BillyClark

This is the type of episode I’ve been wanting this entire season. This episode feels like the anime took a moment to just breathe. Some people might complain that even this episode did too much, but I think it’s reasonable, considering the rest of the season.

I wonder if they rushed through so much other stuff in other episodes just so that they could give Georgine’s visit more time to push the plot forwards.

One thing I liked about this episode is that, at the beginning, Georgine, talking about Rozemyne, insults Sylvester’s bad parenting, especially his laziness, leaving her to be raised by Ferdinand. And then, at the end of the episode, Georgine is proven right, but it was Wilfried. Wilfried was indeed raised extremely poorly, and that’s why he made the mistake in saying his farewells to Georgine, and the underlying reason for that is very related to Sylvester’s attitude about leaving all of his work to other people.

This type of thing is so important to good storytelling. The protagonists are not perfect, and sometimes they’re extremely flawed. The antagonists are fully fleshed out, thinking individuals. Sometimes, when you really think about a well-written story, you realize that literally the only reason the protagonists are seen as the good guys is that the story is written from their perspective, and that if the story was written from the opposite perspective, you’d believe the other side was the good guys.

I don’t think “found crypto” describes what you really mean, that he found a way to accept bribes and to use the bribe money to scam poor people.

All you have to do is release a new crypto coin, and have people bribe you with well-timed bribes to keep the price looking like it’s going up. The people giving you bribes know it’s just manipulation and that they’ll lose everything, but to all of the normal MAGA investors with room temperature IQs, they see a good investment.

That way, you get to double dip on the bribe money. When the bribes slow down, the price will go down and those people you grifted will lose everything.

Yeah, I’m pretty sure it’s illegal to sell raw salmon to be eaten raw unless it has been frozen to kill parasites. So because it’s been frozen, a chef bragging about how it was caught the same day would just be misleading people. It can be kept frozen for some time and still maintain the same amount of freshness for the person eating.

But actually showing everyone independently connecting those dots would slow the story to a crawl, so I don’t mind the shortcut.

One alternative that doesn’t slow things down much is they’re taken into a private meeting room and the whole conversation happens in private. Then, when they’re coming out of the room, the entire guild quiets down, and are looking at them with greedy eyes, and maybe the MCs project and think to themselves, “They know we made a lot of money.”

Or, they leave the guild after the private meeting, and when they’re in the restaurant afterwards, that asshole adventurer comes up to them and makes an ass of himself in an even worse place, and tells them that everybody in the guild knows they defeated the dungeon and made a lot of money.

Anyways, I’m not really a writer. It’s a lot easier to throw out ideas than it is to write the scenes using the ideas. Like you said, I also can’t really blame the anime for doing it the way they did. I just personally don’t like the trope. I don’t think I’m precisely their target audience.

I dislike the trope where the hero goes into the guild and everybody learns too much about them because their conversation with the receptionist is overheard by everybody.

Like, everybody had to hear that they earned 10,000,000 gold just from the bounty and that they didn’t think it was that much?

I get it that probably the bounty was public knowledge, and probably everybody would learn through gossip that Elymas’s team defeated the dungeon, and that this is just an easy way to add drama, but I don’t think story writing is supposed to be just easy and cliches. Good fantasy story writing is predicated on a believable world that’s been lovingly and carefully crafted, but the guild here is just so hard to believe even in the context of that world.

And speaking of easy and cliched writing, Malice is suddenly obsessed with Elymas? That makes zero sense to me, at least only watching the anime. If she was really that obsessed, why wouldn’t she have killed him rather than letting him leave home at the very beginning of the anime? The moment she let him go, he’s much harder to kill because, for example, first she has to find him.

Good story writing gives the viewer or reader reasons why something might happen. It’s not enough for the first episode to say that Malice is crazy and hates Elymas. That’s different from being obsessed with him after she’s already taken everything from him and exiled him. The viewer or reader needs to understand characters well enough to understand their actions. The fact that she already let him go needs to be explained.

But again, this episode had a part that I really enjoyed, which was the negotiation with the shop owner. And just to compare it to those other two parts, it feels like a consistent and realistic part of the world, and you had previously gotten a great glimpse of how all of the characters involved would act. It was just fun and lovely. Whoever wrote that scene has the ability to write really well. I don’t understand how there is such a huge difference in quality, scene to scene.

The serious answer is that they are an unchecked police force that is willing to break laws and abuse and murder people in support of Trump’s policies.

They’re Trump’s version of the Nazi SS. He gives them authority so that they will help him in his next coup attempt.

The type of bullet definitely, 100% matters. Some bullets have more mass than other bullets, and the material of the bullet can be harder or softer. All of that will affect the type of damage. The amount of powder used to fire the bullet also affects its kinetic energy when hitting the target.

Of all of the people in the world who didn’t have a cell phone or other device to record video, he was the one who was furthest away from any other people and other recording devices.

It’s the same criteria the aliens always use for interacting with humans.

Now, you might say, “Wait a minute! Don’t they also try to find a human who is drunk or high or crazy to try to find the least reliable witness?” Well, the answer is “no.” Aliens have a hard time telling humans apart and just think we’re all about the same. Those are just the kind of people they tend to choose because of their other criteria.

I mean, you are describing modern copyright.

But copyright is an example of something where the US Constitution, at least, explicitly says its purpose is to “promote” something:

[the United States Congress shall have power] To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries.

I like how straightforward the Copyright Clause is. It even gives a testable standard. The length of “exclusive Right” for IP should be the “limited” length of time that “promote[s] the Progress of Science and useful Arts.”

So, the plain reading here is that IP laws need to give exclusivity long enough to encourage creation, by making authors and inventors think it is worth the time and money investment, but not so long that they discourage creation, for example, where a person doesn’t create something because they are afraid of violating IP laws.

Originally, in the US, copyright lasted 14 years, with an option for renewing for 14 more years, and this is one example where I think they got it about right.

Not just software. Anything digital that is protected by copyright. Sony has massive media holdings in the television, movie, and music industries. Here’s Wikipedia’s list of assets owned by Sony.

Sony can’t speak for everybody who owns a copyright, but it does seem like they’re making the sort of argument where the logical end result is that they’re giving everybody permission to copy any Sony media without paying.

can’t remember which country ending in N he started a war with

You mean “The Islamic Republic of Japan”? You give him too much credit that he simply can’t remember the specific country. He doesn’t even know the country names in the first place.

AI and religion both let hallucinations become the final product, and are accepted by people who are incapable of thinking rationally or doing basic checks to verify it, so it seems like a good fit to me.

I have a few stupid memories that I come back to over and over. Maybe someday, I’ll be able to go to the doctor and have a few memories erased.

They should just go ahead and rename the State of Tennessee to Greater Dollywood.

Another note is that this is a sweetener, so it replaces sugar, and sugar is also linked to strokes and heart attacks through diabetes and obesity.

Nobody deserves a good back lashing more than Donald John Trump.

It’s an amazing accomplishment, but if anybody is wondering why it’s not flat-out impossible, she very likely was snooping on how it was controlled by existing drivers, either by looking at the software side, which honestly, I’m less familiar with, or by using something like a logic analyzer, which can be used to record signals being sent to the hardware directly. So, if she did it that way, she didn’t reuse the code of the existing driver, but analyzed the output. I’ve had to debug some drivers in the past with a logic analyzer, and just that was a lot of work.

If she did it without existing drivers, then it would have been an absolute slog, I think bordering on impossible. You’d have to guess every signal. GPUs may be more specialized than CPUs, meaning that their instruction set will be smaller, but that would be insane.

The recap in this episode was like 9 minutes long. That’s too long.

And then, the fight itself was crazy stretched out. It was two attacks with zero counter attacks, but it lasted most of the rest of the episode.

I think the thing that bothers me the most about this anime is the way that Elymas seems to be unable to use his common sense or any knowledge that he gained from living in that world for his entire life, and he purely makes his choices based on his knowledge of the game. It’s hard to fathom that his entire life in that world made no difference to him from the entire time since he got his class to this episode, and that has made him act inconceivably stupid, I guess.

So, the fact that he’s starting to overcome this weird mental block that doesn’t really make much sense in the first place, well, it’s a good sign for this anime. Elymas has actually realized that he’s not just playing a game, and it’s not completely governed by game rules. I have no idea how he didn’t realize it up to this point, but at least he’s there now.

It seems that parties back then had a lot more hat-related fun than parties today.

The man she is bringing home has noticeably different shoes from the man that she showed up with, but if you consider that he’s wearing a nightcap, I guess he might have brought slippers, too.

I guess it all makes sense. At a potluck, you basically only need to bring a little more food or drink than you’d consume yourself, and so those three liquor bottles poking out of the top might be all the liquor they brought. So, the rest of the bag must be full of clothing.