How to claim Verizon's $20 outage credit Papers Please but with zombies, a farming-based shoot-'em-up and other new indie games worth checking out Welcome to our latest roundup of what's going on in the indie game space. Several neat-looking games arrived this week, we got release dates for several others that I'm really looking forward to and a brand-new Steam festival was announced. The Love, Romance, and Heartbreak Debutante Ball is said to be the first Valentine's Day-themed Steam festival. It'll run from February 13 to 20 and feature more than 100 games, including discounts and demos. A showcase will take place on February 13 at 1PM ET on the Sunny Demeanor Games YouTube channel too.

A visitor has called it a miracle no-one was hurt when a section of cliff collapsed on to a beach on Dorset's Jurassic Coast. Suzanne Sears, from Hemel Hempstead in Hertfordshire, was taking a walk near West Bay when she heard a deep cracking noise coming from the cliffs before the rockfall shortly after 16:00 GMT on Tuesday. The Maritime and Coastguard Agency confirmed a rescue team was sent to a report of a cliff fall at West Bay and no one was found to be in distress. A woman was forced to run to safety as the Dorset cliff collapsed on Saturday. The kayakers spotted the creature after hearing it exhaling loudly off Portland Castle beach.

It was a Monday night in Myanmar's Chang U township in the central Sagaing region, where nearly 100 people had gathered to mark Thadingyut, the festival of the full moon. Some held candles at the event, which doubled as both a celebration and a protest against the military, which seized power in 2021, plunging the country into a bloody civil war. But the celebration soon turned into horror as a motorised paraglider - known locally as a paramotor - flew overhead and dropped bombs onto the crowd. The attack lasted just seven minutes, but at least 26 people died as a result and dozens more were injured. Initially, I thought the lower part of my body had been severed, one 30-year-old who was at the gathering told news agency Reuters.

We introduce DRISHTIKON, a first-of-its-kind multimodal and multilingual benchmark centered exclusively on Indian culture, designed to evaluate the cultural understanding of generative AI systems. Unlike existing benchmarks with a generic or global scope, DRISHTIKON offers deep, fine-grained coverage across India's diverse regions, spanning 15 languages, covering all states and union territories, and incorporating over 64,000 aligned text-image pairs. The dataset captures rich cultural themes including festivals, attire, cuisines, art forms, and historical heritage amongst many more. We evaluate a wide range of vision-language models (VLMs), including open-source small and large models, proprietary systems, reasoning-specialized VLMs, and Indic-focused models, across zero-shot and chain-of-thought settings. Our results expose key limitations in current models' ability to reason over culturally grounded, multimodal inputs, particularly for low-resource languages and less-documented traditions. DRISHTIKON fills a vital gap in inclusive AI research, offering a robust testbed to advance culturally aware, multimodally competent language technologies.

Large Language Models (LLMs) have emerged as powerful general-purpose reasoning systems, yet their development remains dominated by English-centric data, architectures, and optimization paradigms. This exclusionary design results in structural under-representation of linguistically diverse regions such as India, where over 20 official languages and 100+ dialects coexist alongside phenomena like code-switching and diglossia. We introduce PARAM-1, a 2.9B parameter decoder-only, text-only language model trained from scratch with an explicit architectural and linguistic focus on Indian diversity. PARAM-1 is trained on a bilingual dataset consisting of only Hindi and English, constructed with a strong focus on fact-rich, high-quality content. It is guided by three core principles: equitable representation of Indic languages through a 25% corpus allocation; tokenization fairness via a SentencePiece tokenizer adapted to Indian morphological structures; and culturally aligned evaluation benchmarks across IndicQA, code-mixed reasoning, and socio-linguistic robustness tasks. By embedding diversity at the pretraining level-rather than deferring it to post-hoc alignment-PARAM-1 offers a design-first blueprint for equitable foundation modeling. Our results demonstrate that it serves as both a competent general-purpose model and a robust baseline for India-centric applications.

Drone shows are becoming ever more popular. Once rarities, they are now appearing at occasions ranging from birthday parties and weddings, to major sporting events. Some theme parks even have resident drone shows that take place multiple nights in a row. Glastonbury music festival had its first drone show in 2024. And record-breaking displays are pushing the technology to its limits – the biggest drone show in history took place in China last October.

Did you know that soundtrack concerts are among the most popular for touring orchestras? A full third of the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra's first-time audience members are coming to the concert hall via their favourite series and movies – and video games. It is a huge cultural growth area, and one that may have gone unrecognised by the general public. "It is impossible to ignore video game music now," says Tommy Pearson, founder and artistic director of the inaugural London Soundtrack festival. "The sheer creativity and artistry in games is incredible, and it's been fascinating to see so many composers blossom in the genre."

Large Language Models (LLMs) have shown proficiency in generating persuasive dialogue, yet concerns about the fluency and sophistication of their outputs persist. This paper presents a multi-LLM communication framework designed to enhance the generation of persuasive data automatically. This framework facilitates the efficient production of high-quality, diverse linguistic content with minimal human oversight. Through extensive evaluations, we demonstrate that the generated data excels in naturalness, linguistic diversity, and the strategic use of persuasion, even in complex scenarios involving social taboos. The framework also proves adept at generalizing across novel contexts. Our results highlight the framework's potential to significantly advance research in both computational and social science domains concerning persuasive communication.

The first piece of AI-generated video I ever made moved me to tears – tears of laughter. Given the chance to fool around with Runway AI's Gen-3 Alpha, I dropped in an image of an eagle carrying off a wolf. Moments later, the picture sprang into life. Except the bird only had one leg – and its plummeting prey sprouted wings from its tail and morphed into a wolf-headed goose. It was weird and hilarious.

Not everyone thinks that way. He was compelled to take action after noticing unsold seats on his US arena tour last year. "Five hundred seats would be completely empty because they were 200 a ticket," he told Music Week. "I'd have 1,000 kids outside the venue who couldn't afford to come in and I was like, 'Something's got to change here.'" But the festival didn't go completely to plan.