Bartimaeus

I ended up reading summaries of episodes for seasons 2-4. While I'm sure I would've enjoyed a bit of the Villanelle stuff, it felt like it would be a huge mistake to repeat the mistake of watching it for too long...and from what I read, it seemed to be pretty much exactly what I expected minus Carolyne apparently continuing to be important (honestly, I thought she was exiting the show at the end of season 1, and good riddance - apparently not). Bullet dodged I guess, as I definitely don't want anything to do with where it went overall, which seemed to be mostly around in circles. Bleh. Well, guess that's that for a promising albeit flawed first season.

I was thinking "man, that cloak looks really ridiculous". Then I googled her and, well, the cloak is gone. Not...sure...if improvement. Yeah, I don't like it either, but I guess she'll have a chance to win me over.

The other three seasons are really that bad? I tend to be way more harsh and down on these types of dark dramas than other people, so if other people think the additional seasons are bad, that must mean...either a slim possibility that I'd think they're great, or much more likely that they're really bad - depends on why they're not good, I guess. The end of season 1 seemed like a pretty clear "let's randomly do a soft reset so we can really stretch this out instead of telling the nice, concise story that we could've" to me, and I just...don't want that, like, at all? Honestly, I really just don't care about the incredibly lame investigative half of the show, and it's the heavy focus on the psychopathic thriller half of the show that makes it interesting and different to the other millions of police/investigation shows out there. That should really be a show in of itself: watching Villanelle enjoy life while finding new spins to eviscerating and disembowelling people in various kinds of situations both personal and impersonal, all the while weaving some kind of slow-burn narrative and theme around her...not this embarrassing Sherlock* nonsense. *Again, speaking specifically of the show with Martin Freeman and Benedict Cumberbatch, not Sherlock Holmes in general - it's an important distinction, especially seeing as the two are practically complete opposites stylistically.

Killing Eve. I thought this was an 8-episode miniseries (in my defense, I think I watched two minutes of the first episode when the first season originally came out before saying "maybe later" while just assuming it was a miniseries), but apparently it's a whole 4 season thing. Anyways, this is an investigative thriller show told from the perspective of two characters: Eve, the investigator, and Villanelle, the psychopath being investigated. I rather enjoy the psychopath's half of the show, but much less so Eve's investigative half, which takes a little too much in style from that awful Sherlock show from some years back. There's just too much of a focus on her being painfully dumb and obstinate while hand-waving away a lot of the actual investigative work that she's supposed to be doing...just like Sherlock. Being offhandedly told that character x, y, or z found and did some things off-screen so that we can now proceed with the plot is such a laughably bad convention in these fast-paced investigative dramas, and it happens danged near constantly. Gee, it's so cool when you have the computer nerd hack into whatever to get the critical information you need, what amazing storytelling, . Anyways, I don't know if I'll continue with the second season or not, four seasons of this seems like it'd be a lot of really bad investigation work. Maybe I should Stranger Things it by only watching Villanelle's bits. ...This is normally the part where I post a poster of the show, but all the posters for this show are uncharacteristically somewhere between bleh and terrible, so forget about it.

Kind of clunky title for a Zelda game. Very much looks like BotW 2 still, though...eh. Should very much excite @majestic, our resident BotW superfan, .

Gave Steelrising a try, and the game doesn't launch because of the same no "DirectX12 rendering device" that Hawke had. Updated my drivers because they were relatively ancient as well as Visual C++ and DirectX...still no go. Google gives nothing useful. Hmm, well, alrighty. Right, time to finally try Control after having it installed for like a year and a half. ...Half an hour later, I've uninstalled Control: gotta keeping it moving, boys, ain't got no time for these terrible games. Hopefully the issue with Steelrising will be figured out, as it has to be better than whatever that was.

Took almost the entire length of the show, though! Boy, that'd be terribly lame. I mean, probably. I'm more open to religiously-inspired stuff than most, but Battlestar Galactica-ing it in completely tacking it on at the last second is pretty unacceptable to me, . (e): Also, I didn't mean to say Miyu and Noir were similar in content per se - just that their intended demographic would seem to be similar, I think.

Maybe I'm slightly unusual in that I have full over-the-ear active noise cancelling headphones, and even while playing music, I can still hear through them pretty well unless I really turn them up. Well, the active noise cancelling is good at cancelling out stable white noise like fans (and AC...kind of), but stuff like people talking, stuff clanging, TV sounds et al. just sounds marginally more distant. It's enough to take a little of the edge off of external noise, which can be valuable, but drowning them out to the point of not realizing somebody is talking to you? Uh...not so much for me. Haven't seen the film in question, but I did just watch the scene: pretty absurd. Never shot a suppressed gun before, but just the action (ammunition firing, discharging, feeding mechanism) of a firearm can be pretty noticeable, never mind the actual combustion from a round being discharged. If someone dry fired (no round in the chamber) a gun next to you, you should pretty easily notice that telltale metal-against-metal sound from just the action...though I'm sure there are some firearms out there with particularly quiet action, maybe quiet enough that you wouldn't notice in a mall full of people talking. That'd still be pretending that there's no combustion, though. Supposedly, a silenced .22 can be about as quiet as ~100db, which is still really freaking loud even if you only hear it for a split-second.

Aren't the headphones like $10 hunks of garbage that would be physically incapable of muting outside noise unless you can turn them up to like 110db? Visible full ear-covering headphones would probably make it a lot more clear to someone not familiar with the idea (...and it would be at least a little more realistic). Still, it's a silly movie cliche that I'm surprised anyone would have trouble picking up. Cellphones are pretty terrible for dramatic cinema and atmosphere, in all fairness. That's why whenever I wander the streets late at night, I make sure to not have my phone on me...you know, for the suspense, .

I'm through 5 episodes (of 10) now. My impression so far is that it's functionally Samurai Jack but prehistoric and way more violent and gruesome...and basically no dialogue.

It's probably more or less the same intended demographic as Vampire Princess Miyu, which is...what, young teenaged girls who want at least a little thought and feeling infused into their action and mystery? Neither Vampire Princess Miyu or Noir are the deepest of shows, but they are tonally serious and at least are trying. From the way you described the beach scene, I was expecting it to be questionable; I thought it was perfectly tasteful and served a pretty clear purpose in illustrating some differences between them. Yeah, it's a swimsuit, but there was pretty clearly very little male gaze with how they presented her. P.S. After four episodes, I've begun to look forward to the intro song, .

Two more episodes of Noir. This show is strange: the best way to describe how watching it feels is...that it's like a "serious" and "artsy"/highbrow romance novel made for women, but the romance is completely replaced with assassin action stuff while being treated with the same level of seriousness. Does that make any sense, @majestic? It's not necessarily a bad thing (again, it's certainly much better than slapstick shonen crap), but I'm really struck by how many scenes there are where the focus seems to be making our two leads look like they're really thinking or feeling something as they're doing "cool" stuff (like staring someone down or literally being engaged in a firefight...there's pretty frequently not much heed for what they're physically doing or what they're saying making complete sense when it might get in the way of the style and tone). It's perhaps a little too much gravity at this stage in the show given how little we know about what's going on, either with the plot or with our characters. Overall, I'm still enjoying it, but it remains difficult to fully grasp how I feel about it. Also, it's been like a week since I watched the first two episodes, and I have no idea what our two characters' names are. I feel like I've been spoiled with other shows like Neon Genesis Evangelion and Sailor Moon, where main characters' names are said almost constantly in normal conversation and also even when they're fighting together. Girls, it wouldn't hurt to be slightly more conversational with each other when you're not in stealth mode blowing people's brains out so that I can learn more about you, .

There are those "slenderman-esque faces" I was talking about earlier,

Was the second post of the thread and what at least some of us were already responding to, .

Yeah, that exposition dump at the end is really pretty bad, but maybe necessary for audiences in 1960.

It was the best of times, and it was the worst of times. Did not believe one bit in the Packers the moment I heard our two star tackles were still out. (e): Meanwhile, Cowboys season may well realistically be over at 0-1 with all the injuries.

The piece that won the competition has the normal telltale signs of it being AI generated (impossible brushstrokes, frightening slenderman-esque faces, fused/smeared/stretched details, and certain other visual patterns that I've never seen outside of AI-generated stuff that I have trouble putting into words...), but the people responsible for voting were clearly unacquainted and more impressed by the idea rather than the technique (the concept is neat and the the lighting looks pretty impressive).

Pastel Yumi. It's essentially the sequel to Magical Emi - made by the same studio (Studio Pierrot), started a mere month after Magical Emi ended, it looks very similar, the setting is the same, the setup is pretty much the same except swap out doing magic for playing violin instead...yeah, it's pretty much the same show, but with a different yet similar-ish cast. There is one big difference that I've noticed after having seen two episodes of this: Pastel Yumi kind of stinks whereas Magical Emi doesn't. Why? ...I don't know. Well, thanks for coming to my TEDx Talk everyone, and have a great day.

Nope (2022) by Jordan Peele. I really love being able to recognize stock sounds from random games I've played over the years: https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/s/c125advjobc7qgt/explorer_3WU1zNjcbn.mp4 (note: the one used in the movie is pretty quiet, so you might have to turn it up to hear it if you're not using headphones) The creature sound effects that have been haunting me for the last 15 years are the dog whine sound effects from S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Shadow of Chernobyl, as I've heard those sounds used in probably like fifteen other places now. Anyways, in this movie, we learn why we do not use live animals for film anymore as per @Hurlshort. Also, another pretty enjoyable film by Jordan Peele.

How similar mechanically is it to Dark Souls? My quick glance at the game made me think it was something more like Nier: Automata, Devil May Cry, or even Bayonetta than Dark Souls, and if that's the case, I am super out, GOG release or not.

Since Carr was drafted in 2014, Raiders had been my secondary/AFC team up until Gruden became their head coach. I'm not sure if I should go back to liking them again now that he's finally gone.

Going back to the Super Bowl would be pretty cool at least, .

I believe the Saints would still control his rights since he was not fired but rather "retired", but I'm really not sure how much an inhibiting factor that really would be in practice. Note that I said I was only picking non-winners from last year, . I'm not really a big believer of gut feeling or intuition about sports due to their incredibly chaotic nature, so I really only have a few strong feelings about this upcoming season: 1. AFC West and NFC West should both be bloodbaths with possibly 6 playoff teams coming from them. 2. NFC North will probably be bad and should be pretty easy for the Packers to win unless injuries pile up. 3. Packers will inexplicably implode at some point in the playoffs.

Think McCarthy gets canned if Cowboys don't make the playoffs? Jerry isn't getting any younger... Division winners, but assuming none of last years' winners repeat because picking previous winners isn't any fun: AFC North: Ravens AFC West: Chargers AFC East: Dolphins AFC South: Colts NFC North: Vikings NFC West: Cardinals NFC East: Eagles NFC South: Saints

That would probably be the better format for me to play it in. Though for me, that would probably look more like "let the other person dictate the general flow of the room and make the major decisions while I just home in on the minor stuff", .