Zoraptor

A surprise, to be sure, but a welcome one: Hayden Christiansen is going to reprise his role of Darth Vader in the forthcoming Kenobi miniseries.

Stuffed pumpkins are my #1 culinary discovery of the last year. Ran out of pumpkins for doing it half way through the year, but pumpkin stuffed with finely chopped vegies and quinoa is great for a roast and looks really high effort too.

Yeah, at least in theory a day 1 patch only shows that they've been working on bugfixes since the game was 'locked' after going to physical media fabrication x weeks ago. No day 1 patch would imply that either the game is considered perfectly stable/ tested (as if any ever is) or that everyone went on holiday for 4 weeks once the game went gold. It seems kind of weird on the face of it for download copies, but then the patches are integrated into that as they come out anyway (ie if you were preloading now, the 9.7GB patch is integrated into the download rather than separate).

IIRC it was the other way around. It became dangerous, then got shut down because the repairs needed- cable replacement- had gone too far to be done safely/ economically. (Having checked wiki it was only decommissioned a few weeks before the collapse, and two cables needed replacing)

Not the first time that's happened. Most large scale ransomware attacks use stolen NSA tools to gain initial access.

No. Spoiler protection, after all the movie is only 18 years old... Interesting factoid: the '2nd' person to get the UK vaccine was William Shakespeare. I'm not sure if his parents hated or loved him giving him that name.

Abysmal RT performance in historic nVidia branded games means very little. Most future titles will be of the Dirt 5/ WD:L mold since AMD is in consoles, and there AMD relatively outperforms nVidia. Funny thing is, they really could have had a >80CU card since the performance scaling is almost linear and the 6900XT is ~12% faster than a 6800XT with 12% more cores. Top end cards are always awful value. But if I win Lotto I promise I will buy a 6900XT, liquid cool it and overclock it to 3000 Mhz, for the memes.

The governmental report into the Christchurch Mosque attack was released today. Fairly typical governmental fare, literally nothing could have been done to stop him, nobody really failed at anything- well, except for all the stuff governmental entities failed to do to stop him that they should have but didn't. But we really, really need more spies and a new anti terrorism agency! Ironic, considering what 'terrorism' in New Zealand has consisted of*. Quite how he could not have been stopped when the police flagrantly failed to follow the rules when doing the vetting for his firearms licence check is not really apparent; referees are meant to be a close family member and a close friend/ colleague who knows you well and he managed to get away with providing neither, instead it was a gaming friend and one of their parents (!) (Having been involved in firearms licence checks I know exactly what happened. They use retired police officers to check the referees as a bit of a low energy low effort post retirement perk, and they are, frankly, awful at the job. You'd get a more probing interview as a 4 year old from your kindergarten teacher trying to find out your favourite colour. The guy I talked to for my dad's firearm licence last time both provided the questions and answered them for me (!) and if that is an exaggeration it's a very slight one. Pretty much the entire time was spent with him having a cup of tea and biscuits and chatting about the garden and rugby) *Past forty years: one Australian shooting muslims that could have been stopped by the police enforcing the rules, French DGSE officers blowing up a Greenpeace boat and murdering a cameraman, and a bunch of maori running larp camps in the Ureweras that ended up having more apologies made from the police than convictions, and those convictions being made on technical non terrorism grounds for that matter.

Yeah, much as we may dislike Trump that isn't a charge that can be leveled at him. He put a lot of effort into getting a vaccine as quickly as possible- Operation 'Warp Speed'. Of the vaccines that will be available soon they (part) funded the AstraZeneca/ Oxford and Moderna vaccines. The Pfizer vaccine iirc was in fact privately funded in toto Germany had given funding to BioNTech in general but not specifically for vaccine development. That is one of the other reasons to be suspicious of its rapid approval and deployment, it's extremely expensive and the company stands to lose all its development costs if a cheap alternative got to the finish line first.

There was near exactly the same amount of time between ME1 --> ME2 as ME2 --> ME3 down to the day. Nov 2007, Jan 2010, March 2012; 26 months between games so if ME3 was 'rushed' then logically ME2 was as well. The size of the narrative job was, er, massive for ME3, but that was mostly due to how little ME2 did. Sure, the companion quests were interesting enough, but they'd have been far far better off dropping a few of them and adding to either the main plot of the game itself or better developing the overarching plot by tying it and the game plot together better. The criticism about ME2 is not that it lacked content, but that it lacked relevant content that advanced the narrative overall. I'd also have to strenuously disagree with the conversation direction if only because every ME2 conversation with Miranda was obsessed with posing her ludicrously to emphasise that Yvonne Strahovski is more than averagely attractive. Retroactively hilarious though, given how woke Bioware is now. As for the overarching subplot resolutions- Geth/ Quarians, genophage etc- they had to be resolved in ME3. In theory of course they could have been resolved fully in ME2 to give ME3 less to do but they weren't, for good reason; but then ME2 only added more to the stuff that needed resolving in ME3 (ie the big emphasis on Cerberus, lots of recruitables that were left needing resolution). The resolutions of each subplot in ME3- except Cerberus, caught up in the whole endgame mess- were generally well received, and the reaction if they'd been left out would have been at best strongly negative. It can be argued that ME3 needed more time due to the massive narrative difficulties inherent in tying up the story, but that is equally an argument that ME2 did not do its job properly by leaving too much to be done narratively. If you've resolved nothing in ME2 and only added more then that is part of the problem when complaining that the last game was rushed, and that could have been prevented by cutting some of the peripheral guff from the previous game to streamline things for the sequel. But no, they wanted The Dirty Dozen in space instead...

To an extent, sure. Ultimately BG2's story did not move the bhaalspawn saga far along its path except in a few respects, and the main plots of BG1/2 were mostly self contained, with BG1 and ToB doing a lot more of the overarching story progression than BG2, same as ME1/3 did more in that series than MW2. The difference are that BG2's main story was, well, good and there was some plot movement and added concepts, while ME2's main story was... vestigial, featured a soylent green fed terminator analogue end boss that made zero sense and what main plot there was was just plain not very good- and near literally the only overarching plot movement came in the final dlc. Also ToB was definitely rushed and intended to be a full game not an expansion, so a certain amount of plot wobbliness and contrivance (mostly, everyone except Gromnir hapless dopes) was to be expected. Even with that ToB had, more or less, a satisfying conclusion though, with sensible options and while (A)Melissan was not exactly the most brilliant enemy in the world she was far better fleshed out than the reapers were.

Prey is a lot closer to Dishonoured in a contiguous world than Doom. If Dishonoured is Arkane's homage to Thief then Prey is very much their homage to System Shock- a bit more shooterish and less sneaky, but by no means a run and gun game unless that's what you want. It has its weaknesses but if you liked Dishonoured chances are you should like Prey as well.

ME3 wasn't significantly rushed though. The main complaints about it would not have been fixed by Bioware having more time- the ending/ Starchild was not due to not being given enough time (mostly it was a botched way of explaining important concepts to the player) and the shoehorning of MP into the war readiness (or whatever it was called) and initially not being able to reach the max level of it without playing MP (or microtransactions, presumably) wasn't a time constraint thing. K** L*** wasn't a time constraint thing, someone actually thought he'd be 'cool'. I say it every time the subject comes up but ME2 was simply awful from a narrative perspective and the only thing which moved the story forward significantly was locked away in the last DLC. Apart from the companions 95% of ME2 might as well have not happened so far as overarching plot was concerned. That was the fundamental problem with ME3, it had to do everything plot wise and there was no practical foundation laid by the previous game. The things people complained about story wise would have been far better received if they hadn't come out of the blue but been set up previously. The 'traffic light' ending was almost identical to the end choices in Deus Ex, and they were well received there. And K** L*** was... well OK, irredeemable most likely, but at least if he'd been set up in ME2 he would not have been so jarringly awful. A decent comparison would be Game of Thrones' last season, though it would have to be acknowledged that there was a big writing change for Bioware when Karpyshan left whereas Benioff&Weiss were constantly there. It wasn't bad because it was rushed, it was bad because the writers did a bad job setting expectations and executing what they had set up, while the more technical side and the actors were as good as ever, mostly, and delivered the best they could from the production direction given. They could have had another extra season or 4 more episodes and it would still have been rubbish, if left as written. Then again, ME3 was a pretty good game with deeply flawed aspects, mostly writing, while GoT's final season writing was a black hole of mediocrity which sucked every bit of enthusiasm for the franchise out of public consciousness.

It's great news for any shop that keeps its historic unsold stock up on its website though, the nVidia 6800XT from 2005 is finally out of stock after bots scalped its 130nm, AGP 8x goodness.

The fundamental problem with DAI and ME:A was far too much samey content, until you noticed that the games themselves were fine. Inquisition was at least better than DA2.

If thousands of Brits do drop dead from the vaccine at least the poor pharmaceutical company won't be inconvenienced, since they've been granted indemnity against adverse effects. Bit of a conundrum, you want lots of people to take the vaccine as quickly as possible so you need confidence in it, but making sure there will be no repercussions if your rushed product turns out to be botched hardly screams confidence. Better give it first to all the crusties who are going to die anyway. Kind of ironic that the BBC brings up Sputnik being rushed and Putin not taking Sputnik constantly. Unless they're expecting him to take it on camera there wouldn't be 'proof' he'd taken it if he said he had. And if they'd accept his word then they'd have to accept their own reporting, that Putin's daughter got one of the first doses. Ironically, that was simultaneously a sign of nepotism and killed her, if you believed certain press reports.

Nobody knows if the 3080Ti is really coming this time or not. It won't add to availability anyway, it'll pull more chips from the standard 3080 pool, the one that would add to availability would be the 3070Ti since it would use chips not good enough for normal 3080s. Shipping worldwide is pretty stuffed, to be fair, though you'd think nVidia could charter one of the hundreds of planes doing nothing at the moment to fly some to Europe. AMD is definitely constrained by chip manufacturing limits, nVidia shouldn't be.

I tend to think the retirement thing is rubbish, but there isn't really a way to retire from a big studio without being in the middle of an ongoing project unless you're planning on a ~5 year cycle, especially if you're pretty senior and have responsibility for multiple games. If you were the game director of Cyberpunk 2077 and planning to retire at its release you'd probably have been planning to retire in ~2017, not 2020, or 2022 (?) after all the dlc is done.

The DS9 episode I used to compare Picard (show's) handling of characters and DS9 was 'In the Pale Moonlight' and it applies to Discovery as well. Sisko's behaviour there is in theory out of character, certainly with how his character started out/ a starfleet captain is meant to behave, but the set up and context is such that it's completely believable for him to cover up a false flag murder of diplomats. A lot of people didn't seem to like Avery Brooks' performance in DS9 as being too 'wooden', but it meant when he showed emotion it counted and had actual impact; the complete opposite of Discovery's current approach. The Discovery equivalent would not be pretty, with the possible exception of Georgiou being a passable Garak equivalent. Burnham would be wandering around looking like a stunned mullet with an existential crisis and having stilted emotional chats with everyone about how terrible it all is (and probably forgetting what happened in S1E1), then Saru would turn around and be fine with it, because that's what the plot needed and who cares that he wouldn't be fine with it having not had the context Sisko had. And Saru would probably go back to being a model Starfleet captain very next episode just to ram it home.

Wow, that's really surprising... ...that anyone could make it through 2.5 seasons of Discovery without noticing how cheap the 'emotional' hits were. The writers' idea of a huge emotional hit can best be summed up by that cyborg girl who got killed off last season. You don't feel anything for her death because she's had about 4 lines in the previous season and a half, you haven't seen her interacting with the crew or anything else, you don't even know her name; you're just told that you should feel bad about her dying and how everyone loved her. The complete lack of secondary character development is one thing wrong with Discovery that could be fixed very easily, but instead we have to have Wesley v3. Ironically, the season guest stars like Captains Pike/ Malfoy and Admiral Beardyman are the one consistent bright spot they've consistently done well with.

I think Darth Bane got mentioned in Rebels. It's kind of 50/50 whether he was ever not canon anyway, since he was a Lucas created character for the prequels' backstory.

A lot of people hated the tonal shift in the later EU, from the Vong war on, which was definitely a darker more 'mature' tone than earlier. There was a decent amount of stuff that could certainly be considered edgy, though I wouldn't personally consider it so except in the context of previous SW. I'd compare it to something like 'The 100' on TV, there's a lot of things happening that fit a description of edgy but... it's a CW show, so the cannibalism, mass murder, biological warfare, organ harvesting etc are a lot 'lighter' than they sound if you write them down and the overall reaction more of a 'what will those crazy kids get up to next?'. While I don't have any sympathy for Disney at all, the old EU was unwieldy, and in theory they can re-canonise whatever they want. So Malachor exists again, because Rebels used it. Not explicitly the Trayus Academy, but certainly something that looks suspiciously like it. There were four (?) conflicting stories of how the Rebels got the plans to the Death Star in EU and some genuinely convoluted attempts to reconcile them. The old post ROTJ EU was largely incompatible with the story they wanted to tell in the sequels (and Dark Empire and Heir to the Empire were functionally incompatible with each other, plus the returning Emperor in Dark Empire would be outright lol funny given sequel context). They simply didn't want to be bound by the old stories, which would be eminently forgivable, if their new content was good. For their high profile entries the only ones which are generally well regarded are Rogue One- the first product- and The Mandalorian. The others have been badly run projects received at best equivocally.

If the rumours of how awful Samsung 8nm is are true they should have a lot of defective GA104s to use. Assuming they haven't sold $200 million worth direct to miners this time I guess.

Of course Morrison wants to stop them. He'd happily turn all social media into his personal mouthpiece, if he could. He can't though, so it's irrelevant. Much as Xi can't get every Winnie the Pooh cartoon banned, outside China. Of course it's hypocritical. Politicians excel at being hypocrites and there quite literally isn't enough time in the day to point out every bit of it. The problem is very much with who is pointing out the hypocrisy, not that it's being pointed out. OTOH, it's absolutely hilarious France joining the complaints post Charlie Hebdo. French political cartoons obviously deserve political protection and promotion, Chinese ones... not so much. Then again, that is from Macron, the guy who wants to make photographing police illegal.

China can tweet whatever it likes, no one is stopping them. Their approach is just counterproductive* in this case and, of course in the context of it being 'freedom of speech' it has to pointed out that access to Twitter is severely restricted inside China so while it might be nice they're practicing their governmental freedom of speech it might also be nice if their populace could too.. It's 100% in Morrison's best interests to be 'trolled' because it allows him to shift the narrative away from his efforts to suppress the revelations and target the whistleblowers rather than the perpetrators, and to instead frame it as part of the larger China v Australia dispute. That's why it's counterproductive. And yeah, Australia perhaps isn't in the best position to criticise others for human rights violations in general given things like its treatment of Aboriginals being (and to a far lesser extent still being) about as bad as you can get. But while Aborigines are to put it mildly massively disadvantaged at least they aren't in huge re-education camps learning to worship Scott Morrison and the Liberal Party while having their organs stolen if they don't re-educate quick enough. *well, the whole 'wolf warrior' thing is targeted at the Chinese diaspora more than foreign citizens generally, to stoke feelings of righteous indignation and threaten any dissenters. In that context it kind of works, usually.