Emahlstadt

After weeks of conflicting reports, teary interviews, and more rumors than our broken brains were designed to handle, the Chicago Police Department has presented the results of its investigation into the alleged hate-fueled assault of Empire actor Jussie Smollett. As the Chicago Tribune reports, Chicago police…

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The Horns might be significant underdogs when the Tigers come to Austin in early September.

Projected betting odds for several high-profile games during college football’s non-conference schedule include the Texas Longhorns as eight-point underdogs against the LSU Tigers for the much-anticipated tilt at Darrell K Royal-Texas Memorial Stadium in Austin on September 7.

And while that line is just a projection, it does represent one data point in what could become a consensus about that game — it’s certainly also the case that two major metrics aren’t high on the Longhorns this season.

In the S&P+ projections, Texas ranks No. 35 nationally, largely due to the departures of 13 starters and the fact that S&P+ never like head coach Tom Herman’s team last year, either. By comparison, LSU ranks No. 4 nationally in that metric — despite losing three early entrants to the NFL draft, the Tigers still rank fourth in returning production.

Over at ESPN, the FPI projections of the Longhorns at No. 26 nationally were enough for the Worldwide Leader to declare that “Texas is not back” due to those aforementioned losses:

Though Texas took strides last season, it had the benefit of starting 13 seniors and graduate students. Even with a cumulative top-five recruiting rank over the past four seasons, the fact that Texas is returning just eight starters is very likely to be a problem.

The combined strength of LSU’s offense and defense, which both rank in the top 10 according to that metric, also slots the Tigers at No. 4.

So while a game against an offense led by Big Ten castoff Joe Burrow might not seem that intimidating, there’s plenty of production returning to aid Burrows and an elite defense to back him up.

An electric atmosphere in Austin will only help the Sugar Bowl champions, but at this point, neither the home-field advantage nor the finish to the 2018 season are sparking much optimism in the metrics or the projected betting odds.

The Sooners' offense -- with new quarterback Jalen Hurts -- should keep rolling. But can the defense improve enough to make Oklahoma title-worthy?

Reddit:

Coolth is an actual word and it's the opposite of warmth

crocodiles can climb trees

If you mix water and sawdust and freeze it, the resulting 'ice' melts extremely slowly. like, 'weeks at room temperature' slowly

A spaghetto is one noodle of spaghetti

A dark story from the same thread:

Yo talking about capybaras. I thought they were great animals and were definitely my favourites at the local animal sanctuary.

HOWEVER

I helped out one day cleaning up all the animal shelters, etc. and they have one capybara who is completely seperated from the rest. Thought it was weird so I asked why he is all alone.

Turns out they put him together with other animals (and other capybara) and every morning there would be animals with several bites/several dead capybaras, etc. and they couldn't figure out what the fuck was wrong.

They placed a night camera and turns out the capybara that is now separated was the goddamn problem! He murdered them, absolute psycho.

Hasbro is about to give you many, many ways to flaunt your Overwatch fandom beyond the occasional Nerf gun. It's launching a series of toys and games themed around the character-driven shooter, including Monopoly Overwatch Collector's Edition. The $50 board game turns maps into properties, cards into loot boxes and player pieces into familiar characters like D.Va and Winston. However, that's really just the start of the collection -- the action figures in particular stand out.

Source: GameStop (Monopoly), (Reinhardt), (Ana/Soldier), (Mercy/Pharah)

It is finished. Jessica Jones and The Punisher have officially been canceled, reports TheWrap, thus ending the Marvel era of Netflix. Their cancellations follow the individual axes buried into the skulls of Luke Cage, Daredevil, and Iron Fist, not to mention The Defenders.

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The stakes have been raised (get it?!) in Ravensburger’s upcoming board game Horrified, which brings together the iconic Universal Monsters and pits YOU up against them!

Detailed by Gizmodo, the 1-5 player game “comes with ‘high-quality sculpted miniatures’ of Frankenstein, the Bride of Frankenstein, the Wolf Man, the Mummy, the Invisible Man, and the Creature from the Black Lagoon.” Essentially, a village is being terrorized by the monsters, and you and your friends need to work together to take them down and save the day.

So yeah. Sounds like this one basically doubles as a Monster Squad board game!

Horrified is set for release on August 1st, selling for $35.

Fedora met with Tom Herman and the Texas staff last week.

After meeting with Texas Longhorns head coach Tom Herman last week to discuss the possibility of joining his staff in Austin, former North Carolina head coach Larry Fedora is now officially coming aboard the Texas staff as an offensive analyst, sources tell Burnt Orange Nation. Orangebloods’ Anwar Richardson was the first to report the news.

Fedora was fired from North Carolina at the end of 2018 following back-to-back nine-loss seasons.

Though the last few years of his tenure were rough, Fedora was also responsible for the most successful period of football in Chapel Hill since the early Mack Brown years. In 2015, Fedora guided the Tar Heels to an 11-win season, coming a few plays short of beating Clemson in the ACC Championship with a potential playoff berth on the line.

Fedora also groomed a relatively unknown high school quarterback from Ohio, Mitch Trubisky, into a top-10 NFL Draft pick.

Prior to his stop in Chapel Hill, Fedora was the head coach at Southern Miss, leading the Golden Eagles to multiple winning seasons including a 12-win campaign in 2011.

Fedora has also worked as an offensive coordinator at Oklahoma State, Florida, Air Force and Middle Tennessee. His coaching career began at Garland High in the Dallas-Fort Worth area.

A native of College Station, Fedora’s brother is currently the head coach at A&M Consolidated High in College Station.

Anthem is an example of where the industry is heading and I’m not a fan at all.

Here we have a triple-A game that’s clearly been put together by talented people, yet it feels like it’s been designed by a board room full of grey-skinned men in £2,000 suits.

It’s a loot shooter where all the loot is variations of the same boring shotguns and assault rifles. The kids love real world guns.

You shoot these real world guns at bugs and humanoids, causing numbers to pop out of them – the better your gun, the higher the number. The kids love numbers.

It’s game design based on KPIs and Google trends.

This is a BioWare title, of course, and what would a game from the creator of Mass Effect be without player choice? Anthem. It would be Anthem.

Here conversations have two inconsequential dialogue options that slightly change what’s said without any impact on the story or your relationships. It feels like a direct response to the backlash against Mass Effect Andromeda, a game taken down by shareable gifs of awkward facial animations.

Those facial animations were likely an issue of scope. Andromeda was a proper RPG with hundreds of thousands of voice lines and branching paths. The budget went elsewhere. In Anthem, all the money has been pumped into making sure it can’t be mocked by gifs. It looks phenomenal and the performance capture is some of the best I’ve seen. It’s also lacking any substance.

You fly to a mission, shoot stuff, occasionally hold X on something interactive, head back to the hub, swap your mech’s crotch from chrome to rubber, then head back out and do it again. Absurd levels of visual decadence aren’t enough to mask over Anthem’s deep flaws.

The illusion almost works, though. For the first few hours, you’ll be distracted enough to be tricked into thinking it’s a good game. When you’re flying up a waterfall with the stars in your face, cresting the verge as some alien fungi pops, creating clouds of neon spores that frame the scene, it’s stunning. Playing it on a RTX 2080Ti, it’s one of the best looking games I’ve ever seen. There’s also a lot to be said about the novelty of a game that nails 360 degree movement as well as this. Minute to minute, it feels great. The problem is everything else: mission design, story, pacing, and even customisation.

A big part of Anthem’s appeal is in the Javelins. They’re your very own mech and you’re free to mess about with them, tweaking materials on different body parts, changing colours, and even applying vinyls. But if you had dreams of roleplaying some kind of mech mechanic, endlessly switching out parts for cooler loot as you progress through the story, you’re going to be disappointed.

If you pre-ordered, you get some free parts and can swap out your Javelin’s legs, arms, head, and body for some different armour. Outside of that, you only have a couple of other choices and they’re all locked behind an absurd amount of in-game currency. The customisation is clearly designed to push you towards spending real money. Even then, there’s barely anything to tempt you.

The story isn’t even an incentive to plod along. There are flashes of BioWare’s brilliant world-building in there – mostly hidden within codex collectables dotted around a soulless hub area – but you’ll likely be lost in a sea of pretend words if you don’t bother reading them.

At one point, the game gives up trying to string you along entirely and you’re asked to open a handful of tombs in free roam. You head into the map, fly to the tombs, and are met with a list of challenges you must complete to unlock them: get 50 kills with an assault rifle, 20 melee kills, complete five world events, etc. It’s blatant, dull padding that kills the pacing dead.

Every mission is automatically matchmade with random players if you don’t squad up or select a private session – by the way, enemies don’t scale down if you go private. You head out in a team of four and speed towards your objective as a unit. The map is vast and unreadable, so you’re always following waypoint markers. Of course, this being an open world game in 2019, there are also collectables dotted around that you can hoover up to use as crafting materials. However, you’re always tied to whoever is leading the pack. Fall behind too much and you’re met with a loading screen before being teleported to whoever is speeding off in front. There’s always some dick speeding off in front.

It’s also a team game where there’s barely any teamwork. Sure, you can all time your ultimate abilities together to quickly take down a boss. You can also combo together different moves – melee attacking an enemy frozen by one of your allies, for example – but the battlefield is so busy with fancy effects that it’s almost impossible to coordinate with intent. Occasionally, you’ll just pop off a power at the right time and the game will tell you that you did a combo. Yay, teamwork!

If you get killed in action, your allies can also revive you to bring you back into the fight. Once you are knocked down, there’s no way to signal your allies to tell them you’re down, however – you just have to hope they revive you. If not, you’ll spend the rest of the mission staring at your downed character. You can’t even reach the pause menu in this state. Even without the bugs where the volume cuts out entirely, the game freezes up, or the netcode makes you teleport through the sky and into a wall, Anthem’s biggest issues can’t be fixed with a patch.

In fact, there’s so much wrong with the design that I felt compelled to put together an extensive list for how to fix Anthem. Anthem’s day one patch certainly hasn’t solved its issues.

I went into Anthem with an open mind. It’s a game I wanted to succeed from a studio I’ve always been fond of. Unfortunately, it’s everything everyone feared at reveal. It’s a hollow experience that’s been designed to appeal to the widest market possible while squeezing more money out of those who are hooked in by its doggy treat design.

The post Anthem review – BioWare adrift in design by spreadsheet appeared first on VG247.

Amazon's upcoming miniseries Good Omens has been in the pipeline for a while, and now Neil Gaiman has revealed that Benedict Cumberbatch will take a starring role in the series. The Sherlock star will appear in episode six of the show as a "giant, an...

weissesrauschen:

https://www.levkhesin.com

historyarchaeologyartefacts:

One of the fake heads fashioned from soap, toothpaste, concrete dust, and toilet paper, used as a decoy during the 1962 escape of 3 prisoners from Alcatraz [924 x 922]

Guardian:

The markings, at Creswell Crags, a limestone gorge on the Nottinghamshire/Derbyshire border, include hundreds of letters, symbols and patterns carved, at a time when belief in witchcraft was widespread. The scale and variety of the marks made on the limestone walls and ceiling of a cave which has at its centre a deep, dark, hole, is unprecedented.

...

The trust was alerted to the marks last year by Hayley Clark and Ed Waters. The two keen-eyed cavers thought there were perhaps two or three markings; it soon became clear there were dozens and then on further investigation up to a thousand. And counting. “They are everywhere,” said Baker. “How scared were they?”

...


Up close the walls are a remarkable frenzy of marks. Everywhere you point a torch there are overlapping Vs, a reference to Mary, virgin of virgins.

Kids had to work to find things to do before the internet was widespread enough to consume all our lives. Desperate for something, anything to occupy their tender minds, they scavenged for dead animals to poke with sticks, hunted for stuff to set on fire, and, most troubling of all, devoted themselves to collecting…

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Anne Hathaway’s 2019 kicked off with one of the biggest cinematic misfires in recent memory, but the Oscar winner’s got several high-profile projects in her quiver, none of which, fingers crossed, take place (spoiler alert) inside a video game. Not only will Hathaway star in both Robert Zemeckis’ The Witches and a new …

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Last month, Anne Hathaway signed on to play the Grand High Witch in director Robert Zemeckis‘ The Witches, a new adaptation of the 1983 Roald Dahl novel that was originally adapted by director Nicolas Roeg back in 1990. We’ve learned today, thanks to Variety, that Octavia Spencer (The Shape of Water) will star alongside Hathaway.

The site adds that Jahzir Bruno and Codie-Lei Eastick are also in talks. They note, “Spencer will play the grandmother of Bruno’s character, and Eastick is portraying the other boy who has a run in with the Witches.”

The film will be set in the Gothic South in the 1960s.

Guillermo del Toro and Alfonso Cuaron are on board to produce, with Kenya Barris (“Black-ish”) co-writing the script with Zemeckis.

The Witches will put a spell on audiences on October 16, 2020.

Anker’s Nebula Capsule mini projector gets all the hype, but if its standard definition resolution and 100 lumen brightness won’t cut it for your portable cinema needs, the newer Nebula Mars II is on sale for $390 today, the best price we’ve seen by $10.

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Here’s nine minutes worth of pre-beta Rage 2 gameplay to start the lunch hour off right.

Or maybe it’s breakfast, second-breakfast, supper time or even elevenses where you are – no matter. Just give this Rage 2 gameplay video a watch.

The video demonstrates one of the new abilities in the game, the player fighting an “angry man in a mech suit,” and plenty of carnage to whet your appetite for the crazy shooter.

Rage 2, co-developed by Avalanche and id Software, releases May 14 on PC, PlayStation 4 and Xbox One. If you decide to pre-order, you’ll receive the exclusive Cult of the Death God mission and Nicholas Raine’s armor and Settler Pistol.

Be sure to give Matt’s hands-on preview with Rage 2’s open world and story missions a read if you haven’t already.

The post Rage 2 gameplay video shows off nine minutes of crazy action appeared first on VG247.

A short film set in the world of BioWare's online shooter Anthem, which highlights some of the universe's lore, dropped on Thursday morning. Conviction is directed by Neill Blomkamp, a name you might recognize from District 9, Chappie, the ill-fated Halo movie or an upcoming RoboCop reboot.

Source: Oats Studios (YouTube)

Beat Saber has become something of a hit in the rhythm game scene thanks to its clever VR mechanics, and the veterans at Harmonix clearly want to offer their own response. They've unveiled Audica, a VR-only title where you blast the notes instead of slicing or tapping them. You're testing both your aim and your knack for keeping time, really. The soundtrack includes tunes from "some of the world's most popular electronic artists" (no Rock Band-style jams here), and you'll naturally compete against others on global leaderboards.

Via: Harmonix (Twitter)

Source: Audica, Oculus Store, Steam

Yuri Shwedoff x INPRNT.

The spectacular, hauntingly gorgeous illustration work of artist Yuri Shwedoff is all available as fine art prints in his INPRNT Shop.

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Be sure to follow INPRNT on Tumblr, too.

A new paper from researchers at University College London argues that the genocide of indigenous peoples in the Americans after Columbus’s landing in 1492 had a significant effect on the Earth’s global climate and was a major cause of the Little Ice Age, the dip in global temperatures from the 16th to the 19th centuries. They estimate that 55 million indigenous people died during Europe’s conquest of the Americas (~90% of the population), and the 56 million hectares of land that they had cleared of vegetation (roughly the area of Kenya) was then reclaimed by forests, which then took in more carbon dioxide, reduced the greenhouse effect, and caused the Earth to cool. From the paper’s conclusion:

We calculate that this led to an additional 7.4 Pg C being removed from the atmosphere and stored on the land surface in the 1500s. This was a change from the 1400s of 9.9 Pg C (5 ppm CO2). Including feedback processes this contributed between 47% and 67% of the 15-22 Pg C (7-10 ppm CO2) decline in atmospheric CO2 between 1520 CE and 1610 CE seen in Antarctic ice core records. These changes show that the Great Dying of the Indigenous Peoples of the Americas is necessary for a parsimonious explanation of the anomalous decrease in atmospheric CO2 at that time and the resulting decline in global surface air temperatures.

The authors also assert that this effect of human action on global climate marks the beginning of the Anthropocene epoch.

I first heard about this theory from Charles Mann’s excellent 1493, which led me to William Ruddiman’s 2003 paper. I heard about this most recent study from Mann too… he called it “most careful study of the impacts of Euro conquest of Americas I’ve yet seen”.

If you’re not up for reading the paper itself, you can check out the coverage from the BBC, the Guardian, Nature, or the NY Times.

Tags: 1493   books   Charles Mann   global warming   science

Wargroove is rather popular.

Chucklefish released its turn-based tactics game Wargroove on Friday, February 1. Within three days, the game broke even.

It’s obviously rather pleased to have the cost of development already covered, and has plans in place for future updates.

The first post-launch patch has been submitted to available platforms for approval. It will include a number of bug fixes and small improvements the team “weren’t able to fix in time for release.”

You can expect the following bugs to be addressed once the patch is available:

• Fix bug that caused online multiplayer maps against AI to sometimes go into a broken state.
• Fix bug that caused spectating online on Fog of War maps to not work correctly.
• Fix bug that caused issues around resigning on matches.
• Fix the display of some Japanese and Chinese characters.

Quality of life improvements are also on the way. These include the ability to skip battle scenes more quickly; force fast map movement to ‘always on’; the ability for multiplayer hosts to fill open spots with CPU players; and more.

 

Modding is also coming soon, and Chucklefish said a larger content update, DLC and more are being looked into.

The team said it is “constantly checking Reddit, Discord,  Community Forums, Twitter” and other channels for feedback, and encourages you to add to the discussion.

 

Wargroove is available on Steam, Humble, Switch eShop and the Xbox One store. It will release on PlayStation 4 in the future.

You can look over the review scores for the game through our round-up. You should also check out some of the cool maps players have created using the in-game editor and customization tools.

The post Wargroove development costs covered within three days of release appeared first on VG247.

In a rather exciting deal for RPG fans, Skybound Games and Beamdog have partnered to publish a selection of classic RPGs on consoles for the first time ever.

Heavyweight titles Baldur’s Gate, Baldur’s Gate ll, Baldur’s Gate: Siege of Dragonspear, Icewind Dale, Planescape: Torment, and Neverwinter Nights are all set to come to console at some point in 2019. Which consoles they’ll be heading to is unconfirmed, but the prospect of Baldur’s Gate on say, Nintendo Switch, is especially tasty.

Versions of these games are expected to be enhanced editions, so they’ll be spruced up and a little more user-friendly.

The classic PC RPG has been having something of a revival in recent years, with Divinity: Original Sin, Wasteland 2, and Pillars of Eternity among the success stories. So it’s a great time to reintroduce some old classics at a time where that style of game can be translated to a controller far more easily than before

After establishing her cinematic dominance, it looks like it’s actually happening: Danai Gurira is finally resting her katana above the mantle after seven seasons and exiting The Walking Dead—for real this time. Per The Hollywood Reporter, sources confirm that Gurira, who arrived in the third season as the iconic…

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Not to be confused with the Child’s Play TV show from the original creators, or that other movie about toys come to life that’s opening on the same day, the movie we’re here to discuss is a reboot of Child’s Play that looks much more beholden to its source material than we originally thought. Sure, as the above…

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Later this month, Sean Lennon and Primus’ Les Claypool will drop their second album as The Claypool Lennon Delirium. South Of Reality arrives on February 22 via ATO Records, and it’s been previewed with “Blood And Rockets,” a six-and-a-half-minute sprawl of eerie psych-rock that sets the duo’s acid-soaked …

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Nebula by Anker Prizm II | $146 | Amazon

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Jonas Åkerlund, who began his career as the drummer for influential proto-black metal act Bathory, is the perfect director for Vice Films’ long-gestating Mayhem biopic Lords Of Chaos. Åkerlund may not have been present at the drunken rager where corpse paint was introduced for the first time, but he understands…

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