Yeah, I’ll definitely try Metaphor. I’ve played through P3R and P4G already. P3R was my introduction to the series and I think it’s an incredible game.

It might be another year for me to finish lol but I definitely will make a post about it when I’m done!

SARU cooked. They really added their own flavor to this.

From what I understand, it picks up from the third movie “Rebellion” (the first two movies are series recaps).

Last year, I bought an Eva blind box figure and got Mari.

She’s still in the box.

my bad g

No it was telegram invite links

time

should be okay now. i put a certain domain in the slur filter rather than the domain filter. everything should be ok now

Catherine Classic

Finally! I couldn’t get this one to work at all following all the guides and workarounds from ProtonDB. I ended up playing the PS3 version.

The file name is funny

I think it was Season 3 of SNK. Watched the whole thing in a day lol

I don’t think the Fediverse will surpass mainstream social media by any means. I genuinely don’t believe there will be a day where any Fediverse platform will reach even a tenth of the userbase of its mainstream counterpart.

The current trend of Fediverse platforms seems to operate in this way: “make X ActivityPub compatible” where X is any existing or emerging mainstream platform. A good example is Loops which, I feel is completely disconnected from the TikTok userbase that it attempts to capture. TikTok is very popular precisely because of its addictive algorithm and I’m not sure if the ethics of Loops will follow in that direction.

Although the Fediverse population is small, I think it’s pretty resilient at least. We’re all here because of a shared ideal of “social media” that isn’t owned by a single entity. Unless users outside the Fediverse share the same ideal, it is unlikely they’ll stick around.

The three problems listed on your post have pretty much been the same for the past three years and I don’t think anyone has made a good solution for it (otherwise, it would have blown up by now). There are so many suggestions like making a quiz or choosing a random instance but we all know those come with their own flaws. I don’t know how many years it will take for us to solve this problem but I’m always happy to see new attempts at solving them. The funny thing though is that some of these solutions rely on centralization…

However, in my opinion, I think we are approaching the Fediverse wrong. The current expectation is it to eventually replace mainstream social media (it won’t). There is an obsession with a grand narrative or even a utopia.

In my opinion, the “new” problem of the Fediverse should be this:

“How do you build a platform with decentralization first in mind?”

If we start thinking about this question, then problems like “choosing a server” should be irrelevant. I think about this question almost every day and I’m always on the look out for new platforms (both Fediverse and non-Fediverse) that hopefully aren’t just “X but ActivityPub”. I hope there will be more effort put into developing a platform where choosing an instance isn’t thought to be a hindrance but is actually part of the experience. A platform where we aren’t actively trying to “hide” decentralization.

The question might sound stupid for some but just try to think about how we’re always chasing after mainstream social media and never really coming up with something original and unique where features are designed around decentralized interactions first.

I don’t have the answers to this problem but I hope we can change the way we think about the Fediverse.

I don’t think it will ever conclude. It does get better but not consistently. Most times I’d still get fatigued from all the dialogue but there are very rewarding moments at the end of some quests that make it feel worth it.

The quests that have been consistently good in my opinion are the “intermission quests” - the last major quest of each region before the next. The last quest of Sumeru is the most memorable one for me.

Genshin Impact does storytelling really bad but I don’t know how to explain why. I’m not aversed to games with lengthy dialogue (I love the Persona games for example), but Genshin Impact feels like a slog to sit through 95% of the time.

Serial Experiments Lain.

I was rewatching a couple of episodes and I had forgotten how eerie and creepy this one was.

The Persona 4 English dub is funny (good) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VIERguCzJD0

I have been craving for a Sky Crawlers video essay and I’m happy to see STEVEM deliver.

This is one of his better videos in my opinion, and he did his research well and covered perhaps everything there is to talk about the movie although some sections felt cut a bit too short. Particularly on Jean Baudrillard who I think has been highly influential in many of Oshii’s films.

I hope STEVEM (or anyone else) would make a video on Oshii’s live action films too. I think that side of Oshii is often overlooked by his anime fans.

Oh wow that’s Senjougahara Hitagi’s birthday

Your Name is always a good choice.

It’s a movie so newcomers don’t need to invest a lot of time to finish it. It’s visually stunning, the soundtrack sticks with you, the narrative starts simple but becomes increasingly complex and memorable. It fits into most age brackets and its not marketed toward one gender only.

I think it’s still widely available for streaming too so it should still be pretty accessible.

Here’s mine. I kind of cheated with the last three though.

I didn’t particularly enjoy The Sky Crawlers as much compared to other films that I did not include in the list but I often use these type of threads to suggest works that aren’t commonly suggested anyway. Sky Crawlers doesn’t have the same meditative feeling you get from watching other Oshii Mamoru films but Oshii always had a very complex understanding of war and its relation to media and global politics (see Patlabor and the Kerberos Saga) which are often absent in many war-themed films.

The next one, Genius Party, is a collection of short films. I don’t think short films get enough discourse within the anime community but if you’re looking for originality in anime this is often the place to go. There’s one short there with a yapping salaryman and sitting through it makes me want to jump off the roof for fun but in the end I realized that’s kind of the point. The life of a salaryman is mundane and boring. Thank god it was a short film.

Last one is from Koji Yamamura. I actually didn’t enjoy this one as much as his other short films like Atama Yama, Inaka Isha, and Muybridge’s Strings but I think Dozens of Norths is the only one that could be classified as a feature length film.