TwinIon

Sunshine - 4/5 First time I’ve seen this in years. I’ve long been pretty down on Sunshine, but I think I’ve finally come around. First of all, an incredible cast. I’d forgotten who all was in this film, but there aren’t any slackers here. Two future Oscar winners, a pair of MCU vets, and plenty more. The other thing that struck me is how confident it is. It’s beautiful and strange and it takes a lot of swings, and even when it doesn’t connect, I can appreciate the try. Something I didn’t love was the sound design. I was constantly wishing it was more restrained; more quiet, or even silent. Half the sound effects are of light, which really didn’t register as anything more than unnecessary and annoying. Maybe it’s just a personal preference for overblown visuals and a restrained soudscape, but I consistently was bothered by the overwrought audio effects. It’s a difficult complaint to make while the soundtrack has some truly great tracks, but the two audio channels really are on different levels. Still, even if I enjoyed Sunshine much more this go-around, I still don’t think the psycho killer twist was for the better. The film really is at its best as a pesemistic sci-fi adventure. The addition of a crazed killer after 3/4 of the way through is not to the films’ benefit. Also, I completely didn’t realize this was written by Alex Garland.

I feel like Titanfall 2 is too low. Personally, I'd put Crysis on there. As always with these lists, there's also the problem of generally important vs favorite vs some attempt to define "best." Halo:CE was so good at the time, even with repetitive levels. The other Halo games might have had better campaigns, but Halo:CE stands out the most in my mind.

Outside of Tel Aviv, what is the general assessment? As someone with little knowledge of Iranian capabilities, I feel like the expected result of this attack is that most of those weapons would be intercepted. On the other hand, it seems like Israel got a lot of help defending from this attack, which either means they needed the help or the collective effort to defend Israel was itself a message.

Sounds like Sony will have a wide definition of what qualifies as “enhanced for PS5 Pro.” Sony wants 60fps PS5 Pro ‘Enhanced’ games, but it’s happy to settle for less - The Verge WWW.THEVERGE.COM The PS5 Pro will boost older games, too.

I suppose the way I was thinking about it is that everything in that first 3/4’s of Messiah is the exact kind of stuff that was left out of Villeneuve’s adaptations. The movies don’t get bogged down in explanations of mentats or the politics of CHOAM or the specifics of Imperium or Fremen customs, and those kinds of things dominate the early pages of Messiah. Which isn’t to say that Messiah needs to be made just like Part 1 & 2. It could and perhaps should be a very different kind of movie.

I’ve long felt like this is the obvious case to take on if you want to increase public confidence in anti-trust or just government in general. I have mixed feelings about the recent cases against Meta, Amazon, and Apple, but I want the DOJ to destroy Ticketmaster, and I don’t even go to concerts. Sure, they probably had to build a case and whatever, but I have to imagine that unless the whole company communicates purely in person or through Snapchat that discovery is going to be exciting.

Shut it down. It will never be better than that.

I'm trying to figure out how to post process all the images that I got, and it's quite a chore. I started out trying to get as sharp a corona as possible, given the clouds I had to shoot through. Apparently the auto align features don't really work for eclipses, so I've been manually stacking images by hand. One camera was on a motorized mount and the other shoots at 20fps, so thankfully most of the images weren't too far off (as long as I don't stack between sequences), but it's still a pain. I also feel conflicted as to just some of the basics, like color balance. It seems slightly more natural to make things warmer, but maybe the Corona is better off white? In the partial phases they're more or less straight out of the camera, but I could match the colors and exposures if I wanted to.

That's how I've always thought about cosmetics.

Even though I've loved Dune for a long time and read the book multiple times, I've never read any further in the series. I finally decided to pick up Messiah and it was very much not what I expected. Spoilers for Messiah:

Getting over a cold this weekend, so instead of going to the theater I stayed home and watched through this. I really enjoyed it. It's fun and quirky all the way through. I love The Last of Us, but this is an entirely different kind of adaptation. Last of Us is playing through an already cinematic story, beat by beat. This is telling an original story while judiciously stealing what it needs to from the source material. This is a far less straightforward adaptation and exactly the kind that has typically failed in the past. This is what Halo tried and (IMO) failed to do. Personally, I would put this just below Last of Us and Arcane, but it's close. It far exceeded my expectations and I hope that it finds enough of an audience to keep going.

Honestly, I think reddit is getting scammed here. They're not making money and the big boys in AI are eating their lunch. Meta makes ~$40 average revenue per user per year, and it's way higher for NA. Reddit makes more like ~$0.80 in ARPU, but I think that's largely a failing of their ad platform and the general insanity that is Reddit. I think it's obvious that Reddit is more valuable as training data for AI than it is for their home grown insubstantial ad platform. If this was typical tech, I'd say that they can totally afford to take a worse deal now because if they survive they'll be worth far more later, but that's just not the nature of AI. Reddit's data will never be as valuable as it is right now unless they hit some ridiculous TikTok growth curve, which seems incredibly unlikely. Maybe the courts will rule that anything that you can index publicly is purely fair use and let every AI company off the hook for all the data they stole, but if the pendulum swings the other way Reddit will have given away billions a year. Hell, Meta was just thinking about buying Simon & Schuster just for AI training data. Reddit has one of the few online repositories that (at least in the past) was an absolute treasure trove of actual, legit user generated text on nearly every subject. I'm sure that they'd have been scooped up purely for this reason if there wasn't an anti-trust backlash happening at the same time it's unclear what the legality of scraping data for AI training.

I watched this on a plane and I thought it was a freaking perfect plane movie. I honestly think it's great modern camp. It's silly and stupid and charming and of course it's over the top. I enjoyed how Conner McGregor showed up and just blew up the second half of the movie. This movie is one of the patrons of the titular Road House; drinking itself into an idiotic stupor until the only thing left is violence and chaos. It's great. I went in with bottom barrel expectations and supremely enjoyed myself. Yeah, you can see the limits of the budget and of course there isn't a single well developed character in the whole thing. Everyone is a cliche that you know everything about the second they open their mouths, but that's half the fun. It's self aware enough to take the risks it takes, but not self aware enough to always be in on the joke. I'll take Road House over nearly every Fast and Furious movie, that's for sure.

That's a bummer, but at least it will go out on a high note. I like Disco, I really enjoy New Worlds, but Lower Decks has been my favorite Trek since TNG.

This thread is making me feel the grey in my beard. I remember joining IGN because I was so excited about the Dreamcast.

Couldn't sleep last night so I watched the first couple episodes and quite enjoyed them. I've only barley played the games, but the show seems to really nail the vibe.

I'm all for court reform, but in the meantime, with the system we have, I agree with Silver that the system needs to be gamed at every possible opportunity. I think it's perfectly plausible that it's quite a while before the Democrats control both the Presidency and the Senate again, and there is no reason to take any unnecessary risk. It's not like the Republicans are holding anything back when it comes to stacking the court. As far as court reform goes, while I think a more radical approach is justified, the easiest thing to do IMO would be the Term Limits Bill that was (again?) proposed last year. Justices serve no more than 18 years, Presidents select someone to the court after their first 180 days of their first and third years. It's by no means perfect, but it's something I think could reasonably pass. It would make court seats a (slightly more) predictable and direct outcome of every presidential election, and includes some ethics reforms as well.

I think Alonso is probably best off at Aston, but it makes silly season a bit less silly without him in the mix. At Aston he gets to be the only driver that matters as the full benefits of papa Strolls investments start hitting the track and they transition to a full works team. Given their pace right now compared to Merc, unless the Honda engine is a disaster, you have to think it's the best call you could make at the moment. Mostly though, I'm just glad he's staying on the grid. The sport is better when he's in it, and he hasn't shown signs of slowing down. If AM could deliver him a championship caliber car in 26, which is entirely plausible, it would be amazing to watch.

Well, that's sure unexpected. Makes me wonder if they saw some positive demographic scores for Mutant Mayhem.

Continues to look pretty good. I know Ubi open world games get a lot of hate, but I generally enjoy them. When they get the story and the world right, like with AC Odyssey, they can be great games. This sure looks promising on both setting and story. If the gameplay structure is any good this game could be awesome. Fingers crossed.

SBF sitting in prison thinking, "well, I guess it could be worse."

This is the first movie I want to see once I'm back home.

This better shows the clouds I was shooting through the whole time: The Corona ends up pretty soft in all my pics Still, lots of good prominences

We ended up having clouds in Mazatlan, but it was still quite cool to see. Photos turned out better than expected given the cloud cover. Now I have a thousand images to go through and process, but that can probably wait until my vacation is over.

I'm also in Mexico right now. Wife and I were in Cabo whale watching and now we're in Mazatlan for the eclipse. Weather isn't looking too promising at the moment, but that's out of my hands at this point. Besides, I got to touch a whale.