Zoraptor

Both of them are. Though I got it around the wrong way which was which; he is NSA and was working with GCHQ in the UK, she is CIA. (10 years later and that last clause still makes me feel compelled to mention Aiden Gillen)

Good news everybody! Anne Sacoolas, the US diplomat's wife (and active NSA agent, since promoted) who ran over and killed Harry Dunn and fled back to the US rather than face any consequences then tried to ambush his family into forgiving her along with Trump is going to be hit with a wet bus ticket via video conference link to a UK court. Funny thing being that this was the best the UK could get, as a swap for approving Navalny's extradition. How utterly pathetic is that?

Don't know if I'll buy anything (meh, who am I kidding? This being the year that I'd concentrate on my backlog is as much an annual thing as The Year of the Linux Desktop) but them stuffing up the banner advert for it in Galaxy so that it 'launched' in New Zealand 12 hours early was so very typically GOG.

Expanse S6 (though only really spoilers for S5) WoT Ep6 and book spoilers

I have played it, and was completely unaware of any differences- which I guess is actually a pretty good sign, for a (free) remaster. Might have been a little more unstable, but it was like 2 crashes in a 30 hour game so nothing extreme.

Expanse S601 TLDR; already feels a lot better than S5 did.

WoT Episode 6 TLDR: "we were this close to greatness, this close"

Wow, I missed that Tilly was being written out first time. Everything really does just blur into one. Shame, she had some potential and I liked her as a concept, even if it was utterly wasted in execution. Yep, he and Tilly's actor- plus Saru and Captain Malfoy, of course, and Michelle Yeoh at least looked like she was enjoying herself- were completely fine as actors, and made the most of the very limited amount they were offered. Their main trouble is the writing, and I'd certainly add the directing too, which meant they were either given uninteresting and inconsistent rubbish, or told to be ludicrously melodramatic. For that matter even Stamets was far better as Mirror Universe Stamets, but my overwhelming memory of him was his tendency to smile as if he'd never done it himself but read how to do it in a manual. Actual real person managing uncanny valley or Pod People simulation, and there was a lot of it even from people I know are capable of acting from other things (hence the directing being an issue). End of the day though as Picard shows you can have a literal RSC legend delivering the lines, and actually trying, but if they're garbage lines then they're garbage and the gravitas counts for nothing. On the tokenism, and because it came up earlier in the week... Frankly, I'd say that Omar Little the Baltimore stick up boy murderer and drug dealer from 2003 (?) does more for gay perception than Stamets the engineer and Culber the doctor. But that's because Omar (and Rawls, if you want to count him) are well written characters first and foremost whose sexuality is secondary. And you don't have to be premium drama to do it that way either. End of the day if your stated goal is to normalise those who are marginalised then you have to, well, normalise them. And that means not writing them as if that one marginalised trait is the only thing about them that matters most of the time.

Dunno, from what I've seen it's not very popular on reddit either, except in places criticism is banned. That clearly isn't Woody Allen- it's 100% John Munch. Star Trek added to Munchverse; Homicide: LotS/ L&O holodeck crossover incoming. Weird thing for me is that I only stopped watching 5 episodes ago and I literally cannot remember who half the characters are, they're like a singularity of blandness. I last saw, say, Blake's 7 more than 25 years ago but I can remember some single episode characters better than main cast Discovery people. I watched the thing for three seasons and I actively had to think about who Culber is. And I have to say, since it reinforces the whole "road to hell.." thing the only thing I actually remembered about Culber is that he's the gay doctor. OK, and that he got killed by Michael's beardy emo cryptohuman S1 boyfriend, then resurrected in S2 because you cannot have permanent consequences. I think I'd been trying to suppress that though. Let's say 2 seasons of him being a character, and that's the sum total of what I can remember.

Practically, overhead isn't that important since it gets defrayed over potentially thousands of products. Vendor cut (eg Walmart/ Amazon for dvds; or movie theatres) is the big factor that download distribution avoids, assuming you have your own service. The cost to do download/ streaming distribution is almost zero, fabrication and distribtion cost of a dvd is higher but still very close to zero. The closest parallel is Spotify vs CD sales. Pretty much all the big names prefer the old model, and now make the vast majority of their money from live performance rather than sales. If you're getting in the region of 2c per track played you need a track to be played 1000 times to make the same as a $20 CD sale's gross. Maybe halve that for vendor cut (and distribution), but it's still 500 plays required. For most albums that would requires it to be played 50 times to make back the money. I've probably listened to a decent number of albums more than 50 times, but over the course of 30 years. As a corp once you've got the money from a CD (or DVD) it doesn't matter if it's never played once. Disney would love to cut out the middleman and stream everything, but they also want to retain the premium pricing. If you're got 5 people in a family watching a PPV movie they need to charge you maybe $30* to break even compared to 5 people going to the movies- but most people would consider that unreasonable when it's multiple months worth of subscription streaming and they know they'll get it bundled if they wait 6 months. *no idea what it costs in the US, but that would be roughly NZ pricing in USD assuming half to the theatre, half to the movie maker.

Sildenafil/ Viagra is a vasodilator (opens/ widens blood vessels, hence its primary pharmaceutical use) which lowers blood pressure. High blood pressure is a major factor in Alzheimer's. So there's a sensible/ logical reason for it. If you really want to go off with a bang though when it comes to Alzheimer's consider nitroglycerin. Other blood pressure medications such as statins have a similar effect but aren't as funny.

Ingtar was originally in S1 as well, but that actor had a scheduling clash for S2 so they've renamed the S1 version. Allegedly Uno is in S1 as well but doesn't get lines (and is probably portrayed by a random extra wearing an eyepatch).

US launches diplomatic boycott of Beijing Winter Olympics. Back in the day you used to do proper boycotts for proper reasons like the All Blacks touring apartheid South Africa.

So am I, though I started a month or so before the series dropped (and am up to Shadow Rising) WoT spoilers

GOG specifically labels In Development reviews as being In Development. You'd think Valve could do the same for Early Access.

Since Raithe mentioned Romeo and Juliet... By any objective measure its plot is actively worse than pretty much any modern movie's and almost all modern media full stop. Massively contrived at all points, ludicrously contrived ending, maudlin, and the entire plot from meeting to falling in love to eloping to suicide with duels etc along the way takes place over- and this is literally, literally- one day. If it wasn't 400+ years old, written by Bill the Bard, directed by [famous director] with [RSC alums] acting it would be laughed at by the elitists.

While the answer it trite you really can't get around the Galbrush Paradox as an explanation; anything other than consistent strength and competence is seen as sexist when applied to a female character. And unfortunately that tends to lead to boring characters who cannot get character development because they're already fully developed. To be frank I find that idea to be the intellectual equivalent of expecting all women to be bikini models looks wise. So for Egwene...

WoT spoilers re Egwene (show and book)

Honestly, I think the biggest reason for the LOTR show is Jeff Bezos' ego and a desire to add prestige to his rather shabby business empire (bit like his obsession with space, really, though without the practical aspect of him flying off to the moon or whatever once the earth has become covered with extraneous amazon wrapping from tacky plastic nick knacks). He's always wanted Amazon to be #1 in everything, including streaming, it's only once they're #1 and have the competition hobbled that the money making takes over. It's been Amazon's #1 tactic since getting big to use profits in one area to subsidise another which is losing money while they drive the competition there out of business. Bundling the streaming with other more desirable services is, er, prime Amazon tactics, and parachuting in a well known IP with a built in fanbase is an obvious approach. So overall the LOTR show looks like a classic loss leader, ie not actually designed to make money but to get attention. Even just the rights are ludicrously expensive- and they were happy enough to sit on them until Christopher Tolkien was no longer a problem. They did a huge amount of prelim work on the initial 'Young Aragorn' concept that all went into the circular file once they got the rights to 2nd Age when C Tolkien stepped back (and later died). Will be interesting to see if the focus on big budget stuff lasts since Amazon as a whole probably doesn't have too many illusions about driving Netflix or Disney out of business and Bezos is at least theoretically gone; so it will be a battle of how much money it loses vs the hit to Amazon's prestige a cancellation would have. (99% chance its bad fanfic writing is the problem, but its failure gets blamed on black hobbits triggering incels or something)

If I were generous I'd count her impersonation of alt universe bondage Tilly back in S1 as some sort of diplomatic mission, at least. Wheel of Time ep5: TLDR; not a fan of this one at all, possibly worse than Ep1. Changes stuff that doesn't need changing, badly unfocused, and then doesn't change stuff that actually does need changing because you've changed other stuff. Note: includes fairly extensive book spoilers this time

Wait, what. How can you list weird and wonderful things from Dune 1984 without mentioning Sting's batarang codpiece? It's the single most memeorable thing from the entire movie, and the second most memorable codpiece in entertainment after the Black Russian.

In utterly unsurprising news, Omicron has been detected in European samples from before its first official detection in RSA. In utterly utterly unsurprising news, despite this the west have travel bans from southern African countries, most of which have zero detected omicron, and no travel bans for all the western countries that definitely have it. So yeah, South Africa being punished for being competent and transparent, and Euros suffering nothing from their lack of competency and their opacity*. I may poke fun at the WHO for their pandering to China (no Xi variant as it would embarrass a certain corpulent honey loving Chinese leader) and India (switching to greek letters when an Indian variant would embarrass Modi) but there was a good reason for it when the rest of the world is all Trumpian 'just test less' to avoid being the first country to find it. As always, a big thanks to that cretin von der Leyen**- and to Germany, for kicking its embarrassments upstairs- for blocking the removal of vaccine patents, allowing more spread and more variants with more mutations. Great news for German company BionTech though, especially if there's immune escape, and that's the important thing... *should have been detected earlier, you can bet that any EU country larger than Luxemburg is doing more sequencing than RSA is. Wouldn't be in the least bit surprising if they were holding off on an announcement to avoid the negative press. **though it seems the waiver may be coming now and it is better late than never, and to be fair to the EU the Euro Parliament voted for it. In true "wouldn't be allowed into the EU itself, for being undemocratic" EU style it was the autocratic/ undemocratic level of career incompetencies on the top that was blocking it.

Royal snakes. Thank me later.

Yep. You could easily have positively charged electrons instead of negative- presumably it's true arbitrary so a 50% chance of either, though you'd never actually know since they'd translate into our language/ scientific perception- so long as you then have negatively charged protons, that's an arbitrary difference based on language much like north and south magnetic poles. But an electron will always have the opposite charge from a proton whatever the charge is called, and the poles of a magnet will always be opposite whether you call them north and south or Neville and Steve. You cannot have hydrogen with a proton and a positron, and you can't muck around with universal constants (typically because if you do, everything stops working spectacularly; hence the deep philosophical observation that the universe works because if it didn't we would not be here to know about it). Different cultures or species may call them different things, perceive them differently (an obvious example being synethesia and the ability to 'see' music some have) and express them differently but they're interpretations of the same physical phenomena.

Seems a bit odd the WHO decided to skip two iterations in the naming scheme and use Omicron. OK, so there would be interminable jokes about the Nu/ new variant if they named it that much like all the Windows? Nein! jokes we so sadly missed out on due to MS skipping an iteration. Guess they must have skipped the other one because they thought people might confuse it with any upcoming Chi variant. Can't think of any other reason they wouldn't want people talking about the Xi variant.