Month: February 2022

Enlarge / Joe Rogan on July 9, 2021, in Las Vegas, NV. (credit: Getty | Icon Sportswire)

Long before the pandemic took the lives of more than 5.6 million people and created a lucrative market for COVID grifts, misinformation, and snake oil, there was Goop.

The aspirational lifestyle brand and its lustrous "contextual commerce" products are helmed by actor Gwyneth Paltrow, who has used her fame, wealth, and enviable genetics to peddle all manner of wellness pseudoscience and quackery. With the manipulative mantra of "empowering" women to seize control of their health and destinies, Paltrow's Goop has touted extremely questionable—if not downright dangerous—products. Perhaps the most notorious is the jade egg, a $66 egg-shaped rock Goop advised women to shove up their vaginas while claiming it could treat medical conditions, "detox" lady bits, and invigorate mystical life forces (of course).

But let's not forget the $135 "Implant O'Rama" enema device intended to squirt scalding coffee into your colon, the $90 luxury vitamins that almost certainly do nothing, or the $85 "medicine bag" of small, polished rocks that Goop suggests have magical wellness properties. Then there was the bee-sting therapy—no, not therapy for bee stings but therapy imparted from bee stings. Paltrow personally endorsed the practice, which was blamed for the death of a 55-year-old Spanish woman in 2018.

Enlarge / Every image in this review was captured while playing the near-final retail version on a Windows 10 PC. That includes a shot of this underwhelming mini-boss zombie, who does little more than wave around an oversized weapon while slowly stumbling. The same issue applies to most of the game's ho-hum zombie cast. (credit: Techland)

Eventually, Dying Light 2 opens up and becomes an OK game. I needed to play this sequel for roughly 12 hours to see the premise of the original 2015 game—"run away from zombies in a first-person view, and combine parkour with rusty machetes for bloody combat"—go somewhere satisfying.

But Dying Light 2's early segments are boring and repetitive. The tutorials are overlong, and the first zone is claustrophobic. And its plot setup and dialogue feel like they've been stitched together at the last minute—with a pinch of weird English translations tossed in.

Want to blow up zombies and then slice their remains with a hacksaw? DL2 has you covered. (credit: Techland)

If you mash the "skip dialogue" button every chance you get and ignore any zombie-game fatigue you may have, you might cut DL2's shoulder shrug of an opening down to eight hours of adequate, repetitive first-person action. Only then will you find yourself in a sprawling, fun-filled megacity. By that point, however, I was too worn out to keep playing. I wasn't remotely close to developer Techland's lofty estimate of 500 hours of play.

Enlarge / Texas Governor Greg Abbott, center, during a press conference at the Capitol on June 8, 2021, in Austin, Texas. He signed two bills into law to reform the Electric Reliability Council of Texas. (credit: Montinique Monroe/Getty Images)

Nearly one year ago, the state of Texas suffered a debilitating power outage to its independent power grid amidst one of the coldest Arctic freezes in decades.

During this power outage crisis, 246 people died, and homeowners and businesses suffered an estimated $200 billion in damages as pipes froze, melted, and then burst. In the aftermath of this crisis, the Republican-led legislature vowed to shore up the state's power grid. Critics, however, said the state officials only took care of the power companies at taxpayers' expense and left power-generating facilities at risk to extreme cold.

Now, we may be about to find out the truth of the matter.