Ran

Indeed, after a 20 year break. I think the song is solid, but unfortunately the bookies have it as among the very bottom. Once we're closer to the final, it'll be interesting consider who'll make it through each of the semis. Here's Tali's "Fighter", for Luxembourg, for those wondering: Not much movement in the odds the last days, but the London pre-Eurovision party took place without too much to note except that Austria's Kaleen gamely performed through a "wardrobe malfunction" that started almost immediately from the first dance break. I see among the hardcore fans that people have liked her "We Will Rave" but felt that she came off as too impersonal and media polished, and the humor and good-nature with which she dealt with her wardrobe issue made a few people warm up to her more:

Jeesh, favorite releases over my lifetime... 1978: Air-Sea War - Battle (played on the Atari 2600 at least 6 or 7 years after the fact; 1984 to 1986, thereabouts) 1979: Space Invaders (ditto) 1980: Star Raiders (ditto) 1981: Jupiter Lander (Played some years after release on a Commodore VIC-20) 1982: Tough year, with Dig Dug, Pitfall!, and Q*bert all in the same year. And Zaxxon, too. I'm thinking most of these were in the arcade when I played them (years after their releases, of course) so I'll go with Pitfall! which we had on the Atari a few years later. 1983: The old Star Wars arcade game with its vector graphics for the assault of the Death Star. 1984: 1942. (Didn't play until we got an NES in 1988-1989. 1985: Super Mario Bros.. (Ditto) 1986: Metroid (Ditto) 1987: Mike Tyson's Punch Out!! (Ditto) 1988: Super Mario Bros. 3 with an honorable mention to Tetris which properly released on the NES the next year. 1989: Strider 1990: Wing Commander with a bullet, honorable mention to Quest for Glory II: Trial by Fire. Oh, and Super Mario World, though I wouldn't have an SNES at the time -- think we got in in 1992. 1991: Wing Commander II and Street Fighter II. WC2 was sort of the pinnacle of space sims for me for a long time, but as SFII went from arcade to SNES, I probably ended up playing it a lot more. 1992: Wolfenstein 3D and King's Quest VI with its fully-voiced CD-ROM. Bonus nod to Wizardry VII: Crusaders of the Dark Savant. 1993: Doom, Star Wars: X-Wing, Frontier: Elite II, Sam & Max Hit the Road, Merchant Prince, Gabriel Knight: Sins of the Father, Star Fox, Master of Orion, Sim City 2000... yeesh, what a year. I've fond memories of all of them, but I'm going to go with Master of Orion. 1994: Star Wars: TIE Fighter or X-COM... yeesh. TIE Fighter I suppose, I went through so many cheap joysticks thanks to space and flight sims. I also played Hammer of the Gods a lot. 1995: Interesting year, not a lot leaping out at me that I really played with any great intensity. Maybe Heroes of Might and Magic? 1996: Civilization II and Quake, but more the former than the latter. That was my first Civ game. It ate way too many of my study hours when I started university. After this year, I never played a console again, and 99% of gaming was on PC (the other 1% being arcade games like Virtua Fighter). A more obscure game I'll add is Terra Nova: Strike Force Centauri, a sadly rather forgotten voxel-based game from the late, great LookingGlass Technologies. It's a first person tactical shooter where you play a power-armored soldier in a squad sent on missions. Some really memorable times playing that game. 1997: SubSpace, my first foray into competitive multiplayer games. It's kind of like a multi-player Asteroids, but you attack one another or try to capture the flag, etc. Lots of different modes. This was the point in time where I start to play video games a lot less often, so there may be some year-skipping going on soon. 1998: Soulcalibur at the university's student union arcade. 1999: The Longest Journey, one of the great point-and-click adventures, and kind of a last gasp for the genre in a lot of ways. Honorable mention to FreeSpace 2 and The King of Dragon Pass, a narrative strategy game set on Glorantha in the Runequest tabletop RPG universe. 2000: I missed a lot of the games that year, but I did play Ground Control. 2002: Freedom Force, absolutely fantastic super hero RPG that captured the Stan Lee-Jack Kirby silver age. Also, Medieval: Total War. 2003: Freelancer 2004: Rome: Total War and Sid Meier's Pirates!... I'd go with the latter over the former, played it I don't know how many times. 2006: Medieval II: Total War and the sequel to The Longest Journey, Dreamfall. 2007: Team Fortress 2 is one of the games I've spent the most time playing in a long while. I still pop in on occasion, despite the hackers, just for the sake of nostalgia and some easy fun. 2008: Mirror's Edge, classic parkour first person. 2009: Braid, Machinarium, and the renaissance for indie games about to begin. 2011: Bastion from Supergiant games, who'd go on to make a number of great games, including the awesome Hades. 2012: Crusader Kings II was my first introduction to Paradox's grand strategy games, and I made my first foray into Far Cry with the 3rd entry in the game. Also, the terrific Sleeping Dogs: But the true winner is the MMO The Secret World from Funcom, led by Ragnar Tornquist of The Longest Journey. We didn't play it that first year or two, but it was the first MMO Linda and I ever played, and we went deeeeep into it, hooking up with a cabal of mostly-Scandinavian players (plus the odd Brit and German). It ate up waaaay too much time until the game started to collapse on itself, and the revamp to Secret World Legends in 2017 kind of took the luster off of it and we stopped, alas. We miss it sometimes. After that it gets very tough to find anything. TSW kept me going until 2017, with the occasional foray into TF2 when I felt like it, but otherwise... ETA: 2018: Hades, although that was the early access release whereas I started playing it in 2020. It was a nice lead-up to the next game on the list.. 2020: Cyberpunk 2077, followed by the 2023 release of its expansion Phantom Liberty, possibly the best game and certainly the best expansion to a game I've ever played. I could easily do another run of that game. Outside of TSW and maybe TF2 (and Street Fighter 2 and its variants back in the day), it may be my single most-played game.

Watched In The Land of Saints and Sinners, a Liam Neeson film from last year set in Northern Ireland in the mid-1970s. It's in some ways a typical late-era Neeson film, where he's playing a man with a past who has a certain set of skills, but it's enlivened by the period setting, especially footage of the west coast in Co. Donegal, as well as the cast which includes Colm Meaney as a fixer, Neeson's long-time friend Ciarán Hinds as a garda, and especially Kerry Condon in a fiery performance as an IRA terrorist. (Oh, also Jack Gleeson -- aka Joffrey -- back out of retirement from acting, doing a good turn as a cheerful sociopath) I've enjoyed Condon's performances ever since I first saw her, years ago, in Rome as Octavia, and this particular performance shows a very different kind of character, flinty and hard and uncompromising. The film's let down a little bit by its rather formulaic back quarter, everything pretty much ends up as you expect it to, but it's a fun enough ride as that goes, and apparently most critics feel it's a sight better than a number of Neesons' recent paycheck films.

Loved all the call backs, and the Seinfeld-finale meta. Only thing I regret? No Jon Hamm. He killed it every time he was on the show, would have been fun to have a cameo from him.

Griffith is a pretty awesome character, though, just looked at as a whole. But if they like Griffith specifically for (spoilery horrible stuff), then yeah, I get your point.

It's really charmingly well-done, I have to say. Damon's charismatic, the casting is spot on for everyone, great humor, great pacing. Honestly, it's one of Scott's best films.

Having watched For All Mankind, I'd have gone for a marsquake causing a landslide that'll envelop the lander. Watney gets knocked out by a tumbling rock, biomonitor destroyed, and the crew needs to take off without being able to search for him.. But even there they'd have to both have NASA be stupid (placing the landing spot anywhere liable to be subject to landslides) and probably also exaggerate the power of marsquakes (think the strongest that has been recorded was like a 4.2 on the Richter scale, so it'd be a weird situation to cause a significant landslide).

I'm not sure what speed is given in the book, but it's strong enough in the film to have Watney go flying for a couple dozen yards, at least. Everything I've Googled says that 62 mph is the max anyone estimates for Martian winds. The toxicity comes from the massive amount of perchlorates in Martian soil. The only place on earth that matches that level of perchlorate in its soil composition is the Atacama desert, one of the least hospitable places on the planet. Besides that, Martian soil is also extremely alkaline. It's not impossible to fix these things. Given time and effort you could treat Martian soil to breakdown the perchlorates into chloride and also its very alkaline nature, probably by combining the soil with large amounts of water and adding some organic matter... but I'm not sure how they'd have made that work under the conditions Watney was under. But they don't even address it, and just treat the soil as needing water and some fertilizer.

@Which Tyler The Martian storm was exaggerated by several orders of magnitude, as Mars's atmosphere is only 1% as dense as ours, so not only do winds top out at ~60 mph, they have about 1% of the force of a similar wind on Earth. Hardly enough to tear away a big antenna and send a man flying, or even to necessitate an emergency evacuation. I believe the other big issue is that Martian soil is actually toxic to plants and microorganisms, so you couldn't just fertilize some soil and start growing potatoes. For dramatic effect, too, they just have Glover's character be the only person who even starts to think about slingshotting the Hermes back to Mars, when in reality it would have been one of the first things everyone at NASA and the JPL would have considered. They might have rejected it out of hand for the reasons stated in the film, but it didn't need a single eccentric to hit on the idea.

Rewatched The Martian. What a well-made movie. Yeah, it takes some leaps with science, but it's nice to just see something where people are solving problems through intelligence and knowledge rather than punching and shooting. Also, a fine cast, and a great script. I kept remarking to Linda how I liked the humor, and then looked up who adapted it, and no great surprise that it was Drew Goddard. Goddard started his career in the Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Angel writers' rooms, and his quippy humor obviously fit into that. (I'm not sure if the Project Elrond thing is from Weir's novel or an additon, but kind of too perfect to have Sean Bean in the room when they're riffing on that.) Also, skimmed through the 2nd season of South Korean game show, Physical: 100, where 100 athletes (current and former), bodybuilders, fitness models, ex-military or ex-firefighters, etc. compete in various physical challenges. Like I said, I skimmed it - there's a lot of padding -- but I started it as a way to pass the downtime during my trip the other week, and figured I'd wrap it up. If you like seeing extremely fit people performing feats of strength and/or endurance in a competitive environment, it's not a bad show to watch.

We're just a month away from the start of Eurovision, and it's that time to share a few links to the popular, the weird, the bad! Bookmakers this year have been a bit interesting, in that for a long stretch Ukraine was the favorite, and then (bafflingly, IMO) Croatian group Baby Lasagna was on top, but now as pre-Eurovision performances have been going around, Switzerland's Nemo with the song "The Code" has opened a sizable margin. But before we get to that, lets start our way down towards the bottom of the odds, where San Marino's Megara with the song 11:11 shares space with Moldova's Natalia Barbu and her song "In The Middle" These aren't really crazy at all, they're just rather meh. To be honest, most of this year is just a series of "meh" songs, with very few that are truly out there. So I'll skip ahead through some of the other dead ends (per the bookmakers -- you can find updated odd aggregation here) to the next song that I at least think is interesting, which is Poland's Luna singing "The Tower"; the one live performance is not the best (these pre-party events sometimes have dodgy acoustics), but here is the video: Right now at the bottom of the Big 5 is Germany, with Isaak's "Always on the Run". Nothing wrong with it, just uninspiring: Okay, here's a weird entry, just because the lyrics are kind of spacey and New Agey: Australia's Electric Fields, with "One Mikali (One Blood)": Right above that in the odds is Hera Björk from Iceland with "Scared of Heights", which may be the lowest rated song according to visitors to Eurovision World (9500 ratings putting it at 1.9). Not sure it deserves quite that low a rating, but... meh again: Next up from the Big 5, Spain's Nebulossa singing "Zorra". This has a certain fandom among the hardcore Eurovision fandom, and certainly it's got a nice rhythm, but I can't say Maria Bas's voice keeps up with it. The crowd in Spain loved it, though, as well as the thong-and-corset-wearing male dancers. From Denmark, we have Saba with "Sand", presently sitting at 22 of 37 songs in the odds. This is pretty milquetoast too, but she sings it well: Okay, here's a funny one, Estonia's 5miinust & Puuluup with the song "(nendest) narkootikumidest ei tea me (küll) midagi", which translates to: "We (Really) don't know anything about (these) drugs". Eurovision World has a handy multilingual lyric translation. First verse: You can find live performances, but the video needs to be seen: Slovenia's Raiven seems set to win the "Most Nearly Naked" prize this year, with "Veronika": The video goes further, with mostly body paint and angles. Her voice isn't bad, though, I will say. Georgia's Nutsa Buzaladze and "Firefighter" sits at 18 at the odds, and it sounds pretty good, but a live performance does not seem to be available which may or may not be a warning sign: LADANIVA from Armenia has a very traditionally-inflected song called "Jako", about a girl who's constantly told to be modest but she wants to live freely and dance however much she wants: Oh, here we go for odd -- Ireland, of course, the usual culprit! They've sent the artist Bambie Thug (bit of trivia: they are half-Swedish!) with "Doomsday Blue". Bambie Thug calls their music "Ouija-Pop", and ... well, listen to it: I think it's a mess, but what do I know? Weirdly, someone in Sweden seemed to have a similar idea, entering this year's Melodifestivalen with a song called "Circus X": Must be something in the Swedish-Irish water. Next among my fellow Nordics is Norway's Gåte with "Ulveham" (Wolfskin), a neo-folk sort of thing that has very few lyrics (two verses) and is mostly a lot of ullulating: And then Finland, with another song that has a certain popularity with the hardcore Eurovision fans, but, well, it's definitely a joke song. Also, Windows95man is no Hackerman! Here's "No Rules!" ... which he discovered was not, in fact, true, as Eurovision rules required them to blur the Windows 95 logo due to forbidding commerical advertising. LOL. You can't even buy it any longer, pretty sure it's out of support... Lithuania's Silverster Belt with "Luktelk" is kind of interesting, but bits of it remind me a little of The Roop, who I'm guessing are an influence: And next up in the big 5, the UK with former Years & Year front man (and pretty good actor -- watch him in It's a Sin, a heartbreaking miniseries about young gay men in the UK as the AIDs epidemic was beginning) Olly Alexander with "Dizzy". He's collaborated with the Pet Shop Boys before, I believe, and I can hear an influence in the music from producer Danny L Harle, but I find the lyrics a bit too repetititous: And just outside the top 10, the last of the Nordics, Sweden... who decided to send two Norwegian twins who are immensely popular among the younger kids. At least they are not Jedward... Here's Marcus & Martinus with "Unforgettable" (a big boast that I don't think they'll be following through on, but YMMV): At #10 at present is Kaleen for Austria, singing "We Will Rave", which is a very high energy song at parts. However, her live performance had a lot of people thinking she had room for improvement while others thought she was simply holding back and taking it easy with the performance: Next is Eden Golan for Israel, with "Hurricane". The lyrics and title of this song have gone through at least two or three versions, all considered too political by the EBU (IIRC, one of the previous titles was "October Rain"), until they settled on this. Someone did a comparison to the prior version and the changes were fairly minor. Near as I can tell, the actual music has been the same through all of it. Don't think there's been a live performance of this one, beyond a brief clip, but here's the video: Then there's Greece, right now at #8, with Marina Satti's "ZARI", which has a rather clever video shot around Athens: The penultimate of the big 5 is France's Silmane with "Mon Amour": Strong voice. Belgium's Mustii with "Before the Party's Over" is next in the odds: The Dutch have a popular entry in Joosti Klein's "Europapa". I'll link the video, as it's interesting but I admit also a bit confusing: Aspects of the lyrics and the visuals of the song made it seem almost anti-EU to Linda and I... but apparently the song's subtext is quite different; Joost lost his father very suddenly when he was young, and then his mother not long after, and so the coda at the end kind of recasts his musings on traveling in the EU but not feeling satisfied, with the burning of the very Euro-house in the video representing his breaking out of the self-imposed sadness he felt and instead finally enjoying the freedom he has. Something like that, anyways, as I understand it. Ukraine starts with the standard Ukrainian folk-inflected opening, but goes in a different direction when alyona alyona joins in. Can't say this is really a top 3, but support for Ukraine can boost it: Third place, we have the last of the Big 5, Italy, with Angelina Mango singing her San Remo winner "La noia", a cumbia-music inflected song (more on Italy later): I believe Angelina has said they'll be tightening up the song a little from San Remo, cutting down a verse or two and shortening the overall play time. Now, San Remo is a multi-night affair. In the "Superfinal" were five songs. "La noia" was #1 with the press and radio jury, but #2 with the televote. 2nd place went to Geolier's "I' p' me, tu p' te'", where the press and raido ranked it 4 and 5 respecitvely, but the televote loved it and made it #1 -- personally, I don't care for it. But when I heard the 3rd place song, Annalisa's "Sinceramente" -- which was #2 with the press and radio juries, and #4 with the televote -- well... I think this song would have performed better at Eurovision than "La noia", but maybe that's me: Now we come to the former front-runner, Croatia's Baby Lasanga and their song "Rim Tim Tagi Dim". I find nothing to like in it, but obviously mileage varies (it's still listed as #1 in Eurovision World's poll of who should win Eurovision). This is over-rated, it's a Eurovision hardcore fan gimmick song. Silly: And last but not least, the new front-runner, with odds at 24%: Switzerland's Nemo, with "The Code". Here's the live performance, but I'll add the video because I think it's pretty good: Quite some range on Nemo, seems to have some operatic training. And the video: Not too many odd-balls, as I said, this year -- mostly just mediocrity, alas. But a few good ones, and hey, at least I'll always have "Sinceramente" on my Spotify playlist.

Cohollo is never named ko in the books, so I think that is an error.

What's the con party situation like? In the convention hall, as has ecome the norm these days, or are there actually going to be room parties? I miss room parties.

Dying Inside is one of them, 100%, it's a genuine classic of the genre. Lord Valentine's Castle I know was in the 80s. The Book of Skulls, perhaps? That's 70s, anyways. The Stochastic Man, perhaps? Think that would be in the mid-70s... The thing about Silverberg is he's written so much stuff that it's hard to actually remember when they all came out. But Dying Inside, for sure, it's one of the nominated works.

Tiny one-inch castles? Hmm, I think that's unlikely to exist in any quantity. Best bet might be getting a cheap 3D printer and printing your own from free 3D models that are available online, maybe? Though at 1 inch square, the detail wouldn't be great, unless it was a resin printer I guess, which has its own issues.

She felt she had had so much awards success up to that point that she wanted to give others the chance to win, and so withdrew at that time, but noted it was not a permanent decision. She'd just had a string of good fortune, awards-wise, and felt she could let that one go, but would consider staying on a shortlist again afterward. She wrote about it on her blog

I wonder how much these retro-ish CGI cartoons inspired by Clone Wars cost relative to the state of the art. If they announced they were doing a Star Wars Legends: Heir to the Empire series adapting the Zahn trilogy, I'd watch it.

It's a weird one because the description ifrom Variety et-al is that Julia Garner will be playing Shalla-Bal, who in the comics was Norrin Radd's lover/wife, and will be the "Shalla-Bal version of Silver Surfer". Which is from an alternate timeline story (Earth X) from the 2000s, where the new Galactus (Franklin Richards!) turns her into the Surfer as well, so you have both Norrin Radd and Shalla-Bal at the same time as Heralds of Galactus. So, what does this mean? Are we getting two Silver Surfers, male and female? This undercuts the tragic, aloneness of the Silver Surfer, I have to say, but fine I guess. Or are they cutting Norrin for Shalla, and having her be the original and only Silver Surfer? The thing is, Norrin Radd is the character that has been around for nearly 60 years, a tragic, lonely figure, often philosophical. But the Shalla-Bal Silver Surfer was a one-off limited series gimmick. It feels weird, from the perspective of just a comic fan, to substitute one for the other. If they wanted to gender-swap the Silver Surfer, give her a new pre-Surfer name, maybe something reflective of Norrin Radd like the way, way out there Norra Radd (I know, it's too crazy!), and go from there. But who knows. Maybe it'll be two Surfers. And Garner's a fine actress.

If anyone runs into any others pages the act the same way, let me know. We've actually killed the specific rule that caused it there, but you never know what other security rule may get tripped by a random URL.

Skimmed the video, since I didn't actually watch the show, and he seems to raise many reasonable points I've heard from others. I winced when he turned to counting fan fic counts, but at least he acknowledged that the level of "horniness" in a show has a big impact on what people write. But it's true, TRoP is absolutely a disappointment in relation to its budget. That said, he makes the mistake many people make, re: HotD, that GRRM's involvement means approval on all aspects of the show. George is not the show-runner, he's not the writer of any of the episodes, and he and the showrunners have acknowledged in interviews that there are times that Condal and the writers makes choices he disagrees with but ultimately it's their responsibility to make and deliver the show, and they agree to disagree. But Condal genuinely involves George in all of these discussions, and at least explains why they want to deviate or do something different, so that George will understand it even if he disagrees. That's respect. We do not know what things would differ if George was in fact truly in charge of the show (well, other than the fact that he wanted to start way back when Aemon and Baelon were still alive), but it would not be 100% the same as the show we've got in regards to the places where they deviate from his story and setting. (I'm 100% sure the Velaryon seahorse would be an actual seahorse, though. #FixTheSeahorse)

The old copyright protection check. Brings back memories. It did lead to great extras with games, like the manuals with lore. Wing Commander had ClawMarks, Frontier: Elite II included a book of short fiction dramatizing done if what you'd be doing and seeing in the game And Ultima, of course. Maybe the gold standard of that era.

Catching up on these trailers, and Downtown Owl is supposed to be set in 1983 but everyone looks like ... now. Like, they made an effort with the clothes, but the hairstyles are mostly all wrong, as are the make-up styles. It's really weird. Them: The Scare, set in 1991, manages to be a lot more evocative of its era.

Funny, I saw this and thought of this thread, too. TL;DR: Tekken producer says younger gamers prefer these multiplayer games because they can then blame others if they lose, whereas in solo games they have only themselves to blame.

Did you miss the bit that he started working in the family business? He obviously did not come out of poverty. But, a lot of people get windfalls in life. Most of them don't turn them into Fortune 100 corporations. So, yeah, he was a good businessman. Doesn't mean, as @DMC says, that this means he knows anything about the movie business.

@Nittanian Give it a try now.