dium

Phaedrus' Street Crew
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Posts posted by dium

  1. Posted

    If I were to re-watch Crystal Skull I'm almost certain I'd find it awful. But when I watched it as a 17 year old I thought it was decent, and I think I gave it more credit than it deserved because I disagreed with other teenagers' arguments for why it was bad. Arguments that boiled down to "aliens were an awful choice" (which I still disagree with) or "the fridge scene was idiotic" (...which it was, but at the time I didn't think that sufficient reason to dismiss the entire movie). 

  3. Posted

    fwiw (prob not much), Idle Thumbs ads are some of the only ads I don't impulsively skip over. A HUGE part of this is brevity. There are other podcasts who put a lot of effort into making their ads entertaining, which I appreciate, but I'll take a short straightforward ad over a long scripted one with gags or w/e any day.

     

    That said. If I could pay Idle Thumbs directly and the ads would go away, I would do it.

  8. Posted

    I'm sure the suggestion algorithm is a good suggestion algorithm, I'm simply not interested in any suggestion algorithm (at this time). The real reason I'm likely to stick with letterboxd is probably just inertia, of course, but also I really like the diary paradigm. I like seeing a movie, recording when I saw it, and writing what I thought about it then (allowing for revision and more thoughts when I see it again). A diary paradigm also aligns well with how I'm writing for an audience of myself, you know, like a diary.

     

    I 100% don't trust myself rating a movie from memory beyond 'enjoyed' or 'didn't enjoy', especially if it's been longer than a month or so since I've seen it. When I started logging I spent some bored downtime going through movies I've seen in the past and giving them ratings before I realized how pointless an exercise that was, at least for my purposes. 

     

    32 minutes ago, Patrick R said:

    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've thought about this a lot recently. Since I've started logging movies I've realized that, in addition to watching few movies in general, I've watched exceedingly few movies that I dislike. I blame this mostly on vigorous self-curation that's easy to fall into without any effort: I would only see a movie once I was fairly certain I'd enjoy it.

     

    At this point I'd like to better understand what I like vs what I don't, and I think that necessarily means watching movies that I end up disliking. But it's a tricky thing, because I still don't want to deliberately seek out movies that I suspect are reprehensible or that are otherwise likely to really put me off. 

  9. Posted

    In December I started logging and 'reviewing' every movie I watch on letterboxd, and I really like it. Everything I log is public, of course, but I use it more like a personal movie diary than a social media service – at least in part because I don't imagine anyone would be interested in reading my highly uneducated thoughts about film.

     

    Forcing myself to form written opinions about what I watch feels good, and helps me better appreciate films in general. Or at least that's the illusion I'm getting.

     

    The user-created lists are also a lot of fun, albeit often in a big time-wasting sort of way. 

     

    Review-based algorithmic suggestions (which seems to be the big selling point of Criticker when compared to Letterboxd) doesn't really appeal to me. I've recently wanted to become more voracious with the movies I watch, not just in quantity but in diversity. And it seems to me that a suggestion algorithm based on what I already know I like would be counterproductive to that. Besides, the list of movies I want to watch is already huge and still growing – I don't need any help making it longer.

  11. Posted

    Super duper late, I know, but I finally saw Rogue One yesterday (which was, I think, the last day I could expect to see it in a theater without traveling somewhere inconvenient/suburban). It was kind of a bummer.

     

    It was a bummer disproportionate to the actual quality of the movie – which I thought was fine and kept me entertained, especially in the final act. But it wasn't great, and the worst parts for me felt like fan-servicey bullshit, and it's made me worried about how many more annual Star Wars movies I can take before I'm just spent on Star Wars. And that thought makes me sad.

     

    It's just one thing but, honestly, I probably would've enjoyed the movie considerably more if the CG dead actors weren't in it. What an expensive, technically impressive mistake. I can recognize the level of craft and the dollars on display but it's still not good enough, and it's only gonna look worse with every passing year.

     

     

     

    WRT episode 8 title: Ben is absolutely right, of course, it's 100% in line with past Star Wars titles. I still think it's an obvious, dull choice, but not inappropriate in the context of the series.

     

    I still think the best subtitles in the series belong to the two worst movies. Attack of the Clones has that cheesy old serial flavor to it but also some intriguing specificity that most of the other titles lack... and The Phantom Menace is just badass.

  13. Posted

    there's a balancing act with the glitch runs, where the weirder and more game-breaking the glitch is the more interesting it is to watch... up until a point, where suddenly the glitch makes the run terribly boring.

     

    I also tend to appreciate glitched runs substantially more when I'm familiar with the game at least a little bit. I need some context as to what is being skipped, what would've been in front of the curtain in the first place.

  16. Posted

    New York and Chicago still have a fair number of Mom+Pop used game stores, and yeah, they must survive on collectors because the prices range from dirt-cheap to vastly-more-than-expected. But they're fun to look around in! I especially enjoy perusing old PC game boxes, when possible. I (literally) do not have room in my life for old game boxes but I have repeatedly almost bought myself an old Monkey Island boxed edition.

  18. Posted

    TOP 4 RANKED 2016 GOTYs
    4: Rimworld, which was the first of its genre (descendants of Dwarf Fortress, IDK if there's a word people use) to really click with me

    3: Obduction, which may be my favorite Myst game now

    2: Quadrilateral Cowboy, which is definitely the coolest game on this list, in more than one way

    1: The Witness, of which I have too much to say, really.


    HONORABLE MENTIONS
    Like TychoCelchuuu, I played way more new games this year than I usually do. Most years I would struggle putting together any list at all, but in 2016 I played eight nine 2016 games! And since I enjoyed almost all of them, the non-gotys all get honorable mentions. I suspect XCOM2 would be my number 5 if I played more of it, but for whatever reason it got pushed aside and I need to go back to it. Civilization VI is probably the best vanilla Civ game to ever come out, but after 25 years of civ games and two still-amazing expanded editions (Civs 4 and 5) that apparent superlative doesn't mean as much as you might expect. Pokemon S/M is a Pokemon game that confirmed I still like those. EDIT: I forgot about Imbroglio, because it's a phone game, but it was great too!


    I also played Stellaris. I hear it's gotten better.

     

    SHAMEFUL LIST OF 2016 GAMES I OWN AND PROBABLY WILL LOVE BUT STILL HAVEN'T PLAYED

    Firewatch

     

    OLD GAMES THAT I LOVED IN 2016 (aka the real GOTYs)

    The Witcher 3

    Undertale

    Dark Souls

  20. Posted

    I was pretty bored with and still haven't finished ORAS (having never played original Ruby or Sapphire) but Moon so far has me much more engaged. This is fascinating since it really isn't a very different game at all, even if it's somewhat more different than usual.

     

    The visuals, the mixup in structure, and the quality of life changes are all nice and welcome. But I think the thing that's really sold me (at least in comparison to ORAS) is that I finally feel they want me to care about what happens in cutscenes. I don't mean to oversell them – they're fluffy and silly and not why you're playing – but whenever anything happened in ORAS (or earlier games) where I had to watch a thing happen or read more than 4 lines of dialogue I was desperate to skip through it asap. In Moon, so far, I'm actually fine watching the little bits of story unfold, to the extent that I almost don't realize that there's actually more cutscenes than usual.

  21. Posted

    The erasure of bi men is maybe the grossest part, but the bit about gender differences wrt attraction and age was also disgusting. Disgusting! Knowing that's going on under the surface is probably enough to keep me from enjoying Rimworld from now on.

     

    It was a good video game. I suppose I should regret giving it my dollars (especially since Sylvester seems to have entrenched himself in his harmful pov rather than have any discussion about it) but mostly I don't, I had a lot of fun with it. I'm thinking, now that I really can't go back to Rimworld without seeing the gross ideology behind it, it might push me to finally learn and play Dwarf Fortress.

     

    (unlikely)

  23. Posted

    I love bilingual puns, though. They usually need to be explained to me but that's fine.

     

    ***

     

    The music in Civ 6 actually is based on specific civilizations: each civ has their own theme (based on some traditional music from that part of the world) and different versions of that theme for each era. However, the music you'll hear in any given game of Civ 6 is based not just on your own civ, but also all the other civs you've met. So if England is in all your games, you'll always get Scarborough Fair in the mix.

     

    I am SO curious as to what track apparently sounds like the Muppet Show theme. I'm sure it'll pop out at me eventually in some future game session.

  24. Posted

    I'm still in the exploratory phase of playing this Civ game. By which I mean: I'm happily playing on Prince difficulty, realizing I've made blatant mistakes 2 or 3 turns after I've made them, but keeping good pace anyway. By the time I want to start challenging myself, I hope most of the cheesy exploits are patched out. High difficulty-level Civ (and multiplayer, I assume) always involves capitalizing on every little mechanical efficiency and exploit, but some of these go way beyond "little".

     

    Anyway, the game definitely has the same psychic attraction as the series always had with me. I suspect I'll be spending much of my work week thinking about coming home to play more of it. But of course, I'm still several thousand turns away from being able to measure it up against its predecessors in any meaningful way.