Netflix's The Witcher franchise is going through some major changes, with Henry Cavill, the star of the main show, set to depart. Before Cavill's swansong in season three, though, a miniseries set in the same universe will hit the streaming service, and Netflix has offered another look at it.
The latest teaser for The Witcher: Blood Origin opens with sword-elf Scian (Michelle Yeoh) carrying out a ritual before showing violence, devastation and magic in otherworldly, high-fantasy settings. The four-episode miniseries is set 1,200 years before the events of The Witcher. Scian and her cohorts will bring about the very first witcher — a monster hunter with magic powers.
The Witcher: Blood Origin will arrive on Netflix on December 25th. It could help you bide time until the arrival of season three of The Witcher, which is slated to premiere next summer.
If I’m honest with myself, my one true hobby is collecting hobbies. I play guitar and record electronic music. I picked up painting last year. (I am objectively horrible at it.) I cook. I brew beer. I dabble in DIY electronics. I’m an avid hiker. An on-again-off-again runner. I’ve flirted with boxing. Oh, and I write. Obviously.
Now I’ve added photography to the list. I explored it a bit back in high school and college, but had only picked up a camera (that wasn’t built into my phone) outside of work a handful of times since. Then in 2021, after a couple of years exclusively using my phone’s camera for review photos, I decided I desperately needed to upgrade. I eventually settled on the Fujifilm X-T30, in part because I had a limited budget. But, while I went out in search of an affordable workhorse to up my photo and video game at Engadget, what I ended up with was the perfect camera to rekindle my interest in the art of photography.
Terrence O'Brien / Engadget
Let’s start with what attracts many people to the Fujifilm family in the first place: the controls. My first photography experiences were with film. Sure, it’s been a long time since I last used a film camera, but at least I have some level of comfort there. Unlike most digital cameras, Fujifilm’s X series mimics the look and feel of a 35mm film camera. There are dedicated dials for shutter speed and exposure compensation, and many of Fuji’s first-party lenses have physical aperture rings. If I had sprung for the X-T3 I’d have even gotten a dedicated ISO dial. But there are two programmable dials that can be mapped to control ISO and aperture, even if you’re using a lens without an aperture ring.
This makes the X-T30 far more tactile and satisfying than other digital cameras I’ve used, whereas I would usually just put them in aperture priority and forget about it. Without a PASM dial (Program, Aperture priority, Shutter priority and Manual) as a crutch, I’ve been forced to learn the camera’s various options inside and out. I also have to think more carefully and critically about each exposure. Yes, you can essentially put the X-T30 in shutter or aperture priority mode by changing certain settings to auto, but you can’t just turn a dial and be done with it.
Terrence O'Brien
The other big thing for me is the film simulations. Fuji cameras have a built in set of profiles that are supposed to mimic particular film stock. Think of them kind of like Instagram filters, but less terrible. Astia is tuned for portraits, Velvia is perfect for landscapes, Eterna gives you that low-contrast cinematic look, and so on.
And that’s just scratching the surface: You can tweak the settings further to fine-tune your straight-out-of-camera (SOOC) JPGs to achieve various styles and approximations of other films. There’s even a whole little Fujifilm subculture dedicated to “film recipes” that aim to capture the general vibe, if not the look of many classic film stocks. One of the best resources for this is Fuji X Weekly, where Ritchie Roesch shares and shows off various recipes to try and recreate things like Kodak’s Portra 400 or Ilford Delta.
Because I’m someone who likes to obsess over tiny details and tweak things, this is perfect for me. When I first discovered Fuji X Weekly I spent several days going through the recipes that were compatible with my particular camera (and some that weren’t), punching in the settings and taking test photos, saving my favorites to Evernote for easy recall. Fuji makes it simple to load up to seven of these presets with the Q menu, so I can essentially go out with seven different “films” loaded in my camera and switch between them as the situation dictates.
What I like most about this setup is that I can just go out and shoot, and come back with great looking photos that don’t need any editing. I can decide in the moment: Would this be better with a warmer color palette? Should I be turning up the saturation here? How would this scene look in high-contrast black and white? And I don’t need to do a lot of menu diving to test different looks out.
Terrence O'Brien
I always shoot in RAW + JPG, in case I change my mind later or if something doesn’t come out quite how I wanted. But being able to basically see the finished product and focus on actually composing photos, as opposed to spending even more time sitting at a laptop is great. It’s exactly what I need in a hobby: less staring at a computer screen.
Without getting absurd and gimmicky – artificially limiting how many pictures I can take or using only one preset for at least 24 shots in a row – this feels about as close to shooting film as I’m gonna get on a digital camera. And while, yes, I know I could always just go back to shooting on film, I’d really rather not. I like many of the modern conveniences afforded by a digital camera. Plus, 35mm film and quality development services have gotten quite expensive. Even expired rolls of lower-end stock can fetch a decent price on Craigslist.
It’s not all roses, though. The X-T30 is limited to recording 10 minutes of 4K video at a time, which can make shooting reviews a PITA. And, perhaps more importantly, I may have joined the Fujifilm flock at the exact wrong time. For years the company cultivated a loyal fan base with its philosophy of “kaizen,” which saw it continuously updating even older devices to bring new features and bug fixes. Unfortunately, the company has started to move away from that in recent years.
The X-T30 last received a firmware update over one year ago, in early October of 2021, and that was almost entirely minor bug fixes. It wasn’t even three years old at that point. The company introduced the X-T30 II around the same time which from a hardware point of view is almost identical, but it has a host of new software features and film simulations. There seems to be no technical reason that many of those features couldn’t be ported over to the slightly older camera, especially the film sims, but Fuji has left some of its users out in the cold.
Terrence O'Brien / Engadget
Here’s hoping Fujifilm remembers that it attracted dedicated followers by focusing on the experience and delivering regular meaningful updates to users. Because, while I love my camera, and do think it is probably the best camera for me, I’m a little concerned that I discovered the Fuji community just in time for it to evaporate.
Twitter has altered the rules for its $8 Blue subscription service to prevent new accounts from getting a blue checkmark. Yesterday evening, the company edited the service's help page to add that accounts created on or after November 9th, 2022 "will be unable to subscribe to Twitter Blue at this time." The website also added that Twitter Blue is only available on iOS for users in the US, Canada, Australia, New Zealand and the UK, with plans to expand in the future.
While Twitter didn't explain why it's putting the restriction on new accounts, the move came after an influx of impersonators got verified by paying for the service. "Twitter's current lords & peasants system for who has or doesn't have a blue checkmark is bullshit," the website's new owner, Elon Musk, tweeted earlier this month before details about the revamped subscription service were revealed. Yesterday marked the launch of the new Twitter Blue, and it allowed people to get the formerly elusive blue checkmark by paying for its perks that include instant verification.
The internet being the internet, people quickly realized that they can pretend to be someone else and that the checkmark could help them fool unsuspecting users. A bunch of impersonators popped up on the website, including one claiming to be LeBron James who tweeted that the basketball star was requesting a trade. A fake Nintendo of America account tweeted a photo of Mario giving Twitter the middle finger, while a fake Valve account tweeted about a new competitive platform. Twitter started banning them after a few hours. The new rule could help curb the number of fake accounts, but it's unclear how Twitter plans to address the issue going forward — it can't lock new users out of Blue forever.
While Twitter's blue checkmarks are now for sale, it has another smaller, gray checkmark reserved for public figures. It started rolling out these "official" checkmarks yesterday, but it quickly pulled them back down and will hand them out to "government and commercial entities" first.
In 2021, Twitter launched an in-app tipping feature that people can use to send money to creators, but it needs to be connected to a third-party payment processor to work. If Elon Musk's vision for the social network comes true, though, Twitter may have a payment system of its own.
Twitter's new owner and temporary CEO has discussed his plans for the social network in a Spaces Q&A for advertisers. One of the things he revealed is that he envisions a future wherein users can connect their bank accounts to Twitter, enabling them to send money to each other. While it will likely take a long time before we see that happen, if it actually does, The New York Times has confirmed that the company filed registration paperwork to process payments with the Treasury Department's Financial Crimes Enforcement Network (FinCEN) last week.
In the Spaces discussion, Musk spoke about the feature in relation to creators. He talked about how the website needs to enable monetization for creators to entice them to post their work on the platform. "Now we can say that, okay, you've got a balance in your account, do you want to send money to someone else within Twitter?" the executive said. He also discussed how users will be able to take money out of Twitter by linking their bank accounts, hinting at a system similar to PayPal, which he helped found. The company might even offer an "extremely compelling money market account," as well as debit and credit cards, if things work well.
This is but one of the changes Musk has planned for the social network. The $8-a-month Twitter Blue subscription that gives users access to instant account verification was one of the very first changes he implemented after taking over the company. Twitter will still verify government entities, celebrities, publishers and other public figures with a second gray "official" checkmark, but the big blue checks are now reserved for paying subscribers. This unpaid checkmark started rolling out yesterday before Twitter stopped its deployment and pulled it back to focus on "government and commercial entities" first.
Elon Musk is trying, once again, to sell his vision of Twitter’s future to the company’s advertisers. Musk, who by all accounts has yet to address Twitter’s remaining staff as a group, joined an hour-long “town hall” to take questions from advertisers and share more about his plans for the platform.
The company’s advertising business has taken a significant hit in recent days as a number of major brands have pulled back from the platform and activists have called for a boycott. Musk said last week that these actions had caused a “massive drop in revenue” for Twitter.
In his talk on Twitter Spaces, Musk tried again to reassure advertisers that their brands would be safe on the platform. He said that ads appearing next to hate speech “isn’t great” and pitched the newly launched Twitter Blue as a way to decrease hate speech on the platform. Under the new Twitter Blue, brands will need to pay for the blue check like all other accounts, Musk said. He added that anyone impersonating a brand would be permanently banned from the service.
He also said that he hopes to make Twitter ads a lot more relevant, and wants to integrate ads into recommended tweets. The goal, he said, was to “drive sales in the short term and protect the demand in the long term.”
Notably, he struck a much different tone than in recent tweets when he threatened “a thermonuclear name and shame” for advertisers boycotting the platform. “I understand if people kind of want to give it a minute and see how things are evolving,” he said. “We've been more rigorous about clamping down on bad content and bots and trolls, not less. So my observation of Twitter over the past few weeks is that the content is actually improving, not getting worse.” He added that brands and advertisers should be more active on the platform and that if they see something they don’t like they should “reply to one of my tweets and I’ll do my best to respond.”
Musk also talked more about his philosophy on content moderation, though he didn’t share any concrete changes to Twitter’s policies or how its moderation council might function. "We have to be, I think, tolerant of views we don't agree with, but those views don't need to be amplified," he said.
He also stated that he has plans to make Community Notes, the crowd-sourced fact checking feature that used to be known as Birdwatch, a more central part of the platform. “This is really gonna help in improving the accuracy of what's said in the system.” He also suggested that Community Notes would have an impact on the visibility of content on Twitter. “It's analogous to the way sort of Page Rank works in Google, where the the prominence of a webpage is proportionate to how much weight other prominent web pages give that web page. I think it’s a game changer.”
Sony has revealed another selection of games that will be available to PlayStation Plus subscribers on the Extra and Premium tiers. The headliner for many folks is one of the most beloved games of all time,The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim (a game from Microsoft-owned Bethesda Softworks, fact fans). The special edition of the classic 2011 RPG includes updated visuals and other features.
Subscribers will soon be able to play three of Ubisoft’s Tom Clancy-branded games at no extra cost: Rainbow Six Siege (both the PS4 and PS5 versions), The Division 2 and Ghost Recon Breakpoint. Several Kingdom Hearts games are on the way as well. You'll get access to Kingdom Hearts HD 1.5 + 2.5 ReMIX (a remastered collection of four games), Kingdom Hearts HD 2.8 Final Chapter Prologue,Kingdom Hearts: Melody of Memory and the most recent mainline entry in the series, Kingdom Hearts III.
On top of that, you'll be able to check out Oddworld: Soulstorm – Enhanced Edition (which features a new game mode) and space shooter Chorus. PS4 and PS5 versions of both games will be available. Also on the docket are classic indie walking sim What Remains of Edith Finch, puzzle title The Gardens Between, Earth Defense Force: World Brothers, Earth Defense Force: Iron Rain and Onee Chanbara Origin.
There are some worthy PS3 titles coming to the Premium lineup this month, in the form of five more Ratchet & Clank games. You'll get access to Ratchet & Clank, Ratchet & Clank 2: Going Commando, Ratchet & Clank: Up Your Arsenal, Ratchet & Clank: Deadlocked and Ratchet & Clank Future: Tools of Destruction.
These games will be available on November 15th. It's a pretty solid batch of additions to PS Plus Extra and Premium. Perhaps these titles will help Sony gain back some of the PS Plus subscribers Sony has lost in recent months.
Following a false start over the weekend, the new Twitter Blue has arrived. Priced at $8 per month in the US, the service grants subscribers access to instant account verification and an accompanying blue checkmark that shows up on their profile page and alongside their tweets. As of the writing of this article, the subscription isn't available on Android. It's also unclear when Twitter Blue will arrive outside of the markets where the service was already available before today.
The other perks Twitter owner and CEO Elon Musk announced would be part of the package, including the ability to see half as many ads and post longer videos, also aren't available yet, with the subscription prompt listing those as "coming soon." Notably, the signup form lists the $8 monthly price as a "limited-time offer."
You didn't have to wait long to see Twitter's reworked verification system in action. The Vergereports that the social network has begun adding its subtle "official" checkmarks to major accounts, including those of celebrities, large publishers and politicians. This includes Engadget, The Verge and general publications like The New York Times. Curiously, though, new Twitter owner Elon Musk doesn't have the mark yet — you'd think he'd adopt it quickly given the many impersonators who use his name to pitch crypto scams.
VP Esther Crawford previously stressed that the "official" badge won't be available for purchase, unlike the blue checkmarks that will come with an $8 Twitter Blue subscription. Those that previously received blue ticks won't necessarily get the second label, however. It's not yet certain if those seeking the extra mark will need to go through further vetting.
The complete rollout should be relatively quick. Twitter has been testing the "official" checkmarks for a while, and previously said the deployment should wrap up in the coming days.
To some extent, this feature is fixing a problem Twitter created for itself. Musk and others have blasted the previous approach to verification as an unfair "lords and peasants" system that disenfranchised ordinary users while enshrining a selected elite. While that's true, the old method also established authenticity — the changes to Blue effectively break verification by letting determined fraudsters pay to get a checkmark next to their name, even if that carries the risk of a permanent ban. The "official" mark brings back that trust, although it asks Twitter to once again decide who's deserving of special recognition.
In a few short hours, Nintendo will stream its latest Indie World Showcase. Announced on November 7th, the company promised approximately 25 minutes worth of information about upcoming indie games that are coming to the Nintendo Switch. You can watch the entire event unfold on the gaming giant’s website, as well as its YouTube and Twitch channels. If you miss the livestream, don’t worry: we’ll have you covered with coverage of the major announcements from the event.
What will Nintendo announce Iduring Indie World? One can always hope for a more definitive release date for Hollow Knight: Silksong. Based on Microsoft’s recent announcement that the game would be available on Xbox Game Pass and PC Game Pass on its release date, some have speculated that Silksong would arrive before June 2023. That said, Nintendo is more likely to share updates about games like Oxenfree II Lost Signalsand Metal Slug Tactics. The latter was delayed this past summer until 2023.
For a project that was divisive among critics and players alike, Death Stranding has done pretty well for itself. With the game celebrating its third anniversary today, Kojima Productions revealed that more than 10 million people have played the studio’s first game. The milestone takes into account all the platforms where Death Stranding is available, including PC Game Pass. “It makes me happy to think that there are over 10 million “Sam one” players around the world, all loosely connected,” creator Hideo Kojima said on Twitter.
It might seem obvious that a game from the creator of Metal Gear Solid would find commercial success, but it didn’t always look that way. By some accounts, Death Stranding was a flop when it first came out. According to one ResetEra post from 2020, Sony was reportedly unhappy with the game’s sales, with the author of the post claiming 3 million copies of Death Stranding were sitting in warehouses as of March of that year. But then the critical reevaluation of the game began, helped first by the pandemic and then its arrival on PC. In Death Stranding, a lot of people found an experience that helped them make sense of a world that had changed overnight and by July 2021, the game had sold 5 million copies.
As for Death Stranding’s future, actor Norman Reedus recently said in an interview that Kojima Productions is working on a sequel. In the past weeks, the studio has also begun teasing a game that will star actors Elle Fanning and Shioli Kutsuna.
