thrill
This futuristic surfboard lets you fly above water at 25 mph
Have you ever imagined what it would be like to glide over the water, the wind whipping past your face and actually feel in control the whole time? If that sounds exciting, you'll want to check out the latest electric hydrofoil from Unifoil. The Hydroflyer Sport brings something new to the table with its handlebars, giving you extra control whether you're just starting out or you're always chasing your next thrill on the water. Join the FREE "CyberGuy Report": Get my expert tech tips, critical security alerts and exclusive deals, plus instant access to my free "Ultimate Scam Survival Guide" when you sign up! The Hydroflyer Sport is an electric hydrofoiling board that lets you "fly" above the water.
I had a passionate crush on The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion. Could it still thrill me 19 years later?
For a 10-day period the summer of 2006, in between handing in my resignation at my first job on a games magazine and returning to Scotland to start university, I did almost nothing except eat, sleep and play The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion on my Xbox 360. I hauled my TV from the living room of my small, unpleasantly warm flatshare into my bedroom so I could play uninterrupted; it was all I could think about. My character was a Khajiit thief, a kind of manky lion in black-leather armour with excellent pickpocketing skills. One afternoon, I decided to see whether I could steal every single object in the smallish town of Bravil, and got caught by the guards a couple of hours in. I did a runner, dropping a trail of random plates, cheese wheels and doublets in my wake, and the guards pursued me all the way to the other side of the map, where they finally got entangled with a bear who helpfully killed them for me.
How does AI see your country?. Let's take a Midjourney around the…
If you're not interested in where these images came from, simply scroll past the all the text to view them. Start reading here or watch me make some AI art with OpenAI's DALL·E 2 in the video below. Similar to DALL·E 2, Midjourney is an AI art generator that takes text prompts as input and generates four images per prompt as output. In order to use it, you need a Discord account connected to the Midjourney bot. While this was annoying and took me 10 minutes to set up, I think it's worth the effort. To try it out, you'll type the command /imagine and then enter your prompts directly into a Midjourney newbies channel for free. The downside of the free version is that you get only 25 prompts and you'll keep your eyes glued to the screen while your creations flash by and are lost in a chaotic jumble of results from everyone else who's on the channel with you. Any art you make is also posted publicly on their website under your username and you may use your images under a Creative Commons license as long as you cite Midjourney as the source. There's a lot of joy you can get out of 25 free prompts, but do take a bit of time to see what comes out of other people's prompts so you get the hang of some "prompt engineering" (how to phrase your prompt to get the result you want) before you start, else you might waste your 25 opportunities.
The Legend of Zelda games – ranked!
The 3DS's multiplayer Zelda game wasn't so much bad (unless you tried to play it by yourself, laboriously switching between all three characters) as eminently forgettable. Its weird, camp send-up of Hyrule and three-player puzzles have slipped almost entirely from my mind in the years since I played it, and what I do remember mostly involved shouting impotently at the screen as some online playmate entirely failed to see the solution to a puzzle that was staring them in the face. I maintain that hardly anyone has actually finished this needlessly opaque side-scrolling follow-up to 1986's The Legend of Zelda, because: a) it's incredibly hard to figure out what the game wants you to do; and b) the final dungeon has TWO bosses, and if you can't finish it then you're turfed out to attempt the whole thing again. Long considered the worst game in the Zelda series, it hasn't improved with age. The touch controls were cool, but what everyone remembers about Phantom Hourglass is being sent back to the same dungeon again and again every time you threatened to make some small amount of progress.
The Best Video Games of 2020
In the Before Times, on transatlantic flights, I would often assume the role of a deadly virus that threatened the human race. The key to success in the game Plague Inc., from 2012, is to mutate in ways that both hasten the virus's spread and impede a vaccine's development. It was perversely enjoyable to pass an hour, forehead smushed against a window, swiping toward extinction. Much like transatlantic travel itself, role-playing a pandemic can appear, at the moment, to be rather unseemly. The medium is ideally suited to coronavirus lockdown, when the boundaries of the physical world contract and the imagination strains for freedom.
'POPULATION: ONE' removes VR barriers, replacing them with thrills
While the full "POP: ONE" package produces an sincerely enjoyable time (even the after-death screen is fun, enabling players to float around via an omnispective camera in 3D to watch the final fights unfold) there is room for improvement. Even after a tutorial and a few test runs in the game, it takes some time to find your footing. To that end, the all-too-familiar storm that shrinks the battlefield moves a tad too quick for my liking, which also limits the time I can get my bearings or just enjoy looking around the map and not running/fighting for my life. Related to this, I wish there was more control over walking speed. There is only one movement speed on the ground, with the game using its climbing/jumping/flying mechanics as a replacement for "sprinting."
Accessibility option in survival game 'Grounded' turns my arachnophobia into a thrill
I was understandably apprehensive when I first heard about "Grounded," a game from Obsidian. "Grounded" is stressful in ways similar to most survival games. You scavenge for resources, build shelters, and manage your hunger, health, thirst and limited stamina. Your foes are all gargantuan insects, and spiders are a frequent antagonist -- among the toughest to overcome.
Your cat that sleeps all day is still smarter than the most sophisticated AI
If you share your home with a dog or a cat, look at it carefully and you will get a good overview of everything we don't know how to do in artificial intelligence. "But my cat does nothing all day except sleep, eat and wash herself," you may think. And yet your cat knows how to walk, run, jump and land on her feet, hear, see, watch, learn, play, hide, be happy, be sad, be afraid, dream, hunt, eat, fight, flee, reproduce, educate her kittens – and the list is still very long. Each of these actions requires processes that are not directly intelligence in the most common sense but are related to cognition and animal intelligence. All animals have their own cognition, from the spider that weaves its web to the guide dogs that help people find their way.
AI Is Curbing the Thrill Behind Netflix & Chill
It has come to Netflix's attention (perhaps a long time back) that its subscribers have been sharing their Netflix credentials with their loved ones. As harmless as this may seem on paper, Netflix reports the magnitude of revenue deficits it is experiencing because of this common practice. Netflix is the United States' most popular paid video streaming channel. Globally, 37% of the population that uses the internet is connected to Netflix in one way or the other. Netflix is a behemoth and is known to heavily invest in the production of its original series.