If you’re hoping to get Helldivers 2 for less than $5 (which is an absolute steal at that price), this Fanatical Winter Mystery Bundle is the opportunity for you. Of course, luck needs to be on your side, but for as low as $1 / £1, you have the chance to get Helldivers 2 for a cup of coffee, as well as other triple-A titles like Indiana Jones and the Great Circle. Continue reading Don’t miss the chance to grab Helldivers 2 and nine other games for under $8 MORE FROM PCGAMESN: Helldivers 2 weapons, Helldivers 2 stratagems, Helldivers 2 system requirements

If you were feeling smugly content after upgrading to a 2TB gaming SSD, then prepare to feel humiliated, as SK Hynix has just announced a new PCIe 5.0 SSD with a whopping 61TB capacity. Not only that, but the firm intends to double that space to 122TB next year, with a massive 244TB version also in the works. To put that figure in context, 61TB is enough space to store a massive 160GB game, such as Stalker 2, over 380 times. Of course, these massive drives aren’t intended to rival the best gaming SSD options you can buy right now but are instead designed for data centers. However, what starts in the data center often filters down to PC gaming hardware, and the latest tech clearly makes it possible to manufacture SSDs with an astronomical amount of storage space. Continue reading This colossal SSD can hold over 380 copies of Stalker 2, and it’s fast too MORE FROM PCGAMESN: Best graphics card, Best gaming PC, Best SSD for gaming

'Humor Is Dead'! Rep. Biggs Reminds Journo Trump Was Joking About Making Canada the 51st State

You don't always think about love stories when it comes to gaming, but there are quite a few that stand out. Some of gaming's most famous characters have had them and while some of only brief, they share a human side to these often hard to connect with characters.

NEW: Florida Announces Attempted Felony Murder Charges Against Would-Be Trump Assassin

Skateboarder Carlos Ribeiro during X Games Ventura 2024. | Photo by Ronald Martinez/Getty Images Roku got the exclusive US streaming rights to next year’s X Games Aspen and a “soon-to-be-announced” X Games event in the summer, the company announced on Wednesday. Both events will air on Roku’s free 24/7 sports channel as the service continues its push into live sports. Though the X Games were founded by ESPN in the ‘90s, the sports network sold majority ownership to MSP Sports in 2022. Since then, the X Games have streamed on various platforms, including YouTube, Twitch, ESPN, ABC, and the VR app Xtadium. But now, X Games Aspen will appear on the Roku Sports Channel, a newly launched hub for Roku’s live Sunday MLB games, Formula E races, and other sports-related content. This channel lives within the overarching Roku Channel that comes pre-installed on most Roku devices and is also available on the web, as well as an app on third-party smart TVs and mobile phones. Additionally, Roku launched a free ad-supported streaming TV channel dedicated to the X Games, which will air “programming highlights, clips, interviews, archival content, and more” leading up to the event. X Games Aspen takes place from January 23rd to the 25th, with more details to come on an “additional” X Games coming this summer. Roku is just one of many streaming platforms getting into sports, with Netflix airing live NFL games on Christmas Day, Max launching a live sports add-on, and Amazon Prime Video picking up streaming rights to NBA games. Even the tournament series Street League Skateboarding signed a deal with the right-wing streaming platform Rumble.

Cath Virginia / The Verge | Photos from Getty Images The Supreme Court agreed to hear arguments on whether a bill that could ban TikTok violates the First Amendment. The arguments will take place on January 10th, just over a week before a potential ban could take effect. While the outcome is far from guaranteed, SCOTUS’ decision to take up the case is a small win for TikTok, which is barreling toward expulsion from the US unless the court throws out or pauses the law, or its China-based parent company ByteDance agrees to sell it in time. The law at the center of the case, the Protecting Americans from Foreign Adversary Controlled Applications Act, seeks to prohibit apps like TikTok from being owned by companies in a set list of foreign adversary countries. The Department of Justice successfully defended the law as constitutional before the DC Circuit Court of Appeals by arguing the government had a compelling interest in protecting US national security from foreign influence. Congress voted overwhelmingly to pass the bill after classified briefings in which intelligence officials shared concerns over how China could potentially use the app to exert influence over the kinds of content US users see, and potentially access sensitive data — though publicly, the government has not come forward with declassified information showing such dangers are already happening. The arguments before the Supreme Court will consolidate two cases against the law, from both TikTok and a group of creators on the platform. The parties will get a total of two hours to make their cases. The court said it would defer a decision on whether to halt the law until after the oral arguments. The lower court had declined to stop the law from taking effect pending the Supreme Court’s review. TikTok filed for an emergency injunction to the Supreme Court just two days ago. That same day, CEO Shou Zi Chew was set to meet with President-elect Donald Trump at Mar-a-Lago. Trump, who has noted his success on TikTok in the campaign, at one point seemingly promised to save the app, although his more recent comments post-election make it less clear how exactly he’d plan to do that. The deadline for the ban — unless the court stops it — is the day before Trump’s inauguration. The president has discretion to extend the deadline 90 days, though one big remaining question is whether China would even agree to let ByteDance sell the app.

Surf’s homepage is just feeds. It’s feeds all the way down. | Image: David Pierce / Flipboard Mike McCue, the CEO of Flipboard and an internet entrepreneur since the Netscape days, is a true believer in the fediverse. He doesn’t love the word: he’d much rather call it “the social web.” But whatever you want to call the open, decentralized, interconnected social networking experience that apps like Mastodon and Bluesky promise, McCue is absolutely convinced it’s the future. For the last year or so, McCue and his team have been completely overhauling the Flipboard platform to make it a part of the social web. Once the change is done, Flipboard will be a fully decentralized way to discover and read stuff from across the internet. The process seems to be going fine, though it doesn’t seem poised to take over the fediverse the way Threads could if it fully opened up. At the same time, though, the Flipboard team has been working on something even bigger. That something is an app called Surf (not to be confused with the other recently launched Surf), which McCue called “the world’s first browser for the social web.” He first said that to me a little over a year ago, when Surf was mostly just a bunch of mock-ups and a slide deck. Now, the app has been in beta for the last few months — I’ve been using it most of that time — and a public beta is launching today. Not everyone can get in; McCue says he wants to bring in some curators and creators first, in order for there to be lots of stuff in Surf when everyone else gets access. And he promises that’s coming soon. But wait, sorry, back to the whole “browser for the social web” thing. McCue’s best explanation of Surf’s big theory is this: in a decentralized social world, the internet will be less about websites and more about feeds. “You won’t put in, like, theverge.com and go to the website for The Verge, but you can put in ‘the verge’ and go to the ActivityPub feed for The Verge.” Your Threads timeline is a feed; every Bluesky Starter Pack is a feed; every creator you follow is just producing a feed of content. Surf’s job, in that world, is to help you discover and explore all those feeds. The app can see three kinds of feeds: anything from ActivityPub, which means things like Mastodon and Threads and Pixelfed; anything from AT Protocol, which means Bluesky; and any RSS feed. You can search for feeds by topic, publisher, or creator; you can curate your own feeds by combining other feeds. And then you can share those feeds, which other people can combine and recombine. It’s all a little confusing. Just imagine a nicely designed, vertically scrolling feed, somewhere between a Twitter timeline and the Apple News homepage. Image: David Pierce / Surf You can have any kind of content in Surf — which means the app has to be good at absolutely everything. A feed can be made up of almost any kind of content, which presents a tricky design problem for Surf. It has to be equally adept as a social network, a news app, a video platform, and a podcast player. Combining all that stuff into one place isn’t just the goal; it’s the whole point. And it’s very hard to do all of those things well. Personally, the most eye-opening moment in my time testing Surf has been the way the app lets you automatically filter a feed. I set up a feed that’s just all my favorite stuff: my go-to podcasts, must-read blogs, a couple of can’t-miss YouTube channels, and my favorite folks on Bluesky. I can open that feed and see everything, in order, no matter what it is or who it came from. But I can also filter it to just show all the videos in the feed or tap on “Listen” to turn it into a podcast queue. Surf isn’t yet a full-featured app for any of these uses, much less all of them, but it’s already a pretty useful app for all kinds of media. It presents videos like an endlessly scrolling TikTok feed, which is actually a pretty fun way to flip through a YouTube channel. Posts with links are formatted like news stories, with big images and headlines. It’s not a particularly dense timeline-scrolling experience, either — the whole thing is more like Flipboard’s flippy magazines than the For You pages we’re used to. Because it’s trying to compile a bunch of disparate platforms into one, search can be messy — I found five profiles with my name and picture, for instance, and it’s not obvious which one is the one you’re looking for. Surf is also designed to be interactive, but right now, that pretty much only works if you’re a Mastodon user liking Mastodon posts. For most other things, it’s either kind of broken or entirely broken. For now, and probably for a while, Surf is going to be much better as a consumption tool than a social one. McCue sees the social web as the beginning of an entirely new internet. He even uses old-web metaphors to explain these early products: the current era we’re in is like AOL back in the day, “a walled garden that contained all the innovation in the walled garden”; Surf is like old-school Yahoo, “a collection of feeds that other people have made.” He wants to enable paid feeds, so publishers, creators, and curators can make money on the platform. He has big ideas about custom designs for feeds, so they can look more like homepages. There’s an awful lot left to build — not to mention a lot of protocols and tools left to convince all the internet’s platforms and publishers to work with. But I’ve been talking to McCue about this for two years now, and his conviction and optimism haven’t wavered a bit. When I tell him that I definitely wavered — that I was once all in on ActivityPub as the future but am worried seeing Bluesky grow on another protocol and hearing some of the issues Threads and others are having with ActivityPub — he just laughs. One, he says, that’s how it always goes in these early phases. Two, that’s what Surf is meant to fix. To prove his point, McCue opens up a feed full of basketball content, created by David Rushing. Rushing was a big figure in early NBA Threads, a community that has splintered thanks to some of Threads’ moderation and community policies. Now, people are posting with #nbathreads on Bluesky and elsewhere, too. It’s messy. But Surf, McCue says, can bring it back together. He starts scrolling Rushing’s custom feed: “You’re seeing Bluesky posts, Mastodon posts, Threads posts, Flipboard posts, anything with the hashtag #nbathreads across the whole social web. If you post a podcast, if you post a YouTube video, anything with the hashtag #nbathreads, it’ll show up in this feed.” Rushing can add or remove individual posts or even use Flipboard’s filtering systems to get rid of anything that feels political, mentions gambling, or whatever else he wants to do. McCue is practically giddy as he scrolls through all this basketball content. This is the whole thing, right here. “Ultimately,” he says, “you’re just not going to care whether something is on Threads — I don’t write you a separate kind of email because you’re on Gmail, right?” People will use lots of apps, there will be lots of communities, and that’s good. “There are nerds on Bluesky, there are nerds on Threads. How can all the nerds gather together?” That’s the question for the fediverse — sorry, the social web — and Surf looks like it might be the best answer anyone’s come up with so far.

Is it a bird? Is it a plane? | Image: Getty Okay, I get it, we’re all sick of the drones. I went to two holiday parties over the weekend in the New Jersey suburbs, and it was all anyone wanted to talk about. The news coverage has been breathless, all-consuming, and most importantly, completely unhinged. No one knows anything. The cops don’t know anything. The feds sure don’t sound like they know anything. Sure, everyone has a theory. Depending on where you fall on the DSM-5 spectrum for conspiracy-addled nonsense, they could be a few DJI Mavic enthusiasts having a laugh, a bunch of small planes, or a full-on alien invasion of our nation’s most consequential state. But the people who are supposed to know things — the ones whose jobs are to have access to all the technology and equipment afforded by bloated law enforcement budgets, the ones who have security clearance and subpoena power and all the various trappings of authority that the vast majority of us can only dream of — don’t know shit. Actually, it’s worse than that: they think they know shit, and they are willing to confidently stand before the public and say as much, even when they actually don’t know shit. Here are the best examples I could find of current and former elected leaders and government officials spouting utterly deranged nonsense about the drone sightings. Jeff Van Drew What we’ve uncovered is alarming—drones flying in from the direction of the ocean, possibly linked to a missing Iranian mothership.This is a national security crisis we cannot ignore.Bring them down now. pic.twitter.com/YicWkcoJR1— Congressman Jeff Van Drew (@Congressman_JVD) December 11, 2024 Jeff Van Drew is a member of Congress from New Jersey, where the bulk of the sightings have taken place. He’s also a member of the House Judiciary Committee, which entitles him to high-level security briefings. He should know shit! But alas, he does not, as evidenced by his completely factless musings about the drones coming from an “Iranian mothership” anchored off the Jersey Shore. “I’m going to tell you the real deal. Iran launched a mothership that contains these drones,” Van Drew told Fox News. “It’s off the East Coast of the United States of America. They’ve launched drones.” When someone says they’re going to “tell you the real deal,” you know you’re about to get body-slammed with some grade-A horsepucky. The Pentagon denied this, but Van Drew doubled down, slamming defense department officials for treating us like we’re “stupid” and withholding information about the drones. And fearing that his fearmongering about Iran was insufficiently fearful, he broadened the scope to include “China” and “somebody else.” Literally one day later, he walked the whole thing back in a tersely worded statement. (No Fox News appearances for embarrassing mea culpas, I guess.) He acknowledged that the Iranian mothership he previously said on national television was off the coast of the United States was actually — get this — still in Iran. “This new information only brings us closer to figuring out what is really going on,” Van Drew said. Yes, congressman, thank you for your service. Larry Hogan Last night, beginning at around 9:45 pm, I personally witnessed (and videoed) what appeared to be dozens of large drones in the sky above my residence in Davidsonville, Maryland (25 miles from our nation’s capital). I observed the activity for approximately 45 minutes. Like… pic.twitter.com/Ipx8ctLmhs— Governor Larry Hogan (@GovLarryHogan) December 13, 2024 The drone sightings hysteria has been a golden opportunity for politicians who like to get their hands dirty. If he was still in office, you could picture ex-New York Governor Andrew Cuomo in some flight tower, wearing a parka and a headset, operating the radar equipment himself. Instead, we’ve got grainy iPhone footage from former Maryland Governor Larry Hogan, who claims he “personally witnessed (and videoed)” several large drones hovering over his home. See! It’s not just New Jersey! Maryland has unexplained phenomena, too. I mean, sure, some of the lights Hogan spotted were just the constellation Orion, according to a community guidelines note appended to his tweet. And the stars Sirius and Procyon. But hey, at least he got some fresh air. “Like many who have observed these drones, I do not know if this increasing activity over our skies is a threat to public safety or national security,” he said on X. (Last week, the FBI and the Department of Homeland Security said that “many of the reported sightings are actually manned aircraft, operating lawfully” and weren’t a threat to public safety.) Michael Melham Belleville Mayor Michael Melham wasn’t going to let this opportunity pass. As mayor of a relatively small New Jersey suburb (population approximately 35,000), he knew he needed to use his preciously allotted five minutes on Fox 5 to say something that was going to get him noticed and generate some content. He needed to up the stakes. What if the drones were looking to steal our nuclear secrets? What if the drones were looking to steal our nuclear secrets? “What might they be looking for,” Melham mused. “Well, potentially, we’re aware of a threat that came into Port Newark. Maybe that’s radioactive material. There was, and there is, an alert that’s out right now that radioactive material in New Jersey has gone missing, on December 2nd.” First of all, Melham’s not technically wrong. The Nuclear Regulatory Commission did say some radioactive material went missing in a recent alert. But it’s missing some important context, namely that said material is cancer screening equipment used to calibrate PET scanners. And the amount in question was “unlikely to cause permanent injury.” Not exactly the nuclear codes! Donald Trump pic.twitter.com/IVKeU3dqY6— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) December 14, 2024 It kind of feels like President-elect Donald Trump is the only one having fun with the drone sightings. In addition to trolling one of his favorite whipping boys, ex-NJ Governor Chris Christie, Trump is also totally in his element when he gets to spout inane bullshit about something on which nobody can agree what’s real and what’s not. First, he said he was canceling his trip to his golf course in Bedminster, New Jersey, because drones were spotted there. (The Federal Aviation Administration had already issued temporary flight restrictions prohibiting drone flights over Bedminster as well as above the Picatinny Arsenal, a military installation.) He claimed, without evidence, that the military knew where the drones “took off from.” And in a social media post, he urged people to “shoot them down!!!” Shooting in the air is a bad idea! Shooting in the air is a bad idea! Especially in densely populated areas like New Jersey. Do not listen to this man. I guess maybe that’s been the key takeaway to all this drone silliness. Do not listen to any of these people. Sure, they have official-sounding titles — congressman, mayor, president! — but really, they’re just like us. They don’t know shit, but they’re happy to pretend that they do. They look up in the sky and they see a few lights, and suddenly, they’re like one of those uncontacted Amazonian tribes that has never witnessed modern technology. The FBI, Pentagon, Homeland Security, and FAA released a joint statement yesterday that essentially throws a bucket of cold water on all the speculation. Their assessment: “a combination of lawful commercial drones, hobbyist drones, and law enforcement drones, as well as manned fixed-wing aircraft, helicopters, and stars mistakenly reported as drones.” In other words, exactly what you would expect when you look up at night in a densely populated area in the year 2024. The most boring answer is usually the one that’s most likely to be right.

A few days ago, we saw a purported Nintendo Switch 2 case that seemed to confirm the next-gen console's new design. The Switch 2 console seen in the dbrand case looked like what you'd expect from the 2025 device. It's still a handheld tablet-like console with Joy-Cons on the sides, but it appeared to have a larger display. The controllers were almost identical to their predecessors but slightly larger to match the console's bigger footprint. They also featured a few additional buttons. It was nothing too crazy, not that we expected Nintendo to offer a significant redesign with the Switch 2. But, as it turns out, dbrand's leak isn't even our best unofficial look at the Switch 2. A YouTuber got their hands on a Nintendo Switch 2 dummy console from a different accessory maker. It's a high-quality model with detachable magnetic controllers that match what we saw in the dbrand leak. It's very likely this is our first look at the full Nintendo Switch 2 design, months ahead of the official announcement. It's almost certainly the real deal — if this is fake, someone went through a whole lot of trouble just to get five minutes of attention. Continue reading... The post Switch 2 hands-on video with a dummy unit likely reveals Nintendo’s new design appeared first on BGR. Today's Top Deals Today’s deals: $279 iPad 10, 20% off gift cards, huge Sonos sale, ultimate DEWALT power tool set, more Today’s deals: $40 Magic Bullet, $38 Sony Bluetooth speaker, $25 myQ, Energizer batteries, more Today’s deals: Free Blink cameras, huge Sonos sale, $374 PS5 Slim, 20% off LG OLED smart TVs, more Today’s deals: 20% off Amazon gift cards, $100 Beats Pill, $60 Oral-B iO electric toothbrush, $100 Nextmug, more