Kalphite

Hey man. Yeah the boards are a bit quieter now. There was a period of time about a year ago where the boards kept going down for weeks at a time and there was no moderation so the board was just taken over by spambots, so most of the OTers made a discord to stay in touch cause we thought the boards were going to be gone for good. Now the boards are in better shape but discord's a way more convenient medium so most of the activity is there. if you check your PMs soon we'll send you an invite if you use that (and same goes for any other old regulars I've seen popping in here lately - just message RPG if you want to join) Anyways, I'm doing alright. Lucky to be in tech so I've been able to work fully remote and still have a job and everything. Living alone though so the isolation parts have been pretty hard. It feels like this isolation has been like a pendulum for me with how well i'm doing - I'll have a couple weeks that are really productive at work and cooking good meals and exercising consistently and practicing my synths followed by a period of just no motivation / energy where I can barely focus on anything and just daze through the days anxious from the news and playing video games til I fall asleep. Trying to be more consistent about the taking care of myself to foster the good weeks but its hard. Lost a couple family members to COVID back in March so I'm extra sensitive to news anxiety right now. Thankful for discord / being able to stay connected with online and IRL friends more easily, if I wasn't able to have video calls and stuff i'd be going insane. but yeah, just trying to hang in there and be patient for things to be safe out again.

who do you even think you're talking to at this point

Yeah everyone should definitely join the discord at this point if they haven't already

trains is #1 ptree for me but tbh i never really explored anything from before in absentia when I was in my prog phase

Has anybody else seen Us yet? Just saw it last night, curious what y'all think. I have kinda mixed feelings about it which feels a little sacrilegious to me rn because all my friends and the critics seemed to love it. [spoiler=opinions/light spoilers] I thought the film was pretty technically incredible. Definitely owed a lot to old kubrick movies like the Shining but redone in a modern light. A lot of the cinematography was just gorgeous (especially the boy with the car), the music was super intense, and there were tons of moments that just felt downright stressful / skin crawly without having to get so gorey that it distracted from the effect of it. However, the actual plot left a lot to be desired. I feel like every time they tried to explain what was going on it seriously took away from the tension. The first scene where lead girl's clone started explaining what was going on in her gravelly voice was so cheesy to me that I started cracking up in the theater which I really don't feel like was the desired effect. I also found I really wasn't gripped by any explanation given about the "tethered" and kind of feel like it would have been more effective with less of an explanation of what was going on. Also the twist at the end was obvious from a mile away and presenting it like it was some huge reveal kind of cheapened a lot of the ending for me. I think a lot of the thematic points were interesting with how the tethered versions of the characters seemed to emphasize faults / things that were lacking with the earthly versions of themselves. It kind of felt like a commentary about how everyone grapples with insecurity about the things that they aren't and past traumas and that it's something that can completely take over your life and takes a lot of effort and active fighting to be able to move past, and if you can't you're basically just walking around dead anyways. And I thought the ending scene with all the tethered shown all over the world showed that these kinds of struggles are really something universal that everybody has to deal with, not just this family. I think I definitely enjoyed Get Out more though, as I thought it was a lot more thematically interesting and conversation provoking than Us, even if Us is a lot more thrilling than Get Out was. Its definitely more of a traditional horror movie though and is a very different experience. Peele had some really interesting ideas with the movie and I definitely enjoyed it, but I feel like he just had a problem stringing his ideas together without having to fall back on more generic plot devices (all the tethered mom's dialogue, the entire twist at the end, the scene where the mom runs into the woods for no reason, etc), and that the times that it did really detracted from the experience and broke the immersion for me. I still enjoyed the movie, but the problems make it fall short of being something really special to me.

Yeah going to jump on that bandwagon here, used to love Dream theater in middle school/ high school but nowadays I don't really feel the desire to listen to them. Kinda feel like I grew out of them in general, +1 to Hedgehog's comment about not really feeling much from their music anymore and James LaBrie's voice has aged like 2 buck chuck to me as I've gotten older lol. Even the older stuff I used to love doesn't really do that much for me anymore but maybe I'm just due to give Metropolis pt 2 another spin. randomly have really been getting into Tokimonsta's older stuff recently

I mean you wanted feedback and people are giving it to you, complaining about it isn't going to encourage people. Things I noticed: Even when you pointed out the book was supposed to be an I I still had a hard time seeing it. Also combination of the slideshow and arrow buttons for the pictures felt a little weird to me. I wasn't sure that the arrows did anything the first couple times I used them because the pictures were scrolling at the same rate. Maybe just pick one or the other? Also the arrow buttons aren't aligned in Chrome which was a little jarring - I see you have a margin on one but not the other, maybe it'd look better with a bottom margin on the left arrow? I think the font / character images are nice but the layout kinda reminds me of a 90s geocity site lol. It's fine but doesn't look super modern, probably because you don't use the full width of the page like most more modern pages do. Look at some examples for some more modern games like the sites for Stardew Valley and Wargroove - see how these sites use the full width and break up into sections? I think that would help your site look more professional. You could maybe have your background on top, transition into the ItsyRealm logo over it, go into a slideshow, then give your blurb and github link at the bottom. edit: posted this before the second logo but I still have a hard time reading the I tbh

After playing rivals of aether til 3 am with some friends friday night would highly recommend spending the $4 on the game for anyone whose into smash-bros-like games, it's a blast. Plays super similarly to melee.

WHOA THIS THREAD WORKS AGAIN And yeah I was super disappointed by the new Paak album not gonna lie. I loved the direction he was going on Bubblin but the new album just all blended together. It was fine and inoffensive but idk just felt like I was listening to off-brand bruno mars or something on the other hand the new Earl album is [bleep]ing amazing and I can't stop listening to it, probably have listened to it at least 6 times yesterday already. The production all over this thing is incredible, super spaced out and abstract and all over the place as Earl's flows are in top form as he breaks down his depression over the last few years and the loss of his father. It's crazy how much substance he packs into 25 minutes on this thing and it's so out there that it took a while to grow on me but now I'm obsessed. Also for something a bit more straightforward the new JID is pretty wild too, he finally leveled up his production to match how crazy his flows are and it makes SUCH a huge difference.

Holy shit that was the most reading I've had to catch up with on this thread in who knows how long haha Veiva how was Los Campesinos?? I saw them a couple weeks ago here and they [bleep]ing RULED, haven't danced that hard in god knows how long LA was [bleep]ing awesome. Didn't get to see that much of the city aside from the festival but all the brunch places I went to were great, got to go to the Broad which is a crazy cool art museum (finally got to see a yayoi kusama infinity mirrored room which was wilddd) and the festival itself was sickk. Tyler the Creator, Lauryn Hill, and Brockhampton were my favorite sets (Brockhampton's entire crowd was a massive mosh pit to the point where the ffire department had to shut them down). Also ended up getting a bloody nose within like 5 minutes of the mosh pit starting at flatbush zombies lmfao. But it was a ton of fun! def necessary. also found out the company I work for was acquired while I was in LA. so work's been kinda weird, no idea how this is going to pan out but I'm def going to start getting ready to look around there. Promo process hasn't really been working out for me too well here anyways so I'm probably due for a change of scenery (even if I just got a raise this week it's kinda way smaller than I was told it would be and I'm really sick of this happening so often, seems to be very recurring for me here). Off to a friend's going away party and another friend's birthday party tonight and then I'm hoping to just be a vegetable for the rest of the weekend to make up for how crazy this has been.

WHOA HEY THERE I'm kinda terrified to look back at my old posts here honestly lol work is so bleh and it's getting cold here BUT I'm going to LA on friday for Camp Flog Gnaw and it's gonna be 80 degrees and sunny and I honestly can't comprehend that right now but it's gonna be WILD

cat

I feel like I have a ton of problems with first dates. I went on my first date from Tinder in a long time last week. We met up, she was really cute, we had a nice conversation over coffee for like an hour, and...that was it. Like we had a ton in common but we never really broke past talking about mutual interests / kinda small talk-y background stuff. Like at the end of the day this was one date and maybe this girl just wasn't attracted to me in person or something but I feel like I'm doing something wrong with how many of my dates I've been on have ended this way, like I need to find a way to make these more fun. bleh, just kinda frustrating, especially when I've been in a way better place mentally lately and I just want that to translate to other areas in my life I've been trying to improve on lol. But it's all a process I guess and at least I'm finally trying again - a string of bad dates / an extended bout of depression after moving here / latent oneitis / excessive weed use really set me back for a while and now I'm just trying to make up for what feels like lost time now that I've mostly moved past these things.

Wait then what happens to the dispensaries in British Columbia that already exist lol?

voting against natalie dormer feels super wrong but saq def put up the best pictures for miranda kerr who knew this would be such a ~difficult~ vote