Category: Rant

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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.

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Shmee Knows The Secret To Making A Shared Cinematic Universe!

We live in a post Marvel Studios world were everyone wants to build a shared universe.  So far only Marvel is really succeeding, but everyone else is trying.  Though the Warner Brothers MonsterVerse is starting to pick up, and after Wonder Woman’s astonishing success there is hope for the DCEU.  Meanwhile Universal’s Dark Universe is dying for the second time.  So to all you movie executives out there that want to make that sweet, sweet shared universe cash, I will tell you how to do it: MAKE GOOD MOVIES.

Why is the MonsterVerse taking off?  Godzilla and Skull Island turned out to be pretty good.  Marvel movies? For the most part, good.  The struggling DCEU? For the most part, not good.  Then Wonder Woman came along and was awesome, so now people are excited to see her again in Justice League.  Know who we don’t want to see again? A kind of evil and bland Tom Cruise, who is not the Mummy, but more of a reincarnated evil god who killed the Mummy, and thus the Dark Universe no longer has an iconic character.  Instead it has a jerky god-ish Tom Cruise.

There you have it.  Focus on making good films, and for the most part people will watch them.  Especially if you have that major movie studio marketing power.  Do no make movies that are advertisements for future movies.  If you want to included a few Easter Eggs that is fine, but focus on the story at hand, not the story three movies from now.  Believe it or not we don’t care that much if it doesn’t hang together that well.  It will just give us something to talk about later.  So get out there and make those cool flicks!

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Wonder Woman Is Having An Incredable Box-Office Run!

Remember when I said Wonder Woman was avoiding the massive day to day drops of the other DC Extended Universe films?  Well it turns out that she is avoiding the massive weekend to weekend drops as well.  In the blockbuster era any weekend to weekend drop of less than 55% is good.  Wonder Woman only dropped 43% for an impressive haul of $58.5 Million in its second weekend.  Marvel is probably kicking itself for not making that Black Widow movie.

There has been so much pent up demand for a good female superhero movie that Wonder Woman’s run is making film executives look like idiots.  Luckily for DC they already have Batgirl and Gotham City Sirens in pre-production.  Not to mention Wonder Woman 2 has no doubt been fast tracked.  Marvel still only has Captain Marvel on the schedule, but it hasn’t even finished its script.  Though I am guessing Wonder Woman’s success will set off a female superhero arms race.  Marvel has a lot of them, so it is time for them to come out shine with the ladies from DC.

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Snowpiercer The TV Show? No Thanks … Wait Jennifer Connelly Is In It?! I Am In!

TNT is making a Snowpiercer TV show for some reason.  I liked the movie, but it wasn’t like I was dying for more.  I am not sure how long I can watch strange rich people and desperate poor people ride a train.  Well, I mean, I guess I do know: about two hours.  Of course none of that matters because TNT had the wisdom and foresight to cast the unimpeachable Jennifer Connelly in it.  Snowpiercer is now the greatest upcoming show on television.

You don’t know who Jennifer Connelly is? Well I don’t like you very much, but here is her picture:

She has been in a lot of stuff, but for now I will just say she was from The Rocketeer and Dark City.  You have Google for the rest.  Annnnyyyywaaay, all of that is to say, look out for Snowpiercer on TNT some time next year!  It will probably not be that great.  Except for the fact it has the amazing Jennifer Connelly in it.