Gormongous

I was skeptical to start, but I knew for sure that it was something great when Justin breaking made the mayor break.

My friend and I were playing through Batman: Arkham City at his place and we were forty-odd hours in. It was time to call it a night, so he went to make a manual save... but Arkham City doesn't have manual saves, so he just scrolled down to "delete." My jaw dropped and I said, "What are you doing," too quietly for him to hear or do anything about it. Apparently his brain was on autopilot from a different game and he didn't even realize it until I asked him again, louder this time, and he checked the load menu to confirm that, yes, he'd deleted all of his progress. He said, "Fuck this game anyway, I'd seen what I wanted to see," deleted it from the PS3, and bid me goodnight. Two weeks later, when I asked what he'd been playing, he said that he immediately reinstalled it and spent the entire weekend getting back to where we were... and then ended up hundred percent-ing the game. Apparently, losing all of his progress was exactly what he needed to let the game take over his life. Arkham City remains one of his favorite games, and he'll often ask me to double-check that he's saving his game and not deleting it when it comes time to save now.

I saw The Arrival and liked it a lot. I don't really have much to discuss, except to say that Denis Villeneuve continues to move from strength to strength and, if anyone has the juice to do a Blade Runner sequel/reboot that's not unmitigated dreck, it's him.

I mean, the reasons that Greenlight sucked were that it was hard to find and advocate for games, especially smaller games from relative unknowns. Removing the voting system and just making Steam a pay-to-play storefront is going to fix exactly zero things there. Steam needs active curation, executed by real people, or at least robust and thoroughly implemented tools to allow users to provide that curation to each other, but Valve is seemingly willing to move heaven and earth to vacate themselves of that responsibility.

It's a cool novella, especially in terms of using the shifting of tenses in a first-person narrative to make time feel more fluid, but I think the movie's going to end up stealing its thunder somewhat, invariably, just because the gradual revelation is so important to the novella's climax.

Yeah, Max Fun podcasts have more ad time in them than I like, particularly in terms of content-free network cross-promotion, but I can handle it and it's not remotely close to the worst among those that I listen to. I like My Favorite Murder still, but jeez if their podcast isn't now five minutes of ad read, twenty minutes of "housekeeping" and self-promotion, another hundred and fifty seconds of ad read, thirty minutes of the actual thing their podcast is about, and then another five minutes of ad read. I think about dropping it every time I listen. They also pre-record their ads and splice them into the conversation, which makes it much much worse.

I don't disagree, although I liked the film a lot more than you. I think it's a natural consequence of adapting a novella that uses the intimacy and identification with the narrator that happens in literature, but I don't know what I'd improve in my own version of it.

And then, if you ever bring Idle Thumbs back, you can call it Is It Idle Thumbs. IIIT.

Ugh, the tendency of color timing in the first decade of the twenty-first century to make everything the yellowed green of terminal monitors is genuinely frustrating for anyone with a shred of curiosity about the creator's original intent. There are so so many problems with the 2.0 release of Ghost in the Shell, the decision to replace the hand-drawn opening with already-obsolete CGI foremost among them, but redoing the warm amber tones of the original cut to match the greenish tone of the sequel movie (and the prevailing attitudes in the industry) in order to reinforce the sense of a "franchise" of GitS media is really unforgivable.

I think that certain "open world" games with more simulational ambitions tend to benefit from larger gameplay spaces, even if they tend to be empty. Although it's not how I enjoy the game, I know that a lot of people love Crusader Kings 2 because its relatively simplistic system of stat checks and event triggers is repeated across a huge map that allows for the impression of denser content. Kerbal seems to be the same, although I never got as deep into that.

To me, at least, the raptors look conspicuously washed out because it's one of the few CG scenes done in decent lighting (the Gallimimus herd and the final battle in the atrium are the other two, but both are fast-moving and that makes it less obvious). Also, with so many reflective surfaces, the direction has to work around the practicalities of technology and there are more than a few shots that seem framed primarily to save the CG workload. Like I said, it's an excellent scene in its staging and execution, it's just the low point of the movie's graphical splendor to me.

It does feel like three separate movies, all of which come off as longer than they should because Spielberg seems to have forgotten what pacing is and has a "kitchen sink" approach to his worldbuilding.

I think I agree that there could be something more subtle going on with Hammond, Patrick, but I enjoy Attenborough's grandfatherly performance so much that I'd miss him if he were more of the carnival barker and eccentric millionaire that he hints at being when he's not showing off his new amusement park with his grandchildren. As a casualty of Jurassic Park being the first blockbuster that got me hyped to see it, at the age of seven or eight, I don't think I can get enough distance to float an alternative properly. I feel like the raptor scene should be taught in film school, because it's a brilliantly staged and executed sequence, built around state-of-the-art CGI, and it's gone from the crowning moment of the movie's visual effects to its conspicuous low point. There's just no way to futureproof CGI except by only using it where necessary, I think.

Hammond is responsible for the disaster, regardless of his personality. There's no attempt to shirk that in the movie, which states outright that Hammond relied too much on Nedry because he wanted to get the park up and running as fast as possible. My problem with the novel version of Hammond is that he has as flat a character arc as possible because he's the personification of predatory greed that was everywhere in the eighties. His last thoughts in the novel are about covering up this disaster and starting over again, before he's summarily killed, in order to show that these kinds of people never learn. Having a kindly entrepreneur may be more family-friendly (and more self-aggrandizing to Spielberg) but I still think it improves on the novel. Also, I don't think "effective" and "successful" are referencing the same things? Financial success and viewership numbers are only one rubric of a movie's quality, and the bluntest one at that.

I mean, I read the book relatively recently and, in it, Hammond is a miserable, money-grubbing industrialist. The presentation of the park as the brainchild of someone who's just out to fuck over all the dummies out there and take their money would be vastly less effective as the setting for a disaster movie than a charming, well-intentioned grandfather who just wants to make people happy and, for some reason, thought that massive bloodthirsty creatures were the way to do it. Now, if you want to debate the problems introduced by Grant's arc as a surrogate parent, there's more room for that, certainly.

Excellent! I'm sure we can count on you for a clever omnibus title, too.

Even with its shoestring budget and odd choices for casting, the Syfy Channel's six-episode miniseries is still the best adaptation of Dune by leaps and bounds! Villeneuve seems like a real fan, though, and the weirdness of stuff like Enemy makes me hopeful that he can do the same with Herbert's world. It really depends on the script and the casting.

It makes so much sense, and yet... and yet... Actually, I wouldn't put it past Disney to hold off on releasing a "classic" edition of the original trilogy because they don't want to confuse customers about what the "real/true/right/correct" Star Wars is.

I'm hoping for Surprise 2: Donkey Cock Country.

I resisted getting a lot of anime on Blu-ray for many years because there was a period of time between the spread of digital masters in the late 1990s and the popularization of high-def standards in the mid-2000s where the vast majority of anime were animated at a maximum resolution of 480p, meaning that any high-def releases were going to be upscaled from low-def sources. It took a long time for Western distributors, especially FUNimation, to do more than pile on DVNR to get rid of "texture" in the fills, add edge enhancement to make the lines "cleaner," and crop the edges of the frame to "fix" gate weave. Even today, it's usually more comforting when word gets out that an upscaled master from the original Japanese studio is being used, rather than an in-house upscale done stateside. That's why the Serial Experiments Lain and Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya Blu-rays look amazing, while Dragon Ball Z, Lucky Star, and Claymore look terrible (although it's not an ironclad rule, considering that the FLCL remaster was done by GAINAX and is worse than anything FUNimation has done short of the infamous Samurai Champloo upscale). It feels ridiculous that we're a decade into widely available high-def media and it's still a crapshoot if you're going to pick up a Blu-ray where everyone looks like wax dolls with no definition. Not to drop a TV Tropes link here, but their "Digital Destruction" article is a good chronicle of some mistakes that have been made.

I'm watching a bunch of shows that are currently airing again, although I don't really have much to say about them right now. Kuzu no Honkai is angling to be the best of the bunch, but it's very dark and emotional even just three episodes in, so it's hard to recommend. In terms of older series, I've had a run of good luck the past couple months. I watched Nadia and the Secret of Blue Water, an anime from 1991 that was the first full-length series Anno Hideaki directed. I'd been meaning to watch it for years and kept putting it off because an anime inspired by the works of Jules Verne seemed boring to me. Man, I was wrong. There is so much wonder and joy in every episode, especially in the two young leads Jean and Nadia. Anno and GAINAX really captured the feeling of a new age of discovery wherein anything could turn out to be possible. Jean's inventions, Nadia's past, Nemo and the Nautilus, and the threat of the Neo-Atlanteans are all tailored perfectly to feed into that feeling. At the same time, it's also balanced by a certain pessimism, the idea that great things were achieved in the past and nothing good came of it, and that's why, even though this anime has Miyazaki's fingerprints all over it, I'm glad that Anno directed Nadia. His personal beliefs about technology being the intersection between hope and despair work well with the themes of the anime, as does his love for the operational details of weapons and other machines. Also, the OP and ED have the clean and full emotion that I expected from his other works, from Gunbuster and Neon Genesis Evangelion to His & Her Circumstances. Seriously, for all of their simplicity, are these not totally charming? Of course, the problem with Nadia is that it's a two-cour anime that was forced to take a third cour because of how successful it was. It's said that Anno, who hated working on the project, had his infamous breakdown around episode 22 when he got the news, and it shows that the storyboard artist Higuchi Shinji had to take over as director there. The remaining episodes (which the internet terms the "Island" and "Africa" episodes) are not only boring but roll back the characters' growth to buy more time in the story. Jean becomes a dope, Nadia becomes a harpy, etc. Then the ending rushes in out of nowhere and, without the nostalgic pitch of the epilogue, I'd feel hard done by the anime. Still, I didn't, and overall Nadia is interesting and beautiful on its own, as well as a great primer on Anno's budding interests in classic sci-fi from the seventies, be it Space Battleship Yamato or the British TV series UFO, and in "hidden histories" like Gnosticism and the Kabbalah. Then I watched Barakamon, which was a very healing anime about which I don't have too much to say. It captured the feeling of being a success in life but not knowing how that success was reached? I liked it, it was just what I needed. After the New Year, I watched Taisho Baseball Girls, which was about some mid-1920s schoolgirls forming a baseball team against the wishes of authorities and society in order to prove that women could compete on the same level as men. For an anime that bases most of its appeal on its period trappings, it has a lot of anachronisms and modern tropes, but it was still a fairly good time. I'm not usually big on J.C. Staff productions, they seem like a studio to which you license your property if you want the anime to look good but not have any signature style, but they pulled it off here, at least. And finally, most recently, I finished NieA_7. This anime is an odd one, from the same team that made Serial Experiments Lain, and in terms of audio and visual direction they're almost identical. The only difference is that NieA_7 is a comedy, albeit a black comedy, about mental illness, isolation, and codependency. It stars Mayu, a hardworking student who's possibly drowning under the weight of her depression, and NieA, an unemployed alien who lives with Mayu and mooches off of her. They live in a struggling bathhouse in the poorer part of town, next to the slums where the aliens live, and most of the episodes just focus on daily life. The word is that the team made this to "cool off" after the intensity of Lain, and that boggles my mind. Mayu is crushingly poor and, despite being successful in school, is probably going to drop out eventually because of that. She tries to keep her depression under control, but having to look after NieA, who presents as severely schizophrenic, makes that impossible. She's lonely because the people around her exhaust her, but she can't be rid of them, else she'll be even more alone. It's a miserable show, but also gorgeous and full of a longing that is really unique in media. It puts me in mind of Yamada in Honey & Clover or Rei in March Comes in Like a Lion, but without the promise of healing that those characters have. It's just someone surviving, but rendered with such verisimilitude. I wish the ending were stronger, because it doesn't really follow through with the themes that I described above, but I'm still glad that I watched it. You should, too. Now I'm watching Eureka Seven, a dumb anime about surfing robots that occasionally expresses a desire to be a smart anime about war crimes, alien life, and finding oneself. I'm thirty episodes into its fifty-one episode run and it hasn't managed to shed the former identity for the latter, but it has given me one of my favorite anime couples: Charles and Ray Beams! Look at the late-era disco style of these two mercenaries. Okay, I'm done.

Which is a shame, because Justin's a strong storyteller in his writing and is, in their other shows, often the most inventive of the brothers. The reasons that he typically gives, mostly that he couldn't hope to come up with something as creative and unique as Griffin, make me sad. I wouldn't mind a D&D campaign with a fuckin' castle and dragon, it doesn't all have to be medieval Men in Black from the moon!

I've always been curious what would happen if one of the players in The Adventure Zone just said no, especially when Griffin is obviously setting up a trap for them, but I think they're all too experienced as entertainers and comedians to snuff out someone's bit like that. Also, Griffin's used instantaneous incurable poison, surprise 20+ stats during opposed skill checks, and immune-to-everything baddies to railroad them before, so I'm not convinced that he wouldn't just make them do it anyway. I am also curious about this. I tried hard with the first season, because I love Austin's DMing, but some of the players were bleh and other players talked to much and/or were hard to listen to, so I gave up after four or five episodes.

Also, it's not strictly accurate that the Thumbs have never released the evidence of a ruined or restarted podcast before. After all, we have this masterpiece: https://www.idlethumbs.net/idlethumbs/episodes/surprise