Hopes

Earlier this month, Spotify took its first step into the metaverse by partnering with Roblox to create the company’s first island and yesterday (May 24) it unveiled K-Park, a “homage to all things k-pop”. An off-shoot of Spotify Island, the limited-time world will allow fans to interact with Stray Kids and Sunmi through signed digital merch and virtual meet and greets. K-Park also hosts a special K-Pop cafe “with special Korean treats like Dalgona Coffee, Patbingsu (Korean shaved ice with toppings) and Boong Uh Bbang…

Image via DC Films Johnny Depp, Amber Heard, Warner Bros. exec Walter Hamada, and Zack Snyder would make for an intriguing — if not extremely contentious — line-up of celebrity poker players that we would pay top dollar to see. They also represent some of the names thrown around during the latest testimony of an ongoing trial of dueling defamation lawsuits. Hamada, who is the boss for WB’s DC studio division, testified Tuesday that any negative press by Depp or his lawyers, directed at Heard, did not impact her…

Edelgard and co. get some new duds The next faction spotlight for Fire Emblem Warriors: Three Hopes is here, and it’s all about Edelgard and the Black Eagles. The Adrestian Empire is the banner they’ll be fighting under, but Three Houses players will remember this motley crew as the Black Eagles. Edelgard is here, of course, but in today’s trailer we get to see all the former students in action. There are some neat touches here, considering the variety of skillsets in the Black Eagles. Two little aspects I dug were…

The world was ready for a better surgical adhesive. But Pittsburgh wasn’t. So a decade after its founding Cohera Medical, a promising startup based on an invention by University of Pittsburgh (Pitt) chemical engineer Eric Beckman, left town for what its owners considered a more favorable location for biomedical innovation—Research Triangle Park in North Carolina. This month, the National Science Foundation (NSF) rolled out a huge new funding program aimed at halting that type of…

‘A story can be a weapon,” a character says with metatextual significance at one point in this historical, fact-based drama about the early days of the Arab-Israeli conflict, set in 1948. But Israeli director Avi Nesher seems to be also hoping that this story will be something more like a surgical suture, helping to heal a situation that’s one big mass of psychic wounds left by highly weaponised narratives about the past. It’s an idealistic if laudable goal, and Image of Victory sets out to heal by telling its story from…

For most people, their introduction to the Fire Emblem series was a pair of weirdly out-of-place Smash Bros. characters wielding swords. Originally a Japan-exclusive, the series got a slow start gaining popularity in the west, but by the time Fire Emblem: Three Houses hit the Nintendo Switch, the series had become one of the most popular tactics titles, with a dash of life sim, ever released. Most titles in this series are distinct from one another, not all that unlike the Final Fantasy series, but considering just…