Dragon Age: The Veilguard arrived with pretty solid critic scores, racking up an 84 on Metacritic, translating into what appear to be pretty solid sales, at the very least, putting up the highest playercount EA or BioWare has seen on Steam, with seemingly good console performance as well.

But after the critic reviews come in, user scores go live, and it was exceptionally easy to predict how they were going to split between players who had played the game, and ones that likely hadn’t. See if you can spot the difference.

• Steam – 77% “Mostly Positive” scores
• PlayStation – 4.45/5 stars
• Xbox – 4/5 stars
• Metacritic – 3.4/10

You can guess which three platforms there require you to own the game to rate it, and which one does not.

Candace Fails screamed for someone in the Texas hospital to help her pregnant daughter. “Do something,” she pleaded, on the morning of Oct. 29, 2023.

Nevaeh Crain was crying in pain, too weak to walk, blood staining her thighs. Feverish and vomiting the day of her baby shower, the 18-year-old had gone to two different emergency rooms within 12 hours, returning home each time worse than before.

The first hospital diagnosed her with strep throat without investigating her sharp abdominal cramps. At the second, she screened positive for sepsis, a life-threatening and fast-moving reaction to an infection, medical records show. But doctors said her six-month fetus had a heartbeat and that Crain was fine to leave.

Now on Crain’s third hospital visit, an obstetrician insisted on two ultrasounds to “confirm fetal demise,” a nurse wrote, before moving her to intensive care. 

By then, more than two hours after her arrival, Crain’s blood pressure had plummeted and a nurse had noted that her lips were “blue and dusky.” Her organs began failing. 

Hours later, she was dead.

Fails, who would have seen her daughter turn 20 this Friday, still cannot understand why Crain’s emergency was not treated like an emergency. 

But that is what many pregnant women are now facing in states with strict abortion bans, doctors and lawyers have told ProPublica.

In a quarterly earnings call that was overwhelmingly about AI and Meta’s plans for it, Zuckerberg said that new, AI-generated feeds are likely to come to Facebook and other Meta platforms. Zuckerberg said he is excited for the “opportunity for AI to help people create content that just makes people’s feed experiences better.” Zuckerberg’s comments were first reported by Fortune.

“I think we’re going to add a whole new category of content, which is AI generated or AI summarized content or kind of existing content pulled together by AI in some way,” he said. “And I think that that’s going to be just very exciting for the—for Facebook and Instagram and maybe Threads or other kind of Feed experiences over time.”

A new documentary, Kingdom Uncovered: Inside Saudi Arabia, has revealed the total amount of worker deaths related to Mohammed bin Salman’s Saudi Vision 2030, a multitrillion dollar program which includes NEOM and the Line.

According to the exposé by ITV, more than 21,000 Indian, Bangladeshi, and Nepalese workers have died in Saudi Arabia since 2017 working on various aspects of Saudi Vision 2030. And according to The Hindustan Times, reports show that more than 100,000 people have “disappeared”during NEOM’s construction.

Workers also say that, under current working conditions, they are “trapped slaves” and “beggars.” There’s also been reports of wage theft, illegal working hours, and human rights abuses. More than 20,000 Indigenous people were also forcefully removed from the region to make way for NEOM.

Josseli Barnica grieved the news as she lay in a Houston hospital bed on Sept. 3, 2021: The sibling she’d dreamt of giving her daughter would not survive this pregnancy.

The fetus was on the verge of coming out, its head pressed against her dilated cervix; she was 17 weeks pregnant and a miscarriage was “in progress,” doctors noted in hospital records. At that point, they should have offered to speed up the delivery or empty her uterus to stave off a deadly infection, more than a dozen medical experts told ProPublica.

But when Barnica’s husband rushed to her side from his job on a construction site, she relayed what she said the medical team had told her: “They had to wait until there was no heartbeat,” he told ProPublica in Spanish. “It would be a crime to give her an abortion.”

For 40 hours, the anguished 28-year-old mother prayed for doctors to help her get home to her daughter; all the while, her uterus remained exposed to bacteria.

Three days after she delivered, Barnica died of an infection.

MADISON COUNTY, Ind. — A former Republican candidate running for an Indiana seat in the U.S. House of Representatives has been arrested and charged with stealing several election ballots during a recent voting machine test.

Larry L. Savage Jr., a candidate in the Republican 5th District primary held earlier this year, was arrested Tuesday morning by Madison County authorities and charged with destroying/misplacing a ballot and theft. He has since been released on a $500 cash bond.

The charges filed against Savage, a 51-year-old Anderson resident and precinct committeeman, stem from an incident on Oct. 3 in which two election ballots went missing at the Madison County Government Center during testing of the local voting machines. 

Court documents show county officials began testing voting machines at 10 a.m. on Oct. 3, an event open to the public. Several citizens attended the tests and were allowed to run “test” ballots through the machines assigned to their county.

Despite being marked “test,” the ballots were still officially tracked and counted by the State and included real candidate names as well as differing votes. After testing, officials found one straight-Republican ballot and one write-in ballot were missing.

A review of security footage, which was subsequently being live-streamed online, showed Savage handling the two missing ballots. He can also be heard confirming with an election official that these are “absolutely, totally real ballots.”

In the video Savage can be seen looking around the room before folding up two ballots and putting them in his sweatshirt pocket.

While the choices this cycle may seem so stark, many in my Arab and Muslim community are asking how I can vote for someone who cannot commit to ending the genocide of my people? To a grieving community where so many of them barely survived the first nightmare Donald Trump presidency, but who are also now watching as their families and loved ones are eliminated using our tax dollars and bombs, the choice feels impossible. 

I have agonized over this question every single day. Having this conversation right now feels like talking about politics at a funeral. The urgency and complexity is even more intense since early voting started in Georgia, a key swing state. So today, I once again find myself propelled by a grief so overwhelming it has made breathing, let alone making decisions, impossible some days. 

Voting this year carries a heavier weight, as it feels like choosing between survival and surrender. Please know this is not fear-mongering. It is a reality. Organizing around Palestine is difficult already with unprecedented efforts to silence and punish advocates. I don’t believe there’s anything worse than genocide. But the reality is a second Trump presidency would ensure continued disaster for our community and far too many other allied communities as well.

The Washington Post has been rocked by a tidal wave of cancellations from digital subscribers and a series of resignations from columnists, as the paper grapples with the fallout of owner Jeff Bezos’s decision to block an endorsement of Vice President Kamala Harris for president.

More than 200,000 people had canceled their digital subscriptions by midday Monday, according to two people at the paper with knowledge of internal matters. Not all cancellations take effect immediately. Still, the figure represents about 8% of the paper’s paid circulation of 2.5 million subscribers, which includes print as well. The number of cancellations continued to grow Monday afternoon.

A corporate spokesperson declined to comment, citing The Washington Post Co.'s status as a privately held company.

Two hours before Donald Trump was set to take the stage at Madison Square Garden in New York City, right-wing comedian Tony Hinchcliffe warmed up the crowd with a shockingly racist performance. 

“Where are my proud Latinos at tonight?” Hinchcliffe asked the packed arena, eliciting scattered loud cheers. “You guys see what I mean? [The border’s] wide open. There’s so many of them.” 

“These Latinos, they love making babies, too,” he added. “There’s no pulling out. They don’t do that. They come inside just like they did to our country.” 

The crowd groaned and cheered as Hinchcliffe continued, saying, “Republicans are the party with a good sense of humor.”

A three-year fight to help support game preservation has come to a sad end today. The US copyright office has denied a request for a DMCA exemption that would allow libraries to remotely share digital access to preserved video games.

"For the past three years, the Video Game History Foundation has been supporting with the Software Preservation Network (SPN) on a petition to allow libraries and archives to remotely share digital access to out-of-print video games in their collections," VGHF explains in its statement. "Under the current anti-circumvention rules in Section 1201 of the DMCA, libraries and archives are unable to break copy protection on games in order to make them remotely accessible to researchers."

Essentially, this exemption would open up the possibility of a digital library where historians and researchers could 'check out' digital games that run through emulators. The VGHF argues that around 87% of all video games released in the US before 2010 are now out of print, and the only legal way to access those games now is through the occasionally exorbitant prices and often failing hardware that defines the retro gaming market.

REDDING, Calif. - A former Redding landlord is in hot water today after recent Reddit posts he made were shared across the app.

Charles Pierce is a 70-year-old former landlord of the Manzanita Manor Apartments in Redding. Pierce says he was fired from his role after his reddit posts came to light.

Pierce told Action News Now that under a now-deleted account, he posted that he received mail-in ballots of four previous tenants at the Manzanita Manor Apartments.

In a post to Reddit, Pierce claimed that he used all of the four ballots to cast votes for former President Donald Trump, and to vote "no" on all rent control and school bond measures in Shasta County.

Tech behemoth OpenAI has touted its artificial intelligence-powered transcription tool Whisper as having near “human level robustness and accuracy.”

But Whisper has a major flaw: It is prone to making up chunks of text or even entire sentences, according to interviews with more than a dozen software engineers, developers and academic researchers. Those experts said some of the invented text — known in the industry as hallucinations — can include racial commentary, violent rhetoric and even imagined medical treatments.

Experts said that such fabrications are problematic because Whisper is being used in a slew of industries worldwide to translate and transcribe interviews, generate text in popular consumer technologies and create subtitles for videos.

More concerning, they said, is a rush by medical centers to utilize Whisper-based tools to transcribe patients’ consultations with doctors, despite OpenAI’ s warnings that the tool should not be used in “high-risk domains.”