CPU Intel Core i5-4210U
GPU NVIDIA GeForce 840M
RAM 6 GB
Pcgamebenchmark tells me "No" due to my GPU, however the same website also marks as "No" games that ran fairly decently on my PC (Dark Souls 1 and 2) as well as games I could squeeze an acceptable experience at minimum specs (FFXIV and Dark Souls 3).
Let me explain: I've been making a budget for the Steam Summer sales, and the original "The Legend of Heroes: Trails in the Sky" (NOT the remake) is a candidate for that.
When asking about it with some people, what some people told me made me fall into the impression that it is only "Complete" when thought of as a trilogy, the corollary being that playing only the first one would be "an incomplete experience".
Buying the whole trilogy is a bit above what I'm intending to spend right now, and it seems to go on sale more sparsely than most games, so the "make or break" thing for me would be that: Is the first "The Legend of Heroes: Trails in the Sky" worth it (And felt "complete) on it's own if you don't intend on playing the rest of the trilogy?
Let's go one by one for the paper alternatives:
1: Faux-Papyrus
Yeah, that one was dead on arrival, but I'm surprised that Myne didn't have the idea of using tree-bark weaved like in a basket for that purpose. Granted, I myself only thought about that near the very end of the volume when the tree bark got brought up again when talking about the bamboo.
2: Clay Tablets
My first guess as to why it didn't work was that you likely had to make holes it it for the moisture to leave, similar to hardtack. Though I don't see any holes in historical clay-tablets so maybe it's not that? (Couldn't they just dry naturally?)
I guess the biggest issue here was being prohibited from the trial-and-error, though you could argue she could've tried once more using the hearth in Lutz's home.
Plus, if bricks and pottery exist in that world (Though it seems that brick usage is rare? Everything is either a white building, made out of wood, or made out of cobblestone), then there was likely someone she could ask for tips that. Though, I wouldn't be surprised if such things were "secrets of the pottery guild".
3: Mokkan
That one was strange, because it's about Myne's relationship wit her family.
I guess there are two layers of cultural shock here: The fact that children in Japan are expect to be more self-sufficient than the ones in my country, and the facts that children in a medieval world are expected to be more self-sufficient than children in modern Japan. Because of this, it was often not obvious to me what Myne's family trusted her to do.
If things like her Shampoo weren't immediately admonished as "wasting precious oil" and her family even let her cook "bone broth" (Though apparently a dried fish was too much), then they seem to trust and listen to her to some level.
In which case, I don't see why she couldn't just have explained to them that she was using wood and bamboo for writing, since at that point she had vocabulary to do so, and it's not like she was Lutz, who had to hide his dream from his family. Though I guess she was at her wit's end back then...
I say this because, as someone who has a nonzero chance of being autistic, I have some painful memories from when I was very little and didn't have the vocabulary needed to be able to express what I wanted, which would get me very nervous, and then my family would just dismiss it all as "me just being sleepy" (I was never sleepy), I could understand Myne's dreams being crushed because her family would either not be able to understand her or not take her seriously (She's a small child, after all), or even sometimes do harm out of ignorance when trying to do good... but considering that her family trusts her with knives and needles, I don't think that was the think that was stopping her here.
Now, with the benefit of hindsight we know it was a good thing that she gave on trying alternatives and just decided to finally try washi, but I keep thinking: If she had not given up so easily, could a "paper alternative" have eventually worked?
I recently started reading the LN from the very beginning.
Perhaps due to not reading books at all, I'm a bit of a slow reader, usually taking more than two minutes per page, but I'm having fun doing it.
Reading the J-Novel Club translation of the first volume, however, I noticed that Lutz's mom is first introduced as "Carla", though later in the same book she's referred to as "Karla". I understand that both are the exact same in katakana, but assuming that similar things might also happen in the future (Depending on different translations people read the LN, manga, anime and WN in, or if they just consumed those in Japanese, I would expect multiple different spellings for some things), are there certain spellings of names/places/things that the community agrees on? If so, where could I find those?
Historically, I was someone who didn't read books, at all.
No reason not to do so, I just didn't.
Then, I decided I wanted to start reading them.
I'm currently starting with the Honzuki no Gekokujou Light Novels, and I've noticed that my average speed is around one page every two minutes.
I'm assuming this is a slow reading speed, but I wanted to be sure if that's the case or not (And, if it is, if it is possible to "read faster", as it will allow me to read more stuff).
In summary: Back in mid-2024 I went back to watching anime en force, and since then watched 1/3 of all anime I've watched. At the start of last year however, I was bothered by not having people to talk about anime with, nor a stream of YouTube videos or social media posts from what I was watching.
People recommended me to watch seasonals to solve that, so I began increasingly watching seasonals (10 per seasons, then 15, then 20, now I'm watching more than 25)... which didn't solve me issues as my social media algorithm is still no good, still no videos, and the only place I have to talk about anime is /a/.
I decided that I should dial down on seasonals a bit and go back to focusing on older anime or even reading manga/LNs... the problem is that I no longer sure I can, because all the seasonals I watched in the past, I now have a ton of "Part 2"s that will easily give me another 20 anime even if I don't pick anything else.
I already handpick every anime I watch from checking very trailer at the start of a season, but it seems I would need some better filters, as I'm currently already in the 4-5 episodes per day average.
What do you usually do to avoid becoming overwhelmed with anime?
I've been thinking about that for a while, is there any specific reason?
Is it a standard because some popular software would parse the filename and check for the hash?
I want to make clear in advance that I stopped reading HeroAca after the Overhaul arc in the manga, so around 2017-2018? So some things I might mention this MIGHT have been addressed after that.
One of the things that really bothered me with HeroAca and that I felt was solved in Vigilantes as it's almost refusal to engage with it's own worldbuilding and have it's characters in settings that weren't "controlled environments", I really wanted it to be more "sandbox" and less "theme park".
It kinda bothered me that it would go out of it's way to say "Problems exist in this society", but would stop at that and wouldn't try to analyze them, much less solve them. Back at that time I used to be a libertarian, so it irked me a bit on how everyone in that world just treated as normal and completely naturals laws saying that "you can't use your power without a permit".
It might be related to some other issues I have with the series writing (Basically, after the arc of a certain character ends, the character has nothing to do for the entire rest of the story). Back when the first tournament arc ended I was REALLY expecting something on the level of "Oh, I think Todoroki will flee from school, or at the very least this whole thing might make Deku reflect that this is the system he's building himself to defend and be a symbol of and-".
Nah, it was resolved with an off-screen talk with his mother, no biggie.
You had the entirety of Stain's arc being about hero society is corrupt and worsens society, but as much as we see heroes that seem more preoccupied with fame and their image, we're never shown any scenes of this making problems worse.
Likewise, we're only thrown a random stat of "Oh, Stain's culling made the average hero more efficient".
We have no reason to believe the author is LYING to us, but I would really prefer if this was SHOWN rather than TOLD.
Most of those complaints were kinda solved with Vigilante, where we DO explore the logical conclusions of a hero society and explore it in a more "sandbox" way, and that heroes relationship with the law is one in a "honne/tatemae" way (In the outside they're 100% legalists, but in secret they're always overlooking small infractions they feel are no big deal, as well as preferring doing things "their own way" when they feel the law is ineffective).
Basically, Vigilante works in a "You can just do stuff" way.
Tongari Boushi no Atelier is feeling like a breath of fresh air so far in comparison, as it heavily signals it will work on themes of "things not being so black and white", "rules no being so absolute" or "if a system really deserves being continued".
I was watching some political video-essays yesterday, and the quote in one of them really stuck with me:
>[T]he discussion is almost never 'How can these systems become better?'. It is always 'What sacrifices do ordinary people have to make so the current system doesn't collapse?'
The best this country can apparently hope for is "a managed decline", and that pessimistic perspective has to be combated.
That came to mind with the latest episodes: "The World of Magic", now shown to us, the audience (Though not yet to Coco) is a decadent one, one who only survives via generalized paranoia, lies and zealotry.
Rather than "the use of magic to help people", the attitudes from the knights show us a system whose primary purpose is maintaining itself. We see how people like Agott suffer from it, and in it's most extreme examples we see how the total eradication of "healing magic" was seen as "a more than reasonable sacrifice".
So while in HeroAca our protagonist Deku seems pretty alienated to systemic issues, TBA feels like... Dark Souls. A common theme in the three games (Though especially in 2 and 3) is showing us the world as it is as a "diseased organism", with the main character, after all their travels being able to choose at the end of the game if they choose to continue the system, merely easing it's burdens in the short term, or try something new, a change. This "something new" or "change" is always left vague, we never end up knowing if it worked, if it might work, or if it will make things worse, what we know is that it might lead to change.
TBA is similar: We have a main character that is being shown the world and being groomed into changing it, into futurely being given a choice of getting into the system, perhaps being able to ease some of it's flaws with their presence, or being something outside of it, a change in it.
It specifically reminds me of the two "alternative" endings in Dark Souls 3.
I have a dream: I would like to find people talking about anime in a way I could join the conversation and add my two cents.
Surprisingly, this is very rare.
Something that was very formative to me during my teenage years was watching "Trixie the Golden Witch" videos (A channel previously known as Digibro), and in retrospect I noticed a lot of them were basically responses to common discourse of the time.
I don't feel that this type of discourse even exists anymore, safe from very rarely someone re-heating some misinformation that got popular 10 years ago from some youtube video (e.g. people mentioning that Miyazaki quote out of context).
This came to me when I thought about making a YouTube channel and start by making somewhat educational videos responding to common misconceptions about anime. The problem being that I don't even know what misconceptions people have nowadays, because I never see anyone talking about anime other than episode discussions (And indeed, 99% of r/anime is Episode Discussions or recommendation threads).
Recently, my Facebook and Twitter feeds are full of people talking about "The Boys", especially comparisons with the source material and themes it works with. I've never watched a single episode of it nor ever liked/commented on a single post of it, yet they keep coming. It's the exact type of discussions I want to see about anime, yet I barely even receive anime anime posts at all in my SNS despite constantly posting about anime myself.
It feels like every single other hobby has what I want, that being people actively discussing it spontaneously, from video-games (A lot of video-essays come every weeks) to movies, but not anime, never anime.
The trigger for me writing this thread is currently watching 27 seasonals and not seeing almost any talk about ANY of them. despite ALL THE ELEMENTS being there for SOMEONE to say something. Logically speaking, there's no reason for people not to be talking or making videos about 3DCG in anime with discussions spearheaded by things such as the new Hokuto no Ken anime, the ED from Meitantei Precure, the anime "Snowball Earth", etc
Yet, those are nowhere to be seen.
You could argue that "very few people are watching ALL of those anime", but my argument is that... they don't have to. In a place full of people who watch anime, each should be bringing something about the anime they're watching and sharing with others, that way everyone becomes "aware" of most anime despite only watching a few of them (Again, that's how it was in my formative years, I became aware about dozens of anime I would only watch years later or still haven't watched).
That's what an "Agora" for anime would be: You wouldn't need to have watched those specifically, but from a few clips or images you would be able to add something of vale from other anime you've watched.
Yet, this doesn't happen.
The closest thing I can currently find is current /a/ which, due to also being mostly threads about specific anime ("Generals") rather than anime in general, is less of an agora and more of a "garden of flowers being pollinated".
Keyword here is "pollinated": A lot of flowers end up being so by accident because some pollenizer (Could be a bee, a bird, a bat, a moth, etc) was interacting with other flower before, and now it's pollen touches the new flower.
Likewise, in /a/ I can make a "Clevatess" joke in a "Akujiki Reijou" thread or a "Maomusu" reference in a "Yomi no Tsugai" thread because, even if not everyone in that thread watch both anime, statistically someone did, because we're all pollenizers in a garden of flowers.
So I can "bring my pollen directly to other flower", but there's no place for random pollen to be randomly floating in the air (Damn you, allergic people!).
So yeah, why are things that way?
Saw a thread where people found out they had (Literally) a million of those and never heard of the system.
I have nowhere are near, but I'm also new to it. I heard people telling me I should "use them to level my account", though I have no idea what they mean with that.
I'll be blunt: I don't think that my life outside of the internet is complex enough to require of me a personality.
I think that from the entirety of my high-school and college years I had very feel contexts or opportunities for self-expression or talking to people.
So in my mental image of what therapy is, I don't think that any of my answers to questions about my job, my family how or how I react to daily occurrences could be described as anything other than mundane, average, boring or normal.
The reason's I'm considering therapy for years now lie on the internet, either me arriving at that conclusion or other people saying that I should. That's because pretty much all the part that matters of my life seems to be there: Friends, interaction with people, interaction with the world, having contact with new ideas, things to think about and talk about, opportunities for self-expression, arguments, etc
I know that a common phrase is "stop using social media", but having some form of socializing, even if a lot of it is around things astroturfed by algorithms that no one believes in or is talking about IRL, is better than no socializing at all.
I don't think I would be able to answer questions like "Why do you feel that you need therapy?", and talking about anything in general could seem a bit hard, since I would have to explain layers over layers of "terminaly-onlineisms", so I wanted to ask for advice here.
Basically, I'm like a robot IRL, an empty shell, but I do have "a personality" on the internet, which is where I was socialized, had contexts to develop a personality and have contexts to express it.