Gwardinen

If I had any money, I would be all up on those Planet Earth and Life Blurays. Since I doubt I will any time soon, I heartily recommend someone else pick them up, I'm certain they look glorious.

This is true, though I must admit given it was made in 1979 I was expecting more flagrant sexism from the characters that never really came. No one ever made reference to her gender or suggested she couldn't do anything because she was a woman. I'm not sure whether this is a sign that my preconceptions about films in the late 70s are wrong (maybe sexism was already a bit more subtle by then), or whether it's a sign of the exceptionality of Alien. That said, I will say that there were still moments of portrayal of the characters that seem somewhat gendered by the film itself (ie. it's the camera that is sexist, not the characters). The only characters we see cry at all are the women. Ripley briefly seems about to begin crying when she reads the special order, and the Lambert is semi-sobbing on multiple occasions. In fact she's seemingly the only one who is really panicking when Dallas is in the ducts, and the panic sobbing seems... conspicuously feminine? I can't imagine the scene being done that way with one of the men sobbing like that. She's again paralysed by panicky crying while Parker shouts at her to get out of his line of fire to the alien, and it could be argued that her womanly hysteria is what gets him killed - he has to rush in close to try to save her. No other character in the film is shown acting in this manner. They're either never put in the position, just being murdered too fast/off screen, or they're shown acting stoically or even heroically. Lambert is the only character who gets screen time during moments of weakness - she's the only one who is SHOWN to be weak, who actually behaves like a victim. Meanwhile, however, Ripley is a great character and acts like a human, but a competent and serious one. It's still surprising and great today! I can't imagine what it must have been like to see in '79.

I can't remember how I was recommended the Love Affairs of Nathaniel P. but it's really good. It absolutely nails some of the internal monologue of being a modern, liberal, intellectual male in relationships with women, and the bizarre ways you can find yourself slipping into horrible thoughts and behaviours. It's especially noteworthy for being so acutely insightful about men due to the fact that it's written by a woman.

Yeah, although I was kind of looking out for moments that passed it during the film and there's really only one scene in which the two female characters directly talk about something other than a man. Unless you count "raise landing gear"/"landing gear raised". So even Alien only just squeaks by.

I'm intending to watch it tonight. My attempted research on director's cut vs theatrical actually suggested the opposite, that it's the director's cut that is streamlined for pacing. But there's been a lot of dissent about which is better and what the changes actually accomplished. In the end I've gone for the theatrical cut primarily because it was the easiest for me to get.

Ehh, to present an opposing view I've definitely never felt much love for the combat. Mington seems to be mostly referencing the second game in what he says, and I really felt like success in combat in that game mostly had to do with the things you did before the fight. For example, your equipment, your talents, which potions you drank. Preparation, effectively. The difficulty level primarily just changed how much prep you had to do. I never felt like I won fights through much skill, and I never felt like I lost them through a profound lack of it, though it is of course an element in there somewhere. In the first game it's a bizarre clicking game mostly to do with being in the right stance for the right situation. Again, I didn't feel like success or failure was particularly dictated by moment to moment skill, if that's what you're looking for. That said, the combat is competent enough to get what you want out of the games, usually. It depends on your personal sensitivity to that as a sticking point.

What a brilliant idea.

Part of me wants to try those games, but a much larger part is completely done with point and click adventure games. I simply don't find their dodgy interfaces and inscrutable logic entertaining anymore. I'm fairly sure if I played those games I'd just be annoyed that I was being prevented from seeing the story.

Among other things, this election is making me seriously consider finally getting British citizenship. Not just so that I can vote, but also simply as protection against the direction of policy changes at the moment.

I saw that. I played the shit out of Starfleet Academy back in the day. I'm actually skimming through to get the nostalgia of the FMVs (!) between missions and such.

With hindsight, that's probably true. From what little I've seen of the start of TNG, Tasha was pretty boring. Whereas she's given quite a lot to do in the later cameos, particularly Yesterday's Enterprise. Her as a Romulan was also sort of boring, though. For them being such a major antagonist in so much of TNG, I never really felt like they figured out how to portray Romulans interestingly. With the possible exception of the episode with Troi disguised as a Tal Shiar officer, which had a few good moments of weird Romulan inter-departmental paranoia.

Scary Go Round is really good at times. I am slowly making my way through the archives.

Well if she was a PhD she probably wasn't wearing a lab coat to begin with. So dressing up as what she "was" would probably just have meant a suit. I presumed she was just dressed that way due to setting. The main copyable professions that would work there would be doctor, nurse and guard. They presumably chose nurse either because it was the easiest to make "sexy" or because they felt it fit Harley or both.

It was a little strange that you have two Named Plot-Relevant Characters just wrecking shit while around them everyone else dies in pretty human ways. GoT is usually a bit more egalitarian about that - season one spoilers for a moment: That said, the characters in question are defined in huge part by their fighting ability, so it's not as egregious as it could be. What WAS a bummer was the artificiality of the other scene you mentioned. You could maybe get away with that monologue being previously unknown, as it's a relatively personal event, but what threw me was how they go out of their way to have weapon specific moments like they're enemies being introduced in a game cutscene. I'm doing my best to write that off as just a particular style of Dornish melodramatic tendencies, though. We've seen one "sensible" member, but everyone else in this particular family has been overly theatrical from the get go, so I'm just sort of going along with it.

Just finished watching the latest Game of Thrones episode. Motherfucker. What a place to leave it. The series has diverged enough from the books now that I don't feel I have any real foreknowledge of the fates of any given characters, so when people I like are in trouble it's actually tense again.

Just watched Generations. I was expecting, given the prevailing poor perspective on it and the way my tastes and sensibilities have developed in the time since I first saw it, to find it had aged poorly. I actually didn't experience that much at all. There are a few hokey moments and odd decisions (why does Data have luminous highlighter yellow tears?) but overall I still enjoyed it. Perhaps it's just that the Star Trek films (pre-Nemesis) were a big part of my childhood. Perhaps it's because I've seen it several times before so my brain just tunes out the dodgy parts, or finds something else to focus on. Whatever the case, I had no real problems with the film - it was far from excellent, but it was certainly the right side of decent for someone who has affection for Star Trek, the original films and the Next Generation cast. That said, though, it did remind me that almost none of these films actually feel like Star Trek. They're mostly just sci-fi action films that happen to be in the Star Trek setting. As an example, almost no time was devoted to the actual concept of the Nexus, whereas in an actual TNG episode that would be the whole point of the story - it would be used as an allegory for examining aspects of the human condition. In Generations, we quite quickly skip over the idea of Picard's struggle with legacy and aging and death in order to get back to the action, and once the action is over we have a couple of token lines about what we leave behind not being as important as how we live. That sounds like a good lesson to learn, Picard! Why couldn't we have explored that a bit and learned with you rather than dossing about on a mountain, repeatedly falling off things?

Ugh. Those on set photos look awful.

This mostly reminds me that I fucking love playing Batgirl in Injustice. She is crazy good. So yes, I could be interested in this.

Weird, had no idea about Tasha's actress wanting that. Watching some of the season seven extra features, and it turns out they had a live orchestra to score every episode with! No reused music save the theme, there's just genuinely an orchestral soundtrack to every TNG episode. That's crazy, and explains why it's one of the few TV shows that I've actually consciously enjoyed and savoured the music in.

I had a fun time bumbling around Harvest Valley and Earthen Peak with Bjorn last night. He helped me find a bunch of items and crap I'd missed because they were tucked away in weird places, covered in poisonous fog or protected by a dozen huge scythe wielding nutters. Sometimes all of the above! After that I was just going to try dropping down the pit in Majula a bit to grab some items, when I discovered an entirely new area, with an entirely new boss. After that I discovered yet another new area, which was almost exclusively filled with rotting wooden structures in a seemingly infinite darkness. Made it through that. There's another area! At this point I realised I'd basically stumbled into the entire underworld, and when I found another bonfire I went to bed. Souls games are bizarre at times.

I just got to the Iron Keep! I think I more or less skittered my way through Harvest Valley/Earthen Peak. I was too scared to go off the beaten path while alone, and didn't want to make phantoms wait when I had any with me. So I killed the bosses but I'm pretty sure I effectively skipped most of the area. Looking at a walkthrough, there are whole sections and NPCs mentioned that I just never met... but it's a blighted poisonous hellzone, so maybe I should just be pleased I got through it? As for the Iron Keep, it's proving pretty hardcore. A lot of invasions, from both NPCs and other players. I'm not sure how well I'm going to do here without some phantom assistance.

So I watched "All Good Things...", the series finale of the Next Generation. I'm a little melancholy now that it's over, but I was struck by the fact that the episode itself is actually not that sentimental, for a finale. It definitely hits some good notes for a finale, with the nostalgia of the beginning of TNG timeline (and the inclusion of Tasha Yar again - it really seems like the producers decided it was kind of a mistake to have killed her and found ways for her to be in the show later on) and the cross between a "what if" and a "Jimmy went on to be President" epilogue in the future timeline. You get to be reminded of where the characters came from, and where they might go to, but it doesn't devolve into schmaltz at any point. Actually, there's very little sense of an ending in the episode at all. Even the very last scene, which certainly seems to be somewhat of an opportunity to gather the main cast together to say goodbye to them, is actually as much of a beginning - the beginning of Picard being more socially at ease with his comrades - as it is an ending. There's no intimation that the Enterprise's journey is coming to an end, and in fact the text of the episode is quite the opposite - the trial continues, the journey continues, humanity must continue to grow. When I compare this to what I remember of the DS9 finale, for example, there's a definite difference in tone. The DS9 finale feels like an ending, it feels like goodbye. As I recall, there's even a lengthy emotional scene with a song playing which is basically about how relationships end and how we should hold onto our happy memories while the camera pans over the cast. The Voyager finale, while not as sentimental in my memory, was also a genuine ending - the end of their long voyage home. I wonder whether this is the influence of Gene Roddenberry. I've heard a lot of things about how he affected production of Star Trek while he was alive, and I know there's division among the fans about how much of his legacy survives in the later shows. I'm not necessarily saying that all of Star Trek needs to be as optimistic as the Roddenberry era stuff often was, but I think part of me is glad that the Next Generation kind of stretches into this infinite bright future. It's sad at times, and difficult, but in the end the captain and crew of the Enterprise overcome each challenge as it comes, and we're given no reason to believe they won't continue to do so after our time with them.

I've been getting some of that too. I wonder if it's just throwing it at people who've watched general gaming videos.

I haven't been with a specific person all the time, but I just recently moved into a place completely on my own for the first time (previously having lived with 3, then 2, then 1 other person) and it was definitely kind of a mindfuck for the first week or so.

I dunno, if I don't actually have to kill the gargoyles I might just avoid that area. I don't really know any of the meta behind Dark Souls PvP and whenever I win against an invader I always feel like it was more luck than anything else. I've not seen any summoning signs in Huntsman's Copse yet, and having put down my own sign I've only been summoned once.