Bartimaeus

More amused than anything else, especially as I was so out of wack with my chronically terrible sleep that I got too sleepy and actually went to bed at 8 so I didn't see the game (though I did just watch the highlights after waking up a little bit ago), so while it's certainly another horrifically embarrassing and painful playoff loss (bonus points for being against the Bears!), I did at least have the good fortune of not watching it live. Deja vu of three weeks ago against the Bears but somehow even worse this time: 25 points given up in the 4th quarter? Yowch! It's been a very Jekyll and Hyde season for the Packers, but really, the Packers have been having these sorts of horrific playoff collapses under LaFleur since he got here, wonder if he's now in real danger of being let go after that. This Packers team did not have the legs to go the distance after losing about half its starters, most of them late into the season, but I did think there was a real possibility of them knocking off the Bears. Whoops. To fumble it like that is pretty inexcusable.

Eddington (2025). It got maybe just a little over the top towards the end there, but overall, it felt like a very wonderful, horrible look into the disaster that is the United States of America and its many crises, new and old alike. Very stressful. Probably don't watch it if if you live in the U.S. and having to think about the current state of this country and its future might push you over the edge.

A friend got me into this vocaloid bullcrap last month. This particular one, Kasane Teto, is the first one I've heard where I seem to actually like the voice. Now she's been using it as an excuse to send me a bazillion different songs of extremely varying quality and styles...but I like this one. Honestly, I used to have a really diminutive view of vocaloids, but ever since generative AI became a thing, they just seem so silly, tame, and harmless in comparison.

I'm sure you can appreciate the sad irony for your eternal refrain of waiting for the full story to come out against the actual legal reality requiring that someone speak as soon as humanly possible if they want to safely tell lies or drive an agenda...

Don't be silly: Just because I haven't taken the time to study the particulars of any of BruceVC's turds doesn't mean I'm blind or stupid: it's quite obvious who is being talked about when somebody like Zoraptor seems to call someone else disingenuous when there doesn't appear to be any inciting incident for it. That's only going to be one person responsible for that sort of thing around here these days, which is our very own BruceVC.

Correct. Come 2028, if we still have elections, the Democrat that runs on abolishing or at least completely firing and restarting all of ICE is very certainly to be the one that gets my vote in the primaries. Wiping out the brown-nosers in our federal agencies is going to be a requirement for functioning government after all of this.

I've been working very hard to get a warning for my treatment of Bruce the past ten years - I'm not likely to give up now, am I? One of these days, I'll finally get there... Yes, it's true: I do not believe free will exists in any meaningful capacity, and so I must accept that BruceVC is simply the product of conditions and forces outside his control. Still have to call a spade a spade sometimes, though.

The sad thing is, Volourn at his worst was never as bad as BruceVC at his best: at least Volourn was always exactly how he presented himself. I can appreciate that sort of sincerity, even if his behavior was generally kind of awful and usually not worth engaging with: he had real thoughts and beliefs, even some ones that didn't seem to follow what maybe anyone else in the world thinks, and he wasn't afraid to share them...and that's much better than all the "oh won't you please poop directly into my mouth" takes that BruceVC has always had.

Once upon a time, I reported one of Volourn's posts by saying that I and a few other people would start re-framing everything Volourn said as supporting dog-****ing if staff didn't tell him off for constantly re-framing everyone and everything he disagreed with as being or supporting Nazis, and while I never heard back from staff, he coincidentally decided to take his ball and leave the forums forever literally immediately after that. Food for thought, people.

Actually, that's very apropos, because this past summer... I'm funny about musicals: either they're they're great and wonderful...or they're the worst thing I've ever seen in my whole life. I do like my musicals to be more on the diegetic side broadly speaking, and Cabaret is one of the very few 100% diegetic musical movies that I know of, which makes its musical numbers quite lovely (albeit completely insane) to me. Combine that with the lead being loosely based off of Louise Brooks and it's difficult not to automatically like it. It's unfortunate that I don't have any of the two or three quotes from her book as a signature that I had for years right now... I might have to bring them back for the occasion. I've seen Louise Brooks' "A Girl in Every Port", "Beggars of Life", "Diary of a Lost Girl", "God's Gift to Women", "It's the Old Army Game", "Miss Europe", "Now We're in the Air", "Pandora's Box", "The Canary Murder Case", "The Show Off", and "Windy Riley Goes Hollywood", and despite the fact that most of them are somewhere between bad and terrible (with the major exceptions of the German Pandora's Box and Diary of a Lost Girl, and to a much lesser extent the American Beggars of Life and French Miss Europe which are alright and at least kind of interesting), they are not terrible because of Louise Brooks and I would love to uncover more of her lost, forgotten, and probably awful movies. I know there are more out there, but they can unfortunately be quite difficult to get a hold of by way of either legal or illegal means. Not that I'm like...some kind of Louise Brooks turbonerd or superfan or anything... It's always a toss-up whether I want to zoom out and get proper framing of the face with the drawback of being too small...or to just get memey with it. I chose memey this time, but I might change my mind later.

good news: scary tibetan death mask bartimaeus is finally gone bad news: back on that louise brooks crap again tangent: i hate circle avatars, they're so much harder to get right compared to square avatars, LC's avatar accurately captures how I feel trying to make circle avatars

YouTube recently recommended me and apparently about a million other people this 18 year old Christmas x Lovecraft song. Okay. Nice. Yeah, it's a lot better than random AI slop, I guess. Merry Christmas, everyone!

Why is Europa Universalis 5 in the Steam Awards for Most Innovative Gameplay

https://overclock3d.net/news/gpu-displays/nvidia-plans-heavy-cuts-to-gpu-supply-in-early-2026/ Gamers Nexus has been yelling to the rooftops for a bit now that we may well be in the last few years of consumer ownership of computers if this AI bubble doesn't burst.

Wolfwalkers (2020). I'd only heard great things about it, but... It is a gorgeous film, but it was difficult to fully recover from the painful first ~20 minutes. Most every scene felt like it was lingering or outright repeating a few beats too many, I was getting genuinely kinda mad at how poorly edited this felt and how reducing the film by even just...five, maybe ten minutes by chopping off a few seconds from each scene would've helped it feel so much punchier. The script also has a strange way of feeling too kiddie and too adult at the same time, like it can't really quite make up its mind what kind of tone it should have, and I found that...uh, a little weird and off-putting. It could've been great, but I guess it's just one of those movies where a series of seemingly small issues keeps taking you out of it, try as you might. Oh well. As far as wolf movies go, I liked Princess Mononoke better, and I still don't much like Princess Mononoke despite having seen it four(?) times, so...

You already lost me here. - Someone who doesn't watch anime with male protagonists because of how awful they and their animes are in 99.9999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999% of cases that was exactly 99 "9"s for my sig figs, for the record, i was doing a thing

Wembanyama: "I’m just glad to be part of something that’s growing to be so beautiful: pure and ethical basketball."

Is isekai still the genre of the day? Gosh, that's been going on for a while now, hasn't it?

Here is what I remember about seasons 3 and 4 of Stranger Things: 1. The new characters (i.e. Robin, Erica, Eddie) and how they played off of the old characters they interacted with most (mostly Steve and I think Dustin) were generally a thumbs up, probably because they were new characters and the writers actually had motivated reason to add them to the mix. Robin was my favorite out of the lot, and from what I gather most people seem to agree on that. 2. Literally anyone and everyone else could've been killed in the most brutally horrific way possible and I would've been sitting there applauding the show for finally getting one of its many deadbeats off of my television screen. Joyce, Jim, Mike, Eleven, Lucas, Nancy, Jonathan, Will, Max, and Murray...any of these I would've been overjoyed to see get axed - with especial emphasis on Eleven, Jim, Murray, and Jonathan. No hate for the actors, you were all a great lot in the first season (well, excepting Max who only shows up in season 2) when you actually had fun and/or compelling parts to play, it's sadly the writers who have done you wrong. ...and that's pretty much it. I guess I remember vaguely about some incredibly awful Russian stuff with Joyce and Jim, but I think my subconscious has once again done me a solid by blocking out most of whatever that stupidity was. I don't even remember who Vecna is, I don't think I have even the vaguest concept of what he looks like or anything he was about or did...but in all fairness, I think I mostly skipped all of Eleven's stuff in season 4 on account of it being soul-shatteringly drab and repetitive by that point, which probably plays into it. I'm still as of yet undecided whether I shall hate-watch season 5 or not.

The only issue I've ever run into with LTSC was with the old versions e.g. LTSC 2019 being feature-outdated for a couple of newer games, which is what necessitated me upgrading to LTSC 2021. But they would just straight up not run - otherwise, no problems I can think of, it's pretty much just Windows 10 but a little lighter and a little less annoying. However, I have not ever used Edge and I have not played Anno 117, so I cannot comment on those. You could try temporarily disabling UAC entirely (i.e. everything is run as admin all the time always) to see if it resolves the Anno 117 saving issue. Admin permissions can be a little flaky with Windows: in theory, an application you start as admin should also open other stuff as admin (e.g. in the event of running secondary executables), but somehow it doesn't always necessarily work out that way. Someone also posted having a similar issue with the game, and it actually ended up being the fault of Windows Defender:

Weapons (2025). Wasn't sure how I felt about it for most of it, but the hilarious ending pushed me it into liking it overall.

Marjorie Taylor Greene announced her resignation come January. Years of trolling and fighting the left, but only lasted about a week against the MAGA death cult threatening her for her "betrayal"...what a pity.

32A (2007). Irish film. Writing-wise...it was a little basic, all the beats you'd probably expect, but otherwise I thought it was quite nice. A little silly, a little cringey, a little funny, a little drama, a little sad - all the things you'd probably want in a girl's coming-of-age film, without ever being too much in any particular way, and executed in a nice style with good casting. Jared Harris...probably shouldn't have been in it. Too small and simple a part for him, he sticks out like a sore thumb in an otherwise very natural cast. I didn't initially place him, but I burst out laughing as soon as I heard his voice. A little too recognizable for his own good, I think. I don't think I wrote about it here, but I watched My Girl (1991), another girl-coming-of-age film, a while back with my nieces, and I can't understate how much better 32A is, despite how much simpler and straightforward 32A is. Hollywood films can just be so painfully dumb and misguided with all the silliness they pre-occupy themselves with in an attempt to earn back the money they cost for their big names, which a smaller foreign/indie film can just ignore in favor of...trying to make a decent film that will resonate with the demographic it's being made for. It's good for this kind of film.

The eyes and mouths are a little freaky, but you mostly get used to them in motion. I'm not saying it's my favorite, but...as far as modern anime art styles go, you could do worse. Do I think it would only take some lighting/color tone changes to make it look like horror instead? Yes...but beggars can't be choosers. My problem with this movie isn't the art, but rather the general direction. It's one of those movies where it has what you want...in theory, but something's just a little bit off, so you feel disconnected and it just doesn't really end up working despite its good qualities. Frustrating, as usual. Another one to add to my proof wherein I feel it's not actually the art/visuals that's the root cause of my issue with modern anime, it's the general direction and style overall...which the visuals are sometimes married to, but not always.