Bartimaeus

Local stupid bastard who should be chemically castrated to stop any possibility of offspring continues to insist, "Nothing will change." Of course, such people are not always stupid bastards - they're often just disingenuous pieces of **** instead.

My sisters loved to cheat so that they could build houses...I, on the other hand, have always hated base-building or anything even remotely adjacent to it, so I was more the type to start with whatever is the default options they give you and never move a single thing ever. So instead I would spend a couple of hours customizing and playing dress-up with my character, and then I'd try to play the character, and then I would quickly realize that I really must be missing something because The Sims seems to have no gameplay, no interesting stories, and no characters that aren't just walking RNG dice roll people that don't matter. I don't understand The Sims, there seems to be a chunk of brain matter missing from my head that makes the game work for other people but not me.

I just wish it hadn't been AI-generated, but I guess anime memes are probably the most appropriate usage of AI, .

I did watch LadyCrimson's video, yes, and it was pretty awful...for a number of reasons. Beyond even just the character visuals, I think the game in general is extremely displeasing to view in real time, especially with the constant stutter and pop-in on what I think are already unpleasant visuals. But I confess that I'm totally unconcerned with stuff like lighting, shadow, model, and texture fidelity relative to general visual style/cohesion and animation quality, and while I'm no fan of The Sims (despite growing up with three sisters that played several entries of the series and who tried to have me play it despite the fact that I could never figure out exactly what I was supposed to be doing in the game to make it fun), I'd take its art direction a hundred times over Inzoi's. Different strokes for different folks, though - maybe a competitor would at least move EA to try to make meaningful improvement to the series.

I would like to make clear something: I know that there are real life people out there who look approximately, in terms of real features and clothing/hair style, like the character depicted above, and other characters that you can see in official screenshots from this game. Somebody who looks like the totality of this character probably wouldn't draw a second thought from me in real life - I might not personally love their style, I might not find them particularly easy on the eyes or cute or beautiful or whatever, but that's a me problem, that's fine, I obviously understand that the appearances of characters and real life people in general should not and could not ever be specifically tailored to me. The specific issue is the "approximately" bit and how damned creepy it is seeing these horrible video game renders that somehow make them look so much weirder than they should, and it's why I always try to make sure to use the word "uncanny" instead of anything more pejorative like "ugly*". I searched for "inzoi characters" before I made my previous post and looked through a few pages of results, and I do not believe basically any person would be rendered well in this game's visual style - though there were some that seemed to be a little more and a little less bad than the others. All I can really say is...kill it with fire. *Though any game where every character looks like they have lip gloss on is always going to be an automatic no from me dawg, because there might very well be nothing on a human face I like less than big wet shiny lips, but again, that's a me problem...and it's also not even necessarily specific to just female characters: I've happened across random Korean and Chinese games on Steam Discovery game queues where this affects even male characters, and it's why I knew Inzoi was likely to be either a Korean or Chinese game.

Wow, that game has the most hideously uncanny character visuals. Must be Korean or maybe Chinese, their attempts at more realistic character visuals seem to have a tendency to come out looking like that. I suppose it is a bit of a shame you can't run over those nasty little nightmare spawn anymore.

The spambots that at least had vaguely intelligible-sounding usernames instead of just random letters mashed together did it better.

With Nosferatu, I found myself just kinda checking out a bit any time any of the three main characters were being focused on, but my ears would perk back up anytime I heard Willem Dafoe's or Ralph Ineson's voices. Honestly, I could've just gone without the whole vampire thing and instead went along with those two trying to deal with a plague, so maybe it's my mistake for watching the entirety of a movie that apparently just didn't much appeal to me. Just one of those times where a movie inexplicably doesn't click for you, I suppose.

I think I said about a total of twenty intelligible words for the actual literal hour and a half that we were having a "conversation". I could not speak, I could not move, there was no escape from this person endlessly blathering on. I was only finally rescued because I received a phone call - which was an incredible stroke of good fortune, because this whole past week I'd had my phone on silence, and I'd only turned my ringer back on just 10-15 minutes before this happened.

If there's one saving grace for the situation, it's that it happened while I was working, so I technically got paid for it. Now whether I should get paid for it is another question, but it's not one I'm going to ever raise with my superiors.

Today, I was cornered by an old homeless woman who had an Irish accent talking about anything and everything that popped into her brain for an hour and a half. She was perfectly nice, but she would not let me leave. I really need to learn the art of being rude. Strange that it happened on my very least favorite holiday, too.

The measles vaccine is not, to my knowledge, 100% effective: some people's immune systems are really bad at keeping the antibody around. However, even if you are one of the ~3% or so of people that it's not effective for, it will not kill, maim, or otherwise injure you unlike actual measles, and if everyone has the vaccine, then you'll receive the benefit of herd immunity. But when enough idiots decide the measles vaccine is not for them and their kids, suddenly those 3% of people who can't keep the antibody can actually be quite at risk, even if they've been previously vaccinated.

From the GamersNexus "Fake MSRP" video that came out last night, Steve mentioned reading and being told by both board partners and retailers that they only intend to honor the listed MSRPs for the initial launch, but no further. After that, it will be a matter of supply and demand. In other words, if you don't camp out the initial launch and win the lottery, you'll have to pay a much higher price to get your card in the ensuing weeks and months. And your chances of winning that lottery are effectively zero, given that scalpers know by now that prices will be quickly raised after launch, which means the cheaper initial launch cards are what they'll be trying to obtain and scalp the most. I think it's safe to say that until fabrication isn't bottlenecked by the limits of TSMC's production output, the market is going to continue to be very bad. There's not enough competition, supply is too low, demand is too high, and that's always going to be a very bad situation for anyone that isn't in the business of scalping.

5x Oscar and Palme d'Or-winning Anora (2024), by Sean Baker (director and writer of one of my favorite movies of all time, The Florida Project). Kind of feels similar to Parasite for me, where it's not quite entirely my movie, so it'll never be an all-time favorite of mine, but I nevertheless really enjoyed it, even despite the really gratuitous amounts of sex and nudity (particularly in the first third or so). I liked how nasty, unsentimental, and unglorified the film was, befitting the realities of the subject material ...but without having the most obnoxious visual style it could possibly ever have (The Substance). I'm a little surprised that it won all the awards, and that it would tie Sean Baker as the all-time Oscar leader in a single awards show...shared with the ever-esteemed Walt Disney all the way back in 1953, whose four award-winning films that year (The Living Desert for Best Documentary Feature; The Alaskan Eskimo for Best Documentary Short; Toot, Whistle, Plunk, and Boom for Best Short Subject Cartoon; and Bear Country for Best Short Subject Two-Reel) no-one has now ever heard of. Nosferatu (2024). I wasn't into it, but I also wasn't not into it. I watched this last week and I don't really have much of a lasting impression, except that it's always nice to see Willem Dafoe. I don't think Robert Eggers is going to be better than The Lighthouse for me at this point. A Charlie Brown Christmas (1965). I feel like I've been deprived by not watching this (and maybe other Charlie Brown stuff) every year: it's really great. All the little facial expressions that punctuate every dialogue really get to me, and the character writing is just lovely and hilarious, and I really liked that it sounded like they must have used real kids to voice all of them. It felt silly, simple, but authentic and enjoyable for all ages in a way that I think cartoons are currently struggling to be today.