Enlarge / Jack (Leonardo DiCaprio) sacrifices his spot on a makeshift raft to save Rose (Kate Winslet) in Titanic. (credit: CBS/Getty Images)

(Major spoilers for the 1997 film below. Psst: The ship sinks.)

Ever since James Cameron's blockbuster film Titanic hit movie screens in December 1997, fans have been arguing about a specific scene in which Jack (Leonardo DiCaprio) nobly gives up a spot on a makeshift raft to ensure Rose (Kate Winslet), the woman he loves, survives. Tired of constantly having to defend his artistic choice against claims that both lovers could have fit onto the raft, Cameron decided to re-create the scenario under controlled conditions in a new documentary for National Geographic: Titanic: 25 Years Later with James Cameron, marking the film's quarter-century anniversary.

For the 10 people on the planet who haven't seen the film, Jack and Rose are star-crossed lovers from different social strata who have the misfortune of consummating their love minutes before Titanic hits that infamous iceberg. (The characters are fictional, intended to humanize the tragedy by giving us someone specific to root for.) Much drama ensues, involving Rose rescuing Jack from a lower deck as the icy waters approach and engulf them and jumping off the lifeboat she briefly boarded because she can't imagine leaving Jack behind.

Enlarge / A small selection of the characters that would be part of Microsoft if its proposed Activision/Blizzard merger is allowed to go through.

Microsoft's legal team now expects Britain's Competition and Markets Authority to formally oppose its long-planned $69 billion merger with Activision Blizzard. That's according to "four people briefed on the matter" cited many paragraphs deep in a New York Times report about the direction of globalized antitrust regulation.

Microsoft expects the European Union's separate "in-depth" investigation into the deal to be more amenable to "potential remedies" that would allow it to go forward, according to the Times' report. As those processes play out on the other side of the Atlantic, the US Federal Trade Commission for now seems content to limit its response to an administrative lawsuit rather than issuing an emergency injunction that could have stopped the deal from moving forward.

Representatives from Microsoft and Activision have yet to offer any public comment in response to a request from Ars Technica.

Enlarge / Replacing a drifting Joy-Con joystick is a lot easier than finding standing to sue Nintendo about it. (credit: iFixit)

A potential class-action lawsuit over the joystick drift experienced by Nintendo Switch owners has been dismissed, with a federal judge ruling that Nintendo's end-user license agreement (EULA) for the console bars such lawsuits.

William Alsup, US District Judge for the Northern District of California, ruled (PDF) in late November that two plaintiffs, both minors, were not able to sue Nintendo because setting up the Switch requires agreeing to a EULA that has arbitration and forum-selection clauses. The minors and their mothers were the original plaintiffs, but after an arbitrator ruled that the mothers couldn't pursue a claim because their children had accepted the EULA, they attempted to refile the case, with the children as plaintiffs. Because Nintendo's EULA requires a person to be at least 18 years old to sign it, the mothers argued, the children could not have agreed to it and should be able to pursue their case.

But Alsup ruled that the parents who purchased the console were the true owners and that they had failed to assign ownership to the children. Having already sent the parents to arbitration, the judge denied the plaintiffs' request to amend their complaint and dismissed the case.

Enlarge / A screenshot of Nothing, Forever showing faux-Seinfeld character Larry Feinberg performing a stand-up act. (credit: Nothing Forever)

Since December 14, a Twitch channel called Nothing, Forever has been streaming a live, endless AI-generated Seinfeld episode that features pixelated cartoon versions of characters from the TV show. On Monday, Twitch gave the channel a 14-day ban after language model tools from OpenAI went haywire and generated transphobic content that violated community guidelines.

Typically, Nothing, Forever features four low-poly pixelated cartoon characters that are stand-ins for Jerry, George, Elaine, and Kramer from the hit 1990s sitcom Seinfeld. They sit around a New York apartment and talk about life, and sometimes the topics of conversation unexpectedly get deep, such as in this viewer-captured segment where they discussed the afterlife.

Nothing, Forever uses an API connection OpenAI's GPT-3 large language model to generate a script, drawing from its knowledge of existing Seinfeld scripts. Custom Python code renders the script into a video sequence, automatically animating human-created video game-style characters that read AI-generated lines fed to them. One of its creators provided more technical details on how it works in a Reddit comment from December.

Enlarge / Not the most efficient way to read the news, but at least he's reading...

New episodes of The Last of Us are premiering on HBO every Sunday night, and Ars' Kyle Orland (who has played the games) and Andrew Cunningham (who hasn't) will be talking about them here every Monday morning. While these recaps don't delve into every single plot point of the episodes, there are obviously heavy spoilers contained within, so go watch the episode first if you want to go in fresh.

So you really think you have what it takes to kill without remorse?

Hello, I would like to speak to this apocalypse's manager...

Same fascistic military, now with less FEDRA.

Lighting the way.

Enlarge / An early edition of one of Dublin's most famous literary masterpieces: Ulysses by James Joyce, published in 1922. (credit: Fran Caffrey/AFP/Getty Images)

Ulysses, the groundbreaking modernist novel by James Joyce, marked its 100-year anniversary last year; it was first published on February 2, 1922. The poet T.S Eliot declared the novel to be "the most important expression which the present age has found," and Ulysses has accumulated many other fans in the ages since. Count Harry Manos, an English professor at Los Angeles City College, among those fans. Manos is also a fan of physics—so much so, that he penned a December 2021 paper published in The Physics Teacher, detailing how Joyce had sprinkled multiple examples of classical physics throughout the novel.

"The fact that Ulysses contains so much classical physics should not be surprising," Manos wrote. "Joyce’s friend Eugene Jolas observed: 'the range of subjects he [Joyce] enjoyed discussing was a wide one … [including] certain sciences, particularly physics, geometry, and mathematics.' Knowing physics can enhance everyone’s understanding of this novel and enrich its entertainment value. Ulysses exemplifies what physics students (science and non-science majors) and physics teachers should realize, namely, physics and literature are not mutually exclusive."

Ulysses chronicles the life of an ordinary Dublin man named Leopold Bloom over the course of a single day: June 16, 1904 (now celebrated around the world as Bloomsday). While the novel might appear to be unstructured and chaotic, Joyce modeled his narrative on Homer's epic poem the Odyssey; its 18 "episodes" loosely correspond to the 24 books in Homer's epic. Bloom represents Odysseus; his wife Molly Bloom corresponds to Penelope; and aspiring writer Stephen Daedalus—the main character of Joyce's semi-autobiographical A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916)—represents Telemachus, son of Odysseus and Penelope.

Enlarge / Raft is developed by Redbeet Interactive and published by Axolot Games. (credit: Redbeet Interactive)

My co-op gaming group has logged a few hundred extra hours in Deep Rock Galactic since I wrote about it a year and a half ago, but we're always looking for another game to fall in love with.

We've tried a bunch of things in the last year, guided by a combination of positive reviews and "whatever is on sale in Steam at the time." We've logged time in Back 4 Blood, Payday 2, Warhammer: Vermintide 2, Sea of Thieves, Diablo III, Risk of Rain 2, and Borderlands 3, and each has had its charms. But the one that has stuck with me the most is called Raft, a game about building a raft.

Raft isn't new—it went into Early Access in 2018—but its formal 1.0 release happened this past June. The pitch: You begin the game drifting across an endless ocean on a tiny wooden raft cobbled together from flotsam and jetsam. Armed with only a trusty throwable plastic hook, you must comb the ocean for planks, plastic, and other bits of scrap that you can use to expand your raft and stay alive. And once you're no longer in constant danger of starving to death (and once you can steer your raft instead of just letting it drift), you can begin sailing to the world's remaining islands to figure out what happened to everyone else.

Enlarge / Taking a close look... (credit: Aurich Lawson / Ars Technica)

The Securities and Exchange Commission announced Friday that Activision Blizzard has agreed to pay $35 million to settle a probe into the company's handling of widespread workplace harassment and discrimination allegations.

In an administrative order, the SEC said that complaints of workplace misconduct at Activision Blizzard "were not collected or analyzed for disclosure purposes" since at least 2018. This left Activision Blizzard management "lacking sufficient information to understand the volume and substance of employee complaints of workplace misconduct," and therefore unable to warn investors of any potential business risks those complaints entailed.

The SEC also found that Activision asked departing employees to enter into "separation agreements" that illegally asked those employees "to notify Activision Blizzard of any requests from an administrative agency in connection with a report or complaint." That violates SEC rules designed to protect whistleblowers and prohibit employers from impeding employee complaints to government agencies.

Mitchell (right) at the 2007 FAMB convention with former Twin Galaxies referee Todd Rogers and what appears to be a Donkey Kong cabinet with a modified joystick. (credit: David Race)

Over the years, King of Kong star Billy Mitchell has seen his world-record Donkey Kong scores stripped, partially reinstated, and endlessly litigated, both in actual court and the court of public opinion. Through it all, Mitchell has insisted that every one of his records was set on unmodified Donkey Kong arcade hardware, despite some convincing technical evidence to the contrary.

Now, new photos from a 2007 performance by Mitchell seem to show obvious modifications to the machine used to earn at least one of those scores, a fascinating new piece of evidence in the long, contentious battle over Mitchell's place in Donkey Kong score-chasing history.

The telltale joystick

The photos in question were taken at the Florida Association of Mortgage Brokers (FAMB) Convention, which hosted Mitchell as part of its "80s Arcade Night" promotion in July 2007. Mitchell claims to have achieved a score of 1,050,200 points at that event, a performance that was recognized by adjudicator Twin Galaxies as a world record at the time (but which by now would barely crack the top 30).

Enlarge / Five years later, there are still seemingly infinite upgrades to each class you'll get after just _one more run_. (credit: Ghost Ship Games)

Deep Rock Galactic, the grim vision of galactic extractive hypercapitalism that's also a wonderful community and great hang, will soon be 5 years old. The co-op first-person shooter is celebrating by letting you play the game as it launched in preview form in 2018.

Deep Rock Galactic (DRG) is a co-op shooter that's not like other co-op shooters. You and up to three other players choose a class of dwarven miner, enter a procedurally generated section of an insectoid-infested planet, and then shoot, dig, build, fix, collect, and goof your way toward objectives. One moment you're deep into a tough-as-nails, Aliens-esque blitz for survival, and the next you're picking out silly hats and tossing beer steins at a robot barkeep.

Some of Deep Rock Galactic's sales and engagement stats since its early-access release in 2018. (credit: Ghost Ship Games / Steam)

That game and other factors—lower system requirements, a generally friendly and welcoming online community, constant updates, Game Pass availability—have led to DRG selling more than 5.5 million copies by the end of 2022, across all platforms. Its daily active users have nearly tripled since 2019. And its Steam reviews have been 97 percent positive since its launch there.

Enlarge / The quirky work of two brothers' lives has found a wider audience on Steam and Itchi.io, and now they have some breathing room. (credit: Bay 12 Games)

The month before Dwarf Fortress was released on Steam (and Itch.io), the brothers Zach and Tarn Adams made $15,635 in revenue, mostly from donations for their 16-year freeware project. The month after the game's commercial debut, they made $7,230,123, or 462 times that amount.

"The fairytale ending is reality, but you didn't kiss the toad," Zach Adams wrote on Bay 12 Games' forums. "You gave him money." He went on to write the kind of grateful response to fans you don't often see from game developers:

The appreciation you give us is part of our being now. It carries us in the cars we drive. It sustains us as the food that we eat. There is now no longer any existence except the one that you have provided. When we pass from this world, you will be the reason we are remembered.

Tarn Adams noted that "a little less than half will go to taxes," and that other people and expenses must be paid. But enough of it will reach the brothers themselves that "we've solved the main issues of health/retirement that are troubling for independent people." It also means that Putnam, a longtime modder and scripter and community member, can continue their work on the Dwarf Fortress code base, having been hired in December.

Enlarge (credit: Razer)

There are a lot of cookie-cutter mice that, though made by different manufacturers, have the same shapes and features but rely on mild changes in color or sensor specs to differentiate themselves. So when Razer announced the Viper Mini Signature Edition (SE) today, a wireless mouse that looks like it forgot to get dressed, we took notice.

The Viper Mini SE uses a magnesium alloy chassis "exoskeleton," as Razer describes it. Lines of dark gray stretch across the mouse's palm area, creating a web-like design and bold, gaping holes. Razer's using an extreme take on the honeycomb design, which has holes drilled into a mouse's chassis to reduce weight. However, the typical honeycomb mouse, like the Glorious Model I, has many more holes that are smaller, while the Viper Mini SE has holes that are so big, it looks like you could poke your finger through them.

It'll be easy for dust to fall into those openings. (credit: Razer)

At first look, I was immediately concerned about the mouse's durability. Despite what Razer claims, I still think I'm more likely to break a mouse with 18 holes in it than one with none. Large openings can also attract dust and debris, but bigger holes should make the mouse easier to clean with an air blower than a honeycomb mouse topped with more, smaller openings.

Enlarge / A look at the games available in the PlayStation Plus Collection, which will no longer be offered to PS5 subscribers as of May.

For over two years now, PlayStation Plus subscribers who owned a PS5 got access to the PlayStation Plus Collection, a set of 19 legacy PS4 games available for free download and play via the console's backward compatibility. This week, Sony announced that it will be ending this subscriber benefit in May. Current PS5 owners will have until then to redeem their free games, which will remain available on their account as long as they stay subscribed to any of PlayStation Plus' multiple tiers.

Hundreds of legacy PS4 games are still available for download as part of the higher-end PlayStation Plus "Extra" and "Premium" tiers (starting at $14.99/month or $99.99/year). That list includes many of the titles that were part of the PlayStation Plus Collection, including almost all of Sony's first-party titles. But the PlayStation Plus Collection was also available at the cheapest "Essential" pricing tier ($9.99/month or $59.99/year).

The PlayStation Plus Collection served as a valuable introduction to legacy PlayStation franchises for PS5 owners who never owned a PS4. Sony said in an earnings release last night that such users made up a full 30 percent of the PS5's monthly active users, suggesting that "the acquisition of new users is progressing," as the company put it. Players who did upgrade from a PS4 to a PS5, meanwhile, are spending significantly more time and money on the new console on average, according to Sony.

Enlarge / Illustration of an embalming scene in an underground chamber. (credit: Nikola Nevenov)

Most of what we know about ancient Egyptian mummification techniques comes from a few ancient texts. In addition to a text called The Ritual of Embalming, Greek historian Herodotus mentions the use of natron to dehydrate the body in his Histories. But there are very few details about the specific spices, oils, resins, and other ingredients used. Fortunately, science is helping fill in the gaps. A team of researchers used molecular analysis to identify several basic ingredients used in mummification, according to a new paper published in the journal Nature.

Egyptian embalming is thought to have started in the Predynastic Period or even earlier, when people noticed that the arid heat of the sand tended to dry and preserve bodies buried in the desert. Eventually, the idea of preserving the body after death worked its way into Egyptian religious beliefs. When people began to bury the dead in rock tombs, away from the desiccating sand, they used chemicals like natron salt and plant-based resins for embalming.

The procedure typically began by laying the corpse on a table, removing the internal organs—except for the heart. Per Herodotus, "They first draw out part of the brain through the nostrils with an iron hook, and inject certain drugs into the rest" to liquefy the remaining brain matter.

Enlarge / Among the many upgrades made possible by this project, A Link to the Past is now a game you can Alt+Tab out of when a supervisor comes near. (credit: Nintendo / Kevin Purdy)

It's a sad reality among retro emulation enthusiasts: You often spend far more time crafting your perfect setup than playing the games. You get your controller, linear filtering, sound engine, and everything else just right, and then you discover that your favorite game of yesteryear is far slower and more annoying than you remember.

That's why the hard work of reverse engineers is so valuable. Hobbyist decompilers have worked to turn ROM binaries into thousands of lines of human-readable code, allowing for far deeper audiovisual upgrades, features, and other tweaks. It's resulted in some impressive new takes on games, including Ocarina of Time, Sonic the Hedgehog, and Grand Theft Auto. And unlike many fan-based projects, reverse engineering generally passes legal muster as long as no copyrighted assets are distributed along with the decompiled code.

And they often far outshine game publishers' official offerings, which usually amount to little more than officially licensed, lightly tweaked emulation.

Enlarge / Artist's conception of a single player (foreground) trying to access Redfall without an Internet connection.

Bethesda's upcoming supernatural shooter Redfall will require "a persistent online connection," even for the single-player experience. That's according to an FAQ posted by Bethesda last week, which also confirms that players will need an active Bethesda.net account to play the game.

There are many modern single-player games that require an online check-in (or even a text message confirmation) the first time they're launched, and some require periodic online anti-piracy checks. Games that require a persistent online connection for solo play are rarer, though significant exceptions do exist.

While Bethesda has not responded to a request for comment on the decision, game publishers often cite piracy or cheating concerns as reasons to require players to connect to the Internet for solo play. In 2013, for instance, Blizzard's Mike Morhaime said an online connection was "critical to the long-term integrity of the game experience" for Diablo III and its controversial (and later removed) real-money auction house.

Enlarge / A still image from the short film Dog and Boy,, which uses image synthesis to help generate background artwork. (credit: Netflix)

Over the past year, generative AI has kicked off a wave of existential dread over potential machine-fueled job loss not seen since the advent of the industrial revolution. On Tuesday, Netflix reinvigorated that fear when it debuted a short film called Dog and Boy that utilizes AI image synthesis to help generate its background artwork.

Directed by Ryotaro Makihara, the three-minute animated short follows the story of a boy and his robotic dog through cheerful times, although the story soon takes a dramatic turn toward the post-apocalyptic. Along the way, it includes lush backgrounds apparently created as a collaboration between man and machine, credited to "AI (+Human)" in the end credit sequence.

• 

  A still image from the short film Dog and Boy that features AI-assisted background art. [credit: Netflix ]

In the announcement tweet, Netflix cited an industry labor shortage as the reason for using the image synthesis technology:

Enlarge / AMD has announced pricing and availability for its newest 3D V-Cache desktop CPUs. (credit: AMD)

AMD's pumped-up, 3D V-Cache-equipped Ryzen 7000 desktop processors will be available to buy on February 28, the company announced today. The rollout will start with the 12-core Ryzen 9 7900X3D and the 16-core Ryzen 9 7950X3D, which will start at $599 and $699, respectively. A cheaper model, the eight-core Ryzen 7 7800X3D, will be available for $449 but won't launch until April 6.

All of these CPUs are successors to the original Ryzen 7 5800X3D, and their sales pitch is similar. AMD is stacking 64MB of additional L3 cache on top of the regular Ryzen 7000 CPUs, which can provide a big performance bump for software (like games) that is especially sensitive to cache sizes and speeds.

These prices are actually not all that much higher than the launch prices for the original Ryzen 7000 CPUs back in August—the 7950X3D has the same launch price as the 7950X, and the 7900X3D and 7800X3D are only $50 more expensive than their counterparts. But prices have come down a lot since then; the 7950X usually costs between $550 and $600 now, and non-X-series CPUs like the Ryzen 7 7700 and Ryzen 9 7950 are even cheaper. The X3D chips' prices will eventually come down, too, but they're still significantly more expensive than the versions without the extra cache.

Enlarge / The Arc A750 is slower than the top-tier A770, and it's getting a $40 price cut to make it more appealing. (credit: Intel)

It has been about four months since the launch of Intel's long-awaited Arc graphics cards. If you rolled the dice and bought a flagship A770 or an A750 in the interest of getting a decent deal on a mid-range GPU after two years of artificially inflated prices, the news has been mostly good. There have been some weird issues here and there, but Intel has kept plugging away at its buggy drivers, slowly improving Arc's performance across a range of games.

The company is making a pair of announcements today. First, the Arc A750 (the third-fastest Arc card, behind the 16GB and 8GB versions of the A770) is getting an official price cut, from $289 to $249. Second, the company is releasing yet another driver update (version 31.0.101.4086), bragging about widespread performance improvements in old DirectX 9 games and more targeted improvements for newer titles relative to the launch drivers from October.

Intel is using the A750 for these performance comparisons, but the drivers will benefit all Arc GPUs, from the lowly A380 up to the 16GB A770. (credit: Intel)

In our review, the Arc A750 was usually around 10 or 20 percent slower than the 16GB version of the A770, at least for games where the A750's 8GB of memory wasn't a bottleneck. But in the games where it did well, it usually still outperformed Nvidia's RTX 3060, and Intel's driver updates have made the "games that Arc plays well" list a little longer by now. A new RTX 3060 still typically goes for somewhere in the $350 to $400 range.

Enlarge / Say so long to the original PSVR's glowing blue lights. (credit: PlayStation Blog)

Sony is drastically scaling back its sales expectations for next month's launch of the PlayStation VR2 headset, according to a Bloomberg report citing "people familiar with [Sony's] deliberations."

The PlayStation 5 maker now expects to sell just one million PSVR2 units by the end of March, down from sales expectations of 2 million units in that period, as reported last October. Sony expects to sell about 1.5 million more headsets in the following fiscal year, which ends in March 2024, according to the report.

The scaled-back sales expectations would put the PSVR2 slightly ahead of the pace set by the original PSVR headset, which sold just under a million units in its first four months and 2 million units in just over a year. But that kind of sales pace looks less impressive today, when a headset like the Meta Quest 2 can sell a reported 2.8 million units in its first quarter, on its way to total sales of over 15 million, according to market analysis firm IDC.