Bartimaeus

I'm not too interested in most of what they talk about either - between Hollywood trash, the endless B-movies, Star Wars, Star Trek, and a plethora of other things I am not interested in, I would say roughly 95% of what they talk about is of no interest to me at all. Thing is, I like them as characters/personalities. Truth be told, I have had pretty terrible anxiety about death basically ever since I could form conscious/deliberate thought (which was like...when I was 5), so the stuff Ask a Mortician talks about isn't really what I'd ideally be watching either, but...I like her too, so it just doesn't really matter. For me, the entertainer themselves is usually a lot more important than necessarily what they entertain me with.

My three main subscriptions these days are all long-form content people. RedLetterMedia... ...which most everyone here should be at least passingly familiar with for one reason or another, Ask a Mortician... ...who isn't really what her epithet implies, she just makes research videos (or relies on her own expertise being a mortuary director for many years and generally being on the in with such things) about any and all matters related to death. In more recent years, she seems to be covering death-related stories of note rather than anything "ask a mortician"-specific, and I am totally okay with that. ...hbomberguy... ...who is an insane person that makes extraordinarily long but very entertaining research videos about a very random collection of subjects. And then...well, Lindsay Ellis is dead, matthewmatosis is dead, the only amateur singer I've ever subscribed to on YouTube is dead, most everyone else is dead. So long and thinks for all the fish, people. If anyone has suggestions for other interesting long-form content, feel free to suggest - I don't really have the patience or attention span for short stuff. I can't guarantee that I'll like it, but I'll at least give it a try. (Editor's note: The people previously mentioned are not actually dead, just inactive on YouTube. In other words, they are dead.)

If you mean specifically me, well, all I can say is my dear Sarex...please consider the person who you speaking to! Do I really seem like the type of person that would find any value in automated suggestions? My first subscription to a channel predated YouTube and Google merging, and I previously mentioned that I'm only subscribed to around 5 channels*. Think about how long that is and how picky I am about movies, TV shows, books, music, et cetera. I don't think I have ever, even once, subscribed to a channel that I just randomly came across by way of YouTube's suggestions/related videos - all channels I have come across have either been by searches that I've done or specific suggestions other actual people have made to me. With the way YouTube currently works and the 'quality' of their suggestions, I do not believe it is even possible for them to suggest anything that would be of interest to me. *This is not quite accurate, but the spirit of it is: I'm subscribed to around 15 different channels, but only five of them have posted anything within the past year. So what I actually meant is that I'm only subscribed to five channels that are currently active. Little different, but more or less the same. Well, I don't use bookmarks for frequently visited sites. For example, my process for coming here is hitting CTRL+T (new tab...or F6 if I want to edit the current URL) + "obs" + down arrow + enter -> I am now on the Obsidian forums. It's quicker than using a bookmark, I don't even have to touch my mouse. With YouTube, it's easier to be subscribed because that way I don't have to manually navigate to each channel and then go to the videos tab of each person I am subscribed to (because the "home" of each channel doesn't usually even display new videos for some gosh-forsaken reason). As previously mentioned, I am also subscribed to some people who are inactive, and even some of the people who are active only post a video every 1-2 months, so manually navigating to check would be a patently absurd approach.

My issue is that I'm actually subscribed to a handful of channels that I want to keep up with, and my home page used to be a disaster of utter garbage YouTube was trying to drown me with. If THE ALGORITHM hadn't so consistently recommended me things that have seemingly zero relation to things I have previously watched and/or the five or so people I'm subscribed to, I would be more tempted to let it be - instead, it was always just funnel town for trash clickbait as well as the legitimately insane, so it had to go. (e): Okay, yeah, I just disabled Unhook for a second and...Adam Sandler, shorts by INFLUENCERS, car news, random musical artists I've never even heard of...what the hell is all this crap? No, absolutely not.

I highly recommend the "Unhook" Chromium/Firefox extension for YouTube if you want to modify various YouTube behaviors. I kind of forgot that THE ALGORITHM exists in the first place because I have suggestions completely disabled.

More nostalgia: A Series of Unfortunate Events (2004): Huh, I remember this being a lot better when I watched it 20 years ago. Seeing it as an adult now...well, the setup and pacing feel so awful from almost beginning to end of the film. Guess that's what happens when you haphazardly smash three different books together all at breakneck speed. Weirdly, I initially thought Jim Carrey's trademark silliness was a total mismatch for Count Olaf, but then I realized that he's probably the best part of this film even if that's true, so I guess whatever. I heard the TV show does a better job of things, but it's so very long and it is very difficult to make me stick with multi-season shows. Matilda (1996): Haven't seen this since I was very young (around 6 or 7), didn't ever really want to re-visit it because I didn't think it'd hold up. Major error on my part, it's really great in a lot of different ways. The first hour of being purely a little slice of life film about a little girl in some less than perfect circumstances is fantastic. So much thought, charm, style, and love went into making this (...and also a lot of pretty inexplicable dutch angles). Straight into my favorite films of all time, #thankyounostalgia, I'm going to go read the book too. My utter contempt for "artiste" food knows no bounds, so I will take that explanation and run with it gladly, .

Eh, a 6/10 isn't particularly rare. Although...you know, if I look over the movies I've watched within the past month, only 8/24 made it to a 6/10 or better, so I suppose it is some level of distinguishment for me. And two of those 8 were documentaries, so I'm not sure they should really count. According to my movie rating-tracking site, my mean average rating is in fact 60.34%, so it's right there. I'm not sure if that's what bothered me about Midsommar or not. Everything about it seemed...well-made and nice, but for some reason it left absolutely zero impact and I remembered and felt almost absolutely nothing about it a few weeks after watching it, which I find to be a very tragic quality for a film.

Yeah, I initially thought it was The Murderbot Diaries and was confused when it turned out not to be. How many different things can be called Murderbot? ...At least two, apparently. I watched Nope twice, and I liked it the least out of Peele's films...but I still mostly enjoyed it. Well, I enjoyed the first half, the second half really tried my patience. The film really went off the rails and in a bad way for me after the "it's above the house" scene and never recovered. I also don't even remotely understand your comparison to Evangelion with it, .

Even ignoring the principal of it...if you live in a big city that where you have a lot of internet and server infrastructure pretty central to you, you might not be particularly bothered by the performance of always-online stuff. For those of us who live a bit farther out, and that's tens of millions of Americans at least and never mind the rest of the world, it can be a little bit of a different story. It's especially infuriating when it's completely unneeded from the perspective of just trying to play the game - it's one thing if it's an MMO and that's just a necessary part of the package, it's another if I'm trying to play a game that is a totally or predominantly singleplayer experience and it's being an unnecessary hassle. If my experience is improved by pirating instead of purchasing the game, you the developer/publisher have made what I would call a very grave error.

and people say wes anderson is more style than substance, really shows them (although real talk, this trailer did a better job of interesting me in a film than the last hundred I've seen, it's somewhat tamed by not actually liking the wes anderson films I've already seen - maybe because his style in short bursts can be fine while not so much over two hours)

I don't care about Steam for anything but being a messenger at this point anyways. Don't much play video games anymore in the first place, but when I do, it's usually retro or weird indie stuff, which is typically on GOG instead. Occasionally, I come across something that's only on Steam, but $5-20 a year for a few things on Steam a year really isn't that bad.

Speaking of gaming on Windows 7, Valve recently announced that Steam will no longer run on Windows 7 (and 8, but not a single person on the whole wide Earth cares about that) on January 1st of next year.

I was able to uninstall it and it does seem to actually be gone, but a broken/ghost shortcut remains in my Start Menu, and it doesn't seem to be easy to remove based on what I've read online. I think this bothers me more than just having it installed. My primary PC uses Windows 10 LTSC 2019 which didn't come with Edge at all, but my secondary PC uses LTSC 2022 which did. Hmm. Winaero Tweaker and ShutUp10 (both of which I highly recommend both for reverting and changing various Windows settings/behaviors) come with settings to at least prevent Edge from invisibly loading and prefetching crap automatically (even if you literally never use Edge), but no actual proper uninstall. (e): Running this short and clean-looking .bat seems to have done the trick for me, though I know not what other consequences might arise from it throughout the rest of the OS, and it seems to be targeted specifically at post-2019 LTSC versions: https://gist.github.com/ishad0w/d25ca52eb04dbefba8087a344a69c79c/27e1e32a40c82f5dc46a81dca87ba8842616ae03#file-microsoft_edge_uninstaller_21h1_ltsc-bat A comment at the bottom suggests this .bat has been superseded by the linked "Aveyo" Edge Removal .bat.

I think PST:EE is the only EE I would actually play - from what I understand, Beamdog didn't butcher it like they did the BG EEs.

Okay, yeah, the strange pauses between every line is usually a big pet peeve of mine as well. I think the only anime where I've tolerated what I felt were way too long pauses was Devilman Lady. So I just watched all of episode 4, and I...kind of get what you mean, because while initially I didn't notice it, when I really started to pay attention, it did start to feel like the pauses were just a beat too long. It's not much, but it's there. Please don't make me start noticing that too, I already get annoyed by too many things that I can't fix - this is fine. IT'S FINE! P.S. The English dub is close to intolerable. Well, Syphas and Trevor are intolerable in the English, rather.

What problem, man? We still don't know what you're talking about: "weird dialogue edit problem" is not very helpful. Is it too fast, is it too slow, are there inexplicable pauses between lines that sound totally unnatural to you, are there strange cuts in the middle of lines? Ya gotta help us out here.

I recall trying both and liking the Japanese better is why I asked, which made me curious as to what you did.

is this meta joke if so very hilarious @majestic Did you watch in Japanese or in English...or German?

Peter Pan (1953). I think I actually enjoyed Return to Neverland even with its massive issues more than the original here, probably because at least the core ideas felt stronger (not to mention grouchy Jane seems a way better protagonist than the vague and wishy-washy Wendy). It doesn't help having read the book not that long ago and keenly feeling all the omissions...and the additions. Hook feels bizarrely sympathetic at points, Peter Pan's (lack of) character is inconsistent, the themes are largely watered down or simply not really there, and...boy, those Native American scenes seemed, um, a bit questionable. Thinking back to what I saw of that trailer for the new live-action one, it seems doubtful Disney will try to give a more interesting or faithful interpretation, but I suppose you never know.

I made it through about an episode and a half waaaaay back when there was only one season, I'm pretty sure. Don't remember who Trevor is, but Castlevania certainly didn't seem to be my kind of vampire show. Admittedly, I was probably harder on it then than I might be now, but I'm still not much tempted to return. Frederator apparently animated Castlevania. Same company as My Life as a Teenage Robot, The Fairly OddParents, and Adventure Time, so that's pretty wack.

Smile (2022). Man, I really hate "curse" horror films, even ones with half-decent coats of paint. For 2022 films...dang it, this goes below The Northman. Are you happy, @PK htiw klaw eriF?

Whole milk? Man, I got scammed hard. I never asked my mom to do that. I don't know why, maybe because I knew she would yell at me if she learned that I was skipping lunch and she probably wouldn't have the time or energy to do it anyways. Actually, I absolutely hated asking my mom for money because we were really poor and it was just...difficult, so skipping lunch was kind of killing two birds with one stone. Don't have to ask for money, don't have to eat bad food.

Not usually anything more than very faintly, but last night was a real...oh, that's what they're supposed to look like! moment.

Good man. The issue for me is I didn't like school cafeteria food period, so I skipped it unless it was one of the very few things I actually liked...which, I think only came down to when they served breaded chicken of some kind. Though I moved around during my childhood a lot, I was at that school for grades 2-4, so that was three years of my childhood I didn't hardly ever eat a thing for lunch on school days. And to not even let me have orange juice when you actually have it available so that I can at least have something...cruel and unusual, I says! Though they probably thought it was cruel and unusual having to deal with me, so maybe it all balances out. Don't know what kind of effect not eating lunch most days out of a year has on a kid during that age range, though.

Northern lights were a pretty ludicrous display last night. It's not usually very strong where I am, but it was as though the heavens dumped a dump truck's worth of green-purple puke everywhere.