Blame it on PoE // What's Good: Mar. 29, 2024
Newsrooms, harvests, and Beyonce.
Hello, good evening, happy Monday. Listen, we made it a day earlier than last week, that’s progress.
The new Path of Exile league launched this weekend and I am having a blast with it, even if Reddit hates it. Meanwhile, they just announced massive buffs to loot, so I am a happy camper. Check it out if you enjoy action RPGs. It’s free! It also has an insane difficulty curve, but it’s extremely worth the effort.
Nothin’ really ends
Did you listen to the new Beyonce album yet? You should:
IRVING, Texas — Beyoncé lovers donned cowboy hats and boots this weekend as they descended upon parties across the country, in dance clubs and bookstores alike, to celebrate Queen Bey’s new album, “Cowboy Carter.”
At a club outside of Dallas, Tamera W. and her friends showed up in large cowboy hats and short shorts, with their hair pulled back or in pigtails. It wasn’t long before their cowboy boots had scuff marks from dancing. While her friends said they hadn’t listened much to country music before “Cowboy Carter,” Tamera said country music is in her roots.
Beyoncé’s “Cowboy Carter” has been out for only a few days, yet it’s already obvious that we’ll be talking about it for years to come — it’s breaking records across streaming platforms, and the artist herself calls it “the best music [she’s] ever made.” But in the middle of the press release for “Cowboy Carter,” Beyoncé made an unexpected statement against the growing presence of AI in music.
“The joy of creating music is that there are no rules,” said Beyoncé. “The more I see the world evolving the more I felt a deeper connection to purity. With artificial intelligence and digital filters and programming, I wanted to go back to real instruments.”
Wildfire
That’s about the only way I can describe the downfall of Vice:
Shane Smith built Vice into a cultural behemoth by bluffing his way into round after round of funding — until he reached a dizzying $5.7 billion valuation from which only a precipitous fall was possible.
That fall has been happening in slow motion for years, but things finally crashed to the ground in February of this year, when Vice announced it would shutter its award-winning news division, lay off hundreds, and stop publishing to its website entirely. For some insiders at the company, this outcome felt inevitable. The only question was how long Smith could keep making deals to keep disaster at bay.
Elsewhere in newsroom news:
Kotaku’s future is hanging in the balance.
It hinges on whether the decades-popular online publication’s owner G/O Media succeeds in transforming it from a gaming news outlet to a hub for game guides — tips and walkthroughs to help gamers overcome tricky challenges.
MediocreHelp
I support people getting therapy - some is probably better than none - but I find the advent of BetterHelp to be… well, not much better at all:
What do Anthony Padilla, the Try Guys, JacksFilms, and Good Mythical Morning all have in common? Other than the fact that they are all incredibly popular YouTubers with millions of views, they’ve all recently taken sponsorships from BetterHelp.
The online therapy platform has been aggressively promoting YouTuber sponsorships over the past half-decade. Its reach has grown in the wake of a series of controversies that have called into question the platform’s legitimacy.
Lost the plot
I’m sorry, I couldn’t help it, the opportunity was too perfect:
In 2018, Anne Reynolds bought an acre of empty green land where the stars aligned on Hawaii’s Big Island. She had plans to one day build a healing retreat for women there. Then, someone accidentally built a house on it.
The bizarre story, which involves a construction crew building a three-bedroom family home on the wrong plot of land, has resulted in high emotions, recriminations, and now a court case in which the developers are suing nearly everyone involved.
“It’s terrible. I felt like I wanted to cry,” Reynolds told SFGATE. “There is this house on my land, and it’s not mine.”
A truly sad story! How does this even happen!
Leaving the promised land
I feel bad for these people, kind of, but this is a classic me sowing, me reaping moment:
One of the first signs Barb Carter’s move to Florida wasn’t the postcard life she’d envisioned was the armadillo infestation in her home that caused $9,000 in damages. Then came a hurricane, ever present feuding over politics, and an inability to find a doctor to remove a tumor from her liver.
After a year in the Sunshine State, Carter packed her car with whatever belongings she could fit and headed back to her home state of Kansas — selling her Florida home at a $40,000 loss and leaving behind the children and grandchildren she’d moved to be closer to.
Sufficiently advanced technology
So says Clarke’s third law:
The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom is a phenomenal game, praised for being able to improve and iterate upon Breath of the Wild. In the weeks after the game’s release, it was written up with all sorts of breathless praise as people wondered how Nintendo managed to make a game that seemed to outstrip the technical capabilities of now seven-year-old Switch hardware.
To developers, the game looked like magic. But during a talk at the 2024 Game Developers Conference, Nintendo shared that it wasn’t magic but a distinct, well-executed development strategy that nevertheless seemed magical.
You deserve some good animal content
https://twitter.com/RedPandaEveryHr/status/1774944300041740532
https://twitter.com/twaniimals/status/1774929838953910443
https://twitter.com/raccoonhourly/status/1774912142883369202
https://twitter.com/twaniimals/status/1774891025560932422
https://twitter.com/OregonZoo/status/1774885968501465249
https://twitter.com/lynn2wine/status/1774399040534311056
https://twitter.com/twaniimals/status/1774526891631804821
https://twitter.com/CatWorkers/status/1774541377621139577
Have a good week.
Addendums
Sam Bankman-Fried’s Hallucinations of Grandeur. Trump's net worth plunges $1 billion, as Truth Social shares sink. Starvation has decimated gray whales off the Pacific Coast. Can the giants ever recover? As men struggle with mental health, manosphere influencers say depression doesn’t exist. You will no longer need to log in to use ChatGPT. Wait, why is there a camera hole in that Coke vending machine?