Host Andrew Davidson is joined by technology, travel and consumer trend experts for a discussion about the 2023 Mintel Global Consumer Trend ‘Hyper Fatigue’. The trend predicts that instead of trying to keep up with technology, consumers will be tempted to give up entirely and return to the ease of tactile pleasures. As the pandemic, economic uncertainty and geopolitical tensions impact consumers differently, what role should brands play to support and engage? How concerned should marketers be with influences like social media and choice paralysis? And how can brands capitalise on the way consumers are feeling? Listen now to learn how brands can help consumers and themselves!

For a good chunk of my young-adult life, I was obsessed with the idea of creating my masterpiece. It’s not even that I wanted to create a great work of art with something to say; I felt I had to. My fear of death led me to believe that I needed to find a way to leave a lasting legacy behind, like the filmmakers and playwrights I revered at the time. While that feeling dissipated in later years, it reformed as a constant imposter syndrome that I still grapple with from time to time. There are moments where I feel that my writing or music isn’t good enough. At other times, I become bitter when a work I’m proud of doesn’t get the attention I wished it deserved. It’s a vicious ouroboros that I struggle to break out of.

This may sound like a strangely dramatic way to introduce Starstruck: Hands of Time. If you look at the new PC game’s Steam page, you’ll find what looks like a goofy adventure that takes notes from Earthbound, Guitar Hero, and Katamari Damacy. While that’s all true, the avant-garde adventure is hiding something much more grotesque below its bubbly surface. It’s a slow-bubbling anxiety attack, one that makes for one of 2024’s most unexpectedly vital games.

Spiraling out of orbit

In those early moments, Starstruck sets the stage for a charming suburban adventure about Edwin, a young guitarist, trying to rise to stardom within his town. His first mission is to head to a local venue and play a gig with his pals. It’s a sweet start that immediately calls Earthbound to mind, a game that’s become an important touchstone for indie developers in recent years. It makes sense; Nintendo’s classic RPG is one of the few games that really feels like it understands young people and the personal struggles they face in everyday life. In its most direct reference, Starstruck’s characters are displayed as handmade clay models that call back to the physical figures used in Earthbound’s original marketing materials.

The more Starstruck sets up its story, the more light-hearted it becomes. When I get to the venue for my show, I’m introduced to an entire Guitar Hero-type rhythm game where I play along to songs (Starstruck is even compatible with some guitar controllers). It’s a messy minigame due to some hard-to-parse guitar riffs and sloppy controller integration, but it’s another callback that puts me into a time and place. I’m once again in the mindset of a young adult wondering when my life is going to begin in between Freebird solos.

Even then, Starstruck still hasn’t played all its gameplay cards. When Edwin has trouble getting into the venue, the astronaut observing them steps in to help by sending their hand down to Earth. In a minigame reminiscent of Katamari Damacy, I need to smash as much stuff as I can around town until I can summon a hammer to knock an opening into the fence surrounding the venue. It’s a bizarre visual, but another filled with a familiar youthful energy.

Things get much weirder from there.

Only near its halfway mark, after going through those minigames a few times and meeting a few friends, does Starstruck show its hands. Edwin and his friends begin to let their different anxieties slip. It turns out that the gang is suffering from different identity issues. One charter struggles with imposter syndrome over her music; another is desperate to be the center of attention and have his work celebrated. The more those feelings come out, the more the game itself corrupts.

There’s no way to easily describe what unfolds in Starstruck’s back half; you’ll really have to see it for yourself to fully soak in its overwhelming panic attack. A cute adventure veers into eldritch horror territory as each character succumbs to their anxieties. The cheery visuals give way to avant-garde eeriness, in a turn that calls Neon Genesis Evangelion’s striking midseason direction shift to mind. The deeper these characters get into their minds, wishing they could be anywhere else than where they are in life, the farther they spin away from Earth. There’s nothing up there but darkness. It slowly swallows the entire adventure like a snake eating its own tail.

If this all sounds like a baffling mess, it is at times. Starstruck takes some wild swings that don’t always feel like they cleanly connect. Its personal story takes several detours to showcase the history of art theft, delve into the history of the Roman empire, revisit the moon landing, and more. Its gameplay can similarly feel unfocused as it hops between ideas at a rapid-fire pace. It’s confounding, but effective too. Starstruck feels like a mental breakdown in motion; it’s a throbbing brain that can’t keep its focus as it spirals deeper and deeper into philosophical despair.

Despite how out there it is, Starstruck tells a down-to-earth story that’s still sticking with me days after rolling credits. I can see myself in its insecure heroes, so desperate to be the center of the universe that they’re left alone in the cold vacuum of space. Maybe we take how miraculous it is to be a face in a crowd here on this planet for granted.

Starstruck: Hands of Time is available now on PC.

In terms of cybersecurity, 2024 has been especially unfortunate for AT&T. Agencies like the SEC and the carrier itself confirmed some data breach incidents that affected millions of customers’ data. Now, the FCC says that AT&T could have prevented one of the customer data leaks related to the hack of its cloud vendor, but it didn’t.

AT&T got a $13 million fine for a 2023 data breach related to a cloud vendor

In April of this year, AT&T found that a team of hackers breached the security of one of its cloud vendors and disclosed it publicly. The hackers were able to download millions of the carrier’s customers’ call and text records. The mobile carrier now faces a $13 million fine for its failure to protect the data. Furthermore, the government agency revealed more details regarding the incident

The name of the cloud vendor whose security was breached is not known, as the FCC’s public report refers to it as “Vendor X.” According to the report, AT&T gave “Vendor X” access to customer data from 2015 to 2017 to create personalized videos related to billing and marketing. A clause in the deal stated that the data must be “securely destroyed or deleted” by 2018. However, neither AT&T nor the cloud vendor guaranteed the destruction of the data.

The data breach originated in early 2023, several years after the 2018 deadline. So, basically, the hackers had access to information that was supposed to be destroyed years ago. The FCC revealed that the hacking team managed to download data from about 8.9 million AT&T wireless customers.

It was forced to establish new procedures for handling customer data

AT&T’s failure to take appropriate action represented a violation of data protection laws that all carriers must follow. As a result, the company was fined $13 million and forced to establish new methods for managing customer information. The monetary fine is “symbolic” considering the company’s billion-dollar profits. Investing in new security systems and procedures will likely cost more.

Fortunately, the hackers did not access extremely sensitive data such as social security or credit card numbers. However, it is surprising that AT&T left the security of millions of customers’ data in the air. This year, AT&T confirmed a separate data breach involving Snowflake, another cloud provider. This hack was especially severe, affecting call and SMS records from May to October 2022 from “nearly all” AT&T customers.

Couchbase on Tuesday made Capella Columnar generally available on AWS in a move aimed at helping customers streamline application development by centralizing real-time data analysis and operational workloads together in a single location.

In addition, the vendor launched Couchbase Mobile with vector search so that users can conduct hybrid and similarity searches in mobile applications at the edge rather than just their traditional database environment.

Based in Santa Clara, Calif., Couchbase is a NoSQL database vendor that competes with other database specialists such as Redis and MongoDB, as well as tech giants including AWS, Google, Microsoft and Oracle that offer database platforms.

Despite a crowded database market, Couchbase has been able to differentiate itself with forward-thinking product development such as its launch of Capella Columnar, according to Stephen Catanzano, an analyst at TechTarget’s Enterprise Strategy Group.

“Couchbase is seen as an innovative player,” he said. “Compared to its peers, Couchbase stands out for its ability to handle both transactional and analytical workloads in a unified platform. Columnar adds to this.”

Couchbase is seen as an innovative player. Compared to its peers, Couchbase stands out for its ability to handle both transactional and analytical workloads in a unified platform.