Bartimaeus

Do you have fun while playing Diablo 4?

Constant injuries the past three years, unfortunately. I'm glad that Bucks core won a (admittedly kinda fluky) championship, because the way they've just been injured and disappointed in the playoffs outside that run would be pretty sad otherwise.

Yeah, I do...though I'd be lying if I didn't admit that a big part of it is simply because children are disease magnets. Which is honestly probably faulty thinking, since both times I've gotten Covid, it's actually been the fault of the same stupid bastard-ass coworker whose kneecaps I want to take a sledgehammer to because she's always coming in while sick. I barely work in-person and she's not even in my department, and yet somehow this part-time moron still manages to get me (and others) sick. When I was a kid, my father literally killed one his coworkers, who he knew was immuno-compromised, by going into work while he was sick while not bothering to try to be careful (and while I wish I could say that it might've been his mind being affected by his illness, my father was, in fact, also a total bastard-ass, so I'm not much inclined to give him the benefit of the doubt). It's so incredibly negligent, especially if your job is not actually trying to make you come in to work while sick. I feel like watching fever dream movies while you're sick is like, probably the worst time to watch them, while a movie you've already seen is not nearly as big of a deal, even if it still fits the billing. Time to re-watch some Ken Russell films... Speaking of Ken Russell films, I've watched Ken Russell's The Boy Friend (1971) literally about 15 times since I first watched it early last year, so someone please send help. It's so rare that a film you watch the first time as an adult is one you can watch over and over and over like you would have as a child (or at least it is for me!), so I think I can now fairly qualify this as one of my very favorite films of all time. I've even purchased DVDs and blu-rays to give out to family and friends that I think might be interested, since it doesn't stream anywhere and I need the share the madness of this silly matinee show musical that is unlike any other I've seen...

I am currently dying of a covid infection, and so to celebrate the occasion, I decided to re-watch Rosemary's Baby. While my temperature spikes to 102 and above over the next few days (if current evidence as well as my first bout with the miserable fake news disease that's bound to disappear - like a miracle! - any day now were indications), I'd like to think to think that my illness in some way compares to It's a great movie: shame who made it, but this at least is one occasion where I can separate the art and the artist, maybe because it feels so much like Mia Farrow's movie than anything else. Now, I must return to my fever dreams.

Chelovek s Kinoapparatom AKA Man With a Movie Camera (1929). Oh my gosh, look at the poster. How can you not be seduced by this poster? Well, I couldn't. I'm not very knowledgeable about art, so I don't even really know what to call it, but it always gets me whenever I see it. Bizarre superimposition of foreground and background, those circular or recursive or liminal elements...all rendered in a kind of art deco style. And when I learned that the movie was a Soviet experimental film "documenting" several Russian/Ukrainian cities in the late 1920s, I was all in. No dialogue, no intertitles, just cinematography of life, society, industry, and many different kinds of objects - set to several musical scores that you can choose from (including one by In the Nursery). I genuinely had a good time watching this, and the filming techniques used lived up to the "experimental" label - it was often times quite bizarre what things they decided to do with the camera as well as how they would interstitch different scenes and shots together. Wikipedia: In particular: "The pace of the film's editing – more than four times faster than a typical 1929 feature, with approximately 1,775 separate shots – also perturbed some viewers, including The New York Times' reviewer Mordaunt Hall:[18] "The producer, Dziga Vertov, does not take into consideration the fact that the human eye fixes for a certain space of time that which holds the attention." Oh, you sweet summer children of 1929... If only you'd known what the future would hold for you.

The "WTF weird ending" really just felt like the product of lame storytelling that wasn't able to effectively tie together the grounded reality of the world/universe that the movie had constructed and the simple, relatable human story that it wanted to tell. We have a hard sci-fi story that should have concrete issues and solutions (or lack thereof), but it in the end, it just comes down to...the most base character emotions and beliefs driving us towards a magical resolution that is only the most tenuously connected to the real physical world. Which, hey, if you at least enjoyed the preceding two hours and if you liked and cared about the involved characters, that might just be alright and you'll get into that emotional ending and accept it for what it is, or you'll at least forgive it. I...did not.

TARS was the comic relief. He doesn't really have the most distinctive design, so I can understand if this visual aid doesn't help. I actually found him to be the least awful character out of everyone, and when you can say that about the comic relief robot in a serious sci-fi drama film, you probably have a really crummy set of characters that you didn't like and which sunk the movie for you.

Addendum: I was just reading some comments on Interstellar, and someone else compared it to Contact as well while mentioning "McConaughey is in the driver's seat 15 years later", which left me confused. Lo and behold, I'd completely blanked out that Matthew McConaughey also happened to be in Contact as well: he's the greasy gross love interest. Whoops. Honestly, it's just as well, since now that I remember he was in Contact, I mostly just recall being yucked out and annoyed by him.

Also, did Obama actually have any executive orders relating to the Affordable Care Act (ACA, presumably what Gfted1 meant)? The only two things thing I saw relating to it when I did a quick search was Obama issuing EO 13535, which...tried to strengthen restrictions against federal funds being used for abortion, and also issuing EO 13507 in 2009 (i.e. pre-ACA), which established the White House Office of Health Reform...and it only existed for two years before it was abolished in 2011. Maybe I'm missing something, but to my knowledge, the the vast majority of ACA was Congressional legislation.

I think people's memories are short, since I feel like that's been one of his favorite tactics since pretty much day one of his first term. He'll threaten the cudgel on one issue while demanding action on another that's essentially unrelated to the first: when he's made something happen as a result, he can then declare it as a major win, even when we're now in a worse position than when we started. Like a king, he makes the decisions that everyone else has to visibly react to in real time, and it doesn't really seem to matter whether the decisions are good or bad, just that he's the one making them and driving the resulting situations. In truth, as a U.S. citizen, I am generally far less concerned about his constant bluster directed at foreign affairs than I am at the total perversion of our institutions and further societal polarization and destabilization. The former will be very annoying for everyone, just as it was last time (and I don't discount that there may well be some major dominoes to fall at some point throughout the rest of the world as a result), but there are...certain realities to the limits of what he can do on the world stage, and I tend to think that things will eventually normalize to "well, he's only going to be around until 2028, we'll try to put up with and just get through it for now and re-evaluate the U.S. as a partner/ally after that depending on what follows". It's in domestic affairs where Trump's power is virtually unchecked, and unfortunately, all I can say is that...well, we voted for it. It's also our domestic affairs that the rest of the world is going to have to monitor closely in the coming years to see whether or not a return to sanity will even be possible, never mind probable. So keep your eyes peeled as Elon Musk dismantles our institutions brick by brick while Trump directs the remaining federal agencies still standing to act as agents of chaos throughout the states that he doesn't like.

"Even if Trump is elected, nothing will change," said the stupid bastard.

Interstellar (2014). You know, if I had remembered that this was directed by Christopher Nolan, I probably wouldn't have had it on my watchlist for like the past six or seven years. It's not as dumb as Gravity, but...ergh, I just get frustrated with Hollywood films like this where it seems like the fate of the human race is hinging on some interpersonal character drama that just feels kind of overwrought and phony. Like, I know the basics of stories and character emotions and the human experience will all stay the same no matter whether it's between two characters in a dark cave or a trained crew of hundreds on a spaceship hurtling towards a black hole, but...but really, that's why it's all the more frustrating when it feels like something takes a big swing and an equally big miss. I had a pretty similar experience with that 90s Jodie Foster film, Contact...but at least there, you've got Jodie Foster starring instead of Matthew McConaughey, which helped a lot.

Not directed at anyone here: The constant refrain of people saying "I hope AMD/Intel are able to compete with Nvidia because Nvidia is the worst" is truly hilarious when it's also always paired with those exact same people refusing to ever buy anything except for Nvidia. Neither AMD or Intel are going to compete at the top-end any time soon, so either A. get used to not owning the top-end GPUs or B. get used to waiting months for the honor of being able to pay thousands of dollars to Nvidia for a GPU that's hardly better than the previous gen. And here come the tariffs...

Cyber City Oedo 808. Don't let me sing, don't let me speak! My English sucks, it really stinks! What's up with Japanese songs using utter nonsense English, anyways? I might've asked this at some point already...but honestly, you'd think that if you were going to include words from another language, you'd make sure they were meaningful and/or at least make sense first. Uh, anyways, this show is just 80s junk, don't watch it. The story's premise is that three HARDENED CRIMINALS (who definitely come across as being cool rebels just like writer intended) get a second chance at freedom...if they arrest enough other criminals. Or just kill them, I don't know. My greatest regret about 80s anime is how much dumb sci-fi and fantasy nonsense they made for male audiences. I mean, something like The Matrix is clearly aimed more at a male audience, but it feels like there is some thought and intelligent ideas behind its story, characters, what it's trying to say, its style and editing, visual design, and how everything ties together. There might still be some problems, there might be some specific design choices that I don't really much love, but there's still some good stuff there that at least makes it more than watchable cinematically speaking. With something like this, it's like the visuals are fine and there are high production values by all means...but there's really just not much sign that any intelligent life was involved in its making elsewise. This show's idea of a good turnabout for a character is introducing them and immediately being like, "Remember when we were partners? Those were the good old days, I wish we could go back to them... Anyways, I'm betraying you for a bunch of money. ...Oh no, I can't betray you, I'm pathetic!". Blargh, dead a minute of mindless action later. Wow, such character, really stirs the heart. Oh, this was directed by Yoshiaki Kawajiri. I should've expected this: just about everything I've seen from this joker has been somewhere between disappointing and awful. The one exception is...oh, speaking of the Matrix, one of the shorts from the Animatrix, Program. That one was pretty good, but it also, like, didn't really have anything going on writing-wise beyond just the basic premise, which probably explains why he didn't manage to totally bungle it.

My understanding is that while this is true for trademarks, it is not true for copyrights. I think Gromnir hammered us a few times on the difference between them over the years.

Unless you live near a MicroCenter, which is U.S.-only. That's basically the only reliable way to get your hands on one right now.

I never played Dead Money, but a quick Google search says that if you trap him in the casino vault, there's a radio broadcast you'll then be able to see that you can optionally tune into where he starts ranting and raving. I don't know if that's what you're talking about or not.

Yeah, I personally don't particularly mind if a game has DRM for a few months to half a year - even if it's Denuvo. Mind you, I'm not going to buy it while it has Denuvo, but I understand its use for that initial release period, since initial release is supposedly where games lose the most revenue to piracy. But I very much like to see games eventually get a DRM or effectively DRM-free release. I prefer GOG for its actually fully DRM-free approach, but basic Steam-wrapping can be disabled by pretty much anyone if they look up how, and that's what's typically used for most singleplayer games on Steam. Ubisoft is one of a few companies that seem to never remove Denuvo from their games no matter how old the games in question get. I wouldn't play, much less buy, any Ubisoft games in the first place, but it's nice of them to to enforce that I don't.

I see a "2010 GOG Edition" version as well (the only other GOG release for this particular game), but the one under the list I posted above is shown as "2024 GOG PP Edition" and has separate versioning (i.e. the 2010 release's final version is notated as 2.0.0.9 from about 5 years ago, while the 2024's is 1.0.1.0 from a few months ago). What "PP" might stand for, I do not know, and Google doesn't seem to give me any relevant results. "GOG PP Edition" is a funny name, though, which has to count for something. Given that there was a previous GOG release, it probably shouldn't really be included in these results, though. (e): Oh, duh, "PP" is the "Preservation Program" GOG started not that long ago. It's basically their own souped-up version of the game that's supposed to ensure that it can be run on modern operating systems. So yeah, definitely shouldn't be included. I wonder how many like that are in my list...let's check: four. They are RollerCoaster Tycoon 2, Caesar III, SimCity 3000, and I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream. Okay, so not as many as I expected, doesn't really affect the results all that much. There are more games in this Preservation Program than that, but those four were apparently the only ones that changed significantly enough to warrant the separate/distinct release year notations from any previous releases GOG might have had of them. Yeah. If nothing else, I would not want to see what these lists would look like for Steam, as I'm sure the GOG lists must dwarf the Steam ones.

GOG launched approximately 358 games whose initial releases were in 2024 (...I say it this way specifically to exclude games whose initial releases on other platforms or consoles were a previous year, but then released in 2024 on GOG). They are the following: I sorted them by popularity, hence why it starts with S.T.A.L.K.E.R. 2 and then proceeds to almost immediately descend into games you've never heard of. There were approximately an additional 229 non-2024 games that were launched in 2024 as well. Again, sorted by popularity. Some more mainstream titles there, albeit older games. Anyways, doesn't mean anything with regards to your point, I just wanted to check for my own curiosity. Specific to Obsidian, you can see Alpha Protocol near the top of the second list!

Bloodborne with the new GPU (7800 XTX and the 16 GB of VRAM necessary to play this game at a high resolution without the emulator exploding, bite me Nvidia). Consistent 60 FPS (with the patch to enable it) on 1440p, most of the biggest playability glitches have been fixed since I last tried this...it's go time, baby. Everything was going fine for a couple of hours, until the emulator crashed while I was loading an area: rebooted the emulator, and when I started it back up, the main menu music wasn't working anymore. Huh, weird. Loaded into the game, still no sound...and when I tried to attack an enemy, it crashed. Restart...same thing: no sound, attacking enemies causes a crash. Apparently, my save got corrupted during that crash, and wiping my save game data fixes both the no sound and crashing issues. Maybe I'll let this emulator bake for a few more months after all.

One thing I'm going to miss about the past four years of the Biden administration was how precious little anybody had to say about it. This is day one and I'm already getting bombarded by friends and family with all of the old nonsense that I'm trying to avoid. It's like everyone is terminally addicted to Trump, one way or another.

School was cancelled because it was -51 F (with wind chill) this morning. BACK IN MY DAY...well, back in my day, I think they would've cancelled school for -51, too.

Thanks for the recommendation, my nieces and I enjoyed it - though we all started to lose our minds a little after the 30th production company logo at the beginning.

I've never seen even a single second of Lost and I only have a vague idea of what it's about, so the details are completely lost on me: what I said is more a general commentary on the average person's inability to consciously discern and relate the specifics of their ire with media. The average person. You know, the person when they don't like a popular blockbuster movie, they just say "the CGI was bad". Despite their shortcomings and general lack of media literacy, average people nevertheless shape a lot of the popular narratives around media, and they sometimes also write hilariously stupid imdb reviews that should make you fear for the future of Earth and the human race. Mind you, there are certainly times where I'm not completely sure why I do or don't enjoy something as well, but I at least try to be conscious of that.