Bartimaeus

Setting up some private email servers for Blinken.

I've played Pony Island but not The Hex; now I understand why the game has...

A couple of hours of Inscryption, a singleplayer roguelite-ish card fighting game that everyone was raving for when it came out. To my surprise (as someone who can't understate how much I don't want to play any deckbuilding, card fighting games...nor roguelike games), it's actually pretty cool and fun. Basically, every attempt to win you go through little maps of random encounters and events, like a little miniature campaign (pretty similar to Faster Than Light). The fighting mechanics don't seem too terribly deep, but that's not to say you'll always win; just the opposite, you'll lose but get stronger. Lots of variation with how cards work but not overwhelming so...and a few of the cards that you have are actually characters that give you drips of information about the setting/what you're trying to accomplish as you play, and all that's done fairly well so far too. Maybe this game earned its Overwhelmingly Positive score.

Unannounced FBI raid of Trump's Mar-a-Lago was executed earlier today, though the exact intent of the raid has not yet been released. (e): The retrieval of stolen classified documents from his time as president? Huh.

Olivia Newton-John. I've only ever heard a few songs she sang, but she did sing the intro song, Take Me Home Country Roads, for my favorite animated film of all time...which I know is a cover, but it matters not to me. RIP. Apparently, she'd been fighting breast cancer on and off for 30 years, and it's what got her in the end.

It's a very niche product. My preferred aesthetic for a PC is usually a small black box with no lights or decoration. The most "flashy" I've ever done is my current case, the Fractal Design Blackout Meshify C...and that's still relatively modest, especially given that I have no LEDs on the inside. So "spaceship" cases always get a laugh out of me, but I'm not really sure what to make of this one...but as I have no application for such an extremely light case, well, it's obviously not for me in the first place. At $1600 for just the case, that'd be a pretty tough sell without actually needing it, .

SpyxFamily, episode 2. Yor...seems to be a little bit of a smorgasbord of anime cliches, but they're at least not the worst ones that they could be, and it's still early, so there's time to get past that. My impression of Anya so far is that she's great...but I don't know why whatshisname keeps monologuing over his own dialogue (like, literally directly over it, with both sets of dialogue and subtitles playing at the same time) to tell us really obvious things that we already know. Overall, I seem to be enjoying it though.

The Mitchells vs. the Machines (2021). I don't normally make note of the random kids movies/shows that I watch with my nieces (particularly as I don't usually have too much of a problem with most of it as long as it's not overly cringey or RANDOM LOL kind of stuff, and my nieces thankfully generally like stuff that I either like myself or at least think is okay)...with that said, my nieces are sadists (i.e. normal children that want to re-watch something endlessly), and I have been forced to view this film several times now - my face is going to melt off like the nazi from Raiders of the Lost Ark if I have to watch this even one more time. I didn't like it the first time I saw it, but now my skin crawls even thinking about it: do not recommend.

SpyxFamily, episode 1. Very silly, but mostly enjoyable and certainly not too shabby for a first episode. My least favorite part so far is probably the overly excessive amount of internal monologuing, but...maybe the most basic of those will calm down a bit later. Bonus points: the animation doesn't make me want to throw up.

If it's an issue of political reality vs. actual reality, of course I want actual reality to win out. I think that ship has long sailed, though. I wish I could say it was uniquely a human problem to in all likelihood doom ourselves, but really, it's probably (at least) all Earth-based life, a necessary fatal flaw in the very basic biological building blocks responsible for making life succeed in the first place: everything is programmed to endlessly consume and multiply beyond their limits in order to "win" natural selection, and it is too difficult for the vast majority of life to resist (or even be aware that it may be necessary to resist) that programming. It's just that our minutely greater modicum of intelligence allowed us to find more and more extreme ways of consuming that the rest of our animal kingdom couldn't; given another hundred million years to evolve, I'm sure some other newly sapient-level species would do more or less same thing that we appear to be doing. Now that's no reason to throw in the towel, but with the way these things work, it's probably just healthier for everyone to look at the Senate as if it were currently not Democratic-controlled - a 50-50 split is simply too tight, and at least two Democratic senators that we know of oppose eliminating (or even reforming?) the filibuster that would be necessary to make anything but token changes possible. For myself, I mostly don't generally think too much about any of these social wedge issues, since I am largely unaffected. That doesn't mean that I lack empathy for people who are affected by them (particularly with regard to the specific states that they have the mis/fortune of living in) or that I would ignore those issues when evaluating whom I am voting for, just that my brain space is typically taken up by more pressing existential matters, such as, yes, the planet currently being on fire. So I get you from that perspective, I just...I guess it's pretty hopeless with how generally broken both our society and political system are, it feels pretty unfair to lump so much of the blame on one guy that shouldn't even rightly be a Democrat in the first place, who's more or less just fairly representing the constituents that inexplicably continue to put him there in the face of Senate elections not really working like that anymore. Undoubtedly fuelled by many of the same base emotions, even if applied for totally different reasons. I'm certainly no exception: I've personally had some eminently dangerous feelings and thoughts (quite recently too), much worse than anything that anyone else has expressed in this thread, but I generally prefer to keep them to myself. They don't do anyone, least of all myself, any good.

Yeah, don't get me wrong, there are reasons to not like him or what he's doing on a personal level...but on a political level, it's really difficult or me to muster up much fury about any Democrat holding what should be a 30 point or worse blow-out seat for Republicans, particularly when it's pretty widely accepted that literally nobody else could replace him...heck, if you could somehow get conservative Democrats in seats like that for other deep red states, the party would be absolute fools not to - just being able to control the majority party via that 50/51 seat caucus is very powerful for making sure what has literally already happened with the Supreme Court doesn't transpire. Unfortunately, voters have overwhelmingly stopped caring about the quality or positions of individual candidates in favor of pure party politics - more and more voters inextricably tie who they vote for to their political identities instead of evaluating who and what the candidates are....

It just doesn't make sense to me to think of it from that way given the political reality of that particular seat being the darkest shade of red possible. Looking at a WV senatorial seat as somehow being in any way equal to a blue or purple state's senatorial seat is just...not realistic: nominate any other Democrat for that seat, and it's forever Republican again. Accept the small blessing that is the Supreme Court not becoming 7-2 or 8-1 conservative when Republicans inevitably win the presidency again because Democrats couldn't ever get control of the Senate at the same time that they had a president - Manchin was critical for that. The lack of Senate control in the latter half of Obama's second term was pretty key to the current breaking of the Supreme Court. Once upon a time, the particular candidates for senate races mattered a lot more than they do now, so exceptions like this didn't used to be so uncommon and it lead to more "big tent" politics where the parties were able to get to the 60 senatorial seats required to pass general bills because their caucuses were allowed to have members with much more varied positions that would support most but not all of their party's positions, making it so that they could actually unite on and agree upon at least some bills rather than be in the never-ending fillerbuster deadlock that we face today (though admittedly, AFAIK the current fillerbuster rules are the most restrictive they've ever been). Now senatorial races are so nationalized that every single member of their respective caucuses needs to practically be in lockstep with each other or be dubbed a traitor (and god forbid they ever cross the aisle to support a common sense initiative that practically every voter supports for fear of giving the opponent party a "win"!), even when it makes zero sense for that to be the case. The situation is so dire that it seems likely the senatorial fillerbuster will be eliminated if Democrats are able to get to 52 or more members this upcoming November while retaining the House (though the former is probably a lot more likely than the latter, and if they don't get both, it won't happen), and there's a good chance of all hell breaking loose politically if that happens because they're likely to do some very stupid stuff with it that will lead to a huge backlash. If it ends up with Republicans back in complete control in the succeeding years, they will undo anything and everything Democrats tried to do...and worse. It is a most dangerous game when both parties keep pushing the envelope farther and farther out of "revenge" for what the other did, particularly when one of those parties is bordering on being openly fascist.

People are always complaining about Manchin, but if it weren't for specifically him being who he is, that seat in West Virginia would 100% be Republican. Be content that he caucuses with Democrats and doesn't block judge confirmations. Now Sinema, on the other hand...that I don't really understand, since it seems like she's just making her own constituents hate her. Last I heard, her approval rating was higher with Arizonan Republicans than Democrats...but it's not like Arizonan Republicans are going to vote for her come election time, so what's the danged point?

I've come to understand that it's more than just that for me, because it's not only the visuals/aesthetic (although that can be a big part of it): there's also something to be said for how even just characters are presented and communicate. Even when a lot of the old stuff (e.g. @Amentep's Space Adventure Cobra or your City Hunter) is not particularly interesting to me, I still find it way more...like, I feel as though I understand what they're trying to do, and it's not an active assault on my senses even when I don't care for it. With new stuff, I almost always feel like I've been rudely deposited into an alien hellscape where I don't understand why anything is the way it is, how anyone could possibly prefer things to be this way - like they're two different mediums with completely divorced styles of communicating to the viewer, and I just fundamentally don't get the new style. If this show, Yawara, was re-made now with the intent to be functionally faithful to both the story and characters, I would undoubtedly find it completely unwatchable. For just characters: how they look (faces and how eyes/lips in particular are used, bone structure, hair styles/colors, clothing, movement, ...), how they express themselves, the voice-acting casts, the particular direction in tones/cadence/word choice, how characters are written and framed and what's normal/accepted within that, et cetera. That's just on the subject of characters, and there's a lot more than that that goes into the style of a show than just its characters (even if I would personally say that's the most important). Plus, the more questionable elements of this show that I don't care for would surely be magnified a dozen-fold because that's what modern audiences apparently prefer. Well, I don't think any of these things are ever going to go back to how they used to be...which is probably good for me in a way, because it means I have very little new that I need to ever investigate or try, but I hate it at the same time too.

Yawara, episode 8. This show is pretty dumb, but...I continue to watch it.

I wrote out the following post, but am now prefacing it with this: it would probably be useful to define what you think "caring" about something actually means, because the particular way you conceptualize what that functionally means in your day-to-day life has to play a pretty big role in determining the things you feel you do or don't care about. It's impossible to even remotely conceptualize that many people. I'm pretty sure there's a reason reading a headline like "young girl tragically killed in car accident" while attaching a face to the headline is much more likely to get our attention and an actual empathetic reaction compared to "294 children among thousands of dead because of extreme flooding" with a generic picture of the flood in question. One person suffering is tangible and digestible, getting into even the hundreds or thousands just becomes an incomprehensible statistic...at least not without some direct visual aid (e.g. 9/11...but that is obviously extremely traumatic and almost certainly unhealthy to experience the brunt of, particularly repeatedly*). If by "care" you meant able to offer up a very basic feeling of "that sucks" when something terrible happens to [whomever], okay, but that feels hard to really qualify as proper caring - those people didn't exist to me before I learned whatever it was that happened to them, and they're not going to exist for any longer than probably an hour after in the vast majority of cases either, even given a normal sympathetic reaction. Chilloutman already said they don't want bad things to happen to anybody anywhere, so if that's the level of "caring" that you're talking about, it seems like they pretty much already expressed it (...even if it was less than diplomatically said). *I wonder what psychologists have to say about the health of caring about things that are beyond your control. Is there any value whatsoever to anybody, least of all yourself, in trying to care about stuff happening on the other side of that planet that you can do practically nothing about?

Yeah, the English dub was unbearable from the ~10 seconds or so I tried of it in the first episode. Not that I particularly liked the direction of the Japanese* either, but I don't know why so many modern English dubs go with the over-the-top false/artificial style for their direction when you could just...like, not? There's something there that I clearly just don't get.

Yeah, doesn't really sound like a show I'd appreciate unless the characters magically grab me without actually making the effort to do so (which...is not impossible, but is definitely pretty rare). I'm also not known for caring about mystery stuff for the mystery in of itself (now as a vehicle to propel characters forward a la Steven Universe, heck yes...but otherwise, not really), . I'll try an episode, but if I don't take a liking to it within that, I'm not gonna sweat it. Doesn't sound nearly as horrific as the U.S. Sailor Moon pilot - how unfortunate. American TV animation was almost as skilled and detailed as Japan in the 90s.

We just got out of Irenicus' dungeon, and...hey, there's an illusory wall in the main room of this inn, wonder what's inside! Oh, instantly blown to smithereens by an epic-levelled lich, what great design. And by "great design", I mean "terrible design", but it was funny and memorable, and it can be easily avoided until later...so maybe not terrible design.

@Humanoid I guess it depends on whether it's singleplayer or multiplayer. My experiences with multiplayer CRPGs have suggested that probably exactly one is the optimal amount each player controls, with a maximum of two if it's only a two-player game. In singleplayer, I would probably personally prefer 3 if they're characters I control all of the time. But you're right, the game has to be designed as if those limitations are law, because otherwise you can get something like the Baldur's Gate AD&D experience where playing solo means you level up approximately every five minutes and you become a god that destroys practically everything without effort for most of the game...until you come up against the hard level cap and the game starts to catch up with you with nowhere for you to go. See above: I would say playing solo makes all balance and progression moot much more than a quest XP reduction mod intended to make a 5 member party more balanced, but people apparently do that and think it's fine, . There really is a lot of worthless trash in BG1, between near empty wilderness areas and low quality quests being everywhere from beginning to end of the game. You'd think by the time you get to the city of Baldur's Gate, the game would ease up on a lot of that, but it doesn't. I honestly don't remember much about IWD, except that it was atrociously boring with no reason to care about anything even like ten hours into the game, so I just stopped playing and ejected it from my brain.

The amount of combat in the IE games would make turn-based gameplay untenable (unless you want BG1 to last approximately 200 hours in a utterly miserable slow slough where each battle with every random wolf takes a couple of minutes instead of 10 seconds like it does via RTwP), so you can throw out 90% of that as well. I don't really see how the IE games would benefit from being turn-based, particularly because they kind of already are - enemies generally operated in a (albeit somewhat chaotic) turn-based manner, it's the player that can bend and break the rules by operating outside of that structure with micro-managed movement, reactive targeting, intelligent ability sequencing, concerted character tactics, etc., .

Not playing with a full party completely breaks the game balance of Baldur's Gate entirely due to AD&D's terrible level progression wherein all else being equal, a level 7 fighter will defeat a level 5 fighter probably 99% of the time. I usually play with 5 characters, but I use a mod that reduces all quest XP to half in order to compensate. Level 10 is...what, about the time you're ready to start the Bodhi/Shadow Thieves stuff before going to Spellhold? I'll power game a little, but I ain't power gaming THAT much and for that long, . I'd probably place PST and BG2 equally, though for very different reasons. I don't know where I'd place BG1/IWD2; my first inclination was to place BG1 above it since I have much more fond feelings for the BG series than the IWD series, but every time I actually play BG1, I get like halfway through before I quit, so I guess I'm not too sure.

What did the EEs do? The only thing I can think of is restricting level 1 proficencies (i.e. so you can't put all 4 of a fighter's level 1 proficencies into one weapon type, which is a BG2 bug and wasn't allowed in BG1 in the first place AFAIK). Generally, I think 7 makes the most sense, since it's when you get the +1/2 APR from being a fighter. It's also not too high level and so it doesn't take too long to reactivate your class (which gets exponentially more annoying and burdensome the farther you go past level 7), you still get most of your fighter 1D10 HP dice and enough THAC0 progression, you can have two weapon types with 3 stars (or dual wielding with 3 stars + one weapon type with 3 stars). Going up to level 9 for grand mastery with one weapon type doesn't even give you anything but +2 damage in BG2, since grand mastery was completely broken in that game. EEs fixed it so you get the other 1/2 APR and extra THAC0 that you're supposed to get, but it means you're going to be gimped for almost all of BG2... Icewind Dale 1 is literally the only Infinity Engine game I haven't beat, . Haven't ever been able to suffer through it...would rather play PST probably ten more times rather than IWD once, I think.

In Everything Everywhere All at Once's case, the justification is really twofold: I will forgive a lot of ridiculous silliness that might really bother me elsewhere if I love the character stuff...in fact, there's even a chance that my tastes might literally change as I watch it so that I am more accepting of whatever precise type of silliness it's engaging with. Characters trump everything else - they are the foundational backbone of almost all types of fiction/entertainment for me. I will also forgive what should be unforgivable if the film manages to resonate with me on a personal level, and Everything Everywhere All at Once very strongly resonated with me on a personal level from multiple angles, which is very rare indeed. I've always said that I don't really care for themes and other kinds of big ideas in entertainment, but that's because they generally stand extremely little chance of affecting me on a personal level: without characters that I like, it's virtually impossible for me to pay enough attention to even fully understand the plot of something, and never mind looking deeper for the themes. So when you have characters that I like while being able to interweave ideas and themes that I like, you've really got potential for something special. And then I watch Aliens where the characters are completely one-note meme-worthy non-characters that can't even deliver their lines properly, and people wonder why I'm not impressed with it. I'd like to turn to my friend George Lucas here... ...who, although he would completely and utterly forget what he said fifteen years or so later while making the prequel trilogy, pretty much hits a home run on my feelings here with regards to not spending your time on the proper elements. Haven't seen Event Horizon, but obviously I love Satoshi Kon's Magnetic Rose as previously discussed. Slow, personal, atmospheric horror that builds itself through what our characters are experiencing...what they see, or what they don't see, their personal weaknesses and fears, and the terror they experience. At the most base level, I want to feel something for my characters as a result of what they're going through, and you have to make it personal to them to accomplish that. I want to become afraid and get hurt just as they do.