TwinIon

Rebel Moon: Part Two - The Scargiver is remarkably bad in basically every way that a sci-fi movie can be bad. The nicest thing I can say about it is that individual shots are occasionally pretty, but only in the way that an AI generated generic sci-fi image might be. Every single other thing here is just bad. The writing, the acting the directing, the music. It's all just so lazy and boring.

This is the worst thing Snyder has made.

Sony makes a lot of sense as a buyer. They have a movie studio, but not a streaming service. They lack franchise IP (though Paramount isn't exactly overflowing with them either). There probably wouldn't be an anti-trust battle.

I think the new prism class mixing thing looks pretty awesome. If I was still playing, I'd be really excited about it, but it's not the kind of thing to bring me back to the game. If I'm honest, I'm not sure what would bring me back, so maybe that's not a fair test.

I'm kind of surprised that they've only shipped under 4000 Cybertrucks up to now. I kinda thought that by the time they finally shipped any, they'd be able to really push them out. Tesla's Q4 2023 deck says they have production capacity for 125k Cybertrucks a year and their goal is to double that in 18 months. Apparently analysts seem to think they'll ship somewhere between 20k - 80k this year, with a few outliers even higher. 1000 vehicles a months is outpacing the notorious model 3 rollout, but Telsa is shipping more than 10x as many cars a quarter now than they were then. They should be better at putting out new models. They didn't separate the Y deliveries from the 3, so it's hard to say how quickly they ramped that up, but with the similarities, it should have been pretty easy.

On 3/18/2024 at 5:31 AM, Kal-El814 said:

 

As ever, the issue is not as black and white as “what if this version of Batman killed people” or “what if this version.of Superman was viewed as potentially dangerous.”

 

The issue with doing that in a movie, forgetting Snyder for a moment, is that even though comic book movies happen much more often today than they used to, it’s still unfortunate that we’d see a version of this character on the big screen that’s not a reflection of the most ironic version of an iconic character. Like if Gunn wants to fuck with the Guardians of the Galaxy or Vigilante or Peacemaker… that’s probably GOOD because nobody really gives a shit about them. That’s not the same with Superman or Batman or The Flash. I love an Elseworlds or alternate take story in print. For as fun as something like Red Son was… I dunno if I’d want a big budget, movie adaptation of that especially since it’s been so long since we’ve seen a great movie Superman. Or the recent DC games in the Rocksteady Batman universe or whatever it’s called, or the Injustice universe, etc. I may not like all of those, but it’s cool that they exist in those media because they’re interesting CONTRASTS to the existing characters and their stories.

 

The Snyder aspect of the issue is that he doesn’t take the actual question to any point beyond the superficial. “What if Batman killed?” Okay… what if he did? The other heroes don’t really react differently to Batman being a killer compared to how they do in the comics, which kinda makes sense if Wonder Woman is clicking terrorist heads and leaving their brains splattered against walls in front of children while not giving a single fuck. And we get a throwaway line about how Batman brands people he sends to prison with the knowledge that they’ll be abused in there because of that, and that’s supposed to show how “hard” Batman is… but it really just makes him a horrible person. So criminals fear Batman, sure, but Bruce Wayne is just still… Bruce Wayne in the Snyderverse. There’s no different insight into the character, nobody really treats him all that differently than he’s treated in the comics where he DOESN’T kill people. It doesn’t seem like he’s even all that fussed about killing them. He just kills them. So why change a critical aspect of a character if it ultimately doesn’t mater? And it’s the same with Superman; he’s out there brooding, he’s letting his dad die, he’s not containing collateral damage… and then people make statues of him anyway.

I disagree with your first point, but I think you nail it in the end. I don't think it matters that Batman is such an iconic character, specially now that we've seen him on screen in so many big movies. We've gotten the platonic ideal of Batman in various flavors and, as ever with adaptions, the problem is rarely that the adaptation diverges from the source material, it's making those changes without sufficient reason or proper care.

I completely agree that the problem with Snyder making Batman kill is he did it so casually and never did anything interesting with it. You bring up how Bruce Wayne is a typical Bruce Wayne, but other his sudden penchant for casual homicide, Snyder's Batman was a pretty prototypical Batman as well. If you're going to make him a killer, it should have some gravitas to it precisely because Batman is so iconic and his rule against killing is so central to his mythology. The audience should feel the weight of that decision. It should be a seismic event in the evolution of the character, but instead it's just treated like a new costume design or batmobile; just one of those standard things that changes with each iteration.

Not that we need to intermingle over-discussed film nerd lore, but it makes me think about The Last Jedi. Johnson was challenging his characters and the audience, and regardless of if you think reclusive Luke should have remained the golden boy hero or not, Johnson brought a lot of attention to Luke being so different from what we (and Rey) expected. Successfully or not, a huge portion of that film was dedicated to Luke's change of heart, and that's the kind of time and focus that making Batman willing to break his unbreakable rule deserved.

After months of being too intimidated to even start, I finally started playing. Only a few hours in I think I'm even more intimidated and lost. Hell, even this thread is too much for me to catch up on. I decided I wouldn't try and optimize everything and instead jump right in without worrying too much about screwing things up, but even with that attitude I can't help but feel the massive weight of this game. Even resting is a complicated decision! I clearly don't want to rest too much because of the ticking clock, but some spells need me to, which makes me more weary of using them, which compounds my other problems. Early leveling has way too many decision points, between choosing a subclass and being given a huge array of spells and skills to choose from, with basically no context for what what might be worth taking. I imagine much of this is more a complaint about D&D than BG3 specifically, but having to chose a subclass at level 2 is bonkers. I've barley even touched the game, haven't even used the majority of my abilities and now I'm making big (potentially irreversible?) decisions about the future. I'm trying not to worry about it too much and just pick things quickly, but it's hard not to think I'm handicapping myself or locking myself into some trap I don't even realize.

That second guessing is getting worse as I go along because I keep running into encounters and getting absolutely beat down. I'm not sure how much of it is poor setup choices, how much is just sucking at combat, and how much is the game telling me to find another way to avoid combat in those situations. I know I have a huge array of non-combat options, but I don't even know where to begin exploring them. I had to turn down the difficulty to easy because I kept getting my party wiped and I'm still firmly in the beginning section.

All that said, I can easily see why people love this game so much. The characters are already varied and interesting. It's great that I'm already making far more difficult and morally grey choices than in any game I've played in recent memory. There is so much freedom here in all the ways that I'm always asking for in games. I suppose I just wish wish I was being eased into this ocean of unlimited complexity instead of being tossed into the deep without knowing how to swim.

Personally, I'm not convinced this isn't just the expected way for people to consume all media now that digital distribution has made so much all content available all the time. Here's an article from a couple years back noting a similar trend in music. I couldn't quickly find numbers, but it's no secret that shows like The Office and Friends continue to do numbers on streaming. It hasn't even been that long since games have had these long running titles or large back catalogs that are easy to access, so it makes sense that this might be a new development for the medium as it matures.

Games certainly face unique issues when it comes to catalog titles, but I think it's probably a natural state that given access to decades of media that the combined attention will be balanced towards the back catalog more than the most recent stuff. Back catalog media is better vetted, likely more accessible (as prices come down, wider distribution channels, etc), and long term success builds on itself. Get to a certain point of popularity, and that popularity can be self-sustaining for quite a while.

4 minutes ago, SuperSpreader said:

 

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I don't see it that way. I really feel corporations would do this if you let them. They already do to a certain extent! You've got US Arms manufacturers smuggling arms S of the border for $$$ over innocent people there literally empowering villains.

 

Corporations are people.

Short term profits over long term sustainability.

Boy's clubs

Epstein's clients weren't people who didn't benefit from corporate greed. 

Just on and on. 

 

 

12 hours ago, skillzdadirecta said:

I really think he should approach a Streaming service and do a Ten episode Magnum Opus. He writes scripts like novels andyway and aways has to edit himself down. I'd be curious to see what Tarantino's work would look like if runtime wasn't a consideration. Outside of that, he's been hit or miss for me with his last couple of films.

Maybe he'll make 10 movies and then decide to move on to TV.

It would probably take him a decade to write a full series, but I'd watch it.

The Magneto line that got me was “we will not live our days wondering if we could have saved more.”

This show isn’t afraid to do crazy things, that’s for sure. For once I’m all about comic book storytelling’s tendency to reverse death.

Tarantino has long declared his intention to only make ten movies, and for a while now that tenth and final film was to be “The Movie Critic,” a story based on a real person who was writing movie reviews for a porn rag in the late 70s. Brad Pitt had been attached to star though production had been stalled by a rewrite.

Now it appears the film has been dropped because Tarantino has simply changed his mind.

Quentin Tarantino Drops ‘The Movie Critic’ As His Final Film

DEADLINE.COM

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Quentin Tarantino has changed his mind about making The Movie Critic, scrapping the film as his 10th and final project.

As the article mentions, this isn’t entirely unlike what happened with The Hateful Eight. QT was nearing production and he changed his mind and shelved the project for a while.

Whatever he does as his next film and whatever becomes of The Movie Critic, I just hope that Tarantino has more final films than Miyazaki. Or at least he keeps writing scripts. If nothing else he’s a singular voice in filmmaking and the cinema landscape would be lesser without him.

1 hour ago, SuperSpreader said:

 

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Capitalism does that all the time? Destroying pathways so that others can't ever compete with them, tying things up in legal terms (the code for the device) so that no one can have access to tech that competes with them. Merging with challengers to stay in control. Their customer base wasn't poor people, their customer base are the people who bought vault space. Everything the villain-dad-dude said is a version of corporate BS I've heard.

 

On 4/15/2024 at 1:29 PM, Kal-El814 said:

Finished the show today.

 

Broadly, I really liked it. Again it absolutely nails the BGS Fallout aesthetic so if that's part of what you liked about the games, it's very faithfully represented in the show. The main three characters are all pretty well written and interesting. Their development over the course of the series feels earned and pretty well done. Overall the plot moves pretty briskly and is pretty interesting, even if there's a lot of beats that are familiar to someone who's spent a lot of time in this game universe.

 

Some spoilery thoughts ahead...

 

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The main issue I have with the story is kinda similar to the issues I have with the BGS games themselves, so maybe this is just projection.  But by the end, things feel somewhat small? Most of the main secondary characters and everyone aside from Lucy and Maximus seem to know one another or are directly connected to each other in a meaningful way. I wonder if it's a red herring, but if not, confirming that Vault Tec is the one to cause the bombs to drop is a pretty big lore pivot. I guess we'll see.

 

My only real eye roll came from that specific notion, that the world's capitalists would form a secret pact in a Strangelove room to kill almost everyone on earth to see whose capitalism dick has the most girth? I appreciate that the franchise has never been sunshine, lollypops, and rainbows, but Jesus Christ

 

Minor quibbles aside, it's a pretty fun, good looking show. Interested to see where the second season goes.

As far as your spoiler thoughts, I agree.

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.

On 4/14/2024 at 1:48 PM, Commissar SFLUFAN said:

The question now becomes whether Tel Aviv shares the assessment that this action was "face-saving nonsense" or reacts as if it represented an apocalyptic, existential threat.

 

Unfortunately, I think we all can kinda guess on that one already.

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

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The PS5 Pro will boost older games, too.

Quote

 

That could mean we see PS5 Pro Enhanced games that run at between 1080p and 1440p resolution at 30fps on the base PS5 and run between 1280p and 2160p on the PS5 Pro at the same frame rate. A fixed resolution increase from 1440p to 2160p would also qualify as a PS5 Pro Enhanced game. Developers could also choose to enable ray-tracing effects and get the PS5 Pro Enhanced label without improving resolution or frame rates. If a developer wants to target 60fps instead of 30fps with the same resolution, this may also qualify as a PS5 Pro Enhanced game.

 

On 4/15/2024 at 5:52 PM, Greatoneshere said:

There's an incredible amount of scheming and world building in the first 3/4's of Dune Messiah that I don't think should be ignored, but yes it's not an action adventure yarn but something quite different. I think there are a lot of interesting angles one could take with the adaptation, so long as the core story (and reveals) remain.

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.

On 2/21/2024 at 12:51 AM, Keyser_Soze said:

Reddit's set to rake in $60M per year in a deal with an unnamed AI company to train future models on its 20 years' worth of user generated content | PC Gamer

WWW.PCGAMER.COM

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In the eyes of AI, it would seem that nothing is ever truly yours once it's posted online.

 

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.