On the surface, Gods Unchained is a clone of Hearthstone, Blizzard’s game that made the genre immensely popular after it launched in 2014. You collect cards, which give you various traits and abilities, build a deck, and then try to defeat opponents in turn-by-turn play.
But the game is different in one key aspect — its cards live as non-fungible tokens on the Ethereum blockchain. Non-fungible tokens or NFTs are cryptographic tokens which are unique, contrary to fungible tokens (think ethers or bitcoins) which are all exactly alike and interchangeable (for technical details, go here).
This means that once you purchase a Gods Unchained card (which you can easily do with ether, Ethereum’s currency), it’s literally yours — no one can alter it (unless the code of the smart contract that defines it allows it). This trait should resonate with gamers who are annoyed by Blizzard’s constant changing of Hearthstone‘s rules, with certain cards being nerfed (i.e. made less powerful) and others boosted in order to balance gameplay.
Fuel Games, the Sydney-based company behind the game, received a $2.4 million seed round of funding in May, with Coinbase Ventures participating. It also created quite a bit of buzz among would-be-players, who spend tens of thousands of dollars on rare cards well before the game’s planned launch. In total, the company says it sold over 1.5 million cards.
To date, we’ve sold over 1.5 million Gods Unchained cards to thousands of gamers all around the world. We are so excited to finally show them what we’ve been working on.
Games based on non-fungible Ethereum tokens aren’t new; one often cited example is Cryptokitties, a digital kitty trading card game whose popularity brought Ethereum’s network to a screeching halt earlier this year. But Cryptokitties (which recently received a big round of funding of its own) is quite a simple affair, while Gods Unchained appears to be fully-fleshed out with beautiful graphics and tons of features.
The game is also different in the way it interacts with Ethereum’s blockchain. In Cryptokitties, everything happened on the blockchain; with Gods Unchained, the gameplay takes place on the company’s servers. This means that the game should probably perform well and not clog Ethereum’s network once it goes live — but it also means it’s not very decentralized, which is an important trait of many Ethereum-based projects.
CoinDesk reports that the game will enter a closed beta period in the “next couple of weeks,” during which the players who have pre-ordered cards will be able to try it out. A three-month open beta period is scheduled after that, followed by a full launch.
Disclosure: The author of this text owns, or has recently owned, a number of cryptocurrencies, including BTC and ETH. The author is also quite sure he had once purchased some Gods Unchained cards, but for the life of him, he can’t find them now.
Time to crack open the sparkling wine, pull on some comfy sweats, and fear for your safety in a male-dominated world. It’s ladies night—and we need to talk about Netflix’s CAM.
Set in the cyber space of virtual sex work, CAM chronicles the nightmarish ordeal of Alice, an internet model or “cam girl,” who one day logs on to discover she has been replaced by a mysterious doppelgänger. As her many fans obsess over the menacing substitute, Alice fights to regain control of her image, freedom, and physical safety.
The brainchild of Blumhouse Productions and Netflix (with numerous other studios also involved), this psychological thriller is the product of 2018’s horror resurgence colliding head-on with fourth-wave feminism.
Sure, it isn’t the genre’s first take on women’s lib, but it is the latest and greatest.
Check out the trailer:
More than a disturbingly sexy Unfriended, CAM uses its adult setting to indirectly address feminist themes and motifs in a way that is not only nuanced, but also highly effective.
Let’s break just a few of them down.
First, as revealed by the nauseating throat slitting gag in the trailer, CAM spotlights the frightening market demand for erotic content that glorifies violence towards women. Even before the horror commences, Alice must navigate and command control over a space that actively seeks to fetishize her fear of physical harm. It is an uncomfortable reality too many women regularly disregard or internalize and is more than a little refreshing to see addressed on screen.
Brewer’s portrait of complicated female sexuality is one in which many women will see themselves.
From that complicated tightrope walk, Madeline Brewer’s portrayal of Alice takes flight. Far from her role as Janine in The Handmaid’s Tale, but unfortunately with just as much suffering, Brewer’s portrait of complicated female sexuality is one in which many women will see themselves.
Alice is at once sex-positive and realistic about her industry’s demands, manipulating her anonymous audience almost as much as they seek to manipulate her. She is an unapologetic, ambitious flirt taking control of a space in which she could be easily victimized.
While Brewer’s performance is captivating, it is far from pandering or dehumanizing and those who seek to misread it will struggle to not “read the room.” Alice is smart, capable, and the clear hero of her own story.
But, as the horror genre is wont to do, that real woman quickly loses agency. The film’s big hook, coming in the form of Alice’s double, is a metaphor for the lack of control many women feel over their own bodies on and offline. What begins as a consensual encounter quickly devolves into a visceral, psychological assault. Sprinkle in a big helping of men not believing a woman’s claims in the second act and you’ve got one of 2018’s better feminist allegories.
Who created such a masterful, layered work of horror about a cam girl? A woman who lived it.
No, writer Isa Mazzei wasn’t terrorized by her spitting image, but she did face many of these real-world nightmares during her time as a webcam performer.
“I really wanted an audience to feel what it was like to be in it,” Mazzei says an in-depth interview with Vice. “I felt like often, for people that I talk to about camming, no matter how much I would explain it or show it to them, they still didn’t fully get it. And so I think the genre is an incredible way to bring an audience inside of a character, or inside of an experience.”
Mazzei’s theory about horror’s engrossing nature is spot-on. CAM will suck you in, chew you up, and spit you out. But, be warned: once you hit play, you’ll need plenty of time post-credits to do your own digesting.
According to NFL.com’s Michael Silver, there is “a growing sense that McCarthy may be replaced—barring a dramatic turnaround in the team’s fortunes.”
The Packers, who dropped to 4-5-1 with Thursday’s loss, have lost three of their last four games and are 0-5 on the road.
Questions were asked Thursday when McCarthy decided to punt on 4th-and-2 from the Green Bay’s 33-yard line with 4:20 remaining in regulation. The Seahawks proceeded to run out the clock to deal another sizable hit to the Packers’ playoff hopes.
“We’ve lost too many games like this—that’s the most frustrating thing,” quarterback Aaron Rodgers said, per Silver. “We’ve had a chance in almost all our road games—especially against the Rams and the Patriots, and again tonight. We’re right there. But we just can’t get it done.”
McCarthy, who is in his 13th season as head coach, justified the decision by saying he “played the numbers,” per Pro Football Talk’sMichael David Smith.
The 55-year-old now owns a 125-75-2 (.624) record in Green Bay. If the Packers miss the playoffs, it would mark the first time they have done so in consecutive seasons during his time at the helm.
The Packers will look to avoid another crushing loss in Week 12 when they clash with the Minnesota Vikings at U.S. Bank Stadium.
We kinda miss those crazy giveaways Oprah used to do on her show. There was something equally heartwarming and hilarious about the sheer insanity that broke out when she gave her entire audience new cars.
If anyone has tried to fill that gap, it’s been Ellen DeGeneres. The comedian and talk show host has tried to give back to her fans and audiences when she can, and she’s looking to do the same ahead of Black Friday. (More like Ellen DeGenerous, right?!)
If you’re a new Walmart online shopper, you can use the code Ellen10 to save $10 when you spend $35 or more on your first online order.
That means an extra $10 off the Keurig K-Compact Single-Serve coffee maker that’s already on sale for $49.96. Or $10 off the Hot Wheels Ultimate Garage Tower Shark Loop Racetrack for your kid this holiday — already on sale for $94. If you’ve been looking to get your hands on one of the classic gaming consoles that everyone’s been raving about, how about getting one on sale? You can knock $10 off the NES Classic, dropping it down to $49.99, or save on the SNES Classic and drop the price down to $69.96.
The offer is going to be running until Dec. 31, so you’ll have plenty of time for shopping. Just know that the code is limited to the first 50,000 shoppers and it’s not applicable on multipacks, photo, pharmacy, tires, gift cards, personalized items, or anything by Marketplace sellers. And it’s limited to one per customer, so sorry, but no stacking to get $20, $30, or $50 off.
This post is part of our High-tech High series, which explores weed innovations, and our cultural relationship with cannabis, as legalization in several U.S. states, Canada, and Uruguay moves the market further out of the shadows.
Chicken and waffles. Moscow Mule. Gingerbread cookies. Plum.
Joe Edwards says he’s made cannabis flower taste like all of the above and then some, using a high-tech curing unit produced by Colorado startup Yofumo.
The plum was made specially for his grandma who uses cannabis for her arthritis pain but hates the taste.
“My grandmother has no interest in Skunk No. 1,” Edwards, vice president of client applications and deployment at Yofumo, jokes, referring to a popular cannabis strain that smells, well, skunky.
Yofumo is part of a growing contingent of companies using science and tech to experiment with cannabis terpenes. Terpenes are aromatic organic compounds found naturally in marijuana, and they impact weed’s flavor and smell. The type and amount can also have varying biological effects when paired with THC and CBD, according to marijuana researchers.
“My grandmother has no interest in Skunk No. 1.”
As terpene experimentation advances, more producers are adding the amount and type of terpenes in their offerings to product descriptions. The compound, lesser-known among the general public, is something consumers are becoming more aware of as they seek out a specific kind of high — or flavor.
“We’re seeing a lot of our patients, or our clients, are demanding to be able to see terpene expression data for the flower that they purchase,” says Philippe Henry, director of R&D genetics and analytics at Flowr, which operates cultivation facilities in Canada.
“It’s part of educating people that they can make better choices,” adds Henry, who has a Ph.D. in population geneticsand hasanalyzed 5,000 cannabis plants to study terpenes and genetic markers.
Cannabis gets a trim at a Flowr facility.
Image: Flowr
Sometimes marketing gets in the way of information in the cannabis field. Blue Dream is a popular strain, but some producers may call their plant Blue Dream even if it isn’t the same as the original product, Henry says. Knowing more about the flower’s chemical expression, and how you react to that mix, helps you as a consumer.
While there are hundreds of terpenes, a few show up more frequently. Generallylinalool, also found in lavender, calms you, while limonene, with its citrusy aroma, can give you energy. Keep in mind, compounds may impact people differently. For example, myrcene generally relaxes, but it could do so to a different degree depending on the individual. When it comes to terpenes, and cannabis in general, it’s often about finding what works for you.
“I like to refer to it as the Jurassic Park principle.”
“It’s synergism,” says Mark Lewis, founder and president of NaPro Research in California. He compares a single terpene or a singlecannabinoid, be that THC or CDB, to a note — but when everything works together, it’s a chord.
What Lewis compares to a musical chord, others have called the “entourage effect.” Researchers have analyzed how terpenes interact with other compounds, but there’s room for further investigation. Weed is complicated, and there’s more to discover with expanding legalization.
While terpene levels in cannabis flower tend to be below 2 percent and cannabinoids hover around 20 percent, NaPro tweaks that through breeding plants with desired attributes together over several years. They’ve amped the terpene level up to 7 percent and THC down to 9 percent in one plant for a client entering a competition that awards top quality cannabis. Changing a plant’s composition can take years of breeding. Think about how watermelon today looks and tastes different than it did thousands of years ago, due to human intervention.
Once you get below 1.5 percent, the THC takes over, Lewis, who has a Ph.D. in biochemistry, says. But if a single terpene is higher than 2 percent, the flavor and impact “will hit you like a ton of bricks.” One NaPro offering that has 4.5 percent myrcene will cause one’s eyes to feel heavy for 15 minutes or so and then provide balanced, euphoric pain relief, Lewis claims.
NaPro Research has also built a search tool for clients to review the chemical expression of marijuana products to discern quality and value.
A breakdown of Cookie Crizzle from NaPro’s search tool, called PhytoFacts.
Image: NaPro Research
Flowr and NaPro mess around with a plant’s terpene profile through breeding, but Yofumo uses a different technique.
Its curing unit is currently only available commercially (the company is working on a consumer model). It releases terpenes from other plants stored in rods into a mahogany chamber, and through atmospheric transfer, the terpenes bind to the plant at a molecular level.
There’s a trend in the marijuana space of upping THC content to get super high, but Edwards says cultivators should look beyond THC.
“Instead of just maximizing THC potential, how can we also look at post-harvest curation practices and maximize terpene potential as well?” he questions.
OK, but how did he do that for his flower with hints of chicken and waffles?
Yofumo plans to release smaller units for consumers next year. As of know they focus on commercial clients.
Image: Yofumo
He starts with scrutinizing what makes up the flavor of chicken and waffles — the herbs you use, the buttery crunch of the bready exterior, the syrupy sweetness — and then replicates that as best as he can through chemical means.
“Once you understand the creation and how this works, it really does open itself up to you,” Edwards says. “I like to refer to it as the Jurassic Park principle.”
Edwards has had his share of duds in the past, but those failures have helped fine-tune the curing process.
“I’ve personally consumed an amount of cannabis that is extraordinarily unpleasant,” Edwards says. “I’ve had results that are similar to orange dish detergent just as often as I’ve had them be similar to orange fruit.”
Yofumo customers work with flower as well as oil, but it’s the expanding vape and oil market that has added an extra boost to terpene’s rise. (The strength of terpene’s impact in flower versus oil can differ because of a variety of factors, including the types of terpenes used, their source — cannabis or another botanical, synthetic or natural — and the ratio of cannabinoids to terpenes.)
Yofumo sells terpene formulas to clients to use in their curing units.
Image: Yofumo
LucidMood adds terpenes from other botanicals to enhance cannabis oil for its vapes.
The Colorado company removes the jargon from the equation, naming vape pens based on the desired effect, including Energy, Chill, and Relief. Each contains roughly 40 percent THC, 40 percent CBD, and 20 percent terpenes. LucidMood is focused on new users, not the seasoned dabber. “It’s for the person who doesn’t have a Ph.D. in cannabis,” Watkins quips.
“The more that we learn about these, the more we can control.”
Calm includes geraniol, a terpene that smells like roses. LucidMood names its pens based on focus group studies in which the first group gets pens with terpenes and a second does not. By having a control group, LucidMood can show that terpenes were behind certain biological effects felt by the first group.
“The more that we learn about these, the more we can control,” Watkins says.
There is a divide among terpene researchers, though. Purists believe terpenes should come from the cannabis plant, not an additive. There are also those who don’t want their marijuana’s flavor messed with at all.
“Consumers should be asking for a product that’s 100-percent cannabis,” Flowr’s Henry says. “The ones that are really 100-percent cannabis are going to catch a premium sliver of the market.”
LucidMood’s “lifestyle” collection of pens include Chill and Energy.
Image: LucidMood
As marijuana legalization spreads in the U.S., each state has its own regulations, from who can buy to requiring mold checks. At least two U.S. states, Nevada and New Mexico, mandate terpene testing.
Now, what about weed you eat? If terpenes bring flavor and aroma, are they being used in edibles? Not so much. Edibles tend to use distillates, a form of THC that is supposed to be void of taste, or cannabutter, which is butter infused with cannabis that provides a strong, euphoric high.
Periodic Edibles uses terpenes in their caramels, but for the effect, not the taste.
“We’re actually limited on how high we can go with the dosage because of the flavor that they add,” says the Oregon company’s founder, Wayne Schwind. If Schwind adds limonene to give a burst of energy, he doesn’t want the lemon flavor to overwhelm the caramel.
Periodic Edibles current packaging that lists terpenes.
Image: Periodic Edibles
Periodic Edibles caramels will get a packaging makeover in 2019, but the terpene content will still be listed.
Image: Periodic Edibles
Periodic Edibles started listing terpene profiles on their packaging a few months ago. Schwind says budtenders, the people who sell weed at dispensaries, love it, but buyers are sometimes confused. Many don’t know what terpenes are, but that may change over time.
Multiple brewing companies have also been adding cannabis-derived terpenes to their beer. Devour Brewing Co. in Florida uses cannabis terpenes to add lemon, pine, and earthy flavors to its Florida Thunder IPA, and Lagunitas, a California brand owned by Heineken, adds them to its SuperCritical Ale. Prank, a Los Angeles bar, mixes terpenes in cocktails.
The terpene innovators may disagree on what’s best, but they concur that discerning customers will be key. Those seeking high-quality products, the craft beer drinkers of weed, if you will, are the target market for terpene experimentation.
“It’s not a big thing now, but I think that return to quality is going to explode,” says Yofumo founder Alfonso Campalans. “It’s really the only way the small and middle producer is going to compete.”
British Prime Minister Theresa May has defended the draft Brexit deal reached with the European Union that triggered the resignations of senior ministers and mutiny within her Conservative Party.
May appeared on British radio station LBC on Friday, amid mounting speculation that Conservative MPs could trigger a vote of no confidence in her leadership in the coming days.
“I truly believe this is the best deal for Britain,” May said of the proposed withdrawal agreement, adding that she was “very sorry” that ministers had quit her government.
When asked to resign by a caller during the radio phone-in, May said that her divorce deal delivered on the key issues for many people who voted to leave the EU.
“You’re absolutely right that for a lot of people who voted “Leave”, what they wanted to do was make sure that decisions on things like who can come into this country would be taken by us here in the UK, and not by Brussels, and that’s exactly what the deal I’ve negotiated delivers,” she said.
“We are leaving the European Union on the 29 March, 2019,” she added.
There was intense speculation on Friday morning in London that prominent Brexit hardliner Michael Gove was close to resigning, but he later announced his support for the prime minister.
“I think it’s absolutely vital that we focus on getting the right deal in the future, and making sure that in the areas that matter so much to the British people, we can get a good outcome,” he told reporters.
The UK voted to leave the EU in a 2016 referendum, when 52 percent of voters opted for Brexit while 48 percent voted to remain in the EU.
But two years after the vote, the terms of the separation remain undecided.
The 585-page draft aims to ensure a smooth divorce from the EU after more than four decades of membership and outlines a transition period for both sides to adjust to the break.
It addresses issues including citizens’ rights after Brexit, the controversial “backstop” to avoid a hard border in Ireland and the divorce payment that Britain will pay when it leaves the bloc.
Opponents of the deal have cited concerns that it leaves too much power in Brussels and places Northern Ireland in a separate regulatory regime to the rest of the UK.
Brexit Minister Dominic Raab and the Minister for Work and Pensions Esther McVey both resigned from May’s cabinet on Thursday, saying they could not support the agreement.
Two junior ministers also quit and pro-Brexit Conservative MPs warned that May’s deal would not win the approval of parliament.
A spokesperson for the prime minister said that a replacement Brexit minister is expected to be appointed.
Meanwhile, Jacob Rees-Mogg, who leads a group of anti-EU Conservatives, submitted a letter of no-confidence in the prime minister on Thursday saying that “it would be in the interest of the party and the country if she were to stand aside”.
At least 48 such letters from the ruling party MPs are required to trigger a vote of no-confidence in the party leader, and a majority of the party’s 315 legislators would have to vote against May in order for her to be removed.
MPs from the Democratic Unionist Party (DUP), a Northern Irish party that props up May’s minority government, have also expressed strong reservations over the proposed deal.
When Steve Carell’s character in The 40-Year-Old Virgin is getting ready to start dating, he gets his chest waxed. And during that wax, he inexplicably screams out “Kelly Clarkson!”
Carell told Jimmy Fallon on The Tonight Show that he had never met Kelly Clarkson until recently, and that he was very nervous about her feelings towards that slightly awkward shout out in the 2005 hit comedy.
“I thought she’d be mad about me about that,” Carell said. “Like, ‘is he making fun of me?’”
I don’t know about you, but my number one smartwatch-related complaint is battery life — no matter how I use it, my Wear OS watch barely makes it through the day.
Now, Google has an update to its Wear OS wearables platform that addresses this issue.
Wear OS 2.2 or H, as it’s called, comes with a feature that automatically puts the watch in Battery Saver Mode after your battery drops below 10%. In Battery Saver Mode, all the smart features are disabled, but the watch still tells the time.
Furthermore, the watch will now go into “deep sleep” mode after 30 minutes of inactivity. That means you’ll be able to take the watch off for longer periods without having to worry about the battery draining to zero in a matter of hours.
These features aren’t exactly groundbreaking; for example, my Huawei Watch 2 also goes into battery saving mode when the battery is low, and my Suunto Ambit 3 Sport goes to sleep shortly after I remove it from my hand. But it’s nice to see Google implementing them at the OS level, which should theoretically make them available to all owners of smartwatches running the latest Wear OS.
Image: Google
Other features of note include Smart App Resume for all apps, meaning your apps will remember what you were doing when you leave them and will let you get back to it when you fire them up again. And you’ll also be able to turn off the watch in two steps, by holding the power button until you get the power off screen, and then selecting “power off” or “restart.”
Unfortunately, it’s not exactly clear which devices will get the update. Google says “you should soon see a system update on your device,” clarifying it should happen “in the next few months.” But the fine print says that “your device may not immediately be eligible for this update and will be determined by your watch manufacturer.”
Michelle Obama may describe her new life as “boring”, but her interview with Jimmy Kimmel is anything but.
In the nine-minute clip above, the former First Lady talks about her new book Becoming, her life with Barack, and the celebrity she currently texts with the most (spoiler alert: it’s Oprah).
She also drop a few details about what life was like in the White House, including her dogs’ work schedules and — perhaps most surprisingly — the fact that they still had to pay for all the food they ordered in.
Tariq Ramadan, a prominent Islamic scholar, has been released on bail after being held in detention for nearly 10 months over charges of sexual assault, his lawyer said.
A Paris Court of Appeal granted the 56-year-old Swiss academic bail on Thursday even as the investigation into the case continues.
“Where would I flee to,” he asked during his hearing, his first public appearance since the arrest in February.
His bail was set at 300,000 euros ($340,000) and it requires him to hand over his passport and report to police once a week.
One accuser is a disabled woman identified in media reports as “Christelle” and the other is a feminist activist, Henda Ayari.
That changed last month when Ramadan admitted that encounters did take place but that the acts in question were consensual.
‘I am not a rapist’
In the court on Thursday, Ramadan said he did not intend to become a fugitive from the law, adding his multiple sclerosis meant he couldn’t walk properly.
“I will remain in France and defend my honour and my innocence,” he told the judges in what was his fourth bid to secure freedom.
“I would like you to make your decision from your conscience, not because my name is Tariq Ramadan and I’m demonised in this country.”
His lawyer Emmanuel Marsigny told Reuters news agency, “Ramadan’s release… demonstrated that the rape accusations against him were lies.”
Ramadan also faces criminal complaints of rape by women in the United States and Switzerland.
Once hailed as a religious reformer, Ramadan’s career has been brought to a halt since his arrest earlier this year.
He portrayed his accusers as liars bending media attention in the case to their benefit, asking: “Who has instrumentalised the ‘Me Too’ movement?”
“I have never raped, I am not a rapist. It’s true that I made a mistake,” he said.
But Ayari’s lawyer Francis Szpiner said the two “women were regularly threatened”.
Ramadan, whose grandfather founded Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood, was a professor at Oxford University until he was forced to take leave when the rape allegations surfaced at the height of the #MeToo movement late last year.
His supporters have strenuously rejected the allegations, characterising them as part of a concerted effort to defame the academic.
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