News (old posts, page 826)

Is it true that I ‘don’t get angry’? Or am I actually dangerously suppressing it?

Anger is rarely thought of as positive – but the emotion itself exists to protect us, says author of Good Anger, Sam Parker

My friends and I sometimes rank the seven deadly sins in order of personal relevance. For me, “wrath” always comes last. (I shan’t say what’s first – too revealing.)

Anger doesn’t feature in my day-to-day life. I even struggle to feel wrathful when it’s appropriate. World events make me fatalistic and depressed; when my gym instructor says to “let loose” on the ski machine, my effort remains constant. The time I visited a rage room, my main takeaway was that the Metallica song I selected as the soundtrack sounded fantastic on big speakers.

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The Maga-flavoured faux pas that shook the games industry

Splitgate 2’s Ian Proulx thought his Musk gag was funny – but what it revealed was the major blind spots still in the business

One thing most game developers can agree on in the modern industry is that it’s hard to drum up any awareness for your latest project without a mammoth marketing budget. Last year, almost 20,000 new titles were released on the PC gaming platform Steam alone, the majority disappearing into the content blackhole that is the internet. So when a smaller studio is offered the chance to get on the stage at the Summer Games Fest, an event streamed live to a global audience of around 50 million people, it’s a big deal. Not something that you want to spectacularly misjudge.

Enter Ian Proulx, cofounder of 1047 Games. His short slot at the event earlier this month had him walking on stage with a baseball bat to promote the online shooter Splitgate 2 by announcing that he was “tired of playing the same Call of Duty every year”, while wearing a cap bearing the slogan “Make FPS great again”. It did not go well. Gamers and fellow developers criticised his decision to diss another studio’s game as well as his politically charged use of a Maga/Trump meme, especially with anti-ICE protesters being beaten and arrested just across town. Proulx defended his actions, denying that his use of the cap slogan was political, but four days later he made an apology via X explaining: “We needed something to grab attention, and the honest truth is, we tried to think of something and this is what we came up with.”

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Florida is now the Stanley Cup’s semi-permanent home. What does that mean for Canada?

The NHL’s southern expansion was mocked in the 1990s. But it led to better hockey, more money and a long drought for the sport’s spiritual home

“There are a lot of things I do not understand about this proposed expansion,” New York Times sports columnist George Vecsey wrote in December 1992, as the NHL wrapped up its annual Board of Governors meeting in Palm Beach, Florida. During that week’s meeting, the league received expansion proposals for two teams. One was for a team in Anaheim, California, backed by Disney. The other was for a team in Miami, Florida, put forward by waste management-and-VHS-video magnate, Wayne Huizenga. “What makes it think the Sun Belt is ready for all these hockey teams?” Vecsey wondered.

At the time, the answer was money. With more time, the answer seems to be: because championship hockey teams can be built anywhere, including in the South. On Tuesday night in Florida, the Panthers won their second-straight Stanley Cup against the Edmonton Oilers, this time in six games – one fewer than they needed last season. If anything, you could now argue that there’s no better place to build a championship NHL team than the southern US. Since 1990, the Stanley Cup has been awarded to a team based in the South nine times – but five of those have come in the last six years. And three of those have also been against Canadian teams.

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Iran leader threatens ‘irreparable damage’ if US joins fight and rejects Trump call for surrender – Israel-Iran conflict live

Ayatollah Khamenei says Iran will not accept demand for surrender and warns against threatening language

Iran said on Wednesday it had detained five suspected agents of Israel’s Mossad intelligence agency on charges of “tarnishing” the country’s image online, Iranian news agencies reported.

“These mercenaries sought to sow fear among the public and tarnish the image of the sacred system of the Islamic Republic of Iran through their calculated activities online,” Tasnim and SNA news agencies quoted a statement from the Revolutionary Guards as saying.

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Trump overseeing a ‘fascist regime’ says Brad Lander after arrest – US politics live

New York City mayoral candidate warns administration could ‘undermine the rule of law’ after incident at immigration court

Russian deputy foreign minister Sergei Ryabkov warned on Wednesday that direct US military assistance to Israel could radically destabilise the situation in the Middle East, where an air war between Israel and Iran has raged for six days.

In separate comments, the head of Russia’s SVR foreign intelligence service, Sergei Naryshkin, was quoted as saying that the situation between Israel and Iran was now critical.

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Deliver Me From Nowhere: first trailer for Oscar-tipped Bruce Springsteen biopic

The hotly anticipated music drama stars The Bear’s Jeremy Allen White as the rocker with Jeremy Strong and Stephen Graham also starring

The trailer for Bruce Springsteen biopic Deliver Me From Nowhere has offered the first real look at Jeremy Allen White in the lead role.

The award-winning star of The Bear plays the musician as he puts together his sixth album Nebraska in the early 1980s. The film, from Crazy Heart director Scott Cooper, is based on Warren Zanes’ 2023 book.

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Europeans may as well start learning Russian if Ukraine does not get more support, Kaja Kallas warns – Europe live

EU foreign policy chief says Russia is a direct threat to Europe and has plan for long term aggression

And speaking of Russia’s impact on its neighbours, let’s quickly go to Miranda Bryant in the Nordics and see how the region monitors the global threat of war, terror and piracy on seas from its Maritime Cyber Resilience Centre.

The European Commission has insisted there will be no return to Russian gas, as it published plans to phase out fossil fuel imports from its eastern neighbour by 2028.

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