Bartimaeus

It's not that much about The Acolyte specifically (they say it's basically maybe alright but not great and certainly not worth all the controversy), but it's nonetheless a really good discussion on how insane everything has gotten, on all sides, except for the people who just want to enjoy something decent. Diversity and representation are both good, but they're not necessarily appropriate or needed for everything all the time every time. It's also not going to make any material difference in how good or bad something is, no matter how much we're told something either is great by those who want it or is terrible by those who hate it. I hope we can eventually get past all of this and reach a happy medium where people feel like they're being represented well enough without it feeling like over-compensation for the past but also without the constant culture wars. On a side-note, why is Wil Wheaton the most punchable interviewer any time I see the stupid bastard? Gosh. Mike talks about how if you turn something on and you don't like it, you can just turn it off, but I really don't see an easy way to tell RLM to stop putting Wil Wheaton in their Star Trek/Wars videos. Bah, humbug.

Visually, I remember everything about it looking great, and I didn't even get to see the new scan from the negatives that Vinegar Syndrome did which looks so much better than the old extra-regional transfers. But the story and characters ultimately left me, uh, feeling like the cinematography and premise both got rather let down.

I really hated Dobby when I read the books, but I hated Dobby somehow even more when I watched the films. Besides The Chamber of Secrets unfortunately having the highest Dobby-to-No-Dobby ratio, it's probably also my favorite. For me, this problem also applies even to the earlier books, especially insofar as the series predominantly takes place at a school of magic where students supposedly make life-long friends, grow up, and study/learn magic. You know, normal school and coming-of-age stuff. With the exception of The Goblet of Fire (the film of which is both strange and kind of horrendous for my tastes - big surprise when you hire a new director that didn't watch the previous movies or read the books and who you then ask to adapt the wackiest and most off-beat entry), I feel the movies do a much better job than the books of conveying all of that than the books did, which doesn't make a lot of sense given how easy it would be to just...write more stuff into the books. How precious little time is actually spent in the classroom learning or doing just normal school/friend stuff versus "Harry didn't have a good time in Divination and Potions with Snape proved to be no better" and then we're suddenly into the next month is a bit bizarre. The only spells the series ever mentions characters learning are always the exact ones that will be needed for the plot to function without something we've never heard of or seen before just suddenly appearing and being used. Most characters outside of the core cast which should in theory flesh out the world feel like they're only mentioned in brief, vague asides that aren't even actively written but are instead just passive descriptions of what they said or did. At times, reading those books almost feels like they were explicitly written to be turned into movies. Despite their issues, I do think the first three to four-ish books are pretty fun - heck, even movie 4, as much of a disaster that constantly goes off-style and off-script as it does, has its moments. That changes in a very bad way with book 5, and... In film The Order of the Phoenix's defense, I think the book is way worse than the film, which you kind of allude to later in your post. I expected the movie to be pretty unbearable because of how awful the book was (it does not help that Harry, whose eyes we see everything through, becomes an absolutely unlikeable bastard during this whole book, though I'll blame it less on him as a character and more on all of the idiotic circumstances that start at the end of The Goblet of Fire which Rowling wrote), meanwhile I was looking forward to film The Half-Blood Prince because while still very messy, it had been a hugely welcome and much more enjoyable respite compared to The Order of the Phoenix. To my surprise, I got almost nothing out of movie The Half-Blood Prince while I felt movie The Order of the Phoenix did about as well as it could to minimize how atrocious its source material was. I guess the flipped expectations helped the one I didn't like and hurt the one I did.

I just watched Klute not that long ago, too. RIP.

Maggie Smith played a...very different kind of teacher in this film. Very different. From a certain point of view, I think you could perhaps say even the complete opposite. Heck, her character in this film might even be a Voldemort supporter in the Harry Potter world, though probably not for the reasons one might expect. As I said, I have some unclear feelings about the character Maggie Smith played here, but it was a marvellously played character nevertheless. I also have no idea why this "Miss Gaunt" is named so, when it seems as though no-one else I can see in the cast list has anything even vaguely approaching something so on the nose. I should find another Maggie Smith film to watch, maybe one where she doesn't play a school teacher. The only two Harry Potter films I particularly like are the first two, but that makes sense, they're the silliest and lowest stakes out of the lot: by the time you get to Half-Blood Prince, there's barely a single speck of fun left in the whole series, because it's been completely drained in exchange for all the drama and serious plot stuff, and as someone who read the books when I was young as they were coming out, that just never really felt like a strength of Rowling's writing in the first place. Bleh.

I have not had any problems since you posted here. I have not ever had any 2FA enabled on the Obsidian fourms, though.

The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie (1969). I wanted to watch at least one non-Harry Potter Maggie Smith film, and this did not disappoint: though I'm not entirely sure how I feel about the complicated and sometimes ridiculous titular school teacher that she played in the film, there's no doubt that Maggie Smith did play her most wonderfully and I very much enjoyed the film because of her. However, the much more pressing issue cloaking this film in shadow is one Miss Gaunt, whose blank and dead-eyed stare will forevermore haunt my nightmares. If anything, the name "Miss Gaunt" doesn't nearly do this spectre justice. I looked up this actress in other films and I guess that's just how she looks, and a good thing too: the world of film always needs more unique and frightening faces. Hollywood in particular has always been so dreary with all its wretchedly ugly beautiful people, never more so than now.

I've played about a handful of hours of Stardew Valley and my impression of the game turned into "this is going to be impossible for me to enjoy because of how quickly days are over combined with how much crap you have to do that they've stuffed into this game...unless I just start cheating". I was really only scratching the surface with how little I played, too. The reason I didn't start cheating and instead quit was because I was not confident that I was actually enjoying any of the game's writing, content, or gameplay. None of the characters did anything besides annoy me, I don't really enjoy any element of farming or "designing" a home/base, and while there certainly seemed to be mysteries abounding, I kind of just found the gameplay loop to be too dull and repetitive for that to compel me forward any. I see people sink hundreds of hours into Stardew Valley and I wonder what I'm not getting, but I suppose that's just how it goes.

I have been playing a singleplayer poker game called Balatro recently. This short trailer more or less gives you the idea: As you win rounds, you earn money which can be used at the shop which you visit in between each round to try to modify your build (modify, add, or remove cards from your deck, add jokers that give various kinds of bonuses or change how your build functions)...but the more you win, the more points you'll need to win the next round. Anyways, I only mention all of this because after having played the game for like 20-30 hours over the last month or so, I was finally able to construct more or less the exact deck and winning hand, a High Card build (i.e. a single card and normally the absolute worst hand type that you can play), that I've previously tried to create a few dozen times but failed to, which I took a video of here: I only needed about 86,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 (i.e. 8.6*10^43) points to win the hand, but I scored 4,283,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 (i.e. 4.283*10^90) points, so I guess I got a little carried away there. Anyways, don't play Balatro, it's a pretty good but pointless poker game and you'll start go crazy from the possibilities that you can see but can't quite ever put together. I was finally able to build the exact build I had thought of like 5 hours into the game but couldn't ever quite get all the parts lined up for, and now I finally have no reason to continue playing it: though the game officially has no end as the required winning amount of points just continue to scale up exponentially (a build "wins" the game after defeating Ante 8, for reference - as you can see in the bottom left, I am actually at Ante 20/8 instead, and Ante 8 usually only requires around a score of just 100,000 to win), I think I can consider it "beat".

@LadyCrimson and I are continuing to have issues...I couldn't even login for like the last two days, cos each time I tried, it gave me that same error I showed in the image above. Well, at least my Steam profile is linked in my account here now in case I can't ever login again and somebody needs to contact me, .

Semi-related: the only malware I've ever had in my entire life was thanks to my brother installing a pirated version of Temple of Elemental Evil on my PC back when I was like eight. No, I'll never forgive him for it...though there was one good effect: it permanently scared me off the whole sordid affair of online piracy. Squeaky clean ever since.

Not sure whether to post here or in the anime thread... The Lord of the Rings: The War of the Rohirrim, an official feature film coming to theatres somewhere near you this December... ...No, this isn't a joke, this is really what a Lord of the Rings feature film is actually going to look like...in theatres. Well, until it horribly flops and they release it to streaming shortly after, anyway.

Dontnod made 1 and 2, Deck Nine made Before the Storm and True Colors; they also developed the remastered version of 1, and will also be making Double Exposure. Dontnod said they were done with the series after 2, so...eh? Maybe it's a game series that'll always be a one-off for me, for largely inscrutable reasons. As an aside, remasters of games that came out not that long ago and even on the same system(s) will always be weird and kind of scummy to me.

I don't really get the best impression from this trailer either, even bringing back Max...and I sure wish they'd go back to something closer to the original game's art style. The stylized semi-painterly visuals of the first game make it a lot softer on the eyes compared to these newer entries. It's funny how near and dear to me the first game is, meanwhile everything else since then has just felt like a non-stop series of fumbles.

Got logged out again...couldn't sign back in for quite a while, kept getting this error each time I tried:

Same browser (Firefox), same device (my PC, the only device I ever login to here with), same IP*, didn't clear cookies or anything else. The second logout happened in the middle of me writing a post - I was quite confused when I tried to post it and was given a "forbidden" error. *-ish. It looks like my last two IPv4 octets changed sometime within the last two weeks from what I can tell, but I can't say for sure when the switch happened - you might have a better idea by checking some of my latest posts for their IPs with your moderator tools, if that's something possible on this forum software like it is with phpBB. I don't think the last two octets changing would affect anything, but...

i was logged out twice today pity me PITY ME

Unforgiven (1992). In theory, I should've liked the ugly story that this was trying to tell, pathetic and free from any 'glory', a solemn introspection and sunset for westerns...but the leading trio of Eastwood, Freeman, and Woolvett conspired to blow up half the film for me. They all inexplicably stunk...or maybe were trying to do or be something that I just didn't understand. Everything else about this movie was pretty enjoyable, especially with the film seeming to be a kind of reflection on Clint Eastwood's career in the genre that he helped shape and popularize. It's one of those films I wish I had liked but for some reason didn't, especially what with this being considered one of the best films of all time. Funnily, the opening of the film (i.e. the king's...uh, play, or whatever) was probably my least favorite part of the film, mainly because I was wondering what the hell was going on and just what I was getting into. I think if I re-watched the opening, I'd like it a lot more now, but it was a bad way to start the film for me. Initial impressions can be difficult to shake, so it's further credit to the film (...and the king) that it did.

And Beast Boy...inexplicably just stops doing that even though it was effective. Trigon just sits there uselessly flailing around in agony until Beast Boy decides to leave of his own accord. In video games, you keep doing what works until it stops working...in shows and movies, a character doing that to resolve every situation gets repetitive and boring awfully quickly, even if it makes the character seem stupid when they stop. Similarly, a character using one of their abilities in an unexpected way to resolve a problem can either be great or completely stupid, depending on the drama of the situation, how well it was or wasn't set up, how cool or funny it is, and probably a variety of other factors. Look at this nonsense I found in Atom Eve's Invincible wiki entry, under "weaknesses": And noted right next to it... In effect, the typical "we gave this character too powerful of an ability" combined with "so we're going to put an artificial limit on it" topped off with "but actually she can bypass it...but only when we want her to" nonsense. Is it better than not addressing it at all? Maybe, maybe not...addressing it kind of just draws more attention to how stupid it is, so maybe it's better to just not. She changes a textbook into something else entirely different and then right back again, with the textbook having completely resumed its previous form so that it can still be read, so I guess her ability to instantly analyze, memorize, and change reality is literally just about perfect, which makes her powers seem even dumber. This is precisely why I try not to think about this, it really doesn't matter and it's all a load of nonsense. I only care about something like this is if there isn't other things that I like about what I'm watching to distract me from thinking about it, which if it's not accomplishing, is usually a sign I should just stop watching.

I forgot exactly what I said about Invincible...something like "I could barely watch the first half, but by the end I'd had a pretty good time because it stopped being stupid". Common problem with a lot of shows, really, especially in this new age of low episode counts causing the front-loading of all your character and world setup right off the bat. I haven't started the second season...to be honest, all the people that I knew who liked the first season seem to have completely lost interest in the show because of the amount of time it took to make a second season, so nobody watching it and nobody caring hasn't really put me into a mood to watch it. To be honest, on the very rare occasion that I watch it, I basically don't pay attention to what anyone can do in superhero/villain stuff. The moment I start thinking about it, my suspension of disbelief can't help but go right out the window. Strengths, weaknesses, and powers/abilities come and go while new ones are made up all as the narrative demands it, and there are pretty much always obvious massive issues like the one you pointed out with Atom Eve, so does any of it really matter? It's just better not to care, if you can.

Aren't they a dice roll with OLD games, too? That's the primary I've never considered them, having heard horror stories about compatibility with old crap, especially anything DX9 and earlier. Immediate compatibility with new games doesn't really concern me.

Yeah, I don't play new AAA games basically ever, so last year I bought an RTX 2060 from EVGA for a hundred bucks and called it good. I haven't run into any games where I needed it to be more powerful than that, so... It's not as if I can't afford it, but I don't know, I've never paid more than $200 for a GPU in my life and I'm kind of inclined to keep it that way what with my faded interest in current AAA games.

The Devils (1971)...by the ever incorrigible Ken Russell. It's difficult to put into words exactly what makes Russell's films so...is "on-putting" a word? It should be: it's basically the same as "off-putting", insofar as that there's something bizarre and disconcerting experienced, except that it's interesting and entertaining instead of being unpleasant or tiresome as you would rightfully expect given the content. The man has this inexplicable superpower of making films that don't really have any right to be good...exactly that. I would say this is his best film of the ones I've watched, and I was rather enthralled by both characters, story, themes, and performances, though I think I still ultimately liked The Boyfriend a little more for subjective reasons. The Exorcist is widely remembered as one of the best films of all time while The Devils was heavily censored and disavowed by the media: it perhaps seems a strange difference in reactions, given how many similarities you might notice between the two and that they were released at close to the same time (1971 vs. 1973). I suppose The Devils has a more...dual nature, in that the audience has to grapple with the fact that it walks a very fine line in being comedic, nearly parodical, in how outrageous (though never unintelligible) it gets - in grave contrast to its all too real messaging on the harrowing and dangerous intersection of politics, religion, and human nature, among a number of other things. I could see that offending many political and religious sensibilities where The Exorcist didn't, as The Exorcist always played it straight, always treated the religious and supernatural elements very seriously while keeping any commentary it might have on them quiet enough, while The Devils most certainly did not. On the other hand, I wouldn't dream of The Devils giving up on its funnier, more sociopolitical side if it meant the film forsaking the scene where a carefree and whimsical King Louis XIII lounges around in the raving throng of "demonically possessed" nuns. Who else is going to dispel the demons from all of them with an ancient vial of Jesus' blood inside of a relic container before impishly revealing that the box was in fact completely empty, causing the possessions to resume as if they hadn't ever paused? I was quite saddened the king didn't show up at either the trial or the stake burning, but I suppose His Majesty's delightful presence there would've rather undercut the film, so it was probably all for the best.

"It isn't accurate, but it is correct." I haven't checked my YouTube subscriptions in two days and GN appears to have released six videos in that time.

Assuming it hasn't been remade into some abomination and you're talking about the 1990 OVA, I'm pretty sure I have a copy of that lying around somewhere, but I haven't checked it out yet...