TwinIon

So my biggest question with the next Xbox is if games will be completely compatible in the same way that PC or iOS games are. I feel like there has been a lot of mixed messaging on this topic, and I feel like there still is some, but this language may have clarified it: To me, that says that this does still mark a standard generational divide. They'll sell versions for each generation in the same way you could get Black Flag for the 360 or XOne. Saves and achievements might recognize it as the same game, but you'll probably still be buying a generation specific game. I would imagine it's possible that digital versions are cross compatible, and obviously for first party titles there's Gamepass, but it really seems like the standard generation cycle is alive and well. So for all the talk about consoles becoming PCs, other than the architecture, that really doesn't seem to be the case. I really hope that the interface is completely rethought. I think the current home UI is the worst on an Xbox since the OG. And yes, the name is dumb. MS screwed up by not just going with Xbox 2. They've been lost ever since the 360.

I'm not that familiar with British politics, but in the end I think the Labor thought that their economic message would overcome their poor messaging on Brexit. They were wrong. They needed a clear message and promote a clear alternative to Johnson's no plan Brexit and they couldn't, and frankly any party that couldn't do that probably didn't deserve to win. I feel like there is so much evidence and so many good arguments that any Brexit, and a hard Brexit in particular, is a really bad idea. Not taking a hard position on the most important topic of the day was bound to be problematic, though I wouldn't have guessed it would be this bad for them. I also think that's why this result doesn't have any real implications for the US election. If anything, the Democrats are the ones promoting plans of action. Whoever ends up winning the primary will have something of a plan for healthcare at the very least, something the GOP hasn't come up with since Obama stole their only idea. It also helps that there is much less required for the US vote to swing. Where the Conservatives have won the popular vote in the last two elections, Trump lost the popular vote. The electoral college will likely still act as a bit of a handicap, but still, the point is the elections will under very different circumstances.

We're doing it for games, may as well do it for films as well. Thanks to Letterboxd this was both much easier and much more difficult than with games. On the one hand, I knew all the movies I'd loved over the last decade, on the other hand, it was not easy to narrow down the last few spots on my list. The Social Network The Avengers Your Name Inside Llewyn Davis Gravity Fury Road The Act of Killing Arrival Dunkirk La La Land Blade Runner 2049 and First Man could easily be in there if you ask me tomorrow. I have a bunch that I haven't really revisited enough to be confident in. Burning, Parasite, Citzenfour, Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, Restrepo, Shirkers, Tale of Princess Kaguya, Ida, Jackie, The Favorite, and The Great Beauty might all be up for a spot if I rewatched them again. Then there are a few that just missed out: Cloud Atlas, Drive, Ex Machina, Grand Budapest Hotel, and Moonrise Kingdom.

Hearthstone Lone Echo SuperHot VR Portal 2 GTA V Last of Us Spider-Man Rise of the Tomb Raider Horizon: Zero Dawn What Remains of Edith Finch Hearthstone is the easiest inclusion. It's by far the game I've played the most, and as I've tried other CCGs, there's a simplicity and polish alongside sufficient complexity that keeps me coming back. Lone Echo and SuperHot VR are the two games that I keep thinking of when I imagine the future of VR. The feelings that I got from those games are unlike anything any game has ever done for me. Great VR is transcendent, if only it wasn't so incredibly rare. GTA V, Last of Us, Spider-Man, Horizon: Zero Dawn, and Rise of the Tomb Raider are all games that did little to redefine their genres, but they're such good entries. Looking back at the decade, it's easy to say that those kinds of single player experiences clearly defined my favorite games. When there's a good one, there's little else I find more enjoyable in gaming. Portal 2, despite being a sequel, remains so unique and memorable. What Remains of Edith Finch is borderline, but despite only being a long afternoon of gameplay, it's something that has kept with me. It's inventive and moving and a reminder of how little gaming as a whole even tries to accomplish. Obviously there are a lot that I'd like to put on a longer list. Breath of the Wild and Skyrim come to mind as experiences that I really enjoyed, but I just don't hold quite as high as others. God of War could easily switch spots with a few games on my list. There are a ton of games like Minecraft and Fortnite that I never got into that would make a "most important" list.

A very good question that I don't think we have an answer to. I would think the timeline would be pretty short. Weeks seems unlikely, but I wouldn't put it past a couple months if Johnson can do whatever he wants.

I've just started my rewatch of the series. Episode 1 is ok. It's a massive miscalculation, bogged down by trade routes and Tatooine and little Ani. Still, it's a worthwhile entry if only for Qui-gon and duel of the fates. Episode 2 is a disaster. Individual sequences can be individually compelling, like Jango vs Obi wan, but basically everything with Anakin is pretty much unwatchable. Something that stood out to me more, watching in 4K, is how bad some of the effects are, but also how incredibly ambitious they were for the time. The sheer scale of the CG is incredible, and very much explains why it's so uneven. Some of it got the really short end of the stick. CG backdrops look flat and straight out of a video game cutscene. Elements given more care (like Jar Jar) are impressive for the time, even if they don't hold up very well.

As of day two it sure seems like the battlecry / Galakrond Shaman is the nuts. I've been playing the quest version, and it's made my climb pretty easy so far. I hadn't played ladder for a while, so I was at 16. After a 15 game win streak I'm to 6. Overall the current build I'm using is 21/3. Once I get back to 5 I'll probably mess around some more and see what else is working.

I've really been ignoring the ladder since Battlegrounds became available, and for the first time in a long while I haven't been paying attention to the card reveals. Battlegrounds is a surprising amount of fun, and surprisingly addictive. I never really played any of the other autobattler games, so while I was aware of them, this is really my first. I first thought that not being able to choose attacks was going to make it far too random and far too passive. It is quite random, but it still largely feels within your control. There are also a surprising number of decisions to be made each turn, and there's a lot of freedom in how you approach the game. I think there are balance issues that need to be addressed (murlocs are way too strong right now, Brann should probably be tier 6), but they've been updating it frequently and rotating heroes quite a lot. I hope that attention doesn't disappear with the end of the Beta phase. I'm far more interested in Battlegrounds than I am in Arena. I've got 140 Arena wins, since launch. I've got 77 top 4 finishes and 22 first place finishes in Battlegrounds thus far (yay for the stats screen!). I don't expect the current MMR system is going to stay, and I hope they find a good replacement, but it's been fun seeing the number tick up over time. I'm not really sure how much time I'll be putting into each mode over time, but if the ladder gets stale, Hearthstone now has another good way to keep me in the game. I do wish you could complete quests in Battlegrounds though. I'm going into this expansion with little gold saved up because I haven't been completing my dailies. As for the standard game, so far I haven't played much, but there seems to be an obvious synergy with Battlecry Shaman and Galakrond. Who knows if it's good enough to stay in the meta, but the deck was straightforward enough to build with a bunch of new cards that it's easy enough to get wins.

Pretty nifty expansion. Probably enough there for me to play through it.

Overall, I think they did an excellent job of dealing with Manhattan in this episode. His very nature makes him hard to write, but I think they managed to portray it really well. I also liked that they didn't show his face while he wasn't wearing Cal's. It made it feel like Cal's face was his real face, and not merely one he adopted. They're really hinting hard that someone else (likely Abar) will be getting Dr Manhattan's powers. It seems like the obvious conclusion, but on the other hand, anything hinted at too strongly seems immediately suspect. So, Dr. Manhattan said that the 7th Cav was going to teleport him somewhere in order to steal his powers, right? Unless they're secretly being controlled or at least fed tech by Treiu, that all seems hard to swallow. Hopefully something about their ability to conjure up that kind of tech will be revealed. I feel any successful plot against Manhattan has to be better than Veidt's, and therefore you need someone more capable than Veidt to make it believable. Treiu is the only character set up that way, so either she's behind the cav, or there better be a hell of a reveal. I actually thought that the reveal of Veidt's location was a bit of a let down. For a man that was always thinking so many steps ahead, that it was his choice to go to Europa without any real knowledge of it seems odd. Of course, he'd been sitting by himself, stewing in his partial failures for decades, but we just got so little time to see him that way before he was teleported away. I really hope the finale pulls everything together. It's got a lot I'd like it to do, but I'm sure it won't do everything. This has easily been the best season of TV this year, so I sure hope it can end that way.

The articles of impeachment are out. Two articles: 1. Abuse of Power 2. Obstruction of Congress

The specials where always the best parts of Top Gear, and I think this is a good idea for one. They get to complain and screw things up and joke around and that's all they really need.

I was skeptical of Infinite, but I liked it a lot. Still, I think I'm more skeptical that a new studio will be able to take the licence and make a compelling entry in the franchise without Levine. My guess is that it ends up looking good and gets the aesthetic right, but other than that, who knows.

I'm still surprised that the case wasn't taken up by the court, and even more surprised that the law was upheld. This seems a lot like the CA crisis pregnancy center law that was struck down in June of 2018. Basically, the decision was that the state couldn't compel speech that people might not believe in. This seems like the same thing, so I don't see why that precedent wouldn't apply here.

I feel like this show was really rushed out so they had something for the launch of Disney+. Not that the show is bad, but it doesn't feel like an 8 episode show. It really feels like it would be more at home with a longer season. I wouldn't be surprised if that was the plan, but they couldn't get that much ready before the launch, so they cut season 1 short and will expand it in season 2. I know season 2 is underway, but I haven't seen anything about how long it will be.

Could be fun. Nothing about this movie sells me right away, but there's potential.

Trailer looks fun. I don't really have much sense as to what it's about, but that's fine by me.

I never saw a trailer and didn't see any other advertising for it other than a cardboard stand at my theater. Can't say I'm shocked it bombed. It could be that they knew it sucked and decided not to put any ad budget behind it.

This first headset was never going to be a mass market product. Still, even for a dev kit that's pretty low. It seemed obvious to me that they were sunk when it became obvious that their AR display wasn't really any better than what MS had. Their entire valuation was based on the idea that their display was that much better, and it just isn't.

But I think this is the concern being expressed here. If you're building a game for the next gen consoles and you want to take advantage of the SSD and high end CPU for seamless worlds and AI simulation and whatever, you can't really do that if you also have to support the One X or even One S. With graphics, it's somewhat straightforward to just scale things down for a lower spec. You really can't build something reliant upon SSD speed and scale that back to a spinning disc. Sony talked about how the swing speed in Spider-man was limited to how fast they could stream the world from the HDD. Put in an SSD and all the sudden you can stream it much faster and now you can change the gameplay; put more stuff in the world, allow faster travel speeds, etc. Or let's say you're building a game with a lot of real time deformation, and you need the power of these new CPUs to do it. I'm not sure how a developer would scale those kinds of things down. If it's just "make it less pretty" or "the loading screens are 10x shorter on SSD consoles" then yeah, it's easy to see how you build a game that scales with the hardware. But if MS expects devs to build for the whole range I don't see how they can also build in gameplay leaps that require the new hardware.

I missed that it was only the US. That changes things quite a bit.

The most important benefit to modern screens compared to CRTs is size. I can understand there are some real benefits to CRTs, but I'll take whatever minor visual downgrades for that nice big screen any day.

I believe that's what most of Europe does.

Anthem outsold SSBU? That's a surprise. It may have been deemed a failure, but Smash sold ~16M copies, maybe 5M were sold that first month, so that would put Anthem sales somewhere above 11M copies. Not entirely a flop I guess. Glad to see Outer Wilds get recognized. I really should try some of these small games.

Here's a recommendation of the film from a Guantánamo Bay lawyer. He mentions something I didn't know: He also brings up that Jones didn't talk to any of the victims. I don't know if Jones would have been allowed to interview any of them, but I think it is notable that it doesn't really come up.