Bartimaeus

The premise is interesting, the execution leaves me...wishing it weren't quite so play/theater-like. Scene after scene where characters are sitting, standing, or slowly walking around while pompously pontificating endlessly about various things in a very untrue-to-life fashion seems to always be a bit of a difficult sell for me, no matter who or what it's about, or what it all eventually culminates in. It's just not really my preferred manner of storytelling, no matter how many times I've experienced it. It may be because I never really get a strong and independent impression of the characters, who they are, or what they're trying to accomplish, as they end up feeling like lifeless extensions of the film with no real setup, personality, or agency of their own - instead of the film being an extension of the characters, which is always my preference. I think The Banshees of Inisherin is a good example for comparison, as that's a film with some vague similarities in style and comedy to El Conde, but the moment I think of that film, I'm instantly recalling the three main characters, things they said and did, what they wanted and needed from one another, each one's specific and personal eccentricities, and how they all connected to the themes of the film, whereas...with El Conde, I don't know, it's all very much a muddled mess with characters that I can't really pin down for the most part, and that makes connecting with the film in a broader sense very difficult for me. Boil it down to just not getting much out of the experience, I suppose. Speaking of Utena, I always thought Utena was at its best when it was just being silly and letting characters organically interact as opposed to getting singlemindedly focused on bolting whatever it was trying to say straight to my forehead. I think El Conde would've benefited from being a little more silly, which you think would've come naturally with the premise, but somehow it didn't manage to get there for me.

El Conde (2023). That was weird. It won't be cracking the shell, I'm afraid.

now i'm no deer expert, but that really looks like the same guy from last year

The only thing Steam reviews is any good for these days is identifying small-time indie games possibly worth playing. If there's an indie game with 100 reviews that no basically no-one has ever heard of much less played that you're considering, seeing >95% positive is surely a lot more encouraging than <50%. But that's pretty much it.

Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny (2023). I genuinely had a pretty decent time watching this. Oh sure, there were some lulls and the action scenes were a tad weak/goofy (Harrison Ford is like two thousand years old, give him a break), some of the humor doesn't work as well as it should, and I'm sure if I read detailed analysis of all the things wrong with it, it'd get torn apart, but I actually enjoyed watching it for the vast majority of the runtime. It mostly but not entirely feels like a retread of stuff done better in the first three films, but...you know, as far as completely unnecessary sequels go, if you want more Indiana Jones, it absolutely beats the socks off of Crystal Skull as a complete product. With Crystal Skull, you get such an immediate Star Wars prequels level of a "oh god" gut-punch right from the start, which you you can try to ignore for the first half (maybe even successfully!), but then it practically turns into a cage match against Muhammad Ali as you get into the second half, and that's just not a fight you're going to win: in contrast, this film just feels at least pretty alright to watch, from start to end, and that's nice. Dial of Destiny even has a lot more (and I mean a lot more) restrained and effective use of CGI to boot (yes, even accounting for the opening being approximately 95% CGI): it doesn't outright ruin nearly so many scenes like it did in Crystal Skull (actually, I think the most distracting thing was Indy's de-aged face during the back-in-time opening...that crap is getting better, but it's still not quite there when you put it directly under focus). There's nothing in this that's even within the same plane of existence compared to Crystal Skull's jungle car chase scene. Heck, right off the bat with Crystal Skull, you had the magically magnetically flying gunpowder, and I don't think this film has any one scene even as bad as that one...but, well, enough thinking about Crystal Skull. Also, and this may just be me, but I found the lady and kid way less annoying than...jeeze, didn't I just bloody say enough thinking about Crystal Skull? Sorry, that didn't last long. Okay, they're not nearly as much fun or as memorable as Short Round and Willie, but they're fine, and actually, I think Phoebe Waller-Bridge was even a little bit better than simply fine in her role. In full disclosure, the fun of Indiana Jones was never particularly about the action scenes for me, so the fact that they're a little weak is not at all the end of the world for me in the face of other things I care about a lot more being pretty decent, but if you're desperately looking to re-live your childhood through Indiana Jones doing his trademark young man swashbuckling stuff, you'll probably come up pretty empty-handed. Maybe Crystal Skull softened me up or something, but I enjoyed it. e: Red alert, red alert, this is not a drill: @Amentep, @majestic, and I all enjoyed the new Indiana Jones film. Yeah, wrap it up, folks: that should just about seal the world's fate. e2: Okay, watching the RLM video about this film, yes, it is a giant mess and I can't disagree with anything they say. Lmao. Still.

Eight hardliner Republicans who felt betrayed (or whatever) by him working with Democrats to not shut down the government voted with a unified Democrat vote to remove him (note: the vote was initiated by Republican Matt Gaetz). Democrats seemed to be willing to save him in exchange for some concessions to avoid more of this clown circus show in the future, but he was in between a rock and a hard place: working with them probably would've made more of his caucus turn against him, and the very little power he was already wielding with them would've become even thinner. He seemed to believe he would survive the vote leading up to it. First time in U.S. history the Speaker of the House has been ousted: now we'll get to see even more of the clown circus show, and what follows will probably be even worse.

"Bring it on." - Man who got brought on

The Rocky Horror Picture Show (1975). Well, that was certainly an experience. This is one of those films that's like...you know, a cult classic that you're supposed to watch, but then you take a glance at it and you're like "well, cult classic or not, I do believe that one is just not going to be for me". But despite my misgivings, this was pretty hilarious...though I did need subtitles because some of the voice recording was not the best. Tim Curry...it's, uh, difficult to believe that his career essentially started with the stage version of this.

I didn't, but I do appreciate a good Bard slaying.

You saying this really reminds me of an old N64 RPG called Aidyn where party members would have dialogues/cutscenes in really random places and as a result of inscrutable party composition choices that you could never really predict (i.e. if you had certain companions in your party together, dialogues could trigger if you happened to be in the right place at the right time...but otherwise, you might never see or even know that they exist) - on top of said joinable party members often not being where they're supposed to be and randomly disappearing from the game because of...reasons that you'll never find out. It was always unclear if it was because the game was buggy or if the developers intended for characters to just up and vanish on some kind of criteria, but regardless, the result was that if you wanted a party member to stick around, recruit them early and keep them the whole game, because kicking at least a couple of them out for even a second could result in you never seeing them ever again.

The price they gave up for him could potentially be very high if Giannis is gone and/or the Bucks are bad in the late 2020s...or surprisingly fairly little if they're somehow able to keep it together until then. The Trailblazers are betting on the former, the Bucks seem to be on the latter. Jrue was a key part of the Bucks' championship run, but at the same time, the man has been deplorable on offense all three years he's been on the Bucks as soon as the playoffs started, and in the current NBA, offense is simply way more important than defense. He's also repeatedly mentioned wanting to retire as soon as his current contract with the Bucks was up (and he also mentioned that he would retire as a Buck, to boot!) - whether or not that ends up holding true, we'll see. Either way, this was definitely not something I foresaw.

The local film club recently featured Satoshi Kon's Paprika (2006). Loved or at least liked everything else Satoshi Kon did, but Paprika did not click for me at all. Will a second watch change my mind any? Um...kind of! It's a visual treat, especially impressive for a 2006 film...well, minus the little random cost-saving 3D CGI bits here and there, but I still struggled to really fully 'get' it, though I did feel like I at least enjoyed it more this time around. I can't fault Satoshi Kon for making exactly one thing I can't quite seem to fully into, try as I might. Regardless, it's an awful shame that Dreaming Machine (and everything else he might've made if his life hadn't been cut so horrifically short) was never completed. RIP to that brilliant weirdo: it's utterly tragic that the man died at 46, long before many of the best creators would ever complete their finest works.

updating my nvidia gpu driver caused my computer to kill itself during the update, i lost all video output and nothing i could do would restore it (although I was able to confirm that my system was actually still running because I could start music with a hotkey press and hear the generic windows error sounds by just smashing buttons); tried to restart, tried to go into safe mode, but even on bootup during just the motherboard manufacturer logo, my screens were totally blank had to put my system drive into another computer and delete my nvidia drivers from there in order to restore functionality of one of my monitors, because literally nothing else i did would work...i'm now sitting here wondering if i roll the dice by trying to install the latest driver again is this the part where i vehemently swear off all nvidia products for the rest of my life? regardless, would not recommend the latest nvidia gpu driver, I'd give it a 4/10 at best, would really like to see a return to form for the inevitable sequels, but i'm not too optimstic about it at this point

That reminds me when of when I played a retro-ish indie game, there was inexplicably no FPS limit on the pause menu, so anytime I paused my FPS would go up to (I believe) >10,000 and my GPU would instantly reach max temp while very audibly screaming out in mortal agony. I gave them a bad review on Steam that specifically called out that issue for it and they fixed it a week later, and since I did like the game, I changed my review to a positive one. The system works.

My best friend in kindergarten was this very silly and incredibly sweet mute girl named Haley, but she sadly moved away during the next summer. She really helped me with a lot of things I was struggling with during that first year of school, and I'd always wished she hadn't moved away in the ensuing years...though I'd myself move away a handful of years later, and then again, and again, and again thereafter. Anyways, moral of the story being, try to treat people with kindness and you might make some genuinely good friends from it, though it's obviously a lot more difficult in adulthood than it is as a schoolkid.

Like Steam with video games, I do not find streaming services at this time to be performing an adequate job of helping me discover movies/TV I am genuinely interested in watching (as opposed to just "eh...maybe, kind of?" at best), so quite often, I am spending time on a particular website that I use which does a much better job of helping me identify things that I actually do want to try. But I am also not the "let's just turn something, anything on" type: I can only watch things with explicit attention and purpose, and I'd rather spend time exploring and researching to find something I earnest want to put my time and attention towards than mindlessly turning on something I'm just not really feeling. Streaming services seem to be invariably funnelling everyone towards their latest crap anyways, and I am simply not very interested - it doesn't help that Netflix seems to have an ever-shrinking library of older, foreign, and other third party content (which I feel is its true death knell, as that is what I am primarily interested in these days) with these streaming services essentially turning into TV channels by another name that you need to subscribe to in order to get 'their' content. Speaking of Netflix, it's hilarious that it's getting more expensive as the service has increasingly less to offer. That is not a winning value proposition, I am afraid, and I do have other options that I can and will use.

There is a story and theme to the film, but it is minimalist and rather impressionistic, and yes, I think you could work through the same ideas in a smaller time frame...but you'd take away both marvel and gravity that it would have if you did so too much. Rather than "it should have been twenty minutes", I would personally say that it probably would've been better off at twenty minutes less from its run time of 1:23: tighten up the pacing and cut out some of the of the indulgently gratuitous fat, and I probably would've gone from an "it was really neat and imaginative" to a less reserved "I actually rather quite liked it". Especially because anyone who knows my tastes in TV and film should know that anything which could even be vaguely called "impressionistic" would not normally fall under my wheelhouse: I'm all about comprehensible characters and dialogue and fully understanding what I am watching, and Mad God offers very little in any of that. I think for KP's "Eraserhead"-addled brain, it will probably be quite sublime, but for me...well, yeah, it was definitely neat. The opening scene shows a particularly noteworthy event in mythological history while reading a passage from Leviticus, which I took to kind of inform the audience for understanding the story and themes, but it's still definitely a bit loosey-goosey and up for some level of individual interpretation.

Mad God (2021). Well, cinema was a mistake. I don't think you'll ever see a more vile visual masterpiece of a stop motion film. Strongly recommended to @PK htiw klaw eriF if he hasn't already seen it. It was hard to look away except for when I had to cover my eyes.

Alice (1988). Super cool visuals and incredibly creative live-action take on Alice in Wonderland, combining many practical and stop-motion effects in a pretty awesome way to create a surreal and creepy adventure. Unfortunately, I kind of hated it, mostly because every time any character talked, it would cut to these gross close-ups of a mouth saying the dialogue. The stupid bastard who thought that literally every even momentary piece of dialogue should hard cut to and from this disgusting mouth should have their own sheared straight out of their skull. I got so aggravated that every time I even thought a character might possibly speak, I automatically started closing my eyes. It was miserable.

Fortunately, it's usually super quick and easy for companies to build up the trust and goodwill that they carelessly poured gasoline on before tossing into a bonfire for no reason.

There's been a number of classic games over the years teased for re-release by GOG that have mysteriously never seen the light of day... Don't think they ever reveal why something that they expected to get done never quite came to be.

Barbie (2023). I was told to expect feminist proaganda, but instead I got a movie that just tries to have a discussion about societal issues affecting not just women but also men (...though obviously especially women) coming from an interesting perspective. It's not the greatest or nothing, it's not really my thing to be so on the nose and accomplish it via toys, but it was alright. Horrible country music being the ultimate representation of patriarchy was pretty hilarious, though.

A furnace? A gas chamber, perhaps?

1. Buy helmet online from specialty outlet. 2. Receive helmet, it's the wrong size. 3. Online store says return it with original invoice that works as proof of purchase. 4. Invoice that came with the helmet is for a completely different person and order. 5. Their only method of contact is through social media. 6. I don't have any social media. well babies and gentlemen, it appears i have been scammed

This would have been such a great year for Aaron Rodgers to destroy the Cowboys' hopes and dreams in the playoffs. Truly, it might turn out to be one of the great what-ifs of our generation.