TwinIon

Oh, so they just didn't sell any games. That makes sense.

Are you picking the calls up or are they leaving silent voicemails? If you're picking it up and don't hear anything for a moment, some robocallers will connect you to a person once the call has been answered and they hear something on the other end, but it'll be silent until that happens. I assume that's why they end up leaving silent voicemails as well, but it's just my best guess.

If you're trying to get people to believe you, don't blatantly lie right after a denial.

The only thing about this that makes me interested is my faith in Joaquin Phoenix.

I think it makes sense to use something like this for streamers. Everyone else not so much.

Amazon held an event yesterday and released a deluge of new Alexa enabled devices, many expected, some rather surprising. Not surprising: New versions of the Echo Dot and Echo Plus (an Echo with smart home radios). More fabric, supposedly better speakers, pretty much exactly what you'd expect. They also released an updated Echo Show with a 10" screen that no longer looks like an engineering sample. Amazon is also going after Sonos and Chromecast Audio by releasing products designed to plug into your existing speakers. There's the Echo Input, which is pretty much just the microphone array from a dot with bluetooth and audio connections, so you can turn any speaker into an Echo. They're also going after higher end audio by releasing the Echo Link, which is designed to plug into your existing home amplifier setup. They also put out the Echo Link Amp, which is the same thing with a 60W 2-channel amp. For some reason they also put out an Echo Sub, just in case you need to add some base to your otherwise poor sounding Echos. They put out an Echo smart plug, which is exactly what it sounds like. Then Amazon went a little bit overboard. On one end you have the "silly, but still maybe a good idea" Echo Wall Clock. It's a basic wall clock, but it connects to your Echo over bluetooth. It will automatically set the correct time, including for daylight savings, but the big pitch here is the ring of LEDs around the edge that will show a visual indication of the timers you set on your Echo. As someone that uses the Echo for cooking timers daily, this might be worth the $30. Then Amazon put out a freaking microwave. It's a basic, $60 microwave that, like the clock, connects to an Echo over bluetooth, allow you to add time or start a preset. I hardly use our microwave, but it's hard to imagine this being very useful to anyone. Just in case having Alexa everywhere in your house, talking to all your appliances isn't quite enough, they also put out an Echo for your car. It pairs to your phone and your car speakers, so you can ask for directions, start a call, or do any other Alexa commands. It seems to me that the only thing that this will do that your phone won't do with its native voice assistant is connect to your smart home. I suppose having a better mic is something, but still it seems pretty questionably worthwhile. The last thing that I think is actually kind of cool is the Fire TV Recast. It's basically a hard drive with an OTA tuner that you plug into your network and an antenna to get a DVR for OTA TV. It doesn't plug into your TV. You'll need a Fire TV that this box will stream to. It's probably not going to be the best OTA DVR you can get, but it might be a really good, simple solution for many.

How does Hue Jackson still have a job. How is it that he didn't know that Mayfield is better than Taylor? At what point would you not just put in another coach just for the hell of it?

Those stats are a pretty interesting comparison. Fitz's stats are really not bad. They're not great, but not bad.

I love the animated series, but I'm not terribly excited by this.

I'm not sure if this has already been posted, but it's pretty awesome that Apple actually shot all the video for their motion watch faces: These seem like exactly the kind of thing that you'd just render, and it's unlikely that anyone would have known differently, especially for a watch, but it's pretty cool.

There should be a name for the correlation between how quickly the GOP tries to push something through and how terrible that thing really is.

It certainly makes sense from a box office perspective. The only X-Men movies that have crossed $300M domestic are the Deadpool films. Still, as lackluster as the films and the box office results for the X-Men films have been, the overseas numbers have been pretty good. If Disney can put out some real MCU quality X-Men films, it's easy to imagine them quickly becoming billion dollar grosses. Still, Fox's difficulties are almost certainly what lead them to take the risks that resulted in Deadpool and Logan. I hope that Disney's purchase doesn't eliminate the appetite for those kinds of films, even though all signs point to yes.

I can't believe that this isn't bad enough to justify a technology solution. My guess is that the carriers just don't want to solve this problem (at least not for free), and they've successfully lobbied against anything that would come close to solving the problem. My understanding is that phone number spoofing is the biggest culprit, because as long as callers can effectively hide their actual phone numbers, there's no good way to for the receiving party to correctly determine the source of a spam call. A kind of "SSL certificates for phone numbers" has been proposed, but carriers would need to implement it, and before that they'd need to agree to a standard. The FCC is well within their rights to force something like that through, but for some mysterious reason they've made no real efforts to do so.

I remember rumors about a Veronica Mars follow up where she's in the FBI. I wonder if that's the premise of this reboot.

I think I would feel differently about this if we were talking about human characters rather than muppets. That Frank Oz didn't really consider the sexuality of muppets doesn't bother me in the least.

After watching that I was concerned that I only saw joycons and not any pro controllers, and it turns out that this game doesn't support pro-controllers at all. So now it'll cost me another ~$70 in joycons that I wouldn't otherwise have a use for if I want to play 4 player.

My takeaway from all this is I'm going to end up wasting time, replaying missions, and reloading saves because my horse died.

I refuse to believe the police in Southern California have done anything untoward.

I agree that this was, by and large, very well done throughout the game. As far as the ending goes:

All that seems very measured, reasonable, and fair. Which is to say there is about a zero percent chance of it happening.

Big budgeted streaming series starring big name MCU actors? 6-8 quality episodes? Marvel Studios producing with Kevin Feige shepherding the shows? Yes Please. Oh, it's Loki and Scarlet Witch? Well... Loki is one of the great MCU characters, but I feel like his strengths are outside being the lead. He's at his best playing off Thor. Still, Hiddleston is wonderful and the character is consistently entertaining. I feel like there are a ton of ways this could go, so I'll be optimistic. Oh god I hope they can get Taika Waititi to help out in some capacity. Olsen is a talented actress playing a character that really hasn't had much to do in the MCU. If they're going to shell out the big bucks I imagine they must have a good story, so I'll be cautiously optimistic, but immediately I'm more dubious about this one. Also, if this is starring teenage Scarlet Witch, does that mean she gets her accent back, or has that just been scrubbed from the MCU? Will it be in Sakovia, with everyone speaking in bad accents? Will we get Aaron Taylor-Johnson and his terrible hair?

I don't know. If you make Superman anything but white you'd have the character contending with race relations in America. Especially if you kept the Kents white and in Kansas, you'd probably need Pa Kent trying to convince baby Superman not to overreact at his racist classmates or something. That sounds dangerously like you're turning Superman into a somewhat interesting character. Serious question though: are there not a bunch of alternative Supermen in the comics? I know there are a bunch of guys who are the Flash, Spider-Man, Green Lantern, and others. Has Superman had a bunch of alternative characters, or is he more or less uniform in the comics?

Using a government car to commute and putting aides up in hotels (assuming they're there for a government purpose), seem like things that I might have assumed were allowed.

Eh, I didn't find that trailer particularly exciting. I'll see it opening weekend for sure, but if they want this to be a breakout success, they'll need to do better.

It's pretty rough when it takes 40 minutes to describe all the crimes you're pleading guilty to in your second trial. Mueller isn't playing around. This man wrote out "Bada bing bada boom.” He deserves to be in prison.