Outerloop Games’ colorful new RPG will be released next year. The studio says it's determined to “humanize” immigrant experiences amid ICE raids.

Feeling bad about your appearance? Try making a fan edit of yourself.  That’s the latest advice circulating on TikTok, where users are cutting and stitching together dramatic clips of themselves to the tune of Rasheeda’s 2006 track Got That Good.  And it seems to work. One viral video, with 10 million views, has people hyping up the creator in the comments. “WHO IS THAT DIVA?” one wrote. “Chill out my bf is on this app,” another added.  In another video, with 5.6 million views, the creator wrote, “Feel ugly? Make an edit with yourself to boost your confidence.” Again, the internet responded with compliments, and many saying they are going to try the trend for themselves. “This was my favorite activity as a high schooler,” one commented. “Made one yesterday and can’t stop looking at it,” another wrote. “Hold on wait I’m gonna try this but I’m afraid it would raise my ego through the roof.” The trend is meant to boost creators’ confidence by giving themselves a fan edit normally reserved for the likes of Harry Styles, Timothée Chalamet, and other beloved celebrities.  Fan edits have long been a cornerstone of fandom and online culture. They are also an art form, with dramatic music, flashy transitions, and glowing filters that show the subjects at their most attractive and iconic. But why should celebrities be the only ones who get the fan-cam treatment? It’s no secret that social media is a highlight reel. Yet even when we know Instagram is not real life, the constant exposure to filtered photos and curated feeds can take a toll on our self-image. Research backs this up. One 2021 study found that frequent Instagram use is linked to higher rates of body dissatisfaction, a stronger desire to be thin, and lower self-esteem among girls ages 14 to 24. Why not put those editing skills to good use instead? 

Weekly curated resources for designers — thinkers and makers.“Its “almost there” quality — the feeling we’re just one prompt away from the perfect solution — is what makes it so addicting. Vibe coding operates on the principle of variable-ratio reinforcement, a powerful form of operant conditioning where rewards come unpredictably. Unlike fixed rewards, this intermittent success pattern (“the code works! it’s brilliant! it just broke! wtf!”), triggers stronger dopamine responses in our brain’s reward pathways, similar to gambling behaviors.”The perverse incentives of Vibe Coding →By fred benensonIs your research repository holding back the impact of your insights? →[Sponsored] Join UX research experts Jake Burghardt and Emily DiLeo as they share the 6 red flags to look out for in failing repositories. Plus, get practical tips on how to build a repository that ensures your UX research delivers business value.Editor picksFigma uses nostalgia for their future in IPO →What happens when design tools grow up — and grow corporate.By Darren YeoDo people really want AI friends? →Zuckerberg seems to think so.By Daley WilhelmDesign for trust, then for possibility →From horseless carriages to robotaxis.By Sarah CordivanoThe UX Collective is an independent design publication that elevates unheard design voices and helps designers think more critically about their work.Nordic design gallery →Make me thinkThere should be no AI button →“It’s often unclear what the button will actually do. You may have a small text box to add a user prompt, but you’re at the mercy of the quality of an opaque system prompt.”Products need soul but markets reward scale →“Uber is the clearest example of a company that let go of the original story and embraced what the market wanted. It started out as a premium ride experience. Nice cars, polite drivers, smooth UX. Then it went public. Growth expectations took over. Fleet owners stepped in. Car quality dropped. The experience became inconsistent. And then came the ads.”About showing the “open to work” badge →“The reason might be that I do use LinkedIn professionally and that I’ve been both recruiting and being hired by large corporations. I’ve also been part of reorganisations, companies going bust and was on the wrong spreadsheet when mass layoffs happened. So I know how it feels to not have a job even when your performance was great.”Little gems this weekIs your creative character being sacrificed to Algorithm, Inc? →By Ian BatterbeeNo country for junior designers →By Patrick MorganThe next design trend should start with your hands, not a computer →By Michael F. BuckleyTools and resources20+ GenAI UX patterns →AI beyond the model.By Sharang SharmaUsing simulation models in UX research →Why it’s time we take behavior seriously.By Talieh KazemiDesign in the age of vibes →What the new wave of tools means for the future.By John MoriartySupport the newsletterIf you find our content helpful, here’s how you can support us:Check out this week’s sponsor to support their work tooForward this email to a friend and invite them to subscribeSponsor an editionPerverse vibes, Figma’s future IPO, 20+ GenAI UX patterns was originally published in UX Collective on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

The current era of Doctor Who has tried to shy away from resurrecting some of the series’ biggest bads for the 15th Doctor to face off against—but that’s not to say it has been devoid of classic villains. As we barrel towards the finale of the show’s latest season, we’ve been given another in the form of the Rani, a brief but brilliant icon of ’80s Who. Who Is the Rani? An amoral Time Lord scientist, the Rani, portrayed by Kate O’Mara, appeared in just two classic Doctor Who storylines in the 1980s: “Mark of the Rani,” where she teamed up with the Master to face off against the Sixth Doctor, and “Time and the Rani,” Sylvester McCoy’s debut storyline as the Seventh Doctor, responsible for his prior incarnation’s regeneration as she takes over an alien world in an attempt to manipulate evolution across the cosmos. O’Mara would appear onscreen once more as the Rani during the 1993 special Dimensions in Time, both a celebration for the then-cancelled show’s 30th anniversary and a charity drive for Children in Need that saw Doctor Who cross over with the long-running British soap EastEnders, and the Rani trap multiple incarnations of the Doctor and several of their companions in a time loop in Walford, for inexplicable reasons. Little is known about the Rani beyond her on-screen appearances. She was given a similar background and status as a foil to the Doctor as the Master: a sinister mirror that felt kinship with the Doctor for their shared status as renegades of Time Lord society, as well as contemporaries who studied at the Pyrdonian Academy on Gallifrey together in their youths. But while the Doctor fled their people in rebellion, the Rani was exiled from Gallifrey for engaging in radical experimentation as part of her obsession with science and evolution. An obsession she was willing to do anything for, at any cost. Unlike many classic Who villains, the Rani has a limited life in spinoff media, even more so than her already limited TV outings. O’Mara portrayed the Rani once more in the questionably licensed 2000 audio drama The Rani Reaps the Whirlwind, set after the events of “Time and the Rani,” and was set to reprise the role for Big Finish before her death in 2014. Instead, the Rani returned in a new incarnation for two Sixth Doctor audio stories, played by Siobhan Redmond—and was seemingly never to be heard of again until this year’s season of Doctor Who revealed that Anita Dobson’s mysterious “Mrs. Flood” character is in fact the latest incarnation of the Rani… before she herself promptly regenerated into another new incarnation played by Archie Panjabi. Camp and the Rani The Rani has perhaps an oversized imprint on Doctor Who fandom despite her extremely limited number of appearances. This is largely down to O’Mara’s performance as the character. While the Rani herself is absolutely dastardly, and Doctor Who itself never treats her as anything less than serious (even if her schemes are inevitably foiled), O’Mara played her as big and brash, vamping about the place in glamorous outfits as she snarls and shouts and cackles, woe betide any fool who gets in her way. A lot of classic Doctor Who has taken on a camp appreciation in recent years, but if that appreciation could be distilled into the embodiment of a single character, the Rani is exactly that. It’s that camp status as an obscure, yet loved favorite that also has led the Rani to take on a different kind of life in modern Doctor Who before her appearance last weekend. After the series’ return in 2005 made clear just how quickly it was willing to bring back monsters and antagonists from the classic era of the show, the Rani became a catch-all speculatory guess whenever the series presented a mysterious woman to its audience. The running joke was known not just among fans, but the creative team as well, who would jokingly acknowledge that she was always the first guess for any potential returning identity. That is, until modern Who‘s second showrunner, Steven Moffat, tried to clamp down on it. “People always ask me, ‘Do you want to bring back the Rani?’ No one knows who the Rani is,” Moffat said to SFX magazine in 2012. “They all know who the Master is, they know Daleks, they probably know who Davros is, but they don’t know who the Rani is, so there’s no point in bringing her back. If there’s a line it’s probably somewhere there.” Perhaps that was where the Rani fit best: known enough to be loved, not known enough to actually make her way back to TV… until 2025, that is. What Bringing the Rani Back Means for Doctor Who Aside from the end of a very long joke, the Rani’s awaited return simultaneously means a lot and very little. On the one hand, showrunner Russell T Davies has made it clear that while the Rani is a known name, her character is minor enough that the show can essentially do whatever it wants with Panjabi and Dobson’s iteration of the Rani, so whatever schemes they get up to in the final two episodes of this season, they don’t necessarily have to align with the kinds of things we’ve seen the Rani doing in the past. But at the same time, the Rani is very interesting for another reason beyond being herself: she is the first Time Lord to return since Gallifrey’s second sundering in contemporary Doctor Who continuity. The Time Lords were seemingly wiped out prior to the show’s 2005 return in an almighty war with the Daleks, only to be saved from that fate during the events of Doctor Who‘s 50th anniversary and following series, which saw Gallifrey isolated but returned to existence once more. During the climax of the 2020 season of Doctor Who, it was revealed that the Master had razed the returned Gallifrey and harvested the bodies of the Time Lords as a new army of Cybermen called the CyberMasters, only for those to be seemingly wiped out for good during the events of “The Power of the Doctor.” With the Doctor once again the “last” of the Time Lords, just how the Rani escaped not one, but two cataclysms on Gallifrey remains to be seen—as does whether or not her return could mean that the series is on the verge of restoring Gallifrey for a third time. Time will tell, and so will Time Ladies! Want more io9 news? Check out when to expect the latest Marvel, Star Wars, and Star Trek releases, what’s next for the DC Universe on film and TV, and everything you need to know about the future of Doctor Who.