Bartimaeus

Some of us find any amount of grinding to be completely reprehensible - there's also the fact that these types of games never used to be designed with it in mind, and now suddenly they are because companies figure they can make money off of the people who don't want to. If you're going to introduce a crappy free to play model in your game, please don't charge the additional $60 to buy the game to begin with - as I said before, that's just double-dipping.

Ah...he directed the Fifth Element too, did he? Suddenly, Leon's weirdities make a little more sense...

The international cut, .

That's stupid.

Okay, yeah, The Thing was like ten times the movie They Live was. That was good: had me on edge pretty much the whole way through.

I think silent protagonists are a developer's way of saying, "We can't think of how to write the protagonist's part in this story in a way that isn't going to annoy a lot of people", opting instead for something about as blank and inoffensive as possible. It's an okay route to go in some cases - really depends on the game in question - while others, it's pretty dumb. Half-Life 2, for example, I always felt it was a pretty bad choice to do a silent protagonist because Gordon Freeman really has a set role in the game, and the character interactions actually come across as being pretty comedic at times because of him being silent for no apparent reason. On the other hand, the cutscenes in that game (that technically aren't cutscenes) were already painful enough for the most part, so it was probably for the best they didn't make it worse by having Gordon talk in them too.

Yeah, there's nothing like that in EA games. Crap's all server-side and account-based.

Portman's part was super creepy - that's why I thought it was unusual and uncomfortable. It presents a side of young teenagers/teenage girls that you won't often see in film for the exact reason that it does come across as being really creepy...but can actually happen, especially when they've been abused/traumatized. I also was glad that they didn't take it far enough that I had to stop watching. As for Eternal Sunshine...agree to disagree! I actually liked the supporting cast, but I think their inclusion ruined the mystery part of the movie for me too quickly - it was too easy to figure out what was going on. And they kind of just kept taking me out of the movie every time it switched to their general nonsense... I'm not really on a backlog kick, per se - I'm not really much of a film/TV person in general, but lately I've actually been in the mood. It's more like I'm picking acclaimed films by decade that I've never seen and know (next to) nothing about just by the cover and like a one sentence premise summary. Stalker was pretty much the one exception out of the things I've watched recently - that had been something I'd wanted to see for a while. On another note, I am currently starting The Thing right now, and I'm already annoyed by the bogus chess scene at the very beginning of the movie where the formations of the chess pieces make zero sense and doesn't even remotely resemble a late-game chess scenario, and there's no possible way for the guy to have been checkmated in the next move. Didn't anybody working on this film ever actually play chess and notice that nothing about it made sense? Random details that are so easy to get right that films somehow repeatedly get wrong annoy me so much...but I assume the rest of the movie will be better than this minor annoyance.

Leon: The Professional (1994). I'm not a fan of Natalie Portman - as far as A-listers go, good golly she is wooden - but she gave a pretty unusual and uncomfortable performance in this one (in a...good way?). A pretty cool action flick, though Gary Oldman was way too over the top and unnecessarily evil to be even remotely believable, and kind of made for an unfortunately extreme contrast to the other two main characters. Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (2004). The main story with Jim Carrey and Kate Winslet was decent, all the additional bullcrap with most everyone else was not and was really just kind of annoying most of the time. An okay watch.

"Yo dawg, we heard you like paying so we put a F2P model in your $60 game so you can pay while you pay..." This is why I can see people being mad. It’s the idea of components of free to play games slipping into $60 Games. Either you pay $60 for the game or yeah, spend 40 hours to unlock that character like you would in a free to play game. I think that’s the problem. I think they call that double-dipping.

It's because Arkham Asylum created, or at least popularized, that type of combat system where you just hit a button and your character magically parries or floats over to another combatant, regardless of what they were doing previously or where they were, which, while nonsensical, looks pretty from a cinematic standpoint and was really fresh and novel at the time. That and Assassin's Creed, which actually came out a year earlier. Having played both, I think AC is a bit different. AC tried to create a marionette style of controls that maps buttons to certain parts of the player character. Arms, legs, head. Other than parries which when times can auto-trigger caned counters or finishers, it's mostly free form. Just if you get good then there is no reason to try for anything short of a finisher. Arkham has a far more intrusive "A to win" style of combat that grows old really fast. AC seems to be moving even further away from this style, and expanding ever more on it's more free form aspects. Yeah, I wasn't trying to say it was equivalent, but a pretty similar idea. I still remember being surrounded be like two dozen guys in AC1...and all of them attacking you one at a time where you can just parry every single attack for easy kills. Super silly stuff.

It's because Arkham Asylum created, or at least popularized, that type of combat system where you just hit a button and your character magically parries or floats over to another combatant, regardless of what they were doing previously or where they were, which, while nonsensical, looks pretty from a cinematic standpoint and was really fresh and novel at the time. That and Assassin's Creed, which actually came out a year earlier.

Yeah, I actually wasn't going to watch The Thing because I figured it'd be more of the same, but I talked to a friend and they said it was better and still worth a shot, so I'll still be trying it.

One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest (1975). Really good and a very wacky performance by Jack Nicholson. John Carpenter's They Live (1988). I did not care for it: way too much "dead time" throughout the movie, where nothing is really happening and there's nothing interesting to look at or anything to contemplate. Hopefully, Carpenter's The Thing is better than this one. Little Women (1994). Hm. It was a sort of Gone with the Wind-type life story, but not nearly as long or expansive, which was probably for the best. Winona Ryder was the star of the show, while Christian Bale felt...almost out of place in comparison. A decent watch, but not really my style.

feeling good being the only person to pick the packers and cowboys correctly in my pick'em today.

packers beat the bears I am content for the rest of the season

I have not - it was something I had wanted to watch for years as it's supposed to be one of the jewels of Soviet-era film-making, and I'm a big fan of the Roadside Picnic and STALKER series.

Actually, yeah, re-reading all of that:

Yeah, quoting and linebreaks are a disaster here, and the BBCode Mode doesn't really make things any easier.

Stalker (1979). It was more of a philosophical and art piece than entertainment. Beautiful, with lots of camera shots and extraordinarily long takes set in some really cool locations and environments that were positively filthy and decrepit unlike anything I've ever seen in a Western film...but slow and hard to digest at times, and rather boring at others - it also doesn't help that it's nearly 3 hours long. I can cross it off my bucket list, at least.

for comedic purposes

Star Wars Battlefront II: It Takes 40 Hours to Unlock a Hero https://www.reddit.com/r/StarWarsBattlefront/comments/7c6bjm/it_takes_40_hours_to_unlock_a_hero_spreadsheet/ Looks like their worst form of micro-transactions yet.

The real funny thing was Putin's office announcing that they didn't discuss "election meddling" at all right after Trump said that: http://thehill.com/blogs/blog-briefing-room/news/359893-putin-trump-did-not-bring-up-election-meddling

It also helps that what Louis did is probably the mildest out of everything we've heard so far. Kind of crappy and exploitative of your star status, but it's not to the same level as actually assaulting other people/children.

Too quick on the draw: FX just fired him from everything he's on there. (e): George Takei is next, I guess. Which, in retrospect, actually makes sense, as he's made comments about not always waiting for consent and trying to convince straight men to "try it out" before. Hopefully a whole bunch of other known predators in Hollywood, like Jared Leto, Woody Allen, and Dan Schneider start getting some bad publicity as well.