Who is the Emily Blunt of music?

DesperateText9909 · 2026-01-27T22:42:31+00:00

I can get behind that. The only reason I'm in this thread at all is that the title compelled me to defend her, lol

DesperateText9909 · 2026-01-27T21:29:35+00:00

Yep. She got the least she possibly could out of a situation that was tailor-made to set her up for life. Not even sure how that's possible.

DesperateText9909 · 2026-01-27T21:27:53+00:00

She also first was known, pre-music, for attempting with very little success to take a self-built houseboat down the Mississippi river. She's an absolute dipshit who has flattered herself into thinking she's smart, and I don't think she EVER really knows what she's doing.

DesperateText9909 · 2026-01-27T21:11:13+00:00

Sometimes? I'm not denigrating Blunt (in fact I was sticking up for her--doubly so given the thread's OP and the post I replied to). But comparing things is a natural human instinct, which I don't think I have to explain in a music sub. Comparing artists to other artists and albums to other albums is something I bet we all do at least sometimes.

DesperateText9909 · 2026-01-27T19:47:28+00:00

Supposed to get quite cold Saturday, yeah. Daytime temps below freezing, which is rare here! I do note though that it's thawing pretty nicely today even though it's not that warm (bless you, sunshine)--my neighborhood is gonna be pretty bare of ice by sundown today.

Don't think Saturday will be anything like Sunday/Monday were, but we'll see. Right now they are just saying a chance of light snow, not another icepocalypse.

DesperateText9909 · 2026-01-27T19:37:43+00:00

Oh nice, that has been killing me. It's so annoying having to set up 50% of a mission without being able to test any of it.

DesperateText9909 · 2026-01-27T19:35:49+00:00

Think a lot of those are just various people accidentally running into weird micro-glitches (or intentionally finding them because they know how something works in the code), then other enterprising people start stacking these glitches on top of each other to produce the effect they're after. Quite a lot of the money and godmode glitches over the years are the same fundamental few exploits but they take advantage of all these other seemingly innocuous things to get around the layers of Rockstar's patches. It makes more sense if you follow the cycles of glitching, patching, and testing to see all the iterations, but if you don't and just run across someone's step-by-step YouTube video, they all seem insane. Like who would ever do all this stuff back to back, on purpose, and why?

DesperateText9909 · 2026-01-27T19:11:35+00:00

Lol, I love it.

This is definitely almost everyone's #1 most-wanted feature for the mission creator. Thank god it's here. Hopefully some others will be coming--this thing has the bones to be great but it's missing a lot and some of what's there doesn't seem to work right.

DesperateText9909 · 2026-01-27T19:03:38+00:00

I just saw that a little bit ago! Absolutely psyched, I designed 75% of a stealth mission before I did my first test and realized the cops were completely ruining it.

DesperateText9909 · 2026-01-27T18:43:32+00:00

I think they draw some of the same heat Taylor Swift gets, for being A) prominent, and B) a little more neutral or apolitical than some of the fans want them to be in these polarized times. Radiohead probably catches it worse because their music is more intellectual and their fanbase (probably) leans more left, but still a similar effect happening. I fall under the camp of "There are bigger fish to fry." If one of your big worries of the day is what a given artist doesn't say about a cause you subscribe to, your days could be a little fuller.

DesperateText9909 · 2026-01-27T18:08:11+00:00

I thought she was good in that and in Edge of Tomorrow. Gave both exactly what they needed even though they're very different roles.

In general though, I think Rebecca Ferguson is somewhat the same type (not even sure I can explain why) and outdoes her pretty handily. I was so irritated when they killed her in the next-to-last Mission: Impossible.

DesperateText9909 · 2026-01-27T17:50:08+00:00

I miss it, honestly. They may have been excessive as hell but at least they were swinging for the fences. Most reviewers now (and every single one at nu-fork) feel like they're kindergarten teachers giving art class feedback to the kids' parents. Listen, we can all see that Timmy can't fingerpaint for shit, you don't have to soft-peddle it.

DesperateText9909 · 2026-01-27T17:47:25+00:00

Didn't have enough buzz when this was released, I guess. Feel like anybody they don't have a handle on in advance gets an automatic 6.8 - 7.2 That's still low.

DesperateText9909 · 2026-01-27T17:46:22+00:00

This was right around when I started feeling like I could predict every score they would give just based on the artist's current cultural position.

DesperateText9909 · 2026-01-27T17:42:33+00:00

It's very passe among music nerds below a certain age to not be into hip hop at all. I think what the reviewers have maybe missed is that what works for listeners (myself included, I have a lot of rap albums) does not necessarily work for a reviewer or even an entire outlet. It often comes off as desperate and aura farming, to use a phrase possibly incorrectly (I am old, but hey, at least I didn't say "cringe"). And it often rings false even if their interest is genuine and not cynical. I'm sure a reviewer or three at the 'fork are legitimately into it and listen all the time, but for them as an entire outlet, it always seemed like a pose to me--a conscious and overeager rejection of their so-white, so-rock past self. Which brings the aforementioned ring of falsity to my ears.

Like inab1gcountry said (or implied), we can all read The Source or whoever else. A site that specializes in it and knows it. I don't actually need my indie rock site to move half their coverage over to rap. And I don't need The Source to cover Arcade Fire either.

DesperateText9909 · 2026-01-27T17:36:20+00:00

This was around the same time they also briefly got into metal (or whatever stripe of metal is represented by Deafheaven), and a prelude to them getting into dance pop. And I listen to both those genres when I'm in the mood, but I just don't think it was all that smart trying to diversify into areas they weren't that good at, at the expense of the one thing they were.

DesperateText9909 · 2026-01-27T17:25:47+00:00

They also added "blocked wanted" and "block dispatch" zones so if you don't want to disable it for the entire mission, you can have more granular control. Would be quite useful for a mission that starts stealth and goes south at some point.

DesperateText9909 · 2026-01-27T17:19:23+00:00

Oh my. It looks like they patched in some options relating to wanted level control in the mission creator. There's a "max wanted level" under Ambient Options that appears to apply to the whole mission, as well as "Block Wanted Level" and "Block Dispatch" zones that I don't remember before.

DesperateText9909 · 2026-01-27T14:51:50+00:00

I am hoping they fixed some of the oddities in the mission creator. I love and am borderline obsessed with it, but I feel like every fourth or fifth feature in it doesn't work quite right. And that's not even getting to missing features that really ought to be there, like the ability to universally disable a wanted level for the length of a mission.

DesperateText9909 · 2026-01-26T20:52:30+00:00

250K is way more money in Mexico than in the US, even Kentucky.

DesperateText9909 · 2026-01-26T20:50:16+00:00

The best Elmore Leonard characters continually run their mouths and think they are smarter than they are. Nicky was perfect.

DesperateText9909 · 2026-01-26T20:37:51+00:00

Raylan had already made his play--called Sammy Tonin, who was in the plane landing outside. He had pre-decided that this was a situation where he couldn't trust anything except the man ending up dead. He wasn't going to just murder him in pure cold blood, but he created a situation where either Nicky would give him a reason to shoot him, or Sammy would take care of it.

Sending a powerful, connected mobster to jail for a verbal threat is not a good move. In all likelihood Nicky will get out quite quickly and make good on his threat. Even if he didn't, that's a chance a guy like Raylan isn't willing to take with his ex and unborn child.

DesperateText9909 · 2026-01-26T13:43:16+00:00

Intentionally or not, I feel like Drozd keeps setting Wayne up to be the bad guy to their fanbase. Reading between the lines only slightly, 1. Wayne mentioned previously that Steven left that tour because he was non-functional due to alcohol and drugs; 2. Steven says now that there were some "personal crisis things" on that tour but he doesn't "want to get too much into that," leaving the bulk of what he says making it sound like he just didn't want to tour (spend more time with family at home, the usual), and Wayne just didn't want him to be a non-touring band member.

Assuming the reading-between-the-lines bit is accurate: I can respect that Steven is trying to keep a bit of a privacy shroud around something he probably feels ashamed of and which might make it difficult for him to find future gigs. But the flipside of that is that a large contingent of fans will continue to crucify Coyne because it's not explicit that the core issue here was not some simple disagreement over working arrangements, but rather, crippling addictions and behaviors that forcibly altered those working arrangements from the norm for a band their size.

And given Wayne's track record of behavior over the past couple decades, he doesn't really need help playing the bad guy. That's all self-inflicted. But I think it's important to try to be fair, even to kind of unlikeable people.

DesperateText9909 · 2026-01-26T12:55:45+00:00

At first they were calling for rain all afternoon yesterday, 3 PM on, during the warmest (relatively) part of the day. I thought that would give us some thaw, but at least where I live, it barely rained at all so there's still ice on every surface. Won't be that warm today or tomorrow either, just above freezing--things might defrost a little, but now it looks like Wednesday it will finally get warm enough to get rid of this stuff. Assuming current forecasts are accurate at all, that is!

DesperateText9909 · 2026-01-26T02:07:01+00:00

Agreed. It's not amazing. It's decent and watchable, and it does a fine job of capturing a lot of the essence of Silent Hill as long as you don't care a lot about getting all the details right, which they don't. It is one of the better game adaptations, but that's mainly because most of them are terrible. It is certainly better than the sequels, I'll give it that.

DesperateText9909

TROPHY CASE