majestic

Hardware just arrived. Funny, usually you get a "warranty void if opened" sticker on the case. Not so this time, there's a huge fat sticker on the case that reads: REMOVE TRANSPORT PROTECTION BEFORE TURNING ON. Yeah no wonder, the transport protection is a bag of instant foam. If you'd turn the computer on while the CPU and graphics card are wrapped in hardened material blocking all airflow, you'd get some very expensive and quite crispy trash. Well, time for the not so fun stuff, let's see if it works and set everything up. Now, where did I put my display port cable? Hmmm. Questions, questions.

Okay, maybe not random game news, but it's kinda funny, at least when viewed through the lense of too little sleep and a tiring couple of weeks at work: I suppose it is not entirely impossible to write for a game without using any pronouns at all, but it is most likely going to be a bit of an awkward read. There are languages where the use of pronouns is fairly limited or generally ungendered (as far as I know Hungarian doesn't distinguish between third person based on gender at all, neither does Mandarin), or they are a different class/type of word than what we would understand as such (Japanese pronouns are simply nouns and behave as such and also have different meanings), and there are a handful that have no pronouns as separate words (like the Iroquoian languages, they have pronominal verb endings), but as far as I know every language we have has a way to refer to people in some form or another. Think about it, it would be really strange to have no way to do that. Languages exist to talk to other people. Even if you can leave them out because the context makes it clear and your languages allows for that, they're still implied. They (oh, snap!) of course meant the game has customizable pronouns that replace them in the text when set accordingly, a feature that does not need to be used and defaults back to regular usage when unused. Seems like a trifle to get one's panties in a bunch, but what do I know, maybe it really is possible to catch the gay from a computer game that allows you to pick the pronouns used to address your character.

Now he's just playing Dr. Soong in every incarnation of Star Dreck. Ancestors, lost offspring, who knows what else they'll come up with. Eventually he's going to play a Dr. Soong who cosplays as Data.

A certain 'sharp' poster of the past with a distinctly right wing bent had George Orwell quotes in his signature. They're co-opting any- and everything that fits their worldview. It gave me a chuckle every time I saw it, right next to that picture of Trump.

I already made a full backup of my entire user folder, so yeah, good to know that works too. Kinda hoping that'll work for Thunderbird just as easily, because otherwise that's going to be boring fiddlework. Oh, yeah, funny, I still have a local mailbox because that non-profit can't afford unlimited space. On the other hand, I'm pretty sure they don't analyze my mail traffic to bring me tailored ads. Screw gmail.

Going through the checklist. Item #2, right after creating a Mozilla account to be able to sync my Firefox stuff was finally giving in and start using a Microsoft account for my windows, otherwise I'll run into licensing shenanigans sooner or later (a friend of mine just recently bricked two Windows licenses, better safe than sorry). I was reminded of why I only had a local account until now, Microsoft just stubbornly refuses to create a Microsoft account with my regular mail adress, telling me that I can't use work, school oder university mail addresses for my Microsoft account. I realize why that is there, because these are usually transient. Here's the thing, while my mail account is hosted by a communications non-profit, it is just that. It is a non-profit association under local law, the mailbox is not transient and I've had it for, well, 26 years now. It is probably older than the twerp intern who set up the validation. Halfway through changing my mind and just refusing the delivery. Would save me a pretty penny too. Time to stare at file copy progress bars. edit: I realize that I could also just physically transfer my old hard disk to the new computer for easier access, but that's work I don't want to do. I'd rather stare at a progress bar for the time it takes to copy the relevant 400GB through an external hard disk. Plus it'll make a long overdue backup of the important stuff in the process. *shrug*

That's what they want you to believe. Don't be a fool! #ITISFLAT

Got a shipping notification, my hardware will - any issues aside - arrive on Thursday, so that gives me all of tomorrow to prepare. Not exactly my most favorite part, but I am looking forward to the reduced loadng times.

Why? Watch the Escaflowne film and tell me that doesn't remind you a little of his work. The film would also probably be more your thing than the series.

Yeah, maybe I'm also just alone in getting Kurosawa vibes from Escaflowne. Some of his films are of major film-historical interest, and they were very influential, to say the least. The Magnificent Seven is basically a Westernized (in more than one way, oh ho ho ho ho) The Seven Samurai remake and his oddball goofy film The Hidden Fortress served as an inspiration for Star Wars. As for whether or not to recommend watching the films based on that, now that's something... else. I guess you know that already, anyway. There's a certain melancholy to Kurosawa's movies that is also very present in Escaflowne. Somewhere between 6 and 7/10 seems legit. Perhaps not enough to reach 7/10, there were some things in the film that made preciously little sense and even less if detached from prior knowledge of the series, there certainly was an odd shortcut or two taken in writing. Hard to blame the film for it, as it apparently struggled with funding, and it's fairly easy to see where all the money went - if nothing else, the film is a visual feast that unlike it's late 80ies and early 90ies counterparts holds up much better. I guess, in part, also due to it being more than just visually interesting. Squint a little and one can see that with an extra half an hour of runtime and some changes there'd be a genuinely good film in there. Anyway... It could be argued that the characters and themes weren't put in the garbage bin* as much as they were replaced by a more serious, darker version of something similar. The primary impetus for the resolution of the plot in both the series and the film is Hitomi's arrival changing Van's outlook on fighting. The way they go about it is just completely different, with the film having the two of them fast-forward through depression in an unbelievable manner due to the limited runtime. Rebuild, on the other hand, is just a dumpster fire. If I had to choose, I'd rather rewatch Escaflowne than Rebuild, and that includes the first one, which is arguably the least bad of the bunch, and elements of the last one that were fine for a while - but yeah, in terms of judging Rebuild, I was the meanie zucchini here. I guess I still am. *That may or may not be a garbage bin depending on one's own outlook and interests. It's certainly not wrong to say the film took a giant dump on everything the show was. To me, though, the Escaflowne film still feels less wrong than this Rebuild garbage, but perhaps that's because I already went through the painful process of watching these four dumpster fires, and at least Escaflowne didn't waste my time like Rebuild and it's accumulated total of what feels like twenty hours of screentime.

Well, maybe next time. In a vacuum, if such a viewing would be possible at all, it would be an all right samurai fantasy action film with an appropriate amount of thematic exploration regarding isolation and loneliness when it comes to Hitomi's depression and Van feeling like he has to shoulder the weight of the world on his own, doing it in the only way he can: By fighting for what is by all accounts a lost cause. Not particularily something I would turn on because I want to see it, because there are other films to choose from that would be better watches overall (not necessarily more enjoyable, but this is an area where watching Japanese live action films clearly yields better results), but equally nothing I'd turn off immediately either. As Escaflowne, indeed, this is just terrible. It's character assassination of the worst sort, removes everything that made the original lovable and arguable unique and replaces it with an equal amount of serious, gritty and bleak. 外伝 (side story, sometimes used to mean spin-off, but literally more like outside legend, 外 is the same kanji used to spell the somewhat pejorative word for outsider/foreigner gaijin - 外人) stuff is pretty popular for a whole lot of things. I'm not sure, but the ones I encountered at least all had the sense to not be retellings set in the same universe using the same characters, but rather perhaps using the same characters in different settings or making actual side story in a similar or the same universe. One of my most favorite Gameboy games is one of those, Final Fantasy Adventure. It became the basis of the Secret of Mana series. Anyway, The End of Evangelion is more like an actual narrative ending to the series. It works as a replacement for the last two episode, it arguably works in tandem and/or parallel with the last two episodes of the show, I'm not sure I'd call it a traditional side story, and I also really don't think Escaflowne counts either, but hey, if people want to label it like that that's fine with me. It's still a bad Escaflowne film and would improve immensely by letting the characters - and the film - stand on its own. It might be that Perfect Blue looks like something else or was inspired by some other film, for that I don't know enough about anime films in general, it's mostly Hitomi's character design and animation, that did remind me of Mima a bit. It's not entirely fitting because the eyes are drawn rather differently, but everything else fits. As for many of the scenes and influences, if you want take a look at the scenes from The Seven Samurai. While that's live action, does that remind you of something? edit: I mean some of the action setpieces and general looks, not necessarily the plot or anything else. Escaflowne is still a fantasy piece with a bit of a sci-fi bend, all in all. Pretty much.

Vatican, do I win at the quiz?

The End of Escaflowne: エスカフローネ Simply "Escaflowne", not even a "the movie", and the why becomes clear the moment it begins. Back when I first started to watch The Vision of Escaflowne, I took note of the director and some of the writing team, like I said, they've been involved in various other projects that we've watched in this thread in some form or another. Sailor Moon, Revolutionary Girl Utena, and some Cowboy Bebop. That the film was written by Ryōta Yamaguchi made me hopeful that it would be good. Ryōta Yamaguchi is a bit of a mixed bag though. He's consistently inconsistent, sometimes writing both the best and the worst episodes of anything he's working on. For Sailor Moon, that meant writing what's probably the funniest straight comedy episode of the entire run, where a series of increasingly improbable events cause everyone to join Usagi at home to make a mockery of their Clark Kent disguises, the transformations and the series' dependency on its formula. On the other hand, he also wrote that episode where Ami suddenly finds herself cosplaying at a video game convention and winning a fighting game tournament in spite of never having played before. For Vision of Escaflowne, that meant writing the second episode, arguably the weakst of the entire show (or, at least, the second weakest). Episode nine is also from him, which is the runner up, although it's probably not as easily gauged as the quality of the second episode is as it just happens to be wedged in between a run of really, really great episodes, and also, while the Sailor Moon episode with Ami playing video games was arguably not good, these two episode in The Vision of Escaflowne were merely "just" solid compared to the other episodes. On the other hand, he also wrote the introspective episodes where Hitomi saves Shinji Van from being merged with EVA Unit-01 Escaflowne and the absolutely amazing first part of the two episodes set in the ruins of Atlantis. That said, I don't think Escaflowne is bad, even with all the Dr. Phil seizures it causes. Arguably, it's worse than that. It was a bad idea. Invariably, watching this film evokes the echoing voice of The Transcendent One, when he confronts The Nameless One over the corpses of his companions. "Are they dead? Yes. Unlike you, they had but one life. They wasted it for your sake." They had the talent, some development problem and the buget for one film, and it looks so great, and yet it is wasted for the sake of an unecessary dark fantasy retelling of an anime series that needed none. There are also some inexplicable changes to the character designs, and I don't mean them looking differently, although that is of course true too. If the series was a hodgepodge of different anime series styles across different eras, this borrows from films of the 90ies. Hitomi and Yukari sometimes reminded me of, dare I say it, Perfect Blue. One of these changes is giving Merle the cat girl underwear. No, really, she went through the entirety of the series wearing nothing but a short dress, and it was visible several times that she doesn't wear anything else, and yet nothing in the series came close to this moment in the movie. Why? For the same reason the princess wears a crop top and hot pants instead of something appropriate for a princess. Admittedly, one does not often see scenes where adding clothes makes them sexually more charged. Quite a feat, all in all. Looking at this sceneshot also makes me wonder how she managed to put her underwear on. Ah well, it's probably a cat thing anyway. Allen and his gang look like a group of criminals from any post apocalyptic movie. The plot of the film is, well, can't even really call it even an abridged version of the series, can I? So, what else could I possibly add? This film should not be part of the Escaflowne universe, even as an alternate reality retelling. In a way, this is Star Trek 2009 all over again, althoug in terms of being stupid and ridiculous, Star Trek 2009 has this one beat by a mile. If this wasn't called Escaflowne it at the very least wouldn't cause Dr. Phil seizures, even with the increased silly fanservice. There are certain themes in the film that aren't handled badly, and some of the scenes with Merle and Hitomi were actually quite nice. The film is darker, gritter, more serious. Focused on some more action and loneliness, isolation and depression. It also does something else that's quite a feat, it's both more and less generic fantasy than the anime series. Sometimes, indeed, the films feels more like an Akira Kurosawa film than the sometimes fun, sometimes silly, but almost always really good fantasy romp that the anime series was. It's less generic European fantasy, even though it's still set on Gaea and makes much heavier use of Japanese aesthetics. That leaves the point of making this film. Star Trek 2009 at least was trying to revive a well known intellectual property to squeeze some more money out of it, and oh boy did that work. Escaflowne wasn't the commercial hit in Japan it was original anticipated to be. Stronger abroad, but still a fair bit short of the mark. What was gained from setting this film in the Escaflowne universe? Nothing but alienating the fans of the series. Did this win new ones? Maybe, but those would go and check out the series and just drop it. If it's not a cashgrab, has no meaningful ability to bring in and retain a new fanbase or expand the old one and has arguably nothing to add the the universe, the question becomes, then, as always with such things, the why? Why is this movie there? I have no answer, dear reader. None. However, to leave you slightly less disappointed, have a Lake of Tears song to tide you over:

It's also an episode that can be used to showcase just how impenetrable the show sometimes is, unless you have studied certain aspects of art, (classical) music and culture. There's the easy part, the story about the prince who knew no woes in both past and future - that is clearly meant to be Mytho on his journey of self-discovery. With emotion comes comfort, as well as pain. The fire festival in the episode is either about what's nowadays Easter Fires in central Europe, lighting fires to chase away the darkness, or what eventually turned into the celebration of St. John's Eve. Thematically the former is more fitting, but dancing around the fire is more the latter, but she show itself also makes heavy use of central European (and Germanic) folklore, more than northern. Very significant use of music by Richard Wagner too (the piece is related to Siegfried, itself based on the myth of Sigurd, which has Siegfried eventually reforge a broken sword to slay a dragon, hint hint). Then there's the whole metaphor that begins in the opening scenes when Fakir (a case of meaningful name) stares into his mirror, and finished when later Mytho is found sleeping next to a lamp. The Mirror and the Lamp, a book by Meyer Howard Abrams. Go all that while watching the episode? Yeah. Neither did I. The Mirror and the Lamp bit I stumbled upon while reading up on the episode. English examinations of literary criticisms aren't exactly my specialty.

Huh, so, this is... different. Or at least, the trailer makes it look a whole lot different than what came before. Might be a good thing, as much as I liked the first season and thought the other two were still good it was getting a little stale and more and more ridiculous - but this season seems to drive the ridiculousness up to eleven. This could be the worst thing ever, or an awesome 80ies horror revival. It looks like Stranger Things, Nightmare on Elm Street and Hellraiser went on a date with Stephen King's It.

Get well soon in advance!

Oh, no, they did not, the defib exploded after she used it on Picard.

Hah, I never thought Star Trek Picard could be this self-reflective. Episode opens with a shrink talking to Picard about his claustrophobia (I kid you not!) and Picard eventually replies by calling this line of questioning absurd. Absurd, yes. All of it.

In theory, all of Anthy is fanservice, just not visual one. What two twelve episode seasons and a movie are you talking about? There's only that 4 piece OVA, and that wasn't so great... Oh joy, I still have to watch that. Well, those screencaps look great, and good to hear that it focuses on the right things, instead of being boring. Should have expected something like that with HoonDing arguing in favor of watching the movie, huh?

Fine with me as long as the shuts the service down afterwards.

You're right, she once did what her conscience told her to do, and reneged on it later after "Wir schaffen das!" proved to be rather unpopular. How else would you define a populist then? Yes, of course she was a lot less blundering and pompous about it than Trump or Orban, and she also did not attempt to undermine Germany's democratic institutions, insofar that is a perfectly valid statement - but does that make her less of a populist in a more strict sense of the word (instead of the pejorative it has become, at least) just because she was not an autocratic (extreme) right-wing one but more soft-spoken, eloquent and politically centered? Everything Merkel did had one, and one goal only: To get Merkel re-elected. From blustering against Greece and the other "PIGS", to actively making sure there's no party competition rising to meet her, to first wanting to extend nuclear power generation to suddenly deciding to not to the moment it became clear that voters are currently leaning heavily against nuclear power. The good thing about it was that not tolerating any popular competition inside her party made sure the CDU finally got where it belongs, now and for a long, long time hopefully. Far away from governing. I am/was rather partial to Panzeruschi or Zensurla.

Speaking of nations doing business with Russia, well, it's a fairly long list though, and one that includes the Ukraine, ironically - and not just in the times when a corrupt Russian puppet was president. They didn't say no to being able to siphon Russian gas deliveries on the by when they needed them for their own purposes, whether they were profit for a few or for the people, and the sweet, sweet transfer tariffs? Yes please. Singling out Germany, a nation that has imported Russian energy ever since before the Soviet Union collapsed, is a little ridiculous. Almost all of Central Europe is dependent on Russian energy, whether it is oil or natural gas. The noose was always there, this isn't a recent development under Putin, although he made very sure to ever tighten Russia's grip. Diversification initiatives like the Nabucco pipeline never amounted to much either, but that was largely because Russian money was very well received everywhere, including the upper echelons of the European Union leadership. This isn't on Germany alone, they're just in the spotlight, and for the most ridiculous reasons too, because their exit from nuclear power isn't what makes them dependent on Russian natural gas. That's a fairly minor part of their gas usage, overall - although I'm definitely with @Chilloutman in calling the exit ridiculous. That happened in the wake of Merkel waffling on her commitment after the Fukushima incident. Instead of telling her constituents that they should not worry because having a major earthquake and a tsunami hit a German nuclear power plant at the same time is going to be rather unlikely (for fun, think of this, there's the joke that German has a word for everything under the sun - and yet these sort of giant waves are called tsunami, even in German, so what does that say about how common they are?) she immediately turned towards going with what was popular - and it came from a PhD in physics to boot, let's not forget that Merkel definitely knew better than what she said and did at the time. Merkel was the ultimate populist leader. Spineless, no ideology of her own - and I don't mean being ideologically set in stone and unmoving even in the face of overwhelming evidence to the contrary, like so many politicians seem to be, but really, void of any ideology at all - and never giving any impetus, for good or ill. 16 years of complete standstill, why thanks Mutti. Said my piece. I'll show myself out again.

There's a chance it is a damaged aluminum electrolytic capacitor, but then the monitor would actually turn on (i.e. the power light would most likely indicate it is running) but the backlight of the panel would stay off and you'd just not see any image. That randomly can and will still work for a while whenever the electric field doesn't collapse immediately or remains stable enough to sustain the drain of the backlight, at least until it dies completely. Not sure if that's the issue here, but it fits the descriptions.

Here Dokken is best known for the title song of what's arguably the best Nightmare on Elm Street film.

There are other nations in the EU which get almost all of their gas from Russia too, just not in the overall volume that Germany does, so I guess... they're probably happily not the center of attention.