TwinIon

Well, it's a good thing the Russians don't also make airplanes. Otherwise, the threat to not sell some pretty questionable and extremely expensive jets might seem a bit hollow.

Disappointing that Intel's answer will still be on 14nm (now +++!) and still have PCIe 3.0. In the end the lithography doesn't really matter and it'll be a little while before PCIe 4 is terribly useful, but it's still disappointing. I'm sure that with higher clocks and more cores these new chips will be quite capable, but it still seems like a weak response.

While I really enjoy Ehrlich's videos, I find he's a reviewer that I frequently disagree with. That said, I expect to agree with him on this one.

From here, the games that don't support handheld mode are: Labo Mario Party 1-2 Switch Just Dance Fitness Boxing

There's no way that I would personally buy one of these, but I absolutely see the appeal. I do have to wonder what kind of extra silicon they saved by eliminating the dock mode.

Often horror movies get criticized for what characters "should" do, and I agree with you in that Midsommar doesn't have those issues. Either logically or emotionally, we understand why these characters make the decisions they do. Also, I generally agree that it's not really meant to be a straight horror film, still, I think it's clear from the tone of the film that it's made to impart some kind of emotional response, and I just never really felt that outside of the opening.

That's true, and they're a great model of what can be done, but they also have a density that few American cities can match. I won't pretend that these numbers are truly apples-to-apples, but based on the wikipedia's numbers, the city of Amsterdam has a population density of 13,300 sq/mi, three times the 4,325 sq/mi of San Diego city. Once you start talking about the metro areas, things get far worse. 57% of Amsterdam's population lives in the urban area, compared with only 43% of San Diego, but even that makes it look closer than it is since Amsterdam's metro area is just under 1000 sq miles, compared to San Diego's 4,500 sq miles. When I see those photos of traffic through Amsterdam, they're all surrounded by buildings, which isn't really how all but a few square miles of San Diego is. If you magically willed all of the planned San Diego trolly lines into existence tomorrow, the city still just isn't built in such a way that one could easily live and work without needing a car. As the OP article points out, things like zoning and parking requirements really need to change before the density for transit or bike systems can really have any hope of working. Now, San Francisco doesn't have the benefit of that kind of excuse. The city proper has a density of 18,838 sq/mi. Then again, according to this, only 50% of trips are made in cars, so they're not doing too bad.

It's a good article and a well made point. It's also terribly hard to undo, but we're starting to see some small glimmers of hope. San Diego is updating their long term transportation plan, and it's a good deal less car centric than it has been in even the recent past. The last long term plan put 36% of funds towards transportation, and the aggressive new strategy (if it survives the planning process and tax hikes), seems like it would put far more money towards allowing people to move without cars. Still, even this new plan would aim to take public transportation from 1.5% to 5% of vehicle trips. So even this incredibly optimistic solution would hardly dent the problem.

Maybe that's what attracted me to this trailer more than the others. I would much rather have another take on these stories than a complete re-telling, which is what they've mostly been so far.

There's an impressive amount of craft in Midsommar, but it all seemed a bit of a waste as it failed to function on an emotional level. As with Hereditary, Ari Aster and cinematographer Pawel Pogorzelski make every single shot feel purposeful. I love how they frame their subjects, hold shots just long enough, and move the camera with such care. In both films, it heightens the drama, insinuating that everything has been considered; it all matters, it's all there for a reason. However, where Hereditary proves that out, I think Midsommar put all that great craft to waste. Besides the opening, my overwhelming sense of Midsommar's horror was "huh." There wasn't a sense of dread or impending doom, even when it was quite obvious. There wasn't a great tension or confusion, just a mild bewilderment and a general dissatisfaction. It's a movie that is demanding of your attention, but did little to pay that off in all but the most obvious ways. I think much of this stems from a lack of agency. So much of Midsommar's primary plot points happen while characters are heavily drugged. There's a clear sense of danger, or at least oddity, but they're not in a state to decipher it or to act on it, and as a result there's little tension to be made. The characters are more like flies caught in a web, but so heavily sedated that they just don't really know or care. That lack of recognition and drug induced apathy couldn't help but carry over to my viewing experience. I still think that Aster is a filmmaker to watch, but Midsommar is an unfortunate miss.

So this is a rumor taken from a Hollywood newsletter, so take it with a grain of salt, but it's interesting if true. There's a chance of Far From Home breaking $1B, but it's going to be close. Homecoming made $880M. I think Far From Home will top that, but given it's odd release timing and with Lion King waiting to take over all the screens, it's far from a certainty it'll get there. Still, it's kind of hard to imagine how this kind of deal could possibly work. A third Spider-man movie would have to be in the MCU to make any sense, and I can't imagine Disney being ok with Sony overseeing an MCU film. Then again, Venom made $855M, so maybe Sony is just looking at the bottom line and thinking they don't need Disney to make that much on a Spider-man film.

I don't think anyone should buy these chips based on this particular hope. The "extra cores will be better utilized once all software developers get better at threading" idea has been thrown out there every time a chip with a higher thread count has been released, and it's never come true in any meaningful way. The value of additional cores is unlikely to rise over the lifespan of a given CPU. It certainly seems like these chips are competitive, and there are lots of good reasons to buy them, but hypothetical future performance gains isn't one of them.

Interesting that they're going to revert to something tried and true. I feel like Apple would would more likely try and reinvent the wheel again.

Marvel continues to hit it out of the park, and it certainly seems Disney dominance is set to continue with Lion King only a couple weeks away.

I might finally be nearing an upgrade cycle and AMD certainly has my attention. It doesn't seem like AMD has made the choice simple, but they're certainly competitive, which is great to see. I haven't had an AMD chip since my Athlon way back when. I'm also excited by the idea of greatly improved storage speeds. I wonder how overkill it would be to put two PCIe 4 NVMe drives in RAID 0.

I enjoyed it overall. It's not great, but it's good corny fun.

I actually think that looks pretty great. I haven't really liked these remakes, and I'd argue that even a good one is questionably worthwhile, but I think that's a really excellent trailer. I agree it's going to make a ton of money.

This is one of those movies that demands from the start that you get on board, and feels no pity and makes no effort for anyone who fails to do so. It deadpans meta jokes and bizzaro moments, it veers wildly from expectations and then plays right into them. It hammers at the grotesque and lets comedy pass right on by. It hits with a deadly seriousness but also makes the severe farcical. It's slow in pacing and in dialogue, and only occasionally makes room for wit. For such bewildering oddity, you likely couldn't do better than the cast assembled here. The sheer weight of the assembled talent makes the purposeful "waste" of it feel almost insulting. Still, this is a film that insists on it's incenserity, and to be aggrieved by such trolling is kind of the point. There are pleasures to be had here, and for much of the film I was on the right wavelength to appreciate them, but I think for most, this will be as story that doesn't end well.

Late Night: 2/5 A comedy about a comedy show that has plenty of heart, but not so much actual comedy. Mindy Kaling and Emma Thompson are both quite good, but never particularly funny in a film that is ostensibly about comedy. The film also tackles a number of issues about race, gender, representation, sexual misconduct, public forgiveness, the burdens of genius and power, the right to employment, privilege and more. However, in just over 100 minutes, it doesn't really find the time to say anything meaningful about any of them, and in treating characters as a series of issues to address, it erects barriers instead of connections between characters. Rocketman: 4/5 A musical biopic that doesn't follow the Walk Hard formulation, instead choosing the extremely fun, and rather fitting, path of fantasy and whimsy. While the film does go all the way back to young Elton first learning the piano, it doesn't feel any particularly need for strict continuity. Songs from Elton's enormous discography play when thematically or energetically appropriate, regardless of when they were written or released. Flashbacks turn into full on dance and musical numbers, even as the film delves into addiction to sex and drugs. You're unlikely to learn much about Elton John from Rocketman, but it's still an exciting excursion through his life and music, which makes it a perfectly fitting biopic for a man of such exuberance.

I enjoyed it. At this point Marvel has gotten pretty good at making these movies, so there aren't a ton of real surprises (sans the post credit scenes), but everything is executed very well. Holland continues to be a wonderful "friendly neighborhood spider-man," and I think the idea of his reluctance to take Iron Man's spotlight post Endgame makes for a compelling narrative thrust. Holland and Zendaya have great chemistry, and both play well into the innocence of the whole high school group. It gives the film a smaller, more personal, more restrained context that I think is a perfect backstop for Phase 3 of the MCU. There's time for Spider-Man to grow into a lead avenger, and he's perfectly capable of showing up for the big team up movies, so I relish these smaller MCU films when they find a way to fit them in. On a side note: I saw the film in 3D thanks to showtime availability and it was the most uneven 3D I've seen in years. At times it was really great, and at others there were 3D oddities that I can't completely guarantee were inherent to the film and not to my specific theater. If anyone else sees it in 3D, let me know if you also saw some odd clipping and layering issues. As for the credits scenes:

I think a murder mystery is a perfect genre for Johnson. Looks like a ton of fun, and it comes out this year.

Not sure why this took so long.

To me, AAA means the same thing as "blockbuster" does for a movie. It's an indication purely of the budget behind the title. Indie simply means that it's independent, not being funded by a huge corporation. So yeah, something like Cyberpunk could count as both, just like Valerian was both an Indie film and a blockbuster (and a bomb, and sucked). They're not the only two possibilities in games (or movies), and I don't think everything needs to be classified in similar terms, but they serve to indicate the origins of a game.

I can see that people might be upset by that. Part of going to a sequel is to see the characters that you already know and love once again. Still, I appreciate that this film was willing to move on. It's pretty important to the overall theme, and what little time the old guard did have was well spent. It might have bothered me if the new characters weren't entertaining or if it felt like wheel spinning, but I don't think either was the case. Bo was awesome, and Bunny/Ducky were hilarious, and they all got a good deal more screen time than I expected.