“My husband has a changed heart,” said Denise Bartik, who stood with a crowd of other advocates outside Governor J.B. Pritzker’s office in downtown Chicago on Thursday to call for compassion and a reinstatement of parole in Illinois. Jeff Bartik, her husband, has served 48 years in state prisons for murder. His clemency petition was […]

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I've attempted to write this Control Resonant review for a few hours now. Every time I put words on the page, I fail to capture exactly how striking and earnest Resonant can be. It's a messy game, one that lets its characters get in the dirt and roll around. Layered emotions, a larger and oftentimes difficult-to-navigate open world, and a sharp and varied melee combat system make Control Resonant a strong sequel, and one unafraid to get it wrong sometimes. 

Dylan Faden isn't particularly likeable. He's got bad posture, a bad attitude, and his vibes are just kind of off. I guess being awakened from a long coma does that to you, but he's certainly a protagonist who took some warming up. However, I came to love everything about Dylan. The way he clambers up the side of a building with his feet like a weird little freak, the way he's constantly trying to do right by the people he's wronged, and his sick-as-hell metal rod that his sister jammed into his chest before disappearing.

Control Resonant is a vastly different game from 2019's Control. A now open-world melee action game, Control Resonant has a different vision for the universe and its inhabitants. The Hiss have broken out of the Oldest House, now spilling into the streets of Manhattan and infecting anything and everything they can worm their way into. Turning Manhattan into their playground, Dylan and a ragtag group of The Federal Bureau of Control members have to work together to try and save the city after FBC Director and protagonist of the first game, Jesse Faden, has gone missing. 

There's a lot going on in Control Resonant. It's a map littered with side quests, collectibles, and odd bits and bobs to poke around and explore. Early on, I worried about open-world bloat, but Control Resonant seems to strike a nice balance between small objectives and maintaining the quirky and exhilarating nature of the oddities of the world. Altered items are still running afoul, like a rogue karaoke machine that turns a house party deadly. Strange members of the Bureau parked around every street corner, waiting to comment on their deep disdain for you and your past transgressions.

Dylan's suite of traversal tools provided me with its own sense of fun. Running full speed off a building to leap into the air, hovering over the dangerous Hiss filled streets below was exhilarating. Despite having such a robust toolset for playing around in this space, navigating Remedy's version of a distorted Manhattan is one of its messiest parts. An unhelpful map system combined with limited entry points for parts of the city left me confused. I was constantly turned around while attempting to chase a marker on my map. Transitioning through zones of the map aren't as easy as just going there, many locations have specific entrances and exits that aren't always clear. I spent large stretches of time circling the same three city blocks looking for a small gate, doorway, or some rooftop access point to reach my destination.

While it certainly got easier once I had my bearings on this messed up version of my once home, it still feels like a growing pain of trying an open-world game for Control. Taking a world so tightly made inside of one ever-changing building and expanding it out to incorporate an entire densely packed city. This idea's ripple effects are felt all over Resonant. 

This effect is felt most deeply in its narrative which sprawls out over the course of roughly 30 hours. Pulling Dylan apart at the seams in every direction you can think of. He's hunting The Hiss, he's researching his sister's disappearance, he's taking on FBC requests, and he's trying to come to terms with his past. The plot of Control attempts to cover a lot of ground across the broken and bruised pavement streets of the city. New characters like Dylan's handler Zoe take front and center in the fight against The Hiss and Jesse's disappearance means previous characters like Emily Pope get an even more active role in the story.

Zoe and Dylan's relationship is one born out of a lot of shared trauma. One that binds people together unreasonably quickly. It felt jarring, and uneven in its pacing, but in the same breadth realistic to how I've made friends in the past. Sometimes a weird night out really does forge a friendship in fire in ways that are somewhat unexplainable and strange to everyone around you. There's a beauty in its messiest parts, the gears that don't click together, but you understand how they turn all the same.

Reading an unending cavalcade of documents further expands out the darkness of the world around Dylan. I read a lot of documents, and I mean, a lot. Sometimes it's light hearted reading about the Hot Dog Incident or other times it's a deeper look into the mind of everyone's favorite doctor Darling. Remedy really uses its writing chops to hide some of Control's best lore bits in these notes, making the act of reading one such a delight every time. 

Control Resonant's biggest change is in its combat. No longer did I have access to The Director's service pistol and instead Dylan is treated to an Aberrant Rod that changes form. Resonant's melee action focus provides something that feels all its own. It's not quite a stylish action game or one that's interested in doing forever combos, but rather a system that puts the focus on expression.

A rather robust selection of forms for your Aberrant Rod means I was able to craft things to my liking. I rocked dual blades that allowed for quick, poking and prodding damage. It kept me light on my feet and gave me a higher than normal percentage chance to crit. For my heavy attack, I went with a devastating drill that provided sustaining damage the longer I held it down. Swapping between these two attacks to string together combos shredded enemies on the ground and in the air. 

I also had access to a combo ender, one of multiple different ways to end your string with a flourish. My Split Pivot rotating disc of death was another way to add constant damage on the board as it ripped through an enemy. I had begun to craft my own little build inside a more robust offering of tools. I began to understand how grabbing pieces off the shelf and jamming them into my arsenal could further build into the playstyle I wanted rather than having to meet Resonant where it needed me to be. 

As I slayed more of the game's Resonant's – powerful beings molded and corrupted by The Patterning – I unlocked more combat abilities to augment my arsenal. I shot heatwaves out of my hands like a firebender, formed telekensis shields around me to block damage, and summoned weird orbs to fight my battles for me. The dance between spending your Combat Power to use these powerful abilities and then using your basic attacks to build that meter back up was a constant push and pull. It was the one extra plate to spin during a fight that rewarded me for being bold.

Combat sings in Resonant. Mainly because it's not designed for you to wail on an enemy forever. Combos have intentional ends, Dylan cannot stay in the air endlessly, falling down after the second round of his combo. It means I had to move smart and plan my next position out while juggling my first. Knowing when to use your two dodges in the air to extend the combo just a little more made Control's combat feel like a playground, a place to constantly experiment with new ideas. 

Near the end I found the late-game boss fights to pull out the worst parts of Resonant's combat design. Bulky, hard-hitting bosses with an overwhelming amount of additional enemies made combat feel like a chore. Fights became slugfests that stacked against me. One wrong step on the razor's edge and a redo of a 15 minute fight was in front of me again.

Control's combat is met with incredible audio design. The clanging of the metal as Dylan discards and conjures more of these metal rods out of thin air. The way it clangs as it hits the ground. The creaking of the wooden scaffolds on the New York City Streets or the shrieking cries of The Hiss. Control Resonant is able to set a scene and tell a story alone with its audio. Weaving in music at the right moments, using spatial sounds to underscore creepy moments.

Resonant's length and scale showcase what the larger world of Control looks like. It takes the FBC and lets them run free around Manhattan. It's a look at the Bureau and the incompetence of the government. A system that has failed so many people and still plays by all of the red tape we've come to expect when asking for real change. Seeing the greater FBC work through its collective issues with Dylan and The Hiss provide for some real eye-opening moments and ones that will stick with me for quite some time.  

I love Remedy's willingness to take swings at something, to be wrong rather than to be safe. Control Resonant feels like a confident step in a new direction from Remedy, one that is far from perfect but reminds me of the beauty of not knowing everything. Not needing to be the smartest person in the room or correct all of the time, but the beauty in knowing who you are and what you want to be, warts and all. 

Executives working on AI at Microsoft and OpenAI admitted what its critics have been saying all along: Large language models are predatory pieces of technology that have been built on what a Microsoft executive called “an astonishing theft of unprecedented proportions,” and the “largest theft of labor in human history.” An internal Microsoft document said generative AI products have created a “doom loop” that is killing “the entire web.” 

Those statements and a series of other mask-off moments feature heavily in an unredacted court filing that was unsealed Thursday in the behemoth New York Times vs OpenAI copyright lawsuit that has been winding its way through the court system for years. In a filing asking for summary judgment (basically, a filing with the court asking it to rule), lawyers for the New York Times laid out a series of admissions made by Microsoft and OpenAI executives in documents and depositions that until now had remained either sealed or redacted at the request of Microsoft and OpenAI. 

It’s easy to see why the AI companies wanted to hide this from the public. The statements, taken together, are some of the most damning indictments of the ways LLMs were trained, how they worked, and the immediate threat they pose to human labor. It is a reminder that even as AI becomes more powerful and companies try to shift the narrative to the supposed existential risk of “superintelligent” AI, the tools they have already built were created by stealing from human creativity and labor and are by definition existential threats to the human labor market.

“Millions of people around the world will soon consider large models ‘hoovering up’ all their work to be an astonishing theft of unprecedented proportions,” an internal Microsoft document cited in the case read, adding “almost no one intended for content they created to be used in this fashion, nor are they compensated for its use.”

The filing was written by lawyers for the New York Times but is largely comprised of statements and interviews with big tech executives that admit both that LLMs are largely trained on stolen content, that they represent an existential risk for the human writers, artists, and media companies that they stole from, and that their products have started a “doom loop” that is eating the web and destroying the businesses that these companies stole from. 

The unredacted filing was found by Jason Kint, the CEO of Digital Content Next, a trade organization that represents digital media companies. Kint has been closely following and posting about massive AI copyright lawsuits.

The court filing cites an internal Microsoft document that found that AI products steal from human content creators, then cannibalize clicks from the people and websites they’ve stolen from, thereby destroying their business models. 

“Our AI content strategy has started a ‘doom loop’ that will hurt the performance of our models and the entire web at the same time: It is highly unusual that an end-product threatens the economic foundations of its essential suppliers, but that is the situation we have created for our LLM business with respect to its ‘content supply chain,’” the document said. 

Microsoft executives, including CEO Satya Nadella, testified under oath that after ripping content from the New York Times and other news sites, clicks to those news sites fully cratered, falling by more than 90 percent on Bing. 

Documents obtained during the court proceedings found that OpenAI created “a hack to get around nytimes paywall,” to which OpenAI cofounder Greg Brockman said “ah, nice.” Microsoft executive Brent Hecht wrote that LLMs steal content “without ways of distributing economic value down the supply chain, [which] necessarily threatens the economic stability of those who create the content.” 

OpenAI’s policy director Jack Clark wrote that the company was “creating systems that substitute for the labor of the people that define the ‘culture’ of society” and Microsoft, in a policy document, wrote that generative AI could “significantly disrupt the employment of the very people who generated the data on which the foundation model was trained […] LLMs are a product that destroys its supply chain.” OpenAI called itself an “existential threat” to news publishers, and an OpenAI software engineer testified that “no matter how prominently we show the links, users won’t click.” 

None of this is at all surprising to anyone who has been paying attention to the development of generative artificial intelligence, but the document, taken in whole, is a real they-admit-it situation. OpenAI’s and Microsoft’s lawyers have been trying to argue that their model training is fair use and transformative under copyright law and that they are building something that is fundamentally different from the human labor that it was trained on. But internally, these executives know that what they have built has been built on stolen content and that the products they’ve made are cannibalizing the sources they’ve stolen from and destroying the internet as we know it.   

The name of the game at the Walt Disney Company in the 21st century has been “acquisition.” The company has grown massively in size thanks largely to the era in which former CEO Bob Iger oversaw the purchases of Pixar, Marvel, and Lucasfilm. But in the years before Buzz Lightyear, Spider-Man, and Luke Skywalker became Disney property, an equally beloved if frustratingly underserved group of characters took up residence in the Magic Kingdom. That would be the Muppets, who joined the fold in February of 2004, ensuring that any future films, TV shows, and specials starring Kermit The Frog, Miss Piggy, and Fozzie Bear would have the Disney imprimatur. 

This was one of the final big moves from Iger’s predecessor, Michael Eisner, the completion of a deal that had fallen through nearly 15 years prior—just before the death of Muppet creator Jim Henson. Compared to Iger’s active pursuit of Pixar once he was installed as CEO, the view from outside the company was that Eisner had handed his former underling a bag of unwanted felt on his way out the door. As the company poured more money into (and made more money from) sequels to Toy Story and Cars, the many phases of the Marvel Cinematic Universe, and the start-and-stop expansion of the Star Wars galaxy, the Muppets managed to feel left out of the expansion party even though they were first to arrive.

The House Of Mouse’s shaky stewardship of Kermit and friends has become a flashpoint once more in light of the recent one-off revival of The Muppet Show and its impressive wins it racked up at this year’s Primetime Emmy Awards. Fans and industry watchers alike remain baffled that Disney hasn’t ordered any additional installments of Sabrina Carpenter’s critically acclaimed, much-watched visit to The Muppet Theater—all the more so after a recent Deadline report suggesting that the sticking point is “the premise” of such a show. Considering that the premise of The Muppet Show is built in (the premise is that it’s The Muppet Show), and considering the state of the Muppets overall, we should ask one simple question. What the hell is Disney doing with the Muppets?

On the surface, the answer would seem to be “quite a lot.” Theme-park fans were heartbroken to see Muppet*Vision 3D permanently retired at Disney’s Hollywood Studios in Orlando last year, but that was somewhat offset by Dr. Teeth And The Electric Mayhem replacing Aerosmith as the musical headliners on the park’s Rock ’n’ Roller Coaster. Last decade, Disney released two separate feature films, The Muppets and Muppets Most Wanted, the former of which netted the Muppets’ first Oscar for Best Original Song. (Yes, inexplicably, “Rainbow Connection” lost to the largely forgotten theme from Norma Rae in 1980.) And in 2015, ABC aired a weekly TV series also titled The Muppets. Add in Disney+ projects like Muppets Haunted Mansion and The Muppets Mayhem and it doesn’t seem like the studio has ignored these characters at all.