No one is as vicious about a game as its most dedicated player. Take a jaunt over to the forums for WoW, or CoD, or Overwatch sometime and you'll see what I mean: Scores of people who play almost nothing but the game in question but have almost nothing positive to say about it. But not a single irritated MMO player is a patch on my own personal icon of this genre: Herp McDerperson—real name Scott Smith—who I discovered one day when I stumbled on the negative review he left on Steam for Battlezone 98 Redux (BZ98R), Rebellion's 2016 remaster of the original RTS/FPS hybrid from 1998. A negative review which he left, says Steam, after 8,461.1 hours of playtime, then followed up with 600 more. I've been curious about Smith since before I even began writing about games—a product of both the disparity between his hour-count and his attitude and the authoritative tone of his review (it pretty much kicks off with the statement "This review involves numerous statements of objective fact"). It's a relationship with a single piece of art that I can't really fathom. My favourite game of all time is Morrowind and I've poured a paltry few hundred hours into that. My most-played, according to Steam? Fallout: New Vegas with 650ish hours, a mere 7% of Smith's total in BZ98R. I have only positive things to say about either. Naturally, I had to leverage my position as a PCG writer to reach out to Smith and see if he'd chat about what makes him tick.

From questions in online forums to TikTok Live streamers looking around Parnell Square, there’s been some confusion this evening over Dublin’s Halloween Parade. Unfortunately, people have been left “ghosted” by the phantom parade which seems to have all been part of an ad-revenue scam.

The blogging platform Medium is facing an influx of AI-generated content. CEO Tony Stubblebine says it “doesn’t matter” as long as nobody reads it.

At a news conference Wednesday, Portland police released their first description of a possible culprit, but declined to provide any details about a possible motive for the attacks.

Young Thug is coming home from prison after making a non-negotiated plea in the RICO trial against his record label, YSL. The rapper, born Jeffery Williams, pleaded guilty to various firearm and drug charges, along with one count of participation in criminal gang activity, while pleading no contest to a RICO charge and a gang leadership charge. He was sentenced to serve five years, commuted to time served, along with various conditions. Below, the latest on his plea and sentencing.

Ubisoft has quietly released its own NFT game to join the ranks of other vaunted, widely-played blockchain enabled titles like Axie Infinity and...uh, Ember Sword. Champions Tactics: Grimoria Chronicles launched earlier this month with relatively little fanfare or marketing. The game comes two years after Ubisoft’s failed bid to make NFTs work in Ghost Recon: Breakpoint, a solid three years after NFT prices and purchases fell off a cliff, and barely a week after it announced it would disband the team behind the critically acclaimed Prince of Persia: The Lost Crown. Surface level, Champions Tactics is a PC strategy game where players assemble teams of champions to fight their way up the rankings. Teams are composed of three champions, each with their own attributes and abilities that can exploit enemy teams’ weaknesses. At the beginning of each round, players roll dice to determine combat order. Next, they select abilities for their champions before combat plays out simultaneously. Rinse and repeat until one team is defeated. All in all, the game looks like a surprisingly decent, if generic, tactics game. But then there’s all the NFT garbage. Champions are the game’s NFTs associated with the Oasys blockchain. To acquire champions you have to either forge them from existing champions you own or purchase them off the game’s marketplace. To purchase champions, you can either use the OAS cryptocurrency or plain ole cash money, with the cheapest going for about $7 and the most expensive sitting at an eye-watering $63,000 whole-ass American dollars. To understand what’s in it for Ubisoft to perpetrate this nonsense, the company takes a six percent “royalty fee” for every marketplace transaction, and there are about 2,700 active listings on the site. But wait! There’s worse! Having more champions increases your VIP status. The higher your VIP status, the more experience points and in-game currency you earn, thus incentivizing players to spend money accumulating champions. To entice even more dollars out of customers, Champions Tactics also features an additional exclusive collection of NFTs to buy called warlords. According to the game’s website, owning a warlord unlocks access to “special events” and even more in-game boosts to earning EXP and gold. Players can use their warlords as their in-game profile pictures. Here’s what they look like.

In Trump’s America, neighbors coerce and silence where the government lacks the resources to intrude.

A successful CIA hack of Venezuela's military payroll system, insider fights for spy agency resources, and messy opposition politics: A WIRED investigation reveals a secret Trump-era attempt to oust autocratic ruler Nicolás Maduro.

The long read: After his wife and two of his children were killed in Gaza, Al Jazeera journalist Wael al-Dahdouh became famous around the world for his decision to keep reporting. But this was just the start of his heartbreaking journey

Scores of people have died in Spain as country hit by deadliest floods in decades

America PAC door knockers were flown to Michigan, driven in the back of a U-Haul, and told they’d have to pay hotel bills unless they met unrealistic quotas. One was surprised they were working to elect Donald Trump.

My grandmother was a good Catholic who didn’t go to college and had eight children. Her oldest child went to college and had one child, me. Your own family probably fits this pattern. In a decline that correlates with education and secularism, and is concentrated in the Global North, women across the world are having about half the number of children they had only fifty years ago. The far right sees this choice as a specific kind of crisis. While anti-abortion, anti-immigrant nationalists like J. D. Vance might not use exactly fourteen words when they rail against “childless cat ladies,” they echo eugenicists like Madison Grant and Theodore Roosevelt in blaming female emancipation for “race suicide.” America was “great” when (white) families were large because (white) women were in the home having children, and (white) labor was cheap enough to make large-scale (nonwhite) immigration unnecessary. It does not mitigate the problem that about half of the current rate of population increase in the United States comes from new immigration; for them, that is the problem. The liberal counternarrative tends to be a smaller story, about individuals choosing not to be parents. More people are making this choice, they concede, but the important question is whether people are choosing freely. Are those who never wanted children—especially women historically forced into childbearing—finally free to forgo them? Or are those who would want children choosing not to have them, for economic or cultural reasons, or out of anxiety about a war-ridden, warming world?

The Supreme Court decided Wednesday that at least 1,600 people—including some known to be U.S. citizens with every right to vote—can be removed from Virginia’s voter rolls before Election Day. The conservative supermajority’s order, issued on the shadow docket, essentially nullified a landmark federal law that bars last-minute voter purges. All three liberal justices dissented. Ominously, the court’s intervention signals to other states that they can commence purges at the eleventh hour, suppressing the vote through legal gamesmanship that Congress sought to ban. Wednesday’s order is a major victory for Virginia Gov. Glenn Youngkin and Attorney General Jason Miyares, both Republicans, in their quest to expand states’ authority to cancel voter registrations just before voting begins. And it’s a clear violation of federal law. A federal statute, the National Voter Registration Act of 1993, outlawed any state “program” that “systematically” removes “ineligible voters from the official lists of eligible voters” starting 90 days before a federal election. Congress enacted the statute in recognition of the obvious fact that these purges often caught up eligible voters, as well, creating confusion and threatening civil rights. Nonetheless, Youngkin issued an executive order exactly 90 days before the Nov. 5 election mandating a daily set of voter purges.

Georgia's "party to a crime" law traps women who live with abusive or coercive partners. I would know—I'm one of them.

Mary Howard-Elley is the 10th U.S. citizen identified by ProPublica, The Texas Tribune and Votebeat whose registration was canceled after her citizenship was questioned. Her saga shows how tough it can be for eligible voters to get reinstated.

The personnel who roam freely between jobs in government and corporate America are the tendons that allow Boeing to flex its muscles.

The 24-hour chain famously stays open come hell or high water (inspiring FEMA’s Waffle House Index), but pays workers as little as $3 an hour.

Elon Musk wants to donate sperm to friends and acquaintances as he expands his family in an Austin, Texas compound to combat falling birth rates.

The San Jose State women’s volleyball team finds itself at the center of a storm as the Spartans make a run toward their first NCAA Tournament appearance in more than two decades. Overshadowing the program’s strong season are national talk-show hosts and politicians weighing in on one of its players. At issue is the participation of transgender women in women’s sports, which has taken on political implications — former President Donald Trump, the Republican presidential nominee, recently spoke about the issue — and is apparently why five teams have canceled their games against San Jose State.

Revealed: officers appear to hold Michael Kenyon, 30, to hot pavement and give him third-degree burns in July footage