TwinIon

I enjoyed Boba Fett, driving instructor. Yeah, it's a story that's been done, but it was a perfectly enjoyable episode of TV.

For some reason, I thought I recall hearing that the Quest 2 was sold at a price that they don't make any money on it. I'm dubious that Sony would chase a similar model, but possibly. Personally, I'll guess $400. I'd be very surprised if Sony made the new headset PC compatible, but I can imagine it getting some unofficial drivers. So far, everything they've announced has been beyond my expectations. If it's anywhere as good as it could be, It'll be a great addition to the VR space.

I didn't really keep a log during the year, so here's a recap of what I played through this year. PC: Destiny 2 - I continue to enjoy my time in D2, which is an excellent shooter that still stumbles with its MMO aspirations. Hearthstone Battlegrounds - I've long since given up on Standard in HS, but I return to Battlegrounds periodically since it doesn't require any deck building and is easy to play for 20min and then have that turn into 2 hours. Dyson Sphere Program - I haven't played any of this games' progenitors (factorio and the like), but DSP consumed me for over 100 hours and there was still endless optimization to be done long after I put it down. Nier Replicant - A very solid action game in an interesting world that unfortunately isn't great at respecting the players' time. I still need to play through Automata. Humankind - A very worthy Civ competitor that doesn't really stray far enough from its' inspiration to feel totally unique. Deathloop - Possibly my favorite roguelike game that avoids a potentially repetitive experience with a compelling story line and strong guidance. I only wished for a bit more genuine discovery. Switch: Metroid Dread - A very solid 2D Metroid entry that also doesn't stray too far enough its roots to feel exciting in 2021, but is overall still a worthwhile playthrough. PS5: Ratchet and Clank: A Rift Apart - Pixar quality visuals is not an understatement. R&C remains as it ever was, entertaining, straightforward, and zany. Returnal - I typically stay away from "hard" games that punish the players, but I'm glad I gave Returnal a try. I think a more gradual learning curve might have been warranted, but once I got through the first biome, I was able to quickly clear the rest. The shooting and movement feel superb, and the graphics feel as modern as they are. Spider-Man (PS4) - My first PS5 experience was one I'd already had on my PS4. I've replayed so few big open-world games that it's an incredible affirmation of the quality of Spider-Man that I was willing to replay it so soon. It really shines on the PS5. Spider-Man: Miles Morales - Largely more of the same, which is (for now) more than enough. Traversal is just so joyous in these games, combat is fluid, and the story is well told. Guardians of the Galaxy - It's a fine shooter, a meh adventure game, but a wonderful time. The characters and story make it worthwhile, even if the moment to moment gameplay isn't super compelling.

Apparently someone at The Verge noticed the discontinuity within nVidia.

Perhaps he just didn't have time to get them to put in a notch.

After a tweet from Paul Tassi, I became aware of Decentraland, which seems to be "Second Life, but with NFTs." That feels pretty run of the mill, and it's probably not even the only game that could be described that way, but what I find kind of demonstrative of the whole hype around blockchain is that decentraland is organized as a DAO, and the value of their coin Mana currently has a market cap of $5.9 Billion. To put that in perspective, that would value Decentraland not far below Zynga, Square Enix, and Ubisoft, but above Capcom and CD Projekt. That gives it a valuation double that of Razer and nearly triple Corsair. All for a game that has a maximum concurrency of ~2,500 players, which (at this exact moment) would put it as the ~280th most played game on Steam, below Fishing Planet. To be fair, those player numbers aren't terrible for a game launched only a few months ago. Still, the valuation of that coin is insane.

I watched the recap video from the Verge and noticed that the dude introducing the 3090 Ti says "tie" rather than "tee eye." I had to make sure that wasn't the way everyone in the company says it, so I went back and found founder/CEO Jensen Huang does say "tee eye" at the 2080 TI announcement.

The haptic touchpad seems like it should be fine, but I don't understand why they wouldn't even put an outline as to where it ends. The keyboard itself looks like it might be a pain, given that it's flat without much spacing between the keys, but without hands on it's hard to say for sure. What is certain is that the lack of a real function key set is an absolute deal breaker. I'd never buy a laptop with a capacitive row like that. It's bizarre that this came out now. If this had come out shortly after Apple launched their touchbar, then at least you could say they were just following the market leader. Here we are months after Apple, after so much negative feedback, finally killed off their touchbar, and there's just no excuse.

Fair enough. I didn't read too much in to the actual case. It does seem to be safe to say that it seems extremely unlikely he remains in prison for this charge, absent SCOTUS ruling with AZ.

I definitely thought that "innocence isn't enough" was going to be a quote from the article, not a direct quote from a state lawyer arguing before the supreme court. Also, pretty nuts that this guy was in prison for over twenty years, proven innocent, and has remained there for an additional four years and counting because AZ doesn't want Federal courts the ability to find any of their prisoners innocent. At least the article made it sound as if SCOTUS didn't seem like they were too on board with overturning Martinez. Hell, it wouldn't surprise me if Kavanaugh and Coney Barrett wanted to take this case just so the could point and say "hey look, we respect good precedent," while at the same time overturning Roe.

I'm not a Chargers fan like I used to be, but I'm still rooting for them to beat the Raiders and get in. If nothing else, they're a fun team to watch right now.

I couldn't quickly find the tweet, but I saw a recent thread of someone complaining of "stolen" NFTs. It turned out that the person saving and re-minting the images was just hosting them on Google, so they sent Google a takedown request and Google removed it. I just find the whole thing so absurd. First, that someone would care if a digital image on the internet had been copied. Then that it's even possible for these NFTs to be minted to a https address where who knows what will happen to the host. Plus, it's hilarious that this technological savior of digital scarcity is saved by issuing a copyright takedown request of a standard web host. It's all just so absurd. So I went on OpenSea and clicked on a random NFT on their front page and checked the TokenURI, and the very first one I clicked on used an https address that was a domain obviously affiliated with the minter. I'd love to know what percent, both in total NFTs and in dollar values, of NFTs resolve to an https address. If you have to trust the domain provider and the host, you've avoided exactly zero web 2.0 gatekeepers or pitfalls. At least when something is on IPFS or something else distributed, there's some case to be made that it's more likely to stick around, but it's still trusting a very new system where even the survival of that system doesn't guarantee the survival of your particular content. Hell, right now only 30 of the 107 public IPFS gateways are online. I have no clue how often that changes, and obviously there are private peers, but it doesn't seem like the kind of system that I'd want to rely on to store all my "valuable" NFTs on forever.

At first I thought this was because of some sort of driver shortage or something, but as a once a month dogfooding program, it totally makes sense. I think it's always obvious when a company's developers don't use their own product. It reminds me of when Facebook being desperate to get their devs to use android phones. Their android apps were giant pieces of bloatware, but everyone at the company had iPhones, so no one cared. I haven't had a FB app installed in a long time, so not really sure if it got better. I think it was Sundar who said in an interview that he switches primary phones all the time, and often uses low to mid tier android phones just to get a feel for them. Given that a huge percent of all their users are likely using similar devices, it makes a lot of sense.

I agree that it's way too long, especially since it only really has one joke. I also agree with @Komusha that the tone is never really fitting. It's alternating between entirely too cartoonish and not quite cartoonish enough. That said, I did feel the frustration of the main characters, which I think is very much the point.

There's really a lot to digest, but my first thought is that I don't think I've ever seen a blockbuster film in a more direct dialog with the audience than this one. So much of it felt like an outpouring of bottled up emotions and thoughts about the original trilogy that you have to wonder how different it would be if the Wachowskis had a blog and had worked out some of these feelings before committing them to film. At the same time, it's hard to tell how much of what ended up on screen is genuine and can be taken at face value, at least in terms of what is said straight to the audience. For example, did WB actually come to the Wachowskis and tell them they're making a fourth Matrix film with or without them? I'd have to revisit the film to have a better sense of it all, but one thing that definitely didn't work for me was the emphasis on bullet time. Early on we get Jude talking about how synonymous the Matrix is with bullet time, which I felt like was sufficient talk on the subject. Later the Analyst comes in and talks about bullet time and how he uses the power that defined Neo to control him, but that didn't really go anywhere either story-wise or from an effects perspective. The story impact the Analysts "super bullet time" is entirely negated by Smith showing up and saving Neo, which felt pretty anti-climatic. From an effects and action perspective, it's also a let down. The effect has been done before and with much greater flair, with the X-men movies are perhaps the best examples, though perhaps an unfair comparison since there basically isn't used during the action in Matrix 4. Without the super slow mo having any real impact, were left with Neo's new ambiguous force push powers, which feel like a natural extension of his stopping bullets, but also were mostly visually uninteresting. There's a cool moment on the motorcycle, but it almost felt like an excuse not to have Keanu do more fighting. Then you have the repeated new threat of "swarm mode," which again, was uninteresting from both a story and visual perspective. Yeah, it basically turns every person around them into mild threats, but the lack of a more significant transformation felt like it lessened the mild horror element of agents taking over people's bodies. Oddly enough, it also essentially eliminates the need for the face replacement tech that the sequels pioneered. The result by the end is a giant anonymous mob that made the final in Matrix action feel like a bad zombie movie. All that said, there were a some things I did like about Resurrections as a Matrix sequel. I think the idea of some AI joining the humans in both the Matrix and the physical world is a fun one. It's well implemented as a story device, and while I didn't love how Morpheus looked in the real world, the rest of the human/machine hybrid stuff looked pretty cool. I wish we got more of them. I'll might have to revisit it, since it is strangest blockbuster I've seen in a long time.

Hard to imagine that they'll continue with their existing content policy if they need to increase revenue. I like Reddit well enough, but the product really needs some work. I really hope that they don't end up going the way of Twitter and killing off the ecosystem of Reddit apps, which have been by far the best way to use the site for years. The thing about Reddit that I like the most is that different communities build up their own set of rules and are able to uphold those rules pretty well. All social media has a problem with moderation, Reddit included, but I think Reddit's ideas might actually work. It alleviates the site at large from having to do too much action in removing individual posts, and allows them to just ban whole communities when they are a problem. That's not to say that Reddit's moderation solution is perfect. Subreddits get taken control of by malicious actors, it can be difficult to maintain rules within a given community, and of course, all that moderation is being done by volunteers, which makes it feel like a house of cards that could fall at any moment.

Ended up re-watching the anime with the wife so we only just watched the first episode, and I disliked it so much I doubt I'll continue with it. For one, the show looks terrible. It suffers from a bad case of "establishing shot syndrome" common to Sci-Fi TV where the big establishing shots of space ships and what not seem to have eaten the whole budget, leaving the sets (where most of your time is spent), feeling both cheap and disconnected. More than that though, I felt like when the new pilot strays from the original, it does so for the worse. A very small thing that feels emblematic is a tiny interaction at the bar. In the anime, Asimov's "pregnant" wife orders a double bloody mary and sips on a beer. In the adaptation, she orders water, is presented with Tequila, and refuses it. If anything, the interaction in the live action says more about the bartender than the character that actually matters in this episode. In the anime, we get a hint as to her real condition and a nod that maybe she's not trying too hard for appearances sake. Again, that is a terribly small moment, but I note it because it's indicative of the million tiny decisions that add up to a show becoming special in the way the original is. When they're already adapting so many things so directly, when you do decide to deviate, those changes should make the sequence better than what we had before, not just different. In general, I prefer adaptations changing things as they see fit, but that first episode feels like it only changes things for the worse. A more significant change is in the opening, where we see Spike killing a bunch of goons. It's a stark contrast to the anime, where Spike himself doesn't even shoot at anyone until the chase at the end, and definitely doesn't kill a bunch of guys he doesn't actually want to kill. Maybe they're going in a different direction with Spike, but that wasn't really the impression I got from the rest of the episode. Maybe I'm just being too harsh because I love the source material.

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.