Patrick R

My toolbar looks like this. At some point it looked like this: I asked around the Slack and it seems like some people see the former, some see the latter. The former is pretty incomprehensible (the smiley face is italics, the landscape photo is strikethrough). As far as I can tell, I first saw this last night. Any idea what would cause this?

His name is Mario. His brother's name is Luigi. I think it was whenever those names were revealed.

I would say that The King of Comedy skirts on the edge of not being a comedy at all the way Curb never does. The tones are very different, what they share is that socially awkward situations (which, in The King of Comedy, turns directly into extreme anti-social behaviors) that are mined for maximum tension. But it's easy to imagine someone loving The King of Comedy while not finding it funny at all, while it's impossible to imagine the same with Curb.

I was thinking about maybe trying to borrow a Wii from someone on the forums, and paying for shipping, but that seems like too much to ask. Seems like Wiis alone are still in the 50-80 dollar range on eBay, which is a lot of money for me, especially for consoles that may or may not work properly. If I can't end up playing Super Mario Galaxy I will at least watch a playthrough online. My time with Assassin's Creed was short but most everything about it was very off-putting. I hated the story, I hated hated that there was no subtitle option, I hated the framing device, I hated all the techno garbage that filled my screen, I hated how that garbage made the world ugly and unappealing to explore, I hated how everything was just doing exactly what onscreen prompts told me to do, I hated that the combat was just mashing X over and over, I hated how I was constantly holding a trigger AND the A button...basically the only thing I liked was randomly parkouring around and accidentally jumping off ledges into bales of hay. That was always fun. Obviously a seminal video game franchise, but perhaps it is one that just isn't for me. So far it's my least favorite game of 2007.

Season 6 is definitely where the show started it's downhill trajectory, but Triangle is such a stupidly awesome episode. It's kinda meaningless, it doesn't really tell us anything about the characters we didn't already know, it doesn't advance the plot, but it is such a logistical nightmare and it's amazing Chris Carter had so much clout he could convince Fox to spend so much money on such an insane idea.

i found u

Is this you?

Part of my skepticism of data-driven algorithm based recommendations (and this extends way beyond Criticker and even beyond movies) is that, in over ten years of talking about films online, podcasting about films with tons of different people, posting reviews on Criticker and later Letterboxd, being friends with pretty much only movie people on Facebook, etc. I have never once met someone whose taste is actually similar to mine. There is not another human I've ever encountered in person, online, via a film site, etc. who I don't diverge with in taste in several major ways. That's why I like following the 83 people I choose to follow on Letterboxd. I know that one person may have the same taste in slasher movies in me, while another may have the same taste in contemporary arthouse fare, but also I know I can discount it when they, say, gush over a Brian DePalma movie because I know that me and them have wildly different opinions of his work. I grow to know them and their predilictions and their pet peeves. And even when I disagree (for example, the new cult that has risen around Paul W.S. Anderson, declaring the Resident Evil movies post-modern masterworks) there is value in being exposed to those opinions. Also, I do think there is some benefit in willfully throwing yourself into movies that you don't think you'd like, but that is definitely dependent on what you want to get out of film culture. Probably all this is dependent on what you want to get out of film culture. I will say that I've never seen Criticker crash and Letterboxd is down on a fairly regular basis, which is very annoying.

Yeah, I was eyeing Romania as a possible destination but with Trump in the White House and Putin in his house eastern Europe doesn't necessarily sound like a safe bet. Plus they have their own problems of religious fundamentalism.

They're more grounded? Thanks for writing about Super Mario Galaxy. It's the one major game from 2007 that I really regret I won't get to play.

The parameters are more complex on Criticker (I really wish Letterboxd would add country of origin as a data point). Part of that is that Letterboxd tries to maintain a really clean look, while Criticker is way more stripped down and text based.

Yeah, they definitely added features since I used it, then. Those are all also part of Letterboxd as well.

OJ: Made In America really is amazing. The only problem is that it cuts all the archival footage to 16:9, which is occasionally really ugly and incoherent. It's so dumb that ESPN didn't trust TV audiences to understand why certain footage would be 3:4. It's bad enough when something like the HD re-release of The X-Files does it, but to crop so extensively on a historical documentary is just madness.

I used to log everything on Criticker but I never found the algorithm recommended me anything I hadn't heard of and wasn't already interested in. I use Letterboxd now and it suits my needs a lot better. I follow people whose taste I find interesting (including several critics and programmers for theaters like the Alamo Drafthouse), and I've discovered way more underseen and little known films that way. It also works better for me as a film journal, as I've written a review for every film I've seen since early 2013 (1,346 reviews so far), and I prefer the emphasis on reviews rather than ratings because sometimes I even discover movies I like via people giving it a bad review, if their review seems to imply that I'd still like it. But maybe Criticker's design and algorithms have improved a bunch in the nearly 10 years since I used it.

Dan's absolute refusal to play along with any bit that doesn't involve him as the center of attention is absolute death in the context of the Beastcast. But as a source of video series ideas, he's been a boon to the East Coast guys. Bombcast, on the other hand, has greatly improved for me, though anytime Jeff isn't on it (like the last one) it sinks it. But Drew needs to talk more because he's great.

I wouldn't wish fame on them because I suspect being famous is kind of awful, but I dunno if a show on Seeso is going to expose them to that many new people anyway. I am curious as to how My Brother, My Brother and Me would translate to a TV format but mostly skeptical that it can be done well. Radio shows (or podcasts) crossing over into TV shows almost always feel redundant and purposeless to me.

Series 1 of The Fall was very promising. Good performances, really well-edited, good pace, relatively small scale (though all the stuff with the murdered cop was completely unnecessary and dumb), a real psychological depth...but Series 2 throws it all out. It was a compelling portrayal of a serial killer as an addict, a real man whose complicated web of lies starts tightening around his neck as he tries to feed this addiction. Now he's just The Joker, taking insane risks at every turn that always pay off for him, risking exposure to the cops all the time for no good reasons, and trailed by a totally gross serial killer groupie. It's the sort of nonsense that made me stop watching Hannibal. TV is a terrible medium. People should stop watching TV.

I haven't played any of the 3D Marios after 64, which puts me in a unique position to definitively say that Super Mario World is still king and always will be forever.

I switch up the Morgans all the time. I like the Season 4 ep. Never Again. Scully's "Why don't I have a desk?" moment was a long time coming, and I like that her response to being frustrated with her job is to say "Fuck it." and just get laid and get a tattoo. In general Season 4 is a good Scully season that does some necessary work on her character after three seasons of "Actually Scully, you're dumb because it's a mummy." and "Scully was kidnapped, we have to save her!" Though sometimes the cancer stuff can feel like the latter. I also like the recurring motif that, in the super secret Organization, The Cigarette Smoking Man is this weird fuck-up who they have no faith in and are constantly questioning. "Are you sure you have this under control?" "Of course I do." "Because this is really important." "I know!" "Ok, just saying. You know. If you don't have this under control..." "I do!"

Crush looks pretty great. Too bad it's not on Steam. I am considering purchasing a DS Lite for the sake of this thread (Phantom Hourglass! Picross! Prob a Pheonix Wright!) but that is about as far as I'm willing to go, so I won't get to any PSP games. I am really looking forward to replaying Portal, as I genuinely believe it features the greatest storytelling of any game I've ever played. Be fun to go back and see if that holds up.

I know he probably just doesn't want to be on anymore but A) Sean was always my favorite when talking about non-game things. If you're already gonna be messing with the format and focus, he might as well come on more often. C) Maybe he's already planned to be on for 300? Or should?

The way James gets all stop-motiony when he climbs into the giant peach?

Important Assassin's Creed update: I pretty much instantly fell into hate with the world, story, characters, etc. but I discovered that even if the game doesn't let you skip cutscenes, it does let you ruin them by letting you spin your character in little circles during all the dialogue, even his.

The more I think about it the more mad I get that all those journalists went to that Switch event in New York and not one thought to bring measuring tape.