Bartimaeus

The local film club recently featured Satoshi Kon's Paprika (2006). Loved or at least liked everything else Satoshi Kon did, but Paprika did not click for me at all. Will a second watch change my mind any? Um...kind of! It's a visual treat, especially impressive for a 2006 film...well, minus the little random cost-saving 3D CGI bits here and there, but I still struggled to really fully 'get' it, though I did feel like I at least enjoyed it more this time around. I can't fault Satoshi Kon for making exactly one thing I can't quite seem to fully into, try as I might. Regardless, it's an awful shame that Dreaming Machine (and everything else he might've made if his life hadn't been cut so horrifically short) was never completed. RIP to that brilliant weirdo: it's utterly tragic that the man died at 46, long before many of the best creators would ever complete their finest works.

updating my nvidia gpu driver caused my computer to kill itself during the update, i lost all video output and nothing i could do would restore it (although I was able to confirm that my system was actually still running because I could start music with a hotkey press and hear the generic windows error sounds by just smashing buttons); tried to restart, tried to go into safe mode, but even on bootup during just the motherboard manufacturer logo, my screens were totally blank had to put my system drive into another computer and delete my nvidia drivers from there in order to restore functionality of one of my monitors, because literally nothing else i did would work...i'm now sitting here wondering if i roll the dice by trying to install the latest driver again is this the part where i vehemently swear off all nvidia products for the rest of my life? regardless, would not recommend the latest nvidia gpu driver, I'd give it a 4/10 at best, would really like to see a return to form for the inevitable sequels, but i'm not too optimstic about it at this point

That reminds me when of when I played a retro-ish indie game, there was inexplicably no FPS limit on the pause menu, so anytime I paused my FPS would go up to (I believe) >10,000 and my GPU would instantly reach max temp while very audibly screaming out in mortal agony. I gave them a bad review on Steam that specifically called out that issue for it and they fixed it a week later, and since I did like the game, I changed my review to a positive one. The system works.

My best friend in kindergarten was this very silly and incredibly sweet mute girl named Haley, but she sadly moved away during the next summer. She really helped me with a lot of things I was struggling with during that first year of school, and I'd always wished she hadn't moved away in the ensuing years...though I'd myself move away a handful of years later, and then again, and again, and again thereafter. Anyways, moral of the story being, try to treat people with kindness and you might make some genuinely good friends from it, though it's obviously a lot more difficult in adulthood than it is as a schoolkid.

Like Steam with video games, I do not find streaming services at this time to be performing an adequate job of helping me discover movies/TV I am genuinely interested in watching (as opposed to just "eh...maybe, kind of?" at best), so quite often, I am spending time on a particular website that I use which does a much better job of helping me identify things that I actually do want to try. But I am also not the "let's just turn something, anything on" type: I can only watch things with explicit attention and purpose, and I'd rather spend time exploring and researching to find something I earnest want to put my time and attention towards than mindlessly turning on something I'm just not really feeling. Streaming services seem to be invariably funnelling everyone towards their latest crap anyways, and I am simply not very interested - it doesn't help that Netflix seems to have an ever-shrinking library of older, foreign, and other third party content (which I feel is its true death knell, as that is what I am primarily interested in these days) with these streaming services essentially turning into TV channels by another name that you need to subscribe to in order to get 'their' content. Speaking of Netflix, it's hilarious that it's getting more expensive as the service has increasingly less to offer. That is not a winning value proposition, I am afraid, and I do have other options that I can and will use.

There is a story and theme to the film, but it is minimalist and rather impressionistic, and yes, I think you could work through the same ideas in a smaller time frame...but you'd take away both marvel and gravity that it would have if you did so too much. Rather than "it should have been twenty minutes", I would personally say that it probably would've been better off at twenty minutes less from its run time of 1:23: tighten up the pacing and cut out some of the of the indulgently gratuitous fat, and I probably would've gone from an "it was really neat and imaginative" to a less reserved "I actually rather quite liked it". Especially because anyone who knows my tastes in TV and film should know that anything which could even be vaguely called "impressionistic" would not normally fall under my wheelhouse: I'm all about comprehensible characters and dialogue and fully understanding what I am watching, and Mad God offers very little in any of that. I think for KP's "Eraserhead"-addled brain, it will probably be quite sublime, but for me...well, yeah, it was definitely neat. The opening scene shows a particularly noteworthy event in mythological history while reading a passage from Leviticus, which I took to kind of inform the audience for understanding the story and themes, but it's still definitely a bit loosey-goosey and up for some level of individual interpretation.

Mad God (2021). Well, cinema was a mistake. I don't think you'll ever see a more vile visual masterpiece of a stop motion film. Strongly recommended to @PK htiw klaw eriF if he hasn't already seen it. It was hard to look away except for when I had to cover my eyes.

Alice (1988). Super cool visuals and incredibly creative live-action take on Alice in Wonderland, combining many practical and stop-motion effects in a pretty awesome way to create a surreal and creepy adventure. Unfortunately, I kind of hated it, mostly because every time any character talked, it would cut to these gross close-ups of a mouth saying the dialogue. The stupid bastard who thought that literally every even momentary piece of dialogue should hard cut to and from this disgusting mouth should have their own sheared straight out of their skull. I got so aggravated that every time I even thought a character might possibly speak, I automatically started closing my eyes. It was miserable.

Fortunately, it's usually super quick and easy for companies to build up the trust and goodwill that they carelessly poured gasoline on before tossing into a bonfire for no reason.

There's been a number of classic games over the years teased for re-release by GOG that have mysteriously never seen the light of day... Don't think they ever reveal why something that they expected to get done never quite came to be.

Barbie (2023). I was told to expect feminist proaganda, but instead I got a movie that just tries to have a discussion about societal issues affecting not just women but also men (...though obviously especially women) coming from an interesting perspective. It's not the greatest or nothing, it's not really my thing to be so on the nose and accomplish it via toys, but it was alright. Horrible country music being the ultimate representation of patriarchy was pretty hilarious, though.

A furnace? A gas chamber, perhaps?

1. Buy helmet online from specialty outlet. 2. Receive helmet, it's the wrong size. 3. Online store says return it with original invoice that works as proof of purchase. 4. Invoice that came with the helmet is for a completely different person and order. 5. Their only method of contact is through social media. 6. I don't have any social media. well babies and gentlemen, it appears i have been scammed

This would have been such a great year for Aaron Rodgers to destroy the Cowboys' hopes and dreams in the playoffs. Truly, it might turn out to be one of the great what-ifs of our generation.

They're also listed on streaming services such as Deezer and Qobuz, but oddly, "The Biawac" is missing and leads to a tracklist of 61 instead: https://www.deezer.com/us/album/217946932

Not sure that being publicly drunk and getting diddled while sitting around children before you do a full on "DO YOU KNOW WHO I AM" Karen episode and then lying about all of it is really a situation that warrants much sympathy - any one much less all four of those are enough to make me hate somebody. Unless I missed something that happened even more recently than that... Like, just don't be a complete trashcan of a person in public.

Well, those are incredibly offensive and damaging stereotypes of foreign film, but I was laughing out loud by the time I got to the German one, so I think it's okay. I did groan from the American one, but because you're unfortunately completely correct with that one, and that combined with really a host of other related and also unrelated issues really makes the majority of American teenage-focused cinema/TV very unbearable for me. Although Peppermint Soda was indeed very French/10, I probably undersold how much I enjoyed it: I think I kind of loved it.

Peppermint Soda (1977). The hilarious, somewhat depressing, much higher budget, awkward teenaged version of the aforementioned The Pupil. Instead of a small orphanage of Italian girls being rather miserable with life, it's an entire French girl's school of them (though the film predominantly focuses on two sisters, their respective social groups, and their relationship with each other). It was very French/10, but also quite enjoyable (especially at the scale that this was depicted - so many students in such a huge school!)...well, except for one of the main supporting cast turning into a Nazi as well as the girls being preyed on by creeps, but what else is new? I don't know what's going on here, but I like the cut of their jib.

well, brad dourif is a national treasure, so who can blame you I didn't keep up with this enough to understand the whys, but I sure thought it was odd the Republican House overwhelmingly decided to impeach him but the Republican Senate overwhelmingly decided against convicting.

Yes, and Android phones still let you manage the phone via ADB (the Android Debug Bridge). It was practically the first thing I figured out when I bought an Android phone...the iPhone I'd previously been using going straight into a trash compactor being the next. Don't think I ever got so consistently enraged at a piece of tech than the year or so I had an iPhone, it was utter misery.

The impermanency of what you've experienced is something that really bothers me about online-only games.

I had to go through the squirrel conversation in act 1 twice because of a glitch that lead to me closing and reopening the game, and the first time Shadowheart was sarcastically like "well, wasn't that wonderful?" when I kicked the squirrel to death...but the second time I did it, I instead got Astarion yelling at me for all the blood being wastefully spilled (hello Mr. I'm Totally Not a Vampire!) - nothing from Shadowheart. I got the feeling that for certain quick and relatively unimportant events, the game might just pick one reaction instead of letting all possible reactions play.

Yeah, but then you'd be supporting the public library having licensed it. A reminder that stealing things is always an option, and sometimes the only option that's actually ethical. Biden really is at his worst when he's publicly speaking. Once in a while he gets something that's hilarious and pretty poignant off the cuff, but he's many times more likely to do the opposite instead. It's not nearly as bad as Trump's constant word salad, of course, but...Biden is definitely not the most inspiring speaker or character, to say the least.

I think I agree, actually: their scenes worked the best when they were bouncing off of each other. Listening to Wang Miao neurotically repeating his own thoughts himself ad nauseum, not so much. I suppose you're probably not being subjected as much to that, watching the TV show instead of reading the book and all. Countdown: Yes...though from what I see, it and the video game stuff will be resolved and the book (or, well, show) will finally get on its way to where it wants to go after that.

Who's the other lead in the TV show, the crass military dude? Anyways, I got real tired of the countdown nonsense, so to then segue to the video game stuff...and then right back to the countdown again, is what caused me to drop the book. In my defense, I prefer Columbia.