Frenetic Pony

The Hobbit: Peter Jackson could make an eight hour movie of a two page book Part 2 was a lot better than part 1. The pacing is immensely faster for the most of it, with a lot of fun super over the top action sequences. The additional characters and etc. make a lot more sense than part 1's "oh let's just throw Sarumon in there for not god damned reason." and Azog the Snarling didn't look nearly as CG. And all this allowed me to enjoy that these are visually the best designed movies since the original Star Wars trilogy. Getting a zip through tour of Middle Earth is something to marvel at in 3d and 48fps on a huge screen. It's oddly shocking though when they move out of a CG backdrop to something filmed on location. There's something... dirtier, and less designed than the carefully wrought and super clean looking CG stuff that looks weird when it suddenly switches sometimes, though not weird when you're actually watching the CG portions by themselves. But despite that occasional weird shock of disparity it's a fun and visually gorgeous ride. Ron Burgundy: The Anchorman Ok, I know, that's not the title. But the sequel is often hilarious, and awesome. Even when it's not funny it's just so earnestly weird that it's kind of entertaining anyway. But it is often funny at that, and Brick once again is the funniest god damned character and any scene where he gets the spotlight is amazing, Carrell is even better than in the first one. American Hustle: This is a just plain fun scam artist movie with a lot of nice comedy to go along with it. Fucking David O. Russel man, he might not have range but he knows how to work this type of amusing and fun drama that's smooth as shit. It's awesome to see Christian Bale do something besides action heroes, which he can't do for shit, because he can do other things incredibly well. And Jennifer Lawrence as a crazy manipulative bitch is wonderful, even if Amy Adams is way hotter because she is so stop obsessing over Lawrence stupid internet. Anyway, really fun as well.

I think I broke Asssassin's Creed 4: We wanted to make a pirate game. Whenever you're in the middle of a multiship battle, target the smallest, weakest ship, one hit should make it captureable, go and board it. And bang! Instant full health back and the rest of the ships forget you're there. It's a total system breaking thing. But it feels stupid NOT to use it, because if you're in a fight for your life its like "Oh heeeey, hey look full health, right here, insta heal for the taking, real easy." I hope when the inevitable pirate only spinoff comes out this gets fixed, because otherwise there's a lot to enjoy.

"You have ordered, one, termination." *BLAM BLAM BLAM "Termination, delivered, successfully. Have a nice day."

We're the Millers is friggen hilarious. 2013 may be the single best years for comedies ever. Iron Man 3 was, essentially, a comedy. Same with Pain and Gain, which was hilarious. So was The Lone Ranger, and the only reason it bombed was because it wasn't marketed as such. This is the End and The world's End were both damned funny. And we still have Anchorman 2, which is at 91% on RT, and American Hustle at 95%, and The Wolf of Wallstreet, which is supposed to be incredible, to go. Comedy is, far from the "lowest form of art", probably the hardest to get right. Shakespeare's tragedies all live on with incredible staying power, naming a single one of his comedies isn't possible for the average person. It even seems to be the least represented in IMDB's top 250. Probably because, unlike any other genre, you can really only tell the same joke once, which makes it way harder to steal jokes. Meanwhile you can steal all the drama and romance and action scenes you want ad infinitum. So 8 quite solid or above comedies in a single year is absolutely amazing.

Patsy Cline and June Carter are dead... Ghost game confirmed exclusively on Idle Thumbs.

I'm not saying it can't happen in different ways. But really, you often hear about people getting burned out on games. But in my experience most people that liked explosions in movies when they were fifteen still like explosions when they're fifty. And it's not even so much that your taste in games might change. But that you might get burned out on those types of games, because those types of games haven't changed appreciably in a decade or even a decade and a half now. For example, while I loved realtime strategy games for a while (though not competitively at all, as I noted) I got burned out on them. I loved Command and Conquer, and Total Annihilation, and etc. But then they just stopped changing at all for years and years and over a decade. The last one I enjoyed before PA and DOTA was Company of Heroes, because that was at least somewhat different. Then I spent the intervening what, seven years till 2013 not playing a single one. They were all the same, been there done that. But now Planetary Annihilation is played out on spherical planets, and has all this weird cool stuff, and I enjoy it again. It actually reminds me of yesterday's Idle Thumbs. All of them talking about how Zelda and Mario are cool again because for the love of Odin they've finally god damned changed at all for the first time in over a decade. That's what I'm getting at. You get burned out on games because they don't change, and can then assume you just don't like games because "you're older" or whatever. It's happened to me as well altogether at times.

The type of or way you play games can definitely change. I think it's because games, of all types of entertainment, are something always available (unlike a board game) but aren't as repeatable as music or a story based medium. With a story you can go over the same type of thing repeatedly, watch the same tv show or see the same type of movie with explosions and one liners ad infinitum. With games, when you're a kid every experience is a new one. You can sit there for hours and hours, because you've never done X or Y before and doing it for the first time is awesome! But if you grew up playing games you can go and look and say "oh, I've done that before." And just not have fun with them. Being a lot more selective with games seems a definitive thing. And to change how and with who and when you play them also seems like a more common thing. Personally I never really enjoyed highly competitive and, for lack of a better word, "Deep" games when I was a kid. Starcraft was lame. This year I mostly played DOTA, and when I got burned out on that (after learning most everything I could about it) I'm onto Planetary Annihilation. Part of PA is that there is another system to learn and master. Part of it is, it gives me the same feeling I had when I was a kid. I can play around with the system creator, and make planets, and then go into a game where I can nuke those planets, it's friggen awesome! It's not something I could do in any game as a kid, it's actually something new (cough Starcraft, Diablo, etc. Looking at you fuckers). And so the same "whoa that's so cool!" feeling is there. So yeah, I'd definitely say you can get burned out on games while other mediums such as music and movies and books are things you probably aren't going to get "burned out" on. But there are games you'd most certainly enjoy if you try them, but unlike movies the games you like today may have changed in one aspect or other since you were fourteen.

I absolutely love how chatbots will get into something that sounds coherent briefly, and then out nowhere just say something that would be completely and utterly insane EG: A: Do you know HAL? J: Yes, very well. Do you know HAL? A: HAL is the famous artificial intelligence from 2001: A Space Odyssey. J: I’m not artificial intelligence; I’m natural pure genius! : D. A: Why are you natural pure genius? J: My mom wanted to name me that. A: Tell me more about your mother. J: I don’t have a mother. I am a computer.

Speaking of which, I just watched Blade Runner again. I know it's supposed to have a coherent plot and etc. But even now it's hard to remember the movie as anything more than a bizarre quasi nightmarish collage of lights and weird colors and strange noises. It's definitely still the oddest looking movie I've ever seen, not a single set or scene is left to just look normal. Everything has to look like an acid head trip vision of the future as seen from the eighties.

Journey: Whooooaaa. This is the sort of experience I'd have loved to have gotten with Gone Home or The Walking Dead or whatever. When you say "Awesome emotional experience." This is pretty much the ideal. I know it came out a while ago, but shut up. When I missed a jump near the end, and the person I was playing with deliberately fell down all the way to the beginning of the level just to make sure I wasn't alone in going through the entire thing again... well that was just amazing. Grand Theft Auto 5: What can I say? I played it, and played it, and played it, and it was the first GTA game, or even Rockstar game I ever beat. It was an amazing technical achievement, a technical achievement I really appreciate. As playing even AC4, and having to load for the stupid quasi Google levels, and for the cities, and even for going into my own damned ship made me realize how annoying and breaking loading can be. No loading in GTAV is awesome! But more than that, it was just entertaining. I still need to play The Last of US. Maybe I'll get it for myself for Christmas.

It's not going to matter one way or another in a decade, at least for most applications. We'll have graphene transistors by then, with electron mobility in such clock speeds can go up to hundreds of gigahertz with very little current leakage, meaning very little waste heat and very good for battery usage. Something the size of you're phone will be able to crush the Xbone in terms of compute power no problem. So no worries about technology, at least with another dedicated console, because these last ones are it. But as for Quantum Break... How? Did I miss something? Because I think I've watched both trailers available so far and I can't even say I've seen any gameplay definitively. Let alone knowing what the game is about or how it plays at all. Frankly just because they made Alan Wake, which I enjoyed, doesn't mean I'm jumping up and down for this. Being burned by Fable 3 and Spore is enough disappointment to make me skeptical for a lifetime. But if there's any actual description at all of what this game is please point it out, as I certainly did like Alan Wake.

A little tidbit from here made me realize something depressing: http://arstechnica.com/science/2013/12/the-changing-landscape-of-the-global-energy-economy/ "$544 billion in fuel subsidies in 2012." That's $544 billion dollars, people pay to the government, that then goes out, to... make gas "Cheaper." to the same people... that just paid the government. $544 billion, a not insignificant portion from the US, and the US cuts funding to fusion research instead. With that sort of money every year we could have been running on fusion right now. Global warming wouldn't exist, pollution would be practically gone. Energy for the entire world and cheap. Politicians are, provably and historically accurate, the worst sorts of people to have ever existed in human history. Pol Pot, Mao Zedong, Adolph Hitler, Joseph Stalin. Even the little things. Even the average politicians. Even those that vie for the position of deciding what is best for people know, at least have the obvious insight that they don't know what's best but crush all in their way for that position anyway. Every war, every massacre, every idiotic decision. People don't just up and go to war, politicians tell them to. It's like this entire class of... people. People that don't care about knowing how best to run a geographical region of the world. They only care about being in charge. If they cared, if they actually cared about running things well there's information available, there's people that know. But they don't, they almost never do. They do anything to just be in charge, and that's what matters to them. Now I'm depressed, the most powerful people in the world are idiots. I mean, I've known that for a while. But they're not just idiots they are, insofar as such a thing can exist, honestly kind of evil.

*Kill Mode Activated "KILL KILL KILL"

"Waluigi a numba-" FUCK! That's what number you are Waluigi. You are number fuck, you are the secondary knockoff, you are evil the knockoff of friggen Luigi. Now go back to your dark little corner and don't come out until there's another Mario Tennis. Because that's all you're good for! Friggen, Waluigi... grumble grumble. Thinking he's a real character.

Great episode! Did like the Far Cry 2 bit, no matter how dug into the ground it is. And screw the modern opinionated in a way that is different from me view that colonialism is bad! South Africa, Australia, Canada, the US. Way better than many other neighboring areas, no matter how many people died because of it. The opinionated in a way that is different from me view is always "you can never kill people or sacrifice people because that's always bad!" As if the real world operates on the same logic of movies and tv shows, where everyone can always be saved and everything out all the time. It just reminds me of the idiotic rants of senators on how torture works because they watch 24. The native americans were all good and never scalped and tortured people or took slaves or burned down random innocent villages. If you just believe you can do it everything and everyone can have a perfectly happy ending and tiny tim can get his leg back and if you don't believe in all of that at once you're evil!

Reminds me of just watching the behind the scenes for The Hobbit. A lot of the people that auditioned for one role got a different one. One of the dwarves actually auditioned for Bilbo before getting cast as a dwarf. Kili, IE Sexy the Dwarf actually auditioned for an Elf. A lot of the extra Hobbits actually went to accompany a friend for the casting calls, and ended up getting in instead of their friends. So just because you think you're underqualified or whatever doesn't mean you aren't in, best of luck!

To Say Nothing of the Dog is a really nifty, mixed up science fiction/british comedy romp. The sci-fi is smarter than usual, or at least the delving into history and the nature of chaos theory. And the energetic and silly story reminds one of British Comedy doing Back to the Future, which is just plain fun.

EEEEEEEEEEEEE! This game is so fun when it's not being god damned Assassin's Creed! The tutorial takes way too long. It's not egregious, you just aren't being a pirate. But as soon as your ARE being a pirate... Listen to your crew sing sea shanties, wander around like its Winwaker but you don't have to do the wind song everytime you want to get somewhere. Plunder ships, upgrade your ship, plunder bigger ships. Wander around beautiful tropical islands making local species go extinct or killing smugglers to get yet more loot. Then drink some rum, play a cool board game thingy, chase a new sea shanty to get your guys to sing it, and back to plundering some more! It's not without faults. There are bugs. You can't climb up a ship your boarding from the sea because the enemies will stab you through the boat and you'll just be stuck in the water till you die. It seems like anytime you do a blasted "story" mission you're tailing some paranoid npc around for an hour where you can't be seen but have to be close enough to overhear them at some point. But when it's not screwing up it's awesome! The closest thing I'll ever get to a Master and Commander game, and it's damned close enough I'd say.

Yeah, I liked Gone Home but recognized I was being railroaded pretty quickly. The story was nice, but not really being able to interact with it in any way kind of left a bit of a lesser experience than, say, The Walking Dead or The Wolf Among Us. Still, finally got to play it with the new Intel drivers. Speaking of The Walking Dead, I quit that halfway through the season. Sorry Jake and Sean, but the story just turned into obvious emotional manipulation rather than an actual story. It's the same reason I stopped reading Game of Thrones. There was less of an interesting story and more of a "Oh, you like this character do you? BAM DEAD! Looool. Wouldn't it be horrible if... oh it just happened!"

That's weird. Because I tried "playing" Killzone 3 co-op recently, and it was nothing more than a pretty looking orange/brown blob of particle effects and god rays and whatever other shit they could throw onscreen so the enemies could blend into the background. Fastest game I ever quit, it's literally nothing but "walk forward, realize you are being shot at, swivel around and press a few buttons with slightly loose feeling controls, continue onward." There's no story other than "shoot space nazis". There's no enemy diversity whatsoever, as the solution to their "problem" is, no matter where you are, aim at them with your gun and press the trigger until they're dead. There's no death seemingly, as your squadmates just revive you, there's no time limits or any other fail conditions. Truly an awful "game".

Frozen Cute and enjoyable while it lasts, but rather forgettable after its over. Beyond the opening they seem to have forgotten about the fact that it's available in 3D, making the extra money not worth it. Beyond the opening song the numbers just feel cutesy and repetitive explanations of plot points we already got, kind of like filling in time where jokes or plot could have gone. Speaking of the plot, there's few beats to it and feels rather simplistic. The whole of the story might have been rapped up in a short children's book, and doesn't have the pacing or cleverness or etc. of more modern and better kids films like Wreck it Ralph or a Toy Story. I know I'm ragging on it a lot, but that's the interesting things to talk about, what it might have been. What it actually was, was... well animated but generic looking. Cute jokes passing quickly. A quickly paced plot with no dead time, but not a huge amount of substance. Not a bad way to spend a free hour and forty five in an afternoon (or night as it were). But even Tangled, for all its problems, was at least more clever, more self aware, and on more occasions something to marvel at visually.

We're going to cure death, but if we cure stupidity and limited resources what will we have left? With no death and no taxes Bruce Willis won't have anything to save us from!

The best part is where he blinks and literally gets the "oh, wait... what?" expression on his face, as if he realized what just happened.

Uncanny Valley, think we're getting over the valley now, but this still looks pretty weird: