dr. b

I won't be on the call!

Howdy Rulk. How are you keeping up these days?

I'll have to wait for BNA to hit North American Netflix, judging by how long it took for Carole and Tuesday to be available it will be months yet... but I'll definitely check it out when it pops up there.

Last night I watched episodes 4 and 5 of Gleipnir because I was bored, and then I moved along to a few more episodes of Darwin's Game because I couldn't sleep. It almost felt like I was watching the same show. Obviously the finer details are different, but there are parallels for sure.

I don't think linearity would bother me that much, especially these days when gaming time is limited for me and I don't want to waste time just figuring out where to go next. I'm OK with the game showing me the way in that respect. When I eventually got around to playing FFX a few years ago I enjoyed it and it was a very linear game compared to classic FF games. But I do think I would still much prefer a more classic FF battle system to what you guys have described for XIII and VII Remake.

Finished Id: Invaded last night and moved on to the first episode of Darwin's Game (that was pretty messed up )

I haven't played anything past X and X-2 so I don't really understand what you're referencing in XIII... but I'm assuming it's not good?

I've been watching ID: Invaded the last few evenings once the kids are asleep. It's a fairly interesting sci-fi / crime thing from the winter season. Definitely getting some Psycho-Pass vibes.

Honestly there isn't much that's actually bad in my life right now. My salary took a 20% cut as of last week - but if we budget carefully we'll still be able to cover all necessary expenses. Staying at home is getting to be rather boring - but my family and I have continued to stay healthy and (as far as we are aware) virus-free. Working from home some days can be very frustrating with the kids bugging me every ten minutes - but at least I still have my job. And so on. Life's fine on the whole.

Hmm... 88 episodes and counting... maybe not. I will prioritize more bite-sized options. 12-13 episode original anime (open to lots of different genres) with a complete (enough) story is basically my anime holy grail that I look for every new season. A Place Further Than The Universe seems to tick all those boxes.

Up until last week, I was playing Smash quite a bit. Unlocked all the characters, beat Classic Smash with as many characters as I care to... I tried but I can't really get into the World of Light thing. I've done a chunk of it, but it feels tedious to me. So enough Smash for me for a while. This week I got back into some Street Fighter (30th Anniversary Collection). No way I wasn't going to play some Street Fighter after I finished watching High Score Girl. I remember being kinda good at the games a long time ago. Now, not so good Thankfully the difficulty is adjustable I snagged Songbird Symphony on sale recently so I should give that a go this weekend if I have some gaming time. I think it's a fairly short game. And all this Final Fantasy talk lately has got me sort of in the mood for FF7. If Squeenix has a publisher sale on the eShop any time soon then I will succumb and start replaying it.

We've mostly been watching subs for shows on Crunchyroll, though if a dub is available she would probably prefer it. But she's 9 and a voracious reader. She hasn't had any trouble keeping up with subtitles, aside from having to ask the meaning of a new word every once in a while. Another one I was thinking of trying was A Place Further Than The Universe... that might be next in line after Flying Witch.

Cloud/Yuffie/Vincent were my go-to characters once I had them all available, as I recall... though I liked Cid as well. Vincent is cool as heck and I've always been a sucker for ninjas in FF games so Yuffie was an obvious choice. These days if I went back and played it, I'd probably give Cait Sith more play time. I like the goofier characters and the randomness. I remember load times being very bad in FF9

I've been watching Flying Witch with the kiddo this week, it's a nice and relaxing slice of life that seems to be kid friendly so far (4 episodes in). You guys think Boku no Hero Academia would be good for a 9 year old? I was thinking about adding that to our queue. She's already watching basically everything Pokemon (that is on Netflix), and we will be following Digimon when it comes back. The thought of starting from the beginning of Dragon Ball has crossed my mind, as she watched quite a bit of Super with me and the Broly movie, but I dunno... that's a lot of episodes if we do DB and then Kai. I'm probably not up for it.

So I guess you didn't breed yourself a gold chocobo? Which characters did you use the most? You played on a PSP? Was it the PSOne Classic version? I think that's on the PS Store and playable on PSP/Vita/PS3... I bought it in a sale a few years ago but I don't think I ever actually played it on my Vita. But I recall other PSOne games having absolutely awful load times. I don't think I could have made it through all of FF7 with those load times

Pretty long (and still growing???) list of anime impacted by COVID-19. The things I'm watching that are listed: - Appare-Ranman! delayed after third episode - Digimon delayed after third episode - Major Second S2, NHK is going to re-broadcast the first four episodes from this season and then decide when they will continue airing from episode 5 Depending on how long this goes on, this might end up being more of a "backlog clearing season" than a new anime season I finished Carole & Tuesday last week, which was absolutely fantastic, and there is a lot of both old and recent stuff that I could watch on Crunchy/Funi if I feel like it. Not sure what direction I want to go yet when it comes to the backlog of shows. Maybe I'll start by looking back at recent season threads to see which shows I was interested in but couldn't watch at the time because I wasn't subscribed to Funimation...

My company's global HQ is in Georgia (Rome) so I guess upper management is going to be happy... until half the workforce calls in sick

Turns out Bill Gates is to blame for all this: https://petitions.whitehouse.gov/petition/we-call-investigations-bill-melinda-gates-foundation-medical-malpractice-crimes-against-humanity To accomplish his goal of reducing the world's population growth he is sterilizing children with vaccines, and I guess he helped to create COVID-19 to kill off more people as well??? Or just to create a new way to get more people with his evil vaccines.

My company has determined that we need to reduce costs by 20% across the board, for the long term benefit of the company. So my branch is going down to a four day work week and everybody's salary will take a 20% hit. Hopefully this only has to be this way for a couple months, but who knows. 80% of my salary is still a bit better than the alternative, which is being laid off and collecting the Canada Emergency Response Benefit ($500 per week for up to 16 weeks) ... but the budget is definitely going to get tight. Right now I'm really happy that we paid off our credit cards recently as we got a pretty nice tax return this year. There will be very little money to cover debt / credit card payments going forward.

I watched the first few episodes of Gleipnir last night and I'm not sure what to think. Weird and kind of interesting, in a way, but also not very compelling... I guess? Like, I didn't find myself wondering why our how these kids can turn into monsters, what the deal with the coins is, etc. Folks who like to see the anime girl get naked love it I'm sure, but the story hasn't really hooked me yet If I'm bored enough over the next few weeks (which is fairly likely!) then I may give it one two more episodes.

I'm glad I got to The Beer Store before they closed and that the lineup wasn't too long It was a mostly bad day but now the wife and kids are asleep and I can drink and play my bass to blow off a bit of steam

Kill la Kill is a fun time

Now I'm going to finish watching Carole & Tuesday. Part 2 has been available on Netflix for a while now and I keep forgetting about it...

Not a bad idea to keep wearing the mask anyway

I finished High Score Girl last night. Not a 100% satisfying finish, bit at least it wasn't a total heart-breaker. I wish there was more. Tower of God continues to be interesting. I like the style too. Even if the story ain't great, it's great to look at.