Bartimaeus

I could be misremembering (as it's been a few years), but I believe ShadySands was more of a Packers fan than a Broncos, but he's also more or less stopped watching the NFL. This was probably the least I've been interested in the NFL in the past decade (I only caught about half of the Packers games and really didn't watch much else), but it's probably less to do with the NFL itself for me, and more to do with sports just not being a super compelling method of escapism for me this year.

Stranger Things season 5... Just kidding, I ain't watching that crap. Nope, I watched Neon Genesis Pluribus. Really great. Kind of fantastic, actually. Final episode smashed it out of the park so good that I almost don't want them to make a second season, I'd be perfectly fine with them just leaving it how it is, despite it being a massive cliffhanger. I feel like you can really only go down from here, but I suppose if they got us this far, you have to at least give them a chance. The incredibly high-stakes scenario is contrarily married to a low-key, character-driven, and incredibly personal story, it was really just kind of beautiful and exactly what I want out of high-minded sci-fi or fantasy concepts, which for TV so often just gets bogged down with...all the normal yucks of a million different characters and increasingly complex plotting and set pieces. None of that was necessary here, I did not miss it at all, it stayed true to its colors all the way through. Will that be the case for season 2? We'll have to wait and see.

More amused than anything else, especially as I was so out of wack with my chronically terrible sleep that I got too sleepy and actually went to bed at 8 so I didn't see the game (though I did just watch the highlights after waking up a little bit ago), so while it's certainly another horrifically embarrassing and painful playoff loss (bonus points for being against the Bears!), I did at least have the good fortune of not watching it live. Deja vu of three weeks ago against the Bears but somehow even worse this time: 25 points given up in the 4th quarter? Yowch! It's been a very Jekyll and Hyde season for the Packers, but really, the Packers have been having these sorts of horrific playoff collapses under LaFleur since he got here, wonder if he's now in real danger of being let go after that. This Packers team did not have the legs to go the distance after losing about half its starters, most of them late into the season, but I did think there was a real possibility of them knocking off the Bears. Whoops. To fumble it like that is pretty inexcusable.

Eddington (2025). It got maybe just a little over the top towards the end there, but overall, it felt like a very wonderful, horrible look into the disaster that is the United States of America and its many crises, new and old alike. Very stressful. Probably don't watch it if if you live in the U.S. and having to think about the current state of this country and its future might push you over the edge.

A friend got me into this vocaloid bullcrap last month. This particular one, Kasane Teto, is the first one I've heard where I seem to actually like the voice. Now she's been using it as an excuse to send me a bazillion different songs of extremely varying quality and styles...but I like this one. Honestly, I used to have a really diminutive view of vocaloids, but ever since generative AI became a thing, they just seem so silly, tame, and harmless in comparison.

I'm sure you can appreciate the sad irony for your eternal refrain of waiting for the full story to come out against the actual legal reality requiring that someone speak as soon as humanly possible if they want to safely tell lies or drive an agenda...

Don't be silly: Just because I haven't taken the time to study the particulars of any of BruceVC's turds doesn't mean I'm blind or stupid: it's quite obvious who is being talked about when somebody like Zoraptor seems to call someone else disingenuous when there doesn't appear to be any inciting incident for it. That's only going to be one person responsible for that sort of thing around here these days, which is our very own BruceVC.

Correct. Come 2028, if we still have elections, the Democrat that runs on abolishing or at least completely firing and restarting all of ICE is very certainly to be the one that gets my vote in the primaries. Wiping out the brown-nosers in our federal agencies is going to be a requirement for functioning government after all of this.

I've been working very hard to get a warning for my treatment of Bruce the past ten years - I'm not likely to give up now, am I? One of these days, I'll finally get there... Yes, it's true: I do not believe free will exists in any meaningful capacity, and so I must accept that BruceVC is simply the product of conditions and forces outside his control. Still have to call a spade a spade sometimes, though.

The sad thing is, Volourn at his worst was never as bad as BruceVC at his best: at least Volourn was always exactly how he presented himself. I can appreciate that sort of sincerity, even if his behavior was generally kind of awful and usually not worth engaging with: he had real thoughts and beliefs, even some ones that didn't seem to follow what maybe anyone else in the world thinks, and he wasn't afraid to share them...and that's much better than all the "oh won't you please poop directly into my mouth" takes that BruceVC has always had.

Once upon a time, I reported one of Volourn's posts by saying that I and a few other people would start re-framing everything Volourn said as supporting dog-****ing if staff didn't tell him off for constantly re-framing everyone and everything he disagreed with as being or supporting Nazis, and while I never heard back from staff, he coincidentally decided to take his ball and leave the forums forever literally immediately after that. Food for thought, people.

Actually, that's very apropos, because this past summer... I'm funny about musicals: either they're they're great and wonderful...or they're the worst thing I've ever seen in my whole life. I do like my musicals to be more on the diegetic side broadly speaking, and Cabaret is one of the very few 100% diegetic musical movies that I know of, which makes its musical numbers quite lovely (albeit completely insane) to me. Combine that with the lead being loosely based off of Louise Brooks and it's difficult not to automatically like it. It's unfortunate that I don't have any of the two or three quotes from her book as a signature that I had for years right now... I might have to bring them back for the occasion. I've seen Louise Brooks' "A Girl in Every Port", "Beggars of Life", "Diary of a Lost Girl", "God's Gift to Women", "It's the Old Army Game", "Miss Europe", "Now We're in the Air", "Pandora's Box", "The Canary Murder Case", "The Show Off", and "Windy Riley Goes Hollywood", and despite the fact that most of them are somewhere between bad and terrible (with the major exceptions of the German Pandora's Box and Diary of a Lost Girl, and to a much lesser extent the American Beggars of Life and French Miss Europe which are alright and at least kind of interesting), they are not terrible because of Louise Brooks and I would love to uncover more of her lost, forgotten, and probably awful movies. I know there are more out there, but they can unfortunately be quite difficult to get a hold of by way of either legal or illegal means. Not that I'm like...some kind of Louise Brooks turbonerd or superfan or anything... It's always a toss-up whether I want to zoom out and get proper framing of the face with the drawback of being too small...or to just get memey with it. I chose memey this time, but I might change my mind later.

good news: scary tibetan death mask bartimaeus is finally gone bad news: back on that louise brooks crap again tangent: i hate circle avatars, they're so much harder to get right compared to square avatars, LC's avatar accurately captures how I feel trying to make circle avatars

YouTube recently recommended me and apparently about a million other people this 18 year old Christmas x Lovecraft song. Okay. Nice. Yeah, it's a lot better than random AI slop, I guess. Merry Christmas, everyone!

Why is Europa Universalis 5 in the Steam Awards for Most Innovative Gameplay

https://overclock3d.net/news/gpu-displays/nvidia-plans-heavy-cuts-to-gpu-supply-in-early-2026/ Gamers Nexus has been yelling to the rooftops for a bit now that we may well be in the last few years of consumer ownership of computers if this AI bubble doesn't burst.

Wolfwalkers (2020). I'd only heard great things about it, but... It is a gorgeous film, but it was difficult to fully recover from the painful first ~20 minutes. Most every scene felt like it was lingering or outright repeating a few beats too many, I was getting genuinely kinda mad at how poorly edited this felt and how reducing the film by even just...five, maybe ten minutes by chopping off a few seconds from each scene would've helped it feel so much punchier. The script also has a strange way of feeling too kiddie and too adult at the same time, like it can't really quite make up its mind what kind of tone it should have, and I found that...uh, a little weird and off-putting. It could've been great, but I guess it's just one of those movies where a series of seemingly small issues keeps taking you out of it, try as you might. Oh well. As far as wolf movies go, I liked Princess Mononoke better, and I still don't much like Princess Mononoke despite having seen it four(?) times, so...

You already lost me here. - Someone who doesn't watch anime with male protagonists because of how awful they and their animes are in 99.9999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999% of cases that was exactly 99 "9"s for my sig figs, for the record, i was doing a thing

Wembanyama: "I’m just glad to be part of something that’s growing to be so beautiful: pure and ethical basketball."

Is isekai still the genre of the day? Gosh, that's been going on for a while now, hasn't it?

Here is what I remember about seasons 3 and 4 of Stranger Things: 1. The new characters (i.e. Robin, Erica, Eddie) and how they played off of the old characters they interacted with most (mostly Steve and I think Dustin) were generally a thumbs up, probably because they were new characters and the writers actually had motivated reason to add them to the mix. Robin was my favorite out of the lot, and from what I gather most people seem to agree on that. 2. Literally anyone and everyone else could've been killed in the most brutally horrific way possible and I would've been sitting there applauding the show for finally getting one of its many deadbeats off of my television screen. Joyce, Jim, Mike, Eleven, Lucas, Nancy, Jonathan, Will, Max, and Murray...any of these I would've been overjoyed to see get axed - with especial emphasis on Eleven, Jim, Murray, and Jonathan. No hate for the actors, you were all a great lot in the first season (well, excepting Max who only shows up in season 2) when you actually had fun and/or compelling parts to play, it's sadly the writers who have done you wrong. ...and that's pretty much it. I guess I remember vaguely about some incredibly awful Russian stuff with Joyce and Jim, but I think my subconscious has once again done me a solid by blocking out most of whatever that stupidity was. I don't even remember who Vecna is, I don't think I have even the vaguest concept of what he looks like or anything he was about or did...but in all fairness, I think I mostly skipped all of Eleven's stuff in season 4 on account of it being soul-shatteringly drab and repetitive by that point, which probably plays into it. I'm still as of yet undecided whether I shall hate-watch season 5 or not.

The only issue I've ever run into with LTSC was with the old versions e.g. LTSC 2019 being feature-outdated for a couple of newer games, which is what necessitated me upgrading to LTSC 2021. But they would just straight up not run - otherwise, no problems I can think of, it's pretty much just Windows 10 but a little lighter and a little less annoying. However, I have not ever used Edge and I have not played Anno 117, so I cannot comment on those. You could try temporarily disabling UAC entirely (i.e. everything is run as admin all the time always) to see if it resolves the Anno 117 saving issue. Admin permissions can be a little flaky with Windows: in theory, an application you start as admin should also open other stuff as admin (e.g. in the event of running secondary executables), but somehow it doesn't always necessarily work out that way. Someone also posted having a similar issue with the game, and it actually ended up being the fault of Windows Defender:

Weapons (2025). Wasn't sure how I felt about it for most of it, but the hilarious ending pushed me it into liking it overall.

Marjorie Taylor Greene announced her resignation come January. Years of trolling and fighting the left, but only lasted about a week against the MAGA death cult threatening her for her "betrayal"...what a pity.