GLOBAL DISPATCH The DJI Osmo Nano: A Pocket-Sized Panopticon for the Jet-Lagged Masses By Our Man in Departures, Terminal 3, Somewhere Between Jet Fuel and Existential Dread Somewhere over the Sea of Okhotsk—where Russian air-traffic controllers sound like they’re narrating a Tolstoy audiobook and the in-flight Wi-Fi wheezes like a Soviet tractor—a new icon of…
The Elder Scrolls VI: A New Empire of Digital Escapism Rises While the Old One Burns Byline: Geneva, Wednesday, 3 a.m.—because insomnia, like Bethesda bugs, is now a global feature. Somewhere between the collapse of a regional banking system and the re-election of a septuagenarian strongman, humanity received word that The Elder Scrolls VI is…
Physint: Kojima’s New Espionage Opera Proves the World Still Loves a Good Wiretap By Dave’s Locker International Desk If you were hoping 2024 would finally be the year humanity outgrew its addiction to clandestine snooping, Hideo Kojima has some unfortunate news. Fresh off Death Stranding’s existential parcel-delivery simulator—and Norman Reedus’s increasingly sentient beard—the Tokyo-based auteur…
The Last Line That Wasn’t Encrypted International dispatch from the Department of Schadenfreude By the time you finish this sentence, three presidential bodyguards in three different time zones will have whispered the same six-digit code into the same brand of Chinese-manufactured earpiece. The code is supposed to change every 12 hours. It doesn’t. Somewhere between…
TSMC: The Tiny Island That Holds the World Hostage By the time you finish reading this sentence, Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (TSM) will have printed another 300 smartphone processors—each one capable of running TikTok, Instagram, or the nuclear launch codes of any moderately funded superpower. Investors politely call TSM a “bellwether”; the rest of us…
The DJI Osmo Nano: A Pocket-Sized Eye Watching a World That’s Already Watching Itself By: “Jaded in Jakarta” | Dave’s Locker Global Desk The first thing you notice about the DJI Osmo Nano—apart from its unnerving ability to perch on a café saucer like a mechanical mosquito—is how perfectly it embodies the new global pastime:…
Hideo Kojima—part auteur, part walking meme, full-time corporate enigma—has just announced “physint,” a project whose name sounds like a rejected pharmaceutical for social anxiety. In the usual Tokyo livestream, complete with moody lighting and the faint hum of existential dread, Kojima teased a “new action-espionage” game that will somehow be both interactive entertainment and, if…
**The Empire Strikes Back… With a USB Stick: Jaguar Land Rover’s Cyber Attack and the Global Theater of Automotive Vulnerability** In the grand chessboard of global geopolitics, where nations once moved tanks across borders, they now shuffle malware through fiber optic cables. The recent cyber attack on Jaguar Land Rover—Britain’s flagship automotive manufacturer—serves as yet…
TOKYO—Hideo Kojima, the man who once hid the meaning of life inside a 90-minute cut-scene, has transcended mere game design to become a geopolitical weather vane. While Washington and Beijing trade tariff threats like Pokémon cards, Kojima quietly ships “Director’s Cuts” that feel more predictive than the CIA’s morning brief. If you want to know…
AT&T Finally Pays the Tab for Its World Tour of Negligence, or: How to Settle for Less Than Your Data Is Worth Geneva—While delegates at the UN were busy arguing over the precise definition of “cyber-war,” roughly 70 million former and current AT&T customers received an email this week that was part apology, part ransom…
The Catfish Show Goes Global: Digital Deception as the World’s Newest Export By the time the sun rises in Lagos, someone named “Chloe from Miami” is already sliding into the DMs of a lonely oil-rig engineer. By dusk in Sydney, a widowed pensioner is wiring rent money to “Sergeant Brad” stationed in Kabul. And somewhere…
**The Cosmic Reality Check: NASA’s Asteroid Ballet and Earth’s Delusions of Invincibility** While humanity busies itself with the terrestrial absurdities of TikTok trends and cryptocurrency crashes, NASA has been playing cosmic billiards with a 560-foot space rock named Dimorphos—proving that somewhere in the universe, something actually gives a damn about our collective survival, even if…
