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Four years later, PlayStation and Insomniac gives Marvel’s Wolverine a 2026 release window, debuts trailer full of blood, brutality, and blades

by admin September 24, 2025

Other than that brief teaser from 2021, any official word on Insomniac’s Wolverine has been slimmer than an adamantium claw blade. But today – finally! – at Sony’s State of Play livestream, the developer has kicked down the door, made that trademark ‘snikt’ sound, and shown us an uber-violent trailer and behind-the-scenes video chronicling the development of the game so far.

We’ve also got a release window: Fall 2026.

The trailer, and the behind-the-scenes footage, confirms that this will be a project that takes in a lot of Wolverine’s history: we’ve seen proof of life of important locations to him like Japan, Madripoor, and the American North, whilst key characters in his history like Omega Red and Mystique have thus far been confirmed. Will we see more X-Men – Jean Grey or Cyclops? – or maybe even some external team-ups (Colossus, Hulk, and Cable come to mind…)

Check out the videos below.

The gameplay trailer.Watch on YouTube

“Become a living weapon,” reads a blurb. “As he searches for answers about his past, Wolverine will do whatever it takes – unleashing brutal claw combat, violent rage, and relentless determination – to cut through the mystery of the man he used to be.”

Here’s some more info about how Insomniac is bringing Logan to life, per the PS Blog:

Bold, resilient, and volatile, Wolverine is a character that all of us at Insomniac are thrilled to explore in collaboration with our friends at Marvel Games and Sony Interactive Entertainment. Like our Marvel’s Spider-Man franchise, we’re once again combining our super powers to deliver an original take on a beloved character based on Marvel Comics.

Our Wolverine, AKA Logan, is played by actor Liam McIntyre who taps into the rage, pain, and nuances of this iconic character. In this story, he is on the hunt to uncover the secrets of a dark past that keeps eluding him. Unfortunately, in this world, he’ll have to dig his claws deep to pull any shred of information that may lead to answers. Often, that means shredding into a relentless onslaught of enemies who aim to stop him by any means necessary. Fueled by unflinching resilience (and a rapid healing factor), Wolverine won’t go down easy if it means keeping the mission on task.

Wolverine was first teased back in 2021, during a PlayStation Showcase. At this time, the studio stated the game was still “very early in development”. It also still had its Marvel’s Spider-Man sequel in the works at this point, with that project ultimately releasing in 2023.

The most we’ve seen from the game, to date, was actually back in 2023, when files were stolen from Insomniac Games by ransomware hackers. Following this attack, people began playing – and uploading footage – of an incomplete early development build of Wolverine, which was found within the stolen files. Safe to say, things are looking a bit more like a finalised game right now.

We’re going to see more of the game in Spring 2026, apparently. See you then, bub.

The making of.Watch on YouTube

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September 24, 2025 0 comments

Crypto Trends

Cardano Marks 8 Years: The Blockchain Is Still Heating Up With Activity And Development

by admin September 24, 2025

Trusted Editorial content, reviewed by leading industry experts and seasoned editors. Ad Disclosure

During a period of notable celebration and excitement in the broader Cardano community, the major blockchain is showcasing robust momentum and development. With the blockchain sector heating up, Cardano’s on-chain activity and investor engagement are persistently growing.

8 Years Later, Cardano Continues To Thrive

In a significant development, the Cardano blockchain is marking its 8th anniversary of existence, and the network continues to thrive. Despite being around for almost a decade, the network is showing signs of continued energy and expansion.

Based on research, the network has evolved over time into a thriving ecosystem of decentralized apps, smart contracts, and an increasingly engaged community. As it commemorates this milestone, Cardano keeps pushing the envelope in terms of adoption, governance, and scalability.

Fresh developments in the blockchain’s performance indicate that it is still in its infancy and has a long way to go. According to Dave, the network has been relentless in its 8 years of existence, with peer-reviewed innovation, building a platform defined by its unparalleled reliability and security.

Cardano’s progress has been impressive, going from a visionary whitepaper to a vibrant global ecosystem. Furthermore, Dave highlighted that the foundation is more solid than ever, expressing his confidence in the blockchain witnessing its best year in the near term.

Presently, the blockchain is experiencing an explosive surge in activity, with the number of transactions conducted on mainnet skyrocketing to record levels. This massive growth in transaction count, which highlights increasing adoption and utility, was reported by TapTools on the social media platform X.

Data shared by TapTools shows that the overall number of transactions executed on the mainnet has surpassed 114 million. Interestingly, these massive transfers have a success rate of 0.73 TPS (Transactions Per Second).

Cardano transactions count over time | Source: Chart from TapTools on X

Such a huge transaction count marks the heightened engagement across DeFi, staking, and real-world applications building on the blockchain. With developer trust in the platform and consumer demand growing rapidly, the development could position the network as a major player in the next wave of blockchain expansion.

A Climb In Global Sentiment Hierarchy

According to a report from Mintern, Cardano has climbed up the global charts in community sentiment. This move up reinforces its standing as one of the blockchain ecosystems that receives the most active support and attention.

After moving up the ranks, potentially due to its heightened engagement, the network is now positioned at the 7th spot in global community sentiment. In addition, ADA has one of the most robust and upbeat communities among the Top 10 cryptocurrencies. Thus, the blockchain is showing its ability to stay relevant in a landscape that is becoming highly competitive.

At the time of writing, ADA was trading at $0.81, demonstrating a more than 7% decline in the past week. CoinMarketCap data shows that its trading volume has also fallen by over 26% in the past day, indicating growing bearish investor action.

ADA trading at $0.81 on the 1D chart | Source: ADAUSDT on Tradingview.com

Featured image from Adobe Stock, chart from Tradingview.com

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September 24, 2025 0 comments

Product Reviews

DHS Has Been Collecting US Citizens’ DNA for Years

by admin September 23, 2025

The expansion has been driven by specific legal and bureaucratic levers. Foremost was an April 2020 Justice Department rule that revoked a long-standing waiver allowing DHS to skip DNA collection from immigration detainees, effectively green-lighting mass sampling. Later that summer, the FBI signed off on rules that let police booking stations run arrestee cheek swabs through Rapid DNA machines—automated devices that can spit out CODIS-ready profiles in under two hours.

The strain of the changes became apparent in subsequent years. Former FBI director Christopher Wray warned during Senate testimony in 2023 that the flood of DNA samples from DHS threatened to overwhelm the bureau’s systems. The 2020 rule change, he said, had pushed the FBI from a historic average of a few thousand monthly submissions to 92,000 per month—over 10 times its traditional intake. The surge, he cautioned, had created a backlog of roughly 650,000 unprocessed kits, raising the risk that people detained by DHS could be released before DNA checks produced investigative leads.

Under Trump’s renewed executive order on border enforcement, signed in January 2025, DHS agencies were instructed to deploy “any available technologies” to verify family ties and identity, a directive that explicitly covers genetic testing. This month, federal officials announced that it was soliciting new bids to install Rapid DNA at local booking facilities around the country, with combined awards of up to $3 million available.

“The Department of Homeland Security has been piloting a secret DNA collection program of American citizens since 2020. Now, the training wheels have come off,” said Anthony Enriquez, vice president of advocacy at Robert F. Kennedy Human Rights. “In 2025, Congress handed DHS a $178 billion check, making it the nation’s costliest law enforcement agency, even as the president gutted its civil rights watchdogs and the Supreme Court repeatedly signed off on unconstitutional tactics.”

Oversight bodies and lawmakers have raised alarms about the program. As early as 2021, the DHS Inspector General found the department lacked central oversight of DNA collection and that years of noncompliance that can undermine public safety—echoing an earlier rebuke from the Office of Special Counsel, which called CBP’s failures an “unacceptable dereliction.”

US senator Ron Wyden more recently pressed DHS and DOJ for explanations about why children’s DNA is being captured and whether CODIS has any mechanism to reject improperly obtained samples, saying the program was never intended to collect and permanently retain the DNA of all noncitizens, warning the children are likely to be “treated by law enforcement as suspects for every investigation of every future crime, indefinitely.”

Rights advocates allege that CBP’s DNA collection program has morphed into a sweeping genetic surveillance regime, with samples from migrants and even US citizens fed into criminal databases absent transparency, legal safeguards, or limits on retention. Georgetown’s privacy center points out that once DHS creates and uploads a CODIS profile, the government retains the physical DNA sample indefinitely, with no procedure to revisit or remove profiles when the legality of the detention is in doubt.

In parallel, Georgetown and allied groups have sued DHS over its refusal to fully release records about the program, highlighting how little the public knows about how DNA is being used, stored, or shared once it enters CODIS.

Taken together, these revelations may suggest a quiet repurposing of CODIS. A system long described as a forensic breakthrough is being remade into a surveillance archive—sweeping up immigrants, travelers, and US citizens alike, with few checks on the agents deciding whose DNA ends up in the federal government’s most intimate database.

“There’s much we still don’t know about DHS’s DNA collection activities,” Georgetown’s Glaberson says. “We’ve had to sue the agencies just to get them to do their statutory duty, and even then they’ve flouted court orders. The public has a right to know what its government is up to, and we’ll keep fighting to bring this program into the light.”

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September 23, 2025 0 comments

Crypto Trends

Ontario Kidnapper Who Demanded $1M Bitcoin Ransom Sentenced to 13 Years

by admin September 23, 2025

In brief

Keyron Moore received a 13-year sentence, with three years credited for time served.
A youth co-accused, identified only as S.M., will be sentenced in Oshawa on Oct. 3.
The victim was abducted in 2022, tortured, and told to pay $1M in Bitcoin before escaping.

A Toronto-area kidnapping tied to a $1 million Bitcoin demand has led to fresh court rulings, with one man sentenced and a youth awaiting judgment.

Keyron Moore, 39, has been sentenced to 13 years in prison, with three years credited for time served, after being convicted in connection with the abduction, torture, and sexual assault of a woman identified as A.T. in 2022.

Justice M. Townsend handed down the sentence in Newmarket on August 22, imposing concurrent terms for forcible confinement, sexual assault with a firearm, and reckless discharge of a firearm, alongside additional orders including a lifetime weapons ban and a 20-year registration as a sex offender.

The sentencing decision also referenced the youth co-accused, identified only as S.M. under the Youth Criminal Justice Act, noting that Moore is barred from contacting him while in custody. S.M. was convicted in 2024 and is scheduled to be sentenced in Oshawa on October 3.

A non-publication and non-broadcast order was implemented in March 2024 to protect the victim’s identity.

The assault happened on November 1, 2022, when A.T. was abducted outside a Thornhill plaza and forced into a vehicle at gunpoint. She was driven to Barrie, confined in a garage, stripped, beaten, burned, and threatened with a syringe filled with fentanyl while her captors demanded $1 million in Bitcoin, according to a court document from the Ontario Court of Justice published in December last year.

The perpetrators “kept saying that they wanted money as well as cryptocurrency and Bitcoin,” according to a summary line by Detective Renwick, the case’s File Coordinator.

During the ordeal, Moore at one point threatened to shoot her unless she performed sexual acts. A.T. eventually escaped through a garage door and ran to a neighbor’s house to call for help.

The case joins a growing number of violent assaults tied to digital assets, including so-called “$5 wrench attacks,” where victims are physically coerced into surrendering their crypto holdings.

Such incidents show how crypto has become a direct target for extortion, with courts and law enforcement treating digital-asset ransom demands much like traditional armed robbery and kidnapping.

In her victim impact statement, A.T. described the lasting trauma she continues to face.

“I don’t go outside alone. The fear is too overwhelming. I feel like I have a target on my back, like someone is always watching, waiting for the right moment. My heart races at the thought of being approached, followed, or taken.”

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September 23, 2025 0 comments

GameFi Guides

New AI System Predicts Risk of 1,000 Diseases Years in Advance

by admin September 23, 2025

In brief

Researchers unveiled Delphi-2M in Nature, an AI that forecasts risk for 1,000+ diseases up to 20 years out.
The model outperformed single-disease tools, predicting co-morbidities and generating synthetic health trajectories from medical records.
Trained on UK Biobank and validated on 1.9M Danish health records, Delphi-2M shows promise but faces bias, privacy, and deployment hurdles.

Researchers have built an AI system that predicts your risk of developing more than 1,000 diseases up to 20 years before symptoms appear, according to a study published in Nature this week.

The model, called Delphi-2M, achieved 76% accuracy for near-term health predictions and maintained 70% accuracy even when forecasting a decade into the future.

It outperformed existing single-disease risk calculators while simultaneously assessing risks across the entire spectrum of human illness.

“The progression of human disease across age is characterized by periods of health, episodes of acute illness and also chronic debilitation, often manifesting as clusters of co-morbidity,” the researchers wrote. “Few algorithms are capable of predicting the full spectrum of human disease, which recognizes more than 1,000 diagnoses at the top level of the International Classification of Diseases, Tenth Revision (ICD-10) coding system.”

The system learned these patterns from 402,799 UK Biobank participants, then proved its mettle on 1.9 million Danish health records without any additional training.

Before you start rubbing your hands with the idea of your own medical predictor, can you try Delphi-2M yourself? Not exactly.

The trained model and its weights are locked behind UK Biobank’s controlled access procedures—meaning researchers only. The codebase for training your own version is on GitHub under an MIT license, so you could technically build your own model, but you’d need access to massive medical datasets to make it work.

For now, this remains a research tool, not a consumer app.

Behind the curtain

The technology works by treating medical histories as sequences—much like ChatGPT processes text.

Each diagnosis, recorded with the age it first occurred, becomes a token. The model reads this medical “language” and predicts what comes next.

With the proper information and training, you can predict the next token (in this case, the next illness) and the estimated time before that “token” is generated (how long until you get sick if the most likely set of events occurs).

For a 60-year-old with diabetes and high blood pressure, Delphi-2M might forecast a 19-fold increased risk of pancreatic cancer. Add a pancreatic cancer diagnosis to that history, and the model calculates mortality risk jumping nearly ten thousandfold.

The transformer architecture behind Delphi-2M represents each person’s health journey as a timeline of diagnostic codes, lifestyle factors like smoking and BMI, and demographic data. “No event” padding tokens fill the gaps between medical visits, teaching the model that the simple passage of time changes baseline risk.

This is also similar to how normal LLMs can understand text even if they miss some words or even sentences.

When tested against established clinical tools, Delphi-2M matched or exceeded their performance. For cardiovascular disease prediction, it achieved an AUC of 0.70 compared to 0.69 for AutoPrognosis and 0.71 for QRisk3. For dementia, it hit 0.81 versus 0.81 for UKBDRS. The key difference: those tools predict single conditions. Delphi-2M evaluates everything at once.

Beyond individual predictions, the system generates entire synthetic health trajectories.

Starting from age 60 data, it can simulate thousands of possible health futures, producing population-level disease burden estimates accurate to within statistical margins. One synthetic dataset trained a secondary Delphi model that achieved 74% accuracy—just three percentage points below the original.

The model revealed how diseases influence each other over time. Cancers increased mortality risk with a “half-life” of several years, while septicemia’s effect dropped sharply, returning to near-baseline within months. Mental health conditions showed persistent clustering effects, with one diagnosis strongly predicting others in that category years later.

Limitations

The system does have boundaries. Its 20-year predictions drop to around 60-70% accuracy in general, but things will depend on which type of disease and conditions it tries to analyze and forecast.

“For 97% of diagnoses, the AUC was greater than 0.5, indicating that the vast majority followed patterns with at least partial predictability,” the study says, adding later on that “Delphi-2M’s average AUC values decrease from an average of 0.76 to 0.70 after 10 years,” and that “iIn the first year of sampling, there are on average 17% disease tokens that are correctly predicted, and this drops to less than 14% 20 years later.”

In other words, this model is quite good at predicting things under relevant scenarios, but a lot can change in 20 years, so it’s not Nostradamus.

Rare diseases and highly environmental conditions prove harder to forecast. The UK Biobank’s demographic skew—mostly white, educated, relatively healthy volunteers—introduces bias that the researchers acknowledge needs addressing.

Danish validation revealed another limitation: Delphi-2M learned some UK-specific data collection quirks. Diseases recorded primarily in hospital settings appeared artificially inflated, contradicting the data registered by the Danish people.

The model predicted septicemia at eight times the normal rate for anyone with prior hospital data, partly because 93% of UK Biobank septicemia diagnoses came from hospital records.

The researchers trained Delphi-2M using a modified GPT-2 architecture with 2.2 million parameters—tiny compared to modern language models but sufficient for medical prediction. Key modifications included continuous age encoding instead of discrete position markers and an exponential waiting time model to predict when events would occur, not just what would happen.

Each health trajectory in the training data contained an average of 18 disease tokens spanning birth to age 80. Sex, BMI categories, smoking status, and alcohol consumption added context.

The model learned to weigh these factors automatically, discovering that obesity increased diabetes risk while smoking elevated cancer probabilities—relationships that medicine has long established but that emerged without explicit programming. It’s truly an LLM for health conditions.

For clinical deployment, several hurdles remain.

The model needs validation across more diverse populations—for example, the lifestyles and habits of people from Nigeria, China, and America can be very different, making the model less accurate.

Also, privacy concerns around using detailed health histories require careful handling. Integration with existing healthcare systems poses technical and regulatory challenges.

But the potential applications span from identifying screening candidates who don’t meet age-based criteria to modeling population health interventions. Insurance companies, pharmaceutical firms, and public health agencies may have obvious interests.

Delphi-2M joins a growing family of transformer-based medical models. Some examples include Harvard’s PDGrapher tool for predicting gene-drug combinations that could reverse diseases such as Parkinson’s or Alzheimer’s, an LLM specifically trained on protein connections, Google’s AlphaGenome model trained on DNA pairs, and others.

What makes Delphi-2M so interesting and different is its broad scope of action, the sheer breadth of diseases covered, its long prediction horizon, and its ability to generate realistic synthetic data that preserves statistical relationships while protecting individual privacy.

In other words: “How long do I have?” may soon be less a rhetorical question and more a predictable data point.

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September 23, 2025 0 comments

Product Reviews

SpaceX’s Starship Lunar Lander Could Be ‘Years Late,’ NASA Safety Panel Warns

by admin September 22, 2025

NASA aims to return astronauts to the Moon by mid-2027—a feat that would fulfill a decade of preparation. The agency may have to extend that timeline even further, however, as slow progress on SpaceX’s lunar lander threatens to delay the Artemis 3 mission.

During a public meeting on Friday, members of the Aerospace Safety Advisory Panel warned that the Human Landing System (HLS) version of Starship could be “years late,” SpaceNews reports. The panel reached that conclusion following a visit last month to SpaceX’s Starbase facility in Texas.

“The HLS schedule is significantly challenged and, in our estimation, could be years late for a 2027 Artemis 3 Moon landing,” said panelist Paul Hill, former director of Mission Operations at NASA.

Another Artemis delay—so what?

Putting American boots back on the Moon is a top priority for NASA. With a new space race underway, global powers including the U.S., China, and Russia are vying for a first-mover advantage.

Whoever reaches the lunar surface first will be able to set certain ground rules about who can do what and where. This would not only reinforce that country’s influence on the Moon and in space but also give it strategic leverage as military operations increasingly depend on space-based assets.

“This is a pivotal moment for our nation’s space program,” said Senate Commerce Committee Chairman Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) during a hearing on legislative priorities for NASA earlier this month. He went on to emphasize that space has become a “strategic frontier with direct consequences for national security, economic growth, and technological leadership.”

How did we get here?

In 2021, NASA contracted Elon Musk’s SpaceX to build a version of Starship capable of landing astronauts on the Moon. At that time, the agency aimed to accomplish a landing by 2024, but that target date has been pushed back in recent years.

Development of Starship HLS has slowed significantly as SpaceX has struggled with repeated explosive failures this year. While Starship’s most recent test flight on August 26 was a success, unmet technical milestones have piled up.

One major issue is demonstrating the cryogenic propellant transfer needed to refuel Starship in low-Earth orbit before the rocket heads to the Moon, Hill said during the Friday meeting. Developmental delays for Starship 3—the first iteration capable of in-orbit fuel transfers—have slowed progress toward this goal.

Hill also pointed to potentially competing priorities for SpaceX between Starlink and Starship HLS, SpacePolicyOnline.com reports. Starship 3 will be integral in launching the third generation of Starlink satellites while simultaneously creating the on-orbit fuel depots and lunar lander for Artemis 3.

“The next six months of Starship launches will be telling about the likelihood of HLS flying crew in 2027 or by the end of the decade,” Hill said.

Despite these concerns, the panelists emphasized that SpaceX is still the only launch provider for the job. “There is no competitor, whether government or industry, that has this full combination of factors that yield this high a manufacturing and flight tempo, with their direct effects on reliability increases and cost reduction,” Hill said.

The downside to relying on SpaceX, however, is clear: Without a launch-ready Starship HLS by 2027, Artemis 3 won’t get off the ground on time.

Back in 2023, NASA selected Jeff Bezos’s Blue Origin to provide a second lunar lander, dubbed Blue Ghost, to be used during the Artemis 5 mission later this decade. The contract is worth $3.4 billion and includes a development team consisting of Lockheed Martin, Boeing, Draper, Astrobotic, and Honeybee Robotics.

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September 22, 2025 0 comments

A screenshot of the Windows NT Server logon screen, which requires you to press Ctrl+Alt+Del to proceed

Product Reviews

Microsoft’s pivotal Windows NT 3.5 release made it a serious contender, 31 years ago today

by admin September 21, 2025

The Windows 11 you use today is still identified as “Windows NT” in some ways, and that’s because its lineage extends all the way back to the venerable Windows NT. Version 3.5 is widely considered the most pivotal release for the “New Technology” version of Windows, so today we cast a glance back at Windows’ forebears, as it was 31 years ago today that Windows NT 3.5 released to the public.

When Microsoft first announced NT, it wasn’t aimed at the family PC. NT was built for the enterprise, where Novell NetWare ruled networking and UNIX workstations were the only type of workstation taken seriously by “serious” computing guys. Windows 3.1, the friendly GUI most people knew, was still fundamentally an MS-DOS front-end, and that means it was for baby computers used by baby users, at least in the minds of workstation guys.

By contrast, Windows NT was designed as a clean-slate fully-32-bit operating system with a portable kernel, preemptive multitasking, and protected memory. Dave Cutler and his team — many of whom were veterans of DEC’s VMS — engineered Windows NT with long-term ambitions that went far beyond Microsoft’s popular consumer products.

No MMO will ever have graphics as good as the text MUDs I played for years

by admin September 20, 2025

My friends, you’ve been had. You’ve been suckered. A cabal of sirens has made you stupefied and susceptible, bearing impressive names like Unreal Engine 5, Unity, Anvil, Snowdrop. These are distractions: dark paths to divert you from the true way. You don’t need nanite-rendered leaves or dappled evening sunlight rendered with lumen. Look away. Look away!

Terminally Online

This is Terminally Online: PC Gamer’s very own MMORPG column, and I am not Harvey Randall, your usual author. I’m Joshua Wolens, filling in for Harvey this week with a lot of wistful, misty-eyed old-man musings about the glory of the MUDs of yore.

Look away and look back to the last time anything was good: the ’90s, when the internet moved too slow to cook your brain and the absolute peak of graphical fidelity was translucent water and the PlayStation 1, whose vertices swam and staggered beneath their own raw aesthetic power. Back then, if you wanted a world—a real world—there was only one place to go: Multi-User Dungeons (MUDs).

And frankly, my contention is that for all our modern graphical horsepower, that’s still the case.

Sacred texts

MUDs, if you’re not familiar, are large, shared, entirely text-based worlds where everything is conducted by the input and output of text. Massively multiplayer command lines, of a sort. Want to go somewhere? Prepare to type GO NORTH, GO NORTHWEST, GO NORTH, GO NORTHEAST ad nauseum until you reach your destination.

PvE might, in a generous game, consist of you typing KILL until the deed is done, pausing intermittently to input whatever the appropriate verb is for healing. A less generous game will have you type out the correct verb for every specific type of attack you want to do. As for PvP? Likely a terrifying arms race of custom-made combat scripts based on an ever-shifting sea of variables.

(Image credit: Mudlet Makers / Iron Realms Entertainment)

They’re complex, in other words. But despite that, it was a MUD—Achaea—that got its hooks into me at the tender age of 13. Not WoW, not EverQuest, not anything else. Achaea was my main game for years, but I moved on to others: Lusternia (no, it’s not a XXX game), Aardwolf, a brief flirtation with Discworld, and so on.

The ‘why’ of it is easy: more than any graphical MMO, these games captured the spirit of tabletop roleplaying—where the gaps in presentation left by dry stat sheets and dice rolls have to be filled by your imagination. MUDs were (and are) nothing but imagination, and their rudimentary presentation left enormous room for players to fill the gaps themselves.

In my heyday, the meat of what I got up to in the MUDs I played didn’t consist of relentlessly grinding dev-authored quests (though there was plenty of that), it took place in all the interstices the designers had left and that players had moved to fill. The beauty of text is that there’s very little you can’t do with it and doing it takes very little time.

Being able to describe yourself any way you liked, to perform any action you could fit into a sentence meant that players I knew made their living as travelling performers, as essayists on in-game lore (this was often tedious), as politicians and diplomats. Also they would quite regularly retreat to somewhere secluded with one another and—sweaty fingers trembling—co-author the most specific smut you can imagine. The internet!

(Image credit: Iron Realms)

It is, in these circumstances, relatively easy to catch a dev’s attention and have them help you roleplay out some kind of in-game event. Perhaps you want to be an archaeologist making a momentous discovery: all you need is someone to type you up a new item, and maybe briefly inhabit a nearby NPC to act out the scene.

And it really did look great, too. Not to turn into a kindergarten teacher, but your imagination is quite powerful, and good writing is timeless in a way no texture or lighting model ever will be.

Left on read

Alas, MUDs are on the downswing. In fairness, they’ve been that way since at least the late ’90s. They were dying even when I was first getting into them, slowly supplanted by MMOs which more closely resembled videogames and less resembled emacs. Where my favourites of yore once had playercounts in the hundreds, now they number in the tens. Some in the single-digits. Though some are doing quite well, I understand.

(Image credit: Iron Realms / Mudlet)

We’ll miss them if they ever go entirely, I think. As tech advances to fill more and more of those gaps which we used to have to fill ourselves, our scope for participation and mental investment in the worlds we spend thousands of hours in diminishes. Or mine does, anyway.

I’ve tried to get into the WoWs and SWTORs of the world (not FF14, which I believe I need some kind of catboy licence to enter legally), but none of the many characters I’ve made linger in my mind like the cadaverous freak I used to play in Achaea, and it’s Lusternia—not any MMO normal human beings play—that I habitually return to every holiday period. If I’m going to take part in a massive online world, I want to feel like I have the capacity to shape it, if nowhere else than in my own mind.

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September 20, 2025 0 comments

Product Reviews

The Best iPhone Value in Years

by admin September 19, 2025

Next to the ultra-thin iPhone Air and the packed-to-gills iPhone 17 Pro/17 Pro Max, the iPhone 17 looks unremarkable—boring, even. The three new colors other than black and white are less vibrant than the shades the iPhone 16 came in. But peel back a few layers and things become clear: the iPhone 17, starting at $799, is in fact a remarkable value, providing a ton of bang for your buck.

Besides the slight growth of the screen from 6.1 inches to 6.3 inches, the iPhone 17 is cosmetically similar to the iPhone 16. If the iPhone Air is the new premium model and the iPhone 17 Pros are the most powerful, then the iPhone 17 is the everyman’s iPhone. It has more than enough solid upgrades over last year’s model, but not as many as the iPhone 17 Pros.

The iPhone 17 is not going to wow anyone with its industrial design, but underneath it all, it’s a trooper that goes the distance. It’s the iPhone you get if you want the Goldilocks experience.

iPhone 17

The iPhone 17 offers the best bang for buck in an iPhone. It’s a value proposition that’ll last for at least five years.

Pros

Finally 120Hz, always-on display
Nearly A19 Pro-level performance
Great Center Stage camera for selfies
48-megapixel ultrawide camera
Excellent battery life

Cons

Dull colors
Only USB-C 2 speeds

Basic design

Take the iPhone 16 design, stretch it a teensy bit up, and you get the iPhone 17. That may sound harsh, but it’s true: the iPhone 17 is 5.89 inches tall versus the 5.81-inch iPhone 16. Somehow it’s 0.01 inches narrower, though. It’s unlikely you’ll feel that it’s 0.24 ounces heavier, either; I didn’t.

If you were hoping for more material change, you’re gonna be disappointed. I don’t think it’s worth fretting over since the iPhone 17 feels great in the hand. Not that most people will care since they’ll slap a case over it.

Apple has stuck with an aluminum frame and gently curved sides that melt into the cover and back glass. The back has a vertically aligned pill-shaped bump for the dual cameras. What you can’t see with the naked eye is the improved scratch resistance for the screen. Apple is using Ceramic Shield 2, its second-gen cover material with increased durability, which Apple claims is 3x more scratch resistant than the iPhone 16’s first-gen Ceramic Shield screen. Apple also says Ceramic Shield 2 cuts down on glare. It doesn’t eliminate reflections from what I could see, and any reduction in glare is minimal at best. Still, I’ll take the increased scratch resistance. I asked Apple if Ceramic Shield 2 now means that keys or sand or pocket lint won’t easily scratch it, but the company clarified that its durability claims are not for a single instance where there’s unfortunate contact with some scratchy objects; it’s over time. Take that for what you will.

Colors are subjective, but if you ask me, I think the iPhone 17 colors are dull. Besides black and white, there’s lavender, sage, and mist blue. Sage looks the best to me, but it’s still a muted green. I think it’s time for Apple to bring back red or coral or pacific blue. Give the regular iPhone some soul to stand out between the iPhone Air and iPhone Pros.

A more “pro” display

That 0.08 inches of extra height means Apple was able to squeeze in a slightly larger 6.3-inch screen versus the 6.1-inch display on the iPhone 16. This is the same screen as the iPhone 17 Pro, with the same resolution, same 3,000 nits of peak outdoor brightness, the same 120 Hz “ProMotion” refresh rate, and the same always-on display. At last, Apple’s regular iPhone series isn’t saddled with a 60Hz refresh rate.

To my eyes, there’s no visible difference between the screen on the iPhone 17 and the 17 Pro. Both Super Retina XDR displays look crisp, have excellent and wide viewing angles, and get more than bright enough indoors and outdoors. I neglected to mention this in my iPhone Air and iPhone 17 Pros review, but I really wish Apple would include something akin to the “Aqua Touch 2.0 technology” in the OnePlus 13 that makes the touchscreen more responsive when there’s liquid on it or your fingers are wet. The slightest droplet of water on the iPhone 17 still confuses the screen into thinking you’re touching it when you’re not.

Nearly pro performance

Unlike Android phones, where performance can take a major downturn if the chipset maker (Qualcomm, Samsung, MediaTek, etc.) has architecture or production problems, Apple’s A-series silicon just steadily gets better year after year.

I’ve long stopped putting too much emphasis on synthetic benchmarks like Geekbench 6, but just to see how much less powerful the iPhone 17’s A19 chip is compared to the A19 Pro in the iPhone Air and iPhone 17 Pros, I ran the CPU test. The results truly shocked me. Using the average of three tests taken on the iPhone 17, iPhone Air, and iPhone 17 Pro, the iPhone 17 was 1.6% more powerful than the Air and 1.3% less powerful than the 17 Pro for single-core tasks.

The A19 Pro chip pulls ahead of the A19 for multicore applications, but not by much: the Air is 5% more powerful and 17 Pro is 9.48% more powerful than the iPhone 17. I thought for sure with one less GPU core (five instead of six) that the iPhone 17 Pros would be more powerful by a larger margin, but that doesn’t seem to be the case.

That’s great news if you’re worried about getting FOMO from not having the A19 Pro chip in the iPhone 17. But there’s another thing to consider: thermals and sustained performance. Compared to the iPhone 17 Pros, which have a vapor chamber that keeps temperatures down and spreads heat across the phone more uniformly when apps push the GPU hard, the iPhone 17 gets warmer a lot quicker. And if it gets too hot, it takes a little longer to cool down. Generally, my iPhone 17 review unit never got toasty, but if you’re planning to play 3D games like Genshin Impact or shoot a lot of 4K video with the phone or do either under the sun in hot environments, you may run into the infamous “”iPhone needs to cool down” sooner.

The Center Stage camera is legit

The iPhone 17 has some solid camera upgrades, too. The dual rear camera is now a “Fusion” camera consisting of a 48-megapixel main camera and now a higher-resolution 48-megapixel ultrawide (up from 12 megapixels on the iPhone 16). Photos look about the same to me compared to the same shots taken with my iPhone 16 Pro. Even the ultrawide shots look nearly identical; okay, they’re slightly brighter, but that’s nothing dialing up the brightness slider in the Photos app couldn’t easily handle. There’s no telephoto lens on the iPhone 17; if you want that, you’ll need to step up to the iPhone 17 Pros, which have a 4x telephoto lens that’s also capable of 8x “optical-quality” shots. You do get the 2x “optical-quality” lens from the main 48-megapixel image sensor, but that was already a feature on the iPhone 16.

As I said in my iPhone Air and iPhone 17 Pros review, the Center Stage camera is the biggest upgrade for photography and video since Apple first added a front-facing camera on the iPhone 4. The 18-megapixel Center Stage camera is a square image sensor, which can capture horizontal selfies even if you’re holding the phone vertically. You can also take vertical photos if you hold the iPhone 17 horizontally. The feature also works for video recording. It’s a very cool feature that everyone is going to appreciate, not just Gen Z TikTokers. The Dual Capture mode that records from the front and rear cameras is also very fun, especially for reaction-type videos.

Since the iPhone 17 is not a “pro” iPhone, it doesn’t have the more advanced recording features found in the iPhone 17 Pros, like ProRAW for stills, ProRes for video, Apple Log 2, or genlock. Slow-motion video recording is also limited to 1080p at 240 fps compared to 4K at 120 fps on the 17 Pros. Lastly, you don’t get the “studio-quality” microphones found in the 17 Pros. I don’t think any of these “missing” features makes the iPhone 17 a dealbreaker, but it does feel like Apple could have included them if it wanted to, other than to feature-lock them to the higher-end iPhones.

And just like I said in my iPhone 17 Pros review, I think Camera Control is still largely wasted. It’s there, but not more useful than as a shortcut to launching the Camera app. I much prefer the camera shortcut on Android, which has been a thing for over a decade: double-clicking the power button.

More battery to doomscroll

No amount of battery life is ever going to be enough, but I’ll gladly take more hours gen-over-gen. In the iPhone 17’s case, battery life has increased by 8 hours compared to the iPhone 16—up to 30 hours versus 22 hours (for local video playback, which is how Apple measures battery life). It’s 3 fewer hours than the iPhone 17 Pro, which gets up to 33 hours.

Using the iPhone 17 like a normal human being (because who is insane enough to watch local video for 30 hours straight), I found the iPhone 17 lasted about as long as my iPhone 16 Pro, which Apple says gets up to 27 hours for video playback. Give or take, I was able to go from off the charger at 8 a.m. to 6 p.m. on a single charge with around 20 to 25% left in the tank. That’s great battery life and you can easily go two days with light usage.

More for the same money

If all of that doesn’t sound like a good enough value, how about double the storage (256GB versus 128GB) versus the iPhone 16—for the same $799? That’s a good deal. Yeah, inflation and all that, but that’s still a damn good deal for everything that you get.

There’s a $300 difference between the iPhone 17 and the 17 Pro this year, which is $100 more than last year. For most people, the iPhone 17 has more than enough, and the extra $300 can be pocketed or put towards an accessory like the new $250 AirPods Pro 3.

I truly couldn’t find much to complain about on the iPhone 17. iOS is iOS. If you don’t like the “walled” Apple garden, there’s nothing new to report here, since it’s the same deal. Apple Intelligence, unfortunately, is still underwhelming and we’ll have to wait until next year to see the new AI-powered Siri. If there’s anything to really gripe about, I wish the USB 2 transfer speeds for the USB-C port were the faster USB 3 on the iPhone 16 and 17 Pros.

If you’ve reached this far and you’ve been nodding your head at all the new stuff and don’t feel an urge to jump up to the 17 Pros, congrats, maybe the iPhone 17 is for you. If you still have an iPhone from recent years and it’s not having any issues, just update to iOS 26 (unless you really hate Liquid Glass). The best thing about iPhones is that they last a long time and Apple supports them with annual software updates for at least five years, and security updates for a few years after. You get a lot with the new iPhone 17, but you also may not need one if yours works just fine. For people switching from Android—you’re either gonna love Apple’s ecosystem or hate it and crawl back.

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September 19, 2025 0 comments

Crypto Trends

Crypto Investor Turns $1k Into $1M In 8 Years, as BNB hits $1,000 ATH

by admin September 18, 2025

A long-term cryptocurrency investor has turned $1,000 into $1 million, underscoring the payoff of patient holding strategies in digital assets.

The “diamond hand” cryptocurrency holder turned their original $1,000 BNB (BNB) investment into over $1 million, marking a 1,000-fold return in eight years.

The investor acquired their stash for just $1,000 when the Binance ecosystem’s native token traded for around $1 back in 2017, according to blockchain data platform Lookonchain.

Despite the 1,000-fold return, the trader continues holding their BNB tokens instead of taking profits, according to data from blockchain intelligence platform Nansen.

Wallet “0x850” historical token returns. Source: Nansen

The near $1 million profit comes as the BNB token rose to a new all-time high of $1,005 on Tuesday, according to Cointelegraph data, signaling growing investor expectations for an incoming altcoin season.

BNB/USD, 1-day chart. Source: Cointelegraph

Three weeks ago, Raoul Pal, founder and CEO of Global Macro Investor, predicted that the crypto market is in the “waiting room” ahead of the next phase of the price discovery stage, which may extend the market cycle top to the first or second quarter of 2026.

“Our work suggests (probabilistically speaking) that the cycle extends into Q1 2026 and possibly Q2 2026 due to slow business cycle forcing more liquidity for longer,” he said in an Aug. 29 X post.

Source: Raoul Pal

Related: CZ sounds alarm as ‘SEAL’ team uncovers 60 fake IT workers linked to North Korea

BNB all-time high driven by native utility

A combination of growth factors contributed to BNB’s new all-time high above $1,000, including the token’s native “utility,” according to Marwan Kawadri, DeFi lead and head of EMEA at BNB Chain.

BNB is a “unique” network token with growing utility in centralized exchanges, seeing increased demand from institutional investors due to the “growing momentum of DATs coming in with a focus on high-quality assets like BNB,” Kawadri told Cointelegraph.

“[BNB] continues to see strong growth momentum: more developers, more protocols, more capital, more users.”

This creates a “flywheel for the network and native token,” he added.

Related: SEC approves first US multi-asset crypto ETP, from Grayscale

Source: Changpeng Zhao

“Watching #BNB go from $0.10 ICO price 8 years ago to today’s $1000 is something words cannot explain,” said Binance co-founder and former CEO Changpeng Zhao in a Thursday X post.

“We had our challenges along the way, but we worked hard, we built, and we held,” he added.

Magazine: Astrology could make you a better crypto trader: It has been foretold

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September 18, 2025 0 comments