As wildfires continue to ravage Southern California, Apple continues to rally support for victims by prompting users for donations, as well as streaming the upcoming LA wildfire relief concert.Apple prompts users to donate to Southern California fire relief effortsIn an effort to raise awareness and money for the Southern California wildfires, Apple will join other major streaming services in streaming upcoming FireAid benefit concert. The concert is set to take place on January 30 at 6:00 p.m. PT/9:00 p.m. ET and will be held at both the Intuit Dome and Kia Forum.FireAid's benefit concert will feature the following acts: Continue Reading on AppleInsider | Discuss on our Forums

If you're in search of new, exciting architecture and design competitions, take a look at the latest curated picks of challenges listed on Bustler. Featured below are four briefs seeking transformative projects across architecture, interiors, and unbuilt work, exceptional works from recently graduated architects, urban planners, and landscape architects, proposals for the transformation of a historical heritage site into a start-up hub in Busan, South Korea, and exceptional designs for a new arrivals terminal at the Vilnius International Airport in Lithuania.For the complete directory of newly listed competitions, click here.

Do you know what weirdly specific, niche, and typically underrepresented subgenre of games snuck up on me out of nowhere in 2024? The open world experience that almost seems to take pride in how hostile it can be to the player. The open world experience that is built on the strength of its systems and the emergent sandbox gameplay they give rise to, the open world experience that refuses to hold the players hand in any way, shape, or form, to the point that many may even find it outright daunting.In the early months of last year, we gotDragons Dogma 2, doing exactly that, while bookending the other end of 2024, in November, wasS.T.A.L.K.E.R. 2: Heart of Chornobyl, yet another unforgettable game that falls in that category. And soon,Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2looks set to add itself to that list. Back in 2018, the originalKCDearned itself a large fanbase by delivering exactly that sort of open world adventure one that was uncompromising in its vision of complete immersion even with its many rough edges, and now, its highly anticipated sequel is promising to build on those solid foundations, sand off many of its rough edges, and in the process craft an open world RPG experience unlike the vast majority of what the genre traditionally sticks with.PartS.T.A.L.K.E.R.,partElder Scrollsis a description thats long been popular forKCD,and sure enough, it looks likeits upcoming sequel will fit that same mould. Set in a medieval, historically inspired European setting, the first person RPG will borrow liberally from the Bethesda Game Studios playbook where its progression mechanics are concerned, and how you choose to invest in different skills and abilities for Henry will have great impact on how your gameplay experience is tailored.As crucial as that will be to the backbone of the experience, just as important (if not even more so) will be just how dependent on its systems and its emergent gameplayKingdom Come: Deliverance 2is clearly going to be. This, of course, is another area where you could argue the game borrows from theElder Scrollsseries, though honestly, KCDsbrand of emergence is quite different- in that the game leans way harder into realism, employs way more systems and mechanics that deliberately create friction, and as such, is the sort of game that could be perceived as being markedly less accessible to the casual audience.But of course, if you were to ask fans of the first game, it is precisely those eccentricates and bizarre tendencies that give Kingdom Come: Deliveranceis buckets of identity and sense of place, and a big part of why the game was as memorable as it was. Unsurprisingly,KCD2is promising to build on all of those ideas, with some expected coats of polish and refinement here and there. Managing Henrys hunger and fatigue, for instance, will still be an important part of the moment to moment experience, which is one of several tiny steps that the game plans to take to ground players in its world.Combat is far from a mindless button mashing affair, and requires not only precise blocking and parrying, but also demands that you pay attention to the animations of your enemies, lest you be caught off-guard with their blows. Objects and even menus and UI items have a sort of physicality to them that makes actions feel diegetic, removing abstractions wherever possible. Even something like saving, for instance, isnt as straightforward as youd expect, with limited potions instead being the currency that is needed to save your progress, in a returning (if slightly modified) version of the first games save system. So yes, if you run out of saving potions and should happen to die in combat (which, ifKCD2is anything like the first game, is going to happen quite a bit), you could lose a good chunk of progress.On one hand, if someone were to find such tendencies offputting in a game, you wouldnt necessarily be able to blame them. At the same time, games that deliberately create friction to heighten the sense of immersion and create a much more dynamic and lively open world experience tend to be very uniquely memorable, especially if they are done well. I started this piece off by talking about howDragons Dogma 2andS.T.A.L.K.E.R. 2both left a strong impression on me precisely because they delivered that brand of punishing and emergent open world gameplay, so sure enough,KCD2spromise of an epic RPG adventure defined by similar sensibilities is an enticing one.In fact, the games purported emphasis on choice and consequence mechanics could make it even more of a champion for that style of game. After all, this is yet another area where the upcoming sequel is promising notable improvements on its predecessors framework, whether thats in the form of NPCs being more reactive to your actions, dialogue choices seemingly having greater weight and informing conversations and their outcomes more noticeably, or what have you. Admittedly, the list of games that have promised meaningful choice and consequence mechanics and then failed to deliver on them is a long one, and only grows longer with time. Then again,KCDwas no damp squib in this department, and based on whats been shown of the game so far, theres every reason to believe thatDeliverance 2will indeed offer meaningful improvements on the first game.So we hope, at least- because if it can indeed let players shape their journeys and stories with decisions that actually impact the story in tangible (and, just as importantly, interesting) ways, thats going to make the sense of ownership over the games world feel that much stronger. That sense of ownership is what emergent, systems-driven sandboxes thrive on first and foremost, after all, because theres nothing quite as captivating as a game that lets you mess with its systems to bend its open world to your will (or brutally die trying, if nothing else). IfKCD2can combine that with meaningful, weighty player choice mechanics in other areas, that would elevate it to entirely new heights.Going into any game with expectations that high an be a risk in and of itself, but the originalKingdom Come: Deliverance,with all of its flaws and warts and what have you, did provide a solid platform for potential sequels to continue building on. The imminentKCD2looks set to be doing just that, so its no surprise that excitement surrounding its looming release is continuing to build. The historical first person action RPG is promising to be a bigger and better sequel in all the right ways, which is a good direction for any sequel to be headed in as it is. But when the sequel in question is building on one of the most unique open world experiences of the last decade, you can imagine how much more exciting of a prospect that sequel becomes. One can only hope thatKingdom Come: Deliverance 2lives up to that promise, because the potential here is immense.Note: The views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily represent the views of, and should not be attributed to, GamingBolt as an organization.

Starship lifts off on January 16, before undergoing a "rapid unscheduled disassembly" roughly eight and a half minutes into the flight. SpaceXOn Thursday, observers in the Turks and Caicos Islands region witnessed a stream of fireballs light up the evening sky. No, it wasnt aliens or even meteorsit was the remains of SpaceXs Starship spacecraft, which came apart during its seventh test flight.Starship experienced a rapid unscheduled disassembly during its ascent burn, SpaceX wrote in a post on X. Thats a rather understated engineering term to describe an explosion or breaking apart of a spacecraft.Teams will continue to review data from todays flight test to better understand [the] root cause, the company continued. With a test like this, success comes from what we learn, and todays flight will help us improve Starships reliability.At 5:38 p.m. Eastern time on Thursday, the Super Heavy booster successfully lifted a redesigned and upgraded Starship from its Texas launch pad in the spacecrafts first flight test of the year. The booster then separated from the spacecraft as planned, and headed back to the launch site.To loud cheers and applause, Super Heavy safely landed in the mechanical arms of the catch tower, dubbed chopsticks. This marks the second time the maneuver was executed successfully, after the company made the catch on its first try back in October. (SpaceX chose to abort another catch attempt in November.)Meanwhile, Starships six engines gradually shut down during its ascent, reports the Associated Press Marcia Dunn, and SpaceX lost contact with the spacecraft about eight and a half minutes into its flight.The companys initial data suggesta fire developed in the rear section of the ship, which led to the explosion over the Atlantic Ocean and a consequent rain of debris.Preliminary indication is that we had an oxygen/fuel leak in the cavity above the ship engine firewall that was large enough to build pressure in excess of the vent capacity, billionaire SpaceX founder Elon Musk wrote on X. Apart from obviously double-checking for leaks, we will add fire suppression to that volume and probably increase vent area. Nothing so far suggests pushing next launch past next month.SpaceX will carry out an investigation with the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) to determine what went wrong with the vehicle.According to CNNs Jackie Wattles, regulators are looking into reports of property damage from falling debris in Turks and Caicos. Pieces of the broken-up spacecraft also disrupted airspace over the Gulf of Mexico, as Joey Roulette reports for Reuters. Dozens of commercial flights altered their paths to avoid potential debris, and some departures in Florida experienced delays.The FAA briefly slowed and diverted aircraft around the area where space vehicle debris was falling, agency officials explain to Space.coms Mike Wall.SpaceX spokesman Dan Huot tells the AP that it was great to see a booster come down, but we are obviously bummed out about ship. He emphasizes, however, that its a flight test. Its an experimental vehicle. Starship was only carrying ten mock Starlink satellites, which engineers had planned for it to release as practice.In addition to executing a second booster catch, Starships most recent test flight also achieved the successful restarting of a Raptor engine used in a previous test flight, according to CBS News William Harwood. This is a small but crucial step for SpaceXs goal of building a fully reusable transportation system, because it shows that the engines can fly on multiple missions.Early Thursday morning, SpaceXs competitor, Jeff Bezos Blue Origin, saw its New Glenn rocket lift off for the first time. The maiden voyage had, in a way, almost opposite results to Starships recent test flight: While New Glenns spacecraft reached orbit as planned, the separated booster was unable to maneuver to its landing platform.And on Wednesday, a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket sent two commercially built lunar landers to space. The spacecraft are intended to touch down in the moons northern latitudes, conduct science experiments and test equipment.Get the latest stories in your inbox every weekday.Filed Under: Elon Musk, Engineering, Innovations, Space Travel, SpaceX, Technology

The model excels in rendering advanced textures, natural lighting and complex compositions, providing more flexibility.Read More

TikTok says it will go dark on Sunday, January 19th if the Biden administration doesnt intervene.The company confirms earlier reporting that it will be forced to go dark on the 19th unless the outgoing administration provides a definitive statement assuring its most critical service providers that they wont be held liable for breaking the law. Those providers include Apple, Google, Amazon, and Oracle.TikToks statement follows Fridays Supreme Court ruling that upheld the law banning the app unless its Chinese parent company, ByteDance, divests its ownership stake. Shortly after the Supreme Court ruling, TikTok CEO Shou Chew appealed to President-elect Donald Trump in a video but didnt give any indication of what might happen when the law goes into effect at midnight on Saturday.Unfortunately for TikTok, the White House has already made clear that it intends to punt the fate of the app to Donald Trump, who has promised to save it and is set to be sworn in on Monday, January 20th. President Bidens position on TikTok has been clear for months, including since Congress sent a bill in overwhelming, bipartisan fashion to the Presidents desk: TikTok should remain available to Americans, but simply under American ownership or other ownership that addresses the national security concerns identified by Congress in developing this law, the White House said in a statement on Friday. Given the sheer fact of timing, this Administration recognizes that actions to implement the law simply must fall to the next Administration, which takes office on Monday.Meanwhile, the Department of Justice which is tasked with enforcing the TikTok ban by fining service providers $5,000 per user with access to the app has signaled its still supportive of the law going into effect.Authoritarian regimes should not have unfettered access to millions of Americans sensitive data, Attorney General Merrick Garland said on Friday. The Courts decision affirms that this Act protects the national security of the United States in a manner that is consistent with the Constitution.You can read TikToks full statement below:The statements issued today by both the Biden White House and the Department of Justice have failed to provide the necessary clarity and assurance to the service providers that are integral to maintaining TikToks availability to over 170 million Americans.Unless the Biden Administration immediately provides a definitive statement to satisfy the most critical service providers assuring non-enforcement, unfortunately TikTok will be forced to go dark on January 19.Developing...

The Empyrean series has quickly become one of the most popular books of the last few years thanks to a unique premise and boost from TikTok, where the series first went viral. Fourth Wing, the book that kicked off the series, has been sitting on Amazon's top-sellers list since 2023 and hasn't really left since. In fact, preorders for the latest book in the series from Rebecca Yarros, Onyx Storm, were actually the number two best-seller on Amazon in 2024.Onyx Storm is officially releasing on Tuesday, January 21, and preorders are currently discounted on Amazon. Additionally, if you haven't already read the first two books, you can access them for free with a Kindle Unlimited subscription for a limited time.Onyx Storm PreordersOnyx Storm (Standard Edition)Hardcover and Kindle versions available at a discount.Preorders for Onyx Storm are currently discounted for the standard version of the Hardcover and Kindle ebook. The deluxe edtion is currently still full priced and paperback versions are not yet available for purchase. For more options, you can check out our guide on where to buy books online for additional details.What Is the Empyrean Series About?Before I read the series, I had a friend recommend Fourth Wing to me by describing the premise as "Like the Harry Potter books, but with dragons". I was surprised to find that while that was true in the beginning stages of the book, it quickly started to resemble the Twilight series more and more. It's essentially a magical, fantasy romance novel that gets very graphic with the details.The story follows Violet Sorrengail, a seemingly fragile young girl who has been forced by her powerful mother to enter into the very dangerous academy of dragon riders. As she finds ways to overcome her weaknesses and survive, Violet must also battle her own complex emotions about her mother, her old friend, and a boy she thinks wants nothing more than to see her dead. All the while, there's more going on with the dragons and her world than meets the eye, and she finds herself at the center of it all whilst in the heat of an epic romance.Fourth Wing and Iron Flame are Part of Kindle UnlimitedKindle UnlimitedSee subscription options.See it at AmazonThe first two books in the Empyrean series are currently free on the Kindle app if you have a Kindle Unlimited subscription. If you want to get into the series, you can log on to your Kindle account and download both Fourth Wing and Iron Flame before they are no longer available with your subscription.Looking for more book recommendations? Check our out guide to the best-selling books of all time.

In a Friday night bulletin, TikTok issued a statement on what it calls a possible shutdown after tomorrow. In short, TikTok does not plan to remain operational in the United States through the weekend despite the Biden White House deferring ban enforcement to the Trump White House.TikTok cites critical service provider uncertainty from the government as reason for planning to still go dark this weekend:The statements issued today by both the Biden White House and the Department of Justice have failed to provide the necessary clarity and assurance to the service providers that are integral to maintaining TikToks availability to over 170 million Americans. Unless the Biden Administration immediately provides a definitive statement to satisfy the most critical service providers assuring non-enforcement, unfortunately TikTok will be forced to go dark on January 19.Another read is that TikTok wants to show U.S. users what a ban would look like if the Trump White House were to enforce it. The law doesnt specifically ban TikTok from service in the U.S.; it insists that China must divest from TikTok in favor of U.S. private ownership. Thats the legal angle that the Supreme Court upheld today in a rejection of TikToks free speech argument (which doesnt apply to China).As of this upcoming Monday afternoon, the White House will change hands as former President Trump replaces President Joe Biden. For his part, Trump has played coy on how his administration will handle enforcement of the TikTok divestment law.Perhaps the Biden White House will issue an even more convincing statement that TikTok is clear to operate in the United States. From a liability perspective, however, it seems no amount of reassurance from either administration provides TikTok with risk-free legal standing to continue operating in America.It now seems likely that TikTok will leverage its ability to selectively go dark on Sunday in order to show customers what divest-or-bust means for their addictive, brain cell-deteriorating smartphone app of choice. Attention spans may marginally improve by Wednesday if so.Meanwhile, the head of TikTok in the States plans to attend President Trumps inauguration affair on Monday alongside Apple CEO Tim Cook and other conveniently patriotic tech bros who each recently lost $1 million.Shop Apple on Amazon to support my work Add 9to5Mac to your Google News feed. FTC: We use income earning auto affiliate links. More.Youre reading 9to5Mac experts who break news about Apple and its surrounding ecosystem, day after day. Be sure to check out our homepage for all the latest news, and follow 9to5Mac on Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn to stay in the loop. Dont know where to start? Check out our exclusive stories, reviews, how-tos, and subscribe to our YouTube channel

Image by Amy T. Zielinski via Getty / FuturismBeloved "Mulholland Drive" director David Lynch lived just off that titular Hollywood street and his death may well have been related to the wildfires that blazed nearby.Sources close to the director toldDeadline that Lynch "took a turn for the worse" after being forced to evacuate his house due to the Sunset fire, which burned for about a day in the Hollywood Hills as larger conflagrations devastated other parts of LA County.Aged 78 at the time of his death, the lifelong smoker revealed to Sight and Sound magazine last year that he had been diagnosed with emphysema. During that gloomy interview, Lynch said that he didn't leave his house often due to fear of contracting COVID-19 alongside his debilitating lung disease, and could only work if he directed remotely."Ill tell you, I've gotten emphysema from smoking for so long, and so Im homebound whether I like it or not," the "Twin Peaks" creator told the magazine. "I cant go out. And I can only walk a short distance before I'm out of oxygen."Though no official cause of death has been released in the aftermath of Lynch's passing, speculation has raged online about the potential link between the fire-mandated evacuation of his Hollywood home a brutalist mauve mansion built by Frank Lloyd Wright's son for the writer Beverly Johnson that's located right off Mulholland and his death so soon after.The already-dodgy air quality in LA has been positively apocalyptic since it suffered warring wildfires last week and Lynch being exposed to it could well have contributed to his death,linking it in a grim way to the climate and energy crises also implicated in the deadly California fires.In a meta-analysis of studies about wildfire smoke's impact on emphysema, a common form of chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD), theHealthcare (Basel) journal suggested not only that inhaling post-fire particulates can lead to "increased all-cause mortality," but also that older people with COPD are at greater risk of becoming ill or dying after wildfires.And the fires notwithstanding, Lynch acknowledged in his Sight and Sound interview that his love affair with cigarettes was likely to do him in."Smoking was something that I absolutely loved but, in the end, it bit me," he told the magazine. "It was part of the art life for me: the tobacco and the smell of it and lighting things and smoking and going back and sitting back and having a smoke and looking at your work, or thinking about things; nothing like it in this world is so beautiful.""Meanwhile," he said, "its killing me."Observers on social also tied those poetic factors together when mourning the "Inland Empire" auteur."Dying from cigarettes and a fire itself caused by both nature and human evil is deeply Lynchian," one wrote.Share This Article

Time zones: EST (UTC -5), CST (UTC -6), MST (UTC -7), PST (UTC -8), AKST (UTC -9), HST (UTC -10)As a Senior iOS Engineer you will work alongside a small team of engineers, creatives, and project managers working on mobile apps that connect fans and collectors to the exciting world of Funko.This is a contract position.Your Superpowers in ActionDevelop iOS apps using the latest Apple frameworks and technologies to deliver exceptional user experiences.Implement advanced animations and transitions with a focus on performance and usability.Develop resilient non-UI components, including networking, caching, and long-running task functions, classes, and libraries.Participate in our established code review process to ensure code quality and consistency.Must-Have Superhero GadgetryExpertise in UIKit and SwiftUI.Strong architectural skills, designing scalable apps with reusable components and patterns.Strong skills in creating custom UI components.Proven experience building apps with adaptive layouts for various screen sizes.Deep understanding of Swift Concurrency and solving complex multithreading challenges.Familiarity with functional reactive patterns and frameworks like Combine.Experience integrating with external data sources (e.g., REST APIs) and managing caching effectively.Proficiency with Git and branch-based workflows such as GitHub Flow.Meticulous attention to detail, writing clean, maintainable code.Write unit tests for critical sections of the code base.Experience with the full app deployment lifecycle, including continuous integration, TestFlight, and App Store submission.5+ years of experience as a design-focused iOS software engineer.Nice to HaveExperience with 3D libraries such as Unity, RealityKit, SceneKit, or Metal.Understanding of ARKit.Familiarity with Core Bluetooth for interacting with external peripherals over BLE.Familiarity with in-house app development workflows and deployment processes, including ad-hoc and enterprise signing.