Bartimaeus

I miss the days when things were all just ugly polygons. At least that didn't constantly fall into the uncanny valley. There will hopefully come a day when modern 3D graphics aren't constantly doing that to me. Also, yeah, the directional lighting issue is usually pretty noticeable if you're moving the camera around to a lot of different angles to either look at something close to you or your own character.

You know, I'm not a thousand percent sure what the accepted verbiage is around the world. In the U.S., it might be "African-American lady", but this takes place in Britain, and some in the U.S. don't prefer that term anyways...just like how some prefer the term "Native Americans", some prefer "Indians", and some prefer "American Indians".

Hogwarts Legacy, I got as far as the character creator and the very first cutscene. What the heck is wrong with all the hair options, and why do the faces all look so glossy and gross? I just can't ever seem to into 3D graphics these days. I ended up settling on a black lady because she had the least lizard-like skin out of anything I could come up with, and then the first cutscene had her open her mouth and immediately look like a complete doofus with cartoonishly bad face expressions. Ah, I miss ye olde days of the silent protagonist. Well, I suppose I didn't really want to spend a hundred-plus hours on an endless collectathon anyways...

Like most shows of its type, the plots of each episode are largely just a vehicle for the characters and humor. If you hate the characters, you should loathe the show. Don't really see it being any different compared to something like Monk, Sherlock, or any other investigative/procedural show. Well, Sherlock doesn't really even pretend to have any investigative stuff, as all of the actual work and "deduction" either happens off-screen or devolves into almost literal omniscient wizardry on the part of the titular character, but that just means even more that you need to love the characters for it to work.

Yeah, those Sakura cards have been around for a few generations now, I think. Have seen near endless mocking them. The actual color scheme on that purple-teal-pink one isn't that terrible if you're into that sort of thing, kinda almost Outrun-looking, but...

Reading about the ways in which it was way ahead of its time and how it changed cinema was practically the only reason I was in any way tempted to watch Citizen Kane in the first place, as I'd already seen two Orson Welles films before I watched Citizen Kane and I came away with an extremely negative impression of the heliocentric director. Film language devices and techniques like the ones you pointed out are interesting, but neither art nor entertainment do they make by themselves for me (and anyways, what one personally values from both sides of that aisle will vary greatly from person to person). Call it a lack of appreciation for the art of cinema by all means - I did say that I'll never be a proper film buff, didn't I? Unfortunately, I find it impossible to detach myself from what I value and enjoy vs. what I don't, and you simply cannot be that way if you wish to see the entire history of a medium with an open mind. If nothing else, I can at least say that I am equally harsh to both old and new, so it's hardly an issue specific to him. But I think I'd rather go delve more into 1920s silents than I would anything else in Welles' filmography.

Are there any half-decent prebuilt companies that go for less flashy aesthetics? That's usually always my problem with them - well, beyond the PSUs often needing to be immediately replaced thanks to them cheaping out and using the worst possible units. I just don't want my computer to look either like a spaceship or a light show...where are my plain and simple black box PCs? Luckily, children are likely to love that sort of thing!

It's complicated. I think of Tarantino and his films generally being slick and enjoyable enough yet ultimately coming away not liking them, usually because I don't appreciate how he conveys themes, characters, story, dialogue - there's nothing lasting for my brain to grasp onto, they're all the quintessential "wild ride" films for me, and that's just not enough. With Lynch, it's...well, even with Mulholland Drive, for probably the first half of the film I was thinking "why is everyone acting like they all came from slightly different planes of existence?". His weird and surrealist style unfortunately takes me out of the experience rather than pulling me deeper in even when he's being relatively straightforward in presenting events and characters, and by the time I get over that, I start getting shoved into the really weird stuff and I'm pretty ready to resign. I've seen Eraserhead, Blue Velvet, and Mulholland Drive now, and none of them seemed to ever want to click for me on even the most basic elements of film-making, and I think that is probably what is hurting me the most with his films. I'll probably try The Elephant Man as one last attempt for Lynch - if I can't enjoy that, I think I should give up. I guess it is difficult for me to grasp what Lynch is attempting to do in any given scene - I don't know exactly what I should be taking seriously and trying to read into or not. Maybe if I watched all of his films like 10 times I would finally start to get his style, .

Probably because it gets so muddled with all the typical Lynchian extracurricular, leading to much more open interpretation and different levels of interpretation. Which, again, isn't necessarily a bad thing...but I can't help laugh at those screenshots of comments that I took, knowing that their and everyone else's interpretations are all probably perfectly valid yet still feeling like the lot of them largely come across as total crackpots. For me, as with Utena, I shan't delve too deeply into something I did not particularly like in the first place, which I guess means I'm really just a hater, . Not for us they ain't, but a lot of people clearly do, Mulholland Drive is considered one of the best films of all time and I think a lot of people really enjoy interpreting it. That's okay, I don't much enjoy all-time greats Citizen Kane or Metropolis as films either - interesting curiosities at best. I'll never be considered a film buff, and that's just fine with me.

Mulholland Dr. (2001). @Fire Walk with KP I finally enjoyed a David Lynch film! You're the first to know, just like I promised!

did a cartoon liquid metal bubble explode on this thing like from an episode of spongebob or something? "there is liquid metal [everywhere], this is bad"

@Fire Walk with KP Is it greed and suppressing labor? Oh look, it is. Wow! A couple of weeks ago, I received a message from someone regarding a comment I made about Wolf Children. Specifically, that they agreed that the first twenty or so minutes almost made them turn it off like I did, but they were surprised that they came around by the end of it and ultimately did enjoy it. Fool me once, shame on you...fool me twice, shoot me in the face. So was I fooled again? Does Bartimaeus need to have his cranium crushed? Are catgirls actually real? Click the spoiler button to find out!

Cowbop Bebop, episodes 7 and 8. There was an interesting omission at the end of episode 8. Stella the blind girl says her brother must've died doing something bad, and for some reason Spike doesn't do the obvious in correcting her - that her brother died doing everything he could to help her. But...I guess if your brother, the one person in the entire world that you love and trust, just died for your sake, that would probably just make you feel even worse about it to hear it, wouldn't it? Kind of a damned if you do, damned if you don't situation. Still, feel like that's something you kind of have to mention so she doesn't think he went off and pointlessly died doing something stupid. I don't know if the viewer was actually intended to read into that or not.

Taking out many of the weirdest, darkest, and most interesting elements of stories, which are often times pretty foundational to what those stories are trying to say, always strikes me as pretty wrong. But more importantly, I want to see the keeds cry when Ariel can't bring herself to murder her prince and kills herself instead. Yeah, that sounds like a good time. Well, you know, I'm not sure that The Little Mermaid was originally written for children in the first place...

Yes, and it looks perfectly in line with the rest of Disney's live-action remakes. If you didn't like the others, there's no reason to expect to like this one, but if you did...well, there you go. I personally saw the Cinderella remake and Emma Watson's Beauty and the Beast, and I haven't had any appetite for more since. Live-action magic and fantasy never really captures my interest or imagination like animation can, especially modern computer visual effect-driven stuff. All the movie magic which was ingeniously crafted by many other means in the 70s-90s will forever remain there no matter how much one wishes elsewise. @Gromnir I don't think Keyrock was necessarily suggesting something untoward with the casting, though it doesn't help that a lot of people really struggle with putting their actual problems with media into meaningfully intelligible words, myself a queenly example, and instead focus on utterly minute details that don't really matter in the grand scheme of whether something is "good"/enjoyable or not. Sometimes, you watch a trailer (or even an entire film) and immediately go "whoa, that really spoke/appealed to me"; other times, the exact opposite happens, and it's just better to leave it at that rather than say something like "the epic music didn't seem fitting". No, I do suppose the epic music was in fact not particularly fitting, but if that truly poisons your initial impression of a film, then you should probably be like me and largely stop watching trailers because that happens with most of them. I try to make good on that when I can, though I did make an exception here because of the ongoing discussion of the film. You know, I have audiobooks of the Peter Pan trilogy(?) for my nieces to listen to*, and I don't really have a ton of time or attention span to read novels these days. Never been much one for audiobooks, but maybe I'll give them a try to get a better picture of the series. *Hey, if anyone has any good idea for audiobooks both old and new that might appeal to fairly young children, you let me know. I already have the following, but I could use more:

Women Talking (2022). A period drama about women and girls in a traditional Mennonite colony who find themselves frequently being assaulted and raped by the men of their colony with no reparation or resolution available to them. The men say they are lying, that what they are experiencing is merely flight of female fantasy; one of the young women decides to take a sickle to her would-be assaulter. In response, the women and girls are finally recognized and given an ultimatum by their church: forgive the men responsible for the attacks...or abandon the colony and their only chance to gain entry to Heaven. Fantastic options from the point of view of religious and uneducated women and girls, I have to say. I am not at all familiar with Peter Pan outside of the Disney stuff, and it's been quite a while since I saw even any of that. Weirdly, I have stronger memories of Return to Neverland than I do of the original Disney animated film...but not strong enough in either's case to really have a good grasp to see exactly what you mean.

It's not a musical, which we can all be thankful for. This reminds me that as a kid, I watched the direct-to-DVD sequel to Disney's Peter Pan, Return to Neverland, and I remember liking it. IIRC, it takes place during...probably World War II, with a new main character, Jane, and her city/home is getting bombed at the beginning of the film? I have recently learned that it was apparently(?) terrible, so I should probably re-watch it to appropriately destroy more of my childhood memories. I should also probably get a copy of Hook for my nieces to watch at some point.

These Merlin challenges sound an awful lot like the Shrine challenges in Breath of the Wild, of which there were also 120 of IIRC and were used to upgrade health/stamina. They became extremely tedious fairly quickly as well, though not as bad as trying to find the 800 Korok seeds used to upgrade inventory slots.

i laugh every time one of these reviews gets to the power efficiency slide and intel looks awfully bulldozer-y across the broad

Interestingly... Tough to win awards when you bomb, but I guess you can still earn a lot of nominations. This was pretty much the opposite of the type of story I would've liked to have seen during this time period, so it was a pretty tough scene for me.

Babylon (2022). It's made by the same director as the J.K. Simmons-starring Whiplash. It is nominally a film about Hollywood in the 20s-30s and a fictionalized account of three characters at different stages of their life during the shift from the silents to the talkies. It's an incredibly self-indulgent celebration of the glory of Hollywood in pretty much all the ways I was hoping it wouldn't be while paying some only marginally effective criticism to how the industry chews up and spits people out at the same time. It's not the worst thing I've ever seen by any means, but it was a little difficult for me to believe that the director of Whiplash made this. I don't think I really care for Margot Robbie, though I'm still probably going to watch her I, Tonya at some point, and if I don't like her in that, that'll probably be it.

I sometimes think about Amentep saying that Indiana Jones and the Crystal Skull is fine and more or less in line with the rest of that franchise, and I don't know, maybe he's right and I've just lost sight of the forest for the trees because of a few issues that I can't get over that at least some other people can. I was never the biggest Indiana Jones fan in the first place, but I can watch the first three movies - the fourth one hurts my brain to sit through (not being hyperbolic here, I have to cover my eyes at many junctures throughout the film in order to keep "watching" it), and that's not something I can really get over even if I wanted to, and it probably unfairly paints my view of the film and others like it. No, it makes sense, and I think it's something that every medium suffers to some degree. One only has to go through your Steam queue to see that it feels like the vast majority of games, particularly AAA games, suffer from the same issue: endlessly deriving and iterating on the same gameplay concepts that have been done so many times already. Companies usually go for what they believe is a safe return of investment, whether it's television, movies, or video games. That's probably not ever going to change because the people that run these companies view their medium as being a vehicle for making money first, being entertainment second, and being art...probably 9th or 10th or worse, .

Cowboy Bebop, episode 6: Faye eats dog food, Fatty eats cake, and Giraffe eats bullets. There was a very particular musical cue in this episode that was also used for Satoshi Kon's Magnetic Rose, which threw my brain for a loop when I heard it. Turns out, the same composer, Yoko Kanno, did both movies, so I guess it's alright even if it's pretty weird to re-use music like that. Magnetic Rose used it first, . P.S. I kind of forgot I was watching this show. P.P.S. This might have been my least favorite episode so far. I seem to not particularly care for when the show tries to get more serious about anything. So far, it feels at its best when it's being purely silly. You can dislike something while still finding it enjoyable. Go with that!

Eye of the beholder and all that: I love Undertale's visuals, . Also, Morrowind looks more visually appealing to me than either Oblivion or Skyrim, so I just don't think we're going to agree on visuals very much at all.