It’s strength against smarts in a struggle for the soul of postwar Britain Continue reading… Coinsmart. Europe's...

The China-affiliated state-sponsored threat actor used Log4j and zero-day bugs in the USAHerds animal-tracking software to hack into multiple government networks.

Let's talk about a Nintendo-published rhythm game that made its name on Nintendo DS and deserves a modern revival. You're probably thinking about Elite Beat Agents, but that's actually not the focus of today's discussion. However, it is important to our story, so let's begin there.

Osu! Tatakae! Ouendan is one of the more surprising success stories from a console that was a goldmine for under-appreciated and unique creative experiences. The game's wacky premise of a cheer squad helping strangers and fighting aliens in a rhythm game played using the touchscreen earned viral success as import websites and magazines touted the wonders of this bizarre iNiS-developed curio. Fast-forward a few years and Nintendo finally rewarded eager fans with a localized release, replacing the songs with Western hits and the cheer squad with spies. To this day, Elite Beat Agents remains one of the company's more bizarre published efforts of the last 20 years.

Read more

Russian invasion has led many crypto personalities to support Ukraine. Binance CEO and Cardano founder extend their support. Bitcoin donations ...

Read More...

Just about every week brings something new to Destiny 2, whether it's story beats, new activities, or interesting new combinations of elements that let players devastate each other in the Crucible. Iron Banter is our weekly look at what's going on in the world of Destiny and a rundown of what's drawing our attention across the solar system.

It has been quite the month in Destiny 2. Over the past few weeks, Bungie has dropped a ludicrous amount of information on players about The Witch Queen, ranging from new details regarding the story campaign and weapon crafting system to a closer look at Void 3.0. There's a huge amount of detail to take in, building a runway for the launch of the expansion in just a few days.

Honestly, it's been too much to contend with. Between our early look at The Witch Queen and Savathun's throne world, all the details about weapon crafting, the changes coming to Gambit and the Void subclasses, it's a lot to keep straight.

All that stuff is fun, sure, but the thing that's been baking my noodle is the lore. The Season of the Lost has finally concluded, leaving a few hanging threads (and blowing out the fan theory I liked that a blown Ahamkara wish was going to be Savathun's road to the Light). And we've been getting a bunch of looks at the upcoming expansion, in trailers, a vidoc, social media posts, and the Witch Queen Collector's Edition. It's creepy and excellent and I've been thinking about it too much.

So, let's talk about the story ahead of The Witch Queen real quick--emphasis on quick, because honestly, there's too much to hit here and we're rapidly running out of time. We got word from Fenchurch, we learned new stuff about Ikora and the Ahamkara, and we found out that there might be some traitorous Ghosts out there.

Welcome, o honored guest

This week, we got the last bit of story from the Season of the Lost, illustrating how we're going from Savathun hiding in a big crystal to Savathun wielding the Light next week. The short answer is: Savathun did a magic thing, though what that entails I don't really understand. In any event, Mara Sov failed to kill the Hive god of cunning, despite that being her plan for something like six months while preparing the ritual we saw during this week's "Exorcism" mission.

This suggests Savathun had an inside track on Mara's plan--either she guessed she'd be a target a long time ago (which, to be fair, is kind of obvious) and never intended to make herself vulnerable, or she gleaned that information at some point through her various means and made preparations. While the first possibility seems like the most likely, the second one is the more interesting of the two. After all, we've seen the weird things Savathun can do to people with Savathun's Song, the strange chant that (apparently) gives her some light mind-control powers. Did she use it to spy on Mara and get one step ahead of her impending assassination?

By the way, if you haven't played through Exorcism at this point, you should hopefully be able to do so. The mission launched with some bugs but Bungie has made some alterations that should make it easier to complete now. Just don't skip the cutscene.

"Exorcism" gave us the setup for The Witch Queen, and we've been seeing a whole lot of potential clues pop up in all the other info Bungie has spread around, including in its vidoc, launch trailer, and hands-off preview opportunity. That last one gave us a sense of what to expect with Savathun's throne world and the new story campaign that Bungie is bringing to the game with the expansion.

If you haven't watched it, I'd definitely suggest checking out the vidoc, which gives a pretty complete look at what's coming in the expansion. It also contains a lot of footage from cutscenes and the expansion at large, which in turn gives us a bunch of hints. We dug around and pulled out 26 things you might have missed from the Witch Queen vidoc and another 17 you might have missed in the launch trailer. There's a lot of weird stuff being teased!

Some of the coolest items, though, are the ones that maintain the Lovecraftian horror vibe The Witch Queen is throwing off. In the launch trailer, we see what looks like a vision, experienced by Ikora Rey, of the Hive's origins on their home planet of Fundament. Even that, though, is tinged with hints at deception. And then there's that glimpse of the Traveler, undamaged, in the sky. Seriously, it feels like the Traveler is working with Savathun. I know I keep saying this. It's real.

That shot of the Traveler, and the markings you can see on it (which are usually obscured by the giant chunks missing from the Traveler in the present), play into the continued hints that Destiny 2 is going into some f ascinating alchemical and spiritual territory. Check out Saniya Ahmed's look at the way alchemy seems to be a big part of The Witch Queen, and then speculate to yourself what it all means long-term.

Word from Fenchurch

In slightly more concrete story territory, I've been spending time catching up with the Witch Queen Collector's Edition, which is, as usual, pretty excellent. Bungie does a great job with its CEs, including a lot of fun items and also a fair share of secrets and puzzles for the community to uncover. Like, what is bungie.net/Circles, a URL hidden in the CE's documents? Who knows! But it's cool.

A little more straightforward is what's in the book contained in the CE, which is meant to represent a dossier for the Hidden, Ikora Rey's network of Guardian spies. The book is a series of reports and missives annotated by Ikora that give a look into her character, and it's all really informative of what's going on with a person who the game has largely held at arm's length. Ikora is not nearly as cool, collected, and meditative as she appears to be.

The lore book talks about Ikora's run-ins with the Ahamkara, the Destiny universe's frightening, shape-shifting dragons that are basically trickster gods running monkey's paw scams. Back before the era we play the game in, Guardians took part in something called the Great Hunt to eliminate all the Ahamkara, Ikora included. She nearly got killed by one Ahamkara as it tricked her into making a wish, only to be saved by the legendary Guardian Wei Ning, and defeated another Ahamkara by, essentially, wishing to be someone who could not be tempted by wishes. There's a big implication that meditative, even-tempered Ikora exists because that's who she needed to be to survive the Great Hunt.

In the journal, Ikora is extremely worried nobody likes her, because if nobody likes Ikora, nobody will trust her, and if nobody trusts her, they're not going to follow her as she tries to lead them against the growing threat of the Darkness. It's a fun problem to hint at, drawing us closer to the Warlock Vanguard than we've ever been, while also making it clear what massive repercussions something like Ikora's likeability factor can be for the Destiny 2 story at large. I really think we're going to get into Ikora's head a lot more in the coming year--she's clearly the central figure of The Witch Queen's story, as Elsie Bray was central to Beyond Light. We're getting some character development because of that, and I'm expecting a lot more.

The journal also includes a few other fun tidbits I mean to dig into deeper in articles in the next few days. One is that there's a whole group of Ghosts who kind of function as conscientious objectors--they haven't found their Guardians, and they like to hang around talking about whether they ever will. There's a suggestion in the report about those Ghosts that they might be purposely avoiding finding Guardians. And since we know the Hive wind up with Ghosts in The Witch Queen, we get a very real implication that maybe those Hive Ghosts chose to switch sides. The report discusses how the Ghosts are fascinated by the Books of Sorrow, the Hive creation myth, and how they think the Hive are a victim class manipulated by their worms. Maybe it's not the Traveler that betrays humanity, but the Ghosts who don't agree with them.

There are some other things worth mentioning, but my favorite is a report from Fenchurch Eververse--yeah, that Fenchurch. There aren't a ton of lore entries about the guy, but we know that when the Guardian isn't sourcing antiquities and oddities for the Eververse Store out in the field, he's working as one of Ikora's Hidden. Back during the Season of the Drifter in 2019, a report from Fenchurch served as a particularly weird lore entry with some strange implications. In it, he had a dream about Eris, woke up to find a Hive thrall standing over him acting strangely, and killed it to discover a chunk of black material that, when touched, gave him another vision of Eris. For years, that lore entry alluded to some weirdness, but we never fully understood it.

The Collector's Edition contains another report from Fenchurch that, finally, explains that earlier report. It answers some questions, like the identity of the other person in the original vision (it's Mara Sov, actually), and raises others. It also gives a hint of what Mara's role might be in the story of The Witch Queen and beyond. It's all very fascinating.

The hours between us and The Witch Queen are dwindling, but there's still more to unpack, like the Vanguard-like Hive transmissions Bungie is sharing on its Instagram, or the two days in which Savathun apparently took over the Destiny Twitter account. Expect a lot more to talk about next week; hopefully there will be enough time to write this column. In the meantime, feel free to share the strange, interesting, or mysterious story hints that are baking your noodles in the comments below.

The collector's editions for Destiny 2 expansions include a lot of the usual stuff, like statues and stickers, but the most interesting items included are always their physical lore books. The book inside The Witch Queen Collector's Edition doesn't hit quite as hard as the journal included in the Beyond Light CE (which details how Clovis Bray was almost mind-controlled by the Vex), but it does feature a bunch of interesting tidbits about Ikora Rey, the Darkness, and the Hidden. It also gives us something we've been waiting for: word from Fenchurch.

The lore book in The Witch Queen CE sets the stage for the story of the expansion, though one fascinating entry in particular fits nicely in with the story we've seen unfold in the Season of the Lost. That season was all about Mara Sov, the Awoken queen, who has been missing in action since all the way back during the Forsaken expansion. Mara has been around, though, even if we didn't know the full details of her exploits. In fact, the CE lore book tells us that in the period between Forsaken and the Shadowkeep expansion, she was hanging out with Eris Morn. She might also have destroyed one of the Darkness' Pyramid ships.

Within the Witch Queen CE lore book is a report from Fenchurch Everis, who most players will know from a voice line delivered by Tower cosmetics merchant Tess Everis at the Eververse kiosk: "No word from Fenchurch today. He must have found something interesting." Canonically, Fenchurch is the guy who finds all the weird artifacts Tess sells in the Eververse Store, but he also has a story role with the Vanguard, serving as one of the Hidden, Ikora's secret group of Guardian spies. The entry in the Witch Queen CE is one of his reports to Ikora, which actually completely explains another of his previous reports--one that was among the spookiest recent lore entries in the game.

That lore entry is called "Fragment," and it appeared way back during the Season of the Drifter in 2019. In it, Fenchurch submits a report about a day when he was patrolling on the moon with some other Guardians, before he suddenly was overwhelmed by a splitting headache. He went to lie down, but instead instantly fell asleep and had a strange dream. The lore entry mentions specific people in the dream, but Fenchurch uses Hidden codes that obscured who the main participants are. One is definitely Eris, but the other--VIP #0704--was unknown until now.

In his dream, Fenchurch saw Eris and tried to catch up to her in a crowd, but couldn't. He woke up a few moments later to find a Hive thrall standing there, looking at him and not moving. Fenchurch blasted the thrall and found a weird piece of black material, the fragment the entry is named for, sticking out of its chest. Fenchurch's Ghost, Neville, tried to scan the fragment but had a hard time doing so. Eventually, Fenchurch touched it with his hand and had a sudden vision.

The vision showed Eris and VIP #0704 together in a field of black debris, apparently that of a destroyed ship, with #0704 dressing a big gash in Eris' thigh. Before the vision ended, Eris turned and said something to Fenchurch in Russian, which roughly translates to "pathetic" in English. (We never do find out what this Russian part is all about.)

Eris was missing for a long time between The Taken King expansion and her return in Shadowkeep.

The CE lore entry has Fenchurch offering a new report on the vision, the weird thrall, and the black item he found stuck in its chest, after talking to Eris and convincing her to tell him what the hell was going on. Eris explains that Fenchurch's vision was an event that actually happened, and that she sent the thrall to find a Guardian in order to make a report in case she and VIP #0704 died doing whatever they were doing.

There's a whole lot more to the situation we learn from the new report, though. First and foremost, we can pick up that VIP #0704 is, in fact, Mara Sov.

Fenchurch reports what Eris tells him: Between the Forsaken expansion and the Shadowkeep expansion, Mara consulted VIP #0101 (who we soon figure out is Elsie Bray, the Exo Stranger) about the approaching Pyramid ships. (As an aside, assigning #0101 to Elsie has to be a Terminator joke: T-101 was the designation for Arnold Schwarzennegger's killer robot in a movie about time-traveling robots, and Elsie is a time-traveling robot.) We saw during Forsaken that Mara was aware of the Darkness' Black Fleet before just about anybody else--she's been making plans to deal with it since the original Destiny.

Using a combination of Elsie's future tech from other timelines and some time traveler insights, as well as the Warmind artificial intelligence Rasputin and the AI Failsafe from the Exodus Black, Mara was able to pinpoint one of the Pyramid ships within the solar system long before the rest of the ships showed up during the Season of Arrivals, and before the one on the moon was discovered in Shadowkeep. This one was in orbit around a dwarf planet called 136199 Eris, a body that exists in the solar system (in the real world as well as the game) but which is pretty distant. Together, Mara and Eris made for 136199 Eris to see what the deal was with the Pyramid ship.

The Pyramid ship on the moon was there before the rest of the Black Fleet arrived in the Season of Arrivals, and apparently it wasn't the only one.

What happened next isn't super clear. Apparently, after discovering the ship, the pair moved closer to investigate. Fenchurch doesn't know exactly what happened after that. Apparently, Mara left the ship to get closer to the Pyramid, and then even abandoned her spacesuit--which sounds very similar to the origin story for Mara described in the lore book Marasenna. Fenchurch isn't sure, but he believes Mara either interacted with or even entered the Pyramid ship; he also doesn't know if Mara was able to affect the Pyramid at all, or if the debris field he saw in his vision was actually the result of Mara destroying the Pyramid ship. What he does know, however, is that whatever happened caused Mara to die.

Death isn't the end for Mara, however. Like Hive gods Savathun, Oryx, and Xivu Arath, Mara has managed to use the power of the Dreaming City and her Techeun witches to create a "throne world" on the Ascendant Plane--in fact, if you've ventured into the Shattered Throne dungeon in the Dreaming City, you've seen it. A person or entity with a throne world can be killed in the material world, but they survive in the Ascendant Plane, which essentially renders them immortal. That's why, during the Taken King expansion, Guardians had to kill Oryx in his throne world in the King's Fall raid--if they didn't, Oryx wouldn't stay dead.

The throne world is how Mara survived her apparent death during The Taken King, when the Awoken fleet attacked and disabled Oryx's Dreadnaught. And she survived her death here, too, by zapping back to her throne world. At this point, though, Savathun and her daughter, Dul Incaru, had taken up residence there, as we see in the Shattered Throne dungeon. Eris used her weird Hive powers to pull Mara back from the throne world, but to do that, the two of them had to fight Dul Incaru and Savathun.

Fenchurch says that Eris and Mara made it through that battle and wound up on the surface of 136199 Eris. However, the fight was a hard one, and Eris was injured--when Fenchurch saw Mara treating Eris' wound amid the debris on a frozen planet, this is why. We still don't know what all that debris actually is, though.

Mara sacrificed herself against Oryx during the Battle of Saturn, but thanks to her throne world, she can't die.

Before this, the relationship between Mara and Eris, who worked for the Awoken queen for years, was a strained one, presumably because of the trauma Mara suffered during the battle with Oryx in The Taken King and her death afterward. Mara sacrificed a lot for Eris' plan to take down Oryx, including a huge number of the Awoken people, and in the end, her brother, Uldren Sov. But after the fight with Dul Incaru and Savathun, and faced with the prospect they might die, Mara and Eris managed to reconcile. That point is important for a couple reasons: First, Mara and Eris are both a big part of the story of The Witch Queen; and second--according to Elsie Bray in the dark timeline she seeks to prevent--Eris is eventually corrupted by the Darkness and becomes a bigger threat than even Savathun. The Dark Future lore book says that in that timeline, Eris eventually helps the Darkness defeat the Traveler and the Light, and is even responsible for Mara's death.

Back on the dwarf planet, Eris was worried she might not survive the ordeal; though she's a former Guardian, she has no Ghost, and is therefore mortal. Fenchurch says that Eris used some Hive magic to zap a report onto a piece of the black metal in the debris field and then transported it to the moon, along with the compulsion for a "lesser Hive" to bring that report to the nearest Guardian, which is how the thrall came to Fenchurch and the reason he saw the vision.

The report ends with Fenchurch frustrated that Eris' explanation of the vision he saw leaves even more questions, specifically about what Mara did to the Pyramid ship in orbit around 136199 Eris. Was she able to destroy it, and if so, how? Can she do it again, and if not, why not?

In her response, Ikora notes that, like Savathun, Mara is moving pieces around a chessboard and she keeps secrets for a greater purpose. She also suggests that Mara might be trying to come to terms with the fact that she won't be able to control events as much as she wants.

Mara squared off with Savathun and was beaten in the Season of the Lost, but the two queens are still locked in a battle of wits.

"I believe Mara has begun to consider that she may not be the prime executor of her own endgame," Ikora writes to Fenchurch. "She may be just one component of the bomb--the payload or timing device. At the end of her own journey, she is necessary but not sufficient. She can no longer fight alone."

It seems Mara has a big role in the story to come, as we saw set up in Forsaken and lately in the Season of the Lost. Destiny 2's story lately has been pushing the idea that the way to defeat the threat of the Darkness is through alliances, and this lore entry gives a sense that we'll need to continue to strengthen our relationship with Mara Sov. It also hints at more of what Mara might have up her sleeve--she's seen a whole lot of things we have no idea about, and I have a feeling we're going to see her take on the Darkness directly before too long.

Hurt yourself to hurt your enemies worse.

The CIA has a secret, undisclosed data repository that includes information collected about Americans, two Democrats on the Senate Intelligence Committee said. While neither the agency nor lawmakers would disclose specifics about the data, the senators alleged the CIA had long hidden details about the program from the public and Congress.

read more

Bitcoin Events is excited to be hosting the definitive African blockchain and cryptocurrency event, the Blockchain Africa Conference, on 17 and 18 March 2022. This event marks the annual conference’s 8th and 2nd virtual edition and introduces attendees to some of the most influential cryptocurrency and blockchain industry figures. These acclaimed experts will assemble at … Continue reading "Blockchain Africa Conference Returns for Its 8th Edition and Announces Speakers"

The post Blockchain Africa Conference Returns for Its 8th Edition and Announces Speakers appeared first on CryptoCurrencyWire.

Between 2020 and 2021, a China-linked advanced persistent threat (APT) actor ran an espionage campaign targeting financial institutions in Taiwan, Symantec reports.

Tracked as Antlion, the hacking group is believed to have been active since at least 2011, and is likely backed by the Chinese government.

read more

With so many wonderful roulette movies is tough to choose the best one. To ease your search, we selected a few titles highly recommended by viewers and critics.

The post Roulette Movies appeared first on BestCasinoSites.net.

When 2013 began, the general public had no idea who Edward Joseph Snowden was, but by the end of the year, everyone knew his...