TwinIon

Yikes. Nothing but pretty terrible reactions so far. There's a good chance I still watch it, but it's a shame this didn't work out.

Seems like it was probably the best choice for the studio and it’s the direction that I’d personally prefer them to take. The thing that I find interesting is that they were able to make this decision as Sony has made a big deal about wanting to go towards live service games, but also after it’s revealed how much trouble Bungie has been having lately. I would love to know what the calculus with dealing with Sony was in this case. Naughty Dog is arguably the best single player dev in the business. I look forward to whatever games they end up making.

I know that viewer hours is what matters to Netflix, but it's not a number that normal people really understand, so I wanted to figure out how many people actually watched these shows. If you do what Netflix does for it's weekly top 10 and just take hours viewed divided by the runtime, that works out to ~88M viewers for The Night Agent, 76M for Wednesday, and 60M for Beef. Then again, most people don't really finish shows all the way through, so you could probably increase those numbers by 50% or more to get an idea of how many people watched a good portion of the show.

Whatever gets us closer to Micro LED. I'm going to stick to OLED for now, but it's nice to see the tech progressing.

Pretty fun, but for some reason my xbox controller's A button keeps bringing up the menu. It is neat to run it at 1:1 and see the whole map.

I went to check this out last night and it's a bit funny and a bit sad, but I don't think it was weird enough. Cage is very good here as the straight man, a boring and unaccomplished professor that random people start dreaming about. It's a fun idea that toys with modern notions of fame and social media virality, but the real tragedy is that it ends up feeling more hollow than insightful or fun. It makes me wish that this premise had been explored by Spike Jonze or Ari Aster.

A friend of mine got to see it early and absolutely loved it. I've got my tickets for Thursday.

He'll be missed. He was a highlight in basically everything he was in. I was rewatching Fringe when Lance Reddick passed, and I've been rewatching B99. Such a shame to see such talented actors pass so young.

I like Alex Garland, and that sequence with Jesse Plemons looks great, but selling that premise is going to be hard work. I know trailers are chopped up and often provide incomplete or misleading context, but it sure seems like it's Texas and California against the rest of the US? That's an odd line to draw for a new civil war.

I'm pretty surprised by this outcome, and I agree that this being a Jury made a big difference in the outcome. I think Epic would have had a much better chance with a Jury against Apple. Google being more open is what doomed them with the jury. Google allows a lot more than Apple does, but because they allow so much more they strike all kinds of deals to maintain their advantage, and that doesn't look good. Apple doesn't really strike any deals, they just say no. That said, I still think the biggest reason that Apple won and Google lost is thanks to market definitions. In the Apple case the judge decided that the market was "mobile game transactions." In the Google case, the markets in question were decided to be "Android app distribution" and "Android in-app billing". If Epic had gotten the Apple market defined as "iOS app distribution" and "iOS in-app payment solutions" like they wanted, I think it would have been very hard to argue Apple didn't have a monopoly. The reverse is true for this Google case. If the market was the same "mobile game transactions" that was used in the Apple case, then all of Google's deals now look like they're desperate plays for revenue in a market where they control the market share but not the profit share. Limited only to what is happening on Android, I agree that they're pretty clear monopolists. It'll be very interesting to see what kinds of remedies the judge comes up with. He could limit the kinds of deals that Google is allowed to pursue. He could force Google to allow alternative payment systems on the Play store and/or to allow app stores in the Google Play store. With a lot of those kinds of deals, we actually already have some expectation of what Google could do to get around it thanks to Apple being forced to do the same. Sure, they'll allow you to use your own payment processor, but you still owe Google 27% of all digital transactions.

I've never upgraded storage space on consoles, I just don't jump between games often enough to justify keeping a bunch of games on them. My PC is a different matter, and I've been running low lately. Currently have a 2TB primary drive along with 12TB of disk storage, mostly for photos, all in RAID and backed up to both my local NAS and the cloud.

Some are easier to remember, probably helped by many having already been mentioned: Futurama - Luck of the Fryish, Jurassic Bark, The Devils Hands are Idle Playthings Bojack - Free Churo, Time's Arrow Cowboy Bebop - Ballad of Fallen Angels, The Real Folk Blues p2 The Simpsons - Cape Feare, Marge vs the Monorail, Homer's Enemy, probably at least a dozen others There are other series that I'd put up with the best of TV animation, but it's harder to narrow down a single episode Avatar, the last Airbender - Sozin's Comet p4 Neon Genesis Evangelion - Introjection Arcane - The Base Violence Necessary for Change Fullmetal Alchemist Brotherhood - Death of the Undying Primal - Rage of the Ape Men There are recent shows that I haven't re-watched yet, but might deserve to be up there: Blue Eye Samurai - The Tale of the Ronin and the Bride Scavengers Reign - The Fall Invincible - We Need to Talk

I don't think it's impossible to do both. With the speech lengths they had, it wouldn't have been a much longer show if we got to acknowledge more of the winners. Sometimes the Oscars do a thing where they show a clip real introducing of the Best Pic noms throughout the show. It would be great if they had did something like that. They don't need to be full on NoClip documentaries, but a couple minutes of a dev talking about how hard it was to get Alan Wake 2 approved or the new technology they built for it, or the daunting task of following up Breath of the Wild, or a taste of the underdog story of Larian Studios.

I don't have a hard and fast rule about subs or dubs, I can enjoy either if they're well done. The dub here is very well done. The film is classic Miyazaki. Whimsical, inexplicable, magical, confounding, touching. I don't think it's his best, but it's a fitting finale for a legend.

I finally caught up with this over the weekend and it was amazing. Such a delightfully and frightfully alien world is presented. My only qualm: I really hope we get more of this show. I was getting some real Dune vibes at the end and I'd love to see this universe expanded on.

I don't really mind short speeches, but I really don't like completely skipping them and just listing who won what. I understand that the viewership is largely there to see new trailers and game announcements, but I think it's a real shame that we can't even get a YouTube live stream that takes the people behind games seriously and celebrates their accomplishments. I think it's fine to celebrate Kojima, but it's a shame that he's in such rarefied company as a game dev who people actually know. The Game Awards has the opportunity to elevate devs to known quantities, or at least be part of it. Yeah, no one mentioned all the game devs who have lost their jobs this year, and part of that is the problem is is that it's so easy to ignore mass layoffs when we have no idea who makes our games. I think it's fine for a game awards show to talk about what is coming next and get hyped about it, but if it's not just going to be a fancy E3 conference, it should actually elevate the creators. It's often not the most popular part of other awards shows, but I think having technical awards would be a real positive change, even if they get a bit side lined. DICE has pretty good categories that would work, just steal from them. Having a short montage of someone talking about animation or what game direction means would be a service.

I think it's difficult to read into exactly what he means. He says that he doesn't want to make a sequel to a sequel, not what form the next game will take. It could well be a BOTW/TOTK style game but without any continuity, new powers, new world, etc. Personally, I really hope that they keep with the philosophy of powers that allow you to be creative to solve puzzles and approach situations. If they maintain that philosophy, I don't really care what the overall shape or story of the game ends up being.

I haven't played it since launch, but my recollection is that RDR2 was more impressive than fun. If you're enjoying it, all the more power to you. It's an amazing experience in many respects, I just wish they'd put as much attention to gameplay and mechanics as they did into building the world.

I suppose it makes a certain amount of sense. They have an inflated stock price and a failing business. May as well count on other business to actually make money with your money.

With all the GTA 6 hype, I decided to install GTA 4 on my Steam Deck since I somehow I had it on Steam despite never having played it on PC. I remember liking the game back in the day, but it doesn't feel great in 2023, and I don't mean the car handling. It starts so slowly and needy, having to go on dates and hang out and suffer incessant calls from Roman. The toll roads are a complete mistake, forcing you to either stop or have to out run police that can easily block the bridge. I also hate some of the "hidden" mechanics that pop up in GTA missions that I've run into a couple times, where guys are hard coded to stay ahead of you or are even invincible until they reach a destination. I also think that the dull faded colors and dour atmosphere just suit GTA poorly compared to the more laid back and fun settings of the other games. I'll probably put in a few more hours to see if I like it better once things kick into gear, but I'm not rushing to put in a full run.

I think you're right about talent getting burned out on Destiny, which is funny because Bungie went so far as to leave their publisher to get out of having to keep making Halo games. Then they go off and put themselves in the same position, but arguably worse, since they can't even really experiment with the kind of stuff you might do if you're making sequels and not just iterating on the same game year after year.

I think the bottom line is that Bungie dug themselves into a giant hole with Destiny 2 in both how it was being developed and how it was monetized. First they built a live service game that wasn't great at being a live service game. Then they had to figure out how to keep it going, and to their credit, they did. Unfortunately while they built a system for putting out content, that wasn't paying the bills, so they had to resort to the monetization scheme of a free-to-play game, but without the kind of casual user base or content that keeps those games flush with new players, dooming them to build ways to milk their hardcore audience endlessly. With the entire company bet on one continuing game, they haven't been able to put out another game for years, and when they did start developing that next game, it took valuable resources away from Destiny, making that game noticeably worse. They'd put out blog posts explaining how their core playlists of PvE, PvP, and PvEvP were central to the game, but all the PvP people were working on Marathon, so they'd go years between releasing new PvP maps in a live service game. Even as someone who never liked the PvP in Destiny, it was insulting, and as someone who enjoyed their PvEvP mode, it sucked that as time went on the number of maps and play modes actually went down. The PvE stuff kept me playing the game for much longer than I should have, but it's been clear for a long time that they couldn't figure out how to balance production and draw in new audiences.

I saw some piece on TV, I wish I could recall where (daily show maybe?), where they were talking to people at a school where they had a zero phone policy and I was kinda surprised that it's not the default. The policy was just no phones in use at school at all. Obviously not during class, but also not during lunch or breaks or anything. Basically the same policy that I had in late high school when the Star Tac was still a cool phone. The one thing that stuck out to me was the unexpected push back from parents. I did have a phone by the end of high school, but I don't think it would ever have occurred to either me or my folks to text during the school day. I suppose these parents have had constant digital communication with their kids for their kids' entire lives, but these parents didn't grow up that way. Is it really so beyond the pale that they don't hear from their children during the school day?

Trailer looks to be largely real time and very doable on current gen consoles, probably at a around 1440p, except for the TikTok style videos which seem to have a lot of post processing. There's evidence of ray traced reflections and GI. Some details that stuck out to them were the hair (both graphical quality and physics) and the paint quality on the cars. They're expecting it to target 30fps. Overall think it looks very good.

The graphics exceed my expectations, but don't completely blow me away for a game that might not be out for another ~2 years. I hope that the actual game can maintain the density and population we see there, but I don't think it will. I expected them to go full Florida, and it certainly is that. I was hoping for at least some gameplay info with the release of the trailer, and I'm bummed we didn't get that. I expect this to be very much like any other GTA game, but I hope I'm wrong.