Bethesda and developer Alpha Dog Games have announced Mighty Doom, an “adorably violent top-down, single-touch action shooter” roguelite available for preregistration on Android and iOS, and it has a release date of March 21, 2023. In turn, the Mighty Doom announcement trailer reveals a new protagonist, the “Mini Slayer,” in what Bethesda describes as an “animated Doom universe,” an alternate reality that is inspired by the collectible toys that featured in Doom Eternal. So basically, this is a toy-ified version of Doom designed to deliver a satisfying action experience on your mobile device.
The story is silly to match. The Mini Slayer is brought to life and sent to an alternate dimension after an “unknown energy surge rips through a Gibbo toy factory.” So the Mini Slayer is a sentient toy, apparently. And your mission is to kill all the demons keeping you from your pet bunny, Daisy. Gameplay will entail collecting lots of guns, upgrading gear, and using special skills to kill and evade thousands of mini demons.
If you preregister for the game (or just play the game by April 20, 2023), you will receive the following as the Mini Slayer’s Pack:
Baron of Hell Heavy Cannon Weapon Skin
Cacodemon Rocket Launcher Weapon Skin
3 Equipment Keys
1 Weapon Key
80 crystals
Personally, I don’t think any of this forgives Bethesda and Marty Stratton’s treatment of composer Mick Gordon, but based off how silly the concept is alone, Mighty Doom is likely to collect a lot of attention and a lot of mobile downloads for its March release date.
One of the managers at work brings a toy cow called Derek to every online team meeting and makes us update him. At least 25% of the organisation is now in the Kill Derek secret WhatsApp group. An in person meeting is planned. Derek's days are numbered.
In a potential game changer for the treatment of superbugs, a new class of antibiotics was developed that cured mice infected with bacteria deemed nearly “untreatable” in humans — and resistance to the drug was virtually undetectable.
Developed by a research team of UC Santa Barbara scientists, the study was published in the journal eBioMedicine. The drug works by disrupting many bacterial functions simultaneously — which may explain how it killed every pathogen tested and why low-level of bacterial resistance was observed after prolonged drug exposure.
Huge if true, etc. What really caught my attention is how they discovered this in the first place…they were working on a way to charge cell phones:
The discovery was serendipitous. The U.S. Army had a pressing need to charge cell phones while in the field — essential for soldier survival. Because bacteria are miniature power plants, compounds were designed by Bazan’s group to harness bacterial energy as a “‘microbial”’ battery. Later the idea arose to re-purpose these compounds as potential antibiotics.
“When asked to determine if the chemical compounds could serve as antibiotics, we thought they would be highly toxic to human cells similar to bleach,” said Mahan, the project lead investigator. “Most were toxic — but one was not — and it could kill every bacterial pathogen we tested.”
As a former biochemist, this is what pulled me into that study and it is absolutely fascinating. The question of where molecules end and life begins is really deep and meaningful.
DNA and RNA get all of the headlines, but it’s not difficult to argue that much of the glorious complexity and possibility of life is due to proteins. In the latest episode of Kurzgesagt, they explain the role of cellular proteins in creating life.
You are cells. Your muscles, organs, skin and hair. They are in your blood and in your bones.
Cells are biological robots. They don’t want anything, they don’t feel anything. They are never sad or happy. They just are, right here, right now. They are as conscious as a stone or a chair or a neutron star. Cells just follow their programming that has been evolving and changing for billions of years, molded by natural selection.
They are impossible machines and yet, here they are, driven entirely by the fundamental forces of the universe. The smallest unit of life, right at the border where physics becomes biology.
Sometimes, to get a truer understanding of how amazing something is, you need to hold your breath and dive in really deep. So, what are cells and how do they work?
Games Done Quick swiftly decided which game is the Undesirable No. 1. The video game livestreaming charity organization has banned Hogwarts Legacy from future speedrunning GDQ livestream events.
If you take a good look at GDQ’s website, Hogwarts Legacy landed on the “Disallowed Games” list over the weekend, which means it cannot be submitted for consideration and will not make an appearance at upcoming event livestreams, including the event that will raise funds for the Malala Fund from February 26 to March 4. GDQ extended the ban to other games in the Harry Potter series as they contain “content, views, or an origin that we have deemed unsuitable for our stream.”
While GDQ gave no explanation for banning Hogwarts Legacy and other Harry Potter games beyond that disclaimer, it may be in response to the controversy regarding J.K. Rowling and her views on transgender people. The Escapist’s own Elise Avery recently explained the link between the game and Wizarding World creator’s transphobia.
GDQ placing the hotly debated Warner Bros. game on the Disallowed Games list comes five months after it decided to host Awesome Games Done Quick (AGDQ) online instead of an in-person venue in Florida. At the time, the organization said it turned the event into a virtual one (which ran from January 8 through January 15) for political and safety reasons, citing Florida’s mishandling of the COVID-19 pandemic and the discriminatory “Don’t Say Gay” law that went into effect last summer.
Hogwarts Legacy joins some other banned games on the GDQ Disallowed Games list, including games that carry an “Adults Only” rating, God of War (2005), the Five Nights at Freddy’s series, and Ion Fury. However, Harry Potter games and Five Nights at Freddy’s both carry an asterisk, saying they are “Subject to further review in the future.”
One client was the absolute worst — just a complete sexist pig — but I would suck it up because I was young and well-paid, so I didn’t want to mess things up. One day, that all changed.
Since striking ancient cave paintings in southern Europe were first discovered more than a century ago, modern humans have tried to figure out if they have a meaning beyond being staggering works of art. Are they early animations? Examples of a primeval need to tell stories? An antique backdrop for us to project contemporary mistakes?
A new theory proposes that the repeatedly occurring nonfigurative signs (the ones that don’t look like anything concrete) are a kind of protowriting. This guess has been floated before, but this time, a number of earlier proposals are synthesized, and there’s a semantics attached: the symbols in the caves, these researchers argue, were used to mark time:
We hypothesize that the number of lines/dots, or the ordinal position of symbols, in sequences associated with depictions of prey taxa in Upper Palaeolithic art, convey information about events in those animals’ annual lives important to hunter-gatherers, expressed in lunar months RBS, i.e. anchored to the start of the bonne saison. That information is likely to reflect birthing, and possibly mating and/or migration of the animals of concern in the region in which the images are found (or originated).
A relatively simple statistical analysis shows good correlation with the number of marks and the number of lunar months between cycles of mating/birthing. In this way, early hunter/gatherers might have been able to track the availability of bird eggs, or to find new prey.
This would be a revolution in the history of recorded information:
Although a series of marks can of course be ambiguous, the Upper Palaeolithic written system was thus clear, unambiguous and permanent, and could have widespread meaning irrespective of any linguistic barriers (about which, of course, we know nothing), particularly given the fact that our database contains samples from across western—and some central—Europe. It made possible the accumulation and transmission of intelligible information over multiple generations, independent of the need to maintain parallel oral explanations (although of course we do not propose that these simply disappeared). This was clearly much more than a simple ‘tally’ of accumulated information. We believe that the numeric notational marks associated with the animals constituted a calendar, and given that it references natural behaviour in terms of seasons relative to a fixed point in time, we may refer to it as a phenological calendar, with a meteorological basis. It may be of greater significance, however, that it significantly backdates by thousands of years the permanent combination of information (in the form of numerosity/ordinality) with its subject (the animal/symbol).
But is it writing?
In our reading, the European Upper Palaeolithic system functioned to record a subject and information about the behaviour of that subject expressed in relation to natural events; it therefore expressed far more than the tablets recording numbers of commodities from Uruk-period Mesopotamia (Steinkeller 1992). In the sense of the Sumerological use of the terms, we suggest that we can accord it the function of a script. But could the information that it recorded really be intelligible without at least the underpinning nouns for the animals, the moon and its phases, and the bonne saison and its defining events, in addition to the actions of mating and birthing? We will presumably never know the specific words for these in whatever languages were spoken in Upper Palaeolithic Europe, but we can assume that our script could be communicated orally by using them. Is this, then, not the definition of writing?
We may not be convinced that the Upper Palaeolithic sequences and associated symbols can be described as written language, given that they do not represent grammatical syntax, but they certainly functioned in the same way as proto-cuneiform… We do not want to press the controversial (and in many senses, semantic) question of whether writing was a Palaeolithic invention; perhaps it is best described as a proto-writing system, an intermediary step between a simpler notation/convention and full-blown writing. Assuming we have convinced colleagues of our correct identification, there will no doubt be a lively debate about precisely what this system should be called, and we are certainly open to suggestions. For now, we restrict our terminology to proto-writing in the form of a phrenological/meteorological calendar. It implies that a form of writing existed tens of thousands of years before the earliest Sumerian writing system.
To translate this out of scholarly passive-aggressiveness: “you don’t have to call it writing if you want to be dicks about it, but we all know it’s writing, chumps.”
From Wikipedia contributor Cmglee and Astronomy Picture of the Day, a color-coded periodic table that displays which cosmic events — the Big Bang, exploding stars, merging neutron stars, etc. — was responsible for creating each element, according to our present understanding of the universe.
The hydrogen in your body, present in every molecule of water, came from the Big Bang. There are no other appreciable sources of hydrogen in the universe. The carbon in your body was made by nuclear fusion in the interior of stars, as was the oxygen. Much of the iron in your body was made during supernovas of stars that occurred long ago and far away. The gold in your jewelry was likely made from neutron stars during collisions that may have been visible as short-duration gamma-ray bursts or gravitational wave events.
The nitrogen in our DNA, the calcium in our teeth, the iron in our blood, the carbon in our apple pies were made in the interiors of collapsing stars. We are made of starstuff.
Gathering the data required to cover this much of the night sky was a Herculean task; the DECaPS2 survey identified 3.32 billion objects from over 21,400 individual exposures. Its two-year run, which involved about 260 hours of observations, produced more than 10 terabytes of data.
Most of the stars and dust in the Milky Way are located in its spiral disk — the bright band stretching across this image. While this profusion of stars and dust makes for beautiful images, it also makes the galactic plane challenging to observe. The dark tendrils of dust seen threading through this image absorb starlight and blot out fainter stars entirely, and the light from diffuse nebulae interferes with any attempts to measure the brightness of individual objects. Another challenge arises from the sheer number of stars, which can overlap in the image and make it difficult to disentangle individual stars from their neighbors.
if youre gonna migrate to Mаstօԁοո and use a service to locate your twitter mutuals there you NEED TO DO IT *NOW* before fedifinder and debirdify get blocked too
if you might ever wanna migrate then there's NO MORE TIME TO PROCRASTINATE
My wife died unexpectedly at 33 years old. I miss her so much. I bought a single electric blanket for her side of our bed so that it feels like she's still there when I'm sleeping.
Elon Musk's $1.5 billion Bitcoin bet at Tesla turned out to be a bad deal. He sunk the funds into Bitcoin in January 2021, when Bitcoin was trading between $30,000 and $40,000. Simultaneously, he announced that Tesla would begin accepting Bitcoin — an announcement that was quickly reversed when someone apparently pointed out to Musk that Bitcoin is an environmental nightmare.
Now, according to SEC filings, Tesla suffered a net loss of $140 million in 2022 thanks to the gamble. Their reported $64 million in trading profits were eclipsed by their $204 million loss. Tesla still holds somewhere around 11,000 BTC.
Yeah we did this too. Was very illegal but it was fun while it lasted. :)
Back in early days of the internet before "file sharing" we used to port scan for open computers and just dump files for others to download and share the address. I often wonder to this day how many people found there hard drive full to discover a load of Playstation or SNES roms
My wife bought a painting when on holidays in South Africa. It hangs in our bedroom. Every week, our ten year old son moves it slightly so it is lopsided. His mum thinks the picture is haunted by a poltergeist. The boy has done this every week for two years and has yet to fess.
Starting today, Xbox and Windows PC players will be able to blast away decades of dirt in the new Tomb Raider Special Pack for PowerWash Simulator, available with Xbox Game Pass and PC Game Pass!
Walk in Lara’s footsteps as you traverse the illustrious halls of Croft Manor and its sprawling grounds. Tarnished treasures, muddy motors… even dirty dinosaurs – you’ll find them all here.
The Tomb Raider Special Pack for PowerWash Simulator contains five all-new maps to wash and explore.
Deciding which locations to feature from Tomb Raider was no easy feat, but after whittling down a list of environments that were both iconic and rife with cleaning potential, Croft Manor’s undeniable appeal won our designers’ hearts. Not only is it a nostalgic place for fans of the franchise, but its owner is often too busy elsewhere to take care of the cleaning…
Speaking of which, you are summoned to Croft Manor for this very reason. While Lara is away, it’s time to spray! The revered residence has been somewhat neglected recently, and while Winston has tried his hand at buffing the odd brick, the sheer extent of the mess requires more power.
From the announcement trailer, eagle-eyed Tomb Raider fans will have recognized Croft Manor, the Obstacle Course, the Treasure Room, and vehicles such as Lara’s trusty jeep, motorboat, and quad bike. We decided to keep one level under wraps, Croft Manor’s Maze; we did send a cameraman in there, but he hasn’t found his way out yet. We hope you enjoy navigating the maze and its secrets with fresh eyes.
The Obstacle Course is a great opportunity to test your parkour skills (we’re sure Lara won’t mind) while the various vehicles will have Lady Croft regaling you with tales of close scrapes and narrow escapes.
Collecting treasures is Lara’s prize but cleaning them is yours! The Treasure room was a great opportunity to feature lots of the artifacts Lara encountered and collected in Tomb Raider’s early years – channel your inner architect as you uncover precious artifacts lost to layers of dust and grime. Well, maybe you’re not quite as delicate as an architect should be, but you’ll get the job done!
So, pack up your power washing provisions, fire up the blue van, and head on over to Croft Manor in the Tomb Raider Special Pack for PowerWash Simulator. We can’t wait to see what you do with the place!
Whilst some seek the thrill of adventure, others prefer good clean fun – that’s where you come in! Grapple with grime in the ultimate quest to defeat all dirt covering Croft Manor and its grounds, along with Lara’s trusty vehicles.
Lara’s childhood home is impressive but in need of some serious TLC to restore it to its full potential – rumour has it, the owner much prefers a life of danger to domesticity. You’ve been commissioned to undertake the ultimate cleaning caper.
Your client may be used to less-than-ideal conditions out on the trail, but only the very best will do when it comes to the Croft residence. Unwind and blast away every speck of dirt you can track down, whilst Lara regales you with tales of past adventures.
Wash and explore five new levels, including:
– The illustrious Croft Manor
– The iconic Obstacle Course
– The mysterious Croft Manor Maze
– Lara’s trusty Jeep and Motorboat
– Lara’s majestic Treasure Room
Release the Pressure with PowerWash Simulator! Wash away your worries with the soothing sounds of high-pressure water. Fire up your power washer and blast away every speck of dirt and grime you can find. Build your own power-washing business and unlock new tools, upgrades and more – all with the simple satisfaction of power-washing to a sparkling finish.
TIME TO CLEAN UP THE NEIGHBOURHOOD
Build up your business in Career Mode and complete a variety of dirty jobs across the dusty town of Muckingham. There's no right or wrong; no time pressure or final score, just you and the tools you need to soak away your stress. Want a clean start? Chill out and replay your favourite jobs in Free Play.
POWERWASH AND CHILL
Relax, unwind, and play with friends in Online Co-Op! Lend a helping hand to your closest pal in Career Mode, or up to 6 friends can splash around in Free Play, tackling any job the host has already completed.
KEEP IT CLEAN
For those looking for a little more pressure, beat your best scores in Challenge Mode! Fight grime in different scenarios; wash against the clock in Time Challenge or test your accuracy by using as little water as possible in Water Challenge.
GOOD CLEAN FUN
Graffiti, grime, moss, and mould, no dirt is too tough for your range of washers, nozzles, cleaners, and extensions. Different dirt types have different levels of toughness, so make sure you're getting tactical with your equipment. Feeling fancy? Then customise your look with washer skins and gloves!
RELAXATION, SATISFACTION GUARANTEED
From casual, clean freaks to players looking to get into the nitty-gritty, everyone can pick up and play to feel immersed. Absorb the relaxing atmosphere and stress-free pace as you strip dirt from patios, pavements, vehicles, and public parks. Stress gets to us all, so sit back, relax, and wash your worries down the drain.
THE WORLD IS YOUR CANVAS
Create art by cleaning the way you want. Your nozzles are your brushes; the neighbourhood is your canvas. Unleash your creative talents and transform ordinary dirt into exceptional artwork. Share your techniques and showcase your power-washing prowess and mud-caked masterpieces!
Played FIFA with my 12yo son. He beat me 12-1. Was fuming, so for last few weeks I've been secretly practising after he's gone to bed. Just had a rematch. Lost 14-0.
My wife has developed a Mr. Tumble kink. Watching that stupid twat on the TV is bad enough, but now at least once a week I have to dress up as him and give her 'tumble time'. Making me want to leave her tbh.
More his confession than mine but when my son makes a cup of tea, he squeezes the bag really hard against the side of the cup. Every teaspoon we have is bent; it's like living with Uri fucking Gellar.
To save myself a £90 dynorod call-out charge I once cleared our badly blocked drains with my cheap pressure washer, only to get drenched head to toe by a shit tsunami. 8 years later our neighbours still can't look me in the eye without laughing.
Elden Ring is certainly a celebrated game. It sold a boatload of copies, in addition to winning many awards. But what does one do when almost everyone has already played through the adventure? You get creative. One way to do so is to beat the title in record time. If you are Twitch streamer Perrikaryal, though, you may have something else on your brain. Literally. The talented gamer has devised a way to control and play Elden Ring with her mind.
Check out footage of this amazing feat below:
She is playing Elden Ring… with her brain. Twitch streamer @perrikaryal has hooked up an EEG to her brain, where different brain activity is key bound to different abilities in game
Here’s how it works. Perrikaryal, who has a master’s degree in psychology, uses an electroencephalogram (EEG) to measure her brain functions. She then maps specific types of brain activity to various in-game Elden Ring actions. Simple tasks, like summoning allies and casting spells, are all done without touching a controller.
Doing relatively easy functions is impressive enough, but Perrikaryal wants more. The endgame is being able to control and play the entirety of Elden Ring with her mind, but that will take a lot of time and training — the brain is a muscle, after all.
I am always fascinated by gamers and the way they elongate a title’s life by finding new ways to play it. Elden Ring itself is no stranger to inventive ways of conquering its challenges. Remember MissMikkaa, who defeated Malenia using a dance pad? Gamers are nothing if not resourceful.
Currently sat here in the airport departure lounge thanks to the thirsty guys of London. I set up a fake Tinder profile with an insta models photos with a bio asking for £10 to my cash app to show you're actually serious. 5 weeks and £470 later I'm on my way to Ibiza.
