Month: October 2020

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  Microsoft provided the following three images of DiRT 5 running on Xbox Series X, which line up with how the game can look in its sweetened "photo" mode. But how does it look in action? Read on to find out. [credit: Codemasters ]

While I have been testing a pre-release Xbox Series X console for nearly a month, ahead of its November 10 launch, I have had very few new games to test on it. Most of my effort has revolved around its massive backwards-compatible feature set—as seen in a very long feature about how older games benefit from newer hardware.

Today, for the first time, I'm allowed to lift the curtain on a game made for Xbox Series consoles: DiRT 5, the latest drift-heavy racing game from Codemasters. What's more, it is the first game I've ever tested for a bespoke game console with frame rates up to 120fps. That's a substantial increase from the 60fps max of past console generations (and a big rally-car leap above the 30fps cap you typically see on current-gen games).

I want to be clear: DiRT 5 is not the best foot forward for Xbox Series X, and I'm not entirely sure it's representative of the console's next-gen promise. I urge you to keep an eye out for more next-gen game impressions before loading ammunition into your preferred "console war" cannon. But DiRT 5's first taste of 120Hz racing on a console, and what it takes to get there, is fascinating enough to merit an asterisk-covered preview.

Enlarge / Layers of phosphorene sheets form black carbon. (credit: Wikimedia Commons)

Right now, electric vehicles are limited by the range that their batteries allow. That's because recharging the vehicles, even under ideal situations, can't be done as quickly as refueling an internal combustion vehicle. So far, most of the effort on extending the range has been focused on increasing a battery's capacity. But it could be just as effective to create a battery that can charge much more quickly, making a recharge as fast and simple as filling your tank.

There are no shortage of ideas about how this might be arranged, but a paper published earlier this week in Science suggests an unusual way that it might be accomplished: using a material called black phosphorus, which forms atom-thick sheets with lithium-sized channels in it. On its own, black phosphorus isn't a great material for batteries, but a Chinese-US team has figured out how to manipulate it so it works much better. Even if black phosphorus doesn't end up working out as a battery material, the paper provides some insight into the logic and process of developing batteries.

Paint it black

So, what is black phosphorus? The easiest way to understand it is by comparisons to graphite, a material that's already in use as an electrode for lithium-ion batteries. Graphite is a form of carbon that's just a large collection of graphene sheets layered on top of each other. Graphene, in turn, is a sheet formed by an enormous molecule formed by carbon atoms bonded to each other, with the carbons arranged in a hexagonal pattern. In the same way, black phosphorus is composed of many layered sheets of an atom-thick material called phosphorene.

Maybe this is too wonky for those outside of film nerdom to care, but 2020 has cemented a fundamental truth about festivals—international films are increasingly the MVP of this scene. Sure, at the highest of high profile events (Cannes, TIFF, Sundance, Telluride), you can reliably get a sneak peek at the titles showing up at the next Oscars ceremony. But for the rest of us who maybe only make it to one or two of these things that tend to be local affairs (shout out to Austin Film Festival and Fantastic Fest), a lot of the most interesting stuff available comes from abroad. Russia's Zoology (now on Amazon Prime) took How Stella Got Her Groove Back and gave it a dystopian sci-fi setting in 2016. Sweden's Border (streaming on Hulu) found a fantastic approach to examine national borders and how we treat others in 2018, and it played some of the same events as the gripping filmmaking of Denmark's The Guilty (also on Hulu before the US version with Jake Gyllenhaal happens). And last year, anyone even remotely following the film calendar was aware of Bong Joon-Ho's masterful Parasite (Hulu, again, really getting it done) rising up from the festival scene to the Oscars stage.

Our year of COVID-19 may only be strengthening this trend. Big US feature films with hopes for a theatrical run seem hesitant to participate in festivals that exist only as VOD. Small shorts looking to make a splash and find a deal for full-length productions have hit pause, too, preferring to save their "premiere" bargaining chip for a time when film festivals can bring industry folks together in person once more. But international films, some of which have already enjoyed theatrical runs in their home countries (last year or during a better pandemic response), simply come to festivals to find new audiences and maybe upgrade for a US theatrical run or a wider-reaching streaming service deal. That's still happening in 2020. And in a year where US film fans may be starved for new titles to get excited about, we all need to hope the Netherlands' The Columnist soon transitions from the festival scene to your preferred at-home screen.

Talk about relatable

Dutch newspaper columnist Femke Boot (Katja Herbers, Westworld) writes about the toxic aspects of online culture, which means anonymous haters on Twitter and Facebook or in comment threads just love her. All that bile seems to grow exponentially with each of Boot's new columns or appearances. "We are all people, and we shouldn't forget that," Boot says while appearing as an analyst on some 24-hour news channel's "Twitter: A Blessing or a Curse?" special. "Well, we also shouldn't forget to recycle or to eat our vegetables," responds her counterpart, a conservative fiction writer named Stephen Dood (Bram van der Kelen). His work, naturally, seems to often involve an awful lot of murder and violence against women.