YouTuber Charles Cornell recently broke down the unassailable soundtrack of Streets of Rage 2, and his glee mirrors the feelings I’ve had about that song collection for the last cough years.

While you’re watching, check out The Verge’s interview with Yuzo Koshiro, the game’s composer.

Kotaku wrote yesterday that PlayStation owners will lose “previously purchased Discovery content” on December 31st after a change in Sony’s licensing agreements.

There’s almost nothing to mourn in Sony’s list of disappearing shows (apart from 20 seasons of Mythbusters, that is), but it’s an annoying reminder of the woefully ethereal nature of online digital entertainment.

I mean that literally, at least judging from the lighting-challenged clip from Discovery’s fifth and final season, which Paramount Plus shared today at Brazil’s CCXP 2023.

In what looks like almost the dead of night, Captain Burnham (Sonequa Martin-Green) and Book (David Ajala) try not to get killed by giant cloaking aliens with lava faces.

Somehow, even after the Cybertruck launched, we still don’t know how many wipers it has. But we do know a lot more about it, including how to open the door! We also kinda sorta got some closure on the OpenAI drama, but as always the CEOs are still out here saying some wild stuff on stage and on the internet. Thank goodness we have a podcast where we get to loudly ask the digital gods: why?

Warner Bros Discovery dropped the season 2 trailer for House of the Dragon at CCXP in Brazil today. The season’s eight episodes will start streaming on Max in summer 2024.

The Hollywood Reporter writes that House of the Dragon is bringing in some new actors, as well:
The production also announced additional actors joining the show: Clinton Liberty as Addam of Hull, Jamie Kenna as Ser Alfred Broome, Kieran Bew as Hugh, Tom Bennett as Ulf, Tom Taylor as Lord Cregan Stark and Vincent Regan as Ser Rickard Thorne.

During a United Nations climate conference, the US joined the Powering Past Coal Alliance. It includes more than 50 other countries that have committed to switch from “unabated coal power generation” to clean energy. But let’s keep it real. The word “unabated” changes everything. It means that power plants can continue to burn coal, the dirtiest fossil fuel, as long as they install unproven technologies designed to capture carbon dioxide emissions but not other air pollutants. Such technologies are expected to make electricity more expensive, and have already wasted hundreds of millions of federal funding in failed carbon capture projects. The US recently carved out a similar loop hole for carbon capture in its federal pollution standards for power plants.

The New York Times reported that at the United Nations climate summit, Vice President Kamala Harris said a new final rule put in place by the Environmental Protection Agency will heavily curb energy companies’ methane emissions.

The EPA said in a press release that this rule will mean “a nearly 80 percent reduction” of methane, a far more potent greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide.

As the Times notes, 50 oil and gas companies pledged similar reductions, though environmental groups are skeptical. In an open letter, 320 organizations signed an open letter criticizing the “voluntary efforts” as a “distraction from the task at hand.”

The US Fusion Energy International Partnership Strategy “will support the timely development, demonstration, and deployment of commercial fusion energy,” the White House announced during a United Nations climate conference going down in Dubai. For decades, scientists have chased breakthroughs in nuclear fusion, seen as the “Holy Grail” of nearly limitless clean energy. Most experts don’t think commercial nuclear fusion power plants can come online in time to meet global climate goals, even under optimistic scenarios. Nevertheless, the Biden administration and Microsoft are supporting startups trying to make fusion a reality.

Amazon Prime just dropped the season 4 teaser trailer for The Boys at CCXP in Brazil. There’s plenty of the show’s familiar satire of the US’ political and societal landscape in it, and Homelander looks like as much of a nightmare as ever.

The season comes next year.

Amazon Prime video is counting down to something to do with the new Fallout show that’s coming next year. A “live report from Galaxy News” on YouTube has a camera pointed at a Valut-Tec vault that almost certainly doesn’t have any dead people and giant roaches in it.

We’ve got a little over 30 minutes until whatever is going to happen happens.

Here’s a fun guessing game for your Saturday morning. Chris Rosales of The Drive took a Lexus LC 500 for a spin over several days to find the locations used in Gran Turismo 7’s Scapes photo mode and recreate the shots himself.

I embedded one of the images here, but be sure to head over to the article to see the rest.

Ahead of The Big Bang event happening at 2PM ET, Epic has released a quick look at the game’s impending Chapter 5. It includes a new island, a train to ride, some revamped movement mechanics, and the ability to heal and move at the same time. Talk about innovation. Oh, and as the leaks suggested, both Peter Griffin and Solid Snake are there. Players now have just a few hours left to enjoy the nostalgia of Fortnite OG.

Leading the way is the biggest monster of all, as Godzilla Minus One hits theaters. Also in theaters: John Woo’s Christmas-themed revenge movie Silent Night.

Elsewhere, season 2 of Netflix’s survival horror series Sweet Home is now streaming, the latest Indiana Jones is on Disney Plus, Baldur’s Gate 3 just got a huge update, and Fortnite OG is about to end with The Big Bang event.

Did you know the product was previously called “Messages by Google?” I didn’t until I read this 9to5Google article about the recent name change.

Just don’t get Google Messages and Google Chat confused.

In a Friday SEC filing providing an update on its investigation of a recent security incident (that it will not call a breach, based on justifications that remain unclear), 23andMe says a bad actor was able to access 0.1 percent of the company’s accounts through credential stuffing. According to TechCrunch’s estimates, that 0.1 percent figure translates to around 14,000 accounts.

However, those accounts were used to access a “significant number of files containing profile information about other users’ ancestry” that users share when opting in to its DNA Relatives feature. How many is “significant”? 23andMe didn’t say.

Or maybe it’s Berkely, CA, or Cambridge, MA, or some other college town. Enough people were confused about Spotify’s latest Wrapped to spur articles in the New York Times and Washington Post, and Spotify is extending 2023’s audio recap season by explaining how they were assigned:

Sound Towns selected for eligible users are made up of two factors: a user’s most-streamed artists of the year, and the way in which those artists are streamed in other cities. It’s objective and driven by a user’s listening history.

If what that has to do with your music listening habits isn’t immediately clear, it also posted the top ten lists for each city. Noah Kahan, Sza, and Lizzy McAlpine took the top three spots in Burlington.

I can’t believe it didn’t have one already. Google says the feature is available on Android and rolling out now on iOS.

Instagram boss Adam Mosseri says letting users see search results chronologically “would create a substantial safety loophole.” I’ve replied to ask exactly what he means by that. Perhaps it’s so that Meta can always algorithmically sort search results and root out the bad stuff? I do hope Mosseri reconsiders this position, as chronological search results on X (formerly Twitter) can be pretty useful.

On Thursday, Meta expanded Threads’ keyword search feature to more languages.

According to a thread from Bluesky’s safety account, it’s introducing “more advanced automated tooling” to flag content to its moderation team before users see it and letting users once again report their own posts for mislabeled content. And sometime “soon,” users will be able to set controls for who can reply to a post.

You still can’t view Bluesky posts unless you have an account (that feature is “realistically” arriving “mid month,” a Bluesky developer said Friday), so if you can’t see the posts yourself, TechCrunch has a good summary of what’s changing.

Epic v. Google won’t be over for a bit yet, as we’ll come back December 11th for closing arguments and jury instructions before the verdict. But the evidence is all in. Both Epic and Google have rested their cases. See you the week after next!

Copilot, the AI chatbot formerly known as Bing Chat, is out of preview. That means Copilot is now available in 105 languages and 169 countries “on all modern browsers for mobile and web,” according to Caitlin Roulston, the director of communications at Microsoft.

Even though the preview label is going away today, Roulston says Microsoft will continue to “launch new features in preview while we iterate, listen to feedback, and improve the experience for our users.”

From an interview with Windows Central:

We have a service that is financially viable, meaning it makes money, in Game Pass. We’ve put a lot of money into the market, over a billion dollars a year supporting third-party games coming into Game Pass.

Spencer also says that the company “has no plans to bring Game Pass to PlayStation or Nintendo;” earlier this week, Xbox CFO Tim Stuart said that Microsoft is interested in bringing Game Pass to “every screen that can play games” including “what we would have thought of as competitors in the past like PlayStation and Nintendo,” as reported by GameSpot.

Windows Central’s full interview with Spencer is worth reading, if you have a few minutes.

Showrunner Craig Mazin said in a Variety panel that production begins on February 12th. The date’s not a total surprise, as HBO and Max content chief Casey Bloys recently said that production would start in early 2024, but now we know exactly when it starts.

Now we just need to know who is going to play Abby. Hopefully we’ll find out soon, given that the role has apparently already been cast.

The new trailer debuts on December 4th at 12PM ET, according to a post on X. I’m hopeful it’s something big, but given that the image is styled almost exactly like Rockstar’s GTA VI trailer announcement and Fall Guys’ subsequent trailer announcement, maybe Microsoft is just getting in on the memes.

In 2016, an employee sued Google for having too strict of a confidentiality program, which allegedly discouraged workers from reporting illegal activity in violation of California’s labor laws.

Google’s decision to settle means the majority of the $27 million will go to the state of California, while employees will get anywhere from $20 to $70, according to Semafor. A Google spokesperson tells the publication “that resolution of the matter, without any admission of wrongdoing, is in the best interest of everyone.”