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.

Funko Fusion, the upcoming third-person brand-blending action game, is out next month. And to help spread the world, the devs have released a demo for Funko Fusion, as well as confirmed that not even Mega Man is safe from this mish-mash of IP.

Read more...

The first day of Blaugust has arrived!  Welcome to the 11th annual running of the blogs!

Blaugust – 2024 Edition

I haven’t been very good about the build up to Blaugust this year.  Fortunately the event doesn’t rest in any way on my shoulders, and others, Belghast especially, have been out there spreading the word and getting things ready.

There are currently 75 or so blogs registered to participate in the event, but that doesn’t mean that you are left out.  It is a month long event and you can join at any time.

So how do you get involved?

Here is everything you need to know about Blaugust but were afraid to ask, in easy link form.

• Blaugust initial Announcement – All this info in a longer format
• Blaugust 2024 Eve – Last minute event updates
• Blaugust Sign-Up Page – Get yourself officially on the Blaugust list
• Blaugust Discord Server – Come hang out with fellow Blaugust participants
• Blaugust Mastodon Account – The official social media organ of Blaugust
• The Blaugust Prompt List – Post idea central
• Blaugchievements – Achievements you can claim during Blaugust
• Blaugust Media Kit page – Where to find the Blaugust logo in various sizes
• Blaugust Participants List – A Google sheet of who is in it to win it
• Blaugust OPML File – All the RSS feeds for participating blogs

What is in the event for you?

That is sort of up to you, really.  We do have a community that has been hanging around on Discord for a few years now, a community that persists between each annual event.

If you think it will boost your readership by 10,000%, perfect your SEO, and get you a job in publishing then you might be a bit let down.

If you want to rub elbows with other bloggers, see how they approach things, trade tips and recipes, and find yourself mildly perplexed as how several curmudgeons like myself with days jobs still crank out a thousand words a day… this is the place.  I’ll even let you in on my person secret:  Low standards.  Nearly 7,200 posts in to this it is quite clear I’ll push the “publish” button on just about anything.

If you need structure to help you write, you can find that.  There are prompts above and people will riff off of each other’s post ideas and the various weeks of the event each have their own theme.

• Welcome to Blaugust Week (August 1st – August 3rd) – The idea behind this week is to give a specific time to be actively talking about Blaugust and welcoming new members to the fold. This could also count as promoting Blaugust for the “Spreading the Madness” achievement. The hope is that drumming up some heavy activity of talking about the event might allow us to pick up a few more stragglers.
• Introduce Yourself Week (August 4th – August 10th) – The idea behind this week is to have some structured time around getting to know the other bloggers. I realize that those of us who are veteran bloggers might have already written half a dozen introduction posts by now, but it is a great time to share anything interesting you might have in your arsenal.
• Creator Appreciation Week (August 11th – August 17h) – Developer Appreciation Week or the D.A.W. was an event that took place in the blogging community independent from Blaugust but eventually died out. The more modern idea is to show appreciation for the things and creators that we love. This could be authors, musicians, developers, artists, or even other bloggers, with the focus being on sharing something that we love so that maybe others might appreciate it as well.
• Staying Motivated Week (August 18th – August 24th) – As we get towards the end of the event, the activity can often trail off a bit. The goal of this week is to share some of your own tips surrounding how you keep motivated and stay focused on creating content. If you are new to the event, you might share some of the things that have helped you stay engaged during Blaugust.
• Lessons Learned Week (August 25th – August 31st) – This week is a reminder that the goal of Blaugust is to refresh the content creators out there for the coming year, and not to burn them out in the process. Some folks are going to cross the finish line and immediately go dormant and others will want to process their thoughts about the proceedings. This space is reserved as a bit of a cooldown lap so that you can share your own experiences.

I am kind of bad at Blaugust, more because my ability to write about any particular idea is very much influenced by my mood.  So the prompts tend to be right out unless somebody tackles one in a way that inspires my own riff.  I do try to at least do one post on each of the weekly themes, often during the designated week.

I wrote in my previous post about the 2024 event, there are achievements and awards and shiny badges to be displayed when all is said and done, on the other side of things when we reach September.

We do have quite a few blogs here on day one.  Here are all the participants so far.  Please try to take a bit of time to visit as many as you can.

1. 2TonWaffle Community
2. A Boy and His Computer
3. A Hobbits Journey
4. AI MMORPG News
5. Alexs Review Corner
6. Alligators And Aneurysms
7. Alvans Digital Garden
8. Amerpie
9. And So It Goes…
10. AppAddict
11. Aywrens Nook
12. Beats and Skies
13. Beyond Tannhauser Gate
14. Bio Break
15. Chasing Dings
16. Contains Moderate Peril
17. Cotswold Diary
18. Cubic Creativity
19. Endgame Viable
20. EVE Online Pictures
21. Exposition is Inevitable
22. Flamingo Flix
23. Gaudete Theology
24. Geek on a Harley
25. Heartless Gamer
26. In An Age
27. Indiecator
28. Inconsistent Software
29. Inventory Full
30. Juha-Matti Santala
31. Just Text
32. KayTalksGames
33. Kellys World
34. Kluwes
35. Lameazoid
36. Linkage
37. Living Out Loud
38. Mailvaltar – MMOs and other stuff
39. Martins Notebook
40. Monsterladys Diary
41. Mormoroi
42. Mutant Reviewers
43. Nathan Friend
44. Necoco loves stuff
45. Nerd Girl Thoughts
46. Nerdy Bookahs
47. Notes by JCProbably
48. OwlBlog
49. Peridotlines – A Place Where I Write
50. Ramble With(out) A Cause
51. Riels Nest
52. rscottjones.com
53. rsjon.es
54. Rumors Matrix
55. SamJC
56. Scopique
57. Select Star Studio
58. Shadowz Abstract Gaming
59. Sharon A. Hill: Strange Claims Adjuster
60. TAGN
61. Tales of the Aggronaut
62. Tart Darling
63. The Chip Bag
64. The Dragon Chronicle
65. The Everjournal
66. The Friendly Necromancer
67. The Last Chapter Gaming Blog
68. Time to Loot
69. Uncountable Thoughts
70. Unidentified Signal Source
71. Valentines Days
72. Vicissitudes
73. Wand3r
74. WAWAWA
75. Words Under My Name
76. Yordi

And off we go.  First post in.  Just 30 days left.

Other Blaugust first day posts to look at:

• Inventory Full – Good Grief! It’s Blaugust! Again!
• Chasing Dings! – Welcome to Blaugust, 2024!
• Monster Lady’s Diary – Welcome To Another Blaugust
• Time to Loot – Blaugust 2024 is Here!
• Words Under My Name – Blaugust2024 Day 1 – An Introduction
• The Friendly Necromancer – Welcome to Blaugust 2024! Life is crazy!
• Many Welps – Re-Introductions
• Indiecator – Blaugust 2024 is here!
• Living Out Loud – Blaugust Introduction
• Cubic Creativity – Blaugust 2024: The First Post of Blaugust
• Juha-Matti Santala – Blaugust 2024: Batteries included
• Nerdy Bookahs – Blaugust 2024: Here we come!
• Wa Wa Wa – Introduction, Because of Blaugust
• AI MMORPG News – Unleash Your Inner Blogger: Dive into Blaugust 2024!
• Shadowz Abstract Gaming – Welcome, Hello, Glad you’re here #Blaugust2024
• valentine’s days – welcome to blaugust 2024!
• StarShadow – #blaugust2024 Introduction ~ Day 1
• Aywren’s Nook! – Blaugust 2024: First Post of Blaugust
• The Dragon Chronicle – First Post of Blaugust 2024
• Kelly’s World – Motivation for posting more- Blaugust 2024
• Notes by JCProbably – Birthday Month with a side of Blaugust
• Heartless Gamer – First Post of Blaugust

If you consume social media, you may have heard: Seed oils are terrible for your health–even toxic! Cooking oils derived from seeds cause everything from heart disease to inflammation to fatigue to bad skin–according to a certain subset of Internet influencers. Yet contrary to the posts demonizing the common ingredients, a bevy of scientific research disagrees. Here’s how to understand the health “scare.” 

What are seed oils?

There’re many different types of plant-based cooking oils, but when people talk about seed oils, they’re often referencing a list of eight: Canola, corn, cottonseed, soybean, sunflower, safflower, grapeseed, and rice bran oils. (Note that things like olive, avocado, and coconut oil are absent from this list.) All of these eight oils contain fat and therefore fatty acids (an essential major nutrient group). And many (though not all) of these seed oils contain a relatively high proportion of omega-6 fatty acids.

A quick chemistry aside: fatty acids are the building blocks of triglycerides, or complete fat molecules. They are organic compounds made up of predominantly carbon and hydrogen chains with an acid group on the end. In saturated fats, every carbon except for the terminal ones have two hydrogens bonded to it. In unsaturated fats, some of those hydrogens are replaced with double bonds between adjacent carbons instead. Omega-6 fatty acids are unsaturated, and the first of those double bonds occurs at the 6th carbon from the end–hence the name.

There are multiple kinds of omega-6 compounds, but one particular type, called linoleic acid, is at the center of most of the scorn against seed soils. Linoleic acid is, again, an essential nutrient that our bodies need. We cannot synthesize it, and we need it to support healthy cell signaling, function, and immune systems.

But seed oil detractors argue that we are ingesting far too much linoleic acid, leading to the accumulation of byproducts like arachidonic acid, which they claim causes inflammation and also counteracts the benefits of eating omega-3 fatty acids. The domino impact of all of this, anti-seed oil advocates assert, is higher risk of diseases like type 2 diabetes, heart disease, and cancer. 

A kernel of truth

Inside the backlash against seed oils are a few kernels of truth. Eating fried and processed foods in excess is generally detrimental to your health. So if avoiding seed oils translates into eating fewer french fries and snack cakes, you might feel better. 

Plus, if you eat a typical western diet, you are probably at no risk of linoleic acid deficiency, and you likely ingest more omega-6 fatty acids than omega-3s. In recent decades the amount of linoleic acid in our diets has increased because many processed foods and restaurant meals are made with soy, sunflower, or safflower oils and animal feed now contains a lot of soy, which translates to more linoleic acid inside meat and dairy products, says Philip Calder, a nutrition scientist and professor at the University of Southampton in England. “Linoleic acid has permeated the food chain in the last 50 to 60 years,” he tells Popular Science. 

Additionally, Calder explains that there is “theoretical evidence” that linoleic acid can be partially converted into arachidonic acid, which is subsequently partially converted into compounds associated with inflammation. Additionally, omega-6s and omega-3s can compete for the same metabolic pathways. All those biological mechanisms exist in the human body. 

Yet here is where things get sticky: that theoretical argument doesn’t stack up to scientific observation. “That just really doesn’t happen in real life,” says Guy H. Johnson, a nutrition scientist and adjunct professor of food science and human nutrition at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. “If you’ve got enough omega-3, the inflammatory environment isn’t increased by omega-6s.”

What the research indicates

Calder agrees. “Most human studies either show there isn’t a relationship between linoleic acid intake and inflammation biomarkers, or that the relationship is the opposite to what you might think would happen. You see higher linoleic acid and higher arachidonic acid are associated with lower levels of inflammation biomarkers,” he says. He co-authored a 2018 review study assessing the published literature on inflammation and omega-6s and concluded as much. 

“We didn’t find anything that demonstrates there’s a harmful association between omega-6’s and inflammatory markers in humans,” he adds. A 2012 review co-authored by Johnson found the same thing.

Many other review studies and meta-analyses have come to similar conclusions, and additionally finding pluses where you might expect minuses. “Every time anybody looks at blood levels of omega-6s and health outcomes–and we’ve done this several times with thousands of people… you find that people with the highest levels of omega-6s have the best outcomes,” says William S. Harris, a professor at the University of South Dakota’s Sanford School of Medicine and president of the Fatty Acid Research Institute. 

Harris has co-authored multiple human cohort studies as well as large review papers assessing the impacts of omega-6 fatty acids on health. In a 2017 meta-analysis, he and his co-authors found that omega-6 consumption actually lowers risk of type 2 diabetes. In a 2020 review of 30 observational studies, Harris and his colleagues concluded that higher linoleic acid levels are associated with reduced risk of cardiovascular disease. 

In fact, higher linoleic acid intake is associated with lower risk of death from all causes including heart disease and cancer, according to another 2020 meta-analysis that assessed 38 different studies. I could keep linking studies–there are dozens of them, but you probably get the point. 

The way fatty acids and metabolic processes unfold in the body is complicated. “There’s a nuanced interplay between omega-6s, omega-3s, and a variety of other metabolites,” Harris says. The view that omega-3s are good and omega-6s are bad “is not true and is far too simplistic,” he adds. 

There are a couple of legitimate, contrary bits of research out there, say both Harris and Calder. Including two, often-cited papers published by lead author Christopher Ramsden, chief of the Lipid Peroxidation Unit in the National Institute on Aging. In these studies, Ramsden uncovered previously unpublished research from the late 1960’s and early ‘70’s wherein two groups of people fed a diet high in seed oils and margarine showed worse health outcomes. 

However, there are big caveats to these findings. For one, the study participants were fed much higher levels of omega-6-containing oils than is common in diets today, notes Harris. Plus many of the solid margarines the study used likely contained high amounts of trans fats, which are uniformly understood to be harmful to human health, says Calder.

Another concern that the seed oil skeptics cite is the use of hexane in production. “It’s true that hexane is used to extract vegetable oils from whatever their source is,” notes Johnson, who has written multiple health claim petitions on various oils. “But the product that consumers buy in the grocery store has no hexane in there at all. It’s gone,” he adds– removed during processing. 

All in all, the vast majority of scientific evidence indicates that cooking with omega-6 containing oils is harmless and probably good for you. 

So, what should you eat?

Given the above, it might sound like you start chugging safflower oil, but that’s not exactly the case. Since the western diet already includes so much omega-6, you’re probably covered. “We’re getting plenty of omega-6s. I’m not really advocating that people start supplementing their diet with omega-6,” says Harris. “But what I would say is efforts to reduce the intake of omega-6 are going to have an adverse effect on health,” he adds. This because less omega-6 means less of the observed protective benefits of linoleic acid, Harris explains. 

And it may also be that those seeking to swap out seed oils inadvertently end up swapping in less healthy alternatives. Often, influencers combine their disdain for seed oils with other health fads, like promoting the “carnivore diet,” anti-sunscreen sentiment, or even sometimes all three in one. This pile of misinformation would have viewers eschewing sun protection and vegetables, while chowing down on whole t-bone steaks and sticks of butter daily. Nothing in the vast amount of scientific research on human health and nutrition indicates any of the above is a good idea. 

Saturated fats may not be as harmful to heart health as once thought, but a diet very high in saturated fats and animal products can still raise your risk of high cholesterol and cardiovascular disease. And again, we already eat a lot of saturated fat. In order from most to least healthy in the context of the modern western diet, Calder says that omega-3s are the best option, omega-6s come second, and saturated fats are at the bottom of the pyramid of things you need to eat more of. 

Harris, too, recommends people try to eat more omega-3’s, particularly the kind found in seafood (seaweed and algae can provide a plant-based source for vegans and vegetarians). 

And broadly, the best path to a healthy diet is probably what you’d expect. A diet rich in fruits and vegetables, with whole grains and lots of fiber, is best, say Calder and Johnson. “It’s what your mother told you,” Johnson adds. Moving more and eating slightly less overall, are probably also good ideas for most Americans, notes Harris. “It’s not sexy, but that’s the way it is.” 

Finally, to stay your sharpest, be mindful of the health claims you see online. Always remember correlation doesn’t equal causation, one person’s experience is not equivalent to a robust scientific study, and there is no simple quick-fix for every health problem. “If it sounds too good or simple to be true, then it probably is,” says Johnson. 

The post What science actually says about seed oils appeared first on Popular Science.

The first day of Blaugust has arrived!  Welcome to the 11th annual running of the blogs!

Blaugust – 2024 Edition

I haven’t been very good about the build up to Blaugust this year.  Fortunately the event doesn’t rest in any way on my shoulders, and others, Belghast especially, have been out there spreading the word and getting things ready.

There are currently 75 or so blogs registered to participate in the event, but that doesn’t mean that you are left out.  It is a month long event and you can join at any time.

So how do you get involved?

Here is everything you need to know about Blaugust but were afraid to ask, in easy link form.

• Blaugust initial Announcement – All this info in a longer format
• Blaugust 2024 Eve – Last minute event updates
• Blaugust Sign-Up Page – Get yourself officially on the Blaugust list
• Blaugust Discord Server – Come hang out with fellow Blaugust participants
• Blaugust Mastodon Account – The official social media organ of Blaugust
• The Blaugust Prompt List – Post idea central
• Blaugchievements – Achievements you can claim during Blaugust
• Blaugust Media Kit page – Where to find the Blaugust logo in various sizes
• Blaugust Participants List – A Google sheet of who is in it to win it
• Blaugust OPML File – All the RSS feeds for participating blogs

What is in the event for you?

That is sort of up to you, really.  We do have a community that has been hanging around on Discord for a few years now, a community that persists between each annual event.

If you think it will boost your readership by 10,000%, perfect your SEO, and get you a job in publishing then you might be a bit let down.

If you want to rub elbows with other bloggers, see how they approach things, trade tips and recipes, and find yourself mildly perplexed as how several curmudgeons like myself with days jobs still crank out a thousand words a day… this is the place.  I’ll even let you in on my person secret:  Low standards.  Nearly 7,200 posts in to this it is quite clear I’ll push the “publish” button on just about anything.

If you need structure to help you write, you can find that.  There are prompts above and people will riff off of each other’s post ideas and the various weeks of the event each have their own theme.

• Welcome to Blaugust Week (August 1st – August 3rd) – The idea behind this week is to give a specific time to be actively talking about Blaugust and welcoming new members to the fold. This could also count as promoting Blaugust for the “Spreading the Madness” achievement. The hope is that drumming up some heavy activity of talking about the event might allow us to pick up a few more stragglers.
• Introduce Yourself Week (August 4th – August 10th) – The idea behind this week is to have some structured time around getting to know the other bloggers. I realize that those of us who are veteran bloggers might have already written half a dozen introduction posts by now, but it is a great time to share anything interesting you might have in your arsenal.
• Creator Appreciation Week (August 11th – August 17h) – Developer Appreciation Week or the D.A.W. was an event that took place in the blogging community independent from Blaugust but eventually died out. The more modern idea is to show appreciation for the things and creators that we love. This could be authors, musicians, developers, artists, or even other bloggers, with the focus being on sharing something that we love so that maybe others might appreciate it as well.
• Staying Motivated Week (August 18th – August 24th) – As we get towards the end of the event, the activity can often trail off a bit. The goal of this week is to share some of your own tips surrounding how you keep motivated and stay focused on creating content. If you are new to the event, you might share some of the things that have helped you stay engaged during Blaugust.
• Lessons Learned Week (August 25th – August 31st) – This week is a reminder that the goal of Blaugust is to refresh the content creators out there for the coming year, and not to burn them out in the process. Some folks are going to cross the finish line and immediately go dormant and others will want to process their thoughts about the proceedings. This space is reserved as a bit of a cooldown lap so that you can share your own experiences.

I am kind of bad at Blaugust, more because my ability to write about any particular idea is very much influenced by my mood.  So the prompts tend to be right out unless somebody tackles one in a way that inspires my own riff.  I do try to at least do one post on each of the weekly themes, often during the designated week.

I wrote in my previous post about the 2024 event, there are achievements and awards and shiny badges to be displayed when all is said and done, on the other side of things when we reach September.

We do have quite a few blogs here on day one.  Here are all the participants so far.  Please try to take a bit of time to visit as many as you can.

1. 2TonWaffle Community
2. A Boy and His Computer
3. A Hobbits Journey
4. AI MMORPG News
5. Alexs Review Corner
6. Alligators And Aneurysms
7. Alvans Digital Garden
8. Amerpie
9. And So It Goes…
10. AppAddict
11. Aywrens Nook
12. Beats and Skies
13. Beyond Tannhauser Gate
14. Bio Break
15. Chasing Dings
16. Contains Moderate Peril
17. Cotswold Diary
18. Cubic Creativity
19. Endgame Viable
20. EVE Online Pictures
21. Exposition is Inevitable
22. Flamingo Flix
23. Gaudete Theology
24. Geek on a Harley
25. Heartless Gamer
26. In An Age
27. Indiecator
28. Inconsistent Software
29. Inventory Full
30. Juha-Matti Santala
31. Just Text
32. KayTalksGames
33. Kellys World
34. Kluwes
35. Lameazoid
36. Linkage
37. Living Out Loud
38. Mailvaltar – MMOs and other stuff
39. Martins Notebook
40. Monsterladys Diary
41. Mormoroi
42. Mutant Reviewers
43. Nathan Friend
44. Necoco loves stuff
45. Nerd Girl Thoughts
46. Nerdy Bookahs
47. Notes by JCProbably
48. OwlBlog
49. Peridotlines – A Place Where I Write
50. Ramble With(out) A Cause
51. Riels Nest
52. rscottjones.com
53. rsjon.es
54. Rumors Matrix
55. SamJC
56. Scopique
57. Select Star Studio
58. Shadowz Abstract Gaming
59. Sharon A. Hill: Strange Claims Adjuster
60. TAGN
61. Tales of the Aggronaut
62. Tart Darling
63. The Chip Bag
64. The Dragon Chronicle
65. The Everjournal
66. The Friendly Necromancer
67. The Last Chapter Gaming Blog
68. Time to Loot
69. Uncountable Thoughts
70. Unidentified Signal Source
71. Valentines Days
72. Vicissitudes
73. Wand3r
74. WAWAWA
75. Words Under My Name
76. Yordi

And off we go.  First post in.  Just 30 days left.

Other Blaugust first day posts to look at:

• Inventory Full – Good Grief! It’s Blaugust! Again!
• Chasing Dings! – Welcome to Blaugust, 2024!
• Monster Lady’s Diary – Welcome To Another Blaugust
• Time to Loot – Blaugust 2024 is Here!
• Words Under My Name – Blaugust2024 Day 1 – An Introduction
• The Friendly Necromancer – Welcome to Blaugust 2024! Life is crazy!
• Many Welps – Re-Introductions
• Indiecator – Blaugust 2024 is here!
• Living Out Loud – Blaugust Introduction
• Cubic Creativity – Blaugust 2024: The First Post of Blaugust
• Juha-Matti Santala – Blaugust 2024: Batteries included
• Nerdy Bookahs – Blaugust 2024: Here we come!
• Wa Wa Wa – Introduction, Because of Blaugust
• AI MMORPG News – Unleash Your Inner Blogger: Dive into Blaugust 2024!
• Shadowz Abstract Gaming – Welcome, Hello, Glad you’re here #Blaugust2024
• valentine’s days – welcome to blaugust 2024!
• StarShadow – #blaugust2024 Introduction ~ Day 1
• Aywren’s Nook! – Blaugust 2024: First Post of Blaugust
• The Dragon Chronicle – First Post of Blaugust 2024
• Kelly’s World – Motivation for posting more- Blaugust 2024
• Notes by JCProbably – Birthday Month with a side of Blaugust
• Heartless Gamer – First Post of Blaugust

Remember when the Google Pixel 7 cost $599? Or when you could grab a Galaxy Z Flip for under $1,000? As a tech reviewer, I’m painfully aware of how prices have changed in the last few years — and it hasn’t been a change for the better. Recently, though, we’ve seen a rise in smaller brands and spin-offs trying to offer maximum value at a minimal price. I am, of course, referring to Nothing and, by extension, its spin-off CMF by Nothing.

CMF’s plan is ambitious — peg its debut smartphone at $200 and surround it with accessories that cost less than half of that — but can it work? How much value can you get from an entire ecosystem that costs less than a Google Pixel 8a? Well, let’s find out.

The Buds Pro 2 are a no-brainer

I know you’d probably expect me to start at the top and work my way down through the CMF ecosystem, but for reasons that will eventually become clear, I’m going to do the opposite. Instead of starting with CMF’s debut Phone 1, which should be the star of the show, I’d rather kick things off with the supporting cast — a group that I actually think is much better than its lead. Up first in this impressive yet affordable group is the CMF Buds Pro 2.

Now, I’ll admit that I’m not always caught up on the latest developments in earbuds — I usually wear bone-conduction headphones while running for my safety — but I’ve been thoroughly impressed during my time with CMF’s Buds Pro 2. They’re a massive change from my last pair of budget buds, which was Google’s original Pixel Buds A-Series. Those earbuds came without noise canceling, a reliable IP rating against water or dust, and sat in a simple, shallow charging case that never felt very secure. Sure, I liked their simple controls and appreciated having Google Assistant in my ear by default, but they never punched above their $100 billing.

If there's one CMF product you should definitely buy, it's the Buds Pro 2.

The CMF Buds Pro 2, on the other hand, exceed their $60 price tag in just about every way. For less than the price of a new PlayStation 5 title, you get noise canceling, a workout-ready IP55 rating, and perhaps the best earbud case I’ve used in a long time. At the very least, the case’s customizable Smart Dial makes for an incredibly addicting fidget toy. And yes, I realize that some of my excitement comes from not having used budget-friendly earbuds in a while, but my colleagues at Sound Guys tend to agree — and they know a thing or two about audio.

Anyway, I’ll readily admit that I mostly worry about two things when it comes to earbuds: comfort and a good seal. The CMF Buds Pro 2, with their AirPods Pro-like design and soft ear tips, check both boxes. I find that I can keep the Buds Pro 2 in for a few hours at a time without reaching to adjust them — at least until my Spotify daylist switches or I convince myself that my cats are up to no good. When I’m done, the earbuds pop nicely back into their charging case with the help of some surprisingly strong magnets, ensuring that I can line them up easier than Samsung’s Galaxy Buds 3 Pro.

Of course, you will need the Nothing X app to customize the controls on your Smart Dial and the individual earbuds, but it also lets you tweak your equalizer and noise control (canceling) preferences, so I’d call it a valuable addition. I’ve also noticed that a few of the CMF Buds Pro 2 tap controls work better than others — fast forward works every time, even when I don’t want it to, while play and pause are hit or miss. I’m sure CMF can drill down its controls with a future update, though, so it’s not nearly enough of a problem to outweigh the remarkable value.

I’d recommend the Watch Pro 2, too

Moving on, I’m a little bit pickier with my smartwatches than I am with earbuds, typically preferring to keep a powerful Garmin or Coros GPS watch on my wrist. However, when the CMF Watch Pro 2 showed up, I was happy to try out a modular wearable, strapping it to my less-favored right wrist. And, at just $10 more than the Buds Pro 2, I was curious if anything would impress me about the seemingly simple watch.

Once again, the answer turned out to be yes. I might not be as impressed as I was by the Buds Pro 2 — after all, I have very high standards for the watch on my wrist — but it remains hard to argue against what you’re getting for just $70. CMF’s controls are simple and Coros-like, with a single button in the form of a rotating crown that, yes, actually serves a purpose (looking at you, Samsung and OnePlus). A press of the button from the watch face opens up a menu of options to scroll through, while a swipe left or right runs you through a set of widgets, all bearing Nothing’s signature dotted design language.

$70 for a watch with 11 days of battery life seems like a pretty good deal to me.

This brings me to my first issue — CMF’s mostly square widgets don’t feel like they’re optimized for the Watch Pro 2’s round AMOLED panel. Instead of giving each widget its own display, the Watch Pro 2 pairs them up, cramming the weather in with your Apple Watch-like tracking rings and shoving your recent calls, dialer, and contacts all onto one screen together. The shape of the widgets makes it feel like they were designed for a square display, while their size, even when combined, leaves plenty of space around the edges of the panel. And yet, the button-based menu, which uses the rotating crown, takes up the entire display and scrolls nicely with a rounded effect along the edge.

But, if you can live with the slightly unorthodox menus and widgets, the CMF Watch Pro 2 has much to offer. Its battery life is excellent — it claims 11 days of regular use or nine days of heavy use, and I’ve only had to charge it once since the watch arrived about two weeks ago.

Other touches, like the IP68 rating, 120 sport modes, and five auto-detectable activities, make the Watch Pro 2 sound like it should be an athlete’s dream and one of the best smartwatches for the money. It might turn out to be, but I can’t trust it with a few of my adventures. The few default bands I’ve used are made of a very plasticky faux leather material, which I can’t help thinking would become incredibly slippery during sweaty summer runs.

CMF’s interchangeable metal bezels are an interesting idea, too, allowing you to spice up your watch for several different occasions, but they seem like a nightmare for a frequent climber like me. They’re easy to twist on and off, only taking about a millimeter of travel, but I’ve already had a few times when the bezel hasn’t fully locked into place and come tumbling off in my living room. If you were, say, climbing in a gym and happened to smack your wrist against a hold, I could see it knocking the bezel loose or even damaging the metal itself. Have the same thing happen outside, and you might never see that bezel again.

And yet, I know that most people won’t go smacking their wrists into rocks or sweating their way through faux leather bands. For most people, their biggest headache will be the small, square widgets, while the long-lasting battery life, 80 watch faces at launch, and 24/7 health tracking will be more than worth the $70 price tag. This leaves us with one more piece of the CMF puzzle…

Reaching for the CMF Phone 1 isn’t quite so simple

And finally, we have what should be the star of the show — the CMF Phone 1. I find myself saying it should be the star rather than it is the star for one fundamental reason: The CMF Phone 1 doesn’t work in the US. It follows in the footsteps of Nothing’s Phone 2a, which was launched earlier in the year and arrived as part of a developer’s program without the proper band support for any of T-Mobile, Verizon, or AT&T. As such, I can’t recommend it to most people I know to cap off their less-than-a-Pixel-8a spending spree.

But, while it’s a no-go for the Americans I know, there’s a lot to like about this $200-equivalent phone in the rest of the world, and that’s without even considering the interchangeable accessories. CMF’s 6.67-inch AMOLED panel is vibrant, its 120Hz refresh rate is smooth, and I can’t help but like the dot-matrix design of Nothing OS (yes, the CMF Phone 1 uses its parent company’s flavor of Android). The Phone 1’s 33W wired charging is a nice touch, too, out-pacing what Samsung and Motorola offer for their similarly priced devices.

The CMF Phone 1 would be a great value... if it worked in the US.

And, although you probably shouldn’t buy a phone for the accessories that it comes with, CMF’s modular options are worth mentioning. This is the first time I’ve ever had a phone case come with a screwdriver, and I actually dig the setup. It’s a strange feeling to remove four screws and a twist-off button to change the parts on your phone, but it feels very industrial — not to mention the fact that there’s no way a phone case is coming off after it’s been screwed in. CMF’s other accessories are equally secure, with the card case and stand slotting into the small wheel in the bottom corner. It feels like a new take on an Erector set, which I did not expect in 2024.

However, several situations highlight the CMF Phone 1’s budget limitations. The phone is predominantly made of plastic, and its interchangeable nature means the plastic on the back panel is pretty flimsy. It’s meant to be easy to swap in and out, but this mostly results in a device with soft buttons and a little bit too much give to its back. CMF will only bring two full Android updates to its debut device, followed by a third year of security patches — it’s not the worst update commitment at this price point, but that’s hardly a ringing endorsement. I also personally can’t stand Nothing’s notification chimes and ringtones — to me, they sound like R2-D2 being crushed by a trash compactor.

Again, though, none of this matters when buying the CMF Phone 1, at least not in the US. For most of us, the phone simply won’t work due to having the wrong set of bands for our major carriers. As such, it’s tough to recommend the CMF Phone 1 as the last piece of an affordable ecosystem. You’ll get excellent value out of the CMF Buds Pro 2 and a solid (if not the most athletic) experience from the CMF Watch Pro 2, but you might have to wait a little bit longer before trying out a modular phone for yourself.

If you’re still interested, you can check out all three CMF by Nothing launches below.

Intel’s next-gen chips are set to launch in a little over a month and while Intel, like most chip makers these days, is playing up the AI capabilities of its upcoming Lunar Lake processors, I’m much more interested to see if the chips live up to Intel’s promises that we can expect up to a […]

The post Lilbits (chips edition): Intel Lunar Lake, Google Tensor G4, and Qualcomm Snapdragon 4s Gen 2 appeared first on Liliputing.

Announced today, The Thing, a 2002 video game sequel to the 1982 film The Thing—yes, they both have the same name, it’s weird—is being remastered by the experts over at Nightdive Studios and will be released on consoles and PC later this year.

Read more...

The Spotify Car Thing is a short-lived gadget that Spotify launched and then quickly discontinued in 2022. It’s basically a smartphone accessory for automobiles, giving you a 4 inch display and a dial that lets you interact with Spotify without looking at your phone. Originally launched for $90, the Car Thing eventually had its price […]

The post Spotify Car Thing hacking community could keep the gadget useful after Spotify ends support appeared first on Liliputing.

When OnePlus co-founder Carl Pei launched a new business called Nothing in 2021, the company promised to eliminate “the barriers between people and technology.” But so far what the company has actually built are a couple of unusual-looking smartphones and accessories like wireless earbuds, with some distinctive features like LED lights on the back. In […]

The post Nothing CEO Carl Pei: Smartphones will be the main platform for “AI first hardware” appeared first on Liliputing.

Google released the first Android 15 beta back on April 11, with the second beta following it up on May 15. Only a day before the second beta went out, Nothing rolled out Beta 1 to the Phone 2a. Now the company is opening up the update to the Phone 2.

Nothing announced in a blog post that Phone 2 owners can now join in on the Android 15 Beta 1 party. If you want to take part in the beta, the London-based phone maker warns that this build is meant for developers and advanced users. It also warns users to back up their data as the storage device will be formatted, and all data will be erased.

Nothing, the tech company known for its transparent gadget designs, has just unveiled its latest offering: the Phone 2a Special Edition. This new variant of Nothing’s affordable Android phone introduces a vibrant twist by combining red, yellow, and blue — colors that have previously been used individually in Nothing products — into a single, attention-grabbing device.

Adam, Design Director at Nothing, described the Phone 2a Special Edition as a celebration of primary colors within the brand’s identity. He emphasizes its unique aesthetic, which draws inspiration from design influences of the past while offering a fresh take on smartphone design.

The design has certainly sparked strong reactions online. Personally, I find the colored accents add a nice contrast to the phone’s transparent back, making it quite eye-catching. However, the internet seems divided on this opinion, with some loving the bold new look while others find it jarring or even downright ugly.

The pattern on the back has even been compared to a side view of someone on a toilet, showcasing the range of reactions this design is eliciting. Tech YouTuber Marques Brownlee (@MKBHD) summed up the divided opinions perfectly in his tweet: “You’re only allowed to love or hate this Nothing Phone 2a special edition design, no in between.”

Availability and Pricing

Aside from the new colorway, the Phone 2a Special Edition shares the same specifications as the standard model. It features a 6.7-inch 120Hz AMOLED display, a MediaTek Dimensity 7200 Pro chipset, a dual 50MP rear camera system (main and ultrawide), a 32MP front-facing camera, and a 5000mAh battery with 45W wired charging.

The Phone 2a Special Edition has 12GB RAM and 256GB storage and is priced at £349 / ₹27,999 INR / €379. Limited quantities are available now through nothing.tech, and a first-come, first-served in-person drop will take place at the Nothing Store in Soho, London, on June 1.

For US buyers, the standard Nothing Phone 2a is available for $350 through Nothing’s developer program. However, the Special Edition colorway is not yet available for direct purchase, but interested buyers can sign up to receive an alert when it becomes available in the US.

With opinions split, the Phone 2a Special Edition has certainly sparked curiosity and debate among the tech community. Whether it’s a hit or miss, one thing is clear — it’s got everyone talking.

Last week Spotify announced it would end support for its short-lived Car Thing accessory for streaming music in an automobile… and by end support, I mean the gadgets would just stop working altogether. Part of the problem is Spotify never sold many of these things, but folks who did buy them weren’t too happy, and now Spotify […]

The post Lilbits: Spotify is refunding Car Thing customers after all, Librem 16 Linux laptop on the way appeared first on Liliputing.

Nothing is a relatively new company, but it already has its CMF sub-brand for cheaper products. We’ve heard for a while that a CMF smartphone could be on the way, and we’ve now got some apparent specs.

Developer and leaker MlgmXyysd posted purported CMF By Nothing Phone 1 specs on X. These specs suggest that the new CMF handset is derived from the Nothing Phone 2a in some ways.

The phone is said to pack a MediaTek Dimensity 7200 series chipset, a 6.67-inch 120Hz OLED panel, 8GB of RAM, and a 5,000mAh battery with 33W charging (down from 45W on the Phone 2a). The tipster also claimed that the device will be available in Black, Green, and Blue, while an Orange color scheme will be restricted to India.

This latest leak comes after a previous 91mobiles report listed purported specs. That report mentioned a 6.5-inch screen with Gorilla Glass, a 5,000mAh battery, 33W charging, and Black/White/Orange colors with a plastic body. It was also claimed that the CMF By Nothing Phone 1 would run Nothing OS and offer the same update policy as other Nothing phones (three years of OS updates and four years of security patches).

There are still a few unknowns about the device, though. There’s no word on camera details, storage, and whether it’ll have Glyph lighting like Nothing’s mainline handsets. So we’ll likely have to wait for more leaks to get these tidbits. But between the chipset, battery/RAM figures, and the screen, it looks like the handset could share some DNA with the Nothing Phone 2a.

Our natural fear of the unknown immediately makes us keen on blending Science Fiction with Horror, but the combination isn't all that easy to pull off. For every Alien, you get ten movies like The Happening, and, well, the Alien sequels.

Here are ten movies that did the formula justice, some of which even pushed the genre forward by adding surprisingly effective, fresh new elements.

Cloverfield (Matt Reeves, 2008)

Movies about big monsters ravaging through a city rarely fail to entertain, no other did it better than Cloverfield, the only film courageous enough to ask people to experience all the fear and devastation in first person perspective.

The found footage genre can go from scarily horrifying to incredibly good at putting you to sleep. After The Blair Witch Project, Cloverfield is likely the most interesting attempt at this genre — and one of the best Kaiju films ever made.

The Myst (Frank Darabont, 2008)

If you want to see a truly messed-up alternative to the father-and-child dynamic of The Last Of Us and Logan, you can do no better than The Myst. Instead of a bunch of people who get more than they bargained for by venturing where they shouldn't, The Myst tells the story of a family just going about their business when their town gets engulfed by a mysterious mist that, you guessed it, is hiding scary things within.

There's no lack of cool jumpscares and monster designs here, but The Myst never stops being about family, a family that ends up having to face making a decision that you'll never forget.

The Fly (David Cronenberg, 1986)

The Fly references in more popular media are so prevalent that younger audiences might attribute the accidental mix between a person and an insect to a surprisingly popular trope, not a specific film. Still, David Cronenberg's The Fly is much more than the imagining of one of humanity's (apparent) greatest fears.

Though we tend to remember the scene of the accident and the very gory climax of the film, the entire deterioration of Jeff Goldblum's character is more than worthy of everyone's time.

Spring (Justin Benson, Aaron Moorhead, 2015)

Spring ups the Sci-Fi Horror ante by inviting Romance in. Yes, even though it features spooky monsters and scientific concepts are thrown around, those take the backseat to a surprisingly great love story between a regular guy and a mysterious Italian woman. Spring would've been an interesting experiment even if it had failed in the daunting task it set out to achieve, but it doesn't.

It's heartbreaking that not many people know about this one, and there's only one way to fix that.

28 Days Later (Danny Boyle, 2003)

While it's only natural to think of George A. Romero's movies or Resident Evil when you think about Zombies, it's hard to deny how much 28 Days Later revitalized the genre.

Running infected were some of the most divisive movie monsters when we first saw them, but now we can all admit they're much scarier than the classic zombie type. Also, 28 Days Later doesn't just rest upon this update, as it weaves a personal and at some points even heartwarming tale of survival in an outbreak-ravaged England that you'll never forget.

Aniara (Hugo Lilja, Pella Kågerman, 2019)

Aniara invites viewers to see what an interstellar cruise ship trip might look like, too bad it picks the worst possible voyage to promote this cool new type of travel. Aniara doesn't feature the space equivalent of an Iceberg crash that quickly leads to the sinking of a ship. Instead, it masterfully shows the slow descent into madness of a ship's crew that accidentally strayed off course and has to come to terms with the possibility of never reaching the destination.

While Aniara doesn't feature jumpscares, it's hard to ignore all the existential dread it fills viewers with by constantly giving them new hope and squashing it in front of their eyes.

Cube (Vincenzo Natali, 2000)

As far as low-budget sci-fi horror goes, I doubt you can do better than Cube — In fact, some of its darkest aspects are so well-conceived that you'll have a hard time noticing it was even low-budget.

Cube invites viewers to experience a reality where a bunch of people are seemingly put at random into a megastructure composed of cubes that lead into other cubes, some of which feature deadly traps. The movie offers no answers, which helps the incredible violence of Cube feel extremely alien — or something late-stage capitalist humans would totally come up with.

Alien (Ridley Scott, 1979)

Ever since the release of Aliens, fans have been arguing over which is the best between the two original Alien films. Aliens fits more neatly in the sci-fi action category, and, as for the main reason why it's not featured on this list, well, I just don't think it measures up to the original.

The original Alien from 1979 set an incredibly high bar for Sci-Fi horror by introducing us to a story equal parts Sci-Fi and Gothic Horror. Unlike Aliens, Alien revels in its buildup, and the moments we spend trying to understand what's happening and watching the Xenomorph grow are as enthralling as the moments we spend being afraid once this perfect killing machine reaches maturity.

Predator (John McTiernan,1987)

If you like the action of Die Hard, Terminator, or even Commando, Predator has that for you, but what sets it apart is a brilliant genre subversion. Predator follows a group of soldiers led by Arnold Schwarzenegger, who are naturally the biggest and baddest dudes in the world — but not in the Universe.

After a mission in which Arnie's squad kills an entire battalion like it was a video game tutorial, they start dropping one by one in a gruesome fashion. Out of nowhere, what you thought would be another celebration of testosterone, turns into a slasher where the hopeless victims are all badasses you'd think each could've carried their own horror movies. On top of all the beautifully well-realized Sci-Fi and Horror crossover, Predator cements Arnie as the greatest action hero of them all by showing how the man isn't afraid of getting slapped around by something bigger and stronger that forces him to use his wits to come out on top.

The Thing (John Carpenter, 1982)

What makes The Thing special isn't the evil shapeshifting alien that hunts down the members of a likable crew one by one — though it features the best practical effects ever seen in cinema history. It's the sense of dread you cannot shake by having to constantly wonder who's the monster and who's just an equally dangerous human on the verge of losing it.

John Carpenter's loose remake of Howard Hawks's The Thing From Another World was a critical and commercial flop upon release, with Roger Ebert seeing it as little more than " a gross-out movie in which teenagers can dare one another to watch the screen". Still, I believe there's no better possible laurel for a sci-fi work than coming out ahead of its time, and The Thing was quick to get a cultural reappraisal that propelled it into the podium of sci-fi horror, which it hasn't left since.

The post 10 best Sci-Fi horror movies appeared first on Destructoid.

Only a few weeks ago, an Android smartphone made by Nothing’s sub-brand was discovered on the BIS certification site. At the time, almost no information was available on the device. However, that may have changed thanks to a new leak.

According to 91mobiles sources, CMF by Nothing’s upcoming phone will be called the CMF Phone 1. This device will reportedly feature a plastic body and will come in three color options that include black, white, and orange.

Meanwhile, the display is said to measure 6.5 inches and will have some version of Gorilla Glass protection. On the back, there is a single camera, however, nothing is known about the lens.

Sitting inside of the device will reportedly be a MediaTek Dimensity 5G chip. This SoC is said to be joined by a 5,000mAh battery with 33W charging support.

On top of that, the device will run on Nothing OS, however, it won’t have all of the features that are available on Nothing’s other phones. The sources claim that CMF could announce three years of OS upgrades and four years of security updates.

Although the details are mostly vague, it sounds like an affordable entry-level handset that will be a tier below the Nothing Phone 2a. Further supporting this, the price is alleged to be around Rs 12,000 in India (~$144 USD). For comparison, the Nothing Phone 2a sells for $349.

When it comes to updates, Nothing has been on the ball with the Phone 2a. In fact, the handset received three updates just one month in April. Now the Nothing Phone 2a is getting another one, with the key highlight being ChatGPT integration.

Nothing announced on X (formerly Twitter) that Nothing OS 2.5.5 has rolled out to the Phone 2a. With that update, owners will get a handful of new ChatGPT features including:

Nothing is riding on a wave of good reception from consumers, thanks to impactful products like the Nothing Phone 2a, which we’ve liked for bringing something new to the budget smartphone market. But the company has also had its share of controversies, like the Nothing Chats debacle, which was a privacy nightmare. Nothing appears to have suffered an alleged data breach recently, as we could locate a bunch of information around Nothing Community profiles floating on the internet.

We have located a file on a text file-sharing website containing a data dump of several Nothing Community profiles. The data present in this dump includes already-public information, such as usernames, display names, join dates, comment counts, last-seen information, forum profile permissions, and more.

Nothing is fresh off its launch event for the new Nothing Ear (2024) and the Nothing Ear a, wherein they also announced a deeper ChatGPT integration within Nothing OS. This integration is rolling out through the Nothing OS 2.5.5 update, arriving first to the Nothing Phone 2, while it will roll out to the Phone 1 and the Phone 2a later this month.

While ChatGPT integration is the highlight of the Nothing OS 2.5.5, the update changelog for the Phone 2 is quite lengthy (h/t 1NormalUsername). The Nothing Phone 2 is also getting the “TrueLens Engine” with “Ultra XDR,” though unfortunately, Nothing did not elaborate on these marketing terms. If we can speculate, this could allow capturing photos with high dynamic range in the Ultra HDR format (or a similar HDR-focused format), essentially as a jpg file with an extra HDR gain map file.

Here are all the changes that users can expect on their phones after the update:

• ChatGPT Integration: The following features are available with the latest ChatGPT version installed from the Play Store:
  • Added a new gesture option in Nothing X to start a voice conversation with ChatGPT for Nothing Ear & Nothing Ear (a). Coming soon to our other audio products.
  • Added new ChatGPT widgets to launch ChatGPT in different modes from your home screen for quicker access.
  • Added a button on the screenshot and clipboard pop-up to directly paste the content to a new conversation in ChatGPT.
• More features:
  • Camera now supports Ultra XDR. To set, head to Camera settings > Ultra XDR.
  • Within the camera app, Photo and Portrait Modes now feature an HDR switch. Activate or deactivate via the settings at the top.
  • Added RAM Booster feature. To set, head to Settings > System > RAM Booster.
  • Added a Ring Mode option in Quick Settings for easier sound management.
  • Added a new Recorder widget for effortless audio recording on-the-go.
  • Introduced a new Battery widget to monitor power usage more efficiently.
  • Added Glyph Interface Debug Mode to developer options.
• Improvements and Bug Fixes:
  • Enhanced system stability, NFC functionality, and Wi-Fi connection stability.
  • Optimised animations for smoother widget and app openings.
  • Improved response speed when setting Bluetooth in Quick Settings.
  • Optimized volume settings to make interactions more intuitive.
  • Improved clarity of album cover display in the Music Player widget.
  • Fixed experience issues when switching SIM cards with the Data during call feature enabled.
  • Resolved flickering when launching apps from Quick Settings on the lock screen.
  • Resolved flickering issues on the AOD interface.
  • Addressed the disappearance of lock screen widgets after ending screen share in certain scenarios.
  • Addressed abnormal lock screen wallpaper display when swiping-to-unlock is interrupted.
  • Fixed a widget display issue which showed Bluetooth as being off when a watch was connected.
  • Resolved frequent refreshing and flickering when setting Wi-Fi in the Quick Settings widget.
  • Other bug fixes and performance enhancements.

Have you received the update on your Nothing Phone 2 yet? Let us know how you like the changes in the comments below!

ChatGPT has spurred the use of AI in mainstream use cases. Many people now prefer Google Gemini or ChatGPT to help with daily tasks, and every business is scrambling to integrate AI into its products and services. At the launch of the new Nothing Ear and Nothing Ear A earbuds, the company also announced that ChatGPT integration is coming to the earbuds and Nothing OS.

On the new Nothing Ear (2024) and Nothing Ear A earbuds, you can set a pinch shortcut to start a voice conversation with ChatGPT. Once set, you can pinch the earbud stem to begin talking to ChatGPT and tap once to stop the conversation. ChatGPT will then work its magic and get back to you with a response. You will need to be on Nothing OS 2.5.5 and set the shortcut through the Nothing X app for the ChatGPT integration to work.

The company says that the ChatGPT integration will also be rolled out to all of its Nothing and CMF audio products in June 2024.

If you don’t have the earbuds, you can still enjoy the deeper integration with Nothing OS. With Nothing OS 2.5.5, you can now add ChatGPT widgets for Text, Voice, and Vision when you have ChatGPT installed on your phone. This is beyond the regular 4×2 widget that the ChatGPT app offers to all Android users.

Further, Nothing OS 2.5.5 adds a Clipboard to ChatGPT shortcut when selecting text, letting you paste the text directly into a new conversation on ChatGPT.

When you take a screenshot, you will also see a new Screenshot to ChatGPT shortcut that allows you to paste the screenshot directly into a new conversation on ChatGPT.

Nothing OS 2.5.5 is rolling out to the Nothing Phone 2 today. It will also roll out to the Nothing Phone 1 and the Nothing Phone 2a later this month.

Do you like this ChatGPT integration within Nothing OS? Let us know in the comments below!

Nothing is all-in on smartphones now, with the recent Nothing Phone 2a earning strong marks from reviewers. However, the company started just a few years ago as an audio brand with the well-received Nothing Ear 1 earbuds. Since then, it’s launched a few other sets of earbuds, but today it’s revamping its naming system while simultaneously launching two new audio products: Nothing Ear and Nothing Ear A.

As you can see, the revamped earbud naming system includes removing numbers from the names. Nothing told us it is doing this to make customers feel less pressured to upgrade every time there’s a new release. Instead, you’d buy a set of Nothing earbuds now and then buy a new set in the same line sometime later when you feel an upgrade might be necessary (or, of course, opt for a more/less expensive model).

Nothing didn’t say anything about this new naming scheme also applying to its other products, including smartphones. Considering the Nothing Phone 2a dropped just a few months ago, we will assume that numbers will continue to be a part of its smartphone portfolio.

In addition to the new hardware, Nothing also announced deeper ChatGPT integration within these earbuds. On Nothing OS 2.5.5, with the ChatGPT app installed, you can set a pinch shortcut to start a conversation with ChatGPT.

Now, let’s break down what you get with the Nothing Ear and the Nothing Ear A.

Nothing Ear

First up, we have the premium model: Nothing Ear. While one might think these would be the Nothing Ear 3, the company isn’t going to call them that due to the previously mentioned abandonment of numbers.

Besides, these are more like Nothing 2.5 rather than a full numerical upgrade. They look incredibly similar to Nothing Ear 2, right down to the case design and available colorways (transparent black or white).

There are some differences, though, which I’ll list out for you here:

• Active Noise Cancelation (ANC) is now up to 45dB, a good bump over the 40dB limit of Ear 2.
• Battery life is allegedly better, with Nothing claiming 5.2 hours of power for Ear with ANC active, compared to four hours of juice under the same conditions for Ear 2.
• The earbuds now support LDAC as well as LHDC, which means they’re compatible with high-quality audio on more phones.
• Unfortunately, the driver shrunk a bit. Nothing Ear have 11mm custom drivers, while Ear 2 had 11.6mm custom drivers. This is probably not a big enough difference for people to notice, though.

Other than these three points, Nothing Ear are basically the same as Nothing Ear 2. Therefore, if you already own Nothing Ear 2, there’s not much reason to upgrade.

If you don’t already own Nothing Ear 2 (or don’t care about Nothing’s ambitions to stop you from upgrading yearly), these will set you back $149 / €149 / £129 — the same pricing as Ear 2. Pre-orders are open now at Nothing.tech and general sales begin on April 22, 2024.

Do note that Nothing confirmed Ear will replace Ear 2. When the company sells through its stock of Ear 2, it will not make more. If, for some reason, you’d rather have Ear 2 over these new models, you’d better grab them quickly.

Nothing Ear A

While Nothing Ear are an obvious iterative upgrade to Nothing Ear 2, Nothing Ear A are a bit trickier to peg. One would assume these would be the spiritual successors to Nothing’s previous budget-minded earbuds (Nothing Ear Stick), but these feel more like a slightly upgraded version of the original Nothing Ear 1.

Right off the bat, Nothing Ear A are in-ear earbuds, as opposed to Nothing Ear Stick, which simply rested in your ear canal, like Apple’s entry-tier AirPods. This allows them to support ANC, something that wasn’t possible with Ear Stick.

Nothing Ear A also have a brand new case design that’s unlike anything the company has done before. It’s smaller and curvier than the Ear/Ear 1/Ear 2 cases and nothing like the tube case for Ear Stick. There’s also a new colorway on offer: yellow. This is a fun choice for folks bored of the usual black/white colors Nothing offers.

As for specs, you’ll find a lot of crossovers here from Nothing Ear, including 11mm drivers, 45dB ANC, a triple-mic setup, LDAC support (but no LHDC), etc. There are a few significant differences, though:

• Unlike Nothing Ear, the Nothing Ear A case does not support wireless charging.
• Battery life is nominally better with Nothing Ear A. According to Nothing, Ear A get 5.5 hours of use with ANC on, about 0.3 hours better than Nothing Ear.
• The diaphragms of Nothing Ear are made of a premium ceramic material, while Nothing Ear A get PMI + TPU diaphragms, which is not as premium.

In other words, it’s easiest to think of Nothing Ear A as a cheaper version of Nothing Ear rather than a sequel to any other Nothing earbuds.

Speaking of being cheaper, Nothing Ear A will set you back $99 / €99 / £99. Like the Nothing Ear, you can pre-order them today from Nothing.tech and general sales begin on April 22, 2024. Also, these will become the only other earbuds Nothing offers outside of Nothing Ear. In other words, if you want Nothing Ear Stick or Nothing Ear 1, you should buy them soon, as they will no longer be in production.

Nothing is fresh off its launch event for the new Nothing Ear (2024) and the Nothing Ear a, wherein they also announced a deeper ChatGPT integration within Nothing OS. This integration is rolling out through the Nothing OS 2.5.5 update, arriving first to the Nothing Phone 2, while it will roll out to the Phone 1 and the Phone 2a later this month.

While ChatGPT integration is the highlight of the Nothing OS 2.5.5, the update changelog for the Phone 2 is quite lengthy (h/t 1NormalUsername). The Nothing Phone 2 is also getting the “TrueLens Engine” with “Ultra XDR,” though unfortunately, Nothing did not elaborate on these marketing terms. If we can speculate, this could allow capturing photos with high dynamic range in the Ultra HDR format (or a similar HDR-focused format), essentially as a jpg file with an extra HDR gain map file.

Here are all the changes that users can expect on their phones after the update:

• ChatGPT Integration: The following features are available with the latest ChatGPT version installed from the Play Store:
  • Added a new gesture option in Nothing X to start a voice conversation with ChatGPT for Nothing Ear & Nothing Ear (a). Coming soon to our other audio products.
  • Added new ChatGPT widgets to launch ChatGPT in different modes from your home screen for quicker access.
  • Added a button on the screenshot and clipboard pop-up to directly paste the content to a new conversation in ChatGPT.
• More features:
  • Camera now supports Ultra XDR. To set, head to Camera settings > Ultra XDR.
  • Within the camera app, Photo and Portrait Modes now feature an HDR switch. Activate or deactivate via the settings at the top.
  • Added RAM Booster feature. To set, head to Settings > System > RAM Booster.
  • Added a Ring Mode option in Quick Settings for easier sound management.
  • Added a new Recorder widget for effortless audio recording on-the-go.
  • Introduced a new Battery widget to monitor power usage more efficiently.
  • Added Glyph Interface Debug Mode to developer options.
• Improvements and Bug Fixes:
  • Enhanced system stability, NFC functionality, and Wi-Fi connection stability.
  • Optimised animations for smoother widget and app openings.
  • Improved response speed when setting Bluetooth in Quick Settings.
  • Optimized volume settings to make interactions more intuitive.
  • Improved clarity of album cover display in the Music Player widget.
  • Fixed experience issues when switching SIM cards with the Data during call feature enabled.
  • Resolved flickering when launching apps from Quick Settings on the lock screen.
  • Resolved flickering issues on the AOD interface.
  • Addressed the disappearance of lock screen widgets after ending screen share in certain scenarios.
  • Addressed abnormal lock screen wallpaper display when swiping-to-unlock is interrupted.
  • Fixed a widget display issue which showed Bluetooth as being off when a watch was connected.
  • Resolved frequent refreshing and flickering when setting Wi-Fi in the Quick Settings widget.
  • Other bug fixes and performance enhancements.

Have you received the update on your Nothing Phone 2 yet? Let us know how you like the changes in the comments below!

ChatGPT has spurred the use of AI in mainstream use cases. Many people now prefer Google Gemini or ChatGPT to help with daily tasks, and every business is scrambling to integrate AI into its products and services. At the launch of the new Nothing Ear and Nothing Ear A earbuds, the company also announced that ChatGPT integration is coming to the earbuds and Nothing OS.

On the new Nothing Ear (2024) and Nothing Ear A earbuds, you can set a pinch shortcut to start a voice conversation with ChatGPT. Once set, you can pinch the earbud stem to begin talking to ChatGPT and tap once to stop the conversation. ChatGPT will then work its magic and get back to you with a response. You will need to be on Nothing OS 2.5.5 and set the shortcut through the Nothing X app for the ChatGPT integration to work.

The company says that the ChatGPT integration will also be rolled out to all of its Nothing and CMF audio products in June 2024.

If you don’t have the earbuds, you can still enjoy the deeper integration with Nothing OS. With Nothing OS 2.5.5, you can now add ChatGPT widgets for Text, Voice, and Vision when you have ChatGPT installed on your phone. This is beyond the regular 4×2 widget that the ChatGPT app offers to all Android users.

Further, Nothing OS 2.5.5 adds a Clipboard to ChatGPT shortcut when selecting text, letting you paste the text directly into a new conversation on ChatGPT.

When you take a screenshot, you will also see a new Screenshot to ChatGPT shortcut that allows you to paste the screenshot directly into a new conversation on ChatGPT.

Nothing OS 2.5.5 is rolling out to the Nothing Phone 2 today. It will also roll out to the Nothing Phone 1 and the Nothing Phone 2a later this month.

Do you like this ChatGPT integration within Nothing OS? Let us know in the comments below!

Nothing is all-in on smartphones now, with the recent Nothing Phone 2a earning strong marks from reviewers. However, the company started just a few years ago as an audio brand with the well-received Nothing Ear 1 earbuds. Since then, it’s launched a few other sets of earbuds, but today it’s revamping its naming system while simultaneously launching two new audio products: Nothing Ear and Nothing Ear A.

As you can see, the revamped earbud naming system includes removing numbers from the names. Nothing told us it is doing this to make customers feel less pressured to upgrade every time there’s a new release. Instead, you’d buy a set of Nothing earbuds now and then buy a new set in the same line sometime later when you feel an upgrade might be necessary (or, of course, opt for a more/less expensive model).

Nothing didn’t say anything about this new naming scheme also applying to its other products, including smartphones. Considering the Nothing Phone 2a dropped just a few months ago, we will assume that numbers will continue to be a part of its smartphone portfolio.

In addition to the new hardware, Nothing also announced deeper ChatGPT integration within these earbuds. On Nothing OS 2.5.5, with the ChatGPT app installed, you can set a pinch shortcut to start a conversation with ChatGPT.

Now, let’s break down what you get with the Nothing Ear and the Nothing Ear A.

Nothing Ear

First up, we have the premium model: Nothing Ear. While one might think these would be the Nothing Ear 3, the company isn’t going to call them that due to the previously mentioned abandonment of numbers.

Besides, these are more like Nothing 2.5 rather than a full numerical upgrade. They look incredibly similar to Nothing Ear 2, right down to the case design and available colorways (transparent black or white).

There are some differences, though, which I’ll list out for you here:

• Active Noise Cancelation (ANC) is now up to 45dB, a good bump over the 40dB limit of Ear 2.
• Battery life is allegedly better, with Nothing claiming 5.2 hours of power for Ear with ANC active, compared to four hours of juice under the same conditions for Ear 2.
• The earbuds now support LDAC as well as LHDC, which means they’re compatible with high-quality audio on more phones.
• Unfortunately, the driver shrunk a bit. Nothing Ear have 11mm custom drivers, while Ear 2 had 11.6mm custom drivers. This is probably not a big enough difference for people to notice, though.

Other than these three points, Nothing Ear are basically the same as Nothing Ear 2. Therefore, if you already own Nothing Ear 2, there’s not much reason to upgrade.

If you don’t already own Nothing Ear 2 (or don’t care about Nothing’s ambitions to stop you from upgrading yearly), these will set you back $149 / €149 / £129 — the same pricing as Ear 2. Pre-orders are open now at Nothing.tech and general sales begin on April 22, 2024.

Do note that Nothing confirmed Ear will replace Ear 2. When the company sells through its stock of Ear 2, it will not make more. If, for some reason, you’d rather have Ear 2 over these new models, you’d better grab them quickly.

Nothing Ear A

While Nothing Ear are an obvious iterative upgrade to Nothing Ear 2, Nothing Ear A are a bit trickier to peg. One would assume these would be the spiritual successors to Nothing’s previous budget-minded earbuds (Nothing Ear Stick), but these feel more like a slightly upgraded version of the original Nothing Ear 1.

Right off the bat, Nothing Ear A are in-ear earbuds, as opposed to Nothing Ear Stick, which simply rested in your ear canal, like Apple’s entry-tier AirPods. This allows them to support ANC, something that wasn’t possible with Ear Stick.

Nothing Ear A also have a brand new case design that’s unlike anything the company has done before. It’s smaller and curvier than the Ear/Ear 1/Ear 2 cases and nothing like the tube case for Ear Stick. There’s also a new colorway on offer: yellow. This is a fun choice for folks bored of the usual black/white colors Nothing offers.

As for specs, you’ll find a lot of crossovers here from Nothing Ear, including 11mm drivers, 45dB ANC, a triple-mic setup, LDAC support (but no LHDC), etc. There are a few significant differences, though:

• Unlike Nothing Ear, the Nothing Ear A case does not support wireless charging.
• Battery life is nominally better with Nothing Ear A. According to Nothing, Ear A get 5.5 hours of use with ANC on, about 0.3 hours better than Nothing Ear.
• The diaphragms of Nothing Ear are made of a premium ceramic material, while Nothing Ear A get PMI + TPU diaphragms, which is not as premium.

In other words, it’s easiest to think of Nothing Ear A as a cheaper version of Nothing Ear rather than a sequel to any other Nothing earbuds.

Speaking of being cheaper, Nothing Ear A will set you back $99 / €99 / £99. Like the Nothing Ear, you can pre-order them today from Nothing.tech and general sales begin on April 22, 2024. Also, these will become the only other earbuds Nothing offers outside of Nothing Ear. In other words, if you want Nothing Ear Stick or Nothing Ear 1, you should buy them soon, as they will no longer be in production.

The Playdate is an unusual and ambitious handheld game console. The $199 console has a 1-bit display and a set of simple controls that includes a hand crank. Instead of enabling support for existing games, the folks behind the Playdate partnered with indie game developers to create a bunch of new games for the console, […]

The post Lilbits: Playdate’s growing game catalog, Zotac’s ZBOX PRO eGPU, and Framework’s firmware woes appeared first on Liliputing.

The Nothing Phone 2a is a unique new phone in the Carl Pei-led brand’s lineup, as it’s the first truly budget-minded phone from the startup. It’s not aiming for premium flagship territory, and it’s also not going for value flagship territory either. This is a phone designed for folks who want to spend as little money as possible while still getting all the basics. But how does it compare to the Nothing Phone 2? I spent time with both to find out.

Nothing Phone 2a vs Nothing Phone 2: What’s the same?

The Nothing Phone (2a) is the third smartphone from Nothing, but it’s the company’s first budget model, with prices starting at £319 in the UK, €329 in Europe, and $349 in the United States (although it will only be available in the US through a developer program at launch). But while that makes this new […]

The post Nothing Phone (2a) is a cheap(er) phone with premium features appeared first on Liliputing.

At Mobile World Congress 2024, we’ve seen a whole bunch of new tech. Today, though, we saw one of the more exciting smartphone launches of the week: the Nothing Phone 2a.

At a Barcelona restaurant packed with journalists, Nothing “unboxed” the Phone 2a by literally pulling apart two large boxes covering a display case with the Phone 2a inside. Because of the way it was propped, we could only see the back of it. However, that’s where a lot of interesting stuff is happening.

First, any concerns that the Phone 2a wouldn’t have Glyph lights can be put to rest. There are three lights on the back of the phone — far fewer than the 11 on the back of the Nothing Phone 2 — and the bottom “exclamation point” light isn’t one of them. That means the charging animation seen on the Phone 2 and the Phone 1 won’t be included with the Phone 2a, at least not in the same way. That’s a bit of a bummer.

The phone also has a unique camera module that’s centered in the top half, with the lenses grouped to look like eyes. This explains the “Fresh Eyes” tagline Nothing has been using in teasers so far.

Since the phone was in a glass display case, we couldn’t do much of a size comparison to other devices. However, judging from what we could tell, the Phone 2a is not significantly larger or smaller than the other two Nothing phones. If you were hoping for something more compact, it does not appear the Phone 2a will provide.

Since we couldn’t see the front of the phone, we can’t tell you much else. However, we do know through previous confirmations that the Phone 2a will come with the MediaTek Dimensity 7200 Pro and 12GB of RAM. We also know the phone is launching on March 5, so you only have about a week to go before we know everything.

Nothing revealed chipset details regarding the upcoming Nothing Phone 2a yesterday, confirming a Dimensity 7200 Pro SoC. The company also claimed that the new handset will be more powerful and efficient than the Nothing Phone 1.

Now, company co-founder Carl Pei has elaborated on these claims in an interview with Digital Trends.

“The Phone 2a is a clear upgrade from Phone 1, particularly in terms of performance. Phone 2a is 18% more powerful than Phone 1 and 16% more efficient in terms of battery consumption compared to Phone 1,” the executive asserted.

The comparisons suggest that Nothing wants Phone 1 owners to upgrade to the Phone 2a. But Pei didn’t clarify whether the Phone 2a would replace the Phone 1 in its portfolio.

What makes the Nothing Phone 2a better?

This disparity isn’t a surprise as the Nothing Phone 1’s Snapdragon 778G Plus chipset was a mid-range chipset back then. It’s been almost two years since the Phone 1 was launched, so that processor will have undoubtedly been surpassed by other mid-range chips.

The Snapdragon 778G Plus has a 6nm design compared to the Dimensity 7200 Pro’s smaller, more efficient 4nm process. So that partly accounts for the battery life claims.

The MediaTek chip also brings a more modern CPU, featuring two heavy Cortex-A715 cores and six little Cortex-A510 cores. In saying so, the older Snapdragon chip has four heavy CPU cores and four little cores. So we’re curious to see how the Nothing Phone 2a fares against the Phone 1 when it comes to multi-core workloads. It does, however, stand to reason that more little cores will result in a more power-efficient processor.

Nothing will launch the Phone 2a on March 5. So we’ll be sure to put the phone through its paces to see if it indeed eclipses the original handset as far as performance and battery life are concerned.

Nothing is continuing its drip-feed of Nothing Phone 2a spec disclosures in the run-up to its March 5 launch. Now, the smartphone brand has revealed the new phone’s processor.

Nothing confirmed in a YouTube video that the Nothing Phone 2a will be powered by a MediaTek Dimensity 7200 Pro processor. This is the first Nothing phone with a MediaTek chipset, following in the footsteps of the Snapdragon 778G Plus and Snapdragon 8 Plus Gen 1 in the Nothing Phone 1 and 2 respectively.

Nothing product marketing manager Raymond Zhu noted in the video that the Dimensity 7200 Pro differs from the standard Dimensity 7200 in a couple of areas. For one, he says certain components such as the display IC chip and modem are roughly 10% more efficient. Nothing also developed some software features specifically for this chipset, such as a Smart Clean feature.

Otherwise, it seems like the Dimensity 7200 Pro is in line with the standard chip. That means we’re expecting a capable CPU (2x Cortex-A715 and 6x Cortex-A510) and a Mali-G610 MC4 GPU.

Nothing Phone 2a: Why MediaTek over Qualcomm?

Zhu claimed that the Dimensity 7200 Pro was chosen because the company wanted the “best possible performance” for its users.

“We knew MediaTek was a hard sell since Qualcomm is a lot better known (sic) here in the UK, but we couldn’t justify going with a lower-performing processor” Zhu explained.

Interestingly, the representative said that the choice of chipset came down to the Dimensity 7200 Pro, Snapdragon 7s Gen 2, and Snapdragon 782G. But Zhu confirmed that the Snapdragon chips had lower performance than the MediaTek SoC.

Nothing’s clip also showed a graphic (seen at the top) pointing to the Phone 2a packing 12GB of RAM. But it’s unclear if this figure applies to all variants.

Aside from Nothing’s official disclosures, we’ve also recently seen apparent leaked renders for the device. The renders show a phone with a circular camera housing and two cameras sitting side-by-side. Thankfully, it looks like the phone still retains the company’s Glyph lighting.

One of the biggest mysteries regarding the upcoming Nothing Phone 2a is what the phone will look like. A trusted source recently published purportedly leaked renders but later confirmed they were inaccurate. Now, the same source has posted what they claim are accurate Nothing Phone 2a renders.

Veteran leaker Steve Hemmerstoffer and SmartPrix posted new Nothing Phone 2a renders, and we get a decidedly different design compared to the previously posted images. Check the gallery below, showing an apparent Dark Gray model.

Perhaps the biggest tweak here is the move to a distinctive, center-aligned rear camera system with the two sensors being side-by-side. This differs from the previous render which offered a pair of vertically stacked rear cameras in the top-left corner of the phone, bringing to mind older iPhones.

We can also make out at least three LED lights on the back here, forming the apparent Glyph lighting setup. So those who were worried about this trademark Nothing feature disappearing on the budget phone can seemingly breath easy.

Otherwise, we’ve still got flat edges here, along with a center-aligned punch-hole cutout. We’ve also got volume keys on the left-hand edge while the power button sits on the right-hand edge. The phone is also said to measure 162.2 x 76.5 x 8.7mm.

SmartPrix also asserts that the phone will feature a Dimensity 7200 Pro chipset rather than a vanilla Dimensity 7200 SoC. The outlet further claims that you can expect dual 50MP rear cameras (S5KG9 main sensor and JN1 ultrawide sensor), a 32MP selfie camera, and a 5,000mAh battery with 45W wired charging. But we’ll take these claims with a pinch of salt as Hemmerstoffer doesn’t usually supply specs to his media partners.

Nothing revealed chipset details regarding the upcoming Nothing Phone 2a yesterday, confirming a Dimensity 7200 Pro SoC. The company also claimed that the new handset will be more powerful and efficient than the Nothing Phone 1.

Now, company co-founder Carl Pei has elaborated on these claims in an interview with Digital Trends.

Nothing is continuing its drip-feed of Nothing Phone 2a spec disclosures in the run-up to its March 5 launch. Now, the smartphone brand has revealed the new phone’s processor.

Nothing confirmed in a YouTube video that the Nothing Phone 2a will be powered by a MediaTek Dimensity 7200 Pro processor. This is the first Nothing phone with a MediaTek chipset, following in the footsteps of the Snapdragon 778G Plus and Snapdragon 8 Plus Gen 1 in the Nothing Phone 1 and 2 respectively.

One of the biggest mysteries regarding the upcoming Nothing Phone 2a is what the phone will look like. A trusted source recently published purportedly leaked renders but later confirmed they were inaccurate. Now, the same source has posted what they claim are accurate Nothing Phone 2a renders.

Veteran leaker Steve Hemmerstoffer and SmartPrix posted new Nothing Phone 2a renders, and we get a decidedly different design compared to the previously posted images. Check the gallery below, showing an apparent Dark Gray model.

  The Nothing Phone (2a) is the target of multiple leaks and teasers in the coming days. The fact is that Nothing’s first mid-range smartphone ...

The post Nothing Phone (2a): New Renders Confirm the Design; Indian Price Revealed as Well appeared first on Gizchina.com.