majestic

Well, look at episode 20 of PGSM. Usagi figures out that Mamoru is engaged in the worst possible way. The writers are really milking that set up for as long as it lasts, and the foregone conclusion that is hovering over all of this makes it kind of feel superflous and wasted. There are some really significant deviations from the source material(s) in this series, but not enough to make anyone ever believe that the romantic core of this series could have any other outcome than the canonical one. This version of their relationship might be the best yet, though. Mamoru isn't a weird creep and Usagi is, while childish at times, a lot less immature and co-dependent than her anime counterpart. With this being a live action series involving actual minors, I also doubt we'll be treated to an implied sex scene where Mamoru has nothing better to do than jumping on Usagi after she calls him a pedophile. Yes, that's in Crystal, in case any of you forgot or, uhm, didn't read my posts. Motoki continues to be an idiot, but now that Makoto has actually talked to him and gave him a scarf for Valentine's day, things are progressing there, although they'll only conclude in a post-series special. I just hope Motoki isn't going to bring his turtle to the wedding. Ami is abudcted by Kunzite, finally starting her path down to DARK SAILOR MERCURY after being the Ensign Mayweather* of PGSM for the past couple episodes. Minako figures out that Mamoru is Tuxedo Mask, while psycho-killer Rei is trying to figure out what Minako's deal is. Mamoru and Usagi take the creepy kids out for what creepy girl calls a double date, only to have Usagi's hopes cruelly dashed by the creepy boy telling her that Mamoru and Hina are engaged. The series seems to have some pacing issues, after a while of not much happening too much happens all at once and way too quickly. *Character on Star Trek: Enterprise who, if he was lucky, got a single line to say per episode, because the writers had no idea what to do with his character.

Ineed, the overzealous backend protection issue is back, and it includes quoting certain characters too by the looks of it, like asterisks and ellispsis and quotation marks. Meh. Meaning that just because something can be posted doesn't mean it can be quoted in response.

Okay. This day is officially over. I am, for a lack of a better term, exhausted by the sheer amount of incompetence of what feels like everyone working in IT. I ask someone from which IP address(es) they are going to connect to our system for the data transfer as we need to white list on the firewall, and the answer is: 192.168.XXX.XXX.

Buy one and find out! Pretty sure that's just the regular keyboard though, the mechanical one is an upgrade option. The XMG NEO is also available with regular air cooling, but you can bet that both the CPU and the GPU will start throttling down the moment you turn it on. Complete waste of hardware and money. Arguably either way, but more so with air cooling.

Indeed, particularily for international communication, YYYY-MM-DD is the only format that is readily understood by everyone. It's a bit of a pickle now because we were told the deadline is in October, and now it is three weeks ago. In the days of yore unused HDDs would spin down to reduce wear, and when they spun up it could take a while for the system to react. Actually, HDDs still do that. My father has some 30 odd TB storage space that is largely unused in regular use, but when opening the explorer they start spinning up. Takes up to a minute until Windows reacts. So, yeah, things taking a while with hard disks, not necessarily a sign of problems.

Found out that we got some wrong information about a certain date from our reseller, because Muricans just can't write dates. 01/10/2023 is somehow not in October.

The ARC suffers from ludicrous price syndrome(tm) in Yurop. The A750 and A770 cost almost the same, which is right around the cost of a RTX 3060 12 GB, and yeah, that makes it a lot less appealing. Should still be good for 1080p gaming for a while though. Could certainly do worse, and an A750 anywhere near MSRP would be a really nice option for the price range.

Just for the fun of it, because they can be (pre)ordered now. Behold the XMG NEO 17: So, what sort of prices are we looking at? Uhm... with... Intel Core i9-13900HX nVidia RTX 4090 Laptop 16GB 64 GB SK Hynix 5600 DDR5 (comes with a buyback option for the upcoming 6400 MT DDR5 once they pass validation and QC checks) 17" IPS 99% sRGB WQXGA panel 4 TB M.2 Corsair MP600 PRO NH Mechanical Cherry MX keyboard XMG OASIS Rev. 3 portable AIO water cooling system 2 year warranty So, anyone here with some leftover money who wants to buy me a new laptop?

Whaaaaaaaaaaaaaat, AMD is as bad as Intel and nVidia when afforded the opportunity? You don't say. I thought Lisa Su is my lord and saviour?

Look at that, Xandria got yet another vocalist... I want to like them, really, but they keep pulling the rug from under me every time I get used to the new lead vocalist. I'm probably the odd one out who liked the first one best.

So, basically, when I think of someone who likes Crystal more than the original anime, I imagine a certain type of person, and I have to say this particular comment basically confirms my prejudices. Giant sentences, disjointed stream of consciousness, complete nonsense ahead: Small sample size, to be certain, but let it never be known that I am fair in my criticism of things I do not enjoy.

Are there anime stock character designs? I could swear I've seen that blonde haired guy in several other animes already. Edit: Kunzite just owns every scene he is in. edit 2: Artemis after Minako pranks him: Usagi's mother tells her to watch a frist grader, the daugther of a friend of hers. Usagi proceeds by offering her coffee. She looks like she escaped from some horror movie shoot. Talks like it too. And then Usagi just drops her off at a boy's house after creepy girl gives him chocolates for Valentine's Day. Uh, Usagi, are you sure about that?

PGSM continues to be a little weird because the characters are somewhere in between their manga and anime counterparts, and it sometimes just clashes. It's just too weird to see Minako dressing down psycho-killer Rei for not being serious enough, only to then throw a really childlish, competitive fit over taking care of a stray dog with her, as Rei brings some dog food with her and Minako just has to run off and buy four large boxes of high quality dog food to one-up Rei. Next scene, Makoto is telling Usagi to not give up because who knows if that girlfriend of Mamoru's is going to stick around (I suppose Makoto read the script). Makoto, of all people, should not try to get Usagi to mess up other people's relationships. Minako totally would. It makes sense in context of the series, I suppose. This is by the way the fifth set of voices for the characters I've heard (Crystal and original German and Japanese dub, now PGSM). It's starting to be really confusing.

It was great.

So, a YouTube channel I made the mistake of watching a video or two of (it happens) just announced that laptops with Ada Lovelace are basically dead on arrival because "European manufacturer XMG" confirmed to him that their RTX 4090 based laptops will cost over 4000€, and nobody's going to buy them in this market. Perhaps, but it betrays a certain lack of knowledge. XMG is a premium manufacturer where you get built to order computers (it's where I got mine). They only let you select from a handful of carefully picked components, and there's no compromise on quality (except perhaps on desktop AIB cards where they generally allow you to pick whatever is available at the moment, but that was not always the case), their products are assembled to order (each of them has a two to three weeks delivery time if components are readily available at the time of ordering) and go through rigorous QC (tested twice by different employees), and they come with a three year warranty for desktops and a two year warranty for laptops, and if indeed something goes wrong, then they offer top notch service. In other words, whoever wants an XMG notebook with an RTX 4090 in it will pay that premium because they want to. That might just be a very small, select clientel, but that's their business model. Heck, they offer calibrated 4K IPS 100% AdobeRGB LCD panels in some configurations, that panel alone costs more than some lower end laptops as a whole. Of course, tech companies are in for reduced revenue, and Nvidia's pricing is by far and large to dump existing Ampere stock, which by all accounts works pretty well, and it is entirely possible that nobody's going to buy mass manufactured notebooks with 40-series GPUs, but basing an estimation of future sales for products that aren't even available yet on what amounts to premium, assembled-to-order notebook models is perhaps not the best of ideas. By the way, their website offers a decent clue as to why RTX 4070 Tis are selling pretty well in Central Yurop, in case you've seen the tweet from one of the German retailers and wondered what the hell is going on: Pick a system that comes with an RTX 3080 as base configuration and make it cheaper by adding a faster and more power efficient card? Gee, makes you wonder how that happens that such cards sell well. You'd have to be one ginormous dunderhead to order a 3080.

I did, because at the time I could play through Origin Access - EA Play nowadays. Anthem, at release, was l ike a tech demo that promised a fun game once completed, which is a truly sorry state for a multiplayer experience to launch in. When it worked and you got a decent group to play with, it was pretty good. The flying worked well and the combat was much better than in Mass Effect: Andromeda and Dragon Age: Inquisition. It was everything else that was the problem, from the disjointed story to the technical aspects that led to the game's loading screens being longer than some of the missions, to a grindy and repetitive endgame with way too little variety in everything. Loot was boring, it was always the same handful of missions, and the loot was boring. Did I mention that everything that is supposed to keep one playing through an end-game grind in a co-op multiplayer experience with RPG elements was boring? Particularily the loot and the mission variety. Forcing Bioware to adopt Frostbite for everything turned out to be a wonderful decision, and when they were close to actually making it work EA pulled the plug. Not that the decision was not understandable, Anthem hat preciously little to show for its enormous development time.

I saw them live once, before the dark times. Before the lockdowns. As Sonata Arctica support. Pretty sure they had a different singer back then though. That one sounds like a discount Fabio Lione.

Every time you eat something like that, God kills a kitten.

Macaroni is a type of noodle... It is entirely possible that there's a different export recipe, all I know is that Felix is a damned sight better than Heinz, but I have noticed similar discrepancies with other food. For instance, a lot of people I interacted with told me that McDonald's food is vile. Now, while their fries aren't great and the food is, well, McDonald's, it is a far cry from being vile. The patties are regularily overcooked and therefore a little on the dry side, but you can't reasonably expect properly medium grilled patties at a McDonald's. I never really understood that until I visited a McDonald's on Malta, and that was indeed vile. From YouTube I learned that McDonald's in Germany is much better than in the US, and while I don't know if that applies to the chain across the entire US, McDonald's in Germany is - while better than in Malta, at least - still a far cry below what we get from them here in terms of taste and ingredient quality. Oh, also, that is only true for the regular ketchup. The Felix hot varieties aren't good. The seasonal varieties are miss and hit, although I don't know if you actually get any of them. The onion one is not particularily great, but onion and garlic is good enough for red meat. The weirdest one was ketchup and plum, which tasted pretty good on its own, but did not mesh particularily well with any meat.

Whoever made your meatball image clearly has ketchup on... well, pasta. Ugh. What are you dissing Felix ketchup for, it's the only edible ketchup there is (the sugar reduced variety, at that, less sweet). Hela is okay in a pinch. Heinz is vile.

So much pain this thread. Tongue in cheek part: First: please, for the love of god, keep ketchup away from pasta. I love me my good ketchup, really, but noodles? What savage puts ketchup on noodles? But, well, let's never say that Scandinavians know anything about good food. Second: putting ketchup on eggs isn't any better. That is, at best, an acceptable side effect of eating pan-fried or grilled knacker (kinda like baloney) with sunny side ups. Third: Eating mayo with fries is borderline criminal, but something I sometimes induldge in too. Mixing it with ketchup, or even buying one of those dreadful pre-mixed disgusting sludges that are sometimes sold is a crime against humanity and should be prosecuted accordingly. Yuck. Fourth: Käsespätzle > Mac'n'Cheese, but it is close. Lastly: Milk is perfectly fine for making savory dishes and that goodly bechamel sauce, but it's not fine to insult the god of sausages by throwing milk on them after cookng them in a pan. Real talk: For @Keyrock (image repost): We've given up on making our rouladen into rouladen shape. Why? Because we just make a beef "pouch" to hold as many pickles, mustard and onions as you can possibly stuff into it. Yeah, it's that good. For the record, I also don't have any issue with cream based sauces or gravy. They should just not be put on beautiful, crispy meatballs. It is acceptable to eat condiments with them, perhaps even decent ketchup (which means not Heinz). I also stand by them having to be properly deep fried in clarified butter. For anything else? Just make meatloaf.

The banner is five times larger on the desktop browser (in 1920x1080, on Firefox, that is) than it is on mobile. The banner is fine on my phone. It is still there and isn't nearly as obtrusive as the deskopt variety is.

I'm just going to leave this here: I managed to live four decades without seeing an image of Swedish meatballs by the way, and now I wish I had managed for longer. Needless to say, I also never ate at an IKEA store, and after looking it up, I certainly am not going to. Repost: There there, don't you worry none, we'll never add cream based gravy to you. Or any gravy, for that matter. Hush now. Off you go, into my mouth.

Finished watching the film. It is fine. The first thirty minutes are good, as are the last thirty minutes, the main problem, for me, is that hour in between that goes nowhere, or rather, it does go somewhere, but it is both obvious and unnecessary long, and hence as dull and dreary as life on Inisherin. If that was the point, then it is well executed. Now, it is not nearly as dull or overly long in the setup as some series I have watched who had preciously little to show for 26 episodes, like the recently watched Noir, but that cannot possibly be the yardstick against which to compare a self-indulgent film that otherwise had exquisite mastery of filmcraft lovingly applied to its making, including fantastic performances from almost everyone involved. Except the priest. Screw that guy. Pretty sure Colm was right, he does have impure thoughts about men. So, basically, this has the exact same issue as Everything Everywhere All At Once had, just with darker and much less whacky humor. Beyond that, do I have much of an opinion about it? Not really, other than perhaps mentioning that in times past I have had my fair share of Padraics that I luckily managed to phase out of my life without becoming am Irish civil war analogy, a conflict I admittedly do not know enough about to find deeper meaning in what is depicted in The Banshees of Inisherin, but I doubt it would have led me to greater appreciation. As far as there being any comedic (under)tones, I have laughed three times, which is actually not that bad: I also once knew a Dominic, someone who ended up on my team during my (not brief enough) stint in the armed forces. I could write a whole essay about how much fun acting out the Full Metal Jacket boot camp in real life is, but what would be the point, just go watch the boot camp part of Full Metal Jacket. We ended up carting him to an fro at the weekends, because his parents could not be bothered. They would have left him at the barracks. Hell, they probably intended for him to be left there just to have a couple more days without the guy around them. Not entirely sure how he passed the psych/mental ability eval. He was much more limited than Dominic, really, barely capable of even remembering the ranks. He kept calling the corporals corpo-rats, and the NCOs sub-officers, which was hilarious in some ways, and decidedly less in others. Never managed to properly unload his assault rifle either. He also kept folding up his used shirts and putting them back into his locker for inspection, because he was told that all the shirts in the locker needed to be folded perfectly. Except, of course, the ones that should be in the laundry. Sigh. Well, that is that. As with EEAAO, the world is once again safe from any impending apocalypse, at least as far as breaking the laws of physics to the point where reality unravels goes. Indeed. There is a time and place for everything, and I do not mind slow burning movies or even series. Not that I would need to state this so explicitly, as my past posts on the subject and on really slow material (Violet Evergarden comes to mind, but also the initial seasons of the new Battlestar Galactica series), but it bears repeating. The problem I had with The Banshees of Inisherin was that after 31 minutes I felt like the setup of the film had run its course, but instead of moving on, it basically kept showing the same things over and over again to really drive home the point that Colm was trying to make to Padraic. It was enough to make me feel Colm's pain. Then I looked at the time elapsed, and it was 36 minutes. At this point I was ready to post "I hate myself" in this thread, and almost did, but then I just sat through the rest, at least until I noticed that Padraic's beer kept moving around in the same shot, depending on the camera angle. Three separate configurations in ten seconds, I have no idea how that was not caught. Well: The film did catch my attention early on though. It did so rather well, it just completely turned sour at around the thirty minutes mark, and then it go progressively worse until just before the second round of Colm throwing stuff at Padraic's door. Funny, I had almost said that after that the film picks up some pace at the time, but it really does not. It just stops telling me that life on Inisherin is dreadfully dull. It felt like sitting through a work meeting or a seminar where someone keeps asking the same questions, and they are getting everything patiently explained over and over again until they finally understand it, while meanwhile I contemplate how to best resist my personal urge for self-harm in such situations. Alan Rickman was awesome in Dogma, but I was talking about Christopher Walken. I think you clearly need to go and watch The Prophecy. The film very clearly proves that most film critics are simply hacks, because they could not appreciate its greatness - at least it became a cult hit. Avoid the sequels though, they have something in common with the Starship Trooper sequels. You can watch them, of course, but only if you can appreciate them for what they are. The Prophecy also had the best portrayal of Lucifer. Only appears for a very short time, but Viggo Mortensen steals everyone's show, and that is hard to do next to Christopher Walken.