Zoraptor

Since it came up in the movie thread, the NZ based What We Do In The Shadows spin off 'Wellington Paranormal' has a trailer out. July 11 here and I presume since it's Jemaine Clement/ Taika Waititi it will end up on international Netflixes or similar at some point. I'm reminded of the X-Files crossed with another NZ spoof sketch series, 'Speedo Cops'.

Finished Deadfire. Overall, I liked it a lot. Massive improvement in pretty much every single respect over PoE1. Negatives first: combat was far too easy on the first patch but far better balanced after 1.1 with a few highly annoying exceptions- dominate/ charm attacks that can use your abilities and have no use limitation are way too powerful; I hate regenerating boss boss battles with a passion. By the nature of the game there are a fair few trivial battles of course if you find content you missed, but that is to be expected. The main plot was a bit disjointed from everything else as you never really got a sense of urgency. Then again, that's a flaw with a lot of games including BG2 and FONV. Ship combat... probably needed to go the whole hog and have a grid etc if they were going to have it. Economy etc was unbalanced, but when is it ever not. Positives: it's pretty, it's a big improvement gameplay wise over PoE1, it was largely bug free for me (in fact I had more crashes on 1.1 than before, and even then only a handful and only a few other bugs) it has about the right references to the first game in dialogue and it's about the right length. The NPCs were fine and fit the game and its plot well enough, definitely better than a Bioware pseudo Whedon style quirk-a-thon but worse/ less memorable than classic NPCs. Everything about it felt a bit more polished and less mechanical than PoE1. I also cannot emphasise enough how much better the combat is, whether it's encounter design or the changes to per encounter uses I don't know, but the flow is far better. I also overall liked the travel map over location clicking, and it was pretty well thought out as well. Other observations with spoilers

They should just be refilling the kegs and hooking them up to existing cylinders though, so there's no especial need for more cylinders (just a marginal need, for temporary venues, and a need for more CO2). CO2 is laughably easy to obtain though which is why it's so cheap, so the whole thing stinks of artificial scarcity.

And the beer shortage is for a pathetic reason- not enough cylinder CO2. Just let the yeast do its natural job instead of making alcoholic sodastream like you usually do, euro brewers.

"it's a trap concentrate all fire on the command cruiser!"-- Admiral Allahu Ackbar, Battle of Endor, RotJ. They also show the shield generators being shot out before the A wing crashes; and the Executor a 5 9 13 25km long ship crashing into DS 2 does basically nothing to it. The physics of the kamikaze is fine anyway, it's it not being the go to tactic for any situation that is the problem. The Clone Wars should have ended in five minutes with droid ships simply kamikazing everything and anything that moved. A ST or SW movie still relies on its fanbase for a lot, especially word of mouth. A lack of enthusiasm from the fanbase results in a lack of chatter and things like the almost stealth releases of Solo and ST Beyond. TLJ got very good critic reactions (and STID decent) but I think everyone would accept that it was polarising to the fanbase, the argument being how polarising and how much Solo's performance (or Beyond's) was backlash to the predecessor. I actually enjoyed Into Derpness well enough since I caught it late enough to know what to expect and due to Cederic Crumbleplot and Robocop hamming it up unremittingly, but I'm not a massively strong ST fan. In general though, there's no need to have gaping plot holes in any story telling medium and if they are there then the writers have simply not done their job properly- doesn't matter whether it's Shakespeare or not. In terms of actual plot holes in the other SW movies I can come up with some (un/)lucky happenstances and scales being off eg in ESB (how long does it take to get from Hoth to Cloud City, etc) and they can be handwaved easily enough. With that TLJ one though as above it's a win button for every single space battle in the series; past, present, or future. SW is basically Space Opera/ Space Fantasy, but even fantasy has to have some consistent rules to protect suspension of disbelief.

Jar Jar's Star Trek is simply put terrible Star Trek - and if there's one thing these movies are not, it's close to the originals - unless you base all of Star Trek on Wrath of Khan, which is still a much better movie than Star Trek or Into Darkness will ever be. JJ was pretty open about really wanting to do SW rather than ST. Ironically Rian Johnson was probably a lot better suited to ST rather than SW based on TLJ. The ST movies were also a bit of a warning to Disney/ LA: Into Derpness did decently at the box office despite being largely hated, its successor on the other hand copped the backlash despite being far better and generally liked by the fans who watched it. How much of the TLJ hate is real or apparent is an open question, but I don't think there's real doubt that it influenced Solo's poor performance. And while you don't expect high art from Star Wars or to a lesser extent Star Trek and you shouldn't expect an oscar nominated soliloquy from Sir Larry Olivier about the unbearable agony of exposure to abraded silica particles, if you accept bad writing and bad plotting just because it's __ and has the pew pew and technobabble then bad writing and plotting is all you will ever get. It isn't that hard to write logically rather than, say, deus ex machina Holdo's kamikaze as if that wouldn't have solved every other space battle in SW as well (sheesh, just have Vader get a light speed kamikaze on the blockade runner in ANH, a rebel ship light speed kamikaze Death Star I etc etc) and couldn't have been suggested by anyone with basic physics knowledge. At least do something with a decent immediate reason for not being used all the time.

Value is decent enough for a prebuilt, especially if it comes with windows. If it were a proposed build then: PSU is overkill, more storage is needed, RAM is probably single channel and Ryzen loves faster RAM too, MSI AM4 motherboards are probably the worst overall for reliability and bios and consider that the 1500X is going to be superceded soon. The Razer mouse also has a bad rep for falling apart and the kb/m aren't from the same brand so for any customisation you'll probably need two sets of apps. But for a prebuilt/ 2nd hand it's OK and an order of magnitude better than most big brand prebuilts*. *a skylake non k i7 and 16GB generic 2133 RAM on a custom MB, plus a 1030 and ExplodeMax 350W PSU for 4000 3500NZD? By Grabthar's Hammer, what a savings!

Not a minimum effort solution that allows later monetisation, so won't be done. (Yeah, it can be monetised, but even Valve would immediately see that monetising fixes without which games they're selling literally wouldn't work would be worse for PR than simply having games that don't work)

Bit of a shame that Russia v. Uruguay and Belgium v. England are games where both teams have already qualified since they may not be as competitive as they'd otherwise be on form. golf clap

Picking jobs are typically dreadful- seldom near accommodation so often labour ends up living in caravans being gouged by their employers, they tend to be volume rated rather than on an hourly rate so you end up working for $2 an hour while learning, and it's hard work in blazing sun, cold wind or rain- or alternatively you don't get paid because it's raining. All that is partly due to dodgy owners running down conditions and targeting vulnerable people as workers though. Having said that, the picking/ packing job I had in Britain was just about perfect for when I was doing my OE since they valued reliability more than cheapness so paid hourly, and had decent conditions. Still, they got accused of favouring their Bulgarian and Ukrainian import labour over locals when the season was wrapping and they had to lay off staff, but the truth was a lot of the local labour was awful and considered themselves far too good to work there, only doing it because they'd lose the dole if they didn't.

Yeah, when it comes right down to it there's a lot of stuff on a processor which simply doesn't scale any more. They are still getting decent density improvements on the new processes at least. Intel have equivalents to ccx structure and infinity fabric ('mesh') as some sort of infinity fabric like approach is pretty much essential for large core counts due to ringbus interfaces starting to choke latency wise as core counts go up. Intel and AMD have a cross licensing agreement anyway which I think covers pretty much everything and is kind of essential with AMD owning x64 and Intel owning x86. As keyrock says, the big advantage of the ccx approach is scalability so Intel's consumer chips having ringbus is fine when they were 4 core sky/kabylake but struggles when you start getting to 8 core whisky(?)lake. The ccx approach also is way more efficient for manufacturing, AMD has a low error rate anyway with Zen but with ccx you can just plug combinations together to get anything from 'super' Epyc/ Threadripper chips right down to an r3 1200; and 'defective' ccx can also (mostly) still be plugged together and sold. Intel's specific move into graphics is probably more about the top end machine learning type stuff than consumer and iGPUs- a lot of that used Intel CPUs originally but has shifted to graphics cards especially nVidia as they are better suited to it. Intel actually have at least one gen of iGPU that haven't been released yet due to the cannonlake problems, but fundamentally most people who buy and use an iGPU just want anything that will output Excel or whatever, if they care about games or workstation stuff they have a dedicated graphics card.

Some recent gaming benchmarks for SSDs. NVMe/ PCIe is faster in general than SATA, but not by much and they are not really worth the premium for general usage.

I'd also suspect some people at Intel were extremely annoyed at him cashing out most of his shares the day before the spectre/ meltdown announcement as that really did look bad- and the rest of the board may not have had the chance to. That certainly looked like little letter insider trading even if it didn't make the definition of criminal Insider Trading. In the end though I'd suspect everything else- mobile woes, the affair, share trading and the various PR gaffes- is peripheral to the 10nm fiasco as that will potentially eat deeply into Intel's core (hoho) business.

No irony, if Muharrim Ince wins it would certainly be a revolution given how entrenched the AKP is. If they go to a 2nd round he has a decent chance too since every candidate who isn't Erdogan seems to hate Erdogan, including the islamists and conservatives who should be his allies. A narrow first round victory would still mean 50% of the vote for Erdogan, and it's all he needs for his program. I'm sure he'd like Putin numbers for bragging rights, but a win is a win.

Turkish election is on tomorrow. Will be interesting to see whether there really is an Incel Revolution or near total control of the media and throwing dissenting reporters in jail works out for Erdogan. I'm not sure how Erdogan would cope with even a 2nd round, his ego is sufficient that anything less than victory on the first round would be a defeat. In other news, the Saudi Coalition in Yemen announces the capture of Hodeida Airport for the 8th consecutive day. Actually no, they seem to have conspicuously not announced it today. Given that there's sudden 'pressure' from the US to accept the UN peace deal- and the mind boggling number of destroyed vehicle videos released by the Houthis- it seems likely that things are... not going well. Maybe charging along a narrow unsecured coastal strip in a procession of MRAPs when your enemy has ATGMs wasn't such a good idea after all, who'd of thunk it. On the positive side, no literally starving the population into submission, for the moment at least.

It's about marketing really, smaller size being better. The '12nm' process used in Ryzen 2 is more akin to Intel's 14nm++ as well. 10nm is the more accurate name for all '7nm' processes, though the whole nanometer naming scheme is beginning to get a bit silly anyway at these scales. But assuming TSMC/ GloFo can get their 7nm process working in mass production they deserve the marketing edge of '7nm' given that Intel's 10nm is so error ridden that the only chip being sold after 3 years is a low clock dual core. The prospect of Intel 14nm Skylake v4 or v5 taking on 7nm Zen- probably 6 core/ ccx so 12 core desktop to 48 core TR/ Epyc and not on a low power node so more overclockable to boot- is likely why Krzanich got the chop at Intel yesterday rather than him boffing an intern or whoever. He did pretty well at gouging maximising profit while AMD was not competitive but dreadfully at contingencies in case they did come out with a 'Zen' like product and some of their damage control has been absolute cringe and poorly judged- their 28 core answer to Threadripper 2 needing 1kg of VRMs and an industrial fish tank cooler to run briefly probably got more and more prolonged coverage than the demo of it did. The Intel board certainly seemed peeved since he didn't get the customary golden handshake on leaving.

It was 10% off on GOG during their sale starting 2 weeks ago. It was also bundled with WL2 (and 10% off? not sure as I backed it anyway) on pre-order there. Given that Deadfire is probably more natural as a $40 title than $50 and it was released close to Major Sale Time I wouldn't be too surprised if a higher base price but quick small discount was part of a sales strategy to get it sales listing exposure once the Summer Sales hit.

You should definitely watch 'Boy' then. A pause is a good idea, if it coincides with self reflection and an honest appraisal of what went wrong. The fundamental problem they have with SW as a franchise is that people want it to be similar to the previous movies but without being derivative, and to respect what came before without being hamstrung by it- and that is a difficult tightrope to walk. What they've done has managed to alienate a lot of people by veering from one extreme of being derivative (JJ/ TFA) to the other with TLJ, and that makes it hard for spin offs which already have innate problems from their connection to 'recent' in universe events. In retrospect (from their perspective, I always thought it was questionable for the movies in the long term) setting the sequels so close to the originals and using Luke/ Leia/ Han is the biggest mistake, and in effect it's the same one they've made with the spin offs- having the 'big names' for continuity and recognition causes big limitations as well as giving big advantages.

Orogun = John McAfee confirmed.

Football is near unique in that rankings mean very little when it comes to specific results, outside the very top sides. Italy, Chile and Netherlands are all very highly ranked but didn't even make the finals and Argentina was within a whisker of missing out (albeit Chile would have got in in their place). Russia certainly has a weak pool though, even with Egypt being African champions. Assuming Uruguay beats Saudi qualification won't be at stake for their match against Russia, so unless they really want to avoid whichever group leader they might face in the next round the final match is unlikely to be a very competitive game.

DPRK wouldn't get elected to it for the same reason they don't get onto the UNSC, they don't have enough friends to and aren't in a bloc, let alone an influential one. Congo or Saudi get onto the UNHRC much the same way as Ivory Coast or Kazakhstan or Ethiopia or Equatorial Guinea gets onto the UNSC- they have enough political friends, leverage or influence to get there. That's not ideal, but then nothing is whether in the UN or anywhere else, the question is whether there is anything that is better, practically, and whether the current situation is better than nothing (it is). Frankly, given Trump's popularity with erstwhile friendly countries I suspect that this withdrawal was plain inevitable whatever happened, as the US faces a re-election next year that they might well have embarrassingly lost. This way at least the isolationists/ manifest destiny types get to think that Trump is being 'strong'.

WWDITS is getting two TV spinoffs, one centered on vampires and the other on the werewolves. I always wonder how well things like Boy or Hunt for the Wilderpeople or WWDITS translate overseas as they have a lot of in jokes and specifically kiwi stuff (eg Huia and Crumpy's Ute in Hunt) without being quite as... direct as something like Once Were Warriors, but most people seem to like them anyway.

The UN Human Rights Council could definitely use some integrity itself, that would be a massive increase over its current zero integrity. Mostly though, having Haley and Pompeo give masturbatory speeches about how great the US record on human rights is and how principled they are when literally the previous story was about kids being forceably separated from their parents in the US as a political lever is slightly jarring. Nevertheless, if that was the reason the US withdrew I'd be applauding them, but it isn't, they've withdrawn because it won't act as a rubber stamp for US positions- and, once again, they've failed to even get their friends on board with said positions. It's clear that the UNHRC has problems, but the number of countries who believe they can be fixed by taking their ball and going home while whining about the injustice of it all is... not very high. To paraphrase the common saying with a smattering of Seymour Skinner "if you have the occasional disagreement it's probably not you; have nothing but disagreements and it probably is you who is the problem, not everyone else" On a more practical level, excluding countries from the UNHRC as the US wants would not improve things. Israel cannot get support even from staunch US allies for a reason, and that won't be 'fixed' unless the US and its appointees are the only countries with a seat at the table- or Israel stops its quite genuine abuses of human rights so they can at least get support from US allies. As for excluding the DRC or Saudi etc, preaching down to the disenfranchised seldom works and has some... unpleasant historical overtones, especially when most of DRC's population was literally worked to death by a particular modern western bastion of human rights, without any repercussions at all, and not that long ago either. So if you're going to exclude DRC do you exclude Belgium for slavery, genocide and leaving Congo as a complete basket case, or was that too long ago/ accidental/ too white man's burden? Do you exclude the US due to the School of the Americas, rendition, coups, invasions, drone strikes etc? Britain due to the Opium Wars or Churchill's Bengal Famine, or forceably deporting Diego Garcia's entire population etc? France due to Libya and the plethora of coups and strongmen its supported in Africa etc? Even little old NZ let a plague ship into (then) German Samoa and systematically nicked land off brown people. Apply any exclusion principle equitably and we end up with the UNHRC being... Bhutan, maybe? In the end you just get a variation on the Genocide Olympics but with Human Rights and people arguing about the quality and reasons for all the abuses and which should be exclusionary and which not.

A country which has appointed a torturer to head of its spy agency has decided to withdraw from the UN Human Rights Council in "shame". Nice to see some integrity for once. (Always amusing to see Haley act as if everyone else is an integrity vacuum except the US and Israel, then complain about how she's Nicky No Mates without the slightest trace of irony showing)

It's Vice, they're a corporate stooge so long as it's the right corporates. They'd also be concerned saying anything that might put gamers in a positive light lest said gamers turn out to have 'gator' at the end. You can get addicted to gaming for sure, I very much doubt it's unique enough to deserve a separate category though. You can get addicted to pretty much anything that has a reward reaction, as it's the reward reaction you usually get addicted to.