Bartimaeus

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.

Apropos of nothing, if Canada were made into the 51st state, its population is the same as California's and could prevent us from having a Republican president for a long while. Please come save us, Canada.

Why don't the women who are scared of rape and murder simply declare themselves to be transgender men? Problem solved.

They might at least prevent the situation from becoming worse...if they're actually available to purchase. All in all, it seems like a perfectly fine performance-for-value card, but AMD kind of needs to be better than that if it ever wants to claw back market share in a meaningful way.

I haven't made up my mind about it. I mean, I'm enjoying or at least tolerating it enough to keep going through it, but would I actually recommend it to anyone else? I am at conflict with that, probably because it is, as previously mentioned, so all over the place in quality that it feels difficult to just be like "yep, go ahead and watch it" to anybody (and I am generally quite harsh on any media that can't be consistently at least okay, but I am being uncharacteristically forgiving here with Batman, for whatever reason - possibly because despite all its issues, and really the general issues of DC stuff at large, I still tend to like the characters and world). If you aren't at all into the central conceit and formula of Batman as a TV show, then no, it's probably not quite good enough to warrant starting, especially if you know that the first season is an incredibly daunting sixty half-hour episodes long (strangely, the rest of the show, i.e. the next five seasons combined, is only 49 episodes total). You can also typically tell pretty quickly if an episode was written by one of the good writers or one of the bad writers, usually within a few minutes, and I won't lie, I can kind of mentally check out when I detect that it's going to be one of the worse episodes, which softens the blow a little. I think the more character-introspective episodes tend to be the biggest hits and misses - when they're good, they're good, but when they're bad, oh boy are they bad. As I've mentioned some number of times before, I can handle a whole lot of nothing (e.g. Batman doing his thing and beating up the bad guys in a largely unmoving but inoffensive episodic plot) a lot better than I can handle a show or movie trying to get all serious on me and thinking that it's being big and important and emotional while actually instead falling on its face painfully. I will say that I am enjoying it more than The Big O, which I watched like ten episodes of some years back and which is clearly a ripoff of Batman: The Animated Series. Actually, I just noticed that The Big O was literally made by Sunrise, and Google results suggest that yes, they intended it to be their own mech-Batman show after their experiences with animating Batman: TAS. The only issue is that the addition of the mech elements were dumb as all get out and seemed to be as pointlessly formulaic as Sailor Moon monsters of the week (it seemed like each episode would always end in a completely shoehorned in giant mech fight no matter how irrelevant it actually was to the plot of the episode), and the main character is just a whiny manbaby instead of...well, you know, Batman. Batman might be badly and/or inconsistently written at times, but he is not a whiny manbaby at least. I also just noticed that the episode that I want to watch most, the episode that is probably primarily responsible for me starting to watch this at all after I went through the trouble of reading the original comic for it, is literally the very final episode of the whole series. Season 6, episode 11: Mad Love. So...that's great.

I've been watching Batman: The Animated Series. The quality in writing is all over the place - sometimes the show is really quite good, sometimes it is just fine, sometimes it is pretty bad...and there are tons of inconsistencies that contradict each other between episodes. Not too surprising, given the nature of comic book writing and episodes being based off of individual stories by different authors, I suppose. But the reason why I post about it in here instead of the TV thread is because I'm through about 30 episodes so far, and I said to myself during one of the last episodes I was watching that I simply do not believe that all these episodes could have been animated by the same team: similar to the writing, sometimes the animation is great, sometimes it is pretty good, sometimes it is just fine, sometimes it is bad, and sometimes it is really bad. I started looking up all the individual episodes that I've seen so far and to my total lack of surprise, there have been seven different animation teams that have made episodes so far of what I've watched (and there are more to come). They are... Spectrum Animation Company [Japanese] Sunrise [Japanese] Tokyo Movie Shinsha Company [Japanese] Studio Junio [Japanese] Akom Production Company [South Korean] Dong Yang Animation Company [South Korean] NOA Animation [Canadian] Yes, that Sunrise, and yes, there's not a single American animator between the whole lot of them. This certainly helps explain a number of things: all the episodes I thought that looked by far the worst were by Akom, and they were actually fired halfway through the first season. Spectrum and Sunrise were the best, but apparently Spectrum wasn't getting paid enough, because they literally went bankrupt and folded before the end of season 1 as well. I suppose it's a lot easier to get an episode out every week if you just hire half a dozen different animation companies and stagger their output...but it sure leads to some inconsistent quality.

Isn't that exactly what Macron wants, to make clear to the rest of the world (and especially Europe) that the United States is lost to them, will not help if they actually need it? I feel like that's something he's been trying to accomplish for years at this point, even during the Biden administration. Felt like that was a pretty good demonstration.

I was looking into Firefox user scripts. I'd always used tampermonkey, but people said to use greasemonkey, then I saw someone say "no, violentmonkey is open source and actively developed", but another person said "actually, firemonkey is like a better version of violentmonkey, and doesn't have the same privacy concerns", and then I saw someone "I like dancemonkey the best out of everything". Guys. That's too many monkeys, even if the last one was a joke.

Yeah, my ability to mentally visualize things is almost none, and it even applies to dreams. Anything I try to mentally visualize, be it a place or a face that I should know very well, all I really get is a very vague outline that's muddy, dark, and nearly unseen, as if what I'm trying to picture is hidden behind a thick black veil. I can't actually make the details appear, it's more just summoning up fleeting impressions with my meanings and feelings towards them attached. I've never been able to visualize characters or places in a book. Exactly one time in my life, a few years ago now, I had an extremely vivid lucid dream that was unlike anything I'd ever dreamt or imagined before. Though I was consciously aware it was a dream, it somehow seemed more real and powerful in terms of sensations than even real life, even though it was a completely boring dream where nothing of note happened at all. This gave me insight into what normal people's mental imagery and dreams must look more like, and boy, I sure am envious. Such a phenomenon has unfortunately not occurred to me since that instance.

Hey everyone, look at the bright side: in another election cycle, maybe the U.S., Germany, and Russia will all be on the same side, and by this time in four years, we'll all be enjoying the perks of jolly old global cooperation between powerful states with militaristic ambitions. Of course, it is sometimes the case that seemingly similar nationalistic authoritarian regimes do not always get along with one another...but bah, I'm sure it'll be fine.

Children Who Chase Lost Voices (2011)...directed by Makoto Shinkai. Who's his poster guy? Needs a new one, he or she just keeps making the same poster for all of these movies, and they're all kind of bad. Even this alternative variant still looks mostly the same, but I guess it's a little less awful. Doesn't start out with wimpy piano music. Not raining. No whiny monologue. Young girl who seems to be an independent explorer type. Okay, this one might actually be watchable. Don't like the voice direction of either the Japanese or the English audio, but what are you gonna do? I eventually settled on the English because the Japanese was more annoying: the lady voicing the main character in English at least sometimes sounds like a human being, as opposed to an always out of breath chipmunk. . . . Good lord, it's just a Laputa rip-off. It's not even a good one, and I'm not the biggest fan of Laputa in the first place. And it was a sappy piano drama after all, it just wasn't completely front-loaded like the rest of this guy's movies. Honestly, that kind of makes it worse, because it just means I was duped into watching the whole thing instead of only the first five minutes I usually do. I somehow hate this guy even more now.

Played a few hours of it, we thought "yeah, that was fun", proceeded to completely forget it ever existed and never picked it up again. Whoops. I think if the characters and story had been less grating, would've been more compelled to keep playing.

Yes, I would've said it was corrupt if we were transitioning to basically any other administration in U.S. history, but the one that openly promised to be fascist while also perverting the justice system? No: while certainly not ideal, it was understandable.

Blood: The Last Vampire (2000) & Vampire Wars (1990). Right, here's my vampire anime tier list so far: A (I love this!). Vampire Princess Miyu B. Vampire Hunter D C (I like this!). N/A D. Vampire in the Garden, Darkness of the Sea and Shadow of the Moon E (This is fine). Vampire Hunter D Bloodlust, JoJo's Bizarre Adventure (1993), Mermaid Forest F. Blood: The Last Vampire, The Laughing Target, Mermaid's Scar G (Meh). JoJo's Bizarre Adventure (2000) H. N/A I (I dislike this). Castlevania, Night Warriors: Darkstalkers' Revenge J. N/A K (I hate this). Vampire Wars ... Z (This is the worst thing I've ever seen in my whole life). Hellsing Ultimate Thank you for coming to my TedTalk.

Parents: What's your New Years' resolutions? Honesty is only the best policy if it doesn't end up with your parents beating you.

I know that's a thing on Steam, but does it happen with new releases? I thought that was only a thing for games that already had positive reviews and then suddenly get an influx of negative reviews after the fact that Valve believes aren't really to do with the game itself.

Is there such a thing as reverse review bombing? Like, if you're expecting Avowed to get review bombed by people who are going to refund the game during the early part of release just for being "too woke", is there a group of people out there buying games just to give them positive reviews and then refunding them?

That was my understanding as well, and yet, they don't work because of there being too many damned people on mine. It's very puzzling, and I hope Michaelsoft looks into it.

If Avowed sells well, will Michaelsoft let them spend some money to upgrade the forum infrastructure? Grounded already screwed us right proper, we're going to just be a pile of smoldering ruins if Avowed does well too.

I sometimes forget how silly first person view models look in first-person action games, especially if you're not the one playing (...and I don't play first-person action games anymore basically ever, so that doesn't help either). Hands and arms coming directly out of your face... It doesn't help that the reviewer's FOV looks terrible, wonder if they didn't bother to change it or if it can't be changed. It's funny, I don't suffer from claustrophobia (and I've been strapped inside an MRI machine where you can't move and the whole of the machine is surrounding you and just about pressed up directly against your face and there's no way out without people from outside extracting you), but every time I see an FOV that is too low, I feel like I know what claustrophobia is like, because yuck!

You're just jealous because he's finally found the true love that you never have.

What is not in my nature, I cannot give. - Lucifer, The Tragedy of Man It does put one at conflict, doesn't it? I don't like the character designs, but not because I'm a moron that's always been a moron and who will always be a moron, but because I think they all just look like real (but creepy) people dressed up in cosplay, and cosplay deeply upsets me, so I don't like that. I've said it a number of times before, but the closer graphics get to reality, the more uncanny valley they are, and that goes double once you start dressing them up in fantasy get-ups. Ya gotta have an art style that is more than just "let's map real people's faces to our character models"...well, you do unless you want my first impression of your game to always be, "Are those skinwalkers doing cosplay? Yeah, I'm out." More importantly, I think there are right ways and wrong ways to criticize media, and I think the other intelligent humans that know you will be able to recognize the difference if you take a fair approach to it. If we had to defend every piece of media whose views we agree with just because we agree with it, we would have to defend a lot of crap that isn't worth defending, and that's no way to live life. Really, it's just better to cut people who are either stupid or disingenuous. Sorry, did I say "cut people [...]"? I meant to say "cut out of your life people [...]", of course. Whoops, honest mistake, .

Do you have fun while playing Diablo 4?