Stack CommerceShareWe may earn revenue from the products available on this page and participate in affiliate programs. Learn more Will AI take your job? Let it in the new year. We dont mean it should replace you and run your meetings, but it should do the parts of your job that you hate for you. Write rejection emails? Yes. Proofread sales reports? Absolutely. Create infographics for your website? Done.One of AIs biggest issues, though, is there are so many (probably too many) tools out there. We are about to introduce you to a new onebut dont let us lose you!because the idea behind 1minAI is to combine all of todays top models into one platform. To cut out the need for recurring payments, just pay $29.97 for lifetime access (reg. $234) while this offer is still available.Fire your least favorite tasks with AIMeet your new coworkers in 2025 and beyond: OpenAI, Google AI, Meta AI, Cohere, and Anthropic! Except, now you dont have to pay for premium access to each or hop between platforms.With 1minAI, join a virtual meeting (aka a chatbot) with ChatGPT-4o (the newest OpenAI model) or Gemini Pro 1.5 and see how it can help you save time at work. Try having them generate boring sales reports, handle customer inquiries with a more positive attitude than you would, or transcribe a meeting into text for your minutes.If youre a small business owner or entrepreneur, you might also use 1minAI to create content, research keywords, write blog posts, edit images, and more.Youll get 1,000,000 generation credits (1 credit = 1 word or image) to use each month, and you can get 15,000 more free credits each day just by visiting the web app. Any unused credits do roll over for future use.Whaddya say? Ready to let AI offload some of your day-to-day tasks this year? Try 1minAI with a lifetime subscription for $29.97 (reg. $234) while supplies last.StackSocial prices subject to change.1minAI: Lifetime Subscription $29.97Get It Here

This marble statuette is emblematic of Ptolemaic-era art: a mishmash of styles with a decidedly Egyptian twist.

Paramount Pictures has announced that the Sonic the Hedgehog film franchise has earned more than $1 billion at the global box office. The movie franchise--based on Sega's long-running video game series--kicked off back in February 2020 and has since expanded with two sequels, a TV spin-off series starring Knuckles, and a cameo appearance for the original "Ugly Sonic" in Chip 'n Dale: Rescue Rangers.The first movie grossed over $319 million worldwide, and its 2022 sequel made over $405 million. The threequel has earned $336 million at the global box office so far (via Box Office Mojo). This isn't the first film series to reach this milestone at the box office, as The Super Mario Bros. Movie ($1.36 billion) and the Resident Evil movies ($1.2 billion) have also been commercial success stories. "The Sonic the Hedgehog franchise has become an unstoppable cultural force with limitless potential," Paramount Pictures President and CEO Brian Robbins said in a press statement. "As each chapter of Sonic's adventures continues to raise the bar, we're incredibly proud and excited to continue delivering stories and characters that resonate with audiences around the world."Continue Reading at GameSpot

After the Christmas-exclusive Jingle Joy album, Monopoly GO is all set to welcome the new year with another exciting album season called Artful Tales. This album is truly special and is bursting with creativity, stunning designs, and incredible rewards. From the Artist Hazel token to the Man with Earring shield, there are a bunch of new collectibles for you to add to your Monopoly GO shelves. One quirky token you can add to your collection is the Visual Virtuoso Token. Read on to learn how to get the Visual Virtuoso Token in Monopoly GO.

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Disney Dreamlight Valley's The Storybook Vale DLC adds a massive set of recipes to your collection as you learn to make more meals, with an impressive additional 96 recipes overall. Of course, with so many Storybook Vale recipes to unlock and cooking ingredients to find, you may wonder how to make Garlic Steam Mussels in Disney Dreamlight Valley.

When it comes to educational video games, the Carmen Sandiego franchise is a benchmark. The original computer game, Where in the World is Carmen Sandiego?, came out in 1985 and has gotten tens of sequels and spinoffs since. In 2025, the first new franchise installment in 10 years, simply titled Carmen Sandiego, will hit store shelves (or, perhaps more accurately, public library shelves). Polygons early playthrough of a few hours of the game showed it was not just for fans of the franchise the game is also profoundly educational, which is refreshing in the age of overstimulating and hastily created content for children. Carmen Sandiego also looks to be an excellent, kid-friendly crash course in how to play video games.In the new puzzle-adventure game, Carmen Sandiego is a spy working case-by-case to take down a malicious thieving group called V.I.L.E. (just as she does in her Netflix TV show adaptation). As Carmen, the player visits locations around the world to uncover clues about suspects, chase down V.I.L.E. operatives, and ultimately issue a warrant to arrest the key perpetrator.The educational elements are woven into the game mechanics, so you cant help but learn facts about the countries youre visiting. For example, a witness who saw the thief may give you a few pieces of information, like that the thief spoke about studying Mayan ruins and that they had red hair. You can use that first bit of information to select your next destination Mexico City, in this case. Simultaneously, you use information you learn about the thieves themselves to narrow down your suspect database, marking off red hair as yes, for example.The learning doesnt just come in the form of static facts; Carmen Sandiego is designed in such a way as to encourage players to pay attention and absorb the full picture. Therell always be kids (and players in general) who want to skip all the dialogue and text and focus only on interactive gameplay mechanics. But in this case, youll fail quickly at your missions if you dont do that reading, so the incentive to take in the facts and make informed decisions is high and fun gameplay mechanics are still sprinkled in heavily throughout. In this way, Carmen Sandiego also successfully teaches the player how to play different kinds of video games in general; youll control Carmen first-person in one minigame, then solve a tangled-wires puzzle in the next. Youll find yourself jotting down quick math problems to determine how much time you have left to solve the case if you take one more 10-hour flight across the world. Youll sit idle for a few moments at your computer, determining whether to chase a suspected thief or to simply pickpocket them instead.The game isnt overly easy, and with no voice reads, its likely only a good fit for strong readers or kids who play games with adults who can read. There are some quirks that make me think itd make a good fit in a classroom, where a teacher can help students search for clues online (like, What country is Nara Park in?) and define tough vocab (like southpaw for left-handed). But based on this preview, Carmen Sandiego looks like it will be a near-perfect new addition to the franchise, and more importantly, a near-perfect game for kids who like to learn.The game isnt sanitized, nor is it a watered-down version of the original in short, it isnt trying too hard to appeal to the youngest members of its audience, though I think theyll like it. Its a Carmen Sandiego game through and through, which means its genuine fun and subtly educational. I, an adult with no children, will probably spend several more hours with it just for fun but if I did have kids, I feel confident itd be a killer first RPG/puzzle game for them. Carmen Sandiegowill be released in Q1 2025 on PC, PS5, Xbox Series X, and Nintendo Switch. This preview was played on PC using a pre-release download code provided by Gameloft and HarperCollins Productions. Vox Media has affiliate partnerships. These do not influence editorial content, though Vox Media may earn commissions for products purchased via affiliate links. You can findadditional information about Polygons ethics policy here.

Sometimes a failure is just a good idea with bad timing. Consider the Steam Machine.In 2013, at the height of the console gaming era, Valve, the owner and operator of Steam, the biggest PC digital video game storefront, announced an attempt to mainstream PC gaming with a console-like experience and convert millions of console gamers to Steam shoppers along the way.At the time, consoles were thriving, home to exclusives and the assumed first stop for 90% of AAA releases.The Steam Machine wasnt one literal machine, but a conceptual blueprint for gaming PC manufacturers to create cheaper, itty-bitty PCs that fit comfortably under a living room TV.Players would surf through their video game libraries in an operating system that looked less like a Windows desktop and more like an Xbox UI. And to do so, theyd use a special controller that blended the console controls of the past with the laptop trackpads of well, also the past.Despite the hopes of many industry analysts, the Steam Machine project, which promised all the benefits of PC gaming with no headaches, led to a paltry set of middling gaming PCs. Valve mothballed the strategy in 2018.Of course, thats not the end of the story. Far from it.Though the hardware died, the dream nonetheless persisted. The Steam Machine has inspired more industry changes in its death than most video game consoles do in life. Valves primary goal was to get its storefront on more screens, but it was the Steam Machines secondary function popularizing PCs that resonated.A decade ago, according to a chart by Visual Capitalist, PCs had managed parity with consoles after years eating their dust. By 2022, however, PC gaming accounted for $45 billion in revenue 50% more than its console cousins. And in 2025, a decade after Valve launched the first Steam Machines, PC gaming will have its victory lap, thanks in large part to another piece of Valve hardware.Heres how PC gaming went from hardcore to mainstream, and why you should expect PC gaming culture to expand even further in the years to come.PCs arent intimidating now that they look (and feel) like a Nintendo SwitchIn the 1990s and early 2000s, people who preferred console games had a fair and repeatable critique of PC gaming: Youd spend as much time fighting the machine as you would playing a game. PC gaming, its critics would say, meant lots of tinkering, where consoles for all their limitations just worked.Now, you can experience the lions share of what PC gaming offers through a Steam Deck without worrying about specs, GPUs, or processors and without ever seeing Windows blue screen of death or Windows at all. The Steam Deck condenses many of Valves best ideas from the Steam Machine into a single, reasonably priced, portable device that also can connect to your TV via HDMI, of course.The Steam Deck looks and feels like a Nintendo Switch but with all the freedom and perks of traditional PC gaming. For example, mods no longer require lengthy setups from sketchy websites; they can be added to a game directly from the Steam Workshop. For people tempted to tinker beyond simple mods, the Steam Deck also includes a Linux desktop experience. A cottage industry of YouTubers, writers, and coders produces a constant stream of guides and tools to simplify once complex processes like setting up a dozen or more emulators or access to things like Xbox Game Pass.A decade ago, PC manufacturers struggled to translate Valves vision of the Steam Machine into a viable commercial product. They needed to see what success looked like if they ever hoped to achieve it themselves. Today, the Steam Deck serves as a tangible example of what an approachable, marketable console-like PC experience can be. Companies like Asus, Alienware, Lenovo, Logitech, and Ayaneo have spent the past year flooding the market with Steam Deck competitors, and 2025s release calendar is already filling with plenty more handheld gaming PCs.My colleague Sean Hollister wrote at The Verge about how this shift may allow Valve to take a kind of soft control of the PC gaming space, that other hardware makers could shift to SteamOS and Valve itself could return to the living room hubs of the Steam Machine era, now in a position of strength. And all of that might happen. But while Valve has a history of controlling the PC digital storefront market, its been notoriously slow (if not outright unwilling) to grow into something that could rival Sony or Microsoft.Thats fine. Even if Valve simply keeps its course, the Steam Deck has already turned PC gaming into a snowball rolling downhill, getting bigger and bigger and bigger. It cant be stopped. And the whole industry is better off for it.AAA exclusives became too financially riskyDragon Age: The Veilguard was in development for nine years. The smaller Senuas Saga: Hellblade 2 was in development for nearly five years. Major video game publishers fixated on making games that suck up dozens if not hundreds of hours have perpetually expanding teams spending more time making fewer games. As a result, AAA games are more expensive to produce than they have been at any point in history.Thus, the survival of big-budget video game studios depends on each major release reaching the largest audience possible.Xbox has even begun to move many of its releases to rival hardware, like the Nintendo Switch and PlayStation 5, hoping to recoup its budgets (and humor an ever-watchful FTC).But for games that cost hundreds of millions of dollars to make and market, the cumulative console player base still isnt enough. And so, nearly every publisher, big and small, is porting its games to PC often releasing them on the same day they hit consoles.This is a radical change from 15 years ago, when many game publishers avoided PC releases due to widespread (and in hindsight, demonstrably unreasonable) fears of piracy. And from 10 years ago, when what games did arrive on PC were gated behind byzantine, publisher-owned apps.Now, you can skim Steam and see games from EA, Ubisoft, and Activision, along with Microsoft and Sony. The major holdout is Nintendo which has been busy battling emulation of its games on PC hardware.Video game publishers need to break free of this cycle of scale. But until they do, the best way to break even (let alone profit) will be expanding their pool of customers with the millions of PC gamers.People expect to enjoy their media wherever and whenever not just on their sofaRemember the Xbox One, the colossal failure from which Microsoft has never fully recovered? Its architects imagined the Xbox as the center of entertainment. People would funnel their entire media diet from their streaming apps to their cable box through the Xbox hardware, making it the centerpiece of the living room. The One home entertainment machine to rule them all.Microsoft overlooked one fatal fact: The average person no longer spends their free time in the living room sharing a TV. With the rise of the smartphone and laptop, people now consume media whenever and wherever is most convenient and comfortable. So as Microsoft imagined families gathering around the living room TV, parents and kids were splitting up to consume media on their screen of choice. Four years later, Nintendo went the other direction with the Nintendo Switch, a video game console that could be removed from its dock and played wherever the kids and parents went.But its PCs that have long untethered gaming from the living room. Because PC owners can choose from hundreds of variants or build their own gaming PC altogether PC gaming has existed on storefronts and digital libraries that follow players from one device to the next. So, if you want to play PC games on a console-like system, you can. Or you can do so on a gaming laptop, a handheld device, or a traditional desktop machine.Following the failure of the Xbox One, current Xbox CEO Phil Spencer has been charting a many-years-long path to make Xbox an anywhere brand instead of just a console. The companys This is an Xbox ad campaign which shows Xbox games running on the Xbox console but also smartphones, laptops, and handheld PC gaming devices is a clear culmination of that effort.But what has taken Xbox nearly a decade to achieve has been possible with PC gaming the whole time.What even is a console at this point?For decades, consoles were an obvious choice for most gamers. They were cheaper, had comparable graphical power at their launch, required minimal technical expertise, and were the only way to play some of the biggest games of a given year. Now all those arguments apply more to portable PCs like the Steam Deck than they do to consoles.The PS5 Pro launched a few months ago for an eye-watering $700. Its visuals still cant compare to high-end PCs. The systems big exclusives eventually make it to PC, where they often run better and are sold for less. Meanwhile, Xboxs latest commercial spends more time showing Xbox games on devices other than its own console. And PCs offer a wider selection of indie and multiplayer games than consoles, too.In March 2024, Spencer told Polygon hed like to see PC gaming storefronts like Epic Games Store and Itch.io running on Xbox hardware. And this past month, rumors have swirled that Steam may appear on Xbox.This should it come to pass in 2025 is the endgame scenario. PCs wont surpass consoles; consoles will become PCs.

Bathrooms are no longer just functional pitstops in the home theyre spaces where we recharge, refresh, and truly relax. Like mini-spas, bathrooms have evolved into wellness retreats, which is precisely the vision Spanish company Sanycces and interdisciplinary design practice Jorge Herrera Studio sought to realize with the Oasis collection. This collection takes a holistic approach to bathroom design, transforming the bathroom into a sanctuary that beautifully blends relaxation with high design.The Oasis collection includes everything you need to create an immersive bathroom experience: bathtubs, sinks, headrests, side tables, poufs, and towel racks. Unlike other bath collections that focus solely on functionality, Oasis adds warmth and coziness to a traditionally cold, utilitarian space. Instead of sterile materials, Jorge Herrera selected walnut, oak slats, natural fibers, and customizable textiles elements that feel as inviting as they do durable. We wanted to integrate the essence of the home, using textures and natural materials that make us feel good in our space, explains Herrera. If other rooms in the home are enriched with textures and materials, why not bring that same warmth to the bathroom?The result is a well thought out collection that makes it easy to create a seamless sensory experience. With soft, rounded shapes, neutral tones, and natural materials like oak, its capable of transforming your bathroom into a personal spa retreat. Oasis has already garnered international acclaim, winning both the IF Design Award and Red Dot Award for Product Design in 2024, a testament to its innovative, wellness-focused approach.This isnt the first time Sanycces and Herrera have collaborated; their previous Duna, Calma, and Tempo collections also drew inspiration from natures quiet beauty and organic shapes. With Oasis, they take this connection further, creating a space that welcomes warmth, tranquility, and a sense of retreat right into your home.To learn more about the Oasis collection by Sanycces and Jorge Herrera Studio, visit sanycces.es.