Month: May 2020

Enlarge (credit: Blizzard)

“Games are very rapidly solved these days,” says Ion Hazzikostas, the game director of World of Warcraft.

Hazzikostas, known to the World of Warcraft community as Watcher, has developed the 16-year-old massively multiplayer online role-playing game since 2008. On a call with WIRED, he reminisced about how, early in the history of games, before raid walk-through videos, data-mining dumps, and Easter egg maps, opacity was a double-edged sword. To explain, he swerved over to Street Fighter.

“You’d have a whole competitive hierarchy in a local arcade, a local videogame store, where there was some character that was perceived as the best or the strongest because some person in the neighborhood was great with them,” he says. But in the next town over, arcade regulars battled with different tricks, different strategies, a different hierarchy of characters. Information was fragmented, localized.

The glorious sight of the sun's rays peeking over the horizon as it rises has inspired mankind for millennia. But what if the sun brought death, literally killing people where they stand? That's the premise behind the pulse-pounding Belgian science fiction drama, Into the Night, that recently debuted on Netflix. It's a fast-paced, engrossing, and enormously entertaining series that will definitely leave you wanting more.

(Some spoilers below, mostly for the novel.)

The series is based on a 2015 novel called The Old Axolotl, by the visionary Polish science fiction writer Jacek Dukaj, who has been compared to his compatriot, Stanislaw Lem. The novel exists entirely in digital format, designed to be read solely on tablets, smartphones, e-readers, and computers. While most e-books simply recreate the printed text in an electronic medium, Dukaj designed his novel to be something more.

Enlarge / Elon Musk listens as Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel talks about constructing a high speed transit tunnel at Block 37 during a news conference on June 14, 2018 in Chicago, Illinois. (credit: Joshua Lott / Getty Images)

Elon Musk's contentious relationship with Alameda County officials reached a tipping point on Saturday, when the Tesla CEO announced plans to relocate the company's headquarters and "future programs" away from Fremont, CA, to facilities in Texas and Nevada "immediately." This came as a response to the continued forced closure of Tesla's Fremont manufacturing plant as per COVID-19 stay-in-place regulations.

"Frankly, this is the final straw," Musk tweeted.

Musk also announced his intent to file a lawsuit against Alameda County officials "immediately," adding, "The unelected & ignorant 'Interim Health Officer' of Alameda is acting contrary to the Governor, the President, our Constitutional freedoms & just plain common sense!" Musk also encouraged Tesla shareholders to file a class-action suit against the county.

Enlarge / Yes that's a door handle on the front cover, but do you know which door handle? (credit: Jonathan Gitlin)

If you're the sort of person who reads Ars Technica, there's a good chance you appreciate the finer details in life. You know, the tiny nuggets of information other people might leave out, like a 12-part history of the Amiga, told over more than a decade, or just why the kerning in the OS X Terminal was so objectionable. If you're feeling seen right now, and you're looking to amass more obscure facts that you can use to educate the normies in your life, do I have the book for you. It's called A Medium-Sized Book of Boring Car Trivia, and it's written by Sniff Petrol, aka Richard Porter, a British automotive journalist and writer whose work you almost certainly know from Top Gear and The Grand Tour, even if you didn't know that you knew that. (See? Another way to "well, actually" your less erudite friends.)

The experience of reading this book was a little like the first time I played Forza or Gran Turismo online. Up until then, I thought I was pretty good, but realized quickly there are some true aliens out there, with skills that are the benchmark to aspire to. When it comes to knowing random car facts, Porter is up there.

Some of the trivia is recent, like the fact that Jaguar's current supercharged V6 actually uses the same engine block as the V8, just with two cylinders blanked off. That's either a wonderful example of British engineering efficiency or of its audaciously cheeky laziness. Maybe both. Other facts date back a bit, like explaining how you can tell the true color of a 1996 Volkswagen Polo Harlequin, seen below: