Jump to content

TwinIon

Members
  • Posts

    19,494
  • Joined

  • Last visited

  • Days Won

    1

TwinIon last won the day on November 27 2018

TwinIon had the most liked content!

Reputation

3,131 Excellent

About TwinIon

  • Birthday 05/31/20

Recent Profile Visitors

1,894 profile views
  1. Yeah, I'm not really sure what to make of it. Reminds me of HAM/VER in Saudi 01, although there was contact in that instance. On the one hand, these guys are going really fast, if you do something really unexpected then you really increase the chances of a crash and penalties should exist for driver safety. On the other hand, if you're a wily ol fox and you come up with some novel line or strategy, I'm inclined to call that fair racing. Especially given the nature of these aero dependent cars, dirty air, and DRS. We've seen other drivers let up a bit in order to be behind at DRS detection points, and they get praised to high heaven for their strategy, and rightfully so. What Alonso did was much more dramatic than that, but it's in the same vein. I'm not enough of a racer to know if Alonso's strategy would have worked if he braked more gently, or if it would have worked at all, but I would like to see an F1 where that kind of race craft is allowed and even encouraged, as long as it's safe.
  2. I have a Ryzen 7 3800X and game at 4K. I went from a 2080 to a 4080 and it was very worthwhile. I can generally get at least 4k60 with all the bells and whistles. For 4K gaming it was a huge leap.
  3. Pretty sure I saw the same thing, and the whole thing about the Jones act and running these massive ships on minuscule margins rang true to me. Far as I can tell, a vessel this size would be considered post-panamax or neo-panamax, which basically just means it's as big as possible for the upgraded panama canal locks. This USDA site (odd source, but seems legit) says that in 2019 there were 585 of them, or 5% of global bulk vessels. 38% of bulk vessels in 2019 were Panamax or larger. So this ship was in the upper middle of the pack when it comes to sheer size. To me it sounds very plausible that the crew was a victim of circumstance.
  4. That's just the nature of anti-trust. The rules are different once you control enough of the market. It's the most natural thing in the world to build your products in a way that makes people want to use more of your products. Apple has done this very successfully; arguably more successfully than anyone else ever has. It only becomes a problem when the government decides that it's become a problem. That does kind of rub me the wrong way, but it does actually make some sense in context.
  5. I think the super app thing is useful for the DOJ for a few reasons. The biggest thing is that it's very clear Apple doesn't like them and Apple takes a bunch of very obvious and some very technical steps to prevent them. They don't allow third party payment systems, they don't allow mini-apps, they prevent PWAs from accessing a bunch of APIs. Another big reason is that China provides a counterfactual example of what the smartphone market could look like if Super-Apps were popular in the US. The DOJ also have convenient emails from Apple talking about how Apple don't like super-apps because they reduce stickiness. So you have a thing that we know Apple doesn't want, where it's easy to show the policy and technical barriers that Apple puts up to prevent their adoption, with a thing we can show does work overseas. I think that makes it a good case to take to court. Also, even if you don't care about super-apps, if the DOJ wins on these counts, there are a bunch of things that could conceivably help plenty of non-super-apps. If you open up payment options or PWA API access or just in general lessen the control Apple is able to exercise over the content of apps, all of that could benefit plenty of different apps.
  6. Maybe I need to re-watch the beginning of season 1 and I just didn't pick up what they were giving us, but I feel like they did a terrible job of setting the stage. Episode 1 we had Spartans, including Master Chief, saving (or at least attempting to save) insurrectionists from Covenant. It was really not clear if humanity was still in some civil war, what exactly was happening with the war with the Covenant, to what extent MC was already some legendary hero, or why. I think some of that is their failing, and maybe some of it is that it conflicts with the games. I'm fine with dropping the audience off in media res, but I feel like that works best when things are simple and it's easy to get your bearings. You don't watch the opening of Star Wars and wonder who the good guys are. It felt to me like they wanted to make Halo more complex in different ways than the game did, when I think it would have worked better without all the mess. So I completely agree with you that the "UNSC does bad stuff" threads were so weirdly the core of this show, arguably until the very end of season 2.
  7. The old titles thing doesn't surprise me. Look at the top of Steam's charts or Twitch and you'll see games like League of Legends, Counter Strike, DOTA, GTA, etc. all leading the charts. Yeah, press and conversation is often focused on new games, but it's no shock that the games people spend the most time on are older. I'd love more context for that top graph though. I couldn't find much searching on Google. If those charts are right, then the top one only represents the 25% of "new game play time," but I can't think of 25 new pay-to-play live service games would make up that number. Given the time period, it would count games released after January 2021. Overwatch 2, Halo Infinite, Dreamlight Valley, and Diablo 4 are the only mildly successful games I can think of that would count. Are they counting Hogwards Legacy and Call of Duty as live service? What about sports titles? Are they counting games that got paid updates like Destiny in that time? Are they counting mobile games? That graph would mean that new AAA non-live-service games make up only 4% of annual playtime. That would be a surprise, however, if you count every game that has any kind of update or paid content as live service, then the delineation is basically meaningless.
  8. I spent way too much time in WoW and I look back fondly at the best parts of it. The beginning of that game was such a special time, but long before I quit it had fallen into a pattern that wasn't great for me or the game. I do wonder what those graphs look like if they went all the way back to the beginning.
  9. How is this a situation where he gets to retire own his own timeline and stay until the end of the year? Boeing should be shoving him out the first blown out plug socket and finding someone new to fix this broken company.
  10. Season finished up and it’s not uniformly terrible, but I just have a hard time connecting with it. I think there’s a lot to like. The finale ended with some pretty decent action. There are some very cool shots in space, some nifty horrorish sequences, and I appreciated the lack of cuts from the final fight. I think a lot of the issues I have with the show are remnants from a first season that failed to really connect me to all these characters. So even when individual scenes are well done, they’re just not hitting me with the weight they’re trying for. That said, I’m kind of excited about Season 3, if we actually get one.
  11. It's been a while since I read the books, but episode 1 seemed like a pretty decent start. Reviews are pretty good, and I enjoyed the series, so I'll be seeing this one through. I did find it kind of funny that it wasn't at the top of my Netflix screen. At a reported $160M total, Netflix is spending Game of Thrones money at this show. A generous reading is that the Netflix algorithm expects that I'll watch it or seek it out, so they need to promote other content to me that I might find interesting while I scroll over to this series. The more likely answer is that Netflix still just sucks at promotion, even inside it's own app.
  12. Has anyone here beaten this? I'm curious if it's worthwhile to spend any time grinding materia or levels before the end?
  13. After reading about the changes that Williams underwent over the summer, like moving away from tracking everything in Excel, it doesn't shock me that they didn't have a third chassis available. Watching the crash, I'm surprised it necessitated one, and it sucks for Logan that he doesn't get to race, but putting Albon in the car is probably still the right decision.
  14. This game really cannot resist introducing a new gimmick. At every step of the game they just feel compelled to add something extra and ephemeral, and it is so infrequently worthwhile. Sometimes it's a mini game or a new mode of transportation or a new ability for the chocobo, or maybe it's a character ability that only works for this sub-chapter of the game. The chocobo ability in the canyon is interesting, but you can hardly steer it, it's hard to look down without going down (which makes it so fun to try and line things up), and all it really does is turn the map into a maze. Sure the thing you want is over there, but you have to figure out where the jump point begins. I actually really like the Chocobo power in ch 11 (with the water). It doesn't really make sense, but for the first time in the entire game it was actually kind of fun getting around. I'm in chapter 11 and controlling Cait Sith is such a pain. Sure, he can run (roll), but if he bumps into something you stop, and while controlling the moogle you move incredibly slowly for no apparent reason. Also, you get to throw boxes at stuff with strangely convoluted controls. Maybe hitting a switch makes sense, but then you're throwing boxes to break boxes while Barrett is standing next to you with his gun arm in a game where you've already controlled Barrett and used his gun to break stuff from a distance, it's stretching the necessity of the gimmick too far. I try to imagine this game if they had built it as an actual open world adventure where all these things you learn and do in the party were additive instead of one off gimmicks. See a box way up high? Great, pull out Barrett and blow it up. Going back to an earlier area in the game? Wonderful, now your chocobo has new abilities that make getting around a breeze! Even if they didn't open up the design space to accommodate all that and they still wanted this eclectic mix of gameplay moments, they still could have cut half of them, polished the other half, and have a nice toy box of surprises instead of a junk drawer of functional but un-fun segments throughout an otherwise excellent game.
  15. Sounds like a poorly managed mess. Credit to the designer, I didn't think it was thrown together, but I didn't come away impressed by the final mission either.
×
×
  • Create New...