cerebralhawks

Movies: Maquia: When the Promised Flower Blooms, A Silent Voice

Series: Your Lie in April, Angel Beats!, Sword Art Online: Mother’s Rosary (last 7 episodes of season 2), Clannad

It’s ironic because the first time around, I would have had to drive 8 hours to see it. Now it’s playing 2 hours away, but only the English dub. And I’ve seen it over 50 times. What my youngest niece did with Frozen and Kpop Demon Hunters, I did with 君の名は。. So I really don’t need to see it again.

Also, it was filmed in 1080p. The 4K version is an upscale.

Lastly, I don’t hate the English dub, it’s just such a quintessentially Japanese story… I prefer the Japanese dub with no subs. They get in the way. Though I have some really good fansubs I quite like.

I remember back in the day, you could edit the context menu. They should bring that back.

I just use Plex. It shows me the next episode on the top. If I stop watching for (I think) 60 days, it drops off Now Playing, but it still remembers if I go back to it, jumping automatically to the next episode.

If you’re on Android, I used to like SeriesGuide. I haven’t used it in over a decade, though, but it came up in conversation and I looked it up, and it still exists. Hasn’t been ported to iOS yet, though, but IIRC it was completely offline.

The MAL stuff is hit or miss because MAL itself is hit or miss.

When you get into online stuff, you tend to run into online problems. Like I know some Sword Art Online fans want the fourth season merged in with the third season. They don’t dislike the fourth season, they just don’t think it should be called the fourth season. They hashed this out on The TVDB, the site that all these other sites pull from, and they lost. Then you have issues like with Bungo Stray Dogs where the first two seasons are put together for some reason — so they’re not always right. But, if you use an online service, you kinda gotta play by their rules, so if those rules become an issue… well… their way or the highway.

You could always just use a note in your phone. I have this app called Hindsight that is kind of a habit tracker. Just for fun, whenever I watch a movie, or finish a video game, or finish a show/season, I log it there. It’s not connected to any metadata provider, it’s just a dumb app that tracks how many times you do something. This is on iOS, but there are tons of these habit tracker apps out there. You can even vibe code them — I don’t endorse vibe coding, but I fell for one first. Apparently whatever AI made them the app couldn’t figure out things like dark mode or other stuff people were requesting and finally they just admitted they vibe coded the thing to make some money. So that is an option, I suppose.

Looked into this, it looks awesome. Plex is meeting my needs and I own a Plex Pass, but if I didn’t, I’d probably be running this. The server works on Macs, too. Not all of them do.

Unnecessary. It adds compatibility with another service. I looked into it a few weeks ago. I forget the details, but I looked into this and thought, oh I’ll never need that. The $5.99 gives you all the features you need for all devices.

Somebody did and I have it saved in my notes. It’s not the same questions you’re asking. But I got a good explanation. This was after the first or second season. Before the last one, where Gojo fought in the subway. It gave me a rough understanding of the basis of the show’s universe and rules.

Man, I don’t get most of JJK. I watch because my wife enjoys it, and even she doesn’t get everything. The guy who wrote it is kind of a madman from what I’ve heard, and it makes sense to him and apparently the manga explains it better than the anime does.

So I just watch it for the fights, and for the green-haired girl with the glasses. I guess she can be best girl.

That said, this shoulda been the first OP: www.youtube.com/watch?v=PfRTpS58jL8 (fanmade AMV, saw it at a convention, it was a riot)

Navidrome looks like good stuff. If I ever move off of Plex, I’ll absolutely be looking at it. I’m running macOS, but my goal is to buy a gently used Windows PC from a business or something (like they couldn’t upgrade it to Windows 11 or whatever’s after that) and replace Windows with Linux, and use it as a server. My Mac (M2 Pro, 16GB RAM) is more than enough machine to run multiple servers, but I’d rather do that with a dedicated machine running some *nix that I can terminal into from the Mac. Navidrome does run on macOS with minor tweaking that is not above my skill level, but when I set up the server I’ll be looking real hard at alternatives.

Definitely more advanced than what I do! I’ve also been collecting for a long time, and I’ve just been storing the media. I went from Windows/x86-64 to Mac/ARM64 a few years back, and I have kinda limited options that way. I would have just gone to Linux if my computers didn’t die, but at the time, Apple made sense.

I do Apple Music, but, that doesn’t answer the question. I also self-host my music via a Plex server. I got Plex Pass for well under $100 on sale years and years ago. Much harder to recommend now. Plexamp is awesome for music, and I also use Prologue (iOS app) for audiobooks hosted on Plex.

For tagging, I use Mp3Tag and tag manually. It was free on Windows, but the guy wants $30 for it on Mac. It’s a long story as to why, but after he was kind enough to explain it to me… I paid the man. (For my part, I’d used it for free for many years and I got a lot of miles out of it, and still do, and it’s a good, well maintained app from a solo developer.) There are free alternatives. Not so many good ones on Mac (part of why I paid). For album art, I get them from Apple using this handy site (not mine): bendodson.com/projects/itunes-artwork-finder/ — you can use 600px or you can use either 2000px or 3000px, I forget which. I’m good with 600px. I think Apple uses the smaller size for phones and the bigger one for TVs and Macs (especially as iMacs have 5K screens now).

My library might also not be as big as yours is. Plex says I have 14,462 tracks indexed. Maybe those are rookie numbers, I dunno. I pretty much have everything I want. All I’d really want now is to take my Apple Music playlists and download them to m4a 192k or similar. I have a few decade playlists that are like 500-600 songs each (80s, 90s, and 00s).

Sachi being Yui’s mother isn’t in the books. She wasn’t very well described in the books, so when abec (pronounced ab-eh-she) went to draw her, fans pointed out she looked an awful lot like Sachi, and formulated the theory that while both Kirito and Asuna needed the child to bring them together, Asuna really only required that the child be a girl because of her daddy issues (favouring her brother, which was in the books), and she needed to look like Sachi to keep Kirito grounded in his promise to protect others. Yui and Sachi were never meant to be connected in the books (and Sachi’s entire story wasn’t in the first two books, it was a side story in the 8th book, so no way was Yui originally meant to be based on Sachi as she came first). However, someone presented abec with the theory (and maybe Reki Kawahara?) and he/they said they liked the theory but it wasn’t canon. There may even be a note about it (like “I swear I didn’t base her on Sachi”) in the art book.

Yui’s true parent is the Cardinal system, the AI which runs the original death game. But it’s been theorised that she was modeled after Sachi to nail the point to Kirito. Also, Kirito had a younger sister whose relationship with had soured, so he wasn’t gonna take on some random little girl unless he had a good reason to. And he kinda does, he treats her as a stray dog Asuna brought home, but warms to her later. Like “aww how cute, you can keep it if you take care of it” kind of thing. But then he fell hard for her and went to some pretty crazy lengths to protect her and now that’s his child.

But yeah, put Yui and Sachi side by side. Age aside, I think the biggest difference is, one has a mole and the other doesn’t.

They’re remaking the first arc of SAO in movies. If they ever get to Yui, even odds they make that connection. I mean, it was right there all along. Kind of like how Game of Thrones fans had Jon Snow’s parentage figured out way before the reveal (I mean in the books, but also in the show). Except I think that was always intended.

I’ve seen most of those. I didn’t really consider Maquia because it’s a film, though it is an anime.

My problem with Maquia is that you knew what it was going to do right from the start. Elves live forever and they avoid entanglements with the lesser races because losing generation after generation of them as you never age is heartbreaking. Lord of the Rings did it, D&D is based on that, and, like, everything with elves is about the tragedy of their longevity. So when Maquia sets itself as “exiled elf adopts human child,” most of us knew exactly how that was going to play out. And it did.

But the ending still kicks your arse. And I love it. I felt like some of the writing in the middle was weaker, it kinda dragged on and I found it difficult to stay engaged with it. Then the ending happened and I had a feeling it was gonna be one thing, and it was actually a slightly different thing.

My favourite tragic anime would be Sword Art Online if all they adapted was the seventh book, Mother’s Rosary, but since it started as a .hack//SIGN knockoff, it’s not really tragic, it’s just redundant. I say that as a fan — I mean, they’re both a stack of MMO tropes from the 90s. SAO is actually good, though. But you can’t call it tragic because of seven episodes, unless you also mean the stuff about the Moonlit Black Cats (i.e. the true mother of Kirito’s and Asuna’s child), the fate of Eugeo, and a few other things. Anyway, I still think it’s well written, though, more so the books than the anime. (I swear, I’m a fan, I just never drank the Kool-Aid.) (Also, season 4 was fine.) (Really calling down the thunder with that last one. It’s like telling Tokyo Ghoul fans the second season was better than the first.)

But my real favourite tragic anime is Your Lie in April. Does it have the best writing though? I mean, they signpost the ending in the OP of the first cour. That’s not very good. Love it to death though. A close second is Angel Beats!, but the ending kinda confused me a bit. That’s gonna be the honourable mention.

For my money, it’s Clannad, but Clannad isn’t without its problems. First, the name. The anime is named after Enya’s family’s band, over in Ireland, but has nothing to do with them. They thought the band name meant “family” in Gaelic so they rolled with it, and did not change the name when they were corrected. They just doubled down, so we have an anime called Clannad that has nothing to do with Clannad. THIS is Clannad: www.youtube.com/watch?v=4zHTcxVjX0I Yeah, you’ve heard it before. I think it’s a law in Eire (Ireland), if you make a movie about Irish people, it has to have Theme From Harry’s Game by Clannad in it. You get an exception if you use another Clannad song, an Enya song, or a U2 song. I’m sure that’s a law. Okay, anyway, there’s also this kinda bullshit thing the second season has going on that makes no sense. And the ending is dumb. But they tried. It was based on a visual novel (one of those point and click games where you try to get your character to bang the girl you think is the hottest), except it was sad. If you ditch the ending and you ignore the robot stuff, yeah, it’s pretty solid.

If you’re not willing to make those concessions, it’s Angel Beats!. Your Lie in April had the better ending, and probably has the best ending of any anime, ever, at least since Sword Art Online got a third season. We can’t say best show ever, because Six Feet Under is still a thing. I mean holy shit, if you wanna get wrecked and don’t mind live action, the first 55-ish episodes won’t hurt you much, but those last few, and especially the last 10 minutes of the last one… I’m still not okay hearing that Sia song. (Though it’s awesome and I love how they did the video.)

Light started out with such good intentions though. Imagine if he existed now, and had access to the Trump-Epstein files… I’m just saying.

I expected garlic to get called out here, but I did not expect that outcome.

I eat a primarily carnivorous diet — I need protein and plant protein will not suffice, for my particular condition (gastric sleeve patient) — with a little bit of carbs/starch. I need more vegetables, and I should target more fibre, but meat is what I go for. Some dairy but I don’t care much for cow milk. I’ll eat cheese, but the cream in my coffee is oat “milk”. I know it’s not milk, but it’s my creamer of choice. (Traditional creamer doesn’t have much cow milk in it, either. It’s mostly oils. Like your “French Vanilla” and “Caramel Macchiato”.

I’d rather they just do a cameo. Doesn’t matter which Trek show, but have the away team walk by a TARDIS. That’s all you need to do to show that the crossover could happen, but get people talking about it, and most will soon realise why it shouldn’t.

There is no justification for lethal force for stealing diapers. The lost profit is a rounding error for the store. Not even that, their prices actually account for some shoplifting. Prices don’t go down when they catch a shoplifter, they’re just double-dipping.

Black shouldn’t matter; it’s a sorry state of affairs that this is a problem in {current_year}.

Sell your account. Let another astroturfing company mislead Reddit.

To answer your question: it’ll take time. After 100 downvotes it stops counting them against you. So your efforts will only drive engagement and make them more money.

I self-hosted Plex and Jellyfin on Windows. It’s fine. But as others have said, Windows machines tend to be too power-hungry. Honestly I think that’s more a symptom of x86-64. Changing the OS from Windows to Linux does not magically change the power needs of the hardware. (However, Linux tends to demand less of the hardware, especially if there’s no GUI.)

I now self-host Plex on a Mac mini (M2 Pro, 16GB RAM/512GB SSD). M2 Pro in Intel speak is like i5 as in, it’s the “next one up” and “good enough for most people” but not the low entry into the platform (M# base or i3), though I’d say M4/M5 base is better than M2 Pro. Just like going 2-3 generations newer, the i3 gets closer to and may surpass an older i5.

There’s a reason self-hosters prefer Linux, but I’d think it would be more about the hardware than the software. Windows is problematic because you’re opening ports and Windows is a target due to its massive market share. Mac is kinda (/sorta /not really) UNIX based, and Linux is, well, it’s Linux; neither is bulletproof, but both are better than Windows because they’re not really being targeted. That said, the MacBook Neo and Mac Mini going for $500 if you’re a student, $600 otherwise is getting a lot of people sick of Microslop’s BS to switch, and the Neo in particular is forcing the PC market to get competitive as macOS market share is rising — this also makes it more of a target. You’re always at some risk online and a little common sense goes a long way.

I don’t see how the car park revenue is irrelevant. But, we’ll table that — neither of us are winning anyone over given the context the OP framed this shit in. Call it “agree to disagree.”

You’re 100% right about the maintenance of the panels, though. I feel like there’s probably an easy way to do it, like have an access ramp and a way to get a golf cart up there. But, it’s a stretch and you made a good point, so that point goes to you.

Side note: Anyone know why indented lists drop the first letter? I’m not seeing the “Y” that should be at the start of those bulleted items, or the bullets, dashes, or numbers. (I still knew what you meant. I’m bitching about the tech that runs this site.)

Okay. How so?

I get there’s an up-front cost of building more stuff. You have the solar panels in both pictures, but the one on the left has a car park as well. I also said they can lease/rent out the spaces. Which means it’s less expensive over time as those costs pay for themselves.

I think they’re saying the picture is wrong. Assuming you have the same amount of space, placing solar panels on the ground, or paving the ground and putting the solar panels on the roof of a car park, assuming also the same number of solar panels, it should generate about the same amount of energy. What do the solar panels care if they’re a few meters off the ground? Plus, the car park can lease or rent its spots and generate revenue that way as well.

That was specifically stated for the Steam Controller, but I wouldn’t be surprised if they extended it to others.

Some gamers have really deep pockets, but most of us don’t.

Guarantee it’s scalpers.

And people will pay them $1200, $1500 or more. Crazy, eh? I would not expect scalpers to jump on the more expensive one that fast, but they must know something we don’t.

Let’s try to waste their money and not pay them anything?

Yes but more like Fallout Shelter (which is like FTL but from the side).

I get why you went to FTL, because it’s in space and you’re on a ship. Maybe Fallout Shelter was inspired by FTL?

But nah, this is more like Fallout Shelter in space, maybe with some elements of FTL because rather than having a base where characters are added and must go out for resources, the base moves and can’t really get new characters (or maybe it can, Neelix, Seven, and Kes came from the Delta Quadrant, so ostensibly they could get more) but still sends people out on missions.

Because the point was the moral question.