TwinIon

I really enjoyed the campaign for Inifinite. I'm going to try to get a buddy who doesn't play many games join me in a play through.

My first thought was who would put in the effort to actually do something like that, and the answer seems to be a combination of at least one crazy guy with access to the right resources and Snyder himself. My second thought is that I'd love to see the internal metrics for the Snyder cut on HBO Max. Sure, they might have just been curious about exactly what happened with all this, but I'm guessing that someone looked at the ROI for that $100M and wasn't impressed.

Another example of why the right to repair is so important.

I would be surprised if this kind of thing doesn't happen relatively often for her. I know a couple women who are consistently assumed to be nearly 20 years younger than they are. One was just telling me the other day that it comes in handy when solicitors ask her if her parents are home and she can honestly tell them no.

Here's a pretty good rundown of the whole situation from someone that's been doing a lot of reporting on it.

I agree that season 3 is the strongest so far. I felt like the overall arcs were very solid and the now standard sex/violence/gore continues to be entertaining in its own way. I did have some quibbles with the end of the season though. Starlight's big sequence was a complete bust. I don't know if it was meant to be such a let down, that with all that DBZ style powering up the best she managed was to shove Solider Boy to the ground, but I didn't think it was played that way. It was played like she took her best shot and it wasn't enough, but it was almost comically bad. Even the effects were cheesy. I also wasn't a big fan of how they used the kid to get Soldier Boy and Butcher to fight and that the kid was why Homelander gets away. Just felt cheap and anti-climactic. Still, overall a good season. Feels like Amazon is putting a lot of weight behind this show with the spinoffs and everything, so I wouldn't expect them to end it anytime soon.

I thought Love and Thunder was fine. I didn't enjoy it nearly as much as Ragnarok. It's goofy and weird and expands the MCU in ways that feel both huge and unimportant. I feel like a lot of the character development that happens during the course of the film is glossed over and so many of the decisive moments feel unearned. Spoilers: In the end I think it's a perfectly serviceable and forgettable Marvel movie. It's not something I expect to revisit anytime soon.

At this point it seems like Musk would be lucky if he can just pay the $1B breakup fee, but I haven't seen much analysis suggesting that he has much of a way out of the deal. Musk buying Twitter always seemed like a bad thing. Musk ending up owning Twitter after spending months badmouthing the service and desperately trying not to buy it seems even worse.

This ties in with one of my fascinations about many flavors of conspiracy theory, which is that so many seem to revolve around the conspirators very public messages. Like an uber secret organization that runs the world from the shadows just can't help itself but to reveal their otherwise hidden agenda. Like with the murals at Denver International. Same thing with the hidden symbology that so many conspiracy theorists thrive on. The secret cabal just can't help itself but to put messages about their hidden purpose all over the place, just for their own amusement, but at the risk of exposing themselves.

This reply to the web3 console guys is perfect:

Wait, so he's resigning, but he's going to stay in his job until they find a replacement, which is expected to take months? Seems like a softer exit than I expected.

Same goes for the Swiss Franc. Right now 1CHF = 1.03 USD. As someone that just spent the last few weeks in Italy, Switzerland, France, and Germany, I very much appreciated that I didn't have to do any real conversions.

I agree with @Spork3245 The DF video says rather directly that the PS5 remaster of Part 1 looks pretty much identical to Part 2. Part 2 is a very good looking game, but it's still a PS4 game that got a very minimal PS5 patch, and Naughty Dog are kings of graphics. I doubt I'll have any real issues with the graphics, but we're 2 years into the PS5 and this is Naughty Dog's first game on the platform, so I was hoping for something that would blow me away. If Part 3 came out and looked indistinguishable from Part 2, despite a console generation launching between them, I'd be disappointed. This one gets a pass because it's just a remake, but still.

I suppose when your character doesn't have a voice, it doesn't make as much sense to have a more cinematic camera for conversations. It's still a bit of a shame. The standard Bethesda conversation setup just feels so archaic. Hopefully they at least make the characters emote a bit more so the conversations aren't entirely robotic.

I agree with @legend that there isn't any reason to suspect this thing is sentient, it did make me think that it would be pretty difficult to tell the difference between a system that actually is and one that is just the world's best chatbot. I honestly don't know how one might meaningfully make a distinction. I agree with @LazyPiranha that I'd expect an actual AGI to respond to things in a decidedly non-human way. So it would need to be human enough that we recognize its' intelligence, but at the same time you wouldn't expect them to always have a perfectly human response to every query. I think it'll be fun to be able to talk to something like lambda. I wonder how resource intensive a conversation is right now and how far away they are from some kind of commercial application.

I'm looking forward to Diablo 4. I played a bit of D2R and enjoyed it, but there was so much that rightfully felt ancient. It seemed like they are really modernizing the format and the gameplay loop, and I hope they find a way to make it fun. Blizzard hasn't been anyone's favorite game company as of late, but everything I've seen of D4 looks good.

The gunplay looks pretty poor. There was very little movement from either the player or the enemies. I'm interested in low/zero G combat, but far from convinced they can make it fun. The guns seem pretty standard, and overall it just looked bland.Graphically it was about what I would expect from it; good but not spectacular. The environmental detail looks excellent and the lighting engine is doing some work, but the faces and animation don't live up to the highest standards. The star system view looked really bad, but hopefully that's just a work in progress. Unfortunately the Bethesda jank still seems present. After playing Forbidden West, I don't know if I can go back to a big RPG where the camera just snaps to the face of everyone we talk to. There were some camera movement in dialog scenes, so hopefully there's more of that and less straight on camera shots. The two things that really blew me away were the base and ship customization and the sheer size of it. I can easily imagine spending a lot of time building my perfect ship (or fleet, if that's a thing). Having NMS like planets while also still having a bunch of hand crafted locations seems like an ideal setup. I just hope that they did spend enough time building out the cities and outposts and what not so that the core planets feel substantial and purposeful. I'm sure that 990 or so planets will be algorithmically generated blandness, and that's fine, as long as there is enough well crafted stuff to play in. I do hope that we get NMS style travel, while also having some kind of fast travel. The solar system view had you choosing a landing spot, so some kind of fast travel is obviously included. We didn't see ground to space travel, which I hope is included. It also seems like a modder's dream to have a huge game like this where things can be added. It'll be a largely blank canvas that we'll see expanded on for years (assuming it's any good). It really feels like they're leaning into the idea that they want this game to be another Skyrim, a game where people can spend 1000s of hours over a decade.

I think the hearing so far was well done, but I also can't help but feel like it's all rather toothless. With the Impeachment, the stakes were very clear. They were presenting information in order to make a specific judgment on Trump. With this hearing, everything felt desperately important, but also almost irrelevant. They're shouting from the rooftops how close we came to literally losing our democracy, but at the same time this hearing is not (at far as I was able to tell) about solutions or consequences. Maybe that comes in the following hearings, but I think as a framing device it's rather important to be consistent and clear about it. Yes, it's important that we understand how much Trump did to incite Jan 6 and how little he did to diffuse the situation once it got out of hand. It's important to know that everyone around him was telling him that he lost the election, to give up on the big lie, and that many pleaded with him to do something to stop the violence. All that important information would have felt more vital if they were recommending Trump be prosecuted under the Insurrectionist Disqualification Clause like Cawthorn (at the very least). It's also important to know that a bunch of GOP congresspeople sought pardons after Jan 6th, implying they thought they could be guilty of a crime, but it would be great if we got some insight as to if the committee looked into those potential crimes and enumerated what they might be and what the DOJ was going to do about it. So yeah, I'll tune in and support any effort to educate the public as to what happened, but what I'm hoping for is some indication that those in power are going to do more than make a televised special.

I agree. On Facebook they have a policy against setting up multiple accounts or accounts under fake names, but that's not the case on Twitter. There's nothing really stopping reporters from having a personal account to tweet bad jokes and workplace complaints and whatever else while not leveraging the audience that is following them for their work product or other professional views. I have the feeling that if you asked reporters why they don't do that, they'd probably ask why they should have to "hide" their opinions or their jokes. I don't think she was trying to get fired in order to secure some kind of settlement, and I think that she had a valid complaint, but at the same time it's understandable that maybe the organization you work for wouldn't be too happy if you keep putting them and your coworkers on blast.

MS has done a lot of Samsung exclusive deals in the past, so I wouldn't be surprised if it's a year or more before we see it on most other TVs. I'd also guess (or at least I'd hope) that MS is putting some effort into validating the experience and that we don't just get a bunch of mediocre TVs that struggle to play well.

I agree that "edgy" is probably a fitting descriptor for what we got in that trailer, but that's not exactly selling me on the film. When it comes to DC taking big swings, I remain skeptical.

The Xbox App on a TV feels like the natural endpoint for so much gaming, even if this version is bound to be questionable at times. The only thing that surprises me about it is that it got built into a TV app before we got the Xbox "keystone" streaming stick. I'm very curious as to what about it needed to be revised. Sure seems like MS has the capability to put together a small streaming box that runs the Xbox versions of media apps alongside Xbox game streaming, but maybe they couldn't figure out the pricing.

Probably doesn't help that we're only getting a meh 1080p feed, but I agree that it wasn't terribly impressive. It didn't look bad, but it didn't blow me away. Remastered still holds up pretty well. Maybe when we get some higher quality 4k footage to compare it'll stand out more.

Even if it's for stupid reasons, I'm always happy to see public funding for stadiums fail.