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Finished this. Solid enough I'll continue the series. I'm always happy when I see a series recommendation that's recent and has regular releases - first book released in 2018 and has sequels releasing annually. Wind and Truth - Yea it's another in the stormlight archive, and yes it's like 1300 pages but I'm enjoying it. There's also so many different POV characters that the variety is really nice. I personally enjoyed that aspect of the Song of Ice and Fire series, and I'm enjoying it in this book. There's definitely been an increase in the interconnectedness of these books and his other work (he specifically says it's all a shared universe, and has released books with varying degrees of expanded lore), and I'm mostly ok with the increase but I'm starting to realize it's going to suffer if it gets much bigger in his more "mainline" novels. I'd prefer if he kept the overarching plots to more niche books but I suspect his audience is fine with it. Just makes recommending his books harder if you need to read 12+ novels to understand his recent releases. James S. A Correy (expanse authors) came out with a new space opera series - The Mercy of the Gods - I'll give this a go at some point. There's also the 2024 goodreads winners: https://www.goodreads.com/choiceawards/best-books-2024 And NPR's list: https://apps.npr.org/best-books/#view=covers&year=2024

Alien Romulus - This was ok, too close of a retread of the first film. Also I thought the CGI for a particular android was surprisingly low quality, I think I even saw a post recently showing they had gone back and redone it for the bluray release. The Knick - I actually went back and finished this, it's really good. Here's a fantastic little video talking about why the show feels different and so high quality as well as the consistent cinematography/editing (because it's essentially all one guy). The show is absolutely worth a watch due to the quality level, and honestly deserves to be included in the "prestige tv" club. Mr. and Mrs. Smith - This show is far more style over substance, but it absolutely nails the style. Donald Glover's character unironically talks about fashion and looking good and it felt almost fourth wall breaking. The show also does a decent job with the romance aspect considering the short runtime of the series. Bonus, Ron Pearlman's character is fucking hilarious, and totally against type. SAS Rogue Heroes - Turn your brain off WW2 themed nonsense, British flavoured. Anime bullshit: Solo Leveling Season 2 - Power fantasy garbage, but high quality animation. This is also one of the few non-japanese original material shows that have been turned into anime.

Secret Level stuff: td:dr - just watch the unreal tournament and warhammer 40k episodes everything else is skippable. Outer Worlds - meh MegaMan - cool intro, way too short Exodus Odyssey - neat intro for an upcoming knock off mass effect game Spelunky - meh Concord - neat intro for a game that has already been delisted / killed (lol) Honor Way of Kings - No idea what the fuck this was Playtime Fullfillment - Absolutely trash playstation commercial Day of the Jackal - This is decent but there's too much fluff around character's personal lives that don't add anything to the overall plot of an assassin and the agency trying to catch him. It seems like they're going to get another season, hopefully they focus the plotline and ignore the family drama, but knowing hollywood they'll do the opposite. Dune Prophecy - This ended up middling. I feel like there are cool ideas they could get into but they're missing the mark. I'm also not sure the super short season (or it being cut in half) was the right call. I'll keep watching but I'm mildly disappointed this isn't better. It's also unfair to compare this to the movies, but it's almost impossible to tell your audience not to do that. The Agency - This is a remake of the French series The Bureau, which I watched some of. So I keep getting weird feelings of deja vu because I recognize the characters and plot elements. The show is clearly premium tv with solid actors, good set design and a nice layer of polish. They've also changed some stuff to be more topical, including some very current stuff about the war in Ukraine, and tensions with China. I'd give this a tentative recommendation. I'm also really tempted to go back and watch the Bueau because I remember that show being solid. Anime bullshit: DanDaDan is fantastic, please watch. Sadly they ended the season at an odd place and left with an abrupt cliffhanger. At least this was wildly popular and successful so we're guaranteed more.

I am wondering about this, since when all these empty nesters / childless individuals die, where does their property go especially if they have no next of kin.

Hoping they do a lot more secret levels or LDR as its one of my favorite series in all of Netflix

Secret Level - It's basically video game themed "Love, Death and Robots" made by some of the same people. I'll try and keep my thoughts on each episode brief because they are all quite different and generally different levels of quality. D&D - meh, nothing special. Sifu - cool concept, middling executution New World - Arnold voicing the character, it's goofy and mostly bad. Unreal Tournament - One of the best in the series. Really good. Warhammer 40k - The guy who made astartes worked on this, so it's fantastic. Pac Man - Uhh, high concept grimdark pacman... that's a take. Crossfire - Grounded setting, but this is generic enough it could be call of duty / battlefield / whatever. Armored Core - Keanu Reeves + big robots, sadly not interesting. They're going to release another batch I'll check through those when they come out. They're very quick episodes, honestly I wish they were a bit longer, but I suspect this first season had a very low budget. Say Nothing - The trailer for this is practically a comedy, and while there's a few moments of levity, the general tone is as dark as the subject matter. This is one of the few shows I might want to either turn on the dialogue booster or subtitles, I can understand them but sometimes the audio mix is a bit all over the place and I'm straining against it + heavy accents. Creature Commandos - It's basically a knockoff animated "The Suicide Squad". It's more James Gunn DCU content so if you're into that it might appeal. So far it's mid.

Megalopolis 2024 imdb - https://www.imdb.com/title/tt10128846/ Imagine a famous painting. Now imagine someone made a poor copy. It's just plain bad right? Then you realize they also added some clowns. It's still just plain bad but what is it now? This movie is a disaster. It's so terrible. Many of the scenes are so far beyond ridiculous they end up being funny while the (thin) story is completely serious. Watch this 4 min clip below. The context doesn't even matter (there isn't much anyways). I laughed a lot watching this movie. I would only recommend this as like a party movie when people want to intentionally see something bad and just laugh together.

I haven't played many ARPGs like Diablo or the original path of exile - honestly most of them didn't really appeal to me at the time. Obviously I've now decided to give Path of Exile 2 a go, and I've really been enjoying myself. I've played through act 1, and hit somewhere around level 20 - I still feel like I have no idea what I'm doing but still making consistent progress. I will say my decision to play as a monk definitely made the first few hours of the game tough and slow. Basically all level before 14 and frost strike were awful, playing a squishy melee character in a game where bosses and even normal mobs hit very hard was... not super great. The inverse difficulty curve of early levels being a struggle bus and then later levels when your character "comes online" is a weird switch. I've actually seen some people suggest monks basically play a different ranged class through early game (you get enough skill gems to do this) which seems a bit extreme, but I definitely understand it. Obviously the complexity of this game is more than half the point, with a skill tree that makes anyone feel overwhelmed, and more crafting materials than I can keep track of. I still feel completely clueless but I'm slowly picking up tips from the internet and feeling a bit more confident in some of the basic gameplay and economy elements. I still think I'll be that guy following guides, because the thought of building a whole character out of that skill tree is just way too complex for me. I'm roughly following this guide: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rtywy8D7Wrs https://maxroll.gg/poe2/planner/6ib9x036 Basic focus on ice strike as an attack skill with bell as a boss/elite enemy killer. It really was a night at day difference once you get ice strike - I feel like the speed and damage I'm doing is dramatically better than the first 14 levels. I don't know how I feel about about the relative impermanence of characters in this game. Basically each "season" you need to roll a new character, which feels antithetical to all the MMO style games I've played and enjoyed. On the bright side it does push people to play "new" content or different styles which might force people into finding stuff they otherwise wouldn't be interested in. I'll keep an open mind about stuff. I'm enjoying myself so far and I can definitely see getting into this game and at the very least keeping up whenever there's a new season or additional content to enjoy. I'm normally heavily opposed to early access, but considering the gameplay loop of rolling a new character each season, I feel like this is a really solid way for them to iron out kinks and weird balancing issues before the 1.0 launch.

Megathread of the Game Awards: https://old.reddit.com/r/Games/comments/1hcy68n/the_2024_game_awards_megathread/ Highlights according to me: I love when companies either shadow launch or pull the "OUT NOW" move with content. I think with so many live service games, they should be willing to do more of that especially when they get some free advertising at an award show like this. In general, I prefer a really short lead up to launch, Bethesda used to do this (not anymore) - just announce like 3 months before and put out a media blitz to maximize hype. Witcher 4 probably won't be out for a long time, my guess would be 2027. They did the same thing with the initial cyberpunk 2077 announce trailer being like 5 years before the game came out. I'm kinda shocked they're going to have us potentially playing Ciri (there were some minor sections in Witcher 3 we got to play her). My concern is that they wanted a "new" character with familiarity to the setting - but she canonically is one of the most powerful beings in the entire setting. Also surprised they had her go through the trial of grasses / become a full Witcher (notice the cat eyes and ability to use Witcher potions) because the Wolf school never had a woman pass the trial. Full speculation mode: I hope this is a bit of a red herring and we end up playing a brand new Witcher working under Ciri's new Wolf school. You could do something similar to V in cyberpunk with modest character customization and it would allow them to be more broad with how you intereact with other people. If they do instead stick with Ciri as the player character, I sincerely hope they go a bit over the top with the powers. She has full mage abilities (not the limited Witcher ones) and has the ability to world hop. They could do some cool stuff with having a small side quests where she visits night city or other planes. They could also do some stuff with the convergence of spheres (how monsters originally came about) which gives some nice stakes but allows for plenty of story opportunities. They seem to be teasing other weapons like that chain she wields - I think that's fine, but I still think they should lean into the swords similar to Sekiro or Ghost of Tsushima - they could bring back the stances from witcher 1 to help counter different enemies. Combat in the Witcher games has never been the high point, so I hope they put some effort into making it a bit better. Naughty Dog always makes good stuff, I'm excited to see what they have cooking since The Last of Us. Looks more action oriented, which I think could be cool. I hope this comes to PC sooner, Last of Us 2 came out in 2020, and remastered in 2024 with the PC release in 2025. I've seen evidence that Sony/Playstation is taking PC releases more seriously, maybe aim for 12-18 months delay, it might also help capture any follow-up DLC into a sort of game of the year edition. I'm curious about the Elden Ring spinoff - this could be really good, or absolute trash. Interesting that they're saying it's more targeted for 3 player co-op (but also allows solo play). Not entirely sure if this is from one of the main teams at FromSoft or what, but they've been on a tear lately.

Nosi - WEIGHTLESS Atu x Dpat x Sango - 3

Arcane (Season 2) The animation is pretty fantastic and is a good enough reason alone to watch this show but the story this season lost me a bit. I'm an outsider to League lore. Noxus? Ionia? These don't mean anything to me other than what the show tells me. What is that thing? Why is he doing/saying that? Is this supposed be a special location? When did we learn about this? I stopped asking questions after a bit. Dune Prophecy The show is fine but I almost feel like it hurts the show that it has the same name as the movies. This is a different story and comparison is almost unfair. It's not about a journey of the hero. It's about schemers long before the hero ever showed up. Acting is fine but I am having a little issue buying the character of the emperor. He seems so easily swayed by everyone. Silo (Season 2) It's plodding along fine. I'm pretty invested in this show and seeing how they finish it since I read the books. I'm pretty sure they changed a lot of things but the most important parts are there. The Newsroom (all seasons) Finished it. I enjoyed it but it definitely swings "soap opera" and gets pretty preachy sometimes. There is obviously a specific style to this (Sorkin) which you either like or don't.

I'm still grinding through this. It's been going slow lately. Too sleepy.

Arcane Season 2 - Solid as hell, I know there's some mention of the second season having pacing issues. I get that and I respectfully disagree. I had a blast with season 2, it's still solid and fast paced with great character elements. From my very basic league knowledge they absolutely did some ret-conning which I"m mostly ok with. I absolutely love their animation style which I think is wholly unique and I expect that Riot now owning a bit of Fortiche will push for more (please dear god make more). I think the league universe is messy and deserves a bit of a pass on some of their main story lines. We could see some cool stuff regarding noxus vs demacia or noxus vs ionia. I feel like an old man because I remember when the first music vidoes regarding Vi and Jinx came out and how that made me more interested in the characters and the lore. I'm biased because I think jinx is my most played champion but damn am I impressed with what they made this season. Spoiler stuff to follow: Dune prophecy has been surprisingly good. I heard some weirdly obnoxious reviews about how it looks "low budget" - (go fuck yourself) this show looks great and while the plot is basic I'm having fun. It helps that they hired great talent for the main characters. I'm interested in how they progress with references to some of the major factions in the books.

Dropped this, it wasn't pulling me in. I might go back to it one day, it wasn't offensively bad, just not what I was in the mood for. I'm about halfway through Empire of Silence [Sun Eater #1] - I've heard this is a solid modern space opera series, with heavy influence from Dune books. So far this is solid with some interesting if familiar worldbuilding elements and some neat asides where the author/protagonist inserts a reference to a future event, with just enough of a tease to keep you engaged. It leans heavily on some fantasy elements, and isn't hard sci-fi but so far I've been enjoying it. Sidenote: I know it's easy shorthand to have medieval style lords and landed gentry in sci-fi and especially space operas but man, I wish authors did something else.

Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning | Teaser Trailer (2025 Movie) - Tom Cruise The Amateur | Official Trailer Secret Level - Official Trailer | Prime Video

November 17. I'm keeping my expectations low. I'm basically just watching The Newsroom right now.

Empire of the Vampire #1 Empire of the Vampire Jay Kristoff https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/56269205-empire-of-the-vampire More than half way in. Not exactly enlightened reading but I'm kind of having fun with it. Feels a lot like a witcher story. Special individuals who train and specialize in killing monsters who are a bit ostracized from normal society.

Finished the single player campaign of this. It's a decent game. Surprised they were willing to use some major named characters in the campaign. I still need to get used to the combat mechanics - I might give some of the co-op a try but I suspect I'll bounce off of this fairly quick. I've just got too much else to play.

The Penguin - Really great. I don't know why they decided to give Sofia Falcone some ye-ye ass haircut but that's one of the only things I didn't like about the show. This is going to be a weird show because it's being lauded but it's tied to the newest batman movie, which is most likely going to be retconned shortly by James Gunn's new DC stuff. It still stands on it's own and is a great show. Agatha All Along - My opinion of this change drastically towards the end. There still some goofy superhero crap that I eye-rolled at. But they also did some very clever stuff with the writing. The Diplomat Season 2 - Solid little season, but it's starting to approach "jumping the shark" territory. I'm getting flashbacks of latter seasons House of Cards. Arcane Season 2 - First 3 episodes dropped. It's fantastic, no notes. Upcoming Dune Prophecy - I'm hoping this is good, it's based off the spinoff books from Frank Herbert's son - which are... not as good. But I suspect they're doing some heavy adaptation and if you throw a decent budget on this you could get a nice space opera setting with some palace intrigue/drama. I'm fairly certain people are going to call this game of thrones in space - I really hate reductive takes like that, but because HBO owns both properties it's an inevitable comparison.

https://www.nar.realtor/research-and-statistics/research-reports/highlights-from-the-profile-of-home-buyers-and-sellers First-time buyers decreased to 24% of the market share (32% last year). This year now marks the lowest share since NAR began collecting the data in 1981. 62% of recent buyers were married couples, 20% were single females, 8% were single males, and 6% were unmarried couples. 73% of recent buyers did not have a child under the age of 18 in their home. This is the highest share recorded. At 22%, the primary reason for purchasing a home was the desire to own a home of their own. For first-time buyers, this number jumps to 64%. 26% of home buyers paid cash for their home, an all-time high for all-cash buyers. There's more data in there, just be aware this is from NAR which means this is all national data - and as the old saying about the most important thing in real estate, location [matters]. Here's California's most recent data: https://www.car.org/marketdata/data/countysalesactivity My initial thoughts were: Housing supply still sucks, normally increased interest rates would create downward pressure on home prices, but with such limited inventory this isn't behaving normally. Not surprised that the overwhelming number of sales are not first time homebuyers because, and tangentially all cash offers are way up - partly due to rates making this more attractive and partly due to people having capital / equity in their existing homes giving them the ability to make these all cash offers. Dual incomes make up the overwhelming majority of buyers - also a healthy dash of gender gap with single women being 2.5x more likely than single men to purchase a home. Another weird demographic crossover is the 73% of buyers don't have children under 18 - this suggests that we're seeing empty nesters and childless individuals make up the vast majority of buyers. 64% of first time home buyers primary reason is a desire to own their own home. I genuinely want to shout this into the face of some political commentators that occasionally have the audacity to suggest that young people prefer renting over buying. I understand this is a self selecting group (first time buyers obviously made this calculus) but confirmation bias aside, I think this should be a strong statistic to counter this garbage take about "young people" preferring to rent. These stats are depressing...

1. https://gopro.com/en/us/shop/cameras 2. https://store.insta360.com/consumer?i_source=website&i_medium=menu_button&i_campaign=consumer 3. https://www.dji.com/handheld?site=brandsite&from=nav Nice to see the space getting more competitive. Jump to 3:27 for the low-light.

https://www.imdb.com/title/tt1870479/ The Newsroom TV Series 2012–2014 TV-MA 1h This was recommended to me a long time ago but I recently stumbled across a youtube clip and decided to finally check it out. I'm only two episodes in and it's mostly been alright so far. I have a few complaints but I'm going to save them until I'm a little farther into the series to see where they go with some of the plot. It has a high rating.

Severance — Season 2 Official Teaser | Apple TV+ January 17 Finally this is coming back...... ICE - A Thousand Suns / Episode 1 Not really a trailer. A full episode lol. The Agency | Official Trailer | Paramount+ with SHOWTIME November 29th Say Nothing | Official Trailer | FX I'm only posting this to comment that the trailer has a weird vibe considering the subject matter. Silo — Season 2 Official Trailer | Apple TV+ November 15 Since I read the books I'll definitely be checking this out. THE ORDER Trailer (2024) Jude Law, Nicholas Hoult The Franchise | Official Trailer | Max Elevation - Official Trailer (2024) Anthony Mackie So we have done vision, sound and altitude so I'm going to make a new movie about arbitrary monsters that only kill people who speak in vowels but a small group of people learn hw to spk wtht nd fght fr th ftr NYCC Exclusive Clip | Star Trek: Strange New Worlds - Season 3 2025 Last season was alright. I'll be checking this out too. The Diplomat: Season 2 | Official Trailer | Netflix October 31st Season 1 was neat. I'll be checking out season 2.

So the Insta360 Ace Pro 2 officially launched today. I suspected it would continue to over-perform in low light, but some of the comparisons I've seen really emphasize how awful GoPro's low light performance is. The DJI Action 5 is decent, but still falls behind the Ace & Ace 2 in low light conditions. Of course I have a specific use case with my scuba diving, which heavily emphasizes low light performance. There are some other minor improvements, and oddly enough the inclusion of a physical windscreen over the mic seems to be a big advantage over the competition. I've also looked at some of the 360 cameras (Insta360 X4) because you can sort of set and forget, or pick your angle after the fact. But I think when it comes to scuba diving there are some specific dives / environments that would be great, and others where I would probably prefer a more standard action camera. I think stuff like swim throughs, caverns/caves, or DPV footage look great with the 360 setup, but pointing at specific wildlife, either macro or wide angle stuff favors the more standard action camera. Great example of the 360 camera scuba diving - Another one. Either way I'm heavily leaning towards buying an Ace Pro 2. I'm also debating on some mounting options. My initial gut instinct is to go with a tried and true collapsible selfie stick - but the downside is that you need to find a good way to stow it at the beginning/end of the dive. There are options like attaching a bolt snap onto the bottom of the selfie stick and clipping it off to a chest d-ring and then using some bungie/range band on the webbing so you can keep it reasonably flush. It's a bit of a pain in the ass to secure it but it gives you some distance and allows you to essentially point the camera closer to the wildlife without getting too close (or putting your hands close to them). I've also seen plenty of people that use a tray with 2 handles. I have strong opinions on this because it basically requires you to hand up a camera when getting back onto the boat, and sometimes even asking a crew member to hand you the camera setup when getting in, or jumping while one handing the camera setup. I also don't ever expect myself to use video lights - the main advantage of the tray setup imo. The final and most simple option is actually just attaching a bolt snap to the bottom of the dive housing. Easiest to secure, smallest profile, but really only best for quick shots. Sidenote: This is one of the few instances where I can actually find benefit in the "AI" component of the camera. I know this is at least partially AI-washing, because the AI chip is really just running a bunch of denoising algorithms to help boost low light performance, but it's actually working. For many years Google's pixel cameras were so well regarded not because of impressive hardware but a better software implementation. Taking some ideas from the phone segment and dedicating an extra chip to help handle processing seems like a good idea.

I think the frustrating thing is that even if you wanted to be extremely lazy, you could rotate in a single piece of sunset content - or during content droughts you could bring something out to help gin up excitement. Imagine if they decided to re-open menagerie, make zero updates except for "new" loot rolls or just allow those weapons to be craftable. That alone would probably have some people excited and you've spent very little dev time to add a bunch of content. They could DOUBLE seasonal content by having a "main" season and a reprized season, just like what they did with raids swapping between new and reprized. While I don't generally like pointing to other games as comparison - my understanding of warframe is that they don't cut old content, they just keep building more. There's clearly some really dumb decisions being made regarding how they try to keep player engagement, and tap into the FOMO attitudes of players. Why are the grim (new faction) used so sparingly? They should be popping up in each of these echoes seasons (only the birds show up in revenant so far). The moon is huge - why not design missions set in that play space? You could just have a fireteam specific map set (not open world) and use existing play spaces with new encounters or new mechanics. If you want to be "cheap" with dev time, that seems like a better use of limited resources rather than continuously designing all new play spaces and all new content for it to last a maximum of 1 year. It's frustrating. I still enjoy the game, but the amount of stupid decisions I've seen made repeatedly (adding back light level grinds between seasons - which braindead moron thought this was a good idea?) just irritates me. I still yearn for a decent MMO, but there's nothing that really grabs my attention.