Bartimaeus

There are two major ending branches, with different sub-endings for each. The first branch I got was the one you mentioned (where you attend Hugo's birthday party - this is the 'normal' one), but there's a second branch that veers wildly off into a different direction that reveals a lot more about the Sintra family (you must discover where the ritual dagger, the Athame, is hiding and take it before the birthday party happens). I feel this is intended to be the true ending, though interpretation may vary depending on exactly what you value (also, I think it probably works better if you've already played the first ending, as I feel it builds off of what you learn in the first ending branch). Yep, I've also played both of those. Though very different, DDLC is a pretty cute/horrific game and one of like...maybe four visual novels I've ever played all the way through, and The Count of Lucanor I quite liked as well though it didn't quite match the highs of Yuppie Psycho. Thanks for the other mentions. Yeah, finding quality games that really hit the mark can be difficult...there's always stuff where it's similar-ish and kind of alright, but it's usually pretty clear when a game really has its claws in you versus when it doesn't.

Yuppie Psycho, successfully 100%-ed! This time, I played through the 'true' ending, which actually properly resolved the central story once and for all... ...but it was personally much more horrifying for me. Steam lists these two game tags back-to-back, just like this, for Yuppie Psycho: It's honestly pretty accurate, and I think I'd say that cute horror is the best horror. The same developer is working on a similar game that I hope is at least 75% as good, and having now played this game twice (although really more like three times, what with the failed "no save" playthrough mentioned in my previous post having gotten me like 80% of the way there), I can now safely qualify this game as one of my favorite games of all time - it's stuck with me for years at this point, and I still love it. There's something about all the different little pieces that come together perfectly to make it a really personalized-for-me kind of game. Though I could probably play quality games in this genre (this kind of top-down exploration game with fun characters, world, and story) for probably forever if I had enough of them. If anyone knows of any more, feel free to recommend them to me. Though I've already played SIGNALIS, which was similar-ish and which I also really liked.

It's 1 AM CST right now (~1:12 AM to be specific is when I first noticed a huge lag spike), and this is who is online: It's taking anywhere between 10 and 30 seconds to navigate to each page (and that is not an exaggeration, I have literally been counting as I try to refresh pages). I opened and loaded literally every single one of my bookmarks in the time it took for me to get to the Obsidian forums' front page and then open this thread to be able to post this. There do seem to be quite a number of guest browsers at this particular moment, but I'm not sure if the 449 shown in the image above adequately explain the really terrible performance here (especially at 1 AM). Note also these posts from other forum residents LadyCrimson and Keyrock mentioning recent performance issues:

Holy spoilers, Batman! I was planning on watching this, and you went and just ruined the whole thing. . . . Is what I would say if I had received a frontal lobotomy sometime within the last 24 hours. That's perpetually my experience with modern anime: things that are clearly supposed to come across as being 'cute' to the viewer instead almost always seem some combination of manipulative, wrongheaded, and creepy/uncomfortable to me, which has the effect of taking me out of the whole thing really quick when I can palpably sense that I'm at odds with whatever I'm watching. Though there have always been hacks creating shows/movies while not knowing how or not wanting to put in the work to make something effective (usually instead using cheap shortcuts, or sometimes not even that!), I really feel like sensibilities for what's okay have changed to the point where I cannot cope. I didn't think it was that bad...but I was watching it with my eyes squinted to the point where they were only one planck length open, which may have had something to do with it. Honestly? From all the characters I've seen in your screenshots from this show, she looks the closest to her original design. Maybe seeing her in motion would change my mind, but she doesn't look nearly as weird or creepy as...uh, everyone else. I mean, just look at some of the main cast just one screenshot below this one, they all look like sneople. What an abominable art style, and what's scary is that it's so much better than the first season too! WHAT?! Apparently, this more or less follows the original manga story: she appears and then she is immediately destroyed by the Sailor Starlights. It doesn't really make sense or work on any level, especially once you know that these corrupted Sailor Guardians have been brainwashed and actually are good (which the writers of the Sailor Stars season obviously recognized with how they and their fates were re-written), but that's Naoko's Takeuchi's (self-admitted) terrible writing for you. I suppose I can at least be thankful that she did appear for a page or two in the manga, because that lead to her being much more extensively used in the show. Oh man, I figured we were like at least an hour in at this point. The one you always hated was...Makoto and Ami, wasn't it? So they obliterated those two together and now are feeding into the other two? Ugh. I have seen more convincing planets in space in N64 games. Yeah, as mentioned above. I am a little confused as to whether these corrupt Sailor Guardians are actually supposed to be corrupt/brainwashed in the manga and this show, or whether that was an invention of the original TV show when they tried to flesh these characters out. And honest to god, the show doesn't even flesh them out that much, but the time spent with them doing all the silly episodic hijinks combined with the little bit of additional story about them does wonders for them in comparison to this trash. I guess if you don't read them as being brainwashed, and that they're more just "fallen" (i.e. willing) Sailor Guardians, it makes more sense that they just keep getting killed over and over, but it's still real bad. Gosh, I miss Japanese lady voices from the 70s-90s: these are the same songs, but the voices just suck. You know, the Amazoness Quartet was probably my favorite part of SuperS...not that there was a ton of competition, given the bad writing for the main cast, the awful writing for Nehellenia, the wretched writing for the Amazon Trio, and the disgusting writing for Pegasus and Chibi-Usa. I thought they seemed to be the only part of that season that wasn't completely out of place when compared to the other seasons: they were pretty silly, fun, and overall harmless compared to everything else. I'm sure they were stupid in the manga and Crystal, though. And there it is. Guess I did correctly remember that this was the one you hated. ok.jpeg Sorry, I can't make any promises.

People are saying that the forums' performance has been less than great as of late, with many second page loads randomly occurring when they hadn't in the past. I'm saying that, I am the people.

There's a lot of factors that go into humor, and that can definitely be part of it. But I would say framing also matters a lot, and one of the ways in which framing strongly affects humor is precisely who is telling you the "funny" and in what context. I have a friend that likes to occasionally link me clips from the demon/televangelist known as Kenneth Copeland... ...and in the context of knowing that my friend also thinks he might be a demon, the clips are usually pretty funny. But if I saw the same clips linked by one of his cult members (i.e. charitably, probably a moron...though potentially someone much more insidious than that), it would be a whole different story: you might well be able to apply a similar train of thought to some of the things said/linked to here, though probably for different kinds of reasons in different situations. I also think Alex Jones can be the funniest guy on Earth...sometimes, but I'm certain that I don't find him funny in the same ways that his true believers can, and I would no doubt be an alien in their midst.

Yuppie Psycho. I played through this game once years back and loved it, now I came back to replay it and also to tackle all the achievements. One of the achievements is to play through the whole game without saving even once (howlongtobeat.com says it's an 8-10 hour-ish game, not including the extended alternative/true ending content that's a little tricky to get). I got like 80% of the way through the game and then died during a short (5 second or so) cutscene. I'd pressed a button that revealed a passageway, which the game panned over to show me, but the game didn't actually pause during said pan, and a zombie hyucked acid barf all over me and I died right as it came back to me.

Suzume...Hyoutan Suzume (1959). It's a really great movie...well, maybe it's a great movie, I don't understand Japanese too well and nobody ever bothered to translate it, but yeah, it's probably a great movie. I got the impression that the narrative was some really high brow, deep thought, complex feelings kind of stuff, but it thankfully wasn't too heavy on the piano, so it was nice to see Makoto Shinkai finally branch out a little from his usual fare. I was a little miffed that @Sarex wouldn't recommend something like this to me, but it is rare that we agree on something, so I suppose he probably was just exercising an understandable level of caution. Luckily, there was no need for that here: when you've got such cutting edge art and animation like the above, I don't think you really need anything else anyways, .

The Lair of the White Worm (1988). A very entertaining albeit rather clumsy and confused film. This was a very curious case of the villain being much more interesting and likeable than any of the main characters...initially, and then the Peter Capaldi (yes, Doctor Who) and Hugh Grant characters pull themselves together for some seriously wacky and outrageous hijinks that has the effect of making you like them as well, so in the end, you're okay with pretty much anything that might happen - whether the villain or heroes win, either way is perfectly good. Altered States is a much more well made film than this silly load of nonsense, but on the other hand, I actually liked this one exponentially more (and would rate Altered States as easily my least favorite of the Ken Russell films I've seen). This one didn't fry my brain like The Boy Friend though, so that one's still my favorite of the lot.

I looked both of them up, and I am not convinced either of them are real movies. Are you sure you actually watched them? I think their promotional materials may have been AI-generated. Smashing Time (1967). So exactly what was in the water in the UK during the 1960s, anyway? It's a vaguely Alice in Wonderland-ish tale about two young ladies moving to London to try to become famous and their hijinks together...and then their rivalry against one another when they start to go different directions. It's supposed to be a comedy, but there's such a strange flow to all of it that it doesn't always land as would seem to be intended, but then it comes back around to being funny anyways because of how weird it is. I can understand why it wasn't received well in its day, but I enjoyed it...though I admit a certain bias, because Rita Tushingham as the primary lead is rather delightful, which certainly helps carry the film for me. I like that when I look up UK actresses, they so often have continued to act well into their old age: she has had a career spanning from 1961 to as recent as 2024. Whereas with actresses in Hollywood...the poor dears seem to be pushed out of the industry and forgotten so quickly.

Hey, when you have to take a stand, that's just the way it's gotta be. Probably the only one I'm particularly interested out of those is the Terry Gilliam one anyways. Speaking of the Coen Brothers...Burn After Reading (2008). I'd been linked the ending scene in isolation before, and I figured since that was great and it's a Coen Brothers film, the rest is probably worth watching. But...I kind of feel like I could've gone without seeing the rest of the film. It's a funny enough movie, I suppose, but every major character with the exception of Brad Pitt's puppy dog impression being so utterly revolting the whole way through the film kind of dampered my enjoyment. Funny in of itself just doesn't get very far with me, which is why I hardly ever watch anything primarily labelled as a "comedy". Well, it's no Fargo, that's for sure.

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.