Driftini

@driftini.bsky.social

213 Followers 229 Following

Artist guy, music enthusiast, novice webdev, 2000-early 2010s UI design crackhead, 🇮🇹 I usually draw: - #kasaneteto #重音テト (there used to be more tags lol) https://driftini.github.io

and so ends my 2nd gundam show, this time it's Turn A's.. turn

easily the best gundam entry I've watched thus far, for as much as it pains me to say it, zeta (let alone 0079) just doesn't hold up nearly as well

unlike with previous entries, presentation oddities are completely out of the window this time - great animation, very distinctive mobile suit designs, and finally great sound design that makes MSs FEEL heavy

the mobile suits here (with special exceptions I can't spoil) look very different both from each other and from anything the first couple gundam entries ever had, with common sights like WaDs and WaDoms outright trashing the humanoid silhouette for something entirely different¹
the Turn A gundam itself just looks awesome to me, the face has some weird appeal with the orange eyes, the crest-like feature on the head, the more dynamic shapes and all² (not to throw shade at more traditional gundams, the Turn A is just so different there's no direct comparison)
the pronounced textures on several mobile suits also look really cool, like the leg vents/thruster things on the Turn A and the extreme roughness of WaDoms' legs (Wodoms according to the wiki?)

production values aside, unlike the entries I watched prior to it, proper mobile suit battles not only take a long while to show up in Turn A, but they remain relatively uncommon (for most of the runtime at least) compared to 0079 and zeta, with characters getting far more attention instead

I've gone on several times about how I love most of the character designs here, they're a huge upgrade from differently colored spacesuits and they're also woven deep into the unusual steam-age setting of the show
the characters themselves feel more interesting, with even a few gimmick characters I originally dismissed as.. well, gimmicks, eventually redeeming themselves by actually having plot significance and just being fun to watch³

well, after almost a whole month of watching zeta, it's about time for my closing thoughts on it

I'll start by saying this is not one of those insane shows I'd recommend hands down with no strings attached, for two reasons

for one, it semi-depends on having watched 0079 first, and that's 50 episodes/3 movies of prelude, which is undeniably a lot; the second reason is zeta itself is pretty long for today's standards with its own 50 episodes, and I feel like it could've handled its runtime better

it's probably just a product of its time, but I believe if it rearranged certain events, removed some repetition¹ and simply cut to the chase on several subplots², zeta could've managed a shorter, but much better paced runtime which would've absolutely served it well

I really don't like admitting zeta isn't an awesome show because it IS awesome at its peak, it's just that I didn't feel it reach that peak very often³

now that the cons are out of the way, let's balance things out with the pros: the artwork and animation are a great step up from 0079, you can see the advancement in animation techniques, audio quality and overall polish

battles feel way better than 0079 too - maybe it's just cause I got used to the mobile suit designs, maybe for the slower pacing, but I didn't find action scenes to be confusing like in the original show/trilogy

in addition to that, there were many fights in unique contexts that really helped set them apart from the others⁴ and the mobile suits' designs are both far easier to take seriously
as they no longer look like plastic toys, and clearly more original in terms of design

the character cast is also great, most of them distinguish themselves well and kamille especially is a far better protagonist than amuro, imo (I expect pitchforks for saying this), acclaimed AEUG lieutenant Four Pussy is also part of the cast which automatically elevates the show to a higher level

watched cosmic princess kaguya cause my friend recommended it to me

given the "yuri movie" reputation, I feared I as a straight guy would've just been too far out of the target demographic I expected it to have but.. nope I think the movie is perfectly capable of standing on its legs even if you're not a girl into other girls

the production value is quite insane (then again I barely watch ultra-new shows so idk) and there are some scenes that really make it clear they couldn't have been done without new animation techniques, and I'm not talking mere eyecandy here but insane shots with the camera rotating in way too many directions to be able to realistically get good results out of it without a 3d reference

the music.. idk it's good I guess but the only song that was my kinda thing was the second one during the big concert and I quite liked that one

the plot is surprisingly absolutely fucking insane in the same manner as classics like terminator or the matrix, won't get into details but it's got some great out of the box thinking going on

and as far as the actual romance elements go? I found them to be not overbearing in the slightest regardless of how clearly they're presented, it's all really natural and it never once felt cheesy to me

overall yeah quite a good watch, don't be like me though and forget it's 2h30mins long instead of barely under 2h (I finished watching past 1am cause of that)

just downed 4 pmmm eps, and yeah the presentation is VERY good, I really like the unconventional artstyles used in witches' barriers (the animation felt.. eh? in the first one with the collage-y theme, but it's definitely getting better with every new barrier)

the plot felt relatively chill at first, but after a couple eps you can start feeling the darker stuff creeping in

I also really appreciate how the characters aren't dumbasses and don't immediately do stupid things to speed up plot development

obviously I couldn't help but notice some similarities with - you guessed it - jjk, particularly the parallels you can draw between witch barriers and innate domains, grief seeds and cursed wombs and whatnot

hell a whole episode gives strong cursed womb arc vibes

anyway yeah I think this will be a really good watch

sooo I finished watching angel beats (the main 13 episodes at least, I'll take care of the OVAs soon enough)

the opinions I read before watching led me to expect it was more action heavy, which was very much not the case
still, I don't mean to say I liked it any less cause of it - I think it did a good job with its own set of characters and setting

speaking of characters.. maybe there are too many? a good amount of them only really serve for running gags and I feel like the main cast could easily be boiled down to some 3-4chars less
those characters' total lack of backstory (in the original episodes at least) makes them feel even more like little more than filler
though on that note, I'd rather take a handful of well-written backstories over 7 out of 10 really uninspired ones

one thing I couldn't really figure out was the intended tone the show wanted to set... on one hand, it kinda overuses humor that isn't that excellent to begin with, then again we're talking about something from 2010 so maybe it's just tropes that didn't age well; on the other, you got some really heavy topics going on in the character backstories
I think the show could've taken a more serious approach (considering the overarching theme of acceptance, it would've been fitting) but then again, I'm coming hot off jjk which was very much a show that took itself fairly seriously, so I'll just blame my incorrect expectations for angel beats

(1/3)

the concept of profiles has become pretty common in mod managers and similar stuff (gmod presets...), but I think a much-needed evolution to that would be toggleable mod groups

in games like l4d2, gmod and payday 2 you often rack up a bunch of mods to fix game issues the devs couldn't be bothered with, and having to remember them all individually gets hard really fast; this obviously gets even worse when you start delving into content mods of different kinds

but if you had mod groups? you could just put all content mods of a certain kind under the same umbrella to be able to toggle them on/off in no time flat and without fearing to have forgotten one or two mods

I actually love the sm64 personalization trope

I believe an experimental personalization ai is a much better excuse for unusual game behavior than "ooo game is haunted by a ghost"

a technical excuse like that also works better (on me at least) to create suspension of disbelief in the reader: while with a supposed haunting you almost instinctively go "yeah that's fake", with a for-the-time impossible but nowadays real technology you're just that tiny bit away from instinctively dismissing what you're reading and breaking your immersion

the concept of n64 roms found online just happening to not have the personalization ai built into them, while theoretically being VERY hard for it to happen, is just that tiiiny bit within the realm of possibility, again just barely not enough to instantly break your immersion

the takes on the personalization trope that involve the ai having a personality (stanley from sm64 classified) begin to cross that line where things start getting too cheeky, but if you don't think too much about it it's still an ignorable nitpick (the "ghost-haunted game" excuse would've actually been better for this specifically)

but as far as small, subjectively creepy changes to the game (white-eyed chain chomps, etc) go? or maybe additional castle floors with nonsensical layouts? that's pretty much remixing pre-existing content in the game, so I'd say it could be believable if you assume the personalization ai really exists

at last, we're finished

the last story arc was honestly surprisingly good for being a much more mystery focused thing (won't get any more specific for the sake of who hasn't read it yet) (probably the entire audience of this post), compared to the slice of life that is the rest of the manga (how did I read a slice of life for a month?????), I wish there were more chapters like that lol

and that's the vague expectation I'm gonna start reading forbidden scrollery with, apparently the premise is more about investigation so it might be more interesting across the board

still I don't wanna paint WaHH in a remotely uninteresting light, I found it pretty entertaining, especially thanks to a poster character as mysterious and interesting as kasen

compare to that miyoi from lotus eaters, and.. yeah I think kasen wins by a long shot

I dropped lotus eaters after like 7 or 8 chapters cause it just felt like barely anything was happening, and miyoi just isn't as captivating of a character as kasen and just generally fails at being a good reason to keep reading, imo

getting back to WaHH, another thing I REALLY loved was the full color pages at the beginning of every chapter, they never failed to look gorgeous with really pleasing color choices

anyway yeah, if you're into touhou I can recommend WaHH, it's a good read (even if you're not into slice of life apparently, going off of my experience)

Half-Life 3

Wikipedia homepage: "Did you know... that USS Gyatt (pictured), after being fitted with a Terrier anti-air missile launcher, became the world's first guided-missile destroyer?"

needed an excuse to wipe 3 months worth of dust off my tablet

Silence this thread

Bluesky dialog box asking for confirmation to hide the new Trending topics on the side

SmartDeploy.App started following you

I was randomly glancing over at packet tracer's log and, jesus christ how did cisco implement the (absolutely useless) "required" login

are they seriously just trying to directly launch a thousand browsers until they hit one which is actually installed

..what the fuck???

[terminal output screenshot reads:]

/usr/bin/xdg-open: line 881: iceweasel: command not found
/usr/bin/xdg-open: line 881: seamonkey: command not found
/usr/bin/xdg-open: line 881: mozilla: command not found

Screenshot of the Jujutsu Kaisen manga, showing Satoru Gojo with edited dialogue in speech bubbles reading "I got lotion on my dick, right now I'm just stroking my shit"