The latest episode of Willow on Disney Plus has introduced a new character and we explain who Allagash is and explore the past roles of actor Christian Slater.
The sequel series suffers the notable absence of Val Kilmer’s Madmartigan. The actor was previously on board the revival but was later forced to exit the series during the brunt of the pandemic when he was unable to travel.
Based on the characters created by George Lucas and developed by Jonathan Kasdan for Disney Plus, the fantasy adventure series Willow is a direct sequel to the 1988 film of the same name by Ron Howard, starring Warwick Davis, Ruby Cruz, Erin Kellyman, Ellie Bamber, Tony Revolori, Amar Chadha-Patel, and more.
Allagash is an original character to the franchise introduced during Episode 6 of the series, titled Prisoners of Skellin.
Succeeding his alluded-to existence in Episode 5, Kit and Willow meet the character after being imprisoned by trolls and learn Allagash has been imprisoned for a decade.
Allagash pretends to be Kilmer’s character, Madmartigan, despite Willow knowing better, and the character ultimately sacrifices himself so that the others can escape the troll dungeon.
American-born actor, Christian Slater, is a veteran performer in the field, beginning his career in the soap opera The Edge of Night in 1976 when he was just 7 years old.
Slater performed in a host of Broadway shows during the 80s and received his big break in The Legend of Billie Jean as Binx Davey in 1985.
The actor’s notable performances include roles in Heathers and Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves, but the actor has also performed a number of roles playing himself, including spots in Entourage, Two and a Half Men, and Curb Your Enthusiasm.
Slater also has a number of upcoming projects, including The Spiderwick Chronicles and Army of the Dead: Lost Vegas.
For the A16 Bionic, Apple mentioned that its latest SoC would deliver a 20 percent improvement in power savings, and the company might be aiming for the skies in battery savings when it launches the A17 Bionic next year. However, this can mean that the next-generation chipset does not deliver a massive performance leap, which might not matter to the average iPhone customer, but it can mean it will give competitors like Qualcomm and MediaTek a chance to capitalize on the opportunity.
With Apple giving TSMC orders for the A17 Bionic, a ton of emphasis was placed on power efficiency, not performance
TSMC recently held a ceremony, announcing the mass production of 3nm chips at its new Fab 18 facility located in the Southern Taiwan Science Park (STSP). This hub will likely be used to mass produce the A17 Bionic in the second half of 2023, but there was an interesting metric surrounding the benefits of using 3nm technology. The new process will deliver up to 35 percent in power savings compared to the 4nm node (TSMC calls it an enhanced version of 5nm), and surprisingly, there was little information provided on performance uplift.
Even Bloomberg states that according to the company’s chairman, Mark Liu, the new 3nm process will bring a 35 percent power efficiency, but no one talked about performance gains. Now, this does not mean that the A17 Bionic will not see some performance improvements compared to the A16 Bionic, but there may not be major jaw-dropping differences that Apple includes it in its marketing slide when announcing the iPhone 15 series.
Apple’s A16 Bionic slide does not compare it with the A15 Bionic when it comes to CPU performance
Also, if you noticed, for quite a while, and this year too, Apple did not directly compare the A16 Bionic to the A15 Bionic, or the A14 Bionic for that matter. Its slide was compared to the A13 Bionic, indicating that the company is unable to reach comparable performance stats to include in its keynote. The reason for this is simple; Apple has lost a ton of chip talent to competitors, resulting in a massive brain drain. The A15 Bionic lacked sufficient CPU performance gains compared to the A14 Bionic for this very reason.
Even here, no performance comparison was mentioned by Apple when highlighting the A16 Bionic’s features
The A17 Bionic may be going down the same path if that is the course Apple has planned for it. Then again, just because TSMC’s newest 3nm process delivers a 35 percent power savings benefit does not mean the iPhone 15 Pro and iPhone 15 Ultra will immediately see these advantages. Apple will have a free hand to use the 3 nm’s improved transistor density, and that can also mean adjusting performance while sacrificing some battery life. However, Apple would have little motivation to go down this route since the A16 Bionic continues to be the fastest mobile SoC in existence at this time.
However, given the A17 Bionic may potentially feature greater power efficiency, Apple could use this benefit to incorporate features that it had to scrap from the A16 Bionic such as ray tracing support, which could not be added due to unacceptable power consumption, among other flaws. Whatever Apple’s decision may be, we cannot wait to see the A17 Bionic in action.
What are the 20 highest-scoring anime of 2022 and what are the 20 series with the most gained members on MAL this year?
2022 has been an incredible year for the anime industry, with countless series going viral in the mainstream and technical aspects of animated storytelling reaching new heights.
However, as we look back on the last 12 months, it can be hard to digest just how many amazing series we watched from around the world.
Here are the 20 highest-scoring series on MyAnimeList in 2022, as well as the 20 series that gained the most members on the popular anime review platform.
Just 12 months ago, CloverWorks was a studio that inspired 0 confidence and was almost derided by a big portion of the anime community. Now they end 2022 having made 3 (and a half) of the best shows of the year. Truly remarkable. pic.twitter.com/nykiEVS5tD
Members’ rankings are also an interesting way to gauge where the global audience sits when it comes to anime in 2022.
For those who need a recap, on MyAnimeList fans can add different series to their own personal account rankings; thus, adding themselves automatically as a ‘Member’ of that production.
Per MyAnimeList, these are the top 20 anime series from 2022 with the most members:
Spy x Family Part 1 – 1.1 million members
Attack on Titan: The Final Season Part 2 – 1 million members
Chainsaw Man – 980,000 members
My Dress-Up Darling – 838,000 members
Kaguya-sama: Love is War- Ultra Romantic – 724,000 members
The Rising of the Shield Hero season 2 – 651,000 members
Spy x Family Part 2 – 593,000 members
Mob Psycho 100 season 3 – 448,000 members
Call of the Night – 436,000 members
Classroom of the Elite season 2 – 435,000 members
Shikimori’s Not Just a Cutie – 430,000 members
Overlord season 4 – 406,000 members
The Devil is a Part-Timer season 2 – 403,000 members
My Hero Academia season 6 – 399,000 members
Komi Can’t Communicate season 2 – 386,000 members
Blue Lock – 363,000 members
Summertime Render – 347,000 members
Rent A Girlfriend season 2 – 347,000
Bleach: Thousand Year Blood War – 343,000 members
Lycoris Recoil – 337,000 members
Scores are accurate as of December 29, but are still subject to change as these are ongoing figures.
A few weeks ago, I wrote that NVIDIA is mulling pricing the NVIDIA RTX 4070 Ti at an MSRP of $899and had informed AICs that this would be the launch price tentatively. Multiple sources have informed us that they have received a last minute update from big green with what appears to be a pre-launch price drop and the current tentative MSRP of the NVIDIA RTX 4070 Ti: $799.
NVIDIA quietly informs AICs of a price cut for the 4070 Ti's MSRP: tentatively launching at $799
NVIDIA likes to keep the pricing of its GPUs close to itself before launch and some AICs had already started taking orders at an MSRP of $899 from some of their channel partners. However, they have been informed today that the tentative launch date is now $799 and the difference will be adjusted for existing orders. Since we are closer to the launch, this price point is likely going to stick (although that is just my educated guess).
That said, this extract form my original article still remains relevant (although price is unlikely to go up, and more likely to go down if Jensen changes his mind again):
Keep in mind, however, that Jensen wields the black leather jacket and all of us must submit to its power. So he could very well snap his fingers and change the MSRP at the very last moment should he want to. This is also why I am still tagging this post as a rumor - because until the marketing and documentation gets made for the launch, details like this can still change.
A big reason for why NVIDIA might have had a change of heart could be because of the fact that 25% GPU tariffs were set to resume on 1/1 and were pushed back by the US government by 9 months. This meant that if NVIDIA and AICs kept the pricing of their cards constant, it would have shrunk their margins. They might have figured to take the hurt anyways and pass on the savings from the lack of resumption to the consumer.
But of course, the biggest reason is probably the completely lackluster traction of the NVIDIA RTX 4080 which has had serious difficulty in flying off the shelves unlike its much more expensive sibling: the NVIDIA RTX 4090. The updated value proposition of NVIDIA's RTX 40 series based on the value that the RTX 4090 offers is below:
GPU
FP32 TFLOPs
MSRP
TFLOPs/$
Value (%)
GeForce RTX 4090
82.59
1599
0.05165
100.0%
GeForce RTX 4080
48.74
1199
0.04065
78.7%
GeForce RTX 4070 Ti
40.09
799
0.05017
97%
As we can see, the RTX 4070 Ti with this new MSRP is far closer to the value that the TITAN offers from a TFLOPs/$ perspective and should enable the card to take the burn to AMD's recently launched Radeon RX 7000 series GPUs. With just a few weeks to launch, NVIDIA has decided to reduce the price of its relatively-mainstream entry and further price cuts could be in the pipeline should the wielder of the black-leather-jacket deem it so. If there any more price changes, I will report on them right away.
Which NVIDIA RTX 40 GPUs would you consider buying (multiple choice)?
NVIDIA RTX 4070 Ti
NVIDIA RTX 4080
NVIDIA RTX 4090
Vote to see results
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Users searching for popular software are being targeted by a new malvertising campaign that abuses Google Ads to serve trojanized variants that deploy malware, such as Raccoon Stealer and Vidar.
The activity makes use of seemingly credible websites with typosquatted domain names that are surfaced on top of Google search results in the form of malicious ads by hijacking searches for specific
During our introduction to Saul Goodman (Bob Odenkirk) way back in season 2 of "Breaking Bad", we quickly learned he had more layers than you would guess at first glance. As he offhandedly mentions to Walter White, "Saul Goodman" is just his professional pseudonym and his real name is "McGill." That line didn't get any follow-up in "Breaking Bad," where Saul remained a sleazy, hilarious criminal lawyer, but it was the bedrock of the prequel series, "Better Call Saul."
Contrary to its title, "Better Call Saul" actually didn't feature the character who'd charmed fans that much. Instead, as we've covered before, the show was much more interested in the man behind the name: James Morgan McGill. A former con man trying to make it as an honest lawyer, the comedy and pathos of "Better Call Saul" comes from Jimmy's inability to escape his old ways. Still, it takes him time to run away from himself.
He only begins practicing law as "Saul Goodman" in the season 4 finale, "Winner," and it takes until the season 6 episode "Fun and Games" when the persona absorbs him. However, by that point, the show transitioned to a full-on sequel, where Odenkirk's character was now "Gene Takovic," an anonymous Nebraskan Cinnabon manager. A few flashbacks were all the show offered of Saul as audiences knew him in "Breaking Bad." Why did "Better Call Saul" skimp on its main attraction? Because Jimmy McGill was too good of a character to write out.
Bob Odenkirk And Vince Gilligan's Thoughts
The February 2023 issue of Empire magazine includes a feature where Bob Odenkirk reflected on his time playing Saul/Jimmy/Gene. Also quoted is Vince Gilligan, creator of "Breaking Bad" and "Better Call Saul." When asked if he was "surprised" by how little Saul there was in "Better Call Saul," Odenkirk felt the show spent enough time with the character for him:
"Oh, that was a perfect amount for me. There's not a lot to Saul. Saul is actually one of the easiest iterations of the character to play. Life is kind of simple for him."
Jimmy McGill is a man of conflicting desires. He wants to go legitimate, but he's not willing to change himself to get there. He wants the respect of elite lawyers, like his brother Chuck (Michael McKean) or Howard Hamlin (Patrick Fabian), but resents them for looking down on him in the first place. Gene Takovic, meanwhile, is a husk of a man, always keeping his head down and looking over his shoulder for the heat around the corner.
Saul Goodman, on the other hand, has three modes: greed, self-preservation, and smart-ass. As we see in "Better Call Saul," he's also developed no attachments since his relationship with Kim Wexler (Rhea Seehorn) failed. Saul probably sounds fun to play (and he definitely always has the best lines in any given scene), but I can see why Odenkirk would regard the persona as "less challenging" than Jimmy or Gene.
Low Tolerance For Scumbags
Speaking to Vince Gilligan, the Empire interviewer postulated that the writers "fell in love with Jimmy" and "didn't want to spend any more time with Saul Goodman than was absolutely necessary." Gilligan agreed with the sentiment and added the following:
"I think your psychoanalysis is right on the money. There are so many despicable people, real-life people in the world now, on a news feed every day. So five, six, seven years ago I could have stood Saul Goodman more. We could maybe have had a season of just Saul Goodman. But there are so many sh*theels in the world right now, succeeding and excelling and taking up all our attention. My capacity to stomach yet another one, fictional though he may be, probably lessened."
Gilligan's comments, and his lessened stomach for evil, also help explain the difference between "Breaking Bad" and "Better Call Saul." The former shows a man succeeding at being evil, the latter is about a man failing to be good. Some of Walter White's (Bryan Cranston) early criminal actions are framed as badass, particularly his debut as Heisenberg when he blows up a drug den with fulminated mercury in "Crazy Handful Of Nothin." Nothing about Saul Goodman's existence ever looks enviable, though, especially when we see what Jimmy lost and where being "Saul" will lead him to.
An Evolution In Perception
During a 2018 interview with Chris Hardwick, Vince Gilligan was asked the question many "Breaking Bad" fans have considered themselves: was Walter White a good man turned evil, or was Heisenberg always his true self? Gilligan admitted that his own answer to this conundrum changed the more he spent with Walt:
"When I wrote the Pilot, I thought Walter White really was a great guy and he truly needed to do what he needed to do to leave money for his family [...] I figured this good man would become, by virtue of the act of immersing himself in this swamp of criminality, he would therefore become bad, [...] what I came to realize, which I didn't at the beginning, it's like that old saying about Hollywood, 'Success [...] it's not so much that it changes you, but that it reveals your true self.' And I think, in my opinion, that's what happened to Walter White."
While in "Breaking Bad," you realize that Walt is a less complicated man than you first assume, you learn the opposite about Jimmy McGill. He's a flawed man, but not an evil one, so you don't want him to become Saul. The show chronicles the descent of Mike Ehrmantraut (Jonathan Banks) in the same fashion. Even drug kingpin Gus Fring (Giancarlo Esposito) denies himself a less violent path when he brushes off flirting from a sommelier (Reed Diamond) in "Fun & Games."
Gilligan's comment about how one's true nature is revealed through success reflects the finale of "Better Call Saul," — Jimmy throws away a sweetheart plea deal to atone for his sins via confession. Therein lies the final trick of Gilligan's world: the two-bit con man was at heart a better person than a once-upstanding chemistry teacher was.
Last week, LastPass announced that attackers stole customer vault data after breaching its cloud storage earlier this year using information stolen during an August 2022 incident. "While the company insists that your login information is still secure, some cybersecurity experts are heavily criticizing its post, saying that it could make people feel more secure than they actually are and pointing out that this is just the latest in a series of incidents that make it hard to trust the password manager," reports The Verge. Here's an excerpt from the report: LastPass' December 22nd statement was "full of omissions, half-truths and outright lies," reads a blog post from Wladimir Palant, a security researcher known for helping originally develop AdBlock Pro, among other things. Some of his criticisms deal with how the company has framed the incident and how transparent it's being; he accuses the company of trying to portray the August incident where LastPass says "some source code and technical information were stolen" as a separate breach when he says that in reality the company "failed to contain" the breach. He also highlights LastPass' admission that the leaked data included "the IP addresses from which customers were accessing the LastPass service," saying that could let the threat actor "create a complete movement profile" of customers if LastPass was logging every IP address you used with its service.
Another security researcher, Jeremi Gosney, wrote a long post on Mastodon explaining his recommendation to move to another password manager. "LastPass's claim of 'zero knowledge' is a bald-faced lie," he says, alleging that the company has "about as much knowledge as a password manager can possibly get away with." LastPass claims its "zero knowledge" architecture keeps users safe because the company never has access to your master password, which is the thing that hackers would need to unlock the stolen vaults. While Gosney doesn't dispute that particular point, he does say that the phrase is misleading. "I think most people envision their vault as a sort of encrypted database where the entire file is protected, but no -- with LastPass, your vault is a plaintext file and only a few select fields are encrypted."
Palant also notes that the encryption only does you any good if the hackers can't crack your master password, which is LastPass' main defense in its post: if you use its defaults for password length and strengthening and haven't reused it on another site, "it would take millions of years to guess your master password using generally-available password-cracking technology" wrote Karim Toubba, the company's CEO. "This prepares the ground for blaming the customers," writes Palant, saying that "LastPass should be aware that passwords will be decrypted for at least some of their customers. And they have a convenient explanation already: these customers clearly didn't follow their best practices." However, he also points out that LastPass hasn't necessarily enforced those standards. Despite the fact that it made 12-character passwords the default in 2018, Palant says, "I can log in with my eight-character password without any warnings or prompts to change it."
After Rian Johnson took the reins and veered "Star Wars" towards a greater future with "The Last Jedi," the arrival of "The Rise of Skywalker" felt like such a step backward. It was less of a natural continuation of the story, and more like a course correction to appease the sect of fans who felt as if they had somehow been betrayed. Everything that once was is now presented in what appeared to be a brand-new package, including the revival of some familiar faces.
"Star Wars" has been reviving deceased force-sensitive characters ever since "The Empire Strikes Back," with force ghost Obi-Wan Kenobi (Alec Guinness). The purpose of their inclusion has usually been to impart some wisdom on the main characters during a moment of inner conflict, whether it's Yoda's fireside lesson ("The Last Jedi") or Obi-Wan confirming Luke's suspicions about Vader ("Return of the Jedi"). Even Luke (Mark Hamill) himself returned in the blue-hazed form. But the ghostly appearance of one character caught a lot of folks by surprise, myself included.
After Kylo Ren (Adam Driver) has been momentarily defeated on the wreckage of the second Death Star, he's greeted by the spirit of his father, Han Solo (Harrison Ford). Given Ford's comments about wanting to let the character go, it came as a shock to see him return for one last appearance, especially since he's not considered a force-sensitive character. His death in "The Force Awakens" may have given Ford the out he needed, but J.J. Abrams made him an offer he couldn't refuse.
A Favor To Abrams And Driver
According to a 2020 article from USA Today, even though the character had plunged into the heart of Starkiller Base, Ford had been approached by Abrams to come back for the brief scene:
"When JJ asked me to do it, I said, 'Are you kidding? I'm dead!'[...] He said, 'Sorta dead. You can do this.' He hadn't written anything at that time. But he said, 'This is going to be great.' So I said okay. If JJ asked you do something, you'd probably do it too. He's a very persuasive guy."
On top of that, he also saw this as a good opportunity to give a boost to the emotional journey of Kylo Ren. "It was a useful addition to the story and the continuing development of Adam Driver's character.[...] And the chance to do another scene with Adam was great," says Ford.
Back when Ford was making the press tour rounds for "The Force Awakens," his answer to coming back as Han jokingly involved the mention of money. When Jimmy Fallon asked him if the character's return made him emotional, he hilariously responded with "no, I got paid." The payday for "The Rise of Skywalker" was likely too big to turn down, but I can also see him having a great deal of respect for Abrams and Driver. In terms of why Han would return, his presence felt like the best alternative that didn't involve dredging up Carrie Fisher's likeness.
'I Don't Know What A Force Ghost Is'
At this point in the story, Kylo Ren had lost a lightsaber duel with Rey (Daisy Ridley), in addition to losing his mother, Leia (Carrie Fisher) from across the galaxy. It would have been more emotionally fulfilling for her to bring her son to his senses, given that she's in tune with the Force, but given Fisher's untimely passing between the making of "The Last Jedi" and "The Rise of Skywalker," bringing Ford in for a day or two was the next best step. Lucasfilm even went so far as to put out a statement saying that thankfully they weren't going to digitally recreate her likeness, so much as repurpose leftover footage from "The Force Awakens."
Having a Force ghost preside over the final transformation of Kylo Ren to Ben Solo would have made sense, but I can also buy Kylo Ren's weighted guilt coming back to haunt him in the form of his most personal kill. Even as a favor, Ford is still a wonderful actor who made the most of his brief screen time. The most hilarious thing about all of this is that, if you ask Ford about the logistics of his ghostly presence, he makes it very clear that it just doesn't interest him. As Ford bluntly told USA Today, "I have no (expletive) idea what a Force ghost is. And I don't care!"
"Star Wars: Episode IX - The Rise of Skywalker" is currently streaming on Disney+.
In short, it wasn’t my choice. Then who decided? Jim Leonard, aka Trixter. So is Jim able to singlehandedly decide who is and isn’t part of the ‘team’? Yes, apparently. So, it isn’t really a ‘team’ then, is it? No, it is not.
What happened is a long and complicated story, some of which you may have been able to read between the lines already in thesetwo earlier blogposts. I think it is only fair that I make the full conversation between Jim and myself available, so it’s not just a “he said, she said”. So you can read back what happened exactly. And I will give my view on this:
In short, given the aftermath of BLM protests-turned-riots after George Floyd’s death, and the fact that there were even BLM/Floyd-inspired protests in my country, I was curious about Jim’s view on this, given that these riots had taken place in his country, and some even close to where he lives.
As far as I am concerned, this was a conversation between two people who have known each other for many years, and could be considered friends. And it was a conversation where I showed interest in current affairs and cultural phenomena.
Also, given that we are more or less the same age, I would have assumed that Jim would have a similar liberal, humanist outlook on these things, given that this was the dominant view in Western culture for as long as we can remember, and this woke ‘successor ideology’ has only come into vogue in recent years. Not to mention that just common sense, logic and rationality would lead you in that direction anyway.
But apparently I was wrong. For some reason, Jim did not apply any kind of rational thinking or common sense, but seemed to have been fully emerged into the dogma’s of the woke cult. Which resulted in him just giving knee-jerk reactions. To the point where he escalated by asking me if I were a “White Supremacist”. Because apparently that’s what you call people who don’t want to racialize everything, and who don’t want to judge people based on the colour of their skin, but on the content of their character?
Shortly after that, I let the conversation rest for about a month, and I wrote the first article on wokeness. I don’t know if Jim read that, but when I picked up the conversation again, a month later, he only insisted even more. Instead of just asking, he started literally calling me a “White Nationalist”, and basically became completely unhinged. For no apparent reason as far as I am concerned, as I have said nothing even remotely racist, unlike him.
Not wanting to get too deep into this whole woke/CRT/intersectionality thing again, but there are a few things I’d like to mention.
First, there is this article that talks about Learned Helplessness, which also explains why this woke view on ‘White Privilege’, ‘White Supremacy’ and such, is actually a form of racism in itself.
Secondly, the article also explains how this creates a mindset where black people think they have less agency than they actually do. The included diagrams make it very obvious that the *perception* of racism has changed a lot, while the actual racism has not. Because of the framing of CRT/BLM, people blame more things on racism/discrimination, rather than on their own actions.
Or, in the words of the ever insightful and eloquent Helen Pluckrose:
Consciousness-raising: developing in yourself or in a group of people like you in some way a greater awareness of your own worth, particularly in relation to your position in society to undo a false schema (or consciousness) you have accepted uncritically that devalues you.
Speaking of Helen Pluckrose, for more background regarding woke/postmodernist ideology, as well as its antithesis, premodernist ideology, I can suggest this excellent article from 2017, which is still relevant today:
This also covers another pet peeve of mine: how the enemies of Modernity make everything political, and put every topic and opinion either under the left-wing or the right-wing label. If it’s not the one, it must be the other.
Which boils down to this: CRT/BLM is supported by left-wing. So if I am critical of CRT/BLM, then I must be right-wing, and the fact that I even want to discuss this topic means that the discussion is ‘political’.
None of which is true. But that is what I ran into. First, Jim clearly gave me an ‘ultimatum’: as a proper wokie, he made ‘political’ topics ‘off-limits’, where ‘political’ can be any subject we don’t agree on. Free speech, free opinions… we can’t have any of that! And apparently, it was fine that he called me an asshole, White Supremacist and whatnot… but ohnoes, I responded to his many insults and deliberate misrepresenting of my statements with an f-bomb. Totally inappropriate! I mean, why would Jim hold himself to the same rules as me? He can say and do anything, but I must bow to His Greatness, and only speak when spoken to.
These were terms that I was not willing to accept. So I mentioned on the team mailing list that Jim called me a White Supremacist, and that I was not willing to work under those circumstances. To which Jim responded by removing me from the mailing list, Github, Trello and whatever other team resources I had access to. He even blocked me on Twitter. He tried to cover up this cowardly ego-act by claiming he was afraid that I would delete the team resources if I had access. Yea right… Firstly, I didn’t have the rights on most resources to do that, and secondly, I would never do anything remotely that childish. I guess it says a lot about him that he thinks like that.
Okay, so now the ball was in the court of the rest of the team. Did I say team? Whoops, nope. There is no team. Only one person reached out to me, and we could discuss what happened in more detail. I haven’t heard from the others at all. Apparently they were fine with Jim calling me a White Supremacist, and removing me from the team single-handedly (does that mean they too think this? Based simply on Jim saying that?). They didn’t care that I wasn’t part of the team any longer, or that Jim had made it impossible for me to return to the team, as it stands. The disconnect between him and me would have to be resolved, and it is pretty obvious, at least to me, who is in the wrong here.
I mean, I can’t even begin to imagine how you can think that someone whom you’ve known for many years, who’s never made political references, let alone racist references, is somehow a White Supremacist, and is somehow trying to be a political activist, or whatever it is he thinks. What’s worse, I can’t even begin to understand how you can think that it’s just fine to call someone a White Supremacist, and then think you can still make a demo together. You know that when you do that, you cross a line, one that is not easy to get back from. You chose to burn that bridge.
And I don’t understand either how the rest of the people from 8088 MPH could just be silent when someone boots one of the members out of the team, under some vague accusation of “White Supremacist”. I mean, unless you’ve been living under a rock, it should be pretty obvious that accusations of “White Supremacy” are being thrown around gratuitously by radicalized activists, so when you hear that accusation being thrown around, the first thing you do is smell a rat, not think the accusation is an accurate representation of someone’s stance.
But well, with the exception of one person, apparently nobody thought that. After the release of Area 5150, I asked what exactly the other team members thought. But only two people responded, and both of them gave me the same bullshit ‘political’ nonsense. One of them even went into an unhinged rant, making all sorts of assumptions about me that were obviously wrong. When I pointed out that in all my years of demoscene and writing music, I have NEVER included any kind of political statement whatsoever, and even on this blog, I have only written two blogs regarding ‘wokeness’, which obviously were related to what happened with Jim (but were written AFTER our initial clash, so could not have *caused* the disagreement with Jim), there was no response.
I guess I am just deeply disappointed. Both in people in general, and in these people I considered to be friends in particular. You’d think there’d be some kind of bond, some mutual trust and respect after having made 8088 MPH together, visiting Revision, and then staying in touch for years after that, working on a successor. But nope, apparently none of that means anything to them.
But to me it means I won’t join another team lightly. It takes months, if not years, of intense work and collaboration to make a demo of the caliber of 8088 MPH or Area 5150. I thought it should be obvious that this requires a good team, with mutual trust and respect. But apparently others think you can just call people a White Supremacist and think they’ll just continue making a demo with you. Well, not me anyway.
In closing, I would like to mention the book The Parasitic Mind, by Gad Saad. I read it recently, and I recognized various aspects. Like Gad Saad, I value freedom and truth a lot. And I like to approach things with a healthy combination of rationality and humour. Jim’s behaviour in the conversation can be described as ‘enemy of reason’. Some of Gad Saad’s descriptions are spot-on for this case.
This is also about the two modes of thought, as formulated by Daniel Kahneman. “System 1” is where you act primarily, based on emotions and preconceptions, where “System 2” is more elaborate, logical reasoning.
Gad Saad argues in his book that you can use nomological networks of cumulative evidence to show that something is likely to be true (or false). And if you read back the conversation, you can see that I try to bring in various sources of information, and try to approach topics from various sides. Sadly, Jim does not bother to even look at them. He outright rejects sources, simply based on the messenger (or more accurately: the radicalized activist propaganda against the messenger that he has been exposed to). So there’s a problem with that approach: you can bring a horse to water, but you can’t make them drink. Well, at least I tried…
It just surprised me that even demosceners, who should be more System 2-oriented, can be so socially awkward they they are only going for knee-jerk System 1-thinking when the topic is more social/cultural than technical, and don’t bother to dive any deeper in the subject matter, even when it’s being spoonfed to you, and aren’t able to keep an open mind and have a more logical, rational approach (not even the rather obvious possibility that organizations such as BLM and Antifa might not be exactly what their name implies). And instead, actually choose to behave like a total asshole toward you, and not even have the self-reflection to see what you’re doing. To me, Jim shows all the signs of having been radicalized.
Anti-woke isn’t anti-black, anti-immigrant, anti-LGBT, or anti-equality. It’s neither MAGA nor fascist, and it’s absolutely not discriminatory or extremist. Anti-woke rejects the artificially constructed forced morality binary. Elevating arbitrarily chosen “grievances” and protecting select groups above others can only end in disaster. Not all grievance rises to a level that requires or demands redress. Don’t allow yourself to be manipulated.
This sounds like Jim:
Ironically, in practice, wokeness manifests in bullying, threats, identitarian essentialism, and devaluation of others. Many times it’s just narcissism masquerading as empathy.
Sadly, it does not address any of the core issues, and he also lies about the fact that he singlehandedly removed me from the mailinglist and other resources. Also, it doesn’t make sense that he claims “we could continue making demos together as long as we never discuss politics again” (which as I already said, is an unacceptable ultimatum), while at the same time he has blocked me from Twitter and other resources. The one who would want to continue is the one who doesn’t block the other party, and that would be me. As I said, just not under circumstances that are unacceptable, so those had to be worked out first. With the whole team obviously (as it was clear at this point that Jim had completely shut down the conversation with me, and there was no way for me to get any kind of point across, and trigger any kind of introspection. He had dug himself in too deep for that). There was no reason to block me if I had just chosen to no longer contribute. But blocking me does guarantee that I CANNOT contribute, and cannot even get in contact. And that is what Jim did. For those who still need subtitles: look up “passive-aggressive behaviour“.
Bonus: there is a rather long comment that provides quite a bit of scientific/historic information, and you can find Jim’s response once again denying science and history, as he’s still fully sucked into the cult. Jim’s response also seems to indicate that he sees no difference between my stance and the commenter’s, while there clearly is a fundamental difference (as anyone who has read my earlier articles on wokeness should be able to pick out). Spoiler:
To me, the only race that exists is the ‘human race’.
Update: Jim continues lying. I was removed from the mailing list almost immediately after my last message. That is BEFORE anyone could even respond. Which means Jim had not had feedback from anyone. Jim was also the sole administrator of the mailing list, so he was the only person who could remove me from it. Ergo, he singlehandedly removed me from it, without consulting the rest of the team (if you read between the lines, he basically admits this, since he doesn’t mention any feedback from the team, between points 4 and 5. He just pulls up a smokescreen to hide that, by claiming I’m wrong, which I’m not. He’s just being manipulative, as we’ve already seen in the private exchange as well).
Aside from the obvious logic that I had no reason to leave the team other than Jim calling me a white supremacist repeatedly, combined with all the other underhanded bully tactics you can find in our mail exchange. It should be obvious that I would have wanted an apology and some kind of reconciliation, but other than that, there was no reason not to continue on the demo. But Jim clearly didn’t want me on the team anymore, so that never happened (Jim isn’t man enough to just outright say “I didn’t want you on the team because I think you’re a racist and white supremacist, and that’s why I took action”. He wants to disguise his actions and motives, but he’s the one who decided to burn that bridge. Now he can’t own up to it).
Even now, if you read his message, he doubles down on me actually being a racist/white supremacist. He just regrets saying it to me. That’s not an apology, is it? The problem is that you think I’m a racist. Not whether or not you say it out loud. Who wants to be friends with a racist? And who wants to be friends with someone who thinks they’re a racist? So what we would need, is some reconciliation where you understand that my viewpoints are not racist (nor political for that matter). Jim is just a terrible person. And he tries to cover up for how terrible he is. He even removed the comment from user ‘Catweazle666’, to hide his denial of science and history. Just keep digging that hole deeper, Jim!
He removed it under the guise of ‘political’. Which it wasn’t. It was a combination of some historical facts, and Catweazle666’s personal view on these. There were no politics involved. History isn’t political (well, it is when you’re woke, because you want to rewrite history to suit your political agenda). So there we are, Jim has given us the perfect proof that he indeed will censor anything he doesn’t agree with, under the guise of it being ‘political’, exactly as I said.
The part where he claims he was “trying to help me” because I would have been “deeply troubled” is hilarious (not to mention completely arrogant and misplaced). Anyone who reads the conversation, can see I was not asking for help, nor was he giving it (but perhaps he means that he thinks that everyone who doesn’t share his opinions, is deeply troubled and needs help). Also, it is clear that I wasn’t deeply troubled. I was more surprised that groups of people in various parts of the country were tearing down entire city blocks in riots, based on ideology that at least as far as I had looked into it, was basically a conspiracy theory (similar to the classic antisemitic conspiracy theory where a small group of powerful Jews would control the world, except the Jews were replaced with ‘White Supremacists’ in this version. A conspiracy theory that Jim has clearly bought into, given that the only ‘proof’ he goes on for me being a ‘White Supremacist’, is that I do not condemn ‘The System’ enough to his liking. As such, I must be ‘complicit’ in this ‘system’, which makes me a ‘White Supremacist’, despite the fact that I have never uttered anything remotely racist or white supremacist myself. That is how radicalized he is). Given Jim’s responses, and his inability to have a reasonable, factual conversation, but instead shut down and start insulting his otherwise calm and rational discussion partner, he is the one who is deeply troubled. Are his social skills that bad that he can’t even read a conversation properly? Or is he again lying and manipulating to make himself look good in the shitshow that he himself created, at my expense?
His claims about deleting resources are also quite sad. The fact that *someone* may have done this in the past still doesn’t mean that *I* would ever do that (aside from the fact that as I already said, I wouldn’t have the rights to do that in the first place). I’m a different person. Apparently Jim is a very poor judge of character. And apparently, Jim thinks very lowly of me. Again, where’s the mutual trust and respect, if I were to do a demo with him? The fundamental difference here is that Jim judges me on things that he *thinks* I would say or do (but never actually said nor did, nor even planned to say or do, as he is very wrong in his judgement), whereas I merely judge Jim on things he *actually* said and did.
His tribal groupthink is also obvious in how he thinks he is a spokesperson for all Americans, when he describes what he thinks. Whereas in the conversation it is clear I only asked him what *he* thought, and would in no way generalize that to ALL Americans. We’re all individuals, all capable of making our own decisions, forming our own thoughts etc.
It's (another) Rian Johnson whodunnit! The news that Johnson was teaming up with Natasha Lyonne for a puzzle-of-the-week series for Peacock called "Poker Face" was exciting enough when we only had the success of his mysteries "Brick" and "Knives Out" to go off of, but after the hilarious delights of "Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery," Johnson may have carved himself a little niche as Hollywood's go-to director for stories of mystery and intrigue. "Poker Face" marks Johnson's return to the small screen, after having directed some all-time great episodes of "Breaking Bad," but this is his first project where he's got full creative control.
Lyonne plays an accidental detective named Charlie Cale, who has been gifted with the innate ability to tell if someone is lying. A sleuth with the ability to sniff out fibbing is one hell of an advantage in the line of duty but poses a pretty big challenge in how to write a mystery show centered on a ridiculously effective character. In the most recent issue of Empire Magazine, Johnson talked about how he creatively worked around it. "It presented an interesting obstruction in the writing process: how is it not over in the first five minutes of talking to the person," he told Empire.
As he would explain, the mystery isn't whether or not someone is lying, it's figuring out why they feel the need to fib in the first place. "[Charlie] gives this monologue in the pilot about how people are constantly lying," he said. "You have to pay attention to why the person is lying about that specific thing."
Can't Read Lyonne's Poker Face
Rian Johnson and Natasha Lyonne both spoke to Empire Magazine about their excitement for the series, and how it relates to their own interests. "I really love the accidental detective," Lyonne told Empire. "You know, the person who stumbles into a life of solving things just because their brain works that way." Given her character's ability to detect dishonesty, Charlie Cale is like the inverse of Ana de Armas' Marta in "Knives Out," who is incapable of telling a lie without puking. This talent also allows Charlie to solve mysteries rather quickly, allowing "Poker Face" to follow in the footsteps of beloved shows like "Columbo" and "Murder, She Wrote."
"The fact that with each new episode we can attack a totally different style and story and cast ... it's something similar to the mystery movies with Daniel [Craig]," Johnson said. "If I can keep doing it, then I will." Lyonne joked with Empire that Johnson is the perfect person to continue writing these mysteries because he can solve the Saturday edition of the New York Times crossword puzzle. "I can do a Thursday and a Sunday, sure. I can do most of the days of the week, but he can do a Saturday, and to me, that's a really good reason to want to be in that person's puzzles," she said.
"Poker Face" will premiere exclusively on Peacock with four episodes at once, with the remaining six to stream every Thursday starting on January 26, 2023.
This author was exiting a screening in Hollywood, California when he spotted the preeminent film critic Leonard Maltin in the halls of the theater. He was idly looking at a pair of posters for upcoming film releases. The poster for Fede Álvarez's them-upcoming 2013 film "Evil Dead" was displayed on the wall next to Andy Fickman's upcoming 2012 family comedy "Parental Guidance," starring Billy Crystal and Bette Midler. The tagline for "Parental Guidance" was a whimsical "Here come the grandparents, there go the rules." Meanwhile, "Evil Dead" sported the bold assertion "THE MOST TERRIFYING FILM YOU WILL EVER EXPERIENCE." Maltin, tapping into his inner bon vivant, proposed that the two films ought to swap taglines. It would certainly apply, he felt, to "Parental Guidance."
The 2013 version of "Evil Dead" was a remake of Sam Raimi's 1981 low-low-budget cult classic "The Evil Dead" about a group of friends who run afoul of demons at a remote cabin in the woods. Raimi's "The Evil Dead," its two sequels, and spinoff TV series are frequently held in high esteem by young horror lovers and remain excellent examples of how to make low-budget films look and feel energetic and exciting. They also serve as a lesson on how horror tropes can be effectively accented using the language and timing of slapstick comedy. The 2013 film kept a lot of Raimi's enthusiasm for blood, but removed a lot of the more slapstick elements to insert, well, more blood. One of the final scenes of "Evil Dead" depicts one person chainsawing another person's head lengthwise while blood literally rains from the sky.
The 2013 film was a modest hit, and Irish writer/director Lee Cronin will return in April of 2023 with a spinoff called "Evil Dead Rise."
Evil Dead Rise
According to a 2022 interview with Empire Magazine, Lee Cronin wanted to pay his proper respects to Sam Raimi's original two films, a double feature he says he watched with his father when he was only nine years old. The first film was initially rated X, and has since been rated NC-17 (meaning in the United States that no children under 17 are permitted to see it) for its pervasive levels of blood and gore. The sequel was rated R, making it safe for someone under 17, provided a guardian is present. The original was included on England's notorious list of Video Nasties. In the case of the quite silly and very funny "Evil Dead" movies, violating the rating suggestions is more like an impish act of punk rebellion. It seems that Cronin's father was quite open-minded and eager to share something over the edge with his child. Cronin's father is, according to Empire, now 80 and saw how taking his son to a double feature led directly to filmmaking work as an adult.
Prior to filmmaking, however, Cronin was issued a pair of edicts by Raimi, who serves as executive producer on "Evil Dead Rise." In Raimi's words, Cronin was to "Make sure there's a book involved, and make sure there are good Deadites." The action in the three "Evil Dead" movies is always instigated by dark magic flowing from the Necronomicon, an evil tome bound in human flesh and inked in blood. Reading from the book summons Deadites, a flock of demonic monsters that can take possession of humans, alive or dead. Raimi and his crew created some rather impressive makeup and designs for the monsters and insisted they remain terrifying.
"What I love about the 'Evil Dead 'is that these aren't just mindless zombies. They talk [and] taunt. [...] There's more Deadite dialogue than ever before."
Empire also reported that Cronin, to keep the series' quota of blood, made 6,500 liters — about 1,700 gallons — of the stuff in a specialized blending lab.
"Evil Dead Rise" is not a direct sequel to the 2013 film, but will follow the experiences of sisters Beth and Ellie, played by Lily Sullivan and Alyssa Sutherland, and Ellie's three young children, as they discover the evils of the Necronomicon in a cramped apartment in Los Angeles. Contrary to the previous movies, this will be the first "Evil Dead" flick to be set in a big city. One might immediately intuit, however, that any city-bound resources will not aid in the fight against Deadites.
Bruce Campbell, the star of the first three "Evil Dead" movies as well as the spinoff TV series "Ash vs. Evil Dead" bears no credits on "Evil Dead Rise" other than as an executive producer. This doesn't discount the possibility, however, for a cameo appearance; Campbell did appear after the credits of the 2013 film to deliver his signature catchphrase "Groovy." It's also been established that "Evil Dead Rise" is indeed set in the same universe.
So long as the filmmakers are enthused, the blood levels remain high, the humor remains intact, and the budget remains constrictively low, there's no reason not to keep making films under the "Evil Dead" banner for generations. "Evil Dead Rise" is merely another iteration of a now well-worn series. Long may they reign.
As the year's end shuffles into view, number-crunching firms are taking a look back at the last 12 months to recognize patterns, facts, and figures as they pertain to gaming, retail, prices, sales, and player behavior — And a new report from the statisticians at NewZoo offers up some interesting reading.
NewZoo places its estimate for the global games market value at a staggering $184.4 billion USD. This accounts for almost game sales, on PC, console, and mobile platforms. It should also be noted that this already impressive figure does not take into account Nintendo game sales, as the publisher has always been weirdly prudish when it comes to revealing its own bottom line.
Of this total market value, $51.8 billion manifested through console games, with a further $38.2 billion pulled in by downloaded/boxed PC titles, and $2.3 billion from browser-based PC games. Of course, mobile gaming takes the lion's share, with a massive $92.2 billion in total revenue. This sector was led by the continued dominance of titles such as TiMi Studios' Honor of Kings, and PUBG Corporation's PUBG Mobile, which continue to earn billions year-on-year from the global market.
When it comes specifically to console gaming, around 72% of all game sales were digital downloads, with only the remained 28% accounting for physical releases. This continues a trend we have witnessed for many years now, with each consecutive year seeing more and more customers opting for digital game purchases over boxed copies. Again, this figure does not include Nintendo Switch software, which represents perhaps the last real bastion of high-street retail gaming purchases.
The Achilles heel of being a gamer is that we are locked ceaselessly in a battle against our backlogs. No matter what we do, we just can’t seem to ever quite get out from underneath that growing list of titles that we put aside for a “slow period” that never materializes. We get side-tracked by the next shiny major release, that new game that everyone is talking about, or a game that our friends beg us to play with them. There are an endless number of forces working against us in this most noble crusade to eliminate the backlog.
I come before you today to propose some minor respite in this battle of the backlog. A window. An opportunity. The cavalry, if you will. I propose that the video game community adopts an industry-wide moratorium on new game releases, beginning at 12:01AM the day following The Game Awards. No game can release beginning at that time, with new releases resuming on January 1st of the following year. And I am only half-joking. The industry is almost to that point of its own volition, as dropping a major new release after The Game Awards is largely a fool’s errand that gets lost in the hustle and bustle of the holidays. I say we stop with the half-measures and commit fully as an industry. The last three weeks of December shall be hereby dedicated to annihilating the backlog, full stop.
Of course, this also requires a certain amount of self-discipline from us gamers. No grabbing a handful of games on a deep price cut during the holiday sale on your platform. No starting a second play through of your favorite game. No downloading a free-to-play MMORPG just to see what it’s like, risking getting sucked in for dozens of hours. Who does that?
This is all much easier said than done, of course, but I stand resolute before you, dear gamers. Shall we unite to defeat the almighty backlog, or continue to tremble before it on bended knee?
With these tenets in mind, today I'll be finishing up God of War Ragnarok (finally) and then testing out Genshin Impact for the first time because a friend wants to play it. And I'll do it in spite of needing to return to Ghostwire: Tokyo or dozens of other games in my backlog. Listen, some of us are just stronger-willed than others!
It’s a question we’ve all asked ourselves at some point in time: How do I take a screenshot on this thing? There’s a good reason for that, as knowing exactly how to capture that funny text, strange email or high score is eternally useful. And on some devices, it turns out there’s a bit more to taking a screenshot than simply hitting the right button combo.
Below we’ve put together a comprehensive guide to taking a screenshot on the most popular phone, tablet, PC and gaming platforms, from iOS and macOS to Windows and Android. If you or your less tech-literate loved ones find yourselves forgetting how to get the right shot, consider this an all-in-one resource.
How to take a screenshot on an iPhone
Apple
If you own a recent iPhone without a physical Home button, you can capture a screenshot by pressing volume up and the right side button at the same time. You’ll hear a shutter noise if your sound is on, and you’ll see a small preview of the screenshot in the lower-left corner of the screen. You can then tap on that preview and edit the screenshot as needed.
With iPhones that do include a Home button, such as the iPhone SE, press theHome button and right side button at the same time. And for older iPhones whose sleep/wake button is located at the top of the device, press the top button and the Home button at the same time instead.
For an alternative method, you can also use iOS’ Back Tap feature, which allows you to take a screenshot just by double- or triple-tapping the back of your iPhone. To enable that, go to Settings >Accessibility >Touch, select Back Tap, and set the Double Tap or Triple Tap settings to Screenshot. You can use this feature to perform other functions as well, such as activating Siri or turning on your flashlight.
If pressing multiple buttons at once is physically difficult, another option is to use the AssistiveTouch feature. This puts a small virtual button on-screen at all times, which you can tap to quickly access various device menus and settings. To activate this, go to Settings > Accessibility > Touch, then set AssistiveTouch to on. From there, you take a screenshot by tapping the AssistiveTouch button, then tapping Device > More > Screenshot.
Jeff Dunn / Engadget
There are a couple ways to make this process quicker, though. First, you can go back to your Touch settings, look under Custom Actions, then set the Double-Tap or Long Pressoptions to Screenshot. As you can guess, this will let you double-tap or long press the AssistiveTouch button to capture a screenshot. Alternatively, you can go to Customize Top Level Menu and either add or swap in Screenshot. This will make the screenshot function appear in the default menu that pops up whenever you press the AssistiveTouch button.
Beyond that, you can always ask Siri to capture a screenshot for you. Pulling up the voice assistant – either by saying “Hey Siri” or holding the side or Home button – and saying “take a screenshot” will do the job.
By default, your screenshot will only capture the visible portion of your display. If you’re reading a larger web page or document and want to capture the whole thing without taking multiple screenshots, though, you can. Just tap the screenshot preview when it pops up, then select Full Page at the top before saving your capture.
To find your screenshots on an iPhone (or iPad), open Apple's Photos app, go to the Albums tab, scroll down to Media Types, then select Screenshots.
How to take a screenshot on an iPad
Apple
Taking a screenshot on an iPad is largely similar to what you’d do with an iPhone. If your iPad does not have a Home button, press the top button and either volume buttonat the same time. If there is a Home button, simultaneously press the top button and Home button instead.
If you have an Apple Pencil, you can also take a screenshot by swiping the stylus up from either corner at the bottom of your display. It’s possible to use this shortcut without a Pencil, too: If you go to General > Gestures, ensure Allow Finger to Swipe From Corner is on, then set either Left Corner Swipe or Right Corner Swipe to Screenshot, you can quickly capture the screen by swiping out from either corner with just your finger.
Siri and AssistiveTouch are still options, too, though Back Tap is not available on iPadOS.
How to take a screenshot on a Mac
Devindra Hardawar / Engadget
There are multiple ways to take a screenshot on a Mac, most of which depend on how much of the screen you actually want to capture.
The simplest method is to press and hold Shift + Command + 3 on your keyboard. This will take a snapshot of your entire screen. Again, you’ll see a preview thumbnail in the bottom corner of your display, which you can click on to quickly edit.
If you only want to screenshot a specific portion of your display, hit Shift + Command + 4. Your mouse cursor will turn into a little crosshair, which you can drag to select the segment of the screen you want to capture. From here, you can do a few things:
If you hold the Space bar while dragging the crosshair, you can reposition the selected capture area while keeping it locked in its current size and shape.
If you tap the Space bar, the crosshair will turn into a camera icon. If you move this over an open window or menu, then click, you’ll capture a screenshot of that window or menu alone. By default, these captures will have a border around the edges – if you don’t want that, you can exclude it by holding the Option (⌥) key while clicking.
If you hold the Shift key while dragging the crosshair, you’ll lock in the sides of the selected capture area except for one edge. This allows you to more finely adjust the size of your capture before taking the screenshot.
You can cancel the screenshot, meanwhile, by hitting the Esc key.
Once you release your trackpad or mouse button, the screenshot will be captured.
Jeff Dunn / Engadget
MacOS also includes a dedicated Screenshot app, which you can quickly pull up by pressing Shift + Command + 5. You’ll see a small toolbar with all of the screenshot functions noted above, including icons for capturing the whole screen, one portion or a specific window. There are icons for taking a video that records all or part of the screen, too, plus options for choosing where your screenshots save, turning off the preview thumbnail and so on.
By default, your captures will save directly to your desktop. If you want to paste a screenshot into another app – say, an iMessage thread – you can copy it to your Clipboard by holding the Control key while capturing. Hitting Shift + Command + Control + 3, for instance, will capture and immediately copy a screenshot of your entire screen, which you can quickly paste elsewhere. Just note that this won’t save the screenshot to your location of choice.
Finally, if your MacBook has a Touch Bar, you can capture that as well by pressing Shift + Command + 6.
How to take a screenshot on an Apple Watch
Apple
To take a screenshot on an Apple Watch, you first need to enable the feature, either through the Settings app on the wearable itself or the Watch app on your iPhone. On an Apple Watch, go to Settings > General > Screenshots, then turn on Enable Screenshots. On a paired iPhone, open the Watch app, go to My Watch > General, then scroll down and activate Enable Screenshots.
Once that’s all set, you can press your watch’s Digital Crown and side button simultaneously to take a screenshot. Your captures will be stored in the Photos app on your iPhone, in the Screenshots folder within the Albums tab.
How to take a screenshot on Android
Sam Rutherford/Engadget
Not all Android phones and tablets behave the same way, so the exact command for taking a screenshot may differ depending on which device you own. Most of the time, though, you can do the job by briefly pressing the power and volume down buttons at the same time.
Similarly to iOS, you’ll usually hear a shutter sound from your Android device that confirms the capture, then you’ll see a preview thumbnail that you can edit, share or delete. If you save the screenshot, it will typically reside in your device’s photos app.
You can also go hands-free by asking the Google Assistant – or an alternative like Bixby on Samsung phones – to “take a screenshot.”
Many recent Android phones can take scrolling screenshots, letting you capture a full message thread or web page in a manner somewhat similar to the Full Page option on iOS. The feature goes by different names on different devices and can be somewhat finicky, but it often involves taking a screenshot, then tapping an icon with two arrows when the screenshot preview pops up. This icon is labeled “Capture more” on many Android devices, while certain Samsung phones, for instance, call it “Scroll Capture.”
Jeff Dunn / Engadget
There are likely additional ways to take a screenshot on your Android device of choice, but exactly how those work differ by manufacturer. To give some examples:
On recent Google Pixel phones, you can swipe up from the bottom of the screen and hold for a moment to open up the app drawer (or tap the square Overview button, if you’re using Google’s 3-button navigation mode), pick the open app you want to capture, then tap the Screenshot button that appears underneath.
On some Samsung Galaxy devices, you can take a screenshot just by swiping the edge of your hand across the display. Just go to Settings > Advanced features> Motions and gestures, and ensure Palm swipe to capture is turned on first.
On select Motorola, OnePlus and Xiaomi phones, there are options for taking a screenshot by swiping down on the screen with three fingers.
If you find your phone is making things difficult, remember that there are many third-party apps that can replicate screenshot features that are native on other devices.
How to take a screenshot on Windows
Jeff Dunn / Engadget
The most straightforward way to take a screenshot on a Windows PC is to press the Print Screen (PrtScn) button. This will copy a full-screen capture to your clipboard, which you can then paste in any program that accepts images (Microsoft Paint, a Twitter DM, et al.). To do the same thing, but only for one active window, press Alt + Print Screeninstead.
Pressing the Windows key and Print Screen, meanwhile, will take a full-screen screenshot that saves directly to your PC, instead of only being available via the clipboard. You’ll know this worked if your screen goes dim for a moment. You can then find the image by going to File Explorer (Windows key + E) > Pictures (under “This PC”) > Screenshots.
Note that you can also make screenshots automatically save to Microsoft OneDrive. To do this, click the OneDrive cloud icon in your taskbar, go to Settings (the gear icon) > Backup, then check Automatically save screenshots I capture to OneDrive. If you don’t like having to manually paste PrtScn screenshots from your clipboard, this is an alternative way to avoid it, provided you don’t mind using cloud storage.
Jeff Dunn / Engadget
For partial screenshots, press the Windows key + Shift + S to bring up the Snipping Tool (or, in Windows 10, the Snip & Sketch app). This dims the screen and presents a small menu with options for a rectangular, freely drawn, single window or full-screen snip. The first two of those let you click and drag a cursor around the specific portion of the screen you want to capture. (The rectangular option is generally tidier than the freeform one.) Once you release your mouse button or trackpad, you’ll take the screenshot.
When you take a screenshot with the Snipping Tool, you’ll see a preview thumbnail in the bottom corner of the display. Clicking that will let you edit the image in myriad ways, save it to a specific folder and so on. By default, though, any screenshots taken through the Snipping Tool will automatically save to both the clipboard and your Screenshots folder.
If you find yourself using the Snipping Tool often, note that you can set the Print Screen button to open the app. Just go to Settings > Accessibility > Keyboard, then turn on Use the Print screen button to open screen snipping.
If your keyboard doesn’t have a Print Screen button, you can press Fn + the Windows key + Spaceto take a screenshot. On recent Microsoft Surface devices, meanwhile, you can also hit volume up + the power button at the same time. Both of these methods will save your captures to the Screenshots folder noted above.
Jeff Dunn / Engadget
Finally, you can take a screenshot via the Xbox Game Bar, an overlay with quick links to various functions and settings, many of which are aimed at gaming. You can pull this up by pressing the Windows key + G. From there, select Capture (the icon in the middle that looks like a webcam) and hit the Take screenshot button (the camera icon) to take a full-screen capture. You can also hit Windows key + Alt + Print Screento capture a screenshot through the Game Bar without having to open up the overlay.
Any Game Bar screenshots are saved to File Explorer> Videos > Captures on your PC, though you can also find them by going back and clicking Capture in the Game Bar itself, then clicking See my captures in the resulting menu. Note that you can create screen recordings through this Capture menu as well.
As of this writing, using the Capture menu in the Game Bar is also the simplest native method of taking a screen recording in Windows. However, Microsoft recently confirmed plans to add a video recording option to the Snipping Tool in the near future. The company says you’ll be able to record your entire screen or just a cropped section when the feature fully rolls out.
How to take a screenshot on a Chromebook
Nathan Ingraham / Engadget
In most cases, the fastest way to take a screenshot on a Chromebook is to press the Control (Ctrl) and Show Windows keys at the same time. This grabs a shot of your entire screen. As a reminder, the Show Windows key looks like a rectangle with two lines next to it. It’s often located where the F5 key would be on a Windows PC.
Hitting Shift + Control + Show Windows, meanwhile, opens up ChromeOS’ Screen Capture toolbar. This presents a menu with options to capture all of your screen, a specific portion or a single open window. It also gives you the ability to take a recording of part or all of your screen. You can get to these tools through your Chromebook’s Quick Settings menu as well. To access that, click the time in the lower right corner of the screen, then click the Screen Capture icon that appears in the resulting menu.
Google
Note that some Chromebooks have a dedicated Screenshot key, which looks like a rectangle with a circle in the middle. If your device has it, you can just press that button instead of the three-button shortcut above. If you have a ChromeOS tablet, you can take a screenshot by hitting the power and volume down buttons simultaneously. And if you’re using an external keyboard, you can press Ctrl + F5 to take a full-screen capture, or Ctrl + Shift + F5to pull up the Screen Capture menu and/or grab a partial screenshot.
Once you take a screenshot, ChromeOS will automatically copy it to your clipboard, and you’ll see it appear in a small window in the bottom corner of the display, from which you can edit or delete the capture. Recent screenshots will appear in a holding area on your taskbar – or “shelf,” in Chromebook parlance – called the Tote, while all of your captures will go to your Downloads folder by default.
How to take a screenshot on a Nintendo Switch
Kris Naudus / Engadget
Taking a screenshot on a Nintendo Switch is easy: Just press the square Capture button. This is located underneath the directional buttons/D-pad on the left-side controller of a Switch, Switch OLED or Switch Lite. You can also take a video of your last 30 seconds of gameplay by holding the Capture button down for a moment. As with most game consoles, note that you won’t be able to take a screenshot in certain apps and, occasionally, at specific moments in some games.
You can find your captures by going to the Switch’s home menu and selecting the Album icon at the bottom of the display. It’s the one that looks like a blue photo.
You can transfer a screenshot from your Switch to a computer with a USB cable. Go to the home menu, select the System Settings icon, then go to Data Management > Manage Screenshots and Videos > Copy to a Computer via USB Connection. Then, connect the Switch to your computer through an appropriate cable and copy it from there for sharing and the like.
Jeff Dunn / Engadget
You can also transfer screenshots with a microSD card. If you have one installed in your Switch, go back to Manage Screenshots and Videos. From here, select Save Location to ensure your captures are saved to the microSD card, which you can remove and insert in other devices to access your captures. (Per usual, you may need an adapter to use the card on devices without a proper microSD slot.) Use the path “\Nintendo\Album” to find the captures on the card. To copy screenshots from the Switch’s internal storage to a microSD card, go back to Manage Screenshots and Videos, then select System Memory > Copy All Screenshots and Videos to microSD card. This might take a few moments to complete.
To transfer a specific screenshot, go to Album from the home screen, go to the capture you want to share, then hit A to bring up the Sharing and Editing menu. From here, you can select Copy to copy the screenshot to a microSD card (if it’s not there already), Send to Smartphone to wireless send one or a small batch of captures to your phone via QR codes, or Post to directly (and slowly) post a capture to a connected Facebook or Twitter account.
How to take a screenshot on a PlayStation 5
Aaron Souppouris / Engadget
By default, you can take a screenshot on a PS5 by pressing and holding the Create button on your DualSense controller. This is the thin button located just above the D-pad. (On the PS4, it was labeled Share.) When you release the Create button, you’ll see a confirmation icon if the screenshot was taken successfully.
As an alternative, you can briefly press the Create button once, then select Take Screenshot in the small menu that pops up at the bottom of the screen.
Among other things, this menu also lets you take a video recording of your recent gameplay. If you want to capture something that just happened, select Save Recent Gameplay and choose the appropriate video length. You can also do this by double-tapping the Create button. If you want to start recording future gameplay, select Start New Recording, then go back to the menu and select Stop Recording to do just that.
Jeff Dunn / Engadget
If you find these default methods to be too slow to reliably capture fast-paced gameplay, you can reconfigure how the Capture button works. To do this, go to the PS5’s Settings menu – which is easily accessible by selecting the gear icon in the upper-right corner of the home screen – then go to Captures and Broadcasts > Captures > Shortcuts For Create Button > Button mapping and select the option you want. My preference is the “Easy Screenshots” configuration, which makes it so tapping the Create button once takes a screenshot, holding it brings up the create menu, and tapping it twice saves a video of recent gameplay. (The default length of video clips is configurable in the Shortcuts for Create Button menu as well.)
All of your PS5 screenshots and videos automatically save to a somewhat tricky-to-find app called Media Gallery. One way to get there is by scrolling to the far end of the PS5’s home screen and selecting Game Library, then opening it up within that. Another is to go back to Settings, then select Storage > Console Storage > Media Gallery. If you click the PS logo button on your controller shortly after taking a screenshot, you can reach the Media Gallery through the New screenshot card that’ll pop up in the control center menu, too.
Jeff Dunn / Engadget
However you get to it, you can share your screenshots from the Media Gallery by hovering over a specific capture, hitting the Options button (the thin button opposite the Create button), and selecting Share. You can then send a screenshot to Twitter, a video to Twitter or YouTube, or either to folks on your PlayStation friends list as a PS5 message. This Share option is available through the New screenshot control center card as well. (It’s the arrow icon.) You can copy captures to a connected USB drive from the Media Gallery as well, which may be the most convenient option if you’re looking to send a batch of screenshots and videos to a computer.
It’s also possible to make the PS5 automatically send screenshots to your phone. First, you have to download the PlayStation app on iOS or Android and link it to your PS5 console. In the app, go to the Game Library tab, hit the Captures toggle at the top, then tap Enable. Then, on the PS5, go to Settings > Captures and Broadcasts > Captures and ensure Auto-Upload is activated. Any captures you manually take on your PS5 will now go straight to the app – but photos will only stay there for 14 days, and video clips must be less than three minutes long.
How to take a screenshot on an Xbox Series X/S
Aaron Souppouris / Engadget
To take a screenshot on an Xbox Series X/S, simply tap the Share button on your controller while playing a game. To take a video recording, press and hold the Share button. (It will capture the last 30 seconds of gameplay by default.) If you double-tap the Share button, meanwhile, you’ll bring up a list of your recent screenshots and video clips.
If you’re using an older Xbox One gamepad without a dedicated Share button, press the Xbox logo button on your controller while playing a game to bring up the Xbox guide menu, then press Y to capture a screenshot or X to record your last 30 seconds of gameplay. If you want to record a longer stretch of gameplay, hit the View button (the one with two rectangles) and select the duration you want. You can still use the guide to capture screenshots and videos with a Series X/S controller, though naturally it’ll be slower than just hitting a button.
Jeff Dunn / Engadget
This guide menu allows you to record upcoming gameplay as well. For that, press the Xbox logo button on your controller, go to the Capture & share tab on the right side of the guide, then select Start recording. (If you want, you can also take a screenshot or record recent gameplay from here, too.) To end the recording, open the guide back up with the Xbox logo button, then press the X button. Note that your recordings and screenshots will start and stop from the moment you press the Xbox logo button, not when you press Y or X afterwards.
In any event, you’ll see a notification appear once you’ve taken your screenshot or video clip. If you hold the Xbox logo button on your controller while this banner is on-screen, you’ll open up the Share menu. This lets you quickly share the capture to your Xbox activity feed or an Xbox club, attach it to a message, post it directly to Twitter, or send it to your OneDrive account. You can trim video clips, set a capture as a background or delete it from here as well.
Jeff Dunn / Engadget
If you download the Xbox mobile app and link it to your account, you can also use the Share menu to send screenshots and video clips straight to your phone. Just select Mobile. Once the capture hits your phone, you’ll see quick links for easily sharing or downloading it right from the Xbox app. To see all of your Xbox screenshots and video recordings in the app, go to the My Library tab – the one with the icon that looks like three books – then select Captures.
If you just want to keep playing, know that you can access these screenshot management options at any time. Just hit the Xbox logo button, move to the Capture & share tab, then select Share last capture or Recent captures, selecting a screenshot or video to share and/or edit from there. As noted above, you can also double-tap the Share button on an Series X/S controller to open the Recent captures menu.
Microsoft
It’s possible to change the default length of video recordings in your Xbox’s settings. You can get there by selecting the gear icon at the top right of the home screen. Alternatively, you can hit the Xbox logo button, move to the Profile & system tab – it’s on the right in the guide menu – then select Settings in the middle of the menu. Then, go to Preferences > Capture & share > Record what happened, then select whatever duration you prefer.
The Capture & share menu is also where you can, among other options, turn off automatic uploading of screenshots to the Xbox network. Be aware that Xbox screenshots must be uploaded to the network in order to be shared in the first place, so if you deactivate this setting, you’ll have to manually upload any individual screenshot or video you want to share going forward. Still, this can save you from seeing a bunch of pop-up notifications while playing.
Microsoft
To see all of the screenshots and video clips on your Xbox console, go to the Captures app. To get there, double-tap the Share button to get to the Recent captures menu, then select Show all at the bottom. Or, press the Xbox logo button, then select My games & apps > See all > Apps > Captures. (It’ll look like a gamepad in front of a film strip.) Either way, once you’re there, hover over a capture and hit the Menu button on your controller (the one with three horizontal lines) to access options for sharing, deleting, copying to external storage, uploading to OneDrive, etc. You can also select Manage at the top to more easily delete or upload captures in bulk.
To customize how the Share button behaves, use the Xbox Accessories app. You can get to this by selecting Button mapping in the Capture & share menu, or by going back to the Apps menu and selecting the app icon with a joystick on it. If you do the latter, select your controller, then select the pen icon to edit your profile. Now you can make it so double-tapping the Share button starts and stops a recording, to give one example.
Using third-party tools to capture and share screenshots
ShareX
For the most part, it’s straightforward enough to share your screenshots directly from the built-in tools on most platforms. That said, it’s worth remembering that there are third-party alternatives on some OSes that can make the process a bit easier.
ShareX, for example, is worth a shout. It’s a free and open-source program with all the screen capture options as Windows’ Snipping Tool, plus a range of after-capture editing tools. Notably, it also allows you to directly upload (and delete) captures to image hosting services like Imgur (with easily shareable URLs), apps like Twitter and Google Photos, cloud storage lockers like Dropbox and more. You can make it so captures automatically go to these destinations, too.
Dropbox Capture, meanwhile, puts quick options for taking screenshots, video recordings and audio recordings in your taskbar, then lets you copy (either as an image or URL) and/or download your captures for easy sharing right from there. There are plenty more options beyond that, so if you find yourself needing a little extra power, you aren’t necessarily limited – though, as always, you should exercise caution with lesser-known services that may carry privacy risks.
Several months ago I had a go at producing a high resolution 256-color driver for Windows 3.1. The effort was successful but is not yet complete. Along the way I re-learned many things I had forgotten, and learned several new ones. This blog entry is based on notes I made during development.
Windws 3.1 running Word in a usable resolution
Source Code and Development Environment
I took the Video 7 (V7) 256-color SuperVGA sample driver from the Windows 3.1 DDK as the starting point. The driver is written entirely in assembler (yay!), consisting dozens of source files, over 1.5MB in total size. This driver was not an ideal starting point, but it was probably the best one available.
The first order of business was establishing a development environment. While I could have done everything in a VM, I really wanted to avoid that. Developing a display driver obviously requires many restarts of Windows and inevitably also reboots, so at least two VMs would have been needed for a sane setup.
Instead I decided to set everything up on my host system running 64-bit Windows 10. Running the original 16-bit development tools was out, but that was only a minor hurdle. The critical piece was MASM 5.NT.02, a 32-bit version of MASM 5.1 rescued from an old Windows NT SDK. The Windows 3.1 DDK source code is very heavily geared towards MASM 5.1 and converting to another assembler would have been a major effort, likely resulting in many bugs .
Fortunately MASM 5.NT.02 works just fine and assembles the source code without trouble. For the rest, I used Open Watcom 1.9 tools: wmake, wlink, and wrc (make utility, linker, and resource compiler). I used a floppy image to get the driver binary from the host system to a VM, a simpler and faster method than any sort of networking.
With everything building, the real fun started: Modifying the Video 7 driver to actually work on different “hardware”.
Trials and Tribulations
Fortunately there was not a huge amount of Video 7 specific code in the sample driver. Unfortunately the hardware specific code was sprinkled throughout the code base.
My first change was to unify the bank switching code, which is critical for performance. The sample driver had about half a dozen different bank switching routines (no, I don’t know why). I replaced them with one, and made sure the bank switching is only done when necessary (i.e. the current bank differs from the requested one).
Why not use a linear framebuffer, you ask? From the beginning, I did not want to restrict the driver to 386 Enhanced mode Windows. Using a LFB in Standard mode is difficult; it’s easy to reprogram a selector base, but that breaks down when the system runs with paging and the LFB is not mapped. Even worse, in real mode a LFB just can’t be used, period.
Then came the painstaking work of removing the V7 specific drawing code. There was more of it than I’d expected. The V7 hardware has latches and pattern blit registers that accelerate certain operations. Now, there were pure software fallback drawing paths more or less everywhere, but not at all clearly identified. It took some effort to force all drawing to go through the software path.
There was one very nasty bug related to this; the driver assumed that the hardware pattern blit registers take care of pattern rotation. Forcing pure software drawing could lead to a situation where the pattern was not correctly rotated. This caused very visible problems when dragging windows around, as the selection rectangle (a patterned line) was prone to leaving “droppings” behind.
I ditched any attempts to use offscreen memory in the driver. While that is usually a performance win on real hardware, it’s not in a VM. Due to the bank switching overhead, moving data from system memory is always faster.
The drawing code in the V7 driver assumes that a single scanline never crosses a bank boundary; that significantly simplifies the drawing logic because there’s no need to potentially switch banks between two adjacent pixels. The original driver used a 1K pitch, allowing maximum horizontal resolution of 1024 pixels. I changed that to 2K, which enables resolutions up to 2048 pixels horizontally. This could potentially be made more flexible in order to conserve video memory, but at least for the time being that didn’t seem worth the effort.
The mouse cursor drawing code had another nasty bug in it. The V7 driver would more or less always use the hardware cursor and the software fallback was probably very rarely used, if ever. Under some circumstances, the routine to save screen contents under the cursor could be entered with the direction flag set, and ended up copying data in the wrong direction and overwriting innocent memory. A single CLD in the right place fixed that.
I also had to contend with the question why the colors in my driver are different from the Windows 3.1 VGA/SVGA drivers. I learned that for whatever reason, the Windows 3.0 and 3.1 8514/A driver (the canonical high-res driver) really used a different color scheme. This was documented in the Windows 3.0 and 3.1 DDKs, although no explanation was provided as to why the colors should be different.
Tools Fun
The linker (wlink) caused one very interesting problem. By default, wlink enables far call optimization, replacing far calls with near ones. This optimization is almost always safe and a performance win, but not in the case of the Windows display driver. The driver “compiles” drawing routines by copying fragments of code from the code segment on the stack, assembling a selection of them together as needed and modifying constants within the code. Now, wlink optimized the far calls within the code segment, which would have been fine, but when that code got copied on the stack, calls to the code segment really needed to be far. Disabling the far call optimization was trivial once I knew what the problem was.
As a side project, I also wrote a quick and dirty wmapsym tool, a functional equivalent of Microsoft’s MAPSYM but using Watcom map files as input. This proved extremely useful when debugging the driver.
Apropos debugging—the tool for Windows 3.1 driver debugging is WDEB386, a more or less standard Microsoft-ish debugger similar to SYMDEB, the OS/2 kernel debugger, NTSD, and others. I used it with input and output redirection to a serial port; this was routed to a pipe on the host, and PuTTY attached to the pipe.
WDEB386 in PuTTY
Going More Retro
The display driver functionality in Windows 3.1 Standard and 386 Enhanced does not matter much. The one area where there’s a major difference is DOS session support. In 386 Enhanced mode, there’s a whole dedicated VxD (VDDVGA) that handles video virtualization.
Even when switching to a fullscreen DOS session, the display driver remains active in 386 Enhanced mode, but it is notified via dev_to_foreground and dev_to_background calls that it’s going to the background or coming back. In Standard mode, the driver is shut down via the Disable call when switching to a full-screen DOS session, and re-initialized via Enable on the way back.
Things started getting even more interesting with Windows 3.0. In Standard and 386 Enhanced mode, the differences from Windows 3.1 are minimal. But Windows 3.0 running in real mode is a different beast. I had to modify the driver to not use any APIs available only in protected mode and decide at runtime (using WinFlags) what to do.
It would have been lovely if I had the Video 7 sample driver from the Windows 3.0 DDK. Alas, I never managed to find it. Anyone?
Windows 2.x was more work to get going. The basic structure of the driver is the same, there are just fewer GDI calls the driver needs to implement. For the most part, Windows 2.x is extremely similar to Windows 3.0 in real mode. The difference is that the API calls added to support protected mode (such as AllocCSToDSAlias) do not exist in Windows 2.x at all. The drawing code is essentially identical, but the driver initialization and teardown need to be slightly different.
In theory it might have been possible to import the Windows 3.x specific routines dynamically, and use a single binary for Windows 2.x and 3.x. In practice that is not workable because the drivers also need a different format of resources (Microsoft significantly changed the resource format between Windows 2.x and 3.0). It was therefore much simpler to create a separate Windows 2.x driver binary and use conditional compilation for using either Windows 3.x or 2.x code paths.
A related complication was that I could not find a resource compiler capable of dealing with Windows 2.x resources and running on 32-bit Windows. I resorted to running RC from a Windows 2.x SDK in a DOS VM in order to finalize the 2.x driver binary. Not pretty but fully functional.
All in all, it was an interesting retro development trip. And there’s more work to be done.
Update: An interesting problem was noticed in Windows 3.1 running in Enhanced 386 mode. A windowed DOS application performing a mode set (e.g. ‘MODE CO80’) would corrupt the display. Specifically the host VGA hardware (host from Windows 3.1’s point of view) would switch to planar mode, disrupting 256-color banked mode operation. This was unexpected since windowed DOS apps shouldn’t be able to do that.
This problem did not happen on Windows 3.0, and moreover it also did not happen when using VDDVGA30.386 on Windows 3.1 (the 3.0 compatible VDD or Virtual Display Driver is shipped with Windows 3.1 and some drivers use it).
Further probing established that on Windows 3.1, the display driver must call into the VDD and use the poorly documented VDDsetaddresses (0Ch) service. This subtly changes the behavior of VDDVGA. An internal fVDD_DspDrvrAware flag is set, which skips certain parts of the VDD logic.
Without the display driver linking up with the VDD, it appears that the VDD itself (as opposed to the windowed DOS box) modifies the VGA register state. This is likely not a problem for a display driver running in a planar VGA/EGA mode.
The exact logic is very poorly explained in the DDK documentation, but can be discerned from the VDDVGA source code in the Windows 3.1 DDK. As always, the source code is the best documentation.
There's been a lot of debate over the years over what exactly qualifies as the male gaze in film, but most people can agree that Leia's treatment in the opening act of "Star Wars: Return of the Jedi" definitely counts. Like the rest of Luke's crew, Leia (Carrie Fisher) gets caught by Jabba as part of their plan to rescue Han Solo (Harrison Ford) and is held captive by the Tatooine crime lord in the movie. Unlike the rest of the crew, however, she's forced to wear nothing but a metal bikini and a chain around her neck.
Jabba, and seemingly the camera itself, is constantly leering at Leia throughout the 1983 film, which is a strange choice for a supposedly family-friendly movie. Fisher herself would often speak out about how weird it was in the years that followed. "Don't be a slave like I was," she warned Daisy Ridley in 2015. "You keep fighting against that slave outfit." The sequel trilogy, for all its faults, managed to make it the whole way through without doing anything like this to its own female lead.
Still, if there's one saving grace of this part of "Return of the Jedi," it's that Leia gets to be the one to kill Jabba in the end. She takes the chain around her neck and chokes Jabba to death with it -- an act that could be interpreted as the movie commenting on the objectification of women. At least, that's how Fisher saw it. When asked in a 2016 NPR interview if she saw that act as "female empowerment," Fisher responded, "Oh, absolutely."
Sorta Kinda Redeeming The Outfit
As much as Carrie Fisher hated her metal bikini, she considered the resolution to this sub-plot as a worthy consolation. "What redeems it is that I get to kill [Jabba]," she explained. "I sawed his neck off with that chain that I killed him with. I really relish that 'cause I hated wearing that outfit and sitting there rigid straight, and I couldn't wait to kill him."
And sure enough, Leia strangling Jabba is one of the most satisfying moments in the entire "Star Wars" film series. It's even more satisfying with the prequel movies in mind, knowing both that Leia is the daughter and granddaughter of enslaved people and Jabba enslaves individuals. In a franchise where so many of the villains have sympathetic backstories and are given moments of redemption before their end, it's nice to have a moment where a main character gets to murder a baddie the movie doesn't even try to make us feel bad for.
Whereas Luke (Mark Hamill) struggles a lot with the idea that killing Darth Vader might turn him to the dark side, Leia slays Jabba without a second thought, and it's perfectly fine; her place on the light side is never in doubt. That might sound like a double standard, but Luke was objectified in the way Leia was. Putting Leia in that outfit may have been a weird, bad choice for "Return of the Jedi," but at least the film lets her have an unapologetically badass moment in return.
Though it can be depressing to consider the worst in tech each year, sometimes naming some of the losers can actually bring some schadenfreude. In 2022, watching the long-overinflated crypto bubble burst was like staring at a pimple being popped in slow motion: oddly and grossly satisfying. And though some of us were sad to see Stadia go, no one in the tech and gaming industries was surprised when Google sent it to the graveyard. More frustrating, though, were the debacles that unfolded this year with very real and sometimes dangerous repercussions for the most vulnerable communities. As we recap the worst things that happened in tech in 2022, let’s hope that the year ahead brings more positive developments for us all.
Twitter
Even before Elon got his hands on Twitter, the service was being mis-handled by its leaders. As soon as Musk floated the idea of a $44 billion takeover earlier this year, Twitter CEO Parag Agrawal and the company’s board seemingly jumped at the potential payday. Who cares if it’s a singular social network, one of the few platforms for under-served communities to get their voices heard? Agrawal alone reportedly received $57.4 million from the sale. (Founder Jack Dorsey ended up rolling over his investment in the site, rather than nabbing a near $1 billion payout.)
And now we have Musk’s Twitter, an increasingly toxic pit of the internet’s worst, driven entirely by the richest man in the world’s id. Advertisers are leaving in droves, and Twitter obsessives are making their way to whatever alternative they can find. Meanwhile, Musk is learning just how difficult running a social network is (what’s that, you actually need content moderation?!). At this point, we can only hope Twitter will go the way of Tumblr: Mismanaged until it’s sold at a fire sale price to someone who actually cares about the internet. — Devindra Hardawar, Senior editor.
Crypto, FTX and everything related
2022 saw the value of major cryptocurrencies fall by a significant margin, with billions of dollars being wiped off the industry in minutes. Major crypto companies saw that a winter was coming, and started running layoffs in the hope of staunching the flow. But that winter got turned into a blizzard when FTX collapsed, pulling the already downward trends even further south. The year also saw plenty of other crypto exchanges get hacked, or burn up quite spectacularly when things got hairy. It was only then that the air started pouring out of Sam Bankman-Fried’s bubble, and we’re living through the consequences of that right now.
An Aside: I studied company law and finance for two years, and while I’d never pretend to be a high-minded finance type, even a cursory look at FTX should have aroused suspicion. The business was structured so opaquely that it seemed like an obvious ploy to mask something, be it amateurishness, or criminality. No company that drew in just $388 million in profit needed to be structured into 100 wholly-owned sub-businesses – only a megacorporation like Disney could possibly justify such a sprawling structure.
The other thing that FTX’s collapse should remind us all is that, while the current banking system is hardly a paragon, it does it least function. The fact that FTX was allowed to hold so much money in a system run by a bunch of comparatively unqualified figures is ludicrous. Maybe there’s a reason we don’t let a bunch of relatively young kids with little real-world experience in the banking world run major financial institutions.
JANE ROSENBERG / reuters
If you want to know how bad FTX was, just look at what John Ray III, who famously nursed Enron through its bankruptcy, wrote in the Chapter 11 filing. “Never in my career have I seen such a complete failure of corporate controls,” he said, adding that the founders were “inexperienced, unsophisticated and potentially compromised.” It gets worse when you reach the bit where it turns out the company had no idea how much cash it had at any one time. Which is surely table stakes for most financial institutions?
Then there’s the, ahem, alleged prevalence of wash trading in the NFT sphere, as holders swap assets amongst their wallets to give the appearance of a healthy market. Or the fact that a number of major crypto billionaires recently passed away in mysterious circumstances. But there’s no proof, friends, that this is tied to crypto’s usefulness in laundering cash for major criminal networks. None at all.
I do think, however, that what will really hammer the nail into crypto’s coffin in 2023 is the recession, as people need to cut down on their luxuries to pay for the essentials. Sure, you could justify buying a Bored Ape as an “investment” when there were stimulus checks rolling around the economy. But when you’re deciding between getting $100 bucks to cover your fuel bill this month or a JPEG of Jimmy Fallon as a monkey, a lot of people are going to make the sensible choice. — Daniel Cooper, Senior editor.
Google Stadia
Stadia didn’t last long. But at times during its short life, it was amazing. During Cyberpunk 2077’s unmitigated disaster of a launch, Google’s cloud gaming platform was one of the best places to run the sprawling game with minimal problems. When many couldn’t get the latest PlayStation or Xbox, Stadia was a way to play games with visual fidelity beyond the PS4 and Xbox One – as long as your internet connection could handle it.
The problem (and there are a few reasons why it struggled) was Stadia didn’t have enough games to stay relevant. Exclusives were rare and there simply weren’t as many games as the competition. Many of Stadia’s titles were also far more expensive to buy compared to other online game stores – even when on sale. When the company closed its internal development studios last year, it was not a good sign.
Then, a rumor gathered pace in late July 2022 that Stadia was going to be shuttered by the end of the summer. It was never substantiated, but it was enough to send devoted Stadia gamers (and their communities in places like Reddit) into freefall. Perhaps this was because Google has a reputation for killing its darlings. (RIP Google Hangouts, Play Music, Cardboard, Reader and the rest). Or perhaps because it was completely plausible?
Google denied it. Well, for two months. Then, the company announced it was shuttering the service, saying Stadia "hasn't gained the traction with users that we expected.” Which was… true. But it worked incredibly well. That’s probably why this isn’t where Google’s game-streaming tech ends. Earlier this year, AT&T offered a handful of games, including Control, to its customers through Google's Immersive Stream for Games – aka Stadia but not. Capcom used Stadia’s technology to offer a web-based Resident Evil: Village demo back in June, while Bungie reportedly used it to test out Destiny 2 changes and improvements with staff before rolling it out to gamers.
Google is, mostly, doing the right thing and reimbursing game and hardware purchases. But that didn’t include Stadia Pro subs – arguably what its most passionate supporters were using. Users will be able to play their game library until January 18, 2023. Then the Stadia servers get turned off, forever. — Mat Smith, UK Bureau Chief.
Tasos Katopodis via Getty Images
Period tracking apps and digital privacy
After the Supreme Court’s draft decision to overturn Roe v. Wade leaked, there was widespread panic. Amid disbelief, incredulity and outrage, people began to question if the tools they were using to track or avoid pregnancy would be used against them. Chief among the concerns was the reliability of period and cycle tracking apps. Were they collecting data that could be used to identify people who had terminated pregnancies? Would they hand that information over to anyone looking for it?
The Dobbs decision had a ripple effect when we went from scrutinizing the privacy policies of all cycle-tracking apps, to realizing that the overall digital privacy of every user was on a tenuous foundation. Lia Holland, campaigns and communications director for Fight for the Future, told Engadget in June that period-tracking apps were the “canary in the coal mine in terms of our data privacy.”
We learned too, that tracking tools used by platforms like Facebook to serve personalized ads could also be used for insidious reasons. Anti-abortion groups, for example, kept tabs on people seeking abortion services using Facebook’s advertising tools, despite Meta’s rules against doing so. Those groups could also share the data with third-party anti-abortion marketing companies to target “abortion-minded” people with ads. Though Google announced its intention to phase out third-party cookies in Chrome by 2023, this year the company had to delay that to 2024 as it continues to test a feasible replacement that would protect consumer privacy while allowing marketers to serve targeted ads.
At the start of 2022, Google announced that it was trying out a different tracking approach called Topics API, instead of the FLoC method it had initially prioritized. In February, after years of testing, Google’s proposal was accepted by the UK’s Competition and Markets Authority. Still, despite rolling out previews of its privacy sandbox on Chrome in March and Android in April, Google still needed to push back the disabling of third-party cookies in its browser another year.
The outlook on our digital privacy in general may be bleak, but there may be hope for improvement. With all the scrutiny this year, many popular period-tracking apps took clear stands and launched privacy-focused modes or made it clear that they would not collect user data. The FTC has also warned companies and data brokers against the misuse of health and location data, and said it was “committed to using the full scope of its legal authorities” to safeguard consumer privacy. — Cherlynn Low, Deputy editor
Peloton
Peloton and home fitness tech (everyone went back to the gym)
We’ve all been cooped up at home long enough and in 2022, we all let the dogs (and ourselves) out. And as we all ventured outside, we stopped using the at-home gear we bought to tide ourselves over during the dark days of lockdown. Every time we came home to the sight of the expensive console or the exorbitant stationary bike we no longer used, we were reminded of sadder times or unfulfilled goals.
So while companies like Peloton and Bowflex saw a huge boost in sales during the lockdown, they quickly saw numbers stagnate or plummet in 2022. After an ambitious effort to manufacture its own equipment, this year the company gave up making its own products and struck a deal to start selling its machines on Amazon. That marked the first time Peloton had sold its products on a platform other than its own, signaling that the company needed help to move units.
Since then, it’s also launched a partnership with sporting goods retailer Dicks to sell the Bike, Tread and Guide at 100 brick-and-mortar stores in the US. It also launched a rental program to let people get the Bike for a monthly fee and CEO Barry McCarthy said it was contemplating opening its workout content to competing bikes and treadmills.
These efforts to reach a wider audience makes sense. Peloton posted a net loss of $757.1 million for the first three months of the year on a revenue of $964 million. The company tried drastic cost-cutting measures, including laying off about 2,800 corporate employees, which is equivalent to 20 percent of its total workforce. It laid off an additional 570, 784 and 500 workers in July, August and October, effectively halving its workforce in a year. It also cut the prices of existing models in an effort to lower the barrier to entry and draw in more new customers.
It’s not all doom and gloom for Peloton, though. The company did launch a new rowing machine and connected camera this year, and appears to be setting its sights on more markets around the world. — C.L.
Mike Blake / reuters
Toyota’s EV failure
Everything about Toyota’s bZ4X is disappointing. It came far too late, long after the company established itself as a hybrid leader and Tesla paved the way for true electric vehicles. It’s a bit ugly and surprisingly boring compared to other EVs, judging from practically every review. Oh, and it had to be completely recalled because the freaking wheels could fly off. Instead of being a market leader in safety and reliability, the bZ4X made it seem like Toyota had never built a car before. Even its name didn’t make sense!
While Toyota has resumed production of the bZ4X, it’s clear the company missed out on a huge opportunity with its first mass market EV. (There was a RAV4 EV, once upon a time.) And it’s doubly disappointing after we’ve learned that the company has been lobbying to slow down the EV transition. It’s classic innovator’s dilemma stuff – after pioneering with hybrids, why rock the boat any further? Toyota is reportedly pushing to reboot its sluggish EV plans, and given its sheer size it’ll likely catch up to other EV companies within the next decade.
But the company’s image is tarnished. It used to be the car maker that put its customers first, one that actually cared about the environment. But it turns out even the good guys can become complacent. — D.H.
Many, many wrestlers have attempted to transition into acting over the years. This has come with mixed results, ranging from disastrous to impressive. Heck, Dwayne "The Rock" Johnson is arguably the biggest, most recognizable star on the planet. Then, we have guys like "Stone Cold" Steve Austin who have little to show beyond direct-to-video fares, such as "Hunt to Kill." But, in the eyes of director Rian Johnson, one wrestler-turned-actor stands tall above the rest: Dave Bautista.
Johnson recently worked with Bautista in "Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery," which is now streaming on Netflix (read our review here). In a recent interview with The Atlantic, the filmmaker explained that he originally hadn't thought of a guy like Bautista for the role of right-wing video game streamer, Duke Cody. "When I was writing [his character], I was picturing a scrawny dude who's trying to overcompensate. When Bautista was brought up, I was instantly so smitten by the idea. I've been a very big fan of his dramatic chops as an actor," Johnson said. When the interviewer said that Bautista is the best actor to come from the world of wrestling, Johnson then agreed.
"I absolutely 100 percent agree. And I think somebody like [Paul Thomas Anderson] is going to give him a real part and is gonna look like a genius. As a person, Bautista is genuinely, immediately vulnerable when you meet him, and that's what I was excited about. This is someone who has the physical trappings of someone who would play it big, but he actually brings sensitivity to the role."
The Resume Speaks For Itself
While difficult to quantify "best" in this arena, it is tough to argue with Rian Johnson's thinking here. Is The Rock arguably more successful? There is an argument to be made there. But in terms of raw acting talent and range, there doesn't appear to be anyone remotely close. (Though John Cena is making a pretty compelling case for himself as well, it should be said.) Looking over Dave Bautista's resume, it's growing more and more impressive, with a mixed bag of projects that any actor would be happy to have.
Bautista seemingly approached his acting career with no ego, starting out small, like an appearance on "Chuck" or with a role in "The Scorpion King 3." But fame came calling when he played Drax in "Guardians of the Galaxy," a role that yes, used his size, but also proved the man had copious amounts of charm. Drax is funny, dry, charismatic, and lovable. We don't get that out of many superheroes — particularly ones who were on the D-list before becoming a part of a major franchise.
From there, Bautista continued to make interesting, diverse choices. From his silent role as the henchman Mr. Hinx in "Spectre" to his compelling bit-part in "Blade Runner 2049," this is a man that made the most out of everything he said yes to. Rather than take the bigger, flashier part, he took the more interesting parts that allowed him to flex his skills and showcase his range.
His Willingness To Take Risks
Mr. Hinx, in particular, is a fascinating example of Dave Bautista setting ego aside. After a hit like "Guardians of the Galaxy," so many other figures from the world of wrestling would want screen time, lines, and spotlight. Instead, he wanted to do something interesting. As an actor, he proved that he could lead a studio comedy alongside a downright bonafide comedian in "Stuber," which co-starred Kumail Nanjiani. He went toe-to-toe with some of the finest actors as part of an ensemble in the underseen "Hotel Artemis." Heck, he even made a sweet PG, family-friendly action flick with "My Spy." The man has range and is not afraid to take risks.
Yes, we've absolutely seen Bautista do what is perhaps expected of a wrestler-turned-actor as well, but even then, he does it on a high level. Just look at "Army of the Dead," the zombie heist flick that saw him bring his A-game when, perhaps, an argument could be made that he didn't have to, in a movie with so much going on. He did it anyway, and the movie is better off for it. With his time as Drax in the Marvel Cinematic Universe coming to a close with "Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3," the door is wide open for even more from him in the future. In the rearview, he's got a multi-billion-dollar franchise to go along with his smaller successes.
Soon, we'll get to see what he can do in the hands of M. Night Shyamalan with "Knock at the Cabin," as well as a return to another sci-fi franchise with "Dune: Part Two" out in 2023 as well. So yeah, Johnson has a point.
"Knives Out: Glass Onion" is streaming now on Netflix.
The life of farmers and ranchers has never been easy. When Willie Nelson, Neil Young, and John Mellencamp organized the first Farm Aid concert to help struggling farm families in 1985, the total debt of farmers had experienced its peak of $440 billion just a few years earlier. Today, even before COVID-19 ravaged the meat industry and the country's entire food infrastructure, the total debt had already hit a staggering $425 billion. When the pandemic came knocking, government payments such as trade bailouts and federal relief programs accounted for 36% of net farm income, the eighth highest percentage share since The Great Depression.
In "Yellowstone," the fight to keep control of the Dutton family ranch is still raging, long after the ancestors of John Dutton (Kevin Costner) first laid claim to the Yellowstone Ranch in Montana. That story was told in the prequel series, "1883." Catching up on the family saga 40 years later, "1923" stars Harrison Ford as Jacob Dutton, a Montana Land Commissioner with struggles of his own. During the 1920s and '30s, banks were growing weary of extending credit to farmers and ranchers, and foreclosures were at an all-time high (via The Journal of Economic History).
To make matters worse, in the first episode of "1923," sheep and cattle are struggling to find enough grass to feed on, forcing Jacob to organize a massive cattle drive to higher altitudes where more grazing is possible. The situation already feels fairly dire, even with the challenges of Prohibition and The Great Depression looming large on the horizon.
Ford has previously sported a cowboy hat in "American Graffiti," played a bank robber in the comedy western "The Frisco Kid," and a cattle man in "Cowboys & Aliens." But "1923" is the first time he's played a real cowboy. Just don't call him one.
Jacob Dutton Is A Rancher, Not A Cowboy!
In an interview with Uproxx, Harrison Ford was quick to say, "I don't know what a 'cowboy' is!" After doing lots of press for "1923," a show he is obviously passionate about, the term "cowboy" has probably been a bit overused. When Jacob Dutton, the great-great uncle of John Dutton, is introduced in "1923," he's much more than just a cowboy. He's an aging man who is trying to lead a simple life as a rancher as the world grows more complex around him. Ford is definitely having a little fun with the semantics of the word "cowboy," but from his comments, it's clear that he wants to accurately depict the real people of the times. He explained:
"The guys who work on ranches are 'cowboys.' They work with cows. And many of them are boys! But he's a rancher, and a rancher is financially responsible as well as everything else for the outcomes. The pressures on Jacob Dutton at this point are considerable. The economic pressures. Banks are not loaning to cattle ranchers, having suffered losses. The business has not become as efficient as it needs to be just to generate consistent profits."
Ford, now 80, owns a ranch in Jackson, Wyoming, and seems to relate to the hardships that ranchers have had to endure over the generations. Not one to rest on his laurels, he even helped herd cattle in subzero temperatures while filming "1923" in Montana. Ford is more than just an actor, and Jacob Dutton is more than just a cowboy. He has to be a rancher, a businessman, and an officer of the state tasked with overseeing the local cattle industry for the Montana Livestock Commission. Life is becoming more complicated for the Dutton family and the world isn't slowing down.
The Struggle To Stay The Same In A Changing World
When "1923" begins, there's already a central conflict that Jacob has to head off at the pass. Settlers from Ireland and Scotland have come to Montana, bringing in sheep herders like Banner Creighton (Jerome Flynn) that are forced to fight for the land's quickly depleting resources. Some of Creighton's flock have been slaughtered, leading him to accuse a group of Irish farmers of the crime, which leads to a fight in the street (a classic trope of the Western) that Jacob has to break up. That's just one problem faced early on. For now, Jacob can only deal with what's in front of him, but Harrison Ford was quick to point out that the country is about to experience a bottleneck where the old ways of doing things collide with a new way of life.
"There are a lot of things coming that are unknown. There's electrification. There's cars in the street instead of horses," Ford told Uproxx. In one fell swoop, Ford went on to encapsulate how his character's actions will help cement the Dutton family legacy:
"Jacob Dutton looks around and he's seeing the threat to his way of life, to the simplicity. He's challenged by all of it. All of it becomes his responsibility to extend the opportunities he's had to his family for generations to come. You want that ranch, you got to keep that ranch in the family. You got to hold onto it, and there's a lot of pressure on it."
Find out how Jacob Dutton and everyone at Yellowstone Ranch stand up to that pressure when the next episode of "1923" premieres on Paramount+.
This piece contains mild spoilers for "Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery."
The first time Benoit Blanc (Daniel Craig) appears on screen in Rian Johnson's latest installment to the "Knives Out" franchise, he is in a tub. From the looks of it, it's an average tub spruced up with a chic, wooden tub tray, a bottle of Ricard, and one lone but cheery-looking rubber ducky. Benoit indulges in a cigar as he struggles to understand the rules of the popular video game, "Among Us." Viewers quickly learn that he's in the midst of quarantining during the pandemic, which has forced him to seek out new intellectual pursuits to keep his mind busy while he waits to return to his true passion of detective work.
Of course, Benoit is not playing "Among Us" alone. He is tapped in to a Zoom call with four friends: Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, Natasha Lyonne, the late Angela Lansbury (i.e. Jessica Fletcher from the supremely popular "Murder, She Wrote"), and, curiously, Stephen Sondheim. Sondheim, who passed away in 2021, is best known for his influence in the world of musical theater. He's worked on and written some of the biggest musicals — "West Side Story," "Into the Woods," "Sweeney Todd" — and has been an inspiration for countless numbers of people, including Rian Johnson.
But Sondheim's inclusion in this very famous on-screen quranteam goes beyond Johnson's appreciation for the late composer. It is also a subtle acknowledgement of one of Sondheim's other loves: mysteries. In fact, some might be surprised to find out that the screenplay for "Glass Onion: A Knives out Mystery" was partially inspired by a little-known neo-noir murder mystery flick that Sondheim helped write.
An Inspiring Boat-Born Parlour Game
It's no secret that "Knives Out" and its recent sequel are heavily inspired by the work of Agatha Christie. Benoit Blanc takes a page from the book of one of Christie's very own detectives, Hercule Poirot, and the plots of both of Johnson's films are filled with the same clever playfulness that makes Christie's mysteries so compelling. But the set up of "Glass Onion" is also influenced by the '70s whodunit, "The Last of Sheila." In an interview for Vanity Fair, Johnson explains that "Glass Onion" has ties to this Sondheim flick. "It's an incredible murder mystery," he says of the film. "We take a real page from it in terms of the set up of this movie."
"The Last of Sheila" was co-written by Sondheim and Anthony Perkins, and it tells the story of a group of friends who gather together for a cruise one year after the tragic death of Sheila Greene (Yvonne Romaine), the wife of one of the men in the group, Clinton Greene (James Coburn). On the boat, Clinton wants everyone to play a game where each guest is given a card containing a supposedly false piece of gossip that they must try not to reveal to those on board. However, as the game unfolds, it becomes clear that the secrets on the cards are actually true and that at least one of the friends on board — if not more — is also the murderer of Sheila Greene. The film is a clever mystery full of all of the twists and turns sleuths love, and fans of both films will no doubt see similarities between the two.
For The Love Of The Game
In terms of the similarities between the two films, Johnson tells Vanity Fair that in "The Last of Sheila" all of the guests meet on a dock and take a picture together before setting sail. For those who have seen "Glass Onion," you will recall that the guests of Miles Bron (Edward Norton) similarly convene on a dock before traveling by boat to Bron's island home. This scene serves as both an in-depth introduction to the characters, as well as the first opportunity for viewers to see everyone interact with each other in person. "You're trying to get across as much as possible," says Johnson.
Glass Onion" is also inspired by the plot of "The Last of Sheila" by having the characters take part in a murder mystery party game that actually ends up turning into a real life murder mystery. This idea of friends gathering to play an elaborate game is something that Sondheim occasionally did, as well, and which was also a big influence on the plot of his and Perkins' film. Ian article for The New Yorker details some of the aspects of Sondheim's "game parties," which included everything from "complicated maps full of numbers and arrows" to cryptic clues hidden in song lyrics.
The plot of "Glass Onion" obviously draws a lot of its charms from "The Last of Sheila," and even the film's eccentric character, Miles Bron with his love of complex puzzles, can be seen as an on-screen homage to Sondheim himself and his own love of figuring things out. The only difference is that while Bron is merely hiding behind a fake façade, Sondheim was the real deal.
What are the Elden Ring system requirements? With Shadow of the Erdtree creeping ever closer, it's time to revisit these demands to make sure your gaming PC still has what it takes to conquer the Land of Shadow,
Elden Ring supports a maximum resolution of native 4K with HDR if you have one of the best graphics cards, but the 60fps frame rate cap remains in place. As usual, this is circumvented through mods, and they're not difficult to install, so it's not a major obstacle to overcome for one of the best PC games.
Recently, a Reddit user posted that his reference AMD Radeon RX 7900 XTX graphics card was reaching 110C Junction temps while playing the new Modern Warfare II. However, when contacting AMD with an RMA request, he was denied, with the company stating that "The temperatures are normal. If there is any issue, please, contact us back." Another user made a successful request but was denied a refund for the previously opened box. The company has since received a bit of backlash for the issue, especially with the growing number of cases arising.
More cases of high temperatures on AMD Radeon RX 7900 XTX graphics cards continue to rise, with companies like PowerColor stepping up to help consumers
Before this new AMD development, NVIDIA received backlash for overheating and melting 12VHPWR connectors on the flagship NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4090 GPU, which surpassed thirty individuals and reported cases of issues after the graphics card launched.
What is unique about the AMD situation is that it is currently affecting the reference and AMD-manufactured Radeon RX 7900 series GPUs. It covers any cards sold by AMD partners or the company but not custom-created GPUs utilizing the same graphics architecture. It is speculated that a flaw could be in a few coolers or mounting designs as indicated by De8auer in the video below:
Three years ago, AMD posted in the company's blog an article titled, "AMD Radeon Community Update: More Control Over GPU Power and Performance, Enhanced Thermal Monitoring, Maximized Performance." When discussing junction temperatures in the enhanced thermal monitoring of the AMD Radeon VII GPU, they posted this statement:
... Instead of setting a conservative, ‘worst case’ throttling temperature for the entire die, the RadeonTM RX 5700 series GPUs will continue to opportunistically and aggressively ramp clocks until any one of the many available sensors hits the ‘hotspot’ or ‘Junction’ temperature of 110 degrees Celsius. Operating at up to 110C Junction Temperature during typical gaming usage is expected and within spec. This enables the RadeonTM RX 5700 series GPUs to offer much higher performance and clocks out of the box, while maintaining acoustic and reliability targets.
One of the technical engineering leads on the AMD Radeon RX 7900 XTX, "Kevin," does state that as of yesterday, the company is aware of the hotspot issue and is actively investigating and putting together a plan of action "to repro and collect serial numbers." He further explains that the current COVID situation overseas is slowing the process but agrees that a mechanical issue would fall under creating and fulfilling an RMA for consumers. Still, they are also looking into firmware updates to fix isolated incidents where a software fix would be necessary instead of a hardware replacement. "Kevin" also discusses edge heating, the temperature near the edge of the silicon on a GPU, stating that 90° edge temperatures are abnormal, but 70° edge temperatures are nominal.
Reddit user and PowerColor representative on the platform, "PowerColorSteven," is doing his part to assist consumers with this current issue about the AMD Radeon RX 7900 XTX graphics cards. For those who may not remember Steven, we mentioned in this article that the company had a prior issue where the AMD RX 6700 XT series GPUs were shipping with the thermal pad covers still attached, which, at the time, would cause high temperatures from the graphics card. The sales representative has been closely monitoring this issue for the last couple of days and recently posted this as a pinned thread on Reddit:
uh... just adding this in here in case anybody has not seen my other posts.
if you are dealing with the 110c issue and nobody else is helping you out. doenst matter which (AIB you bought this from) you bought it from. send me an email or direct message (since my emails are not working right today) (also, please dont use chat, that shit dont work right). i am putting together a list for my AMD contacts of how many issues we are seeing. they asked if it was just a few users. i said its def more than a handful, so now i need to show some sort of backing for my fat mouth. send me serial numbers. i am sending an email to the AMD guys with how many units are affect. powercolor. sapphire. gigabyte. amd direct. whatever. send me serial numbers. hopefully amd will get some news for all of us, but regardless, when i hear something of substance, i'll make a post to provide some level of guidance on how to go about getting this sorted out.
— User "PowerColorSteven," aka "sales guy or something" on Reddit
However, it is hard to find out which companies accept RMAs and fulfill them, as the number of recorded cases have stated that some are allowed while others are denied, even when it is the same manufacturer. Several other theories are also arising about the problem, from uneven cold plates to using a graphite thermal pad to fix the issue. With the number of cases rising during the initial reports, it is not recommended to alleviate the problem but to hold on until an official statement or acceptance of a series-wide RMA is allowed by AMD.
Before I delve into a game, I like to know roughly how long it's going to take me to complete, so HowLongToBeat.com has been a staple of my gaming experience for years. While I usually use the website to get an estimate of how many hours I'm about to invest in a title, turns out you can glean a lot of information about how many people played a game, and how many actually finished it, too. One game's HowLongToBeat page has been getting some attention, and that title shouldn't come as a surprise to anyone who's been even remotely connected to the gaming industry this year: Elden Ring.
As reported by Kotaku, EldenRing has topped the leaderboards of HowLongToBeat — its title of Most Completed with just under 6,000 players makes sense considering how popular the game is, but what's somehow even less surprising is that it was the Most Retired game on the site with 261 players. It was well ahead of the second-place titles as well, with Stray's completion number settling at just under 4,000, and Tunic's retired rate coming in at 114.
Keep in mind, however, that this is only one website's metrics, and it's a site that a good portion of the player base doesn't log their hours on, and maybe doesn't even know exists. Even with such a small survey pool, I can't help but feel like there's some truth to this. Elden Ring was wavering at the top of Steam's most played games of the year. It was also far and away the most popular title of March 2022, and has stayed near the top of that list since, especially when it comes to single-player games. The retirement numbers are even harder to contextualize from a sheer lack of data, but given how difficult FromSoftware games are, this would not surprise me in the slightest. I tried playing Elden Ring on my friend's account to just see if I could beat Godrick — after switching off for over two hours, we finally gave up.
Elden Ring was also able to claim the titles of Most Backlogged, Most Reviews, and Longest Games on HowLongToBeat, which means that it takes the number one spot of five of the ten categories that the website accounts for. You can say a lot of things about EldenRing, but calling it forgettable is not one of them.
I have always had a bit of trouble playing older games.
This might not come as a surprise to some discerning Destructoid readers, who have, in the past, derided me for the recency bias seemingly on display in a handful of my ranked lists. It's true — I do tend to play more new releases than older ones, and I tend to enjoy them more, as well. Call it an occupational hazard (it's easier to write about new games when you're playing them on release), chalk it up to my age (I am, as you might imagine, younger than many readers), but the fact stands: I prefer more modern titles.
Of course, this isn't a moral failing, but it is a bit of a problem. See, I am the kind of person who takes a great interest in figuring out why things are the way they are. Anthropologically, I'm fascinated by older games. I like to see the seeds of a great franchise, and I like to chart design trends from their earliest inception. To that end, I really should like playing older games.
So what do I do about that?
Put a bow on 2022 — it's done. The new year is upon us, and it's time for resolutions. So here's mine: I will play a lot of games that I've passed over. Titles that I was too young for on release, titles that arrived before I was around to play them, titles that simply don't seem appealing. I will learn design languages that games have outpaced. I will find the fun, come hell or high water.
In some areas, this will be easy. Every year, I make a point of going through an older franchise with a new entry on the way. While the cynic in me wants to deride studios for coasting on successful ideas and properties instead of coming up with original concepts, this year, that particular strategy exposed me to a mess of games that I otherwise wouldn't have played.
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2022 was, for example, the year that I finally played the Souls games (I'm aware that I'm stretching the definition of "old" a bit, but Demon's Soulswas 13 years ago). That's a truly excellent series, even better if you're willing to include a handful of structurally similar FromSoftware games under the umbrella. I also played the phenomenally funny The Secret of Monkey Island for the first time, and I gave the original Advance Wars a shot (whoops).
Where you come in
2023 will bring plenty of franchise entries. I imagine I'll spend a lot of time digging into the annals of Armored Core history, just to understand why my mecha-enthusiast friends are so damn pumped. Maybe I'll finally check out Diablo and Street Fighter. But I want to play the games I'm not thinking of.
And, obviously, it's tough to think of things that I'm not thinking of.
That's where you, dear readers, come in. I want to play your favorite older games. Do you have fond memories of a game played in decades past? Please, tell me about them. Did you try any ancient titles for the first time in 2022? I'd love to play them. Are there any that you've been meaning to get to for ages? I want to join you on that adventure. So please, let me know! Tell me the games that you view as foundational to the medium, or just the ones you really love. I'm looking forward to it.
Valve have launched Steam Replay, their own equivalent to Spotify Wrapped. It offers you a single page covered in graphs and diagrams which illustrate how you spent your time on Steam in 2022. Me? 30% of my total playtime was spent in Spelunky 2, and I played 41 different games over the course of the year. How about you?
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