Skyblivion Lead Backs Fellow Modder’s Approval of Bethesda’s New Creations Paid Mods Program

Baldur's Gate 3 and Alan Wake 2 prepare to take another victory lap, as the pair lead nominations at the New York Game Awards 2024. Baldur's Gate 3 just edges ahead with six nominations, with Alan Wake 2 in second place, netting five nominations. Both are up for Game of the Year too, solidifying their place as two of the most celebrated games of 2023.

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

Just a couple of days after winning the Game of the Year and Best Story-Rich Game prizes at the Steam Awards 2023, Baldur's Gate 3 is once again preparing to clean up the house at the upcoming 13th Annual New York Game Awards. The New York Videogame Critics Circle (NYVGCC) has just announced the full list of nominees during a live stream event and Larian's outstanding cRPG has received six nominations in the Game of the Year, Best Writing, Best World, Best Music, and Best Acting (twice, for Amelia Tyler as the narrator of Baldur's Gate 3 and Neil Newbon as the High Elf Vampire Rogue companion character Astarion) categories.

An interesting new Starfield Faction mod adds the new Grindterra Industries faction to Bethesda's most recent hit title.

One of the things I really don't get about Starfield is the whole mech situation. Mechs are everywhere. There's a bunch of lore about mechs being used in the Colony Wars that took place decades earlier. There are mechs you can look at in factories and junkyards and museums. There was even a shot of a player walking past a mech shown in one of Starfield's early gameplay trailers, and an animated trailer heavily featured them.

It was a comeback year for the world's wealthiest. The combined net worth of the 500 richest people surged by $1.5 trillion in 2023, fully rebounding from the $1.4 trillion lost the year prior, according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index. Once again, their fortunes were closely correlated to the performance of tech stocks, which rose to fresh records this year despite recession fears, lingering inflation, lofty interest rates, and geopolitical turmoil. Tech billionaires saw their wealth grow by 48% or $658 billion, propelled by intense hype around artificial intelligence. No one did better than Elon Musk, who recaptured the title of world's richest person from French luxury tycoon Bernard Arnault. The Tesla Inc. chief executive officer netted an additional $95.4 billion through Thursday's close, bolstered by the success of Tesla and SpaceX, after losing $138 billion in 2022. His net worth is now more than $50 billion above Arnault's after a global slowdown in demand for luxury goods dented shares of LVMH Moet Hennessy Louis Vuitton SE.

ABC's multi-city New Year's Eve special and new music from the K-pop act TVXQ are some of the new television, movies and music headed to a device near you.

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.

Earlier this year, my left ear, previously every bit as capable as my right, started letting me down. I at first had many explanations for this — a buildup of ear wax, some side effect of a sinus infection or a prolonged reaction to a lot of flying recently. It took a specialist to break it to me that I had joined the ranks of 1.25 billion people in the world who suffer from mild to moderate hearing loss.

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. 

Apple has opened negotiations in recent weeks with major news and publishing organizations, seeking permission to use their material in the company's development of generative artificial intelligence systems, the New York Times reported on Friday.

Wordle was a lockdown phenomenon: one of those games that, merits aside, simply landed at the right time. I've kicked the habit now but like pretty much everyone else I had a Wordle phase with the family WhatsApp group and, yes, when I'm nearly out of chances I have gone running to my six-letter friend Google. Wordle's enormous popularity was such that, in January 2022, the New York Times purchased the game from creator Josh Wardle for a sum «in the low seven figures.»