This post contains minor spoilers for season two, episode four of ‘Star Trek: Lower Decks.’

If you were a Star Trek newbie, today’s episode of Lower Decks, “Mugato, Gumato,” is not a good place to start. It’s packed full of references across the franchise, including Beckett Mariner, Sam Rutherford and Brad Boimler engaging in a not-so-friendly match of anbo-jyutsu, the appearance of not-so-enlightened Ferengi and even the episode name, which references how no one can seem to agree on how to pronounce the creature whose name is spelled “mugato.”

CBS

However, after a season and a half, the show has already settled into a groove, and as a streaming program there’s no reason why “Mugato, Gumato” would be anyone’s first episode. Paramount+ would only pull up this one if last week’s “We’ll Always Have Tom Paris” had recently been watched. With less need to be accessible, that leaves a show like Lower Decks free to dabble in continuity and in-jokes for the long-time fans.

Fan service is often derided for being gratuitous at best, and an act of gatekeeping at worst. After nearly 55 years and over 800 episodes aired, Star Trek has a lot of baggage that can be intimidating to a newcomer. The Abrams reboot in 2009 tried to wipe the slate clean but was still bogged down by decades of cultural knowledge, with even Trek casuals expecting to hear phrases like “beam me up” and “I’m a doctor!” It found itself trying to appease multiple groups of fans and ultimately thrilling few.

And yet, despite its deep dives into Star Trek lore, Lower Decks can still be a great entryway for new fans in how it chooses to subvert so many long-time franchise tropes. Both newcomers and hardcore Trekkies get to be on the same page when it comes to the all-important question: What comes next?

In that vein, “Mugato, Gumato” is a fun ride. The main plot revolves around the re-discovery of a rare species only previously seen in a rather forgettable TOS episode, with the USS Cerritos charged with finding out how the animals got so far from their home planet. It’s not the most thrilling adventure on the surface, which makes it a perfect assignment for the crew of the lower-tier ship. Boimler and Rutherford are assigned to the away team, which would normally spell doom for a pair of chronically unlucky ensigns.

CBS

Instead, the rest of the group is captured by a group of Ferengi poachers, leaving Brad and Sam in the unlikely and awkward position of saviors. But rather than have them step into the role of “action-oriented leading men,” they instead embrace their unique skills as “nerdy supporting characters.” Meanwhile, it’s the captain and bridge crew who get stuck with the b-plot of helping out a stranded trader whose ship they accidentally destroyed.

After Boimler and Rutherford save the day with a well-thought-out PowerPoint (yes, really) it ends up being the senior staff who isn’t fully informed of what happened on the planet. This is in direct contrast to a previous episode where Boimler has pointed out that it’s not their place to know what’s going on. Captain Freeman just shrugs the whole incident off as some “environmentally conscious Ferengi,” apparently unaware of the two ensigns’ key role in getting the ultra-capitalist Ferengi to change their ways in favor of a more profitable path without resorting to violence.

CBS

It also ends up being good for continuity, in how it reconciles the two versions of Ferengi we’ve seen throughout the franchise. Here, it argues, they really are the same species in the end, just that the offensive, retrograde Ferengi from “The Last Outpost” hadn’t found a less overtly evil way to make money.

“Mugato, Gumato” may have trafficked in old tropes, but it also twisted them in a way to teach the characters and audience something new about themselves and the franchise. Or, as Boimler and Rutherford would say, “If we’re both unhappy, it means we’ve reached… a compromise!”

Twitter is finally flipping the switch on “Super Follows,” its new subscription feature that allows creators to charge their followers for exclusive content. Starting today, the company is making the feature available to a “small group” of creators, with plans to expand the lineup in the coming weeks (Twitter has been taking applications for Super Follows since June).

For now, creators can set monthly rates of $2.99, $4.99 or $9.99 in order to access “subscriber-only” tweets. Twitter says it will eventually incorporate other features, such as Spaces and newsletters. But until then the feature essentially amounts to.. paying for tweets, which might explain why the company is trying it out with just a few people to start. The initial lineup includes:

• @MakeupforWOC who will offer “client-level treatment” for subscribers with skincare questions

• @myeshachou who will provide exclusive “behind-the-scenes stories”

• @KingJosiah54 who will offer “in-depth sports analysis”

• @tarotbybronx who will provide Super Followers with “astrology, tarot, and intuitive healing advice” and “extra spiritual guidance”

Of course, if you’re especially interested in one of these topics or just a dedicated fan, there is an upside to buying a subscription. You’ll be able to interact with creators in a smaller, and slightly more private, forum. That could be useful if, for example, you’re hoping to get some personalized skincare advice. On the other hand, asking fans to pay for the kind of content they’re used to getting for free might be a tough sell.

Super Follows is one piece of Twitter’s strategy to reshape its platform as a destination for creators. Outside of subscriptions, the company is also experimenting with letting creators sell tickets to audio chats in Spaces. Twitter is also working on a newsletter platform — it acquired Revue earlier this year — and has opened up tipping features in its app.

The following contains spoilers for episodes three and four of 'What If...?'

There’s a Twilight Zone episode I’m particularly fond of called “A World of His Own,” where a writer discovers that everything he speaks into his dictaphone comes true, and he can undo it by simply burning the tape. By the end, even narrator Rod Serling is shown to be a creation of this character’s imagination, making this one of the few TZ episodes where the fourth wall is firmly broken. It took an entire season for that classic program to feel comfortable enough to play around with its format and premise like that. However, we’re only on the fourth installment of What If…? and it’s employing similar tactics, though with a less comedic tone.

The first two episodes of What If…? revolved around a simple switch, trading one character for another and seeing how things play out as a result. Last week’s hinged on a minor change — Hope Pym joining SHIELD — that spiraled out with huge consequences. This week shows us a simple substitution again, putting Dr. Christine Palmer in the car with Stephen Strange and killing her off in the accident that in another timeline, destroyed the gifted surgeon’s hands instead.

Her death ends up being the catalyst for Strange studying the mystic arts, and the events shown here pretty much follow the same lines as they did in the film. It’s kind of unlikely, given that a motive to fix one’s injured hands is small peanuts compared to an attempt to undo death. But we still see Stephen training in Kamar-Taj, learning about the Eye of Agamotto and eventually fighting Dormammu. As far as the timeline is concerned, everything is pretty much the same.

Marvel Studios

Except Stephen, who can’t get Christine’s death out of his head. He ends up going back to the moment of the crash and trying to save his girlfriend’s life, only to fail again and again. Since her death was the catalyst for him to learn magic, he can’t use his powers to save her. She is a fixed point, an unchangeable event (something Doctor Who fans will be well acquainted with).

For the viewer, this raises a big question: If Christine’s death is really such a concrete event in the time stream, how did we end up with “our” Stephen Strange back over in the regular MCU timeline? Here, the episode inspired an intriguing possibility: that perhaps this Doctor Strange will succeed in changing the timeline so that Christine isn’t in the car and he destroys his hands, in fact making this episode a prequel to the 2016 film. That would have been a rather mind bending twist that certainly would have made this series more important, though still not essential, to the MCU.

Alas, it was not to be, with Strange descending further and further into his obsession to the point where even our narrator is concerned. And for the first time, a character becomes aware that they are being observed and actually calls the Watcher out. Like in the Twilight Zone episode, the sequence is intended as a demonstration of power, showing that Strange has reached the level of awareness to notice the fourth wall. But still his powers are limited; he’s not cognizant of the audience (though Uatu the Watcher is, having addressed us directly earlier in the episode) and his pleas for assistance ultimately go unheeded.

Marvel Studios

Compared with the first three episodes, this one ends on a dark note. That’s actually truer to the original comic series the show is based on where, freed from the constraints of long-term continuity, the writers could take the story in whatever direction they wanted. If they wanted to kill everyone they could and would, since the main timeline was to go unaffected and future issues of What If…? would just hit the reset button.

Whether the animated version will go the same way remains to be seen, but with the fourth episode an underlying sense of continuity has started to develop: The tentacled creature from "What If... Captain Carter Were the First Avenger?" makes a reappearance, and Uatu acknowledges to the audience the stories he’s already told, which at the bare minimum hints that these episodes are meant to be viewed in a specific order. What If…? may be a diversion, but there seems to be a destination on the horizon.

There are secrets buried in the first video from Eyes Out. It’s just two minutes long and filled with overlapping shots of drums, mics, guitars and snakelike cables packed into a lonely desert hideaway, all while an unsettling, ambient score gathers layers of sound. Over time, the scenes are flooded with red and the film is overcome by a horrendous groaning scream. Thin white text flashes across the screen, telling a disjointed story about burying bones and walking with the bloom of a burgeoning universe.

Among this vibrating chaos, there are hints about the kind of studio Eyes Out will be and even what the team’s first game might look like. Or, more aptly, what it might sound like.

Eyes Out is the new video game studio founded by Nine Inch Nails guitarist Robin Finck and veteran AAA director Cory Davis, and the team is already hard at work on its first title, a mysterious horror game with an emphasis on experimental audio.

“We want to create mind-bending experiences that cause you to question reality,” Davis said. “That's what we're really excited about. We’re all fans of horror, but specifically this kind of — it's a new and emerging space that doesn't just sit within the extremely violent and dark and terrifying, but also reaches into the vibrant and even surprises you with moments of bliss or self-reflection. Horror really has a lot of room to grow.”

Finck added on to that thought, saying, “We're playing in this field that provides an emotional and psychological response, which really, I feel, is heightened as a singular experience. And we're really fortunate to be attracting developers who are so genuinely passionate about these types of conversations.”

Davis has built a successful career as a video game designer, directing and crafting high-profile titles including Spec Ops: The Line and Here They Lie, but he’s also a composer. In fact, the first word of his Twitter bio reads, “musician.” Meanwhile, Finck’s Twitter bio has just two tags, both of which speak for themselves: @eyesoutofficial and @nineinchnails.

Note which one comes first.

Eyes Out

Finck got involved in the video game industry about six years ago, after striking up a friendship with Devolver Digital co-founder Mike Wilson at Burning Man. Finck ended up handling the soundtrack for Noct, a top-down horror game published by Devolver in 2015, and his interest in development was piqued. He dove further into the video game industry, attending conventions and connecting with creators.

“I was just really inspired by people and their enthusiasm, the forward tech of it all, and the collision of art and music, design, agency, narrative, and also the experience of really becoming immersed in all of this,” Finck said. “It really feels like the most focused and the most highly attuned experience to imbibe this sort of storytelling. And that continues to turn me on. And this led me, fortunately enough for me, to meet Cory as he and his team were completing Here They Lie.”

Eventually, Finck found himself at Sony Santa Monica, playing an early version of Davis’ VR horror title, Here They Lie. He was floored by it. Finck and Davis got to talking, and they haven’t stopped since.

“We immediately were talking about sound and music and the weight of that and the experience,” Finck said. “And we kept on in the coming days and weeks and months. And then eventually were working together on music for projects that Cory was heralding. We have a simpatico workflow and creatively sync in a lot of ways.”

Davis remembered feeling a spark at that first meeting, too.

“We started to go down the rabbit hole of distortion pedals and different synthesizers and stuff like that,” he said. “But that led us to this other type of discussion where I really felt this connection in terms of an understanding of the power of games as a medium and the impact and the possibility of what the medium holds for the future.”

Davis and Finck were both interested in building a single-player experience around music and tone, rather than starting with a narrative or visual style and applying sound later on in the process.

“From the first conversation with Robin, I could feel that he's this other type of creator that wants to be driven by his passion and his soul, rather than maybe what's trendy or what's even necessarily gratifying,” Davis said. “I just felt this kind of depth of possibility of what we could do together. I had other prototypes going on at the time at my old studio, but every time I got back together with Robin, our conversations would go deeper. And they'd go beyond the music and they'd go to places where I'd been hoping to go my whole journey as a game developer.”

Eyes Out is the result of this creative magnetism between Davis and Finck. They’ve attracted other developers, too, and have hired 15 collaborators from the industries of visual art, film and games to work on their first project.

“That's really what I've been looking for since way back in the Spec Ops: The Line days, was to build a team that has a diverse enough approach to both things like the difficulties in game development, as well as their acceptance and embrace of people that are from different parts of the world, from different backgrounds, that are of any kind of personality, and especially people that have been downtrodden and haven't had opportunities in the past,” Davis said. “We see those opportunities allowing us to have so much more depth in the types of stories that we're able to tell.”

There’s no name or release window for the studio’s first game, but Davis and Finck are dropping hints about how it’ll play and what they want players to feel. It’s not a VR game, it’s designed with complete immersion in mind, and it features creatures that behave strangely in response to generative audio cues. The team is playing around with rhythm mechanics and figuring out how to build creeping tension through sound.

“The type of horror that we're building has a lot to do with the horrors of the universe and the horrors that you kind of go to sleep with at night, the ones that are just around the corner and outside of our purview, but exist,” Davis said. “And the technology for building those types of soundscapes, the localized audio and reverb and the realism behind that, coming from VR before, I had a lot of opportunity to work with that stuff.”

The debut game from Eyes Out will be a focused, single-player horror experience built around sound — and silence.

“I'm really excited about the nuance and the subtlety of coming from silence, like a really impactful silence, and beginning to emerge from that silence towards an impactful embellishment of some sort, however great or greater,” Finck said. “And that play between the diegetic soundscape of the world within the tangible, physical space inside the game, and where it blurs with the score, the music of the game, can be really challenging and inspiring.”

Eyes Out's first project is poised to be otherworldly, introspective and experimental, just like the studio itself.

Facebook wants in on the predictive games trend. The social media giant has launched a Fantasy Games feature in the US and Canada with "free, simple" sports and pop culture prediction titles. The fantasy sports offerings let you predict winners for matches, top players and other stats. MLB Home Run Picks asks you to predict the team with the most home runs in a given day, for instance, while La Liga Winning Streak challenges you to predict daily wins in the Spanish soccer league for as long as possible.

You can also guess the victors in reality TV shows like Survivor and The Bachelorette. There are promises of other pop culture games, although Facebook didn't cite examples.

Fantasy Games are currently available through Facebook's Android and iOS apps. You'll find them both through the bookmarks menu as well as through notifications in the News Feed.

Facebook clearly isn't interested in direct competition with for-money fantasy game services like DraftKings and FanDuel, at least not right now. However, there are still plenty of incentives for the social network to launch Fantasy Games. The feature could keep you coming back, boosting ad revenue as well as your overall engagement with Facebook. It also opens the door to paid fantasy games in the future. Still, this might hit the spot if you've been tempted by fantasy sports but don't want to spend real money.

LinkedIn is ditching Stories. The company will shut down the feature by the end of September, a year after rolling it out. As it turns out, ephemeral posts aren't a perfect fit for every social network. Perhaps with ROI and KPIs in mind, LinkedIn says its users want videos that stay on their profiles permanently, not ones that vanish.

"In developing Stories, we assumed people wouldn’t want informal videos attached to their profile, and that ephemerality would reduce barriers that people feel about posting," Liz Li, LinkedIn's senior director of product wrote. "Turns out, you want to create lasting videos that tell your professional story in a more personal way and that showcase both your personality and expertise."

As such, the company's going back to the whiteboard. It's taking what it learned from Stories (such as users wanting creative tools to liven up videos in a professional way) to create a "reimagined video experience across LinkedIn that’s even richer and more conversational."

Just about every major social network hopped on the Stories bandwagon after the likes of Snapchat and Instagram found huge success with the format. Although the feature has proven a hit on the likes of YouTube and Facebook, Stories haven't taken off on every platform. Twitter recently shut down Fleets, its take on Stories, less than nine months after launching the feature.

Ghostrunner was one of the best surprises of 2020. It’s a stylish first-person platformer that takes the best elements of Titanfall’s parkour mechanics and adds a cyberpunk twist to the proceedings. It’s also a challenging game that demands precision and purpose from the player. Make a single mistake, and you’ll need to replay a section of a level again. That can get frustrating fast, so developer One More Level is adding a new feature called Assist Mode.

Assist Mode introduces three options you can toggle on and off. You can opt to shorten your character’s ability cooldowns, slow down the game to give you more time to react and play with an extra life to make mistakes less punishing. Accessibility modes are becoming more common in video games, and it’s always good to see another developer find a way to allow more people to enjoy their work.

For experienced players, there’s a new feature called Wave Mode that is essentially Ghostrunner’s take on a roguelike. You’ll need to complete 20 rounds in succession, with each one featuring different enemies — even when you attempt the same one multiple times. Make it all the way to the end, and you’ll earn a fancy new katana for your character.

Both Assist and Wave modes are available today for free on the platforms where you can already buy Ghostrunner. That includes PlayStation 4, Xbox One, Nintendo Switch and PC via Steam, the Epic Games Store and GOG. When the game makes its way to PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X/S on September 28th, it will come with those modes included.

Amazon may be the next to hop on the live audio bandwagon, although its take might not be what you'd expect. Axiossources claim Amazon is developing a live audio offering that would focus on music, including concerts and other events — more like Spotify than Clubhouse. The company is reportedly considering podcasts and talk radio as extensions, but Amazon Music would lead the project.

The internet giant also hopes to build live audio into Twitch. The sources didn't say how or when this might arrive.

We've asked Amazon for comment on the rumors. It wouldn't be surprising if Amazon leapt into the live audio space, at least. Amazon recently integrated Twitch streams into the Music app, and the firm's acquisition of podcast subscription business Wondery in 2020 signalled an intent to dive further into audio. There's also the simple matter of competition. Spotify, Twitter Spaces and Facebook's audio rooms could all pose a threat, even if Clubhouse doesn't. This would at least give Amazon a foothold before others dominate the category.

Facebook is planning to reduce political content in the News Feed starting today, it confirmed to Engadget. The move, which was first reported by Axios, follows tests in the US, Canada, Brazil and Indonesia earlier this year, where Facebook limited political content. The company plans to expand the tests to Costa Rica, Sweden, Spain and Ireland.

"These changes are in response to common feedback from our community," a Facebook spokesperson told Engadget. "We conduct ongoing research with people to hear what parts of Facebook are working well for them, and to gather feedback about what we could be doing better. One of the themes we’ve heard is that some people feel that there’s too much political content in their News Feeds. We hope these changes address this feedback and preserve the ability for people to find and interact with political content on Facebook, while respecting their appetite for it at the top of their News Feed."

Facebook says some engagement signals are better than others at indicating which posts people deem interesting or valuable. As a result, the company is expanding some tests related to engagement signals. The tests put less importance on how likely a user is to share or comment on political content. "At the same time, we’re putting more emphasis on new signals such as how likely people are to provide us with negative feedback on posts about political topics and current events when we rank those types of posts in their News Feed," Facebook wrote in an updated blog post.

The changes could reduce the level of misinformation on Facebook, if the algorithms are able to effectively detect and de-emphasize all political content. Political campaigns might have to rethink their strategies of how to reach voters too. On the flip side, the move could come as a blow to news organizations, especially those focused on politics, given the volume of traffic Facebook can drive to websites.

The switch could also make Facebook a less hostile place for users. Political discussions can quickly get heated, which might put off those who use the service largely for keeping in touch with their loved ones and sharing pictures of their kids. For what it's worth, Facebook claimed in November political content makes up just six percent of what users see.

"We’ve learned that these changes will affect public affairs content more broadly and that publishers may see an impact on their traffic," Facebook said. "Knowing this, we are planning a gradual and methodical rollout for these tests, but remain encouraged, and expect to announce further expansions in the coming months."

The reported changes follow other moves that Facebook has made to make political content less visible. It stopped recommending civic and political groups to users earlier this year after temporarily pausing those recommendations ahead of the 2020 US election.

Back in June, Spotify introduced Blend, a shared playlist that pulls together songs from your listening history and that of a friend’s. Today, that feature is not only rolling out to Spotify users globally, but it also comes with some new improvements.

To start, each time you create a Blend playlist with a friend, Spotify will generate a match score, telling the two of you how close you are on your musical tastes. Like with the company’s end-of-year Wrapped feature, it will now also create a shareable story that tells you some fun facts about the songs and artists that made their way into your playlist. Spotify says it has also tweaked the cover art to make it easier to identify each Blend playlist you create.

All users can try out the feature. However, if you’re a Premium subscriber, you’ll see whose music taste contributed to each song in a playlist. To make your first one, tap the “Create Blend” option in the For You hub in the Spotify mobile app, and then invite your friend. Once they accept, Spotify will handle the rest, and you can share the resulting story the company generates about your playlist.