28/10/24

really really underrated sci-fi flick. one of the few films i have on dvd that i bought myself.

i won't say too much about this film because it is a lot more enjoyable going in completely blind especially if you're a fan of space horror but god. anyone else love the strength of the human spirit.

i will say thought that i am very fond of the way it depicts the main character, sam bell, learning that he's grown so much from the person he used to be 3 years ago, something he never would've realized without seeing it for himself.

also shout out to my buddy gerty. he's actually awesome.

4/08/24

this has got to be the best fallout mod ever made, bar none. it's all i've been playing whenever i have free time for about a week straight [mostly to avoid spoilers, but i've only beat one ending so far] and oh my god it is what the fallout community has been missing for such a long time.

it's straight up the best fallout we've gotten since new vegas. and get this, it's fan made and completely free, huge kudos to team FOLON.

it's even got all of the bugs and crashing every hour or so that all bethesda game fans are familiar with, which in my opinion, truly makes it a fallout game. in all seriousness, it is a little bit annoying having to boot up the game again whenever it crashes, but luckily there are many threads on reddit already with modlists to tone down the bugs and crashing a whole lot. the 2 i used are Buffout 4 and Weapon Debris Crash Fix, which helped so much.

can't really blame team FOLON for this too much, since the mod's only been out for a week or so and they've had to work with the same shitty engine that base game fallout 4 is hosted on. thanks todd.

won't get into too much detail into fallout london's story here, as it is definetely something you should play completely blind, but i will say one thing; it surpasses fallout 4's story in every way possible, so if you really liked the gameplay in fo4 and hated the story like I do, this is the perfect substitute in my opinion.

i also really loved the amount of unique factions that had me invested the whole time. they were all such a massive breather with how well written they are, the characters all felt realistic with a sense of individuality, you aren't obligated to join up with the first one you see and given immediate leadership like you are with a few of the factions in fo4, you're given proper agency like all roleplaying games should have.

speaking on roleplaying, another thing i really loved is the reworking of the dialogue systems to that seen in fallout 3 and new vegas. finally, options other than "yes", "maybe", "no", "slightly less enthusiastic yes" in a shitty dialogue wheel that grately limits the freedom you have in fo4. The perk system was also reworked, and oh my god it's so much better than whatever was going on with fallout 4's. much less confusing too.

I only ended up meeting about 4 companions in this run, but they were all delightful to travel with, especially my best friend forever arthur mountbatten. loved pendragon too, although i did not travel with them as long as i did with arthur.

18/07/24

binged this show over the course of? 2-3ish weeks and oh my god. i am so pissed off that i didn't watch this earlier in my life because it contains elements of absolutely everything i've ever liked since i was conscious.

it's got bullshit sci-fi, highly unethical scientists, goofy robots, homoeroticism, over 20+ references and homages to almost all of my current favourite bands and movies, men with female hysteria, incompetent yet charming villains, you get the point.

I will fully admit that I originally started watching it due to my buddy Dr. 0 and Rusty Venture sharing a voice actor, but even prior to that i had seen a couple of the characters around and desperately wanted to know what their deal was. and oh my god. oh my fucking god. now i know. tmw there's themes. and motifs.

i'm especially extremely fond of the way the show handles their superhero/villain society. what if you wanted to blow up your arch enemy but they were a level 10 on this unbelievably unserious list, and you're only a level 4, meaning you cannot go after them. i'd be pissed off too, and this ends up leading to the best the plot of this show has ever gotten.

unfortunately, since this is an adult swim show that started in the early 2000s, it is rife with the sort of shitty humor that was acceptable at the time, but as the seasons go on the jokes become less and less outdated and a whole lot more thought out and just a lot more funnier in general. god bless.

call me a little basic, but my favorite characters out of the bunch are dr. thaddeus "rusty" venture and the monarch. especially obsessed with their dynamic of "guy who really does not give a fuck" and "guy who let his rage consume his every waking moment due to one fucking guy."

utterly obsessed with henchman 21 and 24 too. tag 2 blokes who do fuckall.

venture bros stands as my favourite show of all time i think, nothing else i've watched can really compete with how insanely good it is. feels like it was made for me specifically.

18/07/24

god where do i even start with this one.

old world blues has got to be my favorite fallout new vegas dlc by far, as well as my fav bit of any sort of fallout content out there.

i've played this dlc a few previous times, but it wasn't until recently where it started to completely change my brain chemistry. it's really just this weird mix of the characters, setting, plot, and underlying themes and motifs that are constantly lingering that make this an extremely addicting experience i like to think.

and do not even get me started on the themes and motifs in here. most of them are covered up by the genius use of over the top 50s sci-fi humor that somehow never gets old. obsidian really went "hey, you know what would be funny-" at least 50 times during the making of this dlc, because it seems to me that most of the ideas proposed were accepted on first thought with how absurd they are.

and once you leave the safety of the center dome and the sink and start exploring things for yourself, you start to discover that the experiments conducted here were extremely terrible and tragic, and the brains that have been sitting in aforementioned dome for the past 200 years have never been good people - yet you can't help but like them.

dr. klein's bitchy attitude and his constant contradictions, dr. borous' boiling hatred of communists and twisted sense of love, especially for animals, dr. dala's sexual fascination with the innerworkings of the human body that totally doesn't awaken anything in you, dr. 0's lack of confidence in himself and his identity, dr. 8's talkative nature, despite his voice module being broken, and being the only member of the think tank willing to truly make friends with the courier - these all add up into traits that make each of these war criminals extremely likeable, and also links back to the humanity they've lost over the years.

for klein in particular, he tries to make himself seem perfect, that he cannot make any mistake in his calculations and judgements. this is very much not the case though, and ties into the fact that humans have never been perfect creatures, and that we are constantly making mistakes over the course of our lives.

you can also see a much more softer side of him during the bittersweet "good" ending of the dlc when you're pretending to be dr. mobius. here he realizes just how much he missed working with his "rival", and is willing to partner up with you with an agreement that he and the rest of the brains don't fuck up the mojave with their advanced science.

a peaceful ending is a little more tricky to get without gaslighting klein into believing you have the brain of mobius in your skull, as you are required to complete all of the think tank's personal quests in order to want to convince klein to back down on lobotomizing you again. and it's been making me think that perhaps the relationship between klein and mobius was romantic in nature at some point, and that they had a category 10 divorce situation.

there's a couple more bits of evidence that point to this, and the environmental storytelling in fnv has always been very delibrate, such as mentats [mobius is addicted to these] being on a side table next to klein's old bed in his house at higgs villiage, and the constant back and forth messages the two send each other on big mt's PA system, with one being mobius denying klein access to his "forbidden zone." which could be taken as both literal, as that is where he is located at, but also as an analogy, which is funnier in my opinion. thanks for announcing your insane divorce to me man.

i always thought i was looking into things a bit too much, but i've noticed that a lot of other people agree that there must've been a divorce at some point down the line. i love you shitty old divorced gay men.

and i like to think it is one of the factors in mobius deciding to simply trap the think tank in a recursion loop for as long as possible instead of outright killing them. he'd be very capable at taking all of them out, but he doesn't, he chooses to keep them alive - but as complete shells of their former selves. he says himself that he basically lobotomized them with how he reprogrammed them in order to forget their history and location and general sense of self to the point that big mt turns into their entire world.

and total isolation would just not do someone like mobius any good whatsoever. he very clearly loves interacting with people whenever he can, as he states that he had a lot of conversations with the courier's brain while waiting for the courier themselves to get there. and he starts to become more and more curious about the courier as they inquire into the "why's" of this whole operation.

to quote arthur c. clarke; "no conscious entity could survive ages of isolation without damage."

speaking of recursion loops, i've been weirdly obsessed with eternal cycles in media since i was at least 14, and now that i've realized that so much of old world blues revolves around constant repetition its been keeping me up at night. and it honestly makes constantly going back and forth between and in quest locations a lot less tedious, knowing they were designed like that with a lot of thought behind them.

unfortunately, the structure of these quests have caused old world blues to be heavily disliked by a lot of people, and it's understandable but it is rather sad because of how good the dlc is in terms of writing alone. if you can ignore the quest design, there's a chance it'll become an absolutely lifechanging experience. that's how it was for me anyways.

this is getting pretty long, so i'll stop it here, but there's a good chance i'll end up making a fanpage for this dlc alone in the near future, depending on how long it continues to affect me.