TwinIon

I'm sad that it's going away, but it's a show that's had a great run. Really rewatchable to. I can't imagine how many background jokes/puns I've missed.

You can add Wag, the Uber for dog walkers app, to the pile. After raising $400M and reaching valuations around $600M, they had problems working at scale, particularly with customer service and dealing with incidents. Apparently, it's a problem for a dog walking app when dogs run away or die.

I don't think I really agree with that. If nothing else over the last few administrations we've seen how effective the minority party can be at preventing a majority from being even mildly effective. Ensuring that every congressional structure that used to promote any kind of common purpose or camaraderie amongst colleagues between parties is eliminated in favor of a dogmatic antagonism doesn't seem very helpful.

These are things that I've been frustrated by just as an observer. That nothing can happen in the House or Senate without a single leader's say so seems so deeply undemocratic. I don't have any precise fixes, but something that I desperately would like to see is more voting. I know the current SOP says that you don't bring up a vote if you don't know the outcome, but I hate that about as much as anything in congress. I don't know how to structure a rule to prevent terrible abuse, but I wish groups could force votes more easily. I want these people to constantly be generating records to defend, and I want to know where they actually stand on things when it's not entirely theoretical. This article didn't go too deep into it, but whenever I read any take on what it's like to be a congressperson, the worst sounding part is always the fundraising. I'd like to think that public funding could help, but I don't really know the best solution. What I do feel pretty certain of is that fundraising should not be the primary and overriding focus of every member of congress.

Can we just banish all EGS conversations to a seperate perpetual thread of endless bickering? On the actual topic of Untitled Goose Game, I played through it on the Switch and I mostly enjoyed myself. I finished the standard checklists and will go back and finish the extended ones soon. Unlike a lot of reviewers, I think the length of the game is appropriate, given the actual depth in the game. Goose Game leans heavily on the novelty, which is quite substantial, but it isn't around long enough for that novelty to really wear out. The gameplay is simple, repetitive, and sufficient to carry it through the couple hours one can reasonably expect to be playing it. I can imagine a more substantial Goose Game where your options for interaction and the effects you have on people are more intricate, but that's not this game. You have a specified set of interactions available to you, and what you can do to objects or people (or otherwise incite them to do) is all pretty limited. This isn't a real sandbox of possibility, but no one should expect it to be. For $15 on the Switch it was well worth the money and the time. There's a palpable joy in being a dick of a goose and terrorizing a frightened child or outsmarting a shopkeep. The simple graphics and soundtrack make just waddling around and flapping your wings is entertaining enough. I did get stuck early on, unable to snatch a hat. I tried a few things getting the man to bend down and just grab it, but I couldn't get the hat. I then spent a few minutes trying a bunch of things trying to be more clever (will he take it off if it gets wet? can I flap my wings and blow it off? can I push something over on him to knock it off?), but it turns out that I just hadn't done a good job of aiming in the first place, and basically any simple bending interaction got him in range. There were a few times where selecting the right object was a bit of a pain, but it wasn't a game breaking issue. In the end this won't be a game that has a lasting impression, and it's not exactly vying for game of the year, but it's also the kind of gaming experience I'm increasingly taken with. It's a short, but pleasurable experience. It hasn't been streamlined by endless playtesting, and it's not exactly breaking new ground, but it's consistently entertaining in its simplicity and novelty. If the game takes off and they expand on it, great. If this is the final form of Goose Game, I'll be content that I played it and had a few good laughs.

If you released Taxi Driver today, I can't even imagine how people would interpret it, but it wouldn't be the film's fault. I don't expect Joker to be Taxi Driver, and certainly Phillips is no Scorsese, but I'm not going to waste time worrying about how terrible people will interpret a film that I haven't seen.

It seems like Dems might be rushing forward to an impeachment vote ASAP, and I'm not really convinced it's a good idea. If the end goal is to make sure that Trump's wikipedia page says he was impeached, then yeah you could probably get there. This story is easy to communicate, seems to be polling well, and likely enough to get that impeachment vote through without a whole lot of investigation. Of course, at the end of that impeachment vote, either the Senate quickly dismisses it, or McConnell never brings it up and it just goes away. On the other hand you could use this as the clear jumping off point that Muller should have been to have a bunch of wide ranging investigations, a la Nixon. Make Trump's crimes the story all the time. Know Ukraine is your ace-in-the-hole, but use it as a hammer to get his tax returns, push harder on emoluments, try and get transcripts from other conversations he's had, etc. Sure, Trump will claim it's all a witch hunt and the system is rigged, etc. etc., but he does that even when he wins and there isn't a real investigation happening. The only risk here is if you can't find crimes he commited. If you re-enact the Whitewater investigation and bore the public to death with some boring scheme that no one has any reason to care about, yeah, you might help Trump somehow. But Trump is not Clinton. He's historically unpopular and guilty of a bunch of stuff. Shine official spotlights on it all instead of just hoping the Post writes another damning article.

God I hope Giuliani goes down in history as the guy that accidentally took down Trump. He sure seems to be doing everything in his power to make that happen. I know we're a long way from any real consequences, but it's nice to dream now and then.

If we get one more MCU Spider-Man film and spidey in another team up or two, that would be great.

I have to spend a bit of time writing down my thoughts, but my initial feeling is that this is the biggest take down of god since Noah.

I'm happy to hear that series may has more residual goodwill than I thought. Certainly NBC seems to think it does.

Netflix has bought a bunch of movies and they've funded a bunch of movies, but I'm not sure if either is really an indicator of quality. Does anyone have a list of which is which? For example, Beasts of No Nation was bought after it premiered at Venice, but others like The Irishman (in addition to Okja, Private Life, Roma) Netflix funded the production of the film. They don't have a production company, so both categories just get lumped together as distributed by Netflix. I'd be kinda interested to see how well they've done funding films.

My point is basically that BSG was never broadly popular enough to support a spin-off. Of course, it's all relative. BSG was getting ~2M viewers (+ or - depending on the season), which would be pretty good compared to a lot of shows now (The Expanse averaged less than 1M). Unfortunately we have no real data on how well Star Trek Discovery is doing, but Enterprise's worst season in 04 beat BSG's best season the same year. Enterprise's first season was nearly double that. The rise of time shifted viewers through BSG's run and the broadcast/cable divide makes those numbers of questionable value, but I still think that BSG was never a sufficiently popular IP for NBC to use it as a selling point for a new subscription service. Maybe I'm underestimating BSG's popularity, or fans it gathered on DVD or streaming. I'm just skeptical of the IP's value at this point. Of course, the new show might just be marketed as a new Sci-Fi series, with little to no emphasis on its connection to BSG, making all this a null point.

While sheer scale makes companies like Uber and We Work the poster children for VC funded nonsense, moviepass is my gold standard for insane business strategies. It's still shocking to me that for a single monthly payment of less than one ticket, moviepass would absorb the full retail cost of as many tickets as I was willing to show up for. I'll give them the credit for accelerating the release of viable theater subscription services, but everyone who gave them money should be put in the investors hall of shame.

I trust Moore to have a good take, so creatively I think this is probably a good thing and I'm interested to see what this show ends up being. As a business decision, it's kind of baffling. BSG was never all that popular, with it's one existing spinoff getting quickly canceled. I don't believe we're in a world where 'Battlestar (2004) spin-off' is a selling point to broad audiences. I love BSG. I think the reboot series is one of the top few sci-fi shows of all time, right up there with TNG. I think the mini-series/pilot is amazing and that 33 is a perfect episode of TV. I'm happy to hear we're getting more of it in whatever form that comes. I just don't expect it to be a hit. That said, launching a new streaming service might be the best time possible to come out with a show like that. If critics like it, NBC might approve multiple seasons just hoping to get some buzz, regardless of viewership.

Like almost everything about this movie, this could go very well or very poorly.

I have my IMAX ticket tonight. I've been out of the country since it's release and I don't think it'll be available in IMAX after this weekend, given it's pretty terrible box office.

I have yet to see When They See Us, but I'm happy for Chernobyl win it. I feel like Chernobyl is the kind of series that will be kind of timeless, where every once in a while some thread brings it up and everyone re-discovers how great it was.

That is a good trailer. I don't think it reveals too much, instead doing just enough to remind you of the mood of Breaking Bad.

I kept hearing praise for this and expected it to be a much more quiet movie than the trailer sells. It certainly has my attention.

I watched the new episodes on the plane yesterday. It's kinda fun, but overall I'd say it's just fine. I'm enjoying the story well enough but it's not all that funny, at least compared to good Simpsons/Futurama. Still, I'll probably keep watching for the time being.

What is clear above all else is that Feige is very capable of producing enormous blockbusters. He's very capably shepherded the MCU, but I don't think it's clear where his producing skills shine outside of that particular rubric. My guess is that Feige will be quite good at making a Star Wars film feel like a Star Wars film. Beyond that, I don't think his involvement says much more than the fact that he wanted to be involved.

So Trump posted a CNN clip from Wednesday to prove a claim he made on the following Sunday. The man is not well.

While not recent news, I personally wasn't aware of SB 206, a California bill dubbed the "The Fair Pay to Play Act." The bill allows student athletes at public or private schools that earn more than $10M in media rights revenue (Division I) to profit from their name, image, or likeness. It would not allow the NCAA or anyone else to stop a student that is being paid from participating in athletics nor would it allow schools to change their scholarship. Schools would still not be allowed to pay athletes. The bill has already passed through the CA Senate, and is now going through the state assembly. If it is signed into law, it would take effect in 2023. It's back in the news thanks to some supportive tweets from Lebron. I've long been in favor of college athletes getting paid, and anything that takes power away from the NCAA is alright in my book. It could be an interesting world if CA schools are the only ones where athletes are allowed to get paid. I imagine other states would follow, but there would likely be holdouts. Imagine the recruiting dynamic if you know you can get paid directly if you go to USC but Alabama still has to pay you under the table.

In what seems to be a move made purely out of spite from the Trump administration, the DOJ has launched an antitrust investigation into four automakers that agreed to meet California's more strict emissions standards. Ford, Honda, BMW, and VW are under investigation for the CA deal that was announced in July. Trump has been trying to rollback Obama era emissions standards, but in general automakers haven't been going along with it. As Trump has been fighting for the rollback, automakers have largely decided to side with California, likely in an effort to avoid regulatory uncertainty in federal law. That has made Trump try and revoke CAs waiver, a legal move that it seems they're unlikely to win. This investigation just reeks of pettiness and spite, and it feels like an abuse of power.