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I somehow got roped into watching Discovery with my dad. Maybe I'm just built different, but I don't think it's outright horrible like Top Gun: Maverick or VillenDune. For me it's more like the Marvel movies, exceedingly generic CW-tiwr SciFi that nostalgia bait and uses kewl imagery to sucking you into sitting through hollow technobabble nonsense. It's like if they set the most forgettable episodes of any of the old Trek shows in the middle of the Dominon War. It leaves me feeling nothing at all, neither hatred nor the sense of wonder that I got watching the best of TOS/TNG/DS9. Do not reccomend, will probably continue watching because my Dad has very questionable taste (he loves The Phantom Menace because of the pod racing, I am not joking). Perhaps the one thing I found interesting, Klingon supremacist cult fearing assimilation, gets quickly squandered to make the Klingons classic baddies who don't really believe in anything but power. The redesign also looks awful.

"Don't look at me. I'm beautifuuuul. I'm beautifuuuuuuul." and Louis XIII doing a drag performance has been seared into my mind since I saw the film. I think that what makes it work so well for me is how I went in expecting somethings like the Excorcist but moar lewd and instead got a substantially better version of The Crucible. Frankly what I found disturbing wasn't the nun orgy but just how relevant a 50 year old film about events 4 centuries ago feels. Maybe I'm just too brain damaged by Evangelion. I think it's a really solid horror that manages to straddle the line between being too much of a joke to taking itself so seriously it disappears up it's own ass.

Well that's what I get for making a joke without knowing Florida law.

I guess felons are gonna get the right to vote in Florida.

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The ICC clearly only has legitimate jurisdiction over Africa and Russia.

I Saw The TV Glow (2024) The film legit made me depressed. A neon draped nightmare of nostalgia that detonates a tactical nuke to the feels. It's perhaps one of the scariest horror films in terms of actually being frightening for the viewer. Could not reccomend more. Showgirls (1995) Kyle MacLaughlin's unsettling chin strikes again. It's obsessively horny, glamorous in a gaudy way, and more than a little excessive, just like the myth Vegas has built for itself. Perhaps it's because I'm viewing it almost 30 years later, but the film really feels like it was ahead of it's time in some ways.

We're All Going To The World's Fair (2021) A brilliant exposition of isolation and loneliness in the always online world. It's very disturbing and low-key, and doesn't commit the cardinal KP movie sin of explaining itself in a way that feels unnatural/solely for the benefit of the audience. You pick up enough from each character to know who they are while still not really knowing who they are, which is very fitting given that it is a film about online engagement. Highly reccomend, can't wait to see the director's next film tonight. There's just a hollowness to his films that all the spectacle in the world can't compensate for. I don't think he can understand the human element(s) of storytelling to make a film that is compelling

In this case it's definitely my fault for going against my instincts and watching it. Dissecting the movie more in my head, the thing that really stands out to me is Florence Pugh's horrible last line in the film, which sounds like she was rushing through a line read at 2am instead of being on a set with a dozen incredible actors. When I say this I'm not just angry about how that French-Canadian fool squandered the Midsommar star's talent to have her stand around in weird costumes delivering plot exposition, I mean that with the cast of actors that are all capable of incredible performances he managed to get for the movie he wanted to make since he was a child....he didn't get a memorable performance out of any of them. Not a one. How do you get Christopher Walken out of retirement and sequester him to making grumpy faces while wearing a dress? Villeneuve with his hatred of dialogue and inability to understand humanity should just make videogame cutscenes or something.

Dune: Part Two (2024) I was told to give it a chance so I did. As many of you know, @Bartimaeus and I have hated on Villeneuve a lot, frankly this film confirms it. Dune: Part Two has a stellar cast and it absolutely disrespects them. Florence Pugh is one of the greatest actresses of her generation and she is absolutely squandered here, relegated to wearing weird aesthetic outfits and delivering one of the most wooden lines I have ever heard. And it is constantly like this, all of that talent is wasted on horse**** lines or set pieces against barren fake scifi sets. Perhaps the closest the film gets to real acting is through Dave Bautista, whose background in wrestling primes him to be able to act without using the dialogue Villeneuve so despises, in the scenes where he is afraid or humiliated. Everything else is just ****ing bland as hell, if it wasn't for the lack of melted faces or unnatural numbers of fingers I could believe this film was completely AI generated. The cinematography feels like it just shot concept art. None of this **** feels like anyone actually lives here, none of it. Villeneuve's precision and set building captured nothing, even the closest "real world" shots of the desert feel much more like they dumped 9000 tons of sand into a studio lot, it doesn't feel like a desert with actual creatures that live in it. And to get a bit....woke, as some would say, Villeneuve ripped out the Arabic influences and attempted to sew it back together without filling in the gaping holes. This film actively attempts to de-Arabize the Fremen into generic sci-fi future humanity, grinding off the serial numbers so to speak. Perhaps it's political, given that a film about obivously arab stand-in desert people fighting comically cruel invaders occupying their home would not be a politically popular among the ruling class for entirety the 21st century, but substantially less so in 2024. Whatever the case may be, it is a cowardly move that makes me feel like I'm being insulted. This movie is a soulless piece of **** and I feel like I need to cleanse by watching a good film. So I'm going to buy tickets for I Saw The TV Glow (2024) and see it tonight or tomorrow, hell I'll probably watch the director's previous feature We're All Going To The World's Fair (2021) to boot, because that movie is ****ing great.

Jojo's Bizarre Adventure: Stardust Crusaders

https://steamcommunity.com/games/1184370/announcements/detail/4170974735557630184?snr=2___ Looks pretty Owlbrew Ranger - Sable Company Marine - potentially gets a superpet. Magus - Bladebound - looks like they also get a pet, in the form of an animated weapon. Warpriest - Mantis Zealot - Cult Leader alternative with locked diety, fighting style, and weapon type. Kineticist- Kinetic Sharpshooter - looks like it uses bows to shoot blasts or something. Arcanist- Magic Deceiver- Much more limited slots but gets to make custom spells. Probably a cluster****. All things considered, I think the SCM and Bladebound show some promise depending on pet implementation while Mantis Zealot is going to be reliant on Sawtooth Sabers in game being good. I'm not optimistic about the Magic Deceiver and Kinetic Sharpshooter seems redundant for a class that is already ranged focused.

So first of all, "ANOTHER WAVE" is seared into my brain from DA2 and I think the combat in that game is some of the worst I've played, if not THE worst. While both Owlfinders have some serious issues with their combat, they are nowhere near that level of unpleasant. Secondly, I am a very weird guy who likes both incomprehensible high brow and nostalgia-bait low brow, so I've got no room to **** on anyone's preferences. I've put in a lot of time to WotR so clearly they did something right, and here I am still planning on doing a whopping six runs of WotR after the last DLC drops. But for me at least, the way Larian both had consistently solid combat encounters and engaging non-combat gameplay really knocked down WotR, because WotR is almost exclusively combat focused and still doesn't particularly well.

Yeah, it's bizarre that quantity itself is measured as a positive without any analysis of what that quantity is. If a 100+ hour game feels like a chore half the time then I'd think the length would be a negative. The character sheets are basic, but I think that what makes a game isn't necessarily how complex the mechanics are but what it does with them. There's more than a few encounters in BG3 that make very good uses of the game mechanics to make you play tactically in a way the Owlfinder games just don't....and that's without factoring in how BG3 is 3-dimensional with the ability to fly or jump or push enemies off cliffs that add an absolute ton of options to gameplay. While Owlfinder certainly has more individual combat options than BG3, BG3 still feels like there are more useful options to take than in Owlfinder.

Houston got ravaged by a storm and my parents electricity went out, so I've spent the last 24 hours scrambling to set them up somewhere with electricity to run my dad's oxygen concentrators. So far everything has settled, but I'm damn tired.

That's all true, but even if Harpies were reused several times I still think that fight would stand out favorably. It provides an alternative (optional) objective of protecting the tiefling kid, makes good use of terrain to show what a danger flying enemies can be, and even provides a powerful use of the Silence spell if you've got it prepped. It's honest to god one of the best low-level encounters I've seen in a RPG. Oh no doubt that any straight comparison of BG3 and WotR is flawed, as it had 50x the budget and 2-3x the development time to bake. But all the same I can't help but think that for a game that is incredibly combat focused as WotR is that it just doesn't do it particularly well, I can't really think of too many battles I found challenging tactically in either Owlfinder so much as I found myself managing a spreadsheet of buffs. I agree with the idea that WotR would be significantly better with cutting down combat by half, but I don't know if Owlcat can really deliver on consistently interesting encounters to even make the remaining half worthwhile. I wouldn't be surprised if it is, as you said there's a sort of stigma to shorter/smaller games and an unearned prestige to larger games. Certainly being able to put out a beeg epic game and then 3 or so pieces of DLC every 2-3 years seems to be going well for Owlcat. Uhhh, man I spent 5 minutes googling and it's been almost a decade since the last Dragon Age. No idea what the **** is going on over there, but I have very little confidence in it being good.

Razmirin Darkness confirmed. When I think about the encounters that really stick out for me it's how silly some of the bosses are kitted out and how I defeated them with spreadsheets and cheese rather than tactical challenges. After that it's getting killed by a mob whose archers gun down the back line and make me reload or red, and finally it's the small number of encounters that made me think and play tactically... which seems to go away when the party gets more spreadsheet stuff and cheesey strats. I think BG3 really knocked WotR on it's ass for me, because the Harpy fight alone is more interesting than the vast majority of non-random fights in WotR and too boot does a substantially better job at non-combat gameplay.

Josuke's hair made him too powerful for this clip.

I wonder what iteration of Playful Darkness will show up to **** up the party?

I have no regrets over my novelization of Obsidian Forum Adventures: The Wrath of SonicMage117

Well it certainly isn't going to be worse than pedohorse grooming a preteen but....yeah I can believe it's the least bad. If only because it's shorter and the production values of the series looked like cat **** eaten by Bruno and puked up. I guess it's a miracle that the 90's show is what it is. That song is great but incredibly misplaced. Imagine hearing "put your glasses on and nothing will be wrong" during the ****ing Eclipse.

It's wild how so many politicians, pundits, police, officials, and other overpaid dip****s think that this is going to be the time that sending in the police to terrorize students is being on the right side of history. This is at least the fifth time as farce right? Here in Texas Abbot's personal army, the DPS, has been behind a lot of violence towards the campus at UT Austin. This is the same agency that played on their phones while children got gunned down in Uvalde by the way. Kinda hard to believe some college students camping is a bigger threat than a guy shooting kids, but I guess I don't have the galaxy brain for politics.

Sounds like a trainwreck that got over 9000 kilos of liquefied **** dumped on it before being lit on fire. Uhhhh, man I'm struggling to say anything about this because it well and truly looks like a very bad time. Like you go from bad music to borderline pedophile stuff to bad cgi in loops until mercifully the credits roll and when you think you're finally through you get a post-credits scene of Tuxedo Kamen impregnating his teenage bride which is grounds to have everyone involved in making this get ora'ed or muda'ed. What the actual ****? If this was a dark seinen or josei like Madoka or Narutaru maybe that'd work, despite the dubious quality, but this is just damn creepy to see done unironically.