TwinIon

Exposing actual owners of companies? Auditing people who make more than $400K? Earning $700B by spending $80B? Yeah, those all seem like pretty excellent ideas. Add in free and automatic tax filing and you'd scratch off most of my IRS wishlist.

The MS store needs a serious overhaul, and I wouldn't buy anything on that store until they do. Especially with Gamepass I've had so many issues installing and launching games that in at least one case I bought the game on Steam to get out of the MS store hell. Good on them for reducing their cut, but it's not something that would make me use the store again.

Automata has been one of those games that I've never gotten around to. It was one of the first games I installed on my PC last time I upgraded 18 months ago, and I even found all the mods and what not before getting started, but somehow I forgot about it and played other things. With Replicant coming out, I decided I'd give that a shot first, so this game has been my first interaction with any of the Nier games. I read and watched some reviews, so I didn't go in blind, and I have been willing to put up with a lot that I wouldn't normally, somehow feeling a certain sense of sunk cost to a series that I've never played. Overall, I'd say Replicant is a poor game with some interesting ideas that lack the game to back them up. It's an interesting, if frustrating exercise in storytelling, but more than anything it's about 8-10 hours of game stretched out to 30+. As someone that never really gets deep into combat systems, I actually like what I found in Replicant. It's simple, but responsive, and thankfully pretty fast paced. Unfortunately, the enemy variety and overall difficulty is really lacking, which is especially notable after you've powered up a decent weapon. Also disappointing is how your companions work in and out of combat. Per the story and in cutscenes they should be quite capable, but they hardly seem to make any real difference in combat. I guess you can give them orders, but I never saw the point. There are all sorts of questionable choices made that seem to be that way only to pad the length. Fetch quests are everywhere, and it's never clear if they'll be worthwhile. Thankfully, nearly all side quests can be ignored completely, even if you want to see all the endings. In the story missions themselves, there is a whole lot of running back and forth between the same locations. In one particularly egregious case one of your companions mention it, so clearly the developers were aware of the monotony, but just didn't care or have any better ideas. Simple things like being able to save anywhere or fast travel are effectively absent. (There is technically fast travel, but it's only sporadically available in the second half of the game and it doesn't save you much time anyways.) Even the towns feel like they were designed specifically to take longer to traverse. I enjoyed having multiple weapon types available after a certain point, but the upgrade system is terrible. For many weapons there will be one or two materials you need to upgrade that only exist in one place in the entire game, so the only way to get them is to load an area, search for it, and then leave and re-load. Finding enough material to upgrade one weapon might take 30min to an hour of reloading an entirely empty area or town. I grinded out the mats for two upgrades and was done with the system forever. Turns out it didn't matter anyways, because even though the game encourages multiple playthroughs, it doesn't become any more difficult or interesting to play. So if you max out a good weapon in your first go, all combat becomes trivial. Speaking of the multiple playthroughs (vague descriptions of the mechanics, but no specific story spoilers follow) I honestly can't explain why I felt compelled to spend as much time as I did with Replicant. I guess I was just curious as to why I was seeing so much hype. I am interested in moving on and finally playing Automata, but I think I'll wait for the steam upgrade.

That's a bummer. We only have two Mac users in our office and both had been running their old iMacs as target displays. It's one reason I don't like all-in-one desktops, but at least target display mode increased their useful life for a while. I imagine that Apple wants their displays to be a differentiator, because otherwise I wouldn't be able to understand why they don't sell monitors. I'd generally recommend the Mini over the iMac, but there's no way to get a similar quality display for a decent price. Hell, the 5K LG display sold by Apple is the exact same price as the new 24" iMac. Apple is all about going green, and while they should be applauded for all their efforts, I hope at some point those efforts lead them to make different design decisions. My broken iPad Pro I mentioned earlier can't be fixed, the only option is to trade it in. I guess they recycle or refurbish what they can, but repair-ability, even if only possible by Apple themselves, would likely keep a bunch of stuff out of landfills.

I remember thinking Dexter Season 1 was amazing and gradually felt it decline as it went along. I was considering revisiting the early seasons just to see if they still hold up. I'm open to the idea that Dexter could be good again, but at this point I won't expect it to be.

I recently broke the screen on my 11" iPad Pro and I was waiting to see the new iPads before replacing it. A week later and I'm still undecided. I really want to integrate my iPad more completely into my photography workflow. It's great at family events to pull full RAWs from my DSLR, open them up in lightroom, do a few quick adjustments, and distribute a group photo then and there. The problem is right now I basically end up re-importing all those photos into Lightroom Classic and re-editing them. For a few quick pics at a party, it's no big deal, but I'd really like to be able to take a short trip with only my iPad for editing and then import those edits directly into lightroom when I get back. If I was only using Lightroom CC, always had a fast data connection, and paid Adobe for a ton of creative cloud space, I think their expected workflow might work, but I don't really want to move to CC from Classic, don't always have a fast connection or want to transfer 100GB+ wirelessly, and I don't want to pay even more for adobe cloud storage. I don't think we'll see it, but I'd love to be able to run the full Mac Lightroom app on an M1 iPad. When they announced they had the M1 in them I was briefly excited that some sort of fusion of MacOS was coming, or even the ability to run Mac OS natively. After reading this interview and listening to Apple's comments since, I'm pretty convinced that's not happening anytime soon. Reading that interview I get the impression that the Apple answer to "I want to do more Pro things with my iPad Pro" is "we'll provide the hardware and hope that the software catches up eventually." Especially when the vast majority of iPads sold won't have an M1, it seems kind crazy for Adobe or anyone else to build apps for a small selection of iPads.

I'm not a huge fan of the new iMacs, and from my perspective they made some questionable trade-offs. A lack of ports is a common issue with Apple, but going down to two USB 4/TB ports on the base model is a bummer. A lot of basic desktop accessories are still using USB A, and losing those ports is a bummer. As someone that typically uses the 3.5mm jack for speakers, having it on the side would annoy me. I do think they mostly look good, but I'd much rather they be a bit thicker and lose the bezels. Apple obviously disagrees, but I think they'd still be striking computers at double the thickness but just being pure screen. Of course, these computers are not meant for me.

In terms of the awards I have few complaints. The only real surprises to me were the two big acting categories. I think McDormand totally earned another win, though the top three were pretty close for me. For best actor it would have been great to see Boseman win, but I'd have picked Hopkins, Yeun, or Ahmed before Boseman. As for the show, I felt like it was more boring than usual. I can't say that they should bring back everything they got rid of, but I think the extra long speeches along with little relief made the show feel particularly long.

I don't always like rougelikes, and I think the fact that there is some permanent progression will be a saving grace for me. It means that each run will be meaningful in the scope of the game and that I'm not always starting from scratch. Also, I'm not one of those people that feel like they need 100 hours from a game for it to be worth my money. Excited to have another good new game to use my PS5 for. I tried so hard to get the freakin thing.

Personally, it's the ascetics that don't work for me. Hard to criticize the reality of the MCU at this point.

In the end I didn’t end up thinking much of this. It was all made up to Marvel standards, but the themes and character arcs were all under baked, and the implications to the MCU feel minor at best. Also, the suit is just bad, especially the headgear.

Unless it turns out to be really short or these early impressions drastically differ from the final reviews, I’ll pay the $70 for it.

If we're staying away from CG. Your Name would top my list. The Tale of the Princess Kaguya, Grave of the Fireflies, The Wind Rises, and 5 Centimeters per Second all might make the list. Evangelion would probably be my pick for a TV show.

As someone that doesn't watch the sport at all, this is both a bummer and seemingly inevitable. I've always liked the relative meritocracy of European football. To force an incomplete analogy, I kinda love the idea that Alabama would join the NFL and relegate the Browns back to school. I also think that having multiple leagues going, even if it's mostly the same teams that make money in each league, is preferable to the insular monopoly that exists throughout American Pro sports. Losing the biggest players from that system would be a blow I'm sure I can't fully appreciate. The fact that a team like Leicester can win the Premier league and get to play in the Champions league is pretty nifty. On the other hand, it does feel inevitable. The American model of pro sports is essentially a game you can't lose. Take a big business and tell them that if they sign a new deal they're guaranteed to remain hugely profitable even if their product sucks, and I can't see why they wouldn't take that deal. Especially in a business like sports where you're relying on a very small number of young men as your "product," and the competition has made buying the best players exceedingly expensive. I wouldn't be shocked if this brings that player market way down, further increasing the profit to be made. I know the interplay between leagues throughout Europe is complex. It'll be interesting to see how this all sorts out. I'll get back to watching my favorite sport that is in no way corrupted by the influence of money, F1.

As @GeneticBlueprint pointed out,~$250M is for the rights, so immediately we're down from the astronomic to the merely excessive. That leaves them at ~$215M. As @sblfilms mentioned, a good chunk of this is building up physical and virtual assets for VFX (think building Hobbiton and the cosutmes for the films), not to mention all the design work that goes into that. Now I also imagine that they spent at least some time in the writing room mapping out seasons 1-5, even if they're far from finished. I wouldn't be shocked if all that up front work came out to something like ~$100M. That would put the actual filming cost back towards the same $100M+ range as other very expensive shows like Game of Thrones, just with the massive up front costs associated with getting a multi-season production going and securing the rights to one of the best known properties on earth. Also, it seems that they might get as much as $100M back in tax breaks from the Kiwis, which really softens the blow. Additionally, the rights they paid are pretty far reaching, and while their planned LOTR MMO was canned, you can bet that this TV show won't be the end of their LOTR content.

Apple confirms it will allow Parler to return to App Store Seems like the GOP members of congress finally complained loud enough that Apple will relent. I haven't been following Parler much, but I'm curious how many other services they still lack.

Looks good. Marvel continues their streak of excellent casting. I have very "MCU solo movie" expectations of this.

Wow. That's exciting and quite a bit of a surprise. I can only hope for the best. You have to admit, a starship on the moon would be a pretty amazing sight. The scale of it alone will be incredible. The video NASA released mentioned that the proposal includes "in space propellant transfer demonstration." I wonder if that means they plan to launch it, refuel in space, and then go to the moon?

I couldn't quickly find any trustworthy estimates for Steam's total revenue, but I imagine it's a big enough number that spending a few hundred mil a year would be worthwhile if you could capture a good chunk of it. Especially if you happen to have a cash cow product and a ton of foreign investment.

I think this is still mostly just a PR campaign. In the end it really just matters how you define the market and if you can sufficiently differentiate iOS from other digital marketplaces like Xbox/Playstation/etc. If you can define the market as "iPhone app stores" and not "digital marketplaces," and you can sufficiently make the general computing environment case, it's easy enough to make a clear anti-trust argument. If you can't, something like keeping iMessage to yourself is just good business. You have a feature that people really like and will keep them buying your products, and putting that feature on competing devices might hurt your market share? Well shucks, what's a good profit seeking business to do? Honestly, something I'd find far more damning is if they can dig something up about Apple's stance on RCS. If Apple plans to avoid implementing a new messaging standard that would be an indisputable customer good because they're worried it might lessen iMessage as a lock in mechanism, that would be anti-competitive, though largely unrelated to Epic's point.

The President should be appointing someone to the court every two years. Implement term limits so the rotation works out. Put in some provisions to appoint temp justices if someone leaves office early. That way every Presidential election has a very consistent effect on the court, and we change justices much more often than we do now.

Also interesting is that they will "go to somewhere like an HBO Max after it’s in theaters." (emphasis mine) So they're not even willing to commit fully to their own streaming platform, even after all this investment, they still might end up selling off some film rights to Netflix. It'll be interesting to see how the theatrical window changes over the next year. Will we see a short theatrical only period followed by the increasingly common $30 VOD rentals, followed by standard VOD/subscription availability? Will those $30 rentals become a pandemic relic once theaters are all back to full occupancy? Will the long sought shorter transition to streaming actually happen, or will things revert to the norm. I feel like I could make a case for any of those outcomes, but I'm not sure we'll even see much experimentation.

I'd have to think about it a bit, but off the top of my head: TDK Batman Begins The Avengers X2 Spider-man 2 If you have a broader definition and include non-Comicbook films The Incredibles is right towards the top. The Matrix would be as well if you consider it in the same category.

Caught up with this recently and I'm finding it enjoyable. It's an odd combination of ingredients, but I think it mostly works pretty well. They really spent a ton on the voice cast, is this a big property that they had good reason to expect to be popular? I'd never heard of it until I started getting twitter ads for basically nothing else.

Continues to look like a lot of fun. Probably my most anticipated of the Disney+ MCU shows.