Araj Oblodra is an NPC merchant that you first meet at Moonrise Towers in the second act of Baldur's Gate 3. She is one of the unique merchants in the game, selling a variety of magical equipment and rare consumable items. This drow alchemist takes a twisted interest in experimenting with blood, creating some of the powerful, one-time use potions.

I am making ai for turn based game and I want it to choose good positions for its units.Algorithm I come with looks like this:For each tile in ai unit movement range I calculate a Djikstra map (distances with pathfinding to every other tile). Then I calculate heatmap based on distances from this tile to points of interests. Then ai just move its unit to tile with highest points.The problem is, that result I getting is too slow. My map consist of a lot of tiles and unit mo

History is told by the winners, the saying goes, and thats certainly been true with English-language coverage of the video game industry. Want coverage of the NES and PlayStation? Thats easy to find. Want coverage of the Zemmix and Dendy? Were you even aware they existed?Lewis Packwoods book Curious Video Game Machines was written to fill in some of those gaps. Structured around game consoles and hardware that never got much attention in the West the first time around, the book is an exhaustively researched look at a world that has largely been unexplored either in English, or at all.In an effort to spotlight many game-related books and documentaries, Polygon is running an email interview series with the people behind them. We previously connected with Julian Rignall about his not-quite-an-autobiography The Games of a Lifetime and Paul Vogel about his Housemarque documentary The Name of the Game, and below we have Packwood discussing how and why he went digging into the most curious of game machines.Polygon: I love this book because I think when most people think of obscure game consoles, they go to something like Pippin, but you show there was a whole different world out there. Where did that idea come from?Lewis Packwood: It all began back in 2014, when I discovered the Avatar Machine, created by the artist Marc Owens. It was such a wild idea: hed created a polygon-style suit with VR goggles, which were attached to a camera on a pole sticking out of the back of the suit, so this contraption let you view yourself from a third-person perspective, as if you were in a video game. I wrote an article about it, and shortly after that I came across a forum discussion about a unique, open-source Yugoslavian computer called the Galaksija. I wrote about that, too, and over the years Ive kept an eager eye out for stories about unusual consoles and computers, like the Casio Loopy, a Japanese exclusive console that prints stickers. It regularly astounds me just how many weird and wonderful game machines are out there, machines that hardly anyone has heard of.The catalyst for writing the book was an interview with Chris Crawford a few years back in 2021. I was talking to him for a feature about Balance of Power, the brilliant Cold War tactics game he made in 1985, a few years before he founded GDC. Apropos of nothing, he showed me some pictures of a custom machine hed made back in the 1970s out of a KIM-1 kit computer, and I was fascinated. He called it Kimtanktics, and it was one of the first ever computer wargames: a real-time, two-player tank battle that you controlled with a calculator-style controller in conjunction with a big paper map. The machine itself was housed in a huge wooden cabinet, and Chris had only ever shown it off at early game conventions, meaning just a few hundred people have ever played it (with a blanket hung between the players so they couldnt peek at each others maps). It felt like such an important piece of gaming history, but I also knew it was such a niche thing that it would be difficult to persuade any editor to commission an article on it. But I was fascinated, and I was certain other people would be, too. Thats when I decided to write the book, with the idea of revisiting several of the unusual machines Id discovered over the years and really digging into the stories behind them.If you had to choose one, what would you say is the most curious game machine featured in the book, and why? (Side note: Any chance you have a photo of this?)Its so difficult to choose, but one of the most surprising machines was the Daewoo Zemmix. I found out about it through a console collector, but its a machine that very few people know about, since it was never sold outside South Korea. Daewoo was a huge Korean conglomerate that was probably most famous for manufacturing cars, but back in the 1980s it developed a line of computers based on the MSX standard, which was popular for a while in places like Japan, the Netherlands and South America. Daewoo then expanded into MSX-based consoles, beginning with the Zemmix in 1985, followed by the Zemmix V, the Zemmix Super V and the Zemmix Turbo. And they are gorgeous machines. The Zemmix V in particular looks phenomenal, like a triangular rocket ship. It came in a range of colours, too, and the asymmetrically coloured version is particularly beautiful.These machines were so popular in Korea that there was even a mini console version of the Zemmix V released a few years back in the same vein as the NES Mini, but almost no one outside the country has heard of them. It just goes to show that the history of video games is much more complicated and interesting than the narratives were often told, and it varied enormously according to which country you lived in. This is something that Ive tried to get across in the book, exploring, for example, how the video games crash of 1983 wasnt felt in the UK, where everyone was excited about microcomputers like the ZX Spectrum and the ill-fated Enterprise 64, while Brazil was dedicated to the Sega Master System (which was released in a number of unique forms in the country, like the Master System Girl) and Russia was devoted to the Dendy, a bootleg version of the Nintendo Famicom that even had its own TV show and magazine.When researching the book, what were some of the biggest hurdles you had to jump through to track down details on these machines?The trouble with writing a book about rare and unusual video game machines is that its often very hard to find information on them: even basic things like when they were released. I spent a long time picking through dusty texts and forums and trying to track down the people involved with these machines, and I got lucky on a few occasions: like interviewing Laury Scott, who ran the plant that produced the Radofin 1292 Advanced Programmable Video System. Many early consoles and computers were based around either the Zilog Z80 or MOS 6502 chips (the Atari VCS used a variant of the latter, for example), but Radofins console used the now long-forgotten Signetics 2650 chip and this chip was also used in a host of other rarely talked about consoles, like the Interton VC 4000, which was made by a German hearing aid company. It was wonderful to explore the history of those strange old Signetics 2650 consoles, but so little has been written about them that the research was particularly difficult. Even the German Computerspielemuseum had only a couple of magazine articles relating to the VC 4000, although they ended up proving very useful.One person who I spent ages trying to track down was Rick Dyer, the creator of Dragons Lair. He was also behind a couple of machines featured in the book: the hologram arcade cabinet Time Traveler and the now extremely rare RDI Halcyon, a 1985 LaserDisc-based console with voice recognition, of which only a handful of prototypes remain. Unfortunately I wasnt able to get hold of him (if youre reading this Rick, Id love to chat), but I was still able to tell the story of these machines through other sources. That wasnt the case for a couple of other machines, and there were two chapters I had to drop because I just couldnt dig up enough trustworthy information. But Im hoping to revisit these in a follow-up book somewhere down the line if more information comes to light and there are so many more curious video game machines out there to discover. I have a huge spreadsheet of rare and unusual machines that Id love to feature in the next book, so this is just the tip of the iceberg!

People dont talk enough about how funny Bong Joon Hos movies are. Thats probably to be expected from one of the greatest masters of tension working in movies today but its a shame, because even his tensest movies are also funny as hell.With his latest movie, Mickey 17, director Bong has finally made an out-and-out comedy: the story of a miserable clone worker who gets killed in the name of science over and over. Its all pitch-black humor, a little bit of affliction, and a lot of heart; in other words, a sci-fi comedy that only Bong Joon Ho could pull off, which also makes it the perfect time to finally give him the comedic credit he deserves.[Ed. note: This post contains spoilers for many Bong Joon Ho movies. It does not contain spoilers for Mickey 17.]While tension might be what hes most immediately associated with, the truth is Bong Joon Ho is just a master of mood in general. Like most truly great directors, he is an expert at using every part of the filmmaking process to guide audiences to the feelings hes trying to convey. More so than almost any director in history, one of the things that marks his movies as so singular and specific is the elegance with which he mixes together genres. In single scenes he can flit from horror to romance to melancholy to action, all while feeling perfectly seamless and eluding any kind of conventional classification.But in all this genre mastery, comedy is perhaps the sharpest tool in his kit. Whether its a well-timed diversion to give the viewer a break between intense moments, like every ridiculous, over-the-top detail of Tilda Swintons performance in Snowpiercer, or something more crucial to the story, he always knows when the moment is right for a joke.While Bong might build entire scenes or conversations out of other genres, he uses comedy like seasoning, bringing out the full flavors of even the smallest elements of his characters or plots. Park Gang-dus (Song Kang-ho) attempted sacrifice at the end of The Host wouldnt mean quite as much if we didnt spend the beginning of the movie watching his extremely funny, lackadaisical laziness at his convenience stand. Similarly, Park Doo-mans (also Song Kang-ho) slow arc toward despair and madness in Memories of Murder wouldnt hit the same way if we didnt see his earlier goofiness.Parasite is perhaps the best example of how Bong uses pitch-black humor to constantly underline a movies themes. The scene of Park Dong-ik (Lee Sun-kyun) and Choi Yeon-gyo (Cho Yeo-jeong) on the couch having sex while the entire Kim family is tucked under their coffee table is absolutely hilarious; a scene and situation so bizarre you cant do anything but laugh. At the same time, though, its also the entire movie in miniature: the Parks opulent wealth, in this case a coffee table big enough to squeeze in a family of four, literally blinding them to the poor people in their lives while they galavant around having sex on couches. Like everything in Bongs movies, its just another example of every mechanism working in perfect sync to tell the story.While comedy has played an important but supporting role in so many of Bongs films up to this point, with Mickey 17 he gets to invert the formula. The movie is hilarious, openly (and successfully) vying for laughs in nearly every scene thanks in large part to Robert Pattinsons incredible physical comedy chops and his absolutely ridiculous voice.Bong also reiterates himself as a whiz of slapstick and visual humor, and the script too (particularly the narration) is full of hilarious and bizarre little jokes about the peculiarities of how Mickey 17 views the world. But it wouldnt be a Bong Joon Ho movie if it was only a simple comedy. Scenes that start funny in Mickey 17 often take an unexpected turn, suddenly flying into violence, gore, or even white-knuckled tension at the drop of a hat. Its a masterful blend of genres in a way that few other modern directors even attempt, and that Bong seems to pull off easily in every movie he makes. Every scene has elastic flexibility and madcap energy that helps its jokes land harder and amplifies its moments of horror, action, and suspense in a way that only Bong Joon Ho could.

Google will have to break up its business, the Justice Department said in a filing, upholding the previous administration's proposal after a federal judge ruled last year that the company illegally abused a monopoly over the search industry. As The Washington Post and The New York Times have reported, the Justice Department reiterated in a new filing that Google will have to sell the Chrome browser. When the DOJ argued for its sale last year, it said that selling Chrome "will permanently stop Googles control of this critical search access point and allow rival search engines the ability to access the browser that for many users is a gateway to the internet."The Justice Department also kept a Biden-era proposal that seeks to ban Google from paying companies like Apple, other smartphone manufacturers and Mozilla to make its search engine the default on their phones and browsers. It did remove a previous proposal that would compel Google to sell its stakes in AI startups, however, after Anthropic told the government that it needs the company's money to continue operating. Instead of banning AI investments altogether, the government wants to require the company to notify federal and state officials before making investments in artificial intelligence. Earlier this year, the Financial Times reported that Google was investing another billion dollars in Anthropic.Google is expected to file its own proposal for its final set of alternative remedies. In the earlier one it filed in December, the company said that the Justice Department's original remedies went "overboard" and that they reflected an "interventionist agenda" that "goes far beyond what the Court's decision is actually about [its] agreements with partners to distribute search." Google suggested allowing it continue paying partners like Apple and Mozilla to offer Google Search, but also to allow them to form agreements with other partners across different platforms. Apple could, for instance, offer different default search engines for iPhones and iPads. Meanwhile, browser companies could change default search engines every 12 months.As The Post notes, the Justice Department's filing could be an indicator of how the Trump administration will handle antitrust cases involving tech companies. It could be strict on big tech like the Biden administration was despite tech leaders supporting the new President and his policies. Google donated to the Trump campaign when he ran last year and just recently halted efforts to hire employees from diverse backgrounds. It said that it was "no longer set hiring targets to improve representation in its workforce." The House also recently subpoenaed Alphabet and its CEO Sundar Pichai for communications between the company and the Biden administration regarding COVID-19.Judge Amit Mehta, the original judge who ruled that Google was a monopolist and had "acted as one to maintain its monopoly," will hear both the government's and the company's remedies and will decide on the final solutions for the case in April.This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/big-tech/google-will-still-have-to-break-up-its-business-the-justice-department-said-150000739.html?src=rss

Alibabas research arm has launched its first server-grade RISC-V processor to take on Intel and AMD.

Thanks to some dummy units, we've got another look at the iPhone 17 designs and some key dimensions.

The 2001 Tilda Swinton film The Deep End features a scene that has stuck with me for nearly 25 years, even though Ive forgotten almost everything else about the movie. Swintons character is being blackmailed for $50,000 and is given 24 hours to come up with the cash. Although her character is shown to live a comfortable, upper-middle-class life, she spends a stressful day on the phone trying to find the moneyand she misses the deadline.As a budding money nerd, I wondered what I would do in her situation. I had some go-to sources of cash for smaller financial emergencies, but there was a limit to how much I could gather quickly.The thing is, everyone has a limit to the cash they can accesseven those financial experts who wag their fingers at anyone whose limit seems too low. But wherever your financial limit is, a need for more cash than you can access feels insurmountable. It doesnt have to be.Here are some ways to find money in an emergency that you may not have thought of.How soon is quickly?In the film, Tilda Swintons character has 24 hours to come up with a substantial amount of money. If shed had a month, or even a week, she probably could have found that money with a minimum of fussbut it takes more than one day to take out a home equity loan, liquidate investments, or sell anything worth tens of thousands of dollars.While few emergencies have a 24-hour turnaround time (unless youre being blackmailed by Goran Vinji), they do generally come with looming deadlines. Thats why all the options on this list should take no more than two to three days.Additionally, the best options for quick cash wont hurt your future finances, your credit score, or your relationships. The options below are as low-impact as possible, but remember to always do your due diligence and understand the potential drawbacks.Up to $500Downgrade your credit cardIf you have a credit card with annual fees, you could potentially recoup some of the fee youve already paid. Eric Roberge, CFP and founder of Beyond Your Hammock, offers this suggestion:Call the credit card company to downgrade the card to one with no annual fee. Most credit card companies will refund you the prorated amount of the annual fee.Doing this will help you avoid the credit-score-hurting move of closing the card, while still helping you recoup the fee. How much you receive depends on the fee and when you cancel.If you paid an annual fee of $100 in August and call to downgrade your card to the no-fee version in March, the credit card company will provide you a statement credit of ~$50, Roberge says.This may not hold true for every credit card, and the found cash is a statement creditbut this option can help if youre in a situation where every penny counts.Sell stuff on Facebook MarketplaceSelling something is usually the easiest way to drum up a couple of Benjamins. Financial coach Justin Brown-Woods recommends using Facebook Marketplace to quickly sell unwanted items. Ive sold over $16,000 of items on Facebook and I love using it as a quick spurt for my financial coaching clients, Brown-Woods says.Brandon Lovingier, a Chartered Financial Consultant based in Maryland, seconds this option. I did this the other day. I sold an old standing desk and monitor I had laying around for $50 each, Lovingier explains. Took a few minutes to take pictures and about an hour total of meeting people.Sell your plasmaPlasma donation has a stigma, but it can be a good way to generate cash quickly. According to Jim Wang, founder of Wallet Hacks, plasma donation is not a fun process, which is why it pays so much, but does offer a high hourly payout.How much of a payout? You can get up to $100 a visit, Wang says. It takes a few hours the first time but becomes faster as you dont have paperwork and are more familiar with the process. Additionally, many plasma donation centers run promotions, where you can get bonuses for frequent donation.$500 to $2000Leverage your carYour ride may be a source of ready cash, according to Lovingier. You can make $500 in a week by listing your car on Turo and bumming rides from friends for the week, he says. Turo is the app-based peer-to-peer car rental company that allows travelers to rent cars from local vehicle owners. Just note that Turo requires cars that are younger than 12 years old with less than 130,000 miles on the odometer.Another alternative Lovingier recommends is driving for Uber, Lyft, or DoorDash for a few days. Ive heard of people earning a lot of money by driving during peak hours for a weekend, he says. These can be really lucrative during peak times.Rent out your homeThis option depends on your location and timing, but putting your house up on AirBnb could potentially net you big bucks for a short stint. For example, I live in Milwaukee, which hosted the Republican National Convention last summer. Some Milwaukee residents were able to get as much as $2,400 per night by renting out their homes to visitors.Use your skillsLike Liam Neeson, you have a very particular set of skills that can equal quick cash. For example, freelance writer Paulette Perhach has photography experience and a great camera, which she used to generate cash in a hurry several years ago. It was nearly Mothers Day, so she took her camera and business cards to a local park and offered to take photos of the moms and kids for $20 per portrait.Similarly, my husband is an automotive engineer and lifelong grease monkey. He could easily make some money by offering to vet used cars for potential buyers. He has the knowledge and technical skills to know what to look for in a good used car and what issues may present a problem down the roadand that kind of expertise is worth money.Whatever you know well is something someone else needs and is willing to pay for.$2,000 to $10,000Sell a carIf you are in a two-car household and you either finance or own at least one vehicle, selling that car could help you get cash within a day. Lovingier explains that this would be his go-to method.If I absolutely had to get my hands on $5,000 today, we could sell the nicer vehicle we have and buy a cheaper car, he says. This could potentially be enough to get you into the $10,000 to $25,000 plus range, too.As an added bonus, selling a car means you can cancel insurance on that vehicle. If you paid ahead for your insurance, your insurer will give you a prorated refund on what youve already paid. Even if youre not paid ahead, cancelling your insurance will free up the monthly premium moving forward.Check for unclaimed fundsThere may be money with your name on it just sitting around unclaimed. As of 2023, states held $70 billion in unclaimed funds, and its estimated that one out of every seven Americans is owed unclaimed property. Whats more, the average amount of unclaimed money is more than $2,000.To discover if your state owes you money, you can search your states unclaimed property office. Make sure you check any other states you have lived in, as well.But its not just state governments that may owe you money. You can also check to see if youre owed unpaid wages from a former employer, money from someone who has declared bankruptcy, or even unclaimed insurance funds, among other sources of unclaimed funds.$10,000 to $25,000Tap your home equityA home equity loan or line of credit are common options for generating cash quickly, but the application and approval process typically takes at least 30 days. These kinds of loans are also hard to qualify for if you have a low credit score.However, there is another way to exchange your equity for cash: a home equity sharing agreement. With this process, a company or investor pays you a lump sum of money in exchange for a share of the homes future appreciation or for partial ownership of the home. You repay the investor when you either sell the home or after an agreed-upon period of time, typically 10 or 30 years.There are several online companies that offer home equity sharing agreements. Typically, you will need to prequalify before filling out the full application, but the process for this option tends to work quickly.Borrow against your investmentsIf you have money invested, you may be able to leverage it for a loan, according to Jim Wang. Most people dont consider getting a loan against their investment portfolio, Wang says. But similar to home equity, your portfolio can work as the basis for a loan of $25,000 or more.You can take out a loan against your portfolio or take a portfolio line of credit, Wang suggests. Talk to your brokerage and see if this is something they offer.Get your money on timeIf you find yourself facing a serious financial crisis, dont stressstrategize. No matter how you define a large amount of money, there are a number of methods you can implement to generate big bucks in a couple of days.

We need to talk about AI. Have you noticed it often just isntwell, very intelligent?Already, weve lived through years of AI hype. Weve watched companies pitch AI as a great tool for writing boring corporate emails. Weve seen it shoehorned into all kinds of places it doesnt belong. And its often just been bad. Were all exhausted.So lets cut through the fluff: The AI were about to go over is actually impressive. Ive never felt that AI truly delivereduntil now. Im genuinely impressedand I didnt expect to be.If youre intrigued, great! If youre thinking, Well see about that, thats also OKdont take my word for it. You truly need to try it yourself.For once, this isnt some overhyped AI tool with a required subscription and questionable usefulness. Its back to basics: a web page with a text box. Just you and the response from the AI model. And its 100% freeno account, no friction. You can try it in seconds.Let me show you how.Be the first to find all sorts of little-known tech treasures with my free Cool Tools newsletter from The Intelligence. One useful new discovery in your inbox every Wednesday!DeepSeek R1hosted by NvidiaIt seems like everyones raving about DeepSeek these days. But it is actually as good as people say? I doubted itbut then I tried it myself.To be clear, Im not recommending you use the official DeepSeek app, which will send your inputs to a server in Chinawhere theres no telling how the data might be used. DeepSeek is open source, and other companies can host it. And now, Nvidia has DeepSeek running on its own super-fast servers. Its technically intended for developer-level testing, but anyone with the link can access it.A quick note: Nvidia is a sponsor of The Intelligence, but my recommendation has nothing to do with that relationship. I could point you at another DeepSeek instance hosted by a company youve never heard of, but Nvidia is a recognizable name with speedy servers.And since this tool is intended for developers, theres no nonsense involved. You dont have to pay moneyin fact, theres no upsell at all. Its just a text box on a web page that lets you access the model on Nvidias fast servers.To start, just open the Deepseek-R1 page on Nvidias developer website. All you need is the chat boxyou can ignore the developer stuff.Heres my suggestion: Dont use boring questions. Ask something complex, something that requires knowledge and creativity. I asked DeepSeek for some examples you might want to use, and heres what it came up with:Generate five absurd tech support FAQs for a dystopian smart fridge that judges your life choicesInvent a fake Apple product so pretentious even Jony Ive would blush (and include a press release)Turn the five stages of grief into a guide for switching from iPhone to AndroidTry one of the above promptsjust copy-paste it right into the text box on Nvidias websiteor make up your own.After you do, youll see DeepSeeks reasoning process in action, followed by the response. It should only take a few seconds to work. (You may have to wait a few extra seconds if the server is a little busy, but it should still be fast!)You can ask the Nvidia-hosted version of DeepSeek virtually anything and get an answer back in seconds.The answers frequently demonstrate impressive amounts of knowledge, logic, andseeminglycreativity. But DeepSeek can have serious conversations, too. Ask whatever you like and see what happens. (As a general rule, you probably shouldnt provide private or sensitive information to any AI service, unless you really trust it.)DeepSeeks answers are surprisingly thoughtful and complex compared to other AI engines.Its there and waiting. And all you have to do is give it a try.Nvidias DeepSeek-R1 site is completely web-basedno downloads or installations, and no accounts to create.The service is free. Bear in mind that its for trial purposes and intended for developers, so you may run into a limit if you use it a lot, and Nvidia could pull the plug on it at any moment.Nvidia says it doesnt store any prompts you send to its server. The website says it logs your use of the serverinformation like your IP addressbut doesnt keep any records beyond that. (Again, I recommend you dont send anything private or sensitive, even soand that same suggestion goes for any web-connected AI tool.)Want even more productivity-boosting goodness? Check out my free Cool Tools newsletter for an instant introduction to an incredible audio appand another off-the-beaten-path gem every Wednesday!

Inside the artist's whimsical images that capture joyful interactions between people and animals