Author: Shmee

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We Are Getting À La Carte TV. Proving You Should Be Careful What You Wish For…

Disney announced that after its two year deal with Netflix is done it will pull all of its movies and shows off of the popular streaming service.  This is so it can launch its own online streaming network.  There has been no word yet on how this will affect the current Marvel/Netflix co-produced TV shows.  Though I am guessing due to their success they will continue to stay on Netflix and continue to be made by the same team.

The real news is that there will soon be yet another streaming TV service.  It will be joining the likes of Netflix, Hulu, HBO Now, CBS All Access, CW Seed, and the soon to be launching yet to be titled DC/Warner Brothers online network.  Plus who knows how many others are in the works.  Netflix opened Pandora’s TV box, and now every TV Service provider who’s ratings have taken a hit due to streaming media want a piece of the action.  This would be fine if the channels were going to be cheap, but it looks like they will start around $5.99 a month a piece and then go up from there.  Heck HBO Now is $15 a month.  You thought à la carte programing was going to save you money.  Well guess what, it won’t.

People are going to have to think long and hard about what services they are going to watch and need, and if these services keep dividing up their content and charging a lot for it, it may force people back to cable to ‘save’ money.  For some reason when people said they wanted to be able to pick and choose their channels they assumed that they could still just pay the $1 to $2 a channel like they are now.  That of course is not the case.

The à la carte future everyone said they wanted is almost here, and it is going to cost us all a fortune.  Not to mention the services we using now are going to continue to have less content as shows and movies are added to their IP owners’ own services.  Somehow the future is always less cool than we hoped it would be.

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There Is Nothing New To See At The Dark Tower!

I did my best to read all the books before watching The Dark Tower, and I am glad that I did, but the books didn’t help me gain any understanding with what was going on in the movie.  Not that the movie is confusing in any way, because it is constantly going out of its way to inform the audience with what is going on, but because it is a radical departure from the books.  That is not my main issue with The Dark Tower however, my issue is that they turned one of the craziest Sci-Fi/Fantasy/Western universes out there in to something generic.

The Dark Tower is about Jake Chambers (Tom Taylor), who see visions of a strange land and a Dark Tower, and an ongoing battle between a Man in Black (Matthew McConaughey) and The Gunslinger (Idris Elba).  Jake seems to think that the current series of world wide earthquakes are due to the Man in Black attacking The Dark Tower.  No one believes Jake of course, so he has to travel to Mid-World himself to find The Gunslinger and save The Dark Tower.

It probably made sense to the writers to make the movie about Jake instead of the Gunslinger because then Jake could be the avatar for the audience seeing all these strange things for the first time.  Of course if any of this was strange it probably would have been fine, but in all honestly had you told me that this was just the next Maze Runner movie and in this one they can hop dimensions, I would have believed you.  Mid-World is just a random place with a lot of broken stuff and a creepy Matthew McConaughey constantly feeding us Gunslinger trivia.  The only part of The Dark Tower that really works is when The Gunslinger comes to New York and does his best Last Action Hero impression.

Thankfully the cast they hired was excellent.  Even new comer Tom Taylor sold his role.  The fact these actors had almost nothing but exposition for dialog and almost pulled it off as natural is a minor miracle.  The Dark Tower would have been so much better had people just stopped explaining everything and just started having meaningful character interactions, or better yet shown us what they were explaining.

I don’t know if it was budget or lack of vision that kept Mid-World from being as interesting in the movie as it is in the books, but it was a shame that it felt stripped of everything that made that place feel unique.  I didn’t need a homicidal train in the movie, but it would have been nice to feel like one could have shown up at any minute.  Thanks to the great actors and the brisk pace The Dark Tower ended up being okay.  Almost like the cheep cable version of the book that made you want a real movie.  For people that haven’t read the books this movie might be easier to watch because they don’t know what they are missing.  Though they could also go out and watch The Maze runner or Divergent again and have just as much fun.

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Shmee Made It To The Dark Tower

I told myself that I needed to finish Stephen King’s The Dark Tower books before the movie came out, and I did it, barely, so now that I am free to watch the movie, the reviews say that I should skip it.  Which is a bummer because the books are excellent, and people that love fantasy novels should give it a shot.

The series is as weird and crazy as you would hope a Stephen King fantasy series would be, and it is always fun to see his other characters show up in unexpected places.  Not that you need to read his other books to enjoy The Dark Tower.  He has had such a profound impact on pop culture that you will get a lot of the references by just having lived in the 20th and 21st centuries.

If you are thinking you need a few thousand pages to read and you are sick of all the current gritty fantasy books out there, why not travel with The Gunslinger to The Dark Tower.  Who knows it may just be your Ka to do so.

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Is AMD’s Vega Too Late?

Yesterday AMD FINALLY announced their Vega lineup of cards.  Their top end card will be the Radeon RX Vega 64, starting at $499 US, and their slightly lower end card is called the Radeon RX Vega 56, starting at $399 US.  As an AMD fanboy I was excited to see their new cards, and even more excited that they should be hitting stores soon, August 14th, but the sad news was that they were merely going to go toe to toe with the Nvidia GeForce GTX 1080 and the GeFore GTX 1070 respectively.

Coming out a year later and not being faster than those cards is a real bummer.  Don’t get me wrong, Nvidia needs the competition, but considering Nvidia already has their ultra fast GTX 1080ti out, and it easily bests the Vega 64, that means Nvidia’s next round of cards that are coming out soon will be even faster than Vega without even trying very hard.

Granted AMD will be able to compete on price like they always have, and they are promising to keep the supply chains stocked to keep crypto-miners from driving the price up, but it just would have been fun to see a fight for the high end graphics market again.  If Vega would have come out even six months ago maybe would we be talking about some sort of Super-Vega to compete with the 1080ti, but that didn’t happen, and now if you want super high-end graphics Nvidia is still the company you should turn to.

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If You Are Streaming, People May Snipe You!

The Playerunknown’s Battlegrounds (PUBG) community was all up in arms this weekend because a well known player got banned for “Stream Sniping”.  What is Stream Sniping you may ask? It is watching a player’s live stream, figuring out their location, and then killing them with that info.  Crafty and underhanded to be sure, but it hardly seems like a ban-able offense.

I mean it is hard to prove for one thing.  I guess since most people’s PUBG accounts are linked to Twitch, you could try and get the logs from the stream and see if that player was watching, but that would take a lot of work, and Twitch would have to be willingly giving out streaming data.  That seems unlikely.  Not to mention the act itself would be hard to pull off.  You would need to be watching the stream, somehow get in the same match with the streamer, and then pay attention to both the stream and the game at the same time.  That is not even taking in to account the lag between the stream and real time.  If you can do all that you should get an award not a ban.

In the end though, if you are streaming your game, you are willingly giving up your game information anyway.  Unless it is in a tournament or something, this is a choice the streamer is making to let everyone watch their every video game move, so guess what?  Some people may use that information against the streamer in the game they are playing, and I think that is why the community has come to the defense of the player that got banned.

Is it cheating? Sort of, but no more then screen looking while playing Halo or Golden Eye back in the old days.  It is just a hazard that comes with participating in this new hyper-connected digital age.  If you don’t want people knowing where you are in your stream, build in a ten second lag.  That is enough to keep it ‘live’, but it would make it even harder, if not impossible, on all those super talented Screen Snipers.  Though I doubt it is necessary, since I think amount of Screen Snipers our there may be close to zero, successful ones anyway.