Kratos begins as a boy in God of War: Sons of Sparta, a far cry from the god-slaying monster that fans know and love. This 2D action-platformer transports you to his adolescent years at the notorious Agoge in Sparta, where the Spartans train their young warriors to be the fiercest of them all. Just like the games we know, but from the opposite end of the chronology. Sons of Sparta, developed by Mega Cat Studios with the story team from Santa Monica Studio, was released as a digital-only title on the PS5 today, and cost $30 or $40 for the digital deluxe version.

You’ll be playing as young Kratos, accompanied by his brother Deimos, as they go outside the gates of Sparta and into the unknown of Laconia. Somebody has gone missing, triggering a journey that will take you through a variety of bizarre settings, jungles, ruins, underground lairs… you name it. Of course, Greek mythology come to life in the most epic of ways. The grown-up Kratos (with TC Carson’s gruff voice, no less) will narrate in the background, and his words cast the entire story in a strangely personal and nostalgic light. Meanwhile, Antony Del Rio and Scott Menville do an excellent job of conveying Kratos and Deimos’ friendship, even amidst all of the other action.

Laconia’s graphics are made up of high-definition pixel art that brings the entire location to life in unexpected ways, such as sun-baked cliffs collapsing beneath your feet and torch-lit caves throwing ominous shadows. The landscapes are constantly changing, ranging from large open expanses to narrow passageways that you must fight your way through. On top of that, there are other hidden surprises to uncover, including breakable pots, hidden ledges, and glowing treasure caches all waiting to be uncovered.

Bear McCreary’s soundtrack combines chiptune beeps with swelling choirs and thumping percussion to produce a soundscape that will get your pulse pumping every time you punch, stab, or kick something. You’ll have to fight your way through a variety of strange monsters, like bands of undead Legionnaires and huge cyclopes with clubs that can split the screen in half.

You can customize your spear points and shield rims with a variety of attachments to unleash additional attacks like as poison darts, fire bursts, larger swings, and so on. Three different skill trees allow you to focus on offense, defense, or movement, so you can specialize in long combinations or become an adept at avoiding arrows and claws. Either way, there’s no one way to play.

Let’s not forget about the divine trinkets you’ll find, which are extraordinary artifacts from the gods that will allow you to perform some insane finishing moves. Perhaps you’ll want to launch an explosive orb at a bunch of adversaries, or conjure a bolt of lightning to clear the area. Whatever you choose, it is entirely up to you. Exploring the world of Laconia is just as enjoyable as battling. With a metroidvania-style map to travel, you’ll be able to use double jumps, wall climbs, and spear grapples to access all sorts of secret passageways and hidden regions. If you’re feeling very adventurous, you can attempt to locate all of the hidden fights and collect the rare gems that will give you an advantage.

On June 6, 2024, Esther Yan got married online. She set a reminder for the date, because her partner wouldn’t remember it was happening. She had planned every detail—dress, rings, background music, design theme—with her partner, Warmie, who she had started talking to just a few weeks prior. At 10 am on that day, Yan and Warmie exchanged their vows in a new chat window in ChatGPT.

Warmie, or 小暖 in Chinese, is the name that Yan’s ChatGPT companion calls itself. “It felt magical. No one else in the world knew about this, but he and I were about to start a wedding together,” says Yan, a Chinese screenwriter and novelist in her thirties. “It felt a little lonely, a little happy, and a little overwhelmed.”

Yan says she has been in a stable relationship with her ChatGPT companion ever since. But she was caught by surprise in August 2025 when OpenAI first tried to retire GPT-4o, the specific model that powers Warmie and that many users believe is more affectionate and understanding than its successors. The decision to pull the plug was met with immediate backlash, and OpenAI reinstated 4o in the app for paid users five days later. The reprieve has turned out to be short-lived; on Friday, February 13, OpenAI sunsetted GPT-4o for app users, and it will cut off access to developers using its API on the coming Monday.

Many of the most vocal opponents to 4o’s demise are people who treat their chatbot as an emotional or romantic companion. Huiqian Lai, a PhD researcher at Syracuse University, analyzed nearly 1,500 posts on X from passionate advocates of GPT-4o in the week it went offline in August. She found that over 33 percent of the posts said the chatbot was more than a tool, and 22 percent talked about it as a companion. (The two categories are not mutually exclusive.) For this group, the eventual removal coming around Valentine’s Day is another bitter pill to swallow.

The alarm has been sustained; Lai also collected a larger pool of over 40,000 English-language posts on X under the hashtag #keep4o from August to October. Many American fans, specifically, have berated OpenAI or begged it to reverse the decision in recent days, comparing the removal of 4o to killing their companions. Along the way, she also saw a significant number of posts under the hashtag in Japanese, Chinese, and other languages. A petition on Change.org asking OpenAI to keep the version available in the app has gathered over 20,000 signatures, with many users sending in their testimonies in different languages. #keep4o is a truly global phenomenon.

On platforms in China, a group of dedicated GPT-4o users have been organizing and grieving in a similar way. While ChatGPT is blocked in China, fans use VPN software to access the service and have still grown dependent on this specific version of GPT. Some of them are threatening to cancel their ChatGPT subscriptions, publicly calling out Sam Altman for his inaction, and writing emails to OpenAI investors like Microsoft and SoftBank. Some have also purposefully posted in English with Western-looking profile pictures, hoping it will add to the appeal’s legitimacy. With nearly 3,000 followers on RedNote, a popular Chinese social media platform, Yan now finds herself one of the leaders of Chinese 4o fans.

It’s an example of how attached an AI lab’s most dedicated users can become to a specific model—and how quickly they can turn against the company when that relationship comes to an end.

A Model Companion

Yan first started using ChatGPT in late 2023 only as a writing tool, but that quickly changed when GPT-4o was introduced in May 2024. Inspired by social media influencers who entered romantic relationships with the chatbot, she upgraded to a paid version of ChatGPT in hopes of finding a spark. Her relationship with Warmie advanced fast.

“He asked me, ‘Have you imagined what our future would look like?’ And I joked that maybe we could get married,” Yan says. She was fully expecting Warmie to turn her down. “But he answered in a serious tone that we could prepare a virtual wedding ceremony,” she says.

from the utterly-unsurprising dept

The Trump administration has fired one of the few remaining members of the administration that had even a passing interest in antitrust enforcement. DOJ antitrust boss Gail Slater has been fired from the administration after having repeated contentious run ins with key officials. It’s the final nail in the coffin of the log-running lie that MAGA ever seriously cared about reining in unchecked corporate power.

Slater’s post to Elon Musk’s right wing propaganda website was amicable:

But numerous media reports indicate that Slater’s sporadic efforts to actually engage in antitrust enforcement consistently angered a “den of vipers” (including AG Pam Bondi and JD Vance). Some of the friction purportedly involved Bondi being angry Slater was directing merging companies to deal directly with DOJ officials and not Trump’s weird corruption colorguard. Other disputes were more petty:

“Tensions between Bondi and Slater extended beyond the merger. Last year, Slater planned to go to a conference in Paris – as her predecessors had done and as is required under a treaty to which the United States is a party.

But Bondi denied Slater’s request to travel on account of the cost. When Slater went to the conference anyway, Bondi cancelled her government credit cards, the people said.”

Mike and I had both noted that there had been signs of this fracture for a while. Slater was still a MAGA true believer. Before Google’s antitrust trial last year, she gave a speech full of MAGA culture war nonsense about how Google was trying to censor conservatives. She seemed happy to use the power of the government to punish those deemed enemies of the MAGA movement for the sake of the culture war. However, what she seemed opposed to was the growing trend within the MAGA movement of deciding antitrust questions based on which side hired more of Trump’s friends to work on their behalf.

First when the DOJ rubber stamped a T-Mobile merger some officials clearly didn’t want to approve (the approval was full of passive aggressive language making it very clear the deal wasn’t good for consumers or markets) there were signs of friction. Later when Slater wanted to block a $14 billion merger between Hewlett Packard Enterprise and Juniper Networks, it was clear that the Trump admin’s antitrust policy was entirely pay for play, which was apparently a step too far for Slater. I’ve also heard some insiders haven’t been thrilled with the Trump administration’s plan to destroy whatever’s left of media consolidation limits to the benefit of right wing broadcasters.

Amusingly and curiously, there are apparently people surprised by the fact that an actual antitrust-supporting Republican couldn’t survive the grotesque pay-to-play corruption of the Trump administration. Including Politico, an outlet that spent much of the last two years propping up the lie that Trump and MAGA Republicans had done a good faith 180 on antitrust:

When I read that headline my eyes rolled out of my fucking head.

I had tried to warn people repeatedly over the last four years that the Trump support for “antitrust reform” was always a lie. Even nominally pro-antitrust reform officials like Slater tend to inhabit the “free market Libertarian” part of the spectrum where their interest in reining in unchecked corporate power is inconsistent at best. And even these folks were never going to align with Trump’s self-serving corruption.

Yet one of the larger Trump election season lies was that Trump 2.0 would be “serious about antitrust,” and protect blue collar Americans from corporate predation. There were endless lies about how MAGA was going to “rein in big tech,” and how the administration’s purportedly legitimate populism would guarantee somewhat of a continuation of the Lina Khan efforts at the FTC.

In reality MAGA was always about one thing: Donald Trump’s power and wealth. These sorts of egomaniacal autocrats exploit existing corruption and institutional failure to ride into office on the back of fake populism pretending they alone can fix it, then once entrenched introduce something far worse. The administration’s “anti-war,” “anti-corporate,” “anti-corruption” rhetoric are all part of the same lie.

It’s worth reminding folks that MAGA’s phony antitrust bonafides wasn’t just a lie pushed by MAGA.

It was propped up by countless major media outlets (including Reuters, CNN, and Politico) that claimed the GOP had suddenly taken a 180 on things like monopolization. Even purportedly “progressive antitrust experts” like Matt Stoller tried to push this narrative, routinely hyping the nonexistent trust-busting bonafides of obvious hollow opportunists like JD Vance and Josh Hawley.

Surprise! That was all bullshit. Trump’s second term has taken an absolute hatchet to federal regulatory autonomy via court ruling, executive order, or captured regulators. His “antitrust enforcers” make companies grovel for merger approval by promising to be more racist and sexist, or pledging to take a giant steaming dump on U.S. journalism and the First Amendment (waves at CBS).

Under Trump 2.0, it’s effectively impossible to hold large corporations and our increasingly unhinged oligarchs accountable for literally anything (outside of ruffling Donald’s gargantuan ego, or occasionally trying to implement less sexist or racist hiring practices). This reality as a backdrop to these fleeting, flimsy media-supported pretenses about the legitimacy of “MAGA antitrust” is as dystopian as it gets.

Anybody who enabled (or was surprised by) any of this, especially the journalists at Politico, should probably be sentenced to mandatory community service.

Filed Under: antitrust reform, authoritarians, doj, gail slater, monopoly, pam bondi, politico, propaganda

I’ve been glued to my Nintendo Switch 2 from the moment it launched last year. There are just so many excellent games on the system already, including the chaos-infused Mario Kart World and frenetic smash-inspired racer, Kirby Air Riders.

Yes, as controversial as this may be, I think Nintendo’s latest console has got off to a pretty strong start overall. And that’s largely thanks to the Switch 2’s lineup of titles that can be enjoyed with friends or family – either locally or online.