Bartimaeus

Both of them have been released on blu-ray by the Criterion Collection (and also via the Criterion Channel paid streaming service). Not sure if they're anywhere else - I would guess not, given their age. I've seen The Great Dictator, I thought it was fairly amusing.

You know, some might say that you should extend your cynicism to not just humanity, but also what humanity makes as well, including our lazy retread films... Of Human Bondage (1934). Pre-code 1930s Hollywood films can be weird. Feels like stepping into a different era of American film that never was - or rather an era that was murdered and buried with the intent to make sure everyone forgot that it ever happened. Bette Davis plays a vacuous and cruel vampiress in this film, and I don't mean the supernatural kind. She acts so much with her eyes, and I think that might be the best kind of acting for this kind of role: the lazy seduction, some manipulative side-eye, a contemptuous raised eyebrow, the slightly uneven makeup and wide-eyed psychosis...she does it all and it's what makes the performance and the film. I think the only other Bette Davis film I've seen is All About Eve, but that was a very different kind of role and I don't think I appreciated it enough, even as well as I liked that film. Of Human Bondage is a very odd duck of a film (with a message that I'm not particularly fond of and some stretches that I think are a bit boring, no less), but the 1920s and 1930s films that I like do tend to be.

Okay, so I recognize that pronunciations don't really matter...especially given that from what I noticed even from my little exposure of the Japanese, it seemed to be sometimes "ehv-vuhn", sometimes "aev-vaun". The original English dub changed how it was said as the series went on: the first episode, it is "ee-van", but that's definitely not how it's said for the majority of the series (and hearing characters say "ee-va" over and over would've been very noticeable). I've said before that the original English dub is a hot mess to start with and it takes at least a handful of episodes before both the overall voice/script direction and individual actors start to get their act together, so it is what it is. But as I said, it doesn't really matter: what matters, and what is the actual problem here, is that it's very difficult to listen to this guy talk for 30 seconds, never mind 2 hours, . There's a lot that goes into video essays (such as subject material, writing, the base sound of their voice, speaking style/cadence/accent*, having relevant/interesting visuals, and probably a number of other little but still important things I could identify if I spent like fifteen minutes thinking about it), and if you don't have at least most of those nailed down just right for me, it's probably not going to work out. This guy has maybe one of those things, which is that I should theoretically be interested in someone talk about Neon Genesis. And that's really only theoretically, because I'm really honestly not sure how much I care about the Evangelion series as a whole whenever we look at it outside specifically just the interwoven stories of Shinji, Rei, Asuka, and Misato. I clearly don't enjoy Neon Genesis for the same reasons that most other people seem to enjoy the Evangelion series, and I'm perfectly okay with that given how abysmal discourse around a show like this generally is. *Yes, even accent: for example, there's no way in hell I'm ever listening to some guy with a heavy French accent talk about anything at length at any point in my life, and anybody who tries to make me can go right ahead and suck it, because that's just not happening.

who's gonna listen to a weeb drone on and on about NGE for two hours and am i pronouncing evangelion wrong, or is he

I played about 2 minutes of Dredge before I uninstalled it because gameplay in video games is bo-o-oring and I don't really want to spend a bunch of time fishing, Lovecraftian horrors or no. Just one of those games that you try and it instantly jumps out as a "no" for you. So I started another game called Homebody, except I've already had this game installed for a while and so I do not remember even the littlest bit of what this game is about. O.K., I'm a young woman that is apparently struggling with her mental health, seems to have some kind of guilt and obsessive compulsive complexes right off the bat that's making doing basic things painful/difficult, and I'm on my way to spend a night with my old high school friends at a remote-ish Airbnb. Lots of dialogue as I try to catch up with these friends of mine that I haven't seen in a while, but that's fine, they seem nice enough, except for the jerk who has some kind of problem with me because he's mysteriously pretending that I don't exist. The house has only one apparent exit, the front door, and there's some kind of weird powered lock on it that nobody else seems to be very concerned about at the moment. It's all kind of strange, but whatever. The house rules put down by the host say don't go into a few rooms that have been locked up, so of course after talking to everyone in the house, I immediately go looking to solve some of the puzzles to open them up. One thing leads to another, I'm collecting little bits of information and putting them into my character's notebook, and then pretty soon I'm in the basement examining this weird liquid canister stuff. So I'm sitting there trying to figure out what I'm supposed to do with it and not really paying attention to what's going on around me - I think I heard some sounds coming from upstairs, but nothing distinctive enough that I really paid much notice because I kind of just figured it was environmental noise. But then a little bit later, I suddenly hear my character start to breathe loudly and just kind of freak out, so I stop looking at the canisters and turn around right in time for me to scream in real life because I got stabbed right in the face by a knife-wielding maniac, game over. Well, guess I should've paid attention to the weird sounds upstairs after all - though I didn't lose all the information I put into my character's notebook, so that's nice. Now if I had actually looked at the banner art of the game on the Steam store page, I probably would've noticed the knife and blood and generally murder-y look of the game, but since I didn't do that, I honestly thought this was gonna be a very chill and laid back dialogue/puzzle kind of game. Whoops. But hey, moments like that are what you live for in video games, so I won't complain. Now I just have to actually play the rest of the game.

The Stranger (1946). Man, Sigmund Freud was the worst...and I really ought to stop watching Orson Welles films, it just never goes well for me.

Yeah, I kind of assume they set their recommendations around not wanting to spectacularly burn down end users' Raidmax-powered computers...even though end users who use Raidmax PSUs probably deserve to have their computers spectacularly burn down for cheaping out so much on their PSUs, the single item responsible for making sure your computer doesn't spectacularly burn down. Still, the fact that the system is suddenly folding when under load does at least suggest a possibility of power issues, even with a good PSU. I don't know that it would be my first suspect necessarily...I'd like to at least get a look at Windows' event log to see if it says anything useful - it happens every once in a while.

Just what the doctor ordered.

I played like ten minutes of Citizen Sleeper and then was like "this seems cool, it's definitely gotten past my 'should i immediately chuck this into the garbage' test - not going to play it for real right this second, but I'll get back to this". It currently sits directly above Disco Elysium in my games directory, which I also did the exact same thing with. Whoops.

AMD's minimum recommendation for the 6900 XT seems to actually be literally exactly 850W, but it'll obviously depend on the rest of your system specs and the health of your PSU. I think my $2000 worth of HDDs adds probably somewhere around 150-200W to my system power draw, but the $100 GPU I have because computers graphics are a scam makes it not much of a concern for my particular system.

Laputa: Castle in the Sky (1986). It definitely improved from being in Japanese over the English dub, but it wasn't nearly as strong of an improvement as which Porco Rosso experienced. I think I'm just not the biggest fan of this story (which is basically the same story as both Nadia: The Secret of Blue Water as well as Future Boy Conan) or the characters (also a lot of similarities to both of the aforementioned shows as well). There's a certain scene that makes my skin crawl in this film, which I think is intended to be humorous but which I do not find to be. But while I think Castle in the Sky is not quite totally my thing and has some unnecessary issues that take away from my enjoyment of it, I still think it's a fundamentally good children's adventure film. Princess Mononoke rates as "it's just about the best a film could possibly be except for the fact that I don't like it basically at all" for me, so Laputa obviously places above it. But the gap between Princess Mononoke, my second least favorite Miyazaki film, and Ponyo on the Cliff by the Sea, my actual least favorite Miyazaki film, is quite vast. I've watched Ponyo twice, once by myself and once with small children, and I had a very bad time during both watches. I'm curious to see if I like The Boy and the Heron: from the little I've glimpsed of it, I am guessing it'll probably be another Princess Mononoke or thereabouts for me.

gdgd Fairies (2011). This is the ugliest, cheapest, dumbest piece of crap CGI anime comedy series ever produced. The show format is basically these three fairies just sit at a table for most of the episode having these off the walls silly conversations about nothing much (e.g. "what're the little things in life that make you happy?"), then there's some kind of ridiculous sketch involving magic powers (e.g. "let's summon pets you wouldn't want!"), and then the episode ends with the "the animators have made some kind of random wacky CG scene not related to the show at all (usually with overweight and/or nearly naked men doing something silly), and now we want each of you ladies to do your own unscripted voice-acting like something from Whose Line Is It Anyway over it" segment. It's as lazy as it sounds, except that it's actually pretty hilarious and quite charming, and the three voice actresses for the fairies clearly had a lot of fun goofing off with it, especially during the unscripted parts. Also, the awful N64-quality art/animation is somehow a point in its favor rather than an active detriment. I don't know, it's just one of those weird things that somehow works. Now if you'll excuse me, I'm going to go check myself into the nearest loony bin, as I've clearly lost my mind for enjoying this. Please don't acknowledge or respond to this post, I'll be long gone into the insane asylum by the time you read this.

While Gromnir has a point about Roald Dahl's original material, I think Tim Burton's Charlie and the Chocolate Factory is just one of those cases where the film simply rubs a lot of people the wrong way for a vast multitude of reasons, both little and big throughout the film, that it makes whatever good ideas that were put into it pretty much unsalvagable for a lot of people, especially those who are big fans of 1971 Mel Stuart adaptation, such as myself. Wonka (2023). Speaking of, it bears little to no relation to the 1971 film in any meaningful way, so banish that from your mind if you're going to try it: this basically serves as a kind of origin/prequel story, how Willy Wonka came to be. I didn't want to peel either my ears or eyes out while watching it, unlike by the time I got ten minutes into the 2022 Matilda musical remake where I very much did want to do both and so I had to stop watching, so it can't be all that bad. Though I wouldn't say it's all that good either, just a fairly trite but serviceable and inoffensive family film. It's not cinema that I suspect will leave much of a lasting impression on anyone, especially if you're not really big into Broadway-styled musical films/performances, but that's just kind of the state of "family movies" decided by committee and produced off on an assembly line these days, so that's not exactly a surprise. All in all, I guess it could've been a lot worse, but don't go in expecting anything similar in either style or substance to the 1971 film, or you'll certainly have a very bad time.

I was enjoying it up until like ten minutes in, and then he spent like a solid five minutes straight talking about the length of a ship and shuttle bay, and I was like "wait a second, oh gosh, is he actually doing the Star Wars idiot fan boy thing where they spend hours analyzing inane technical details that were just arbitrarily made up by the filmmakers, as if they're actually important?". Then I skipped ahead to a random part about pod racing and he was talking at length about aerodynamics and that's when I closed the video. I'm sure there's some decent structure/character/motivations/plot commentary in between the technical stuff that doesn't matter an iota...but he had me, and then he lost me.

Doc Rivers, after going 1-2 with the Milwaukee Bucks so far, is the All-Star coach for the Eastern Conference. Life is a joke.

I've watched Arrival, Blade Runner 2049, and Sicario, and I feel like they've all had the same kinds of issues from front to back. "Bland", "emotionless", and "mechanical" are all great words to describe what I've seen; there's a lot of good stuff in his films as well, but...they're just not doing it for me on the whole because of those issues. They used to make movies!

For me, it's an underrated aspect of cinema-making that feels like it's largely gone by the wayside: scenes and environments that look like they make sense and seem casually lived in, with people actually transversing and occupying them. When you see the girl living in her bubble room and it's just...a completely empty room, my brain goes "ehh...what is that, are there more rooms in the back that we can't see, how could she possibly live in there?". Immediately preceding entering this building, Agent K had to survive hordes of armed bandits harpooning and bringing down his flying vehicle so they can presumably steal and salvage it, but I guess they've just let this completely undefended techno-paradise devoted to exactly one girl be untouched? Neither of these are ultimately important details (nor a host of other little things nagging at my brain), but they're details that don't feel like they had enough attention paid to them in a film whose environments are all very deliberately planned as well as quite expensive to put together (...one way or another). I don't know. When I watch the original Blade Runner, I feel like I get a solid grasp for how tragically real the world is or at least could be, the kind of lives people have to live in order to make it given the circumstances they helplessly find themselves in - with characters who make impressions both quick and slow upon you over the course of the film in order to really lend weight to the illusion. With this film, it's just smoke and mirrors from the start until end, it feels like we're only ever shown exactly what we need to see to make the film make sense and maybe occasionally wow us with some pretty visuals, but the environments don't feel very cohesive or as if they fully connect to each other (especially because we basically never see anyone travel from one area to another...Agent K never walks or drives anywhere - even in the flying vehicle scenes, we always just hard cut from one scene to a character already being where they need to be right as they're about to land, while Luv seems to just get to wherever she wants to go like magic), and it doesn't capture the essence of what I look for when you're trying to take me to a different place and time distinct from my own, and I feel like that's a really important thing for a film like this, especially when most of your main characters are very stoic and flat. No, I didn't see the in-between shorts.

My rule whenever I started an SL1 character was that if I died and then died again before I recovered my souls, the game was over and I had to delete that character. Why? I don't know: as an SL1 character, you don't need souls. Principle of the matter, I suppose.

Blade Runner 2049 (2017). I had a pretty tough go with this film the first time around years ago, but I liked it a bit more this second watch. It's still too long, too sterile, too Villeneuve, but as far as kind of unnecessary sequels go, I guess it got the job done alright. I shouldn't re-watch movies I didn't like the first time, because sometimes I have to re-evaluate what I previously thought and experienced, and then sometimes I have to take back the nasty things I said about them. I don't like that. Nasty things should stay true forever.

I feel bad that I have to watch a Doc Rivers-coached basketball team. Sorry, did you say something? Yeah, I kind of just wish there were less games in a season. That probably sounds silly, but I think it's stupid that B2Bs exist, and less games overall would mean they individually mean more. But within the reality that we live in...uh, I think the media voters should've already just recognized that between two guys with close-ish level of play, the guy that played 15-20 more games should obviously win the awards, but for some reason, that needed to be legislated? IDK, seems weird.

Hoping the laws will catch up one day. Being able to sell this garbage that's generated off the backs of other people's work is a joke.

Roujin Z (1991). I put this on my list years ago so when I opened it up yesterday I had zero clue what it was about. Written but not directed by Katsuhiro Otomo of Akira fame, which, of course, I also did not know until after watching it. It's a film that has some big ideas but tells them in a rather small, cute, and silly manner, which is basically the opposite of how Akira tried to do it. The film opens up with our main character, Haruko, a strong-willed trainee nurse kindly trying to take care of one of her patients, an elderly and almost completely comatose little old man who lost his very dear wife years ago. The poor guy is 'volunteered' by his remaining relatives that evidently doesn't want to take care of him to be the test subject of a new automated system that will severely reduce the need for family, nurses, and other caretakers to be constantly attending to him and others like him...you know, eliminate whatever small human element they receive in their advanced age. After all, it's expensive and there just aren't enough people to do it anyways. Things do not go quite as planned. Apparently, this film was kind of considered to be the black sheep of Otomo's early career, as it awkwardly fits between Akira and Memories and is relatively unknown even today. While I love his and Satoshi Kon's collaboration in Memories' Magnetic Rose more, I did like this way a lot more than Akira and it was a very enjoyable watch. If I had one strong criticism that was a very noticeable distraction, it's that the sound engineer was clearly asleep at the wheel, as there are all sorts of obviously missing sound effects and bad audio mixing...that, or the blu-ray audio got really funked up. Not sure.

One moment, I have to go look up benchmarks for my GPU to see how it compares to the "trashy" RX 6500. . . . Phew, okay, I guess I'm doing alright. Yeah, as the review points out, the CPU itself is obviously much better than the i3-12100F, but...modern gaming requires a GPU, and the iGPU just isn't good enough to make the product make sense outside of maybe specialized power/battery/size-limited scenarios. If it's a gaming chip, then having a really good CPU and a bad iGPU just isn't a great pairing.

The Silver Pendant that you can find in Oolacile provides complete protection against dark magic, including Manus' spells. Though using it is a little weird, as it's an (unlimited use) activated item - you just spam it whenever somebody's casting dark magic at you and it all just bounces off harmlessly. Makes that part of Manus' moveset pretty trivial. The four bosses in Artorias of the Abyss are all pretty stupendous in terms of design. When I went through it on NG7 at SL1, I realized how tight, punishing, but fair all of them were...with the single exception of a rarely occurring bug(?) with Kalameet where he would use his leap-forward-turn-around-and-breath-fire attack when you're at point blank range. His entire body instantly turns into a giant hitbox that you can't avoid if you're in melee range, so I'm pretty sure it wasn't intended that he would use it while in melee range and I can't ever say I've seen FromSoftware design something like that anywhere else (and I only discovered it because fighting Kalameet at SL1 on NG7 is quite a lengthy battle where you would naturally be more likely to experience any AI behavioral issues that there might be, especially with repeated attempts), but besides that, a really fantastic group of bosses, probably the best little slice of Souls content FromSoftware has ever put out.

I feel like I've seen that NFCCG collapse somewhere else before . . .