Gyokuyoutama

Foxgirl quiz

The really crazy thing is that while there is some Pippa merch available in Hot Topic, that specific shirt is not available in black through Hot Topic.  So this isn't a case of the costume designer walking through Hot Topic for something edgy without thinking about what it is.  It's still possible that it was picked up randomly by searching online shops, or that it showed up in a thrift store, but that also makes it more likely that this was deliberate.  (By some rando in the costume department, I'm not claiming that the character was scripted to be a Phase Connect fan.)

We have a medical drama and a character is a loser gamer.  But as the character has just suffered a stroke, and can't say anything to indicate that  So how do we solve this problem?

Break out the Pipkin Pippa shirt:

I told you guys to watch Key: The Metal Idol and you didn't listen.

Maybe this guy can convince you:

EDIT: When I came across this channel I thought it was standard autism causing someone to post videos for an imaginary TV station.  There's tons of stuff like that on youtube.  But it looks like this guy actually does do pirate streams of anime, 90's cartoons and internet animation over on Twitch.

9 hours ago, A 1970 Corvette said:

I mean that looks like Osaka but she clearly says Ayumu. You must be mistaken?

Not sure if being trolled...

but she does explicitly retain the nickname Osaka in Yotsuba:

Osaka from Azumanga Dai-Oh is now a teacher in Yotsuba:

One of the first recommended trailers that the fest gave me was a hentai game, with the trailer immediately going into explicit sexual intercourse.  I thought I already had an option to hide adult content from the store page precisely to avoid getting blindsided by that crap.  Looking in my preferences "frequent sexual content" and "adult only sexual games" are disabled on community pages but not store pages, which makes me think that they separated out the two at some point and auto-enrolled everyone in the mature content side of things (or maybe anyone who had passed an age verification page in the past.)

Saw the movie "Looker."  This is part of my quest to see absolutely everything that Michael Crichton had a hand in (I'm almost there for books.)  He's most famous for the adaptations of his books, like Jurassic Park or the Andromeda Strain (though The Great Train Robbery might be the best of the adaptations).  But he also wrote and directed a bunch of stuff.  The most famous of these is definitely "Westworld."  First for basically being The Terminator before The Terminator was shot.  Then they made a TV show about it.

The other three are "Looker," "Coma", and "Runaway."  I haven't seen the last two yet.  Looker is a great example of a movie that's overlooked, but because of that can be overpraised.  It's kind of like "Streets of Fire" and "The Hidden" that I mentioned in the last post in that regard (maybe I'll do a proper review of those in the future.) I've seen reviews call it "The Best Thriller You've Never Seen."  I wouldn't go that far.  Some of the action scenes are cheesy and there are some definite questions about character motivations.  But it is worth watching and better than the average movie that you'll see today.  Plus if you like the 80's, you're in for a treat.  The soundtrack is one of the only "synthwave" OSTs I've heard from the 80's outside the works of Jan Hammer and Giorgio Moroder.  This is mixed with some 80's pop rock that sounds like it could have been licensed hits, but was actually made for the movie.

I won't get too much into the plot of the movie, since I think it works better as a thriller if you don't know what you are in for.  Suffice to say, there are a lot of things that are still very relevant today (not uncommon for works by Crichton), though it is interesting how they are interpreted in the 80's.  You have a mix of technologies just being developed today, together with analog technologies that became obsolete even by the turn of the millennium.

The movie starts with a beautiful actress who is convinced that she is imperfect, because things like her nose or cheekbones are off by tenths of a millimeter.  A hotshot plastic surgeon is initially reluctant to "fix" her (though it doesn't take that much to convince him.)  Later the actress dies in a way where even the audience is not sure what exactly happened, though it is written off as a suicide.  And another of the surgeon's patients who had a similar surgery also died in a mysterious "suicide."  So we have our setup for a mystery thriller where he must determine who is killing his patients and why, before all of them are dead.

I won't go further than that.  Watch it if you are interested.  But even that is enough to touch on theme that is more relevant today: the idea that women will become hyperfixated on minute "flaws" due to technology allowing them to notice such things in the first place and having their looks exposed to the masses.  In Looker it's more a commentary on the advertising business, but it's not hard to think about social media these days, and in particular how only a computer created image could truly erase those flaws (which also isn't entirely irrelevant to Looker...)

Like I said there are some goofy action sequences, but even those are pretty damned creative.  Nothing is really by the numbers.  Definitely worth your time.

I just watched an episode of Cat's Eyes where two characters wear shirts with checkered patterns and they aren't plaid from the plaid dimension.  By which I mean that thing where they have the outline of the shirt move over a constant background, see Chowder for millions of examples. Instead in Cat's Eye the lines of the shirt are never straight since they move with the curves of the body, and properly adjust as characters turn and move their arms.

I don't know how many times I've actually seen this done.  Mainly artists avoid checkered patterns since it's such a pain, and when they do use them they cheat.  There was a real trend in 80's anime to do difficult perspective shots just because they could, and even by the 90's the trend was dying down.  Of course nowadays they would just use CGI.  I watched Suzume a while back and they did similar stuff with CG backgrounds where there was a pan with parallax scrolling and it certainly looked nicer than the stuff that they did in the 80's, but it didn't really wow me.  Even when change of perspective shots are rough just the knowledge that some poor animator had to struggle with it for hours, and for no real good reason, always impresses me.

Of course nothing in anime tops that moving lamp scene in Who Framed Roger Rabbit?

8 hours ago, Moby said:

Heavy update is dead

I don't think it's anything to worry about.

I still like VTubers, but there are things that annoy me about them.

Like the repeating trope of titling the stream "Playing Game X!" and not playing the Game X until 50 minutes into the stream.

Finally got around to seeing Mangum Force.

I recall hearing somewhere that the Meet the Sniper theme was influenced by Magnum Force's score, but man I did not expect it to be so blatant.

4 hours ago, TheOnlyGuyEver said:

I play lots of F-Zero 99 so "crash out" elicits a completely different feeling from me.

I initially assumed that it meant falling asleep due to exhaustion since "crashing" has been used as slang for sleeping or coming off a caffeine high for decades.  Hell, you can find several dictionaries online that give that as the definition, or spending the night somewhere (though I don't think that was ever "crashing out", just "crashing.")

But yeah, I have found some references to it from before 2024 as a term in the black community or as a very niche term, so that checks out.  I also have found some references in the "mainstream" to earlier in 2024, but they aren't nearly as common as from November on (and in that time period you also get lots of people asking the same question as me, i.e. "when the hell did everyone start saying 'crash out'".)  So it looks like it exploded during that time period.

I've seen like five different places in the last week use the term "crash out" to mean something like "have a meltdown."

This isn't really me bitching about new slang, since it's going to do what it's going to do.  It's more just befuddlement that I've never seen this term before and now it seems to be fairly common, at least online.  Literally like it sprang into existence fully formed on Monday.

After a more extensive search, I still couldn't find anyone using it before November of last year.  But if it is that new there should be some obvious origin from it rather than people just using it out of nowhere like they were programmed to do so....

...it's a TikTok thing, isn't it?

There's a a million Japanese remixes of this Thai Commercial:

But what I want to know, is "get money" a phrase that's actually used in Thai?  It's said when he's getting paid and the Japanese subtitles are about getting money.  Or is it just a coincidence and there's some Thai term for getting paid that just sounds like "get money"?

My work laptop has Windows 11 and it regularly has such high CPU usage in "sleep" mode that it's uncomfortably hot to the touch when I come back to it.  I've tried all the fixes, such as disabling wake timers, and none of it works.  But really this is just par for the course when it comes to Microsoft lately.  My fix is to just power it off when I'm not using it which obviously isn't ideal, but you do what you can.  And if it does break, fuck it that's work's problem.

What gets me really annoyed about this is that I can't even verify what is happening.  I've heard people say that Windows 11 has "sleep" mode work more like a phone, where they just turn off the display and put some suggestions for programs to maybe not run but everything can still run.  And hey, maybe the problem is being worse by IT forcing updates or something while my computer is asleep.  (They certainly did seem shocked that my computer's updates were three months out of date when I left it turned off all summer, but I can't be the only person to not use work computers when there's no classes.)

However there's no official documentation on the sleep features, so who knows if this is accurate or not.  Even on Microsoft's answer section all you get are responses saying that you can change power settings (which doesn't work) or answering completely different questions (like thinking that people are complaining about the computer not coming out of sleep mode when the issue is that it never really goes into sleep mode to begin with.)  I know at least a couple of other people with Windows 11 that have the same issue, and there are tons of complaints online, but who knows how universal it is?  Kind of a microcosm of modern computers: something breaks and stays broken for a long time and you can't even figure out if it really is a bug or just a misguided feature.

This is one of the straws that's going to finally push me to Linux for all my home stuff.

No view recommendation of the day:

Fuck off. The 3DS isn't retro.

I know it's over a decade old (which really is just on the threshold of "retro" time-wise) but there hasn't been a handheld to supplant it.  Switch doesn't count and mobile phones don't count.  The most recent iteration of a thing can't be retro.

It's like saying that 4k players are retro.

Thank Ljot (CAUTION: She is not fucking around when she give a strobe light warning.)

These are the two earliest dreams that I remember.  Both are from when I was something like six years old.

In the first dream I was exploring my house, and came across a bookcase.  I started looking through an encyclopedia, and I think we actually did have an encyclopedia there in real life.  But this one was a pop-up encyclopedia, where when you'd turn the page a real world item would pop up corresponding to what you were looking at.  I got to a series of pages on awards or something, and there were statues in gold, silver and bronze.  They were kind of like a mixture of an Oscar award and "The Thinker."  Then I got to the fourth statue, which was a chocolate chip cookie statue.  Being a dumb kid, I ate it, only for my dad to walk in and start screaming at me in a way that was far harsher than anything he did in real life.  I remember waking up crying and frantically apologizing to my dad who was completely bewildered.

In the second one I was on the playground and they told everyone to come inside, but I didn't.  Eventually a giant bee, about the size of small dog, came up to the playground.  It had wings but didn't fly and had sort of a cartoony face rather than what an insect would look like.  I freaked out because its stinger was huge but then calmed down when it became clear it wasn't going to sting me, and it honestly looked like some sort of mascot character you'd see on a cartoon.  And then when I got used to it being there, it suddenly chomped off my hand in one bite.  There wasn't gore or anything, but I remember staring at the stump at the end of my arm.  This one also traumatized me for a while.

I bet that you could just plop down unedited gameplay footage of The Lawnmower Man for SNES and get people to believe that it is a new "retrowave analog horror" series:

It helps that the franchise has almost completely vanished from the public consciousness, and how the vibe is intentionally weird and otherworldly.

EDIT: I didn't know this until just now, but apparently there was a Sega CD version of this that fits even better:

The history of book covers, as told by the Hardy Boys:

Now I realize that this isn't entirely fair since they didn't update the cover art much after the 50's (I'm not sure exactly when the paperback edition art came into being; I'm guessing based on the style of the text.)  The last two are also not "official" editions but rather editions made after the book went public domain.

But honestly this tracks with what I've seen in book stores.  Various hand drawn art for most books through the 90's.  Ever more minimalistic, cell shaded style artwork when we get into the 00's.  This creeps into just having collages with stock art as we get into the 2010's.  Lazier than you thought possible by 2020.  And of course, AI generated art now.

Virtual virtual youtubing

You know, one thing I do miss about cable TV is when you would be channel surfing and then come across something bizarre and end up watching the whole thing.

That's how I ended up seeing Zardoz.  I'm sure that there are other more obscure cult movies that I saw in this way which are buried in my subconscious.

You don't really get that with modern broadcast TV.  There are plenty of channels that serve random stuff, but it tends to be only TV shows and movies that have withstood the test of time for long enough to be firmly in the public consciousness.  (You ain't seeing stuff like Unhappily Ever After, Get A Life, Jack of All Trades or Sheep in the Big City.)  There's stuff like Svengoolie that does low budget horror movies, but since that show is directed at the whole family you won't see the really bizarre arthouse stuff.

Now a lot of this stuff is online, but the trouble is that you have to look for it so you don't get the same experience of accidentally stumbling upon it.  Furthermore, while you can find bonkers movies on places like Tubi, there are so many no talent cash ins on those sites that it's almost impossible to find the "so bad it's good" or the "so weird I don't know how to evaluate it" stuff from the "so bad it's boring" stuff.

All you really have is word of mouth, though there's a couple of problems with that.  First, when you stumble upon something it has feels very personal.  You saw it, but who knows who the hell us saw it (especially if it's 2 AM).  If you get a recommendation off a video with a million subscribers, it's obviously not something personal to you.  The second problem is that word of mouth is very heavily focused on the mainstream with anything outside of it viewed as a "cult film."  So there's not much room for movies that aren't watched by many, but which are good for the right audience.  (I'll give you some recommendations though: Streets of Fire, The Hidden, The Last Man on Earth, Beyond the Black Rainbow.)