majestic

Original English, no need to try Japanese or German dubs. I guess the Japanese dub would be hilarious, but more recent German dubs, particularily on Netflix stuff, haven't been of really high quality. I generally go original with subtitles nowadays, if available.

As far as I know and from articles I've read, Castlevania's production team contained a number of people who worked on various anime series. Which makes the claimes by fanboys that Western Animation(tm) finally strikes back all the more hilarious. Fandumbs are pretty dumb, all across the globe. Eh, and yeah, I don't think you need to re-visit the series, it is unlikely to change your mind. There's too much focus on (somewhat) pointless action sequences and not enough character development, I'd say. The later seasons get more traditional antagonists. I actually liked the setup from the first season, with Darcula being clearly wronged and having a point. The priests and their flock sure had it coming. Nothing wrong with the pacing of the first three seasons, perhaps a bit too fast in some places, but overall it's fine. The fourth season spins its wheels in place at times as if they couldn't come up with enough content for the amount of episodes they were asked to provide. Not sure what is weird about the dialogue. It was fine. Voice actors were told to sound as deep and mysterious as possible, I guess.

nuTrek went with keeping Jar Jar Abram's Star Trek 2009's opening events, meaning the Romulan Star Empire was more or less destroyed, and they're galactic refugees now*. Never mind how utterly dumb the idea was in the first place, it is what it is. They install a cloaking device from a Klingon Bird of Prey on the USS Titan, and Geordi is all like: "Do you have any idea how many treaties you're violating?" Yes, indeed. One irrelevant one. I mean technically the Romulan Free State is still around and the Federation mantains that treaty, but, uhm... it really is whatever at this point. *Unless they need to be a threat, in which case the Romulans can muster an enormous fleet out of nowhere to face off Picard at the end of the first season. They couldn't ferry their own refugees or evacuate Romulus properly with the thousands and thousands of ships they have, but hey... Condolences are in order, I think. Have "fun".

120+ minutes queue in D4. Congratulations ActiBlizz.

Went to my ophthalmologist for a checkup today. The same doctor as usual, the experience was vastly improved though, by the simple fact that she decided to go fully private, meaning she no longer has any contracts with our regular, public insurance companies. Instead of health insurance paying the checkup, you pay the bill yourself, and then hand in the bill and get reimbursed up to a certain amount (for me and my really bad eyesight that is going to be roughly 80% of the bill, for others, much less), with the rest potentially covered by any additional, private health insurance. In the past the waiting time was like an hour, sometimes even more when some acute case came in. Last time I had to wait hours just to see the doctor, in spite of having an appointment, because someone came in with glass splinters in their eyes. I mean, yeah, I get it, that does take priority over a regular check. Today though, I was ten minutes early, got to the checkup immediately, then got eye drops (for dilation, looked like a junkie afterwards) and a complete ophthalmoscopy. Took 20 minutes. Well, aside from being half-blind, nothing's noticably wrong. Pupil dilation is back to normal too, and none too soon, everything was uncomfortably bright. To think people used to use atropine eye drops for beauty effects in the past (it is how belladonna allegedly got its name - pretty woman). What a stupid idea.

The episodes are only good when you check your brain out at the door, because the moment you start thinking about some of the things you see, it all pretty much falls apart. Then there's this whole fake warp trail nonsense after we've been shown that Starfleet had the ability to track its ships decades ago. Man, like, what? Watched The Mandalorian, episode four. The series has established a rhythm by now. It's one stinker episode followed by one that is decent enough if - and there it has something in common with Picard - one just checks out one's brain before turning it on. The Mandalorians certainly deserved being bombed into oblivion, they're the dumbest people of the galaxy, by a great margin. This is just dumb with a capital D.

^ There was once a time when people thought HammerFall was cheesy.

Finally finished season four of Castlevania after putting it off for a longer while. Half of the season was wasted on Marvelesque, endless action sequences that were neither interesting nor meaningful - although impressive in their animation - and a certain reveal at the very end came out of the left field, with not enough prior setup. Dedicating a full episode to the epilogue was a great idea though, and the final confrontation between and Trevor showed that they could actually make a meaningful action scene if all the pieces are in place. Probably would have been better to call it quits after the second season and end the series on a really high quality note, but still, overall, rather enjoyable if one likes vampires and action and can get past Trevor's introduction to the series, which really had me groaning and facepalming throughout. He never really gets any more interesting and is often used as exposition dump thanks to his background, but at least the other characters make up for it.

Fixed in the latest release, at least according to the patchnotes. Direct link for the full installer: https://content-system.gog.com//open_link/download?path=/open/galaxy/client/2.0.60.2/setup_galaxy_2.0.60.2.exe Just start Galaxy and uncheck "run at system startup" if it isn't unchecked already, then reboot, run the setup -> should work again. I also ran into the issue, but running the manual setup always fixed it, at least until it broke again an update or two later. Still can use the standalone installer from the website if nothing else helps. I doubt SFC will get a whole lot of updates...

That is true for the first IWD. Druids in IWD2 are used in cheese builds for Barkskin and the fun fact that Druid/Bards can sing while shape-shifted, allowing for some really wild character stats. Having a character with 12 levels in Druid is more or less a requirement for smoother Heart of Fury play as Barkskin yields an impressive generic +5 AC that stacks, but otherwise, nah. There are only two. Three if you count the Dark Arts one from the DLC.

The best Russian music was posted by @Chilloutman in the joke thread a while back. They even have English subtitles. Ah, my Putin... what a glorious composition. Didn't age so well though, in light of last year's events. Edit: Clearly, the best male Russian singer is a German pretending to be Russian:

It really is sort of funny how certain shows can inadvertently improve or worsen one's opinion of other series. Love Live!, while pretty bad in my opinion, was made even worse by realizing that what was actually nice about the series was lifted from K-On!, a series the creator of Love Live! also wrote for. Recently I started a really leisurely rewatch of Star Trek: Voyager, and it is so much better than it was in my memory because even the mediocre or bad episodes are still leaps and bounds ahead of everything in nuTrek. Tomo-chan Is a Girl makes Tamako Market look like the epitome of artistry, warts and all. The animation, content, scene-setting - literally everything. One of two more of these clips and I'll forgive Tamako touching Midori's ass to see if ass-shaped mochi might be a good idea for their mochi shop.

*snort* Blizzard, before every online game launch they ever had. Next weekend will see the login system crash and burn and the servers strained beyond capacity, and so will the launch. Business as usual.

Have I mentioned how much Makoto kills in Pretty Guardian Sailor Moon? I did? Oh... well, then I'll just repeat myself. Makoto is awesome, and Kunzite is just glorious. I already said that too? Oh... The series is a damned sight better than the manga and Crystal/Eternal, although that is not a very high bar to clear.

I looked it up, so the others in the thread won't have to. Ah, how I suffer for others, what a selfless act. Tomo who apparently passes as a boy increases her bust size to DD in swimwear. Classic. I guess she gets her bikini top from the same manufacturer that made Haruka's dress in Sailor Moon Eternal.

Curiously enough, I managed to avoid breaking a rule I set for myself on a technicality. I said that I'll never ever give Blizzard money again, so I did not. I gave someone else money so they can pre-order D4 for me. Idea inspired by local politics.

Ka is a wheel. Having a deja vu here. Although it's not a feeling, I'm pretty sure polish posters were a topic before.

I lack a frame of reference, so do take that with a grain of salt, but the city being small was a complaint from launch, as far as I can remember.

What you get out of collection chests is random, so there's no telling at all what you missed, made worse by the 27 untrackable collection chests* that are in the game. Everything else has a counter on it, why not those? Well, at least I'm cured of trying open world games for the forseeable future. Every now and then I do, and the experience is almost always a sour one. Cyberpunk 2077 stands apart there, for some reason. Probably because everyone else complained how small the city is. *Well, technically, 15 of them show up on the map in some fashion, it's 12 that don't at all.

The GOG version works - for me, at least - on Windows 11. In the configuration utility, select "primary display driver", go as high with the resolution as you can, save the settings. Go to the installation folder, pick Windows XP SP3 for compatibility mode, and finally change two settings in the sfc.ini file in the directory under the [Mouse] section. async to 0 and hwblit to 1. It is a little fiddly, but it works, at least without major graphics issues or crashes. If it crashes, well, there's always the refund option. I do not know if one can make the Steam version run with these settings. Presumably GOG changed something with the game. The game is still the way it is, so I find little enjoyment in it. That didn't change in over 20 years now. Guess it never will.

Everyone involved in making these two achievements needs to die, perferably in a very uncomfortable, painful way, something out of the medieval ridiculous executions book. To quote Lindsay Ellis: "Thanks, I hate it!"

Having had some unexpected free time, I've finished some odds and ends that piled up over the lockdowns (which were, working on supply chain b2c transport systems, a tad stressful). Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D., season 7: Well, it was a time travel season, so not all of the plot makes sense, but that also was not the aim. Much like with the preceeding sixth season, it is clear that the series was finished with season five, and every episode afterwards was just everyone having fun. Clearly where the writers of WandaVision got some ideas from, as Coulson and the crew travel through the decades in what is probably best described as a balls-to-the-wall whacky adventure. The title cards of the episodes match the theme it conveys. As far as the cast goes, Joel Stoffer and Clark Gregg, as per usual, totally own every scene they're in. Two of the absolute highlight of the season is an 80ies splatter episode with killer robots with Knight Rider sound effects and red running lights. One of them runs around and yells EXTERMINATE. It is titled The Totally Excellent Adventures of Mack and The D and features Clark Gregg as Max Headroom (it does make sense in context) and Deke becoming a pop star by writing 80ies hits before they actually came out. It's filled to the brim with fun 80ies allusions without it ever feeling obnoxious, but that is perhaps just my eternal infatuation with the decade I lived though my early childhood. Where's my Deke Squad cover album? Hello, Marvel! Come on. Like I said, this is just everyone having fun, at least until the final episode, which is probably one of the better series endings I've ever watched - it is arguably even better than what was probably intended as the series ending at the end of season five. Said it before, still stand by it, Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. is easily my favorite Marvel outing. Outside of the weaker first half of the first season (so, not recommended for anyone who cannot look past middling first introductions, or has problems with "Asian Mary Sue ladies" in a universe populated with Thor, Iron Man, Ghost Rider, sentient Androids, killer robots, super soldiers... well, you get my drift) this is just the perfect mixture of mystery, action and character interactions. It does feature the occasional pacing issue, but which series running for seven season does not? As always, Phil Coulson remains the best character in the MCU. Star Trek: Strange New Worlds, episodes nine and ten: Found myself not caring for either. The ninth episode, which is trying to be Alien(s) in Star Trek using the otherwise comical Gorn from TOS exemplifies the difference between what is actually a fairly decent nuTrek show and actual Star Trek. Arena makes a point beyond "Gorn bad", this here does not. In a way this is really similar to that one episode where someone tries to kidnap a child to prevent it from doing something that is necessary, which then just happens, with Captain Pike trying to stop it. An actual Trek series would have had a morality debate in that episode, and a more modern Trek show would include a request for asylum instead of an attempted kidnapping. Alas, actual Star Trek is as dead as the horse I'm beating here, so I'll just leave it at that. Yes, it was the best nuTrek series to date. It might actually be the best first season of any Star Trek show, if it actually was Star Trek, not nuTrek with a less obnoxious coat of paint thrown over it, and all the pandering in the series? No, sorry, can't stand it. It's perhaps not as bad as it appeared, but such things are highly subjective after all. La'An Noonien-Singh? You might actually be a nice character, but with that name you go into the same trash bin as Noonien Soong's great-great-great-great-great-great-grandfather and his identical looking son from Picard. The tenth episode is just a "what if?" alternate timeline exploration of The Balance of Terror. Kyouma Hououin would call Pike weak for giving up so easily. Well, that's how you end up with a saved Krisu in one series, and a soon to be mutilated Pike in another. Or whatever. Who cares. ** One new thing, Star Trek: Picard, season three, episode five. I was already a lot more negative towards what was basically an unneeded The Next Generation style Wrath of Khan remake (like I said, I have no idea how Mike and Rich can be so positive about this, outside of perhaps being grateful that Star Trek: Picard makes one not wanting to gouge one's eyes out, but that's clearly not a bar I am comfortable with setting for any Star Trek series) than others, and this episode just seals the deal further. Good thing this is finally over after this season.

Kung Fury is absolutely glorious, and that includes the soundtrack. There could not be a better title track for Kung Fury than True Survivor. Still, there's always the option of making a cheesy power metal cover of the cheesy 80ies revival Hoff track:

The third season of The Mandalorian is shaping up to be the worst one yet. Three episodes so far, two stinkers, and one that was "fine", except for the sheer stupidity of everyone involved. They really should have ended it with season two.