Within a year, two federal judges declared the tech giant a monopoly in search and ad technology. The tide may be turning for antitrust.

Macworld Apple’s Beats brand has a habit of one-upping its parent company with products that are a little less restrictive, a little less one-size-fits-all, and a little more colorful, while still offering the same Apple quality (and indeed, often the same exact technology). Now, there are official Beats charging cables, and honestly, I’ll probably never buy an Apple-branded one again. A single Beats cable costs the same as Apple’s ($19 for a single USB-C to USB-C cable, USB-A to USB-C cable, or USB-C to Lightning cable), and they have the same specs: USB 2.0 data transfer speeds, charging support up to 60W. They’re probably identical inside. But they’re better in three significant ways. First, they come in colors. Apple’s basic charge cables are only white. The Beats cables come in black, navy, red, and a sort of sandstone color. Color is good! (Some colors are not available in some cable types, though.) Second, they’re longer. Apple’s $19 cable is 1 meter (39.5 inches). The Beats cable is 1.5 meters (59 inches). It makes a big difference. The Beats cable is 50% longer than the Apple-branded one.Foundry Finally, they’re probably a little more reliable. Both cables are braided, which is nice, but the Apple cable goes straight from the connector to the cable while the Beats cable has a little half-inch sleeve. This should help keep it from bending too sharply right next to the connector, which is a primary cause of cables splitting over time. Foundry The Beats cables distinguish themselves in a few other ways. First, you can get the USB-C to USB-C or USB-A to USB-C cables in a two-pack for $35 (but only in black). Apple-branded cables are only sold separately. Also only available in black are neat little 20cm (8 inches) short cables, in USB-A to USB-C, USB-C to USB-C, and USB-C to Lightning. They are still $19 despite the tiny length, but if you plug in a battery pack or portable drive a lot (especially inside a backpack or purse), a very short cable can really reduce clutter. The Apple-branded cables still have their place. If you want really high-power charging support for your laptop, you’ll want to step up to Apple’s 240W cable. Or if you’re moving lots of data between a fast external drive and your Mac, you’ll want a Thunderbolt 4 or Thunderbolt 5 cable. These new Beats cables don’t cover any of that ground. But if all you really need is a good USB cable for charging your iPhone, iPad, MacBook, or headphones and maybe moving around a bit of data on occasion, and you don’t trust third-party cables (of which there are so many), you should go grab the Beats cable over the Apple-branded ones. You can even grab ’em at the Apple Store.

Americans don’t agree on much these days. Yet even at a time when consensus reality seems to be on the verge of collapse, there remains at least one quintessentially modern value we can all still get behind: creativity.  We teach it, measure it, envy it, cultivate it, and endlessly worry about its death. And why wouldn’t we? Most of us are taught from a young age that creativity is the key to everything from finding personal fulfillment to achieving career success to solving the world’s thorniest problems. Over the years, we’ve built creative industries, creative spaces, and creative cities and populated them with an entire class of people known simply as “creatives.” We read thousands of books and articles each year that teach us how to unleash, unlock, foster, boost, and hack our own personal creativity. Then we read even more to learn how to manage and protect this precious resource.  Given how much we obsess over it, the concept of creativity can feel like something that has always existed, a thing philosophers and artists have pondered and debated throughout the ages. While it’s a reasonable assumption, it’s one that turns out to be very wrong. As Samuel Franklin explains in his recent book, The Cult of Creativity, the first known written use of creativity didn’t actually occur until 1875, “making it an infant as far as words go.” What’s more, he writes, before about 1950, “there were approximately zero articles, books, essays, treatises, odes, classes, encyclopedia entries, or anything of the sort dealing explicitly with the subject of ‘creativity.’” This raises some obvious questions. How exactly did we go from never talking about creativity to always talking about it? What, if anything, distinguishes creativity from other, older words, like ingenuity, cleverness, imagination, and artistry? Maybe most important: How did everyone from kindergarten teachers to mayors, CEOs, designers, engineers, activists, and starving artists come to believe that creativity isn’t just good—personally, socially, economically—but the answer to all life’s problems? Thankfully, Franklin offers some potential answers in his book. A historian and design researcher at the Delft University of Technology in the Netherlands, he argues that the concept of creativity as we now know it emerged during the post–World War II era in America as a kind of cultural salve—a way to ease the tensions and anxieties caused by increasing conformity, bureaucracy, and suburbanization. “Typically defined as a kind of trait or process vaguely associated with artists and geniuses but theoretically possessed by anyone and applicable to any field, [creativity] provided a way to unleash individualism within order,” he writes, “and revive the spirit of the lone inventor within the maze of the modern corporation.” Brainstorming, a new method for encouraging creative thinking, swept corporate America in the 1950s. A response to pressure for new products and new ways of marketing them, as well as a panic over conformity, it inspired passionate debate about whether true creativity should be an individual affair or could be systematized for corporate use.INSTITUTE OF PERSONALITY AND SOCIAL RESEARCH, UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA, BERKELEY/THE MONACELLI PRESS I spoke to Franklin about why we continue to be so fascinated by creativity, how Silicon Valley became the supposed epicenter of it, and what role, if any, technologies like AI might have in reshaping our relationship with it.  I’m curious what your personal relationship to creativity was growing up. What made you want to write a book about it? Like a lot of kids, I grew up thinking that creativity was this inherently good thing. For me—and I imagine for a lot of other people who, like me, weren’t particularly athletic or good at math and science—being creative meant you at least had some future in this world, even if it wasn’t clear what that future would entail. By the time I got into college and beyond, the conventional wisdom among the TED Talk register of thinkers—people like Daniel Pink and Richard Florida—was that creativity was actually the most important trait to have for the future. Basically, the creative people were going to inherit the Earth, and society desperately needed them if we were going to solve all of these compounding problems in the world.  On the one hand, as someone who liked to think of himself as creative, it was hard not to be flattered by this. On the other hand, it all seemed overhyped to me. What was being sold as the triumph of the creative class wasn’t actually resulting in a more inclusive or creative world order. What’s more, some of the values embedded in what I call the cult of creativity seemed increasingly problematic—specifically, the focus on self-­realization, doing what you love, and following your passion. Don’t get me wrong—it’s a beautiful vision, and I saw it work out for some people. But I also started to feel like it was just a cover for what was, economically speaking, a pretty bad turn of events for many people.   Staff members at the University of California’s Institute of Personality Assessment and Research simulate a situational procedure involving group interaction, called the Bingo Test. Researchers of the 1950s hoped to learn how factors in people’s lives and environments shaped their creative aptitude.INSTITUTE OF PERSONALITY AND SOCIAL RESEARCH, UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA, BERKELEY/THE MONACELLI PRESS Nowadays, it’s quite common to bash the “follow your passion,” “hustle culture” idea. But back when I started this project, the whole move-fast-and-break-things, disrupter, innovation-economy stuff was very much unquestioned. In a way, the idea for the book came from recognizing that creativity was playing this really interesting role in connecting two worlds: this world of innovation and entrepreneurship and this more soulful, bohemian side of our culture. I wanted to better understand the history of that relationship. When did you start thinking about creativity as a kind of cult—one that we’re all a part of?  Similar to something like the “cult of domesticity,” it was a way of describing a historical moment in which an idea or value system achieves a kind of broad, uncritical acceptance. I was finding that everyone was selling stuff based on the idea that it boosted your creativity, whether it was a new office layout, a new kind of urban design, or the “Try these five simple tricks” type of thing.  You start to realize that nobody is bothering to ask, “Hey, uh, why do we all need to be creative again? What even is this thing, creativity?” It had become this unimpeachable value that no one, regardless of what side of the political spectrum they fell on, would even think to question. That, to me, was really unusual, and I think it signaled that something interesting was happening. Your book highlights midcentury efforts by psychologists to turn creativity into a quantifiable mental trait and the “creative person” into an identifiable type. How did that play out?  The short answer is: not very well. To study anything, you of course need to agree on what it is you’re looking at. Ultimately, I think these groups of psychologists were frustrated in their attempts to come up with scientific criteria that defined a creative person. One technique was to go find people who were already eminent in fields that were deemed creative—writers like Truman Capote and Norman Mailer, architects like Louis Kahn and Eero Saarinen—and just give them a battery of cognitive and psychoanalytic tests and then write up the results. This was mostly done by an outfit called the Institute of Personality Assessment and Research (IPAR) at Berkeley. Frank Barron and Don MacKinnon were the two biggest researchers in that group. Another way psychologists went about it was to say, all right, that’s not going to be practical for coming up with a good scientific standard. We need numbers, and lots and lots of people to certify these creative criteria. This group of psychologists theorized that something called “divergent thinking” was a major component of creative accomplishment. You’ve heard of the brick test, where you’re asked to come up with many creative uses for a brick in a given amount of time? They basically gave a version of that test to Army officers, schoolchildren, rank-and-file engineers at General Electric, all kinds of people. It’s tests like those that ultimately became stand-ins for what it means to be “creative.” Are they still used?  When you see a headline about AI making people more creative, or actually being more creative than humans, the tests they are basing that assertion on are almost always some version of a divergent thinking test. It’s highly problematic for a number of reasons. Chief among them is the fact that these tests have never been shown to have predictive value—that’s to say, a third grader, a 21-year-old, or a 35-year-old who does really well on divergent thinking tests doesn’t seem to have any greater likelihood of being successful in creative pursuits. The whole point of developing these tests in the first place was to both identify and predict creative people. None of them have been shown to do that.  Reading your book, I was struck by how vague and, at times, contradictory the concept of “creativity” was from the beginning. You characterize that as “a feature, not a bug.” How so? Ask any creativity expert today what they mean by “creativity,” and they’ll tell you it’s the ability to generate something new and useful. That something could be an idea, a product, an academic paper—whatever. But the focus on novelty has remained an aspect of creativity from the beginning. It’s also what distinguishes it from other similar words, like imagination or cleverness. But you’re right: Creativity is a flexible enough concept to be used in all sorts of ways and to mean all sorts of things, many of them contradictory. I think I write in the book that the term may not be precise, but that it’s vague in precise and meaningful ways. It can be both playful and practical, artsy and technological, exceptional and pedestrian. That was and remains a big part of its appeal.  The question of “Can machines be ‘truly creative’?” is not that interesting, but the questions of “Can they be wise, honest, caring?” are more important if we’re going to be welcoming [AI] into our lives as advisors and assistants. Is that emphasis on novelty and utility a part of why Silicon Valley likes to think of itself as the new nexus for creativity? Absolutely. The two criteria go together. In techno-solutionist, hypercapitalist milieus like Silicon Valley, novelty isn’t any good if it’s not useful (or at least marketable), and utility isn’t any good (or marketable) unless it’s also novel. That’s why they’re often dismissive of boring-but-important things like craft, infrastructure, maintenance, and incremental improvement, and why they support art—which is traditionally defined by its resistance to utility—only insofar as it’s useful as inspiration for practical technologies. At the same time, Silicon Valley loves to wrap itself in “creativity” because of all the artsy and individualist connotations. It has very self-consciously tried to distance itself from the image of the buttoned-down engineer working for a large R&D lab of a brick-and-mortar manufacturing corporation and instead raise up the idea of a rebellious counterculture type tinkering in a garage making weightless products and experiences. That, I think, has saved it from a lot of public scrutiny. Up until recently, we’ve tended to think of creativity as a human trait, maybe with a few exceptions from the rest of the animal world. Is AI changing that? When people started defining creativity in the ’50s, the threat of computers automating white-collar work was already underway. They were basically saying, okay, rational and analytical thinking is no longer ours alone. What can we do that the computers can never do? And the assumption was that humans alone could be “truly creative.” For a long time, computers didn’t do much to really press the issue on what that actually meant. Now they’re pressing the issue. Can they do art and poetry? Yes. Can they generate novel products that also make sense or work? Sure. I think that’s by design. The kinds of LLMs that Silicon Valley companies have put forward are meant to appear “creative” in those conventional senses. Now, whether or not their products are meaningful or wise in a deeper sense, that’s another question. If we’re talking about art, I happen to think embodiment is an important element. Nerve endings, hormones, social instincts, morality, intellectual honesty—those are not things essential to “creativity” necessarily, but they are essential to putting things out into the world that are good, and maybe even beautiful in a certain antiquated sense. That’s why I think the question of “Can machines be ‘truly creative’?” is not that interesting, but the questions of “Can they be wise, honest, caring?” are more important if we’re going to be welcoming them into our lives as advisors and assistants.  This interview is based on two conversations and has been edited and condensed for clarity. Bryan Gardiner is a writer based in Oakland, California.

The European Union has reportedly postponed fining Apple and Meta over alleged Digital Markets Act violations, specifically so the decision would not affect trade negotiations.The European Union has reportedly postponed fining AppleIn January 2025, it was reported that the EU appeared to have put its planned rulings and fines against Apple on hold. It was partly because key EU staff were being replaced, but also because the European Commission was waiting to assess what the then-new Trump administration would do.Subsequently, it was reported that the EU was planning to drastically reduce its fines against Apple and Meta, because of fears it Trump would impose retaliatory tariffs. Now according to the Wall Street Journal, the EU has delayed fines still further. Continue Reading on AppleInsider | Discuss on our Forums

It's time for another round of curated picks of architecture and design competitions listed recently on Bustler. This week, we are featuring four unique challenges aimed at areas as far-reaching as delivering better quality affordable housing in Denver, a dramatic reinvisioning of the iconic Market Street in San Francisco, innovative strategies for European cities by emerging architectural, urban, and landscape designers, and the chance to be included in the annual AIA Canada Student Design Awards. For the complete directory of newly listed competitions, click here.

Among Sony’s first-party exclusives, Housemarque’s Saros is one of the more intriguing despite how far off its launch. The developer promised more details later this year, and thankfully, that’s not all, as an extended gameplay reveal is also on the cards. The set-up for the title will sound very familiar to Returnal fans. As Arjun Devraj (played by Rahul Kohli), you’re trapped in an endless cycle on Carcosa, looking for someone. Each death causes the world to change, but unlike Returnal, you can find resources that carry over and permanently upgrade your loadout. Arjun will thus become stronger and more capable of tackling Carcosa’s mysteries, including the strange multi-armed figure and the eclipse. Housemarque also promises an “evolving set” of weapons and suit upgrades, though we’ve yet to see much beyond the debut trailer. Saros launches in 2026 for the PS5, so stay tuned for more updates. In the meantime, check out our review for Returnal on PC. Expect our first look at extended gameplay later this year. #HMQ30 #SAROS pic.twitter.com/tpqPlPlzUN— Housemarque (@Housemarque) April 17, 2025

Squirrels, Not Monkeys, May Be the Animal Source of Mpox, Researchers Suggest A preliminary study traces an mpox outbreak in a group of Ivory Coast monkeys to the fire-footed squirrel, indicating the rodent may be a natural reservoir for the virus Lillian Ali - Staff Contributor April 18, 2025 10:52 a.m. Researchers suggest fire-footed rope squirrels might be a "reservoir species" for mpox, capable of harboring and spreading the virus without becoming sick. Here, one is photographed in Kibale National Park, Uganda. David Cook via Flickr under CC BY-NC 2.0 In the Ivory Coast in West Africa, a baby sooty mangabey monkey fell ill. It developed red, pus-filled blisters all over its forehead, chest and legs. The rapidly spreading virus killed the monkey within three days. Over the next months, between January and April 2023, the virus infected about 25 others, or one-third of the group, killing four. These monkeys had mpox, the infection caused by the monkeypox virus, a potentially deadly virus similar to the ones that cause smallpox and cowpox. Mpox gets its name from the lab monkeys in which the disease was first observed in 1958, but scientists say the recent outbreak in Ivory Coast wildlife didn’t start with the baby monkey. Instead, it started with its mother. Or rather, its mother’s dinner: a fire-footed rope squirrel. Researchers from the Helmholtz Institute in Germany have been observing this population of sooty mangabey monkeys in Ivory Coast’s Taï National Park since 2001. When the monkeys began getting sick in 2023, researchers had a unique opportunity to pinpoint the animal source of the outbreak by comparing their wealth of footage and biological data on the monkeys with virus samples they took from other species in the area. Their findings, which are currently awaiting peer review, were published as a preprint in Nature Portfolio this month. Usually, scientists do not start studying disease outbreaks until weeks or months after they’re reported. However, since the monkey population was already being monitored, researchers were able to pinpoint an exact genetic match between the virus found in the monkeys and the virus found in the animal that likely caused it: the fire-footed rope squirrel, a rodent in West Central Africa. “It’s unbelievable how well things fit together,” lead researcher Fabian Leendertz, a wildlife veterinarian at the Helmholtz Institute, tells Nature’s Jane Qiu. Three sooty mangabey monkeys, of the same species that experienced an mpox outbreak in early 2023. Justin Philbois via iNaturalist under CC0 1.0 The researchers went through hundreds of rodent and shrew carcasses to look for mpox infections and found one: the carcass of a squirrel that had died less than three months before the outbreak started. From video footage, they saw the monkeys eat rope squirrels, and fecal samples from the baby monkey’s mother, the first to contain DNA from the virus, revealed she had eaten a squirrel. The mother’s infection was asymptomatic, but the virus to spread throughout the population. According to Nature, the findings offer the first evidence for squirrels transferring the virus to primates. “Exposure to those squirrels is likely responsible for some human mpox outbreaks as well,” says Yap Boum, a biologist at the Africa Centers for Disease Control and Prevention who was not involved with the study, to Science’s Kai Kupferschmidt. Researchers think the squirrel could be a reservoir host for the virus. A reservoir host is an organism in which a pathogen, like a virus, can live and reproduce, usually without getting the host sick. Bats, for example, are prolific reservoir hosts—they’ve been found to harbor Ebola, rabies and coronavirus. However, the complete role of these squirrels in mpox transmission isn’t fully understood. Délia Doreen Djuicy, a disease ecologist at the Pasteur Center of Cameroon, tells Nature that the squirrels could either be a reservoir host or merely a susceptible species in the chain of inter-species infection. So far, she adds, researchers don’t have enough evidence to show that the rope squirrels can carry and shed the virus without becoming sick. Leandre Murhula Masirika, who helped discover a new mpox strain last year but was not involved in the new research, tells Maeve Cullinan of the Telegraph that rope squirrels are “the most probable species to be the reservoir of the disease.” “The rope squirrels that I have tested always have antibodies for mpox,” he adds. “Historically, nearly all the outbreaks of clade 1 mpox in Africa have been in areas where people commonly eat rope squirrels.” Get the latest stories in your inbox every weekday.

Kazu Gomi, president and CEO of NTT Research, has a big view of the technology world from his perch in Silicon Valley.Read More

Assassin's Creed Shadows' success shows that the threat of negative campaigns is overblown | Opinion As solid sales numbers for the new Assassin’s Creed stack up, other companies should take note of how little the manufactured controversy around it mattered Image credit: Ubisoft Opinion by Rob Fahey Contributing Editor Published on April 18, 2025 It’s been a fairly grim few years for Ubisoft – buffeted by allegations of an abusive culture, plagued by dismal stock market performance, and seemingly unable to turn out the kind of hit titles that would silence its detractors, the company has seen its strategy and its future openly called into question. Late 2024 was a low point. Star Wars Outlaws underperformed commercially and the company's other great hope for that period, Assassin's Creed Shadows, was pushed back into 2025 after becoming the target of an online outrage campaign over its choice of protagonist characters. Consequently, there have probably been some heartfelt sighs of relief at the company as the sales figures for Shadows finally started to roll in over the past few weeks. We don't have precise numbers yet, but while Shadows doesn’t seem set to break any records, nor is it doing badly by any reasonable measure, and in the US at least, it's reportedly running in second place in the annual sales charts thus far. It's trailing only Capcom's immensely successful Monster Hunter Wilds. It's hard to overstate how important this is for Ubisoft. The Assassin's Creed franchise sometimes flies under the radar a little compared to other powerhouse franchises, because it isn’t a bankable annual event like Call of Duty or a complete sales juggernaut like Grand Theft Auto. Nonetheless, it's a franchise whose mainline entries have the kind of broad consumer appeal many other IP holders would sell their grandmothers to attain. The last major entry in the series, 2020's Assassin's Creed Valhalla, comfortably clocked up over a billion dollars in revenue, and the franchise overall has sold over 200 million games, putting it in roughly the same bracket as Final Fantasy or Resident Evil for lifetime franchise sales. It's not quite big enough to be the single tentpole IP that holds up all of Ubisoft, but it's the closest thing the company has to that. If the Assassin’s Creed franchise was actually to lose its mojo, it's honestly hard to imagine what Ubisoft's commercial path forwards would look like. One of the biggest problems is that such manufactured controversy is incredibly random in nature Assassin's Creed Shadows was therefore a make-or-break title – and before the delay and the manufactured controversy, it looked like a shoo-in. Fans had been clamouring for the heavily ninja-inspired series to do an instalment set in Japan for years; Assassin's Creed Shadows is, on paper at least, a perfect example of giving your fanbase precisely what they want most. We don’t yet know how Shadows has stacked up to Ubisoft's internal sales expectations, but the positive buzz around the sales data and the generally positive responses to the game from consumers suggest that it's done what it was supposed to do – namely, proved that the AC franchise still has gas in the tank at a crucial juncture for the company. The fact that we even need to have this conversation ("they set an Assassin's Creed game in Japan and it sold well" would have felt like the most staggeringly obvious thing only a few years ago) is largely down to the aforementioned controversy – a very intense "anti-woke" campaign against the game, which was sparked off when it was revealed that the playable protagonists would be a Black man and a woman. As is generally the case with these things, the initial racist and misogynistic backlash was quickly veiled in more broad-based concern trolling, alleging that Shadows was disrespectful or derogatory towards Japanese culture and religion in general. Things got very silly, very quickly. A historian who consulted on the game's depiction of its Black protagonist, Yasuke – a historically attested figure who has been featured uncontroversially in plenty of media over the years – was targeted by online harassment and it was falsely reported that he had been dismissed by his university. Twitter found itself home to a steady influx of accounts claiming to be outraged Japanese gamers who happened to post in fluent English and very obviously Google Translated Japanese. A few enterprising Japanese right-wing influencers did try to make hay from the controversy, albeit with limited success; one widely shared video in which a creator raged about the game allowing him to smash up a Shinto shrine was widely ridiculed by commenters, who pointed out rather reasonably that the creator himself was the one smashing the virtual shrine and getting mad about his own actions. Image credit: Ubisoft The campaign's high water mark came when a lawmaker in Japan's Diet asked the Prime Minister about defacing shrines in the game during an open question session. The questioner, Kada Hiroyuki, is a relatively unknown one-term Councillor whose marginal seat is at severe risk in the upcoming July election, so it was a fairly transparent grab for attention. PM Ishiba's answer entirely sidestepped any mention of the game to focus instead on some recent cases where real-life shrines were vandalised. Still, it was translated (or in some cases, wilfully mistranslated) as a triumph: get woke, go so broke that they'll ask time-wasting questions about you in the Japanese Diet, I guess. Storied game director and exceptional Twitter poster Kamiya Hideki, perhaps unsurprisingly, had the most level-headed take on the whole affair, pointing out in essence that when a fuss like this is being made by a relatively small group of extremely vocal people, it means little to a large majority of ordinary folk who will simply shrug their shoulders and quietly enjoy the game. The sales figures now trickling in suggest that he was essentially right. Incidentally, in the supposedly incensed and insulted Japanese market, physical sales of the game are sitting at around 25,000 – far from a smash hit, but reasonably solid for a PS5 launch in that territory. Back of the envelope calculations suggest that total sales in Japan are probably broadly in line with 2020's Valhalla, taking into account the massive switchover from physical to digital sales that's happened in that timeframe. For comparison, Monster Hunter Wilds sold less than half as many physical copies as 2018's MH World in its first week, but still sold significantly more copies overall once digital is factored in. These kinds of controversies around games and other kinds of media have become commonplace in recent years, and many companies struggle to figure out how much attention to pay to them, or how best to respond. One of the biggest problems is that such manufactured controversy is incredibly random in nature; companies trying to figure out how to avoid being the target of this kind of hate campaign are essentially setting out on an entirely fruitless quest, because there's little rhyme or reason to the special alignment of planets that turn a specific game or company into the right-wing punching bag of the week. Completely excluding whole swathes of ethnicities and identities from your game entirely is potentially far more commercially damaging than any online hate campaign might be – and even then, the stochastic finger of internet outrage may still end up pointing at some member of your team, some seemingly innocuous public statement, or even something entirely made up from whole cloth. Stick to your guns and release the best game you can – it's not just AC Shadows that shows this to be an effective approach The triggers for these outbursts only seem obvious in hindsight. I've seen people argue that Ubisoft was deliberately provoking a response by choosing Black and female protagonists, but when the company chose to use Yasuke as a protagonist, it was doing so off the back of well-received depictions of him in games like Nioh and Samurai Warriors, a highly rated Netflix anime series based on his life, and his role as inspiration for the hugely popular Afro Samurai anime series. None of those had caused so much as the barest whisper of controversy. Yasuke seemed like a safe bet, not to mention a perfect figure for the narrative, being that he was a total outsider who moved through some of the most interesting events of Japanese history. (As for the long history of popular, uncontroversial depictions of female ninjas, where to even start?) Wrong place, wrong time, wrong side of bed to get out of; these reactions are impossible to predict, and trying to design games "defensively" to avoid people on the Internet getting mad at you is likely to cause far more harm in the long run than the ravings of any number of sock puppet accounts could. Moreover, Ubisoft seems to have set out a reasonably decent playbook for how to deal with this sort of campaign when it does happen. The situation around Shadows was exacerbated by the delay to the game, which was interpreted as panic on Ubisoft's side and a sniff of blood in the water for its detractors. In reality, any panic was entirely down to Star Wars Outlaws' underperformance, not anything happening online. Shadows was delayed not to remove or change content that its detractors deemed objectionable, but rather to ensure the game was polished and high quality at launch, which is pretty much the best response there is to such bad-faith criticisms. Stick to your guns and release the best game you can – it's not just Assassin's Creed Shadows that shows this to be an effective approach. Aggressively anti-woke campaigns against games like Baldur's Gate 3 have even tried to turn on a dime and claim that the game is actually on their side of the argument when it became clear that it was immensely successful and popular. That may not fully happen to AC Shadows, which is unlikely to be quite the commercial juggernaut or the critical darling that BG3 was, but the lesson is clear – just as Kamiya suggested, a critical mass of ordinary people playing and enjoying a game will easily overpower the reach and volume of a small bad-faith negative campaign.

If you didn’t catch Mythic Quest’s series finale when it first debuted last month, there’s a chance you may never be able to see the episode as it originally was. Shortly after Mythic Quest’s fourth season and its Side Quest spinoff hit Apple TV Plus, the streamer announced that it was cancelling the series. The news came as a surprise given how “Heaven and Hell” — the open-ended finale — implied that Mythic Quest might return for a fifth season. And there were so many unresolved plotlines that the sudden cancellation meant that Mythic Quest would always feel incomplete.  Apple seemed to understand that last point when it announced its plan to debut an “updated” version of “Heaven and Hell” meant to tie up all of the series loose ends. The episode went live today, and it does deal with some of Mythic Quest’s big cliffhangers. But in addition to dropping the updated episode, Apple confirmed to The Verge today that it has also removed the original cut of “Heaven and Hell” from its platform entirely. You can kind of understand why Apple would want to direct viewers towards Mythic Quest’s proper ending. But the move smacks of revisionist history and streamersâ … Read the full story at The Verge.