Month: May 2019

• 

  Death Stranding main character Sam plugs into a "bridge baby."

Video game auteur Hideo Kojima's first game since leaving Konami, Death Stranding, finally has a release date: November 8 for PlayStation 4 consoles. The news came at the end of the game's most revealing "gameplay" trailer yet, though as you might expect from the enigmatic Kojima, Wednesday's trailer raised more questions than it answered.

Yes, we've seen long and utterly confusing trailers for this game before, but this one comes with a semblance of a plot anchor. From what we can tell, the game revolves around a United States that has been torn asunder by some kind of plague or extinction event. The hero, Sam, played by actor Norman Reedus, is asked by the president "to help us reconnect, to make America whole." To which the character Sam replies, "You're the President of jack shit."

Yet clearly Sam is compelled to do something. This trailer shows him generating ladders and ropes to scale rocky cliffsides, getting into melee fisticuffs, hopping on a stylish, three-wheeled military vehicle, stealth-crawling through tall grass and alongside giant tanks, shooting guns, and scanning environments to discover, and stealth-sneak around, spooky creatures made of dust.

Enlarge (credit: Photo by Craig Hartley/Bloomberg via Getty Images)

Call it a rebranding of "energy dominance."

In a press release published on Tuesday, two Department of Energy officials used the terms "freedom gas" and "molecules of US freedom" to replace your average, everyday term "natural gas."

The press release was fairly standard, announcing the expansion of a Liquified Natural Gas (LNG) terminal at the Freeport facility on Quintana Island, Texas. It would have gone unnoticed had an E&E News reporter not noted the unique metonymy "molecules of US freedom."

Enlarge (credit: Ars Technica)

Greetings, Arsians! The Dealmaster is back with another round of deals to share. Today's list is highlighted by a number of deals on Lenovo's ThinkPad notebooks, which the PC maker has once again discounted on its online store with various coupon codes.

The best deal of the bunch looks like the 6th-gen ThinkPad X1 Carbon with an 8th-gen Core i5 chip, 8GB of RAM, and a 256GB SSD, available for just under $1,000 with the code "THINKMEMORIAL2". (These are mostly leftover Memorial Day deals.) We've highlighted similar deals on this laptop in the past, and while an updated model should arrive in the near future, this is still a stronger-than-usual price for a laptop that we firmly recommend. If that's still too expensive, the ThinkPad E490s trades in some thinness, build quality, and battery life but is similar from a specs and keyboard standpoint and costs less than $700 with the code "THINKMEMORIAL6." The ThinkPad X1 Yoga (which we've praised profusely) and ThinkPad X1 Extreme (with its discrete Nvidia graphics) are on sale as well.

If you're not into ThinkPads, we also have deals on iPads, loads of video games, Logitech's Crayon stylus, Philips Hue lights, and more. Have a look for yourself below.

• 

  The new iRobot Roomba S9+. It's "D" shaped.

iRobot recently announced its yearly cleaning robot upgrades, and as usual, there is a new Roomba robo-vac, the Roomba S9+. This year, the company is also releasing a new, full-sized mop-bot, the Braava Jet M6.

First up, the vacuum. The big upgrade in the S9+ is an all-new shape. The Roomba ditches the iconic round puck design for a "D" shaped robot. This is copied straight from iRobot's main rival, Neato Robotics, and as Neato has been saying for years, the D shape allows the robot to better get into the corners of your house.

The underside of the Roomba S9+ looks just like a Neato, with a cleaning brush pushed out to the edge of the robot and a corner-mounted rotary sweeper. In its round designs, iRobot would have to put the cleaning brush in between the wheels of the robot, and the D shaped design allows for a much wider brush and larger cleaning area. The Roomba's original round design happened as a navigation aid—it's a lot harder for a round robot to get stuck—so now that the S9+ has corners it will be swinging around, it will need to be smarter about movement.

Enlarge / Is falling in this hole going to take long? I have a meeting at 2...

These days, the game industry at large seems to be focused on games that can keep players playing, and paying, indefinitely. This overarching genre of "forever" games encompasses esports like Hearthstone and Overwatch, social hangouts like World of Warcraft and Fortnite, and endlessly repetitive grinds like Destiny 2 and even Candy Crush Saga. The idea in each case is to create an experience that can engage a critical mass of players for hundreds or even thousands of hours over a span of years.

There's something to be said for these kinds of endless experiences. These days, though, I'm frequently more fascinated by games at the complete opposite end of the spectrum. This class of "lunch break" games—single-serving, single-player narrative experiences designed to be played once, in about an hour or less—will never be as big or as popular as games that can demand thousands of hours of player attention. But there's also something to be said for a game that makes its impact quickly and lingers with the player for much, much longer.

The latest fine example of the form is Kids, a "game of crowds" that "allows you to move with and against crowds until everyone is gone," as its Steam page puts it. I don't really want to spoil the entirely unique experience by saying any more than that, but this 30-second trailer gives a good feeling for how the game's smooth animation and striking, minimalist, black-and-white characters create a creepy, claustrophobic aesthetic that's hard to shake.

Enlarge / Two white dwarfs pondering a merger. (credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech)

It seems like you can’t go a day without hearing news of a merger. Not corporate mergers—those are boring. Mergers between astronomical bodies are where it’s at these days. And it's not just black holes and neutron stars doing the merging. I honestly had no idea, but it seems that it is not so unusual for stars to be the product of a merger.

Of course, it's also possible that a collision between two stars would lead to a massive explosion. And, so far at least, it's been hard to answer the question of what happens when two stars collide: do they explode or go out with a whimper? The observation of a large white dwarf that seems to have been the product of two titchy white dwarfs may support the whimper side.

Stellar end-times 

When stars run out of fuel, their mass determines their fate. Very large stars end spectacularly. The star collapses in on itself, followed by a violent explosion—no going silently into the night around here. As the stellar dust settles, the remains include a neutron star or a black hole. This is the ending for show-offs.