Mr. GOH!

Because this was bothering me, I checked with some friends who work with Instagram and do these sorts of promotional campaigns professionally, and they all told me that it is very likely Facebook and Disney have a done a deal such that Disney will promote video snippets on instagram in exchange for prominent placement in FB feeds, among other things. They all also said it is almost certainly the case that if anyone got dollars out of the deal, it would be Facebook and not Disney, but that it is most likely a low dollar-deal and more about using popular disney brands to help drive Facebook and instagram's video platform because Facebook is aggressively promoting video posts in people's feeds. One of them also said that YouTube is not nearly as useful for brands trying to go viral or propogate video into people's Facebook feeds as Instagram is. She reminded me that Facebook recently had 1 billion simultaneous users all looking at their feeds for the first time, so the value of a Facebook partnership is waaaaaaaaaaaaaaay higher than a partnership with YouTube.

I think you're right that no money exchanged hands, if it's true that it's difficult to pay to promote Instagram clips in people's instagram/FB feeds. But I think there are reasons it was not put on YouTube yet, including: Disney wants this to feel like a leak/sneak preview rather than a full roll-out of a trailer; Disney may want the Star Wars YouTube account to be for full trailers; to make folks accessing it on instagram feel like they're getting a special sneak-preview; and to allow it to propagate into more social media feeds (including pushing phone notifications when friends share or comment on the post, which I'm not sure YouTube even has). Also, Dean, the thing about lawyers is that we're not just experts on the law, but experts on everything. At least that's what we tell ourselves.

Ethan gets it. Instagram likes and shares take fewer clicks/taps than YouTube likes and shares, and are more likely to infect Facebook feeds, I think (although I'm not sure that Instagram can be set up to automatically cross-post shares to Facebook.) I also think it's cheaper/easier to pay Instagram for prominent placement of your clip in Instagram feeds than it is to promote your YouTube video. If you want to tease an eventual trailer, it makes sense to do it on Instagram and/or Facebook to create hype and let the consuming public know that there will be a YouTube trailer forthcoming.

Makes sense for Disney to release a teaser for a new trailer on social media to maintain/increase the hype, considering that videos posted to social media are more immediately share-able than video on other traditional video hosts.

Shadowrun: HK the best of the bunch, though it felt like it was the shortest. I really loved the second game's director's cut,though, too. I'd love to see a longer Shadowrun game with slower character progression for the PC and more options for the companions' level growth rewards. Oh, and I also bought the new Metal Gear Game for PC on Steam. Just started Ground Zeroes, which comes with the TPP preorder; feels very MGS-y, so I think I'll enjoy the full game once I've finished this demo mission.

This movie is going to be terrible, like every other video game movie ever.

I can't really like the content of that link, Dean, but I don't think it's wrong at all.

What's a James Corden and why does everyone hate him?

I do think that if you're doing serious graphics work, the GTX 960 will have to go around the same time the i5 becomes outclassed. The [NUMBER]60 versions of nVidia GPUs tend to be good for fewer years than the [NUMBERS]80 versions, in my experience. That said, there's been a very annoying trend among some game developers (more often indies, in my experience) to really, really, really rely on CPU speed in a way I haven't seen since the late 90's and early 00's. I have no idea why this is, but it's really annoying, since I have an older i5-2400k which is great for the vast majority of new games, but causes problems in a handful and is even below minimum specs for a few AAA's, though those games are nonetheless maintain a solid >45 fps on ultra settings at 1080p (Witcher 3 comes to mind). So, at some point, you might have to upgrade to an i7, I suppose. Then again, I am hesitant to ever chalk up game performance hiccups to the CPU, unless it's a simulation game. Fun fact: the most processor-intensive game I have ever played is Dwarf Fortress, which doesn't even really have graphics but brings high-end processors to their knees. If you're truly doing professional graphics work on your machine, I'm surprised you already didn't spring for an i7; I was under the impression the biggest performance gains consumers see when switching from an i5 to an i7 are found in professional applications (aside from a few extra fps when pushing the limits of high-resolution gaming).

That GTX 960 may be a weak link, performance-wise, on higher resolutions. It should be great for those games at 1080p, I'd reckon. I am fairly certain that if things are not "well-fitted," as you say, they would not cause framerate drops; generally, if your components are loose or ill-fitted, the problems they cause are more of the "PC won't turn on" variety. The biggest physical build things for newbies to be sure of are that the screws holding the mobo are well-seated so the mobo doesn't short out and that you applied thermal paste to the CPU. The thing about unknown quantities is that they're only unknown until you discover them, And those of us building PCs for a while have already encountered the vast majority of minor annoyances that may seem huge or scary to a PC newbie. It kind of astounds me that you say "everything" is an unknown quantity. That said, the price of freedom is the occasional error. And as a PC gamer and console gamer, I think you're overstating the relative complexity and number of errors PC gamers get in general. I haven't had a game crash out on me in months, and I've been playing heavily.

Bought Shadowrun: Hong Kong because FUCK YEAH.

Almost nobody in the US would call 9900 ninety-nine hundred. In fact, I think using 'ninety' for any number in the nine thousands sounds odd. CGP Grey sounds American, not British. The woman has a slightly-funny American accent that I associate with people from the Pacific Northwest, but may actually be rooted elsewhere in the U.S.

Yeah, my experiences living in Germany and traveling throughout Europe bear out that dryers tend to be more of a luxury than washers over there. In The U.S., folks tend to have both, even if it's just a tall front-loading washer/dryer combo unit to reduce the footprint. Most folks here don't want to hang dry their sheets, and apartments tend not to have enough space to hang dry every bit of clothing. Hell, I haven't hang-dried t-shirts or underwear or other non-delicates since I lived in Europe in 2003.

Ethan: I was making a joke about the relative expense of living in the greatest city on Earth. An in-unit washer/dryer is a luxury when you live in high-density areas like NYC. But most everyone I know who lives in flyover country either has their own washer and dryer or at least access to a cheap in-building laundromat if they don't make much money. I mean, my wife and I have a pretty high combined income, enough that we'd own a 4 bedroom house in any sane real estate market, but in NYC all we can afford is a modest 2 bedroom in a good neighborhood without a doorman or washer/dryer. All for the low, low price of $3k a month in rent!

You all must be motherfucking millionaires, what with having your own private washers and dryers in your homes. We pay $1 per pound to have our basic laundry done at a laundromat and I pay about $25.00 a week to have my shirts laundered by real professionals who won't just wash and dry them on the hottest settings. That's still WAY cheaper than the extra rent (or mortgage payments if we bought) we'd have to pay for a place in a decent neighborhood with a washer and dryer. Edit: I used to have a homemade rack on which I'd dry my shirts when I'd launder them myself, but my wife put the kibosh on that when we moved in together. We have nowhere to hang laundry to dry. 2nd Edit: Dean, how much money do you save by not using your lights as much? I know our lights cost something like 25 cents a day to have on for eight hours at a time if we had them all on at once. The only real electricity hogs are my desktop, the TV, the AC, and the refrigerator. Our bills are based on usage, but unless we run the AC, our bill is always within $10 of $70 a month.

Mr. Holmes. Ian McKellan plays a 93-year old Sherlock Holmes, in 1946 or so, battling senility at his country home 30 years after retiring from detective work. The plot follows his attempts to remember his final case in order to write a true account to correct Watson's sensationalized version (in the movie, Watson wrote the Sherlock Holmes stories, not Arthur Conan Doyle). Between his remembrances, he forms a relationship with his housekeeper's 8-10 year old son, who is fascinated by Holmes, both for the famous stories and for Holmes's current passion for beekeeping (which the movie implies Holmes pursued due to his hope that the pseudoscience-supported senility-reversing effects of royal jelly were true). McKellan is excellent both as the 93 year-old and the 63 year-old Holmes; in particular, he wonderfully juxtaposes the older version's general physical and mental frailty with moments of razor-sharp and crystal-clear Holmesean deductions without the transition seeming jarring or unnatural. It's a generally quite film about Holmes learning to forge real relationships with other human beings.

Thanks, there wasn't much last time a checked.

SSD is not yet purchased, but I'll probably go with a 512 GB. HDD is 1.5 TB, about 75% full, but I could pare that down by deleting my massive collection of games just sitting there gathering virtual dust. But I also think I should be able to download an install disk image of W10, burn it to DVD, and just do a clean install on a new SSD, ideally. Just wonder if that's a possibility, too.

Question for those in the know (likely FDS): so I upgraded my Windows 7 desktop to W10 for free. Currently, the desktop only has an HDD and I want to buy and install an SSD for the OS and select games. Am I able to migrate the free W10 to a new hard drive? How? Note: I own the Windows 7 license since I built the computer myself (it's not an OEM license).

It's being released in February. Not a great omen.

I feel like Deadpool is good in theory, but nothing I've read or seen, from trailers to the comics themselves, lives up to the hype.

I fucking HATE the trackpad gestures/swipes because they severely fuck up my experience when playing games like XCOM and Crusader Kings. The fuck of it is that I can't change the settings because my trackpad device control panel is incompatible with W10 and there's no update for it yet, so I can't turn the gestures off. Cortana is just a verbal Bing search tool, so I disabled it because fuck Bing.

XCOM: Enemy Within. I bought it at release and played through a mission, but didn't get any deeper into it until this week. I've played about a dozen or so missions by now, and I'm enjoying it. I do think the expansion throws so many new options at you that there's no way to use all the new gear, upgrades, and units they packed in. I started playing both because XCOM 2 is coming up and to slow my Witcher 3 roll' I'm nearing the end of The Witcher 3 and kind of don't want it to end. :\

Zoolander is a wonderful movie. This trailer for the second one sucked, though, and I don't think we really need a Zoolander 2 anyway.