Brickmuppet Blog 2.0

June 01, 2026

Project Hail Mary

I had not been to a theater in about 2 years.

However, I had heard good things about this film and against my better judgement I spent WAY more than movies used to cost to go see it.

I'm really glad I did.

This film is excellent, being a very enjoyable thriller that keep providing twists and surprises.

Thing is: This review has been sitting in draft for 2 weeks because the film is SO full of twists that's it's hard to review without spoilers. (The audience is not told what is going on at the beginning of the film and figuring it out is a major part of the movie).

The film is a surprisingly hard sci-fi flick, and features some aliens that are genuinely alien...and yet relatable...frequently....mostly. Except when they aren't.

The film is a thriller and after a bit of tension build-up it delivers the thrills in rapid succession and in great quantity. However, the movie is also literate, thoughtful, and poignant.

This film is Absolute Cinema.

It's one of the best films I've seen ever, and despite my aforementioned hiatus, I used to go to the movies quite often.

If you can find it in theaters I HIGHLY recommend it. It really is best viewed on a big screen. If you can only find it streaming, well I STILL recommend it. And you won't pay as much.

Just go watch it.

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May 30, 2026

Theories & Questions

...about Genshin lore, magic mechanics (ect. ect.)

UPDATE:

Sorry...paragraph breaks nullify the spoiler tag.

Perhaps I should hire some specialists in arcane magic, OH. LOOK!

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April 21, 2026

Inconsequential Interlude

Take a break from the dystopia countdown to watch this.

Even if you know nothing about Genshin Impact, it's fun.

...and after Mauvika's motorcycle....it doesn't seem so out of place to people who are anymore.

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1 Scuff alert! Just now today, I watched yesterday's zenless stream. Your BGM channel, and then your game audio channel was fine.

Your voice channel was not audible to me. Maybe check your microphone, and stuff?

I checked several parts of the video, and did not hear your voice, so I guess it was not fixed?

Posted by: PatBuckman at Tue May 5 10:24:23 2026 (s6adZ)

2 It's been a wild week. I went back and watched the V.O.D. to make sure the sound levels were OK and....they weren't. I checked the others, (I usually do a cursory double-check of the V.O.D. before publishing it, but had not this week.) Turns out 2 of the streams had issues, one with game audio, one with my audio.
I spent yesterday morning after work trying to figure out what was wrong since all settings seemed correct. I then went about deleting and re-installing the sources, then activating them via advanced audio options then doping several test recordings and that seemed to fix the issue...which does not make sense.
Last night's stream went OK.
But the solution had more in common with exorcism or magical incantation than any software fix.

Posted by: The Brickmuppet at Fri May 8 05:53:00 2026 (dLZLE)

3 (I caught a lot of the stream last evening, and it looked and sounded very nice.)

Software man, software.

I'm a little jaded about the software world now.

Given how things seem to me, I am not at all surprised if it seems pretty much like a spell to people who are not technically inclined, and who are not trying to follow this stuff.

Lots and lots of work has gone into hiding the 'finger pinching' bits of software away from users, and in trying to make it seem like it 'just works'. This is fine up until the complexity explodes, and we start having trouble teaching people how to handle the fiddly internal bits. My self-study of this stuff has maybe been one of the more ill-starred. But I do know now that there can be significant gaps in the software fu that we try to teach university students.

What I do is much more 'I look for buttons to push until something works' than I expected five or ten years ago. One or two years ago, I think I still thought that if I read more books, I would start figuring stuff out better.

Posted by: PatBuckman at Fri May 8 13:50:57 2026 (s6adZ)

4 re: bootopia

The vendor trash that you should sell may be everything with a gem icon.

You should probably also try to use the various upgrades in the boxes you have unlocked, in the boost menu.

You can probably also more quickly decide what to grab, and what to ignore or leave behind, by looking at the color bar, and the icon. The purple/pink bar is better than the blue bar items, and those are better than the grey bar/no bar items.

Posted by: PatBuckman at Sun May 10 19:02:11 2026 (s6adZ)

5 buy the various upgrades

I apparently lose my ability to think pretty quickly.

Posted by: PatBuckman at Sun May 10 19:03:22 2026 (s6adZ)

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April 15, 2026

I'm going to go out on a limb and say....

YES! YES! YES! YES! YES! YES!

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November 30, 2025

K-Pop Demon Hunters

Watch this trailer:

There is no way this film is not bad.

In fact it is not merely bad, it is GLORIOUSLY, AMAZINGLY, EPICALLY, WONDEROUSLY bad.

Perhaps a better description would be "unpretentious".

This film is exactly what it says on the tin. It delivers exactly what it promises (K-Pop singers fighting demons aaaand K-Pop). To say any more would involve spoilers.

This is one of the few films I've seen in the last few years where I actually laughed out loud at points.

K-Pop Demon Hunters is goofy, touching at points, and bone-crushingly dumb at others and I must say, I thoroughly enjoyed it.

Go watch this film. It delivers what it promises and that is a joyous thing in current year.

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November 25, 2025

Not Plot Current Anymore: But NEAT!

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October 25, 2025

Genshin 6.1

Genshin Impact is a free to play, online, gacha game. This means that expectations are rather low. However the game has, over the 18 months that I've played it, actually impressed me with its storytelling.

What starts out as a bog-standard fantasy game (with, God help, me isekai elements) develops over the first few scenarios into something quite unique.

Then it gets really strange

And awesome..

Over the last 5 years (or 18 months if you're speed running it like me) Genshin Impact has drip-fed its players a quirky, interesting and exceedingly deep, & detailed backstory for the world in which the player finds him/her self.

This drip feed has been quite entertaining and thoughtful, providing a very well realized world and that worlds history which one uncovers different layers of , as one wanders across the planet of Teyvat exploring each country and discovering how their histories and challenges tie into the larger story. Amazingly the characters one encounters are well written, and well realized.

With the 2 latest updates, however. this drip feed has stopped.

It's been replaced with a firehose.

Genshin's 6.1 update story was "all that and a bowl of grits". Exceptionally well written, with excellent character development, surprises galore, and building on the previous story in a believable way, An Elegy for Faded Moonlight ties together or clarifies more than half a dozen plot threads, some of which had appeared to just be flavor text. It resolved the current in-game crisis in a most satisfying way, while simultaneously setting up foundations for future mayhem. The only online game I've seen that has anything on a par with this is Final Fantasy14 with its award winning Heavensward update from a decade ago. This really was a 9/10 out of 10, and exceeded even the high expectations I have come to have of this game.

My only concern is that the next updates will be hard pressed to live up to this. But given the tightness of the story and how well it integrates elements from the beginning of the game, I do hold out some hope that this is not a fluke and they've really been working towards a coherent and satisfying ending.

Fingers are crossed. But as of now, it's looking quite good.

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July 27, 2025

This Time FOR SURE!

TONIGHT! at 6:30pm EDT/ 10:30pm UTC. Join us as we are assisted in our quest to solve our audio issues by TEVAT'S FRICKING GODDESS OF WISDOM.

No, we didn't pull her but the quest does revolve around Nahida. We'll also be joined by The Balladeer and, presumably, a metric ton of lore. So, grab a drink and a snack, stop by, say "Hi!", and prepare to mercilessly harass a streamer as we try again (this time WITH SOUND) to do INVERSION OF GENESIS (the quest we started on Friday) in GENSHIN IMPACT! Join the fun at https://www.twitch.tv/brickmuppet

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July 20, 2025

Meanwhile: On the Twitch Channel

Next week's schedule sees some changes, as we RETURN to Hydaelyn, amusingly, we're now actually farther behind in the story than when we started Final Fantasy 14. We will attempt to finish Disgaea: Hour of Darkness, derp around in Doom 2, and do SOMETHING on Thursday. Friday, we'll be celebrating the end of the week by chilling in Genshin Impact with another audience participation stream. Tonight, however, we must try to save a Raccoon! (We might also have to rescue an annoying redhead) as we seek to thwart a corrupt CEO, defeat Lovecraftian cultists, and finish the incredibly well written, and horrifying.....uh....BEACH EPISODE of Zenless Zone Zero's second season. Stop by tonight, be amazed by the story and take the oportunity to bully a streamer, the fun begins tonight at 6:30pm EDT / 10:30pm UTC over at https://www.twitch.tv/brickmuppet