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Well Disney Went And Did It; It Owns The Best Parts Of Fox Now!

What does $52.4 Billion buy you these days?  Well if you are Disney it pretty much gets you all of Fox except Fox News.  It is official as of this morning (12/14/2017).  Disney now has almost all of the Marvel Movie rights under its umbrella.  Bring out the count down clock for Wolverine being featured in a Marvel movie.  At this point it is just a best guess, but I am giving it a year and a half.  They have to re-cast him/her, and then figure out how to jam him/her in to story that makes sense.

Warner Brothers executives must be screaming in to a pillow somewhere.  Though it is kind of on them for not being able to make an actually good movie for two flicks in a row.

Of course Disney also gets another 30% stake in Hulu (they now own 60%), the Simpsons, and all of Fox’s random cable networks.  It is safe to say that their media empire just grew significantly.  As with any acquisition this big, regulators will get involved even though Disney isn’t technically buying all of Fox.  That way the regulators can pretend that they do something useful.  In which case, I may have to set the Wolverine Count Down ClockTM back another six months.

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PUBG Is Now On Xbox! … And It Is PUBG.

Yesterday PC’s biggest game, PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds (PUBG), came out on Xbox One, and you may be wondering how it turned out.  Well, for better or worse it is PUBG.  It is graphically uninspiring, the framerate is choppy, and it feels like you are always fighting the controls, so it is a pretty good port.  Thankfully, the heart pounding and exhilarating action holds up with a controller and a couch.

A word of warning, this game is still in Microsoft’s Game Preview Program, which means it isn’t done, and it doesn’t look or feel done, but it is still really, really fun.  It also has PUBG’s new vaulting feature.  Which is supper handy for getting over walls and rocks.  However, that means I can no longer blame dying on being stuck on a fence.  I am just not very good.

I will be playing a lot of PUBG in the days to come, and based on the usage numbers online, so will all of you.  With that being the case, I will be seeing you all parachuting to your almost certain doom very soon with the rest of Xbox Live.

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RPCS3 Works, But You Better Have A Beefy Rig.

I have always had fun playing with emulation, so RPCS3 has intrigued me.  The PS3 uses a very custom Power PC based processor called ‘The Cell’, so in order to emulate it on an x86 based processor it all needs to run at the software level.  The developer recommends an Intel Core i7 or better to get games running decently, but I thought I would give it a shot with my cheap overclocked AMD FX-8320.  It didn’t go well.

I couldn’t get games to run over 15 FPS, but I am guessing with a Threadripper or a an i7 I could have stabilized things a bit more.  Some people are able to get amazing performance, but most of us are stuck in frame drop city.  This is why it is incredible that the Xbox One is able to run un-recompiled Power PC Xbox 360 games so well, and even run some of them at 4K on the Xbox One X.

I am not condoning pirating, and if you are going to run emulators on your PC please buy the software first, and in RPCS3’s case, you can get a used PS3 for far cheaper than you can buy a PC that can run the emulator decently.  Not to mention most PS3 games are pretty cheap themselves theses days.  All in all, it is amazing what the RPCS3 team has accomplished, but don’t go thinking your bargain PC will be running PS3 games in a playable fashion any time soon.

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They Really Had To Streach For Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom…

So the movie is about saving the dinosaurs from a volcano?  I can only hope that they jump sharks as well.  I mean what the heck?!  Did they get a twelve year old to come up with this script.  That is the sort of thing twelve year old me would have come up with.  Then me and the dinos would jump from couch to couch so that we didn’t fall in the lava.  We can only hope Blue eats Owen.  That at least would be a surprise.  If nothing else it looks like Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom will have lots of action.  Big, dumb, action.

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Shmee Visits The Good Place!

Do you like The Office or maybe Parks and Recreation?  What if I told you the same guy that wrote and produced those shows, Michael Schur, made another show about ‘heaven’, The Good Place.  While it is theologically unsound, it is very funny, and since it has been out for a year you can blitz through the first season right now on Netflix.

The Good Place is about Eleanor Shellstrop (Kristen Bell) who ends up in the titular Good Place by accident.  She of course doesn’t want to admit she is in the wrong place then be sent to eternal damnation, so she has to do her best to fit in, but her innate selfishness keeps getting her in trouble.

The Good Place is unlike any major religion’s idea of paradise.  Pretty much if you are good, like really good, you end up in a little neighborhood with a soulmate, and you can do whatever you want.  Things are fine for most of Eleanor’s neighbors, but she keeps doing things that screw her neighborhood up.  Making it hard to keep up her lie.

Like all comedies, they are only as good as their cast, and The Good Place has a great one.  Bell is hilarious, and Ted Danson as ‘The Architect’ of the neighborhood is still at the top of his game, but rest of the cast is great too.  They have good chemistry, and the laughs don’t stop coming.

While I doubt The Good Place will be used in seminary classes any time soon, it is a funny show, and another hit for Michael Schur.  You can watch the first season on Netflix, and the second season is airing now, so you can catch up on Hulu.com if you have it.  In these dark days without The Office or Parks and Rec it is nice to have The Good Place to visit.