TwinIon

That might make some sense if the VP had any constitutionally defined authority. As it stands the VP gets to do as much as the President wants to let them do. If Hillary was Trump's VP, she'd never do anything.

At first I found it odd that Pence left the country when the Senate trial started. I assumed that as president of the Senate that he'd have some role in impeachment, but I guess not. I suppose it makes sense that you probably don't want the VP in charge of the trial. The VP is both politically tied to the President and the person who would ascend to the presidency in the event of a conviction, so maybe it's best he's not around.

I think the Wii-U just sold so poorly that they needed to put all their effort into moving on as fast as possible. I'd argue that putting a console out lacking its primary feature would be stupid, but Nintendo has proven multiple times that they don't seem to mind doing so.

It kinda sounds like they're doing a FF7 with KOTOR. Not necessarily in that it's episodic or in a gameplay sense, but in that they take the story from 1&2 and make it into a completely new game. That would be very exciting to me.

They were talking about this at CES and they insist that it's not a distant concept and that they will actually build it, but it's hard to buy at this point given how little they want to tell anyone. It also doesn't look like it would meet safety standards. Another thing that occurs to me is that while the mostly symmetrical design makes sense given its purpose, it also seems confusing to other drivers who might not know which way is forward. Given that it'll be pulling over to pick up and drop people off, I feel like a better visual indication of front and back would be helpful to the human drivers this would be sharing the road with.

Fair enough. I appreciate the rundown. I was just quoting from the video in the OP (from around ~6 min). Which is pretty much where I'm at. I think there is a core of pokemon that would work well outside the existing gameplay structure. Finding and putting together a team, leveling them up, and exploring the world could all easily work outside the pokemon blueprint. I don't think that the standard pokemon routes or even the turn based combat are that necessary for a pokemon game to work well, and I think there's a lot of room to explore. Compare where the Final Fantasy games have gone in roughly the same time frame. Even if you ignore the graphics, just the gameplay systems from game to game have varied so much. Yeah, some of them have sucked, but I'm a fan of bold attempts to innovate. None of this is meant to be a shot at TemTem. Like The Outer Worlds, it's a game in the mold of other very successful games. There's clearly a market of people who want to play things that are extremely familiar, and I hold no ill will against the people who like those games or the devs that make them. To TemTem's credit, the move to a full on MMO is a massive undertaking, and I hope they can find the audience they deserve.

As said in the video in the OP, it doesn't seem to deviate from Pokemon in any meaningful or interesting way, so that's a hard pass. Playing through my first pokemon game in a decade I couldn't help but feel like there was so much more it could be doing, and how few risks it was willing to take. What's the point of building a pokemon knock off if you're not going to push the envelope a bit more?

It's really good. Though if Bojack or Fleabag count as dark comedy, it at least has some real competition.

Tenet Dune Eternals Soul West Side Story Mank

Here's a hypothetical that could bridge some of the gap between the $10M settlement and the $400M state figure. In 2011, Tencent bought 93% of Riot for $400M. I realize this isn't exactly how things work, but if they bought the company with stock, the price for Tencent then was ~$4.45. It's now ~$49, making that initial $400M worth $4.4 Billion. Tencent also bought the remaining 7% of the company when their stock was worth ~$15 for an undisclosed sum. If you include stock compensation, it's not impossible that we're talking about total compensation for the top guys in the hundreds of millions. Riot's co-chairs are questionably listed as being worth $200M, on a page that underestimates the sale of Riot by almost half, and also seems to think they get $10M a year in salary. If we work under the assumption that some of these women may have been in a position to be compensated like some of the top brass, and may have had compensation in the form of a stock that has grown more than 10x its value since Riot sold, that makes the idea of $400M in "missed wages" seem much more plausible.

The article says that the $400M is "in potential back pay based on the wage differential between men and women at the company, excluding any additional penalties." That doesn't sound right. If it was $400M because there was a bunch of punitive fees put on Riot, that might make sense, but it's hard to imagine that they owe these employees $400M in missed wages.

My feelings on the game haven't really changed much. I don't think it's bad if it's what people enjoy. There are genres and subgenres of everything that I don't love that other people do, and if something is a pretty good entry in one of those subgenres, that's probably enough. Personally, I fell a bit out of love with this particular subgenre long before most. Morrowind came out in 2002 and I was astonished. By the time Fallout 4 came out 13 years later, the novelty had largely worn off. The rhythm of the gameplay, the detached feeling of navigation, the unexciting combat systems, the unnatural interactions, the constant menu navigation, and all the assembled jank pulled me out of what is unquestionably an impressive game. I realize they're not all in the same genre, but when Assassin's Creed came out and showed such incredible fluidity of movement, and Uncharted had new levels of filmmic intensity, Rockstar iterated on their vision of open world gameplay in GTA4 and RDR, and Bioware was working through Mass Effect, the Bethesda model of RPGs had lost so much of its luster to me. That's not so much a critic of Fallout 4 or Outer Worlds as it is an observation as to how I reacted to those games. Outer Worlds is a much smaller, but perfectly fine entry into that Bethesda style of RPG that we've been seeing since Morrowind. Some genres don't really evolve too much, and that's fine. I don't play many fighting games, but I don't think anyone's really complaining so much about the formula for the latest Mortal Kombat. It seems plenty of people are perfectly happy with that type of game. Myself, I feel like they are stuck in time, beholden to a success born out of incredible innovation, but unwilling to attempt another similar leap.

In tv and film, the subscription war is funding a ton of stuff just because there is so much competition, and the assumption is that not all of these services will survive. We still have more to come with HBO MAX, Peacock, Quibi, and whatever else I'm forgetting launching this year, so everyone is pumping untold amounts of cash into productions hoping that when the dust settles and cable TV revenues disappear, they're still standing with a sizable subscription base. For games, I feel like we're going to accelerate past that pretty quickly. There just isn't the explosive growth potential, and there isn't a slowly dying giant to siphon dollars from. The expectation certainly is that subscriptions will be the way forward, and I hope that weird indie games continue to find funding thanks to that new model, but the transition hasn't seen the same explosion of investment in games. If this is what peak investment looks like (and I'm not sure it is), I hope we don't see those dollars disappear in a few years.

I think the shift that people are seeing is that the PC and console markets are overlapping far more than they used to. It's becoming more and more common to play games that have traditionally been seen as console games on the PC, and visa versa. So we're seeing games like Gears or HZD go to the PC, Minecraft and Fortnight on consoles, and more and more games like Destiny that launch everywhere. I think it's fair to say that PC gaming has largely been defined by PC only titles. MMOs and MOBAs make up a huge portion of overall PC market. Strategy and simulation games are often PC only. It's hard to find any numbers, but it seems like world wide the revenue from free to play PC games is roughly the size of the entire console market. However, those markets have largely been separate. Yeah, MMOs have and continue to make a ton of money, but their continuous nature kind of exempts them from the regular news cycle that dominates mainstream gaming discussion. Now we're at a point where a big, traditional AAA game like Cyberpunk will sell roughly as many copies for the PC as it will on the Xbox.

Seems that the Bad Boys did pretty good at the box office. $62M opening weekend is well above predictions.

Some big awards happened this weekend that are making it look like a two horse race. 1917 won the PGA award and Parasite became the first foreign language film to win the SAG award. Prediction sites still have Once Upon a Time as a likely contender, but I increasingly feel like 1917 is the default "standard Oscar film" this year, with Parasite being the one people are rooting for. I think the DGA and BAFTAs are coming up this weekend, which will probably solidify something as a clear front runner.

Am I correct in that they're basically doing what the Air Force Space Command has been doing? According to wikipedia, Air Force Reserve members have been used by the Air Force Space Command. I honestly have no clue how specialized that training is. I think you're right in that Space Force existing as an effective subsidiary of the Air Force, just with it's own name, would basically ensure it survival through future administrations. If they start asking for billions of dollars more to start duplicating all the roles of the other branches, that could kill it. Then again, in an environment where defense spending is higher than it was during Korea or Vietnam and nearly double what it was during the Cold War, maybe asking for billions of dollars is the way it survives. If the Space Force decides they want to be their own autonomous branch and doing so would building new bases and schools and hiring thousands of people, it's not hard to imagine some Senators and Congresspeople getting all excited at the prospect of bringing those defense dollars home.

Not the exact teams I wanted, but still probably the most excited I've been to watch a Super Bowl in a good while. Hoping for a good game.

They've shot up 57 Falcon 9 rockets so far with a 100% success rate. Of the active launch vehicles, only the russian powered Atlas 5 has more consecutive successful launches (71), with it's last failure coming in 2002. Here's the replay of the launch escape test: The escape test itself happens at ~19:20

This is one of those things that is either the result of lobbying, pure pettiness, or both. I really don't think there is some big national outcry against serving children healthy food.

I've been very impressed by what people have been able to create already in Dreams. I imagine that PC support would dramatically increase how much quality content is created. Creation and mod tools are always terrible on a gamepad.

I just upgraded my PC, so for now I suspect that I'll be playing most of my games there whenever they're available.

It would be cool if this signals a new openness in how Sony might treat future games, but I won't get my hopes up. Highly recommended for everyone that missed out on it.

I knew I jumped the gun on finally building a new PC.

For as much as the pro-Brexit folks like to trumpet the idea of doing the will of the people, they sure to seem afraid of additional votes, even after winning a landslide victory. From that article it sounds like this kind of refusal is effectively the last word, at least for a long while. I wouldn't be surprised if the short term answer ends up being some kind of informal preliminary vote, but either way I suspect that Scotland's Independence will depend largely on how Brexit goes. If it really is a disaster, and everyone hates the new limits in visiting/dealing with the EU, the NHS falters, the economy tanks, etc. then the long term impact on Scotland seems assured. If it's more akin to the Trump presidency, with a series of blunders and unpopular policies, but not economically disastrous, then I think Scotland won't push the issue too hard or tip too much more in favor of Independence.