TwinIon

So will they basically be trying to make a licensed Uncharted game, or is there a less obvious game style that would fit the IP?

The "intelligence" failure here isn't hard to understand. The people in charge figured "these are our people, so no need to worry." If you had the same level of warning from the FBI and open online planning from people protesting against the President, the National Guard would have been there in force. I don't even mean if it was specifically BLM or Antifa, just any ol group that isn't pro Trump.

Looks like Epik (wiki link) will be hosting Parler. Epic is a registrar and host that also serves 8chan, Gab, and the Daily Stormer, so Parler will be in good company. I would expect the transition to still take a little while, since it's not only just a matter of moving the domain name and hosting, but also transferring info and setting up all sorts of other services (like Twillo auth) that they need to replace.

I agree that using a firearm should be a measure of last resort for the police. Based on what I've seen, I think there's a case for that here. I don't know what that officer's options were or exactly what the layout of the Capitol behind him is, but if he felt like this barricade was his last stand, or the last stand to protect congress (or anyone else) from the mob, I think you could justify the use of force here. It certainly wasn't a case where the worst case scenario is a suspect gets away or some kind of snap decision by an unprepared officer.

I'd be happy to see it go, but I'm always surprised how much bipartisan support there is for the death penalty, so I doubt this one will be going anywhere.

Reading a bit more about the Parler lawsuit against Amazon, they're making the argument that since Twitter uses AWS, Amazon is using their market power to help Twitter, which is just stupid on the face of it. Since both are AWS customers, why the hell would Amazon care where users go? If anything, Amazon would have a compelling interest in seeing more Twitter size customers use their platform. Besides, Amazon hosts tons of competitors on AWS, even competitors to Amazon's own products, like Netflix (where a legit antitrust conflict could actually exist). There's some contract stuff that could be more legit, but given Parler's very public stance on not moderating the problematic content, I don't think Amazon will have much trouble convincing a judge that Parler was in breach for quite a while.

Option 2 is what seems to have happened in Hawaii.

Glad to see the Georgia calls made it into the articles of impeachment.

Started playing Hellblade via the Wireless Virtual Desktop link and I'm very impressed how well it works. After Hellblade I'll definitely have to give Alyx another playthrough wirelessly. Anyone have the Elite battery strap? I've also noticed the issue that @cusideabelincoln mentioned with a narrow sweet spot. Wondering if the upgraded strap would help.

There are some theoretical antitrust concerns with AWS. If Amazon is using data from AWS to gather proprietary information from competitors or something, they're certainly big enough to face anti-trust issues. Refusing to host a website after they break your TOS is definitely not going to get them in trouble beyond some Republicans yelling at them in their next congressional hearing.

I'm almost disappointed I didn't get to unfollow him after he left office. I'd long expected there would be a short window between Biden's inauguration and Trump being banned, so I'm pretty surprised the hit the under.

According to Buzzfeed news, Apple has given Parler 24 hours to submit a moderation improvement plan or else be removed from the App store. Parler's CEO has pretty much said they won't do it. Google hasn't said anything about doing the same on the Play store, but if Apple does follow through, I'd expect them to follow Apple's lead. The next question is this is the beginning of a larger deplatforming of Parler as a whole. If they start losing their domain provider and CDN and what not, it could get very hard very fast to keep the service up.

So I've definitely hit the real endgame of D2, and it's kind of a bummer. I certainly can't complain about how many hours I've been able to put into the game. I've put more time into Destiny 2 this year than I have any game for a long time. There are a lot of issues with the game, but overall I have really enjoyed my time with it. I really like Europa, the new raid, and I've enjoyed tackling content at higher difficulties. In particular I've really liked doing the Grandmaster Nightfalls. So much of Destiny quickly becomes about how fast you can do content over and over again, but GMs really feel like a place where your gear and your build and your teamwork matter. Far more than any other part of the game, it feels like it's what you've been building towards. The bummer of it all is that it's very much a case of climbing the mountain because it's there. There's very little reason to do GMs when the same rewards are available at lower levels where they're much easier to farm. I complete one for the Conqueror title, but there's no real point in running it over and over again. It's strange that it feels like the whole game is built towards preparing you for non-existent content. The only other part of the game that felt like that was day one raiding. By day 2 the challenge was making sure teammates knew the mechanics, the enemies hardly posed a threat then, and are a complete joke now. I think it's good to make raid content accessible to more people, but I also wish there was a raid mode that required the same thoughtful playing that a GM does. At first I was carefully crafting my mods and loadout for each encounter, but now I really just make sure I have the right guns. I'm very guilty of looking back at my time in WoW with overstated nostalgia, but while I was raiding then it felt much different. I suppose I never was quite as well geared in WoW as I am now in Destiny, and I imagine that if vanilla WoW came out now I might rail against the slow drip of progression. Still, when I think back I remember upgrades feeling so much more impactful. Getting my mana regen up so I could keep up with healing on a raid boss was hard, and it was almost never enough. Even when my guild could regularly complete the raids, they were still clearly the endgame, the pinnacle of difficulty and loot. Perhaps this is me wishing for Destiny to be a game it never promised to be. I wanted it to be a game where I had to min-max my stats and find the right gun with the right mods and where my time spent would be rewarded, but very little of that actually matters. It's a game where they want you to be able to get into almost everything very easily. There's a lot to do, checklist after checklist of triumphs and light levels and weapon rolls to chase down, but there's almost no content that actually asks you to have done all that.

Just got my Quest 2 in, haven't really taken it for a spin yet. Kinda annoyed that some games I'd happily replay aren't available for cross play. How often do games like Beat Saber or Superhot go on sale for the Quest? I think I'm going to try out the wireless PC link and see how that goes.

I imagine someone telling Trump that if he doesn't admit defeat he won't be able to get a TV show.

Well, he admitted that he lost. I'm guessing that's enough to prevent the Senate from removing him.

Well, guess I'm definitely waiting for a Ti now.

Yeah, I think it's very fair to say that the police presence should have been far more significant given that this was a joint session of congress in the freaking capitol and not just a protest in a park somewhere. And like I said, they should never have been allowed to get into the building. At the same time, I also don't want to hold this protest up as an example of why we need to militarize our police and have tanks show up to every BLM event. I can just see people holding up this example of what happens when you don't let cops gas and beat everyone up.

Twitter has been pretty open about only keeping Trump's account up because he's the President. I'd say he'd have been banned within days of leaving office. If they're going to lock his account now, just do away with him already. Then again, they only just banned Lin Wood, who has deserved a perma for a while.

Obviously there was an incredible contrast in how police responded yesterday versus how they treated the BLM protests, any loss of life from a protest is the most terrible of prices, and I think it's safe to say that they probably shouldn't have been able to get into the Capitol. However, I do think there's a case to be made that the police response yesterday is closer to how we'd like police to respond to protests in general. If the choice to gas and beat and choke and assault protesters or to just do your best to manage the crowds, falling back on extreme measures only when necessary, I think the latter is preferable.

I doubt it will happen, and I honestly don't fear for our Democracy, but I really hope Trump is removed from office somehow. It just seems like a much more fitting end to his presidency than simply walking away onto an OANN show or something.

This was a known threat during a join session of congress. I don't think it was a given that they'd just successfully storm the building with so little resistance.

It's insane to me that they got this far. We've seen such extreme police responses over the last year for people protesting in parks or on streets, and these guys manage to storm the freaking capital building? The reason for the differing response isn't a mystery, but seeing such a stark difference is still shocking.