majestic

I often feel this is a factor, more often among critics than the audience, but the audience is guilty of that no less. Games, books, movies, TV shows, it pretty much happens everywhere. It might also be a wrong impression, of course, because I often happen across entertainment that is rated highly and I wonder how that ever could have gotten the praise it did. I know my particular tastes are a little out there at times (or maybe often), and for some things I can at least understand their popularity in some way, for others, ah, no. It's a cheap and recent example I already talked about, but given with how well received Discovery is by professional critics, I really get the impression that there's just nobody who wants to be seen throwing in with the reactionary crowd just because they don't like a badly written and terribly directed show. Transformers is a really good example because the scenes with the focus on Megan Fox just "being sexy" stand out as much as the random dips into fanservice in some animes (hello Nanoha). Films and TV shows are generally more honest, if there's a whole lot of that sleaze in the film or in the show, it's marketed as such, and I guess when you turn on a late night movie called Bikini Jones and the Temple of Eros (no really, that's an actual Indiana Jones, ahm, erotica knockoff that exists) you know what you're getting. In a way that makes hentai films more honest than, again, say, Nanoha, which has probably the most extreme creepout "what the hell is happening now?" ecchi scene of all time. Well, and on TV there's always to option to pick a channel that doesn't have that type of content anyway. Plus, unlike with anime series, there's barely ever any chance that these movies would interest me from a thematical or plot standpoint - they usually have neither. With anime, as it so recently happened even as I watched the Tamayura OVA which is only 4 episodes of 15 minutes each, the scenes are sometimes even in material where it makes no sense and sometimes they're not - and I'm trying to be objective here - looking like the target audience would like these shots because they're badly made, out of place and not in any way visually enticing. Or maybe I'm wrong about that, who knows. I haven't posted anything about Tamayura yet, but hey, why not use the occasion. There's not much to say about it anyway, it's about four girls, nothing happens - which was the point why I tried it, by far and large - which isn't the problem. The voice direction is terrible (and keep in mind I'm so much more forgiving about this particular point than you are ), it sometimes looks like K-On! without the elements that made K-On! work for me in spite of the looks and it sometimes sounds like it too, mostly becaus the main character is voiced by Azusa from K-On!. There are random shots of the girls' legs all over the place, which also looks like an element taken from K-On!, but whereas K-On! did that for a reason, here it looks like misplaced and confusing fanservice that kind of isn't. It's baffling, and I have no idea how the hell Mr. Sato managed to direct the first one and a half seasons of my most favorite anime series of all time. Honestly, if I hadn't watched Utena I would have said that it all came down to having Ikuhara on the team, but hell, I mean, Utena... wasn't really problem free, was it? Hey, Miranda was made to be genetically perfect, so of course the camera magically focuses on her butt. It's phsysically impossible otherwise. Eh, okay, this is a joke from How I Met Your Mother. Anyway, about Miranda, yeah, don't ask me, I'm the wrong person to talk to. But yeah, Sailor Moon's occasional forays into showing girl's underwear is at least alwas framed properly. Maybe except for that SuperS episode that has Ami hanging off a trapeze for absolutely no reason other than to show us a nice upskirt shot of her. But that's SuperS, and SuperS is just all out terrible, and it has the circus girls, but well, that's circus outfits, so I'm not sure if I should blame them for it. The designs ARE from Naoko Takeuchi after all. Where were we? Oh, right Mass Effect 2, that was weird, but that game also has really, really weird fanboys. Someone here once posted that Tali must have good genes because she has such a big thigh gap. I think that was the same dolt who kept posting that BioWare made women in their games with male skulls for some nefarious "turn everyone into trans-f*g" SJW secret agenda, or something. I usually press "random" and then "next", assuming there is a "random" button. I might press it twice if I feel adventurous, but that's pretty much it. I usually don't play female characters unless they're the default, but I really don't care either way. Oh, don't I know that feeling. In SW:ToR there was this huge content patch that barely had any content in it. For me, I mean. In reality, it was a patch to introduce player housing and you could - in theory - spend hours upon hours setting up your home just the way you want it, and then invite other people. The only thing I used it for was to put a shop droid in a corner and my bank/storage access next to it. Finished it off with a trading terminal and every now and then the occasional trophy from a nightmare difficulty raid. All I got out of that patch was a separate teleportation button, because you could go to your home from anywhere in the galaxy, instantly, and then head to where you want next. It was a convenient place to go to instead of the regular fleet hub that suffered from the game's poor performance and net code. Every now and then I looked at other guild member's homes and felt a little pang of jealousy, I mean, the rooms were really decorated prettily and all that, but for me? Yeah, no. It had a checkpoint list of all decorations found, so it was something to obsess over, but that's really all it was. I get that. I don't identify with my character very well either way, that's not something I get from creating it. I often see people post about how they don't like fixed protagonist games, and I'm like, yeah, who cares. It's what happens in the game that makes or breaks my immersion, not whether I can play Billy Jean Someone and make sure her lips are a lighter shade of red and she has long, jet-black hair. Picking portraits is pretty much the same. Most of my Baldur's Gate characters were that fighter portrait with the bald head. Why? Because it was like the first, or one of the first ones, anyway. *shrug* If playing a girl when given the option works better for you, then hey, just do it. I generally pick male characters when given the chance for exactly the same reason. Although... I also couldn't tell you why. I don't think it really matters though. Heh, I don't have anything against generic fantasy settings, at least not usually, other than them feeling a little tired, but I think Gaia/Gaea was helped by having typical elements and atypical elements. If it had elves or dwarves, that would have been pretty... bad. Show went from me posting about it after the first episode(s) wondering "what is wrong with me, why don't I hate this?" to "why is this so good?" in the span of like, the first 8 or 9, episodes. It then turned out to make an episode that's basically about Hitomi going back to a day before she came to Gaea one of the best episodes in the show, and a really good episode overall in the history of all episodes, based on a premise that's a little tired already too. Still not sure how it managed to do that, but I'll take it. They did a pretty good job at making the characters from Earth look a bit different, not counting any of the animal-themed people of course. Allen was probably the most distracting, because he really looks like Touga with blonde hair, but with the release dates, it's probably better to say that Touga looks like Allen. I didn't find any of the characters inherently unappealing, but they're not my favorite designs either. As much as NGE's characters had some in-built fanservice, I do like how the show looked from start to finish. It also still has the distinction of producing scenes that were clearly meant as fanservice and yet still had a narrative or thematic function, even when it was Asuka.

I'd say when pigs can fly, but sadly pigs actually can fly since 2011, so thanks Duke Nukem Forever, I guess.

That's not how it works, finishing the game on Unfair isn't the same as not having finished it at all.

Had that last year, was probably the worst cold I ever had. I even used a nose spray to cope with it, and sticking something up my nose and snorting an aerosol from it is very high on my list of not fun things to do, like driving rusty nails through my scrotum or watching nuTrek. So yeah, get better soon, and for once you don't need to feel bad about man-fluing.

It's also probably related to the impression of the first few episodes, before Allen, Hitomi and Van arrive at the capital everyone's pretty busy being on the run and not dying. Understandably so, but afterwards the character elements got a bit more time to breathe. I'm guessing that's the point where it lost the shounen crowd, unless they turned off the first episode because why am I watching a girl and her attempts to run 100m in less than 13 seconds? The show's pretty great, yeah. It has to be with everything it got away with. Well, hey, the emperor must stick to some tropes, at least. Always saying the same thing isn't that uncommon for villains. Don't fail me again, Jadeite! There's maybe something else, I don't think it's possible for the most vocal part of the fanbase to complain about NGE in some manner, because it's a classic you just have to like to be part of the crowd. The insane success of the more fast paced and somewhat more straightforward Rebuild speaks volumes, but who knows how long that's going to last, or perhaps I haven't looked properly. There must be some people who watched Rebuild and then went for the classic and said something like: What's with the boring talking, where's the LARGE SCALE CGI MADNESS? I'm not going to pretend to be able to look past visual misgivings, all in all, because there are instances where I can't, but Girls' Last Tour was fairly eye opening. I never thought I'd be able to like that based on how it looks, but here I am. One of the good things that came out of this thread is that I successfully branched out of my comfort zone a little. Kinda agree with The Vision of Escaflowne over the looks of Twelve Kingdoms. Escaflowne has a relatively strange mix of character art and sometimes combines elements from different eras in a way that I can at least understand if it's not exactly liked. Particularily compared with the looks of other mid 90ies shows. I still need to finish that film, but the first thiry minutes left me rather unimpressed - with the film, not with the visuals, so I still can't contribute anything to the (attempted?) rape scene discussion. The one thing I really get is how the little things sometimes are all that's needed for enjoyment, but that happens more often in music for me than in film or TV shows, but even there. Heck, I watched two full seasons of Kevin Sorbo ruining Andromeda not just because any OCD issue forced me to, but beause the memories of the characters I used to like made not hate watching the series. Up to a certain point, at least. Nowadays on rewatches, oh dear... It's one area where I am more forgiving - or perhaps less... or sometimes not bothered at all - when it comes to live action over animation, and video games. Way back when I refused to play the original Tomb Raider games because everyone was talking about Lara Croft's triangular, ginormous pixel cleavage and hot pants. The only Tomb Raider game I've played so far was the first of the remakes that was free on Steam a while back. Lara has regular sized assets in this one, but overall while I wouldn't have minded paying money for the game, it's been just as well that it was free. The difference is, in reality, yes, you still have male gaze shots - regardless of the gender of the characters involved, because oh boy, Andromeda sure made use of Kevin Sorbo's and Keith Hamilton Cobb's phsysique at the time... actually... I think initially, the two were more used for shirtless workout scenes than the girls on the crew were part of fanservice, Lexa Doig's jelly boobs aside - but outside of plastic surgery, nobody created the characters involved just for that. Lara was designed from the ground up to appeal to mouthbreathers to increase sales. I'm pretty sure the games were good outside of having tank controls, but seriously... also, when playing MMOs, I can't count how often I've heard that the only reason people play female characters is because "if I'm going to stare at an ass for hours, it should at least be a pretty female one", like what? Yeah, I don't want to play with you guys. Still, I'm probably not the best person to judge this.

Funny how that works, huh, I was the one complaining about something and you end up being the one apologized to all the time, even if it is for different reasons now...

My Unfair playthrough stalled because I'm in Enigma and I have a very hard time forcing myself to care enough to finish it. I tried to play a little today, then ran into a group of enemies that accidentially critted the one character I have without Last Stand - and I just quit. I've got plenty of resurrection scrolls and spell slots, an accidential death isn't the end of the world at this stage of the game of course, but it didn't just kill the character, but also whatever remained of my motivation to soldier on. I wish I could just ignore the quest, because on Unfair these companion quests outside of your core party are super tedious because one has to waste time running around with characters that are mostly useless (Greybor at least debuffs his quarry before running away in fear the moment the fight starts in earnest, but the same can't be said for having to drag that Woljif weasle with you, or Nenio now in Enigma - although Nenio is technically Unfair viable, she's just not a good fit for my party setup) for fighting the endless waves of super powerful trash mobs that the game throws at you, but no, Enigma just can't ignore it because of course it is the only way* to get anoter certain piece of loot for a certain secret ending. Enigma is even worse because not only the combat wastes your time, but it has an endless amount of tedious puzzles. Screw this quest. *Not true for the Trickster and Demon mythic paths, but certainly for my Angel.

Reported for spamming, because I apparently have an axe to grind.

Speaking of fun little roguelike games, it's a bit older but Enter the Gungeon is pretty fun. Silly gun-based humor and good for a quick paced round of action or two. The perspective took me a long while to get used to, so take care if that sort of thing bothers you.

Lady Asuka, Episode 19: More interactions, an attempted murder and a 43 year old guy kissing the hand of a 12 year old girl, which I presume is code for 18th century molestation*. Technically her mother pawned the 12 year old off for a political marriage but… overall the episode was also better than the first 17. Running naked through a sea of nettles is more fun than the first 17 episodes, so being a bit better is perhaps not saying as much as it appears to. *

Hey, I really liked Girls' Last Tour. That was absolutely fantastic, even though I couldn't tell you why exactly. His best work was as animator anyway. *cough*

Was more thinking of (Western) live action films. Haven't watched First of the North Star. For animation, pretty much all I got is MD Geist and MD Geist II, and I watched those when I was a lot younger and a lot more forgiving. Edit: Unless Akira counts, but it at least tried no to be mindless. Didn't like the film though.

Doubly so since it is racing action, which is cetainly the surest way to bore me. I still haven't watched any of the Fast and Furious movies. I saw like the first five minutes of Tokyo Drift on TV at some point, after which I decided that changing channels would be preferable to dismantling the TV. Fast cars, racing stunts and blasting hip hop music with hawt racing babes on the street, yeah, very hard pass. Mindless action can be fun, but it needs the proper setting and aesthetic* for it, and that almost never works for me in animation. Most of the instances where I enjoyed mindless action schlock it was due to something else, not the action. Skeletor's wonderful performance in Masters of the Universe, for instance, or the absolutely ludicrous commitment to stereotypes in Dark Matter. Whether or not fast paced action is to my liking is something I can explain with even less accuracy than why The Vision of Escaflowne was so good for me. Not that I haven't seen my fair share of action stuff, but really enjoying it is something else. I'm pretty much the only one I know who has watched Avengers: Endgame and was bored through most of it. Yeah... hah, did I ever mention that my friends often drag me to the movies and then ask like: Hey that was great, what did you think? And I'm usually like "it was okay", and every now and then they ask if I even like movies at all? *I have a soft spot for 80ies action aesthetic. Mullets, shoulder pads and leather gear at least looks fun.

Triple post time, because... well, enough time has passed in between. Lady Asuka, episode 17: Lady Asuka survives an assassination attempt. A couple of episodes ago she picked up a common wench who attacked her mother because she mistook her for the murderer of her mother, the incident with the carriage I mentioned. Ever since Lady Asuka has passed her off as a noble born, distant cousin while they were looking for the perpetrator. That just so happens to be Marie Antoinette's most favored court sycophant. That sounds more interesting than it really was. Lady Asuka, episode 18: Okay, so this one is a little difficult to gauge. The first episode after the change of directors focused a whole lot more on character relationships than boring court intrigue and pointless swordfighting scenes. Marie Antoinette's supposed affair, von Fersen, returns to France. The episode also made much better use of music, the scenes were not necessarily framed any better than before but they felt a little less stiff. Not that it should make any difference for the dub, but the voice direction in this episode also felt like it had a little more heart poured into it. It might also just have been an episode that was simply slightly better than the ones before. Too early to tell, and certainly no reason to get excited or be optimistic, but for the first time watching this I'm not dreading turning on the next episode. If that's all it does going foward, it'll still be a win.

Please, for the love of all that's good and right in the world, stop it. The only thing that's worse than Mari is Mari with what looks like heavily oversaturated and hyperbright colors. Yikes, I feel like that image directly penetrated my eyes and singed my brain. Feels like Words Bubble Up Like Soda Pop, except... worse.

Neither have I, but I think not. I'd just install it, play for a bit and then quietly drop it and hope my brain won't force me to go back. Essentially the same thing that happened with Breath of the Wild.

For those who want to know how it compares to the other games by From and do not mind spoilers:

Yeah, well, if we separate that then that's 18% for social security (health insurance, pension plan, insurance against loss of employment, etc.) and 22% income tax. In the end the difference is of no consequence to me, but it is for the state of course because the social security part goes to the state insurance companies and pension funds. Our land tax is an annual 0.2% with some leeway for the municipalities, but it can never exceed 1% of the calculated unit value. The unit values are currently based on hitherto unvalorized rates from 1973. Basically you're taxed at a maximum of 1% per year for property unit values based on a fraction of 1973's market prices. It's so little that there's a special provision in the tax law stating that when the land tax does not exceed 75€ it is to be collected annually instead of quarterly. There's also no inheritance tax, and a 30% profit tax on selling real estate that (i.e. the difference between buying and selling price). There are tax exceptions for older real eastate and for property used for residential purposes. In other words, it's a tax levied on the sale of investment properties, not people's homes.

Now for the promised reply to other the Escaflowne post. Still feel like a stirred up hornet's nest is in my head, but at least it is no longer on the verge of exploding. The realities of limited ressources. Could have just off-screened some dialogue in and retooled the scene and left the episode with 10 seconds less runtime, but hey, how knows how the production pipeline looked like. The scene itself was fairly harmless anyway - at least in comparison to some others I've seen not so long ago *cough* - it just felt a lot worse because it's probably the most jarring and immersion breaking moment in the anime. Eleventh Hour weapons of mass destructions aisde, of course. Like flying fortresses, a shounen deuteragonist, the show steadily but ever increasingly losing touch with being grounded near the end? Yeah, there's a number of things that would bother me in a different anime, and some silliness that I'd make overy long complain-posts out of for other series. I caught an episode of Voyager on TV the other day, and while I used to think that Voyager is the least consistend and worst of the old Star Trek shows (prior to Enterprise, at least - not counting all the nuTrek), the episode was about some technobabble and Voyager punching a hole into a quantum singularity's event horizon. A hole. In an event horizon. I facepalmed and ignored it. If this happened in Discovery, I'd be here writing an essay about missing science advisors. However, the mainstay of the episode was character development for B'elanna, Chakotay and Janeway and some fun Robert Picardo stuff, so while it was annoying, it wasn't killing my interest in the episode, nor was it egregious enough to warrant massive complaints. In the end, it really is like Jay said when they watched Skyfall - when you're entertained enough and the other parts are good enough then you just won't be as bothered by plot holes, inconsistencies and stupid things. I disagree with them on Skyfall because that film was so bad I haven't even bothered with the newer ones, but I can agree with the point. Guess what I mean is, when you're a good show, you've earned the right to occassional annoyances or dissatisfying results. I've thought about this. I think that's the same reason why the first two seasons of Nanoha were so well received vs. StrikerS, while I would consider StrikerS to be the apex of the series - the complaints by watchers about it mirror those of The Vision of Escaflowne, like trying to cram a storyline barely enough for 13 episodes into a 26 episode anime, and it hence feeling slow. I don't entirely get it, because neither The Vision of Escaflowne nor StrikerS ever felt slow for me, but then again, neither did Sailor Moon (outside of SuperS), and oh boy do people complain about the filler and the storyline not advancing. These people probably have never seen a truly slow show in their life - like the first season of the reimagined Battlestar Galactica where, in terms of plot, literally nothing happened for almost the entire first season and we're not seeing anything but character driven events unfold with people coming to terms what it means to be refugees on a (space) convoy with nothing left. When plot elements begin to happen they ironically lay the groundwork for the failure that the series' last one and a half seasons ended up being. Yeah, well, of course, I can see someone being bored withe The Vision of Escaflowne if they want to keep things moving without much character interactions or don't really care for motivations and moving pieces into place before paying them off, even though there are some instances where I felt the payoff came too quickly, like with Marlene having secretly studied medecine, revealed just in time for her to save Allen. However, with the pacing of the show as it is, I'd almost be inclined to diagnose someone who thinks it is too slow paced with shounen attention deficit syndrome (SADS). Allen's part, particularily that flashback episode with an entirely new character that just happened to fly by is something that should have annoyed me, but didn't. Between reading of the troubled production and the rest of the show being as good as it is, well, there's plenty that can be more readily forgiven than with other shows. Allens arc also feels somewhat unfinished. It isn't, not really, because he resolves his issues, but there still could be something, like, more. He feels a little like Makoto in Sailor Stars. Has anyone ever complained about Evangelion being tediously slow? Because I feel like that has roughly the same pace, except it has a little more* action maybe. To be honest, I think these people just notice that the plot is a little slower because they don't have animated fanservice to keep them entertained. NGE might not be the fastest paced show either, and it doesn't even get a semi-rushed conclusion in the same way The Vision of Escaflowne did, but there's enough of Misato's and Asuka's assets to gawk at, I guess. I think SADS might be held off by copious amounts of masturbatory material. An arguably unfinished anime based on an unfinished manga - hard pass, unless you try it and think it's the best thing ever. Otherwise that's a minefield I'm not deliberately stepping into. *Maybe not more, but longer action sequences, at least. The fights in The Vision of Escaflowne have a certain weighty feel to them and have no lack of tension (in spite of always kind a knowing that everyone of the main characters will pull through by the end), but they're generally pretty short and to the point, unless there's a reason for them to not be.

Fun, tax comparisons. I'm currently sitting at 40% of my income going towards taxes and social security. For that I get commie stuff like universal healthcare, pension plans, good public education, no tuition fees at our universities, decent roads, a power grid that doesn't explode when usage spikes, not the worst deal in the world.

Lady Asuka 16: Court intrigues and a pair of scammers. Looks like high society has not changed in 250 years. Know what else has not? This is still riveting beyond ken.

No, it's not, but I'm not sure what my support is worth. I hate most controllers layouts, think the GameCube controller was the best, and I'm using a Logitech M1 laser mouse to play games and want my PS/2 ports back. I'm clearly not the target audience for any modern input device.

Sure thing. The hardware I'm currently using is 10 years old, except for the 970 GTX , that one's slightly newer - but not much.

Finally decided to buy some hardware upgrades. Going from my trusty old Western Digital WD10EALX to a Samsung 980 PRO SSD should be, let's say, slightly noticable.

God damned Mari.