TwinIon

There was an earlier thread about the game. I really enjoyed it. I generally don't do well in games that lack a strong direction and make you find your own way, but there was something about the mystery of Outer Wilds and how you explored it yourself that I found captivating. It's really a game more focused on exploration than any I can think of. There's no combat, very few puzzles in the Zelda dungeon style, and no real progression other than what you've learned. It's very BotW like in that you can "finish" the game on your first go if you know exactly what you're doing, but unlike BotW, the only thing you gain by playing more is a better knowledge of the solar system and the mysteries it contains. It's a unique setup that I'm surprised worked so well for me. I have my issues with the game, gameplay issues that I really wish they would have sorted out, but overall it was a great experience that I'd encourage to nearly everyone to try. I do have two things that I would specifically recommend to anyone playing. First is to give it a decent shot. Especially if you're getting it on gamepass, it could be easy to play for 30 minutes and decide you're not getting anything out of it. Go out into the world and set your sights on a specific thing: a building you want to get into, a question you want answered, a thing that keeps killing you, whatever. Find something to focus on, but don't stick to it dogmatically, because in the course of trying to solve one mystery, you'll run into a bunch out of necessity. If that progression doesn't grab you, the game probably isn't for you. The second thing is to remember that there is a computer in the back of your lander that keeps notes for you. I had a bunch of hand written notes before I figured out the computer was there. Basically everything you scan gets uploaded and it does a good job of piercing the threads together and pointing you towards things that you might want to look into and ensuring you don't overlook crucial pieces to the puzzle. One last thing that I think really enhanced my playing of the game is cheating a little bit. Outer Wilds is wonderful in that you can access most areas in a number of ways, especially the "hub" areas on a couple planets. If you know the right route, it might only take you 2 minutes to go from take off to the center of one of these hubs. When you're starting out, if you don't find one of these quick entries (one in particular is very well hidden) you might spend half your loop trying to get in. I think it was fun to try a bunch of things to find my way in, but if you're in the middle of exploring a mystery, or trying to get through each nook and cranny in a hub, the travel time is unacceptable. Go on youtube, find a non-spoiler video that shows the fastest way in, and take it from there. I really think the game should surface these shortcuts to you once you have found your way in, but it doesn't really do that, so if you're like me, a little bit of cheating can make a big difference.

I have no doubt that Disney is being horribly greedy and trying to bully Sony into a worse deal. I have very little doubt that Sony would make very similar money on Spider-man stuff without Disney. I also think that both the live action Spider-man movies and other MCU films would be better if Disney and Sony can make a deal here. So while I don't really want to root for Disney to suck more money out of their few remaining competitors, I do hope they can make a deal.

I don't imagine that this is a change he can get through. I really don't think there's a reasonable interpretation of the 14th that could limit birthright citizenship.

I agree. It's not like she's been playing it safe since The Matrix ended. Speed Racer, Cloud Atlas, Jupiter Ascending, Sense8. At worst her work is still crazy, exciting, and wildly ambitious. At it's best, it's unlike anything else out there.

I feel like this is such a flashback to the .com boom. I look at a company like Uber, one that might never make any money, and at least there's a good idea at the heart of it that shifted a whole market. This isn't a good idea, it's not changing markets, it's just debt funded nonsense. If you're in one of their buildings taking advantage of it, good for you, but I'd keep any money far away from this whole debacle. I can't believe it's lasted this long.

I love the first film and have a real soft spot for Reloaded, but I'm not really interested in a fourth film. Honestly, I'd probably prefer a reboot to a sequel. Still, having Lana Wachowski on board gives me some hope, and now is a good time for a blockbuster that re-examines our relationship with technology.

After Far From Home I don't know how you take the MCU out of Spider-man without another reboot. This is a real bummer, but it's a possibility that's been on my mind ever since Venom made so much money after being so bad.

That tweet makes it sound like it could be a remake, but I'd be much more interested in a new game.

Yeah, but that's tied to the device. If you want backups and you've got an Apple device, you don't have a choice. While annoying, or even predatory, I see how they get away with it. This is an actual competitive market. It's more like Apple Music, a service that gives you all the same content as its competitors for the same price. Like Apple Music, this is a service that they're trying to sell more broadly. They're making a big push to make sure you can watch Apple TV without even owning an Apple product. They haven't gone all the way to Android or Fire TV apps, but still, they're trying. They're also spending $6B on content this year. That's more than double what they spent on Beats, their largest acquisition ever (and one that came with a profitable hardware division in addition to a streaming service). Sure, it's a drop in the bucket for them, but again, it shows that they seem to be serious about this. A $10/month service with the content they've shown just isn't competitive, and I feel like they must know that.

Well, it's a Bond title.

So will this be a complete disaster or an entertaining one?

It looks like it sticks pretty well to the formula of the previous games, but while I enjoyed some of them (to various degrees), I'm also a bit concerned about a superhero game that's setup like a Tomb Raider title. In Tomb Raider the confined spaces and corridors of baddies were mostly fine (though the more open parts were generally better), but in these demos they just look small. It's one thing if you're this lone person trying to make it through a jungle of terrorists. It's another if you're freaking Iron Man, being rushed to a given location, and you're stuck in a box. Then again, the only level we've seen is this intro. It's quite possible the rest of the game opens up significantly, which would be typical of Crystal Dynamics previous efforts. The combat looks expected, but solid. They're not doing anything revolutionary here, but if it's executed well it could be a worthwhile playthrough. I agree that it's best that they don't make them look like carbon copies of the MCU characters if the game isn't in the MCU. The problem is everything is so close to the MCU. I know these are characters with long histories of mild revisions, but at this cultural moment the MCU versions are the canonical incarnations of these characters. I feel like they might have been better served by doing the "Miles Morales" versions of characters, or at least find some variations on familiar characters that are more visually distinct. The way it is, it's hard for a casual fan to escape the feeling that these are the "store brand" versions.

They just released a trailer for The Morning Show. It looks fine, could be great, could be meh. It certainly doesn't scream that it's worth $10/month. I don't see how Apple thinks that this will work. How is this not going to be bundled with other stuff? How in the world do they look at the prices for Hulu and Disney+ and think, "yeah, our five shows are worth more than those libraries." My theory is that Apple "leaked" this high price but the official announcement will be lower. There's no way a $10/month price works for something with so little content.

It makes sense given how aggressive MS has been at buying studios lately. I wouldn't be surprised if they already had a deal with Sony that would give Sony a chance to buy them if they got an offer from anyone else. The only bummer here is that I imagine their VR stuff will go towards being PSVR only. Stormland looks freaking amazing, and I feel like it's exactly the kind of game that would be hampered by PSVRs limitations. I really hope the PS5 launches with a PSVR2 that has better controllers and inside out tracking, making it capable of experiences that aren't always forward facing.

I think the argument is that Google's algorithm produced more favorable results for Hillary than for Trump, and that bias lead to those votes being swayed. I believe it comes from this testimony from June. As a side note, I looked into that researcher's proposal for how to break Google's monopoly, and it's an interesting idea that I don't think would really work. His plan would be to force Google to publish a free api to their web index, allowing competitors to bypass the work required to build their own, effectively jumpstarting competition in the market. I'm personally very skeptical that such a solution would work though. I've never gotten the impression that Bing or Duck Duck Go or Yahoo failed to effectively index the web, especially the popular parts of it. The secret sauce of Google search is, and always has been, their ability to find what you want better than the other guys. If I put the first line of a popular Wikipedia article into Bing, I imagine it will always find the right article. If I type something vague and misspelled and slightly off topic, Google is uncannily good at finding what I actually meant, where Bing has a hard time surfacing the stuff that I want even with more straightforward queries (or at least this was true the last time I tried switching for a while). Google has the benefit of being able to look through an untold number of searches and see what people actually wanted from them. It's a network effect for intent that's so effective that its convinced people that their phone is listening to them. Getting access to Google's index won't help you with that.

Trump's large union crowd at Shell was given the option of not showing up — and not getting paid This is why the President always accuses protestors or other crowds as being paid for. He does it so often that figures that everyone must operate that way.

I'm a complete sucker for that Cloud Atlas track. I played around with KSP for a little while, but the UI was so difficult I never bothered to figure it out. If the new UI is a good deal better I could see myself spending a lot of time with a game like this.

I popped back into the game for a bit to try out the VR. My re-introduction to the game reminded me just how freaking unintuitive nearly everything about it is. I couldn't figure out how to craft a basic commodity for quite a while, constantly getting lost in a tangled mess of menus. There isn't even a map of controls. You can remap all the controls, but the remapping screen doesn't even show you the default key. Apparently the transporter that I'd built at my base now required power to work, which seems like a real step back in usability. I also had just recently gotten a giant freighter, but I hardly recall what I'm even supposed to do with it. I'm considering starting over just to figure out how to play the stupid game. As to the VR experience, it's somewhere between amazing and terrible. It's quite impressive that this is the full game in VR. No limits on what you can do, no need for a different save, just a decision to play in VR or not. It's great. It's also a huge mess. The HUD is always pointed forwards, which I guess makes sense if you're playing on a PSVR, but if you have a room scale setup it's incredibly stupid. This is a game where you're wearing a helmet all the time, having a HUD that is attached to that helmet, and therefore your vision, only makes sense. Then you get into the menus, which are already a jumbled mess outside of VR, are even worse to navigate in VR. There's nothing fun about navigating strange floating 2D menus in VR. Almost everything, from the way you change gun modes to the way you interact with objects is cumbersome or lacking. There are games that have done pretty well in this regard, but I think the rule of thumb in VR is to stay away from menus as much as possible. Then you get to flying a ship, the experience that I expected to be the best, is still pretty messy. Inside my little ship there is a ton of detail, but you can only interact with the throttle, the control stick, and two handles on either side of the cockpit that do nothing. There are a bunch of visible buttons, but none are interactive. When I got an incoming radio message, I couldn't interact with the notification, I had to bring up some jankey menu to accept the call. Actually flying was mostly fine, but not great. Using a joystick with the Oculus touch controllers is odd, but it works well enough. For some reason there is no fine control of the throttle as far as I could tell. You can have it full ahead, full reverse, or in neutral. It seems like there could be an analog acceleration option using one of the joysticks if fine control of a throttle is too hard. There's also the issue of travel time. I imagine it's a function of how the game works or maybe it was even a gameplay choice, but traveling a few minutes on a screen is much more bearable than doing the same in VR. This is a game that has been iterated on in very significant ways since launch, so I suspect that some of this will get ironed out over time, but right now it's hard to recommend playing NMS in VR for any real length of time. I might give the game another shot, and I might even try the VR mode out occasionally, but it's not the ultimate VR demo it could be.

Looks fun. It's a proven gameplay loop in a fun new setting, seems like a winner.

Stellaris seems like it might be right up my alley. Anyone have any idea what the timeline is when it says "coming soon to Xbox Game Pass for PC"? Do they mean days, weeks, months?

You can set one up without going through an employer.

Smaller states are already disproportionately represented in the Senate, and that seems unlikely to change. I don't know why we need grant them a similarly disproportionate representation in other branches. A straight popular vote doesn't give a California voter any more power than a voter in Wyoming or Ohio, but any system that relies on the EC changes that one way or another.

This is exactly the kind of thing I imagine Trump would want his legacy to be about.

I picked this up when they announced the VR mode but I haven't put too much time in. Being able to carry an unlimited amount makes a huge difference. I'll certainly have to give it a go.

Is there much of a precedent for this? The Post doesn't mention any, and it certainly seems odd for such a close US ally to prevent US congresspeople from visiting. If nothing else it's amazingly petty.