Bartimaeus

i'm confused, where's the cute spider? i expected shelob, but all i get is some lady? sorry but a half-dressed bint with pale skin, black hair, and full-on uncanny valley just doesn't make a spider (e): Lmao, I did a reverse image search and apparently this literally is Shelob. Alright, whoever designed this atrocity gets thrown out the nearest window.

If I had more disposable income, I'd buy a lot of hellfire missiles that immediately target and blow up anybody setting off fireworks past 11.

Basil II > Basil the Second

Whisper of the Heart (2022). The basic premise is that Shizuki, our protagonist who was so driven and full of her dreams and ambitions of writing by the end of the original film, is now ten years older: she is a failure who cannot get anything she's written herself published, and she is being left behind by friends who are moving on with their personal and professional lives while she wilts away. She works as an editor at a podunk children's books publisher, in an uncaring industry that cannot really afford to approach writing in the way that she dreamed of when she was a child - she is even micro-managed into pushing the writers she's managing into directions she does not agree with, which only kills her even more. And her guy, Seiji, has been training to become a professional cellist in Italy...for ten damned years, and it has understandably taken its toll on both of them. It's a weird phenomenon to take a child's pure, hopeful, and beautiful perspective of their life and the world...and then flash forward ten years into the future where they've effectively been ground up into a fine paste - a nervous wreck that feels like they can't possibly accomplish anything with their life, that they're just...stuck at best, doing everything wrong at worst, and in the way of others. To a degree, it's kind of what happens to a lot of people in reality: sooner or later, most everyone gets eaten up one way or another by life, including and especially the wonderful, driven, and talented. Okay, as for the movie itself. There are some pretty good ideas here, but it's such a hot mess. I'm just imagining how this might've been tackled if it were instead a Studio Ghibli-animated film made right after the first, and I think using the same core but cleaning and tightening it up, it would actually probably be great. But in 2022, in live-action, made by a mediocre director in what feels like a made-for-TV production, with all of its different ugly warts and awkward compromises...it's definitely less than. Still, the idea is there, just deeply buried.

Only tangentially related, and I don't know if they still do this now, but many years back, they would once or twice a year send one of their manly man reps to try to recruit people straight out of high school. Never understood why people seemed to gravitate towards them - always thought they were right nasty creeps, so I avoided them like the plague. I remember the very last one I ever saw before graduating had apparently been told specifically to look out for me and ended up following me around and hounded me into filling out and signing some kind of form. Don't remember exactly what it was for, but he tried to sell it to me as some kind of "we have an active interest in you and we would very much like for you to reciprocate that interest". I did and returned it to him, but he didn't notice that I had printed and signed a completely bogus name, . As if I would ever do well in any kind of military setting...don't know what the bloody school staff (or whoever responsible) was telling them for him to have specifically sought out me, but the whole idea was utterly ludicrous.

The longest I ever went without sleeping was just a little over 80 hours. No special occasion, my brain just decided it didn't want to be in anything but a very wakeful state anymore, and I just couldn't do much about it. At about 30 hours, I already felt like a total zombie and it was completely awful, so you have my sympathies - but at 70 hours, the walls and ceilings started to spontaneously manifest writing upon their surfaces, so that was pretty cool. I don't think I'd do it again if given the choice, though.

Not only that, but the alternative backends that fix many of twitter's most annoying problems (e.g. my favorite, unofficialbird.com) seem to be broken right now no matter what profile or post I go to, which means I cannot see anything twitter-related at all. It's really dumb for me too, because I actually tried to register years ago, but every time I make an account, they immediately ban me within seconds. I mean, I can't blame them, it is me after all, but why, what did I do? I had never even posted/commented/liked/favorited anything, and I even registered from my home connection. Twitter is the worst, to be sure, but I still get occasionally linked something to there and now literally I can't even check out a basic post.

i watched the first episode that was something it was not bad, but it was something kind of like if zero punctuation wrote a show, but with some interesting character writing

Bartimaeus is known to be, and has been called, much worse than that, . If I'm already bothered by these things in the first book, guarantee I'll be positively seething about it by the end of the third book if it doesn't get any better.

See, that's exactly what I didn't want to hear. Characters with weaknesses (their unwise way of approaching situations, bizarre idiosyncrasies that can blow up in their face, strict limitations that they're never going to get past but will find smart ways of working around as necessary, explicit vulnerabilities that they can feasibly be exploited or felled by, potentially fatal character flaws that make them unsuited for their environment - all of these and more!) are almost always far more interesting and memorable than the "I am awesome at everything" types...especially if you can really work those quirks and details into strong character writing that actually matters for your story. You know, characters should be...well, characters! Particularly for books, where there's so much more opportunity to flesh them out in comparison to a movie or miniseries. Heck, if you're clever, you'll find ways to turn what are usually weaknesses into key strengths in appropriate situations. I thought Bequin's introduction was great, it really made her seem like she would be very different from everyone else...but no, she kind just gets moulded into the same amorphous tough dude blob that everyone else already started out as. Hmph. Given my tastes in film, perhaps reading books rather explicitly made for men about men is not the best idea on my part. We'll see if I ever get around to it. melkathi's words do not fill with great anticipation.

Warhammer 40,000: Xenos by Dan Abnett. I don't know whether to post this in the reading thread or here. It was pretty decent, but a little rough around the edges in a couple of ways. For an introduction to Warhammer 40,000, you could do so much worse. The book stayed quite focused on the story local to our characters rather than doing any big world/setting dumps, which would be the absolute worst thing you could do to someone new to a truly gargantuan series like Warhammer. My biggest complaint: characters that weren't Gregory Eisenhorn started to feel a bit...telegraphed and perfunctory. When Bequin was introduced, I was like "oh sweet, this lady's awesome, she should be great for the rest of the series!"...but then she almost entirely disappears from the book except for when she's going to be used for her abilities. Every time she was mentioned, I started to think "guess they're going to need her for something pretty soon here...aaand yep, there it is". Hey, this isn't a video game: if you're going to introduce a character (especially one that I like), you need to take the time to actually write out and include them! I started noticing what felt like similar patterns with other characters like Betancore and Aemos. I'm also not so sure that everyone in the core group really needs to be written so similarly as Toughdudes McStrongmans. Hell, by the end of the book, even Bequin was apparently an ace shooter, and that's absolutely absurd given the relatively short timeframe and everyone else having spent decades (or more!) honing their craft. But otherwise, I thought it was a fairly enjoyable romp.

Oh, right, the Tulsi Gabbard approach. Yes, that would make an unfortunate amount of sense: despicable creatures abound everywhere, it seems.

Yeah, I initially wrote the question in a much different manner, but I decided it'd be best to be as least toxic/snippy as possible. You know, in the hopes that it gets answered! Making an actually funny/clever meme would've been difficult enough even before you constrained it to such a basic/cookie-cutter template, so that surely did not help. I could see maybe children/young teens who are excited for upcoming games deciding to do some in that vein, but the fact that literally nobody has kind of ties in to my question of us just being too old for this silliness.

Now that we're two weeks into this, are you perhaps starting to think that your player base is just too old and ornery for making memes?

Choosing to attend and speak at literal Hitler-quoting far-right hate group events probably doesn't do him any favors either.

planet of lana cheat engine's speedhack doesn't work on this game for reason, so it got uninstalled pretty promptly after I had to slowly crouch walk under something for the umpteenth time in the intro billiam shakesman once said that brevity is the soul of wit, which is just a fancy way of saying QUIT WASTING MY TIME also, why can't 2d platformers that are trying to be pretty have gameplay just a little closer to Donkey Kong Country and a little farther away from clunky walkathon Limbo, it'd do them a whole lot of good to have some kind of gameplay that isn't only "hold right" and "stop holding right until you can hold right again"

you used to be able to CARRY cats and dogs back in 2006 (Twilight Princess), we've only gone backwards really

. . . The End of Bosco Adventure. Something about all of this feels just a little bit off to me. Oh well, it was a mostly lighthearted and decent show, though I probably wouldn't particularly recommend it to anyone here - it's kind of in that Legendary Idol Eriko tier of shows that's certainly watchable and fine enough, but not so much more than that that I would press anyone else to watch it.

Maybe Laika shouldn't have made their protagonist so annoying that I wanted him to get horrifically maimed just ten minutes in - get a new one and restart the movie, please. Grumble, grumble. ...I liked the song, though.

I have been recommended Eisenhorn (and the closely related Ravenor and Bequin series) a number of times by people of various tastes, including a couple of people whose opinions on books I trust to a pretty decent degree...but I've been told by most of the same people to stay far away as I can from the Horus Heresy*. Which seems very obvious for a 60+ book series written by...30, 40 authors or something like that? Even if it started out good, it is against all manner of reason that it could possibly stay good. *And really most of the rest of WH40K, but that's a whole other thing.

Man, if that ain't the truth - at least for the section of people who don't reliably vote by nature. It's definitely a double-edged sword: both sides are hyper-energized to vote when Trump is on the ballot. It creates weird and difficult to predict results in both directions, and I'm not super keen on an unpopular Biden (although he was already unpopular leading up to 2020's election anyways) facing him off again, which I think I've been making mention of here on the Obsidian forums practically since the day Biden won the last election. I want the Trump era of U.S. politics to be over and done with, but sadly, I think it's here to stay one way or another for the foreseeable future: the entire political paradigm has changed so much we'll be suffering the effects for at least the next decade (...and most likely a lot longer after even that).

Yeah, uh, I don't think Biden has much to worry about with regards to that crackpot, at least at this particular moment. Even somebody who heavily distrusts polling* should probably feel a little skeptical when it's a 60 point difference. *Which is almost always the result of their inability to parse statistical information and how fuzzy probabilities regarding uncertain outcomes work. But people going "my candidate was given a 20% chance to win and they did just barely win so EVERYTHING IS A LIE AND THE POLLERS ARE STUPID [even though that's literally the exact outcome that the 20% was accounting for]" is always pretty hilarious. The more things change, the more they stay the same.

Palme no Ki AKA A Tree of Palme (2002). So I'd never heard of this film until just a few days ago...and nobody else has ever heard of or watched this film either, as best as I can tell. When I looked at a few screencaps of it, I...had a few questions. Like, who even made this obvious Studio Ghibli film rip-off? And secondly, why does it look...surprisingly good? But for as good as it looks, it's rated quite badly, so it's probably not any good...right? Strongly recommended, although it is very difficult to find an HD copy of this film with subtitles (or even the English dub, which I have not heard yet - actually, this is how I came across the film in the first place, as it was listed as something ADV FIlms dubbed and distributed, the same people who did Neon Genesis Evangelion). From what I can tell, no blu-rays were ever released and only Amazon Prime ever carried the HD version and it was for a limited time, and they didn't include either English subtitles or the English dub with it, for some reason. Which is weird, because there is an English script for it out there. Initially, all I had was a terrible bootleg DVD, and I played it and I was like "whoa, whoa, hold on a second...okay, there has to be a better version of this out there, right?". Lo and behold, there was. I guess if anybody is actually curious enough to watch it and can't find any avenues for doing so, I could help you, just send me a PM.

Oh, that makes sense I wouldn't have a good impression of where it was used then, as that sudden jump back to the present after almost all of the first 40 minutes being a childhood flashback was probably my least favorite part of the film, .

Yeah, long gone are the days where music like Teremtés could actually fit right into anime. ...Though I actually couldn't tell you precisely when this song was used in Only Yesterday, I have nevertheless heard it on the soundtrack.