I slept on Citizen Sleeperwhen it originally released in 2022, and it wasnt until a couple of years after its launch that I finally played it. But though I came to it a little late, I instantly fell in love with it. Combining a fascinating and deeply imaginative sci-fi universe, incredible writing and storytelling, and compelling choice-driven gameplay that revolved around a unique dice rolls system, indie studio Jump Over the Ages RPG instantly had its hooks in me. I may have initially slept on the first game, but I decided I wasnt going to make that same mistake with its sequel.Im glad I did, becauseCitizen Sleeper 2: Starward Vectoris fantastic. It takes everything that was good about its predecessor and smartly builds on it, delivering what feels like an even more engaging and fleshed out experience. From the stellar writing and world-building to the dangerously addictive time management, choice-driven, dice rolls gameplay loop,the sequel retains all of the first games biggest strengths. At the same time, with smart tweaks, improvements, and additions, it also expands on everything from the progression mechanics to player choice systems and more. The end result is a stellar sci-fi RPG that manages to capture lightning in a bottle yet again."Citizen Sleeper 2: Starward Vectoris fantastic. It takes everything that was good about its predecessor and smartly builds on it, delivering what feels like an even more engaging and fleshed out experience."Citizen Sleeper 2once again puts players in the shoes of a Sleeper robots who have had human minds and consciousness uploaded into them and one again, you have fled from the clutches of the corporation that owns and enslaves you. This time, however, youre joined by a crew, have a ship of your own, and have different threats bearing down on you. Chased by your corporate masters, as well as by a criminal faction looking to control you, and having to deal with a failing and glitching body,Citizen Sleeper 2tasks you with once again building a life for yourself and finding an escape. This time, however, the focus is just as much on gathering a crew, improving your ship, and taking on different jobs scattered throughout the Starward Belt.On one hand, not being tied to a single location like the original game was does feel like a bit of a loss. I loved exploring and slowly but surely growing familiar with the Eye and its ever-expanding environs inCitizen Sleeper, and Ill admit that I do feel the lack of a similar, single location that spans the entire game. Then again, what Citizen Sleeper 2gains in exchange comes with its own benefits. Your ship, for instance, is still very much a single location that you call home. Slowly improving and expanding its capabilities and getting better acquainted with your crewmates remains quite satisfying throughout the game.Having constant access to a ship means youre also moving around a lot inCitizen Sleeper 2. Scattered throughout the Starward Belt are a number of different contracts and quests that take you to different asteroids, stations, ruins, and more. The greater location variety lends the game a greater sense of scale, and also shakes up the familiar core loop in interesting ways. At its core,Citizen Sleeper 2still tasks you with managing your dice and energy as you make use of limited actions every in-game day to advance quests, earn money, explore, and just plain survive, but each contract breaks up that cycle with its own minicycles."Having constant access to a ship means youre also moving around a lot inCitizen Sleeper 2. Scattered throughout the Starward Belt are a number of different contracts and quests that take you to different asteroids, stations, ruins, and more. The greater location variety lends the game a greater sense of scale, and also shakes up the familiar core loop in interesting ways."Success in contracts is determined by a variety of factors, from what your crew composition is and how smartly (or not) you use your dice, to how well stocked your ship is with supplies and more. Being locked into a contract once youve accepted it does admittedly feel a little limiting, which sort of goes against everything thatCitizen Sleepersdesign is about, but on the whole, they succeed in injecting much greater quest variety into the game.Of course, alotof the credit there has to go to the writing. After the first game, it should be no surprise that that is the area whereCitizen Sleeper 2probably shines the brightest. Every character you meet in the diverse, wonderfully realized cast makes a strong mark, every scene and dialogue conversation is immaculately written, every dialogue choice or decision youre asked to make feels deliberate. The game weaves a captivating tale thats hard to tear yourself away from, and also uses its more expansive setting to flesh out and reveal more of the universes lore and backstory. Narratively, then,Citizen Sleeper 2is a triumph yet again.The moment-to-moment time and resource management mechanics that form the backbone of the experience also see some changes for the better. For instance, the first games Condition system has been replaced with a new Stress system. InCitizen Sleeper 2, though youre still managing your energy by making sure youre eating regularly, unlike the first game, youre no longer dependent on stabilizers, which means your body isnt in a constantly deteriorating condition. That said, taking Stress damage on failed actions now impacts the health of individual dice, which, once fully depleted, renders that dice unusable until you find a way to repair it.The Stress system definitely feels a little less strict than the Condition system in terms of how it punishes failure and how much it restricts your actions, which works wonderfully with the greater sense of freedom that the rest of the game affords as well. Those restrictions, meanwhile, now take other forms, like glitches that your body accumulates overtime, in turn glitching some of your dice to dramatically increase their failure rates. Its a smartly implemented system that manages to retain a sense of risk and reward while ensuring that players dont ever feel too throttled."For fans of the first game, for fans of RPGs, for fans of choice-driven gameplay, and for fans of the sci-fi genre, Jump Over the Ages sophomore outing is an easy game to recommend."Citizen Sleeper 2also introduces skill checks, allowing players to choose special actions during certain scenes that work the same as dice rolls and see the story being impacted by your choices and branching in interesting ways. On the progression side of things, meanwhile, the game introduces a new Push system, which grants special abilities to each class, granting each of them different tactical advantages (depending on how you use them, that is). Like its predecessor,Citizen Sleeper 2keeps its progression systems lean and focused, but every upgrade that you make feels meaningful and genuinely impactful.Whether its the day-to-day gameplay cycle, the progression mechanics and class differentiations, or even how quests function, the running theme inCitizen Sleeper 2is one of smart, iterative improvements that take its predecessors winning formula and hone it to near-perfection. That one more day hook that characterized the first game so well is still very much present and accounted for in the sequel, to the point where it may be an even stronger and more addictive force than it was the first time around. Combined with its stellar writing, engrossing worldbuilding, and expert storytelling,Citizen Sleeper 2: Starward Vectorsticks the landing in every way that counts. For fans of the first game, for fans of RPGs, for fans of choice-driven gameplay, and for fans of the sci-fi genre, Jump Over the Ages sophomore outing is an easy game to recommend. Absolutely do not sleep onCitizen Sleeper 2.This game was reviewed on the PlayStation 5.

The rumors have finally come true as Xbox Game Studios has announced Forza Horizon 5 for PS5. Its launching this Spring and developed by Panic Button alongside Turn 10 Studios and Playground Games.The open-world racer is available to wishlist on the PlayStation Store, though a price has yet to be confirmed. Its Car Packs and expansions, Hot Wheels and Rally Adventure will be sold separately, though expect a bundle packing them together. And yes, there will be cross-platform play with Xbox and PC at launch.If that wasnt enough, the PS5 versions launch will coincide with the Horizon Realms update. According to Microsoft, this will offer the chance to explore a curated collection of some of the communitys favorite previously released Evolving Worlds, alongside some other surprises. More details will be revealed in the coming days.Forza Horizon 5 launched in November 2021 for Xbox One, Xbox Series X/S, and PC. It became a massive hit for Microsoft, crossing ten million players in ten days and experiencing the biggest launch week for Xbox and Game Pass at the time. Check out our review here, where we gave it a ten out of ten.

The painting is signed "Elimar" in its bottom right corner. LMI Group International, Inc.During Vincent van Goghs year-long stay in a French asylum, he created some 150 paintingsincludingIrises andThe Starry Night. He also painted many interpretations of other artists work, calling them translations. As van Gogh wrote in a letter to his brother Theo, he was not copying pure and simple but rather translating into another language, the one of colors, the impressions of chiaroscuro and white and black.Now, experts say theyve identified a long-lost van Gogh translation: an oil portrait of a red-cheeked fisherman, which an antiques collector purchased at a garage sale in Minnesota for under $50.The collector sold the piece to the art research firm LMI Group International for an undisclosed amount in 2019. Since then, the companys researchers have been investigating the painting, and they recently released a 450-pagereport detailing their conclusion: Its a van Gogh. Vincent van Gogh'sThe Reaper, an interpretation of Jean-Franois Millet's drawing of the same name Van Gogh Museum, AmsterdamWhen art historian Maxwell L. Anderson, chief operating officer of LMI Group, first laid eyes on the painting, he was struck by what [he] saw, as he tells the Wall Street Journals Kelly Crow. Was I all in? No, he adds. But I was super intrigued.At the garage sale, the collector had been intrigued by the paintings impasto, a technique involving thickly laid paint. The 18-inch-tall portrait depicts a white-bearded man by the sea who is smoking a pipe and repairing a fishing net. His downcast eyes betray contemplation, and his face is marked by ruddy coloring and deep smile lines. In the works bottom right corner is a signature: the word Elimar.Though the piece lacked van Goghs famously vivid colors, Anderson saw telltale signs of a deft painter at play, per the Wall Street Journal. He also noticed a hair embedded in the brushwork.In its analysis of Elimar, LMI Group combined science and technology with traditional tools of connoisseurship, historical context, formal analysis and provenance research, as chairman, president and CEO Lawrence M. Shindell says in a statement.The company hired Jennifer Mass, president of Scientific Analysis of Fine Art, to analyze the canvas fibers and pigments. One particular redgeranium lake, or PR-50introduced doubts. Van Gogh died by suicide in 1890, and researchers have always thought geranium lake was first patented around 1905.Mass brought in patent lawyerBen Appleton to search for an earlier patent. After a month of research, his firm found an 1883 patent for PR-50a find-within-a-find for conservators, who can now date and authenticate works containing this red pigment to the late 19th century, writes the Wall Street Journal. The letters of the "Elimar" inscription matched those of "Emile Zola" in van Gogh's paintingStill Life With Bible(1885). OddCommonA genetic analysis of the hair embedded in the painting revealed that it had belonged to someone with red or red-brown hair. As van Goghs 35self-portraits illustrate, the artist had ginger locks. Additionally, researchers found that the letters in the paintings Elimar inscriptionparticularly the Es, Ms and Asmatch those in an 1885 van Gogh painting.Van Gogh regularly neglected to sign his paintings, but why mark this one Elimar? According to LMI Group, Elimar is the name of a character in the 1848 Danish novelThe Two Baronesses by Hans Christian Andersenone of van Goghsfavorite authors.According to the report, van Gogh painted Elimar in 1889, during his first year at the sanitarium in southern France. Experts think Elimar is a so-called translation of Danish artistMichael Anchers portrait of fishermanNiels Gaihede, a subject to which both [painter Paul] Gauguin and van Gogh were drawn, per the statement.As soon as we saw the Ancher, I knew we were right, art historian and LMI Group researcher William Havlicek tells the Wall Street Journal. Experts thinkElimar was inspired byMichael Anchers portrait of fisherman Niels Gaihede. LMI Group International, Inc.The analysis has provided fresh insight into the oeuvre of van Gogh, particularly as it relates to his practice of reinterpreting works by other artists, Anderson says in the statement. He thinks Elimar is a form of spiritual self-portrait, allowing viewers to see the painter as he wished to be remembered.LMI Group will soon begin showing Elimar to major van Gogh scholars and dealers. They think the artwork is worth at least $15 million. Still, the paintings authorship is not yet widely accepted, and art experts are generally hesitant to draw conclusions about newly discovered works authenticity.People love it when things fall through the cracks, and it would be wonderful if they found a van Gogh, Richard Polsky, an art authenticator who wasnt involved in the project, tells the Wall Street Journal. But theyve got to pin everything down and get a scholar at theVan Gogh Museum [in Amsterdam] to sign off on it.The Van Gogh Museum has seen the painting before. The anonymous buyer submitted it to the museum in 2019, and experts ruled that it wasnt the real deal. However, the museum hasnt yet responded to the new report.At the end of the day, the most important thing is what the experts in Van Gogh think of the artwork, Robert Snell, co-owner and fine arts specialist at Revere Auctions in St. Paul, tells KAREs Kent Erdahl.Snell is particularly interested in the paintings provenance. Trying to figure out how that piece ended up at a garage sale in Minneapolis is really the $15 million mystery, he adds.Get the latest stories in your inbox every weekday.

The fossil find, dubbed Danekr DK-1295, contains regurgitated fragments of sea lilies. Sten Lennart JakobsenSixty-six million years ago, a marine creature, minding its own business at the bottom of a Cretaceous sea, munched on some sea liliesthen didnt feel too great.Now, a fossil hunter in Denmark named Peter Bennicke has found the remains of this Cretaceous snack: fossilized vomit. The discovery was announced Monday in a statement from the natural history museum in the Danish town of Faxe, called Geomuseum Faxe.The fossil is truly an extraordinary find, as Jesper Miln, a paleontologist and curator at Geomuseum Faxe, says in the statement, per CNNs Jack Guy.It all started when Bennicke found some strange fragments on the Danish island of Zealand at Stevns Klint, a fossil-rich, coastal cliff thats also a UNESCO World Heritage Site. He brought the fragments to the Geomuseum Faxe, where experts identified them as pieces of sea lily. These aquatic, plant-like animals related to sea stars and sea urchins are formally called crinoids.In the fossil, the hard-to-digest bits of sea lily were encompassed in chalk. Essentially, it was prehistoric puke, scientifically called regurgitalite.Technically, the sea lily does not appear to have reached the vomiters stomach, since the edges of the fossils are very sharp and clear, as Paul Olsen, a paleontologist at Columbia University who was not involved with the find, tells NPRs James Doubek. For that reason, he calls it a gastric ejection rather than true vomit. But nevertheless, he adds, its an especially nice example of a regurgitalite fossil.Besides giving millions of people around the world the chance to giggle about vomit like children, the finding tells us something about who was eating who 66 million years ago, Miln tells the BBC. It helps scientists better understand the organization of the Cretaceous period food chain.During the Late Cretaceous, dinosaursincluding Tyrannosaurus and Velociraptorroamed the land, shortly before the notorious Chicxulub impactornearly wiped them out. Miln, however, suspects the animal that ate the sea lilies all that time ago to be a bottom-dwelling shark with crushing teeth instead of sharp ones, as Victor Mather reports for the New York Times.Lilies, however, arent that great to eat, because they are almost only skeleton, he explains to the New York Times. So, they took what they could and threw up the rest.Sharks survived the Chicxulub impactor, and today, the closest living relative of Milns hypothesized shark would be Australias Port Jackson shark.The fossilized vomit has been designated Danekr, a unique Danish term for objects discovered in Denmark of significant natural historical value. As of today, more than 1,000 discoveries have been identified as Danekr, and finders are required by law to hand them over to a natural history museum in the country.While this may now be the worlds most famous piece of puke, as Miln tells the BBC, its actually not the oldest. That award goes to 160-million-year-old ichthyosaur vomit discovered in England in 2002, according to Guinness World Records.Get the latest stories in your inbox every weekday.Filed Under: Animals, Cool Finds, Denmark, Digestive System, Dinosaurs, Fish, Fossils, Paleontology, Sharks

French AI startup Mistral unveils a breakthrough 24B parameter language model that matches the performance of models three times its size, challenging tech giants with faster speeds and lower computing costs while targeting enterprise deployments.Read More

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Entire God is a Geek editorial staff walk out and cut ties with alt-right founder"It has become increasingly clear that we can no longer separate the site from the owner"Image credit: God is a Geek News by Vikki Blake Contributor Published on Jan. 30, 2025 The entire editorial staff of God is a Geek has quit en-masse after its founder, Calvin Robinson, mimicked a Nazi salute at an event last week, causing a widespread backlash that resulted in him losing his position in the Angelican church and impacting the work of the site still associated with his name.Robinson - who is reportedly no longer part of the site's editorial team but is still listed as its owner - claims he is "not a Nazi", but made the gesture at the National Pro-Life summit last week as a "mockery of the hysterical liberals".In a statement this evening, the team said: "In light of the recent actions of GIAGs owner, the editorial team has taken the decision to cease publication on GodisaGeek.com."We have each of us put years of work into this site, attempting to keep entertaining despite the actions of our estranged owner. His input on the site has been zero for several years, but we cannot continue to say nothing."To be absolutely clear, we do not support, share, or condone Calvin Robinsons politics or actions."The team - consisting of Adam Cook, Mick Fraser, Chris White, Chris Hyde, and Lyle Pendle - said it has "run the site independently of Calvin for several years now in the hopes that we would not have to lose the hard work we have poured into it, the access we have worked hard for, and the relationships we have developed", but today admitted it had become "increasingly clear that we can no longer separate the site from the owner.""As a result, the entire editorial team will be stepping down with immediate effect. We will create a new site and our future content will be published there, bereft of any connection to Calvin Robinson. It will be hard to start again, hard to walk away from the work weve done here off our own backs, but this is the right thing to do."GodisaGeek will no longer publish work under any of our names. Whatever the future holds we will be working together to bring content that is fair, inclusive, and entertaining as we always have," the statement continued. "But we will be doing it under a new banner and we hope that some of you will come with us on the new journey."The post finished by saying the editorial team "cannot apologise on behalf of Calvin, and will not. Our severance should stand as proof that we do not support or condone his actions, politics, or beliefs".

A new year means a new Sundance Film Festival, and a fresh crop of promising original features that could go on to become awards season darlings in a few months. It might be hard to top last years festival where Ddi, A Different Man, and I Saw the TV Glow all made strong showings. But with films like Atropia, Bubble & Squeak, and Didnt Die on the roster, this years Sundance might just do the trick.

LatestMachine LearningA 1953 Sci-Fi Story Predicted Todays Hottest AI Topics 0 like January 30, 2025Share this postAuthor(s): Yasameen Thaer Originally published on Towards AI. A timeless tale about the moral implications of rapid technological advancement.This member-only story is on us. Upgrade to access all of Medium.Admit that we were wrong trying to cure human problems by mechanical means. Start again. Use machines, yes, but not as judges and teachers and fathers.This is a quote from Robert Sheckleys Watchbird, a sci-fi short story in his collection book, Untouched by Human Hands.Photo of book captured by the article author. Cover Art by Saul Steinberg, Untitled, 196567 Ink on Paper, 16 X 12in. Private Collection The Saul Steinberg Foundation/ (ARS). Cover Design: Jim Stoddart.I stumbled upon this piece by chance when I spotted the collections book cover; it was simple yet a bit weird.I was immediately sold!Little did I know that the book contained a story that held many thought-provoking reflections about todays generative AI and maybe highly unlikely our future with Artificial general intelligence (AGI) if it ever gets inventedWatchbird by Robert Sheckley is a story written in 1953 that paints a world where they found a solution to end murder of all kinds. By using smart drones named Watchbird. These drones had the ability to detect and prevent murder before it happened. Their core mission is to protect all living organisms. Equipped also with Read the full blog for free on Medium.Join thousands of data leaders on the AI newsletter. Join over 80,000 subscribers and keep up to date with the latest developments in AI. From research to projects and ideas. If you are building an AI startup, an AI-related product, or a service, we invite you to consider becoming asponsor. Published via Towards AITowards AI - Medium Share this post

Though Stranger Things season 5 is set to premiere at some point this year, details about the final season of Netflixs sci-fi/horror phenomenon have remained scarce. So much so that desperate content junkies have resorted to writing about upcoming Duffer Brothers shows that vaguely sound like Stranger Things. Following the Duffers successful trip to Los Angeles for a Netflix event, however, the streamer has now begun its Stranger Things season 5 promotional journey in earnest. The first official teaser for the shows last hurrah comes not in the form of a trailer or release date but in a wanted poster. Folks, it brings us no pleasure to report that Jane Eleven Hopper appears to be missing. This MISSING TEEN poster is a rich text that reveals a lot more about Stranger Things season 5 than you might think. For starters, Eleven being M.I.A. isnt merely reflecting the state of affairs at the end of season 4. If you recall, Stranger Things penultimate season concluded with its characters reunited in Hawkins and ready to confront the final threat of Vecna and The Upside Down to come. In fact, the seasons final shot sees Eleven standing closest to the camera in an open field, battle-weary but still very much accounted for. According to the fan-compiled timeline of the shows canon, the season 4 finale takes place on March 29, 1986. Meanwhile this poster claims that Jane Hopper a.k.a. Eleven was last seen wearing a hooded jacket walking alone in the vicinity of Hawkins High School on June 13, 1986. That date represents three months between season 4s conclusion and Elevens disappearance. When those three months occur in the context of season 5 (or perhaps even before season 5) remains to be seen. We do, at least, have access to seven of the seasons eight episode titles. And wouldnt you know it, the name of episode two seems to be pretty revealing. Per Netflix, that one is set to be called The Vanishing of [REDACTED]. It now seems pretty safe to conclude that that will be The Vanishing of Jane Hopper or The Vanishing of Eleven.The other item to note on the poster is the phone number. Rather than going the usual 555 route, Stranger Things has elected to include what could theoretically be a real American phone number with an accurate central Indiana area code. Our calls to 765-303-2020 have yet to bear any fruit. But thats still worth occasionally checking in on in the lead up to season 5. Finally, the most important part of the missing poster might not be on the poster itself but in the Netflix social copy that accompanies it. Whos *really* looking for Jane Hopper? Netflixs post on X (which used to be Twitter but is now something dumber) reads. Who is looking for Jane Hopper indeed? One would assume her friends and family, of course. But if Eleven has gone missing theres only one logical place for her to have ended up: The Upside Down. And down there theres a fella by the name of Vecna who will undoubtedly be looking for her.