Struggling California EV startup Faraday Future was dealt a potentially crippling blow on Thursday, according to a press release from its main investor and confirmed by a person familiar with the matter. The arbitrator in Hong Kong that’s sorting out the company’s fight with its main investor ruled against a motion from Faraday Future to loosen the grip that the backer, Chinese real estate conglomerate Evergrande, has on the startup’s intellectual property and assets. Faraday Future was seeking this specific relief from the arbitrator because the company believed it would enhance the chances of receiving a lifeline from a new investor, according to the person familiar with the matter. But without any assets left to offer up as collateral, and with Evergrande still holding the reins, the people in control of the company were now scrambling to figure out what other moves might be available in an emergency meeting held Thursday, this person said. The urgency comes from the fact that Faraday Future is almost completely out of money. Faraday Future only had $18 million in cash at the start of September, according to recently publicized court documents. That was more than a full month before the company’s fight with its investor became public, and well before it had to resort to salary cuts, layoffs, and furloughs. Even with those reductions, Friday’s paycheck is the last one the company can afford, even at reduced furlough salaries, as The Verge previously reported. And there’s only enough cash left in the bank to keep the lights on until the second week of December. Representatives for the company did not respond to a request for comment. Lawyers for Evergrande could not be reached for comment. Faraday Future started out the year on a high note, having escaped from near-bankruptcy after finding a then-unnamed eleventh-hour investor. It was eventually made known that Evergrande had pledged $2 billion to the California-based EV start up, with $800 million being delivered upfront and the remaining $1.2 billion to be dispersed across 2019 and 2020. Once again flush with cash, Faraday Future began tooling up a factory in Hanford, California, and set a target of December 2018 for production of the first models of its luxury SUV, the FF91. But because Evergrande’s investment had come at a time when Faraday Future was backed into a corner, the Chinese conglomerate (which is run by one of China’s richest men, Hui Ka Yan) received very favorable terms in the deal. In return for the investment, Evergrande wound up with a 45 percent stake in the company, and Faraday Future also pledged its intellectual property and most of its hard assets as collateral. This fall, Evergrande announced that Jia Yueting, Faraday Future’s CEO and one of three co-founders, had spent that $800 million by July. The conglomerate also accused Jia of trying to break the deal. This set off a public back and forth between the two sides, which resulted in the conflict being brought to an arbitrator in Hong Kong (where Evergrande Health, the subsidiary that technically made the investment, is located). According to court documents, Jia requested in July that Evergrande advance $700 million of the remaining $1.2 billion to help with Faraday Future’s new cash crunch. Evergrande agreed, but only on two conditions: that Jia step away from any director roles at any of the companies associated with Faraday Future, and that he turn over his controlling shares to a third party. (While Evergrande wound up with a 45 percent stake after the investment, Jia’s shares still have more overall voting power.) Evergrande claims it was never fully convinced that Jia adhered to either of those terms, and so it never sent Faraday Future any new money. In turn, Faraday Future started racking up new debts with suppliers, and the company’s problems quickly escalated from there. In October, the company laid off a few hundred employees, and announced salary and wage cuts across the board. A number of key, high-profile executives — including one of the other three co-founders — resigned. By the end of October, Faraday Future decided to furlough hundreds more employees, and kept about 600 onboard at drastically reduced pay. Since then, Faraday Future sued Evergrande in US court claiming that the conglomerate is “deliberately starving” the startup into bankruptcy in order to make off with its IP and other assets. A group of Faraday Future employees has also sued Evergrande making similar claims. Last week, the Trump administration mentioned Faraday Future as an example of how Chinese companies often invest in US companies with ulterior motives. Similar allegations were previously lobbed at Jia, who treated Faraday Future like a subsidiary of his own Chinese tech conglomerate, LeEco, when he still controlled that company. He had Faraday Future employees work on LeEco’s own electric car program, and the two companies once had “agreements in place to share specific IP and technologies,” according to the company. Jia has since been largely pushed out at LeEco after his assets were frozen by the Chinese government. He’s lived in the US in self-exile since last summer, and has been named on a Chinese government blacklist as well. Multiple current and former employees, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because of nondisclosure agreements with the company, have told The Verge that Jia would rather run Faraday Future into the ground than relinquish any control. The case between Faraday Future and Evergrande is still in front of the arbitrator, but in the meantime, the startup filed two different requests for emergency relief over the last two months. The first one was granted, and allowed Faraday Future to seek up to $500 million in outside funding separate from the Evergrande deal. The second was the one that was denied on Thursday. Faraday Future has said in recent weeks that it was drawing interest from investors, but it’s now less clear if the company will be able to entice new backers as long as Evergrande has a line on the company’s assets.
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Mark Ronson and Miley Cyrus recently teamed up for the new song "Nothing Breaks Like a Heart," and days after teasing the project on Instagram, the duo dropped the video on Thursday. The trippy visual follows Cyrus (literally) as she leads the police on a high-speed car chase that goes from the freeway to the strip club to a gun range, where young girls are doing target practice. There are more moments that seem to send a message and add cultural commentary, including a Black Friday-style shopping showdown and a group of kneeling football players. Watch the video above now to decipher for yourself.
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A flurry of digital-first insurers are betting they can surpass industry incumbents with a little help from technology and a lot of help from venture capitalists. The latest to land a massive check is Bright Health, a Minneapolis-headquartered provider of affordable individual, family and Medicare Advantage healthcare plans in Alabama, Arizona, Colorado, New York City, Ohio and Tennessee. The company, founded by the former chief executive officer of UnitedHealthcare Bob Sheehy; Kyle Rolfing, the former CEO of UnitedHealth-acquired Definity Health; and Tom Valdivia, another former Definity Health executive, has brought in a $200 million Series C. The funding values Bright Health at $950 million, according to PitchBook — more than double the $400 million valuation it garnered with its $160 million Series B in June 2017. Sheehy, Bright Health’s CEO, declined to comment on the valuation. New investors Declaration Partners and Meritech Capital participated in the round, with backing from Bessemer Venture Partners, Greycroft, NEA, Redpoint Ventures and others. Bright Health has raised a total of $440 million since early 2016. VCs have deployed significantly more capital to the insurance technology (insurtech) space in recent years. Startups in the industry, long-known for a serious dearth of innovation, have raked in nearly $3 billion in private capital this year. U.S.-based insurtech startups have raised $2 billion in 2018, a record year for the sector and more than double last year’s total. Deal count, meanwhile, is swelling. In 2016, there were 72 deals conducted in the space, followed by 86 in 2017 and 94 so far this year, again, according to PitchBook’s data. Oscar Health, the health insurance provider led by Josh Kushner, is responsible for about 25 percent of the capital invested in U.S. insurtech startups this year. The company has raised a total of $540 million across two notable deals in 2018. The first saw Oscar pulling in $165 million at a $3 billion valuation and the second, announced in August, had Alphabet investing a whopping $375 million. Devoted Health, a Waltham, Mass.-based Medicare Advantage startup, followed up with a massive round of its own. The company nabbed $300 million and announced that it would begin enrolling members to its Medicare Advantage plan in eight Florida counties. Devoted is led by Todd Park, the co-founder of Athenahealth and Castlight Health. VC’s interest in insurtech isn’t limited to healthcare. Hippo, which sells home insurance plans at lower premiums, officially launched in 2017 and has brought in $109 million to date. Earlier this month the company announced a $70 million Series C funding round led by Felicis Ventures and Lennar Corporation. Lemonade, which is similarly an insurer focused on homeowners, raised $120 million in a SoftBank-led round late last year. And Root Insurance, an app-based car insurance company founded in 2015, itself raised a $100 million Series D led by Tiger Global Management in August. The financing valued the company at $1 billion. Together, these companies have raised well over $1 billion this year alone. Why? Because building a health insurance platform is incredibly cash-intensive and particularly difficult given the breadth of incumbents like Aetna or UnitedHealth. Sheehy, considering his 20-year tenure at UnitedHealthcare, may be especially well-positioned to disrupt the industry. The opportunity here for investors and startups alike is huge; the health insurance market alone is forecasted to be worth more than $1 trillion by 2023. Companies that can leverage technology to create consumer-friendly, efficient and, most importantly, reasonably priced insurance options stand to win big. As for Bright Health, the company plans to use its $200 million infusion to rapidly expand into new markets, planning to triple its geographic footprint in 2019. “Bright Health has continued to execute at a fast pace towards our goal of disrupting the old health care model that places insurers at odds with providers,” Sheehy said in a statement. “[Its] current high re-enrollment rate shows that consumers are ready for this improved healthcare experience – especially when it is priced competitively.” Long-awaited rain is pummeling California, threatening dangerous mudslides in areas reeling from recent fires. Officials are currently warning people to evacuate parts of southern California where the Holy Fire burned more than 23,000 acres this summer. Further north, in burn scars where the deadly Camp Fire recently raged, the National Weather Service has issued flash flood warnings, too. Paradise, a town that was devastated by the Camp Fire, remains under mandatory evacuation orders as the rains pour down. It’s a familiar sequence of disasters for Californians: after the record-setting fire season of 2017, waist-high mud flowed through Santa Barbara County at more than 35 miles per hour — killing at least 17 people in January. And it’s a cascade of catastrophes we may see again in the wake of this year’s fire season, now the worst on record. Slopes stripped bare and desiccated by wildfires are more prone to these post-fire debris flows, a kind of landslide where rushing water picks up the remnants of burnt homes, trees, dirt, rocks, and even cars. For people living in risky areas, it will be key to listen to emergency managers, and follow evacuation orders. The way to survive a landslide is not to be in its way, says geophysicist and disaster researcher Mika McKinnon. “You keep it from happening in the first place, or you’re not there when it happens. That’s it.” The Verge spoke with McKinnon about the dangers of rain on burnt ground. This interview has been edited for clarity and brevity. Now that we’ve got rain in California right on the heels of these wildfires, what sort of hazards are we looking at here? Anytime we have fires, we end up with landslides during the next big rains. This happens for a whole bunch of different reasons. One is you have a whole new layer of debris, so you’ve got broken tree branches, you’ve got ash — really slick, fine particles that slide really easily — you’ve got destroyed homes, and if there hasn’t been time to clean it all up, that’s just debris waiting to get swept away by water. Just like the first rains mean you’re going to clear all sorts of pine needles and leaves out of your gutters, when you’re going through a fire area, all of that garbage is going to get swept up as debris flows. What’s the difference between a mudslide, landslide, or debris flow? Landslide is the big, overarching term. The only term bigger than that is mass movement, the generic term for anything falling downhill. The most common ways to divide up landslides are by material, and by mechanism. The material is the stuff that is moving: is it rock, is it debris, mud, dirt, soil, earth, snow? And the mechanism is how the landslide moved: does it fall, topple, rotate, flow? So a mudslide would be mud and water sliding down a slope, slipping, kind of a blob. A debris flow would be a bunch of debris and water flowing like a fluid as opposed to a debris avalanche, where you have less water and it moves more like a snow avalanche does. You can mix between the material and the mechanism to come up with a name for different types of landslides, but the word landslide covers all of those. Why do fires increase the risk for landslides? When a fire comes through, it burns a lot of material, and this creates debris. It also kills the trees, chars the ground and produces a lot of ash. Ash is very fine, and very slick, which makes it a perfect sliding surface. It lubricates geologic materials. Fire is also hot, and dries things out and chars them up, and when it dries out that chunk of ground, it can create a hard dry layer on top that’s difficult for water to get through. That water skims across the surface instead and picks up more debris, and then you get a debris flow. What areas are particularly vulnerable to landslides, and how can we predict where they’re going to hit? The steeper the slope, the more likely you are to have landslides. It also depends on the material. Hard rock is more stable and loose materials — sands, dirts, soils — are weaker. If there are a lot of plants, plants tend to hold things together with their roots. They cling and weave together the materials. If there are fewer plants, you don’t have that root stability and the slopes are less stable. The water will flow into valleys, and ravines, and gullies; all of those places are going to be more likely to have landslides. If you’ve got all that water washing [away] debris, tree branches, boulders, and ash, sooner or later, it’s not just water — it’s now a debris flow, a very fluid landslide that’s a mixture of water and debris. They’re very, very fast moving. How does a landslide start? A funny quirk of terminology is that we say that a landslide fails when it starts moving. From the landslide’s point of view, it’s succeeding. But what that really means is the slope or the material has failed, it’s no longer stable, and it’s now collapsing and moving downhill. What we’re more likely to see after the fires are debris flows, and debris avalanches. Instead of having an entire piece of the slope fail, the water picks up more and more material. And the more material it gathers, the more it picks up. It’s a feedback loop. And how does a landslide stop? It’s just going to keep going until one of a few things happens. One, it runs out of energy, so it’s gone all the way down and kept running until it’s run out of kinetic energy, and comes to a stop. And that pretty much never happens in northern California because we’ve got too much stuff in the way. But sometimes that might happen in a desert. The next thing that could happen: something separates the water from the debris. If someone went through and expected there’d be this type of landslide, and built a debris retention barrier — which is like a giant strainer for a landslide — it could trap all the debris, so it’s a lot less dangerous. But that means that you needed to expect that you were going to get debris flows, and have the foresight, and planning, and money to build structures to protect against it. You could also get so much debris that it all starts clogging and jamming together and creates a debris dam, or a landslide dam — blocking the rest of the landslide. And now all the debris starts piling up behind it, making it bigger, and bigger, and bigger. The water gets trapped in behind, and creates a flood, so now you’ve got upriver flooding. It’s a really weak dam, and so it will erode quickly and break. And then all that water that built up during the flood upstream is now released in an outburst flood swishing downstream. What’s the most dangerous part of a mudslide? With most disasters we have survival tips. For an earthquake, it’s “duck, cover, and hold on.” Or for flooding, it’s “turn around and don’t drown.” We don’t have survival tips for landslides, at all — aside from just don’t be there. So what’s the most dangerous part of a landslide? Getting buried by the landslide. Even a rockfall can kill you. A fist-sized rock falling even 10 feet can have enough kinetic energy that if it hits you in the head, it will kill you. If you’re beside the landslide, if you manage to be uphill at all, you’re going to have slightly better luck. What can we expect in the future with landslides in the West? The research and the funding is just not there. Even when we know there’s a problem, we don’t often have the resources to be able to mitigate that risk. And that’s something we can start talking about more, and start asking about more. Because we’re going to have more droughts, and we’re going to have more floods and we’re going to have more fires, and we’re going to have more severe storms. That’s just our future. And if we’re going to keep having them, we’re going to have more landslides, and maybe it’s about time for us to start looking at that seriously, and start being more proactive in mapping out potential landslide hazard areas, and changing what sorts of buildings are zoned for construction in places we know are at risk, and starting to engineer protective barriers to deflect landslides or to catch them or to separate the debris from the water so they’re less dangerous. There are things we can do. If we have the political will and the monetary resources, we can reduce our risk from landslides. Warning: Spoilers for Creed II ahead, so get yourself to a theater before you read on. Long before we knew him as Pittsburgh Steelers-loving Jack Pearson, Milo Ventimiglia actually had another iconic Pennsylvania role under his belt. He portrayed Sylvester Stallone's onscreen son Robert in the 2006 film Rocky Balboa, and after a decade, fans finally have a chance to see the 41-year-old take up the part again in Creed II. Audiences last saw Robert Jr. (a role originally brought to life by Stallone's late son Sage) as he supported Rocky in a match against Mason "The Line" Dixon. The father and son maintained a tumultuous relationship throughout the course of the last few movies, and when the first Creed film rolled around, it appeared their bond had deteriorated once more. But come Creed II, Rocky spends a significant chunk of time pondering his life and the importance of family, all to finally visit his son and grandson at the end of the movie. Before Creed II even hit theaters, Stallone hinted at a possible Ventimiglia return. The two had crossed paths again in 2017 when Ventimiglia asked Stallone to guest star on This Is Us, so his appearance in the film came as a delight to fans of the boxing series and fans of the NBC drama alike. While Stallone recently revealed he's likely done playing Rocky, we wouldn't complain if Robert Jr. carried on the Balboa legacy in any future movies.
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AWS launched Lambda in 2015 and with it helped popularize serverless computing. You simply write code (event triggers) and AWS deals with whatever compute, memory and storage you need to make that work. Today at AWS re:Invent in Las Vegas, the company announced several new features to make it more developer friendly, while acknowledging that even while serverless reduced complexity, it still requires more sophisticated tools as it matures It’s called serverless because you don’t have to worry about the underlying servers. The cloud vendors take care of all that for you, serving whatever resources you need to run your event and no more. It means you no longer have to worry about coding for all your infrastructure and you only pay for the computing you need at any given moment to make the application work. The way AWS works is that it tends to release something, then builds more functionality on top of a base service as it sees increasing requirements as customers use it. As Amazon CTO Werner Vogels pointed out in his keynote on Thursday, developers debate about tools and everyone has their own idea of what tools they bring to the task every day. For starters, they decided to please the language folks introducing support for new languages. Those developers who use Ruby can now use Ruby Support for AWS Lambda. “Now it’s possible to write Lambda functions as idiomatic Ruby code, and run them on AWS. The AWS SDK for Ruby is included in the Lambda execution environment by default,” Chris Munns from AWS wrote in a blog post introducing the new language support. If C++ is your thing, AWS announced C++ Lambda Runtime. If neither of those match your programming language tastes, AWS opened it up for just about any language with the new Lambda Runtime API, which Danilo Poccia from AWS described in a blog post as “a simple interface to use any programming language, or a specific language version, for developing your functions.” AWS didn’t want to stop with languages though. They also recognize that even though Lambda (and serverless in general) is designed to remove a level of complexity for developers, that doesn’t mean that all serverless applications consist of simple event triggers. As developers build more sophisticated serverless apps, they have to bring in system components and compose multiple pieces together, as Vogels explained in his keynote today. To address this requirement, the company introduced Lambda Layers, which they describe as “a way to centrally manage code and data that is shared across multiple functions.” This could be custom code used by multiple functions or a way to share code used to simplify business logic. As Lambda matures, developer requirements grow and these announcements and others are part of trying to meet those needs. Leaf Corcoran would rather you didn’t compare Itch.io, his digital marketplace that currently houses around 120,000 games, to Steam, the leading video games distribution platform on PC. “We’re a tiny company, the kinds of games and service are definitely different,” Corcoran tells The Verge. “I like the idea of us providing an alternative thing.” It’s true: you won’t find the latest triple-A release on Itchio. Best compared to the zine section of a comic book shop, Itchio has nonetheless become the go-to platform for up-and-coming game developers to share their games with the world — and for more established developers to release games that take risks. As of this writing, the Itchio front page features eclectic games such as one where you can go on a beach date, one that generates random homes for you to enjoy, and one where you can play as a frog detective. Dive deeper and you’re sure to find something even more offbeat and unexpected. “Putting your game on Steam is a gamble,” says an established developer who spoke with The Verge on the condition of anonymity. “It costs money to upload your game and if it doesn’t reach a certain threshold of sales, you don’t get any money at all. Yes, you get exposed to a lot more eyeballs, but the people there are also much more likely to be looking for ‘real games.’ So if your game is weird or simply just not polished to a mirror-shine, then Itch is a much more fitting place for it.” This willingness to experiment without feeling beholden to fan expectations about what games should be sold or shared makes Itchio feel like a garden of digital possibility, one unburdened by corporate overlords or the growing malaise of loot boxes. Here, you might find some junk that someone made in a few hours, barely playable or legible — or you might find a raw yet heartfelt game that does something you’ve never seen before. Given how often PC gamers bemoan that nothing in a Steam sale feels exciting or new anymore, a digital ecosystem that still inspires wonder in the face of algorithm-driven consumption is refreshing. Corcoran built Itchio haphazardly and by happenstance, starting in 2013. His initial aim was to make his own programming language, and while he was successful, Corcoran wanted to do something with his project, which he named “Moonscript.” So, he started making games — but he had nowhere to put them. Around this time, Steam was debuting a new program called Greenlight, where people could vote for what games would make it onto the platform. That’s when Corcoran got the idea of building a distribution platform without any sort of gatekeeping, like Bandcamp, but for games instead of music. He happened to have the domain name Itch.io, so he used it. At first, the platform was mostly Corcoran’s personal repository, but when the notoriously impossible mobile game Flappy Bird came out on Itchio, the site exploded. Someone threw a game jam that invited people to make other fiendishly difficult games, which were naturally shared on Itchio as well. Hundreds of Flappy Bird-inspired games followed. Corcoran wasn’t prepared for the sudden influx at first, and Itch buckled under the pressure. The site would sometimes randomly go down, prompting Corcoran to spiff up his otherwise makeshift code. Since then, Itchio has continued to grow, with Corcoran employing a few full-time employees and contractors to handle the influx — but he notes that from time to time, something unexpected will still go wrong. “I haven’t really taken a proper vacation in a long time,” Corcoran says after evading a question about how many hours a week he works. “I don’t know if I would admit that.” Beyond the fact that Itch has a tiny outfit compared to the number of people using the platform, part of the reason that Corcoran is always busy is because he actually gives a shit, and giving a shit is time-consuming. Steam, meanwhile, has become notorious for being so big that it does not have to care. Baffling platform-wide changes will happen on a moment’s notice, seemingly without any input from the people whose livelihoods rely on Steam, or Valve will decide to change its policies without actually telling anyone what they are. To use Steam, both as a developer and video game fan, is often an exercise in frustration. Until very recently, the platform — which is the biggest on the market — did not hire any moderators to keep Steam’s forums clean. Before 2018, you didn’t have to go far into the Steam forums to find something nasty, both toward developers and between players themselves. “This approach has led to numerous other issues over the years: a flood of ‘fake games,’ a multi-billion-dollar under-age Counter-Strike gambling ring, an unhinged developer trying to sue 100 users for $18 million — the list goes on,” says Nathan Grayson, who writes for leading Valve news website Steamed. Valve’s recent decision to start allowing everything on Steam, coupled with their generally hands-off approach, makes critics wary. “Now Valve is doubling down with an ‘anything goes’ policy for games that shirks responsibility and shows that the company has learned basically nothing from a series of highly publicized fiascos it did nothing to safeguard against,” Grayson says. Valve’s mercurial and opaque nature is a large part of why, despite Corcoran’s protests, Itchio is so often mentioned in the same breath as Steam. People can’t help but compare Itchio, a platform defined by its compassion to users and developers, to Steam’s seemingly uncaring nature. In an age of platforms that are too enormous to be controlled, supervised, or to extend empathy to all users, Itchio is the rare tech creation that puts humans, rather than products, at its forefront. The mandate isn’t to become as huge or as profitable as possible, but to genuinely provide something different. While games make up the bulk of Itchio’s content, creators can also upload things like books, music, and comics. It’s also where people go to raise money for causes like Ferguson, or for life-saving surgeries. It is where people upload intimate games they’re scared to show to the world, or to feel heard. Developers speak of Itch with reverence and delight, and almost everyone has a story about how Corcoran personally went above and beyond to help them achieve their vision for release. Alan Hazelden for example, creator of A Good Snowman Is Hard To Build, had the idea of having a launch period where the price of the game would be determined by the real-world temperature. On most marketplaces, this would be impossible. On Itch, something this specific and absurd is a tantalizing challenge for Corcoran. “I emailed to ask if there was a price-changing API that I could use, and a day later Leaf replied saying that he’d implemented one,” Hazelden says. “That kind of response time and implementing features on a whim is unprecedented, and not something I’ve seen at any other store or would expect to see. They’re incredibly responsive and considerate of developer needs.” There are many stories like these, where Corcoran personally builds something for a game just because, as well as stories about how the platform treated its users with kindness. One developer, Kevin Cole, describes a tight situation where he once forgot to ask for a payout from Itch after the release of his game. On most marketplaces, missing your window means you don’t get a paycheck. “I forgot and [thought] I was basically going to be out of luck, so I sent a polite and apologetic email to Itch, explained my situation and asked if I could cut in line, thinking that probably wouldn’t happen,” Cole says. “It did happen! That real human person got back to me super fast and I was paid out the next day and my financial life dodged complete destruction once more. This may seem like a really minor thing but $80 when you super need it can change a person’s life.” Corcoran knows that doing things like this “means a lot” to people, and he largely does it because he feels invested in the games that get released on the platform. In a presentation at the 2016 XOXO festival, Corcoran said that he wants games on the platform to succeed to the degree that he gets “emotionally attached” to them. “I had anxiety for them, I felt terrible if they didn’t sell well,” Corcoran said. “I felt ecstatic when they succeeded.” No surprise, then, that Corcoran says he likes to look for more opportunities to give creative work released on Itch a personal touch. Unlike other storefronts, Itchio allows creators to set the price of the game, including “pay what you want.” More importantly, Itchio also lets developers decide how that money gets divided between the platform and content creator. If a developer doesn’t want to give money back to Itch, they don’t have to. In the XOXO presentation, Corcoran said that he didn’t want to take a cut of money that someone might need for rent or food. “I want them to feel okay to put [the percentage] at zero,” he said, noting that most developers end up setting the split at 8 percent. Steam, like other digital marketplaces, reportedly takes around 30 percent of a sale made on its platform. Some games, like Paratropic, end up profiting more per unit sold on Itch than they do on Steam. Itchio’s own profit varies from month to month, Corcoran said, but it usually breaks even. Itch also allows creators to customize their store pages, rather than demanding that they all adhere to unified branding. Scrolling through different landing pages, Itchio is reminiscent of the early days of the internet, when web pages felt more personal because they could look like anything, even if it meant being messy and overwhelming. While many pages opt to keep standard layouts, others experiment with color schemes, fonts, specialized backgrounds, and themes. One moment you might be looking at a store surrounded by moving waves, and the next you might find yourself descending down digital pipes. You never know what to expect on Itchio, which is part of the appeal. Venturing into its marketplace feels like setting out into the wilderness: you’ll probably need a machete to cut your way through, but that’s what makes Itchio an adventure. The platform also allows developers to upload unfinished games that can only be played by audiences specified by the creator, rather than allowing early access to anyone who pays or opts into it. Itch has become a hub for game jams where people challenge each other to make themed digital experiences within a set time frame — right now, for example, there’s a challenge to make a game about friendship. Most of Itch’s features and prioritizations are aimed at creators, which may be part of why the platform is kind of niche. Even as many game developers know of or use the platform, mainstream gamers don’t always know what Itchio is. “There’s this weird cultural thing, where it’s kinda difficult for us to gain traction among gamers because Steam is such a massive source,” Corcoran says. And when someone does find a game on Itch, it’s not uncommon for them to say they’ll wait for the eventual Steam release. For Corcoran, that’s painful — he hates the idea that someone might upload a game to Itch only to have nobody play it. “It’s gonna take time, a cultural shift,” Corcoran says, for people to stop considering Steam the end-all-be-all distribution platform. But the shift may already be underway: publishers like EA, Ubisoft, and Blizzard have their own game launchers and storefronts that exist independently on Steam, and extremely popular games like Fortnite and Minecraft don’t exist on platforms like Steam at all. In the meantime, Corcoran is left wondering about better ways he could engage with consumers, whether that’s better marketing or new features. But the prospect of Itch becoming more popular is a double-edged sword; a large part of what makes it so good is precisely that it is small and personal. Corcoran couldn’t possibly find the time to make game-specific custom features in a marketplace as big as Steam, nor could Itchio bend its own rules for every single person in need. As platforms like Facebook and YouTube have shown us time and again, decency does not scale. The only way to keep up with unencumbered growth is to rely on algorithmic black boxes that make decisions for us, ultimately stripping the humanity out of platforms that are meant to serve us. “I think there’s a good chance that when any platform becomes very large, maybe [decency] becomes impossible to enforce,” Corcoran says. “That’s probably what happened to Steam, Twitter, Facebook, et cetera … now we’re small so it’s easy to enforce.” The hope, Corcoran says, is that perhaps maintaining “caring” as a value will allow the platform to avoid some of the pitfalls that come with growing big. “I do care about trying to scale our culture, I do think it’s going to be challenging,” he says. “Maybe there’s a chance that having good intentions from the beginning can kind of offset. Kind of what I’m hoping for.” Until then, Itchio will continue blazing forward the only way it knows how. “We’re always going to host weirder, smaller things that probably will never feel appropriate on Steam,” Corcoran says. “Getting bought, creating money, changing our focus — I don’t really want to do that. I really enjoy building the site and talking to people.” The Elder Wand is kind of a big deal in Harry Potter lore, up there with the soul-storing horcruxes and immortalizing Sorcerer's Stone. The actual power of the wand has never been extensively discussed, but many a Potter maniac knows how powerful wizards have fought and killed over it. It's key in Harry's final showdown with Voldemort and pops up again in Grindelwald's hand in the Fantastic Beasts prequel franchise. If you wanted to know the comprehensive and very gory history behind the wand, you're in luck. Keep reading to learn about its known owners and masters. We'll cover the whole shebang, discussing the wand's context in The Tales of Beedle the Bard, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, and Fantastic Beasts: The Crimes of Grindelwald. Antioch PeverellAn aggressive man, Antioch was found living during the 13th century with his younger brothers Cadmus and Ignotus. According to The Tales of Beedle the Bard, the Peverell brothers outwit death, which gifts the elder wand to Antioch and the resurrection stone and invisibility cloak to his brothers. All three objects form the Deathly Hallows, and with all of them, one could master death. At a pub, the eldest brother later gets in over his head by drunkenly bragging about how his powerful wand helped him win a duel. A pub patron later slits Antioch's throat and steals the legendary wand. The story makes for good folklore, but it's likely that Antioch and his brothers were merely very gifted wizards who either created or came across the Hallows. Emeric the EvilEmeric terrorizes the South of England in the early Middle Ages. He's the first well-documented account of someone with a wand made of elder. Egbert the EgregiousHe kills off Emeric in a duel. GodelotLiving a century after Egbert, he writes Magick Moste Evile as he studies the Elder Wand. HerewardNot much to say about him, except that he locks his father Godelot up in a cellar to die after stealing his wand. Barnabas DeverillBarnabas is a notoriously evil wizard in the 18th century who uses the wand to hype up how bad he is until Loxias kills him. LoxiasHe calls the Elder Wand "the Deathstick." Ownership of the wand gets murky after him because many people claimed that they killed him, including his own mother. In Deathly Hallows, Mr. Lovegood suggests that it could've also been a wizard named Arcus or Livius who defeated Loxias. Mykew GregorovitchGregorovitch acquires the Elder Wand in his younger years as a wandmaker. He starts a rumor that he has the most powerful wand in the world and has plans to replicate it for business. This gets in the ears of Grindelwald, who steals it. Many years later, Voldemort goes to the wandmaker to figure out where the Elder Wand is. Gregorovitch doesn't know and begs for mercy, but, of course, Voldemort kills him. Gellert GrindelwaldTeenage Grindelwald steals the wand from Gregorovitch, stunning the wandmaker shortly after. The Fantastic Beasts franchise has fed speculations that Newt Scamander or Tina Goldstein may be the temporary master of the wand, since they both defeat him before he goes to MACUSA's prison. If you remember, Newt binds up Grindelwald, and Tina uses the Accio spell to get a hold of his wand (technically Graves', the person he was impersonating) in Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them. Albus DumbledoreDumbledore gets a hold of the Elder Wand after famously defeating Grindelwald in 1945. Draco MalfoyRight before Snape gives Dumbledore a coup de grâce, Draco disarms Dumbledore, turning the wand's allegiance toward him, albeit unknowingly and without ever having the physical wand. VoldemortVoldemort steals the Elder Wand from Dumbledore's tomb. He later goes after Snape under the wrong assumption that the Potions professor had become the master of the wand because he killed Dumbledore. While he has the wand, he doesn't rightfully master it. Harry PotterHarry earns the allegiance of the Elder Wand after overpowering Draco at Malfoy Manor. After Harry gains its loyalty, Voldemort's killing curse against him backfires, because the wand will not kill its master. With the invisibility cloak, resurrection stone, and allegiance of the Elder Wand, Harry becomes the master of death. In the movie, he snaps the wand in half and throws it away. In the book, he uses it to repair his wand and returns it to Dumbledore's tomb. |
AuthorAt the moment I'm exporting jigsaw puzzles in Prescott, AZ. Once had a dream of getting my feet wet with crayon art in Orlando, FL. Spent a year training wooden trains in Salisbury, MD. Spent childhood selling salsa for the underprivileged. Had moderate success building Virgin Mary figurines on the black market. Archives
April 2019
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