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The Adventure Zone: Balance is coming to an end all over again! The Adventure Zone: Story and Song is the final volume of the graphic novel adaptation of the critically acclaimed actual play podcast. To celebrate, Dan Casey sat down with Griffin McElroy, Clint McElroy, Justin McElroy, and Travis McElroy to dive deep into what to expect from the final volume; saying goodbye to Taako, Magnus, and Merle all over again; and much more.

The Adventure Zone: Story and Song is available from Macmillan and 23rd St. on July 14, 2026: https://bit.ly/TAZStoryAndSong

Listen to more of The McElroy Family’s excellent work at https://www.themcelroy.family/

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The post Quests N’ Answers: The Adventure Zone w/ The McElroy Family appeared first on Nerdist.

Qualcomm is finally getting serious about AI infrastructure, but its push into the datacenter hinges on the success of an ambitious near-memory compute architecture designed to deliver better inference economics than today's GPUs. Announced during its 2026 investor day last week, the tech will see Qualcomm stack layer upon layer of DRAM on top of its XPUs to form a single unified compute and memory module it's calling high-bandwidth compute (HBC). “We offer all of the performance advantages of SRAM, but with the density and the memory capacity that HBM (high-bandwidth memory) stacks offer,” Tony Pialis, Qualcomm’s EVP of datacenter, claimed during last week's investor presentation. This technology is set to launch next year as part of Qualcomm’s AI250-series of Dragonfly rack systems, and marks a distinct shift in Qualcomm’s AI infrastructure strategy. The handset giant is no stranger to AI accelerators. Essentially every Snapdragon processor sold today ships with an NPU on board. But in the datacenter, the company has struggled to garner the same excitement as Nvidia, AMD, and even startups like Cerebras. Compared to the big two’s GPUs, Qualcomm’s AI-series accelerators haven’t compared that favorably, but that could soon change as the company looks to make its mark on the datacenter. With the AI250, the SoC maker is claiming 768 GB of memory capacity and up to 133 TB/s of effective memory bandwidth per card. For reference, Nvidia's Groq 3 LPUs offer just 500 MB of SRAM and 150 TB/s of bandwidth. If that seems too good to be true, that’s because it is. Qualcomm is leaning heavily on the word “effective.” We know that because for the AI200-based Dragonfly systems rolling out this year, they claimed 414 TB/s of “effective” memory bandwidth across all 56 chips. On its face, that seems more realistic, but actually achieving that with 8800 MT/s LPDDR5x alone would require a 6,720-bit-wide bus, which it almost certainly does not possess. Qualcomm insists that this is the "pure physical bandwidth of the LPDDR interface," but declined to offer any specifics as to how it's somehow managed to achieve what Nvidia needed eight HBM3e stacks to do. In any case, according to Qualcomm’s marketing materials, with the move to HBC, the AI250 will offer 18x the effective bandwidth of the AI200, while the forthcoming AI300 will deliver 54x the bandwidth. Given the context, these seem like outlandish claims, but these "effective" multipliers are really a feature of Qualcomm's HBC architecture. Unpacking high-bandwidth compute Amplifying “effective” bandwidth isn’t the only party trick from these HBC-based accelerators. Qualcomm claims that by moving some of the XPU’s compute under the DRAM, it can significantly reduce the amount of power its chips consume. On a conventional datacenter GPU, data is rapidly shuffled between HBM and the compute dies. Even using advanced packaging technologies like TSMC’s CoWoS, the power required to move this data back and forth is significant. By stacking the DRAM directly on top of some of the logic and connecting them using through-silicon vias (TSVs), the path from compute to memory is shortened considerably. "Imagine working in the same building that you live in so you only travel up and down," Pialis said. "What does that mean for the highways and the roads that connect the suburbs to the city? Guess what? The roads are clear. The value this brings to the industry is lower power consumption, less heat, and that expensive road of silicon interposer that HBM solutions use is no longer needed." Performing bandwidth-bound operations on the base die also has the benefit of reducing the amount of data that needs to be shuttled to and from the HBC to the SoC. In effect, memory bandwidth is amplified. This is why Qualcomm is using “effective bandwidth" so liberally. Compared to doing all of that work on a conventional GPU or XPU with distinct HBM and compute dies, the effective bandwidth would be significantly higher, which also achieves better density than SRAM-only designs, like Nvidia’s LPUs or Cerebras’ dinner plate sized accelerators. With that said, Qualcomm probably won’t be running its entire AI software stack on HBC. Higher memory bandwidth primarily benefits decode, when the entirety of the model’s active weights are streamed autoregressively from memory one token after another. Decode isn’t particularly compute-intensive. As such, doing decode partially or entirely in HBC starts to make a lot of sense because it also avoids the thermal constraints associated with burying the compute under multiple layers of DRAM. Qualcomm tells us that the AI250 can be used as a standalone AI accelerator, but notes it is heavily optimized around addressing bandwidth bottlenecks. So, in addition to being a dedicated inference chip, it can be used in disaggregated inference architectures that use GPUs or other Qualcomm parts for prompt processing and the AI250 to speed up memory intensive decode operations. Peak FLOPS are notably missing from Qualcomm’s AI250 disclosures — the company declined to share specifics upon our request. Is HBC actually a competitive advantage? While Qualcomm is early among chip designers to make a fuss about near-memory or HBC, it’s not the first, nor is the technology beyond the means of Nvidia or AMD. In fact, both Nvidia and AMD are rumored to be working with HBM suppliers and TSMC to develop custom base dies to boost the performance of their next-gen chips, though it's still not clear how much, if any, compute has been integrated into them. Qualcomm tells us its HBC "uses LPDDR memory in a purpose-built near-memory computing architecture that combines compute and highly-accelerated memory bandwidth within a 3D-stacked silicon design. While both HBC and HBM use stacked-memory concepts, HBC is a distinct architecture designed to address AI’s data-movement bottleneck by bringing compute and memory closer together, increasing memory bandwidth efficiency and improving energy efficiency for AI inference workloads. HBM has more stacks of DRAM, uses 2.5D interposer to route more wires, and does not do computing in the base logic die." AI chip startup d-Matrix is also developing accelerators that will use 3D stacked DRAM to extend their in-memory compute capabilities. The underlying technology described by Pialis may not be as unique as Qualcomm would like investors to believe, but it shows the company hasn’t missed the boat. However, Qualcomm’s ability to work with Nvidia and AMD may end up doing more to sell customers on its tech than anything. As we previously wrote, in a disaggregated AI world, Nvidia can be both a friend and an enemy. Qualcomm finds its Mojo In addition to teasing its upcoming AI250 and AI300 accelerators, Qualcomm’s investor day also coincided with the acquisition of AI software startup Modular. Modular was founded by Tim Davis and Chris Lattner, the latter of whom you may recognize as the creator of LLVM, Clang, the Swift programming language, and the multi-level intermediate representation (MLIR) compiler infrastructure. At Modular, Lattner and crew developed Mojo, a low-level programming interface for GPUs, which offered a high-performance alternative to Nvidia’s CUDA or AMD’s HIP and ROCm stacks. The big idea is that users should be able to write highly performant AI apps that’ll run regardless of the underlying hardware. For Qualcomm, Mojo presents an opportunity to sidestep the CUDA moat, which has dogged AMD for so long. With Mojo, Qualcomm’s customers won’t need to choose one platform; they can develop their apps and run them on whatever compute is handy at the time. It’s not all or nothing either. Modular should help to support heterogeneous deployments similar to what Nvidia is doing with Groq’s LPU tech, where GPUs might be used for prefill and AI250s are used for decode in whatever ratio makes the most sense for that specific application. However, the acquisition doesn’t just buy Qualcomm a vendor-neutral programming model. The folks buying these systems are primarily concerned with one AI workload in particular: LLM model serving. For this, Modular developed a serving platform called Max. Max is a bit like SGLang or vLLM in that it’ll run interchangeably on AMD or Nvidia hardware, but because it’s built atop Mojo, it, at least in theory, shouldn’t require nearly as much hand tuning. The offering should help Qualcomm compete in a landscape where software has become even more important than the hardware it runs on, if it manages to close the acquisition this year without regulators stepping in. In any case, we won’t have to wait much longer to see the HBC in action. After launching its AI200-series racks later this year, Qualcomm plans to push its first-gen HBC-based AI250 out the door beginning in 2027, while its second-gen HBC platform is slated for 2028. While you wait, why not read up on Qualcomm’s new datacenter CPU, which we explored in more detail last week. ®

Sophisticated AI models tend to require a lot of memory and take up a lot of storage space. One of the ways to reduce that footprint involves a process called quantization, which changes how model weights are represented and stored. But quantization has its drawbacks. Andrés Mac Allister, CEO and founder of The SEMQ Group, believes there's another way to make machine learning more efficient and less resource intensive. Instead of compressing model weights (specifically embeddings), he contends you can separate the semantics (the meaning) from how that meaning is represented. Model weights, including embeddings (which map tokens to vectors), are the numbers in a machine learning model that determine how strongly one piece of information relates to another. Taken all together, they reflect learned behavior. These parameters are commonly represented in Full-Precision (FP32), which requires 4 bytes per parameter. A 7B parameter model at FP32 would need about 28 GB of disk space and memory. To save space, the model might be quantized at FP16/BF16, which requires 2 bytes per parameter. The resulting model would need about 14 GB of disk space and memory. And there are smaller quantization options like FP8, INT8/Q8, Q6, Q5, Q4, Q3, and Q2, each of which reduces the storage and memory footprint while also reducing precision – the answers get worse. SEMQ stands for Symbolic Embedding Multi-Quantization. As described in a paper published earlier this year, SEMQ "replaces raw vectors with fixed-dimensional symbolic structures that preserve relational properties, such as relative similarity ordering and neighborhood structure, while decoupling representation from metrics, indexing, and execution semantics." Essentially, Mac Allister has devised a way to construct a semantic abstraction layer that decouples the meaning captured in embeddings – vectors representing data – from the way that data is represented. The operative idea is that semantic relationships depend primarily on the relative orientation of embedding vectors, so the absolute magnitude of those vectors becomes less important to preserve. That's less data to store. The potential impact to businesses running AI workloads depends on the portion of infrastructure costs attributable to semantic state. "An embedding is usually represented as a long vector of floating-point numbers," Mac Allister explained in an email to The Register. "In conventional embedding systems, semantic state is typically stored as a sequence of high-precision numerical coordinates. Those coordinates jointly encode both magnitude and direction in the embedding space. "Our original question was whether a substantial part of the useful semantic information could instead be represented through the structural relationship among components, how they move relative to one another, which regions they occupy and what directional configuration they form in the overall space." To this end, SEMQ aims to represent relative geometry rather than an enumeration of independent floating-point magnitudes. "That matters because semantic systems generally care about relationships, similarity, neighborhood, continuity, retrieval behavior, change over time, rather than only about preserving each raw numeric value in isolation,' said Mac Allister. "The result is a portable representation of semantic state that can be reproduced, audited, compared and transferred across processes." According to Mac Allister, initial validation tests that focused on converting the embedding-based semantic state into a deterministic .semq representation, restoring it, and evaluating the stability of retrieval and classification operations have shown good results. "For example, in one benchmark using the Banking77 dataset from MTEB and the all-MiniLM-L6-v2 embedding model, the FP32 baseline achieved 92.26 percent accuracy. SEMQ achieved 92.27 percent effectively matching the FP32 baseline within 0.03 percentage points." SEMQ thus did substantially better than 4-bit quantization, which registered 56.05 percent accuracy, 36.22 percentage points less than FP32. "These are not claims that conventional quantization is universally ineffective but they show that, in this particular semantic classification setting, preserving the relevant semantic structure is materially different from simply reducing numerical precision," said Mac Allister. Applying SEMQ can be done at the point of data ingestion – organizations can use the SDK on the vectors generated by their embedding model on their documents to encode that data as an .semq artifact – or at query time to load, query, compare, restore, and verify that encoding. "That means a team can adopt SEMQ without replacing its LLM, embedding model, vector database or agent framework," said Mac Allister. "It can initially run alongside the existing stack as a sidecar layer, then become the representation used for selected retrieval or memory workloads." Potential use cases, he said, include making embeddings or memory state portable across systems, reproducing semantic state across different runs or machines; auditing model changes; reducing dependence on opaque or hard-to-reproduce stateful pipelines; and diffing semantic state. He added that the SEMQ can be extended to runtime cognitive state. "In our research, .semq files have been used to snapshot and restore transformer KV-cache state across process boundaries," he said. "That is not a pre-training workflow either: but a runtime-state workflow for pausing, transferring and resuming an active model session." Mac Allister isn't yet ready to talk about specific customers. He said his company is working through a Founding Design Partnership Program with organizations exploring applications in enterprise AI, retrieval, agent memory, and auditable AI workflows. This includes some AI infrastructure hyperscalers and some companies operating at the AI application layer. "We signed NDAs with all of them, so I cannot name all of the organizations publicly yet," he said. "What I can say is that the interest has come from teams dealing with AI systems where reproducibility, state, lower infrastructure overhead, and the ability to inspect semantic behavior are operationally important. So this is a big problem for big companies." ®

A procedural vote on the National Defense Authorization Act failed to pass the House Tuesday, in no small part because the SAVE America Act was attached to it.

The lower chamber voted 198-224 to reject the rule, with 14 Republicans joining Democrats to oppose the last-minute addition of Donald Trump’s voter restriction bill to the proposed Pentagon budget.

Representatives Tim Burchett, Eric Burlison, Eli Crane, Randy Fine, Andy Harris, Anna Paulina Luna, Max Miller, Chip Roy, Keith Self, Victoria Spartz, Mike Turner, Thomas Massie, and Lauren Boebert all voted no. House Majority Leader Steve Scalise switched his vote as well, but only so that Republicans could readdress the matter in future.

The stalled NDAA vote is a major blow to leaders of both parties, who have historically passed the defense spending package with minimal partisan objections. But the wide rejection also illustrates the low support behind the SAVE America Act, despite repeated insistence from the White House that it needs to be turned into law.

Since he lost the 2020 election, Trump and his allies have amped up their base over contrived claims of voter fraud, a statistical nonissue in U.S. elections. Trump has worked overtime to force his unpopular election reform proposals through the legislature, throwing confirmation hearings and bipartisan bill signings to the wayside while demanding Republicans prioritize passing the SAVE America Act.

The backlash to the bill—which was introduced months ago—has been grave, so much so that it gummed up efforts to fund Homeland Security for several months. Republicans eventually had to bail on the package to end the congressional gridlock.

Yet Trump has nonetheless opted to make it a legislative priority once again, effectively paralyzing the House for another week. House Speaker Mike Johnson told reporters Tuesday that the lower chamber would work on the matter for another day and a half and try to hold another vote by the end of the week.

Another member of “60 Minutes” is making his exit from the once-renowned TV newsmagazine. The latest to call it quits? Veteran producer Henry Schuster. “It has been a great run at 60 MINUTES and what I got to do there was extraordinary. But I have been thinking about leaving for a while now and when the opportunity presented itself in February, I took it,” Schuster wrote on LinkedIn Monday.

Source

In a widely anticipated defeat for transgender rights, the Supreme Court upheld state laws in Idaho and West Virginia that ban transgender girls from playing on girls’ school sports team. The decision, issued on Tuesday, does not impose a nationwide ban on trans athletes. But it does preserve laws passed in 27 states by GOP politicians and anti-trans activists who argued that transgender women threaten safety and fairness in women’s athletics.

All nine Supreme Court justices agreed that Title IX, the federal law forbidding sex discrimination in schools, allows states to ban trans girls from girls’ sports. They also ruled 6-3, along ideological lines, that such bans do not violate the Equal Protection Clause of the Constitution.

“He’s not only creating a bad precedent for trans people, he’s significantly lowering the protection all women get under Equal Protection.”

The science is far from settled about whether trans girls who have received gender-affirming treatment actually have a competitive advantage or pose a greater risk of injuring other players. But the majority opinion, authored by Justice Brett Kavanaugh, glosses over those unknowns—reasoning that “biological sex” is a good enough proxy for athletic ability for states to categorically ban trans girls from girls’ sports.

“Separate sports teams for biological males and biological females are reasonable,” Kavanaugh writes. “Given the inherent physical differences between the sexes, allowing only biological females to play on women’s and girls’ teams can reduce the risk of physical injury and ensure fair competition.”

Yet the ruling has much broader implications. In her dissent, Justice Sonia Sotomayor points out that the majority opinion is allowing states to make laws based on broad differences between boys and girls, without looking closer at the subcategories of people who may not fit into those generalizations. “In so concluding,” she writes, “the Court…lowers the State’s burden for justifying the use of sex classifications in potentially all cases.”

In other words, the decision makes it easier for states to justify treating men and women differently. In the past, Sotomayor argues, the court has overturned laws that used “overbroad generalizations” that suited most men and most women but failed make exceptions for a minority who did not conform to sex stereotypes. But this case breaks that longstanding pattern: The court on Tuesday failed to account for the minority of students who have received gender-affirming treatment and thus may not conform to sex stereotypes about their athletic performance.

As a result, the ruling could threaten decades of progress on gender equality, Sotomayor warns. “The majority applies its diminished view of equal protection to the sports context today,” she writes. “One can only hope that the same misguided approach does not and will not extend to other contexts tomorrow.”

The legal cases, known as Little v. Hecox and West Virginia v. B.P.J., began in 2020 and 2021, when trans students’ participation in sports had not yet become a culture-war flashpoint or presidential campaign-defining issue. Back then, conservative political strategists had just begun to invest in messaging on trans athletes, and Republican legislators began to introduce legislation banning them —even though many couldn’t identify a single trans athlete playing school sports in their state.

“There was a concerted effort to use this issue as the wedge for establishing…that transgender women are not women.”

The issue of trans athletes in sports proved persuasive. Soon, Republican legislators were introducing and passing a wide array of anti-trans laws, targeting LGBTQ-inclusive school curricula and medical gender transitions for minors, and even successfully passing the kinds of bathroom bans that had failed in the past. “There was a concerted effort to use this issue as the wedge for establishing, both in law and in public opinion, that transgender women are not women, and that they should be treated differently from cisgender women,” explained Joshua Block, the American Civil Liberties Union lawyer who argued one of the cases before the Supreme Court, in an interview last year. “They go right from ‘transgender women don’t belong on our sports teams’ to ‘and they don’t belong in our restrooms or in our social clubs.’ It’s been a very potent political weapon for them.”

When Idaho and West Virginia passed their sports bans, trans students in each state sued, arguing that the laws were discriminatory and unjustified—not just because there are so few trans athletes, but also because the science remains unsettled about whether athletes who medically transition from male to female retain any physical advantage. The plaintiff in the West Virginia case, Becky Pepper-Jackson, had identified as a girl at school since the third grade, and, thanks to puberty blockers, never went through a male puberty; still, she was banned from trying out for her middle school’s girls’ cross-country team. Meanwhile, in Idaho, Boise State University student Lindsay Hecox was also barred from running women’s cross-country, even though she had medically transitioned and suppressed her testosterone for a year, as NCAA rules at the time required. In response to their challenges, federal appeals courts blocked the bans in both states. Then the Republican-led state governments asked the Supreme Court to take up the issue.

On Tuesday, the Supreme Court overruled those appeals courts decisions. “This is a heartbreaking ruling for our clients and transgender girls like them who’ve asked for nothing more than the same opportunities afforded to their peers,” Block said a statement following the ruling. “The reality is that the equality of transgender women and girls takes nothing away from, and in fact promotes, the equality of all women and girls.”

The court’s decision on Tuesday is limited in some important ways.

For one thing, it doesn’t require all states to ban trans girls and women from women’s sports. “This ruling does not require any state to follow West Virginia’s or Idaho’s cruel, overly-broad approach, and it does not mandate categorical bans on transgender students participating in school sports,” Chris Erchull, Senior Staff Attorney at the nonprofit GLBTQ Legal Advocates & Defenders, said in a statement following the ruling.

On top of that, the Title IX ruling is specific to sports—citing an amendment made to Title IX in 1974 that allowed schools to separate athletic teams by sex—and does not say whether Title IX allows or forbids discrimination against trans students in other contexts. That means trans students can continue to use Title IX to fight back when schools impose policies that harm them—such as rules that restrict their bathroom use, forbid teachers from using their preferred pronouns, or forcibly out them to unsupportive parents or guardians.

And while the justices decided that trans sports bans are allowed under the Equal Protection Clause of the Constitution, they didn’t rule on a broader question: Whether judges, when analyzing other anti-trans laws, should apply the same rigorous legal analysis they use for laws that treat men and women differently. That bigger, still-unresolved question has enormous consequences for transgender rights. If that answer is yes, courts must examine whether anti-trans laws are “substantially related” to an “important government” objective. That standard, known as “intermediate scrutiny,” is tough, and it makes it more likely that anti-trans laws of all kinds will be overturned.

In Tuesday’s ruling, Kavanaugh said that trans sports bans must be analyzed under intermediate scrutiny—because they treat people differently based on “biological sex.” But the court still hasn’t decided whether other laws that treat people differently based on transgender status qualify for the more rigorous legal analysis.

Still, Tuesday’s ruling could have much wider consequences for gender equality under the Constitution—affecting not just trans people but cisgender men and women.

As I reported in depth earlier this year, feminist legal scholars have been sounding alarms about the conservative legal movement’s strategic use of anti-trans laws to chip away at the Equal Protection Clause’s protections against sex discrimination. The term “biological sex” has become “the new takedown strategy for anti-discrimination law,” legal historian Mary Ziegler, of the University of California, Davis, explained:

“What they’re trying to do is to replace sex discrimination law with a Trojan horse sex discrimination law that no longer prohibits sex discrimination,” Ziegler says. Rather than attacking protections head on, she explains, “they’re going to say, ‘American anti-discrimination law means you can treat men and women differently because they have different bodies.’” If courts embrace this logic, Ziegler says, it would be much harder to fight back against potential restrictions on women’s lives—laws that limit job options for pregnant workers, for example, or that ban women from military schools—by arguing they violate the Constitution’s equal protection clause.

Sotomayor points out a similar threat in her dissenting opinion. Under the court’s previous precedents, Sotomayor explains, states are not allowed to treat people of different sexes differently based on generalizations about “the way women are.” Instead, they have to account for the subset of women who might not fit into sex stereotypes. In a famous case, the court ruled that the Virginia Military Institute couldn’t categorically exclude women by reasoning that most women wouldn’t do well under its adversarial style, since at least a small subset of women would, in fact, succeed there. 

In the case of the trans girls who have received gender-affirming care, Sotomayor argues that it’s too soon to say whether or not they fit into generalizations about the athletic ability of “biological” boys. “West Virginia might be right that transgender girls retain some inherent athletic advantage over cisgender girls due to their sex identified at birth even after receiving the hormonal therapy B. P. J. identifies,” she writes. “At this point, however, neither the District Court nor the Fourth Circuit has passed upon any of the available evidence or made the necessary factual findings about the state of the scientific debate.”

Trans girls who have received gender-affirming treatment may, in fact, not threaten safety or competitive fairness in girls’ sports. The court simply doesn’t have enough evidence to tell.

In other words, trans girls who have received gender-affirming treatment may not, in fact, threaten safety or competitive fairness in girls’ sports. The court simply doesn’t have enough evidence to tell, Sotomayor argues. Instead, she says, Idaho and West Virginia’s laws “[rest] on exactly the kind of overbroad generalizations based on sex the Equal Protection Clause is supposed to root out.”

“Even if most trans athletes would have strength advantages or potentially raise safety concerns, not all of them would, and that’s what intermediate scrutiny requires you to look at, and [Sotomayor] thinks that the court is watering down that part of equal protection,” Ziegler explains.

That’s important, explains Albany Law School professor Ava Ayers, because Kavanaugh’s decision on Tuesday could make it easier for courts to uphold other laws that generalize about all men and women based on sex. “What really concerns me about this decision is that he’s not only creating a bad precedent for trans people, he’s significantly lowering the protection all women get under Equal Protection,” Ayers says.

In the immediate term, the people who will have to live with the Supreme Court’s decision are mainly teenage girls. Disturbingly, Idaho’s law allows a “dispute” about a student’s sex to be resolved by a “physical examination” of their “reproductive anatomy.”

Many of the transgender girls seeking to play on the girls’ team simply want to play sports with their friends. “Where are they supposed to go?” says Ayers, who clerked for Justice Sonia Sotomayor before she was appointed to the Supreme Court. “It’s not safe for a trans girl to play on a trans boy team, or at least she’s very justified in feeling that way.”

And there are the harder-to-quantify consequences for teenagers encountering rigid gender policies at school—no matter whether or not they’re trans. “I didn’t realize I was trans until I was about 40, but I was deeply confused and perplexed by gender when I was a kid, and sports is a fraught experience,” Ayers says. “I think there are lots of kids who may not grow up to identify as trans, but who benefit immensely from a space in which they can think about their gender with a measure of freedom that these laws deny to people.”

The Supreme Court on Tuesday struck down yet another campaign finance restriction in what has become its years-long aim to obliterate regulations governing money in politics. In a decision that broke down along party lines, the six Republican appointees lifted limits on how much parties and candidates could spend in coordination with each other. The decision will effectively allow wealthy donors to circumvent caps on direct giving to candidates by routing funds through the party, which can now spend the entire sum in coordination with the candidate.

The majority’s decision, authored by Justice Brett Kavanaugh, hangs the ruling on the First Amendment. To restrict how a political party coordinates with one of its candidates—whether to consult on an ad or to pay the pizza bill—now infringes on the party’s free speech rights. To reach this conclusion, the majority overruled both Congress’ judgment about how to stop political corruption and its own precedent in a case just 25 years ago.

“The political party coordinated-expenditure limits impose a ‘stifling effect on the ability of the party to do what it exists to do,'” Kavanaugh wrote, arguing that the coordination limits imposed by Congress some 50 years ago are too burdensome.

In a dissent joined by the Democratic appointees, Justice Elena Kagan warned that the decision endangers our democratic system of government. As it has in other campaign finance cases, she wrote, the majority “jettisons a rule needed to protect our democracy’s integrity.”

This court has repeatedly blocked Congress’ attempts to limit political spending.

Indeed, with Tuesday’s opinion in NRSC v. FEC, the Roberts Court has, once again, nullified Congress’ judgment about how to stop corruption and given wealthy donors another vehicle to influence elections and extract favors from politicians. Thanks to the court’s past rulings, our elections are already defined by massive spending from the ultra-wealthy and our politics is already reoriented toward repaying those oligarchs for their donations. Though the Federal Election Commission announced after Trump’s inauguration it would not enforce the coordination limits struck down today, the ruling is a green light to both rich donors and candidates that their cozy relationship can become even closer.

Just by looking at the case docket, it’s clear that this case was a partisan brawl where the Republican-appointed justices threw in with the Republican Party. On one side were the GOP party committees, the sitting vice president, and the Trump administration, all urging the court to strike down the limits. In amicus briefs, conservative organizations funded by GOP-backing billionaires like Charles Koch joined their political allies. A win would allow these billionaires to have more influence over politicians, and for the politicians to get more money in return. The Roberts Court appears endlessly solicitous of both these groups. On the case’s other side were a handful of left-coded good government groups, Democratic politicians, and the Democratic National Committee. While some billionaires give to Democrats, Republicans receive a much larger slice of the billionaire pie. The New York Times recently found that in the 2024 election, Republicans took in five times as much as Democrats from billionaire donors.

Congress passed the Federal Election Campaign Act just ahead of the Watergate scandal, then amended it after President Richard Nixon’s quid pro quo with the dairy industry came to light as part of the Watergate investigation. Over many decades, the Supreme Court has eroded the anti-corruption limits that Congress enacted in this era. The Roberts court has knocked down limits on outside political spending, creating a free-for-all of super PAC and nonprofit election spending. Corruption and outsize influence from the wealthiest has predictably followed. In today’s opinion, the court turns to restrictions on donations that, effectively, go directly to candidates and starts to dismantle those.

After Watergate, Congress realized that if it wanted to limit how much money an individual could give to a campaign, it also needed to restrict how much parties could spend in coordination with a candidate to prevent circumvention of that limit.

After today’s decision, one of the last remaining pieces of Congress’ anti-corruption campaign finance laws is a limit on how much individuals can give to parties. For now, that means that technically there remains a ceiling on the amount of money a donor can route to a candidate through the party apparatus. But that number is still high. In her dissent, Kagan lays out how the decision allows donors to get around the individual contribution limit, now $7,000 for both a primary and general election campaign. The majority enables “a party to serve as an alternative checking account for a campaign,” she writes. “As a result, a donor will be able to give a party as much as half a million dollars (as compared to the $7,000 he can give directly to the candidate) to cover the candidate’s bills.”

The remaining aggregate limits on how much people can give parties and directly to candidates will almost certainly become the next targets of Republicans and their wealthy allies. In fact, during oral arguments, the attorney for the GOP political committees, former solicitor general Noel Francisco, admitted as much.

For decades, this Supreme Court has repeatedly blocked Congress’ attempts to limit outside political spending which is ostensibly—though not in reality—independent from the candidate and therefore uncoordinated. But it has repeatedly upheld Congress’ ability to limit direct payments to candidates, including through parties, as part of Congress’ power to limit quid pro quo corruption schemes. Tuesday’s ruling argues that there are other avenues to combat corruption that are less burdensome on First Amendment rights: namely that records of donations to parties are available for people to find online. It’s hard to see how that sort of disclosure will stop an exchange of favors for donations, but the majority thinks it’s enough.

Not only does the majority use the First Amendment to attack the integrity of our democratic system, but it also based its opinion on its members’ own policy preferences. Suffice to say, that’s Congress’ and the president’s job—not the court’s. Nonetheless, the opinion is overly concerned with the weakened status of political parties in relation to the massive figures flowing through outside super PACs and other independent dark money groups. What the court doesn’t admit is that it created this current imbalance, most notably in Citizens United, when it lifted outside spending limits on corporations and unions. To enact one policy due to the ill effects of another is Congress’ role—but in Tuesday’s opinion, the Supreme Court acts as a super legislature, responding to its own folly by pursing a new policy.

Perhaps most galling, Kavanaugh lays the blame for the parties’ weakened state at the feet of the 2001 precedent he overturns, Colorado II, which 25 years ago upheld these coordination limits. “That one is rich,” Kagan rights in dissent. “If one is overruling—or just reversing—decisions on that ground, I can think of a couple of more obvious ones—that is, the ones that created the modern Super PAC system, and thus the complained-of imbalance,” she added, going on to reference Citizens United.

Both Democrats and Republicans have been preparing for the court’s decision. In the short term, it is likely to change how they pay for television ads. By allowing coordination, the party expects to purchase ad time at a lower rate that is generally reserved for candidates, allowing them to buy more ads. After the midterms, this rule could result in more advertising and longer campaigns, as the parties’ dollars stretch further.

So perhaps the most immediate consequence felt by voters will be an even greater barrage of ads. But in the long term, far more is at stake. The result, in Kagan’s words, is “a legal regime increasingly unable to stop political corruption, and thus to preserve our institutions’ democratic legitimacy.”

Perhaps bots aren't the answer to everything when it comes to finding flaws. Fully automated pentesting has been a letdown for many security teams, according to offensive security firm Cobalt, as support for the approach has fallen sharply over the past year. Cobalt’s recent 2026 State of Pentesting report found, among other things, that security practitioners are rapidly ditching autonomous pentesting tools, in large part because they’re simply failing to detect critical vulnerabilities. Cobalt reported that 78 percent of respondents to its survey for the 2026 report experienced “critical false negatives” from automated scanning tools, with the tools quite bad at detecting the sort of vulnerabilities its AI ilk inflicts on environments in which it’s prevalent. “Automated scanners are brilliant at finding known, signature-based vulnerabilities. But they fail miserably at AI security,” the company said in a release summarizing the report’s findings. “Prompt injection exploits and excessive agency flaws require creative, multi-turn interaction chains [and] adversarial psychology,” Cobalt continued. “These logic flaws are entirely invisible to tools that test using single-shot automated queries.” A year of disappointment with automated scanning tools has led to a considerable decline in the number of organizations considering a purely automated security scanning approach, with just 9 percent of respondents saying that they were open to the idea, compared to 29 percent last year. It’s worth noting that the number of respondents to Cobalt’s survey was small - just 450 folks - but even with so few data points, the numbers are still bad news for automated pentesting vendors, but good news for infosec professionals, says Cobalt. “The drop in reliance on fully automated pentesting is actually a healthy sign,” the company said in its report summary. “It proves that practitioners are seeing through the vendor hype and demanding actual assurance rather than just coverage.” Those practitioners may also be simply overwhelmed by the number of vulnerabilities that non-security AI tools are introducing into their spaces: Per Cobalt, around 12 percent of the vulnerabilities detected in traditional environments are classified as high or critical severity. In AI and LLM environments, that number climbs to 32 percent, and that's not a new number, either. That 32 percent figure has held for the past two years, Cobalt said of its pentesting data, suggesting AI is introducing a lot more vulnerabilities. Combine those increased severity odds with automated pentesting bots that miss the sort of vulnerabilities that AI often introduces and it’s a recipe for disaster. Cobalt says the solution is hybrid security in which most systems are allowed to be automatically scanned by AI, while the most critical systems are left up to humans to protect and manage. The company sells such a solution, naturally, but it’s worth pointing out that its findings on the uptick in vulnerabilities introduced by AI aren't exactly a unique claim. Application security firm Veracode reported earlier this year that AI-assisted software development is creating more vulnerabilities than security teams can keep up with, leaving more vulnerabilities left unresolved for longer periods of time. Per Veracode, some 82 percent of companies are leaving known vulnerabilities unresolved for more than a year, while the number of high-risk vulnerabilities as a share of all discovered is rising as well. That said, not everyone is as skeptical of automated pentesting as Cobalt and its survey respondents. According to Amazon security chief CJ Moses, AI pentesting tools have made Amazon security teams 40 percent more efficient, though Moses’ measure for that figure isn’t clear. Moses still wasn’t keen on handing the entire security project off to AI, however. He told us at the RSA Conference in April that AI pentesting still needs a human in the loop to ensure it doesn’t muck something up. "AI is very good at doing things, especially when you have large amounts of data and need that big view,” Moses said in an April interview. “But from a decision-making capability, it isn't something that we're ready to rely on." ®

On Tuesday, US Rep. Tom Kean Jr. (D-NJ) returned to Congress after a four-month previously unexplained absence, during which he received his full salary despite missing over 100 votes.  He revealed on the House floor that he sought treatment for depression.

“I am grateful that I accepted help because today I stand before you healthier, stronger, and excited to return to the work that I love,” Kean said. 

But during his two decades in the New Jersey Senate, Kean consistently opposed paid sick leave for his constituents.

He voted against New Jersey’s historic Earned Sick Leave Act, which mandates 5 paid sick leave days per year for New Jersey workers. He also voted against New Jersey’s No Surprise Medical Bills act and two of its paid family leave laws, in 2008 and 2018.

For Yarrow Willman-Cole of the nonprofit New Jersey Citizen Action, who organized for the Earned Sick Leave Act in 2018, Kean’s four-month absence is bitterly ironic. “He’s been able to rely on things he directly voted against,” Willman-Cole said. 

On the House floor on Tuesday, Kean said he has been a longtime “supporter of mental health care.” But, he hasn’t made it easier for others to take the leave they need. 

“You want your lawmakers to really be connected to their constituents and understand what their constituents need,”  Willman-Cole said, “and this disconnect with a lawmaker clearly not representing the needs of the average worker, the average family, is a problem. That’s not what government should be like.”

Matthew Camarda, the advocacy and public policy director of the nonpartisan NAMI New Jersey, said that all politicians should recognize the importance of the need for mental health care. 

“All individuals with mental health conditions deserve that opportunity to get care and to recover on their own terms,” Camarda said. 

Kean also notably voted for Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill Act, which establishes work requirements for people on Medicaid. For low-income people on Medicaid, the need to fulfill work requirements to keep their health care could be a barrier to treatment as they go into effect.

“All of it makes it very challenging for millions of Americans in this country who do have mental health conditions like depression to get the care that they need without risking their employment and the rest of the stability of their lives,” Camarda said. 

Whether or not Kean’s voting record and absence are dealbreakers will be up to constituents in his district come November, when he is facing Democratic challenger Rebecca Bennett to keep his seat. 

“Many of our lawmakers are out of touch with the reality of most working people,” Willman-Cole said, “but the good news is there [are] always elections.”

⚡ Quick Take

• Lionel Messi, a fútbol star known for playing for Barcelona and France, appeared in the new Spider-Man: Brand New Day teaser.
• The ad used the hype around the 2026 FIFA World Cup and Messi’s star status to promote the movie.
• Brand New Day will come out July 31.

Tuesdays are for spiders and soccer, with a new teaser trailer for Spider-Man: Brand New Day coming out featuring a prominent fútbol star. Lionel Messi, known for his many years spent on the Barcelona national team (and a few with France), starred in the advertisement.

Marvel Studios

In the trailer, Peter Parker sees Messi using the Spider Tracker in hopes of spotting Spider-Man in New York City. Peter immediately goes, “gets” Spider-Man, and takes Messi for a swing around the city. With the 2026 FIFA World Cup underway, the advertisement was perfectly timed.

Who’s got next?#SpiderManBrandNewDay is in theatres July 31. Get tickets now. https://t.co/Gm9mNYmuub pic.twitter.com/uiQOtcBElX

— Spider-Man Movie (@SpiderManMovie) June 30, 2026

Brand New Day is the fourth Spider-Man movie in Tom Holland’s run playing the hero. The past three explored how he became Spider-Man, with the help of Iron Man. The most recent, No Way Home, brought in Marvel’s “multiverse” idea, with Peter Parker working with Doctor Strange to return the multiverse to normalcy. Past Spider-Men (Spider-Mans?) made cameos during the movie and worked with Holland’s Spider-Man to save their universe.

Brand New Day comes after the events of No Way Home, which erased the memory of Spider-Man’s identity from the entire world. This includes Peter Parker’s closest friends, Ned and MJ. It also killed off Aunt May. This Spider-Man is now a lone wolf.

A forgotten Peter Parker lives alone as a full-time Spider-Man until mounting pressure triggers a dangerous change, and a powerful new enemy emerges.

Well, he’s not entirely alone. The trailer features cameos from characters like Jon Bernthal’s Punisher and Mark Ruffalo’s Hulk. Bruce Banner, the Hulk’s alter ego, is a science professor who helps Parker manage the changes occurring in his DNA. The Punisher also fights alongside Parker in his own anti-hero way.

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SPIDER-MAN: BRAND NEW DAY Trailer Gives Us Hulk and the Punisher

The trailer indicates some fundamental changes to the version of Spider-Man that Tom Holland has been playing. It will also introduce a more adult version of Holland’s Spider-Man after playing a high-schooler for six movies.

Spider-Man: Brand New Day comes out in theaters on July 31.

The post Fútbol Star Lionel Messi Appears in BRAND NEW DAY Teaser appeared first on Nerdist.

An anonymous victim of Jeffrey Epstein who has accused President Trump of sexually assaulting her is reportedly living in fear of retaliation.

The Guardian reports that the woman identified in the federal government’s Epstein files as “Jane Doe 4” is “living off the grid” and fears retaliation from the Trump administration, according to one of her relatives.

“Trauma is brutal. Chronic trauma destroys. She’s coping as best she can,” the relative told the publication, saying the woman had been abused since early childhood. “She’s coping as best she can.”

Jane Doe 4 spoke to the FBI in 2019, telling agents she was abused by Epstein in the 1980s and sexually assaulted by Trump when she was between 13 and 15 years old on Hilton Head Island in South Carolina. In March, South Carolina’s Post and Courier confirmed certain details of the woman’s life outlined in the Epstein files. None of these details were related to her allegations against Trump.

There’s no evidence the FBI followed up after the woman made the allegations. One of her attorneys, who accompanied her in two of her FBI interviews, said he never received follow-up calls from the agents nor got copies of their reports, which normally are given to defense counsel. In her final FBI interview, the woman cut off contact with the bureau, telling agents that she believed she was being followed.

White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt told The Post and Courier the woman’s allegations were “baseless accusations from decades ago’’ that “are backed by zero evidence or facts,” describing her as “a sadly disturbed woman who has an extensive criminal history.”

The woman’s account is one of the few from the Epstein files that accuse Trump directly, and the Justice Department has been criticized for its handling of her case files. Last week, a federal judge ordered the Justice Department to comply with the Epstein Files Transparency Act and either release any unreleased Epstein files—including interview notes on Jane Doe 4—or explain why it can’t do so.

There are about 2.5 million unreleased government files on Epstein, which were either classified as “duplicative” or remain legally protected by the DOJ for unknown reasons.

“It should not be Jane Doe 4’s responsibility to keep coming forward,” Sky Roberts, the brother of Epstein victim Virginia Giuffre, told The Guardian. “She’s already given her testimony to the FBI. It should be Justice’s responsibility to take that evidence and press forward.”

Realta Fusion showed it could generate electricity from a fusion reaction, no steam turbine required.

President Donald Trump’s Great American State Fair just gets weirder and weirder. 

The Daily Wire’s Michael Knowles stopped by the Great American State Fair Monday to play the “Yes or No Game,” the conservative commentator’s weirdly political alternative to Cards Against Humanity. 

A video showed Knowles on the mainstage, appearing to debate a young girl about the Salem Witch trials—and reveal his own outrageous opinions. 

“But the one area where the Salem Witch trials went a little far is, I would say, they weren’t organized enough,” Knowles said. “So, you had these like random judges who were, you know, kind of, burning these ladies.” 

“I don’t know if they were guilty or not,” he continued. “But I think more—if it were more formalized, built up a little bit more, maybe with like a grand inquisitor or something that would’ve been the way to do it.”

Just left the great American state fair where I watched Michael Knowles debate a ten year old girl about the Salem witch trials in front of DOZENS of people pic.twitter.com/j06YTbKrbv

— Madeline Peltz (@peltzmadeline) June 30, 2026

What’s worse: that Knowles thinks the problem with the Salem Witch trials was that they were too disorganized, or that he can’t say whether the women were actually guilty of witchcraft? Actually, nevermind. The second one is definitely worse. 

It appears that after several high profile musical artists backed out of the fair, the brains behind  the festivities have seriously struggled to come up with alternative programming—and the visibly low attendance clearly reflects that. 

So far, Trump’s Great American State Fair has been supremely underwhelming, and beset by bad reviews, technical difficulties, and disappointing weather delays.

Google is updating its image generator to make it faster and cheaper, making it a more useful tool for creators looking to make AI content.

Conservative pundit Megyn Kelly’s latest rage target is “Supergirl” actor Milly Alcock. During a recent episode of her podcast, the former Fox News host lit into Alcock for her physical appearance and defense of feminism, arguing that superhero films featuring women must have romance. “Milly Alcock is as loathsome as the girl [Rachel Zegler] who played in ‘Snow White,’” Kelly said. “We’…

Source

⚡ Quick Take

• Gordon Cormier chatted with Nerdist about bringing Aang to life in Netflix’s live-action Avatar: The Last Airbender season two.

It’s time to dive back into a familiar world we love in a whole new way. Yes, Netflix’s live-action Avatar: The Last Airbender season two has arrived—and once again, it delivers the perfect blend of fantasy and realism. This season, the Gaang is older, and the stakes are higher. War is all around, and our favorite squad has seen battle in ways they never have before, a truth which threatens to steal away their hope and light. And still, within one another, there is the beautiful solace of friendship and love. In celebration of the live-action Avatar: The Last Airbender season two, we spoke to Gordon Cormier, who beautifully plays Aang in the series, about returning to the role and breathing life into the Avatar.

Netflix

As we stop from season one to season two of Avatar: The Last Airbender, what do you think has changed most about Aang, and what has kind of stayed the same?

Aang is a lot more grown-up physically, and I think that he’s matured quite a bit mentally. He can waterbend now, and he’s honestly just a lot more powerful, but I think the one thing that would stay the same is like his fun childlike spirit, his curiosity, and his seeking for adventures.

And season two of Avatar: The Last Airbender, as you said, is a much darker, more adult chapter for Aang and Team Avatar than season one was. What do you think is driving Aang in season two, and what is he struggling with the most?

This season, he’s worried about the Great Comet that’s going to come back, and that’s what the Firebenders originally used to wipe out all the air nomads. I feel like that’s what’s driving him forward. Now there’s actual pressure, and we need to defeat the Fire Lord fast. There’s a time limit and a deadline. We don’t necessarily know how long this deadline is, but it’s definitely placing some pressure on him.

Netflix

Although the enemies become a bit more dangerous in season two, the most painful fights are the ones between the friend group. What do you think is the sort of cause of this friction that really seems to form between everyone this time around?

It definitely seems like a lack of communication and quite a bit of mistrust. I feel like all the characters are learning more about themselves. Like Katara and Sokka came from a small village in the Water Tribe. Aang was raised as an air nomad. Toph has been sheltered her whole life, so we’re all introduced to this giant city. All of a sudden, we realize that we all want different things, and we go out and seek what we want. We notice that we’re not really out for the same stuff. We all want something a little different. And then when we find out what we’ve all been doing, neither of us definitely agrees with each other about it, and it gets us in a lot of trouble, so it causes us to fight.

What do you think Aang learns that he wants in Avatar: The Last Airbender season two?

Well, Aang, weirdly enough, is searching for a father figure in season two of Avatar: The Last Airbender. For example, Long Feng, that’s kind of the person that he clings to. And when he finds out that Long Feng is actually the enemy and not a friend… It’s quite heartbreaking for him and the audience, but I feel like he’s searching for something that he had at one time, maybe with Gyatso, but he’s hoping that it’s something he can recreate.

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Zuko and Iroh’s Relationship Is Even Better in Live-Action AVATAR: THE LAST AIRBENDER

Aang also ends up spending some time with Uncle Iroh toward the end of this Avatar: The Last Airbender season. Do you think that he sees some of that energy in Iroh, and how does that relationship work with the sort of Fire Nation clashing?

Well, funny enough, I think that Iroh and Gyatso are, to just to Aang, but just in general, quite similar as people. But I think that with Iroh sitting on the other side, like he’s quite loyal to Zuko, not really loyal to the Fire Nation necessarily, but he definitely is Fire Nation… There’s just a little bit of clashing going on there. At the end of the day, though, he’s one of the good guys. He’s part of the White Lotus. He’s not one of the enemies, and he makes it quite clear.

In season one, I feel like the show really fleshes out the idea of a friendship possibility between Zuko and Aang. I feel like we spent more time with them on a camaraderie level in season one, maybe more than even in the cartoon, at that point. How does Aang feel about Zuko in season two of Avatar: The Last Airbender?

It’s a tricky one because in season one, yeah, Aang did try and reach out for that friendship, but it didn’t really work. Obviously, Zuko’s trying to capture me throughout almost the entire series, but I feel like Aang is definitely very forgiving. He’s the type to always give second, third, maybe fifth chances. But I think that if Zuko ever came around, he would definitely be skeptical, but I don’t think Aang’s heart would be closed off to

Netflix

And the relationship between Toph and Aang is also so fun and exciting to experience in live action. What do you think the relationship with Toph brings to Aang that he didn’t have before?

Tough love, honestly. Katara is like so nurturing, and Sokka is kind of like just the funny guy, but he’s not necessarily … He contributes so much to the show, but he doesn’t train Aang. That’s something that Katara, Toph, and Bumi have, Zuko eventually, that’s so special. But I think that she brings this educational experience, but also literally just the third element. She brings Earth to the TV show. When she shows up all of a sudden, that’s what it’s about. It’s about learning the third element, and that’s new for Aang, considering he’s only been working on the first two.

Earthbending is such a different movement set and look than water or airbending. What was it like to take on the task of kind of learning that style of movement?

Honestly, it was quite easy. I’ve wanted to learn earthbending from the start. Season one bootcamp, I remember I wanted them to teach me how earthbending looks so bad because I thought it just looked so cool. So I’ve been getting glimpses of it and almost studying it for the past two years, honestly, or the two years leading up to when we shot it. But Toph’s style of earthbending is also a little bit different, which is cool. She’s not necessarily super like… She’s not in the widest dance. She’s not always closed fist. She has this interesting style of earthbending, which definitely took me a second to pick up, but I feel like I was so excited to learn it that it just became easy.

Netflix

The best part of an adaptation is retaining some of the original moments but changing others. What is your favorite Aang moment this season that’s straight from the Avatar: The Last Airbender cartoon, and what is your favorite kind of original to the live-action moment that you got to experience?

If I’m being honest, I can’t really recall any one-for-one line or one-for-one shot, but I remember the training montage from season two, which we kind of recreated. For example, in the animated series, this training montage was with Aang and Toph in the desert. And it was kind of all the same stuff, but in our live action, it’s within our little… It’s in our home in the backyard. I’m basically getting trained. But our training montages are very similar, just in different locations because of changes that we’ve made to the series. But I really like the way that we did it, and I think it gives us this fresh perspective, or I don’t know, almost like a new training montage is what it feels like, but it breathes life into the old one, at the same time.

It lets us see it twice, I feel like. We got to see it in the animated series and we don’t need to watch it exactly the same again. Now we get to watch a slightly different version, but it’s new. It’s different.

Losing Appa is a really harrowing experience in the cartoon, but even more devastating in live action, but of course, you don’t actually have an Appa to build a relationship with on set. So what were those scenes like to bring to life?

When I was interacting with Appa, it was always like a tennis ball, a giant blue circle, or sometimes a giant blue opa, but it really just helped me train my work with my imagination. I feel like that’s a very useful tool for an actor to have, and I had a lot of time to practice and develop it on this show, which I’m really grateful for. Hopefully, I could carry it on to whatever is next. But I learned a lot about just really building what Appa would look like in live-action in my head, studying photos of him so I could actually see him there on the day, even though I’m really just looking at a blue screen, a tennis ball, or someone in a blue tube.

Netflix

Stepping into this older Aang this season, what do you think he ultimately fears the most, and what do you think gives him hope in Avatar: The Last Airbender season two?

I think Aang fears failure. The idea of failure is really scary because his failure is the world’s failure. The Earth Kingdom, Water Tribes, I was going to say Air Nomads, but, no. Everyone is kind of relying on him to claim the victory, but if he doesn’t do that, the Fire Nation takes over, and everything’s really bad. So I feel like that’s his fear, that’s what’s driving him forward. But I hope he finds it in his friends. I think that his friends give him a lot of hope. I think that if he was doing this by himself, I don’t think he would be able to do it. I think that his friends drive him forward, they motivate him, and they honestly just keep him in check.

And finally, looking ahead to season three, are there any moments that you’re particularly excited for people to get to see going forward?

Honestly, the end of the season two cliffhanger, like the end of season two ends with Aang maybe dying. Yes, we’ll figure that out. But if he’s alive or dead where it picks up, like if he’s alive, how is he going to rebuild? How is he going to go forward? How is he going to defeat the Fire Nation? Are there going to be any more avatars? He died in the avatar state. That’s like a crazy thing. That could be the end of the Avatar Cycle… Or not. We don’t know. So I think just the cliffhanger that Netflix left everyone on for season two, it’s going to carry on in season three and be super awesome. And I’m really excited for the fans to see it.

Avatar: The Last Airbender season two is now streaming on Netflix.

The post Gordon Cormier Talks Breathing New Life Into Aang for AVATAR: THE LAST AIRBENDER Season 2 appeared first on Nerdist.

A new video shows the final production version of the upcoming Clicks Communicator, a BlackBerry-like smartphone that runs modern apps.

Businesses operating in Santa Cruz County must register with the county clerk. Lookout Santa Cruz reviews the public filings from local businesses to report on new businesses starting in the area.

Here is what’s new in local business recently.

New businesses

• GREEN HILL GARDENING was registered at 236 Miramar Dr., Santa Cruz, by Gavin Wellington Hill as an individual business on June 22.
• AKFLORES CONSULTING was registered at 260 Camino Al Barranco, Watsonville, by Alexandre Kozoroski Flores as an individual business on June 22.
• COFFEE AND JAM was registered at 107 Washburn Ave., Capitola, by John Borgman as an individual business on June 22.
• DR JIMI’S HANDYMAN SERVICES was registered at 590 Madrona Ave., Felton, by Phd Operations, LLC, as a limited liability company on June 22.
• BLACKWING MARKETING was registered at 270 Cambridge Dr., Watsonville, by Blackwing Ventures, LLC, as a limited liability company on June 22.
• ARTTERIE, YOLTZIN was registered at 191 Acorn Dr., Boulder Creek, by Yoltzin Q Delgado as an individual business on June 22.
• HELENA ROMERO ART was registered at 519 Humes Ave., Aptos, by Helen Thompson as an individual business on June 22.
• ALIGNED WITH ALLY was registered at 511c Swift St., Santa Cruz, by Allyson N Torres as an individual business on June 22.
• FEHER SUPPLY POTS MATERIAL NURSERIES was registered at 63 Mount Madonna Rd., Watsonville, by Fernandez Hernandez Antonia as an individual business on June 22.
• OMNIA STONE AND TILE was registered at 825 Walker St. #102, Watsonville, by Mx Builders, Inc. as a corporation on June 22.
• ALEXAS DOG GROOMING MOBILE was registered at 1 Amesty Rd., Watsonville, by Bernardo Garcia Contreras as an individual business on June 22.
• ALCHEMY EPOXY COATINGS was registered at 216 Arthur Rd., Watsonville, by Martin Evan Gonzalez as an individual business on June 23.
• THE SANTA CRUZ CHILDREN’S THEATRE was registered at 510 Riverview Dr., Boulder Creek, by Sunflower Stages LLC as a limited liability company on June 23.
• HotelKio was registered at 228 Potrero St., #B, Santa Cruz, by Hotelkio LLC as a limited liability company on June 23.
• SANTA CRUZ CABANA COMPANY was registered at 516 Wilkes Circle, Santa Cruz, by Santa Cruz Cabana Company LLC as a limited liability company on June 23.
• TOM’S PAINT & FINISH was registered at 154 Elm St., Watsonville, by Thomas Tamayo Alvarez as an individual business on June 23.
• LATIN FINANCE was registered at 1481 Freedom Blvd., Watsonville, by Dagoberto Marin Gomez as an individual business on June 23.
• UN FINANCE was registered at 1481 Freedom Blvd., Watsonville, by Uriel Nolasco Hernandez as an individual business on June 23.
• FLOW IN KINETIC CURVES was registered at 2800 A Glen Canyon Rd., Santa Cruz, by Randolph Lee Smith as an individual business on June 23.
• SANTA CRUZ POOP SCOOPERS was registered at 10 Fred Court, Scotts Valley, by Reilachi Ventures LLC as a limited liability company on June 24.
• MATH ROCKS was registered at 22 Blake Lane, Scotts Valley, by Nadzeya Miatselitsa as an individual business on June 24.
• MONUMENT BUILDERS INC. was registered at 103 Bluebonnet Lane, Scotts Valley, by Monument Builders Inc. as a corporation on June 24.
• CORRALITOS CREEK SANCTUARY, INVISION HEALTH was registered at 52 Browns Valley Rd., Corralitos, by Gina Lynn Locatelli as an individual business on June 24.
• DRIP 2 HARD BARBERSHOP was registered at 2120 Soquel Ave., Santa Cruz, by Drip Fades Barbershop LLC as a limited liability company on June 24.
• PENCILS PORTRAITS PAINTS was registered at 127 Prospect Court, Santa Cruz, by Pencils Portraits Paints LLC as a limited liability company on June 24.
• AMERICAN INSPECTION SERVICE was registered at 165 Hillcrest Ave., Ben Lomond, by Chance Group Inc as a corporation on June 24.
• FUSION DANCE COMPANY was registered at 272 Hames Rd., Watsonville, by Cambell Ruth Walker as an individual business on June 24.
• DENHAM CONSTRUCTION was registered at 491 5th Ave., Santa Cruz, by Jordan Riley Denham as an individual business on June 25.
• MINDFUL-MEDIATION, LLC was registered at 226 Campus Dr., Aptos, by Mindful-mediation, LLC as a limited liability company on June 25.
• ELAINE MURPHY NUTRITION was registered at 732 Delta Way, Watsonville, by Mary Elaine Murphy as an individual business on June 25.
• TERIYAKI MADNESS was registered at 550 River St., Suite D, Santa Cruz, by Archgate Inc as a corporation on June 25.
• GIVE THANKS was registered at 2851 Research Park Dr., Suite D, Soquel, by Stony Cruz LLC as a limited liability company on June 25.
• MIKE’S PLUMBING was registered at 8297 Hermosa Ave., Ben Lomond, by Michael Rose as an individual business on June 25.
• SANTA CRUZ RECOVERY LOUNGE was registered at 542 Ocean St., Suite # I & J, Santa Cruz, by William R Maximiuk as an individual business on June 26.
• CALCOMP ADVISORY was registered at 113 E 5th St., Watsonville, by Linda L Rosser as an individual business on June 26.
• RESCUED BY THE DUSTY BAG LADY, THE DUSTY BAG LADY BOUTIQUE, THE DUSTY BAG LADY ENTERPRISES, THE DUSTY BAG LADY ON WHEELS, THE DUSTY PEARL COLLECTION was registered at 5515 Washington Way, Felton, by Khristine Joanne Guire as an individual business on June 26.
• EL BARRIO OAXAQUENO INC was registered at 329 Rodriguez St., Watsonville, by El Barrio Oaxaqueno Inc as a corporation on June 26.
• WINDWARD LEADERSHIP LABS was registered at 1329 Seabright Ave., Santa Cruz, by Katelyn Marie Lucille Judge as an individual business on June 26.

Have news that should be in Lookout Briefs? Send your news releases, including contact information, to news@lookoutlocal.com.

MORE LOCAL COVERAGE

The post Santa Cruz County business filings: Week of June 30 appeared first on Lookout Santa Cruz.

Nvidia AI chip competitor Etched says it has already booked $1 billion under contract for the inference systems powered by its chip.

The MAGA world raged Tuesday at Trump-appointed Supreme Court Justice Amy Coney Barrett for voting to uphold birthright citizenship.

The Supreme Court’s ruling left right-wing pundits predictably fuming, as Donald Trump has made it perfectly clear that he believes the high court’s conservative justices—especially the ones he saw appointed to the bench—owe their fealty to him over the law.

The Daily Wire’s Matt Walsh called Barrett the worst thing he could possibly think of: a woman.

“It turns out that Amy Coney Barrett is a DEI hire, little better than Kentanji Jackson. Terrible pick,” Walsh wrote on X Tuesday. “When’s the last time we had a Republican president who didn’t put a liberal justice on the court?”

“The worst Supreme Court Justices of all time have all been women. That’s just a fact. Republican presidents should take the hint,” Walsh wrote in a separate post, including an image of the high court’s four female justices.

But Walsh had originally celebrated Barrett’s nomination in 2020, calling the jurist’s selection a “bullet proof choice.” Ouch.

Conservatives had previously raged against Barrett last year after she joined the court’s liberal justices in dissenting against a decision granting Trump emergency relief to use the “Alien Enemies Act” to deport immigrants at whim. The fervor was reignited Monday after Barrett sided with the liberal justices to reject the Trump administration’s plan to gut mail-in voting.

Speaking on her radio show Monday night, Megyn Kelly fumed that Barrett had become a “turncoat,” because she was “constantly siding with the left.”

Before the Supreme Court had even delivered its opinion on birthright citizenship, Joey Mannarino, a far-right internet personality, wrote on X: “If Amy Coney Barrett really votes against ending birthright citizenship, we should begin to look into how to deport her Haitian child back to Haiti.”