Bartimaeus

The very final title in the list was just "The Man", though I have two notes about it: one, I listed it last but I actually came across it much earlier into making the list but wisely reserved it for the final entry; two, I actually saw two different movies with that title.

Took my mountain bike out on some hiking trails for a bit. Cursed my state when the cold whipping wind made me asthmatic and my vision started going red because I couldn't breathe after like just half an hour. I'm not allergic to anything (I've done one of those allergy test panels and nothing triggered), but exercising in the cold does tend to do me in. A small but athletic lady at the local bike shop that I was at recently was telling me how I should really get a steel mountain bike because sure, the bike is a lot heavier, but you can crash all you want and the bike will be fine, and if she can ride everywhere and carry her steel bike across streams and into her apartment without no issue, there's no way "somebody like you" couldn't handle a steel bike as well. Lady, while I may look young and in shape, I'm fairly confident that my moderately cripppled body would crumple and tear like tissue paper if I crashed all the time like you apparently do. I was both very envious of her and also felt like a million years old.

I didn't watch but came across a movie called "The Man Without a Body". The title made me curious as to how many movies there are that start with "The Man". I've decided that I won't ever be watching any movies that start with "The Man". To my delight, I looked through my list of watched movies and I haven't already accidentally seen one.

I had this page open from a few hours ago before I left for a while, and then when I came back, we were back to normal. So which version did you guys prefer? vs.

but all of my passion for gaming died over a decade ago i am just a withered husk of my former self

I suppose it at least means he doesn't have the opportunity to ruin anything else in the meantime, a la James Cameron and the Avatar series.

Frieren, episode 2. This show is so glacially slow, I have way too much time to ponder how dense Frieren is. Admittedly, 3 and half minutes of the 26 minutes runtime is used up by music that I immediately skip, but that just takes it down to 22 minutes, which is probably 11 minutes too many. ...You know, that gives me an idea. Frieren, episode 3, double speed. That's sort of better - closer to but still not quite a normal pace, anyways. Fern called Frieren "helplessly dense", which seems appropriate. Eh, this still isn't really working for me, though. Frieren, episode 4, triple speed. You know, these first four episodes have basically felt like the second coming of...uh, what was it called? Girls' Last Tour, I had to go look it up. There are things that I like about it, but it feels more like an "in theory" rather than an "in practice" kind of thing. Too slow of a pace combined with too much artificial writing/characters, I suppose. All the moments that are clearly supposed to be cute just seem...annoyingly manipulative in that very nu-anime fashion to me, so I'm just getting kind of grumpy instead. Frieren, episode 5, light speed. Yeah, okay, I think we're done here, this isn't working. It's not awful, it's not offensive, but I am just not getting anything out of this. But just in case... Frieren, episode 25, LUDICROUS SPEED Wait, who the hell are all these people? Oh, forget about it, the show still feels exactly the same anyways. I'm the type of person that vastly prefers the short and sweet fight of Obi-Wan Kenobi vs. Darth Vader in A New Hope, no matter how simple and goofy it may be, over what feels like the hour long and much more technically impressive fight of Anakin vs. Obi-Wan in Revenge of the Sith, so that wasn't necessarily the best way to try to appeal to me. Though it didn't really end up having anything to do with my issues with this show, so...

Frieren, episode 1: This episode did not make me want to claw out my eyes, chew off my tongue, cut off my ears, burn my nose hairs, tear out my spinal cord, or excavate my brain from my skull. So, that's an improvement over the last one...that gosh-awful food one. Though it also didn't do that much for me either...interesting concept, but I'm kind of lukewarm on it so far. Both Frieren and Fern have annoying voices/mannerisms, so that's not helping. If I hadn't noticed this was made by my guys Madhouse, I don't think I would have checked this out at all.

The Disney effort was a traditional (i.e. not AI-assisted) upscale with some additional filtering done to it to try to give the illusion of being digital, though they actually didn't go as far as they could have - for example, they didn't even jack up the bright/dark dynamics and completely wipe the darker sections of the image to a flat black, which is an all too common sin for upscales like this. Some people like the look of upscales such as this, they think it looks "cleaner", but they are (no offense to anybody here that does) complete tosspots that should not be allowed to give their opinions on anything film-related. Okay, that's probably a little harsh, but...actually, no, I think it's pretty well-deserved. The fan-made AI upscale, on the other hand, is a total lie that has all sorts of wrong/fabricated micro-details, but aesthetically speaking, it's certainly much softer and filmic while just being more pleasing to the eye in comparison. Other shows I'd really like to see rendered with that upscaling method: Sailor Moon, Vampire Princess Miyu, Avatar: The Last Airbender, the 'lost' episode (16) of Neon Genesis...

Feel like that's not really going to be a thing, since the audience that fell in love with a show like K-On is obviously not going to want the animation that they already like to suddenly look look ye olde cels. So it's not something companies would be interested in trying to make/sell, and it's not something even fans would probably be very interested in making themselves. Though I'd be very curious to see what that would actually look like, especially given that there are obviously so many other art style differences as well - I'd imagine it'd be a rather bewildering hybrid. It's possible that the tools and training data could be made available for most anyone to use on anything someday, though... In fact, I have already seen one fan-made AI upscale doing a similar thing as the above Dragon Ball images. Mickey's Christmas Carol (1992), compare the images at full size: One of these is the official Disney blu-ray, one of these is a fan-made PAL DVD upscale. Unfortunately, the first column is the official Disney source. Yikes. I'd love to be able to apply this process to something like Steven Universe and see what results...

On the subject of Akira Toriyama, most of the Dragon Ball series has never released in real/quality HD, mostly due to consistent and wilful incompetence by Funimation/Toei Animation (and also some other companies from different regions, like Selecta Vision). A French studio has been releasing the original Dragon Ball (not Z) show on blu-ray, and it looks a bit different from previous releases... Here's the kicker: it is an AI upscale from a DVD source, a model trained specifically and only on cel animation. If I hadn't been told that, I would've assumed this is a real (albeit flawed and too processed but still pretty decent) HD transfer. Now that I know it's an AI upscale, I'm pretty certain companies making real HD transfers of these old animated shows/movies is going to become largely a thing of the past - why go through the trouble of finding and re-scanning all your original materials, which is time-consuming and expensive, when you can just...do this, which looks alright, costs pennies, and takes practically no time/oversight in comparison?

Uh, why was this obvious spam not deleted? Fun fact: if you Google the username "Howrdwallt" (with quote marks around it for an exact search), you can find a bunch of similarly generic comments around the internet, on threads both new and years old...but their posts all date to yesterday: #1, #2, #3, and so on. It's probably some kind of AI experiment, and I've seen somebody who was posting similar comments get banned on a different forum once moderators realized what was up...uh, admittedly, once I informed them: the point stands, . We're entering a brave new world of spam, and our moderator team needs to be prepared for it, .

The Milwaukee Bucks are supposed to be a super team with a "big 3" between Giannis, Dame, and Middleton (maybe even a "big 4" if you include Brook Lopez given how he'd played the past few years), but I think this is the worst superteam I've ever watched: it's like everyone besides Giannis forgot how to play. Maybe they all just got really old at the same time...if that's the case, this team is totally screwed going forward. How's that, uh, going?

I think the thing that really strikes me with The Boy Friend is that there's really no reason for a silly 1920s matinee show quasi-musical to seem deranged whatsoever, especially when the stated goal of the filmmaker was just to make it sweet and innocent, and yet I could feel a nuclear meltdown starting in my brain about a third of the way through as I tried to make sense of the choices that the director was making, and it didn't really ever stop. There was a distinct sensation of fire and smoldering in the top left part of my brain even after the film had finished. I'd definitely appreciate someone else's take on it to determine whether or not maybe I'm just cracked for reasons unrelated to the film - perhaps it was just all the characters staring with the full whites of their eyes straight into the camera for what felt like half the film that did me in. I should probably watch The Devils sometime, it is rather infamous. Probably a little outside my wheelhouse, but that's exactly how I got into this mess in the first place.

The Boy Friend (1971) by Ken Russell. Ken Russell said he made this film...um, "[...] to prove to people I'm not totally deranged; I love the innocence and charm of musicals", but I came away from this becoming certain that he must be. I think it's one of the most fun films I've ever viewed, but I feel I lost my sanity watching it through. I don't know what I was expecting after having seen Altered States and Crimes of Passion, but I certainly wasn't prepared for whatever that was.