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Messages - Fiero

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61
Tenet is a lot better than I thought it would, but also so self-serious that it crawls all the way up its own ass.

And then it dawns on me that that describes pretty much every Nolan film.

Every time I read Nolan talk about his films, I lose some appreciation of those films. Tenet was already in the ground before I even considered watching it.

62
Now that Xbox Series S/X have turned out to be emulation beasts, combined with its ingrown ability to play every worthwhile thing that's been published on a Microsoft console over the past 20 years, I'm starting to think that might not be such a ridiculous idea to get one. Too bad Sony doesn't publish cross-platform, or that'd be the end-all be-all gaming machine as far as I'm concerned.

I still find it absolutely ridiculous that we still have proprietary consoles as well as first- and third-party exclusives in this day and age. If it hadn't been for the consistent cash cow of online subscriptions we'd have probably wound up there along with with swappable upgrade modules every couple years. But no, we're still stuck in the razor blade business model and now forever will be. GD-nonphysical media-ITA.

XSX does seem worth it (and I say that just having bought my X1X in the Spring) but these scalpers are ridiculous. The fact that they don't have enough stock is ridiculous. It's all ridiculous.

63
Read through all the Earthsea novels by Ursula K Le Guin for the first time. It was a refreshingly different fantasy world from what I'm used to. Nice to see conflicts resolved some other way than blasting each other with magic or swords.

Read The Empress of Salt and Fortune by Nghi Vo. Excellent novella with a neat premise (cleric of an order that records memories talks to someone she finds in a ruin about the days at the end of an empire).

Currently reading The Fifth Season by NK Jemison. I'm not 100% sure what I think of it yet but compelled to finish it, at least. The setting is interesting (supercontinent where certain people are outcast because they can cause earthquakes, but those people also keep disasters from occurring through an organization that keeps them in line).

64
I remember maybe once a month to come take a look. Sometimes it's once a quarter. Oh well. You'd think with all the extra time right now (working from home, pandemic lockdown stuff, etc), that I'd have remembered sooner.

65
Also Schitt's Creek, which is much funnier than I expected. I hope they come back for a movie.

66
I haven't watched a movie in so long.

67
Xbox Gamepass got all these EA games so I'm playing Mass Effect Andromeda. It's better than I was led to believe by critics when it came out. I didn't have a way to play it at that time or I would have already known that. Annoying bugs aside (I've fallen through a few floors, weird visual stuff, annoying repeated triggered dialogue). It does feel a bit too Ubisoft-open-world for my liking but I'm at least intrigued enough by the story so far to keep going.

Surviving Mars had most of my attention before jumping into ME:A. I'm sure I'll get back to it.

Playing a lot of Rocket League since it's FTP now. It's fun enough for a few matches a day before someone shows me how they're playing a spaceship simulator while I'm driving around on the ground like a doofus.

68
His Dark Materials season 2 is fine so far. I think that's how I feel about the show overall, "it's fine." Good enough that I'll keep watching, and I enjoyed the books.

Mandalorian season 2 is about as good as the first season. Even if it was bad, I'd still watch it because I'm still a sucker for St*r WarzzZZ. This still feels more St*r WarzzZZ to me than some of the other recent stuff in the property, so there's that, I guess. Fuck Gina Carano and fuck Rosario Dawson if she is actually in it, and fuck Disney, but damn it I want to keep watching.

Discovery Season 3 has been good so far. They've created a believable future for the universe that is actually interesting. But I want my space utopia back.

69
I started watching ATLA for the first time. It's fun and good so far.

70
Also watching Agents of SHIELD again. It's still fine but nothing special. Quake's seeming refusal to use her powers in situation's where there's no one who would really see her and using them wouldn't negatively affect her team and would probably deal with the "bad guys" easily has gotten really annoying over the length of the show. But I still enjoy Coulson.

71
Oh, I also forgot about the Harley Quinn series, which I've watched as it was airing. Fantastic little comedy show that came as a real surprise to me from DC. Feels almost like a spin-off of Batman TAS but twisted and warped in ways that make for a lot of fun. It takes a lot of risks and brings characters to the forefront that just absolutely make no sense being there. This show makes Kite-Man likeable, and I even felt sympathy for his story.  Fucking KITE-MAN. It also brought back Condiment King from TAS, lots of references to that show as well as to other Batman(+other DC) properties.

One complaint is that Harley's accent is inconsistent, which I can't entirely tell is on purpose (the Jersey dialect did seem to come back more when dealing with her own family, and in some other tense situations for her), or if it was just inconsistent VA work (Kaley Cuoco, who's also an EP through her company, Yes, Norman) or if it was inconsistent directing.

But overall, the show has been a lot of fun. There's been interesting takes on all the characters, mostly villains. But even the hero side is there and parodied  well, particularly Batgirl, Gordon, Alfred, and Bruce/Batman, and even a bit of fun with Damian Wayne as Robin. The show parodies a lot but most of it doesn't feel like it sits outside of how the characters have been portrayed in other media (Commissioner Gordon might be the exception, he's really exaggerated, but it's fun).

I really do think that Harley and Ivy really are best together, without Joker, even if they're just friends or if they're romantic. Seriously, fuck Joker.

72
I can't believe I haven't started watching the last season of Legends. Despite my enjoyment of it, it's like all the other CW shows; I like them, but I don't love them anymore. I have tried to get into Stargirl (phrasing), but I just can't bring myself to care enough about it to stay on top of it (again, phrasing).

Forgot about Legends. Last season of Legends was pretty fun and had some good and important character moments. One complaint I have about the last few seasons is that the superpowered side of the show doesn't seem to be doing quite as much stuff as in earlier seasons. In some ways, it's a strength of the show that they don't always rely on the supers to do crazy stuff to fix all their problems, but sometimes you really do want to see it. Not to say it isn't there at all. Constantine in particular probably uses his abilities most commonly, and he's been such a great addition to the show that I never want to see him leave now. I think he's just weird enough that he can't quite carry his own show and just interesting enough that he really improves this one. And I can't deny I like the look of him as well.

That reminds me, if you haven't seen Doom Patrol, it's a similar ensemble of weird characters (all powered, though), including a recurring role for a  Constantine stand-in that's different enough from Constantine to feel a bit unique but also feels like it lampoons the character a bit. Very fun. And Alan Tudyk as villain Mr Nobody is incredible.

73
I can't believe I haven't started watching the last season of Legends. Despite my enjoyment of it, it's like all the other CW shows; I like them, but I don't love them anymore. I have tried to get into Stargirl (phrasing), but I just can't bring myself to care enough about it to stay on top of it (again, phrasing).

To my shock, an hour after I posted that comment, i saw it was announced that Stargirl was picked up for a season 2 and will move to CW.

74
I keep thinking about going back to Animal Crossing, especially now with the added swimming stuff, the art, they keep adding stuff. But I paid off my loans and kind of lost interest at that point, and the fact that the wife and I had to share an island is so fucking obnoxious (only one island per console, regardless of the number of players using the console).

Got an Xbox One, played through some FPSes, had fun, but now I'm pretty much just playing Cities Skylines. I don't like any of the other city-builders currently available on the platform. It's making me want to work on a gaming PC to try some others but I'm not sure when I'll have the money for something decent in that domain. Oh well, I'll keep doing Cities Skylines until I bore of it, I guess.

Still anxiously waiting for Hollow Knight: Silksong. I saw Xbox One is putting up some demos for a week later this month and I'm hoping it will be in the lineup but I'm also not going to hold my breath. It has been at game shows in the past year already as a playable demo, but that's a very different environment to playing demos at home.

75
Reading China Mievelle's The Iron Council (third in the Bas-Lag "trilogy," in quotes because they're only loosely connected). It's been mostly fun. It hard a very strange section in the middle of the book where it broke away from a chapter structure and had probably the contents of 5-6 chapters as almost a stream of consciousness from one character's perspective, which the author did not do in the previous two books at all. That part was kind of difficult to get through, but the rest of the book has been quite good and what the character in the middle went through was still important to the story. I've enjoyed some of Mievelle's other work but I'm still unsure of recommending him in a general fashion. If you like weird semi-gonzo only-vaguely-steampunkish fantasy, it works.

76
Whatever it is, apparently the Amazon LOTR series will cover the Second Age going by the maps they showed on Twitter. I'm not very thrilled about this, since it's a fairly spaced out time frame without a lot of focused narrative...that means a bunch of ad-lib without the constraint of a known and proven story. Would it suck if it just did it's own thing in the fantasy setting? Not necessarily, but how much of the setting would there be to appeal to fans of the Silmarillion who are likely jonesing for an actual adaptation of First Age stuff?


I don't think they are going to cover the entirety of the Second Age, for the reasons you mentioned. My guess at the most reasonable choice is a bit before the War of the Last Alliance. Gives room to establish characters before going into giant battle seasons.




I'm kind of hopeful that it'll be the lead-up to
Whatever they do I hope they recreate the Fingolfin vs Mordoth fight. That's my top one, book narration included. Ive had a painting of it as my computer background for years now and I even had a poster of another one :3

It's going to be mostly second age, based on what little promo we've seen since then. They might do something similar to the films, where we saw the end of the Siege of Barud-dûr as part of a recap of former events. Even if that's all we get, would be cool to see that, and the death of Glaurung, the fall of Gondolin, the Battle of Sudden Flame and more, even if it's from a big view and not down in the details of it. More likely in such a preview we'll get some of the War of Wrath as that was the last big event of the First Age, followed by Beleriand sinking into the sea and Númenor being established, likely some of the events that take place in Númenor before whenever the show's setting starts (rather than all of the biggest battles of the War of Beleriand).

77
Watching Doom Patrol season 2, I'm still loving the fuck out of this show.

Watching Stargirl on DC Universe. It's been fun enough so far. I think the show might find proper legs before the end of the season but I wouldn't be shocked to see this be a one-season affair.

Watched some old Looney Tunes cartoons and forgot how fun that kind of mostly mindless humor can be sometimes. In particular watched Baseball Bugs and Hair-Raising Hare which were both a great laugh, and some random episodes from that same season which were fun enough but I wouldn't revisit by choice.

Wife and I can't decide when we're going to catch up on Westworld, if at all. Been hearing the most recent season is fairly sub-par.

78
I loved She-Ra and the Princesses of Power. It took what was ostensibly a TV commercial with stapled on morals and basically no plot from the 80s and gave it some actual life and characters instead of a bunch of carbon copies, characters who have their own real motivations and stay fairly consistent throughout the show. It wasn't perfect, there were some elements that really did get a WTF from me, but I'm happy with it and wish there was more coming. But obviously some of us are going to disagree on that. Also, the voice acting in both the original She-Ra and He-Man was traaaash. https://bogleech.com/toys/scorpia.mp4 Enjoying the originals in 2020 without nostalgia glasses is basically impossible, and the VA is the worst part of it to me.

I'm worried now that the Kevin Smith's He-Man won't go far enough in changing what was also really just a TV commercial with stapled on morals and basically no plot from the 80s into something that's actually good. If he tries to keep it to close to the original, than remaking it is utterly pointless.

Another 80s show that's had a fairly good remake, that I personally liked, was the 2011 Thundercats. If he gets close to that level of quality, then it'll at least be something decent.

79
Daveed Diggs is great, he's in the Snowpiercer series and it's one of only two things tempting me to watch it (the other being it's loose connection to the film). I was really into Hamilton early on, and it is a really good production, but I'm just not that into it anymore. Wife was really excited to watch it but about 30 mins in I was distracted by my phone again. Jonathan Groff's performance as King George was fantastic, and maybe some of the best in the show (Groff is also Kristoff+Sven and Jesse on Glee). I hadn't seen it on stage or anything, and honestly what surprised me the most was how little people moved around in some of the songs. I expected a lot more movement. Then some songs they did incredible things with the moving stage (concentric circles that can rotate, but not all of them have to move at the same time) which was really impressive.

Wife was on a bit of a kick of an 80-90s action flick run. Terminator, Die Hard, Kindergarten Cop. She couldn't stand Robocop, though. Too gory early on, before the hook of the story even gets in.

80
Picard overall finished fairly good, with some WTF caveats. Lol we completely dropped watching Magicians, will probably binge the final season at some point in the future. We also have completely forgotten to watch Westworld, but season 2 was mediocre.

I was worried about how well Clone Wars season 7 would be, because the first set of episodes were pretty good but not spectacular, the second set were okay but so focused on one character that it was hard to have anything interesting occur. The final set, The Siege of Mandalore, is really fucking good. It feels cinematic.

81
Some games I don't mind the difficulty, but I think with the newer FPS games the big issue I can't tell what the fuck is going on because the details blur together too much in some places. And their always so fucking dark. I miss the colorful cheery FPSes of yesteryear. But then some games I just won't even touch (Souls-likes).

82
Got an xbox for quarantine. Been playing whatever's on gamepass. Working through the new Wolfenstein games currently. For the most part they're good but I question whether I actually enjoy them when I'm not playing them. Also, I play everything on easy difficulty now because I'm an old man who's lost his touch.

83
Saw Onward and Toy Story 4. TS4 was fine, not great. Onward was actually pretty good and I cried when the brother was talking about his dad being hooked up to tubes and wires.

84
Alicia made me watch some scenes from Pinocchio with JTT. Fucking hell world.

85
Animal Crossing is kind of tedious and I guess that's part of why people like it? This is the first one I've really played. I don't think I would have liked some of the previous ones, though. It's like a narrowly defined Minecraft now? Or something? I like it and I can't even really define why. I just go pick up my shells and catch bugs and fish like a good villager does.

I got an xbox one x, so doing stuff on GamePass since I got a month with it. Saw a deal to get 6 months for 3 months cost, so I'll have it for a while at least. I'm apparently not as good at Halo as I was once. That's fine, though. Playing through Prey now, which is pretty interesting. I completely missed picking up the gloo gun at the beginning of the game, went through the lobby and most of the hardware lab before I was like, "Isn't that gloo gun thing supposed to be a key component of this game? I'm surprised I don't have it yet." Looked it up, and sure enough, I literally just walked past it. Good game, though.

I downloaded like six demos on Switch and haven't played any of them, including the Trials of Mana remake which I was pretty excited about. But that excitement is just sort of gone now and I don't know why.

86
Watched Kubo and the Two Strings. The animation is incredible but I couldn't help but thinking throughout about how white the cast is. Matthew fucking McConaughey as a samurai? Ugh. But the animation was so fucking good, and the story is decent.

87
I was just talking about her look from the anime. But they can cast any race they want and it won't affect the character.

With reference to your example I struggle to see why an actress of African descent is playing a character from Atlantis, as that comes from Greek legend and to my knowledge has nothing to do with Africa and thus wouldn't likely have black mermaid princesses living there. Then again, it's neither actually Atlantis nor a real place, so I reckon they can do whatever they want with it.

North Africa isn't that far from Greece. If Atlantis was somewhere in the Mediterranean Sea near Greece, it's also fairly close to modern-day Libya.

Of course, if you instead believe that video my mom shared twice on Facebook, or Aquaman, Atlantis was originally in the middle of the Sahara and it would make even more sense.

88
You know, Sonic the Hedgehog is not a bad movie. In fact, it's actually pretty good, all things considered.

Which is a shame, because I think hardly anyone is going to show up for it.

It opened stronger than what was previously the strongest opening for a movie based on a video game (Detective Pikachu). It's also Paramounts best 4-day opening since MI Fallout (2018). They did something right with the marketing or maybe it really is something that people just want to see. Maybe even the thirst for Robotnik factored in.

Yeah, I heard about that. And then Warner had venues change the title from Birds of Prey: And the Fantabulous Emancipation of One Harley Quinn to just Harley Quinn: Birds of Prey because they thought moviegoers were confused or something? Nah, guys. People didn't go because they're still scraping the horrible taste of Suicide Squad off their tongues. Doomed from the start.

Ah well.

I think there was some good logic to this decision, as far as name recognition. The listing mostly only had "Birds of Prey" because the full title is super fucking long. Harley Quinn is the main thing here, so while the full title is fine, they should have done this for showtimes to begin with. It isn't the only reason the movie didn't do well but I think it's a factor.

89
Got around to the Witcher. I think others have said this, but it feels a bit like the eventual evolution of the Raimi fantasy shows from the 90s. It's fun, at times it's really quite good, but the underlying frame of the show is pretty cheesy. Overall, I do like it but I totally get it when others say it was boring. Very surprised at how good they mad Henry Cavill look with grey hair, though he did look uncomfortable in most episodes. Like his gear wasn't fit well and was pinning his arms out.

Watching Picard and enjoying it. Not much to say about it. Like Discovery, its vastly different than the Star Trek shows that came before, so it's hard to compare it to other ST shows. The ongoing story is such a change. I'm not sure I'll enjoy the season as a whole yet but I've had fun with it so far.

Magicians season 5 isn't as good as previous seasons so far, IMHO. I never particularly liked Quentin as a character, but he sort of was glue between the other characters. Some of them working together now makes very little sense, and the only reason it did before was because Quentin was like a bridge between them. I'm curious where they go with it. And curious about this horrifying misogynistic pig-man.

90
I was enjoying LM3 yet never got around to finishing it. I should pick that back up. I also started and haven't finished Thronebreaker (The Witcher's Gwent's Single-Player game) and only finished the first area. I should get back to that as well.

Most recently playing The Dark Crystal: Age of Resistance: Tactics and honestly it's really quite bad. There's nothing about that's particularly interesting, except maybe some of the Jobs system, but I'm pretty sure everything they've done that's interesting has probably already been done in games I haven't already played. I was excited about this game because it's the first Dark Crystal video game ever, AFAIK. When I saw bad reviews, I was worried. When I saw it was $20 I was again worried. Glad that they didn't charge typical full price for this game because it's probably not even worth the $20. I bought it anyway because it's Dark Crystal but if any of you are interested in this game, see if it ever drops under $5 sometime, because it's definitely not worth $20.

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