TwinIon

But Google is building and buying devs specifically for Stadia, so it is possible that a small number of games do get developed. I think part of the problem is that it's not clear what new gameplay experiences can really be made by going cloud first or cloud only. How many actual gameplay related issues are prevented by compute power? There's also the question of scaling. Maybe it's profitable enough for Google to let you play games in the cloud as is (maybe it isn't we have no way of knowing), but increase the compute power you need per player enough and it certainly won't be.

This is such an incredibly bad idea in so many ways, I can't believe anyone would make such a suggestion public. So you're going to light up a camera at someone every time they look at porn? And you're going provide some sort of API that is open enough that any shadey porn site has access to age verification on your entire populace? And you're going to trust that porn sites will actually implement it? That's not even considering the technical issues. What about devices that don't have cameras (like most desktops)? Then you have an issue of the devices that do have cameras being largely of poor quality and certainly not working well in poor lighting conditions. You think a cheap laptop webcam or android phone selfie cam is capable of decent facial recognition even in good conditions? Even if this was in service of a worthwhile cause it would be a terrible and completely unworkable idea. As an effort just to stop people from seeing naked people, it's certifiable.

Assuming it works well, that is the kind of idea that I think they need in order to convince people that this is a good idea. Thing is, I doubt that Microsoft is behind at all (and in all likelihood, is ahead) in pushing game elements into the cloud. They've been trying to do this for a while now, and haven't found lots of good ideas in how to actually make better games with it. If Google finds something really special that only cloud based gaming, good for them, but somehow I doubt the fundamental idea will be unique to their platform for long.

I think he understands that it's the case. He knows he's one of the most storied filmmakers alive and even with the incredible cast he couldn't convince any major studio to make this movie. I think he's acutely aware of how movies in general and his movies in particular are going to be seen and what their market value is like. He just doesn't like it. For myself, if this was playing in an AMC and I could use my A-list subscription to see it, I'd see it in a theater. I don't think it is though, so I'll be watching on Netflix.

So, assuming Boris actually signs the extension (which I think he's required to do), now we probably move on to a general election in December. The polling I've seen has been pretty bad, but that BBC article says that a lot of young people are registering. Either way, it doesn't seem the UK comes out of this with a clear direction.

Having touch controls is a necessary feature for me. I have no doubt that Apple will sell a ton of these.

I've been sick and didn't have much to do this weekend, so I've spent a lot of time in the game and have surprisingly found myself pretty much at the end of it. Overall I'd say it's a good version of a game that shouldn't still be getting made. If you want Fallout but with a new skin, this will scratch that itch. Otherwise, I think it's fair to wonder why this particular game type has evolved so little since Morrowind in 2002. Most of my criticisms can probably be leveled against any Bethesda style RPG, so make of that what you will, but I still feel like there's a good case to be made against them. The core of the problem is that there is so much about these games that feels incredibly stale from both a technology and gameplay standpoint. When Morrowind released, there was a sense of wonder in such a huge area, all in 3D, all packed with items and enemies and NPCs that you could engage and interact with. It was so easy to overlook the obvious limitations and issues with their particular approach because it was novel and exciting. Here we are 17 years later and so many of those limitations have been overcome by other games, but somehow they're still tolerated in this particular strain. One of those things that initially created such a sense of wonder was the idea that nearly every item was something to interact with. Every cabinet could be opened, every "prop" piece of fruit could be devoured. Kill a man and steal his silverware! Then the reality of the situation sets in. If everything can be interacted with, and if you spread necessities out all over the place, the possibilities made real by making everything interactable simply become chores. Kill the baddies, loot them slowly, repeat. Empty out the hideout, and crawl through every nook and cranny, carefully pointing at each individual piece of money and each tiny container of precious ammunition. In Outer Worlds, so few are the times when those possibilities add up to anything worthwhile. I'd wager entire hours of my gameplay time were devoted just to aiming at each highlightable object, picking up that which was desperately needed along with worthless junk that added nothing to my gameplay experience. It certainly didn't help that the whole process was slightly buggy, often not bringing up the dialog box when a body was highlighted, needing to look away and then look back before I could loot. Then there are the technological limitations that felt so arbitrary. So many loading screens between areas, many of which weren't particularly large. In an age of endless wilderness in RDR2, having to load a tiny laboratory interior feels backwards. Even the large outdoor spaces felt small and isolated, and the cities and towns felt tiny and empty. Companion AI and pathfinding are straight out of the early days of 3D. The questing system is serviceable, but also incredibly limited. Only being able to handle a single quest at a time, it made dealing with multiple quests in the same area a chore of manual discovery rather than simply placing markers on a map. A map which, on my Xbox One X, was incredibly slow to load. There were times that I think it might have been faster to run to my destination than to open the map screen, wait for the map, and load my destination in fast travel. The inventory screen is serviceable, but again, feels out of an older time we should have long passed. Does anyone enjoy dealing with weight limits and juggling weapon and armor durability? Does anyone want to figure out which random bit of food is ideal to load into my healing vape for any given encounter? Again, this is a good game for the most part. The combat is interesting enough (though not great), the setting is fun (if not entirely original), the rpg elements are above average, providing a variety of possible playstyles. The graphics are mostly pretty good, if not outstanding. The score sets the tone well and the cast is entertaining enough. I didn't keep playing for hours on end because this is a bad game and I wanted to punish myself, I enjoyed it because it's well done. It's just a pretty good game that has been grafted to such outdated bones.

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.