TwinIon

I hope they make an example out of whoever is behind this, but man it just makes me wish that the FCC would get their act together and fix the robocalling nightmare. STIR/SHAKEN was supposed to help them crack down and at least stop number spoofing. My personal impression is that it hasn't made much of a dent.

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“People usually play one game at a time,” he said. “So [the] all you can eat type of many games may not be so valuable compared with video streaming services. So we’ll have a kind of balanced or hybrid service on PlayStation Network: a subscription as well as pay-per-content.”

 

Maybe this is expected coming from someone who sells consoles largely based on single player games, but I'll raise my hand and say that's mostly me. I get way less value out of Gamepass than I might because I'm usually focused on one game at a time, with maybe a bit on the side.

I think it has the looks, but I'm still uneasy about this adaptation. The thing that actually gives me hope is One Piece. I'm not aware of the productions having anything in common beyond Netflix, but it did show that a goofy animated show can make a successful transition. However, One Piece had the benefit of being a pretty messy story that they were able to edit down and improve pretty significantly (IMO). Avatar is already paced pretty well, so I can imagine it feeling a bit more rushed.

 

Guess we'll find out soon enough.

 

I really need to watch Anatomy of a Fall.

 

I'm rooting for Oppenheimer. Nolan deserves to have a Best Pic and a Best Director statue and Oppenheimer is as deserving as any chance to give those to him. I'd also be happy to see Yorgos win for Poor Things. A surprise to see Past Lives show up in this category. Not that it's undeserving, but still a surprise.

 

I'm very surprised that Margot didn't get a nomination for Actress given who else in the film did. I felt like either the Academy decides that Barbie doesn't deserve acting nominations or Margot is at the top of the list. The movie doesn't work without her. I'm even more surprised that Greta Gerwig didn't get a directing nom. Easy choice over Zone of Interest for my money.

 

Lead Actor is a really stacked category without a wrong choice. I didn't realize at all that Bradley Cooper doesn't have an Oscar. I would have guessed off the top of my head that he had at least two. Slate has a great piece on Paul Giamatti being the best Actor to never have been nominated for best Actor, which functions as both a reminder that he should have one and that the Holdovers is as deserving a performance as he's given. I absolutely loved American Fiction and Jeffery Wright in it. Colman Domingo delivers exactly the kind of biopic recreation that the Academy often loves to reward (though he's competing with Cooper for that turf). I do kind of feel like of them, this might be Cillian Murphy's only real chance to win and Oppenheimer's other successes may well lift him here. Certainly not a bad pick in the lot. A bit surprised not to see Leo in the mix given how much the Academy liked Flower Moon, but again, the category is just stacked this year.

 

Supporting actor is an interesting mix of actors and roles, from the colorful and wacky worlds of Barbie and Poor things, to the dour Killers of the Flower Moon and colorless RDJ in Oppie. Again, not really a bad pick in the mix.

 

Actress should have been a three way between Lily Gladstone, Emma Stone, and Margot Robbie, but for my money now it's down to two (again, haven't seen Fall).

 

I'm expecting Da'Vine Joy Randolph to easily walk away with supporting Actress.

 

Kinda bummed Turtles didn't get a Animated Film nod, though I'm not sure if I'm rooting for Spider-Verse or Boy and the Heron. I enjoyed Spider-Verse more, but you could never give Miyazaki enough awards to credit him for his career.

 

I was surprised to see Godzilla Minus One up for visual effects. I think if you grade on a cost curve, it'd be an easy winner over second place Creator, but if you're not I don't think it's quite seamless all the way through. Still, all the credit in the world to that team for making that movie.

 

Interestingly Netflix comes out of this as the distributor with the most nominations, though I think it's going to be another year where they walk away with little to show for it.

Probably unnecessary to break out the tin foil for a show that has had production problems since it started.

Finally was able to catch up with this series and this season didn't disappoint. Really enjoyable all the way through with plenty of classic Fargo shenanigans. I didn't love Jennifer Jason Leigh's performance, though I think much of the fault lies with the writing for her character. Juno Temple impressed as Dot and Sam Spruell is so much fun as Ole. There were times that Wayne was maybe a bit too slow, but in a scene with an immortal killer probably not a tipping point.

 

 

One tiny question for those who watched the finale: what was the deal with the constant fades to black? It was a stylistic choice that I didn't get and was actually kind of annoying for the first act of the episode.

3 hours ago, crispy4000 said:

I'm happy for people who didn't have PCs and Xbox's to play it.  But this is still absolutely bonkers to me from a business perspective, for what it implies about future ports.

 

They're struggling to gain ground with their hardware, and Games Pass subscriptions are plateauing on console.  It makes no sense to take away more of the reasons why you might buy an Xbox.

I don't see how this is that different from Sony putting their games on PC. I really doubt Sea of Thieves' ability to sell Xbox consoles at this point. Especially for a live service game, cross platform makes sense to expand the potential player base.

 

I can also imagine the business case for this if it's a demographic issue. I don't know if the demographics are that different for Xbox vs Playstation beyond just regionality, but they're certainly different for the Switch. In that way it's not much different from the way that TV networks might develop shows to air on other networks because they might fit in better with that audience.

 

I also think that it makes good sense for MS to have more multi-platform games that are part of game pass. They've been running Minecraft that way for a long time, and it's only going to be more common for them as they absorb Activision Blizzard. Maybe they're hoping that players might find themselves playing a couple game-pass games on their Playstations and that an Xbox + Gamepass might actually make sense for them.

 

It's also a good play for anti-trust reasons. The more they can show regulators a willingness to put their games on competing platforms, the more likely a regulator might accept MS buying another developer/publisher.

Looks like there is finally a real date for the Vision pro: pre-orders begin January 19th and they will start shipping February 2nd.

Went and saw Ferrari and American Fiction this weekend. Ferrari was really good, if a bit melodramatic at times. Didn't think the accents worked super well, but I enjoyed the film quite a bit overall.

 

American Fiction quickly became one of my favorites of the year. Funny, insightful, dramatic, and more than a little bit meta, it was a complete joy to watch.

It's that time of year when Hollywood gets to look around and marvel at their own greatness.

 

Oppenheimer has been doing well in early awards, but the drama around Christopher Nolan's NYFCC acceptance speech took on a life of it's own. In the speech Nolan is reflecting on the inescapable nature of modern film criticism when he recalls taking a Peloton class during which the instructor ruthlessly bashed one of his movies. Shortly after the speech people online were able to find the video and identify the instructor. The instructor has since apologized and had that apology acknowledged by Nolan.

 

 

Last night was the Golden Globes, the first telecast since the HFPA was disbanded. The awards are now chosen by a group of 300 journalists from 76 countries, and the rights to the Globes are owned by Dick Clark Productions and Eldridge Industries. It's kind of hard to know what to think of the reborn Globes, but starting out a new era by introducing an award for "Cinematic and Box Office Achievement" is pretty silly if you ask me.

 

Here's the full winners list

 

The opening monologue by host Jo Koy didn't go particularly well, and he quickly threw his writers under the bus when he didn't get laughs. I didn't watch much of the broadcast so I can't comment on how it went, but Deadline (which shares an owner with the new Globes) seems to think it was a return to being “Hollywood’s party of the year," while Vanity Fair seems to think it was a complete disaster.

 

Regardless, I personally have very few bones to pick with their choices. Succession and Oppenheimer were the nights' big winners, and I was happy to see Emma Stone and Poor Things pick up a couple awards. Also nice to see Lily Gladstone and The Boy and The Heron win an award.

 

The only Award that really raises any question from me is Ricky Gervais winning for the second new category of Best Performance in Stand-Up Comedy on Television. I can't argue too much since I haven't seen the new special, but I also haven't heard a single positive word about it.

 

Anyways, for anyone that does follow Awards season at all, it's certainly looking good for Nolan and company.

 

I'm sure we'll have no shortage of court cases this year litigating this exact issue, but I don't expect the artists on this list to win most of them.

 

US copyright law is pretty obsessed with the idea of a copy. I expect all the AI companies to get lose some battles over the original copies that they trained data on, but not have to pay royalties going forward for generated content. Downloading a torrent of thousands of books is a pretty clear cut copyright violation. Building a legal library of data to train on will probably become more expensive and time consuming, but I just don't see a world where the end state is that artist X gets paid whenever their training data is utilized to generate something.

3 hours ago, Zaku3 said:

Might as well just keep it in one thread. MSI is gonna use an Intel CPU. Battery life so bad you might as well not even have a battery on it beyond CMOS. 

 

I want a like 10in tablet with a controller. Put in a 7600M and a really basic you unplugged it accidently battery. 

I'm glad that MSI is throwing in an Intel CPU and GPU. Either the new gen is good enough to compete, or it just exposes how far behind Intel remains in low power situations and hopefully pushes them to do better. It's a good sign in general that Intel cares enough about the segment to put any effort into it at all.

I finished this up, along with all the puzzles. I didn't hunt down all the stars, but don't really care to.

 

I played through most of it on the Steam Deck after it was verified, and it ran very well. There were a few sequences that the deck struggled, but not really during gameplay. I also played some on my PC with everything turned up, and it can be quite a beautiful game.

 

Looks aside, it's also a very satisfying puzzle game with a lot of pretty well told story. After blazing through the first game, I was really impressed by the scale of the sequel. This game makes the leap between Portal 1 and 2 look like a tiny step. The game world is much bigger, there are many more puzzles, more mechanics, and so much more storytelling (along with a ton of philosophy to dive into if you're interested). This was one of the more surprising games I played last year, and in the end one of my favorites. Maybe not better than Zelda or Spider-man, but not far off either. An easy recommendation for anyone interested at all in the genre.

 

I'd very much recommend playing through the first one, for anyone like myself that missed out on it. I put in a solid 15 hours into the first and 35 into the second game. Not bad for a total of something like $30.

 

Does anyone have any recommendations for similar games? I saw a bunch of praise for Viewfinder, but got through it in a few hours and didn't feel like they did enough with it.

Very excited to see more of this series, but November remains a long way off. I'll definitely enjoy revisiting season 1 before this arrives.

Of the TVs I'm actually likely to buy, it doesn't seem like this year is much of an upgrade.

 

I've got one 65" TV that is a cheap Roku that I've been looking to upgrade to a bigger OLED, and with this lackluster upgrade cycle from LG, maybe this is the year to hunt for a good deal on the 2023 models.

I'm curious how it is that this show is able to push out new seasons so quickly. I suppose being adapted is helpful, but still, it's an impressive speed.

I love things like this. Great video.

 

Looks like Fractal was able to follow it up with the second kill screen:

 

I'm along for the ride with this one, but the idea of stealing the asteroid seems pretty dumb and I'm not really sure how we're supposed to read the character motivations.

 

They're setting up the whole "heist" aspect just fine, but lets assume they succeed and get the asteroid into Mars orbit. It's not like Mars orbit is some deep gravity well that they couldn't escape. I'm pretty sure the delta v for asteroid capture isn't hugely different if it's in Mars orbit or the Suns. So if they still wanted to get it to earth, the M-7 nations could just run the same mission they're doing to capture it, but now there isn't a time limit. They can leisurely make more fuel, prep the rock, do all their calculations, and they'll have the experience of having done it once. Still sound easier than all the ships and robots and what not required to mine it from Mars.

 

Lets say for some reason that they decide that post heist they really can't get it back to Earth, or they just crash it into Mars. Are we supposed to be under the impression that Dev and Ed expect to still be in charge, or is this entirely a self sacrifice to get Mars built into a new colony? Can Dev really think that Helios isn't just nationalized or dissolved or absorbed or something, or are we really supposed to think he just doesn't care as long as it turns Mars into more than a scientific outpost? Wasn't it this same episode where Margo and the Soviets conclude that Dev is in it for himself?

 

I'm curious to see that they do with this, and I suspect the aftermath won't be clear until next season (if it gets one), but this show just keeps pushing the limits.

I haven't been diligent about tracking my movie watching, but I'll to a very rough ranking in tiers. I could probably move things around for hours, but I'll spare myself that for now.

 

Poor Things and Oppenheimer are my top 2.

 

Spider-Man: Across the Spider-verse

Killers of the Flower Moon
Godzilla Minus One

Barbie

The Holdovers

Past Lives

Saltburn

Beau is Afraid

 

The Killer

Asteroid City

Polite Society

Guardians 3

John Wick 4

Dungeons and Dragons

Suzume

Mutant Mayhem

Return to Seoul

 

May December

Cocaine Bear

The Boy and the Heron

Rustin

Maestro

Creed 3

The Creator

Missing

 

They Cloned Tyrone

Air

Dead Reckoning Part 1

Dial of Destiny

Haunting in Venice
Blackberry

Dream Scenario

No One Will Save You

Leave the World Behind

Tetris

The Marvels

Napolean

Balad of Songbirds and Snakes

 

 

Movies I really didn't like:

Equalizer 3

Blue Beetle

Gran Turismo

The Flash

Rebel Moon Part 1

 

 

Still Very interested in seeing: The Iron Claw, Anatomy of a Fall, Zone of Interest, American Fiction, Ferrari

 I have avoided "buying" any digital media for largely this reason, but I have given in a few times just for the convenience factor. 

 

The only exception is PC games, which I've largely accepted, but still don't love my reliance on Steam and what not. 

Yeah, I misread that comment. I meant that Comcast and Disney were no goes for buying Paramount because of the network TV conflicts.

 

I assumed that Comcast or Disney buying WBD would be unlikely due to anti-trust fears, even though Disney was able to get the Fox purchase through. I suppose that Comcast is possible, but there would still be some heavy scrutiny, much more than merging with Paramount.

 

On 12/26/2023 at 4:53 PM, Remarkableriots said:

If Comcast buys Paramount, they won't get CBS. The same thing happened with Disney when they bought Fox; they didn't get Fox Channel.

I could be wrong, but my recollection of that deal is that Murdoch always wanted to keep Fox TV because Fox Corp would continue to be a profitable company (thanks largely to Fox News). It was only Fox Sports that the DOJ prevented Disney from buying.

 

I think it's dubious that a third CBS corp would be in that same position, but I imagine it would entirely depend on what that new CBS ended up with.

On 12/22/2023 at 1:12 PM, Commissar SFLUFAN said:

The current speculation is that Zaslav isn't actually interested in this tie-up and is floating this idea to force a bid from Comcast.

I was under the impression that Comcast was seen as an obvious no-go since they already own NBC, same for Disney thanks to ABC.

I was on the zero G flight with Steven Hawking.

1 hour ago, Dodger said:

There's also a slide where it suggests Sony will be releasing it's games Day and Date on PC in the next few years. I probably just need to bite the bullet and get a beefy gaming PC. I probably would have done it already if I could just play everything on Steam, or if PC Games Pass worked with Steam. Having GP through 2026 is nice. Maybe for next gen instead of buying the next box I just get a PC and be done with it. PC/Switch 2 is probably the way to go going forward. 

I’d be really shocked if they go forward with that. MS has a unique incentive structure that allows them to devalue their own consoles. For Sony I just don’t see the benefit. Maybe their experiments with PC releases have started to show that PC sales don’t really eat too much into their console sales. Maybe they can project that they lose 500k PlayStation units, but can gain an extra 1M PC sales by releasing day and date it’s worth it, but that still seems unlikely to me. The extra PC sales would have to overcome the Steam tax plus whatever value you can assign to turning a single game sale into a potential PlayStation customer.

 

That said, I’d love to see that be the case. It would probably save me from buying a PS5 Pro and give me the ability to play these games on my Steam Deck.

While I know this isn’t what will happen, I honesty think that unless the new Kang movies are shaping up to be real home runs, Disney should move on. Give time for Marvel to breathe, build up some hype for the next big thing, and make sure it’s really good. With the rights to all the formerly Fox characters, they have so much they could do, and it’s so important they get it right. There is still enough non-Kang related Marvel content in the works that it’s not like they’d be on a complete hiatus. 

 

Assuming they do re-cast him, I think they have a lot of latitude. If I’m not mistaken, he’s not always a black man in the comics. They don’t need to do a Terrance Howard situation and drop in a replacement with hardly a nod. They could cast anyone as Kang and find a way to make it work. Whoever they find, they also don’t need to emulate Majors’ version of Kang. I don’t really know what the character is like outside of what the MCU has given us, but it’s not like the multiverse limits them. I was about to start a list of exciting actors, but basically anyone could potentially fit into the role.

 

I also think it’s kind of an interesting situation here in that they could potentially bring in a big name that might not want to agree to do Marvel stuff forever. I’m sure plenty of A-list actors don’t want to sign up for an endless Marvel run, but with a headlining role in just the biggest movies on Marvel’s calendar, that might be a more attractive opportunity for someone notable. Which isn’t to say that Marvel doesn’t already get plenty of top tier talent, but the nature of this role offers a unique chance.

 

Whoever they find, I just hope they make the character as interesting as Majors did. Doesn’t seem like he’s the best dude, but I enjoyed his Kang. Watching anyone just try to step into that role instead of making it their own would be a real disappointment.