Table of contents for December 2021 in APC

In a recent round table interview about its Arc Alchemist GPUs, Intel revealed that it won’t be employing any hardware or software limiters or locks to dissuade cryptocurrency miners. This could be seen as something of a missed opportunity for Intel, as Nvidia’s hash rate limiter has been welcomed by gamers, despite the numerous hacks to unlock it. In Intel’s defence, these new GPUs are purely focused on gaming, not on trying to dissuade certain parties. As Intel’s Roger Chandler says, “we’re not designing this product or building any features at this point that specifically target miners.” So while there won’t be anything there to dissuade miners, there’s nothing that’s particularly attractive to them either.…

Hackers have absolutely bulldozed Twitch, swiping the site’s source code and revealing everything from how much the top streamers make (a lot) to the existence of a Steam-like game client Twitch has in development, codenamed Vapor. Twitch is still trying to figure out what exactly happened, but while that internal investigation unfolds – and it could very well take a long while, given the scale of the hack – security experts are warning of potentially dire consequences for the livestreaming platform. “Reading of a data breach that includes the entire source code, including unreleased software, SDKs, financial reports and internal red-teaming tools will send a shudder down [the spine of] any hardened infosec professional,” ThreatModeler founder and CEO Archie Agarwal told the Threatpost blog. “This is as bad as it…

DDR5 memory modules and supporting platforms are yet to hit the market, but DRAM houses have already started an informal DDR5 overclocking contest. Recently, Adata’s XPG Overclocking Lab announced that it had managed to overclock the company’s DDR5 memory module to 8,118 MT/s. This is the first time that a memory module house demonstrated overclocked DDR5 SDRAM sticks. To hit a rather record data transfer rate, Adata’s XPG Overclocking Lab took a pre-production 16GB DDR5 memory module based on ICs from SK Hynix with a stock data transfer rate of 4,800 MT/s and an unknown Intel Z690-based motherboard equipped with an undisclosed Intel’s 12th Generation Core ‘Alder Lake’ processor. The system remained stable enough to load Windows and CPU-Z software.…

One of my first articles for APC was back in issue 411, ‘Has the Pirate Bay finally walked the Plank?’, covered what appeared to be at the time the demise of a decade of internet and content culture where the high seas reigned supreme. At the end of 2014, Australia was still in the streaming dark ages, since Netflix wouldn’t even launch till a few months later in March 2015 and Spotify was still working on quaint features like letting you see what your friends were listening to. Sure, many had access to Foxtel, and if you were particularly posh you might’ve even had a Foxtel I.Q. box that allowed you to record shows and play them back whenever you wanted, but for most, the prohibitively high price of pay…

Panic, the company behind this quirky not-a-Game-Boy, says it made this device “just for fun,” and it shows. From the 1-bit screen to its distinctive crank, the Playdate radiates novelty. We just hope it’s as much fun to tear down as it is to play on. Full disclosure: Our unit came from Panic, who sent a Playdate for free. Unfortunately, it didn’t come with any games, so a teardown was all it was good for. Little did they know, that’s our favourite game (okay, they probably did know that). Major tech specs • Extremely high resolution (400×240) display; 2.7-inch at 173 ppi • 180MHz ARM Cortex-M7F CPU • 16MB of onboard memory • 4GB flash storage • 2.4GHz Wi-Fi (b/g/n), Bluetooth 4.2, USB-C, headphone jack • Mechanical crank, because why…

When I was young I got a music tape ‘The Best of Don Spencer’ during a shopping trip containing a track titled ‘Super Computer’. Perhaps this event planted a seed in me, as around 2007 and the early days of Sony PS3 there was talk about clustering multiple systems together to work as one powerful system, and from that point on I have been hooked on High Performance Computing – which everyday people with home systems can contribute with. Folding@Home is my preferred platform although there are others around including for modern mobile phones.During the 2020 COVID outbreak I sent APC an email suggesting a piece on distributed computing efforts to combat the disease (among others)… APC was already on it. In 2020 computing power donated by volunteers made Folding@…

$549 | www.powercolor.com Hot on the heels of the RX 6600 XT comes a more affordable Navi 23 variant: The RX 6600. Ever so slowly, there are current generation cards that can be considered affordable, if only relative to grossly overpriced higher end cards. If you’re suffering with an older card that’s on its last legs, or you’re looking for something that lets you run all titles at 1080p, the 6600 is a card that could satisfy your needs. Is affordable really affordable, though? The RX 6600 contains the Navi 23 GPU, which it shares in common with the 6600 XT. Its 237mm² die contains 1792 Stream Processors compared to the 2048 of the 6600 XT. You get a 128-bit memory bus with 14Gbps GDDR6 memory that provides 224GB/s of…

As anyone who’s ever tried to work out a restaurant bill, including drinks, taxes, and tip, already knows, some math is difficult. Expand that by several orders of magnitude, and suddenly you’re simulating the effects of a nuclear bomb, or protein folding, or calculating how many oil rigs to send up the Bering Strait before winter, and your needs go beyond mere computers. You need a supercomputer. Established in the 1960s, supercomputers initially relied on vector processors before changing into the massively parallel machines we see today in the form of Japan’s Fugaku (7,630,848 ARM processor cores producing 442 petaflops) and IBM’s Summit (202,752 POWER9 CPU cores, plus 27,648 Nvidia Tesla V100 GPUs, producing 200 petaflops). But how did we get to these monsters? And what are we using them…

PC CASE GEAR VOID 1660 TI $2,199 – tinyurl.com/APC500PCC If you’re looking to dip your toes into playing some competitive eSport titles this is a nice place to start. By today’s standards it’s effectively priced and gives you a decent base to start from and upgrade parts later. The CPU is one of the most popular on sale, and for good reason, as it’ll handle any game well at a great price. The GTX 1660 Ti is a solid performer at 1080p with the previously mentioned type of game titles and will offer a good experience even at 1440p with the right settings. The RAM is a perfect match in both capacity and speed, and while the SSD isn’t the fastest, for the price it’s acceptable. Lastly, the case, while…

Cannibalising old components I have some components lying around I’d like to reuse. I would like to consider utilising some or all of the following components: a Rocketfish RF-Fulltwr Aluminum Full-Tower Case (huge, great reviews and mod-able), a barely used 700-watt OCZGXS700 PSU, and a new A8-7670k CPU I bought as an impulse buy four years ago (along with a motherboard I can no longer find). Alternatively, I have a new Asrock 775Dual-Vista 775 MB motherboard I could build a system around, but my first thought is to use the A8 CPU, case, and PSU for a server build. I also have an Asus U3S6 PCIe4 x4 card that offers USB 3.0 ports. I found a review from 2016 where the processor was purchased for a small home virtualisation server…

What sort of world have we created? An open internet was supposed to be a bastion of human knowledge, where we could all share our thoughts, contribute to the advancement of all human knowledge and have an occasional game of Quake. What did we get instead? Facebook and a web of endless adverts and faux top-ten buying guides. One of the standards that grew out of the early(ish) web was RSS (Really Simple Syndication) that was originally built into Nescape Navigator in 1999. It gave websites a way to announce updated content in a minimal way. Its popularity has come and gone, but RSS has stuck around even after Google Reader was killed off and the competing ATOM standard was launched. An RSS feed offers a distraction-free way to obtain…

GRAND THEFT AUTO: THE TRILOGY IS COMING THIS YEAR Rockstar gives the original PS2 series a new coat of paint. Grand Theft Auto 5 is just over eight years old this year, but it’s still Rockstar’s biggest focus – it’s even getting a re-release in 2022 for new-gen consoles. As anticipation rises for morsels of GTA 6 info, here’s something of a rarity nowadays: Rockstar has announced a new game. It’s actually three, and they’re reissues of the first three Grand Theft Auto 3D games (ie, not the first two top down affairs). The reissue treatment will come to GTA 3, GTA: Vice City and GTA: San Andreas, and all will feature “across-the-board upgrades including graphical improvements and modern gameplay enhancements,” while retaining “the classic look and feel” of the…

Free | PC | bit.ly/BloodSpear Blood Spear is a student project that puts its own spin on the Souls-like formula. Gone are the souls, the bonfires, or any sense of character advancement. All that remains is an undead medieval world, and the titular spear: a sentient weapon that thirsts for blood. It’s not entirely clear if you play as the Blood Spear, or the poor dead knight it has possessed. Either way, the pair are soon up and running through a few attractive environments, killing undead and floating eyeballs on their way to the boss. Blood Spear took me about an hour, feeling like a slice of a bigger action game. However, there was enough space for the spear to be given a proper workout. There are no other weapons…

$24.95 | PC, Switch | dicelegacy.com Don’t let Dice Legacy deceive you, as it did me. It’s not a chill city builder, with a couple of quirky features and nascent roguelike elements. No, it’s a pitched battle for survival, pitting your dicey tribe against the winter and, eventually, a rival settlement. You’re not (just) building a cute medieval town by plonking dice down on a dizzying ringworld planet – you’re building a machine to take your enemies, The Others, down. You’d be forgiven for thinking otherwise, given how sedately Dice Legacy starts. Parking your ship by a curved landmass, you soon go about the usual colony stuff: building a house and assigning workers to essential tasks. Food needs to be hunted, wood gathered and so on. But here your people…

ASHAMPOO WINOPTIMIZER 18 Comprehensive system optimisation for Windows PCs. Ashampoo WinOptimizer 18 makes Windows PCs faster, cleaner and safer. The built-in cleaners are among the most popular features and safely remove web browsing traces, junk files and installation leftovers to free up valuable disk space. AntiSpy and Privacy Control put a muzzle on Windows telemetry broadcasts and protect your privacy. Three automatic modules reduce clutter, speed up Windows startup times and program launches and optimise gaming performance. For better system performance and PC stability, WinOptimizer also fixes Registry errors, removes broken shortcuts and disables unnecessary background processes and Autostart entries. Several analysis tools that display detailed information about installed hard and software and that track down resource hogs have been included for better system transparency. The tweaking module allows for…

Microsoft has revealed its plans to shutter its localised version of LinkedIn in China later this year, though the company isn’t giving up entirely on helping Chinese professionals find jobs online. First launched in February of 2014, Microsoft was well aware that it would have to adhere to the requirements of the Chinese government on internet platforms when operating a localised version of its social network for professionals in the country. Faced with a significantly more challenging operating environment and greater compliance requirements in China, Microsoft has made the decision to sunset the current localised version of LinkedIn later this year, while announcing a much simpler jobs site is in development.…

Despite Microsoft’s claims that “if you’re a gamer, Windows 11 was made for you” you will need to watch out for future prebuilt PCs with the new OS factory installed. That’s because the Big M is enabling more security features in PCs by default, and one in particular can seriously tank gaming performance. In our testing, that can add up to as much as a 28 percent drop in average frame rates. And you thought the TPM 2.0 restrictions were a pain... That sort of frame rate delta is like dropping down an entire tier of graphics card and, in these days where GPUs are so hard to come by, Microsoft gimping the performance of the chip in your new machine would surely be hard for gamers to stomach. The…

I’ve been a tech geek ever since I can remember. As a kid, my first computing experience was gaming on a cassette-based Commodore 64 before eventually graduating to an Amiga 500. I had a friend with a 486 PC around 1994, and I remember arguing with him that the Amiga was the superior platform. In hindsight, he won the argument! He had a pile of PC magazines with a whole bunch of programmes on disks that I wanted to use. Some of that stuff was really cool and I began to buy Amiga and PC magazines around then. Finally, I managed to convince my parents to buy a PC. For educational purposes of course! Microsoft Encarta on a CD, that was mind blowing. I recall the thrills of playing Doom,…

$1,649 | anz.dynabook.com If you’re a consumer that would trade thin bezels and polished metallic finishes for a more sturdy chassis structure, or you’d swap out a gaming-capable discrete graphics card for extra long life keyboard keys then read on. If, on the other hand, you’d rather the polished features of consumer grade laptops, then you’re probably going to want to stop reading and start looking elsewhere. The Dynabook Tecra A50 is a 15.6-inch business focused laptop that can be configured with one of Intel’s 11th generation i5 or i7 quad-core laptop processors. The Dynabook Tecra A50 is a 15.6-inch business-focused laptop that can be configured with one of Intel’s 11th generation i5 or i7 quad-core laptop processors. Starting with the Intel Core i5-1135G7 CPU, 8GB of RAM and 256GB…

It certainly feels a bit strange to hit the power button on a freshly assembled build and hear absolutely nothing. It’s actually not that strange, but the usual cause is that the system is failing to boot because we have a loose connection or a faulty part. Mercifully, our fanless PC booted on the first attempt, and we enjoyed the manifold pleasures of installing Windows without any fan noise to irritate us. Before we jump into the numbers with our benchmark testing results, we feel compelled to say that this system exceeded our expectations in numerous ways. Yes, it did get pretty warm, but we were prepared for that; in a well-ventilated room, the Core i5-11600K idled around 40°C, which is considerably above average, but completely within acceptable parameters. Running…

Windows 11 is here. For new PCs it’s coming out this year, and Windows 10 users will be able to get a free update. That is, unless their PC is not supported – and many PCs will not be. As of the time of writing, Windows 11 has a hard requirement of a Trusted Platform Module (TPM) version 2.0, something that many older PCs lack (as well as some new ones, especially ones that have been self-built). It will check during the install if that’s present, and kick you out if you don’t have it. We say ‘at the time of writing’ because this situation is fluid and Microsoft’s messaging has been somewhat confusing. Originally, only TPM version 1.2 was required. Then that was changed to 2.0. Then it was…

No matter your choice of tech, it’s all fuelled by electricity and while it’s the lifeblood of our modern world, it’s also dangerous enough to kill – both you and your favourite gear. You don’t need to panic, but you do need to take care and as we’re into the summer months, now’s a good time to brush up on some good electricity safety to protect you and yours. DIY PC upgrading Working on a PC upgrade can be one of the great joys in life. But to stay safe, always switch off and remove the power cable before you remove the case lid and start tinkering inside. First up, CPUs and RAM sticks are susceptible to what’s known as ‘electrostatic discharge’ (ESD) damage. I can’t remember experiencing this in…

$99.95 | PC, PS5 | bethesda.net/en/game/deathloop Deathloop is all about what happens when things don’t go to plan; about panic and improvisation; about learning from a mistake, and taking those lessons forward. Trapped in a time loop, it doesn’t matter if you botch your way through combat encounter after combat encounter – it doesn’t even matter if you die and get kicked back to the beginning of the day. All that matters is that, in doing so, you gained some information that will help you the next time around. Information is how you find and kill the Visionaries that act as the bosses of the island. There are eight in total, and your job as the amnesiac Colt Vahn is to take them all out in a single day in…

Free | PC | Steam Paz the alpaca might be the star of this 3D platformer, but it’s Streusel who makes it: the jealous squirrel who kicks it off by opening a gate and letting loose five adorable chicks. He’s the heart of a five-minute game that feels remarkably full, despite its brief length, and that has much to do with Streusel’s funny, redemptive journey. After the chick-loosing incident, Paz volunteers to find them, roaming the island and following clues to each of the birds. It’s not very complicated, and anyway the island is so small you’re going to find them all eventually, whether it takes you five minutes or ten. But as you explore, Streusel rears his head. Or rather, his bushy tail, which frequently emerges from nearby shrubbery…

Free | PC, browser r-goulart.itch.io Hexblade is in the same sphere as games like Titan Souls and Furi, in that the only enemies you’ll be battling are bosses. But here they’re queued up in the same hallway, emerging one after another, even saving you the trouble of making your way to each boss arena. Hexblade’s bosses are decently complex, and pretty challenging. While lacking multiple boss stages, there are patterns to memorise, projectiles to dodge, and weak points that can be tricky to reach with your sword. Die and you’ll return to before the latest boss (thankfully), so it’s easy to retry when your luck runs out. Satisfying as it is, I probably wouldn’t be writing about Hexblade if it wasn’t for the novel Curse bar under the hero’s health.…

“Championing technology doesn’t mean we’re unrelenting yes-men and -women, however, and APC aims to be as objective as possible in all our coverage.” APC is Australia’s oldest consumer technology magazine – having been consistently in print for forty years, since our first issue way back in May 1980 – and we take that heritage and responsibility very seriously. While our focus is obviously on the personal computer the very definition of the PC has changed and shifted markedly since the early 1980s. As such, we touch on many other areas of tech, too, from smartphones and apps to peripherals, accessories, and beyond. We have two goals: to find the best modern tech and to help you make the most of it. We’re also an open church in terms of platforms.…

The semiconductor shortage will definitely extend well into 2022 after the chip provider for some of the largest tech companies in the world said that production will struggle to meet the soaring demand for its products. In an online conference in October, TSMC CEO Dr. C.C. Wei said that TSMC foundry production capacity was still insufficient to satisfy the demand for its chips, especially orders for components used for high-performance computing (HPC) systems and 5G devices using the company’s 5nm process node. If TSMC is stretched thin across its most important process nodes, then a far greater number of industries are going to be impacted by the constrained capacity than if Intel were facing the same production constraints which impacts the more “traditional” computing market more than anything else. In…

After introducing its free website builder back in February, Microsoft has announced a number of new features and integrations for Smart Pages which will make the service more accessible to small businesses looking to create their own online presence. Previously users of the software giant’s website builder were required to use the social and advertising tools in its Digital Marketing Center. Now though, Microsoft has announced a standalone mode for Smart Pages that allows anyone to create, edit and publish their own website without having to enter any payment information. While not every business needs to advertise online, if a Smart Pages user does decide later that they want to do so, it’s quick and simple to sign up for Microsoft Advertising to reach even more potential customers.…

Last month Facebook announced it would take steps to curb social media addiction, but the social media behemoth was typically light on details. It didn’t make this announcement in a vacuum: It follows a series of investigative pieces by the Wall Street Journal in September which revealed, among other things, that the company has conducted its own investigation into how Instagram affects teenagers. The results of this research was far from flattering, with 32 percent of teenage girls reporting that the platform negatively affects their mental health. “We’re going to introduce new controls for adults of teens, on an optional basis obviously, so that adults can supervise what their teens are doing online.” That WSJ report was itself based on a trove of leaked documents from a former Facebook employee,…

Last issue I talked about the upcoming switch to DDR5 memory for the next generation Intel and AMD platforms. Now, I want to talk about something we won’t see with AMD’s socket AM5, and most likely not on Intel’s LGA1700 Alder Lake CPUs either – at least, not on common consumer parts. Many laptops still omit Gen4 support entirely due to power requirements, and even those that do support the standard might only provide four lanes for the graphics chip (Tiger Lake-U), sticking with slower and less power-hungry Gen3 for storage and other devices. Before anyone gets too upset, let’s talk about the reason behind the decision. PCIe signalling keeps getting faster, which requires tighter tolerances. Gen3 ran at a paltry 8 GT/s per lane (985MB/s to be precise), yielding…

“Start publishing as quickly as you can before competition grabs the market”. With this advice from UK publishing magnate Felix Dennis accompanying a box of magazines, a 21-year-old Sean Howard embarked on a new career path to launch Australia’s first personal computer magazine. It was the era of the Sinclair ZX-80, the Tandy TRS-80 and in May 1980, the first issue of Australian Personal Computer rolled off the printing presses to explain this brave new world to technology enthusiasts. Despite the trials of the magazine-publishing game, APC, as we now know it, has survived and flourished, having been published each and every month since and this month tops a milestone 500th issue. Over the next few pages, we’ll look back at the history of the PC, and the magazine that…

$4,399 | dell.com/en-au Dell’s XPS brand is about as reliable as they come in the laptop space, and the XPS 15 9510 has everything a creative professional is going to be looking for in a larger laptop. Dell likes to offer the full suite of customisable options for its laptops so you’ll get to choose from Intel’s i5, i7 or i9 11th gen CPUs to meet the demands of your workload. While you can still choose the RAM allocation and storage size on all options, if you go for the entry i5 spec you’ll have to utilise the integrated Intel UHD Graphics GPU, and you can only match this option with a FullHD touchscreen for a starting RRP of $2,999. The Infinity Edge besels, pioneered by Dell, continue to push…

$13,270 (as configured) | www.lenovo.com.au AMD’s Threadripper CPUs have really shaken up the HEDT market. While they’re very strong when measured against mainstream desktop-class hardware, their I/O is handicapped when compared to AMD’s Epyc range. Threadripper Pro bridges the gap between the two. The Pro range includes support for 8-channel ECC memory and up to 128 PCIe 4.0 lanes. Lenovo is the first company to offer Threadripper Pro systems, and impressive systems they are. In fact, they are the first AMD-based ThinkStations from Lenovo full stop. The Lenovo ThinkStation P620 is compact tower system that’s exceptionally well put together. It can weigh up to 24kg, yet it remains easy to work with thanks to a largely tool-less design. This isn’t a bunch of components thrown into a rebadged case. The…

When you actually examine how industry standards for connectivity and hardware performance evolve over time, it’s surprising how quickly the new normal gets adopted by the masses. USB-A was the dominant form of physical port connectivity across the hardware spectrum for years, but mobile devices ran through a flurry of alternate compact ports before settling on the USB-C connector we know and love. It’s strange to think that in a few short years, the top-tier hardware we feature here in 2021’s issues of APC will be heavily outdated, even obsolete. The industry moves fast. When a new gold standard for any aspect of our systems arrives, it doesn’t take long before every new product conforms to the norm. PCIe 4.0 SSDs were hailed as a revolution when they first arrived,…

This was a blessing in disguise at the time, because it meant we didn’t have to enact a dark ritual to summon an appropriate GPU in these troubled times. If you’re willing to brave the waters of eBay and do want to include a GPU, though, you have a few options here. A handful of old Nvidia GT 1030 and 1050 cards came in passively-cooled models, such as the MSI GeForce GTX 1030 2GH LP OC. These generally aren’t too difficult to find used and are likely to cost you around $130. As you can tell from our benchmark results, this isn’t a system built for playing games. The GT 1030 is only just capable of playing games at 1080p, so the performance gains over these integrated graphics will be…

IT WILL TAKE 10 minutes YOU WILL LEARN To copy files so you can restore them YOU’LL NEED macOS 10.15 or later, external storage with sufficient free space, Carbon Copy Cloner 6 Catalina and Big Sur change the way that you restore from a clone. Rather than cloning back from the copy to your internal storage, it’s better to install macOS then migrate from the copy, and that’s the only way for M1 Macs. Whether or not Time Machine makes regular backups of your Mac, making a complete copy (a clone or mirror) of its contents is a good idea before you undertake to install macOS updates or upgrades. Carbon Copy Cloner 6 ($57.15, bombich. com) can make a one-off clone or regular backups in addition to, or instead of,…

As a child I had Spirograph, and it was fascinating how coloured pencils and a rotating cog could create such wonderful patterns. Little did we know that years later we would be reproducing those same patterns with code. In this tutorial we shall use a little maths to generate coloured patterns in Scratch 3. Scratch 3 should come pre-installed on your Raspberry Pi OS image, but just in case it is missing it can be installed from the main menu, under Preferences > Recommended Software. Scratch 3 is found in the Programming category; tick the box and click Apply to install. Once installed, Scratch 3 can be found in the main menu under Programming. Scratch 3 should come pre-installed on your Raspberry Pi OS image, but just in case it…

You’ll need this  http://dcmoto.free.frMinimum Pentium II 300 MHz and Windows 98. This month, we head to France to explore a much-overlooked machine that can provide new experiences for hungry retro gamers. The Thomson MO5 is often referred to as “France’s BBC Micro”, and was the machine upon which many French schoolkids experienced their first taste of computing. The MO5 uses unique hardware combinations with innovations well worth exploring, so let us take you on a brief tour of MO5 history, before showing you how to emulate this quirky machine. Background Thomson is a French sister company to General Electric, which began experimenting with computing in the 1970s. In the 1980s, Thomson started producing French microcomputers to capitalise on high import taxes, beginning with the T07 (1982) and TO7/70 (1984). These…

$69.95 | PC, PS5, XB1 | diablo2.blizzard.com/en-us Diablo II: Resurrected moves at two speeds: You are either carving through swathes of undead with impunity, or you’re navigating each fork in the road with taut reluctance, nursing the small puddle of red in the bottom left corner of the screen. Action-RPGs are a known quantity in 2021, so what I most appreciated about my return to Blizzard’s classic was the way it made me fear the dark again, with no friendly checkpoints to save me. Diablo II came out in 2000, and Resurrected represents the first new game in the franchise since the release of its sequel in 2012. The basics are all in place. You will take control of a lonely warrior – picked from one of seven different classes…

$42.95 | PC, Mac | cyan.com/games/myst It’s a little weird to be back in Myst in 2021, after all this time. Cyan Worlds has completely remade the game (again, following realMyst and realMyst: Masterpiece Edition). And this new 3D Myst works on both desktop and in VR, so I got to spend time actually (virtually) walking around in it. As a remake, Myst is a faithful one, but maybe a bit too faithful. Cyan Worlds says it’s a “reimagined” Myst, but while it’s far more modern-looking it’s still almost exactly the same game. Myst, no matter how it looks in 2021, feels pretty outdated. It is nice to be able to actually walk through the world this time, and for a while it’s novel experiencing a familiar place in a…

WILLIAM SHATNER RIDES BEZOS’ BLUE ORIGIN ROCKET INTO THE STRATOSPHERE Did we pay for all this too, Jeff? Star Trek’s Captain James Tiberius Kirk, a.k.a, William Shatner, took his first flight into actual space on October 14th, becoming the oldest human to leave the Earth’s atmosphere at the age of 90. While the actor was the commander of the USS Enterprise for four decades, he described his 11 minute ride into the void as “the most profound experience”. Clearly grateful for the experience, Shatner thanked his benefactor by bringing a bit of shade back from the edge of the universe and throwing it on all those other Silicon Valley space dudes for the cameras: “whatever those other guys are doing… I don’t know about them”. FACEBOOK WANTS BETTER PRESS BY…