How Ireland's second wave of Covid got so bad, so fast | Coronavirus Ireland recently made the headlines all over the world – for the wrong reason. We had the highest daily number of new confirmed cases of Covid-19 anywhere. The seven-day rolling average hit 1,394 cases per million – ahead of the UK on 810, and the US on 653. We had been doing so well. The Irish love Christmas, and a major cause of this surge was socialising. A stark warning came from Irishman Dr Gabriel Scally, of the Royal Society of Medicine in the UK, who said: “If we have a very merry Christmas, and meet lots of friends and relations, then I fear that in January and February we may well be burying some relations.” Numbers began to creep up just before Christmas. But cases continued to climb exponentially. Ireland is now in as strict a lockdown as it was back in April. A good comparison can be drawn with Finland which back in December had a similar number of cases to Ireland. What now? We are, therefore, at the lowest point in this pandemic. … we have a small favour to ask.
Video games have replaced music as the most important aspect of youth culture | Culture It would be incorrect to say video games went mainstream in 2020. They’ve been mainstream for decades. But their place in pop culture feels far more central – to gamers and non-gamers alike – than ever before. The writing was on the wall in November 2019. The most fetishized products of 2020 were gaming platforms: the Nintendo Switch in the spring and the PlayStation 5 this fall. Being in the spotlight comes with downsides, too. Across music and fashion, cultural leaders have taken note and begun producing gamerbait: cultural products inspired by the aesthetic ecosystem of the gaming world. We’re in the midst of a cultural shift. While the gaming industry booms, the music industry struggles with multiple overlapping crises: streaming platforms pay artists disastrously low royalties, venues scrap to make rent in rapidly gentrifying cities from London to Los Angeles, and Covid bars artists from making any money whatsoever from live performances.
PlayStation 5 v Xbox Series X: how will the rival consoles compare? | Games consoles Last week, in a livestream watched by millions, Sony revealed the first games coming to its PlayStation 5 console. Due out this winter, the machine will be competing with Microsoft’s Xbox Series X in the first major console war since 2013. But what will these new devices offer that Xbox One and PlayStation 4 do not – and will this finally get the kids off Fortnite? Technology Like the Xbox One and PS4, the two new machines have quite similar tech, much of it provided by leading semiconductor manufacturer AMD. Both consoles also have dedicated graphics processing units (GPUs) to drive their high-detail 3D visuals, also based on AMD technology: its Radeon Navi RDNA graphics architecture. Both Sony and Microsoft say their machines will be able to run content at screen resolutions of up to 8K, but it’s not clear whether this will be games or 8K movies. Storage Accessories Both consoles will come with redesigned versions of their familiar controllers. Games Backwards compatibility Conclusion
Cyberpunk 2077 review – could it ever live up to the hype? | Games So here we finally are, in Night City. Almost a decade after it was first announced, CD Projekt’s massively ambitious role-playing game has launched into a swirling maelstrom of hype and controversy that befits its salacious, histrionic setting. Like the technological MacGuffin at the centre of the plot, Cyberpunk 2077 is highly advanced and ingenious, but also bug-ridden and irresponsible. You play as V, a cybernetically enhanced street hustler looking to make their name on these squalid, vicious streets, taking infiltration and assassination jobs for the gangs who’ve carved up the criminal underworld. From here, you’re on a hot-wired muscle-car joyride through cyberpunk trope city. You can play Cyberpunk 2077 as a stealth game, keeping conflict to a minimum by hacking cameras and security droids. There’s nothing new here, though. There are also elements of the genre-defining cyberpunk role-playing game Deus Ex. Amid the excitement, there are many troubling aspects.
How good can Bruno Fernandes make Manchester United? Anfield may tell | Manchester United This is not the beginning of the title run-in. This is not the start of the middle, or the beginning of the end. Let’s face it, nobody really knows what’s going on up there in this jetlagged oddity of a Premier League season, when points have been scattered with luxurious abandon, and none of these teams seem ready to find a sustained higher gear. Not that it makes much difference. There is some logic to this. That game was also at Anfield, the day Fabinho scored, the home crowd became an irresistible noise and Pep Guardiola capered about whirling his fists at the sky, King Lear in a grey knitted cardigan. Back in the current hungover version of reality, the top of the Premier League has been a slow bicycle race so far. For United in particular this is a timely test. It is another small note of regret in a season-long symphony that Fernandes won’t get to play in front of an Anfield full house. For now he has been that rare thing, a genuinely transformative signing.
Telephone Conversation - Wole Soyinka (b.1934) Lukaku - The Players' Tribune I remember the exact moment I knew we were broke. I can still picture my mum at the refrigerator and the look on her face. I was six years old, and I came home for lunch during our break at school. My mum had the same thing on the menu every single day: Bread and milk. When you’re a kid, you don’t even think about it. But I guess that’s what we could afford. Then this one day I came home, and I walked into the kitchen, and I saw my mum at the refrigerator with the box of milk, like normal. She was mixing water in with the milk. My father had been a pro footballer, but he was at the end of his career and the money was all gone. Then I’d come home at night and the lights would be shut off. Then I’d want to take a bath, and there would be no hot water. There were even times when my mum had to “borrow” bread from the bakery down the street. I knew we were struggling. I didn’t say a word. I couldn’t see my mother living like that. People in football love to talk about mental strength. “What?
Shaqiri - The players' tribune Now I Got My Own Army Guy? Our house didn’t have heat. Just a big fireplace. It was a really old, old house on a farm in Basel, and that’s just the way it was. My family had left Kosovo before the war broke out, when I was four years old, and they tried to make a life in Switzerland with me and my two brothers. Switzerland is very expensive for anyone, but it was extra difficult for my parents because they were sending a lot of money back home to our family members who were still in Kosovo. But when the war started it became impossible to go back, and things were very difficult for my family members who were stuck there. Funny story, actually … Ronaldo was my idol. So my birthday comes, and my mom has only one box for me. I was pretty much the only immigrant kid in my school, and I don’t think the Swiss kids understood why I was so obsessed with football. But I had curly blonde hair at the time., so it was just crazy. I didn’t care. The football was real football. I was shocked.