Earlier this week, Plex caused some uproar when its “Discover Together” feature began to surprise users, emailing their friends and media server compatriots with their watch history. The feature seems like a superfluous bell and/or whistle to the rig-your-own Netflix-style streaming service, which allows you to make your own media servers to stream content you own or have downloaded to a TV or similar.

The emails in particular are called the “Week in Review”. To many who were just using the platform as a way to store all their totally-legally-downloaded anime, they felt like an overstep of privacy. Users called it an “opt-out” system, which—as you’re about to find out, is technically not the case, but only in the barest terms.

I’ve received a statement from Plex, which maintains that its Discover Together feature—which had been catching users unaware—is opt-in. “Based on the comments in the forums and Reddit, users who were ‘unaware’ that their watch ac…

One of the things I was most interested to see out here at the Computex 2024 techstravaganza were the swathe of Snapdragon X Elite laptops that are soon to launch, mostly because it’s been surprisingly bullish about its gaming performance. But the first time I’ve actually got to test the gaming performance myself yielded something surprising: The X Elite uses AMD’s FidelityFX Super Resolution (FSR) upscaling to great effect.

And the other surprising thing is that some AMD folk I spoke to at the show didn’t seem to know that was a thing, either.

But this is the strength of FSR; it’s been built to be vendor agnostic, but I don’t think it was expecting to be completely instruction set agnostic, either. After all, we are talking about a very different version of Windows here. Snapdragon X Elite chips run on Windows on ARM as they’re not the same sort of x86 silicon as Intel and AMD’s traditional CPUs.

At the demo event in downtown Taipei we had the chance to get our ha…

A toadstool, the Universe, King Midas, the Golem. This is not a free association exercise, but rather a list of concoctions my coworkers and I have produced in Infinite Craft, a deceptively simple browser game by developer Neal Agarwal, who you may know for creating a delightfully “unhinged browser game about passwords” last year.

Infinite Craft resembles earlier combination games like Little Alchemy or Doodle God, asking you to drag to combine two elements together on a big whiteboard in order to unlock new, ever more complex materials to work with. Like those earlier games, it starts out pretty bare, with your craftables limited to the four classical elements of fire, earth, air, and water, represented here by little flash cards with emojis. 

The difference in Infinite Craft is that it uses generative AI to introduce reactivity and experimentation in its responses, rather than a puzzle-solving ethos with set combinations like in prior games. “I think Doodle God is…

When Jacob reviewed the Intel Core i9 14900K last week he wasn’t particularly impressed with the lack of improvements over the previous generation, and one thing that seems to have remained the same is the tendency to run on the warmer side under heavy load. Of course if you’re in the market for Intel’s latest and greatest you could always just do what the rest of us do and simply accept that the chip is well-within safe tolerances, or if you’re worried about heating up your case you could simply invest in a decent AIO to shift those pesky extra degrees back out into the big wide world.

If you’re Youtuber der8auer though, you might consider doing something drastic. While his channel covers all sorts of hardware breakdowns and analysis he often focuses on cooling solutions. One of the ultimate cooling solutions, and something of a dark art to the majority of us, remains the rather invasive process of “delidding”. 

Delidding involves removing the factory fitted heat s…

Somehow Blizzard got away with adding the most disgusting grenade in videogames to Overwatch 2.

The hero shooter’s latest season has a space opera-themed battle pass, including the Intergalactic Smuggler skin for Ashe. Initially, I thought it was a cute skin. Blizzard gave the ornery cowgirl red hair, wrapped her outfit in tentacled alien creatures, and made her robot butler, B.O.B., a big alien himself. It’s a little Firefly-esque with her puffy brown vest, but it works.

Or I thought it did until Reddit user pogstream ruined the Intergalactic Smuggler skin for everyone.

Overwatch 2 lets you zoom in on a hero’s gear and rotate it around. For Ashe, you can zoom in on her rifle, coach gun, B.O.B., and her dynamite. Everything is pretty standard for a skin like this: her guns go from western to sci-fi. But, as pogstream points out, her dynamite becomes an abomination.

At first glance, it looks like her regular pack of dynamite with three tentacles wrapped around…

It’s hard to imagine now, but when Baldur’s Gate 3’s six beloved companion characters were first imagined, they were just a handful of one-line pitches among “hundreds and hundreds” of other possible character concepts. Their origins were revealed last week during BAFTA’s “An Evening with Baldur’s Gate 3,” which included an interview with Larian CEO and co-founder Swen Vincke, writing director Adam Smith, and lead writer Chrystal Ding.

“It was a huge, huge list,” Smith said, immediately adding a new top entry to my list of spreadsheets I desperately wish I could see. What else could’ve been on there, between the tragic vampire and gaslit githyanki? Half-orc bards, maybe? Dwarven union agitators? Elminster’s surly stepson?

Whoever the other party members might’ve been, when Larian went through the long process of winnowing the ranks, the main consideration was how well their stories would play with each other. “We’d go through them and we’d say, are they compatible? Do th…

John Hight, leader of the Warcraft universe at Blizzard Entertainment, announced on his personal X account this week he was leaving the company for “a new quest.”

I had the opportunity to do an extended interview with Hight last fall at BlizzCon in Anaheim, California. The conversation ranged over much of what he had done and seen over 12 years of shepherding Warcraft in various forms (especially World of Warcraft), and included what he thought his legacy at the company would be.

Hight has been around the industry for decades, an old school game executive. He came to Blizzard from Sony, where had worked on God of War 3 and the launch of the PlayStation Network. Before that, he was an executive producer at Atari and Electronic Arts, where he managed teams at Westwood Studios, often in direct competition with Blizzard’s real-time strategy releases.

Looking back, he said last fall that he hoped his biggest legacy at Blizzard and in general would be the people that he …

Ark: Survival Ascended, a remaster of poop-harvesting dinosaur trainer Ark: Survival Evolved in Unreal Engine 5, was first teased as if it was going to be a free upgrade. When it was officially announced as part of a $50 bundle that included a preorder for Ark 2, fans were unimpressed. Studio Wildcard pivoted and then announced that, rather than packaging the remaster with a preorder for the sequel, it would instead come with several DLC upgrades, which it would receive more of after launch as free updates. Also, it would now cost $10 more.

Studio Wildcard was aiming to release the remaster in late August, which it has now pushed back to October. As the studio’s latest newsletter explains, “We’ve found it challenging working with Unreal Engine 5.2, but at the same time, it is incredibly exciting. We’re discovering new ways each day to push the technology to the next level; combined with the work needed to support a fully cross-platform-moddable game ecosystem on consoles and P…

It’s time. Starfield finally has its most important mod—more important than the script extender, more vital than StarUI—something that changes the game entirely. Thomas the Tank Engine is not, by any means, looming horrifically in the dark corners of my room and forcing me to write this.

Ominously titled “Really Useful Starfield”, this mod by the aptly-named Nexus Mods user Trainwiz mutates every ship into Thomas the Tank Engine. This is tradition, a requisite for every Bethesda game—and it’s not even Thomas’ first foray into the stars, either. Though he’s now transcended the body of Vasco, spreading across the galaxy like a locomotive plague. 

“They say that the Tank Engine has been banished to wander the stars forever, unable to satiate his bloodlust and unable to find peace in his heart,” writes Tranwiz, like a dark prophet coming to portend doom. 

The mechanics of this thing are perhaps the most disturbing bit—…

Whether or not Yasuke, an African man who briefly served feudal lord Oda Nobunaga in 16th-century Japan, was “really a samurai” is a somewhat interesting question for scholars of the era, and comes down to how the historical records of his life pair with use of the term “samurai” at the time. Biographer Thomas Lockley, as one example, has said that Yasuke was indeed one of Nobunaga’s many samurai, the title simply referring to warriors who served a lord (see: this Smithsonian article). 

When Yasuke was revealed as one of the two protagonists in the upcoming Assassin’s Creed Shadows, however, an inquisition into his samurai-ness was launched not by scholars, but by onlookers who decreed it unacceptable for a Black person to headline a work of historical fiction set in Japan. Complaints about “historical inaccuracy” and “forced diversity” abounded.

As of this week, the moderators of the unofficial Assassin’s Creed subreddit are done hearing about it (thanks, GamesRada…