Why so Premium, X?
The service formerly known as Twitter Blue has a new name. And, as you might’ve guessed from the guy who renamed Twitter to X, the name isn’t a clever one. X Premium is now the service that’ll throw a blue tick on the end of your name (if you want) and charge you a lot of money to do so.
Twitter Blue’s name change wasn’t the only notable change to come from the social media platform (are we still calling it that?) over the weekend. In a tweet post made on Saturday, Musk clarified some of the platform’s rules when it comes to its ad revenue sharing scheme, which should put some money back in the pockets of creators.
As the old saying goes, ‘You have to spend money to make money’. Whether you subscribe to that idea in broader life or not, it definitely applies here. Musk said that “To be eligible for your ad revenue share, you must be an X Premium (Blue) subscriber.” Anyone not paying to watch X crash and burn in the front row will lose the chance to make any money off their shitposts. Oh no!
X’s own context feature attached itself to Musk’s tweet and added some important information that Musk didn’t initially include. For instance, to be eligible for the programme, the account must have more than 500 followers and received at least 15 million (yeah, with an M) impressions on their posts in the last three months. That should be easy enough… right?
Super Heavy gets a win
This past weekend saw another big win for SpaceX. On Sunday, the agency successfully conducted a static fire of a new Super Heavy booster – designed to attach to the Booster 9 rocket one day – at its Texan launch site. The ignition of all 33 Raptor engines was a beautiful sight to behold (from afar, obviously), though unfortunately, not everything went to plan.
According to SpaceX’s webcast, the test only ran for 2.74 seconds, with the original plan calling for a full five-second test. And four of those 33 Raptor engines we mentioned decided to shut down for the day ahead of schedule. That might sound bad. It’s certainly not good, but at least the thing didn’t explode. Instead providing valuable data for a second attempt at a Starship launch later this year.
When that’ll be exactly, SpaceX hasn’t said yet. We still don’t know whether SpaceX will attempt another static fire launch for the Super Heavy booster to get the result it’s looking for, or if the test on Sunday offered enough data to get by for a full launch. Judging by the last Starship attempt, and the 70-day gap between the static fire test of Booster 7, it’s possible we could see the Starship attempt to launch sometime in mid-October, barring no other delays.
Call of Duty is shaming its cheaters. Good.
Ever wondered if that guy in Call of Duty was hacking or just better than you? Most of the time, it’s probably the latter. But there’s always that flicker of hope that it wasn’t your skill that was the problem. Now, Call of Duty is naming and shaming players in real-time across Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 and Call of Duty: Warzone, both of which recently received an update to their Ricochet anti-cheating system.
When Ricochet detects what it calls a “problem player,” it’ll remove them and notify everyone in the lobby right in the kill feed. This update to Ricochet is the newest in a long-fought battle between Activision and cheaters in its games. The developer has been attempting to out cheaters in more public and humiliating ways for years.
The most recent example of this was when Call of Duty started sending in clones of real players to players cheating or suspected of doing so. Or our personal favourite retaliation of removing the cheater’s ability to see enemy players which makes for some good content on social media.
That Musk vs Zuck cage match might be on
News about that Elon Musk vs Mark Zuckerberg cage fight is doing the rounds again. Whether the two billionaires will actually go through with it this time, or just milk it for free publicity is another matter altogether.
As you might’ve guessed, it’s Musk that’s holding up the occasion everyone is so desperate to see, whatever his tweets might say. On Saturday, Musk posted, saying he was “lifting weights throughout the day, preparing for the fight,” to which Zuckerberg responded on Threads, confirming that he was ready to fight, saying he had already suggested a fight date of 26 August. “Not holding my breath,” was the Meta CEO’s final statement on whether the fight would happen or not.
A day later, Musk posted again, this time stating that he “may need surgery” before a fight date can be fixed. According to Musk, he is undergoing MRI scans of his neck and upper back soon, and we “will know this week.” Our guess? Musk is deploying a thinly veiled attempt to try and duck out of a fight against Zuckerberg, whose Jiu-Jitst training might send Musk back to his radiographer.
We might have to settle for a metaverse fight after all.