Bartimaeus

Obviously, I very much respect, support, and enjoy the fruits of indie game development, but AAA studios are largely the only ones capable of making large and cutting-edge games - with the resources to fully realize their worlds, stories, characters, audio, environments, et al. in new and different ways that really push the medium forward. Most of the games I've enjoyed within the past ten years have been indie-developed titles, but while indie developers are great at doing some things, there's a lot that they simply can't do given their realities of manpower and resources. It's pretty much the same way @Gorgon has often bemoaned the state of studio film-making: while smaller and independent-ish films made today can be great for what they can do and what they try to accomplish, their small cast of actors, their inability to have expensive visual effects, their limited options for sets/locations, the kinds of stories and settings that they can realistically try to explore given their limitations...well, if you're like Gorgon and you want new, big, exciting films that come out with large fanfare rather than just more soulless, over-formulaic Hollywood dreck pushed out for the sake of being a product, your options for new things to watch start to get sad pretty quickly. It's the same way I really like 2D animated movies/shows (especially when it's traditional animation), and while I still occasionally find things that I like, you just don't see any great big 2D animation productions of any kind any more: it's all smaller, budget-limited stuff aimed at very specific niche audiences. I have largely accepted that I am never going to experience anything new in that vein that even approaches the heights of my favorite things released in the 80s and 90s, some stuff that I first watched as a kid but also some stuff that I first watched as an adult, and that's just the way it's going to be given the realities of the relevant industries. But it didn't used to always be this way, with either film or video games or animation. Times change, and it can be painful to try to adapt when it seems like nothing scratches the itch for your particular want. On a side-note, there is just so much content (a lot garbage, but certainly not all of it!) being constantly pushed out for pretty much every medium that it's absolutely overwhelming to try to find what you might like, particularly if your tastes aren't very mainstream. I very much regret that there are games, movies, television shows, musical artists, books et al. that I would love and which would prove meaningful to me and others I might share them with...if only I could find and experience them. But I can't, because they're drowned out by the endless tidal waves of everything else, and there's not enough time in the day or my life for me to realistically do anything about it.

I've been praying for a video game industry crash for like the past ten years, but haven't ever seen much evidence of it materializing. It'd hurt like hell in the short term, but it seems to be the only way forward to really shake things up and get another decade or two of good games instead of just...products only made for extracting money out of us. And if it kills off a few companies like Ubisoft in the process, how can you be upset about that? I'd drop a nuke on their headquarters myself if I could. ...Uh, maybe my rhetoric got a little extreme there, but you know what I mean.

This has been an issue for about the last ten years - that I know of. Elsagate and similarly disturbing content reached a very loud apogee back in 2017, but as always seems to be the case with censorship where there is both supply and demand, new guidelines and restrictions means that both the producers and the consumers just get more creative in how they communicate to one another. It's pretty grim, especially when you see the numbers on implicated creators, users, videos, and comments between YouTube and TikTok (and presumably other places as well). It's a whole new frontier of abuse and exploitation that these platforms clearly cannot even remotely keep up with, even with honest effort, and it's hard not to think that the public and political forces won't eventually catch wind of it and implement some very draconian measures in response - there doesn't seem to be too much else that could adequately deal with it. The idea of having to use your government-issued ID to register and upload videos to YouTube seems farcical and a little dystopian to me...but boy, every time I'm reminded of just how widespread this is, if it means less children being neglected, abused, and exploited (and less other children viewing this kind of stuff!), I guess I'd be pretty alright with not being able to casually upload to YouTube or anything similar ever again. There's also the uncomfortable fact in knowing that, you know, this sort of thing has clearly found a sizable audience that has internally normalized how they think and behave, so even if you deplatform all of it and them, they're still going to stick around and find other ways to interface with one another...but if you can make it way more difficult for them to attract new people and continue to grow, maybe you have at least a snowball in hell of a chance.

I should also probably re-watch it at some point. I remember liking the main story between Jim Carrey and Kate Winslet, but kept getting a bit annoyed by the constant Elijah Wood and co. machinations that felt like they were thrown in to attract a younger audience and make it more gross than it really needed to be.

I wasn't familiar with Benicio del Toro before watching Sicario, pretty sure I haven't seen him in any other film. My impression of his character was that he was a pissy mildly drunk man, and I had kind of hoped he would die early on into the film - along with all the other cardboard cutouts masquerading as main characters. It's probably not Mr. del Toro's (or any of the other actors') fault, all of Dennis' (sic) characters are pretty much impossible to connect with on any emotional level. Maybe if I had already loved the actor in question before starting the film, that can sometimes help.

Loud and proud. Villaneuve saying that dialogue doesn't matter and film would be better off without it feels like a parody, something I would mockingly ascribe to a director like him that clearly only cares about the looks and mood of a film, except he actually just said it outright and meant it seriously. Consistent flat-line characters and mechanical dialogue that only do the absolute bare minimum just means I never have much reason to care about his pretty little pictures. Again, it's my own tastes, but literally all of my favorite films are very character and dialogue-driven, meanwhile this bozo's out here saying none of that matters. Not exactly a surprise that he and I do not see eye-to-eye on film if that's how he feels about it.

This guy stupid or something? No wonder all his movies are hot garbage. . . . Theoretically, there's nothing wrong with what he's saying. Obviously, what we value is very different, since I almost entirely remember movies by characters and what they do (and yes, especially dialogue!), but I'm not everyone, and clearly some people do like his films. This kind of thinking will probably, 999/1000 times, mean you're not going to have characters that I think are interesting or fun or pretty much anything else, which almost certainly means that at best, I'm going to be pretty neutral towards your film. So yeah, I guess it starts to make a lot of sense why I hate Denis Villaneuve films. That French Canadian bastard. It was nice they gave Ethan Hawke the last word with the obvious rebuttal to that nonsense to end the article.

The biggest hurdle with the original cartoon, I think, is that the first few episodes are pretty rough around the edges. Some pretty basic writing that seems aimed at helping introduce children to the characters and setting, and some real cut-rate animation that's pilot-esque. The show as a whole has also unfortunately suffered the fate that most early 2000s animated shows have in being made only for standard definition - if you're an adult just trying the show for the very first time, I can definitely understand not immediately seeing the appeal. But this...woof, whoa, I guess I'm gonna go back to watching my dadgummed cartoons.

I know I'm just, like, the person that hates almost everything around here, but I think your kids are being smart skipping this one. I can't even...my brain was being boiled in my skull watching this. Comments I read online about the rest of the season give me less than zero confidence that my opinion will suddenly turn itself around in any way, and in fact, it would almost definitely get worse if I watch any more. It's all tell and no show (endless plot dumps and exposition!), you have episode storylines that get haphazardly slapped together so that none of them work, cosplay-level characters who have had all of their development stripped away because there's no time for them to do anything but rush to the next plot point over and over (and some characters actively get assassinated by their writing!), the order of events is confused and there's zero sense of pacing with how rushed it all is, everything has this weird video game cutscene look to it because all the scenes were filmed on a set and they have no locations and nothing ever looks lived in... I've only seen like an episode of Wheel of Time, but I'd genuinely much rather sit through more of that than Netflix's Airbender. Hell, I hate-watched all* of Hazbin Hotel and though I thought it was a total train-wreck from beginning to end, there were still at least a few things I liked in it that made it not a total loss. Given how bitterly disappointed I was by Hazbin Hotel after loving the original pilot and then waiting years for the full adaptation, that should really tell you something. At least, like I said, I already knew this was going to be bad, so it isn't nearly as upsetting as it could be. But...it's still kind of upsetting. *Hazbin Hotel is like...two and a half hours, so "all of" isn't really saying that much, that's about as long as most movies these days.

Avatar: The Last Airbender (Netflix), episode 1. Unlike Hazbin Hotel, I wasn't excited for this one, because I knew it was going to be awful...but I have to admit, I vastly underestimated just how awful it would be. I sat through this with my nieces (who love the original cartoon, we've watched all of it multiple times together over the last few years) and conspired to stay very neutral during this so that I would not ruin it for them in the event that they liked it. I was very mindful, for their sake...honestly, I really was, and so it warmed the deepest, darkest corners of my twisted heart that I was not alone in hating it. I'm proud of them, they're good kids.

boot up pc, freezes and crashes after a few minutes reboot pc, freezes and crashes after a few minutes restart pc, boot into bios, it's all in chinese find english language option, stays in chinese yeah, alright, i can take a hint, i'm clearly not wanted anymore

Lethal Company. I walked through a doorway and a face-hugger dropped onto my head and killed me, then I came back and immediately got eaten by a forest god right after exiting my ship, then I came back and got zapped to death by electric bees after trying to steal their beehive, then I came back and apparently didn't make enough money for the Company so they they threw me off my own ship into the dark void of space. Recommended.

With so much content constantly coming out and no real shared social consciousness on what's "important" to watch so that you can participate in the current zeitgeist, there's not really any pressure to immediately watch anything anyways. Really, the same issue applies to TV, video games, books, and music as well. The Teachers' Lounge (2023). Or, uh... Yeah, let's just stick with the first one. Premise as quoted from Wikipedia: "A teacher [is] tasked with finding out which of her students is responsible for a series of thefts." Normally, I'm all about backhand 'complimenting' both French and German cinema even when I kind of like something, but this was an honest to god great movie from beginning to end, certainly my film of the year for 2023 until/if ever proven elsewise. This film is like...kind of an anti-thriller, insofar that it doesn't really have much of the normal traits/tropes of a thriller (even up to and including the conclusion of the film!), but you will be stressed out watching this kindhearted teacher and her classroom of normal 12-year-olds trying to navigate difficult interpersonal conflict just as if it were a thriller.

Someone made a clip of him fighting the tiger and I was impressed by how decent his special effects have gotten. Well, not really, but relative to what I saw in some of his previous films - it looked like an early 2000s 3D video game fight, but it still looked hilarious, so that was good.

I wouldn't normally be concerned with deleting .log files on a personal computer, since by their nature they are just .log files, but those are awfully large for just .log files, and your system seems to be making them pretty fast-like. Might want to try to track down what the heck is generating them (maybe via Process Explorer if you can catch it in the act) and repeatedly stab it with a knife.

If the rest of his PC didn't fry with the PSU, then he should've considered himself pretty lucky. Though replacing a PSU is a pain in the butt to be sure... I have a friend who used an ancient no-name PSU for a little under ten years. She didn't really know any better and figured that since it still worked, she might as well just keep using it even through building a new PC (or rather, frankensteining various parts into an old one). I once did a look-up of the model name and the little information that came up about it suggested it had zero standard safety features and would eventually blow up and fry her whole PC, so I ended up giving her one of my old ones and she's still using it to this day. Maybe the one that she had would've kept working just fine, maybe it wouldn't have...all's well that ends well, I suppose.

Just whose policy is it to let orcs illegal immigrants run wild in our White City, anyways?

He really likes The Batman. I didn't even know what The Batman was until he mentioned it like a hundred times and I had to go see that it was apparently a 2022 reboot. I'm sure I knew that at some point, but it must have left my brain sometime within the last two years.

Both of them have been released on blu-ray by the Criterion Collection (and also via the Criterion Channel paid streaming service). Not sure if they're anywhere else - I would guess not, given their age. I've seen The Great Dictator, I thought it was fairly amusing.

You know, some might say that you should extend your cynicism to not just humanity, but also what humanity makes as well, including our lazy retread films... Of Human Bondage (1934). Pre-code 1930s Hollywood films can be weird. Feels like stepping into a different era of American film that never was - or rather an era that was murdered and buried with the intent to make sure everyone forgot that it ever happened. Bette Davis plays a vacuous and cruel vampiress in this film, and I don't mean the supernatural kind. She acts so much with her eyes, and I think that might be the best kind of acting for this kind of role: the lazy seduction, some manipulative side-eye, a contemptuous raised eyebrow, the slightly uneven makeup and wide-eyed psychosis...she does it all and it's what makes the performance and the film. I think the only other Bette Davis film I've seen is All About Eve, but that was a very different kind of role and I don't think I appreciated it enough, even as well as I liked that film. Of Human Bondage is a very odd duck of a film (with a message that I'm not particularly fond of and some stretches that I think are a bit boring, no less), but the 1920s and 1930s films that I like do tend to be.

Okay, so I recognize that pronunciations don't really matter...especially given that from what I noticed even from my little exposure of the Japanese, it seemed to be sometimes "ehv-vuhn", sometimes "aev-vaun". The original English dub changed how it was said as the series went on: the first episode, it is "ee-van", but that's definitely not how it's said for the majority of the series (and hearing characters say "ee-va" over and over would've been very noticeable). I've said before that the original English dub is a hot mess to start with and it takes at least a handful of episodes before both the overall voice/script direction and individual actors start to get their act together, so it is what it is. But as I said, it doesn't really matter: what matters, and what is the actual problem here, is that it's very difficult to listen to this guy talk for 30 seconds, never mind 2 hours, . There's a lot that goes into video essays (such as subject material, writing, the base sound of their voice, speaking style/cadence/accent*, having relevant/interesting visuals, and probably a number of other little but still important things I could identify if I spent like fifteen minutes thinking about it), and if you don't have at least most of those nailed down just right for me, it's probably not going to work out. This guy has maybe one of those things, which is that I should theoretically be interested in someone talk about Neon Genesis. And that's really only theoretically, because I'm really honestly not sure how much I care about the Evangelion series as a whole whenever we look at it outside specifically just the interwoven stories of Shinji, Rei, Asuka, and Misato. I clearly don't enjoy Neon Genesis for the same reasons that most other people seem to enjoy the Evangelion series, and I'm perfectly okay with that given how abysmal discourse around a show like this generally is. *Yes, even accent: for example, there's no way in hell I'm ever listening to some guy with a heavy French accent talk about anything at length at any point in my life, and anybody who tries to make me can go right ahead and suck it, because that's just not happening.

who's gonna listen to a weeb drone on and on about NGE for two hours and am i pronouncing evangelion wrong, or is he

I played about 2 minutes of Dredge before I uninstalled it because gameplay in video games is bo-o-oring and I don't really want to spend a bunch of time fishing, Lovecraftian horrors or no. Just one of those games that you try and it instantly jumps out as a "no" for you. So I started another game called Homebody, except I've already had this game installed for a while and so I do not remember even the littlest bit of what this game is about. O.K., I'm a young woman that is apparently struggling with her mental health, seems to have some kind of guilt and obsessive compulsive complexes right off the bat that's making doing basic things painful/difficult, and I'm on my way to spend a night with my old high school friends at a remote-ish Airbnb. Lots of dialogue as I try to catch up with these friends of mine that I haven't seen in a while, but that's fine, they seem nice enough, except for the jerk who has some kind of problem with me because he's mysteriously pretending that I don't exist. The house has only one apparent exit, the front door, and there's some kind of weird powered lock on it that nobody else seems to be very concerned about at the moment. It's all kind of strange, but whatever. The house rules put down by the host say don't go into a few rooms that have been locked up, so of course after talking to everyone in the house, I immediately go looking to solve some of the puzzles to open them up. One thing leads to another, I'm collecting little bits of information and putting them into my character's notebook, and then pretty soon I'm in the basement examining this weird liquid canister stuff. So I'm sitting there trying to figure out what I'm supposed to do with it and not really paying attention to what's going on around me - I think I heard some sounds coming from upstairs, but nothing distinctive enough that I really paid much notice because I kind of just figured it was environmental noise. But then a little bit later, I suddenly hear my character start to breathe loudly and just kind of freak out, so I stop looking at the canisters and turn around right in time for me to scream in real life because I got stabbed right in the face by a knife-wielding maniac, game over. Well, guess I should've paid attention to the weird sounds upstairs after all - though I didn't lose all the information I put into my character's notebook, so that's nice. Now if I had actually looked at the banner art of the game on the Steam store page, I probably would've noticed the knife and blood and generally murder-y look of the game, but since I didn't do that, I honestly thought this was gonna be a very chill and laid back dialogue/puzzle kind of game. Whoops. But hey, moments like that are what you live for in video games, so I won't complain. Now I just have to actually play the rest of the game.

The Stranger (1946). Man, Sigmund Freud was the worst...and I really ought to stop watching Orson Welles films, it just never goes well for me.

Yeah, I kind of assume they set their recommendations around not wanting to spectacularly burn down end users' Raidmax-powered computers...even though end users who use Raidmax PSUs probably deserve to have their computers spectacularly burn down for cheaping out so much on their PSUs, the single item responsible for making sure your computer doesn't spectacularly burn down. Still, the fact that the system is suddenly folding when under load does at least suggest a possibility of power issues, even with a good PSU. I don't know that it would be my first suspect necessarily...I'd like to at least get a look at Windows' event log to see if it says anything useful - it happens every once in a while.