The DuckDuckGo browser has this baked in as ‘Cookie Pop-up Protection’. It doesn’t quite get rid of them all, and doesn’t let you set a default for what you want (it’ll basically pick the most privacy-forward option) but I’ve found it works pretty well.
As the big theme of the episode was coincidence, if that was something RTD wanted to continue the list would be:
Some relation to the Ponds. Pond > River > Flood. Given the personality, maybe some future version of River that somehow managed to survive? I’ve seen others say Amy but the math doesn’t work out from 1938 as it would make Mrs. Flood 110~ but who knows, timey wimey etc. Also, ‘The one who waits’ is what Amy did all her life.
Some hidden relation to Ruby. The obvious one being her mother, but then the question becomes why did she decide to watch over Ruby like that from a distance? Also, Ruby was abandoned in Manchester and they lived there long enough for her to develop an accent before moving to London. Mrs. Flood was distinctly from London and perhaps just a coincidence again that they moved in close. Future Ruby/Ruby is a bi-regeneration of X character etc too
Some relation to the Doctor. The Master is the obvious one after the tease we just had, and the Master isn’t beyond breaking the fourth wall. The question becomes why would they aid her in joining the Doctor? The other usual suspects The Rani/Romana/Susan all would be coincidences but would we as the audience really care about it? I’ve seen someone say The Nun (the female incarnation of The Meddling Monk) which makes a little more sense as the episode is about meddling with the time stream.
Small aside: It’s potentially a fake out that the woman we see abandoning Ruby is her mother. I’ve seen others say that Ruby could be her own mother even. It’s certainly implied the character we see is her mother, but for all we know the baby from the 42nd Century and is found by Ruby during their adventures. Making a circle anyway while still keeping the mystique.
Knowing RTD and how he likes to tell stories, I wouldn’t be surprised if 1. Mrs. Flood is just someone they meet in the past and it’s a genuine coincidence. Nothing special, just someone who helps them out a bit. 2. Ruby’s history is just of an ordinary foundling girl swept up in time. The mother who abandons her is Ruby after the baby is the only survivor to some future tragedy. Not special In the way fans think, but special all the same.
Always listening is somewhat preferable to ‘Has such an accurate profile on you from the data that is available that these instances happen by pure coincidence’. That’s way scarier and just as intrusive. At least with a listening device you can get rid of it.
Sad thing is, it’s likely both.
Tbh most employees at a company this size become risk mitigation more than anything else. Once you’ve reached a certain level of success, you’re looking at what doesn’t move the needle as much as what makes it move positively. There could be a feature that is a major QoL improvement, but because in a test segment it performed 1% worse than base then it won’t be implemented.
Spotify, I believe, still works in the tribe and guild model that they created.
Chapter = people with the same skill set, squad = a group of people from different chapters focused on a single project, tribe = a group of squads focused on a large business goal, guild = a collective of folks who have a shared interest like Data Privacy.
Suffice to say, Agile is an imperfect tool and as you try to scale it, you need an increasing number of people to support it and make it run. Coders and Designers are likely just a fraction of their head count.
I’ve worked places that don’t have that support structure in place and they’ve stagnated for years struggling to get the most basic of decisions made. Decisions is what it is about too. Rarely do you get actual leadership from the c-level and especially from a CEO. So you end up with a lot of cooks trying to work out why the broth doesn’t taste quite right and lacking confidence to just add a bit of salt.
Yeah, gotta sell those toys somehow I guess. I didn’t hate it. I think it’ll take a bump or two as time goes on to lose functionality when narratively convenient like always it isn’t that big of a deal. It took the Doctor forever to do his Penny Crayon routine too. In a real emergency he’d still be best just running like usual.
I think it was purely just to set up for the new Disney+ fans he’s an advanced alien with a magic wand. And to shift as many units of the screwdriver before Christmas before it gets a downgrade.
If the show is proven popular, I wouldn’t be surprised for them to deepen the deal and to start seeing merch even appear in the Disney parks.
I really enjoyed the episode for what it was. It served as a decent introduction for the Disney+ crowd without being too convoluted. Which given this was a continuation of a 15 year old plot thread was handled about as well as it could be.
My biggest complaint was how integrated Rose was into the resolution to the metacrisis. I am not trans and don’t pretend to know even a fraction of the struggles they face in our society. The normalisation of Rose throughout the episode and an acknowledgement of how even very well meaning family work to be inclusive felt very natural. However, I did not like how her being trans seemed to have been caused by the metacrisis. It felt like it flew in the face of the normalisation. The reading in the episode is Rose is only trans because of that timelord DNA influence. It felt wrong to reduce her character to being nothing more than a quirk of fate rather than just who she is naturally.
I’d have preferred a ‘Lets all hold hands and the family shares the burden’ hand waving than what we got. Rose deserved more than what we got and certainly more screen time. It was quite weird the rest of the family didn’t go see Wilf. I get they were setting up episode 2, but in the context of the moment it felt really out of character for MumDonna.
To those confused about how Donna and Rose were able to ‘Let it go’ now rather than back then, Frozen wasn’t released until 4 years later so it musn’t have occurred to the Doctor… In all seriousness, I’d point to the scene from The Day of the Doctor where Clara opens the unlocked door for the ‘clever’ Doctors. Sometimes he’ll look for the best solution without realising a simple one is in front of him.
The new TARDIS interior was gorgeous, harkens back to the Hartnell console room. I loved the first thing 13 did was start running around. So much room to practise running haha.
All in all, a solid.episode with some flaws. I really liked the new style and you could feel that new budget while still having a Dr. Who charm aliens that looked like they’d been handmade. I’d put it around a 7.5/8 out of 10. Good foundation, interested to see if it is built on. It definitely makes me excited for Ncuti’s run.
I don’t mind the change, especially as the Davros story has been so told out now I doubt we’ll see much on-screen for the foreseeable future. However, I would question if Davros would have seen himself as disabled. I’m not familiar enough with the canon to know if we ever learned why he was in the chair, but I always assumed that Davros had experimented on himself while working on the Daleks. Him being a transitory phase between the Khaled evolution and the future evolution that would become the Daleks. I saw his chair as a reflection of this mid-way Dalek.
As I said, I don’t mind this change but I feel it is an ultimately empty thought if they don’t have people with disabilities in the ‘positive’ roles too. It’s all well and good saying he doesn’t want to associate disability with evil, but that also has to be followed by normalizing folks with disabilities within other roles too.
Yeah the DLCs made it feel like a full game. The base was a fun proof of concept, the the DLC fleshes that out. Both made me excited to see what version 2 with more time and funding could accomplish.
I hope they build on the more unique systems like the Holographic Shroud and give those systems more opportunities to shine.
That’s most tech corporate jobs tbf. Lots of middle managers with nothing much better to do than play musical chairs once a quarter. It’s like that XKCD meme about there being the standard that will clean up the mess of there being so many standards. Surely my way of working will solve all our problems of underinvestment and losing key talent…
To many in the region, it was more than just a tree. It was where they proposed, it was where they went to find calm during a tough period, it was where they said their final goodbyes to a loved one etc. To say the tree was iconic would be an understatement. It was a constant in a time of change and a place of undeniable beauty in a world of increasing shit. The kinda place you make a special trip out to once your kids are old enough and show them a part of their local identity, untouched by the passing of time.
At the end of the day, yes it is just a tree. But it is also a many missed memories being made and just one more destruction of something just a little special. It’s no surprise people were speculating that some landowner or farmer was refused planning permission after it first happened. Because that is what we’re used to, someone selfish taking away something that was just there because it was beautiful.
The largest owners are Advance Publications and Tencent. Advance also own Condé Nasty (Reddit even used to be under the Condé Nast banner). Weirdly they also own everyone’s favorite plagiarism detection service Turnitin.
Yeah. They could have gotten freaky with that corpse. Telling me Damage Control is out here chasing down Kamala when they could be after a celestial just chilling in the water lol. You know some villain going to try and eat it, get crazy powers. Some good guy has some wash up on their shore, gets crazy powers. So many opportunities left on the table.
The multiverse could have been so cool, but they went about it ass backwards. They introduce Kaang in a ‘quiet’ part of the overall story, where no one really has any stakes and we have little investment in anyone’s stories. Everyone is kinda doing their own things, mainly dealing with the aftermath of Endgame. Even Spider-Man, who we should be feeling protective of, decides to have a reset. We didn’t care about Kaang because we no long had an investment in any character.
Then we’re supposed to feel scared of Kaang? And then in >!Quantumania they straight up just strip him of all mystique to the point the end shot of that movie is just comical with the arena full of Kaang’s making the character have 0 remaining intrigue. !< Even had the stuff with Masters not happened they’d lost their chances to make it interesting. Paired with Skrull just not really resonating with the audience at all, it has been misstep after misstep.
!imo the only way you fix it now is have Doom come in the the F4, outright murder Kaang as the actual universal badass and then switch back to the personal less connected stories to tell a series of Invasion stories as the universe crumbles. Lead up to Fox-verse Vs MCU showdown. Then have a battleworld at the end of it and just reset the whole thing.!<
Basically, in trying to make a mainstream product they’ve ended up with something no one really cares about.
In my experience, even the consumer facing portion suffers from lack of innovation. Look at the big rounds of lay offs this year, fairly uniformly one of the hardest hit teams has been UX Research. If you’ve worked with a good researcher, you really know their value. But translating value that into hard metrics is tough. A lot of the time CEOs in the private sector will accept Good Enough & fast Vs moving at a reasonable pace.
I don’t think there would even be an appetite for hard research at most companies. Takes too long, too much of a risk, the boss’ cousin had a really cool idea instead…
Private sector is very good at operationalizing existing technology. Outside of the FAANGs(/MAMAAs) being good enough is too easy, or investing in research is considered to be too high an expense with no guarantee on return.
I did pick other negative traits. My problem with this one is it straight up lies to you in the description. You think it is going to be negative but instead it is the most basic boring version of what that trait could be. I’ve explored many hostile environments where conditions are common and haven’t had a situation where I didn’t already have the sure on hand but I tend to loot a lot.
You can’t change your traits after starting. For my play style, this one should have been perfect. Instead it just sucked all fun out of the potential mechanic.
Not even to mention the Star Wars games, any Marvel games, the new indie game, the Avatar game from Ubi. They might not have any active in-house studios but they are quite active in giving the rights to studios for their franchises.
There’s a trait you can pick that exactly explains my problems.with the game. The trait is ‘Dream Home’. It is described as
‘You own a luxurious, customizable house on a peaceful planet! Unfortunately it comes with a 125,000 credit mortgage with GalBank that has to be paid weekly.’…
I thought this was a cool way of adding increased difficulty for myself. I tend not to play at the hardest setting because I don’t have much time to play. But having to plan ahead and work around this limitation sounded like it would add an interesting wrinkle to the strategy I’d have in the game.
However, when you start the game you discover that the loan has to be paid off in full… And you have unlimited time to pay it off. The only way to be foreclosed upon is if you actively go tell the bank to foreclose on you. It’s like they had the idea, but couldn’t be bothered to implement it.
What’s worse is 120k is nothing in the game. You can easily get there within a few hours of play. This is just one example, but it speaks to the game’s complete unwillingness to give the player anything negative or push them any way from their ‘freedom’. The sheer fact you are not locked out of any faction or faction mission is another example. There are 0 stakes in the game and you feel 0 connection to the people you meet or places you visit. Not helped by Sarah potentially being one of the most annoying judgemental characters in any Bethesda game I’ve ever encountered.
Update: I eventually visited this ‘Dream House’. It kinda sucked. The planet it is on is kinda ugly. There is more to this mechanic than I originally thought, however. When you visit you can pay 500 credits for 1 week of access as a ‘payment’ towards the principal. Still very deceptive of the original description.
Controller support is pretty good. I’m playing with a PS5 controller and pretty much the whole interface has been redesigned to fit it. It feels like it was an experience designed to fit the systems of the game opposed to fit a controller onto the PC release of the game.
Most annoying for me was End Turn was mapped to Y/Triangle and I kept pressing it. I swapped it to R2 and haven’t had any more slipups.
There’s refinements and QoL changes to be made for sure, but I’ve been surprised at how well it plays so far.
I’m playing docked on the Deck. Animations and cut scenes play really well. If you can, I’d recommend using a Bluetooth controller as I’ve found the deck specific controls to not be the best. The controller UI takes a little getting used to but it is pretty good now I’ve been playing a few hours.
The biggest negative is, naturally, the graphics. It’s smooth enough, but there is just a lot of blurriness and weird edging I can’t get rid of on any setting. In the close up cut scenes that pretty much goes away. That said, I’m still having a lot of fun and none of that was a deal breaker for me. It runs significantly better than it did in EA for me.
The one ‘annoying’ thing that has happened is I’m the video cut scenes there is quite a significant audio delay. It is not there for the in-engine ones or during combat. I’ve only seen two of these though and they’re right at the start of the game. I just watched on YouTube to see them properly.
I’m in the camp of ‘I’ll wait for reviews’ on this one. Indiana Jones is a character with a controversial past and many of his character traits are not exactly modern. The puzzle stuff looked kinda fun and I’d be interested to see just how many there are in the game. Solving what looks like a blood sacrifice bowl with a bottle of wine is neat. Or it will be if that isn’t a telegraphed narrative. If there are point and click vibes where you pick up a clown nose in the first ten minutes of the game and then use It in the 9th hour, that kinda puzzle-bypass would be great.
I will say, ‘The Great Circle’ is such a boring name when they have ‘Circuli Magni’ right there. They give a clear translation in the trailer but ‘Indiana Jones and the Circuli Magni’ is significantly more interesting. SEO considerations I guess.