Bartimaeus

I will almost definitely never go to a theater in my lifetime ever again - not being able to pause, having to deal with other people both in and out of the actual movie-watching experience, the seating situation, the whole food scam - everything, really. The only exception I can think of is if it were limited re-showing of something old or less popular that I love at a smaller theatre that I genuinely wanted to have a theatre experience for. 12 Monkeys, Monty Python and the Holy Grail, Perfect Blue, The Thing...I could see myself going for those and some of my other favorite movies. Something I haven't already seen before? Nope.

...In all fairness, I hadn't gone to the theatres for anything for years even before the pandemic, and I'm certainly not going to now. And I'm probably not even going to watch Dune, not unless it really gets rave reviews anyways. I've only read a few Dune books, so I'm not exactly a superfan of it.

...Was my 5.5/10 for the show perhaps too generous?

Lmao, I had literally just come back to edit in "besides brain-rotted LotR fans, that is". Not that there's anything wrong with the original trilogy by any means, but it is danged long and you'd be completely mad to sit through all of it in one sitting. Also, the theatrical versions of The Two Towers and The Return of the King are better than the extended editions anyways.

"'Let’s watch the four-to-five-hour movie like a TV show,' Momoa said." ...If you actually release it as a TV show, then sure. Who wants to sit down and watch a movie for 6 hours straight, though?

Unrelated: Yeah, sorry, but I think your nephew should be considered a total loss at this point. Ah well. You've done more than me. The only thing I've ever had is an accidental sip of wine a handful of years back, which I sadly ingested a small amount of before I realized what it was. I've had a pretty hard-line anti-drug* stance since...forever, I guess, owing back to my lovely family history, . *On a personal level - others are of course free to do as they please (and I'm pro-marijuana legalization, of course)...though I cannot/will not tolerate the ghastly smell of alcohol. Yeah. Thanks, though - I'm probably just gonna get dementia in my 40s, no biggie.

Huh, forum ate my post that I (thought I) posted like half an hour ago...luckily, it saved a draft copy. Medical yes, recreational no. But it probably doesn't matter, because I don't historically do well with anything even slightly psychoactive (...really, even taking like just a melatonin makes me a bit out of my mind...and also very much unable to sleep), and my family has a history of paranoid schizophrenic episodes from marijuana, so it's probably sadly not a good idea. Well, actually, we have a history of schizophrenia in general, but marijuana induces symptoms in even the people that don't normally exhibit them, . Spirit isn't that bad... Of course, I've only seen (a lot of) it from watching it with my nieces and it's surely very superior to most other children's trash, . Definitely a very girly show, though... Them colors and backgrounds. Looks effective...at least at a glance.

Devilman: The Birth. Everyone looking ever so slightly little different from how I remember them: Lot of similarities to Devilman Crybaby...but a whole lot of differences too, including story and even these main characters. It's still pretty nuts, but a bit slower and more digestible (...and a more stripped-down, just-the-essentials story)...but it is also a lot more my speed. Here are the first few minutes of the film in HD if you want to watch it, : https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/s/kjqvcaa942xfa5p/u1I9kKxqt1.mp4 Little bit different-looking...little bit.

I was kinda hoping the second one TBH for extra weirdness, but I guess not. ...I'm not a hundred percent sure that's it, but sure, let's go with that! No, that's the scary bit: the series of clips you sent I thought were pretty funny (even if also facepalmingly cringey), so if I actually got to know and like the characters, I could really be in trouble. That would be unacceptable, for many reasons, . The only necessary response to them:

It's a shame that if I ever try K-On, I won't ever be able to tell anyone. There are some things that no-one else simply should ever know about, RIP. (e): Also tried somewhere between 2 and 10 minutes of Steam Boy (2004), Summer Wars (2009), Brothers Grimm: The Golden Bird (1987), The Boy and the Beast (2015), Sword of the Stranger (2007), Colorful (2010) each, but all of them were more or less instant rejects for various reasons. I don't know what y'all can do with this information particularly given how finicky I am, so I guess I'm just throwing it out there, . Basically just trying to clear out some random garbage I glanced at for like two seconds...once in a while I get a solid or even good one (Crusher Joe, Vampire Hunter D, Your Name I guess, ...), but most of the time I sadly seem to get something either mediocre, simply unappealing, or worse, . P.S. I have not been able to sleep for more than four hours on any given night in over two weeks, my brain feels like a scrambled egg, please send help.

Besides watching only two minutes of it before going "ight imma head out"? Nothing, I guess, .

Genius Party (2007). A collection of six different shorts: it mostly sucked and so I mostly skipped through all of it. The very first one was the only one semi-worth watching. It seems to officially be garbage day. Anything else terrible I should get out of the way now, guys?

Dead Leaves (2004). A guy with a TV for a head and a lady named Pandy wake up one day with no clothes and no recollection of whom they are, and decide to immediately go rob a place for money and guns and go on a wild police chase. They are then caught and sent to a prison facility called "Dead Leaves" on the moon. That's all I can say because that's as far as I got before I asked myself "is this going to become any less dumb?" and read the plot summary for the movie and immediately concluded "no, no it's not" and turned it off. Sort of neat animation style though, I guess: ...But brainless action stuff is just never for me. Into the trash it goes.

That really was terrible.

Following Vampire Hunter D (1983 1985) yesterday, we have Venus Wars (1989) today. Two colonies on Venus fighting for control of the planet, with our group of older teenagers/young adults being caught in between it all as their city is invaded and they have to decide what they want to do - hide, escape, or fight. I thought this reporter lady that came from off-planet was going to be our protagonist because it sure seemed that way for like the first fifteen minutes or so, but in retrospect, I don't think you can generally have a protagonist gleefully exclaim at the prospect of "total war"... ...while having their eyes light up like this and rightfully expect them to be the protagonist, but I sure was excited at the idea. No, instead, our protagonist is this stupid little prick: He's about as dumb and shooting-self-in-the-foot as you might expect. I'll never understand why young male protagonists have to be so consistently painful...and he's constantly antagonizing everybody else for no good reason, including his girlfriend, and I just...I don't get it, I really don't. To be fair to this movie, it's still pretty decent overall (leagues above something like Iczer One, for example) and it takes turns at focusing on different characters, but every scene involving him I was just praying that someone would blow his brains out or run him over or something. Anyways, if you want an 80s scifi-adventure-war movie with an absolute boatload of well-animated action, you could do a whole lot worse than Venus Wars. Not quite as good as the Crusher Joe stuff (helps that those characters are all good and pretty likeable), but still pretty solid. @Utena: Yeah, all the characters kind of suck (besides the shadowplay girls...and sort of Nanami for being loathsomely terrible but also an absolute lovable meme legend) and it makes it about impossible to enjoy when nothing particularly good ever really happens either, .

More or less the same - I beat BG2 a few years later (turns out BG1 was a little too hard at that age, big surprise) which was long before I ever beat BG1 (suffice to say, that bard chracter was not a success).

@LadyCrimson Beware that if a game has one of your excluded tags up to the fifteenth highest tag, it will be excluded. Even though I hate all of the following genres*... ...I still rarely have cases of games that get excluded that really shouldn't be because one of these tags is like the 13th or 14th ranked tag for a game that has it has a very minor element. Up to the tenth top tag is probably what I personally would set the system to... I had other excluded tags originally that I thought were good choices for myself, but they ended up being so disruptive that I ended up removing them, and decided to just go with an approach of basic genre tags that I literally will not ever play. *Well, besides maybe top-down shooter, but it's not a genre I particularly enjoy either and there are a billion top-down shooters that clog up Steam for no good reason, .

Not going to lie, I've felt a yearning to re-watch season 1...but for the time being, I must press forward with NEW things, so the backlog doesn't exponentially grow! ...The least I can do is finish the rest of Sakura first, . Ah, location scouting... Someone should've gone to animation school instead of film school, methinks, . Thankfully, a quick reverse image search reveals better versions of that Minako poster. And hey, speaking of older animation being better animation... Vampire Hunter D (1985).

Speedruns: Knowing that I'm going to delete the save file immediately after would make it no issue for me, . Tomoyo: I was going through my dropbox recently and discovered a few Sailor Moon gifs I had made way back when I first watched the first season. Really shoulda made more of these...and some from Sakura. Whoops, . ...The only one I have of Minako is of her crying. Double whoops! I'm just imagining Mike and Jay endlessly repeating "how embarrassing" right now, .

It's not the characters they depict I have so much an issue with, more purely the art style. I prefer something a little more...conceptual like IWD, I suppose, rather than a bunch of too realistic yet very silly-looking goofballs looking like they they're all playing dress-up/theater, which is what I see in the BG1 portraits, . But knowing that they're literally supposed to be basically just that (fantasized versions of the developers) helps me forgive it somewhat, . And of course, BG1's are way superior to the BG2 ones. One look at, say...Jaheira's face in BG1 compared to the absolute dumbfoundingly terrible direction they went for her in BG2 (or Viconia, or Anomen, or Aerie, or Edwin, or...) is enough to cement that.

My very first character in BG1 when I was literally about 6 years old was a bard. This was the portrait 6-year-old me selected: It was the first time, and the last time, that I ever played a bard. Ye' gods the BG1 portraits are...not very good (and yet, the BG2 portraits are even worse - IIRC, the BG1 portraits were actually predominantly designed after the developers and their friends and families, and I think it shows in the range of faces and the weird expressions, and so I actually appreciate that on some level even if the actual art style is still not quite to my taste - meanwhile, the BG2 portraits look like they were predominantly designed off of hilariously terrible-looking models looking as stupid as humanly possible).

I think Netflix sadly only goes up to 1.5x speed - not quite the same as mostly switching between 2x and 3x (and occasionally dipping down to 1x) like I was doing, . To be honest, I've employed the speed-up strategy in the past enough times that I have a certain tolerance at this point for everything being chipmunk-ified and basically turning a show into a speed-reading endurance test - trying to follow the dialogue while also trying to figure out what's happening in a scene and the story overall is an interesting and somewhat engaging mental challenge in of itself...but one I usually only reserve for shows that aren't really working for me to begin with, . And hey, it mostly worked...I ended up sort of being okay with the main characters that weren't Ryou (which is funnyc because he was the one character I sort of liked early on after I read your spoiler, but the whole "I am literally (spoiler)" was significantly less interesting and way more dumb in actual implementation than I expected it to be, so RIP him). A very small sense of dignity, perhaps? Plus I have other things I want to get to first! (e): Uh, the forum turned me manually writing "spoiler" (I must've put it in brackets?) into an actual spoiler and broke the second half of my post...but I fixed it now. Very cool. I still miss BBCode mode.