Cascadeur has announced that the new Cascadeur 2025.1 AI tool ‘Inbetweening’ automatically generates smooth, natural animation between two poses. Also included in the Cascadeur 2025.1 update: Improved AutoPosing: Ensures greater stability and improved pelvis control. Improved AutoPhysics: Improved original pose preservation via Geometrical Constraints logic and a new slider for controlling the Physics Corrector. Upgraded Ragdoll System: New interaction with characters and props and support for custom Kinematic mesh colliders. New GLTF/GLB Import Format & FBX Improvements: Extended compatibility with Blender, Daz3d, and other software. New Right-Click Context Menu: Right-clicking now opens a menu for setting the pivot and accessing other functions. Can be reverted to the old behavior in viewport input settings. For a complete list of changes, check out the release notes. Cascadeur 2025.1 is now available with both free and paid download options. Check out the new showcase video now: Source: Cascadeur Journalist, antique shop owner, aspiring gemologist—L'Wren brings a diverse perspective to animation, where every frame reflects her varied passions.

Dake Wells is a Missouri-based architecture firm with offices in Kansas City and Springfield. Its early commissions were K–12 schools and higher-education buildings, and it hasn’t looked back. Firm cofounders Brandon Dake and Andrew Wells met at a previous office more than 20 years ago; the pair decided to go out on their own in 2004. “We were both owners and minority owners in another firm, and we had signed a two-year noncompete contract. The K–12 and higher-ed market was something we could confidently get into without violating that contract,” Wells told AN. “So those were the first projects we went after, but we really started out doing anything we could get our hands on.” It worked: In 2023, the office was recognized with AN’s Best of Practice Award in the Architect (Medium Firm)—Midwest category. In 2018, architect Dan Maginn joined Dake Wells after a tenure in Kansas City running a separate office. Today, Wells and Dake oversee the Springfield office, while Maginn helms the Kansas City address. Maginn described the firm as “one office with two doors.” Wells implied that the distance subtly helps: “We’re only about two and a half hours apart, but we think about our practice as one thing that serves a broad geographic area,” a basket that includes the Ozarks, one of the most impoverished parts of the U.S. “We have a connection to rural projects,” Wells said. “Whether the context is urban, suburban, or rural, in every project we pay close attention to the community while trying to go above and beyond their expectations.” Jarrett Middle School (Gayle Babcock/Architectural Imageworks) Jarrett Middle School 2023 Matthew Thornton is a project architect at Dake Wells who has worked for the firm for well over a decade. Not long ago, Thornton was given the opportunity to embark on a project that “hit close to home,” as they say: He was the project lead for Jarrett Middle School, which his children currently attend. The project consolidated multiple smaller middle schools throughout Springfield into one location. It was built in a single-family suburban neighborhood, so the challenge was packing lots of program into a large volume without making something that stood out like a sore thumb. Architects at Dake Wells tucked the building into an existing hillside, taking advantage of the site’s natural topography. They also had fun with the facade, incorporating Jarrett Middle School’s mascot, a Trojan, into wall art that is visible from the street. Thornton said whenever he picks up his family from Jarrett Middle School, he checks out the fins that make up the facade, without trying to embarrass the kids. “Maybe in a few years they’ll think it’s cool that Dad designed their school,” Thornton said. “But for now they’re still in their ‘Dad’s embarrassing’ phase.” Innovation Lab at Missouri University of Science & Technology (Gayle Babcock/Architectural Imageworks) Innovation Lab 2024 The Missouri University of Science & Technology (S&T) is a top-notch regional institution that has graduated its fair share of astronauts: Sandra Magnus, Janet L. Kavandi, Thomas Akers, and other NASA scientists, to name a few. The University of Missouri satellite in Rolla, a city approximately midway between St. Louis and Springfield, caters to mostly rural agricultural students, and it recently earned Carnegie Classification®, meaning it’s one of the best research universities in the U.S. today. Missouri S&T now has a gleaming new research center designed by Dake Wells, Innovation Lab. The lab building is front and center in a new part of S&T, the Arrival District, meant to be the heart of the campus. Dake Wells designed a structure that stands out as an identifiable landmark. The facade bends and folds while incorporating materials that nod to the institution’s history; it’s meant to suggest a vertical projection map of a silver mine. “The institution began as a School of Mines, which was all about geology and metallurgy,” Wells said. “It also had one of the earliest ceramics programs, so materials like terra-cotta and brick became things we wanted to explore.” Autism and Neurodiversity Center (Courtesy Dake Wells Architecture) Autism and Neurodiversity Center 2025 The town of West Plains, Missouri, in Howell County, is a place where 23 percent of the population lived below the poverty line in 2022, more than double the recent national poverty rate of 11.1 percent. Dake Wells helped deliver a new center there that caters specifically to college students with autism and other neurodiverse individuals, while filling a specific need for the region. The Autism and Neurodiversity Center broke ground in 2023, and it completed construction early this year. The 9,300-square-foot facility is located on the Missouri State University–West Plains campus, approximately 100 miles east of Springfield. Its design focus is on the sensory environment. “This campus serves one of the poorest congressional districts in the country,” Wells said of MSU–West Plains. “It’s mostly commuter students from rural areas. The idea for this program was to provide for students that graduate from high school with autism a way for them to continue their education. There are just not many programs out there that do this sort of thing. It also offers a curriculum for those who want to be caregivers and educators for students with autism.” Judith Enyeart Reynolds Performing Arts Complex (Courtesy Dake Wells Architecture) Judith Enyeart Reynolds Performing Arts Complex 2022– One of Dake Wells’s many ongoing projects is the Judith Enyeart Reynolds Performing Arts Center, which entered construction last year at Missouri State University’s (MSU) main campus in Springfield. It sits on the campus’s southern edge, which is a major east-west thoroughfare. It replaces an existing building, Craig Hall, located between the football field and a retro Brutalist building from the 1970s. The office’s design for the center responds to these contextual signals by making an architectural statement. University officials have called it MSU’s new “front porch” for its Grand Street entryway. “The project, at least programmatically, is relatively simple,” Wells said. “It’s a new black box theater with a lobby, rehearsal spaces for dancing, acting, and performance, while also some smaller editing rooms, and other uses.” Keeping in line with the building’s performing arts usage, Dake Wells looked at the work of Bauhaus artist and choreographer Oskar Schlemmer, whose “slat dance” inspired so many 20th-century artists. “The building is this sort of abstraction,” Wells added, “which is ultimately about accentuating movement.”

This house in Canterbury, Connecticut, is known as the Turnpike House and dates to the early 19th century. A great example of a Federal style residence, the symmetrical, five-bay home exhibits pair chimneys, multi-light double-hung windows, and an elaborate center entry with sidelights and fanlight transom. The house was built along the Windham Turnpike (now Connecticut Route 14), which was an early toll road established in 1795. Behind the main block of the house is a squat gambrel-roofed ell, that is believed to be made from an older house that previously stood on this site, perhaps dating as early as 1745. According to tradition, this early house, which was also at one time supposedly used as a jail, was the home of Rev. Dr. James Coggswell when he ran a school for boys in Canterbury. One of his pupils at that school was Benedict Arnold, the infamous turncoat.

The Titan X Trifold AirTag wallet packs value and function. The best? It's cheaper than Ridge, and 20% off for first-time customers.

Looking for help with today's New York Times Wordle? Here are hints, clues and commentary to help you solve today's Wordle and sharpen your guessing game.

Editor's take: Modern PC peripherals are jam-packed with features and customization options, so they usually require bloated software tools to express their full potential. Corsair, one of the worst offenders in the bulky software business, is now offering an alternative – at least when it comes to updating a device's firmware. Corsair recently introduced a web-based utility for installing newer firmware versions for PC peripherals. The Firmware Update Utility allows users to "effortlessly" update a device's microcode using a browser, eliminating the need to install complex companion software. Corsair Vice President Tobias Brinkmann said they developed the new tool in response to customer feedback. The web-based installer is lightweight and flexible – though accessing a device's low-level hardware over the internet might sound counterintuitive to many. Corsair already offers its iCUE software suite for customizing keyboards, mice, and other compatible gear, including RGB lighting effects. The last time I updated iCUE to tweak the lighting on my Corsair K70 Lux mechanical keyboard (Cherry MX Brown switches), the installer was a hefty 430MB – so it's safe to assume the software has only gotten more bloated since. Those looking to keep their device's firmware up-to-date will likely never force themselves to suffer the iCUE ordeal. The new web-based tool lets customers access the latest firmware directly from Corsair servers. It even has an option to register via email and get notifications when a new firmware version is available. Corsair describes the firmware update tool as convenient, accessible, and portable – so feel free to give it a shot if you're comfortable letting a web browser mess with your hardware. The company shared a list of currently supported devices and promised to add new and existing peripherals over time. Eventually, the web tool might get additional features, too, meaning the bloat will remain on your browser instead of your computer. // Related Stories The Firmware Update Utility currently works with select Chromium-based browsers – Chrome, Edge, and Opera – but doesn't support Firefox or Safari yet. PC World notes that it can detect connected devices and check for available firmware updates. Still, installing firmware directly from a web app feels strange, no matter how convenient it sounds.

Every buyer has an email address, but with inboxes overflowing, the challenge for marketers isn’t just reaching an audience but engaging them effectively. For demand gen emails, this means capturing your reader’s interest and driving them to take action through compelling copy, high-value offers and concise CTAs – all with the goal of moving prospects into the sales funnel.  Fortunately, email marketing is a democratic system. As Jay Schwedelson, CEO and Founder of Subjectline.com, GURU Media Hub and Outcome Media, puts it: “… the inbox is an equal playing field … you have the same exact space as Apple does, as IBM does, as Salesforce does, as the NFL does.” Each business has an equal opportunity to make an impact.  With this in mind, the task at hand becomes creating meaningful, relevant and scalable email campaigns that stand out in a sea of sameness. Let’s break down the core elements of an email and the proven tactics to craft compelling, high-performing messaging that feels personal, even in a 1-to-many environment.  Subject line: The first impression  Subject lines single-handedly determine whether your email is opened or ignored. You can have the best body copy, CTA and visuals, but none will matter if the recipient never opens the email.  Before writing an email subject line (or any email copy really), it’s important to clearly identify “who” you’re talking to – a process most often done through audience segmentation. This ensures you’re delivering a relevant message to the right audience.   “The sooner you can tell somebody who they are, the quicker it is that they want to engage.”   — Jay Schwedelson, The Anatomy of a Killer Demand Gen Email  Marketers can improve their subject lines by telling recipients how they are segmented. Use data points like job function, company, company size, industry and more to craft subject lines that are tailored to your audience segments.   Examples of using audience segmentation information to personalize email subject lines  Source: Outcome Media  The once clever but now basic approach of including a recipient’s name in the subject line isn’t cutting it anymore. Good personalization is about telling the recipient who they are, at scale. As much as marketers would love to write a personalized, 1:1 email every time, it’s just not realistic.   The challenge is to bring the same level of personalization to a 1:many message. Even as AI becomes more capable of supporting personalization efforts and marketers become more technologically savvy, the perfect solution hasn’t been found – yet. But there are several strategies out there to increase readability and open rate.   B2B subject line tactics: Last 90-days open rate increase  Source: Outcome Media  According to Jay and research his team ran at Outcome Media, there are many subject line tactics that can improve open rates, but these are the top four:   Capitalizing the entire first word – In a crowded inbox, this draws immediate attention to your subject line. For example, “NEW: 2025’s Funniest Marketing Campaigns So Far” is more visually striking than a subject line written in sentence-case.” is more visually striking than subject line written in sentence-case.  Placing brackets around the first word or phrase – Brackets provide context to your subject line in a concise way, such as “[Webinar] Why Classic Content Captivates Audiences.” In this example, the reader immediately has the crucial details from the subject line alone.  Having a number be the first character – Numbers make the subject line of the email digestible. For instance, “Three B2B Video Trends Marketers Should Watch,” sets clear expectations for the reader in a compelling way.  Using less than three words – Short subject lines create intrigue and cut through the inbox clutter. For example, “Last Chance,” “Exclusive” or “You’re Invited.”  Take the tactics above, apply them to your email marketing program and test to see what is successful for you.    Event email promotions: First word of subject line open rates drop by:  Source: Outcome Media  While there are strategies to employ, there are also words and phrases Jay recommends to avoid. Take words like “learn,” “discover” and “join” for example. Did somebody say lackluster, drab and just overdone? You might as well have. Starting your email subject lines with overused words or phrases like these can depress email open rates.   To keep your emails fresh, perform an audit of your past subject lines to spot patterns in word choice that increase open rates and those that decrease engagement. A/B testing can help you further identify what words resonate best with your audience. When in doubt, swap in more action-oriented, curiosity-driven language that feels timely and specific to your audience.  And finally, don’t be afraid to be bold. Some marketers hesitate to personalize too much, fearing they might come off as “creepy.” But the key is relevance. If your email references past behavior, like website activity, or details from a form they filled out, such as industry, most consumers will see the personalization as relevant rather than intrusive.   Content and offers: Provide value  Once your email is opened, it’s time to prove it was worth it to your reader by providing them value. A compelling offer or engaging content is what keeps readers interested. Take into account what offers or content formats drive the most engagement from your audience in emails, according to Schwedelson.  To do this, analyze past email performance to see which content types and formats resonate most with your audience, closely looking at click-through-rates to identify what drives the highest engagement.  Email content/offers ranked by percent increase in click-through vs. generic product offer   Source: Outcome Media  According to Jay and the research his team ran at Outcome Media, the top five email content formats that garner the most clicks are: Top # list  – This format promises a structured and digestible way to gain insights. An asset titled “Top 50 Content Marketing Brands of 2024” instantly sparks curiosity and sets expectations for readers for what they’ll get from the content.  “Most read” content – If a recipient’s peers are engaging with content, they’ll likely assume it will provide value for them too. Consider an offer like “Our most read article this month.” This signals credibility and compels the reader to be in the know about what everyone else is reading.  Checklist – Similar to a “top # list,” checklists are tactical and practical, making them highly appealing to professionals. Take “ESG Content Strategy: An Essential Checklist for the Reflective Marketer” for example. This tells the reader exactly what to expect and delivers immediate value.  On-demand video – Videos are a top format for B2B and B2C and marketers because they are engaging and require minimal effort from the audience, especially if they can watch it whenever they want.  Free guide – An offer like “Download the Free Guide: Designing a Comprehensive Intent Data Strategy” implies value with no cost or risk, increasing the likelihood of a click.  Increase in registration rate in head-to-head test of “webinar” vs. “alternate name”  Source: Outcome Media  Finally, experiment with how you frame your content. For example, does a “Insider Session” sound more exciting than a “Webinar”? In the case of Schwedelson’s research, it did. Although this feels like a small change, it can make all the difference in email conversions. “If email doesn’t work for you, it’s because you’re not looking at the little things. This is what matters.  — Jay Schwedelson, The Anatomy of a Killer Demand Gen Email  To find what resonates best with your audience, run A/B tests on subject lines, headlines, body copy and CTAs. Split your audience into test groups and track open rates, click-through rates and conversions to see which wording drives the most engagement.  Call to action: Seal the deal  Your call to action is the bridge between the email, content and connecting with your audience. Let’s dig into a few ways to get your audience to cross the bridge and click.  One effective tactic is directly referring to the reader in the first person. Take, for example, an email with the CTA “Register” vs. “Save my spot.” The second option is more compelling for the reader because it creates a sense of ownership with their click.  “When your call-to-action buttons are written in first person, believe it or not, it will lift your click-through rates by over 28%.”  — Jay Schwedelson, The Anatomy of a Killer Demand Gen Email  Next, don’t shy away from long(er) CTAs. Full-sentence CTAs can be more effective than one-word commands. Consider the difference between “Download” and “I want top HR tips.” The ladder speaks directly to the audience and feels more conversational (bonus points for personalization).   The Moral of the Story: Test, Test, Test  What works for others might not be best for your audience. The key is to continuously test, reiterate and optimize. Take it from Jay, “Don’t ever be nervous about testing something that doesn’t go well. Because who cares? Move on to the next one.”  By focusing on meaningful personalization, refining your subject lines, crafting compelling offers and using conversion-driving CTAs, you can build high-performing email campaigns to engage your audience and spur results.  For more insights on how to supercharge your email marketing, watch The Anatomy of a Killer Demand Gen Email. 

Your upgrade with gaming PC deals won’t matter if you’re still stuck on an outdated display. If your budget’s already running low, don’t worry because you can still get a solid screen for an affordable price — take the Dell G2524H gaming monitor. It’s available for only $170 as part of a clearance sale from Dell, for savings of $80 on its original price of $250. You’re going to have to hurry if you want this 25-inch gaming monitor though, as once stocks are gone, we’re not sure if you’ll get another chance at this bargain. The Dell G2524H isn’t going to challenge the specifications and features of the best gaming monitors, but it checks most of the boxes that gamers should be looking for after consulting our computer monitor buying guide. The size of 25 inches is within our recommended range, and Full HD resolution will let you appreciate the graphics of the best PC games. The monitor also comes with a 280Hz refresh rate and a 0.5ms response time, which are both very nice for a relatively affordable model. You’ll enjoy sharp details, smooth animations, and fast reaction times when you’re playing on the Dell G2524H gaming monitor. The ultra-thin bezels on three sides of the Dell G2524H gaming monitor reduces distractions so you can focus on your gaming, and its support for Nvidia’s G-Sync and AMD’s FreeSync Premium means you won’t run into screen tearing or stuttering. The monitor also comes with ComfortView Plus technology that filters blue light emissions and an adjustable stand, so you can keep playing for hours without straining your eyes and neck. Related You don’t have to spend hundreds of dollars on monitor deals to get a decent display for your PC gaming setup, as there are options like the Dell G2524H gaming monitor. From its original price of $250, it’s down to just $170 following an $80 discount from an ongoing clearance sale from Dell. You’ll need to be quick with your purchase if you’re interested though, as once this offer for the Dell G2524H gaming monitor expires, there’s only a slim chance that you’ll get another crack at it in the near future. Editors’ Recommendations

At 11, she still goes bike-riding with me and lets me hold her hand. Why would I want her to hold a phone instead?

The museum has undergone a thoughtful reinstallation of its art, maintaining its trademark intimacy while emphasizing connections to the history of the institution and its founder.