TwinIon

I miss when Vizio was the TV brand that had image quality above their price class. For a while they seemed like the go-to option for "I want a good TV, but I don't want to buy a Sony/LG Plasma/OLED." It seems like ever since the failed LeEco purchase way back in 2016.

Only saw the first episode and the tone is so different from the original. I'm trying not to judge it too harshly for that, but it is much more serious in a way that the One Piece live action show was not. The thing that makes me more concerned is that they don't seem that consistent in that slightly more gritty tone. The costumes are all bright and colorful and look brand new. Appa is as doofy in live action as in the animation. It makes me think they're going to be struggling with the nature of the show as taking place during a brutal war and the lightheartedness that the animation achieved.

Some of my fears are already coming true as players try to "optimize" their time. I played a bunch of games yesterday and found it difficult to find a group that wasn't just trying to farm the easiest defend missions. I saw similar complaints on reddit who blamed the phenomenon on youtubers and streamers telling people the fastest way to level up is to just grind those missions, but who knows. They are the easiest for sure, but you hardly get any samples and I just don't find them that fun. I think the joy in this game is in the craziness that is occurring as you're exploring the map and trying to complete the objectives. When I'd start my own mission and hope people join, people would just drop out. Playing on hard with only two people at ~15 is not great. Hopefully that was an aberration and not a new normal. The existing matchmaking system is dead simple, but it makes it difficult to find players who want to play in a specific way. There's no good way to advertise that you want to collect all the samples and not just rush main objectives. That said, I've overall had pretty good luck in finding random teammates, and when you do have a full squad that is working together on harder difficulties, the game really comes alive. It's a great sandbox to muck around in and I still have plenty of toys to unlock.

Surprisingly good. I have had the problem of finding a group through. I'm guessing people aren't turning their matchmaking to private when they want to be alone. I had a run this morning where as soon as I joined people (via the quickplay button), they either kicked me or left immediately five times in a row. In a couple cases even when joining a mission in progress.

Finally got to try it out after a few days of ownership. It's a lot of fun but it has a lot of problems beyond just the server issues. My first time loading into my ship the game froze. My very first mission the random that joined me got stuck interacting with something, so I had to kill him to reset. Another mission landed me on top of some geometry, and the game clearly didn't know what to do with me 100 ft in the sky, though I did make it down fine. I think the map could use some work, though I think the Konami code ux for strategems is nifty. I got up to level 5 and unlocked "challenging" difficulty and decided to give that a go. I got paired with a lvl 15 diver, which was good because I was unprepared. After I started using his weapons I became much more useful. I think I'll unlock a few more things before doing that again, but it was fun to have a helpful teammate in a difficult mission and to get a glimpse of what the game looks like after a few levels up. I don't think this is a game that I'll play forever and it doesn't seem like something that would consume me, but it is a lot of fun to mess around in. I think the fate of this game is going to rest in the hands of the community. Right now everyone is just figuring things out, and if people can remain genuinely helpful and co-op minded, then I may keep playing here and there for a while. If people end up getting hyper focused on optimization, it could suck the fun out of it.

Reviews are starting to come in and it seems they're pretty mixed at this point. It's at 62% on RT. Picking through a few reviews, it doesn't sound like a train wreck, so at least there's that.

Yeah, that doesn't look great. What in the world is Cate Blanchett doing in this movie? She seems very out of place.

Probably doesn't bode well for physical media if Disney doesn't think it's worthwhile to run their own operation. I feel like this puts a clock on how long Disney even bothers releasing physical versions of their content.

Sitting at 62 on Metacritic. Not great. After watching the Skill Up review, the conclusion is that there is fun to be had, but it's a real disappointment when put in context. The comparisons to Black Flag are pretty brutal. Seems like it's not a complete disaster, but it doesn't live up to it's potential as a AAAA game after such a long development cycle.

I feel like the both-sides argument for that particular episode stems from just pure time spent. I'm pretty sure that his language around Trump was far more harsh, but I'm pretty sure he spent more time talking about Biden and why it's fair to criticize him for being old or whatever, as if it's not the most common Biden talking point. I didn't love or hate the episode, but I don't really feel like Stewart brought anything new to the discussion. I agree with Jon that it's perfectly fair to be concerned and to criticize Biden for his age, but I feel like the age talk has been over saturated at this point. The same night during his opening monologue Colbert addressed the age thing much more briefly and (to my mind at least) effectively. He said "We are where we are. Unless something drastic happens it's Biden vs Trump. Voters are just going to have to choose between a sympathetic, well meaning, elderly old man with a poor memory, or a contemptible, malicious, elderly rapist with a poor memory."

After watching more of this it certainly has my attention. Hopefully the servers clear up enough to actually give it a go.

I'm pretty much right there with you. There was a lot to like about season 4, but it never really made the most of it. There were interesting characters with complicated dynamics and there were two mysteries, but neither mystery really ever felt urgent or exciting. Part of that is that Liz and Navarro seemed only interested in the Tsalal murders because of Annie's murder, and part of it comes from what I think is a lack of more procedural work. The way the show is setup we get front loaded with all the deaths and the circumstances of their deaths, but there's not much to work through there. It's basically a big question mark until the end (where it still isn't really resolved). I didn't actually mind the lack of entirely definitive answers, but I do think the pacing of reveals and everything is poorly handled.

North America is fortunate to be getting a total solar eclipse this year on April 8th. I'm very excited because this will be the first total eclipse I'll have had the chance to experience and I'm curious who else on D1P is planning on seeing it. Here is a great interactive map to get incredibly specific information for your location. In 2017 I didn't travel, but I have some friends that did and while they loved the experience of the eclipse, they had some trouble with lodging. They had booked their AirBnb well in advance, but the hosts figured out very near the eclipse how much more could be charged, so my friends were left scrambling at the last minute. Looking not to replicate that experience for 2024, they spent some time finding the best place they could get a hotel that was aware of the eclipse and are arranging a group trip to Mazatlan. Since I decided to join this trip, enjoy photography, and have most of the gear I'd need anyways, I figured I should try to get one of those cool corona shots for myself. The result has been falling down a rabbit hole that is so much more complex and annoying than anticipated, even as I remain committed to the idea (have spent enough money that I'm rather "pot committed" as well). First I discovered that eclipse chasing itself is a hobby with some rather intense interest, filled with some very dedicated people. Then there are the solar eclipse photography people, who are often already into astrophotography, but often not into general photography. Still, even for those that are into astro, solar photography is still it's own niche with it's own quirks and requirements. A lot of the advice that I've seen is that a total solar eclipse is a unique experience and that you don't want to be spending those precious moments messing with your camera. Trying to take that advice to some degree, I decided that I wanted to automate my photos. A number of programs exist specifically to automate eclipse photos, but it turns out that's a world of complications. The best software for this kind of thing was mostly written by individual amateurs that don't really keep them up to date. The most recommended program is Solar Eclipse Maestro, which only works for MacOS 10.6 - 10.14 (which was released in 2018). There's a windows option in Eclipse Orchestrator, and while it runs in Windows 11, lets just say that it's not exactly a modern piece of software. Heck, getting it to shoot fast requires buying or building your own shutter release cable from old intervolometers. Add in that I'm using high end modern Nikon cameras, and things get messy. Nikon support in general is far worse than that for Canons, and it also seems like support for the really high end ones has been limited. I've been reading an ebook specifically about photographing eclipses, I've been spending a lot of time going through old threads on Cloudy Nights, and I've been spending hours trying to get some piece of software working that will let me script my shooting for this eclipse, and so far had very little luck. At this point I've given up on the Z9, which is an amazing camera and a joy to work with, but I can't find any software that can reliably control it at all, much less run a script with very specific timing. I'm now trying to get my D850 working, and while I've had some success, it's been mostly failures. Anyways, while I'm mostly ranting about what a time sink and mess this has all been, I'm still excited for the eclipse itself. Who else is making plans?

Huge momentum behind this film going into the Oscars. I just re-watched this weekend. Still love the film and think this praise is well deserved.

In April 2023 in a deposition for the rape trial Trump said that he had $400M in cash. I can't seem to find a great primary source for that, but the number is referenced in a few articles on the topic. Not that I'm willing to take Trump's word for it. Still, it could make it slightly harder to get out of paying these fines when they have him telling a court that he has the funds.

Being a sizeable jump from Control is a good sign for them. They deserve all the success in the world.

Growing up in a suburb I didn't have the ability to get to a store very easily, so the first time I'm certain I bought a game with my own money on launch day was 9-9-99, for the Dreamcast launch.

I went and did the in store demo for the Vision Pro, and it largely confirmed my expectations. Unfortunately my demo got cut short because they took 10 minutes to find the correct light shield size. It was also very overly controlled. The first thing I was told to do was open the Photos app. After doing so I started looking through photos and it seemed to really fluster my "guide." She wanted to specify every single action. Open this photo. Zoom this one. Look at this panorama, not the other one. Make this window bigger and that one smaller. Put this window to the right, not the left. It was irritating and overbearing to be so overly directed with every action and made it harder to get a good feel for the thing. That said, it was still very nice to actually get a chance to use the device. I used the solo knit band and it was comfortable enough for my short demo, but the headset was noticeably heavier than the Quest. Impossible to say after 20 minutes how comfortable it would be to use for hours, but I had no complaints during my demo. The screens are super impressive and really the highlight of the whole thing. The clarity is really excellent, especially with text. It really is a significant step up from my Quest 2 and the other headsets I've tried out. There are still issues like lens glare and some fringing on the edges, but overall it was by far the best I've ever seen. Video looked good enough that I might actually want to watch a movie with this thing, which is not the case for the Quest. Looking at photos was pretty cool, but I wish I could have seen some photos and panoramas that were not shot on an iPhone. iPhone photos look great on an iPhone, but this is an instance where more resolution probably would have helped. The spatial video shot with the vision pro was pretty impressive with excellent depth, but the video from an iPhone was a let down with minimal 3D effect. Apple's own 180 video was also less than impressive to someone who has seen a lot before. It's been true forever that immersive video is a lower quality than flat video, but through the relatively poor screens of past headsets, it was easy to let go. With the clarity of the vision pro, the lacking resolution was far more noticeable. Apple really didn't sell me on the need for their proprietary format. The UX is very well polished and responsive. The eye tracking is excellent, but I found it to be both most natural thing in the world while also being supremely unnatural. When you're doing major actions, like opening an app, eye tracking is great. I'm looking for a specific icon, I find it, and with a tap of my fingers I'm in. Really an excellent way to navigate a UI. When you have smaller actions, even in my short demo, it was easy to see where eye tracking could get cumbersome. With nearly all my other computing devices, I'm not intently watching my every input. I might push a mouse cursor up to a corner or swipe around my phone without necessarily looking at my input. For example, when I open Twitter, I know the home button is in the bottom left. I'll instinctively double tap it so I will go to the top, and once I am I might pull down to refresh. I'm not intently looking at the home button or looking anywhere in particular when doing this, I'm hardly even looking at my phone until the refresh is complete. With the Vision Pro, you need to look at that you're doing until the input is complete. The UI is so intuitive that it's easy to try and fly around it right away, but you really do need to take a beat and make sure you're still looking at the button you want to press when you press it. I think I kept looking at a button, starting the hand gesture, and looking away before I finished, forcing me to do it again. I also had a few times where it seemed to miss what I was looking at. I quickly got used to the idea that whenever I'd touch my fingers together, the vision would register it, but then I'd forget to keep my hands visible to my face. I was sitting at a table and just trying to get comfortable I put my hands in my lap under the table, which obviously meant my inputs were not registering. It all makes me feel like eye tracking is a great input for basic tasks, but very quickly I'd want something more. I would love to use a vision pro with both eye tracking and that wrist controller Meta showed off so long ago. Even if not that, I think having a controller of some kind, maybe even just a mouse, would make it feel much more complete. As impressive as the UI, eye tracking, and screen quality are, my concerns about use case remain. It just seems like a terribly cumbersome way to actually do work or use all the time. It feels most at home doing simple computing tasks that I might use my iPad for, but most of the time I'd probably rather have my iPad. It does seem like a nice media player, but it's so overkill for that and so much of my media consumption is with other people that buying one for plane rides would be a dramatic waste of money. I'm not convinced that this is a thing that needs to exist, but it is a great gadget. If it was $1000 I might have even bought one just to see what it's like to live with one. Priced as it is, it's very hard to imagine being worthwhile unless you have a very specific use case. I hope I'm wrong about how long it will take for something of this quality to get to $1000, but even at that price I wouldn't recommend it to anyone I know. TLDR: Amazing screens, excellent UX, but I have input concerns and don't see a clear use case, certainly nothing that justifies the price.

I kind of understand why Texas is being singled out here, but I'd rather see them work on a larger scale plan to better connect the entire nation's grid. My understanding is that the rest of the nation is kind of connected, but not very well. Sure, connect Texas so people don't die when there's a big storm, but make it part of a project to better connect all other regions as well.

I can't help but feel that, like the Transformers and Fast & Furious films before it, this film is heading into places I'm not willing to follow.

Ok, but how about compared to any other live action superhero movies? Or, if you insist upon a Sony comparison, include their Spider-man movies. I'm guessing it's no Spider-man 2, but how about the Amazing Spider-man films.

Combining the Steam Deck and the Index to make something cool almost makes sense, but I think we're at least a few years away from and AMD having a reasonable chip for this kind of application. I do love the idea of Valve taking their success with the Steam Deck and trying out more hardware.

Bummer not to have him around.

I got in to Blue Sky a few months back and it's been fine. A portion of my twitter follows had migrated over there and they make up most of my feed. Most of those were political reporters, so that's mostly what makes up my feed. I like that it defaults to your non-algorithmic following feed. Now I jump between Twitter, Threads, and Blue Sky. Threads still seems like it has the best chance to completely replace Twitter, but it's still a ways off.

I wonder if we'll see more and more creatives avoid working with WBD, or if they're just too big to really avoid. Obviously with a film like this one or Batgirl, it's not like you could make those exact films elsewhere. Is Nolan a canary in a coal mine, or is he just massively privileged in being able to choose which studios to work with?