majestic

Uh, no, thanks, but I'm not losing sleep* over the situation, just said it was surreal. *Not any more than my messed up sleeping cycle from the lockdowns does, anyway, or the usual sort of insomnia that's normal for me, anyway.

St... St... Discovery, thing. Episode something, season whatever. "We're in orbit around a former gas giant. The gas was burnt off by meterorite impacts." Except for the beginning, the episode was fine, actually. Not good, but in the context of the endless sea of stupid this is, it was passable.

We have colleagues in both Russia and the Ukraine (who are all fine, luckily, for the time being at least), it's pretty surreal.

Speaking of Madhous stuff, time to give an opinion, I guess. Not sure why, but I, ahem, decided to watch: 妖獣都市 / Yōjū Toshi / Wicked City (1987) If one does a quick google search for the title and looks at images, one could get the impression that this is tentacle porn. Hard to deny that there's one scene that fits the bill, there's also a visit in a brothel by a rather energetic old man and not one, but four separate rape scenes (assuming one counts a demon posing as a girlfriend to seduce a man as sexual assault, I'd say it is, but your mileage may vary), which is always a plus. The erotica is softcore by far and large, there's some very explicit tentacle/mouth penetration going on at some point, but that's the worst of it. Well, let's not forget that there's a spider demon with a vagina with teeth and one of the demons has a full body vagina the male protagonist eventually gets, dunno, sucked into, more or less. Let's just say that stuff is pretty Japanese all in all, but it's not as bad as the uncensored version of Legend of the Overfiend, for instance. This film also happens to be one of the few instances where still images look better than the actual film in motion. The animation is choppy and feels pretty constricted, if you've watched any of the old animated Superman or Batman cartoons you know what I mean, scenes where only the mouth moves, animations that seem to be only key-frames strung together, that sort of stuff. It looks a whole lot better than a Saturday morning cartoon, but the animation quality is on par with that, which is somewhat strange for an actual animated feature of the area - much less one made by Madhouse. With that out of the way, let's discuss the films biggest failures. Wait, you say, that wasn't it? No, sadly, it's also tremendously boring. At first its ponderously slow, which is not necessarily a bad thing, but it squanders its time on useless erotic scenes that don't look good enough to be interesting and only have a very limited link to the actual plot. What do I mean by that? Well, the entire opening of the film has one very simple goal: The demons want to obtain a DNA sample of the male lead character Taki. They do so by replacing his girlfriend - or rather the girl whose pants he spent the last three months trying to get into - and cue one very long, excessively boring (albeit quite stylish) scene that ends with a spider demon with the aforementioned toothy vagina absorbing his man-goo. No, we couldn't just had a scene where they'd take his glass in the bar, or something. Pluck out a hair with follicle, or anything else that doesn't waste 15 minutes of the runtime of the film. Normally that would be fine, but the movie stays this ponderous until the end where everything is rushed to a conclusion with no setup, and the final fight between the "Black Guard" (original Japanese means Dark Guard) and the bad guy lasts all but half a minute because the film needs to be wrapped up, folks. Not that I need protracted action scenes or anything, but it sure feels rushed. The subject matter - a tenous peace treaty between demons and humans scheduled to be renewed soon, and the signing ceremony is under threat by extremists - might have been interesting, maybe even original, in the year the film came out, in this day and age that's simply par for the course, but I'm not holding the plot against the film, but the fact that it was boring. There's a plot twist too, one that's silly and links back to the aforemntioned DNA check by the spider demon. Taki is paired with the female lead of the film - after being, well, raped by the spider demon, I guess so props for making a man the victim of something for a change... I think... not sure if that makes it better, but sex with demons is said to be so great many times through the film it should probably tide Taki over any misgivings with the teeth and all that - the demoness Makie, to protect an old geezer who is necessary for the peace treaty signing. Plot twist: As a final insult, none of the characters are actually interesting. Taki is a philandering macho who poses as a pseudo-film noir hardass Dark Guard, and Makie has all the personality of an ice block. Makie is sexually assaulted no less than three times, by her demon ex in the beginning, once by a parasite demon shoving their tentacle down her throat and once in a great gang rape scene where the extremists capture her and the leader decides to let his underlings have fun with her before she's executed in order to lure Taki to the demon realm. Right, there's also the scene where the spider demon catches Makie and Taki, and, ah, she shoots her spider webs at them, in what I can best only describe as a scene looking an awful lot like animated bukkake (editor's note: Do not google if you're unaware) with spider "silk". All in all, this is pretty much a waste of time. The plot is, eh, not very interesting, the plot twist is stupid, the movie at first doesn't go anywhere storywise then wraps everything up in ten minutes, there's a whole lot of not very interesting erotica (and I presume not very interesting even for people who otherwise like animated erotic scenes), some action which is universally boring, choppy animation and... yeah. There's really no point in watching this. Like, at all. Google pictures yourself, I'd rather not post those.

That's pretty much every open world game I ever tried. Dragon Age: Inquisition's Hinterlands was already too large.

Looks like I will not be playing Wrath of the Righteous this weekend. Prior to 1.1.7, I had on and off problems with Steam's cloud syncing where Steam would not properly upload savegames - and only with Wrath of the Righteous. I got into a habit of manually uploading them to my Google Drive just in case. Except today, of course, because it's been working for a month now. Steam immediately started patching the game when I quit earlier today, and guess what's not synced? Hard spoiler!

I have one great example that doesn't feel phoney or ham fisted or forced at all, don't worry, it's time coded to link directly to the good parts. I like to call this one "Two gays talk about a non-binary person", and it's wonderful: The actors almost bursting out in laugther at the dialogue they're having to say really helps selling the point. *snort*

As far as I know the records of his personal physician had Hitler at 5'7", but fine, we can use Stalin just as well. Could also use Berlusconi instead of Sarkozy too, if corruption and underage prostitutes round the image out better than just plain old corruption. Oh, I don't disagree with you there, especially when it comes to having scary buttons that destroy everything, no one person should have full access to those. Nobody should have acccess to those regardless, but that's something else, I guess. I added a disclaimer to the original post and am sorry if that's a touchy subject for you. I'd vote for you if you ever ran for president.

I was thinking about Hitler, Putin and Sarkozy (to complete a murder, arson, jaywalking list ) when I made that comment, more in jest than anything, even though I wrote sorry not sorry for the suggestion. Carry on.

While it's not a film, I've been on and off debating with myself about rewatching Anne of Green Gables. I'm not sure if that's such a good idea in light how how not so well rewatches of Attack No. 1 and Robin Hood went so far (they're fine, but I loved those when I was younger). Plus it's not like I have much time for anything and way too much to watch anyway.

Heh, this is an argument that we've had in the past, only in reverse? I think all arguments that Putin is acting rationally went out of the window when the Russian troops actually crossed the border last week.

It's not really a question of economic strength, but one of "Will Putin incinerate the world on his way out?" and the answer most certainly is far too close to "it's entirely possible" than I'd like it to be.

そうですか？「輝かしい日本語」とはちょっと分かりません。でも、私の言語の勉強の中で日本語が一番難しいですよ。 I make no guarantee that any of the above is correct. I've been doing this for, *checks language course*, 101 days now. Also, pretty much the wrong topic for this, I guess.

I'm just an amateur dabbling in 言語, really, but it's best to be prepared, right?

If I give you my bank account number, will you start paying? I don't mind a bonus or two. How much are we talking about? Gotta be careful with the taxes and all.

Well, time for some food pictures. Some homemade bread, fresh from the oven... Local variant of goulash (more like pörkölt with no tomatoes) to go with it... And finally, while that was made for tomorrow as it's a staple for Ash Wednesday, one has to, ah, sample it, right? Herring salad. Minor spoiler how the sauce of herring salad is traditionally made, don't click here if you're faint of heart: Don't blame me for clicking, eh?

A maximum age for politicians wouldn't be the only thing necessary. I propose a minimum height requirement too, that way we can avoid most Napoleon-Complex idiots that need power to compensate for their short...comings. Yeah, sorry about that pun, not sorry about the idea. Just struck me looking at Putin standing as tall as Merkel. Yeah, no, if you're male and not at least an inch taller than the average height of your compatriots (or at the very least have yuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuge hands!), no leadership position for you. edit: This is a joke, in case it wasn't clear enough.

There's another fun tidbit about me playing the Mass Effect series. I finished the trilogy on Insanity, and the looked up stuff and apparently realized it wasn't that hard, while I actually struggled with the initial stages of the first and second game, at least. Quake on Nightmare mode, for instance, was comparatively easy. In a thing that only ever happens to me, I missed that you're supposed to import a previous character played on another difficulty level when playing on Insanity. The first part is the most annoying to start as fresh Insainty character with, because everything almost one-shots you and the gameplay is pretty awkward at first. Kinda the same thing that made me go through Dark Souls while wondering how casters are supposed to be the "easy mode" of the game when bosses lose less than half of their health and I'm out of spells and forced into melee with a character not really built for it. Buying multiple copies? Why would I do that? I already got the spell. Right? Unintentional hard modes for the win! Strange how diametrically opposite our experiences are. I couldn't ever finish the original NWN2 campaign, and I actually finished the OC of the first NWN. I keep hearing how Mask of the Betrayer is one of the best (if not the best) of Obsidian, and yet I just can't get there, because I just can't start with it and the OC is so... off-putting, boring and, well, terrible that it breaks even my need to soldier on*, and that realiably. Quite a feat. I almost quit over that tutorial, and kept hoping it would improve. Right. It didn't. Dragon Age: Origins, meanwhile, I finished twice (noteworthy insofar as I barely ever replay games that length). However, I despied Awakening. What a terrible expansion. On the other hand I also did what I always do with games like that, build a character that plays itself. The "combat" of Dragon Age: Origins was making an Arcane Warrior and clicking some party scripts together, then watch it play out on its own. There's only a handful of fights that need direct control intervention. I'm fairly content with the game playing out this way, but it anyone wants an actual gameplay experience or riveting tactical combat from BioWare games I think they've been looking at games from the wrong company. It's not really like DA:O created the BioWare game template. *I actually finished Pools of Radiance: Ruins of Myth Drannor. I don't think dwarves are allowed in Orgrimmar.

There's two answers, or rather, one answer with two components. First, the writers all have no concept of astronomical scales, but that's probably something Alex Kurtzman got from Jar Jar Abrams, or maybe it was the other way around. Han could watch the "Republic" die from Angkor Wat in The Force Awakens and Spock watched Vulcan disappear in a red-matter black hole too. The other is that since we barely have established any locations, Vulcan, Earth and Titan are the entire sum of the places the viewer is supposed to care about from the last season. In the third season, Discovery could jump to Titan because it was outside of Earth's sensor range, and the outpost on Titan was capable of launching raids on Earth without being discovered. All from a moon of a planet that's visible from Earth with the naked eye. Combine that and what does it matter that the DMA is large enough to encompass the entire Solar System and it's closest neighbours. Last minute addon to the series. Like, literally. Chakotay and Seven are seen having a date in the very last episode, with an undertone of "this has been going on for a while" while nothing of the sort ever happened in the series. After on and off teasing a potential romance between Mr. Boring and Ms. Bipolar.

Well, I played Andromeda and even enjoyed the ridiculous loot box multiplayer for a while, but it was riddled with constant disconnects and crashes, and that meant investing time and energy for no gain, which lead me to just stop playing. It wasn't the worst game I ever played, but not going to lie, some of the dialogue was CAN I SHOW YOU MY FORCE LANCE level of bad (Andromeda joke, sorry ) and the animations were hilariously broken after the launch. Gameplay wise it was probably better than Mass Effect 2 and Mass Effect 3, all things considered, but that's no real wonder, running on an adapted Frostbite 3 (I think it's pretty clear that BioWare's Unreal 3 implementation for Mass Effect just wouldn't give them any decent shooter gameplay). If it couldn't do the one thing right it was originally designed for then that would have been terrible. Please note that this doesn't mean Andromeda was a good shooter, it just played a whole lot better than the other Mass Effects. When it worked. Which it barely did. The comment however was mostly meant to be tongue-in-cheek, I thought linking Rich destroying Mass Effect DVDs made that clear. Mass Effect 2's excuse for a plot is a rehash of Dragon Age: Origins. Face impossible threat, assemble team, face impossible odds, prevail. I don't mean excuse for a plot as negatively as it comes across here, because that clearly wasn't the focus of the game, and story-wise, it apparently really did not have a focus while everyone was trying to figure out how to best mess up the groundwork laid by the first game in the third one. An excuse plot it was, nevertheless. A collection of small stories with barely any connecting tissue. Still, since I'm a sucker for character stuff, it was probably the Mass Effect I enjoyed the most. edit: I should also mention that I liked Dragon Age: Origins, and to a certain degree Inquisition, so I'm probably not the best person to judge things, at least going by the edgelords and art snobs on this forum, because DA:O is like the worst thing since Pool of Radiance 2, apparently.

The same thing Chakotay suddenly saw in Seven of Nine, out of nowhere. Lines of a script, written by hacks. A-koo-chee-moya. I shouldn't be too hard on Voyager. Voyager is pretty watchable compared to the other stuff that came afterwards. Like One Night in Sickbay, which was probably the worst Star Trek episode until These Are The Voyages... which was the worst until every other Discovery episode became the worst until the androids in Picard summoned Mecha-Cthulhu from Dark Space (tm). Oh how I wish I'd be exaggerating just how breathtakingly stupid this was... edit: Ah, minor tip here, I don't think it'll help, but try not to think about anything that happens in Discovery going forward. It'll just break your brain if you try to make sense of it. Just "enjoy" the ride. You'll get to watch Skynet ASSUME DIRECT CONTROL at some point. That'll probably make no sense yet, but unfortunately it will soon enough...

This is thread is sure going places. If it's an actual harem*, it might have been one of his daughters, sisters, wives, or any other woman of the household, rather than a slave. Wait, that doesn't make this any better, does it? *I think historical accuracy isn't part of Space Cobra, so that's unlikely, huh?

Wand of Call Lightning, there is one right at the beginning of the dungeon, and one more further in.