A new edition of the Steam Next Fest begins today, and Knights in Tight Spaces has been featured in the official trailer.Were joining the Fest with a brand new demo where youll get to discover two new character classes: The Rogue and The Cleric. And much more! More levels to explore and epic weapons to wield New enemies and card art A new boss whos not here to play nice!Were eager to hear your thoughts! Join our Discord to share your feedback and meet other Knights, and follow us on and X and Tiktok to be up to date on our upcoming events.And of course, dont forget to add the game to your wishlist!The post Knights in Tight Spaces joins Steam Next Fest with a new demo! appeared first on Raw Fury.

A hero must be wary at all times. Hear the call of the Oracle as she draws you towards your fated destiny, but do not be swayed from your quest by the siren calls of the dark light The OracleCall of Olympus is out now! Take back Mount Olympus in this major expansion for Kingdom Two Crowns set in a world inspired by ancient Greece. Embark on a quest to win the favor of the gods and defend your Kingdom versus the Greed with powerful artifacts and units.Kingdom Two Crowns: Call of Olympus features:A Quest to Free Mount Olympus An Epic New World: Call of Olympus features a reworked map with an epic conclusion at Mount Olympus, and you choose how to get there! Temple and Quest Islands: These new islands present unique challenges, hidden treasures and powerful artifact rewards prove your worth to Artemis, Athena, Hephaestus and Hermes to open the path to Mount Olympus. Mythological Mounts: Discover and unlock powerful new mounts, like the fierce three-headed Cerberus, the terrifying fire-breathing Chimera, the majestic winged Pegasus, or the trusty Donkey and many more!Fight Greed of Epic Scales Face Your Fears: Muster steadfast defences to protect your crown, the Greed threat is more challenging than ever before, with multi-phased boss battles against the sinister Serpent. Raise Your Banner: Shift the momentum and lead from the front. Bring the fight to the Greed with new siege mechanics, where the Hoplites will join you in Phalanx formation. Assemble Your Fleet: Fight on land and at sea build a fleet with devastating ship-mounted ballistae to join your battle. Once victorious, use your armada to ferry your army across the seas and combat the growing threat of Greed.Discover Godly Powers and Abilities Powerful Artifacts: Unlock four unique artifacts bestowed by the gods. Whether you choose a bow with a powerful directed attack, or a hammer that boosts your troops prowess, these items grant you new offensive and defensive abilities against the Greed. Guided by the Oracle: Never stray from the task at hand. At your request, the Oracle will provide you with wisdom and directions for the next step of your Odyssey! Set the Greed Ablaze: Wield powerful fire technology granted by the new hermit. Its as if it was gifted by Prometheus himself!Kingdom Two Crowns 2.0Kingdom Two Crowns 2.0 is a quality-of-life update that is adding a series of tweaks and updates to the Kingdom Two Crowns base game as well as updating the graphical suite for the game: New Save System with up to 10 save slots Ability to disable Tutorial Ghost Improved level generation Balancing updates across difficulty levels and unit distribution Improved VFX systems Improved Lighting Systems New updated visualsRegents & Archons Royal Wardrobe Cosmetic DLCsAlongside the updates to the base game we are also launching a new series of supporter cosmetic DLCs: Regents & Archons Royal Wardrobe. These are an optional way for you to spice up your campaign and provide an additional way to support us to work on cool new things for the Kingdom series.A heartful word from all of us here on the dev teamWe are excited for everyone to finally be able to play and explore the world of Call of Olympus. Please share your feedback! We would like to extend our gratitude to everyone in the community that has been part of this journey from play testers to viewers, and players actively participating on the forums, social media and our Discord server from all of us, thank you!As were celebrating Kingdom this week here is a little crown from us!Ooops, it looks like the Greed stole your crown! Oh well, at least now you know how it looks like when it gets your precious headpiece, if you have one of those visuals from the freshly released cosmetic DLCs on.Good luck on your adventures, Monarchs! And if you encounter bugs that are not the ever present nocturnal enemy send them to https://rawfury.atlassian.net/servicedesk/customer/portal/1 this is the quickest way for the devs to have a look!/The Kingdom TeamThe post Kingdom Two Crowns: Call of Olympus, Kingdom 2.0 and Royal Wardrobe DLCs are now available! appeared first on Raw Fury.

Bluesky is considering ads; heres why that might not be a bad thingPublished inThe Medium BlogSent as aNewsletter3 min read1 day ago-- Please join me in savoring the happy numerical roundness of todays date: 12 + 12 = 24Issue #227: business models, academic writing, and planning for good sleepLets talk about business models on the internet for a second, shall we?You might be thinking dear god, please not that because the phrase business model doesnt exactly fill the synapses with joy. But so much depends upon a business model, and for the vast majority of internet businesses, there are just two models: Sell things (this can include subscriptions) or sell ads. Many successful companies mix both.Im following a thread here that we picked up last in issue #223, discussing the future of social media. Bluesky, one of the fastest growing internet companies out there, doesnt have a business model yet, but is going to need one soon. Theyve announced theyre starting with subscriptions, but their CEO hasnt ruled out advertising.Thats a good thing, as John Battelle argues, depending on what they mean by advertising. The biggest internet companies Google, Meta, Amazon, Apple are also ad companies with a very specific approach, one thats given rise to surveillance capitalism and enshittification. And while subscription models are extremely powerful for many businesses (shoutout to the million-plus Medium members who make this company and a better internet possible!), theyre not right for all businesses just on their own. The upside when advertisers, consumers, and companies are aligned can be huge (see every top media company, from Disney to Netflix) though often its the consumers who end up getting squeezed out.To remedy that, Battelle lays out some concrete suggestions for what Bluesky might do:Learn from what has (and hasnt) worked in the past. Put simply, dont create ads that annoy or confuse people. Ask your users and potential advertisers what they want, and what can work in your context, and study past platforms (e.g., Google AdWords, Twitter Amplify, etc).Lean into openness: Center developers and keep the data free.Dont get greedy: Ignore the temptation of massive capital and instead build patiently and sustainably.Whats interesting about this isnt just what Bluesky might do (though Im interested to see that), but what might happen if they do and are successful. Could this usher in a new era of very different advertising online? A few short sentences about some great recent storiesIf youre an academic, finding venues beyond peer reviewed journals to share your research isnt just good for your own career. It can help attract funding, recruit talent, and help you mentor your students. (Silvia PM, PhD)This is reassuring, and I think right: A game expert explains why AI just isnt good at certain types of puzzles and games. Its good at prediction, but weak at the associations you must be able to make to succeed at a game like Connections or the crossword. (Sam Liberty)TIL: The traditional French Christmas cake, the Bche de Nol, was inspired by earlier pagan rituals of keeping a log burning during the winter solstice. (Linda Lum) Your daily dose of practical wisdom on getting good sleepFor better sleep, some slightly counterintuitive advice: Start prepping for sleep from the moment you get up get outside, get exercise, address your anxiety.

ChatGPTs favorite words & punctuationPublished inThe Medium BlogSent as aNewsletter3 min read2 days ago-- 20 more days until 2025Issue #226: Nikki Giovanni. Sora. Luigi.Following up on last weeks issue re: two years of ChatGPT, Ive been thinking about something. How do you know, on a word or sentence level, when someones used it? What are the tells? What separates this is kinda formulaic writing from this is definitely AI?As you may remember from a previous newsletter, GPT loves to delve. Its preference for overly formal, vaguely British language is a well-documented result of being trained by workers in Nigeria, where delve is used in a business context far more than in the U.S. or anywhere else. A few more tells, via Jordan Gibbs who analyzed 1 million words from the machine and published his results on Medium:TirelesslyCannotReimaginedIntertwineIntricateTapestryExpanseKaleidoscopicA more recent analysis corroborates these findings, and adds a few more words. Pivotal. Vital. Comprehensive. ChatGPT also imitates certain syntax patterns common among smart-sounding writing, like em dashes and colons in titles.Theres a deeper pattern Ive noticed, though: ChatGPT cant write well in first-person. By well I dont just mean clearly. I mean the type of first-person writing where you feel like theres a real human behind the words. (This is a great example of writing that felt 100% human to me.) One way humans do that show other people were human, not automatons is by telling jokes, but ChatGPT kind of fails at being funny. I mean, its fine at dad jokes (one-liners, puns, predictable humor) but its terrible at a type of humor that is uniquely human: subtext. Humor that says more than what words alone convey. An example: Sarah Coopers 10 tricks to appear smart in meetings, which communicates nuanced subtext about corporate conformity.Journalist Will Lockett writes: As ChatGPT doesnt actually know what it is writing, it cant have the self-aware, helicopter view of writing needed to create great subtext. ChatGPT might be able to riff on a theme, but it doesnt have the societal and self-awareness to come up with those themes in the first place. Harris Sockel Also today: Nikki Giovanni. Sora. Luigi.Nikki Giovanni poet, teacher, activist, and Grammy nominee passed away on Monday. She was 81. At the peak of her career, in the 60s and 70s, Giovanni openly admitted that most people dont read poetry, so she recorded her 1971 debut album, Truth Is on Its Way, with a Gospel choir. At the time, writes Duke Professor Mark Anthony Neal, I didnt fully understand the genius of Giovannis vision she was blatantly trying to bring the profane in conversation with the sacred, two decades before Kirk Franklin and later Kanye West would bring ghetto theodicy to the top of the pop charts.OpenAI launched a new tool, Sora, that allows you to input a few sentences and generate a video. We can all be filmmakers now, even without a camera. (Maybe well feed a few of these newsletters to Sora so you can watch them?)Luigi Mangione suspected UnitedHealth CEO assassin emailed a friend earlier this year to rail against the lack of civil disobedience in Japan, which seems foreboding (to me). Your daily dose of practical wisdom: on creativityA gem from one of my favorite books (which I really need to read again), Oliver Burkemans Four Thousand Weeks: When you no longer demand perfection from your creative work, your relationships, or anything else, thats when youre free to plunge energetically into them.

Suffragettes protest along a London street wearing sandwich boards in 1912. Hulton-Deutsch Collection / CORBIS / Corbis via Getty ImagesJust three days after World War I ended on Armistice Day, 1918, Bonar Law, the leader of Britains Conservative Party, announced that a general election would be held on December 14.It would be no ordinary electionfor the first time in British history, women over the age of 30 who met a minimum property requirement could vote in a parliamentary election.This election came at a time of considerable confusion in British politics, wrote historian Trevor Wilson. David Lloyd George, the Liberal prime minister, had risen to power based on conservative support during the war and would have to reassemble a coalition to stay in power.His task was made even more confusing because demographics and voting rights were in profound flux in Britain. Eight hundred and eighty thousand British combatants died during the war, a whopping 6 percent of the adult male population. To compensate, the Representation of the People Act of February 6 abolished almost all property qualifications for male voters over 21.The effect of this new law was stunning. The electorate nearly tripled from 7.7 million voters to 21.4 million. With the stroke of a pen, women had become 43 percent of the electorate.The same year also saw the passage of the Parliament (Qualification of Women) Act, which allowed women to run as candidates for members of Parliament for the first time. Of the 17 women who stood for this historic election, 15 had backgrounds in the suffrage movement.How the women's vote will go, whether the married women voters will be swayed by their husband's political views or not, are all matters of speculation, the Evening Express wrote shortly after the general election was announced.r Punchcelebrating the women's right to vote Public domain via Wikimedia CommonsBut though popular politics were spreading across the British Isles, party leaders made crucial decisions about the election behind closed doors. As historian Matthew Johnson notes, during the war in 1916, Lloyd George and Law had executed what was effectively a political coup dtat against H.H. Asquith, the incumbent Liberal prime minister, forcing him out of office and consigning him to a political wilderness when Lloyd George took over as premier.Although he was a Liberal just like Asquith, Lloyd George cozied up to the Conservatives in a state of what Wilson called open hostility to the party of which he still claimed to be a member.Because this coalition was now more important than party designations, Lloyd George and Law officially endorsed their preferred candidates with a signed letter known as a coupon. Consequently, the 1918 general election became known as the Coupon Election.In total, the leaders gave coupons to 364 Conservative candidates, 159 Liberals, 20 members of the short-lived National Democratic and Labour Party (not to be confused with the modern-day Labour Party), and two Coalition Labour candidates. There were now, in effect, two Liberal parties. One, led by Lloyd George, supported the coalition with the Tories and had coupons to prove it. The other, led by Asquith, neither supported the coalition nor had coupons.By the time the election took place this day in 1918, the coupon coalition was so electorally strong that the result was already certain, according to the Bristol Times and Mirror. Only 63 recipients of the coupon lost a race. The coalition sailed into power with a 283-seat majority, and Lloyd George stayed on as prime minister.Constance Markievicz was the only woman elected of the 17 female candidates who ran. But as a member of Sinn Fein, an Irish nationalist party, she refused to take her seat in Westminster. (Nancy Astor, who ran for her husbands old seat in 1919, would later become the first woman to be seated in Parliament.)More shocking, however, was the revelation that a historically low 57 percent of the eligible electorate voted in the 1918 general election. Rainand to some extent apathykept polling slow and low, the Sunday Mirror reported, likely reflecting a deep malaise and trauma settling over the war-torn country.Still, the nations newest constituency was the most enthusiastic in this historic election. Eagerly arriving to exercise their new franchise at polling stations, the Sunday Mirror commented, women were obviously determined to show that they were not apathetic towards the great issues of the election. Get the latest stories in your inbox every weekday.

A representation of the evolution of the universe over 13.77 billion years. NASA's Goddard Space Flight CenterAstronomers have long understood that the universe is expandingin other words, the space in between cosmic objects that arent bound by gravity is getting ever more vast. Then, in 1998, scientists discovered the universes rate of expansion is accelerating.In the years since, researchers using the Hubble Space Telescope have observed that the current expansion rate, called the Hubble constant, is faster than what standard cosmology models estimate it should be. This mystery of inconsistent measurements has been dubbed the Hubble tension.Now, a team of researchers has used data from the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) to confirm Hubbles measurementsand thus, the mystery persists. Their study, published Monday in The Astrophysics Journal, suggests the discrepancy may be caused by an as-yet unknown feature in the universe, rather than an error in telescope measurement.The finding suggests that our understanding of the universe may be incomplete, Adam Riess, an astrophysicist at Johns Hopkins University and lead author of the study, says in a statement. Riess co-received the 2011 Nobel Prize in Physics for discovering that the universes expansion is accelerating in 1998.With two NASA flagship telescopes now confirming each others findings, we must take this [Hubble tension] problem very seriouslyits a challenge but also an incredible opportunity to learn more about our universe, he adds in the statement.Riess and his team used JWST data to measure the distances from Earth to specific kinds of galaxies with pulsating stars called Cepheid variables, which are the gold standard for measuring cosmic distances, per the statement. With these measurements, they calculated the universes rate of expansion. The JWST results were consistent with the Hubble ones, which effectively rules out the possibility of the Hubble tension resulting from human or instrument error. The Hubble Ultra Deep Field is a snapshot of about 10,000 galaxies in a tiny patch of sky, taken by NASAs Hubble Space Telescope. NASA, ESA, S. Beckwith (STScI), the HUDF TeamBut the curious thing was the rate they calculated. The universes expansion rate is expressed in kilometers per second per megaparsec. (A megaparsec equals 3.26 million light-years.) Widely accepted cosmology models have used light from the early universe to put the Hubble constant of universe expansion at about 67 to 68 km/s/Mpc.The now-confirmed telescope observations, however, yield an average of 73 km/s/Mpc.As Emilee Speck puts it for FOX Weather, the problem with science is that answering one question creates many more. If the measurements arent wrong, then perhaps its the standard cosmology models that are flawed.Yes, it appears there is something missing in our understanding of the universe, Riess tells Reuters Will Dunham. Our understanding of the universe contains a lot of ignorance about two elementsdark matter and dark energyand these make up 96 percent of the universe, so this is no small matter.Dark matter, hypothesized to make up 27 percent of the universe, is some unknown material that affects the rest of the cosmos with its gravity. Dark energy, on the other hand, is thought to make up some 68 percent of the universe, and scientists speculate it might be responsible for the universes expansion. And now, the new findings suggest it perhaps accounts for the unexplained acceleration of that expansion, too.The more work we do, the more it is apparent that the cause is something much more interesting than a telescope flaw, Riess tells Live Sciences Ben Turner. [The] next steps are many. More data on many fronts and new ideas are needed.One possible explanation for the Hubble tension would be if there was something missing in our understanding of the early universe, such as a new component of matterearly dark energythat gave the universe an unexpected kick after the Big Bang, Marc Kamionkowski, a cosmologist at Johns Hopkins who helped calculate the Hubble constant but was not involved in the new study, says in the statement. And there are other ideas, like funny dark matter properties, exotic particles, changing electron mass or primordial magnetic fields that may do the trick. Theorists have license to get pretty creative.Get the latest stories in your inbox every weekday.Filed Under: Astronomers, Astronomy, James Webb Space Telescope, Mysteries, New Research, Nobel Prizes, Outer Space, telescope, universe

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