Cy~

Oh geeze, I remember trying Atom out when they first released it. At that time, I found it to be just a little bit buggy when handling fairly large projects. I'm guessing that all of the kinks have been worked out of it by now? If you have used Sublime Text or Text Mate, would you say that it beat them or about the same? I actually use Mint.com's banking and budget app for financial stuff. It's part of my routine, so I rarely think of it. However, you may find it useful, since it has alerts and can tie into multiple accounts and help you manage all of your expenses in one central location. I'm a total mint nerd , I can sometimes spend hours tweaking and planning and checking up on stuff, hahaha.

I'm not sure if this really counts, but my favorite anime monster is the Nameless Monster from well... Monster. It's a bit of a strange thing, really, since this monster isn't actually a "real" monster. It isn't a physical presence, and it doesn't exist as a ghost or some other type of non-corporeal form. Basically, you don't ever see it pop into the story and start gobbling people up. Instead, it's a subtle thing, lurking in the subtext of every negative event. The Nameless Monster seems, to me, to represent a feeling of hunger, pain, or lack. It represents the desire to fill the voids that exist inside of us at any cost. It also seems to represent the evil that everyone is capable of if they're pushed too far in the search of their own purpose and identity. Frankly speaking, it made me think of my own "monsters", the parts of myself that I prefer to keep to myself, under lock and key. For its overpowering presence in the story and for its oppressive mystery, I consider the Nameless Monster to be my current favorite monster in and out of anime.

*adds picture to collection* You know what, I had never thought of this, but now that I've seen it, I want more.

Kyubey in Madoka. I found him creepy from the very first frame that he appeared in. His eagerness to make these so-called "contracts" combined with his really unnatural "niceness" set me off horribly. I can't stand him at all. Like, seriously. He's weird, weird, weird, weird and very unpleasant.

In extreme moderation, I think chibis can be really cute and add to the expression of certain emotions in anime. If things go out of control, though, then I find that it kills the story for me. I think that anime chibis are like soy sauce in things that don't have to have soy sauce. A little bit can go a long way, but too much can result in choking on sodium and having your stomach rupture. Errr, or at least that's what happens to me.

Can anyone recommend a sports anime (or four or five) for someone that doesn't know much about sports but just plain enjoys watching on occasion? (I'll watch anything that is amusing, as long as it isn't swimming in fan service and has decent writing.) Basically, I have always wanted to try out a sports-related anime, but I end up looking at the genre list on one of the anime listing sites and having a mild panic attack. Where in the world do you start if you don't even know what you're looking for?! I'm hoping that someone here can help me out a bit, and throw some recommendations at me, because I'm actually really hopeless at digging through old anime and looking for something that I'd actually enjoy.

I actually think that Clannad is the first and one of the very few romance anime that I have ever watched. It was a life changing experience, but like... I don't actually like watching romantic stuff to begin with. I tend to find it boring unless it's really, really, really good. Then, I'm completely indoctrinated.

It's time for deep questions! Has your life ever been changed by an anime? Like, have you ever finished watching a show and then found yourself questioning everything? (Or, am I basically the only one that has *ever* had this happen to them? :quizzical_expression:) Share your stories here! Clannad: After Story Okay, so this entire anime was one enormous Feels Trip for me. I don't know what I was expecting after watching Clannad, but I was definitely not expecting what happened to my brain in After Story. Trying to describe everything would take me paragraphs of describing intensely personal experiences and feelings, which I won't do. Instead of that, I will just say that by the end of the show, I had completely reassessed how I viewed my family. I have a strained and extremely distant relationship with my irl father, and well, Clannad really beat it into me that things are sometimes a little more complex than we see through our "children eyes". I guess I ended up feeling a type of sympathy that I had never felt before, a feeling that I still have today. The Disappearance of Haruhi Suzumiya Do you know what it feels like to have the worst things that you've experienced slowly deconstructed in front of your eyes by a master artist? No? Neither did I, until I watched this anime. I can share how it feels. It. Felt. Bad. :'( At the end of this anime, I was a burning wreck of a human being for days, while I thought about things over and over and over again. However, in the end, I got over it. I guess that sounds anticlimactic, but it's the best way to describe it. I was raked over the coals, and then I realized that I could just walk on them instead. I felt a lot better for having had the experience. I was forced to see something that I didn't want to see, and after a bit, I realized that it wasn't all that bad, because I'm here today and not as utterly lonely as I was before. Zoop~

Do you have any software that you use on a daily basis that you would be lost and confused without? If so, then share it here! Me? I have only one program that I swear by and would completely cease to exist without. First, some background information. I write in a way that would probably drive most people utterly insane. I start writing, switch to another part in the same story, write a little there, switch to somewhere else, write a little bit there. I hate it when people watch me write, because it always looks a little weird. Besides this, I end up scrolling up and down endlessly in my Google Doc, which actually drives me crazy. Enter Scrivener - a program for writing made by a writer and for writers! It basically lets me create a document out of folders, snippets of files, random junk, and other assorted mish mash (I am a wreck of a human being :'(). It frees me up from the prison of linearity! Allowing me to do whatever the heck I feel like! (And, I can use it on my desktop and my phone, so life is reaaaallly good.) Okay, so like, what about you? What're the programs/apps that you can't live without?

Omg, this show! Initially, I started watching it, assumed that there was something really wrong with the voices (yes, I was an idiot). I found out that it was a Chinese production, and I just shrugged and decided to wait until a few more episodes were out. Well, last week I came back to it and holy crap! This show is what Log Horizon wanted to be in its second season (but ended up failing at). Without spoiling, I'll just say that the characters are awesome, the settings (online and offline) are amazing, the animation quality is godly, and the feels are STRONG. I never thought I'd get teary eyed over eSports! I mean, come on now. Ultimately, I really love this show. The fact that it is a Chinese production only means that you hear Chinese rather than Japanese, which was cool for me after I got used to it (took about 5 minutes). I strongly recommend it, and I think the main character is basically cute as hell (I have weird tastes and perspectives, maybe?!).

Do you have an anime character that you think of as your anime "spirit animal"? Like, are there any characters out there that really, really, really remind you of yourself? If so, then share them here! For me, my anime duplicate from an actual anime is probably Kobayashi from Kobayashi-san Chi no Maid Dragon (Miss Kobayashi's Dragon Maid). She works as a Python programmer during the day (near to my heart) and comes home drained and loopy, hahaha. Her personality is a bit dry from the outside, but she's actually fun loving and family oriented. She just doesn't find that out about herself until later in life. She finds a really weird girl that changes her entire existence. Let's just say that I can strongly sympathize with her. (And, yes, I saw that we have another thread that sounds like this one, but I wanted to ask a slightly different question.)

Ooooo, if you replace the green with purple, we are totally on the same page, hahaha. Actually, that makes sense, though, since I'm basically PurpleEyes (in the avvie, anyways)~

Dropbox! Sadly, because I don't have much of a choice. I use Scrivener for writing, and the fact that it breaks things up into a billion tiny files and makes frequent updates causes every other cloud file storage system to sputter, scream, and die spontaneously (taking whatever you were working on with it).

I hate this question. I mean, I hate it because I'm stuck in a weird place with regards to programming languages. Look, I love Ruby. I want to be with Ruby forever. It's pretty, it's fun, and it's really capable. But, like... Ruby can't do ANYTHING. Let me explain. You can do things with Ruby, but you can't easily do ANYTHING with Ruby. The success of Ruby on Rails resulted in the community becoming progressively more narrow. These days, if you aren't actually programming with Rails, you're shit outta luck. Python, on the other hand, I have never particularly "loved". It was just there for me. It was the girl next door, you know? Not particularly flashy, not particularly sexy, and not particularly anything else. But, when I was with Python, I felt like I could DO ANYTHING! See, that's the thing? I wanted Ruby, but I ended up with Python... I don't mind. Though, I sometimes wonder what could have been........

I like you, we think alike. I too used Mac OS X up until Windows 10. Now, I'm a windows fangirl (just like I started, lol). For Linux, I love Debian, Mint, and Ubuntu - especially Debian itself. For a lightweight server OS, it's really hard to beat them unless you decide to subject yourself to the multifold joys of trying to setup one of the BSDs on potentially incompatible hardware. (Good luck with those firewalls!)

Ahhh... Forum backends... I have actually had a long and somewhat complicated relationship with forum software. I don't mean to stamp myself with a date, but the very first time I tried to use a forum backend was back in 2002 or 2003. I tried phpBB at that time, set everything up, and then ran away from it, screaming in terror. It was ugly, buggy, and filled with security holes. I didn't even wait to see how it would end up. Right after that, I said "fuck it" and tried writing my own forum in Perl. Everything was going well, and I had a basic forum put together. Then, I stepped away from the coding for about 6 months and came back to it. Ummm, it looked like some weird kind of line noise, or what you would get if you attended a Xenomorph opera and tried to transcribe the events. I ran away screaming, again, and decided that forums were not for me. Then, I entered college, this is relevant because I realized that obsessive compulsive usage of the Internet was not compatible with actually getting good grades while getting my face dragged through the muck. I vanished from the Internet for basically the next 7 or 9 years, don't remember how long exactly. When I came back, it was 2012, and - This was basically the state of forum back ends. I was like a kid in a candy store. I tried out a bunch of forum packages before realizing that I had nothing to make a forum about. After a little bit of a lag while I thought about this, I stumbled onto an absolute jewel of a forum. The community there was kind and nice, the forum itself was sleek and pretty. It seemed like heaven. I volunteered to help when they ran into some technical problems, and before I knew it, I ended up as an admin. THAT WAS A MISTAKE!!!! The forum was powered by IP.Board. I had thought that IPB was pretty damned good based on my own short trial run. I was completely wrong. I have never, ever, ever, in my entire life been faced by a piece of software that was so wildly engineered. On the backend, it was both beautiful and utterly terrifying, like some eldritch horror unleashed upon a small village during a moonlit night. The screams were musical. Let's review some of the things that I ran into. The theme system made no sense, it was overly engineered and prone to both bugs and being hacked (we'll come back to this). The developers had completely lost control of the caching code, and it had a life of its own. I would report bugs and get responses that were basically like "woah, never knew that could happen! good luck! " The database code was "good" but not particularly durable when faced with weird situations. As an example, multiple posts by the same person at the same time could sometimes make the forum sputter. Why? Well, it had to do with database locking. For some inexplicable reason, the default setting for the forum was not the "safest" when under high load. Who would expect defaults to not crash your site? Right? Let's talk about patches. They were frequent, broke often, and required extreme amounts of babysitting to ensure that they didn't blow up and melt your face. Now, let's talk about modding. I like mods, and I tend to mod the hell out of everything I can mod (I had over 80 mods in Fallout NV, not remarkable, but they RAN PERFECTLY). Anyways, I wrote my own IP.Board mods to add features for roleplaying and character limiting. On the surface, their system is brilliant as fuck. However, when you actually need to tap into the posts database, you hit a problem - IP.Board, lacking the ability to decide how to store posts, basically just tossed them in using whatever format felt good at the time. We had some posts that were stored entirely as complex bbcode alongside posts that were stored entirely as (poorly formatted) html. In the midst of this all, we had mismatched bbcode/html abominations that actually broke the post rendering engine. *deep breath* Look. I spent many, many, many sleepless and relatively thankless nights trying to keep that forum running. In the end, I parted ways with that community due to quite a substantial change in direction (on their part, not mine). When I stepped down, they had to bring on board 3 technical admins to replace me. They still struggled. That's just how bad it was. It was like opening Alice in Wonderland only to find yourself in Dante's Inferno. *slowly raises hand* I did it. Hahaha. I wrote my own forum software, because I couldn't be damned to work with IPB anymore. I started a forum when I left the other site, and I ended up getting hacked by Russians due to an unpatched and unpatchable vulnerability in the theme code (that allowed arbitrary theme uploads). The only "solution" to the hack was to track the version of every file in your installation and monitor them for replacement, hoping that you caught it before it resulted in information theft or worse. I didn't want to deal with that stuff anymore, but I also really didn't want to give up on the IPB prettiness. At that time, I don't think that Xen Foro had quite what I needed, and I was becoming a little insane due to too much forum administration . So, like a lunatic, I decided to write my own software. I spent basically a year, stayed up late at night, and nearly lost my spouse in a sea of Python code (note: this is a dramatization and may not accurately depict real events). The end result was a beautiful forum in Python, a work of art on the front end, and a reliable mish mash on the backend. I used it for about a year and a half before getting sick of the type of people that had drifted towards my forum. At that point, I shut it down, but I still have the code... All 40,000 or 60,000 lines of it. A beautiful monster of Python and CoffeeScript. At some point, I want to open source it and share it with the world, but like... Hahaha... Time! I don't have any of it (more specifically, productive time, I have time, but I'm normally brain fried and in a stupor after work).

Okay, so like, let's talk about disappointment. I mean crushing disappointment. That feeling of terror when you order a plain pepperoni pizza and receive one filled with anchovies. That sinking sensation when you walk outside to your car and have a flat tire. The total devastation that you... Nevermind, you get my point. It's time to commiserate. Which anime have you watched all the way through, waiting for things to get better, only to regret it thoroughly? Have you ever watched an anime that was just totally awesome, until the last arc (or last episode) ruined everything? Let's all sit together and cry as one... :'( I'll start. 91 Days It was sleek, it was stylish, it had so much promise! For the first few episodes, I found it to be utterly amazing. At some point, however, things just became... Banal and predictable. The ending was exactly what I had expected them to do if the writers became lazy, only they somehow managed to make it even worse than that. But, yeah, I watched the whole thing. Mindlessly. Mobile Suit Gundam SEED Destiny My second mecha anime! (Really, it should have been my last, but I'm a slow learner.) I tried Gundam SEED and it wasn't so bad, so I figured, "Hey, let's watch this next thing!" That was a terrible mistake. It was basically the same as the first thing with a less like-able protagonist, lower production values, sloppy writing, and a very unfortunate love story. Of course, I watched the ENTIRE thing. All 50 episodes. Good game, Cy~, good game. I just kept waiting for it to get better... :'(

Omg, you must be my spirit cousin or something! I do this same thing. Anytime I watch something, read something, or just spend too much time around the same person... I end up copying what I see without even thinking about it. I've always been like that, even when I was a little kid, and it has never gotten any better. The absolute worst thing was when I watched too many Steins;Gate marathons and ran around like a caffeinated Mayuri when I went to work the next day. The shame... I will never be able to live the shame down....

Umineko no Naku Koro ni. I was really getting into it, and hyped up to see what happened next... And, that was it. There was no next. I mean, come on, wtf. I guess they had wrapped up the one arc, but I felt like there was so much missing.

This one nuked me. I was a sniveling wreck the next day at work, and people were all like, "Omg, what's wrong?!" I didn't a thing. I mean, really, what am I suppose to say to someone that simply would never understand?!?!?! :'(

This is probably going to be one of the most utterly unsurprising and intensely unremarkable things that I ever say on this site. Alright, I'm braced. The oldest item on my list of favorite anime is Ghost in the Shell, the original movie in 1995. This was actually really surprising to me (probably not to anyone else, lol), since I wasn't particularly fond of one of the bases for the GitS universe, Blade Runner. I just found Ghost in the Shell to be a pretty strong, multilayered treat that tackled artificial intelligence and the puzzles of existence a little better than anything that I've ever seen (anime and non-anime).

My all-time favorite anime genre is horror. If it isn't horrible, I'll probably end up watching it at some point. With that said, I consider a lot of horror anime to be pretty darned horrible, but the ones I like redeem the genre for me. My second favorite is thrillers. I love a good, slow burn thriller. Preferably the kind that creates that uncomfortable squirming tension in the back of my neck and keeps me up at night with paranoid delusions (hullo Monster ). I think that I'm getting there. I keep watching mecha anime, and I keep finishing mecha anime, and every single darned time.... I end up horrifically disappointed with the direction that the story took. I'm not so sure that I can do another one. I get a little every single time I think about watching yet another mecha anime. At this point, I think I'm burned out of watching entire seasons with my fingers crossed waiting for the "amazing muchness" that everyone seems to be saying is going to happen. Blah.

My favorite anime couple is Tohru x Kobayashi from Kobayashi-san Chi no Maid Dragon. The interplay between these two reminds me a lot of my irl relationship, for better and worse, I think. Hahaha. Besides that, there's just something about the way the characters interact in that show that makes my heart melt into a puddle.