TwinIon

Yeah, nothing about that new trailer made me excited for this, and I feel like this is a premise that really needs to be sold.

Looks like fun. I don't love the animation style, but I don't hate it. It looks like the action will be good, but I don't like the faces.

The study here doesn't make a judgment either way. I don't know if someone has already studied it, but my guess would be that some meat alternatives are healthier than the real meat would be and some are very likely not. There are huge differences between how all these meat alternatives are made and what they're made of. Of course, what this study says is basically that "healthier" is a difficult thing to quantify and in the aggregate we really don't know right now.

AC has some things that could make it into a decent live service game. They have precedent for a progression in both skills and gear, though if they're going to have multiple locations and possibly time periods, they'll have to find some way to make the progression carry over between them. They have precedent for multiplayer, and I'm sure people would shell out for AC cosmetics. I'm actually pretty excited by the idea of playing a huge assassination mission in co-op. Of course, the kind of AC mission that I'd like to play co-op is maybe not the kind that we'd see more of. It's easy to imagine most of the game being focused on combat, which would turn AC Infinite into more of a live service brawler than an AC game. If they do make more stealth focused missions, it would probably be the kind of thing I'd only want to play with known quantities, since it would be so easy to troll people. I've also been pretty worn down on the AC formula. I never finished Valhalla, mostly out of boredom. I won't write of a live service AC game immediately, but there are a whole lot of ways for it to go wrong or at least kill my personal interest.

There are a few interesting ideas, I think the actors do a reasonable job with what they're given, and the action is exciting enough, but this is a really really really dumb movie. I have no clue why I bothered to type all that out. It's just a big dumb movie. It probably isn't any worse than any number of others. Still, if anyone was hoping this was another Edge of Tomorrow, it's really not.

I have no clue why Dorff's comments even merit an article. I am happy to hear the good word reviews about Black Widow. It looks like it could be a ton of fun, and it might just be the thing that gets me into a theater.

As someone who almost exclusively plays docked, this doesn't interest me in the slightest. I have to give Nintendo credit though. They know their customer base really well. They'll sell a ton of these, many to existing Switch owners, and it probably took them no time at all.

Elon's got you.

I should clarify: I personally don't grill steaks, but I'm not casting dispersion on those that do. I very much believe that heat is heat. The author isn't wrong that grills are less predictable, harder to control, and otherwise more difficult sources of heat than a pan or oven. That doesn't mean that any grilled steak is garbage, it just means that it's harder to get the exact result you're looking for. If I've paid a lot for a steak, and especially if it's really thick, I personally have a very hard time getting it the right temp throughout on a grill, and unless you're doing something else (indirect heat, etc.) I think most people would as well. If you have a thinner piece of meat, or something like a burger that you want medium to med-well, and don't mind a slight gradient, there's nothing wrong with a grill. Also, when it comes to smoking, that's a whole different ball game, and I don't think that most of the issues that apply to typical grilling apply.

I'm a big fan of sous vide, but it is important to understand that the results do differ slightly from what most are used to, and the timing makes a huge difference. While it is true you can't really overcook things in sous vide, because the temperature of the meat will never go above what you've set it for, keeping meet at a high temp does break down the proteins over time. So a steak in sous vide for 1 hour will be very different from one in a 4 hour bath, assuming equal thickness. I really like it for steak in particular. I get a nice thick piece of meat, and in the end it's perfectly to temp all the way through. Finish it in a very hot pan with some butter and aromatics, and you're good to go. Chicken works pretty well, but I don't often bother with it because it does take a while and I just don't care enough for chicken. I've not loved the texture I get from Salmon, but other fish has turned out pretty well. I think I need to reduce the time and try it again. As far as grilling is concerned, the author isn't wrong, but for a lot of grilled foods, it doesn't matter. I wouldn't grill a steak, but most burgers are perfectly fine.

An off duty middle school resource officer in street clothes saw a few teenagers driving too fast and decided to follow them in his personal pickup truck. When the teens got to the parking lot of Wicked Good Pizza, the officer got out of his truck and approached the kids with his gun drawn. When the kids didn't immediately get out of their car for this random crazy guy with a gun, he began to fire at them, striking the driver in the arm. Thankfully that was the only injury. Amazingly, the officer has now been charged with four felony counts.

If GTA really is 4 years off, I think it could easily beat ES6 to launch. Starfield might launch next year, and I would put the gap between Starfield and ES6 at something close to 4 years. So I wouldn't be surprised if GTA6 arrives a year earlier than ES6.

Not a shock considering they've been working on Starfield. I just really want these new Bethesda games to feel like a real leap from the previous games. As long as they are really a new generation of WRPG, they can take as much time as they want. If ES6 comes out and it's Skyrim but with ray tracing in a new map, I'll be really disappointed.

That's a really difficult market to define to a court though. You might not count iMessage, but Facebook's lawyers could probably successfully argue otherwise, same with SMS. Plus, tons of apps have messaging features built into them, from Twitter to Venmo to Google Photos. Speaking of Google, they're constantly launching messaging products. Then you have all the messaging platforms that Facebook is failing to compete against, like Slack and Teams. Yeah, you might think they're a clearly different market, but if you're talking about messages sent over the internet, it's not a stretch for Facebook to tell a court, "look at these innovative new products with millions of users that send messages over the internet that are demolishing our competing products." So from a court's perspective, they have to be convinced not only that some very specific subset of messaging constitutes a definable market, but also that Facebook lacks competition in that market, that they stifle innovation, and that their monopoly status inflicts consumer harm. Given the number of apps that are constantly coming out that in some way include messaging features, I think there's a good argument to be made that innovation in the space continues. And again, when it comes to consumer welfare, the current standard is that the consumer is harmed when prices go up. Given that Facebook's purchase of WhatsApp only made it free, and both Facebook and many of it's competitors are free, there's no consumer harm here. Now, if you could change that standard, then maybe there'd be a real case here, but under the current situation, I just don't see a court ruling against Facebook.

I think there's a good case to be made that making a super faithful adaptation of Foundation would make for a worse series than one that uses it more as a starting point.

Don't get me wrong, I support breaking Facebook up, I just didn't think the FTC could prove a monopoly here, especially given current antitrust standards. When it comes to Facebook, what do they have a monopoly in? Social networking? They can point to Twitter, Snapchat, YouTube, Reddit, Tik Tok, Pintersest, Linked In, and all the sites like WeChat that don't get as much play in the States. Then you get into messaging, where they clearly don't have a monopoly with competitors like iMessage, Telegram, and SMS/RCS. Then you have even more dubiously defined competitors when you get into things like Fortnite as a social space or email as internet communication. All this is why the FTC didn't really even define a market or Facebook's share of it. Then you have the question of where they actually make their money, which is internet advertising, in which they're a dominant player, but not even the dominant player, and they have two trillion dollar plus companies (Amazon and Apple) coming for them. Additionally, Facebook would argue that internet advertising itself is only a subset of the larger advertising space, where they're really far from being a monopolist. Which is all almost beside the point when the consumer welfare standard is still in place and you can't prove consumer harm because everything is free.

That article sure makes it sound like the FTC complaint was poorly written. That alone is pretty bad. I don't really think there was much for this FTC complaint to actually do. They weren't going to actually break Facebook up. The biggest lesson from Facebook is just to prevent the big mergers and acquisitions in general. A world where Facebook competes with Instagram is better than one where they own it.

It's a good article, and why I would rather see games that go for a pixel look just go for a high def image rather than try to re-create the CRT experience. CRTs just had a different look, and while it does seem like some of those CRT filters are doing a decent job, it's still not the same.

I think it's fine to make a clean-ish start and require newer hardware for new software, but I really wonder if the current CPU requirements will stand or if MS will continue certifying older CPUs for Win 11. If they hold firm on 8th gen and up, there must be a specific feature on newer CPUs they rely on. My desktop is fine, but my laptop (2017 XPS 15) has an Intel Core i7-7700HQ that is apparently one generation too old for Windows 11. It's a few years old now, but it was one of the fastest mobile chips you could get at the time, and according to Notebook Check it holds up pretty well against newer chips like the Intel Core i5-10200H, which makes sense given that despite being 1300 days newer, that 10th gen i5 uses the same 14nm process, has the same number of cores and threads, and runs at similar clock speeds. My expectation is that the current CPU list is very preliminary, and we'll see a much larger list of supported chips in the near future. Preview builds of W11 apparently don't enforce many hardware requirements, so MS will soon be collecting plenty of data on how it runs on older machines.

I understand Biden's desire to bring the GOP on board and get a bipartisan bill done. It's what he ran on, and I think it's important to him that he make every effort to cross the aisle. I really don't like that the compromise bill seems to jettison two of the things that I think would be the most lasting day-to-day impacts of the original plan: electric car charging and internet infrastructure. I'm in favor of rail and transit, but right now charging stations are probably the single biggest issue with electric cars, and a massive investment into that infrastructure could dramatically change how quickly the US electrifies. It could possibly be the single most visible and impactful large scale infrastructure project since the highway system. The internet stuff is less visible, but it might be even more crucial. The GOP has surrendered to lobbyists, and the Democrats haven't been fighting nearly hard enough on this issue, but I think the impacts will be long term if we don't get our infrastructure improved. As an anecdote, my brother just moved to TN and only a 30 min drive outside a major city he can't get any wired internet service. It's insane. I really hope that the big plans Biden had on these issues either find their way back into this bill (with or without the GOP) or into any other bill that he'll pass under reconciliation.

I definitely read that as two and a half years and was unhappy with that result.

I'm not optimistic about this holding up, but I'm glad they're trying at least.

When MS says that Direct Storage uses the "Standard NVM Express Controller" driver, I wonder if that means my RAID will need to go.

It will take games that have not been updated to include native HDR support and allow them to be played in HDR, just like on the Xbox. The resulting HDR effect isn't quite as good as a native implementation, but you do end up with a higher dynamic range than without it. I've heard pretty good things about it on the Series X, but never seen it for myself.