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Won tickets to the premier from the Viz booth yesterday. \o/ Gonna have to find the time to see it, but definitely excited.

Suspi~ is it too late to request a forum badge~?

(whoa, haven't been on the forums in a while)

At any rate, yeah - just lemme know and I'll toss ye a dollar. Image? Eh, I'll leave it in your hands.

This is a decidedly cooler FanimeCon than is usually the norm. Enjoy it, folks!

I've been taking the Metro-Airport -> Santa Teresa light rail for something like a year now. It's pretty well regulated, at least during the day time. I can't recall a week where they didn't bust a few dozen people for trying to get a ride without paying for the ticket. There's a noticeable police presence that probably does a decent job at deterring various levels of idiocy.

Hell, lost property isn't an issue either. Lost a phone on the light rail, got it back the next day.

It's a pity that scanlations for it have been rather... slow... but Pandora Hearts is seriously entertaining me.

Marriage started out as an economic institute. Uphold tradition, ban marriages for love.

Eve tempted Adam into mankind's fall from grace, robbing us of immortality and freedom from illness and disease. Ban women.

Divorce is a religious violation, severing a contract made under the eyes of God. Ban divorces.

The Treaty of Tripoli, signed by Thomas Jefferson, specifically states in Article 11 that the United States is not a Christian nation. It is but one of three treaties in which the Senate unanimously ratified thus far, with absolutely no evidence of dissent during the period. Ban churches.

You starting to get my drift? Or do you require the infusion of a few stem cells into your cerebral cortex in order to have a high enough IQ to get it when a man's spitting sarcasm at you? Marriage isn't a Christian concept. Love isn't a Christian concept. Tolerance ought to be a Christian concept. Because the concepts of love and marriage do not explicitly and solely fall under Christian conceptual grounds, because even in Christianity there are those that believe that love between two individuals trumps all other considerations, the neutral and therefore jurisdictional ground of the state is to treat gay marriage as functionally and completely equivalent in every way to heterosexual marriage. And therefore privy to the same tax codes and same civil rights as heterosexual marriage.

All your religiously fueled ignorance is doing is further proving that those that did support Prop 8 were all hackneyed idiots that totally missed the historical and political context in which the whole debate is framed in the first place. There is absolutely no way you can argue that Prop 8 isn't discriminatory and bigoted - and that supporting it is exactly the same fucking thing as being a bigot yourself.

Enjoy your shame.

If I hear one more time about people refusing to eat pork because of swine flu...

*muttergrumble*

Just learn to wash your goddamn hands and don't play tonsil hockey with a sick person. It's a bad, fast-spreading, high-mortality flu, but it's a flu. Hygiene and care'll get your farther than panic.

Been using Twitter for a while now. Mainly use it as a data-trawler amongst the news organizations and geek celebrity figures that use it. I also make blog update announcements on it. http://www.twitter.com/gonzomehum

Argh. Missing the point entirely. First, on the actual substance of the debate, there are few objective lines in which we can define what is and isn't art: rather, we can define whether or not it's legal, and while many of us don't find rap music to be entirely pleasant, those that do seek it out completely consensually. If your little sister is listening to filth, blame yourself, your parents and her for raising her in such a way that its themes of urban violence are somehow romantic to her. Nobody's tied her up to a chair and taped a pair of headphones around her ears to brainwash her into liking it - and if family influence is getting trumped over by street influence, I'd say the problem lies... elsewhere.

Not to mention that some early forms of rap, before its mainstreaming, does have artistic value to it - as an examination of the reality of urban life and an outlet for its stresses. And even some contemporary artists hold true to those merits - as do legions of amateurs. Music serves as a reflection of the social turbulences of its contextual era: silencing any form of it is nothing more than turning a deaf ear towards what is quite possibly an incoming stampede. Better to listen than to ignore.

As for the meta-critique, not all opinions are equally valid. Opinions based off facts and opinions with a stronger narrative structure are always considered more valid. It doesn't matter whether or not they offend - it matters entirely if there's any substance to back it up. Ikari's arguments tend to hold water - RKitty's are about as porous as a sponge, and ill-defended to boot.

Republican National Committee chairman Michael Steele, he of the awkward hiphop/politics juxtaposition, had recently been under fire for a number of things, ranging from his stance on abortion and gay marriage, but especially for his derisive comments made about conservative radio pundit Rush Limbaugh.

Notably, Limbaugh's infamy has risen to such a degree that both Democrats and Republicans are publicly calling him the "face" of the modern Republican party. With a bit of glee, perhaps, from the former party.

It's gotten to the point where any conservatives that speak out against his rather... shall we say, radical dialogue has been ostracized for their supposed disloyalty to the party line. Poor David Frum certainly didn't deserve the abuse he got for an otherwise intelligent article on the Limbaugh dilemma...

http://www.newsweek.com/id/188279/page/1

Naturally, I disagree, Ewu. Meta-debates are just as important a part of the discourse as any other - it sets the framework and guidelines for all parties involved. A bad argument should be called out on, rather than treated with equal weight as a valid argument - if done well, it prevents the debate from slipping off the topic too often.

As for the judicial precedence issues, yes - historically, the judicial branch /overall/ has usually been in favor of more civil rights than less. But there are exceptions, and harmful ones as well - CA's state supreme court is actually rather in the minority on their previous ruling in favor for gay marriage, and the national supreme court is staffed by not a few right-wing hardliners as well. Not to mention prior rulings on freedom of speech, rights to privacy (treating corporations as legal individuals? Really?), etc.

My liberal bias is, of course, showing as plain as day here, but given the rather... diverse... makeup of the judicial branch of government, are you folks /certain/ that leaving it in the hands of a few, each with their own political and perhaps personal agendas, our best course of action? Should the rights of individuals really be left at the whim of whatever group of judges hold power at the moment of the legal test?

As for Ewu's arguments about public servants acting as a neutral balance... hahahahahahahahahaha. No. Public Servants is a job title, not a personality description. The best you can hope for is that their competing agendas will cancel each other out sufficiently to come to some semblance of an unbiased decision. Let's not forget that, when a government messes up (and boy howdy has it messed up in recent years), the blame for it applies not just to the individual leaders, but the entire human infrastructure below them too.

Beated stage 5 with lives and bombs to spare!

Only to have the clock roll around to the 5 AM Bad End. orz

This game haets meeeeeeee...

...why do people insist on using this subforum as a personal journal sometimes? Seriously - Pyron just went off on a rant about RadioactiveKitty getting off-base in her rather substance-light rebuttal to Leslie. Why repeat her mistake?

Anyhow, to get back on topic, the legal test of Prop 8 is, or has, been argued in the state supreme court. Rather than arguing the merits of the proposition itself, as the majority of the discussion participants have clearly shown a negative response to it, I propose a more general topic: <i>should</i> matters of civil rights be left to majority vote? Is the alternative, letting an effective oligarchy of judicial agents set the precedent for an entire body of people, really any better? If neither options satisfy, what are our alternatives?

Ready... set... debate!

I did! Game save file that came with the translation patch, see.

Lasted all of ten seconds.

orz

Since there isn't a single active thread about Touhou or any other bullet hells/schmups, I figured I might as well toss one up and see what happens.

I (finally) got around to picking Touhou up just recently, starting with Imperishable Night. Getting my ass kicked on easy mode~ Massive amounts of QQ~

Eve no Jikan does have an international release planned, but that doesn't mean I can't be impatient. Want. Do want. Want moar episodes already.

It's arguable that Prop 8's passing was not, in fact, a true representation of untainted public opinion. Proponents for Prop 8 would be fools to overlook the influence of the Mormon and Catholic church's megabucks advertisement spending when asserting the proposition to voters. After all, the argument that media affects public opinion is the same argument people've been making to address video game violence, deviant behavior in the media, sexual objectivity, ect.

Forgot who was it that said that trying to say that books have never harmed a person is saying that books have never helped a person- but they were on the right track. Media influence cuts both ways, and Prop 8's legitimacy is affected by it.

And that is why we need a judicial court to finalize the legality of legislative processes and propositions. If the court strikes Prop 8 down, they will have done so for what they believe to be strong and lawful reasons- and frankly, historical patterns concerning civil rights would suggest they're merely following precedent in doing so.

tl;dr: Just because "The People" agreed to it doesn't mean it's the right move- or even representative of the populace's actual will or best interest.

After P3:FES, I was already edging towards Atlus fanboyism. P4's pretty much had me sucking their c- wait, what rating's this forum again?

Ah, anyhow. Damn good game. If you're dying to the occasional Megido or Megidola, either you haven't leveled enough (and like with P3, there's very little grinding involved, so maybe you ought to slow down a bit), or your armor sucks, or you're like me, and started out with Expert mode before you realized exactly what you were getting into.

Once you get into the groove, though, the gameplay's a significant upgrade on P3 (in that you actually get to control your damned party). Animation-wise, no change. Story-wise, on par with its predecessor, and not at all in a bad way.

The biggest improvement, though, is the voice acting. Though a few characters were relatively on the weak side, the ensemble as a whole has proven surprisingly strong. Most importantly, not a single one of them were anywhere near as ear-gratingly bad as Fuuka from Persona 3.

(Or Alliance, whatever floats your boat)

That's lowering your standards quite a bit, Steve-o. :J

Oy oy oy oy none of that. Kargath Alliance, at least, has some balls to speak of. Two hour Halaa attempt with inferior forces- not a single quitter. Bombs flying everywhere. Skeletons all over the field. Tenacity won the day.