I have been crushing through the Legend of the Galactic Heroes 2018 remake, refreshing myself before I get to the seasons I haven’t seen.
So many things suck so much.
It rules.
2 Likes
USL Season has started so right this minute I’m settling down to watch El Paso Locomotive lose at home to Monterey Bay Union. I was watching Bundesliga until Dortmund started to fall apart, but I’ve been following the EPL more closely. Yes, I’m that guy who’s above 30 and whose television watching habits are almost exclusively sports.
2 Likes
Oh Dortmund started falling apart? Good to know once I fix some stuff to catch back up with the Bundesliga. I can focus more on Leverkusen.
2 Likes
This was like back in November that I kinda gave up, but if you’re following Leverkusen this is going to be a fun season for ya.
1 Like
I’ve popped in when I can and they’ve been doing great. Been a month and a half since I could catch a match and have been avoiding the standings. Hope they’ve maintained steam.
1 Like
i just watched the love is blind reunion and that was the messiest shit I’ve ever watched. perfection.
@robunny i can’t wait to hear your reaction
i’m saving it for after work today. i’m so excited for this absolute dumpster fire
1 Like
i’m halfway thru and my god, this shit is wild.
alright, i finished watching that shit. an absolute bloodbath, tbh. Like, they went after Jeramy and what’s her face which like, good. those two are a match made in hell. Will say, her post about like “it’s reality tv, it’s entertainment, we gave you so much entertainment” like she’s not fucking wrong LMAO for all that Nick and his wife talk about “oh, this is experiment, it’s about love”, no man, it’s a netflix show.
The stuff with Trevor was… I’m honestly lowkey speechless. very much a “we were all posting for you” moment but also it was palpable how uncomfortable he was when they read the texts. They raked that man over the coals. Would love to know why he agreed to show up.
Felt like they kinda softballed Kenny and Brittany. Like, they’re friends now! cool! What actually happened between him having the most ecstatic proposal and when they left the pods?? Still some like inexplicable shit.
Not to be that guy but god, AD is gorgeous. Putting her in that outfit was… phew…
And giving me a reason to dislike Jimmy again was great. Glad they did that for us.
2 Likes
(Dave) As a deaf person, I… honestly really can’t recommend either A Silent Voice or Sign of Affection. They were both really offputting to me in various ways but one thing they do both have in common is that they infantilize and objectify their deaf protagonists to the point they don’t have much agency or say in what is done to them for the sake of the plot. They’re both reminiscent of inspiration porn and it makes me sad that this is basically some of the VERY few representations we have in animation for deaf people. Dragon Prince isn’t much better either, even if they put Amaya in a role where she was a leader and made decisions for herself… it felt like tokenism and they used interpreters, not actual deaf people, to animate the ASL in the show.
I don’t want to join this thread saying only criticism about shows others may love - though I really wanted to point out how flawed that representation is. Unrelated to deaf representation, I’ve been watching and reading Delicious in Dungeon - it’s really cool and all life is treated with respect in it, but it’s also just… so realistic about the way the world works and how important food is to living and just so much depth in the worldbuilding.
(If anyone wants to see deaf characters and ASL animation by an actual deaf person, you might want to check out our Vimeo. We’re a deaf animator working hard to change the way deaf representation is in animation.)
6 Likes
Kenny is gay and they didn’t wanna out him on national TV is my theory
agree that nick and his wife were clowning. i’m glad i never gave you the trevor spoilers i bet that shit went even harder as a result lol. probably the greatest, most uncomfortable moment i’ve ever experienced in reality television.
jimmy a headass for sure
nice to see clay get a bit of a comeback. his monologue felt real as fuck i got very emotional watching it. i hope he’s able to get past all that shit, from one black dude to another
1 Like
As Frieren approaches the end of this arc, I just can’t stop thinking to myself, what was even the point? Not that it was a bad story, per se, but I can’t see how it fits in the overall story, or even in the tone of the show.
I’ve made the point before of how jarring it is for a series that has such a heavy emotional weight to suddenly have a tournament-like arc, but its more than that. The introduction of a dozen side-characters, the detour from the adventure because of a bureacracy, the Mage Association, it all feels like this is suddenly a completely different story, and I don’t like either options I’m visualizing; Either this was a massive one-off, and all those characters and lore will be left behind as Frieren goes back to her original goal and travel, or this will somehow have repercussions for the future and all these people will somehow influence the journey.
The capstone of the Mage Exam almost feels like a joke, or an apology. After 9 episodes (and I don’t know how many manga chapters), the final test is Serie, the head mage saying “Approved” or “Not Approved” to the candidates, ending the whole thing in less than 15 minutes. Hope none of those characters had hopes and dreams, and also that you didn’t get attached to their emotional stakes! Even the emotional plotting of the episode doesn’t hit as well. Its all - as it has been for 10 episodes - different ways to go “Wow, Fern/Frieren is such a badass!” which like. We get it. Yes, they are, that has been established long ago.
I hope that there is some payoff/explanation to why these exams are so demanding, to the point of killing some of the candidates, because it really doesn’t paint the Mage Association in a good light but it also doesn’t do a good job of criticizing it (so far the only manga that really made that point well to me has been One Punch Man, and that is baffling)
And not that episode count or length of story is directly relative to its quality, but even the amount of episodes for this is disappointing. You have Episodes 1 through 17 telling multiple short stories, spanning several decades on the first episode, and then a few years after that, building on Frieren but also on the Hero’s Party, the new generation (and also the even older one), what this world is like and what good Frieren did for it - even if she doesn’t fully realize - and the effect her party members did on her life. And then you have Episodes 18-27 (and probably 28 for the fallout) just on this wild “We gotta take the 1st Class Mage exam!” subplot over the course of a few days/weeks. Stark has become a tertiary character! He appeared in literally 2 episodes, and mostly for gags!
I genuinely can’t fathom what’s happening, if everything that happened before was either a bait, if they author wanted to stall for time, if this was all an experiment for the plot beats, or whatever the heck.
1 Like
This is basically why all us manga readers were tugging our collars while everyone was (rightfully, to be fair) praising Frieren in the first half of the anime. I get the vibe it was a classic “introduce a ton of new characters to see who the fans like, and then we have ammo to bring them back later just in case” kind of development.
Chart breaking down the number of manga chapters per arc and how long they took to come out in real life (I have blocked out the names of the arcs to avoid spoilers)
…and it just started another month-long hiatus at the start of what appears to be Another Somewhat-Lengthy Arc.
I think the Good Stuff from the beginning is still there as the series progresses, but it’s definitely taken a backseat to wizard battles and longer arcs that are there broadly to build up to wizard battles. Perhaps the fate of all manga that build up goodwill on episodic adventures is to spend it all on arcs that take up as long again as the parts we actually liked.
Yeaaaaaa I don’t think I’m picking the manga up again.
At least Dungeon Meshi is already done, even though I think it might flow better in the manga than it is on the anime (cooking scenes are okay in motion, but IMO it takes a lot of the momentum away from the flow of the episode)
1 Like
Watched the first episode of Blue Eye Samurai. It’s OK, but you can definitely tell this is written by folks whose knowledge of the feudal Japan era mostly comes from watching Kurosawa films rather than more complete examination of historical research. That said, most of the best moments in that first episode are the ones tied to commentary about the social status of women.
I haven’t seen any episodes in a while, but the only anime I’m consistently watching is the Brazilian dub of the 1st season of Knights of the Zodiac.
For Reality TV, I’m watching Love & Hip Hop. (Miami + Atlanta)
2 Likes
oooo i need to get back on L&HH that shit is FUN, any particularly good season i should jump into
I started on season 9 of ATL which was ok, but cut short by the pandemic.
If you haven’t seen it. season 7ATL is a fun one and Season 10 was hilarious cuz it was teh first time I was really exposed to Safaree and it made me go "oh, this man is a 12c year old. Your woman needs you to be there for her and you’re being a 12 year old.
I only recently started watching miami and that’s a higher level of messy but it has a more convoluted storyline imo.
1 Like
I’ve been rewatching the Boondocks and it pretty much 95% still clears. Masterpiece of television.
3 Likes
FR FR again, they came out of the gate with some incredible gags “I’m gonna go lie to a white man right now”
1 Like
Saw Jurassic Park in a theater for the first time, really won me over. I previously had a like, aesthetic aversion to it? idk what it was, just something about the costumes and the overcast daylight in the first third really did not gel with me. But leave it to the power of Going To The Movies to solve that.
Do have a couple nitpicks with the 4K remaster they showed, though. They should not have replaced the original Universal logo with the current CGI one, it’s just distracting and weird. Also, while most of the movie looked fantastic, every time they had a location title or any other compositing they cranked the DNR wheel like crazy and I genuinely don’t know why. I know the CGI is probably really low-res by modern standards, and maybe part of it is just baked in to how they did those shots to begin with. But like, it still doesn’t blend with the stuff from the negative, because that’s all razor-sharp and visibly grainy. At least throw some fake grain on top!
1 Like