If you've been using Twitter's "For You" instead of the chronological "Following" tab as God intended, you may have noticed a problem. A number of users have remarked that the algorithmic feed has been showing a lot of Elon Musk's tweets and replies, whether they follow him or not. Twitter's CEO effectively confirmed the matter, tweeting "please stay tuned while we make adjustments to the uh... 'algorithm.'"
I'd assume that by putting "algorithm" in quotes, Musk is joking that a person, possibly himself, may actually be responsible for the change. That's not too far-fetched, considering that the Elon-forward feed arrived shortly after Musk complained about a drop in his own engagement and even reportedly fired an engineer over the issue.
Please stay tuned while we make adjustments to the uh .… “algorithm”
Following that episode, Musk tweeted that a fix was coming after a "long day at Twitter HQ with eng team." He said that 95 percent of his tweets weren't getting delivered to the Following feed due to an issue with something called "Fanout," so that's now been shunted to another service. He also noted that the Recommendation algorithm wasn't working correctly, "causing accounts with many followers to be dumped."
There's no word yet on why Twitter went from "Musk lite" to "all Elon all the time," but it appears that issue is being addressed. In the meantime, you could either mute Musk (at least temporarily) or simply use the Following feed to see only the tweets you want to see, precisely when they happen.
Many people in Japan have been outraged by a recent trend dubbed "sushi terrorism." Videos across social media show people carrying out all kinds of unhygienic acts, like licking the spoon for a container of green tea powder. Another video, which has more than 98 million views on Twitter, showed a person licking the top of a soy sauce bottle and a teacup's rim before putting them back at a branch of the Sushiro chain. The company said it has replaced all the soy sauce bottles and cleaned every cup at the affected restaurant.
To combat this gross trend, one chain, Kura Sushi, said it would use artificial intelligence to look for "suspicious opening and closing of sushi plate covers," Nikkei Asia reported. The company plans to upgrade existing cameras, used to track the dishes customers take from conveyor belts to determine their bill, by early March. If the system detects suspicious behavior, it will alert employees.
– Mat Smith
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The original HomePod was notoriously difficult to repair – cutting tools were sometimes necessary. The second-gen model, however, isn’t as bad. iFixit has torn down the new smart speaker and discovered the large amounts of glue are gone – you can get inside using little more than a screwdriver, and the internal components are similarly accessible. Combine this with the detachable power cord and it should be feasible to fix some parts yourself. However, Apple hasn’t yet added its newest HomePod to its Self Service Repair program, but at least it would now be a more realistic addition.
Hogwarts Legacy arrives with all the controversy of a Harry Potter project and a lot of anticipation. For many, this is, finally, a game that does justice to the magic and spectacle of the pop-culture phenomenon, with an open-world design, side quests, customizable characters and more. There’s a solid game, here, with an entertaining combat system and plenty of mysteries to solve.
Sony’s full-frame A7R IV was one of the best mirrorless cameras Engadget’s Steve Dent ever reviewed, so there was a lot of pressure on its successor. Fortunately, this fifth-generation model is improved in pretty much every way. It’s a technological tour de force, featuring most of the company’s industry-leading tech. It has the best articulating screen on the market, the best autofocus system and much-improved video at up to 8K internally. The only real drawback is the rolling shutter effect that can mar video or photos taken in electronic shutter mode.
A busy week of news from OnePlus, Nintendo, Samsung and more.
It was a busy week. Microsoft and Google both unveiled their AI products for the masses, with Microsoft holding an entire event this week to show off the new Edge and Bing. Google also had an event in Paris and unveiled the first Android 14 developer preview, while OnePlus launched its first-ever tablet alongside a new flagship phone. Cherlynn is joined this week by guest co-host Sam Rutherford to tear into the week’s onslaught of news and see how we feel about Samsung’s Galaxy S23 Ultra while reviewing it.
Comcast subscribers are about to lose a big perk: free access to Peacock streaming. Since it launched in April 2020, the ad-supported version of Peacock Premium has been provided to Xfinity TV and broadband customers at no charge. Starting on April 3rd, it will no longer be offered to new subscribers, and as of June 26th, existing customers won't get it either, NBCUniversal has confirmed to Variety.
The news was first noted on Reddit via screenshots posting more details. "Customers will be presented with discounted offer details within the Peacock app," an internal message reads. "Stay tuned for offer details and more information." NBCU has also sent messages to customers that they'll be able to purchase Peacock Premium at a discounted price, which has yet to be determined.
Last month, Peacock stopped offering the free ad-supported standalone service to new users. At the time, the company said it believed Peacock's paid tiers were the best way to experience the service. More likely, it's because despite counting 20 million subscribers in 2022, up 9 million from the year before, Peacock has yet to turn a profit for NBCU/Comcast.
The company's plan was always to phase out free Peacock access for Comcast users, a spokesperson told Variety. By next year, it aims to hit 100,000 hours of programing divided between original series, licensed TV, movies, live sports and more. Its buzziest original hit right now is Rian Johnson's Poker Face, and it also streams popular classic TV fare like The Office.
Hogwarts Legacy is the Harry Potter game I’ve been dreaming of since I was a teenager. I grew up alongside the Harry Potter novels and devoured them all, and I spent the time between book releases reading and writing fanfiction set in the Wizarding World. I would’ve traded my little emo soul for a sprawling role-playing game that allowed me to be a student at Hogwarts, and 16 years later, that exact wish has been fulfilled. (And now I know what happened to my soul.)
Hogwarts Legacy is alive with magic. It’s a massive and gorgeous open-world RPG that extends far beyond the walls of the wizarding school, with mysteries, danger and cute creatures packed into every corner. Casting spells quickly becomes second nature in this environment and when it comes to puzzles, my magical instincts are often correct and richly rewarded. Combat involves intricate spellwork and lightning-quick responses, and this combination consistently results in a seamless, satisfying flow. I feel powerful while playing Hogwarts Legacy. I feel like a witch — and that’s all I’ve ever really wanted.
Warner Bros. Games
I’m not done with Hogwarts Legacy, but we weren’t given much lead time for the review and I feel I’ve played enough to form lasting opinions about the game. I’m about 22 hours in on PlayStation 5 and I’m one skill away from completing my witch’s ability set. Her name is Chenault, she’s a Slytherin, and her wand is 13 inches with a dragon heartstring core. Her favorite spell is incendio.
Combat in Hogwarts Legacy plays out across a variety of environments and against multiple enemy types, and it’s consistently delicious. Players eventually step into battle with 16 spells ready to fire, a wheel full of potions and plants, a meter that generates extra-powerful magic moves, and some basic defenses — and all of these actions culminate in explosive, frictionless duels. Spells, healing potions and protego bubbles respond even at the last possible moment, and my witch’s moves chain together in a way that feels volatile and magical. There’s strategy and challenge in each new battleground, and I look forward to testing my abilities and various clothing upgrades every time.
Combat may be where the action lies, but customization and exploration are core aspects of the game. Hogwarts is packed with students to assist (or not) and the school is overflowing with secrets, each one unlockable with the proper combination of curiosity and spellwork. I’ve spent a significant amount of time simply running through the halls and across the grounds of the school, happy to explore while passively gathering XP and watching the mysteries unravel around me.
Flying only makes this process more enjoyable. Whether on a broomstick or the back of a thestral, flight in Hogwarts Legacy feels exactly how I wanted it to — smooth, swift and stylish, and always with gorgeous views.
As the map expands beyond Hogwarts, past the streets of Hogsmeade and the boundaries of the Forbidden Forest, players encounter sidequests, challenges, secrets, puzzles and obstacle courses at a persistent pace. The world is large, but purposeful and truly beautiful; it’s clearly the result of intentional design, rather than procedural generation. There’s always something to find, a fresh riddle to solve or skill to learn, and my Quests tab is constantly growing. What’s more, I’m actually stoked to complete the activities I encounter, whenever I want to grind or take a breather from the main storyline.
The list of things to do in Hogwarts Legacy feels never-ending. For instance, about 10 hours in, the game introduces interior design mechanics in the Room of Requirement, allowing players to decorate a cavernous space from the architectural touches, to the placement and color of individual tables, chairs, paintings, rugs and tchotchkes. It’s a useful room, too; this is where players keep their clothing-upgrade loom, potions tables, herbology boxes and captured beasts. I’ve spent far too much time tweaking the appearance of my own Room of Requirement — like, hours — but I’m in love with the results and I’ve enjoyed the process immensely.
Warner Bros. Games
I see potential for the glut of stuff in Hogwarts Legacy to become tedious, but this hasn’t happened in my playthrough yet. More than 20 hours in, and the magic is still alive for me.
Before actually playing the game, I was especially excited to brew potions because this was my favorite activity in Pottermore, the browser-based Hogwarts-student simulator that disintegrated into gibberish in the mid 2010s. In Pottermore, brewing potions involved reading recipes and physically manipulating ingredients at the proper moments, and I found the process to be incredibly peaceful. However, potion-making isn’t an overly complicated affair in Hogwarts Legacy. You simply get the ingredients and then leave them on the table for a while, just like growing plants. The mechanics fit the game — in a world this busy and vast, gathering ingredients is the challenge, not the minutiae of chopping, stirring, grinding, measuring and timing — but it’s a missed opportunity.
Even just writing that, I’m itching to spend some quality time at a potions bench doing all of these things. Maybe this would make for a solid piece of DLC down the line, Advanced Potion-Making? Just a thought, Avalanche.
Right, back to the actual game.
Warner Bros. Games
The main storylines in Hogwarts Legacy are generic fantasy platforms. Two main arcs collide: one pits players against goblin revolutionaries planning to destroy wizardkind, and the other is an extensive investigation of an ancient and powerful magic — the same magic that you, the main character, can uniquely wield. The latter arc will be painfully familiar to Harry Potter fans, as it involves a bunch of old farts repeatedly throwing a child into deadly situations while withholding crucial information and stroking their long white beards. I guess we know where Dumbledore got it from.
Personally, I don’t love the focus on the Goblin Rebellions. It’s functional as a basic fantasy premise, but it’s an obvious choice for a Harry Potter prequel and the game hasn’t yet demonstrated that it was a particularly thoughtful decision. The conceit so far is, “goblins are bad, wizardkind is good,” and there hasn’t been an intricate discussion about class, power and revolution within this framework, though these opportunities are prevalent. Regardless of how this storyline concludes, I would’ve appreciated a more nuanced approach or an original enemy.
There are valid questions about whether the depiction of goblins in Harry Potter is inherently antisemitic, or the result of centuries of European fiction that coded vampires, dwarves and other creatures with its authors’ antisemitism. What you need to know is that goblins in Hogwarts Legacy are not meaningfully different to those in the novels, so your stance on the issue is unlikely to shift with this presentation.
Warner Bros. Games
The conversation around goblins and antisemitism would likely be top of mind in reviews and tweets about the game, but the author of the Harry Potter novels has made it publicly known that she’s transphobic, and this has understandably dominated the discourse. It’s led some people to call for a boycott of Hogwarts Legacy, and a portion of these folks are rebuking anyone who reviews, streams or talks about playing it. This controversy has consumed any broader criticism about the game itself. I addressed my personal decision to review this game for Engadget in an editorial at the start of the week, which is available to read here.
For anyone concerned about encountering transphobic or bigoted content in Hogwarts Legacy: The author of the Harry Potter novels was not involved in the game’s writing or creation, and in fact, its world is more inclusive than the series has ever been. Crucially, the Hogwarts Legacy character builder allows for an array of gender, voice and appearance configurations, and lets players choose their own names. In fanfiction terms, it’s basically a Mary Sue machine. This is ideal for an interactive role-playing medium — the customization options allow players to project their own identities onto the main character, who is an extra-special, super-powered student sorcerer surrounded by basic magic users. It’s a familiar premise for fantasy RPG players.
What makesthis game stand out among open-world RPGs is its density of activities, mysteries and awe-inspiring moments, and its expertly tuned combat mechanics. Hogwarts Legacy is thrumming with magic, and it expands not only the landscape around Hogwarts, but also the boundaries of representation in an incredibly popular fantasy universe. It’s the coolest work of Harry Potter fanfiction I’ve come across in years, and I’m excited to keep playing. Especially if there’s an Advanced Potion-Making DLC down the line.
The following article contains spoilers for earlier Star Trek properties but doesn’t reveal specific spoilers about Star Trek: Picard season three, not that you should be watching it anyway.
It’s 2034 and Warner Bros. decides it needs to wring more cash out of Friends, the decade defining cultural juggernaut and sitcom behemoth. Imagine what that show would be like; A warm and cozy three-decades-later check-in on characters you know intimately well. After all, you probably spent your formative years watching them mature from young single New Yorkers to a series of families. Maybe it’ll tickle those nostalgia glands, reminding you of when you watched the show with your own family as a kid.
Unfortunately, the hotshot creator of the age decided they want to go in a different direction this time. This needs to be a dark and gritty miserycore grief orgy that better reflects our more rough-and-tumble times. After all, TV these days can’t be gentle or comforting, offer escapism or posit a better world, not since Trump, Brexit, Bolonosaro, January 6th and Ukraine. The creative team have got that quote on a poster in their office, the one about thetriumph of evil, and they’re not going to sit idly by, they’re taking a stand.
In the sequel, Rachel’s famous for her wellness TikTok that often makes allusions to “reclaiming” the US as a white ethnostate. Joey lost an arm while filming a movie and is now in prison after a failed heist to pay off his life-ruining medical debt. Monica’s got a crippling adderall addiction and slips away most nights to murder the neighborhood cats and dogs. Everything’s shot in ultra gloomy vision, and there’s no laugh track, jokes or a studio audience, just unrelenting misery.
This revival is dense with references to the Friends backstory as well as the broader Friends universe. Remember that Lisa Kudrow played Phoebe’s twin sister Ursula on Mad About You, right? If not, you better get yourself to Wikipedia to study up. I mean, it won’t be relevant to the plot, but it’s something you remember, so clap, go on, clap.
You might be wondering why such a project would be allowed to happen, given that it wouldn’t be fun for fans of the original series. Times change, characters age, but you can’t turn a cozy sitcom into Breaking Bad overnight and expect that to be satisfying. You’d hardly think it’d be a big pull for newbie viewers either, who’d probably steer clear if they weren’t already familiar with 236 episodes of intricate backstory. Nostalgia revivals don’t need to be slavish to their source material, but it’s hard to see the appeal for something so grim and unpleasant.
Apropos of nothing, let’s talk about the third and final season of Star Trek: Picard.
Trae Patton / Paramount+
Season three was sold as something of a course correction for Picard after its first two deeply unpopular runs. It ditched all but Raffi from the roster of original characters created for it, and instead pulled in the stars from Star Trek: The Next Generation. As well as the returning Jonathan Frakes, Marina Sirtis and Brent Spiner, we’ll see LeVar Burton, Gates McFadden and Michael Dorn back in action. And, in the six of ten episodes I’ve been permitted to watch under strict embargo, I’d say only one of them feels like the character we know and love.
Unfortunately, while we have the other TNG stars, the creative team of Executive Producer Alex Kurtzman and showrunner Terry Matalas didn’t bother to grab any of that show’s lightness of tone. Picard remains a grimdark slog, shot on perpetually underlit sets and featuring a succession of increasingly-bleak setpieces. The plot is stretched so thin that the first four episodes turn out to be little more than an extended prologue for the rest. A prologue that could, I should add, have been an efficient, and possibly more enjoyable, hour. The story is so obvious, too, that you’ll be ahead of the characters pretty much non-stop as they stumble from one idiot plot to the next.
It’s maddening that we can see how much of the plot is blocking itself to ensure things can’t move forward too quickly. There’s a whole episode of gosh-isn’t-this-tense tension that could have been eliminated if anyone in Starfleet pulled out a tricorder and used it as God intended. In this utopian future, where science and technology really are advanced enough to look like magic, why does nobody employ the tools hanging from their waistband? Mostly because Paramount ordered ten episodes, and ten episodes is what we’re going to give them. Another episode has a time-filling punch fight runaround because it’s now somehow impossible for a serving officer to use a Federation ship’s intercom system to call the bridge and warn them of impending danger.
Picard is one of those series where you often find yourself shouting at the screen as the next stupid moment unfolds in front of you. Even worse is that the show’s creative team seem to think that it’s us, the audience, who are deficient in the thinking department. There is scene after scene in which characters repeat the same lines back to each other because the crew assume we’re not paying attention. Because of the limits on spoilers, I’ve re-written a scene to match the sentiment, if not the words verbatim, so you can get a sense of what to expect:
CREW 1: The ship is being pulled closer to the black hole’s gravity well.
CREW 2: We do not have enough power to pull ourselves away, sir.
RIKER: Are you saying that we’re dead in the water?
CREW 1: We will be passing the black hole’s event horizon in 17 minutes.
RIKER: We’re dead in the water and we’re sinking.
PICARD: We’re going to be dead in 17 minutes, Will, unless we can find a way to solve this.
RIKER: We’re sinking into quicksand, and there’s no time to grab a helping hand.
The irony is that this run is so thicket-dense with references that the show basically assumes that you’ve already seen pretty much everything produced during Trek’s gold, silver and bronze ages. But, to make sure nobody’s left behind, everyone has to speak in exposition so hamfisted that, now that this is over, I think Michelle Hurd deserves personal injury compensation. Raffi gets saddled with so many cringe-inducing lines where she states, and restates and re-restates the obvious that I started grasping fistfuls of my own hair to relieve some of my discomfort.
And as for the storyline, what can I say? It’s clear that Alex Kurtzman is only comfortable writing in a single register. His go-to is usually a militaristic, testosterone-fuelled paranoid Reaganite fantasy in which the real villain was our own government all along. He did it in Into Darkness, Discovery season two and even the first season of Picard – to the point where Starfleet is now so lousy with double agents that all of their schemes fail because the saboteurs are all too busy sabotaging each other’s plans instead of that of the wider Federation.
If Picard is nothing else, it’s nearly pornographic in its use and misuse of franchise iconography. I always felt that Jeff Russo’s Picard theme sounded more like the library music for a corporate advert than the makes-your-heart-soar theme a Star Trek deserves. And here, it’s been ditched in favor of Jerry Goldsmith’s sumptuous, nectar-for-the-ears score for First Contact. The first title card is a direct pull from Wrath of Khan, and pretty much every element therein is an elbow to the ribs, reminding you of older, better Star Trek movies and TV series.
An early scene has a character “hijacking a starship” under false pretenses while it’s in spacedock. You know, the mushroom-shaped megastation orbiting Earth from The Search for Spock onwards. And because we’re already going beat-for-beat for a sequence xeroxed from 1984, said starship even jumps to warp as soon as it’s past the exit doors. Despite the fact that the sort of hardcore Trek fans who would spot the reference would also note that you’re not meant to jump to warp while inside a solar system when there’s no urgent need to do so.
I’ll admit, this is postgraduate degree-level Star Trek nerdery, but you can’t have it both ways: If you’re trying to placate hostile viewers with the excessive fan service, you can’t then complain when they point out that you’re doing it all wrong.
The show’s teaser trailer already revealed we’re getting an overstuffed roster of villains to round out the run. Amanda Plummer’s captain of an enemy ship that shares a design with the Narada from Star Trek ‘09. Then there’s Daniel Davis’ holographic Professor Moriarty, as well as Data’s evil twin brother Lore. Both of these sorta make sense in the context, but there’s a hell of a lot of narrative scaffolding to explain away the fact that Brent Spiner is now 74 years old. (The dude looks good for it, but it’s hard to play an ageless android when time marches on and the de-aging CGI budget is spent on smoothing out Patrick Stewart’s face for a single flashback and the pointless needle-drops that open every episode.)
Now, before you scurry off to Memory Alpha to confirm that Moriartywas locked away in a holobox at the end of “Ship in a Bottle,” and Lorewas disassembled at the end of “Descent Part 2,” yes, they were. Try to remember that showrunner Terry Matalas and executive producer Alex Kurtzman treat Star Trek’s continuity less as something which informs storytelling and more as a series of shiny objects to keep us all amused when the plot sags or anyone has any time to think about what’s going on.
I’ll also add that the trailers and promotional material have very intentionally kept a lot of material back. There are more classic-era heroes and villains crowbarring their way into the story in the way that, if it were fanfiction, would seem excessive. But, if I’m honest, the second or third time someone, or something, familiar popped up, I wasn’t whooping and cheering, I was sighing. The Star Trek universe is vast and broad and deep, but Picard makes it feel like a puddle where everyone knows each other, and everyone under the age of 30 has grown up watching The Next Generation. If you’re serving in the US Navy, for instance, how likely is it that you’d know the ins and outs of every exploit of even the most well-traveled combat vessel?
Now, I don’t have the language or experience to discuss this properly, and I’m aware of others who do feel differently. This is just my opinion, but I think the depiction of drug and alcohol use in Picard has always felt off. And since I can’t talk about the third season, I’ll talk about the first, where something very similar happened and is just as vexing here as it was back then. Raffi deals with her son’s rejection by relapsing, but then mere hours later, she’s back at her station and advancing the plot. I don’t recall a sense that her use clouded her judgment and I don’t think it was discussed subsequently – so despite the portentiousness in the build-up, it was depicted almost like someone just having a bad day and knocking back some drinks. I’m not saying that’s a bad thing, because there are plenty of people who use drugs and it doesn’t impact their professional lives at all. (Read any Making-Of book about The Original Series and you'll notice how more than a few references to the production team's drug use.) But if you’re going to write a plot where scenes hang on the will-she-or-won’t-she tension of relapse, but it all turns out to be hunky dory straight after, what was the point of depicting any of this in the first place?
Then there’s the violence, and the casual way that it’s doled out, especially in the show’s numerous interrogation scenes. I’m not advocating for forced confessions, but given Starfleet’s advanced science, and the Federation has a planet of literal telepaths at its disposal, why are we always punching people in the nose with a butt of a phaser pistol? I mean, I know why: It’s a nerdy sci-fi show play acting as a muscular basic-cable drama, but that doesn’t mean it works. I’ve often theorized that many modern-day Star Trek creators would much rather be over the hall making their own Star War instead. Maybe I’m wrong, and the Picard crew is really nostalgic for the hamfisted Bush-era politics of 24.
Trae Patton / Paramount+
It was always going to be hard to pull Picard out of its creative slump that started back when the show was greenlit. If there was ever a character who we’d seen grow, change, mature and treat his own life with more kindness, it was Jean-Luc Picard. Some of TNG’s best episodes forced Picard to consider his own life, his history, his mortality, his motives, including the series’ grand finale. “All Good Things” isn’t just good Star Trek, it’s one of the best series finales ever made, encompassing the entire breadth and depth of The Next Generation in one glorious sweep. And between seven years of TV and four less essential but still important movies, he was done.
I wrote somewhere, I forget where, that a smarter idea would have been to center the action on a less-well served member of the Enterprise D crew. I’d have been second in line to watch a Geordi LaForge spin-off (behind uber fan Rihanna, of course), and there’s plenty to explore there. Or a Beverley Crusher spin-off, as she solves people’s problems as a simple country space doctor back on Earth or on some far-flung planet. Maybe a sci-fi version of In Treatment fronted by Marina Sirtis could have worked, and would have certainly cost less than this.
All of which would be preferable to what we got, which despite initially having a Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist at the helm, was two years of go-nowhere, do-nothing bore-a-thons. Its brief moments of cleverness drowned out by the baffling character decisions, tin-eared dialog and ligneous acting. And both had plots which would have struggled to fill a movie stretched out across a painfully slow ten hour runtime.
And that’s before we get to the moralizing, which had characters pointing at a bad thing and saying “thing bad.” I don’t think the second season’s 26 percent rating on Rotten Tomatoes is because the (inexplicably) conservative wing of Trek fandom was outraged that a show about happy space communists solving problems while remaining friends suddenly “got woke.” Good, old-fashioned Star Trek at least had the good grace to cloak its progressivism in allegory that could slide past the otherwise closed minds of some of its viewers. By comparison, Picard felt like the first draft of a high school theater production made the term after the teacher had explained agitprop.
Maybe that’s why I feel so annoyed by Picard, because all of the things that are wrong with the show, and its kin, are examples of amateurishness. Amateurish plotting, amateurish dialogue, a lack of thoughtfulness about the material, what it says, or what it’s doing. Just an endless parade of big, dumb, brash, po-faced melodrama used in place of some sort of maturity or integrity. I don’t expect Star Trek to be brilliant all the damn time, but I do expect a minimum standard of something to be upheld. And this falls so far below it, it’s hard to call it Star Trek. Some people will call that gatekeeping, but Star Trek can be anything it damn well wants to be, so long as it's competently made and halfway entertaining.
The constant callbacks got me thinking about the period when Nicholas Meyer was, directly or indirectly, the major creative force behind Star Trek. It’s been 32 years since his 1991 swansong, The Undiscovered Country, and it remains a high-water mark of cinematic Trek. Drawing to a close the story of The Original Series crew, Meyer didn’t go for nostalgia, but savaged his characters, exposing their flaws, their bigotries, their failings. There was redemption, and heart, and it never needed Meyer to stage endless close-quarters phaser-fu fights in unlight rooms.
But that was a filmmaker with a clear vision, and the good graces to really drag his characters in the dirt before washing them clean. Imagine what would happen if Picard encountered any of the same level of subtext – they’d probably spend an hour running from it before beating it over the head with the butt of a phaser rifle and then spend the next hour feeling glum about it. If nothing else, I’d say don’t even watch Picard for ironic kicks, lest Paramount think it’s somehow a runaway hit and continue to produce crap like this.
Twitter is making millions of dollars from just a handful of some of its most infamous users, according to a new report. New research from the Center for Countering Digital Hate (CCDH) estimates that Twitter “will generate up to $19 million a year in advertising revenue” from just 10 accounts that were once banned from the platform.
The report looked at the current engagement with 10 accounts that were previously banned for “ for “publishing hateful content and dangerous conspiracies.” The accounts were reinstated after Elon Musk’s takeover of Twitter. The group includes a number of high-profile accounts associated with extremism and conspiracy theories, including those belonging to influencer Andrew Tate, Daily Stormer founder Andrew Anglin, prominent antivaxxer Robert Malone and the Gateway Pundit.
In order to estimate their reach and engagement, CCDH analyzed nearly 10,000 tweets from these accounts during a 47-day period in December and January. According to their analysis, “on an average day, tweets from the ten accounts received a combined total of 54 million impressions,” they write. “Projecting this average across 365 days, the accounts can be expected to reach nearly 20 billion impressions over the course of a year.”
In order to determine how much ad revenue those impressions might generate for Twitter, CCDH says it created three new Twitter accounts that followed only the 10 users named in the report. The authors found that ads appeared about once every 6.7 tweets. Then, using data from analytics firm Brandwatch, which estimates that “Twitter ads cost an average of $6.46 per 1,000 impressions,” CCDH came up with “a total figure of up to $19 million in estimated annual ad revenues across the accounts.”
While the estimates aren’t a precise accounting of how much Twitter might be making from these users, it demonstrates how valuable a small number of highly polarizing accounts can be for the platform. It also underscores how much more Twitter stands to gain by bringing back even more controversial users.
All of the accounts named in the report were once permanently banned from twitter, but were reinstated after Musk said he would offer “general amnesty” to users who hadn’t broken the law. Twitter also recently announced plans to allow even more previously banned users to appeal their suspensions.
At the same time, Twitter’s advertising business has taken a major hit since Musk’s takeover. A number of high profile advertisers have pulled back from the platform, and revenue is down as much as 40 percent, according to reporting fromPlatformer.
The report also points out several instances when ads from prominent advertisers appeared adjacent to offensive and inflammatory posts from these users. For example, a Prime Video ad directly underneath a tweet from Andrew Anglin that states “the only career a woman is actually capable of on merit is prostitution.” The report also highlights an ad from the NFL, which appeared directly underneath a tweet misinformation about COVID-19 vaccines.
“This work confirms that Twitter has been displaying ads next to every one of the toxic accounts we have investigated, despite the fact that the individuals behind them are known to promote hateful views and falsehoods,” CCDH writes.
Amazon is moving forward with a live-action Spider-Man Noir series, according toVariety. It will reportedly focus on “an older, grizzled superhero in 1930s New York City” — one that isn’t Peter Parker.
Spider-Man Noir is an alternate version of the web-slinging hero, first seen in the 2009 Marvel comic series of the same name. The comic version was set in 1933, as a freshly bitten Spidey navigates New York City’s Depression-era criminal underworld. The character, who exists in a separate universe from the mainline Spider-Man stories, also appeared in the 2018 film Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse, voiced by Nicolas Cage. The report doesn’t mention whether Cage will be involved in the new project, but the actor has said he wasn’t asked to return for the upcoming animated sequel, Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse.
Marvel
The as-yet-untitled series will be Amazon’s second project based on Sony-controlled Marvel superheroes after the upcoming Silk: Spider Society. Oren Uziel will write and executive-produce the show; Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse alumni Phil Lord, Christopher Miller and Amy Pascal share executive-producing credits.
Sony controls the film rights to Spider-Man and supporting characters like Venom, Carnage, Vulture, Black Cat and others. In addition, it works with Marvel Studios on the current MCU film franchise starring Tom Holland.
Twitter has shared more details about the upcoming changes to its API that will require most developers to pay in order to keep using its developer tools. In an update, the company said that there will be “a new form of free access” that will allow “Tweet creation of up to 1,500 Tweets per month.”
That clarification means that many of Twitter’s so-called “good” bots — the automated accounts that tweet everything from historical photos to helpful reminders — will be able to continue on the platform. Previously, the future of these accounts was uncertain as many bot makers said they would not pay for API access.
A new form of free access will be introduced as this is extremely important to our ecosystem – limited to Tweet creation of up to 1,500 Tweets per month for a single authenticated user token, including Login with Twitter.
However, the 1,500 monthly limit on tweet creation could still impact bots that tweet most frequently. Fifteen hundred tweets a month works out to roughly 50 tweets a day, which could be problematic for Twitter’s most active bots. The company also granted a short reprieve for developers about to lose API access, saying that it had extended the current version of the API until February 13th.
After that, developers wishing to access the “paid basic” tier of Twitter’s API will need to pay $100 a month, according to Twitter. The company also confirmed that it would be ending the Premium API, and that subscribers would have the option to apply for the Enterprise version of the service. The company still hasn’t weighed in on what, if any, options will be available to researchers currently using Twitter’s developer tools for their projects.
Spotify is launching a new feature today called Exclude from your Taste Profile. As its name suggests, it lets you choose playlists — perhaps those played by a child or other family member — that you don’t want affecting your personalized recommendations.
The company says the feature “reduces the impact” the playlists have on your recommended content. So if your child loves jamming out to “Elmo’s Favorite Elmo Songs!” ad nauseam, the new feature should help you avoid hearing similar children’s tunes in your Daily Mix playlists and other algorithmically generated content. (Although we wouldn’t fault you for putting on “Brushy Brush!” while cleaning those pearly whites.)
Exclude from your Taste Profile only works with playlists — not albums or individual songs. Spotify says liked songs within those playlists will still affect your recommendations, so it may be wise to ask family members to ease up on the heart button. The changes will apply retroactively, excluding past and future listens of the unwanted playlists from your recommendations.
Spotify is rolling out the feature “starting today,” suggesting you may not see it immediately. The feature will work on iOS, Android, desktop and the web. Once available, you can exclude music by selecting a playlist, tapping the three-dot menu near the top and selecting “Exclude from your Taste Profile.” In addition, the company says you can turn the feature off at any time using the same process.
Get ready, Nintendo fans: it’s almost time for the company’s first Direct of 2023. The showcase will mostly focus on games coming to Switch in the first half of this year and it will run for around 49 minutes. The Nintendo Direct starts at 5PM ET and you can watch it below.
Everything else is largely a mystery, and that's part of the fun of a Nintendo Direct. Rumor has it that Nintendo will release the delayedAdvance Wars 1+2: Re-Boot Camp imminently and many folks are hoping for news on Metroid Prime 4 and Hollow Knight: Silksong. Luckily, we won't have to wait much longer to find out more about what Nintendo has in store for the next few months.
