TwinIon

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.

Watching through this season, I keep thinking they’re making excellent choices in where to diverge from the source material, even if it’s not all that often. This is a really great adaptation that I’m immensely enjoying and I really hope the wait for the next season isn’t too long.

I agree that this felt like an odd place to leave the season, but I don’t think there are a whole lot of great season breaks in this story. Anywhere they leave it is going to feel unfinished, because it is. 

2 hours ago, Greatoneshere said:

Season finale was pretty good, taking time to cover a lot of the fallout with Angstrom Levy. I was a little disappointed in their confrontation given Levy's power and intelligence and the time he had to create a plan to take down Mark but there didn't really seem to be a plan, especially given how things end up. The episode didn't really feel like a season finale in some ways, it just felt like another episode of the show but clearly we're in the middle of a larger arc. I thoroughly enjoyed the season and look forward to season 3.

My read on it is that, as evidenced by both the disfigurement and the flashbacks, is Angstrom is broken. He probably still did have the power to save worlds, and he probably did still have the intelligence to end Mark, but he’s broken in ways that prevent him from perusing either path well.

21 minutes ago, AbsolutSurgen said:

The 20 second penalty on Alonso was very harsh.  I get he was playing games, but Russell was not even close -- and they didn't touch.

Yeah, I'm not really sure what to make of it. Reminds me of HAM/VER in Saudi 01, although there was contact in that instance.

On the one hand, these guys are going really fast, if you do something really unexpected then you really increase the chances of a crash and penalties should exist for driver safety.

On the other hand, if you're a wily ol fox and you come up with some novel line or strategy, I'm inclined to call that fair racing. Especially given the nature of these aero dependent cars, dirty air, and DRS. We've seen other drivers let up a bit in order to be behind at DRS detection points, and they get praised to high heaven for their strategy, and rightfully so. What Alonso did was much more dramatic than that, but it's in the same vein. I'm not enough of a racer to know if Alonso's strategy would have worked if he braked more gently, or if it would have worked at all, but I would like to see an F1 where that kind of race craft is allowed and even encouraged, as long as it's safe.

I have a Ryzen 7 3800X and game at 4K. I went from a 2080 to a 4080 and it was very worthwhile. I can generally get at least 4k60 with all the bells and whistles. For 4K gaming it was a huge leap.

1 hour ago, ort said:

I saw an interesting take from a guy who works on ships like these. This is some sort of modern super ship that's designed to be as big as possible while still fitting through the Panama Canal. There aren't actually many of these ships in service. Margins are so tight in the international shipping industry that most of them are run by overworked skeleton crews and are poorly maintained. Stopping to properly service things costs time and money so they do the bare minimum.

 

It possible the crew didn't do anything egregiously wrong, but were victims of circumstance, tight budget and poor training.

Pretty sure I saw the same thing, and the whole thing about the Jones act and running these massive ships on minuscule margins rang true to me.

Far as I can tell, a vessel this size would be considered post-panamax or neo-panamax, which basically just means it's as big as possible for the upgraded panama canal locks. This USDA site (odd source, but seems legit) says that in 2019 there were 585 of them, or 5% of global bulk vessels. 38% of bulk vessels in 2019 were Panamax or larger. So this ship was in the upper middle of the pack when it comes to sheer size.

To me it sounds very plausible that the crew was a victim of circumstance.

On 3/21/2024 at 12:47 PM, ort said:

Apple will be allowing streaming apps and iMessage will also soon have full support for RCS.

 

Marrick Garland presented some email exchanges in 2012 and a joke Tim Cook made during a Q&A session as evidence they are acting maliciously. I'm not sure I hold them in that much confidence either.

 

It's kind of funny, because I do want apple to change their stance on most of these things, but I do not want the government to decide how they should do it.

 

I think I'm just confused about when and how incredible common business tactics and strategies suddenly became anti-competitive. Where is the line?

That's just the nature of anti-trust. The rules are different once you control enough of the market. It's the most natural thing in the world to build your products in a way that makes people want to use more of your products. Apple has done this very successfully; arguably more successfully than anyone else ever has. It only becomes a problem when the government decides that it's become a problem. That does kind of rub me the wrong way, but it does actually make some sense in context.

I think the super app thing is useful for the DOJ for a few reasons. The biggest thing is that it's very clear Apple doesn't like them and Apple takes a bunch of very obvious and some very technical steps to prevent them. They don't allow third party payment systems, they don't allow mini-apps, they prevent PWAs from accessing a bunch of APIs. Another big reason is that China provides a counterfactual example of what the smartphone market could look like if Super-Apps were popular in the US. The DOJ also have convenient emails from Apple talking about how Apple don't like super-apps because they reduce stickiness.

So you have a thing that we know Apple doesn't want, where it's easy to show the policy and technical barriers that Apple puts up to prevent their adoption, with a thing we can show does work overseas. I think that makes it a good case to take to court.

Also, even if you don't care about super-apps, if the DOJ wins on these counts, there are a bunch of things that could conceivably help plenty of non-super-apps. If you open up payment options or PWA API access or just in general lessen the control Apple is able to exercise over the content of apps, all of that could benefit plenty of different apps.

6 hours ago, Greatoneshere said:

That is the case, but the show takes place primarily in 2552 (the same year as Halo 1), 27 years after first contact at Harvest and by now there should be no "outer colonies revolting" plot by the time of Halo: Reach and Halo 1 yet in season 1 (and somewhat in season 2) the UNSC are "bad" is a bigger plotline than warring with the Covenant and stumbling on Halo which is just strange, but that's one aspect I don't have much issue with compared to everything else I mentioned. When you play the original games you get that the UNSC, like any militaristic organization, gets up to some shit but you never get the sense they are completely incompetent and evil like the higher ups are portrayed on the show. It's just a tonally strange swerve to make when adapting Halo of all things. But the human touch point I'm referring to is a McKee, who is a human raised from a young age to follow the Covenant and for some reason is still around and it's like: just give us the Arbiter from Halo 2 and make him the Covenant POV, no need for McKee (they almost did it with the not-Arbiter that was following McKee around, but that's not Keith David's Arbiter so who cares).

Maybe I need to re-watch the beginning of season 1 and I just didn't pick up what they were giving us, but I feel like they did a terrible job of setting the stage. Episode 1 we had Spartans, including Master Chief, saving (or at least attempting to save) insurrectionists from Covenant. It was really not clear if humanity was still in some civil war, what exactly was happening with the war with the Covenant, to what extent MC was already some legendary hero, or why. I think some of that is their failing, and maybe some of it is that it conflicts with the games.

I'm fine with dropping the audience off in media res, but I feel like that works best when things are simple and it's easy to get your bearings. You don't watch the opening of Star Wars and wonder who the good guys are. It felt to me like they wanted to make Halo more complex in different ways than the game did, when I think it would have worked better without all the mess. So I completely agree with you that the "UNSC does bad stuff" threads were so weirdly the core of this show, arguably until the very end of season 2.

On 3/25/2024 at 8:41 AM, AbsolutSurgen said:

There is a fundamental disconnect between what many core gamers think is popular, and what is actually being played.

 

 

The old titles thing doesn't surprise me. Look at the top of Steam's charts or Twitch and you'll see games like League of Legends, Counter Strike, DOTA, GTA, etc. all leading the charts. Yeah, press and conversation is often focused on new games, but it's no shock that the games people spend the most time on are older.

I'd love more context for that top graph though. I couldn't find much searching on Google. If those charts are right, then the top one only represents the 25% of "new game play time," but I can't think of 25 new pay-to-play live service games would make up that number. Given the time period, it would count games released after January 2021. Overwatch 2, Halo Infinite, Dreamlight Valley, and Diablo 4 are the only mildly successful games I can think of that would count. Are they counting Hogwards Legacy and Call of Duty as live service? What about sports titles? Are they counting games that got paid updates like Destiny in that time? Are they counting mobile games?

That graph would mean that new AAA non-live-service games make up only 4% of annual playtime. That would be a surprise, however, if you count every game that has any kind of update or paid content as live service, then the delineation is basically meaningless.

I spent way too much time in WoW and I look back fondly at the best parts of it. The beginning of that game was such a special time, but long before I quit it had fallen into a pattern that wasn't great for me or the game.

I do wonder what those graphs look like if they went all the way back to the beginning.

How is this a situation where he gets to retire own his own timeline and stay until the end of the year? Boeing should be shoving him out the first blown out plug socket and finding someone new to fix this broken company.

Season finished up and it’s not uniformly terrible, but I just have a hard time connecting with it. I think there’s a lot to like. The finale ended with some pretty decent action. There are some very cool shots in space, some nifty horrorish sequences, and I appreciated the lack of cuts from the final fight. I think a lot of the issues I have with the show are remnants from a first season that failed to really connect me to all these characters. So even when individual scenes are well done, they’re just not hitting me with the weight they’re trying for. 

That said, I’m kind of excited about Season 3, if we actually get one. 

It's been a while since I read the books, but episode 1 seemed like a pretty decent start. Reviews are pretty good, and I enjoyed the series, so I'll be seeing this one through.

I did find it kind of funny that it wasn't at the top of my Netflix screen. At a reported $160M total, Netflix is spending Game of Thrones money at this show. A generous reading is that the Netflix algorithm expects that I'll watch it or seek it out, so they need to promote other content to me that I might find interesting while I scroll over to this series. The more likely answer is that Netflix still just sucks at promotion, even inside it's own app.