Pretty sure that plant is trying to mind-control him.

Arcane.

I missed the hype for Arcane season 1, mostly because it didn’t really seem up my alley. I figured it’d be boring to me because I wasn’t into that specific game, or too juvenile for me, or something.

I was really wrong. Really, really wrong. It stands on its own and season 1 has the strongest storytelling I’ve seen in anything in a good, long time. You don’t need to care about or play League of Legends to watch the show. And it’s very much NOT a kid’s show even if it starts with kid characters…it touches a lot on crime, poverty, mental illness, etc. It’s very honest and truthful and complex and nuanced on these things.

And every aspect of storytelling was strong. EVERY ONE.

What I mean by that is this…in most TV shows, animated or live, you usually have one form of strong(ish) storytelling carrying the entire thing and compensating for other things that are weaker. So a show will have one or two stand-out aspects, and others that are okish to bad, but able to be overlooked because of the other awesome things going on.

Like, you might have a poor script but really good actors who can elevate the poor script with their spoken intonation or physical acting. Or you might have a good script and really good soundtrack but mediocre acting and bland costume/set design. Basically, script, art/costume design, music, and actor ability all play together to deliver a story, and usually you have one or two of those that are strong, and the rest are being carried by the strong parts and ranging from competent-but-not-awesome to mediocre to bad.

Arcane’s not like that.

Arcane has top-tier storytelling on the writing level, AND on the art and animation level, and in the choice of songs for the soundtrack. Like, the script itself is fantastic, but then you watch the animation and see they decided not to use common animation shorthand. Instead, they went back to actually LOOK at how humans display emotion and move their bodies and translated THAT into their animation. So you have a strong script AND strong “physical acting”. How they frame shots is fantastic too. And if that wasn’t enough, all the music is stellar and pertinent to the scenes it’s used in. And if THAT wasn’t enough, even the design of the characters BEFORE they even move or speak is top-notch. And if THAT isn’t enough the voice actors are phenomenal too.

For Season 1, nothing’s carrying anything else, everything is strong. And that’s EXTREMELY rare in ANY show. So, so, SO rare.

Season 2 is not as good–but that’s really just in comparison to how outrageously and unusually good Season 1 was. I’d say in Season 2, the script is not as tight, but all the other things are still as good as Season 1. So the animation/art design/music/etc. carry the script a little in the second season. The script isn’t HORRIBLE though…it’s mostly the pacing is off and it’s missing some appropriate build-up in some parts. I’ve read they had to cut some scenes, and if that’s true it would completely explain the flaws. The second season also suffers a bit in comparison to Season 1…Season 1 did everything right, so anything that’s not perfect in Season 2 naturally sticks out. It doesn’t make it bad though.

Anyway, yeah. Watch Arcane, if you missed that boat previously.

I read that as Miette and did a melodramatic voiceover in my head.

Not from a video game exactly, but in the early days of the internet, I had urges to delete things instead of putting them into the trash.

Just so anyone reading knows…some games with Linux binaries sometimes run better using proton and the windows binaries.

Crusader Kings 3 is buggy with Linux binaries but fine using proton, while Stellaris is the reverse for me. Ymmv.

I’ve been trying to move to Linux for about 20 years, but gaming issues always sent me back to Windows.

I tried again after hearing about how proton and steamdeck have made it so much easier for most games and it’s true. Been exclusively on Linux on my gaming rig since about September. The only one I couldn’t get working was oddly a little simple indie game, it lagged badly while stuff like No Man’s Sky and Cyberpunk ran fine.

Microsoft is pushing this at a very bad time, because you CAN game on Linux now.

I really don’t like this article because it reminds me of the crazy health nut parents who get disgusted by fat babies and try to make them diet for “health” and instead starve them. Babies are supposed to be fat.

Is the writer here applying guidelines for adults to babies? Babies are supposed to take in foods that are high calorie. I think Nestle is a shit company, but I am extremely suspicious of the article.

Does it turn into a gryphon when it grows up?

And would the fiber from its cocoon be considered fur or silk?

Yeah, I’ve had such an easy time of it that I’m actually surprised when a game doesn’t work in Linux now too. Which is a reverse of how it used to be.

I switched from Windows to Linux in the last year.

There are sometimes odd things to configure, but it’s no more difficult than the windows XP era was.

It is much much easier than Linux used to be due to Steam, and I find I more often have problems with smaller indie games than big ones.

I’ve been playing Cyberpunk, Baldurs Gate 3, Stellaris, No Man’s Sky, Crusader Kings 3 no problem. Plus many others.

I tried to game on Linux for many years with wine, but it was Steam that actually made it feasible for me .

Fred’s absolutely a setup to have Brent Spiner appear as SOMEONE in some episode.

And given Season 3 of Picard, it might even be Data, with his new hybrid with-bits-of-Lore personality.

But it could be a human Soong too, or another Soong-type android (I absolutely hate they call them “synths”, all I hear is Fallout references.)

Edit: It just really stood out to me there was a line referencing that Fred might have “a family”.

I was raised Catholic in a deeply Evengelical town. The little girls were saying out of the blue that I wasn’t Christian. I was like 8, they were like 6. They were absolutely parroting what their parents said, there’s no way the little girls I played with daily came up with that shit on their own, and since then I’ve noticed that’s one of the “protestant culture” things that gets passed around in those circles and occasionally escapes. That Catholics aren’t Christian because saints or whatever.

They get all wound up about the “pagan” elements of Catholicism then turn around and worship their dollar bill golden idols. Hypocrites!

But basically, Catholics get crapped on when there’s no other minority around and they are tired of talking about Jewish folks.

I don’t practice, I’m atheist, but in the USA from a culture perspective Catholics aren’t in the WASP good old boy group, even if you are otherwise white. And WASP types are happy to let you know it, although its less common than it was a few decades back.

Biden being Catholic, and JFK before him, is basically a dog whistle to certain rightwing groups to make them lose their shit, it’s just less obvious than, say, Obama being black esp if you don’t have a family background that would expose you to that stuff.

Like in a file?

Bitwarden already syncs between PC and phone.

What solution would you suggest if there’s shipping damage to contain the leaking cleaning fluid so it doesn’t damage any nearby objects?

The reason dog food is a no for cats isn’t because it’s harmful if they eat a kibble or two, but because dog food isn’t fortified with an amino acid cats need, taurine, so feeding a cat exclusively on dog food will result in a type of malnutrition in the cat.

https://www.petmd.com/blogs/nutritionnuggets/cat/dr-coates/2014/december/what-taurine-32287

Aren’t there, in blind cave species where there’s no pressure to select for coloring to protect from the sun or to camouflage or display for mates?

Then science better get going on artificial, external wombs. A lot of people would be overjoyed to be able to have kids without the physical risk of pregnancy, and the technology seems like it’d be mandatory for true colonization efforts

I ran into something like this from a company named Botrista who was supposedly hiring remote positions. I got suspicious before they got my personal info, dug deeper and found their site ran on wix, tried to contact them by other methods to see if I could get a real person, and concluded it was all a scam to collect the typical prehire personal info like bank accounts, ss number, home address, etc.

It legitimately surprised me back when Russia first attacked Ukraine how parts of the internet suddenly reverted in tone to how the early 2000s internet used to be. The posts pushing subtle division in random message forums just stopped for a few days.

Really made me realize how pervasive the social engineering of English speakers by outside agencies has become online. I think about it much more, using that brief cessation as a touchstone. Like, my memories of forums being saner weren’t false, heh.

That’s a really good point. There were individual trolls and general cruel maladjusted scum, but they hadn’t yet been courted or manipulated by political orgs and fed collective marching orders to sow discord.