ThaOGDreamWeaver

Replies to yours..

Bumping for part 5:

thoughts on ep2:

In my headcanon, the Sundown event was an actual Nemesis conspiracy that worked... and like the Blip, characters have a vague memory of a life before, of people and heroes they met, though they are somehow different now... They can't quite remember the event itself, or what happened next, or why life resumed. Just that somewhere, there are heroes that made it happen. But some of the originals vanished to other dimensions, especially those who were in and around Portal Corp at the time. The original Emily Watson/Dreamweaver is now 50 - she's kind of getting used to the idea of aging at all, if disgracefully - and runs an occult shop / cat café in Earth-616 Apponaug, Rhode Island. Some people still grumble, but they can't deny the neighbourhood's improved since she moved in. As if criminals just turn round and walk away without knowing why...

]Just dropping this into your field of vision if you haven't run across it yet, as it's been released just in time for Halloween. And if there's a comic book connection, or a Paragon one, every good comic needs the Creys of the world. This follows the (mis)fortunes of the Sackler Usher family as they negotiate a make-or-break drug trial. It's got vibes of Succession, a touch of Mad Men as it flashes back through time, heavy elements of madness and obsession, Mark Hamill guesting as an absolutely terrifying golem of a lawyer... ...oh, and some out and out nasty horror, with great slow-burn setups, and some wonderful, elegantly evil touches. Plus a whole bunch of Edgar Allen Poe references from subtle to obvious to slightly damn dumb, but the Red Death episode takes the whole idea and rolls with it spectacularly. Even giving Prospero the chance to stop everything and avoid the fate he's due. You can almost guess what's going to happen before it does but it doesn't stop you tensing up ready for it. And you still won't get it right. Dear Sweet Freya in Asgard... Oh, and Bruce Greenwood's "lemons" speech is almost as good as the "forces of Nature" speech from Network. The kind of writing actors would kill for. And Carla Gugino is amazing in her multiple, multiple roles, from seductive strangers to animalistic, screaming visions of pain. And you can't say she didn't warn 'em... EDIT: finished the series now. For the most part, a nicely balanced blend of psychological and actual full-on hand-over-mouth-gutwrenching... Stellar casting - once again, all plaudits to Gugino: and that one last point in the spoiler box aside, cracking script, direction and... executions. Recommended.

If we're talking about Cryptic / NCSoft's mistakes through history... ...did anyone else ever play Auto Assault or Wildstar? AA was clearly a SJ Games Car Wars "homage" with quite a lot of Carmageddon thrown in, but the controls were appalling and the GFX needed serious work. Wildstar was gorgeous, lovely toony style, but needed quite a lot of time, involvement and practice to get anywhere serious with the content.

Heh. Wine lets you run more or less anything as Mac native these days, including CoH. There's now also an official Porting Kit (which is... well, still basically Wine plus some better instruction manuals). https://developer.apple.com/videos/play/wwdc2023/10123/ Something graphics-heavy works better with a couple tweaks so that it can use the Metal onboard GPU allocation. But there's not the barrier to build that there used to be, and there's a whole audience out there ready to goof off at work enjoy relaxing gaming time. And besides... it's set on a spaceship/generation ship, and all decent spacecraft are Mac-compatible. Even alien ones.

Technomagic? Golemborgs? Voice work (per the Steam trailer) is clearly from a speech reader, and an older model - but not bad for one that's rendering on the fly. Sounds a little like Balabolka. You can get better quality TTS than this these days: but not for free, and they tend to create out finished files that you can post on websites or social media rather than work as a plugin to another app. After 5-6 years of amateur development - with a pandemic on the way - this is still not a bad bit of work and it's got plenty of imagination in terms of setting and design. But it's going to need some serious polish before it's ready to have the Steam community unleashed on it. ...and a Mac client.

Tim Curry - Anything Can Happen On Halloween (from The Worst Witch)

Not least because it makes heroes easier to tell apart from villains, baby, yeah.

Mia Asano & Ally The Piper - Shippin' Up To Boston

Patton has the most Marvel credits (depending on how many Koenigs you count) and also starred in Ratatouille.

So, finally got round to this tonight. I'm two episodes in, and thoughts so far... Now updating for Parts 3 & 4:

Industry note:

I understood that reference... 😊 thoughts:

A Tribe Called Quest - Can I Kick It?

Joan Jett & The Blackhearts - I Hate Myself For Loving You

Goldfrapp - Strict Machine

Me either. I have people to do that for me. ...this is the understatement of the decade... Yup. Also, it's worth looking at each movie in its own right, not just because actor X is or isn't in it. I mean, "Keanu Reeves, action hero" still has the inner 90s' me going "...whoa...", but after Speed, that happened, and now we have Ted Logan as a franchise-making dark avenger dude. I can't imagine why or how Cage maintains his phenomenal work rate - or how stir crazy he must have been going in this strike. But he's clearly got to that Bob De Niro era in an actor's life where they've gone "screw it, let's do everything". Cage is just gutted he missed out to Bob on that Stardust role...

Thoughts:

This sorta exists in the UK, though from a thoroughly evil source. Sky's bundling integrates P+ and Netflix free on certain packages, and while D+ and Amazon need separate subscriptions, all their content becomes searchable from the same single menu structure. So I get the feeling the cable carriage fees that are slowly dying out for major US channels (apart from the Not-News-because-nobody-sane-would-believe-us-honest-guv Channel, unfortunately) might be replaced with content access fees for the streaming apps.

Picard S3 felt a little more disjointed plotwise than S1 or S2, but by the Great Bird Of The Galaxy, does it deliver on fanservice and pure joy moments... As a sendoff for Picard - and just maybe the start of a Legacy franchise - maybe not perfect, but damn if it's not entertaining. That said, I still haven't felt the need for Paramount beyond the end of my discounted trial. What else have they got that's worth it? I still also strongly feel, given the current market conditions, that there will come a shakeout of all the streaming platforms with at least one or two biting the dust. Paramount+ and Discovery+ seem the most vulnerable. Disney+ has a great content lineup but also very grumpy shareholders (and dopey, and sleepy, and...)

Look, they're under 40, I consider them basically teens and immature. Grrr. Youths! *shakes walking stick and accidentally fries passing cyclist with a lightning bolt* ...oops. Sorry. My bad. I tried watching it, but - despite Maisie being cool as usual - didn't grab me either by the feels for the characters, or by the throat with fear, and gave up after about half an hour. Felt like it wasn't quite sure either in plot or direction what it wanted to be. If it feels like a bit of a mess, the production history is making me cringe in pain and want to send chocolates to the cast and crew in solidarity. Because sweet Freya in Asgard, this doesn't sound like a fun gig. And given Fox had started to lose interest in the franchise after Apocalypse, it had no serious budget, promo or management backing to play with. Per Wikipedia: Fox wanted the book made into a YA Stranger Things-y flick, but then flipped it into a horror movie when IT (2017) came out. Executives wanting to redo movies based on the zeitgeist is a Bad Thing, BTW, and is why management need to give them shock collars if they send more than five notes a day. There then followed two years in Post-Prod hell - a much rarer and more terrifying punishment than Development Hell, with reshoots, plot changes and even whole new characters being mooted and then dropped. After the acquisition, Disney put back some of the horror and stripped out some of the X-references, and it tested... okay, but no reshoots or additional scenes were filmed, even the usual fix-up pickups. Partly for budget, but mainly because the cast had aged three years since the main shoot. Also, a lot of the final cut had to be done by a lone editor as the director (Josh Boone) was already off making The Stand. As if that wasn't enough, the release date was March 2020, right at the start of COVID, so it went DTV, with a contractually-required cinematic limited release in October. And then the critics got at it - eventually, as Disney refused to provide screeners. And then came the neckbeards... Let's hope - given Amazon were prepared to give The Boys the fairly terrifying level of creative freedom they were allowed - Gen V fares better. From your enthused noises, it certainly seems to be - will be tuning in later this weekend...

Lori Chacko ft Elvira, Mistress Of The Dark - Once Bitten, Twice Shy

I'd been saving this one too... I guess they wanted to have something like a Christmas single for the best time of the year? Muse - You Make Me Feel Like It's Halloween