Bartimaeus

I think the thing that really strikes me with The Boy Friend is that there's really no reason for a silly 1920s matinee show quasi-musical to seem deranged whatsoever, especially when the stated goal of the filmmaker was just to make it sweet and innocent, and yet I could feel a nuclear meltdown starting in my brain about a third of the way through as I tried to make sense of the choices that the director was making, and it didn't really ever stop. There was a distinct sensation of fire and smoldering in the top left part of my brain even after the film had finished. I'd definitely appreciate someone else's take on it to determine whether or not maybe I'm just cracked for reasons unrelated to the film - perhaps it was just all the characters staring with the full whites of their eyes straight into the camera for what felt like half the film that did me in. I should probably watch The Devils sometime, it is rather infamous. Probably a little outside my wheelhouse, but that's exactly how I got into this mess in the first place.

The Boy Friend (1971) by Ken Russell. Ken Russell said he made this film...um, "[...] to prove to people I'm not totally deranged; I love the innocence and charm of musicals", but I came away from this becoming certain that he must be. I think it's one of the most fun films I've ever viewed, but I feel I lost my sanity watching it through. I don't know what I was expecting after having seen Altered States and Crimes of Passion, but I certainly wasn't prepared for whatever that was.

I'd definitely be curious to see a demographic and voting breakdown for specifically the Republican primaries...might help understand why polling was so off. Still probably unhelpful for trying to fix forecasts of the general election, though.

Unpacking is pure existential dread and terror, do not play if you're weak of heart.

Polling continues to remain very troublesome (the phenomenon of which became very publicly noticed back in 2016 when Trump was first elected): in the Republican primary, there was widespread systematic error and results outside the margin of error (sometimes as much as 20-30%!) throughout the nation, even when looking at aggregate polling averages. Though unlike in 2016 (where Trump ran ahead of the projected results right up to but just barely inside the margin of error), the bias seems to be in favor of Trump rather than against him like it was back then (i.e. this time around, the polls were projecting that he would win primaries by much better margins than he actually did)...what, if anything, this might mean for the general election, is anyone's guess. It could very well mean absolutely nothing. Polling seems to always be very screwy one way or another when Trump is on the ballot, so this shouldn't really surprise anyone.

There should really be an easy way on their end to just copy-and-paste all the titles of your leftover/unredeemed keys. Thanks as always, ShadySands!

It's a good thing you didn't post about all the other games you've probably received since the last time you updated this thread three years ago - I wasn't necessarily looking forward to looking up approximately 500 different games, . Pretty sure I've played Children of Silentown, but it was on GOG. I remember thinking that it was totally going to be up my alley, but then it was just...you know, alright. It didn't really, uh, hit me like I thought it was going to. I'm not particularly keen on games that I've actually played through but the only thing I remember is that the title sounded familiar before having to look them up to figure out why. When I took a glance at Otxo just now, I was like "I have a friend that seems to always like this kind of game", and so I was very unsurprised to see that it was actually already sitting on their wishlist. If nobody else ever claims it, feel free to send it my way and I'll gift it to them and tell them that it was from you.

The only Obsidian game that I've finished is Neverwinter Nights 2 (and Mask of the Betrayer). The controls and movement in the NWN games are a royal pain in the butt and I never thought the transition from isometric gameplay a la Baldur's Gate really served it well, but I did quite like MotB even so...the base campaign was alright. I put like ten hours into New Vegas and Pillars of Eternity both, didn't really care for either of them - otherwise, I haven't tried anything else. I was vaguely interested in trying Grounded and Tyranny at some point, but I'm pretty bad at playing games these days. Though I registered in like 2008 for some reason that I don't remember, I only became more active here on the Obsidian forums when Pillars of Eternity was kickstarted back in 2012, I'm pretty sure. When Josh Sawyer started releasing the little video diaries that explained various things about how the game design/development was going was unfortunately when I kind of started to check out of the whole Pillars of Eternity experience, which was probably for the best because I ended up really not liking the game pretty much at all once it was released.

The only Dune book I ever read was Sandworms of Dune, which I think is the last one narrative-wise. Inconceivably, I did not get that much out of it.

I thought I read that he had 4 hours of usable footage, but his initial rough cut brought it down to 3 hours, which he submitted to the studio and they were like "this is still too long", so he went back and re-shot some too long/complicated scenes and was able to pare it down to the eventual theatrical cut, which he did approve of. @majestic mentioned "Alan Smithee" directing the film (for anyone who doesn't know, Alan Smithee is the name used by directors not wanting credit for their own film), but that was only the case for the 3 hour TV cut that he didn't have control over. He's rejected Universal's attempts to get him to make a director's cut, and from my own impression of the film, I don't really think there was anything that anyone could've done to save it: there are certainly some cool things in it, but it seemed to be a production that just didn't even nearly satisfactorily come together for various reasons, and no amount of editing or inserting/removing scenes was going to change that. Lynch is kind of the guy known for making things extra long as he feels necessary, so I can't see why in the world he would refuse to make a director's cut if he thought the film could actually be fixed. With regards to hair styles, that doesn't surprise me based on my own experiences of how drastically I perceive change in people's faces when they change their hair.

Sazae-san, episode 1. I did it! I watched an episode of the longest running show in history...well, the longest running scripted (or animated) show in history anyway. There have been at least 8,540 episodes of Sazae-san since it started in 1969...but uh, there is only about one episode that is English-subtitled, so I guess that ends my viewing of Sazae-san. It's basically an every-day family/slice-of-life show focused around the different members of a family, with the titular character, Sazae, being the mom. Shockingly...or probably not, I thought it was pretty good and would happily watch more if I had anymore to watch, but I don't. It was quite charming and surprisingly tight/well edited - the latter of which in my experience is a rarity for 1960s anime shows, even right at the end of the decade. I think the funniest part was during the final segment when the grandfather was on his "deathbed" (not really, he just wasn't feeling well after a pretty rough day) with all the womenfolk doddering over him at home, and Sazae started to look up his symptoms in a medical book...and promptly reached the conclusion that he must have cancer, sending everyone into a panic. I wasn't expecting the old "look your symptoms up online and WebMD will for sure tell you that you have cancer" to be a meme all the way back in 1969, but it seems the more things change, the more things stay the same. Fun fact: the original voice actress for the main character has stayed the same since 1969, which means she's been voicing the character for 55 years now, and she is now...84 years old. Talk about a job to last you a lifetime. "Although the series is now long-running, Katō would later recall in 2009 that she initially thought it would last only three months." Whoops.

It's especially noticeable whenever you see him from the side - the guy looks like he had to be the inspiration for the Crimson Chin. Features that go just a little too far beyond normal proportions seems to usually have the effect of freaking my brain out...see also Julia Roberts and her very frightening mouth/smile. Her jaw is going to unhinge and she's going to chomp my poor little head off in one bite. I have been told that my fear of Julia Roberts is irrational and not based in reality, but I still dread the snake people among us...

Dune... . . . . . . . . . ...(1984), by David Lynch. What a weird, clunky, messy film. It's like David Lynch couldn't make the narrative Lynchian enough, so he decided to Lynch it up in other ways. But it was vaguely entertaining somehow (sometimes in unintentional ways...), so I guess you could do worse than watch this nonsense. I assume it's probably for the best that I'm pretty much not at all familiar with the Dune books - while some of the sets certainly look cool enough, I can't think the film quite captures the spirit of whatever the heck the books were supposed to be about. Kyle MacLachlan has the most unsightly chin - a chin I daresay made for a villain of some nature, and certainly not a messiah.

Power lines ignited the largest wildfire in Texas history and one nearby, officials say This will, uh, 'please' @PK htiw klaw eriF.

A co-worker from a different department brought her laptop that wouldn't charge its battery anymore to a local PC repair shop, and they went and changed its operating system from Windows 10 to Windows 11 without asking her, and it FUBAR-ed her operating system, e.g. wi-fi doesn't work anymore, browser crashes upon opening every time, start menu doesn't open at all, random blue screens, etc. They didn't bother to test anything before handing it back to her, and they didn't fix the charging issue anyways. She tried a system repair, the ol' always-recommended-yet-always-pointless SFC repair, not doing it. She also just, like, didn't want Windows 11. I think she can maybe do a complete rollback to Windows 10, if she can figure out how - not something I've ever personally done myself, to be honest. Could maybe also try uninstalling her old system drivers and re-installing versions for Windows 11 to see if that fixes the worst problems, but it sounded like the issues were too severe and widespread for it to be worth the bother. I'd be pretty apoplectic if somebody ever tried to pull a stunt like this on me...but uh, I guess that's why I handle my own affairs: if something ever goes wrong, I can only blame myself, .

Void Stranger. I got a couple of hours into this puzzle game and was like "whew, that sure was a lot of puzzles...just how long is this game, anyways?". Oh, just somewhere between 20 and 65 hours - you know, depending on just how much you hate yourself and really want to see all the story bits hidden behind having to do everything absolutely perfectly. No, I don't think I will.

I don't know, I've played at least a handful of Switch games; that's better than the exactly zero from both the PS5 and whatever the name of the current Xbox is. So you tell me, I guess. On what other game console am I going to hear Princess Daisy scream "WOWIE-ZOWIE!" over and over, anyways?

Did I really write "paided" in my previous post? Good lord.

I'd be more sad about it if there hadn't already been a competing Nintendo Switch emulator, Ryujinx, that was doing alright itself. They haven't been doing all the stupid pre-release/leak stuff, they don't have official instructions for how to circumvent the Switch's cryptography and DRM, their Patreon doesn't sell/gate features behind payment, and they don't run an official Discord that is basically in a constant state of "WHAT GAMES ARE WE GOING TO PIRATE NEXT?" like Yuzu did. I think emulation and preservation of the Nintendo Switch will be just fine. Now Nintendo 3DS emulation, where the only emulator (Citra) was made by the Yuzu team which also got taken down as a result of this lawsuit...well, the emulator was not being updated very much anymore and it was more or less feature-complete, I'm sure someone will host the latest version somewhere. As to why Yuzu was doing all that stuff...complacency and dollar signs is my guess. A small dev team was getting paided $30-40k a month, and they'd gotten away with every potentially legally problematic thing they'd done before, so what's one more? Whoops.

Highly popular Nintendo Switch emulator Yuzu was sued by Nintendo last week, and today agreed to fold and pay 2.4 million dollars to Nintendo to settle it, along with some other terms like the dev team never being allowed to work on emulators for the rest of their lives. Although painful for the future of Nintendo Switch emulation and preservation, I think they pretty much deserved what they got: they did the stupidest thing possible, the one thing you absolutely cannot do unless you want to bring the law down upon your head, which is blatantly advertise and monetize leaked/pre-release content. How stupid do you have to be to sell Patreon-only builds (they were earning tens of thousands of dollars a month, by the way!) that can run The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom before the game has even officially released? Any support for pre-release/leaked content is bad enough and will draw the ire of crime investigators and lawyers alike in of itself, but then going so far as to actively monetize it... Woof.

Though it helps the worst person you know, letting individual states decide who they can disqualify for federal elections would be heading down a pretty dangerous path - even if the Supreme Court had strictly limited any implementation of disqualification to the 14th amendment and insurrection, that was a Pandora's Box that I was not particularly eager to see opened. The whole thing was pointless with regards to Trump in the first place: even if the Supreme Court had allowed it, the only states that would've went ahead with it would be Democrat-controlled states anyways. He'd have lost a single electoral vote from Maine's second district (Maine does not grant its electoral votes as a whole state, and Trump won Maine's second district while Biden won Maine's first district), and maybe guaranteed that he would lose Michigan. Meanwhile, you'd be possibly opening the door for Biden and Democrat senators to get kicked out of Republican-controlled states like Wisconsin, Arizona, and Georgia based on novel interpretations by executive and judicial office-holders in those states. No, as is usually the case, the voters get the candidates they deserve and we're going to have to save ourselves from ourselves. With civic virtue being at an all-time low, I'm not very optimistic.

The Zone of Interest (2023). Thematically strong, a lesson on the banality of evil. There's no sentimentality of any kind, it's just the rather dreary and dispassionate every-day life of seemingly normal (if a bit boorish) people going about their business and living their lives. Except for the fact that it's Rudolf Höss and his family that we're watching. The approach here was thematically interesting for a Nazi film, though hardly exciting cinematically. I've seen Jeanne Dielman before, and I enjoyed that more. My favorite part of the film was, funnily, the intro music that played onto a totally black screen. If my sleeping brain had music, this is it.

Obviously, I very much respect, support, and enjoy the fruits of indie game development, but AAA studios are largely the only ones capable of making large and cutting-edge games - with the resources to fully realize their worlds, stories, characters, audio, environments, et al. in new and different ways that really push the medium forward. Most of the games I've enjoyed within the past ten years have been indie-developed titles, but while indie developers are great at doing some things, there's a lot that they simply can't do given their realities of manpower and resources. It's pretty much the same way @Gorgon has often bemoaned the state of studio film-making: while smaller and independent-ish films made today can be great for what they can do and what they try to accomplish, their small cast of actors, their inability to have expensive visual effects, their limited options for sets/locations, the kinds of stories and settings that they can realistically try to explore given their limitations...well, if you're like Gorgon and you want new, big, exciting films that come out with large fanfare rather than just more soulless, over-formulaic Hollywood dreck pushed out for the sake of being a product, your options for new things to watch start to get sad pretty quickly. It's the same way I really like 2D animated movies/shows (especially when it's traditional animation), and while I still occasionally find things that I like, you just don't see any great big 2D animation productions of any kind any more: it's all smaller, budget-limited stuff aimed at very specific niche audiences. I have largely accepted that I am never going to experience anything new in that vein that even approaches the heights of my favorite things released in the 80s and 90s, some stuff that I first watched as a kid but also some stuff that I first watched as an adult, and that's just the way it's going to be given the realities of the relevant industries. But it didn't used to always be this way, with either film or video games or animation. Times change, and it can be painful to try to adapt when it seems like nothing scratches the itch for your particular want. On a side-note, there is just so much content (a lot garbage, but certainly not all of it!) being constantly pushed out for pretty much every medium that it's absolutely overwhelming to try to find what you might like, particularly if your tastes aren't very mainstream. I very much regret that there are games, movies, television shows, musical artists, books et al. that I would love and which would prove meaningful to me and others I might share them with...if only I could find and experience them. But I can't, because they're drowned out by the endless tidal waves of everything else, and there's not enough time in the day or my life for me to realistically do anything about it.

I've been praying for a video game industry crash for like the past ten years, but haven't ever seen much evidence of it materializing. It'd hurt like hell in the short term, but it seems to be the only way forward to really shake things up and get another decade or two of good games instead of just...products only made for extracting money out of us. And if it kills off a few companies like Ubisoft in the process, how can you be upset about that? I'd drop a nuke on their headquarters myself if I could. ...Uh, maybe my rhetoric got a little extreme there, but you know what I mean.

This has been an issue for about the last ten years - that I know of. Elsagate and similarly disturbing content reached a very loud apogee back in 2017, but as always seems to be the case with censorship where there is both supply and demand, new guidelines and restrictions means that both the producers and the consumers just get more creative in how they communicate to one another. It's pretty grim, especially when you see the numbers on implicated creators, users, videos, and comments between YouTube and TikTok (and presumably other places as well). It's a whole new frontier of abuse and exploitation that these platforms clearly cannot even remotely keep up with, even with honest effort, and it's hard not to think that the public and political forces won't eventually catch wind of it and implement some very draconian measures in response - there doesn't seem to be too much else that could adequately deal with it. The idea of having to use your government-issued ID to register and upload videos to YouTube seems farcical and a little dystopian to me...but boy, every time I'm reminded of just how widespread this is, if it means less children being neglected, abused, and exploited (and less other children viewing this kind of stuff!), I guess I'd be pretty alright with not being able to casually upload to YouTube or anything similar ever again. There's also the uncomfortable fact in knowing that, you know, this sort of thing has clearly found a sizable audience that has internally normalized how they think and behave, so even if you deplatform all of it and them, they're still going to stick around and find other ways to interface with one another...but if you can make it way more difficult for them to attract new people and continue to grow, maybe you have at least a snowball in hell of a chance.