Senior Software Engineer, Game ServicesBlizzard EntertainmentIrvine California 92618 United States of America1 hour agoApplyTeam Name:Battle.net & Online ProductsJob Title:Senior Software Engineer, Game ServicesRequisition ID:R025190Job Description:Are you a motivated and experienced Senior Software Engineer interested in developing social features that impact many games across all of Blizzard?Game Service is dedicated to delivering a high-performance, large-scale distributed system that provides essential game features for all titles on the Battle.net platform. These features encompass lobbies, leaderboards, matchmaking, along with engaging social features that connect millions of players both within and outside of games. Additionally, Game Service develops the edge servers, SDKs, and game client samples to enhance the overall gaming experience on the Battle.net platform.Our mission is to empower players with the facilities to engage with one another, to create the best interactive player experience worldwide.This role is anticipated to be a hybrid work position, with some work on-site and some work-from-home. The potential home studio for this role is Irvine, CA.Responsibilities:Design, development, and maintenance of large-scale distributed systemsImplement features in SDKs that are used in all the games that are integrated with the Battle.net platformCreate unit and integration test code to validate service reliabilityWrite API documentation for consumption by game developers and other integratorsParticipate in on-call rotation to rapidly resolve live incidents related to our systemsCoordinate with embedded and external teamsTroubleshoot and debug issues with our live and in-development servicesRequirements:5 years of professional experience with software development in C++Experience building high-quality software and protocol and API designStrong data-structure, logic, and algorithm skillsExcellent communication skillsBonus:A degree in computer science, or a related fieldProduction quality engineering experience with C++17 or laterWorking knowledge of MySql , Cassandra, Redis, or related relational and NoSQL databasesPrior development work on distributed systems and client/server architecturesExperience in Cloud development and infrastructureEnthusiastic about supporting a live always-on serviceSkilled in Linux development, GDB debugging, and command line toolsYour PlatformBest known for iconic video game universes including Warcraft®, Overwatch®, Diablo®, and StarCraft®, Blizzard Entertainment, Inc. ( www.blizzard.com ), a division of Activision Blizzard, which was acquired by Microsoft (NASDAQ: MSFT), is a premier developer and publisher of entertainment experiences. Blizzard Entertainment has created some of the industry’s most critically acclaimed and genre-defining games over the last 30 years, with a track record that includes multiple Game of the Year awards. Blizzard Entertainment engages tens of millions of players around the world with titles available on PC via Battle.net®, Xbox, PlayStation, Nintendo Switch, iOS, and Android .Our WorldActivision Blizzard, Inc., is one of the world's largest and most successful interactive entertainment companies and is at the intersection of media, technology and entertainment. We are home to some of the most beloved entertainment franchises including Call of Duty®, World of Warcraft®, Overwatch®, Diablo®, Candy Crush ™ and Bubble Witch™. Our combined entertainment network delights hundreds of millions of monthly active users in 196 countries, making us the largest gaming network on the planet !Our ability to build immersive and innovative worlds is only enhanced by diverse teams working in an inclusive environment. We aspire to have a culture where everyone can thrive in order to connect and engage the world through epic entertainment. We provide a suite of benefits that promote physical, emotional and financial well-being for ‘Every World’ - we’ve got our employees covered !The videogame industry and therefore our business is fast-paced and will continue to evolve. As such, the duties and responsibilities of this role may be changed as directed by the Company at any time to promote and support our business and relationships with industry partners .We love hearing from anyone who is enthusiastic about changing the games industry. Not sure you meet all qualifications ? Let us decide! Research shows that women and members of other under-represented groups tend to not apply to jobs when they think they may not meet every qualification, when, in fact, they often do! We are committed to creating a diverse and inclusive environment and strongly encourage you to apply .We are committed to working with and providing reasonable assistance to individuals with physical and mental disabilities. If you are a disabled individual requiring an accommodation to apply for an open position, please email your request to accommodationrequests@activisionblizzard.com . General employment questions cannot be accepted or processed here. Thank you for your interest .We are an equal opportunity employer and value diversity at our company. We do not discriminate on the basis of race, religion, color, national origin, gender, sexual orientation, gender identity, age, marital status, veteran status, or disability status, among other characteristics.RewardsWe provide a suite of benefits that promote physical, emotional and financial well-being for ‘Every World’ - we’ve got our employees covered! Subject to eligibility requirements, the Company offers comprehensive benefits including:Medical, dental, vision, health savings account or health reimbursement account, healthcare spending accounts, dependent care spending accounts, life and AD&D insurance, disability insurance;401(k) with Company match, tuition reimbursement, charitable donation matching;Paid holidays and vacation, paid sick time, floating holidays, compassion and bereavement leaves, parental leave;Mental health & wellbeing programs, fitness programs, free and discounted games, and a variety of other voluntary benefit programs like supplemental life & disability, legal service, ID protection, rental insurance, and others;If the Company requires that you move geographic locations for the job, then you may also be eligible for relocation assistance.Eligibility to participate in these benefits may vary for part time and temporary full-time employees and interns with the Company. You can learn more by visiting https://www.benefitsforeveryworld.com/ .In the U.S., the standard base pay range for this role is $101,000.00 - $186,754.00 Annual. These values reflect the expected base pay range of new hires across all U.S. locations. Ultimately, your specific range and offer will be based on several factors, including relevant experience, performance, and work location. Your Talent Professional can share this role’s range details for your local geography during the hiring process. In addition to a competitive base pay, employees in this role may be eligible for incentive compensation. Incentive compensation is not guaranteed. While we strive to provide competitive offers to successful candidates, new hire compensation is negotiable. Create Your Profile — Game companies can contact you with their relevant job openings. Apply

During Project Reviews as a consultant for the Customer Success team, I often work with customers that create game-switching applications. These applications have one main menu or theme menu, presenting multiple choices of games for the player to choose. In those setups, the main concerns are how to ensure that the time between switching games is as short as possible and how to ensure optimal performance across the games. In this blog post we will explore different approaches based on project needs as well as some best practices that can be useful for any game environment, with or without a game-switching setup.When planning for a multi-application environment–whether for gaming, entertainment, or industrial simulation–the most important decision to make is how to manage game executables. There are many factors that can influence this decision:How many games will the platform handle?How big are the games?Are the games made with the same Unity versions? What are the application's bottlenecks?Other factors are target hardware, memory and CPU, and disk speed (SSD vs HDD vs SD Card).Answering these questions and deciding how to handle executables is crucial to understand whether we need separate executables for each game; one shared executable for multiple games, or a combination of both to ensure the applications perform optimally.Having multiple executables is a great option to handle games that are made with different Unity versions. With this approach it’s possible to reduce the time to switch between games by caching the executable in the memory, and leaving each instance in the background. However, keeping all executables in the memory is not always the best choice since it can be straining on memory. It should be avoided in cases where the individual games have a higher memory footprint, and/or when there are many games in the game switching application.To ease memory constraint, it is possible for games to share a single executable. The games can be in a single Unity project, or each have their own project, as long as the games share the same Unity version. Since Unity 2022 LTS in Windows it’s possible to use the -datafolder argument to pass a variable path via command line ( -datafolder ), specifying the selected games data folder in order to switch change. One potential disadvantage of this approach is slower game switching times; therefore it’s important to follow loading best practices to reduce this drawback.No matter the nature of the game we’re developing or on which platform, it’s important to spend as little time as possible from the moment of game selection until it’s fully loaded on the screen. This goal becomes particularly important for game switching applications.A great way to handle loading is by using Addressables. With Addressables, contents are downloaded and released on a need basis. This deferred loading strategy is the most efficient way to reduce load times for games since it limits the amount of data that has to be loaded during initial startup. Furthermore it can help prevent any CPU background activities related to background games, which can contribute to CPU bottlenecks. Addressables: Planning and best practices blog post is a great starting point to learn more about addressables and how they can help improve your game.A great way to ensure faster loading, regardless of how many executables we’re using, is via the asynchronous loading APIs. When loading asynchronously, the Unity main thread will execute a process called “main thread integration” which is responsible for the initialization of native and managed objects in a time-sliced manner. Since this process performs some operations that are not thread-safe it will occur on the main thread, and the time allowed to execute the main thread integration is limited to prevent the game from freezing for a long time. The amount of time that can be spent on the integrations is defined by the Application.backgroundLoadingPriority property. We recommend setting the backgroundLoadingPriority to High, or 50 ms, during loading screens and then returning it to BelowNormal (4 ms) or Low (2 ms) when loading is complete.An additional way to speed up loading is via Asynchronous Texture Upload. Async texture load can decrease the amount of load time by coordinating how much time and memory is used for uploading textures and meshes to the GPU setting. The Understanding Async Upload Pipeline blog post provides detailed information on how this process works.These practices will help speed up loading times:Minimize your scene content as much as possible. Use a bootstrap scene to load only what’s needed for the game to be in a playable state, then load additional scenes when needed.Disable cameras during loading screens.Disable UI Canvases while they are being populated during loading.Parallelize network requests.Avoid complex Awake/Start implementations and make use of worker threads.Always use texture compression.Stream large media files (like audio files and textures) instead of keeping them in memory.Avoid JSON Serializer, and instead use binary serializers.As mentioned earlier, memory is not the only concern for multi-game environments, background CPU activity is also something that can put a toll on the player's gaming experience. When games are not actively being played, their CPU is still running, causing the active game to perform suboptimally by creating CPU starvation. A way to prevent CPU starvations for the active game, and any other backend platform processes is to set the Run in Background player to false in Unity Settings. Run in Background will cause the Unity game loop to stop while the game is not in focus. The setting can also be changed dynamically via scriptOne thing to note is the Run in Background setting won’t stop any custom scripting threads from running, so it’s important to set to sleep any threads of non-playing games via the Thread.Sleep C# method. Remember that working with background threads in Unity requires careful programming. Since these threads don't have direct access to Unity's API, there can be a greater chance of creating issues, such as deadlocks and race conditions. Preventing this requires proper synchronization with the main Unity thread. To properly implement multi-threading, review the Limitations of async and await tasks section of the Overview of .NET in Unity manual page and the MSDN article about using threads and threading. Unity 6 introduces Awaitable class which offers better support for async/await.It can be difficult and time consuming to identify and fix the causes of memory leaks, especially in the later stages of development. As cliche as it may sound, prevention is always better than the cure. Here are a few recommendations that can help prevent leaks in any game environment:When creating new objects/assets in memory, make sure to delete them when not needed. If using Addressable, make sure to release unused assets.When loading/unloading scenes, assets should be properly removed from memory. Unity doesn’t automatically unload assets when a level is unloaded, therefore it’s important to make sure to remove any access from the memory. The Resources.UnloadUnusedAssets API can help clean up assets. However, it can cause CPU spikes, since it returns an object that yields until the operation is complete, therefore it should be used in non-performance-sensitive places.Avoid frequently using Instantiate and Destroy GameObjects. Doing so can lead to unnecessary managed allocations, while also being a costly CPU operation. However, in cases where using Destroy is necessary, make sure to remove all references to the object to avoid Leaked Shell Objects. When an object or its parents are destroyed via Destroy, a C# code holds a reference to a Unity Object, keeping the managed wrapper object–its Managed Shell–in memory. Its Native Memory will be unloaded once the Scene it resides in is unloaded, or the GameObject it is attached to or its parents are destroyed via Destroy. Therefore, if something else that was not unloaded still references it, the managed memory may live on as a Leaked Shell Object.Be mindful when implementing events using Singletons. Singleton instances hold references to all objects that have subscribed to its events. If those objects do not live as long as the singleton instance, and they do not unsubscribe from these events, they will remain in memory causing a memory leak. If the event source gets disposed before the listeners, the reference will get cleared, and if the listeners are properly unregistered there is also no reference remaining. To solve and prevent this problem, we recommend implementing the Weak Event Pattern or IDisposable in all objects that listen to singleton events, and make sure they are properly disposed of in your code. The Weak Event Pattern is a design pattern that helps you manage memory and garbage collection in event-driven programming, particularly when it comes to long-lived objects. It's especially useful when you have subscribers that are short-lived, but the publisher is long-lived. Please keep in mind these are C# specific solutions and work only with C# events and are not directly supported by UnityEvents or the Unity UI Toolkit. As such, we recommend implementing these solutions only in your non MonoBehaviour scripts.Lastly, profiling, performing CI/CD testing and stress testing from the early development stages can be a real time saver, since detecting leaks as they arise will allow you to promptly address the issue, saving time in debugging, and ensuring optimal performance.

Nestled between an elementary school and a public library in Brooklyn’s Greenpoint neighborhood sits a new kind of “luxury” coworking space.  Dubbed the Chat Haus, this space has many of the elements you’d find in a traditional coworking office: people hammering away at their computer keyboards, another person taking a phone call, someone else pausing by their computer to take a sip of coffee.  There is, however, one key difference: Chat Haus is a coworking space for AI chatbots, and everything — including the people — is made out of cardboard.  More specifically, the Chat Haus is an art exhibit by Brooklyn artist Nim Ben-Reuven. It  houses a handful of cardboard robots working away at their computers through movements controlled by small motors. There is a sign that offers desk space for “only” $1,999 a month and another that labels the space as “A luxury co-working space for chatbots.” Ben-Reuven told TechCrunch that he built the exhibit as a way to cope and bring humor to the fact that most of his work — which largely centers around graphic design and videography — is being pushed into the AI world. He added that he’s already getting denied freelance jobs as companies turn to AI tools instead.  Credit: REbecca Szkutak “It was like an expression of frustration in humor, so I wouldn’t get too bitter about the industry changing so quickly and under my nose and not wanting to be a part of the shift,” Ben-Reuven said. “So I was like, I’ll just fight back with something silly that I can laugh at myself.” He said he also wanted to keep this exhibit from being too negative because he didn’t think that would tell the right message. He said creating art that is blatantly negative forces it into a corner and requires it to defend itself. He added giving the display a “lighter tone” also helps it drawn in viewers of all ages and with all opinions on AI. While Ben-Reuven and I were chatting at Pan Pan Vino Vino, a cafe located across the street from the window display, numerous groups of people stopped to look at the Chat Haus. Three millennial-aged women stopped and took pictures. A group of just-out-of-school elementary-aged students stopped and asked their adult companions questions. Ben-Reuven also thought that despite what AI is doing to the industry he works in, the situation remains lighter than some of the other horrors and trauma going on in the world today.  “I mean, AI, in terms of the creative world, seems like such a light thing compared to so many of the other, like war, things that are happening in the world and like the terror and the trauma that exists,” he said.  Ben-Reuven has always used cardboard in his art. He made a lifesize-replica of an airport terminal out of cardboard in grad school. In between freelance jobs over the last decade, he’s worked on building these cardboard robots, or “cardboard babies” as he calls them. So while using these cardboard robots was a natural choice for display — he joked he also needed a reason to get them out of his apartment — the material is also providing another commentary on AI. “The impermanence of this cardboard stuff, and the ability for it to collapse under even just a little bit of weight, is how I feel that AI is interacting with the creative industries,” he said. “People can make their Midjourney images that look really great on Instagram and excite 12 year olds to no end, but with any level of scrutiny, it’s garbage, and I feel like you look close enough at these cardboard things, they are easily collapsible and easily will fall under any weight.” He understands why consumers are drawn to some AI-generated art, though. He likened it to junk food and the fast-acting serotonin hit that comes from eating junk food before it gets digested quickly.  The Chat Haus is a temporary display as the building that houses it awaits permits to get approved for renovation. Ben-Reuven hopes to keep the display up until at least mid-May and has hopes to move into a larger gallery if he can. He wants to be able to add more to it — but is worried about where he’ll put any additional materials in his apartment once the display is over.  “I just thought it would be funny to express this idea of, like, a whole bunch of kind of cute, kind of creepy, baby robots typing away because of our ChatGPT prompts in some warehouse somewhere, working non-stop taking as much like electricity as Switzerland ruses in a year,” Ben-Reuven said.  The Chat Haus is currently on display in the front window of 121 Norman Avenue in Brooklyn, New York’s Greenpoint neighborhood.

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Thunderbolts* is the latest installment in the Marvel Cinematic Universe, set to hit cinemas on May 2, 2025. With a brilliant ensemble cast that features some talented actors and characters that haven't been overexposed at this point, there is a genuine buzz for what the movie can deliver.

Season 8 of Diablo 4, Belial’s Return, out this week, sees the… uh… return of an old foe from Diablo 3: Belial, Lord of Lies. In addition to fighting the large, eye-obsessed boss, you’ll be able to wield powers inspired by some of the series’ biggest and baddest bosses. In this Diablo 4 guide, we’ll cover when season 8 releases in your time zone and what you can expect from Belial’s Return. Diablo 4 season 8 release time on PC, PS5, and Xbox Diablo 4 season 8 will launch at 10 a.m. PDT on Tuesday, April 29. Here’s when that is in your time zone: 10 a.m. PDT on April 29 for the West Coast of North America 1 p.m. EDT on April 29 for the East Coast of North America 6 p.m. BST on April 29 for the U.K. 7 p.m. CEST on April 29 for Western Europe/Paris 2 a.m. JST on April 30 for Tokyo The launch of season 8 will be global across PlayStation 5, Windows PC, and Xbox Series X. Blizzard Entertainment recently announced a Diablo 4 roadmap, showcasing what players should expect for the rest of 2025. According to that roadmap, season 8 will run until sometime in July, when season 9, Sins of the Horadrim, is set to begin. What to expect from Diablo 4 season 8 Season 8 is all about killing bosses and taking their powers. Players will be able to harness signature abilities that are inspired by some of the game’s biggest bosses, such as the chest beam from Wandering Death. With the return of Belial, players will also need to battle ghost-like figures spawned from the Lord of Lies in the new Apparition Incursions world event. Belial himself will be featured as a new endgame boss, and Blizzard will be adding multiple bosses from Vessel of Hatred as Lair Bosses (although they will only be accessible to players who own the expansion). Speaking of Lair Bosses, players will be able to earn increased loot from them over the course of the season. In addition to some of these endgame updates, Blizzard is bringing some interesting new additions to the game’s cosmetics. First, as you can see in the trailer above, the world of Berserk is coming to Diablo 4 via cosmetics (that you can either earn or purchase). Players who complete the Season Journey during season 8 will also earn a new pet, Iris the hairless cat covered in gross, nasty eyes. It’s creepy! Finally, the studio is updating how the game’s battle pass works with what it’s calling the “Reliquary system.” Instead of a straight line battle pass that you can progress through, the new battle pass is split into four major categories: Belial’s Return (free cosmetics themed after the season) Weapons (a premium track for weapon skins) Beasts (a premium track for mounts and pets) Armor (a premium track for armor skins) There will also be an Event Reliquary section for Berserk coming on May 6 and lasting through June 3. Going into this season of Diablo 4, here are all Tenets of Akarat locations, and guides on how to unlock Mercenaries and get more loot in Kurast Undercity.

4chan, the infamous forum known for its anonymous user base posting unhinged material, has made its comeback. A post on the website’s official blog, titled “Still Standing,” detailed the timeline of events that led to 4chan’s shutdown earlier this month. According to the site’s own status checker, the boards and front page are up, but posting and images are still down. The 4chan blog post explains that moderators shut down the servers on April 14 to prevent any more damage after a serious database attack where hackers gained access to the site’s source code. The blog post labeled the incident “catastrophic” since it breached a ton of 4chan’s databases along with its most important server. The hack even vandalized the website and revealed personal information of the 4chan moderation team and many of its users. The blog post attributed the hack to the site’s inability to update the code and infrastructure due to a lack of “skilled man-hours.” Unsurprisingly, the site was starved for money to address these concerns since it’s hard for 4chan to find willing financial backers. “Advertisers and payment providers willing to work with 4chan are rare, and are quickly pressured by activists into cancelling their services,” the blog post read. “Putting together the money for new equipment took nearly a decade.” Now that the website is back, there will be some crucial changes. According to the blog post, the /f/ board will stay shut down since the 4chan team can’t prevent exploits related to the commonly-posted .swf file format. For similar reasons, the resurrected 4chan will also disable PDF uploads for now, but will reintroduce them in the near future. Moving forward, 4chan says it is bringing on volunteers to keep up with the workload of putting the website back together. The moderation team apparently isn’t going to let 4chan die easily — the blog post read “no matter how hard it is, we are not giving up.” Still, it feels inevitable that 4chan will run into a similar problem in the future, considering it hasn’t solved the root issue of securing money to keep its servers up-to-date.This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/social-media/4chan-is-back-after-a-nearly-two-week-shutdown-but-it-still-has-some-serious-problems-171124240.html?src=rss

The largest DDoS attack of 2025 so far hit an online betting organization with almost 1Tbps of brute force.

If the tariff-triggered drop in your 401(k) balance has got you sobbing into a pint of Ben & Jerry’s, you’re not alone. U.S. and global markets have yo-yoed in reaction to the current administration’s inexplicable tariff wars. And since this market downturn is a direct result of American foreign economic policy, we may not be able to just wait for a recovery in the next few months (or years). While there’s no promise of fiscal unicorns and rainbows at the other end of this, economic history may offer some guidance. The Smoot-Hawley Tariffs None of us has ever lived through a tariff-triggered market crash, which is part of the reason why we’re all chewing our fingernails. But just because this is a new worry for modern investors doesn’t mean our current situation is unprecedented. America has been through a tariff trade war before, thanks to the work of the improbably named Utah Senator Reed Smoot and Oregon Representative Willis Hawley—two men without a single first name between them. You may only remember the Smoot-Hawley tariffs of 1930 as part of the mind-numbing lecture Ferris Bueller missed on his day off, but this act raised import duties in an attempt to protect American farmers and businesses. Unfortunately, the Smoot-Hawley tariffs prompted retaliatory tariffs, which further entrenched the financial crisis known as the Great Depression. Here’s why the history with Messrs Smoot and Hawley is important: it gives us a precedent to look to. Any financial adviser worth their salt will tell you that past performance is no guarantee of future returns—but understanding how markets have reacted in the past can offer some perspective on how markets may react in the future. What’s different about this market volatility The current financial turbulence stems from the president’s tariffs rather than a market crash like the 2008 housing bubble collapse. That’s important because we know how to plan for the worst-case scenario of a market crash. While anything but fun, market crashes are relatively common and repeat on a somewhat predictable seven-to-ten-year pattern–followed by an average recovery time of 1.4 years. Since our current heartburn-inducing market ride stems from America’s global retaliatory trade war, we can’t necessarily count on the “natural” rebound that has occurred after every other destabilizing market event in recent memory. Any countries angry about America’s tariffs could make financial or policy changes that will continue to affect the U.S. market for years to come. There is simply no way of knowing what long-term effects there will be on our investments. Let tariff history be your guide Even though none of us can personally remember a tariff trade war, we can learn from the devastating effects of Smoot and Hawley teaming up, bleach and ammonia style, to impose massive tariffs.  Looking back to see how other countries reacted to America’s isolationist financial and foreign policy in the 1930s and how the market responded to the subsequent tariffs being flung back and forth across borders like a game of hot potato, we can make plans and predictions based on the historical worst-case scenario. Specifically, Smoot and Hawley showed us that tariffs often lead to retaliatory tariffs, which can have a negative impact on the market. Even though there is no way of knowing what will happen, it’s probably a good idea for investors to buckle up for a bumpy ride. Best practices for surviving Trump’s tariffs You can get to the other side of this economic nightmare if you keep a cool head and follow these strategies: Remember that the market will eventually recover For anyone who is 10 or more years out from retirement, you can feel confident that things will improve. Unless we’re in a “dogs and cats living together–mass hysteria!” type of extinction-level event, consider ignoring your 401(k) balance for a little while. Your investments will do better if you back slowly away from your portfolio and let the market recover. Forewarned is forearmed Just because the market will return to some semblance of normalcy without any effort on your part doesn’t mean you should do nothing. Now is the time to shore up your finances by paying off high-interest debt, setting aside money into an emergency fund, finding ways to lower your expenses, and starting some secondary income streams in case of job loss or involuntary retirement. All of these actions will help your finances whether we’re in for a long stretch of tariff-induced market nastiness or things are about to come up roses. Invest conservatively as you get closer to retirement Your asset allocation is supposed to get less risky as you approach retirement, since that will protect your principal in case of a market downturn at the wrong time. If you’re planning to retire in the next few years, you can make sure any new contributions you make to your retirement accounts are invested in low-risk-lower-return assets, like bonds, treasury funds, CDs, or other cash equivalents. While these investments aren’t going to grow like the market normally would, the market also may not grow like it normally would. Stashing your contributions into these kinds of investments will offer you more peace of mind that the money will be waiting for your retirement. You still have time for market recovery Once you’re no longer in the flush of youth, you may assume you don’t have the luxury of investing for the long-term. It’s not like a 60-year-old can afford to wait out the market like a 30-year-old can. Except, you can invest like you have decades ahead of you. Because you do! Even while you approach retirement and during your retirement, you will keep a portion of your portfolio invested for the long haul. When you retire, you don’t need all of your money right away. You’ll keep a significant chunk invested for a longer time horizon, which helps ensure that your money will last your entire life. How to respond if you’re already retired By far, retirees are the most vulnerable to a protracted market plunge. Going back to work or waiting out the market weirdness are generally off the table for retirees, so it can feel like there are no good choices. But that doesn’t mean retirees are helpless in the face of larger economic forces. As with current workers and near-retirees, retirees can make plans now for the worst-case scenario. This might include: Reducing expenses: This is easier said than done, considering the price of eggs and everything else, but start thinking about ways to downsize your costs. Selling items: If you have a lifetime’s worth of home goods, collectibles, or Precious Moments figurines sitting around, you may want to start selling some off. This could be a good way to increase your retirement income without having to take money from your investments. Considering a reverse mortgage: Since your home is likely your most valuable asset, a reverse mortgage could be a decent way to access cash from something other than your investments. Don’t panic—plan Panic is the leading cause of selling at the market’s low point. Instead of selling off your investments to staunch the flow of tariff-induced anxiety, make a plan instead. If you assume the market may be bumpy for the foreseeable future, how will that change your financial decisions? Making investment choices based on that assumption will serve you well no matter what happens. In the best-case scenario, things will recover sooner than expected and this will be a footnote in your investing career. But even in the worst-case scenario, planning for volatility will help you make more rational decisions—and protect you from making your paper losses real by getting out of the market. It may be a bit of a grim sounding win-win, but it’s a heck of a lot better than crying into a pint of Chunky Monkey.

Yes, Princess Isabella has an iPhone.