coming of age, a journey of self-discovery and finding your place in the world. The one thing that stuck with me the most was this particular scene: It has been a long time since I heard this, but this is a melody that is forever stuck in my mind. I sometimes find myself humming it for no particular reason, and until a while ago when I saw that this is available on Prime Video didn't even truly remember from where. This was hugely popular when it aired here. In fact... we have 52 episodes, while the original Japanese run was only 39. The anime studio Tatsunoko created 13 new episodes for overseas release. It was directed by Kōichi Mashimo, the later founder of Bee Train, an animation studio with a different focus than most: Nurturing young talents and artistic quality rather than profit. Our thread regulars might know Bee Train from animes like .hack//Sign, Noir or Tsubasa Chronicles. My memories of this are a little fuzzy, aside from Robert (well, Robin) playing music on a leaf there's also the iconic bowstring drawing stock footage that shows up every now and then: It also contains some mild fantasy and magical elements, Robin's bow, for instance, cannot be drawn by people with evil intent. If I'm not entirely mistaken, some of the episodes are very melancholic and downright sad, the series begins with almost everyone of Robin's family killed. With that in mind, I put this on my Prime Video watchlist. Expect infrequent updates, as this will be something that I'll weave in every now and then, unless it really proves to be absolutely riveting (not entirely sure, I think this is much more distinctly aimed at children then other animes I've watched). Time to hum that melody over and over again...

CCS, #27 There's an unwritten rule that every anime not set in a fictional world or city must feature the Tokyo Tower, and this one is no exception of course. The writers also prove that they don't really thought the ages of the characters through all that much. Very strong episode, regardless. In terms of doing something with the story setup the strongest so far.

The range of my new microchip leaves much to be desired, instead of being able to unlock my phone by simply picking it up I need to rub it on my shoulder for a while. Even so it works only once in a blue moon. Kind of disappointed. No signs of thought control either, I'm still unhappy with out current government. No side effects so far other than a bit of pain in my left shoulder. Yay.

There's a certain cadence to it for sure, and it was a weekly broadcast too. The entire anime was never really meant to be binged and in a way it shows, after the initial setup is over, i.e. the first three episodes that end with Mami's fight against Charlotte, it falls into a rhythm of action - twist - exposition that is somewhat (actually, completely) lost in translation when viewed as a film. It's worse for the second one because Homura's flashback was a dedicated episode. There are also a lot of scenes that ended up getting cut that feature Madoka and Sayaka talking about their potential wishes, or with Mami, and a scene or two with Hitomi. While nothing of true value was lost other than Hitomi getting the idea that Sayaka might be into Madoka more than she is into Kyosuke (which probably helped with her decision to - as she says - not lie to herself any more and ask him about his feelings), what was cut was by far and large dialogue and character interactions that you would most likely have hated anyway, so it wouldn't really have made any difference. Good day sir! I said, good day! What bothered me was the explanation, not the exposition, but I now see it as necessary evil if you will. Kyubey's motivations for his actions help differentiate this from the usual torture porn theme that some "dark" animes have adopted. What he does is cruel and inhuman (well no wonder, he isn't human to begin with), but it's understandable instead of just merciless and cruel for no other reason than being cruel. Or as KP put it, Kyubey is not an edgelord. Spoilered from here on out just in case all this talk makes Sarex want to check it out and I don't know if he has seen it yet. Regarding the third film:

That was Karagga's Palace. Eternity Vault was always in the game, it was just so easy that you could do it directly after leveling and so bugged that you could permanently mess up the puzzle boss for the reset period, and PVP gear had expertise attached to the base components at almost no (or actually no, not sure any more) item budget cost, making PVP another really easy way at the time to gear up - before level 50 players got a separate PVP queue. If you were an early level 50 player, you could quite frankly faceroll a game of PVP without any other 50ies in it on your own. The pre-nerf hard mode level 50 instances dropped worse gear than EV or PVP and were a lot tougher to go through, which exacerbated the problem of having nothing to do. The entire "collect pre-raid BiS gear to get into raiding" part of the progression loop went away for almost all interested players. WoW has similar issues with their new expansions at times (WotLK was a prominent one that lead to a lot of winging) but the instances there are at least usually tuned in a way that it takes really good players to be able to progress in or even clear raids while undergeared. Bioware did an admirable job in fixing things - but by no means fast enough, and once the free month expired the game lost the first huge chunk of the player base, and never properly recovered from it.

Guess that means I'm not starting to read Berserk any time soon. It's bad enough getting stuck with an unfinished series (regardless of the medium), but willingly walk into one? No. CCS #26. Turns out I was wrong about a few things. Well, one thing for certain at the very least. Also, continuity, what are you?

It's a game mode that also barely has a place in SWTOR. I only played it before the great Strike Fighter rebalancing patch, but I did have roughly 10k matches under my belt, was de-facto the VC server first player to earn all GSF achievements. De-facto only because there's (still, as I haven't logged in since the very early days of SoR) one ship left to master on my Republic pilot toon. I even have more than enough requisition, I just... never got around to logging in on the Rep pilot and clicking on it. I even had my own hate thread in the German GSF forum, people accused me of all sort of cheating. It was fun. Actually, my favorite part next to nightmare mode raiding, and the latter was soured by the players I had to interact with to do so - also the reason I quit the game. Didn't mention it because I feel like a broken record, I'm pretty sure that even this very thread (or maybe its predecessor) has exactly the same post. GSF's biggest problem is that it is an almost purely skill based arcade shooter with a tactical component in a hotkey/GCD APM locked MMO. While it was fun to collect the tears of the usual PVP heroes who think that MMO PVP is "hard", they also never really stuck around. At best they'd yell "go play real pvp, I'll kill you!" at me and left, before I coud yell back that this IS real pvp. More so than picking the FotM class to faceroll newbies who don't know that they need to stack <mmorpg pvp stat> to be competitive. Thing is, I'm not even that good a shooter player, or at least, I'm no longer the 15 or 16 I was when I started playing Quake World and was physically in prime condition for that. Agree with you there, though. It was... probably still is a fantastic game mode.

For anyone interested: Madoka Magica parody, not on YouTube... Small preview from a scene cut from the movie: Language warning, obviously.

Sure I do, but that has no relevance to Origin or Steam. While they can be integrated into Galaxy 2.0, you still need them installed to play.

Bioware also stated they were surprised that players hit the level cap so quickly and wanted more content. They thought they had six months or longer to prepare the first content patch after launch (like it was for Blizzard with WoW, with a completely different levelling curve at a very different time). Instead what they had so far was petered out over several content patches, and the actual large content pack they planned was turned into Rise of the Hutt Cartel. I don't know if the images of the planned roadmap are still online somwhere, but that was pretty interesting to see. I understand that EA wanted to have the game out for the 2011 christmas holiday season, but seriously, that ended up hurting SWTOR more in the long run than it brought in with short term sales. The engine has some essentially unfixable issues that I know about because an acquaintence of mine was a high level backer of The Repopulation and was on friendly terms with the developers. It takes ages to prepare a patch, it's not possible to hotfix anything, the underlying technology is a mess that the company developing the engine has grabbed from various sources, and a bunch of other things. You'll never see properly working fly text or chat bubbles. Not unless you take the engine apart and start from scratch. It must have taken BioWare an absolute mad scramble to uncouple the animations and actions after the launch for a more reactive gameplay feel. For a while the endgame had a really engaging storyline, but that still required getting at least 7 other people and get through the story mode raids. That was easy enough, but still quite a hurdle for the more casual players, I guess. I also liked the hidden 16 man bosses, but hey... can't really argue with the argument that making content for 0.1% of the player base is a waste of money, especially given how limited the team's resources were after the Rise of the Hutt Cartel launch.

It may sound strange, but I don't really have any complains about Origin. It works well enough, doesn't look like it was made a hundred years ago like Steam and the one time I needed a refund EA dealt with it swiftly and perfectly satisfactory. In theory you could sign up for EA Play Pro, which costs 14€, immediately cancel the subscription again and play the ME Legendary edition through the subscription. That gives you access to the game for a month (that's how I played Anthem when it launched...). With the full price of the game being what it is, you could even do that for a second month, or drop down to the 4€ subscription plan for a while. No new EA titles, but lots of games available anyway. It's a decent offer, as far as subscriptions services go. Especially wondrous because it's from EA. I only cancelled my subscription because I didn't have enough time and interest to make use of the money spent at the time.

...theatrics? I feel like they're being entirely unfair to Madoka's father here. He only got a handful of lines and does nothing offensive other than picking tomatoes! I know a lot of people who hate tomatoes for some reason, but surely none of you are among those, are you? One point about the exposition dumps by Kyubey: Zucchini and tomatoes have something in common - they're both berries. Don't be sorry, I'm trying my best not to hold it against you. No, just kidding, really. I can't even begin to count the amount of films I've hated watching that friends, family or colleagues recommended to me. There are some beloved classics even that I usually just pretend to have enjoyed so I don't get into debates over it (one of my greatest character "strengths" is being utterly focused on avoiding conflict to the point of rather suffering in silence than actually saying something). There's a wide variety of them, across several genres, and is sometimes seemingly so arbitrary that I can't even properly express why. I absolutely hated Pulp Fiction and I intensely disliked Sin City, and everyone I know enjoyed them. On a more positive note (has nothing to do with anime, film, tv or music): Some talk about Cardcaptor Sakura, Episode 25 (spoilers, obviously):

I understand what you mean. It's similar for me with music. There's a reason I'm so hyper focused on vocalists. Most people I know think the vocalist is merely one of the instruments, and when they're not good, just as long as they're not downright awful, it's all right. It's not for me. I for the life of me can't listen to most hip hop, for instance. I have no problems listening to silly Eurodance numbers with rap vocal parts, because they are usually done by people who at least can sing passingly, but to some of the stuff that was really popular in the mid 90ies, dear god, please stop it, please, stop. The absolute epitome of all that I hate about this was Busta Rhymes' Woo-haa!!. This... creation has the distinction of giving me a headache. I'm not even exaggerating here. The Fugees are another group that are really good at doing this (Lauryn Hill being the sole exception, but that's just one of them...). Someone on the old Interplay forums once accused me of being racist because I said I don't like hip hop. Man, really, I hate white rappers just as much (oh, by the way, anyone who is reading this, please... don't tell me that there's a difference between rap and hip hop, I know that, and I really don't care, the end result is rhythmic speaking that breaks my brain, thank you very much), if not more so - and don't get me started on German rap and its myriad offshoots that have the crudest, most ridiculous lyrics you could find. Luckily I don't have reactions like that to other entertainment. I mean, as long as its not an Adam Sandler level "comedy" or animation that lacks any... any sort of artistry. Yes, looking at you South Park, or stuff like Phineas and Ferb. Or German TV or films. Come to think of it, I hate those for similar reasons you dislike most anime. The (stilted) dialogue, the direction style and editing that is typical for German film, the camera hardware used to film and the character tropes employed. Everything made in Germany looks and feels to god damned German. For me to enjoy any of them, they need to be really good. Insofar, I... understand your position, even if I can't relate to it when it comes to anime. Apology: I'll let you in on a secret: I don't like stage plays either. I mean I read a lot of them because they're part of our curriculum and I, at some point, cared for being able to pass myself off as "cultured" and for that you need to be at least passingly familiar with the classics, and there's not much difference between having read them and having seen them - familiarity is the key, the finer points of who is a better stage actor or some such might be debated, but not that often... so for emulation purposes, reading the silly things is enough. There's a certain irony in that, insofar as I think being familiar with Faust made Madoka less enjoyable. Not that it isn't immediately noticable with the atmosphere of the show/films, but there's literally the writing on the wall at the very beginning that comes directly from Faust. I also mentioned a while back that spoken Standard German was modelled after the language spoken by travelling theatre troupes, so it sort of makes sense that I dislike German film. Although I don't have such extremely adverse reactions to it. That's really only for terrible vocalists. Since foreign languages seem to break that problem in both our cases (in a milder form for you than English does for me, it seems, but still) how about you just learn German and enjoy German dubs from now on. That doesn't seem at all like a lot of work for very little gain (as a bonus, German voice acting is much less theatery than film). Ganbatte! (how perfectly Japanese is that to wish someone good luck by saying do your best?) I wasn't implying that you hated Sayaka in particular, but the first film is arguably all about her, even more so than it is about Madoka or Homura. But who knows, maybe the Speed Racer effect will hit you with the second movie. It doubles down hard on the imagery, relies more on stylistic elements and mood and a bit less on character interactions. Maybe it'll cause a buffer overflow and you'll just start laughing - or enjoying it. I wouldn't bet anything on it however. Now that's just mean. Pegasus has expressed no interest in the actual 8th graders on the show. He only likes elementary school girls. You're right, that was hyperbole, I was just surprised at the level of, let's say detail, this went into considering it's rating. I liked the anime up until its ending, but that we already talked about a while back.

No kidding, after the first episode I wondered if I had accidentially stumbled into a tentacle porn anime that someone accidentially rated FSK 16 (our version of R-rated, sort of).

Yeah, that's just not me. I found that interacting with 8th grade girls is much more stressfull than simply watching them from afar. Besides, it was weird, being creeped out by that unblinking gaze all the time. I'm also not really good at dealing with change, and that... worked better in my mind than it did in practice. So yeah.

Changed my avatar back, that's much better now. Time to go and shoot up some Kilrathi. Boom, kitty litter!

How very American of Netflix, then.

Every now and then I stumble into this thread only to be reminded of why I decided 15 years ago that I will never ever again build a computer myself, after trashing my P4 D840* (great idea Intel, by the way, putting two of these heat monsters onto a single chip) in attempt to get the core temp down to a workable range. I'll just pick the parts I'd like to have and let someon else assemble it, luckily there are plenty of shops these days that do just that. *Might have been broken right from the start, I changed the heatsink because the idle core temperature went up to 70°C, and the CPU overheating protection fired the moment I started a game or two. However, I well and truly trashed the CPU trying to mount the other heatsink, which of course meant that I voided any warranty.

And now for the obligatory more in-depth reply:

I remember I once posted pictures of Madoka as a reference between "then and now" anime styles compared to Sailor Moon - not only in terms of art presentation but also expressions. Interesting how far visuals can go alone. Have stuff to do so can't entirely reply yet - so I will make this short. It's in a spoiler, it concerns the next part, i.e. Eternal, and given your reaction to this, it would be somewhat unfair not to mention it. Still, it's a massive spoiler, so feel free to disregard it. Also (not a spoiler, so feel free):