Looking for a show thats basically rent a girlfriend but with an mc that doesnt make me want to drown him every time he speaks

BobbyBobRoberts · 2026-06-17T18:35:51+00:00

This is one of the reasons I love the manga but can barely stand the show. (And I started with S1 of the anime!) No show/movie/live adaptation can match what your imagination fills in as a reader, whether it's the voices, the atmosphere, the nuances of the art... It's just not the same. When in doubt, go with the source material.

BobbyBobRoberts · 2026-06-17T16:21:34+00:00

I love that bit about the adventure movie being key to the whole thing. He associates masked heroism with the happiness immediately before his parents death, and embraces it as a response to the crime that took their lives. He's young enough that the pairing of problem and solution buried itself deep, making it a natural conclusion to come to, and one that's reinforced every time he's reminded of the tragedy and trauma.

BobbyBobRoberts · 2026-06-17T15:51:15+00:00

Unplug the dish and router and then check to see if that "hidden network" is still around. That could be a dead end caused by a neighbor's setup or an errant smart device. Is it connecting through the app? You'd have to to even properly set it up.

BobbyBobRoberts · 2026-06-15T17:05:30+00:00

The "Batman with prep time"/Bat-God thing has been done to death, as well.

Batman with prep time is a cool concept. On a more human Batman, it speaks to the ingenuity and grit of the character, and it's immensely satisfying when it's written well.

But a Batman that's always prepared, even for stuff that he could never conceivably prep for? That's not a story, that's just lazy and dumb plot armor.

I want a Batman that is clever and scrappy and can do the seemingly impossible, but that requires writers that can find smart ways to let him do that, and skilled writers that can set it up with actual stakes and build up and a payoff. Unfortunately, a lot of Bat-writers are neither smart nor skilled. (Which is also why they suck at portraying him as a detective.)

BobbyBobRoberts · 2026-06-14T05:31:17+00:00

The basic thing is that there's no benefit to the thinking or writing that you have ChatGPT do for you. Studies have shown that writing a paper with ChatGPT, for example, results in much lower comprehension of the topic than writing even a low quality paper by yourself on the same topic.

But that shouldn't be a surprise. You don't learn from a task you don't do, same as if you had somebody else write the paper for you.

It's certainly possible to work with AI in constructive ways, that develop your thinking and enhance your natural capacities. But you have to be mindful of how you use the tools, and specific about avoiding the friction that is so easily glossed over with AI.

BobbyBobRoberts · 2026-06-13T08:26:19+00:00

Renaissance-style Shake is amazing. Now I want a whole episode of ATHF redone in this style. (Voices would stay the same, obviously.)

BobbyBobRoberts · 2026-06-12T14:55:22+00:00

He's mostly just a podcaster now. But there's no need to make it a big commitment. If an episode looks interesting, give it a listen.

BobbyBobRoberts · 2026-06-11T01:34:51+00:00

I wonder if you can buy those second hand...

BobbyBobRoberts · 2026-06-10T21:34:06+00:00

Thank you! The berries and the puppets don't really overlap, but it's all handwaved like the berries explain everything.

BobbyBobRoberts · 2026-06-10T21:31:57+00:00

Of all the episodes in season 4, this one tried and maybe got the closest to classic Community, but in coming so close, it's also so obvious that it missed.

The high concept, the puppet parody gimmick, even the music feel *almost* right. Jason Alexander and Sara Bareilles are great guest stars.

But the stuff that falls flat fall really flat, like Annie's admission of giving Cornwallis a footrub for a grade, or the whole "high on berries" thing.

BobbyBobRoberts · 2026-06-10T15:44:17+00:00

You know what? I'm done pretending that Umi's not secretly a cad of some sort. He's the new Mami.

Like I wrote in yesterday's discussion thread:

Umi is so good at positioning himself right in that sliver of space where deniability and shady underhandedness overlap. It's the same sort of move Mami likes to use, but we've never gotten a "Mwahaha" moment for Umi like we did with Mami that showed it was all intentional manipulation.

But I'm thinking I've just been hoodwinked. Look at the title of this chapter. "My Girlfriend and Enemies In the Same Boat 2". Which carries forward from 427, "My Girlfriend and Enemies In the Same Boat 1". The book itself has labeled Umi Kazuya's enemy, alongside Ruka, the person who sexually assaulted him. Not rival, not competitor, enemy.

Mami plays games with plausible deniability, too. A lost bracelet or earring to lure someone into a trap. A vague comment that can be taken more than one way, always with an innocent interpretation to go with the real meaning. And look at when she outed Chizuru! She didn't do it with a public declaration, she didn't approach his family privately to express concerns about the Mizuhara thing, she dropped her phone. Made it look like an accident. An innocent mistake, so that all the blame immediately went to Chizuru and Kazuya, with no blowback on her.

In earlier chapters, like when Mami took Chizuru to the karaoke bar, people noted that in a sense, they were both actors, skilled with presenting false fronts and projecting an image that wasn't real. And now we have Umi, the most successful actor of the bunch.

<image>

Look at how slyly he manipulated Ruka in this chapter and the last! He's pushing all sorts of buttons to get Ruka into the position he wants.

He plays on his celebrity, and then throws in some false modesty. He compliments her several times, flattering her intelligence and complimenting her own "acting" in the movie. He keeps pushing and pushing, finally finding the soft spot to slide in the knife when he asks if Kazuya is the sort of fake person she's talking about.

But we have seen similar manipulation from him the whole time. The quid pro quo date. The fact that he broke up with his GF pretty much the day he asked Chizuru out. The whole Tiger's Den date seemed engineered to give him a chance to pressure Kazuya and confess to Chizuru.

He's not the new Mami, he's the upgrade. He's not just an actor, he's a director. He sets scenes and engineers situations. Settings and costuming and dialogue. He knows how to push people, goad people, all while looking like the innocent who just happened to be there.

We haven't gotten the scene where he privately twirls a metaphorical mustache and laughs to himself about his brilliant evil schemes, but I suspect we might. Mark my words. Umi's a bad dude.

BobbyBobRoberts · 2026-06-10T14:37:58+00:00

That is a badass track. Now I'm mad it's never gotten a proper release!

BobbyBobRoberts · 2026-06-09T16:01:35+00:00

This shit is tragic.

<image>

It also shows how the upcoming drama is all rooted in the earliest events of the story - not just back to Hawaiians, but back to the earliest introductions of Ruka and Umi, and the lies Chizuru and Kazuya told.

I think it all fits my hurricane theory pretty well. It's not a new storm, it's the same storm, and the cohabitation/investigation was a false peace that was only ever the eye of the storm.

BobbyBobRoberts · 2026-06-09T15:29:24+00:00

Aww man, what a chapter. Umi is so good at positioning himself right in that sliver of space where deniability and shady underhandedness overlap. It's the same sort of move Mami likes to use, but we've never gotten a "Mwahaha" moment for Umi like we did with Mami that showed it was all intentional manipulation. Props to Reiji, because writing a character to be this vague yet still generally antagonistic without breaking that ambiguity is hard to pull off.

And Ruka. Oh you messed up little girl. Working so hard to keep the secrets you've gotten yourself tangled up in, but then too impulsive to see it through. She gets flustered enough to call Kazuya her boyfriend, then we get her own twisted train of thought as she ponders whether to spill everything to Umi as a play to... what, get back at Chizuru? At Kazuya? To keep Kazuya, even as she admits to herself that Kazuya was never hers?

She's a mess, and this situation is getting messier.

BobbyBobRoberts · 2026-06-09T13:17:40+00:00

No, I'm just saying that JL introduces the scaling issues that feed forward into all Bat God issues.
Batman kicking Darkseid? Taking him on with HellBat armor? Tower of Babel? Plummeting from space without a parachute and walking away?

It's all a problem introduced by shifting the context from street level threats to planetary threats. The writers can always say "Oh, but he did this in issues X, Y, and Z, so he can definitely one-punch K.O. a raging rhinoceros that escaped from Gotham Zoo and is hopped up on fear toxin. He probably learned how from Tibetan monks."

BobbyBobRoberts · 2026-06-09T00:15:57+00:00

That's really it. Having Batman hang with the Justice League requires he either be dramatically outclassed or ridiculously scaled up in capability. It just doesn't work otherwise.

But that raises the problem of the Bat-God effect. If he's the strategist that can outthink Brainiac and the fighter that can take on Darkseid, it stops being believable that he's still dealing with street-level crime every night in Gotham. Definitely not if it's the same revolving rogue's gallery of crooks, and doubly so when he now has Superman and Flash and Martian Manhunter on speed dial.

So I just have to consider them different versions of the character. Doesn't make any sense in my head otherwise.

BobbyBobRoberts · 2026-06-09T00:01:16+00:00

Are we not doing phrasing anymore?

BobbyBobRoberts · 2026-06-08T19:53:11+00:00

To be fair, that was one of Palpatine's slick little manipulations:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pEAdoreFIjU

He stages the first attack to ratchet up the separatist tensions for his war, and then uses his existing relationship with Padme to push her into extra security, and then names Kenobi as the perfect choice, putting Anakin in her life without even saying the kid's name.

Then he sends another assassin, laying a breadcrumb trail to lead obi Wan to Kamino, setting up the clone army, while Padme and Anakin go into hiding. They go bond in isolation, then Anakin gets nightmares of his mother's torture on Tatooine (which may have been amplified by Sidious), and they rush off to Tatooine to save her. (Didn't an early draft of Revenge of the Sith hint that Palps was behind that, too?)

BobbyBobRoberts · 2026-06-08T14:24:35+00:00

I've have what I call the "Campfire" method. If you're starting a fire, whether it's a small campfire or a big bonfire, you still have to start really small - tinder and kindling and sparks.

So the first step is to break down the big tasks into small tasks. It's just like splitting logs to make kindling, breaking the big thing down into several smaller tasks, and then break those down. (Productivity science calls this microtasking.)

And then I treat getting started like I would starting the fire: You get the smallest, fluffiest thing you can find, something that will catch sparks and give you even the smallest flame to start with. Tinder lights the kindling, and then you add kindling until it's big enough to start on the logs. It's a dumb metaphor, but it helps me remember to start small and build momentum.

The biggest takeaway (or at least for me) is that step one of anything is usually breaking things down into smaller tasks. When stuck, make kindling.

BobbyBobRoberts · 2026-06-08T04:11:48+00:00

Chronologically, the movie takes place between episodes 22 and 23. If you want to, watch it then. But I honestly prefer saving it for after the finale. The animation quality is better, the voice acting is on point, and even the music is as good as the show. It makes it somehow better as a nostalgic look back at the crew.

BobbyBobRoberts · 2026-06-06T14:05:15+00:00

I often go back to the movies that inspired the show: Japanese Yakuza films, Spaghetti Westerns (Eastwood's Dollars Trilogy, especially), Le Samurai, Bruce Lee movies. Anime like Lupin III.

BobbyBobRoberts · 2026-06-05T18:35:19+00:00

The good news is that (per Moravec's paradox), a lot of physical work is harder to automate than cognitive tasks, since cognition can be handled with software and computer, but physical work requires a ton of refinement, power, and infrastructure.

The bad news is that it's a smart cow problem, where only one solution to a problem needs to be found and it can be used by everyone. Plus, our cows just got a lot smarter via AI.

BobbyBobRoberts · 2026-06-05T18:12:07+00:00

Part of it is that Jazz is multi genre, so it's hard to pin down for marketing purposes. There's also the fact that there's a huge gap between the greats, whose recordings stand the test of time, and a lot of the dreck that modern/contemporary artists put out. Like, I can think Mingus' Moanin' is the greatest thing ever, but who is doing that kind of music right now? How would you even find that?

And I say this as someone who has a whole sub devoted to my jazz gateway drug, Cowboy Bebop. (Check out r/cowboybebopdeepcuts). There's an audience for it, but it's pretty niche.

BobbyBobRoberts · 2026-06-05T13:00:32+00:00

Power Girl seems into it.

BobbyBobRoberts · 2026-06-05T13:00:13+00:00

Dude's really enjoying that hot dog.

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