Nuclear Monster

  • Toho looks to be doing for Ultraman what it did for Godzilla and I could not be more excited. Shin Ultraman is coming out in Japan early this summer.

  • One of my favorite things to watch is other people dealing with problems. They can be out of this world science-fiction problems or they can be terrestrial problems and All is Lost is more of the latter. Robert Redford plays an unnamed (“Our Man” in the credits) sailor on a solo sailing voyage. Unfortunately everything goes wrong. 

    The hull gets a big hole. 
    Our Man’s patch job kinda works? 
    He hits his head.
    The supplies are running low.
    …and on and on.

    This is a beautiful struggle and there isn’t much else to say. Redford does a terrific job in the role, and it is truly painful to watch him struggle to get out of the situation. 

    Perhaps then the question is: Who gets to sail? Our Man’s boat isn’t the fanciest ship, but maintenance is clearly expensive, as are other fees, and Redford’s character could easily be a millionaire on his little voyage out of his element, but he clearly seems to know what he is doing.

    I’ll never be rich enough to sail like this, unless some stroke of luck changes things, and I’m not sure I’d want to. So maybe this is a kind of voyage-fiction. It is alien to imagine myself on a boat at sea.

    If I had to compare All Is Lost, it’d be to The Martian, but without anyone backing the protagonist up, it’s almost more dangerous to be on the open ocean than on Mars.

    In that we can thank Redford for pretending to go out to the open sea so we don’t, and I sure wouldn’t want to after watching his struggles.

    Rating: 4 out of 5.

  • (content warning: the death penalty)

    ProPublica’s Isaac Arnsdorf on how the murder factory at the combination White House/Justice Department that Trump and Barr are operating is hurrying through as many murders as it can before Biden takes over the murder factory and moves operations more exclusively overseas:

    The Justice Department has killed 10 people since July, with three more executions scheduled before Biden’s inauguration. Most every federal agency is rushing to wrap up unfinished business, cementing policy objectives in ways that will make them harder for the incoming president to unwind. But the Justice Department’s pressing forward with executions, even after the election of a new president who opposes them, is uniquely irreversible.

    This article goes into much more detail about what the government is using to kill, who is doing the murder for cash, and gives us details about the career staff that support the death penalty but as with all bad news lately, and if you’re like me and don’t get Trump’s emails you’ll find out this also serves to partially fulfill our national embarrassment’s ego and campaign.

    The murders and other violence at the Capitol took over the news, and some Republicans may well be done with our national embarrassment over that and because there isn’t any functional process today that let them proceed with overturning the results of the election, but this kind of murder that is legally justified by a crooked set of Supreme Court Justices rushed through before a change in power is essential to the operation of the Republican party.

  • GMK Awaken is a new keycap set from the designer biip and Novelkeys. This one has a bit of a cyber style. There are also matching deskmats and even an Awakened version of Novelkeys’ NK65 65% keyboard in either green or pink (I’m told it’s more of a red by someone with better color vision.)

    For me, Awaken is somehow too busy, but it probably looks better in-person and that’s kind of the challenge with these keycap group buy situations, you can’t know how they’ll actually come out or when they’ll really ship, but everyone involved with Awaken is reliable: GMK in Germany making the caps, Novelkeys for the US sales, and biip is a terrific designer who has shipped quality sets before.

    GMK Awaken starts at $120 for the base set and the same price for a base kit that has Katakana sublegends.
    There is an expansion kit that adds for more boards (notably my beloved Alice and Arisu layouts with split spacebars) for $35
    A RAMA keycap collaboration is also available for $65.

    The NK65 Awaken Edition keyboards in either pink or green include enough keycaps to cover the board with a few color options, color-matched Novelkeys Silk Yellow linear switches, and are $230 a pop.

    Space Cables is also running a matching Awaken cable that’s anywhere from about $40 to $102!

    GMK Awaken set is only available until January 31st, and Novelkeys estimates that it will ship in the fourth quarter of 2021.

  • Skipping an event, Apple launched a new 16″ MacBook Pro to replace the 15″ model via press-release and inviting some folks to look at the new laptop. The 16″ MacBook Pro was changed by thinning the bezel to slightly increase the size of the display, upgrading the speakers and microphone, and the keyboard is back to a scissor-mechanism instead of the dreaded butterfly-mechanism.

    The new laptop looks like this:

    This new 16″ laptop was rumored for a while, and part of the rumor was that the price would get a significant bump. That rumor was a little bit wrong, the starting price for this MacBook Pro hasn’t changed at all since Apple raised it a few generations prior. It’s still $2400 for the base 15″ MacBook Pro, before you add on an AppleCare insurance plan and upgrade any components before you order it. Fortunately it does start with an entirely reasonable 512GB SSD and 16GB of RAM.

    I thought it was interesting that Apple specifically called out Fortnite players as having a better experience in their press release with the meaningless non-statistic of “Gamers will enjoy smoother gameplay with up to 1.6 times faster performance in games like Fortnite.” 1.6 times faster what? Framerates, presumably.

    Game developers are also purported to have improved performance with another call-out: “In Unity, developers will experience 1.4 times faster fly-through performance during game development.”

    All of this improved performance is attributed to better Radeon Pro options, the 5300 and 5500 with either 4 or 8 gigs of video RAM with the pseudo-benchmarks attributed to the highest end Radeon Pro 5500 8GB.

    The new speakers on the 16″ MacBook Pro are supposed to have less vibration, due to being paired back-to-back which Apple promises will cancel out the rumble. The new microphone array sounds better than any other laptop microphone I’ve heard, which should make video and audio calls better, unfortunately the built-in camera is still an old 720p module that hasn’t been upgraded in years.

    The new keyboard has the inverted-t arrow keys that were replaced four years ago with what most people seem to think is a less useful shape that looked kind of bizarre with extremely tall left and right arrows that were hard to find by touch. There is now more space between the keys, and a physical escape key and a separate power/Touch ID button on the opposite sides of the Touch Bar panel. All those changes are welcome, but the most important change is the new scissor key switch mechanism that may be more reliable than the butterfly mechanism, and here is the real question: after three generations of awful, unreliable, butterfly keyboard mechanisms, should anyone trust Apple to get this right?

    I don’t think so. I think most people would be better served to wait for longer-term reports. As long as there is still time left on the extended keyboard warranty if they have a butterfly-mechanism keyboard and if they don’t have daily issues with key switch unreliability. You’ll also have to wait if you want this new keyboard part on any other size or type of MacBook. It’s only on the 16″ Pro for now.

    It stinks that Apple is the only company that can make laptops that run macOS, because it puts people in a bad situation where they have few choices if they want privacy, security, and enjoy the user experience of Apple’s products. I’m glad that Microsoft continues to work on their Surface line of devices to challenge Apple, and we may see ARM-based macOS devices before long that replace these Intel-based laptops.