Mr. GOH!

But you should scrape and replace thermal paste every year or thereabouts. Just monitor your CPU temp; when it starts being significantly hotter all the time, it's time to scrape and replace your thermal paste.

No. These early fan screenings always stack the deck.

TME: Probably because they decided main sequence SW movies are part of the "Star Wars [roman numeral] ; [subtitle]" sequence while the side stories are "a Star Wars story" to differentiate the two and let audiences know the side stories don't follow the main saga of the Skywalker family.

I'm reading The Fifth Season by N.K. Jemisin. She's one of my favorite new fantasy authors, and the book is an interesting first novel in a trilogy. It takes place on a very tectonically active world upon which many civilizations have flowered and then been destroyed by tsunamis, megavolcano eruptions, and massive earthquakes. It's an interesting setting in that the civilization is organized around the twin concepts of a perpetually-looming natural apocalypse and harnessing the power of people who are able to magically (or not; it may be a technological ability, but it's a mystery) sense and redistribute force, i.e., they can influence the tectonic activity by sucking energy from the magma/plates/etc and redirect it to stabilize the ground (among many other things, such as killing people by sucking out all of the kinetic energy in their body and constituent cells, effectively freezing people in an instant). Non-magical people hate and fear the magical, who are harshly controlled by the empire the rules the continent. The main character is a woman who has this power but has been hiding it from her village until her husband discover that their youngest has the power and therefore murders the child and flees the village with their other child as the largest earthquake and volcano ever rips the continent in two. I don't want to give any more away, but the characters and world building are great. The only annoying thing is that the chapters from the viewpoint of the main character are in second person ("You wake up suddenly as the air suddenly chills."), which I never like. Reading the author's blog, she's also an avid gamer; she references how Mass Effect 2 and 3 shaped how she treats building fictional races, which I found neat. She's a Garrus-Shepard shipper, though.

I think the courtroom in Daredevil is pretty accurate, actually. Lit and decorated differently than usual, but it's a reasonable facsimile of what the Bronx courthouse big old-school courtrooms are like. TCP: Never in court, only when doing depositions, and I say it in a regular voice.

Ethan: depends on the courtroom, but most do. I've never seen them used except in federal criminal cases in which a witness is giving testimony (habeas hearings, to be precise) I've sat through waiting for my civil hearing to begin. Most arguments are done from the table or, depending on the judge, up at the bench. Edit: and appeals courts. Most appellate arguments are made from a podium, but I think one city civil appellate court only has tables. Why?

Ethan:

I've been switching between Trails in the Sky and Dark Souls 2: Scholar of the First Sin in order to experience the full breadth of non-erotic (unless you're a freak) Japanese RPGs.

Do games for these VR units make you run around your gaming room to play them? That's the impression I get and it makes me less and less interested in them. Square footage is way too expensive in NYC to justify clearing out a holodek in my apartment.

Batman v Superman. There is potential for good, interesting storytelling with the DCCU's ideas about batman, Superman, and Wonder Woman, but this was just a mess. Jesse Eisenberg was terrible, conflicts that start off seeming to mean everything to a character end up being tossed aside, Batman is crazy without justification, Superman is weirdly pouty, the action is confusingly shot and staged, and the plot is dumb. As Dean says in the other thread, this thing is edited very badly and there are weird, meaningless scenes shoved into it for no reason (including a random scene that's just Perry White wondering where Clark is sandwiched between scenes that have nothing to do with Superman). And the stupid dream sequences! Such a waste of time and not strongly connected to anything at all. The thing is, I think Afleck could be a really good Batman, and the chemistry between him, Cavill, and Gadot is better than I expected. I also thought Gadot made a good, if sparingly-used, Wonder Woman. She feels like she's older and wiser than Supes or Batman, but that she's somewhat given up on humanity bettering itself. She also seemed to really enjoy battle, which makes sense for a 3000-year old warrior demigoddess.

I'm not sure the reddit guy is real, either. But it is good to know the photos of the terrible controller are fake.

Reddit guy also said the NX is more powerful than the PS4, but didn't seem to go into technical specifications. That's good for Nintendo, especially if this is a particularly long console generation.

The legal stuff doesn't bother me or really affect my enjoyment of the show; I expect movies and TV to grossly simplify and misrepresent the work of the legal profession. I'm just amused at how DD goes about the simplification, as well as having the Bronx courthouse stand in for the Manhattan courthouse. I still think the hand-waving about Hell's Kitchen goes against the sort of verisimilitude that has been one of Marvel's strengths, but it's not a huge problem for me, either. Just an interesting one. The real problems I have with DD season two, as a whole, are behind the spoiler tags:

Part of what sets Marvel stories and characters apart from DC is that they're set in a recognizable and realistic world (or America, at least).The poor, Irish Hell's Kitchen of the 50's and 60's is a central facet of the Daredevil character. But that Hell's kitchen disappeared by the mid-80's. It's been gentrified for the entirety of the MCU Matt Murdock's life. A Matt Murdock who grew up in the 90's and went to college and law school in the 00's would have zero experience of the Irish ghetto Hell's Kitchen was 60 years ago. I think the sort of hand-waving regarding the setting apparent in Daredevil undercuts some of what makes Marvel's stuff interesting. I think they should not have tried to pretend that NYC is anything like it was back in the 60's but rather updated the character and setting so that it makes sense. I know Queens is usually Spiderman's beat, but that had a vibrant working-class Irish immigrant community until fairly recently, and Queens is also where a lot of the kind of organized crime DD opposes goes down. I do admit "the Devil of Sunnyside" is less evocative than "the Devil of hell's Kitchen."

Wow. I didn't think Nintendo would finally make a controller worse than both the WiiMote and the original NES rectangle controller.

I still cannot get over how much DD makes of Hell's Kitchen as a working-class neighborhood when, in reality, it's super fucking trendy and expensive. I also am contsantly amused by the fact that all of the court exterior scenes (and a good number of the hallway scenes) were shot at the Bronx courthouse, even though the characters act like it's in Manhattan. Doesn't Marvel realize everyone has seen Law and Order and knows what the Manhattan courts look like? Also, everything having to do with lawyering and the law and trials is cartoonishly bizarre and unreal, but I don't expect anything else from a superhero show. It's just jarring after watching the much more realistic (although still not perfect) portrayal of legal work in Better Call Saul.

Nintendo had to say something. Any decision to halt production, even in a year, would be very damaging to Wii U sales. I mean, when you're selling so few to begin with, Any drop off hurts badly.

Good riddance to bad rubbish. I eagerly await Nintendo's next step on the path to irrelevance. ETA: It's too bad, sort of, because the Wii U had some cute games. It is a shame that they were stuck in the Nintendo walled garden; Splatoon, or variations on it, could be fun on almost any modern platform.

That 20% of people trust Cruz about anything is disconcerting.

You can at forever.