I remember always hearing about Evangelion, especially back in the day, on imageboards. I also remember finally watching a full length movie and thinking something like "they made everyone fall in love with this character who hardly says a word in the whole movie". I vaguely remember the plot. It was a long long time ago. I never watched the tv series. Now I want to reconcile that. I have started with the original 1995 episodes, and, can I just say, the way people used to animate is ... I don't know if it's just me, maybe somewhere deep inside I associate that look of old anime with my early childhood where I saw Sailor Moon, and Spirited Away, the happy carefree time, because after that I didn't really watch anime pretty much at all. Or maybe it is the pieces of art themselves and the genius people behind them. Or both. I don't know, but compared to stuff like zootopia/steven universe/star/teen titans/{almost_anything_past_1999_here}, the latter is so much more removed from the world, than the obviously fictional series from the 80s-early 90s. Something happened in the 90s. We got all those crazy wacky cartoons (no shade, they were also cool, just in a different way), and it feels like the more removed from the world they were, the better. And now everything is just sugarcoated and polished, and empty. Although, I shouldn't say everything, but the culture goes in that direction. Partly, I think, it has led to the retro-revival, 'cos like, yeah, it was cooler back then. Now people are dressing up like it's the 90s, the indie web gravitates towards retro, hopefully we get old-school-style series as well. But then again, we have all seen the new HP series trailers, which are as far into wokeness as they could get. Anyway, long post TL;DR - I'm old, it was better back in my days, go watch old stuff P.S. Also, let me know if you have watched the 1995 Eva and whether you liked it or not P.P.S. I'm mainly writing this to be able to remember when I first watched it

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Turns out you don't have to be popular to receive tons of spam messages in your guestbook from bots - over the last few hours alone I have received over 20. So I have implemented a couple of ways to stop them, one of which you might experience yourself - a simple math question - we all know clankers can't math, right? Other measures won't affect real people. On a brighter note, I have assembled the junk PC I was writing about below - it's running a Phenom II and Win7, and it's awesome - I have been piling old games onto the SDD, so far I've got L4D, Metro 2033, the first 2 Stalkers, Borderlands, HL2, HoMMIII, Stronghold, Syberia, Assassin's Creed 2, Skyrim, Vice City, San Andreas, LotR BfME2, LotR Conquest (hell yeah!), Spider-Man 2, the first three Harry Potter games, No One Lives Forever 2, American McGee's Alice and NFS Underground 2. So far I was unable to make LEGO Stunt Rally work - it runs, but the cars don't. I have had some problems running Prototype - it crashes as it loads a saved game, but otherwise runs. I'll try to debug as much as possible. Voodoo isn't always the solution.

I have managed to get a retro PC together, but there are 2 main issues with it currently - the HDD is very slow, and XP (even with the latest community driven updates) is too outdated to be realistically useful for gaming. Hence, I will do 2 things - first, I will install XP on an SSD and check the responsiveness of the system; second, I will likely just install a version of Windows 7 on the SSD. I was focusing on XP for nostalgia, which I have somewhat satisfied using the system again, and for Lego Stunt Rally, for which I have found an alternative loader that supposedly works on newer Windows versions

I have been thinking about playing the good old games again. I should clarify that my childhood/adolescence gaming era was in the '00s - '10s, so that's what I feel most nostalgic about. I used to have an NES clone with cartridges, but here I'm talking about PC games specifically. I should also say that my favourite games were mostly not the ones that are generally popular. I had a lot of games that were based on movies and cartoons - like Madagascar, the Da Vinci Code and the Harry Potter games, or the second Shrek - and some random ones, the demos of which I had got with the local monthly gaming magazine - like Giants: Citizen Kabuto or No One Lives Forever 2. I also remember random games - like Lego Stunt Rally and Creatures: Village - that I had bought from the local CD store. A lot of these games don't run on modern PCs unless you voodoo them into running through emulators, VMs, graphics cards sims &c. And that kind of voodooing leads to bugs, animations are too fast because CPUs are faster now, and in general it takes some of the magic away. So, I have found my old motherboard with Phenom II still in it, along with the cooler and RAM. I have an old Internet card and a graphics card from that time, which supports DirectX 9 (sorry, didn't meant to flex on you). Basically, I only need a hard drive, a power unit and a case to shove it all into, and I get a somewhat 'retro' PC for Windows XP. I also have an old VGA LCD display, which would also be nice to use for the build. I think I also have an internal CD drive somewhere, I know I have an external one and an external floppy drive. Anyway, I'll let that thought cook in my brain for a bit, purely because that setup needs space in the flat, and I'm not sure I want to allocate it just yet. I'll let it simmer

There was a reddit post asking about people's favourite love story in Tolkien's works, and people were mostly saying Aragorn/Arwen or Beren/Luthien, which is understandable. I decided to joke about Amrod and the Telerin ship at Losgar, which is an obscure reference. The reply I got was something like "You're a monster, I love you" - the horror of the reference and the pleasure of understanding a niche apocryphal thing in a cocktail. It's nice that we can explore niche communities on the net, although they can lead to bias confirmation. Fandoms are fun nonetheless.

I strongly associate the old winrar interface with the game Heroes of Might and Magic III. It was one of the first games I ever played. I went to a neighbouring city to my cousin's family once, and he had a pc. And one of the games there was HoMMIII, and I remember playing the tutorial and being captivated by the art style and the overall classic fantasy aesthetics. I forgot all about the game for some years untif later stumbling across it and playing again. But that's not the point. The point is that the old winrar button icons carry ther same level of fantasyness to me. You have a stack of old clearly magical books, a pair of binoculars, a FREAKING WIZARD HOW CLEARLY CAN SUMMON JINNS, and olf cursed bottle of bug, and an elvish shield! This is HoMM and you can't convince me otherwise.

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There is an insistance on using subtractive analysis when looking into objects. Our materialist minds want to know what the object is made of and how. Let's say I have a book signed by the wonderful Helen Kirkby. Let's also say a copy of this exact book was produced in such a way that the book was replicated to the point of atomic identity, the ink leaving the exact same microscopic marks and indentations of the same depth on the page. I would still much rather have the original. Why so if the objects are identical? They might be identical in the subtractive analysis model, looking deep into the matter of the thing. However, looking up, they are far from identical. I value the original, because it is in this place, of this time, handled by those people, given to me and has a story that is as much a part of the object as the material composition, if not more. I might just want the original still even if the copy is better preserved. It feels like looking down into the atomic structure carries less emotional value than looking up into the context of things. On top of that, the higher you look, the clearer it gets that we draw value from the interconnected value hierarchy going higher and higher.

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