TwinIon

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.

The Verge has more. Don't like those big evil banks controlling your money? Great! Just let an association made up of trustworthy tech companies like Uber, Lyft, Ebay, Paypal, Facebook, financial service companies, and venture capitalists handle your cash instead. Want to embrace crypto to get out from under the heel of burdensome regulations? Great, just put your financial transactions in the hands of a merciless megacorp with no particular need to service you as a customer and no system of recourse should anything go wrong. Think middlemen companies like Visa and Mastercard provide no value and are just sucking money out of the system? Don't worry, they're already partners leading the charge. Don't trust Facebook? Great, they really promise to keep your transaction history separate from your advertising profile. Their word is their bond! The thing is, there is a real need for a lot of unbanked people to be able to safely secure and transfer money, and mobile based system makes a lot of sense. It's why things like M-Pesa have been so successful in places like Kenya. At the same time, I have a hard time imagining that's where Facebook's real intentions lay. They're looking for the "meaningful side effects" of billions of people transacting directly over Facebook. I doubt their real driving incentives have to do with helping out the unbanked African folks move around a couple bucks. If they're able to provide a useful service to that population, great. (and I mean that sincerely) There's also a potential use case for a solid digital currency to move money across countries regularly. If you're living in the states and sending money back to your family elsewhere, something like this could be safe, stable, and easy enough to be useful. I'd still tell such a person to be wary and not store money there if at all possible, but there is a real need there that could genuinely help a vulnerable population. For everyone else that already has access to any kind of banking infrastructure, the people that I think Facebook actually wants to make money from, I wouldn't touch this with a ten foot pole. The potential consequences of giving Facebook even nominal control over financial transactions is mildly horrifying, and nothing about their incentive structure makes me think much good can come from this.

That's kinda funny, since the GOP party platform says: It doesn't support Statehood for DC.

To a PC, or a Steam link (which I do own). Steam link for iOS only just launched, so I haven't had a chance to try it. What I'm most interested in is having games be more like movies in that basically every screen I own can play that content. Almost every screen or device can play Netflix, Amazon, Vudu, etc. That is far from the case with games, though steam link is getting closer now that it works on iOS.

I'm certainly interested in streaming games, even if I'm unlikely to use Stadia or similar products anytime soon. The thing that interests me most about streaming is the portability of the experience, even just in my own home. I've got a decent home theater setup where I can watch movies from 4K Blu Rays, but I still watch Netflix in the kitchen or in my office, or stream a football game to my iPad if I'm only half paying attention to it. I like having that flexibility to watch almost everything everywhere, even if I have a "premium" experience available to me. That's what I want from game streaming. I want to be able to play a couple missions downstairs while my wife has friends over to watch Drag Race. From what it sounds like, Xbox local streaming might be all I need for that kind of thing, but if games ever had a "digital copy" model like movies do, I'd use it from time to time. I imagine the best experience will be locally rendered for some time, but if the overall experience can improve and I can get that ability to play anywhere, I'll be interested.

Another brutal BO showing. John Wick 3's performance is even more impressive in retrospect.

On the bright side, at least the LCS will only cost $13B instead of the $400B we've spent on the 35, and they're already much closer to selecting a successor. Far as I can tell the sixth gen fighters are pretty far out.

Here's a nice early look into iPadOS that has me pretty hopeful about the update. I'm also hopeful that Apple requiring apps to support the windowing system will help. It's really annoying to use an app like Google Hangouts and not be able to slide it over.

Odd, since I got it from the Times. I agree it's not completely a kids table, but I'm also not too worried about Warren standing out until the field narrows a bit.

Here are the lineups for the debates: Night One: June 26 Cory Booker, senator from New Jersey Julián Castro, former housing secretary Bill de Blasio, mayor of New York John Delaney, former representative from Maryland Tulsi Gabbard, representative from Hawaii Jay Inslee, governor of Washington Amy Klobuchar, senator from Minnesota Beto O’Rourke, former representative from Texas Tim Ryan, representative from Ohio Elizabeth Warren, senator from Massachusetts Night Two: June 27 Michael Bennet, senator from Colorado Joseph R. Biden Jr., former vice president Pete Buttigieg, mayor of South Bend, Ind. Kirsten Gillibrand, senator from New York Kamala Harris, senator from California John Hickenlooper, former governor of Colorado Bernie Sanders, senator from Vermont Eric Swalwell, representative from California Marianne Williamson, self-help author Andrew Yang, former tech executive Kind of annoying that Warren is separated from the rest of the top 5.

I don't know all of it, but I think of the Littoral combat ship as being kinda like the boat version of an F-35. Maybe they're not quite as broken, but they're supposed to be a do it all kinda thing and haven't been able to do much of anything, at an enormous cost. The fact that they're not using them here emphasizes their uselessness.

It's bizarre that the White house feels the need to contradict the owners. The Japanese aren't even saying Iran didn't do it, just contradicting the story of how it happened. It just makes it feel like you're making up who did it when you can't even agree on what happened in the first place.

The critics I follow keep describing it as "weird," and everyone seems to uniformly love Forky. I didn't need any incentives to see this, but a little weirdness sounds good to me.

Thanks to Gamepass I'm checking out some games that I never bothered to pick up, so I gave FH4 a shot last night for a couple hours. As a brief preface, I don't think I've put any real time into a "pure" racing game since Gran Turismo on the PS3, and even that one I didn't get too into. I played some of the OG Forza on the Xbox, and while I might have played some of the sequel, it wasn't for long. Given that, I was freaking blown away by FH4. The graphics look great in 4K HDR on the One X (I haven't tried the performance option yet), but I really loved how it just gets to it. The opening sequence is amazing, and it wastes no time in showing you what the game can be. Having an open world instead of a horrific menu system is great fun, and the variety of driving opportunities in the first hours is wonderful. I also really love the rewind feature. I obviously want to get good enough to not need it much, but it's such a good learning tool. This is the first racing game I've played since I've actually driven on a race course (only for a few days in a 15' vette) and the first racing game since I started following motorsports (F1 mostly), so I'm trying to play in the cockpit view and I turned off traction control and ABS, though I'm leaving the racing line on. The instant rewind is so great at allowing me to be competitive while still very much learning how to drive in this game. It has me wanting a steering wheel after only a couple hours. I know most of my impressions are from having missed the boat for so long, but it was quite amazing to jump right into such a brilliant game. I have no freaking clue what half the systems in the game are, but I'm glad the game doesn't make you learn all about them before just letting you play. The game just so desperately wants you to love cars and race as much as possible, it's wonderful.

They need to pad out their catalog for their inevitable subscription service. Once it transitions to a streaming service, it'll save them a lot of money if you're streaming SNES games for $15 a month.

I can't seem to get it to work on the PC. I'm certain that I'm signed up to Gamepass, as I've been able to download games on the Xbox. I've updated windows and downloaded the beta Xbox app, but when I click to "play a game with gamepass" it just asks me to sign up.

Sometimes I wonder if Xi is sufficiently annoyed with the tariff nonsense that he'd work against Trump. Putin is easily getting his money's worth, but I don't know if Xi is quite as happy. Then again, maybe Xi would probably take the tariffs in exchange for an incompetent running the US every day of the week.