The devs behind AI-based sample editing software Samplab are back with a free VST3 plugin that generates samples from text prompts. The appropriately-named TextToSample is a plugin that opens inside your DAW or as a standalone tool, allowing you to type, say, “bubbly synth melody” to create a, well, bubbly synth melody to do with as you see fit.

TextToSample utilizes Meta’s open-source AI-based sound generation toolset, MusicGen, and was trained using data provided by the algorithm. You can also drag and drop pre-existing sounds into the plugin and have it generate related samples, in addition to typing out commands.

The UI is extremely minimal and sparse, which makes it easy to use, but does present some inherent limitations. For instance, it doesn’t take pre-existing music on your track into account, so your first, second, and even third attempts will likely not match the tone you are going for. It also has trouble recognizing basic music concepts like keys, scales and BPM. Just like most AI-creation platforms, you aren’t going to get a perfect match right away. You’ll have to tweak, augment and provide further instructions, bit by bit, until satisfied.

However, when you get there, it’s pretty darn fun, creating the kinds of happy accidents you’d never stumble into on your own. Check out the demo video and that little flourish of guitar at the tail end of the sample as an example.

This is an AI tool in the year 2023, so there are some bugs. During experiments, we ran into issues like the plugin adding drums when we clearly stated that we didn’t want percussion. To that end, Samplab says the tool is not intended to “replace human musicians, which it’s not capable of doing anyway.” It’s free, though, so there's no harm in checking it out, and the technology should improve as more people use it.

If reality television has taught us anything, it's there's not much people won't do if offered enough money and attention. Sometimes, even just the latter. Unfortunately for the future prospects of our civilization, modern social media has focused upon those same character foibles and optimized them at a global scale, sacrifices at the altar of audience growth and engagement. In Outrage Machine, writer and technologist Tobias Rose-Stockwell, walks readers through the inner workings of these modern technologies, illustrating how they're designed to capture and keep our attention, regardless of what they have to do in order to do it. In the excerpt below, Rose-Stockwell examines the human cost of feeding the content machine through a discussion on YouTube personality Nikocado Avocado's rise to internet stardom.

Legacy Lit

Excerpted from OUTRAGE MACHINE: How Tech Amplifies Discontent, Disrupts Democracy—And What We Can Do About It by Tobias Rose-Stockwell. Copyright © 2023 by Tobias Rose-Stockwell. Reprinted with permission of Legacy Lit. All rights reserved.

This Game Is Not Just a Game

Social media can seem like a game. When we open our apps and craft a post, the way we look to score points in the form of likes and followers distinctly resembles a strange new playful competition. But while it feels like a game, it is unlike any other game we might play in our spare time.

The academic C. Thi Nguyen has explained how games are different: “Actions in games are screened off, in important ways, from ordinary life. When we are playing basketball, and you block my pass, I do not take this to be a sign of your long-term hostility towards me. When we are playing at having an insult contest, we don’t take each other’s speech to be indicative of our actual attitudes or beliefs about the world.” Games happen in what the Dutch historian Johan Huizinga famously called “the magic circle”— where the players take on alternate roles, and our actions take on alternate meanings.

With social media we never exit the game. Our phones are always with us. We don’t extricate ourselves from the mechanics. And since the goal of the game designers of social media is to keep us there as long as possible, it’s an active competition with real life. With a constant type of habituated attention being pulled into the metrics, we never leave these digital spaces. In doing so, social media has colonized our world with its game mechanics.

Metrics are Money

While we are paid in the small rushes of dopamine that come from accumulating abstract numbers, metrics also translate into hard cash. Acquiring these metrics don’t just provide us with hits of emotional validation. They are transferable into economic value that is quantifiable and very real.

It’s no secret that the ability to consistently capture attention is an asset that brands will pay for. A follower is a tangible, monetizable asset worth money. If you’re trying to purchase followers, Twitter will charge you between $2 and $4 to acquire a new one using their promoted accounts feature.

If you have a significant enough following, brands will pay you to post sponsored items on their behalf. Depending on the size of your following in Instagram, for instance, these payouts can range from $75 per post (to an account with two thousand followers), up to hundreds of thousands of dollars per post (for accounts with hundreds of thousands of followers).

Between 2017 and 2021, the average cost for reaching a thousand Twitter users (the metric advertisers use is CPM, or cost per mille) was between $5 and $7. It costs that much to get a thousand eyeballs on your post. Any strategies that increase how much your content is shared also have a financial value.

Let’s now bring this economic incentive back to Billy Brady’s accounting of the engagement value of moral outrage. He found that adding a single moral or emotional word to a post on Twitter increased the viral spread of that content by 17 percent per word. All of our posts to social media exist in a marketplace for attention — they vie for the top of our followers’ feeds. Our posts are always competing against other people’s posts. If outraged posts have an advantage in this competition, they are literally worth more money.

For a brand or an individual, if you want to increase the value of a post, then including moral outrage, or linking to a larger movement that signals its moral conviction, might increase the reach of that content by at least that much. Moreover, it might actually improve the perception and brand affinity by appealing to the moral foundations of the brand’s consumers and employees, increasing sales and burnishing their reputation. This can be an inherently polarizing strategy, as a company that picks a cause to support, whose audience is morally diverse, might then alienate a sizable percentage of their customer base who disagree with that cause. But these economics can also make sense — if a company knows enough about its consumers’ and employees’ moral affiliations — it can make sure to pick a cause-sector that’s in line with its customers.

Since moral content is a reliable tool for capturing attention, it can also be used for psychographic profiling for future marketing opportunities. Many major brands do this with tremendous success — creating viral campaigns that utilize moral righteousness and outrage to gain traction and attention among core consumers who have a similar moral disposition. These campaigns also often get a secondary boost due to the proliferation of pile- ons and think pieces discussing these ad spots. Brands that moralize their products often succeed in the attention marketplace.

This basic economic incentive can help to explain how and why so many brands have begun to link themselves with online cause-related issues. While it may make strong moral sense to those decision-makers, it can make clear economic sense to the company as a whole as well. Social media provides measurable financial incentives for companies to include moral language in their quest to burnish their brands and perceptions.

But as nefarious as this sounds, moralization of content is not always the result of callous manipulation and greed. Social metrics do something else that influences our behavior in pernicious ways.

Audience Capture

In the latter days of 2016, I wrote an article about how social media was diminishing our capacity for empathy. In the wake of that year’s presidential election, the article went hugely viral, and was shared with several million people. At the time I was working on other projects full time. When the article took off, I shifted my focus away from the consulting work I had been doing for years, and began focusing instead on writing full time. One of the by-products of that tremendous signal from this new audience is the book you’re reading right now.

A sizable new audience of strangers had given me a clear message: This was important. Do more of it. When many people we care about tell us what we should be doing, we listen.

This is the result of “audience capture”: how we influence, and are influenced by those who observe us. We don’t just capture an audience — we are also captured by their feedback. This is often a wonderful thing, provoking us to produce more useful and interesting works. As creators, the signal from our audience is a huge part of why we do what we do.

But it also has a dark side. The writer Gurwinder Boghal has explained the phenomena of audience capture for influencers illustrating the story of a young YouTuber named Nicholas Perry. In 2016, Perry began a You- Tube channel as a skinny vegan violinist. After a year of getting little traction online, he abandoned veganism, citing health concerns, and shifted to uploading mukbang (eating show) videos of him trying different foods for his followers. These followers began demanding more and more extreme feats of food consumption. Before long, in an attempt to appease his increasingly demanding audience, he was posting videos of himself eating whole fast-food menus in a single sitting.

He found a large audience with this new format. In terms of metrics, this new format was overwhelmingly successful. After several years of following his audience’s continued requests, he amassed millions of followers, and over a billion total views. But in the process, his online identity and physical character changed dramatically as well. Nicholas Perry became the personality Nikocado — an obese parody of himself, ballooning to more than four hundred pounds, voraciously consuming anything his audience asked him to eat. Following his audience’s desires caused him to pursue increasingly extreme feats at the expense of his mental and physical health.

Legacy Lit

Nicholas Perry, left, and Nikocado, right, after several years of building a following on YouTube. Source: Nikocado Avocado YouTube Channel.

Boghal summarizes this cross-directional influence.

When influencers are analyzing audience feedback, they often find that their more outlandish behavior receives the most attention and approval, which leads them to recalibrate their personalities according to far more extreme social cues than those they’d receive in real life. In doing this they exaggerate the more idiosyncratic facets of their personalities, becoming crude caricatures of themselves.

This need not only apply to influencers. We are signal-processing machines. We respond to the types of positive signals we receive from those who observe us. Our audiences online reflect back to us what their opinion of our behavior is, and we adapt to fit it. The metrics (likes, followers, shares, and comments) available to us now on social media allow for us to measure that feedback far more precisely than we previously could, leading to us internalizing what is “good” behavior.

As we find ourselves more and more inside of these online spaces, this influence becomes more pronounced. As Boghal notes, “We are all gaining online audiences.” Anytime we post to our followers, we are entering into a process of exchange with our viewers — one that is beholden to the same extreme engagement problems found everywhere else on social media.

For anyone with an eye on video game news, it’s been hard to ignore the recent rise of names like Annapurna Interactive, Devolver Digital, Private Division, Humble, Epic Games and Netflix tied to independent projects. The distribution process for indie developers has shifted over the past few years from a self-publishing-first model, to one that prioritizes deal-making and acquisitions. For the moment, this shift is powering a small but highly visible boom in the world of indie games.

“I don't think I ever want to self-publish again.”

Ben Ruiz has been a game developer since 2005, and in that time, he’s pretty much done it all. He founded two studios, he did contract work on titles including Super Meat Boy and Overland, and he independently published a tentpole original project, the monochromatic brawler Aztez. Nowadays, Ruiz is running a five-person studio called Dinogod and he’s building Bounty Star, a game that blends mech combat with life-sim mechanics. Bounty Star is being published by Annapurna Interactive and it’s due out in early 2024.

Annapurna Interactive

“Everything favors a publisher relationship, seemingly, because self-publishing has become this extraordinarily difficult thing,” Ruiz said. “It’s possible, but without help, I just don't know how anyone's doing it … I got a lot of friends in the same boat.”

Ruiz’s career is a microcosm of the shifting landscape for indie developers over the past 10 years. He began working on Aztez in 2010, when Steam was a curated marketplace where Valve employees hand-selected individual games for the platform. This system had fully imploded by 2012: On the heels of breakout hits like Braid, Super Meat Boy and Fez, the indie market was overrun by new games and developers, and Steam dropped its curation efforts. It shifted to a community-voting approach called Greenlight, before eventually landing on the everything-goes Early Access model we know today.

Ruiz and his business partner built Aztez in between contract projects, and by the time it was ready to debut on Steam in 2017, the indie market was saturated. There were 309 games added to Steam in 2010; in 2017, there were 6,306. Even with a hefty amount of hype behind it, Aztez had trouble standing out, and that was the last time Ruiz tried self-publishing.

Ruiz did contract work for a while after Aztez, and in 2018 he pitched Bounty Star to people he knew at Annapurna. The game has a complex premise — it stars Clem, a desert bounty hunter with plenty of baggage, and it involves mech battles, emotional narrative scenes and home-management mechanics, including some light gardening. Annapurna bit, and Ruiz landed a publishing deal.

Annapurna Interactive

Annapurna Interactive is one of the most prominent publishers of indie games today, with titles like Stray, Outer Wilds, Neon White, Donut County and What Remains of Edith Finch on its books. It was founded in 2016 as an offshoot of Annapurna Pictures and quickly established its brand as an arthouse publisher, focused on visually innovative and emotionally driven experiences. Its showcases are now a staple of the gaming calendar.

Annapurna is handling the marketing for Bounty Star, and it’s also financially supporting Ruiz’s studio, Dinogod. When Ruiz pitched the game, he was clear that he’d need a team of five or six people to bring his vision to life, and Annapurna gave him the funding to hire up.

“The fact that Dinogod has five full time people, that was a part of the partnership,” Ruiz said. “When everything was greenlit, that was the first step, to bring in these five or six people…. If [Annapurna is] into a thing that they think is a good move, and it needs more people, that seems to be fully okay. Like, they're not averse to scale.”

It’s not just Annapurna making these types of deals with indies nowadays. Devolver Digital is the granddaddy of indie publishers, and since 2009 it’s released hits including Hotline Miami, Hatoful Boyfriend, The Talos Principle, Gris, Fall Guys, Inscryption, Weird West and Cult of the Lamb, all in collaboration with small development teams. There’s also Humble, Private Division, Raw Fury, Epic Games, Finji, Gearbox, EA and Netflix, all of which have stepped up their indie publishing efforts in recent years. Meanwhile, Microsoft’s strategy is to simply acquire the studios it likes, and today it has 23 developers under the Xbox Game Studios banner. Sony is taking a similar approach, though it owns fewer studios than Microsoft. Microsoft and Sony are also signing hundreds of one-off deals with indies as they attempt to fill their streaming libraries — Xbox Game Pass and PlayStation Plus Premium — with a steady stream of new experiences.

This is the new standard for indie developers: Identify the publisher that best matches your game’s tone, pitch it, and pray. Even established studios, such as Device 6 creator Simogo, have swapped to a publisher-first model. Simogo’s latest projects, Sayonara Wild Hearts and Lorelei and the Laser Eyes, are the result of its partnership with Annapurna.

Annapurna Interactive

“I think for us as a studio, the biggest change is working with a publisher, something which we would see as completely uninteresting and impractical ten years ago,” Simogo co-founder Simor Flesser told Engadget earlier this month.

And then there’s Netflix. The streaming company officially entered the game-distribution business in 2021, and it’s on track to have 100 titles in its library by the end of 2023, all freely available to anyone with a Netflix subscription. It’s already brought a number of high-profile titles to mobile devices, including Kentucky Route Zero, Poinpy, Into the Breach, Spiritfarer, Lucky Luna and Oxenfree II, and it’s purchased a few studios outright — notably, Alphabear developer Spry Fox and Oxenfree house Night School Studio. The first of these purchases was Night School, which Netflix acquired in 2021.

“Consolidation — I didn't really have my finger as much on the pulse of that, because when we joined Netflix, it didn't feel like that was happening so rapidly,” Night School co-founder Sean Krankel told Engadget. “And now in the last few years, literally, it's non-stop.”

The acquisition allowed Night School to move into the Netflix offices and it provided stability for the studio overall, Krankel said. With Netflix’s resources, the Night School team was able to add day-one support for 32 languages in Oxenfree II, and they were able to fly in remote collaborators as needed.

“All that's really exciting,” Oxenfree II lead developer Bryant Cannon said just ahead of the game’s July 12th release. “I think the game is going to be better because we have this battery in our back.”

Netflix

Outside of acquisitions, Netflix is also signing individual deals with developers. Snowman is best known as the name behind Alto’s Adventure and Alto’s Odyssey, and its latest project is Laya’s Horizon, a serene wingsuit experience exclusive to Netflix. There are two big benefits of working with Netflix, according to Snowman creative director Jason Medeiros: The instant access to an audience of more than 230 million people, and the freedom to build a game without worrying about monetization.

“You'll notice real quick that the game that you've been playing can't be free-to-play,” Medeiros told Engadget in April. “Like, where would the ads go? It’s this fantasy world with no currency, even, and all that’s intentional. As the creative director, I didn't want any of that stuff. Because I mean, I liked games before all that stuff happened. So having a platform like Netflix, it's just like, none of that matters. You don't have to do that stuff. It's a breath of fresh air; we jump on opportunities to make games that way.”

Of course, there are still developers self-publishing their projects — Vampire Survivors, Phasmophobia, Celeste and Among Us are all standout examples — but there’s a murkier path to success with this model, one based on timing, trends and a hefty amount of luck. There are more than 90,000 games on Steam today; Xbox Game Pass and PS Plus Premium libraries each have more than 400 titles (and counting). In this marketplace, it’s hard to stand out without a little help.

It’s taken 10 years to get here, but it’s now a solid, quantifiable fact: There’s a lot of money in indie games. So much money that outside companies are popping up and trying to get a piece of the pie — and for now, it’s created a shiny bubble of pretty PR packages and bespoke showcases dedicated to small teams and their games.

Devolver Digital

It’s difficult to ignore the potential for exploitation down the line, especially with Netflix in the mix. Amid the ongoing writers’ and actors’ strike, the company is facing accusations that it instituted wildly unfair compensation deals for creatives, paying out one-time, minimal wages even as projects became massive hits on the streaming service. Annapurna, for its part, was accused of mishandling claims of abuse at three prominent studios on its publishing roster — Mountains, Funomena and Fullbright — in a March 2022 documentary by People Make Games. Meanwhile, the current consolidation craze is shrinking the video game industry overall, even as the market caps of the biggest companies continue to rise.

For now, bespoke publishing is the name of the indie game. This system has already distributed innovative and important games to huge audiences — Tchia, Tunic, Sea of Solitude, Gris — and it’s offered stability to a lot of independent artists. Like, for instance, Ben Ruiz.

“I hope Annapurna’s success means more Annapurnas in the future,” Ruiz said. “It doesn’t feel like they’re just trying to grab a thing that will make money or collaborate with people that are just going to make them money. They clearly have a brand and an aesthetic directive … if I can keep making games for them for a long time, I will.”

The new normal works for Ruiz — and Flesser, Krankel, Medeiros and plenty of others. For now, it’s a functional system, even if it ultimately leaves publishers, rather than independent developers, with most of the power.

The Primetime Emmys won’t take place on September 18th, according toVariety. The publication reported on Thursday that vendors scheduled to work the event have been told the ceremony is delayed because of the writers’ and actors’ strikes that have shut down all Hollywood productions and promotions. The TV Academy hasn’t yet announced a replacement date, but Variety previously reported that broadcast partner Fox tentatively wants to shoot for January 2024. HBO’s Successionleads this year’s field with 27 nominations, while The Last of Us made history with an impressive 24 nods for the video game adaptation.

Hollywood writers began striking in early May, while actors joined them earlier this month. Artificial intelligence figures prominently in both cases: Scribes and performers fear producers will increasingly use AI-generated content to diminish humans’ ability to make a living in the already-brutal show business industry. Perhaps the most startling revelation was the report that studios offered a “groundbreaking AI proposal” to pay performers for one day of work to use their digital likeness for eternity. As generative AI advances quicker than most people could have imagined, it now threatens to annihilate content creators’ careers inside and outside of Hollywood.

Disney / Lucasfilm

Although The Last of Us marked a milestone for gaming adaptations (including acting nominations for Pedro Pascal and Bella Ramsey), season three of Disney’s The Mandalorian received an impressive nine nominations. At the same time, Andor picked up eight nods — including Outstanding Drama Series. It recounts the journey of spy Cassian Andor (Diego Luna), one of the fallen heroes of 2016’s Rogue One, in the period building up to the Rebel Alliance’s rise against the Galactic Empire. Obi-Wan Kenobi, also on Disney+, received five more nominations, including Best Limited or Anthology Series.

In addition to The Last of Us and Andor, Outstanding Drama Series nominees include Better Call Saul, House of the Dragon, Succession, The White Lotus and Yellowjackets.

Apple

Apple TV+ also fared well in nominations, with 52. Ted Lasso is up for Best Comedy Series among its 21 nominations, which also include Best Actor in a Comedy Series for lead Jason Sudeikis, Best Supporting Actress in a Comedy for Hannah Waddingham and Best Supporting Actor in a Comedy for Phil Dunster. Apple’s mesmerizing sci-fi adaptationSilo debuted too late for consideration this year, but don’t be shocked if it features prominently in the 2024 list.

Elsewhere, Amazon’s colossally ambitious The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power received six nods (mostly in technical categories). Netflix’s Stranger Things picked up six, Peacock’s Poker Face nabbed four and Star Trek: Picard got two makeup nominations. HBO led all platforms with 127 nods, while Netflix led streaming-only networks with 103, followed by Apple (52) and Amazon (46).

Call of Duty Season 5 will feature Nicki Minaj as the first ever female celebrity "Operator" playable character, Activision announced. She'll appear in Warzone and Modern Warfare 2 as part of CoD's "50 Years of Hip Hop Celebration," along with Snoop Dogg and 21 Savage. 

Other celebrities including Lionel Messi, Kevin Durant and Snoop Dogg (multiple times now) have appeared in CoD in the past. Minaj, however is "Call of Duty’s first-ever self-named female Operator," the developer noted. "Playtime is over; this is not 'Chill Nicki'; this is Red Ruby Da Sleeze," it added, referencing Minaj's track and video released earlier this year. 

Minaj will appear and have her own storefront later in Season 5, with items for sale likely including the hot pink rifle pictured above. Minaj's appearance was previewed last year in a YouTube video called Squad Up, which also featured Lil Baby, Bukayo Saka, and Pete Davidson — though there's no word if those people will also appear in CoD at some point. 

The Season 5 website also shows information on the 9mm ISO sub machine, the AN-94 assault rifle and other weapons. CoD also previewed multiplayer additions like new maps for Livestock and Petrov Oil Rig. Meanwhile, Warzone 2.0 adds new locations like Verdansk Stadium. Season 5 will also include a reveal of the upcoming Call of Duty 2023 (Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3) — in Warzone. Season 05 Call of Duty: Modern Warfare II and Call of Duty: Warzone are set to launch on August 2 at 9 AM PT across all platforms.

The following contains spoilers for “Under the Cloak of War.”

“Some things break in a way that can never be repaired, only managed.” It’s the final line in a powerhouse episode of Star Trek: Strange New Worlds. “Under the Cloak of War” lays out a host of questions about memory, grief and redemption – reiterating the key obsessions of this season – none of which it could possibly answer. For some shows, this would be a bad thing, but Strange New Worlds is becoming increasingly comfortable living with ambiguity. Much as I may be flush with recency bias, I already feel it may be the standout of the season.

The Enterprise has been asked to carry Dak'Rah (An unrecognizable Robert Wisdom), a successful, but deeply controversial, Federation ambassador to the Prospero system. Controversial because he’s a Klingon who defected during the recent war, who is also known as the “Butcher of J’Gal.” Not just because of the orders he gave, including massacring his own civilians, but because he killed all of his generals just before he defected. Dak'Rah is embraced by Pike, Una and Uhura as a beacon of hope for a more peaceful future. But Ortegas, who fought in the war, and M’Benga and Chapel, who actually served in a field hospital on J’Gal, can’t get over the past, or their own pain. 

We flash back to Chapel’s arrival on J’Gal, where she’s greeted by Trek good luck charm Clint Howard’s commanding officer. Her orientation lasts for all of a minute before she’s picking up casualties from the transporter pad and trying to save them without key medical tech. One soldier gets loaded into the pattern buffer to keep him alive until rescue arrives, while others get operated on the old-fashioned way. M’Benga and Chapel quickly bond over their rough time in the medical trenches, and develop a shorthand to help each other along.

Paramount+

In the present, Pike asks all three to quell their objections and come to dinner with Dak'Rah, who is trying to hold court over the captain’s table. None of them are able to make nice for too long, and Ortegas quickly leaves, with Chapel following behind. Pike notices that while M’Benga remains, he’s gripping the arms of his seat so tightly that he’s about to rip them off, and asks him to go look after the absent pair. But not before Ra, knowing that M’Benga loves martial arts, asks to set up a session between the two with an arm grip that’s a little too aggressive.

Back on J’Gal, M’Benga treats a wounded soldier who wonders what the point of this battle really is. The doctor gives a rousing speech, bringing to mind the “you want me on that wall” speech from Aaron Sorkin’s A Few Good Men. He says the risk of Klingon expansionism is too great, and that Starfleet fights so that others can live their lives in peace. But while the speech is effective, it’s delivered a little too convincingly, especially given we soon learn that M’Benga used to be the guy wielding the knife rather than the scalpel.

Soon after, a special forces commander asks M’Benga for some Protocol 12, the green steroids M’Benga and Chapel used in “The Broken Circle.” As annoyed as I was that M’Benga himself created it – I’m never a fan of secret origin stories where the same five characters are at the center of literally everything in the universe – I was pleased we didn’t get an over-explanation of its genesis. The doctor refuses, so the commander asks if M’Benga himself, under his old guise of “The Ghost” will join the team on its daring mission given how effective his murder skills are, or were.

The military is planning to send a small unit to try and wipe out J’Gal’s leaders once and for all, while committing the bulk of its forces to a grand frontal assault as a distraction. The soldier M’Benga previously patched up is going back out there to get chopped up, everyone knowing ahead of time they’re being sent to the meat grinder. But the Klingons are ready for them, disabling the field hospital’s power generators, preventing them from saving the casualties as they pile up. Chapel gets a transporter online, but can’t activate it without wiping the soldier who was kept in the pattern buffer earlier, something M’Benga does with little hesitation.

Back on the ship, M’Benga and Dak'Rah start their sparring session, with Dak'Rah doing his best to try and make nice with the doctor. He talks about how good the symbolism of two former enemies, quite literally on the opposite sides of the same battle, standing side-by-side would be. But M’Benga can’t bring himself to be friends, just allies, and soon starts to ask Dak'Rah which of his generals fought the hardest during his final day on J’Gal. Dak'Rah can’t answer, because it wasn’t Dak'Rah that killed them, but M’Benga, hopped up on his own fury steroids and looking for revenge.

The Enterprise takes a shortcut to get their unwanted Klingon off the ship before someone gets hurt, but not before Dak'Rah once again goes to M’Benga. The Doctor is looking at his little personal effects case, which includes a D’k tahg he kept as a reminder from J’Gal. They discuss the fallout from their prior discussion, with M’Benga angry that Dak'Rah has used the deaths M’Benga caused to launder his own reputation. We cut, then, to the other side of the doctor’s office, through partially-opaque glass, as the pair scuffle, before cutting back to Dak'Rahdead on the floor with a dagger in his chest.

Chapel provides cover for M’Benga, saying Dak'Rah caused the fight, which M’Benga agrees to, despite Pike pressing him for an off-the-record admission of guilt. He tells his captain he’s not responsible, but he’s glad his old enemy is he kept as a reminder from J’Gal. They discuss the fallout from their prior discussion, with M’Benga angry that Dak'Rah has used the deaths M’Benga caused to launder his own reputation. We cut, then, to the other side of the doctor’s office, through partially-opaque glass, as the pair scuffle, before cutting back to Dak'Rah dead on the floor with a dagger in his chest.

Michael Gibson/Paramount+

If there’s one thing that Star Trek (both back in the day and now) can sometimes forget, it’s that history doesn’t just happen to other people. As much as it focuses on the great people of history making soliloquies on the bridge of their starships, that’s the start of things, not the end. Despite its apparent progressivism, it rarely engages with the material concerns of the ordinary people living and serving in Starfleet on that sort of level. That’s why the fact we got to see the Klingon war from something approaching the ground is a refreshing change.

And at the start of the season, I talked about how confident Strange New Worlds’ storytelling had become. Bursting out of the gate, even its weaker episodes were elevated by a production team pulling their hardest in the same direction. With a strong script, credited to writer/producer Davy Perez and directed by Jeff W. Boyd, there’s not much that can go wrong. It helps, too, that Strange New Worlds this year has restrained its urge to explain, and over-explain, every facet of what’s going on. But what really makes this episode is the towering, blockbuster performance by Babs Olusanmokun as Dr. M’Benga who, once again, demonstrates he’s this series secret weapon.

It’s Olusanmokun who holds the broad tangle of ideas in this script together, including the key issues around memory, grief and forgiveness. There’s a clear dichotomy between those in the crew who are motivated for revenge and those who are looking toward a better future. I’m sure that particular conflict can be mapped over several real-world fault lines, for better or worse. The episode, wisely, doesn’t necessarily take one side over the other, although the fact M’Benga and Chapel are our POV characters this week means we’re already on side.

It’s a shame that there’s less emphasis on making Dak'Rah as fully rounded-out a character as he could, or should be. He’s not given space to justify Pike’s faith in him, and it’s clear pretty much as soon as he arrives that he’s ever so slightly phony. Much of this can be attributed to our old enemy running time, and the fact that Strange New Worlds’ storytelling is that much more ambitious this time out. But I’m never going to criticize a series for having too many ideas and not enough time to explore all of them in enough detail.

Oh, and I wanted to draw attention to Strange New Worlds’ excellent use of virtual stages both here and for much of the season. The world of J’Gal feels pretty believable, rendered as a living backdrop behind the field hospital in the flashback sequences. Given the cost and logistical demands of trying to set up a series of night shoots on rough terrain, I can understand why the team opted to shoot the scene in the studio. But while keen-eyed fans will be looking for the edges of the stage, the atmosphere feels a lot more real than if they were acting in front of a green screen.

It’s clear now that each season of Strange New Worlds conforms to a similar shape across its run. After a mission-setting premiere, you get three episodes exploring standard Trek tropes, with a focus on Una and La’an. Episode five is a Spock-heavy romantic comedy romp, followed by a heavy episode that emphasizes the season’s overall theme. Seven is a lighter episode, while eight is primarily focused on Dr. M’Benga, while nine is one of two big showcase episodes to cap the season. And I’m hoping I get some credit for clocking – last year – that we were going to see a musical episode, which is what we’re getting next week.

Deconstructeam announced today that its upcoming divination-based game, The Cosmic Wheel Sisterhood, arrives on August 16th. The player-choice-driven narrative adventure will be available for PC and Nintendo Switch. In addition, a new launch trailer gives us a closer glimpse at the title’s tarot deck building and weighty decision-making.

In The Cosmic Wheel Sisterhood, you assume the role of Fortuna, a witch imprisoned for 1,000 years on a remote asteroid after foretelling an unwelcome prediction of doom. (You join her 200 years into her sentence, although the game includes plenty of pre-exile flashbacks.) However, Fortuna’s stay isn’t as lonely as you may expect: She’s accompanied by Ábramar, a god summoned by Fortuna to help her escape and serve cold revenge on the coven. You’ll also receive a surprising number of visitors for someone floating on a space rock in the middle of nowhere.

Following Deconstructeam’s Gods Will Be Watching and The Red Strings Club, its latest entry expands on the studio’s tendencies toward philosophical and narrative experiences in dystopian settings. Much of the gameplay revolves around the narrative forks you choose (primarily through dialog trees) and the building and deployment of tarot decks, presented intricately in vibrant pixel art. You can customize the cards’ backgrounds, symbols and supporting elements, crafting a magical repertoire that feels distinctly yours. (However, you can keep the deck-creation process relatively simple if you prefer a more straightforward playthrough.) “At its core, Cosmic Wheel is a visual novel with narrative paths dictated by the player’s choices,” Jessica Conditt wrote in Engadget’s April preview.

The Cosmic Wheel Sisterhood will cost $18 when it launches on August 16th for Switch and PC. You can pre-order it on Steam and wish-list it on GOG ahead of its arrival. (Nintendo hasn’t yet published its product listing.)

Will this pair of Hollywood strikes ever end? It looks like the big corporations are digging in for a long battle, illustrated by Netflix’s recent job posting for a machine learning platform product manager. The position pays an annual salary of $300,000 to $900,000 at a time when many actors make around $200 a day, according to this SAG-AFTRA contract. The role AI will play in creating future entertainment is a key item of debate for both striking parties.

The job listing indicates that the AI will be used to “create great content” and not just develop new algorithms to recommend shows and movies. The posting also alludes to a far-reaching effort by the streaming giant to integrate artificial intelligence in “all areas of the business.” A separate section on the company’s website goes on to say that Netflix uses AI “to optimize the production of original movies and TV shows.”

That’s not the company’s only AI-heavy job posting promising a giant payday. Netflix is also hiring a technical director for generative AI at its burgeoning gaming studio that pays an annual salary of up to $650,000, as reported by The Intercept. These efforts are already bearing fruit, as Netflix currently airs a Spanish reality dating series called Deep Fake Love that scans contestant’s faces to create AI-generated “deepfakes” and its gaming studio employs generative AI to compose narratives and dialogue.

This all comes after striking actors rejected a proposal from the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers (AMPTP) that generously offered workers a one-time $200 day rate for performers to get scanned for future use as AI-enhanced CGI simulacrums forever, until the end of time. SAG-AFTRA says the company would “own that scan, their image, their likeness, and be able to use it for the rest of eternity in any project they want with no consent and no compensation.”

Twitter’s rebrand to X is officially underway, and CEO Linda Yaccarino has offered some new clues about what it may mean for the company. In a memo reported byCNBC, Yaccarino suggested that payments and banking features could feature prominently in Elon Musk’s new vision.

“Our usage is at an all time high and we’ll continue to delight our entire community with new experiences in audio, video, messaging, payments, banking – creating a global marketplace for ideas, goods, services, and opportunities,” she wrote.

It’s long been rumored that Musk is keen to bring banking features to Twitter. In January, the Financial Timesreported that he wanted “to offer fintech services such as peer-to-peer transactions, savings accounts and debit cards” to users, as well as additional tipping and shopping features. The paper reported the company had applied for regulatory paperwork necessary to offer such features in the US, but the executive reportedly overseeing the project departed in February.

Yaccarino’s memo suggests those plans have been revived, though it’s light on specifics. Musk has previously talked about his desire to turn Twitter into an “everything app” akin to WeChat in China, where the messaging app is central to users’ daily activities.

Overall, Yaccarino’s memo is notably vague. She said that X would “go even further to transform the global town square” and cited recent updates the company has made around creator monetization and longform content. “Many companies say they want to move fast — but we enjoy moving at the speed of light, and when we do, that’s X,” she wrote. “With X, we serve our entire community of users and customers by working tirelessly to preserve free expression and choice, create limitless interactivity, and create a marketplace that enables the economic success of all its participants.”

In a series of tweets last Saturday, Musk said the company’s famous bird logo and name would soon disappear. The company will change from Twitter to “X.” According to Platformer, Musk emailed staff later over the weekend saying the company would become X and his note “was the last email he’ll ever send from a Twitter email address.” And a lot of those changes have now happened.

Twitter’s own account is now all “X” branding, and it’s rolled out quickly elsewhere. Twitter employees are getting an “X” tag to their Twitter handles, next to their blue check, while the “X” logo has already been projected on a building, like a bat signal for self-aggrandizing tech executives and their minions. (I’m still not sure what this tweet (X?) even means.)

X.com was once an online bank co-founded by Musk in 1999. It eventually became PayPal and was bought by eBay. Of course, we already have SpaceX, his recently announced AI venture is called xAI and Twitter’s holding company was rammed to X Corp in April. Musk has also talked about how X would help Twitter become an “everything app.”

Terms that still need to be rebranded: subtweets, retweets, fail whales.

– Mat Smith

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AI can now place us inside South Park episodes – should we be worried? This week, Devindra and Deputy Editor Nathan Ingraham chat with Edward Saatchi, the CEO of The Simulation, about his company’s new AI technology that can generate TV episodes, movies and more. We preview a test South Park episode featuring Devindra and discuss if this technology is actually a good thing for creatives. Also, Editor at Large James Trew joins to discuss his piece on AI-powered immortality.

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Redditors troll AI content farm into covering a fake 'WoW' feature

The hugely anticipated Glorbo feature is not a feature.

Blizzard

Some redditors were very excited about a new World of Warcraft feature called Glorbo. Just one problem: Glorbo isn't real. Their faux enthusiasm for Glorbo caught the attention of a blog named The Portal, which publishes "gaming content powered by Z League" – often tenuously rewritten subreddit scraping, seemingly done by AI. (We hope it’s not a human.)

Redditor u/kaefer_kriegerin noticed The Portal was turning discussions from some gaming subreddits into blog posts. They decided to try to trick the content farm into covering a fake WoW feature. The ruse was a success. The Portal's now-deleted blog post even quoted u/kaefer_kriegerin as stating, "Honestly, this new feature makes me so happy! I just really want some major bot-operated news websites to publish an article about this."

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Our favorite VPN is Express VPN

It’s the best one for gaming and streaming.

The best VPNs stay out of your way, and you'll barely even notice they’re running. But ExpressVPN internet speeds outperformed even our baseline internet speed measures. The service is likely circumventing traffic shaping by the internet service provider or a similar anomaly because every other VPN will hurt internet speed in some way. It was also easy to access geo-blocked content using ExpressVPN, with little-to-no buffering – which is the cheeky reason a lot of us invest in a VPN.

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