Sorry to come in a week later with a hot take.

But something I think would be awesome, probably for GOG, would be for them to offer a backup service where they will put your GOG library onto M-Disc Blurays in 100Gb increments for a nominal fee, say $40 plus postage.

For people who game preservation matters to it would be a solid statement. I doubt many of us can afford a salt mine to store the disks in but they are still about as long lived as you are going to get in a format that’s accessible for a home user (let’s be honest those disks will likely outlast the drives to read them with).

For GOG the costs would be fairly minimal and since M-Disc is a pretty valid backup media they would gain that capability from a business perspective.

Just something that sprang to mind while I was reading this thread.

Just finished watching it myself. It seems a.bit muddled right now but I will give Noah Hawley a lot of lee way after Legion, judging that show on its first season would ha e robbed me of so much good mind bending fun in the later seasons.

Love the movies (mainly). Not a huge fan of the novelizations and didn’t read any of the comics, found them to be fairly hit and miss.

Nothing stands out to me so they are for the most part inoffensive.

They were simple and short enough that I would suggest giving one or more a crack and seeing if they gel for you.

Alien : Out of the Shadow is available on Amazon as a full cast audio drama on Audible if you prefer an Audiobook to reading.

Yeah that movie was something. Having not read the comics first I quite enjoyed the vibe of it. I think the penis in question glowing in Watchmen made it fairly hard to disregard. I really liked the HBO series and as much as I hated it at the time I respect that they had a single season show and they just did a single season.

Yeah the puritanical thing is weird right. I took my kids to a beach here in Australia and they literally staked out a spot 5 metres from a lovely Canadian backpacker, who just so happened to be topless. We had a chat for a bit and I gave her some tips about local sightseeing as well as directions to the nearest unofficial nude beach. Both my boys (6 & 8 at the time) didn’t glance at her once, kids just aren’t super concerned about boobs in my experience. On the other hand you better believe I heard ALL about the first fight they ever saw in person.

My kids are now teenagers and have gotten a bit more concerned with their own privacy, but still don’t seem to be exhibiting any hang ups about casual or contextual nudity.

I’d just watch the 2nd, I don’t get why its so disliked, not going to say it was a masterpiece but its better than average for the genre. But I think there is more than enough c9ntext to watch any of them in isolation.

No, I’m from Australia, which I always considered to be a pretty conservative country with regards to nudity. I think we have been more inconsistent with that than the USA though.

I read my comment out to my wife after I posted it. She gave me a smirk and asked if I had any good responses yet.

As far as the TV is concerned, it has been a bit of a nuisance in terms of finding the right space for it, but it does make going back to smaller TVs super noticeable. It was actually my wife who demanded we get the 85 over the 75, pricing was good on both. Can recommend getting the best tech you can afford though, our blacks are not super uniform and that shows up quite a bit on better quality Dolby Vision content.

You know what its like, it seems big at first. I remember right after I first mounted it I wasn’t sure I would be able to take it all in. After a while though you get used to it, it doesnt seem so unmanagable. Hell I could probably handle something a bit bigger when the time comes to upgrade.

Oh yeah Eccleston knows how to play an absolute monster.

For this though:

I guess I just saw it as fairly naturalistic, the whole naked infected kinda made sense to me and after a moment or two it stopped registering with me. I guess I watched the movie on an 85 inch TV, maybe it was more evident watching it on the big screen at a cinema.

Also the series has been fairly judicious with its use of femininity throughout I think the way that the female characters were put in jeopardy in the first film made it clear that the apocalypse held additional threat and danger for the girls and women after society had collapsed. I can see how given that framework this primal embodiment of masculine power and virility might hit some people hard.

I’d be curious how it landed with Europeans as opposed to Americans/English/Australians I wonder if the more puritanical views on nudity would show differences in audience reactions.

Look I kinda agree with most of what’s said here, the tonal whiplash of the final act left me a bit lost for words. The thing I find so weird about the reviews I have read is the obsession with penises. Have these people not seen one before, is it that upsetting to them. There are also nude infected women, you can see some “zombie” titties but this seems completely unremarkable.

Am I just too old and rational to express adequate shock about seeing naked men in a group of naked people for whom nudity isn’t an absolutely unreasonable state of being?

Or was it just the size of one particular member that made the experience noteworthy for them?

See I also think that there is something to be said about how there’s people still out there making new music, performing it, recording. But business has captured the market and is drowning out the smaller players. The signal to noise ratio gets so skewed that even if the best song you never heard is only a web search away you may never listen to it because your streaming service will never play it. But the soulless corporate remix of a remix of a cover of a song from the 80s, you hear that 4 times a day because they have a marketing budget and algorithmic influence.

Maybe I am misreading your comment here, but I am going to take it on face value, I have never written a song. In an interesting note I believe cutting pages out of a bunch of books and sticking them together in a new binding wouldn’t make a compelling read, I also have never written a novel.

I seriously respect people who can write songs, I would imagine they have or had passion for the art. I seriously doubt any song writer is out there thinking "Holy fuck this song is amazing, I really hope some shithead producer crops the chorus and mashes it together with a bunch of other tracks to make it completely meaningless. That would make it perfect.’

Ahh down votes in lieu of a substantive argument. Love it. If there wasn’t a thread to pull on in all that word salad that would unravel the tapestry do you think maybe there’s something to my take on this matter?

Anyway, don’t care, this isn’t Reddit so a downvote doesn’t mean shit, and you at least read some of my post. To quote a somewhat famous Doctor “Don’t you think she looks tired?”

I got stuck today in a part of my workplace where they have one of the local shitty radio stations playing, couldn’t have my headphones in as people kept coming up and talking to me, and a shitty pop music mashup plays and it struck me, this is AI.

To clarify there is some shitty artist who gets the credit, but its just a selection of clips crossfaded and slightly processed into each other to make a new “song” out of a dozen pop songs. No actual creativity, no new material, just a quasi algorithmic blending of songs so that some soulless talentless grifter can claim they are an artist.

It gets deeper though, as mixed in there are songs that couldn’t actually be performed live and acoustic due to the amount of sound engineering and vocal processing that went into the original versions of these songs.

The whole thing is turning into an Ouroboros, they have worked out how to make perfectly bland, meaningless music and now the snake is eating its tail as the industry consumes that slop to manufacture more slop.

Yet deeper, why does this beige bullshit get air time… Why its our old friend capitalist market forces, no one passionate about music wants to make this shit, its the people who want the fame and money and view music as the means to that end.

We know that AI makes people dumber, we know that it leads to the atrophy of skill and talent, and we know the only motivation for its use is capitalist. AI is pop music.

For what its worth I used italics on AI as I categorically refuse to believe this garbage is actually artificial intelligence. I am reasonably certain that actual artificial intelligence is the next fusion power, it’s going to be “only a few years away” from being viable until well after I die, but its just too good a marketing term to leave it alone while we make do with these stunted chinese rooms.

Wow that rant blew up.

Nah my wife loves Forged in Fire too much for me to dare criticize Damascus, its way too cold in my neck of the woods to spend a night in the dog house… And we don’t have a dog house.

I feel like there should be some quotes in there. Damascus “Steel”

And give up on making you explicitly hand over your identity… Sir/Ma’am/Other I believe you have misjudged the ever beneficent Google. This will simply be to augment the other fingerprinting methods they already use regardless of what they might say.

I keep seeing this suggested and while I think that would be amazing I really don’t think its likely. These incumbents are set up to make things difficult for new entrants to their market. With political will and engagement it would be possible, but in the current world political environment these payment processors would simply buy the right politicians & court officials to ensure that any legislative challenges would be killed in the nest.

In the world we are in right now we need to instead focus on making the payment processors bend to the will of the majority not a vocal minority.

We also need to start finding strategies to fight back against paedophilia as an accepted permission slip to let the worst people in the world get away with whatever they want. If its not a disqualifying status for the office of president of the US, then why does the existence of paedophiles mean we (vast majority not paedophiles I hope) have to sacrifice our rights, our privacy, and our free speech?

Was surprised to see sone of the games on here, Starglider 2 was always compelling to me but it was sheer chaos most of the times I tried to play it.