On Friday, Amazon customers received an email alerting them to an update to the site's terms and conditions. Most notably, it stated that disputes would now be resolved through arbitration and said users agree to a class action waiver.
Amazon framed this as a "fast and efficient" way to resolve issues, but it notably would prevent customers from seeking the involvement of a judge or jury in most circumstances. Customers can still take Amazon to small claims court in certain circumstances, though payouts are often limited to a few thousand dollars.
The relevant sections of Amazon's legal policies page now read:
Meta released Glimmer this week, an open-weight AI model anyone can download and run on their own hardware — a contrast to Muse Spark, the company’s more powerful model that stays locked behind its own APIs. The release landed alongside a letter from Mark Zuckerberg arguing AI should be “for everyone” rather than controlled by a handful of labs, but as Equity’s […]
Luna dropped the full list of titles coming to the game streaming service in the second half of August and one of the most popular modern Assassin’s Creed titles is going to be available to play at no additional cost for Amazon Prime subscribers.
Luna Adds Assassin’s Creed Valhalla and Mirage In August
Although services like Xbox Game Pass, Nintendo Switch Online, and PlayStation Plus are certainly far more popular with console gamers, many Amazon customers also have access to a large library of streaming titles that they might not even be aware is included in their Amazon Prime subscription.
Amazon Prime members gain access to a decent amount of titles through the Luna service. Luna has done a pretty good job of securing attractive titles over the last few months and late August appears to be another drop that could get some extra attention.
Although there’s a lot to check out, one of the biggest highlights is definitely the inclusion of Assassin’s Creed Valhalla. Although the Ubisoft title is six years old at this point, it’s still a fan-favorite and well worth checking out for any gamers who may have slept on it when it first released. Assassin’s Creed Mirage will also be arriving later this month.
Luna didn’t release a specific date yet, but did confirm that the title will be available to stream sometime in August for Amazon Prime members. Subscribers should keep an eye on the Luna Standard library for new additions in the coming weeks.
Here is the full list of new additions to Luna Standard this month:
Now Available: Bluey: The Videogame – Playtime with the Heeler crew is now bigger and better, with new characters, minigames, unlockables, and collectibles to discover. Join Bluey, Bingo, Mum, Dad, plus her cousin Muffin and Uncle Stripe in interactive adventures set across iconic locations. Whether solo or in co-op, experience the joy of Bluey’s world with your family and friends.
Now Available: Disney/Pixar Brave: The Video Game – Brave: The Video Game invites players to run, jump and battle their way through the rugged landscape of mythical and mysterious Scotland. By using their wits and bravery, gamers will also be able to wield a sword and bow and arrow to defeat fierce enemies, break a magical curse and save a kingdom.
Now Available: Disney/Pixar: WALL-E – WALL-E follows the story of a small, sentient robot whose sole purpose is to clean up Earth’s voluminous garbage. Based on the 2008 computer animated film from Pixar Animation Studios, the video game version of WALL-E involves playing as the lonely robot as he navigates a trash-tainted world and begins an unlikely trek across the cosmos.
Coming this month: Assassin’s Creed Valhalla – Become Eivor, a legendary Viking warrior, driven from Norway by endless wars and dwindling resources in ninth century AD. Players can relive the ruthless fighting style of Viking warriors and partake in political alliances to influence the world of Assassin’s Creed Valhalla.
Coming this month: Assassin’s Creed Mirage – Follow Basim Ibn Is’haq, a young thief with a mysterious past who joins the Hidden Ones in Alamut on a quest for answers, in ninth-century Baghdad at the peak of its Golden Age.
Additionally, Prime subscribers can also access the following PC titles during August:
Right and Down (August 6, GOG)
Hiveswap Friendsim (August 6, GOG)
Pyramids and Aliens: Escape Room (August 13, GOG)
Airship: Kingdoms Adrift (August 13, Epic Games Store)
Steelrising (August 13, Epic Games Store)
Royal Romances: Forbidden Magic (August 20, 3P)
Spray Paint Simulator (August 20, Amazon Games App)
Havendock (August 27, Amazon Games App)
Clash: Artifacts of Chaos (August 27, Epic Games Store
Be sure to check back soon for more news and updates on the Luna catalog and the Assassins’ Creed franchise.
Amazon Prime subscribers can check out the full Luna GameNight and Luna Standard library of games now.
Amazon is fully stepping back from MMOs. After saying last year that it would be halting "a significant amount" of its work on first-party AAA games, "specifically around MMOs," Amazon will be handing over live operations of Throne and Liberty and Lost Ark in the West to other companies, according to announcements on Wednesday. Throne and Liberty will be taken over by FirstSpark Games and NC in Q4 2026. Lost Ark will be run by Smilegate starting in early 2027.
When Amazon announced the broader strategy shift in October, the developers of a third MMO, New World: Aeternum, announced plans to stop offering new content updates. As of January, y …
Earlier this summer, Amazon customers began noticing that emails related to their online orders looked sparse: Order confirmation emails didn't name specific items anymore, and instead listed only item categories.
AI has already had a significant impact on Amazon’s carbon emissions, which it reported were up 16% last year — the wrong direction for a company that pledged to eliminate its carbon emissions by 2040.
To power its new West Texas data center, Amazon is investing in the construction of a new power plant that could be one of the largest single producers of greenhouse gases in the US, according to The New York Times. The new gas-burning plant in Pecos County, Texas, has received significant investment from Amazon and, at least initially, would not be connected to the state's power grid. Instead, its 35 natural-gas turbines would primarily deliver its 7.65 gigawatts of electricity to the new data center.
According to Cleanview, which tracks data centers and their associated power projects, GW Ranch received a permit from Texas allowing for th …
Ring has debuted a new version of its smart doorbell camera that's designed to be easily installed as a replacement for a door's peephole without drilling or running wires. The Peephole Cam 2K is a replacement for the brand's Door View Cam that first debuted in 2019 and, alongside a sleeker design, it features a bump from 1080P to 2K video recording, some tracking upgrades, and a cheaper price. It's available for preorder now for $99.99 with shipping expected later this month.
As with previous models, the Peephole Cam 2K is divided into two halves that connect to each other through your door's peephole. On the outside there's a camera, door …
The starkest contrast between two summertime TV hits about women navigating midlife’s challenges shows up in the way its leading ladies handle themselves in the kitchen. For Jennifer Garner’s Hollis Shaw, the influencer around whom “The Five-Star Weekend” revolves, the kitchen is her happy place and moneymaker. Within moments of the series’ opening, she’s sliding a pie in the oven and futzing over tiny tarts and meringue kisses to photograph for her Hungry with Hollis followers.
Hannah Waddingham’s “Ride or Die” assassin, Judith Burton, earns her pay quite differently: She kills the world’s worst people. To her, the kitchen is an arsenal; in the premiere, she beats two men silly with a stock pot, a skillet and several dinner plates. Later, her best friend, Debbie Claybourne (Octavia Spencer), is shocked to discover that Judith stores a submachine gun in her oven.
Both series meet a cultural moment many middle-aged women would call miraculous, and pharmaceutical and cosmetic corporations would describe as profitable. No generation of 40- and 50-somethings has been as extensively catered to as Gen Xers and geriatric Millennial ladies, for whom hormone replacement therapy, along with the secret ways of retinol, hyaluronic acid serum and collagen therapies, have been normalized.
Every TV show is selling us something: “Five-Star Weekend” markets the expectation of how women should age well and politely.
There comes a point at which a woman realizes she’s a lot closer in age to Diane Keaton in “Something’s Gotta Give” than Amanda Peet, and she’s OK with that. Remember which one got to smash Keanu Reeves’ doctor?
In this economy, though, not many people can afford a house in the Hamptons or Nantucket. But we can vacation vicariously with Hollis and her friends Dru-Ann (Regina Hall), Brooke (D’Arcy Carden), Tatum (Chloë Sevigny) and Gigi (Gemma Chan) to the place Dru-Ann virally nicknames “white person clam island.”
(Greg Gayne/Peacock) Regina Hall as Dru-Ann, Jennifer Garner as Hollis, D’Arcy Carden as Brooke, Chloë Sevigny as Tatum in “The Five-Star Weekend”
“The Five-Star Weekend,” based on Elin Hilderbrand’s novel, is currently topping Peacock’s list of most popular series because of its breezy familiarity; we’ve spent time with these women in past summers, dating all the way back to “Big Little Lies.” You should know the formula by now. They have enviable wealth and careers, except for one who’s relatively less well-off than the rest. A tragedy or a mystery that brings everyone to a seaside locale; here, the sudden death of Hollis’ husband sends her sailing off to her family home on Nantucket, where all the interiors are as creamy and dreamy as a Nancy Meyers film. And there must be romance, represented in Hollis’ conveniently single high school sweetheart, played by the perennially foxy Timothy Olyphant.
Everybody’s hiding something from themselves and their host, who has planned all their fun with a pathological degree of anal retentiveness. There is a spa trip and fancy dinner at a restaurant and behind it all, lurking silently, a cancer scare.
If the “Five-Star” crew were to meet “Ride or Die” duo Debbie and Judith at a pub, they’d have war stories to swap. Debbie is a politician’s wife who sidelined her career aspirations to support his ambition to be Prime Minister. She gets him within spitting distance of Downing Street just in time for her husband to dump her.
You think that’s bad? How about this: Hours before that happens, Judith’s younger handler Sam (Calam Lynch) invites her to retire over lunch, suggesting that her recent 50th birthday might have made her a little psychologically unstable. “My mum turned 50 last year,” he shares, “and she went absolutely insane!”
The funniest part of that conversation is when Sam labels Judith a WOACA, a Woman of a Certain Age, pronouncing it as if he were Fozzie Bear punctuating a joke in an old-timey stand-up set. Only the real joke, it seems, is that Judith assumed her mission-completion rate and dedication were enough to maintain the respect of Sam and their boss, played by Bill Nighy. Not so.
(Courtesy of Prime Video)
There’s an additional slathering of irony in Garner, the woman behind “Alias” superspy Sydney Bristow, playing the happy homemaker. Meanwhile “Ride or Die,” created by Tessa Coates, introduces Waddingham, the elegant and proper boss lady from “Ted Lasso,” by showing Judith trading an easy assassination by distant sniping for an up-close-and-personal stabbing. Just for the fun of it.
I’d say that’s a pretty good representation of the gap between the long-shot fantasy of midlife and an intimate understanding of how it actually turns out.
As every perimenopausal woman knows, it’s really hard to relax when so many people in the world deserve to be punched.
Every TV show is selling us something: “Five-Star Weekend” markets the expectation of how women should age well and politely, which is to propose we seek respite from all the heartbreak, ageism and our creeping fear of obsolescence and decrepitude by leaning on our nearest friends. That, and sitting in salt rooms and mud baths or gazing at the bottom of our stand mixer’s bowl. Expressing our rage at all that, however, is still frowned upon.
That makes Debbie and Judith relatable and extraordinary figures, in that they are 50-something women, played by 50-something women headlining a high-velocity espionage thriller, linked to developments each is entitled to be angry about. Instead of proposing Waddingham as a Bond co-star, she’s the expertly skilled agent flanked by a best friend with an equally formidable intellect – the Moneypenny to her 007.
With the scrape Debbie and Judith find themselves in, a beach holiday is out of the question. Besides, as every perimenopausal woman knows, it’s really hard to relax when so many people in the world deserve to be punched.
“Ride or Die” reminds us that our local multiplexes used to be dominated by buddy action blockbusters in past summers, most of which starred men.
An exception was “Thelma & Louise,” which became the talk of the season and then year when it landed in theaters 35 years ago in May. Susan Sarandon’s Louise and Geena Davis’ Thelma spurred debates about what it meant that this film, written by a woman, created two female folk heroes out of the cold-blooded killing of a would-be rapist. Feminists loved it, but plenty of other women viewed it as improper.
It only occurred to me recently that Sarandon was 44 years old when she played Louise, the pal who pulled the trigger. I wasn’t thinking about that when I first saw “Thelma & Louise” because my 40s were far away enough to not even consider that detail. Now I know how much it matters.
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Ultimately, what sisterhood there is between “Five-Star Weekend” and “Ride or Die” can be seen in the way they consider the resources a woman has as she enters middle age. If we are “Five-Star”-fortunate, we can hire assistance to handle the inevitable difficulties associated with this time of life, whether that means groundskeepers or divorce lawyers. Would that were possible for all of us.
“Ride or Die,” for all its fanciful twists, ultimately has more realistic counsel for all the WOACAs watching: Bank on yourself and your extensively earned skills. You don’t need to be rich to burn the road behind you to the point of no return, just confident enough to keep barreling forward. And if you’re really lucky, you’ll have a trustworthy person riding shotgun in your getaway car.
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