Switch Your BladesMonster Hunter Wilds is not very challenging, but that means it pushed me to try weapons I normally would be scared of - and I think that's beautifulMonster Hunter Wilds lower general difficulty lead down a path of much wider weapon variety, and that is a silver lining on a pretty big cloud.Image credit: VG247 Article by Sherif Saed Contributing Editor Published on March 10, 2025 I think Its fair to say that Monster Hunter Wilds is a far more accessible game than World, and certainly more than anyone couldve predicted for a mainline Monster Hunter title. Capcom invested a lot into streamlining so many aspects of this game (many of which I would argue needed it the least) while leaving some other features - which couldve used some of that simplification - intact.Regardless of where you land on the end result, however, its hard to deny how much Wilds encourages experimenting with different weapons, while actually facilitating the act of taking them into hunts.To see this content please enable targeting cookies. I feel a lot better about the lack of challenge in Monster Hunter Wilds now that I have doubled my time with it since the review period. In a very general sense, my experience with the series is limited (I never played the 3DS games), but fights in World never made me feel like I was going through the motions, and though Rises gameplay was faster and less punishing, it demanded a different kind of staying-on-your-s**t. It was generally easier, too.I stuck to the Hammer for almost the entirety of my time with World. I experimented with some other weapons - I pulled out a Bow when I joined busy hunts that left little room for my slow, lumbering mallet - but I rarely diverged from my main. Part of that was the result of World being my first Monster Hunter, so it took me a while to feel confident enough to be able to adequately make the Hammer work for me in different situations. I didnt feel like adding more complexity to what was already a very complex game was a good idea.Worlds aggressive monsters didnt leave a lot of room for messing around, and I often felt that taking up a new weapon 50 hours in would reset much of the progress I had earned. Picking up something new and spending several minutes in the training area to get the flow right felt about as intimidating as taking on Nergigante solo; I just didnt want more friction between me and the carve. Don't lose your charge (blade). | Image credit: Capcom/VG247I went into Wilds with that same attitude. I initially started with Great Sword, because Capcom developers said that the game is balanced around it. The Great Sword is a slow weapon; it was close enough in my head to the Hammer, so I went with it. I enjoyed it for four or five of the early hunts, before I switched to the Long Sword for the rest of my time with the game.Now that I am in the endgame, I find myself making frequent visits to the Smithy to craft the base version of some of the other weapons I had been wanting to try out. Wilds doles out materials far more generously than World, so it was easy to make anything I wanted and go punish some poor Chatacabra or Congalala to see if the flow felt right.And you know what? It made me see the game in a different light. Weapons in Monster Hunter are effectively different classes. The time investment required to reach the same level of efficiency with, say, a Switch Axe or Charge Blade as I have with the Long Sword or Hammer feels like creating a Titan in Destiny after youve been playing entire games as a Hunter. Don't switch (axe) it up too often, though. | Image credit: Capcom/VG247Wilds less demanding hunts, however, leave a lot of room for you to be terrible with an unfamiliar weapon. And its starting to feel like that was intentional, because this is also the game that lets you carry two of the damn things into hunts and switch between them during the same fight. It wants you to more liberally use its tools to adequately tackle the different situations you find yourself in.Couple that with the ease of getting materials - especially early on - and you get a Monster Hunter game that really wants every player to at least leave the game having experienced more of one of its best parts. For me, that was falling in love with the pizza cutter form of the Charge Blade, and finally taking the time to wrap my head around the Insect Glaive.

Make it a Mario day.Nintendo has already kicked off its MAR10 Day celebrations with new LEGO, sales and Alarmo themes, but there's plenty of fan-made goodness to get into, too. Like, for example, this stunning animation from the YouTube artist maribou, which provides a whistle-stop tour of the prized plumber's Switch adventures.The 'SUPER MAR10 WORLD' animation is only a little over a minute long, but boy is it packed with personality. maribou reimagines iconic moments from the likes of Super Mario Odyssey, Wonder and Strikers heck, even the Rabbids games make a cameo and threads the movement together to create a 'best bits' mixtape of Mario's last eight years.Read the full article on nintendolife.com

It has not been a good week for Russian crypto exchange Garantex.Firstly, on Thursday, stablecoin issuer Tether blocked access to Garantexs wallets that held around $28 million of the crypto exchanges funds. On the same day, an international law enforcement operation led by the U.S. Secret Service seized Garantexs official websites. At the time, Garantex made no mention of this operation in its official Telegram channels; instead, the company announced it was suspending all services, including cryptocurrency withdrawals.Then, on Friday, the U.S. Justice Department announced charges against two of the exchanges administrators, Aleksej Besciokov, and Aleksandr Mira Serda, accusing the pair of facilitating money laundering on their platform on behalf of cybercriminals and terrorists. U.S. prosecutors also said it froze over $26 million in Tether and Bitcoin that were used to facilitate money laundering, which explained what happened with the Tether wallets.As of Saturday, Garantex offered a potential lifeline to its customers with a catch.Contact UsDo you plan to attend the meeting at Garantexs office? Or do you have more information about the exchange? From a non-work device and network, you can contact Lorenzo Franceschi-Bicchierai securely on Signal at +1 917 257 1382, or via Telegram and Keybase @lorenzofb, or email. You also can contact TechCrunch via SecureDrop.Without acknowledging the law enforcement actions, Garantex published an announcement on its official Telegram channel saying it has developed a solution for blocked assets, and is inviting customers with a positive account balance to a personal meeting in our Moscow office, according to a machine translation.Garatex said it will start face-to-face meetings in its office as of Monday, and is asking customers to arrive with the phone to which the account is linked and with access to your email, because the company may need to send you confirmation codes, its announcement read.The companys request is unusual, in a world that highly values anonymity like the world of crypto. Showing up at the offices of a company thats been sanctioned by both the U.S. government and the European Union poses difficult-to-predict risks to customers, notwithstanding the risk from the Russian government itself, and theres no guarantee at this point that Garantex will be able to refund customers.Its unclear exactly how many customers Garantex has, but the exchange has processed more than $96 billion in cryptocurrency transactions since 2019, according to the DOJ. Garantex likely has a large number of customers, many of which dont live anywhere near Moscow.Garantex did not respond to a request for comment.

A nifty new Gmail capability powered by Googles Gemini AI has arrived for Google Workspace customers. Starting Monday, users can add events to a Google Calendar directly from an email.Gemini will automatically detect calendar-related content in an email and present an Add to calendar button. After clicking the button, the side panel in Gmail will open to confirm the event has been added to the calendar.Google notes in a blog post that the feature is only available in English and on the web for now. A calendar event created via the Add to calendar button wont include other guests, and it also wont appear for emails with already-extract events, like restaurant and flight reservations. The new Gemini-powered Add to calendar feature in Gmail.Image Credits:GoogleUsers on Google Workspace Business and Enterprise tiers, as well as customers with a Gemini Education, Gemini Education Premium, or Google One AI Premium plan, are eligible for the new feature. (Users who previously purchased the now-deprecated Gemini Business or Gemini Enterprise add-ons are also eligible.) Admins can enable Add to calendar by switching on smart features and personalization from the Workspace Admin console. Add to calendar is only the latest Gemini-powered tool to reach Gmail inboxes. In June 2024, Google added new capabilities toGmail on the web to help users write emails and summarize email threads, plus ask questions and find specific information from emails within an inbox. Some of those capabilities came to the Gmail apps for iOS and Android toward the end of last year.

Breakdown & ShowreelsRed One: Compositing Breakdown by Sony Pictures ImageworksBy Vincent Frei - 10/03/2025 Step into the winter wonderland of Red One with Sony Pictures Imageworks! Compositing Supervisor Zacary Campbell breaks down the VFX work behind the film, from terrifying snowmen to the epic final battle at the North Pole!WANT TO KNOW MORE?Sony Pictures Imageworks: Dedicated page about Red One on Sony Pictures Imageworks website.Chris Waegner: Heres my interview of VFX Supervisor Chris Waegner at Sony Pictures Imageworks.Jerome Chen: Heres my interview of Production VFX Supervisor Jerome Chen. Vincent Frei The Art of VFX 2025

Want More?Fluid Effects BundleGet Splashes 1, 2, 3, 4, Bubbles, Bubbles 2, Rivers, Crown Splashes, and Glass Shatter together and save 20%! Thats 225 professional, realistic, and highly detailed fluid simulation elements for your render engine of choice.Learn MoreWant More?VFX Elements BundleGet thousands of professional VFX elements for your next project and snag a tasty 25% discount with this bundle!Learn MoreWant More?VDB BUNDLEIf you want to save 25% off the thousands of assets in our VDB lineup, check out our VDB Bundle!Learn More

Atlas Football Club has a championed history in Mexico that stretches back to 1916, when it was founded in Guadalajara.Academia Atlas, a new training ground for the team, was designed by Sordo Madaleno, a Mexico City office, alongside landscape architecture firm Plantica.The new training facility is sited between the Primavera Forest and Barranca, an important biodiverse corridor at risk of sprawling development. Sordo Madaleno said that, in light of this looming detriment, Academia Atlas treads lightly into the context. It supports professional athletes, but also young players training in Atlas FCs academy. The 90,000-square-foot complex deliberately uses a low-rise, modular building meant to blend in with the nearby flora and fauna species. Paulina Robles, founder of Plantica, said the landscape architecture has already sparked genuine curiosity among users.It is common to see maintenance staff being asked about the species, and athletes of all ages often stop to observe the animals within the space and comment on the scents, Robles said.Academia Atlas is sited in between the Primavera Forest and Barranca, an important biodiverse corridor at risk of sprawling development. ( scar Caballero)We wanted to create an enclosure within the landscape that is highly exposed to the elements, and we wanted to blend the landscape in and around Academia Atlas to show how important planting and wildlife are in giving us a sense of belonging somewhere, Fernando Sordo Madaleno shared. Working with the landscape is a key tenet of our work, Sordo Madaleno added. The territory we are commissioned in is not a blank canvas; it is history, nature, and memory layered over time. Weve worked with Plantica to fully integrate the built and natural environments so together they create spaces that inspire, nurture, and respect their context.The complex uses Brise-soleil to provide shading where needed. ( scar Caballero)More than 50 native trees and 17,000 plantings were included. ( scar Caballero)The campuss architecture, namely its red tones, echo Jalisco red-mud adobe. Red is also Atlas FCs primary color, so the choice to use it was an obvious one. Meanwhile, the massing, materials, and textures take cues from the nearby Cerro del Topopote hills, trees, and rocks, architects noted. The building incorporates Brise-soleil to provide shading when needed in the exterior courtyards. The plantings by Plantica are native and draught tolerant; they were located in beds inside the courtyards and on the terraces and railings across the built structure.The campuss architecture, namely its red tones, is meant to echo Jalisco red-mud Adobe. ( scar Caballero)The vegetation enhances Academia Atlass sensory experience, helps with wayfinding, channels views, and amplifies the sites aromatic properties.Other prominent architectural features include a spiral staircase with a smoothed finish that shares a tonal quality with the adobe brick construction, while contrasting with it texture-wise.Several playing fields surround the complex. ( scar Caballero)Ayoyote trees, Rosemary, Mexican feathergrass, Papelillo Burseraare, Firestick, Cacti, Agaves, and scented herbs are interspersed throughout the grounds. Some of these materials are the same resources Aztec and Mayan cultures leaned upon for making instruments and ornaments, renowned for their healing properties.Fifty native trees, including Paperbarks and Oaks, were planted at Academia Atlas, along with 260 Agaves, and more than 17,000 low vegetation specimens.Academia Atlas was a Project of the Year finalist in ANs 2024 Best of Design Awards.

The First Baptist Church of Salem was built in 1805on Federal Streetand is the oldest brick meetinghouse in Salem. The local Baptist congregation was established in 1804 when 24 parishioners formed the First Baptist Church, and began gathering funds to elect a pastor and build a house of worship. At the time, Baptists were a religious minority in Massachusetts, where nearly all churches were Congregational, so against large odds, theparishioners funded a brick buildingand lot on the prominent Federal Street in Salem. The structure was completed by 1805 and is said to have been one of only fifty brick structures that stood in the city at the time. A major renovation to the building occurred in 1850, when the churchwas renovated in the Italianate style. Its three bays are articulated as an English basement containing three identical entrances framed in heavy rusticated brownstone. A belt course separates this basement from a principal story composed of tall arched windows capped by drip-molded brownstone. A lunette window is the centerpiece of the strongly projecting modillioned pediment.The entire compositionis very pleasing and showcases the ever-evolving architectural tastes in the 19thcentury.A tower was later removed due to structural issues. In the early 21stcentury, the site of the church was needed for an expansion of the Essex County Courts. The congregation sold the property and in the following year,the old brick church was moveda couple hundred feet to the west and restored and wasconverted into a law library for the new courthouse. Talk about historic preservation at work!

.shock - stock.adobe.comOpinion2024: the year misconfigurations exposed digital vulnerabilitiesSmall configuration errors cascaded into major outages during 2024. Mike Hicks, from Cisco ThousandEyes, propounds techniques to defend digital resilience against tales of the unexpectedByMike HicksPublished: 10 Mar 2025 Imagine the impact of a sudden service disruption on your business. Customers unable to access your platform, transactions put on hold, and your team racing against the clock to fix the issue. These arent far-fetched scenarios theyre the kinds of challenges many organisations faced in 2024 when small configuration errors cascaded into major outages.Our increasingly digital world has provided incredible opportunities for growth and efficiency, but its also introduced new vulnerabilities. Configuration changes have always had the potential to take out services but with more of the digital landscape managed and configured with code, the propensity for mistakes is now much higher. The missteps of 2024 were a stark reminder that even minor errors can disrupt operations, dent user trust, and create lasting challenges for businesses across all industries.This makes digital resilience more than a best practiceits a critical necessity. By examining the high-profile outages of 2024 and understanding their causes, businesses can take actionable steps to build stronger, more reliable systems and safeguard their digital experiences.Identifying the route causeWhen it comes to configuration-caused outages, businesses were challenged by two key trends over the last year that elevate the importance of digital resilience in the face of disruptions: continuous improvement and delivery (CI/CD), and the accelerated deployment of modern applications and cloud services.The first trend, CI/CD, characterises modern software engineering best practices. It allows product and engineering teams to make small modifications and improvements faster and with greater frequency, but on the flipside, the rapid pace shortens the time available for end-to-end testing. In addition, the ever-changing nature of application code makes its behaviour unpredictable, even on a day to day basis.The second trend is the accelerated deployment of modern applications and cloud services, which are inherently distributed in design, including their underlying infrastructure. Digital applications comprise of many components that are orchestrated together to deliver a single, seamless experience. These components are often developed by different agile teams and may reside on either owned or unowned (third-party) infrastructure. In these environments, we often observe instances where a team making a change is doing so to improve their own patch or portion of the application, but may not have complete visibility into what flow-on impact their change might have on the rest of the infrastructure.While the resulting misconfigurations may be unintentional, software configuration outages can have a significant impact relative to the size of the change. So, what does this look like in practice for organisations?2024 - the year of outagesIn the networking space, unintended misconfiguration of routing policies has been a recurring issue over many years. A service provider, for instance, may mistakenly insert themselves into a traffic path by advertising a prefix it doesnt own or control and is unable to handle the sudden traffic influx, leading to timeouts and other connectivity-related failures for end users. One example took place in October last year, when a number of OVHcloud services were subject to a faulty configuration that impacted several regional telecom providers.With accelerated cloud adoption, configuration errors have also become an increasingly common issue in the cloud, impacting security functionality, performance, and availability. Last year, for example, two Azure resources were impacted: one in January, when an erroneous configuration change triggered a dormant defect that resulted in a 7-hour long degradation of the Azure Resource Manager; and one in July, when a configuration change impacted backend connections to compute and storage resources, ultimately impacting services such as Confluent, Elastic Cloud, and Microsoft 365. Later in the year, Salesforce also suffered a similar incident that prevented global users from accessing the cloud service when critical information was left out of an updated configuration file.It isnt just the network or cloud infrastructure where configuration errors occur. Problems also manifest within the applications themselves. Notably in July last year, an issue with a single CrowdStrike configuration file resulted in system crashes and blue screens of death (BSOD) on affected Windows systems worldwide - but there were other incidents as well. A series of temporary issues with ChatGPT pointed to configuration changes and re-architecture to improve the user experience. And Square merchants experienced payment problems when a new feature configuration could not be interpreted by Android devices.Digital resilience in the face of disruptionIn 2024, many configuration changes not only degraded digital experiences but also disrupted the delivery of the service completely. Its this subset of incidents that produced the biggest lessons of 2024 that shouldnt be repeated in 2025.For product owners and operations teams, the drive to continuously improve remains as important as ever, but user experience needs a bigger focus. Automation and assurance technologies both have a role to play here. These solutions can compare ongoing patterns against known outage patterns, providing visibility and correlating signals to allow early detection of degradations or disruptions to an application or other IT asset. In the case of a configuration change gone wrong, this could be the difference between a speedy rollback and a lengthy troubleshooting process.Successfully implementing a configuration change on the first attempt is key for businesses across all industries and indicates that the organisation has access to ample data and insights all the way from the end user to the cloud, allowing them to adequately assess the potential impact of changes made at any point in the end-to-end delivery chain.Be it caused by a misconfiguration or otherwise, lessons can be learned from the outages of 2024 and minimising the occurrence and impact of any disruption will be core to achieving digital resilience in 2025.Mick Hicks is a Principal Solutions Analyst at Cisco ThousandEyesRead more about outagesBig bank systems crashed for over 800 hours in last two years due to IT outages8 largest IT outages in historyCauses of IT outages explainedIn The Current Issue:DeepSeek-R1: Budgeting challenges for on-premise deploymentsInterview: Why Samsung put a UK startup centre stageDownload Current IssueSLM series - OurCrowd: Are domain-specific LLMs just as good (or better)? 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The AI skills gap is real, but Nvidia's new program is focused on tackling it.