Erkki

Although I am pretty sure it has existed at some point, I couldn't find a thread for getting help with remembering a movie you saw years ago and remember some vague details, but can't find it. I'll start... What was the movie (80s I think, or maybe 70s) where in the beginning a dude wakes up and shoots a fly on his wall (with an air gun?). He gets into fights with some gang and I think they kidnap his girlfriend. He also rides a bicycle at some point, breaks a car antenna from a car and uses that as a weapon. I don't remember the actor, but I think he was blonde and had curly hair. I don't even remember if it was a good movie or not, just that it left some kind of a vague lasting impression when I saw it as a kid.

So I'm getting the new HDMI switch on Monday, but have no use for it for a while because my projector's lamp exploded while I was watching You're Next. I'm wondering if the projector's problem could have affected the HDMI switch? Maybe it sent a power surge over HDMI or something. That could explain why the HDMI output is not working while the coaxial audio output is fine. Or perhaps I should be worried about some electrical fluctuations at my apartment? I also had a LED power supply unit fail recently (but apparently that is common). Anyway, ordered replacement lamp, which I'll get in 8 days... I'm so used to watching movies every day now that I don't know what I'm going to do now. Maybe something useful.

It seems my HDMI switch died. I didn't know that happens to such simple piece of hardware. Maybe I should have been turning it off occasionally? I always had it on and it just lied there on the floor in a holy mess of cables. Now it only forwards audio from inputs to the coaxial digital out, but not the video to the projector. I got a simple male-male connector thingie to replace it temporarily while I get a new and slightly better switch on Monday (as Amazon promised), so until then I have no proper audio. For some reason there seems to exist only two HDMI switch models in the world that fit my need (4+ inputs, digital coax audio out, HDMI 1.4a support for all the 3D modes) and aren't terribly expensive. Also, I think my computer is dying... or at least the USB ports are. I think it was the MotionInJoy DualShock controller driver that killed my ports, but I'm not sure. I use a logitech wireless keyboard/trackpad (K400) and occasionally it skips input, or buffers it for a long time, especially noticeable in full screen games for some reason. I think this started happening after I had some troubles with the PS3 controller, or maybe when I plugged in a USB stick to where I usually plugged DualShock while MotionInJoy was installed. I've now replaced the driver with the other one (forgot it's name), but USB ports keep acting up. If I boot into Linux I can clearly see occasional error messages related to that in the terminal. Since this motherboard also has faulty HDD ports (I knowingly bought it, thinking I'll get it replaced when they fix the design, but never did get around to that) so maybe that's all related and now I'm kind of too scared to plug things into it. I don't really have money for a new computer right now, though, because I finally got a good offer for some furniture I've been wanting for two years and the bill is about as much as I have saved.

x = 1 and x > 2

Oh, and happy Groundhog Day! One of the best comedies ever made.

Yeah. I was somehow always "the smart one" almost to everybody I knew, not just my parents. I think I never developed any really obnoxious entitlement issues, but the reality kind of hit me when I barely passed a math test to get into uni. I was the second best at math in my class and still even took extra classes that spring before the test. My friend who was one of the most average students throughout the 12 years we went to school together scored perfectly. I totally failed at uni (but just not enough to get expelled for years), but the first years I had this huge pressure to do well, and I basically lied to my parents for a couple of years about how well I was doing. Some days I pretended to go to exams while I actually found something else to do, and then told them that I had passed the exam. I think I probably turned out fine in the end, though.

First, is it only me ... after the "anal(ytical the)rapist" joke in Arrested Development I cannot read the world "therapist" as one word any more. Second, I have also had trouble keeping my apartment clean. One thing that helps is having people over regularly, as really forces me to at least clean the rooms they will be in. I host board game nights (sometimes movie nights) at my place about once a week, partially with that purpose in mind. Also I hired a cleaner in December, and indeed, my room gets relatively a huge amount cleaner just before she comes every two weeks, because I have to clean up the mess so that she can get at the surfaces. I'm also really good at not fixing the things that need fixed in my apartment. Like there is some damaged wallpaper from a flood that happened a year and a half ago that needs gluing to the wall or something. But still I have this one room that I don't even really go into any more, it is so messy. I used to have my computer there at the desk, before I installed a big screen and projector in my living room. Now it's just a room for storing stuff, but there's no order at all, things are sort of just lying on the floor. But the good thing is that it doesn't get a lot of dust since I don't go there a lot and keep the door closed.

Wow, how did I even think it was? I don't really know.

Oh, and I almost forgot, I actually wanted to post about some other movies (I saw a lot of movies last week). Well, for some I can just confirm that some movies mentioned here multiple times already were really good: Gone Girl (it blew my mind, but I don't really watch mystery movies so maybe I'm just susceptible) and The Guest (is very predictable for the first 1/3, but quite well done nevertheless). Gone Girl left a big enough impression that I looked up some other Ben Affleck movies, which I didn't really know about. Gone Baby Gone was his debut as a director, I think, and is in some ways remarkably similar to Gone Girl, although it never gets to being as suspenseful, IMHO. The Town is different, a really good story about bank robbers. So turns out Affleck is a really good mystery director, which came as a very positive surprise to me. I guess I just ignored a lot of Hollywood movies over some recent years.

So my Jarmusch binge took me to finding some cool stuff, not all by Jarmusch. La Samourai was clearly a huge inspiration for Ghost Dog. Leningrad Cowboys Go America had Jarmusch in a minor role, It also feels like something I should have definitely seen before, having been aware of Leningrad Cowboys forever (as a kid I even saw them perform), but I actually hadn't seen the movie that created them. I'd say it's worth watching - a road movie about a fictional Finnish or Russian (not sure) band with weir haircuts going to America since they're not wanted back home. Fishing with John seems kind of cool, but I only watched the first episode so far. I also saw the earliest Jarmusch films, as I hadn't seen any of the ones before Night on Earth fully. Permanent Vacation (his first) -- this movie already shows some of Jarmusch's characteristics, but it's a bit boring and it doesn't feel like it has anything much to say. However, his next movie Stranger Than Paradise is really something already, showing immigrant's lives in American cities. Turns into a road movie about 1/3 in. Down by Law really seems to focus on showing off the actor's skills, where 3 of the main characters are low-lives who end up sharing the same prison cell. Mystery Train ties 3 completely different stories together by having their protagonists end up staying at the same shitty Memphis hotel. Night on Earth I had seen multiple times before on local television. I think this might actually be one of the most popular Jarmusch films in Europe? I don't remember seeing any of his other's on TV. It's really good, but again I'm left wondering if it really has anything meaningful to say? That taxi drivers all over the world might be assholes? Anyway, while already then Jarmusch had a rather distinct style, it's safe to say that his style took a turn to even more weirdness with Dead Man in 1995 and everything that followed (Ghost Dog, Broken Flowers, Limits of Control, Only Lovers Left Alive). I loved Dead Man and saw it 3 times the first week it was in cinemas, and pretty much became a Jarmusch fan (although I didn't really start following his career yet as my access to movies was limited then). Somewhy it took me so long to get around to his earliest stuff, but I'm really happy to have finally found the time to watch those movies.

I feel the same way. I think this was normal at the time, but modern times have moved game storytelling forward somewhat, and I would be disappointed if a newly designed game had you discover crucial puzzles by noticing some minor detail that you can't really care about. Why would Manny care about the server room in the beginning? There is a cut-scene that tries to make it relevant, but fails to really motivate Manny to explore it. So, since it's really long since I last played it, I missed the fact that is interactive and was wandering around aimlessly. Manny is kind of separate from the player, having more knowledge than him or her, but he never tries to motivate the player to do anything, leaving everything to the player -- collecting background info, sorting the relevant from the irrelevant and come up with motivation and an action plan that is not necessarily very in sync with what is going on on the screen. I think the puzzles are definitely not up to modern standards. In the beginning, there's also the thing with the rope... there's an implication that you can use it to find some new area, but no real indication that it's just too early. I kept trying to do something with it again and again.

Holy crap, why did I wait this long with reading the Witcher books by Sapkowski? I've been a fan of the games since first release, but couldn't imagine that the books they are based on would be so good. I guess it's genre could be described as dark fantasy or whatever genre also contains Song of Ice and Fire. But this is much better than Martin's tomes (and predates them), IMHO. Sapkowski's style is less pompous, and descriptions are usually short and to the point, without slowing down reading. There are lots of dialogs. Perhaps the best are the collections of short stories The Last Wish and The Sword of Destiny -- the fan translation of the latter is even quite decent. These mix elements of fantasy and fairy tales, and are less dark than the 5-book saga. But the 3rd and 4th books in the saga were also great. And then the beginning of the 5th surprised me with something completely different. I burned through the books quite quickly, especially considering I've only finished a couple of books this year -- 6 books since August 24th and just started reading the 7th and last. Also, maybe this was known, but I only now realized that the games' story happens completely after the books end. So the only thing spoiled between the books/games are the parts of the games where Geralt gets his memory back or hears about the past from other characters.

Last week I got really into Donker Mag, as I only discovered Die Antwoord through the Chappie trailer (I think I had only seen Pitbull Terrier once before). PS. Can a machine be zef?

In hindsight, I think my above post is a bit naive, but I wasn't really talking about reactions of the people getting called out, I also had for example that ESA t-shirt thing in mind where a lot of intelligent geeks were suddenly outraged at feminists that a Scientist had been forced to apologize and made to cry.

I have no problem with call-out culture myself, although I didn't even know it existed and am too lazy to read anything about it, including the thing written by that Chait guy. I think why I don't care much is probably because it seems to be about US politics perhaps even more than about something relevant internationally, such as feminism etc. I actually have way more problems with how many people are reacting when someone is getting called out. Often I see acts of calling someone out equated with censorship, bullying, attempts of limiting freedoms, and so on. Eventually someone will say, "if we continue like that, soon we will not be able to say anything". Although I don't really have a feel for what the local culture is as I haven't really read news or columns for two years. But from the occasional reactions of some otherwise very intelligent people I know, I will still often see rationality disappearing when someone gets called out and they jump into this mode where someone is being censored, bullied, or our collective freedoms (of speech) are getting erased because a person was criticized openly and perhaps had to apologize for something (someone having to apologize is apparently as good as cencorship). People should be more able to deal with criticism in a rational manner and not jump to extreme counter-opinions immediately and generally have better tolerance of critical opinions. So in my opinion, there should be way more calling out, for all kinds of reasons, so that people get more used to it.

I probably have thought about the meaning of things in Braid for a couple of hours in total, but it was triggered either by posts in this forum or interviews with Blow, not the game itself. I also didn't find a single star as far as I remember. The game is awesome even without trying to connect the dots. But I still love that there are hard to find secrets and some intentional hidden meaning and that it probably connects with game mechanics more than the narrative.

Seems I missed White God in cinemas and there don't even seem to be any torrents available. And I'm not going to use (suspicious) VPNs to pretend to be from a country where I could view it online. On the other hand, I learned today that Jim Jarmusch's Ghost Dog was based on an old French movie Le Samouraï (1967), and watched that just now. It was quite good. It starts strikingly similarly to Ghost Dog, but a way in it becomes clear that while Jarmusch made a lot of references to it, he wasn't really copying it. Ghost Dog is clearly an homage, though and I might just rewatch it. It was my favorite movie for a few years.

So I'm playing it a bit now. The lighting and high-res models look great, and music is great, but the controls are a bit weird, especially if you want to combine direct character control with point and click. E.g. pressing the use key while hovering the mouse over something will non-intuitively interact with the thing Manny is looking at instead. Also in the ledge I had to actually press "U" to get down via the rope, even though I had mapped "Use" to "F" (and movement to WASD). I actually looked it up in a walkthrough. It said "press U", thankfully [edit] Actually I think I was facing the thingie the wrong way. U still works as use everywhere even after remapping

Whoa, just saw Drunken Master II. Some amazing (fighting) scenes in that one. The first half of the movie is the best.

Thanks, I'll try that. The last time when the pain was subduing, I was also doing some stretching regularly (besides taking the meds.), except I didn't do the ball-under-feet thing. I should resume the regular stretching, maybe that will be enough to help. I also just read that yin yoga might be useful. I'll try going to yin yoga instead of the more dynamic one I currently do.

I've had to reduce my workouts due to plantar fasciitis (inflammation in the heel). I'm also now feeling some pain above the heel as well, maybe I have achilles tendinitis as well. The doctor told me the plantar fasciitis is chronic, but failed to provide any advice as to whether I should adjust my workout schedule. The first time he did an injection and I took some medicine and it helped a lot, the second time I went when it was returning, I thought I'd try other remedies, but I haven't really taken them up yet. It's getting worse, though, so I really should do something. But I also feel that my heels are getting more flexible in yoga, so could this inflammation be a normal part of that happening?

Wow, I put 400 hours into Mount & Blade: Warband's multiplayer (during one year, I think) and I thought that was a lot. Now I hardly play games any more.

I'm going to pretend that this thread is speculative, like "what if there was a game like SpaceChem in 3D". Yes, this will work. Bye!

Maybe The Witness will have an easter egg that unlocks the secrets of Braid, but it's inaccessible until the year of the PS4?

So far it seems to be pretty much that, although I'm sure a lot of the bad stuff will happen despite what you did or didn't do, it will just be a different way to get there. Episode 1 ending spoiler: