Bartimaeus

I'm a sucker for witch stuff that doesn't suck. I will have to determine if Sanctuary sucks or not.

David Souter, former U.S. Supreme Court Justice. He was nominated to the court by Bush Sr., but was immediately a moderate that became known for voting more and more with the left wing side of the Court as time went on, before deciding to retire early during Obama's term. He was replaced by Sonia Sotomayer. From an interview in 2012: "I don't believe there is any problem in American politics or American public life which is more significant today that the pervasive civic ignorance of the Constitution of the United States and the structure of government. Some of the aspects of current American government that people on both sides find frustrating are in part a function of the inability of people to understand how government can and should function. [...] What I worry about is that when problems are not addressed, people will not know who is responsible. And when the problems get bad enough, some one person will come forward and say, 'Give me total power and I will solve this problem.' That is how the Roman republic fell." He was my favorite Supreme Court Justice. RIP.

Well, I always played glass cannon builds with the intent to blow everything up before it could hit me in ARPGs, and if I get hit even once and instantly explode, it's my fault for getting hit. I don't know, games are just more fun that way, .

I think the constant penalties and free throws are even worse than the TV timeouts. But yeah, people generally only watch the playoffs, and sometimes not even then. Watching the regular season makes sense if your team has been in the gutter for forever and suddenly start to have a good season and/or if your team gets a breakout star player, but besides that, there are way too many games and they happen every single day of the week. I prefer the NFL's approach to having the majority of games all take place on Sunday (and I generally hate having to tune into the solitary Monday Night Football and Thursday Night Football games, so I usually don't unless it's my own team). Also, two years later, and it's very clear the Bucks' gambit in rebuilding the team around Giannis and Lillard has not worked out in their favor. The team is worse in every way than it was before that trade, and now Lillard blew out his achilles at age 36. I wouldn't be surprised if Giannis ends up leaving this off-season or the next, the state of the team under this GM and Doc Rivers has become rather deplorable.

Although I don't play them anymore due to my wrist injuries, I always thought this was the way to go with singleplayer shooters. A player that can be killed easily but who can also kill everyone else easily (especially if they're consistently playing intelligently and making sure to out-position and out-gun everyone else) has always seemed so much more satisfying than both player and enemies just being damage sponges. Well, really, I kind of prefer it in all types of games, but especially shooters.

It took them forever to finish The Empire Strikes Back - IIRC, the film prints they had available for it were all badly damaged and it took combining several of them to construct a whole film...plus all the necessary editing and re-grading to make them approximately match. The Empire Strikes Back is, of course, the only Star Wars film I particularly like. The result is...mixed. I think their A New Hope looks generally better than Harmy's Despecialized, I think their Return of the Jedi trades blows with Harmy's - both kind of have their pros and cons, I don't think you're wrong for going with either. But their The Empire Strikes Back has a rougher appearance to it, and I feel like Harmy's generally wins. Though both of them kind of try to accomplish different things - Harmy's is a cleaner and more traditional digital blu-ray experience, while TN1's efforts are more like what you'd have experienced if you'd watched these movies in theaters way back when. Even with that said, I like to see clarity of detail, correct color grading, and not having the brights or darks blown out, and I think the Empire Strikes Back reels they had just have too many problems - problems like the above LotR screenshots that are simply impossible to correct in post. I think I read that they actually found a new reel that's better than the previous sources they used and they plan on making a 2.0 at some point using it, but that might still be years off at this point. While the neutral color tones are interesting, The Fellowship of the Ring is my favorite of the LotR movies and has the widest range of deliberately chosen color tones/themes due to its more varied locations than the later two movies, and seeing it all get neutralized ends up being rather undesirable to me. The over-sharpening and DNR (dynamic noise reduction) employed to eliminate grain and make the movie look more digital (they were shot on film!) is also terrible, it gives the whole thing a certain uncanny look. It's bad enough when it's done to just cartoons, but I cannot abide it at all when it's done to real human faces.

Let's play a game: Spot the Source We Made a Crappy Upscale From! Was it A., the theatrical blu-ray that actually has the proper colors and uses different color tones for different times and locations throughout the movie as shown in original theatrical viewings, or B., the extended edition blu-ray that's a load of busted-up garbage? If you chose A., then congratulations, you won a one-way ticket to Mount Doom! If you chose B., then good job, you have eyes. tl;dr: "sharp and clear" That's because the recent-ish 2K and 4K remaster blu-rays of LotR are just processed color regrades of the ancient original blu-ray releases. The image is sharper, yes - that's typically what these processed "remasters" (as opposed to actual re-scans of original film elements) do, sharpen up already prominent details while losing or warping smaller details. The color regrading is an inconsistent mess on top of it - instead of restoring the films to their original theatrical look (which you can see in the original non-Extended Edition blu-rays), they are all over the place - sometimes it looks more similar to the theatrical colors, sometimes it's very neutral, and sometimes it's...just doing something else entirely. The neutral colors are weird - those films used color to signify different locations and their respective tones, so it's bizarre to see a "remaster" lose that entirely at times. They're awful releases that are lower picture quality than the original blu-rays from which they are derived from (plus, as you mentioned, the over-clarification of details makes some of the already low quality 2000s CGI effects stand out even more, and the films generally lose their filmic look due to over-processing), but if you really prefer the Extended Editions, I guess they might be preferable to previous official releases. There are fan color regrades of the original blu-rays that are better quality than those shoddy remasters.

Even better are TN1's efforts, which are derived from actual film prints, IMO:

oh god he's still doing it

Yes, that's great, but it does nothing to actually address the fact that an increasingly large percentage of Germany's population evidently shares their values (at least more so than they do the other parties) and intends to put their leaders in charge - whether it's under the banner of "Alternative for Germany" or something else, it won't really much matter when/if it happens. Banning a growing party is just a speedbump measure, especially given that it apparently takes years to classify a party as extremist and even longer to ban them as a result. And I have to wonder if banning a party doesn't have an effect much like trying to assassinate a candidate...more coverage, more eyes on that coverage, more exposure to their leaders and platform, more outrage that they were banned, and more votes when they come back under whatever new name they decide on when the first one is banned. As I said, banning strengthening parties historically just doesn't have the greatest track record of working out. The 'beautiful' thing about democracy is that the politicians and parties that don't use their current power and authoritarian measures to stay in power seem to so often find themselves eventually kicked out and then stomped on by the people who will.

Meant to reply to this: While I'm all in favor of deplatforming hate to minimize its exposure and spreading as much as possible, banning political parties already on the upswing...does not have the greatest track record of working out for the people wanting/doing the banning. Banning other political parties when you're the party that was on the upswing and you've just gained power, on the other hand? Much more successful. I'm not generally a fan of moving further to the right, but sometimes I wonder if it might not be a bad idea for the left-ish parties to figure out what is the single biggest issue driving voters to parties like AfD (immigration?) and meaningfully act on it (but humanely and legally) before it's too late, before they get thrown out entirely and the opposition decides state-sponsored kidnappings and deportations of people to gulags in countries that your courts have no jurisdiction over a la the U.S. is a good idea.

I guess at least Guard Dog didn't do Keyrock's special brand of pretending to be "both sides"-ing while actually supporting and voting for the exact type of scum he constantly railed against. That was some real bozotown stuff. Sigh. Whenever the law leaves something up for Congress to decide, it's pretty safe to say that it's doomed. It's the same reason I question why Trump has not already decided to just to start ignoring judges altogether - or begin imprisoning or killing them. The only remedy at that point would be Congress, and he should feel pretty assured at this point that they'll do nothing.

It's never stopped running since 1947. It is currently set to 89 seconds to midnight, the closest it's ever been - though with the recognition that it is slow to update, and certain near-catastrophes such as the Cuban Missile Crisis and the 1983 Soviet nuclear attack false alarm were never represented on the clock (the former because it started and ended before the clock would be updated, the latter because it was unknown to everyone except a small number of Soviets exactly how close we were to nuclear armageddon - both of those events would seem to warrant being 1 second until midnight-level events). It should mainly be seen as an interesting talking point, not really a definitive declaration on the current day-to-day state of the world: if nuclear war was ever to imminently break out, the Doomsday Clock would likely be too slow to appropriately react and provide warning before it did. e: Ninja-ed!

I will believe you're not an AI bot (or at the very least that even if your stroke-inducing posts are AI generated, there's an actual human behind the controls) if you give the post above yours, HoonDing's, a like.

That's why I mentioned that you should also make them a big deal, instead of just...uh, a few creatures hanging out and wandering outside them. In my mind, the game world would've been a lot better off if it were shrunk down and condensed a bit while eliminating a bunch of the copy and paste fluff (be it Oblivion gates or random caves/ruins...), and from there, you could ideally overhaul the whole idea of Oblivion gates and integrate them more meaningfully, maybe even have quests tailored to specific gates depending on where you decided to put them. The cost of a massive game world where 75-90% of it is pointless is just not a bargain I'm ever willing to make, and it's why I don't hardly ever play or stick with open world games. New Vegas is probably the best out of what I've played in having both a good-sized world, solid content density, and the content actually generally being worth your time to find and explore. That was a pretty good balance, but it's not how most open world games are built...even Game of the Year-winning ones, like The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild. Can you imagine how Obsidian of the mid-to-late 2000s might've tackled making Oblivion instead of Bethesda? That really could've been something...

I really liked the idea of the Oblivion gates - in theory. It's one of those things that big open world-making devs like Bethesda seem to always mess up: instead of spending dev time making a smaller amount of higher quality and preferably unique content, what do we do? Copy and paste, boys...copy and paste. According to Google, there are 20 permanent gates that always open throughout the course of the game, but there are another 80 "possible" gates, of which 40 will open. It would've been nice if instead of 20 fixed gates and 40 possible gates, we just have like...10, maybe 15 total, all of which would hopefully be a big deal and be specifically tailored in design.

Ever since I said "RFKJ is probably one of the best people in the administration", it feels like every RFKJ headline I see or hear about is worse than the last. The thing about him being a true believer in his own ideas (as opposed to just another mindless sycophant like the rest of the administration) is that while he might fight for some of his decent ideas like banning food dyes and limiting added sugars to food, he's also going to fight to end water fluoridation, limit access to narcan, and round up autistic and ADHD people to put them into work camps. Great. And treat measles with vitamin R or whatever too, but we already knew about that one. Although while I know the liberals aren't great and the conservatives aren't the same as U.S. conservatives, I can't help but think it's a good thing when countries globally stagger out their nationalist parties and candidates...so congratulations to Canada on not electing conservatives.

Batman update: Second half of the season has generally been much stronger and more consistent than the first half. Less episodes that feel like they were written by idiotic ten year old boys that think Batman is just the coolest and is never weak or makes mistakes certainly helps a lot. I've noticed that most of the best episodes, including most of the Joker and/or Harley Quinn episodes, are written by one Paul Dini, and there have been some pretty great episodes among those. I read this excerpt from the infamous episode "Harley and Ivy", the first time Harley and Poison Ivy teamed up together, which would be a reoccurring partnership in the decades to come: Quote: According to Paul Dini, this was meant to be the first prime time episode. "Fox was going to run it. Then a Fox executive saw it and said 'What the hell is this? Batman's not in this episode. He's only in it at the end? The whole episode is two girls running around in their underwear. There's no boy appeal here.' I said, 'Well maybe not any boys you know.' They refused to run it in prime time. Their idea of a perfect [episode] is 'I Am the Night.' That meets their criteria. It's dark and grim, with more of an adult feel and Robin was in it." Interesting thought process by that Fox executive there. I would say that "Harley and Ivy" was among the best episodes of Batman: TAS (and it was the first time you ever see Harley without her makeup or costume, with her normal hair and in normal clothing), with a lot of very interesting subtext about Harley's abusive relationship with the Joker that would come to fruition later in the Joker's murderous betrayal of Harley...also written by Paul Dini, in the final episode of the whole series. It's almost kind of like some writers were actually trying to tell evolving long-form stories about their characters, while some other writers were just smashing their action figures together.

@PK htiw klaw eriF Have you ever watched 964 Pinocchio? I just came across it a few minutes ago, saw the poster, read the premise, and immediately thought of you.

Oblivion always had the absolute worst difficulty balance: you basically had to keep going out of your way to make sure the game didn't completely break, either in your favor or against. What kind of cruddy game makes all difficulty scale to the player's level (already terrible), but then also makes the player's level either never increase (if you choose Major Skills you never use, like Alchemy or Hand-to-Hand) or increase way too fast (if you choose Major Skills you use all the time like Athletics or Acrobatics) but which don't actually increase your combat skills to keep up with the insane level scaling? It's so hard to get satisfying difficulty balance out of the game, everything either dies in a hit or two or is a ridiculous damage sponge. The best approach to fix that sort of design would probably be to just disable level scaling while also disabling damage scaling of the various combat skills, so that you can just set creatures' stats and they'll stay constant throughout the whole game, but also the player's own damage output with the same weapons will stay constant as well, making finding better weapons/spells actually mean something. Make bigger and better weapons/spells require those higher stats to use or something so they're not pointless, IDK.

Honestly, I kind of thought crisis might be the whole point: crisis, after all, generally leads to the seizing of more power, not the loss of it. Even if you're the one who's deliberately causing it.

Pope Francis

My understanding is that it's like most vulnerabilities: a threat can use it for escalation, but it's not something where just because your computer has internet while also having this exploitable vulnerability, you're going to suddenly get hacked. The threat needs to already have a high level of access to your local system in order to exploit WinRing0 being present on it, so there are a few steps in between there. Fun fact: most ransomwares don't even need admin privileges, much less the kernel-level access that WinRing0 gives. I'm a lot more worried about ransomwares than I am about WinRing0 - this doesn't mean turning a blind eye to any threat WinRing0 might pose, but I think WinRing0 should be low on your list of worries relative to, like, starting random .exes that you really shouldn't trust. And anyways, it sounds like Microsoft is trying to forcibly phase out WinRing0 as it is, which means developers are going to have to come up with different solutions that should reduce the possible attack surface.

I think it's aimed at too young of an age group to be of genuine interest to anyone else here, a Ghibli movie it is not...but it's one of those occasions where even though something feels like it's kinda for babies with a lot of the messaging really on the nose, it still manages to get an effective and powerful message through.

The Supreme Court apparently seized the deportation case from Alito after he inexplicably didn't refer it to the Court and then summarily ruled on it without even giving him or Thomas any time to write their dissents at 1 in the morning. If that's not the Supreme Court in a late night panic trying to conserve the little power they have remaining (and in the face of two of their members willingly try to give that away, too), I don't know what is. Waiting for that Gromnir Easter scoop on this...