Blog Features

Recent Media Round-Up

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Hey Folks! I have been more or less taking the last several days off because I am technically on vacation. Due to the less-than-opportune placement of July 4th, I took off today and also largely checked out of doing blog posts late last week giving myself a bit of a vacation. This morning however I had to do some work really quickly and make sure that timecards were approved. So I thought that I might as well bang out a blog post because I have some things to talk about. More specifically I have watched quite a bit of movies and series of late, and thought I would give a bit of a round-up of some of my thoughts regarding them.

Nimona

I feel like all of you need to stop what you are doing right now and watch Nimona. It is available on Netflix, and if you don’t have access to Netflix… then pirate the fuck out of it because it is very good. If you are/were a fan of Lumberjanes or the most modern incarnation of She-Ra or pretty much anything else from ND Stevenson, then you are probably going to love this. If not… then you will probably still love this because it is exceptionally well-written. It is a story about trying to find your place in the world when that world often is diametrically opposed to your existence. It has a lot of things to say, but also… I want Nimona to be my sidekick. I had not been following the production mess that surrounded this property, but it sounds like it is a sheer miracle that this came out at all.

Very much a good film for the entire family as well. I highly suggest you check it out.

Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny

First I feel like I have to say that I don’t hate Kingdom of the Crystal Skull. The movie had problems and I feel like the whole aliens thing was pretty divisive, but for me most of the problems with that movie came from the fact that it looked wrong. We were still in the era of CGI “all the things”, and it looked it… and now I feel like we realize what we lost during the CGI boom years… and folks go out of their way to make things feel like practical effects even when they may not be. Dial of Destiny harkens back to the era of Last Crusade, and while it is still maybe a bit busy and a little bit less about bringing the audience along for the hunt, it feels more grounded in at least imagined reality.

I think what I like the most about this movie is that it serves as a nice bookend for the entire series. Indy is still punching Nazis and still chasing objects of tremendous power but is very much a man out of time. He doesn’t really fit into the world of the moon landing, but no longer has the vim and vigor to really keep chasing forbidden treasure. Dial of Destiny serves as a great last hurrah for Indiana Jones and hopefully can put the character to bed on a good note. If this series continues, it needs to continue in the hands of someone other than Indy, and at most him serving as a supporting character. He has had his curtain call, and I feel satisfied with this movie being the last stanza.

The Flash

I am not going to spend much time talking about what a seeming shithole of a human being Ezra Miller has turned out to be. I don’t really care much about the current state of the DC Universe. I’ve watched the various movies, and enjoyed them enough to keep watching them… but also never really felt the love for them that I have in the MCU. I was mostly interested in this film as it serves to give a last hurrah to “my Batman” aka Michael Keaton. What I was not expecting was to enjoy the film as a whole anywhere near as much as I did. I’ve always sort of hated Ezra Miller’s version of Barry Allen. I found the character annoying as shit and extremely abrasive… and this movie goes a long way to resolving that problem and shows reach growth of the character.

Michael Keaton as Batman and Sasha Calle as Kara Zor-El were both phenomenal. The two different Barry Allens though… felt almost like watching two different actors in the same way as you do when Tatiana Maslany plays dozens of unique characters in Orphan Black. The only disappointment in the movie though is the fact that I expected something that just simply was not there. Knowing that the DCU is being rebooted… I expected this movie to play more into that fact. There were a lot of deep cuts showing alternate timelines like the Nick Cage Superman… but the entire thing wraps up in a very weird note that makes me question what this means for everything that comes forward. It doesn’t so much give the current DCU one last send-off as much as it just deeply muddies the waters. It is still a good film but I would probably suggest waiting for it to release on streaming before you watch it.

The Witcher Season 3 Part 1

Unfortunately, Netflix has realized the error of its ways when it comes to releasing episodes… and has begun awkwardly cleaving a series in half so that they can have two different epic premiere dates. This weekend the first part of The Witcher Season 3 dropped, and with it comes the first five episodes that end on a bit of a cliffhanger. I have a lot of issues with this show… not the least of which is the fact that Henry Cavil will be moving on from the series after this season. I get WHY he would want to leave however because the showrunners and writers are needlessly fucking with details constantly. The Witcher is one of those shows that is good… so long as you know nothing about the supporting material. It reminds me of my early experience with the Harry Dresden series prior to reading the novels. I thought it was pretty good… until I actually read the books and then suddenly got annoyed at the weird inconsistencies.

I think what bothers me the most about The Witcher series, is the fact that entire scenes have been lifted from whole cloth from either the books or the games… but little details have been fucked with for no apparent reason. The worst of this is the way that they are suddenly changing the entire personality and motivation of different characters. I am sorry folks… but they did Eskel dirty last season… and this season they are making some truly bizarre fucking choices with Radovid. The series version of Djikstra is fucking heinous as well and is nowhere near as compelling of a character. Basically, the show feels sloppy, and that is maybe the worst thing a show based off course material can be. The only reason why I kept watching is that they’ve at least nailed the pivotal characters of Geralt, Ciri, Yennifer, and Dandelion/Jaskier. The source material is so fucking strong… that it just infuriates me that the folks writing this show seem determined to sloppily copy the original homework.

Final Thoughts

I cannot understate how much I enjoyed seeing the Keaton Batman ride again. Have you seen any of the media that I talked about? What were your thoughts? What things did I completely miss? I’ve tried to keep everything spoiler free because I do think that everything was worth watching at least once. Again I highly suggest that everyone stream Nimona because it was so freaking good.

A Simulated World

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Hey Folks! Since today is the Memorial Day holiday I opted not to do a traditional blog post. However, I did decide to record a video. This is another of my bits of nonsense where I talk about some aspect of a video game I am playing. In this case, I have been playing a lot of Honkai Star Rail and I thought I would talk a bit about Simulated Worlds. This Rogue-Lite mini-game within a game does not require any of the limited daily “activity currency”, which means you can effectively farm it forever for at least some amount of resources per run.

Unfortunately, it just takes a significant amount of time to run through a Simulated World, which means this is clocking in at roughly 24 minutes long. If you are curious about the game and have not given it a shot, feel free to watch the video. I am running on autopilot largely because I was trying to keep the size of this video down, and the NPCs can complete battles much faster than I can when I am being more strategic.

Clearing Delve Cities

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Hey Folks! I have been recording a series of videos of me playing various games as part of a larger “Bel Bungles” series. I have no clue why but I find some modicum of enjoyment to record short videos of me talking about a thing from a game. Today I am experimenting a bit because normally speaking I do not make a specific blog post when I do one of these. I occasionally reference a video and embed it in another post, but I’ve never really made a post exclusively for one of these uploads. So I am shifting things up a bit and doing just that thing.

Today I figured it had been a bit since I had recorded one of these dumb Bel Bungles videos talking about my Righteous Fire Juggernaut in Path of Exile. So since I mostly do Delve on that character, I decided to post a video of me clearing out a few city nodes down in the mines and talk through some of my thought processes. I have no clue why anyone watches these, but I enjoy making them… and will likely keep making them until I stop enjoying them. Thanks to everyone who is just along for the ride, and hopefully they don’t get too terribly annoying.

Automatic Screenshots

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Good Morning Friends! Yesterday I talked about how I wished there was a tool out there that would just take screenshots at key moments for me. I get deeply engaged and in a focused state… and forget to mash the screenshot key. Then there are moments where I am actively fighting and think a screenshot might be cool… but it is inconvenient to break the action and try and capture it. So instead what I posited is something sitting there in the background snapping a screenshot every minute or so, and then later I could review these and cull the dross. I think largely I landed on something that works for me in this fashion and while I hinted at it yesterday, I am going to talk a bit more about it today after having played with it.

I’ve been using an open-source program called ShareX since 2020 to record my screenshots. I like its default structure of naming the files based on the program that is actively in use and then dumping them into monthly directories. This works well for me other than on the first of the next month… when I seem to forget that I will need to start looking in a new directory. It is extremely flexible and even offers the ability to upload screenshots as part of the capture process. I’ve turned all of that off and I largely just use the “Capture Active Window” task hotkey. However, I noticed that I had available to me a “Start Auto Capture Using Last Region” option which will turn on the auto capture dialog to the left and minimize it. In order to turn it off you have to click through to your system tray pop up that window and hit stop. However what it does amazingly well… is just start working and do so seamlessly in the background until I am ready for it to stop working.

I did have to configure some overrides specific to that hotkey, and you can access those by clicking on the gear next to the hotkey that I configured. Namely, I needed to change the file naming structure because the default option was simply not granular enough for my needs naming the files a sequence of letters: A, B, C, etc. The other thing that I needed to do was manually kick off the auto-capture functionality and set it to full screen. The default seemed to be “region capture” which was capturing both of my monitors at the same time which is not useful at all. I removed the %pn from the beginning of the file name because for fullscreen captures it is not able to determine what program it is capturing. I wish there was an option to have it capture the active window, but it works well enough for what it does do.

So last night while I was running maps and done delve, I had it sitting in the background quietly snapping a screenshot every minute. This allowed me to capture some really interesting screenshots of skill effects firing off. For example, I was getting attacked by some sort of lightning attack it seems like and you can see my Toxic Rain falling as well as I was clearing my way through a Crimson Temple map. I never could have captured a moment in time with quite so much clarity as I would have effectively had to stop what I was doing, hit the print screen key, and then go back to attempting combat.

It also captured a good number of completely useless screenshots of me futzing with my inventory. The normal process of me running content is to fill up my inventory, then port to my hideout and dump said inventory before diving back in again. This means that I have a fair number of photos of me showing my inventory in various states of being unloaded.

There were enough cool screenshots though that I think this is going to be how I handle this going forward. For example, it caught a pack in mid-explosion down in delve which looks freaking sweet. Really at the end of the day, this gave me what I really wanted. While it would be cool if it actively triggered specific events going on in the game, I am more than happy to just have random shots at regular intervals.

As far as gaming goes… I spent a good chunk of last night clearing out this massive Vaal City Complex with about a dozen city nodes and a Vaal boss. Then down to the left I found another smaller Abyssal City complex with five nodes and a Lich Boss encounter. I also ran a lot of maps on the Toxic Rain Pathfinder to fuel delve and while doing so I was swapping out at the end of each map to run Crucible with Righteous Fire which is just better at dealing with massive amounts of damage. This provided a truly ridiculous number of Heist missions which I burned through to get the quest items out of my inventory. It legitimately was an almost perfect night of hanging out on the sofa, playing Path of Exile, and snuggling with Josie and Gracie. Josie was curled up beside me and Gracie laying on my legs.

I am legitimately not sure if this auto-screenshot thing is going to be of use to anyone else, but I certainly think it works well for my purposes. If you go down this path I would certainly be interested in hearing about your exploits.