Nintendo announced that it plans to release a duo of wireless Switch controllers modeled after the gamepad for the original NES, but the way the company plans to sell those controllers is somewhat unusual.

The NES controllers go up for sale in December, but would-be purchasers will be limited to only one set of controllers and will need to have a Nintendo Account with a paid Nintendo Switch Online subscription to make the purchase.

It’s not unusual for console-makers to offer certain sales or features to those that sign up for online subscriptions, but tying hardware goodies to paid accounts is a notably unusual move.

The Nintendo Switch Online subscription service goes live on September 18 and, in addition to granting Switch owners access to the NES controllers, opens up the use of cloud saves for the duration of the subscription, offers a playable library of classic Nintendo titles, and is required for online multiplayer on the system. 

While some are learning about the peculiar pleasure of Animal Crossing thanks to the series’ latest release on Nintendo 3DS, the game has long charmed and puzzled players and critics. In this excerpt from his 2007 book Persuasive Games, Ian Bogost discusses the game’s first edition (released for the GameCube in 2002) in relation to his theory of “procedural rhetoric,” the act of expressing ideas through rules. While some details have changed over the years, Animal Crossing’s overall themes remain constant: the strange, unresolved conflict between consumption and naturalism.

The Nintendo GameCube videogame Animal Crossing is an “animal village simulator.” Players move into a town filled with cartoonish animal characters and buy a house, then work, trade, and personalize their microenvionment. The game offers a series of innocuous, even mundane activities like bug catching, gardening, and wallpaper designing; like The Sims, Animal Crossing’s primary metaphors are social interaction and household customization.

Although the GameCube supports simultaneous play with up to four players, Animal Crossing only allows one player at a time. The game can store up to four player profiles in one shared town, and human players can interact with friends or family members who play the game, but only indirectly, by leaving notes or gifts, completing tasks, or even planting flowers or trees. Furthermore, Animal Crossing binds the game world to the real world, synchronizing its date and time to the console clock. Time passes in real time in Animal Crossing—it gets dark at night, snows in the winter, and the animals go trick-or-treating on Halloween. Since game time is linked to real time, a player can conceptualize the game as a part of his daily life rather than a split out of it.

This binding of the real world to the game world creates opportunities for families or friends to collaborate in a way that might be impossible in a simultaneous multiplayer game. Since the whole family shares a single GameCube, the game’s persistent state facilitates natural collaboration between family members with different schedules. For example, a child might find a fossil during the afternoon, then mail it to her father’s character in the game. At bedtime, she could let Dad know that she needs to have it analyzed at the central museum so she can take it to the local gallery the next day. As critics Kurt Squire and Henry Jenkins wrote of the game, “Families (of all types) live increasingly disjointed lives, but the whole family can play Animal Crossing even if they can rarely all sit down to dinner together.”

One of the most challenging projects in the game is paying off the mortgage on one’s house. Animal Crossing allows players to upgrade their homes, but doing so requires paying off a large note the player must take out to start the game in the first place. Then the player must pay renovation mortgages for even larger sums. While the game mercifully omits some of the more punitive intricacies of long-term debt, such as compounding interest, improving one’s home does require consistent work in the game world. Catching fish, hunting for fossils, finding insects, and doing jobs for other townsfolk all produce income that can be used to pay off mortgage debt—or to buy carpets, furniture, and objects to decorate one’s house.

Animal Crossing deploys a procedural rhetoric about the repetition of mundane work as a consequence of contemporary material property ideals. When my (then) five-year-old began playing the game seriously, he quickly recognized the dilemma he faced. On the one hand, he wanted to spend the money he had earned from collecting fruit and bugs on new furniture, carpets, and shirts. On the other hand, he wanted to pay off his house so he could get a bigger one like mine. Then, once he did amass enough savings to pay off his mortgage, the local shopkeeper and real estate tycoon Tom Nook offered to expand his house. While it is possible to refrain from upgrading, Nook, an unassuming raccoon, continues to offer renovations as frequently as the player visits his store. My son began to realize the trap he was in: the more material possessions he took on, the more space he needed, and the more debt he had to take on to provide that space. And the additional space just fueled more material acquisitions, continuing the cycle.

Yesterday, the team at Rockstar revealed further details on the Van der Linde Gang, a group of outlaws, renegades and misfits, bonded together under the charismatic and idealistic Dutch van der Linde.

Check out some of the new character illustrations featuring members of Dutch van der Linde’s gang below, then head over to the official Red Dead Redemption 2 website to be introduced to the full Van der Linde Gang.

Dutch Van der Linde: The leader of a sizeable gang of outlaws and misfits. Idealistic, anarchic, charismatic, well-read, well-lived, but possibly starting to unravel under the pressures of the encroaching modern world.

Arthur Morgan: Dutch’s most dependable and capable enforcer since he was a boy, the outlaw life is all Arthur has ever known. Sharp, cool-headed, and ruthless, but with his own sense of honor. A man who gets the job done.

John Marston: Once an orphaned street kid taken under Dutch’s wing at the age of twelve, John has always had to live by his wits. Shrewd, fearless and strong-willed, he and Arthur are Dutch’s proudest protégés.

Sadie Adler: A widow who is hellbent on taking revenge upon those who killed her husband. Relentless and afraid of nothing and no one. The wrong woman to cross, but very loyal to those she loves.

Micah Bell: A career criminal and hitman. Wild and unpredictable but he lives for the action.

Charles Smith: A relatively recent recruit to the gang, Charles is quiet and reserved but extremely competent in everything he does and virtually unbeatable in a fight. A decent, honest man who also happens to be deadly.

Javier Escuella: A notorious bounty hunter and Mexican revolutionary. Javier immediately had a strong connection to Dutch’s ideals. Very committed, passionate and loyal.

Now that you’ve met some of the gang, head over to the official Red Dead Redemption 2 website to be introduced to the full Van der Linde Gang.

7.19c:
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* Blade Mail: Cooldown increased from 20 to 25
* Blade Mail: Bonus armor reduced from 6 to 5

* Clinkz: Base strength reduced by 2
* Clinkz: Searing Arrows manacost increased from 10 to 12
* Clinkz: Level 20 Talent reduced from +20 Health Regen to +16
* Clinkz: Level 25 Talent reduced from +4s Strafe Duration to +3s

* Crystal Maiden: Arcane Aura allied mana regen reduced from 0.8/1.0/1.2/1.4 to 0.7/0.9/1.1/1.3

* Dark Willow: Brambles total damage reduced from 140/180/220/260 to 125/150/175/200
* Dark Willow: Shadow Realm cooldown increased from 30/24/18/12 to 32/26/20/14
* Dark Willow: Cursed Crown stun duration reduced from 2/2.5/3/3.5 to 1.75/2.25/2.75/3.25
* Dark Willow: Bedlam damage reduced from 60/120/180 to 60/110/160

* Earthshaker: Root now disables his Scepter ability

* Enchantress: Strength rescaled from 19 + 1.3 to 16 + 1.5
* Enchantress: Base movement speed reduced from 325 to 320
* Enchantress: Base intelligence reduced by 2

* Grimstroke: Ink Swell no longer makes the target immune to attacks
* Grimstroke: Ink Swell no longer silences and disarms the target
* Grimstroke: Soulbind duration increased from 4/6/8 to 6/8/10

* Phantom Lancer: Agility gain reduced from 2.8 to 2.6

* Phoenix: Level 15 Talent reduced from +50 Fire Spirits DPS to +40

* Silencer: Last Word damage rescaled from 150/200/250/300 to 120/180/240/300
* Silencer: Arcane Curse manacost increased from 105/115/125/135 to 125/130/135/140
* Silencer: Global Silence manacost increased from 250/375/500 to 300/450/600

* Spectre: Desolate radius increased from 375 to 500
* Spectre: Dispersion rescaled from 10/14/18/22% to 7/12/17/22%
* Spectre: Haunt manacost increased from 150 to 150/200/250
* Spectre: Level 10 Talent changed from +15 Desolate Damage to +4 All Stats
* Spectre: Level 15 Talent changed from +8 All Stats to +15 Desolate Damage
* Spectre: Level 25 Talent reduced from +8% Dispersion to +6%

* Storm Spirit: Static Remnant damage reduced from 140/180/220/260 to 120/160/200/240

* Ursa: Fury Swipes damage per attack reduced from 15/20/25/30 to 12/18/24/30
* Ursa: Earthshock damage reduced from 90/140/190/240 to 50/100/150/200
* Ursa: Enrage damage multiplier rescaled from 1.5/1.75/2.0 to 1.4/1.7/2.0

* Vengeful Spirit: Movement speed reduced by 5
* Vengeful Spirit: Magic Missile projectile speed reduced from 1250 to 900

* Weaver: Base intelligence reduced by 2
* Weaver: The Swarm cooldown increased from 35/30/25/20 to 44/36/28/20
* Weaver: Time Lapse cooldown increased from 60/50/40 to 70/55/40
* Weaver: Level 10 Talent changed from +20 Mana Break to +7 Strength
* Weaver: Level 15 Talent changed from +12 Strength to +20 Mana Break

* Wraith King: Wraithfire Blast stun duration rescaled from 2 to 1.1/1.4/1.7/2.0
* Wraith King: Wraithfire Blast base damage rescaled from 50/100/150/200 to 100
* Wraith King: Wraithfire Blast DPS rescaled from 20/35/50/65 to 10/30/50/70
* Wraith King: Vampiric Aura is now a melee only ability

* Zeus: Strength gain reduced from 2.3 to 2.1
* Zeus: Level 25 Talent reduced from +170 Arc Lightning damage to +155

Dr. Angel Diaz is the face of open source at IBM as Vice President of Developer Technology, Open Source & Advocacy. At the recent Open Source Summit in Vancouver, we spoke with Diaz to talk about the importance of open source at IBM and how it’s changing the world around us.

LF: What’s the importance of open source in modern economy?

Angel Diaz: We are living in a technology-fueled business renaissance — cloud, data, artificial intelligence, and the redefinition of the transaction. There is constant democratization of technology. This democratization allows us as computer scientists to innovate higher orders of the stack. You don’t have to worry about compute, storage and network; you get that in the cloud for example, but what has been driving that democratization? Open source.

Open source has been the fuel, the innovation engine, the skills engine, the level playing field that allows us as a society to build more, to build faster and move forward and the rate and pace of that is increasing.

What’s really nice about that is we are doing it in a controlled way with open governance and leveraging the all the work that we do in consortia such as the Linux Foundation.

Read more at The Linux Foundation

In his office in suburban Beijing, Zhang proudly demonstrated the physical part of Airdoc’s system – a small desktop device that looks similar to a scanner a neighborhood optometrist might use for a routine eye exam.

You sit on a stool, lean forward, place your chin on a padded brace, and stare into the darkness of an eyepiece. The algorithm then takes over, precisely adjusting the angle of your head until a green cross comes into focus in the gaze of your right eye. A moment later there’s a bright, but not uncomfortable, flash of white light. The process is repeated for your left eye.

The machine has just taken high-resolution medical-grade images of both your retinas. It instantly sends them to the cloud where it takes 20 to 30 milliseconds (about the same time as an eye blink) of computation to analyze both.

Moments later an impressively detailed diagnostic dashboard is sent to your smartphone. It rates from low to medium to high your susceptibility to a long list of diseases. If there is a problem, it urges you to seek professional medical help.

Right now, it can search for 30 diseases. More machine learning will soon boost that number to 50, and eventually, it could go beyond 200.

Zhang regards his system as a gamechanger because of its potential to deliver at scale and relieve stretched medical resources. To date, it has scanned more than 1.12 million people, mostly in China, but also in the United States, India, Britain, and parts of Africa. “Airdoc users are all over the world.  We hope our deep learning technology can prevent all kinds of disease.”

China, with a population of 1.3 billion, only has about 1,100 eye doctors who are qualified to analyze retinal images. So, the challenge of providing adequate diagnostic services is truly massive – and perhaps no more so than for the epidemic of diabetes.

Authorities estimate as many as 114 million Chinese have diabetes – but only 30 percent of them know that. The other 70 percent are unaware and, without early detection, will eventually be struck down with serious maladies, like blindness, strokes and other potentially fatal conditions.

“Diabetic retinopathy, or DR, is one of the most common and serious complications of diabetes. Once patients feel symptoms, they are already in a severe stage of DR and will go blind without proper treatment,” says Dr. Rui Li Wei (pictured in top image) of Shanghai’s Changzheng Hospital, one of several major medical institutions that now routinely uses Airdoc’s technology as a quick, accurate, and simple diagnostic tool.