TwinIon

I'm going to guess you're right. The current organizational structure of the Air Force was created by the National Security Act of 1947. It certainly seems like creating a whole new branch of the armed services and reorganizing what is there would require a similar act of congress. In which case, it seems unlikely.

I've always enjoyed R* games, and I don't suspect this one will be an exception.

Good to hear that Disney's own service will be cheap to start. I still subscribe to cable, but I suspect that after I ditch it I'll end up paying just as much for all the streaming services.

They might have a real chance. More so than Twitch I think.

I think the only news here is that we now know the exact end of the Disney / Netflix arrangement. For me, I'm not sure what I'll do. Right now the big Disney films are some of the few Blu-Rays that I still buy. Either I'll end up subscribing to the new Disney streaming platform and I'll buy fewer of those films, or I'll just keep going as is. The real question for me about Disney's new service, is if the original content will be worth whatever price they come up with. They're spending $100M on a new live action Star Wars, so that certainly has my attention. If they can fill the service with worthwhile stuff I haven't already seen elsewhere, I might sub. If the lure is primarily films I've already seen, many of which I already own, I'll pass.

As someone that does follow the Oscars, I can tell you what I get out of them. One part is that the Oscars are legitimately discerning in their selections. I don't always agree with them, but with the Oscars there is a certain base assumption that worthy films and people are being recognized. This means that it's nice to see deserving folks win and it that it's usually worth seeking out films that have been nominated. It's hard to say the same for the Globes or awards shows in other mediums. Still, it is very much an industry event. As someone that enjoys following the business of making movies, awards season in general and the Oscars specifically are chock full of industry politics that I find interesting. Seeing what studios decide to push what films, and how they try and shape the story is half the fun of it. It's kind of like following real politics, but the stakes are tiny beyond how they might shape the next entertainment product I'm interested in. Speaking of the next thing, I think the Oscars do have some very real influence on future products, so it's not an entirely empty pursuit. I doubt it matters too much to anyone that Bruno Mars beat Jay-Z for a Grammy; it's not going to affect the sales of their albums, turnout on their next tours, or their ability to do their next projects. Meanwhile, someone like Guillermo del Toro can very much trade off not only his Oscar win, but the notoriety that the entire awards season gave him. More than even that, I don't think it would be unfair to credit something like 50% of Shape of Water's box office take to the awards attention. New projects are greenlit out of both the drive to potentially win Oscars and as the result of having won. I couldn't care less about what dress someone wears, who is dating whom in Hollywood, or what bad jokes someone makes on the stage of the Dolby theater, but the Oscars do have a very real effect on an industry that I enjoy following.

Here's a piece from The Verge discussing why taking the company private would be so difficult.

First day I tried out Mech Paladin. I think it did well enough because it was a pretty fast list, but it's not a particularly good deck and horribly unoptimized (as one might expect). I suspect that a smaller mech package will work better than a more all in approach. Trying out an even shaman variant and it's doing ok. I'm not sure if it's going to stay in, but I'm running Geist in every deck that it wouldn't hurt me. Just seems like there are a lot of targets out there.

Very cool.

But so much of that is outside the hands of the creatives. Would Get Out be any less of a film if no one saw it? Get Out opened in 2,700 theaters. Sorry to Bother You opened to 800. The award that you get for being a massive cultural impact IS the cultural impact. Well that, and the money. The Oscars are an inherently silly thing. It's millionaires and billionaires patting themselves on the back. Still, at it's best it can be an institution to promote art and artists beyond their own ability to do so. To shine just as much of a light on a little film about addiction and war and PTSD as it does the biggest blockbuster of all time. Even the nominations are useful as a tool for sorting through a sea of content, helping to focus on quality pictures that might otherwise get lost. As I said above, I think sometimes the Academy can ignore the intense amount of craft that goes into a big budget movie, and I'd love to see the people behind those films be recognized when they do good work. Still, the place for Get Out isn't in "popular film" it's in Best Picture. The reward for being popular is tangible and doesn't need to be signal boosted by an institution like the Academy.

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.