Bartimaeus

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.

Wow, that game has the most hideously uncanny character visuals. Must be Korean or maybe Chinese, their attempts at more realistic character visuals seem to have a tendency to come out looking like that. I suppose it is a bit of a shame you can't run over those nasty little nightmare spawn anymore.

The spambots that at least had vaguely intelligible-sounding usernames instead of just random letters mashed together did it better.

With Nosferatu, I found myself just kinda checking out a bit any time any of the three main characters were being focused on, but my ears would perk back up anytime I heard Willem Dafoe's or Ralph Ineson's voices. Honestly, I could've just gone without the whole vampire thing and instead went along with those two trying to deal with a plague, so maybe it's my mistake for watching the entirety of a movie that apparently just didn't much appeal to me. Just one of those times where a movie inexplicably doesn't click for you, I suppose.

I think I said about a total of twenty intelligible words for the actual literal hour and a half that we were having a "conversation". I could not speak, I could not move, there was no escape from this person endlessly blathering on. I was only finally rescued because I received a phone call - which was an incredible stroke of good fortune, because this whole past week I'd had my phone on silence, and I'd only turned my ringer back on just 10-15 minutes before this happened.

If there's one saving grace for the situation, it's that it happened while I was working, so I technically got paid for it. Now whether I should get paid for it is another question, but it's not one I'm going to ever raise with my superiors.

Today, I was cornered by an old homeless woman who had an Irish accent talking about anything and everything that popped into her brain for an hour and a half. She was perfectly nice, but she would not let me leave. I really need to learn the art of being rude. Strange that it happened on my very least favorite holiday, too.

The measles vaccine is not, to my knowledge, 100% effective: some people's immune systems are really bad at keeping the antibody around. However, even if you are one of the ~3% or so of people that it's not effective for, it will not kill, maim, or otherwise injure you unlike actual measles, and if everyone has the vaccine, then you'll receive the benefit of herd immunity. But when enough idiots decide the measles vaccine is not for them and their kids, suddenly those 3% of people who can't keep the antibody can actually be quite at risk, even if they've been previously vaccinated.

From the GamersNexus "Fake MSRP" video that came out last night, Steve mentioned reading and being told by both board partners and retailers that they only intend to honor the listed MSRPs for the initial launch, but no further. After that, it will be a matter of supply and demand. In other words, if you don't camp out the initial launch and win the lottery, you'll have to pay a much higher price to get your card in the ensuing weeks and months. And your chances of winning that lottery are effectively zero, given that scalpers know by now that prices will be quickly raised after launch, which means the cheaper initial launch cards are what they'll be trying to obtain and scalp the most. I think it's safe to say that until fabrication isn't bottlenecked by the limits of TSMC's production output, the market is going to continue to be very bad. There's not enough competition, supply is too low, demand is too high, and that's always going to be a very bad situation for anyone that isn't in the business of scalping.

5x Oscar and Palme d'Or-winning Anora (2024), by Sean Baker (director and writer of one of my favorite movies of all time, The Florida Project). Kind of feels similar to Parasite for me, where it's not quite entirely my movie, so it'll never be an all-time favorite of mine, but I nevertheless really enjoyed it, even despite the really gratuitous amounts of sex and nudity (particularly in the first third or so). I liked how nasty, unsentimental, and unglorified the film was, befitting the realities of the subject material ...but without having the most obnoxious visual style it could possibly ever have (The Substance). I'm a little surprised that it won all the awards, and that it would tie Sean Baker as the all-time Oscar leader in a single awards show...shared with the ever-esteemed Walt Disney all the way back in 1953, whose four award-winning films that year (The Living Desert for Best Documentary Feature; The Alaskan Eskimo for Best Documentary Short; Toot, Whistle, Plunk, and Boom for Best Short Subject Cartoon; and Bear Country for Best Short Subject Two-Reel) no-one has now ever heard of. Nosferatu (2024). I wasn't into it, but I also wasn't not into it. I watched this last week and I don't really have much of a lasting impression, except that it's always nice to see Willem Dafoe. I don't think Robert Eggers is going to be better than The Lighthouse for me at this point. A Charlie Brown Christmas (1965). I feel like I've been deprived by not watching this (and maybe other Charlie Brown stuff) every year: it's really great. All the little facial expressions that punctuate every dialogue really get to me, and the character writing is just lovely and hilarious, and I really liked that it sounded like they must have used real kids to voice all of them. It felt silly, simple, but authentic and enjoyable for all ages in a way that I think cartoons are currently struggling to be today.

Apropos of nothing, if Canada were made into the 51st state, its population is the same as California's and could prevent us from having a Republican president for a long while. Please come save us, Canada.

Why don't the women who are scared of rape and murder simply declare themselves to be transgender men? Problem solved.

They might at least prevent the situation from becoming worse...if they're actually available to purchase. All in all, it seems like a perfectly fine performance-for-value card, but AMD kind of needs to be better than that if it ever wants to claw back market share in a meaningful way.

I haven't made up my mind about it. I mean, I'm enjoying or at least tolerating it enough to keep going through it, but would I actually recommend it to anyone else? I am at conflict with that, probably because it is, as previously mentioned, so all over the place in quality that it feels difficult to just be like "yep, go ahead and watch it" to anybody (and I am generally quite harsh on any media that can't be consistently at least okay, but I am being uncharacteristically forgiving here with Batman, for whatever reason - possibly because despite all its issues, and really the general issues of DC stuff at large, I still tend to like the characters and world). If you aren't at all into the central conceit and formula of Batman as a TV show, then no, it's probably not quite good enough to warrant starting, especially if you know that the first season is an incredibly daunting sixty half-hour episodes long (strangely, the rest of the show, i.e. the next five seasons combined, is only 49 episodes total). You can also typically tell pretty quickly if an episode was written by one of the good writers or one of the bad writers, usually within a few minutes, and I won't lie, I can kind of mentally check out when I detect that it's going to be one of the worse episodes, which softens the blow a little. I think the more character-introspective episodes tend to be the biggest hits and misses - when they're good, they're good, but when they're bad, oh boy are they bad. As I've mentioned some number of times before, I can handle a whole lot of nothing (e.g. Batman doing his thing and beating up the bad guys in a largely unmoving but inoffensive episodic plot) a lot better than I can handle a show or movie trying to get all serious on me and thinking that it's being big and important and emotional while actually instead falling on its face painfully. I will say that I am enjoying it more than The Big O, which I watched like ten episodes of some years back and which is clearly a ripoff of Batman: The Animated Series. Actually, I just noticed that The Big O was literally made by Sunrise, and Google results suggest that yes, they intended it to be their own mech-Batman show after their experiences with animating Batman: TAS. The only issue is that the addition of the mech elements were dumb as all get out and seemed to be as pointlessly formulaic as Sailor Moon monsters of the week (it seemed like each episode would always end in a completely shoehorned in giant mech fight no matter how irrelevant it actually was to the plot of the episode), and the main character is just a whiny manbaby instead of...well, you know, Batman. Batman might be badly and/or inconsistently written at times, but he is not a whiny manbaby at least. I also just noticed that the episode that I want to watch most, the episode that is probably primarily responsible for me starting to watch this at all after I went through the trouble of reading the original comic for it, is literally the very final episode of the whole series. Season 6, episode 11: Mad Love. So...that's great.

I've been watching Batman: The Animated Series. The quality in writing is all over the place - sometimes the show is really quite good, sometimes it is just fine, sometimes it is pretty bad...and there are tons of inconsistencies that contradict each other between episodes. Not too surprising, given the nature of comic book writing and episodes being based off of individual stories by different authors, I suppose. But the reason why I post about it in here instead of the TV thread is because I'm through about 30 episodes so far, and I said to myself during one of the last episodes I was watching that I simply do not believe that all these episodes could have been animated by the same team: similar to the writing, sometimes the animation is great, sometimes it is pretty good, sometimes it is just fine, sometimes it is bad, and sometimes it is really bad. I started looking up all the individual episodes that I've seen so far and to my total lack of surprise, there have been seven different animation teams that have made episodes so far of what I've watched (and there are more to come). They are... Spectrum Animation Company [Japanese] Sunrise [Japanese] Tokyo Movie Shinsha Company [Japanese] Studio Junio [Japanese] Akom Production Company [South Korean] Dong Yang Animation Company [South Korean] NOA Animation [Canadian] Yes, that Sunrise, and yes, there's not a single American animator between the whole lot of them. This certainly helps explain a number of things: all the episodes I thought that looked by far the worst were by Akom, and they were actually fired halfway through the first season. Spectrum and Sunrise were the best, but apparently Spectrum wasn't getting paid enough, because they literally went bankrupt and folded before the end of season 1 as well. I suppose it's a lot easier to get an episode out every week if you just hire half a dozen different animation companies and stagger their output...but it sure leads to some inconsistent quality.

Isn't that exactly what Macron wants, to make clear to the rest of the world (and especially Europe) that the United States is lost to them, will not help if they actually need it? I feel like that's something he's been trying to accomplish for years at this point, even during the Biden administration. Felt like that was a pretty good demonstration.

I was looking into Firefox user scripts. I'd always used tampermonkey, but people said to use greasemonkey, then I saw someone say "no, violentmonkey is open source and actively developed", but another person said "actually, firemonkey is like a better version of violentmonkey, and doesn't have the same privacy concerns", and then I saw someone "I like dancemonkey the best out of everything". Guys. That's too many monkeys, even if the last one was a joke.

Yeah, my ability to mentally visualize things is almost none, and it even applies to dreams. Anything I try to mentally visualize, be it a place or a face that I should know very well, all I really get is a very vague outline that's muddy, dark, and nearly unseen, as if what I'm trying to picture is hidden behind a thick black veil. I can't actually make the details appear, it's more just summoning up fleeting impressions with my meanings and feelings towards them attached. I've never been able to visualize characters or places in a book. Exactly one time in my life, a few years ago now, I had an extremely vivid lucid dream that was unlike anything I'd ever dreamt or imagined before. Though I was consciously aware it was a dream, it somehow seemed more real and powerful in terms of sensations than even real life, even though it was a completely boring dream where nothing of note happened at all. This gave me insight into what normal people's mental imagery and dreams must look more like, and boy, I sure am envious. Such a phenomenon has unfortunately not occurred to me since that instance.

Hey everyone, look at the bright side: in another election cycle, maybe the U.S., Germany, and Russia will all be on the same side, and by this time in four years, we'll all be enjoying the perks of jolly old global cooperation between powerful states with militaristic ambitions. Of course, it is sometimes the case that seemingly similar nationalistic authoritarian regimes do not always get along with one another...but bah, I'm sure it'll be fine.

Children Who Chase Lost Voices (2011)...directed by Makoto Shinkai. Who's his poster guy? Needs a new one, he or she just keeps making the same poster for all of these movies, and they're all kind of bad. Even this alternative variant still looks mostly the same, but I guess it's a little less awful. Doesn't start out with wimpy piano music. Not raining. No whiny monologue. Young girl who seems to be an independent explorer type. Okay, this one might actually be watchable. Don't like the voice direction of either the Japanese or the English audio, but what are you gonna do? I eventually settled on the English because the Japanese was more annoying: the lady voicing the main character in English at least sometimes sounds like a human being, as opposed to an always out of breath chipmunk. . . . Good lord, it's just a Laputa rip-off. It's not even a good one, and I'm not the biggest fan of Laputa in the first place. And it was a sappy piano drama after all, it just wasn't completely front-loaded like the rest of this guy's movies. Honestly, that kind of makes it worse, because it just means I was duped into watching the whole thing instead of only the first five minutes I usually do. I somehow hate this guy even more now.

Played a few hours of it, we thought "yeah, that was fun", proceeded to completely forget it ever existed and never picked it up again. Whoops. I think if the characters and story had been less grating, would've been more compelled to keep playing.

Yes, I would've said it was corrupt if we were transitioning to basically any other administration in U.S. history, but the one that openly promised to be fascist while also perverting the justice system? No: while certainly not ideal, it was understandable.