Bartimaeus

Oh yeah, I watched an episode of that a while back and it made me want to die. This trailer...only confirmed that feeling.

I'll miss the old Rareware character designs, but I think my biggest issue is that the game just looks like Super Mario Odyssey, but Donkey Kong-ized. As a Super Mario Odyssey hater, this does not make me happy. Guide me, o' Lucifer, to some new road... Also, I lied, I just looked again and I think I like her "touring" skateboarding/rollerblading outfit the best out of all the new ones. That one seems the most Princess Daisy to me. It's like a better and more detailed version of some of her old soccer designs, and the little hair ribbon is cute...unlike the silly French beret or baseball caps. The swimwear outfit...if someone had explained to me in words its design, I probably would've thought that I'd have liked it, but for some reason, it just doesn't look great to me.

That's five minutes I can't play as Princess Daisy. What am I going to do in the meantime, play as Baby Daisy? My God.

MSRP is $450 ($500 for the Mario Kart World bundle), which everyone got mad about as being about $50 too high. Then the whole tariffs business started, and Nintendo retracted their MSRP and waited for the dust to settle...then tariffs were taken back(-ish), and Nintendo re-announced that $450 would indeed be the MSRP and everyone was like "phew, okay, that's so much better than what it was looking like", but then the initial stock was immediately sold out and now all we have are scalper prices, which are generally between $650-800. Depending on how the whole tariff situation ends up ultimately working out, it might actually get way worse. Anyways, I'm not familiar with WalMart or how their online store works, but I was looking at the shipping details and it says it's being shipped by a third party seller called "Sunrise Mail", so that's not WalMart's own price...and indeed, pricing aggregators seem to register the WalMart page as actually being "out of stock", with the listed price as being $500 instead. I don't think any of this much matters yet, since there ain't any games, not unless you count Mario Kart World as one, which I don't. Haven't ever enjoyed Mario Kart, and an open world version of it makes it exponentially less appealing to me, . All these cruddy open world games, I tells ya - at least it's a franchise I don't care about at all this time. You can't even start off the game as Princess Daisy, you have to unlock her in one of the cups. What an absolute outrage.

It's funny how the fall of cable and the rise of streaming services have actually made many more niche shows way more inaccessible than they used to be.

One thing I know that should stir up Guard Dog's heart and finally break through his paradoxically pathetic yet practically impervious shell of "both sides are the same"...the assassin even shot and killed the dog, a darling golden retriever. Find me any evidence of anyone but right-wing scum, be it this creep or cops or ghoulish governors of South Dakota, deliberately going out of their way to kill dogs in this day and age. Even their king hates dogs: doesn't that tell you both sides are, in fact, not the same?

Cool, Democratic reps and senators in Minnesota are getting assassinated now.

I'm not sure about either of those guys, but she was great and everything she said seemed to make sense.

It's been 30 years since a 4th seed or lower has won a championship ('95 Rockets, 6th seed). Actually, there have been just two non-1/2/3-seeded teams winning an NBA Finals, with the other being the #4-seeded 1969 Celtics. #1 seeds have won the NBA Finals 67% of the time, #2 seeds have won 21%, and #3 seeds 10%. I've been rooting for Indiana since they eliminated the Bucks, maybe it'll happen. They seem to out-stamina every team they face, which is kind of hilarious but seems to work.

Biden has had a noted speech impediment his whole life, but he did start to slur and say the wrong words more, and just seemed altogether slower. Trump in 2016 had already been pretty demented, and it's only gotten worse since then, but not all dementia manifests the same. Some get really slow, some say the wrong words or can't construct coherent sentences with proper structure, some pause or slur, some get confused and angry because of their diminished abilities (mental and/or physical), some lose their filters, some momentarily zone out and aren't aware of their lapses (...or are, which in of itself can feel pretty frightening to them), some lose their memories of their lives and people they know... Anyone who's watched any interviews of him speak at length in the 80s or 90s should immediately notice how present Trump constantly gets enraged at nothing and word salads his way through just about everything he tries to say: he is not even remotely as sharp or well-spoken as he used to be. Just because he still speaks confidently and aggressively doesn't mean he's not completely out of his mind: there are plenty of nursing home patients who do the same, but we don't make them President of the United States...usually.

Support the Girls (2018). I don't really understand the poster calling it a comedy, it's not very funny and really doesn't seem to trying to be. It was essentially "day from hell in the life of a Hooters manager", but without getting overly exaggerated or involved with any larger than life plot. I enjoyed it, but it was very stressful.

Amazon's The Wheel of Time has been cancelled after its third season.

Cabaret (1972). I liked it a lot! I was not surprised to read that the starring actress (Liza Minnelli) had been advised to play the lead role and subsequently researched and modeled her mannerisms after Louise Brooks. It's the kind of performance I wish Louise Brooks had been afforded the opportunity to play in a talkie. The musical numbers were really something else.

rip bozo. Bit of a fart of a game 7, at least after the first quarter. Honestly, these post-championship Nuggets are starting to seem similar to the post-championship Bucks...still a good team, but starting to age and get injured too much with there being no bench because of having to pay everyone, and all the guys you paid besides your superstar not really consistently performing up to the level they should be. I personally don't think Jokic or Giannis will ever be able to have a team around them that will get them into the Michael Jordan / Kareem / LeBron stratosphere - they'll always be at least a rung or two below, with the two of them both probably sitting somewhere in the top 10 to top 25 of all-time when they're done, especially what with the recent changes to the salary cap to make it more punishing to over-spending teams. And make no mistake, winning both championships and MVPs almost always requires a great-performing team around you (though Jokic did already receive an MVP in 2021 that went against this historical requirement due to there not being a great candidate in the top seeds that season - hence the "almost always"): SGA will win this season's MVP because of having a better team and more wins as a result. Flip their records, and Jokic would be winning his fourth.

I actually watched the whole first season of that show. I believe I mildly liked exactly one episode and disliked or hated the rest, though looking at the list of episodes, I don't remember which one exactly I liked...but I do remember the ones I hated.

I don't want to look at real people unless I really have to. Then again, I don't want to look at current anime unless I have to, either. Anyways, it satisfied my yearly quota for assessing the state of anime.

The United Papal States of America

Two episodes of The Apothecary Diaries (2023). Premise: Young woman (older teenaged girl?) that is an apprentice apothecary is kidnapped, sold, and ends up a servant girl in the Chinese Imperial Court, uses her skills, intelligence, and total lack of charm to prove herself and rise up from her position as the lowest of the low. There are good elements here that I like, but I am frustrated with this. I am reminded greatly of the movie Like the Clouds, Like the Wind (1990)... ...which has a very similar premise and seemingly some of the same ideas at play. I wish this show had been made around the same time, I probably would've really liked it; as it is, trapped in the conventions of modern anime and the show's unwillingness to slow down (she's already tasked with making drugs by the end of the second episode, with god knows what the eventual end point of the show is...), I switch between smiles and groans too much while watching this. This show really needs a heavy dose of common sense injected into its approach and writing so that just a speck of suspension of disbelief can be had, but I know that's not something that really happens anymore. It's very bittersweet that so many old shows (cartoons, anime, and live-action alike) are largely episodic and their main stories almost always move at a snail's pace even while they continue to build up their world and characters, while new shows completely reverse this by instead just running full speed ahead through so much of the story that they want to tell, not taking the time to consider what pace is sensible or how to bond the viewer to itself with its characters and intrigue. And the Apothecary Diaries actually has a number of episodes - 24 in the first season, with the second season still ongoing - so maybe it does eventually settle into a better pace than what I saw in the first two episodes, but I find it very disappointing nonetheless.

I'm a sucker for witch stuff that doesn't suck. I will have to determine if Sanctuary sucks or not.

David Souter, former U.S. Supreme Court Justice. He was nominated to the court by Bush Sr., but was immediately a moderate that became known for voting more and more with the left wing side of the Court as time went on, before deciding to retire early during Obama's term. He was replaced by Sonia Sotomayer. From an interview in 2012: "I don't believe there is any problem in American politics or American public life which is more significant today that the pervasive civic ignorance of the Constitution of the United States and the structure of government. Some of the aspects of current American government that people on both sides find frustrating are in part a function of the inability of people to understand how government can and should function. [...] What I worry about is that when problems are not addressed, people will not know who is responsible. And when the problems get bad enough, some one person will come forward and say, 'Give me total power and I will solve this problem.' That is how the Roman republic fell." He was my favorite Supreme Court Justice. RIP.

Well, I always played glass cannon builds with the intent to blow everything up before it could hit me in ARPGs, and if I get hit even once and instantly explode, it's my fault for getting hit. I don't know, games are just more fun that way, .

I think the constant penalties and free throws are even worse than the TV timeouts. But yeah, people generally only watch the playoffs, and sometimes not even then. Watching the regular season makes sense if your team has been in the gutter for forever and suddenly start to have a good season and/or if your team gets a breakout star player, but besides that, there are way too many games and they happen every single day of the week. I prefer the NFL's approach to having the majority of games all take place on Sunday (and I generally hate having to tune into the solitary Monday Night Football and Thursday Night Football games, so I usually don't unless it's my own team). Also, two years later, and it's very clear the Bucks' gambit in rebuilding the team around Giannis and Lillard has not worked out in their favor. The team is worse in every way than it was before that trade, and now Lillard blew out his achilles at age 36. I wouldn't be surprised if Giannis ends up leaving this off-season or the next, the state of the team under this GM and Doc Rivers has become rather deplorable.

Although I don't play them anymore due to my wrist injuries, I always thought this was the way to go with singleplayer shooters. A player that can be killed easily but who can also kill everyone else easily (especially if they're consistently playing intelligently and making sure to out-position and out-gun everyone else) has always seemed so much more satisfying than both player and enemies just being damage sponges. Well, really, I kind of prefer it in all types of games, but especially shooters.

It took them forever to finish The Empire Strikes Back - IIRC, the film prints they had available for it were all badly damaged and it took combining several of them to construct a whole film...plus all the necessary editing and re-grading to make them approximately match. The Empire Strikes Back is, of course, the only Star Wars film I particularly like. The result is...mixed. I think their A New Hope looks generally better than Harmy's Despecialized, I think their Return of the Jedi trades blows with Harmy's - both kind of have their pros and cons, I don't think you're wrong for going with either. But their The Empire Strikes Back has a rougher appearance to it, and I feel like Harmy's generally wins. Though both of them kind of try to accomplish different things - Harmy's is a cleaner and more traditional digital blu-ray experience, while TN1's efforts are more like what you'd have experienced if you'd watched these movies in theaters way back when. Even with that said, I like to see clarity of detail, correct color grading, and not having the brights or darks blown out, and I think the Empire Strikes Back reels they had just have too many problems - problems like the above LotR screenshots that are simply impossible to correct in post. I think I read that they actually found a new reel that's better than the previous sources they used and they plan on making a 2.0 at some point using it, but that might still be years off at this point. While the neutral color tones are interesting, The Fellowship of the Ring is my favorite of the LotR movies and has the widest range of deliberately chosen color tones/themes due to its more varied locations than the later two movies, and seeing it all get neutralized ends up being rather undesirable to me. The over-sharpening and DNR (dynamic noise reduction) employed to eliminate grain and make the movie look more digital (they were shot on film!) is also terrible, it gives the whole thing a certain uncanny look. It's bad enough when it's done to just cartoons, but I cannot abide it at all when it's done to real human faces.

Let's play a game: Spot the Source We Made a Crappy Upscale From! Was it A., the theatrical blu-ray that actually has the proper colors and uses different color tones for different times and locations throughout the movie as shown in original theatrical viewings, or B., the extended edition blu-ray that's a load of busted-up garbage? If you chose A., then congratulations, you won a one-way ticket to Mount Doom! If you chose B., then good job, you have eyes. tl;dr: "sharp and clear" That's because the recent-ish 2K and 4K remaster blu-rays of LotR are just processed color regrades of the ancient original blu-ray releases. The image is sharper, yes - that's typically what these processed "remasters" (as opposed to actual re-scans of original film elements) do, sharpen up already prominent details while losing or warping smaller details. The color regrading is an inconsistent mess on top of it - instead of restoring the films to their original theatrical look (which you can see in the original non-Extended Edition blu-rays), they are all over the place - sometimes it looks more similar to the theatrical colors, sometimes it's very neutral, and sometimes it's...just doing something else entirely. The neutral colors are weird - those films used color to signify different locations and their respective tones, so it's bizarre to see a "remaster" lose that entirely at times. They're awful releases that are lower picture quality than the original blu-rays from which they are derived from (plus, as you mentioned, the over-clarification of details makes some of the already low quality 2000s CGI effects stand out even more, and the films generally lose their filmic look due to over-processing), but if you really prefer the Extended Editions, I guess they might be preferable to previous official releases. There are fan color regrades of the original blu-rays that are better quality than those shoddy remasters.