TwinIon

ArsTechnica preferred the new control scheme: The problem from that reviewer with the new controls is that with the sword mapped to the right stick, you have to hold L to free-rotate the camera.

I don't ever believe that more than a very small portion of people actually think seceding is a real or plausible idea. As mentioned in that followup tweet, it's got to be almost all signaling. On the other hand, I think changing States up a bit could work out just fine. Breaking some up, combining others. I don't expect that to happen either, but it seems at least remotely plausible. I also think it would be a good thing for us to re-consider some of the "foundations" of this country. It's one of the reasons I'm rooting for D.C./PR statehood. Maybe some of the lines drawn 150 years ago don't make as much sense anymore. Maybe we can increase the size of the House again. Maybe the structure of the Senate could be re-examined. Then again, it's probably foolish of me to expect that any real changes would be for the better. The Democrats would probably try and compromise and accomplish nothing while the GOP creates the states of middle Dakota and Western Wyoming and Newer New Mexico to ensure a Senate majority.

Well, they are good at actually streaming stuff. If they treat it like they did streaming back in the day, basically giving it away for free until it matures, I can see it gaining some traction. If that's the case, I would guess they have very few, if any exclusive games to start. One big question is if they'd put games into their main app, or if they'd spin it off into it's own thing. If they're going to try and gradually grow the service and capture players just checking out this thing they're getting for "free," it makes the most sense to put it on their primary app, but that might risk the wrath of Apple in particular. I suppose we could see the Android app include games but iOS forces you to a web page. I'm still bullish on streaming as being a significant part of the future of games, and I think Netflix has as good a shot as anyone to capture some of that market if they play it slow. The more I think about it, the more sense it makes. In their earnings reports, Netflix calls out games and Fortnite in particular as being some of their biggest competitors for entertainment time. If they can capture some of that back by streaming some of those games, they can capture more of that time back.

With 52 Reviews in, Space Jam is currently sitting at 40% on RT.

I'm glad they give you the option to play without motion controls, but even though I never finished Skyward Sword, I'm not really tempted to spend $60 on this version.

As a side note, last night I finally finished Death's End, the third book in the Three Body Problem trilogy, and the ideas explored in that the series has some real parallels here. Some general spoilers for the second book:

I feel like this show pretty significantly changed the status quo. Unless I'm mistaken, prior to this show there was basically a single universe, but now all the other timelines and universes are allowed to exist, and likely to interact with each other. I don't know if Multiverse of Madness will rely on anything established in Loki, but it seems plausible. I agree with you on the time spent with Mobius and Renslayer and the TVA in general. It's super unclear what exactly happened and if they were wiped, if a bunch of TVAs now exist, or what. I don't need all the secrets explained, but I do want an emotionally satisfying moment if not an actual ending or explanation.

Microsoft has offered Azure Virtual Desktop for a while now, and Citrix (among many others) has offered something very similar. I wouldn't expect the pricing to be too different from the solutions that exist now. It seems like this is mostly a re-branding along with a few new features. Hopefully it will be easier to manage. I have access to virtual machines hosted locally and on my company servers, so I can attest to the value in having another virtual PC at your disposal. For me, sometimes there's just another task that I need running that I don't want to disturb, sometimes it's resource intensive and I don't want to slow down my primary machine, and sometimes I need a system that is outside of my network to test or verify things on. It's hard to imagine the pricing being such that I'd be interested in moving my company users over in any large numbers. If we really wanted to do that, we could have invested in the server hardware and done so long ago.

This feels a bit like nominating Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti as ambassador to India or Rahm Emanuel as ambassador to Japan. A quick look through the list of Biden ambassadors seems like it's mostly career diplomats for smaller countries and politicians of one sort or another for bigger countries. I'm glad he's not just naming donors everywhere (through there are still plenty of vacancies for that to still happen, but it doesn't seem like a lot of the guys nominated to be ambassadors of these prominent countries have any real expertise with them.

The breakable weapons and the random rain preventing climbing in BOTW. A few of the extended flood levels in Halo CE Basically the entire story of all the MGS games.

Executive orders can only do so much, and I think it makes sense for Biden to use a EO to pass this kind of thing off to the agencies in charge. What I'm less clear on is why Right to Repair legislation isn't just going through congress. It's a bi-partisan issue that has very few detractors and does have proponents of all ages and backgrounds. I was listening to an interview with the CTO of John Deere and his objections to RTR is so weak and obviously not the reason they actually want to prevent it. He basically argues that there are things that they don't want people messing with because they could interfere with safety or something regulated like emissions. At the same time he's quick to admit that people could make those kinds of physical modifications to old tractors. Their liability hasn't changed, only their ability to profit has. His only argument is that software is harder and less obvious than hardware, but that feels pretty weak to me. I feel like if this was a court case, we'd hear from John Deere more or less what we heard from Apple during the Epic trial. Apple's bottom line argument is that they feel that by creating the phone and the OS they're owed a piece of any transaction that happens on the device. I imagine John Deere feels basically the same. By having created the machinery they feel they're owed a cut of any profitable maintenance done, and everything else is just justification for getting that cut. I'm slightly more sympathetic to the idea of preventing RTR in the case of truly autonomous vehicles, but I think that default should be that if you own a thing, you should be able to do whatever you want with it. If the government finds a case, like autonomous vehicles, where there is a compelling public interest in limiting the right to repair, they can make that carve out.

There's nowhere good to start with that card, but one thing that always gets me is that the claim to have proof of some insane conspiracy just waiting to be revealed. This was a common part of all the Q nonsense for years, and I can kind of imagine how it might have tracked during the 2016 election. "The bad guys are in charge, and if you elect this truth teller then all the secrets of the evil cabal will be revealed and the forces of good will strike a lasting victory!" Then you had four years of the Trump administration and still no grand revelation. If it was as easy as "pulling back the curtain" why in the world didn't you do it while in power? Why suffer the loss of an election without pulling out that silver bullet? I realize this is basically that doomsday cult mentality of "we must have misread the tea leaves, the real doomsday is actually next Tuesday, I swear!" Still, it always gets to me.

I hope the protests go well for them. When blackouts and food shortages spur these kinds of protests in a country not prone to them, I have to imagine things are bad. If the US were to do anything, it seems like helping out with food in some way would be a good place to start. I don't really know what the current state of the embargo is with Cuba, and Wikipedia is uncharacteristically unhelpful on the subject. I know Obama gradually eased a bunch of restrictions and Trump re-imposed a bunch of them, but it's not clear where we stand at the moment.

Yeah, this was very unimpressive and not a great live stream either. As far as the "space" travel is concerned, it still seems like this whole venture is a very complicated way to not get very high up. If it could launch something much bigger much higher, it would be interesting, but that doesn't seem to be the case. I didn't even realize until I looked it up just now that the commercial spin-off Virgin Orbit doesn't even use the White Knight aircraft, it just puts a rocket on top of a 747 and only has a payload capacity of 300kg. So you have a flight that didn't do much more than the test flight did a decade ago, and doesn't seem to hold any promise for something bigger than super rich tourist trips. In terms of a customer experience, I don't think this is even much better than a $7,500 Zero G flight. The Zero G planes keep you weightless longer, though it is split up into chunks, and you have a much larger cargo area to float around. That extra $242.5k gets you bragging rights and an (admittedly amazing) view. The stream itself was super cringeworthy. I like Colbert, but having weird segments scattered throughout the stream felt out of place. The whole thing was (as I should have expected) basically a big congratulatory self pat on the back to Branson and a commercial to all the idiots who will be buying seats.

After Florida's social media bill was quickly deemed unconstitutional, Texas has decided to get in on the action with their own preposterous bill. As TechDirt notes, the bill includes an insane definition of censorship that conforms to how conservative twitter uses the term more than it does any sort of actual definition: I don't think I've ever seen a more unworkable definition. So you've now made all basic moderation illegal, but insisting that denying equal visibility is discrimination basically breaks the internet again. Should Google or Twitter just randomize the results of all searches? How in the world would TikTok operate if their algorithm now has to treat everyone equally? If I decided to post a message, would Facebook be forced to give me equal visibility to everyone else? As far as I can tell, there's no Texas equivalent to Florida's "theme park exemption," but other than that Texas is sure trying it's best to emulate the State no one should be emulating.

I know Fisker is basically a whole new company with lots of money behind it, but if the combination of Foxconn and Wisconsin wasn't already enough of a reason to avoid making any kind of deal, adding Fisker in sure doesn't help.

I don't know if we need to abolish credit scores, but they should probably only be used for credit, and even then they still need far more oversight and regulation. Everything from data privacy to transparency to the dispute process needs to be addressed. The fact that Wells Fargo can end your line of credit for any reason and have it negatively affect your credit is an obvious failure of the system to do what it was designed to do.

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.