Bartimaeus

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 . . .

I swear they're waiting until Bloodborne is emulatable before they decide they ought to start developing their "remaster" of it. Felt like that's what happened with Demon's Souls: playable on emulator in 2017, and then Sony set Bluepoint Games to start development of the crappy remaster in 2018. That, or maybe the rumor about Sony and FromSoftware having completely lost the source code for Bloodborne is true. Thing is, I don't really care if they re-release it on console again, as I'd just run into the same problem that happened when it was a PS3 exclusive...I'll keep my PC around in some form or another for forever, but certainly not these crapbox consoles.

The Blue Sky Maiden (1957). I waited just a little under three years to watch this. Japanese cinema continues to be an impenetrable enigma to me, but I guess it was okay - a kind of coming of age story about a young woman from a small town trying to find her lost birth mother while being looked down upon by her relatives in Tokyo. Tetsuo the Iron Man (1989). This is the type of film where you watch the whole thing, you go to read the plot summary on Wikipedia to try to figure out what happened, but then Wikipedia says all they've got is some notes from the director because only he would ever be able to really know what it's about. So I didn't understand it one bit, but it was probably one of the funniest films I've ever seen while also having a great industrial soundtrack and incredibly unique visuals...and if I had exactly one film to recommend to @PK htiw klaw eriF for the rest of my life, it'd have to be this one. No way you're ever getting more Kaine Parker than Tetsuo the Iron Man. Plus, it's only an hour long.

Thank goodness for digitization: a single $200 14 TB hard drive can fit about 350 full blu-ray dumps (or about 1800 DVDs...and the numbers get even better if you don't have to keep the full disc dumps). Honestly, who has the time, space, or desire to manage all that except in a virtual environment? That path lies to madness.

Neo Ranga (1998). I got through like seven episodes, but it's so confusing and everything feels so inexplicable/poorly explained that all I know is that, one, it's very clearly a Neon Genesis Evangelion rip-off, and two, nobody has ever seen it. I cannot really make heads or tails of what it's trying to accomplish, except that it's obviously trying to cash in on the general style and mannerisms of Neon Genesis Evangelion...just, uh, without necessarily doing it all that well. Well, the art and animation are nice enough, the character writing seems alright, scenes in a vacuum are well-made...but as to the overall story and how it flows as a whole, I really just am not getting it even after so many episodes. Long and short of what I know is that the brother of three sisters (pictured above) went missing a decade earlier, said brother somehow became a king of some island in the Pacific, he suddenly passed away, and then a mecha-god awakens from the island and invades Japan in order...to follow them around and basically be their guardian angel, causing massive disruptions to the central and local governments as it just levels entire buildings by accident? You know, now that I say all that out-loud, it sure sounds pretty stupid. The show is 48 episodes long, so I'm sure the thing serves some greater purpose, but information online is pretty threadbare because again, it seems nobody watched it, ergo no good explanations as to what the heck is going on. I don't know, forays into old, obscure stuff sure can be difficult and weird. I can only presume from the posters of this show that the three girls are eventually absorbed into or at least start to be able to control the thing, but if that's what ends up happening, there isn't any hint of it from what I've seen, and I'm not super compelled to keep watching more at this point, so...

Anatomy of a Fall (2023). Man, I'm getting a bit tired of all these uneconomically long, single-toned films with characters/dialogue so flat/'realistic' you'd think you were watching raw documentary footage. They used to make movies! It's a perfectly fine film, I'm just a little weary of it.

Your post has made me realize that I have no idea how basketball fantasy football works. In other news, the Milwaukee Bucks suddenly fired their head coach today, and it looks like we're going to hire Doc Rivers to replace him.

According to this blogpost, you'll have to do...incremental patches, if you can find them. The old NWN Vault website that used to host that sort of thing is looking pretty busted these days.

Oh no, Jordan Love has mastered Aaron Rodgers' patented technique of throwing a really stupid interception when down late against the 49ers in the playoffs!

I'm assuming you mean you ran through exactly one iteration and then quit: the game seems to have a kind of branching structure that reacts to your choices to shove you off a certain direction for future iterations before you can reach a proper ending. I don't think it's possible to beat the game in ten minutes unless maybe you literally don't read a single piece of text and just spam through everything. My playthrough took about two hours, but the average time listed on howlongtobeat.com is 3 hours, and that probably makes sense given that I had voice audio disabled so I could read and click through prompts at my own speed. My first iteration started with both of us murdering each other, and that seemed to lead to future iterations getting a bit more...scary and paranoid.

I have an addendum to make to my previous post about Slay the Princess that I totally forgot about until I was reading your post: I heard like two lines of the voice work in that game and then I completely muted the voice audio for the rest of the game. This isn't really all that important, but I just wanted to note this in case anybody thought I actually played through an entire visual novel with the voice-acting on - hell no, you'd have to have some outstanding voice-acting for me to do that, and...no, that game definitely did not have it. Well, I don't know, maybe it did, I did only listen to like two lines before muting it, so what the heck do I know? But voice-acting in games that are all dialogue is pretty much intolerable, as far as I'm concerned - it slows games down massively to have to listen to all of it, and if the voices aren't just right, it can really throw the whole atmosphere into question pretty much immediately. I always thought the Infinity Engine games had the right of it in only voicing lines sparingly/appropriately - use it to establish a character by all means, and use it for moments important to those characters and the plot, heck yeah...but every single line all the time? Eh.

Hazbin Hotel. I really liked the pilot...that released four years ago on YouTube. It was pretty messy, it tried to do too much in too short of a time, the animation was a little janked at parts...but as someone who almost universally hates adult animated TV shows and who doesn't normally give anything they don't immediately like much of a chance, liking it at all was pretty much a miracle. A while back, it was announced that A24 had picked it up to adapt it into a full series, and I got excited for it, and there are now four episodes out, and I watched all four episodes, and...I just kind of hate it, as it pretty much categorically misses every single thing I liked about the pilot and just feels like a flanderized parody. The lesson I have learned here, for the umpteenth time, is to never get excited about anything.

Oh no, I'm not confident about anything at all. I think I was the one that immediately said after the results of the 2020 became clear that we would be doing this all over again in 2024, even while others danced on Trump's grave. I already thought he was a Hitler-esque demagogue leading up to the 2016 election - though that wasn't quite accurate at that time, as he turned out to be such a simple-minded attention seeker that didn't have basically any actual values or convictions, and he just wanted to get his way and be loved in the process. In another universe, Trump's need for pure and unadulterated adoration could've lead to him directing his energies towards doing actually great things...but uh, obviously, that did not even remotely happen, and hell hath no fury like a man-child scorned: losing the 2020 election and his ongoing legal jeopardy has left Trump feeling scorned in a bad way, and I think anyone not taking it seriously must be a rather silly person. It took the utter bungling of Covid for him to just barely not win re-election in the first place, and people seem to always forget that Biden won the 2020 election by what was effectively 30,000 votes throughout a few key battleground states. Our institutions, our norms, our traditions, our laws, and our society were all pushed to the brink under his disastrous and corrupt presidency...and while it's a credit to them that they didn't completely fail (though they did certainly weaken), our country is only as strong as we make it, and electing people whose only interest is in breaking it will certainly bear poisonous fruits sooner rather than later. My glib comment was more a reflection of just...voters either love him and actively support his desire to become a king (or whatever they think unlimited power and what he would do with it would make him), or voters fear and despise him so Trump saying the quiet part out loud doesn't feel even mildly surprising at this point, no matter how disconcerting it may be. Well, there is one other camp I didn't mention: the people who can't be motivated to care or vote no matter what, but they aren't really worth talking about at this point, since it's pretty clear they'll never see past the length of their nose. Maybe we'd finally start getting through to them if they started getting those noses punched in by reality...but probably not.

Does the field of view value affect how motion sick you get in first person games? I remember the first time I opened up Metro 2033 like a decade back I thought I was going to throw up because the FoV was so low and there wasn't any way to change it through the in-game settings (...but you could through some manual .ini editing, which fixed the issue for me). I can't tell for sure with this YouTube video, but it looks a little on the low side there.

I think I've mentioned a number of times over the years about how they must be the single worst major video game publisher in all North America and Europe for producing games that are in any way actually fun, so that really doesn't surprise me. I've always felt that if there were a single publisher I could wipe off the face of the Earth, it'd have to be Ubisoft: this new line of theirs doesn't really phase me, though it is probably indicative of a new disturbing trend that we'll be seeing more of sometime soon.

Sounds like he's another great example of Brandolini's Law in action.

No, no, they've got a point: when it comes to Ubisoft, I'm more than happy to not own their games.

Am I thinking of somebody else, or is Peterson that self-help incel who thinks men should own women? I'm pretty sure I have a distant cousin who was trying to shill him to me one time at a big family gathering some years ago, but said cousin didn't realize that them being a Trumper meant I already thought they were an unserious person. I think people are probably largely split into one of two camps here: 1. Well, duh, we already knew he wanted to be a king. 2. Well, duh, we already want him to be a king. Pretty easy to shrug off either way, really. Of course, if the Supreme Court were to accept that reasoning, I do believe it would mean Biden could just brutally massacre the Supreme Court without it being illegal - not to mention Trump or anyone else the Republican party might put up - so I think it's in everyone's best interests that they don't do that.

Run Lola Run (1998). Me from the opening scene until pretty much the end: One of the most torturous film experiences I've had...so far, and sadly not in a good way. Just trying to follow the wretched over-stylized camera work, visual effects, and editing that started within the very first scene made me literally physically ill, and it kind of snowballed out of control straight down into hell from there for various other reasons. That's gonna be a no from me, dog.