Say what you will about the otherwise calorie-lite first fortnight of the Kamala Harris/Tim Walz campaign, at least it eased for a moment the shrill catastrophizing that has marked Democratic messaging against former President Donald Trump over these past nine years.

"Gone are [President Joe] Biden's sober exhortations about the battle for the soul of the nation and a democracy under attack," The Washington Post observed earlier this month. "In its place are promises of 'freedom' and 'a brighter future' and, at times, audible giggles and laughter."

Well, the darkness came back with a vengeance in Chicago during Monday's opening night of the Democratic National Convention. Staged as a somewhat awkward and late-running "Thank you Joe" celebration, Day One demonstrated that the party remains in thrall both to the millenarian temptation and its flip side of messianic zeal.

"We're facing inflection point, one of those rare moments in history when the decisions we make now will determine the fate of our nation and the world for decades to come," Biden barked, familiarly. "That's not hyperbole. I mean it literally. We're in a battle for the very soul of America."

As puzzling as it may seem to those scores of millions of us who never once voted for the man during his half-century in elected office, we heard serial testimonials during Biden's valedictory night about the president's soulcraft. "He has brought us together, and revived our country, and our country's soul," Convention Chair Minyon Moore claimed, improbably. Sen. Chris Coons (D–Del.) extolled the president's "determination to heal the soul of our nation." Daughter Ashley reassured us that "He never stops thinking about you."

If only these sentiments were merely the good-natured embellishments of retirement banquets. Democrats, as they did massively for former President Barack Obama and are already cranking up for Harris and Walz, positioned Biden as a benevolent, borderline omniscient parental figure, ennobling citizens with meaning through the munificence of their gaze.

"They saw us, they fought for us, they heard us," Democratic National Committee Chair Jaime Harrison said of Biden and Harris. The 2024 ticket, Harrison continued, "will invest in our hopes, and our dreams, and our futures." Hillary Clinton posited that "We're not just electing a president. We are uplifting our nation." California Lt. Gov. Eleni Kounalakis testified of the Democratic nominee that "She cares. She cares so much that if you are lucky enough to be her friend, she called you on her birthday, and sometimes she sings to you."

It was only the Democrats' miserable show-running organization that prevented Biden from being serenaded by James Taylor with a rendition of "You've Got a Friend," a song he also performed for Obama at the 2012 Democratic convention, and that Carole King dedicated to both Clinton and Bernie Sanders in 2016. These politicians seeking access to the nuclear codes are not some distant, calculating power-seekers, but rather neighborly types who just want to lend a hand!

Sen. Raphael Warnock (D–Ga.), a Baptist pastor, was the most effective at tying together the Democratic strands of millenarianism and messianism. After busting Trump's chops for hawking Bibles ("he should try reading it"), and alleging that the GOP nominee "is a clear and present threat to the precious covenant we share with one another," Warnock reached for the stars.

"I'm convinced tonight that we can lift the broken even as we climb," he said. "I'm convinced tonight that we can heal sick bodies. We can heal the wounds that divide us. We can heal a planet in peril, we can heal the land."

George Will produced a memorably relevant metaphor in the 2014 Ken Burns documentary The Roosevelts: An Intimate History. "The presidency," Will mused, "is like a soft leather glove, and it takes the shape of the hand that's put into it. And when a very big hand is put into it and stretches the glove—stretches the office—the glove never quite shrinks back to what it was. So we are all living today with an office enlarged permanently by Franklin Roosevelt."

So too goes the stretching of presidential speechcraft. Obama, with significantly more charisma than Biden or Harris could ever muster, expanded the modern rhetorical template with his 2008 convention speech, delivered against a backdrop of Greek columns in a 76,000-seat stadium, that climaxed with this rapturously hubristic close:

I am absolutely certain that, generations from now, we will be able to look back and tell our children that this was the moment when we began to provide care for the sick and good jobs to the jobless. This was the moment when the rise of the oceans began to slow and our planet began to heal. This was the moment when we ended a war, and secured our nation, and restored our image as the last, best hope on Earth.

Just prior to Obama's rise, Gene Healy warned us about executive branch omnipotence in his terrific book (and Reason cover story) The Cult of the Presidency. "The chief executive of the United States," Healy wrote, "is no longer a mere constitutional officer charged with faithful execution of the laws. He is a soul nourisher, a hope giver, a living American talisman against hurricanes, terrorism, economic downturns, and spiritual malaise. He 'or she' is the one who answers the phone at 3 a.m. to keep our children safe from harm. The modern president is America's shrink, a social worker, our very own national talk show host. He's also the Supreme Warlord of the Earth."

Obama's successor Trump, after having campaigned on a Great Man Theory of politics, continued the modern tradition of playing overpromiser in chief. "Dying industries will come roaring back to life," he predicted in his 2017 speech in front of a Joint Session of Congress. "Crumbling infrastructure will be replaced with new roads, bridges, tunnels, airports and railways gleaming across our very, very beautiful land. Our terrible drug epidemic will slow down and ultimately stop. And our neglected inner cities will see a rebirth of hope, safety and opportunity." Or not.

As Reason Editor in Chief Katherine Mangu-Ward remarked at the time, "This weirdly grandiose rhetoric is a reflection of a weirdly grandiose bipartisan conception of the powers of the president….Presidents do not make the earth move. They do not turn back tides. They do not heal the sick, or eliminate vice, or remake the nation. They are humans with human failings, and one of those failings is the inability to resist taking a big slurp of their own Kool-Aid in moments of triumph."

Investing our very souls into the fortunes of politicians is not the habit of a healthy civic culture. The people who compete for the right to control $7 trillion of money extracted from taxpayers upon threat of imprisonment are not your friends. The executives who sit atop the Justice Department, who have control over history's most powerful military, are not responsible for your hopes, your dreams, your healing. Imbuing elected officials with such spiritual potency is a recipe for self-infantilization, disappointment, and terrible executive-branch governance.

Presidential candidates will only stop promising to heal our souls when we stop asking them to. The long, slow climb out of our national sump hole requires not only that we treat pompous pols with the derision they deserve, but that we stop pouring our own aspirations into the career prospects of the politically ambitious.

Democrats will spend these next three days scaring voters both about Trump's legitimately scary behavior, and such Potemkin threats as Project 2025 (or as Sen. Jim Clyburn (D–S.C.) called it last night, "Jim Crow 2.0"). Such darkness is the regrettably typical stuff of politics, on both sides. It's when they imagineer a government headed by Kamala Harris to be an agent of spiritual healing that you should really reach for the gong.

The post Democrats Just Can't Quit Saving Our Souls appeared first on Reason.com.

When I zoom the camera on Alex's momentarily untensed face while he's dozing by the pool, it's not because I'm a creep. When I pursue Ayo and Dija around the garden, keeping their feet and butts in shot as they belittle each other, it's not because I'm a busybody and a lech. And when I pan to the lighthouse piercing the sunset beyond the security spikes it's not out of any feeling of wonder, or even curiosity about possible escape routes. Please understand: I do not see these people, these objects at all, just the boneless, faceless traces they leave upon my own servitude to the lens.

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From the recently released SAND LAND to the unknown Blue Dragon or Chrono Trigger, we are fascinated by the artwork of Akira Toriyama. Let's see some of these.

SAND LAND

Sand Land, in a dramatic way, marks the farewell of one of our greatest storytellers, Akira Toriyama. Through this journey, we see his artistic evolution move from Dragon Ball's fast action and explosions of his signature anime style, all the way to this introspective desert adventure. Though an element of sadness remains when knowing this may be his final work, Sand Land serves instead as a celebration. Sand Land isn't without its flaws; some side quests may feel repetitive and the combat system might lack some of the depth craved by hardcore action game fans; nonetheless, these minor shortcomings won't take anything away from your experience - its greatest strength lies in being pure fun - something too seldom experienced today when gaming comes out with all-inclusive offerings like Sand Land does!

Blue Dragon

The art style of Akira Toriyama has left an indelible imprint on the JRPG universe contributing to the success of so many games, from iconic characters of Dragon Ball and the whimsical charm of Dragon Quest to lesser-known titles like Blue Dragon about whom I will say a few words here. This is maybe the only game that did not receive mainstream recognition. However, this game - filled with potential yet rarely recognized - should never have fallen under the radar. One must appreciate Blue Dragon for its artistic prowess before discussing its content because Toriyama's signature style can be seen throughout the game. Blue Dragon's characters boast their spiky hair and exaggerated features. They are brought here straight out of a Dragon Ball manga pages, while its vibrant world, full of floating islands and ancient ruins, provides an exciting sense of adventure reminiscent of classic JRPGs.

Dragon Ball FighterZ

Dragon Ball FighterZ serves as an important tribute to Akira Toriyama's legacy and visual storytelling within the fighting game genre. While we honor a master artist like Akira Toriyama with our memory of him and his masterpieces, Dragon Ball FighterZ stands as an ongoing reminder of their lasting appeal and impactful enjoyment by fans worldwide. For any true Dragon Ball fan - and particularly Toriyama fans like myself - this fighting game provides the complete Dragon Ball experience! Other fighting games may have attempted to capture its magic, but none come close; FighterZ truly nails it! Imagine playing as your favorite characters like Goku, Vegeta, and all the rest from Dragon Ball Z and feeling exactly as though you were entering into one of its episodes - with animations so accurate they mirror Toriyama's artwork perfectly - it feels just like being right there in an episode! FighterZ makes that dream possible like no other game has before it!

Dragon Quest

Toriyama's work can easily be identified among its characters, monsters, and environments found within Dragon Quest. His signature style characterized by faces with expressive features like expressive facial features such as expressive facial features such expressive faces with expressive facial features; expressive hair; dynamic poses; and dynamic poses is integral to its identity and visual identity. While core elements remain constant over time; his art style has slowly transformed over time: earlier games had sharper lines with detailed designs while later entries feature smoother curves with rounder faces - so Dragon Quest serves as an accurate depiction of Akira Toriyama's video game artwork! So if you're searching for Akira Toriyama artwork in video game form then Dragon Quest is a surefire way!

Dragon Ball Z: Kakarot

Kakarot takes it one step further than Dragon Ball FighterZ did, however. Remember how Toriyama designed an amazing original character just for FighterZ? Kakarot delivers that magic too: Bonyu from Toriyama is here as well, providing Goku with yet another boss battle straight out of his mind - adding even more dimension and originality!  every piece of detail from Toriyama makes Dragon Ball Z: Kakarot more than worth playing! JRPGs were at their most beloved when Dragon Ball Z first hit theaters, leaving us to spend hours grinding levels, pouring over stat sheets, dreaming about Kamehameha blasts and transformations, all the while dreaming about them all the same! Dragon Ball Z: Kakarot capitalizes on these memories while staying true to Akira Toriyama's artwork! Furthermore, modern open-world JRPG games remain true to Akira Toriyama's artwork!

Conclusion

Perhaps this article has brought back fond memories from your golden JRPG days or awakened curiosity about an obscure title; either way, take this as your invitation to go deeper - endless worlds are waiting to be discovered that offer us magical storytelling from master storytellers all waiting to transport us with their masterful artful artistry of true master storytellers waiting to transport us into his imagination & artistry of such masterful storytellers's masterworks!

Sand Land (2024), the latest action-adventure game from ILCA and Bandai Namco Entertainment, has caused some debate among manga readers that can be summarized this way: some consider it to be an independent story-arc adventure, others contend it acts both as a continuation of an original manga published back in 2000 (carrying the same title). So, which side has it right? Is Sand Land the solution or just more smokescreen that makes things look through the fog? A definite answer is impossible to get (like many things in life, like philosophy) but, in any event, it is worth investigating and learning about it. The journey is many times better than the destination, so let us navigate this fascinating desert journey that Sand Land offers us and find out together its connections to the source material at the beginning of the millennium, as well as what it may signify for potential newcomers.

The Link with the Past

Sand Land's inconsistency stems from its source material because why else would the game have the same name as the Manga book? Akira Toriyama himself (known to players through Dragon Ball and Dragon Ball Z: Kakarot) created one short manga series in 2000 titled Sand Land that took place after an apocalyptic desert event and featured Beelzebub and other unlikely allies working together (attempting to locate water sources, and more). Similar to Cowa, another of Toriyama's comics, Sand Land was collected in a tankobon manga and it is 14 chapters long. The game is inspired by this book, so here is the link to the past. However, the video game is not a 1 to 1 representation of the book, how could be, after all, it is a short comic that tells a story, whereas the video game does more.

Bridging the Gap for Newcomers

Sand Land the video game is an adaptation and in a way, a sequel of its respective manga counterpart, keeping much of what makes it special - among those, themes, characters, and plot elements - intact while expanding upon these in a manner the limited manga could never do. Sand Land is clearly one ideal entry point for newcomers to the universe. Sand Land's world of quirky characters and fantastical creatures features familiar elements from both media (including characters from the Dragon Ball series), so it is worth starting here. If you have the chance to buy Sand Land and play it, and at the same time enjoy the Manga book, you will experience both sides with rich narrative tapestries to explore.

So, who will get the most value out of Sand Land? This desert adventure is perfect for:

• Fans of Akira Toriyama's work: The vibrant world design and quirky humor will delight fans of Dragon Ball and other Toriyama creations (Dragon Quest, Chrono Trigger, Blue Dragon, Dragon Ball FighterZ, Dragon Ball Z: Kakarot), and being able to recognize some new work in Sand Land is a gift.
• Exploration enthusiasts: The vast desert world filled with loot, hidden secrets, and ancient ruins is a mesmerizing playground for those who buy cheap PS4 games and love to uncover every nook and cranny of the new game.
• Casual RPG players: This is not a role-playing game but it features elements of this genre, so if you're looking for a lighthearted and engaging RPG experience with a focus on fun over extreme difficulty, Sand Land fits the bill (and gives you some change back).

Verdict

Sand Land is a delightful, visually striking open-world adventure that makes it possible to admire once more the art of Akira Toriyama. It is simply enjoyable and adds a fresh breath to the genre via its distinct art style. The engaging story, exploration focus, and quirky characters are among its key strengths that enhance, in my opinion, the work of Akira Toriyama. Some purists might find similarities with its source manga disappointing but they are missing the point: the game is not the book. Its expanded narrative options and accessible entry points make this game great for newcomers who should be appreciative of the entire work. 

Itch.io – Steam

Back in 2017, a developer from France contacted me about their new point-and-click sci-fi game in the works called Ama’s Lullaby. But, it’s more than a point-and-click game, it’s also a hacking game. Now, this developer works on this game in his free time after his day job and with a small budget. Sometimes these passion projects die due to lack of time, money, motivation and/or just interest. But it looks like Ama’s Lullaby isn’t going to be one of those projects. Earlier this year, a demo of the game got released. Now, I asked the developer if he was interested in streaming this demo with us, and he did. Here is a link to part 1 & part 2. Sadly, due to overheating of Klamath’s computer, it had to be cut into two parts and the ending was quite abrupt. Now, this stream is almost a month ago, and I still wanted to write an article about this game. So, what do I think of the demo? Am I still as impressed when I saw it during the livestream, or is my opinion going to change when I’m not back seating and playing it myself? Let’s find out in this article.

Hacking The Point-And-Click Genre

The story of this demo is quite simple. Ama enters the police station and gets new tasks to aid the space colony she is in. Overall, the story is told more naturally compared to other games. Mostly, we get an opening where the main story of the game is teased, but not in this game. During interactions with the others, we get little glimpses into the world and story. Now, this is a tricky thing to pull off, since either you have to force the player to interact with everybody or risk that some players miss potentially important information. On the other hand, info dumping on the player isn’t always the best solution.

Now, in this space colony, there is an AI that makes a lot of decisions. It turns out that Ama and her dad have created that AI and the software to interact with it. She is one of the ambassadors of the human race. But it doesn’t take too long before strange things start to happen, and you notice that not everything is what you think it is.

The dialogues in this game appear above the character’s their head. When it’s cursive, you know it’s a thought. Not only that, you have simple sound effects that appear to put some additional power to the dialogues and to quickly differentiate between thoughts and spoken dialogues. Currently, there are plans to fully voice act this game, but if those plans fall through, I’d recommend to the developer to have different sound effects for the dialogues for different emotions.

Now, the game cold opens with an old school terminal as a main menu. This might be a bit jarring for new players who aren’t used to working with the command line. Personally, as somebody who knows how a command line works, I really love this touch. Since, this interface is also present in a lot of puzzles in the game. It fits the atmosphere and style of the game as a glove. To be honest, I think that with some minor polishing, it would be perfect.

There are a few things I would change. First, I’d get rid of the case-sensitive commands. The main reason is that a lot of people have the default keybinding for the Steam overlay with is… Shift+Tab. Since I love using autocomplete, it got pretty frustrating when I was holding my shift button and tabbed to autocomplete and my Steam overlay popped up.

A second thing I’d change is to allow the user to enlarge the font of terminal. The reason for that is because it doesn’t really scale pretty well with people who are using larger monitors.

Now, since this game is still in development and this is just the demo… I can totally excuse that there are features not present. Like pushing the up arrow to get the last command, or the help feature not always working correctly in all menus. For example, if you are in the options menu and use “QUALITY HELP”, you get information but if you first write “QUALITY” to see the options you can input and then “QUALITY HELP”… It bugs out and doesn’t give you help at all. Another small bug I noticed is that for some reason, the enter button on my numpad didn’t enter but always selected the whole text. But hey, during the stream the developer said that some of these things are on the list to get fixed for the full game.

Cyberpunk Sci-fi

I was impressed with the visuals of the game when we were playing this game on stream. While I haven’t played the Blade Runner games yet, I have seen a lot of people talk about it and know the visual style of the game. This game really mimics that style extremely well. You really feel like you are in a sci-fi world with some older technology than we have compared to our own technology.

Also, something I really love in this demo is that everything is one big space. You don’t really have “screens” in this game, like in a Broken Sword game for example. No, the camera swings and follows Ama as if she was in a movie. This sells the illusion of the area even more. While I’d have loved to see the details the developer put in every scene more up close sometimes, the more zoomed out look gives you a better overview on the scene. It almost feels like you are watching Ama through security camera’s or a drone camera in a way.

The biggest thing that I want to point out in terms of the visuals is Ama herself. The game goes for a more dark and dimly light environment and with a main character that’s wearing black clothes, it’s extremely easy to lose Ama in the scenery. It wouldn’t surprise me if they gave our main character in Blade Runner a brown coat for that reason, so you can more quickly see the main character without breaking the visual style of the game. But, overall, this is almost a nitpick. Since, it didn’t happen a lot that I lost Ama in the scene. It mostly happened when I was replaying parts of the demo while writing this article.

Now, I want to talk about the command line. The tutorial in this game on how a command line works is actually well done. I love how it doesn’t hold the players hands and tries to force them to input the right thing. It really lets you experiment with it and learn how it works. All the while, a small guide on how things work is displayed on the top of your screen.

This whole command line mechanic in this game is a breath of fresh air. It’s impressive how true to reality the whole command line is. While it uses some creative liberties here and there to make it fit into the game world, overall, it might be a real command line interface that’s open in the game.

In this demo, you have a few tasks to complete. Most of these tasks involve fixing various things. One task is highly dependent on the command line. This was quite easy for me since, like I said, I know how to use a command line. Visually, it’s a bit tricky during the tutorials in the network view since it’s not really clear/easy on how you can scroll up or down while in the network view. Using the mouse mostly scrolls around the network map. I think an easier way to scroll up and down in the terminal could be useful there. Also, when you have to input a command that’s longer than the terminal screen, I’d start a second line. Since, that’s how real life works. Or move the whole thing, and not let the username stay.

Final thoughts and future wishes

Overall, the demo is quite short. If you don’t know what you are doing and exploring everything, it will take you mostly two hours to complete. But if you know what to do, you can finish this in 10 minutes. Yet, the impression I got from the stream hasn’t changed. This game has quite a lot of potential but it needs some polish here and there.

There are some minor things like some objects not being solid and Ama being able to run through them, but there are also more major issues. The elevator bug the developer Marc mentioned during the stream, happened to me. Ama didn’t go up with the elevator and she was stuck. I think it was related to another bug I encountered where the head of IT got stuck in an animation loop. Somehow it was like Ama was near him while Ama was walking in other parts of the station. I don’t know what exactly triggered that, and I have replayed the demo trice to try and get it back into that bugged state, but I was unable to find the cause and I was unable to replicate it.

Currently, there is one way to save the game. There are several terminals in this demo where you can save your game. You only have one save slot. There is also no manual saving of the game. So, remember that. You can also only load from the main menu.

Reviewing a demo is always tricky to do. Especially if the game is still in development, since you never know for sure how the final game is going to look like. Yet, this demo is extremely promising. The puzzles where a lot of fun and after playing the demo, I had the same feeling that Klamath had at the end of the stream. I want to play more or similar games like this.

I could start talking about how the sound effects are amazing but there isn’t enough music yet. But, at one hand, the lack of music really sells the atmosphere of the game a lot more but on the other hand, the music during the terminal sections is really enjoyable. But, I’m sure that in the full game we shall see more music.

Just like I’m convinced that when the full game releases and the players find bugs, they will get fixed. While I was talking with Marc during the stream, I really felt the passion for creating this game and how he wants to make it the best experience it can be for his players. So, if you are interested in this game after reading this article in any way shape or form, I highly recommend that you give this game a chance, play the demo for yourself and give the developer feedback via his Discord or any other of his official channels.

I can’t wait to see and play the final game. Various things got revealed and talked about during the stream and I have to say, it was an amazing experience and conversation. I was already interested in seeing this game when it was on KickStarter but now that I have played the demo, I think we are on a winner here. This game will put an interesting twist on the point-and-click genre and will be interesting to anyone who enjoys adventure games with a sci-fi influence or just enjoy more unique puzzle games.

I want to thank Marc for reaching out to me and talking about his unique project. You can be sure that when the full version releases… me and Klamath will play through it and most likely stream it. And I’ll write a more in-depth article on the final product. Since, I might have not talked quite in-depth in this article but I want to hold off my final opinions when the game is fully released.

If you have read my article, played the demo and/or watched our stream, I’m curious, what did you think about this game? Feel free to talk about it in the comments. Am I overhyping the game or overlooking flaws? Or is there something you’d love to see in the full game?

And with that said, I have said everything about the game I want to say for now. I want to thank you for reading this article and I hope you enjoyed reading it as much as I enjoyed writing it. I hope to be able to welcome you in another article but until then, have a great rest of your day and take care.

In Landnama you'll be found exploring, expanding, enduring and given the opportunity to go writing your own saga.

The post Forge Your Viking Destiny in Landnama: A Unique City Builder appeared first on TheXboxHub.

Sometimes a game comes along and sucker punches you right in the gut. You can be completely aware of the premise going in, but some element of the setting or the mechanics takes a broader theme or commentary and makes it deeply, intensely personal. Papers, Please got me like that. My job at the time involved identity verification and, while it was nowhere near as life or death as the game, it still made it all too real, too visceral. Dragon Age: Inquisition completely caught me off guard, with NPC reactions to my Qunari Inquisitor feeling way too close to my experiences as a very visible trans woman.

Nobody Wants to Die is a work of dystopian science fiction, so I was expecting some hard hitting moments. I'm hardly the first person to point out that the last few years have felt increasingly like living in a cyberpunk novel - only without the ability to get shiny chrome replacements for my ageing knees. As a disabled person with a veritable laundry list of health conditions forced to rely on the underfunded NHS, the games' medical themes hit way too close to home.

Nobody Wants to Die is set in New York circa 2329, which, in a completely shocking and surprising twist, looks a lot like New York circa 1929, complete with tommy guns and prohibition. The sci-fi angle brings flying cars, 500+ story high apartment blocks and, most importantly, immortality. The discovery of a substance called ichorite allows brains to be encoded and transferred to new bodies, making death little more than an inconvenience, other than on the rare occasions that ichorite is completely destroyed. It's all very Altered Carbon, really.

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Cancellation Watch: Status updates for the sci fi and fantasy shows on the broadcast networks, cable channels, and streaming services as well as breaking news on the currently airing, returning, and upcoming genre entries. 

Status Updates

The Boys (Prime Video, Status: Renewed): This superhero satire entered the Nielsen Streaming Rankings for the week of its fourth season premiere. It landed at Number 2 with an estimated 1.2 billion minutes watched across just four days. The show has been renewed for a fifth and final season, and I expect it to continue on with spin-offs for several years.

House of the Dragon (HBO, Status: Renewed): This show entered the Nielsen Rankings under the Acquired shows for its run on Max at the Number 8 with 741 million minutes watched. That represents just one evening for viewing for the second season premiere plus any of the first season episodes that were streamed that week. The linear ratings have not been as strong, but not surprisingly this one has already been renewed for a third season.

Supacell (Netflix, Status: Renewal Possible): This British-made series has now spent three weeks in the Netflix Top 10, two at the Number 1 slot. There has been no word on a second-season renewal at this point, but I expect that the streamer will be interested in bringing this one back.

Futurama (Hulu, Status: Renewed): This animated sci fi comedy slipped into the Nielsen Rankings at Number 10 with 241 million minutes of viewing over a month and a half before its twelfth season premiere. It has already been renewed for two more seasons, so the hi-jinks should continue for several more years.

Scavengers Reign (Max/Netflix, Status: Cancelled): This animated sci fi series has not made it into the Netflix Top 10 in its encore run on that streaming service which definitely puts a damper on the hopes that it would get a second season. However, it did just get an Emmy nomination for Outstanding Animated Program which could give it a boost. Fans should definitely take the opportunity to get the show trending on the social networks and bring it more attention in an attempt to convince Netflix to keep it going.

You can see the status of all the shows from the current season at our Cancellation Watch Page.

Go to r/SciFiTV to join the discussion on sci fi and fantasy television and to keep up with the latest news, trailers, schedule announcements and more

Cancellation/Renewal Score:

On Monday, the cancellation of Syfy’s horror dramedy Reginald the Vampire was announced which brings the Cancellation/Renewal Score for the current season to 20 cancelled and ending sci fi and fantasy entries (28% of shows tracked) vs. 29 renewed (40%). Below are this season’s numbers, and you can see the list of shows and keep up with the score throughout the week at our Cancellation Watch Page.

Be sure to follow the Cancelled Sci Fi Twitter Site  for breaking news and updates. And for the latest news and discussions on sci fi and fantasy television, follow r/SciFiTV

Follow our Sci Fi TV Schedule for all the currently airing and upcoming sci fi and fantasy television shows, and you can see the premieres for all the upcoming genre entries at this link.

The post Cancellation Watch: The Boys and House of the Dragon Enter the Nielsen Rankings, Supacell Continues to Top Netflix Top 10, and More appeared first on Cancelled Sci Fi.

Řadu karetních her s lamou doplnila novinka Lama Kadabra. Určena je pro 2–6 hráčů od 8 let. Jejím autorem je známý Reinera Knizia. Navazuje na původní hru Lama a na hru Lama párty. K původním principům přidává několik nových prvků, které celkově zpestřují hru.

Vaším cílem ve hře je zbavit se svých karet, abyste nedostali trestné body, a zbavovat se již získaných trestných bodů. V nové variantě Lama Kadabra můžete žetony získávat či se jich zbavovat i během kola. Můžete dokonce donutit ostatní hráče, aby si vzali ty vaše. V balíčku je 60 karet, mají hodnoty 1 až 6 a nechybí známe lamy, nově zde najdete karty v hodnotách 2/3 a 4/5. Novinkou je velká karta jeviště.

Ve svém tahu provedete jednu ze tří akcí. Primárně se snažíte zbavovat karet, tím že je vynesete na odhazovací balíček. Můžete vynést kartu stejné hodnoty nebo přesně o 1 vyšší. Lama má současně hodnotu 0 a 7. Můžete ji vynést na kartu hodnoty 6 nebo na jinou lamu, ale také na 1. Další vaší možností je dobrat kartu. Pokud dojde dobírací balíček, nový nevytváříte. Poslední možností je odstoupení z kola. Pak odložíte karty a již se kola nezúčastníte.

U karet, na nichž jsou uvedeny dvě různé hodnoty, si můžete vybrat, kterou využijete. Speciální karty poskytují kromě hodnoty i speciální akci. Po vynesení těchto karet musíte provést danou akci. Symbol kolečka vám umožní předat žeton nejnižší hodnoty libovolnému soupeři. Symbol obdélníků znamená, že další hráč v pořadí si dobere kartu. Když zahrajete kartu se symbolem hvězdy, vezmete si modrý magický žeton, ať už je v tu chvíli kdekoliv.

Magický žeton vám umožní přeskočit váš tah. Pokud vám ale zůstane na konci kola, přinese vám 10 trestných bodů.

Novinkou ve hře je LAMAgická show. Když vynesete lamu, umístíte žeton nejnižší hodnoty na kartu jeviště. A pokud jste na tahu ve chvíli, kdy je jeviště plné, musíte vynést lamu, odhodit magický žeton nebo si vzít veškeré žetony z jeviště.

Konec kola nastane, když někdo vynese svou poslední kartu, nebo když všichni odstoupí z kola. Pak si spočítáte trestné body za karty, které vám zbyly, odpovídají jejich hodnotě – každá hodnota se ale počítá jen jednou (za tři čtyřky dostanete jen 4 trestné body), za lamu je 10 trestných bodů. Z banku si vezmete příslušný počet žetonů. Pokud se vám podařilo zbavit všech karet, můžete vrátit jeden libovolný žeton (bílý s hodnotou či černý s hodnotou 10).

Hra končí, když má na konci kola některý hráč alespoň 40 trestných bodů. Zvítězí hráč s nejméně trestnými body.

Jedná se o jednodnoduchou karetní hru pro celou rodinu i příležitostné hráče. Čeká vás více rozhodnutí a interaktivních efektů. Je svižná, takže jednu partii zvládnete za čtvrt hodiny.

Související články:

• MindOK již má LAMU (novinka)
• Hra Lama bude mít nástupce Lama párty (chystá se)
• MindOK vydá oceněnou rodinnou hru LAMA (chystá se)

The post Lama Kadabra je nová verze svižné karetní hry appeared first on Hrajeme.cz.

Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and two other Al Qaeda members behind the 9/11 attacks pleaded guilty to 2,976 counts of murder, U.S. military prosecutors revealed in a letter to 9/11 victim families on Wednesday. In exchange, the 9/11 plotters will escape the death penalty. The letter called the plea deal "the best path to finality and justice in this case."

Mohammed and his accomplices were first taken into U.S. custody in 2003. There was little doubt of their guilt; Mohammed admitted to plotting the attacks to a TV reporter a year before his capture. So why was a plea deal in a shadowy military court more than twenty years later the best that the U.S. government could do?

It was a self-inflicted problem. Rather than letting law enforcement handle a massacre on American soil, President George W. Bush had the suspects rounded up into secretive torture prisons, forever tainting the evidence. No court would admit torture-derived confessions—and any statement made after the torture could also be challenged by lawyers. After all, several known innocents have also confessed under torture.  

When the Obama administration tried to put Mohammed on trial in New York, the scene of his crime, politicians from both parties helped stir up public outrage. Congress passed a bipartisan law preventing Al Qaeda suspects from being moved to the U.S. mainland. Instead, Mohammed and other defendants were tried by a Guantanamo Bay military tribunal that delivered neither fairness and transparency nor swift justice. It was the worst of all worlds.

The relatives of many victims felt blindsided by the plea deal.

"There's a sense of betrayal amongst the 9/11 family members right now," Brett Eagleson, president of the nonprofit 9/11 Justice, told SpyTalk, a Substack focused on national security. "We weren't consulted in any way on what was going to be happening down in Guantanamo."

The 9/11 plotters' guilty plea was one of many missed opportunities for closure on the War on Terror. After killing Al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden, the Obama administration could have declared victory and begun the process of moving on. Instead, he promised endless war.

"His death does not mark the end of our effort," President Barack Obama said in his announcement of bin Laden's death. "There is no doubt that Al Qaeda will continue to pursue attacks against us. We must—and we will—remain vigilant at home and abroad."

This "vigilance abroad" meant war against an ever-shifting alphabet soup of Islamist rebels, most of whom had nothing to do with 9/11 and some of whom didn't exist when the War on Terror began. The American public was left confused about what they were even fighting for or against. As Rep. Sara Jacobs (D–Calif.) pointed out at a hearing last year, even the list of groups that the U.S. government considers to be "Al Qaeda affiliates" is classified.

Meanwhile, the constant feeling of siege corroded American domestic politics. Counterterrorism became an excuse to militarize the police. Obama-era defenses of drone strikes were recycled into anti-immigrant conspiracy theories. Concerns about "radicalization" and "extremism" were used to push for online censorship.

"The same tools that destabilized foreign countries were bound to destabilize America," wrote journalist Spencer Ackerman in his 2020 book, Reign of Terror. "Experiencing neither peace nor victory for such a sustained period was a volatile condition for millions of people."

All the while, it was easy to forget that the people who sparked all this fear to begin with—the perpetrators of 9/11—were either dead or behind bars.

Perhaps Bush and Obama's decisions are understandable, if not excusable, because the trauma of 9/11 was still so raw. But those decisions prevented this wound from ever healing. Two decades on, the closest thing to "finality and justice" is a sad, quiet compromise.

The post The 9/11 Plotters Should Have Been Found Guilty in a Real Court appeared first on Reason.com.

Robert F. Kennedy Jr. won applause at the Libertarian National Convention by criticizing government lockdowns and deficit spending, and saying America shouldn't police the world.

It made me want to interview him. This month, I did.

He said intelligent things about America's growing debt:

"President Trump said that he was going to balance the budget and instead he (increased the debt more) than every president in United States history—$8 trillion. President Biden is on track now to beat him."

It's good to hear a candidate actually talk about our debt.

"When the debt is this large…you have to cut dramatically, and I'm going to do that," he says.

But looking at his campaign promises, I don't see it.

He promises "affordable" housing via a federal program backing 3 percent mortgages.

"Imagine that you had a rich uncle who was willing to cosign your mortgage!" gushes his campaign ad. "I'm going to make Uncle Sam that rich uncle!"

I point out that such giveaways won't reduce our debt.

"That's not a giveaway," Kennedy replies. "Every dollar that I spend as president is going to go toward building our economy."

That's big government nonsense, like his other claim: "Every million dollars we spend on child care creates 22 jobs!"

Give me a break.

When I pressed him about specific cuts, Kennedy says, "I'll cut the military in half…cut it to about $500 billion….We are not the policemen of the world."

"Stop giving any money to Ukraine?" I ask.

"Negotiate a peace," Kennedy replies. "Biden has never talked to Putin about this, and it's criminal."

He never answered whether he'd give money to Ukraine. He did answer about Israel.

"Yes, of course we should,"

"[Since] you don't want to cut this spending, what would you cut?"

"Israel spending is rather minor," he responds. "I'm going to pick the most wasteful programs, put them all in one bill, and send them to Congress with an up and down vote."

Of course, Congress would just vote it down.

Kennedy's proposed cuts would hardly slow down our path to bankruptcy. Especially since he also wants new spending that activists pretend will reduce climate change.

At a concert years ago, he smeared "crisis" skeptics like me, who believe we can adjust to climate change, screaming at the audience, "Next time you see John Stossel and [others]… these flat-earthers, these corporate toadies—lying to you. This is treason, and we need to start treating them now as traitors!"

Now, sitting with him, I ask, "You want to have me executed for treason?"

"That statement," he replies, "it's not a statement that I would make today….Climate is existential. I think it's human-caused climate change. But I don't insist other people believe that. I'm arguing for free markets and then the lowest cost providers should prevail in the marketplace….We should end all subsidies and let the market dictate."

That sounds good: "Let the market dictate."

But wait, Kennedy makes money from solar farms backed by government guaranteed loans. He "leaned on his contacts in the Obama administration to secure a $1.6 billion loan guarantee," wrote The New York Times.

"Why should you get a government subsidy?" I ask.

"If you're creating a new industry," he replies, "you're competing with the Chinese. You want the United States to own pieces of that industry."

I suppose that means his government would subsidize every industry leftists like.

Yet when a wind farm company proposed building one near his family's home, he opposed it.

"Seems hypocritical," I say.

"We're exterminating the right whale in the North Atlantic through these wind farms!" he replies.

I think he was more honest years ago, when he complained that "turbines…would be seen from Cape Cod, Martha's Vineyard… Nantucket….[They] will steal the stars and nighttime views."

Kennedy was once a Democrat, but now Democrats sue to keep him off ballots. Former Clinton Labor Secretary Robert Reich calls him a "dangerous nutcase."

Kennedy complains that Reich won't debate him.

"Nobody will," he says. "They won't have me on any of their networks."

Well, obviously, I will.

I especially wanted to confront him about vaccines.

In a future column, Stossel TV will post more from our hourlong discussion.

COPYRIGHT 2024 BY JFS PRODUCTIONS INC.

The post RFK Jr. Pays Lip Service to the Debt While Pushing Policies That Would Increase It appeared first on Reason.com.

Enlarge (credit: https://www.uschemlabs.com/product/semaglutide-2mg-5-vials/)

Buying counterfeit weight loss drugs from illegal online pharmacies that don't require prescriptions is, in fact, a very bad idea, according to a study published Friday in JAMA Network Open.

The counterfeit drugs are sold as equivalents to the blockbuster semaglutide drugs, Ozempic and Wegovy, which are prescription only. When researchers got their hands on three illegal versions, they found that the counterfeit drugs had low-purity semaglutide, had dosages that exceeded the labeled amount, and one had signs of bacterial contamination.

The three substandard drugs tested came from three different illegal online pharmacies, which sold them as generic semaglutide drugs for weight loss, appetite suppression, diabetes, and cardiovascular health. However, the researchers, led by scientists at the University of California, San Diego, and the University of Pécs in Hungary, had initially tried purchasing counterfeit drugs from six such sellers.

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Following starring remaster turns for Pheonix Wright, Apollo Justice, and Ryunosuke Naruhodo, it's finally Miles Edgeworth's time to shine; Capcom has unveiled the Ace Attorney Investigations Collection, coming to PlayStation, Xbox, PC, and Switch on 6th September.

The newly announced collection includes two Miles Edgeworth led Ace Attorney spin-off adventures - both incorporating the series' usual mix of crime scene exploration and courtroom cross-examinations - starting with Ace Attorney Investigations: Miles Edgeworth, which originally released for Nintendo DS in 2009.

It's the second included title that's perhaps most exciting, however, given that Ace Attorney Investigations 2: Prosecutor’s Gambit - which initially launched for DS back in 2011 - hasn't previously had an official release outside of Japan.

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As part of the coverage of a major league baseball game being played in the former Negro League venue Ridgewood Field in Birmingham, Alabama, Hall of Fame baseball star Reggie Jackson was asked how emotional it was to return to the field. — Read the rest

The post "I wouldn't wish it on anyone": Baseball legend Reggie Jackson describes racism early in career appeared first on Boing Boing.

Picture a himbo tent. Now, see if you can get your mind around the concept of a flirtatious windmill. What exactly are the key architectural qualities of dwellings you might wish to go to bed with? Actually, don’t bother stretching your grey matter – you can just play Building Relationships, which is sort of A Short Hike but also, Love Island for anthropomorphic toy houses. There are demos on Itch and Steam. Be warned that you will be asked whether you’re a rooftop or a bottom floor.

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The Ace Attorney Investigations Collection is heading to PC later this year on September 6th. "Waitaminute," you might be saying, "Didn't this already come out?" No, you choob, you eejit, you dafty, you're thinking of one of several other collections of Ace Attorney games.

Ace Attorney Investigations Collection comprises two games: Ace Attorney Investigations: Miles Edgeworth and its sequel, Ace Attorney Investigations 2: Prosecutor’s Gambit. Neither game has been on PC before, and the latter has never been released outside of Japan.

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No, it's not Silversun. Sit down, Brian. Let somebody else have a go at answering. Citizen Sleeper 2: Starward Vector is a sci-fi RPG with plenty of dice and a heavy nod towards tabletop role-playing. The first Citizen Sleeper saw your bio-robotic protagonist landing on a donut-shaped space station where they learned to make a new life for themselves among interstellar farmers and ramen-serving rapscallions. In the sequel, a demo of which I've played [smug face], the hook is a little different. This time you're being pursued across a bunch of backwater truck stops, colonies, depots, and derelicts. All the while your misfit crew will clash and commingle. You still haven't got it, have you? Ugh. I suppose I'll let the game's designer tell you then.

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Picture a himbo tent. Now, see if you can get your mind around the concept of a flirtatious windmill. What exactly are the key architectural qualities of dwellings you might wish to go to bed with? Actually, don’t bother stretching your grey matter – you can just play Building Relationships, which is sort of A Short Hike but also, Love Island for anthropomorphic toy houses. There are demos on Itch and Steam. Be warned that you will be asked whether you’re a rooftop or a bottom floor.

Read more

The Ace Attorney Investigations Collection is heading to PC later this year on September 6th. "Waitaminute," you might be saying, "Didn't this already come out?" No, you choob, you eejit, you dafty, you're thinking of one of several other collections of Ace Attorney games.

Ace Attorney Investigations Collection comprises two games: Ace Attorney Investigations: Miles Edgeworth and its sequel, Ace Attorney Investigations 2: Prosecutor’s Gambit. Neither game has been on PC before, and the latter has never been released outside of Japan.

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No, it's not Silversun. Sit down, Brian. Let somebody else have a go at answering. Citizen Sleeper 2: Starward Vector is a sci-fi RPG with plenty of dice and a heavy nod towards tabletop role-playing. The first Citizen Sleeper saw your bio-robotic protagonist landing on a donut-shaped space station where they learned to make a new life for themselves among interstellar farmers and ramen-serving rapscallions. In the sequel, a demo of which I've played [smug face], the hook is a little different. This time you're being pursued across a bunch of backwater truck stops, colonies, depots, and derelicts. All the while your misfit crew will clash and commingle. You still haven't got it, have you? Ugh. I suppose I'll let the game's designer tell you then.

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Citizen Sleeper 2 is coming in early 2025, publishers Fellow Traveller have announced, and it's also going to be releasing on PlayStation 5 and Switch alongside the already confirmed Xbox Series S/X, Game Pass and PC versions.

Unveiled at tonight's PC Gaming Show during its first proper gameplay trailer, Citizen Sleeper 2 will see you wake up in the body of a brand-new Sleeper android who's fighting for survival out on the Starward Belt on the edge of the Helion System. We've known for a while that Citizen Sleeper 2 is going to be a much bigger game than the original, but tonight's trailer gave us a taste of just how large the Belt actually is, as it will have its own navigable map screen, along with lots of different space ports and unique locations to visit along the way.

We also get to see some of the characters we'll be meeting when we get there. Unlike the first game, though, they'll be joining your crew as valuable team mates here, and will live alongside you in your ship as you travel between locations. You'll also be able to draw on their unique skills and character traits when taking on big contract jobs, too, as each crew member you recruit will have their own set of dice rolls to use to help you complete tasks and get the job done.

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Hyper Light Drifter developer Heart Machine unveiled its next game at the Devolver Direct showcase.

Called Possessor(s), it's a side-scrolling action game with a beautiful hand-drawn aesthetic set in a devastated mega-city. It's due out in 2025.

Players control two protagonists - Luca and Rehm - with melee combat involving juggles with an array of weapons like swords, bats, and even an electric guitar.

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The news panamax has come in and all the shipping containers are spilling off the deck in an uncontrollable catastrophe of trailers. Here's another: you may remember The Crush House, the colourful 90s reality show where you film the cast by day, trying to please the audience, and creep around by night, trying to investigate the unsettling true nature of the show. No? You don't remember? Well, it has been a long year. Never mind, The Crush House now has a release date. But I'm not telling you what it is until you come watch the new trailer.

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Large language models, the AI systems that power chatbots like ChatGPT, are getting better and better—but they’re also getting bigger and bigger, demanding more energy and computational power. For LLMs that are cheap, fast, and environmentally friendly, they’ll need to shrink, ideally small enough to run directly on devices like cellphones. Researchers are finding ways to do just that by drastically rounding off the many high-precision numbers that store their memories to equal just 1 or -1.

LLMs, like all neural networks, are trained by altering the strengths of connections between their artificial neurons. These strengths are stored as mathematical parameters. Researchers have long compressed networks by reducing the precision of these parameters—a process called quantization—so that instead of taking up 16 bits each, they might take up 8 or 4. Now researchers are pushing the envelope to a single bit.

How to Make a 1-bit LLM

There are two general approaches. One approach, called post-training quantization (PTQ) is to quantize the parameters of a full-precision network. The other approach, quantization-aware training (QAT), is to train a network from scratch to have low-precision parameters. So far, PTQ has been more popular with researchers.

In February, a team including Haotong Qin at ETH Zurich, Xianglong Liu at Beihang University, and Wei Huang at the University of Hong Kong introduced a PTQ method called BiLLM. It approximates most parameters in a network using 1 bit, but represents a few salient weights—those most influential to performance—using 2 bits. In one test, the team binarized a version of Meta’s LLaMa LLM that has 13 billion parameters.

“One-bit LLMs open new doors for designing custom hardware and systems specifically optimized for 1-bit LLMs.” —Furu Wei, Microsoft Research Asia

To score performance, the researchers used a metric called perplexity, which is basically a measure of how surprised the trained model was by each ensuing piece of text. For one dataset, the original model had a perplexity of around 5, and the BiLLM version scored around 15, much better than the closest binarization competitor, which scored around 37 (for perplexity, lower numbers are better). That said, the BiLLM model required about a tenth of the memory capacity as the original.

PTQ has several advantages over QAT, says Wanxiang Che, a computer scientist at Harbin Institute of Technology, in China. It doesn’t require collecting training data, it doesn’t require training a model from scratch, and the training process is more stable. QAT, on the other hand, has the potential to make models more accurate, since quantization is built into the model from the beginning.

1-bit LLMs Find Success Against Their Larger Cousins

Last year, a team led by Furu Wei and Shuming Ma, at Microsoft Research Asia, in Beijing, created BitNet, the first 1-bit QAT method for LLMs. After fiddling with the rate at which the network adjusts its parameters, in order to stabilize training, they created LLMs that performed better than those created using PTQ methods. They were still not as good as full-precision networks, but roughly 10 times as energy efficient.

In February, Wei’s team announced BitNet 1.58b, in which parameters can equal -1, 0, or 1, which means they take up roughly 1.58 bits of memory per parameter. A BitNet model with 3 billion parameters performed just as well on various language tasks as a full-precision LLaMA model with the same number of parameters and amount of training, but it was 2.71 times as fast, used 72 percent less GPU memory, and used 94 percent less GPU energy. Wei called this an “aha moment.” Further, the researchers found that as they trained larger models, efficiency advantages improved.

A BitNet model with 3 billion parameters performed just as well on various language tasks as a full-precision LLaMA model.

This year, a team led by Che, of Harbin Institute of Technology, released a preprint on another LLM binarization method, called OneBit. OneBit combines elements of both PTQ and QAT. It uses a full-precision pretrained LLM to generate data for training a quantized version. The team’s 13-billion-parameter model achieved a perplexity score of around 9 on one dataset, versus 5 for a LLaMA model with 13 billion parameters. Meanwhile, OneBit occupied only 10 percent as much memory. On customized chips, it could presumably run much faster.

Wei, of Microsoft, says quantized models have multiple advantages. They can fit on smaller chips, they require less data transfer between memory and processors, and they allow for faster processing. Current hardware can’t take full advantage of these models, though. LLMs often run on GPUs like those made by Nvidia, which represent weights using higher precision and spend most of their energy multiplying them. New hardware could natively represent each parameter as a -1 or 1 (or 0), and then simply add and subtract values and avoid multiplication. “One-bit LLMs open new doors for designing custom hardware and systems specifically optimized for 1-bit LLMs,” Wei says.

“They should grow up together,” Huang, of the University of Hong Kong, says of 1-bit models and processors. “But it’s a long way to develop new hardware.”

Indika, unhelpfully for a desperately devout Orthodox nun in early 19th Century Russia, is in communion with the Devil. Or maybe she just isn't as piously pure of thought as she'd like to believe. In the slippery, shifting world of Indika (I'm talking about developer Odd Meter's wonderfully confounding platform adventure now, not the character - brace yourself for some back-and-forth there), disorientating, uneasy ambiguity reigns over all.

Which isn't to say Indika the game is afraid to commit; this is an astonishingly confident experience, so full of swagger and style, so fearless in its presentation and thematic reach, it's hard not to be immediately taken in. Indika opens very much as it means to go on, beginning not with a dreary pan across the snow-battered Russian landscape, but with a dreamy, expectation confounding interactive free-fall through an inverted world, brazenly presented in the style of a 16-bit arcade game and accompanied by a muffled, insistent cacophony of song. Then, as the miserable reality of Indika's convent snaps back into focus with a crash of metal on parquet and the first of many striking directorial decisions - here, the cutscene camera remains firmly fixed on Indika's wretched face as the world around her tilts and swirls - Odd Meter deals its next hand.

Indika the character, as becomes immediately apparent when the game relinquishes control moments in and her idle animation takes over, is an extraordinary creation. Not only is she brought to life through a wonderfully nuanced vocal performance by Isabella Inchbald (the game's English translation is consistently strong and its voice cast superb), her complex, conflicting inner life is evident just from the way she moves. She's a twitching, restless ball of nervous energy; awkwardly shifting her weight from one foot to the other, eyes darting back and forth, occasionally chewing on her fingernails or wringing her hands.

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Role-playing musical Stray Gods is getting DLC in which you'll play as sorrowful ghostly rocker Orpheus, the developers have announced. You briefly meet Orpheus in the base game while playing as leatherclad muse Grace, finding him moping in the underworld, eyes dripping with glam rock mascara. In the DLC he makes a musical comeback on earth, alongside messenger god Hermes. I've not stumbled on Orpheus in the other mythical game of this season, Hades 2 (he showed up in the first Hades but there's no sign he's reappearing in the sequel). So it looks like fans of the ancient Greek sadboi will have to flock to Summerfall's expansion when it comes out this summer.

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Indika is a good game about a good nun, and I’ll talk about why in a sec, but first - a complaint. ‘Low’, ‘Medium’, or ‘Ultra’ graphics settings? Really, Indika? Where is 'High'? Where’s it gone, eh? This isn’t cute when Papa John's do it, and it’s not cute now. You’re lucky you’re an extremely interesting game, Indika. Let’s talk about that instead.

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The U.S. Supreme Court ruled Thursday that the due process rights of two Alabama women were not violated when they both had to wait over a year for a court hearing to challenge the police seizure of their cars.

In a 6–3 decision, the Court's conservative majority held in the case Culley v. Marshall, Attorney General of Alabama that property owners in civil asset forfeiture proceedings have no due process right to a preliminary court hearing to determine if police had probable cause to seize their property.

"When police seize and then seek civil forfeiture of a car that was used to commit a drug offense, the Constitution requires a timely forfeiture hearing," Justice Brett Kavanaugh wrote in the majority opinion, joined by Chief Justice John Roberts and Justices Samuel Alito, Clarence Thomas, Neil Gorsuch, and Amy Coney Barrett. "The question here is whether the Constitution also requires a separate preliminary hearing to determine whether the police may retain the car pending the forfeiture hearing. This Court's precedents establish that the answer is no: The Constitution requires a timely forfeiture hearing; the Constitution does not also require a separate preliminary hearing."

Under civil asset forfeiture laws, police can seize property suspected of being connected to criminal activity, even if the owner is never charged or convicted of a crime. Law enforcement groups say it is a vital tool to disrupt drug trafficking and other organized crime.

Civil liberties groups across the political spectrum argue that the process creates perverse profit incentives for police and is unfairly tilted against property owners, who bear the burden of challenging the seizures in court. 

Those criticisms have been echoed in the past by not just the Supreme Court's liberal justices but also Justices Clarence Thomas and Neil Gorsuch, giving forfeiture critics hope that a skeptical majority on the Court would clamp down on civil forfeiture.

However, despite writing in a concurrence that "this case leaves many larger questions unresolved about whether, and to what extent, contemporary civil forfeiture practices can be squared with the Constitution's promise of due process," Gorsuch, joined by Thomas, both agreed with the majority opinion.

Today's ruling is a disappointment, then, for groups such as the Institute for Justice, a libertarian-leaning public-interest law firm that filed an amicus brief on behalf of the petitioners. Kirby Thomas West, an Institute for Justice attorney, calls the ruling "a big loss for private property rights."

"Today's decision will mean many more property owners will never get their day in court when it could do them some good—shortly after the seizure of their vehicle or other property," says West. "Instead, civil forfeiture cases will languish for months or years before they are resolved. Meanwhile owners of seized vehicles will scramble to find a way to get to work, take their kids to school, run errands, and complete other essential life tasks."

The Supreme Court agreed to hear the case—two consolidated cases both involving Alabama women whose cars were seized by police for offenses they were not involved or charged with—last year.

In the first case, Halima Culley's son was pulled over by police in Satsuma, Alabama, while driving Culley's car. He was arrested and charged with possession of marijuana and drug paraphernalia. The City of Satsuma also seized Culley's car. It took 20 months, during all of which Culley was bereft of her vehicle, before a state court ruled that she was entitled to the return of her car under Alabama's innocent-owner defense.

In the second case, a friend of Lena Sutton took her car to run an errand in 2019. He was pulled over by police in Leesburg, Alabama, who found methamphetamine in the car and seized it. Sutton also eventually was granted summary judgment on an innocent-owner defense, but not until more than a year after the initial seizure of her car.

Culley and Sutton both filed lawsuits claiming that the towns violated their Eighth and 14th Amendment rights by depriving them of their cars for months when a pretrial hearing to establish probable cause for the seizures could have quickly determined that they were innocent owners.

Those long waits are not unusual. Last year, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 6th Circuit ruled that Detroit's asset forfeiture scheme violated residents' constitutional rights by making them wait months for court hearings to challenge the validity of seizures. One of the plaintiffs in that lawsuit waited two years for a hearing.

However, the 11th Circuit rejected Culley's claims, finding the state's civil forfeiture process satisfied the requirements for a timely hearing under the speedy trial test, a balancing test created to resolve allegations of Sixth Amendment violations. However, every other circuit that has weighed in on the issue used a different balancing test established in the 1976 Supreme Court case Mathews v. Eldridge to determine due process violations.

The Supreme Court's conservative majority sidestepped the question of which test to use altogether, ruling that the existing requirement for a timely court hearing in forfeiture cases satisfied constitutional requirements.

"A timely forfeiture hearing protects the interests of both the claimant and the government," Kavanaugh wrote. "And an additional preliminary hearing of the kind sought by petitioners would interfere with the government's important law-enforcement activities in the period after the seizure and before the forfeiture hearing."

In a dissent, Justice Sonia Sotomayor, joined by Justices Elena Kagan and Ketanji Brown Jackson, wrote that the majority opinion's reasoning was "deeply flawed" and, rather than resolve the question of which test lower courts should apply, creates a universal rule that "hamstrings federal courts from conducting a context-specific analysis in civil forfeiture schemes that are less generous than the one here."

The post Supreme Court Rules No Due Process Right to Preliminary Hearings in Civil Asset Forfeiture Cases appeared first on Reason.com.

It’s that time of year again, LudoNarraCon! The annual Steam festival organized by indie publisher Fellow Traveller (known for games like Citizen Sleeper) is back as of May 9 and will run until May 13. Like previous years, the festival brings with it sales, panels with interesting developers, and exciting demos for…

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Electronic Arts, the publisher of most sports games on the market, Battlefield, Mass Effect, and plenty of other huge franchises, is considering putting ads inside its video games as another source of revenue. This isn’t the first time the company has done this, but given how poorly it’s gone in the past, I’m…

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Hello and welcome back to What To Play! We've returned from a little hiatus, which you definitely noticed and have been very sad about, of course. It's finally edging towards spring here in the UK, but don't let that tempt you into going outside, there's video games to be a-playin'!

As ever, this is where we'll round up the best games from the month gone by, and the things we're most excited to play from the month ahead - plus, any other suggestions for what might complement it. Here's What To Play This May 2024.

Availability: Out now on PC, Switch, Xbox One and Xbox Series X/S.

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In February, police officer John Barton arrested Twyla Stallworth in Andalusia, Alabama, because she refused to give him her photo identification. The only problem? Barton had no legal basis to demand Stallworth fork over her I.D. 

Stallworth's arrest is just the latest in a series of false arrests in Alabama that have stemmed from a misinterpretation of the state's 2006 "stop and identify law," which allows police, when they have reasonable suspicion that a crime is taking place, to demand individuals provide their name, address, and an explanation of their actions—but not their photo I.D.

It's not entirely clear how Barton ended up at Stallworth's home on February 23. A lawsuit filed by Stallworth earlier this month does not provide background on the incident, and video filmed by Stallworth's 18-year-old son Jermari starts after Barton had come to Stallworth's door. According to USA Today, Stallworth's lawyers say that the confrontation started when she called to complain about a neighbor's loud music.

However, even if Barton had some reason to believe Stallworth might have been committing a crime—something that is possible but seems unlikely given Stallworth was in her own home—he still wouldn't have been able to demand her I.D.

"Give me an I.D. or go to jail," Barton told Stallworth, who incredulously responded, "I'm going to jail for not providing my I.D."

In the video of the incident, Barton is seen pushing Jermari away and attempting to handcuff Stallworth.

"Don't push my son! What's wrong with you? You will not push my son!" Stallworth yelled.

A struggle ensued, during which Barton "physically assaulted Ms. Stallworth by shoving her down on a couch," according to the lawsuit.

After Stallworth had been arrested, video shows Jermari asking Barton to see the statute he claims Stallworth violated: "I actually want to see this law in play," he says. 

The statute, which Barton pulled up on his phone, allows police to "stop any person abroad in a public place whom he reasonably suspects is committing, has committed or is about to commit a felony or other public offense and may demand of him his name, address and an explanation of his actions."

"I don't see where it says anything about an I.D.," Jermari says. "It says your name, address, and an explanation."

"She failed to identify," Barton replied.

"I mean it doesn't specifically, you know, say an I.D.," Jermari added before Barton cut in: "I know, but I'm not going to argue with you either."

Despite Stallworth's son pointing out the obvious—that Stallworth hadn't broken the Alabama identification law—she was still charged with "obstruction, resisting arrest, and eluding," according to the lawsuit. The charges have since been dropped.

On March 8, Mayor of Andalusia Earl Johnson issued a formal apology to Stallworth, saying, "I would like to apologize to Twyla Stallworth for her arrest in February. All charges against Ms. Stallworth are being dropped." Johnson noted that Barton "has been disciplined for failing in his duty to know the law."

This is far from the first time that Alabama cops have misinterpreted the state's "stop and identify" law, wrongfully arresting individuals for not forking over their photo identifications. A man who was watering his neighbor's plants was arrested after refusing to give an officer his I.D. in May 2022. Last October, a federal court refused to grant qualified immunity to police officers who arrested a mechanic who refused to provide a government I.D. in 2019.

"The police are free to ask questions, and the public is free to ignore them," wrote 11th Circuit Court of Appeals Judge Charles R. Wilson in that last case. "Any legal obligation to speak to the police and answer their questions arises as a matter of state law."

The post Alabama Woman Arrested for Refusing To Give a Cop Her I.D. appeared first on Reason.com.

You might assume that Indika will be dour, given that it's a story-driven game about a nun in a grey, cold, alternative Russia. Then you watch its trailers and find surrealist imagery, genre-hopping, and a bleak sense of humour are part of its arsenal, and suddenly it seems, to me, irresistible.

It's out now.

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Dorfromantik, jak krásné to místo plné svěžích luk, průzračné vody, voňavých lesů a klidného sousedství. Digitální verze této hry sklízí jedno ocenění za druhým, a tak jsme se dočkali i deskové verze, která je tak perfektně zpracována, že získala ocenění Spiel des Jahres 2023.

Jestli se dá o nějaké hře, kdy říct, že způsobuje duševní satisfakci, tak je to právě tato. Posezení u večerního stolku s partnerem, či partnerkou a vytváření malebné vesničky, přináší potěšení nejenom pro duši, ale i pro oko. Žádný zbytečný text, krátká pravidla a hurá na hraní.

Princip je skutečně jednoduchý na pochopení, ale zároveň příjemně komplexní pro nahrání co nejvíce bodů. Stejně jako v digitální verzi, máte k dispozici určitý počet hexů, obsahující různé druhy krajiny, které se snažíte propojit mezi sebou podobně jako Domino. Jak ale asi tušíte, nic není jenom tak. Kromě malebné vesničky s přírodou, obsahují některé destičky potoky a koleje, které musí vždy navazovat na sebe. Dostáváte se tak do situací, kdy by se některé na sebe fakt hodili, ale potůček vám kazí vaše plány. Aby toho nebylo málo, tak ještě navíc plníte úkoly, které tvoří většinu bodů. Tyto drobné „questíky“ způsobují notnou dávku adrenalinu, jelikož Vás motivují ke specifické velikosti dané krajiny. Pokud tak vytáhnete úkol, aby kolejiště mělo přesně pět dílků, tak zaměření je jasné, pořádně se připravit a doufat, že to pěkně přijde.

A teď za nás to nejlepší. Prvek objevování. Kromě samotné hry, která je perfektně vybalancovaná, neuvěřitelně zábavná, když si chcete užít klidný večer a nepotřebujete potit mozky, hra obsahuje uzavřené krabičky „s překvapením“. Většina z Vás už asi tuší, že pro jejich otevření je potřeba splnit specifické úspěchy (achievementy), které Vás budou provázet od začátku do konce průchodu hrou. Sice se nejedná o legacy opus (legacy = po dohrání už nelze ve hře pokračovat), nicméně její nejzajímavější prvek už prostě nebude k dispozici. Ačkoliv každá partie trvá i se setupem přibližně 20 minut, na otevření všech úspěchů Vám nebude stačit ani 10 hodin.

Když to tedy shrneme. Dostali jsme na stůl hru, která je věrnou kopií digitální verze, ze které vychází. Je svižná, jednoduchá na pochopení, komplexní na získání co nejvíce bodů. S legacy prvky jako je odemykání úspěchů a krabiček, avšak i po odemčení všeho je hra bez problémů hratelná. Kvalitní materiál, nádherný design a… já už nevím, potřebujete vědět víc? Plný počet.

CZ Distributor: TLAMA Games

Počet hráčů: 1–6 (doporučujeme hraní ve dvou)

Přibližná herní doba: 60 minut (počítejte max. 30 minut)

Doporučený věk: 8+

Článek DESKOVKA: Dorfromantik – Večery ve dvou při stavbě vesničky? Proč ne… se nejdříve objevil na GAME PRESS.

What I like about browser games is that clicking on a word in this mundane piece of software could take you anywhere, to anything. For example, if you click on this link to the domain corru.observer, you'll find yourself in a dark room before a strange glowing device. Apparently it's your job to do... something with it? So begins one of the most surprising and delightful games I've played all year, a sprawling, shape-shifting sci-fi story which is still unfolding through updates. I didn't even know all this was possible with HTML and CSS.

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Less than a month after the Alabama Supreme Court ruled that frozen embryos created for in vitro fertilization treatment are children, Alabama Gov. Kay Ivey has signed a law protecting access to IVF treatment in the state. 

In February, the Alabama Supreme Court handed down a controversial ruling, deciding that frozen embryos would count as children under a 19th-century Alabama wrongful death statute. Justice Tom Parker used extensive quotes from the Bible and Christian theology to justify his decision. "The doctrine of the sanctity of life is rooted in the Sixth Commandment," which prohibits murder, Parker wrote. "All human beings bear the image of God," he continued, "and their lives cannot be destroyed without effacing his glory."

IVF is an infertility treatment involving the fertilization of multiple eggs with the goal of inserting them afterward in a woman's uterus, where they may hopefully implant and grow into a healthy baby. As Reason's Ronald Bailey put it shortly after the ruling was released, "Since the implantation of any specific embryo is far from guaranteed, IVF often involves creating several embryos that are stored in liquid nitrogen that could be made available for later attempts at achieving pregnancy." Parents often have to choose whether to leave their remaining frozen embryos in storage (at a cost) or to have the IVF clinic discard them.

The ruling caused near-immediate chaos, with three IVF providers in the state shutting down operations, citing confusion over the legal implications of the court's decision. The ruling quickly garnered widespread outrage, even among many who are avowedly pro-life.

"We want to make it easier for people to be able to have babies, not…make it harder….And the IVF process is a way of giving life to even more babies," Texas Gov. Greg Abbott told CNN in February. "What I think the goal is is to make sure that we can find a pathway to ensure that parents who otherwise may not have the opportunity to have a child will be able to have access to the IVF process."

Soon after the ruling was handed down, Alabama legislators moved quickly to introduce bills that would protect access to IVF treatment in the state. Senate Bill 159, which Ivey signed Wednesday, ultimately passed with a large bipartisan majority. 

"No action, suit, or criminal prosecution for the damage to or death of an embryo shall be brought or maintained against any individual or entity when providing or receiving services related to in vitro fertilization," the bill states. "No criminal prosecution may be brought for the damage to or death of an embryo against the manufacturer of goods used to facilitate the in vitro fertilization process or the transport of stored embryos."

"The overwhelming support of [the bill] from the Alabama Legislature proves what we have been saying: Alabama works to foster a culture of life, and that certainly includes IVF," Ivey said in a statement on March 6. "I am confident that this legislation will provide the assurances our IVF clinics need and will lead them to resume services immediately."

After the bill's signing, two of the three closed clinics announced that they would restart IVF treatments.

Alabama's IVF protection bill will likely assuage fears that access to fertility treatments could be seriously impacted by state-level court rulings. Even in a state where abortion is banned from conception, attacks on IVF remain incredibly unpopular—and stridently pro-life legislators still recognize the importance of safeguarding fertility medicine. 

The post Alabama Governor Signs Bill Protecting IVF Treatments appeared first on Reason.com.

Folks, Akira Toriyama’s passing has completely shaken me in a way I didn’t think possible. It’s always sad when someone responsible for a thing you love passes away, but what’s getting to me today is how much it feels like I took him and his work for granted. I didn’t recognize he was a hero of mine until it was too…

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If you haven’t heard, Akira Toriyama, the legendary creator of the Dragon Ball franchise and character designer of beloved games like Chrono Trigger and the Dragon Quest series, has passed away at the age of 68. As fans and collaborators have expressed condolences and tributes online, a lot of attention has…

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Late last night, the world discovered that it lost one of its giants. Akira Toriyama, the creator of the Dragon Ball series and renowned character designer on games such as Chrono Trigger and Dragon Quest, passed away at 68 from a subdural hematoma on March 1. In the time since his passing was announced, people the…

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Akira Toriyama, the creator of the Dragon Ball franchise and character designer for video games like Chrono Trigger and Dragon Quest, has died at the age of 68.

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Various outlets are reporting that the influential creator of Dragon Ball and character designer for games like the Dragon Quest series and Chrono Trigger, Akira Toriyama, died on March 1 of a subdural hematoma.

You’d be hard-pressed to find a game developer in Japan who wasn’t influenced by Toriyama in some way. His work on Dr. Slump and Dragon Ball has pervaded the culture there and even found popularity in the West. Because of this recognition, he was tapped to design the characters for Dragon Quest (Dragon Warrior in North America) which itself became a cultural phenomenon in its home country.

As Streets of Rage and Actraiser composer Yuzo Koshiro put it on Twitter, “Toriyama’s work, with its unique art style, captivating characters, and warm, comforting stories, really made an impact on us kids.”

From there, Toriyama continued to work on the Dragon Quest series throughout his life. He later assisted with the creation of Chrono Trigger, often cited as one of the best RPGs ever made. He also lent his character design to the Tobal series and Blue Dragon. April will see the release of the adaptation of his manga, Sand Land.

This comes as quite a shock. Many people, including myself and the rest of Destructoid, are deeply saddened by this. But while Akira Toriyama may have passed too soon, his influence and his works will live on for a long, long time.

Lead image via Yahoo News.

The post Famed storyteller and artist Akira Toriyama dies at 68 appeared first on Destructoid.

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Very rarely do you see anyone prevail in court when any form of forfeiture is in play. The forfeiture litigation deck is firmly stacked in favor of the government, which rarely needs anything approaching actual proof to walk off with someone’s property.

It’s even more rare to see someone awarded damages in a civil lawsuit against law enforcement officers. In most cases, qualified immunity terminates the lawsuit. If qualified immunity is not awarded, agencies and governments are often swift to offer plaintiffs no-fault settlements that allow the accused to walk away from the lawsuit without having to admit any wrongdoing, much less pay out of their own pockets for their misdeeds.

This case contains both rarities. Not only does it involve regular people securing some sort of justice for their violated rights, but the underlying set of rights violations included officers walking out the home they’d raided without a warrant with all the valuables they could get their hands on, including $4,000 in cash.

Here’s how the raid went down, as recounted by C.J. Ciaramella for Reason back in 2019.

On January 31, 2018, a Randolph County sheriff’s deputy showed up at the home of Greg and Teresa Almond in Woodland, Alabama, to serve Greg court papers in a civil matter.

Greg, 50, wasn’t home, but his wife Teresa told the deputy he would be back before long. About two hours later, after Greg had returned home, he heard loud knocking on the door. He remembers shouting “hang on” and walking toward the door when it suddenly flew open. The next thing he knew he was on the floor—ears ringing, dazed, wondering if he’d just been shot.

Several deputies from the Randolph County Sheriff’s Department had kicked in his front door and thrown a flashbang grenade at his feet. The officers handcuffed and detained the couple at gunpoint, then started searching their house. The deputy from earlier had reportedly smelled marijuana, and so a county drug task force was descending on the Almonds’ home, looking for illegal drugs.

The supposed odor of marijuana eventually led the deputies to a small marijuana plant, a few scattered leaves, and a single prescription pill that was not located in its bottle. The home invasion also led deputies to other stuff they wanted, but had no legitimate reason to take. They took the cash they found in the house, a wedding ring, some guns, a coin collection, and a couple guitars.

To the Sheriff’s Office, the $4,000 probably seemed insignificant. But it was pretty much all they had. They were in the middle of refinancing an agricultural loan to ensure their chicken farm remained solvent. Thanks to being forced to spend most of two days in jail, they missed their refinancing deadline. That ultimately resulted in the couple losing their house. They were residing in an insulated shed by the time the court took up their lawsuit.

More than four years after the raid, the couple has finally secured some form of justice. The $1 million in damages awarded by the jury will likely be appealed by the sheriff’s department, but for now, that’s what a jury has said the couple is entitled to.

The judge overseeing the case issued an order [PDF] along with the directed verdict, stating that the “rarity” of a directed verdict in a civil rights lawsuit necessitates some explanation.

The explanation reveals just how much of a blatant violation of rights this raid was. Deputy Kevin Walker had no excuse for his actions.

During trial, Judge Amy Newsome testified that she never issued a telephonic warrant to Defendant Walker, or to the drug task force, on January 31, 2018, for a search of the Plaintiffs’ home. She also testified that she did not tell Walker that he had a warrant. In addition, Defendant Walker testified that Judge Newsome did not tell him that he had a telephonic search warrant, although she did tell him that he probably had enough for a warrant.

He also acknowledged that the requirements for a telephonic warrant were not satisfied, that he did not have a search warrant, and that it was a warrantless search. Given this undisputed testimony, even when considered in the light most favorable to Defendant Walker, the search of the Plaintiffs’ home was without a warrant, even a defective one, and therefore violated the Fourth Amendment. No reasonable jury could have concluded otherwise as there was no question of fact on this issue.

Yeah. That’s inexcusable. And yet, Walker had an excuse: good faith. He attempted to avail himself of the good faith warrant exception. But, as the judge points out, good faith relies on someone believing a valid warrant has actually been issued, not just thinking they could probably obtain one at some point in the future. On top of that, the good faith exception invoked by the deputy only applies in criminal trials, not civil trials. Even if it did apply in this content, Walker would still lose. (Emphasis in the original.)

But even if the good faith exception to the exclusionary rule can apply in the civil context, the good faith exception still would not apply in the circumstances of this case. First, per Judge Newsome and Defendant Walker, there was no warrant, telephonic or written, and thus there was nothing upon which Walker could rely in good faith. In other words, because Defendant Walker knew that he did not have a warrant at the time of the incident, the good faith exception does not apply.

And the cases Walker cites are inapplicable to the facts here: Taylor, Moorehead, Henderson,
and Ganzer all involved situations where written warrants were issued, not situations where a warrant was never issued in the first place. And secondly, as a matter of law, given the undisputed facts concerning the non-existence of a warrant, it was objectively unreasonable for an experienced law enforcement officer to believe that he could search an occupied home when no warrant existed, when no judge told him that he had a warrant, when he was merely told that he had enough for a warrant, and when none of the formalities or requirements associated with a telephonic or written warrant were followed.

As the court notes in this order, it fully expects Walker to raise the other form of good faith in a future motion, indicating that while a jury has already said the couple is owed $1 million in damages, the court has yet to issue an order blessing that payout. Hopefully, if nothing else, this utter failure to salvage a blatantly unconstitutional search will urge Walker’s employers to cut a check, rather than continue to embarrass itself in court.

The sorry history of anti-miscegenation and forced sterilization laws in the U.S. provides ample evidence that preemptive government interference in the reproductive decisions of its citizens should be strongly rejected. In a free society, the default should be that individuals are best situated for weighing the costs and benefits, moral and material, with respect to how, when, with whom, and whether they choose to become parents.

The now infamous Alabama Supreme Court decision earlier this month essentially outlawing the use of in vitro fertilization (IVF) by would-be parents highlights the consequences of unwarranted government meddling in reproductive decisions all too well. At its most basic, IVF is a treatment for infertility involving the fertilization of eggs in a petri dish with the goal of installing them afterward in a woman's womb where they have a chance to implant and hopefully develop into a healthy baby. Since the implantation of any specific embryo is far from guaranteed, IVF often involves creating several embryos that are stored in liquid nitrogen that could be made available for later attempts at achieving pregnancy.

Some 12 to 15 percent of couples in the U.S. experience infertility. Fortunately, since 1981 many infertile folks have been able to avail themselves of IVF and assisted reproduction techniques with the result that more than 1.2 million Americans have been born using it. Currently, about 2 percent of all babies in the U.S. are born through assisted reproduction. A 2023 Pew Research poll reported that "four-in-ten adults (42%) say they have used fertility treatments or personally know someone who has." Given the wide public acceptance and ubiquity of IVF, it is no surprise that a new Axios/Ipsos poll finds that two-thirds of Americans oppose the Alabama court ruling that frozen IVF embryos are the equivalent of born children.

The moral intuition that embryos are not people implied by these poll results reflects what research has revealed about the fraught and complex biology of uterine implantation and pregnancy. In both IVF and natural conception most embryos will not become babies. Research estimates that between 50 to 70 percent of naturally conceived embryos do not make it past the first trimester. In other words, one foreseen consequence of conception through sexual intercourse is the likely loss of numerous embryos.

In his 2012 Journal of Medical Ethics article, University of Illinois Chicago philosopher Timothy Murphy argued that the moral good of the birth of a child counterbalances the unwanted but nevertheless foreseen loss of other embryos in both natural and IVF conception. Again, polling suggests that most Americans endorse this moral reasoning.

In another 2012 article speculating on the metaphysical ramifications of endowing embryos with souls, Murphy basically recapitulates the line of reasoning in my 2004 article asking, "Is Heaven Populated Chiefly with the Souls of Embryos?" There I suggest that "perhaps 40 percent of all the residents of Heaven were never born, never developed brains, and never had thoughts, emotions, experiences, hopes, dreams, or desires."

Murphy similarly concludes, "Since more human zygotes and embryos are lost than survive to birth, conferral of personhood on them would mean—for those believing in personal immortality—that these persons constitute the majority of people living immortally despite having had only the shortest of earthly lives."

Metaphysical conjectures aside, former President Donald Trump clearly knows where most Americans stand on IVF. "We want to make it easier for mothers and fathers to have babies, not harder! That includes supporting the availability of fertility treatments like IVF in every State in America," he posted on Truth Social. He's right.

Now, the 124 denizens of the House of Representatives (all Republicans) who cosponsored just over a month ago the Life at Conception Act are scrambling to explain that, no, they did not really mean that every frozen IVF embryo is a "human person" entitled to the equal protection of the right to life. As a butt-covering move, Rep. Nancy Mace (R–S.C.) is circulating a House resolution "expressing support for continued access to fertility care and assisted reproduction technology, such as in vitro fertilization."

More substantially, Sen. Tammy Duckworth (D–Ill.) is pushing for the adoption of the Right to Build Families Act that states, "No State, or official or employee of a State acting in the scope of such appointment or employment, may prohibit or unreasonably limit…any individual from accessing assisted reproductive technology."

The post Parents, Not the Government, Should Make IVF Decisions appeared first on Reason.com.

Enlarge / An electron micrograph of norovirus. (credit: Getty| BSIP)

Officials in Alabama have shut down an elementary school for the rest of the week and are conducting a deep clean after 773 of the school's 974 students were absent Wednesday amid an explosive outbreak of gastrointestinal illness.

Local media reported that only 29 students were absent from Fairhope West Elementary School on Tuesday. However, the situation escalated quickly on Wednesday as word spread of a stomach bug going around the Gulf Coast school. A spokesperson for the county school district told AL.com that 773 students and 50 staff were absent Wednesday. It's unclear how many of the absences were due to sickness or precaution.

Health officials are now investigating the cause of the gastrointestinal outbreak, collecting specimens for testing. So far, officials are working under the assumption that it is norovirus, a highly infectious gastrointestinal bug that can survive hand sanitizer and transmit easily from surfaces, food, and water. The symptoms of the unidentified illness align with norovirus: vomiting, diarrhea, abdominal cramps, and nausea.

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Enlarge / Nitrogen tanks holding tens of thousands of frozen embryos and eggs sit in the embryology lab at New Hope Fertility Center in New York City on December 20, 2017. (credit: Getty | Carolyn Van Houten)

The University of Alabama at Birmingham (UAB) health system is halting in vitro fertilization treatment in the wake of a ruling by the state's Supreme Court on Friday that deemed frozen embryos to be "children," The ruling opens up anyone who destroys embryos to liability in a wrongful death lawsuit, according to multiple media reports.

The announcement—the first facility to report halting IVF services—is the much-feared outcome of Friday's ruling, which was widely decried by reproductive health advocates.

"We are saddened that this will impact our patients' attempt to have a baby through IVF, but we must evaluate the potential that our patients and our physicians could be prosecuted criminally or face punitive damages for following the standard of care for IVF treatments," UAB said a statement to media. The statement noted that egg retrieval would continue but that egg fertilization and embryo development are now paused.

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Enlarge (credit: Google)

On Wednesday, Google announced a new family of AI language models called Gemma, which are free, open-weights models built on technology similar to the more powerful but closed Gemini models. Unlike Gemini, Gemma models can run locally on a desktop or laptop computer. It's Google's first significant open large language model (LLM) release since OpenAI's ChatGPT started a frenzy for AI chatbots in 2022.

Gemma models come in two sizes: Gemma 2B (2 billion parameters) and Gemma 7B (7 billion parameters), each available in pre-trained and instruction-tuned variants. In AI, parameters are values in a neural network that determine AI model behavior, and weights are a subset of these parameters stored in a file.

Developed by Google DeepMind and other Google AI teams, Gemma pulls from techniques learned during the development of Gemini, which is the family name for Google's most capable (public-facing) commercial LLMs, including the ones that power its Gemini AI assistant. Google says the name comes from the Latin gemma, which means "precious stone."

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Frozen embryos are "children" under Alabama law, the state's Supreme Court says. Its decision could have major implications for the future of fertility treatments in the state.

Frozen embryos are "unborn children" and "unborn children are 'children,'" Justice Jay Mitchell wrote in the court's main opinion. Only two of nine justices dissented from the holding that an 1872 wrongful death statute applies to the destruction of frozen embryos.

The ruling seems to represent a turn toward judicial activism among members of Alabama's Supreme Court, which for a long time held that the law's text could not justify reading it to include "unborn children"—let alone frozen embryos.

It also portends a creeping Christian conservatism into court decisions, with Alabama Supreme Court Justice Tom Parker citing the Bible in his legal reasoning. In a concurring opinion, Parker justifies prohibitions on murder not by invoking classical liberal principles, like natural rights, but rather on the basis of "Man's creation in God's image" and the "you shall not murder" edict of the Sixth Commandment. "Human life cannot be wrongfully destroyed without incurring the wrath of a holy God, who views the destruction of His image as an affront to Himself," Parker writes.

Embryos Destroyed 

The decision stems from suits brought by former patients of the Center for Reproductive Medicine in Mobile, Alabama. These patients—couples James and Emily LePage, William and Caroline Fonde, and Felicia Burdick-Aysenne and Scott Aysenne—had used in vitro fertilization (IVF) to successfully have several children and still had some embryos stored in the Center's "cryogenic nursery." In December 2020, a patient at the Mobile Infirmary Medical Center (which the Center was a part of) entered the cryogenic nursery unauthorized and proceeded to remove and then drop some of their frozen embryos, destroying them.

The couples sued the fertility clinic and the hospital, citing Alabama's Wrongful Death of a Minor Act. This 1872 law lets parents sue for monetary damages "when the death of a minor child is caused by the wrongful act, omission, or negligence of any person."

The LePages and the Fondes brought a joint lawsuit, and a separate suit was filed by the Aysennes. Both suits alleged negligence and the Aysenne suit also alleged wantonness and breach-of-contract.

A trial court granted the Center's motion to dismiss all but the breach-of-contract claim. "The cryopreserved, in vitro embryos involved in this case do not fit within the definition of a 'person'" or "'child,'" the lower court held.

The three couples appealed, and their suits were consolidated for Supreme Court purposes.

No Exceptions for "Extrauterine Children" 

In a first-of-its-kind decision, the Alabama Supreme Court decided that frozen embryos are, indeed, children, rejecting the lower court's dismissal of the couples' wrongful death claims.

In the court's main opinion, Justice Jay Mitchell referred to frozen embryos in turn as "embryonic children" and "extrauterine children."

While the state's Wrongful Death of a Minor statute doesn't explicitly include "unborn children"—let alone "extrauterine children"—in its purview, "the ordinary meaning of 'child' includes children who have not yet been born," asserted Mitchell.

Furthermore, Alabama's Supreme Court "has long held that unborn children are 'children' for purposes of Alabama's that law," he wrote. The central question in this case, said Mitchell, is "whether the Act contains an unwritten exception to that rule for extrauterine children—that is, unborn children who are located outside of a biological uterus at the time they are killed."

The couples in this case raised some truly ridiculous arguments for why such an "exception" shouldn't exist. They argued that a finding that the Wrongful Death of a Minor Act doesn't apply to unborn children (including frozen embryos) would mean partial-birth abortions are legal, since the baby would no longer be in utero but would also not be fully born. They also suggested it would OK murdering hypothetical toddlers entirely gestated in artificial wombs, since such children—no matter how old they got—would not technically have been born.

Amazingly, the majority lent credence to these crazy arguments. They are "weighty concerns," wrote Mitchell, albeit ones that needn't be resolved at this time since "neither the text of the Wrongful Death of a Minor Act nor this Court's precedents exclude extrauterine children from the Act's coverage."

Dissent, Dissent, Dissent

Not all of the justices agreed with the majority's logic, and some offered quite scathing rebukes of it.

For instance, Justice Brady E. Mendheim—who concurred with the result of the main opinion but disagreed with some of its reasoning—doesn't think that it's so clear cut that "child" includes frozen embryos. For one thing, the wrongful death statute in question was written a century before IVF was even a scientific possibility. Furthermore, other parts of Alabama law, including the 2019 Human Life Protection Act, explicitly define an unborn child as a human being in utero.

Justice Will Sellers also rejected the idea that this is an easy and obvious call. "Any sequence of linguistic gymnastics, cannot yield the conclusion that embryos developed through in vitro fertilization were intended by the legislature to be included in the definition of 'person,' much less the definition of 'minor child,'" he wrote. Rather, the inclusion of in utero children in certain statutes was there to allow for punishment of violence perpetrated against pregnant women. "To equate an embryo stored in a specialized freezer with a fetus inside of a mother is engaging in an exercise of result-oriented, intellectual sophistry, which I am unwilling to entertain," Sellers added.

Meanwhile, Justice Greg Cook—who dissented in full from the main opinion—rejects the idea that the 1872 law meant to include fetuses and zygotes in its definition of children, even when they are in utero.

The main opinion suggested that the "leading dictionary of that time defined the word 'child' as 'the immediate progeny of parents' and indicated that this term encompassed children in the womb," notes Cook. But if you look at the full entry in the cited dictionary, it indicates the opposite, saying "the term is applied to infants from their birth."

Furthermore, interpreting the Wrongful Death Act to include unborn children is a recent phenomenon. "There is no doubt that the common law [in 1872] did not consider an unborn infant to be a child capable of being killed for the purpose of civil liability or criminal-homicide liability," wrote Cook. "In fact, for 100 years after the passage of the Wrongful Death Act, our caselaw did not allow a claim for the death of an unborn infant, confirming that the common law in 1872 did not recognize that an unborn infant (much less a frozen embryo) was a 'minor child' who could be killed."

Thus, applying the wrongful death act to the loss of frozen embryos runs counter to the philosophy of originalism (the idea, common among libertarians and conservatives, that laws should be interpreted only as they were originally intended) and closer to the progressive idea of a malleable "living Constitution," suggests Cook. And he's not a fan. "It is not our role to expand the reach of a statute and "breathe life" into it by updating or amending it," Cook writes. If the legislature thinks the law needs expanding, it can do so.

Cook and Mendheim both object to characterizing the defense's position as seeking an "exception" for frozen embryos, because to declare it an exception to the state's protection of minor children assumes that embryos are minor children—a point that's far from a given. And they both pan the tacit acceptance of the out-there hypotheticals offered by the patients.

"The main opinion ignores the fact that it is not now—or for the foreseeable future—scientifically possible to develop a child in an artificial womb so that such a scenario could somehow unfold," writes Mendheim. Should that become possible, "the answer to this futuristic hypothetical is simple," writes Cook: "the Legislature can address future technologies and can do so far better than this Court."

Bibles and Broad Reach

Pointing out that no other state has interpreted wrongful death laws this way—and a number have specifically rejected it—Cook suggests that being "the sole outlier" should "cause us to carefully reexamine our conclusions."

He concludes the decision could end IVF in Alabama, since "no rational medical provider would continue to provide services for creating and maintaining frozen embryos knowing that they must continue to maintain such frozen embryos forever or risk the penalty of a Wrongful Death Act claim for punitive damages."

This fear was echoed by the defendants in this case, who told the court a finding that the statute includes frozen embryos could make IVF prohibitively expensive.

Barbara Collura, president and CEO of RESOLVE: The National Infertility Association, called the court's decision "terrifying" for people "who need in-vitro fertilization to build their families."

Chief Justice Parker's opinion suggests that their fears are not unfounded.

His opinion is chilling in the way is showcases the theocratic underpinnings on which he sees Alabama governance resting. Pointing to a 2018 amendment declaring it "the public policy of this state to recognize and support the sanctity of unborn life," he notes that the term sanctity can be defined as "holiness of life and character," godliness, and "the quality or state of being holy or sacred." He goes on to cite the King James Bible, noting that in Genesis man's creation was described as being "in the image of God." Its on these foundations that the legal treatment of frozen embryos should rest, he suggests.

According to Parker, this would not mean the end of IVF in Alabama. But it could mean changes that would seriously upend the IVF process.

In IVF, the process of preparing the body for ovulation and harvesting eggs can be extremely taxing on women's bodies, as well as time-consuming and expensive. After this, not all of the eggs collected may be successfully fertilized. And when viable embryos are created, it may take multiple tries at transferring one into a woman's body before implantation is successful. For all of these reasons, it makes sense for doctors to collect myriad eggs at one time, fertilize these eggs, and then freeze the viable embryos for later transfer, rather than harvesting eggs and creating a single new embryo for each transfer. (This also helps people who may want to create embryos when they are younger to use when they are somewhat older, or who may face illness that will impede their future fertility.) And to maximize the chances of success, doctors sometimes transfer two or more embryos at once.

Treating embryos as having the full legal rights of children could imperil all of these practices.

In Italy, "cryopreservation of embryos" is banned "except when a bona fide health risk or force majeure prevented the embryos from being transferred immediately after their creation," writes Parker. He also points approvingly to countries with other stringent regulations, such as a rule limiting the number of embryos that can be transferred at a time.

"These regulations adopted by other countries seem much more likely to comport with upholding the sanctity of life," Parker concludes, writing that "certain changes to the IVF industry's current creation and handling of embryos in Alabama will result from this decision."

Even if the ruling doesn't end IVF in Alabama, it could pave the way for changes that make fertility treatments more difficult, time-consuming, expensive, and impractical.

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