Erkki

I guess many of you have heard about Letterboxd. To me it's THE social network about movies - a place to log what you see, give your ratings, keep watchlists and other lists, see what your friends are watching/liking. To me it seemed different from the others mostly in how nice the UI looks and feels compared to other similar services. And especially the way movies are shown with posters makes a lot of sense to me. Anyway, at the moment I just noticed there is a campaign to let you import data (in IMDb format) into Letterboxd for free - usually you would have to pay for the Pro account to be able to do that. So at the moment there's a rather good opportunity to give Letterboxd a try if you have a lot of movie watching data or ratings on some other service. BTW, I'm T4ffer on Letterboxd.

I mostly run into 3 people's ratings and reviews on Letterboxd who seem to watch or have watched a lot of the same films as I have: PatrickRipoll - from here (used to be), good well-argued reviews, I don't always agree though. Also I follow Patrick's co-hosts from Director's Club podcast, but they don't seem to write reviews there. MikeMariano - also from here. Really interesting ratings that usually seem to go against the consensus. I wish you also wrote more reviews, @mikemariano ! hamburgersplash - I thought they were from here, but search doesn't reveal. So I can't remember how I started following them, but as I'm watching world cinema they are almost always ahead of me with a one sentence review (and no rating). [edit] ah, realized that I probably followed hamburgerslash because he made a popular list https://letterboxd.com/hamburgersplash/list/weirdo-watchlist/ [edit2] oh and I forgot the 4th one I mostly run into: Sean Baker, the director of Tangerine and The Florida Project. He seems to watch a lot of movies and actively logs them with some comments. He usually avoids giving an opinion, though, which I guess is understandable viewpoint for a director of popular movies.

I have very little experience with fleeces, I should expand my world to include them.

I want the best one, I guess Index is it at the moment? Although it's pretty much the maximum I would pay for one (well I'm willing to get a new graphics card too). I heard a lot of good about Beat Saber but somewhy I have doubts if it's for me. We'll see.

You're right. I've been putting it off for years. Time to do it! [edit] Damn! I think I was a bit late. If I'm not wrong, then a couple of days ago it would have been in stock, but now there's a 8 week wait. [edit2] So sad. I was getting excited, but I guess I can wait... and maybe I was wrong aobut availability couple of days ago, some site is still showing that it's "available" after google search. Anyway, sad news is that I have the EXACT minimum GPU for Index , so to play games I probably want a newer one and good news! hardware hasn't made some kind of leap in the mean time so my pci-express 3.0 slot still seems valid for newest graphics cards?!?! I didn't dare hope so but lucky me.

I just found out that I'll be working from home for AT LEAST 3 more months... I should find some outdoor activities , but also really tempted to get a VR now... Valve Index seems to be in stock even? But I'm still really doubtful that it will get much use beyond this game and a couple of others. And I don't even have that much time for extra indoor activities...

I have now seen 8 Yuzo Kawashima movies! None of them have been quite as good as Suzaki Paradise, but his best work is still ahead. Anyway, I hope the restorations of these films will end up getting some more exposure in the coming years (maybe Criterion). One thing that all of his movies seem to have in common is that they are almost all more about women than men, or at least they treat both as equals, often having main characters of both genders. And some of the films highlight the struggle that women have had to face. I'm not sure I'd call these feminist movies, but it's still so good to find that even back in the 50s Japan, not all filmmakers were sexist or focusing mainly on men's stories.

Oh damn, the amount of rather clever gameplay jokes in this is pretty amazing. Just my two favourites so far: FEELING OLD spoiler: Everything before SUFFERING spoiler. Don't look at this to soon, I think it's actually one of the greates moments in any game I've played in a while:

The FEAR level was brilliant! The last puzzle almost had me reaching for a walkthrough until I remembered that EXAMINING inventory might be useful. You can't have made all these levels in just a few months, right? So when you did the podcast in the bubble bath or something and talked about writing, you already had a functioning prototype? Would love to consume some behind the scenes on this, haven't looked for it yet, maybe after I finish the game.

I’m very early in the game (got Joy), but I like it.

BTW what are the main active channels in Slack? I'm basically only in the TV and movies one at the moment. [edit] Actually I may have muted one of the active ones, #phaedrus-chat, I think it overwhelmed me at some point.

I think I found a new Mario Bava (director to obsess over) for myself - Yuzo Kawashima. Mubi has a special on him at the moment and I loved the two movies I saw so far: Suzaki Paradise - a simple story of a couple struggling with poverty, who move to a place next to a red light district and try to make it there. It's somehow just told in such a nice and enjoyable way. Tales of Ginza - this is almost a city symphony, a campy hang-out movie, and has a Rosebud in it. It gets quite ridiculous at times, but I love it. Both of them have excellent cinematography and I believe his movies have only recently gotten proper restorations. Anyway I haven't quite started obsessing yet, but I might after I watch the rest of the ones available on Mubi.

Looks great! Will rewatch on bigger screen later. Can’t wait for the release.

Well, I got over it actually in a few days/weeks and didn't go to see a therapist. Lately I've been getting a strong feeling that an era has ended (mostly for me personally). My grandma died and even if we weren't super close lately, and I should have spent more time with her than I did, it still gave me an overwhelming feeling that the world is now irreversibly different. Then there's also that I turned 40 just last year. Then there are several things that have been happening over the past few years. I'm no longer hanging out with some friends from childhood at all. We've just grown apart and some spend all their time with work/family. I also had a break-up with a friend who turned out to be an asshole, I think I wrote about it here when it happened. I have made some new friends, thankfully. In my digital life, I'm no longer enjoying computer games as much as I used to. When I play some longer games now I have a nagging feeling that I should be doing something else. Then there are these Idle Thumbs forums here, which don't feel active at all any more and I'm not sure that Slack can fully replace forums for me. Also I rarely listen to the podcasts now when I don't play games much. I'm not sure that I'll ever find another place like this used to be, though. Also now a server that we set up at university in 1997 or so is being closed down and I might lose the e-mail address from there. I've mostly migrated my e-mails away already, though. But I like, still have all those e-mails in a locally running Mozilla Thunderbird, while for other stuff I've used GMail since that's been available. To add to that I'm developing a different attitude to work because I'm not enjoying it as much as I used to. If it wasn't for financial obligations I've managed to create, maybe I would quit IT and try to work in film. But I know it's probably super hard from what I've heard, especially in a place like Estonia where we don't have a big film industry. I've also been thinking if at some point I should have after all seriously tried to become a game programmer instead of working on business software and dev tools. But I think by now game programming (at least when it comes to graphics) has evolved into such complexities that I'm way too behind to consider that again. And a decade also ended (or will end in a year, depending how you count). There's also the political changes in the world... things that were unthinkable 10 years ago seem almost normal now. But on the other hand things have also improved in many ways, there also seems to be a lot more acceptance of people who were ignored before. So yeah, feeling kind of nostalgic and sad right now, but hopeful.

Well, I ended up pushing through the story as fast as I could and am watching the credits now. I got to agree with a lot of criticism of the game. The missions are downright ridiculous and the point where the game really falls apart and even throws away the immersion it seems to be seeking in other areas. The overall story I actually liked, although not all parts of it. The growing rift between Arthur and Dutch was well done. But then again it could have been done even much better. One thing that was pretty weak is the landscapes. They were lit like never before, but the first game had the landscapes almost be characters in the story, or at least important to the story. Here it was just forest, some mountains and the one plain and a swap. Disappointing. I mean, there are beautiful and even different-looking places here, but they don’t feel as different places as the areas in RDR. In RDR you would often travel the ridge between Armadillo and the Macfarlane ranch. And this would give you a wide ass view of the desert/prairie (or what is that type of landscape called?) every time you went down. And then up the ridge you really feel in a different place and then same later in the plains around Blackwater and the snowy forests. And then Mexico again added 2 or 3 different areas on top of that. In RDR2 you have the intro mountains and the epilogue meadows and plains, but the meat of the game takes place in a chunk of land that feels quite similar throughout except that vegetation is occasionally different. Ok, the bayou is something of its own with the crocodiles and then there is the plain with the bison, but the latter doesn’t get much use. And the main piece of beauty near the first camp out of the mountains - the horseshoe - is nice but it’s all somehow shaped so that you never really get a good sense of your beatings around there. And then there’s the fact that all the rocks in the game are kind of similar. I was always keeping an eye out for the face rock as it was on a treasure map and a rail station poster, but never found it. It could have been anywhere on the map because there were rocks like that everywhere. And so maybe my complaint isn’t that there weren’t distinct landscapes, just that they weren’t well organized as in the first game and the way I traversed the game mostly following the story meant that I was mostly seeing same looking places. And now after the credits I see I can go back to the original games areas eg Armadillo, but I imagine there won’t be much to do. Maybe I could have always gone there, but again the story and other content kept me in certain areas. Maybe you can even go to Mexico? The size of the map seems to extend there, but I tried to swim there and died on the shore weirdly. In any case I will try to do the side content like hunting and treasure hunting now and see if that changes what I think of the landscapes in this game.

So far I'm enjoying it, but I've noticed some of the negative sides thenexus6 mentioned a few posts above. Especially riding + shooting combined is fucked. I've been playing both with keyboard + mouse and Steam controller... with mouse the aiming is more manual and takes longer sometimes... but with the controller keeping yourself orientated is such a pain... as with many other games. Indeed it feels like a game from years ago, as already did the previous GTA and RDR games. On the other hand the scope of everything is impressive and in some ways the slowness of everything adds to immersion, but I feel like a fool after a longer session of playing, like I'm wasting my life on mundane things in a virtual world... I got this feeling especially after accidentally riding into Saint Denis after a gunslinger encounter. Before that the world seemed of a manageable scope, with Valentine being "the town". Now suddenly I realized that if the previous area had seemed full of things to interact with (or waste time on), now everything seemed suddenly ten times bigger. And I don't even know if St. Denis is the biggest city in the game. Probably not? I'm now thinking whether to give up at this point to avoid feeling like I'm wasting time completing this game... or I could try to ignore the completionist in me and take the opening up of the world as a chance to pick and choose more of what I interact with... In any case, I don't want to go the route of playing this for an entire year or alternatively screwing up my sleep patterns playing this into late nights...

I liked Marriage Story a lot and The Irishman was also good, although I think the motivation for the main character to become involved in a life of crime (in his 50s or something!) in the first place was almost non-existent. By Letterboxd ratings I Lost My Body and Dolemite Is My Name seem worth a look, but I haven't yet.

I've been away from mainstream gaming for a few years now, I think. Basically since The Witcher 3. But I'll plunge back in at least briefly for hope of some more red redemption, even if dead. The Eurogamer review says that it has (familiar to me) flaws in storytelling, mission design and game design in general, but has some technical and artistic excellence nontheless. So I'll try to enjoy it, shouldn't be too hard given that RDR was one of my favourite games of all time. I'm not sure my PC can cope with it, but if not, maybe an upgrade is in store anyway... [edit] So far it looks very good. With the tutorial, subtitles on and everything, there was a bit too much going on at once during the first mission. I am missing a bigger screen for playing this. It looks like it's not meant for a 21" monitor :| I might try it on my big screen assuming Steam link can handle it.

I played the remastered Full Throttle and I gotta say that it's indeed less cool than I remember. I guess the teenage me was more easily impressed. I liked the visuals a lot, though. In some sections they make a subtle improvement while staying close to original. I checked walkthrough several times because of being stuck on a dumb thing... I think it's still a good game, maybe not a great one.

For some reason the Steam Store doesn't load for me in the Steam app nor Firefox, my main browser. If I go to chrome, it loads. Anyone else having trouble with it? Maybe this is my chance to ignore the sale... just started playing through my long backlog a bit. (PS. I tried deleting the cookies for steampowered.com in Firefox, didn't help) [edit] Anyway it seems I'm able to buy stuff through Chrome. PPS. Even in Big Picture mode it's not available in the app.

Oh man, I shot this Kickstarter video on the weekend and although the acting is very basic (card game developers acting) the material turned out quite nice, because we had done some planning and got a good location that provided a nice natural lighting after some tweaking. Can't wait to share the results in January or so.

Sprint is actually a term used in the very specific methodology called Scrum. There are other methodologies that fall under "agile" that may use different terms or not even do sprint-like things (e.g. Kanban)

For some reason, I made a list of movies that prominently feature a swimming pool throught the movie (i.e. not in just one or two scenes) https://letterboxd.com/t4ffer/list/films-with-swimming-pools/

Thanks for the recommendations. I'm feeling a bit better after a few days. I thought about going to a therapist. A few years ago I actually did find one I liked, but they thought I had no reason to keep going and I only went once. But now it seems they have moved and I don't remember the name and didn't feel like searching for a new one again. So maybe I'll wait it out a bit and if it gets worse again I'll try going to another therapist.

It’s been getting very high early ratings, so I was excited. But when you say it’s like The Witch, it reduces my enthusiasm. I thought The Witch was below average, even though some parts of it were quite memorable.