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Members of the major SAG-AFTRA acting union have overwhelmingly voted in favour of authorising a potential video game strike.

Ballots were cast by 34,687 members, with 98.32 percent in favour of strike authorisation on the Interactive Media Agreement that covers union members' work on video games.

While this does not guarantee the union will call a strike, the next bargaining session is this week, and this ratchets up the pressure. The leverage of this authorisation could compel movement on either side.

Final Fantasy 7 Rebirth will task players with catching chocobo in real-time out in the wild.

Of course, catching chocobo is nothing new for the series, but a new social post on X (formerly Twitter) from the game's official account shows how it'll work in Rebirth for the first time, with a video of Cloud catching one of the iconic yellow birds.

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In the original game players encountered chocobo during battles, where they needed to distract them while fighting enemies. With the open world of Rebirth, we now know it'll work a little differently.

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While we wait (and wait) for Ubisoft to show more of Beyond Good & Evil 2, early footage from the project has surfaced from back in 2008.

Yes, 2008. We've really been waiting a while.

This is the version of Beyond Good & Evil we've seen in other clips released or leaked over the years, and which Ubisoft released an early trailer for (showing main character Jade and Uncle Pey'j in a car out in the desert).

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Capcom's president and chief operating officer has said he thinks game prices should go up.

Haruhiro Tsujimoto made the comments at this year's Tokyo Game Show, Nikkei reported. TGS is sponsored by the Computer Entertainment Supplier's Association, a Japanese organisation which aims to support the Japanese industry, which Tsujimoto is currently the chairman of.

"Personally, I feel that game prices are too low," Tsujimoto said, citing increasing development costs and a need to increase wages.

El Paso, Elsewhere is beautifully simple. It's a third-person action game in which you fire guns and dive through windows, triggering bullet-time as you whittle down ranks of converging foes. Its levels are labyrinthine, its hunger for carnage is nearly endless. It's a thrilling challenge at the standard difficulty and thoroughly cathartic if you drop down the damage you receive, set the ammo to infinite, and just thrash away in the abyss. All of this, yes, but what's special about El Paso is how it's been dressed up.

It comes in layers. A noir hero in a trenchcoat enters a motel and rides the elevator down to hell, stopping at every level along the way. Twin pistols, blocky outlines, fizzing, flickering shadows: at first it feels like a Stranglehold PS1 demake. The character models have the odd silhouettes and triangle noses of early Tomb Raider, while muzzle-flashes are lovingly ragged and pixelated at the edges. Environments have walls and floor and - most often - no ceiling, revealing a twisting Llamasoft sky, while each stage has the twisty-turny relentlessness of a great Doom level.

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Mobile game Final Fantasy 7: Ever Crisis is being developed for PC and will be available via Steam.

Square Enix made the announcement in a Japanese livestream dedicated to the game.

Data will be shared between the mobile and Steam versions, but no further information has been announced yet. It's currently unclear when the Steam version will be released.

After six years of running Blue Origin, Bob Smith announced in a company-wide email on Monday that he will be "stepping aside" as chief executive of the space company founded by Jeff Bezos.

"It has been my privilege to be part of this great team, and I am confident that Blue Origin's greatest achievements are still ahead of us," Smith wrote in an email. "We've rapidly scaled this company from its prototyping and research roots to a large, prominent space business."

Shortly after Smith's email, a Blue Origin spokesperson said the company's new chief executive will be Dave Limp, who stepped down as Amazon's vice president of devices and services last month.

"Dave is a proven innovator with a customer-first mindset," the spokesperson said. "He has extensive experience in the high-tech industry and growing highly complex organizations, including leading Amazon’s Kuiper, Kindle, Alexa, Zoox, Fire TV, and many other businesses."

Limp will join Blue Origin in December and become chief executive of the company at that time.

“This is textbook compelled speech,” U.S. District Judge Alan Albright ruled in halting enforcement of the law. Texas is appealing.

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OP NOTE: This is actually a week old, today 3 judge panel allowed the ban to go into effect. Here's the author's mastodon post about it. though there are few other details

BREAKING: A three-judge panel of the 5th Circuit (Elrod, Haynes, Douglas) allows Texas’s book-ban law to go into effect, issuing an administrative stay of the district court ruling enjoining enforcement of the law.
The court gave no reasoning for its order, which is remarkable given that the law has never been allowed to go into effect, so the order — although posed as merely “administrative” — is a ruling, at least temporarily, changing the status of state law.

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On Monday, a federal judge ruled in favor of booksellers who argued that Texas’s new law banning some books from public school libraries and restricting others through an onerous and complicated regime is likely unconstitutional in an opinion that blasted the law and the arguments the state made in its defense.

“[T]his Court has found that READER likely violates the First Amendment by containing an unconstitutional prior restraint, compelled speech, and unconstitutional vagueness,” U.S. District Judge Alan Albright — a Trump appointee to the federal bench — concluded in issuing a preliminary injunction halting state officials from enforcing the law. Texas already announced that it is appealing the decision.

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“To put the scale of the number of books that would need to be rated in perspective, a librarian in San Antonio for Northside ISD testified that six school districts alone had library collections totaling over six million items,“ Albright wrote. There are more than 1,200 school districts in Texas.

Let’s just get this out of the way: Albright cannot believe this law exists. He also cannot believe the arguments the state made in its defense.

Former GOP vice presidential nominee Sarah Palin said Monday she thinks former first lady Michelle Obama will be the Democrats’ 2024 nominee, adding that President Biden is “out.” …

A federal appeals court on Monday sided with the Biden administration against the state of Utah in a lawsuit over the Environmental Protection Agency’s (EPA) “good neighbor” rule, which regulates the flow of air pollution across state lines.

In a single-page ruling, a three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit declined to stay the EPA rule, writing that the plaintiffs “have not satisfied the stringent requirements for a stay pending court review.” The ruling states that one of the three judges, Judge Justin Walker, would have granted a stay.

The good neighbor rule regulates the air pollution that 24 upwind states may produce. The state of Utah in June sued over the rule, arguing its regulations of Utah’s pollution would harm the state’s economy and cost millions of dollars in upgrades to its coal plants.

The DC Circuit in March dismissed a utility-backed lawsuit against the rule, but in May, another court, the Eighth Circuit Court of Appeals, granted a request for a stay by Missouri Attorney General Andrew Bailey (R). Another court, the 5th Circuit in New Orleans, stayed the EPA’s rejection of Texas and Louisiana’s plans. In response, the agency postponed implementation in those three states as well as Arkansas, Kentucky and Mississippi.

A Times analysis shows that increasingly complex oil and gas wells now require astonishing volumes of water to fracture the bedrock and release fossil fuels, threatening America’s fragile aquifers.

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Along a parched stretch of La Salle County, Texas, workers last year dug some 700 feet deep into the ground, seeking freshwater. Millions of gallons of it.

The water wouldn’t supply homes or irrigate farms. It was being used by the petroleum giant BP to frack for fossil fuels. The water would be mixed with sand and toxic chemicals and pumped right back underground — forcing oil and gas from the bedrock.

It was a reminder that to strike oil in America, you need water. Plenty of it.

Today, the insatiable search for oil and gas has become the latest threat to the country’s endangered aquifers, a critical national resource that is already being drained at alarming rates by industrial farming and cities in search of drinking water.

The amount of water consumed by the oil industry, revealed in a New York Times investigation, has soared to record levels. Fracking wells have increased their water usage sevenfold since 2011 as operators have adopted new techniques to first drill downward and then horizontally for thousands of feet. The process extracts more fossil fuels but requires enormous amounts of water.

Together, oil and gas operators reported using about 1.5 trillion gallons of water since 2011, much of it from aquifers, the Times found. Fracking a single oil or gas well can now use as much as 40 million gallons of water or more.

These mega fracking projects, called “monster fracks” by researchers, have become the industry norm. They barely existed a decade ago. Now they account for almost two out of every three fracking wells in Texas, the Times analysis found.

Since 2015, Be My Eyes has worked to connect our 6.9 million volunteers to users to assist them with everyday tasks. Our mission is to make the world more accessible for people who are blind or have low vision, which is why, seven months ago, our team began working with the blind community to incorporate AI into the existing Be My Eyes platform. Since then, over 19,000 blind and low-vision beta testers contributed to the design and function of our new AI feature.

Today we are thrilled to announce that Be My AI is officially entering an open beta phase for iOS users and in coming weeks will be available for hundreds of thousands of Be My Eyes users worldwide.

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Using Be My AI in your everyday life is quick and simple. Once you have access, open the Be My Eyes app, click on the ‘Be My AI’ tab, and take a picture. Be My AI will give you a detailed description about it, and you can chat and ask Be My AI further questions to get more information. If you like what Be My AI described, you can send its response and photo to others, or use its description in social media.

And don’t worry - if Be My AI can’t answer all your questions, if you want to check its results, or if you just need a little more description than Be My AI can provide or crave the magic and humanity of working with people, you still can easily reach one of our dedicated volunteers, just like before. They will always be there, in 150 languages all across the globe.

If you want to learn more about Be My AI and how to use it at its best, we have collected the most common questions (and answers!) in our Help Center. Make sure to check them out!

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