TwinIon

It was certainly the biggest and dumbest thing I've seen in a long while. It could very well be the poster child for "movie logic." There are a million things that make no sense, but are that way because the movie needs them to be. Thankfully there was plenty of giant monster fighting to make it enjoyable.

Awesome. With that much cash, I imagine that Johnson will be able to assemble some equally formidable casts for the sequels.

The CA HSR obviously faces all the normal issues surrounding large projects in the US (NIMBYism, land rights, environmental review, general bloat, etc.), but it also suffered from a huge amount of fatalism from the get go. If you knew that the project would be completed, and you just set out to build the best commuter HSR you could afford for CA, you would not do it the way CA did. All sorts of compromises in the route, the track and train type, and the station locations were selected on the idea that if the project weren't completed at least the rail lines could be used for the cargo trains that already run up and down the state (and the country). I'd source this claim, but I'm feeling pretty lazy right now and I should be working. As a San Diego resident, I'd love to take a European style train to San Fran or Vegas and I'll vote for any infrastructure improvements including HSR, but I'm not hopeful about the existing plans. Of course, I'd love to see better transit options within CA cities as well. San Diego is finally moving in that direction, but LA really needs to do better. As someone who's taken the train to LA hundreds of times, you really are reliant on cars of some type to get where you want to be.

I read that whole thing expecting a definition of what a real American is or what they should be fighting for. Apparently the "Constitution no longer works" and American democracy can only work when everyone "gets it," but they're not exactly describing what there is to "get" other than some vague notion of natural rights. I suppose if I were to try and create some clarity from this mess of an essay it's that "true" conservatives are the only real Americans, that they're a minority who the government doesn't sufficiently represent, and that the only solution is to disolve the United States through a (likely violent) revolution.

I'm dubious they've found a worthwhile story to tell, but I'd be lying if I said I wasn't going to watch it ASAP.

I'll be interested to hear what people think of 1.2. Maybe I'll give the game a real shot.

Sure seemed like the prosecutor had the bailiff send someone over before she brought it up in front of the abuser. The bailiff knew the officer's name, and the prosecutor said it wasn't hearsay, but didn't want to reveal why until the cops were with the victim. It's always funny in these zoom court cases how it seems like some people just don't take court very seriously when it's online. Like that surgeon who took a call while in surgery. I don't have much personal experience with the court system, but I feel like judges are not people to take kindly to disrespect.

So, according to that reporter the F-35 was portrayed as the solution to every problem. That is obviously not the case, and we're now looking to buy new planes whose roles were to be filled by the 35. If I bought a miracle cure all that turned out to be an effective anti-histamine, I'd call that cure-all a failure. We spent a trillion dollars on a plane that was supposed to be great at everything. Just because it's not useless doesn't preclude it from being a failure.

After watching this, I'm surprised at the number of people that think this is a good movie. This is not the complete train wreck the theatrical release is, but as far as I'm concerned it's still a remarkably bad movie. Sure, Cyborg is a character as opposed to not being one, but the rest of the League is free from any development. Sure, the villian has a motivation, but he's also reduced to being a glorified henchman, while Darksied does all of nothing other than appear in a LOTR style flashback. The mcguffins are better explained in this, but they're still stupid and they added a whole new mcguffin that isn't explained at all. Some of the action is slightly better, but that was far from the biggest sin of the original. As far as I'm concerned, this is a film that is still fighting in the dumpster to be king of the trash pile. I haven't re-watched BvS or the theatrical release, but it's clearly still in a league with those films rather than contending to be an actually decent film like Wonder Woman or most of the MCU.

I'm a registered independent, but functionally a democrat, especially in this day and age.

This NFT nonsense is so crazy to me. It's still a jpeg, it's not creating digital scarcity of this item, it doesn't even transfer rights or even ownership (at least not by itself). We're just in a crazy crypto boom and people are assuming anything on the blockchain will rise in value. All the power in the world for artists who are making money doing this, but I don' think it makes any sense at all to purchase these things.

To me this acquisition feels like it's too big to fail (it isn't, but it feels that way). There are enough studios making enough games with a big enough catalog that it won't be long before MS is reaping benefits from this. It's impossible to say if those benefits will meet that dollar figure, but there should be a pretty consistent stream of games coming out to make it feel worthwhile. With nearly every other purchase, Rare, Bungie, whatever, it was always so dependent on just a few upcoming games. The scale of this transaction is really something else.

Yeah, I don't think they really finished dealing with the reality of what Wanda imposed on everyone in that town. The battle with Agatha and the loss of her invented family took emotional precedence, so it was recognized, but not finished. Sure, sword dude probably deserved to get locked up, but it sure seems like the FBI would have at least feigned at taking Wanda in for kidnapping a town. I think it's a casualty of the finale being a bit rushed. Too many story and emotional beats to get through.

Does anyone like him? Why do people keep putting him on TV?

I had it done years ago. They did it laparoscopically so there was a very small scar and recovery wasn't bad, couple weeks of mild pain when using my stomach muscles. After the surgeon got in there they figured out that my appendix wasn't a problem, but they still took it out anyways.

I did this to run the new Destiny 2 raid on day one. It was my first time doing anything like that in a long long time and it was great fun even though it was with a bunch of random guys and we didn't do particularly well. I have a couple groups of friends that regularly do game nights, one of which I hosted pre-pandemic. Very occasionally we'll make it a longer evening and have pizza or something. There's only been once we set aside a whole day to play Diplomacy, which took something like 10 or 12 hours. I think it's something I should do more often. It's freeing to set aside a whole day and declare that I won't be doing anything useful, won't be cooking, and will just be playing games. They're hard days to come by.

That really seems like a pretty sizeable increase. It would increase it from $0.08 to $2.33 per gallon on beer, where ~$0.08 seems to be in line with other states. The tax structure is sufficiently complicated that it's hard to figure out exactly how much beer is taxed overall from creation/import to consumer purchase, but it does seem like a huge increase from what I can tell.

I'd like a far more powerful switch, but I won't expect one. I also have hardly touched my Switch in the last year+. BOTW2 will get me playing again, but I think I'd need more than just that to upgrade a console.

Arizona is pushing a State bill that would prevent app store operators from forcing a specific payment system, at least for devs located in AZ.

Unfortunately it sells. Anecdotally, I've got family on various levels of the right wing news spectrum, and it seems like this is the kind of stuff they feel most comfortable talking to me about. To them it gets sold as "only crazies would possibly think this is ok" so they always seem surprised when I disagree with them and think maybe it's ok if we don't show kids openly racists books or cartoons. Fox News has done a very effective job at weaponizing this kind of thing.

I would guess it wasn't too expensive an acquisition at this point, so it was probably a good deal. Right now Fall Guys is 97 on the top 100 steam games, but it feels to me like a game that could remain more relevant. Going F2P is the obvious move, and launching on Switch and Xbox will help either way.

As someone who defended sunsetting as a concept, I'm glad to see them abandon it as implemented. They never should have devalued playable activities to worthlessness, and they should have been implementing more weapons to replace what was sunset. I'm surprised they reversed course so soon. I feel like the change to the level grind is a band-aid to a larger issue. Last season I hit the level cap and played all the high end PvE content, and it's just not fun to grind to be able to do those exact same activities. With the release of Beyond Light, at least I felt like I was leveling for the raid. Grinding levels to play the same nightfalls I was playing before is a bummer. Still, I'd rather grind 50 levels of powerfuls than 10 levels worth of pinnacles. The RNG of doing a thing like a master nightfall / master hunt only to get a reward in your highest level slot is horrible. Hell, I'd take a 100 level power grind with RNG protection over the 10 level pinnacle we have now. Ultimately though, the problem is less about how the grind works than what you're working towards. Working towards doing the same things you were already doing is a bad deal. It always feels better to be working towards something you couldn't do if you don't grind those levels. In WoW that always meant a new area, new dungeons, new raids. The comparative trickle of new content in Destiny will always be the fundamental issue the game has. I know they really don't like gating content too much, but there's something primal about powering up in order to earn the new thing. After playing around in a 12 man raid this weekend, I also felt very acutely how much Destiny needs to evolve some of it's activities. Throwing more players and chaos is an easy way to make something feel more epic, and the technology is obviously there. There's still so much to like about the fundamentals of Destiny. I just want them to do a bit more with it.

Think about WB's internal benchmarks. Superman, Superman II, Batman 89, Returns, and Forever were all the top hits of their respective years. TDK had broken records the same year the MCU started. Rises was only behind Avengers in 2012. They put the two most recognizable comic characters on the planet in one movie and it gets horribly panned and grosses less than half a dozen MCU films starring comparative nobodies. I would agree that if I were at WB I'd have been more concerned about the poor reception than the total revenue. $870M is a good haul, but it must have lowered everyone's expectations for what Justice League would make. (Of course, those figures were revised higher after Wonder Woman, and then JL went on to become an actual failure.)

Last week in my tier got effectively removed. I'm not sure if San Diego entirely follows state guidelines or what, but currently the county has phase 1A-1, 1A-2, 1A-3, 1B, 1C, and 2, where 2 is everyone over 16. (They're currently up to 1B) A week ago 1C included a broad swath of "essential workers" as defined by the state that I would have been eligible for. As of last Friday 1C is now only for people with underlying health conditions and there is no priority for the broader essential worker category. I won't argue the change is bad health policy, but it is a bummer that now I have to wait for essentially complete general availability before trying to get an appointment. I was really hoping that being part of the last phase before that would make it easier to get.

Somehow I feel like a couple guys who couldn't figure out how to kidnap a couple of dogs without shooting someone are not exactly mastermind criminals. I would be surprised if they are at large for too long.