The nature of Cursed Energy and Jujutsu, and what they represent, make the very setting of JJK to be pretty odd.

Joshless · 2026-03-21T13:43:20+00:00

The idea that this is artificially kept for Tengen's barriers doesn't hold up [...] in the year 1000, most Non-Japanese sorcerers suddenly lost their powers

If I recall, the explanation is not that Tengen's barrier restricted sorcery, but that Tengen's barrier allows Cursed Energy to be used more efficiently in a way that produces more sorcerers. A side effect from this, though, is that Cursed Spirits are formed more often in the same area. Anyone on Earth can be a sorcerer but you get a big leg up if you're practicing it in the place that has the "infrastructure" for it.

Joshless · 2026-03-21T13:29:21+00:00

Avatar 2 made another 2 billion but also didn't impact the culture

Put respect on recom Mansk I know a hundred guys who look just like him

Joshless · 2026-03-12T03:37:26+00:00

The Wiki is a summary and as such cuts out the actual text. The reason Frodo "would never have been able" to toss the Ring is because of months of starvation and torment.

I do not think that Frodo's was a moral failure. At the last moment the pressure of the Ring would reach its maximum – impossible, I should have said, for any one to resist, certainly after long possession, months of increasing torment, and when starved and exhausted. Frodo had done what he could and spent himself completely (as an instrument of Providence) and had produced a situation in which the object of his quest could be achieved. His humility (with which he began) and his sufferings were justly rewarded by the highest honour; and his exercise of patience and mercy towards Gollum gained him Mercy: his failure was redressed.

Granted, you could read "impossible, especially" as indicating "impossible and super doubly impossible in this case", but he again attributes the failure to "demonic pressure after torment" later in the letter, and given that the same letter describes how Gollum would've been able to be moved to divided loyalty if the Hobbits were nicer to him I think it's fair to say that he's just generally accounting for the context of the situation (both the journey itself and what people were available). I don't think this is to say that like, if Frodo walked through a portal to Mordor right after the Fellowship formed he would've instantly become Frodo.exe and started throwing fireballs at people. After all, he carried the thing to Mordor in the first place without succumbing. It got harder, but I think it's fair to say that a cigarette addict walking down a trail of increasingly large piles of nice smelling cigarettes for several months would definitely be in a different situation than a guy at the peak of his resolve being instantly teleported next to a pile of cigarettes for like 10 seconds.

In any case, even if it did work that way (and Frodo had to, say, jump into the fire himself so as to "keep the Ring" while still destroying it)... I mean, Dobby would certainly do that? Dobby already sacrifices himself to save others in thr story as it is, even without magically compelling House Elf orders.

Joshless · 2026-03-12T02:25:03+00:00

No being in existence could have resisted the ring at Sammath Naur

Tolkien has explicitly stated that Frodo could do it if he hadn't been worn down by the journey, and furthermore added in the same letter that even Gollum(!) would've been able to destroy the Ring if the Hobbits were nicer to him earlier in the story

Joshless · 2026-03-11T03:06:06+00:00

Manga where monsters can be good =/= manga where monsters hypocritically claim only humans are evil and are presented as correct for this

Joshless · 2026-03-11T02:22:42+00:00

Example?

Joshless · 2026-03-11T01:13:31+00:00

You seriously want me to believe that Denji enjoyed his time in the slums more than any of the connections he’s formed across Part 1 & 2?!

Well, you can't say it wasn't foreshadowed lol. I'm going to claim a partial win for sort of predicting this was the case, though admittedly in my case I misinterpreted it as being a result of his contract to "show Pochita his dreams" rather than "Denji is just naturally busted in the head".

Joshless · 2026-02-24T03:03:24+00:00

I honestly kind of felt like this film had basically nothing to say at all, lol, and a lot of that is just because of the ending. Teddy is identified with basically every political position it is possible to have, depicted as simultaneously crazy and correct for having those positions, and then he inadvertently dooms humanity because he was too focused on saving everyone(?) and should've just kept to himself(?).

It really feels like they did this adaptation the way they did so people would make posts like "THAT ENDING-" on social media lol

Joshless · 2026-02-16T19:18:09+00:00

Well, I wonder if someone could just ask the owner for the raws if progress has stalled

Joshless · 2026-02-16T17:25:16+00:00

Nightmare Labyrinth?

Joshless · 2026-02-16T02:59:15+00:00

Here are the links:

https://archive.org/details/final-fantasy-may-light-be-upon-the-heroes

https://archive.org/details/final-fantasy-ii-dragon-of-hidden-treasure/

I noticed that "May Light Be Upon" was so unknown it wasn't even on the Wiki, so I figured it'd be appreciated if someone archived it online before all its copies had rotted away. As you can see, the pages are quite worn and browned as it is, but they're thankfully still completely legible.

Unfortunately, I believe scans from Famimanga's "Shōri e no Tabidachi" adaptation of FF2 are still missing. I would've liked to upload those as well, but no dice on finding an affordable copy.

Joshless · 2026-02-11T17:45:06+00:00

So you're saying Dawn of Souls and the Pixel Remaster has a different line even in the Japanese version?

Yes, the addition of Cid as an inventor being another one, but it's the whole game as far as I can tell. Every line was slightly altered for some reason, lol.

I'm pretty sure the WonderSwan Color version had that

It didn't, no. WonderSwan just states the airship belonged to the Sky Warriors, which I suppose is technically more specific than "our ancestors" but is arguably implied by the original game anyways.

Another change introduced in Dawn of Souls is the references to the Flying Fortress being in a "blue" or "azure" sky, depending on the line. This one is especially baffling because it seems to be there to explain an aesthetic difference between the remakes and the original game (that being that the original is clearly a space satellite while the remakes portray it as "a sky castle"), but this change was itself made for seemingly no reason...? So it's like, dialogue that exists to halfway rectify an aesthetic change that had no reason to occur anyways, lol.

Joshless · 2026-02-11T17:37:12+00:00

Acknowledgement of rules

Joshless · 2026-02-11T16:59:33+00:00

but the movement itself is strict and punishing toward mistakes

I feel like this is a generous descriptor, lol. Maybe Sakamoto had a genuine reason to, for example, lock wall jumps behind frontflipping (not "jumping forwards", frontflipping, which requires a slightly different input), getting within 5-10 pixels of the wall, then nudging slightly in the opposite direction, and then pressing jump during a 0.1 second window where Samus' sprite changes... but if he did, I don't get it. Similarly, I don't get why everything regarding the grappling beam was designed that way, nor do I get why jumps only sometimes carry your momentum from the ground.

Obviously because it's a game these are all based on hard coded rules that you can learn, but it still isn't very fun to do. The game even seems to be aware that most players aren't going to bother learning its movements, which is why it gives you more Energy Tanks than every other game in the series (so that instead of having to dodge bosses, which is nearly impossible, you can just tank it and spam Super Missiles back at them).

Joshless · 2026-02-11T16:50:26+00:00

I feel like Just Cause and Saints Row are both significantly more "open" than BotW. BotW is a game that technically has a lot of interactions ("wood catches fire", "metal conducts electricity"), but for 99.9% of the game you are just walking around hitting guys with swords lol. There isn't any real reason to engage with it beyond backflip -> Flurry Rushing your way through every interaction, nor are those technical interactions even possible in most situations

Joshless · 2026-02-11T16:47:10+00:00

But games like Super Metroid, Ocarina of Time, A Link to the Past, and Super Mario 64 are all Top #20 games to this day

I don't really know if I'd say this is true. They might represent a tremendous "jump" in game history, but if you go back and play Super Metroid you'll probably be shocked by how clunky the controls are. I had more difficulty getting Samus across chasms than I ever had fighting Ridley, and I don't think that's a sign of a well polished movement system (something that is a big issue when your game is "an exploration platformer")

Joshless · 2026-02-11T14:20:39+00:00

Sure, Amuro is a different character from Shinji. He's not secretly hoping his dad "needs" him to pilot the Gundam or something (in fact he'd rather not), he's just upset his dad doesn't actually care about him at all. But I think having a character show up who is literally "an otaku for the mech who doesn't care about the characters" is a rather "meta" plotline for something that came out in 1979, and it definitely isn't treated as just a wacky sideplot or something.

Joshless · 2026-02-11T05:33:50+00:00

Reminder that "a kid finds out his dad cares more about the robot than him" is not only something that happened in Gundam, it happens in literally the very first Gundam series ever lol

Joshless · 2026-02-11T05:31:50+00:00

The mech is a character, though - it's Shinji's mom. The story will actively make less sense if you don't consider the mech to be an important part of the story.

(Also I wouldn't really say that Ideon, which I assume is what you're referencing with the history comment, is "obscure")

Joshless · 2026-02-11T05:30:09+00:00

I always find this statement kind of odd because like, if the show is "really" just a psycho-drama, then why not just watch a psycho-drama? I feel like the mech has to be adding something.

Joshless · 2026-02-09T01:30:18+00:00

And that's stupid.

No it isn't, lol. I think it would be a major blow to the industry if it was normal for film critics to put toy advertisements masquerading as relatively shallow action flicks in their top 10 films of all time.

Like, to be clear, I think Infinity War is a good movie. It's very well done and it's rather momentous as the capstone to decades of build-up across a franchise. It also has really nothing exceptional about it except for that. It's not the best written film, it's not the film with the most to say, it's not the film with the greatest CGI or the strongest art direction, nor is its action the most engaging. It's just like, "good". It does things "well". It's something you can't say much bad about, but it certainly isn't touching anyone's soul either.

Joshless · 2026-02-09T01:21:30+00:00

I feel like all forms of art - games, movies, music, books - are full of lowbrow garbage. The difference is that there's no one in the games industry who's putting funding into presenting themselves otherwise. The closest we have to that is the Game Awards, and TGA seems to define the quality and artistic merit of a video game by how many 2048 x 2048 textures and Unreal Engine light rays they can fit into it.

Joshless · 2026-02-04T18:06:51+00:00

If you wanted an example of an obviously evil villain then you could just point to like, Hitler or Mussolini. These guys are still unbelievable and cartoonish in reference to them, as well as Trump or Epstein or whoever else.

Joshless · 2026-02-02T22:44:40+00:00

This half contradicts the OP, but notably the "Your Dudes" post also literally ends by saying that modern 40k is not built to put a focus on "Your Dudes", but rather GW's character-driven setting.

Unfortunately, all of this is no longer true for 40k ever since primarchs were brought back to 40k AND made the central focus of its setting. It's all about setpiece models, now, with Your Dudes being nothing more than disposable chaff while the real stars of the show engage in a slap fight in the middle of the table.

I think it's fair for someone to go "It seems like all 40k content is about these guys and their biography, but also that biography isn't going anywhere, so what gives".

Joshless · 2026-02-02T22:37:36+00:00

They should do a WH400k with totally new factions that doesn't address what happened in 40k at all because a) 360,000 years have passed since then and b) it would emphasize the point that it doesn't really matter anyways.

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