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sclarflared · 10 months

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hello ! the name is jae ( she/they ) and i was super excited to stumble upon this rp because of my love of cyberpunk and scifi. i present to you all today, yoon jaehyun, local ansan who has lived here pretty much all his life and honestly hasn't known any other place but the city itself. a dj at orbital and one of the better known ones within the last few years, known for sometimes producing his own tracks and intermingling them with well-known songs in popular culture. more about him under the read more. also i ask that you please bear with me, last weekend i broke my humerus bone in my right arm, had surgery, and am recovering. my arm is splinted and i sometimes wear a sling, but my right hand is free so i'm able to type and stuff. i'm excited to plot with you all and if you have discord, i'd especially love to chat with you there ! edit : he now has a pinterest board ! and a stats page !

born and raised in ansan, he grew up with a single mother and a father that was never in the picture. when he was old enough to understand, his mother eventually told him that right after he was born his father earned a one way ticket to astra and didn't think twice and left them behind.

though he's never left ansan, this has largely colored his idea of the colony and he wouldn't give two shits if someone said he could leave tomorrow to the colony above. if he won a ticket in the lottery, he'd give that ticket to someone else in a heartbeat.

currently 24 years old, has a birthday in january, so he'll be 25 early next year. accepts he/they pronouns and is asked for a label would describe himself as a demi-male. often experiments with his clothes when it comes to usual gender norms and rarely has a normal hair color. currently rocking blue hair ( because i'm still over here crying and missing hongjoong's blue hair ).

lived just barely above the poverty line growing up as his mother didn't have a lot of skills or any kind of degree to help with that. she ended up working on average two to three jobs as he was growing up just so they could pay rent, pay for food, and try to give him fun things growing up when possible. grew up really close with his mom and as an adult he tries to help her in anyway that he can since he makes more money than she ever could.

developed anxiety and depressive issues in his middle years around eight or nine years old. was pulled out of school for years because he couldn't handle it and it would be years before his mother could afford something to help him, had some mood regulators that allowed him to enroll back and finish high school, but hasn't used any such since he was about eighteen years old.

always had a love for music and did odd jobs in his teenage years to afford meager producing equipment and a barely passable computer where he could create his own music. if you asked his opinion on his early stuff, it was mediocre at best but as the years have passed and he's gotten better equipment and learned new techniques.

posted some of his tracks on whatever the soundcloud equivalent would be and that gets him noticed slowly but surely. goes by the alias shadowstorm when he first posts his music and it sticks. finds the opportunity to to do some amateur dj gigs, before he finds out that orbital as looking to hire some new djs and were offering opportunities to those generally unknown in the nightclub scene.

surprises everyone when his one night audition is sort of a hit and is asked to become one of the alternate djs at the club. a few years pass and he becomes one of the regular djs headlining several nights during the week and weekend.

still goes by his alias for his stage name and is always seen with a mask that obscures the lower half of his face and large headphones that further obscure things when the dark lights of club strobe around him. he prefers that bit of anonymity that it gives him that not everyone would recognize who he is if he were passing them down the street during the day.

deals with his anxiety and depression issues through recreational drug use. it's not hard for him to acquire considering life revolves around nightlife and orbital most days. usually keeps it under wraps that it's more than just something fun to do and that he uses it as a coping mechanism. still refuses to use mood regulators again because he never liked how it made him feel.

lives in one of the lower floors of la mariposa in a studio apartment. being a dj and royalties from some songs that he had produced haven't made him super rich or anything, but much better off than he used to be. considering he uses some of his money to help his mother out, you won't find him in a bigger apartment or one of of the penthouses that the absurdly rich could afford.

personality wise ; headstrong to boot once he gets his mind on something it's hard to get him to stop. stubborn as hell, doesn't often like to be told what to do. sarcastic and isn't above a bit of dark humor when it suits him. unless you're close with him or known him for years, he's not the type to easily open up to others readily. seeks thrill from time to time and can be a bit reckless at times. if defined, is an introvert who pretends and thinks he's an extrovert but actually isn't and doesn't realize why he just crashes after a long night at orbital.

plots

if they live in la mariposa, someone he's seen in passing ? maybe they've run into each other at the gym, or simply in walking in and out of the building and on that hello i've seen you a few times basis.

fellow bad influence that he regularly does drugs with ? maybe they help supply each other with certain substances that the other isn't able to get easily and often have nights where they party and get wasted together and end up waking up half clothed on the floor of one of their apartments.

some flings and exes ? definitely see him as pansexual but has leanings toward masc presenting/nonbinary folks. give him an ex that really broke his heart and it's been hard on him to let anyone in like that since then ?

close friends he's known all his life, works for those who have lived in ansan for a long time or all their life as well.

anything really ? we can plot it out.

#rmnt:intro #. *. ⋆ — ꜱʜᴀᴋᴇ ʏᴏᴜʀ ʜᴇᴀʀᴛ ᴀɴᴅ ᴡᴀᴋᴇ ʏᴏᴜ ᴜᴘ / intro .#surgery mention tw #because me #drugs tw #depression tw #anxiety tw #this is very rambly and such but is still a work in progress so love him and me please

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thundercrack · 1 year

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I've heard a LOT about gideon the ninth but have never picked it up, i'd be really interested in hearing your thoughts on it and why you don't like it (if you want to)?

ok i'm home i'm watching the fulham vs chelsea game (go fulham) i'm ready 2 answer this (I am always happy to hate. this is just my spitballed opinion on a book i read like three months ago so take it with a grain of salt)....first off i'll say: i read this whole book so u don't have to! i HATED gideon the 9th. literally the worst book i read in 2022. i say this as someone who generally likes some degree of mediocre scifi/fantasy. here are a few reasons why...

Trope city! and done extremely poorly. The book is advertised one way -- lesbian necromancers in space! although I dislike identitarian advertising in general, the book is literally 1) nothing like that 2) ten million times dumber. I read a recent review that lauded Muir's skill at flipping tropes on their head to reveal something new. I got absolutely none of that. It felt like poor execution of...well...take your pick: a) rivals to friends/enemies to lovers b) underdog achieve their goal to find out it's not what they expected c) murder mystery d) house tournament...I could go on. And this is just in general...

Weak plot. Well, like I just alluded to, I think the plot sucks -- or maybe it's just the godawful execution. Somehow there's constant action throughout Gideon the Ninth and yet somehow, I found it completely boring the entire way through. The plot is supposed to carry tension. Will Gideon and Harrow figure out how to work together? Who killed [insert name here. there's plenty]? Why is Harrow pissy now? Given that I wasn't engaged in the characters (see previous complaint) and I also had significant confusion about the worldbuilding (see complaint 4), Muir gave me absolutely nothing to make me care. The bizarre pacing and attempts at humor didn't help.

Weak characters. okay, the plot sucks. well, maybe she's got interesting characters? nope. Jumping back to my trope-city complaint: Muir's investment in the characters read entirely superficial to me -- a translation of the dumb jock, and the cold ruler with a troubled past -- like she could thought she could rest their entire personalities on tropes. In no way did they feel three-dimensional, or did they work as vehicles for plot, or did they say anything about...well...anything. If the main characters in Gideon and Harrow felt flimsy, that's saying nothing about the members of the other Houses, who barely existed with any clarity as actors in the text. Again, tropes, tropes, tropes.

Inconsistent worldbuilding. I've read that Muir built her world in a way that leaves a lot of explanation out on purpose -- it's tight POV to Gideon, so of course she won't explain things that seem standard about her life. Yet...this left me confused, irritated, and frustrated. One minor example: Muir notes a shortage of paper in the 9th house, and then have Gideon (who is apparently in a wretched state) reading porno mags. I think part of the frustration here is that I definitely could have had some interest and investment in Muir's world. I don't mind dark topics. I like extensive space set ups. I like when writing can turn my stomach, or subvert genre expectations and surprise me. Instead, Muir presents an incoherent and inconsistent world. There's only so much imagination can do to make it tolerable.

Funny? No. The most egregious example of Muir's attempted humor is her dialogue. Look, I'm not opposed to a bit of sarcasm, or irony, or anything else. But the way Muir did it was 1) not funny and 2) often jarring within the text (a level of quippyness that just did not work) 3) basically "edgelord" characterization. I generally LIKE some level of referentialism in my work, but the way Muir does it through "memes" etc didn't enhance my understanding of the book, and actively frustrated me, especially in conjunction with the ways she plays with the characters lack of understanding about say... a bath. Muir isn't bad at writing prose, but her decisions here are just baffling to me.

Is there more? Probably. I guess these aren't the most thoughtful critiques, but at the end of the day, Gideon the Ninth felt like it failed at the basic tenants of a novel: coherent characters and some sort of plot. I feel like it's the worst kind of book by an author who went from writing fanfiction to novels. Muir assumes a certain level of investment in her story without giving the reader the tools to understand her characters, and seemingly, without much of a story to tell. I was sucked in by everyone on Tumblr posting about it -- I've gotten some great recommendations here -- but it was truly one of the most dogshit books I've ever read. I feel like, normally, when I dislike a book, I at least can understand why someone might like it. With this one, I had no clue. I finished the book bored, frustrated, annoyed, and feeling like I wasted my time. Anyway. Cheers. and fulham won!!

#ask #book talk #idk if i have a tag for this stuff but. yeah #i'm not even trying to be even handed here. i hated it soooo much #idk how many active followers i have but like please do not start discourse with me LMAO #legit a book when ppl say they really like it. lowers my opinion of what they read. IM SORRY

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joshuaalbert · 2 years

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Geordi if no one else has asked already, Deanna if you've answered for Geordi already

favorite thing about them

he’s literally so good at friendship that he introduced an android and a borg to the concept of friendship. like that’s essentially two entire races that didn’t have an understanding of friendship until they interacted with geordi. I love that while he’s busy holding the ship together all the time, and while he’s an engineer and engineers are. not typically known for being outgoing, he’s still so good at relating to people and making them feel comfortable that ro laren, who has trouble opening up to anyone, straight up hugs him

that said, from a character building perspective, I also really like that it has limits and oversights. guinan has to tell him to take a different approach with barclay because just pushing him harder isn’t working (we’re ignoring for them moment the exact nature of what barclay is doing in the holodeck because they don’t know that yet). he immediately adapts and is successful in making that connection, but I think it’s really interesting to see that it isn’t always pure instinct and sometimes takes more deliberate effort. in tng lower decks, I definitely don’t think he comes off as the worst commanding officer, but it’s a different light than we’re used to seeing him in. it’s a critical situation, taurik is just one crew member among many, and I think it would ultimately feel out of place for him to be super friendly under these conditions even if we’ve seen him reach out to help/reassure subordinates before (ex. sonya gomez).

and these examples make sense in that, as kind and patient as he is capable of being, he IS still the guy trying to hold the ship together and who needs his crew to just do their jobs and you can’t always do that and be 100% unfailingly friendly. sometimes you are going to brush someone off or say something wrong to someone, so I feel like they hit a really satisfying balance there

least favorite thing about them

this isn't really about him it's about the show but he got some of the worst individual/focus episodes. like. in other people’s episodes he’s a cool funny smart guy and then in a lot of his it’s either like “haha geordi can’t talk to women” as though women aren’t, like, people and as though geordi is not really good with people or just kinda mediocre redos of other scifi media (although that said I was kinda fond of the manchurian candidate inspired one). they also just kind of tend to feel Weird in a way I can’t really explain. disconnected? idk. other people have talked about the intersection of racism and ableism in the ways aspects of this character were handled, particularly the romantic plotlines, and I definitely think that’s evident across a lot of his focus episodes. on one hand I wanna do a scene rewrite like I did for remember me for one of his episodes, but on the other, a lot of times it’s the entire episode concept that’s rough.

brOTP

im very fond of the geordi/data/wesley engineering trio that pops up a lot i think they're fun and i also LOVE his friendship with ro laren in the next phase. i wish they'd drawn on that more going forward because it was two characters who hadn't had much of a reason to spend time with each other before so i think it would've been really cool to see them spending free time together willingly even just in the background of other episodes

OTP

i do think he and data are effectively married i do love their dynamic and i was surprised how clear it was that the troy and abed dynamic in community is a direct descendant. that said, i hate that like. all geordi content is in the context of this ship. the couple times I have gone into the geordi la forge tag to see geordi la forge who is my friend it’s basically all ship content

nOTP

I don’t know that he’s commonly shipped with anyone else tbh? I’ll talk more about the leah brahms plotline later in a general sense but I do resent any implications the series tries to make that they would ultimately end up together just because she’s the one woman he had a significant connection with in the series. it’s one thing if like we knew she got divorced and saw them really reconnecting or something but you know they’re literally just namedropping her bc she’s the only woman they could think of that fits that category

random headcanon

I think it is geordi’s god given right as one of the only characters with a sibling let alone one that he was 1) aware of, 2) raised with, and 3) is on good terms with to have a series of completely incomprehensible jokes with his sister. she visits the enterprise and one of them says the absolute stupidest most contextless series of words and they’re both laughing about it and everyone’s just like. uh. okay. for comparison my most recent one with my sister is “you can cut a hot dog up into 16 pieces” so that’s the kind of energy I want here.

unpopular opinion

idk how unpopular this is here but I used to read imdb reviews for episodes before I finally developed some self control and stopped doing that but people on there acted like geordi was the creepiest person alive for the leah brahms plotline and I somehow suspect that opinion represents a racist double standard. I’ve said this before i think but I wonder how many of them were okay with barclay. like as far as I can recall, in booby trap he ran this program literally to try to save the ship, and he gets caught up beyond that as he’s working. it’s a high stress situation, this version of her is someone that he’s really clicking with, and even if he crosses some lines he never set out to do so. this is not a hollow pursuits situation where he created a simulation of a real person with the specific intent to have sex with her. in the followup episode, the real leah brahms chews him out for the program, he’s sorry for it, and he develops a genuine friendship with the actual version of her. I feel like this is a reasonable way for this plotline to be handled! it’s fair to think mistakes were made especially in the beginning since he was kind of specifically looking for a woman when that wasn’t necessary, and he did get hung up on a fake version of a real person to the degree that it impacted his relationship with that real person, but i feel like the intent wasn’t malicious, and those mistakes were apologized for and handled and there doesn’t ultimately seem to be any lasting harm. to me that doesn’t say “wow this guy is so creepy,” it says that he made some mistakes regarding boundaries but ultimately made amends.

song i associate with them

hmm I don’t think I have one? I don’t have one for most star trek characters tbh I was just lucky on the last two. that said electric feel by mgmt did just appear unbidden in my head so maybe it’s a sign.

favorite picture of them

#I think I’m right about how booby trap/galaxy’s child play out but correct me if I’m wrong I have watched. a lot of star trek since then #ty ty!!!!#also I will keep doing them if anyone else wants to send me a character they just take a bit bc. I got a lot to say.#ask game #la forge

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thatangelread · 2 years

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English Review🤍 [kein deutscher ET vorhanden]

Iron Widow by Xiran Jay Zhoa...

Oh, boy. I did really want to love this book.

I mean poly-rep??? Sign me up.

I am done with overly dramatic triangles.

But after 200 pages I- unfortunately -was done with this book as well...

3.25 stars for the idea and the fact that dramatic love triangles are dumb.

And the historical inspiration. Love that kind of stuff.

Because the idea was really great. Here is why I didn't love the book.

—"I am not like the other girls" is a trope that should have died out in 2015 if not earlier. (Definitely earlier.) Yet, here we are ...

—where was the world building???

How do the Chrysalises actually operate,wtf is the science behind them???

In general there was no building if anything.

Our main character Zetian hops from one event to another. Makes sense for the actual target group who sometimes only like those things. But here it was misplaced in my opinion.

In other words this book would have been better off as an adult Scifi book than YA...

I am just going to skip over the fact that those exciting scenes just felt like a mediocre ripped off version of Dune.

If she brings that one person who disappeared back in Book 2 I am losing it (not going to read that btw, but i will find out).

Wtf was the ending anyway???

I am sorry I was bored a lot reading this book (Zetian was a bore and a poor excuse of a feminist stuck in the 90s or sth) the shocking cliffhanger isn't going to change that.

Want to know why? World building is missing. I felt no connection or attachment to anyone or anything here. Wtf was going on in that book???

Yea..so...to summarize it: a bunch of action sort of filled scenes mixed in with some "I am going to change the world for the better because all other women are shallow and can't see the wrongness that is done to them" and a sort of cliffhanger that doesn't have a massive impact on anyone really...

Not terrible but I am sticking with other Sci-fi novels because this fell out very flat for me...

#book photography #book review #bookaddict #booklr #books & libraries #buchblogger #buchrezension #booklover #bookworm

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heretherebedork · 2 years

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Hi, I’m gonna ask something annoying. I’m new to BL, and I love scifi/fantasy/paranormal stuff. Are there any BL that HAVE those elements, even lightly? That vampire gifset made me feel and want things…

Sadly... not really. There's a few on the paranormal front! But sci fi and fantasy... eh, if you go into historical and bromance, you can find a few from China but there's really not a lot in that field. I'm going to include a lot of Chinese censored romances on this list just to give you choices.

Sci-fi has... very, very little.

SciFi:

Customized Companion (lots of cheating, semi-scifi)

Love From Outta Space (just a little commercial but it's OffGun and one's an alien!)

Fantasy, if you want historical, you can go for a variety of bromances out of China that are not BL because BL is illegal in China but come as close as they can... And a few real BLs as well.

Fantasy:

Bite Fight (chinese BL, vampires, weird ending, on Gaga)

Guardian (Chinese censored romance, modern fantasy cop drama, one of my favorite things ever, tries to pretend to be scifi and claim they're aliens but it's just fantasy)

Mermaid's Jade (Chinese movie, weird ending, mermaid! sort of! But definitely fantasy)

The Untamed (very traditional Chinese historical fantasy stuff, either you love it or hate it, censored romance)

Word of Honor (Chinese censored romance, very barely censored, very enjoyable, very much a martial arts with a hint of fantasy)

The Yin-Yang Master (more fantasy than just martial arts, chinese bromance but edging towards censored romance)

Youths In the Breeze (a collection of censored romance from China, little miniseries with two of the three having fantastical elements)

Color Rush/Color Rush 2 (Korea does fantasy BL! A+)

My Esports Genius Brother (Chinese semi-censored fantasy that's similar to Color Rush.)

The Cupid Coach (... bad Thai BL pulp fantasy, probably nearly impossible to find)

The Four Vampires (Korean queer vampires)

Tinted With You (Timeslip Korean BL with reincarnation hinted at the end)

Supernatural/paranormal is definitely the most populated because there have been several ghost romances from different countries.

Until We Meet Again (reincarnation, warnings for suicide, very highly recommended)

He's Coming To Me (ghost romance, fantastic, happy ending, highly recommended)

Hidden Love (A ghost story comedy that teeters on awful but has an amazing backstory for the two ghosts that is worth the suffering)

Something in my Room (Ghost romance, painful ending, bury your gays warning)

Cherry Magic (mostly an office romance but Adachi does spend the majority of the series with mind-reading powers)

Ghost Boyfriend (ghost romance, Chinese, sad ending)

History 1: Obsessed (reincarnating in your own life, fairly high heat, lots of questionable choices but I love this one.)

History 1: My Hero (possessing a body, happy-for-the-gays ending, very mediocre)

Sweet Curse (Korean BL, ghosts summoning/haunting? Strongberry!)

Y-Destiny (Just a few episodes, one with a ghost and one with a timeslip)

He She It (mostly horror? ghosts and haunting, unhappy ending)

Dear Doctor I'm Coming For Soul (currently airing romance between a doctor and a soul reaper that he can see)

Cupid's Last Wish (body switch, finished airing in Thailand but currently airing internationally)

@absolutebl has a much better organized list with more detail than this somewhere as well! Theirs also doesn't have bromances.

#bl drama #bl series #bl recs #thai drama #thai series #did my best!

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deltaengineering · 2 years

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Winter Anime 2022: Cloverworked

I was maybe not as selective as I should have been this past season.

The Orbital Children

Orbital Children was a disappointment in all aspects, and I didn't even expect much given that I think that Dennou Coil is pretty mediocre. Everything makes sense though, since the good parts of Dennou Coil were the one-off filler stories in the middle, not the main story. Orbital Children is a miniseries, so it's all main story, baby, and the main story stinks. The long and short of it that just like Dennou Coil, this is an arch-boomer waxing poetic about how children totally "get" technology while he doesn't get it himself, perfectly encapsulated by every tech problem being solved by hitting the "hack" button. This time we're talking about AI, which is a pretty well explored topic in scifi nowadays, and Iso has precisely nothing to add apart from some irritatingly vague metaphysics. But that's only the main theme, the show is also shockingly bad at suspense and character, which is sort of bad for a character drama based on a failing space station. In fact it's so bad at those that it (probably unintentionally) comes close to being a biting technology satire, but it never commits to that and by the end it just wants to be deep af about AI anyway. And finally, it doesn't even look all that good, at least for something advertised as coming from an animation auteur. Really the best I can say about it is that it has some expressive faces, and that ain't much, champ. 3/10

Tokyo 24th Ward

Speaking of things that think they're saying something, here's the show that saw the trolley problem meme and decided to base its entire social commentary on that like it's an Uchikoshi game. This eventually ends up with the glorious revelation that given the choice between an authoritarian surveillance state and total anarchy, we should try democracy (without further commentary, as if that's an epic mic drop). As you may be able to tell, it's not as smart as it thinks, but it's better than Orbital Children anyway because it's sort of adorable in its ineptitude, like a ten year old that's proud they figured it all out by themselves. To be honest though, I was hoping for a more amusing twist than "brains in jars", but in hindsight that would be just expecting too much. There's also some mediocre action, I guess. Chuckles were had, but this show is bad by any standard. 4/10

My Dress-Up Darling

So here's a fairly controversial one. I do have to admit that I can see this show's appeal, in the abstract - plenty of people seem to like unfunny romantic comedies with annoying main characters. But first, let's talk about the cosplay, because that's ostensibly the selling point. There's a whole lot of uninteresting cosplay detail talk and not a lot (none, until they introduce Juju) of talk about why cosplay is a thing. This seems to check out for something that's aimed at people who are super into it to begin with, but since the shallow obvious thought about cosplay is "it's just thots in skimpy outfits", I was ready to get schooled. Well, the show's retort to that is "yeah totally, but if you have a very specific skillset said thots will line up to form a harem for you", which I'll just have to accept coming from the experts. In any case it's less of a theme and more of something that's just there to provide a framework for exposition and our leads getting together. So, about those leads. Gojo starts out as an annoying sadboi and very slowly gets a little better, while Marin starts out fun but turns into a migraine once she develops a crush. It's not funny and only very occasionally romantic, a death sentence for any romantic comedy. 4/10

Vanitas no Karte Part 2

Remember when I said that Vanitas is worst when it tries to go on these fighting shounen-esque arcs and just turns into a worse version of Fire Force? Well, as of S2 that's all it really does, and it's fucking terrible. The first arc starts promising but then turns into a drama about characters nobody cares about, while the second arc is close to unwatchable because it has one of the most annoying villains I've ever seen in anything, while everyone else is sad/mad and shouts a lot. The random comedy is, of course, more misplaced than ever in the midst of all this epic drama/tragedy/whatnot. To be fair, there's still trace amounts of sexy Jeannecute etc. left, but that doesn't make up for the other 95% of the show being a slog to sit through. It seems Vanitas has decided on a direction, and so we will have to part ways at this point. 4/10

Magia Record S3

First off, this isn't really an S3, it's very obviously just the rest of S2. Which makes forming an opinion pretty easy, because it's just more of the same, which is to say, pretty bad. The first episode of "S3" is actually the best, since it explains a lot of stuff about the story that was sorely missing, but the rest is just the same overblown and undercooked narrative about characters I can barely remember the names of 3 years in. The flashes of brilliant animation are now completely absent, so it's all a wash of substandard Madoka-like things. Could be worse, but not by much. 4/10

Fantasy Bishoujo Juniku Ojisan to

This is a show that I only watched because I couldn't believe how little I hated it, given that it's basically a potpourri of everything I hate in anime ca. 2022 - isekai, video game references, reactionface manzai and so on. And I have to report that all of that stays a factor all the way through, and I spent a sizeable part of the show cringing. So, definitely not good. However, Fantasy Bishoujo has an unexpected asset, which is the chemistry between its two leads. It's honestly great, and cute, and occasionally even funny, and of course a big part of the show. I guess having a better pedigree than "some loser's manifesto on Narou" will do that. A begrudging NOT BAD/10

Slow Loop

Guess what, Connect made a Kiraralike about fishing. These shows are rarely ever truly bad (even if this season's RPG Fudousan is trying very hard to provide a counterexample), and Slow Loop is definitely... competent. Cute, a little funny, a little gay, relaxing, etc, all the safe and easy things a show like this could do. It's just also nothing special or rare at all, and while it doesn't do a lot of things wrong, what it does do wrong is the tedious fishing tutorials it drops frequently. Diary of Our Days at the Breakwater already was little above average and it's a better show than this, but Slow Loop is still okay. Ish. 5/10

Lupin III: Part 6 Part 2

Surprise, Part 6 Part 2 isn't much different from Part 6 Part 1 (though it indeed doesn't have anything to do with it narratively). It also has a mediocre main story and filler episodes that range from really bad to pretty good, even though it's missing the fantastic Oshii episodes. Overall it's maybe a little better, but not by so much it makes a difference. And while the main story is not strictly worse, the fact that it promises something major and then ends up going "lol no, j/k" is more of a bummer (especially since it's almost the same thing that The Woman Called Fujiko Mine pulled and I didn't like it back then either). All in all, Part 6 gets by on Lupin's franchise tentpoles guaranteeing at least some level of entertainment, but it's nowhere near as good as Part 5. 6/10

BanG Dream! Garupa☆Pico Fever!

It's Pico, and Pico is good. I have to say that I'm feeling it less nowadays because it seems to have run out of the truly off-the-wall ideas and is trending towards the more conventional, and it's also starting to recycle some episode concepts. But it's still a fine use of 3 minutes per week. 6/10

Sabikui Bisco

Sabikui Bisco has a lot of things going for it that elevate it above the unwashed shounen masses: Fun characters, a kickass visual design, some cool action, a great OP, and a delightful Kenjiro Tsuda villain performance. So why is it hanging around just slightly above the middle of the pack? Well, for starters the pacing is sluggish and occasionally interminable, no doubt an artifact of its light novel source material. Also, the writing is functional at best and likes to pull non-starters like trying to convince me that the main character dies just before the finale, which was so unlikely to stick that they might as well not have bothered at all. But overall, Sabikui Bisco is a show with quite a few ups, some notable downs and a whole lot of dead air in between. 6/10

Kaijin Kaihatsu-bu no Kuroitsu-san

So here's something you don't see every day: A comedy that's actually funny most of the time. Now, there are two angles of attack to this show's humor: It's both a tokusatsu riff and an office comedy. I don't really care much for the former, but it's clear that Kuroitsu has much love for goofy spandex nonsense with fun characters, and it's kinda infectious. The real good stuff is the jokes about working in a villainous corporate environment though. I laughed, what more do you want? That said, it does have a few off episodes, and is also painfully cheap, so it's more "c-tier show punching above its weight" than a true highlight. But that's totally fine. 6/10

Ousama Ranking

So I already let it slip at the midway point that I'm feeling Ousama Ranking, and that hasn't changed... fundamentally. Right off the bat it's really solid, featuring excellent looks backed up with a thoughful exploration of fairy tale morals. You do need to get used to how this show rolls, since the "front" story quickly becomes less important and mainly just a delivery vehicle for character backstories. It does have a few pacing problems because it spends a lot of time just manouvering characters into position where they can deliver their tragic past payload, and a tendency to oversell emotional moments wildly, and Bojji is a relatively uninteresting character compared to everyone else, but those are not major problems as long as it keeps delivering... right? Well, that's where we're at at about halfway through the second half, when what I'll charitably call the "standing around in a courtyard arc" starts and all the previous issues come to the foreground to such a massive degree that it's very nearly the show's undoing. Because once every character is in the perfect position for maximum backstory density, the show just stops dead in its tracks and becomes tragic flashback central to an obnoxious degree, only punctuated by characters doing the fighting shounen "react and explain" thing. And I have to mention that all of this is so tedious that it even completely lets the air out of what is likely the best looking fight scene you're going to see this year. It's not great, to put it mildly, and after that is just a quick wrapup that's better, but pretty insubstantial.

And there is another thing: I would not usually drill down the morals of an adventure anime, but Ousama Ranking is a deeply moralistic show and extremely upfront about it too, so I can't ignore that towards the end the show pulls a few fast ones on that front. You really should not write a story about how everyone is more complicated than you expect and then make your inciting incident a whole country of people who are just all 100% dicks. Or let Bojji be the naturally correct arbiter of tough decisions just by protagonist fiat. A lot of this is so obvious, and so far below the writing level elsewhere, that I would assume that there's more to this than we can see right now. But none of that is in the anime, so I can't let it just slide, even if it's such a small aspect it doesn't impact the quality of the show much.

So yeah, still a good show, but that's mostly based on the first half. I would definitely watch more of it, but I'd also dearly hope that it doesn't nosedive at a critical juncture again. 7/10

Ryman's Club

Ryman's Club isn't quite done yet, but I doubt my opinion on it is going to change much and it's definitely a show that I don't want to let fall under the table. It's pretty funny — I wasn't looking for another sports anime, but was drawn in by the goofy absurdity of the setting (note that I am not knowledgeable enough about Japanese corporate culture to say whether "ultra intense company badminton team" is fictional absurdity or IRL absurdity, but it's absurd either way). Then it became apparent that the whole corporate aspect of it is more than a mere gimmick and that it was worth watching just for Mikoto's quest to bring spring onion soda to the market. But then that plot ended and we were just left with a pretty generic sports anime... except Ryman's Club is actually exceptionally good at being a generic sports anime. By that I mean that while the writing isn't anything special and consists mostly of well-worn sports story building blocks you've seen before, this show is expertly directed and manages to make Badminton matches really exciting. Not to mention that even when in full sports mode, there's still the benefit that the characters are at least a little bit more mature than your usual highschoolers. Yeah, this is really solid stuff, actually. I'd recommend it. Tentative 7/10, and on the higher end of that.

Akebi-chan no Sailor-fuku

So apologies to hypothetical readers who are here to watch me nitpick popular anime, because Akebi-chan might just actually be perfect. It's not that this is the one that brings the original ideas, but what we have here is top tier execution of something that is often attempted. It's a fusion of coming-of-age-drama, slowburn healing anime and archetype comedy. I can vibe with any of these, but most of the examples I've seen have major flaws; I'll just mention that I think it's most similar to Euphonium S1, but lacks the silly overblown drama. In fact, Akebi-chan features what I'll call "microdrama", but it's executed so well that it makes a girl learning to play the guitar badly seem more profound than all the gigantic brouhahas of Euphonium combined. More strong points? The characters aren't complicated deep dives, but they're all unique in personality and looks without seeming cookie-cutter, including the OP heroine (this one could easily be described as "reverse manic pixie dream girl", but it's the "reverse" that makes the difference). The tone is very lighthearted without falling into the "ultimately not being about anything" trap that the likes of K-ON and Aria find themselves in.

What really pushes Akebi-chan to the next level though is not the concept, but the production. This show is all about the details (even the plot is frequently about that), and the level of production is high enough to actually show all the details. There isn't many shows where the way hair falls or how someone moves their hand really matters, but this is definitely one. This level of detail is incredibly important to how real the show feels and how it really does transport you to a carefree world of adolescence. It's delightful. By the way, this level of detail also means that you have to be comfortable with watching a bunch of middle schoolers really closely, but you can't really fault a show for being exceptionally good at what so many others attempt anyway. If that is a concern, I would suggest sticking to Toonami-approved shounen. 9/10

So. Perfect show, less than perfect score. Why? I still think a true 10 is reserved for things with a bit more impact than this one, but you should keep in mind that this is a show in a niche that I have stated, on record, to top out at an 8 – and this is a high 9 we're talking about here. Akebi delivers and then some and I think it's the new gold standard for not only one, but several genres.

#anime #review #winter2022 #the orbital children #tokyo 24th ward #my dress up darling #vanitas no karte #magia record #fantasy bishoujo juniku ojisan to #slow loop #lupin III #bang dream garupa pico #kaijin kaihatsubu no kuroitsu san #sabikui bisco #ousama ranking #ryman's club #akebi chan no sailor fuku

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carriagelamp · 2 years

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CarriageLamps Favourite Books From 2021

This is an incredibly late end-of-the-year book round up, but December ended up being Way Too Busy for me to get it finished and posted. And I figured I should probably get it done before, like... I started on my January book list, rip

This feels like an odd list, but lbr it was an odd year and my reading habits apparently reflected on it quite a bit. These books helped make it a little bit easier to get through.

I wrote more detailed descriptions about all of these through out the year, depending on which month I read them in, but here’s also some quick blurbs:

All Systems Red by Martha Wells

I read the whole Murderbot series this year and loved with with my entire heart and soul. A scifi story about a SecUnit who hacks its own governor module not so it can go on a murderous rampage and destroy humanity, but so it can do its job in the most mediocre way possible, watch space soap operas, and try to ignore the intense inbuilt anxiety.

Bear by Marian Engel

Horny Canadian literature that does, indeed, involve fucking a bear because when Marian Engel is given a challenge she doesn’t fucking pussy out. I started it as a joke, but hey guys? It actually won the Governor General’s Award for a reason. It’s actually a really solid piece of literature that gives you a lot of things to think about, I genuinely enjoyed it.

FRNCK by Olivier Bocquet and Brice Cossu

A phenomenal bande desinée series about an teenage boy who runs away from the orphanage he lives at, and ends up getting swept off to the prehistoric era where he has to contend with cavemen, hostile floral and fauna, cannibals, and a tragic lack of vowels. Beautifully drawn, hilariously funny, and frankly a crime that you can’t buy them in English. Book 4 was an amazing climax to the current arc and I’m happily reading the second arc now.

From the Holocaust to Hogan’s Heroes, the Autobiography of Robert Clary

I got deeply back into the show Hogan’s Heroes to help cope with pandemic stress and decided to buy a copy of Robert Clary’s autobiography that recounts his childhood, to his time in concentration camps during the Holocaust, to his career as an actor afterwards. Fantastic read, and I would totally recommend it to anyone who’s a fan of either Robert Clary specifically or WWII history in general.

The Game by Linsey Miller

I will devotedly read Linsey Miller’s books, even if I am very slow at getting to them and have been struggling to read over this pandemic. This novella was a change from her previous stories, and a fun one. Instead of fantasy and magic, The Game is about an annual grad game that the local grade twelve students participate in. It starts out as normal, before taking a shocking and deadly turn. Now the main character seems to be mysteriously wrapped up in it all and there’s no answers to what’s happening in sight.

MASH by Richard Hooker

Along with Hogan’s Heroes I got back into MASH as well, and decided I should read the novel for the first time. Can’t say the same for the sequel, but this book at least was hilariously funny and I can see how it spawned such a good show, even if they’re quite different in characters and tone. For those unfamiliar, MASH is about a doctor named Hawkeye Pierce who was conscripted against his will into a M*A*S*H unit during the Korean war, and all the crazy things he and his fellow conscripts do to stay sane amid the horror of war. It’s crude, but ultimately too fun not to enjoy.

Minecraft: The Island by Max Brooks

I started this as a joke but somehow it was actually really good. And I say this as someone with an almost negative interest in Minecraft. It’s about a character who wakes up on a deserted island, with no memory of who they are or how they got there, and has to learn from the ground up what to do to survive. And since it’s written by Max Brooks, an author who writes legit zombie survival novels, it takes the entire premise way more seriously than most would. Imagine how horrific it would be to wake up with no idea how your new body works, what the physics or limitations of this world are, or what these things trying to kill you are. It’s basically a Minecraft isekai but taken serious. Shockingly good, would recommend honestly.

Sweep: The Story of a Girl and her Monster by Jonathan Auxier

A magical realism book set in Victorian England, about a chimney sweeper who is just trying to survive until she finds herself caught in a chimney fire… and is saved by the strangest of creatures.

The Southern Book Club’s Guide to Slaying Vampires by Grady Hendrix

The author really describes it best:

“Because vampires are the original serial killers, stripped of everything that makes us human — they have no friends, no family, no roots, no children. All they have is hunger. They eat and eat but they’re never full. With this book, I wanted to pit a man freed from all responsibilities but his appetites against women whose lives are shaped by their endless responsibilities. I wanted to pit Dracula against my mom. “As you’ll see, it’s not a fair fight.”

A very interesting novel, with lots of delicious tension.

Hunger Pangs: True Love Bites by Joy Demorra

A book that has a little bit of everything. A disabled werewolf, a very political vampire with serious anxiety, and a mysterious woman investigating the death of ancient, magical trees. I’m not sure I can describe it in a way that does it justice -- it’s fast-paced, full of sincerity and heart, and bounces between a hilarious queer romance and a relentless, amusing social satire. One of my absolute favourite novels from this year and I can’t wait for the sequel.

Upright Women Wanted by Sarah Gailey

After reading River of Teeth I desperately wanted more Weird Western Vibes, and to my delight discovered that Sarah Gailey herself has written more Weird Western Novels. This novella is about a dystopian regressive future with a wild west flavour. It follows one young woman who, horrified by her “morally wrong” and illegal love for women, decides to run away and join the travelling librarians, a group of people who are supposed to be some of the most morally upright women you can find. Who else could help her but them? It involves a lot of queer characters, gun slinging, and humour.

wishtree by Katherine Applegate

The story of a much beloved neighbourhood tree who is the home to all sorts of animals. He loves all his animal friends and watches over the neighbourhood — until one day a slur is graffitied over him and now there’s talk of simply cutting him down… it’s an incredibly touching that looks at how one life can touch so many others, and what it means to be a community.

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cisthoughtcrime · 4 years

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just watched the latest Westworld episode (s3e5) and want to braindump some thoughts about this season as I continue to procrastinate, so spoilers under the divide. if any of y’all watch westworld, would be interested to hear your thoughts too.

ok gonna try to keep this short and not overcritical but probably gonna fail on both counts.

I’m still definitely enjoying watching it and I’m likely gonna keep going until it ends, but it doesn’t feel like it’s the same show anymore so much as a spin-off. At first i thought it was just the fact that so little of it is taking place inside the park and the cast has been decimated, but this episode made me realise that s3 has been so unoriginal compared to the original premise. (again: still enjoying it, still watching on it, not shitting on it for the sake of a superiority trip. There are a lot of derivative shows I really enjoy but Westworld isn’t usually one of them).

the original premise’s underlying subject was subtle and existential and imho was very good about laying out the ingredients for the viewer to draw their own conclusions about what the show was trying to say (from the big philosophical questions like “what is humanity/consciousness/free will anyway?” to the implicit societal critiques like “morality is performative and when no one’s looking humans act different”).

I think what’s bugging me about s3 is that we finally broke out of westworld and we’re in a futurescape i’ve seen a thousand times before in scifi.

The downtrodden ‘different’ (white male) outcast disillusioned with The System and omnipresent surveillance who meets the sexy motorcycle-wearing black-leather-clad badass woman who saves him from his mediocrity and validates his disillusionment and recruits him to help dismantle the system and free the sheeple? Check.

The reclusive European gazillionaire who owns an island, has a seemingly-self-contained tragic backstory that will no doubt have one or two vestigial elements that come into play at pertinent times to blindside the audience and/or main character, and espouses his dream of a utopia derived from his trauma but that isn’t really a utopia? Check.

Everything is automated but people are still empty inside so everything the rich do to poke their ennui with a stick is the same ol’ combination of colourful hypersexualisation/orgies/prostitutes, sadism, and synthetically-made drugs that do whatever tf the writers think will play best visually while brushing off the chemistry of it all with whatever the newest version of ‘flux capacitor’ is? Check.

That’s not to say these tropes are all necessarily scorched earth. I mean, worked for The Matrix and Altered Carbon and whatever. I’m gonna try to wrap this up by synthesising what it is that actually bugs me about this in Westworld S3 specifically:

i said earlier that previously Westworld was good about talking around the core concepts and plot, leaving us to infer the patterns and parallels (which tbh is kinda what i credited for the show’s popularity, ie the fact that there was so much to discuss and so many connections for the audience to make in such a creative world of philosophical and moral questions that ofc people would latch onto it and hypothesise wildly). But eg in this episode, when Dolores sends everyone their profiles, the human-host parallels spoke for themselves and seeing people’s reactions in the streets reinforced so much (base human nature, free will, the validity of the hosts’ emotional reactions, flawed attempts to standardise reality at the expense of individuality) but Bernard softballs it in with “they’re breaking their loops,” which hamhandedly shoves the “ooooooo humans have been the automated drones all along, that’s wack man” down our throats as if that hadn’t been a staple of speculative fiction since before Aldous Huxley and as if it weren’t the sort of blatantly fucking obvious thing you or the person watching with you would gasp aloud after a twist or reveal. Not saying I disagree with the criticism of complacent routine, it’s just... we get it already and we got it since whatever grade school essay we had to write on Orwell or The Giver, no? There’s also the “human over-reliance on tech” critique which has been there since S1, but until now it was kinda baked into the background of the main satirisation of hubris in the face of mortality and self-knowledge; now ‘human over-reliance on tech” is the exact weakness that the show keeps overexplaining has opened the door to human extinction.

sidenote: twice so far they’ve alluded to the human ‘real world’ being a simulation (Maeve in War World and Liam’s stoned friend on that rooftop bar), so if this season’s big twist is that the real world is just one of the ziptillion simulations run by the Serac’s machine I might just stop watching and pretend it ended after s1, esp if part of the twist is that Dolores or Maeve somehow merge themselves into the fabric of the simulation/become one with it. don’t even get me started on if serac is a host bc what a cop-out that would be.

I’m setting aside some of my other issues with the show to focus on how weirdly narrowed/streamlined/hemmed-in this season has been. i really want to like caleb but ffs his whole arc so far is simultaneously far too recognisable and far too self-insert-gratifying when the only new thing added to his stock character is the fact that Aaron Paul is playing him now instead of Sam Worthington or Jake Gyllenhall or whichever from the parade of recognisable-action-actors who are Misunderstood and Pouty until sexy miss unreadable fulfills his call-to-adventure fantasy complete with kiss/sex either during or immediately after a big fight scene.

Now that the rich intriguing world we started in has been largely explained and almost entirely killed off, we’re left with loyalty to a few fave characters in this (admittedly aesthetically pleasing and coherent, but still) standard vision of the future, where we already know Dolores’s story and motives and are kinda waiting for Caleb to catch up, and the only questions left really are kinda linear by Westworld standards (what’s Dolores’s plan, what’s gonna happen to each of the characters, like basic unanswered questions in any plot), and they keep recycling the same plot points (’oh they’re a host too?’ or ‘this host can’t trust their own thoughts/memories/actions because they’ve been damaged or tampered with’ but now kinda cheapened bc the setting is different and no one in the show expects them to be hosts but everyone in the audience does).

TLDR

There is nothing special or specific about this future-world that connects it to Westworld. A futuristic theme park of hyperrealistic humanoid AIs designed to facilitate the consequence-free catharsis of the stunted rich elite could be transplanted into any technologically-advanced future where extreme wealth-disparity and omni-surveillance are still problems, but that describes basically every scifi show that isn’t about space or apocalypse. But that’s part of what made the park such a strong concept, and also why i expected/wanted them to have come up with a more original outside world. If the park can fit anywhere, why did they choose such an uninspired world? It just feels like these creative interesting characters left this creative interesting world, took a wrong turn at Albequerque, and ended up in an extra-preachy Black Mirror fan script.

and again: i don’t hate this season, i’m still watching and enjoying, but i’m really disappointed by the reveal of this world.

#westworld #season 3 spoilers

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clockworkouroboros · 4 years

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finished the VNA Shadowmind today, and my ultimate impression isn’t that positive. 4.5/10. More thoughts under the cut.

First off, Shadowmind didn’t strive so much for greatness as it strove for mediocrity. Everything was solidly mediocre. Not awful, but far from great. I wasn’t expecting a whole lot from Christopher Bulis, who I knew from his solidly mediocre Eighth Doctor novel Vanderdeken’s Children, and Shadowmind lived up to those expectations. I’d say the coolest thing about the book is that Bulis also did the cover artwork.

I’d say one of his largest failings was in the size of his cast. Aside from the Doctor, Ace, and Benny, there were at least twenty other characters who popped in and out of the story as they were needed. I read this book over the course of a week––I didn’t have time to forget who half these characters were––and yet I forgot who half these characters were. There were just so many of them, and I failed to care about most of them. There’s a part of the book where several of these characters die, and instead of feeling sad, I thought, “Oh, fewer people to keep track of.”

The book is wannabe scifi: there’s lots of talk about “hyperspace” and “hypergems” and “bioengineered duplicates” but the actual science is, uh, a little weak. (Telepathy can be gained by cutting a hole in someone’s head and sticking a special kind of rock in the middle of their brain, did you know that?)

It also had a gratuitous nude scene for Ace, so check that one off the VNA bingo! Actually, it had multiple gratuitous nude scenes for her, so we know who had a crush on her when he watched the show.

All things considered, though, it really isn’t as bad as some VNAs I’ve read. I want to hate it, but I just can’t be bothered to care that much one way or another about it. It’s just sort of there. I feel like it could have been an interesting story in better hands? Or maybe that’s just wishful thinking.

#doctor who eu #vnas #seventh doctor #ace mcshane #bernice summerfield #emily reads the vnas

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citialiin · 4 years

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technically i have a “lore”/headcanon page but i dont think anyone reads it. which is fine. i am mostly incoherent. here are some assorted facts i typed at 2 AM when i did not want to do my homework.

☆ z doesn’t have the proper digestive enzymes/bacteria to consume meat + animal products, so he’ll puke if you feed him yogurt. he is a vegan. ☆ z’s blood is copper-based and therefore green when exposed to air. when deoxygenized, his blood is red, and this is why his lips/tongue/eye veins don’t look green. some parts of his body have veins that carry oxygen-rich blood close to the surface of the skin, and those parts (like the area over his nose and cheeks) seem twinged with green. ☆ z’s favorite singer is ros sereysothea. z hates the beatles mostly out of jealousy. ☆ to catch up on earth culture/history, z reads a lot. his favorite is speculative scifi (because humans have weird ideas about what space/the future should be like) and any kind of historical fiction (because he thinks earth history is interesting). he got the idea to name his band “spiders from mars” after HG wells books. ☆ z is agender and uses he/him or they/them. his race isn’t sexually dimorphic so gender doesn’t make much sense to him. he lets humans call him a “man” and refer to him with male titles because he doesn’t care enough to think about it for more than 2 seconds. but he is not a man. ☆ z can play the piano, the bass and the guitar. he’s actually pretty mediocre at all of them because he prefers to sing. ☆ z’s favorite flowers are orchids because they remind him of himself. ☆ his favorite food is a toasted slice of sweet potato with avocado and lemon juice. if he feels crazy he’ll put honey or chili flakes on it. despite this being his favorite food, he never makes it because it requires effort and he is lazy. ☆ he thinks thomas looks like mr spock and mr spock makes him feel weak in the knees. ☆ if you read this far you must really like ziggy.

#I dont know how to use photoshop so i cant make cool banners that say like cItIAlIiInfnN lOr e P oS T but i can make teeny tiny pixels.#ooc #KEEP YOUR 'LECTRIC EYE ON ME ; queue

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miseriathome · 4 years

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29, 45, 49 for the weird asks

weird asks that say a lot

29. best way to bond with you?

Give me snacks/be chill about me eating snacks and let me yell about things and tell me how smart and/or right I am. Legit, I think that’s how I came to like the majority of the people I liked in high school and college. But in terms of strengthening a bond, go on adventures. I define adventures as going out, spending an amount of dollars, and finishing slightly more satisfied than you were before.

45. which genre: sci-fi, fantasy or superhero?

Scifi. I look a scifi class in high school and had a blast with that, although I kind of cheated by already being very familiar with several of the texts. My #1 favorite book is 1984. If anybody has a link to where I can rewatch Gattaca, send it my way!

I’ve never particularly liked fantasy, and I’ve only ever gotten into superheroes because of/within the MCU, so I don’t feel a draw to them otherwise.

49. what saying or quote do you live by?

“People will always hurt you, but it’s up to you to decide who’s worth suffering for,” maybe. That was my senior quote in my high school yearbook which I attribute to a really dear friend,but he paraphrased it from Bob Marley. It’s certainly true. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

I used to attempt to live by “sustained mediocrity” as a strategic survival mode of operation. I reevaluated as life circumstances got better and it became “you can survive this” (@ me). Right now it’s probably a little more like “you’ll figure it out.”

I also find myself thinking “you’re better than this” at myself a lot, and “do better” at others. I try not to express it too much because it’s kind of uncharitable by nature, but I guess it reflects… a lot of presumptions I have.

#qzai #ask #about me

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commanderlexaofthegrounders · 5 years

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Eliza Taylor is facing one of her biggest acting challenges to date this season, and has been “shocked” by the direction of Clarke’s journey: “Clarke definitely changes a lot, so I’m kind of freaking out. But it’s gonna be really cool for people to watch.” What is your guess?

As most ppl have answered already it could be a possible cloning sl, maybe a la stepford wives or another alternate reality. Unless he tries the time travel trope which is also something that has been circulating in recent shows, making her deal with another timeless version of herself idk.

Like Jasshole needs to take from all the scifi shows/movies that have been good and turn it into nonsense in his show. Because the writing is just so bad, adding the crappy VFX and you end up with a half-assed story with mediocre acting in a flop of a network.

#anon #ask me

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theredpandayt-blog · 5 years

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Why all the hype? 🤷‍♂️Bird Box Netflix Review - No Spoilers

Each year I eagerly await the Doctor Who Christmas Special. So, when I found out that this year, we weren’t going to be getting one, it’s safe to say I was more than a little bit annoyed.

So, on Christmas day, after way too much food, I took to Netflix to find a replacement to watch instead. Eventually, after endless scrolling, what I settled on not only disappointed me but annoyed me so much that I felt like this review was the only way to fully get over it.

“Bird Box” - the latest original offering from Netflix – is boring, lifeless and slow. Why you ask … well that’s what we’re going to be talking about today.

Released on the 21st of December, Birdbox tells the story of Malorie (played by Sandra Bullock) as she tries to survive in a post-apocalyptic world where millions of people suddenly decided to commit suicide after seeing some sort of entity that compelled them to do so. Trapped in a house, Malorie and some others try to piece together what actually happened and how they might be able to survive in the new world.

It’s a pretty grim premise - one which looked to be both creepy and promising, especially given all of the social media hype. And to be quite honest, the trailer was really good – so I was pretty excited to say the least, and boy was I wrong to be!

Bird Box has all the trappings of a mediocre, uninspired cash grab and yet still people couldn’t get enough of it – colour me confused for sure. watching “Bird Box”, I couldn’t help but feel like it was retracing the steps of older, more interesting, and accomplished films.

I saw flashes of Steven Kings “The Mist” – a totally underrated film that I recommend to everyone as essential viewing. If you can find the Black and White Director’s Cut of the film, then watch that – it’s exceptionally better than the original theatrical release and really helps that gut punch ending make an impact.

I also saw elements of both 28 Days Later and, of course, “A Quiet Place” – which in my opinion was 2018s most captivating horror film. Although, the Bird Box novel was released in 2014, I couldn’t help but feel like I’d seen it before and that’s because I had. Although it didn’t follow A Quiet Place beat for beat, the similarities in both the concept and the journey the central characters go on were too obvious to ignore. Had Birdbox come out before A Quiet Place, I believe I’d be saying the same thing about that.

Side note, the novel is great. You should 100% have a read. SciFi now described it as “Nail-biting” – and I believe that’s a pretty accurate description.

It’s just a pity the film can’t be given such high praise.

Now, don’t get me wrong, there must have been a lot of talented people in-front of and behind the camera - christ, Sarah Paulson is in this briefly - but I can’t help but shake the feeling of disappointment I got after the credits began to roll.

There are some (but not many) things about Bird Box, that actually impressed me that I’d be remise not to mention. The ensemble cast they managed to pull together for this was quite impressive and I genuinely had fun trying to work out who was going to do what.

Bullock, unsurprisingly, puts on a great performance and you really believe the journey her character is going on. Malorie isn’t the most likeable character but when a change in her happens, it actually feels earned, but it’s got absolutely nothing to do with any of the rest of the film. It’s all Bullock and she deserves praise for that. In fact, I’d go so far as to say the filmmakers completely missed the point of the novel while Bullock managed to find it.

Clearly, the source material was strong. So, what the hell went wrong I hear you ask? One word – Hollywood.

As per usual, the core concept of the Bird Box novel was all that the film makers could heave onto the metaphorical big-screen. Perhaps the constraints of time made an impact, in fact that’s probably exactly what happened. But in a world where we get 8 hours films like Stranger Things 1 & 2, there really isn’t a for a half-baked upload on Netflix anymore.

Now here’s for the really confusing part…wasn’t this supposed to be one of the scariest movies of the year? That’s what everyone was saying for sure, but not one of the apparent “scares” in this so-called horror film actually made me jump. I wasn’t scared, and I wasn’t even made to feel uncomfortable – which is surely the point of a film like this? In fact, I felt no emotion at all watching this.

From what I’ve been reading, I’m not the only one to have this complaint. I’d say this was more of a study of how a character like Malorie would react in this world, than a scary film. So, to those calling it that – stop. It’s not. The only horrific thing about this film is that so many of us across the world spent our Christmas evenings watching it.

Which brings me on to my last point … How has this done so well? Really? I’m confused. Apparently, 45 Million Netflix accounts watched at least 70% of Bird Box in its first couple days which is bonkers considering its quality.

Netflix has released so many great films which I guarantee you haven’t had anywhere near that amount of people see them in their recommended section, never mind actually watch them. I’m thinking Okja, Roma and yes (even with its problems) Bright.

The success of Bird Box is undeniable, and it most likely means that we’ll have a sequel in our Netflix queues in no time – let’s just hope that whatever comes next addresses the sameness and innovates within the genre a little bit.

Now before I sign off, I just want to clarify that Bird Box is not bad in the same way that say, an Adam Sandler movie is. It’s just quite forgettable, so much so that I had to look up Wikipedia to remind me of the plot so that I could review it.

Bird Box brought nothing new to the table and bored the living daylight out me.

It’s a been there, done that kind of situation and believe me, it’s been done better.

Like I mentioned before, if it had come out, maybe 4 or 5 years ago I might be saying something completely different.

So, I can’t possibly recommend that you watch this and instead I recommend you watch all the films I mentioned before – those were the real innovators and deserved 100x more hype than this mess managed to get.

youtube

#Birdbox #film review #movie review #youtube review #bird box #netflix

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deltaengineering · 5 years

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Winter Anime 2019 Part 4: That’s all, folks.

Over already? This is a pretty thin season with not a lot of shows, so it’s not that surprising that there’s not many good ones either. Still, a weak showing. Oh well, let’s get it over with. There were a few decent ones in the last batch.

Circlet Princess

What: Dimwitted schoolgirl is good at some vaguely defined virtual fighting sport, changes school based on it, finds out relevant club has been abolished. Forecast says: 5 member plot incoming.

❌ I think it’s already clear this show isn’t very ambitious, and not very well written either. A game adaptation at its laziest.

❌❌ Man, this girl is STUPID. What the hell.

❌ The rest of the cast are less stupid (which isn’t hard), but that just means they’re so forgettable they might as well not exist.

❌❌ It looks cheap, and by that I mean really really cheap. The character design is ISO standard anime and it’s mostly on model, but that’s as good as it gets. The animation just sucks. That’s a death sentence for an action/sports show with terrible characters.

Bermuda Triangle - Colorful Pastrale

What: Japanese Spongebob, as in cute mermaids. Doing things optional.

❌ To make this quick, this is almost exactly Pastel Memories, only every problem is just a little less extreme. It has fewer characters, it’s looking slightly better, there’s a tiny bit more going on, the setting is mildly more interesting. That still means it is:

❌❌ 1. A boring mess in which a handful of samey girls do nothing of much interest in a location that should be unique, but isn’t.

❌❌ 2. Conspicuously cheap. It even has the same sightline problems.

❌❌ 3. Featuring a character model sheet that is “off” even under the best circumstances. This time due to the very offputting decision to give everyone blobby triangular irises.

❌❌ Unlike Pastel Memories (which was an ad for a mobile game) this is an anime original, so it really has no excuse being this lame.

♎ I find it amusing that Pastel Palettes are providing the OP for an anime, and it’s not the one currently airing that they’re actually characters in.

Endro~!

What: Kiraralike comedy thing in a generic JRPG setting.

♎ Namori character designs, so it’s like Spyce in that it just seems like the Yuru Yuri cast cosplaying a genre. But hey, Namori character designs do look good.

❌ I’m not as done with generic JRPG settings as with generic isekai settings, but it’s still a real problem since the former is now a subset of the latter. Mildly making fun of it does not improve things much either.

✅ The tone is cutesy and pleasant. I find this much preferable to something like Mahoujin Guru Guru, which is pretty much the same thing but with abrasive, high-intensity slapstick instead.

✅ It’s backing that up with generally high-quality, agreeable pastel looks.

❌ Not being annoying is a start, but beyond that this seems very middle of the road and predictable. I don’t get much out of the genre “parody” and simply being cute is still not an unique selling point in anime.

Grimms Notes The Animation

What: Did someone say JRPG? This is a mobile one, vaguely based on fairy tales as the title implies.

✅ This universe runs on the idea that every NPC’s fate is controlled by a preset story they’re aware of. You could make a good story about that if you took it seriously. It even does that somewhat, but only to the degree that you’d expect from a throwaway sidequest in a moderately well-written JRPG.

❌ And the reason for that is that it has to make room for being a JRPG, of course. Read: It’s irritatingly mechanics- and combat-focused. Stuff like the characters changing form when in fights just seems overly complicated and adds nothing.

❌ Said combat looks competent, but not good enough to make up for detracting from what could have been an interesting setting. Merc Storia did this aspect far better (by usually not doing it at all).

❌ So it ends up being better than expected, but then that only amounts to a disappointment.

Kaguya-sama wa Kokurasetai / Kaguya-sama: Love Is War

What: Kaguya and Miyuki are in the student council of a prestigious school and HATE HATE HATE each other. Specifically, they hate the part where the other one won’t just finally admit their love.

✅ The joke here is that it’s operating on full intensity at all times, over the most simple matters. It’s pretty much Kaiji, only about dating - complete with hammy narrator. This is another one of those shows where I can’t say with certainty that it’s solid, but I had a blast during the first episode.

✅ Regarding Quintuplets, I made it clear that I love me some sparks in my romantic comedies. It doesn’t get much more explosive than this.

✅ The characters are comparable to Quints too: Smart scheming upstart vs. rich scheming ojou, with a simpleminded girl in the middle that ends up winning more often than not simply by not overdoing it.

✅ The visuals are just as over the top as the proceedings depicted. Occasionally a filter massacre, but mostly cool.

♎ The long-term viability of this show depend entirely on whether they can consistently come up with scenarios that work, which isn’t a given. Also, this is so intense it might become tiresome - I already felt some fatigue towards the end of the first episode. We’ll see, I guess.

Kakegurui ××

What: Some weirdos think they can crash the party at Hyakkaou with an intent to scare the daylights out of Yumeko and Midari, of all people. Let’s just say they were not as prepared as they thought.

✅ As you might have guessed by me watching the sequel, I liked Kakegurui. It has its problems, but if you’re down for some crazypants madness, this show delivers.

✅ This is one of the better episodes of it too, because it gets right into it and the game they play is dead simple. Kakegurui was never about smart moves or strong characters, so not having anything detract from our girls deriving the entirely wrong sort of pleasure from danger is a plus.

♎ Sadly, the OP is a step down (though still great) and the ED is simply an inferior, overcomplicated version of the magnificent original one. They seem to know this too, because they play the OP cut of Deal with the Devil in its entirety for a montage. The rest of the production is on par with the original though, so it’s fiiiine. Oh well.

❌ It got Netflix’d again and the subs situation is dire. Since this is one I actually like, I might have to wait for the official release.

Kouya no Kotobuki Hikoutai / The Magnificent Kotobuki

What: Piston-engined fighter plane pornography.

✅ This delivers where Girly Air Force failed: Close to zero exposition, the majority of the episode is just planes dogfighting with barely any talking either. And that part is executed really well. I think the plane startup sequence alone is as long as the total of Girly’s airtime.

✅ Guess what, it’s Tsutomu Mizushima, previously known for unbridled panzer (und girls) pornography, and boy can you tell. However, this cuts out a lot of GuP’s bullshit: A plane doesn’t have the cast of K-ON in it, it’s not over-the-top zany, and whatever this universe is, it can’t be as insipid as GuP’s. The classy milwank exists you guys, we found it.

✅✅ The music really helps here, sky pirates vs zeppelins just wouldn’t work without some classic swashbuckling orchestra background. Fat sound mixing on the dakka too. It’s great.

♎ Can’t really say much about the narrative because we kinda skipped that in this episode aside from the obvious, but Mizushima’s Shirobako collaborator Michiko Yokote is writing it, and that’s a good sign.

❌ Now we’re getting to the elephant in the room though: There’s no way the planes wouldn’t be CG in 2019, but the characters are CG too, and their animation is mediocre. Also, they did the KADO thing where they 2D-animated the side characters that aren’t important enough to model. This has the funny side effect that you can tell who’s going to die real soon by them looking better. It’s far from great, but probably a worthy tradeoff if the mechanical side is this extensive and also delivers.

✅ This is definitely not for everyone, since you have to have more than a casual appreciation for those magnificent girls in their flying machines. I do, though.

revisions

What: A chunk of Shibuya gets teleported to the dystopian future, local doomsday prepper gets handed a large robot because he’s special.

❌ A Goro Taniguchi joint being a poorly conceived scifi mess? Say it ain’t so! I especially dig the tryhard English jargon (mecha: “String Puppet”, monsters faction: “Revisions”, particular monster, I think?: “Civilian”, tacticool operetah: “Balancer”).

❌ Works very hard to characterize the main character, to the detriment of everyone else. A for effort, but you made an unlikeable asshole though.

❌ This is another full CG show, with the quality of the animation being curiously variable. Sometimes it’s well above average and sometimes it’s painful. There doesn’t seem to be much method to it.

✅ Tries to establish stakes by being mondo edgy and graphically murderizing some poor bystanders. It’s adorable.

❌ If you’re really jonesing for some mecha, you can watch all of this on Netflix right now. It’s not like you have any alte- wait, Egao no Daika has mecha too. Well there you go then. That’s a better show.

#anime #impressions #winter2019 #Bermuda Triangle #endro #grimms notes #kaguya-sama #circlet princess #kakegurui #koya no kotobuku hikoutai #revisions #The Magnificent Kotobuki

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