Bartimaeus

The Timekeepers of Eternity (2021). I've never seen a movie quite like this one...and it's quite possible that I won't again.

https://kmph.com/news/local/amber-alert-issued-for-missing-15-year-old-girl-out-of-southern-california Husband kills mom, then he kidnaps their fifteen year old daughter. Amber Alert gets sent out, cops and father get in a shootout while he and the daughter are in his truck with him driving. 15 year old girl is apparently outfitted with "tactical gear" (what this means exactly is not yet known - armor/helmet, maybe?), she jumps out of passenger side door after the vehicle was disabled by police and runs towards police and immediately gets gunned down and killed by them. Amber Alert cancelled. I think this story could only get more American if it had also happened in Florida. (note: linked story itself is a little light on details, but responding police have already defended shooting her by saying they thought she was possibly armed - and of course, "possibly armed" means she was not, otherwise they would have said that she actually was; one rifle was recovered at the scene)

Primal, episode 6. I have a pretty intense dislike for emotional manipulation via fake-out deaths, but in this case, the show did it about as well as it reasonably could have by doing an entire episode set around tender love + care, rest, and recovery...well, while also under constant threat of being eaten because this is a prehistoric show, but yeah. That's about as good as you could hope for if you're gonna have a character be near bludgeoned to death.

Both Browns and Cowboys have looked surprisingly competent without their QBs. McCarthy saving his job, .

Isn't the 5000 series already like that? I thought the only way to gain more performance out of the 5000 series is by undervolting it and improving the power/thermal efficiency. This seems a bit more extreme because it goes to the absolute limit by default - not my favorite approach personally, but if it's still an improvement when working at roughly the same power draw as the previous generation, then that's still good, particularly because you can implement that yourself if you prefer. Though these benchmarks seem to be proving that performance only matters for productivity purposes, since games just...can't saturate CPUs anymore. I still remember the days of 4 core / 8 thread CPUs being the practical limit not all that long ago...yeah, no more. But if you love power-performance efficiency like I do, it seems the 5950x is still king(?). I wish I'd waited to build my system a little longer so I'd got one of those instead of the 5800x, but it's hard to convince myself to buy one now considering the 5800x is already far beyond my needs.

Neither of them liked the original Top Gun, but both of them really liked Maverick. What does it mean? ...I mean, I get it, since I'd agree, I enjoyed Maverick a bit more than the original, but still.

Twilight Q (1987), a two-part OVA that seems like it was intended to be a kind of rip-off of The Twilight Zone. Only two episodes were made, but apparently there were supposed to be more - all from different directors with their own original ideas. It's kind of a shame that only two were made, as it was a quality production, and it would have been a fun show to watch an episode here and there of a la an anthology series like Tales from the Crypt or The Outer Limits. Ah well.

Posts being eaten has been a thing with this software since the upgrade some years ago (those of us who have written lengthy posts only to see them mysteriously vanish with no draft saved have learned to always CTRL+A and CTRL+C before posting!), but there seems to be times where it's especially bad and it repeatedly happens.

The only work of his that I've seen is Spy Kids, back when I was like seven or eight years old. It looks very unlikely I would enjoy anything he was director or writer for. Apparently, James Cameron wanted to one-up it when he was slated to be director before he was canned because he was too busy with Avatar trash: "With James Cameron as potential director, the film was to be produced with the same mix of live-action and computer-generated imagery that Cameron used in Avatar. Specifically, Cameron intended to render the main character, Alita, completely in CGI. Cameron had stated that he would make use of technologies developed for Avatar to produce the film, such as the Fusion Camera System, facial performance capture, and the Simulcam. In May 2006, Variety reported that Cameron had spent the past ten months developing technology to produce the film." Like...couldn't we just give her a normal head/face but metal android body, like the show did? Wouldn't that look and work a lot better? I don't know, that would just kind of make sense to me. I'm not a famous Hollywood hack director, so my opinion on such things is eminently worthless. I watched Jojo Rabbit recently, does that count for anything?

Battle Angel Alita, a two-part OVA about an amnesiac android girl named Gally. Her head's picked up by some semi-mad scientist in a scrapyard and he resurrects her and treats her like his daughter. Turns out, she musta been a gladiator in her past life or something, because she just destroys. To be honest, it's a little dumb but was a bit more enjoyable than most similar 80s/90s action trash. Overall, not too shabby for a minor cult favorite. I have no idea why they gave her such gargantuan eyes in the live action adaptation (which no, I have not seen): I wonder how much money of their 200 million dollar budget it took to make her eyes like that. (e): Apparently, James Cameron co-wrote the screenplay for Alita: Battle Angel, so that's gonna be an immediate nope from me, dog. Never heard of her.

@Chilloutman Imoen gets access to 9th level arcane spells and HLAs at 3,000,000 XP plus the 40,000 XP that went into her 7 levels of Thief; Aerie will instead take double that at 6,000,000 due to her XP being split between mage and cleric. That's a pretty significant issue if you need the arcane firepower; cleric spells can be nice and all, but being able to get Improved Alacrity and Time Stop at the end of SoA (and certainly for much of ToB) is probably nicer. Though mage-cleric is probably the best multi-class available, dual classes tend to...er, outclass multi-classes pretty heavily simply due to the economy of XP and the fact that a mere 40,000 spent on Imoen's thief levels ultimately amounts to practically nothing. Edwin, on the other hand...yeah, okay. Single-class Conjurer (by far the best kit for the additional spell slot per spellcasting level) combined with his absurd necklace (which gives him an additional two more spell slots per spellcasting level!) makes that a bit of a no contest. @majestic There are some other edge cases for different kits - for example, Invokers pair great with a sorcerer that takes the best and oft-repeated AoE enchantment spells (i.e. Sleep, Confusion, Chaos, Greater Malison, Emotion: Hopelessness). But yes, Conjurers are definitely the "power gamer" pick due to Detect Invisibility/True Seeing really being the only halfway important Divination spells.

That was pretty existentially soul-crushing, but nice - thanks.

I was thinking the visuals looked a little strange, as the backgrounds and character animations didn't look like they quite matched each other. The character animations being actual scanned physical embroidery, I will forgive it, because that's rad and I love it (and also, I would say that character animation is the most important bit to do quality animation for in a game like this, so that was a wise choice). No idea if the game will be any good, but I'll wishlist it and wait for its release, hopefully it'll be enjoyable. And hopefully there won't be too much platforming/combat, as these kinds of games tend to miss the mark pretty badly when they go too heavily in that direction.

I've played a few games of Golf with Your Friends with some friends before. I was pretty bad at it compared to them, but it was fun enough. ...My style of playing anything even slightly competitive with my nieces is that I'll generally play much more risky/daring than I otherwise would. If I were to play this with them, I'd probably be trying to go for wacky shots and bombing it most of the time, . I see that you're the..."I will win every time" type instead.

I've changed my mind.

That was part of the intent, but really, it's more just a general warning on these kinds of threads, whose subjects obviously hit very close to home for some, simply not being a great arena for civil meetings of the minds when feelings and allegiances differ in such an inherently irresolvable manner. Saying this would seem to make me the forum's biggest hypocrite, seeing as I am pretty infamous for being the god-emperor of putting people on ignore...but I'm O.K. with that, particularly given that my criteria for putting people on ignore is a little different in that it's usually just "do I consistently dislike reading posts by this person across the forum?".

I feel like you got the opposite intended reading of my admittedly deliberately ambiguously worded post. C'est la vie, .

No, .

He who desires not to look at his fellow man with contempt should avoid this thread and others like it: nothing good ever comes from arguing with those whose feelings are more determinant to their positions than fairness or logic.

Good people, this friend of yours. You, on the other hand...well, the record speaks for itself, .

I haven't played a ton of Civilization, but I didn't like them they become too important to accelerating early game progression. Getting additional units or random free techs/resources are so important to making sure that you start faster than you otherwise would, that if you fail to get a good amount and of the optimal types, it kind of feels like you've failed the early game. Just turning them off means you don't have to worry about it at all and that it's a bit more fair: the peace of mind in not having to obsess over too much random stuff mostly out of your control is worth it. I realized how extreme it was when I got a number of particularly good ones and accelerated progression so much that the game was effectively decided in the first era due to an overwhelming advantage that the AI wouldn't have ever been able to make up. I don't think Civilization does great at giving a sense of verisimilitude in the first place (which is why I've never been able to play it too much - playing a simulation game where it feels like everything about it is randomly generated makes everything I do feel meaningless), but it's that much worse when it feels like I've already won (or lost!) because of silly RNG stuff like that right at the start. Unsurprisingly, I'm much more of an Europa Universalis 4 kind of guy than Civilization...but Paradox pretty much ruined that game for me by making a million expansions that added so many unnecessary mechanics that don't really fit or feel good together that I can't really play it anymore. It's probably just as well anyways.

Redline was also the very first thing that Sarex recommended to me when I mentioned that I was watching an anime for the first time in my life, specifically Sailor Moon from the early 1990s. Redline is a 2009 action-racing film that's positively dripping with masculinity...which is to say, it was the complete opposite of what I was currently enjoying in the more silly and girly Sailor Moon, and so while it would've been bad for me even in the best of times, it was an utterly miserable experience in that particular context. Suffice to say, it took me a few more tries of things Sarex recommended for me to realize that we perhaps do not quite see eye to eye on what is either meaningful or entertaining in shows/movies, . But I'm me for a reason, so maybe Azdeus would fare better...

His voice actor is Rob Paulsen; don't see any Mass Effect credits for him. From the different roles I recognize him as, he actually seems like he has a pretty good range and there are many I would never have been able to tell that it was him. I think Ashley vs. Kaiden is totally dependent on whether you're a male or female protagonist; if you're male, you kill Ashley, while if you're female, you kill Kaiden. Ideally, you'd really be able to kill both. I mean, ideally, I'd kill probably half or more of all the characters throughout all three games, but those two especially. It's more of a mentality than anything else: there are people who play the game that will rest every every battle because the game allows them to and it means you're at full strength every single time. This is the sort of thing that Pillars of Eternity attempted to stifle with the way it implemented resting...but I think I'd rather let the player decide how they want to play, whether that's the player placing limits on themselves or not, than to deliberately make too many elements of the game obnoxious like Pillars did.

Really, all the details are immaterial: Anomen cannot be in the party because he is Anomen. Anomen is Anomen is Anomen, and that's just not acceptable. You see him in the Copper Coronet, he calls out "fair lady" to you as you walk by, you throw his corpse into the dumpster, and then you go about your day. Seriously, I am not going to be called "fair lady" by that smarmy stupid voice and let it go unpunished, it's just not happening.

Meanwhile, you two weeks ago addressed directly to me: Would you care to revise your statements, tepid in nature or not?