I believe for chamber of secrets, you want the gameboy color one. I know there was some weirdness either two studios switching back and forth who made the GBA game and who made the GBA game. In any case the there were several very good Harry Potter JRPGs in the early 2000s, as weird as that feels to say.
The thing that clued me into it was how I found amateur voice actors and male voice actors to be a mixed bag, but professional voice actresses were this consistent glossy professional style of terribleness. Once I started paying attention to that, It was pretty easy to track down that particular voice/accent as one that really annoys me and is incredibly overused in anime dubbed after about 2008 or so.
It really only works for stupid rich girls that the audience is supposed to find kind of annoying, and yet every female lead in dubs seems to have it.
Really, the only time I hear it is when I forget to change over the audio track in a file that has the English track as default, but just those few seconds is enough for palpable relief, when the Japanese voices kick in and the girl suddenly sounds normal, friendly, and her voice matches her appearance.
Look, maybe it's just me, but mid to late 20s californian woman is a very noticeable accent. It's also a very punchable accent. This only becomes worse if they try to do a cutesy anime voice on top of that. Also, they all sound the exact same as each other.
It is not a good voice for a Japanese high school girl. Or any character you don't want me to instantly hate.
No, learn moonrunes. It adds a natural layer of protection against the woke cancer. English is the language of American imperialisim. There is great power in being able to say "we don't have a word for that concept because it's fucking retarded."
Three houses is the one I know least about. I didn't hear too much about it other than that it was well recieved, so it probably wasn't as bad as Fates. Maybe someone else knows the details.
My basic understanding is that there were enough strange changes that didn't add anything to the character to annoy a few diehards, but not enough to go viral like Fates. Many were again around references to anyone's (man or woman) femininity.
As I said all game since Fates, which came out in 2016, have been heavily altered in localization, and even in the Japanese versions, much of the core identity of the series has changed to be more centered on character relationships and shipping, with the strategy game taking more of a back seat.
Shadows of Valentina probably was the least adulterated, as it was a remake of an older game, but even it had a lot of easy mode mechanics added. Honestly, your best bet is to go play the old GBA games and fan hacks.
As for the latest entry, Fire Emblem Engage, I haven't played it, but from what I've heard the strategy game part is pretty good, but the writing is the least interesting it's been in a very long time, and many of the S Rank supports were altered in localization so that everyone is just really good friends, a guy who ships girls had his personality watered down to being a "people watcher", and many references to feminity were stripped out.
So again, it's a Fates situation, where a weak Japanese script is damaged further by a meddling translation, as opposed to Awakening where changes to the script are almost all in service of giving the characters distinct "voices", building a tone for the game, and giving flavor to the game.
You might say this is hypocritical to forgive the changes to Awakening, but not Fates or Engage, but the difference is that Awakening was done in good faith as far as I can tell, and far more gently. There's a difference between giving Chrom's Mercenaries the name " The Shepards" in English, and changing a character's whole personality to being obsessed with pickles, or removing entire conversations for a joke, or removing anything hinting at a relationship because heaven forbid seventeen year olds have any sort of sex drive.
Awakening was the last one they didn't fuck with. Apparently the series was in a rough spot, but Awakening was an unexpected success, reinvigorating it.
Unfortunately, part of that was due to the shipping mechanics which irreversibly altered the target demographic of the series.
This was followed up by Fates which had a weaker script even in Japanese, and was fucked with heavily by localizes. No game In the franchise has made it to the west unmolested since.
Just going to point out that as far as I know, the working design for Minnesota's new flag is this: https://s.yimg.com/ny/api/res/1.2/z8e9yi49_cJMzYtywR32JQ--/YXBwaWQ9aGlnaGxhbmRlcjt3PTEyNDI7aD02OTk-/https://media.zenfs.com/en/aol_fox_aggregated_articles_807/666b5c77ce0e7017e0c77f53fe107d63
Not the one in the twitter post.
I didn't say that. I have no strong feelings one way or the other about the new flag. The old flag had glaring issues, in terms of legibility at a distance, and memorability, and replacing it was a reasonable thing to do.
Honestly, the only distinctive thing is that It looks like a fucking baseball.
The new flag you might object to, but it has several strong features as a flag, and from a Vexology perspective the inverted chevron is actually quite distinct.
If you actually know what you're doing it's a solved issue in many situations. This type of image is a bit tricky because there are so many people in the image and they are further from the viewer than average. If you were to generate this at a larger scale, one section at a time, it probably wouldn't be an issue.
Also, something like this is super easy to fix with inpainting.
Odds are someone was just lazy and grabbed the first image that came out similar to what they were thinking of.
You guys are reaching on this one. Resemblance to the Somalian flag is tenuous at best, and it is an objectively much better flag than the mess it was before.
State colors happening to match the state colors of a state within a foreign country is not evidence of conspiracy.
If AI is threatening to you at this point, you aren't really an artist. You are an illustrator (or whatever the written equivalent is) who was hoping to convert the ability to churn out pictures of the latest anime waifu, someone's furry OC, or a niche fetish into a source of income.
A real artist sees AI and thinks, "Hey, an automatic junior artist that can do [Backgrounds/colors/whatever the part of my work that I find least interesting and most tedious] quickly and for free with a reasonable degree of competence.
A real artist thinks, hey, I can train a LoRA on my own work, have the AI learn my style, then have it work from my sketches and skip to the touch ups at the end.
A real artist thinks, maybe the AI could give me some inspiration with this thing I gave up on half way through.
A real artist is probably thinking about how they could use an AI to speed up their workflow enough to progress into animation.
Or forgoing all that. A real artist instead ignores AI and produces art because they're passionate about it, having the humility to admit that there will always be others out there that will outshine them, but still persisting because it's about creation and expression, not fame and profit.
If you can't do any of these things, you aren't really an Artist, and you need to get a real job (one that is part of an industry that produces goods or services required by the general population) like the rest of us.
If you want to make AI art, go actually learn stable diffusion, research workflows for auto1111 and comfyui, including img2img and inpainting.
Most importantly, get good enough at art that you can spot glaring errors, push it in the right direction by sketching, and touch things up.
Covid was especially hard on XKCD. Spent multiple years with every other comic advertising that he was a neurotic mess, and an authoritarian who was more than willing to subjugate everyone to calm his unfounded fears.
Of course any sort of punch line fell by the wayside, and many comics became "you're a bad person if you don't agree" or "aren't the people who don't agree terrible " lectures.
Anyone who still liked XKCD after that arc is a lost cause. Even if you agreed with him about covid, it had to be tiresome to be reminded about it constantly in a comic that was apparently supposed to be somewhat humorous.
This is false. Korea is noticeably lower than the other countries you mentioned. Japan has a fertility rate above 1.3 which isn't great, but on the high side for Asian countries. A quick google search tells me that China has a fertility rate of 1.28 and Singapore 1.1.
These are very low, but not in the same realm as Korea.
For comparison this means that in a generation Japan's population will drop to 2/3 what it was, but S.Korea's will crater to 40%
Neither of these are a good situation to be in, but one is recoverable, and one is not.
Another thing to note is that Japan's fertility rate is more or less stable at 1.4, where as Korea's is still on a downward trend.
You have a point, but Korea is in a unique, far more dangerous situation when compared with the rest of Asia.
To be fair, 8mb Shrek does kind of cross the threshold that makes something art, not that I'd expect JP to have any real appreciation of that.