Latest news with #Lego-like
Time of India
12-05-2025
- Time of India
Went hands-on with Nothing's CMF Phone 2 Pro, and who said budget phones can't be fun
A "Lego-like" phone has been every nerd's dream ever since Project Ara was announced back in 2013. Sadly, Ara met its end in 2016, and we've spent the past decade still hoping for a phone that lets us swap out screens, batteries, cameras, and whatnot. Of course, that kind of true plug-and-play modularity would wreak havoc on the business model of phone manufacturers, why buy a whole new handset when you could just swap a component once a year (or once a month, if boredom strikes)? That's almost certainly why Ara never materialised. That said, modular phones do and did exist, but not in the way we originally imagined. Operation Sindoor India-Pak tensions: All eyes on DGMO talks today Before & after: Satellite pics show Op Sindoor's impact on Pak air bases, terror camps 'Shameful': Support pours in for foreign secretary Misri as trolls target his family Fairphone is still trying; LG and Motorola tried, yet never really caught on. Now, years later, Nothing is trying something similar with its sub-brand, wisely named CMF. Yes, it's the same Nothing known for phones with blinking LEDs. While the company says CMF largely focuses on playing with colour, material, and finish (hence the name), it's also where they're exploring this modular phone concept. Last year, the ₹15,000 (or $200) CMF Phone 1 sold 100,000 units, that too, within three hours of launch, so there's clearly demand. Now, about a year later, the brand is back with a sequel, and it's been upgraded to "Pro" status. The Phone 2 Pro arrives at ₹18,999 (about $250). The slight price hike comes with a tad better specs: a 6.77-inch 120 Hz AMOLED screen, a 5,000 mAh battery, and a trio of rear cameras. Sadly, these components aren't modular. by Taboola by Taboola Sponsored Links Sponsored Links Promoted Links Promoted Links You May Like Invest $200 in Amazon without buying stocks to earn a second salary Marketsall Sign Up Undo What's modular here is that look at the screws on the back. Unscrew them, and you can attach a small but respectable array of accessories—camera lenses, a kickstand-card wallet, or a lanyard. The system hinges on two pieces: the round mount at the bottom and a universal cover that screws onto the phone's back. If you're familiar with CMF Phone 1, you'll immediately understand what's going on here. Even though the concept is familiar, Nothing's approach is a little different this time around. Phone 1 let you swap out the entire back case—perfect since you could take out the whole plastic shell and replace it with another one if you broke it or got bored with it. On Phone 2 Pro, that isn't an option anymore: you're stuck with the cover you choose, and if it breaks, you'll need to visit a repair shop. Nothing says they ditched the removable backplate to make the phone thinner and more water-resistant. Compromises have to be made, right? I do have mixed feelings about this trade-off, but more on that later. With the universal cover in place, you get mounting points for the new lenses and the kickstand-card wallet. There's a MagSafe-style magnetic ring that you can see when you flip around the case, which keeps accessories firmly attached—though it sadly doesn't support wireless charging. While I'm not a huge fan of the kickstand-card wallet, it's quite generic, and you'll find dozens of cases with this design in the market, the lenses are where things get interesting. External phone lenses aren't new—you'll find hundreds of clip-on lenses on shopping sites—but they've mostly remained niche accessories. Why? Picture quality often suffers, and the good ones are expensive and limited to iPhones, Pixels, or Galaxies. No one thought to make them for budget phones, until Nothing did. Nothing is selling a pack of two lenses that includes a fisheye and a macro lens, each snapping neatly into the cover's enclosure. I found myself using the macro lens most. Budget phones usually fake macro shots with low-res ultra-wides or tiny sensors, and the results are awful. With Nothing's clip-on macro, you can shoot at the phone's full 50MP resolution and get detail you simply don't see on other budget phones. And, you get a total of five lenses with these two add-ons. The only other Nothing-made accessory is the lanyard: screw it into the bottom mount and sling your phone around your neck. I tried it and got a few curious glances, but roaming hands-free was fun. Nothing also hopes the 3D-print community that sprang up around Phone 1 will return with quirky, useful screw-on mods for Phone 2 Pro. So far, Nothing itself hasn't released many new accessories in a year, nor maintained backward compatibility with Phone 1, but that openness could let third-party creators take the reins. All told, CMF phones aren't exactly the fully modular phones we once dreamed of, but they're the most practical, playful concept we've seen in years. In 2025, at least, with the Phone 2 Pro, Nothing is giving us a fresh taste of what true customisation could look like and how phones can still be fun without emptying your whole wallet for it. As for the Phone 2 Pro itself, it's a well-done budget phone. I've been using it for a few days now, and I rarely felt like complaining, except when I was unscrewing the screws. They are ever so tiny, and the minuscule screwdriver with a SIM-ejector pin on its other end doesn't really help. Also, if you're clumsy like me, be prepared to lose out on the screws (thankfully, there is an extra set of screws with the universal covers and that covered me up). Back to the phone: it's been smooth so far. The screen is big, vivid, and bright; NothingOS is great as usual; and the battery easily lasts over a day. Nothing is also bringing its AI-powered Essential Space from the more expensive Phone 3(a)s, along with the Essential Key. The cameras don't need to be great at this price point—just good, and they are—though the colour algorithms could use some fine-tuning. All this comes at Rs 18,999 or Rs 20,999, depending on whether you choose 128 GB or 256 GB of storage. The accessories cost extra, and should come out some time 'soon,' says Nothing. The prices for these accessories remain unknown for now. AI Masterclass for Students. Upskill Young Ones Today!– Join Now
Al Etihad
22-04-2025
- Entertainment
- Al Etihad
Roblox user group re-creates real-life mass shooting events
22 Apr 2025 18:19 (BLOOMBERG)A group of Roblox users is re-creating real life school shooting incidents on the gaming platform that's popular with kids, including attacks at Columbine High School and the Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, as "Active Shooter Studios,' or A.S.S., the group has attracted hundreds of fans on Roblox to its detailed re-creations of the events, according to a report prepared by the Anti-Defamation League's Center on Extremism.A.S.S.'s influence has extended to other platforms, according to the report, including a private Discord server that has been used as a central hub for discussion and promotion of content. It has also been seen on TikTok, where users share content or ask for links to games, and Reddit, where users shared copies of A.S.S.'s maps. One YouTube video posted to the A.S.S. Discord server introduces a game based on the Virginia Tech shooting of 2007, which contains live footage from the attack and has received dozens of comments.A.S.S. specialises in making highly detailed, disturbing re-creations of actual tragedies, the ADL said. The group is part of a larger online subculture known as TCC, many of whose followers have a fascination with serial killers and mass murderers. A.S.S. had also been running a Roblox group that contained about 800 members, where the leaders share announcements and promote their Discord server, according to the report. Roblox said it shut the group down last Friday after being contacted by the ADL."The maps created by A.S.S. are not simple game environments-they are disturbingly graphic and detailed, designed to mimic the mass shootings they're based on with unsettling accuracy and gore,' according to the ADL report. In A.S.S.'s games, players maim or dismember other players or characters, actions that are nominally prohibited by Roblox's community that re-create incidents of mass violence can desensitise young people to such events and normalise the re-creations as a form of entertainment, according to the one A.S.S. group game seen by Bloomberg, more than 60 players gathered in a re-creation of the events at Columbine. Gamers' Lego-like avatars formed a mob in front of the school holding pitchforks and repeating the White supremacist phrase "You will not replace us.' Players with guns shot students while other players dressed as police officers attempted to gun down the game was removed. However, later the same day a new shooting game that advertised its connection to A.S.S. debuted, attracting more than 1,000 visits before it too was removed."Roblox is committed to safety and civility, and our Community Standards explicitly prohibit any content or behavior that depicts, supports, glorifies, or promotes terrorist or extremist organisations in any way,' a Roblox spokesperson said in a statement to Bloomberg."We take steps to remove violative material and accounts from our platform detected by our AI scans, flagged by users, or flagged by external organisations.'Discord said it has a "zero-tolerance policy against content that glorifies violence on our platform. We take decisive actions when we detect violations of our policies, including removing content, banning users, shutting down servers, and engaging with law enforcement.'The Discord server referred to in the ADL report was removed by Discord's Counter Extremism team on April 18, before it was notified by the ADL, according to the company. Discord has removed several accounts related to the community leaders of A.S.S. and has set up alerts so they can track and ban the accounts if they return.A spokesperson for TikTok said its Community Guidelines "prohibit the promotion or incitement of violence, including praising a violent act, and we do not allow anyone to promote violent or hateful actors.'Representatives for Reddit and YouTube didn't immediately respond to a request for of the A.S.S. community couldn't be reached for Corp., which attracts about 85 million players to its platform daily, has struggled at times to police content. The site is particularly popular with younger kids, though in recent years has begun skewing to older teens and young adults. The company has been called out by researchers and law enforcement officials for not doing enough to protect children from predators and has had to deal with other games inspired by real-life mass shootings for ADL previously found re-creations of the mosque shooting in Christchurch, New Zealand, in 2019, which were later taken said "the vast majority' of the community on its platform doesn't seek out the A.S.S. content and it is not easily searchable through our the site's discovery mechanism."And because of the swift, proactive safety measures we have in place, it is very unlikely users would be exposed to such content on our platform. Combatting content that supports extremist views is an internet-wide challenge, as these individuals constantly try to evade detection,' the spokesperson works with organisations including the United Nations-supported Tech Against Terrorism initiative and the Simon Wiesenthal Center, which gave Roblox a high score on moderating hate online. The company is constantly evaluating and improving its moderation practices, according to the spokesperson. Despite Roblox's efforts to take down the maps created by A.S.S., the group continues to find ways to make the content available, according to the report. For example, it has turned to hosting games on paid Roblox private servers, which give players control over who is admitted to the spaces and make it harder to be detected by Roblox and have their accounts suspended.
NDTV
22-04-2025
- NDTV
"Active Shooter Studios" Recreates Real Life Mass Shootings On Gaming Apps
A group of Roblox users is re-creating real life school shooting incidents on the gaming platform that's popular with kids, including attacks at Columbine High School and the Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, Texas. Known as "Active Shooter Studios," or A.S.S., the group has attracted hundreds of fans on Roblox to its detailed re-creations of the events, according to a report prepared by the Anti-Defamation League's Center on Extremism. A.S.S.'s influence has extended to other platforms, according to the report, including a private Discord server that has been used as a central hub for discussion and promotion of content. It has also been seen on TikTok, where users share content or ask for links to games, and Reddit, where users shared copies of A.S.S.'s maps. One YouTube video posted to the A.S.S. Discord server introduces a game based on the Virginia Tech shooting of 2007, which contains live footage from the attack and has received dozens of comments. A.S.S. specializes in making highly detailed, disturbing re-creations of actual tragedies, the ADL said. The group is part of a larger online subculture known as TCC, many of whose followers have a fascination with serial killers and mass murderers. A.S.S. had also been running a Roblox group that contained about 800 members, where the leaders share announcements and promote their Discord server, according to the report. Roblox said it shut the group down last Friday after being contacted by the ADL. "The maps created by A.S.S. are not simple game environments-they are disturbingly graphic and detailed, designed to mimic the mass shootings they're based on with unsettling accuracy and gore," according to the ADL report. In A.S.S.'s games, players maim or dismember other players or characters, actions that are nominally prohibited by Roblox's community standards. Games that re-create incidents of mass violence can desensitize young people to such events and normalize the re-creations as a form of entertainment, according to the ADL. In one A.S.S. group game seen by Bloomberg, more than 60 players gathered in a re-creation of the events at Columbine. Gamers' Lego-like avatars formed a mob in front of the school holding pitchforks and repeating the White supremacist phrase "You will not replace us." Players with guns shot students while other players dressed as police officers attempted to gun down the attackers. The game was removed. However, later the same day a new shooting game that advertised its connection to A.S.S. debuted, attracting more than 1,000 visits before it too was removed. "Roblox is committed to safety and civility, and our Community Standards explicitly prohibit any content or behavior that depicts, supports, glorifies, or promotes terrorist or extremist organizations in any way," a Roblox spokesperson said in a statement to Bloomberg. "We take steps to remove violative material and accounts from our platform detected by our AI scans, flagged by users, or flagged by external organizations." Discord said it has a "zero-tolerance policy against content that glorifies violence on our platform. We take decisive actions when we detect violations of our policies, including removing content, banning users, shutting down servers, and engaging with law enforcement." The Discord server referred to in the ADL report was removed by Discord's Counter Extremism team on April 18, before it was notified by the ADL, according to the company. Discord has removed several accounts related to the community leaders of A.S.S. and has set up alerts so they can track and ban the accounts if they return. A spokesperson for TikTok said its Community Guidelines "prohibit the promotion or incitement of violence, including praising a violent act, and we do not allow anyone to promote violent or hateful actors." Representatives for Reddit and YouTube didn't immediately respond to a request for comment. Leaders of the A.S.S. community couldn't be reached for comment. Roblox Corp., which attracts about 85 million players to its platform daily, has struggled at times to police content. The site is particularly popular with younger kids, though in recent years has begun skewing to older teens and young adults. The company has been called out by researchers and law enforcement officials for not doing enough to protect children from sexual predators and has had to deal with other games inspired by real-life mass shootings for years. The ADL previously found re-creations of the mosque shooting in Christchurch, New Zealand, in 2019, which were later taken down. Roblox said "the vast majority" of the community on its platform doesn't seek out the A.S.S. content and it is not easily searchable through our the site's discovery mechanism. "And because of the swift, proactive safety measures we have in place, it is very unlikely users would be exposed to such content on our platform," the spokesperson said. "Combatting content that supports extremist views is an internet-wide challenge, as these individuals constantly try to evade detection." Roblox works with organizations including the United Nations-supported Tech Against Terrorism initiative and the Simon Wiesenthal Center, which gave Roblox a high score on moderating hate online. The company is constantly evaluating and improving its moderation practices, according to the spokesperson. Despite Roblox's efforts to take down the maps created by A.S.S., the group continues to find ways to make the content available, according to the report. For example, it has turned to hosting games on paid Roblox private servers, which give players control over who is admitted to the spaces and make it harder to be detected by Roblox and have their accounts suspended.
The Star
22-04-2025
- Entertainment
- The Star
Roblox user group re-creates real-life mass shooting events
A group of Roblox users is re-creating real life school shooting incidents on the gaming platform that's popular with kids, including attacks at Columbine High School and the Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, Texas. Known as "Active Shooter Studios', or A.S.S., the group has attracted hundreds of fans on Roblox to its detailed re-creations of the events, according to a report prepared by the Anti-Defamation League's Center on Extremism. A.S.S.'s influence has extended to other platforms, according to the report, including a private Discord server that has been used as a central hub for discussion and promotion of content. It has also been seen on TikTok, where users share content or ask for links to games, and Reddit, where users shared copies of A.S.S.'s maps. One YouTube video posted to the A.S.S. Discord server introduces a game based on the Virginia Tech shooting of 2007, which contains live footage from the attack and has received dozens of comments. A.S.S. specialises in making highly detailed, disturbing re-creations of actual tragedies, the ADL said. The group is part of a larger online subculture known as TCC, many of whose followers have a fascination with serial killers and mass murderers. A.S.S. had also been running a Roblox group that contained about 800 members, where the leaders share announcements and promote their Discord server, according to the report. Roblox said it shut the group down last Friday after being contacted by the ADL. "The maps created by A.S.S. are not simple game environments – they are disturbingly graphic and detailed, designed to mimic the mass shootings they're based on with unsettling accuracy and gore,' according to the ADL report. In A.S.S.'s games, players maim or dismember other players or characters, actions that are nominally prohibited by Roblox's community standards. Games that re-create incidents of mass violence can desensitise young people to such events and normalise the re-creations as a form of entertainment, according to the ADL. In one A.S.S. group game seen by Bloomberg, more than 60 players gathered in a re-creation of the events at Columbine. Gamers' Lego-like avatars formed a mob in front of the school holding pitchforks and repeating the White supremacist phrase "You will not replace us'. Players with guns shot students while other players dressed as police officers attempted to gun down the attackers. The game was removed. However, later the same day a new shooting game that advertised its connection to A.S.S. debuted, attracting more than 1,000 visits before it too was removed. "Roblox is committed to safety and civility, and our Community Standards explicitly prohibit any content or behaviour that depicts, supports, glorifies, or promotes terrorist or extremist organisations in any way,' a Roblox spokesperson said in a statement to Bloomberg. "We take steps to remove violative material and accounts from our platform detected by our AI scans, flagged by users, or flagged by external organisations.' Discord said it has a "zero-tolerance policy against content that glorifies violence on our platform. We take decisive actions when we detect violations of our policies, including removing content, banning users, shutting down servers, and engaging with law enforcement.' The Discord server referred to in the ADL report was removed by Discord's Counter Extremism team on April 18, before it was notified by the ADL, according to the company. Discord has removed several accounts related to the community leaders of A.S.S. and has set up alerts so they can track and ban the accounts if they return. A spokesperson for TikTok said its Community Guidelines "prohibit the promotion or incitement of violence, including praising a violent act, and we do not allow anyone to promote violent or hateful actors.' Representatives for Reddit and YouTube didn't immediately respond to a request for comment. Leaders of the A.S.S. community couldn't be reached for comment. Roblox Corp, which attracts about 85 million players to its platform daily, has struggled at times to police content. The site is particularly popular with younger kids, though in recent years has begun skewing to older teens and young adults. The company has been called out by researchers and law enforcement officials for not doing enough to protect children from sexual predators and has had to deal with other games inspired by real-life mass shootings for years. The ADL previously found re-creations of the mosque shooting in Christchurch, New Zealand, in 2019, which were later taken down. Roblox said "the vast majority' of the community on its platform doesn't seek out the A.S.S. content and it is not easily searchable through our the site's discovery mechanism. "And because of the swift, proactive safety measures we have in place, it is very unlikely users would be exposed to such content on our platform,' the spokesperson said. "Combatting content that supports extremist views is an internet-wide challenge, as these individuals constantly try to evade detection.' Roblox works with organisations including the United Nations-supported Tech Against Terrorism initiative and the Simon Wiesenthal Center, which gave Roblox a high score on moderating hate online. The company is constantly evaluating and improving its moderation practices, according to the spokesperson. Despite Roblox's efforts to take down the maps created by A.S.S., the group continues to find ways to make the content available, according to the report. For example, it has turned to hosting games on paid Roblox private servers, which give players control over who is admitted to the spaces and make it harder to be detected by Roblox and have their accounts suspended. – Bloomberg
Telegraph
04-04-2025
- Entertainment
- Telegraph
The billionaire free speech warrior who built Minecraft
There are two primary modes in Minecraft, the wilfully basic video game phenomenon that's sold more than any other in history. Users can either play in 'Survival Mode', in which their character must gather resources, defend themselves against hostile invaders and contend with things like depleting hunger and health; or they can play in 'Creative Mode', where everything is limitless, nothing can harm them, and they're free to do exactly as they please. It would be reasonable to say that Markus 'Notch' Persson, the 45-year-old Swedish creator of Minecraft, has played life in both modes now – once as a shy, workmanlike coder; then as a man with enough money to live like King Midas for the rest of his days. And on balance, he might well prefer the former. 'The problem with getting everything,' he once lamented, 'is you run out of reasons to keep trying.' This week, almost 15 years after Minecraft was officially launched, a family-friendly blockbuster movie adaptation, A Minecraft Movie arrives to prey on the purse strings of parents everywhere. As far as intellectual property goes, producers are surely hoping they cannot fail: as a game, Minecraft is still being played by well over 200 million people every month. By the sounds of it, those parents are about to have another reason to resent the phenomenon that's stolen their children's brains. Minecraft was never going to be easy to adapt, even by the standards of most video games – the graphics are rudimentary, the scenery is mostly Lego-like blocks, and as a 'sandbox game', the whole point was that players wander around creating their own stories, rather than complete tasks and quests. As it was, it sounds like A Minecraft Movie's director Jared Hess, whose previous work includes co-directing Napoleon Dynamite and Nacho Libre, found the process a challenge. According to our critic, the film 'doesn't come even remotely close to working out how to turn its source material into the stuff of, or even backdrop for, an engaging feature-length plot [...] Still, with a monetisable fanbase that big, who cares about storytelling?' Over the last few weeks, the film's stars, Jack Black and Jason Momoa, have done a manful job of pretending to know what they've just made, but one person – arguably the one who could best explain Minecraft to confused non-players – was conspicuously absent from the promotional trail, bar a few typically odd tweets. Persson, the singular, reclusive man responsible for it all, wanted nothing to do with the film. But then, in fairness, he's wanted nothing to do with Minecraft for a long time. The story of how Persson wrote the code for the biggest-selling video game of all time all on his own, and in one week, has become legend in gaming circles. In that community, he is better known as 'Notch', his online alias, and he still largely resides online, often stirring up controversies and occasionally appearing as a quasi-hero figure to the alt-right. Indeed, aside from Elon Musk, Persson must be one of the most active and engaged billionaires on X. Persson was born in Stockholm but spent the first seven years of his life in Edsbyn, a small locality in central Sweden known for its carpentry. Lego-obsessed but forced outdoors, he has described wandering endlessly in the snowy forests and mountains nearby, exploring the landscape and making his own fun. His 'nerd' father, a troubled man who worked on the railways, taught him to use the family computer, a Commodore 128, which gave Persson a new kind of landscape to explore – one with infinite possibilities. At the time, computer magazines would print strings of code for readers to transcribe and create a playable game. 'My sister would read the lines out to me and I would tap them into the computer,' Persson once told the New Yorker. 'After a while, I figured out that if you didn't type out exactly what they told you then something different would happen, where you finally ran the game. That sense of power was intoxicating.' His parents divorced soon afterwards, leading him to move with his mother and sister to the Stockholm suburbs, where he became a loner. 'I started spending time at home, just programming, just games,' he said. He was particularly obsessed with the 1993 first-person shooter Doom, so much so that he reverse-engineered it – something he regards as his second-greatest achievement (the first is inventing Minecraft). Though he began a job designing games after dropping out of high school, 'really it was the puzzle-solving nature of programming that appealed', and so started a side-project in 2009 making a sandbox game with deliberately crude graphics. That became Minecraft. 'I expected it to be about six to 12 months of work, and hoped that it might earn enough money to fund development of a subsequent game,' he later said. In reality, the game was downloaded more than six million times in the first 12 months after he published it, so much so that Persson was struggling to keep up with player requests and tweaks. With the company he launched, Mojang ('gadget' in Swedish), Persson became a hero in the gaming world. He was not programmed to be a CEO. 'I've never run a company before and I don't want to feel like a boss,' he once said. 'I just want to turn up and do my work.' It was his belief that 'studios make games to make money, indie gamers build games just to build games' – a credo that assumed he was not in it for the money either. Two years after launching Minecraft, he gave his £2.2 million dividend back to his few employees, and would treat them to parties in Monaco, lavish gifts and bonuses. 'The money is a strange one,' he says. 'I'm slowly getting used to it, but it's a Swedish trait that we're not supposed to be proud of what we've done. 'Also, what if the game stopped selling? But after a while, I thought about all of the things I'd wanted to do before I had money. So I introduced a rule: I'm allowed to spend half of anything I make. That way I will never be broke. Even if I spend extravagant amounts of money, I will still have extravagant amounts of money.' There was a belief that Persson's principled stances meant he would never sell Minecraft to a Big Tech company – not least because he repeatedly said he wouldn't. Having created something with tiny costs and vast profits, he already had more money than he could ever know what to do with, he told Craig Ferguson in a very rare (and surprisingly funny) talk show appearance in 2013. Ferguson, like most people over 18, had absolutely no idea what Minecraft is. Persson had arguably made not just the most successful video game ever, but the most successful cult product ever, too. At one point it was googled more than the Bible and Harry Potter. As it was once put by Ian Bogost, a video games professor at the Georgia Institute of Technology, 'it doesn't compare to other hit games, it compares to other hit products that are much bigger than games. Minecraft is basically this generation's Lego or even this generation's microcomputer.' Persson wore a fedora and gave very few interviews, but his Twitter account, as Notch, was garrulous, spiky and sarcastic. This invited trolls. As Mojang's profits mounted and more and more people bought the game, the pressure of being a god was beginning to weigh on him. Rumours of a takeover swirled. 'Anyone want to buy my share of Mojang so I can move on with my life? Getting hate for trying to do the right thing is not my gig,' he tweeted in June 2014. Three months later, Microsoft purchased Mojang for $2.5 billion. With the click of that deal, Persson made himself a billionaire – and entirely washed his hands of Minecraft. 'It's not about the money,' he wrote in a final blog post. 'It's about my sanity.' That's when his life started getting weird. That Forbes interview, in 2015, caught up with Persson after his first few months of being a bored billionaire. At the time he had bought a $70 million, 23,000-square-foot mega-mansion in Beverly Hills (reportedly beating Jay-Z and Beyoncé to the purchase) with eight bedrooms, 15 bathrooms, iPad-operated fountains, a $200,000 'candy wall', a replica of James Dean's motorcycle, and Chanel and Yves St. Laurent fire extinguishers. He regularly spent over $180,000 per night in Las Vegas nightclubs, began posting Instagram pictures from private jets and super yachts, and, somewhat inevitably, started DJing. One of his tracks is called 'Satan Looks After My Children [mellow breakbeat]'. 'Good times,' he captioned one nightclub photo at the time. 'Expensive times.' In the interview, Persson came across as a sad, lonely figure who had it all, but no one to share it with – literally, he once complained about the lack of quality on Tinder in Sweden. This all attracted great ridicule, and talk of tiny violins, but he kept underlining the point in tweets. 'Hanging out in Ibiza with a bunch of friends and partying with famous people, able to do whatever I want, and I've never felt more isolated,' one read. 'To people out there with real problems: I'm sorry the whining of a newly wealthy programmer gets more attention than yours. Stay strong,' went another. 'I'm very happy about the money, and I'm very happy about my health. I'm not happy about the isolation,' was a third. Persson has remained on Twitter, now X, in the years since, even as he's retreated further and further from the public eye. He would occasionally stray into controversy, including in 2017 when he decided to opine on race. 'It's ok to be white,' he wrote, at a time when writing that on the internet was like dropping a match at a petrol station. 'Privilege is a made-up metric used to silence and repress,' he carried on. On other occasions, he endorsed QAnon, the far-right political conspiracy theory, erred towards the line when talking about IQ differences between nationalities, and didn't amuse many when he sarcastically declared: '#InternationalWomensDay You're an inspiration and a cook!' But he did amuse some, and emboldened a certain very online, very libertarian fanbase. They may be 10-a-penny now, but a billionaire free speech warrior who tweets mildly offensive thoughts just to 'provoke' was a novelty eight years ago. Q is legit. Don't trust the media. — notch (@notch) March 2, 2019 #InternationalWomensDay You're an inspiration and a cook! — notch (@notch) March 8, 2019 Sometimes he even spent his money on ensuring others could get away with trolling. In 2018, Persson donated £10,000 to a charity campaign run by controversial Swedish YouTuber PewDiePie, and then £20,000 to YouTuber Mark Meechan, aka Count Dankula, to help pay for his appeal after he was fined for filming his girlfriend's pug Buddha giving Nazi salutes. Eventually, Microsoft, which had grown increasingly uneasy with Persson's behaviour since they bought Minecraft from him, scrubbed all mention of him from the game. They excluded him from Minecraft's 10-year anniversary celebrations, too. All the while, the game has only grown. 'We're just getting started. As much as we create, our fans just want more Minecraft,' Microsoft's head of Minecraft, Ryan Cooper, said recently. That includes the film, which is auspiciously titled 'A' Minecraft Movie, rather than 'The'. If it even gets close to breaking even, expect many sequels. All the while, Persson, who decided the film looked 'goofy' but not in a bad way, carries on tweeting, carries on programming, carries on spending, and still hasn't released his follow-up game. It has always been said that, as a game, Minecraft is blissfully pointless, such is its lack of structure. But in the life of Markus 'Notch' Persson, there is at least a lesson. Creative Mode may be more fun than Survival – but after a while, you simply run out of things to do.
