TwinIon

I think what Deathloop shows us is that there is plenty of innovation, or at least refining of roguelikes that can be done. I also generally am not drawn to the genre or structure, or whatever label it is, but for a game like Slay the Spire, I think it works well. Each run is different and pretty short, and the repetition is good. When it comes to a broad, story driven experience like Deathloop, I think it easily could have been incredibly frustrating if not for the very clear direction given to the player. Perhaps my single greatest metric for games these days is how much it respects the player's time. Deathloop is very respectful, and I really appreciate that about it.

Certainly there is a lot of criticism around Masi, but I think he's done a generally good job. There are plenty of things that I would like improved, like stewarding consistency and maybe some more explicit rules for some of Max's maneuvers this year, but that's not on him. For the things that actually fall under his purview, I think he's done fine (other than with track limits, which are a mess). That said, this whole fiasco is very much squarely on him. It's hard to escape the conclusion that if he'd just followed the normal rules and procedures we'd have a different champion.

San Diego just opened an extension to our trolley line. It's one of the biggest public transit projects in the history of the city. Now, unless you stay in a very limited number of neighborhoods it would still be very difficult to live without a car and home prices are insane, but you can't beat the weather.

I watched the finale thinking "well, it's episode 9, so at least there's one more." Pretty bummed we only got the nine episodes, but I'm still really enjoying the show.

I didn't go through too much of those previews, but the impression that I get is that this is as close to "this seems likely to be a bad game" as the video game media is likely to get for a big AAA release.

I'm all for pushing EVs, but I agree with the Canadians and (unfortunately) Elon that this particular credit was poorly designed and should be applicable much more broadly or scrapped altogether. I'm also perfectly fine with Canada forgetting about the copyright stuff. I think there are good cases to be made for protecting IP as it pertains to patents and what not internationally, but Canada's 50 years after death copyright protection already seems egregiously long. Extending that to the 70 years demanded by the US is unnecessary at best. These kinds of things are such blatant examples of how lobbying corrupts our legislation, and if Canada wants to throw some weight around on these issues, so much the better.

I understand why people like DS9, but TNG will always be tops for me. I just love the characters in a way that the DS9 folks never really achieved. I went through Voyager for the first time sometime in the last year or two. I'd seen scattered episodes, but never the whole thing all the way through. I feel l similar to @Jason in that it's less than the sum of it's parts. In a lot of ways I think it's best best premise for a Trek show post TNG, but it never really lives up to it's potential. It's been a while since I watched Enterprise, but I enjoy it well enough. I've become a more stout defender of Disco. Regardless of it's official status as canon, I personally put it into a separate category, like the Kelvin timeline. Once I separated it (in my own mind) from both established Trek chronology and my expectations for a Trek show, I've really come to enjoy it. It's a visual feast in a way that no other Trek show has ever been, it's exciting and action packed, and I've come to enjoy the characters quite a bit. It's still treky, but it's also distinct in ways that I found initially off putting, but have come to really appreciate. I've also become a big fan of Lower Decks. It's off the wall and zany, but so deeply in love with Trek and all the oddities that Trek has accumulated over the decades. There's a good case to be made (and my wife will be the first to make it), that it's too reliant on Trek knowledge to really appreciate many of the jokes, but I find it consistently hilarious.

I don't really disagree with you on that stuff, but this year doesn't seem like the year he should have been chosen. I think 2018 is the year I'd have chosen him. By 2018 Space X had established itself as the leading commercial launch provider, every other space program in the world was moving towards reusable rockets, and the Falcon Heavy launch was a worldwide spectacle. You could co earlier when they were first achieving success, or arguably last year when they had their first crewed launch, but this year their biggest news was winning a contract. 2018 is also the year the Model 3 finally escaped production hell, the S was among the best selling luxury cars in the country, and their market cap was competitive with the established automakers. You could make a good case that Telsa's initial successes with the roadster or the Model S would be better years, but I think 2018 is right around the time that Tesla was clearly no longer a bit player. They'd established success, and you could see other automakers rushing to compete with them. This year, the story around Tesla is more about it's market cap than anything else. Sure, they shipped the Plaid Model S, but that's a low volume novelty compared to the rest of their lineup. Both the Cybertruck and the Roadster missed their launch dates, which is particularly notable for the truck since it's now been beat to market by Rivian and will likely be beat by Ford as well (which is pretty embarrassing). So yeah, while I don't really like Elon, I think you could have legitimately given him Person of the Year in a number of years, 2018 in particular, but this year seems like a very odd one to choose.

The best encapsulation of the race I've come up with is that Lewis deserved to win the race, but Max is still a deserving champion. I was personally rooting for Lewis, and he was obviously faster in this race. Even if they made him give the place back at the beginning (which they probably should have), I think it's clear he would have had the pace to overtake Max. By not making him give the place back, the stewards kinda let Hamilton run away with the race. When Latifi crashed at the end, it should have ended under safety car or they should have to red-flagged the race ASAP. If this was any race other than a title defining finale, I think it's obvious the race ends under safety car, but they were clearly scrambling to figure out how to get the race to finish under green with a real racing lap. If they red flag it, they can clean up the order, Max and Lewis both end up on new softs, and we get something like 4-5 laps of them battling it out on mostly equal footing for the championship while also preserving safety, and while not taking too much time. The way they ended up doing it was just about the stupidest possible way they could have accomplished their goals. The came up with the only solution where they finish under green and the racing isn't competitive at all, gifting Max the championship with a race where he was unlikely to ever finish above Hamilton. Of course, plenty of F1 races finish in some absurd fashion because of late crashes and red flags and fortunate safety cars, so it's not like this was some kind of anomaly. It's just such a shame that, after one of the best seasons of all time, that a clearly deserving champion will always have the stewards poor decision making hanging over him.

Well, after after hours of downloading and searching for solutions, I'm still unable to start the campaign. I don't understand why logging into an account and verifying that I'm subscribed to something is so difficult, but I'm constantly having trouble with this on the PC. I'll find some time to try again this weekend. In the meantime, I'm enjoying the new Destiny 2 stuff.

I know the line between TV and movies is blurring more and more, but why would Inside be considered a TV show? I suppose it's a film that didn't get a theatrical release, but that goes for plenty of streaming only movies that no one would ever consider a "TV Show." Classification aside, I loved Inside, and the more recognition, the better. Hell, give it a JD Power award for best mid-size car. I know a lot of people thought this season wasn't as good, but Ted Lasso remains one of my favorites. Arcane should probably be on every list, even if it's not a genre that gets picked by newspaper critics. Another show with a very specific audience that I think really came into it's own this year was Lower Decks. It's crazy and fun and it's doing a surprisingly good job of building characters that I care about. Mostly though, it's just a love letter to Star Trek. It finds just the right tone to skewer Trek silliness while still being a good Trek show itself. If you love Trek, it's an easy recommendation.

Part of UE5's appeal is that it's supposed to be able to pull in assets of effectively unlimited quality, even the assets that are used for the film. Whatever this "experience" ends up being, it would be pretty nifty if this is a glimpse into a future where game assets and film assets are pretty much the same thing.

I'm not a lawyer, but after reading most of the opinion, I don't think it says what that tweet says it does. It says that, during sentencing, if you choose to speak and show no remorse, that can be held against you. So you can say nothing at all, and I don't believe they can characterize that as "lack of remorse." If you do choose to speak, and maintain your innocence during sentencing, that can be considered by the court. I don't agree with that ruling, because it assumes the court's infallibility, but it's certainly not like you can take the fifth all the way through sentencing and the court can take that as "lack of remorse."

According to Just Watch, it's only on Viki, which might be free?

We watched part 1 and my dominant feeling is that I wish this was a movie and not an 8 hour series. I've never been really into the Beatles, their songs haven't ever been in my playlists, but I certainly don't dislike them. I can recognize and enjoy most of their hits, but that's about it. Still, it's impossible to ignore how significant their contributions were to music, and the set up for this doc seemed interesting enough. There are the small, transcendent moments, like the one clipped above; little moments in time where you hear the making of something great. They're the kinds of sequences that music biopics wish they could accurately portray but always strive for. Those bits are wonderful, even for someone with such a casual understanding of the Beatles and their music. The rest of the time, at least in part 1, is spent hanging out with the band. If you're a big Beatles fan, that may well be heaven. If you're not, it's hard to say how much you'll enjoy it. You do get a great sense of the band and their dynamic, but unless you have an intense interest in these guys, it might be hard to keep interest up enough to ensure you don't miss those more meaningful bits. That said, I'll echo @Anathema-'s thoughts on the overall style of the doc. It's easy to imagine much of this footage being used in a more traditional documentary, with talking head interludes and context for each important bit. I'm glad Jackson didn't go that way, because it all does feel so natural and honest. When the band hits one of those recognizable melodies, it's all the more meaningful that we saw a true moment of creation.

As someone who re-watched the Amazing Spider-Man movies recently and who saw Venom in theaters, I applaud Sony's decision to stay out of as many creative decisions as possible.

Something interesting I just learned is that Parag (the new CEO) was involved in Twitter's Blue Sky program, at least in that he announced it and found the project lead for it (18 months later). Not sure if he was in charge of it during that time, or if anything really happened during that period. If you're unaware, Blue Sky is Twitter's project to build some sort of social web protocol. They've been pretty quiet about it all, to the point that it's unclear how real of a project it is or how much work has actually been done. I'm also generally dubious as to if Twitter is really the company to spearhead a decentralized approach to social media, especially since they famously started with an Open API and then slammed the door shut on devs who built on it. Still, I'm almost always in favor of protocols over monolithic products. If Twitter could turn itself into Mastodon, where what we currently see as Twitter was just the central server, maybe they could make it work. I'd certainly welcome third party twitter clients coming back.

He's already neck deep in crypto as the CEO of Square.

Eh. Jack hasn't been a particularly effective Founder CEO, especially since he's the CEO of another company that he seems more interested in. If he's had a clear vision for what Twitter should be, he's never been able to articulate that into the service. It's only relatively recently that they even seemed to care much about Twitter as a product. Maybe the new CEO coming from the tech side will make Twitter a better experience.

That seems like a reasonable possibility. Personally, I have Disney+ and Ad-free hulu. I'd consider the bundle for a couple bucks.

There's more potential there than there is with the Halo series, so why not?

Ted Lasso is great, though I'm not sure how much credit Apple gets when it was a Warner production. I've been a big fan of For All Mankind and enjoyed the first season of Foundation. They're certainly trying to be HBO, but I don't think they're quite there yet. What they do have is unlimited time and money, at least as long as Tim Cook thinks it's a fun thing to own. I just wish their app on non-Apple devices wasn't so bad. After HBO Max it's probably the second worst app on my nVidia Shield.

https://museum.xbox.com/en It's an interactive museum celebrating the 20th anniversary of the xbox. Pretty nifty. It includes a "personal museum" with some stats from your gamertag. My time spent on Xbox probably declined with each console, and it seems yearly stats only go back to 2016, which is a shame. I'd be more fun to see all my stats from the early 2000s.

This was always the inevitable future once Disney bought Fox and NBCU launched Peacock. I can easily imagine Hulu becoming either a section of Disney+, a scaled back service that primarily offers the Fox content Disney owns, or just becoming a live TV service divorced from the more Netflix like service it primarily is. Of course, this will be followed by the inevitable future of all these services becoming bundled again (possibly because Disney ends up owning it all), at which point the re-invention of cable tv will be complete.

Hard to disagree with some that have been brought up already. Portal 2 is an easy go to, but it is a relatively simple and short game. Still, it doesn't miss a single shot it takes. I'd personally put TLOU2 up there as the best made AAA game. The technical aspects are uniformly superlative, the story is devastatingly well told. It's a game that wants to make the player uncomfortable, which by itself is an extraordinary decision, and to my mind it succeeded almost too well. All that, and the gameplay is still rock solid, providing a ton of player choice in how to engage in most combat scenarios. I'd also consider putting Spider-Man PS4 up for consideration. It's not as daring as TLOU2, and while it was technically impressive, it didn't have quite the same level of detail and polish, but I feel like it hit every mark. It's one of the few AAA single player games I've replayed from start to finish. Far fewer people got a chance to try them out, but there are a few VR games I'd consider. Both Half-Life: Alyx and Lone Echo are amazing experiences where failings tend to have more to do with the limitations of current VR than as games themselves. Beat Saber probably qualifies as a perfect game. It understands the limitations of modern VR, provides as consistent, fun, glitch-free experience.