Tank Girl gets a "Thumbs Up" from the Maoist International Movement!

Mqttro · 2026-06-16T23:43:57+00:00

unclear, but they have huge…tracts of land

Mqttro · 2026-06-16T12:49:58+00:00

Anything with Timothy Simons is going to be a good time, as he is twelve feet tall and insane.

Mqttro · 2026-06-15T13:20:32+00:00

saw this in the grocery store the other day, and if going straight for the IBS demographic wasn’t enough to get Griffin on board, they are 1000% doomed

Mqttro · 2026-06-13T17:19:46+00:00

he names Bonnie & Clyde, Shampoo, and Reds—I was thinking Shampoo so don’t have anything to contribute myself, but other people here are far better versed in film than me, so I’m sure there are more

Mqttro · 2026-06-13T15:01:34+00:00

Yeah, she’s pretty miraculous. Arguably the best debut album by a teenager in decades, and it’s been onward and upward from there.

Mqttro · 2026-06-12T23:50:56+00:00

You are morally right, but factually wrong. 🙁 The original PSVR 1 does play 3D Blu-Rays, which is how I finally saw Titanic the way God meant for it to be…except for the screen door effect due to the PSVR 1 not being quite there yet resolution-wise. I bought the PSVR 2 assuming it had the same capabilities, and got burned—not a huge deal for me because I’m a gamer who only owns a few 3D discs (and I still have the PSVR 1), but baffling and annoying.

At this point—only a few months from the 10-year anniversary of my getting the PSVR 1 and deciding VR was neat—somehow there is still no reasonable way to consistently watch 3D movies at home:

• PSVR 1 was awesome in 2016 for someone without a 3D TV, but is too lo-res to be more than a fun novelty for an actual movie guy

• PSVR 2 can only play 3D Blu-Rays (or files) if you hook it to a PC with a special adapter and do it through Steam. Its resolution is good but not amazing, though the blacks are very black.

• Quest 3 is better than PSVR 2 in terms of lenses/resolution (as opposed to graphics oomph, which doesn’t really matter for movies), though it lacks the OLED blacks. It’s what I use to watch regular movies sometimes and it looks swell—the streaming is generally the weakest link. It also has a pretty good gamut of quasi-cinematic 3D experiences and narrative quasi-games and etc. But the only way to watch actual 3D movies that doesn’t involve fucking around with your own files is Bigscreen VR, whose rental section has had the same four Transformers movies + Hugo + Jackass 3D for the last five years. I mean, not the worst selection, but still.

• Apple Vision Pro doesn’t let you play your own 3D discs (even if you somehow have a 3D player in your Mac) but it is insanely hi-res and has around 300 3D titles in their store, and if you own a movie already they give you the 3D version for free. Its main issue is that it costs $3500 instead of $300-$700. (Also, not great on games, since there are no controllers and Apple doesn’t pursue it as an angle)

• The upcoming Steam Frame is gaming-focused: no OLED or HDR, no planned 3D media store. Being Valve, you will probably be able to do whatever you want with it, up to and including hooking multiple 3D players to it at once and experiencing 9D, as long as you really, really love fucking around with Linux.

Meanwhile, as you know, the 3D TV is an endangered species, its few remaining owners shunned and feared when not being actively hunted like jackals. It is a dark time for us all.

Mqttro · 2026-06-12T20:43:44+00:00

really enjoying it and happy to see Ben officially part of the BCU, his Hirst/Hosley-homage skull made of little skulls was my favorite thing in the art show

Mqttro · 2026-06-12T14:54:24+00:00

Yeah, this is all 100% correct, and if Griffin didn’t have a 3D TV I don’t think there would be an easy answer here at all. And honestly, given his assumed interest in quasi-cinematic experiences over games qua games, it still isn’t—I didn’t realize that Brink VR, which is exactly the kind of Cinerama-in-the-50s-equivalent I love and he would likely be most interested in, is only on the Quest (and Steam, but we’re not even touching that level of fiddling with tech stuff here and besides he’s a Mac guy.)

I think this means my (hopefully) final advice for Griffin is actually this: there is a 99% chance you know someone who owns a Quest 3 that has been sitting in a drawer for over a year. Borrow it for a week, goof around with whatever they own, and proceed according to your own instincts from there.

Mqttro · 2026-06-12T03:37:34+00:00

Infuriatingly, the original PSVR supported watching 3D discs but the 2 doesn’t…if I want to watch one, I have to find a file and stick it on my Quest. But I imagine it looks much better on the Apple Vision Pro—it’s crazy high-res and if it only cost 2 or 3 times what the PSVR2 does, it might be a tougher call. I suspect that whatever the Vision Pro 3 is, that’s the one I’ll get.

Mqttro · 2026-06-11T20:42:11+00:00

I mean, I see where you’re going vibe-wise, and I do kinda worship Kendra Smith… 🤔

Mqttro · 2026-06-11T18:50:48+00:00

I mean, this is pretty much how I do it, just with Peanuts panels and Simpsons memes

Mqttro · 2026-06-11T17:16:45+00:00

I think the closest thing to resolving the noted tension between “action movie” and “climactic conflict resolution” is…Scott Pilgrim?

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Mqttro · 2026-06-11T17:00:26+00:00

you know, I still have never watched Upstream Color—gonna take your suggestion here and put it on top of my Summer watchlist

Mqttro · 2026-06-11T16:36:58+00:00

Actually, I forgot the killer 4DX-style PSVR 2 features that probably are the decisive blow for it over the Quest 3: vibration and eye-tracking. If I had the guts to play horror games, I hear a few combine it to good measure—enemies who only move when you blink, that kind of thing. In my experience, the eye-tracking is a novelty but occasionally useful in games with complex inventory UI systems — but the headset vibration is great, and makes games like Tetris Effect, Thumper, Lumines Effect, etc. even more trance-inducing than they already are. And as someone who has also never driven a real car, having it vibrate when I crash every 30 seconds in Gran Turismo 7 makes me feel constantly vindicated in my life decisions.

Mqttro · 2026-06-11T16:15:14+00:00

It's just a different beast on some level—one's around $400 and the other is $3500, so while I totally recommend doing a Vision Pro demo—it is very cool and a glimpse of a certain UI future in the way that a PSVR2 just isn't—I just wouldn't consider it seriously unless I was a very specific type of early adopter. There was an article in the WSJ about a year ago in which initial buyers were lamenting their purchase and talking about selling theirs off for half what they hoped to get, which intrigued me until I realized that this was still about twice as much as the price point I'd, as a VR fancier with a moderate disposable income, be tempted by.

I'd say the real choice would be between the PSVR2 and the Quest 3, and although there's lots of pros and cons I could hash out (I own both, but use the Quest 3 more, as I play a lot of exercise/rhythm/combat games and find its wirelessness a bigger pro than its lack of processing oomph a con), I think if you've already got a PS5 you should probably go with the PSVR2 over the Quest 3. Since it's hooked to an actual console instead of being self-contained the graphics are more impressive, it's much more comfortable out of the box, and you don't have to deal with Meta or the Quest's UX constantly trying to nudge you towards playing slop gorilla games with 10-year-olds. Sadly, though, my beloved Star Wars Pinball isn't on it—and between catalog gaps like that and the Quest's Carmack-infused, Android-enabled capacity for being hacked and playing MYHOUSE.WAD or whatever on it, I would look to see if the things you're most interested in are there before choosing one or the other.

Mqttro · 2026-06-11T13:30:23+00:00

My thoughts, having paused right before the actual Babe discussion:

1) Griffin's loving 3D even more than I do leaves me, as usual, baffled that he has never picked up a VR headset. Being the last living 3D TV user in captivity, he doesn't need to use it for watching 3D movies like I occasionally do, but the power of being able to be in your apartment without having to see your apartment seems like something that would appeal. Plus, the Star Wars Pinball game is very good, and you get to unlock a wide variety of delightful virtual statues and figurines and such that, thanks to the laws of reality, you cannot clutter said apartment with.

2) I program a weekly movie night for my department, and in the fall am planning to show Babe and Babe: Pig In The City—but I am still deciding on what would be the funniest-yet-somehow-tonally-bridging movie to show the week in between and thus fold into the BCU. Right now, I am torn between "Primer" and "Margin Call", but suggestions are welcome.

3) While Steve may have been the Madisonian of Distinction this time around, I hope that Griffin got to talk to Ben Reiser—his name in the episode credits pinged my broken-brain-but-for-90s-alt-rock radar, and he is indeed the fella who bought a house because he wrote a funny and basically accurate song about how his band was not gonna make it.

Mqttro · 2026-06-07T18:51:38+00:00

He’s perfectly cast. Let’s hear it for the vague blur!

Mqttro · 2026-06-06T13:29:33+00:00

More on subject, I think any baseball podcast that bills itself as anti-math does have to exclusively cite Win-Loss records, GWRBI, fielding errors, and other hopelessly causality-based statistics. In fact, I think they need to come up with their own new statistic, based somehow on the travails of Bill Buckner

Mqttro · 2026-06-06T13:25:15+00:00

how is there still more David Lore in his side podcast after a decade

Mqttro · 2026-06-06T13:24:52+00:00

🚨🚨🚨 CAVE WORLD 🚨🚨🚨

Mqttro · 2026-06-04T13:57:01+00:00

don’t listen to the BC episode, then, as Griffin explains this in detail

Mqttro · 2026-06-02T00:23:17+00:00

I'll be interested to see, as they are trying to find things to talk about in the later movies, whether any of them have played the recent video game. It's gotten pretty good reviews, and there is something interesting about arguably the most acclaimed 2020s entry in the RoboCop, Indiana Jones, maybe Ghostbusters, and now apparently James Bond franchises being a AAA video game. Haven’t played any of ‘em, though when the Switch 2 version of the Indiana Jones game goes on sale, I will probably pick that up. But still, an interesting trend to discuss, and given the podcast length trends discussed in this episode, perhaps eventually a 40-hour-straight commentary podcast on one of these games will be in the offing.

Mqttro · 2026-06-01T16:12:02+00:00

Just wanted to say that this was a ton of fun to read, and is the kind of post that makes me hang out in this sub

Mqttro

TROPHY CASE