this has almost literally nothing to do with my previous post. that would be ridiculous. or… is it? MHA’s got me thinking about the past, previous visions of the future, old hopes, dreams, old understandings of the world, yaddyadda. maybe that’s why this is surfacing now. hmm.

oddly enough, the setup for MHA: Vigilantes feels more relatable these days. some joe schmoe and pals who’ve slipped through the cracks, doing the best they can with no obvious trajectory. an imperfect response under an imperfect system

maybe it’s the momentum fall-off in the middle seasons. or how their societal musings flake under scrutiny. both are kind of inherent to the superhero fantasy. there’s just been a lot of atmospheric cynicism ever since MHA’s explosive heyday, and I can’t help but feel that dampen my own mood

Predator feels like it has a vision of the future, and it's gonna reach for it even if the VFX technology isn't ready yet. honestly the CGI effects remind me more of early youtube. which seems quaint to me, but maybe it was crazy to audiences back then.

the predator foreshadowing is a little too drawn out, like I could have done with less of those thermal vision scenes. but once the horror kicks in, that gripe easily falls away

I like the action movie commando squad setup. they commit completely to the bit. the stealth action is filmed more fluidly than the actual shooting. probably because pyrotechnics need to be carefully staged, while fake knives don't.

I wonder what it must have been like to watch Predator in the 80's. raised on an all American, all macho, all action hero diet. and then you come to this movie and they all get torn or blasted to shreds.

A lot of these concepts wouldn't get their due until MGS3 could better realize the jungle setting. so it's ironic that the high concept invisible monster idea was already achievable on PS1

as a side note, Home Depot is fun to walk through. it's kinda neat anyway to walk past wood finish cupboards and chandeliers ranging from elegant to slightly kitschy. feels like a more honest aesthetic than the slightly edgy Gamer finish that gaming hardware still has for some reason

as a kid, I actually did have a foot rest sat atop some large packaging foam under the family computer table. eventually my brother and I got our own PCs, and he got the foot rest, and I figured I didn't need it as much. but the height of my table and chair were always just a little off

lmao only about as much as the musical originally did. it’s still a kind of tragedy, just maybe not as much as one might assume

so now I can see what PC ray tracing is all about! gonna feel weird, finally cranking all my modest graphics settings up to something a little more showy. I actually tried out ray tracing on my old GPU. it was amazing it could output anything at all. but it was like. a literal slideshow.

he also helped me upgrade my GPU and that took like hours of troubleshooting when my PC wouldn't turn on without resetting CMOS. long story short, my other friend and I had installed an NVMe SSD to PCIe adapter card a while back, and it was diverting power away from the GPU on startup. whoops lol

I was starting to think that the console war was all but over, what with console exclusives getting eaten up by the figurative PC singularity. but in a way, the Steam Machine is kind of a literal convergence. I wonder what this means for the console space