Genshin Impact developer Hoyoverse is working on a new project. On Friday, the studio shared the first trailer for Zenless Zone Zero, an action RPG set in a modern urban setting. Reminiscent of titles like The World Ends With You and Scarlett Nexus, the game pits players against Ethereal, monstrous creatures borne from another dimension. In a nod to Neon Genesis Evangelion, the action takes place in New Eridu, one of the few cities to survive the devastation wrought by the Ethereal.

As a “Proxy,” you’ll need to organize a disparate party of characters to battle the monsters. Hoyoverse hasn’t explicitly said how it plans to monetize Zenless Zone Zero, but it sounds like the game will employ a similar system to the one found in Genshin Impact. In other words, expect to use real-world money to improve your chances at obtaining some of the game’s most powerful party members. Zenless Zone Zero does not have a release date yet, but you can sign up to take part in the game’s closed iOS and PC beta by visiting its official website.

Netflix plans to livestream its upcoming slate of unscripted shows and comedy specials, according to Deadline. Netflix told the outlet it was in the early stages of developing the capability.

Deadline suggests the streaming giant could use the technology to hold live voting for competitive shows like the upcoming Dance 100 and air sets from its annual Netflix Is A Joke festival, among other use cases. The feature doesn’t have a rollout date yet, with only a small team within the company reportedly in the “preliminary” stages of developing the tech. We’ve reached out to Netflix for comment.

Separately, The Wall Street Journal reported on Friday that the company recently updated its culture guidelines to add a new section titled “artistic expression.” In short, the section tells potential employees they may be required to work on projects they may not align with their values.

“Not everyone will like — or agree with — everything on our service… and we let viewers decide what’s appropriate for them, versus having Netflix censor specific artists or voices,” the company states in the document. “Depending on your role, you may need to work on titles you perceive to be harmful. If you’d find it hard to support our content breadth, Netflix may not be the best place for you.”

Netflix told The Journal it spent the past 18 months discussing cultural issues with employees. The company says it wrote the tweaked guidelines to help job seekers make more “informed decisions about whether Netflix is the right company for them.”

The update comes after Netflix faced employee unrest over its latest comedy special from Dave Chappelle. Many at the company criticized the comedian and The Closer for being transphobic. Netflix’s reaction to the incident, including the decision to fire a worker who allegedly shared sensitive information about the special, led to a worker walkout.

If your childhood gaming was defined more by Kirby than Mario, don't worry — Nintendo has you covered. As VGCreports, Nintendo is making Kirby 64: The Crystal Shardsavailable through the Switch Online Expansion Pack on May 20th. The Nintendo 64 title was the first 3D Kirby game, although it was really more of a "2.5D" platformer — you set out to reassemble a shattered crystal by copying and combining your enemies' powers.

The Switch experience is effectively what you would remember playing circa 2000, complete with low-polygon 3D visuals. As you might guess, though, the multiplayer mini-games are now available online in addition to at home.

This is the 15th N64 game to come to the Switch Online Expansion Pack, which costs $50 per year or $80 for families. While Kirby 64 might not be as immediately appealing to veteran gamers as the likes of Super Mario 64 or Ocarina of Time, it's still a notable addition that may be great for introducing kids to the games of your youth.

The iPod's death has been a long time coming. Somehow, it's already been eight years since Apple discontinued the iconic iPod classic. Nonetheless, the news this week that Apple is discontinuing its last iPod, the touch is significant: This officially marks the official end of a product that set up the company for two decades of success.

A lot has been written about how the iPod changed Apple's fortunes, transforming the company from an influential but niche computer maker into one of the biggest companies in the world. Similarly, the iPod's effect on the music industry almost speaks for itself at this point. The device slowly but surely ended the reign of the CD and moved people to a world in which they could just buy a handful of songs from an album instead of paying $15 for the whole thing on a plastic disc.

That's probably why the death of the iPod brand doesn't feel all that notable, despite the fact that I was an iPod early adopter who quickly went all-in on Apple's ecosystem. It was inevitable that Apple would eventually stop selling the iPod touch, just as the end of the iPod classic in 2014 felt overdue.

That's probably because both the consumer technology and the music industries have long since moved on from the iPod. It's not hyperbolic to say that the iPod reversed both Apple's fortunes and the record industry’s — but we've since seen another seismic shift that made the iPod feel almost as quaint as the CD.

The iPod was responsible for several major changes in the way music is consumed. In the 2000s, CD sales began to fall as more and more people started buying music through digital storefronts like the iTunes Music Store. There, you could get an album for $10 or a single song for $1, a significant discount over CDs at the time. And while many people still purchased full albums, uncoupling songs from the record propelled custom mix CDs and playlists to the forefront of how people listened to music. The iPod and iTunes Store killed the romance (and burden) of a physical music library while giving listeners more freedom in how they bought and listened to music.

But in 2022, the music industry has undergone a second sea change. For many, the concept of owning music at all is obsolete. Spotify, Apple Music, and the like have fully moved us to a place where we pay for access — to a catalog of some 90 million songs — not ownership. The idea of the album is even less important now than it was during the iPod's peak, as the streaming services curated playlists for us, based on our listening histories and what's popular. Apple, Spotify, and their competitors are the de facto DJs now, guiding listeners to new music the way radio DJs did for decades.

A big part of Steve Jobs' pitch for the iTunes Store was that it was a response to piracy and a way for music creators to get paid. The thinking was that the store would offer a vastly improved experience over dealing with sketchy piracy apps so that people wouldn't mind paying a few bucks here and there to download songs, thus putting money back in artists' pockets.

In the streaming era, however, the debate over the fairness of music streaming payments to artists and songwriters rages on. While the iTunes Store was the first place Apple introduced its controversial 30 percent take, there’s been increasing furor in recent years over how Spotify carves up payments for artists into fractions of a cent per stream. Musicians have often made more money from touring and merchandise sales than album sales, and now that most people are streaming rather than buying music, that gulf has widened even more. (That’s without mentioning how much of a hit artists have taken on touring revenue since the COVID-19 pandemic hit.)

Just as the music industry has moved on since its iPod-fueled transformation in the 2000s, the consumer tech industry no longer resembles one in which the iPod was dominant. The iPod was conceived as a device that did one thing well: play back your music and podcast library. Sure, it picked up other features over the years (most notably displaying your photos and playing videos), but music was always its raison d’etre.

A number of other single-purpose devices flourished around the same time. Amazon introduced the first Kindle in 2007, digital cameras hit the mainstream in a big way throughout the decade and the Flip Video camera had a brief time in the spotlight, just to name a few. But the modern smartphone, which Apple itself ushered in with the iPhone, largely eliminated the need for a dedicated music player, not to mention most other purpose-built gadgets. We’re now 15 years into an era of convergence, where the smartphone is the most versatile and important device we carry.

It’s no coincidence that the last iPod Apple sold was the iPod touch, a device that is basically an iPhone without the phone. For years, it was a good option for kids or people who couldn’t afford an iPhone, but giving children a phone isn’t the taboo it once was, while monthly payment plans mean more people can afford them. It’s not clear who the iPod touch was for in 2022.

Apple may be pulling the plug on the iPod now, but the world moved on years ago. We’re past the point where those of us waxing nostalgic about the iPod can be considered youthful; if the rise of the iPad was a defining experience for you, you’re likely an elder millennial at best. I don’t say all this to downplay the iPod’s importance, though. On the contrary, looking back at how far we’ve come over the past 20 years reveals just how transformative the iPod was for music, and for tech.

Elon Musk's deal to buy Twitter is "temporarily on hold" pending confirmation that spam and fake accounts do represent less than 5 percent of users, he tweeted. Attached to the tweet was a Reuters link reporting that Twitter estimated in a regulatory filing that those types of accounts represented 5 percent of its monetizable daily active users during the first quarter of 2022.

It appears that Musk may have some concerns about those figures, judging by the tweet. It's not clear what steps he and Twitter will take to verify them, however. 

If you've been somehow disconnected from the internet (lucky you!), Musk is in the process of buying Twitter for $44 billion. He aims to quadruple the user base and has said he'll defeat spam bots, authenticate all humans and make its algorithms open source, while also championing free speech and walking back content moderation. As part of that, he said he'd reverse the Twitter ban on Donald Trump and other users.

However, some experts on social media content moderation have said that those goals conflict with each other. Facebook's former security chief Alex Stamos, for one, recently tweeted that Musk's ideals for Twitter may conflict with European laws, pointing out that there's "a large mismatch between the US and the UK's Online Safety Bill and EU Digital Services Act and Digital Markets Acts." Stamos also noted that Twitter is saturated in the developed world, so any growth "will require even more dealing with the challenges of autocracies and developing democracies."

If you want to catch any live performances from Lollapalooza, Bonnaroo or Austin City Limits Music Festival from the comfort of your own home, Hulu will be the place to do that for the next couple of years. The platform has signed a deal with Live Nation to be the official streaming home for all three festivals through 2023. Lollapalooza was available to YouTube viewers for several years, but it moved to Hulu in 2021.

You'll need to be a Hulu subscriber to catch livestreams from the festivals this year and next, though you won't have to be on the Live TV plan. Two feeds will be available for each event Friday through Sunday. There will be one livestream for Thursday programming from Bonnaroo and Lollapalooza (ACL is held over two weekends but doesn't run on Thursdays). Hulu will also offer special footage and behind-the-scenes vignettes.

The livestream schedules will be announced in the leadup to each festival. Gryffin, J. Cole, Tool and Stevie Nicks top the bill at Bonnaroo, which runs from June 16th to 19th. Lollapalooza takes place over the last weekend in July and this year's headliners are Metallica, Dua Lipa, J. Cole and Green Day. As for ACL, you'll be able to check out performances from the likes of Red Hot Chili Peppers, Lil Nas X, Pink, Kacey Musgraves, Paramore, The Chicks, SZA and Flume across the first two weekends of October.

A live-action Resident Evil series is coming to Netflix this summer, and a teaser offers a first look at what's in store. The story takes place across two timelines and locations: a seemingly pristine New Raccoon City in the present day and a ruined version of London in 2036.

In 2022, we see Albert Wesker (Lance Reddick) bringing his daughters Jade and Billie to New Raccoon City. Albert works for the Umbrella Corporation, which unleashes the devastating T-virus on humanity. Fast forward 14 years and Jade is one of the last 15 million or so people on Earth. She tries to survive the zombie apocalypse while reckoning with her family's dark secrets.

The show will build on existing lore from the Resident Evil games but will have an original narrative. The teaser makes it pretty clear this is primarily a horror series with some action weaved in. There are nods to the games as well, including a quick flash of a zombie dog at the end.

This show follows on from the anime Resident Evil:Infinite Darkness, which hit Netflix last year. The first eight-episode season of Resident Evil will arrive on July 14th.

Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg has provided a first proper look at the company's next mixed-reality headset, codenamed Project Cambria, in action. The "high-end headset" is scheduled for release later this year and it will support a new augmented reality experience called The World Beyond.

We see Zuckerberg playing with and petting a virtual creature that's superimposed onto the real world. The clip also shows a user in front of a virtual workstation before looking down at a notepad and writing on it. Reports suggested that Cambria's image quality would allow users to clearly read text, and that seems to be the case.

In addition, the demo shows a virtual workout instructor who appears to be in the same space as the headset wearer. The World Beyond was built with Meta's Presence Platform, which is designed to help developers create mixed-reality experiences.

Project Cambria will support full-color passthrough. Its onboard cameras can seemingly provide wearers with a higher fidelity view of their surroundings for mixed-reality purposes than existing Quest headsets can offer. The World Beyond will be available on Quest soon through App Lab, though you won't be able to access the full-color passthrough experience just yet.

The new headset itself was blurred in the clip. However, it's not that hard to imagine roughly what it will look like, especially given the teaser Meta released last year. Project Cambria (or whatever it will actually be called) will reportedly cost over $799.

A recent report noted that Meta employees likened Project Cambria to a "laptop for the face," given that it's said to have similar specs to a Chromebook. It's believed Meta is planning to release a more advanced version of the Cambria headset in 2024 as well as two new Quest models over the next few years.

However, it seems Meta is scaling back some of its metaverse ambitions. On Wednesday, it was reported that the company is shutting down some projects at Reality Labs, the hardware and metaverse division that lost $10 billion last year, and putting others on hold. Meta is said to be hiring fewer staff than usual this year to reduce costs amid slowing revenue growth. Meanwhile, the company this week opened its first physical store for Reality Labs products.

Wanna know what I miss? Mid-budget studio comedies, the sort that filled the gaps in cinema’s annual calendar. The sort of lightweight, low-energy fare you and your friends could watch on a Saturday morning in the multiplex. Often they’d feature a Saturday Night Live alumnus on an initial foray into the movie industry proper, but just as equally not. Sometimes the films did well, but more often not, would underperform until it developed a second life on late-night cable, video rentals or even DVD sales. You know, stuff like So I Married An Axe Murderer.

There aren’t many cinema-released mid-budget comedy movies these days, and for good reason. Comedy is a more subjective artform than, say, action, and doesn’t travel as well around the world as, say, action. There’s no room these days for an unadulterated comedy movie with a budget in the low-double-digit millions given the economics. Hell, even something as flat and awful as Holmes and Watson cost $42 million, and couldn’t recoup that figure at the box office. I'm sure that film, too, will eventually catch on with some future generation of kids and stoners who delight in it as much as I have a soft spot for some of these early '90s comedies I was too young to see in cinemas. 

Of course, these mid-budget comedies have been priced out of cinemas and straight into our homes, thanks to Netflix. Regardless of the quality, films like The Bubble and Don’t Look Up would, in a previous era, would have slotted into a multiplex roster quite easily. But Netflix’s desire to milk as much sitting-on-the-couch-time-as-possible from every piece of IP it owns is a big problem. Mostly because of its insistence of taking ideas that would have made brisk multiplex movies and dragged them out into time-wasting miniseries. There’s a reason that so many Netflix series have pacing problems as a fun 90-minute story is padded out to four, six, eight or twelve hours.

Which is a neat segue into talking about The Pentaverate, Netflix’s latest comedy featuring a depending-on-who-you-ask long overdue return by Mike Myers. On the surface, it’s a comedy about a secret society which has helped shape the course of human history, except they’re (apparently) nice. Myers plays eight characters, given his endless love of prosthetics and desire to be remembered as his generations’ Peter Sellers. He’s joined by Lydia West, Keegan-Michael Key, Debi Mazar, Ryn Alleyne, Neil Mullarchy, Jenifer Saunders and Ken Jeong. And there’s plenty of A-list talent behind the camera too, with Orbital on soundtrack duties and Tim Kirkby directing.

Our star is Ken Scarborough, a retirement-age Toronto-based local TV journalist who is destined to be retired. On the quest for a big story to save his career, he visits the Canadian Conspiracy Convention (CanConCon) and discovers The Pentaverate. From there, his journey is to infiltrate the organization and, with the help of his cameraperson Reilly, try to expose it. Except, of course, Scarborough is walking in on a conspiracy hatched by one of the Pentaverate’s own for reasons that are fairly obvious as soon as you see who’s running the thing.

Myers is a child of the ‘70s, but his British expat parents imbued in him a love of all things British and ‘60s. Much of The Pentaverate is lifted wholesale from legendary ‘60s series The Prisoner and fans of that show will get a kick out of spotting what’s been stolen. Myers’ love for the show even extends to stealing the best joke from the series, albeit the Canadian manages to blow the punchline here. Hell, even the shadowy cabal’s helicopters are the same brand as what was used to fly people in and out of the Village.

(An aside: Are we living in the age of celebrities producing big-budget fanfiction? After all, this The Prisoner riff comes only a few years after Seth MacFarlane was able to launch his own Star Trek series.)

Unfortunately, despite the wealth of talent here, The Pentaverate falls a little flat because it’s clearly in the wrong format. There’s no proof, far as I can see, that the film was originally a screenplay and then expanded out to a TV-friendly three hours, but it sure feels that way. You can feel the narrative stretching, as characters wait around for their plot thread to start back up. Do we need multiple sequences of people riding a “hyperloop” around pulling g-force faces? No, but you can imagine Reed Hastings behind the camera, tapping his watch and insisting the runtime gets as close to three hours as possible.

This stretching also means that every joke in the show’s arsenal gets repeated a little too many times. You know that friend who really got into Austin Powers and just kept shouting lines from the film into your face? Well, buckle in for plenty of jokes about how Canadians are nice, dicks are funny, no, Canadians are really nice, and dicks are really, really funny. Oh and sex jokes, the sort that your pre-teen nephew likes to make, you’ll get some of those, too. The neater, smarter touches, like the fourth-wall breaking Netflix spokesperson who goes back and edits some sequences to “remove” some of the “profanity” also grow tiresome with repetition.

Unfortunately, while the show can be funny, and it’s a delight to see Myers returning to his roots somewhat, the show drags. I’m sure it would have been a breezy, 89-minute movie that would have enabled viewers to forgive its faults. It would be an interesting experiment to hand this over to a talented editor and see if they couldn’t trim this down to something a lot pacier. Until then, however, it’s for Myers and Prisoner diehards only, at least until a whole new generation of kids are old enough to find it in the infinite scroll in twenty years.

The 5th US Circuit Court of Appeals has paused the temporary injunction on controversial law HB 20, which another court blocked from taking effect last year. As Houston Public Media notes, the state introduced HB 20 last year after high-profile conservatives, including Donald Trump, were blocked on social media websites. Under the law, users will be able to sue large social media platforms with more than 50 million active monthly users such as Facebook and Twitter if they believe they were banned for their political views. HB 20 also prohibits social networks from removing or restricting content based on "the viewpoint of the user or another person." 

Trade industry groups NetChoice and the Computer and Communications Industry Association (CCIA) managed to secure an injunction against the law last year. They argued that HB 20 would lead to the spread of misinformation and hate speech on social networks and that it also violates the websites' First Amendment rights. The federal judge overseeing the case agreed that social networks have the right to moderate content under the First Amendment and also said that parts of the law are "prohibitively vague."

In a hearing for the appeal filed by Texas, the state's lawyers argued that social media platforms are "modern-day public squares." That means they can be required to host content that they deem objectionable and are banned from censoring certain viewpoints. The 5th Circuit judges sided with Texas, with one even telling the trade groups during the hearing that social networks like Twitter are not websites but "internet providers" instead.

NetChoice counsel Chris Marchese called HB 20 "an assault on the First Amendment" and "constitutionally rotten from top to bottom" on Twitter. The trade groups plan to appeal immediately, but for now, HB 20 is fully in effect. 

A federal court blocked a similar law in Florida last year after the judge ruled that it violates Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act that shields online platforms from liability for what their users' post. Florida also appealed that decision, which will be decided by the 11th Circuit Court of Appeals.