TwinIon

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.

This isn't a genre I'm interested in at all, but I do wonder what a game like this needs to do to really set itself apart and find an audience.

It makes sense for Valve to send out dev kits. They're not that expensive, and the difference between a native game and a poorly optimized one can be huge. Even though it is just a PC, I'm sure Valve wants this to be more of a typical handheld console like experience. You're not going to get that without at least some effort from the devs. If you have to tweak settings in every other game you play on this thing, it's going to drive away a lot of customers. You're certainly not going to pick up a lot of the Switch crowd.

While I agree that many of the first applications for many robots will be in the military, the humanoid bots aren't likely to be militarized anytime soon. If you're going to mount a gun, or even just carry equipment, something like Boston Dynamics own BigDog would be more useful. It's a lot of work to build a humanoid bot, and largely you do so to navigate spaces meant for people. Besides, I'd argue the opposite is more true. Boston Dynamics does stuff like this because advanced robotics and AI get quickly associated with things like Terminator or The Matrix, so they need to go out of their way to show their work in a less threatening manner.

I'd say that it's pretty much standard PC hardware, but it is still running non-standard software by default. I doesn't seem like getting a game working on ProtonDB is a big deal, but a lot of devs won't do it. ProtonDB.com says that even their gold rating requires some tweaks, and only their platinum and native rated games run perfectly out of the box. 42% of the steam top 100 will run well out of the box, with 52% running well after tweaks. Please correct me if I'm wrong, but I believe a native Proton game will run better than the same game on the same specs on Windows. So somewhere between 20%-30% of games right now will run better with Steam OS. Nearly half of games will probably run better or will only be playable on Windows, and everything in between will depend on the game. So If we're talking about how games will run on the Steam Deck using Steam OS, I'd argue that the bar for devs to have the game run well is higher than "just another PC configuration." If you're including running the game under Windows, then it's basically just another PC config.

Yeah, the biggest thing that worried me about their write up was their expectation that good performance would require some amount of developer buy-in. Even targeting 800p, I'd expect the Series S to look and run considerably better in nearly every case. If the Series S runs it at 60 fps I'd expect 30 fps for the same game at a similar or slightly lower settings. It's pushing less than half the TFLOPs, using one fifth the power draw, and with the exception of some specific vulkan games, be lacking in almost any of the low level optimizations you get on a console. It is pushing only 50% the resolution (assuming the Series S targets 1080p), but even with that I'd expect a very sub Series S quality performance. If you're interested in a specific game, I'd look at ProtonDB to have some sense of how well it's been optimized. Maybe the existence of the Steam Deck will lead to a significant uptick in Proton compatibility, but I wouldn't hold my breath on that.

Impressed that they fit a full on x86 Zen 2 APU in there. I'll be very interested in how well it runs games at that relatively low resolution. The trackpads are interesting, though I'm dubious as to how much I'd actually want to play any game that relied on them. I'm guessing the resolution was partially a hedge against needing more power and partially a way to increase battery life, but for a premium handheld I'm not excited by the screen at all. As someone that hardly ever uses their switch in handheld mode, this is not a product I'm interested in buying, but there's clearly a big market for people that want to play on the go. Valve doesn't have the best track record for selling their custom PCs or hardware, but I think this has more potential than most.

Also, this post reminds me of an old post that I only recently became aware of: Lizardman's Constant is 4%.

For anyone that enjoys this series, I would suggest you give the spin-off Wellington Paranormal a try. It focuses on the cops investigating paranormal phenomena and is very dry humor. Watched the first episode last night and enjoyed it. It came out in NZ a couple years back, but it's only now airing on TV in the US and I think it's on HBO Max as well.