majestic

Well, at least the potential sentences are appropriate. We jailed a former Russian spy for like three years. Good job.

The classic. The moon's full, Shiina is out on her creepy ass Patrick flying around, when a witch shows up and says hi. Can't have a full moon without witches or werewolves, right? I'm not even going to try to comment on the imagery here.

Not giving Amentep an earful, but I'm not going to take to Twatter to twatter out a reply, so he gets it here. Actually that semi cohesive pseudo-essay began as a one liner nitpicking about R not beginning with Chibi-Usa falling from the sky until I realized that she could potentially be watching the series with an episode guide that leaves out the filler, and everthing else just followed from there. Might as well just go and watch Crystal to have your brain melted like that. I said it before, I can see getting a head start with the series by just watching episodes 1, 8, 10 and 13, but even that is questionable. Sure, it drops Usagi's most annoying early moments, but it also removes a few episodes that were just plain fun (like those completely mad furry glowy-eyed pet things). But dropping all the good episodes in favor of getting to BRACK RADY early? Yeah, count me out. I'd rather watch Makoto tidy up Motoki's room and cook for Ali. Luckily, I am only aware of Scrappy Doo by pop-cultural osmosis. Scooby Doo did air every now and then, but never the episodes with Scrappy, and I am certainly not going to subject myself to them just to figure out just how wrong the comparison really is. I'll take your word for it. It sure is a curious position to be in, understanding both sides of an argument by personal experience. Chibi-Usa occupies a Schrödinger's space in my brain as I remember loathing her inclusion in the series (never mind hating her character), and actually enjoying her presence.

First of all, the obligatory and necessary nitpick: Sailor Moon R begins with the Doom Tree filler arc, not with Chibi-Usa appearing. I hope this doesn't mean that this Erica Henderson character is following some episode guide that recommends dropping the filler episodes. Such things are great for animes like Bleach where there's filler arcs in the filler arcs to pad out filler seasons that are generally of much lower quality than episodes based on the manga because the manga writer is better than the show's writers. For Sailor Moon, that is not the case: not watching the Doom Tree arc will make you miss out on some of the funniest episodes in the series, not to mention some of the most heartwarming scenes. Worse yet: skipping the Sailor Stars filler arc would make one miss out on the only well written story arc of the entire anime. It's not a coincidence that both filler arcs are significantly better in terms of storytelling than the rest of the anime for the simple reason of not being shackled to the confused mess the source material is, which by all accounts has become popular in spite of being a mess (and the reprints of the mangas contain a quasi-apology by the writer for the mess that it is, so this isn't just some generic internet hate). However that has happened will remain an eternal mystery to me. Now, as for Chibi-Usa: I can say from personal experience that one's reaction to Chibi-Usa is also colored by life experiences and maturity. The first time I watched the anime, which was way back when it first aired, I hated Chibi-Usa with a passion, at least while she was around in R, which is to say, well, the entire time after she shows up. When she eventually comes back in the next season, she is a character that gets enough agency to be interesting even if you didn't like her initially. The second time around I wondered why I reacted as badly to her presence. She's a child, and her interactions with Usagi show how much of a child Usagi still is too - which makes sense, with her being 14 at the time. Chibi-Usa acts in a (often incredibly) stupid manner all the time, but that is because she's a child running from a traumatic experience. More specifically, she's Usagi's child, after all, and it only makes sense for her to take after her mother. She eventually becomes the foil used to highlight Usagi's own character development, but she's a disruptive and foreign element that can feel out of place, and if it does, then that is quite bad for one's enjoyment of the series, especially when her actions threaten the characters you've come to love simply because she does not trust them, even though they clearly can be trusted (and it is obvious to literally everyone, even children, that Chibi-Usa is the child of Mamoru and Usagi, so stop being stupid Chibi-Usa and understand that, why don't you?). Chibi-Usa is fine, outside of everything that happens in Sailor Moon SuperS, and the less is said about that, the better. Arguably it is an inverse case of her appearance in R, the greater one's life experience and maturity are, the creepier the contents of Sailor Moon SuperS become. Superficially, her romance with a horse can be seen as, well, romantic, and going by YouTube comments from clips, it often is. One can also see the Amazon Trio's acts of looking at the dreams of their victims as exactly that. Or, well, one can see it for what it is. A season long metaphor for sexual assault and pedophilia, because that horse 'befriends' Chibi-Usa in much the same way a pedophile would groom a little girl, and the less is said about the Amazon Trio's actions the better. SuperS is basically what one gets as a studio when you ask your writers to revert the natural changes to your characters that happen over time back to their more or less super childish season one predispositions even when they don't want to and it makes no sense to do so. Since there are more people aware of Harry Potter these days, I suppose, one can use Harry as an example, imagine what would have happened if Warner Brothers had asked the filmmakers to go back to making films similar to the first Harry Potter movie - after HP & the Goblet of Fire. Granted, the result could not have been much worse than Order of the Phoenix, but let's not let that ruin the metaphor. Little wonder that almost the entire creative team was replaced for the final season. I still remember groaning so hard when Chibi-Usa shows up out of the blue after only a few episodes in S, but the way she integrates into the team and the series is much better in the third season. Like 25 years later it was so much easier to see this as intentional and making sense than it was back then. It's obvious for the viewers who Chibi-Usa is and that she should just tell everything to her parents, but it's not that obvious to her. Eh.

Is the Unicorn of War one of the skins Abeloth wears?

That was the general idea.

No, but there is a powerful witch here. She is called Abeloth, and we need @Hurlshort's daugther to defeat her. He should bring her to us. Bring her to the forum. Yes.

We all are.

I also considered the first three episodes of Book of Boba Fett to be great and much better than the stuff with the Mandalorian - basic pattern analysis says that means I should enjoy Obi-Wan Kenobi. The epitaph of a wasted billion dollars.

Okay, that convinced me to watch Obi-Wan Kenobi.

サイバーパンク エッジランナーズ Okay, so where do I start with this one. First would be to internally debate how to properly measure the success of any given entertainment product. Is it the simple matter of saying how much I was entertained by it, or should we apply different metrics as well? In the former, then, well, I did neither like nor hate watching Edgerunners. If it is the latter, then I just finished watching a modern anime with a shōnen scumbag protagonist that did not make me want to kill myself, and that would be a job well done. Alas, when I look at what it tried to do, then I can just say it did not work for me. Visuals I guess by, this point, I don't need to repeat the same old part of this song like a broken record. There's a whole lot of nudity in this one, on the other hand, it barely ever bothered me. That is most likely because of the immense disconnect the art style causes. Awe-inspiring visual flair is not how I would describe the assault on my eyes that the color scheme and character art was. It looks like someone took 80ies martial art anime character design and mangled it through the eye popping color filter of Words Bubble Up Like Soda Pop, except the filter setting was tuned for dystopian cyberpunk world, not feelgood slice of life romantic comedy. MD Geist fighting... no, wait. Toto, I have a feeling we're not in the 80ies any more. Anyone looking for their haiku dictionary? Guess that's enough. The animation quality is fine, actually, but I would not expect anything less from Studio Trigger. There are some scenes that look really uncanny, but such is part for the modern anime course. Scumbags I'm just copying quotes from wikipedia here, but Jonathon Wilson, whoever he is, certainly has not played Cyberpunk 2077 - or if he did, he did not finish the game. The basic plot elements are similar, except the game is much better in making one care for the characters involved than the show is, particularily with the mentor characters. Jackie is a much better character than Maine ever could be, and we see less of Jackie in the game than we do of Maine in the series. Maine is the guy in the image that looks like an illegal gene splicing experiment between Street Fighter's Guile and Kenshiro from Fist of the North Star. It's not all terrible. The second episode was mostly good, and some situations in between showed what this could have been. In some ways it was much less frustrating than Noir. Noir promised more than it could deliver, but Edgerunners mostly delivers what it promises, with a couple of moments that go beyond that. Having ten episodes while repeating plot points with this little screen time, without fleshing out themes or characters enough for them to matter in the long run, well, what was the point? Flashy entertainment and action was certainly more important than... well, anything else. Congratulations. One would think that people who worked on the original NGE know how to turn action into an addition that can underscore the exploration of existential dread that living in a dystopian cyberpunk world would provide the perfect basis for, but alas, this falls squarely into Rebuild territory. Just with being less obnoxious because it can't ruin anything that preceeded it.

I'm really curious about your reaction. Have your teenage daughter contact @Make a contract with KP, you might be able to change something about it. All for the price of a little... help.

Well my droogs, it kinda vred my rassoodock every time nadsat was used too thickly, it made my gulliver oozhassny. I didn't mind the film being British, it's the Russian based fictional slang Burgess created that I thought did not work all too well in film form. It's been a while since I watched the movie, but it was not easy to follow with having to keep track of fictional words. Hence my musing that it would probably be less problematic in the book where there's more time to mull it over. Caveat: that was a long, long time ago (comes down two to things - command of English at the time of watching and my inability to let go of not being able to properly hear any sort of dialogue, there's a reason I watch everything with subtitles... ). I should probably watch it again. Anyway, like almost five and a half years ago I posted this music video and said it would be what happend if Simon and Garfunkle created the theme song for A Clockwork Orange. Except with old people. Nobody cared back then, here's to another attempt:

Pierre Kartner Not really fond of his political leanings, but ultimately he was responsible for a lot of fun childhood memories. I'm pretty sure my parents were absolutely sick of The Smurfs song at some point. Hey, who's smurfing off key?

Aaron Carter, brother of Nick Carter, also died recently. Being a child star seems to seriously mess people up. :[

Posted this some six or so years ago, it's time for a repost. Time to FEEL RAINBOWS INSIDE!

I could have done with a little less of the nadsat slang that almost certainly worked better in the book that I did not read (yet?), but otherwise, indeed, Kubrick certainly knew his craft, even though by some accounts (like Jack Nicholson) he was a pain in the neck to work with.

Finished a lengthy-ish risk analysis. I really need a henchman to do all these fetch and carry quests for me. What a dreadfully boring experience.

'k, thanks for the reminder why I usually stay out of this thread. Okay, you got me. I was just kidding. I thought of another reasonable cop out: The subjunctive was meant for expressing whether or not the change in the handling of the Ukrainian situation can be considered significant depends on where in the world one is. See, for someone from Serbia, it makes no difference, hence it is not significant. That is clearly what I meant, I was just expressing it poorly! Yes, I'm going with that. No, I took that sentence out of the post in editing before you replied simply because it looks like a cop out and I did not want to give that impression, you can perhaps still check the timestamps (before they start reading "one hour ago"). Alas, that is not at all what I originally meant, of course, because you're right about the pre-invasion handling, which was not really on my mind and I did not take into acocunt Trump's buffoonish handling of intelligence offered to him, simply about his potential reaction to being ignored by Putin. I am uncertain what that has to do with me being paralysed with pre-invasion opines other than the fact that I already admitted to being wrong about the situation that I commented on a handful of times (there are two that I can recall off-handedly, the first that I did not think Russia would weaponize energy exports and that there would be no invasion, as both moves make no sense when thinking about Russia's well-being, or at least the well-being of the people, which Putin does not care about - okay, that one is not much of a surprise, but at least I thought he'd not stand in the way of the profit of his oligarch mafiaesque buddies - and no, I did not count, feel free to take this as another attack vector if you like), but that is fine. Am still right about the intraweb though.

I was not kidding, merely pointing out one area where Biden's current foreing policy could potentially deviate significantly from the Tangerine's. Trump is on record saying that the war would never have happened on his watch, and I am not as convinced as you are that he would not have felt betrayed by is 'good friend' Putin going ahead with the invasion anyway. Trump is nothing if not petty and throws friends and former allies under the bus on perceived slights, much less real ones. It is not that unreasonable to assume that he'd throw tantrum and suggest bombing Russia with Chinese decals. Like he did before. But who knows, I also thought Putin would not be anserous enough to go ahead with the invasion because it clearly was not in Russia's best interest, and lo, he clearly was, so clearly I suck at gauging other people's intentions. Clearly not much of a surprise there, I guess, that's clear.

Ride like the wind, Shadowfax!

Just someone who believes that the future will be better, tomorrow.

The problem is, the very vocal American 'wokerati' on Twatter make it all too easy for them to point to and yell: "That is what you get from the left." In particular because our media (edit: that include Euro-Peon wokerati on Twatter) and some political parties don't seem to have anything better to do than to pick up on these issues and present them. In the real life, I'm sorry, nobody gives a flying rat's ass about whether or not white people should be forbidden from wearing dreadlocks or if languages that have grammatical gender should be changed so that the generic masculine is more gender neutral or if people should be able to pick their own pronouns. The height of stupidity was our government prior to the election that changed our center-right party into a right-wing populist one and brought us a right-right-extremist government for a while. Changing the lyrics of our national hymn to read sons "and daugthers" because that certainy was a pressing issue that very much increased the quality of life, and the best part? Nobody's using the new hymn text, and the minister who came up with the change patted herself on the back for a feminist's job well done. I don't even... don't get me wrong, these are things we should be aware of in some capacity, but it is not something politicians should spent time and energy on when the world's burning to a cinder, there's still a large educational gap, much less women in STEM fields, non-equal rights for people with different sexual orientations, the educational system still in need of reforms, spending goes overboard and rich people can dodge taxes in any which way they feel like. At the moment our conservatives are falling apart at the seams with one massive corruption scandal chasing the next one, and what do our left leaning centrists do to capitalize on it? They want to reduce the hurdles on the way to citizenship right after a hundred people with migratory backgrounds and asylum seekers rioted during All Hallows Eve celebrations. Not only is that the worst possible timing you can have because it's just more wind in the sails of the extreme right, it is also terrible because the idea is a good one and (in my opinion) a just cause, because the hurdles on the way to Austrian citizenship are so high that even law abiding, hard working people from other nations who are well integrated can scarcely afford to apply for citizenship (never mind natural citizens not being able to pass the test, oh boy). We're basically marginalizing even those who are willing to integrate and play by our rules by telling them that no matter what they do, they're not going to be allowed to participate in our democratic process, but at the same time we expect everyone to respect our democratic process. Find the issue there yet? I do. The problem is, many others do not, so you can talk about that at some point later. Win the election first, then change the process. You're not going to win elections by championing easier citizenship after bored asylum seekers threw explosives at the police. Perhaps it should not be that way - but it is what it is. Where's the common sense here? I feel like I'm parroting Dave Chapelle, because he made a similar point about the Democrats before/shortly after Drumpf became president. Name one significant difference in foreign policy since Biden became president. Oh, right, he took the trade wars started by Trump and put on the thumb screws and antagonized China over Taiwan (for better or worse). Yeah, Trump might not want to support the Ukraine in the same way. Does not mean it would not have happened, but that could be a difference. Compared to the Tangerine in Chief, Bush was a reasonable, well spoken and articulated person, and let's not forget that it was Bush who once said he believes that man and fish can coexist peacefully.

Like a horde of comments from foreigners (both US and otherwise) on our 2016 presidential elections, an otherwise mostly meaningless election that suddenly became of world wide interest (in right wing circles) because Breitbart decided it was going to push the issue, because the winning candidate was from the Greens - which again is another misinterpretation based on not knowing anything, because our Greens are fiscal/economic conservatives with a socio-liberal worldview and a focus on environmental protection, i.e. they're mostly well off, highly educated people - libertarians, basically, who want to pay taxes for environmental protection but nothing else, the sort of people who expect that everyone can commute to work back and forth on a bicycle because they can work comfortably from home. They're left in name only, or can be considered left if you simply take the definition and assume it comes merely with not being against gay marriage or polluting the youthful mind with transgender ideas, something that - oh wonder - is being pushed by conservatives and right-wing extremists everywhere in the West at the moment. They wondered how and why the presidential race was called while it was really narrow (like 50.6% to 49.4% or something) based on exit polls. Indeed, calling a race based on exit polls would be stupid. Except, nope, we're not calling races based on exit polls at all, but using statistical sampling to extrapolate the most likely results, and when there's a .6% lead with an uncertainty of only .1%, it is more than fine to call the race. The outstanding mail-in ballots will not magically feature a totally different voting distribution, in particular not when historically, they've been overwhelmingly cast for the Green party. https://www.breitbart.com/europe/2016/05/24/feared-austria-gets-extremist-president/ Jesus H. Christ, I forgot how much of a sh*trag Breitbart is. Sigh. Indeed, mail-in ballots cannot be added to the voting district they come from because they do not contain sender addresses on the envelope, so they're all collected and simply added to the count in the nearest voting district (this happens in the areas where one post office is responsible for several small villages, for instance - it is very common, especially in more rural areas). As such, it is entirely possible for the vote count to surpass the amount of registered voters in a voting district. That does not mean the voter turnout is above 100% or that any manipulation happened. Makes for less interesting headlines, of course. Huh, no idea why I wrote that post, but now that it is there I don't want to delete it. What a long winded way to agree. This red wave seems to be as much of a dud as the 'purple' wave was in 2020. Well, even more so, probably. So sad. No need to go back that far, Mario Draghi's failed government was like that just recently. Except one cannot claim Mario Draghi to be an independent technocrat, but the concept is the same.

I got the impression that @Malcador post was supposed to be a joke, what with the truncated quote and all. Take this as proof that someone reads your posts, but this is wrong, please use intarweb. Intrawebs are for internal use within an organisation only, unless they come with an option for externals to connect, in which case they're called extrawebs. Don't worry, we're as ignorant about our own election/political systems as we are about the US political system. I see that almost every day, and especially again in recent times as we went through three chancellors in a rather short time span. People now complain that nobody elected the current chancellor, even though the established government (and thus, whichever party holds an absolute majority of representatives or establishes a coalition with 50% + 1 representatives) nominates someone for the office of chancellor, not the people directly. If one steps down, the party in question is free to select anyone else as replacement. There is no law that states that when a chancellor resigns there must be general elections. The entire government is established that way, and there's nothing that states that any government official must belong to any political party. In theory (much less in practice, obviously), they don't even need to be members of a party. Three years ago, after the fist vote of no confidence against the entire govnerment ever to succeed in parliament, we had a period where a government of experts was established to propose legislation that was then voted on in parliament, while parties also brought legislation that was voted on. The chancellor during this period was a former member of the constitutional court, which is just about as much free of political influences as it can possibly get (again, ideally entirely, but of course not quite, as usual with any official functions). In elections, we do vote for parties, not people. There are only two exceptions here, the president, who is voted for directly - and is nominally at least independent of parties (nominees sent with party backing are expected to leave their party attachments behind, which does work as well as you might expect it to, but that is a wholly different matter) - and some towns that allow for the mayor to be voted for directly, but those are a stark minority of townships, as most municipal elections result in the selection of the municipal council which in turn elects the mayor. That does not stop the right wing populists from telling their voters that nobody voted for the current chancellor, and that the government should be dissolved and general elections held, and people from parroting misinformation spread by a party who should and does know better, because they were the first ones to break with the tradition that their selected public running candidate ("Spitzenkandidat"), who got 'voted' for, according to their own logic, did in fact not accept the office of chancellor or vice chancellor after the election when they formed part of the goverment, and in fact, they made the running candidate of the third strongest party chancellor. Bet you that in two years time, when the EU parliamentary elections are held, people will once again complain about how undemocratic the European Union is, after not going to vote for the parliament, which will most likely once again result in the conservatives being the strongest party in parliament, which in turn will confirm the new President of the European Commission from within their ranks, and nothing will change, and people will once again grumble about how nothing ever changes with that undemocratic heap of bureaucracy. Of course, the EU also has the issue of being the dumpster for political trash that cannot otherwise be conveniently disposed of, as such it is a veritable cornucopia of toxic waste and people whose intellectual capacities could be benevolently described as limited. Like this here guy, who at various times was responsible for the EU's policy on energy, digital economy and society as well as budget and human resources: Just ignore the subtitles, as they're as terrible as the speech given by Günther Öttinger, and before anyone complains that it is petty to, well, complain about someone's accent and command of English - that does not prevent him from preparing for the speech, because it is quite clear that he's reading it for the very first time (even though it is supposed to represent his views as much as that of the party he belongs to), and it does stand to reason that whoever nominated the person (that would be the German government) should pick someone with a decent command of the language they need to make use of in their everyday work life. *sigh*