Bartimaeus

Dallas vs. Boston? Um...is it too late to cheer for Denver? I think it's too late.

The Trump party leadership unilaterally deciding to kick Trump off the ballot would lead to both a total collapse of the current party structure (i.e. themselves, the leadership) as well as electoral disaster, neither of which the Trump party, in its own self-preserving interest, wants any part of. I feel confident in saying that the old Republican guard is largely just hoping that they can outlast Trump one way or another without ever having "betrayed" him - that's why, over the years, you've even seen cracks in the wall here and there, such as after January 6th, where Republican party leaders did actually attempt to pivot away...before quickly realizing that no, even that still wasn't enough to turn their core voting base against him, and attempting to pull further away would only endanger themselves instead. Powerful cults of personality do not leave easy/feasible ways of getting out once they've taken hold, and they signed an unbreakable deal with the devil by embracing Trump that they're now reaping the rotten fruits from.

For state charges, Florida defers to the state where the convicted criminal felon has been criminally convicted as a convicted criminal felon...criminally, as to whether they're allowed to exercise their right to vote as a convicted criminal felon as a result of their criminal felon conviction. So in this particular case, Donald Trump the convicted criminal felon would be allowed to vote, as a convicted criminal felon, in Florida, because his criminal felon conviction occurred in New York, where criminally convicted felons are still allowed to vote with criminal felon convictions. Woof, sorry, that was a mouthful, but I couldn't think of any other possible way to word it.

In all honesty, even though it IS 34 felonies, they're all the least serious type of felonies, and they're all for the same crime. Even though each charge carries a maximum of 4 years of prison, it's not completely unusual to avoid any prison time here. But sentencing (now announced as June 10th July 11th) is left up to the discretion of the judge and what they feel is appropriate given the general conduct of the defendant throughout the trial (as well as post-trial) as well as other considerations, such as whether it's a consistent pattern of criminal behavior. Really, all bets are off as to exactly what the sentencing will be.

He'll never be indicted, he'll never sit for trial, he'll never be convicted, he'll never see the inside of a prison cell...

From what I read, sentencing may take a few weeks, and it's not clear as of yet what kind of sentencing there may be given the extraordinary circumstances. This particular judge seems to rather explicitly hold Trump in contempt, but...again, extraordinary circumstances.

Trump has been convicted on all 34 felony charges of his hush money / election interference trial. (e): Damn it, sniped by literally like one second. Oh, it looks like the Associated Press website died anyways. Don't know if because of the news or if just coincidence...

Man, I was just talking about this in the other thread, and my guy Nerrel comes out with a video to talk about it at the exact same time. Screw you, James Cameron (and David Lynch, and Peter Jackson, and all the other hack frauds using garbage upscaling processes like this for """4K remasters"""), and screw all this AI nonsense only used to cheap out on doing actual work to sell this crap. Technology advancements seem to always just be used to make everything worse than they already were. "Vasquez starts this shot as an amorphous blob before the AI starts to put a mouth on her cheek, then realizes 'no, that's not it' and then puts a cartoon butthole in, which would be a perfect fit for a little corn cob pipe by the way, and then it gives her Pennywise makeup to cap things off. Nailed it."

He's really going to need a new audio guy/gal, the whole thing was nearly brought to its knees because of bad audio mixing and the sound effects being badly timed and put together. Hell, even the overbearing music kind of sounds like it's underwater, it's all weak and muddy. Oh, he didn't have an audio guy/gal in the first place...uh, I guess he REALLY needs a new one, then, . Woof, nothing like some really bad audio to make you consciously realize how important all the major aspects of a production are, even in just a short piece like this...it can be tough when you're a one-man (or nearly) production and a certain element is just not your specialty. Though I don't know if the creator really intends to try to sell this as a concept to a studio - from the description, it doesn't really sound like it, but maybe you know something I don't. (e): I just looked through the comments and I guess he might try to do just that, and I also wasn't surprised when he said he took inspiration from Tartakovsky's Primal for it.

No...and yes. He's one of the few auteurs to come out of the last decade that is getting actual budgets for his films. There aren't a ton of those around anymore, and most of the ones still working are ten, twenty years older. So I figure I have at least another decade, maybe two, to look forward of Dennis(sic) films, and it is a bit annoying that he's going to inevitably suck up a lot of the air in the room during that time. But like I said, I'm not going to continue to make the mistake by watching more of them, I don't really even want to talk or think about the guy anymore. Let Dennis and his films forever languish in the vast graveyards of my mind. James Cameron: At least he's only working on his cruddy video game movies these days (i.e. Avatar) - well, in between personally overseeing and approving of infamously terrible AI-upscaled re-releases of his previous films, that is. And actually, I'm okay with Terminator 1 and True Lies, which is at least something. I have to be honest, while I do really dislike James Cameron's work as a whole, I kind of forgot my actual least favorite director of all time, which is Darren Aronofsky: now there's a guy whose films have consistently and vehemently disgusted me so much that if I heard he was the victim of a grisly murder, genuinely my first thought would probably be "good!"...before I remember that, oh yeah, he just made awful movies, I don't really need to be a bloodthirsty lunatic because of it, .

I do wish I understood what other people see in his style. Here's a guy who's supposedly making some of the best films of the last decade, but I just can't invest in his stories, develop attachments to his characters, or even be taken to a different world by his visuals and environments. My whole thing is that I want to be emotionally moved one way or another by what I am watching, to actively engage with and become attached to what I'm watching...not get the very life sucked out of me as I watch. He's just one of those guys like James Cameron that no matter how many times I try their films, I really wish I could go back in time and push them off a bridge over an interstate highway so that someone else with a totally different directorial voice could've made their films. That's why I'm not going to watch any more.

On one hand, I think it may be that this guy's films aren't for us and we should just stop trying. On the other hand, that's because they're incredibly dull and it's his fault for deliberately making them that way over and over. Overall, I blame him more than I blame us, .

I used duckduckgo as my main search engine for about a year, and it was useless for all but the most basic searches and I ended up just constantly repeating the same searches with Google instead. Its inability to consistently follow its own search operators (which I just did a search for again and as of the last year is apparently still an issue!) used to infuriate me endlessly. Now I use (and also apparently advertise for) Startpage, which is just a Netherlands-based Google Search pass-through that gives you the same results as Google Search but minus all the, uh, Google. Mind you, Google Search isn't as good as it used to be a decade ago (that or the internet is a much worse place that has lead to every search being inundated with endless garbage), but at least the search operators still correctly work through Startpage to drill down specific things I'm looking for. I'm waiting for the day Google takes away those, too.

Sorry Shady, but go Timberwolves! Second ever conference championship appearance, and did it while beating the reigning champs and MVP.

New York Times: RFK Jr. says "[parasitic worm] ate part of his brain".

Steam says it's been on my wishlist since 2021/09/08. I don't know if I'll actually like it, but the screenshots have always seemed very attractive to me.

Gromnir hasn't logged in for a couple of months as well. My suspicion that we're all just one person's alt accounts has never felt closer to the truth...

Late Night With the Devil (2023). I got a few minutes into the RLM video about this and decided to watch it. I guess I was kinda in the mood for more Satanic stuff after playing Yuppie Psycho recently. I don't know if it's my hatred of late night talk shows, but legitimately the most fun I had with this was the first minute and a half where they had like fifteen different "we made this film!" logos play and I started to think that it was a joke. Ugh.

There are two major ending branches, with different sub-endings for each. The first branch I got was the one you mentioned (where you attend Hugo's birthday party - this is the 'normal' one), but there's a second branch that veers wildly off into a different direction that reveals a lot more about the Sintra family (you must discover where the ritual dagger, the Athame, is hiding and take it before the birthday party happens). I feel this is intended to be the true ending, though interpretation may vary depending on exactly what you value (also, I think it probably works better if you've already played the first ending, as I feel it builds off of what you learn in the first ending branch). Yep, I've also played both of those. Though very different, DDLC is a pretty cute/horrific game and one of like...maybe four visual novels I've ever played all the way through, and The Count of Lucanor I quite liked as well though it didn't quite match the highs of Yuppie Psycho. Thanks for the other mentions. Yeah, finding quality games that really hit the mark can be difficult...there's always stuff where it's similar-ish and kind of alright, but it's usually pretty clear when a game really has its claws in you versus when it doesn't.

Yuppie Psycho, successfully 100%-ed! This time, I played through the 'true' ending, which actually properly resolved the central story once and for all... ...but it was personally much more horrifying for me. Steam lists these two game tags back-to-back, just like this, for Yuppie Psycho: It's honestly pretty accurate, and I think I'd say that cute horror is the best horror. The same developer is working on a similar game that I hope is at least 75% as good, and having now played this game twice (although really more like three times, what with the failed "no save" playthrough mentioned in my previous post having gotten me like 80% of the way there), I can now safely qualify this game as one of my favorite games of all time - it's stuck with me for years at this point, and I still love it. There's something about all the different little pieces that come together perfectly to make it a really personalized-for-me kind of game. Though I could probably play quality games in this genre (this kind of top-down exploration game with fun characters, world, and story) for probably forever if I had enough of them. If anyone knows of any more, feel free to recommend them to me. Though I've already played SIGNALIS, which was similar-ish and which I also really liked.

It's 1 AM CST right now (~1:12 AM to be specific is when I first noticed a huge lag spike), and this is who is online: It's taking anywhere between 10 and 30 seconds to navigate to each page (and that is not an exaggeration, I have literally been counting as I try to refresh pages). I opened and loaded literally every single one of my bookmarks in the time it took for me to get to the Obsidian forums' front page and then open this thread to be able to post this. There do seem to be quite a number of guest browsers at this particular moment, but I'm not sure if the 449 shown in the image above adequately explain the really terrible performance here (especially at 1 AM). Note also these posts from other forum residents LadyCrimson and Keyrock mentioning recent performance issues:

Holy spoilers, Batman! I was planning on watching this, and you went and just ruined the whole thing. . . . Is what I would say if I had received a frontal lobotomy sometime within the last 24 hours. That's perpetually my experience with modern anime: things that are clearly supposed to come across as being 'cute' to the viewer instead almost always seem some combination of manipulative, wrongheaded, and creepy/uncomfortable to me, which has the effect of taking me out of the whole thing really quick when I can palpably sense that I'm at odds with whatever I'm watching. Though there have always been hacks creating shows/movies while not knowing how or not wanting to put in the work to make something effective (usually instead using cheap shortcuts, or sometimes not even that!), I really feel like sensibilities for what's okay have changed to the point where I cannot cope. I didn't think it was that bad...but I was watching it with my eyes squinted to the point where they were only one planck length open, which may have had something to do with it. Honestly? From all the characters I've seen in your screenshots from this show, she looks the closest to her original design. Maybe seeing her in motion would change my mind, but she doesn't look nearly as weird or creepy as...uh, everyone else. I mean, just look at some of the main cast just one screenshot below this one, they all look like sneople. What an abominable art style, and what's scary is that it's so much better than the first season too! WHAT?! Apparently, this more or less follows the original manga story: she appears and then she is immediately destroyed by the Sailor Starlights. It doesn't really make sense or work on any level, especially once you know that these corrupted Sailor Guardians have been brainwashed and actually are good (which the writers of the Sailor Stars season obviously recognized with how they and their fates were re-written), but that's Naoko's Takeuchi's (self-admitted) terrible writing for you. I suppose I can at least be thankful that she did appear for a page or two in the manga, because that lead to her being much more extensively used in the show. Oh man, I figured we were like at least an hour in at this point. The one you always hated was...Makoto and Ami, wasn't it? So they obliterated those two together and now are feeding into the other two? Ugh. I have seen more convincing planets in space in N64 games. Yeah, as mentioned above. I am a little confused as to whether these corrupt Sailor Guardians are actually supposed to be corrupt/brainwashed in the manga and this show, or whether that was an invention of the original TV show when they tried to flesh these characters out. And honest to god, the show doesn't even flesh them out that much, but the time spent with them doing all the silly episodic hijinks combined with the little bit of additional story about them does wonders for them in comparison to this trash. I guess if you don't read them as being brainwashed, and that they're more just "fallen" (i.e. willing) Sailor Guardians, it makes more sense that they just keep getting killed over and over, but it's still real bad. Gosh, I miss Japanese lady voices from the 70s-90s: these are the same songs, but the voices just suck. You know, the Amazoness Quartet was probably my favorite part of SuperS...not that there was a ton of competition, given the bad writing for the main cast, the awful writing for Nehellenia, the wretched writing for the Amazon Trio, and the disgusting writing for Pegasus and Chibi-Usa. I thought they seemed to be the only part of that season that wasn't completely out of place when compared to the other seasons: they were pretty silly, fun, and overall harmless compared to everything else. I'm sure they were stupid in the manga and Crystal, though. And there it is. Guess I did correctly remember that this was the one you hated. ok.jpeg Sorry, I can't make any promises.

People are saying that the forums' performance has been less than great as of late, with many second page loads randomly occurring when they hadn't in the past. I'm saying that, I am the people.

There's a lot of factors that go into humor, and that can definitely be part of it. But I would say framing also matters a lot, and one of the ways in which framing strongly affects humor is precisely who is telling you the "funny" and in what context. I have a friend that likes to occasionally link me clips from the demon/televangelist known as Kenneth Copeland... ...and in the context of knowing that my friend also thinks he might be a demon, the clips are usually pretty funny. But if I saw the same clips linked by one of his cult members (i.e. charitably, probably a moron...though potentially someone much more insidious than that), it would be a whole different story: you might well be able to apply a similar train of thought to some of the things said/linked to here, though probably for different kinds of reasons in different situations. I also think Alex Jones can be the funniest guy on Earth...sometimes, but I'm certain that I don't find him funny in the same ways that his true believers can, and I would no doubt be an alien in their midst.

Yuppie Psycho. I played through this game once years back and loved it, now I came back to replay it and also to tackle all the achievements. One of the achievements is to play through the whole game without saving even once (howlongtobeat.com says it's an 8-10 hour-ish game, not including the extended alternative/true ending content that's a little tricky to get). I got like 80% of the way through the game and then died during a short (5 second or so) cutscene. I'd pressed a button that revealed a passageway, which the game panned over to show me, but the game didn't actually pause during said pan, and a zombie hyucked acid barf all over me and I died right as it came back to me.