Bartimaeus

I distinctly remember some Republican politician, though I don't remember whom exactly, fairly early on intoning something to the effect of "if we would just stop testing for covid, there'll be less covid". It was at that exact point that I realized that at least some states were, suffice to say, very likely to have less accurate data than other states.

The Marriage of Maria Braun (1979). Got fifteen minutes into it and was like "man, this German film sure is...German", and then turned it off. I'm sure it's O.K., but...nah, wasn't feeling it. So instead of a German film, why not go Austrian? Ich Seh, Ich Seh AKA Goodnight Mommy (2014). It starts off as a very obvious "our parent is an imposter!" kind of psychological horror film, but it's really just a cover for being a different and only mildly less obvious kind of psychological horror film. I think I liked it a little more than Martyrs, which I feel is a rather similar kind of film, if stylistically quite different. Don't know a lick of German, but @majestic, does the tagline on the poster say "The Shining for a New Generation"? Bit of a sham of a tagline if so - you'd have to be utterly daft to compare them in any way.

British film Peeping Tom (1960). I watched this on a total whim while knowing virtually nothing about it going in, as I'd only taken a quick look at the poster, and to be honest, it's not a particularly remarkable one. So all I expected was a very tame 'thriller' that'd be able to put my insomniac brain to sleep, and for the first ten minutes, that's more or less what I thought I was getting. It was not what I got. Great film that accomplished the exact opposite of what I wanted it to, but I can't really complain about that. It's kind of wild that this came out the same year as Hitchcock's Psycho, though it was across the pond in a film industry that was in a bit of a different place compared to Hollywood.

Nadia: The Secret of Blue Water: The Secret of Fuzzy: The Motion Picture: The End of Nadia: The Secret of Blue Water (1991). No, really, that's the real title. Okay, wait, no, I lied, I added "The End of Nadia: The Secret of Blue Water". Anyways, I completely forgot that there was a movie to end the series, though it's a film everyone says is very bad and that it's basically a scam. Well...pictures can speak volumes in this particular case, I think. This is how the show started: ...and this is how the movie's ending it: Enough said, right? It can be pretty rough sailing when they break out the D or F team to make the end to a series.

You know, I don't ever remember wanting to kill any children in BG1 and BG2, where you actually can, but all of these games where you can't, there's always at least one that I definitely did. Kind of feels like a chicken-or-the-egg situation: did they give children immortality because they realized their child characters were so annoying that they needed immortality to make sure that players weren't heartlessly slaughtering children en masse, or did they oh so smugly develop all these annoying child characters with the foreknowledge that there's absolutely nothing that the player can do about them? Regardless, I think it'd be a good idea for developers to remember that players will want to mutilate and butcher children if they're too annoying, incentivizing those developers to write them appropriately with that firmly in mind.

Yeah, it doesn't seem to matter if the very little that Republicans want to do (and there really is not much they seem to want to specifically accomplish, which is not surprising for a party that does not currently have any clearly defined platform besides some "we hate x, y, and z" bullet points...and also we love guns) is actually completely counterproductive to helping the people suffering the most, the point is to make those voters identify with you and have them feel like they belong and that their grievances are legitimate and perhaps that they even accomplished something important by voting you in. Whether they believe genuine problems will be solved, or if it's just stemming the tide of evil, hurting the "right" people, ending 'wokeness' or some other kind of lunacy - it doesn't really matter, not so long as they tie feeling better about their life and the state of the world to their side winning. That's a very strong and rather intangible feeling that's hard to quantify or argue against, so no surprise that there's not a lot of movement among the believers no matter how objectively laughable the results were under Trump and Republicans.

Yes, but only for the thread creator (i.e. as part of the first/original post). To be honest, I didn't have the particulars of that question pinned down when I posted it (I was kind of just mildly and indirectly clowning on the Cowboys getting absolutely steamrolled by the 49ers, which I can obviously do without any issue because unlike the Cowboys, the Packers have just been so good against the 49ers in recent history), but I think what I was going for was basically...you know, he was a nobody in the draft but he seems to actually be pretty good, but he also has such a fantastic team around him and he's still so young, it just seems difficult to fully understand how good he may or may not be at this particular moment, so hey, given the similar unique set of circumstances Tom Brady faced early on his career, it seemed like an obvious (if completely silly) question to ask. If he and the 49ers win the Super Bowl this year, that'd really be an uncanny parallel what with Tom Brady also winning a Super Bowl in his second year.

Poll Is Brock Purdy the Next Tom Brady? Yes No Maybe So

my ears, man all the audio is straight up dumped into the left side and it is badly clipping, but...but on the other hand, there is no piano music 6/10, would prefer if they were less technically incompetent at making trailers (e) Wait, this wasn't an official trailer, just some rando who made a clip. Okay, I guess I can't put the blame on the people working on the show for that. Still, if the guy that made/uploaded the clip doesn't have a good explanation for why it's so bad, off with their head and all that.

Ooh, fleas on rats, fleas on rats.

look, i hate to double-post, but even @Hurlshort won't show his children the Matrix sequels: i really feel like that says it all if we can agree on at least this

who re-watches them to even find that out in the first place like many bad sequels (see: indiana jones' crystal skull), there may be parts that are fine or even good, but if they can't make up for the overall experience being bad, they deserve everything they get that was definitely the only problem they had and why both of them received inordinate amounts of hate...in 2003 ftr, i think i liked the third one more than the second, but i only remember the second feeling like a giant waste of time where literally nothing interesting happened, and then later i found out that there was only supposed to be one sequel but they were contractually obligated to make two sequels, so suddenly it made sense that nothing happened in Reloaded stretch that roll of garbage tape out as long as the roll of garbage tape will go, baby my gosh, why hasn't one of Yor, Anya, or the other guy killed this piece of crap yet

Yeah, I'll definitely give it that. Just the 80s big hair lady samurai (now edited into previous post) beats the hell out of anything I saw in either of the sequels, and that wasn't even my favorite one.

The Animatrix (2003). I finally sat down and watched all of it. World Record (guy running so fast he breaks out of the Matrix) was the trash can sandwiched between my two favorites, Program (80s big hair lady samurai getting co-opted by her boyfriend to rejoin the Matrix) and Beyond (lady and her cat exploring a 'haunted house'). The Second Renaissance was also a pretty nice lore setup for the series...but the rest was mostly forgettable, I think. Not too shabby overall.

The premise is interesting, the execution leaves me...wishing it weren't quite so play/theater-like. Scene after scene where characters are sitting, standing, or slowly walking around while pompously pontificating endlessly about various things in a very untrue-to-life fashion seems to always be a bit of a difficult sell for me, no matter who or what it's about, or what it all eventually culminates in. It's just not really my preferred manner of storytelling, no matter how many times I've experienced it. It may be because I never really get a strong and independent impression of the characters, who they are, or what they're trying to accomplish, as they end up feeling like lifeless extensions of the film with no real setup, personality, or agency of their own - instead of the film being an extension of the characters, which is always my preference. I think The Banshees of Inisherin is a good example for comparison, as that's a film with some vague similarities in style and comedy to El Conde, but the moment I think of that film, I'm instantly recalling the three main characters, things they said and did, what they wanted and needed from one another, each one's specific and personal eccentricities, and how they all connected to the themes of the film, whereas...with El Conde, I don't know, it's all very much a muddled mess with characters that I can't really pin down for the most part, and that makes connecting with the film in a broader sense very difficult for me. Boil it down to just not getting much out of the experience, I suppose. Speaking of Utena, I always thought Utena was at its best when it was just being silly and letting characters organically interact as opposed to getting singlemindedly focused on bolting whatever it was trying to say straight to my forehead. I think El Conde would've benefited from being a little more silly, which you think would've come naturally with the premise, but somehow it didn't manage to get there for me.

El Conde (2023). That was weird. It won't be cracking the shell, I'm afraid.

now i'm no deer expert, but that really looks like the same guy from last year

The only thing Steam reviews is any good for these days is identifying small-time indie games possibly worth playing. If there's an indie game with 100 reviews that no basically no-one has ever heard of much less played that you're considering, seeing >95% positive is surely a lot more encouraging than <50%. But that's pretty much it.

Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny (2023). I genuinely had a pretty decent time watching this. Oh sure, there were some lulls and the action scenes were a tad weak/goofy (Harrison Ford is like two thousand years old, give him a break), some of the humor doesn't work as well as it should, and I'm sure if I read detailed analysis of all the things wrong with it, it'd get torn apart, but I actually enjoyed watching it for the vast majority of the runtime. It mostly but not entirely feels like a retread of stuff done better in the first three films, but...you know, as far as completely unnecessary sequels go, if you want more Indiana Jones, it absolutely beats the socks off of Crystal Skull as a complete product. With Crystal Skull, you get such an immediate Star Wars prequels level of a "oh god" gut-punch right from the start, which you you can try to ignore for the first half (maybe even successfully!), but then it practically turns into a cage match against Muhammad Ali as you get into the second half, and that's just not a fight you're going to win: in contrast, this film just feels at least pretty alright to watch, from start to end, and that's nice. Dial of Destiny even has a lot more (and I mean a lot more) restrained and effective use of CGI to boot (yes, even accounting for the opening being approximately 95% CGI): it doesn't outright ruin nearly so many scenes like it did in Crystal Skull (actually, I think the most distracting thing was Indy's de-aged face during the back-in-time opening...that crap is getting better, but it's still not quite there when you put it directly under focus). There's nothing in this that's even within the same plane of existence compared to Crystal Skull's jungle car chase scene. Heck, right off the bat with Crystal Skull, you had the magically magnetically flying gunpowder, and I don't think this film has any one scene even as bad as that one...but, well, enough thinking about Crystal Skull. Also, and this may just be me, but I found the lady and kid way less annoying than...jeeze, didn't I just bloody say enough thinking about Crystal Skull? Sorry, that didn't last long. Okay, they're not nearly as much fun or as memorable as Short Round and Willie, but they're fine, and actually, I think Phoebe Waller-Bridge was even a little bit better than simply fine in her role. In full disclosure, the fun of Indiana Jones was never particularly about the action scenes for me, so the fact that they're a little weak is not at all the end of the world for me in the face of other things I care about a lot more being pretty decent, but if you're desperately looking to re-live your childhood through Indiana Jones doing his trademark young man swashbuckling stuff, you'll probably come up pretty empty-handed. Maybe Crystal Skull softened me up or something, but I enjoyed it. e: Red alert, red alert, this is not a drill: @Amentep, @majestic, and I all enjoyed the new Indiana Jones film. Yeah, wrap it up, folks: that should just about seal the world's fate. e2: Okay, watching the RLM video about this film, yes, it is a giant mess and I can't disagree with anything they say. Lmao. Still.

Eight hardliner Republicans who felt betrayed (or whatever) by him working with Democrats to not shut down the government voted with a unified Democrat vote to remove him (note: the vote was initiated by Republican Matt Gaetz). Democrats seemed to be willing to save him in exchange for some concessions to avoid more of this clown circus show in the future, but he was in between a rock and a hard place: working with them probably would've made more of his caucus turn against him, and the very little power he was already wielding with them would've become even thinner. He seemed to believe he would survive the vote leading up to it. First time in U.S. history the Speaker of the House has been ousted: now we'll get to see even more of the clown circus show, and what follows will probably be even worse.

"Bring it on." - Man who got brought on

The Rocky Horror Picture Show (1975). Well, that was certainly an experience. This is one of those films that's like...you know, a cult classic that you're supposed to watch, but then you take a glance at it and you're like "well, cult classic or not, I do believe that one is just not going to be for me". But despite my misgivings, this was pretty hilarious...though I did need subtitles because some of the voice recording was not the best. Tim Curry...it's, uh, difficult to believe that his career essentially started with the stage version of this.

I didn't, but I do appreciate a good Bard slaying.

You saying this really reminds me of an old N64 RPG called Aidyn where party members would have dialogues/cutscenes in really random places and as a result of inscrutable party composition choices that you could never really predict (i.e. if you had certain companions in your party together, dialogues could trigger if you happened to be in the right place at the right time...but otherwise, you might never see or even know that they exist) - on top of said joinable party members often not being where they're supposed to be and randomly disappearing from the game because of...reasons that you'll never find out. It was always unclear if it was because the game was buggy or if the developers intended for characters to just up and vanish on some kind of criteria, but regardless, the result was that if you wanted a party member to stick around, recruit them early and keep them the whole game, because kicking at least a couple of them out for even a second could result in you never seeing them ever again.

The price they gave up for him could potentially be very high if Giannis is gone and/or the Bucks are bad in the late 2020s...or surprisingly fairly little if they're somehow able to keep it together until then. The Trailblazers are betting on the former, the Bucks seem to be on the latter. Jrue was a key part of the Bucks' championship run, but at the same time, the man has been deplorable on offense all three years he's been on the Bucks as soon as the playoffs started, and in the current NBA, offense is simply way more important than defense. He's also repeatedly mentioned wanting to retire as soon as his current contract with the Bucks was up (and he also mentioned that he would retire as a Buck, to boot!) - whether or not that ends up holding true, we'll see. Either way, this was definitely not something I foresaw.