majestic

I finished watching Sailor Moon S (also known as Season 3). Prior to this rewatch I thought I began watching Sailor Moon in the summer of '97 when it moved away from a TV station that I barely paid attention to and changed from a weekly to a daily schedule, and that it was Sailor Moon R's Doom Tree arc that got me started. Turns out that was wrong, I'm pretty sure I started watching Sailor Moon some time after Sailor Mars joined, not with the Doom Tree arc. I'm not sure if the team was complete already. It might have been after episode 24, i.e. after Jupiter joins, but before Venus. Not that it really matters. What does matter though is that the TV station aired Sailor Moon, R and S in one go, with daily showings and an immediate re-run afterwards, and Sailor Moon Super S, which I'm about to start soon coming a year later then. So there was a major time gap in between seasons. What also matters in this context is that Sailor Moon S is, by far and large, the best of the seasons, and to make matters worse, the follow up Super S is easily the weakest. Now this doesn't say much because even in re-watching the show, having seen it all and being done with 127 (in words: one hundred and twenty seven) episodes the worst you get is an episode that's complete filler where a Chibi-Usa befriends a pliosaur, or one where she befriends a boy, or tries to, at least. Even those aren't bad. They're fun to watch and unlike, say, an episode of Deep Space Nine like Move Along Home or Let He Who Is Without Sin... or any Star Trek TNG episode where Wesley shows up they never tempt one to simply skip them. Even when its bad Sailor Moon just ends up being less good. Assuming one can get over it being anime. I know people who can't, and I get it. I tried a golly lot of times to actually get into South Park, but even though I find it generally amusing, I can't get over that art style. Or maybe the art style is just an excuse to not enjoy something that on a more rational level I know I should like but simply don't. I watched the entirety of BoJack Horseman in spite of loathing how it looks. However Sailor Moon can be an anime that even viewers who generally don't like anime can enjoy (exhibit A, our very own Bartimaeus here). The way the people are drawn is of course typical for Japanese animation, but the art style, directions and the characters involved are noticably different, at least from other animes of the time. Presumably that was in part a reason why the show became so popular later on, a fact that 15 year old me both hated and enjoyed with a passion. It meant losing a part of nerd counter culture to mainstream, but it also meant being able to interact with fans world wide online. Something Sailor Moon shared with X-Files, another mainstay of my adolescence. But I remember Super S having a few questionable story lines / beats. Main TL;DR from the wall of text here: I'm not sure I should immediately jump into Super S. I'll probably ignore my own advice and just go for it, but it would probably be better to let it rest for a while. On the other hand now that I've done almost a 180 on Chibi-Usa maybe... just maybe. *pulls out discs* Anyway, there are many reason why I think S is the best season, but mostly it was just really well written and directed, and I don't mean well written for an anime show about junior high girls in sailor suits fighting monsters. It's well written... period. Even more so when you think about how the writing team of what amounts to a low budget and mostly ridiculous anime adaptation in the 90ies managed to do here, create a plot driven by characters where actions take place and things happen because the characters involved are what they are, not what the plot dictates them to be. Yes, I'm looking at you Game of Thrones and Star Trek Picard... Plus the new Sailor Senshi get awesome theme songs:

Potentially, but usually only if it's far out of the way and would result in other lost deliveries. See, here's the thing, while I can't speak for the situation in the US, I know a bit about the CEE area. Parcel delivery drivers don't get paid at all for failed deliveries, and for succesful ones only a ridiculous amount, like .5 € per package. They're all self-employed to circumvent labor protection laws and have to bring their own delivery vehicle that they need to brand out of their own pocket. Consequently, each driver takes on as many packages as they can cram into their trucks and there's barely any time for the delivery guy to wait and see if someone opens the door. That's why they sometimes throw packages over the fence, and if they don't show up at all then that's mostly because your delivery would cost more time than it's worth. Fail one package but retain enough time to deliver four or five more, possibly to locations that usually work out all right, i.e. drop one private customer in Bumf*ck, Idaho in favor of five guaranteed paid package deliveries to companies? Getting an idea yet why all these parcel distribution services are terrible for you as regular online shop user and nothing ever changes? That's by design.

At the end of the day the reason why I liked Dragonfall more than Hong Kong was the real time stealh matrix weirdness in HK, but you're right. HK would have been improved by an editing pass or two to reduce the word count. That was verbose for the sake of having a lot of text at times.

It is, the show only lets others defeat the enemies for dramatic effect. That happens a veritable... handful of times.

Boy are you going to have fun with seasons 6 and 7... especially 7. That one's often bad, even for fans of the show.

Yeah, I just edited that in. Figured it out myself just a couple of minutes ago. The, uhm, stock footage thing is going to get worse. Where I'm right now (at the end of the third season) Sailor Moon has to go through two seperate transformation sequences and a 30 second attack move to defeat enemies. But to be honest they're so ridiculous that they're fun to watch regardless. I'll just put that in spoilers because, eh... 's not much of a spoiler (except for the really obvious), but it makes the post unneccesarily large.

You managed to miss the only two competent companions then. Heh. Okay, that's a gross oversimplification, but Alchemists are broken OP and Ekun had a ton of bugs that made him one-shot trolls in my game. I'm kind of guessing that no longer works.

The one where one of the great seven Youma is inside the fat cat that's been hitting on Luna (because the other evil pet episode is near the end of Sailor Moon R, and wowsers that would be a quick binge on your part)? 🤣 edit: No, it's not. I just realized you mean the one near the beginning where everyone buys these weird little pet things that turn them miserable and jealous. One of the best things about Sailor Moon is how you can pick out any number of scenes, talk about them and people who have never seen the anime are left to wonder what the hell is going on and how anyone could even being to enjoy this, yet it still makes perfect sense in-universe because the show's just like that and never stops or, heaven forbid, apologizes for it. Glorious, just glorious. And yet, even amongst all this bedlam it still finds time for character development and the odd commentary on 90ies Japan or broader issues here and there.

That depends on what you would call good. If you mean seriously good, not schlock* that's fun to watch like The Expendables then that probably really was True Lies. Escape Plan got trashed by critics but I liked it well enough, it didn't feel like I've wasted two hours of my life. Unlike, say, watching Terminator Genisys or Last Stand. * I'd say The 6th Day and Eraser were fun schlock too, but what do I know about film. edit: You're also not alone with your love affair with True Lies. Way back at that age, at the time, I could have watched Jamie Lee Curtis in anything and liked it. But even without that the film still really fun mix of comedy, action and silly one lines. Perfect entertainment in my book. You're fired.

'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.