Bartimaeus

Yeah, I did. I suppose I should've tried re-seating it and the connection...probably worth a try anyways.

I was recommended this one: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0832MR4WB/ The wifi speeds are on it have been pretty lousy too, though I don't really care about that - I only care about the bluetooth, as that's what I bought it for. But it stands to reason that if the wifi reception is unusually bad, the bluetooth is through the same antenna so that's probably unusually bad as well... I just get a lot of cut-outs and disconnects, worse than I would have expected for a dedicated card with two antennas compared to a rinky dink little USB thingy.

I remember TVTropes being a huge thing on the internet like...ten or so years ago, seemed like everyone was going "egads, it's so addicting to endlessly wander through it", but I wasn't interested at the time because I actually didn't like being aware of and reducing everything to tropes. That's still kind of true today - takes too much of the magic out of my favorite things.

Peter & Wendy (1911). Well...this is a book and not a movie, but they're making a movie of it, and Disney's animated Peter Pan is a very crude adaptation of it as well. I actually quite enjoyed it. Peter Pan himself is a somewhat dark and tragic figure, and the book ends with everyone but him rapidly aging or outright dying of old age while he continues on with his adventures, forever refusing to return but very momentarily from his childish fantasies. He's quite awful and really more some kind of antihero by many measures, yet I found myself empathizing with his intransigence towards growing up nevertheless. But that makes sense - even when I was still a child, I never wanted to grow up, and that certainly still holds today. Life as an adult is a complicated and uncertain cosmic nightmare full of perpetually growing anxiety and suffering, what's there to like about it? I'd go back to the simple perspective of a child in a heartbeat, even if it meant being forever trapped in silly dreams as well...though I hope I wouldn't grow to be nearly so callous as Peter Pan.

I got an AX210 recently as well for the Bluetooth, haven't been terribly pleased with it - it sometimes performs mildly better and sometimes a lot worse than the little trashcan USB transceiver I was previously using, .

If whoever they pick turns into a top 10 QB, then it was worth it. If they don't, then it sets the franchise back a few years before they try again. Just the nature of QBs and not having one at this point.

Yeah, there is some overlap, because character archetypes seem to be made of or at least heavily imply certain tropes, but I think they're just basic starting outlines for different character types. The 'every man' is an archetype that's suggestive of the character being fairly normal with reasonable but unexceptional characteristics and behaviors that's supposed to be a rough stand-in for the average person (and viewer), but you can develop and implement additional tropes for them as you go along with your story to help flesh them out beyond that. Where you start with a character obviously isn't where you end with them - Willie from Indiana Jones being a "screamer" isn't really an archetype but more of a trope. She's...actually, I guess she's probably the fish-out-of-water every man for The Temple of Doom, given that she had presumably been living a pretty normal and safe life before being forced into insane circumstances that her other two main characters were clearly already very experienced with. How would someone living a hitherto safe and stable life with no experience of danger or adventuring do when suddenly put into the same circumstances? Probably not well. @uuuhhii has a point in necessarily being more sensitive towards the main character(s) of a story - if an archetype or trope that I hate appears for a character that's only in a very small percentage of the overall work, I'm not gonna care nearly as much even it's still momentarily painful. With TV shows, sometimes you'll have a supporting character that you hate appearing throughout a series but it isn't typically a big deal because, well, they're usually not around all the time because they're just supporting. But then there'll be an episode here and there where that supporting character temporarily becomes a main character - if you're like me and you have watched a bit of Star Trek TNG and Voyager, you probably have a character or two in those shows that you're less than fond of and whose focus episodes you are not keen on revisiting. I think Councillor Troi is the absolute worst and I cannot imagine how anyone can enjoy her focus episodes, but clearly people must, she's apparently a bit of a fan favorite. I think Worf is perfectly fine as a supporting character, but he and his crazy Klingon problems are pretty awful in his focus episodes as well, .

Strong hero man/boy and the slack-jaw are two that come to mind immediately. The former can be found in about a million different shows and movies predominantly aimed at men, presumably with the intent for them to be able to self-insert. The latter...recently, Dominic from The Banshees of Inisherin would be a good example. I have been told his character is in fact good and very sympathetic (the actor won this past year's BAFTA for best supporting actor in his portrayal of this character), but all I could think anytime he was on screen that I really wish one of the other characters would just do him in. Two others, usually specific to cartoons/children's media, are the diminutive comic relief or overly talkative/expressive sidekick (and these can sometimes be packed into one character, possibly in the form of the unholy abomination that is the talking animal companion). Disney's Frozen has a good example of each of these, as it has both Sven the Reindeer and Olaf the Snowman. I also virtually always hate any kind of bad boy or "smooth" manwhore type character. Off the top of my head, I tend to immediately like crazy cat lady-like types, femme fatales (bonus points if they're also wacky, insane, or outright psychopathic), unlikely heroes, and probably others... I don't know the 'official' names for most character archetypes, but I'd say Willie from The Temple of Doom should be called the screamer, .

"Liking" and "caring about" a character can both come in many shapes and sizes, IMO: there are many favorite characters of mine from media that I would not want to know in the event of them being real people, both good and terrible, both protagonist and antagonist. There is definitely something to be said about a character being written (and acted if applicable) genuinely well that can help overcome initial impressions, but there are still a few particular character archetypes that I would just rather never see in any media again ever, and there are also a few that I am especially prone to automatically taking a liking for as well. Shows like Sherlock and Psych have "strong" characters - in the sense that they make who and what they're about pretty clear from the get-go (often thanks to them being quite exaggerated and ridiculous by the standards of typical real life people) so if your immediate impression is "these guys are the worst", you should probably get out pretty quickly. With slower and more serious entertainment, it's likely to be harder to immediately discern...but if you have characters whom I have some manner of immediate positive impression towards, then I am much more likely to stick around to see you try to fully bake them versus characters I want to shove under the nearest bus.

If I had enjoyed the characters and their dynamics, I'm sure that I could've overlooked that Sherlock was made by people who either A. didn't know how intelligent people actually problem solve and deduct things, instead believing it to essentially be a magic power, or B. did know but decided the aforementioned portrayal made for more exciting television. Either the creators are stupid or think their audience is (and it's especially grating given that this runs completely contrary to the spirit of being a Sherlock Holmes adaptation), but really, I just didn't like the characters, so...forgiving that was impossible. Characters you consistently like and/or care about trump most everything else for multiple season TV series that want to attract a loyal audience.

I miss the days when things were all just ugly polygons. At least that didn't constantly fall into the uncanny valley. There will hopefully come a day when modern 3D graphics aren't constantly doing that to me. Also, yeah, the directional lighting issue is usually pretty noticeable if you're moving the camera around to a lot of different angles to either look at something close to you or your own character.

You know, I'm not a thousand percent sure what the accepted verbiage is around the world. In the U.S., it might be "African-American lady", but this takes place in Britain, and some in the U.S. don't prefer that term anyways...just like how some prefer the term "Native Americans", some prefer "Indians", and some prefer "American Indians".

Hogwarts Legacy, I got as far as the character creator and the very first cutscene. What the heck is wrong with all the hair options, and why do the faces all look so glossy and gross? I just can't ever seem to into 3D graphics these days. I ended up settling on a black lady because she had the least lizard-like skin out of anything I could come up with, and then the first cutscene had her open her mouth and immediately look like a complete doofus with cartoonishly bad face expressions. Ah, I miss ye olde days of the silent protagonist. Well, I suppose I didn't really want to spend a hundred-plus hours on an endless collectathon anyways...

Like most shows of its type, the plots of each episode are largely just a vehicle for the characters and humor. If you hate the characters, you should loathe the show. Don't really see it being any different compared to something like Monk, Sherlock, or any other investigative/procedural show. Well, Sherlock doesn't really even pretend to have any investigative stuff, as all of the actual work and "deduction" either happens off-screen or devolves into almost literal omniscient wizardry on the part of the titular character, but that just means even more that you need to love the characters for it to work.

Yeah, those Sakura cards have been around for a few generations now, I think. Have seen near endless mocking them. The actual color scheme on that purple-teal-pink one isn't that terrible if you're into that sort of thing, kinda almost Outrun-looking, but...

Reading about the ways in which it was way ahead of its time and how it changed cinema was practically the only reason I was in any way tempted to watch Citizen Kane in the first place, as I'd already seen two Orson Welles films before I watched Citizen Kane and I came away with an extremely negative impression of the heliocentric director. Film language devices and techniques like the ones you pointed out are interesting, but neither art nor entertainment do they make by themselves for me (and anyways, what one personally values from both sides of that aisle will vary greatly from person to person). Call it a lack of appreciation for the art of cinema by all means - I did say that I'll never be a proper film buff, didn't I? Unfortunately, I find it impossible to detach myself from what I value and enjoy vs. what I don't, and you simply cannot be that way if you wish to see the entire history of a medium with an open mind. If nothing else, I can at least say that I am equally harsh to both old and new, so it's hardly an issue specific to him. But I think I'd rather go delve more into 1920s silents than I would anything else in Welles' filmography.

Are there any half-decent prebuilt companies that go for less flashy aesthetics? That's usually always my problem with them - well, beyond the PSUs often needing to be immediately replaced thanks to them cheaping out and using the worst possible units. I just don't want my computer to look either like a spaceship or a light show...where are my plain and simple black box PCs? Luckily, children are likely to love that sort of thing!

It's complicated. I think of Tarantino and his films generally being slick and enjoyable enough yet ultimately coming away not liking them, usually because I don't appreciate how he conveys themes, characters, story, dialogue - there's nothing lasting for my brain to grasp onto, they're all the quintessential "wild ride" films for me, and that's just not enough. With Lynch, it's...well, even with Mulholland Drive, for probably the first half of the film I was thinking "why is everyone acting like they all came from slightly different planes of existence?". His weird and surrealist style unfortunately takes me out of the experience rather than pulling me deeper in even when he's being relatively straightforward in presenting events and characters, and by the time I get over that, I start getting shoved into the really weird stuff and I'm pretty ready to resign. I've seen Eraserhead, Blue Velvet, and Mulholland Drive now, and none of them seemed to ever want to click for me on even the most basic elements of film-making, and I think that is probably what is hurting me the most with his films. I'll probably try The Elephant Man as one last attempt for Lynch - if I can't enjoy that, I think I should give up. I guess it is difficult for me to grasp what Lynch is attempting to do in any given scene - I don't know exactly what I should be taking seriously and trying to read into or not. Maybe if I watched all of his films like 10 times I would finally start to get his style, .

Probably because it gets so muddled with all the typical Lynchian extracurricular, leading to much more open interpretation and different levels of interpretation. Which, again, isn't necessarily a bad thing...but I can't help laugh at those screenshots of comments that I took, knowing that their and everyone else's interpretations are all probably perfectly valid yet still feeling like the lot of them largely come across as total crackpots. For me, as with Utena, I shan't delve too deeply into something I did not particularly like in the first place, which I guess means I'm really just a hater, . Not for us they ain't, but a lot of people clearly do, Mulholland Drive is considered one of the best films of all time and I think a lot of people really enjoy interpreting it. That's okay, I don't much enjoy all-time greats Citizen Kane or Metropolis as films either - interesting curiosities at best. I'll never be considered a film buff, and that's just fine with me.

Mulholland Dr. (2001). @Fire Walk with KP I finally enjoyed a David Lynch film! You're the first to know, just like I promised!

did a cartoon liquid metal bubble explode on this thing like from an episode of spongebob or something? "there is liquid metal [everywhere], this is bad"

@Fire Walk with KP Is it greed and suppressing labor? Oh look, it is. Wow! A couple of weeks ago, I received a message from someone regarding a comment I made about Wolf Children. Specifically, that they agreed that the first twenty or so minutes almost made them turn it off like I did, but they were surprised that they came around by the end of it and ultimately did enjoy it. Fool me once, shame on you...fool me twice, shoot me in the face. So was I fooled again? Does Bartimaeus need to have his cranium crushed? Are catgirls actually real? Click the spoiler button to find out!

Cowbop Bebop, episodes 7 and 8. There was an interesting omission at the end of episode 8. Stella the blind girl says her brother must've died doing something bad, and for some reason Spike doesn't do the obvious in correcting her - that her brother died doing everything he could to help her. But...I guess if your brother, the one person in the entire world that you love and trust, just died for your sake, that would probably just make you feel even worse about it to hear it, wouldn't it? Kind of a damned if you do, damned if you don't situation. Still, feel like that's something you kind of have to mention so she doesn't think he went off and pointlessly died doing something stupid. I don't know if the viewer was actually intended to read into that or not.

Taking out many of the weirdest, darkest, and most interesting elements of stories, which are often times pretty foundational to what those stories are trying to say, always strikes me as pretty wrong. But more importantly, I want to see the keeds cry when Ariel can't bring herself to murder her prince and kills herself instead. Yeah, that sounds like a good time. Well, you know, I'm not sure that The Little Mermaid was originally written for children in the first place...