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  • ✇NekoJonez's Gaming Blog
  • First Impression: The Legend of Zelda – Echoes of Wisdom (Switch) ~ Renewing the EchoNekoJonez
    Wikipedia – Nintendo Microsite After the release of Tears of the Kingdom, I was afraid that we would never see a new game in the style of the 2D Zelda game. Yet, I have been proven wrong when this game was announced. To be very honest, I didn’t have very high hopes for this game. Especially since this game was announced this summer and released in late September. I felt that this game going to be a game to fill a gap while the developers are working on a much larger game. Now, the game is
     

First Impression: The Legend of Zelda – Echoes of Wisdom (Switch) ~ Renewing the Echo

Od: NekoJonez
20. Říjen 2024 v 13:53

Wikipedia Nintendo Microsite

After the release of Tears of the Kingdom, I was afraid that we would never see a new game in the style of the 2D Zelda game. Yet, I have been proven wrong when this game was announced. To be very honest, I didn’t have very high hopes for this game. Especially since this game was announced this summer and released in late September. I felt that this game going to be a game to fill a gap while the developers are working on a much larger game. Now, the game is released, and I have played through a fair chunk of it. So, what is my opinion on this game? Well, that’s what I’m going to tell you in this first impressions article, while I all invite you to leave a comment of your thoughts and/or opinions in the comment section down below.

Renewing the Echoes

After a short introduction where you play as Link, the main story of this game is introduced. There are all consuming interdimensional rifts appearing all over Hyrule, and it’s eating various people in the kingdom.

Link gets eaten by one of those rifts while freeing Zelda and when Zelda tells her father, the king, about these rifts… A new rift appears and replaces the king with an evil clone of himself. Zelda gets thrown in the dungeon and there she meets a fairy named Tri. This fairy gives Zelda a special staff where she can summon objects into the world using echoes. With those echoes, she escapes the dungeon and sets out on an adventure to save Hyrule from doom before the land is fully consumed by the rifts.

Something I always love about the Zelda games is that there is a different core mechanic at the base of the game. In this game, we get two things. We got the rifts to another dark world, but we also got the magical staff, which we can use to summon various echoes into the world. These echoes mean you can tackle this game in various different ways. But I’ll talk more about that later in this article.

In terms of story, this game is hitting all the same beats as your typical Legend of Zelda game. It might be disappointing, to some, that in this game there is no voice acting anymore apart from the grunts and various emotional noises. Personally, I think it adds to the charm of this game. That’s because the characters in this game are way more expressive. While the story isn’t going to leave you at the edge of your seat of “what’s going to happen next”, it’s still well quite enjoyable, and the more expressive characters add quite a lot to the charm and atmosphere of the game.

Something I really like is how in this game, you are free to explore the world at your own peace. This game isn’t limiting you to go in a certain order. While this game isn’t fully open world like Breath of the Wild or Tears of the Kingdom, it’s somewhere in between. You can tackle parts in a different order. Like the first two major dungeons can be done out of order. Each area is its self-contained puzzle, and everything you need can be found in that general area.

In my introduction of this article, I said that I was afraid that was afraid that this game would be a short one where you were able to beat it in a few hours. That it was going to be a game that’s supposed to hold players over for the “next big 3D Zelda title”. To my surprise, this game is rather lengthy for a 2,5D Zelda game. It clocks in at 25 hours of casual playtime, which is, to my knowledge, one of the longest 2,5D Zelda games.

Climbing with beds

Something I find myself doing quite a lot while playing this game was climbing the area with beds. I summoned various beds stacked on top of each other to climb a wall. Since, I wanted to know if the developers hid a secret on that cliff face.

The exploration of this version of Hyrule is a blast to do. While you visit a lot of familiar places and meet your usual suspects like the Zora and the Gerudo, it’s a treat seeing them again. The only thing I missed a bit is showing the impact of the rifts. Something that this game only tells through dialogue was how things got impacted by the rifts. I wish it was shown a bit more visually. Like different animations of the characters before and after. But maybe, Tears of the Kingdom set the bar a bit too high for those expectations where each major area had a certain curse.

In terms of gameplay, this game really leans into the echoes mechanic. It also remembers that Zelda is a princess and didn’t really have combat training. So, you have to use summoned enemies to your advantage to let them fight for you. Now, you do have a sword, but you can only use it when your power meter has charge. I always reserved that for the dungeon bosses or when the situation got pretty dicey. Since recharging that meter is either done with potions or by defeating monsters from the rift world. These enemies aren’t exactly common in the overworld, and the energy bar drains fast.

In general, this game hits the same general gameplay beats as all other Zelda games. You go from dungeon to dungeon, learning a new technique or skill, defeating the boos and moving forward to another dungeon. There are also side quests in this game, that give you a nice reward. In this game, you also have a nice system to keep track of these side quests, like in Tears of the Kingdom. Something they also brought over from that game is the cooking system to a degree.

That’s something I personally feel mixed about. Maybe it’s me, but I feel the ingredients are quite rare to come by and there is no real way to farm certain ingredients like in Breath of the Wild. I have to admit that it adds a certain charm to this game, but I feel it’s a bit under implemented here. Like when you first meet the potion creators Deku shrubs, they talk about recipes… And I had a hard time finding any.

Like in Tears of the Kingdom, you can also eat most of the ingredients without cooking them. While I personally dislike the fact you have to do two clicks to consume an item, I do understand why they did it. To avoid you consuming them too much. Yet, this is a change from the two previous games and I honestly really feel it’s a set backwards. A fine solution would be to give the player an option to switch between both systems.

Grezzo playset

This game was co-developed by Grezzo. Their previous original Zelda game was Tri Force Heroes. But, this game looks very similar in graphical style to the remake of Link’s Awakening on the Nintendo Switch from late 2019.

This game looks like a plastic toy set and it looks amazing. While I was playing this game, I felt amazed at how expressive they were able to make everything without breaking the illusion that this is a toy set brought to live by our imagination. I don’t have a lot of complaints about the visuals and animations. And most of my complaints aren’t that big of a deal in the grand scheme of things.

Just like, I don’t have any complaints about the music and sound design of this game. If you take the music and sound design in a vacuum, you would say that it sounds just like very other Zelda game. It sounds like a remix of the familiar melodies we all know and love from the Zelda games. But, this isn’t a problem, since it sells the illusion that you are a child playing with a sort of Playmobil toy set of Hyrule and trying to recreate the sound effects and music of the game.

In terms of controls, this game plays like a dream. I rarely had problems with the controls and something I really like is the fact that with one press of a stick, you can see a view from on top when you feel the camera is blocking something. Now, there is one thing that I do have some things to criticize about. And that’s about the jumping.

It’s pretty difficult sometimes to judge how high Zelda can jump. I had moments in combat where I wasn’t aware I could jump on a higher ledge until I saw an enemy jumping backwards on that ledge. I also got tripped up several times with how far Zelda can jump. Her jump is shorter than I think, and the amount of times I jumped into a pit misjudging the jump is quite a lot. Something that would have helped is something a small landing shadow when Zelda was coming down. Then again, that must have been a nightmare to implement… So, maybe I should keep her shorter jump just better in mind.

Now, something else. Something I really like is how this game has two difficulty modes. I’m playing through this game on the normal difficulty setting and I have to say, I’m happy that I did. This game can lure you into a false sense of security. I wouldn’t say that this game is hard, but it isn’t a cakewalk either. You really need to keep your wits about you and think fast sometimes.

Being aware of what’s around you is also quite important since this game loves to hide things in little side area’s and using the map system is a must. I love how you can put pins and such on the map. Yet, I have to admit that I still keep notes in my phone like: “treasure in Gerudo dungeon, need to check later”.

The more I play through this game, the more I realize that the critiques I can make about this game are more on the minor side. Like how it feels like a waste of time when you are scrolling through a long list of echoes when you just want to find one. An easy solution would be to give the player an ability to favorite certain echoes. But then again, the sort function in the quick menu has “most used”, “recently learned” … So, it’s kinda that.

Now, you have two save slots in this game. So, you can play through this game and let a friend or a sibling play through a different slot. Now, this game also autosaves for you frequently, in case you forget to save. The game also keeps like several autosaves in case you want to return to an earlier point.

Something I really like is how this game also has a quick travel system. The system works similarly like an owl statue in Majora’s Mask or a water vane in Link Between Worlds. It makes it easy when you feel stumped by a puzzle and want to return later. The fast travel locations are very fairly placed all over the land.

While I went quite critical in this game, the more I played it, the more it won me over. This game is a new 2,5D Zelda adventure game I hope we were going to see again. The last new, non remake 2,5D Zelda game was released almost 11 years ago. And, I’m so happy to see a return to this style. I’d love to see a this style also making an appearance very so often since it’s clear there are still various unique ways to explore Hyrule and tell a story about the Hyrule legend without going fully 3D.

Apart from a few small complaints you read in this article, I honestly don’t have any major complaints about this game. This is a game I’m going to finish for sure, since I’m enjoying my time with this title quite a lot. If you are into the series, I highly recommend this title to you. If you enjoy exploration and playing with unique mechanics, I also think this game is for you. This game is totally worth it’s price tag and it pleasantly surprised me.

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

  • ✇NekoJonez's Gaming Blog
  • Preview: Cave Hikers (PC) ~ Point and DragNekoJonez
    Trailer – Steam store page Today, I want to talk about a new game that’s going to come out later this year. It’s called Cave Hikers. It’s being developed by Porcupine Parkour. This small Croatian based studio reached out to me to review their demo in July. I would have written an article about it before, but I have been suffering from a writing burnout. Thankfully, I’m slowly getting back in the groove. And I’m going to make it up to the developers by publishing an article on their game t
     

Preview: Cave Hikers (PC) ~ Point and Drag

Od: NekoJonez
22. Září 2024 v 15:24

TrailerSteam store page

Today, I want to talk about a new game that’s going to come out later this year. It’s called Cave Hikers. It’s being developed by Porcupine Parkour. This small Croatian based studio reached out to me to review their demo in July. I would have written an article about it before, but I have been suffering from a writing burnout. Thankfully, I’m slowly getting back in the groove. And I’m going to make it up to the developers by publishing an article on their game today. Let’s take a look at the demo together, shall we? And I have a small surprise in store later.

Demo review

In this demo, you get an introduction to the gameplay. If you ever played a game like My Brother Rabbit, you will feel right at home in this game. This is a point and click game where you go from screen to screen. Each screen has a small puzzle or hidden object moment for you to take part in.

This game feels like playing through a children book. The voice of the narrator sounds like a (grand)father telling a story to their children. It’s extremely charming, and the story book art style really helps to sell this story.

Overall, there is no real tutorial in this game. Yet, the gameplay is quite simple. You learn quite quickly that this game is controlled with only the mouse. The menu system exists out of icons that make the game a lot easier to localize.

The demo is rather short but gives a very good impression of the full game. This game looks like it’s something I’m going to play. It’s a charming point-and-click game with hidden objects that feels nostalgic. Since the demo is so short, I don’t have a lot to talk about in terms of feedback.

The art style, voice acting, animation is all pretty well done. I only have a few minor complaints. The first complaint is that clicking to unmute the music or sound effects can’t be done right away. It doesn’t always register right away. And the second complaint is the in some rare spots, like with the red crystal at the end of the demo, the hitbox of placing it in the crusher is too tiny.

So, the game describes itself as:

Cave Hikers is a relaxing and humorous 2D interactive cartoon mockumentary that follows three characters through a cavernous world, on a quest to find the mystical “cave with an infinite ceiling”.

And I think it fits the game pretty well. Like I have been saying, the humor and charm of this game is there, and it’s pretty clear that maybe from some very minor things, this game is going to be an extremely charming game.

Now, how interesting would it be if I asked some questions to the developers of this game? Well, I had a few interesting questions in mind, so I went and asked them. Here are their replies.

Interview with the developers

– What games inspired you take to make this one?

It was mostly HOPA style games, which are usually made by much larger companies with inexpensive artists and a pseudo-realistic and kitsch-y style. So we went more in line with our own kind of art style, with some inspiration from Amanita games.

– What’s your process in creating puzzles?

It’s a strange process. As we started making the game in our free time for fun between odd jobs and more “serious” projects, we made a number of locations, creatures and simple mechanics. First we take a look at what already exists on the screen, then we intertwine the narrative with some clicking and potential puzzle elements. Then we play around with it until we are happy with the amount of “work” the player needs to do before accomplishing the goal.

Sometimes it includes a bit of moon logic. First, we make it clearer through conversation clouds and drawings. Then, whatever is unclear or hard to find for testers, we explain further through the Narrator.

– What are the funniest bugs or whoopies that happened during development?

For a while, we had a splash screen that looked exactly like the main menu, which created a lot of confusion! That was because the engine was upgraded, and also we started working with a much better programmer, we consolidated it into a coherent menu.

As for actually funny bugs, at one point we had Valeriano’s secret twin showing up at the cutscene. It took a while to realize we accidentally put two Valerianos of which one was outside the camera view.

– What engine did you use and why?

It’s Construct 3. At first, we made this project for fun and the Animator wasn’t exactly a programmer, so he used a really simple engine. (Un)fortunately, the project got out of hand and got some funding. Now we have a real programmer, but he had to learn Construct with all its limitations, but it’s also a really simple engine so we can still make a lot of the game without much hassle.

– What are some things you learned during developing this game?

Something that we re-learned time and time again… a game is easier to build if you have the whole team and a proper plan. Because otherwise you leave a lot of work and frustration for “future you”. We also learned that Construct can be a lot stronger than we initially thought… but also that it can be really stubborn in some areas.

– How many people worked on this game?

It first started with Sven the illustrator and Zvonimir the animator. At first, we were building a completely wordless game. But some testers were a bit confused at what the characters are really doing. So we hired Tom Bennet as the narrator and also Lea Konjetić to compose original music for the game. In the last six months, Fabjan the programmer also joined the team and superpowered our development process. All in all, five people, excluding all the translators.

Final thoughts

I’m very happy that games like these are getting more attention. Hidden object games have a strange reputation of being “too casual” or “boring”. Yet, I dare to argue there is something to love in these games. Especially when a game is created with this much passion and love.

I want to apologize to the developers again for taking such a long time in creating and article about the demo. But, I’m happy I did today. Since, if you have any interest in playing this game after reading this article, go and play the demo. Or share this article with somebody you think will enjoy playing this game. The demo takes roughly 15 minutes to finish.

I wish the developers a lot of luck and success with their game and when it’s fully released, I’m going to play this game and most likely review it on my blog. And with that said, I have said everything I wanted to say about this game for now. Thank you so much for reading this article, and I hope you enjoyed reading it as much as I enjoyed making it. I hope to welcome you in another article, but until then, have a great rest of your day and take care.

  • ✇Eurogamer.net
  • Everything announced at Gamescom Opening Night Live 2024Katharine Castle
    Gamescom Opening Night Live 2024 is done and dusted for another year, but it's certainly kicked off this year's Gamescom with a bang - and we've got all the news, trailers and announcements right here in one handy summary. Whether you missed the show itself or just want a handy reminder of everything announced at Gamescom Opening Night Live this year, read on below.Of course, alongside the main show, this year's ONL also had a 30-minute pre-show that was stuffed with announcements as well, whic
     

Everything announced at Gamescom Opening Night Live 2024

20. Srpen 2024 v 23:27

Gamescom Opening Night Live 2024 is done and dusted for another year, but it's certainly kicked off this year's Gamescom with a bang - and we've got all the news, trailers and announcements right here in one handy summary. Whether you missed the show itself or just want a handy reminder of everything announced at Gamescom Opening Night Live this year, read on below.

Of course, alongside the main show, this year's ONL also had a 30-minute pre-show that was stuffed with announcements as well, which we'll quickly run through here before getting into the detail of the main show announcements below. Here, we got new trailers for Dave the Diver's latest crossovers, spooky co-op adventure Begone Beast and construction sim Roadcraft, alongside Italian Soulslike Enotria: The Last Song, Cairn (that shouty, but lovely looking climbing game from Summer Game Fest), life sim Inzoi from PUBG publishers Krafton, as well as a Terry showcase for Street Fighter 6.

There were also new game announcements in the pre-show in the form of Sniper Elite Resistance (coming 2025), the Donkey Kong-esque platformer Nikoderiko: The Magical World (with music from David Wise, no less), "first person farming horror allegory" We Harvest Shadows, the also quite spooky-looking Aila, a tease for the sequel to Journey to the Savage Planet (aptly named Revenge of the Savage Planet), action RPG Tribe Nine from the creators of Danganronpa, and the Lashana Lynch-led Directive 8020: A Dark Pictures Game.

Read more

  • ✇Eurogamer.net
  • Batman: Arkham Shadow gameplay reveal shows off first-person fisticuffsTom Phillips
    Tonight brings a first look at the next game in the legendary Batman: Arkham series - the upcoming entry coming to Meta Quest 3. Batman: Arkham Shadow is a prequel story set before Rocksteady's Arkham Asylum, though after existing prequel entry Arkham Oranges. In first-person, you'll be able to do many of the things you could in those entries - including boshing your enemies in the face with your fists, grappling across gaps and using various other bat-gadgets, plus switching on Detective V
     

Batman: Arkham Shadow gameplay reveal shows off first-person fisticuffs

20. Srpen 2024 v 21:45

Tonight brings a first look at the next game in the legendary Batman: Arkham series - the upcoming entry coming to Meta Quest 3.

Batman: Arkham Shadow is a prequel story set before Rocksteady's Arkham Asylum, though after existing prequel entry Arkham Oranges.

In first-person, you'll be able to do many of the things you could in those entries - including boshing your enemies in the face with your fists, grappling across gaps and using various other bat-gadgets, plus switching on Detective Vision.

Read more

  • ✇Eurogamer.net
  • Dying Light: The Beast is a new 18-hour standalone game that began life as DLCTom Phillips
    Dying Light developer Techland has shown off a new game in its zombie series that began life as a DLC for Dying Light 2 Stay Human. Announced during Gamescom Opening Night Live, Dying Light: The Beast is a solo or four-player co-op experience pitched as a "tight" 18-hour ride through a fresh area of the franchise's world. Dying Light protagonist Kyle Crane, once again voiced by Roger Craig Smith, returns here, a decade on. In-game, Crane has been in captivity, and experimented on. The upsid
     

Dying Light: The Beast is a new 18-hour standalone game that began life as DLC

20. Srpen 2024 v 20:43

Dying Light developer Techland has shown off a new game in its zombie series that began life as a DLC for Dying Light 2 Stay Human.

Announced during Gamescom Opening Night Live, Dying Light: The Beast is a solo or four-player co-op experience pitched as a "tight" 18-hour ride through a fresh area of the franchise's world.

Dying Light protagonist Kyle Crane, once again voiced by Roger Craig Smith, returns here, a decade on. In-game, Crane has been in captivity, and experimented on. The upside? You have zombie DNA powers to unleash that beast on enemies.

Read more

  • ✇Eurogamer.net
  • Horizon Forbidden West is leaving PlayStation PlusVictoria Kennedy
    Sony is pulling Horizon Forbidden West from its PS Plus subscription service in the coming weeks.The first-party Sony game is now listed under the 'Last Chance to Play' section on PS Plus, along with the likes of NieR Replicant, Marvel's Midnight Suns and Alien Isolation.This upcoming removal of Forbidden West comes just a few months after Horizon Zero Dawn was also removed from the service, which as Tom wrote at the time seemed a surprising move by Sony. Read more
     

Horizon Forbidden West is leaving PlayStation Plus

20. Srpen 2024 v 18:37

Sony is pulling Horizon Forbidden West from its PS Plus subscription service in the coming weeks.

The first-party Sony game is now listed under the 'Last Chance to Play' section on PS Plus, along with the likes of NieR Replicant, Marvel's Midnight Suns and Alien Isolation.

This upcoming removal of Forbidden West comes just a few months after Horizon Zero Dawn was also removed from the service, which as Tom wrote at the time seemed a surprising move by Sony.

Read more

Modern Warfare modder thinks Activision shut down multiplayer mod so it didn't "interfere" with Black Ops 6

20. Srpen 2024 v 14:26

The creator of the now-defunct Call of Duty Modern Warfare 2 mod, H2M, has opened up about what happened when Activision slapped the mod with a cease and desist, admitting, "the past couple of days have not gone to plan".

Although the mod - which upgraded Modern Warfare 2's multiplayer mode - was announced over a year ago, the cease and desist arrived the day before the mod was scheduled to be released last week, forcing the project to "shut down [...] immediately and permanently".

Shortly thereafter, unhappy Modern Warfare 2 fans jumped onto the Steam page to express their dismay.

Read more

  • ✇Eurogamer.net
  • Vendetta Forever is a moreish mash-up of VR greats Superhot and Pistol WhipIan Higton
    nDreams, the developer behind one of my all-time favourite VR titles, Synapse, has announced a new shooter game called Vendetta Forever during this week's VR Games Showcase.If that wasn't cause for celebration enough, nDreams also released a short, Quest-exclusive demo for the game that I played through for this week's episode of VR Corner. In the video, you can see me play the Quest 3 version, but it will also be available on the Quest Pro, Quest 2 and the PS VR2 at some point in October.So wh
     

Vendetta Forever is a moreish mash-up of VR greats Superhot and Pistol Whip

18. Srpen 2024 v 15:00

nDreams, the developer behind one of my all-time favourite VR titles, Synapse, has announced a new shooter game called Vendetta Forever during this week's VR Games Showcase.

If that wasn't cause for celebration enough, nDreams also released a short, Quest-exclusive demo for the game that I played through for this week's episode of VR Corner. In the video, you can see me play the Quest 3 version, but it will also be available on the Quest Pro, Quest 2 and the PS VR2 at some point in October.

So what is Vendetta Forever? Well the easiest way to describe it is a mash-up of Superhot and Pistol Whip, with some of the best aspects of both games cherry-picked and given a little twist to make them feel fresh and unique. The monochromatic-but-not-quite visuals are definitely more Pistol Whip-y, but the title screen is just full of those iconic Superhot reds, whites and blacks. Then there's the main menu, which is almost a carbon copy of Pistol Whip's, with mutator and level select options, alongside online leaderboards and a nice little shooting gallery area which is something Pistol Whip does lack.

Read more

  • ✇Eurogamer.net
  • Call of Duty: Modern Warfare Remastered mod H2M shuts down after cease and desist demandVikki Blake
    Call of Duty: Modern Warfare Remastered mod, H2M, has been cancelled following a cease and desist demand from Activision.Although the mod - which upgraded Modern Warfare 2's multiplayer mode - was announced over a year ago, the cease and desist arrived yesterday, a day before the mod was scheduled to be released later today."Today, our team members received a Cease & Desist order on behalf of Activision Publishing in relation to the H2M-Mod project," the team explained on Twitter/X. Read mo
     

Call of Duty: Modern Warfare Remastered mod H2M shuts down after cease and desist demand

16. Srpen 2024 v 13:19

Call of Duty: Modern Warfare Remastered mod, H2M, has been cancelled following a cease and desist demand from Activision.

Although the mod - which upgraded Modern Warfare 2's multiplayer mode - was announced over a year ago, the cease and desist arrived yesterday, a day before the mod was scheduled to be released later today.

"Today, our team members received a Cease & Desist order on behalf of Activision Publishing in relation to the H2M-Mod project," the team explained on Twitter/X.

Read more

  • ✇Eurogamer.net
  • Hitman 3 VR: Reloaded's enhanced stealth action gets an airing in first gameplay trailerMatt Wales
    Back in June, developer IO Interactive revealed it was resurrecting and reworking Hitman 3's VR mode, first released for PSVR in 2021, exclusively for Meta Quest 3 - and the studio has now shared first gameplay, showcasing this Reloaded edition's various enhancements. On a basic level, Hitman 3 VR: Reloaded is the same game that earned itself a Eurogamer Recommended badge back in the day, meaning players can don goggles and immersively sneak through likes of Dubai, Dartmoor, Berlin, Chongqing
     

Hitman 3 VR: Reloaded's enhanced stealth action gets an airing in first gameplay trailer

15. Srpen 2024 v 21:56

Back in June, developer IO Interactive revealed it was resurrecting and reworking Hitman 3's VR mode, first released for PSVR in 2021, exclusively for Meta Quest 3 - and the studio has now shared first gameplay, showcasing this Reloaded edition's various enhancements.

On a basic level, Hitman 3 VR: Reloaded is the same game that earned itself a Eurogamer Recommended badge back in the day, meaning players can don goggles and immersively sneak through likes of Dubai, Dartmoor, Berlin, Chongqing, and Mendoza.

However, Reloaded - which is being developed with XR Games - is more than just a straight port of Hitman 3 VR's scrappy but enjoyable previous release. It also introduces a new flat-shaded artstyle, more "fluid and natural" movement options, an overhauled UI, and - perhaps most notably - dual-wielding, so players can use a different weapon or item in each hand.

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  • ✇The Ancient Gaming Noob
  • Blaugust and Wondering If Blogging is Dead?Wilhelm Arcturus
    And, if it is dead, what I am still doing here? I jumped into blogging back towards the end of 2006 when the popularity of the medium was, if not at its peak, certainly close to it… though some where saying it was already past its prime by then. We were probably long beyond the point where having a blog made you special in any way, and getting past where blogging about a topic might get you a career move or a book deal.  I mean Julia & Julie was already a book (and later a movie) before I st
     

Blaugust and Wondering If Blogging is Dead?

17. Srpen 2024 v 17:15

And, if it is dead, what I am still doing here?

I jumped into blogging back towards the end of 2006 when the popularity of the medium was, if not at its peak, certainly close to it… though some where saying it was already past its prime by then.

We were probably long beyond the point where having a blog made you special in any way, and getting past where blogging about a topic might get you a career move or a book deal.  I mean Julia & Julie was already a book (and later a movie) before I started blogging (though that was a blog on Salon, so perhaps not representative of the medium), as was that one about the life of being a waiter and a few others.

And while blogging being a more common practice makes it harder to be noticed and called out as special, it didn’t mean the medium was dead.  And I wasn’t looking for a career move out of blogging in any case.  As documented, I already managed that with a BBS back in the early 90s and by the time I started a blog I had a career and a position that paid better than any equivalent in video games… plus a family and a mortgage that would be difficult to sustain had I any talent in video game development.

So the medium was perhaps dead by the time I started in the sense of being an easy way to be discovered as a stepping stone to something else, though that was not entirely uncommon for some time after I started.

Still, it was a heady time.  There were lots of blogs around no matter what topic you were delving into and more showed up every day.   I jumped into the MMORPG sub-genre zone, the state of which was immortalized by Michael Zenke as he took the 2007 XKCD online communities graphic and made a little map of our corner of the blogosphere.  Look at us.

The community of old

Some of those site persist.  Heartless still posts and Raph still keeps his blog going.  A few still stand, like Kill Ten Rats and Terra Nova, but get no updates.  Others are around, but on different mediums.  Lum, perhaps the ur MMO blogger, left behind the many iterations of Broken Toys and now has a substack or something like it… I don’t know, Substack had a nazi problem at one point and I don’t remember where he landed… while Damion Schubert of Zen of Design mostly trolls people on Twitter with bad opinions about Star Wars.

More though are just memories, shadows on the Internet Archive.  Long was the reach of VirginWorlds and its podcast at one time, but now the site stands no more.

During that era being an MMO blogger of any quality and sufficient quantity could push you into the belief that you might actual be relevant that to the genre, that your opinions might matter.  They didn’t, but community managers, always looking for some way to escape the inbred echo chamber that official forums tend to become, seemed keen to pay bloggers some attention now and then if only to break up the perpetual complaining of their site regulars.

Brent from VirginWorlds got a card

People could afford to be picky.  You could take a stand, take a side, champion a cause or a very narrow point of view and get a following.  I got kicked out of the EVE Blog Pack for not being sufficiently devoted to the topic. (Also, JFC there is a kind comment from Gevlon on the post at that link. That belongs in a museum!)  Dedicated WoW bloggers would not talk to me because I wrote about other games.  We argued with each other.  SynCaine and I used to have at each other in what became known as the Friday Blog wars.  I was nearly part of a holy war because I was insufficiently effusive about Warhammer Online, only to have most everybody dump the title and walk away a couple months later.

It was a happy and chaotic time and, not coincidentally, the peak era for Google Reader, the handy, easy to use, free RSS feed reader that Google killed in 2013 because they wanted everybody to use Google+ instead… and then Google+ was so flawed that they killed that too.

Sure, new venues show up.   There were podcasts, and for a while podcasters were all the rage, taking the limelight from all but the most famous bloggers.  And then there was Facebook and YouTube and Twitter to contend with, and even Tumblr seemed to be a thing… until Verizon bought that and screwed it up.

XKCD, again on the pulse of the internet, had a comic about that too!

But all of those got along pretty well.  I appeared on quite a few podcasts, syndicated my blog feed to Facebook, made some YouTube videos, and even did things on Tumblr.  I just got my 11 year badge on my Tumblr account in June.

Then came Twitch, and I kind of want to blame the demise of blogs on that.  Certainly if we look at the annual page views for my blog for all the full years from 2007 to 2023, things start to go down hill not too long after Twitch becomes a thing in 2011.

Page view for TAGN by year

I mean look at that line.  It feels like the body blow of Twitch and the demise of Google Reader conspired against me, to mix a metaphor.

And I am especially prickly about Twitch because it now dominates the attention of community managers, still keen to escape their self contained forum hell and whatever sub-reddits they are being assailed from.  The peak of my ire remains the EVE Vegas 2018 where I gave a presentation about the EVE Online blogging community and the value of the written word in recording the vibrant history of the game… and they put my presentation up against the Stream Fleet broadcast, which meant about six people sat and tolerated my plea… honestly, I should have bought them all a cocktail for enduring me… while literally everybody else, all CCP team members included, went to the Twitch event.

My sole recorded contribution to the discourse is this meme.

Highlight of my Presentation

Okay, there were a few more people than that.  But still, as a metaphor for the state of blogging in the eyes of the community team it was unparalleled in its poignancy.

And that is certainly one way to look at things.  The written word out maneuvered by a bunch of shallow attention seekers like Asmongold, who probably couldn’t string together three coherent sentences about a day at the zoo without checking to see which animals were trending and should be featured in his latest tirade against the people who dumbed down zoos so that they are no fun anymore.

Or, you know… maybe it is my topic of choice.

I mean, if you look at the arc of my so-called popularity, it might very well describe the ascendancy of MMORPGs and their eventual fall from the top of the food chain.

I mean, WoW hasn’t been on fire since the run up to Cataclysm and has felt the pinch of declining subscribers since Warlords of Draenor, which is when the panic really set in down in Anaheim.  Star Wars: The Old Republic was in some ways the last gasp attempt to get an old school subscription model expansions and so on MMORPG off the ground… and it had to go free to play.

If you go look at EVE Offline, the site that tracks the New Eden online user count and has done so for ages now, you will see that the peak of online concurrence was in May of 2013, when 65,303 accounts were logged into the game.  That was before free to play, the peak of EVE Online’s paid popularity.

Maybe in my pursuit of the same topic over and over again for 18 years I have ended up in an internet backwater, no longer of interest to any sort of mainstream audience.  Maybe it is merely MMO blogging that is dead.

Or maybe it is the written word, or the long form written word that has fallen out of favor… not that I would call what I do “long form” in a world where Stephen King exists.  Magazines are dead, newspapers are dead, books are not dead but not as popular, and we like to get our daily doses of news and gossip in the short little squirts of social media.

Maybe it is the words… or the quantity of words?  Maybe I would be more popular if I just kept to 140 or 280 or 500 or however many words are the limit of the modern attention span.

Should I eschew words and just do pictures?  Take the ultimate path against the trend against reading?

No, that can’t be it.  I literally have another blog that is just pictures and it isn’t even a tenth as popular as this, my bloviation platform.  Though, then again, it is pictures from an MMO… a pretty, spaceship MMO, but an MMO all the same and those aren’t so popular any more as noted above.

Of course, the real question at the heart of this is not whether or not blogging is dead, but whether or not it matters.

I have said on a number of occasions that I would keep doing what I am doing, cranking out an excess of words on the trivial or obscure twists of fate and business in a niche sub-genre of the PC gaming market even if I had no readers.

I am not sure that is 100% true.  Zero readers might be too much quiet.  But I’ve kept going at the same pace… hell, an increased pace if words per post are any measure… even as readership has declined.  For a brief peak period I could count on as many as 2,500 page views in a day on a regular basis.  Now I’m happy if the number breaks 500, and I suspect that I would continue to cater to an audience that added up to just 100 page views a day, even if most of them were comment bots.

The writing isn’t the joy… the writing is work and I often stare at my drafts folder and say, “Nah, not ready to finish that one.  That one is for another day… or maybe never.”  Then suddenly something will come up and I will be inspired and I will crank out 500 or a thousand words in a quick burst of energy, a flurry of words and typos flooding the screen, and I will press the Publish button and off it will go, another post done.

And there is the pleasure, the having written.  The ability to go back and filter through what happened a year ago, five years ago, and so on, the act of going back and reading something you wrote in a different era to see if or how your opinions have changed.  Did I soften on this expansion or that release?  Am I nostalgic for some title I panned?  Maybe?

Sometimes I kind of want to go back and try Warhammer Online.  Not enough to play the pirate server version of it, but I think about it sometimes.  Was it really that bad?  Did I miss something in it?  Is the me of 2024 more or less likely to play something like that?

Probably less likely, in all honestly.  My patience for the genre has constricted quite a bit.

And occasionally somebody else comes along and finds some old post of mine, some piece of history from the genre and gets a kick out of it or is reminded of some past venture.  Just the other day Asher Elias, leader of the Imperium, was writing something up and said that he was happy to have found some written records of old Reavers operations somewhere on the web.

Preserving a small sliver of the player lore of New Eden is just part of the job.

And anyway, how can blogging be dead if all these people showed up for Blaugust?  Look at them all!  Here, in 2024, in an age where some people can’t string together three sentences on what they did over the weekend without injecting a meme or an emoji, 117 blogs made the list.

I mean, two of them are mine, and one of those is just pictures of internet spaceships, but still, that is quite a turn out for our little corner of the internet.

  1. 2TonWaffle Community
  2. A Boy and His Computer
  3. A Hobbits Journey
  4. Abhinav Ramesh Kashyap
  5. AI MMORPG News
  6. Aistoryweavers.studio
  7. Aiyna
  8. Alexs Review Corner
  9. Alligators And Aneurysms
  10. Alvans Digital Garden
  11. Amerpie
  12. And So It Goes…
  13. AppAddict
  14. Art by Lucas da Silva
  15. Avaruussuo
  16. Axxuys Blog
  17. Aywrens Nook
  18. Beats and Skies
  19. Beyond Tannhauser Gate
  20. BinaryDigits Cafe
  21. Bio Break
  22. Cascading Space
  23. Chasing Dings
  24. Contains Moderate Peril
  25. Cotswold Diary
  26. Cubic Creativity
  27. Endgame Viable
  28. EVE Online Pictures
  29. Exposition is Inevitable
  30. Flamingo Flix
  31. Funky Frogster Zone
  32. Gaudete Theology
  33. Geek on a Harley
  34. Gendo Glow
  35. Grubz Blog
  36. Heartless Gamer
  37. Hey Dingus
  38. In An Age
  39. Inconsistent Software
  40. Indiecator
  41. Inventory Full
  42. Jeremy Cherfas
  43. Jess is Typing
  44. JJxSly
  45. Juha-Matti Santala
  46. Just Text
  47. Kaushiks Blog
  48. KayTalksGames
  49. Kellys World
  50. Kluwes
  51. Lameazoid
  52. Linkage
  53. Living Out Loud
  54. Mailvaltar – MMOs and other stuff
  55. Martins Notebook
  56. Matan Abudy
  57. MMO Casual
  58. Monsterladys Diary
  59. Mormoroi
  60. Mutant Reviewers
  61. Nathan Friend
  62. Necoco loves stuff
  63. Nejimaki Blog
  64. Nerd Girl Thoughts
  65. Nerdy Bookahs
  66. Neville Hobson
  67. Noisy Deadlines
  68. Notes by JCProbably
  69. OwlBlog
  70. P.S Its Me
  71. Peridotlines – A Place Where I Write
  72. Pink Gallica
  73. Point Click Repeat
  74. Quintessence of Dust
  75. Ramble With(out) A Cause
  76. Ramblings by Joshua
  77. Reality Frameworks
  78. Riels Nest
  79. rscottjones.com
  80. rsjon.es
  81. Rumors Matrix
  82. SamJC
  83. Sane Boat
  84. Sane Boat
  85. Scopique
  86. Select Star Studio
  87. Shadowz Abstract Gaming
  88. Shaky.Sh
  89. Sharon A. Hill: Strange Claims Adjuster
  90. SoftThistle 2.0
  91. Splendide Mendax
  92. StarShadow
  93. Sword of Seiros
  94. TAGN
  95. Tales of the Aggronaut
  96. Tart Darling
  97. The Chip Bag
  98. The Dragon Chronicle
  99. The End of My Worlds
  100. The Everjournal
  101. The Friendly Necromancer
  102. The Last Chapter Gaming Blog
  103. The Lost Outpost
  104. The Naming Way
  105. The Tony Burgess Blog
  106. Time to Loot
  107. Uncountable Thoughts
  108. Unidentified Signal Source
  109. Usama Insights
  110. Valentines Days
  111. Vicissitudes
  112. Wand3r
  113. WAWAWA
  114. Werd I/O
  115. With Love Kechi
  116. Words Under My Name
  117. Yordi

As always, if you can find the time, please visit some of our participants.  We all like a page view or three when we can get them.

  • ✇Android Authority
  • Meta Quest headsets now support HDMI connections to let you stream anything on a big screenRushil Agrawal
    Credit: C. Scott Brown / Android Authority Meta has launched the Meta Quest HDMI Link app, enabling users to connect their headsets to HDMI and DisplayPort devices. The app supports Meta Quest 2, 3, and Pro headsets and offers 1080p resolution content with low latency. Setting up the feature requires an additional UVC and UAC-compatible capture card. Meta has rolled out a new app, Meta Quest HDMI Link, designed to extend the functionality of its VR headsets. The app is available for Met
     

Meta Quest headsets now support HDMI connections to let you stream anything on a big screen

17. Srpen 2024 v 22:20

Meta Quest 3 with Two Controllers On Table

Credit: C. Scott Brown / Android Authority

  • Meta has launched the Meta Quest HDMI Link app, enabling users to connect their headsets to HDMI and DisplayPort devices.
  • The app supports Meta Quest 2, 3, and Pro headsets and offers 1080p resolution content with low latency.
  • Setting up the feature requires an additional UVC and UAC-compatible capture card.


Meta has rolled out a new app, Meta Quest HDMI Link, designed to extend the functionality of its VR headsets. The app is available for Meta Quest 2, Quest 3, and Quest Pro models. It allows users to connect their headsets to various HDMI or DisplayPort-equipped devices, such as gaming consoles, laptops, and even smartphones, effectively turning the headset into a virtual display. (via The Verge)

The Quest headsets have traditionally been positioned as standalone devices for VR experiences. With HDMI Link, the company is acknowledging users’ desire to access content from other devices within their VR environment.

HDMI Link supports 1080p content with low latency, providing a customizable virtual screen experience. Users can resize and reposition this screen within the VR environment, making it suitable for gaming, watching movies, or even working privately.

Setting up HDMI Link, however, isn’t as straightforward as plugging a USB cable into your phone or gaming console. It requires a compatible capture card — a small device that connects your HDMI source to your headset via USB — adding an extra layer of complexity and cost. Meta acknowledges this in its blog post, cautioning users that it’s not quite as plug-and-play as they might expect.

Another important drawback to HDMI Link is its inability to display content protected by HDCP, which is common with many streaming services. This limitation means that while the feature is versatile, its utility for streaming movies and TV shows might be limited.

Meta emphasizes that HDMI Link is not meant to replace existing features like Air Link or Xbox Cloud Gaming, which offer wireless streaming options under ideal network conditions. Instead, it’s intended to provide a solution for situations where Wi-Fi is unreliable or unavailable or when users want to connect devices that aren’t supported by other methods. The app is currently available on App Lab, which indicates that it’s still in development and might need some work to iron out some kinks.

You're cleaning your pup's paws all wrong — fix it with this training!

21. Srpen 2024 v 02:00
Dog Training Essentials Bundle

TL;DR: Give your doggo the love and care they deserve when you learn how to walk, train, and groom them properly with this $14.99 bundle!

We know you love your dog, but are you taking care of them the right way? — Read the rest

The post You're cleaning your pup's paws all wrong — fix it with this training! appeared first on Boing Boing.

Make precious travel memories by learning the local language with Rosetta Stone!

20. Srpen 2024 v 23:00
learning the local language with Rosetta Stone!

TL;DR: Feeling inspired by the Paris Olympics to travel abroad? Learn up to 25 languages with Rosetta Stone, now $179.99 (reg. $399) for a limited time.

Seeing all the Olympic athletes compete this summer was inspiring (we're anxiously waiting to watch the Paralympics!), — Read the rest

The post Make precious travel memories by learning the local language with Rosetta Stone! appeared first on Boing Boing.

  • ✇Boing Boing
  • Wildlife photographer snaps image of mysterious hairy beast that turned out to be something even odderAllan Rose Hill
    Wildlife photographer Carl Bovis has an incredible talent for capturing stunning images of birds. But while he was wandering with his camera near his Bridgwater, Somerset home, he had a rather strange sighting on the road. "Being unable to investigate what it was due to it being on private land and the setting sun being in his eyes, the 53-year-old says he spent a couple of minutes watching it to see if it would move before taking a single photo of it and heading home," reports BristoLive. — Rea
     

Wildlife photographer snaps image of mysterious hairy beast that turned out to be something even odder

20. Srpen 2024 v 22:14
illustrative image: encierro/Shutterstock

Wildlife photographer Carl Bovis has an incredible talent for capturing stunning images of birds. But while he was wandering with his camera near his Bridgwater, Somerset home, he had a rather strange sighting on the road.

"Being unable to investigate what it was due to it being on private land and the setting sun being in his eyes, the 53-year-old says he spent a couple of minutes watching it to see if it would move before taking a single photo of it and heading home," reports BristoLive. — Read the rest

The post Wildlife photographer snaps image of mysterious hairy beast that turned out to be something even odder appeared first on Boing Boing.

  • ✇Boing Boing
  • How psychics and tarot readers use software to fight online scamsThom Dunn
    Who could have predicted that the last few years would see such a vast increase in social media spam? Certainly not professional tarot card readers, whose identities have become ripe opportunities for online scammers looking to exploit gullible consumers. This has been a worsening issue in the spiritual advisor industry since at least 2021. — Read the rest The post How psychics and tarot readers use software to fight online scams appeared first on Boing Boing.
     

How psychics and tarot readers use software to fight online scams

Od: Thom Dunn
20. Srpen 2024 v 20:31
Image: Five of Cups Tarot card; SerkanSenyuz / shutterstock.com

Who could have predicted that the last few years would see such a vast increase in social media spam? Certainly not professional tarot card readers, whose identities have become ripe opportunities for online scammers looking to exploit gullible consumers. This has been a worsening issue in the spiritual advisor industry since at least 2021. — Read the rest

The post How psychics and tarot readers use software to fight online scams appeared first on Boing Boing.

  • ✇Boing Boing
  • TikTok is making you boredGail Sherman
    If your response to boredom is to whip out your phone and scroll endlessly through TikTok, you might be doing it wrong. According to a study published in the Journal of Experimental Psychology, this kind of "digital switching" intensifies boredom rather than relieving it. — Read the rest The post TikTok is making you bored appeared first on Boing Boing.
     

TikTok is making you bored

20. Srpen 2024 v 20:01
Photo: salarko / Shutterstock.com

If your response to boredom is to whip out your phone and scroll endlessly through TikTok, you might be doing it wrong. According to a study published in the Journal of Experimental Psychology, this kind of "digital switching" intensifies boredom rather than relieving it. — Read the rest

The post TikTok is making you bored appeared first on Boing Boing.

  • ✇Boing Boing
  • The Atari 7800+ is a trip down the retro rabbit holeJason Weisberger
    Atari has updated the 7800 with an HDMI port and wireless controllers and announced ten new games. If you want wireless controllers or prefer the 7800 form factor, this is the retro Atari cartridge-playing console. The 7800 has always been backward compatible with the VCS/2600/Telegames cartridges, but the 7800 versions are always better. — Read the rest The post The Atari 7800+ is a trip down the retro rabbit hole appeared first on Boing Boing.
     

The Atari 7800+ is a trip down the retro rabbit hole

20. Srpen 2024 v 19:29
Atari Screenshot

Atari has updated the 7800 with an HDMI port and wireless controllers and announced ten new games.

If you want wireless controllers or prefer the 7800 form factor, this is the retro Atari cartridge-playing console. The 7800 has always been backward compatible with the VCS/2600/Telegames cartridges, but the 7800 versions are always better. — Read the rest

The post The Atari 7800+ is a trip down the retro rabbit hole appeared first on Boing Boing.

  • ✇Boing Boing
  • ILL-ABILITIES showcases amazing differently-abled breakdancersJennifer Sandlin
    Check out the amazingly talented dancers of ILL-ABILITIES. On their website, ILL-ABILITIES states that they are: an International Breakdance Crew comprised of eight members from around the world:  Luca "Lazylegz" Patuelli (Canada); Jacob "Kujo" Lyons (USA); Sergio "Checho" Carvajal (Chile); Redouan "Redo" Ait Chitt (The Netherlands); Jung Soo "Krops" Lee (South Korea); Samuel Henrique "Samuka" da Silveira Lima (Brazil) ; Lucas "Perninha" Machado (Brazil); "Junior" Bosila Banya (France). — Rea
     

ILL-ABILITIES showcases amazing differently-abled breakdancers

20. Srpen 2024 v 19:02
Image: YouTube

Check out the amazingly talented dancers of ILL-ABILITIES. On their website, ILL-ABILITIES states that they are:

an International Breakdance Crew comprised of eight members from around the world:  Luca "Lazylegz" Patuelli (Canada); Jacob "Kujo" Lyons (USA); Sergio "Checho" Carvajal (Chile); Redouan "Redo" Ait Chitt (The Netherlands); Jung Soo "Krops" Lee (South Korea); Samuel Henrique "Samuka" da Silveira Lima (Brazil) ; Lucas "Perninha" Machado (Brazil); "Junior" Bosila Banya (France).

Read the rest

The post ILL-ABILITIES showcases amazing differently-abled breakdancers appeared first on Boing Boing.

  • ✇Boing Boing
  • Star Wars: The Acolyte's cancellation leaves High Republic fans with NubsJason Weisberger
    There is a disturbance in the force, and his name is Nubs. Disney has a fairly sweeping Star Wars High Republic story going. Everything from live-action to books, video games, audio dramas, comics, cartoons, and tie-in merchandise abound. With the cancellation of The Acolyte, however, if you want to watch High Republic Jedi do their thing, Nubs is your guy. — Read the rest The post Star Wars: The Acolyte's cancellation leaves High Republic fans with Nubs appeared first on Boing Boing.
     

Star Wars: The Acolyte's cancellation leaves High Republic fans with Nubs

20. Srpen 2024 v 18:51
Star Wars

There is a disturbance in the force, and his name is Nubs.

Disney has a fairly sweeping Star Wars High Republic story going. Everything from live-action to books, video games, audio dramas, comics, cartoons, and tie-in merchandise abound. With the cancellation of The Acolyte, however, if you want to watch High Republic Jedi do their thing, Nubs is your guy. — Read the rest

The post Star Wars: The Acolyte's cancellation leaves High Republic fans with Nubs appeared first on Boing Boing.

  • ✇Boing Boing
  • These new baby capybara triplets are adorable!Jennifer Sandlin
    What's cuter than a capybara? A baby capybara, of course. And what's even cuter than a baby capybara? THREE baby capybaras!  This video of the Capybara triplets recently born at the Sydney Zoo to Capybara parents Zoey and Sanchez is unbearably cute. — Read the rest The post These new baby capybara triplets are adorable! appeared first on Boing Boing.
     

These new baby capybara triplets are adorable!

20. Srpen 2024 v 18:35
Japan's Fireworks/Shutterstock.com

What's cuter than a capybara? A baby capybara, of course. And what's even cuter than a baby capybara? THREE baby capybaras! 

This video of the Capybara triplets recently born at the Sydney Zoo to Capybara parents Zoey and Sanchez is unbearably cute. — Read the rest

The post These new baby capybara triplets are adorable! appeared first on Boing Boing.

  • ✇Boing Boing
  • Documentary highlights the men that Abraham Lincoln slept withThom Dunn
    Lover of Men is an upcoming documentary film directed by Shaun Peterson and written by Grace Leeson which explores the age-old question: was Abe Lincoln gay? Specifically, the movie examines Lincoln's relationship with four different men, with whom Lincoln shared clothes, sleeping arrangements, and deep emotional connections: David Derickson, Lincoln's Civil War-era bodyguard often stayed in his tent and wore his clothes Joshua Speed, Lincoln's former roommate and close friend, whose many corre
     

Documentary highlights the men that Abraham Lincoln slept with

Od: Thom Dunn
20. Srpen 2024 v 18:12
Image: YouTube

Lover of Men is an upcoming documentary film directed by Shaun Peterson and written by Grace Leeson which explores the age-old question: was Abe Lincoln gay? Specifically, the movie examines Lincoln's relationship with four different men, with whom Lincoln shared clothes, sleeping arrangements, and deep emotional connections:

  • David Derickson, Lincoln's Civil War-era bodyguard often stayed in his tent and wore his clothes
  • Joshua Speed, Lincoln's former roommate and close friend, whose many correspondences were described by one historian as having a "streak of lavender, and spots soft as May violets";
  • Billy Greene, another roommate from Lincoln's 20s who factually slept in the same bed with him and whose thighs Lincoln once described in writing as "as perfect as a human being could be";
  • and Elmer Ellsworth, an army officer and close friend of Lincoln.

Read the rest

The post Documentary highlights the men that Abraham Lincoln slept with appeared first on Boing Boing.

  • ✇Boing Boing
  • 'Haley Voters for Harris' speaking outJason Weisberger
    Nikki Haley caved, endorsed adjudicated rapist Donald Trump, and hit her former followers with a cease-and-desist order for supporting President Harris, but it hasn't shut them up. A couple of weeks ago, we shared the story of Haley Voters for Harris getting CND'd by their former candidate. — Read the rest The post 'Haley Voters for Harris' speaking out appeared first on Boing Boing.
     

'Haley Voters for Harris' speaking out

20. Srpen 2024 v 17:42
republican

Nikki Haley caved, endorsed adjudicated rapist Donald Trump, and hit her former followers with a cease-and-desist order for supporting President Harris, but it hasn't shut them up.

A couple of weeks ago, we shared the story of Haley Voters for Harris getting CND'd by their former candidate. — Read the rest

The post 'Haley Voters for Harris' speaking out appeared first on Boing Boing.

  • ✇Boing Boing
  • 1953 U.S. Navy training film about fire control computersRob Beschizza
    This 1953 U.S. Navy training film discusses the mechanisms used by the fire control computers. Yes, mechanical computers calculating fire control for big-ass guns—though 70 years ago, men were still needed to move the dials. [via Hacker News] The ship's location, direction, speed, and the enemy ship's location, direction, and speed—in a matter of seconds so that the ship's guns may fire accurately and effectively. — Read the rest The post 1953 U.S. Navy training film about fire control compu
     

1953 U.S. Navy training film about fire control computers

20. Srpen 2024 v 17:28
U.S. Navy training video

This 1953 U.S. Navy training film discusses the mechanisms used by the fire control computers. Yes, mechanical computers calculating fire control for big-ass guns—though 70 years ago, men were still needed to move the dials. [via Hacker News]

The ship's location, direction, speed, and the enemy ship's location, direction, and speed—in a matter of seconds so that the ship's guns may fire accurately and effectively.

Read the rest

The post 1953 U.S. Navy training film about fire control computers appeared first on Boing Boing.

  • ✇Boing Boing
  • Friday Night Videos is a blast from the pastGail Sherman
    Friday Night Videos was a weekly dose of music videos for those without cable and, therefore, no MTV. I hadn't thought about it in years until this episode from 1984, complete with commercials, popped up on YouTube. It is pure 80s nostalgia with Tracey Ullman, who I honestly forgot had a music career, Rockwell, whose Somebody's Watching Me video still creeps me out, a "brand new video by John Cougar Mellencamp," and a talking head of Freddie Mercury smoking like a chimney in an intro to the Radi
     

Friday Night Videos is a blast from the past

20. Srpen 2024 v 17:22
Screenshot: Bud Light ad from the 1980s

Friday Night Videos was a weekly dose of music videos for those without cable and, therefore, no MTV. I hadn't thought about it in years until this episode from 1984, complete with commercials, popped up on YouTube. It is pure 80s nostalgia with Tracey Ullman, who I honestly forgot had a music career, Rockwell, whose Somebody's Watching Me video still creeps me out, a "brand new video by John Cougar Mellencamp," and a talking head of Freddie Mercury smoking like a chimney in an intro to the Radio Gaga video. — Read the rest

The post Friday Night Videos is a blast from the past appeared first on Boing Boing.

You'll feel like a real DJ when you spin records or stream your playlists with this turntable!

20. Srpen 2024 v 17:00
Gemini Sound TT-1200 Belt Drive

TL;DR: Want to spin records at your next hangout? You can play records from your shelf or playlists from your phone with the Gemini TT-1200 Turntable, now $159.99 (nearly 20% off)!

Who doesn't want to pretend you're the hottest DJ? — Read the rest

The post You'll feel like a real DJ when you spin records or stream your playlists with this turntable! appeared first on Boing Boing.

  • ✇Boing Boing
  • "25 and Me" is your guide to the horrors of Project 2025Jennifer Sandlin
    Here's a great resource to learn how Project 2025 will affect you or those you love and care about on specific issues such as health care, food assistance, education, etc. The site is called "25 and Me" and is a collaboration between Rajat Paharia and Google Gemini. — Read the rest The post "25 and Me" is your guide to the horrors of Project 2025 appeared first on Boing Boing.
     

"25 and Me" is your guide to the horrors of Project 2025

20. Srpen 2024 v 16:57
Image: Kashif - Khan/shutterstock.com

Here's a great resource to learn how Project 2025 will affect you or those you love and care about on specific issues such as health care, food assistance, education, etc. The site is called "25 and Me" and is a collaboration between Rajat Paharia and Google Gemini. — Read the rest

The post "25 and Me" is your guide to the horrors of Project 2025 appeared first on Boing Boing.

  • ✇Boing Boing
  • Calculating Empires: an huge online chart of tech historyRob Beschizza
    Calculating Empires is a "a genealogy of technology and power since 1500" — a beautiful and interactive monochrome chart you can zoom in and out of to trace the connections between all such things in the modern age. I immediately crash zoomed in and found myself face-to-face with a Debord quote: "In societies where modern conditions of production prevail, all of life presents itself as an immense accumulation of spectacles. — Read the rest The post Calculating Empires: an huge online chart of t
     

Calculating Empires: an huge online chart of tech history

20. Srpen 2024 v 16:34
Calculating Empires

Calculating Empires is a "a genealogy of technology and power since 1500" — a beautiful and interactive monochrome chart you can zoom in and out of to trace the connections between all such things in the modern age. I immediately crash zoomed in and found myself face-to-face with a Debord quote: "In societies where modern conditions of production prevail, all of life presents itself as an immense accumulation of spectacles. — Read the rest

The post Calculating Empires: an huge online chart of tech history appeared first on Boing Boing.

Trump not technically saying he'll refuse to accept election results—he just won't accept them and has explained why

20. Srpen 2024 v 14:58
Image: Donald Trump booking portrait, courtesy Fulton County Jail

Here's the fact check of the century, courtesy of The Washington Post's Amy Gardner: '"Donald Trump says he will refuse to accept the election result if he loses again," Biden said. But that's not true. Trump just hasn't said that he would accept. — Read the rest

The post Trump not technically saying he'll refuse to accept election results—he just won't accept them and has explained why appeared first on Boing Boing.

  • ✇Boing Boing
  • A video game just got FDA clearance as an ADHD treatmentThom Dunn
    Last fall, amidst the ongoing national Adderall shortage, I decided it was time to start playing video games every day. That's because I learned about a new game called EndeavorOTC, which was in the process of gaining FDA clearance as a potential alternative treatment for ADHD. — Read the rest The post A video game just got FDA clearance as an ADHD treatment appeared first on Boing Boing.
     

A video game just got FDA clearance as an ADHD treatment

Od: Thom Dunn
20. Srpen 2024 v 14:11

Last fall, amidst the ongoing national Adderall shortage, I decided it was time to start playing video games every day. That's because I learned about a new game called EndeavorOTC, which was in the process of gaining FDA clearance as a potential alternative treatment for ADHD. — Read the rest

The post A video game just got FDA clearance as an ADHD treatment appeared first on Boing Boing.

Statue of civil rights leader John Lewis replaces 100-year-old slaver monument

20. Srpen 2024 v 13:45
Screenshot: NBC News Now

In Decatur, Georgia, a momument to the Confederacy stood for 100 years before being removed in 2021. Yesterday it was replaced by a 12 foot statue of John Lewis, the civil rights leader and U.S. Representative who died that year. — Read the rest

The post Statue of civil rights leader John Lewis replaces 100-year-old slaver monument appeared first on Boing Boing.

Beat the hackers by storing your passwords on this physical security key!

20. Srpen 2024 v 02:00
Thetis FIDO2 Security Key

TL;DR: Evade password hackers by storing your passwords on Thetis, a physical password key that ensures only you can access your info. A three-pack is now on sale for less than $65!

Still storing your passwords on your iCloud key? — Read the rest

The post Beat the hackers by storing your passwords on this physical security key! appeared first on Boing Boing.

  • ✇Boing Boing
  • The 'Frame TV' experience can be yours for less than $100Boing Boing's Shop
    TL;DR: Want the Samsung 'Frame TV' experience for less? This phone and TV app can turn any smart TV into a digital picture frame for less than $100! It seems like everyone and their mother is obsessed with the Samsung 'Frame TV,' and it makes sense why. — Read the rest The post The 'Frame TV' experience can be yours for less than $100 appeared first on Boing Boing.
     

The 'Frame TV' experience can be yours for less than $100

19. Srpen 2024 v 23:00
Digital TV Frame

TL;DR: Want the Samsung 'Frame TV' experience for less? This phone and TV app can turn any smart TV into a digital picture frame for less than $100!

It seems like everyone and their mother is obsessed with the Samsung 'Frame TV,' and it makes sense why. — Read the rest

The post The 'Frame TV' experience can be yours for less than $100 appeared first on Boing Boing.

  • ✇Boing Boing
  • Inside the struggle to unionize the animation industryThom Dunn
    In the wake of the recent unionization efforts, such as the Writer's Guild strike, the Animation Guild is also pushing for more power in the industry. Production houses such as Dreamworks and Pixar—once celebrated for their revolutionary in-house work and style—have increasingly outsourced their once-award-winning animation labor. — Read the rest The post Inside the struggle to unionize the animation industry appeared first on Boing Boing.
     

Inside the struggle to unionize the animation industry

Od: Thom Dunn
19. Srpen 2024 v 22:43
Image: Los Angeles Times Photographic Collection at the UCLA Library / Wikimedia Commons (CC-BY 4.0

In the wake of the recent unionization efforts, such as the Writer's Guild strike, the Animation Guild is also pushing for more power in the industry.

Production houses such as Dreamworks and Pixar—once celebrated for their revolutionary in-house work and style—have increasingly outsourced their once-award-winning animation labor. — Read the rest

The post Inside the struggle to unionize the animation industry appeared first on Boing Boing.

  • ✇Boing Boing
  • Making sense of Stan Lee's many financial messesThom Dunn
    Stan Lee was a beloved American icon—but he also may have been more exploitative and more exploited than most people realize. In recent years, Josie Riesman's fantastic book True Believer: The Rise and Fall of Stan Lee and Tom Scioli's comic book-styled biography I Am Stan: A Graphic Biography of the Legendary Stan Lee have both explored the nuances and complexities around the man's self-styled myth-making. — Read the rest The post Making sense of Stan Lee's many financial messes appeared first
     

Making sense of Stan Lee's many financial messes

Od: Thom Dunn
19. Srpen 2024 v 22:36
Stan Lee image: Featureflash Photo Agency/Shutterstock

Stan Lee was a beloved American icon—but he also may have been more exploitative and more exploited than most people realize. In recent years, Josie Riesman's fantastic book True Believer: The Rise and Fall of Stan Lee and Tom Scioli's comic book-styled biography I Am Stan: A Graphic Biography of the Legendary Stan Lee have both explored the nuances and complexities around the man's self-styled myth-making. — Read the rest

The post Making sense of Stan Lee's many financial messes appeared first on Boing Boing.

  • ✇Boing Boing
  • Fox News reports "Harris Topping Trump"Rob Beschizza
    Fox News today reported "Harris Topping Trump" in a renewed sign that one person at the cable broadcaster is fully cognizant of the term's many shades of meaning and is involved in graphic design there. The numbers beneath the headline—49% to 45%, quoting an Ipsos poll—do suggest intrusive thoughts ahoy for the former president of the United States of America. — Read the rest The post Fox News reports "Harris Topping Trump" appeared first on Boing Boing.
     

Fox News reports "Harris Topping Trump"

19. Srpen 2024 v 22:30
HARRIS TOPPING TRUMP

Fox News today reported "Harris Topping Trump" in a renewed sign that one person at the cable broadcaster is fully cognizant of the term's many shades of meaning and is involved in graphic design there.

The numbers beneath the headline—49% to 45%, quoting an Ipsos poll—do suggest intrusive thoughts ahoy for the former president of the United States of America. — Read the rest

The post Fox News reports "Harris Topping Trump" appeared first on Boing Boing.

  • ✇Boing Boing
  • Starliner spacesuits not compatible with SpaceX DragonGail Sherman
    Two months into what was scheduled to be an eight-day mission, we learn that spacesuit compatibility problems are also keeping NASA's astronauts stuck in space. I missed something in the recent discussion about the possibility of Starliner's stranded crew returning to Earth on a SpaceX Dragon. — Read the rest The post Starliner spacesuits not compatible with SpaceX Dragon appeared first on Boing Boing.
     

Starliner spacesuits not compatible with SpaceX Dragon

19. Srpen 2024 v 22:25
Starliner capsule. Image: NASA

Two months into what was scheduled to be an eight-day mission, we learn that spacesuit compatibility problems are also keeping NASA's astronauts stuck in space.

I missed something in the recent discussion about the possibility of Starliner's stranded crew returning to Earth on a SpaceX Dragon. — Read the rest

The post Starliner spacesuits not compatible with SpaceX Dragon appeared first on Boing Boing.

  • ✇Boing Boing
  • Trump makes worse comments about Medal of Honor recipientsJason Weisberger
    Rather than apologize or praise recipients of the nation's highest Military honor, Donald Trump explained how being good at sports is cooler than winning an MOH. One of the most shocking things about Donald Trump has been the support he received from our armed services and veterans. — Read the rest The post Trump makes worse comments about Medal of Honor recipients appeared first on Boing Boing.
     

Trump makes worse comments about Medal of Honor recipients

19. Srpen 2024 v 22:12
wrong jeremy rosenberg

Rather than apologize or praise recipients of the nation's highest Military honor, Donald Trump explained how being good at sports is cooler than winning an MOH.

One of the most shocking things about Donald Trump has been the support he received from our armed services and veterans. — Read the rest

The post Trump makes worse comments about Medal of Honor recipients appeared first on Boing Boing.

  • ✇Boing Boing
  • Woman in court for sex with troutAllan Rose Hill
    Catherine June Lee, 58, of Tasmania, was in court today after being busted in 2022 for having sex with a live brown trout. According to police, June and one Ashley David Hallam, 55, allegedly filmed the act on a boat. Le requested an adjournment without plea until October, which the court granted. — Read the rest The post Woman in court for sex with trout appeared first on Boing Boing.
     

Woman in court for sex with trout

19. Srpen 2024 v 21:19
image: CSNafzger/Shutterstock

Catherine June Lee, 58, of Tasmania, was in court today after being busted in 2022 for having sex with a live brown trout. According to police, June and one Ashley David Hallam, 55, allegedly filmed the act on a boat.

Le requested an adjournment without plea until October, which the court granted. — Read the rest

The post Woman in court for sex with trout appeared first on Boing Boing.

  • ✇Boing Boing
  • Famed TV host Phil Donahue dead at 88Rob Beschizza
    Phil Donahue, the presenter, writer, producer and and host of The Phil Donahue Show, is dead at 88. The longtime TV presence was famed for many achievements off and on-screen. Donahue became a household name in the daytime talk show space in November 1967 when The Phil Donahue Show premiered on a local news network in Dayton, Ohio. — Read the rest The post Famed TV host Phil Donahue dead at 88 appeared first on Boing Boing.
     

Famed TV host Phil Donahue dead at 88

19. Srpen 2024 v 21:19
Donohue

Phil Donahue, the presenter, writer, producer and and host of The Phil Donahue Show, is dead at 88. The longtime TV presence was famed for many achievements off and on-screen.

Donahue became a household name in the daytime talk show space in November 1967 when The Phil Donahue Show premiered on a local news network in Dayton, Ohio.

Read the rest

The post Famed TV host Phil Donahue dead at 88 appeared first on Boing Boing.

Mysterious and spooky sounds of the forest may be coming from the sky not the trees

19. Srpen 2024 v 20:51
image: andreiuc88/Shutterstock

Wandering through a forest at night, you might be treated to a strange symphony of creepy cracking sounds. In some cases, the source of the sounds are the trees. Temperature changes, especially between day and night, can cause the wood in trees to expand or contract. — Read the rest

The post Mysterious and spooky sounds of the forest may be coming from the sky not the trees appeared first on Boing Boing.

  • ✇Boing Boing
  • Australian otter's tribute to Rachael "Raygun" GunnJennifer Sandlin
    Of all the memes inspired by Rachael "Raygun" Gunn, the B-girl from Australia who scored zero points in breakdancing at the Paris Olympics, my favorite spoof is this one shared by the Sydney Zoo, titled "Everyone is doing the Raygun!" The video features adorable otters showing off their Raygun-like moves, such as wriggling in the grass and squirming on the rocks. — Read the rest The post Australian otter's tribute to Rachael "Raygun" Gunn appeared first on Boing Boing.
     

Australian otter's tribute to Rachael "Raygun" Gunn

19. Srpen 2024 v 20:35
Eric Isselee / Shutterstock

Of all the memes inspired by Rachael "Raygun" Gunn, the B-girl from Australia who scored zero points in breakdancing at the Paris Olympics, my favorite spoof is this one shared by the Sydney Zoo, titled "Everyone is doing the Raygun!" The video features adorable otters showing off their Raygun-like moves, such as wriggling in the grass and squirming on the rocks. — Read the rest

The post Australian otter's tribute to Rachael "Raygun" Gunn appeared first on Boing Boing.

  • ✇Mondo 2000
  • Leary, Mondo2000, and TESCREALKen Goffman
    Propaganda poster by Ed Reibsamen with a little help from Midjourney Article by Aragorn Eloff There’s been a lot written lately about the so-called TESCREAList ideology that is currently hegemonic in the Silicon Valley tech circles frequented by people like Elon Musk and Peter Thiel. TESCREAL stands for transhumanism, extropianism, singularitarianism, cosmism, rationalism, effective altruism and longtermism – terms that are probably at least intuitively familiar. Reading recent critical descript
     

Leary, Mondo2000, and TESCREAL

21. Srpen 2023 v 18:28

Propaganda poster by Ed Reibsamen with a little help from Midjourney

Article by Aragorn Eloff

There’s been a lot written lately about the so-called TESCREAList ideology that is currently hegemonic in the Silicon Valley tech circles frequented by people like Elon Musk and Peter Thiel. TESCREAL stands for transhumanism, extropianism, singularitarianism, cosmism, rationalism, effective altruism and longtermism – terms that are probably at least intuitively familiar. Reading recent critical descriptions of this facile, elitist ideology, which is driving a lot of the hype around machine learning, I’m struck by how familiar it all seems. Listening to a podcast on 60s psychedelia on my run this morning, it suddenly all made sense.

It turns out you can trace a pretty direct line back from TESCREAL ‘philosophers’ like Kurzweil and Bostrom to Wired magazine and the extropians mailing list, and from there to the legendary Mondo2000 magazine – a 90s tech-enthusiast counterculture publication from California put together by old sixties heads enthused by nascent technologies like the web, VR and ‘nootropics’. Indeed, 1992’s Mondo 2000: A User’s Guide to the New Edge, a gorgeous typographic mess of glossy 3d graphics and paeans to the coming techno-singularity, feels almost like a secret peek into the TESCREAL gang’s wildest fantasies, although regulars like Douglas Rushkoff, Mark Dery and Bruce Sterling were admittedly far more interesting than the current dreck. Mondo 2000 was, in turn, the successor to the less glossy High Frontiers and Reality Hackers, 80s publications that mixed cyberpunk and surrealism with phone phreaking and experimental music. And then, of course, there was the psychedelic enthusiasm, particularly the strong echoes of one Timothy Leary.

1980's computer graphic of Timothy Leary and the words Timothy Leary's cyberdelic experience

As a diligent student at the Hofmann and McKenna school for young dropouts in the early 90s, I devoured all the Tim Leary books I could get my hands on. Classics like Psychedelic Prayers, High Priest and The Psychedelic Experience, but also an oddly singular text titled Neuropolitics: The Sociobiology of Human Metamorphosis, published in 1977. The book was written while Leary was languishing in jail for his psychedelics advocacy, and marks a shift in attention away from LSD and towards quintessentially TESCREAList topics like space migration, life extension and so forth. Indeed, Tim essentially argues in the book that by the year 2000 we’ll all be immortals travelling through space and indulging in increasingly exotic pleasures while expanding our intelligence using computers and smart drugs. As a useful heuristic, he coined some acronyms that are particularly revealing: SMI2LE (Space Migration, Intelligence Increase, Life Extension), HOME (High Orbit Mini-Earths) and HEAD (Hedonic Engineering And Design).

Essentially then, Tim Leary, psychologist and psychedelics guru, synthesised a fairly significant chunk of the philosophy that would become TESCREALism while sitting in his prison cell, undoubtedly fantasizing about the great outdoors and all the experiences he was missing out on. My fellow students and I also spent a fair amount of time in the early 90s learning how to SMI2LE and use our HEADs while gazing up into the stars waiting for our new HOMEs to be ready. In retrospect it was in large part a naive fantasy fueled in no insignificant part by prodigious consumption of 5-HT2A receptor agonists.

There is a grain of intuitive truth to Leary’s dreams, of course -—we could and should try to enrich life in whatever way we can – but when divorced from the messiness of real life in all its social, political and ecological complexities, SMI2LE, like TESCREALism (and, yes, like Fully Automated Luxury Communism) is the kind of indulgent hopium that’s fine, perhaps even vital, when you’re 16, but probably not when you’re a billionaire with immense economic and political power seeking to enact your juvenile fantasies at the expense of the rest of the world. More importantly though, the TESCREALists are far, far more boring than Leary and the Mondo crowd. We could do a lot better.

Aragorn Eloff is an experimental musician and long-time wanderer through the counterculture. He is based in South Africa, where he is currently working on a PhD on the philosophy of psychedelics. He writes on anarchism, embodied cognition and the philosophy of Deleuze and Guattari.

The post Leary, Mondo2000, and TESCREAL appeared first on Mondo 2000.

  • ✇Mondo 2000
  • Turn On, Tune In, Boot Up! For MozFest 2023:ed523
    AI-Musement Park and MONDOVanilli’s Blockchain Busting Musical Experience “R.U. Cyber.. R.U. Against NFTs?” Immediate release from: 03/03/2023 “AI-Musement Park comprises a cornucopia of performances / talks / happenings /documentary & discussion about AI, Intelligences, technocapitalism’s more thanpressing-ongoing urgencies.” -Eleanor Dare, Cambridge University & AI-Musement Park R.U. Cyber.. R.U. Against NFTs? An original AI-Musement Park, PlayLa.bZ & MONDO 2000History
     

Turn On, Tune In, Boot Up! For MozFest 2023:

Od: ed523
5. Březen 2023 v 02:53

AI-Musement Park and MONDO
Vanilli’s Blockchain Busting Musical Experience “R.U. Cyber.. R.U. Against NFTs?”

Immediate release from: 03/03/2023

“AI-Musement Park comprises a cornucopia of performances / talks / happenings /
documentary & discussion about AI, Intelligences, technocapitalism’s more than
pressing-ongoing urgencies.”
-Eleanor Dare, Cambridge University & AI-Musement Park

R.U. Cyber.. R.U. Against NFTs? An original AI-Musement Park, PlayLa.bZ & MONDO 2000
History Project
human and machine learning co-creation, taking the perspective of an AI that is
training itself on the R.U. Sirius & MONDO Vanilli ‘I’m Against NFT’s’ song lyrics, exploring a
surreal, mind melting and multi-dimensional 360 world of paradoxes and conflicting rules.

“Mondo Vanilli was originally intended to be a virtual reality band exploding all
assumptions about property and propriety in the 1990s. Today fabrication becomes de
rigueur as the connection to the real is intentionally confused by the banal political
tricksters of power and profitability… while storms pound our all-too-human bodies and
communities. I am thrilled to finally see MONDO Vanilli in it’s appropriate context.
Immersive. Come play in the simulacra one more time”
-R.U. Sirius, MONDO 2000

R.U. Cyber.. R.U. Against NFTs? Is a satirical, irreverent block-chain busting commentary on
the propaganda relations fueled ‘Web 3’ hype around non-fungible tokens and the broader
issues that underpin our algorithmically massaged hyper-connected infinite scrolls and trolls
age. Challenging our assumptions about the nature of technology, creativity, and value,
reminding us that the digital world is shaped by powerful forces that determine what is valued
and what is not, and a click is not always for free.

Join Us! On Spring Solstice 2023 For “R.U. Cyber? :// Mondo 2000 History Project Salon”
at MozFest Virtual Plaza & Mozilla Hubs: AI-Musement Park
20th March / 8.30pm EU / GMT

R U Cyber Funzone ai-musement park

About R.U.Sirius & Mondo 2000 #Mondo2000 #RUSirius

R.U. Sirius is an American writer, editor, and media pioneer. Known for being one of key
psychedelic & cyberpunk movement figures. Best known as Mondo 2000 editor-in-chief and at
forefront of 1990s underground cyberculture movement.

About Mozilla Festival #TrustworthyAI #AIMusementPark

Since 2010, MozFest has fueled the movement to ensure the internet benefits humanity, rather
than harms it. This year, your part in the story is critical to our community’s mission: a better,
healthier internet and more Trustworthy AI.

About PlayLa.bZ CIC #PlayLabZ #SpatialCadetZ

Co-founded by PsychFi, FreekMinds & Squire Studios we’re a next generation multipotentiality
multi-award-winning, multi-dimensional motion arts experience design laboratory, developing
DIY changemaking createch immersive experiences & software applications for social good
storycraft. Supporters & Friends: Mozilla Festival, Jisc: Digifest, Beyond Games, Tate Modern,
Furtherfield, Boomtown Festival, Sci-Fi-London, Ravensbourne University London, UAL, East
London Dance, NESTA, Modern Panic, ArtFutura, Kimatica, National Gallery X, Kings College
London, Looking Glass Factory, SubPac, Ecologi, The JUMP, BOM Labs, Mondo 2000

PR Contact: James E. Marks, Tel: 07921 523438 @: [email protected] Twitter: @GoGenieMo

The post Turn On, Tune In, Boot Up! For MozFest 2023: appeared first on Mondo 2000.

  • ✇Pocketables
  • Google’s new Nest Learning Thermostat available for pre-ordersPaul E King
    The fourth generation of the Nest Learning Thermostat was announced and is available for preorders. The new Nest Learning Thermostat features a new display, a new interface in the Home app, and a lot of saying it’s packed full of AI. You can customize your display now… that’s kind of cool Having recently suffered through an AI-driven thermostat that couldn’t understand that I was on chemo, had lost all my hair, and just wanted to set and maintain a temperature above 62 in the winter, le
     

Google’s new Nest Learning Thermostat available for pre-orders

6. Srpen 2024 v 17:48

The fourth generation of the Nest Learning Thermostat was announced and is available for preorders.

The new Nest Learning Thermostat features a new display, a new interface in the Home app, and a lot of saying it’s packed full of AI.

Nest Learning Thermostat generation 4
You can customize your display now… that’s kind of cool

Having recently suffered through an AI-driven thermostat that couldn’t understand that I was on chemo, had lost all my hair, and just wanted to set and maintain a temperature above 62 in the winter, let me tell you how well the AI worked previously. Not very.

A “not smart” mode is not listed, but one can hope there will be ways to just lock the temperature and get around all the smart controls when you need to just set it and forget it and maintain. We can also hope that Google Location Services that work with the Home / Away assist will be fixed at some point and I won’t have to keep turning on the AC when Kim gets home because her phone only works 1/3rd of the time for home/away assist.

The new design looks nice, but in the end it’s a thermostat you can control based on a number of conditions and I don’t see a lot of reason to be excited.

The new Nest Learning Thermostat is available to pre-order in Silver, Black, and Gold for $279.99 in the Google Store.

[Google Blog]

Google’s new Nest Learning Thermostat available for pre-orders by Paul E King first appeared on Pocketables.

💾

Meet the smartest Nest thermostat yet—an evolution of an iconic design, reimagined from the award-winning original, and built with over 12 years of expertise...
  • ✇Semiconductor Engineering
  • Chip Industry Technical Paper Roundup: August 20Linda Christensen
    New technical papers recently added to Semiconductor Engineering’s library: Technical Paper Research Organizations Design Technology Co-Optimization and Time-Efficient Verification for Enhanced Pin Accessibility in the Post-3-nm Node Samsung Electronics and Kyungpook National University (KNU) Search-in-Memory (SiM): Reliable, Versatile, and Efficient Data Matching in SSD’s NAND Flash Memory Chip for Data Indexing Acceleration TU Dortmund, Academia Sinica, and National Taiwan Univers
     

Chip Industry Technical Paper Roundup: August 20

20. Srpen 2024 v 09:01

New technical papers recently added to Semiconductor Engineering’s library:

Technical Paper Research Organizations
Design Technology Co-Optimization and Time-Efficient Verification for Enhanced Pin Accessibility in the Post-3-nm Node Samsung Electronics and Kyungpook National University (KNU)
Search-in-Memory (SiM): Reliable, Versatile, and Efficient Data Matching in SSD’s NAND Flash Memory Chip for Data Indexing Acceleration TU Dortmund, Academia Sinica, and National Taiwan University
Achieving Sustainability in the Semiconductor Industry: The Impact of Simulation and AI Lam Research
HMComp: Extending Near-Memory Capacity using Compression in Hybrid Memory Chalmers University of Technology and ZeroPoint Technologies
Retention-aware zero-shifting technique for Tiki-Taka algorithm-based analog deep learning accelerator Pohang University of Science and Technology, Korea University, and Kyungpook National University
Improvement of Contact Resistance and 3D Integration of 2D Material Field-Effect Transistors Using Semi-Metallic PtSe2 Contacts Yonsei University, Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (KAIST), Lincoln University College, Korea Institute of Science and Technology (KIST), and Ewha Womans University
Ultra-steep slope cryogenic FETs based on bilayer graphene RWTH Aachen University, Forschungszentrum Julich, National Institute for Materials Science (Japan), and AMO GmbH

More Reading
Technical Paper Library home

The post Chip Industry Technical Paper Roundup: August 20 appeared first on Semiconductor Engineering.

Judge O’Connor Says It’s Crazy To Think Tesla Is Connected To ExTwitter; Forces Media Matters To Pay Elon’s Fees

20. Srpen 2024 v 00:05

Apparently, Judge Reed O’Connor doesn’t think that owning a massive amount of Tesla stock constitutes a conflict of interest when it comes to judging Elon Musk’s legal battles.

Last week, we were briefly surprised when infamously partisan Judge Reed O’Connor recused himself from Elon’s nonsense SLAPP suit against GARM and some advertisers.

As we had reported back in June, Media Matters had raised the issue that Judge O’Connor owns a ton of Tesla stock, which arguably is a conflict of interest in ExTwitter’s lawsuit against Media Matters (which Judge O’Connor had refused to dismiss despite its obvious problems). That matter had still been pending last week when O’Connor surprised lots of people (almost certainly including Elon’s lawyers) by recusing himself from the GARM suit.

We had wondered if it was a sign that Judge O’Connor realized how bad it looked for him to hold Tesla stock while repeatedly ruling on behalf of Elon. But, no, it quickly came out that the issue was almost certainly that O’Connor also owned stock in Unilever, one of the firms that Elon was suing in the case.

And then, just days later, it was made clear that Judge O’Connor sees no conflict in owning Tesla stock. He not only rejected Media Matters’ request that Elon be forced to list Tesla as an interested party, but he also made Media Matters pay Elon’s legal fees over this matter.

Judge O’Connor insists it’s just crazy to suggest that Tesla is somehow an interested party:

First, there is no evidence that shows Tesla has a direct financial interest in the outcome of this case. Tesla neither directly nor indirectly holds equity in X, Tesla is not a director or advisor, and it does not participate in the affairs of X. In other words, there is no indication that Tesla has any control over X or any financial ties to X, and Defendants do not claim as much. The question for disclosure is whether Tesla has a “legal or equitable interest” in X. Defendants merely point to news articles that report some blurred lines between Tesla and X that do not rise to the level of financial interest. These articles do not amount to evidence of a financial interest. Tesla is a publicly traded company, with tens of thousands of stockholders, its own board of directors, and external auditors. X is a privately owned company. The mere assertions that Musk owns a constellation of companies, some former Tesla employees now work at X, and that Tesla leased workspace from X do not support a finding that Tesla and X are not separate legal entities or that they share a financial interest.

Later, in response to points about Tesla stock fluctuating in direct connection to Elon doing stupid shit on ExTwitter, O’Connor notes in a footnote: “Musk, who is neither a plaintiff nor defendant in this suit.”

C’mon. None of us were born yesterday.

Elon is totally driving this lawsuit. He was the one who announced that this lawsuit would be coming based on a tweet that he saw. And, obviously, Tesla’s stock is tied to nonsense going on at ExTwitter. He sold a ton of Tesla stock to do the deal, and there are constant reports that he’s almost certainly going to need sell more to keep ExTwitter afloat.

None of this is that big of a surprise, though. Talking to lawyers, I didn’t find one who thought that O’Connor would buy this argument (which is partly why his recusal in the GARM case took me by surprise, before it was revealed that that was due to the Unilever stock).

But just to add absolute insult to injury, O’Connor said that Media Matters, a small non-profit, has to cover ExTwitter’s legal fees over this motion, despite it being owned by the world’s richest man:

Defendants’ Motion to Compel does not have a basis in law. It lacks a reasonable basis in law because the motion is motivated by an effort to force recusal, as opposed to disclosure of unknown information. Compelling disclosure is proper only when a party lacks necessary information. Carr, 2024 WL 1675185, at *1 (compelling disclosure of unknown LLC members); Steel Erectors, 312 F.R.D. at 677 (compelling disclosure of an unknown parent corporation). The information Defendants seek to compel was not unknown to them.

A Motion to Compel Corrected Certificate of Interested Persons when that information was known appears to be unprecedented. Indeed, Defendants did not cite a single case in which a motion to compel a corrected certificate of interested person was brought under this posture, much less one in which the effort was successful under the Local Rule 3.1 “financially interested” standard. Additionally, Defendants’ motion has no basis in fact. Local Rule 3.1’s clear incorporation of “financial interest” requires “legal or equitable interest.” 28 U.S.C. § 455(d)(4). Defendants failed to show facts that X’s alleged connection to Tesla meets this standard. Instead, it appears Defendants seek to force a backdoor recusal through their Motion to Compel. Gamesmanship of this sort is inappropriate and contrary to the rules of the Northern District of Texas.10 Accordingly, Defendants’ Motion is not substantially justified and attorney’s fees are appropriate.

Already, Judge O’Connor’s ridiculous decision to order discovery in this case, rather than properly dismissing it for lack of jurisdiction (among many other reasons), has resulted in layoffs at the non-profit. The impact of this ruling and the fee shifting is likely to do even more damage.

From the beginning, it has been clear that this was a SLAPP suit by Elon, angry that Media Matters (accurately) called out how ads on ExTwitter were appearing next to literal neo-Nazi content. The complaint from ExTwitter admitted that Media Matters accurately reported what it found. The only purpose of this lawsuit is to try to bleed Media Matters dry and to warn away other critics from doing similar reporting.

There’s a reason that most anti-SLAPP laws include fee shifting going the other way (making the wealthy vexatious plaintiffs pay the legal fees of the weaker defendants). Seeing O’Connor basically flip the script here is yet another reason why anti-SLAPP laws are so important.

Having Judge O’Connor let the case move forward to discovery in the first place was already a travesty. Now awarding fee shifting over Media Matters for calling out the potential conflict regarding Tesla’s connection to the case just feels like O’Connor, somewhat gleefully, twisting the knife that Elon plunged into the non-profit.

  • ✇Finding God in Video Games
  • Counting the Cost, Carrying Our CrossFinding God in Video Games
    Launching a new console is neither easy nor cheap, and in order to remain relevant in the “console wars” a continuing price has to be paid… a price that Microsoft learned the hard way. But while hardware developers like Sega and Google were unwilling to pay the ongoing price and watched their dreams crumble as a result, Xbox doubled-down and continued to invest deeply in their commitment to the home console market every year… because while each iteration of their hardware has sold at a net loss,
     

Counting the Cost, Carrying Our Cross

Launching a new console is neither easy nor cheap, and in order to remain relevant in the “console wars” a continuing price has to be paid… a price that Microsoft learned the hard way. But while hardware developers like Sega and Google were unwilling to pay the ongoing price and watched their dreams crumble as a result, Xbox doubled-down and continued to invest deeply in their commitment to the home console market every year… because while each iteration of their hardware has sold at a net loss, the only path to the treasure they are seeking is to see the road through to the end.

The act of “taking up our cross” involves more than a one-time event of accepting Christ and His grace… it is an ongoing, self-sacrificial journey that will continue for the rest of our lives. Each step we take as we carry our cross will compel us to shed the layers of selfishness that once defined us, and it is a process that is guaranteed to be uncomfortable… crosses are costly, not cozy. But it is in our choice to carry a cross that we’d rather not carry that shows we’re actually following in His footsteps… and that is where the true treasure is finally found.

Whoever does not bear his cross and come after Me cannot be My disciple. For which of you, intending to build a tower, does not sit down first and count the cost, whether he has enough to finish it – lest, after he has laid the foundation, and is not able to finish, all who see it begin to mock him, saying, ‘This man began to build and was not able to finish’? So likewise, whoever of you does not forsake all that he has cannot be My disciple. Luke 14:27-30, 33

And He was withdrawn from them about a stone’s throw, and He knelt down and prayed, saying, “Father, if it is Your will, take this cup away from Me; nevertheless not My will, but Yours, be done.” Luke 22:41-42

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  • ✇My Nintendo News
  • Zelda: Echoes of Wisdom and Super Mario Party Jamboree will be at PAX West 2024Sickr
    Nintendo is excited to announce it is coming to PAX West 2024 in Seattle from Aug. 30 – Sept. 2 with a new The Legend of Zelda adventure, the biggest Mario Party experience yet, and some competitive spirit with Nintendo World Championships: NES Edition and STAR WARS: Hunters. Additionally, My Nintendo members are encouraged to check-in when they arrive to earn My Nintendo… Read More »Zelda: Echoes of Wisdom and Super Mario Party Jamboree will be at PAX West 2024 Source
     

Zelda: Echoes of Wisdom and Super Mario Party Jamboree will be at PAX West 2024

Od: Sickr
20. Srpen 2024 v 15:07
Nintendo is excited to announce it is coming to PAX West 2024 in Seattle from Aug. 30 – Sept. 2 with a new The Legend of Zelda adventure, the biggest Mario Party experience yet, and some competitive spirit with Nintendo World Championships: NES Edition and STAR WARS: Hunters. Additionally, My Nintendo members are encouraged to check-in when they arrive to earn My Nintendo… Read More »Zelda: Echoes of Wisdom and Super Mario Party Jamboree will be at PAX West 2024

Source

  • ✇Cowded
  • Slots About the Most Popular Fairy AnimalsMark Fighter
    Graceful unicorns are heroes of myths, epics, and fairy tales; they are often associated with fabulous money, which in the Middle Ages fortune hunters were ready to pay for the horn of a magic horse. In modern times, the allure of unicorns has made its way into the realm of online gambling, where players can engage with these mythical creatures in various slot machines. For those who seek to make the most out of their gaming experience, exploring Risk-Free 2nd Chance Bets can offer a safer way t
     

Slots About the Most Popular Fairy Animals

7. Srpen 2024 v 14:45

Graceful unicorns are heroes of myths, epics, and fairy tales; they are often associated with fabulous money, which in the Middle Ages fortune hunters were ready to pay for the horn of a magic horse. In modern times, the allure of unicorns has made its way into the realm of online gambling, where players can engage with these mythical creatures in various slot machines. For those who seek to make the most out of their gaming experience, exploring Risk-Free 2nd Chance Bets can offer a safer way to enjoy these games without the fear of losing their initial stakes. Foreign developers have created numerous types of slot machines based on legends about unicorns that will appeal to gambling fans worldwide.

Unicorn Reels Slot: Forest adventure

This machine is created by representatives of the popular company-developer Wazdan, which has established itself among foreign players by releasing more than a hundred quality entertainment products for a little more than a decade of existence. Unicorn Reels is created in a classic fairy-tale setting: unicorns, mysterious forest, clover, horseshoes, and shimmering jewels. The bright interface is complemented by a large number of graphical options: you can enlarge the slot screen, enable the light mode, etc., that is, customize the slot to suit you. You can speed up the animation and switch on the familiar automatic game mode. The spirit of the game is emphasized by the sublime soundtrack and fantasy sound effects.

But the most important advantage of the machine is its game features. The standard five reels are complemented by 10 paylines. Wilds, which replace any other chip, scatter chips – this is fine, but Western players are interested in a special bonus round.

If a combination of unicorn images, the symbol of this game falls out, then there is a transition to the mode of additional game, where freespins are provided. The more freespins scroll, the higher the chance of multiplying the bonus winnings. It is also worth noting the three types of jackpot.

Vomiting Unicorns: what makes unicorns vomit

Today’s review features an unusual but curious guest – Vomiting Unicorns. Gluck Games, a company based in Berlin and Gibraltar, is responsible for the development of the hooligan slot.

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Its style is an unusual approach and bright execution, which are appreciated by foreign gambling fans. Unicorn has always been a symbol of purity and nobility. But not in the case of Vomiting Unicorn Slot – these horses do nothing but eat, and what they eat makes them vomit rainbows.

The game features five characters: a punk unicorn, a policeman, and others. The chips are made in the style of food, with junk food bringing in more money. The case takes place near an unnamed cheap pub. Funny setting and high-quality animation make foreign gamblers smile during the game. However, unlike the previous slot here is not unfolded in terms of options: you can turn on/off the sound, fast animation, and automatic mode and familiarise yourself with the legend and rules. In general, the interface is simple and clear from the first minute.

The gameplay unfolds on five reels in four rows, images fall on 30 winning lines, and there is also a traditional wild symbol. But the ‘Wishes’ mode deserves special attention. With random probability during the scrolling one of the five characters (they are located above each reel) may have an appetite for some chip – if it falls out, the unicorn eats the chip and vomits a rainbow onto the reel. And that’s a good thing – because all the chips hit by the rainbow turn into wilds, significantly increasing the chance of winning.

The Game of Chronos Unicorn Slot: fantasy combat

After such a fun outrage, you want to review something more refined. Designed in high fantasy style, The Game of Chronos Unicorn slot is closer in theme to the first product in our review – unicorns, elves, forests, jewels, and magic. Spanish developer R. Franco started working in gambling back in 1965 and took on the task of developing game offerings in 2014.

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The company has offices in Madrid and Belgrade. The company makes slots that vary in theme and execution, The Game of Chronos Unicorn is part of The Game of Chronos series of machines that is popular among foreign players. The graphics are understated and neat, silver and green colors prevail, soothing the eyes. As for the interface, it is quite clear, but all the buttons look exactly the same and are often located completely randomly. For example, the bet up button is removed from the bet indicator, and the option buttons cover important game keys by default. This spoils the impression of the game a bit. It is also possible to switch on the automatic game, but there is no acceleration of animation detected.

The choice of slots is very large, including those dedicated to the theme of unicorns and fairy tales.

The slots selected for review are of high quality, bright pictures and created by experienced developers who are popular with gamblers all over the world.

The post Slots About the Most Popular Fairy Animals appeared first on Cowded.

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