TMoney

Happy birthday!

Late last year I was reading a feature (maybe it was a profile of the movie coming later this year?) where the author made reference to Dune as being impenetrable to a lay audience and full of gobbeldy-gook. I first read the book about two decades ago, so I figured it was a good time to pick it back up and re-read. I'm happy to say the opposite is true. Far from being impenetrable, I found it all but impossible to put down once I got momentum going. I think it has aged beautifully. I think it is well deserving of its "classic of the genre" status. Dune's brilliance, to me, comes from the combination of its world-building, characters, prose (better than I remembered), and plot (schemes within schemes). I think Dune ends up as more than the sum of its parts. In not being overly reliant on any one aspect of story-telling, it succeeds in a way that a lot of classic sci-fi does not under contemporary scrutiny. Herbert's focus on character and location give Dune timelessness in ways that sci-fi novels overly reliant on cool/novel technology can never be. I also can't believe how middle-eastern the book is having re-read it after travelling to the region. -- I'm not at all excited about the 2021 movie. I get wanting to bring this story to a wider audience who is never going to read a 600 page sci-fi book from the 60s. Dune is just so fulfilling to those of us who love it. However, even with low expectations for the movie I fully expect to be disappointed. The Lynch movie at least nailed the production design and a lot of the casting, even if it ended up a colossal mess. The story is just very difficult to cram down to a 2-3 hour script without losing a lot of the richness that makes Dune what it is. But hey, paging @cutestory! When was the last time you (re)read it, Jeffy who is known to us as Maud'dib, and how did it hold up for you?

Happy birthday, G-Man!

🍿 I think I'm going to wait to play it until the 1.2 patch hits. I'd rather experience it at its best.

Happy birthday, meme-lord!

Deadwood What an absolute joy this show has been. I missed it back in the day, but going through it now on HBO Max over the past two months has been delightful. I fell in love with the amazing cast of characters and the setting. Al Swearengen is the fucking man. I'm really going to miss watching it now that it is all over. The movie, coming 10 years later, was also a beautiful send-off and love letter to fans of the show. Recommended without qualification!

The Cure - Kiss Me, Kiss Me, Kiss Me. Just Like Heaven is one of my all-time favorite songs, no question.

Happy birthday, Esme’s dad!

Happy birthday!

I have no intention to use the case unless I need to transport them somewhere in my bag.

Gonna be hard for CDPR to ever attempt an ambitious game again at this rate. This might kill their studio in its current form. Sad to see.

It'll sit in a drawer until we can travel again so I didn't pay much attention to it.

So the Maxx showed up yesterday. I'm impressed. I think people who purchase them will be very happy. $600 with tax is a lot, but the build quality is impeccable and you pay a premium for how slick all the (cr)apple stuff works together. Switching from listening to a podcast on my phone to a YouTube video on the iPad to a work zoom call on the MacBook without pressing a single button is a neat trick. As for sound quality I think it meets expectations. It will not blow anyone on HC away with how good it sounds, but I also think it won't offend either. The tuning is fairly neutral, which is appreciated. Beats by Steve Jobs™ with a warmed-over bass-boosted response they are not, and that makes me glad. I'm not a lover of closed headphones when open headphones are an option. The usual closed headphone characteristics are all present in the Maxx. These are not a replacement for a proper headphone rig. My HD800S aren't going anywhere. My HD800S also aren't able to operate without being tethered to my ECP amps, which is where the Maxx come in. If you want to listen to something while walking around the house or the office or on the airplane then these will hit the spot. Their mass is such that I don't think they would be a good fit for exercising.

Happy birthday, man!

The visual bugs in the first two hours just repeatedly broke my immersion. I really don't mind waiting. World of Warcraft is so good right now that honestly it'd be hard for CPunk to pull me away from it even if it had launched in a polished state. Blizzard tuned everything to be harder and the gear grind to be slower. I love that.

I'm pretty sad to see what a disaster the CPunk launch has been. I'm putting the game aside until Q1-Q2 '21. I trust CDPR to make it right eventually, but it is just too buggy to want to play through right now. I can wait. CDPR's stock price is getting devastated as the state of the game is even worse than I had feared, especially on the consoles. Lifetime sales projections I'm sure are getting revised heavily downward.

RIP John le Carré. Wrote some amazing spy novels. One of the best in the genre.

The visuals in this game are just mind boggling. A few screenshots from the 4k Ray Tracing-Ultra preset I'm playing on. I'm getting like 50fps but it is hard to turn anything down, particularly the ray tracing. The difference is so dramatic that I think I'll just take the pain and play below 60hz. This is the best ray tracing showcase on PC right now, full stop.

WOW. It is beautiful. This art style is incredible. It also is absolutely pile-driving my PC in to the ground. Getting sub 60fps even with the 3080. RTX on ultra, natch.

To Tyll's credit, he predicted that we'd see the tech come much more strongly into the headphone space in the future when he was on his way out from InnerFidelity. Apple doesn't seem to be doing personal HRTF in the sense that Tyll predicted, but they do seem to be doing some kind of equalization based on sound interactions from inside the ear cups to fix sonic deficiencies and enhance noise cancellation. Makes sense. If you can't get there with electrical and acoustic engineering then use EQ to make up a lot of the difference. I think I might take the plunge.

Well this certainly looks interesting! I love the smaller AirPods for calls and podcast listening so I’m real curious how the tech they’ve done in that product translates to a full size over ear headphone. https://www.apple.com/airpods-max/

It'll run amazing on your 2021 iMac with M1X 32-core processor though!

RIP Chuck. He may be the "ace of aces" with "the right stuff" but it is hard to think about him the same way after the black astronaut candidates on a recent PBS special, Chasing the Moon, described how Yeager went out of his way to ensure a black man wouldn't go in to space in the 60s and 70s.

Reviews have me a bit scared of CPunk's launch state, though I knew from the delays that it was going to come in "hot" with tons of bugs and performance issues. CDPR would not delay a huge launch like they did so close to the goal line unless the game was in a state too embarrassing to ship. Tom's Hardware put out a performance guide and it looks like the game is going to be a resource hog like few other games other than Flight Sim. https://www.tomshardware.com/news/cyberpunk-2077-performance-preview Fingers crossed that it plays well, but I may delay playing it until 2021 to give them a chance to fix it up.