TwinIon

The House and the Senate have now passed the bill, leaving only Biden's signature (which he pledged to give). Obviously ByteDance will sue, but my guess is that this time they lose. After which they'll probably just need to sell.

This interview in the NYT is short and well worth a read. I hadn’t realized that the quote at the beginning of the first film was spoken by a Sardaukar priest.

Some of my buddies got really into this and recommended it, but I find myself bouncing off it pretty hard. I’m generally an easy sell for animation, especially adult animation, musicals, and high concept shows of all kinds, but something about this one just isn’t working for me. I even grew up in the church, so I’m a sucker for biblical references (like you find in Good Omens) but from what I’ve seen this doesn’t do anything fun with that material.The design work I find inconsistent and off putting, and I really can’t get into the songs. The animation is pretty poor, reminding me more of old flash animations more than anything. I’m having a hard time figuring it out exactly, but something about this show makes me feel like I’m just a bit older than the target audience. It certainly seems that this show has found a following, but I will not count myself among them. How about you all? Are you enjoying this more than I am?

Rebel Moon: Part Two - The Scargiver is remarkably bad in basically every way that a sci-fi movie can be bad. The nicest thing I can say about it is that individual shots are occasionally pretty, but only in the way that an AI generated generic sci-fi image might be. Every single other thing here is just bad. The writing, the acting the directing, the music. It's all just so lazy and boring. This is the worst thing Snyder has made.

Sony makes a lot of sense as a buyer. They have a movie studio, but not a streaming service. They lack franchise IP (though Paramount isn't exactly overflowing with them either). There probably wouldn't be an anti-trust battle.

I think the new prism class mixing thing looks pretty awesome. If I was still playing, I'd be really excited about it, but it's not the kind of thing to bring me back to the game. If I'm honest, I'm not sure what would bring me back, so maybe that's not a fair test.

I'm kind of surprised that they've only shipped under 4000 Cybertrucks up to now. I kinda thought that by the time they finally shipped any, they'd be able to really push them out. Tesla's Q4 2023 deck says they have production capacity for 125k Cybertrucks a year and their goal is to double that in 18 months. Apparently analysts seem to think they'll ship somewhere between 20k - 80k this year, with a few outliers even higher. 1000 vehicles a months is outpacing the notorious model 3 rollout, but Telsa is shipping more than 10x as many cars a quarter now than they were then. They should be better at putting out new models. They didn't separate the Y deliveries from the 3, so it's hard to say how quickly they ramped that up, but with the similarities, it should have been pretty easy.

I disagree with your first point, but I think you nail it in the end. I don't think it matters that Batman is such an iconic character, specially now that we've seen him on screen in so many big movies. We've gotten the platonic ideal of Batman in various flavors and, as ever with adaptions, the problem is rarely that the adaptation diverges from the source material, it's making those changes without sufficient reason or proper care. I completely agree that the problem with Snyder making Batman kill is he did it so casually and never did anything interesting with it. You bring up how Bruce Wayne is a typical Bruce Wayne, but other his sudden penchant for casual homicide, Snyder's Batman was a pretty prototypical Batman as well. If you're going to make him a killer, it should have some gravitas to it precisely because Batman is so iconic and his rule against killing is so central to his mythology. The audience should feel the weight of that decision. It should be a seismic event in the evolution of the character, but instead it's just treated like a new costume design or batmobile; just one of those standard things that changes with each iteration. Not that we need to intermingle over-discussed film nerd lore, but it makes me think about The Last Jedi. Johnson was challenging his characters and the audience, and regardless of if you think reclusive Luke should have remained the golden boy hero or not, Johnson brought a lot of attention to Luke being so different from what we (and Rey) expected. Successfully or not, a huge portion of that film was dedicated to Luke's change of heart, and that's the kind of time and focus that making Batman willing to break his unbreakable rule deserved.

After months of being too intimidated to even start, I finally started playing. Only a few hours in I think I'm even more intimidated and lost. Hell, even this thread is too much for me to catch up on. I decided I wouldn't try and optimize everything and instead jump right in without worrying too much about screwing things up, but even with that attitude I can't help but feel the massive weight of this game. Even resting is a complicated decision! I clearly don't want to rest too much because of the ticking clock, but some spells need me to, which makes me more weary of using them, which compounds my other problems. Early leveling has way too many decision points, between choosing a subclass and being given a huge array of spells and skills to choose from, with basically no context for what what might be worth taking. I imagine much of this is more a complaint about D&D than BG3 specifically, but having to chose a subclass at level 2 is bonkers. I've barley even touched the game, haven't even used the majority of my abilities and now I'm making big (potentially irreversible?) decisions about the future. I'm trying not to worry about it too much and just pick things quickly, but it's hard not to think I'm handicapping myself or locking myself into some trap I don't even realize. That second guessing is getting worse as I go along because I keep running into encounters and getting absolutely beat down. I'm not sure how much of it is poor setup choices, how much is just sucking at combat, and how much is the game telling me to find another way to avoid combat in those situations. I know I have a huge array of non-combat options, but I don't even know where to begin exploring them. I had to turn down the difficulty to easy because I kept getting my party wiped and I'm still firmly in the beginning section. All that said, I can easily see why people love this game so much. The characters are already varied and interesting. It's great that I'm already making far more difficult and morally grey choices than in any game I've played in recent memory. There is so much freedom here in all the ways that I'm always asking for in games. I suppose I just wish wish I was being eased into this ocean of unlimited complexity instead of being tossed into the deep without knowing how to swim.

Personally, I'm not convinced this isn't just the expected way for people to consume all media now that digital distribution has made so much all content available all the time. Here's an article from a couple years back noting a similar trend in music. I couldn't quickly find numbers, but it's no secret that shows like The Office and Friends continue to do numbers on streaming. It hasn't even been that long since games have had these long running titles or large back catalogs that are easy to access, so it makes sense that this might be a new development for the medium as it matures. Games certainly face unique issues when it comes to catalog titles, but I think it's probably a natural state that given access to decades of media that the combined attention will be balanced towards the back catalog more than the most recent stuff. Back catalog media is better vetted, likely more accessible (as prices come down, wider distribution channels, etc), and long term success builds on itself. Get to a certain point of popularity, and that popularity can be self-sustaining for quite a while.

Maybe he'll make 10 movies and then decide to move on to TV. It would probably take him a decade to write a full series, but I'd watch it.

The Magneto line that got me was “we will not live our days wondering if we could have saved more.” This show isn’t afraid to do crazy things, that’s for sure. For once I’m all about comic book storytelling’s tendency to reverse death.

Tarantino has long declared his intention to only make ten movies, and for a while now that tenth and final film was to be “The Movie Critic,” a story based on a real person who was writing movie reviews for a porn rag in the late 70s. Brad Pitt had been attached to star though production had been stalled by a rewrite. Now it appears the film has been dropped because Tarantino has simply changed his mind. Quentin Tarantino Drops ‘The Movie Critic’ As His Final Film DEADLINE.COM Quentin Tarantino has changed his mind about making The Movie Critic, scrapping the film as his 10th and final project. As the article mentions, this isn’t entirely unlike what happened with The Hateful Eight. QT was nearing production and he changed his mind and shelved the project for a while. Whatever he does as his next film and whatever becomes of The Movie Critic, I just hope that Tarantino has more final films than Miyazaki. Or at least he keeps writing scripts. If nothing else he’s a singular voice in filmmaking and the cinema landscape would be lesser without him.

As far as your spoiler thoughts, I agree.

Sunshine - 4/5 First time I’ve seen this in years. I’ve long been pretty down on Sunshine, but I think I’ve finally come around. First of all, an incredible cast. I’d forgotten who all was in this film, but there aren’t any slackers here. Two future Oscar winners, a pair of MCU vets, and plenty more. The other thing that struck me is how confident it is. It’s beautiful and strange and it takes a lot of swings, and even when it doesn’t connect, I can appreciate the try. Something I didn’t love was the sound design. I was constantly wishing it was more restrained; more quiet, or even silent. Half the sound effects are of light, which really didn’t register as anything more than unnecessary and annoying. Maybe it’s just a personal preference for overblown visuals and a restrained soudscape, but I consistently was bothered by the overwrought audio effects. It’s a difficult complaint to make while the soundtrack has some truly great tracks, but the two audio channels really are on different levels. Still, even if I enjoyed Sunshine much more this go-around, I still don’t think the psycho killer twist was for the better. The film really is at its best as a pesemistic sci-fi adventure. The addition of a crazed killer after 3/4 of the way through is not to the films’ benefit. Also, I completely didn’t realize this was written by Alex Garland.

I feel like Titanfall 2 is too low. Personally, I'd put Crysis on there. As always with these lists, there's also the problem of generally important vs favorite vs some attempt to define "best." Halo:CE was so good at the time, even with repetitive levels. The other Halo games might have had better campaigns, but Halo:CE stands out the most in my mind.

Outside of Tel Aviv, what is the general assessment? As someone with little knowledge of Iranian capabilities, I feel like the expected result of this attack is that most of those weapons would be intercepted. On the other hand, it seems like Israel got a lot of help defending from this attack, which either means they needed the help or the collective effort to defend Israel was itself a message.

Sounds like Sony will have a wide definition of what qualifies as “enhanced for PS5 Pro.” Sony wants 60fps PS5 Pro ‘Enhanced’ games, but it’s happy to settle for less - The Verge WWW.THEVERGE.COM The PS5 Pro will boost older games, too.

I suppose the way I was thinking about it is that everything in that first 3/4’s of Messiah is the exact kind of stuff that was left out of Villeneuve’s adaptations. The movies don’t get bogged down in explanations of mentats or the politics of CHOAM or the specifics of Imperium or Fremen customs, and those kinds of things dominate the early pages of Messiah. Which isn’t to say that Messiah needs to be made just like Part 1 & 2. It could and perhaps should be a very different kind of movie.

I’ve long felt like this is the obvious case to take on if you want to increase public confidence in anti-trust or just government in general. I have mixed feelings about the recent cases against Meta, Amazon, and Apple, but I want the DOJ to destroy Ticketmaster, and I don’t even go to concerts. Sure, they probably had to build a case and whatever, but I have to imagine that unless the whole company communicates purely in person or through Snapchat that discovery is going to be exciting.

Shut it down. It will never be better than that.

I'm trying to figure out how to post process all the images that I got, and it's quite a chore. I started out trying to get as sharp a corona as possible, given the clouds I had to shoot through. Apparently the auto align features don't really work for eclipses, so I've been manually stacking images by hand. One camera was on a motorized mount and the other shoots at 20fps, so thankfully most of the images weren't too far off (as long as I don't stack between sequences), but it's still a pain. I also feel conflicted as to just some of the basics, like color balance. It seems slightly more natural to make things warmer, but maybe the Corona is better off white? In the partial phases they're more or less straight out of the camera, but I could match the colors and exposures if I wanted to.

That's how I've always thought about cosmetics.