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Between kbin's issues around the holidays and some of my own issues this month I haven't been very active lately, but I'm still here.

I finally managed to finish watching Penguindrum! That show was weird. I really don't have the words to properly express just how weird it was. Did you know that Penguindrum and Utena share a director? I didn't realize that going into it, but after finishing Penguindrum I felt like giving Utena another try -- and realized that fact after looking up some details about it. It was very much an "ohhhh..." kind of moment. I'm not deeply familiar with the details of the 1995 Tokyo sarin gas attack, Night on the Galactic Railroad, etc. that were sources of inspiration for the show; so, a lot of it probably went over my head. I still have a few screenshots left that I never got around to posting -- here's a suitably weird one.

Since the last time I commented on here, I've also gone back and cataloged all the anime I have. I looked up the starting air date for every show and movie, and then sorted them oldest to newest. That was a bit more involved than I expected it to be and I wasn't sure how I should handle some entries (e.g. Index/Railgun, Fate/<whatever>, FMA, ...) where there's multiple works that are related in a complex fashion. For movies there were often multiple dates associated with a work so I went with public release dates (in Japan) even if they were shown a few months earlier at a film festival or whatever.

The oldest anime movie I've watched is The Castle of Cagliostro from 1979 (which is older than I thought it was), and the oldest series I've watched through (if you count it) is The Mysterious Cities of Gold from 1982. (The oldest series I have is the first season of Lupin III from 1971, but I've only watched a few episodes and the pilot.) It turns out that the year with the most entries I've got in my collection is 2013 with 2012 as a close second; I did a lot of DVD collecting around 2015-ish when I had terrible internet at home, so I suppose that makes sense.

I also realized recently after seeing a post about a nihonga featuring a tiger and a dragon and wondering if it was referenced in ToraDora (didn't see it in the first episode) that Taiga's English voice actor (Cassandra Lee Morris) is the same person who voiced Fie in Trails of Cold Steel, Morgana in Persona 5, Ritsu in K-On, etc. That was a bit trippy.

Still got any fun renders from back then?

POV-Ray, perhaps? You give it a scene description text file and it will render a raytraced image of the scene for you. You'd need to find or write an appropriate scene description though for what you want to randomize.

Hopefully both dishes come out great!

I've never tried to make a stew out of duck before, but if someone asked me to wing it anyway, I'd probably try to use it in a gumbo: Dark roux, Cajun Trinity (celery + onion + bell pepper), jalapeno, garlic, stock, fresh thyme, bay leaf, lots of fresh ground black pepper, spoonful of hot sauce (e.g. Crystal or Tabasco if I can't get that), plus your meat -- served over white rice. For chicken (e.g. chicken thighs), I'd sear it first but I'm not sure on the best treatment for gamey fowl. Personally I might try to blanch it first to try to reduce the gameyness (based on recommendations I've seen about cooking certain kinds of stewed pork -- like pork belly in Chinese dishes), but you'd do better to get advice from someone who's actually cooked with gamey ingredients more than I have if you can.

Adapting a coq au vin recipe might be another idea to try if gumbo doesn't appeal, but again, I've never tried that with duck either.

Thanks for introducing me to this. I hadn't seen it before. FYI, there's a higher resolution version on the Japanese Wikipedia:

• Tiger portion
• Dragon portion

What are the eyeballs made of?

I mean, we all know what happened when old Godzilla was hoppin' around Tokyo city like a big playground... right?

Stein's Gate's OP with the song Hacking to the Gate is probably my favorite overall including both visuals and the song itself.

Prior to watching Stein's Gate my favorite was Shakugan no Shana's first OP with the song Scarlet Color Sky.

I also really liked the OP for Mahou Tsukai ni Taisetsu na Koto (Someday's Dreamer) with the song Kaze no Hana which was my favorite OP before that.

Honorable mention to Honey and Clover for having the most WTF OP out of all the anime I have ever seen.

If you're looking for something else to listen to, basically any OP by Yoko Kanno or performed by Kalafina is good. e.g.:

• Hikari no Senritsu from Sora no Woto
• Tank! from Cowboy Bebob
• to the beginning from Fate/Zero (EDIT: I originally said "both OPs" but I got mixed up with one of the EDs -- the other OP is oath sign performed by LiSA)
• the Ghost in the Shell SAC OPs -- particularly Rise fron 2nd Gig

A few others that I enjoyed are:

• Asterisk -- Bleach's first OP
• Only My Railgun -- A Certain Scientific Railgun
• Choir Jail -- Dusk Maiden of Amnesia

but there are way too many to list, so I'm going to stop there before I write a novel.

Edit: Added links. Thanks @Davel23 -- I've been trying to stay off of YouTube lately and didn't know about that site until you posted your comment!

And Sim Tower I was obsessed with that game for a long time when I was younger. Couldn’t stop playing until I got everything completed and filled every empty space on the map.

Single, double, or triple story lobby? :-)

I remember having a pretty good time with SimTower myself -- I liked seeing all the little animations of people doing stuff throughout the building. I didn't understand the apartment pricing thing as a kid, but as an adult thinking back on it, it's clear that I was supposed to renovate the units if I wanted to keep renting them at the higher rates... (Delete and rebuild was not intuitive to me as a kid so I kept getting frustrated with the apartments and usually built massive amounts of hotel rooms instead.)

I haven’t heard of Sim Safari myself what was that one like?

I hadn't played it for 20+ years so my memory of it wasn't great when you asked this question -- but I went down a bit of a rabbit hole digging through my boxes of old anime DVDs and strange things I burned to CD-Rs as a teenager and such -- and it turns out I still have the original CD-ROM! It's got orange and white stripes. It's scratched up a little bit, but it's still readable enough that I was able to install the game under WINE and IT WORKS! (The installer prompted me to install DirectX 5 to "improve performance"... lol)

The game opens with a short animated splash screen -- a map of Africa with animated zebras and other animals shown over it before eventually displaying the game's logo. It then dumps me onto a main menu with a lantern that toggles an interactive tutorial on and off -- somewhat confusingly; it wasn't immediately clear that it was a switch unlike the other options. I turned the tutorial on but didn't find it very helpful.

The game itself is isometric and features a bunch of animals wandering around randomly while grass grows. (Screenshot) There are three different modes (park, camp, village) that I don't really understand the details of. Park shows your animals, of course. I think the idea is you build up the camp site to get tourists to come (and bring you money), do gardening and animal management and such in the park which attracts more tourists, and hire people from the village to keep things running (otherwise they poach your animals, probably?) but it's not clear how to actually get things going and most of the advisors seem pretty useless.

There's an ecologist adviser who has a field guide about plants and animals and can also show you various graphs and things. You can click on binoculars and then on an animal and it will bring up a window with a little animation of that animal.

The game constantly plays animal sound effects by default including crickets and various birds and a bunch of animals whose sounds I don't know well enough to name -- but could probably learn from the embedded educational material if I cared to. (I have a feeling many parents of kids who had this game were probably driven bonkers by some animal or other going "AWEEEEE heee heee heee hee!" over and over.)

I remembered the game being presented as more serious than SimPark (which has a talking cartoon frog guide you through things like leaf identification) -- and, indeed, the character graphics are more realistic cartoon drawings in this one, but it's also more cartoony than I remember with the sound effects for things like a "boing-a-boing-oing-oing" failure noise if you misclick the binoculars.

The controls are not very good. Moving around the map is tediuous and unintuitive (you have to click in a particular region near the window border and hold the mouse down there -- or else pull up a mini-map and navigate with that). The game also just builds paths immediately when you try to draw them with the mouse instead of letting you choose a route and drop to release to confirm the construction. You can "build" a 4 door car on your camp site for some reason as well as construct roads, but I think it may just be a decoration. There doesn't seem to be any way to pick it up and move it if you plopped it in a bad spot (bye $3k!).

Unfortunately I don't have the original box/paper manual/whatever else came with the disc and the README file (in an ancient .DOC format) is not very helpful. It does, however, contain some lines like:

By the time you read this document, the average home computer might be a 700MHz GazillaComp 2000 with 58 gigabytes of memory.

which is pretty amusing since the decade old machine I'm running it on has a 3.7GHz processor -- obscenely far beyond their dreams of high performance -- but a mere 32GB of RAM. :p

Somewhat oddly the game apparently has the ability to print -- although I haven't tried it.

I've seen Bubba Ho-Tep and Cemetery Man! Watched them during a movie marathon once that also included From Dusk Till Dawn and Jacob's Ladder. That was a night well spent.

Out of the games, I've played Sim Tower. I never made it to 5 stars but got as far as building the subway in at least one of my towers. I played way too many sim games as a kid. SimSafari is probably the most obscure I tried -- never really made much sense out of that one though.

I don't know if it's that obscure... but for anyone else who played a bunch of sim games -- do you remember the song with the lyrics "I'm just a splatter, splatter, splatter on the windshield of life"?

Didn't the GDPR have a data portability rule requiring that sites provide users the ability to easily export their own data? Does that not apply to Lemmy for some reason -- or, am I misremembering it? (I remember account data download being a big deal a while back on reddit, but it's been a few years...)