Month: January 2022

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It’s the weekend, which means it’s time for another Dealmaster. Our latest roundup of the best deals from around the web includes a number of sales for Lunar New Year across video game storefronts. Steam looks to have the most sweeping selection of deals for PC gamers, but the Epic Games Store is running its own sale as well, and some of the deals from those promotions are also available at competing stores like GOG and Humble. And on the console side, Microsoft has discounted several Xbox games for the occasion.

In general, these sales aren’t quite as extensive as the ones we saw around the holidays, but they still include several notable discounts on games we like. Past Ars game of the year winners Psychonauts 2, Hades, and Celeste are all available for less than their average going rates, as are several of the lesser-hyped gems we recommended during Steam’s summer sale last year. We’ve noted a few more highlights—including deals on Half-Life: Alyx, Untitled Goose Game, and Halo Infinite, among others—below.

End dates for these sales vary, but Steam says its promotion will end on February 3, while Epic says its sale will wrap up on February 10. If you shop through the latter, note that you can use the $10 coupon offer the company has rolled out for previous sales—but you’ll need to sign up for Epic’s emails and alerts program (or already be signed up) to access it. If you can live with that, you’ll get a coupon that’ll take an additional $10 off the deals already in place, provided your cart totals $14.99 or more. This means you could get, say, Hades for $6 instead of its current discounted price of $16. Unlike the Epic sale we saw last month, however, this coupon is one-time use only.

Enlarge / This galaxy brain image is still working out Ubisoft’s apparent “piece-by-piece” puzzle explanation of its NFT plans. (credit: Aurich Lawson | Getty Images)

In the weeks since Ubisoft rolled out non-fungible tokens in one of its video games, critics—particularly those here at Ars Technica—have shot back with questions about their purpose. While Ars is still waiting for a formal response to our December questions, the closest we’re likely to get comes from a Thursday interview with Ubisoft executives that included a bold assertion that players’ “resistance” to NFTs is “based on misunderstanding.” (We hope Ubisoft isn’t saying that to anyone who has read Ars’ lengthy guide to NFTs.)

In the interview, conducted by Australian tech site Finder, two Ubisoft executives (Didier Genevois, head of Ubi’s blockchain team, and Nicolas Pouard, lead on Ubi’s “Quartz” and “Digits” NFT systems) fail to clarify how an online game’s NFT implementation differs on a gameplay basis from existing digital rights management (DRM) solutions, particularly those baked into storefronts like Steam and Ubisoft Connect.

When pressed directly on what benefit a player might expect from engaging with Ubisoft Digits, Pouard first said that “gamers don’t get what a digital secondary market can bring to them.” Eventually, Pouard answered with one potential benefit: “the opportunity to resell their items once they’re finished with them or they’re finished playing the game itself.”

Enlarge (credit: Kryssia Campos | Getty Images)

Twenty-four years ago, Briana Pobiner reached into the north Kenyan soil and put her hands on bones that had last been touched 1.5 million years ago. Pobiner, a paleoanthropologist, was digging up ancient animal bones and searching for cuts and dents, signs that they had been butchered by our early ancestors trying to get at the fatty, calorie-rich bone marrow hidden within. “You are reaching through a window in time,” says Pobiner, who is now at the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, DC. “The creature who butchered this animal is not quite like you, but you’re uncovering this direct evidence of behavior. It’s really exciting.”

That moment sparked Pobiner’s lasting interest in how the diets of our ancestors shaped their evolution and eventually the emergence of our own species, Homo sapiens. Meat, in particular, seems to have played a crucial role. Our more distant ancestors mostly ate plants and had short legs and small brains similar in size to a chimpanzee’s. But around 2 million years ago, a new species emerged with decidedly humanlike features. Homo erectus had a larger brain, smaller gut, and limbs proportioned similarly to those of modern humans. And fossils from around the same time, like those excavated by Pobiner in Kenya, show that someone was butchering animals to separate lean meat from the bone and dig out the marrow. For decades, paleontologists have theorized that the evolution of humanlike features and meat eating are strongly connected.

Enlarge / The Keychron Q2. (credit: Scharon Harding)

Not everyone appreciates the luxury of a mechanical keyboard. Many are happy with the flat keys that come with their laptop; they don’t need to deal with the price premiums, varieties, and complexities of mechanical switches. Among those who do make the leap to mechanical switches, plenty are happy to settle on a keyboard preloaded with a specific switch type. But the Keychron Q2 is for those wiling to go an inch or two further down the rabbit hole.

I say “an inch or two” because the Q2 comes completely assembled (or with just the switches and keycaps missing), letting you pick your level of customization—and it offers options that only a mechanical keyboard enthusiast would consider.

Those options include a gasket-mounted design, sound-dampening foam, and pre-lubricated switches, which should eliminate pinging noises or cheap stabilizer rattling. The Q2 is a surprisingly hefty 65% keyboard built for the long haul, and while the starting price of $150 isn’t cheap, it’s more digestible than other high-end rivals.

Enlarge / The intersection of Interstates 10 and 610 in Houston, Texas, during evening rush hour. (credit: Getty Images)

Statistics help tell stories, and one often touted by technologists and engineers and police officers and even the federal government told a tale. The statistic: 94 percent of US traffic crashes are the result of human error. The number felt right. It also appealed to a very American idea: that individuals are in charge of their own destinies. Rather than place the burden of road safety on systems—the way roads are built, the way cars are designed, the way streets are governed—it placed it on the driver, or the walker, or the cyclist.

The statistic was based on a misunderstanding of a 2015 report from the US Department of Transportation’s National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, which is in charge of US road safety. The report studied crashes between 2005 and 2007 and determined that the driver was the “critical reason” behind the vast majority of crashes. But a driver’s actions were typically the last in a long chain of events. The driver’s fiddly movement of the wheel, in other words, was the final thing to go wrong—a process that started with, perhaps, the surveying of the highway, or the road design laid out on the desk of an engineer, or the policy crafted by lobbyists decades ago that made it impossible for anyone to get across town without a car.

Earlier this month, after pleas from researchers, advocates, and another Biden administration official, the US DOT nixed that 94 percent statistic from its website. And on Thursday, Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg began to tell a very different story about US road deaths. “Human fallibility should not lead to human fatalities,” he said during a press conference in Washington, DC. His goal, he said, is zero road deaths.