What started as a satire concept trailer will now be a full length film. The "Weird" Ak Yankovic Story teaser trailer is here.

Daniel Radcliffe will star as Weird Al Yankovic along with notable star Rainn Wilson (known famously as Dwight Schrute from The Office).

It's an adorable tribute. Weird Al Yankovic has been in the music and entertainment industry since 1976 and has been parodying pop songs until now. He's made written and starred the UHF (Ultra High Frequency) movie in 1989 and now will be portrayed by Daniel Radcliffe. He is stil active in his career; he appears on Weezer's cover of Africa (originally sung by Toto).

For real though, Weird Al Yankovic has a great voice, extended vocal range, and a fast tongue. He's a great artist. A genius perhaps for his witty writing and composition. I mean listen to one of his original songs in the hey-days, "You Don't Love Me Anymore".

Now that TERA is shutting down, what becomes of TERA players?

TERA was released on PC as early as January 25, 2011 and also made its way to PS4/Xbox One consoles in 2018.

TERA peaked at around 28 million players worldwide and boasted some unique outfits, armors, and character designs on its conception. The character design had more impact than its world that skins were ported to games like Skyrim.

TERA had a free-to-play, and a pay-to-play subscription. So this triggers my deep concern on investing time on MMOs. Once they shut off, we're left with no choice but to accept the decision that we won't be playing it anymore. We also would overlook any culpability involved by the developers. If the pay-to-play aspect of the game did not help incentivize developers, then what will?

TERA shutting down should allow for private servers since the work will be ceased and abandoned.

There are circulating threads about how Elyon (another BHS MMO) caused the backend shutdown to TERA. The overarching issue is apparently a financial problem and mismanagement issue in Bluehole Studios.

According to Gameforge hosting the TERA Club Membership, TERA developers asks players to respect this decision on shutting down the game. TERA will run permanent events until its shutdown on June 30, 2022.

Watch the Operation Monarch Playstation trailer here.

Check out the Kingdom Hearts IV official trailer. No release date announced yet.

I've received an email from Amazon informing me that my annual Amazon Prime membership will increase from $79.99 to $99.99 + taxes. They explain that this is the first price increase ever since Prime was launched in Canada in 2013. While Prime costs also increased in the US, the increase in the Canadian soil is still relatively cheaper.

Amazon explains that the price increase is due to heavy investment on their infrastructure (e.g. one-day delivery, unlimited Prime shipping), and they've added benefits to the Prime Video.

Frankly, I don't care about Prime Video, and they could've kept the price around $89.99 without it. The last time I checked, Amazon Prime members buy their membership for their online shopping, not so it would fund Amazon creating original TV series. So it seems like they're bundling the Prime Video (which is unnecessary) to justify the price increase. There are other places to stream videos. But WHAT BOTHERS ME MOST is that this price increase does not include Amazon Music Unlimited. Which I think would be justifiable instead of Prime Video.

Pokemon Scarlet and Pokemon Violet aims to be truly open-world which fans have been imagining since the conception of the term 'open-world'. It seems that Pokemon Legends: Arceus has been the test prototype all along as the Pokemon game evolves into a more seamless experience involving exploration and pokemon battles. It's time to move on from the clunky combat mechanics of encounters brought from previous generations before Pokemon Sword and Shield.

The new starters look great -- I finally want a cat pokemon.

Despite that I'm excited, I'm a little uncomfortable about the 2022 release date. Now, if Pokemon Scarlet and Violent have been concurrently been in production with Pokemon Legends: Arceus, then we could say that these have been in production for a couple of years already. The iterations make sense, since Pokemon Sword and Shield featured both an open world setting and a route-based map. Then they've added expansion passes as well which proved that the formula clicked.

For me, there is no doubt that the gameplay mechanics worked for Pokemon Legends: Arceus -- though the graphics may be outdated and the audio value could improve. Pokemon Legends: Arceus was what prompted me to revisit all of my Pokemon game saves on the Switch. And I want more Pokemon games to bring a similar exploration, role-play, and battle mechanics to it. Pokemon Scarlet and Pokemon Violet seem to be the culmination of all of these Pokemon iterations which asks the question: would it become the ultimate Pokemon game?

Notable updates and additions to New World 1.03 are:

Personally, I prefer the world I am playing now since our faction understands the incentive of a 5% Property Tax. But I'm also quite disappointed that having the top tier house would demand around 1k gold per ~week regardless of the discount. The one we're trying to determine now is that if you were away for two weeks, would you owe two weeks of Property Tax or would you owe only ~1 week of Property Tax since you haven't truly been using any house benefits in those two weeks? To be clear, property tax is due 7 days after purchase, and 5 days therafter which adds a layer of difficulty in playing this game.

Buying a house in New World is a trap where you'll be forced to play just to maintain it. It's a reverse trap! It's a reverse subscription model wherein you have to play the game in order to pay off what you owe. Normally you have to pay off what you owe in order to continue playing the game. Note that it's not required to own a house in the game, but it is nice though. Why can't I have nice things in the game? Oh, right. The full-time permanent job and adult responsibilities in real life. We are left to realize that we if we bought an expensive house, we have to grind too in the videogame to pay it off.

Finally, there is official news from Google itself about the new Google Pixel 6 phone and its new Tensor chip which I'm absolutely curious. The big question is will this Tensor chip be enough to sway ALL smartphone users to the Google smartphone? The Google Pixel 6 and Pixel 6 Pro will boast its camera again with an added layer of touch up to your photo/videography using its formidable cameras + the Tensor chip (a tech which would supposedly enhance your images).

When I got the Google Pixel 2 XL, it significantly changed my perspective on smartphone tech. I used to buy smartphones simply so I could have a phone that's able to surf the web and take pictures. Not anymore. The Pixel 2 XL was a highly reliable phone with an astounding camera that blew me away (in 2017). The Pixel 2 XL was my GPS/scheduler on my commute, catered to my various apps, and fetched my files remotely. Then the Pixel 3, 4, 5 kind of passed me by because the 2-series was still working for me; unfortunately, the proceeding series also didn't wow me much. But this time I want to find more about the Google Pixel 6 since it's introducing it custom Tensor chip. Take note that Google is facing stiff competition from all the iPhones, the premium Samsungs AND with its folding screen lineup, then there's affordable mid-tier smartphones who get the job done. It's a highly stiff enough competition that drove LG to forfeit in the smartphone arena. Which asks the question again: will the camera + new tech be enough for Google?

The next competitor that I can think of in the photography niche is Sony with its Xperia 1 III -- think DSLR camera on a phone. Although Samsung's 108 MP camera on the Galaxy Note 20 Ultra and the Galaxy S21 Ultra is already a current contender. If the Pixel 6 is right, it should boast an excellent camera + the Tensor chip enhancements. I guess we'll find out more on October 19 and beyond.

Breaking: Reuters report that Facebook, Messenger, Instagram, and Whatsapp experience a global outage.

Facebook is down along with Messenger, Instagram, and Whatsapp. Perhaps now is the time to seriously consider other social media platforms alternative to the Facebook giant - such as Minds, Rumble, or Parler. I didn't think that Facebook could be down for this long and I fail to realize that Facebook is still a website that can still crash.

Perhaps folks started to think Facebook as something invulnerable, but the reality is Facebook does not exist at the moment and it's rendered useless.

There are other people claiming that this may have to do with the recent FB whistleblower, Frances Haugen, that hate speech encourages profit on FB. I am curious what the cause is for the outage. If it's a tech difficulty outage then fine; if it's cyber attack related then we realize that Big Tech are still vulnerable; but if it's indeed related to damage control then it's time to jump ship.

I apologize that we've been silent for a few days as my business colleague and I have been playing and enjoying New World. I haven't experienced any queue problem, because I played it after getting back from work. They've added more servers on the evening of launch, but our server population is now high. New World is fun. But so was Maplestory 2 on Steam. The question is will it keep a high playerbase after three months?

Honestly, I prefer the buy-to-play model of New World and it works. Amazon is running it too so folks shouldn't be too worried. All the territories have just been claimed today too: 5 Marauder, 4 Syndicate, 2 Covenant territories in Neritum server US East. The fun starts now.

The fishing is relaxing. Mining and logging are chill too. In fact, resource gathering is fun and you can focus on turning those into goods instead of adventuring as folks are still turning to the player markets since there is not any NPC shop in the game. The closest thing to selling equipment for money is salvaging your item which converts it into repair parts and a fraction of gold. So imagine: waking up from your player home, going outside the hamlet to gather stones, raw hide, or timber and then sell them to the trading post and call it a day, then detour to fish before going home -- rinse and repeat.

I always have major concerns playing MMOs and I can't shake the feeling that New World may become another Maplestory 2 where it started great then Nexxon shut down the Western servers. This is every MMO players' nightmare -- investing a lot of time, creating a lot memories inside a game, meeting new friends and then everything is gone one day. We're only into the first week and I'm already thinking that it's shutting down. The trauma is real. In New World, the game has plenty of space for expansion so I'm not worried.

There will be players who will drop later on especially those who can't wait for mounts (if mounts are indeed coming despite that the lore suggests otherwise). A shed of players is to be expected. Let's not hope that the shed would be at least half of the total. Although that means they'd be missing out on the game they've paid in full. Let's stop the report for now and I'll post more New World content in the near future.