Author Hi Gamedev! :DSo I'm using some existing models from other games for a PRIVATE mod im working on (so no restributing, don't wanna rip of talented artists and using existing meshes form games due to cost). But when i import them into blender or 3ds max the modeling software tells me it's got overlapping vertices. Is this normal with game models or is every vertex supposed to be welded?Kind regards! Maybe. They might not be duplicates, it could be that there was additional information which was lost, such as two points that had different normal information or texture coordinates even though they're at the same position.It could be normal for that project, but no, in general duplicate verts, overlapping verts, degenerate triangles, and similar can cause rendering issues and are often flagged by tools.  If it is something you extracted it might be the result of processing that took place rather than coming from the original, like a script that ends up stripping the non-duplicate information or that ends up traversing a mesh more than once.Most likely your warning is exactly the same one artists in the game would receive, and they just need to be welded, fused, or otherwise processed back into place. Advertisement It's normal. Reasons to split a mesh edge of geometrically adjacent triangles are:Differing materials / textures / uv coordsEdge should show discontinutiy in lighting (e.g. cube) instead smooth shading (e.g. sphere)Dividing mesh into smaller pieces for fine grained cullingThus, splitting models and duplicating vertices is a post process necessary to use them in game engines, while artists keep the original models to do changes and for archivation.Turning such assets back to editable models requires welding with a tolerance of zero, or eventually a very small number. Issues might still remain. Other things, e.g. the original cage of a subdivision model, or Nurbs control points, etc. can't be reconstructed that easily. Author Hi Guy's so i usually use this tutorial if i get overlapping:The reason im asking this is because: Does it matter if faces are welded or not if i convert them to meshlets like Nvidias asteroids? Or should they still be welded then?Does it matter how small/large the mesh is when welding by distance?Kind regards! That is another “it depends on the details” question. There might be visual artifacts or not, depending on the details. There can be performance differences depending on the details. There are reasons to do it that we're already covered, a vertex can have far more than just position data which would make them different despite both being at the same location. There are details and choices beyond just the vertex positions overlapping.  Newgamemodder said:Does it matter if faces are welded or not if i convert them to meshlets like Nvidias asteroids?Usually no. You need to regenerate the meshlets anyway after editing a model. It's done by a preprocessing tool, and the usual asset pipeline is: Model from artist → automated tool to split edges where needed to get one mesh per material, compute meshlet clusters, quantization for compression, reorder vertices for cache efficiency, etc → save as asset to ship with the game.So meshlets do not add to the risks from welding vertices which you already have (e.g. accidental corruption of UV coordinates or merging of material groups). Artwork is not affected from meshlets in general.However, this applies to games production, not to modding. Things like Nanite and meshlets ofc. make it even harder to mod existing assets, since modders don't have those automated preprocessing tools if devs don't provide them.Newgamemodder said:Does it matter how small/large the mesh is when welding by distance?Yes. Usually you give a distance threshold for the welding, so the scale of the model matters. My advise is to use the smallest threshold possible and observing UVs, which should not change from the welding operation. 

In 2025, it’s very difficult not to see gambling advertised everywhere. It’s on billboards and sports broadcasts. It’s on podcasts and printed on the turnbuckle of AEW’s pay-per-view shows. And it’s on app stores, where you can find the FanDuel and DraftKings sportsbooks, alongside glitzy digital slot machines. These apps all have the highest age ratings possible on Apple’s App Store and Google Play. But earlier this year, a different kind of app nearly disappeared from the Play Store entirely.Luck Be A Landlord is a roguelite deckbuilder from solo developer Dan DiIorio. DiIorio got word from Google in January 2025 that Luck Be A Landlord was about to be pulled, globally, because DiIorio had not disclosed the game’s “gambling themes” in its rating.In Luck Be a Landlord, the player takes spins on a pixel art slot machine to earn coins to pay their ever-increasing rent — a nightmare gamification of our day-to-day grind to remain housed. On app stores, it’s a one-time purchase of $4.99, and it’s $9.99 on Steam. On the Play Store page, developer Dan DiIorio notes, “This game does not contain any real-world currency gambling or microtransactions.”And it doesn’t. But for Google, that didn’t matter. First, the game was removed from the storefront in a slew of countries that have strict gambling laws. Then, at the beginning of 2025, Google told Dilorio that Luck Be A Landlord would be pulled globally because of its rating discrepancy, as it “does not take into account references to gambling (including real or simulated gambling)”.DiIorio had gone through this song and dance before — previously, when the game was blocked, he would send back a message saying “hey, the game doesn’t have gambling,” and then Google would send back a screenshot of the game and assert that, in fact, it had.DiIorio didn’t agree, but this time they decided that the risk of Landlord getting taken down permanently was too great. They’re a solo developer, and Luck Be a Landlord had just had its highest 30-day revenue since release. So, they filled out the form confirming that Luck Be A Landlord has “gambling themes,” and are currently hoping that this will be the end of it.This is a situation that sucks for an indie dev to be in, and over email DiIorio told Polygon it was “very frustrating.”“I think it can negatively affect indie developers if they fall outside the norm, which indies often do,” they wrote. “It also makes me afraid to explore mechanics like this further. It stifles creativity, and that’s really upsetting.”In late 2024, the hit game Balatro was in a similar position. It had won numerous awards, and made $1,000,000 in its first week on mobile platforms. And then overnight, the PEGI ratings board declared that the game deserved an adult rating.The ESRB had already rated it E10+ in the US, noting it has gambling themes. And the game was already out in Europe, making its overnight ratings change a surprise. Publisher PlayStack said the rating was given because Balatro has “prominent gambling imagery and material that instructs about gambling.”Balatro is basically Luck Be A Landlord’s little cousin. Developer LocalThunk was inspired by watching streams of Luck Be A Landlord, and seeing the way DiIorio had implemented deck-building into his slot machine. And like Luck Be A Landlord, Balatro is a one-time purchase, with no microtransactions.But the PEGI board noted that because the game uses poker hands, the skills the player learns in Balatro could translate to real-world poker.In its write-up, GameSpot noted that the same thing happened to a game called Sunshine Shuffle. It was temporarily banned from the Nintendo eShop, and also from the entire country of South Korea. Unlike Balatro, Sunshine Shuffle actually is a poker game, except you’re playing Texas Hold ‘Em — again for no real money — with cute animals (who are bank robbers).It’s common sense that children shouldn’t be able to access apps that allow them to gamble. But none of these games contain actual gambling — or do they?Where do we draw the line? Is it gambling to play any game that is also played in casinos, like poker or blackjack? Is it gambling to play a game that evokes the aesthetics of a casino, like cards, chips, dice, or slot machines? Is it gambling to wager or earn fictional money?Gaming has always been a lightning rod for controversy. Sex, violence, misogyny, addiction — you name it, video games have been accused of perpetrating or encouraging it. But gambling is gaming’s original sin. And it’s the one we still can’t get a grip on.The original link between gambling and gamingGetty ImagesThe association between video games and gambling all goes back to pinball. Back in the ’30s and ’40s, politicians targeted pinball machines for promoting gambling. Early pinball machines were less skill-based (they didn’t have flippers), and some gave cash payouts, so the comparison wasn’t unfair. Famously, mob-hating New York City mayor Fiorello LaGuardia banned pinball in the city, and appeared in a newsreel dumping pinball and slot machines into the Long Island Sound. Pinball machines spent some time relegated to the back rooms of sex shops and dive bars. But after some lobbying, the laws relaxed.By the 1970s, pinball manufacturers were also making video games, and the machines were side-by-side in arcades. Arcade machines, like pinball, took small coin payments, repeatedly, for short rounds of play. The disreputable funk of pinball basically rubbed off onto video games.Ever since video games rocked onto the scene, concerned and sometimes uneducated parties have been asking if they’re dangerous. And in general, studies have shown that they’re not. The same can’t be said about gambling — the practice of putting real money down to bet on an outcome.It’s a golden age for gambling2025 in the USA is a great time for gambling, which has been really profitable for gambling companies — to the tune of $66.5 billion dollars of revenue in 2023.To put this number in perspective, the American Gaming Association, which is the casino industry’s trade group and has nothing to do with video games, reports that 2022’s gambling revenue was $60.5 billion. It went up $6 billion in a year.And this increase isn’t just because of sportsbooks, although sports betting is a huge part of it. Online casinos and brick-and-mortar casinos are both earning more, and as a lot of people have pointed out, gambling is being normalized to a pretty disturbing degree.Much like with alcohol, for a small percentage of people, gambling can tip from occasional leisure activity into addiction. The people who are most at risk are, by and large, already vulnerable: researchers at the Yale School of Medicine found that 96% of problem gamblers are also wrestling with other disorders, such as “substance use, impulse-control disorders, mood disorders, and anxiety disorders.”Even if you’re not in that group, there are still good reasons to be wary of gambling. People tend to underestimate their own vulnerability to things they know are dangerous for others. Someone else might bet beyond their means. But I would simply know when to stop.Maybe you do! But being blithely confident about it can make it hard to notice if you do develop a problem. Or if you already have one.Addiction changes the way your brain works. When you’re addicted to something, your participation in it becomes compulsive, at the expense of other interests and responsibilities. Someone might turn to their addiction to self-soothe when depressed or anxious. And speaking of those feelings, people who are depressed and anxious are already more vulnerable to addiction. Given the entire state of the world right now, this predisposition shines an ugly light on the numbers touted by the AGA. Is it good that the industry is reporting $6 billion in additional earnings, when the economy feels so frail, when the stock market is ping ponging through highs and lows daily, when daily expenses are rising? It doesn’t feel good. In 2024, the YouTuber Drew Gooden turned his critical eye to online gambling. One of the main points he makes in his excellent video is that gambling is more accessible than ever. It’s on all our phones, and betting companies are using decades of well-honed app design and behavioral studies to manipulate users to spend and spend.Meanwhile, advertising on podcasts, billboards, TV, radio, and websites – it’s literally everywhere — tells you that this is fun, and you don’t even need to know what you’re doing, and you’re probably one bet away from winning back those losses.Where does Luck Be a Landlord come into this?So, are there gambling themes in Luck Be A Landlord? The game’s slot machine is represented in simple pixel art. You pay one coin to use it, and among the more traditional slot machine symbols are silly ones like a snail that only pays out after 4 spins.When I started playing it, my primary emotion wasn’t necessarily elation at winning coins — it was stress and disbelief when, in the third round of the game, the landlord increased my rent by 100%. What the hell.I don’t doubt that getting better at it would produce dopamine thrills akin to gambling — or playing any video game. But it’s supposed to be difficult, because that’s the joke. If you beat the game you unlock more difficulty modes where, as you keep paying rent, your landlord gets furious, and starts throwing made-up rules at you: previously rare symbols will give you less of a payout, and the very mechanics of the slot machine change.It’s a manifestation of the golden rule of casinos, and all of capitalism writ large: the odds are stacked against you. The house always wins. There is luck involved, to be sure, but because Luck Be A Landlord is a deck-builder, knowing the different ways you can design your slot machine to maximize payouts is a skill! You have some influence over it, unlike a real slot machine. The synergies that I’ve seen high-level players create are completely nuts, and obviously based on a deep understanding of the strategies the game allows.IMAGE: TrampolineTales via PolygonBalatro and Luck Be a Landlord both distance themselves from casino gambling again in the way they treat money. In Landlord, the money you earn is gold coins, not any currency we recognize. And the payouts aren’t actually that big. By the end of the core game, the rent money you’re struggling and scraping to earn… is 777 coins. In the post-game endless mode, payouts can get massive. But the thing is, to get this far, you can’t rely on chance. You have to be very good at Luck Be a Landlord.And in Balatro, the numbers that get big are your points. The actual dollar payments in a round of Balatro are small. These aren’t games about earning wads and wads of cash. So, do these count as “gambling themes”?We’ll come back to that question later. First, I want to talk about a closer analog to what we colloquially consider gambling: loot boxes and gacha games.Random rewards: from Overwatch to the rise of gachaRecently, I did something that I haven’t done in a really long time: I thought about Overwatch. I used to play Overwatch with my friends, and I absolutely made a habit of dropping 20 bucks here or there for a bunch of seasonal loot boxes. This was never a problem behavior for me, but in hindsight, it does sting that over a couple of years, I dropped maybe $150 on cosmetics for a game that now I primarily associate with squandered potential.Loot boxes grew out of free-to-play mobile games, where they’re the primary method of monetization. In something like Overwatch, they functioned as a way to earn additional revenue in an ongoing game, once the player had already dropped 40 bucks to buy it.More often than not, loot boxes are a random selection of skins and other cosmetics, but games like Star Wars: Battlefront 2 were famously criticized for launching with loot crates that essentially made it pay-to-win – if you bought enough of them and got lucky.It’s not unprecedented to associate loot boxes with gambling. A 2021 study published in Addictive Behaviors showed that players who self-reported as problem gamblers also tended to spend more on loot boxes, and another study done in the UK found a similar correlation with young adults.While Overwatch certainly wasn’t the first game to feature cosmetic loot boxes or microtransactions, it’s a reference point for me, and it also got attention worldwide. In 2018, Overwatch was investigated by the Belgian Gaming Commission, which found it “in violation of gambling legislation” alongside FIFA 18 and Counter-Strike: Global Offensive. Belgium’s response was to ban the sale of loot boxes without a gambling license. Having a paid random rewards mechanic in a game is a criminal offense there. But not really. A 2023 study showed that 82% of iPhone games sold on the App Store in Belgium still use random paid monetization, as do around 80% of games that are rated 12+. The ban wasn’t effectively enforced, if at all, and the study recommends that a blanket ban wouldn’t actually be a practical solution anyway.Overwatch was rated T for Teen by the ESRB, and 12 by PEGI. When it first came out, its loot boxes were divisive. Since the mechanic came from F2P mobile games, which are often seen as predatory, people balked at seeing it in a big action game from a multi-million dollar publisher.At the time, the rebuttal was, “Well, at least it’s just cosmetics.” Nobody needs to buy loot boxes to be good at Overwatch.A lot has changed since 2016. Now we have a deeper understanding of how these mechanics are designed to manipulate players, even if they don’t affect gameplay. But also, they’ve been normalized. While there will always be people expressing disappointment when a AAA game has a paid random loot mechanic, it is no longer shocking.And if anything, these mechanics have only become more prevalent, thanks to the growth of gacha games. Gacha is short for “gachapon,” the Japanese capsule machines where you pay to receive one of a selection of random toys. Getty ImagesIn gacha games, players pay — not necessarily real money, but we’ll get to that — for a chance to get something. Maybe it’s a character, or a special weapon, or some gear — it depends on the game. Whatever it is, within that context, it’s desirable — and unlike the cosmetics of Overwatch, gacha pulls often do impact the gameplay.For example, in Infinity Nikki, you can pull for clothing items in these limited-time events. You have a chance to get pieces of a five-star outfit. But you also might pull one of a set of four-star items, or a permanent three-star piece. Of course, if you want all ten pieces of the five-star outfit, you have to do multiple pulls, each costing a handful of limited resources that you can earn in-game or purchase with money.Gacha was a fixture of mobile gaming for a long time, but in recent years, we’ve seen it go AAA, and global. MiHoYo’s Genshin Impact did a lot of that work when it came out worldwide on consoles and PC alongside its mobile release. Genshin and its successors are massive AAA games of a scale that, for your Nintendos and Ubisofts, would necessitate selling a bajillion copies to be a success. And they’re free.Genshin is an action game, whose playstyle changes depending on what character you’re playing — characters you get from gacha pulls, of course. In Zenless Zone Zero, the characters you can pull have different combo patterns, do different kinds of damage, and just feel different to play. And whereas in an early mobile gacha game like Love Nikki Dress UP! Queen the world was rudimentary, its modern descendant Infinity Nikki is, like Genshin, Breath of the Wild-esque. It is a massive open world, with collectibles and physics puzzles, platforming challenges, and a surprisingly involved storyline. Genshin Impact was the subject of an interesting study where researchers asked young adults in Hong Kong to self-report on their gacha spending habits. They found that, like with gambling, players who are not feeling good tend to spend more. “Young adult gacha gamers experiencing greater stress and anxiety tend to spend more on gacha purchases, have more motives for gacha purchases, and participate in more gambling activities,” they wrote. “This group is at a particularly higher risk of becoming problem gamblers.”One thing that is important to note is that Genshin Impact came out in 2020. The study was self-reported, and it was done during the early stages of the COVID-19 pandemic. It was a time when people were experiencing a lot of stress, and also fewer options to relieve that stress. We were all stuck inside gaming.But the fact that stress can make people more likely to spend money on gacha shows that while the gacha model isn’t necessarily harmful to everyone, it is exploitative to everyone. Since I started writing this story, another self-reported study came out in Japan, where 18.8% of people in their 20s say they’ve spent money on gacha rather than on things like food or rent.Following Genshin Impact’s release, MiHoYo put out Honkai: Star Rail and Zenless Zone Zero. All are shiny, big-budget games that are free to play, but dangle the lure of making just one purchase in front of the player. Maybe you could drop five bucks on a handful of in-game currency to get one more pull. Or maybe just this month you’ll get the second tier of rewards on the game’s equivalent of a Battle Pass. The game is free, after all — but haven’t you enjoyed at least ten dollars’ worth of gameplay? Image: HoyoverseI spent most of my December throwing myself into Infinity Nikki. I had been so stressed, and the game was so soothing. I logged in daily to fulfill my daily wishes and earn my XP, diamonds, Threads of Purity, and bling. I accumulated massive amounts of resources. I haven’t spent money on the game. I’m trying not to, and so far, it’s been pretty easy. I’ve been super happy with how much stuff I can get for free, and how much I can do! I actually feel really good about that — which is what I said to my boyfriend, and he replied, “Yeah, that’s the point. That’s how they get you.”And he’s right. Currently, Infinity Nikki players are embroiled in a war with developer Infold, after Infold introduced yet another currency type with deep ties to Nikki’s gacha system. Every one of these gacha games has its own tangled system of overlapping currencies. Some can only be used on gacha pulls. Some can only be used to upgrade items. Many of them can be purchased with human money.Image: InFold Games/Papergames via PolygonAll of this adds up. According to Sensor Towers’ data, Genshin Impact earned over 36 million dollars on mobile alone in a single month of 2024. I don’t know what Dan DiIorio’s peak monthly revenue for Luck Be A Landlord was, but I’m pretty sure it wasn’t that.A lot of the spending guardrails we see in games like these are actually the result of regulations in other territories, especially China, where gacha has been a big deal for a lot longer. For example, gacha games have a daily limit on loot boxes, with the number clearly displayed, and a system collectively called “pity,” where getting the banner item is guaranteed after a certain number of pulls. Lastly, developers have to be clear about what the odds are. When I log in to spend the Revelation Crystals I’ve spent weeks hoarding in my F2P Infinity Nikki experience, I know that I have a 1.5% chance of pulling a 5-star piece, and that the odds can go up to 6.06%, and that I am guaranteed to get one within 20 pulls, because of the pity system.So, these odds are awful. But it is not as merciless as sitting down at a Vegas slot machine, an experience best described as “oh… that’s it?”There’s not a huge philosophical difference between buying a pack of loot boxes in Overwatch, a pull in Genshin Impact, or even a booster of Pokémon cards. You put in money, you get back randomized stuff that may or may not be what you want. In the dictionary definition, it’s a gamble. But unlike the slot machine, it’s not like you’re trying to win money by doing it, unless you’re selling those Pokémon cards, which is a topic for another time.But since even a game where you don’t get anything, like Balatro or Luck Be A Landlord, can come under fire for promoting gambling to kids, it would seem appropriate for app stores and ratings boards to take a similarly hardline stance with gacha.Instead, all these games are rated T for Teen by the ESRB, and PEGI 12 in the EU.The ESRB ratings for these games note that they contain in-game purchases, including random items. Honkai: Star Rail’s rating specifically calls out a slot machine mechanic, where players spend tokens to win a prize. But other than calling out Honkai’s slot machine, app stores are not slapping Genshin or Nikki with an 18+ rating. Meanwhile, Balatro had a PEGI rating of 18 until a successful appeal in February 2025, and Luck Be a Landlord is still 17+ on Apple’s App Store.Nobody knows what they’re doingWhen I started researching this piece, I felt very strongly that it was absurd that Luck Be A Landlord and Balatro had age ratings this high.I still believe that the way both devs have been treated by ratings boards is bad. Threatening an indie dev with a significant loss of income by pulling their game is bad, not giving them a way to defend themself or help them understand why it’s happening is even worse. It’s an extension of the general way that too-big-to-fail companies like Google treat all their customers.DiIorio told me that while it felt like a human being had at least looked at Luck Be A Landlord to make the determination that it contained gambling themes, the emails he was getting were automatic, and he doesn’t have a contact at Google to ask why this happened or how he can avoid it in the future — an experience that will be familiar to anyone who has ever needed Google support. But what’s changed for me is that I’m not actually sure anymore that games that don’t have gambling should be completely let off the hook for evoking gambling.Exposing teens to simulated gambling without financial stakes could spark an interest in the real thing later on, according to a study in the International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health. It’s the same reason you can’t mosey down to the drug store to buy candy cigarettes. Multiple studies were done that showed kids who ate candy cigarettes were more likely to take up smoking (of course, the candy is still available — just without the “cigarette” branding.)So while I still think rating something like Balatro 18+ is nuts, I also think that describing it appropriately might be reasonable. As a game, it’s completely divorced from literally any kind of play you would find in a casino — but I can see the concern that the thrill of flashy numbers and the shiny cards might encourage young players to try their hand at poker in a real casino, where a real house can take their money.Maybe what’s more important than doling out high age ratings is helping people think about how media can affect us. In the same way that, when I was 12 and obsessed with The Matrix, my parents gently made sure that I knew that none of the violence was real and you can’t actually cartwheel through a hail of bullets in real life. Thanks, mom and dad!But that’s an answer that’s a lot more abstract and difficult to implement than a big red 18+ banner. When it comes to gacha, I think we’re even less equipped to talk about these game mechanics, and I’m certain they’re not being age-rated appropriately. On the one hand, like I said earlier, gacha exploits the player’s desire for stuff that they are heavily manipulated to buy with real money. On the other hand, I think it’s worth acknowledging that there is a difference between gacha and casino gambling.Problem gamblers aren’t satisfied by winning — the thing they’re addicted to is playing, and the risk that comes with it. In gacha games, players do report satisfaction when they achieve the prize they set out to get. And yes, in the game’s next season, the developer will be dangling a shiny new prize in front of them with the goal of starting the cycle over. But I think it’s fair to make the distinction, while still being highly critical of the model.And right now, there is close to no incentive for app stores to crack down on gacha in any way. They get a cut of in-app purchases. Back in 2023, miHoYo tried a couple of times to set up payment systems that circumvented Apple’s 30% cut of in-app spending. Both times, it was thwarted by Apple, whose App Store generated $1.1 trillion in developer billings and sales in 2022.According to Apple itself, 90% of that money did not include any commission to Apple. Fortunately for Apple, ten percent of a trillion dollars is still one hundred billion dollars, which I would also like to have in my bank account. Apple has zero reason to curb spending on games that have been earning millions of dollars every month for years.And despite the popularity of Luck Be A Landlord and Balatro’s massive App Store success, these games will never be as lucrative. They’re one-time purchases, and they don’t have microtransactions. To add insult to injury, like most popular games, Luck Be A Landlord has a lot of clones. And from what I can tell, it doesn’t look like any of them have been made to indicate that their games contain the dreaded “gambling themes” that Google was so worried about in Landlord.In particular, a game called SpinCraft: Roguelike from Sneaky Panda Games raised $6 million in seed funding for “inventing the Luck-Puzzler genre,” which it introduced in 2022, while Luck Be A Landlord went into early access in 2021.It’s free-to-play, has ads and in-app purchases, looks like Fisher Price made a slot machine, and it’s rated E for everyone, with no mention of gambling imagery in its rating. I reached out to the developers to ask if they had also been contacted by the Play Store to disclose that their game has gambling themes, but I haven’t heard back.Borrowing mechanics in games is as old as time, and it’s something I in no way want to imply shouldn’t happen because copyright is the killer of invention — but I think we can all agree that the system is broken.There is no consistency in how games with random chance are treated. We still do not know how to talk about gambling, or gambling themes, and at the end of the day, the results of this are the same: the house always wins.See More:

The tower takes shape as two sets of overlapping cylinders, clad with prefabricated panels intended to evoke clouds. PROJECT The Butterfly + First Baptist Church Complex ARCHITECT Revery Architecture PHOTOS Ema Peter When you fly into Vancouver, the most prominent structure in the city’s forest of glass skyscrapers is now a 57-storey edifice known as the Butterfly. Designed by Revery Architecture, the luxury residential tower is the latest in a string of high-rises that pop out of the city’s backdrop of generic window-wall façades.  The Butterfly’s striking form evolved over many years, beginning with studies dating back to 2012. Revery principal Venelin Kokalov imagined several options, most of them suggesting a distinct pair of architectural forms in dialogue. Renderings and models of the early concepts relay a wealth of imagination that is sorely missing from much of the city’s contemporary architecture, as land economics, zoning issues, and the profit motive often compel a default into generic glass-and-steel towers. The earliest concepts look starkly different—some evoke the Ginger and Fred building in Prague (Frank Gehry with Vlado Milunić, 1996); others the Absolute Towers in Mississauga (MAD with Burka Varacalli Architects, 2009). But one consistent theme runs through the design evolution: a sense of two Rilkean solitudes, touching.  On each floor, semi-private sky gardens offer an outdoor place for residents to socialize. Client feedback, engineering studies, and simple pragmatics led to the final form: two sets of overlapping cylinders linked by a common breezeway and flanked by a rental apartment on one side and a restored church doubling as a community centre on the other. The contours of the floorplan are visually organic: evocative of human cells dividing. The roundness of the main massing is complemented by curvilinear balustrades that smoothly transform into the outer walls of each unit. It’s an eye-catching counterpoint to the orthogonality of the city’s built landscape. The two adjacent buildings—built, restored, and expanded as part of a density bonus arrangement with the city—help integrate this gargantuan structure with the lower-rise neighbourhood around it.  The Butterfly is a high-end, high-priced residential tower—one of the few typologies in which clients and communities are now willing to invest big money and resources in creative, visually astonishing architecture. That leads to a fundamental question: what is the public purpose of a luxury condo tower?  A public galleria joins the renovated First Baptist Church to the new building. Serving as a welcoming atrium, it allows for community access to the expanded church, including its daycare, full gymnasium, multi-purpose rooms, overnight emergency shelter, and community dining hall equipped with a commercial kitchen. Whatever one feels about the widening divide between the haves and have-nots in our big cities, this building—like its ilk—does serve several important public purposes. The most direct and quantifiable benefits are the two flanking buildings, also designed by Revery and part of the larger project. The seven-storey rental apartment provides a modest contribution to the city’s dearth of mid-priced housing. The superbly restored and seismically upgraded First Baptist Church has expanded into the area between the new tower and original church, and now offers the public a wider array of programming including a gymnasium, childcare facility, and areas for emergency shelter and counselling services for individuals in need.  The church’s Pinder Hall has been reimagined as a venue for church and community events including concerts, weddings, and cultural programming. The Butterfly’s character is largely defined by undulating precast concrete panels that wrap around the building. The architects describe the swooping lines as being inspired by clouds, but for this writer, the Butterfly evokes a 57-layer frosted cake towering above the city’s boxy skyline. Kokalov winces when he hears that impression, but it’s meant as a sincere compliment. Clouds are not universally welcome, but who doesn’t like cake?  Kokalov argues that its experiential quality is the building’s greatest distinction—most notably, the incorporation of an “outdoors”—not a balcony or deck, but an actual outdoor pathway—at all residential levels. For years the lead form-maker at Bing Thom Architects, Kokalov was responsible for much of the curvilinearity in the firm’s later works, including the 2019 Xiqu Centre opera house in Hong Kong. It’s easy to assume that his forte and focus would be pure aesthetic delight, but he avers that every sinuous curve has a practical rationale.  The breezeways provide residents with outdoor entries to their units—an unusual attribute for high-rise towers—and contribute to natural cooling, ventilation, and daylight in the suites. Defying the local tower-on-podium formula, the building’s façade falls almost straight to the ground. At street level, the building is indented with huge parabolic concavities. It’s an abrupt way to meet the street, but the fall is visually “broken” by a publicly accessible courtyard.   The tower’s layered, undulating volume is echoed in a soaring residential lobby, which includes developer Westbank’s signature—a bespoke Fazioli grand piano designed by the building’s architect. After passing through this courtyard, you enter the building via the usual indoor luxe foyer—complete with developer Westbank’s signature, an over-the-top hand-built grand piano designed by the architect. In this case, the piano’s baroquely sculpted legs are right in keeping with the architecture. But after taking the elevator up to the designated floor, you step out into what is technically “outdoors” and walk to your front door in a brief but bracing open-air transition.  The main entrance of every unit is accessed via a breezeway that runs from one side of the building to another. Unglazed and open to the outside, each breezeway is marked at one end with what the architects call (a little ambitiously) a “sky garden,” in most cases consisting of a sapling that will grow into a leafy tree in due course, God and strata maintenance willing. This incorporation of nature and fresh air transforms the condominium units into something akin to townhouses, albeit stacked exceptionally high.  The suites feature a custom counter with a sculptural folded form. Inside each unit, the space can be expanded and contracted and reconfigured visually—not literally—by the fact that the interior wall of the secondary bedroom is completely transparent, floor to ceiling. It’s unusual, and slightly unnerving, but undeniably exciting for any occupants who wish to maximize their views to the mountains and sea. The curved glass wall transforms the room into a private enclave by means of a curtain, futuristically activated by remote control. The visual delight of swooping curves is only tempered when it’s wholly impractical—the offender here being a massive built-in counter that serves to both anchor and divide the living-kitchen areas. It reads as a long, pliable slab that is “folded” into the middle in such a way that the counter itself transforms into its own horseshoe-shaped base, creating a narrow crevice in the middle of the countertop. I marvel at its beauty and uniqueness; I weep for whoever is assigned to clean out the crumbs and other culinary flotsam that will fall into that crevice.  A structure made of high-performance modular precast concrete structural ribs arcs over a swimming pool that bridges between the building’s main amenity space and the podium roof. The building’s high-priced architecture may well bring more to the table than density-bonus amenities. On a broader scale, these luxe dwellings may be just what is needed to help lure the affluent from their mansions. As wealthy residents and investors continue to seek out land-hogging detached homes, the Butterfly offers an alternate concept that maintains the psychological benefit of a dedicated outside entrance and an outrageously flexible interior space. Further over-the-top amenities add to the appeal. Prominent among these is a supremely gorgeous residents-only swimming pool, housed within ribs of concrete columns that curve and dovetail into beams.   The ultimate public purpose for the architecturally spectacular condo tower: its role as public art in the city. The units in any of these buildings are the private side of architecture’s Janus face, but its presence in the skyline and on the street is highly public. By contributing a newly striking visual ballast, the Butterfly has served its purpose as one of the age-old Seven Arts: defining a location, a community, and an era. Adele Weder is a contributing editor to Canadian Architect. Screenshot CLIENT Westbank Corporation, First Baptist Church | ARCHITECT TEAM Venelin Kokalov (MRAIC), Bing Thom (FRAIC, deceased 2016), Amirali Javidan, Nicole Hu, Shinobu Homma MRAIC, Bibi Fehr, Culum Osborne, Dustin Yee, Cody Loeffen, Kailey O’Farrell, Mark Melnichuk, Andrea Flynn, Jennifer Zhang, Daniel Gasser, Zhuoli Yang, Lisa Potopsingh | STRUCTURAL Glotman Simpson | MECHANICAL Introba | ELECTRICAL Nemetz & Associates, Inc. | LANDSCAPE SWA Group (Design) w/ Cornelia Oberlander & G|ALA – Gauthier & Associates Landscape Architecture, Inc. (Landscape Architect of Record) | INTERIORS Revery Architecture | CONTRACTOR Icon West Construction (new construction); The Haebler Group (heritage) | LIGHTING ARUP (Design) & Nemetz (Engineer of Record) | SUSTAINABILITY & ENERGY MODELlING Introba | BUILDING ENVELOPE RDH Building Science, Inc. | HERITAGE CONSERVATION Donald Luxton & Associates, Inc.| ACOUSTICS BKL Consultants Ltd. | TRAFFIC Bunt & Associates, Inc. | POOL Rockingham Pool Consulting, Inc. | FOUNTAIN Vincent Helton & Associates | WIND Gradient Wind Engineering, Inc. | WASTE CONSULTANT Target Zero Waste Consulting, Inc. | AREA 56,206 M2 | BUDGET Withheld | COMPLETION Spring 2025 ENERGY USE INTENSITY (PROJECTED) 106 kWh/m2/year | WATER USE INTENSITY (PROJECTED) 0.72 m3/m2/year As appeared in the June 2025 issue of Canadian Architect magazine The post The Butterfly takes flight: The Butterfly, Vancouver, BC appeared first on Canadian Architect.

Why it matters: A technological leap in fiber optics has shattered previous limitations, achieving what experts once considered impossible: transmitting data at 1.02 petabits per second – enough to download every movie on Netflix 30 times over – across 1,808 kilometers using a single fiber no thicker than a human hair. At the heart of this breakthrough – driven by Japan's National Institute of Information and Communications Technology (NICT) and Sumitomo Electric Industries – is a 19-core optical fiber with a standard 0.125 mm cladding diameter, designed to fit seamlessly into existing infrastructure and eliminate the need for costly upgrades. Each core acts as an independent data channel, collectively forming a "19-lane highway" within the same space as traditional single-core fibers. Unlike earlier multi-core designs limited to short distances or specialized wavelength bands, this fiber operates efficiently across the C and L bands (commercial standards used globally) thanks to a refined core arrangement that slashes signal loss by 40% compared to prior models. The experiment's success relied on a complex recirculating loop system. Signals traveled through an 86.1-kilometer fiber segment 21 times, simulating a cross-continental journey equivalent to linking Berlin to Naples or Sapporo to Fukuoka. To maintain integrity over this distance, researchers deployed a dual-band optical amplification system, comprising separate devices that boosted signals in the C and L bands. This enabled 180 distinct wavelengths to carry data simultaneously using 16QAM modulation, a method that packs more information into each pulse. // Related Stories At the receiving end, a 19-channel detector, paired with advanced MIMO (multiple-input multiple-output) processing, dissected interference between cores, much like untangling 19 overlapping conversations in a crowded room. Schematic diagram of the transmission system This digital signal processor, leveraging algorithms developed over a decade of multi-core research, extracted usable data at unprecedented rates while correcting for distortions accumulated over 1,808 km. The achievement caps years of incremental progress. In 2023, the same team achieved 1.7 petabits per second, but only across 63.5 km. Earlier efforts using 4-core fibers reached 0.138 petabits over 12,345 km by tapping the less practical S-band, while 15-mode fibers struggled with signal distortion beyond 1,001 km due to mismatched propagation characteristics. The new 19-core fiber's uniform core design sidesteps these issues, achieving a capacity-distance product of 1.86 exabits per second per kilometer – 14 times higher than previous records for standard fibers. Image diagram of 19-core optical fiber. Presented as the top-rated post-deadline paper at OFC 2025 in San Francisco, this work arrives as global data traffic is projected to triple by 2030. While challenges remain, such as optimizing amplifier efficiency and scaling MIMO processing for real-world use, the technology offers a viable path to petabit-scale networks. Researchers aim to refine production techniques for mass deployment, potentially enabling transoceanic cables that move entire data centers' worth of information hourly. Researchers aim to refine production techniques for mass deployment, potentially enabling transoceanic cables that move entire data centers' worth of information hourly. Sumitomo Electric's engineers, who designed the fiber's coupled-core architecture, note that existing manufacturing lines can adapt to produce the 19-core design with minimal retooling. Meanwhile, NICT's team is exploring AI-driven signal processing to further boost speeds. As 6G and quantum computing loom, this breakthrough positions fiber optics not just as a backbone for tomorrow's internet, but as the central nervous system of a hyperconnected planetary infrastructure.

Imagine: China deploys hundreds of thousands of autonomous drones in the air, on the sea, and under the water—all armed with explosive warheads or small missiles. These machines descend in a swarm toward military installations on Taiwan and nearby US bases, and over the course of a few hours, a single robotic blitzkrieg overwhelms the US Pacific force before it can even begin to fight back.  Maybe it sounds like a new Michael Bay movie, but it’s the scenario that keeps the chief technology officer of the US Army up at night. “I’m hesitant to say it out loud so I don’t manifest it,” says Alex Miller, a longtime Army intelligence official who became the CTO to the Army’s chief of staff in 2023. Even if World War III doesn’t break out in the South China Sea, every US military installation around the world is vulnerable to the same tactics—as are the militaries of every other country around the world. The proliferation of cheap drones means just about any group with the wherewithal to assemble and launch a swarm could wreak havoc, no expensive jets or massive missile installations required.  While the US has precision missiles that can shoot these drones down, they don’t always succeed: A drone attack killed three US soldiers and injured dozens more at a base in the Jordanian desert last year. And each American missile costs orders of magnitude more than its targets, which limits their supply; countering thousand-dollar drones with missiles that cost hundreds of thousands, or even millions, of dollars per shot can only work for so long, even with a defense budget that could reach a trillion dollars next year. The US armed forces are now hunting for a solution—and they want it fast. Every branch of the service and a host of defense tech startups are testing out new weapons that promise to disable drones en masse. There are drones that slam into other drones like battering rams; drones that shoot out nets to ensnare quadcopter propellers; precision-guided Gatling guns that simply shoot drones out of the sky; electronic approaches, like GPS jammers and direct hacking tools; and lasers that melt holes clear through a target’s side. Then there are the microwaves: high-powered electronic devices that push out kilowatts of power to zap the circuits of a drone as if it were the tinfoil you forgot to take off your leftovers when you heated them up.  That’s where Epirus comes in.  When I went to visit the HQ of this 185-person startup in Torrance, California, earlier this year, I got a behind-the-scenes look at its massive microwave, called Leonidas, which the US Army is already betting on as a cutting-edge anti-drone weapon. The Army awarded Epirus a $66 million contract in early 2023, topped that up with another $17 million last fall, and is currently deploying a handful of the systems for testing with US troops in the Middle East and the Pacific. (The Army won’t get into specifics on the location of the weapons in the Middle East but published a report of a live-fire test in the Philippines in early May.)  Up close, the Leonidas that Epirus built for the Army looks like a two-foot-thick slab of metal the size of a garage door stuck on a swivel mount. Pop the back cover, and you can see that the slab is filled with dozens of individual microwave amplifier units in a grid. Each is about the size of a safe-deposit box and built around a chip made of gallium nitride, a semiconductor that can survive much higher voltages and temperatures than the typical silicon.  Leonidas sits on top of a trailer that a standard-issue Army truck can tow, and when it is powered on, the company’s software tells the grid of amps and antennas to shape the electromagnetic waves they’re blasting out with a phased array, precisely overlapping the microwave signals to mold the energy into a focused beam. Instead of needing to physically point a gun or parabolic dish at each of a thousand incoming drones, the Leonidas can flick between them at the speed of software. The Leonidas contains dozens of microwave amplifier units and can pivot to direct waves at incoming swarms of drones.EPIRUS Of course, this isn’t magic—there are practical limits on how much damage one array can do, and at what range—but the total effect could be described as an electromagnetic pulse emitter, a death ray for electronics, or a force field that could set up a protective barrier around military installations and drop drones the way a bug zapper fizzles a mob of mosquitoes. I walked through the nonclassified sections of the Leonidas factory floor, where a cluster of engineers working on weaponeering—the military term for figuring out exactly how much of a weapon, be it high explosive or microwave beam, is necessary to achieve a desired effect—ran tests in a warren of smaller anechoic rooms. Inside, they shot individual microwave units at a broad range of commercial and military drones, cycling through waveforms and power levels to try to find the signal that could fry each one with maximum efficiency.  On a live video feed from inside one of these foam-padded rooms, I watched a quadcopter drone spin its propellers and then, once the microwave emitter turned on, instantly stop short—first the propeller on the front left and then the rest. A drone hit with a Leonidas beam doesn’t explode—it just falls. Compared with the blast of a missile or the sizzle of a laser, it doesn’t look like much. But it could force enemies to come up with costlier ways of attacking that reduce the advantage of the drone swarm, and it could get around the inherent limitations of purely electronic or strictly physical defense systems. It could save lives. Epirus CEO Andy Lowery, a tall guy with sparkplug energy and a rapid-fire southern Illinois twang, doesn’t shy away from talking big about his product. As he told me during my visit, Leonidas is intended to lead a last stand, like the Spartan from whom the microwave takes its name—in this case, against hordes of unmanned aerial vehicles, or UAVs. While the actual range of the Leonidas system is kept secret, Lowery says the Army is looking for a solution that can reliably stop drones within a few kilometers. He told me, “They would like our system to be the owner of that final layer—to get any squeakers, any leakers, anything like that.” Now that they’ve told the world they “invented a force field,” Lowery added, the focus is on manufacturing at scale—before the drone swarms really start to descend or a nation with a major military decides to launch a new war. Before, in other words, Miller’s nightmare scenario becomes reality.  Why zap? Miller remembers well when the danger of small weaponized drones first appeared on his radar. Reports of Islamic State fighters strapping grenades to the bottom of commercial DJI Phantom quadcopters first emerged in late 2016 during the Battle of Mosul. “I went, ‘Oh, this is going to be bad,’ because basically it’s an airborne IED at that point,” he says. He’s tracked the danger as it’s built steadily since then, with advances in machine vision, AI coordination software, and suicide drone tactics only accelerating.  Then the war in Ukraine showed the world that cheap technology has fundamentally changed how warfare happens. We have watched in high-definition video how a cheap, off-the-shelf drone modified to carry a small bomb can be piloted directly into a faraway truck, tank, or group of troops to devastating effect. And larger suicide drones, also known as “loitering munitions,” can be produced for just tens of thousands of dollars and launched in massive salvos to hit soft targets or overwhelm more advanced military defenses through sheer numbers.  As a result, Miller, along with large swaths of the Pentagon and DC policy circles, believes that the current US arsenal for defending against these weapons is just too expensive and the tools in too short supply to truly match the threat. Just look at Yemen, a poor country where the Houthi military group has been under constant attack for the past decade. Armed with this new low-tech arsenal, in the past 18 months the rebel group has been able to bomb cargo ships and effectively disrupt global shipping in the Red Sea—part of an effort to apply pressure on Israel to stop its war in Gaza. The Houthis have also used missiles, suicide drones, and even drone boats to launch powerful attacks on US Navy ships sent to stop them. The most successful defense tech firm selling anti-drone weapons to the US military right now is Anduril, the company started by Palmer Luckey, the inventor of the Oculus VR headset, and a crew of cofounders from Oculus and defense data giant Palantir. In just the past few months, the Marines have chosen Anduril for counter-drone contracts that could be worth nearly $850 million over the next decade, and the company has been working with Special Operations Command since 2022 on a counter-drone contract that could be worth nearly a billion dollars over a similar time frame. It’s unclear from the contracts what, exactly, Anduril is selling to each organization, but its weapons include electronic warfare jammers, jet-powered drone bombs, and propeller-driven Anvil drones designed to simply smash into enemy drones. In this arsenal, the cheapest way to stop a swarm of drones is electronic warfare: jamming the GPS or radio signals used to pilot the machines. But the intense drone battles in Ukraine have advanced the art of jamming and counter-jamming close to the point of stalemate. As a result, a new state of the art is emerging: unjammable drones that operate autonomously by using onboard processors to navigate via internal maps and computer vision, or even drones connected with 20-kilometer-long filaments of fiber-optic cable for tethered control. But unjammable doesn’t mean unzappable. Instead of using the scrambling method of a jammer, which employs an antenna to block the drone’s connection to a pilot or remote guidance system, the Leonidas microwave beam hits a drone body broadside. The energy finds its way into something electrical, whether the central flight controller or a tiny wire controlling a flap on a wing, to short-circuit whatever’s available. (The company also says that this targeted hit of energy allows birds and other wildlife to continue to move safely.) Tyler Miller, a senior systems engineer on Epirus’s weaponeering team, told me that they never know exactly which part of the target drone is going to go down first, but they’ve reliably seen the microwave signal get in somewhere to overload a circuit. “Based on the geometry and the way the wires are laid out,” he said, one of those wires is going to be the best path in. “Sometimes if we rotate the drone 90 degrees, you have a different motor go down first,” he added. The team has even tried wrapping target drones in copper tape, which would theoretically provide shielding, only to find that the microwave still finds a way in through moving propeller shafts or antennas that need to remain exposed for the drone to fly.  EPIRUS Leonidas also has an edge when it comes to downing a mass of drones at once. Physically hitting a drone out of the sky or lighting it up with a laser can be effective in situations where electronic warfare fails, but anti-drone drones can only take out one at a time, and lasers need to precisely aim and shoot. Epirus’s microwaves can damage everything in a roughly 60-degree arc from the Leonidas emitter simultaneously and keep on zapping and zapping; directed energy systems like this one never run out of ammo. As for cost, each Army Leonidas unit currently runs in the “low eight figures,” Lowery told me. Defense contract pricing can be opaque, but Epirus delivered four units for its $66 million initial contract, giving a back-of-napkin price around $16.5 million each. For comparison, Stinger missiles from Raytheon, which soldiers shoot at enemy aircraft or drones from a shoulder-mounted launcher, cost hundreds of thousands of dollars a pop, meaning the Leonidas could start costing less (and keep shooting) after it downs the first wave of a swarm. Raytheon’s radar, reversed Epirus is part of a new wave of venture-capital-backed defense companies trying to change the way weapons are created—and the way the Pentagon buys them. The largest defense companies, firms like Raytheon, Boeing, Northrop Grumman, and Lockheed Martin, typically develop new weapons in response to research grants and cost-plus contracts, in which the US Department of Defense guarantees a certain profit margin to firms building products that match their laundry list of technical specifications. These programs have kept the military supplied with cutting-edge weapons for decades, but the results may be exquisite pieces of military machinery delivered years late and billions of dollars over budget. Rather than building to minutely detailed specs, the new crop of military contractors aim to produce products on a quick time frame to solve a problem and then fine-tune them as they pitch to the military. The model, pioneered by Palantir and SpaceX, has since propelled companies like Anduril, Shield AI, and dozens of other smaller startups into the business of war as venture capital piles tens of billions of dollars into defense. Like Anduril, Epirus has direct Palantir roots; it was cofounded by Joe Lonsdale, who also cofounded Palantir, and John Tenet, Lonsdale’s colleague at the time at his venture fund, 8VC. (Tenet, the son of former CIA director George Tenet, may have inspired the company’s name—the elder Tenet’s parents were born in the Epirus region in the northwest of Greece. But the company more often says it’s a reference to the pseudo-mythological Epirus Bow from the 2011 fantasy action movie Immortals, which never runs out of arrows.)  While Epirus is doing business in the new mode, its roots are in the old—specifically in Raytheon, a pioneer in the field of microwave technology. Cofounded by MIT professor Vannevar Bush in 1922, it manufactured vacuum tubes, like those found in old radios. But the company became synonymous with electronic defense during World War II, when Bush spun up a lab to develop early microwave radar technology invented by the British into a workable product, and Raytheon then began mass-producing microwave tubes—known as magnetrons—for the US war effort. By the end of the war in 1945, Raytheon was making 80% of the magnetrons powering Allied radar across the world. From padded foam chambers at the Epirus HQ, Leonidas devices can be safely tested on drones.EPIRUS Large tubes remained the best way to emit high-power microwaves for more than half a century, handily outperforming silicon-based solid-state amplifiers. They’re still around—the microwave on your kitchen counter runs on a vacuum tube magnetron. But tubes have downsides: They’re hot, they’re big, and they require upkeep. (In fact, the other microwave drone zapper currently in the Pentagon pipeline, the Tactical High-power Operational Responder, or THOR, still relies on a physical vacuum tube. It’s reported to be effective at downing drones in tests but takes up a whole shipping container and needs a dish antenna to zap its targets.) By the 2000s, new methods of building solid-state amplifiers out of materials like gallium nitride started to mature and were able to handle more power than silicon without melting or shorting out. The US Navy spent hundreds of millions of dollars on cutting-edge microwave contracts, one for a project at Raytheon called Next Generation Jammer—geared specifically toward designing a new way to make high-powered microwaves that work at extremely long distances. Lowery, the Epirus CEO, began his career working on nuclear reactors on Navy aircraft carriers before he became the chief engineer for Next Generation Jammer at Raytheon in 2010. There, he and his team worked on a system that relied on many of the same fundamentals that now power the Leonidas—using the same type of amplifier material and antenna setup to fry the electronics of a small target at much closer range rather than disrupting the radar of a target hundreds of miles away.  The similarity is not a coincidence: Two engineers from Next Generation Jammer helped launch Epirus in 2018. Lowery—who by then was working at the augmented-reality startup RealWear, which makes industrial smart glasses—joined Epirus in 2021 to run product development and was asked to take the top spot as CEO in 2023, as Leonidas became a fully formed machine. Much of the founding team has since departed for other projects, but Raytheon still runs through the company’s collective CV: ex-Raytheon radar engineer Matt Markel started in January as the new CTO, and Epirus’s chief engineer for defense, its VP of engineering, its VP of operations, and a number of employees all have Raytheon roots as well. Markel tells me that the Epirus way of working wouldn’t have flown at one of the big defense contractors: “They never would have tried spinning off the technology into a new application without a contract lined up.” The Epirus engineers saw the use case, raised money to start building Leonidas, and already had prototypes in the works before any military branch started awarding money to work on the project. Waiting for the starting gun On the wall of Lowery’s office are two mementos from testing days at an Army proving ground: a trophy wing from a larger drone, signed by the whole testing team, and a framed photo documenting the Leonidas’s carnage—a stack of dozens of inoperative drones piled up in a heap.  Despite what seems to have been an impressive test show, it’s still impossible from the outside to determine whether Epirus’s tech is ready to fully deliver if the swarms descend.  The Army would not comment specifically on the efficacy of any new weapons in testing or early deployment, including the Leonidas system. A spokesperson for the Army’s Rapid Capabilities and Critical Technologies Office, or RCCTO, which is the subsection responsible for contracting with Epirus to date, would only say in a statement that it is “committed to developing and fielding innovative Directed Energy solutions to address evolving threats.”  But various high-ranking officers appear to be giving Epirus a public vote of confidence. The three-star general who runs RCCTO and oversaw the Leonidas testing last summer told Breaking Defense that “the system actually worked very well,” even if there was work to be done on “how the weapon system fits into the larger kill chain.” And when former secretary of the Army Christine Wormuth, then the service’s highest-ranking civilian, gave a parting interview this past January, she mentioned Epirus in all but name, citing “one company” that is “using high-powered microwaves to basically be able to kill swarms of drones.” She called that kind of capability “critical for the Army.”  The Army isn’t the only branch interested in the microwave weapon. On Epirus’s factory floor when I visited, alongside the big beige Leonidases commissioned by the Army, engineers were building a smaller expeditionary version for the Marines, painted green, which it delivered in late April. Videos show that when it put some of its microwave emitters on a dock and tested them out for the Navy last summer, the microwaves left their targets dead in the water—successfully frying the circuits of outboard motors like the ones propelling Houthi drone boats.  Epirus is also currently working on an even smaller version of the Leonidas that can mount on top of the Army’s Stryker combat vehicles, and it’s testing out attaching a single microwave unit to a small airborne drone, which could work as a highly focused zapper to disable cars, data centers, or single enemy drones.  Epirus’s microwave technology is also being tested in devices smaller than the traditional Leonidas. EPIRUS While neither the Army nor the Navy has yet to announce a contract to start buying Epirus’s systems at scale, the company and its investors are actively preparing for the big orders to start rolling in. It raised $250 million in a funding round in early March to get ready to make as many Leonidases as possible in the coming years, adding to the more than $300 million it’s raised since opening its doors in 2018. “If you invent a force field that works,” Lowery boasts, “you really get a lot of attention.” The task for Epirus now, assuming that its main customers pull the trigger and start buying more Leonidases, is ramping up production while advancing the tech in its systems. Then there are the more prosaic problems of staffing, assembly, and testing at scale. For future generations, Lowery told me, the goal is refining the antenna design and integrating higher-powered microwave amplifiers to push the output into the tens of kilowatts, allowing for increased range and efficacy.  While this could be made harder by Trump’s global trade war, Lowery says he’s not worried about their supply chain; while China produces 98% of the world’s gallium, according to the US Geological Survey, and has choked off exports to the US, Epirus’s chip supplier uses recycled gallium from Japan.  The other outside challenge may be that Epirus isn’t the only company building a drone zapper. One of China’s state-owned defense companies has been working on its own anti-drone high-powered microwave weapon called the Hurricane, which it displayed at a major military show in late 2024.  It may be a sign that anti-electronics force fields will become common among the world’s militaries—and if so, the future of war is unlikely to go back to the status quo ante, and it might zag in a different direction yet again. But military planners believe it’s crucial for the US not to be left behind. So if it works as promised, Epirus could very well change the way that war will play out in the coming decade.  While Miller, the Army CTO, can’t speak directly to Epirus or any specific system, he will say that he believes anti-drone measures are going to have to become ubiquitous for US soldiers. “Counter-UAS [Unmanned Aircraft System] unfortunately is going to be like counter-IED,” he says. “It’s going to be every soldier’s job to think about UAS threats the same way it was to think about IEDs.”  And, he adds, it’s his job and his colleagues’ to make sure that tech so effective it works like “almost magic” is in the hands of the average rifleman. To that end, Lowery told me, Epirus is designing the Leonidas control system to work simply for troops, allowing them to identify a cluster of targets and start zapping with just a click of a button—but only extensive use in the field can prove that out. Epirus CEO Andy Lowery sees the Leonidas as providing a last line of defense against UAVs.EPIRUS In the not-too-distant future, Lowery says, this could mean setting up along the US-Mexico border. But the grandest vision for Epirus’s tech that he says he’s heard is for a city-scale Leonidas along the lines of a ballistic missile defense radar system called PAVE PAWS, which takes up an entire 105-foot-tall building and can detect distant nuclear missile launches. The US set up four in the 1980s, and Taiwan currently has one up on a mountain south of Taipei. Fill a similar-size building full of microwave emitters, and the beam could reach out “10 or 15 miles,” Lowery told me, with one sitting sentinel over Taipei in the north and another over Kaohsiung in the south of Taiwan. Riffing in Greek mythological mode, Lowery said of drones, “I call all these mischief makers. Whether they’re doing drugs or guns across the border or they’re flying over Langley [or] they’re spying on F-35s, they’re all like Icarus. You remember Icarus, with his wax wings? Flying all around—‘Nobody’s going to touch me, nobody’s going to ever hurt me.’” “We built one hell of a wax-wing melter.”  Sam Dean is a reporter focusing on business, tech, and defense. He is writing a book about the recent history of Silicon Valley returning to work with the Pentagon for Viking Press and covering the defense tech industry for a number of publications. Previously, he was a business reporter at the Los Angeles Times. This piece has been updated to clarify that Alex Miller is a civilian intelligence official. 

Maksim Kabakou - Fotolia Opinion Rethinking secure comms: Are encrypted platforms still enough? A leak of information on American military operations caused a major political incident in March 2025. The Security Think Tank considers what can CISOs can learn from this potentially fatal error. By Russell Auld, PAC Published: 30 May 2025 In today’s constantly changing cyber landscape, answering the question “what does best practice now look like?” is far from simple. While emerging technologies and AI-driven security tools continue to make the headlines and become the topics of discussion, the real pivot point for modern security lies not just in the technological advancements but in context, people and process.  The recent Signal messaging platform incident in which a journalist was mistakenly added to a group chat, exposing sensitive information, serves as a timely reminder that even the most secure platform is vulnerable to human error. The platform wasn’t breached by malicious actors, or a zero-day exploit being utilised or the end-to-end encryption failing; the shortfall here was likely poorly defined acceptable use polices and controls alongside a lack of training and awareness. This incident, if nothing else, highlights a critical truth within cyber security – security tools are only as good as the environment, policies, and people operating them. While it’s tempting to focus on implementing more technical controls to prevent this from happening again, the reality is that many incidents result from a failure of process, governance, or awareness.  What does good security look like today? Some key areas include: Context over features, for example, whether Signal should have been used in the first place; There is no such thing as a silver bullet approach to protect your organisation; The importance of your team’s training and education; Reviewing and adapting continuously.  Security must be context-driven. Business leaders need to consider what their key area of concern is – reputational risk, state-sponsored surveillance, insider threats, or regulatory compliance. Each threat vector requires a different set of controls. For example, an organisation handling official-sensitive or classified data will require not just encryption, but assured platforms, robust access controls, identity validation, and clear auditability. Conversely, a commercial enterprise concerned about intellectual property leakage might strategically focus on user training, data loss prevention, and device control. Best practice isn’t picking the platform with the cheapest price tag or the most commonly used; it’s selecting a platform that supports the controls and policies required based on a deep understanding of your specific risks and use cases.   There is no one-size-fits-all solution for your organisation. The security product landscape is filled with vendors offering overlapping solutions that all claim to provide more protection than the other. And, although we know some potentially do offer better protection, features or functionality, even the best tool will fail if used incorrectly or implemented without a clear understanding of its limitations. Worse, organisations may gain a false sense of security by relying solely on a supplier’s claims. The priority must be to assess your organisation’s internal capability to manage and operate these tools effectively. Reassessing the threat landscape and taking advantage of the wealth of threat intelligence tools available, helps ensure you have the right skills, policies, and processes in place.  The Computer Weekly Security Think Tank on Signalgate Todd Thiemann, ESG: Signalgate: Learnings for CISOs securing enterprise data. Javvad Malik, KnowBe4: What CISOs can learn from Signalgate. Aditya Sood, Aryaka: Unspoken risk: Human factors undermine trusted platforms. Raihan Islam, defineXTEND: When leaders ignore cyber security rules, the whole system weakens. Elliot Wilkes, ACDS: Security vs. usability: Why rogue corporate comms are still an issue. Mike Gillespie and Ellie Hurst, Advent IM: Signalgate is a signal to revisit security onboarding and training. Best practice in 2025 means recognising that many security incidents stem from simple human mistakes, misaddressed emails, poor password hygiene, or even sharing access with the wrong person. Investing in continual staff education, security awareness, and skills gap analysis is essential to risk reduction.   This doesn’t mean showing an annual 10-minute cyber awareness video; you need to identify what will motivate your people and run security campaigns that capture their attention and change behaviour. For example you could consider using engaging nudges such as mandatory phishing alerts on laptops, interactive lock screen campaigns, and quizzes on key policies such as acceptable use and password complexity. Incorporate gamification elements, for example rewards for completing quizzes, and timely reminders to reinforce security best practices and fostering a culture of vigilance.  These campaigns should be a mixture of communications that engage people coupled with training which is seen as relevant by the workforce, as well as meeting role specific needs. Your developers need to understand secure coding practices, while those in front line operations may need training in how to detect phishing or social engineering attacks. In doing so this helps to create a better security culture within the organisation and enhance your overall security posture.  Finally, what’s considered “best practice” today may be outdated by tomorrow. Threats are constantly evolving, regulations change, and your own business operations and strategy may shift. Adopting a cyber security lifecycle that encompasses people, process and technology, supported by business continuous improvement activities and a clear vision from senior stakeholders will be vital. Conducting regular security reviews, red-teaming, and reassessing governance and policies will help ensure that defences remain relevant and proportional to your organisation’s threats. Encryption, however, still matters. As do SSO, MFA, secure coding practises, and access controls. But the real cornerstone of best practice in today’s cyber world is understanding why you need them, and how they’ll be used in practice. Securing your organisation is no longer just about picking the best platform, it's about creating a holistic view that incorporates people, process, and technology. And that may be the most secure approach, after all.  Russell Auld is digital trust and cyber security expert at PA Consulting In The Current Issue: UK government outlines plan to surveil migrants with eVisa data Why we must reform the Computer Misuse Act: A cyber pro speaks out Download Current Issue NTT IOWN all-photonics ‘saves Princess Miku’ from dragon – CW Developer Network FinOps Foundation lays down 2025 Framework for Cloud+ cost control – Open Source Insider View All Blogs

The probability of any American having dementia in their lifetime may be far greater than previously thought. For instance, a 2025 study that tracked a large sample of American adults across more than three decades found that their average likelihood of developing dementia between ages 55 to 95 was 42%, and that figure was even higher among women, Black adults and those with genetic risk. Now, a great deal of attention is being paid to how to stave off cognitive decline in the aging American population. But what is often missing from this conversation is the role that chronic stress can play in how well people age from a cognitive standpoint, as well as everybody’s risk for dementia. We are professors at Penn State in the Center for Healthy Aging, with expertise in health psychology and neuropsychology. We study the pathways by which chronic psychological stress influences the risk of dementia and how it influences the ability to stay healthy as people age. Recent research shows that Americans who are currently middle-aged or older report experiencing more frequent stressful events than previous generations. A key driver behind this increase appears to be rising economic and job insecurity, especially in the wake of the 2007-2009 Great Recession and ongoing shifts in the labor market. Many people stay in the workforce longer due to financial necessity, as Americans are living longer and face greater challenges covering basic expenses in later life. Therefore, it may be more important than ever to understand the pathways by which stress influences cognitive aging. Social isolation and stress Although everyone experiences some stress in daily life, some people experience stress that is more intense, persistent or prolonged. It is this relatively chronic stress that is most consistently linked with poorer health. In a recent review paper, our team summarized how chronic stress is a hidden but powerful factor underlying cognitive aging, or the speed at which your cognitive performance slows down with age. It is hard to overstate the impact of stress on your cognitive health as you age. This is in part because your psychological, behavioral and biological responses to everyday stressful events are closely intertwined, and each can amplify and interact with the other. For instance, living alone can be stressful—particularly for older adults—and being isolated makes it more difficult to live a healthy lifestyle, as well as to detect and get help for signs of cognitive decline. Moreover, stressful experiences—and your reactions to them—can make it harder to sleep well and to engage in other healthy behaviors, like getting enough exercise and maintaining a healthy diet. In turn, insufficient sleep and a lack of physical activity can make it harder to cope with stressful experiences. Stress is often missing from dementia prevention efforts A robust body of research highlights the importance of at least 14 different factors that relate to your risk of Alzheimer’s disease, a common and devastating form of dementia and other forms of dementia. Although some of these factors may be outside of your control, such as diabetes or depression, many of these factors involve things that people do, such as physical activity, healthy eating and social engagement. What is less well-recognized is that chronic stress is intimately interwoven with all of these factors that relate to dementia risk. Our work and research by others that we reviewed in our recent paper demonstrate that chronic stress can affect brain function and physiology, influence mood and make it harder to maintain healthy habits. Yet, dementia prevention efforts rarely address stress. Avoiding stressful events and difficult life circumstances is typically not an option. Where and how you live and work plays a major role in how much stress you experience. For example, people with lower incomes, less education or those living in disadvantaged neighborhoods often face more frequent stress and have fewer forms of support—such as nearby clinics, access to healthy food, reliable transportation or safe places to exercise or socialize—to help them manage the challenges of aging As shown in recent work on brain health in rural and underserved communities, these conditions can shape whether people have the chance to stay healthy as they age. Over time, the effects of stress tend to build up, wearing down the body’s systems and shaping long-term emotional and social habits. Lifestyle changes to manage stress and lessen dementia risk The good news is that there are multiple things that can be done to slow or prevent dementia, and our review suggests that these can be enhanced if the role of stress is better understood. Whether you are a young, midlife or an older adult, it is not too early or too late to address the implications of stress on brain health and aging. Here are a few ways you can take direct actions to help manage your level of stress: Follow lifestyle behaviors that can improve healthy aging. These include: following a healthy diet, engaging in physical activity and getting enough sleep. Even small changes in these domains can make a big difference. Prioritize your mental health and well-being to the extent you can. Things as simple as talking about your worries, asking for support from friends and family and going outside regularly can be immensely valuable. If your doctor says that you or someone you care about should follow a new health care regimen, or suggests there are signs of cognitive impairment, ask them what support or advice they have for managing related stress. If you or a loved one feel socially isolated, consider how small shifts could make a difference. For instance, research suggests that adding just one extra interaction a day—even if it’s a text message or a brief phone call—can be helpful, and that even interactions with people you don’t know well, such as at a coffee shop or doctor’s office, can have meaningful benefits. Walkable neighborhoods, lifelong learning A 2025 study identified stress as one of 17 overlapping factors that affect the odds of developing any brain disease, including stroke, late-life depression and dementia. This work suggests that addressing stress and overlapping issues such as loneliness may have additional health benefits as well. However, not all individuals or families are able to make big changes on their own. Research suggests that community-level and workplace interventions can reduce the risk of dementia. For example, safe and walkable neighborhoods and opportunities for social connection and lifelong learning—such as through community classes and events—have the potential to reduce stress and promote brain health. Importantly, researchers have estimated that even a modest delay in disease onset of Alzheimer’s would save hundreds of thousands of dollars for every American affected. Thus, providing incentives to companies who offer stress management resources could ultimately save money as well as help people age more healthfully. In addition, stress related to the stigma around mental health and aging can discourage people from seeking support that would benefit them. Even just thinking about your risk of dementia can be stressful in itself. Things can be done about this, too. For instance, normalizing the use of hearing aids and integrating reports of perceived memory and mental health issues into routine primary care and workplace wellness programs could encourage people to engage with preventive services earlier. Although research on potential biomedical treatments is ongoing and important, there is currently no cure for Alzheimer’s disease. However, if interventions aimed at reducing stress were prioritized in guidelines for dementia prevention, the benefits could be far-reaching, resulting in both delayed disease onset and improved quality of life for millions of people. Jennifer E. Graham-Engeland is a professor of biobehavioral health at Penn State. Martin J. Sliwinski is a professor of human development and family studies at Penn State. This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Moving is famously one of the most stressful things you can do. Not only is it a ton of work and a major financial expense, but you're dealing with the weight of leaving behind one home and starting fresh in another. It's a burden on your calendar, your wallet, and your emotions. Whether you are relocating for a new job, moving in with a partner (or moving away from one after a breakup), or just need a change of scenery, you should take the opportunity to appreciate (if not relish) the momentous event—and not be filled with dread, stress, and regret throughout the process. If you're looking to pull off the smoothest, least painful move ever, follow these five essential steps, as outlined by experts in the moving business.1. Start planning as early as possibleLong before you put a single possession into a cardboard box, you have to plan out your move. And I really mean it—every aspect. This is more involved than you think, so start early and set aside a chunk of time. Shanaiqua D'Sa, a content marketing lead at Attic Self Storage, notes that planning ahead is, "undoubtedly the first and most important step." It should include budgeting, comparing moving companies, considering if you need a storage unit to temporarily house your stuff, acquiring packing materials, and more. Set a budgetBudgeting should be your main focus. This can include: A truck rental or a moving company, insurance, fuel, labor costs, packing supplies, overlapping rent or mortgage payments, a storage unit, utility transfers, cleaning fees, repairs (on the old or new property), and paying food and/or shelter during the move. Costs for all of these will vary depending on your needs, so spend some time sketching out different scenarios. Once you have a budget in mind, increase it by 10% to 15%, according to Rob Rimeris, owner of EverSafe Moving Co. "Build room for the unpredictable," he says. "We see a lot of people plan for truck and labor, but forget about costs that compound." Be realistic, and you'll avoid surprises. Nick Friedman, co-founder of College HUNKS Hauling Junk and Moving, advises, "The more labor you require, the higher your overall cost will be. For local moves, many companies offer flat rates based on time and labor, but it’s important to make sure those quotes match your actual needs. Opting for too many services can lead to overpaying, while too few may leave you scrambling on moving day." Start by figuring out what, if anything, you will handle yourself, and what you'll outsource. Moving companies can help with everything from packing to furniture disassembly, but each likely comes with additional costs. Define what you want before you start calling companies to avoid getting upsold on something you don't really need help with.Find the right moversThat leads me to your next step, which is researching moving companies. Marshall Aikman, owner of Amazing Moves Moving and Storage, advises prioritizing reliability and reputation as highly as price: "Pay attention to how long the company has been in business because solid experience usually means smoother operations."Call a number of places and be upfront about everything from the scope of your move, to any special considerations like unusually heavy furniture, tight hallways, or lots of stairs. Get multiple estimates, and get everything in writing. Ask for detailed cost breakdowns to find out whether gas, stairs, furniture wrapping, furniture disassembly and reassembly, and more will increase your costs. Once you've narrowed down your list of possibilities, ask for proof of licensing and insurance, advises Friedman. If a company won't be straightforward about answering your questions and providing you with paperwork, cross them off your list. Matt Graber, co-owner of Cool Hand Movers, cautions against being "drawn in by lowball pricing," too. Any quote that seems "too good to be true" almost certainly is. Avoid companies with excessive upfront deposits—usually anything over 25% of the total cost—and read a ton of customer reviews before signing any contracts. 2. Declutter before you move (or pack)Multiple pros I spoke to made the same point, and it's worth repeating here: Declutter before your move so you don't waste money moving things you don't need or want to keep. (Here's a more detailed breakdown of how and why to declutter before a move) In general, you should start this process a few weeks in advance of your move. Three or so weeks at least ensures that you have enough time to think about what you really need to keep, and to donate or sell what you don't. If something is broken or rarely used, consider leaving it behind as you move into a new phase of your life. A few weeks will give you time to actually list and sell things to make money for your move, but set a deadline for when you'll donate the remainder—you don't want junk lying around when the movers show up. This could come with additional expenses. D'Sa points out that if you're downsizing significantly, you may have to budget for a small dumpster for everything you need to throw away. Still, it's worth it: All of my experts agreed that decluttering is the single most effective way to save money and psychologically prepare for your move. You'll also get a head start on packing simply by getting a clearer picture of everything you own. 3. Pack like a pro, even if you can't pay for itLike planning and decluttering, packing will start weeks before you move. I realize that's not always possible, but do try to start as soon as you can. Waiting until a few days before—or worse, the day the movers show up—can lead to chaos. Movers can help you pack, but that's typically expensive. Evan Hock, co-founder of MakeMyMove, cautions, "Packing always takes longer than expected, so start early, especially with seasonal items or belongings you don't use daily." While you can likely score some free boxes from local businesses, it's a good idea to just buy them (you can usually find the best prices at big box hardware stores). Rimeris suggests purchasing high-quality tape, "markers you can actually read," and strong boxes, all of which are "worth every penny." Mindy Godding, president of the National Association of Productivity and Organizing Professionals, advises buying all your boxes so they're all similar shapes and sizes and will pack more easily. You can cut down your costs on protective supplies, Godding says, noting packing paper works just as well as bubble wrap or pre-made inserts when it comes to protecting your fragile items. Renting crates can save you some effort, at a costIf you don't want to buy boxes, you can consider renting reusable plastic crates. A number of companies, both local and national, will deliver these crates to you before you move and pick them up when you're done. They're sturdier than cardboard boxes, stackable, uniform, and returnable, so they make packing easy. Uhaul, RentalCrates.com, and Perfect Crates all offer this service, so compare prices for your exact needs. Get creativeGodding suggests placing plastic cups around delicate items like figurines, and clearly labeling any boxes with something breakable inside. Shannon Beller, CEO and co-founder of Wall-Russ, adds that you can use household materials like towels and linens to cushion delicate items as you pack, and Tiam Behdarvandan, founder of Let's Get Moving, suggests packing heavier things, like books, into rolling suitcases, since the wheels make it easier to haul them around. Photos are your friend during this porcess. Take photos of your boxes as you pack so you know what's in each box if you should need something in an emergency. Also take pictures of things like cable configurations behind the TV, so setting everything back up will be easier.Beller and Charles Chica, co-owners of CT Best Movers, recommend keeping your clothes on the hangers and tossing a garbage bag over them. When you get to the new house, cut a hole in the bag, thread the hangers through, slip them on the rod, then cut the bag off. (Here are more tips on how to pack in a way that makes it easier to unpack.)Have a systemPack room by room, and within each room, proceeding in terms of urgency, and designate one box of "essentials" from each. These boxes—which will contain things like toothbrushes, soap, pajamas, and coffee pots, plates and silverware, and anything else you might need in the first days at your new home—should be loaded into the moving van last, unloaded first, and opened on your first night there. Making sure your boxes of must-haves are easily accessible will make settling in a lot easier. (Keep a knife or scissors handy so you can actually open them.)4. Do what you need to do online before you moveIt's eay to get so wrapped up in the physical process of moving your possessions from one place to another that you can forget about what comes next: Living somewhere new. Especially if you're moving to a new town, you will have to check a bunch of boxes to get your new life up and running.A lot of these things can be handled online, so do your research and accomplish as much as you can before your move. Start by making a list of all the different things to deal with at your current address. You may need to make some repairs to get your security deposit back if you're a renter. Take stock of your bills and memberships: cancel your gym membership and any other local recurring charges, like public transit cards that auto-renew. Set up a mail forwarding so you will get any mail that comes to your old place. Cancel your utilities. Reach out to your doctor, dentist, optometrist, and other providers to find out if they can make referrals for you in your new area and provide copies of all your important records and documents. Forward your prescriptions to a new pharmacy. Now, shift focus to your new location. Set up your utilities and the online accounts you'll need to pay them, switch your driver's license information if necessary, research the deadlines for re-registering your car, and contact your insurer (hopefully your new area will have lower rates). You can even start looking for local doctors, dentists, or any other professionals you'll need to avail yourself of in the short term after you move.5. Stay on top of things the day ofThe last step is the big one: It's time to move. Even this part still comes down to planning and budgeting. Jordan Sakala of laborhutt.com suggests moving during the week and mid-month, when demand is lower, and making sure you're ready and packed before the movers arrive. If you're not ready when they pull up, you could get charged an hourly fee while they either wait around for you or jump in to help speed things along. Make sure to tell movers about heavy furniture or tight squeezes in advance so they come with all the necessary tools, as if you don't, you may end up waiting around (and being charged for it) while they run to get them—or, worse, be told they can't move those things at all. On moving day, even if you've hired a full-service moving team and outsourced pretty much everything, it's a good idea to stick around and supervise so you can answer any last-minute questions. There are some things movers won't touch, so it will be your responsibility to coordinate their transport. Get a written list of what your company won't deal with in advance, but in general, expect to take care of your own jewelry, delicate valuables, identifying documents, medical papers and medications, hazardous materials, plants, and pets. Before walking out your door for the last time, check the place over, and make sure you know exactly where the "essentials" boxes you packed are. Once they're all accounted for, get on the road to your new home—hopefully feeling excited, instead of frazzled and exhausted.

Devlog #9: A Little Bit of Polish posted in Sword and Quill Devlog Published May 26, 2025 Advertisement Hi, wonderful humans! It's time for another devlog.The Creature Collector Fest is over but the Next Fest is right around the corner! Juggling priorities gets harder and harder between improving the demo, working on the main game, making sure the Twitch integration works, adding Animons, capturing fixing wild bugs, marketing. I'm trying to use Codecks more consistently which definitely helps. Did you know I have an open board? You can check what I'm working on or what I have planned and even up-vote features you like to see most. You can find it here.With another upcoming event, the Access-Ability showcase, I've been prioritizing accessibility features like optimizing the UI for scaling to reduce cases where elements get pushed out of the screen. Next, I'm trying to tackle adding more options for photosensitivity. You can already disable screenshake but there's currently no option for reducing flashing lights. Time for PolishWith a little bit of time opening up, I managed to dedicate some of it to polish which felt incredibly good after weeks of very technical tasks. I improved the win screen that shows when you beat either the demo or the alpha and added animations to it (loving Tweens y'all!). Honestly, the win screen was all over the place before that with elements overlapping each other, text being cut off, and more abominations. Oof...At the end of last week,  I started working on preventing the UI getting pushed around when you or the enemy had too many dice. I added dynamic spacing between the dice that takes the amount and the width of the container into account and added a nice bouncy hover effect to make it easier to see when they are close together. Again, using Tweens, I scale the node up and down accordingly with the "elastic" curve for that nice swing effect at the end.I hope to find time to add more battle effects to tricks which are also in need of a lot of polish. Many attacks just reuse the tackle or jump attack effect but they deserve their own little identity. This might lead to refactoring the entire battle effect system which I implemented a while ago before I learned how to write better code. I'm currently creating a scene for each effect with the battle effect resource which has a drop-down for all sorts of effect types like animation, tween, particles, and so on. I can assign a target control and tell it what to do from self-defined presets, if the effect should target the player or opponent, and so on. I probably want to rework it to be similar to how I create tricks now, where I can add trick features as a sub-resource indefinitely to customize it however I want because – like with the old tricks – I cannot combine effects like tween and particles with the current battle effect system.A few smaller tweaks are the run menu on the map collapsing when not needed and the starter selection screen which now shows the Animon's quirk when hovering/focusing on it.Roadmap(?)Planning the next months is bleh (I hate planning!) but it's gotta be done. I already moved some feature back into the early access period to make sure I get the base game loop solid and working before that. Currently, I'm eyeing end of July for early access which is after the Summer Sale but before the gamescom. Until then, I want all three regions to have roughly the same amount of Animons and the difficulty curve more or less balanced (and of course zero bugs and full optimization which is a reasonable and realistic expectation). There's also a story-cinematic I have planned as an intro to give you a little bit of narrative context but we'll see if I get around drawing all that.A few features I have planned for the ea period are:Soulblaze mechanic: We all want it, we all love it: Evolution, transformation, digitize, super sayjan form, and what not. Soulblaze forms have been on the list since the beginning but I didn't want to add it until I was sure I have settled on the dice mechanics because they will be a big part of triggering it.Nuzlocke-mode: Adding the popular self-imposed difficulty challenge from Pokémon to the game. If you don't know it, it means that if one of your creatures gets defeated, you have to release it and you get to only capture one creature per region. The mode would take care of these restrictions for you, of course.  Co-op mode: I love co-op and there's not nearly enough games with it. Since Soulblaze is turn-based, it's possible to insert a 2-player mode but I'd have to figure out how to handle displaying 2 Animons per side and how to handle turns then. Do the player both plan their turn and they play out together or do they go one after the other? Maybe alternating with the enemy? Will think about this.Unlockable comic pages: Story is always important to me and I literally can't create a game without having a story in mind. While Soulblaze might be my least story-focused game so far, I still want it to contain lore and especially character stories. In that regard, I want players to be able to unlock comic pages while they play which they can read in the collection and don't worry, I'll add visual descriptions to those as well, of course!Keep in mind that those are features I wish to implement and not guaranteed (well, except for Soulblaze forms which... kinda have to be in there, y'know?). I don't know if I will have the time to implement all of these or that I don't run into serious technical issues that I can't solve. Solo dev means that your time is so split between everything that every mid to large hurdle can mean it has to be put on hold indefinitely. But I'll do my best and it also helps that I really, really want those features.Lore Sneak-PeekOver a decade ago the Observer arrived on Earth, a huge crystalline lifeform that appeared to be peaceful. A few years later, for unknown reasons, it shattered and fragments of it grew to became the Animons we know today. Bindshards are made from the outer shell of the Observer and are used to capture Animons because they naturally want to return to their original form, therefore binding easily with the material of the Observer.When exactly the Soulblaze was discovered is unclear but the first Animancers experienced alteration of the Animons' physical shape when they got really excited, scared, or angry. It happens when the soul literally ignites in a surge of energy. Humans, as they do, saw the power and tried to trigger the Soulblaze within themselves which did not go so great...  the results are, well, you have met some of the bosses, haven't you...? Previous Entry Accessibility in Games - Where do I start? Comments You must log in to join the conversation. Don't have a GameDev.net account? Sign up!

President Donald Trump has disrupted global trade and roiled markets in an effort to bring manufacturing jobs back to the U.S. Some of his top tech allies, however, have backed ventures that replace human workers with robots.Elon Musk, a top donor and adviser to Trump, has touted humanoid robots as a future growth area for electric-carmaker Tesla. "You can produce any product,” Musk said of the robots’ potential capacity during a February interview with Dubai's World Governments Summit.Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, who Trump last month called “terrific,” has invested in several advanced robotics firms.Bezos last year poured funds into Figure, a humanoid robot company that says its initial rollout will focus on manufacturers and warehouses, among other business applications. “We believe humanoids will revolutionize a variety of industries,” the company says on its website.Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang and OpenAI CEO Sam Altman – both of whom joined Trump on his recent trip to the Middle East – helmed their respective companies as each invested in Figure. OpenAI ended its partnership with Figure last year.“Trump is talking about bringing back the jobs, and he’s not understanding the tension between that goal and automation, which the tech bros have enthusiasm for,” Harry Holzer, a professor of public policy at Georgetown University and a former chief economist at the U.S. Department of Labor, told ABC News. “There’s a fundamental conflict between those goals.”MORE: Trump wants Apple to make iPhones in the US. Will it ever happen?Musk did not immediately respond to ABC News’ request for comment made through Musk-owned firm SpaceX. Neither Bezos, Huang nor Altman responded to ABC News’ request.Speaking at a conference in April, Huang said the onset of artificial intelligence would fuel "new types of factories," which in turn would create jobs in construction and steelmaking, as well as in trades such as plumbing and electricity.Even more, Huang said, AI is set to trigger a surge in productivity at companies that adopt the new technology, allowing them to add employees as the firms increase output and revenue."New jobs will be created, some jobs will be lost, every job will be changed," Huang said. "Remember, it's not AI that's going to take your job. It's not AI that's going to destroy your company. It's the company and the person who uses AI that's going to take your job. And so that's something to internalize."Even after a rollback of some levies, consumers face the highest overall average effective tariff rate since 1934, the Yale Budget Lab found earlier this month.A key reason for the tariffs, White House officials say: Reshoring factories and rejuvenating employment in the manufacturing industry.Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick said this month in an interview with Fox News that Trump's vision for ushering in a "golden age" for America involved enticing manufacturers to open factories and build in the United States."We're going to have huge jobs in manufacturing. You've heard the president talk about trillions and trillions of factories being built in America," he said in the interview on May 11.In response to ABC News' request for comment, White House Spokesperson Kush Desai said "the importance of President Trump’s push to reinvigorate American industry goes beyond creating good-paying jobs for everyday Americans.""Supply chain shocks of critical pharmaceuticals, medical equipment, and semiconductors during the COVID era prove that America cannot rely on foreign imports. The Trump administration remains committed to reshoring manufacturing that’s critical to our national and economic security with a multifaceted approach of tariffs, tax cuts, rapid deregulation, and domestic energy production," Desai added.The share of U.S. workers in manufacturing has plummeted for decades. Roughly 8% of U.S. workers currently hold positions in manufacturing, which marks a steep decline from about a quarter of all employees as recently as 1970.Researchers attribute such decline to overlapping trends, including the offshoring of manufacturing to low-wage markets overseas and the adoption of labor-saving technology throughout the sector.Long before current advances, automation significantly increased productivity in U.S. factories, meaning the same number of workers could produce many more goods, researchers at Ball State University found in 2015. As a result, they said, manufacturing employment stagnated for decades even as output climbed.Popular Reads“Automation is something we’ve seen for a long time,” Philipp Kircher, a professor of industrial and labor relations at Cornell University, told ABC News.CEO of Meta and Facebook Mark Zuckerberg, Lauren Sanchez, Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, Google CEO Sundar Pichai and Tesla and SpaceX CEO Elon Musk attend the inauguration ceremony of Donald Trump in Washington, D.C., on Jan. 20, 2025.Julia Demaree Nikhinson, Pool via AFP via Getty Images, FILESome of Trump’s tech allies have backed firms that seek to further automate manufacturing, touting a new wave of artificial-intelligence equipped robots as a replacement for some workers and salve for labor shortages.Robotics outfit Vicarious boasts $250 million in investments from a set of backers that includes Bezos, Musk and Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg – all of whom flanked Trump during his inauguration.On a webpage displaying photos of robots for use in warehouse settings, Vicarious tells potential clients that the products can “reduce both your costs and person-hour needs.”In 2022, Vicarious was acquired by Alphabet-backed robotics software firm Intrinsic. Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai also sat alongside tech leaders at Trump’s inauguration.Alphabet did not respond to ABC News' request for comment. Meta declined to comment.Yong Suk Lee, a professor of economics and technology at the University of Notre Dame, described the views on automation among Trump’s tech allies and some of his trade advisers as “opposed.”The tech position, Lee said, would likely win out, even if some firms do open plants in the U.S.“If you want to reshore, are you going to pay the same wages as Vietnam? Probably not,” Lee said. “Companies are faced with higher labor costs. In that case, they’ll probably automate.”Discordant views among some tech leaders and White House officials surfaced in April, when Musk sharply criticized tariff-advocate Peter Navarro, Trump’s senior counselor for trade and manufacturing. Navarro, Musk said, is “truly a moron.”In an interview with CNBC, Navarro responded, saying Musk "isn't a car manufacturer — he's a car assembler.”MORE: Target CEO says tariffs risk 'massive' costs, but price hikes a 'last resort'To be sure, analysts said, automation in manufacturing would likely continue regardless of support from Trump’s tech allies, since producers are locked in a competition to lower costs and increase output. The precise outlook for manufacturing employment is unclear, they added, since additional technology may add jobs for those maintaining and optimizing the machinery.“Whether it’s the companies that currently support the U.S. president or not, somebody would be doing this innovation, maybe slightly slower,” Kircher said.Even at current employment levels, a labor shortage bedevils U.S. manufacturers. Roughly one of every five U.S. factories that failed to produce at full capacity cited a shortage of workers, Jason Miller, a professor of supply chain management at Michigan State University, found in a January study analyzing government data.Agility Robots, an Amazon-backed firm building humanoid robots, identifies the current push for rejuvenated U.S. manufacturing as an opportunity for greater adoption of technology.“Manufacturing companies are seeing a massive reshoring movement spanning various industries,” Agility Robots says on its website. “Adding a humanoid robot to your manufacturing facility is a great way to stay on the leading edge of automation.”In response to ABC News' request for comment, an Amazon spokesperson pointed to previous remarks about robotics made by a company executive."Our goal is to ensure these systems improve safety and productivity. Technology should be used to help us retain and grow our talent through skill development and reimagining how we make our workplace better, both in productivity and safety. If we do this well, we’re certain to always innovate for our customers," Tye Brady, chief technologist at Amazon Robotics, said in a September blog post.Amazon has "created more U.S. jobs in the last decade than any other company," Amazon said this month.