TwinIon

Very impressive sales for Playstation. I haven't used mine a ton, even after it was so hard to get one, but I know there will be plenty of games that I can only play on it. Sony's first party strategy seems to be working quite well.

It's Impressive that it's running on a Series X, otherwise it seems like a lesser version of Epic's demos. I remain impressed by the UE5 demos. Can't wait to see what actual games look like.

To be clear, India Walton (the presumptive new Mayor) hasn't won yet. She won the Democratic mayoral primary running against someone who has been in office for 16 years, but is unlikely to face much competition. Also, while being a Bernie style democratic socialist certainly isn't popular, there is something else that might make some in buffalo nervous: I feel like this is key: So yeah, they probably won't be able to keep her out of office.

I'm no expert in Tunisian parliamentary procedures, but I think most parliaments have some way to be dissolved that doesn't involve the army forcing everyone including the media out.

Tampa Sheriff's Office is now sending "acceptance letters" to those enrolled in their pre-crime initiative. Last year the Tampa Bay Times found out that the Sheriff's Office creates a list of people they consider likely to break the law based on "criminal histories, social networks and other unspecified intelligence." The agency then sends deputies to their homes "at all hours of the day and night, writing tickets for violations like overgrown grass and making arrests for any reason they could find." As of last year, they'd arrested 1000 people on this program, ~10% of them being 18 or younger. Four targets and relatives of targets are now suing the office in federal court. Hopefully this incredibly dystopian program will get shut down.

My understanding is that NASA asked for a bunch of money and time to have multiple companies build landing systems. Congress gave them a fraction of that money and cut the timeline dramatically, so they went with SpaceX because they were the cheapest and they had the only proven human-flight capable tech. If Bezos wants to spend $2B to stay in the running, that's fine with me. NASA shouldn't just give Blue Origin (and their "national team" of defense contractors) the contract, but if he can prove a more capable craft in the right timeframe without spending any taxpayer money, go for it. Unlike everything else Blue Origin has done, this would at least be impressive.

Didn't watch the video, but this Forbes article says that the workers are part of the Parks department that are not specific to Disneyland, including ShopDisney merchandise, publishing and Disney Cruise Line and Walt Disney Imagineering. I have the feeling that if you're working for a merchandise store or in publishing, there might be other jobs in CA you could find. However, it wouldn't surprise me if some jobs are so theme park specific that there really aren't many other similar job opportunities out there. It seems like Disney could find a place for these people in CA if they wanted to. It's not like the area around Disneyland is the only property they own, or that they couldn't expand if they really needed the space. Hell, the recent Fox purchase must have made some decent square footage available. Still, I guess when you have unlimited land and effectively run your own country in Florida, there's no reason to invest more in CA, and when you're Disney, there are a lot of people that will uproot everything to work for you.

It looks like the CG cut-scene from an old game.

Makes sense they'd green light a second season. As we've seen with the numbers from the LOTR show, so much of the costs are up-front one time expenses. Licensing and Initial production (CG, costumes, sets, etc.) can be a huge costs that are quickly justified by more seasons. I wouldn't think that you'd pick up a series like Wheel of Time if you really thought you'd only get one season out of it. I wonder if they were waiting to hear a date for Witcher season 2 before announcing a date for this. I don't have a great sense of how much streaming services consider stuff like that, even for big releases.

Another batch of GPUs I wouldn't have been able to buy.

I remember this guy because of the Butterfly sanctuary. What a dope. It's hard to believe that so much time money and effort has been spent debating, planning, and building portions of this stupid border wall that was pretty much just the deranged ramblings of one colossal idiot that people took seriously.

Portal sounds pretty awesome. I can easily imagine spending more time in custom portal games than regular matches. Makes me think of all the time I spent playing custom maps in Starcraft.

Yikes, that's pretty horrific stuff. I'd like to think that a lawsuit like this will clean things up, but when the culture is so rotten as to allow these things to happen, it's hard to imagine what would actually change things.

Will be interesting to see if those plans hold up after they spin off from AT&T and finish the merger. Kilar has been the biggest proponent of doing everything possible to prop up HBO Max, but he won't be in charge of Warner Bros Discovery. If the box office does indeed bounce back, it'll be harder and harder to justify making exclusives for streaming and forgoing box office revenue, especially without AT&T to pay for it all.

A Pokemon Switch MOBA seems like a potentially interesting game, but P2W gameplay boosting items seems like a huge mistake. I won't even touch this unless that goes away.

I really hope the Dems don't let this become a real fight when they have the tools to get rid of it. It's just not a useful roadblock. Nothing good can come from holding it up, so why even let it be a point of leverage?

That's a pretty scary case. I'm slightly curious if they were looking specifically for this guy, or if they were looking more broadly, perhaps looking for any grindr users that frequented catholic churches. It feels like this is one area where legislation is needed. I'm not sure if it should be entirely illegal to sell any kind of user data, but any data that is "anonymized" in aggregate should be stripped of unique identifiers. If you buy a mass of data, you shouldn't be able to single out a single user and follow their usage and location information. The NYT did a great story on this a while back.

I haven't. I kinda forgot about it, but I might give it a go.

Reading that made me feel bad for the devs. Just wanting a few days of sales not impacted by piracy is so little to ask for, and it's a shame that is such a difficult decision to get the game working the way the want it, but likely have to suffer fewer sales. I am looking forward to trying this. I can easily see sinking a hundred hours into this. More if it really captures me.

Yes please.

I find it particularly funny that they're removing the requirement of MLK Jr.'s "I Have a Dream" speech, given how much they love to quote the "content of my character" line. Maybe someone actually did read it and realize he wouldn't have been on their side. Also, between cutting MLK and the requirement to say the KKK is bad, it makes this a lot more transparently racist than I'd expect it to be. I feel like much of the CRT debate, while never done in good faith, at least pretended it was about equality (hence the constant quoting of MLK). I feel like you could have gotten away with cutting Cesar Chavez, Native American history, women's suffrage, an most mentions of any people of color, and at least feigned some plausible deniability about the overt racism of the bill.

Makes sense to go after mobile games first. Assuming their goal is to occupy more entertainment time, mobile games likely represent the best return on investment, have the lowest barrier to entry, and the shortest development time. It also means they don't need to get game streaming working for the time being. If they're developing their own games, it also means expanding their existing IP. I do still think that if they get into streaming bigger games, they're more likely to license existing games (like Witcher 3) than build their own, but mobile is a whole different ballgame that absolutely makes more sense for them to start with.

The Closed Beta begins today (progress will not carry over to release). I'll be interested to hear what the game is like now.

I'm kinda surprised it hasn't happened at this point. SpaceX has previously announced plans to send tourists into orbit, and even send some around the moon. The moon flight is presumably waiting on Starship at this point. While watching the Everyday Astronaut stream this morning, he got a bunch of questions as to how easy it would be for SpaceX to do exactly what Blue Origin is doing, and his estimate is that it's just not nearly as profitable to do tourism as it is to do cargo and ISS missions. I think that's probably true, but it still seems like Elon himself would have taken a victory flight just for the hell of it. Maybe he'll do it once Starship can get to the moon.

This time I watched the Everyday Astronaut stream rather than the official one. Much better. Given that this was still a suborbital flight, I can’t say it was terribly exciting, but at least this time we got a rocket booster landing. Even if it didn’t go as high or carry as much as a Falcon 9, it’s still cool to see it land.