TwinIon

I'd be happy to see a Diablo 4. I'm not sure what I'd like to see from it, but hopefully something that grips me as much as 3 got some of my friends.

It's surprisingly difficult to pull off just the right amount of "this is ridiculous and dumb, but fun the whole way." I'll be happy if the Meg can find the right balance.

YouTube identified four specific videos that were against it's policy. Two with hate speech against Muslims, one contained hate speech against transgender people, and another promoted violence against liberals. On the Alex Jones Show he also went off on a threatening rant that contained this bit: I haven't seen statements from any of these companies identify exactly where Jones crossed their particular terms of service (Buzzfeed collected a few direct statements). It seems that once Apple decided to ban him, everyone else decided to as well. At least, everyone other than Twitter: Also interesting, is that despite Apple being the one to set off this sequence, his app on the iOS App store remains up, and has shot up the charts.

I'd love them to award the elements of those films that deserve recognition. Stunt Work should absolutely be a category, and think it's probably time for some kind of "digital / motion capture / augmented performance" award. I also think it would be great if we could see popular movies recognized more often. Too often we see award worthy elements in popular films go unrecognized because they're in blockbuster action films and not typical oscars films.

Can you come up with a criteria for which you would find this kind of award palatable? I personally cannot. Set any kind of box office or ticket sale or wide release threshold and suddenly you're competing against a very different type of film. And what about movies that end up being big hits or are great, artistic films that are also awards worthy? Do you take popular films that weren't going to win Best Picture, but did get nominated like The Martian or American Sniper, and put them into a lesser category? Are you nominating films that wouldn't otherwise be, like Black Panther or Mission Impossible? What about films that are real contenders that are also popular? Does Christopher Nolan get sent to the kids table because now there's a category for him to win? Perhaps more core to the issue is that there is no measure of "popularity" which isn't heavily controlled by the studio's and their willingness to spend money.

Well that's terrible, but not entirely surprising.

In an effort to get more people to watch the actual Oscars broadcast, the Academy will play edited versions of less popular categories and will be adding a new category for "outstanding achievement in popular film, eligibility requirements and other key details will be forthcoming." I guess I can now be proven wrong when I said that there was no way that Black Panther would win an (non technical) Oscar. On a related note:

I entirely agree with you. This is not a movie that breaks any kind of ground or challenges any kind of preconceptions. It's not out to transcend the genre or make deep insights into the human condition. It's a big dumb thrill ride, and I'd argue a pretty good one. Still, I think it's unusual for any kind of film to be made in a way so seemingly backwards and haphazard, much less one that costs $180M. I don't know much about the making of the Fast and Furious franchise, the recent Bond movies, or the Bourne films, but I'd be surprised if the production process of any of those is similar to what McQuarrie describes.

I've never spent too much time thinking through the plot of any MI movie, but I didn't feel like the last two were any more convoluted or nonsensical than the previous entries.

The disingenuous first amendment argument increasingly being put forward is that people have a right to an audience. You should have a right to speak on a campus or have your content hosted by private company. I don't think they actually think through the legal ramifications that such an interpretation would incur.

Does anyone have even the slightest clue what these tweets are going on about? I think this is the second time he's talked about CA dumping water into the ocean.

I understand you don't like Jones, so I'm curious what you would consider a "win" here. Obviously he won't be completely silent, but from some quick googling around it seems about standard that a typical video will get views in the range of ~15% of it's subscriber count. For Jone's 2.4M subs, that means about ~360k views. Since the channel is down, it's hard to see it's stats, but you can see some overall here. It also seems that subscribers will only account for a minority of actual views. Creators report something like 25% of views come from subscribers. For Jones, who was getting ~20-30M views per month, even if his views skew very heavily towards his built in audience and 50% of his views come from subs, that means he was getting something like 10 million views per month from people who didn't follow him. Youtube is such a dominant player that when Jones moves his content to another smaller site, it's highly unlikely he will be able to convert a high percentage of those views to his next platform. Between even just Facebook and Youtube, that means that there are literally millions of people that will would have seen his headlines and read or watched his videos that will not see them anymore. He'll still get millions of views and millions more hits, but that's a real win in my book.

Sure, 2 is better than 1, neither is particularly good. They're fine, enjoyable, disposable.

Fallout looks to be the highest grossing film in the franchise (before inflation). In a more relevant comparison, it should top 4 and 5 by a decent %. Christopher Robin never looked like a big earner to me, and I hear it's tonally all over the place. $700M for Black Panther is amazing. I think it'll always be one of those things that it Infinity War didn't quite get to $700M but Panther did, in the same year.

At first I thought it was an AMC like 3 movies a week, not 3 a month. Honestly, even for 3 a month, it wouldn't be a bad deal if I thought the service was reliable enough, but they've consistently proven that not to be the case anymore. So far I'm liking the A-List enough to stick with it.

If you enjoyed this film, I'd recommend listening to The Q&A with Jeff Goldsmith . It's a long interview with Christopher McQuarrie and it's completely insane how he makes these movies. I guess the same process applied to Rogue Nation as well, so if you listen to the commentary or interviews on that film you might be aware, but McQuarrie's process boggles the mind. He shoots these film with only a flimsy outline that he feels no need to adhere to. Often shooting defining sequences without having a script days or hours before. With Fallout, he wouldn't even write the script until he had photographs of where he was going to shoot it. Almost everything about this film is reverse engineered from either a location that McQuarrie found visually interesting or from a suggestion from Tom Cruise. Tom wanted to do a helicopter stunt, so they figure out that New Zealand is the only country in the world that will let him do it. So they go to NZ. Then they want to push Cruise off a cliff, so they find a spot in Norway where the fall is precipitous enough, so they have to figure out where in the world kinda looks like both Norway and New Zealand where they can have some political intrigue. They built the town at the end of the film from scratch without knowing why the script would take them there or where it was even supposed to be, and they built it the way they did only to have good lighting for one shot of one character. It's completely insane that these movies were finished, a miracle that they weren't dramatically over budget, and impossible that they make any sense at all, much less are any good. McQuarrie also did a gigantic interview with Empire where he discusses all this, but I haven't gotten around to that yet.

The stuff that you can steal doesn't change, but if something has a low % chance to steal you can be better of save scumming rather than paying the money to restore your reputation (it's $100k in Grandport). Also, the guy you have to scrutinize in order to boost your chance to steal is a pretty low chance (I think it was ~15% for me).

Yeah, screw the guy that doesn't want to alienate the mega corporation that controls 40% of the box office and controls the franchise that represents the vast majority of his acting income.

What I don't like about wireless headphones has nothing to do with charging them or audio quality or anything else. I love my Bose QC2 when I fly. They're great and being wireless an almost unequivocal good (especially when I can just plug them in). What I don't like and worry about is that we're taking an audio standard that was universal and open and without restrictions and we're replacing it with a standard that is being built on with proprietary technologies and infused with new restrictions. Look at speakers. For a very long time speakers only had a universal jack(s) that accepted whatever you plugged into them. When they went wireless, first they were bluetooth and bluetooth kinda sucked, but early bluetooth was at least mostly universal. Still, even then there were questions of what bluetooth profiles a device supported and what kind of audio could be transmitted. Then speakers became more and more locked down. With smart speakers you're increasingly being locked into specific services for music and for voice control. Audio playback that used to be entirely source agnostic has become service and ecosystem dependent. If you want the best experience with your Homepod, you better use Apple Music. If you want the best experience with your Echo, you better use Amazon music. If you want to control them, you better be comfortable with their respective voice assistants. Sure, most of these still have a universal bluetooth connection, and some even have a wired port, but it's not the best way to use those devices, and the open standard is always treated as a second class citizen. Now we're seeing headphones go that direction, and if you don't expect them to, you're being naive. Now we're seeing Apple and Google and Samsung build their proprietary tech on top of bluetooth. Want the best experience with your headphones? You better hope your headphone vendor works with your phone vendor (or even better, is your phone vendor). In a few years when that W1 chip grows up and is running a custom version of iOS that allows those headphones to be more and more independent from your phone, you better be getting your music and your podcasts from Apple and you best not ever switch platforms. The best experiences are becoming more and more walled in, and if you like living in those walls it'll all be fine, in fact, the experience will be better than it ever has been, but you're still locked in. Even more, those devices that used to last effectively forever are having their lifespan determined by an ever evolving and depreciating set of proprietary standards. Sorry for the rant. Also, screw Nintendo for not supporting Bluetooth on the switch.

Jones has his fanatical supporters that will follow him on whatever platform, self hosted or not, but what getting him off of Facebook and Apple Podcasts and (hopefully) Youtube does is dramatically limit his reach. These platforms extend his audience far beyond what it would otherwise be and it legitimizes him in a way that he cannot achieve by himself. When his podcast or his video or his story gets recommended by some algorithm because other Fox News viewers also liked that content, it pushes his narratives to people that aren't die hard Infowars followers. His content ends up in feeds of people that don't necessarily know who he is, and when these platforms push his headlines and thumbnails it only serves to push his false narratives well beyond his existing fanbase. This isn't about extinguishing his voice or taking away his rights, it's about treating him like the cancer he is and limiting his ability to spread. These platforms don't need to take responsibility for every bit of content that they host, but they should be responsible for their loudest bad actors. Everyone draws a line, and if Jones hasn't crossed it for your platform, I have a hard time imagining who would.

More Jean Luc can only be a good thing. God I hate paying for another stupid streaming service.

Even automakers aren't really happy about this. I imagine that they need to justify their investments in R&D, that they're going to need to continue to do it for Europe anyways, and what they dislike most of all is all the uncertainty. If this ends up shattering US standards among the states, it could be a real hassle for them.

I assumed either they just paid, or they made it like Amazon Prime where you get re-directed to a web page before you can buy anything.

In an effort to get around Google's 30% cut, Fortnite on Android will only be available through Epic's website, not through the Google Play Store. That's a massive deal, and it'll be interesting to see how Google responds. It's possible that they just accept that Fortnite is an exception, and that it will remain that way, not provoking other big name games to follow its lead. It's also possible that this could lead to the seemingly inevitable breakdown of the hard and fast 30% cut, which at one time seemed so generous, and now seems like a ridiculous burden. I'm not familiar with the iOS version. Does it just not allow in-app purchases, or is Epic just paying Apple's ransom?