Bartimaeus

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.

I still hold a bit of a grudge because grade school wouldn't let me take the orange juice, the only thing I actually wanted, instead of the garbage 2% milk. Who in their right mind drinks 2% milk, and out of a cardboard carton no less? That cow-flavored paper-infused swill water is downright inhumane. No, they said if I wasn't actually lactose intolerant, I have to drink the milk. What, did you guys have a terribly limited supply of orange juice? Fine, I'll go back to eating nothing at lunch - we were too poor for me to be wastin' money on lunches I wasn't going to eat anyways. Of course, looking back now, the easy solution would've been just to lie. Damn, why didn't I think of that back in second grade? What a maroon I was.

I just hope it's not chemotherapy period. My gosh, I hope that stuff is just about completely retired in favor of something far less nasty and more effective someday, and the sooner the better. I have...less than great memories of seeing what it does to people. I also have little desire to suffer through it myself in my middle or old age... I do not believe I would cope well.

Okay, but just to be clear in case you did not do even a quick Google search, it's specifically grapefruit that can hurt/kill you. Not limes or lemons or most oranges, grapefruit. Grapefruit messes with metabolizing enzymes responsible for fully breaking down and flushing drugs, which means those drugs can stick around in you for a lot longer and in higher concentrations than they should, causing more severe side effects and/or possibly even overdoses. Here's a random excerpt from a random article that at least gets the idea across: With most drugs that are affected by grapefruit juice, “the juice lets more of the drug enter the blood,” says Shiew Mei Huang, Ph.D., of the FDA. “When there is too much drug in the blood, you may have more side effects.” For example, if you drink a lot of grapefruit juice while taking certain statin drugs to lower cholesterol, too much of the drug may stay in your body, increasing your risk for liver and muscle damage that can lead to kidney failure. Many drugs are broken down (metabolized) with the help of a vital enzyme called CYP3A4 in the small intestine. Grapefruit juice can block the action of intestinal CYP3A4, so instead of being metabolized, more of the drug enters the blood and stays in the body longer. The result: too much drug in your body. The amount of the CYP3A4 enzyme in the intestine varies from person to person. Some people have a lot of this enzyme and others just a little. So grapefruit juice may affect people differently even when they take the same drug. Although scientists have known for several decades that grapefruit juice can cause too much of certain drugs in the body, more recent studies have found that the juice has the opposite effect on a few other drugs. “Grapefruit juice can cause less fexofenadine to enter the blood,” decreasing how well the drug works, Huang says. Fexofenadine (brand name Allegra) is available as both prescription and OTC to relieve symptoms of seasonal allergies. Fexofenadine may also not work as well if taken with orange or apple juice, so the drug label says, “Do not take with fruit juices.” Why this opposite effect? Instead of changing metabolism, grapefruit juice can affect proteins in the body known as drug transporters, some of which help move a drug into our cells for absorption. As a result, less of the drug enters the blood and the drug may not work as well, Huang says. Hope you make it through the medical issue you're dealing with. If it's chemotherapy (and I don't know that it is and nobody here needs to know if that's what it is...I've just had family and friends who have gone through it and have repeatedly said how awful it is, and how it makes it so they simply cannot eat), there's a strong possibility you do not want to be having grapefruit with it - everywhere I see seems to say "DO NOT MIX CHEMOTHERAPY WITH GRAPEFRUIT". If your doctor has okay-ed grapefruit, then okay.

Minnesota became a blue trifecta by the thinnest of margins this past election, and so far...I don't think I've had any cause for complaint.

Uh, did you make sure that the grapefruit was a-okay for whatever medication that was? Grapefruit has potentially fatal interactions for a pretty wide variety of medications. Grapefruit is probably my favorite fruit, but there may come a day when I'm too old and take too many medications to be able to safely eat it anymore...

Yeah, I get it. Over the last couple of years, Packers football has become purely stressful without basically any of the positive stuff that used to come with it. It's why I'm relieved Rodgers is finally moving on, even though the Packers are likely to be somewhere between bad and very bad for the coming years. Have been way more excited and have had way more fun with the Milwaukee Bucks' core group of players than I have with the Packers', and it's what made their championship journey so sweet (as opposed to just...the championship itself). Meanwhile, if the Packers had won another Super Bowl with Aaron Rodgers taking all the glory, I'd...certainly be conflicted. Maybe that's somewhat enabled by knowing that the Packers have already won four SBs and a pile of pre-SB championships though, as opposed to other teams who have never won anything ever and are desperate for any kind of legitimate chance at the thing. Doesn't matter either way though, as I just don't enjoy rooting for a team whose players I don't like. My "hmm" reaction was actually more about trash can man than not understanding you moving away from enjoying watching the Suns, .

Pheonix trading for garbage can man didn't change your tune about them any? Huh, weird... I'm greatly curious to see how far the Nuggets get. They have kind of earned a reputation for being tough yet falling well short over the last handful of seasons... Given how absolute trash the Warriors have been away this year, I do believe they may have some difficulties going all the way this postseason...

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