Bartimaeus

I really liked the idea of the Oblivion gates - in theory. It's one of those things that big open world-making devs like Bethesda seem to always mess up: instead of spending dev time making a smaller amount of higher quality and preferably unique content, what do we do? Copy and paste, boys...copy and paste. According to Google, there are 20 permanent gates that always open throughout the course of the game, but there are another 80 "possible" gates, of which 40 will open. It would've been nice if instead of 20 fixed gates and 40 possible gates, we just have like...10, maybe 15 total, all of which would hopefully be a big deal and be specifically tailored in design.

Ever since I said "RFKJ is probably one of the best people in the administration", it feels like every RFKJ headline I see or hear about is worse than the last. The thing about him being a true believer in his own ideas (as opposed to just another mindless sycophant like the rest of the administration) is that while he might fight for some of his decent ideas like banning food dyes and limiting added sugars to food, he's also going to fight to end water fluoridation, limit access to narcan, and round up autistic and ADHD people to put them into work camps. Great. And treat measles with vitamin R or whatever too, but we already knew about that one. Although while I know the liberals aren't great and the conservatives aren't the same as U.S. conservatives, I can't help but think it's a good thing when countries globally stagger out their nationalist parties and candidates...so congratulations to Canada on not electing conservatives.

Batman update: Second half of the season has generally been much stronger and more consistent than the first half. Less episodes that feel like they were written by idiotic ten year old boys that think Batman is just the coolest and is never weak or makes mistakes certainly helps a lot. I've noticed that most of the best episodes, including most of the Joker and/or Harley Quinn episodes, are written by one Paul Dini, and there have been some pretty great episodes among those. I read this excerpt from the infamous episode "Harley and Ivy", the first time Harley and Poison Ivy teamed up together, which would be a reoccurring partnership in the decades to come: Quote: According to Paul Dini, this was meant to be the first prime time episode. "Fox was going to run it. Then a Fox executive saw it and said 'What the hell is this? Batman's not in this episode. He's only in it at the end? The whole episode is two girls running around in their underwear. There's no boy appeal here.' I said, 'Well maybe not any boys you know.' They refused to run it in prime time. Their idea of a perfect [episode] is 'I Am the Night.' That meets their criteria. It's dark and grim, with more of an adult feel and Robin was in it." Interesting thought process by that Fox executive there. I would say that "Harley and Ivy" was among the best episodes of Batman: TAS (and it was the first time you ever see Harley without her makeup or costume, with her normal hair and in normal clothing), with a lot of very interesting subtext about Harley's abusive relationship with the Joker that would come to fruition later in the Joker's murderous betrayal of Harley...also written by Paul Dini, in the final episode of the whole series. It's almost kind of like some writers were actually trying to tell evolving long-form stories about their characters, while some other writers were just smashing their action figures together.

@PK htiw klaw eriF Have you ever watched 964 Pinocchio? I just came across it a few minutes ago, saw the poster, read the premise, and immediately thought of you.

Oblivion always had the absolute worst difficulty balance: you basically had to keep going out of your way to make sure the game didn't completely break, either in your favor or against. What kind of cruddy game makes all difficulty scale to the player's level (already terrible), but then also makes the player's level either never increase (if you choose Major Skills you never use, like Alchemy or Hand-to-Hand) or increase way too fast (if you choose Major Skills you use all the time like Athletics or Acrobatics) but which don't actually increase your combat skills to keep up with the insane level scaling? It's so hard to get satisfying difficulty balance out of the game, everything either dies in a hit or two or is a ridiculous damage sponge. The best approach to fix that sort of design would probably be to just disable level scaling while also disabling damage scaling of the various combat skills, so that you can just set creatures' stats and they'll stay constant throughout the whole game, but also the player's own damage output with the same weapons will stay constant as well, making finding better weapons/spells actually mean something. Make bigger and better weapons/spells require those higher stats to use or something so they're not pointless, IDK.

Honestly, I kind of thought crisis might be the whole point: crisis, after all, generally leads to the seizing of more power, not the loss of it. Even if you're the one who's deliberately causing it.

Pope Francis

My understanding is that it's like most vulnerabilities: a threat can use it for escalation, but it's not something where just because your computer has internet while also having this exploitable vulnerability, you're going to suddenly get hacked. The threat needs to already have a high level of access to your local system in order to exploit WinRing0 being present on it, so there are a few steps in between there. Fun fact: most ransomwares don't even need admin privileges, much less the kernel-level access that WinRing0 gives. I'm a lot more worried about ransomwares than I am about WinRing0 - this doesn't mean turning a blind eye to any threat WinRing0 might pose, but I think WinRing0 should be low on your list of worries relative to, like, starting random .exes that you really shouldn't trust. And anyways, it sounds like Microsoft is trying to forcibly phase out WinRing0 as it is, which means developers are going to have to come up with different solutions that should reduce the possible attack surface.

I think it's aimed at too young of an age group to be of genuine interest to anyone else here, a Ghibli movie it is not...but it's one of those occasions where even though something feels like it's kinda for babies with a lot of the messaging really on the nose, it still manages to get an effective and powerful message through.

The Supreme Court apparently seized the deportation case from Alito after he inexplicably didn't refer it to the Court and then summarily ruled on it without even giving him or Thomas any time to write their dissents at 1 in the morning. If that's not the Supreme Court in a late night panic trying to conserve the little power they have remaining (and in the face of two of their members willingly try to give that away, too), I don't know what is. Waiting for that Gromnir Easter scoop on this...

My Sister Momoko (2003). A cute children's movie about a brother and his disabled sister, where everyone learns to get along with each other and appreciate their differences despite their own personal struggles, both small and large. Maybe a little on the edutainement side, but it was still pretty enjoyable, and I saw comments online about how viewers with either their own disabilities or family members with disabilities really connected with it.

When I look up "is martin sheen a scumbag", all that comes up is stuff about his father. He's certainly got some...interesting political and spiritual beliefs (and I say "spiritual" instead of "religious" because he considers himself spiritually Catholic while simultaneously spurning the religion itself), but seems like he might be a real and okay person. I wonder sometimes why some actors seem to be drawn towards portraying absolute scum - is it because they identify in any way with those roles, or is is it because they feel comfortable enough in their own skin that they're willing to portray those roles with their unique talent and skills while not worrying about it...or something else? I guess I should try to not have a viscerally negative reaction to seeing his face or hearing his voice. If he gets MeToo-ed in ten years, I'm gonna be so mad that I made any effort to not hate him. Apparently, I was super confused: Martin Sheen is the dad (who is reportedly at least an okay guy), Charlie Sheen is the son that's...less than. Charlie Sheen is the guy that always made me think he was a creep, Martin Sheen...I don't think I've seen in anything besides this movie. They looked like the same guy, which is probably why I couldn't make sense of who was whom.

The Little Girl Who Lives Down the Lane (1976). This is another one of those cases where I saw a poster and immediately said "yep, gotta watch it". Was it good? Yes, really good, actually. Was it exactly what I expected? Uh, no, not quite: on one hand, half of it was a pretty wholesome and cute young teen romance and coming-of-age movie, and that part was great despite it not being what I was expecting...and on the other hand, the other half was Combining the genuinely sweet with the genuinely horrific in a dark but grounded way seems to work with me more often than not, and while this was frightening enough for me to bring out the ol' hands-over-eyes style of viewing... Also, I didn't even notice Jodie Faster was the headline actress listed in the poster up above before deciding to watch it, but while I didn't initially recognize her, I knew it was either her or a total deadringer as soon as I heard her voice. I've always liked Jodie Foster, she's always oddly seemed like a stand-in for my own mom whenever I see her in movies...but I've always felt there's a dearth of movies I actually like that she's in. I have some mixed feelings about adding this one to the list of her movies that I like, but I guess it is what it is.

It's a lot more charming than the actual scene, that's for sure.

Oh, I know. Reportedly, he's also a serial adulterer, he's known for blackmailing and sexually assaulting women, and he also drove his first wife to commit suicide. What people like Keyrock could possibly ever see in a scumbag like RFKJ, I don't think we'll ever know. Alas, still one of the best people in this admin, at least as far as leadership positions go.

It's pretty sad state of affairs that someone as both awful and idiotic as RFK Jr. has been consistently throughout his entire life is actually one of the best people in the entire administration.

I googled and apparently she's been a cigarette smoker for forever, which might play into it.

Maybe they can be the next team to inexplicably hire Doc Rivers.

That's an incomplete Handsome Squidward, as Zoraptor mentioned. Oh, what fun repressed childhood memories...

I appreciate 3D games where light reflects off the shiny scales of the human characters because then I know that THEY'RE SNAKE PEOPLE

Local stupid bastard who should be chemically castrated to stop any possibility of offspring continues to insist, "Nothing will change." Of course, such people are not always stupid bastards - they're often just disingenuous pieces of **** instead.

My sisters loved to cheat so that they could build houses...I, on the other hand, have always hated base-building or anything even remotely adjacent to it, so I was more the type to start with whatever is the default options they give you and never move a single thing ever. So instead I would spend a couple of hours customizing and playing dress-up with my character, and then I'd try to play the character, and then I would quickly realize that I really must be missing something because The Sims seems to have no gameplay, no interesting stories, and no characters that aren't just walking RNG dice roll people that don't matter. I don't understand The Sims, there seems to be a chunk of brain matter missing from my head that makes the game work for other people but not me.

I just wish it hadn't been AI-generated, but I guess anime memes are probably the most appropriate usage of AI, .

I did watch LadyCrimson's video, yes, and it was pretty awful...for a number of reasons. Beyond even just the character visuals, I think the game in general is extremely displeasing to view in real time, especially with the constant stutter and pop-in on what I think are already unpleasant visuals. But I confess that I'm totally unconcerned with stuff like lighting, shadow, model, and texture fidelity relative to general visual style/cohesion and animation quality, and while I'm no fan of The Sims (despite growing up with three sisters that played several entries of the series and who tried to have me play it despite the fact that I could never figure out exactly what I was supposed to be doing in the game to make it fun), I'd take its art direction a hundred times over Inzoi's. Different strokes for different folks, though - maybe a competitor would at least move EA to try to make meaningful improvement to the series.

I would like to make clear something: I know that there are real life people out there who look approximately, in terms of real features and clothing/hair style, like the character depicted above, and other characters that you can see in official screenshots from this game. Somebody who looks like the totality of this character probably wouldn't draw a second thought from me in real life - I might not personally love their style, I might not find them particularly easy on the eyes or cute or beautiful or whatever, but that's a me problem, that's fine, I obviously understand that the appearances of characters and real life people in general should not and could not ever be specifically tailored to me. The specific issue is the "approximately" bit and how damned creepy it is seeing these horrible video game renders that somehow make them look so much weirder than they should, and it's why I always try to make sure to use the word "uncanny" instead of anything more pejorative like "ugly*". I searched for "inzoi characters" before I made my previous post and looked through a few pages of results, and I do not believe basically any person would be rendered well in this game's visual style - though there were some that seemed to be a little more and a little less bad than the others. All I can really say is...kill it with fire. *Though any game where every character looks like they have lip gloss on is always going to be an automatic no from me dawg, because there might very well be nothing on a human face I like less than big wet shiny lips, but again, that's a me problem...and it's also not even necessarily specific to just female characters: I've happened across random Korean and Chinese games on Steam Discovery game queues where this affects even male characters, and it's why I knew Inzoi was likely to be either a Korean or Chinese game.