Free games

• Epic Games

  • The Messenger

    • 2018
    • As a demon army besieges his village, a young ninja ventures through a cursed world, to deliver a scroll paramount to his clan’s survival. What begins as a classic action platformer soon unravels into an expansive time-traveling adventure full of thrills, surprises, and humour.

Pokemon Sword and Shield are under fire ahead of their release this weekend because of weird limitations and broken promises

• First up is the fact that even though new Pokemon are being introduced, bringing the total up over 1,000, they’ve actually removed many older ones from the game
  • For instance, Bulbasaur and Squirtle were cut but we’ve seen Charizard in trailers so far
  • Apparently the game’s producer, Junichi Masuda, worried that the new ones would be overshadowed by fan favourites, and that it would be too time-consuming to include all the different Pokemon
  • Many fans are disappointed though, because not being able to catch some is one thing but since they’re being completely excluded from the game you can’t even trade them forward
    • There are hardcore fans that complete the National Pokedex, owning every single Pokemon, in each game as it comes out. This is the first time that it won’t be possible
  • The worst part of this is that they said it would be too time-consuming to rebuild all the Pokemon from scratch, and they didn’t have the manpower to do all 800+ from the previous generations, but dataminers have confirmed that the character models are taken almost completely from the 3DS games
• Not only have they removed Pokemon, but they’ve also removed some random moves (like Karate Chop and Hidden Power) so that even if a Pokemon is included in the game it can’t be traded forward if it knows one of them
• Some are saying that if The Pokemon Company wanted to clear the way for the new generation, they should have just started with a clean slate and let this be its own isolated experience instead of picking and choosing which previous gen moves and monsters would be brought forward
• And in one last strange little feature, the sound control settings are locked behind an optional item
  • There’s an NPC in one of the cities that gives you ‘Hi-tech Earbuds’, and unless you speak to them the options for changing Background Music, Sound Effects, and Pokemon Cries are not available in your settings screen.

Google has quietly partnered with Ascension, the USA’s second-largest health system, and gained access to medical records for tens of millions of Americans

• In what they’ve code-named Project Nightingale, at least 150 Google employees have access to patient health info including diagnoses, test results, and hospital records, including names and birthdates
• Both Google and Ascension say the project is compliant with federal health information privacy protections, but the more you spread this kind of thing around in the cloud the more vulnerable it’s going to be
  • Whether that’s actually the case remains to be seen, as after the Wall Street Journal broke the story the project is now under investigation by the Office for Civil Rights in the Department of Health and Human Services

Bringing more ammunition to the Delete Facebook bonfire, users have discovered that Facebook actively uses your iPhone’s camera while you’re scrolling through your timeline

• It only works if you’ve granted the app permission to use your camera, so that’s something at least
• Facebook has apparently confirmed the issue, calling it a bug, but say they have no evidence of photos or videos uploaded due to it

Many smartphone owners were surprised this week when they started receiving delayed text messages from Valentine’s Day this year

• Apparently the glitch was due to the cross carrier messaging system, causing cell companies across north america to send or re-send random texts from that day
• People reported everything from random messages, Valentines from exes, or even messages from people who have since died

Han Shot Last Video

Hazbin Hotel

Tidbits

• Good news everyone, they seem to have fixed the crime against nature that was the live-action Sonic model
  • Instead of weirdly almost-human proportions, Sonic is back to his usual spindly limbs and big hands, feet, and head
• Disney+ is here, and for $9 CAD/month or $90/year you can get access to decades of Disney-owned content along with new stuff like The Mandalorian and The World According to Jeff Goldblum
  • One thing of note is that the service brings us yet another re-edit of the Han Solo / Greedo interaction, removing the straight-on shot of the exploding dummy and making it look like Greedo shouted something right before being killed
  • I do really want to watch The Mandalorian though

Alan and Josh recommend Living With Yourself

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