TwinIon

I got a chance to put in another couple hours. I'm enjoying the slightly more open nature of the levels, the combat is fine, and the presentation is top notch (with the exception of a few bugs, like squeezing through a passage and not having the next area load). My biggest annoyance with the game is the freaking load times and the infrequent save points. Yes, I know, git gud. Still, I've had a number of times where I died in the encounter right before a save point, and retracing my steps feels like a waste of time, but it's still not as bad as how long the loads take on the One X. I think it's the longest load time of the generation. When I'm flying to a new planet they hide it well enough, but when I'm just respawning it's silly. I also don't like that all enemies respawn on resting. It really doesn't make sense that I kill a storm trooper 10 feet away, I rest, and he's back! I feel like it's an odd and artificial way to increase difficulty or at least play time. Also, having all the enemies in exactly the same place all the time kinda kills the natural feeling of the open areas. It makes encounters that at first feel organic quickly feel forced. Still, I'm enjoying it well enough to keep going.

I suppose that's the real rub though, partnerships. Google doesn't have any software worth pushing through this kind of tech. As @XxEvil AshxX pointed out, companies can already setup RDP servers for demanding software. Photoshop/Lightroom/Premier/etc all rely on a whole lot of local disk stuff. Now, as part of their creative cloud thing they want you to push all your media to them anyways, so maybe that's a benefit (for Adobe). Still, that cloud storage stuff is primarily for cross platform use. Put a photo in the cloud so you can edit it on your tablet and then your PC and then share it on your phone. None of the actual processing has been abstracted to the cloud. I suppose it could be, but for the moment that would be a very expensive subscription. Looking farther into the future, it's also a real question as to how software gets built. Office is an easy example, because it's already in the middle of this. The web versions of Office remain very much second class citizens. Is the future building out the web versions, allowing them to access more local resources, and bringing them up to par, or would it be better to stream the "full version" from the cloud? Or does the current paradigm just live on? Whatever the case, the question of if Google has plans for Stadia tech beyond games is interesting. Games likely make up a good majority of demanding applications individuals run.

Is it me, or is it a pretty weak field this year? I haven't played Sekiro, so I guess my pick for GOTY would be Control. Also, all the mentions of Outer Worlds should go to Outer Wilds.

An odd trailer that seems to focus on the story instead of the music. It's been a while, but I don't remember a lick of what Cats is actually about. It always just seemed like a vehicle for the music

I'm certainly in the minority, and I don't really fault Mangold too much for this one. There's certainly nothing damning about it. It might even be the best possible version of this script. I just found it to be less than the sum of its parts for some reason I'm having trouble articulating.

It's a bit sad that the microtransaction question needs to be asked of all games at this point. Sad, but necessary.

That's an obvious conclusion that I hadn't come to. Games are a great test case for high demand computing in a market that might be more forgiving. (In that if your $60 game doesn't work perfectly, you're annoyed, but if a company's $5k productivity software isn't working, it's a whole different issue.) If Google is using this as a trojan horse to deliver application layer cloud computing, they might be willing to fund it longer than the revenue from games might support.

That's an interesting perspective. While I agree it's hard for the squid not to seem like a 9/11 analog, it's also taken from a pre-9/11 text, so I'm not particularly inclined to take it that way. Still, it's an unavoidable comparison, and I think this is a show that is quite happy with moral grey areas. The cops are also criminals. The criminals might know the truth, but they're still terrorists. I have the feeling that this show is far from done saying what it has to say about truth and justice.

Saw it last night. It was fine. It doesn't do much to justify its existence, but it's entertaining enough. There's very little point in going down the Terminator logic wormhole, but I still couldn't help but thinking about something after the movie. I really think the accidental message of Dark Fate is that these leaders of men don't really matter, it's the inventors and the scientists that actually control our fate.

The DOJ is moving to terminate the Paramount Consent Decrees, rules governing how film distributors are allowed to treat theaters. Basically, in the 1940s it was becoming a big problem that the major studios could bully around theaters. They owned or controlled 17% of the theaters in the US, accounting for 45% of the film-rental revenue. An antitrust case was brought, and the court set down some rules that have been in place ever since. The courts forced the studios to divest from the theaters and prohibited practices such as block-booking. This move from the DOJ would mean that distributors could again own theaters, though there will be a two year sunset period on block-booking and circuit dealing. While the consent decrees have indeed served their original purpose, their termination seems most likely to take power away from struggling theater chains, returning it to major distributors, at this point dominated by Disney. Given how tenuous the theater business seems to be, it's hard for me to see the consumer benefit in this.

It'll be interesting to see if Google stays the course on this. It's super hard to imagine them making any money from this at all while the service is still so limited and equally as expensive as the alternatives. Best case scenario for Google is that in the next ~10 years streaming becomes the default (but not only) way to distribute games, and that they're the market leader in doing so, effectively putting them in a position to be the next Steam. Is that future really valuable enough to them to keep Stadia going for years while they figure it out? My best guess is no.

That was a great episode. Looking Glass's backstory was by far the highlight, but it was woven into the plot reveal so well that we got the history, insight into his current character and still got shot forward through the story. Really great stuff. I also continue to love Agent Blake. "We're the FBI, we bug stuff." I also kinda love that Abar/Lady Night has already gotten in trouble for her hiding stuff. I feel like so many shows have a protagonist that flouts the rules/the law and we're just supposed to root for them because they're investigating the mystery or whatever. I love that this show is so self aware of the inherent conflict of an officer going rogue. My bet after an earlier episode was that Veidt was on Mars, but a moon around Jupiter or our Moon, same difference. My question is why he would think that the satellite would be his salvation. I feel like only Dr Manhattan could have put him there and built that place, and only the government or Veidt's old company/Lady Trieu's company would be on the other side of that satellite, and I'm not sure why either would want to save him. Still, it'll be interesting to see how it goes from there. I guess Lady Trieu did seem to have a reverence for him, and the government is seemingly indebted to him (in that he kinda installed the President).

Caught this over the weekend and I was underwhelmed. Ford v Ferrari plays it all so by the book that it takes a rather exciting true story, and reduces it down to another boring sports story. Everyone is exactly who you think they are from the moment you meet them, everything plays out exactly as you'd expect it to (except for the coda, which is a questionable decision). The call backs are precisely what you'd suspect, even when they don't make any sense. While nothing is a surprise, it's all very well done. Damon and Bale are fun to watch, the racing is exciting enough, even if it's largely unrealistic. It moves along at a fine pace, and it's very pretty; almost too pretty. There are so many shots at golden hour; warm light perfectly framing our plukey heroes, or the concerned wife, or proud son, or the very cool car. Speaking of cars, this is a film that is ostensibly about the development of a one of the coolest race cars in history, and while we get hints of the size of the operation, we get very little insight into it. I know it would be too much to hope for "Spotlight, but for developing the GT40," but Ford v Ferrari is to car development as Bohemian Rhapsody is to songwriting. That makes the drama free ride feel all the more disposable. Ultimately, the lasting impression of the film is that it doesn't really have one. It's all smoothed out, buffed to perfection, nary a handhold for excitement.

I haven't really been a handheld gamer for a long time, so I haven't played a Pokemon game for years. I think I had the first one for the DS, but never a 3DS version. It's almost bizarre how little these games have evolved and how little effort seems to have been put into them. If this game came out 10 years ago it would have felt dated. It's kind of like Octopath Traveler, but without the care put into the presentation and it's the same game I played back when games kinda looked like that. This is a game that will probably sell 20-ish million units, but feels like it has the polish of a medium effort mod or unfunded kickstarter title. I'm not really mad or surprised, and I certainly understand how they get away with it, but if you take a step back it is a real oddity. I can't think of another game series that tries so little. I don't really buy them, but I feel like even the FIFA games put in more effort to at least look modern and add new play modes and such. Certainly series like Mario and Call of Duty, despite their release cadence, feel like they try to earn your money with each new entry. Even though I don't have any saved Pokemon from back in the day, I almost understand why people are upset about the Pokedex thing now. This is a full priced game in 2019, a major new entry in one of the most successful franchises of all time, and if they didn't put their effort into adding more Pokemon, there is literally no part of the game that demonstrates where that dev time might have gone. All that said, I probably am going to put some time into this, if only because it's so easy to play while watching something on the couch. It's almost absurdly old, but I've also never heard of the vast majority of Pokemon I run into, so there is some base sense of novelty.

So are the Titanfall games.

I just feel like we've heard a bunch of stories of EA studios being forced to use Frostbite despite all their objections. That, and Respawn had only used Source for their previous games, so I would have expected that if they did get to use an engine of their choice, they'd go with that.

Any indication as to when it's coming?

Watching the DF review, I didn't realize that this is an Unreal engine game. I wonder how Respawn managed to negotiate that.

Here's the relevant section of the bill: (page 16) I don't think the headline is actually correct. I suppose if a teacher worded a question like "explain how humans came to be," you couldn't fail them for saying "god created humans in his image." If you word a question like "explain the theory of evolution," you can still fail them if they say "doesn't matter, because Jesus." I'd be interested in hearing what teachers think. I imagine there's an argument that this could make them afraid to grade students that interject religion into answers, but I'm not actually sure that there's a lot of problems with the bill as presented.

Nothing looks too surprising about what the game. I look forward to bringing it home tonight.

The computer systems that car companies implement are largely built and maintained by third parties, especially if they have any actual computing power. Very little, if any of their computing expertise is applicable to what is required of self driving cars. Google does have a large chip making business, specifically focused on machine learning optimization. Ford's experience buying chips from BlackBerry RIM to run the UI for the explorer isn't really the same thing. Margins don't matter when the product doesn't exist. Neither does the ability to work with fleet purchasers, or experience of getting cars to work on the road. I will grant that when self driving cars do hit the road en-mass that they will likely be wearing the badge of an established car company. As you rightfully pointed out, building cars is hard, and it's not a business that Google or Uber or nVidia or anyone else is in a reasonable position to usurp. However, none of that experience really applies to the unsolved problems of self driving cars. The problems of vision and computation and machine learning optimization are not problems the car companies are positioned to solve. Personally, I find it as hard to imagine that existing automakers "solve" self driving cars without licencing the tech as I do tech companies actually building their own cars.

I don't mean that building cars is easy, just that it's a solved problem that gives you no insight into building a self driving car. You can be the best car producer in the world, but that doesn't mean you don't have any leg up in building software and you don't have any of the manpower necessary to get working on it. They want to be working on it because it could fundamentally change their entire industry, but that doesn't make Ford/Daimler/etc aren't well suited for solving the problem.

Todd Phillips is apparently open to working on a sequel if he can find a similar thematic resonance. Which to me means there will be a sequel. The film was too profitable to not get a sequel.

I kinda don't understand why they're launching it at all right now. Are they trying to get a slightly larger user sample than they had with their beta? It really seems like the whole thing is unfinished and there's so little to do. I feel like this is the kind of service that lives or dies on the idea that "it just works." If it was really as simple as "pick a screen, play a game," that's a value proposition that I think could be compelling. With all the barriers they have now, and with so little content behind them, it's hard to see how they think this is a worthwhile product to put out into the world.

While I think it's clear that there have been setbacks, it's also really unsurprising that car companies like Daimler, GM, and Ford are having trouble with self-driving vehicles. It would be like Vizio announcing that they were going to figure out quantum computing because they make displays. Building the car is the easy part, building the self driving part is the unsolved problem. I honestly think that it's more of a question of risk than anything else. For an established company with a lot to lose, putting a self driving car out that crashes far less than a normal car is still a huge risk. I couldn't find any good recent numbers, but in 2016 Ubers were involved in at least 753 collisions that caused injuries and 10 fatal collisions in the US. If you have robots hurting hundreds of people per year and killing a few, even if you're a good deal safer than normal drivers, you still might not survive the public and regulatory scrutiny that would come with that. So the barrier to entry isn't "is it as good at driving as a person," and probably something more like "is it 100x safer than a human driver."