majestic

's the best way to deal with this thread. Outside of staying away.

A muppet, not a villain? Or a villainous muppet?

That was the first thing I turned down when I saw the options. I don't like running into useless people in real life, why bother having them in games then?

I know, hence the question.

I'm glad you found some setup that works for you but that... sucks. I'm sorry to hear (well, read) that. How much do you have the vocalist? Also! Related Sailor Moon question, what did you think of the episode where Chibi-Usa befriends a pliosaur? There's a definite trend of episodes involving beaches to be really weird, mostly useless and borderline bad. Assuming that episode was actally on the Italian DVDs. It often gets omitted.

Yeah, I lucked out and was in the pilot area of our cable TV provider offering internet service. Bandwidth startet at 500 kbits/s in '97 but jumped to 5 mbit/second in '99/00 with a cable modem upgrade that became necessary because the old ones had a fun little bug where you could deactivate the upstream throttling. The new ones were even better. They came with a feature that allowed the use to upload their own configuration file. The modems loaded the config file from the ISP after a reboot, but if the config server wasn't reachable it tried a default fallback in the local network. All you had to do was set up a TFTP server with the correct file on it on a computer with the IP 168.0.0.1, make sure the modem can't connect to the ISP and reboot it. Plug everything back in, done! Well that one got patched real quick. Bit of a shame.

Fun, that patch is only 1.1 GB on GOG but their download servers are giving me .3 MB/second right now. Let's party like it is 1999?

My computer setup gets a lot of laughs and weird looks when people actually see it. I was an avid MMORPG gamer for a long time. My /played across Everquest 2, WoW and SWTOR is measured in years (as in net time played at 16000+ hours). Frightening, really, and not counting the time when I was still at school that I've spent playing Quake and Quake 3 online, and I was... pretty good at it, so naturally guild colleagues expected my setup to be all decked out in great MMORPG hardware. Most notably a gaming mouse with two hundred and a half buttons while I'm actually using a Logitech LS1 (a mouse that is roughly a third the size of my right hand). I got accused of using a mouse with programmable click macros while playing SWTOR once (they are or at least were forbidden by the terms of service back then). I almost fell off the chair laughing my behind off. I'm really peculiar about the devices I use. I used PS/2 mice until computers no longer had PS/2 ports and had a 5:4 aspect ratio screen up until actually not that long ago when it died and was replaced with the 16:9 one I have now. But this has nothing to do with TV or streaming. Ho humm. Guess the TL;DR here is, yeah, I understand where you're coming from here. Heh. Oh and you could potentially add the 5000 hours GOG Galaxy is telling me I've played across all my connected platforms (GOG, Steam & Epic). I think I might play too much, ey? To make this not completely off-topic, the original German DVD version really got the shaft in terms of quality. I think I mentioned that before, but there are actually two video tracks for each episode - one Japanese original, remastered, and the original German dub version. Because screw effort, right? Why bother having one good quality video track and multiple audio sources, that would have required some actual authoring. Way to go, just lower the bitrate and the resolution a bit. But I just noticed that along with the blu ray version there were also new DVDs released. They're bound to be better than the old ones, at least. If they're based on the same remaster that the blu rays are then it wouldn't be better than the Italian DVD source though, when the new remaster isn't any better than the old DVDs according to your information it might really be better to go look for that Italian video source somewhere else. Fun Sailor Moon fact of the day, did you know that there was a Sailor Moon themed Euro Dance group called Super Moonies in Germany in the late 90ies? I mean, yeah, that's bad in every way. Heh.

Mhm, going with the preview of the screen captures it's pretty obvious that your video is the superior source (at least in that particular scene). I guess that's from the Italian DVD then? I was basing this assertion purely off watching Sailor Moon on a 54" 4K TV, with an older Panasonic DVB-C(2) receiver/BR player as the source of the video. The DVD source is much blurrier than even the YouTube video (although admittedly it is definitely not the Italian one), and the colors of the latter are better too. I could potentially look into the settings of the BR player and see if it upscales the DVD to 1080p and turn that off and leave it to the TV to upscale entirely. It might make a better job of it. I don't watch videos on my computer if I can help it. In fact, I guess it wouldn't really matter what source I used if I did. I picked the screen I'm sitting in front now based purely on being Free/Gsync compatible with a 144Hz refresh rate and a 1ms gray to gray latency. The image is far too bright even with really low settings on contrast and brightness, the blacks aren't nearly black enough and the colors are better not talked about. You've probably guessed it - it's a gaming monitor with a TN panel.

Castlevania is pure awesomeoness. I'd say the fault is yours. Oh, and is that subtle hint that we should take our Sailor Moon discussions elsewhere?

Speaking of Sailor Moon, I've tried to find a German BD sample to see how the quality is, but I only stumbled upon a screencap from German TV Station SIXX that was uploaded to YouTube - alas only at 720p (SIXX transmits 1080i, I think, so that was the uploader's fault). Still, that video certianly looked way better than the DVDs, even if the video went through a screencap and a downscaling. It is a bit of a stretch to assume that the source used at SIXX is the same that's on the Blu Ray remaster. However that they used the Japanese intro and not the original German one means that this is indeed at least based on the Japanese remaster. Here's the video, it's the Season 1 finale:

Mira Furlan. Being involved with Babylon 5 seems to have been very unhealthy.

Really? I've never tried driving a white hot poker through my scrotum, and I'm resonably certain I wouldn't like it. But if you want we can try that on you?

Well that's possible, if you really believe that being homosexual is a life style choice and can be treated and/or corrected, then certainly you can apply the reverse and force someone to become homosexual.

No, you can't. The US has laws in place that allow the government to demand any data they would like to see, at any point, as long as its stored under their jurisdiction, and if you really think the Patriot Act and the NSA's systematic attempts to underminde encryption and spy on everyone isn't used for large scale industrial espionage but for protection from "terrorists" then you might just as well start to trust China that they won't simply infringe on your copyrights or patents or buy that bridge in New York someone's been trying to sell. To borrow one from Guard Dog's playbook, the US government is only your friend if you're from the US... and even when you are, they're probably not your friend.

Usagi gets a super hilarious payoff for all the abuse heaped on her by Rei and Luna (and the others to a lesser extent) in that epsiode too, so even if you don't care too much for Ami it might still work for you. Relatability is a huge reason why I'm so fond of Ami, i.e. the exact opposite of your reaction to her. Yeah, that wasn't handled too well. We're supposed to understand that he does all that to help Usagi, but in the end why pick the worst possible way to go about it? It does get a bit better once R is resolved. I thought the entire situation to be understandable. Chibi-Usa's been annoying the entire time she was there, was constantly teasing Usagi, who had the proverbial rug pulled from under her when it comes to her relationship, and to top it all off Chibi-Usa was directly at fault for her friends getting into a situation that they might not get out of alive. Usagi is at the verge of losing everything she really cares about at this point. Who would not want to give into to anger at this point and simply lash out? It's such a human reaction to want to slap Chibi-Usa silly at this point that I thought it was a really nice touch. I mean, obviously it's a good thing that Tuxedo Kamen was there to stop her (and as well he should, being older, more mature and much more grounded than Usagi - plus at fault for her emotional distress as well, silly bastard), but it makes the characters more relatable to have flaws and problems that other teenagers would also have.

So, there's an Artemis focused episode left, one that focuses on Ami and a catalyst episode that kicks off the final arc of R. Looking forward to reading what you think of the end of R. And that Ami episode, because I love that one. I mean, yeah, I love pretty much everything that deals with Ami, even the bad ones, so that's not saying much. I just adore her. I kind of "made up" with Chibi-Usa during the rewatch if that makes sense. The first time around I hated her so much for being an additional wedge between Mamoru and Usagi, making fun of Usagi because he broke up with her. Usagi sure can be annoying, she's silly, klutzy and can be really dense, but she sure never deserved any of that. Eh, that reminds me, what did you think about Usagi trying to slap Chibi-Usa when she almost got all the other Guardians killed? I remember we discussed that episode at school when it aired, mostly whether or not it was grossly out of character for her to try and slap her silly.

No, not really, but some of them have special abilities outside of their tranformations. Minako is sometimes shown to be really athletic*, Rei is psychic, Makoto is superhumanly strong even when not transformed into Sailor Jupiter and Ami is super smart. It's just Usagi that is completely useless, but she's kind of the team's Ma-Ti, right? The heart of the gang, and the only reason they're all friends. Well and for some reason only Sailor Moon's attacks can actually destroy enemies (with some exceptions), so there Ma-Ti, take that. Sailor Moon S gives the other girls really good spotlight episodes (Makoto's is best though, I think, such a sweet episode and it showcases just how much character growth is really hidden under the silly veneer of the show - that episode has Makoto talking to Usagi about her problems and Usagi not being a complete moron about it, just imagine that happen during season one), so there's something to look forward to for you then. Oh and yeah, Minako** and Usagi being sort of similar is one of the nice touches of Sailor Moon. While technically it's Mamoru that represents Earth (albeit not directly), it makes sense for Moon and Venus to be similar. Earth and Venus are called the twin planets or a reason. Oh and that episode with Minako trying to help her friends was a riot. There was something super hilarious about Minako and Chibi-Usa being the worst nurses in history. *Mini-Spoiler: It's volleyball, not basketball. The anime even references Attack No. 1 at some point and there's a chance that the name Sailor V is a reference to Sain wa V!, a volleyball manga that Naoko Takeuchi maybe read during her childhood. The timeframe would fit, the name of Sailor V, her poses, her being a volleyball player and the immense popularity of women's volleyball at the time. Not sure if that was ever officiall "confirmed" or not, but it seems reasonable enough. **I think the manga has Minako pretending to be Princess Serenity for a while, until Usagi gets her memories back. The inconsistencies can also be kind of explained because Sailor V was written before Sailor Moon and Naoko Takeuchi created Sailor Moon supposedly because a planned anime adptation for Sailor V was requested to have a larger cast. Not sure if that really went down like that, but Sailor V was integrated into Sailor Moon and V turned into Venus.

He convinced a hell lot of people that he is though. Being an Average Joe is also by no means a requirement to understand the plight of the working class. Our greatest chancellor way back in the 70ies was a wealthy person. Bespoke suits, shoes, living in a luxurious villa in the rich part of the capital. Didn't matter though. He understood the problems of the regular people and acted accordingly (good old times indeed, in this case). Unlike Trump, who simply applied the Ferengi Rule of Acquisition #211 to politics: Voters are the rungs on the ladder of success. Don't hesitate to step on them.

But Zora, surely you don't want to claim that Americans are hyprocrites ! We need to support the USA and Western culture unquestioningly. Their can be no argument here, right? It's best for us all! /Bruce lol

Had a fun conversation with a user today. User: "I cannot log in, it keeps telling me wrong user name or password, but we never changed the password!" Me: "Yeah, I bet you always read every EULA you agree to as well, right?" Honestly... if nobody changed the password of your branch account then it would still work. You're either too dumb to input a user name and a password correctly or someone in your branch changed it. Well technically there's a "non-zero" chance that someone hacked the system and the only thing they did was change the password of one single user. Sure, that's probably what happened.

Heart Moving shows up a lot as instrumental score during episodes though: I'm rather fond of the Star Locket version of the theme song: Not sure how well they stand on their own, but they work perfectly to underscore the scenes they're used in.

Ah, well, going through Sailor Moon S at a decent pace. I'll keep this as spoiler free as possible, anyway. The last somewhat rambly post spoiled a bit too much for Bartimaeus. I mean, even without not minding spoilers. It'll most likely still be my favorite season even after the rewatch. There are some less than stellar episodes strewn in every now and then but overall S is a decent improvement of existing strengths, there's some fun meta commentary that I may or may not imagine, i.e. Haruka / Sailor Uranus is sometimes used to lampshade just how ridiculous the Clark Kenting in this anime is. Plus she's got the best attack animation of all the Sailor Senshi, hands down: Speaking of attack animations, Sailor Moon's grow more and more ridiculous with every season. Heh. MOON SPIRAL HEART ATTACK has a thirty seconds attack animation. Okay, I get it. Transformation and attack scenes can easily be reused and can pad out an episode when you come up a minute or two short. It looks like every now and then an episode or two were the animation equivalent of live television bottle episodes. These episodes usually show all transformation scenes in full (bonus points if all five Inner Senshi show up to transform but only one or two of them actually do something) and the animation outside of the transformation scenes looks like they were handed over to a different team. Might just have always been the same animation team, just under time constraints. Hard to tell with anime that is based on a manga still in writing. Doubly so when the mangaka involved was asked to come up with more after the first run became an unexpected smash hit. If I recall correctly Naoko Takeuchi never planned to do more than the first Sailor Moon arc. Still, even the lesser Sailor Moon episodes are generally ahead of other shows. Look at all that Naruto or Dragonball filler. Psh.

You should just join us in watching Sailor Moon. You know you want to.