The latest season of Netflix's The Witcher has landed - with one big difference. Former lead actor Henry Cavill has been replaced as main character Geralt of Rivia by Liam Hemsworth. The Australian has stepped in for the final two seasons of the fantasy show, based on a popular series of novels and video games. Previously, British actor Cavill had portrayed the title character, a monster hunter with supernatural abilities known as the White Wolf. When he announced he was passing the torch to Hemsworth in October 2022, describing him as a fantastic actor, not all fans agreed.

Welcome to Pushing Buttons, the Guardian's gaming newsletter. If you'd like to receive it in your inbox every week, just pop your email in below – and check your inbox (and spam) for the confirmation email. Welcome back to Pushing Buttons! In the spirit of carrying my perennial real-world lateness over into this newsletter, let's talk about love, even though it is now 15 February and everyone will instantly forget about romance again until this time next year. As 500 different articles will already have reminded you this week, so much of the art that we humans make is about wanting someone you can't have, having someone you don't want, missing someone you once had, or sometimes even how much we like person/people we're actually with.

Video game characters do not have great sex lives. The sex in Cyberpunk 2077, one of the biggest releases of the decade, was lambasted by PC Gamer as "horrifying" and "truly awful" for its weak writing and general clunkiness; character models designed to run and shoot just look strange when made to contort in moments of intimacy. But while Cyberpunk was criticized for its bad sex--and for flubbing LGBTQ representation--the erotic indie title Hardcoded was gathering praise for its explicit, queer-friendly sexuality set against a dystopian cyberpunk backdrop. Sex has been part of gaming from the beginning--Atari 2600 owners could buy Custer's Revenge, a heavily criticized rape fantasy that sold 80,000 copies--but for most of the medium's history, any sexuality was aimed at straight white men with all the subtlety of a horny sledgehammer. It was seen as a mark of maturity for the God of War franchise when its 2018 installment abandoned the subject entirely rather than return to the cringeworthy "Here are some tits, you rube" minigames of previous entries.

As we progress from "the new normal" to "the next normal," businesses are working hard to revise their marketing strategy and develop an omnichannel presence to improve sales in the brave new world of e-commerce. Read on to learn everything you ever wanted to know (and then some) about omnichannel, including what it is, how to build yours with voice commerce, and how to use it to maximize reach and fulfill consumer needs. Recently, Forrester hosted the Engage Digital conference, a virtual adaptation of its annual user event. According to Brendan Witcher, Principal Analyst for Digital Business Strategy, "the next normal" will "involve advances in omnichannel." During his presentation, Witcher noted that it will be necessary for retailers to switch gears to be prepared for the next phase of e-commerce.

Brendan Witcher, vice president at research firm Forrester, sees the project as a positive step to protect brands and tackle the issue of counterfeiting. "This is in no way going to create more burden on the side of brands. This essentially helps them quite a bit," he said. "While there was some work that Amazon was doing up to this point, brands had to keep a close eye on what was going on with the website." Amazon has been testing the new project with several brands, including Vera Bradley, Thunderworks and ChomChom Roller, and says its systems on average detect 100 times more suspected fakes than its previous process of relying on what brands report to the company. In its annual report released earlier this month, Amazon included a warning about counterfeit products.

The day before a fully automated grocery store opened its doors in 1939, the inventor Clarence Saunders took out a full page advertisement in the Memphis Press-Scimitar warning "old duds" with "cobwebby brains" to keep away. The Keedoozle, with its glass cases of merchandise and high-tech system of circuitry and conveyer belts, was cutting edge for the era and only those "of spirit, of understanding" should dare enter. Inside the gleaming Tennessee store, shoppers inserted a key into a slot below their chosen items, producing a ticker tape list that, when fed into a machine, sent the goods traveling down a conveyer belt and into the hands of the customer. "People could just get what they want – boom, it comes out – and move on," recalled Jim Riot, 75, who visited the store as a child. "It felt like it was The Jetsons." Despite Saunders' best efforts, the Keedoozle's circuits frequently failed and the store closed for good by 1949.

The online giant has revealed its advanced concept for a store utilizing "Just Walk Out" technology. SAN FRANCISCO -- The Amazon Go grocery store, now in the testing stage in Seattle, sounds like a dream come true for holiday shoppers waiting in long lines. The underlying technology seems to be routed in terra firma, however, a mix of cameras, microphones and the massive servers that Amazon uses to run its cloud computing service and power digital assistant Alexa. The concept promises to let shoppers walk into a store, pick things up, and walk out, thereby skipping the checkout line while everything acquired gets automatically charged to a credit card. Amazon's explanation on how it works in its video is heavy on buzzwords: computer vision, deep learning algorithms and sensor fusion.

The online giant has revealed its advanced concept for a store utilizing "Just Walk Out" technology. SAN FRANCISCO -- The Amazon Go grocery store, now in the testing stage in Seattle, has captured the public's attention. At a time of year when many people are standing in long lines to do their holiday shopping, the idea of being able to walk into a store, pick things up, walk out and have everything automatically charged to a credit card sounds like a dream come true. The video the Seattle company released online Monday said nothing about the underlying technology beyond some buzz-words: computer vision, deep learning algorithms and sensor fusion. But a patent filed by the company in 2014 and published in 2015 may shed some light on the process, and it looks like it's all about cameras and microphones.