Erkki

After getting accepted at the "origin sort facility", mine arrived at "origin facility" and is now "in transit to destination".

There are reliability upgrades and accuracy upgrades. And then separate things for increasing ammo. Also as I remember it you always know what you are buying -- weren't the guns and upgrades in different menus and it would say "AK-74 Accuracy Upgrade" or something?

Wow, I got into the anime auteurs list and just saw Wolf Children. What a beautiful story! I've never cried this much before during watching a movie or reading a book or playing a video game. And I'm still having trouble holding back the tears 15 min after it's over. I'm now eager to watch Mamoru Hosodas other work as well, although I really should take care of some stuff before I indulge myself. Yesterday I watched several Makoto Shinkai movies (animes? what's the best word <-- anime noob here) and while I had seen 5cm/s before and liked it, I was kind of disappointed that all his works were so similar, even seemed like all started at a desk positioned in a similar place in a classroom. I was a little bored in the end, but I really liked The Garden of Words, it just looked so pretty.

Awesome, I've been thinking about getting into anime beyond Studio Ghibli, which is what I've mostly seen so far. I guess this is a good list to start with.

So I'm seeing so many movies these days that if I mentioned all that I liked here, I would be spamming this thread quite a bit, perhaps I already am? There are several reasons, like finally having a big screen at home; not playing that many video games any more; discovering that I can really appreciate old movies, whereas earlier in my life I didn't really want to watch old black and white movies that much; and finally that I spent most of the 2000s up to 2013 or so not watching a lot of movies. Last week the best thing I saw was Half-Nelson. It was really great, and cemented my opinion of Ryan Gosling being one of the best actors right now. I was already really impressed by him in The Believer, but forgot his name as that was about when my mostly movie-free decade begun. Now I've seen a lot of the movies he played in and he is great in most. My lost movie decade also means I discovered Michelle Williams only about a year ago in Wendy and Lucy. I didn't even realize she was the same person who played in Dawson's Creek. I wonder what other great things I may have missed. But I also wonder whether it's actually a luxury to go back and pick movies from the last decade based on what has been filtered out by time and critics, instead of seeing everything when it comes out. I know I've had a few disappointments in cinema recently, when I started going more. Another one worth a mention from last week - rewatched Fisher King. Last saw it in the 90s and it seemed much simpler back then. Now it feels even more magical.

Maybe the pins weren't securely attached

I have somehow managed to not hear or see anything about this game besides the basic facts that it's a kickstarted obsidian isometric rpg in the style of BG and a lot of people are talking about it. Makes me want to get it and go in unknowing, and then I become sad realizing that I still haven't started Divinity: Original Sin or Wasteland 2.

Just watched Short Circuit, an 1986 movie about a military robot who becomes "alive". Also saw Ex Machina last week, and having recently seen Chappie, it's interesting to compare the three. Maybe it was also mentioned in this thread already, it Chappie seems to draw a lot from Short Circuilt. While Chappie was entertaining but ultimately superficial, I think Short Circuit is even more so. It's characters are likeable, but cartoony; it's a very 80s movie. It hardly deals with any philosophical issues relevant to the story beyond whether Number Five is "alive" or not. Chappie is a bit more thoughtful than that, even just by going beyond "aliveness" by talking about conciousness. I liked Ex Machina as well, but... It appeared to be a more intellectual movie, but ultimately ended up disappointing a bit with an outdated romantical idea of AI. Not saying that Chappie's idea is more realistic or rational, but it at least tried to somehow explain the conciousness within a sci-fi framework. The whole situation in Ex Machine seemed very set-up for this story, it didn't feel like it could happen in any universe.

Yeah, already added to my to-watch list. Will try to see it the first chance I get. Just saw Meek's Cutoff, a western about 3 families trying to make it on the Oregon Trail. I liked it, but it's only for those who like really slow-paced movies.

Finally put edge-of-Tallinn, Estonia on the map.

Watched The Myth of American Sleepover, and I liked it. Will watch It Follows next. Also saw A Girl Walks Home Alone At Night, and it was fantastic. Indeed made me think of early Jarmusch movies.

After a week of using Mubi, I'm both and . Selection is good, I found a lot of interesting movies to see. And I usually wouldn't watch old movies that much without such a curated selection. On the other hand, being limited to around ~30 movies at a time seems kind of arbitrary. I guess the 5€ a month price is competitive? How much does Netflix or other services with a wider selection cost? The streaming quality is good, I didn't really run into any issues. I didn't see anything with super-good video quality but maybe it was just the selection of movies. With some movies I have the question of whether the original was actually super bad video quality like it is on this service (e.g. Lars von Trier movies). Software quality is so-so. It's slow to boot up (I don't see why, really, does it need to pre-load all the images?) and crashed my PS3 several times on two evenings. Today it didn't crash any more, thankfully. A few negative points, but overall I'm really happy to have a new curated source of movies I probably wouldn't watch otherwise. Some movies I saw (some I'd seen before): House on Trubnaya Square (1928, Russia) Jacquot de Nantes (1991, France) Louisiana Story (1948, US) 101 Reykjavik (2000, Iceland) The Goat (1921, US) Cleo from 5 to 7 (1962, France) Arena (2009, Portugal) Documenteur (1981, France) Two Cars, One Night (2003, New Zealand) I enjoyed most of them. I skimmed through some others, there's some crap on the service as well, for example even as I loved the 3 Agnes Varda movies listed above, another 2 of hers were too boring to watch fully. Also I realize I should probably make a list of watched movies because one that expired already I can't remember the title or details enough to find it again, and the service doesn't show my watching history.

I was never very close to my parents emotionally, but they live nearby and I visit them at least once every two weeks or so.

What's great is that they also have short movies. I don't usually stumble upon shorts, but with this I could. But yeah, I imagine the schedule will be a bit of a problem.

I was looking into whether the PS3 has any alternative DLNA player apps and instead discovered Mubi, a streaming service that seems to stream critically acclaimed and/or rare films. Anyone else use it?

Wow, Plex is also very nice. Having a special PS3 app instead of just making the movie streams accessible form the PS3's own menu and player looks much better. Although it seems the app is limited to 720p

I tried again with PS3 Media Server and this time it worked fine. I had connected the PS3 to wired network, although I'm not sure whether it picked that up or still used Wi-Fi. Might have also been that the movie had smaller bitrate, or less variable one.

Yeah, I couldn't really go back to a TV either. But a lot of people who have been thinking about projectors seem to have doubts about the complexity of the setup and well, my experience so far does seem to confirm that it's a bit more complicated than having a TV. This time I'm not moving my main computer into the living room as I had for the past year -- it just doesn't work out well to do everything from the couch. So I'll be looking into Steam machines or something similar (I know I've been planning for a long time, but now I really need to do it, and I'm also getting the furniture for the living-room electronics soon). Right now I'm using PS3 as my movie player, however I'm having trouble Streaming from my PC. Using Kodi (XBMC) doesn't work that well, as some movies don't play and subtitles don't work. Using PS3 Media Server I find severe lagging is ruining the experience. Maybe I should connect the PS3 to wired network? I have it on Wi-Fi.

I still have a nice stockpile of 20-30€ rums (Bacardi Oakheart and up) from when I was trying out a lot of rums. The one that used to be my favourite is still great, but once I'm done with some of these rums I want to try a few more highly rated ones. So far I've only been mixing, mostly with coke, but I want to try to start sipping. I have never been able to enjoy it so far in my life, but I always avoided drinking any strong alcohol, even mixed, until a year or so ago.

Damn, the lamp driver (or "ballast") wasn't quite fixed. It turned the lamp on for ten seconds and then failed again. I decided to install the new projector. While there's still some hope that I'll get the old one working, I just couldn't wait any more to have a screen again.

Maybe I'll write up some more thoughts on my first year of home theater after having a picture again. But so far it has been awesome for me to be able to watch movies on a relatively big screen. I don't have 5.1 sound or anything, which I never cared about in movies, even though I really liked 3D sound in games in the Aureal days. The projector is a bit noisy but you get used to it. I even got used to using the computer from couch using the big screen, but I think I skipped doing some things (like programming cool stuff at home) because I wasn't really comfortable. So for the future I'm looking into keeping the main computer in the office room and streaming games to a smaller box connected to the big screen. For the last month and a half I've really missed being able to see movies at home (I don't want to see them on small screens any more) and I've went to the cinema a lot more (there was one week when I went every day).

So, after more than a year, I was mostly happy with my projector setup, even though it ended up being a bit more noisy than I expected. Also I ended up leaving the projector on for more time than was probably sensible, even having it turned on days when I was mostly listening music through the computer for which the projector was the only screen. So the lamp exploded more than a month ago (maybe because of my abuse, maybe because of power fluctuations, maybe because of a defect, who knows). I ordered a new one and it arrived broken. Yesterday I found out I'll at least get the money back. I ordered another one from AliExpress, which arrived two days ago, but required some more tinkering to get it installed. Turned out there was more broken than the lamp. I gave up hope and ordered a new projector -- the exact same model, since the newer model has a higher input lag of ~50ms (up from ~25ms) and I need to keep it mostly the same to keep physical stuff in place. Then I discovered that the cause of error on the old projector may be the lamp driver -- it had some burnt components. It's now being fixed and tomorrow I'll get to see whether the new lamp and the lamp driver work. I hope I didn't screw anything up while messing about with the insides of the projector. Also today I got the new projector I ordered. Took only 1.5 days compared to the two weeks it took me to get the first broken lamp and the month it took to get the second lamp -- next time I'm going to have some back-up lamps nearby, just in case. So tomorrow morning/noonish I'm going to have a test -- if I get the fixed lamp driver and it works, I'll probably return the unopened replacement projector. If not, I'll "write off" the original and keep the new one (while also having a back-up lamp from the old one).

I want to see it (White God), but I missed it in cinemas and I there aren't even torrents of it. My only hope is probably that there'll be a Blu-Ray release.

Chris Hecker's SpyParty game looks super promising: http://spyparty.com/ It's a two player game where one player is a spy and the other is a sniper, who has only one bullet. The spy will have to complete some missions, while blending in among a crowd of NPCs. It's a bit like a Turing test. If the sniper spots that you are a human player, he shoots you and wins. If he shoots an NPC, he loses.

CHAPPIE! It's first-class (almost) entertainment. Visually stunning, exciting and has enough twists to keep it just unpredictable enough for me to be entertained. Both of those trailers had it wrong in some way. It's not a very deep movie, but occasionally does make you think about what would happen if this premise were true. It explores the subject matter enough to not be totally superficial, but at the same time doesn't go into anything too deeply, so it's still pretty lightweight. I like how Die Antwoord was handled here, mostly - they pretty much seemed to play themselves and their Zef sensibility was consistent throughout the movie. The question I had, "Can a robot be Zef?" was answere with "fuck yeah!" But on the other hand, I didn't like how Yo-Landi was turned into a stay-at-home-gangsta-mom for a robot. Women lacked agency in the film, including Sigourney Weaver as the corporation boss being there just to authorize a crazy idiot plan of a macho military guy who she had been rather dismissive about before. The other flaws are more spoileric: I don't remember what I thought of as the fourth flaw exactly, but probably it's the lack of depth in portraying most things. I'm beginning to think that Blomkamp would do much better to leave more of the writing to someone who is more nuanced, and focus more on the visual and the overall direction. I don't actually know who did how much writing and screenplay on this, but it would be helped by another perspective.