Vi bounces her leg when she’s nervous. It’s something she does throughout the first four episodes of Arcane, the Netflix series based on League of Legends lore, and it’s a tiny yet charming habit. Vi’s leg shakes up and down with anxious anger as she argues with her friend from a squashed armchair in their makeshift lair; later, her knee bounces as she sits alone in a dark room, facing certain doom. It’s something that makes Vi feel real, like she has a history that she carries with her, as natural as her pink hair.

Even though Arcane is packed with incredible action and delicious animation, small details like these truly bring the world to life — only for Jinx to blow it all to smithereens.

Riot Games

Warning: Slight spoilers for the first four episodes of Arcane ahead.

Arcane begins with a quintessential story of class warfare, depicting violent clashes between the rich citizens of Piltover and the oppressed, criminal society of Zaun, where Vi, Jinx and their crew live. In the first three episodes, Vi and Jinx are kids: Vi is the leader of a small gang of teen outlaws, while Jinx — who actually goes by Powder at this time — is her little sister, a few years of heist experience and growth spurts behind the others. By the fourth episode, Vi and Jinx are older and on equal footing, even when they find themselves on opposite sides.

The sisters start out surrounded by their chosen family members, including their father figure, Vander, who acts as the unofficial mayor of Zaun. A former leader of the resistance, Vander runs a bar called The Last Drop and tries to keep the peace with the Enforcers, Piltover’s militarized security team. Meanwhile, scientists in Piltover are on the verge of harnessing synthetic magic, while the most vile forces in Zaun are creating monster soldiers by feeding people shimmering purple liquid. Altogether, it’s a recipe for war.

Arcane’s disparate worlds are vibrant, vast and alive, Piltover shining gold among the clouds and Zaun buried beneath the dirt, filled with toxic green light. The show itself feels less like anime and more like an almost-R-rated Disney film, with buttery-smooth character movements and elaborate environments, courtesy of Riot Games’ go-to animation studio, Fortiche Production. The entire thing looks as if it were the product of motion-capture technology, but it’s hand-animated in a mix of 2D and 3D.

The fights in Arcane are particularly gorgeous. Vi is a boxer, diving in with her fists raised, while Jinx has a bunch of semi-functional homemade grenades covered in crayon scribbles, allowing her to participate from afar — even though she wants to be with the big kids, in the center of the action. The largest battles tend to play out in slow-motion, with emotional electronic music thrumming through the scenes and close-up shots of vicious punches, heavy kicks and last-second dodges. In wider angles, every frame of these fights has desktop-wallpaper potential.

Riot Games

Arcane takes its time establishing characters and revealing how they’re all intertwined, and by the end of episode three, this work crashes into a massive fight scene and pays off in a powerful way. In League of Legends lore, Vi and Jinx are bitter rivals, but in Arcane, they start off as sisters with a deep, true love for one another. They support each other, save each other’s lives, and fall apart together. They feel inseparable. It takes something catastrophic to rip them apart, and Arcane shows us every horrific second. It’s heartbreaking.

It’s not all about Vi and Jinx, and there are plenty of other League of Legends characters with starring roles in Arcane, including Viktor, Jayce, Ekko, Caitlyn and Heimerdinger. As a fan of the game, I feel a happy spark whenever I recognize a face or name in Arcane, but it won’t detract from the experience if you don’t already know who these people are. This is an origin story, after all.

Episode four, which will hit Netflix along with two other episodes on November 13th, fast-forwards to a time when Jinx and Vi look more like their in-game character models, and it establishes the groundwork for a future confrontation — family reunion? — between the two. Jinx and Vi are both haunted by their pasts, and their evolution is captivating. The story spins out around them, tantalizing and tense.

Arcane might ruin me. The show quickly and effortlessly establishes connections with its characters, bolstered by an enchanting animation style and emotional, raw voice acting. It’s making me feel things, and I’m only four episodes in. The first batch of three Arcane episodes is on Netflix today, November 6th, while the second bunch will land on November 13th, and the final three will hit on November 20th.

Dune is a film filled with gorgeous vistas from alien planets; skyscraper-sized spaceships; and some of the most beautiful actors working today. It's a joy to watch, especially on the big screen. But there's also an undersung element that ties everything together: sound design. It practically breathes life to the film — so much so that it makes Dune's wing-flapping ornithopter ships seem surprisingly real. The key to that magic, according to sound designers Theo Green and Mark Mangini, was a focus on capturing and using organic sounds, rather than fantastical digital creations.

Working together with Dune's director, Denis Villeneuve, the pair aimed to make "a real-sounding science-fiction film with things we've clearly never seen and heard before," Mangini said in an interview with Engadget."[It was] almost as if you put out a microphone and captured sounds as if those things actually existed. Everything we did ... is an outgrowth of that overarching philosophy to design a soundtrack for two hours and forty minutes that felt organic, as if we were [making] a documentary film."

That philosophy was essential to crafting the Bene Gesserit voice, a seemingly supernatural ability that allows members of Dune's religious order to control others. Think of it like the Jedi mind trick (Star Wars owes an absolute ton to Dune, don't forget). But instead of a hypnotic wave of the hand, the sound of Dune's voice is like a simultaneous kick to the gut and punch to the face. If you were somehow dozing off while the film's hero, Paul Atreides (Timothee Chalamet), tests his budding Bene Gesserit powers, you'd be easily jolted awake.

To make that otherworldly voice a reality, Green credits three elements. There's the voice actor Jean Gilpin, who he says is “brilliant” at crafting witchy and ancestral voices. The sound designers also recorded Dune's actors saying their lines several different ways, which they played back through a subwoofer and recorded the final output. That's an age-old technique known as "worldizing," or the act of recording audio that's being played back through speakers in a physical space.

Warner Bros. and Legendary Pictures

The final component of the voice is the simplest: whenever a character starts to use that technique, the other sounds in the world fade away. In that early scene with Paul Atreides, we go from hearing the sounds of birds in the morning and a far-off thunderstorm to silence. That's an innately eerie effect that draws us into the interior world of the Bene Gesserit's powers: As Frank Herbert described it, they're calling on their ancestors and using advanced psychological techniques to manipulate others.

Green and Mangini went similarly old-school when designing the sound of Dune's ornithopter ships. They're the equivalent of helicopters in the film's universe, but they sound more like gigantic insects. To achieve that, Mangini says they combined the sounds of a large purring cat, a tent-strap flapping in high-velocity wind, and the fluttering wings of a large beetle. They weren't working from pre-existing sound libraries, either. Green had to bring a beetle into a quiet room and somehow get a decent recording.

Warner Bros.

All of that was just for the sounds of the ornithopters’ wings. To craft their propulsion system, the duo took recordings of beehives and modulated them to sound like RPMs revving up in a car's engine. The shifting of the ship's wings also came from an unlikely source: Mangini's Chevy Volt.

Once their work on Dune was over, the sound designers counted 3,200 new sounds that they developed for the film. Only three or four of them started out as electronic or synthetic sounds, Mangini says. That hearkens back to the way Villeneuve has approached visual effects in Dune and his earlier genre films: Go real whenever possible. For the sound designers, that push for authenticity also led to some inventive techniques. The gaping maw of Dune's enormous sandworms, for example, started out as the sound of Mangini half-swallowing a microphone.

Warner Bros.

Green likens the use of organic sounds as a way to avoid the "uncanny valley" that plagues some visual effects. Our eyes know when certain things look fake, and that takes us out of the reality of the film. "I think [the uncanny valley] is in sound," he said. "It's those tiny complexities and tiny nuances that you only get from an organically sourced thing that sells something as being real."

Twitter wants to expand Spaces' potential audiences, so it's making audio conversations available to anyone — even those who'd rather not sign up for an account. Now, hosts and listeners can send anybody a direct link to a Spaces audio broadcast, and those with no Twitter accounts can listen to it on the web without having to log in. They won't be able to participate, but it could still lead to more listeners and a wider reach.

The website has been adding more and more features to make Spaces easier to share and discover ever since it launched live audio conversations. In July, it allowed users to compose new tweets directly from the Space, which will link to the audio chat and any accompanying hashtags. It introduced a Spaces tab on iOS in October, giving users a way to find audio shows in one place. Then, it opened up hosting duties to everyone, which potentially means more audio shows people can listen to.

Since not everyone can tune it to live broadcasts, Twitter also rolled out the ability to record Spaces audio to a limited number of iOS hosts. By recording their sessions, hosts will be able to link to it and share it for 30 days, and listeners on the platform can watch it right on their timeline. 

Game marketing is creating more strange bedfellows. Epic Games is addingLeague of Legends champion Jinx to Fortnite today (November 4th) at 8PM Eastern, just ahead of her debut in the Netflix series Arcane on November 6th. She'll be available in the battle royale shooter's Item Shop alongside themed gear like a pickaxe, spray, Back Bling, a lobby soundtrack and loading screens.

It's not a one-way partnership, either. Riot Games is bringing League of Legends, Runeterra, Teamfight Tactics and Valorant to the Epic Games Store. This won't matter much if you're a fan (you probably downloaded those games a long time ago), but it might expose some Fortnite players to Riot's titles.

Epic has been rapidly expanding its gaming-themed expansions in recent months. It just added two Resident Evil heroes in late October, and previous updates have added characters from the likes of God of War, Halo and Street Fighter. However, the League of Legends update is unique as a tie-in for a streaming TV series — it's about as convenient a promotional tool as you can get.

Facebook is bringing monetization features into yet another part of its service: groups. The social network is testing new tools that allow group admins to make money, with new shopping, fundraising and subscription features.

The company announced the updates at its annual Communities Summit event, where it said the new features will help people who run groups “sustain” the communities they have built. With the changes, Facebook is group admins three ways to monetize their communities. The first two, community shops and fundraisers, mirror features elsewhere on the platform. Community shops is an extension of Facebook’s existing features, and allows group admins to sell themed merch or other goods. Likewise, fundraisers will enable admins to crowdfund specific projects or otherwise “offset the costs of running the group.”

But the third feature is entirely new: paid subgroups. Subgroups are essentially smaller groups-within-a-group where members pay a monthly fee to participate. While Facebook is also allowing group admins to set up free subgroups, the paid version of the feature is the company’s latest effort to create subscription-based products. Elsewhere, Facebook has been hyping subscriptions as a way for creators to make money, either via newsletters or fan subscriptions for streamers. In the context of groups, subscriptions are meant to enable access to exclusive or specialized content like “coaching or networking or deeper conversations.”

Facebook

Maria Smith, Facebook’s VP of Communities says that Facebook doesn’t expect all groups will want or need paid features, but that many groups already sell their own merch or organize fundraisers. So bringing the tools directly to them could be useful. On the other hand, groups have also been home to Facebook’s most toxic and divisive content, and the company has at times struggled to keep problematic groups in check.

Given Facebook’s track record here, it feels almost inevitable that some groups will find a way to misuse these tools (Facebook is planning a slow rollout, so most groups won’t have access to these features right away.) Smith notes that subgroups will have the same moderation tools as the wider group and that it could in some cases make it easier for admin to handle. “It’s going to classify the discussions in the different subgroups and then they can manage them more efficiently,” she said. She added that groups and subgroups will also be required to follow the company’s commerce guidelines and fundraising rules.

As much as groups have been maligned, the feature is also the one that Facebook frequently points to as proof that its platform can bring people together and be a force for good. Facebook has also indicated that groups will play an important role in its plan to build a metaverse. “We're focused on building bridges from our apps on 2D screens into more immersive virtual experiences,” Mark Zuckerberg said at the start of Thursday’s event. “Facebook, and your groups, are going to be central to this.”

Zuckerberg is still explaining what a Metaverse means for the social network and the company now known as Meta. But it’s not hard to imagine that today’s Facebook groups could one day inhabit virtual spaces within the metaverse, though that vision is still “a ways off,” says Smith.

In addition to the new monetization features, Facebook announced several other updates for groups, including:

• New customization features that allow admins to change background colors, font styles and other aspects of the way groups look

• Community chats to make it easier for admins and group moderators to reach each other

• A new “featured” section so group admins can pin content that stays at the top of the group

• Facebook also plans to start testing a new set of features that will streamline the groups and Pages experience for admins who manage both a group and a corresponding page. It’s still not totally clear exactly how this will work, but Facebook says the goal is to bring some group-specific features, like moderation tools, into Pages while also giving admins the ability to “use an official voice when interacting with their community.”

T-Mobile is offering its customers another perk. Folks with a new or existing T-Mobile or Sprint postpaid cell or home internet plan can snag a year of access to Paramount+ Essential at no extra cost starting on November 9th. T-Mobile also offers subscribers on eligible plans free access to Apple TV+ and Netflix.

Paramount+ Essential is the lower tier of the streaming service and it typically costs $5/month or $50/year. There are some ads and although you won't be able to stream your local CBS station, you can catch live NFL on CBS and UEFA Champions League games. The offer is also open to current Paramount+ subscribers.

Even though it won't cost T-Mobile subscribers anything extra for a year, they'll still need a credit card to sign up for Paramount+. If you don't cancel your plan before the year is up, Paramount+ will start charging for a monthly subscription. So it's probably worth setting a reminder to cancel if you don't plan to keep using the service after 12 months — Paramount+ won't send you a reminder that your free access is running out. 

Along with live sports, Paramount+ offers a wide selection of shows from CBS, BET, Comedy Central, MTV, Nickelodeon and other Viacom networks, as well as Paramount movies such as A Quiet Place Part II and PAW Patrol: The Movie. Paramount+ has originals as well, of course, including severalStar Trek shows, Evil, South Park movies and the terrific The Good Fight. 

Scammers used a new type of phishing campaign, which doesn't use emails, to steal around $500,000 worth of cryptocurrency from wallets this past weekend alone. According to Check Point Research, those bad actors purchased Google Ads placements for their fraudulent websites that imitate popular wallets, such as Phantom App and MetaMask. The malicious websites have URLs close to the original's, such as "phantonn.app" — the real service's URL is "phantom.app" — with designs also copied from the real deal. 

Check Point Research

The scammers will then steal the victim's passphrase if they visit the fake website and type it in. If the victim uses the fake website to create a new wallet, they will be given the attacker's secret recovery phrase. In the event that they use the recovery phrase to log in, they'll actually be logging into the bad actor's account, and any fund transferred to it will go to the scammer. For MetaMask, in particular, the fake website has the option to import an existing wallet. Since doing so requires a seed phrase, the scammers will also get access to it. 

As Check Point Research explains, the Phantom App and MetaMask are some of the most popular wallets for Solana and Ethereum. It cross-referenced Reddit forums to come to the conclusion that around half a million dollars were stolen last weekend alone, and it found 11 compromised wallet accounts containing crypto worth between $1,000 and $10,000. The scammers had already withdrawn funds from those wallets before CPR found them. 

CPR says scamming groups are now bidding on keywords on Google Ads, which is a testament to how effective the method is. It's now advising users to examine the wallet's URL closely and to skip Google Ads results altogether so as not to unknowingly fall for the scam.

You no longer have to tap an Instagram link in Twitter to see what you'll get. Twitter has started rolling out preview cards for Instagram links in its official apps and the web. If someone shares an Insta post, you'll see a thumbnail of the imagery you can expect when you tap that link. You may know if a photo is like-worthy without leaving your Twitter timeline.

The move puts an end to a long-running feud. Instagram's Twitter photo integration vanished in 2012, and neither social network has had a strong incentive to use preview cards in the years since. Twitter would rather you post photos directly on its service, while Instagram clearly has motivations to keep you using its platform whenever possible. Those issues apparently aren't much of a problem at this stage.

It's not clear what prompted the decision. We've asked Instagram for comment. Either way, it's good news if you're a social media fan — there should be less guesswork and more attention for your posts.

Facebook is rolling out another bonus program as it tries to bring more creators into its platform. This time, the company is focusing on subscriptions, which it says will help creators avoid Apple’s 30 percent commission on in-app purchases.

The social network is launching a web form for subscriptions, so individual creators can direct fans to subscribe outside of the app using Facebook Pay rather than Apple’s in-app purchases. “When people subscribe using this link, creators will keep all the money they earn (minus taxes),” Mark Zuckerberg wrote in a post.

Additionally, the company is introducing a bonus program that will pay creators between $5 and $20 for each new subscriber who signs up between now and the end of the year. Creators can earn up to $10,000 in bonuses, Facebook wrote in a blog post. The new bonus program is “invite-only in all 27 markets where the subscriptions feature is available to creators,” Facebook said, noting it wants to expand the program to more people “in the coming months.”

Facebook

Zuckerberg, who has had a long-running feud with Apple, has made the so-called “App Store tax” one of his top talking points about the iPhone maker. The company already created a workaround for businesses to circumvent in-app purchases for paid events, and has told creators Facebook won’t take a cut of their earnings until 2023. On Wednesday, Zuckerberg said creators would also be able to download their subscriber lists in order to have “more ownership of their audience.”

Winning over creators has become an increasingly important priority for Facebook, which already announced plans to funnel $1 billion into creator programs by the end of next year. The company sees creators as key to fending off rivals like TikTok and YouTube, and winning back the “young adult” demographic. Newly disclosed documents show that Facebook and Instagram are facing increasing declines in the number of younger users on its platform. The trend has worried executives and stumped researchers, who have so far been unable to turn the numbers around.

Board games are a great gift for anyone who wants to spend time with friends and family without staring at the TV. They’re interactive, fun, and you get to tell everyone to put away their phones and tablets for a while. But instead of pulling out the same old classics like Monopoly and Scrabble, we recommend giving some new titles a try. Here, we’ve compiled a list of games that you might not have heard of, but will still make excellent gifts this holiday season. Some are perfect for fantasy and video game nerds, while others are likely to be a hit with the whole family.

Trails: A Parks Game

Keymaster Games

Trails is a great little board game for anyone who loves hiking or even just the idea of it. In Trails, players hike on picturesque nature paths while gathering resources, taking pictures and encountering wildlife, earning points along the way. Whoever gets the most points wins. The art in this game is beautiful, featuring 11 national park illustrations from the Fifty-Nine Park Print series. Trails makes an especially great game for nature lovers, as a portion of every game sale is donated to the National Park Service.

Sleeping Gods

Will Lipman Photography for Engadget / Red Raven Games

If your loved one is a fan of open-world video games such as Skyrim or No Man’s Sky, Sleeping Gods could well be the perfect board game for them. In this cooperative game, you and up to three friends play the part of Captain Sofi Odessa and her crew, who find themselves lost in the Wandering Sea. With a game atlas of connecting maps and a thick choose-your-own-adventure style storybook, players will have to explore the land to uncover its secrets, fight beasts, complete quests and make game-changing decisions. It all adds up to an engrossing and immersive experience sure to please anyone who loves a good story.

Marvel United

Will Lipman Photography for Engadget / CMON

MCU fans will definitely appreciate it if you give them Marvel United, a game where the player and their friends have to work together to defeat the forces of evil. They can take on the role of one of seven heroes such as Captain America, Iron Man and Black Widow, each with their own unique powers and abilities. To win, players must choose their cards carefully and also collaborate with their partners to combine each other’s actions whenever possible. They’ll have to fight off henchmen, rescue civilians and, of course, take down one of three super villains: Red Skull, Ultron or Taskmaster. If X-Men is more their style, you could get them the Marvel United: X-Men version instead, where they get to play as characters like Professor X, Cyclops and Storm.

Canvas

Will Lipman Photography for Engadget / Road to Infamy

Canvas is perhaps one of the prettiest board games we’ve ever seen — it’s so lovely that we almost want to hang the cover on a wall. It’s apropos because in Canvas, players are painters in an art competition. They collect art cards, layering them on top of one another to create their own unique “painting.” As they do so, certain icons will be revealed or hidden, which will determine the resulting score, depending on the objectives for that round. It might sound confusing, but Canvas is a beginner friendly game that should make a great gift for art lovers of all stripes.

Space Invaders

Buffalo Games

Space Invaders is an enjoyable dexterity game for the whole family, even for those who don’t remember playing the classic arcade title of the same name. In this game, players have to work together to defeat descending aliens plus the UFO mothership before their health runs out. But instead of smashing buttons, they’ll take turns launching battle tokens with a mini catapult, and each player has a special ability they can deploy as well. It all adds to a bunch of silly fun that anyone aged eight and up can partake in.

Summer Camp

Buffalo Games

Another excellent family game is Summer Camp, which will have your loved ones recalling fond memories of canoeing, making friendship bracelets and roasting marshmallows. In this game, players are racing against each other to earn merit badges in different categories such as adventure, arts and crafts, cooking, friendship, outdoors, games and water sports. They’ll want to buy the right cards, build the best combos and beat their opponents across the finish line to get the most points possible. It might not be as fun as actually being at summer camp, but hey, at least they won’t get eaten by mosquitos while playing.

Summoner Wars 2nd Edition

Plaid Hat Games

If your loved one isn’t new to the world of tabletop gaming, then consider giving them Summoner Wars 2nd Edition, a tactical dueling card game that pits them against a rival to see which one will reign supreme. Players take on the role of powerful summoners that each control a large army of units in the form of cards, which are then placed in a head-to-head board. They also choose one of six different factions, each with unique attacks and moves. Some wield dark magic that can drain enemies, while others utilize brute strength to force their way through. If they’re really into combat games with a lot of tactics and strategy, Summoner Wars would make a thoughtful gift. The only downside is that you'll have to gift this a bit late as it comes out on January 12, 2022.

Wrath of the Lich King: A Pandemic System Board Game

Z-Man Games

For those who are really into World of Warcraft but might not have a lot of board gaming experience, Wrath of the Lich King: A Pandemic System Board game is the perfect introduction to the pastime. Based on a WoW expansion of the same name, players will take on the roles of legendary characters such as Thrall, Varian Wrynn, Sylvanas Windrunner, Tirian Fordring and Jaina Proudmoore, all of which will be familiar to anyone who’s ever played WoW. They’ll travel around the frozen continent of Northrend, completing quests and setting up strongholds in order to defeat armies of the undead and, eventually, the Lich King himself.

Why the long name? Well, the game utilizes similar mechanics found in Pandemic, a much beloved board game about eradicating the world of diseases. Those who are already familiar with Pandemic should be able to learn the game quite easily as a result, though Wrath of the Lich King has enough differences that it won’t feel like the same thing.

Cuphead: Fast Rolling Dice Game

Will Lipman Photography for Engadget / Cuphead

One of the most popular video games in 2017 was Cuphead, a run-and-gun style video game that features a hand-drawn 1930s art style. If you know someone who loved it when it came out, they might be interested in this card and dice version of the same game. Players play as Cuphead, Mugman, Elder Kettle or Ms. Chalice, and will attempt to defeat a gauntlet of bosses by rolling dice. Players can roll the dice as many times as they want per round, but there’s one problem: the time limit. It all adds up to a chaotic experience that really emulates the insane adrenaline rush of the original video game.