TwinIon

I liked Disco season 2. Sometimes I wish it wouldn't do so much alternate reality / timeline stuff and be more typical Trek, but I'm willing to go for whatever ride as long as they do it well.

I noticed that my local AMC had an armed private security guy hanging around (presumably all weekend, there was one on Thursday and Sunday). So AMC took the threat seriously enough to spend that money. I'm not shocked by how well Joker did. I think there's a lot of residual goodwill for TDK that pushed it along. A awards worthy Joker performance in a "serious" comic book movie? Yeah, I can see how it made money. I wouldn't have guessed it would pull in quite so much, but it's clearly one of those movies that was able to break out into a larger cultural conversation before it even opened. Kinda crazy that it was only a few 100k away from the opening for Justice League.

I'm not trying to judge it for what it doesn't do as much as what it tries and fails to. Stuff like the dancing before the curtain pull is a beautiful image that felt entirely out of place. One of many beautiful pieces of a collage that never quite coheres. If you want overly harsh, I'd very much recommend Richard Brody's take at the New Yorker. He spoke directly to that point:

My overly long, kinda spoilery take: 3/5

With the release tomorrow and 182 reviews in, Joker is sitting at 76% on RT.

I've been pretty much only buying 4K discs lately, and it's been hard to find consistent sales.

So the even was this morning, and we did indeed see the expected updates. The ARM based Surface X was announced, but you'll really be paying extra for that weight savings and battery life, since it starts at $999, compared to the Surface Pro 7 starting at $749. I imagine the ARM performance is great, as long as you're not running anything emulated. MS spent very little time discussing software. They got Adobe up on stage to talk about apps, but then disappointed by only announcing Fresco, their new drawing app, would be "optimized for Surface." If all you do is Office+Web and can use the cloud for everything else, maybe it's a great device. For everyone else, it seems overly expensive and probably ill fitting. Still, the real excitement was around the rumored two screen Surface Neo: It's pretty slick, even if I would personally question how universally useful the form factor is. It's two 9" displays that fold together, not a folding screen. So it's very focused on productivity. I isn't scheduled to ship until the end of 2020, and I think it says something that MS doesn't think folding displays will be ready even then. Given the screen divide, it's really meant to be doing either two things at once, or one app that splits across (like Outlook, with a list of emails on one screen and an opened email on the other). Given that it doesn't really work very well as one screen, this feels like it'll only work well with MS stuff. No one is going to build specific apps for this. If it was a bending screen, and it could do all this and just be a bigger screen when you wanted it to be, it would be so much more enticing, as it is, it feels like a stopgap. Speaking of which, MS also surprised everyone by showing off their Surface Duo phone: It's basically a miniature version of the Surface Neo, with two 5.6" displays. It's running heavily skinned Android, so at least MS isn't trying to get people to build apps for another OS. The product design isn't finalized, so things like a missing rear camera will likely change (although with this design putting the camera on the "front" seems like it would work best). Wired has more details. The Duo is also scheduled for release at the end of 2020. I think it basically has the same problems. No one other than MS will make apps that support both screens, so you're left with a device that is is only advantageous while multitasking. Whenever you're not doing two things at once, you're carrying around a device that is extra large and thick for very little benefit. Unlike the Galaxy Fold, all that extra screen doesn't even give you a better Netflix experience. MS says this is a different category of device. It's not a smartphone and it's not a 2-in-1 like the Surface. I don't really buy it. It's replacing your phone. Still, as much as I think these devices are stopgaps that basically no one should buy, I'm excited that MS is experimenting and building the software experiences that will make foldable screen devices much more interesting. Once that tech is ready, MS could well be in the best position to take advantage. They're working on the UI paradigms that will make those future phones and PCs more than just a bigger screen in a smaller package. Kudos to MS for pushing boundaries and creating cool new stuff. It'll be interesting to see if all their work pays off, or if Apple and Samsung and whoever else are just able to steal the best ideas to put in devices that will actually sell.

Coming December 13th, this certainly looks like a Michael Bay movie. Rumor is that at $150M this is easily Netflix's most expensive film to date. It looks fun enough to me. A pretty easy "turn up the sound, turn off your brain" Netflix movie.

Microsoft is holding a Surface event tomorrow to show off all their new hardware, but most of it was leaked yesterday. The new Surface Pro 7 seems to finally have a USB-C port, there's a 15" varient of the Surface Laptop, and most interestingly, there's a all new ARM based Surface. Almost certainly powered by Qualcomm's 8cx chips, I'm personally very interested in how MS handles this second attempt at building an ARM based Surface. I believe in MS's ability to get Windows, web browsing, and Office working well on such a device, but I'm pretty dubious as to their ability to get anything else. What exactly this device will bring to the table is an open question, but it has me personally interested. The leaks also mentioned Windows 10X, likely a fork of Windows that will be used on an upcoming dual screen Surface product. If we see that product tomorrow, it will steal the show, even if it's not entirely ready. People have been speculating about dual screen Windows devices as far back as the Courier concepts, so it'll be exciting to see something real.

I generally like Silver, but I think he has increasingly been doing a lot more standard punditry on his twitter feed. Most 538 articles are still pretty good looks at the data, but his personal twitter is more and more standard pundit thinking.

A federal appeals court affirmed that the FCC is allowed to scrap net neutrality rules, but it also may allow states to introduce their own regulations on the subject. SCOTUS will not review the challenge. Of course, the FCC's justification for killing net neutrality was again proven false. The FCC is also going to have to re-write the order as it pertains to public safety, pole attachments, and the broadband reclassification of the low-income Lifeline Program. When the FCC re-submits their order, if they can provide sufficient justification for allowing preemption, the courts may grant it. So CA and other states can pass net neutrality laws, but the FCC may be able to preempt them on a case by case basis. While I think the order is bogus and the courts should have seen that, I think the lack of a clear ruling on preemption is a good thing. A lot of the worst case scenarios surrounding net neutrality have been held at bay by regulatory uncertainty. It was quite possible this case could have ended with Title II rules going back into effect, so no one wanted to reachitect their network or pricing plans around something that could just go away. With states possibly having the ability to still meddle with net neutrality, and many having already gone pretty far in doing so, it keeps a large amount of regulatory uncertainty on the table. It's entirely possible that we get through the election before this is all cleared up.

Always good to see a cop get convicted when the facts of a case are so plain.

I used to be the loudest voice in the room for a single, cohesive vision. When something like True Detective was announced as being all written and directed by the same people for it's whole season, I was overjoyed. It turns out, that was a pretty darn good example of what a singular vision can do for a creative work. What it wasn't was any kind of proof that doing so is necessarily better than going one step at a time. I don't have any statistical analysis, but when it comes to art, I don't think such a study would be really helpful anyways. In the end, I don't think that having a giant arc planned out is necessarily better than not having one. You can do one episode at a time and get Godfather 2, Aliens, or Breaking Bad; alternatively, you can plan a whole storyline out and get the prequel trilogy. The opposite is obviously true as well. If Episode 9 is a failure, I don't think that it will be a failure of vision and planning, it'll be a failure of JJ and his team to make a satisfying movie. If I could go back in time and give someone an extra year to make the sequel trilogy, I wouldn't give it to Kathleen Kennedy before VII, I'd give it to JJ and company after VIII. I think it is interesting that JJ is thinking more about IX as being the conclusion of the whole saga. I think a lot of people are like myself, primarily thinking of XI as an end to the sequel trilogy. A great movie would work as both, but it'll be helpful to go into the film with JJ's intent in mind.

While the online conversation around this movie has been bizzare and poorly handled, I don't think it's going to amount to much. It's currently tracking for an October record $82M debut, which I don't doubt at all. After winning Venice, I expect that even after all the op-eds, it's going to end up with a good, if not great RT score.

Lawsuits from whom? The NCAA? Other Schools? I'm not aware of any real legal challenges this law faces. Also, it seems that CA might not be alone in this fight for long.

Governor Newsom has signed the bill, which was passed unanimously in the state Legislature, into law.

I felt done with the series after the second one, but I'm sufficiently interested by the trailers to give it another go.

Ukraine’s former top law enforcement official says he repeatedly rebuffed demands by President Trump’s personal lawyer to investigate Joe Biden and his son, insisting he had seen no evidence of wrongdoing that he could pursue. Here's the thing that, for me, makes this so incredibly clear cut: Even with his incredibly corrupt group of assembled lackeys, Trump couldn't get the Justice department to open an official investigation into Biden. If he had, there would actually be some cover here. It would still be corruption, but at least there could be some fiction to hold up that Trump was working on behalf of the country, furthering the cause of American justice. Without an American lead investigation, there's just no possible explanation other than the obvious.

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.