DeathscytheX

Imitation is the sincerest of flattery. Pretty much every movie/tv series with a definite start and end is a rip off of something. It's just in the past its normally been of obscure things. Anime was a huge source of this in the 80s and 90s before it exploded over here. They could still get away with it probably. Normally things that were getting ripped off were obscure comics, books, short stories. etc. Pretty bold to rip a game, but the producers and directors are probably boomers that think not a lot of people play games.

At this point everything should be scary when you can't even trust established developers in their respective genre to make a complete and satisfying game. If I had to choose between Bioware and Respawn though, I'd choose Respawn. If they can go from FPS to 3rd person action/puzzle game. I'd have more faith than Bioware making something better or even on par with the original. I'm sure they'd consult heavily with Bioware either way.

I could be completely wrong though. I mean they just put out Fallen Order, so I doubt they've been developing a KOTOR remake for any lenght of time for this to be news. It would still be or just exiting the concept stage I'd imagine. It could be Bioware, their burning trash pile of Anthem is almost a year removed. What a dissapointment that was. The gameplay engine was absolutely phenomenal... and that was it once you got past the campaign.

If I had to guess, it would be Respawn/DICE LA collaboration. Fallen Order has given Zampella a ton of power at EA. He put everything on the line for a single player experience. Now that he's taken over DICE LA, they'll either rebrand or merge with Respawn. It could go either way. KOTOR happens so far into the past from the canon series/movies there is no reason to change the story at all.

You're not missing much with KOTOR2. It's not terrible. But it was rushed to release so a lot went unfinished and unpolished. If they Andromeda it, they'll be screwed. If they Fallen Order it, it will be amazing. They really should leave the story alone, bring back all the old VAs, and just make reimaginings of all the planets.

 Can't have a movie, and now the "series" is only going to be 4 eps. WTF. Kennedy needs to go. Everything is getting multiple rewrites, making trainwrecks. Let Jon Favreau be in charge since its clear she didn't have much clout for Mando because of his reputation.

I just caught up after getting 3 weeks behind. Now that I'm wiping my eyes dry. The best character of this series is gone. Kinda F'ed up how they did it, but she was already dying from an epic fight. Hvitserk got his addictive nature from Ragnar clearly but now he'll freak out more that he's taken the one thing Ivar wants, that is if Bjorn doesn't find out what hes done first. What a masterful acting by Bjorn by the way, the monologue was excellent. I can't even get into King Harald and Ivar parts which are equally interesting. I've been kinda cruising through this season with half interest since it started out slow, but its coming together midway through. The last 2 weeks have been pretty good. Since netflix is going to do a spinoff I wonder if its going to be based on Erik the Red who I assume just debuted.

If they announce this event I'll ask off just so I can preorder. Otherwise I'll get in trouble at work for refreshing the amazon search. 🙄Fucking Ebay scalpers are going to be in full force. One touch amazon purchasing is the best thing ever. I remember the days of frantically typing in your credit card number hoping to get one before the bots purchased everything.

Maybe there is some hope for a least a section of EA.

This is very true, shit there would be at least 5 shows in the last 2 years that would make my list.

I don't care what anyone says about MHA being "overhyped" Its the most dynamic Shonen in years if not ever. People will always hype that Naruto is the greatest ever. I'm not even going to argue because I never got to watch pass the Chunin exams. But I know it suffers from the exact issues every other shonen except MHA does. Filler garbage arcs. The seasonal format gets rid of all the bloat and just gives use the mostly good stuff. Plus I think it benefits from the effect of absence makes the heart grow fonder. The story forces it self into situations where it can't fall upon the same ole same ole formula to victory like DBZ. The animation quality is spectacular for a genre that requires various intense scenes with a lot of action. It almost reaches a Fullmetal Alchemist level of a large cast that is equally important across the board. Either way, haters gonna hate. It deserves the praise it gets. Its hard to stand out in the overcrowded world of Shonen.

Mother's Basement had Promised Neverland, I just picked Arkada's list for more bias reasons since I've seen most of what he has on there even though I wouldn't put some of them in my top of the decade despite enjoying them thoroughly. Both had Mob Psycho which I adore, and A Place Further than the Universe which I guess I need to watch now. Plus I knew he'd have Evergarden which would absolutely be on my list. Death Parade is criminally underrated. I'll raise an eyebrow at JoJo's though, I could only make it through 2 seasons before It got a bit too wacky for my liking And I watch A LOT of garbage. My top 10-25 list would be all over the place since my anime pallet is not as refined  

I'll leave this here since it's what I was originally coming to post. 😛

Politics

When he got elected I figured he'd only be a 1 term deal because the Dems would come up with a credible candidate. But as Sledge pointed out, Trump will win reelection. The media will continue to lose more credibility as they put up a bunch of polls leading up to election day showing he'll lose. Not only do they give him free air time, they continually discredit themselves as they can't come to terms that the internet is a bigger source of information than they are. They give him more fuel to self promote each time they mess up. On top of that, watching the news is just as utterly pointless as a newspaper subscription. These channels, ALL of them, are only about ratings. Remember when that Malaysia flight went down? CNN covered it for a month and even threw around a theory that it got sucked into a time space continuum for a second. But anything you see on the news, you've already read hours prior to it being talked about unless its a California car chase or terrorist attack.

Anyways, on the surface the economy is doing way better. For the average person there are more jobs to choose from rather than taking anything available. I've noticed this trend on a personal level as now its become increasingly hard to find qualified people to hire at my work. the applicant pool is smaller and poor, as in years pass it was easy to find someone, and they were probably overqualified trying to make ends meet. I've also seen a lot more people switch jobs/find a new job while previously everyone was holding on to their miserable job, and the only way they were leaving is if they got fired or laid off. When it comes down to it, a lot of people have more money in their pocket today than they did a few years ago. When this happens they give less of a fuck about anyone else but themselves. They don't care if you can't get married or go use a different public restroom. It doesn't concern them, they're doing great. That's how Trump wins. Fired up base, unenthusiastic opposing base, and complacent independents that are good with their current situation in life. 

The deficit will never be fixed until the whole thing collapses. Republicans stopped being fiscally conservative long ago, and democrats will only cut spending where it hurts the people that work hard for a living, the military, or some other type of budget that leads to innovation. They say "wErE gOnNa TaX tHe tOp 1%" but they don't tell you, they're gonna lump you in with them because the top 1% alone can't pay for all the spending they want to do". You get told you gotta take one for the team and face your new reality, sorta like Obama said all them jobs weren't coming back unless Trump had a magic wand to bring them back. Well... I guess he had a magic wand. No, he didn't but here is the reality of it:  entitlement spending needs to be cut and neither side is willing to do it. Dems will cut out everything but entitlements, and Repubs will come back in and restore them all, without cutting entitlements to balance it out. Instead of taking the issue serious its political football of one side saying the other hate poor people, and one side saying the other is just trying to pay for votes with the government purse while we give out money we don't have, and haven't had for a decade now. Also we need better review of all these federal departments that waste money because they had excess and just spent it all on dumb shit so the budget committee doesn't see that they had excess and feel like they can trim the fat from them. Why are we just looking at numbers like this? End of year reviews should be made, purchases restricted and excess should go into somewhere else or be saved for the next year and docked. Budgets should never keep increase automatically like it some type of cost of living raise...

Either way, politics have been changed forever. Maybe for the better, maybe for the worse. After Trump, I can see more people that aren't government lifers getting nominated. Congress is where the real rot is. Most these fuckers have been in there for 40+ years, and anything they say you can go back 20 years and find where they said the exact opposite. Plus they waste even more money by stuffing a bunch of unrelated shit into critical bills that have to be passed. If both sides could come together on a grassroots/state level and call an Article V to impose term limits on congress it would do us a lot of good. Lets face it, they'll never vote term limits for themselves. But not enough people have the drive or care because at the end of the day, politics currently doesn't effect the common person on a daily basis. Politics is shit, and being a keyboard warrior about it does nothing but get you a few likes from your friends that agree, while changing no one else's mind. People can swap bias articles with cherry picked data all day, but I've noticed the fatigue on that is starting to settle in... right up until the election cycle fires up in full force. Enjoy the calm while it lasts.

Whew rant over.... on to other predictions.

Gaming

PS5 vs. XBSX will be a closer one this gen. PS4 completely dominated this last generation because MS miscalculated how powerful the Sony launch console would be and ended up with a weaker console filled with forced features no one wanted. The whole thing was a debacle. PS4 not only had the more powerful system, they had the better first party titles and none of the silly features getting in the way of playing games. The poor UI and lesser online service was a minor inconvenience lost in it all. This go around it looks like XBSX will have more processing power by more than 3 teraflops. MS will still struggle with their 1st party exclusives. They bought up a bunch of financially marred 3rd party studios and I feel like all they'll do is release sequels to old series that use to be cross-platform. While Sony will continues to launch beloved series sequels and create new IPs. The One X is more powerful than the Pro and it hasn't done anything to play catch up this gen. so power is a thing that continues to diminish in relevance as long as it doesn't impact 3rd party title availability. In the end, I don't think anyone really wins this gen now that Sony has caved into cross play. I expect full cross play for all 3rd party multiplayer titles. People can buy the console with the 1st parties they want and play with their friends either way. So in reality the gamers win the console wars... aside from having to sign up a new account for every developer to enable cross play, and have 30 new passwords to remember, data breaches to worry about, and an inbox full of even more spam.

Internet

YouTube will be different by the end of 2020. It seems like they're cracking down on all the hatebate videos. Commentators will be thinned out as corporations are probably pouring money YTs way to get rid of the negative press they get from big YT talking heads like Jim Sterling. This will hurt YT in the end, as just as much good comes from YT as bad for some of these companies. Hypemen for stagnate franchises like COD and new titles like Apex will have a harder time making money without some type of official endorsement form the company of the game they cover. This in turn will cost them credibility with their viewers as a shill.  Expect a few new social media/stream platforms to come to light this coming year if YT does indeed head down this path.

Internet in the US will be just a shit as it has been the past decade. Marginal increases in some places. Fiber internet will still not be in enough places at affordable rates.

Entertainment

At least 10 new streaming services will debut this coming  year. Netflix's financial woes will start to really affect the product as their content gets stretched even more thin along with everyone else's. Disney fired the first shots for a stream bundle with Hulu and ESPN. They own all of that, but expect to start seeing others "team up" for bundles. We're headed towards cable packages 2.0 just like I felt we were earlier this year. 

Hollywood will continue to struggle with more pointless and horrible movies from shitty actors that are really just wannabe activists trying to make your escape from every day life about every day life. Marvel Phase whatever we're in will start to struggle at the box office as well because they don't hold the weight of interest as the Avenger's group. We'll all get called racists and sexist for not wanting to watch it. They'll have to rely on D+ shows as well but I don't think they'll be as popular as where they could go with Star Wars.

Ugh, can't come fast enough!!

This is the future of Star Wars. The Mandalorian was a blast and there is very little I can complain about without being nitpicky. The characters were good, each ep may not have been coherently connected, but each was a blast in its own way. The finale was very satisfying, and the not so subtle jab at storm trooper accuracy was amazing. . I think a big part of what gave this series its own feel is its diversion away from the classical John Williams atmosphere. Its own unique OST is probably overlooked. I hope Gina Carano and Carl Weathers return next season. This def worth signing up for the free trial and binging.

300 watts? Oh no! My PC uses 500 watts, and my old PC had a 1000 watt power supply.

The second season was better, but not really "lost in space". The family is still a bunch of annoying fuck ups. The Dad is constantly getting injured the first half of the series like a buffoon. The added a massive cast and diluting the insufferable Robinson family amongst them made them less annoying than the first season.

Ah so where do I begin. From what I gathered after digesting this film for a week is that J.J. Abrams was truly unhappy with TLJ and basically tried to retcon it and cram everything he wanted it to be in that movie along with this movie in the time span of a single movie. What you have is a nonsensical film that moves insanely fast without much logic. There are a bunch of new characters that you have zero investment in. They started their plotlines too late in the game. This is where I believe Abrams crammed stuff in that was too late to be added. These characters probably would have been pretty good if they debuted in the last film and developed naturally. Instead they're just tossed in and given sizable roles for such minor characters. Now on to the spoilery stuff

Oof. I can't defend this one. Awesome special effects and action galore... plot is fucking terrible, story went totally off the rails. Defies all logic even in the Star Wars universe. Forced nostalgia, and technological inconsistencies.

Hot Take Key Words/Phrases: Shang Tsung, Fairy Tail Friendship Power, Power Level Over 9000, Star Forge without the Star Forge.

I don't have time right now, but ill spoiler tag everything I found wrong with this film.

So long as they never put a joy stick at the bottom center.