Simon

Played both Subnautica and Horizon Zero Dawn for the first time this month.

I feel like I've seen the face of God twice in a row. My goodness.

So I'm going into work for a day or two this week until I officially get remote networking approval from IT. And I need to bring my laptop in to test the networking setup whenever it's ready.

Translation:

From Twitter

The Good Place ended after four seasons. Absolutely perfect show.

Knives Out is the best movie I've seen in years.

I'm enjoying Pokemon Shield, but it mostly only succeeds as a Pokemon game and not as a next-gen leap game. Alas.

For those more versed in Halo than myself, is $10 worth it for Reach? I've literally never played any of the games.

1 hour ago, Wulff said:

Has the subspuf bookmark been restored?

Yes.

So let's see, things that happened in my life since July 2016:

Did I miss anything major around these parts?

Hey guys, been a while, how's it been around here in my absence?
I can guess, actually:

TBH I was checking one of my old posts to see how I reacted to To The Moon when a friend asked about it and was pleasantly surprised to see the place still active, so figured I'd drop in and say hello if nothing else.

If I'm remembering right - [checks post history] and I am - I stormed out in a huff over something very minor, which I probably shouldn't have done at all.

So, hi again, everybody

Thanks for reminding me why I stopped coming here, Huff. Truly.

That Ninetales oh my god

2 hours ago, Moby said:

Sasuke is still a massive emo for no reason

So, this is something I have to contest.

It is a freaking miracle Sasuke is even remotely functional as a person.

Sasuke's life:

At eight years old, his loving older brother murders his entire extended family and makes him watch it over and over again. For three days. At eight years old.

Four years later, with no support network whatsoever, he graduates top of his class. 

Some time later, when he's finally made some friends, gotten stronger, and seems to be on the way to a healthy life, his brother shows up again and repeats the mental torture. This time, Sasuke's thirteen, and gets put into a coma from it this time.

This time, a new group (Orochimaru and his minions) offer him the power he thinks he'll need to achieve his goal of revenge. They tell him that his bonds with his comrades, everything he's been doing, is holding him back.

Sasuke, after mulling it over for multiple weeks, leaves in pursuit of greater power.

Three years later, when Sasuke finally achieves his nearly decade-long quest for vengeance, defeating his brother ... he finds out it was all for nothing. His brother was ordered to kill their entire family, to protect the village he abandoned in pursuit of power. And now Sasuke gets manipulated by yet another person (Obito) into taking a path of vengeance.

This time, he... goes nuts. He goes off the rails in pursuit of revenge on the village leaders that did what they did.

(He is also sixteen years old at this point. You try making sane decisions as a thirteen/sixteen year old orphan, when everyone in sight is trying to manipulate him into doing their bidding.)

And finally, during the war arc, Sasuke gets the truth from his reanimated brother. He's pushed back toward sanity, and with perhaps his first independent thought in a decade, decides he wants to know the full story before going any further. So he gets the full story. He learns about the origins of the ninja system, about everything that made the village elders tell his brother to kill their entire family. And he decides he wants to make a new system. One where he'll be the Lelouch of the world, ruling through fear, so nobody ever does something like that again. Where he is the object of the world's hate.

And then Naruto teaches him friendship through a brofist so spectacular it destroys a part of his arm, and he goes off to learn more about the world and himself.

 Sasuke is essentially a character with little to no guidance. Sasuke is an emotional trainwreck with no one to really help him out, except Naruto. And when your biggest asset to positive mental health is a peer and not some adult figure, that is probably a bad thing. Guy spent first half of the story trying to kill his brother and when he finally did, oops, he loved you all along.

So Sasuke just sort of starts doing things with vague concepts attached to them after this. He has no one to really lean on like Naruto and no one to tell him, "No Sasuke, don't go attack the Kage Summit, you will die." His lack of ties with people means there's no one there to stop him really (except of course Naruto) and by the end nobody can physically stop him from continuing to make bad decisions... except Naruto... as usual. It's this lack of voice of reason for Sasuke that plays a major role in him being, well, Sasuke.
 

...that kinda got longwinded. But there's my character analysis on Sasuke. Screwed up kid who makes dumb decisions, and is thus a fantastic character.

(and really, emo? Emos whine. Sasuke went out to solve his problems. By killing people, sure, but still. That ain't emo.)

edit: FUCK I FORGOT THE BEST PART

I liked the Bort movie, but the new manga's artwork is atrocious.

Those are supposed to be Sakura and Hinata.

The artwork is molten sewage.

10 hours ago, Moby said:

I believe the problem with Naruto was that, after a while, noone knew who the bad guy was, then everything began to scalate to ridiculous levels, ending with a fight with

  Reveal hidden contents

god itself.

 

Then they started Boruto, because its a cow worth milking, and threw most of that into the treeeeeeeeeesh.

 

And talking about ridiculous scaling, I still have no idea what the fuck is going on in Toriko.

I mean, when you talk about power levels...
 

Quote

 

There once appeared a Nine-Tailed Demon Fox. With a single swipe of its tails, it could crumble mountains and create tsunamis.

 

- literally the first page of the manga

Fifteen years later, and people are still complaining that it actually lived up to the hype.

8 hours ago, Rynjin said:

Eh, I've got time. But jesus, 231 pages of forum posts.

 

Since you've done a pretty detailed analysis I assume, where would you say the series "went wrong" exactly? I remember really enjoying the first part, and a lot of stuff post time-skip, but somewhere between the introduction of the Akatsuki and where they started to be killed off en masse I remember enjoying it much less. But a lot of stuff happened in between there, so...

It's taken me nearly nine months to get to chapter 430, and there's 700 chapters + the ten-chapter gaiden manga, so... yeah.

That said, I think it's a better manga than quite a few people give it credit for. I don't want to clog this particular thread, but there's stuff that was foreshadowed years in advance, and the character development flows a lot better when it's taken as a whole rather than on a weekly/monthly basis. I like Naruto more now than I did when I started the thing (at the time, it was primarily to clear up rampant fanon).

Shameless plug for a thing I'm doing over on Spacebattles, a comprehensive reread of the Naruto manga.

Yes, I'm insane. 

I know almost nobody here follows baseball, but this is one of the funniest stories ever.

White Sox star pitcher Chris Sale didn't want to wear the throwback jerseys tonight, so he cut them up with a knife in the clubhouse so nobody could wear them. This is hysterical. 

also tomorrow's my last day (for real this time) at the country club

Jeurys what even are you doing

Oh my god, IV training is now a thing.

oh and some new Pokemon

it took me two god damned weeks to log in with the same password i've been using on this forum for three years what the hell

also how do you not have a reaction image bookmark folder

Please tell me I'm not the only one who was watching game 7 tonight. Holy shit, what a game.