Bartimaeus

Yeah, my cat was recently diagnosed with feline diabetes. Switched from regular cat food (aka carbohydrates) to animal byproduct meat pate thingies and he went from looking like he was going to expire in less than 24 hours (almost totally comatose and ultra-dehydrated) to looking and acting like himself in about 48 hours. Stupid diabetes - he's not even overweight, so I guess it's just because he's really old. Good luck with keeping yours healthy.

Poltergeist (1982). Uh, yeah, I can see how Stranger Things might have been inspired by this. It was...interesting. I wouldn't say it was a great movie, but definitely interesting and entertaining at times.

That's pretty much been my experience as well. DC has had such low lows, but there's actually been a couple that I moderately enjoyed...Marvel, on the other hand, I'd characterize as being consistently mediocre/bleh all the way down, but never really quite "turn the TV off" terrible like some of DC's movies have been. Watchable, but not really very enjoyable. So I guess I'd rather waste my time taking a chance on a DC movie than another predictably mediocre Marvel movie. I like the Marvel films overall more than you do, but this is roughly how I feel about them. They play each of these films very safe, they deliver a familiar experience and by and large do so in alright fashion nowadays. I do think they are better overall films than DC, but at least up until recently I also felt like DC had the greater ability to surprise. Now, however, I'm not even so sure that DC will do as much - they seem very intent in trying to replicate the MCU formula beat for beat. I actually think Fox are the ones with the greatest capacity for surprise, unpredictability and uniqueness at this point, if both Logan and Legion and their relative success are any indication. With regards to Thor, it was very enjoyable but didn't really break the MCU mold in any fashion. I like that the series is becoming a bit more creative visually, but it does feel like they take babysteps toward that goal, and there's still a long way to go. Dramatically it's still utterly inert. Yeah, for Thor, I've only seen the first, which I thought was pretty dull already. Well, actually, I've seen bits and pieces of the Avengers and the Dark World, but I really just couldn't sit through them. I guess the problem with Marvel and DC is that one, I'm really just not very into superhero-ish characters on a conceptual level, and two, I don't know, I just don't seem to really like any of the characters to begin with. So the fact that I'm not invested into literally any of the characters, and in fact have a tendency to grow to dislike them over the course of the movie, makes them a hard sell, especially when all of these movies feel like they're following a very similar formula, as you said. I guess the genre's just not really for me. If I had to pick a favorite Marvel movie, I think I'd have to go with Iron Man 1...which they, of course, immediately followed up with the crappiest sequel that killed any interest I had in the franchise.

That's pretty much been my experience as well. DC has had such low lows, but there's actually been a couple that I moderately enjoyed...Marvel, on the other hand, I'd characterize as being consistently mediocre/bleh all the way down, but never really quite "turn the TV off" terrible like some of DC's movies have been. Watchable, but not really very enjoyable. So I guess I'd rather waste my time taking a chance on a DC movie than another predictably mediocre Marvel movie. Heathers. I knew nothing about the movie except that Winona Ryder from Stranger Things was in it, and nearly turned it off 20 minutes in, but it was literally right as I was seconds away from turning it off that it suddenly became a lot more interesting, and I actually ended up liking it. Weird movie, but fun.

​ok, I previously thought the packers would realistically win 2-3 games the rest of the year. after seeing the aborted mooncalf fetus that is mccarthy's "taking the training wheels off" offense without aaron rodgers while also getting a fresh reminder of our diarrhea dump of a defense, I'm thinking I'm gonna have to revise that to 0-1 games, maybe 2 (buccaneers and browns?) if we're lucky. a man can only take so many passes 5 yards behind the line of scrimmage and toss plays before he goes completely mad

joke somebody just sent to me: ​ ​what has 4 letters, sometimes has 9 letters, but never has 5 letters ​ ​I felt like a dummy when it was explained to me

Yeah, 12v12s in casual TF2 pretty much always sucked - and the 32 man servers were laughably bad. For casual play, I always thought 8v8 was best for most maps - some of the bigger ones were fine with 10v10. Competitive was a different beast, of course.

I don't know what it is about people singing in a non-singing locale that makes me squirm, but there it is

​ hey guys I don't know if you've ever heard of this little known band, but ​@Shady: though I was a big Psych fan, I hate musicals that aren't cartoons. I was never able to sit through it, so that was actually my first time hearing it. it was...uh...silly.

Rodgers, Tannehill, Bradford, Palmer, Luck, Watson: it's a bad year for star injuries, and that's just the QBs.

I'm not a big release day person (i.e. it's extremely rare that I have to play a game on release), so Denuvo doesn't really bother me if it's eventually removed: by the time I get around to a game, even if it might pose a problem, it'll no doubt be removed by then. And for as long as it's not removed, it's unlikely I would purchase it, so that rather takes care of itself. For people that pay full price to experience a game on release day or near then, I can imagine how improperly implemented DRM schemes could be quite annoying. Isn't that the one that didn't let you run Cheat Engine? On a singleplayer game? Into the garbage can it goes, and never will it return.

Yeah, I'm pretty sure if Romo didn't apparently even contact the Packers when Rodgers went down, the Broncos probably aren't going to change his mind either (seeing as Romo loves the Packers...). I think he's happy where he is - less pressure, less injuries, and probably more fun.

The reality is that moderately-sized mods in 3D engines take a variety of skills and a lot of time to create in any manner approaching "good"/professional. Modeling, texturing, scripting and/or coding, writing, game system balancing, figuring out how to place it all in-game, etc. Depending on what you're doing, it can be sort of like having a part-time job for a not-insignificant amount of time to complete a mod that you will ultimately get little in return for...and we're assuming that your mod turns out to be any good, which there is certainly no guarantee of. Total conversions, then, are that much harder. There have been so few successful total conversions that it's really hard for me to ever get my hopes up by any. I've never worked on a total conversion project, but I've tracked the progress of many, and guys work on them for literal years with no apparent end in sight, with little benefit to come from it (maybe if you're in the video game industry, you could put it on your resume, maybe?), and just get burned out. Throw in real life complications and obligations, and it's easy to see why total conversions never get finished. One of the few that I've seen actually get released that I was excited for, Stalker: Lost Alpha, ended up greatly disappointing me. The level/world design was pretty rad (which was ostensibly the original point of the mod, restoring cut/scaled down content like the levels), but the developers mucked about in a lot of other areas like writing, voice-acting, and game balance, and all of it really just fell totally flat on its face for me. It's a crappy predicament, but if I'm not enjoying their game, I'm not enjoying it. They worked on it for bloody forever, too...and while it seems like they had a good vision in some aspects, it felt to me they didn't really know what they were doing in others, and the experience ultimately ended up being sub-par because of it. I think for a long-time development project to be sustainable, that by necessity needs a bunch of people with a variety of skills working on it for a significant amount of time, there needs to be some sort of funding. But that's sort of the problem with modding: what kind of quality of work are you getting out a bunch of amateur (in terms of level of experience) unknowns? We, as consumers, would no doubt just be endlessly burned by people who can make a good-looking proposal on sites like Patreon or Kickstarter and never end up delivering (if funding by those sites to mod other people's games would be even legal - I know some emulator developers have taken up receiving funds via Patreon, but it still seems to be a bit of a grey area as of now). You also can't get commercial funding for this type of effort, like you could if you were trying to sell an original game (or the idea of a game) to a publisher. So I don't really see a good way of solving this problem, which is probably why video game modding has been the way it is for the past few decades: smaller endeavors, such as a mod that only does some game re-balancing or a mod that only adds a few items (or whatever) can be successful, and occasionally a smart and dedicated developer comes along and makes something more moderately-sized like an overhaul of game AI or a complete HD re-texture of the game or something...but by and large, big projects combining a lot of skills just don't end up making it.

I mean, I liked it just because I really like the setting and overwhelmingly like the cast. Jonathan and Nancy are probably the two biggest drags of the show for me, but even they aren't bad. I have a soft spot for good and likeable child actors and good adventures, and Stranger Things puts both of them together. Yeah, it wasn't quite as good as season 1, but it was still really good.

I saw it earlier today, and gave it about twenty seconds before I closed out. Just for you, I tried again: sadly, I still no likey.

https://twitter.com/AdamSerwer/status/925018021005070337: "We need someone to communicate that DT is not doing these trips. It should be someone low level in the campaign so as to not send any signal" https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-10-30/trump-foreign-policy-adviser-pleaded-guilty-in-mueller-probe Perhaps more interesting than the Manafort and Gates arrests, one George Papadopoulos, a foreign policy advisor for Trump, secretly plead guilty earlier this month. He appears to have been flipped by Mueller.

"[the cross] asserts the truth of one religion and, implicitly but necessarily, the falsehood of all other religions" Though I know this type of meaning has been propagated by a multitude throughout the millennia, it's a pretty crappy way to look at it (and similar icons) in a modern context, and especially in the additional context of its original creation and subsequent donation.

I just finished Stranger Things 2 as well. (e):

two episodes into things that are stranger electric boogaloo, seems pretty good so far

The euphemism is still well-known, I'm pretty sure...just in really, really bad taste, as Hurlshot said. Furthermore, he actually said "prison", not asylum. So you're having a big problem about black players protesting about police brutality, so you make a parallel between them and prisoners. It's not quite "we can't have the slaves running the plantation", but man, it's still pretty bad. But hey, at least Jerry Jones seems slightly less awful in comparison to that guy. As for the rankings, Cowboys have the biggest fanbase, so that might be propping them up a bit (very optimistic fans pushing the betting lines against the pros), plus no huge injuries unlike a lot of teams right now is surely helping as well. Meanwhile, clearly neither fans nor pros have faith in the Packers without Rodgers, and so it seems, if anything, there's a bit of cynicism there instead. And I thought I was grim about the rest of the Packers' season...seems Vegas thinks even more poorly of them than I do.

https://twitter.com/rjinvegas/status/923705489162039297 From 3rd to 30th - the Packers are only better than the Browns and Colts without Rodgers in Vegas' eyes. Brutal. I'd probably put us more at something like 24th or 25th, but that's just me. (e): 3nd -> 3rd, lol

Detention, "an atmospheric horror game set in 1960s Taiwan under martial law" that has overwhelmingly positive reviews on Steam. I thought it seemed like an interesting setting for a potentially more story-driven horror game, but it just alternated between boring me with not that well-written dialogue and other text, and startling me with jump scares. Not for me. Not as bad as other poor entries in the genre like Dreadout, that's for sure, but still not what I was looking for.