Bartimaeus

I've never seen even a single second of Lost and I only have a vague idea of what it's about, so the details are completely lost on me: what I said is more a general commentary on the average person's inability to consciously discern and relate the specifics of their ire with media. The average person. You know, the person when they don't like a popular blockbuster movie, they just say "the CGI was bad". Despite their shortcomings and general lack of media literacy, average people nevertheless shape a lot of the popular narratives around media, and they sometimes also write hilariously stupid imdb reviews that should make you fear for the future of Earth and the human race. Mind you, there are certainly times where I'm not completely sure why I do or don't enjoy something as well, but I at least try to be conscious of that.

Wallace & Gromit: Vengeance Most Fowl (2024). There's something about the three OG shorts that I don't think anything else will really ever be able to touch in their charming simplicity, good pacing, and small but tight cast of characters...but unlike the Chicken Run sequel, this is still pretty good. Maybe not Were-Rabbit good, but I liked it better than A Matter of Loaf and Death at least. I think I would've preferred a more original story without the Feathers McGraw tie-in (he's right there in the movie poster, this isn't a spoiler), but it is what it is.

Sounds like it could be another example of viewers not truly knowing why they didn't enjoy something but knowing that they didn't enjoy it, so they latch onto whatever reason they can and public perception runs with it and subsequently snowballs out of control. It's probably just more fuel to the fire if the actual problems started cropping up way earlier but the majority of viewers failed to notice until the very last second, so they feel like it got dumped on them all of a sudden even when that's not actually the case.

While over a third of the voting population couldn't even be bothered to care enough to vote in the first place. Yes, I'm afraid that we get the representation that we duly deserve.

Yeah, I used it to play through the game with a friend across the country, their new netcode worked surprisingly well and we had fun. Speaking of netcode with old games, I tried playing through Baldur's Gate: Enhanced Edition sometime ago with a friend, purely for the more modern netcode, and it was an absolute disaster, with endless glitches and desyncs that required reloading constantly. Really great, super fun, thank you Beamdog.

(Ignore the messed up colors/lighting, someone that was not me didn't know how to take screenshots of an HDR source.) I don't know about great, but I guess there's some hints of retro design there, even if it kind of looks weird and off-putting to me...and then, we also have this... Modern anime literally scares me.

Frame generation is hilarious to me: you get fake frames that make the visuals seem smoother but actually introduce input lag and make the game noticeably feel and perform worse despite the artificial smoothness. It's brilliant, except that it's total garbage, but hey, at least a bunch of dummies get fooled by it and think their games are better with than without it. Perhaps even more comical is that as the higher visual fidelity that 3D graphics are able to achieve, it inversely becomes easier and easier to notice that animations simply aren't able to keep up. Nothing like pumping all the pixels and ray tracing in the world into models, textures, and lighting, only to be immediately let down by forever wonky animation work that make the whole effort seem hardly worth the bother.

A couple years back, I played the DevilutionX re-build of Diablo 1 (it's very faithful but has some engine and QoL improvements, you can even transfer saves between DevilutionX and the original game), and I tried playing a Sorcerer for the first time: I'd only ever tried a Rogue or Warrior before then. Felt like I was playing on easy mode, the Sorcerer is so much more powerful than the other two classes. Given that I only ever played Sorceress in Diablo 2, you think I would've tried it at some point already... Let's take a twenty to thirty hour game and stretch it into a hundred hour game while diluting and piecemealing out everything fun and interesting that you could do or find in it. I love open world games, they're the greatest.

Not sure if here, the Politics thread, or the "What Are You Reading" thread is most the appropriate place for this.

Mouthwashing. Neat visuals and cool story, but literally half (or maybe even more) of the game is a dream sequence, and the other half is told out of order. 6/10, which is just barely a "pass" for me, coulda been a lot higher if not for all the nonsense. I am once again asking that indie game developers, particularly horror ones, learn how to develop and tell stories, themes, and characters without the non-stop use of dream sequences. You can do it, I believe in you, even though you keep proving me wrong.

Casablanca (1942). I hadn't watched this for like, twelve years, and it was just once at like 1 in the morning with my mom near Christmas on some TV broadcast. I thought it was great back then, and now, re-watching it...it helps me realize how much dumb writing and direction I sit through in movies that don't get anywhere even close to 1942's Casablanca. This is a movie where I don't really care that much about the subject material, the locale, or even particularly the characters or themes, but I sit through it and I have a great time regardless. And my goodness, the whole movie goes by so fast, and it's really hard not to wish that similarly excellent movies could be consistently made every year - even better if they're about things or people you're a little more predisposed to care about. It's kind of the anti-Citizen Kane for me, which I find to be borderline unwatchable despite the two of them being released within a year of each and both being hailed as all-time dramatic cinema. A man after my own heart.

hbomberguy's video on Fallout 3 vs. Fallout: New Vegas was pretty funny in that regard... The former kicks off with you escaping from your vault, and you have to slaughter half of your entire community, all people that your character grew up with and knew, in order to get out, and there aren't any non-violent options presented to you. Fallout: New Vegas, on the other hand, the whole game can be completed while being completely pacifist. Bethesda, not even once.

Only relevant to like the first third of that dunkey video, but watching that a couple of days ago helped me realize, for the umpteenth time, how broken and dystopian the whole online news/media/commentary landscape is. It's like a whole under society where tens of thousands of these "content creators" constantly churn out fake news about everything under the sun - and if one of them is doing it without also engaging in ragebait, then they're actually relatively harmless in comparison to some of the worst offenders. Probably none of us here watch any of that crap, but millions of people out there do. The internet was a mistake... guide me, o Lucifer, to some new road.

The Windows memory diagnostic test is pretty flaky, but in the opposite way: it usually fails to diagnose defective RAM that memtest86 would find quickly. If both sticks of RAM are individually failing the test at both XMP and at base speeds, then make sure you test both those new sticks with the same diagnostic tool to make certain that it doesn't keep failing even with the new RAM, which it hopefully won't. I'm a little concerned that it might not actually be the RAM at this point, but two new sticks should, in theory, illuminate the situation. You weren't kidding when you said you bought a generic, that particular one doesn't even advertise a brand, which I always think is super sketchy for electronics in particular. But I guess it's fine as both a test run and as a bridge until the Apple version comes out.