Bartimaeus

You are clearly unacquainted with American healthcare: I will just let my nieces collect the life insurance cheque.

Got the flu shot yesterday...fever, headache, and body aches today for the last few hours. Feels like somebody keeps stabbing me right in my heart every 5 minutes or so - it's occasional enough but it also hurts enough that I keep actually yelping out loud every time it happens. Haven't had trouble with flu shots in the past...

It was a long shipping time for me as well - I ordered it the day Keyrock mentioned it, and it arrived yesterday, so that was about two weeks. It also came with like...a hard plastic shell that you can use to encase it. I've heard that you're supposed to cover up controllers when you're not using them, presumably to prevent dust from getting into the internals, but I'm not sure how effective that strategy actually is. But since I did pay a bit for it and it came with it, I have and will probably keep using it...

Here comes a film from the legendary mind of George Lucas from before he was known for Star Wars, a stunning sci-fi masterpiece written and directed by the film-making guru himself that will leave you speechless... THX 1138 (1971): it was ok

It came with a USB cable, but I did not test it to see if it worked - in my experience, wireless controllers often don't work except through the wireless, and the USB port is only there purely to charge. But that is not the case here, as I unplugged my crappy USB Bluetooth adapter (which I already have for my headphones), then plugged it in via the cable, and it immediately worked. Neat.

I bought one because I wanted to try it out, and also because my cache of Xbox One controllers that I bought for $20 each has reached its end and the final one I have has a busted right joystick that makes using it annoying for many games. With regards to the d-pad, I actually hate the new style of d-pad for the Xbox controllers, and this one is more of an old school d-pad, which is what I want. Mind you, I understand WHY Microsoft changed the design of the d-pad, and I'm sure it's good for modern games where it's not used as a main control input, but it's really terrible for retro games. Otherwise, I think I agree with everything you said - I particularly like that you can easily switch input modes and it remembers which system it's paired to (for example, you can have your Switch mode paired to your Switch and your XInput paired to your PC and painlessly switch between them with just a button press), and I like that you can completely disable rumble from the controller itself (actually, this was a bit of a selling point, as I despise rumble and it drives me insane whenever a game has it and there's no way to disable it...I've literally quit playing and uninstalled games purely because of it - this controller allowing me to disable it entirely on the controller itself is great for me). I haven't tested the sticks enough to determine how well they work in comparison to traditional sticks, but they seem like they're fine. If the controller is able to last 2 years without major issue, then it'd be well worth the money, because I am so freaking sick of every Xbox-styled controller I buy breaking in some major way within six months.

The End of Gunbuster. As far as Gainax goes, it probably slots in above Nadia: The Secret of Blue Water, but I would say I enjoyed Royal Space Force a bit more, and never mind Neon Genesis Evangelion. It's also a lot shorter than Nadia, which is a good thing, because Nadia should've been half as long as it was (...actually, that legitimately would've massively improved Nadia if all the hours of "yelling at clouds" fluff had been cut, but that's neither here nor there). The mark of a show or movie that I really like is that it's able to make me care and be invested in the action, and that just...didn't really happen here with Gunbuster: for the most part, I wanted the space battles that started to dominate the last few episodes to end so that stuff like Noriko and her best friend Kimiko hanging out could happen more, and there was too much of the former and not enough of the latter. Still, it could've been a lot worse.

Lmao, I feel like I should remember Spritle gut-punching Trixie, but somehow I don't. I'm also starting to become convinced that I need to get a Trixie avatar...or 30, there's so many different 'unique' Trixie faces to choose from, and this is just one episode!

I'm actually not a huge proponent of BG1, something that I've mentioned a number of times on here. I think the game has serious structural issues and the game kind of "ends" with flooding the Iron Throne mines for me because I cannot be arsed to do the whole city of Baldur's Gate song and dance without wanting to immediately just go to the end of the game, and never mind playing sweeper with all the sparse outdoor areas. Still, unfortunately for me, so much better compared to what I've played of PoE, . Maybe chalk it up to being invested to some degree in the world, setting, and story, and having some amount of fondness for the characters.

Yeah, I don't know exactly what KP meant when he said that, but it's pretty difficult for me not to agree completely with him. Don't remember being interested in or even slightly fond of even a single character or quest narrative throughout the entire duration that I played. I don't think it was an issue of "hey, these writers don't know how to write sentences or paragraphs competently, or how to string a back and forth dialogue together", but more that I was not at all invested in any of it and there was just nothing even really small that was interesting for my brain to grab hold of to motivate me to keep going forward. There's a lot of garbage quests in BG1 that have bad gameplay - one that jumps out in my mind right now is "go get the dead cat from the waterfall for the little girl". The gameplay around that is literally...you talk to the little girl once, she tells you to go find her cat, you walk up the hill, pick up the cat, bring it back down and give it to her. In terms of gameplay, that's really quite lousy. But...the oddball way she resolves the dialogue after you bring back the cat's body with her being completely unphased by her beloved cat being dead because she'll just get her dad to revive it is enough for my brain to go "huh, that was weird and interesting" and remember it from then on. Meanwhile, I'm trying to remember...just a single character or line of dialogue from what I played of Pillars of Eternity, and I got nothing, it was all so...incredibly unremarkable and functional in nature. Maybe I didn't get deep enough in to give it a chance to get its footing, but both the BG games and PST did so much more to pull me in within the first few hours than the twenty hours I put into PoE. A waste of time for somebody who doesn't understand the opinion, perhaps - not so much the case for those who keenly feel it as well. As it happens, I don't think KP is trying to convince specifically you that your experience with the game was, in fact, bad when you obviously feel different about it. These are opinions all the way down regardless of how you spin them.

When I played Pillars of Eternity 1, the first 10 hours was pretty much, "Am I enjoying this? I should be enjoying this. There's no reason for me not to be enjoying this. They've fixed a number of the core gameplay issues that plagued the BG games, are making use of the couple of good Planescape gameplay ideas that the BG series lacked while presumably lifting some more from other modern CRPGs, and I still enjoy the Infinity Engine games not named Icewind Dale, so I should enjoy this. Maybe I just need to play more before I start enjoying this." The next 10 hours after that was, "Yeah, so...like, I'm pretty sure I'm still not enjoying this, and I'm starting to feel like I'm not ever going to enjoy this." The final hour that I played was more like "p̷͖̈l̴̨̐e̶̥̽ă̷̭s̴̞͐ë̸̬ ̸̗̆g̵̀͜o̸̼͗d̶̨̿ ̸̱̐m̸͍͆ă̶̟k̶̻̓e̵̤͊ ̷̘̏ī̴̮ť̸̳ ̶̡̋s̸̡̔t̷͔̀ȯ̴̜p̵̬̈́". God must've heard my plea, because I stopped playing and uninstalled the game. I came back to try again sometime later because I thought maybe I just needed some time, but I only made it a few hours, and that was the end of it. I have ideas on a few of the particulars of why I didn't enjoy Pillars of Eternity, but I really think it's the culmination of many different things, both little and large, that are difficult to succinctly explain which eventually ended in me wanting to move my keyboard out of the way so that I could gently faceplant into an eternal coma onto my desk so that I wouldn't have to keep playing this game. Thankfully, since then, I have grown wiser: I don't force myself to play a game for nearly so long that such feelings arise if it's clearly not working for me, .

Yeah, so I think I'm going to call up Joe and let him know that he can turn off the internet now. I just don't think it's good for us as a species at this point. You guys need anything you need passed along?

Wednesday, episode 2. Maybe it's the lack of sleep doing me in and making me somehow quite enjoy a stupid Tim Burton show, but this show actually seems like it's...pretty good, and so far I really like the cast. Especially the star of the show, which is of course Thing (who I have been told is not CGI but is actually a guy running around in a green screen suit with a glove doing everything for real, which I guess makes sense, because I usually have a strong dislike for little CGI creatures interacting with the world weightlessly...not at all the case for Thing who's constantly moving and knocking stuff over). It's kind of like...an off-brand American goth Harry Potter, and that's not a bad thing at all.

The Midnight Club by Mike Flanagan, creator of beloved series Midnight Mass and The Haunting of Hill House. I got about fifteen minutes in before it became pretty clear that he made it for a completely different audience and I was not part of that audience. Right, that's crossed off. Wednesday, episode 1. It has that kind of tone where it's kind of a "fake" serious because it's actually very silly. It's thank-god-fully not nearly as teen drama-centric as The Chilling Adventures of Sabrina was, which is what killed that show for me. Wednesday is the main character and her point of view is basically a no nonsense "I want to run away and/or murder everyone" sort, and that's a pretty simple and relatable approach, especially after having been just sent to boarding school. Though she definitely has at least a little bit of a soft spot somewhere in there too, maybe one that will expand as the show goes on, I'm not sure. That or she'll just kill everyone like she wants to do right now, that's okay with me too. That's obviously not going to happen, though.

Yeah, I've had the "locked thread ate my post" thing happen too. It's funny, irreversibly losing even just a couple of paragraphs of text makes it feel like a pretty herculean task to write up the rough equivalent again, and it always makes me wonder how I had the energy or inclination to do it in the first place, because I certainly don't anymore. If I do lose a post, I ain't redoing it, so I guess I better always remember to CTRL+A+C. The original thread could still possibly have a draft of your post saved, but the only way to see would be to unlock it.

Hey, I wasn't gonna say nothing...but I did need to actually mention the character, .

Unrelated: it was weird to see Joe Pantoliano and Carrie Anne-Moss star in the same movie again, even though they never interacted with each other.

Tangent: People complain about Dark Souls being too hard, but one thing that's great about it (specifically speaking of Dark Souls 1 here) is that there's a ton of variety in how you can play...at least on NG1. Shield, heavy armor, or rolling? Magic or melee? Do you use bows to snipe enemies before they aggro onto you? A lot of fast and light attacks or fewer but well-timed slow and heavy attacks? Are you an up close sloppy brawler that gets hit a lot but has lots of health and armor so you can always get back up, or are you someone that's always backpedalling trying to figure out what leaves your enemies vulnerable for safe attacks? There's a lot of variation to how one can decide to play, lots of personal flair and style, and the game is forgiving enough that most of them are pretty effective once you get your mechanics, timing, and strategy down somewhat consistently - plus the game gives you plenty of options to change up your approach if what you're doing just isn't working for a particular fight. So what is often frustrating to me with other games, particularly a lot of so-called soulslike games, is that they lack these kinds of options and variety - maybe they present you a few, but the one thing that really ends up working and actually being effective just isn't that fun, and what should be fun just isn't very effective, so it kind of herds players towards doing the same thing over and over for the entire game. Bleh.

Memento (2000). Halfway through the film, I paused it to spend a few minutes to try to figure out what missing piece of the puzzle had set the events of the film in motion, because that was obviously what the film was working towards by presenting events in reverse chronological order. I couldn't rightly figure out the answer, even though in retrospect, the film has really given you everything you need by that point.

Yeah, my problem with Crystal Skull is just that it's generally a giant pile of unenjoyable garbage that's genuinely difficult to watch and enjoy, nothing to do with realism. I don't even really have that much of an issue with Shia LeBeouf or the job he did - much more pressing is the vomit-worthy CGI and action set-pieces because big budget film-making was completely dead by the time that Crystal Skull came out. Seriously, I don't know how people look at so many of those scenes and don't my kb stopped working and and im using the osd windows keyboard, so im just gonna leave it there - the universe telling that crappy film aint worth it, i guess

Temple of Doom is the best one because Willie and Shorty are silly and fun characters that play well with and off of Indiana. All other considerations are secondary for me. Now I could see liking Last Crusade more, as it's really the better quality film on the whole, the tone is more serious and it's a little more grounded, it's a lot less racist and sexist than Temple of Doom...and the rest of the cast isn't bad by any means - in fact, it's a pretty good cast. So that at least makes sense to me if one prefers Last Crusade, I can absolutely accept that. But Raiders? Yeah, I just don't know, Raiders is pretty stilted in terms of writing and performances compared to the other two, Miriam stinks, and just...yeah, I mean, it was the first one and maybe the varied globe-trotting setting and initial establishment of Indiana Jones is more your thing, so eh, maybe... Now it's a good thing nobody brought up Crystal Skull, because boy, I would really have some choice words for anyone that might suggest Crystal Skull could ever possibly be even remotely better or even just more enjoyable than any of the first three...

Gunbuster, episodes 2 and 3. So as it turns out, mech combat in the middle of empty space is, contrary to what you might expect, kind of confusing and scary. Honestly, space being an incomprehensible nightmare and certainly an affront against all earthly nature (no gravity, no sense of direction, practically empty yet infinite and endless!) is really something that should be focused on more a little more in sci-fi. I don't think I'd be able to handle space, pretty sure the lack of constraints and absolutes would crush my little brain.

Still makes me laugh how they characterized her in season 1 as like the epitome of responsibility and leadership...and then just rapidly transformed her into her off-the-walls wacky Sailor V self for season 2 and I somehow didn't notice the change. Wonder what version the TV adaptation gets. Psycho killer Rei is the best version of Rei, though...and it's definitely not my inexplicable fondness for insane female characters in fiction speaking here.

Yes...uh, kind of. Basically, the mechs are said to be actually quite difficult to control, so I guess it's all kind of muscle memory building exercises. Noriko talks about how she just can't seem to get the hang of using all of her limbs while also looking at the different screens to be able to control the stupid thing - she says that the girl she has a crush on just has a knack for it, but that girl actually tells Noriko that it's really just a lot of hard work and training to really get it down right. I also assume the gymnastics stuff is because they're all girls and...yeah, of course girls in mechs would be doing gymnastics and borderline cheerleading stuff, why wouldn't they?

Gainax. Mechs. Gunbuster, also known as Top o Nerae, also known as Aim for the Top. 1988. I was originally going to have a poster here, but all of the posters for this show are terrible. Which, I have to be honest, doesn't exactly fill me with the utmost confidence about this show as I sit here writing this post after having only seen only the first 3 minutes of the show. So instead, you can watch that hilarious PS2 opening intro (which is actually pretty accurate to the show's real intro, but just...extremely terrible looking because it's in 3D PS2 graphics). Also, this, since I just saw it: No, I don't know what it means either, but it sure is provocative. The first two minutes is the main character, Noriko, very matter of factly stating the apparent premise: she's very young and dearly loves her father, who is an accomplished space captain - now she's a teenager and he was just killed by invading aliens, and she's going to avenge him. Right! Well, that doesn't sound the most interesting to me, but let's see how this episode (there are a total of six) goes.