Well, I say "entirety", but it's missing ep 1 for some reason. I had it running yesterday in the background while playing WoW. It's been quite a while since I saw it.
I have actually not watched it since my initial viewing, but for an ep here or there. I've got the series on LaserDisk--that's how long it's been--and never bought the DVDs or anything else.
Tenchi Muyo! in its various forms always had excellent dubbing, right up until I stopped paying attention to it, fed up with the jillion reboots and restarts and spinoffs. The series suffered from endless tinkering with the basic premise, which needed no tinkering, and with spinoffs that endlessly recast the characters in different roles. It results in continuity fatigue, and I found myself simply not caring about what happened in Tenchi in Tokyo and the later series. I did start to collect that series, but gave up on it.
Tenchi Universe, in the meantime, has a 26-episode arc that has a definite beginning, middle, and end. It's got a different feel than the original OVA series does, but by comparison the OVA series also feels like a kind of rough draft. It meanders too much, and has what feel like "filler" episodes.
Seriously, I think you could cut the first 13 OVA eps down to ten, and miss nothing. Get rid of eps 8, 10, and 13 entirely. And maybe 9, come to think of it.
Oh well.
* * *
The SWJ media really doesn't like the idea that Justice League might be released in the format its first director had intended.
JL was a trainwreck of a movie, I'm told, possibly the wreck of a train carrying dumpster fires. Zack Snyder was the original director; then he was replaced with Joss Whedon, who reshot a bunch of footage, and the result did...poorly...at the box office.
Now there's a push on to rerelease the movie with Snyder's footage and the various critics are losing their shit at the proposition.
And then Collider lost its shit over Fan Privilege. And Fan Entitlement and just how dangerous a precedent actually giving them what they want is. And then the dog-pile started. The Verge. Kotaku, Polygon were all doing little hit pieces. Vanity Fair's (of all things) headline was "Is Releasing the Snyder Cut of Justice League a Victory for Toxic Fandoms."...because what the fans want is not what the SJWs want to give them. If the fans want something different, it's because THEY ARE WRONG and not because they have any idea of what quality entertainment actually is.
There is no getting around it, the Snyder Cut is pissing off all the people that regularly piss me off. When something is "deeply troubling" the SJW turd-weasels that write for the access media, I have to wonder if there isn't some virtue to the Snyder Cut that I've missed?
***
What is really frightening the access media is just what they said it was, they hate the idea of the fans getting their way. Because when they do get their way the studios are that much closer to flushing their beloved, godawful SJWized garbage versions of franchises.
I used to buy, kind of, the idea that Hollywood's main motivation was money--but their stubborn refusal to make movies and shows that would make them scads of money solely because they didn't like the politics involved changed my mind. I've seen it time and again, where they did this or that or the other thing, none of which made a lick of sense to me if MONEY! was their motivation.
Though it was a poor argument against the obvious media bias, I must admit, even forty years ago. "Why would they deliberately piss off half their customers?" I don't know! You tell me--you're the one saying that money is their entire reason for doing anything, so why do they consistently act like leftism is the default position and anything else is a psychotic, evil deviation? Why do conservatives in Hollywood have to hide their opinions lest they never work again? Where are the right-wing versions of the Dixie Chicks, getting up on stage and unapologetically voicing right-wing opinions? And where is the press rushing to defend them as having the right to freedom of expression?
In the 1980s, Hollywood depicted Presidents as evil and self-centered, or ineffective and weaselly. In the 1990s, suddenly Presidents were heroes. The difference was in who held the White House. The situation has not improved since.
* * *
The creative bankruptcy of Hollywood was already obvious and the fact that Hollywood is planning to release thirty sequels in the coming year does not surprise me.
The only title on that list that sparks any interest at all is the Minions movie. Minions are awesome.
The superhero movies are going to be nothing but SJW-fests. Matrix 4 is a sequel to a trilogy which had already completed its tale. The Jurassic Park series is just beating a dead horse at this point, a dead horse that only knew one trick to begin with. And the rest of them--endless sequels used to be a joke, even to the point that Hollywood sometimes self-parodied itself. Remember the opening sequence in Alien Nation showing a theater marquee advertising "Rambo 6"? They released Rambo 5 last year!
But it was obvious that Hollywood was out of ideas long before this. When they started releasing movies based on board games. *sigh*
* * *
What do you call it when the mayor of a major city sends police to raid a Christian church for holding "illegal" worship services?
"Police state" is the term I'd use.
...if this unconfirmed story turns out to be true, which we don't yet know. But given the way Chicago has been acting towards Christian churches thus far, it would not surprise me.
* * *
Hertz is in trouble. The funny thing is that their listed assets actually outweigh their debts; but that merely suggests that the valuation of their assets is, shall we say, optimistic.
The value of a thing is not the price tag on it, but what that thing will bring at time of sale. Look, I could stick a price tag of $50,000 on my motorcycle, but that doesn't make it worth fifty grand.
I do think we're in for a deflationary cycle, though. One should have been triggered in 2009; the banks and the fed printed money at an astonishing rate to prevent it, but that bolt has been shot. I don't know enough about all this to know what else they can possibly do to prevent it happening now.
Ordinarily, that's what happens to bad debt: it gets cleared by the system. The subprime mortgage crisis (which was what set off the whole depression in the first place) should have led to an enormous write-off of loans which, honestly, should never have been extended in the first place. The problem is, this would have led to the wholesale failure of some very large financial institutions--companies that employ some very rich people who have the ears of many politicians, and who themselves would have been financially ruined had things gone that way. Think 1929; the causation was largely the same: people borrowing money to invest. And what billionaire is willing to accept penury because it's the right thing to do?
I say "penury" but what I actually mean is, "Having to live on a middle-class income." Relative penury. None of the banksters affected by a crash in 2009 would have been reduced to abject poverty, not like the apocryphal Wall Street investor who was trying to sell his Duesenberg for $20 in order to buy food.
But they would have had to find real jobs, work for a living, and make do with average incomes.
The money-printing that was done in response to the 2009 crisis merely kicked the can down the road. I haven't said much about Trump's economy here because I know that the fundamentals haven't been corrected, and I worry about the continued deficit spending. To be fair, the President does not write the budget; he merely signs or vetoes it--and the GOP has not shown any interest in reducing federal spending since 1996.
The massive deficits given the green light by Obama in the 2000s were meant to help Wall Street and the banks, and did that handily, for good or ill...but the problem is that those deficits have continued after the emergency was over.
Trump is not (or, at least, is "not really") a fiscal conservative. I haven't been able to pin down what his general ethos is, other than "MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN"--and to be honest, that's such a refreshing change from the "America whenever" shitheads we've had over the past twenty years that I don't really care. He certainly seems to be a social conservative, though, and that is a refreshing change from the country club Republicanism we've had since, oh, January 1989.
But Hertz--you can only kick a can so long, and my biggest fear is that Hertz is the first in a long line of failures of overleveraged businesses. And because "borrow money to improve the bottom line and keep the stock price up" has become a business strategem for a lot of major corporations, there are a lot of overleveraged businesses out there.
* * *
Of course the Illinois legislature voted itself a pay raise but didn't lift any lockdown restrictions because of course.
If I had a time machine, one of the things I would do would be to go back in time and try to convince the founders of our country that the Constitution needed to have very strong wording about what governments could and couldn't do, monetarily.
"You guys really need to include a lot more anti-tax language than you do here," I'd tell them, "because in the 20th century they're going to write an amendment which will emplace a tax on income. Do you guys have property taxes right now? We will then! An annual tax paid to the county you live in, and if you don't pay it the government seizes your house."
They'd probably say, "If you let that happen, then you deserve it."
*sigh*
They'd be right, of course. So I'd bop over to England and kill Karl Marx in his childhood, only to come back to the 21st century and find that the left was all ga-ga over "engelsianism" or some shit and there'd be no effective difference. No--according to the unwritten rules for time-travel stories, the communist death toll rising out of engelsianism would be 200,000,000 million instead of 100,000,000 because any change made to the past intending to fix something always results in making things worse, because of course it does. The ultimate expression of this is to kill Hitler in WWI and end up with world nazism because Hitler acted as a brake for Himmler or some shit....
* * *
I'm super-important so I deserve special service! Nope. Go to the back of the line, bitch. HA! HAAA!!
* * *
Rachel Maddow has definitely lost whatever marbles she had.
* * *
Someone down the street just had a "drive by" birthday parade.
* * *
Today is warm, like yesterday. I cold-soaked the bunker last night and got up this morning and closed the windows. I seriously do not want to have to turn on the AC when I had to have the heat on past my birthday. I want to keep the AC off until June, which is a week away.
We'll see if I manage it.