Skunk is a strain of cannabis with notorious origins. Skunk #1 is credited to a breeder referred to as Skunkman Sam, although, Roadkill is an even older Skunk phenotype bred by the much more mysterious, Uncle Fester. (1) 1969, Hollywood, Sam (David Watson) began breeding Skunk phenos under the nickname, Jingles. Skunk is simply a […]

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The final trailer for Stranger of Paradise: Final Fantasy Origin has arrived, providing fans with almost five minutes of footage that mainly focuses on the game's story and characters. While the trailer has a lot to show ahead of Stranger of Paradise's March 18 release date, most people are hung up on its eccentric music choices, with Frank Sinatra's My Way coming in towards the end of the trailer.

Team Ninja's spin-off Final Fantasy game is designed to be an alternate retelling of the story of the original Final Fantasy, which sees four Warriors of Light going into battle against the forces of Chaos. The first part of the new trailer reintroduces the game's main heroes, as well as showing off brief clips and combat footage from the game's bosses, the four fiends of Chaos.

The second half of the trailer veers into more unexpected territory when Frank Sinatra's My Way comes into play, over an extended shot of protagonist Jack Garland standing in a golden wheat field. The rest of the trailer focuses on Jack, hinting at his past and teasing his present relationships with the game's other main characters.

This isn't the first time one of Stranger of Paradise has spurred discussion over its oddball music choices. One of the cutscenes included in last October's demo showed Jack blasting a Limp Bizkit-esque rock song from his phone while making an abrupt exit from a cutscene.

Stranger of Paradise: Final Fantasy Origins will release on March 18 on PC, PS5, and Xbox Series X|S, as well as PS4 and Xbox One. From everything we've seen of the game so far, Stranger of Paradise is a big departure from the usual Final Fantasy formula. For more on the upcoming game, check out Gamespot writer Phil Hornshaw's impressions from the game's second, extended demo last October.

Deals for today.

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Qatar Airways will not serve London Gatwick this summer, despite previously begin available to book. However, fellow oneworld…

The day of rest (and PlayStation games).

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Due to this shift in paradigm, the DEA was forced to shift their stance on certain drugs. First with cannabis and now with psychedelics. The public had to twist the arm of the government in order to have them say, “Sure we’re thinking about making it easier to research…just give us time!”

Cannabis strains (cultivars) cause plenty of debate. Seeds from a single variety can express a multitude of phenotypes and profiles. And clones of a single phenotype can mutate and succumb to change. Terpene and cannabinoid profiles can, however, be kept consistent down a long lineage of generations, clone after clone. In fact, genetic stability has […]

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Sotheby’s is hosting an auction that will feature a 555.55-carat black diamond. What’s the big clincher? Crypto enthusiasts are welcome to the table and can bid on the item with digital currency. Sotheby’s Says “Yes” to Crypto Bids Known as the “Enigma,” the diamond is listed in the Guinness Book of World Records as the...

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Saturday's highlights.

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Sotheby’s, the 277-year-old Brutish auction house, has revealed it’s accepting bitcoin ($BTC), ether ($ETH), and Tether’s $USDT stablecoin as payments for the sale of a rare 555.55-carat black diamond dubbed “The Enigma.” The diamond was declared the largest cut diamond in the world in the 2006 Guinness Book of World Records and was recently put […]

In last week's Friday 'Nite, my weekly Fortnite lore deep dive, I took a look at how much shared DNA there is between Epic's gargantuan battle royale game and the former zeitgeist-dominating TV series Lost. The conclusion, which hopefully I made obvious, is that higher-ups within Epic's storytelling department are Lost fans. In particular, it seems like Donald Mustard, the chief creative officer at Epic and de facto Fortnite lore-bible scribe, clearly nerded out for the show a decade ago, like so many of us did.

But Mustard is multifaceted, and this week I want to highlight another of his apparent influences, even as this one seems all the more unlikely for a game that is made up, in no small part, of teenagers buying avatars of their favorite Marvel superheroes.

In 2011, professor and historian Yuval Noah Harari published what would go on to become his career-defining work: Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind. A nearly 500-page primer on our species from its bloody beginnings to the modern day, the text went on to become a bestseller. To this day, it remains atop many public figures' recommended reading list, and Harari's subsequent books, Homo Deus and Lessons For The 21st Century, have become bestsellers of their own.

What does this have to do with Fortnite? Well, Mustard, famous for tweeting vague teases to Fortnite's story and future events, is clearly a fan.

What Mustard is referring to in his somewhat cryptic tweet seems to be the exact thesis of Sapiens. In it, Harari argues that homo sapiens survived to become the singular human species because of a cocktail of controversial reasons. Ultimately, the author lays out our survival as the result of our ability to lie. We lie to ourselves, lie to each other, lie about what we know about the world, and lie about what we don't. Harari says that it's this important and unique ability to tell stories, make promises, and plan for an unclear future that has been the inextinguishable flame of progress in human history. Harari put it best when he wrote:

"There are no gods in the universe, no nations, no money, no human rights, no laws, and no justice outside the common imagination of human beings."

Our consciousness, however confounding its origins, granted us this exclusive ability and ensured we would outlive (and in some cases slaughter with our own hands) some of the other six species of humans over the last 70,000 years.

While the pop anthropology book has sometimes been criticized for lacking evidence for certain claims about what early humans may have been like, it's nevertheless won over many thousands of superfans, and apparently, Mustard is one of them. Unexpectedly, this is important to the colorful, often ridiculous Fortnite not just because it provides insight into the mindset of its writers, but because it may reveal story details that the always tightlipped Epic Games doesn't intend to share yet.

In Sapiens, the phrase "imagined order" comes up a lot. Harari defines this as a power structure that doesn't exist in nature, but is, rather, one we invented as homo sapiens in order to maintain structure on Earth. In Fortnite, the Imagined Order is the apparent villainous faction that seeks to control the Zero Point, the life-giving energy at the heart of the island. The Imagined Order is presented as the bad guys, and though I have my doubts, maybe that will end up being true.

In Fortnite, the Imagined Order is, well, an imagined order.

But the faction's name reveals at least one thing: Its power is as theoretical as the persistent fan pipedream that the Chapter 1 island is coming back. The Imagined Order's dominance of the Fortnite island, Artemis, is not bestowed by nature. The group has simply planted its flag and decried all others as annoying interlopers.

From that point, what can we infer? For starters, it's possible, and I think very likely, that we haven't met the true grand rulers of the Fortnite world. Maybe the oft-mentioned but never seen Geno serves this role. Maybe Dr. Slone does not represent the tip of the IO's spear and other more powerful levels exist within the shadowy group who better understand the island. Maybe the Zero Point itself is conscious and pulling the strings of loopers, the IO, The Seven, and everyone else who journeys to the island.

While we don't have this particular answer yet, what we can assume is that the Imagined Order, be it good, evil, or something in between, is not the be-all and end-all ruler of the Fortnite multiverse. If it was, apparent Sapiens fan Donald Mustard would've given it another name. Instead, Epic is slyly nodding to the IO's fragile balance of power--its need to satiate its own questions of the omniverse by pretending everything is neat and tidy.

The IO is meant to be the instrument by which Dr. Slone and others make order out of chaos, but like in Sapiens, we Fortnite players may come to understand that these once-seemingly foundational structures are quite bendable, even breakable, in the end. Well, either that, or Epic is just teasing a Yuval Noah Harari skin coming soon to the Item Shop.