Compare that to Star Tours, which while amusing wasn't actually a part of the story or anything. It had no impact, it had no connections, and it didn't leave even a minor hole in its wake.
But some dipshit decided Galactic Starcruiser needed to be canon.
We have the scripts, we have audio copies of every episode, we have novelizations, etc. We have the stories, in some form.
There's nothing like that for Galactic Starcruiser because there *can't* be. It was designed in such a way that it couldn't be easily captured.
And they made it canon.
True, it's not like an entire lost movie, but it's a part of the story you can't experience. Can't watch it, can't read it, can't go and be part of it because it's gone. It has ceased to be.
I think that's a first for a major franchise.
If you have more wealth than a single person can utilize in a lifetime, you are *literally* worth more to all of us dead than you are alive.
Just the money that would change hands to tax and settle your estate would pay *hundreds* of salaries for maybe a year.
How does that not terrify them?
So far per Twitch Inspector, this is the most stable stream I've had all week with zero unstable events.
I'll keep an eye on it and keep you all updated. Sorry for this mess.
Anyway I've been streaming for 15 minutes now in the background and there's no significant problem. A little flutter here and there, but zero frames have been dropped.
I'm tearing my hair out over here.
Packet loss also has the same kind of impact on online gaming: you need the system to know where you're standing at any given moment in real time. You can't error correct for that because time is of the essence. Re-sending the lost packet won't matter because the rest of the game is still going.
Error correction can re-send lost packets until you get them, but if you're streaming video you can't do that. There's a buffer and some wiggle room, but a lost packet re-sent out of order can't be sorted when you're talking about a real time video stream. Doesn't work.
The trouble is, bits of information are being lost. Just gone, poof, into the ether. That's why packet loss is insidious.
There's generally a type of error correction on the internet that works around packet loss, but when you're talking about streaming to Twitch it doesn't help.
It's also one of those infuriating issues that tech support won't acknowledge, almost as if it's a deliberate blind spot. All they can process is "speed test shows you're getting the rated speeds."
And yes, even with packet loss, you can still have a fast connection.
I know the issue isn't on Twitch's end or the connection between me and Twitch, because the packet loss is general. *Every* site I test shows the interference and dropouts. So that speaks to it being my ISP's network connections at fault.
But WHY?
Listen, if you're not familiar with legal concepts like "Home Base" and "Nanny-Nanny-Boo-Boo," I don't think you can speak to this.
Look, I've never been served (legally), but I'm goddamn certain it doesn't work the way Crazy Uncle Rudy said there. Like, it has to be grist for the outrage mill.
Is it a traffic issue? Are they running tests or upgrades in the afternoons? Is it a temperature-related hardware issue that becomes evident later in the day? (Thermal expansion?)
I hate when the issue isn't on my end, and the hardware is out of reach. I could probably fix this.
Moffat's strength is being able to string together witty banter and giving his characters interesting things to say even if the story they're saying them in is impenetrable.
So by that metric ... yes?
All I want to know - is it better than a Chibnall era storyline? Because his writing was incomprehensible.
Frankly I could give a tinker's about whatever the hell Ruby's arc is. I just want to see her and the Doctor running about being awesome.
*Nobody gives a shit about the magic snow, Russell.*
And moreover, next week is a Doctor-lite episode meaning Gatwa will be spending most of it on the sidelines.
*Already?* The man's barely had four episodes to establish himself. He's clearly the strongest part of this season and I'd watch him read a phone book.
It's amazing.
He invokes the Anglican church without anything really to say about the Anglican church, he invokes arms dealers and war for profit without anything really to say about arms dealers and war for profit, he invokes faith without anything really to say about faith.
You know what this reminds me of?
Moffat's Dracula, where he very insistently was trying to say something, and what he was saying was very important and he really needed to express it, and what he was saying was this:
(long sustained fart noise)
Is it about religion? Religious armies? Armies? Arms dealers? Capitalism? Capitalism and arms dealers? Families? Death? Death and religion? Families and religion? Faith? Blind faith? Learning not to trust blind faith? Wait no now we're *gonna* have faith?
Just a big mess.
What, and let someone other than Todd direct a Bethesda game? That's crazy talk.
(sigh)
As we approach 4pm, the connection is getting less and less stable.
There's nothing I can do about this. We're completely at the whim of whatever's wrong on the network.
I'm sorry. We'll try again tomorrow. Thanks for your patience.
Update:
Test stream is running at about 7% dropped frames. That's not great, but it's way better than the 20% we were dealing with yesterday.
If that number holds, then we might be able to stream today. I'll keep you posted.
It's wild that now Bethesda has a major spotlight moment with the Fallout TV series, and when new fans come to explore their games they're met with nothing to write home about since Fallout 4 (2015).
About the best Bethesda can offer is Fortnite skins.
That's a big ol' problem.
So for Bethesda's releases over the past ten years, we have Fallout 4 (mid), Fallout 76 (disaster that took years to become less-than-mid), and now Starfield (also less-than-mid, also being slowly slowly patched and lacking any kind of mod support on consoles).
This ain't good.
Fallout 4 was already kind of mid, but still a lot of fun.
Fallout 76 is just a multiplayer mod of Fallout 4, minus a lot of the fun single player elements. Plus it took *years* to reach a playable state and it took a toll on Bethesda employees.
Former ZeniMax developers claim that Fallout 76 was severely mismanaged
kotaku.com
The most anticipated Fallout project in recent years wasn't Bethesda's. It was Fallout: London, a fan-made expansion for Fallout 4 with full voice acting, new art assets, a whole new map ...
And then Bethesda ruined it by releasing a half-baked and buggy "next gen" patch.
Fallout 76 is just ... not it. It's fun sometimes, but it's very limited compared to a full-on single player Fallout game.
And what's on offer in the Fallout 76 "Atom Store" (yuck) would maybe hit a little better if build limits didn't mean you couldn't use half of it.
I had to fight tooth and nail to get an appointment for next Tuesday.
This is packet loss. This is noise on the line causing signals issues. In addition, my modem's event logs are showing repeated T3 time-outs indicating the connection keeps being reset.
Turning it on and off don't fix that.
Explaining we've had this issue before - repeatedly - and it's always been line hardware that's been damaged or faulty, from repeaters to hardware damage at the hub, and we've always needed a line tech to repair it.
"okay can you run a speed test"
Slowly explaining that we've rebooted the computer, the modem, the router several times, tried it on both wired and wireless connections, tried it directly connected to an ethernet cable, and it's still showing high packet loss.
"okay can you clear your Google browser"
"Hi, thank you for calling (ISP), how can we help you today?"
"We have up to 20% packet loss. It's been going on since Friday. We've had this issue before and it needed a line technician to repair. I'd like to make an appointment."
"... okay can you reboot your modem"
What's happening is that Tina has a specific overlay for her makeup, and that file is missing or corrupted.
Hence the "I would like to apologize for my racially insensitive Halloween costume" look.
It's not working on these two specific NPCs, and neither are most that were made to fix the issue.
They're just stuck that way.
It appears to be an incredibly unfortunate bug.
And holy crap, the production staff must have had cameo blue balls from the original series because half the fucking Marvel Universe shows up on camera in this one ...
(Yes he did that)
Last week the CEO said Tesla will spend $500 million expanding the charger network.
arstechnica.com
Elon: (fires entire Supercharger team)
Elon: (hires back Supercharger team a week later)
No, he's fine. He's fine.
Plus there's the whole racket Nvidia is running right now that if you're a customer and make deals with competitors, they shove your order to the bottom of the list.
New AI chipmakers claim that brands are intimidated by NVIDIA and its supposed purposeful delays.
www.windowscentral.com
Just to mention because I know it's hard to get definitive pricing right now, but the A100 is woefully out of date. Its successor the H100 usually runs about $30,000 each, or more depending on supply problems. The Blackwell cards are going to be worse.
One single loaded server costs $3,000,000.
Pretty much it comes down to "if I'm not allowed to slap your child then I'm calling the cops to do it and you can take it up with them."
We're doing just fine in America, yes sir ...
The news series has had the Doctor be traumatized, enraged, resigned, and awkward. A LOT of awkward. Sooooo much awkward.
Gatwa brings us the Doctor at ease, sure of himself, but not egotistical. He knows who he is and he's glad of it.
It's been about a minute, yeah?
I will say it's remarkable how much *confidence* Gatwa brings to the role, even more than Eccleston did. We've had a long go of the Doctor being more than a little self-depreciating.
Having the Doctor being sure of himself is a welcome change of pace.