Bartimaeus

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.

The Boy Friend (1971) by Ken Russell. Ken Russell said he made this film...um, "[...] to prove to people I'm not totally deranged; I love the innocence and charm of musicals", but I came away from this becoming certain that he must be. I think it's one of the most fun films I've ever viewed, but I feel I lost my sanity watching it through. I don't know what I was expecting after having seen Altered States and Crimes of Passion, but I certainly wasn't prepared for whatever that was.

I'd definitely be curious to see a demographic and voting breakdown for specifically the Republican primaries...might help understand why polling was so off. Still probably unhelpful for trying to fix forecasts of the general election, though.

Unpacking is pure existential dread and terror, do not play if you're weak of heart.

Polling continues to remain very troublesome (the phenomenon of which became very publicly noticed back in 2016 when Trump was first elected): in the Republican primary, there was widespread systematic error and results outside the margin of error (sometimes as much as 20-30%!) throughout the nation, even when looking at aggregate polling averages. Though unlike in 2016 (where Trump ran ahead of the projected results right up to but just barely inside the margin of error), the bias seems to be in favor of Trump rather than against him like it was back then (i.e. this time around, the polls were projecting that he would win primaries by much better margins than he actually did)...what, if anything, this might mean for the general election, is anyone's guess. It could very well mean absolutely nothing. Polling seems to always be very screwy one way or another when Trump is on the ballot, so this shouldn't really surprise anyone.

There should really be an easy way on their end to just copy-and-paste all the titles of your leftover/unredeemed keys. Thanks as always, ShadySands!

It's a good thing you didn't post about all the other games you've probably received since the last time you updated this thread three years ago - I wasn't necessarily looking forward to looking up approximately 500 different games, . Pretty sure I've played Children of Silentown, but it was on GOG. I remember thinking that it was totally going to be up my alley, but then it was just...you know, alright. It didn't really, uh, hit me like I thought it was going to. I'm not particularly keen on games that I've actually played through but the only thing I remember is that the title sounded familiar before having to look them up to figure out why. When I took a glance at Otxo just now, I was like "I have a friend that seems to always like this kind of game", and so I was very unsurprised to see that it was actually already sitting on their wishlist. If nobody else ever claims it, feel free to send it my way and I'll gift it to them and tell them that it was from you.

The only Obsidian game that I've finished is Neverwinter Nights 2 (and Mask of the Betrayer). The controls and movement in the NWN games are a royal pain in the butt and I never thought the transition from isometric gameplay a la Baldur's Gate really served it well, but I did quite like MotB even so...the base campaign was alright. I put like ten hours into New Vegas and Pillars of Eternity both, didn't really care for either of them - otherwise, I haven't tried anything else. I was vaguely interested in trying Grounded and Tyranny at some point, but I'm pretty bad at playing games these days. Though I registered in like 2008 for some reason that I don't remember, I only became more active here on the Obsidian forums when Pillars of Eternity was kickstarted back in 2012, I'm pretty sure. When Josh Sawyer started releasing the little video diaries that explained various things about how the game design/development was going was unfortunately when I kind of started to check out of the whole Pillars of Eternity experience, which was probably for the best because I ended up really not liking the game pretty much at all once it was released.

The only Dune book I ever read was Sandworms of Dune, which I think is the last one narrative-wise. Inconceivably, I did not get that much out of it.

I thought I read that he had 4 hours of usable footage, but his initial rough cut brought it down to 3 hours, which he submitted to the studio and they were like "this is still too long", so he went back and re-shot some too long/complicated scenes and was able to pare it down to the eventual theatrical cut, which he did approve of. @majestic mentioned "Alan Smithee" directing the film (for anyone who doesn't know, Alan Smithee is the name used by directors not wanting credit for their own film), but that was only the case for the 3 hour TV cut that he didn't have control over. He's rejected Universal's attempts to get him to make a director's cut, and from my own impression of the film, I don't really think there was anything that anyone could've done to save it: there are certainly some cool things in it, but it seemed to be a production that just didn't even nearly satisfactorily come together for various reasons, and no amount of editing or inserting/removing scenes was going to change that. Lynch is kind of the guy known for making things extra long as he feels necessary, so I can't see why in the world he would refuse to make a director's cut if he thought the film could actually be fixed. With regards to hair styles, that doesn't surprise me based on my own experiences of how drastically I perceive change in people's faces when they change their hair.

Sazae-san, episode 1. I did it! I watched an episode of the longest running show in history...well, the longest running scripted (or animated) show in history anyway. There have been at least 8,540 episodes of Sazae-san since it started in 1969...but uh, there is only about one episode that is English-subtitled, so I guess that ends my viewing of Sazae-san. It's basically an every-day family/slice-of-life show focused around the different members of a family, with the titular character, Sazae, being the mom. Shockingly...or probably not, I thought it was pretty good and would happily watch more if I had anymore to watch, but I don't. It was quite charming and surprisingly tight/well edited - the latter of which in my experience is a rarity for 1960s anime shows, even right at the end of the decade. I think the funniest part was during the final segment when the grandfather was on his "deathbed" (not really, he just wasn't feeling well after a pretty rough day) with all the womenfolk doddering over him at home, and Sazae started to look up his symptoms in a medical book...and promptly reached the conclusion that he must have cancer, sending everyone into a panic. I wasn't expecting the old "look your symptoms up online and WebMD will for sure tell you that you have cancer" to be a meme all the way back in 1969, but it seems the more things change, the more things stay the same. Fun fact: the original voice actress for the main character has stayed the same since 1969, which means she's been voicing the character for 55 years now, and she is now...84 years old. Talk about a job to last you a lifetime. "Although the series is now long-running, Katō would later recall in 2009 that she initially thought it would last only three months." Whoops.

It's especially noticeable whenever you see him from the side - the guy looks like he had to be the inspiration for the Crimson Chin. Features that go just a little too far beyond normal proportions seems to usually have the effect of freaking my brain out...see also Julia Roberts and her very frightening mouth/smile. Her jaw is going to unhinge and she's going to chomp my poor little head off in one bite. I have been told that my fear of Julia Roberts is irrational and not based in reality, but I still dread the snake people among us...

Dune... . . . . . . . . . ...(1984), by David Lynch. What a weird, clunky, messy film. It's like David Lynch couldn't make the narrative Lynchian enough, so he decided to Lynch it up in other ways. But it was vaguely entertaining somehow (sometimes in unintentional ways...), so I guess you could do worse than watch this nonsense. I assume it's probably for the best that I'm pretty much not at all familiar with the Dune books - while some of the sets certainly look cool enough, I can't think the film quite captures the spirit of whatever the heck the books were supposed to be about. Kyle MacLachlan has the most unsightly chin - a chin I daresay made for a villain of some nature, and certainly not a messiah.

Power lines ignited the largest wildfire in Texas history and one nearby, officials say This will, uh, 'please' @PK htiw klaw eriF.

A co-worker from a different department brought her laptop that wouldn't charge its battery anymore to a local PC repair shop, and they went and changed its operating system from Windows 10 to Windows 11 without asking her, and it FUBAR-ed her operating system, e.g. wi-fi doesn't work anymore, browser crashes upon opening every time, start menu doesn't open at all, random blue screens, etc. They didn't bother to test anything before handing it back to her, and they didn't fix the charging issue anyways. She tried a system repair, the ol' always-recommended-yet-always-pointless SFC repair, not doing it. She also just, like, didn't want Windows 11. I think she can maybe do a complete rollback to Windows 10, if she can figure out how - not something I've ever personally done myself, to be honest. Could maybe also try uninstalling her old system drivers and re-installing versions for Windows 11 to see if that fixes the worst problems, but it sounded like the issues were too severe and widespread for it to be worth the bother. I'd be pretty apoplectic if somebody ever tried to pull a stunt like this on me...but uh, I guess that's why I handle my own affairs: if something ever goes wrong, I can only blame myself, .

Void Stranger. I got a couple of hours into this puzzle game and was like "whew, that sure was a lot of puzzles...just how long is this game, anyways?". Oh, just somewhere between 20 and 65 hours - you know, depending on just how much you hate yourself and really want to see all the story bits hidden behind having to do everything absolutely perfectly. No, I don't think I will.

I don't know, I've played at least a handful of Switch games; that's better than the exactly zero from both the PS5 and whatever the name of the current Xbox is. So you tell me, I guess. On what other game console am I going to hear Princess Daisy scream "WOWIE-ZOWIE!" over and over, anyways?

Did I really write "paided" in my previous post? Good lord.

I'd be more sad about it if there hadn't already been a competing Nintendo Switch emulator, Ryujinx, that was doing alright itself. They haven't been doing all the stupid pre-release/leak stuff, they don't have official instructions for how to circumvent the Switch's cryptography and DRM, their Patreon doesn't sell/gate features behind payment, and they don't run an official Discord that is basically in a constant state of "WHAT GAMES ARE WE GOING TO PIRATE NEXT?" like Yuzu did. I think emulation and preservation of the Nintendo Switch will be just fine. Now Nintendo 3DS emulation, where the only emulator (Citra) was made by the Yuzu team which also got taken down as a result of this lawsuit...well, the emulator was not being updated very much anymore and it was more or less feature-complete, I'm sure someone will host the latest version somewhere. As to why Yuzu was doing all that stuff...complacency and dollar signs is my guess. A small dev team was getting paided $30-40k a month, and they'd gotten away with every potentially legally problematic thing they'd done before, so what's one more? Whoops.