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AND a price competitive, basic, small 2.5 gig switch?!? Damn ubiquiti is going hard after the small business, prosumer, enthusiast market.... https://store.ui.com/us/en/category/switching-utility/products/usw-flex-2-5g-5

The Fall (2006) - https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0460791/ This is sort of a silly fantastical story and the main character is a small child but it's visually fun. The director and writer is the same as The Cell and you can really see it. Even though the main character is a small child this is not a movie for kids with just a bit too much blood and death. Easy to watch. I watched the series a while back and I did sort of casually enjoy it. I will watch the second season.

The Diplomat - I was way behind on this, in fact the second season is coming out in a month - but I heard good things. I do think the writing is solid, acting was good, and the general tone of the story was interesting without it jumping the shark. It's also very modern in terms of referencing the war in Ukraine, and Iranian nonsense. This reminds me of the early seasons of house of cards. I'd say this lived up to the hype around the show.

Rain Man (1988) https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0095953/ Decided to check this out because of the high rating. I didn't enjoy it but it was easy to watch. Tom Cruise spends 75% of the movie being kind of a dick with his brother Dustin Hoffman who is disabled (severe autism). It's supposed to be a heart warming movie as they grow closer together but I just couldn't get over it. Maybe it's modern sensibilities. I read some commentary that for its time it was pushing boundaries for the disabled. The trailer is pretty accurate.

https://store.ui.com/us/en/category/all-cloud-keys-gateways/products/uxg-max https://ui.com/us/en/cloud-gateways/compact I said it already in group chat but I'll say it again for good measure. I am almost tempted to give it a go with ubiquiti again because of this one product. It does a lot of things right for the price.

The onboarding of any MOBA is brutal. Deadlock obfuscates this because people see the shooting mechanics and think that means the traditional MOBA mechanics are less important (it's the reverse). I'm not an expert on itemization and I still generally select a highly rated build and try to follow it because I don't want to be sitting at the shop reading - I want to quickly buy and get back into the action. This is a bit lazy and I probably need to play a couple of games where I just resign myself to use the shop without a build to get more comfortable. Some things I can recommend - pick a limited number of heroes to play. I understand it's fun to mix things up but playing more than 2-3 heroes is probably going to slow your ability to refine some of the other mechanical elements. I've tried most of the heroes at this point just to get an idea for them mechanically, but I'll probably try to winnow down my selection moving forward so I can work on them and get better. From a mechanical standpoint I disagree about removing the items. While the abilities have unique increases with levels - not just bigger numbers - I don't think that would be enough. If this game didn't have items and build paths it would just be a hero shooter with a complicated objective system. I may not have played overwatch in quite a while, but I recall towards the end it was almost required for people to change heroes mid-match to adapt to the enemy team and help hard counter what was giving you issues. It would also mean every hero had an optimal way to play, making the game far more rock paper scissors with certain heroes being hard counters to others. Since the game currently doesn't have a pick/ban/draft system you could see games lost at the hero select screen. I'm not great with active items in this game, but some of them are clearly meant to help shore up hero deficiencies or allow you to overcome certain hard counters. Imagine being a tank hero that keeps getting blown up by enemy focus fire - you buy metal skin (short immunity to bullets/melee) and now you can live longer and do your job of disrupting the enemy team without instantly exploding. Or if you hate Vindicta (ghost lady) you buy knockdown to drop her ass out of the sky so you can kill her and make her life miserable. There's also a limit to 4 active items, so you have a max of 4 abilities, 4 active items, and the moving/shooting - which is still overwhelming but not impossible. I like this guy's videos about deadlock, his breakdown on the item shop is something I understand but need to put into practice. I will say one thing about this game that's very distinct from other MOBAs is the power of split-pushing. If 5 teammates are fighting and 1 person goes and pushes a lane, that builds huge advantages and can even result in winning games - far more than League or Dota. Every hero can split-push and there are absolutely times when that's the right call, even if that's less fun than joining in the big teamfight. Overall, I like this game, but there's some lingering PTSD from having played other MOBAs. I feel like they've been patching and tweaking numbers very frequently, but they'll also need to release new heroes regularly to keep up the interest that they've generated - especially if they hope to have any semblance of a "casual" audience.

I like the game and I kind of want to play the game but I don't have fun playing the game. Having 20+ heroes and keeping track of what they are doing/can do is not easy but I feel it's manageable. Denying souls also feels manageable even though it's annoying. Map awareness and responding to pings is actually something I sort of enjoy in games. It's the items. I hate buying items. I hate buying them in some special order across multiple categories. I just don't use active items at all. They are so powerful that managing them seems like another game just sitting on top of the game you are playing. I feel the game would be better without items.

Good to see gopro get some competition finally. Never heard of this product - https://www.insta360.com/product/insta360-go3s

GoPro released their newest camera and so did DJI. But what I'm looking forward to is the Insta360 Ace Pro 2. GoPro still hasn't figured out how to handle low light conditions and considering I would use any action camera almost exclusively for scuba, I need the best low light performance. The current Ace Pro is already a damn solid choice, and depending on the updates I might even pick one up at a reduced price instead of going for the newest version but I want to see what they're bringing. https://www.techradar.com/cameras/action-cameras/insta360-ace-pro-2-leaks-reveal-an-8k-ai-powered-action-camera-with-better-battery-life Here's some really solid comparison videos I watched a while back: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TqhYNG7UtNs https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xDSOy4KMxi8

Gaivotas · Rival Consoles BAYNK - Grin

The French Connection 1971 https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0067116/ Definitely one of the oldest movies I have watched in recent history but it didn't feel that old. This felt very noir without being the checklist steroetype of the genre (no PI, no girl, etc.). I think I enjoyed it for the most part. It isn't a terribly deep philosophical story. The main character is a cop that is hard charging to the point of hurting himself and others.

I started this back up again. I finally made it through the prologue area and started the game properly. I also decided to drop the difficulty level to normal, it wasn't that hard was exceedingly difficult, it was more to do with being one shot by a random mob early game. Also I'm not really playing this for it's challenge so I decided to tone it down, if it gets too easy later on when I have more skills/weapons I might bump it back up again. I've heard several AAA style singleplayer games suffer from this weird issue where the character constantly talks and sometimes solves the puzzle before you can even see what's going on. And I will say Aloy, definitely is yapping about random bullshit way too much - There are mods that fix this (Shut Up Aloy Mod).

Only Murders in the Building - This is still a hit or miss for me, some jokes really land and others don't. I enjoy some of the characters, and the mystery elements don't try to go Agatha Christie on you where you can find out if you watch carefully they just lean into some of the absurdities of it all. But I've absolutely had to skip through some of the slower scenes that aren't doing it for me, in fact most of the drama or character moments fall incredibly flat for me. Bad Monkey - Still mediocre but entertaining, I'll finish it but I would most likely tell people to skip it unless you really enjoy Vince Vaughn. Slow Horses Season 4 - This show is so good, I know each season is basically a stretched out film, but the characters are great, the storylines are solid and the acting (not just Gary Oldman) is very well done. I think there's 8 books in the series, and I'd be happy if they do all 8. Terminator Zero - I've seen a few episodes and the animation is decent, but I feel the need to mention the show's default language is English - the japanese audio and subtitles can at best be described as "dub-titles" and should probably be avoided. Upcoming: The Penguin, Agatha All Along (it's probably going to be trash), Legend of Vox Machina Season 3 Upcoming Anime: Re Zero Season 3, Bleach, Dandadan

Midsommar - https://www.imdb.com/title/tt8772262/ I'm not going to write a long thing for this and I'm afraid it's going to sound like I am trying to create the opposite reaction. I regret seeing this movie. I wouldn't recommend this movie. It was too fucked up for me. I deleted it after watching it because I don't want this in my archive.

https://old.reddit.com/r/OLED_Gaming/comments/1bimglp/qdoledwoled_text_clarity_comparison_picture_here/

I had heard about the plan and the land purchases. I had not heard about the lawsuits.

Franklyn 2008 - https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0893402/ "Dystopian Sci-Fi" "Steampunk" "Sci-Fi". See those tags? Did you read the synopsis? None of that is true. Literally none of it. The movie follows 4 people going through some mental distress but all of it is happening in the real world setting. Everything in the "dark city" that features very prominently in the trailer is just one character's delusional imagination and even then it's just mirroring things happening in the real world setting. Just bad. I do not understand how this even has the 6.0 rating that it does. And no the story in the real world setting is not anything special.

Robin Hood 2010 - https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0955308/ This was on an old old backlog for me. I heard it was bad but I still wanted to judge for myself. For the first half I was thinking it's a bit overly serious (and a little too much 'Gladiator') but they are trying something a little different with Robin Hood so okay I want to see where this goes. Then in the second half it goes off the rails. Robin gives the Braveheart speech about freedom to a large crowd including the king to his face. There is a d-day beach landing by the French, and I'm not even exaggerating here, complete with archers on the cliff tops, people drowning in the water as arrows fly by and did I mention the landing ships complete with drop ramps? Robin's wife shows up in battle (from where?!) and participates in a cavalry charge (lady are you nuts?). At this point I was actually laughing so hard I was enjoying myself. Then to cap it all off the ending throws away just about everything accomplished by the characters earlier in the movie. I think it could have been "ok" with some changes but as is it's just bad.

I know they have been walking down the road of investors, funding, then the IPO in 2021 for a while but it feels to me like it did kick into a little higher gear last year and this year. I assume it's just a short matter of time until things like membership tiers, even less 3rd party support (surprised they still allow REI), more partnerships with companies that want to scrape content, less custom feed and more sponsored feed, etc.

Its been happening a long time.

I've had my G9 OLED for about 14 months now and I can finally recommend it. I definitely experienced a ton of OLED text issues in the first few weeks, but it appears have disappeared after a few months (I suspect windows update) and I was trying a bunch of different solutions in the initial weeks which was terrible. The biggest issue with my display was that since DP2.0 is still not available on any nvidia GPU, 240 Hz 5120x1440 is really hard to drive so display stream compression (DSC) is needed to enable all the capabilities which result in a pain when switching between HDR / non HDR.

https://www.goodreads.com/series/193893-the-winnowing-flame-trilogy Read book 1 and 2 a while back and then gave up the series because it just really was not doing anything for me. I have not grabbed anything new but needed something to read so I have been grinding through book #3 from this series. It's really just kind of boring and I have issues believing some of the characters. Putting these links here for later reference. I'm going to need new stuff very soon. https://www.goodreads.com/choiceawards/best-fantasy-books-2023 https://www.goodreads.com/choiceawards/best-science-fiction-books-2023

Big Trouble in Little China https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0090728/ - I have seen posts about this many times. "This film is a wild ride and impossible to categorize!" and things like that. It's a silly 80s fantasy action comedy. I'm not sure why it has the following that it does. It just kind of felt like a mess to me and I didn't enjoy it.

Being John Malkovich https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0120601/ This is supposed to be a comedy? What? Yeah it had some moments that made me laugh but this is horror drama. I guess the imdb rating is fair. Crimes of the Future https://www.imdb.com/title/tt14549466/ Lots of blood. Lots of literal guts. Everybody having sex. This was a really strange movie. I don't recommend it.

Yea, my concern is that it's labeled survivor horror. I'm always skeptical of those type of games, I find them frustrating. I'll still keep an eye out because I like them as a developer.