Bartimaeus

I'm not seeing how that makes him more valuable than the quarterback throwing to him. No quarterback, no catches, which are tough circumstances to win an award called the "most valuable player". Again, it's not the most outstanding player award: an offense can run through a QB or a RB (or at least it used to be able to in the past for the latter), but it can't really for a WR or TE outside of some truly outstanding circumstances that don't really feel possible in the modern game, so I'm not seeing how either of them could ever win an MVP. It's the (current) nature of the game that makes QBs inherently more valuable. Don Hutson won it back-to-back in '41 and '42, but he was half his QB's entire production in both years and he was considered one of the league's best safeties on defense as well, so that makes a little more sense.

That really depends on what you consider the MVP to be. It's never been "most outstanding player" (which is more fulfilled by Offensive Player of the Year, and which I would bet is won either by Hill or maybe Christian McCaffrey), and I don't really see how a WR could ever be more valuable than the QB throwing to him. But "most valuable" is not really the criteria used to award it either, clearly, as that's just about impossible to figure out given that you can't realistically evaluate a QB or RB without their surrounding talent heavily factoring into it. Heck, even a WR is dependent on the QB throwing to them, who is dependent on their line keeping them upright to throw it to them, and having other WRs and RBs that can draw defensive attention so they're not just constantly blanketed sure makes their job easier as well. I don't know what a WR would need to do in order to win MVP, but I don't think Hill will have done it this season, and I wouldn't be able to call him more valuable than at least a handful of QBs myself.

Cowboys like to beat on bad teams and then get beat on by good teams. Does this mean the Cowboys aren't doing that anymore, or does it just mean the Eagles were bad all along? It's a pretty crap year for MVP, going to be either Tua, Dak, Hurts, or Purdy without it being very clear whom yet: none of them have a particularly good case, and there isn't even a running back having a fantastic year like Adrian Peterson or Derrick Henry of yesteryears. I'm kind of just assuming that whoever ends up the #1 seed in the NFC is probably going to get it, unless they all look weak down the stretch and Tua closes out the year really well. Dak Prescott possibly winning an MVP just seems wacko to me, but them's the breaks in a bad offense year. Packers may make the playoffs, which seems unthinkable after such a horrid mid-season stretch. We'll see. I would say that the NFC seems top-heavy, and yet I don't really believe in anyone besides the 49ers, who will probably be the ones that get the #1 seed.

Inside Out (2015). As a generally committed Pixar hater, I'll have you know that the only Pixar film that I really like is WALL-E. Okay, and A Bug's Life is enjoyable, and I suppose Monsters Inc. and all the Toy Storys are all roughly equally just okay...but I didn't like Cars, I didn't like Ratatoullie, I didn't like Brave, or Finding Nemo, or either of the Incredibles, or Up, or Turning Red, or Monsters University...and yes, I've actually seen all of these and I think a couple of others, and heck, I even watched some of these during my own childhood, so if I didn't like them as a kid or as an adult, you should know that I'm pretty serious about it. But I'll have you know that I am a big, emotionally underdeveloped baby...which I am sure everyone already knows, and also that I loved Inside Out, and I made a mistake waiting so long to watch it. I am sorry, past myself. It may or may not be in my top 50 films of all time pursuant to watching it again sometime and confirming my feelings towards it (not that that really means much, it's not exactly a super prestigious list seeing as it's like half animated films of various kinds in the first place). Also, I am sure that I knew it was a Pixar film in the past which is why I didn't go out of my way to watch it back then, but right before watching this, I had thought it was a Disney and not Pixar film, and I only learned after finishing it that it was in fact Pixar, and so I had eggs on my face doubly when I realized the horrible truth of the matter. Also, here are some short write-ups of some other films I watched over the past week-ish that don't matter nearly as much to me and in fact I almost cut them out of the post entirely because this post should really be about Inside Out, but since I already wrote them before watching Inside Out, I'm just going to dump them in this here spoiler where nobody will read them:

Sling Blade (1996). Recommended to me by someone, I didn't read anything about it before starting: I heard Billy Bob Thornton do his ridiculous voice and I was like "oh gosh, I'm not going to be able to do this". Completely wrong, it was a wonderful little movie. Utterly predictable in broad strokes (I knew what the ending was going to be within like 15 minutes), but it's the kind of film where that's totally okay and in fact probably preferred over doing something unexpected and unfitting. It also helps when you have a child actor play a main character and do really great, especially for a film like this.

What announcing retirement does to a guy.

Cowboy Bebop: The Movie AKA Knockin' on Heaven's Door. Which I think is the also name of a Neon Genesis episode. Sorry, I actually meant "Cowboy Bebop: The Movie: Knockin' on Heaven's Door: The End of Cowboy Bebop" (...although from what I read, this movie actually occurs between episode 22 and 23 of the show even though it came out years later, so not really). I read a comment that suggested this is basically a really long normal episode that treats itself a little more seriously but without any of the horrid melodrama of the main series' central story...and I thought what are the chances that someone who dislikes the show ends up liking the movie? Probably not great. But then I considered that maybe it'll be a reverse of Escaflowne, where I love the movie but hate the TV show! Yeah, fat chance, but whatever, I'll just turn it off if I need to. Strange thing about that thought: I specifically thought of it well before I started watching, and then as I did start to watch it...well, speaking of Escaflowne, this Cowboy Bebop movie sure looks a lot like the Escaflowne movie. I paused it to find out that the Escaflowne movie was a joint production between Sunrise and BONES released in 2000, and this Cowboy Bebop movie was...a joint production between Sunrise and BONES released in 2001. Hmm. Well, this film is more or less exactly what that comment I read said it was. Here's the really weird thing: I quickly found myself enjoying the film, actually caring about what happened, laughing at most of the humor, and I even paid attention during the action scenes. The film did feel just a little bit wobbly at points, but I didn't ask myself too many questions while watching, and as a whole, it was fairly compelling and I very much wish the show had been more like it. Intertwine the serious and the silly better, slow everything down a little, make it all just a tad more tethered to reality instead of almost always doing that annoying "nothing you're watching really matters because we're not being sincere" tone, have our characters actually do things beyond just the pointless action and the annoying smarm...and suddenly, I enjoy it. Wow! It's like magic. Now I'm almost tempted to go watch the rest of the show...but I think like the eventually cancelled first season of Ranma 1/2 that I very much enjoyed in direct contrast to the not-cancelled rest of Ranma 1/2 that I very much did not, it might be better to just let it be. A reverse Escaflowne indeed.

I never liked co-op (either with PCs or NPCs) in the Souls game for this: having two players either trivializes a boss (by just playing off the other with forcing frequent aggro switches, thereby giving piles of free hits), or...the boss is one of them whirlwindy/AoE types and everything just quickly becomes an absolute cluster. Neither ever really resulted in very satisfying outcomes to me. but even after watching the whole thing, he still failed to convince me to play it

Trump was our great 'coming out of the closet' moment - for grievances, for retribution, for ignorance, fear, hate, and intolerance. That phenomenon isn't even strictly limited to him and his, as those on the opposite side of the aisle have obviously become more hardened themselves in response. But people don't easily give up on their icons and their heroes, those that made them who they are now, who finally represented them and who gave them a voice: we're in this for the long haul and it's bewildering that so many of these experts can't seem to realize that.

majestic is saying that it's a roddy, cloddy, stupid idea. I can tell from some of the words and from seeing quite a few sarcastic posts in my time.

Story, not plot, and I was talking about it specifically in the context of answering questions like "who am I?" and "why should I care?" (among others, like "who are all these characters and what's up with them?" - I can confidently say that Dark Souls answered that stupendously more effectively than Nioh for me, even if I never quite fell in love with all the weirdo characters in Dark Souls as many other players apparently did). You can make most any story sound fine if you just boil it down to some bulletin plot points, but what actually matters is the overall execution of all the smaller elements into a cohesive and compelling story, and Nioh's was ghastly and I'd have preferred it if the entire thing had been completely excised from the game. Now, it probably would've only pushed my rating of the game from like a 3/10 to maybe a 4 or 4.5/10, but that's pretty significant improvement on the totality of a crap sandwich that was Nioh, and it would have taken it out of "games I've least enjoyed playing of all time" territory.

legal expert maybe, political expert perhaps not so much

Not sure if I could possibly disagree more with the thrust of this statement: I will take a game (or movie) not even attempting something 11/10 times over trying and being miserably bad at it. Not trying to do something means you can put your effort and focus towards something you actually do well instead of bringing the whole product down with your sorry excuse for [element]. Dark Souls doesn't have much of anything in the way of a main plot (and the little that is there is fairly nebulous and relies on some creative interpretation by way of the player), so I would agree it is fair to ask yourself questions like "who is my character", "what exactly are we trying to accomplish and why", and "so why should I care"...but I can personally tell you that having to ask yourself those questions and not being able to immediately come up with answers is a hell of a lot better than the games that give terrible answers to those questions and destroy my interest with a bad story that actively distracts me from the things I do think are good (or could be good if not for the bad elements). Playing as a silent protagonist is infinitely preferable over playing as someone whom I wish I could throw off the nearest cliff. Speaking of protagonists... Remember, I'm the person that very nearly quit Dark Souls II at the character creator because I didn't like any character I tried to make...and actually did quit Hogwarts Legacy at the character creator for the same reason, . Having to look at and listen to a total nonce to whom I have share zero affinity or connection to for a whole game will not (or rather cannot) be tolerated on my part, even if I only see them just from the back, .

they need a new cover image for the game on the steam store because i saw that crap months back and put it on my mental blocklist within approximately .2 seconds hope it's better than nioh, which is one of the worst games i've ever played to the end for a legion of reasons and is some pretty concrete evidence for why indirect storytelling is usually better - direct storytelling by game developers (particularly within the action genre) tends to score highly on being overly simple, annoyingly distracting, incompetent, and/or downright embarrassing

Feels like "better" will largely depend on which you happened to experience and enjoy first, though that's not universally true (for example, I strongly prefer the book version of Peter Pan even though I watched Disney's adaptation a number of times in the couple of decades preceding me reading the book). A few of my favorite movies are adapted from books, but I watched the movies before reading the books and so I'm biased when I say I very much prefer the movie adaptations (e.g. Perfect Blue and The Lord of the Rings films - the latter of which I have the distinction of reading all of in spite of the fact that I quite dislike Tolkien's prose for those books).

Porco Rosso (1992). What is just "alright" in an English dub can sometimes turn out to be...much better in Japanese. I'd now rate this as one of the better Miyazaki films, whereas before I had been a bit disappointed with it. Even with Susan Egan voicing one of the main characters in the English, the Japanese is just...that much better for various reasons. Laputa: Castle in the Sky will be next for me at some point, as I remember the English dub was rather poor even at the time of watching it years ago and suffering greatly for it. Additionally, having now seen Future Boy Conan, I think I may well better appreciate it from that angle as well, given Laputa essentially being a spiritual remake movie of the series.

Pretty sure Suspiria is the film that convinced me that I was never going to watch an Italian film ever again, and also that I would never watch a film that Jay (of RLM) calls "dream-like". I haven't held true to the former, but I'm pretty sure I have to the latter.

Toys in the Attic was the episode where I got a few minutes into it and then thought "if I'm ever going to enjoy this show, it should be right here and right now". A totally self-contained story that is tiny in scope but potentially very personal by putting our characters in a dangerous situation together with nowhere to go (bonus points: it seemed to to actually be taking itself kind of seriously instead of having that same old veneer of smarmy crap humor that somehow almost never manages to land for me!), and it's a riff on a classic sci-fi film that I love. And while for the first third of the episode I was still hopeful... ...I actually started writing my previous post immediately after I finished it. Between the awkward and weightless visuals that completely steal the thunder of the 'threat', a lot of weird and clunky dialogue that made our established characters feel like they must have been replaced by doppelgangers that didn't know how to talk or emote like the real characters that they replaced, and then having to bear the full brunt of the stupid humor returning with the effect of completely deflating anything the episode had going for it...well, suffice to say, I wasn't happy with being done so dirty. Then I decided that I might really put the nail in the coffin here by watching a few more, and to follow it up with Jupiter Jazz parts 1 and 2 only incensed me further. Your mention of Noir is timely, because I was literally thinking that I must be watching Noir all over again during Jupiter Jazz. I cannot understate how much I completely fail to connect in any way with these characters and their piecemeal personal stories that the show randomly decides to go 'serious mode' on every once in a while. It feels completely divorced from the rest of the show and thus rendered meaningless, and so these very few 'serious mode' episodes are the absolute worst because they have zero impact which feels worse than just not having them. For me, personally, this show really needed to be more like the mid-section of Neon Genesis (or the second season of Steven Universe), where the marriage of real story and character development was more deftly married and intertwined with the sillier character and episodic stuff, because as it is right now, this feels like two completely different shows that rather rudely replace the other at a moment's notice, and neither of them seem to work with or without each other...though I would say the sillier stuff at least gets closer, even if I still get a bit annoyed with it. At least with that side of the show, I'm not constantly asking myself "why should I care about this?". What's especially weird to me about all of this is that I don't dislike the characters. In fact, I rather like both Faye and Jet...Spike and Ed not so much, but I didn't particularly dislike either of them, and I'm not really being fair to Ed with how little the show did with her up to the point that I watched. This is one of the rare cases where the show is failing me for reasons other than the characters, and it's failing so bad that I just don't feel like I can keep watching. Structurally speaking, I think there are some similarities with this show to Samurai Champloo, but...I don't know, I feel like that show starts you off on a much better foot, and it gives you both a workable premise and tangible goal that the show kind of herds itself and its characters around/towards, and I think that really helps keep it together and not suffer from the feeling of constant deflation and pointlessness seeping into most aspects of Cowboy Bebop. Also, the main character is a mostly defenseless and yet contrarily rather tactless girl that can't just fight* or smarm her way out of situations all day long like Spike and Faye do in Cowboy Bebop, which for me personally makes for much more interesting ways of handling situations. *If in my entire life I never again have to see a scene where our character gets completely surrounded and outgunned and outmaneuvered and just plain old outmatched - you know, like an impossible situation that would require our character to actually surrender or run or practically consider what is the least worst option, or really just do anything besides repeatedly press their magical "ha ha, I win" button that makes the entire setup and scene completely pointless...it will have been too soon. Even in shows/movies that I like, I really hate that crap: it's the cinematic equivalent of playing Baldur's Gate 2 and having to fight a horde of goblins when you're an epic level character...except instead of taking exactly one spell to wipe the whole lot of them out, it feels like you have to do it in turn-based mode because of how much time is spent on it when it should obviously be over in just seconds.

Cowboy Bebop, episode 11: Toys in the Attic. It's the Alien-ish rip-off episode. Some little creature is sneaking around biting everyone, which isn't killing them, but making them very sick. Also, episodes 12 and 13, Jupiter Jazz, which were main story episodes that start with Faye running off for unexplained reasons, and then episode 14, the chess episode. Now, you're probably wondering why I watched so many episodes in a row given my previous glacially slow rate of watching this. Well, as it happens, I thought I was perhaps doing myself a disservice by watching it so slowly, and that I might enjoy it more if I watched more of it consecutively rather than months apart. It turns out that my thinking was very wrong, because now I don't really want to watch any more of this show at all because I'm pretty certain that I just straight up do not like it due to a number of factors that I could go into...but really, why bother? It henceforth goes into that Princess Mononoke tier where there are obviously many good things about it that should place it well above its peers, but...for some reason, no, it just doesn't come together as a whole for me. In other words, into the trash it goes.

Actually, I'd already seen the 1984 short. I think I watched it shortly after The Shining when I saw Shelley Duvall was in it. Didn't know it got him fired from Disney!

thoughts & prayers rip bozo so long, gay bowser et cetera note to anyone who doesn't know anything about deshaun watson and is wondering why i would be cheering on injuries when that is definitely not something i normally ever do: he's a serial sexual assaulter

GN testing of that unfinished APO/thread-scheduling program @Gfted1 linked to. tl;dr: The efficiency cores don't seem like they should be used as primary threads for gaming workloads, they're not powerful enough and lead to both lower performance and ironically worse power efficiency, and this application seems to rather successfully optimize thread scheduling in order to minimize those issues and get more out of the CPU. Unfortunately, if Intel's explanation for why there are so few models and games supported is true, it also seems like an application they might never get fully off the ground and will probably just end up dropping because of it being too much work to maintain...not unless they figure out some automated way of running games through tests to figure out the best thread-scheduling configurations. Which is certainly possible at some point in the future, but it doesn't seem like that's what they're doing right now. I've never been a huge fan of this idea of CPUs having different/asymmetrical core configurations, especially not with how many threads CPUs have these days, so it is kind of funny to see that Intel's approach here is causing them havoc and leaving unrealized gains on the table. And now AMD has similar issues with its X3D cores...

It's always a marvel to watch films where the filmmakers have actual ideas and put in the effort to flesh out and develop its characters, who are so much more than just your average copy-and-paste cardboard cutout impressions like so many others make, so that they can tell those ideas in a manner that is real and impactful. Even the father character, who by all rights I should hate...I don't, because there are reasons, both explicit and implied, that kind of help explain why he is the way he is, and you have Chie being constantly let down and frustrated and embarrassed by him, but still trying to care for him, trying to help him along in the little ways that she can because she is both clever and loving in her own ways, and so you have what would almost always be just a cheap and annoying character pretty much anywhere else take on depth and even a kind of sympathetic quality. I sometimes forget that it is possible for filmmakers to accomplish this kind of thing (even with animated films over 40 years old set in a time, place, and culture so different from my own!) - probably thanks to the endless deluge of films that don't really try because they expend their run-time on things that are apparently much more important than the foundation that is organically telling your story through your characters, right up until I experience a film like this again. Takahata was somehow consistently able to accomplish this feat, particularly in the films that he wrote or helped write himself...and I can't help but notice that the one film of his that I didn't much like, he has no writing credit for. Of course, I am hugely biased in that I prefer my plots, characters, and themes to be written in a very particular manner...but man, when I look at how Takahata told his stories compared to something like Utena, it feels like a child must have been at the helm of the latter for it to have been the way that it was.

Jarinko Chie AKA Chie the Brat (1981). Well, how's that for a messy poster? I think this is the final Takahata* animated feature I had yet to watch, though it seems to be a bit of an ironic title, as it should really be called (spoilers for just the premise) "Chie Is Very Overwhelmed and Her Life Is a Wreck Because Mom Ran Away and Dad Is a Deadbeat Manchild". (Who the hell makes blurays that are letterboxed on all four sides? Memories was like this, too!) Maybe that was too long, though. Now, from what I understand, the original manga that this is based off of is supposed to be a slice of life-ish comedy, and heck, even the movie's poster would seem to suggest that, but...while there are definitely funny parts, the film is way too hard of a commentary on machismo, broken families, and how children are affected by the behavior/decisions of their parents for it to really qualify as an out-and-out comedy, which I am perfectly fine with because this is Takahata at his best: I loved it. After the film was evidently a success, Takahata would also direct a TV series of Jarinko Chie just a handful of months later as well, which I'll have to check out at some point too. Man, it's tough when you go and watch something to finally get it done with and out of the way, and then it's good so you have to go and check out the other related media. *This also means that the only Takahata film I did not really like was his very first, Prince of the Sun...which is a funny contrast to Satoshi Kon, whose only film I did not really like was his last, Paprika. Weird.

Harmagedon AKA Genma Wars (1983). It's a Madhouse-made film, and I saw a screenshot of this girl's hilarious chin and decided I would check it out. Two hours of good art and animation but completely failing to establish world, plot, characters, stakes, and any reason to care later, I reflected that funny chins are perhaps not the ideal manner in which to select films to watch, especially when a film has dismal ratings on even imdb. Whoops.