majestic

Narutaru: This is sure going places. Well, I'm going to have a field day when the metaphorical school shooting starts in the aftermath of this particular fun episode. edit:

It helps to bear in mind that one of the ruling parties at the time was the FPÖ, a party that officially signed a treaty of "cooperation and friendship" with United Russia (which they recently declared to be null and void, for whatever reason, I can't quite figure it out... ). That being said, to borrow something a poster here used to say all the time: "Don't look at me, I voted for the other guy." I can't stand the ÖVP and I never once bought into the Kurz hype, and there are plenty of posts from me where I express my rather low opinion of the party, so I'm probably not the best person to ask what the appeal of that Trump in a slim-fit suit was.

Unhealthy takeout day at work: Productivity projection after consumption: uncertain, but tending towards zero. Needless to say, I sorta feel, uhm, sick. Just in case anyone's wondering what the item on the right side really is, that's deep fried chicken with bacon on top of a massive amount of cheese fries. Not sure why that is under 'sides' on the menu, but... I feel like I'm going to explode. In more ways than one.

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.