Bartimaeus

I think it's aimed at too young of an age group to be of genuine interest to anyone else here, a Ghibli movie it is not...but it's one of those occasions where even though something feels like it's kinda for babies with a lot of the messaging really on the nose, it still manages to get an effective and powerful message through.

The Supreme Court apparently seized the deportation case from Alito after he inexplicably didn't refer it to the Court and then summarily ruled on it without even giving him or Thomas any time to write their dissents at 1 in the morning. If that's not the Supreme Court in a late night panic trying to conserve the little power they have remaining (and in the face of two of their members willingly try to give that away, too), I don't know what is. Waiting for that Gromnir Easter scoop on this...

My Sister Momoko (2003). A cute children's movie about a brother and his disabled sister, where everyone learns to get along with each other and appreciate their differences despite their own personal struggles, both small and large. Maybe a little on the edutainement side, but it was still pretty enjoyable, and I saw comments online about how viewers with either their own disabilities or family members with disabilities really connected with it.

When I look up "is martin sheen a scumbag", all that comes up is stuff about his father. He's certainly got some...interesting political and spiritual beliefs (and I say "spiritual" instead of "religious" because he considers himself spiritually Catholic while simultaneously spurning the religion itself), but seems like he might be a real and okay person. I wonder sometimes why some actors seem to be drawn towards portraying absolute scum - is it because they identify in any way with those roles, or is is it because they feel comfortable enough in their own skin that they're willing to portray those roles with their unique talent and skills while not worrying about it...or something else? I guess I should try to not have a viscerally negative reaction to seeing his face or hearing his voice. If he gets MeToo-ed in ten years, I'm gonna be so mad that I made any effort to not hate him. Apparently, I was super confused: Martin Sheen is the dad (who is reportedly at least an okay guy), Charlie Sheen is the son that's...less than. Charlie Sheen is the guy that always made me think he was a creep, Martin Sheen...I don't think I've seen in anything besides this movie. They looked like the same guy, which is probably why I couldn't make sense of who was whom.

The Little Girl Who Lives Down the Lane (1976). This is another one of those cases where I saw a poster and immediately said "yep, gotta watch it". Was it good? Yes, really good, actually. Was it exactly what I expected? Uh, no, not quite: on one hand, half of it was a pretty wholesome and cute young teen romance and coming-of-age movie, and that part was great despite it not being what I was expecting...and on the other hand, the other half was Combining the genuinely sweet with the genuinely horrific in a dark but grounded way seems to work with me more often than not, and while this was frightening enough for me to bring out the ol' hands-over-eyes style of viewing... Also, I didn't even notice Jodie Faster was the headline actress listed in the poster up above before deciding to watch it, but while I didn't initially recognize her, I knew it was either her or a total deadringer as soon as I heard her voice. I've always liked Jodie Foster, she's always oddly seemed like a stand-in for my own mom whenever I see her in movies...but I've always felt there's a dearth of movies I actually like that she's in. I have some mixed feelings about adding this one to the list of her movies that I like, but I guess it is what it is.

It's a lot more charming than the actual scene, that's for sure.

Oh, I know. Reportedly, he's also a serial adulterer, he's known for blackmailing and sexually assaulting women, and he also drove his first wife to commit suicide. What people like Keyrock could possibly ever see in a scumbag like RFKJ, I don't think we'll ever know. Alas, still one of the best people in this admin, at least as far as leadership positions go.

It's pretty sad state of affairs that someone as both awful and idiotic as RFK Jr. has been consistently throughout his entire life is actually one of the best people in the entire administration.

I googled and apparently she's been a cigarette smoker for forever, which might play into it.

Maybe they can be the next team to inexplicably hire Doc Rivers.

That's an incomplete Handsome Squidward, as Zoraptor mentioned. Oh, what fun repressed childhood memories...

I appreciate 3D games where light reflects off the shiny scales of the human characters because then I know that THEY'RE SNAKE PEOPLE

Local stupid bastard who should be chemically castrated to stop any possibility of offspring continues to insist, "Nothing will change." Of course, such people are not always stupid bastards - they're often just disingenuous pieces of **** instead.

My sisters loved to cheat so that they could build houses...I, on the other hand, have always hated base-building or anything even remotely adjacent to it, so I was more the type to start with whatever is the default options they give you and never move a single thing ever. So instead I would spend a couple of hours customizing and playing dress-up with my character, and then I'd try to play the character, and then I would quickly realize that I really must be missing something because The Sims seems to have no gameplay, no interesting stories, and no characters that aren't just walking RNG dice roll people that don't matter. I don't understand The Sims, there seems to be a chunk of brain matter missing from my head that makes the game work for other people but not me.

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.