You know I haven’t seen a whole lot of anime, so sue me, but I’ll kind of agree with this take. They’re both pretty good anime, and probably even great, and an easy recommendation, right. At the same time, they really don’t inspire me in any way, or bring up like, interesting philosophical subject matter really at all, which are things that are value in media more than like. Cool fight scenes, and an accessible story.

Also, an aside, but these shows don’t have that great of fight scenes. They have pretty good “action”, I guess, pretty good animation, but fight scenes? I wouldn’t say they’re well written or choreographed, they’re about as basic as you can get. FMAB gets some points for having inventive solutions that crop up occasionally as a result of the setting’s alchemy and real chemical reactions and stuff, but that’s about it. Otherwise both of these shows are kind of extremely basic when it comes to their action. Both in the way that it’s conventionally written, but also in their direction and choreography. I think stylistically I might be opposed to anime generally, in this regard, as a medium that has, almost inherently, no limitations (being animation, right), and as a kind of, general style, that tends to place the setup basically right before the payoff happens. Rather than sort of gradually building up to more well-founded action scenes. In action choreography, maybe I just have kind of, infamously high standards for this stuff, or have different tastes from the norm, cause every time I’ve seen “great anime action” it’s always like, the most incomprehensible, stiffly animated, impact frame yutapon cube sakuga nonsense you could ever imagine.

I dunno, am I insane for the take the the vast majority of action choreography is better done when it’s grounded into an actual physicality, and implicit physical ruleset, rather than like, appreciating the tradeoff that comes with not doing that, the tradeoff of spectacle and absurdity?

You know, it’s been pretty good so far, I’d even say, really good, probably, and it has an advantage over FMA:B in that I don’t find the comedy kind of, grating and annoying, and I find it actually funny sometimes, even if it’s mostly just weird and kind of pervy or whatever. Not like, fanservicey, but it does feel like the comedy is just, sex-based, or something? I dunno. I might just be like overblowing it in my brain.

With all that being said, FMA:B is definitely better still. Frieren has specific arcs, FMA:B just straight up has an overarching story that basically never stops and never really falls into, like, specific sections. I dunno, I guess that’s mostly a pacing thing, but if you were to ask me which one I liked more on that basis, I would say FMA:B every time. There are some other anime that can match that pacing, right, but most of the time they end up being kind of older more adult-oriented animation, and they don’t really have as broad of appeal as FMA:B, so I think it still takes the GOAT position.

Frieren is really good though, I will give it that.

Always wondered why those aluminum bottles I see sometimes with screw on tops are so rare, I feel like they should be used way more. Recyclability of an aluminum can, convenience and form factor of a bottle.

Whoever keeps throwing in the shit about law enforcement in these stories, which I think was actually a security officer for the embassy, drawing a gun, is doing a pretty good job of distracting from the main issue of what this guy lit himself on fire and died for. Doing a much better job than all the whinging about how he was mentally ill, and how this won’t change anything, and how there’s no clear cause, that mainstream news outlets are doing when they cover this type of stuff, if they cover it at all.

I would also like to kind of point out here, that “this won’t change anything, this guy was mentally ill, he killed himself for nothing”, is really only true if you decide it to be true. We get to decide whether or not this motivates us to do something or not. We get to decide whether or not we let this affect us. Whether or not we do something, to make sure this doesn’t happen again, you know? And that’s mostly, in my mind, the purpose of this kind of protest.

Maybe it makes the institutions think about what they’re doing, probably not, since, if they were gonna think that, they should’ve probably thought that about the 20,000 or so palestinians that have been killed. This protest is mostly engineered to get you mad, and sad, and to make you, the viewer, think about why this is happening, and think about what you can do to stop it. Not just deflecting immediately to whether or not it was effective, because by doing so, you let it not be as effective.

Brings to mind the discourse against, really any form of protest that I’ve seen. You could take the george floyd protests, for example. So, sure, the government throws in agent provocateurs, in order to turn what would otherwise be peaceful protests, which would shut down any traffic into and out of the city, and would choke off any economic activity (puts pressure on businesses, utilities, puts pressure on local government, which needs to please these people who don’t really care about the protest but want things to go back to normal).

But by doing so, right, by causing those passive forms of damage, but also by causing active forms of damage, say, burning a big box store down, right, the public showcases that, if a certain legal decision to, say, let derek chauvin off, occurs, then there will be potentially more protests and more destruction, which provides great incentive against that decision occurring.

Now, in this case, there’s not as clear of a process, because there’s not as clear of repercussions if they decide to do nothing. About the only thing that might happen is that this might happen again, which, might, by some process of media coverage, put enough pressure on politicians to cause this to stop, if it becomes a political issue. The same thing is happening with mass shootings, which aren’t a greatly impacting issue, by the numbers, right, they’re much less than that of road deaths, heart disease, other forms of gun violence.

But they are so horrifying to the american public and to really anyone of moral conscience, that they should serve as a clear marker that something is wrong, and something needs to change. Serial killers create a similar effect. It’s almost like a kind of terrorism, using that word without judgement, here. That’s the power of these protests. We’ve already seen it spread across a bunch of news media, even though it’s being reported about as poorly as you’d expect.

I’m not particularly sure that repeat incidents would do any good, and I think I’d generally be opposed to that, as should anyone, but, an instance of self-immolation is what caused the arab spring. This sort of thing isn’t ineffective, I think it does a disservice to aaron bushnell to say otherwise.

If you want to stop this sort of thing from occurring in the first place, you should really try to understand why it was happening, instead of brushing it aside.

Damn, this place just kinda is reddit 2.0, huh? You’re still gonna get the same fundamental person posting something to the wrong board, ragebait, to quick kind of snippit, to misunderstanding kind of cycle. If you post any, small or large, fraction of your worldview, you will inevitably get someone taking it out of context, misunderstanding it, or extrapolating off of it, substituting their own worldview for yours because you didn’t provide your entire worldview in an entire reddit comment that they could just kind of piecemeal respond to one by one rather than kind of comprehending it as a whole and then actually responding to it. Regardless of whether or not you provide all of it, even, people consume it piecemeal, they’re incapable of doing otherwise.

My brain is so fried, I fuckin hate the internet so much. Do we want to change this outcome, or is this outcome actually good? I don’t fucking know, google probably don’t know either. If you hit me with the 50/50 abuse stats, cause the men don’t report abuse, then I can hit you with the oh well men are more capable of like causing financial or physical harm with their abuse because of power dynamic. And then you can hit me with oh well that’s kind of a fucked up collectivist analysis to refer to this that way because that’s evaluating every group as a whole, and also that might not be correct even. And then I’m gonna hit you with the oh well I thought we were prescribing a collective top down kind of solution based on this bifurcation here. And then you’re gonna be like, oh, well, I thought you were kind of saying that men just don’t deserve help in these circumstances because that’s what your position was advocating for. And then I’m gonna be like nah not really but I can kinda see where you were coming from because the post is about how like oh this is an unreasonable decision and I’m saying well hold up maybe it’s reasonable.

This is a false dichotomy, is what I think. There are no real trolley problems. Nobody’s help has to come at someone else’s expense. There are only mutually beneficial solutions. Other solutions aren’t real solutions on the basis that they are harmful. I have to believe this or else everything kind of falls apart. I dunno, maybe you believe there are no solutions, only tradeoffs, like that libbed up POS thomas sowell.

I dunno, could we not just, probably figure out the gender of the person making this google search, and tailor their results, like we do for fucking everything else? Could we not probably just expect that if people need marriage counseling, or need some sort of domestic abuse hotline, they’ll search “marriage counseling”, or “domestic abuse help”, or something like that? Can we maybe think that, I dunno, if someone is having a major episode with domestic abuse, maybe the police should be able to help them with that, maybe their support network should be able to help them with that, maybe google shouldn’t be the thing that’s expected to solve all their problems?

But then, if I say all that, make those points, then oh, I’m living in fairy land, and my solutions are unrealistic, and it’s easier to try to ask a theoretical google search engine programmer to fix this very minor problem that is realistically just a kind of band-aid on the buckling crack on the face of the hoover dam. Every fuckin thing affects every other fuckin thing. You ask me about this minor thing, and instead of talking about this minor thing, we gotta blow it up into how life sucks for men and shit cause they can’t report domestic abuse, and that’s just one facet of how men are getting fucked up by everything. I dunno man! I dunno how to solve that! Gender inequality! Can’t we just hit the big red button that says “solve gender inequality” and that will immediately solve everything, obviously, right? Like c’mon, it’s so easy, obviously.

This kinda shit is just annoying cause it feels like nobody has a really good framework for filing this kinda shit away. Oh, yeah, men have problems with overly sealing their emotions, cause we can just kinda, broadly gesture towards patriarchy on that one, and then kind of just provide reasons for why patriarchy exists, and then kind of extrapolate based on that shared establishing on the problem, into what some possible solutions might be. Like instead we’re just gonna spend a million eons debating whether or not patriarchy exists in the first place for the same reason that everyone can call some shit woke, and then two people hear two wildly different things even though the word might have the same literal meaning.

I say patriarchy, one person hears “oh the institution that kind of benefits all men broadly” and one person hears “oh the bullshit idea that there’s an institution that benefits all men broadly”. I’m like what are we talking about, do I have to get into pay gaps, and then I have to get into specific studies on specific pay gaps, and then as we kind of dynamically litigate this argument it’s going to kind of come about that oops this study has problems, dismissed, oops this other study also has problems, dismissed, forever on, eternally, and therefore, my perspective is right, instead of us all just kind of admitting we don’t know shit and then kind of like turning it back to, well, what would be the best thing to do in absence of clear evidence one way or the other?

I dunno man, I have internet brainworms and the peanut gallery is living in my brain rent free. I’m just tired that everything has to be an argument and not an actual conversation where people are asking curious questions in good faith. Welcome to life, though. Don’t let the doctor slap your ass on the way out the birth canal or whatever.

I think it tends to be from a certain kind of framing of abuse, a certain kind of mentality. It’s the same one that has the reaction to cyberbulling of “oh, you should just log off”, type of thing. It’s an oversimplification that basically only conceives of abuse as being as a result from a kind of strictly physical and obvious power imbalance, rather than thinking of abuse as being a more complicated psychological phenomena. You don’t even need a scenario in which a woman is like, trained by bruce lee, or anything, you just need an idea that women are capable of somewhat basic psychological manipulation, and you maybe need a man that’s vulnerable to it.

Damn, dead as hell in here, huh? Weird, I guess anime’s kind of mainstream enough by now that it’s kinda out of the purview of your federated lemmy nerds. Motherfuckers care a whole lot about linux and leftist politics, shit’s crazy.

Anyways, I found this episode to be pretty good, pretty decent. Unlike a couple of the past episodes, I didn’t notice any real stand out sequences of animation, like in the episode where laios goes into the painting, and they have the building joke where he eats a bunch, or the episode with the cockatrice, where they do a double reflection in the cockatrice’s eye, in a really impressive shot. Mirroring the artistic progression of the manga’s author and artist, I feel like this series is maybe a tad amateurish in terms of direction, like when they have the joke where they zoom in on marcille’s face, and then you can noticeably tell that they’ve literally zoomed in on the image, as it has compression.

But still, it feels like, at least with the shots I’m seeing, there’s a good amount of freedom animators are getting in terms of artistic direction, maybe, which kind of gives the series a good energy overall. For this episode, I’d maybe think of the shot with the squid over senshi, and that sequence, as being the most impressive of the episode, but it doesn’t really stand out all that much relative to the rest of the series.

I’ve read the manga, so nothing here is a surprise to me, right, but at the same time, I kind of find it weird how much, in hindsight, a lot of the series at large is just the author kind of like, wheel spinning, and how late the plot actually kicks off and picks up. How much of the plot just sort of, is episodic, and then cuts in for maybe one or two episodes, and then cuts back to being a dungeon crawl. You can definitely tell this is, maybe not her first solo work, I dunno, but you can tell how it’s kind of rough around the edges and lacks a lot of clear plot direction here.

The pacing feels weird, for a group of people who are kind of trying to rush down the dungeon as quickly as possible to save someone. It doesn’t get super insane at any points, right, but it does strike me as the mark of kind of amateurish plot direction, maybe. Without totally outstanding animation all the time to save it, and without being surprised by the novelty of the different takes on fantastical monsters, and, more impressively, the groundedness of those designs, I kind of find myself without a lot left.

Of course, none of this is actually a real downside, because that’s just not the focus of the series, really. There’s not a large focus on action, there’s not a large focus on like, a complex plot, the series is just kind of supposed to be a cute comfy dungeon crawl where we see some cool stuff.

I think I also kind of find the senshi-marcille character clashing to be a little bit repetitive as a character beat, and it’s not really funny enough to me to carry it, except for maybe when senshi has his kind of sperg rage moments, and sunwong cho gets a moment to do some voice acting. I think some very basic, like, plot direction for that, would probably entail marcille showing senshi that magic takes work too, just in a different form than cooking-

(how do spoilers work on lemmy? why can I not seem to get it to work correctly? idk)

I would say that I think a lot of manga kind of, has characterization baked into internal trains of character thought, that aren’t necessarily included in lots of anime, and I would say that a lot of manga gags that will work for a chuckle or two, because of a crazy, hastily drawn expression, don’t really end up working in anime, since the appeal is how unprofessional the image can look. If you don’t include that stuff, or if you include it poorly, it ends up draining your anime characters of a lot of their characterization. I think dungeon meshi, as an anime and as a manga, is doing that pretty well. It stands out relative to other stuff I’ve seen, anyways, in my admittedly limited experience.

Despite my complaints, I’m still gonna watch it, of course. It’s not really required that an anime adaptation necessarily adds a lot, compared to a manga, since that’s kind of the whole point of an adaptation, right. It’s just a medium shift, but I do find myself wanting a little more overall, as a manga reader. Not a lot of replay value, in this one, for me, is what I’m finding.

I dunno, I’m definitely interested to know the experience of a new, fresh anime-only watcher, for sure.

It encourages violence, it desensitizes us,

We can understand why that’s like, not a very concrete justification to be against espousing violence, right? I also find it weird, right, that we’re doing this step-around thing, where you’re calling everyone out for the hypocrisy of, oh, well, people are against this violence, but they’re not against this violence? Have you maybe considered that the two forms of violence are distinct? Perhaps that the two forms of violence are actually not similar? That people have reasons for, say, wanting violence against one party, but not another?

That’s what they’re commenting about. You say “it’s either all okay or none of it’s okay” because it encourages violence, right, but, I am giving you an opportunity to show your work, when it comes to this very basic claim, upon which rests the rest of your argument.

what if we just put them all on an island and then blew it up immediately

None of the idiots who brag about driving a semi have done any of that either.

That’s definitely not true. People can still have a self-image as a kind of asshole truck driver, and also still use their truck. People make this argument, that somehow these kind of aesthetic qualities have some sort of bearing on who does or doesn’t use their truck, and to me, it just kind of comes across like the only people who are allowed to drive trucks are the people who are acting in socially acceptable ways.

The argument is less about the people who use their truck, and more about the relative frequencies of use for everyone generally. Most people would be better covered by a rental. And then we could also make the argument that our development patterns would encourage the use of trucks far too much anyways.

Edit: wait, did you mean to type semi, or hemi? I kind of assumed hemi, but if you mean semi that kind of changes everything and I don’t know how to respond to that.

I don’t really know if any of that holds true if I already have the game in my possession. Maybe if it was theoretically the case that future software was harder to pirate for some additional drm insanity, but then the neat thing is that games that are just released are harder to pirate and tend to never be on sale, so that’s a kind of automatic balance. Also

There is also the fact that others see you using it and are encouraged to not using alternatives.

what do you mean by “alternatives”? alternatives to piracy? alternatives to the games people want to play?

If you even use the software you are supporting them.

How?