Bartimaeus

Yeah, that's literally what I thought of as I was writing that. I only have to shovel a foot of snow a few dozen times each winter to make up for it... Still, it's very nice to have 10% of the entire world's fresh water supply right next to you.

It was 50-60 F for most of the day today...a bit warm for my tastes. Lake Superior not pulling its weight, .

CoP always felt really...sterile to me. Like I'm inside a playpen where I could screw around with all my toys to my heart's content, but nothing too exciting could ever happen because I'm still inside of the playpen. I think it's because none of the levels connected to each other (thus not feeling like an actual game world like SHoC did), the game's A-Life (what determined where NPCs and monsters could go on their own) was in its most neutered state out of all three games which lead to nothing much ever happening unless you personally caused it to happen (also nothing insane like being randomly swarmed by a veritable horde of different types of mutants in e.g. Agroprom or getting caught in some huge fight between different factions or mutants or both could ever happen), a lot of the quests and story were way over scripted (and also...just really not all that good for the most part), levels were super wide open and seemed to have an almost circus-like feel to them ("come look at this weird thing...okay, now go look at THAT weird thing!")... CoP got away from most of what I would consider to be SHoC's strengths - clearly, some people love those changes and that's O.K., but yeah, never really did it for me.

Gaming is very established in its fundamentals, conventions, and style at this point, and there's not a lot of deviation from it. Myself and others that I know feel the same discontent and/or fatigue that you do - you pick up a game that you think looks nice, you start playing it, and within a half hour you feel like you pretty much grasp the game in its entirety. Maybe you don't know every gameplay mechanic yet, but the ones you do know are pretty much the exact same ones found in a dozen other games that you've played and already mastered, while the ones that you'd figure out later wouldn't be much of a surprise or fundamentally change how you play the game; maybe you don't know exactly how the story will go or what will happen to the characters, but you get a general feel for all of it and what it's going for...you feel like you've seen it all executed so many times before, and much better in your favorite works. You more or less know what playing the rest of the game will be like and there's no delight in any of it, so continuing to play feels much like going through the motions - depending on how extreme the feeling for the particular game is, you're usually somewhere between simply occupying yourself with something that is "fine"...or outright numbing your brain by mindlessly shambling forward. Indie games have more experimentation than AAA games, but if you look at the top indie games of any given genre, it's largely going to be stuff that doesn't really depart from their given niches much more than the tired AAA offerings. On top of already feeling a kind of general gaming depression, these storefronts where you're trying to find something (anything!) that's different to enjoy instead bury you under endless tidal waves of samey stuff in a sickeningly over-saturated market that makes it all feel rather impossible. Everything culminates in the general feeling that either gaming has changed or you have (and it's probably a bit of both on top of getting older and having experienced it all already)...and maybe it would be better if you just find something better to do with your time. There are exceptions where something in particular magically hooks you, but it is rare and fleeting. Unfortunately, these sorts of problems pretty much also apply to every other medium of entertainment (...and possibly every source of entertainment in life in general - everything starts to get tired when you've seen or done it too many times). tl;dr: I recommend taking up dance again, .

I think it has pretty general appeal for the most part - strong and distinctive characters, a bit of stylized action, good humor, serialized storytelling, and it's only 26 episodes long. Everyone that has watched it here (which is probably around five people) seems to have liked or loved it. I finally watched Barefoot Gen (1983). It's that movie...I'm sure at least a couple of you have seen the famous clip. All of them on YouTube are in SD, while I got the joy of seeing it in HD (albeit not great HD).

I don't really mind biblical references or allegory at all, but it needed to do something a little more interesting and grounded with it for me to get it on some level - a film can't be 95% symbolism and work for me. I'd joke about it being @majestic's turn, but he has a stated (and understandable) dislike for this sort of thing, so while the film is pretty, that's gonna be a no for him. I might someday re-watch the film to see if I get more out of it a second time, I'm not sure yet. It was kind of hilarious to go read the plot on Wikipedia - I thought it might cover what happened in broader strokes, but no, instead whoever made that section painstakingly wrote out literally just about every little thing that happened throughout its hour and fifteen minute or so run time. Apparently, a little more background for the film is that the creator lost his faith (in Christianity) before making this film.

That sounds about accurate: I read that the director doesn't fully know what the movie is about either (although obviously he intended for some ideas and themes to come through even so). It felt like the anime equivalent of Eraserhead (though a lot less crude). It's not bad exactly, but I don't get it.

Oh yes, I recommend this film to everyone, if only because I'm curious to see everyone's reaction to it and/or whether I'm the big dumb in not being able to appreciate it enough.

Angel's Egg (1985) by Mamoru Oshii, aka the director of Ghost in the Shell. Artsy, bold, beautiful, rich...mind-numbingly slow, repetitive, and runs almost entirely on symbolism without any meaningful semblance of plot or characters. I actually nearly fell asleep while watching this several times, which never happens to me, and then something would actually happen for a second and I would jump awake. Actually, I think there was one part where I did fall asleep for a few minutes, but then a bloodcurdling scream woke me up. I don't know how I feel about it overall, guess I'm kind of ambivalent. I liked the aesthetic a lot, but I don't know, just not really my kind of film.

I can't sleep an iota, so why not? The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent. I couldn't remember a single material word that majestic said about it besides something about the bees from the Wicker Man, so I figured now was an appropriate time - plus, I enjoyed his last film Pig. I have no idea if that was his last film, but I'm pretending it was. Also, that's no offense to @majestic's writing skill that I can't remember anything he said except for the bees and the fact that he really liked it, I'm just bad at absorbing information about things I don't immediately care about right this second - it's what helps make me resistant to the effects of most spoilers.

The fact that you didn't make note of any kind of silly nonsense going on between Cobra and Shella, unlike quite possibly literally every other named female character that you've mentioned thus far, means it has to be her. Or it could be literally anybody else and it just went unsaid this time. Or perhaps it went unsaid this time because you didn't want to draw attention to her...shadows within shadows here, you've got quite the devil's tongue!

No, they have not received an answer, .

This was one of the things I mentioned that I knew should've annoyed me, because most of the action scenes...just aren't very good, in my opinion. But it's one of the very few cases where I actually turned off my brain and let the campy silliness of it all make it O.K. for me (and if it wasn't meant to be campy, it sure felt like it was to me because of how bad and silly it all was). Except for the scene that KP mentioned in reply in earlier to me - that was too much. Honestly that and probably like 30 more seconds of the film in other places felt like they were to arbitrarily raise the age rating on a film that could've otherwise been quite appropriate for much younger audiences, particularly with the messages that this film has. Same for a lot of the setting stuff - everything to do with the multiverse crap is precisely that, and I don't want to ever see it in any property at any time literally ever because of how atrociously stupid that garbage is, but for this particular one, again my brain just turned off and it was somehow okay...I was thankfully more focused on what they were trying to convey than the details. It doesn't happen often for me, but it did here, and I think that deserves special note.

Not sure it's a film I would want to watch right before bed...

Still can't tell if I like or hate the look of that show.

I'm pretty sure the Bible said something about we four Horsemen of the Apocalypse all liking the same thing being the ignition for the end times, so I'm personally hoping @majestic hates it. InsaneCommander can probably get by with enjoying it without the apocalypse starting, though.

@Sarex I'm not going to disagree with you, because I can't. But I can't because I am trying really, really hard to recall what you're talking about right now, but I can only remember all of about a minute or two of that movie, which makes it just about impossible to be reminded of it at any place or time...outside of other situations where I have general feelings of anguish, mental disconnect, and "oh my gosh won't this please end". So no, Everything Everywhere All at Once does not remind me of that film, .

@Sarex No. Also, holy crap, I knew Waymond reminded me of someone... @KP wants Blue Velvet I did see that, but I already forgot I saw that. This movie was, on the whole, slightly more enjoyable than The Northman to me, .

I don't want to oversell it, so maybe only read this after you've seen it:

Yeah, I don't normally go for wacky silly insane stuff, but Everything Everywhere at Once is an exception.

Well, instead of watching that, I watched Wizards (1977). It has magical dwarves and fairies, robots and nukes, Nazi wizards and German war propaganda (no, really, read the plot)...what more could you want? This Ralph Bakshi guy sure made some weird stuff in his day. P.S. Watch the Nicholas Cage film instead.

I have not see Paddington 1/2, which on top of not having see this film either, I really just don't have the right context to understand what you mean, . Nicholas Cage doesn't seem to be in either, so I'm struggling to see the connection...

Did they improve upon the design of the original where like...you could only play as Shinobi and maybe like one other class I can't remember right now because every other class made for terrible damage sponge gameplay?