Bartimaeus

Of all the Soulsborne games I've played, Dark Souls II is by far the...second worst, only beaten by Nioh. The thing is, Dark Souls II coulda theoretically been almost tolerable if not for the trash-tier controls that made me question the health and sanity of the people who made it, whereas I'm not sure if there's a single thing I didn't eventually hate about playing Nioh, so I can't rightfully say Dark Souls II is worse...but certainly more disappointing given that I quite liked the first Dark Souls.

I actually tried to read this manga recently (Junji Ito's Uzumaki from 1998), but I only finished the first volume (of three) before tossing it. Cool art and all, but didn't do anything for me.

I got involved with the Taliban.

Taylor Swift endorses Kamala Harris

Trump: "I have concepts of a plan" Okay, I take it back, maybe Kamala will be fine, she's handled some of the tougher questions just about as well as she could and avoided going completely off the rails like he has multiple times.

They're eating the dogs and cats.

The debate is tonight. It seems unlikely this will go great for Kamala: 1. Trump voters are wholly committed at this point, so it doesn't matter if he looks and sounds worse than Biden did at the previous one, they will not care. 2. Kamala is currently sitting atop a very fragile big tent coalition, and even small missteps could discourage sizable sections of her voters. 3. So-called "independent" voters (i.e. the unengaged and low-information voters - who, in all likelihood, lack internal monologues to drive any kind of intelligent thinking process, which is supposedly somewhere between a third and half of all people - that walk among us) aren't likely to be watching this debate in the first place: at most, they'll maybe read garbage headlines by garbage media tomorrow morning, the vast majority of which will judge Kamala and Trump by completely disparate standards. 4. ...And that last bit of the previous sentence really should've been a point in of itself. I think the best case scenario, she gets a good line in like Biden did in 2020 a la "will you shut up, man?", which is one of the very few times I can remember someone going toe-to-toe with Trump and coming out the better for it. It's not often someone gets one over him with a line like that. 5. I saw someone recently compare Trump to Vladimir Harkonnen of the Dune series, and I haven't been able to get it out of my head ever since. ...Point #5 didn't really have anything to do with the debate, but I feel it was still worth mentioning.

My understanding is that streaming services generally analyze their shows in terms of creating new subscribers as well as tracking already existing subscribers who watch it immediately as it comes out. By the time stragglers that put it off because they were busy with other things or just not in the mood for it yet actually get to watching it, the show may have already been cancelled. This has been widely agreed upon by everyone to be an excellent business model that has in no way left the streaming landscape as a veritable hellhole of shows that were inexplicably cancelled just as they were starting to hit their stride and grow a popular following, and it has absolutely not made audiences reluctant to grow attached to or even try to watch new shows out of fear that they'll be suddenly cancelled. In short, everything is exactly as it should be, especially once you realize that the initial lowball contracts they hand out for the personnel working on and creating a new show only last so long, and so studios prefer to cancel or at least have a show wrapped up before they might have to re-negotiate those contracts in the event of renewing a show past its expected due date.

I'm apparently voting for the same people that former vice president Dick Cheney will be voting for this upcoming election. I really want off this timeline.

Now, is that pronounced "tee-eye" or "tie"?

Were they 2560x1600 panels? They're pretty rare and expensive, would love to get my hands on a few... Screw ultra-wide, I just want my 16:10 back.

I didn't mention it earlier because nobody wants to hear a "MY PET IS ALSO DYING" story right after someone else told their own story, but since it seems like your dog is no longer exactly quite at death's door, now seems to be the time. My calico cat is about eighteen years old, and in June she stopped regularly eating for about a week and started hiding in weird spots and didn't want to come out. Took her into the vet, bladder infection, needs antibiotics and IV fluids...she went about another two and a half weeks without eating at all, lost half her body weight, looked absolutely deathly, no kind of food (cat or human...tried whole salmon!) seemed to interest her - even some expensive appetite medication didn't help. Any time she'd even try a lick of food, she'd start gagging and run away...one night, her entire body froze up on her as she was walking past me and she literally collapsed directly on my feet and couldn't get back up for a while, one of the saddest and most pitiable things I've ever experienced in my whole life, thought maybe she had a stroke or seizure. Heavily considered putting her down because it seemed pretty certain that she was going to die. All of a sudden, one morning she just started eating again, and now she's more active and adventurous than she had been in like the entire previous year, going on for a few months now. Still skin and bones, it's very difficult for old cats to regain lost body mass because they don't absorb nutrients well, but she seems to have a new handle on life ever since her near-death experience. Anyways, I don't know how much longer she has, pretty sure she won't survive another bladder infection like that at this stage of her life, so... Hug and appreciate your pets (and family members, as applicable) while you have them, you never know when they might suddenly leave you. Glad to hear you still have at least a little more time with yours too, majestic.

Yeah, I think you hit it on the head here. It'd been a while since I saw Neon Genesis, long enough that the experience wasn't fresh in my mind, but not so long that I had forgotten everything, so the first movie kind of worked as a vaguely acceptable summary of the first half or so of the show. When going right back to the first Rebuild after having watched the show and that becoming more or less a direct comparison...it became very obvious that the Rebuild movie both directly and indirectly did away with just about everything I liked about Neon Genesis, and it was going to get so much worse as soon as I got into new material, so I abandoned it. Conceptually, there's also the issue of Rebuild being like...an alternative universe version of Neon Genesis. Hate alternative universe stuff, so it was a bad idea for me to start with.

I haven't seen much with David Spader (with the major exception, of course, being his short appearance(?) in Yuppie Psycho), and I know very little about the Blacklist because I'd only ever seen a little of it, so this is only tangentially related...but that's the reason why I think American cartoons can work despite the fact that they usually have no real story: if you like the characters and all the other elements (humor, art, timing, pacing...) surrounding them, then the plot and situation of each episode and the overall story doesn't really matter that much, you'll have a good time. Now having a great story would make it even better, but...having a bad story that doesn't work to the characters' strengths can instead make it all fall apart instead. I know you never had any liking or respect for this in American cartoons, but I do think the format can work given everything else being right.

That was pretty much how I felt about it on my first watch, but I liked it a lot more when I watched it a second time with someone else...who was watching it for the first time and who felt more or less how I did when I watched it for the first time, i.e. ready for it to be over. I think the plot of the show is a bit exhausting, silly, and just not really all it's cracked up to be...but the characters, humor, themes, art style and animation are all strong and can shine much more when you're past the point of caring about the overwrought plot. I watched the Rebuild movies a few years after watching the original series, and my opinion went from "it's okay" starting with the first one to "this is the absolute worst" by the last one...and then after I re-watched the original show, I tried to re-watch the first Rebuild movie and noped out after about halfway. I figured they, like the main series, might improve with a re-watch... That's gonna be a no from me, dog.

Swiss Army Man (2016). Somehow, the Daniels (of Everything Everywhere All at Once) manage to tie together the funny, thoughtful, and face-palmingly absurd for me once again, against all the built-in biases I had against this going into it. With Harry freaking Potter himself starring as the film's inanimate-ish corpse. I don't even know, dude.

I've watched several of this guy's videos and he has just never done it for me, so I guess I can be thankful that I don't care, . Long and short of the boss stuff (which is the bit I was more interested in, since I really do not care about the open world design one iota) seems like the DLC bosses are hard, but they're almost all comprehensible which makes them fun and interesting to play instead of incomprehensible like a number of bosses in the base game are, which is not fun to play or engage with. I think my favorite bit of FromSoftware content is the Artorias of the Abyss in DS1, whose bosses are all harder than almost anything you can find in the base game but who are all quite fair and well-telegraphed in their movesets, so if it's similar to that, I could certainly understand his point of view.

Speaking of which... Mad Max: Fury Road (2015). I hated the first half hour (basically up until Max got free), but it got a lot better after that. I think both movies have their strengths, I guess I'd maybe rate them just about equally, and I'd certainly understand why one might prefer one over the other - they attempt to accomplish very different things, and the story, characters, action, and even visuals are all told in very different ways, even if all of the elements have similarities on the surface. I actually preferred the action and visuals of Furiosa over Fury Road, but that's more a function of Fury Road's being utterly obnoxious rather than being less impressive: I almost turned Fury Road off in that first half hour because of how incensed I was getting at its jerky fast pans/zooms, slow-mos, and random hallucinations/visions...let me get a feel for a film, its characters, story, and stakes before you start throwing all that at me. The film eventually took a few slow moments to re-establish and save itself from that awful start, so all's well that ends well, I suppose. Fury Road is the more novel of the two to be sure, but novelty in of itself has never been a guarantee of a better experience.

George Shevtsov in that role reminded me more of John Hurt than Ian McKellen, but close enough, I suppose. I reflexively skip any movie that I hear anybody describing as being "like a dream". Never my, uh, cup of tea, .

There were definitely a number of bugbears, but I was surprisingly quite into the film, so I didn't really mind that much at all. That's usually how it goes for me with "bad CGI" - I take notice and am unhappy with it way more when a film isn't working for me on other levels, just like how I was watching Godzilla Minus One and mentally complaining about basically everything I was seeing for no particular reason. My understanding is that Fury Road is purportedly one of the most insane films of all time in terms of committing to practical effects (to the point of the actors largely having a bad time filming it), so I'm sure Furiosa pales in comparison to it visually, but overall, I thought it was a pretty good looking film for the most part. But I've kind of realized over the past few years that if a movie or show can successfully pull me, of all people, in by means of its other strengths, I'll pretty much always forgive whatever visual issues there may be: it's just not really that important to me. Which probably sounds completely at odds with me given all my years of incessantly whining and complaining about art styles in animation and video games, but I earnestly believe it's true at this point. Visuals do play a big part in relaying what something is or at least might/should be, though, so I'll certainly continue to use them as a point of evaluation. I haven't seen Charlize Theron's Furiosa, but I'll probably watch Fury Road here at some point after liking this film, and I'll be curious to see how she compares. I've never really liked Charlize Theron in anything I've ever seen, but I've also not seen that much that she's in to begin with, so who knows. Anya Taylor-Joy...I loved her in The Witch and Thoroughbreds, but I haven't been enamoured with her in basically anything else she's done (and I actively disliked her in The Northman, though to be fair, I actively disliked that entire movie period). I guess she was fine here, but I liked the kid playing the young version of her more, so as far as I'm concerned, she's the best Furiosa that I know so far, . Then again, I haven't yet seen what that character ultimately turns into...

Godzilla Minus One (2023). Every time I watch a Japanese movie, I'm constantly asking "what?" and "why?" about every little thing. I think my brain just doesn't like Japanese cinema - there's something about the style, pacing, and editing I just can't into. My best experience with a Japanese film thus far has been Tetsuo the Iron Man, where I was still doing all of those things, but at least it felt like the right thing to do so because of how completely incomprehensible it was. Mad Max: Furiosa (2024). I haven't seen any other Mad Max films, but I thought it was pretty great, though I honestly would've been pretty okay without Anya Taylor-Joy being in it and just sticking with whoever had been playing as the young version of her for the entire first half of the film. She wasn't exactly a character that...uh, really needed a lot of character, anyways.

Blade Runner (1982). This is my second time watching it. I feel that there is a human element here that is missing in the sequel, that makes this more than just moody or pretty environments. This film is not necessarily perfectly sublime from front to back with regards to all of its most essential elements, but it is nonetheless a whole experience, and that is exactly what it needs to be. It was better for a second watch.

I first wrote "I've seen healthier looking ghouls in Fallout", but looking at him again gives me pause on just memeing. I'm reminded of when Trump caught Covid for the first time and he made a televised public appearance outside of the hospital he was staying at, visibly struggling to breathe, yet still posturing because of course. Just...stop, I don't want to feel even the slightest amount of pity for you, especially when you're still being a right bastard. This guy is going to die live on television before he'd willingly slink into the shadows, away from the spotlights.

I broke a molar last year and was worried it was infected or something, but I got into my dentist and he was like "nope, your teeth are all perfectly healthy, bone density looks good, no infections, you're doing great, and we'll fix that one up in a couple of months". So I was like "okay...uh, so why did that one break?", and he posited that I probably bit on something hard and these things sometimes happen, the freakish brute power of our jaws combined with our imperfect nature can sometimes result in strange things happening...and then I told him that it broke when I was just eating some ruffles, just about the softest potato chips you can eat. He went "oh, hmm" and didn't give me any other theories. Alright, cool, guess I lost part of a tooth for no apparent reason.

Well, if I've forgotten that I'd told all of you already, then that would certainly track with the brain worms diagnosis. Though they should hurry up and get to all the bits that care about politics and other worldly affairs...if they're going to eat me, least they can do is make me blissfully unaware of the world falling apart around me.