Month: March 2022

Look out over the indie movie landscape of the last few months and you’ll see a trend: women running. More specifically, single, neurotic women running while coping with their middle-class problems. Renate Reinsve did it in The Worst Person in the World; Alana Haim did it in Licorice Pizza. But they’re not alone. Remember Frances in Frances Ha? She did it too. And let’s not forget Run Lola Run. But what if you, dear reader, were the director of their lives? To wit, may we present Saturn Return, an open-world role-playing game that someone should really make.

Saturn Return: Existential Crisis

The Story

No boyfriend. No career. And now—no roommate. In Saturn Return, you play as Fiona, a dilettante in search of purpose while coping with adult responsibilities. As she rapidly approaches 30, Fiona wakes up in a city filled with lost potential and closed doors.

Armed with only her intellect and wit, Fiona must make money, fall in love, meet cool and interesting people, and gain validation in order to survive in this bitter land and regain her lost optimism—all before the planet Saturn returns to the same ecliptic longitude it occupied at her birth.

The Gameplay

As Fiona, you can explore the landscape of Metro any way that you like! You can attend parties and ask NPCs if they like their jobs, flirt with local baristas, performatively shop in the bookstore, ask a bartender if they have any good sour beers, or search for new destinations. (Maybe go to that museum exhibit your friend recommended? They read about it in The New Yorker.) You set your own path into the overpriced neighborhood she’s decided to call home.

Status Meters

Fiona has two meters that let you know her current ability to function: her mood and stamina. When they’re both filled up, she can explore the world endlessly! When they’re depleted, she is stuck in her apartment and retreating into her brain.

Mood

• Depressed → Jubilant
• Anxious → Chill

Stamina

• Can’t get out of bed → Plans every night
• Dehydrated → Hydrated

Inventory

• Tote bag: Fiona keeps all her belongings in a public radio tote bag.
• Bike: Once you obtain a bike the world becomes a little bit smaller.
• Edibles: Discover cannabis edibles hidden away from a trip to California last year.
• Expired student ID: You can sometimes get into museums with this.
• Punch card for coffee shop by old office: Yeah, you should toss it, but what if you might need it someday?

Controls

The controls for Saturn Return are pretty straightforward, but each one can have profound effects on Fiona’s mood, stamina, and ability to deal. Press the buttons below to select from several options.

A to Interact

Waste on the water is an annoying form of pollution for many people who want to enjoy the watery scenic view at ports, marinas, lakes, and canals. IADYS came up with a solution to tackle waste on the surfaces of water with its water floating robot Jellyfishbot. Jellyfishbot is effectively a fully electric aquatic water Roomba that maneuvers around tight spaces to capture trash and other waste. Equipped with a waste net that can collect up to 20 gallons of waste, Jellyfishbot can be operated by remote control or autonomously. The autonomous feature lets users select their desired cleaning area by mapping it on the remote control and activating the autonomous function to finish the job. A fully charged Jellyfishbot can operate for six to eight hours. Three propellors move it forward, backward and sideways. To learn more about Jellyfishbot and its capabilities head over to the website of Jellyfishbot’s maker, IADYS. 

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Life is busy enough without wasting time on spammers, scammers, and telemarketers. Whether you are suffering insistent injury lawyers, fraudulent IT specialists, or a drunk-dialing ex, there is a way to stop the calls and messages. The major carriers and phone manufacturers have upped their game against unwanted calls and messages in recent years, so let’s look at how you can effectively block them.

We also have guides on how to avoid spam with disposable contact info, guard against smishing attacks, and avoid phishing scams.

What to Keep in Mind

Before we dive into blocking options, there are a few things to know:

• If possible, don’t answer any calls from numbers you don’t recognize. Callers with anything important to say will likely leave a message anyway. Sadly, this won’t work for people with businesses or interests that involve a lot of calls from unknown numbers.
• Never click on a link or attachment in a spam text message because it could trigger malware. If possible, avoid opening them altogether.
• Never respond to a spam text message, as it will confirm that your number is valid.
• If you are concerned that the call or message might be from a legitimate company, try typing the number into your preferred search engine. While it can be tricky to confirm a scammer’s number, it is easy to verify a legitimate one. If you can’t find anything on the number, be cautious and ignore it. We will explain how to block numbers, but it’s also important to report unwanted calls and messages. If it’s telemarketing, scam, or spam, you can report it to the FTC here. You can also add your number to the Do Not Call Registry, though it only works for sales calls from reputable companies. Sadly many organizations and scammers ignore it. We will go into how to report numbers to manufacturers, carriers, and third parties below. The more people do this, the easier it is to identify and preemptively block or label nuisance numbers.

How to Block Calls and Texts on an iPhone

It’s easy to block individual numbers on your iPhone. Here’s how:

• In the Phone app, tap Recents, then tap the Information icon next to the number or contact you want to block. Scroll down and tap Block This Caller.
• In the FaceTime app, tap the Info icon next to the number, contact, or email address you want to block, then scroll down to tap Block This Caller.
• In the Messages app, open the conversation with the contact you want to block, then tap the contact at the top, then tap the Info button, scroll down, and tap Block This Caller.

It’s been impossible to avoid hearing about NFTs in recent months. Hype for the tokens—pitched as proof of ownership of a digital item—has reached a fever pitch, while billions of dollars have poured into the market for them. To some, these non-fungible tokens are the hottest new collectible hobby, to others a powerful investment tool, and still more, they’re the future of the internet.

The reality is, as always, more complex. In their current state, NFTs aren’t actually capable of doing much of what they’re often claimed to do. The extremely technical nature of how NFTs, blockchains, and cryptocurrencies work means that it’s easy to simplify the explanation of the tech to the point of being misleading.

Explaining the problems with NFTs is complicated, but we’re going to try to break down the issues as succinctly as we can. We have to tackle this with the understanding that no explanation, no matter how in-depth, can ever be totally comprehensive. With that in mind, there are some misconceptions about NFTs that are worth clearing up.

NFTs Aren’t Authoritative Tokens of Ownership

The most persistent misleading claim about NFTs is also the one that’s closest to being true. Enthusiasts frequently claim that since NFTs are fundamentally unique and live on a trustless blockchain, this constitutes proof that you “own” a digital asset. There’s only one token like this one, and you have it in your crypto wallet, so the thing it signifies must be yours.

This framing is misleading for a number of reasons. For starters, NFTs can only convey ownership (or rather, possession, but we’ll come back to that) of the token itself. As software engineer Molly White explained to WIRED, “With NFTs, the thing you’ve bought does not tend to give you ownership of the underlying item (image, game asset, etc.) in any way you would normally transfer physical or digital art.”

Instead, NFTs typically contain links to an asset hosted elsewhere. The NFT doesn’t convey ownership of the copyright, storage, or usage rights to the asset itself. As White explained, when someone buys an NFT, “They’ve paid to have their wallet address etched into a database alongside a pointer to something. I wouldn’t say they really ‘own’ anything at all.”

Additionally, as mentioned above, the Ethereum blockchain (currently the most common blockchain for minting NFTs) doesn’t have a mechanism for distinguishing between possessing a token and owning it. If someone steals your bicycle, it’s generally understood that the bike is still yours. With an NFT, the “owner” is whoever has the token in their wallet. So, if someone’s ape NFT gets stolen via a phishing scam, the blockchain treats the thief as the new owner.

Centralized marketplaces like OpenSea have occasionally stepped in to freeze sales of stolen assets (on their own platform, anyway), but this puts the power to determine “real” ownership not in the NFT itself but in the hands of the marketplaces that trade them.

Part of the appeal of riding a roller coaster simulator over the real thing is that you can experience track designs that are physically impossible in the real world. ROCO, a new coaster simulator, takes that idea one step further by letting riders draw their own track designs and then ride them, complete with motions that match the on-screen action.

Designing and building a roller coaster in real life that provides lots of thrills is easy, but designing a roller coaster in real life that’s also safe for human riders and doesn’t subject them to unbearable g-forces is where things get a lot harder. It’s why games like RollerCoaster Tycoon are so popular, as they let players design their own tracks and then ride them through a first-person in-game experience. The only thing that’s missing is actually feeling what it’s like to ride a wacky coaster layout, but that’s what ROCO promises.

Created by a Swiss company called INNTQ which specializes in motion platforms, the ROCO simulator is small enough to install in a modern arcade setting or amusement park (it weighs over 1,600 pounds but is designed to be easily moved around using a standard pallet jack tool) and offers the chance for two riders to experience some of the thrills of riding a real roller coaster through a pair of motion-controlled seats that can each support passengers up to 265 pounds—seatbelts are required.

Once strapped in, users face a 75-inch 4K flatscreen TV a few feet away as well as a smaller touchscreen interface located on the seats’ handlebars. Users select the environment where they want their virtual coaster to be built—like a lush green valley full of lakes and bears—and then use their fingers to draw the actual track layout. Each ride is limited to two minutes in length, and the simulator’s computer automatically determines the hills and elevations of the track sections before virtually rendering the whole experience in real-time with matching sound effects and synced seat movements.

INNTQ doesn’t plan to sell the ROCO simulators but instead intends to partner with businesses that would receive the machines for free and then share the revenues with the company. With a price per ride expected to be around $4, it probably won’t take long for that approach to become extremely profitable.