Brickmuppet Blog 2.0

July 19, 2026

Frau im Mond (The Girl in the Moon) 1929

Frau im Mond is a weird ride.

A bizarre mixture of ahead of its time hard science and absolute woo, it tacks a 1950s space opera onto the back of a noir espionage thriller with cyberpunk and populist propaganda overtones.

The special effects, while obviously dated, are actually superior technically and viscerally to many much later films.

Fritz Lang has a legendary filmography, both German and American, though, aside from Metropolis (1927) and a few of his Westerns, I am shamefully unfamiliar with most of it. However, I do note some similarities in style and pacing, particularly the nagging notion that one is watching two films simultaneously.

Like Metropolis, the film is based on a novel by prolific German writer Thea von Harbou (who was also the screenwriter) and her take on sci-fi is quite interesting.

This is not strictly an effects film and the special effects (if one disregards matte paintings) take up at most 2 minutes at most of a 3 hour film, but they are very effective.

The effects were done with the consultation of Hermann Oberth, a rocket scientist of great renown who later mentored a certain Werner Von Braun and a cadre of others who are best known for mischief perpetrated around Peenemünde and the triumphant glory they later sent from Cape Canaveral. His own contributions to spaceflight include the multi stage rocket, Oberth Effect (a gravity assist technique), and pioneering analysis into the math of ion drives. The rocket in this film is a multistage affair and has a remarkable degree of verisimilitude despite some...poor ergonomics.

The film has as its antagonists a group of international bankers and a particular individual who looks astonishingly like a certain genocidal Austrian after a shaving accident. This was only 4 years before darkness descended upon Germany, and I do wonder if Lang (who had to quickly flee Germany after the National Socialists took Power) intended the character to be a expy.

While I thoroughly enjoyed the movie, the ending is...odd. I will say no more but the levels of "WHAT!" are high.

Also: One of the conceits of the film is that the protagonists are trying to prove a disgraced scientist's theory (that the far side of the moon has a breathable atmosphere) so it is not as hard a hard sci fi film as I had been led to believe.

My only complaint about the film is that I have the distinct impression that several title cards were omitted from the English translation, however Lang's excellent direction and the skill of the actors mean that the film does not suffer for it.

I quite enjoyed the film and recommend it, the VOD of last night's broadcast is available for a time here https://www.twitch.tv/videos/2823457224 (the actual film begins at about the 15 minute mark).

I'm leaving it up despite there being an audio issue early in the broadcast It's a silent film so it does not really matter.

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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.

Posted by: The Brickmuppet at 02:47 PM | Comments (5) | Add Comment
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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.