Bartimaeus

Laputa: Castle in the Sky (1986). It definitely improved from being in Japanese over the English dub, but it wasn't nearly as strong of an improvement as which Porco Rosso experienced. I think I'm just not the biggest fan of this story (which is basically the same story as both Nadia: The Secret of Blue Water as well as Future Boy Conan) or the characters (also a lot of similarities to both of the aforementioned shows as well). There's a certain scene that makes my skin crawl in this film, which I think is intended to be humorous but which I do not find to be. But while I think Castle in the Sky is not quite totally my thing and has some unnecessary issues that take away from my enjoyment of it, I still think it's a fundamentally good children's adventure film. Princess Mononoke rates as "it's just about the best a film could possibly be except for the fact that I don't like it basically at all" for me, so Laputa obviously places above it. But the gap between Princess Mononoke, my second least favorite Miyazaki film, and Ponyo on the Cliff by the Sea, my actual least favorite Miyazaki film, is quite vast. I've watched Ponyo twice, once by myself and once with small children, and I had a very bad time during both watches. I'm curious to see if I like The Boy and the Heron: from the little I've glimpsed of it, I am guessing it'll probably be another Princess Mononoke or thereabouts for me.

gdgd Fairies (2011). This is the ugliest, cheapest, dumbest piece of crap CGI anime comedy series ever produced. The show format is basically these three fairies just sit at a table for most of the episode having these off the walls silly conversations about nothing much (e.g. "what're the little things in life that make you happy?"), then there's some kind of ridiculous sketch involving magic powers (e.g. "let's summon pets you wouldn't want!"), and then the episode ends with the "the animators have made some kind of random wacky CG scene not related to the show at all (usually with overweight and/or nearly naked men doing something silly), and now we want each of you ladies to do your own unscripted voice-acting like something from Whose Line Is It Anyway over it" segment. It's as lazy as it sounds, except that it's actually pretty hilarious and quite charming, and the three voice actresses for the fairies clearly had a lot of fun goofing off with it, especially during the unscripted parts. Also, the awful N64-quality art/animation is somehow a point in its favor rather than an active detriment. I don't know, it's just one of those weird things that somehow works. Now if you'll excuse me, I'm going to go check myself into the nearest loony bin, as I've clearly lost my mind for enjoying this. Please don't acknowledge or respond to this post, I'll be long gone into the insane asylum by the time you read this.

While Gromnir has a point about Roald Dahl's original material, I think Tim Burton's Charlie and the Chocolate Factory is just one of those cases where the film simply rubs a lot of people the wrong way for a vast multitude of reasons, both little and big throughout the film, that it makes whatever good ideas that were put into it pretty much unsalvagable for a lot of people, especially those who are big fans of 1971 Mel Stuart adaptation, such as myself. Wonka (2023). Speaking of, it bears little to no relation to the 1971 film in any meaningful way, so banish that from your mind if you're going to try it: this basically serves as a kind of origin/prequel story, how Willy Wonka came to be. I didn't want to peel either my ears or eyes out while watching it, unlike by the time I got ten minutes into the 2022 Matilda musical remake where I very much did want to do both and so I had to stop watching, so it can't be all that bad. Though I wouldn't say it's all that good either, just a fairly trite but serviceable and inoffensive family film. It's not cinema that I suspect will leave much of a lasting impression on anyone, especially if you're not really big into Broadway-styled musical films/performances, but that's just kind of the state of "family movies" decided by committee and produced off on an assembly line these days, so that's not exactly a surprise. All in all, I guess it could've been a lot worse, but don't go in expecting anything similar in either style or substance to the 1971 film, or you'll certainly have a very bad time.

I was enjoying it up until like ten minutes in, and then he spent like a solid five minutes straight talking about the length of a ship and shuttle bay, and I was like "wait a second, oh gosh, is he actually doing the Star Wars idiot fan boy thing where they spend hours analyzing inane technical details that were just arbitrarily made up by the filmmakers, as if they're actually important?". Then I skipped ahead to a random part about pod racing and he was talking at length about aerodynamics and that's when I closed the video. I'm sure there's some decent structure/character/motivations/plot commentary in between the technical stuff that doesn't matter an iota...but he had me, and then he lost me.

Doc Rivers, after going 1-2 with the Milwaukee Bucks so far, is the All-Star coach for the Eastern Conference. Life is a joke.

I've watched Arrival, Blade Runner 2049, and Sicario, and I feel like they've all had the same kinds of issues from front to back. "Bland", "emotionless", and "mechanical" are all great words to describe what I've seen; there's a lot of good stuff in his films as well, but...they're just not doing it for me on the whole because of those issues. They used to make movies!

For me, it's an underrated aspect of cinema-making that feels like it's largely gone by the wayside: scenes and environments that look like they make sense and seem casually lived in, with people actually transversing and occupying them. When you see the girl living in her bubble room and it's just...a completely empty room, my brain goes "ehh...what is that, are there more rooms in the back that we can't see, how could she possibly live in there?". Immediately preceding entering this building, Agent K had to survive hordes of armed bandits harpooning and bringing down his flying vehicle so they can presumably steal and salvage it, but I guess they've just let this completely undefended techno-paradise devoted to exactly one girl be untouched? Neither of these are ultimately important details (nor a host of other little things nagging at my brain), but they're details that don't feel like they had enough attention paid to them in a film whose environments are all very deliberately planned as well as quite expensive to put together (...one way or another). I don't know. When I watch the original Blade Runner, I feel like I get a solid grasp for how tragically real the world is or at least could be, the kind of lives people have to live in order to make it given the circumstances they helplessly find themselves in - with characters who make impressions both quick and slow upon you over the course of the film in order to really lend weight to the illusion. With this film, it's just smoke and mirrors from the start until end, it feels like we're only ever shown exactly what we need to see to make the film make sense and maybe occasionally wow us with some pretty visuals, but the environments don't feel very cohesive or as if they fully connect to each other (especially because we basically never see anyone travel from one area to another...Agent K never walks or drives anywhere - even in the flying vehicle scenes, we always just hard cut from one scene to a character already being where they need to be right as they're about to land, while Luv seems to just get to wherever she wants to go like magic), and it doesn't capture the essence of what I look for when you're trying to take me to a different place and time distinct from my own, and I feel like that's a really important thing for a film like this, especially when most of your main characters are very stoic and flat. No, I didn't see the in-between shorts.

My rule whenever I started an SL1 character was that if I died and then died again before I recovered my souls, the game was over and I had to delete that character. Why? I don't know: as an SL1 character, you don't need souls. Principle of the matter, I suppose.

Blade Runner 2049 (2017). I had a pretty tough go with this film the first time around years ago, but I liked it a bit more this second watch. It's still too long, too sterile, too Villeneuve, but as far as kind of unnecessary sequels go, I guess it got the job done alright. I shouldn't re-watch movies I didn't like the first time, because sometimes I have to re-evaluate what I previously thought and experienced, and then sometimes I have to take back the nasty things I said about them. I don't like that. Nasty things should stay true forever.

I feel bad that I have to watch a Doc Rivers-coached basketball team. Sorry, did you say something? Yeah, I kind of just wish there were less games in a season. That probably sounds silly, but I think it's stupid that B2Bs exist, and less games overall would mean they individually mean more. But within the reality that we live in...uh, I think the media voters should've already just recognized that between two guys with close-ish level of play, the guy that played 15-20 more games should obviously win the awards, but for some reason, that needed to be legislated? IDK, seems weird.

Hoping the laws will catch up one day. Being able to sell this garbage that's generated off the backs of other people's work is a joke.

Roujin Z (1991). I put this on my list years ago so when I opened it up yesterday I had zero clue what it was about. Written but not directed by Katsuhiro Otomo of Akira fame, which, of course, I also did not know until after watching it. It's a film that has some big ideas but tells them in a rather small, cute, and silly manner, which is basically the opposite of how Akira tried to do it. The film opens up with our main character, Haruko, a strong-willed trainee nurse kindly trying to take care of one of her patients, an elderly and almost completely comatose little old man who lost his very dear wife years ago. The poor guy is 'volunteered' by his remaining relatives that evidently doesn't want to take care of him to be the test subject of a new automated system that will severely reduce the need for family, nurses, and other caretakers to be constantly attending to him and others like him...you know, eliminate whatever small human element they receive in their advanced age. After all, it's expensive and there just aren't enough people to do it anyways. Things do not go quite as planned. Apparently, this film was kind of considered to be the black sheep of Otomo's early career, as it awkwardly fits between Akira and Memories and is relatively unknown even today. While I love his and Satoshi Kon's collaboration in Memories' Magnetic Rose more, I did like this way a lot more than Akira and it was a very enjoyable watch. If I had one strong criticism that was a very noticeable distraction, it's that the sound engineer was clearly asleep at the wheel, as there are all sorts of obviously missing sound effects and bad audio mixing...that, or the blu-ray audio got really funked up. Not sure.

One moment, I have to go look up benchmarks for my GPU to see how it compares to the "trashy" RX 6500. . . . Phew, okay, I guess I'm doing alright. Yeah, as the review points out, the CPU itself is obviously much better than the i3-12100F, but...modern gaming requires a GPU, and the iGPU just isn't good enough to make the product make sense outside of maybe specialized power/battery/size-limited scenarios. If it's a gaming chip, then having a really good CPU and a bad iGPU just isn't a great pairing.

The Silver Pendant that you can find in Oolacile provides complete protection against dark magic, including Manus' spells. Though using it is a little weird, as it's an (unlimited use) activated item - you just spam it whenever somebody's casting dark magic at you and it all just bounces off harmlessly. Makes that part of Manus' moveset pretty trivial. The four bosses in Artorias of the Abyss are all pretty stupendous in terms of design. When I went through it on NG7 at SL1, I realized how tight, punishing, but fair all of them were...with the single exception of a rarely occurring bug(?) with Kalameet where he would use his leap-forward-turn-around-and-breath-fire attack when you're at point blank range. His entire body instantly turns into a giant hitbox that you can't avoid if you're in melee range, so I'm pretty sure it wasn't intended that he would use it while in melee range and I can't ever say I've seen FromSoftware design something like that anywhere else (and I only discovered it because fighting Kalameet at SL1 on NG7 is quite a lengthy battle where you would naturally be more likely to experience any AI behavioral issues that there might be, especially with repeated attempts), but besides that, a really fantastic group of bosses, probably the best little slice of Souls content FromSoftware has ever put out.

I feel like I've seen that NFCCG collapse somewhere else before . . .

I swear they're waiting until Bloodborne is emulatable before they decide they ought to start developing their "remaster" of it. Felt like that's what happened with Demon's Souls: playable on emulator in 2017, and then Sony set Bluepoint Games to start development of the crappy remaster in 2018. That, or maybe the rumor about Sony and FromSoftware having completely lost the source code for Bloodborne is true. Thing is, I don't really care if they re-release it on console again, as I'd just run into the same problem that happened when it was a PS3 exclusive...I'll keep my PC around in some form or another for forever, but certainly not these crapbox consoles.

The Blue Sky Maiden (1957). I waited just a little under three years to watch this. Japanese cinema continues to be an impenetrable enigma to me, but I guess it was okay - a kind of coming of age story about a young woman from a small town trying to find her lost birth mother while being looked down upon by her relatives in Tokyo. Tetsuo the Iron Man (1989). This is the type of film where you watch the whole thing, you go to read the plot summary on Wikipedia to try to figure out what happened, but then Wikipedia says all they've got is some notes from the director because only he would ever be able to really know what it's about. So I didn't understand it one bit, but it was probably one of the funniest films I've ever seen while also having a great industrial soundtrack and incredibly unique visuals...and if I had exactly one film to recommend to @PK htiw klaw eriF for the rest of my life, it'd have to be this one. No way you're ever getting more Kaine Parker than Tetsuo the Iron Man. Plus, it's only an hour long.

Thank goodness for digitization: a single $200 14 TB hard drive can fit about 350 full blu-ray dumps (or about 1800 DVDs...and the numbers get even better if you don't have to keep the full disc dumps). Honestly, who has the time, space, or desire to manage all that except in a virtual environment? That path lies to madness.

Neo Ranga (1998). I got through like seven episodes, but it's so confusing and everything feels so inexplicable/poorly explained that all I know is that, one, it's very clearly a Neon Genesis Evangelion rip-off, and two, nobody has ever seen it. I cannot really make heads or tails of what it's trying to accomplish, except that it's obviously trying to cash in on the general style and mannerisms of Neon Genesis Evangelion...just, uh, without necessarily doing it all that well. Well, the art and animation are nice enough, the character writing seems alright, scenes in a vacuum are well-made...but as to the overall story and how it flows as a whole, I really just am not getting it even after so many episodes. Long and short of what I know is that the brother of three sisters (pictured above) went missing a decade earlier, said brother somehow became a king of some island in the Pacific, he suddenly passed away, and then a mecha-god awakens from the island and invades Japan in order...to follow them around and basically be their guardian angel, causing massive disruptions to the central and local governments as it just levels entire buildings by accident? You know, now that I say all that out-loud, it sure sounds pretty stupid. The show is 48 episodes long, so I'm sure the thing serves some greater purpose, but information online is pretty threadbare because again, it seems nobody watched it, ergo no good explanations as to what the heck is going on. I don't know, forays into old, obscure stuff sure can be difficult and weird. I can only presume from the posters of this show that the three girls are eventually absorbed into or at least start to be able to control the thing, but if that's what ends up happening, there isn't any hint of it from what I've seen, and I'm not super compelled to keep watching more at this point, so...

Anatomy of a Fall (2023). Man, I'm getting a bit tired of all these uneconomically long, single-toned films with characters/dialogue so flat/'realistic' you'd think you were watching raw documentary footage. They used to make movies! It's a perfectly fine film, I'm just a little weary of it.

Your post has made me realize that I have no idea how basketball fantasy football works. In other news, the Milwaukee Bucks suddenly fired their head coach today, and it looks like we're going to hire Doc Rivers to replace him.

According to this blogpost, you'll have to do...incremental patches, if you can find them. The old NWN Vault website that used to host that sort of thing is looking pretty busted these days.

Oh no, Jordan Love has mastered Aaron Rodgers' patented technique of throwing a really stupid interception when down late against the 49ers in the playoffs!

I'm assuming you mean you ran through exactly one iteration and then quit: the game seems to have a kind of branching structure that reacts to your choices to shove you off a certain direction for future iterations before you can reach a proper ending. I don't think it's possible to beat the game in ten minutes unless maybe you literally don't read a single piece of text and just spam through everything. My playthrough took about two hours, but the average time listed on howlongtobeat.com is 3 hours, and that probably makes sense given that I had voice audio disabled so I could read and click through prompts at my own speed. My first iteration started with both of us murdering each other, and that seemed to lead to future iterations getting a bit more...scary and paranoid.

I have an addendum to make to my previous post about Slay the Princess that I totally forgot about until I was reading your post: I heard like two lines of the voice work in that game and then I completely muted the voice audio for the rest of the game. This isn't really all that important, but I just wanted to note this in case anybody thought I actually played through an entire visual novel with the voice-acting on - hell no, you'd have to have some outstanding voice-acting for me to do that, and...no, that game definitely did not have it. Well, I don't know, maybe it did, I did only listen to like two lines before muting it, so what the heck do I know? But voice-acting in games that are all dialogue is pretty much intolerable, as far as I'm concerned - it slows games down massively to have to listen to all of it, and if the voices aren't just right, it can really throw the whole atmosphere into question pretty much immediately. I always thought the Infinity Engine games had the right of it in only voicing lines sparingly/appropriately - use it to establish a character by all means, and use it for moments important to those characters and the plot, heck yeah...but every single line all the time? Eh.