Bartimaeus

Well, does Mr. Dobson have a 27B-stroke-6 or not? Those boys up in Central Services are sticklers for paperwork you know...

Return to Neverland (2002). 3D animation was a mistake. I mean, this is mostly fine enough 2D animation (although a bit blunt in its detail and shading a lot of the time like most digital animation of the early 2000s), but the parts that look bad look really bad. Ya ain't never seen bad 3D animation 'til you've seen a giant 3D pirate ship flying alongside 3D WW2 bombers in front of a 3D Big Ben in all its ugliness and floatiness. Anyways, interesting film. Well, it'd be even more interesting if it hadn't been so...Disney-fied, but I suppose the only reason it can exist in the first place is because Hook wasn't killed and the Lost Boys didn't disband at the end of the original film like was supposed to happen as per the book (and never mind all the other framing differences, like Peter Pan coming across as a brave and mostly considerate boy hero in these movies, as opposed to a bit of a narcissistic dunderhead like in the book). Nevertheless, there's something thematically powerful in the idea of taking a war-traumatized kid like Jane... ...whose childhood, sense of imagination, and love for life has been thoroughly crushed, and then dropping her into the silly and carefree Neverland. Interestingly, Peter and the other Lost Boys are disgusted by Jane - they know an adult when they see one, as it were. And a point is made of the fact that no how much pixie dust they try to drown her in, she cannot fly. This all would've probably been put to a lot better use if it had been explored in a book...by the original author, as opposed to Disney, who instead made a mostly silly movie with only hints of something more thoughtful out of it (and who made arguably even worse books for the series after that). However, from what I understand, it may be a little difficult for the original author to write that book even if he was interested in the idea, seeing as he's been dead for...oh, I suppose a little more than eighty years now. Ah, well, I suppose that's the way it goes. Still, not as bad as the reviews had me expecting.

Oh, I love Alien, it's one of my favorite movies of all time, but seeing that poster...well, the film wouldn't be exactly how I'd expect it looking at that, to say the least, . Still, a fun piece. Crazy concept pieces like those pictured above have a way of making me...you know, actually excited to try out a film, which is certainly a novel idea.

I don't need it to be hand-painted (particularly given how samey ye posters of olde were anyways, as imitators would imitate imitators), but the fact that digital art can be made so much easier and with fewer limitations makes it all the more bewildering that the vast majority of movie posters are simply lazy publicity photos of the stars slapped together with nary thought or feeling put towards its creation. It's the style of poster Hollywood currently desires for its movies, but hopefully it'll someday soon fall in favor of more creative endeavours. The only problem with a great/fun high concept poster is that often times, the movies to whom they belong to will markedly fall short of the expectations set by the poster... That last one here is Alien, of all things - not exactly a perfect stylistic fit if you ask me, .

Yeah, I have a fondness for Polish posters. They go pretty hard with very creative concept pieces.

Ewa Wants to Sleep (1958). Girl arrives in new town one day before her school opens and wanders about trying to find somewhere that will take her in for the night, causing a very strange chain reaction of mistaken identities between citizens, criminals, and policemen to ensue. It's a 1958 Polish comedy that I selected purely on the basis of the poster. Polish comedies sure are...different. Eh, it could've turned out a lot worse.

Blue Yeti is a condenser mic, and it has several directionality modes which also affect how much other sound it picks up - for simple voice-chatting, an omnidirectional condenser microphone is practically the opposite of what one should use. Blue Yetis do have a pleasant and fairly natural-seeming sound signature for voices though, which probably played into how popular they got. Just takes a lot of active filtering to fix its issues, which most non-professionals just ain't gonna set up, so it's not going to sound as nice when used by casuals. A cardioid (single direction) dynamic microphone makes way more sense for this purpose. Amusingly, if one does searches on the Blue Yeti nowadays, the search results seems to be mostly dominated by thoughts such as "why is the blue yeti bad", "is the blue yeti bad", and "blue yeti alternatives". Well, it's definitely the name that everyone still knows, .

Samson Q2U is pretty much the go-to "great and affordable standalone dynamic microphone for general purposes". But it's not a clip-on, I have no experience with those.

CP2077 has a small open world? Well, first things first, the character creator...

Cool Hand Luke (1967). What we've got here is failure to communicate.

You don't like it for your team's sake or you genuinely don't like it for the league as a whole? Any sport/league which doesn't make some kind of serious effort to have parity is one I will not ever watch, so no soccer, baseball, college football, or college basketball for me. I've been quite pleased with the level of parity in the NBA the last few years, not much in the way of superteams since garbage can man left the Warriors. I mean, he tried again in Brooklyn, but that turned into an immediate clown fiesta, so no harm done. ...And he tried again with last year's #1 seed, but it doesn't look like that's probably going to work out at least this season either.

When typing "(edit)" to start a new line (either the first or subsequent) in a PM, the PM breaks: This does not appear to currently happen with a regular post.

Yeah, I can certainly relate - I can give up on shows/movies within literally a minute flat if I have a definitive "I don't like this" impression. It doesn't help that I tend to be willing to give weird/obscure stuff a chance in the hopes of finding gems among the rough, but sometimes you just know immediately that it's not going to work for you. So I'll start skipping ahead to make sure...yep, I'm out. We all dis/like what we dis/like, and there's no help for it. You know, now that you mention it, it could've been great fun to see wackier concepts like Tomo-chan Is a Girl if they were made more with the sensibilities/stylisms of 80s/90s anime. It's a ridiculous concept, but most animes are, so that's not really anything new. The issue is that I open the video and immediately experience the show being the most...you know, present day over-the-top anime/tropey that it can be. Something like Yawara is pretty asinine in terms of concept/premise, but I can sit and enjoy that because the style is simply more my thing even if I still have some issues with it, and thinking how the same could theoretically be applied here with Tomo-chan...oh well. Instead, a huge percentage of 80s/90s anime was incredibly lame-brained and repetitive concepts, chief among them all the terrible shonen. Ick.

Gorth, are there any animes that you've tried which you just didn't much care for? I know that the chances of me liking something you're enjoying are not particularly high, but I figure that we might be able to find some common ground if I try something you didn't like and would actively recommend against. If we can't enjoy something together, I think we should at least hate something together.

Peter Pan and the Starcatchers (2004). I recently read and enjoyed the original Peter Pan (or Peter and Wendy, its proper title), so I thought I would try the next one in the series. I did not know or notice that this was not the same author or made even remotely in the same time period as the original. It's effectively a competent but quite lame direct-to-DVD prequel in classic early 2000s Disney fashion, except it's a book instead of a movie. It's also literally authored by Disney - apparently, they let a bunch of people write what was essentially a pilot chapter, picked what they liked best and rejected the rest, then let their choice of author write five milquetoast Peter Pan books. I do not recommend.

Word on the street is that Rodgers has unofficially officially given some kind of indication he's going to the Jets. If so, phew, that'll finally be over. Lots of really great football memories over the years, but it certainly sounds like he was only going to be around for another year or two anyways and we can finally rip the bandage off, stop worrying about it, and move on.

they should trade for aaron rodgers

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, .