majestic

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.

Yeah, my cousin had one of those too. Well, a local variant, but they were all the rage back in the very early 90ies. Give them a bottle with water, then they make a mess of the room, sort of. I mean, yeah, in theory they were supposed to have diapers, but tell that to a four year old boy, he really liked spraying people and the room more than doing what he was supposed to. That makes Futari wa Pretty Cure look so pale in comparison it's painful. How many episodes does Emi have?

Ah, perhaps I misunderstood then, I seem to recall a conversation that hinted at you playing shooters with a gamepad because you can do so from your couch. It was about Mass Effect 2 at the time, but perhaps not limited to ME2. Anyway, point still stands, albeit slightly changed. Playing shooters with a gamepad is an excercise in frustration.

Some people wouldn't recognize greatness even if it bit them in the arse. Know that I shall henceforth ignore your opinions on input devices. Not that I didn't already after you said you prefer playing Mass Effect 2 with a gamepad to keyboard and while back, but even more so now than before!

To be honest I absolutely hate this trend towards having more and more and then some more buttons on gamepads, and I hate most gamepads to boot, so screw having another to or three more buttons to press. It doesn't enhance the gaming experience for me, at all*, and all it does is make the developers even lazier with control schemes than they already are. Four face buttons, two analog triggers and two shoulder buttons are the upper limit of what I can stomach (not enjoy, but... live with). Gamepads peaked with the GameCube for me**. That one was comfortable to have in my hands, didn't have an excessive amount of buttons, everything was easily reachable and hey, the games could be played just as well. Speaking of FromSoftware games, it's not like they playtest their games with the gamepads either, or else I can't really imagine how they think it's a good idea to default the healing items to the d-pad like it was for Sekiro (not sure if that was like that for DS too, I don't think so). If a fight goes sideways enough to need healing (happens to to the best of us ), and you already slow down when using healing, do you really want to let go of any of the other buttons or sticks? *WoW-gameplay doctrine from Cataclysm going forward. "Players enjoy having more buttons to press." Yeah, maybe, like, damage dealers do. I didn't. I enjoyed making the best use of the buttons that I do have, which is why I always played healers. More buttons, more stuff? Eh... please Blizzard, balance the buttons we already have. **But what do I know, people think the DS-style controller layout is fine. Maybe it is if you don't have spindly and overly long fingers, but with that layout, I can choose between "clawing" at the buttons and sticks (i.e. arching my fingers all the time, which is hellishly uncomfortable after a few minutes) or having my fingers touch all the time. Especially the thumbs when having to use both analogue sticks. Not cool.

Yes, there is, the newer XBox gamepads all die after a couple of months of use.

I'd rather not talk about what goes on in my mind when I look at this manga volume cover. Let's just say it's not pretty. It's also not really making me want to check it out. Neither the manga, nor the anime.

Oh, no, that was a bit different. So far, while I didn't like some of the villains and found their reasoning stupid, they were at least consistent with their characterization. Shounenpads already defeated the girls and could have just killed them, but the endless mockery of his compatriots about being weaker than a pair of 14 year old girls made him give them back their transformation devices in order to defeat them in fair, "honorable" combat to prove that he is indeed the stronger fighter. He lost and died. Predictably, because he didn't have a chance in any of the fights before. It was still perfectly in character for him. Dumb-as-rocks was just dumb and had little to show other than brute force. The lady villain was smart about everything and came really close to defeating or even killing the girls, and would have, if the other boy on the villain squad didn't interfere. She was eventually pushed into a direct confrontation and, well, lost. Kiriya, meanwhile, just liked Honoka more than he should have, and with Honoka refusing to fight him at all, he just gave up and left. The last, pretty creepy guy on the squad is the only one so far who held his own in a fight with the two. So far they've always just been stronger than the villains or could rise to the occasion, unless being tricked or separated. I mean, that's one of the more consistently nice things about this show, the way the villains aren't complete morons and realize the position they are in. Creepy mage guy was already beaten in an episode prior, but only just barely, and he surprised them in this one. Leaving after having gathered the knowledge where the stones are isn't as senseless as I made it out to be, perhaps, but it's inconsistent, he should have at least tried to push his advantage while he had it, but the episode runtime was out... granted he'd just have lost becaues how else would this go, but still, yeah.

Futari wa Pretty Cure, episode 22. I recently didn't have the time or, ah... inclination to watch that series, and now here we are. The episode was, uhm, yeah. Eh. I dunno why, but even in a magical girl series with talking weirdo magical animal companions, two regular dogs talking to each other like it's nobody's business is weird. Overall it was okay.

Yeah you can do that, @KP the Torque Dork does that all the time. Go to your account settings in your profile and click change, then confirm your password and set a new display name.

After the second episode, I'm fairly sure Rich will suffer for that in some way. More than usual.

Oh, it gets better. The Confederation is going to hold "Eradication Day", a celebration of, uhm, mankind's enemies being eradicated, of course. This year's special execution is going to be the Borg Queen, and General Picard already requested to be granted the title of Borgslayer. I wonder if that's going to be the storyline for the entire season, because unlike the Discover mirror universe episodes, this isn't goofy, campy fun, but deadly serious and utterly cringeworthy. It's also not the mirror universe, of course, or even a mirror universe, but just a branched timeline. Imagine of the Brotherhood of Nod and the Federation from Starship Troopers had a bastard child without any fun, camp or satire, and here you are. Ugh. I think Westwood needs to demand royalties here. Can someone with decent Photoshop skills give Picard a goatee here? Please? Oh, before I forget it: Legolas starts chopping up people again, Picard shoots up a stage, uhm... things are back to normal. I was worried I'd have to like this, for exactly one episode. Phew.

Five minutes into the new episode. Q spews overwritten dialogue that would make Chris Avellone blush*, quotes actual Star Trek episode titles ("That's so Yesterday's Enterprise of you!" and "Through a mirror, darkly!") and actually whacks Picard in the face, telling him "This is penance, not a lesson." It also references climate change, I think. Not sure yet. May or may not play in the Mirror Universe, considering Through A Mirror, Darkly did... and Picard suddenly has Romulan slaves. Anyway, unless something changes drastically, that fell off a cliff faster than expected. Managed to get through the first episode without facepalming and almost without groaning, and now I'm already doing both. Plenty of times. Man, you'd think after all this time and all the terrible tripe I've watched, Kurtzman would be unable to surprise me. Turns out not so. There's always something new. And always something worse. Do you remember a time when Q was fun and silly? Also, it's now Picard's turn to swear around. *Let me give you an example: Picard: I am no longer your pawn! Q: Oh, you're not just a piece, but the very board on which the entire game is being played! Why, thanks, I hate it. edit: Seems to be a new sort of Mirror Universe, and Picard commands or commanded the CSS WORLD RAZER. Wow, that name for sure is even cooler than LASERVELOCIRAPTOR. At least when you're a thirteen year old Twilight fan. Picard has skull collection in his trophy room, the skulls of Sarek, Martok, Gul Dukat and a few others. Man, this is so edgy and awesome. Did I mention his ship is called the CSS WORLD RAZER yet? The C stands for Confederation by the way...

I'll just quote the Wikipedia article: No wonder the flame jets on the bridge set come always from the same point and look like heavy metal concert pyrotechnics. Wouldn't want to damage that screen, huh? Picture of the thing in "action": I guess that's one way to make a bottle episode out of everything, at least set-wise. edit: This is from the spoiler part of last week's Discovery post. I honestly had no idea how accurate that caption would turn out to be.

Didn't George Lucas just film everything in front of green screens? Discovery apparently films in front of very large LCD screens that serve as set backgrounds... with the result that the depth of the shots always feels extremely off, and it explains why everything looks so weird in close ups (becaus the background of the set is literally a flat plane that cannot produce any real depth). More so than in the prequels even.

Wow, I really, really need to... to... not make myself an unperson right now. Carry on, Imma head out.

My alarm goes off at 8. The first one, that is. I ignore it and sleep until 08:40 or something, then drag my hide out of the bed. Work day begins sometime between 09:30 and 09:45, depending on how long I need to do the daily Swedish-style crossword in the newspaper. Yep, it's a rather short commute, back when I needed 45 minutes to get to the Office I was there at 10... or even later. Morning meetings are the worst.

Close to midnight now, and I've sent a work related mail to a guy in South Korea, and he immediately replied. It's not even eight in SK yet. I don't like early bird IT guys. They're creepy. It's wrong. Like looking at the Great Old Ones.

Star Trek Discovery Season 4, Episode 12: "I have no idea how this happened" Not the actual title, but an okay episode. It's still saddled with all the baggage of being Discovery, but there's some non-stupid technobabble, they get the distance from the Sun to Mars right, and start communicating with the creators of the negative space wedgie the season is about by using simple base emotions and mathematical equations. I also found out why the "sets" in this season look so terrible. They've been filming this in front of video walls that show CGI for whatever they need. Yeah, now it all comes together. Well, luckily, next week it'll be over, at least until it returns with season five. Tomorrow we'll see if Picard stays watchable or falls off a cliff. I'm expecting the latter.

Hey, what can I say, at the time I really liked broken goth people. Teens gonna teen, ey? Heh.

Unfair is unfun enough without any nerfing tweaks applied to the game, so I'm good. I doubt I'll ever play the game on anything but normal afterwards. Not even Core.

That depends an awful lot on the party you run and whether or not you add mercenaries and know how to game the system*. With a smite mercenary coupled with a Court Poet, you can easily get over 30 CHA, that does a lot with Mark of Justice, and you can just stack Smites too. With Guarded Hearth, every attack bonus buff in the book, plus some extra cheese on top (like an extended duration Fortune) and debuffs on PD, and it's not impossible to actually hit Playful Darkness with some regularity. The problem is withstanding its attacks, and generally, even with a Last Stand tank, it's just much easier if you can use Creeping Doom, the summoned swarms can tank Playful Darkness for the entire duration of the spell with no real issues as they are immune to PD's attacks. The trick is to stack Pillars of Life so that the swarms don't accidentially go after the Shadows because they all die the moment they come into contact with the pillars. Oh, and use turn based mode for the fight, otherwise you'll probably not be able to control PD enough. From there you just pelt it dead. It's also not immune to mind affecting spells, or at least it wasn't before 1.2, so in theory Gromnir's Thug approach could work too, but I don't really know if the roll works out all right on Unfair. I just blocked it with Creeping Swarm and used the smite mercenary's long spear from behind the swarms while Ember used her supercharged Hellfire Rays and the Oracle threw Bolts of Justice. That'll do a some 200+ damage per round, and that's enough. Still managed to kill one of the animal companions, but that's just a minor setback. That's pretty much what they're there for anyway. 94 AC isn't enough for full immunity to physical attacks outside of natural 20ies, but it's not very far away from that either. For all intents and purposes though, that fight is very much designed to be cheesed. I have no idea if they hired Westley Weimar to design it, but Kuroisan the Acid Kensai felt pretty similar. Except that was a mod made to provide the player with a threat on the level of their own party (or rather, to make the player see how it feels to be on the receiving end of some fine cheese). The other is just questionable game design. *Like casting all four Geniekind variants on your frontline with Elemental Barrage on the Brown-Fur Transmuter (that works and yields very funny results), then size buffs afterwards as it doesn't work the other way around. You can really roll some ludicrous numbers with that. By the time you reach Playful Darkness buffing 4x Geniekind + Legendary Proportions should be possible.

Playful Darkness has 94 AC against regular attacks on Unfair. Good thing it can't do anything against Creeping Doom swarms but wait and sit until Ember is done Hellfire Raying his behind while the Angel MC nukes it with Bolts of Justice. Several Pillars of Life made the Shadows go boom after the ran into the fray. I don't see a way to defeat this thing in a non-cheese way on Unfair. Well, if you have a front-line with Last Stand, you can tank it for three turns, I guess. Not necessarily enough to nuke it dead, but it's doable. Still, bringing Creeping Doom along is probably the best way. Swarms suck, huh? Good thing when they suck on your side. Ember got her Cross-Blooded Sorcerer level and spell focus Hellfire Ray, so she's pretty much one-shotting dangerous things that aren't bosses left and right now. Pretty much over the hump now. Sure, ludicrous 300 damage crits can still randomly make any given mook battle an instant reload, but those are getting sparser.

I honestly have no idea. That's just random stuff strung together without any rhyme or reason as far as I can see. I have no idea how old the author is, but I'm guessing having seen Sailor Stars in teenage years is kind of out of the question if they're about as old as one would expect an editor at a magazine to be, unless they were serious anime nerds and watched fansubs of Stars and had both the internet access necessary to get the episodes as well as the know how. It's not impossible though. Or maybe they're really young, that could explain a thing or two. Although, why would you let someone who just recently watched the series for the first time write a 30 year nostalgia piece. That seems silly. I can confirm that in part. My perception of certain things in Sailor Moon certainly changed during the recent rewatch, most notably my intense dislike for Chibi-Usa disappeared, and my appreciation for Hotaru as woobie dropped a little. My overall favorite season stayed the same with Sailor Moon S, the second place once again went to Sailor Stars (but it's close, so close, in spite of all the problems of Sailor Stars), but Sailor Moon R dropped a bit. SuperS is dead last now and something I barely remember from the first watch, so I'm going to assume it was dead last too. The biggest surprise (which really wasn't not hating Chibi-Usa ) of the rewatch was that I really enjoyed the first season, more so than parts of R, but overall they're kind of equal now. As far as the storyline episodes go, back when I was a teenager, I really liked the S storyline, and the end of Stars, in the sense that I didn't really think they were strange or out of whack with the rest of the show, nor did the inconsistencies bother me all too much. R was a mixed bag even then, the Doom Tree arc I thought was thoroughly enjoyable (never mind making sure that I actually fell in love with the show), the DEATH PHANTOM storyline was so-so - the middle parts were fine, the ending was a tad too silly. Now, as an adult, the R storyline at the end is complete pants, while I actually liked the middle parts, or some of it, at least. The redemption of the Spectre Sisters, for instance, or how effortlessly the show made me feel bad for Saphir and especially Petz. I still get the feeling that having watched this much earlier makes me less negatively disposed towards the storyline episodes, even though it's very plain to see how much of a break they represent compared to the other episodes. There's also something else to consider. For instance, the pacing issues of the Sailor Stars finale aren't as bothersome when you're on a TV station controlled watch schedule and they just air one episode a day. You watch that for 20 minutes, are glad that there's Sailor Moon on TV and that's about it. Having control over when you want to continue, you suddenly run into the issue that the finale of Stars is mired in issues that kind of make you want to not click on "next episode" - something that never even could up during the regular TV watching. It's probably even more different for a weekly schedule like Japan had. Overall, I think my impressions of the story episodes would change again on another rewatch, mostly because I now read parts of the source material and watched Crystal, and it's really hard not to appreciate how much effort the writing team of the anime had to put into making a passable anime adaptation at all, never mind one that's semi-coherent, has consistent characterization (outside of SuperS of course) and produced some of my most favorite anime moments of all time. The writers for Crystal did nothing of that, and the result was a disaster. Crystal was way worse than the manga, which is interesting overall because it was rather faithful (not in all things). That also harkens back to the manga being a monthly issue. Reading it all at once reveals an immense amount of issues that one would be more willing to forgive when you read the 20 or so pages an issue has after a month.