Top Gun

I was hoping for "bukkake magnet."

I've loved Roald Dahl's books since grade school, and I deeply respect him, but he was dead wrong about the 70s adaptations. Gene Wilder's performance is one of the all-time greats, and the movie manages to be both heartwarming and really goddamn creepy at turns, which is just right. I didn't even have any interest in seeing Depp's version.

Please tell me you're not just shitting us.

That seems like it would have been a colossally stupid decision. Demographics issues aside, the first few parts of Crystal were absolutely savaged by critics, and for good reason: the artwork was terrible, and despite being a much closer adaptation of the original manga, it lacked much of the charm of its 90s predecessor. (I saw more than one fan argue that the earlier series was a marked improvement on Naoko Takeuchi's original work.) I can't see any way that it would have retained long-term interest.

If you're out of college and still getting plastered enough to post like this, then you have a drinking problem.

I really can't help but wonder how different things would have played out if the series had been given a 12- or 13-episode run. I mean this finale absolutely demanded a two-parter, but even beyond that, just a couple more episodes would have gone a long way towards fleshing out Jack and Ashi's relationship, or the build-up to the final battle, and most definitely some more to the epilogue. It's still far better than having no conclusion at all, and the first 6 or 7 episodes were the show at its all-time best, but a bit more time to play with would have put the entire thing completely over-the-top amazing. I wasn't able to verbalize it earlier, but you're absolutely right here. I think this would have felt like far less of a gut-punch if there had been some more explicit moment of catharsis. Not to belabor the comparison too much, but the main reason I didn't mind Gurren's ending nearly as much as some is that, in the end, we see that Simon and Nia have come to terms with the inevitable, and her final moments involve them expressing their love for each other. Ashi's? She says something like "I never existed" and then...*poof*. It's horrifically abrupt. And I'm in full agreement with you that actually invoking time paradoxes now at the end of it all, when it's something the show has explicitly never mentioned either in its original run or this final season, feels very tonally dissonant.

Toonami almost certainly wouldn't show Sailor Moon even if they had (have?) access to it. It doesn't match the tone or demographic at all.

Dude, stop fucking drinking.

Seriously though, let's make the obvious Gurren comparison: in that case there was no way to see it coming, and no real way to prevent it, so even though it sucks when it happens you (mostly) understand it. And it was greatly aided by the fact that both Simon and Nia accepted it and had come to terms with it. So it hurt, but it was bittersweet, and it somehow fit. But here's what's bugging the hell out of me right now: they never once addressed any of this beforehand. Like, people have fans for years about how if Jack really did go back into the past and kill Aku, it'd mean that everything that happened in the future never happened (including him going back into the past, whee time paradoxes!). But after Jack falls for Ashi, there's never a moment of contemplation about what happens to her if he goes back: even before they knew she was Aku's freaky magical biological daughter, the only reason she was born regardless was because of that cult. And then there's like two seconds between Ashi realizing she can time-travel and opening that portal. No hesitation, not even a breath in-between. And that was sort of cool in the moment, but it meant that what should have been foreseen instead just surprises the hell out of everyone. And what sucks is that I loved the ever-living shit out of the first 80% of the episode. Pretty much every cameo ever? That amazing original intro callback? One huge battle royale against Aku? Jack and Scotsman banter? The POWER OF LOOOOOVE winning out? The final stab? It was fucking amazing. But those last few minutes are leaving a ridiculously bitter taste in my mouth. And one other thing? Her final words were awful.

I am...displeased. And it's fucking killing me to say that. But that doesn't change it.

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My roommate freshman year in college once came back from a toga party (yeah, really) completely plastered and managed to drag his toga across his desk, handily knocking off just about everything on it. The next morning he asked if I'd seen his glasses, and I had to fight to keep a straight face when I told him to check the pile of crap behind his desk.

Zoinks!

What I loved were the claims that it "humanizes being nerdy." And then you watch 10 seconds, hear the first canned laugh at someone mentioning they play D&D, and realize no, it's every bit a piece of fucking shit. Seriously, the fact that people keep paying Chuck Lorre to make shows is nauseating.

Just gonna call Poe's Law on this entire conversation.

...valuable? Again, what could a civilization that was capable of large-scale interstellar travel possibly want here? Nothing about the Earth's composition is particularly unique. There would be literally thousands, if not millions, of other solar systems between us and any far-flung travelers, full of far more accessible resources. Hell, just in our own solar system, we could mine the shit out of the asteroid belt and other terrestrial bodies for millions of years. In the grand scheme of things, to paraphrase Carl Sagan, our planet is an insignificant speck of dust, floating on a sunbeam. Again, the Fermi paradox. If these galaxy-spanning civilizations really exist as you say, then where the hell are they? This is not how proof works. If you make an extraordinary claim, the burden of proof is on you to provide testable evidence for it, and at least attempt to discount current explanations. And no, a simple "I saw some lights moving around!" does not constitute testable evidence.

I haven't watched non-anime [as] in years, outside of Venture Bros. premieres, and I didn't even get through the last season. One or two shows like Rick and Morty seem fun, but I'm not going to go out of my way to watch them. The rest of it's just sort of a general white noise of bleh.

Maybeeee because there's no evidence whatsoever that chiropractic works any better than a placebo? Or that it's founded on any number of pseudo-scientific claims? Turns out if you want to practice actual medicine, those things are kind of important.

Yeah man, evidence-based science and rational thinking are sooooo dull!

Not remotely. You can definitely transmute gold atoms from lead (or more easily, bismuth) using a particle accelerator, but you'll literally produce no more than a handful, and probably won't even be able to pick out the non-radioactive isotope gold-197. This article cites a production cost of a quadrillion dollars per ounce. So yeah, go dig it up.

No, you see, I'm an honest person who doesn't try to bullshit other people with complete woo.

...you really don't understand the point of the Drake equation, then. It was a series of conjectures designed to generate discussion on the steps required to detect a hypothetical advanced extraterrestrial civilization, not a testable scientific formula. Most of the values used have no real locked-down range and thus produce a result that varies by many orders of magnitude depending on the initial assumptions used. I'd advise you read into the Fermi paradox, or look up the fantastic sci-fi short story They're Made Out of Meat. So I guess you'd treat yourself for cancer if you happened to contract it, then?

My mom used to watch all of the CBS lineup (Bold and the Beautiful, Young and the Restless, As the World Turns, Guiding Light) when she was stay-at-home and raising us. Hell, I got to know a bunch of the prominent characters by proxy. Would go gay for Victor Newman.

That'll do.

So hyped for this. Lupin is life. And most of the fantastic Part II Geneon cast is back for it as well.