The indie game mixes puzzles and a random layout of rooms for a one-of-a-kind experience.

OpinionApril 7, 20256 min readLetting Kids Fail Is CrucialOur instinct is to protect our kids from failure. But learning from failure is an important life skill that cant be overlookedBy Amy Edmondson AzmanL/Getty ImagesWhen my older son Jack was in high school, he accepted a summer job selling solar panels door-to-door. My first reaction was to tell him not to do it. I felt protectiveafraid of the rejection he would face on doorsteps all summer long. I just couldnt see how my thoughtful son, a good athlete and straight A student, could cope with so much failure.As a parent, its natural to want to shield your kids from failure. But we often hover over our kids in what are arguably low-stakes situations, inadvertently robbing them of essential learning experiences and causing anxiety rather than the confidence we had intended to build.Instead, we can learn to let kids fail well.On supporting science journalismIf you're enjoying this article, consider supporting our award-winning journalism by subscribing. By purchasing a subscription you are helping to ensure the future of impactful stories about the discoveries and ideas shaping our world today.To be fair, we are in a bind: if we overprotect, we are ridiculed as helicopter parents, but if we underprotect, we suffer the potentially catastrophic consequences of a childs immature decision-making. Making the job even harder, every few years the parenting pendulum seems to swing: the three-martini playdate replaces the anxious co-piloted playdate and back again. Its easy to see why parents are torn: Should you let children make their own mistakes, or stay close by, removing obstacles, limiting risks and preventing failure? Struggling to manage the bind, parents suffer. And so do their kids.But there is a path forward that avoids either/or thinking and helps kids build good judgment to accompany a learning-oriented, adventuresome spirit. It supports kids in pursuing the right kind of failureswhile helping them avoid danger. Extrapolating from my organizational research and personal experience, I think its a parents responsibility to help children develop the failure muscles they need to stretch and learn and to grow into responsible members of society. To do this, we need to examine two dimensions of failure science: assessing the context for risk and understanding that failures are not all alike.Consider three kinds of failure Ive identified in my research: basic, complex and intelligent.Basic failures have single causesusually a simple mistake. They are preventable. This is why we childproof our homes when children are small, and ensure that medicine bottles cant be opened without the strength to twist and pinch. Basic failures dont bring new knowledge, and most of us would be better off avoiding them (such as by paying attention when were following a recipe). But theyre part of the experience for any child learning to master a new topic or skill, and its good to remind children to take the time to learn from mistakes, so they can keep improving.Complex failures have multiple causeseach innocuous on its ownthat come together to produce havoc. You forget to charge your cell phone, get stuck behind an overturned truck on the highway, cant reach your spouse, and miss the day care pick up. Most complex failures can be prevented with vigilance, but weve all had days where everything goes wrong, and these kinds of failures will continue to slip through in our increasingly complex and interconnected world. We should learn from them and move on.The intelligent failures are the ones that matter here, the ones parents should let happen to help children thrive.It starts with learning to reframe failure as a source of discovery and personal development. I believe that most of us, to live the fullest lives, should experience more failures, not fewer. Whether its tennis champion Roger Federer winning only 54 percent of the thousands of points he played in his illustrious career (proving that, as he put it, even top-ranked tennis players win barely more than half of the points they play) or top chemistry professor Jennifer Heemstra saying that 90 percent of the experiments in her lab end in failure, the most successful among us have long demonstrated that you have to be willing to fail. So why do so many parents feel a need to protect their children from failure?Remember Jack and the solar panels? My instinct was to dissuade him. Yes, most people said no, and some were downright rude, but a few said yes, leaving him with a sense of pride that hed brought renewable energy to some of our areas homes. Meanwhile, he learned to pause after each rejection and tell himself that a no was simply a step toward the next yes. He built some healthy failure muscles that continue to serve him well in his career.Failures can help kids succeed. To do this, we need to encourage them to take thoughtful risksto keep stretching outside their comfort zone. Audition for the school play; try out for basketball; ask that classmate out on a date. Yes, rejection is a likely outcome for any of these small life risks. But this is a feature, not a bug. The most successful people are those whove learned how to fail: theyve missed more crucial shots on court, been turned down for more auditions, and had more papers rejected from top journals. Their success comes from trying, learning, improving and trying againnot from magically getting things right the first time around.It can be hard to watch your kids fail. You absorb their disappointment. You want to fix whatever went wrong quickly, so they can feel good again. But part of making this work is learning to live with your discomfort, your anxiety about them missing the short-term gain over the long-term lesson.Give your kids space to fail in contained, safe ways, and teach them to embrace and learn from the failures they experience. Show them how to face forward and go after the next challenge with renewed insight and energy. Dont dwell on failures but do learn as much as you can from them.This mindsetwhat psychologist Carol Dweck calls a growth mindsetis an invaluable resource for children, particularly in a fast-changing world. When my younger son Nick, learning to ski at about age eight, asked me to watch him come down the slope, I dutifully stood at the bottom and waited. After his short run, he looked up and asked, How did I do? My response? You did great! But instead of the smile Id expected, Nick looked puzzled, even disappointed, as he replied, Cant you tell me what I did wrong so I can get better?Now I was the one smiling. Somehow, as a parent, I had helped nurture this growth mindset. Intimately familiar with Dwecks research as a social psychologist myself, I should have commented on his process (You were in control of your speed, and you looked like you were enjoying yourself. If you bend your knees a little more and keep your chest facing downhill, your form will be better) rather than praising his results (You did great!). I had been trying to teach my children not to overvalue successful outcomes, so they could focus instead on building disciplined habits of learning. And Nick showed me that what I was trying to do was working. This doesnt mean we dont ever say, Good job! of course, but praising outcomes isnt the only thing that can motivate a child. Worse, when we only praise outcomes, it teaches kids to be risk aversereluctant to come up short in your and others eyes. Good try! or Great progress! are the kinds of process-focused phrases that offer encouragement without creating a dependence on getting things right every time.What can be remarkable about an intelligent failure is that it shuts down one path and forces us to seek another, as with the time I was rejected from my high school basketball team and discovered debating instead. Other times they take us a notch closer to our goal, in slow but steady progress toward mastery. Although intelligent failures include wildly different phenomena from a missed point on the tennis court to rejection from the college of our choice, they have in common the pursuit of goals we care about. They also require taking the time to think through what is known and not known before acting. Also, the stakes are kept appropriately small, deliberately not incurring undue financial, reputational or safety risks.In sum, to learn to take the intelligence of intelligence failure to heart, parents must consider both the context and the type of failure that may result from their kids decisions. With this awareness, we can appreciate the emotional, cognitive and interpersonal skills the kids need to aim high, stretch their potential and become resilientrather than fearful or ashamed of failing. In this way, parents can help their children build strong failure muscles while saving them from disastrous mistakes.How do you start? Stop yourself from reactively protecting your child from failure. Notice your instincts, which, while valuable in so many contexts, are not helpful in others. Ask yourself, What is the risk here? What kind of failure would this be? to help you override your instinct to shield children from lifes most valuable lessons. Encourage them to take smart risks. Create (and help them create) opportunities to stretch. Support their growth as they do so, while helping them think through the possible outcomes of choices they are considering.Then let them choose.This is an opinion and analysis article, and the views expressed by the author or authors are not necessarily those of Scientific American.

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You can trust VideoGamer. Our team of gaming experts spend hours testing and reviewing the latest games, to ensure you're reading the most comprehensive guide possible. Rest assured, all imagery and advice is unique and original. Check out how we test and review games hereLarian Studios Baldurs Gate 3 is already an unhinged experience at the best of times, but one mod has come along to make the game even more nutty than usual. Following mods that take players on a custom space-bound campaign or a mod that allows players to become Pokemon masters, one mod allows players to summon almost any creature in the game as their own party member.Baldurs Gate 3s Ring of Summon MoreReleased for both PC and console, TGLies Ring of Summon More is a mod that gives players a more powerful variant of the Find Familiar spell. The spell adds a Magic Ring into a players inventory that gives them the ability to summon over 300 characters that can be used as allies.With frequent updates coming to the mod to add even more creatures to summon, the Ring of Summon More is an incredibly overpowered and even more incredibly fun addition to the sandbox of Baldurs Gate 3.This is not the final stage yet, the modder told fans on Mod.io. More characters will be added in the future.Right now, players can summon almost every character and creature in the game with the latest updates adding The Dark Urge, Butler of Bhaal, Withers, Raphael, Rabbit and more to be summoned and used as allies across the entire game.With over 300 creatures available, almost every major character/entity can be summon, from skeletons and zombies to Nine-Fingers Keene and Mystra. Hey, maybe having Mystra and Gale fighting alongside each other can help ease some of their relationship woes? You can also summon Czador Szarr to fight alongside Astarion if youre some kind of cruel snake.With almost everything available as your weapon, you can pummel through goblin camps with a Dominated Red Dragon at your side or infest the titular city of Baldurs Gate with an army of frogs and mice. Its unbridled chaos to the nth degree.Of course, there is one downside to the Ring of Summon More mod in Baldurs Gate 3: performance. Depending on what youre summoning and how many of them you are summoning, its not only Faerun thats at risk of destruction, but your framerate as well. If you want to summon a plague of rats to scurry along the streets in Act 3, youre more than welcome to, but your FPS will suffer for it.For more BG3 coverage, read about how Larian helped save Stardew Valley mod Baldurs Village. Additionally, check out CEO Swen Vinckes thoughts on why single-player games are so important for the future of gaming.Baldurs Gate 3Platform(s):macOS, PC, PlayStation 5, Xbox Series S, Xbox Series S/X, Xbox Series XGenre(s):Adventure, RPG, Strategy10VideoGamerSubscribe to our newsletters!By subscribing, you agree to our Privacy Policy and may receive occasional deal communications; you can unsubscribe anytime.Share

Lambrakis continues, To use cardboard, be sure to avoid pieces with glossy surfaces or heavily printed ones, then lay it over the entire bottom with overlapping layers to prevent gaps, moisten the cardboard to help it break down faster, and immediately pour on your soil mix to hold everything in place.Step 6: Fill with soilNow for the good stufffilling the bed. Use a mix of:Topsoil for structureCompost for nutrientsOrganic matter like fallen leaves, twigs, or aged manure for moisture retention and aerationA good ratio is 60% topsoil, 30% compost, and 10% organic matter. For filling a raised garden bed before planting, you should have two to three layers, Lambrakis says. The first is an optional base layer of logs, sticks, or coarse organic matter to improve drainage and reduce soil usage in deep beds. The second is a mix of compost, leaves, or aged manure to add nutrients. The top layer is high-quality garden soil mixed with compost (about 50/50) to provide a rich growing medium.Mix thoroughly and water well to help it settle before planting. If youre filling a tall bed, save money by adding a base layer of logs, sticks, or coarse mulch underneath your soil mixsort of like Hgelkultur gardening, an ancient German method of gardening on mounds like youre in a Lord of the Rings movie. Itll break down over time and improve the soil structure.Step 7: Plant and maintainOnce your bed is filled, break out your most glamorous gardening gloves and hat: Youre ready to plant. Cocktail herbs, leafy greens, tomatoes, peppers, strawberries, flowersyou name it, they often thrive in a raised bed.Add a two- to three-inch layer of mulch on top to retain moisture and keep weeds down. And consider setting up a self-watering system or soaker hose to make watering easier throughout the growing season. Raised beds do tend to dry out faster than in-ground beds, so keep an eye on soil moistureespecially during summers inevitable hot spells.Want to make your edible garden bed planter a maximalist fantasy, la Bunny Mellon? Add a trellis for climbing plants like cucumbers, pretty pavers around the exterior, and cloche covers to keep pests at bay (this cover from IKEA is beloved for its sturdy powder-coated steel frame). The prettier it is, the more youll want to be out there with your hands in the dirt.What type of wood is best for raised garden beds?Cedar and redwood are top choices because theyre naturally rot- and insect-resistanthandy accolades for an outdoor raised garden bed that can help yours last up to 10 years. If youre on a budget, untreated pine works too, but it may not last as long. Avoid pressure-treated lumber for crop gardens unless its labeled safe for food use. Not up for a DIY garden bed? Fret not. There are ready-made options aplenty. One go-to of AD editors: the Asparen planter from IKEA.How deep should a raised bed be?A minimum depth of 12 inches is good for most herbs and shallow-rooted vegetables. For root crops like carrots or potatoes, aim for 18 to 24 inches. The deeper the bed, the more room roots have to growand the better your drainage.Can I put a raised bed on concrete or a patio?Absolutely. Just make sure theres drainagedrill holes in the bottom if your bed has a solid base, or leave the bottom open and raise it slightly off the ground. Youll need deeper soil (18+ inches) since roots cant grow below the bed.How often should I water my raised garden bed?Raised beds drain faster than in-ground beds, so they need more frequent wateringespecially in sweltering or windy weather. Check soil moisture daily during peak season with a simple finger poke. (The laziest among usmoi, in my own gardenmay want to install a drip irrigation system or some such).

Fight disinformation: Sign up for the free Mother Jones Daily newsletter and follow the news that matters.One evening in March 2017, Hoan Ton-That, an Australian coder building a powerful facial recognition system, emailed his American business partners with a plan to deploy their fledgling technology. Border patrol pitch, the subject line read. He hoped to persuade the federal government to integrate their product with border surveillance cameras so that their newly formed company, later named Clearview AI, could use face detection on immigrants entering the United States.An immigrant to the United States himself, Ton-That grew up in Melbourne and Canberra and claimed to be descended from Vietnamese royalty. At 19, he dropped out of college and, in 2007, moved to San Francisco to pursue a tech career. He later fell in with Silicon Valley neoreactionaries who embraced a far-right, technocratic vision of society. Now Ton-That and his partners wanted to use facial recognition to keep people out of the country. Certain people. Their technology would put that ideology into action.Clearview had compiled a massive biometric database that would eventually contain billions of images the company scraped off the internet and social media without the knowledge of the platforms or their users. Its AI analyzed these images, creating a faceprint for every individual. The company let users run a probe photo against its database, and if it generated a hit, it displayed the matching images and links to the websites where they originated. This made it easy for Clearview users to further profile their targets with other information found on those webpages: religious or political affiliation, family and friends, romantic partners, sexuality. All without a search warrant or probable cause.A diehard Donald Trump supporter, Ton-That envisioned using facial recognition to compare images of migrants crossing the border to mugshots to see if the arrivals had been previously arrested in the United States. His Border Patrol pitch also included a proposal to screen any arrival for sentiment about the USA. Here, Ton-That appeared to conflate support for the Republican leader with American identity, proposing to scan migrants social media for posts saying I hate Trump or Trump is a puta and targeting anyone with an affinity for far-left groups. The lone example he offered was the National Council of La Raza, now called UnidosUS, one of the countrys largest Hispanic civil rights organizations.By the end of Trumps first presidential term, Clearview had secured funding from right-wing billionaire Peter Thiel, one of Elon Musks earliest business partners, and signed up hundreds of law enforcement clients around the country. The company doled out free trials to hook users, urging cops to run wild with searches. They did. Many departments then bought licenses to access Clearviews faceprint database.Since Clearviews existence first came to light in 2020, the secretive company has attracted outsize controversy for its dystopian privacy implications. Corporations like Macys allegedly used Clearview on shoppers, according to legal records; law enforcement has deployed it against activists and protesters; and multiple government investigations have found federal agencies use of the product failed to comply with privacy requirements. Many local and state law enforcement agencies now rely on Clearview as a tool in everyday policing, with almost no transparency about how they use the tech. What Clearview does is mass surveillance, and it is illegal, the privacy commissioner of Canada said in 2021. In 2022, the ACLU settled a lawsuit with Clearview for allegedly violating an Illinois state law that prohibits unauthorized biometric harvesting. Data protection authorities in France, Greece, Italy, and the Netherlands have also ruled that the companys data collection practices are illegal. To date, they have fined Clearview around $100 million.Clearviews business model is based on weaponizing our own images against us without a license, without consent, without permission, says Albert Fox Cahn, executive director of the Surveillance Technology Oversight Project.In December, Ton-That, the face of Clearview since it was forced from the shadows, quietly stepped down as CEO and took on the role of president. In February, he abruptly resigned his new position, though he retains a board seat. When Mother Jones wrote Ton-That, who is now the chief technology officer at Architect Capital, a San Francisco-based investment firm, with questions for this story, he replied: There are inaccuracies and errors contained in these assertions. They do not merif [sic] further response. Ton-That refused to elaborate. Clearview declined to comment.Replacing him as co-CEOs were Richard Schwartz, a co-founder of the company and a former top aide to Rudy Giuliani, and Hal Lambert, an early Clearview investor who runs a Texas financial firm known for its MAGA ETFan exchange-traded fund that screens companies for their political contributions and buys into those that vigorously back Republicans. A top Trump fundraiser who served on the presidents 2016 inaugural committee, Lambert told Forbes in February that he planned to help the company pursue opportunities with the new administration, citing Trumps mass-deportation agenda and anti-immigration policies.Clearview is already well positioned to capitalize on Trumps xenophobic plans. Today, one of the companys top customers is US Immigration and Customs Enforcement, a relationship cemented during Joe Bidens presidency, as the agency inked bigger deals with the startup. Under the Biden administration, ICE records show, the agency deployed Clearview widely, even as officials there charged with monitoring the technology were in the dark about how it was being used and by whom. As the agency executes Trumps emboldened missionBorder Czar Tom Homan has vowed to unleash shock and awe against undocumented immigrantsthe dragnet surveillance outlined by Ton-That during the companys earliest years may already be underway. (ICE did not respond to a request for comment.)During Bidens presidency, the trappings of oversight still existed. But Trump has fired many of the inspectors general who review the use of technology such as Clearview and guard against abuse. And Trumps early actions have shown his administration has little regard for the legal, congressional, and constitutional guardrails that have constrained his predecessors.Immigrants arent the only people at risk. With Trump pursuing retribution against his political enemies, Clearview offers a range of frightening applications. It creates a really disturbingly powerful tool for police that can identify nearly every person at a protest or a reproductive health facility or a house of worship with just photos of those peoples faces, says Cahn.No federal laws regulate facial recognition, and many federal agencies have deployed Clearview for years with little accountability. Consider that the FBInow run by Kash Patel, who has claimed FBI agents incited January 6, pledged to target journalists, and penned a book containing the names of officials he planned to settle scores withis another major federal customer. Patels new deputy director, Dan Bongino, is a conspiratorial right-wing influencer who has used violent rhetoric about liberals and called for jailing Democrats. (The FBI declined to comment on its use of Clearview or on Bonginos extremist views.)Ive reported on Clearview for years. This story, based on interviews with insiders and thousands of newly obtained emails, texts, and other records, including internal ICE communications, provides the fullest account to date of the extent of the companys far-right origins and of the implementation of its facial recognition technology within the federal governments immigration enforcement apparatus. It reveals how Ton-That, who obsessed over race, IQ, and hierarchy, solicited input from eugenicists and right-wing extremists while building Clearview, and how, from the outset, he and his associates discussed deploying the tech against immigrants, people of color, and the political left. All told, this new reporting paints a chilling portrait of an ideologically driven company whose powerful surveillance technology is now in the hands of the Trump administration, as it bulldozes democratic institutions and executes an authoritarian takeover.Ton-That knows better than most how a picture posted online can come back to haunt you. As Clearview took off, he was confronted with a snapshot from his past that clashed with his effort to present himself and his company as apolitical. It showed him partying on election night in 2016 with far-right activists in MAGA hats. One fellow reveler, Charles Chuck Johnson, a political agitator with wide-ranging connections to Republican politicians and right-wing billionaires, was also Ton-Thats business partner. Smartcheckr, the company they founded with Schwartz, would later relaunch as Clearview.In early 2021, Ton-That told the New York TimesFrance 24 asked him about his far-right ties. Im not a political person, he said. Its wrong to assume my political beliefs just from a photoThat was a different time in 2016, a long time ago.But Ton-Thats path to radicalization began earlier than he let on, and his extremism was no fleeting dalliance. By 2015, he was interacting online with alt-right activists, including Milo Yiannopoulos and Mike Cernovich. Deleted social media posts also show him chatting with extremists such as Andrew weev Auernheimer, the longtime webmaster of the Daily Stormer, a neo-Nazi website. (Auernheimer, who has a large swastika tattoo and has repeatedly called for a genocide of Jews, denied to Mother Jones that he holds neo-Nazi views and claimed he was no longer involved with the Daily Stormer. He also said he never interacted with Ton-That but declined to address evidence of their communications.)Pitch decks the company sent to potential investors and customers touted Clearviews ability to surveil protesters and target people involved in radical political or religious activities.By early 2016, Ton-That described himself as a lifelong libertarian whod shifted further right over time. Along the way, he discovered the Dark Enlightenment neoreactionary movement, a fascist outgrowth of Silicon Valleys radical libertarianism. He read the work of Steve Sailer, a longtime contributor to white nationalist publications and a proponent of human biodiversity, a racist pseudoscience favored by neoreactionaries. Like white nationalists, neoreactionaries reject egalitarianism and view America as weakened by feminism and diversity initiatives. But they make room within their elitist hierarchy for Jewish, Asian, and gay mendemographics, conveniently, common in Silicon Valleys leadership class. Neoreactionaries consider themselves a high-IQ natural aristocracy and long for a corporatist strongmana CEO monarchto usher in what Thiel calls a futuristic version of the past, one in which technocrats rule as an ennobled caste. They view technology as the engine to remake society on their terms, an ambition that Thiel has never disguised.We were going to use technology to change the whole world to overturn the monetary system, Thiel said in 2010, explaining the impetus for PayPal, the e-payment company he co-founded with Musk. The basic idea was that we could never win an electionbecause we were in such a small minority. But maybe you could actually unilaterally change the worldwithout having to constantly convince people and beg people and plead with people who were never going to agree with youthrough a technological means. (Thiel did not respond to questions.)As Ton-That radicalized, he grew friendly with Curtis Yarvin, an intellectual muse to Thiel, Vice President JD Vance, and other prominent right-wingers. Ton-That thought Yarvin was brilliant and spoke often and admiringly of Curtis, one source told me. The godfather of neoreaction in America, Yarvin (who did not respond to questions) believes democracy is a dangerous, malignant form of government and has argued for a soft coup and a purge of civil servants in favor of political loyalists. This butterfly revolution, as Yarvin called it in 2022, looks eerily similar to Trump and Musks blitzkrieg against the federal bureaucracy.Neoreaction also led Ton-That to Johnson, a Thiel confidant who ran a far-right site called GotNews that published dirt on Black victims of police violence and Black Lives Matter protesters. Am a reader of yours, like your work, Ton-That wrote Johnson in May 2016, asking to be added to a Slack group Johnson had set up around a different project he had launched, WeSearchr, a crowdfunding platform that raised money for neo-Nazis and far-right causes. The Slack group was an online watering hole for a likeminded crowd, according to Peter Duke, another business partner of Johnsons at the time who participated in the chat and who described it to France 24 in unaired footage.When you get to a point where you understand that democracy is fake, then you have tothink about different frameworks for the way that people are gonna be ruled, he said. What we all had in common when we met was that we thought that neoreactionaryism was an interesting ideaThe United States of America was founded on the idea that all men are created equal. And Curtis simply asked a question, as I remember it: What if theyre not? What do you do?How do you govern that?Thats what we talked about all the time. (Duke declined to answer questions.)Vartika SharmaTon-That and Johnson quickly bonded. They brainstormed alt-tech ideas and a few months later, in early 2017, launched Smartcheckr, Clearviews predecessor. Ton-That also got to know Duke and other radicals associated with Johnson, including Marko Jukic, a self-described extremist Catholic traditionalist who once argued that diversity is corrosive to civilization; Tyler Bass, a white nationalist who, according to his former girlfriend, attended the Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Virginia; and far-right influencer Douglass Mackey, who used a pseudonymous social media persona to disseminate Nazi propaganda and advocate for global white supremacy. (Jukic told Mother Jones that he now considers himself a centrist and that his neoreactionary writings were exercises in theatrical hyperbole and comedic satire. Bass did not respond to a request for comment. Mackey said he identifies today as a moderately conservative Republican and previously promoted white supremacy mostly for shock and trolling.)Jukic, Bass, and Mackey would all go on to work for the facial recognition startup in some capacity. Jukic pitched Clearview to potential law enforcement customers. Bass oversaw a project with a real estate firm whose CEO was considering investing and wanted to test the tech, which the team piloted using a surveillance camera in the lobby of an apartment building to secretly harvest images of tenants and visitors. Mackey, who was later convicted of federal election interference for trying to dupe women and people of color into voting by text, did contract work for Clearviews predecessor firm and briefly handled outreach to political clients interested in using what company promotional material characterized as unconventional databases for extreme opposition research. In 2020, while reporting on Clearview for HuffPost, I contacted the company to ask about Jukic and Bass roles. Clearview parted ways with both soon after.Ton-That sought to recruit other extremists, too. He wrote in a November 2016 email that he wanted to totally hire Emil Kirkegaard, a Danish eugenicist who had scraped OkCupid and published the data of nearly 70,000 users. Kirkegaard, who did not respond to questions, had infamously advocated to legalize child porn and lower the age of consent to 13 or the onset of puberty.Ton-That called him a total talent. Emails show the CEO bounced facial recognition ideas off Kirkegaard, hoping to figure out how to identify gay people, or even predict criminality, from facial features.Ton-That was fascinated by eugenics and admired the fields founder, Francis Galton, who inspired Nazi racial hygiene programs. After digesting a letter by Galton that argued for Chinese immigrants to move to Africa and supplant the inferior Black race, Ton-That declared in an email that Galton was a true prophet. Among friends, he spoke often about IQ and race, wondering aloud about the intellectual superiority of half-Asian, half-white people like himself. He also consulted with Michigan State University physics professor Steve Hsu, a human biodiversity devotee who associates with Holocaust deniers and has spent years researching genetic differences among populations. In a 2017 email, Ton-That thanked Hsu (who did not respond to questions) for his work to reverse dysgenic trends.Emails from the time show Ton-That reading and sharing articles from far-right publications such as Counter-Currents, VDARE, and Unz Review as he collaborated and socialized with a range of extremists and pro-Trump authoritarians. At an October 2016 event co-organized by future Stop the Steal leader Ali Alexander, Ton-That partied with Islamophobe Laura Loomer, right-wing sting artist James OKeefe, and Proud Boys founder Gavin McInnes, who initiated new members into his gang as Ton-That watched. Ton-That huddled at this event with Jeff Giesea, a Thiel lieutenant who helped the tech investor vet candidates for the first Trump administration. This was the far-right elite.Re: Clearviews AgendaA revealing sampling of internal email subject lines:Gayface predictor is 80 accurateThere is no association between wider faces and the rate of convictions for violent offensesTenant screening productSmartcheckr proposal/specs for HungarySend this to thielFaces and criminalityFace & IQ (edited)Smartcheckr for security + Pokemon GoFwd: Using Smartcheckr on voter fraud in New HampshireIn a June 2017 email to Thiel seeking seed funding, Ton-That reported that he and his partners had landed their first facial recognition client: JPMorgan Chase. We helped their security team vet each person attending their shareholders meeting to make sure there were no protestors, Ton-That wrote. (JPMorgan denied using Smartcheckr.) But even as the company attempted to make inroads in the corporate world, its founders remained active in extremist circles. The same evening as the JPMorgan shareholders meeting, Johnson asked Ton-That to tackle another assignment. A technical error had fouled up a campaign on Johnsons WeSearchr crowdfunding platform set up by the Daily Stormers Auernheimer to raise money for Andrew Anglin, the neo-Nazi sites editor, whod been sued for waging a harassment and intimidation campaign against a Jewish woman. Ton-That seemingly fixed the problem. Auernheimer and Anglin ultimately raised more than $150,000.For at least the next year, Ton-That moonlighted as tech support for Johnsons sites, sometimes helping extremists make and move money, usually cryptocurrency. When a co-founder of Johnsons crowdfunding venture quit and left the team without a way to access the bitcoin theyd collected, Ton-That recovered the cryptocurrency, worth more than $150,000 at the time. Underscoring how vital Ton-That was to their operation, Duke wrote in a 2018 email, Hoan is the only resource that has complete access and understanding of WeSearchr.As they grew their facial recognition company, Ton-That, Johnson, and Schwartz brought in investors such as Thiel and Naval Ravikant, an Indian-born technocrat who had encouraged Ton-That to move to the United States and became his first Silicon Valley mentor. Ravikant, who did not respond to questions, imagined a neofeudalist future of small free cities with drone armies and skill-based immigration policies and a one bitcoin, one vote system of government.Another early backer was Hal Lambert, a former finance chair for the Texas GOP who runs Point Bridge Capital, the investment firm behind the MAGA ETF. Lambert, who served on Clearviews board before becoming co-CEO with Schwartz, harbored his own fringe views. He claimed the George Floyd protests had turned into George Soros funded riots on social media and passed around a screed about how Floyd died from drug-induced cardiopulmonary arrest, rather than the knee of a cop on his neck. Like his business partners, Lambert wanted to deploy facial recognition to support a conservative agenda. In September 2017, after reading a Breitbart article that suggested out-of-state Democrats had flipped a close 2016 Senate race in New Hampshire, he emailed Johnson and Ton-That, urging them to use the tech to identify exactly who the 5,000+ out of state fraud voters are.Conspiratorial ideas like these found traction within the company, where the founders exchanged emails indicating their belief that Democrats were cheating in other races around the country. They also appeared to buy into lies about antifascist activists spread by right-wing propagandists who conflate antifa with Black Lives Matter and other liberal protesters.Paranoia about the radical left seemed to infuse their business decisions. As part of their plan to use facial recognition in apartment lobbies, they intended to scan the faces of tenants and compare them to mugshots. But Ton-That noted in an email that he also wanted to run them through any criminal database we have (antifa) or to see if they were friends with criminals. He assumed a link between leftist politics and criminality. I think every real estate firm will sign up, he told his co-founders. Especially ones in diverse areas. Schwartz, a 67-year-old New Yorker who ran Giulianis welfare reform program, which invasively profiled needy people and deprived them of assistance, loved the idea. Quite Brilliant! he replied. After Rudin Management, one of New York Citys largest real estate companies, signed on, the team reportedly collected about 70,000 videos from a lobby surveillance camera. We beta tested their product for a brief period at one of our buildings nearly a decade ago, a Rudin spokesperson said. We chose not to deploy their software at the conclusion of that pilot.During Trumps first term, Clearview made little distinction between bad actors and people exercising their First Amendment rights. Pitch decks the company sent to potential investors and customers, including scores of local law enforcement agencies, touted Clearviews ability to surveil protesters and target people involved in radical political or religious activities. A pitch deck from April 2019 showed how Clearview grouped photos in its faceprint database, including a category it called Protesters & Agitators.In July 2019, Johnson reached out to right-wing attorney Harmeet Dhillon, a Trump lawyer and Republican National Committee official. Dhillon was also representing Andy Ngo, a social media commentator who has made a career out of stoking fear about the radical left and who was preparing to sue several people who he alleged assaulted him at protests in Portland, Oregon. Ngo claimed they were antifascists. Dhillon, an election truther and anti-transgender activist whom Trump tapped to run the Justice Departments Civil Rights Division, wanted to hunt them down. Richard and Hoan can give you a copy of ClearView to help identify antifa, Johnson told her.Thank you! replied Dhillon, who said she would send in a batch of photos. (She did not respond to questions.)Journalists were another target. In May 2017, Bass emailed Cassandra Fairbanks, a far-right activist whom the first Trump administration allowed into press briefings, to ask for the names and emails of reporters in the White House press pool. This would potentially enable Ton-That and his partners to surface social media accounts, pull photos, and, as Bass put it, investigate the leanings of the journalists. Fairbanks quickly sent the names and emails of eight reporters to Bass, who forwarded the details to Ton-That. These shills are high-priority, Bass wrote. Dope this is going into smartcheckr, Ton-That replied. The company later created a Politicians Academics Journalists category in its biometric database.Smartcheckr and later Clearview shunned public attention. Clearviews website was blank for a year. Eventually, it displayed a fake address and a cryptic tagline: Artificial Intelligence for a better world. Ton-That and Schwartz cautioned people using the tech to keep Clearview secret. They and Johnson preferred to hawk their product to their political network. They offered Clearview to anti-Muslim activist Robert Spencer and gave access to Sean Fieler, an anti-trans, right-wing Catholic hedge fund manager. They courted the family office of Shafik Gabr, a tycoon close to Egyptian dictator Abdel Fattah el-Sisi, and solicited venture capital in Beijing. They approached William Je, the financial adviser to Steve Bannon ally Guo Wengui, who was found guilty alongside Guo last year in a sprawling $1 billion fraud case.While one former Clearview employee said the company tried to expand its potential customer base by courting anyone they met, including Democrats and progressives, the firm found few takers outside of the founders MAGA milieu. The Clearview teams connections reached deep into Trumps inner circle. They reportedly set up a free account for Rep. John Ratcliffe, now the CIA director. And Johnson met with Wilbur Ross, Trumps first-term commerce secretary, and discussed facial recognition. The Clearview partners also pitched the Republican Attorneys General Association and the right-wing Club for Growth, offering its chairman what Ton-That described as a motherlode of information that can help with oppo-research.During this stealth phase of its existence, Clearviews most fruitful relationship was with the NYPD, thanks largely to Schwartzs high-level connections, including to former NYPD Commissioner William Bratton, an instrumental figure in the post-9/11 expansion of police surveillance programs. Emails show that Ton-That planned a meeting with Bratton for August 2018. The NYPD began trialing Clearview shortly afterward. Although the department never signed a formal contract with Clearview, NYPD employees evangelized the tech throughout the law enforcement community.The company emphasizes the use within human trafficking and drug trafficking, but its highly unlikely that they would not be actively supporting deportation.Johnson, Ton-That, and Schwartz each owned a third of what was then still called Smartcheckr. But Johnsons outr behaviorincluding publicly denying the Holocausthad become a liability to his partners, who also contended that he wasnt pulling his weight in their venture. In 2018, they formed a new company, Clearview, that initially excluded Johnson from ownership, according to court records. I went from being a third owner of the company to being, like, written out of it entirely, Johnson said in response to questions from Mother Jones. And I said, Well, I will just sue you guys. Eventually, Ton-That and Schwartz gave Johnson a 10 percent stake in the new company in exchange for his signing a November 2018 wind-down and transfer agreement that recognized his good and valuable advisory services but also required him to keep his mouth shut about his new ownership stake and prior work for the startup.The narrative established by Clearview and most media coverage is that Ton-That and Schwartz excised Johnson from operations at this point. But Johnson continued to assist and advise his co-founders for nearly two more years, according to emails I obtained, connecting them with other potential investors and customers. When the Department of Defense scheduled a meeting in January 2020 for Clearview to pitch its services, the invite included Johnson. The following month, Ton-That sent his friend a proposal to compensate Johnson in Clearview stock for advisory services he provided to the company with respect to developing, marketing and selling its technology. In July 2020, Johnson helped Schwartz draft a letter for Rep. Matt Gaetza personal friend of Johnsonsto send to top officials at the Department of Homeland Security, lobbying them to use Clearview to smoke out spies among the 400,000 Chinese nationals who enter the U.S. every year as foreign students.A February 2020 dinner in Los Angeles highlighted the companys significance within the far-right movement. The dinner was one in a series of neoreactionary salons Johnson arranged for young men of ability and distinction to talk about controversial or provocative topics openly, without fear of reprisal, according to an invite he sent. Phones were to be checked at the door, unmarried women forbidden. When reached for comment, Johnson said Ton-That had attended a few of these events, including one where he met Steve Sailer, the human biodiversity writer whose articles about race and IQ Ton-That had read for years. Johnson could not remember if Ton-That had attended the Los Angeles dinner. But Sailer was the guest of honor. The next day, Sailer emailed Johnson some advice about Clearview. One thing to look out for is cops abusing your system, he warned, presciently. Another thing: Hoan is a star, so the question is whether you want to ruin his cover and put him on TV. (Italic Sailers. Reached by phone, he acknowledged knowing Clearviews founders and then hung up.)Ton-That was a star, at least among the far right. And he would soon be all over TV anyway, the result of a blockbuster January 2020 Times story that revealed Clearviews existence and explored the privacy-shattering implications of the technology but did not examine its founders politics. While follow-up reporting, including the article I wrote for HuffPost, excavated Ton-Thats links to Johnson and other far-right figures, these associations didnt stand in the way of Clearview landing its first big federal contract, in August 2020, with ICE.But Johnson and Ton-Thats relationship finally unraveled. In October 2020, enraged by Ton-Thats comments to the media about his involvement with the company, Johnson erupted. Effective immediately I no longer support the direction of the company nor its leadership, he emailed Ton-That, Schwartz, and Lambert. It was a bitter parting. Johnson later sued Clearview and his former partners, who filed a still-pending counterclaim. (Lamberts financial firm has also sued Johnson.)When an irate Johnson spoke to the Times for a 2021 story, Ton-That and Schwartz asserted that hed violated the secrecy clause in the wind-down agreement, which allowed them to buy him out of the company. They paid him $286,579.69.Clearview kept rolling without Johnson. The breakthrough at ICE gave the company a foothold in the federal government. It also brought Johnson and Ton-Thats original vision closer to fruition. As Johnson bombastically described their early mission on Facebook, they were building algorithms to ID all the illegal immigrants for the deportation squads. Now, the company had found a willing partner in ICE, which has a history of racial and religious profiling, violating constitutional rights, and invasive data gathering and surveillance.Since 2016, the agencys employees and contractors have faced hundreds of internal investigations for misusing various databases of personal information. Department watchdogs investigated ICE employees and contractors for allegedly looking up each other and former lovers, giving information to friends and neighbors, and accessing databases in order to threaten and harass people or sell information to criminals, according to a 2023 Wired report.Experts believe Clearview is likely already involved in deportation. If Clearview AI tries to scrape all social media from all around the world, and there is a picture of an immigrant to the United States, then ICE could try to find out who that person is, says Jack Poulson of Tech Inquiry, a watchdog group. The company emphasizes the use within human trafficking and drug trafficking, but its highly unlikely that they would not be actively supporting deportation.Indeed, starting in mid-2019, ICE clandestinely piloted the tech through, among other units, its Enforcement and Removal Operations (ERO) division, which arrests and deports undocumented immigrants. A BuzzFeed News investigation found that ICE agents ran more than 8,000 searches during this period.Records obtained by the Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC) and shared with Mother Jones indicate that ICE has mainly used Clearview in its Homeland Security Investigations (HSI) division, which traditionally conducts criminal probes into human trafficking and drug smuggling. But during Trumps first term, HSI agents were deeply involved in deportation actions alongside ERO teams, participating in aggressive raids in sanctuary cities and sometimes arresting hundreds of undocumented workers in a day. Now, the units are teaming up again to round up immigrants.In Trumps first term, ICE also dispatched HSI agents to racial justice protests that erupted around the country after the police killings of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor. HSI monitored other liberal or left-leaning events, labeling them in an internal document published by the Nation as anti-Trump protests, including a peaceful 2018 rally in Manhattan organized by a Democratic congressman to protest a white nationalist hate group.Vartika SharmaThe EPIC records reveal a culture of indifference at ICE about Clearviews privacy and civil rights implications. It was a fancy toy that promised a low-cost investigative shortcut. This can find faces in a crowd and/or it can show a photo in a crowd if you want to ID people he/she may associate with. It was amazing! one ICE employee marveled. But Clearview spooked some people, including a Customs and Border Protection employee who emailed a colleague at ICE after learning the agency had the tool. You guys use this? the CBP staffer wrote. Looks creepy as hell. It was. An email from an ICE privacy officer noted that the agency wants to use facial recognition to track people threatening its agents online. Only after the Times broke news of Clearviews existence, according to the records, did ICE conduct a privacy assessment that should have taken place before the agency deployed the tech.The EPIC files also show that ICE supervisors had little idea how Clearview was being used and struggled to determine which units and agents had access. ERO and HSI had Clearview. But so did task force officers outside of ICE who work with federal law enforcement. More than 100 people connected to the agency were using Clearview around the world in places like Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam; Rome; Manila, Philippines; and Ton-Thats hometown of Canberra.During the Biden administration, demand for Clearview surged within ICE. On March 25, 2022, the agency held a Clearview expansion meeting. Lambert has said the bulk of the companys $16 million in annual recurring revenue still comes from local law enforcement, but ICE has been Clearviews steadiest customer, paying the facial recognition firm nearly $4 million.In general, the federal government is hungry for facial recognition. The Department of Homeland Security is experimenting with using facial biometrics to monitor migrant children down to the infant and algorithmically predict how they will age so they can be identified if they cross the border years later. Under the Biden administration, CBP already used an app with facial recognition to screen asylum seekers trying to enter the country; like most similar technology, the app has shown a bias against darker-skinned people, blocking Black applicants from filing claims.Between April 2018 and March 2022, Clearview was used by more federal law enforcement agencies than any other privately owned facial recognition system, according to US Government Accountability Office reports and public reporting. It was deployed by agencies including CBP; the FBI; the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives; and the Drug Enforcement Administration. Even the US Postal Inspection Service used Clearview, targeting Black Lives Matter protesters in 2020. Many of the agencies failed to comply with privacy requirements. Some told the GAO they didnt use Clearview, only to be caught later by BuzzFeed News, which cross-referenced the report with a leaked list of federal agencies whose employees had run searches.Hundreds, if not thousands, of local law enforcement departments have also embraced Clearview with even looser oversight. Clearviews user code of conduct states that its search results are not intended nor permitted to be used as admissible evidence in a court of law or any court filing. But cops have used the search results, and nothing else, to secure warrants, rather than as leads to support further investigation. This practice has led to wrongful arrests and risks putting every American, not just every immigrant, in a permanent police lineup.With Congress failing to act on facial recognition, a handful of state laws that protect residents biometric information have been the only tool to hold Clearview accountable. Notably, in 2020, the ACLU sued Clearview in Illinois, which led to a 2022 settlement banning the company from making its faceprint database available to most businesses and other private entities nationwide. Another lawsuit, now in Californias courts, was brought by immigrants and racial justice activists who accuse the company of illegally acquiring, storing, and selling their likenesses, and the likenesses of millions of Californians, in its quest to create a cyber surveillance state.They are making money off our privacy, our own spaces, our biometrics, says Reyna Maldonado, a DACA recipient who owns a Mexican restaurant in Oakland and is a plaintiff in the suit.An immigrant rights activist since her teens, Maldonado has publicly protested ICE. But she and the other plaintiffs allege in their suit that Clearviews chilling effect has already undermined their free speech. Im a lot more careful about what I share. I feel like I cant be fully open about my community organizing work, Maldonado says. People think this is only an immigrant struggle and its only going to affect those who are undocumented. The reality is they have even more information on people who are citizens.Sejal Zota, co-founder and legal director of Just Futures Law, a civil rights group that helped bring the suit, predicts facial recognition will be used even more widely during Trumps second term. We expect to see [it] extend from Trumps alleged targetsimmigrantsto the general public.In March 2024, the US Commission on Civil Rights convened experts at its headquarters near the White House to discuss the dangers of facial recognition. While immigrants were most at risk, privacy advocates told the commission, they were just the initial target. [They] are canaries in the coal mines on civil liberties because they are positioned as test cases for policies that roll back all of our shared liberties, explained Laura MacCleery, a senior policy director at UnidosUS, the same civil rights organization Ton-That mentioned in his 2017 Border Patrol pitch. Something had to be done, the privacy advocates agreed, before it was too late. But it was already awfully late. Facial recognition technology was thoroughly embedded in the nations surveillance infrastructure.Sitting placidly at the panelists table, his long black hair spilling to the shoulders of his gray suit jacket, was one of the people most responsible for that outcome.As a person of mixed race, Ton-That told the commission, it is especially important to me that this technology is deployed in a way that protects and enhances civil rights.Information about Clearviews ties to extremists was already public, but Ton-That faced not a single question about his background. Nor was he asked how, as a class-action lawsuit against the company alleged, violating Illinois law by collecting the biometric identifiers and biometric information of citizens without informing them was compatible with civil rights. In September, the commission issued a 194-page report that failed to mention Clearviews radical associations.The report did acknowledge, however, one of the achievements that Ton-That has trumpeted the most, including before the commission. Clearview, he said, had played an essential role in helping investigate the violent insurrectionists who stormed the US Capitol on January 6, an incident he described elsewhere as tragic and appalling. The attack had proved an enormous publicity boon for Clearviewand an opportunity to scrub the far-right taint from its image. In media interviews, Ton-That touted Clearviews ability to track down MAGA criminals. The company published a case study on its website highlighting its role in the arrest of hundreds of rioters in a short amount of time.The boasts struck a discordant note. The politics of Clearviews founders aligned more closely with those of the rioters. Almost a year after the insurrection, Peter Duke, the founders neoreactionary ally, hosted Stop the Steal ringleader Ali Alexander on his podcast to push a conspiracy theory that the attack was a false flag operation by undercover FBI agents. Duke, who was in Washington on January 6, had photographed dozens of rioters at the Capitol who he suspected were federal provocateurs. Theyre not in the Clearview database, he told Alexander. Ive checked. Duke, who has said he once worked for Clearview as a consultant, took their absence as a sign of a coverup. He later repeated this claim on camera to France 24, explaining that he had friends at Clearview run the faces.It was a startling admission. Clearviews code of conduct prohibits use of the tech for personal purposes. But here was Duke talking about running off-the-books searches in an effort to whitewash an attack on American democracy.All of the evidence we have is that [Clearview] is a corporation that cares not at all about civil rights and that their founders have a potentially ideological agenda inconsistent with democracy, says Emily Tucker, executive director of Georgetown Laws Center on Privacy and Technology. None of that has seemed to slow down their ability to get government contracts in the US or abroad.Nobody in a position to hold the company accountable seemed to care about its far-right DNAand few wanted to consider that the threat to privacy and democracy might not be an unfortunate by-product of the tech, but rather a feature. Tucker said her organization discussed Clearviews extremist ties with several Biden administration officials, as well as congressional staffers, and she was surprised and concerned by the lack of follow-up. Most media coverage of the company left the issue unmentioned or, worse, downplayed what was knownone interviewer for the financial magazine Inc. described the extremists at Clearview as rogue employees who had infiltrated the company.In America, the debate about tech harms proceeds from the flawed assumption that tech is neutral. Its the Silicon Valley version of guns dont kill people, and it obscures the truth in a similar way. This smokescreen allows social media oligarchs to pose as impartial platform owners while their algorithms spread lies about Haitian immigrants, or an AI overlord to claim his tech is unbiased even as it amplifies election misinformation. Technology doesnt exist in a political vacuumindeed, it can be an ideological tool. A designer can imbue bias into their creation.Today, there is no longer a need for Clearview to pretend to be apolitical. Lambert, the companys new co-CEO, is already in business with both Elon Musks SpaceX and the Department of Defense through a separate satellite company, and he has made no secret of his desire to deploy Clearview as an instrument of MAGA rule. Under the Trump administration, we would hope to grow more than we were able to under the Biden administration, he told Forbes. Were talking to the [Pentagon], were talking to Homeland Security. There are a number of different agencies were in active dialogue with.In the emails I obtained, Lambert expressed a desire to take down these lefties and railed against the communist academia left. Unlike his predecessor, who at least paid lip service to the rule of law after January 6, Lambert helped to gin up unscientific and inaccurate analyses of voter data that Republicans used to back false claims of voter fraud after the 2020 election.Even before the leadership shakeup became public, it was evident to the careful observer that changes were afoot at Clearview in anticipation of the new administration. Days before Trump was again sworn in as president, vowing to pardon the insurrectionists who attacked the Capitol in his name, the company updated its website. Deleted were any references to its role in identifying the far-right marauders who had laid siege to democracy.Top image: Evan Vucci/AP; Getty (2)Inside illustrations: Getty (3), Sean Zanni/Patrick McMullan/Getty, Stanton Sharpe/SOPA Images/LightRocket/Getty, Eva Marie Uzcategui/Getty, RIGHT: Getty (3), Roberto Schmidt/AFP/Getty, David Dee Delgado/Getty, Jim Young/AFP/Getty; Simone Fischer/Unsplash, Colin Lloyd/UnsplashRelatedWe RecommendLatest

Pinky SwearPromise Mascot Agency review: Lots of CEOs do heck-all work, but Im not one of thoseCome to Kaso-Machi for the Yakuza intrigue, stay for the gang of weirdo workers in costumes youve actually got to treat pretty decently.Image credit: VG247 Review by Mark Warren Senior Staff Writer Published on April 7, 2025 It probably wont surprise you to hear this.When it comes to Promise Mascot Agency - a game about a psychotic finger mascot and a guy with a broom trying to unravel the Yakuza secrets within a cursed and run-down town, inhabited by a duck voiced by former PlayStation exec Shuhei Yoshida - the weirdness is the thing.I had a feeling it would be after I played the first couple of hours of the game that developer Kaizen Game Works put out as a demo prior to release. Having now driven through the entire thing in a kei truck that sprouted wings towards the end, I can tell you unequivocally that its the case. The weirdness is the thing, and if youre going to fall in love with this indie mascot management game, its the part thatll seduce you, like youre an evil vending machine thats just started spitting junk everywhere because a moss ball with legs forgot that appliances dont respond well to violence.To see this content please enable targeting cookies. There are some points when PMA pretends to be normal. The setup of its story (aside from revolving around a crew featuring a grizzled finger mascot whos permanently smoking a cigar) is very serious and surprisingly lore-heavy. Protagonist Michi Sugawara - dubbed The Janitor because hes good at cleaning s**t up - is a key cog in the Shimazu Family, and is tasked alongside his oath brother Tokihira with delivering a bunch of cash to another Yakuza syndicate as part of a deal to secure underworld peace forever between three of Japans biggest crim collaborations.Naturally, because we cant have nice things, it goes wrong. Instead of killing him to help save her own hide, Michis boss Matriarch Shimazu instead sneakily ships him off in a box to try and earn back the money via a secret business the family controls that no one knows about. Thats the defunct mascot agency in the rural town of Kaso-Machi, which is re-named Promise Mascot Agency when Michi re-opens it alongside the aforementioned non-cigar smoking psycho finger - Pinky.From here, youre in the mascot management business, and your job is to build up the agency by establishing a crop of mascot talent, chatting to people who know of locations and businesses in town that might want to hire them for events, and making sure those jobs get done. Different mascots will suit different jobs better due to their traits - an event at a restaurant is a good place to send a food-themed mascot like a matcha roll thats also a cat, while an event at the cemetery is the ideal place to send a mascot shaped like a funeral urn. However, if you just need the money, so long as theyve got enough stamina, you can send em anywhere. It's a bit like refurbishing your local high street, except with more Yakuza. Unless you live in Grimsby, in which case the usual amount of Yakuza. | Image credit: Kaizen Game WorksOnce theyre away, stuff might go wrong, at which point youll get an alert to respond to via the games initially intimidating, but actually pretty simple, mascot job menu. Youve usually got at least a few in-game hours to respond, and when you do youll be whisked off to the livestream of the event where, after a quick intro that sees a mascot host that vaguely reminded me of Michael McIntyre (read: slightly annoying hack) say stuff like Ichigo Love has absolutely ****** it. Youre drafted in to save the mascot by deploying mascot hero cards to deplete the issue/hostile entitys health bar. If you succeed, youll get the full rewards for the job and, if you fail, youll simply get the base rate.So runs the basic cycle of the management side, but as you explore Kaso-Machi and grow the agency, plenty of additional layers are added into the mix to boost the complexity and keep you on your toes to a pretty frenetic degree assuming youre trying to maximise your earnings. Thats certainly something the game gives you impetus to do right out of the gate, as on top of paying your own bills on a regular basis, you have to visit ATMs and send cash to Matriarch Shimazu in order to help her stay one step ahead of the Yakuza knives of Damocles that are hanging over her head following the botched job.The result, especially as youre getting your feet under you, is that your business-running comes with a pretty strong sense of urgency. Youre spending money to grow and keep your boss alive just as quickly as you earn it, and I even ended up ever so slightly in the red at one point. At that stage, the management side of the game maybe feels a bit atmospherically out of step with the other side of Promise Mascot Agency - exploring the sleepy, stylishly run-down town of Kaso-Machi and its generally pretty mountainous surroundings in Michi and Pinkys kei truck. Naturally, it's also your job to unseat the Tory in charge. | Image credit: Kaizen Game WorksIts through exploring that you not only cross off objectives in the main story; Michi and Pinkys unravelling of the mystery that surrounds Kaso-Machis legendary Yakuza-killing curse and its comically corrupt mayors misuse of a government granted rejuvenation fund. Youll also discover a range of different items and tick off tasks to aid you in running the agency. There are townspeople to recruit as mascot hero cards you can then upgrade by completing their radiant quests, which usually involve running around the town collecting five or six of a specific item, stuff to pick up (like new types of mascot merch) and, most importantl, more mascots to add to your weirdo workforce.In order to convince a mascot to join you, youll need to negotiate with them. As I progressed I found that actually offering a good package out of the gate seemed to pay dividends; low-balling them doesn't quite cut it. Welcome to the real world, kids.Every mascot has stats like popularity, motivation, and stamina. While you will naturally boost these just by sending a mascot out on more jobs, making them happier from the beginning means you start that journey further along the road. Plus, I found that offering perks like holiday days actually fits pretty well into the ideal cadence of the game, with mascots taking a 24 hour break that actually boosts their stamina recharge, rather than just being left on the sidelines until theyve recovered.Heres the thing, though. Above all else, youll want to treat your band of employees well, just because of their weird and wonderful personalities. Theres a lovely amount of unique variety in terms of the mascot cast Kaizen and their collaborators have put together, with each one having a three-part life satisfaction journey they go on as you increase your bond with them. All of these are tailored to each mascots diverse personality, but they all roughly revolve around you helping the mascot to achieve a goal thatll improve its life. Of course you do, cat salaryman. | Image credit: Kaizen Game WorksFor example, my favorite mascot, Karoushi - a terrifying black cowl with a face that lives in a haunted tunnel - serves as a metaphor for burnout, and only speaks in grandiose allegorical passages that belong in an Italo Calvino novel. Their story was about overcoming the trauma of working too hard and helping some locals unionise.In keeping with the games theme of keeping promises to help folks achieve their dreams, most of the townspeople you meet also have arcs like this through their town quests. Kaso-Machis an interesting place to explore, with a cool mix of run-down rural vibes and slightly cartoonish spookiness in the form of places like the haunted tunnel which literally treats you to a black and white filter accompanied by creepy noises every time you drive through it.As with the mascots, you can tell pretty much every area and person has had plenty of thought and care put into shaping them and their backstory. Plus, Kaizens done a good job of ensuring the town changes visually as you renovate different neglected areas of it to establish new mascot events spots - with the passive income generated by that being the games best high-cost, high-yield money earner for the agency.One minor hangup is that the games map indicates where you can find every useful item and person in the world by default. This makes sense in terms of the major characters/landmarks, but it does take some sting out of the exploration knowing that, for example, if you trek out to one of the islands surrounding Kaso-Machi, youll find exactly one item. You still have the fun of uncovering what exactly that item is, but the element of mysterys diluted a bit. You can upgrade your old truck so it can take to the skies and the sea, in true Top Gear challenge fashion. | Image credit: Kaizen Game WorksAnother aspect I didnt quite vibe with mechanically was the mini-game by which you deliver mascot merch to different shops around town - another of the games big money-earners. Basically, once you find a merch item out in the world, it gets added to giant arcade claw machines around the map as toys, which you then have to pick up using the painfully slow claw in order to get shipments to distribute.Its a cool concept that fits the games theming perfectly in theory, but in practice, it was the element of gameplay I found by far the most monotonous. Meanwhile, subcontracting mascots in other cities - the third member of PMAs 'here come the big bucks' trio - is a lot more stripped back. You buy access to locations, find the business cards of mascots to man them, and boom, a decent chunk of passive income.There is a point some way through the game where you suddenly seem to go from having lots to do, but also have a constant need for that money, to having lots to do, but much more money than you have stuff to spend it on. By that point, the main storys kicking into high gear, so its nice to not have to worry about grinding as much.As for that main story, how much youll enjoy it comes down to what I mentioned at the start. It helps to be into Yakuza tales that aren't afraid to get a bit silly, but the weirdness is the thing that will likely decide where PMA lands on the ok to great game spectrum for you. For some, the array of genuinely funny and touching moments that surround everything from minor interactions to major plot beats will make this proper cult classic material. For others, the in-your-face wackiness might not mesh with their sense of humour, leaving their verdict in the realm of just fine.Promise Mascot Agencys a good time. Uniquely charming enough that it doesnt fall into the trap of being as dry as Michis ideal Saturday night, but with enough rough edges that itd need to work on itself a bit before it could run for mayor of whichever cursed town all of the truly great games inhabit.Promise Mascot Agency launches on April 10 for PlayStation 5, Nintendo Switch, Microsoft Windows, Xbox Series X and Series S. This review was written using a PC code provided by the developer.

Is it worth the hassle, though?One of the biggest surprises from the recent Switch 2 Direct is that the accompanying Pro Controller will actually come with two new back buttons labelled 'GL' and 'GR'.In addition to a slightly revamped design in which Nintendo took inspiration from the GameCube controller, the new Pro Controller is also seemingly taking a few cues from the likes of the Xbox Elite Controller and PlayStation Dualsense Edge, both of which sport their own customisable back 'paddles'.Read the full article on nintendolife.com

IBM on Monday announced that it acquired Hakkoda, a data and AI consultancy based in New York, for an undisclosed amount. Mohamad Ali, SVP and head of IBMs consulting business, said that the acquisition would further expand IBMs ability to bring consultants and AI to clients, particularly customers in industries like financial services, public sector, and healthcare and life sciences.With Hakkodas data expertise, deep technology partnerships, and asset-centric delivery model, Ali said in a statement, IBM will be even better-positioned to deliver value faster to clients as they transform with AI.IBMs Hakkoda buy comes as the former company continues to ramp up its investments in AI and automation technologies. In February, IBM acquired DataStax, a platform for building AI apps, and the outfit recently finalized its purchase of infrastructure and security automation firm HashiCorp. Its a strategy thats done well for IBM. In Q4 2024, the company, which makes the bulk of its AI income from consulting, recorded its biggest revenue jump in five years sending its stock soaring 10%. In Q4, IBM said that AI bookings and sales stood at over $5 billion inception-to-date.Co-founded in 2021 by ex-Deloitte GM Erik Duffield, Hakkoda helps customers move data to the cloud in particular, the Snowflake data cloud. The startup offers a range of tools to help firms migrate and transform data, as well as products to modernize data from older systems. Prior to its exit, Hakkoda managed to raise $5.6 million in venture capital, according to Crunchbase. Backers include Tercera, Lead Edge Capital, and Casimir Holdings. Duffield said that Hakkodas hundreds of consultants across the U.S., Latin America, India, Europe, and the UK will join IBM Consulting, IBMs consulting division, as part of the acquisition deal.From the beginning, Hakkoda has committed to being in the arena, not observing the greatest transformation in history but shaping it, Duffield said in a press release. IBMs heritage of innovation, their commitment to discovery, and deep partnerships with clients on their most technical challenges [are] a perfect pairing to take Hakkodas industry-focused modern data consulting to the global marketplace.

The Substance delivers body horror like youve never seen before and CGEV is behind some of its wildest, most visceral visual effects. From skin-tearing transformations to impossible regenerations, this is VFX with bite! Vincent Frei The Art of VFX 2025The post The Substance: VFX Breakdown by CGEV appeared first on The Art of VFX.