Bartimaeus

It's on Amazon Prime, but at a cost. I've also heard good things about it, although it still doesn't exactly sound like my cup of tea.

I saw all the black actors, general style, the fact that it's horror...and couldn't help but immediately think "man, this really feels like a Jordan Peele film". I thought that having watched and enjoyed his Get Out and Us, and then oh look, it actually is a Jordan Peele movie. Feeling slightly racist, but at least I was right, .

This sounds like it's just a transparent excuse for having her fall and look "cute". Is that the case? @majestic Sorry to hear that, I'm sure they'll get back on track soon.

If you've played it, how does it compare to the first Nioh? The first game was one of the "worst" games I've ever played (it's not actually among the worst in an objective sense, but I thought it was a pretty shoddy 5/10-ish Dark Souls knockoff that did practically just about everything it tried to do somewhere between somewhat to much worse than Dark Souls...and a 5/10 game that you play all the way through to the end feels much worse when it's like a 60 hour long game compared to a 5/10 4 hour game). Your top two complaints sound like they didn't fundamentally change much about the design of the game, though.

I have Wolf Children bookmarked from when I looked at a whole pile of modern-ish "prestige" anime films way, way back when I was first starting to try out anime...which I got through probably like ten of and was like "holy crap these are all just the worst" and stopped, so I never got around to it. I think Your Name, which I watched much later because I burnt out on trying them, was the only one of that group that I even semi-liked. I really, really don't feel as though A Silent Voice can work for me - the film-making sensibilities of that film were so repulsive to me that I was instantly hoping for bad things to happen to the characters. It's possible I was in an extraordinarily terrible mood when I tried it, but I feel as though you're not supposed to turn into a raging psychopath within the first 5-10 minutes of a film like A Silent Voice if it's going to work for you.

Are you challenging me? Oh, well, carry on then.

Is Netflix ramping up for Halloween, or what? I didn't much like their teen drama Sabrina show, but a dark Addams family show centered specifically on Wednesday...could be either awful or good.

The only HoMM game I've played is Quest for the Dragon Bone Staff, and that's apparently just a remake of King's Bounty. It was entirely about the units and not the player/hero character. That game is a little terrible, but it's also kind of fun and I beat the entire game a few years back, so I can't complain too much.

My impression of the show is that they really want to give every character something to do, even if whatever that is is pretty worthless to the story or just plain annoying. I can only assume this is at least partly because of fan pressure and trying to please everyone by giving all the fan favorites X amount of time to do whatever. It doesn't help that the cast keeps growing so the different groups of characters are becoming too large to really effectively showcase everyone outside of the slowest moments (not that I am against when the show slows down!). I would have liked for them to kill off or even just drop a few characters.

If you put it on XMP (or whatever) and it gets through one pass without error, it's almost certainly good. There's not really much need to let it do the full 4 passes or whatever it wants to do by default unless you actively suspect that there's something wrong with the module.

The End of Vampire in the Garden. I had a fit of insomnia and watched the rest of it. You know what, @KP wants Blue Velvet was right, it was pretty decent. Did I love everything about it? No way, but it more or less made up for the things I didn't like with things I did, so I wasn't being hypercritical while watching it, and that's what's important.

Vampire in the Garden, episode 1. So the few images I saw of this show highlighted a few things that I liked: odd character design, a girl looking pathetic and disconsolate (as if she had failed or done something that she'd rather not have), two girls working together in what looked like a factory (one of them being the previously mentioned sad-looking girl, which would imply one or both of them are important characters), and...vampires. I didn't really realize it, but I think Miyu has had an effect on me in that I find the idea of vampirism kind of interesting now (assuming they're not the outrageously stupid kind). So even though this is a piece of crap Netflix anime released in 2022, I thought I would try an episode. Plus, it's only 5 episodes long to begin with, and I don't think there's any possibility of a sequel, since it's an ONA? I'm not sure how that works, really. Well...it had some things that I liked, and a few things that I didn't. Well, really, it was kind of just one thing that was strongly negative, but it happened like three times: the main character deciding to have super emotional moments during important scenes that kind of just deflated them because they poorly handled and way overdone, which is unfortunately a bit of a staple of modern anime. Still, I'll watch a second episode, and that's not too bad - I'm kind of curious to see where it goes. I certainly have a much more positive impression than I did when I watched the first couple episodes of that Netflix Castlevania series.

Yeah, I always memtest86 new modules - feel like it's worth it to get it out of the way ASAP given how easily tested RAM is relative to other components.

I was sent this yesterday, and it now feels appropriate to post it here:

Something that I think that goes kind of unsaid for a lot of older shows is that...due to the usually not particularly good (relative to modern stuff) production values/filming techniques/action/acting/special effects and so on, that even when a show is bad, it's usually not terribly offensive to the senses. I've watched a bit of TNG, and while I'm by no means a fan, I can sit down and watch an episode and like...not want to blow my brains out while watching it, you know? There aren't special effects dominating every inch of the screen with a bazillion particle effects flying around the screen that make me just about have a seizure, there aren't a whole bunch of (fraudulently) EMOTIONAL scenes that make me want to curl up and die because they clearly don't work with these characters, no "high octane" action scenes with characters doing amazing (ridiculous) stunts and manuevers, no shaky camera or other annoying modern crap of that nature, no episode plots that you really have to care about for more than a single episode or two... I don't know, I feel like a lot of modern shows make a habit of asking too much of my brain and it can be really overwhelming when it's all combined together, especially if I'm not enjoying the show right off the bat - it gets to be intolerable so very quickly. Those original Trek shows aren't a constant assault on my senses like I feel so many other present day shows can be, and that makes them still at least watchable even when individual episodes are pretty bad in other areas. Maybe that's just the ancient "they don't make them like they used to" part of my brain talking, even though I'm probably younger than most people who frequently post in OT here.

With fan-done [film scans/games/other types of projects], usually the key is to keep quiet about until you're actually ready to distribute it online, and then just...do it. Then it's out there and there's no putting the genie back in the bottle, so to speak. The classic mistake a lot of such projects seem to make is announcing it before it's actually done, and then the project mysteriously disappear overnight halfway through it being done after the person(s) heading the project gets a cease and desist or some other type of legal correspondence that scares them into dropping the project immediately. There's, of course, loads of reasons to announce such projects - community excitement/anticipation, monetary support, community outreach for rare resources (e.g. obtaining specific film reels), getting into contact with those who have technical know-how in specialized areas needed to make the project the best it can be...and so on, but unless you're being very careful and making sure none of it can be traced back to you, you're really opening yourself up to a lot of legal scrutiny...on top of potentially wasting literal years of your hard sweat and tears for it to all come to naught. There's also the possible technical hurdles involved as well, as Amentep mentioned. I don't think any of those Original!Trek shows were shot digitally (early to mid 90s, right?), so at least there's that - if they were, there's no hope of ever seeing them in HD.

IIRC, TNG was very expensive to get on BD because they had to re-do all of the special effects, since all of them were originally made only for SD. And apparently sales of the BDs were pretty poor relative to the expense, so they basically said "welp that's the last time we ever do that". Seems extremely unlikely they'll ever do it for the others.

I guess it's kind of like what Jay from RLM said: if you liked it, you liked it and the little stuff often doesn't really end up mattering too much (but also, the inverse is true as well if you didn't like it). There are some things that are wrong with a 90s animated show called Escaflowne that @majesticand I watched semi-recently that would bother me/us in a different series, that I would gladly nitpick to death almost anywhere else...but the thing is, I super enjoyed that show because of other stuff and so almost everything I could nitpick melted and washed away like so much sea foam. Sure, there's still stuff I can think of that could've been improved to marginally increase my enjoyment, but I already thought it was a great show, and that almost never happens. Only about 30 items out of the 400+ movies/shows I've watched over the past ~6 years (since I started using a particular rating site to help me keep track of what I've seen and how I felt about it, because about six years ago is when I started taking a much bigger interest in cinema) have made me feel like they were actually great. That list of stuff I've seen doesn't include anything I feel like I haven't seen a significant sample of, so the veritable pile of things I've quickly discarded because I deemed they weren't quite to my taste aren't included there...which means "great" stuff is even rarer for me than those already grim numbers would suggest. If another show I've been trying to watch recently otherwise felt great, I probably wouldn't be nearly so intensely irritated by what I feel is gosh-awful music, because I would be much more occupied with the stuff I love rather than the few things I don't, right? Instead, it's hovering right around the danger zone for my brain where it starts to wander and automatically be hyper-critical about every little thing that I don't like...and if it gets any worse, all the stuff that I don't like will begin to feel like the end of the world and I'll just want to turn it off. I mean, I especially proved this true to and with myself recently via Stranger Things, which had a pretty clear delineation between the characters I enjoyed seeing and the ones that I didn't. The show was actually sitting a little below that danger zone for me by the end of the third episode, and then I just started...skipping the characters I didn't care about (which was made incredibly easy with the structure of this season and there being almost literally zero overlap between the separate groups of characters), and suddenly the show feels like an overall positive experience and I can forgive the smaller flaws that were remaining. At least for me, there are a lot of things that really feel like they matter a lot but...other shows that I like or even love that do similar things kind of prove that they sometimes don't, not really*. A lot of such issues actually almost seem more like a misdirection of negative feelings - just a symptom of the larger overall problem of a show/movie straight up not working for a pile of different reasons that we, as non-film critics, may have trouble precisely identifying and putting into words. It's a heck of a lot easier to just focus on the things that are clearly and obviously wrong to me...but really, if a show or movie didn't grab my brain, it just didn't. *Don't get me wrong, there are still some things that are genuine deal-breakers in of themselves that have an immediate and huge negative impact on something...but I don't think it's as much as some of us, myself chief among them, sometimes like to think. Also, a lot of stuff where that's the case is stuff I immediately stop watching within 5 minutes anyways because it's very clearly not for me, not stuff where I'm unsure if I like it or not as I continue to watch it.

Does anyone know if there's anything horribly wrong with the Vivaldi browser? Chromium backend, but I installed it earlier and just spent like an hour customizing the crap out of it so that it's basically the same as my Firefox (which is now like...a year+ out of date because I refuse to update to the latest version that screwed up everything), and I'm seriously contemplating making the full switch now. It's apparently made by the same guy who made the original Opera (Presto) engine before Opera decided to switch to Chromium themselves, which is what inspired me to try it out because Presto!Opera was my favorite browser of all time and I ran it for like 3-4 years past its last version before all modern webpages constantly breaking all the time forced me to switch to Firefox.

Not really related to video game news, but rather something I posted about in here previously: startpage.com is a Netherlands-based search engine that serves up Google search results (including even with respect to Google's specific search operators), but minus the whole Google part of the equation. I only learned this because I was screwing around with the Vivaldi browser today, which comes with like ten different search engines, and seeing which, if any, did what I wanted...and was surprised to see that Startpage did, and I went to go figure out why. Well, that's apparently because they just piggyback off of Google's own search results. I might have to make a permanent switch.

If you're not already, use a Lower Resist wand on your off-hand (or possibly even better, a Life Tap wand that makes it so your mercenary can tank).

I have a friend who within the past year got into 40K and spent several months trying to convince me to read some books from it. Just recently, they told me that they're done with 40K because they've tried over and over, but there seem to be only exactly one good author (Dan Abnett) who writes for it, and he only wrote like ten books out of the few thousand (literally) there are for that universe. Knowing that, I'm not sure if I should be more or less inclined to try those books now.

Neo Tokyo (1989). This, Memories (1995), and Robot Carnival (1987) are all collections of shorts (although Memories' are a bit longer than the others, especially with Magnetic Rose and Stink Bomb being around 40 minutes each - the additional length is a good thing, IMO) and with some overlap in who made them. Neo Tokyo was by far the worst production out of the lot just from a visual and sound standpoint, but all three of its shorts were more engrossing than any of the nine in Robot Carnival. Not as good as Memories, but still a worth a watch.

O.K., seeing it actually in action, I now finally understand why some people like CRT filters on old games (or new games meant to look like old games).