In all honesty, Toads Of The Bayou could have been several notches less ribbet-ing than its Steam demo ended up being, because its stylised pixel fly-snatchers are just that good. There’s only one of the three characters available in the freebie (one of the others is a toad nun with a shotgun), but he’s got a little cutlass, a flintlock pistol, and a can-do attitude - at least when it comes to either stabbing or shooting things. The game itself is a little bit deckbuilder, a little bit Into The Breach: turn based strategy with perfect information and various tricks you can pull to make enemies hit each other instead of the thing you’re trying to protect. Indulge yourself on the gourmet tray-tray below.

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November 8th, 2005 was my first day as a full-time games journalist, which means I have now entered my 20th year of doing this. "This" has changed a lot over time: from producing CD and DVD coverdiscs, to writing for a magazine, to editing magazines and a website, to solely editing a website, to managing several websites. Sprinkle podcasts, videos, events and a lot of other things in there and "games journalist" doesn't really cover it.

One of the only constants is that I read a lot of writing about video games.

Dapper gent Oli Welsh wrote for Polygon about the fan reboot of City Of Heroes. We briefly covered fans getting an official license earlier this year, but Oli went and spoke to the folks making it all work.

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"Imagine you buy a pinball machine, and years later, you enter your den to go play it, only to discover that all the paddles are missing, the pinball and bumpers are gone, and the monitor that proudly displayed your unassailable high score is removed". As reported by Polygon, that's an argument put forth by a new lawsuit against Ubisoft, filed by two Californian players of The Crew. They're suing the company in a proposed class action lawsuit over shutting down the racing game's servers, rendering it unplayable.

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After nearly a year of public beta honing, the Nvidia App – Team Green’s new one-stop shop for desktop GPU management – is out in full. Not alongside the upcoming RTX 50 series, as rumoured, but right-now-today-this-minute. I’ve been testing out the launch version and while it’s not without some dud features, it does agreeably achieve its stated goal of combining the functions within Nvidia Control Panel and GeForce Experience. And if installing it means never having to use the latter again, well, that’s 149MB well spent.

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WASHINGTON — When Karen Pence found out that an art therapist in hurricane-ravaged Puerto Rico couldn’t afford the clay her clients needed, she sprang into action.

A trained watercolor artist and advocate of the little-known mental health profession, Vice President Mike Pence’s wife went to the Virginia art supply store she frequented when they lived in the state during his tenure in Congress, bought 120 pounds of self-drying clay and packed it aboard Air Force Two for their flight down to survey the damage.

“She cleaned him out,” the vice president said of the store’s owner.

Mrs. Pence made art therapy her cause ever since she first learned about it more than a decade ago. She has visited numerous art therapy programs, both in the U.S. and abroad, and on Wednesday in Florida, nine months into the administration, she planned to formally announce the goals for her art therapy initiative.

She wants to help people understand the difference between art therapy and arts and crafts, and to grasp that art therapy is a viable option for treating trauma, injury and other life experiences. She also wants to encourage young people to choose art therapy as a career.

“I don’t think that a lot of people understand the difference between therapeutic art and art therapy,” Mrs. Pence, a trained watercolor artist, told The Associated Press in an exclusive interview before the announcement at Florida State University in Tallahassee. The school has an art therapy program she described as “tremendous.”

Blabbing to a girlfriend can be therapeutic, she explained, but it is not the same as art therapy, which has three elements: a client, a trained therapist and art.

READ MORE: VP Pence’s wife aims to raise awareness about art therapy

As passionate as she is about raising art therapy’s profile, other issues help make Karen Pence tick, too.

One of them is helping military families, especially spouses. Her only son, Michael, is in the Marines.

There’s also her interest in honeybees. Mrs. Pence installed a beehive on the grounds of the U.S. Naval Observatory, where the vice president’s official residence is located, to help call attention to a decline in managed bee colonies that officials say could negatively affect U.S. agricultural production. She had a beehive at the Indiana governor’s residence for the same reason.

Now 60 and married to the vice president since 1985, Mrs. Pence has long been viewed as one of her husband’s most trusted political advisers. They are often together on trips, at the White House, or at the observatory, almost always holding hands.

Since returning to Washington in January (the family lived in the area when her husband served in Congress), she has accompanied the vice president on goodwill tours of Europe, Asia and Latin America, as well as trips to survey recent hurricane damage in Texas, Puerto Rico and the U.S. Virgin Islands. She tries to visit art therapy programs wherever she goes. Journalists who travel with Pence often keep an eye out for his wife; she often brings them cookies when he ventures back to the press cabin for small talk.

READ MORE: Devastated Puerto Rico needs unprecedented aid, says governor

She’s even done a little campaigning, urging Virginians to vote next month for Ed Gillespie in what’s viewed as a tight gubernatorial race.

“It really makes a difference, I can tell you. Nobody thought that we were going to win,” she said, an apparent reference to the Trump-Pence ticket.

The vice president often refers to his wife as the family’s “prayer captain.” She has led congregations in prayer during their hurricane-damage trips.

“We’re people of faith so we just try and approach everything with prayer,” Mrs. Pence said from her sunny, second-floor office in the Eisenhower Executive Office Building in the White House complex, where she and her staff enjoy coveted views of the Washington Monument and Jefferson Memorial. Art therapy drawings given as gifts adorn the outer office.

She proudly displayed several of her paintings, including of the Capitol dome, the vice president’s residence, a Ball canning jar-turned-flower vase, a cardinal bird and a pink peony. She turns many of her watercolors into prints and boxed notecards that she gifts to art therapists she meets.

Except for myriad pets, including two cats, a dog and a rabbit named Marlon Bundo, the Pences are empty nesters. Their son and two adult daughters are off on their own.

“I think for us this is a good time in our life for this role because our kids are out of college. They’re living their own lives,” Mrs. Pence said.

She’s also launching a blog in conjunction with Wednesday’s announcement to chronicle her visits to art therapy programs.

The post Karen Pence to outline goals for art therapy initiative appeared first on PBS NewsHour.

Secretary of State was questioned on Good Morning Britain over the pledge - with host asking 'how much will it have gone up by then?'

New research has revealed a growing mental phenomena sweeping the UK, which may only affect those with a certain income

Finance guru Laura Pomfret explained how changes to inheritance tax in the budget may hit people in a way they hadn't realised

October marked the "biggest" sales month for supermarkets in the UK so far despite food price hikes.

It is nearly time for one of astronomy's top annual sights – the Perseid meteor shower. This year is a bit special, says Abigail Beall

Astronomers have been spotting strange banana-shaped galaxies and the evidence seems to indicate that filaments of dark matter make them take this shape

From artificial retinas to ageing mice, here are five of the most promising results from research performed on the ISS – and what they might mean for humans on Earth and in space

Planets that orbit close to their parent stars are blasted with radiation and contorted by gravity – and the exoplanet TOI-6255b might be the most extreme example yet

After 25 years in orbit, the Chandra X-ray Observatory is under threat. We need to protect this monument to human ingenuity, argues Chanda Prescod-Weinstein

After a star explodes, the resulting supernova remnant collapses in on itself and could begin the cycle again, creating generations of stars enriched with heavy elements

Five satellites due to launch this week could be brighter than most stars, and astronomers fear the growth of such constellations could have a catastrophic impact

The Cassini mission’s samples from Saturn’s moon Enceladus have signs of various organic molecules that could be among the ingredients needed for life to get started

These dazzling images taken by NASA's Hubble Space Telescope are from the upcoming book Cosmos: Explore the wonders of the universe, which has a foreword by astrophysicist Becky Smethurst

How did the supermassive black holes we’re now seeing in the early universe get so big so fast? Astrophysicist Sophie Koudmani is using sophisticated galaxy simulations to figure it out

The Euclid space telescope's massive “cosmic atlas” promises to shed light on fundamental questions in physics and cosmology

A nearby star that exploded some 3 million years ago could have removed all dust smaller than a millimetre from the outer solar system

Maggie Aderin-Pocock, who has worked on the JWST, catalogues the science behind its most stunning images in her new book, Webb's Universe. Here's her pick of the telescope’s best shots

You might have heard about plans to establish a self‑sustaining city on Mars. Here’s what life would really be like on the Red Planet

A robot can hold a squash, pumpkin or melon in one hand, while it is peeled by the other

In Still Wakes the Deep, you play as a Glaswegian electrician on a 1970s oil rig. The well-crafted setting gives way to horror, but I wish I could linger in mundanity for longer, says Jacob Aron

Roads with variable speed limits, designed to manage traffic flow, are normally adjusted according to simple rules, but a 27-kilometre section of the I-24 freeway near Nashville, Tennessee, is now overseen by an artificial intelligence

A robot mimics the clever fin-folding mechanism used by tuna fish, which increased the bot's turning velocity by almost 33 per cent

Plans to create an interactive AI model of the legendary code breaker Alan Turing are reckless and problematic, says Matthew Sparkes

A new procedure turns an alloy of nickel and titanium into a material as strong as steel but 20 times stretchier – and one application could be building planes with shape-shifting wings

In a basement beneath City St George's, University of London, senior NATO leaders watch on as four research teams demonstrate the latest in AI-controlled, autonomous drone technolo0gy

Information on faces recognised, voice commands and internet searches can be extracted from an Amazon Echo smart assistant without help from the user or manufacturer

A powerful new AI called o1 is the most dangerous that OpenAI has ever released, the firm claims – but who are these warnings for, asks Chris Stokel-Walker

Artificial intelligence has more in common with ants than humans, says Neil Lawrence. Only by taking a more nuanced view of intelligence can we see how machines will truly transform society

CAPTCHA tests are supposed to distinguish humans from bots, but an AI system mastered the problem after training on thousands of images of road scenes

Smart TVs from Samsung and LG monitor what you are watching even when you are using the screens to display a feed from a connected laptop or video game console

A US standards agency has issued new guidance saying organisations shouldn’t require users to change their passwords periodically – advice that is backed up by decades of research

If artificial intelligence chatbots are fine-tuned to improve their responses using human feedback, they can become more likely to give deceptive answers that seem right but aren’t

Google DeepMind claims its AlphaChip AI method can deliver “superhuman” chip designs that are already used in its data centres – but independent experts say public proof is lacking

Our Future Chronicles column explores an imagined history of inventions and developments yet to come. We visit 2032 and meet artificial animals that love their owners, without the carbon footprint of biological pets. Rowan Hooper explains how it happened

While quantum computers are still in their infancy, more and more people are training to become quantum software developers

AI models have safeguards in place to prevent them creating dangerous or illegal output, but a range of jailbreaks have been found to evade them. Now researchers show that writing backwards can trick AI models into revealing bomb-making instructions.

A type of mathematical problem that was previously impossible to solve can now be successfully analysed with artificial intelligence

A specialised algorithm could help autonomous vehicles track hidden objects, such as a pedestrian, a bicycle or another vehicle concealed behind a parked car

Scientists used AI to transform tourist photos into a 3D digital map of Antarctic penguin colonies – even as researchers debate whether to harness or discourage tourism in this remote region

Feedback digs into a baffling ad for a mobile game and identifies a new and devilish way to advertise a product online: make it as confusing as possible to encourage people to click (it worked on Feedback)

Just under 5 per cent of the Wikipedia pages in English that have been published since ChatGPT's release seem to include AI-written content

Oil and water can be separated efficiently by pumping the mixture through thin channels between two semipermeable membranes

Tigerair has again cancelled flights in and out of Denpasar, and there is no sign of the dispute being resolved.

Treat yourself to a Becky Lynch book signing, games with the Dropout stars, Kevin Smith’s Dogma, and so much more!

Or, for the other half of you: Here Is Our Ivy Wolk Explainer.