Ran

10 minutes ago, mormont said:

f you go back to the '70s, you can see Bob Silverberg get nominated three times in two years ('72 and '73) then again in '76 and '77: and if anyone here can name any of those novels without looking it up, I'll give them a lollipop.

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.

37 minutes ago, Ormond said:

Back in 2020 Ann Leckie declined a nomination for The Raven Tower.  I wonder why she didn't do the same for Translation State.

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.

1 minute ago, Nittanian said:

Works good, thanks!

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.

13 hours ago, Werthead said:

Timely.

 

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.

5 hours ago, Deadlines? What Deadlines? said:

The thing about those Horatio Alger type bios, they always leave out or diminish some important detail, like he married int

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.

1 hour ago, Deadlines? What Deadlines? said:

but how the fuck is this guy rich?

He was a good businessman, if you read his Wikipedia entry. Started by driving a delivery truck in  his grandfather's small wholesale food distribution business and grew it into a a multi-firm empire with $150 million in yearly sales (equivalent to $1 billion today).

Sold that a few years laters to an investor group who almost immediately tanked the business and their lender begged him to salvage the business before they declared bankruptcy, and he did so within a year of taking over again. From there,.it's a history of buying companies and turning his business into a Fortune 100 corporation and the nation's top food packager, and then he went and started snapping up food brands like Snapple from Quaker Oats, turning the brand around.

But he's also an 81-year-old conservative Jewish guy from Brooklyn and no doubt holds some antiquated notions.

Having the server guys look at it. mod_Security is giving a false positive because the full URL by sheer coincidence appears to have a base64 encoded section which is a common means of attack on a web server. But it's just coincidence. Asking then if there's a way to white list it.

I knew Fortnite started as a single-person thing, but yeah, the explosion of streaming and the wildness of build battles -- a totally novel aspect of the game that I've yet to see replicated or improved on effectively by anyone else -- was pretty cool. I actually followed the first few seasons of competitive, and played very, very casually (mostly for the sake of my niece). But at  my age, the muscle memory to get builds done was... rough.

As it is, apparently, to quite a few of the big streamers of the past, like Ninja, who almost never selects build mode these days. 

Winter Royale 2018 was hilarious with the broken Infinity Blade and the planes which led to people just flying circles and silently agreeing not to shoot one another. Chap going ham with the blade still makes me LOL when I think about it. Funny guy. No idea if he's streaming any longer. Huh, Chap seems to have co-founded a mouse mat company called 4D Gaming with another former Fortnite pro, Wildcat. From the looks of his Twitch, he spends very little time streaming any longer -- last video was from over 3 weeks ago. Shame, he was  a funny guy to watch.

Dead Boy Detectives is radically different in tone and style (and casting) than the original source stuff. I am surprised to some degree. Aging the dead boy detectives up, that makes sense, labor laws and all, but the rest... interesting.  I suppose Gaiman decided that it is a bit one-note as originally created.

4 hours ago, Deadlines? What Deadlines? said:

The...

  Hide contents

 

I still haven't figured out what's up with the apples. Nourishment for possible escapees? 

 

Caching and load probems seem resolved. Spammed the server with nearly 10,000 requests a second and it barely blinked. Things are looking up!

12 minutes ago, Deadlines? What Deadlines? said:

Spoiler

Isn't it weird that Hedwig Höss' mother comes to visit and takes zero interest in the baby? 

 

38 minutes ago, Deadlines? What Deadlines? said:

The Zone of Interest is pretty damn disturbing. 

That dreadful humming sound of the factory of death... ugh.

Aaand.. we're down for a bit due to a problem with upgrading to a debug version of the webserver that would help them diagnose and fix the problems. Will be up soon, hopefully.

ETA: Apparently the issue related to the plugin we use for caching. It had a feature that tagged cached pages with details of the templates the pages used. However, it appears it wiki had sufficiently complicated templates that the processing for the cache caused a major slow down. They have now disabled this tagging of templates.

Downside of it is that changes to templates may require that the cache be flushed, do template makers or editors should check in incognito mode to see if any changes are working and, if not, check again in about 10 minutes (that's the length of time we set files to cache). If the old template still appears, let me know and I will get the cache flushed.

Yes, we've been struggling with very high load since the 27th for reasons unknown, which will lead to time outs of PHP requests during those periods.

It appears to be a bug in our caching system, and the developers of our web server (Litespeed Enterprise Web Server) are actively looking at it right now. I hope they'll have a solution soon, but in the interim, try and save any content you edit in a notepad and if doesn't go throughgo ahead and re-do it if it seems needed.

We can turn off the cache and load drops immensely, but they need the system to be on while they debug, so... thanks for your patience! Will report back when they figure out the problem or tell us to turn off cache for a time.

7 hours ago, Mr. Chatywin et al. said:

This is a hilarious trivia quote from filming EuroTrip:

Mandel's good buddies with HotD show-runner/genuine ASoIaF fan Ryan Condal, and both have a prop collecting podcast they do for the hell of it. Mandel's got a crazy collection, including recently paying $3.1 million for an X-Wing miniature from ANH. 

Being one of the writers of EuroTrip was apparently a pretty good gig to have. Though I'm guessing most of his money is via Seinfeld and Veep. 

I have never actually seen EuroTrip.

@WarGalley

It was the Screen Drafts podcast's 2023 movie draft, and co-host Clay Keller made a really passionate explanation for why Asteroid City was his #1 movie of the year which resonated with me. He really honed in on how the film seemed, in a lot of ways, to be one of the most personal films of Anderson's (since his earliest films, anyways) because of how it engaged with the ideas of conceiving stories, and how to tell or perform them, thanks to its use of the film-within-a-film conceit.

But that was just a short segment in, like, a 4 or 5 hour podcast, so I would not go listen to it just to get to that bit. Anyways, his discussion of why he loved the film so much made me pay more attention to those aspects of the film, and I thought it worthwhile.

1 hour ago, Werthead said:

The "verifying you're human" thing has come back again.

Let me know if it's gone now. Testing out some Cloudflare features and didn't realize it would bring that back unnecessarily. 

Watched a zillion films, it feels like, on airplanes, going out and then coming back from the US. Some of them I ended up snoozing through and did not think too much of (Wonka, Super Mario Bros. Movie, both of which had their cute moments but didn't excite me). I re-watched Portrait of a Lady on Fire and it just confirmed it's one of the finest, most precisely-made films I've ever seen. Also rewatched Asteroid City, which I enjoyed as much as I did the first time, and a recent podcast discussion of the episode made me pay attention a bit more about some of themes of the film which I thought was worthwhile.

I watched A Haunting in Venice after hearing recent praise for it vs Branagh's two previous Poirot outings, and yeah, that was a fun, spooky sort of mystery while having some actual meat at the core of it for the Poirot character, which did wonders for Branagh's performance. 

I also finally saw the original The Fast and the Furious, which I've never seen before, nor any of its many sequels. I appreciated some of the car stunts, and I liked Vin Diesel well enough, but I have to say the late Paul Walker's performance was... weird? Like, he mostly just smiled a lot. He was very handsome, of course, but... I don't know, he didn't interest me. Beyond that, it's a weird film -- it feels pure 90s but it came out 2001, and yet it also is a subpar take on Katherine Bigelow's Point Break.  I don't understand how or why it spawned, like, a dozen follow-up films, but de gustibus...

Oh, I watched Sofia Coppola's Priscilla, starring the diminutive Cailee Spaeny in the titular role and the much-taller-than-actual-Elvis Jacob Elordi as Elvis, which makes a striking difference between the two. I have to say, I am something of a long-term fan of Coppola's, so her approach to film works just fine for me. I thought Spaeny and Butler were both excellent, and I'm curious to see how Spaeny does in the upcoming Alien: Romulus. 

Finally, while laid over in Germany I got the chance to see The Eight Mountains (Original title: Le otto montagne), a 2022 drama from Belgian co-directors Felix van Groeningen and Charlotte Vandermeersch. Based on a novel of the same name by Paolo Cognetti, a documentarian and writer whose novel won a number of international awards when it was published. In any case, it's in Italian and with a fine Italian cast. Starting in 1984, it tracks the friendship (with its ups and downs) of two 11-year-old boys in a remote Alpine village. Pietro's parents -- an engineer and a teacher -- are from Turino, and buy a small place for the summer. There, Pietro meets Bruno, the only child in a dying village, and they become fast friends. Good intentions from Pietro's parents lead to a rift that separates the boys, and they only see one another one more time when they are in the late teens, then not at all again until a tragedy brings them together in their early 30s. But the friendship lives on, and we continue to see their lives. It's a really finely painted relationship, as it goes on to the film's sad and wistful conclusion. Quite profound at times, and the Alpine landscape is sometimes quite breathtaking.

If you like films like Boyhood or Past Lives, this one should work for you.