Finally: a full-length trailer for Christopher Nolan's Oppenheimer, easily the movie I am most looking forward to seeing this summer. Dunkirk was one of my favorite films of the past few years, I've done quite a bit of reading about the Manhattan Project over the years, and I studied modern physics in college, so I am all the way in for this. Fingers crossed!
P.S. The movie is based on the Pulitzer Prize-winning book American Prometheus by Kai Bird and Martin Sherwin. Might have to read this one before the movie comes out.
all this focus on "sentient AI is going to rise up and kill us like in the movies" based on utterly credulous misunderstandings of what ML does, and far less focus on what the people who control these tools *are* doing and will *keep* doing as the tools grow more powerful
When it came to making safety posters, the Dutch were pretty hardcore — a lot of these vintage posters look more like horror film adverts than safety warnings. (via meanwhile)
I deliberately picked the ugliest candidate for our kids au pair so my husband wouldn't be tempted to fuck her. He still fucked her, and he is now my ex-husband, so fat lot of use that was
Went on couples hols with 4 couples. I was pudgy compared to my mates. Overheard my wife say to other wives "here's the Chippendales & their chubby minder". Pretended not to hear. Revenge was getting in serious shape, sleeping with her sis & dumping her. The comment still hurts.
My uncle was a well-respected country solicitor who often sorted wills for his clients. He'd then pass on which ones had the most money and the remotest houses to my dad, who was a prolific career burglar. They never got caught, and never will be since both are dead now
I recently had to fire one of my biggest clients. Simply put, he was horrible in every way a client can be; he was disorganized, he ignored submission guidelines, he never signed proposals, etc.
I hated peas as a child so my mother would hide a pea in my roast dinners every sunday. Every week I would finish my dinner, then victoriously leave the solitary pea alone on the plate.
I'm 44 now and yesterday she confessed that she actually used to hide two peas. The twat.
My 12-year-old son just called his nine-year-old sister a "shitty fuck child", and I've learnt a valuable lesson in how difficult it is to tell someone off convincingly while laughing.
Same. Your kids aren't just sharing your genetic material, but they pick up on literally everything you do. Parenting is hard.
As a parent, I envisaged instilling my children with confidence, compassion, love and intelligence. Instead they're short tempered, passive aggressive and riddled with anxiety like their parents.
My bf came home really late one night, front tooth broken and black eye. He told me he was giving a prostitute a piggy back and she fell and they crashed to the ground. He assures me there was no sex involved. It's such a ridiculous story I have chosen to believe it.
I've terminated eight figure contracts because of emoji. I don't care who you are if you send me an emoji I will cut all ties with you immediately. When they ask why I cut ties I will tell them or their friends exactly why. I don't give a fuck. They should not exist.
When my daughter Katy was 3, I told her I invented the letter K, just for her, because she was so special. I thought nothing of this until two weeks later, her teacher called me over, to congratulate me on my invention of part of the alphabet. Katy had told everyone.
I can't explain it, but I have an overwhelming feeling that the rapper, Lil Wayne might be the reincarnated soul of my Nan, Elsie, who sadly died in 1982. She was a diminutive Yorkshire woman, but Lil's mannerisms are weirdly reminiscent of Granny El.
Yeah yeah we've all seen this scene in A Fish Called Wanda
As a student of Arabic, a one-night stand once asked if I would speak some to her while we were having sex. Not having the requisite vocabulary for dirty talk, I whispered into her ear phrases such as "I would like 3 aubergines and a tomato, please". She absolutely loved it.
Me and kids wanted a dog, missus didn't. We convinced her then I find I'm fucking allergic to him. I itch like fuck, so I pretend it's my shower gel and stock up on antihistamines because he's a big handsome bastard and my favourite member of the house.
Good thoughts from Annalee Newitz on Substack. They're not neutral - they pay and promote writers. "Substack has promoted hate speech and misinformation by paying and/or not moderating its top authors and celebrities."
Niantic, the creator of the popular Ingress and Pokémon Go augmented reality games, announced it will be shutting down its "Trading Post" product for NFT trading cards that it had launched only months before. "Trading Post was an experimentation effort to explore the world of digital collectibles, and while we believe that web3 has the potential to create meaningful experiences in the future, we plan to shift focus to other priorities," they wrote. Owners of the NFTs were told they have sixty days to "download" their cards, and that trading would be disabled in 30 days.
The announcement seemed to come as a relief to many in the Ingress community, with commenters remarking on the "scammy" nature of NFTs. Some wrote that they liked the idea, but that the web3 factor felt like it was "shoehorned" in. "I'll miss the Trading Post, please never bring NFTs or in fact any blockchain into future projects, or if you do at the very very least make it actually matter to the thing it's being put into, but still preferably just don't," said one.
I'm autistic. Many of these fesses are baffling to me, but they're sometimes a good social learning tool. My 'fess' is that I play on my autism to bore to death people at work I don't want to talk to with, by turning any conversation to Minecraft.
Since its unpretentious launch in mid-2022 on Game Pass for PC, poncle’s Vampire Survivors has ridden wave upon garlicky wave of critical and commercial success. Most recently, the game received not one, but two accolades at this year’s BAFTA Games Awards: Game Design and the biggest prize of all, Best Game.
It’s the decadent core loop of shoot, survive, die, repeat that has left countless Vampire Survivors players — including Xbox boss and superfan Phil Spencer — utterly enamored. Its early presence on Xbox and PC Game Pass also ensured millions could immediately get involved with this surprise hit new title.
But Vampire Survivors was not initially built to accommodate for this scale of greatness. The brainchild of creator Luca Galante was initially built for PC platforms using web technologies, specifically JavaScript. Poncle Tech Director Sam McGarry tells us that the launch version of Vampire Survivors was “basically a browser game.”
The build wasn’t running very well on platforms different to PC, players were running into issues across different devices, and addressing those problems quickly became a priority for the team. Once it became the smash hit we know it as now, it became clear it needed a new engine – something fans asked about from early on. It turns out, the team made that happen so seamlessly, many didn’t know it had even happened.
“The overall goal was for players not to notice,” McGarry says. “Even to this day, there are still players that don’t realize that the engine is already out there and has been since launch on Xbox, so we still have differences to sort out, but I think we did a pretty good job.”
Xbox was the first platform that poncle launched the engine-enhanced Vampire Survivors on, and McGarry tells us that one of the main challenges the team faced, and still faces, is maintaining level parity between different versions of the game in parallel — the new engine on Xbox and the original Javascript version on PC.
“Making sure that players can actually go between Xbox platforms and continue their game is very important to us,” McGarry says. “And we’re also trying to maintain that quality so you can jump between two different versions of the game without feeling like you’re playing different copies of the game, without having any technical issues or anything.”
All that effort has been worth it, however – McGarry says the game’s addition to Game Pass has been crucial in how it became a word of mouth success. “If you look at a screenshot of Vampire Survivors, you might not get drawn into the game just by the way it looks,” McGarry says. “And we find often that early game players don’t always get the hook of it until they’ve gotten further in. That’s when we really see that people are like, ‘ah, okay, I get the game now. People will also often play it, bounce off, and then come back. The presence on Game Pass helps us bring a lot more players in through the doors and lets them experience the game.
“The other great thing about [Game Pass] is that it was available via the Cloud as well. So people are able to play not just at home on their console or on their PC, but out and about or… on the toilet on their phone. That was relatively painless process too; we put the game out, and ticked a box, and then it was available on the Cloud just like that basically.”
A development team building two versions of the game across Xbox and PC is leagues away from the before times of Galante working independently on Vampire Survivors. In the last twelve months, the poncle team’s development has mirrored that of a Xenomorph — emerge quickly and grow fast. But despite that rapid expansion, the actual workflow hasn’t really changed all that much, testament to the game’s solid foundations.
“Ultimately, it’s just that we have more people in the process now,” McGarry explains. “So it still starts at Luca and filters through, he’s doing that work on that PC version alongside writers and other teams helping with the creative side of things. We are then taking that work and replicating it in the new engine. Having that dual engine setup has helped us keep that same workflow in a sense, without disrupting the creative part of the very start of the chain.”
Poncle is keen to highlight that while Galante still sits atop of the creative tree and the majority of the game’s increasingly wild ideas come from him, Vampire Survivors is now created by a team that all provide input and feedback.
“The more people that we bring on board, the more we can take off Luca’s plate,” says poncle Lead Game Developer Adam Goodchild. “Throughout last year, everyone tried to take as much as they could so Luca could focus on the creative side.
“The original goal of what Luca set out to make hasn’t changed at all. It’s just the pace at which we can do it is a lot different because there’s more of us, and everybody’s got a role now.”
Vampire Survivors is still dishing out updates and content regularly. The first premium DLC, Legacy of the Moonspell, launched in December, and the second, Tides of the Foscari, launches today.
These paid DLC packs are thematically based in their own worlds — Moonspell took us to the snow-kissed mountains of “the east,” while Foscari promises a lush, vibrant forest concealing a magic academy with absolutely nothing unusual about it. This was always the plan for Vampire Survivors, however, Galante and the team still firmly believe that any content that changes or enhances the core gameplay loop should just be included in free content updates, delivered to every player that has either bought the game, or is playing via Game Pass. We can’t say too much, but the team has plenty in store in that department too.
“For anyone that can’t or doesn’t want to get the DLC, you’re still getting other updates at the same time,” McGarry adds. “We’re also constantly adding little things to the base game, adding more achievements… if only to give Phil Spencer something new to finish off.”
Vampire Survivors: Tides of the Foscari is available across Xbox and PC platforms today.
Vampire Survivors is a time survival game with minimalistic gameplay and roguelite elements. There's no place where to hide, all you can do is try to survive a cursed night and get as much gold as possible for the next survivor, before Death inevitably puts an end to your struggles.
I'm paid to be an persona. Men think they're texting any number of us being the same person leading up to sex, despite the T&C's of the website outlining that we'll never meet. My heart breaks when a man tells me how much he's spent. The longest client I've seen texting is 13 yrs
My boyfriend is colour blind, he bought me a lovely plant, I forgot to water it and it died. It's still the same shape, just brown instead of green and pink. He keeps saying how good it looks. I don't have the heart to tell him, so now everyone in the family is in on the lie.
Jack Black has gone full method actor in a live-action music video as Bowser for his hit song from The Super Mario Bros Movie, “Peaches.” If you’ve seen the Illumination Entertainment and Nintendo film since its release a couple days ago, you’ll no doubt remember the catchy tune that Bowser sings around the film’s midway point. King Koopa’s vocals are filled with longing as he cries out for Princess Peach, so naturally, Black just had to give that performance its own music video. If you couldn’t already tell, Black partially wrote the song himself, and it shows.
For the “Peaches” music video, Jack Black dresses up in a fabulous Bowser-inspired suit and hat (wig?), even going as far as to sport some glittery gold eye makeup. He’s a treasure, really, so it goes without saying that the music video is more than worth your time. See Jack Black sing his fiery heart out in a peach-colored room in The Super Mario Bros Movie “Peaches” music video from Lyrical Lemonade below.
The Super Mario Bros Movie jumped into theaters Wednesday, April 5, bringing Nintendo’s Italian plumber mascot back to the big screen for the first time in decades. It’s chock-full of references to Nintendo’s past and filled with good laughs, too. Despite Mario, Luigi, and Peach’s best efforts, Black’s Bowser might be the true show stealer. Thankfully, you can relive one of his best moments with today’s viral video in the making.
My religious mother once brought back a little container of holy water shaped like the Virgin Mary from a trip to Lourdes. What she dosent know is that it's actually downstairs tap water from our kitchen as me and my brother once drank it in a hope that we'd grow angel wings.
Related: