Month: March 2024

Enlarge / The Galaxy S24 line. (credit: Samsung)

Electric design is a field full of varying opinions and trade-offs. Companies agonize over the physical shapes of their devices and the materials used, all trying to create a high-quality, premium-feeling device that fits with the constraints of mass production. Material choices usually center around cost, feeling, and durability, but how often do manufacturers take into account smell? Samsung users are finding that if you pop out the Galaxy S24 Ultra's "S-Pen" stylus and give it a whiff like you're huffing a marker, you'll find that it... smells bad?

9to5Google found the following incredible post from Reddit user "LatifYil" titled "Why does my s pen smell so bad?" The post has almost 250 comments of users all mostly agreeing with the post's sentiment that "the S-Pen in my Galaxy S24 Ultra absolutely reeks. Either I have a sensitive nose or this thing is being barbequed by the internals while it's unsheathed." The top-rated, very-online comment is "Op got me to smell my pen. Can confirm it's a stinky boi."

Those describing the smell all seem to agree Samsung's stylus often smells like an electrical fire. One user writes that it's "a very burnt and plastics smell." Another says the S23 Ultra stylus "smells like new tech with a hint of burning." A more descriptive commenter says it smells like "an electric mixer that's turned on, but the beaters are jammed up and can't turn, so the motor is overheating." The S-Pen is mostly plastic but has a soft rubber tip, and a lot of users identify that soft bit as the smelly part.

Enlarge (credit: Instagram)

Instagram users have started complaining on X (formerly Twitter) after discovering that Meta has begun limiting recommended political content by default.

"Did [y'all] know Instagram was actively limiting the reach of political content like this?!" an X user named Olayemi Olurin wrote in an X post with more than 150,000 views as of this writing. "I had no idea 'til I saw this comment and I checked my settings and sho nuff political content was limited."

"Instagram quietly introducing a 'political' content preference and turning on 'limit' by default is insane?" wrote another X user named Matt in a post with nearly 40,000 views.

Enlarge / Sometimes your infernal-engine-powered heart just isn't in it. (credit: Larian Studios/Hasbro)

Swen Vincke, director of the colossal entity that is Baldur's Gate 3, is not leaving the door open to future expansions of that already fully packed game.

At this week's Game Developer's Conference (GDC), Vincke made it clear during a talk and in interviews that Larian Studios is not going to make any major new content for Baldur's Gate 3 (BG3)—nor start work on Baldur's Gate 4, nor make anything, really, inside the framework of Dungeons & Dragons' Fifth Edition (5e).

Not that Vincke or his team are bitter. Their hearts just aren't in it. They had actually started work on BG3 downloadable content and gave some thought to Baldur's Gate 4, Vincke told IGN. "But we hadn’t really had closure on BG3 yet and just to jump forward on something new felt wrong." On top of that, the team had new ideas that didn't fit D&D 5e, which "is not an easy system to put into a video game," Vincke said.

Enlarge / The Enterprise-D bridge recreation, seen in London in 2002. (credit: Peter Bischoff/Getty Images)

More than a decade has gone by since three Star Trek: The Next Generation fans first decided to restore the bridge from the Enterprise-D. Plans for the restored bridge morphed from opening it up to non-commercial uses like weddings or educational events into a fully fledged museum, and now that museum is almost ready to open. Backers of the project on Kickstarter have been notified that Sci-Fi World Museum will open to them in Santa Monica, California, on May 27, with general admission beginning in June.

It's not actually the original set from TNG, as that was destroyed while filming Star Trek: Generations, when the saucer section crash-lands on Veridian III. But three replicas were made, overseen by Michael Okuda and Herman Zimmerman, the show's set designers. Two of those welcomed Trekkies at Star Trek: The Experience, an attraction in Las Vegas until it closed in 2008.

The third spent time in Hollywood, then traveled to Europe and Asia for Star Trek: World Tour before it ended up languishing in a warehouse in Long Beach. It's this third globe-trotting Enterprise-D bridge that—like the grit that gets an oyster to create a pearl—now finds a science-fiction museum accreted around it. Well, mostly—the chairs used by Riker, Troi, Data, and some other bits were salvaged from the Las Vegas exhibit.