TwinIon

I guess I feel bad for this woman, but it also seems like she was warned at every step.

I haven't read the whole thing yet, but it is an incredible story. It's amazing that Navalny survived. His ability to then uncover this whole plot afterwards is quite the cherry on top.

I put ~100 hours into Parkitect, and probably that much into Terraforming Mars. Neither are truly exceptional examples of their genres, but they were more than good enough and scratched a particular itch at the time.

It's also probably worth pointing out that this isn't necessarily just Cruise in his role as star of the film. He's also a producer and owns one of the production companies involved in making this.

Going PG may or may not work, but I think Firefly was a show that really succeeded on the back of its writing and cast. This isn't Star Wars, I'm not super excited to discover the whole Firefly 'verse. I think there's some interesting commentary that could be made out of the whole Browncoat situation (though a PG show makes that less likely), but I'm not even all that excited to learn more about Captain Reynolds and friends. I feel like Firefly was a bit of a lightning in a bottle situation, and at this point even bringing back the (surviving) cast wouldn't excite me that much. I feel like the best case scenario there is Netflix Arrested Development quality. I'd be happy to be wrong and enjoy another space cowboy show on Disney+, but I'm skeptical of anyone's ability to recapture what made Firefly special at the time.

It seems I had made an incorrect assumption about the state clones in the Imperial army. I thought the mechanics of the terminal were a bit odd,, and for reasons I explained I wasn't sure why Fett wasn't an ideal candidate, but neither affected my enjoyment of the episode. Mandalorian is really great at capturing the fun part of Star Wars. It doesn't need to get into why Beskar can stop a saber or why it seems everyone forgot about the Jedi in less than a generation. It's a show that can make just the barest case for why Mando and friends need to go on these adventures, and that's good enough for me to enjoy it. My biggest issue with the show is that we only get 8 episodes per season.

I think my diet is mostly fine, but I don't exercise nearly enough. I've got a nice stationary bike setup. I'll get on 3-4 times a week for a couple weeks and then go a month or more without touching it. I also drink too much. I rarely get drunk, but some weeks I'll have a drink or two every night, which is probably more than is good for me.

A year or two ago they were targeting a release that was well ahead of the PS5/Series X. It would be pretty weird to release a game nearly a year before the consoles you recommend people play on have come out.

Yeah, but he's genetically identical and has the same face as the majority of their army. Unless he shows up in his armor shouting his name, he seems like an ideal candidate to sneak into an Imperial facility. I'm actually more confused as to what the implication was when he said they'd recognize his face than the mechanics of the terminal. I feel like the implication is that there aren't many clones left around, so either that makes him either recognizable as Boba Fett (as you suggest) or an outlier for being a clone. Not really sure which they were getting at.

Q is one of the more difficult things to learn about for a variety of reasons, but I think one key to the whole mess is that Q is purposefully vague and interpreting Q's drops is a key tenant of faith. That both gives rise to the insane theories and simultaneously explains away "any" failed predictions. When Q gestures towards something crazy happening, people come up with all kinds of conclusions as to what that thing will be, when it will happen, etc. When that thing doesn't happen, it's because either it happened secretly (Tom Hanks was executed and replaced with a body double! Yes, that's a real belief) or it's because Q's followers misinterpreted his message all along. Q wasn't wrong, Trump didn't lose, it's all part of the plan, we just misread the tea-leaves. That also means that there's no single canonical version of the Q cult. Different sects have their own theories and they're all constantly evolving independently. One pocket of YouTube/Parler/8chan/Facebook/etc. might believe that the Storm will be hidden from view, a silent coup we peasants are unable to verify (like Hanks' execution and body double or literal lizard people being excised from society). Another pocket might be gearing up for open civil war, while a third expects martial law to be imposed for a few weeks. All this makes it particularly insidious and also impossible to really argue with. Nothing can be proved wrong, nothing can be validated, and without deep access to exactly what media any follower is ingesting, it's practically impossible to even know what it is they believe. There's a subreddit dedicated to people sharing stories and advice of loved ones lost to Q. While finding that link it seems that one of the top posts at this moment is likewise about someone expecting a lockdown to be coming. Good luck in dealing with it.

Maybe I'm getting my timelines messed up, but why wouldn't Fett be the ideal candidate to access a terminal? Are there no longer any clones among the troopers? They once made up 100% of the fighting force, and we've seen clones working at every level of the army, so surely it wouldn't have been unusual for a clone to access a terminal. I didn't think we were so far removed that they'd all be gone by now. Did I miss the point at which the empire got rid of all the clone troopers? Regardless, I generally agree that Star Wars is at it's best when it's gesturing to bigger things and wider worlds as opposed to investigating the minutia or the mechanics of something.

I've signed up for CBS All Access a couple times to watch Star Trek and The Good Fight, and canceled quickly thereafter. I'd be happy to skip a step. According to the story, and contrary to the OP, CBS seems to think that this will help boost their own numbers but that doesn't seem like a winning strategy to me. When I look at their lineup right now, it's three Star Trek shows, Good Fight, and three shows I've never heard of, including one called "Console Wars." If anything, that seems to make me an ideal consumer of their product. I pay a lot for entertainment, I love Trek, I very much enjoyed Good Wife and Good Fight, and I even watch some broadcast CBS (thought it's pretty much only Football and Colbert). Still, there just isn't anything there worth paying for more than a month or two a year. CBS by itself simply doesn't make enough stuff to be worth the fee, and I don't see that changing.

So are there any more cases that Trump has pending?

From the Pfizer briefing doc they sent to the FDA, on page 30 they show the efficacy after a single dose: I'm not certain that using all the initial shipment on single doses is a good idea or not, but it seems like something worth considering.

I'm more excited by the idea of a single film than I am of a trilogy at this point.

In the top categories, there really isn't much that I have to disagree with. TLOU2 isn't a game I really enjoyed playing, but in many respects it's one of the best games I've ever played.

At this point they need to do more than saying "Mass Effect" to make me excited for the game.

Disney had their streaming investor day today and they unleashed a ton of news. Disney+ has reached 86.8M subscribers in the first year. It seems that perhaps the Mulan pricing wasn't the failure that we assumed, because Raya and the Last Dragon will come to Disney+ "Premier Access" day and date with theaters. It'll cost the same $35 that Mulan cost. Over the next few years we can expect 10 Marvel shows, 10 Star Wars shows, plus 15 live-action, animated, and Pixar shows and 15 other live-action, animated, and Pixar features. Don't expect big blockbusters to go strait to Disney+ a la Warner. FX is creating an Alien TV series helmed by Noah Hawley with Redley Scott in as EP. There's also a bunch of stuff about Disney launching a "Star" streaming service in February in various markets around the world.

Since the Electoral College is scheduled to vote on Monday, hopefully that means we'll see SCOTUS kill off this nonsense by then.

Apple's new AirPods Max are premium, over the ear, noise cancelling headphones that seem perfectly nice, but for some reason Apple is asking for a ridiculous $550 in a market where the top alternatives are closer to $300. They've only just been announced so full reviews aren't in yet, but the impressions I've read indicate that they're good headphones. They're made of metal, have good sound, and of course have all the nice connection features you get with current AirPods. Of course, they also have the typical Apple exclusions. There's no headphone jack, only a lightning port. You can buy a lightning to 3.5mm cable for $35. There are no touch controls and there aren't many buttons, just a digital crown for volume and a single action button to control things. There isn't even a power button, they go to sleep when not in use for a while, or when put into their case. And what a case it is: It's both a braw and a purse, but it's not particularly good at being a case. The headphones don't fold up, and the case doesn't protect the headband or completely cover the bottom of the headphones. There seems to be a pretty universal dislike for this thing, with the Verge calling it one of the cheapest things Apple's ever made. I really like my Bose QC 35s, and I also really like the new Sonys, and there's nothing here that indicates to me that these would be worth $200+ more than either. If these things folded up into a normal case and cost the same as other high end headphones, I think they'd be a great choice for a lot of people. I'm personally puzzled as to why they priced them so high. The AirPods are pretty competitive in their segment, and this is a pretty competitive market. Still, I'm sure they'll sell plenty of them, just not to me.

I'm only 11 hours in and for some reason this game isn't grabbing me like I hoped it would, but there isn't anything in particular that I can point to that is off putting. Instead it almost feels like the game is less than the sum of its parts. I do think that progression in this game is poorly done, and I'm not just talking about the skill tree. At power 50 I don't have a dominant skill tree direction, so I'm hesitant to upgrade my armor. There really isn't that much gear overall it seems, so I've hardly changed gear at all so far. My settlement is only level 3, but it doesn't seem like there's a huge impetus to upgrade it. Most buildings just increase the feast buff, and the others are probably more interesting for their quest lines than for the building function. Earlier this year I played through Far Cry New Dawn, which also had a settlement mechanic, and that really motivated me to do everything I could to upgrade it. Settlement progress gated new weapons, vehicles, maps, healing, health, and mission types. If I remember correctly, there were also a whole bunch of things that would help upgrade, so most of what you were doing would help in that regard. In Valhalla, you need to be looting specific things, which makes sense, but also limits choices and ability to progress the settlement. I have also gotten a lot of bugs. A couple crashes, but much more frequently issues with enemy AI. They'll just stand around or not react to my presence even in red zones. Couple visual hiccups, but nothing too serious. So far it's probably my least favorite of the three most recent AC games. Hopefully that will change as I get further in.

This CNBC article about how these decisions came together is a good read for those interested. Two things really stick out: First of all, that AT&T's new CEO is operating under the (hardly unique) assumption that streaming is going to eat all television and most movie revenue. For comparison, broadcast TV is ~$60B, pay TV is worth ~$120B, total box office gross is ~$11B, and streaming is worth ~$50B. There's a belief that streaming will be in the hundreds of billions, but timelines differ greatly. The other thing is just how much AT&T CEO John Stankey and WarnerMedia CEO Jason Kilar are willing to completely blow up Warner in order to really compete with Netflix. Killing off theatrical release windows is just one more step in the direction they've recently taken.

I do wonder if we'll see the 32 HPC versions in a laptop anytime soon. The 16 core versions probably, but if the 32 is meant for a "half sized Mac Pro," it might only find a home there and possibly in an iMac. Though I suppose it could depend more on the GPU sizes. Maybe we'll see a 32 HPC MacBook Pro with a similar number of GPU cores and the desktops will be the only ones with those rumored enormous core counts on the GPU side. Perhaps a very large 32HPC w/ some GPU cores for notebooks, and then a similar chip for desktops, but with a dedicated GPU chip on the desktop? The 8 GPU cores on the current M1 make up ~25% of the chip. It's hard to imagine fitting a 32 HPC cpu and even another 32 GPU cores in a single chip, much less 128 GPU cores.

Personally, I think the copyright should expire after maybe 50 years at most, but on death would still be an improvement from what we have now. I don't think it matters to me who owns the rights to Dylan's songs. I don't really know how protective Dylan has been about licencing his music, so I don't have much idea if we're going to hear it pop up much more now or not.

Read some write ups from Ars and The Verge and it sure sounds like it's a buggy game. It also sounds like the combat is pretty lackluster. Everyone seems to agree the world building is in a league of its own, even it it's not exactly groundbreaking. All in all, it increasingly seems like the game that I expected it to be.