Bartimaeus

Yeah, I think you hit it on the head here. It'd been a while since I saw Neon Genesis, long enough that the experience wasn't fresh in my mind, but not so long that I had forgotten everything, so the first movie kind of worked as a vaguely acceptable summary of the first half or so of the show. When going right back to the first Rebuild after having watched the show and that becoming more or less a direct comparison...it became very obvious that the Rebuild movie both directly and indirectly did away with just about everything I liked about Neon Genesis, and it was going to get so much worse as soon as I got into new material, so I abandoned it. Conceptually, there's also the issue of Rebuild being like...an alternative universe version of Neon Genesis. Hate alternative universe stuff, so it was a bad idea for me to start with.

I haven't seen much with David Spader (with the major exception, of course, being his short appearance(?) in Yuppie Psycho), and I know very little about the Blacklist because I'd only ever seen a little of it, so this is only tangentially related...but that's the reason why I think American cartoons can work despite the fact that they usually have no real story: if you like the characters and all the other elements (humor, art, timing, pacing...) surrounding them, then the plot and situation of each episode and the overall story doesn't really matter that much, you'll have a good time. Now having a great story would make it even better, but...having a bad story that doesn't work to the characters' strengths can instead make it all fall apart instead. I know you never had any liking or respect for this in American cartoons, but I do think the format can work given everything else being right.

That was pretty much how I felt about it on my first watch, but I liked it a lot more when I watched it a second time with someone else...who was watching it for the first time and who felt more or less how I did when I watched it for the first time, i.e. ready for it to be over. I think the plot of the show is a bit exhausting, silly, and just not really all it's cracked up to be...but the characters, humor, themes, art style and animation are all strong and can shine much more when you're past the point of caring about the overwrought plot. I watched the Rebuild movies a few years after watching the original series, and my opinion went from "it's okay" starting with the first one to "this is the absolute worst" by the last one...and then after I re-watched the original show, I tried to re-watch the first Rebuild movie and noped out after about halfway. I figured they, like the main series, might improve with a re-watch... That's gonna be a no from me, dog.

Swiss Army Man (2016). Somehow, the Daniels (of Everything Everywhere All at Once) manage to tie together the funny, thoughtful, and face-palmingly absurd for me once again, against all the built-in biases I had against this going into it. With Harry freaking Potter himself starring as the film's inanimate-ish corpse. I don't even know, dude.

I've watched several of this guy's videos and he has just never done it for me, so I guess I can be thankful that I don't care, . Long and short of the boss stuff (which is the bit I was more interested in, since I really do not care about the open world design one iota) seems like the DLC bosses are hard, but they're almost all comprehensible which makes them fun and interesting to play instead of incomprehensible like a number of bosses in the base game are, which is not fun to play or engage with. I think my favorite bit of FromSoftware content is the Artorias of the Abyss in DS1, whose bosses are all harder than almost anything you can find in the base game but who are all quite fair and well-telegraphed in their movesets, so if it's similar to that, I could certainly understand his point of view.

Speaking of which... Mad Max: Fury Road (2015). I hated the first half hour (basically up until Max got free), but it got a lot better after that. I think both movies have their strengths, I guess I'd maybe rate them just about equally, and I'd certainly understand why one might prefer one over the other - they attempt to accomplish very different things, and the story, characters, action, and even visuals are all told in very different ways, even if all of the elements have similarities on the surface. I actually preferred the action and visuals of Furiosa over Fury Road, but that's more a function of Fury Road's being utterly obnoxious rather than being less impressive: I almost turned Fury Road off in that first half hour because of how incensed I was getting at its jerky fast pans/zooms, slow-mos, and random hallucinations/visions...let me get a feel for a film, its characters, story, and stakes before you start throwing all that at me. The film eventually took a few slow moments to re-establish and save itself from that awful start, so all's well that ends well, I suppose. Fury Road is the more novel of the two to be sure, but novelty in of itself has never been a guarantee of a better experience.

George Shevtsov in that role reminded me more of John Hurt than Ian McKellen, but close enough, I suppose. I reflexively skip any movie that I hear anybody describing as being "like a dream". Never my, uh, cup of tea, .

There were definitely a number of bugbears, but I was surprisingly quite into the film, so I didn't really mind that much at all. That's usually how it goes for me with "bad CGI" - I take notice and am unhappy with it way more when a film isn't working for me on other levels, just like how I was watching Godzilla Minus One and mentally complaining about basically everything I was seeing for no particular reason. My understanding is that Fury Road is purportedly one of the most insane films of all time in terms of committing to practical effects (to the point of the actors largely having a bad time filming it), so I'm sure Furiosa pales in comparison to it visually, but overall, I thought it was a pretty good looking film for the most part. But I've kind of realized over the past few years that if a movie or show can successfully pull me, of all people, in by means of its other strengths, I'll pretty much always forgive whatever visual issues there may be: it's just not really that important to me. Which probably sounds completely at odds with me given all my years of incessantly whining and complaining about art styles in animation and video games, but I earnestly believe it's true at this point. Visuals do play a big part in relaying what something is or at least might/should be, though, so I'll certainly continue to use them as a point of evaluation. I haven't seen Charlize Theron's Furiosa, but I'll probably watch Fury Road here at some point after liking this film, and I'll be curious to see how she compares. I've never really liked Charlize Theron in anything I've ever seen, but I've also not seen that much that she's in to begin with, so who knows. Anya Taylor-Joy...I loved her in The Witch and Thoroughbreds, but I haven't been enamoured with her in basically anything else she's done (and I actively disliked her in The Northman, though to be fair, I actively disliked that entire movie period). I guess she was fine here, but I liked the kid playing the young version of her more, so as far as I'm concerned, she's the best Furiosa that I know so far, . Then again, I haven't yet seen what that character ultimately turns into...

Godzilla Minus One (2023). Every time I watch a Japanese movie, I'm constantly asking "what?" and "why?" about every little thing. I think my brain just doesn't like Japanese cinema - there's something about the style, pacing, and editing I just can't into. My best experience with a Japanese film thus far has been Tetsuo the Iron Man, where I was still doing all of those things, but at least it felt like the right thing to do so because of how completely incomprehensible it was. Mad Max: Furiosa (2024). I haven't seen any other Mad Max films, but I thought it was pretty great, though I honestly would've been pretty okay without Anya Taylor-Joy being in it and just sticking with whoever had been playing as the young version of her for the entire first half of the film. She wasn't exactly a character that...uh, really needed a lot of character, anyways.

Blade Runner (1982). This is my second time watching it. I feel that there is a human element here that is missing in the sequel, that makes this more than just moody or pretty environments. This film is not necessarily perfectly sublime from front to back with regards to all of its most essential elements, but it is nonetheless a whole experience, and that is exactly what it needs to be. It was better for a second watch.

I first wrote "I've seen healthier looking ghouls in Fallout", but looking at him again gives me pause on just memeing. I'm reminded of when Trump caught Covid for the first time and he made a televised public appearance outside of the hospital he was staying at, visibly struggling to breathe, yet still posturing because of course. Just...stop, I don't want to feel even the slightest amount of pity for you, especially when you're still being a right bastard. This guy is going to die live on television before he'd willingly slink into the shadows, away from the spotlights.

I broke a molar last year and was worried it was infected or something, but I got into my dentist and he was like "nope, your teeth are all perfectly healthy, bone density looks good, no infections, you're doing great, and we'll fix that one up in a couple of months". So I was like "okay...uh, so why did that one break?", and he posited that I probably bit on something hard and these things sometimes happen, the freakish brute power of our jaws combined with our imperfect nature can sometimes result in strange things happening...and then I told him that it broke when I was just eating some ruffles, just about the softest potato chips you can eat. He went "oh, hmm" and didn't give me any other theories. Alright, cool, guess I lost part of a tooth for no apparent reason.

Well, if I've forgotten that I'd told all of you already, then that would certainly track with the brain worms diagnosis. Though they should hurry up and get to all the bits that care about politics and other worldly affairs...if they're going to eat me, least they can do is make me blissfully unaware of the world falling apart around me.

There's something I haven't told anyone else until just now, but I, too, have had parasitic worms eat my brain. I would like to ask for thoughts and prayers for my family and I as we go through this difficult time. Thank you.

Man who literally had his brain devoured by parasitic worms reportedly plans to drop out and endorse Donald Trump - after polling made it repeatedly clear that he was taking more voters away from Trump rather than Kamala. A small but rather vicious part of me wonders how Keyrock and Guard Dog feel about their man with no brain leaving the race, especially in this manner.

Humanist Vampire Seeking Consenting Suicidal Person (2023). It's...an odd duck of a film. It's more or less exactly what you might think it would be, which is a slow and sensitive coming-of-age film with a vampiric twist. I enjoyed it, but I confess to also being a little disappointed by it, I think it could've been great by being a little more creative and energetic than it was.

That's actually what I meant, but my post was admittedly not very clear. My understanding is that more exposure to bacteria at a very young age (including from breastfeeding) leads to better outcomes. I assume there's also something relevant here with regards to early life gut health (and again, transfer from the mother!), which from everything I've heard over the past few years is an area of increasing interest for determining later life health outcomes and maybe even childhood brain disorders like autism. tl;dr: The vast majority of bacteria is either harmless or actively good for us, especially when we're very young.

I might be wrong, but from what I remember when I was a kid, other kids did have food allergies, it's just that the school didn't really care enough to alert the other parents/students, much less tell them not to bring those foods to school. One of my friends in 3rd and 4th grade was allergic to chocolate, but it was totally left up to him to deal with that. Meanwhile, peanut butter is straight up banned in my nieces' school, which seems just crazy to me. Pretty sure I've heard that children not being exposed to enough foods from a very early age tends to increase allergic reactions, and there's probably something to do with bacterial exposure (and transfer from the mother during pregnancy, childbirth, and when breastfeeding) as well. C-section babies supposedly have a much higher incidence of allergies, so I'm sure all sorts of small and difficult to quantify things go into it. Maybe even the micro-plastics completely permeating and poisoning our environments/bodies like @LadyCrimson mentioned above also have something to do with it...you never know.

Yeah, I think it was very unnecessary to give instructions to enable the built-in administrator account, but the uploader's reply to the top comment saying "please don't do this" makes it pretty clear that they didn't have any clue exactly what they were suggesting to do before they went ahead and did exactly that. I guess the channel's name is "Hardware Unboxed" and not "Software Unboxed" for a reason. I'm curious to know whether the same benefit is experienced if UAC is hard-disabled, which gets you most but not quite all of the way there, though I don't recommend general users do that either. The recommendation really should've just been "wait for Microsoft to fix it".

It was a new addition for this Olympics, and also it's not going to be back in 2028 (though that doesn't necessarily preclude it from returning at some later date; it was decided against for 2028 before the 2024 Olympics even started). I always thought the "amateurs only" rule was silly. Let's have a competition to determine who are the best...buuut let's not include the people that, you know, actually get paid to be the best to do it. And let's ignore that all the Eastern bloc countries were effectively skirting around that restriction by having their governments be the ones who were training, funding, and supporting their top athletes, while we give all the best Western athletes the boot because it was private businesses instead. Farcical. No, we won't ever have an our-amateurs-beating-their-professionals a la the Miracle on Ice again, but that shouldn't have ever been a thing in the first place.

tl;dr: Supposed power efficiency gains with Zen 5 are largely non-existent in gaming workloads (though it is improved for all-core/production workloads), so given that performance is essentially the same, this new generation looks fairly pointless for gaming, go get a 7800X3D if you're building a new PC for that, which performs better and is more efficient for gaming.

That's a pretty attractive trailer...but, why do I know that name, and why do I hate it? One moment, I need to go to Wikipedia real quick. Oh yes, now I remember: it's because I've been tricked into watching a couple of this guy's so-called "films" before, without having realized what I was getting into before starting them. I learned better after the second one. I'm reading now that he has publicly protested this version of the film, which given the positive reviews that have come out, I can only assume is a very good thing.

Rest in peace, X-Ray Engine. You were a load of janked garbage that never worked, but you were my load of janked garbage that never worked.

S.T.A.L.K.E.R. has become very difficult for me to play, unfortunately - it's always been too demanding on my ravaged hands/wrists, and trying to use a controller to play those games is way too frustrating. The last time I played any S.T.A.L.K.E.R. was a couple of years ago when I finally gave the cut-down and rebalanced Lost Alpha mod a proper go, and I think I got about ten to maybe fifteen hours into it over a few weeks before the pain became too much and too constant to the point of affecting the rest of my life on a daily basis, so I uninstalled it and kind of consciously made the decision there that I just would not be able to play S.T.A.L.K.E.R. for the rest of my life. It's just too much. In contrast, I've been able to handle New Vegas in moderation without too much ill-effect so far, though I've been making great use of aiming/iron sights being bound to ALT instead of right-click, which helps a lot.

Not useless, but a little less insane. With the accuracy-affecting mods I installed ([1], [2], [3], [4]), the idea seems to be that first shots when fired from iron sights are generally pretty accurate (though still subject to a weapons' base accuracy, so not like perfect if you're at a pretty good distance), while subsequent shots fired soon after are subject to both degrading accuracy as well as recoil if you don't give it a moment to let it reset. Recoil is especially bad if you do not meet the minimum stat requirements on a weapon, just as it is in the original game (particularly noticeable with automatic weapons). Accuracy and damage still improve with higher skill levels, it's just...you know, if you take the time to line up a shot that's not even very far away, you can now expect the bullet to not go wildly off direction like it used to, or for your weapon to just be wobbling and swaying all the time like it does in the vanilla game, or for the iron sight to be visually inaccurate because the devs unfortunately didn't line the iron sight up with the actual center of the screen, all of which is important to especially me because I literally never use VATS and so I need to have some way of approaching combat that doesn't feel like poopy doodoo all the time (that or go all melee weapons, but that's not really my thing in these games either). But I can assure you that every time I get into combat where I need to burst off more than a couple of shots, I'm still very much feeling how bad my accuracy is at my Gun skill level of 35 even when using something as simple as a revolver. As for why no VATS at all...I've just never found it satisfying to use, you effectively pause the game to take control out of your own hands and instead put it into a random number generator, and a painfully slow and very goofy-looking one at that. Never felt like a good marriage to this kind of action-y gameplay to me, but obviously other people strongly disagree. Oh yeah, I always did that in S.T.A.L.K.E.R. as well. I'd always have a container for all the artifacts I'd ever found throughout the game, a container for one of each of all the armors in the game, a container for one of each of all the weapons in the game... I didn't usually go so far as to upgrade the ones I wasn't going to use though (actually, if I had one I was going to use, then I'd always make sure to have a second untouched copy still in the container instead).