A Logic Named Joe is a 1946 Sci Fi short story that introduces concepts such as the internet, streaming music and streaming video, search engines with family friendly filters and artificial intelligence.

Link to story: http://www.baen.com/chapters/W200506/0743499107___2.htm

Falling Down

Runtime: 1h 53m

Budget: $25m

Tomatometer: 75% 6.8/10 (Audience 88% 4/5)

IMDB Rating: 7.6 / 10 - 188k ratings (Top 1000 7.5/10)

Language: English

Streaming: Vudu , Amazon

Michael Douglas plays Foster, a man with 1950's era mentality who is having a really bad day. He just wants to make it across LA in time for his daughters birthday. The increasing setbacks he faces from modern 1990's society see him increasingly break down into a string of violence episodes. But his violence is guided by his 1950's era set of morals. And in spite of Fosters nerdy 50's appearance, he is surprisingly good at the modern violence thing. Does the movie glorify the violent anti-hero? Not so fast.

Robert Duvell plays Prendergast. A retiring cop on desk duty who is the only who connects the violent dots together. But because he is a retiring desk jockey who is clearly too afraid to take on a real cops job, almost no one listens to him. Almost no one. There is one person on the force who knows Prendergast has a lot more going on than people realize.

This story is an interesting analysis of the male psyche under pressure. Foster reacts with anger and aggression. Predergast bends to the point of being a doormat, and he just lies there and takes it.

What the movie uncovers at the end, is there is a middle ground, that handling life's setbacks sometimes requires patience and grace, and sometimes requires assertiveness and boldness, and that wisdom is knowing what you can and should try to change and what you can and should try to accept.

This movie has always been a favorite of mine, because I love a little bit of the old ultra violence, and I love an unusual ending that makes you rethink about the entire movie with a new perspective.

But what is really interesting, is this movie touches on the 1950's era males ideals and expectations men are still raised with today, and the outrage that arises when that sense of entitlement goes unfulfilled.

Out of Death

Runtime: 1h 36m.

Budget: Unknown. Shot over 9 days.

Tomatometer: 0% - "The cryptic title is about the only intriguing facet of this formulaic cat-and-mouse thriller."

IMDB Rating: 3.2 / 10 - 4.9k ratings

Language: English

Streaming: Hulu , Amazon

This movie is bad. The acting is bad. The dialogue is bad. The plot is bad. But it's a good kind of bad, a watchable kind of bad.

This is the last movie Bruce Willis stared in before he announced his retirement due to Aphasia. He filmed all his scenes in one day. It's not easy watching a great actor brought down low. But even on his worst day, he still out acts all the other actors.

I received my Steam Deck on June 6th and have used it literally every day since then. Here are some assorted thoughts that might be of value to people either waiting on theirs or on the fence about ordering:

The Good

• I had no idea until I got it that there's an official Deck test game: Aperture Desk Job. It's essentially a cute test/tutorial for the Deck's controls, set in the Portal universe. Takes about half an hour, but it's a fun onboarding for the device.
• On the past two Saturdays, I have woken up and played Vampire Survivors with one hand while I held my morning coffee in the other. This is the way.
• The control remapping options are absolutely incredible. It is a very robust system. Even simple fixes (like putting A on a back paddle so I can play Vampire Survivors one-handed) can make a world of difference.
• I haven't run many heavy games on it, but I started up Bugsnax, and it was keeping a solid 60 FPS and looked great.
• Emulation on the device is a dream. I haven't done anything past OG PlayStation games yet, but the power of the device, the robust control customization, and the ease of installing emulators (adding Flatpaks in desktop mode) make this absolutely ideal for revisiting older consoles. I've spent probably 80% of my time on the device in PSOne games.
• Battery life is fine, but I don't really use it. I bought a long power cord and spend most of the time with it plugged in on my couch since it has passthrough. I thought the cord sticking out the top of the device would bother me, but it hasn't really been an issue.
• Game selection is increasing steadily (1700+ verified games currently). If you're buying it to play specific games you might be disappointed, as there's still a lot that doesn't work. If you're buying it for games in general though, there is plenty to keep you occupied.
• The grips are MUCH more comfortable for bigger hands than standard Switch joycons. Those would always cramp my hands, but the Deck feels natural and comfortable.
• The middle of the device gets warm to the touch during gameplay, especially on more demanding stuff, but the grips remain cool and you won't feel the heat at all unless you specifically move your hands to the back middle of the device.

The Bad

• The paddles on the back are a little awkward, and I accidentally click them more than I like. In most games they're not mapped to anything so it's fine, but in emulators I use them for save states. I had to set them to respond to long presses only so my accidental clicks didn't mess things up.
• The software is... still getting there. I get navigation issues on store and profile pages frequently, along with frequent UI lag. It's a bit unpolished at the moment.
• Don't know if it's specific to my hardware or a software bug, but sometimes it won't log me in to my Friends list and the only fix is a reboot.
• I wish the control sticks had deeper indents for your thumbs. They're pretty flat, and my thumbs tend to slip off on stick-focused games (most noticeable on my right (aiming) thumb during 20 Minutes Till Dawn).
• Bluetooth headphones have to be manually reconnected in the Settings menu each time. No idea why this is, but it's a bit of an inconvenience.
• Mid-game suspending is still clunky. I don't really do it, as I don't trust that it'll save like it should. It also still counts playtime while suspended but seems to have a rollback feature? I put the device to sleep with a game open that I'd played for 20 minutes and came back to it saying I'd played it for 3 hours. The playtime ended up dropping back down to 20 minutes, but only after I restarted the device.

The Ugly

• There isn't any ugly. I absolutely love this device. Despite my nitpicks above, I think it's nothing short of splendid. I'm more excited about this than I've been about anything in videogaming in a long time.

If anyone has any questions, ask away! Also if any other people here have their Steam Decks and want to chime in with their experiences (@Autoxidation), go for it!

Note: there's a number of disclaimers I feel I want to include regarding "miracle" diets, direct-to-consumer businesses, health benefits/risks of dieting, etc but it'd get too long to put them up here. I'll add a comment with that stuff. Also, no one is paying me to say anything here.

I decided to write about my experiences with different low calorie/diabetic-friendly/keto food options. Let me know if this is at all helpful to you :)

Magic Spoon

This is that unavoidable direct-to-consumer business; you may have been bothered w/dozens of promo codes for their cereal across various podcasts, YouTube videos, and Twitch streams. I have been on a ketogenic diet for a long while (and have had success with it*), and saw that Magic Spoon is low carb and comparably low in calories compared to other sugary cereals.

I bought a variety pack with 4 boxes for ~$40 including shipping w/promo code. $10/box is pricey, but since I used to be a cereal lover, I figured it might be worth having it to scratch the itch. All of these I had with Blue Diamond Almond Breeze Unsweetened Almond Milk (<1g carbs.) I can't really tell a flavor difference between almond milk and low fat milk. Whole milk sells for about $3 in my market where as almond milk is about $4. Note: I am easy to please, I definitely don't have a "refined" palate. Now to the boxes:

Peanut Butter

I think maybe my expectations were off for this. I'm not a sommelier, so I'll describe flavors best I can in common folk language. This is just not good. At all. The taste is peanut-buttery, but has an overwhelming salty flavor. There's also this off-note that tastes like artificial sweetener. Texture-wise really adheres to your teeth. I finished the bowel, only because I didn't have enough time to pour a new one before work. It's been a few weeks, and I still haven't touched the box (aside from a small bowel to write this review.)

Rating: 1/5

Fruity

I had pretty low expectations from the previous box, and some anxiety about having potentially wasted $40 on food I won't eat. The smell when I opened the box was immediately that of fruit loops. I noticed the shape of the cereal was the same as the peanut butter ones. Fortunately, these didn't glue themselves to my teeth in quite the same way that the PB flavor did, but I still used my tongue to dislodge it from a couple of molars at the end. This tasted quite close to fruit loops, but overall is a unique flavor. I quite enjoyed this flavor. This cereal can sit in the bowel for some time before becoming soggy; a good quality since I typically take my time and browse Reddit/HN in the mornings while slowly working on a bowel of cereal before work. Flavor is a half-step down from fruit loops, but a step up in consistency.

Rating: 4/5

Frosty

When I tried this, this was the best keto cereal I've tried. I'd say it's the best cereal I've ever had, but that title still belongs to Reese's Puffs. It's hard to describe the flavor, something like Lucky Charms if you had a high-number of mash-mellows, but far more substantial. It isn't an especially complex flavor; it's just a "frosted" flavor that seems perfectly balanced in both flavor and consistency. Following the trend of other cereals, it doesn't get soggy fast, which I appreciate. Doesn't really get stuck in the teeth.

Rating: 5/5

Chocolate

This will be a short review: not great. It tastes like Cocoa Puffs, if they very obviously had substituted artificial sweetener for sugar. Maybe that's your thing, but I wasn't a huge fan of Cocoa Puffs in the first place. Not offensive, I'll probably finish the box when I run out of other things to eat, but not great.

Rating: 2/5

Conclusion

This scratches that craving for cereal that you miss out on when you go on a low carb diet. If you are on keto, you should note the cereal is relatively high in protein (around 13g per cup) where total fat is only 8g per cup. I'll probably purchase again, but I'll do a custom bundle next time w/fruity, 2 frosty, and maybe a different interesting flavor as a fourth.

I'm a longtime Linux user, and I haven't used Windows in a while aside from just launching games from Steam on my living room computer, but my new work laptop is Microsoft's flagship Surface Pro 4 so I figured it'd be the best experience you can have on a Windows machine.

I got the laptop in yesterday, and here's the summary of my experience:

• I am required by IT to use Chrome. To install Chrome, I had to click through no fewer than three "Are you sure you don't want to use Microsoft's more secure, faster browser?" banners to do so.

• When I plug in my external monitor, by default, the two monitors were mirrored; when I went into display settings, it didn't show the external monitor until I closed and reopened the settings menu.

• I have an Apple Magic Touchpad 2, and I had some issues getting it set up on Ubuntu 20.04 when I initially got it. These problems are now solved on the latest version of Ubuntu, but I was expecting a nice contrast in a good plug-and-play experience on Windows. Instead, I had to install sketchy drivers from some random GitHub page to get it to work properly.

• I've had some minor annoyances with my audio interface (a Zoom R-22) not being set as the default when I want it to be on Ubuntu, and I was really looking forward to getting a smooth video calling experience with my nice mic and interface on Windows. Lo and behold, the R-22 audio input - the whole reason I have it - doesn't work at all, at least in the Zoom video calling app.

• On Ubuntu, I use QV4L2 to configure the framing, zoom, exposure, etc of my camera. It's a bit clunky, and I was looking forward to having a smooth experience with this on the premier business OS. Unfortunately, the camera on this laptop has extremely aggressive aperture priority mode enabled, and there is no first-party app to configure it! The documentation tells me to go to Settings -> Devices -> Camera but there is no such menu item. So, I just look either washed-out or ultra-dark in every video call.

• After running Windows Update and rebooting, I was greeted with a full-screen and quite annoying to exit tutorial for Microsoft Teams - an app I did not install, because my company uses Slack.

This in addition to some setup papercuts, but I think those were probably due to my corporate IT's process rather than Windows itself.

Is this common? Do people who use Windows just... put up with this kind of thing? Or am I having an exceptionally bad experience for some reason?