TwinIon

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.

It looks nice, but requiring physical cartridges makes it much harder to actually use. I imagine there's a very niche market for this, but it's not me, and in an age where convenience is king, I don't think I'm alone.

I spent an extra hour in traffic to go see it in HFR (60fps 3D @2K) and I'm glad I did. Even without the full 120fps, I'm pretty bullish on the whole idea. At it's best, it really did feel like looking through a window. There was a sense of additional presence beyond what you get from a normal film that I really liked. When it worked well. When it didn't, it really exposed issues that probably don't exist or are minimal at 24fps. One advantage that Gemini Man had over the Hobbit is that they could often just shoot on location. Ang Lee didn't have to invent a whole fantasy world and lots of crazy props. You can just have Will Smith, laying in the grass, aiming a gun, and it looks real because it is real. When things aren't real, that's when the problems arise. I imagine that I would be hard pressed to pick out each time a digital stunt double was used in the last James Bond or John Wick movie, but I feel like I could probably nail every use in Gemini Man. It's hard to say if it was just a budget limitation or something that is just that much harder to fake in HFR, but that weightless feeling that bad effects have was so much more noticeable when it was used. Which makes the occasional successes of Junior, Will Smith's younger digital double, even more impressive. Even in HFR 3D, there were times that you could forget that this was a wholly digital creation. It wasn't as consistent as the deaging in Captain Marvel, but I think it proves that digital doubles are ready for close ups. That said, it's far from perfect. Junior spends a lot of time in the uncanny valley, and camera placement was obviously trying to obscure him at crucial moments. (You will see a lot of the back of young Will Smith's head.) I've only really talked about the effects of the film because that really is the primary draw of the film. If it's on Netflix in a couple months, sure, check it out, but it very much is the 90's era Bruckheimer production its script's history would suggest. The dialog is often heavy handed and a bit silly. Character motivations are hazy and emotional moments never seem to have the intended effect. Benedict Wong is a delightful sidekick, but doesn't get nearly enough to do. Will Smith outperforms the script, but it's not really enough to save the film from mediocrity. I believe in Ang Lee's vision for the future of film, and I commend him for pushing so hard, I just hope he can couple this high end technology with the quality of his earlier films.

I feel quite certain that AMC's servers are not ready. I might just get in line at the theater.

To celebrate League of Legends' 10th anniversary, Riot announced a whole slew of stuff. Some of it is farther along that others, but it was quite a blowout. The one I'm personally most interested in is the new collectable card game called Legends of Runeterra. They seem to have gone the opposite direction from Artifact and made a card game that is much more instantly digestible and with a very kind free to play business model. The gameplay seems like something between Hearthstone and Magic, and from a very quick glance it seems pretty straightforward. If the execution is there, I can see it gaining a real following. There are a few ways to unlock cards, but most don't involve any kind of packs. You can earn or purchase "wildcards" that allow you to unlock whatever card you want of the appropriate rarity. This one feels pretty far along, with beta access already rolling out and a bunch of streams already on twitch. They announced Project F, a game that looks to be a dungeon crawler of sorts that was only shown very briefly. Project A is another game, early in development, which looks like a tactical shooter somewhere between Overwatch and CS. Their 2D fighter is thus far called Project L. It's been in development "for some time" but "still has a long way to go." Probably the biggest announcement for many is that League itself will be coming to mobile in a version called Wild Rift. It won't support crossplay with the desktop version, but there will be shared rewards with the desktop version. Also announced is a League of Legends anime series called Arcane. The series will be streamed on an existing service which has yet to be announced.

It's a crock, but I am glad they decided to hand out the prize money. They still really should not have punished the casters, and unless he's allowed back into Grandmasters (still not clear to me if that's the case), it's still far too much punishment. I just imagine if someone had put on a MAGA hat and shouted "Make America Great Again" on the official stream, they'd have cut away, the casters would have laughed, twich chat would have had a field day, and there'd probably have been a message from Blizzard telling people not to engage in political speech on official streams. I doubt anyone would have been banned and it's really hard to imagine the casters getting suspended.

I haven't even finished control and just started Gears 5. All games should be the length of Goose Game, then I'd be able to catch up.

I heard a great analogy for the larger speech issue at play here that re-framed to me in a very clear way. When car manufacturers build new cars for the US, even though the federal government has separate standards from California, CA's are more restrictive. The easiest thing to do is obviously to just build cars to the more limited CA standard and sell them everywhere. Likewise, we're seeing the much more stringent GDPR privacy notifications and data retention become the norm because any website that wants to work in Europe has to follow that anyways, so best to just follow the more stringent rules everywhere, even if there isn't a penalty in the US. That's what we're starting to see happen with worldwide speech from large companies. China is writing the most constrictive rule set, so these companies are better off trying to play by their rules rather than police things in a more western fashion. It makes a lot of sense, and as China grows larger and gets more protective, it's hard to imagine any company with business interests there not fall into line.

The original deal was $500M, the 5 year extension is $1.5B. NBA China, a separate business arm of the NBA, was valued at $5 billion. They estimate that NBA yearly revenue from China is ~$500M. Perhaps most importantly, nearly 500 million people watched the NBA in China last year. So while China might only be 6% of NBA revenue right now, the expectation is it could be far larger than that. So while the NBA makes a lot more money from China than Activision/Blizzard, they're both really fighting for hypothetical money than they are existing revenue.

xCloud beta invites have started rolling out. Anyone get in yet?

We do know that they're supporting Dolby Vision / Atmos, but I we don't know what will be available that way. Tweeting each movie/show is an odd way to announce everything, so maybe they'll put out a comprehensive press release.

The tone of that trailer is very odd.

Personally, I wouldn't be surprised to see Phoenix win. I think you could easily have given him golden statues for Gladiator, Her, The Master, Inherent Vice, or You Were Never Really Here. If Joker is what gets him an Oscar, that'd be fine with me, even if I didn't love the movie.

It's not really the same character, but the first thing that comes to my mind is A Star Is Born. The 1937, 1955, and 2018 versions all got best actor nominations (none of them won), while the 1955 and 1977 versions won the Golden Globe. A few remakes have been nominated, but I don't think any had the roles get nominated (Cleopatra, Romeo and Juliet, Moulin Rouge).

I liked it a lot. It's a fitting epilogue to the show, but you can tell they had a lot more time than usual to shoot it. There were times when it felt like maybe it was trying a bit too hard on the cinematography, but overall it was a beautifully shot film. It looked especially gorgeous in 4K HDR. I was surprised that it was released in theaters. The local ArcLight has it playing, which I didn't think was a thing for any day and date releases.

AMC hasn't yet decided when they're going to show it. I wouldn't be surprised if it's a slow rollout to only a few theaters.

Kinda. With motion smoothing you're taking a source at a lower frame rate and effectively inventing new filler frames to match the frame rate of the TV. High frame rate movies are actually captured at that frame rate, so no frames are invented. So some of that same feeling might exist, but there should be a clarity that is very different than what you get with smoothed frames. Filmmaker mode to the rescue!

I don't know much about most of these people, but it sure does seem like the Lithium ion battery folks earned their spot.

How about we bother to look up some numbers? While digital distribution is now clearly dominating game sales as a whole (83% digital last year), it's far less true for consoles. It was only in the first quarter of this year that Sony said that digital downloads barely outpaced physical retail sales. Compared to music, LPs accounted for 4.3% and CDs captured 7.1% of music revenue last year. So yeah, when around half your customers are currently buying physical media, even if that number ends up in the single digits by the end of the generation, you have to start with a physical drive. I imagine that I'm in a small minority, but I'm happy that the PS5 will play 4K Blu Rays. I don't buy nearly as many films as I used to, but when I do I try to buy them in the highest quality available.