Gabriel Valdez

Game Awards need to hire a host. Not a celebrity. Someone in the industry. Every voice actor who went up there had so much excitement and verve for what they were doing. Hire a few.

Happy with the results of the awards. There was no show, tho. Wish I'd played something instead and caught up later.

Disappointed she's a floaty gymnast doll again. There's some uncanny quality to the design, as if someone prompted an A.I. to output Ana de Armas-but-not-enough-to-get-us-sued.

And unifying origin stories and the wildly different protags looks like a lie. Survivor-era qualities look erased.

Seriously disappointed by the Tomb Raider reveal. Never liked the original games. Enjoyed the Legend timeline for its spy-esque 2000s qualities.

Loved the Survivor trilogy: more realistic, introspective character. She acted human and actually looked like a climber for once.

I've always felt like Control feels very akin to Half-Life in terms of setting progression and level design, so getting a Control 2 reveal sated the Half-Life 3 wanter in me.

New Frictional game Ontos looks great; been a fan of them since Penumbra.

Game where I get to play a sheepdog looks fun.

If I loved Soulslikes, I might've been more pleased. Lot of those, but I've never sought frustration in my escapism.

Also realized despite playing Hoyoverse games, gacha in general doesn't appeal to me. The writing needs to be there to make me care what 70 characters have to do with each other.

Watched the Game Awards for the first time ever in the desperate hopes there'd be a Half-Life 3 reveal. Which there wasn't.

Holy crap, that thing is mostly ads. They'd sprint through entire genres' worth of awards without presentations or acceptances to get to more ads.

New Shows + Movies by Women — Military Satire, Dog Comedy, Theater Expansions It’s a lighter week than last week’s bonanza, but some of last week’s limited theatrical releases are expanding wide. This includes American pioneering film “Eastern Western” and …

Alia Shawkat stars in a military satire, Zooey Deschanel leads a dog comedy, and a few limited theatrical releases expand to more screens.

Jurassic Tank Top: The Uncanny Valley of Agency This is the first Jurassic Park entry in a while that’s felt like something original author Michael Crichton himself might’ve written: a group of mercenaries bands together with a group…

"For that 20-30 minute stretch where her figure’s regularly in closeup at this or that specific angle, it feels like she’s the last person controlling her character’s actions on-screen. The level of skin shown isn’t what makes things like this creepy. It’s the level of control the actor has lost."

New Shows + Movies by Women — Forbidden Romances, Trading Places, and Great Journeys It’s a rich week for new films directed by women. As can often be the case, it’s a little scattershot where you’ll find them, however. Some are on streaming, but the ones in theat…

Personally really looking forward to '100 Nights of Hero'.

Hey Sluggo Malone, can you call your sister Bubble Malone and your brothers Waggle Malone and Hitch Malone in for dinner? Your uncle Hook Malone's just come back from sea!

I like to think Varsapura only exists bc someone from Hoyoverse played CONTROL and got genuinely confused Remedy featured a floating woman but never gave her an umbrella, so now they'll make CONTROLish 2 and everyone floats with an umbrella, damn it.

New Shows + Movies by Women — The Missing, Cosmetic Surgery, and Body Swaps A quick reminder since it applies to a few movies this week: I include films both when they hit theaters and when they hit a subscription streaming service for the first time. If you ever see an en…

A Claire Danes thriller, Argentina's Oscar entry, Lohan, and more.

What are your Top 5 Movie Genres? Mine are:

-Nobody believes the kids so they'll save the world themselves.

-Magical realist isekai

-Big ships chase each other around on sea/in space

-Social deduction sci-fi/fantasy

-Quiet, understated, atmospheric giallo w/musical score trying to deafen you

Mythic Pixie Drone Quarrel — “Predator: Badlands” “Predator: Badlands” is very good. It’s fun, it’s crowd-pleasing. It does what it says on the tin. It’s two giant, 45-minute roving action set pieces that orbit around 10 minutes …

"It's a silly thing, but in the hands of people who know how to instill a serious, beating heart inside of a silly thing, so that it’s not just a lark for us to forget as soon as we walk out of the theater, but a whole emotional center that can stick with us and keep making us smile."

"I have never seen a 'Frankenstein' that so deeply embodies Shelley’s themes...It simply shifts your perspective to hers so that you might feel the outpouring an artist feels as they create, as they re-break their own hearts as the route from reader to the way the world could work."

Empathy First, the Rest Nowhere — “Frankenstein” The characters in Guillermo Del Toro’s adaptation of Mary Shelley’s “Frankenstein” only ever encounter empathy briefly. It never lasts. Life, for them, is an endurance, and yet through …

"If her novel is grief caught in amber, his film is a lens through which we can see how desperately it tried to reach out, to breathe, to last another moment, both grief and griever alike; to become something else, to transmute meaning from suffering, to justify endurance."

This is a wonderful bit of grounding and love I look forward to every year.

Now here's hoping Wilsonator and those two streamers he carries are back with another 3-4 hours of surreal delusions.

New Shows + Movies by Women — Lawrence. Snook. Fanning. Lee. Jeon. Sennott. Ritter. Shipka. It’s an absolutely loaded week, so screw the preamble and let’s jump straight in. New shows by women this week come from South Korea and the U.S. New films by women come from Canada, Fr…

Among the best weeks for women leads I've covered.

On the list of best games I've played, but on its own as the best written game I've played.

And you read about entire worlds that are gone, and sometimes you relive the memories of those who ended them, and you start to understand why you'd hang out with the refuse, or bartend emotions for broken machines in a dream inside a simulation, or chill with a demigod of Nihilism.

It's silly and joyful, but you set aside a quiet evening once a month to catch up because you can't save everyone, and sometimes you can't save anyone, and a quest might just be talking someone off a ledge, or choosing if a person's body is responsible for what their forgotten mind once inflicted.

Your best friend is Spock-but-a-dragon, your girlfriend is Neon Genesis Evangelion, and your amnesiac adoptive sister probably isn't an evil demigod. Maybe. Despite fighting gods, your true nemesis is a random middle manager who keeps following you around.

You were birthed from an evil tumor in space-time and your hobbies include rooting through trash cans, discovering trash cans are sentient, and competing against trash cans in rap battles.

Star Rail: What if your mom Franz Kafka and her gamer pal hacked the universe to attack a Terry Pratchett Witch's space station where she homunculuses life-sized puppets to make a Matrix to research gods inside and later you have to Inception Space Greece with time travel to bring back the dead?

5 Overlooked Horror Movies That Are a Little Less Bleak Horror can be pretty oppressive, and it’s difficult to feel like that’s the escapism I want right now. But some evoke a different feeling. Some horror movies are scary while being more …

For when oppressive horror no longer feels like escapism, please find within:

2 great found footage horrors,
2 experiments that have fun with their genres, and
1 Krysten Ritter glam witch.

The Road Taken — “Perfect Blue” When I think of my top 10 films, the titles on it shift and change between a good 30 titles. There are two films that make each version of the list, and Satoshi Kon’s “Perfect Blue” is always…

"Deep down, it forces us to glimpse the repulsion of an uncanny valley that each of us carries within ourselves, something that’s increasingly lured out bit by bit in the social media age, that we’re then taught to frenzy and lure out of each other."

That's KB5070773 (WinRe solve) to fix 25h2 (re-introduces WinRe issues) to fix KB5066835 (introduces WinRe issue) to fix KB5063878 (introduces Phison SSD controller issue).

So all you did was introduce another issue it took two updates to solve and I have no clue if the original issue is addressed.

We can tell. I just spent most of the workday downloading the update to fix your update that fixed your update to fix your update. I'm still not sure if the original issue I was trying to fix was ever resolved. Maybe rehire those people with careers worth of skills instead of cheap A.I. coding glut.

I've worked leg. aide before. If I'd spoken with a caller the way the first guy did, I'd have been fired on the spot. It was the worst call I've had with an official's office in a long time. Opened the door for them to give an easy reassurance and they were offended the subject was even brought up.

Called his D.C. office asking for an explanation and got two sentences out before the aide started yelling. Could barely speak the rest of the call, and he hung up inside 3 minutes.

Called local and after making clear the bad experience I'd already had, was put on hold 3 times and then hung up on.