tegan

I had no idea the esports rabbit hole went this deep. (calling it "YoCo" is the funniest goddamned thing to me by the way)

I am well aware. At one point I started doing writeups of Eva merchandise as a joke and it blossomed into the discovery of an amazing series of escalatingly bewildering items. Highlights: narratively-appropriate Ayanami Rei Matryoshka dolls like five different models of air humidifier, but only one dehumidifier AT Field umbrella SEELE monolith calculator bottled water where the bottles are shaped like Rei and Asuka's limbless torsos NERV bucket. Absolutely nothing special about it besides having the NERV logo on it. Evangelion canned bread

So I have a friend who likes anime, but doesn't watch anything unless he's introduced to it by someone else and can sit and watch it with them. I'm thinking of showing him Evangelion, since I think he would really like it. The only thing is, I'm not sure what version is best for a first-timer at this point. Rebuild is arguably the best version of the series*; but I feel like at least some of its impact is dependent on having seen the original series and/or End of Evangelion first, and hell if I want to sit and watch 16+ hours of Evangelion in as few sittings as possible again. Who feels that Rebuild stands/does not stand on its own merit and could be enjoyed by someone who's never seen the show before? Would watching Death and Rebirth or Revival of Evangelion in advance be an acceptable compromise? I can never tell what the general consensus on D&R is since nobody ever talks about it. I can't even remember what makes it different from the series now. All this despite the best way of enjoying the show clearly being living vicariously through its increasingly bizarre and tacky merchandise. *the best animated version, anyway. The manga is probably the best version of the series proper, although with the caveat that it's been running for 18 years and is still only up to its thirteenth volume.

I did watch it in broadcast order, though I only watched the first season.Incidentally, although I wasn't watching the show at that point, "Endless Eight" is probably the most masterful trolling ever perpetuated. So even though I've got this big anime itch right now, I can't figure out what's airing right now that's actually good. I might end watching an old series instead or something. Any suggestions?

About once a year I get the sudden, powerful urge to watch anime, and that's a nerve that's definitely been itching for the past few weeks. Unfortunately I can't think of anything to watch right now. I'm just skimming through this thread but there's a couple of things that people mentioned that I wanted to touch on: I watched the first half of Steins;Gate and thought it was okay. I remember it being compared to Doctor Who when it was contemporary, and it definitely has the same kind of feeling to me: cheap and crudely-fashioned, but somehow endearing. One thing that I hated about it, though, was that it follows suit with the very strange Japanese media trope of being surprisingly open about containing LGBT characters, but having very insulting depictions of them. Ruka is clearly trans, but her closest friends still refer to her as being male. That just rubs me the wrong way. REDLINE is secretly a far better movie than it pretends to be. If you glossed it over or wrote it off as a fun, over-the-top action movie; watch it again. Not that it isn't enjoyable if you appreciate it as such; but I seriously find some new, incredibly subtle thread connecting the characters together every time I watch it. Literally every time. There's also lots of great little character moments (the stuff like JP blowing on hot soup or adjusting his jacket just gets me). The story of Tengen Toppa Gurren Lagann, while very much glorifying of a very foolhardy philosophy, has some really strong themes behind it, especially the visual motif of the spiral. I like how well Gainax retrofitted a very common element of old super robot anime (the drill weapon) into a metaphor for the pervasive attitudes behind those stories. I'm pretty glad that Gainax really does seem to funnel all of the money they must make off of terrifyingly creepy Evangelion merchandise into making actual interesting work. Also, I think the scene that best encapsulates this series is when Kamina first meets Viral. Kamina starts drawing his sword to illustrate bravado while also trash-talking him. The general rule of badassery states that he can't finish drawing the sword until he's done talking, but his speech is so wordy that by the time he's finished drawing his sword it's approximately nine feet long and curved like a protractor. It's just self-aware enough to be hilarious. The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya was one of the series that made me hate anime. Initially I just didn't like it for being the flagship of the new wave of creepy, pandering otaku shit with OPs and EDs consisting of awkward, stilted dance routines (see also: Lucky Star). The more I think about it though, the more I realize that the whole show is basically that one episode of the Twilight Zone with the creepy demon kid wishing people into the cornfield if it had taken every opportunity to make the character endearing in a transparent, plastic way. I do not like Haruhi Suzumiya. Panty and Stocking with Garterbelt is the most loving tribute to trashy American pop culture and cartoons ever, and it's the outsider perspective that really sells it. Every detail is spot-on, like all of the written text being in English instead of Japanese, and a lot of the nods to popular culture are things that I don't think a Japanese audience would really get as well as a western one. I have a bit of a background in animation, and I always thought it was very strange that this seems to be a very one-sided cultural attitude for animators. I still watch the first Scanty and Kneesocks episode from time to time. Oh, and making their transformation sequence into an actual striptease with no embellishment whatsoever is the greatest pisstake in anime history. Puella Magi Madoka Magica was the anime that I was in the trenches for. It's the only series I've ever felt was improved by watching it simultaneously as it aired and joining in some fan discussion. Seeing predictions come to pass, watching real-time responses to shocking reveals, and waiting for fans to translate the runes were all pretty remarkable on their own; but I remember the most amazing thing ever being the discovery that the Latin phrase "Puella Magi," which was initially passed off as a lazy attempt at originality, didn't just translate to "Magical Girl," but also to "Slave to the Deceiver." That's probably the moment where I went beyond the proverbial looking glass. I first watched Neon Genesis Evangelion in its entire original run in a single weekend as a teenager in which I was sick with some horrible fever. I sat through all 26 episodes plus End of Evangelion in some terrifying stupor, and I maintain that it was the best possible introduction to the series. I haven't really gone back to the series since then, but I've been really enjoying the Rebuild movies. My favourite detail was finally paying off on Shinji's SDAT player. Every time he's shown using it, it's always when he's alone and thinking about himself, and always portrayed as he skips back from track 26 to 25... the two episodes of the series where his introspection finally comes full circle. In the new movies, now that Hideaki Anno is over his crippling depression, Shinji finally gets the opportunity to change the way his life is going... and the player skips ahead to track 27. It took fifteen fucking years, but it finally paid off. Plus Asuka gets Wonderswan to mirror it now. Kind of unintentionally hilarious that she's using it to play a Famicom cartridge though. I didn't see it mentioned, but Summer Wars is a movie that people here should see. It is several things: the most clichéd, awful-sounding premise for a film ever; an examination of what a social network really is in a post-internet society; a spiritual successor to the Digimon movie of all things; and a gorgeous portrait of the things we take for granted. It's also the best argument for product placement I've ever seen; it's chock-full of brand-name items that are all specifically chosen to evoke character traits. ie: the only character who wears brand-name clothing is a very intense, competitive kid who exclusively wears Adidas clothing. Every character continues the Japanese obsession for shitty, generic flip phones except for the distant, elitist, iPhone-brandishing prick who spent ten years in America. Etc. These things just keep stacking up. Oh, also, watch the way people drink in this movie. Every character holds their drinks in a different way, and it always reflects their personality. Our perpetually nervous lead holds everything with two hands trying not to spill it, the intense kid holds his juice by the rim and sips it in a very methodical way, the rowdy uncle is the only one who doesn't even bother pouring his booze into a glass and just drinks straight from the bottle, etc. It's so great. also also this film has a scene where a dude does math so hard that his nose starts bleeding seriously you should watch it

This was seriously uncomfortable to watch. I expected every one of the clips to climax with with somebody actually dying or mutilating themselves.

Cute, but it all comes down to how they reacted.

I've been reading these! I got out of the habit of reading prose for a long time, but I ended up picking up a bunch of Terry Pratchett books this winter after recalling that I enjoyed what I read of Discworld in high school. Most recently I finished Moving Pictures, which kind of felt like a prototype for Soul Music (which was probably my favourite). My experience thus far has been that the Vimes novels are the best ones overall though.

Wasn't there one of those rare inter-company crossovers at one point where The Joker got hold of The Mask, or was that just some sort of brilliant fever dream I had? Did you read the regular printing, the original single issues, or the Absolute edition? I hear the Absolute edition is recoloured for the worse (ie: making "Tales of the Black Freighter" not look like it was poorly printed on cheap paper).Also, now that you've read it once, read it again. There is a ton of stuff to pick up on (collected here if you'd rather not find them on your own. My favourites include: You should also watch the incredible intro for the movie and admire that the music from the first film trailer is the slower, more cynical alternate B-side version of that song that Smashing Pumpkins wrote for the end credits of Batman and Robin. Briefly admit that this is probably the most clever thing Zack Snyder has ever done, and then ignore the movie for the rest of your life.

I listened to it ten times before I got the joke.

Yup! It's a useful trick.

I always wanted one of those white Gamecube controllers. They go so nicely with the white Wii. Also, one thing on my desk that's not easily visible in the picture that I should really point out: I was tired of losing track of USB flash drives and SD cards and stuff, so now I keep them all in a soap dish. This is probably the best idea I've ever had.

The two that I'll always remember from working at Blockbuster are LA Noire and Final Fantasy XIII, because there was no practical way to store those two in rental cases.

Neptune's Pride Parade

Also known in some circles as "battlestations." Show me where you play your video and computer games. I always like seeing these kinds of threads, because I'm the type of creep who, when presented any kind of image with a bookshelf in the background, will immediately try to discern what each item on the shelf is. I also really like interior design. Right now I've got a pretty decent thing going on. I just moved into this apartment in December, so it's a little sparse right now. The couch was here when I moved in and is going to be replaced by a black sectional somewhere down the line when I can afford it. Right now my biggest shame is the awful cord management (I've been looking all over for something to hide the cords under the computer desk, but I'm not finding much. Keep in mind that I'm in Atlantic Canada, so there's no IKEA here). I've got my work cut out for me, but I'm happy with what I've got. The compy: Introducing my love of glossy black rectangles, particularly black glass. The tower (not pictured anywhere in these photos, it's right beside the couch) is an okay prebuilt Acer rig I got a few years back. It does what it needs to, though it could use a new graphics card. I've already gone on at lengths about my mouse and keyboard here, so I won't bug you with the details. Most of what's onscreen in this shot is Steam with a custom skin based on Metro. There's a reskinned Winamp up there too. I like having a clean desk and a clean interface. Those awful cords! The office chair is nice, but beginning to get a little ragged. I know I have a warranty on it, but I don't think they make it anymore, so I would have to replace it with a different chair. The footstool is still nice and comfy, though! The outside view from the chair is a very nice grove of trees in front of the downtown skyline. If you get up and move to a different part of the room, however, it's the neighbours' roof. The roof is just close enough that I totally want to try jumping out the window onto it, but just far enough that I would probably fall and die if I tried to. Strongly considering buying one of those remote control toy helicopters and using it to tap annoyingly on their bathroom window. The couch. It's ugly as hell, but it's surprisingly soft and comfortable. This is my first one-bedroom and I've had nothing but futons for years, so it's easily the most comfortable piece of furniture I've ever owned. The black media shelf at the back houses my gradually-shrinking collection of physical games and movies (I do a sweep every spring. If I can't justify owning something I get rid of it, hence having only a handful of games per console). I keep a record of the games on Backloggery. There's also a tiny multi-purpose smoked glass table that gets moved around a lot and a small black basket for storing very frequently-used controllers. I was playing Super Mario Galaxy and left the gold Wiimote+Nunchuk on the couch. Whoops! ...That black line is a lamp, by the way. I have a big thing for the Gameboy Advance, so I pick up a lot of loose GBA carts these days. I like rifling through them. There's a 3DS/DS game case in there too. That statue is the Club Nintendo Platinum prize from a few years back. I've made Platinum every year since I joined, because I am a consumer whore. Keen-eyed observers will note that more than a third of this bookshelf is occupied by the work of Osamu Tezuka (at least one version of everything he ever had published in English, with the exceptions of Metropolis and Crime & Punishment. There's a few essays about him in there too). I want to make an effort to read more prose, so I've been filling this up a little bit with some Terry Pratchett books recently. I also have some things to get rid of here, like the Scott Pilgrim books. The black square at the bottom is a fabric drawer stuffed to the brim with less-frequently-used game controllers. I like these shelves a lot even though they're a little cheap and not really meant for books. The frequently-used-handhelds spot. The PSP gets the least use, but I like having it around. I like to hook it up to the TV and sync it to a Dualshock 3 so that I can treat it like a console. The DS lite serves as a backup for both the Gameboy Micro (the sexiest handheld ever built) and the 3DS. The black and red thing is a GP2X Wiz, a Korean handheld used for emulation. I bought it to play Mother 3, but I also get some Mega Man 2 and Sweet Home in on it sometimes. It is surprisingly nice, but I don't use it too much. Handhelds currently in storage: original-model Gameboy Advance, an iPod Touch that still works fine but has a wonky headphone jack, and the "Elite Beat Agents and World Ends With You DS lite," which has suffered enough damage to be unsellable, but still (mostly) functions. Now used exclusively for touchscreen-destroying games. And finally, the Gigatron. More black glass and awful cord management. Also, my poor plant that almost died from spending six months in a basement apartment and is ever-so-gradually growing up big and strong again. There is a tiny clay purple Pikmin in the pot, made by me. I need to find a better place for my totally bitchin' TRON phone. Devices currently in rotation: PS3, Wii U, Xbox, PS2, Wii, and a Western Digital TV box thing. Currently out of rotation: the Dreamcast (coming back after I get a VGA adapter and maybe give it a good deep-down cleaning and a fresh coat of paint), the N64, the NES (currently broken; repair attempts have been unsuccessful. May be replaced with a Retro Duo later on down the line), and the SNES (currently hooked up to a tiny TV on my bedroom, but mostly unused). The TV will probably be replaced with a bigger one eventually since it's now much further away from where I usually sit. I also intend to replace the WDTV thing with a LaCie LaCinema. I don't know what to do with the Wii now that it's basically only used for Gamecube games and emulating Earthbound. I know it doesn't look like much right now, but I've been living in shoebox apartments all alone since I was a teenager. This is a very small lifetime's worth of stuff spread out over a very big room (the biggest place I've ever lived in!) You should see the bedroom; besides that TV and SNES, the only thing in the room is the bed itself, which is actually a worn-down futon. I have big plans for this place; I just need to build up the money to pay for it all.

Copied over as per request:

Aw, I'm bad at this. Sorry. I'll copy it over. It's so nice. My last apartment didn't even have a full closet (half of it was occupied by a hot water heater), so I'm super pleased with it. Now that I have space for extraneous cruft, I'm considering getting some completely needless big decoration. I'm thinking of building a MAME cabinet custom-sized to fit into a corner or buying one of those black fiberglass mannequins or something. I wanna' hang up some pictures or something too and feel like I should do something to make the space more "girly." It's probably the best thing I've gotten from Club Nintendo. I've got a few other CN things around the apartment too: the invincibility star messenger bag, the Platinum Member pin set, the Platinum Member transparent playing cards, and the Hanafuda cards (which were a big help when I watched Summer Wars).

This is an AMV. The audio is a song by JAM Project, a Japanese music group that make hot-blooded songs intended for anime theme music and such. The video is from a pair of educational films about triangles. Let's watch.

Just as an aside, I always appreciate it when podcasts bring up something LGBT-related (in this case, Mainichi) and treat the topic with respect. So thanks.

Best possible plot: John Hammond's brother starts a preservation fund to protect the dinosaurs; sends a documentary team onto one of the islands to film them for a BBC nature documentary (few survive). I mean come on.

I actually had a much easier time getting to the colossus than I usually do, but a much harder time actually fighting it. Third colossus (Gaius) thoughts: Finding fruit: the big trees out in the open, the ones with climbable moss on the trunk, will almost always bear fruit. It's easier to see the fruit by climbing to the top and just shooting it down from there.

It has indeed been proven. Personally I'm more excited for Jurassic Park 1 being rereleased in 3D this year. Just imagine how much closer objects in mirror may appear! As for Jurassic Park 4: Quadratic Park, I kind of hope they don't add feathers. There's an argument that it lends scientific credibility, but in order for the raptors in Jurassic Park to be the least bit credible they would first have to fix their most glaring inaccuracy, and they're not going to do that for obvious reasons. (...I know they're supposed to be Utahraptors, but they still call them bloody Velociraptors)

The best thing right now is that the internet is collectively bitching about Wind Waker HD's new graphics. It's like 2002 all over again. I'm surprised it wasn't Reggie, to be honest. He's usually the one doing the American Nintendo Directs. What I like most about Iwata doing these is that they clearly realized a while back that he overuses his one gesture and started poking fun at it.

You guys of course realize that the collector's edition of this game is called the Wizard's Edition. I enjoyed the demo, but I just know that I have no chance of finishing this game. I just can't do the 100-hour JRPG thing anymore. Maybe if I finally finish Xenoblade and get the craving again somewhere down the line.

Having actually gone and played Mainichi now... yeah, I can see how this is probably more relatable for more people than the very specific situations of Dys4ia.