majestic

Yeah, although, right now K-On! is in that Schrödinger's state of "might like" and "might hate" at the same time. Once you measure... uhm... not sure where I was going with this, but make sure to not let the first episode bother you too much.

I'm sure my colleagues are having a lot of fun with log4j too. Who thought it would be an advantage to be stuck in Microsoft's ecosystem for a change? Wasn't that long ago I was patching PrintNightmare in the middle of the night, now I get to watch the fun from outside for a change.

Look, you're not just a fascist, you're a biased fascist to boot.

Some healthy food: Oy, I sure did feel all that fat the day after, but what can I say? #noregrets.

It arrived today. That display is really fine, I have to say. It's too bad it won't get much use. No trouble connecting to my WLAN, doesn't at all connect to my parent's Neatgear router, but the old Switch barely ever did that too. Guess that thing is just broken somehow. The only thing that got worse, and I did not think that possible, is the way the console rests in the dock. That's even less stable than the old one. Looks pretty nice though with the white dock and the white Joy Cons. Mom wasn't too happy that I wanted my Pro controller back, but yeah, we'll just order a new one. I'm not playing with the Joy Cons. It's a bit too late to start SMT V now, but hey, I'll maybe give Furi a shake. I tried playing that a while back when I only had the Joy Cons and that did not go over too well.

Beats me. The worst chipmunk is still that second K-On! opening. But yeah, like I said, it's... not good. There's something really hilarious when you're watching it as the outro to one of the really terrible Vivid episodes, but that might just be me. You know, in the way Speed Racer broke your brain with that helicopter scene.

I'll try my hand at making a Hoonding post now.

Vivid is the first time Nanoha is really terrible (outside of the minute and a half in episode 5 of the first season, from now on, just imagine I'm adding this every time I talk favorably about this anime), and I'm not even talking about the extended nude bathing scene and the sexual assault. That's just the icing on the cake, really. The quality drop is worse than in SuperS, because for all that's bad in SuperS, the episodes often have at least a couple of genuinely fun moments. In SuperS, in the episodes where everyone isn't out of character - and that happens every now and then, after all - they're usually terrible because it's either the Amazon Trio that shows up, or Pegasus, or worse, both. In Vivid, nothing is good. Except the hilarious J-Pop Eurodance tune it plays every now and then. That's just mind-breakingly awesome because it makes me laugh like an idiot for no particular reason. Technically the outro song is fine too, in a similar "stupid Japanese ska-pop" sense, because objectively that's... not really good. Also, those credits look like they're from a harmless kid's show.

This is a part of the scene. It's the only one I can post without getting banned but it's super helpful in showing just how terrible Vivid really is. One of Vivio's friends kicks the ever living daylights out of Sein (Number VI). First of all, that drags on forever and ever. It starts at 11:40 and only ends at 20:30. No, I'm not kidding. There's nine minutes of everyone present, except Fate and Nanoha because they're off doing something else (and who can blame them) being stark naked in the hot springs. After a while, Sein shows up. Her cyborg combat power is phase walking, i.e. she can walk through solid matter if she so wants. Last season she used that to infiltrate enemy bases and to take out the enemy's CIC during their attack, leaving the Space Cops unable to put up a coordinated defense. Here, in Vivid, she uses it to... grope the girls from below the hot springs, who then jump out of the water and hold whatever it was Sein touched (ranges from breasts to buttocks... or worse) and yelling "Something brushed up to me". At lest until Chun-Li here transforms and kicks her so hard she launches into the air. Lutecia, the formerly quiet and reserved girl in exile threatens to sue her for being bad for business (is that supposed to be funny? What business?) while the others helpfully explain to her that sexual assault isn't fun. It then continues with Sein stripping down and joining everyone and agreeing to cook dinner and make breakfast for everyone in order to apologize. So, no, this isn't "I don't like you, die!" kind of bad. This is "I'm going to hang myself, see ya!" bad.

Strange, huh? I once spent two hours or so coming up with a totally crazy post about that particular ship that I now tried to find but can't, because the forum software refuses to find it, and I've tried Makoto, Ami, shipper and shippers as well as subtle as search terms, and that should suffice to make it appear. It really didn't. I'm 100% certain the post contains at least one of these words (if not all of them). For what its worth, I really hope they don't make a Stars adaptation. Hopefully Eternal bombed hard enough. I did find my post complaining about the Eternal films, by the way, those were funny, but really... nice to be reminded that Artemis isn't really just a cat. Yikes. I also paused Magical Girl Lyrical Nanoha Vivid at 11:38 into the fifth episode. Because it's the fith episode, and Lutecia just invited all the girls to the hot springs. I should just skip ahead, really, but I can't. Please don't let this be as bad as the original hot springs scene. Please.

It seems like the same sort of silly fun you fairly consistently rejected before, so no, I'm not sure you should like it either. Must be some really good garbage then, hence my curiosity. Funny how that went in stages. After the first four episodes I thought "Okay, so the transformation sequences were made by and for perverts, but that's something I can tell myself is a genre convention and leave it at that." After the fifth episode, I was regretting every life decision I ever made, but then decided to pretend it doesn't exist and actually enjoyed the rest of the season. Ended up liking A's and - that's kind of the weird thing now - loving (probably more than I should) StrikerS. I complained about certain elements, like the turn based feel of the battles and the action not being all too interesting and too plentiful, but overall, and that's something that Vivid made me realize, I actually like Nanoha, Fate, Hayate and the gang. I like Fate in spite of her being set up as this woobie who gets abused by her mother and the ridiculous shipping fuel "sort of, maybe" romance she has with Nanoha. They'd be a nice couple and one of the variety where nobody ever complains or comments on and where they'd just be, like, a normal couple, but the problem is that StrikerS waffles around being intentionally non-commital in an effort to encourage shipper discussions. So instead they're head-canon lesbians of people who post things like "Hey, they have sex with each other!", and I know I already complained about that. Vivid has them living together in a house, so that I can take as confirmation, probably, but Vivid is about an alien copy of the characters I used to like. They vaguely look like them (but really only vaguely, there's better fan art than this), but their behaviour is a mere approximation. I guess you haven't seen the Voyager episode where a copy of the holographic doctor is turned on 700 years in the future of a planet Voyager visited and is confronted with a completely warped view of what his crewmates and friends were (and for him, no time has passed, obviously), but Vivid makes me feel how the good doctor must have. Vivid was made by people who had only incomplete access to very degraded copies of the original show, and they crafted a replica of what they thought Nanoha was like. That must be it, yes. Magical Girl Lyrical NANOHA The MOVIE 1st made me want to pause the series, but 2nd A's was pretty decent, if still not providing a reason to watch it over the series. With Vivid now, the answer to that question becomes: Oh boy, am I ever. All it took were four episodes. It took SuperS a good deal longer to make me want to delete everything Sailor Moon from my brain, but Sailor Moon was a good deal better than the Nanoha franchise as a whole, even though that's tough to compare. They're both a magical girl series, but they're worlds apart in the same way Columbo and X-Files are. Both are about solving crimes, right? Eh, and StrikerS is pretty much its own thing. It's closer to a superhero TV show in a futuristic sci-fi setting than a magical girl show. That is what I meant with it's more comparable to Agents of SHIELD than any other anime I've watched.

She reminded me a bit of the Tactics mod encounters Weimar came up with back in the days of Baldur's Gate 2, but those, ridiculous as they were, stuck with the rules that the player played by, and they also were modifications, not something the game's designers added. This fight, on the other hand, puts you up against a level 16 neutral evil mage who transforms into a fighter, with permanent haste and true seeing just to make sure that pretty much all of your defensive options that otherwise would allow you to potentially withstand melee with such an enemy don't work, i.e. Mirror Image, Blur and Displacement. With more than one stack of Dark Sacrifice (Rule of Cool #1: Everything is more evil when it's called DARK, right?) she has an armor class you can only hit with natural 20ies, saves so high you can't make anything stick and an attack bonus that will make her hit you even if she somehow could roll a negative 20 - and that's with powergamed and prebuffed characters a new player isn't very likely to have. There aren't many enemies who are not immune to poison, but whenever you run into them - mostly humanoids - it really pays off to have a Stinking Cloud memorized. If you're making a conjuration and crowd control Ember, she's the perfect candidate. If not, sacrifice one of Nenio's spell slots. Without any Dark Sacrifice stacks, she still hits like a truck, but your characters are likely to survive more than half a round's worth of attacks. I don't think I need to mention it, but the encounter design doesn't change, these ridiculous roadblock style battles keep happening. The game more or less expects you not only to know what you're doing with the rules, but also to abuse them as best you can, in order to stand a chance.

One of these instances that might leave you wondering what the hell you're supposed to do if you don't beat him down before the buffs go off. The optional fight where you interrupt the summoning ritual earlier in the dungeon is also pretty terrible. You either win without any issues at all if you have a copy of Stinking Cloud lying around, or you end up on the chopping block, at least on Core and above, and it's one instance where RTwP is far easier to handle than TB. Those sacrifices really pop off if your crowd control character has a bad initiative roll in turn based.

StrikerS does very little of the former (the girls are aged up in StrikerS, I mean... fanservice is still there, of course) and has none of the latter, but who am I to argue when it comes to starting in the middle and stopping. Yeah, not gonna lie, those transformation scenes are really borderline, and episode five is beyond that.

Not all of it. Episode five of the first season was worse than anything in Steins;Gate, however the other episodes were all right. StrikerS, when it wasn't doing fanservice or falling apart at the end, I'd even call fantastic - for what it was, a military sci-fi mahou shoujo show with a decent balance between character moments (most of which were not slice of life character moments, make no mistake here, they're all living on the military base and mostly concerns the teambuilding) and action. It was fun, in an entertaining way, not in a comedic way, fast paced and not nearly as melancholic as the two preceeding seasons, and was pretty well written*, at least for 20 of its 26 episodes. The ending does a Sailor Moon / JRPG bit where it suddenly expands in scope to ridiculous end of the world levels, but even then there's only one episode I would say was below average, and that only because it dumped a lot of exposition that could have been worked into the episodes a little more naturally. There's much more to complain about in Vivid than the increasingly creepy transformation sequences or the shounen moments, these were just the primary focus because it's easy to explain them without prior knowlede of the series. Vivid really is the SuperS of the franchise. The old recurring characters are behaving differently than before, are speaking so noticably different than before that I have a hard time believing they're still the same voice cast (I only know for Vivio because I looked it up, haven't checked for the others), Vivio's narration is still ear piercing (she does that every now and then, it was gone for a bit, then came back). Everyone is also kind of the same, energetic, loud, childish, even Nanoha who was for the first three seasons the wise beyond her years sort of girl that always makes sensible choices. Where the first season and A's leaned a bit too hard into feeling melancholic, Vivid is trying too hard to be funny. Even the character moments that are there every now and then feel phony with that terrible voice direction. It's not just bad, it's awful, and was directed by someone else and very noticably animated by a different studio, and apparently it'll get even worse, because... Emphasis is mine. I wondered for a bit now where this is going, because at four episodes in, there's no plot yet. I mean, really, nothing. Except Einhart having attacked combat specialists on the street to see who is stronger, and that stopped in the second episode after Nove hurt her enough to collapse. Since then we're more or less focussing on Einahrt and Vivio growing closer and occassionally punching each other, which sounds fine on paper but really is just bad. Bad. Bad, bad! And if Wikipedia is right, and why wouldn't it be, it'll cap the show off with a magical martial arts tournament. Good thing there's only one season left after this, and that's a spinoff focusing on someone else, a martial artist fighting to... become stronger. *In the sense that the plot, for the most part, did not feel completely ridiculous, the characters behaved consistently and within their established personalities, when changes happen they make sense, the exposition happens - by far and large - naturally in a way that makes sense, nothing it too stupid which is quite a feat given the ridiculous setting, a lot of time is spent on building the team and everything they achieve feels earned, plus there was a good deal of care taken to establish the setting and think about how things should work, what makes sense and why things are the way they are. The story promises more than it can keep, in the end, but that's something else.

Yeah, well... I don't think Steins;Gate Zero can be any worse than Magical Girl Lyrical Nanoha Vivid. I'm at a loss here, really. Episode four sends the new cast to an uninhabited planet one of the antagonists of the last season exiled herself to. The entire time during StrikerS she was a calm and collected young girl with powerful summoning abilities who always spoke softly and somewhat quietly. Not unable or afraid to speak, just quiet. Sure did a full 180° and is the liveliest, high pitched screaming at the top of her lungs, character on the show, and totally happy people are coming to visit her. I'd buy her disposition being improved after Fate saved her mother last season, but really, that's just ridiculous. She even, ahem, completely remodelled open air hot springs for them. You know, on the formerly uninhabited planet she's just living in exile on. Remodelled hot springs, as if the planet was a holiday resort. The real reason there are suddenly hot springs is of course to have her naked in the water, and the scene is paused right now so I can make this post, because I'm "predicting" that everyone else will be naked and in the hot springs before long too. I can only hope not. This series and hot springs are a bad combination. According to IMBD, this was written by the same person that wrote two episodes of the first season, all of A's, and all of StrikerS. That can't be right, can it? So, time to see how many of them get naked and in the hot springs. Yay! edit: Well, so far they just went into the river to punch water. That's... better than anticipated. But the episodes ended and they're still on the planet, so plenty of time left.

I think I'll have to check that anime out eventually. Sounds like it's fun, plus it's really short. Third episode of Nanoha Vivid isn't so bad. Almost all of the Numbers (at least all who took the offer of rehabilitation instead of imprisonment, so Quattro is thankfully absent) showed up to observe the meeting between Einhart and Vivio. Einhart has the memories of former Hegemon Claus Ingvald (eh, okay), who wasn't so much in love with or married to Vivio (Queen Olivie, of whom Vivio is a clone) as much as they grew up together, with Olivie being a political hostage at the time. Great, so this sort of maybe romance between the two isn't weird in the sense that one is an ancient descendant of the other, but it's still weird. No, scratch that, this episode isn't "not so bad", that's just moments that aren't terrible. So far there are two things this show is about. The first: Understanding new people you meet, one punch at a time! And the other: Sure, the other seasons had their share of useless fanservice, including a terrible boob rub and loli-moments in a changing room, but the series were never this bad in addition to being fanservicey. On the bright side, and that's not much, Vivio's voice no longer feels like someone pounding down my eardrums. I don't know if something was wrong with the audio of the first episode or if that is because she stopped narrating in this incredibly toad-like voice or if I just got used to it. The audio quality of this isn't so great in general. Everything about the production quality of this series is bad. Let's see how much worse it can get, huh? edit: Einhart's adult transformation is worse than Vivio's, and that really took some doing. Who let the perv gang animate this?

Looks like I can't. While there's still 30 minutes left until the planned delivery window runs out, we're not that far down on the regular delivery route. Should have been delivered about an hour ago, give or take a few minutes. Sigh.

Dunno, he also claimed there's mercury in vaccinations (I always get a good laugh out of people claiming that organic mercury compounds like Thiomersal are dangerous BECAUSE MERCURY OH MA GAWD!), so at the very least he's been treading dangerously close to the abyss a while ago. Would not be surprised if he jumped off the deep end at some point. Yeah, fun thing that stuff with compounds, huh. Sodium is corrosive and highly flammable, and chlorine is pretty dangerous stuff when it's not used as miracle cure against every illness on the planet, and yet, ever tried living without sodium chloride? No? Yeah, thought so too. *sigh*

Not going to lie, I hoped for an actual hardware upgrade that leads to more stable frame rates* and I never would have upgraded to the OLED Switch if I still had my old one. The new dock has a LAN port now that I can't use (no cables anywhere near the TV, that wasn't a thing way back when), not even that is helpful. Emulation... yeah, for that I would need to emulate a hardware upgrade, so that's sorta out of the question. *Well, maybe they are. It's nominally the same hardware, but it is more efficient, so core temperatures should be lower. There's a chance the little hickups in games like Celeste are gone or at least lessened in docked mode - if they come from hardware issues at all. While I love Celeste, that game has no right to stutter and frame drop even on something as weak as the Switch. I can probably find out by tonight, but I'm more likely to try SMT V than Celeste. I've been sitting on that game for a while, unable to play. Heh.

I went with Einhard since I misread what was on the character chart that Mr. Tiddies used (there it's not very helpfully Einhalt and a bit small, so my brain made Einhard out of it), but in the show it's really Einhart, but I also edited that in at some point. I edited that post like fifteen times. edit: The episode title has her full name: So technically, that's Ainharuto Sutoratosu, Japanese being what it is.

I caved and ordered an OLED Switch for myself, my mother can keep my old Switch. It should arrive today. Not an upgrade I expect to get much use out of since I play docked most of the time, but hey, no point in buying a new old Switch when the price difference is this small. I'm also kind of hoping that the WLAN module in the new Switch is better, because the WiFi on the old one is a bit spotty.

Well... Nove has a fight with Heidi who so totally is not the adult form of future Vivio girlfriend Einhard. Not something I figured out by guessing though. There are not a lot of characters with heterochromia on the show, and "Heidi" is one of them, and Einhard from the chart has the same eye color. Heidi is looking for Ixveria, Flame King of Hades. Sure. Works for me. This is Nove's combat form in StrikerS: I'm a Dr. Light type robot. Well, cyborg, in StrikerS, but yeah, I used to be friends with Mega Man and Zero! ViVid turns her into this: Hello, I'm Nove, and I'll be your waitress at Hooter's today. Are you ready to order? Nothing can excuse Pegasus. Nothing. Absolutely nothing. Speaking of Pegasus, YouTube suggested I watch a "Sailor Moon Iceberg" video. Curious, I started watching, then I got lucky, the guy said "Haruka and Michiru are the second best power couple of Sailor Moon, after Pegasus and Chibi-Usa.", so I turned off the video and removed it from my YouTube history so I never accidentially run into an incomplete progress bar that makes me click back into it. This is going to bother me for a while, but I'm not watching that. No way. Come at me, brain, you'll not win this time I hope. Back to ViVid: