Bartimaeus

I'd just like to point out that the spambot post that BruceVC was apparently replying to has now been deleted. P.S. Yes, I am a bastard.

Oh yeah, that always made it super easy - that, and if your site had it, filling out fields like ICQ, Yahoo Messenger, AIM Messenger, et cetera. Nobody in the universe ever filed those out.

HELLO, THIS IS THE BARTIMAEUS BOT ALERT! Evidence: #1, #2, #3, #4, and #5. All only tangentially related posts made on various random forums by a newly registered user within the last day by the same username. This one had a decently believable post, I almost didn't look them up...but the fact that it didn't seem to be addressing anyone in particular despite starting with "I agree with you" combined with the random words smashed together username (which in my own experiences of forum moderation, is almost always a dead giveaway that the user is a bot) made me make sure, and yep. Once the idiots running these AI-generated spambots figure out how to use different usernames across different websites (i.e. doing the bare minimum to disguise themselves) and maybe some mild textual improvements to avoid easily patterned behaviors, we might really be in trouble, because I honestly thought that this could be a real post for a moment.

The dissent authored by Supreme Court Justice Sotomayor and joined by the other two liberal justices starts on page 68, a direct excerpt: Will Biden use his new extralegal powers to make sure this ruling does not stand? It's not really his modus operandi, but letting Trump waltz into the Oval Office while this Supreme Court does its best to kick start another civil war (it wouldn't be the first time) and crown a dictator is absolute madness. I do wish Gromnir were around to, uh...say something. Some legal analysis that the media isn't necessarily doing the best to cover would be much appreciated right now.

A 6-3 Supreme Court decision has declared that the United States president has absolute immunity from criminal prosecution for any official acts during their terms. I think Biden's first act as Emperor of the United States should probably be to kill the entire Supreme Court and appoint a new one that makes better decisions.

majestic just meant that I might be replying to Wormerine's Fallout 3 video, hence why I suddenly brought up Fallout 3 in my previous post. (e): I see I got a new KP signature quote. Turns out AI bots are good for something, I suppose.

Don't worry, I happened to leave a tab of this page open earlier and took an image of it. Learn to live with your mistake of approving AI-generated spam, you commie bastards! There's certain to be more of it that I'll have to point out anyways, with the way things are going: the least you can do is not delete our posts over it. And here I was, seeing that you replied in this thread, and thought to myself, hey, @Bartimaeus surely commented on a link to hbomberguy, but nah. Another spam bot got through the mod screening. I actually haven't seen this particular hbomberguy video yet, and I'm not too knowledgeable of Fallout 3 (or pretty much any other Bethesda game...or actually, any of the Fallout games for that matter). Anything that says a Bethesda game is bad is pretty much automatically approved by me, though.

Well, that probably explains why it often felt like "right, we just did the one or two things we were supposed to this month, so let's write a barebones couple sentence summary and get into the next one"...

I guess, but I can't imagine Dumbledore would take too kindly to Snape exposing and/or killing one of his teachers without justification. That was a whole arrangement which was necessary for Lupin to be able to work there in the first place. Seeing Lupin "in league" with Black to be able to do away with both of them seemed to be exactly what he wanted...but my goodness, I did rather overlook the whole Lily Potter aspect. Whoops. Funnily, that connection is instead actualized for the readers by Black right after Snape is knocked out...that would admittedly seem to be too much of a coincidence to be an accident, as much of a lame trick on the part of the author in order for readers to give some confidence in the morally dubious Black while denying the same to Snape - not that it's something Snape would've ever mentioned to anyone but Dumbledore, and only because he would've already known. I also went back and actually read some of the specific barbs Snape directed towards Harry about his father, and there's a pretty clear hinting of a "your father was a fool whose poor judgement got your mother killed" pattern going on, which would fit perfectly with the whole secret keeping and having trusted Black to keep them safe (the fact that it actually instead turned out to be Pettigrew whom James instead trusted the secret to and IIRC on Black's suggestion kind of proves what Snape said about the two of them). Alright, you've convinced me that at least Snape's character must have been planned from the beginning.

All I have to do is remember the Supreme Court and their ongoing spree of suspect decisions - with the possibility of Trump getting to nominate even more of his justices while also trying to make good on unitary executive theory - and I suddenly get very enthusiastic about voting for Biden again. Of course, I didn't watch the debate in the first place because seeing both of these guys speak makes me uncomfortable, albeit in different ways: ignorance in this particular way, at least, is bliss.

Gleefully trying to get Sirius Black and Remus Lupin executed in book The Prisoner of Azkaban over their childhood quarrels is where he officially stepped over the "cruel, petty, depraved human garbage of a bully, but technically not evil" line for me. The fact that it's not directed specifically at any of the core cast doesn't really change that. Movie The Prisoner of Azkaban 'mysteriously' just about completely glosses over that entire conflict between them and puts his character in much greater of a bind due to a lack of information...but in the book, he is explicitly written as having been in the room under the Invisibility Cloak and having heard much of the exposition dump by an unsuspecting Black and Lupin, and he just doesn't care about any of it, he becomes quite literally sick in the head with the possibility of being able to get Sirius killed. I don't think he was ever planned to be a villain, but if she had spent the same amount of time consistently making it clear what a piece of crap Snape is in The Order of the Phoenix and Half-Blood Prince as she did throughout the first four books, I think the character's turnabout would have been much more difficult to understand and accept. Well, who knows, the entirety of The Order of the Phoenix was "quite different" from the four proceeding books, for some reasons organic and others seemingly less so... Rowling got very serious with the story and squeezed so much into it, some of which just doesn't go anywhere. If she had his whole character planned out from the beginning, the way he's initially portrayed throughout those first four books just seems a bit at odds with how he's portrayed for the rest of the books and all the movies, and the coincidental timing of The Order of the Phoenix coming three years after the previous book and also after the first two movies doesn't help either.

Unrelatedly, a fire started inside former Green Bay Packers player Randall Cobb's house Tuesday night after his Tesla charger spontaneously ignited while they were sleeping, and the couple of pictures they posted makes it look like a bomb went off in their garage. From what I gather, firefighters were able to put the fire out before it burned down his whole house. Everyone got out of the house without injury, including the dog: may you be so lucky, ShadySands.

I feel like "Alan Rickman changed how I wrote the character in later books" might be a cover for a similar but perhaps more embarrassing explanation on Rowling's part, but that's admittedly mostly mean-spirited speculation on my part: she either didn't know what she eventually planned on doing with the character (i.e. she hadn't actually planned how the/his story would end) OR at some point during the making of some of the early movies she realized that what she had been doing with the character just didn't really jive with what she had planned (i.e. she had planned it, but a fresh look at the series from the very beginning helped her realize that it was a poor plan which wouldn't satisfactorily come together and so happily took the opportunity to agree to some needed adjustments and even try to integrate them as much as she could into her own writing). Movie Snape ends up working a hundred times better than book Snape ever did (especially because in the books, we only ever see events from Harry's explicitly hateful perspective whereas in the movies, Snape is afforded a somewhat more measured perspective on the part of the audience outside probably just the first film), and I'm not feeling particularly generous to the idiot writer with a professed love for re-writing and retconning her characters and story on Twitter just for funsies. Like I said, director that didn't know what they were doing because they didn't really care about the source material or making the film fit in with the previous entries. Movie Goblet of Fire had a lot of additional nonsense that it really just didn't need...except for cutting Dobby out of the film. Despite all its sins, I can at least say good job for that...although it only further weakened how much the audience should care about him and his eventual sacrifice. Whatever, I wouldn't have cared about Dobby no matter what. I think I can forgive something like that because it's not really key (it would be pretty trivial to have just...you know, mention the sword being in Dumbledore's office when Harry visits him earlier and then just have Fawkes carry the sword to him, although it certainly would have heavily telegraphed how the basilisk would eventually be defeated) and I think it kind of fits in with a lot of European mythology...Arthur pulling the sword from the stone and all that. One of those things that feels like a cute thematical fit but then makes you wonder how anything actually works in this poorly written universe that doesn't seem to have any actual hard rules, especially when the author seems completely disinterested in doing any work to flesh anything out.

It's not that much about The Acolyte specifically (they say it's basically maybe alright but not great and certainly not worth all the controversy), but it's nonetheless a really good discussion on how insane everything has gotten, on all sides, except for the people who just want to enjoy something decent. Diversity and representation are both good, but they're not necessarily appropriate or needed for everything all the time every time. It's also not going to make any material difference in how good or bad something is, no matter how much we're told something either is great by those who want it or is terrible by those who hate it. I hope we can eventually get past all of this and reach a happy medium where people feel like they're being represented well enough without it feeling like over-compensation for the past but also without the constant culture wars. On a side-note, why is Wil Wheaton the most punchable interviewer any time I see the stupid bastard? Gosh. Mike talks about how if you turn something on and you don't like it, you can just turn it off, but I really don't see an easy way to tell RLM to stop putting Wil Wheaton in their Star Trek/Wars videos. Bah, humbug.

Visually, I remember everything about it looking great, and I didn't even get to see the new scan from the negatives that Vinegar Syndrome did which looks so much better than the old extra-regional transfers. But the story and characters ultimately left me, uh, feeling like the cinematography and premise both got rather let down.

I really hated Dobby when I read the books, but I hated Dobby somehow even more when I watched the films. Besides The Chamber of Secrets unfortunately having the highest Dobby-to-No-Dobby ratio, it's probably also my favorite. For me, this problem also applies even to the earlier books, especially insofar as the series predominantly takes place at a school of magic where students supposedly make life-long friends, grow up, and study/learn magic. You know, normal school and coming-of-age stuff. With the exception of The Goblet of Fire (the film of which is both strange and kind of horrendous for my tastes - big surprise when you hire a new director that didn't watch the previous movies or read the books and who you then ask to adapt the wackiest and most off-beat entry), I feel the movies do a much better job than the books of conveying all of that than the books did, which doesn't make a lot of sense given how easy it would be to just...write more stuff into the books. How precious little time is actually spent in the classroom learning or doing just normal school/friend stuff versus "Harry didn't have a good time in Divination and Potions with Snape proved to be no better" and then we're suddenly into the next month is a bit bizarre. The only spells the series ever mentions characters learning are always the exact ones that will be needed for the plot to function without something we've never heard of or seen before just suddenly appearing and being used. Most characters outside of the core cast which should in theory flesh out the world feel like they're only mentioned in brief, vague asides that aren't even actively written but are instead just passive descriptions of what they said or did. At times, reading those books almost feels like they were explicitly written to be turned into movies. Despite their issues, I do think the first three to four-ish books are pretty fun - heck, even movie 4, as much of a disaster that constantly goes off-style and off-script as it does, has its moments. That changes in a very bad way with book 5, and... In film The Order of the Phoenix's defense, I think the book is way worse than the film, which you kind of allude to later in your post. I expected the movie to be pretty unbearable because of how awful the book was (it does not help that Harry, whose eyes we see everything through, becomes an absolutely unlikeable bastard during this whole book, though I'll blame it less on him as a character and more on all of the idiotic circumstances that start at the end of The Goblet of Fire which Rowling wrote), meanwhile I was looking forward to film The Half-Blood Prince because while still very messy, it had been a hugely welcome and much more enjoyable respite compared to The Order of the Phoenix. To my surprise, I got almost nothing out of movie The Half-Blood Prince while I felt movie The Order of the Phoenix did about as well as it could to minimize how atrocious its source material was. I guess the flipped expectations helped the one I didn't like and hurt the one I did.

I just watched Klute not that long ago, too. RIP.

Maggie Smith played a...very different kind of teacher in this film. Very different. From a certain point of view, I think you could perhaps say even the complete opposite. Heck, her character in this film might even be a Voldemort supporter in the Harry Potter world, though probably not for the reasons one might expect. As I said, I have some unclear feelings about the character Maggie Smith played here, but it was a marvellously played character nevertheless. I also have no idea why this "Miss Gaunt" is named so, when it seems as though no-one else I can see in the cast list has anything even vaguely approaching something so on the nose. I should find another Maggie Smith film to watch, maybe one where she doesn't play a school teacher. The only two Harry Potter films I particularly like are the first two, but that makes sense, they're the silliest and lowest stakes out of the lot: by the time you get to Half-Blood Prince, there's barely a single speck of fun left in the whole series, because it's been completely drained in exchange for all the drama and serious plot stuff, and as someone who read the books when I was young as they were coming out, that just never really felt like a strength of Rowling's writing in the first place. Bleh.

I have not had any problems since you posted here. I have not ever had any 2FA enabled on the Obsidian fourms, though.

The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie (1969). I wanted to watch at least one non-Harry Potter Maggie Smith film, and this did not disappoint: though I'm not entirely sure how I feel about the complicated and sometimes ridiculous titular school teacher that she played in the film, there's no doubt that Maggie Smith did play her most wonderfully and I very much enjoyed the film because of her. However, the much more pressing issue cloaking this film in shadow is one Miss Gaunt, whose blank and dead-eyed stare will forevermore haunt my nightmares. If anything, the name "Miss Gaunt" doesn't nearly do this spectre justice. I looked up this actress in other films and I guess that's just how she looks, and a good thing too: the world of film always needs more unique and frightening faces. Hollywood in particular has always been so dreary with all its wretchedly ugly beautiful people, never more so than now.

I've played about a handful of hours of Stardew Valley and my impression of the game turned into "this is going to be impossible for me to enjoy because of how quickly days are over combined with how much crap you have to do that they've stuffed into this game...unless I just start cheating". I was really only scratching the surface with how little I played, too. The reason I didn't start cheating and instead quit was because I was not confident that I was actually enjoying any of the game's writing, content, or gameplay. None of the characters did anything besides annoy me, I don't really enjoy any element of farming or "designing" a home/base, and while there certainly seemed to be mysteries abounding, I kind of just found the gameplay loop to be too dull and repetitive for that to compel me forward any. I see people sink hundreds of hours into Stardew Valley and I wonder what I'm not getting, but I suppose that's just how it goes.

I have been playing a singleplayer poker game called Balatro recently. This short trailer more or less gives you the idea: As you win rounds, you earn money which can be used at the shop which you visit in between each round to try to modify your build (modify, add, or remove cards from your deck, add jokers that give various kinds of bonuses or change how your build functions)...but the more you win, the more points you'll need to win the next round. Anyways, I only mention all of this because after having played the game for like 20-30 hours over the last month or so, I was finally able to construct more or less the exact deck and winning hand, a High Card build (i.e. a single card and normally the absolute worst hand type that you can play), that I've previously tried to create a few dozen times but failed to, which I took a video of here: I only needed about 86,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 (i.e. 8.6*10^43) points to win the hand, but I scored 4,283,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 (i.e. 4.283*10^90) points, so I guess I got a little carried away there. Anyways, don't play Balatro, it's a pretty good but pointless poker game and you'll start go crazy from the possibilities that you can see but can't quite ever put together. I was finally able to build the exact build I had thought of like 5 hours into the game but couldn't ever quite get all the parts lined up for, and now I finally have no reason to continue playing it: though the game officially has no end as the required winning amount of points just continue to scale up exponentially (a build "wins" the game after defeating Ante 8, for reference - as you can see in the bottom left, I am actually at Ante 20/8 instead, and Ante 8 usually only requires around a score of just 100,000 to win), I think I can consider it "beat".

@LadyCrimson and I are continuing to have issues...I couldn't even login for like the last two days, cos each time I tried, it gave me that same error I showed in the image above. Well, at least my Steam profile is linked in my account here now in case I can't ever login again and somebody needs to contact me, .

Semi-related: the only malware I've ever had in my entire life was thanks to my brother installing a pirated version of Temple of Elemental Evil on my PC back when I was like eight. No, I'll never forgive him for it...though there was one good effect: it permanently scared me off the whole sordid affair of online piracy. Squeaky clean ever since.

Not sure whether to post here or in the anime thread... The Lord of the Rings: The War of the Rohirrim, an official feature film coming to theatres somewhere near you this December... ...No, this isn't a joke, this is really what a Lord of the Rings feature film is actually going to look like...in theatres. Well, until it horribly flops and they release it to streaming shortly after, anyway.