Approximately 100,000 north Fort Worth residents are being urged to boil their water prior to consumption after a power outage at a water treatment plant, the city says.
The boil water notice applies primarily to people who live north of Interstate Loop 820, near Interstate 35W, U.S. Highway 287 and Eagle Mountain Lake. The city said it expected the notice to stay in place through at least midday Wednesday.
The notice comes after the Eagle Mountain Water Plant and raw water pump station in the 6800 block of Bowman Roberts Road lost power Monday afternoon, according to the city of Fort Worth. The plant has experienced multiple outages Monday.
Much of Texas has experienced rolling power outages Monday due to winter weather across the state.
The city said water in a northside elevated water tank was drained, leaving many customers without any water. Once water pressure is restored, those without any water will have access again, but will be urged to boil it before use.
The water boil notice is to ensure the destruction of harmful bacteria for drinking, cooking and ice making. The city said water should be brought to a “rolling boil” for two minutes before use.
Residents will be notified once the water boil notice is no longer in effect.
For questions about the boil water notice, residents can call 817-392-4477 or email MyWaterAccount@FortWorthTexas.gov.
Mass Effect: Andromeda could have had up to ten new alien species, but they were cut due to budget, scope, and… cosplay considerations.One of the biggest criticisms of Mass Effect: Andromeda was the lack of new alien species, especially when the Mass Effect Trilogy introduced us to the Krogan, Asari, Drell, Batarians, Salarians, Turians, Quarian, Prothean, Hanar, Elcor, Keepers, Volus, Collectors, Geth, Reapers, Vorcha, and more.
In our Mass Effect: Andromeda review, we said “What’s bizarre is that BioWare went to the trouble of shipping us 2.5 million light years away to introduce only two new alien races (plus some robots) over more than 50 hours of campaign and major side missions, and only one local joins your crew.”Apparently this wasn’t the original plan, and many of the developers on Andromeda recently spoke to TheGamer to discuss why these new alien species never made it to the final game.
Have you played Mass Effect: Andromeda?
“I think it was a project that couldn’t have possibly lived up to expectations,” Neil Pollner, who was a senior writer on Mass Effect 3 and wrote parts of Andromeda, said. “Not just the high bar of the original trilogy, but the logical expectations anyone would have of Mass Effect going to a whole new galaxy. Because the scope of [the first] Mass Effect was so incredibly massive, there was an inherent promise that you’d be getting a massive new experience with a ton of new things in [what was supposed to be the first] Mass Effect Andromeda – new species, new lore, an entire new galaxy at your fingertips, etc.
“But we were only given the budget for two new species, plus the Remnant. Not to mention that we couldn’t even include all the Milky Way species. And we weren’t going to be able to let you travel throughout the galaxy. This meant that we had to develop the story around some pretty glaring inorganic limitations. So, not only did you get something that felt (and was) much smaller than what you got before, almost everyone playing the game probably had something that they really liked about Mass Effect that just wasn’t there.”Pollner continued to discuss how they had grand plans in pre-production, including expanding the “first contact” experience with new aliens, but most of that work wasn’t even used.
Chris Hepler, another long-time Mass Effect writer, discussed how he proposed five or six new alien species, and ex-Bioware writer Jo Berry had also come up with a few that “were awesome.”
Dorian Kieken, who was the franchise design director at the beginning of Andromeda’s development, explained that some of the early alien concepts were “pretty out there” and that they were cut because one of Mass Effect Andromeda’s goals was to make it easy for fans to cosplay the game’s characters.
Mass Effect: Legendary Edition Comparison Screenshots
“One of the strengths of the original Mass Effect trilogy is that you can actually cosplay most of the alien characters – except the Hanar, although I wouldn’t underestimate the creativity of some cosplayers,” Kieken said. “The intention in Mass Effect Andromeda was to introduce new races that would still be in the realm of cosplay, which is probably why more crazy concepts were abandoned.”
Kieken even said that the two alien races that did make it into Andromeda gradually shifted to “cosplay-safe territory,” with the team trying to avoid “jellyfish” types of aliens.
While one can hope some of these designs will make their way into the next Mass Effect project, fans of the series can look forward to interacting with the original set of aliens in the Mass Effect Legendary Edition this May.
Have a tip for us? Want to discuss a possible story? Please send an email to newstips@ign.com.
Adam Bankhurst is a news writer for IGN. You can follow him on Twitter @AdamBankhurst and on Twitch.
When a black hole is active, we tend to focus on the effect it has on the material it’s slurping up. It makes sense to do so; black holes themselves are difficult to probe. But the interaction between the black hole and the material should have an effect on the black hole, too – as it gains material, it should also gain in mass.
Such small feedback responses – especially ones previously ignored as trivial – are known as backreactions, and scientists have just observed an analogue of one that’s specific to black holes, and which can be seen in water swirling down a drain.
It’s a detection that could help study black hole phenomena that are too subtle for our current instruments, such as the Hawking radiation that is thought to be emitted by black holes. This is a theoretical type of black-body radiation that would eventually – after a very, very long time – see a black hole completely evaporate, provided it was not growing at all.
In order to study cosmic objects in finer detail than we can across the vast distances of space, scaled-down versions, or analogues, can be created in a lab. Like, for instance, a recent experiment to replicate white dwarf core pressures.
Black hole analogues are an excellent way to find out more about these enigmatic objects, and different kinds can help reveal their secrets in multiple ways.
Optical fibre and Bose-Einstein condensates have both been used to learn more about Hawking radiation. But one of the simplest has to do with how black holes feed: the draining bathtub vortex.
Black hole accretion can be compared with water swirling down a drain. Treating matter as a ripple in a field, the water can stand in for spacetime itself, or a field rippling with quantum activity.
Measuring the ripples responses as the water vanishes down a swirling drain might have something to say about waves of energy disappearing into a black hole.
A bathtub vortex black hole analogue. (The University of Nottingham)
From such analogues, we’ve learnt a lot about the effect of black holes on the space and material around them. But with an external water pump keeping the background of the system steady, it was unclear whether a water black hole analogue would have the freedom to be able to react to waves.
This set of experiments is the first time a draining bathtub vortex has demonstrated an effect on the black hole itself.
“We have demonstrated that analogue black holes, like their gravitational counterparts, are intrinsically backreacting systems,” said physicist Sam Patrick of the University of Nottingham in the UK.
“We showed that waves moving in a draining bathtub push water down the plug hole, modifying significantly the drain speed and consequently changing the effective gravitational pull of the analogue black hole.”
When waves were sent rippling into the system towards the drain, they pushed extra water in, accelerating the “accretion” process so significantly that the water levels in the tub dropped noticeably, even while a pump maintained the same level of water going in.
This change in the water level corresponds to a change in the properties of the black hole, the researchers said.
This could be extremely useful information, partially because an increase in mass changes the gravitational strength of a black hole – it changes the way the black hole warps its surrounding spacetime, as well as the effect the black hole has on the accretion disc. In addition, it offers a new way to study how waves can affect black hole dynamics.
“What was really striking for us is that the backreaction is large enough that it causes the water height across the entire system to drop so much that you can see it by eye! This was really unexpected,” Patrick said.
“Our study paves the way to experimentally probing interactions between waves and the spacetimes they move through. For example, this type of interaction will be crucial for investigating black hole evaporation in the laboratory.”
The team’s research has been published in Physical Review Letters.
The remastered trilogy of Mass Effect Legendary Edition contains almost all of BioWare’s sci-fi RPG epic, with two notable exceptions: ME3’s multiplayer, and ME1’s Pinnacle Station DLC. While the absence of multiplayer is a glaring absence (I’ll honestly miss it), when BioWare announced the release date yesterday I’d initially not noticed Pinnacle wasn’t in the big long list of included DLC. Turns out, the source code was corrupted, and rebuilding it from scratch would’ve taken ages.
Jack was supposed to be pansexual in Mass Effect 2, but BioWare changed her romance after the first game was criticized by the mainstream media.
In the 11 years since Mass Effect 2 launched, fans have often wondered why Jack – a character who specifically references times in which she became intimate with non-male romantic partners – is only romanceable if Commander Shepard is a man. As it turns out, this wasn’t supposed to be the case. Jack was originally written as pansexual, but her relationship conditions were changed towards the end of development due to concerns about the mainstream media’s reception to the first Mass Effect game.
After Mass Effect launched in 2007, Fox News hosted an extraordinarily tactless panel pertaining to the game’s depiction of sex. As expected of the time, sex was spoken about as if it were completely taboo.
The panel instigated a domino effect, which led to baseless criticism not only towards Mass Effect’s sex scenes, but also the fact that it included a non-straight romance option in Liara T’Soni (Kaidan Allenko was locked into a straight-only relationship arc until Mass Effect 3).
“I was trying to chart out the arc of [Jack’s] romance, which for much of the development – it was actually very late that it became a male/female-only romance,” Brian Kindregan tells me. Kindregan was the lead writer for Jack, Samara, and the first critical path mission on Horizon in Mass Effect 2, and also did the first pass on Grunt and Tuchanka, “She was essentially pansexual for most of the development of that romance.
Related: Retailers List Mass Effect: Legendary Edition For March
“Mass Effect had been pretty heavily and really unfairly criticized in the US by Fox News, which at the time… maybe more people in the world thought that there was a connection between reality and what gets discussed on Fox News,” Kindregan continues. “The development team of Mass Effect 2 was a pretty progressive, open-minded team, but I think there was a concern at pretty high levels that if [the first] Mass Effect, which only had one gay relationship, Liara – which on paper was technically not a gay relationship because she was from a mono-gendered species – I think there was a concern that if that had drawn fire, that Mass Effect 2 had to be a little bit careful.”
Interestingly enough, Courtenay Taylor – who played Jack in Mass Effect 2 – also expressed that she was originally supposed to be a pansexual character. In a recent chat with our own Kirk McKeand, Taylor said:
“It’s funny to me because my understanding was always that she was pansexual. So I don’t know if that’s just something I inferred from the character or something that she said that maybe got cut. I was surprised there wasn’t a female romance possible because that was my understanding. I think it was the time, you know? That was, what – 2008/2009? The industry has changed exponentially since then, and BioWare was leading the charge on that. I don’t know if it came down to a budget constraint or maybe someone being like ‘this is too obvious’ because everyone was like ‘of course she’s a lesbian.’ But my sense was always that she was [pansexual] and it just didn’t get followed through. Of course, the community modded it immediately so you can have it your way.”
As Jack’s writer, Kindregan explains that he didn’t necessarily agree with the decision to change her sexuality. He understands why it happened, and says “it wasn’t like some anti-gay person high up on the Mass Effect 2 team saying, ‘we’re not going to have that’.” Instead, it had to do with the firestorm of controversy that Mass Effect had received back in 2007, and attempting to minimize the amount of critique that would be directed towards the community by outlets like Fox News again. “The short version is, a lot of us were asked pretty late to focus the relationships on a more traditional kind of vector,” Kindregan says.
“I’ve definitely heard a lot from people who were surprised that Jack turned out to not be open to that,” he continues. “I understand why. I would say that there were a lot of seeds planted in her conversations that certainly implied that she was pansexual – she once specifically references being part of a thrupple. She says there was a guy and a woman she was running with that invited her into their robberies and into their bed. She definitely references those things. That was explicitly to start sending the message that yes, this is a character who is pansexual. In the eleventh hour revision of cleaning that up, she’d already been partially recorded with voiceover. Not all of that could be changed.
“I would say even with the things I could change, and I don’t know if this was the right decision or not, I still saw her as a character with an edge,” Kindregan says. “Not edgy, but with an edge of not following traditional norms. I think I might have, even during the revision process, kept some of that stuff in there with a sense of like yeah, this is a person who’s been around and done a lot of things, went off the farm and down to Paris.”
Ultimately, though, Jack became a romance option that was exclusively available for male Shepard, despite the fact that both her writer and actor agree that she was originally supposed to be pansexual. 2010 was only three years after the infamous Fox News Mass Effect debacle, and so BioWare was reluctant to follow through on some of the ideas that were specifically put in place early in development. By the end of production, the only non-straight romance options in the game were:
Kelly Chambers, who is not a squadmate and does not disqualify other relationships.
Samara, who expresses that she has feelings for you but ultimately turns you down – Kindregan compares it to someone saying, sure, I’ll be with you, but I’m in love with this other person and I’ll ditch you for them if they come calling.
Morinth, who literally kills you less than a single second into having sex.
“I’ve worked with lesbian developers who have come up to me and said like, ‘Why is Jack not into me?’” Kindregan says. “And I have to say ‘I’m so sorry, it’s partially my fault.’ But I still stand by the thing of keeping her with a more varied background. Maybe someday Jack will be portrayed as pan.”
Keep an eye on TheGamer.com at the beginning of February for our Mass Effect Day – an entire day of deep-dive articles dedicated to one of the best RPG series of all time.
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About The Author
Cian Maher (465 Articles Published)
Cian Maher is the Lead Features Editor at TheGamer. He’s also had work published in The Guardian, The Washington Post, The Verge, Vice, Wired, and more. You can find him on Twitter @cianmaher0.
Google is threatening to pull its search engine from an entire country — Australia — if a proposed law goes into effect that would force Google to pay news publishers for their content.
“If this version of the Code were to become law it would give us no real choice but to stop making Google Search available in Australia,” Google Australia and New Zealand VP Meg Silva told Australia’s Senate Economics Legislation Committee today.
“We have had to conclude after looking at the legislation in detail we do not see a way, with the financial and operational risks, that we could continue to offer a service in Australia,” she added, according to The Sydney Morning Herald.
The company, which has been lobbying against Australia’s plan for months, claims the country is trying to make it pay to show links and snippets to news stories in Google Search, not just for news articles features in places like Google News, saying it “would set an untenable precedent for our business, and the digital economy” and that it’s “not compatible with how search engines work.”
Australia’s Competition and Consumer Commission (ACCC), which drafted the law, seemed to suggest in August that this shouldn’t affect Google’s search business: “Google will not be required to charge Australians for the use of its free services such as Google Search and YouTube, unless it chooses to do so.” Clearly, Google disagrees.
As Google explains in Silva’s full statement and an accompanying blog post, it would rather pay publishers specifically for its Google News products. (It already announced a program to pay publishers in Australia, Germany and Brazil back in June.)
Australia doesn’t seem to think that’s enough, though. The ACCC believes the proposed law addresses “a significant bargaining power imbalance between Australian news media businesses and Google and Facebook.” As my colleague Jon Porter put it in August:
Australia’s proposed News Media Bargaining Code law, which is currently in draft and targets Facebook alongside Google, follows a 2019 inquiry in Australia that found the tech giant to be taking a disproportionately large share of online advertising revenue, even though much of their content came from media organizations. Since then, the news and media industry have been hit hard by the pandemic. The Guardian reports that over a hundred local newspapers in Australia have had to lay off journalists and either shut down or stop printing as advertising revenue has fallen.
Facebook is also in the ACCC’s sights with this particular law, and is threatening to block its news from being shared in Australia, too. Both companies are calling these blockages a “worst case” scenario, and Google insisted it wasn’t a threat, but it certainly sounds like one.
