Top Gun

I haven't had the chance to play it yet, but my mental jury's still out on this whole ticket system, and what the ramifications could be. (Doesn't help that it's a bit confusing.) There's some fairly significant backlash against it going on, which I guess is expected.

Ha...almost everyone on my friends list from these parts is on Steam right now.

It's not short by any stretch of the imagination, but Legend of the Galactic Heroes. It's space opera at its absolute finest.

It really is one of the top two or three English dubs ever made, so you're going to want to go with that. I enjoyed Lain myself, but I can see how it wouldn't be everyone's cup of tea. Even among the SRSLY-DEEP type of anime, it comes across as extremely...abstract. It really isn't so much about character development as it is exploring a few general themes. It was also something of a trend-setter, so there were a number of series that followed it that used some of its elements in a more concrete manner.

I got to see MD Geist (and its sequel!) once. I don't think my brain ever quite recovered.

All of my yes

You are a mad genius, sir.

It really begins!

Oooh. I wonder if that has anything to do with the mysterious stranger who's cut of that old group picture. A new map! And new weapons! Before I even finished getting the last set of weapons! Woo!

I am vaguely interested in Madoka, but quite honestly, either of the two main flavors of moeblob (cute girls doing cute things just for the sake of being cute, or milquetoast male protagonist surrounded by a mostly-broken harem) hold direct negative appeal to me. My preferences on entertainment in general value good storywriting above all else, and almost to a rule, these sorts of series forgo that in favor of pandering to specific audience fetishes. Like, I know multiple people in here have praised the Key VN adaptations, and I haven't seen them myself, but I have read a decent amount about them, enough to make me feel like they generate their "feels" via overt emotional manipulation, instead of having them arise more naturally as the story progresses. There are several series I could point to that pull off this natural progression brilliantly, but it isn't something I think I'd find in most moe-centered series. Even ignoring all of that, I just can't wrap my head around the usual art style. Girls with eyes that cover more than a third of their faces? *shudder*

It is pretty damn depressing when you look at those season preview images and see half of them that seem to be populated by complete moeblobs. I mean, no offense if you like that stuff or anything, but I don't think it's possible for me to have less interest in it.

One of these years I'll get back on here and get a claim set up. I do have a question for Abadoss about the use of a certain plugin. My "home" multi server is planning on starting over with a fresh new map as soon as the upgrade to 1.3 is set up. A few of the regulars, myself included, are pretty bummed about this, because the current map goes back more than a year to the 1.4 beta days, and a lot of people have sunk who knows how many hours into it. (Sure, the spawn area's a mess, and there are several different meandering rail systems, but that's part of the charm!) I suggested that we could set up MultiVerse on the server, since that would let us have a brand-new map, while still keeping the old map around for people who wanted to keep building there. However, the server admin shot it down, saying that said plugin would be a huge resource hog and a royal pain to set up/maintain. I was wondering what sort of experience you've had using it on the OCR server.

What most intrigues me about those movies is seeing how the years have changed Anno's perspective on the characters. He's in a far better place mentally than when he made the original TV series, so I wonder how that will affect the ending of the whole thing.

Death & Rebirth (or I guess really just the "Death" part) is largely a recap of the original TV series, albeit in a different order, and with a bit of extra footage thrown in. Some of that extra footage wound up being in the "director's cut" of several of the later TV episodes...21-24, I think. The "Rebirth" part of that movie is actually the first part of End of Evangelion, which serves as either a replacement for, or a companion to, the final two episodes of the TV series, depending on who you ask. Right now, Anno is in the process of directing a series of four movies, collectively called Rebuild of Evangelion, which are essentially a fresh take on the franchise. I haven't seen them yet, but from what I've heard, they start out fairly similar to the TV series but wind up greatly diverging from its story. Yeah, all of this is about as much of a mess as the original series' story was.

My opinion on Evangelion has flip-flopped a few times in the years since I first saw it, but I think I've finally settled on it. The thing is, I think Eva is fascinating if viewed from the standpoint of looking at what a director suffering from severe clinical depression (which Anno was at the time) can produce. On the animation/music side of things, there are some great individual scenes and sequences. But narratively...it's an utter and complete mess. It feels like Anno never settled on what sort of series he was trying to create, and the latter half of the series infamously jumps off the rails as a result. Most of the main cast aren't so much "characters" as archetypes of individual psychological disorders, which makes them nigh-impossible to relate to. (Really, the fact that there's so much Rei fandom despite her having any personality for all of two minutes in the entire series is frightening.) The constant religious symbolism is obnoxious, though I think that's mostly because so many fans read so much false meaning into it. And in the end, you're kind of left wondering if there was a point to most of what you've seen. Was it influential in the overall anime landscape? Definitely. Is it worth watching? Probably, if for no other reason than to form your own opinion on it. Would I ever label it a "great" series in terms of actual enjoyment? Nope. Some Eva fans would probably lynch me for saying so, but if you want to see "Eva done right," try RahXephon. Also...recommending Trinity Blood, yet bashing Bebop and Eureka seveN? What is this I don't even.

Besides a lot of people often hanging out on Ichi, from what I can see, most of the regulars have been busy checking out their Summer Sale spoils over the past week.

The Strange Huntsman is found only in the #40 "salvaged" crates, which are extremely rare drops. All the Stranges from that crate (and #30 too) are very expensive as a result of that rarity, and since the Huntsman seems to be the most desirable of them, it fetches the highest price. Hell, I managed to sell a #40 crate by itself for 7 keys, which I eventually used to buy a Bill's; the poor sap who opened the crate got something that was only worth 3 keys, so I definitely came out ahead. The vast majority of Stranges go for a Refined or two, or even less, so most of the time you'd wind up losing money by opening them. There are a few Stranges, like the Minigun or Grenade Launcher, that go for a few keys, but you'd only have a 1 in 6 shot or so of getting them if you opened their respective crates. Pretty much the only way you'd be guaranteed to profit off a Strange crate is by getting a 40 to drop and then opening it, since even buying a 30 or 40 is crazy expensive.

It's a Flipped Trilby with...I think it's Vivid Plasma. He hasn't played the game for several months now, so I should really get him to lend it to me. According to ye olde spreadsheet, somewhere around 15 keys, which at current prices is around 37 Refined. So yeah, it's a hefty purchase.

I was violently jealous at first myself, but then I realized that I don't really give much of a shit about unusuals, so he's welcome to it.

And my brother opens a single crate with a free key and gets an unusual. This game is fun like that.

Just saw this, but there's a group of OCR-related peeps that play L4D2 pretty regularly, and you'd be more than welcome to jump in with us for a round or two at some point. It's definitely the sort of game that's way more fun if you're fooling around with friends; Versus mode is pretty much too broken to be played as srs bzns.

Looks like the burned objects are no more. I was hoping to make it to one more Pile of Ash, but I sure as hell won't miss the crate clutter.

Someone needs to inject a heaping helping of GAR into this thread, stat.

The Pyrovision options are very very welcome. I wasn't getting as much weird eyestrain the second time I tried it out, but I'll definitely use it more if I can turn off the border.

I'd do a lot of things I'm not proud of for the Big Kill or Max's Head, though I could really care less about buds except as a means to get said items. I was extremely fortunate recently in getting one of those #40 "salvaged" crates to drop...I traded it for 7 keys, and after saving up a bit of metal, I finally got myself a Bill's.