majestic

I initially had that right at the start and then figured I finally found a useage for that image from the TNG gag reel/outtakes. Yeah, I got enough trash on my plate right now and should not star new series until I've reduced the load a little, but I've been progressing through a couple of things without mentioning it. It'll be the last new thing for a while, I think. I mean... at least as long as I keep adding new stuff I don't need to finish whatever the hell that was I randomly picked on Amazon Prime Video a while back. Kazaka... kama... erm, *looks up* kemurikusa. Well, no. It's a German "Merle" in the dub and in the original Japanese that I've started to use simply because whatever Amazon did to the German dub made it randomly switch to the original in between in both the browser and on my TV - I can only surmise that the original TV version was cut for violence for the German market and had scenes removed that were never dubbed and then restored for a digital release but left original with subtitles, have not done any research in that direction - comes out more like Merure (me like in men) with a semi-dropped u, which makes sense (all Japanese syllables end on a vowel, except for the single n). Not making any promises for the English dub, not sure if they could resist making a cat girl be called Mearle as in M-Earl. Could be worse, she could be called Purrrrrrl, huh? /bows and leaves. I could make an effort and compare them, but I'm pretty sure Amazon Prime Video is worse than the Blu Ray version. It always is. It doesn't look so bad on the 4K TV, and by that I mean it beats the digitalized TV PAL copies they have for other anime (*cough* Attack No. 1 *cough*). That's from the fourth episode. Both Merle and Hitomi have been exposed to a poisonous plant during their escape (Merle was captured by Allen's guard, and Hitomi just collapsed after a vision). Shounen dolt runs off to make medicine, and they both wake up and have internal monologues about finding the other girl weird. Hitomi is weird because she's dressed like a school girl and has short hair, and Hitomi thinks Merle is weird because she's a cat and has a tail. Merle has also typical cat mannerisms - that picture alone is showing that, but she eventually also raises her hair. I really should be annoyed, and I really should not have laughed at the scene, yet I was not annoyed and found it funny enough. Something's wrong with me. Help me. Please. edit: It must be said that cat girls aren't as inherently out of place in a silly fantasy action anime than say, Komi's cat ears or girls cosplaying as cat girls (hello Steins;Gate). Or wearable cat ears like Azusa was forced to wear by Sawako. Ah, stupid Sawako.

Watched two more episodes of The Vision of Escaflowne. After getting used to what this is - and as that was in the same package of recommendations as Lady Asuka (or for those that didn't follow all the other threads, that's Rose of Versailles), I should have expected it to be anything but what it was recommended for - it's actually... more on that later! The anime follows Hitomi, the girl in the middle of the image here on an adventure she gets acidentially swept up in after a vision helps her save a strange boy from a dragon's attack. Said boy is Van, prince of some kingdom or another, and before you get the idea that Van is the princely looking blonde guy on the picture, nah, that's Allen. I used to be a prince and was even crowned king for a bit, but this is a fantasy anime, and as such now I'm just a nobody. Van is your average shounen character. Brash, always on the attack, wants to die for honor and glory and reacts to having his life saved by Hitomi in the only way a shounen character can, by telling her that he doesn't need help - and for sure not from girls. I said that before, but Hitomi just slaps him for the comment, which he so readily deserved. Hi, I was just trying to run 100m in under 13 seconds, and suddenly everything is weird! Hitomi is a nice school girl with an interest in track and field, specifically the 100m sprint. She also likes fortune telling and has her own tarot deck and a pendulum - or better put, an heirloom pendant that can double as pendulum. She does that for fun, knowing it's a tad silly, but she realizes pretty quickly that she's got more than a knack for the arts, particularily after she's whisked away and the world where she ends up enhances her abilities to actually having visions of the future. Now, the first episode, sans the appearance of the dragon that ends up being slain by our shounen dolt up, isn't much more than three quarters slice of life and one quarter fantasy action. That changes pretty quickly after Hitomi accidentially accompanies the dolt back to Gaia, a planet apparently close to Earth as both the Earth and the moon are visible in the night sky, and frighteningly close. Well, it's fantasy, don't expect gravity to work as it should. After returning home by being escorted by a group of wolf-men, having slain the dragon, the dolt is quickly hailed as the whatever it is they hail him as, beause it really doesn't matter. He's crowned King of Fanelia, and we're treated to the first really strange deviation from regular fantasy tropes in the anime, the kingdom is attacked by stealthed mechs. King Dolt runs to his own mech while his Samurai Guard is slaughtered in theirs, which is revealed to be Escaflowne and powered by some crystal thing he took from the dragon, but all he can do is watch how Fanelia is burned to the ground. Hitomi does something with her penadant and they're again whisked away... Mechs aside, there's also a slight break with the usual high fantasy population. No dwarves or elves so far, but cat girls, wolf men, mole men (no really, there's a guy they call mole and he's digging tunnels alls day long) and lots of weird technology. It takes the occasional dip into having a JRPG story because the enemies that burned down Fanelia have a... a... well, a flying fortress, pretty much a JRPG staple. There's always and airship or a flying fortress. In fact, The Vision of Escaflowne has both. I wonder if they're looking for the mana tree here? I'm an airship! Luckily I'm not piloted by Oswald Fiddlebender, because that wouldn't go so well... To round out the flying, some of the mechs can fly, and Escaflowne has a dragon mode where it turnes into a mecha-dragon that can be ridden by King Dolt the Shounen. Now, to document the sad decline of anime in the 2000s, look at the screencaps above and know this was animated by Studio Sunrise, who later went on to make this pearl of animation in 2013: Today I ran into some incredibly big boobs! -- Tamako Guys, for the love of god, do not just search for images entering Love Live! Nozomi boob rub gif. I mean, yeah, there's the boob rub from the Love Live! anime, but that's not the only thing you'll find. A whole lot of: Well, and worse. Have this here gif from Love Live! just in case you missed my posts about it: Dancing, dancing, non-stop me dancing! Yes, actual lyrics. So, where was I. Finish an already a little structureless post about a whole lot of nothing, the bad guys are commanded by a mysterious figure who said they're trying to restore Atlantis. Since the planet they're on is called Gaia (or Gaea, which is the same thing, anyway), I'd say they all came from Earth at some point, or are some reflection from Earth, or something. The four episodes have breakneck pacing, some mech action that's pretty bloody - people get speared to death, burned to death, hacked to death and there's some fun blood splatter going on, but it's not full Blood-C level. It's pretty violent. The shounend dolt is pretty shouneny, and the other main character that was introduced aside from the villains who are either mysterious, traitors or guano-insane is Allen, a chivalrious knight, and someone Hitomi pretty quickly develops a crush on. There's also a cat girl. To sum up, we have a nice girl lead character who does fortune telling, a shounen male lead who is shouneny, a knight in shining armor (well, shining mech), breakneck pacing, JRPG elements all over the place, a high fantasy setting with lots of out of place looking technology and pretty much no time to breathe for anything, which makes my conclusion at the time being all the more strange, I guess. Because, really, when watching this, what I should be doing is this: Or, maybe this: In reality, while watching this anime, I'm looking more like this: Yeah, no, I'm serious. I think I actually like this, and I have no idea why. With Magical Girl Lyrical Nanoha StrikerS, at least, I knew why. That was just great entertainment and more of a special ops / superhero squad fighting of a villain with decent quality world building, great pacing and quite decent writing (I'd say more than decent, but some problems crop up at the end). With this? I have no idea. I should be groaning and facepalming throughout each episode, but I don't do that. Not when King Dolt does something stupid, not even when the Cat Girl (well, her name is Merle) is on screen and jealous of how much King Dolt likes Hitomi, as if she'd be interested in that dweeb. To his credit, Chivalrous Knight in Shining Mech explains to King Dolt that honor and bravery are all nice and fine, but surviving to fight another day beats pointless last stands, and dishonor can be carried with dignity if it means saving your people. I guess he's not a complete moron. I'm kinda hoping that'll change and the show will do something inexcusably dumb soon so the world rights itself.

Are you all right good sir? That's almost an exact copy of your post from the other page.

I expected nothing and had my hopes dashed, and it was incredibly lazy to boot. Man, really, I thought this would go down the crapper, but this was inexplicably even dumberer-er than last week's episode and even less fun. Except for the clinic scenes, those were fine. I'd watch Ramirez' Anatomy, but only if it was written, produced and directed by someone else. I'm going to contradict Rich here and predict that Picard's mother is the mysterious Watcher entity they're looking for right now. Look up, Jean-Luc! Although one doesn't rule out the other. She could be the Watcher and become the Borg Queen.

What I haven't mentioned yet is that I've watched two episodes of Visions of Escaflowne. I'm a little confused so far, as I haven't really done any research before trying it at all, and it's... some sort of high fantasy anime with cat people, wolf people, humans and mech combat and while it's not splatter level, it's a good deal more violent than I expected. It's not bad, but didn't draw me in either. Had a good chuckle when the fantasy prince told the lead character that he doesn't need help from a girl and she just slapped his sorry ass for it. The next episode is going to introduce a knightly character that looks an awful lot like Touga (from Revolutionary Girl Utena) with blonde hair. Yay, I guess. The subtitles on Amazon Prime are so bad that I'm actually watching the dub instead of the original. Still have the subs turned on, might as well be watching two entirely different shows. Really weird.

Yeah, like the Utena movie? I'm going to show myself out.

Sweeping up fallen leaves and burning them to bake sweet potatoes is something common in Japan, they're called Yakiimo, unless it comes from street vendors/food trucks that use hot stones to bake them, in that case they're called Ishiyakiimo (stone baked sweet potato). Magic nor no, that's not nearly enough leaves for that though, so no idea what she's doing there. Ishiyakiimo is something pretty similar to what we have in winter, except people here bake regular potatoes and sweet chestnuts. I wonder if any of the street vendors survived the COVID-19 lockdowns. Guess we'll see next winter, assuming there won't be any more lockdowns, at least.

We also have greenish lakes: The weather's been causing interesting skies in our part of Yurop recently: In theory you could call that a filter effect of a sort, I guess. Not a digital one. Loads of dust in the air. If things are like that here, @213374U probably has seen more spectacular versions of this in Spain this week.

No, and people who uncover war crimes and make them public should be tried as traitors to the fullest extent of the law, saddled with trumped up charges if need be, and we should all be doing a little happy dance when their last appeals fall on deaf ears. Right?

@Mamoulian War, @Gorth or @Amentep... please fix the article in the title. It's das, not der. That is all.

So, there it is, the final episode of Discovery, season four. The way the show meandered through being really stupid in the first half now paid off with an utterly rushed conclusion that has elements that make no sense, everything is resolved instantly and gets no time to breathe, but at least Michael cries twice in the episode. They also seem to have reused art assets for the new species they introduced there, because it sure feels like I've seen those before. I guess they really bought leftover Mass Effect assets from Bioware. Every frame is so dense. Wait, wrong franchise. I wonder if the Reapers ever assumed direct control over those guys... The conclusion: Yeah, it was dumb.

I watched a bit of the video to see the cuts, then turned it off. I agree with the cuts being weird.

Believe it or not, these newer videos of her are much better than the ones she made in the past. Not the first scientist to be bad at communication. Certainly not going to be the last. You also wrote one terribly long paragraph that you could have just summed up as: She's German. Yeah, yeah, stereotypes, I know, let me post a jab at our northern neighbors. She also makes terrible music:

Yes, and it's really problematic because it just gives the culture war brigade a readily exploitable point of attack. Almost 20 years ago, we were discussing Star Trek Enterprise on the Interplay forum and making fun of Ensign Mayweather, the token black guy on the crew, actually counting his lines and marking episodes down where he had more than one. He was so obviously a token character the writers wanted on the show for inclusivity's sake but didn't know what to do with - but at least the other characters on the crew felt a little more fleshed out. Discovery, meanwhile, feels like the entire crew was made to check every box on the token minority list, and not many of them are real characters beyond that. There's a gay couple, a body positivity girl, Michael is of course the token black hire, Michelle Yeoh rounded everything out as the Asian lady on the show. Half of those weren't even real characters, and the half that were got mostly terrible writing to work with. Subsequent seasons added a token trans character and a token non-binary and it's painfully obvious that the writers don't know what to do with them either. From there you can just so easily point to diversity ruining your show, while that has very little to do with it. These characters would all be crap even if they all were caucasian and cis-heterosexual. One could easily also get the impression that these shows are insulated from any professional criticism on account of their tokenistic approach, and I've argued before that this is perhaps one of the reasons to include them - or better put, to keep including more and more of them. Discovery airs to raving critical reviews all the time, while the show is just plain terrible. While such things are always subjective, Discovery has a writing and direction problem, and had so right from the start. I watch that, look up reviews and wonder what's wrong with the world. Then you watch a YouTube video by Critical Drinking Billy 'I hate cuckservatives' of Akkad III telling you that in the past, your favorite shows used to be better because critics treated them fairly and writers worked hard on them because the culture war garbage didn't force them to include every minority under the sun, and you might actually find yourself agreeing with it. It's insidious. Especially because in the case of Star Trek, it's a franchise that was always very progressive for its time. It would be the perfect vehicle, but they're just making an utter mess of it. Also, because I'm contractually obligated (but also want) to, I need to once again point out that most of these things were done better by a now 30 year old cartoon adaptation that had a group of girls transform into superheroes by putting on makeup and nail polish and fight evil in the name of love and justice - and yes, that was more than occasionally just about as campy as it sounds, but it also had real characters, almost always treated everyone as equal (and if anyone did not, it came from the villains) and never felt as if it was pushing an agenda. It wasn't perfect by any means, but it was a damn sight better representing equality and acceptance than Star Trek Discovery or that Captain Marvel film. I had a good chuckle at RLM's comment in their Midnight Mass video that I watched after the fact when they said it was the best Stephen King adaptation ever that wasn't based on an actual work by Stephen King. I made the same point very early in my posts about it, I think.

Since she's mentioned in the article, time for more off-topic stuff:

Yeah, maybe you're right, but still, better not having to find out.

Well, Prime gets that trash only on Fridays, but good to know I can look forward to more greatness.

Oh, oh, oh! Time to once more address the poster, not the issue! *snort* Hmm. Hmmm. Hmmmm. Why yes, you agree 100% here? What is this now, final mask-off, mein Führer? Feels good, right? Let it out. Give in. Purge the undesirables from society. Plus, beat some miners back to work. @BruceVC I also declare victory, but if you want I can call you an -ist first too: FASCIST. Oh and since you like videos so much, have one: But bugie surly you simply must agree that unlawful protests must be punished ? Their can be no exceptions ! edit: In all seriousness, the level of political repression in Russia is horrifying at the moment. To see people agreeing with that - no matter who that person from the KKKodex was, yeah. You know what, Biden might be a feckless idiot and a doddering old fool on the cusp of dementia (or even beyond already), but can you imagine how much worse this situation would be if Trump and his fascist coup brigade would hold the reins right now?

Because I, too, am a tortoise. Right? RIGHT?

That indeed is a possibility. Mother and son writing a creepy romance together, just to round that image out. That sure was a what the hell moment. I think her romance is still possible, but I'm not doing this for the romance part, just for the achievement. Japanese loan words are so weird, it took me a while to realize what muunraito was supposed to be. If the possibility comes up, I'll switch to the resident ワイフ in a heartbeat. Not sure if Gromnir's suggestion is still available, I don't think I'm going to hit that hidden reputation counter, but who knows. Maybe next time, although probably not.

If you somehow stumble into the romance with Camellia... It was probably written by a 13 year old psychopath, or a mid 40ies housewife who thinks 50 Shades of Grey is the bee's knees. Not sure.

Kinda don't know how to get out of this mess, but I also want that romance achievement, so unless some other option comes up, ugh.

There's a bunch of bugs that keep happening for me, and some I don't even know if they're intentional maybe, or not, but I guess at least some of them are attributable to the game not working as written. My Angel Oracle got access to level 8 and 9 spells while unlocking Mythic levels 4 and 5. Not that I'm complaining, being in Chapter 4 and having access to Storm of Justice and Wrath of the Righteous makes clearing screens easy even on Unfair, it's just a little odd with my Oracle level being 14. I guess this has something to do with the game believing my caster level to be 18 (because Wrath deals 180 damage to Demons). I guess that's part of being Angel-overpowered. The Brown-Fur Transmuter keeps losing Arcane Reservoir charges during map transitions, it looks like they're either set to the base value before any modifiers or vanish entirely without using them. Not a big deal since Abundant Casting provides enough fodder for him to restore it as needed before big fights, but annoying nonetheless, given that the entire reason for having this character is to use otherwise personal Transmutation spells on the frontliners. Impassable doors in Turn Based mode were a problem too, but that disappeared for the time being. Turns sometimes spaz out during frame drops. Chapter 4 certainly doesn't get any less annoying when playing on Unfair, but it's fairly smooth now that I can pretty much spam room clearing spells that knock most enemies out of the fight in one cast. Also the first time I'm doing Camellia's quest stuff, and that girl ain't right in the head. I also probably should not do them as Angel, but eh... who cares, really.

Every time I see ridiculous capitalization like this it reminds me of Trump tweets and our own SonicMage117s running around here. What the Hell?

I find your lack of commitment disturbing.