In another reality, The Prince of Egypt kicked off a new wave of American animation

I don’t want to leap to hyperbole in the first week of the year, but I am quite confident in saying that The Brothers Sun has the best fight scene with men in inflatable dinosaur costumes that I’ve seen in 2024. Sure, it’s the only one I’ve seen in this or any year, and I doubt there will be another anytime soon. But that doesn’t diminish how much it kicks ass. It’s simply great to start the year with a show that capably gives me something I’ve been lacking in television for some time: a series that is just as interested in good goofs as it is killer brawls.

The nominees for the New York Game Awards 2024 were announced yesterday, with Baldur's Gate 3 taking six nominations.

Ready Player One is a story about desperate people seeking escape from a collapsing society within the confines of a predatory digital world run by ultra-rich oligarchs who will do anything, including committing mass murder, in order to protect their positions of wealth and power. And now a company called Futureverse is teaming up with Warner Bros Discovery and author Ernest Cline to bring that particular Torment Nexus to life with the creation of the Readyverse, which aims to «to bring the promise of the open metaverse depicted in Cline’s Ready Player One novel and the blockbuster film adaptation into a tangible reality.»

Hasbro is giving the venerable board game Trivial Pursuit a modern shot in the arm with a new daily, Wordle-inspired version called Trivial Pursuit Infinite. Like Wordle, Trivial Pursuit Infinite will be a daily challenge — in this case, players answer six rapid-fire trivia questions and, in theory, share their results with friends and family.

Every year, we turn to a panel of trusted analysts to ask them what they see coming down the road, and ask them to assess their predictions from the previous year.

VR continues to expand. What was once thought of as a fad has now grown into a lucrative market, with Sony's PlayStation VR 2, the Meta Quest 3, HTC Vive, Valve Index and many more headsets all now competing to come out on top.

In yet another blow to China as it attempts to maintain a path towards self-reliance, Dutch-based lithography systems manufacturer ASML has revoked shipments of some of its DUV machines thanks to a request brought forward by the Biden administration. The export ban for such equipment was supposed to come into effect after a few weeks, which would have given China a little breathing room to procure sufficient machinery to continue mass producing chips for various applications, but the U.S. had other plans.

In a shocking development, the American magazine, the New Republic has crowned X owner Elon Musk as ‘The Scoundrel of the Year'. In a long article liberally seeded with choice name-calling, the magazine charted out the actions and decisions made by the billionaire in 2023 that got his this dubious award. The New Republic said, “He proved this year that he's not just evil but deeply stupid too”. This comes after Musk made the headlines recently for posting anti-semitic comments on X, which led to multiple advertisers boycotting the platform and also using expletives during a live interview.

No, this is not another woke idea. It’s not clickbait. And no, it’s not meant to be controversial. Stay with me, and I’ll convince you why having a woman as the protagonist of a God of War game (after Ragnarok) would be a great idea.

Amid rising concerns and multiple legal battles of authors, publishers, and media houses over large language models (LLMs) using their copyrighted work to train AI systems, the New York Times has filed a lawsuit against OpenAI and Microsoft. The publisher has alleged that the two AI firms have been using the former's copyrighted published work unauthorized to train their respective AI models. This lawsuit has now heightened the conflict between publishers and AI companies, as regulatory institutions still try to figure out the right way to control and monitor the data AI models are trained on. 

Today is Christmas and, as expected, most businesses and governments have shut down for the day and people are enjoying a holiday. Yet artificial intelligence developments have found a way to emerge even today. In a shocking development, the parent company of Paytm, One97 Communication, has fired more than 1000 employees. The underlying reason behind the Paytm layoff is reported to be the AI advancement of the company that has caused a few positions to be surplus to requirements. This and more in today's AI roundup. Let us take a closer look.

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