Pyron

SNSD, Twice, and Blackpink for me. All groups represent each company pretty well.

Sadly, these things will just get worse before it gets any better. The only way to solve this is if there is a worldwide effort to fight poverty. However, not even rich countries do anything real about it. Meanwhile more and more people will get more desperate about their living situation leading to situations like human trafficking.

The trailer is very good. Now the rest of the announcement I'm a bit more cautious about getting hyped. They tried very hard to bring D2 feel to D4. They may be pulling a SW Force Awakens with it. The art direction is pretty good so far and if you remember the whole shitfest of the last year, it was mentioned that D4 was like Dark Souls with very dark themes before being scrapped and had Lilith as villain. It seems that they decided to recycle these two aspects and add a D2 flair to it. Their talking points all were evoking D2 which is good, but at the same time, it lacks some forward vision. There are some stuff from D3 as well judging from the demo and the playable demo showed on the floor. I'd not worry much about it as the end product usually ends up vastly different from the final release. Stuff like quest system, mob density, mob abilities, skill layout, stash, evasion, and some other small things were brought from D3. I hope they are just placeholders, so I will not overthink this aspect. Now from some interviews, I think they are trying too hard to bring D2 nostalgia and also listening to the community a bit too much. They had pretty bad communication during D3 with Jay Wilson, but maybe they are overcompensating. Hopefully only good comes from this. Nothing is set in stone, so I will not judge details, but I can judge the philosophy behind it. I have some reservations about how much D4 will be its own thing instead of trying to reach for D2's glory days. However, it's much much better that the approach by D3 team at the time (they remedied it during RoS, but it was too late) and I like most of what was shown in the end of the day. I don't think they will fuck the gameplay up (the online part is a different story). Still I will keep my cautiousness. This isn't the Blizzard I loved from past years. This is gone and will never return. Also, the no apology sorry from the CEO or whatever left me with a bad taste in my mouth. I don't completely drop Blizzard because I actually know some people working there and they aren't happy with it as well. Activision can fuck themselves.

Recently cannabis became legal in SK for medical uses, so although people may have some negative views of conservative SK, they are being the first in East Asia to do something about it. Still it seems very restrictive, but at least it's something. Still it's not even close to ideal. It should be at least decriminalized, but East Asian society changes at their own pace and it may be glacial compared to others. You have to put in context that SK has a lot of oldies that are ultra traditionalists and the rise of SK as a modern society is pretty new. That's why we have this odd mix of Joseon era mentality with first world commodities. Marijuana isn't something in mind in terms of priority for most of voting population and drug use isn't just influenced by SK conservative views, but also US views on drugs at the time of implementing said laws. They probably copied a lot from them like Japan did as well. I think people here are being a bit too harsh to SK stance on marijuana because it affect artists who use it very harshly. The reaction of general public toward marijuana users may be too harsh. Still demanding changes when the average stance of the world is the same is a bit too much. That being said, what SK should do first is stop seeing drug users as criminals once caught and stop shun them. Then, maybe they can jump to the possibility that marijuana is fine for recreational uses. Again, for what I've seen it's not something important for the society in general and they bunch it together with other harsher drugs like methamphetamine, cocaine, and so so. I think this is the worse hurdle most societies have to overcome till we can talk rationally about each drug.

Maybe about 300 for my main bias. I have more than one bias and they rover around 100ish.

Me too. I guess for me it was Major for baseball and if you consider other games as sports anime, Hikaru no Go with Go/Baduk (well I had a complicated relationship with Go because of my father) and Akagi with Mahjong. For real person, I think Ayrton Senna for F1. Sadly when he passed away, my interested over the F1 waned as well.

Mango and grape

They should just make shows where ggs interact and collaborate with each other. The competition part is the weakest part of the show IMO. I had reservations about this format and judging by the pathetic attempts of evil editing by MNET and making them pay the cost of the performances, I wasn't wrong. However, the girls made it work.

I'm not interested in boy groups at all, but I actually curious how a competitive format would fare with them. It's probably a different dynamic and the target public would be probably more passionate about it for the better and worse.

Strategically speaking and with hindsight in mind, if fame/popularity is all is concerned, yeah, some of the decisions were not great for her. It's not all her/her parents/managers fault per se, but the big ones were. Still we don't really know why she took the latest decisions. Maybe it was an artistic choice and she doesn't care much about fame. Who knows. She is still pretty young and she can always change careers as well.

My favorite is John Carpenter's The Thing. I like all the classics cited here. From the newer ones, I really liked Hereditary.

Anticipating S3!

Gfriend always delivering quality JP releases

I lived most of my prime adult life without a phone. However, now I think it's very hard to avoid it without feeling something is missing (same with internet). I think I was without phone for a couple days only.

They can bring both joy and stress. As an idol/celebrity, they need to be prepared and trained on how to handle and interact with them. Managing this is a team effort as well. The company should give proper support for this. I think the level of interaction the idols have with fans is pretty unprecedented and most companies may not put enough effort or have sufficient resources to manage this aspect under this social media reality. They can't do much when fans go overboard unless it's on the criminal realm. Companies can impose some rules/policies regarding fan interaction, but that's about it.

I'm rooting for OMG, Lovelyz, and AOA, but I think OMG deserves it more. They really nailed it. Everyone did well overall. I will not be unhappy with any winner.

I guess nothing can beat Burning Sun/Molka scandal. Dating scandals or bashing some non traditional behavior are just tiresome.

I'm hoping for a total trainwreck. I wanna see more fire added to this. I'm not a big fan of SW. The originals were good films and that's it. The prequels were garbage, but it was fun watch the nerds getting worked out over it. It's more fun than the series itself!

I think it makes sense to expand the option to any cultural or artistic expression including show biz. For a country, their government can use them as a soft power to expand influence. I think it makes more sense than wasting them just to be grunts in the military. We can argue about other careers should receive or not this option, but the government will just add small amendments to legislation. I think we should focus on this proposition instead of expanding it to other careers per se. Pretty sure this was brought up, but again amendments have to be small chances. Otherwise, they'd just do a big overhaul which is the more correct action, but in a democratic process this may be harder to stomach. The whole military service process is very emotionally charged.

I'm usually expressionless when eating something delicious, but I ate a really delicious Mushroom Risotto that made me make TV-like big reactions.

We need Florida news subforum

Back in my day, some Final Fantasy forums were pretty messy. For Kpop, AKP is pretty bad as well both in content and layout.

Some are pretty interesting, but some seem a bit unnecessarily dangerous.

No idea. I tried to count the rings in the growth in its shell, but I was just a dumbo teen. I just guessed it was over 10 as it was pretty hard to count the rings. It is a male as well.

One of my favorite animals. I had a tortoise when I was a teen. The tortoise wasn't originally ours. When we moved to a new house, the garden had it. When my family decided to move from the house, we donated the tortoise to the local zoo. It will probably outlive me!