Bartimaeus

The Boy and the Heron (2023). Uh... Hmm. The initial setup and pacing of the film really stink: it doesn't feel like the film starts until literally the 45 minute mark, and after that, the characters, writing, and direction are all still just...kind of aggravating. I'm very much reminded of a very slow and messy Spirited Away, which was already incredibly inexplicable and messy in of itself...but this is much more meandering and with way less appealing music and characters. Deep and meaningful themes unfortunately don't mean squat if I wasn't able to enjoy the journey meant to relate and explore them. I hope Miyazaki at least found meaning in making it. To be frank, I expected to dislike this movie at the outset, ever since I read the most basic details revealed about it, so I guess I shouldn't be surprised...but somehow, I liked it even less than Ponyo. Man, I wish Isao Takahata were still alive.

While the healthcare cuts are terrible and will cause many critical access (read: rural) hospitals and clinics to close (hopefully leading to as many completely unnecessary MAGA deaths as possible, though we regretfully know that there will be many affected who are anything but MAGA), I think the actual worst part of this bill is that it will increase ICE's funding by many times its current, and they're expecting to roughly triple its current workforce. Trump's secret police will be better funded than most countries' militaries, and I can't imagine there's anything else he wants more than his own private army that personally supports him and only him with the bill mostly footed by the taxpayers of all the states that he'll be unleashing them upon.

Jimmy Swaggart My mom's dad was a pastor involved with a lot of the scumbags like Swaggart and Copeland early on into their ministries/proto-televangelist careers. Swaggart probably isn't as evil as Copeland is, but I can't say I'm terribly sorry to see him go, little good it does now.

Bucks straight up waive Damian Lillard, let Brook Lopez walk, and then acquire Myles Turner. They're doing literally just about anything to keep Giannis, but most everything they've tried the past few years has turned out to be a disaster in retrospect. The East will be very crippled with star injuries next year, and I guess the Bucks see it as an opportunity with Giannis.

I got a hankering to roll up a sorceress in Diablo 2, and I saw that Diablo 2 Resurrected was coincidentally on sale for $13, so I decided to buy it. I decided to buy it, but it doesn't seem like my decision was meant to be, for every which way I attempt to purchase it from Blizzard - be it in the Battle.net game launcher, Firefox, Chrome, both PayPal and card - Blizzard refuses to accept my money, and I just get stuck in an error 500 loop. I don't quite understand: I suppose it must be the universe telling me not to spend $13 on an ancient game I already bought a few times 20 years ago.

A handful of episodes of 1970s' Laverne & Shirley. It's...charmingly amusing. I've heard that it gets terrible after the setting changes from Milwaukee to Los Angeles in the last few seasons, but I probably won't make it that far. For a show that was #1 on TV for a few years in the late 1970s, it's never had any blu-ray releases and is only available to stream in SD on something called Pluto TV.

As someone who has watched a handful of James Bond films spread a number of decades and came away disliking or hating them all, I'm personally very happy to see this pairing - so long as nobody tries to convince me to watch the resulting garbage. Confining Dennis' talents to James Bond seems a small mercy on the part of the universe, honestly.

All in the East, too. At least the Lillard experiment for the Bucks has already proven to not really work on the whole anyways, so I don't think it much moves the needle there. The Pacers and the Celtics, on the other hand...

Oh yeah, I watched an episode of that a while back and it made me want to die. This trailer...only confirmed that feeling.

I'll miss the old Rareware character designs, but I think my biggest issue is that the game just looks like Super Mario Odyssey, but Donkey Kong-ized. As a Super Mario Odyssey hater, this does not make me happy. Guide me, o' Lucifer, to some new road... Also, I lied, I just looked again and I think I like her "touring" skateboarding/rollerblading outfit the best out of all the new ones. That one seems the most Princess Daisy to me. It's like a better and more detailed version of some of her old soccer designs, and the little hair ribbon is cute...unlike the silly French beret or baseball caps. The swimwear outfit...if someone had explained to me in words its design, I probably would've thought that I'd have liked it, but for some reason, it just doesn't look great to me.

That's five minutes I can't play as Princess Daisy. What am I going to do in the meantime, play as Baby Daisy? My God.

MSRP is $450 ($500 for the Mario Kart World bundle), which everyone got mad about as being about $50 too high. Then the whole tariffs business started, and Nintendo retracted their MSRP and waited for the dust to settle...then tariffs were taken back(-ish), and Nintendo re-announced that $450 would indeed be the MSRP and everyone was like "phew, okay, that's so much better than what it was looking like", but then the initial stock was immediately sold out and now all we have are scalper prices, which are generally between $650-800. Depending on how the whole tariff situation ends up ultimately working out, it might actually get way worse. Anyways, I'm not familiar with WalMart or how their online store works, but I was looking at the shipping details and it says it's being shipped by a third party seller called "Sunrise Mail", so that's not WalMart's own price...and indeed, pricing aggregators seem to register the WalMart page as actually being "out of stock", with the listed price as being $500 instead. I don't think any of this much matters yet, since there ain't any games, not unless you count Mario Kart World as one, which I don't. Haven't ever enjoyed Mario Kart, and an open world version of it makes it exponentially less appealing to me, . All these cruddy open world games, I tells ya - at least it's a franchise I don't care about at all this time. You can't even start off the game as Princess Daisy, you have to unlock her in one of the cups. What an absolute outrage.

It's funny how the fall of cable and the rise of streaming services have actually made many more niche shows way more inaccessible than they used to be.

One thing I know that should stir up Guard Dog's heart and finally break through his paradoxically pathetic yet practically impervious shell of "both sides are the same"...the assassin even shot and killed the dog, a darling golden retriever. Find me any evidence of anyone but right-wing scum, be it this creep or cops or ghoulish governors of South Dakota, deliberately going out of their way to kill dogs in this day and age. Even their king hates dogs: doesn't that tell you both sides are, in fact, not the same?

Cool, Democratic reps and senators in Minnesota are getting assassinated now.

I'm not sure about either of those guys, but she was great and everything she said seemed to make sense.

It's been 30 years since a 4th seed or lower has won a championship ('95 Rockets, 6th seed). Actually, there have been just two non-1/2/3-seeded teams winning an NBA Finals, with the other being the #4-seeded 1969 Celtics. #1 seeds have won the NBA Finals 67% of the time, #2 seeds have won 21%, and #3 seeds 10%. I've been rooting for Indiana since they eliminated the Bucks, maybe it'll happen. They seem to out-stamina every team they face, which is kind of hilarious but seems to work.

Biden has had a noted speech impediment his whole life, but he did start to slur and say the wrong words more, and just seemed altogether slower. Trump in 2016 had already been pretty demented, and it's only gotten worse since then, but not all dementia manifests the same. Some get really slow, some say the wrong words or can't construct coherent sentences with proper structure, some pause or slur, some get confused and angry because of their diminished abilities (mental and/or physical), some lose their filters, some momentarily zone out and aren't aware of their lapses (...or are, which in of itself can feel pretty frightening to them), some lose their memories of their lives and people they know... Anyone who's watched any interviews of him speak at length in the 80s or 90s should immediately notice how present Trump constantly gets enraged at nothing and word salads his way through just about everything he tries to say: he is not even remotely as sharp or well-spoken as he used to be. Just because he still speaks confidently and aggressively doesn't mean he's not completely out of his mind: there are plenty of nursing home patients who do the same, but we don't make them President of the United States...usually.

Support the Girls (2018). I don't really understand the poster calling it a comedy, it's not very funny and really doesn't seem to trying to be. It was essentially "day from hell in the life of a Hooters manager", but without getting overly exaggerated or involved with any larger than life plot. I enjoyed it, but it was very stressful.

Amazon's The Wheel of Time has been cancelled after its third season.

Cabaret (1972). I liked it a lot! I was not surprised to read that the starring actress (Liza Minnelli) had been advised to play the lead role and subsequently researched and modeled her mannerisms after Louise Brooks. It's the kind of performance I wish Louise Brooks had been afforded the opportunity to play in a talkie. The musical numbers were really something else.

rip bozo. Bit of a fart of a game 7, at least after the first quarter. Honestly, these post-championship Nuggets are starting to seem similar to the post-championship Bucks...still a good team, but starting to age and get injured too much with there being no bench because of having to pay everyone, and all the guys you paid besides your superstar not really consistently performing up to the level they should be. I personally don't think Jokic or Giannis will ever be able to have a team around them that will get them into the Michael Jordan / Kareem / LeBron stratosphere - they'll always be at least a rung or two below, with the two of them both probably sitting somewhere in the top 10 to top 25 of all-time when they're done, especially what with the recent changes to the salary cap to make it more punishing to over-spending teams. And make no mistake, winning both championships and MVPs almost always requires a great-performing team around you (though Jokic did already receive an MVP in 2021 that went against this historical requirement due to there not being a great candidate in the top seeds that season - hence the "almost always"): SGA will win this season's MVP because of having a better team and more wins as a result. Flip their records, and Jokic would be winning his fourth.

I actually watched the whole first season of that show. I believe I mildly liked exactly one episode and disliked or hated the rest, though looking at the list of episodes, I don't remember which one exactly I liked...but I do remember the ones I hated.

I don't want to look at real people unless I really have to. Then again, I don't want to look at current anime unless I have to, either. Anyways, it satisfied my yearly quota for assessing the state of anime.

This one is strange, because this user's first five posts pretty clearly do not sound like they're spam or were AI-generated...but they were ten years ago all within about 24 hours, and they were also posted in threads that were current at the time. Their last two posts, one in late 2024 and this one here, are written completely differently (i.e. like generic AI slop, with this latest one even containing what seems to be a spam link) and were posted in inactive threads. I suppose it might be a hijacked account....but what I am most curious about is why, given that this user had not posted for eight years at the time, did both Gorth and Amentep visit this user's profile back on August 24th and 25th (respectively) in 2023?