majestic

Yes. You can probably make that a yes for any third person action (adventure/rpg) game with soulslike in its description. Unless you're religiously opposed to gamepads I really recommend finding out whether you like the hand and finger breaking PS-style controllers or the proper ones, and picking one up you like. Some of them can be a bit pricey, but there's plenty of good ones that won't cost you an arm and a leg.

Yeah, sorry, for a moment I forgot who I am replying to. I'll just show myself out.

Not only did you reply in earnest to a bot spam post, you also somehow missed @Wormerine's link to the video literally called:

I wanted to play Still Wakes the Deep. Alas: It's close to midnight anyway, probably better to not try a horror game shortly before trying to sleep. Thanks Microsoft, I guess.

You guys really ought to watch homberguy's Fallout 3 video, if only to find out whether or not Tommy Tallarico made all the music and sounds for it.

If we stop being outraged by the things Trump says we let him shift what acceptable discourse is, and that is not a good idea. We can see that with the Austrian NSDAP offshoot, the FPÖ, where Herbert Kickl has been calling himself Volkskanzler for a year now. Their constant and unabashed Nazi-inspired discourse has pushed what is accaptable without outrage to the point where they can reuse Nazi terminology with nobody batting an eyelash.

Yes, Trump's mental state is mostly okay. Of course. He is a stable genius after all. The most brilliant mind of the century. Ah, what am I talking about, he's the greatest thinker of the modern age. That half of the US population thinks that this moron with the intelligence of a lobotomized chimpanzee represents and embodies them is a scathing indictment of the US education system.

There, I answered your question. Nevertheless, you are right, that was a disaster and the Democrats should nominate someone else, like, yesterday. What's Bernie doing these days?

Anyway, double post time. Just watched episode 5 of The Boys, season 4. Flying the sheep is the new jumping the shark.

*sigh*

Well, it reads The Acolyte - re:View, but it is a little like part one of the Star Wars Holiday Special re:View. They talk about everything else but The Acolyte. Well, almost. They talk about the show for 10 minutes or so. Speaking of The Acoltye, the show continues to be mostly uninteresting, flat and boring (and Qimir had better turn out to be the titular Acolyte, if he's really Mae's master then the entire creative team needs to be detained). Mike and Rich got it right, the show is pretty bland mostly because 90% of the characters are cardboard cutouts, and it would not change a bit even if all the actors were white heterosexual men. They also really have a point in critics being utterly unhelpful by giving all these shows and movies a pass or even praising them for nothing but being inclusive, even if they are complete garbage, something I've complained about for a while now. It is actively hurting their cause. The incels in the comments are pretty funny though, calling them paid Disney shills. Must have been a rough year for them, first they finally realize The Boys is satire and Homelander isn't a misunderstood hero but the villain, and then they have to watch Mike and Rich making fun of them.

The Goblet of Fire film was tonally different in many ways too, like the angry Dumbledore while book Dumbledore was always friendly and supportive. Not that I would have known, having experienced it the other way around, but he was noticably acting out of character with no explanation. Could have been the best, the basis was there. Whacky, fun characters, a school ball, visiting students from different schools. I don't know if some parts of the novels were written with a movie adaptation in mind, but what I recall having read is that Rowling specifically adapted some parts of the movies for her later books, like Alan Rickman's performance of Snape influencing how she wrote and imagined the character. The first movie came out after the Goblet of Fire book, and while negotiations for the rights to the books might have happened significantly earlier, dunno - well maybe Rowling thought she could get a movie adaptation after the runaway success of the Philosopher's Sorcerer's Stone, but that just complicates things unnecessarily. She's just not that good of a writer, and I suspect that, given the success of the books and films, her audience was not overly interested in class hijinks. What is somewhat noticable is that plot elements keep popping up without much prior notice. I have honestly no ideas how much of the overarching story she had in mind while writing the early entries, but given how the series just keeps coming up with elements that should have always been a part of the universe but just never came up before, it cannot have been a whole lot. If I would want to be especially snarky it was fairly obvious that she didn't even have an idea how to finish the first book, and Quill just defeated himself by touching Harry. Because love. Okay, that is probably something specific to watching the film/reading the book as an adult, but that's a major asspull that never sat right with me. Then there are the titular Deathly Hallows, retconning Harry's cloak and Dumbledore's wand into a group of three items that are only necessary so that Voldemort can inadvertently destroy the one Horcrux he did not intend to make without actually having Harry die in his final confrontation. Not that Chamber of Secrets is free of asspulls, there is enough setup to explain how Harry survives his poisoning, and that the Sword of Gryffindor is enchanted to help brave Gryffindors in times of dire need, but there's zero indication that the Sorting Hat can just act as dimensional portal. Whee, enough of that before Hurlshot says I'm overthinking a silly fun fantasy series with magic (which is probably not wrong), but Chamber of Secrets is a good example that if everything else is good enough, a little plot hole or deus ex machina does not hurt one's enjoyment. I was looking forward to reading The Order of the Phoenix because I expected it to explain the film and fill in gaps - what I got was a novel that I actively had to force myself through reading at times. It was easily the worst of the books, and inexplicably the one with the most pages, with a lot of them spent on going nowhere at all while Harry mopes around enough to get Gary Oldman killed. I guess I should really watch the film again after reading the book, it might really change my view of it.

Not different, just greatly expanded, including various forms of fun torture and mental conditioning. Probably should have said expanded tragic backstory. The scene itself is great because Homelander can just chew the scenery like @PK htiw klaw eriF said (supplemented by great performances and direction for everyone involved). There's a certain irony in that Homelander's upbringing was designed to implement a certain level of control over what they perceived to be a monster, only to create the monster they were afraid of in the process. Now don't get me wrong, it's a fine idea, but it really feels out of place in the fourth season. It is something that should have come up after Homelander just lets everyone on the plane die in the first season, and then use Becca and his son as the focal point of his spiralling out of Vought's control - which is something that worked well enough without the expanded backstory anyway. As it stands, it is a good scene in a really sloppy episode, and that's just the best way to describe episode four as a whole, and perhaps some elements that led up to it. Sloppy. The season suffers from a similar problem as Star Trek: Picard's first season. The authors wanted to make it salient to <current year issue> just a little bit too much. While everything about and with Firecracker (who is basically an amalgamation of RageAfterStorm and a variety of similar alt-right female YouTubers) is perfectly salient, it also introduces a new element that needs time and attention in a season that should primarily focus on wrapping the story up. It clearly takes away time the creative team would have needed to come up with more organic ways to move the plot where they want it to go.

The Boys, season four, episode four: We're On A Road To Nowhere (and going pretty hard!) The episode certainly was a banger, but not in the good way. The plot of the episode was a disjointed mess that looks like they let the creative team of Star Trek: Into Darkness write four episodes, film them without second takes and then edit them into one episode's worth of runtime. Things happen with no prior setup, a lot of things just happen off-screen that would have been much better if actually shown and characters make decisions because the plot demands it, not because they make sense, the worst of which was Butcher getting Frenchie to do something instead of doing it himself, which he had ample of time and opportunity to do while standing right next to the objective (before going back to Frenchie) because one of the plot points of the episode needs Frenchie to be hurt by a supe. So, uhm, yeah. There's also this wholly unnecessary attempt at giving Homelander a tragic backstory to explain why he's so messed up. It was still fun to watch if only for the performance of the cast, but it sure is beginning to drift into the territory where my suspension of disbelief is begining to come apart at the seams, not just having a few frayed edges (like, well, the ultimate problem the series had ever since the end of season one, i.e. why doesn't Homelander just kill everyone; for which there actually is an explanation attempt in this episode).

I was 16 when the first book was released here (a couple months after it became a beststelling novel in the UK). Being the counter-culture nerd that I was at the time, ignoring the books purely based on the hype around them was the proper thing to do. When the first film was made a couple of years after that, I ignored those too. Obviously. That puts me in the somewhat strange position of having watched the movies first, as an adult, but only after my brother bought the Blu Rays. As such, the first film was not overly interesting besides establishing the characters and some of the lore. Half the film is Harry being on this wide eyed adventure of discovery with which I have no special connection, and it relied heavily on Daniel Radcliffe looking in awe and wonder, which sadly is something he did not do very convincingly - although considering the performance of the other actors in the film, this impression is likely exacerbated by the contrast between Daniel Radcliffe and, well, almost everyone else. You know, expect for Rupert Grint, but he was a pretty good fit for the role he had to play in the film. That migh seem overly harsh, but if it weren't for the Order of the Phoenix and Deathly Hallows, it would probably be my least favorite film of the series. The Chamber of Secrets, though, is probably the one I liked best overall. Other films might have my favorite moments and performances (Brendan Gleeson and Helena Bonham Carter are just delightful), but they also all have shortcomings. Almost none of which are present in The Chamber of Secrets. Except for having the Wesley Crusher of Harry Potter: Dobby. Some of those shortcomings I attributed to the films skipping or glossing over scenes and information from the books and therefore not being as consistent as they should be, or as logically stringent in their plot progression. This is probably worst in The Order of the Phoenix, but also very problematic in the Deathly Hallows and The Half-Blood Prince, where there are entire scenes that make a viewer wonder what the point is, or why they should even care. Never mind that Half-Blood Prince ends on a revelation that falls so flat that I wondered what the point of the title was in the first place. A couple of years later I discovered that having Amazon Prime entitled me to a free ebook per month (sadly, a benefit to Prime that Amazon has discontinued since, without any prior notice), and the Harry Potter novels were on the list of available books, so I read those, one per month. Funny how it turned out that some of the things I like best about the later films are scenes made for those films, while all the shortcomings are still present in the books. I have read many a fantasy and horror novel way back when I was a more prolific reader than I am today - among them books from Stephen King, and his German counterpart Wolfgang Hohlbein, whose novels - at least those that I read, that is - tended to have a problem with their endings. They are either wholly unsatisfactory, or resolve the plot in such a rushed, glossed over way that it makes the books somewhat worse in retrospective. The worst of which, by far, was Anubis from Wolfgang Hohlbein. Three quarters of the novel is very intriguing and atmospheric, building up tension and the plot very slowly, only for it to just end without any actual resolution. The Order of the Phoenix was a disjointed mess and unnecessarily long for what little content it had (half of which was Harry moping over the death of a sparkly vampire), and The Deathly Hallows was like reading the worst part of a Stephen King novel, just sprawled out over eight hundred pages. Plot points and characters are introduced, resolved and/or discarded or glossed over at every turn, in a book that should just be there to tie up the story, and it looks like by that point Rowling's editor just signed off on everything she threw in there because who would argue with one of the most successful authors of her age. One could easily throw out half of the book without it becoming worse, and the films should really have, but instead Warner went "oh, good, TWO films to rake in oodles of cash, we approve!" edit: I am also pretty sure I wrote a post like this at least once already.

What a treasure trove of fun this article is. Really, a bank? A bank demands ethical behaviour from its employees? That has to be the joke of the century. Oh, wait, they mean towards the bank and their bottom lines and bonuses, not towards customers. People shelling out 10$ for mouse jiggling software is also hilarious, that is something you can just download a free Python script for. Speaking strictly from a very limited efficiency and personnel cost perspective, it makes perfect sense. If employees work only half their time and still get their jobs done, you can either assign more work to them, or fire half the staff. If someone underperforms, you can replace them with someone who does not. Never mind that in real life application and depending on the job done it is much more complicated (to cite an infamous example, like rating developers on written lines of code), but when has such minutiae ever stopped middle management and upwards from doing something dumb in the name of maximizing profits? Obviously this assumes we are not talking about piece-work, where, for better or worse (well, mostly worse for everyone involved), task completion can be readily measured, but for that one does really not need to keep track of mouse movements. In a banking environment, that would probably only apply to jobs that were replaced by automation twenty years ago, although, who knows. Back during my school days we had a simulated bank to work at, where most of my time was spent going through huge chunks of accounting orders on paper and posting money transfers in the bank system. Somehow I doubt that banks still employ Oompa Loompas like that, but who knows. Bank often still run on ancient COBOL software.

The hilarious coincidence of Maggie Smith being a school teacher in a film where a Miss Gaunt is also part of the cast made me wonder if you were talking about Harry Potter the entire time here, as I pretty much watched Harry Potter just for the performances of Maggie Smith and Alan Rickman.

Discovery Season 5, Episode 2: Under The Twin Moons No huge post this time around, the episode was surprisingly undumb (if somewhat uninspired), or maybe the season opener lobotomized me. Well, there was one dumb thing:

I was goaded into watching a video by The Critical Drinker while writing my posts about Star Trek: Picard. It took about five minutes of him making a semi-decent point about why it is bad until he came to the conclusion it is because diversity and because that woman admiral was allowed to yell at Picard. I stopped watching and had YouTube never recommend me a video of his again. Picard was bad for a myriad of reasons, that old, cantankerous admiral yelling at him certainly was not one of them. Gee, unfriendly and unsympathetic female admirals in Star Trek, what a novelty. Must be this woke crap.

All this talk about age appropriate literature reminded me of a "recent" post I made about an illustrated book I read when I was really little, so I went and looked it up. Turns out recent means five years and three months ago. It was originally written because the author bemoaned the lack of decent literature for children and was intended as a gift for his three-year-old. It contains the usual child favorites, really, like girls burning to a cinder, thumbs being cut off with giant scissors, a child starving to death and a kid who had nothing better to do than to go outside during a raging storm being blown away clinging to his umbrella, never to be seen again. I guess it is pretty positive. Only two of the kids die, one gets maimed by a dog, one maimed by a tailor and the one blown away by the storm could technically still be alive, although it seems somewhat unlikely. Why are we not allowing kids to read Asterix again?

The Boys Season 4: Satire Is Over So, the first three episodes are out, and one thing I took away from this is that, in the five years the season ran so far, the world has gone to hell in a handbasket in such a way that The Boys stopped being satire and is now just a pale reflection of actual events, just with superheroes. Still pretty entertaining, but then... I was one of the two people on the planet who thought season two was better than season three, so take my opinion with an unhealthy dose of sodium chloride.

No, that was Pool of Radiance: Ruins of Myth Drannor. While I did not like ToEE, it was never that bad. The only time my computer got infected was back in the ancient DOS times from a shareware collection on CD from a trade show I went to. That was in '93 or so. Well, techically untrue, I once installed a remote control tool with trojan capabilities to test it out. Should probably say the only unintentional infection with malicious software.

Ah, yes, performance leaks and performance expectations are wonderful things. AMD expected RDNA3 to outperform Ada Lovelace. The rumor mill expected a 40% IPC increase with Zen 5. Leaks said Intel is going to up the core count on the 14th gen i5s. Intel thought Meteor Lake would be able to outperform Raptor Lake. There were leaks once about how Battlemage was going to have 512MB of L2 cache. Karzak once expected that Temple of Elemental Evil is going to make people forget about Baldur's Gate 2. You can guess thrice which one of those turned out to be true.

Got a new credit card as the old one expires next month. Spent like half an hour updating various subscriptions and online shops. #firstworldproblems