majestic

There we go, after only 4 episodes, Clear Card is writing out Meiling. I guess it would have been impractical for her to stay over at Sakura's place the entire time, but hey, why does she have to go back to Hong Kong so soon? Anyway, the episode has two cards but was still not so bad. Too much time wasted on actiony-things, however, Sakura and Meiling spent some great time together. MTS #3's butler was finally revealed to be a magic user (not that there was any doubt, like ever), and he can turn back time. He does so to fix a mistake he made while talking to MTS #3. That makes the setup three for three too, with him apparently being similar to... (warning, name spoilers) Considering that he's manipulating time to prevent MTS #3 finding out he knows more than he lets on, at least Sakura isn't the only person being douchewaffled by people she trusts. Time manipulation is also, well, yay, I guess at least it is a way to explain the continuity differences. Nothing about this storyline is engaging, unlike with the other arcs (and Clow Card is better than Sakura Card in terms of story). I guess the similarity to the setup with the other arcs was really meant to evoke nostalgia, which obviously cannot work for me. It could have, had we ever gotten Cardcaptor Sakura along with Sailor Moon, but we didn't. So there. Kero also got an action cam from Tomoyo to be able to capture more Sakura footage. He slept through the second card capturing in this episode, and is all downtrodden about it. Sakura assumes it was because that was actually a fairly close call for her and Meiling, but Kero is just fretting about how he's going to break the news to Tomoyo that he didn't record anything. The poor bugger is terrified of Sakura's stalker. You know what, that joke would have been fun in the Sakura Card arc. Here it just... wasn't.

I'll probably get one, as I'm suspecting hardware issues to be at the core of some of my less than stellar experiences. If nothing else, I can have my Switch for myself then, and give my old one permanently to my nephew. Who is 8 right now, and really into playing Hollow Knight, but I'm not sure I'd recommend that as age appropriate. He's also really bad at it. The other thing he's constantly running around in is The Lost Ember, which is an animal based walking simulator that people either seemed to love or hate. I backed that as a Kickstarter project, but never got to play it (well, yet). He sure does have fun taking the form of various animals and run around in the game world, but from the looks of it other than following a storyline he's not interested in the game is nothing else than that. I've also heard good things about Yoshi's Crafted World, but only second hand. It sure looks good.

Oh my, is everyone silent right now.

Wel that wasn't the best beginning then...

The Engrish in JoJo's is really hilarious at times.

I found myself free of distractions by my computer over the weekend, and in the vicinity of a smart TV, so I... forced myself to binge-finish Kill la Kill. That sounds like I didn't like it, but that's not the case. Kill la Kill was great, but it's an unabating assault on one's senses. The show alone is enough to give you sensory overload, and couple that with having to read subtitles for characters that talk with what feels like a thousand words per minute (especially Mako when she gets going) it becomes quite tiring to watch. It's something similar that makes my going through JoJo's bizarre adventure quite slow. I enjoy watching it and laugh like an idiot at the shenanigans. However, more than one or two episodes a day is kind of hard to do. For JoJo's, that's not sensory overload, but the same thing that happened to me when I watched Way of the Househusband. There's something about the combination of overly dramatic Japanese, reading subtitles and the a mix of barely animated, almost still parts and over the top action pieces, that makes me weary while watching, regardless of of much I like the content. When you find yourself writing... anything, I guess, be it TV, film or animation scripts, music, lyrics or novels, you can do many things within the genre you've picked. Play the established tropes straight, like many do, subvert them, create a deconstruction, or you can do a parody. Sometimes works contain elements from more than one of these, and often, I've noticed, the fandumb and critics alike use the terminology wrong. Kill la Kill, interestingly enough, completes a final element within anime that I haven't seen yet - namely the latter. Although, in all fairness, when you look at anime that plays tropes straight, like Sailor Moon and Cardcaptor Sakura, that only has limited applicability when you are the very shows that establish the tropes, in the case of modern Maho Shojo (and Kill la Kill is, at the end of the day, a Maho Shojo anime, the main protagonist and antagonist and the secondary ones - they're all magical girls, some of which have transformation sequences, coupled with a fighting anime). The difference between subversions and deconstructions isn't an actually easy one. A deconstruction of mecha anime, for instance, would be Neon Genesis Evangelion insofar as it seeks to shine a light on what would happen if you applied this storytelling device or convention to real life. The mech piloting is still there. The mechs are there, even if they get a tinge of a subversion later by turning out to be grown from a giant alien entity, rather than constructed, but that's only a minor element. A deconstruction, by its nature, doesn't do anything to acknowledge prior works with the same tropes, it is a type of reading in the work itself. When you contrast this with Puella Magi Madoka Magica's Kyubey, this does nothing of the sort. It doesn't explore the question of what would happen if magical, wish granting and power giving animals were real, it takes the benevolent magical animal companion trope (like Luna, Artemis and Kero) and subverts the expectations (as loaded as that term nowadays is) of the viewers by not being what is expected of it. Kyubey is cute and fuzzy, but not nice. Not that Madoka doesn't have deconstructive elements too, it's just that the subversion is a much stronger element in it (Mami is the most clearly deconstructive element, I'd say - accepting the fact that nobody would care for an orphan, but that's an entirely different rabbit hole to go down). Kill la Kill, on the other hand, is a parody by way of turning tropes to OVER NINE THOUSAND so they become a ridiculous mockery of themselves, and that former Gainax members are part of it really shows, too. It all begins with Ryuko, a girl looking for the murderer of her father. The only clue she has is her only possession. Half a scissor she uses to fight. Through some shenanigans she ends up finding her late father's final piece of work, a school uniform with magical powers that consumed Ryuko's blood in exchange for power. Right from the start this shows how the parody through crassness works. Her transformation ends with her wearing a ridiculous stripper outfit that barely covers anything, which makes Mako, a girl in the family she stays with, call her an exhibitionist all the time, with Ryuko saying that she isn't. She ends up at the academy that Satsuki runs with an iron fist. A vertiable fascist paradise where the unwashed masses are ruled over by people who have had life fibers (special threads granting magical powers) worked into their school uniforms. Regular students have normal school uniforms, the others have ranked power levels. One star uniforms are worn by the unnamed and faceless masses of the party (sort of, they're just better students here) that lord over students with no stars. Two star uniforms are for the leaders of club activities and finally there are the three star uniforms worn by the student council. They effectively run the school - that itself is making a mockery of the absurdely powerful student council trope that many animes playing at school employ. In time, Ryuko realizes that there's more going on, and that her teacher who claims to be working for an organisation called Nudist Beach actually meant that, and isn't just a creep that undresses at every opportunity (though of course, he is that too). There's a resistance against the life fiber clothing - and it's of course people who go skinny dipping. What else? There are 25 episodes. Well, 24 plus an OVA, but Netflix lists that as the 25th episode. Pretty much worth a watch if you like parodies. One of the biggest laughs was when Ryuko and Satsuki talked to each other while fighting. There's this massive whirlwind of fighting chaos in the middle of the screen, with the faces of the two on each sides, just talking as if nothing else was going on: Time coded. Obvious spoiler warning. Hidden underneath all that are actually certain themes, talk about fashion, individuality vs. collectivism and a number of other things. Phew, that's enough for now.

Can’t do a longer reply at the moment because typing on the phone is horrible but that’s a great question. One that the creative team also could not answer I guess, because that’s exactly what is missing from Clear Card. There is a certain magic to some entertainment that sometimes strikes gold for me an CCS sits very high on that list. Very, very high. It’s episodes also do that with much higher consistency than Sailor Moon or X-Files did, although both ran more than twice as long, so there was of course more potential for misses, but CCS still has 70 episodes, and most of them are really really REALLY good. Funny how, for me, Meiling went from “can you please write her out of the show” to someone whose mere presence made Clear Card better, and her voice actor is really a big part of this too. There is an upcoming episode where Sakura’s class is doing a Sleeping Beauty play and Meiling is the evil witch who curses the princess. It’s like her VA was born for that role.

Yare yare... one of the easier ways to spot someone who tried to learn conversational Japanese from anime. It is not commonly used in conversation. Mostly in writing and anime. For JoJo’s it is a meme all on its own. There are even t-shirts you can buy.

Seems like a good idea, that should lessen the impact. If you have to try Clear Card, that's the way to go, I guess. edit: One of the biggest issues in this season is the decision to make Shaoran know what's going on, so his involvement in the episodes is sort of limited. Tomoyo got flanderized for the first half of the season being almost exclusively the obsessive stalker type, and that leaves Sakura interacting with MTS #3, who on her own is not all that interesting. Her other friends are also not around much. I don't think it's much of coincidence that bringing Meiling back and toning Tomoyo down to normal lead to the much better episodes in the second half of the season so far - at least when they're not focused on useless action pieces, MTS #3 or Shaoran suddenly having the ability to stop time for which he so far always needed the Time card.

Clear Card has maybe switched the set up. It's been another almost entire episode of decent interactions (Tomoyo shows MTS #3 her recording of the second movie, much to the embarrassment of Sakura), then introduces something magical in the last second, which will then be dealt with in the next episode. That's not really any better, but at least provides the occasional decent episode. Eh, and the epsiode took care to re-animate parts of the second movie for Tomoyo's recording, but the writing is still from the movie, of course. It doesn't look as good, but it's better than the regular Clear Card episodes. Which means this really is more of a writing problem, then something caused by not so great animation. That certainly doesn't help, but the issues are somewhere else. Eh. In hindsight, this will have something positive to show for. I've been kind of hard on the Sakura Card arc in the past. It was still good, but the setup for made it less appealing than the first arc (well, in my opionion) - except for a couple of highlight episodes (54, 60 and 66 stand out there - I'm suspecting 60 will be more... uhm, highlighty for @Bartimaeus than 66 ). While Sakura card has strong contenders for the best episode of the entire anime, the average quality dropped a little. Or so I thought. Next to Clear Card, that was still really, really, really good. If nothing else, at least, this will make me appreciate Sakura Card more than I already do. Yay!

More like a strange outlier, yes. A happy accident is when a tree looks good even if it accidentially grows over half your painting.

I meant Love Live! which isn't weird in the JoJo weird way, but weird because it's an apparently popular anime that has no clear target audience. Heh. edit: I see your confusion and raise an edit. There's not enough fanservice, nor is any of it good enough for people who enjoy Seinen and/or Ecchi anime for that. There's some singing and dancing, but not enough for people who would like to watch a musical anime, and the slice of life parts are fun at times, but there's not enough to outwheigh the problems the other two parts cause. So, no idea who this is for.

I guess that's like playing Radiant bosses in the Hall of Gods in Hollow Knight. Nightmare King Grimm, which was the hardest boss in the game (well, arguably) until Absolute Radiance and Pure Vessel were patched in, ends up being one of the "easier" Radiant kills, the early game bosses and meme fights aside. He's 100% fair, telegraphs well and when you die, it was your own fault. Unlike Grey Prince Zote, who can just randomly start his flailing attack while simply walking forward with no indication that he's going to move, and at any point during his flailing he can fall over and cause shockwave. He also... sometimes jumps around, and when you dodge too far out of the way, the game just moves him laterally over your head and drops him on you. Whenever he jumps, he can land on the floor or fall through it. Landing on the floor causes a shockwave you need to jump over, falling through causes him to fall on your head. Good luck if you committed to a jump and your i-frames are on cooldown then. There are ways to deal with all that, of course, but... bad design is bad. It's probably at least partly what happened. Pretty sure someone like Satoshi Kon would push for less exposition, especially when there's animation that shows what's going on anyway. I really wish I could, but so far there's little redeeming about this. What there is I can't talk about because spoilers* for the Sakura Card arc. So far though, everything is just not good. It's not bad, but it is nowhere near the quality of the first anime, and it took 13 episodes and Meiling to come back to make Sakura have a decent conversation with someone. Tomoyo has been flanderized. She already got some of that in the Sakura Card arc, but it's waaaaaaaaaay over the top now, and Kero was like that for the first 10 or so episodes, at least he's getting to do something else. Then there's the issue that the new Clear Cards are all just variations of Clow/Sakura Cards. That one is intentional because the only other thing Tomoyo does besides starry-eyed Sakura stalking is pointing out that the cards to similar things. The absolute worst part is that everyone who isn't Sakura (and spoiler character and Kero) hides something from each other, and from her. Mysterious Transfer Student 2 from Sakura Card and Shaoran (the original Mysterious Transfer Student) know what's going on but won't tell Sakura. Toya on the other hand keeps secrets from Yukito. That's probably related in some way, well, I'll know soon, not that many episodes left. Unless this ends on a massive cliffhanger. Right, and Toya, her father and Yukito are barely in the show. Hoe? There's also way, waaaaaaaaaaay too much time spent on Sakura and Card shenanigans, and way too much time on Mysterious Transfer Student 3. Unlike in the original, where dealing with the cards feels like its naturally a part of the world (except for some parts of the Sakura Card arc, but that one isn't about CATCHING cards), it's almost always tacked on. Sometimes there isn't even a setup and ceratinly no payoff. For instance, Tomoyo and Sakura visit Akiho's house, and find Harry Potter's Invisibility Cloak the "Lucid" Card. They're in Akiho's library, and she's off to get some tea, and they come across a part of a shelf where a section is seemingly missing. Sakura touches it, feels that there's something there, makes a card, done. What? Setup? Payoff? Guys? You can do that, you did that for a lot of the earlier episodes. Whee, that turned into a rant. Sumimasen! *You're pretty close to an episode that should allow you to, uhm, guess some of the more major character developments coming up. That's episode 40.

Yeah, I'm not just watching weird stuff or hate watching Clear Card. Although I have admittedly spent a huge chunk of time on Hollow Knight recently. At least I'm getting somewhere there.

Anyway, turns out the last Clear Card episode was the first part of a two parter, and the second part was... the typical Clear Card episode. The episode also, once again, directly contradicts prior episodes, and in this one it's such a bad idea, because it just messed with one of the best episode of the original (or at least, one of the most emotionally impactful). I sure hope you're going somewhere with this, show. Otherwise you're even worse than you already are. Le sigh.

Clear Card has a new intro in episode 13. This is the first time a Clear Card episode makes me want to watch the next one immediately.

DS TALK: No, only the 10 minute Kero special, but that comes with the second movie and should only be watched after the anime. I guess I'll try to get them at some point. Yes. Character regularily stop dead in their tracks to either announce what they're going to do or talk about what they just did, in fights, and the accompanying Japanese is hilariously dramatic and over the top in this uniquely JoJoish way. It's a huge part of the charm of the anime, it's also usually when the anime looks like barely animated manga panels on purpose. Never having read any of the mangas, I assume that's how they were written (why else would the OVA be like that too). I kow I massively complained about the same thing happening in Crystal, but here it's funny and charming. Well, Crystal also had the bad sense to fully animate everything and still have the character narrate stuff because everyone involved were hack frauds. Except the voice actors, not their fault. Probably.

He was always going about how great he was at Hollow Knight too. Ugh. Yes, really. I also mean the death count. My save has roughly 10000 deaths (main contributer here was one of the C sides at 3000 deaths, huh), although many of them did come from trying to play Celeste with the Joy Cons before switching to the Pro controller. It also repeatedly crashed on me. It might have gotten a patch or two, but it definitely had a rough start. I tried to google a bit now, but it seems there's no more mention of it. The game apparently also runs at 60 fps on the Switch. That leaves controller problems, dock problems or perhaps my Switch has an issue with overheating, maybe? It seems more and more likely that it's a hardware issue, because Hollow Knight's port supposedly also performs great, and it doesn't for me. I also don't think I got much better at the game while not playing it at all in the past two years before buying it on GOG. Well, maybe if that new Switch turns out to be a decent upgrade, maybe... That's kind of the thing, I read around a bit, and the game was supposed to have this amazing story told in an amazing way. What I got was a "You're the CHOSEN ONE, but kek, twist, you undead bro!" story and some obscure lore hidden in item descriptions and architecture. Sure, guys, really, what? One thing the game did was once again prove that I always have issues on enemies or bosses that everyone else seems to think are easy. Guess which boss I spent the MOST tries on. I'll give you a slight spoiler to help, I beat Ornstein & Smough on my first attempt, and Gwyn on my second. I even made the game harder on myself by starting with one build, then being too stupid to realize how that actually works and switchting to something that turned out not working out properly at all in the middle of the run. Initially, expecting the game to be super hard, I started with a caster character because they were supposedly the easy mode. I guess they are, if you figure out that buying multiples of the same spell allows you to equip more of them. Which I didn't. Then I went for the faster casting soft cap for Pyromancy, which was supposedly also super powerful, and ended up not having enough casts to do anything with it. Again, because I never re-bought spells. Why would I. I already have them! Yeah, not my finest hour. So my 45 DEX really low health character with more INT than he needs and the health of a paper towel began wading into melee with Priscilla's Dagger from the DLC, hoping to fix the issues with the bleeding effect - turns out that works like arse most of the time, or at least when it was supposed to matter. Finished the game with an Iaito +15. Less bleed amount, but much more oomph. I guess the dagger is maybe better in PVP, but I played offline. Kalameet was a bit of a pain in the butt. Fun fight though. No desire to do Level 1 NG7 runs. I played an hour or two of Undertale, but I never really go into it. It's one of the games I still want to revisit later.

If you like Metroidvanias, then Hollow Knight is pretty much the best value on the market. It's dirt cheap and has loads of content. It's a bit on the bigger side, if you really search everything and try everything you'll easily be spending the 30 to 40 hours on it that @Bartimaeus mentioned. That's before venturing into the Godhome DLC. Not going to lie, it also has some exceedingly difficult boss fights, but all of them are optional. It's also pretty and has great music. The... aforementioned NPC sound and voice effects do take some getting used to. If you're in the mood for long ass game videos, take a peek at this one:

That's... not getting any better, and all the of the bosses you haven't seen do that too. Worse even, for some of them, their sounds are the only proper tells you get for what they're about to do, so you can't even play with sound off. Luckily the game has a compass you can get after a bit of playing and various quick travel options, so the game world becomes managable. Spoilered the post. Kinda the wrong forum and thread for this.

I'm in the middle of it, but the setup of the entire show is such that spoilers barely matter. The anime adaptation has 46 episodes. I guess the OVA left out the Playboy reading ape that oggles a young woman taking a shower on a ship that's a figment of his imagination (well, his stand, actually)?

I also just managed to beat Absolute Radiance - currently only in the Hall of Gods, not as part of the pantheon - for the first time. It's 00:45, and that was, while great, pretty bad. I'm perfectly sure I'm not going to get much sleep now. Stupid adrenaline rush.

Grandpa Joe already survived being shot into space on a giant rock by causing a massive volcano eruption and the subsequent re-entry and crash into the ocean while he was young*, so... that's not as much of a surprise as you might think it is. He was bit younger back then tho. *He did all that while fighting Kars, the super being who managed to overcome the weakness of vampires by becoming immune to sunlight, a creature capable of transforming into a bird, launching razor sharp feathers at JoJo which then later turn into piranhas that almost eat him. So yeah, uhm. It's called Bizarre for a reason. xD

Ah, well, then I still have like 95 tries left. Not that it would do me any good. I've already forgotten most things, to be honest, e.g. I can no longer read or write notes for instance. I also never could, and probably never will, hear key changes, or even keys, or guess tones like other people do, not even in relation to each other. I'm as tone deaf as they come, I just know when somethings nice to listen to, and when not, and that's pretty subjective. I dislike most Jazz, for instance, and that includes Slow Love, Slow. There's only so much of any melodic pattern subversion that I can take before it breaks my brain, and Jazz makes a point of seemingly doing either only that or having three or four separate tracks playing over each other, i.e. a piano, bass, drums and an optional vocalist all performing their own songs at the same time that are vaguely similar to each other, but not enough to form a coherent whole. That really does a number on me (brain trying to find patterns that deliberately aren't there, yay!). I know, I'm painting a huge and varied genre with very broad strokes here. It also doesn't help that Jazz has some of the worst fandumb imaginable: A bunch of entitled elitists, most of which probably hate the music anyway but pretend they love it to apepar sophisticated and upper class. Glad to be of service. Who knows, maybe it will come in handy at some point. Not only that, but it also kinda misses what I like so much about You'll Never Get to Heaven: it's just this...perfectly consistent mildly low-toned half-whispering kind of singing. Lunascape...doesn't do it for me on multiple levels, . BREAKING NEWS: Bartimaeus continues to be the pickiest bastard about anything and just about literally everything, more at 11! Mmh. 'twas a shot in the dark, anyway. That sure was... something. I think that's about the only thing I can say about it. Not going to repeatedly listen to that. I can't avoid it. Watching the news and reading papers is enough for me. Adele I know from the occasional bout of listening to radio when I'm subjected to it. Can't stop being me, so it's all absorbed and sticks for a while. A long while, in most cases.