Bartimaeus

Chernobyl was absolutely fantastic, definitely my favorite miniseries of all time (my personal love for S.T.A.L.K.E.R. and all things Chernobyl-related surely didn't hurt, either). Stranger Things 3 was pretty good, but season 1 is still so far above both seasons 2 and 3 that I just can't appreciate it the same way as I did. Still has really good character writing for the most part, but my brain is starting to turn off (or...maybe on is more accurate, since it starts to wander) during a lot of parts, especially the big action and CGI scenes, and at some point, I think I just stopped believing in Eleven as a character and more as a set-piece, which doesn't help when the show is nominally centered around her. Eh, whatever, still pretty good, I guess, but seriously, go watch Chernobyl.

I was expecting and desired a rickroll. Hmph.

Trump thinks we had airports in 1775, gets Revolutionary War details confused with War of 1812? It was supposedly a scripted speech, how did no-one catch at least the airport one? ...Trump's constant stream of gaffes might make him a pretty funny guy if he both had zero power and didn't also happen to be a revolting human being...but then we probably wouldn't care if that were the case.

Some absolute nutjob in an IRC channel I was on started messaging me out of the blue a few weeks back. Kept messaging me over and over, pestering me about who I was going to vote for, and who I favored in the Democratic race. Literally messaged me for about an hour about how wonderful Kirsten Gillibrand seemed, and wanted to know my thoughts on whether or not I thought she had a chance of being the Democratic candidate. I had never even heard her speak before. Ended up saying I had to go and making a new username just to get him to stop bothering me. I guess I could've blocked him, too, but it's generally better to stay polite with the nutjobs, I think. Anyways, I finally got to hear her talk tonight and I think I hate her. Not sure if the nutjob biased me against her or if she really was that dreadful tonight (holy cow, the amount of interruption from this lady). Either way, I'd like to award a big "screw you" to that IRC nutjob now - you wasted an hour of my time about a candidate that was polling at like sub-1% at that time, and is probably going to go below even that after this. Think I liked Harris the best out of everyone (whom I knew nothing about beforehand). Was not terribly impressed by Bernie for most of it, which was disappointing - too much of the ol' stump speech (which effectively served as deflection), not enough in-context/situational answers. Will be nice to see a more controlled debate forum than the clownshow that this was with so many candidates that have virtually 0% chance of doing anything, and where they're hopefully not all trying to shout over each other for speaking time.

It essentially means that the quarantined subreddit (and anything that's posted in it) will never appear to anyone not specifically subscribed to it, including non-registered users. Only accounts with verified emails are allowed to subscribe to it as well. It also disables their ability to have their custom formatting and styles IIRC, which means their subreddit will appear simply as the vanilla subreddit (i.e. no giant banners of Trump or such).

But it probably provides a better overview of their thoughts on the movie (yes, they hated it, but it's not "the worst thing ever", and the fact that a bunch of internet nerds got up in such a furor over it just provided it more notoriety than it really deserved - if people want to enjoy some bad gender-swapped reboot of a beloved comedy, it's probably better to just let them and not make a big deal out of it...and this principle probably applies to almost anything). Also, sadly, not everyone is as interested in video essays as some of us.

It also would've probably made more sense to link the real RLM review instead of the Plinkett Review that switches between good points and hyperbole and mocking all the people who were getting comically outraged by what's just yet another bad remake and calling it "the worst thing ever" at the time.

I mean, we have to tolerate media nonsense 24/7 365 days of the year 75 years of our life. Deal with it, .

lmao, yes, you are correct, already freaking forgot the title of the movie and, once again, that was literally YESTERDAY (e): also, yeah, the original HP movies weren't the greatest or anything, but they were mostly solid and had their own distinct charm. I was so bored and numb to this new one, can't see myself going back

Yeah, I got halfway through Crimes of Grindelwald before I was defeated. That was yesterday, and I already don't remember basically anything of what I saw. Something...bank heist, zoo for magical creatures, muggle who doesn't want to be obliviated and lose his memories of the magical world. About all I got. Some movies are simply marvelous at leaving no imprint on my brain.

The Florida Project (2017). Great film about a little girl and her friends living with the "magic" of growing up right outside of Disney World. At one point went from crying straight to laughing out loud, and it was a good thing.

Lupin the Third: The Castle of Cagliostro (1979). Fun watch, but the damsel in distress was a bit too...damsel-y for my tastes to the point of being a drag and feeling a bit out of place for the rest of the movie. I did like the note the movie ended on with her, though, since it seemed like they were trying to setup a romance between her and the titular character for a long while but then suddenly subverted it (and for good reason, I think - I was starting to get a bit skeeved out for a bit there, so that was nice to see). Still, I think I would've preferred a different character entirely, preferably one with more...erm, character.

As I sometimes do, I decided to watch the movie first before the RLM review. ...But I haven't actually done that yet. Speaking of, I watched Us (2019). I'm not much of a horror person, but I do like the odd one here and there (The Thing, Alien), and I thought this was pretty decent. Certainly better than the cheap jump scare factories that most horror movies are now. There were times where I really had to turn off my brain because of logical realizations killing my suspension of disbelief, probably caused by a little too much overexplaining. Still, pretty decent.

...Is it actually industry standard to work with powers of 10 instead of powers of 2 there?

"Generic" protagonists I tend to think of as fulfilling a few archetypes. The good-natured but otherwise poorly characterized hero is one (most regularly found in stuff more aimed at children like Disney movies, sometimes with the addition of having like one negative trait they have to get over to resolve or otherwise successfully get through the plot of the movie), your generic witty action star is another (note my distaste for Marvel movies here, since that's so many of those characters, both male and female), the ultra-specific objective-driven protagonist is one of my most particularly disliked characters (bonus points if they're annoyingly angsty on top of it - "I have to find/avenge/whatever my father/mother/child or die trying!" is usually enough to make me stop watching or reading about anything), and there's probably a few other such archetypes that I can't think of right now that annoy the crap out of me after having seen them used way too many times. Note that I did not actually call Gosling's character in Blade Runner 2049 generic - just bland and underacted. Which, while not necessarily generic when seemingly done deliberately, can still understandably miss the mark for me when I have to watch nearly 3 hours of him barely being a character. 5 hours? Oh boy, can't wait for that Director's Cut... Yeah, it's a shame when a movie with apparent ideas and substance and when it was clearly made with a lot of expertise fails to come together as an actual movie to properly and enjoyably convey those things to the viewer. Apparently it was very well-liked by critics, and pretty well by audiences, too...and yet just barely broken even in theatres. Whoops. Shame is, I like the idea of replicants and am very intrigued by what exactly makes one human and intelligent and aware and such (although I'm more inclined towards intelligent machines in this discussion rather than clones or bio-androids or whatever replicants are supposed to be), yet both Blade Runners (and especially this one) have done pretty little for me on that front. @Gromnir It was about the hour-fifteen mark that we started undeniably having that sinking feeling and wanted it to end. I knew that stupid memory-maker was going to be the prodigal replicant, too, and very audibly groaned when that was the case. The near-OCD need to tie everything perfectly together by the end of a 2-hour movie is something I hate so freaking much for its prevalence. Never does a film feel more artificial. It tends to work better in TV shows and books due to their greater length and your greater investment into the work.

Yeah, I really only care about more meta stuff like that if I enjoyed the underlying movie to begin with, which I sadly didn't. I was rapidly switching between impatient, bewildered, and tense (that was then often deflated by the other two feelings) too often to like it. I'm not against slow movies, but I was internally groaning at where the plot was heading from nearly the start (for the record, I did not know Harrison Ford was in this movie, and kind of expected a plot completely separate from the original's), there weren't any particularly interesting or likeable characters for me to latch onto, and I'm just not the type of person that's very intrigued or wow-ed by 3D CGI in of itself, even though this movie's seemed very good. Didn't come together for me. (e): Also, I should repeat (since I've said it a few times before) that generic or bland male sole protagonists is very often one the biggest death knells in fiction for me, and well, yeah, K (Gosling) in this was bland and underacted (no doubt deliberately following the original movie, but still) to the extreme.

Blade Runner 2049 (2017). I did not care for it much. Some of the same issues I had with the original movie (although I still liked the original overall), I felt this one had even more problems and I unfortunately fell on the other side this time. A plot that gave the impression of being complex yet was stupidly simple and ultimately hackneyed (I also really, really hated that they tried to tie it back to Deckard and Rachael from the original - oh boy did that feel like a gigantic mistake about the time the Evil Corporation Overlord started spouting vague, pointless poetics at Deckard for minutes with near total incomprehensibility and inauthenticity). Just like the original, I didn't like our main character or find him interesting at all (actually I was more interested in the motivations and objectives of the replicant assassin lady...which didn't really turn out to be much anything, and she just got murdered in like the movie's only big action sequence that went on for too long with a lot of pointless and weightless kicking and punching which I hate in pretty much every movie). Much too slow at a lot of points (2 and 3/4ths of an hour...). In spite of the things I didn't like, there was some tension at various times, which is good...but it just didn't end up working for me overall.

Yeah, going into it, he was my least favorite Democrat in this race *that I know of*, and my results certainly supported that. Also wasn't surprised with my senator Klobuchar being my second least favorite known Democrat (I don't know anything about John Delaney). I went through all of the additional questions (although there were a number of questions that I did not feel comfortable answering due to either disinterest or particularly strong lack of knowledge).

lol @ Biden's "sense of humor" being his top-billed trait.

Well, it's not like I'm going to switch to Chrome. Having to browse the internet without any of my addons made me realize how completely terrible the internet is, though. uBlock Origin, Ghostery, Privacy Badger, Canvas Defender, Dark Reader...internet's garbage without all y'all.

Still not effective for me (on version 66.0.4). Have to manually run this script through the console every day to re-enable my add-ons. I think I read that they're aware the fix was not effective for everyone, so I hope a better fix is coming down the line sometime soon here.

Q: Did Bob Mueller support your conclusion? A: I don’t know whether Bob Mueller supported my conclusion. Q: Reports have emerged recently, general, that members of the Special Counsel's team are frustrated at some level with the limited information included in your March 24th letter. Do you know what they are referencing with that? A: No, I don't. -Attorney General Barr's Congressional Testimony on 4/10 "Mueller reportedly wrote a letter to Attorney General Barr objecting to his conclusion that Trump did not obstruct justice in the Russia probe" on 3/27. Whoops.

this is like a jimmy neutron mod or something, right (e): actually, I haven't seen jimmy neutron in nearly two decades, it's possible it looked better and had better writing than this

For people having trouble with linebreaks, you can use shift+enter for the old single linebreak instead.

The Three Caballeros (1944). Really weird, bizarre, and kind of off-putting movie that still had a lot of interesting stuff. Some of it seemed kind of acid-induced. The "Love is a Drug" scene: