Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 turns one year old today, and Sandfall is celebrating in style with a new update and a sale on Steam.

Andy McMillan and Andy Baio:

Today, over 10 years later, and almost two full years after we retired the festival for good, we’re finally launching that website. Named after what we thought would be a throwaway title for a short-lived GitHub repo, allow us to introduce XOXO Explore. [...]

And, for the first time ever (!) on an XOXO website, we now have an actual About page, where we’ve attempted to explain what XOXO actually was, documenting the 12-year history of the festival and its related projects, and featuring a bunch of our favorite quotes from press and attendees over the years.

You’ll also notice the entire site is littered with floating visual ephemera: design artifacts, illustrations, animations, photos, and videos, all pulled from our vast archive of commissions and collaborations.

Conferences come and conferences go. But when they go, they tend to disappear. What a remarkable library, a record, XOXO Explore is.

The Grand Theft Auto 6 release date is scheduled for November 19, but it could all change depending on the Take-Two earnings call.

Eva Corlett, reporting for The Guardian in 2023:

New Zealand’s new government will scrap the country’s world-leading law to ban smoking for future generations to help pay for tax cuts — a move that public health officials believe will cost thousands of lives and be “catastrophic” for Māori communities.

In 2022 the country passed pioneering legislation which introduced a steadily rising smoking age to stop those born after January 2009 from ever being able to legally buy cigarettes. The law was designed to prevent thousands of smoking-related deaths and save the health system billions of dollars. [...]

The laws were due to be implemented from July 2024. But as part of its coalition agreement with populist New Zealand First, National agreed to repeal the amendments, including “removing requirements for de-nicotisation, removing the reduction in retail outlets and the generation ban”.

It’s interesting that this law passed in the first place, but I would argue that there are no lessons to be learned from it given that it was repealed before it ever went into effect. And it seemingly was repealed solely along left/right political lines after a change in the country’s parliament, not because the public had turned against this specific not-yet-in-effect law.

Matt Day / Bloomberg:
Meta and Amazon reach a multibillion-dollar, multiyear deal for Meta to rent hundreds of thousands of Amazon's Graviton chips for its AI inference needs  —  Amazon.com Inc. and Meta Platforms Inc. have struck a multibillion-dollar deal for the social-media giant to rent hundreds of thousands …