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Bauhutte, the folks behind the gaming bed and the gaming mattress, are back with another interesting product: A hand massager for gamers.

Called the Hand Massager (clever!), this desktop contraption is specifically designed to soothe gamers’ hands. The Hand Massager is outfitted with 15 air cushions to remove fatigue and weariness from the palm and each finger one by one.

The Hand Massager has three different settings to allow people to select how hard (or soft) want their hand massage. There are two course settings: One is for the entire hand, while the other is only for the fingers.

Inside the Hand Massager, there’s even an optional heater that Bauhutte recommends using to warm up one’s hand before playing. The company also suggests using the massager while taking a break during playing to help improve circulation and adds that when players are finished gaming, the Hand Massager could be part of a cool down routine.

It is important to take care of one’s hands. Esports health care sites and Red Bull recommend hand stretches to prevent injury. But is a desk top massager really necessary?

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Back in 2018, former Riot Games employees Melanie McCracken and Jes Negrón filed a class action suit against the League of Legends publisher over endemic gender-based discrimination and fostering a “men-first” environment. A settlement has now been reached.

The lawsuit was originally filed three months after a Kotaku investigation into the company’s sexist culture.

Riot has agreed to pay $80 million to members of the class action suit and another $20 million in attorney’s fees and miscellaneous expenses, for a total of $100 million. This global settlement spans from 2014 to present and includes all current and former full-time employees as well as temporary contracts in California who identify as women. The settlement is currently awaiting court approval.

Moreover, Riot has also agreed to having a third party approved by both the company and the California Department of Fair Employment and Housing (DFEH) monitor pay equity and internal reporting for three years.

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Nintendo has obtained a UK High Court injunction against six internet service providers in an effort to stop Switch games from being downloaded illegally.

The injunction means that six UK-based ISPs – BT, EE, Plusnet, Sky, TalkTalk and Virgin Media – must now block access to specific ROM portals for two years.

The injunction application – which is dated December 2nd, 2021 – sees Nintendo requesting a website blocking order under section 97A of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. The six named ISPs are requested to block access to five domains: nsw2u.xyz, nsw2u.org, nsw2u.com, nsw2u.net and nswrom.com. These domains, Nintendo says, offer pirated Switch ROMs.

Nintendo believes these sites are commercial in nature due to the fact that they feature advertising which generates income based on page views and pop-up ads. Nintendo also voiced concerns over explicit adult content appearing during the download process, given the young nature of its main audience.

The company also claims that it has made repeated attempts to contact the owners of the sites via its solicitors in order to settle the matter out of court and that it believes all of the named sites are owned by the same entity.

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Logan Paul has managed to inadverntely stir up controversy time by creating his very own gaming inspired table. 

Paul took to TikTok to show off his unique project, which involved him dunking 15 Game Boys into epoxy resin, covering them with more of the resin and then popping the whole thing inside a Pokémon inspired frame. 

Alongside the video, he wrote: “First epoxy resin project… Game Boy Colors & a metal Pokémon frame made for a nice little tabletop.” 

In a second clip he showed that the whole thing lights up and changes colour. 

Now, personally, I reckon it looks pretty cool, but his treatment of the beloved Nintendo consoles has not gone down well with all his followers. 

One person wrote: “I get it’s your money. And I respect you for taking the time to learn this, but I think giving these away as gifts or something, especially around Christmas, could’ve made some peoples days.”

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Websites that post manga comics without artists’ authorization remain rampant in Japan, posing a serious issue for cartoonists, particularly fledgling ones.

Manga sales in the country are estimated to have hit a record high of ¥612.6 billion in 2020 thanks to such blockbuster works as “Demon Slayer: Kimetsu no Yaiba.”

The stellar result was apparently due in part to brisk demand from people staying at home amid the coronavirus pandemic. At the same time, however, damage from piracy websites also increased.

ABJ, an organization established mainly by publishers including Shueisha Inc. to tackle the issue of manga piracy, has compiled a list of some 400 piracy sites. The combined monthly number of accesses to the top three such sites reached 326 million in October 2021, skyrocketing from 12.5 million in January 2020, according to the group.

The estimated amount of damage calculated on the basis of the number of accesses to the top 10 piracy websites exceeded ¥780 billion between January and October 2021, far more than some ¥210 billion for the whole of 2020.

Damage from Manga Bank, one of the major pirate sites, alone is believed to have totaled over ¥200 billion. The cumulative number of accesses to the site, which was set up in December 2019, amounted to nearly 1 billion.

Shueisha and three other publishers started talks on combating the site immediately after its launch.

They filed a petition with a U.S. court seeking an order for the disclosure of information about the site’s operator.

In November, the court ordered entities including Google to disclose such information. Although Manga Bank was shut down suddenly in the same month, the four companies remain determined to identify its operator and pursue its legal responsibility.

“The picture quality of pirated versions seen recently is very high and almost on par with that of e-books, and unauthorized works of some manga comics are found on the internet on the very dates when their official versions go on sale,” manga artist Ken Akamatsu, known for such hit works as “Love Hina” and “Negima! Magister Negi Magi,” said angrily.

Noting that damage is particularly great for new and unknown cartoonists who are active only online with their works still not published in magazines, Akamatsu said: “If such artists lose motivation, very entertaining manga works that would have appeared in the future could end up not being read. Keeping away from pirated works will lead to protecting talented artists, so I want people to enjoy manga in their official versions.”

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Whether it’s Call of Duty or Battlefield, one of the low-key nicest parts of a shooter can be just watching (and listening to the KAH-CHUNK sounds of) the player reloading various weapons. This video by Kommander Karl is a compilation of exactly that kind of action, only it’s a man reloading toasters, smoke alarms and lamps as though they were video game weapons.

I’m not gonna lie, I do this all the time with my Dyson. And the battery pack on my power drill. And my blender. And...look, this video didn’t get this idea out of thin air, OK. It just executes the idea about as perfectly as it could be done.

The video above is a compilation, but you can see a lot more of these—like reloads for a water bottle a nutcracker—at Kommander Karl’s TikTok channel.

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Ubisoft’s entry into the maelstrom of NFTs, which has so far been comically inept, has also been received by the wider public with an enormous amount of outright hostility. And how has the company responded to this backlash? Exactly as you would expect.

While some studios dipped their toes into the water, found their fanbases were not exactly thrilled with the prospect, and bailed, Ubisoft is far too invested in this bullshit to go backing out now. And so, in an interview with a crypto news site, the company has instead explained how they intend on ignoring your concerns and pushing right on ahead with everything.

We have received a lot of feedback since the announcement, and we hear both the encouragement and the concerns. We understand where the sentiment towards the technology comes from, and we need to keep taking it into consideration every step of the way.

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An unofficial World of Warcraft Discord server has been lit ablaze in recent days. Right now, Twitter is full of screenshots showing people decrying Blizzard adding people of color to the MMORPG, with one particular comment complaining about how there are “too many Black humans in Stormwind.” This caused an expected community backlash, but the discussion around the addition of BIPOC NPCs to the high-fantasy game requires more explanation.

In November, Blizzard went out of its way to create a community council with the goal of soliciting player feedback for detailed ways to improve World of Warcraft. The community then splintered off on its own, creating an unofficial Discord server called Seat of the Council. This new community was partially populated with members of the official one, and also home to the two protagonists of this story.

So, WoW players recently began noticing that NPC humans in the city of Stormwind appeared to suddenly become BIPOC. Characters who were white when the update originally dropped back in 2020 had their skin change, now appearing to be Asian or Black sometime around September of this year. This apparent BIPOC-washing pissed people off. The Seat of the Council Discord server blew up in outrage at the time. While that was a couple of months ago, for whatever reason one member has kept the fight going into December. According to a member present at the time the comment was made this week, a user called chamomile said on Discord that there were “too many” Black people in the game. Now that comment is all over social media.

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Justin Kan, a co-founder of Twitch and the dude Justin.TV was named for, last week decided to launch a site called Fractal. It was to be a ‘marketplace’ where in-game items could be bought and sold as NFTs. Later, in Fractal’s Discord server, a link appeared advertising a drop of 3,333 NFTs. You may have guessed what happened next.

As Twitch reporter Zach Bussey has detailed, the message, which appeared legit since it was coming from inside the house, had actually been posted by someone gaining access to Fractal’s Discord bot, pointing towards ‘Fractai’, not Fractal. The scammers managed to “sell” 3,294 NFTs before the plug was pulled. There were of course no actual NFTs being sold at all, just money being straight up stolen—over $150,000—though you’d be forgiven for wondering what the difference is.

Dear Fractal community,

Earlier today, approximately 373 of our community members fell victim to a scam posted on our Discord. We are sorry. We are going to make this right.

The hacker made out with ~800 sol (~$150,000) by managing to post a fake mint link in our #announcements channel. With over 100,000 members in our community, it’s quite impressive that the hacker only managed to dupe .3% of our community.

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The word that kept coming to mind while watching The Matrix Resurrections was “echo.” Not déjà vu — not the spooky sensation of having dreamt or lived something already without being able to account for when or where it happened. But echo: in which you know the origin, you can pinpoint the source, and yet here it comes, boomeranging back, somewhat the same as before, but also different. Distorted. 

A case in point: the return of familiar characters, like Morpheus and Mr. Smith — unforgettably played by Laurence Fishburne and Hugo Weaving, respectively — but without those actors. (This is no spoiler; we’ve known since at least last year that Fishburne hadn’t been invited back for this sequel.) And a plot, meanwhile, that winkingly replays the story we already knew, almost beat by beat, with an awareness that only heightens the sense of revision. This is a movie that’s playing out in its own, disruptive present tense, looking back on its past self with curiosity and also skepticism. Unsurprisingly, this gets literalized: Minutes into the movie, a crew of familiar characters looks on from a distance as the opening scene of The Matrix replays itself… sort of. And throughout Resurrections, quick, cutting insertions of the previous Matrix movies jut their way into this new movie, sometimes in the form of memories, or maybe-hallucinations; other times grafted onto a literal screen, a torn curtain of sorts, like they’re a scene from a movie — which, so far as we’re concerned, is what they are.

Most ominously of all, we get the return of déjà vu itself, which was once a mere harbinger of some revision in the code of the so-called Matrix, a bit of cleverly conceptual world-building incited by the appearance of a black cat — less of an outright, midsequence info-dump than a brief pause in the action for a tiny info-leak, all of it whittled down into the form of a random animal. Now, in Resurrections, Déjà Vu is the name of an actual black cat. And that cat belongs to the therapist of Thomas Anderson (Keanu Reeves), a man recovering from a suicide attempt and very much still working through it. Anderson’s therapist wears glasses with bright blue rims — a singular, unmistakable blue, an unmissable echo retrieved from the franchise’s gnarled world of symbols and codes. An echo: the same, different. And consistent in this fact: It is a harbinger of something amiss in this world.

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