Codicier

Phaedrus' Street Crew
 View Profile  See their activity

  • Content count

    1010

  • Joined

  • Last visited

Posts posted by Codicier

  1. Posted

    ok I'm exhausted and need something that isn't very taxing to watch

     

    help me idle thumbs anime thread, your my only hope!

     

    (lots of larger than life but likeable characters, with only 1-2 seasons to get through would be great)

  2. Posted

    I played a couple of games with a friends Cho'Gal the other night and had quite a bit of fun, though we sadly one were victorious once so i don't get my own  to play with yet :P I'm sort of dreading the moment someone first picks that guy in hero league on my team because he has so many hard counters (opposing team picks 2 characters with giant killer /gg), that said im equally looking forward to the moment the opposing team does it.

     

    I do really like the little touch they put in of abbreviating the two players names together though.

  3. Posted

    Turns out i totally misunderstood how old a character was because i instinctively assume the drinking age is the same abroad as it is I the uk (16).

    This week's perfect insider was a strange one particular because it had one of the longest English language conversations i remember in a anime. The cadence was very strange like some computer voice spelling word after word out with no flow between them.

    I also wonder if a Japanese audience would pick something else up from it that i didn't that my perception is so coloured by the rhythm it's spoken I'm missing out on tone.

  4. Posted

    I'm really surprised how different my runs have turned out.

     

    My first run was based around the traditional starting duo of Decker & Internationale and as deadpan say she in particular can really shape the strategy a team takes, with my entire hacking strategy being based of her scout to allow me to be incredibly efficient with the aoe hack datablast.

     

    My Second run has been utterly different, i started with Xu and NIka as my starting agents and a combination of seed and golem, which meant i was far more discriminating with my hacking but used virtually no power, instead most of my power usage shifted to shock traps and the tasers. I had 2 very early rescues snagging decker and shallam and picking up the Burst program, which changed my style of play even more because i now had a way of generating AP and power, but which required me to plan for the turns following its use. Finally i picked up a aug for shalem which means if he kills someone for 3 power it has no effect on the allarm.

     

    That last one in particular was huge, now if i cant babysit a downed guard they simply get killed!

     

    edit: i forgot to mention it but i actually prefer the way the missions play out in the 2nd half of the campaign (after what is i assume a dlc introduced event takes place), the new mission format forces me to break up my team far more often than i had to previously

  5. Posted

    I'm thinking of buying a big ass 2tb+ hdd to take over as the main storage drive for my pc since my current main drive is a fair few years old at this point(the old drive will morph into a temporary storage place only housing things i can afford to loose).  Any brand recommendations or tips about what makes a better large hdd?

     

    also is it worth considering a external drive? In terms of just having something that is separate from the rest of the PC (& so i assume less vulnerable to something like a psu breakdown/whatever)

     

    my case has a plethora of usb 3  ports & a vsata so i would hope that it would be possible to get fairly decent data speed

     

    I could either just get a new external drive instead of buying a internal or maybe buy a drive case for my old 1tb take up residence in and make the hdd bay of my pc a little less packed (i also have a hdd and a hybrid drive i use the former for OS and systems etc and the later for my most played games)

  6. Posted

    Ok so Ninja Squirrel and Twig were having a conversation on the Key Frames Slack about the opening sequence for The Perfect Insider and i found it quite interesting so thought id repost a condensed version of it and what it made me think about here:
     
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fa1ckFWKi-Y
     
    n1njasquirrel:

    The song is cool but not the video. It's pretty clearly trying to tell a story, but it's like amateur a level interpretive dance if you take away the animation. It's clearly just rotoscoped all the dancers were recorded and then drawn over. Or at least, it looks that way to me, the animation is so smooth
    I'm not saying that rotoscoped is a bad thing, Just the actual dance is super lame.
    It's done in such a cheesy way, like j drama level acting. Maybe it's just my upbringing, but interpretative dance is like, the worst? It's the kinda crap your drama teacher does when they can't think of anything to do.
    I mean ultimately I don't care, it's not my cup of tea. But I'd be interested to know other peeps feelings. I can assure you I'm in the minority, though I do think the op thinks it is being smarter than it is

     

    Twig:

    There is a story but why does that negate the OP being fun? and iff it's all rotoscoped then they definitely went out of there way to hide it the vast majority of the time.

    They're often super distorted or not at all animated/rendered realistically. Its most obvious with Magata of course, no part of here movements ever look rotoscoped cause she's always melting and fracturing and teleporting all over the place, and the way moe and ...the teacher guy (i forget his name) sometimes melt, or their arms turn into whips, and the way moe's hair moves when it does a close up of her it feels like if they did rotoscope it as i said they went way out of their way to obscure it
     
    I'm not sure why interpretative dance being used makes it bad, it portrays the three characters and their relations to each other and their own personalities and it has a cool style
    We can gather three obvious things: 1) magata is fractured as fuck, 2) sensei and moe are chasing magata around, trying to figure her out, and 3) moe is chasing sensei, probably through admiration or something (though watching the show you know what it is).
     
    would you rather an op where they just sit and talk? why is this more egregious than a normal op where they're fighting or running at or away from each other? that's effectively the same thing, just with more bombast

     
     
    To me now that its been pointed out, I like the idea that rotoscoping was used for this because the process and the intent feel like the mesh really well.
    Its a technique which takes reality and then step by step, frame by frame, creates a new reality on top of it that simultaneously mimics its structure but is totally different.
     
    I feel like Magata (the long haired lady in the OP and subject of the anime's main mystery) is framed as the only person who truly understands whats going on, but that inside she doesn't feel that way at all.
    Instead this is a result of her grasping emotionally for a answer to something and then trying to make that reality by projecting a aura of absolute intellectual conviction on those around her.
     
    So basically flashback sections of the anime cover a period where Magata is coming into her emotional and intellectual adulthood, terrified of her mortality and feeling utterly alone, and wishing that she didn't have to see the world the way she does.
    Initially because needs someone who has undergone the same experiences as her she creates new personality within herself based on people she knows who have died. People assume this is a reaction to loneliness but a way to preserve the ghost of a person but its not that, and while there is some truth in that its main purpose is so she can understand if there's a flaw in the way she sees the world. 
     
    So now all that she experiences of the world is also run through the lenses of these different personalities layered upon her own, in the same way that the animation we see in the OP is drawn onto of a real person.
     
    In the end i think she goes even further than this but since logic on this is based on some really wildly speculative guesswork about Magata which i'll put under a spoiler 

     


    She needs to have a child, someone just as smart as her but utterly separate from her influence, who she hopes that when she reaches the same age will ask the same questions, experience the same doubts, who maybe will understand her. so for the past 15 years Magata has been subtly manipulating her life so that it mirrors her own. 
     
    So in the present day
     
    She isnt dead (& She doesn't have a sister)
    She does have a daughter
     
    and Nishiosono Moe is that daughter
     
    Rotoscoping Moe's life on top of hers you could say


     

  7. Posted

    Ok I'm determined to get through another three episodes of You Lie in April tonight.

    Does anyone know if the title is a specific term of phrase in Japanese culture? I get that April/Spring is supposed to represent the experiences of youth (with a emphasis on young live in particular) and the lying part is sorta self explanatory but I'm interested whether it's a pre existing phrase or if the title id's just something that someone had come up with from nothing.

  8. Posted

    Doctor Who has been so tired, I'm having difficulty motivating myself to watch.

    Is anyone watching The Last Kingdom? I'm really liking it, although Danelaw era England is an easy sell.

     

    Doctor who has had a horrible run this series, perhaps one ,maybe two episodes that really were any good where there was any sense of the situation, characters, or the antagonist being interesting. The rest has either been filler just there to justify bloated two part episodes or like tonight's episodes trying to hard to be clever and falling flat on its face because it doesn't get the basics right.

    It certainly feels like the worst series since the modern run started.

  9. Posted

    I think that match is important outside of the confines of the tournament because it was a very map specific line up, basically a area denial strategy something you just don't see in other Lords management games & if Hots is to carve out a niche for itself amid the multitude of esports then it needs to emphasise the things that separate it from its peers.

  10. Posted

    Since I'm going through one of my nasty insomnia phases and the world itself seems particularly grim tonight I've decided to mainline 6 episodes of You Lie In April tonight with nothing but a bottle of wine and some more wine.

    First time i watched it i bailed at the scene where she is playing music with the the kids because it seemed so saccharine, turns out i should have kept going

    That said there's something really weird about the way the art style handles eyes. It takes the typical big anime eyes and then actually properly renders the whole construction of the eye, which would be fine and interesting but they then seem to whack up their gloss to ridiculous levels do they almost end up gem like. Actually gems the wrong way of describing them it would be better to say they are like giant marbles.

    Which make the fact they seem to have decided to give all the children black dots for eyes sorta creepy

    I'm not sure who said it (might have been twig or gorm)but some of the conversation 100% is the kids taking way to much like adults

    2 episodes in & i think I'm getting the same sort of vine from the dialog as i remember getting from shows like Buffy back in the day. These are teenagers as teenagers imagine/hope they are instead of the inarticulate mess that most of us are at that age.

    Ohh the cg piano hands aren't too bad,i remember Kids on the Slope (for a while that auto corrected to Kiss on the Dope, a different show i imagine) having a bigger disconnect between its animation style and the CG it used fire close ups than this does, however Im also trying desperately to remember how Nodame Cantabile and other older shows dealt with it did they actually animate the playing or just rely on allot of still mood shots.

    Really like the lightly discordant music we get for some of the male protagonists moments of introspection. Not sure how i feel about how they are seeing up future drama surrounding the love interest/muse. It just feels like a big old obvious DANGER HEARTBREAK AHEAD sign.

    After three episodes I'm enjoying the whole thing more than expected though i wonder if they will actually do anything interesting with three supporting cast or if they are gonna just pop up say a few impossible wise for their years lines and then vanish again without any development.

    If they actually give the jock friend a character arci really will be impressed

  11. Posted

    Continuing my long-running pattern of coming to shows maybe two years after the height of their buzz, Your Lie in April is so good. The transitions between drama and humor are natural and effortless, motifs in the dialogue like the dichotomy between "sparkling" and "dull" are upheld consistently in the art rather than just being bullshit flung between characters, and those characters generally seem to feel their feelings deeply without wallowing or anything. I especially like the arc in the fifth and sixth episode that views the male and female protagonists falling for each other through the eyes of the guy's childhood friend. The bittersweetness of her waning crush, the desire to see him happy slowly winning out over her desire to be the one who's happy with him, reminds me of everything that was good about the Yamada/Mayama parts of Honey & Clover without anything about it that made that show contrived and tedious.

     

    looks like this is another series im going to have to try again with, i bounced off it pretty hard only a couple of episodes in but the praise of it seems so universal i should at least try to understand why i didnt like it

     

    Also i was ill all this week and so spent alot of time in bet watching anime!!

     

    Turns out the 2nd season of Aldonoah Zero is hugely better than the first because it has a really strong courtly intrigue subplot going on which means i coukd basically ignore all the kids in special mechs bits and still get something out of the show. I would have never have watched this if I wasn't ill, but im sort of glad i did

     

    Also i watched the first 12 episodes of season two of mushishi and remain as impressed as ever, i think i also feel the shows formula for me is quite different from the one that Twig sketched out, will have to try and see if i can spend the time to write something about it

  12. Posted

    I've just realised I'm probably going to rewatch FMA because of the whole conversation, bang goes a big chunk of my life on rewatching something i may not even still like and may whole be remembering through rose tinted glasses

  13. Posted

    why in the flying goddamn shit fuck is mushishi zoku shou

     

    HIGHER RANKED THAN THE ORIGINAL

     

    ARE YOU FUCKING KIDDING ME????

    One of the things I've heard said about the 2nd series is that it feels like it sometimes repeats some of the broad strokes of the plot of the first series.

    I think I'd broadly agree with that but i feel any show that touches on folk lore is probably going to have at least some recurrent themes.

    I think a case could be made that someone who had never seen either series would probably find the second series just as compelling as the first, with the added bonus of better production values. It wouldn't be a view I'd agree with personally because i did see the first series but i think maybe someone coming fresh could feel different to me.

  14. Posted

    It's been too long since you've watched the original if you really mean "long-winded." I love Fullmetal Alchemist, but its willingness to lose entire minutes to different characters' emotional reactions added maybe a dozen episodes onto its possible runtime.

    My foggy but stubborn memory would still argue that the time theoriginal FMA spent building nuanced and flawed characters is time well spent, compared to time FMA BRO spent weaving a convoluted conspiracy plot and acres of painful lore exposition.

  15. Posted

    I'm with the others that Howl is not generally put at the top of most peoples Ghibli lists,

    But if its time to slaughter the sacred cows of anime then lets do this properly! I wonder what Anime News Network says are the top 10 shows.............

     

    Top 10 Best Rated (bayesian estimate) (Top 50) # title rating nb. votes 1 Steins;Gate (TV) 9.11 4149 2 Fullmetal Alchemist: Brotherhood (TV) 9.10 5307 3 Clannad After Story (TV) 9.08 4987 4 Rurouni Kenshin: Trust & Betrayal (OAV) 8.97 6541 5 Code Geass: Lelouch of the Rebellion R2 (TV) 8.95 7571 6 Mushishi: The Next Chapter (TV) 8.95 355 7 Spirited Away (movie) 8.92 10219 8 Cowboy Bebop (TV) 8.90 11805 9 (The) Disappearance of Haruhi Suzumiya (movie) 8.89 2628 10 Princess Mononoke (movie) 8.87 9560

     

    Ohhhhh kaaaaaaaaaaaaaay

     

    Really Anime News Network?

     

    Reeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeealy?

     

    Steins Gate = no1 anime of all time? Jesey H Titty Feckin Chresy WHAT ARE YOU THINKING!

     

    If your wondering what my reasoning is for my hatred of this series I'm honestly not sure I remember any more, I just remember watching the whole damn series & waiting and waiting for the moment i would start giving a damn about even one of its cast, but that moment never coming.

     

    Clannad = No3? A more than fine example of a show knowing its genre and working strongly within the confines of that genre, sure. but number 3!?!!  (Ninja squirrel will strongly disagree here i have no doubt :D)

     

    Code Geass = No5!!!! Ok if some of you might think my outrage towards the other two was a perhaps a bit was undeserved surely here is something we can agree on? this is what happens when a teenager reads Preacher and decides mechs and royals would somehow make the whole central concept better :P

     

    & thats not to forget you have Ruroni Kenshin sitting there at no4 i mean its a good OVA sure, but man is it old. So old infact youd probably make a really interesting podcast episode about talking about it (Coming Soon TM)

     

    Oh well I'm just glad Ghost in the Shell isn't there 

     

    Edit: dammit i even forgot to rant about how Brotherhood is more long winded, packs less punch, and is just generally worse than the original FMA adaptation

  16. Posted

    Ok so if i understand this correctly

    The GSL is an elaborate tournament which is separated into two tiers:

    Code S contains the top tier players who are competing against each other to win the GSL.

    Code A contains players who are competing against each other to enter Code S.

    So they were in general talented players but apart from sniper they were never really in contention for the top honours?

    That seems about right all in all Hots just doesn't have a huge prize pool to bring in a-listers atm but i can 100% see why a well organised team of people who have strong mechanical gameplay could be seen as a low risk shot at getting what is still a very nice payday.

  17. Posted

    Fair enough! I'm not well versed in mech tropes, so maybe I'm just not used to it? I did notice just how similar some of the beats were to Dallos though, amusingly.

     

    Yeah Dallos and it are weirdly similar, except no giant lazer face!!!!

     

    What i was reacting less to Mech tropes in particular and more just but just general character tropes.

    The clumsy rich girl in particular is just so overused that when it pops up without any sort of subversion to it i don't have much patience for it. I think thtas true of all anime for me after watching for over 10 years. 

     

    It's so frustrating seeing the same things again and again that when something interesting is done with a trope it immediately bumps my interest in that series.

    I mean Yamada from working is technically a clumsy rich girl, but unlike the traditional version she's basically unrepentant about her ineptitude for the job! and its great :D

  19. Posted

    Oh. I'm really enjoying this series. ._.

     

    What didn't you like?

    I think the thing is, i feel if you are going to make a show about children fighting, one of four things had to happen for me to keep watching

    It takes it subject utterly seriously and it's almost unrelenting in its nastiness

    It's takes its subject utterly unseriously and makes it clear from the get go it had no pretensions to be anything more than entertainment

    Its actually about something entirely unrelated

    It just had amazingly written characters whos relationships are interesting regardless of where the plots going or how contrived the world is.

    Iron Blooded Orphans seems to want to be entertainment but also for us to care about the unfortunate plight of its plucky casy of paper thin characters including:

    The clumsy rich girl who really cares for the less fortune, she sure doesn't know how to cook but boy does she try hard!

    The cocky leader & the quite kid who is the only one who can pilot the special mech!

    Seriously It's like gurren laggan never happened they seem to have no sense of how tired and overused those tropes have become.

    I'm probably being over harsh on it but there you go :P

  20. Posted

    Will have to see if i can track it down by other means then.

    I've been watching a couple of kemonozume episodes tonight, i think I'm enjoying it more this time round than than when i first caught the series a few years back.

    It's still uneven as all heck but the characters are actually far more fully formed than i remember them and it's got a great sense of the absurd.

  21. Posted

    It's interesting to see another (partial) recommendation for War in the Pocket I'm going to have to take the time to give it a go at some point.

    That whole franchise seems a big party of the culture surrounding anime but I tried watching the current iteration Gundam: Iron Blooded Orphans and gave up on episode three.

    Which reminds me is there anywhere legit to watch the drama about Anno you linked a few pages back Gorm?

    The other series you talk about remind me that at some point i need to steel myself and get around to watching the rest of Watamote despite how painful it feels to rubber neck at the car crash that is it's protagonists life.

  22. Posted

    I'm a little unsure about how One Punch Man is shaping up.

    I'm still really enjoying it but it's pacing is a little strange, is doesn't seem to have the energy of a pure comedy, and there isn't really any drama to drag it along. It just sorta of ambles along, which i suppose it's actually quite fitting considering the apathy the MC feels towards his work.

    It sorta reminds me of Samurai Flamenco a few seasons back, a series which i never finished but threw multiple weird changes of tone and pacing at me without a plot or compelling characters to drag me through them.

    I think OPM does do a better job of staying entertaining and does look amazing but i don't really feel compelled to watch the next episode like i do with some series.

  23. Posted

    The anxiety issues that have been murmuring along in the background of my life since the turn of the year seem have seemingly turned up their volume again in the last couple of months.

     

    (I'm gonna stick some stuff under a spoiler because although i feel i need to get it off my chest somewhere it hopefully makes it a bit more private)

     

     

    The good news is i know what's caused that upswing, the bad news is that its because someone dear to me is having to deal with unpleasant treatment for a serious illness.

     

    Hearing someone I've been close to your entire life say they couldn't "see a way out of this" is a pretty heartbreaking, no matter how hard I try to rationalise my reaction to it.

    I know confronting your mortality and the mortality of those around you is a pretty fundamental part of the human experience, & in this case their prognosis is more good than bad, but there was evidently still enough of the bad for it to feel overwhelming to them.

     

    I have no idea of how to deal with the whole situation, how do you help someone when there is no way (for any of us) to ultimately win the fight. I've always been someone who's needed something to fight against, or to work towards, and its perhaps why death scares me so much.

     

    The thought of my own mortality has also started creeping into my head most evenings unbidden, what if when I fall sleep i don't wake up? As soon as that thought surfaces there's almost no way to suppress it again, and not only that i feel shitty to be having irrational fears over my own life disrupting my sleep, when someone else is facing a far more real struggle.

     

    How do I help them when i can't even deal with my own fears.

     

     

    Now I'm sleeping even less than is normal for me, I'm regularly not getting more than 4-5 hrs sleep and it's leaving me exhausted. Falling asleep has always been a problem for me, my mum once told me that she felt that i'd "never learned how to sleep" that even as a child i was never able to quieten my mind. Now however it's got to a extent where i can tell the lack of sleep is affecting my mood and the anxiety.

     

    It all feels like a bit of a Catch 22 situation. My anxiety levels are raised because i can't sleep, and i can't sleep because I'm anxious.

     

    This all led to me going to bed this Saturday at 12 and still being awake at 5;30 in the morning, normally when i can't sleep I'll throw on a history podcast or something just to try to give some background noise to break the anxiety loop, and normally it works but not this time.

     

    So i tried something else, and in the end the last thing i remember from before falling asleep was the Thumbs talking about the Star Wars Battlefront beta.

     

    turns out sometimes I need to be reminded of the absurdity of reality to be able to deal with it.

  24. Posted

    So what have people been checking out in the new season?

    There's a few things I've enjoyed in the opening barrage of new shows but the one I'm currently getting hyped up over due to the deadly combo of great lively op & understated art style and storytelling so far is The Perfect Insider.

    http://youtu.be/Fa1ckFWKi-Y

    Although it's way to early to make any big judgements i feel interested to see what a well resourced, character centric show in a contemporary setting can do. All in all i guess they've got my attention by avoiding being flashy and i hope people don't pass on it because the first episode is about building up the characters relationships rather than throwing out a flashy bit of animation or a juicy plot .

  25. Posted

    You are off course 100% correct i have no idea why i decided Adlet was gonna get a random name change, I'd agree with you though that it never felt like much of a series about us finding the mystery out, it was more about enjoying watching them figuring it out.

    Also i like that you abbreviate main character to MC.