Card captor sakura clear card impressions

I’m halfway through watching the new Card Captor Sakura and so far it has has been extremely boring. Nostalgia alone isn’t enough to carry it, and all the characters have been flanderized, without any of the tension or dynamics in the original. Plus the cards and motifs are basically the same, except the original battles and design were more interesting. I was hoping that since they’re in middle school they might be a little more grown up, but Kero is insufferable now like he has gone from having ADD to having ADHD. Every episode is slow and feels pointless with more SoL than plot. It’s more of a rehash than a sequel. Haven’t read the manga but I heard it’s boring too, anyone know if it gets better?
Update:

It does get better in the second cour around when Meiling comes back. Do like me and read a book or something for the first 14 episodes, glancing up for a few minutes per episode when action or seemingly meaningful speeches happens. Once you reach the turning point the series speeds up a tad, and it starts to feel like CCS again. Maybe it took a while for the writers to get over their nostalgia and get in the grove again. Now I’m caught up (ep 19), and only the last 5 episodes feel like a passable sequel to the series + the 2nd movie.

 

 

“My period made me an atheist”

Sounds terrible, but I alsk read a similar account of this taboo subject in Somalia from Ayaan Hirsi Ali. Sex education should defi Italy be required, and parents should break the norm and talk about it sooner–I don’t know why they don’t.

My Period Made Me an Atheist

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Thoughts on Elon Musk

So elon musk wants to make an organization that will rate the truthfulness of news. Good idea in theory, but not when musk heads it since he has been known to lie. He also has been under attack by the media for not letting his tesla employees unionize which is what motivated him to creste pravda.

Though he has more vision than most billionaires, in the end he is still greedy and doesnt care about the wellbeing of his employees, or giving them fair wages if he can. His tweets indicate he is hostile to giving them self-representstion (ie a union). He therefore deserves the criticism existential comics gives him for focusing on scientific advances and high tech infrastructure without also aknowledging the problems of wealth inequality and how we need more philanthropy from people who possess power.

I usually hate people posting screencaps of someone blocking them, but Elon Musk arguing with me that he succeeded *in spite* of billions in public funding, then calling me a chimp and blocking me is too good. BTW, SpaceX launched a government funded rocket *during* these tweets. pic.twitter.com/2At4ihCWxm

— Existential Comics (find me on bluesky) (@existentialcoms) May 11, 2018

 

Anyway, I can cut him some slack as a startup for the safety record of his car factory and Texas on the road, but not for any lies. If you’e rich you should be able to afford to be honest.

 

I do like how he tried to convince Steven Pinker of the danger of general AI (without any more success than Sam Harris.) As a programmer and sci-fi nerd he seems more awakened to doomsday scenarios, than Steven Pinker who is a boring conservative that says everything will work out in the end if we just calm down and keep doing as we’re doing–the way he looks and talks really makes him sound like a tool of the establishment (a kind of captured intellectual people like Bill Gates heap praise on and then bring on dates.) So yeah, overall I do like Elon Musk better than Steven Pinker (or probably Bill Gates), so I guess his charismatic marketing/ branding is actually doing a number on me. I do for instance like the boring tunnel idea he is building in LA and wish more billionaires would give back like that to their countries if they’re going to reap the benefits of low taxes.

 

Because face it, poor nations in Africa will have problems for another 200 years as long as their skyhigh birthrate outpaces their meager gains in productivity, and this country needs reinvestment otherwise enlightenment values may lose the economic war to totalitarian capitalist states like China (and Russia.)

 

Also, his ex-wife wrote an article about his character flaws, dominance issues, and shallow materialism,  titled ” I was Elon Musk’s starter wife. ”

 

Darling in the Franxx episode 19

 

I find it interesring that the series emphasized that Dr. Franxx is an atheist (he said it twice, whenever someone likened his actions to playing God.)  In real life cutting edge Scientists tend to be atheists, and the trope dates back to Frankenstein.  But “Darling in the Franxx” just made it an explicit point that atheists think differently and don’t follow the same morals as theists, and it’s fitting that the doctor alone questioned and resisted the desire for immortality, and intends to fight the totalitarian ideologies which became rooted in religion. (All parasites worship and love an ominipresent papa from birth just like modern monotheists love and follow God, and the council literally lives up in the sky and they even pray to papa in the story. ) Atheists are just better at freethinking, and aside from any nature loving mysticism involving the klauxosaurs, this is an anti-theist anime (set in a sci-fi universe.) Outgrowing papa is a right of passage in becoming an independent actor, aka “an adult.” The anime has so far taken the position that, “there can be no peace on Earth while men worship a tyrant in heaven.”

 

Anti-theism aside, the episode would have been better if they hadn’t explained everything and gone with the fantasy, because some of the attempts at explanations were so far-fetched. You really think in 2025 that the media, government and population wouldn’t demand to see the faces under the masks of the most powerful people on Earth? Now they had better have a good scientific explanation for why an unknown ancient species could hide underground for so long, and then be awakened to come out of the Earth like Godzilla when humanity went too far. As it is, it’s too close to the old Japanese trope of a mystical primordial force appearing to save a desecrated Gaia, and fits uneasily in a sci-fi universe where atheist doctors protect deviants who can one day defy and destroy twisted cults of personality who cloak themselves in religion.

 

Hippies are dead, but people still talk to plants

Does anyone here talk to plants? I was in the gardening section of a hardware store telling someone I was with that I still thought it was crazy some people talked to plants, when to my surprise a woman overheard and interrupted me to tell me that it really worked and they grow healthier if you talk to them or sing to them, encourage them and give them love and tell them you love them. She said it was just like how babies listen to your voice when they’re in the womb.

‘I just come and talk to the plants, really – very important to talk to them. They respond.’ -Prince Charles, the heir apparent to the British throne.

Wikipedia says the idea of plant sentience goes back pretty far, but the idea had a popular revival around 1973 when “The secret life of plants” was published. This was the only time I’ve ever talked about it in public, and there were only two other people there, and yet one of them–a thirty year old bystander contradicted me. That suggests the idea must be fairly common and not constrained to hippies and Prince Charles. Oh dear…

Map of most educated countries

Here’s a map of the countries thst have college graduates.
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/share-of-the-population-with-completed-tertiary-education

A bachelor’s just isnt what it was in 1970, now that colleges have become diploma mills.ive been thinking GDP per capita is the best way to measure a country, but it really isn’t since material wealth and working hard for widgets isn’t the end all to a satisfying life. I think an indicator that measures knowledge obtained might be a better way, and literacy rates correlate with this chart (and also GDP per capita.)

There was never a reason to fight transgenderism

Let’s presume that it’s been proven that men are men and women are women.

-I don’t see any harm in letting a man dress up as a woman or develop ‘fake’ tits. If someone looks like a man but wants to wear a dress at a wedding and be treated like a woman, I see no reason in forcing him to adhere to the norms of a man.

Alternatively, let’s assume what science says about androgyny in nature is true.

-I still don’t see a problem with letting a man dress up as a man or a woman.

There’s no difference because transgenderism is not a harmful belief (and it has never been). While the people opposed to it usually oppose some combination of the following related behaviors:

Transcontinental railroads

Has anyone taken any really long and slow train trips? I took them all over Japan and loved them, haven’t done Europe yet, but since everyone goes there and sees the same stuff, I am not in a hurry either. I would rather have esoteric bragging rights. (Might try to take a train from Europe to India someday.)

I used to spend a lot of time spinning the globe when I was a kid, and Siberia always stuck out because it’s so huge. I have been interested in taking the Transsiberian railroad from Moscow to Mongolia or that hard to spell city which starts with the V– “Very definitely not going to be part of Japan”. Sadly, the current political environment makes Russia an unacceptable place for me right now, and my friends and I will probably cancel our trip to St. Petersberg and Moscow. The visa is ridiculously overpriced anyway, and I am not gonna let my tourist dollars help keep Putin in power.

So then I remembered how I once met a German tourist who actually accepted our terrible mass transportation and spent a month traveling down the west coast by train and bus parallel to the Pacific Coast Highway. (My thought back then: poor guy, what a pain in the add that must have been. I’ve traversed that distance in only 2 days by car.)

I’ve gone around the USA before by car, but the train might be a new experience and I’m now looking into the Amtrack. Open to ideas about where to go. Here’s the map. I’ve seen some stunning videos of where the train passes through passes in the Rocky Mountains, and I’m a little interested in spending a few days stopping at little train station in fly-over country. Thinking of taking a route close to the transcontinental railroad, or up through Canada, or through the north. Probably won’t do Canada though because it’s much more sparsely populated and the fauna and geology doesn’t change as much, compared to taking the transcontinental railroad which begins roughly in New York, down through the Midwest and through the desserts of the South-west before ending in San Francisco. Have no desire to visit the South/South-Eastern United States which wouldn’t be as much fun. The South didn’t build the transcontinteal railroad, and I think I’d have more pleasant conversations up north.

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