Chimp with a Limp

I read this when you posted it Al but never commented. Horrible stuff behind the scenes.

I had this discussion with people recently. The first phase of Marvel was great. Six to ten unique, interesting individual movies to set up the heroes. Iron man, captain America etc. Then a few movies to add a few more people and set up a big bad guy.

This phase just seems all over the place. House of Harkness movie or TV show? Who gives a shit? One of the other witches from the Wandavision TV show gets their own show? No thanks. 

A postmodern ironic self-aware oompah loompah. I honestly wouldn't have predicted that casting if you had given me 100 guesses 

He does far less swinging on whips and crazy acrobatics as an 80 year old, understandably, and there's even a scene where he's just climbing up a wall and listing things like his crappy knee and what's wrong with his body. 

I hope you like it if you go see it!

7 hours ago, sawall said:

37C at night

This sounds like my nightmare. It's 6°c here currently, grey and cold, but I survive perfectly fine in this weather and enjoy it. I can't do hot 😞

Nah, running from a PC at far end of house via the moonlight app running on a chromecast plugged into the projector, and a bluetooth controller connected to the chromecast. Weird but it works great. I bought the dualshock 5 because I needed a good controller for games

I'll definitely try the first person view. It fun to just go about the city and hear people swear at me

Watched Indiana Jones and the dial of Destiny yesterday. I actually quite liked it and it's probably my third favourite after Raiders and Last Crusade. It's long, like everything is now, and probably if it was 1h45 it would have been even better. 

There's a full half hour at the start with a CGI de-aged Indiana Jones and you know what? It's good. It looks fine. He still has the voice of an 80 year old man though which is jarring.

Most of the movie is set in 1969, so it's fun to see that kind of era when we're used to just WW2 nazi punching Indy. 

I'll say this, the final fifteen minutes or so are so unexpected and great, I sat up and was thinking I've no idea what's going to happen here. The rest was pretty formulaic in an Indiana Jones way, but that last bit was very good and I've not seen anything like it really. 

I reckon I'd give it maybe a 7. Target audience is probably my exact demographic, people who saw some of the others in the cinema.

I wrote this in 2007

"talk about the upcoming Indiana Jones sequel? Personally, I'm looking forward to it but boy, does he look old."

"In a ruined and toxic future, a community exists in a giant underground silo that plunges hundreds of stories deep; there, people live in a society full of regulations they believe are meant to protect them."

Silo is one of those great TV shows you watched the first episode of then think about it as you go asleep. We binged season one in about four days. It's really good.

10000 people live spread over 144 floors in an underground silo. They've no idea why they're there. "Relics" of times before the silo are illegal contraband - things like books and toys. They can leave whenever they want but it's a spectator situation because they die pretty rapidly outside.

If you haven't seen it yet, give it a go. One of my favourite shows in a while.

I reinstalled this today, was playing it on a big projector screen and it was wonderful. It's nice to go into settings and it's all on "very high" you can even tick a box and say really go for it and it'll change draw distances, shadows etc to crazy levels. It looks gorgeous. Really excited to play it though.

One difference is that I'm playing it using a Bluetooth dualshock 5 connected to my PC. I'd kind of rather be using keyboard and mouse because I've never gotten the hang of precision aiming using the controller. However, the controller works best for the room I'm using the projector in

Really looking forward to playing it through

The gun you got at 14.45 or so was hilarious. Flaming skulls, with an appropriate reaction by you. That worked really well I thought

It's a fun thing to do, glad its working 🙂

I've only managed it a handful of times but I just ascended Brogue. That was incredible fun

What won it for me was the combo of

• a highly enchanted staff of conjuration, which creates 15 spectral blades that float around and attack enemies
• a good ring of wisdom, which recharges staffs more rapidly like the one above
• A legendary ally, the Phoenix, which isn't particularly good but regenerates when it dies

It means I could attack and distract even the most horrible of enemies from afar. Things that could one-shot me were surrounded in blades. The blades barely damaged them, but they were enough to make the monsters stop and fight them. The ones that easily got rid of the blades, like the Nagas who attack all adjacent squares at one, ended up fighting my phoenix while I got away

Gonzos look entirely stolen

I'll watch this in a bit fully but it looks good 🙂 You can record the entire live feed right in the headset though, right? No need to capture using a 3rd party tool. Just plug headset into PC after to tranfer the file, or you can even do it wirelessly. Video file saved will have game and mic audio no problem

I've made dozens and dozens of vids of Quinn playing VR games.

You can set up a second camera, even a phone, elsewhere and layer them on top of each other if you like using any video tool. Excuse the lame greenscreen, I was no good at it back then

The trailer for the Wonka movie has "dropped" so give it a whirl.

My main feeling was disappointment, or apathy maybe. He just doesn't seem to be right as Wonka. I'll likely watch it anyway but if it's just nods and references and whatnot, so be it. Gene Wilders performance was one for the ages in the original. Anyone else is doing a weird impression.

Looks like CGI aplenty too. When the large title came up "from the director of Paddington" I liked it less. Not because Paddington was bad or anything, but just because.

I'm back playing Brogue, I can't ever really get away from it. Some of the things I like are that you're a generic dungeoneer at the start, not a wizard/barbarian etc and you're at the mercy of what the RNG dungeon generates for you. Find a staff of lightning early, ok, lets try a wizard run. A ring of stealth, ok, lets go thief. You can obviously pick and choose as the game progresses, swapping out stuff for different/better stuff but in general each run is different because you won't know what you might get.

It's thoroughly tactical. I'm so happy that its turn-based. Almost every game, some incident happens where I have to take my hand off the mouse and stop and think and try a last ditch escape. In one of my last dungeon runs, I was fighting an ogre on the edge of a lava pit. When an ogre hits you you fly backwards a space - it knocked me right into the lava. However, at the very same turn, a spider launched webs at me so I was suspended above the lava, unable to move, knowing if I tried to move too much I would drop into the lava. I had to stop and work out what the hell had happened, and look through my pack for anything I had that might fix this crazy situation. Glug-glug, drank a potion of levitation and wriggled free, floated off across the lava pit away from the enemies and continued on.

I've been playing the community edition which fixes a lot of the odd bugs, but I've not noticed any differences really. I guess it's more about not being killed unfairly, which is something they work on I believe

On 07/07/2023 at 18:43, Al. said:

 

I'll probably get the Quest 3 when it launches later this year.  A lighter set without the Fresnel blur of the Quest 2 sounds great.

 

I like to hear that. My friend group here are not sure yet. We play pretty much just walkabout golf which is easily one of my favourite games ever. They've released a set of Jules Verne themed courses. The presence, fun and course design is wonderful.

Other than that, cornhole is a weirdly fun and accurate game. It feels exactly like throwing those bean bags around.

Hope to see a stream of yours some time!

Threads will be the new hotness and all the influencers well flock there. I barely use any social media at all and it's not because of some holier than thou feeling. I just never got from it what others seemed to. Twitter at it's peak was probably amazing, seeing celebrities you love interacting. Reddit is my only vice like that and it's so niche in what I use it for. Wellington is so small (150k people?) and we've such a big userbase in Reddit Wellington (75k) that is super easy to have your finger on the pulse of everything. Obviously not all of those accounts are live, current residents of the city.

Facebook died an awkward foul death of irrelevance. Reddit semi imploded, Twitter exploded after musk. It's probably shrewd of the Facebook brain trust to gobble up the migratory folk.

Watch this space for Threads to add new features. A wall, live chat, friends.. and before you know it, it's Facebook 2.0

Makes me want to try it again to be honest. I think I will

On 13/10/2006 at 10:37, Al. said:

 a familiar falsetto but a different name slapped on them. In 20 years time like.

Spooky premonition

Just had the 15th savoury cinema show, which was Eternal Sunshine of the spotless mind. Fantastic positive feedback and we almost filled the new larger cinema. Had enough left over after paying venue and buying popcorn, lollies and drinks to get in some prizes as well. 

Thanks for the suggestions 🙂 We check out new music regularly

We watch Later with Jools Holland weekly and they were all talking about Glastonbury. I'm going to try to grab some Glastonbury to watch online.. 

Weirdly enough, there seems to be a semi regular flow of games using the Aliens franchise. I picked up Aliens Fireteam elite for about $3 which came out two years ago. Absolute dung. They've made the iconic scary alien into a just a boring FPS wave shooter. The voice acting is very poor, no tension, no fun. I played the first level which was just your commander saying into a comms, go to the generator room, press a button. Aliens attack. Now go to a different room, press a button. Aliens attack. Sometimes you get attacked going between rooms. I must have killed up to a thousand aliens personally by the first level being over. Maybe multiplayer it would be good? Won't be playing again.

There was some interesting fun when the reddit changes were announced and a few seriously disgruntled nerds said, ok we'll make our own /r/wellington so as not to help reddit. Within two days it had 75% right wing super conservative posts. Basically anyone who was kicked off reddit (not by me, by reddit) for extreme anti-trans, racist stuff needed a new home and when people spun up a new one elsewhere, that's where they went. Lemmy was one, made by extremely militant communists I'm told, pro CCP, pro Russia. There were a few others. I saw one post on one saying "can we make a bot to copy all the posts from reddit to here so we have content".