Ozzie

Arrow is so stupid, it's fast food for the brain. And since I already eat too much actual fast food I should at least be more sensible regarding my mental intake. Just finished watching the season one finale. It is easy to watch, entertaining but trite...well, I'm glad I haven't anymore episodes to watch for now... It's been a while since I saw a show with such a conservative and oldfashioned worldview, too.

It's too bad Idle Thumbs lost listeners over it, because I thought the unpredictability of the cast from week to week was rather exciting. It was a strong period of the 'cast during that time.

He got lost in the woods.

Arrow (1st season) is the worst. All the time the characters are saying all the wrong things to each other, and for some reason they mostly lead to the right results anyway. The series is constantly repetitive with the same beats every episode. The flashbacks to the island are perfunctory, nothing connects them to the present. Why are they happening, what do they help us understand? Diggle is a constant nag at Oliver's side and is always only there to be proven wrong. I loved him in his bodyguard role in the first episodes, but since then he's only there lurk in Oliver's lair and to be someone Oliver can talk to, and to be a source of more drama. Oh, and Thea is a selfish, judgmental, hurtful monster and at the same time a screwup of her own, and noone points out her hypocrisy. Why would I care whether or not she goes to prison? Yet, Arrow is a good show in small dosage to waste your time with.

this looks good, surprisingly good. i actually want to see this!

I really have a problem with watching movies and series that feature lots of potentially awkward and embarrassing character interactions. When I feel those coming up I cringe, turn away or close my eyes. Now I'm watching two shows, Looking and Transparent, that are of this kind. I constantly take breaks from them in the middle of an episode. :/

I really enjoyed the second season of American Crime, until it went off the deep end in the latest episode. A shame. :/

I would say it would be better if they didn't exist at all.

Upcoming episodes will be cheaper: the next one 2$, the ones after that 3. http://www.avclub.com/article/louis-ck-says-more-horace-and-pete-coming-saturday-231762

Yeah, I enjoyed it lots, too!

I just wish There Will Be Blood simply ended one scene earlier. I think it would have been better for it.

I guess so, yeah. And is better for sampling than Audacity. I tried out Nano Studio and KRISTAL Audio Engine. They're both freeware and have annoying limits, but are easy to work with. I think I need to give FL Studio another try before I can tell you what bugs me about it. Since I just found out that my MIDI interface works after all, I might even do that. Reaper looks interesting, thanks for the recommendation!

So, I already bounced off of FL Studio/Fruity Loops twice. I guess it's hard for me to wrap my head around its interface, and I'm still too intimidated by it to give it a third try. Maybe it isn't the right tool for me anyway. I don't have big demands. Mostly I've used Audacity so far, and what it lacks for me is a proper support for sampling (you can do sampling in Audacity, of course, but it's clunky) and real time effects (in Audacity you can apply effects on tracks, but not in real-time, instead it processes the selection and bakes the desired effect in). Maybe synthesizer/MIDI stuff would be fine, too, but I don't think I need it. Does anyone know the right tool to recommend to me? It doesn't remind me that much of the Diablo soundtrack, now that I listened to it. Well, the drums do a bit.

I wanted to distract myself for a bit from my inability to do work, so I remembered that someone recommended some freeware (NanoStudio) here, which I promptly downloaded and tested out. Sadly NanoStudio's copy function is so limited that it drives me insane. You can't copy notes between instruments, which makes the testing out of some ideas much too arduous (you basically have to recreate a part for a new instrument then), which is a shame because otherwise the interface is easy to get used to. Anyway, here is the fruit of my one-day fun with NanoStudio. I only used the pre-fab samples that came with it, so yeah, it doesn't sound particularly original. Still, I like the thunder of drums at the end. https://soundcloud.com/ted-ist-tot/trommelgewitter

Pillars of Eternity was similarly priced at release. Yeah, the price of The Witness is what I expected. I'm hyped for it!

incredibly beautiful!

Yesterday I was eager to distract myself, so I made this picture. I wonder if it's obvious how I got to this result, or if I managed to obfuscate the source. Anyway, I'm quite pleased with it, because basically I just fiddled about until it was done. The signature took half the time to make.

Boo!

True. Thanks for the advice on the last page, Bjorn, and for the shared perspectives from everyone else here on this issue. The advice wasn't needed and isn't applicable, though. I feel like I should explain where I stand with my friend to make clear why. We know each other for over two years now, and I'm in love with him for a little more than one and a half years. Our friendship has been odd for most of that time. I barely knew him until two months ago. During the first phase of our friendship I didn't know how to handle my love for him. I often complained when he left early. I felt crushed one time after he left, and with that the need to not rely on him, to make him expendable. So I started online dating. I made a friend through that two days later. You could say then that the heartache had a positive effect on me. Months later he became terribly uncommunicative. When I wrote him asking when he had time he wouldn't answer. I didn't know whether it was appropriate to complain about it. I second-guessed myself: would I feel hurt by it if I had merely amicable feelings for him? Weeks later, after a night out, I went with a friend to his place, where he lived with flatmates, and I barely got a word out of him on that occasion. His lack of communication already wounded me the weeks prior, and for me this was the last straw. I didn't feel that the friendship was strong enough for me to carry the burden. So I decided to not contact him anymore. A few weeks later he contacted me. I hesitated with my answer. I worried that it might be a bad idea to answer. So, for self-protection, I set up rules for myself: to never write him, except for a damn good reason; to answer only briefly if he writes me. Thus the second phase of our friendship began. And it worked fine! I avoided talking and asking about personal things, because I expected it would make things harder for me, that it would flare up my feelings for him. He in return didn't talk about himself either. By keeping the friendship impersonal, my feelings for him had no chance to surface. We would meet, then I would forget about him, until we would meet again. Meetings were as impersonal as sex dates. We played video games (local coop stuff and adventure games) and listened to music (we heard the most recent Sufjan Stevens record for the first time together; one of the exemptions I contacted him for). We talked about video games and music. Our friendship barely existed outside of my bedroom (which is also my living room...still). We had one good personal conversation during this second phase, about online dating. He wanted to know more about my experiences. He commented that...well, it's difficult to translate. I'll say it in German and try to translate it then. He said, to paraphrase: "Ich sollte mich wohl auch auf Brautschau begeben". Which I don't know to translate with the right nuance, but basically, as I also understood it, he said that he probably should also be on the lookout for a wife. Anyway, everything was fine, until a common friend hinted that the friend I'm in love with and his male flatmate were sexually involved with each other. This blew my mind. I don't use this phrase lightly. This one small morsel of information changed me significantly as a person over the following days. My emotions became more intense, my consciousness wider, my perception broader and clearer, my opinions firmer. I suddenly was the person I always wanted to be. This transformation didn't remain permanent to this degree, but to a lesser degree it did. Again, the heartache had a positive effect on me. A few days later I confessed my love to him in a carefully controlled situation in my bedroom (which is also my living room): I let "Future Days" from Can play in the background on constant loop. I teared up when I tried to say how much our friendship meant to me. I made clear that it couldn't go on like it had, that it has to be possible to talk about personal things. I basically demanded it as a condition for the continuation of our friendship. This wasn't a problem for him, and he asked me what it was I wanted to know. Well, it was a lot! There were signs that he and his flatmate (now former flatmate and ex-boyfriend) were in a relationship together. One was extremely blatant: his flatmate cuddled up to him once in my presence. Yet I didn't want to ask about that. Like I said, I didn't want to talk about personal things, even when they jumped into my face like this. By this point I still hadn't figured out that he was gay. I thought he had exclusively romantic interest for men, but only somewhat sexual. So when he told me that he was gay it was a surprise. I also felt misguided: I reminded him about what he said when we talked about my online dating experiences. Then he tried to explain himself, ever more desperately, that he didn't mean it that way, which made me cry in front of him. It took weeks for me to get over the fact that I knew him for almost two years, yet didn't know that he was gay. Heck, when I met him for the first time, I hadn't any gay friends, which changed. Yet the whole time I had him as a gay friend, but didn't know it! This big talk was at the end of last October. Now, in this third phase of our friendship, we are at a point where communication is not only possible, but excellent. My feelings for him are not my problem alone, but one we share.

I'm curious if anyone here had a similar experience: falling in unrequited love with a friend, yet trying to keep up the friendship nevertheless. I can't say that I haven't suffered a bit for it, which I'm ready to to a degree. The friendship is so strong that it is worthwhile to me. It's difficult, but it's working out (I'm not falling out of love with him after all). Most of my friends and my sister assume that this can't work. I think it can if the friendship is strong enough, and maybe also if the feelings of love aren't overwhelmingly strong.

Weird, it's my least favorite by a long shot. I thought the romance was full of platitudes (iirc) and utterly unconvincing, and while Miyazaki tried to do a realistic movie with The Wind Rises, the details overall felt unconvincing to me. I can't give a more detailed critique than that. Oh, except that, when I saw it, there was a break after the first half of the film. The first half I actually liked very much, and I was curious how the second half would play out. I was disappointed with the direction it took, the movie didn't seem to pay off a lot it set up in the first part. My personal favorite is Kiki's Delivery Service. ^^

I think I'm falling out of love with a friend of mine. Which is the second-best scenario I can think of regarding our relation to each other (the best of course would have been if he started to fall in love with me). Our friendship has been a difficult but very worthwhile ride so far. And I'm happy that it won't take an emotional toll on me anymore from time to time. I got a lot out of the emotions, too, though. I already feel like I miss certain things, despite the fact that I haven't quite fallen out of love with him yet: the very pleasurable moments of silence with him, and the desperate need for close friendship (basically I had to know EVERYTHING for the friendship to work). Weird how the dynamic of our friendship constantly changes. It's also very exciting, though!

I had a little edit war with myself, therefore this statement of yours looks like an odd non-sequitur now. Before I edited it out I said something like "I see that you're already a quite active poster here". Thanks! The secret is, of course, that I was still awake. My sleep rhythm is an utter chaos at the moment. The past few days I slept a few hours here and there. Oh well...I guess I need a bit more structure in my day.

It's 6:40 AM where I'm from now. Anyway, hello familiar drawn face, I was active a lot on the Double Fine forums during the Double Fine Adventure, but I barely visited the forums since then. I may have posted under a different name over there (iirc, my avatar was this red-hooded guy who pulled the skin from his own face with his claw-like hand...looked pixelated, gross and awesome XD). I'm glad you found your way over here!

I also really recommend his Nibelungen movies. They are kinda like proto Lord of the Rings, in that they are epic fantasy and add up to a running time of 5 hours, which pales to the length of the Lord of the Rings movies of course, but still, they are unusually long for silent movies.