TwinIon

I really enjoyed it. It's continuously surprising to me that they managed to make a truly worthwhile sequel with new characters and new story beats. Some of the characters get sidelined, but that's not really anything new for the franchise. Overall a very enjoyable and worthy addition to the franchise.

More than 100 levels in story mode? I'm in.

Warren's voting plan includes: -Mandated automatic and same day voter registration -Standardized federal ballots and voting machines -Eliminates voter purges -Makes election day a national holiday -Voting by mail -Required use of independent redistricting commissions It sounds like some of those things (purges, registration) would directly affect state elections, but some wouldn't. So she wants to incentivize states to follow the same rules by paying for their elections if they do. Seems like an interesting idea, but it wouldn't solve the problem for some of the more stubborn states.

I'm happy with the decision, but I don't hold out much hope for other agency decisions to be found similarly arbitrary or capricious.

Honestly, I think it comes down to readership. In the end, (most) news organizations are businesses, and if these stories got the same readership/viewership/metrics as, say, Hillary's emails, we'd have a daily piece on the front page of every paper detailing the latest revelations in Trump's long and terrible history of sexual misconduct. But that's not what we get. I understand that a lot of Trump supporters are allergic to "liberal media," but the apathy among everyone else is still surprising to me.

Can we just please skip straight to the part where we just invent cable again? Disney is going to have at least three major streaming services, AT&T/Warner will have two. Other networks like CBS, NBC, have apps, plus a million apps that are channel specific. Then you've got the tech giants like Netflix, Amazon, Youtube, and Apple. There's just a ton of stuff, and as they're all competing with each other, they're all going to inevitably raise their prices to pay for everything, and pretty soon we're going to hit the ceiling of what people are willing to pay. The less successful services that can't garner a sufficient subscriber base will get rolled into others, and soon enough everything will just be a bundle again, and we'll have re-invented cable TV, but on the internet. In the meantime it means all these doomed streaming services are going to desperately try and poach just enough content to justify a subscription, and it's going to continue to be a freaking pain.

Truly, not threatening to kill police officers and elected officials is an impossible standard.

Season 2 might have been my limit for what I'm willing to put up with.

If all Muller does is read sections of his report out as answers to any questions, it will be a good thing. I just hope the Democrats don't waste all their time trying to get him to explicitly say that Trump committed obstruction. I can just imagine them trying desperately with obvious hypotheticals like "well, if he wasn't president" or "if anyone else did these things" or whatever, and Muller will just dodge it, so instead of any kind of worthwhile soundbites, you get Democrats looking like they're trying to insinuate something Muller doesn't want to say out loud, even if it is true.

I think the current 70/30 split is ridiculous and is a standard that needs to change, I think that having multiple, competing storefronts is an absolute benefit to the customer, and I think that exclusivity agreements can be beneficial in allowing some games to exist or otherwise allow devs to recover their investments. I also think that Sweeney is full of it. He's doing it for business reasons and that's fine, no need to try and butter it up in some kind of transparent moral argument.

I wonder what would have made this story get more traction, or if we're so doomed that nothing really matters anymore. Did it really matter that this was in the New Yorker Magazine, and not the Times or the Post? She certainly seems credible enough. Is the problem that it was 20 years ago? Or is Trump being a rapist just a thing we all either know or reject?

Given how poor most of the summer has been, and how well this one was reviewed, I was certainly in the camp of people overestimating it's potential performance. Still, with the right multiplier and a similar international BO as its predecessor, it seems it could still hit that precious $1B WW total, so I think Disney will be fine.

It's only one mana cheaper than Kel, though you do get the immediate effect, but that's only useful if you've got minions with rush or something and something to throw them into. Shudderwock potential I suppose, but overall it just seems like an expensive card that will be very situational.

I've never been much of a Rogue player, so I'll be happy to see vanish gone. I'm enjoying this new Blizzard, willing to shake things up much more consistently. I don't expect to see any of those new cards see play, but I'm glad they're adding stuff at such consistent intervals.

This is the punchline, and I think I agree: It's certainly the case for myself, and I think the article does a good job of proving that point more broadly. It'll be interesting to see if publishers overcorrect like they usually do.

Kind of amazing how quickly a credible rape accusation against the president can be tossed aside.

For the first time ever, Neon Genesis Evangelion is readily available in the US thanks to Netflix. It's sure to bring with it a renewed discussion of the divisive classic. Polygon has done some good work on the topic, especially this piece on history of the show and its creator and this piece about the hoops you had to jump through to watch the show until now. For myself, I first watched EVA in college thanks to our campus wide file sharing program. At the time I was intrigued, but didn't find myself enjoying the original ending or End of Evangelion. I'm going to go back through the series and I'll be interested to see if I get anything different from the show now, especially given my increased awareness of the creation of the series and its creator. I've also seen the rebuild films, and am very curious to see how the fourth one comes out. I thought the first was fine, the second was great, and the third kind of dropped the ball. So, who all is going to watch the show again? How about for the first time? Any good reads about the show to share?

So he didn't ask about how many people he was going to kill before he ordered the strike?

I use hangouts for SMS through Google Voice, so yeah, the whole systems is likely to tumble down on me at any moment, but the same holds true for Gmail, which really seems like it should work with slide over.

So he's again cleared and again able to be put on trial again? Unfortunately, it doesn't seem likely to me that the prosecutor will give this up, though it certainly seems like there should be some punishment for this.

San Diego has had a prominent cross go through similar issues for decades, and the supreme court refused to hear the case. In 2015 the case ended when the land under the cross was sold to a private entity. I do now have to wonder if this case means that things like having the 10 commandments on court houses will be allowed. I feel like the legal reasoning here is pretty ambiguous and diverse, and it's unclear how broad this ruling actually is.

Top Democrats are already calling for strict oversight of Facebook's new currency, and officials in both France and Germany have declared that Libra "must not become a sovereign currency," in addition to a G7 report. That seems like a pretty predictable reaction, and it's not clear Facebook was expecting it.

An interesting bit from Wired's piece: So Libra is the currency that is run on a public blockchain, and Calibra is Facebook's Libra based financial services company. If you're using Calibra to move money within the Facebook ecosystem (WhatsApp, Messanger, etc.), it's working more like a standard financial authority, keeping internal records and not writing them to the public blockchain. Only when you move Libra outside of Calibra that it writes to the blockchain. I've long argued that financial services companies from Banks to credit card companies do provide a valuable service, and that crypto's abandonment of those institutions is as much a liability as a strength, but in no world would I think that replacing those institutions with Facebook or simply having those same companies use crypto solves the problems that anyone is actually trying to solve.

Didn't see another thread, so I'm bumping this one. With a 24% on RT and an opening BO of barely $30M, things aren't looking great for MIB: International, but I went to see it anyways. Where as I went into both King of Monsters and Dark Phoenix expecting them to be bad, I was still a bit surprised by how those movies failed. MIB: International doesn't go out of it's way to disappoint, it's just bland. The formidable cast actually has excellent chemistry, but it's never used to any real effect. The MIB aesthetic no longer feels novel, and the mystery is all around more boring than the preceding films. There's nothing here that feels like a betrayal of purpose, but also nothing that fulfills that potential whatsoever. Watch it on a plane and don't rewind when you fall asleep.

Outer Worlds seems like a pretty sure thing. Awesome that it's on Gamepass. Control looks interesting, and I feel like it's either going to be awesome or really suck. I'm not convinced that Jedi Fallen Order makes it out this year. If it does, I think it'll likely be worth a buy. I didn't play the other Luigi's Mansion games, but 3 looks good.