Tabletop gaming campaigns: I’ve found they’re best enjoyed with a drink in hand. And what better way to combine your love of tabletop gaming and fine spirits than with these Ice Monster D20 Whiskey Rocks? I can’t think of any. Granted, I didn’t try very hard, but thinking gives me headaches.
Currently an already funded Kickstarter campaign, $52 will get you a single D20 stone with either an Ice Dragon or Lich King theme, and $92 will get you one of each. The stones measure approximately 1.6″ wide and 1.9″ tall and are constructed from laser-etched volcanic obsidian. They’re rated as food safe, which is an important attribute as far as things you’re going to put in a drink go.
Am I going to pull my lucky whiskey stone D20s out of my glass to roll whenever it’s my turn? Yes. Will it be the last time I’m invited to game night? Also yes. Whatever, who needs friends to play role-playing games with when I just bought a whole stack of Choose Your Own Adventure books from the thrift store?
Some jurisdictions are looking into ways of boosting semiconductor production amid the global chip shortage that’s impacting all kinds of sectors. The European Union, for one, wants to become a bigger player in the field and it announced a $49 billion plan to help it get there. The EU’s executive branch has revealed the European Chips Act, which, in part, aims to reduce the bloc’s reliance on components from Asia.
The EU believes the plan will allow Europe to harness its strengths in areas like research and manufacturing, while addressing what it says are some of the region’s weaknesses. The legislation aims to bolster research and development, boost production and monitor the supply of semiconductors.
The plan, which requires approval from member states and the European Parliament, involves public and private investments and looks to mitigate any future disruption to chip supply chains. The bloc also wants to double its share of the global semiconductor market to 20 percent by 2030.
“The European Chips Act will be a game changer for the global competitiveness of Europe’s single market,” European Commission president Ursula von der Leyen said in a statement. “In the short term, it will increase our resilience to future crises, by enabling us to anticipate and avoid supply chain disruptions. And in the mid-term, it will help make Europe an industrial leader in this strategic branch.”
The introduction of the Chips Act follows an effort to bolster chip production in the US. This month, the House of Representatives passed the America COMPETES Act, which earmarks $52 billion in subsidies for semiconductor manufacturing as well as almost $300 billion for research and development. President Joe Biden plans to sign the bill into law should it pass through the Senate.
Legislation on both sides of the Atlantic could lead to a battle between Europe, the US and Asia to attract chip manufacturers. If legislators approve them, the plans should ultimately boost global semiconductor production, which will benefit manufacturing process for things like medical equipment, electric vehicles and game consoles.
The Omicron variant of the coronavirus has found its way into white-tailed deer living in New York, new research released this week has found. The results are the latest to show that deer in the U.S. have become frequent carriers of SARS-CoV-2—a phenomenon that could have important implications for the future of the…
Peloton will replace its CEO, cut about 2,800 jobs, and revamp its leadership team as the company faces declining demand for its exercise equipment. The layoffs account for around 20% of the corporate workforce but will not affect instructors or content.
” data-medium-file=”https://cdn.slashgear.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/02/110_V1.v1-1278×720.jpg” data-large-file=”https://cdn.slashgear.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/02/110_V1.v1-1280×721.jpg” />DS Automobiles is the luxury sub-brand of French automaker Citroen, and the brand has since announced that it will only be making all-electric and hybrid vehicles by 2025. Currently, the DS 3 Crossback E-Tense is the only EV in its stable, but it seems DS has plans to conquer the hyper-EV race with its newest one-off concept: The E-Tense Performance. … Continue reading
This year’s Academy Awards nominations have been revealed, and Apple TV+ execs will surely be pleased. The service’s films received six Oscar nods overall, up from two last year. Most significantly, Apple has broken through in the Best Picture category. CODA is the first Apple Original movie to receive a nomination for the top prize.
It’s the first film with a principally deaf cast to be nominated for Best Picture. It’s been 35 years since a deaf performer was nominated, and Troy Kotsur is now the first male actor to ever receive a nod, as he’s up for Best Supporting Actor.
Writer and director Sian Heder is nominated for Best Adapted Screenplay — CODA is a remake of a French film called La Famille Bélier. Apple paid a Sundance record of $25 million to acquire the rights to the film, which won the Grand Jury Prize for Drama and the Audience Award at last year’s festival.
The other Apple movie that received nominations this year was Joel Coen’s The Tragedy of Macbeth. It earned nods for Best Actor for Denzel Washington, Best Cinematography and Best Production Design.
Elsewhere, Netflix continued the run of awards success it has had over the last few years with a whopping 35 nominations across the board. Star-studded climate change satire Don’t Look Up and Western The Power of the Dog are both nominated for Best Picture. The latter leads the pack overall with 12 nominations. Jane Campion, who received writing and directing nods, is the first woman to land two Best Director nominations. Other nominated Netflix films include The Lost Daughter, The Hand of God, Tick, Tick… Boom and the fantastic The Mitchells vs. The Machines.
Elsewhere, Dune has 10 nominations and Best Picture frontrunner Belfast received seven. Amazon’s Being the Ricardos landed three acting nods, while No Time To Die, which marks Daniel Craig’s final outing as James Bond, was nominated for Original Song, Sound and Visual Effects. Meanwhile, Japanese drama Drive My Car broke through in the Best Picture and directing races for four nominations in total.
The 94th Academy Awards ceremony will take place on March 27th.
From musicians pulling their music to a high-profile podcaster pausing their exclusive show, Spotify is under attack from all sides. Furore over Joe Rogan’s podcast and Spotify’s subsequent misinformation policies and actions has come both internally and externally. Much of the backlash is warranted as Spotify hasn’t been up front about the content of Rogan’s podcast, or misinformation in general. And the lack of transparency is why the company’s current issues are much bigger than one massively popular creator.
By now, you’ve likely heard something about the Joe Rogan saga. The popular podcast host has been controversial for years, but criticism ramped up after a December 31 episode featuring physician and biochemist Dr. Robert Malone. While speaking to Rogan, Dr. Malone made a number of unfounded claims about COVID-19 vaccines, including that “mass formation psychosis” led many in the US to take the jab. After the episode was posted, hundreds of doctors, nurses, scientists and educators sent a letter to Spotify urging it to create a clear misinformation policy and take “responsibility to mitigate the spread” of such content.
When the group posted the letter online, Engadget reached out to Spotify to ask if the company already had a misinformation policy, how it takes action against misinformation and if it was considering any action against the Malone episode of JRE. The company didn’t respond. Two weeks later, CEO Daniel Ek penned a statement on the matter and posted the company’s “platform rules” on a Sunday afternoon. It’s unclear if Ek was already planning to publish the platform-wide policy or if it was in response to a report two days earlier of internal explanations to employees as to why certain episodes of Rogan’s podcast hadn’t been removed.
During the company’s Q4 2021 earnings call last week, Ek took responsibility for not publishing the content policy sooner. “We should’ve done it earlier and that’s on me,” he admitted. To employees during a company meeting the same day, the CEO explained that Spotify is not a publisher, so it doesn’t have creative control over Rogan’s show in advance. He said that since JRE is licensed content, it doesn’t have oversight like it does for podcasts from The Ringer or Gimlet – production companies Spotify owns. “We don’t approve his guests in advance, and just like any other creator, we get his content when he publishes, and then we review it, and if it violates our policies, we take the appropriate enforcement actions,” Ek said.
A control room at Spotify’s “Pod City.”
Genaro Molina via Getty Images
Washington Post columnist Margaret Sullivan wrote this weekend that Spotify’s “failure to take any meaningful responsibility, other than adding a few disclaimers, is all too reminiscent of the way Facebook, for years, has dodged accountability for spreading so many harmful lies.” And part of shirking responsibility comes in the form of Spotify’s argument of a platform versus a publisher.
Spotify is a publisher, no matter what it says to the contrary. Paying a reported $100 million to lock down JRE as an exclusive brings more responsibility for its content than a show from “any other creator.” Ek argued during that same speech to employees that “exclusivity does not equal endorsement” and that the solution is to secure “an even broader set of exclusives that represent even more voices.” These two statements point to Spotify trying to build a foundation when the house is nearly finished.
A treasure trove of exclusives has helped make Spotify the number one podcast app in the US, according to Ek. Over the last few years, the company has purchased podcast production studios like Gimlet, Parcast and The Ringer, making shows exclusive to its service along the way. It has amassed a wealth of talent, including the most popular podcast globally on Spotify in Joe Rogan’s show. Sure sounds like the behavior of a publisher.
One of Spotify’s most important podcast acquisitions was Anchor, an all-in-one production suite that made creating and publishing shows a breeze. The company has since leveraged its powerful ad setup for shows on the service and Anchor has regularly introduced new features to make recording even easier. It’s literally a place where anyone can publish a podcast and it has helped Spotify add over a million shows to its library. In late 2020, Spotify said Anchor accounted for 70 percent of its podcasts, around 1.3 million at the time.
Billy Steele/Engadget
However, Anchor’s own platform policy hasn’t been updated since July 2021. There’s no mention of COVID-19 misinformation, except for one item that bans any content that “conflicts with the Terms, as determined by Spotify, collectively (‘Objectionable Content’).” Right now, that would include Spotify’s recently published policy. However, until recently, those guidelines weren’t public, and Anchor wasn’t clearly displaying Spotify’s policy. Now it’s doing so via a clickable pop-up when you upload a show.
“Spotify’s Platform Rules apply to all content on Spotify, including Anchor,” a Spotify spokesperson told Engadget. “We began highlighting our Platform Rules in our creator and publisher tools on February 2nd to raise awareness around what’s acceptable and help creators understand their accountability for the content they post on our platform.”
The lack of transparent guidelines is Spotify’s biggest problem. The issue goes beyond Joe Rogan and covers the entire platform. When asked for comment about removing Neil Young’s music from the service (at his request), the company said it had “detailed content policies in place and we’ve removed over 20,000 podcast episodes related to COVID-19 since the start of the pandemic.” Those policies were not made public until four days later. What’s more, when Engadget asked for information about the “over 20,000” podcasts that had been pulled, Spotify didn’t respond.
Right now, we only know about a fewspecific instances of content actions. So what happens when a creator who’s not being paid a vault of money espouses similar opinions to the ones Joe Rogan or his guests share on JRE? You know, the ones the company has already said “didn’t meet the threshold for removal.” On last week’s earnings call, Ek was adamant that Spotify doesn’t “change our policies based on one creator nor do we change it based on any media cycle, or calls from anyone else.” However, a Media Matters analysis of Rogan’s show going back to July 2020 highlights numerous times the podcast host has run afoul of the “long-standing” rules on violence or hatred toward marginalized communities and COVID-19 misinformation.
Spotify is saying more about the situation to employees than it is to the public, and none of it is sensitive info or trade secrets. By addressing a major controversy in private, which is ultimately reported by the media, the company further erodes what trust it has left. The company hasn’t publicly confirmed that it removed over 70 pre-Spotify-deal episodes of Joe Rogan’s podcast for racist language, including use of the n-word, late last week at Rogan’s request. But, again, Ek acknowledged the move to employees internally. Why not just let an unnamed spokesperson confirm the details when asked? Especially given Rogan himself addressed the content of those episodes in an apology video. The company also needs to open up about podcast removals and disclose what its review procedure is.
A studio inside Spotify’s “Pod City”
Genaro Molina via Getty Images
Spotify created a content policy, so it’s clearly considering how to police its platform. But what’s in place now is only a partial solution in need of immediate expansion, explanation and revision before more damage is done. It’s vague at a time where some specifics would go a long way. This is not about advocating for the company to “silence” Joe Rogan over his COVID views or anyone else who has been wrong on a podcast. It’s clear the company isn’t going to do so under the terms of its current deal with the host anyway. But a blanket warning label and mostly rationalizing its actions in private isn’t enough.
Of course, Spotify isn’t the first big tech company to hide behind the “platform” label, especially when it comes to taking responsibility for content. Facebook is perhaps the biggest example, as it has argued it’s a technology platform rather than a publisher. CEO Mark Zuckerberg has said the company does bear some responsibility for what’s on the site but its actions have been tepid at best. Facebook has also argued that it’s a publisher when taking such a stance is beneficial in court. Twitter has made the same case, most notably when questioned on how it enforced a “hacked materials” policy regarding a story about Hunter Biden’s laptop. “Is Twitter a publisher? No, we are not. We distribute information,” then-CEO Jack Dorsey told Congress. Section 230, the law that currently protects platforms from legal action for things users post, enables companies to make the argument. And that’s a big reason why Congress is looking to reform it.
Ek wrote in his most recent message to staff that “canceling voices is a slippery slope,” and that’s true. The issue is the chief executive’s mission to find “a balance,” whether that’s with a wider variety of viewpoints or by equally weighting “creator expression with user safety.” Unless that balance comes with more transparency and oversight, more volume isn’t going to solve anything.
This is site is run by Sascha Endlicher, M.A., during ungodly late night hours. Wanna know more about him? Connect via Social Media by jumping to about.me/sascha.endlicher.
