Irish slebs and their offspring attend the opening night of The Helix Panto, The Three Musketeers with a cast that includes includes, Ireland’s premier tenor, Paul Byrom.
From top: Anna Daly with Euan and James Ward; Lucy Kennedy and Jack and Holly Kennedy; Henry and Deirdre Shefflin and kids Henry, Sadhbh and Suin; Bernard, Pamela, Caoimhe and Finn Dunne; Luke Thomas, Sean Lee and Frankie Lee; Kerri Nicole Blanc and daughter Kayla Blanc and niece Ava Fairbrother-Blanc; Musketeers cast; Colette Fitzpatrick, Milo and Olivia McDermott; Norma Sheahan with daughters Isabelle and Jessica Benwell; Eliza, Bonnie, Dara and Mairead Ronan.
1. Stadia is Google’s foray into the $150bn game industry. There’s no console, as games are streamed up to a 4K resolution at 60 frames per second. It’s accessible via laptop, desktop, Chrome OS tablet, Pixel phone or on your TV using a Chromecast Ultra.
2. Stadia is not fully adopting the Netflix model, in that you still have to purchase most games rather than gain access to a library that you can choose from. The current pool of games is small, with headliners including Assassin’s Creed Odyssey and Red Dead Redemption II.
3. A free base service will be coming next year, but for now there is only the option to pay for the Pro monthly subscription that will allow you to stream at higher rates and offer you access to some free games. To access the service you first need to purchase the Stadia Premier Edition for €129 which gets you a controller, a Chromecast Ultra and three months’ access to the Stadia Pro service.
4. Google seem to have gone to market with an MVP that they plan to iterate on. This might work for its software products, but hasn’t worked as they try to disrupt the mature console market. The product feels unfinished and is highly dependent on users’ internet speeds.
5. Stadia will improve as it evolves. More games will added, with online multiplayer, latency will improve, Youtube will be integrated, it will unshackle itself from the Pixel phone, 5G will become a reality.
6. Or… that won’t happen and Stadia will join all of the other products in the cemetery where things that we once loved are buried.
Surreal, precise monochrome tattoos combining negative space and dotwork (the tattoo equivalent of stippling) in the style of vintage scientific illustrations by Italian artist Michele Volpi.
The Whileaways – All The Lights On (Must Be Christmas)
And so begins the festive season of Christmas ditties.
First up is Galwegian folk ensemble The Whileaways who serve up a poignant snapshot of Yuletide in the City of the Tribes, with references to the big wheel in Eyre Square and pints in Neachtain’s…
Singer Noelie McDonnell (top left) is ably assisted here by Nicola Joyce (centre), Noriana Kennedy (right), Eimhin Cradock and Will Merrigan.
The archive video of Galway down all the days was edited by Alice McDowell.
Nick says: In the slick midwinter…
A decade after the collapse of Anglo Irish Bank and 12 years after he temporarily transferred loans valued at up to €122m without disclosing this fact to the board and the bank’s auditors…
Seán FitzPatrick has been expelled from Chartered Accountants Ireland after a disciplinary tribunal found he had brought discredit on himself and his profession.
Behold: the spiral galaxy NGC 4736, aka Messier 94 – 15 million light years away in the in the northern constellation of the Hunting Dogs (Canes Venatici). To wit:
A popular target for Earth-based astronomers, the face-on spiral galaxy is about 30,000 light-years across, with spiral arms sweeping through the outskirts of its broad disk. But this Hubble Space Telescope field of view spans about 7,000 light-years across M94‘s central region. The featured close-up highlights the galaxy’s compact, bright nucleus, prominent inner dust lanes, and the remarkable bluish ring of young massive stars. The ring stars are all likely less than 10 million years old, indicating that M94 is a starburst galaxy that is experiencing an epoch of rapid star formation. The circular ripple of blue stars is likely a wave propagating outward, having been triggered by the gravity and rotation of a oval matter distributions. Because M94 is relatively nearby, astronomers can better explore details of its starburst ring.
