TwinIon

Trump "jokes" about being President for multiple terms and certainly his lackies are happy to find any justification for keeping him in office, but I doubt that he actually has the balls to do anything about it. If he loses the election or if somehow the Senate convicts him, he'll complain about how unfairly he's been treated and about how illegitimate the whole process was, but he won't actually try to stay. He'll happily leave and spend as much time as possible on TV talking about why things would be better if he were still president (which he should be if not for those meddling kids democrats).

I wonder when we'll start getting movie trailers in 4K. Especially for trailers like this I imagine there would be an audience that would appreciate the extra resolution to go through it frame by frame.

While not inherent in the format, I think there's a very real distinction between the budget that television and film currently allow and the resulting quality that we often see. Nothing about The Social Network screams that it must be watched in a theater, but there's a care put into every element of it's production that television can't afford to put in. That opening scene basically tells the entire story of the character and it's so crucial to get it right, and that's why Fincher took 99 takes. Do you bother to CG Armie Hammer into twins if it's for TV? Do you have the time to do every single shot as meticulously as Fincher does in TV? Do you get such an incredible score from moment to moment if it's on TV? Certainly none of these things are inherent to film, but when you're constrained to a shorter time and the business model is so different, you're given the affordances that allow that kind of care to be put in. I also think that time is a double edged sword. Even if you had the time and budget for 10 or 20 hours of movie, how often are you able to get the quality to match up to what the film might be? How many shows can actually maintain a filmic level of quality throughout? Chernobyl comes to mind. Essentially nothing else does. As good as Breaking Bad is, it's run is still uneven at times. And if I just think of all the shows that are too long, with entire episodes desperately working to fill the unneeded hours, I'd basically be listing the history of television. I'm in the middle of revisiting Mad Men right now, and there are times that show is magnificent, but if you told Matthew Weiner to edit it down without regard for how long or short it should be, I bet you lose dozens of hours.

The interesting part of that exchange to me was what came right before. AOC asked if she could run ads telling voters the wrong election date and Zuck said no, which seems completely out of line with the rest of his argument. His argument is that he shouldn't be in the business deciding which lies politicians get to advertise; which even if I don't agree with, I understand. But if you're going to remove some lies and not others, then you're necessarily deciding what lies are ok and which aren't. At least with something like election dates it's super easy to figure out the right date. Personally, I think the distinction that should be made more prominent is lies in advertising and lies in posts. They already allow politicians (and everyone else) to say basically whatever the hell they want on their pages. Let Trump or AOC or anyone else spew whatever nonsense they please over their audience that has opted in. Sure, you're the platform, but there's a certain distance from that I can appreciate in that Facebook hasn't arbitrarily forced that post on you. When you're taking money to boost a specific message (advertising!), that distance is erased and now you have a direct hand in determining how many people that message reaches. Facebook has already taken that responsibility to heart, a fact born out in the types of ads that Facebook already bans. Sure, they don't let you advertise straight up illegal things, but there's a bunch of other stuff they don't advertise. They won't let you advertise legal weapons, "unsafe supplements" (where Facebook decides what unsafe means), any adult product or service, cryptocurrency, surveillance equipment, payday loans, multilevel marketing schemes, penny auctions, tobacco, and pharmaceuticals. I don't really even disagree with those bans and I certainly haven't heard anyone complain about the poor pharmaceuticals companies rights to free speech.

The impressions I've seen have been mostly positive. It's currently at 66%, which is right around T3. I suppose that's the best case scenario. I was wondering why we keep seeing this franchise come back when none of the three post T2 films have actually made their budget back in the US. T3 got 75% of the way there, but Salvation and Genisys were closer to 60%. The only bright spot is that worldwide grosses have been good and keep going up, so I suppose that's the answer. It's become another "hopefully the international box office will save us" action franchise.

I still like the idea of game streaming, but it's pretty hard to justify spending any money on what Google is offering right now.

I feel like this pretty accurately shows why Trump thinks never-Trump Republicans are so dangerous. Right now he can count on effectively unanimous support within his party, no matter what he does. If the idea that you could be a Republican that doesn't support Trump spread at all, he'd be in pretty serious trouble.

I just finished this last night, and I really enjoyed it, even if it's not without its blemishes. I played on an Xbox One X and I still often got texture pop-in and slow downs. Nothing game breaking, but definitely frustrating at times. Still, it is a beautiful game and there can be a ton of particles floating around, all with some amount of physics. I made an early mistake in not pursuing side missions. I got to a point a bit more than half way through and decided to do one (with the refrigerator), and just couldn't get it done. After a number of tries I looked online for a tip, and all it said was to evade the attacks. My B button didn't do anything though, so I wasn't sure what was wrong. Turns out that evade (like a quick dodge) and a couple other core powers are unlocked in side missions that don't seem obviously more important than many others. I imagine I could have finished the game without those powers, but I'd advise doing them asap. I think the game did a great job of giving you interesting powers to juggle, and throwing just enough at you to make fights interesting, but never frustrating. Especially once I got the "optional" powers, combat had a really great flow to it. Towards the end when you're at your peak, it's a real blast to float around, launching large objects, throwing baddies at each other, and select just the right weapon type for the situation. It's some of the more enjoyable combat that I can recall, and it kind of made me wish for some more variety in enemies to test myself against. It certainly makes something like Gears feel very vanilla by comparison. I enjoyed the story well enough. I think they did a good enough job of allowing you to delve into it as much as you wanted, while still providing sufficient story through voice overs and what not. I do kind of wish there were portable audio recordings a-la Bioshock. I was interested enough to occasionally read some of the collectables, but I skipped reading most of them. Everything about the game has these caveats, but overall it's a very solid package that I very much enjoyed.

Having Holdo do it is kinda super important to the whole story. If you have Ackbar, there's immediately a sense of authority that comes along with him, and the confrontations between Holdo and Poe would no longer feel nearly as ambiguous. It's also an emotional moment, and I'd much rather have Laura Dern in that role than a fish man that can hardly emote.

I rewatched the movie (it's pretty good) and went into this one cautiously optimistic. I know Lindelof has said that Watchmen is his favorite piece of media, and boy did it show. The pilot really gives the impression of a deeply thought out world that is also a fascinating extension from the comic. So many little details that added in show a real love for the source material, and the ways that it chose to extend some of the potential implications are both unexpected and completely consistent. What really stands out to me is how headfirst it dives into racial relations and modern politics. I obviously never read Watchmen when it was being released, but it's clearly a work of it's time, harnessing the political environment for its own commentary. I feel like the easy way out with a sequel is to go back to that well; make Adrian's peace short lived and put us back on the brink of nuclear war, returning to a cold war era style of politics. Instead, they've chosen to immerse the show in an set of issues that are both evergreen and undeniably contemporary. It's a bold move that gives the show an urgency and modernity that it could easily have lacked. If the rest can live up to the pilot, this could be a really special show.

We definitely see them do some simple things, like landing and taking off (R2 in Empire, I think Count Dooku's ship in Clone Wars). I only watched Solo once, but L3-37 was the Co-pilot and certainly seemed capable of piloting a ship by itself.

So the company's valuation goes from $47B to $7B in the blink of any eye as soon as everyone gets a rough overview of their books, books that show that they're on track to lose $1.8B this year alone. So what do you do with the captain of ship sinking so fast? You play him $185M in cash, give him a $500M line of credit, and $1.5B in equity in his seemingly worthless company. Maybe his grift didn't make him one of the richest people in the world, but I'd still call it a success.

It certainly seems like Disney is looking at this for the long haul, and I imagine that the VZW deal won't be the last of them.

I put an event on my calendar to remember to buy tickets, and the AMC app actually worked, but I went home from work early sick and slept through the initial ticket sales. Did still end up getting a good seat in an IMAX theater for Friday, so at least that.

I really don't want to get into a long TLJ discussion, but I think it's fair to say that the capabilities of droids has been extremely inconsistent throughout Star Wars media. R2-D2, as much as I love him, is exhibits A-Z by himself. Rogue One only further complicated the situation.

While I imagine they had higher hopes for this film, it's not as if China has been a big box office draw for QT. Far as I can tell, his only movie to play in China was Django, and it made all of $2.6M. I think it's a pretty silly reason to not show the film, and I can also really see why QT wouldn't want to re-cut it. Regardless of whether or not you like how Bruce was portrayed, it's an important sequence for Cliff Booth.

I think that Keanu and Cho both have certain qualities I associate with Spike. I can see Cho's playing Spike's swagger well, while Keanu is maybe a better fit for Spike's aloofness. The only asian actor that immediately comes to my mind that might be better is Steven Yeun, but I'm happy with Cho. Then again, if they're going to successfully translate this show to live action, they can't do it one to one. They're going to have to adapt it, and that means choosing a style and finding an actor that best fits into that style. Maybe their adaptation better suits Cho's strengths.

I haven't even seen Suicide Squad, but somehow it makes me happy that this version pissed off Leto, effectively ended his run of the character, and outgrossed Suicide Squad.

Since Jojo Rabbit, Parasite, and The Lighthouse were all unavailable to me this weekend, I saw this instead. It was fine. A serviceable sequel that was otherwise uninspiring.

I read this the other day and it's extraordinary that there isn't an investigation into this. The trades outlined in that article made profits of $180M, $190M, $82.5M, $1.8 billion, and $1.5 billion. It certainly seems like either someone in the administration or with direct access to Trump is involved, which is probably why there isn't an investigation. It's hard to imagine that we have any idea as to the true scale of the corruption at play right now.

When I was watching streams recently the entire chat was nothing but Hong Kong spam, I was actually surprised they didn't start banning people immediately. Maybe they thought it would only last a day or so.

This isn't here or there, but I hate that using the "ok" sign has gone from 4 chan meme to something regularly used by terrible people. I default to it instead of a thumbs up because that's what I use in scuba diving, where a thumbs up means "I'm going up." Now if a waiter asks me if my food is ok when my mouth is full, I might accidentally flash a white power sign at them.

I'd be shocked if anything comes of this. I realize Trump has the worst lawyers, but no one could actually think they could win something like this, right?

In half an hour we get to hear Zuck's views on free speech, so make sure to tune in for that.

Year over year their defense is maybe better than it was but their offense had slipped significantly. Good time to throw all your picks at a CB. Good thing that no one in LA cares about football anyways.