A24 has made some iconic indie movies in recent years, but merch has typically been kept to the usual movie posters and T-shirts. Taking thinking outside the box to a whole new level, the new Robert Pattinson nesting dolls prove that A24 knows its demographic.

There are six mini Pattinson's in total, featuring the following characters: Reynolds "Rey" from The Rover, Constantine "Connie" Nikas From Good Time, Monte from High Life, Thomas Howard from The Lighthouse, Charlie Thompson from The Drama, and finally his latest roll as Chris Hansen in Primetime.

The collection is not only conceptually iconic, but a great display of Pattinson's wide range of A24 roles. While I'm slightly sad there's no Edward Cullen (Twilight sadly isn't an A24), the nesting dolls are just the right amount of niche bizarre to get me reaching for my wallet.

"This month I'm working to buy myself my Robert Pattinson Russian dolls," one dedicated fan wrote. "Just bought Robert Pattinson nesting dolls at almost 30. I love being me," another confessed. I initially thought these were little Robert Pattinson acrylics for your toes to get a Patticure," a more confused fan wrote.

Sadly, the Robert Pattinson nesting dolls are already sold out, but you can join the waitlist on the A24 website. For more film news, check out how The Backrooms' director used Blender to build a 30k-square-foot set or take a look at why Robert Pattinson’s Primetime performance is cinematic perfection.

Although I don’t depict them, they are an essential part of the narrative; they serve as a background story element to inform and inspire consecutive decisions made during the creation process. Having a solid story idea really helps at all stages and keeps you focused on what’s important.

However, what made the biggest difference on the technical side was using 3D and a proper reference board. Here's how I approached the piece.

If you need to build your own art setup, see our guides to the best drawing tablets or the best laptops for drawing.

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The publication of a huge batch of patent filings shows that the creative tech giant has plenty of ideas about where it could take things next, and that includes into field where Adobe doesn't currently have a strong presence.

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As noticed by the patent tracking site Patentlyze, the US Patent and Trademark office has just published a series of patent filings from Adobe. One of them describes a method for creating navigable 3D worlds from text descriptions.

An example use cited describes a user typing "a foggy Japanese garden at dusk" to generate said 3D environment. A non-specified AI model would first build an intermediate "spherical" 2D picture of the space, like a 360 view produced by stitching 3D scans. That would then be fed back into a second AI process that would use it as a basis for the construction of 3D geometry.

The output would be viewable from multiple perspectives, and the user would be able to move forwards and backwards to explore the environment.

Even with today's procedural tools that allow artists to generate assets using rules, building 3D environments is a time consuming process that requires potentially hundreds of individual assets that are digitally sculpted and then painted with surface details.

Adobe has a suite of 3D programs in its Substance collection of apps. Substance Painter is fairly popular for that part of the process, but Substance 3D modeler remains a relatively niche choice compared to the likes of ZBrush and Blender, with its main advantage being the seamless switching between desktop and VR. For now, it's one of the Adobe programs that hasn't added Firefly-powered generative AI tools.

Adobe's not the only company exploring the idea of text-to 3D world generation. For the moment the nearest thing are tools like Blockade Labs' Skybox AI , which generates 360-degree scenes from text prompts, but these are quite some way from navigable environments for games or VR and AR.

This is just one of the dozens of patents from Adobe published in recent weeks. Other filings include concepts for an AI tool that builds new camera angles from a single photo, one that finds matching materials across 3D models and a tool for rendering a 3D garment preview.

A patent application doesn't necessarily signal a development intention. Companies file patents for various reasons, including to try to prevent competitors from using an idea and to show shareholders that they're being innovative.

Personally, though, I do like using Adobe software. In fact, I've been doing so for 30 years now, which suggests they're doing something right. And honestly, I don't enjoy writing critical pieces too much; I'd far rather praise people when they've done something good. Which is what I'm about to do here.

The good news is that Premiere mobile, which launched on iPhone last year, has finally arrived on Android, and it's free. And let me be crystal-clear. You don't need a Creative Cloud subscription to use it. Which I think is epic.

Indeed, if you're happy with the basic editing experience it offers – trimmed down from the full-blown desktop software – you don't even need an Adobe account. Nor are there any watermarks, ads and interminable upgrade prompts. Double hooray!

What you get for free

So what, exactly, are you getting? Well, the free tier is surprisingly meaty. There's a multi-track timeline for layering video, music, text, voiceovers and effects. There's frame-accurate editing for timing cuts to the beat. You can record voiceovers directly in the app. Plus something I think content creators will prize above all else: Enhance Audio, which cleans up background noise in a single tap.

Add in creator-made templates and unlimited 4K exports to that mix, and you've got everything most social video creators will be looking for from a quick and easy-to-use app.

Not all features are free, though. Firefly-powered features such as Generative Fill, Image-to-Video and Generate Sound Effects run on generative credits, which you'll have to buy. But that seems fair enough to me.

The limitations

A word of caution, though, before you get too excited. The app requires Android 13 or later and at least 5GB of RAM, which rules out plenty of Android budget phones. That's a shame, because affordability is one of the main reasons people plump for Android phones over iPhones.

Plus, as I mentioned, a lot of features you're used to using on desktop are currently MIA. Keyframes, beat detection, Adobe Fonts, enhanced captions and, a little frustratingly, the ability to continue editing a project on Premiere desktop are all marked as "coming soon".

And let's not be realistic. The free app is also a shop window. Adobe is clearly hoping that once you're hooked, you'll start spending for extra features.

Why this is good for creatives

That said, overall this is exactly how Adobe should be treating its audience. For many years, its approach has been: sign up for a serious standing order first, then we'll talk. Free Premiere, in contrast, earns trust first and asks for money later, or maybe never.

That's good sense because the next generation of content creators aren't starting out on a desktop; they're starting on phones, with something like CapCut. If their first serious editing tool is a free, watermark-free Premiere instead, Adobe has a real chance of keeping them for the long haul. No wonder the latter includes features aimed squarely at vertical video and YouTube Shorts.

And who knows? If Adobe carries out releasing useful tools like this, with no strings attached, it might finally start to feel like a friend of creatives again, rather than a heavy handed landlord. Here's hoping...

As you might guess from the name, Messi and the Giants is not an animated biopic charting the young Messi's journey from Rosario to Barcelona, through his treatment for growth hormone deficiency and on to La Liga and then World Cup glory. All the same, few people expected it to be quite as wild as the RPG-inspired story revealed in the trailer below.

Set to stream globally on Disney+ in summer 2027, Messi and the Giants appears to have little to do with Messi beyond its use of his name, vague likeness and ability to kick spherical objects.

A 12-year-old Leo finds himself trapped in an alternate reality ruled by giants. To get home, he must compete in football-like battles using powerful “orbs”. He must also try to reunite the fractured realms of Iko.

Unlike his opponents in these battles, Leo can’t use the world's "code powers" to boost his game. Instead, he has to rely on skill, teamwork and pure grit. That makes the series sound a bit like it could be a human versus AI parable, which could be interesting.

The trailer was unveiled at San Diego Comic-Con Málaga by executive producers Lacey Stanton and Bryan Korn of Sony Pictures Television, director Dan Creteur of Atlantis Animation and Sony Music Vision executive producer Sergi Reitg.

Disney announced its acquisition and distribution of the animated series back in December 2024. Messi himself is listed as an executive producer along with his later father alongside various Sony execs.

Atlantis, a studio based in the Canary Islands that previously worked on Miraculous Ladybug, is doing the animation. The Argentine actor Milo Burgess-Webb provides the voice of Leo, and there's an original theme song from Argentine singer Luck Ra called Vamos, Vamos, Vamos.

The video game concept, action sequences, polished 3D animation style and fantasy aesthetic with glowing powers and anime-influenced action sequences, along with the underdog story angle, could make the series appeal to children who aren't football fans. For now, it seems to have avoided the backlash that often greets celebrity-driven projects. Perhaps celebrity animation works best when it stops being a celebrity cartoon.

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But Pixar's latest animation quickly takes some unexpected turns, turning into a surreal, psychedelic origin story with a very unexpected animation style.

Pixar bills the seven-minute film Fruit & Nut as the "untold story of the most famous duo of all time". It was directed by Pixar artists Rej Bourdages and Tony Maki, who previously worked on films including Coco, Soul, Inside Out 2, Elio and Hoppers.

They used a handcrafted stop-motion animation with tangible puppets and sets, combined with 2D animation sequences. The result has a quirky indie look that gives Fruit & Nut a very different feel from Pixar's feature films with their 3D CGI animation style. In fact, it's only the second stop-motion film that Pixar has released to date, following the experimental short Self in 2024.

As for the plot, it's a deliberately absurd origin story for a popular snack presented as a Thelma & Louise style road trip adventure. A lonely peanut inadvertently becomes a getaway driver for a bank robbery after picking up a hitchhiking strawberry while making a run from dive bar without paying. They're another surprising twist at the end.

Many of those commenting on the short have highlighted its meme potential along with surprise that Pixar would release an animation with such a boldly different direction.

That's the beauty and value of the studio's internal artist-driven programme, which is intended to give employees freedom to experiment with different styles and techniques – a kind of spiritual successor to the earlier SparkShorts initiative. While the films are shorts only released online, they could help inspire Pixar to consider new directions: it's already expanded its stylistic range with the 2D animation of upcoming Gatto.

That kind of small fix runs through Dear Van Gogh and shows how art lays the foundations for indie games, in a season that turns some of the world's best-known paintings into places you can walk, climb, and fly through, and is available for PS5, Switch, PC, iPhone and Android. Yingxian Lu, Content Producer at thatgamecompany, explains how it came together, from the first brushstroke tests to a finale shared with millions of other players.

Which paintings can be levels?

While something like The Potato Eaters could be troublesome, some Van Gogh paintings are easy to turn into an interactive experience. "If the painting is a natural landscape, it's more straightforward to translate into a 3D environment," says Lu. Van Gogh's output is much wider than landscapes, though: flowers, plants, characters, self-portraits. The team didn't want to drop those, "simply because they were more difficult to translate into the game experience."

Almond Blossoms became an enormous tree in the game, with Sky's avatars around the size of the flowers, free to walk across it. "It feels surreal but also very dreamy and poetic," she says.

The Van Gogh self-portrait needed a different approach. "Having avatars jump across Van Gogh's face obviously didn't feel appropriate," Lu says, so it went into the story. A Van Gogh character paints himself in the game, with a mirror on the canvas. The camera pushes in on the canvas, then pulls back to show the finished portrait.

The people in the paintings became cosmetics, and players can play with aspects of life inside a Van Gogh painting – you can get the postman's hat and suit, and outfits drawn from Fisherman's Wife on the Beach and Peasant Woman Against a Background of Wheat, so they can dress as 19th-century people.

Brushstrokes first, story later

The team looked at the brushstroke system first, before they knew the narrative or gameplay. "The visual identity of the project was so crucial that we wanted to make sure we could achieve the look we were aiming for before committing to the project," Lu says. "And we did!"

She credits the graphics engineers and 3D environment artists with the heavy lifting. Her own job was to help define the visual goal and coordinate the teams around it. The finished tool lets artists adjust the colour, thickness and size of strokes and apply them to the game's 3D models.

The system went through many rounds of iteration, with features added along the way. One is "museum light," added by the graphics engineer, which gives uneven brushstrokes highlights and shadows as they're lit, like a painting in a gallery. Lu says it "creates a much more convincing sense of brushwork and elevates the overall visual quality." Another is a gyro effect, where the highlights move as you move your device. "It's just a really cool feature and something that can only really be experienced in the medium of games," she says.

Asked about the biggest technical limitation the team faced, she gives a short answer: "Honestly, the brushstroke system was the biggest one."

When the painting is the concept art

For most of Sky's content, concept art comes first, then 3D. Here, "the paintings themselves were the concept art, and very much what the 3D environments started from and referenced."

Getting the colours right took some effort. Digital images of the paintings online often didn't agree with each other, so the team had people visit museums in Europe and MoMA in New York to photograph the originals. The concept team used those photos to colour-correct the digital versions, and those became the references for the 3D artists.

The team also researched architecture in the Netherlands and France from the period. For Van Gogh's room in Arles, they found material on the building's structure and rebuilt it as it was. Arles itself needed extra concept work, because the team wanted more than the bedroom, the Yellow House and the café. Concept artists imagined what the buildings and other areas might look like beyond those landmarks, so the town would feel like a place where other people lived.

Lighting needed a rethink too. The bedroom painting is bright and well lit, so the team used more light sources than usual. "We couldn't just look at the painting as a reference for the environment itself," Lu says. "We also had to think about what created the particular atmosphere of the painting, and then figure out how to recreate that atmosphere with the tools and limitations of a real-time game."

Almond Blossoms, and the limits of the tree

Lu says Almond Blossoms is probably the most difficult painting to turn into a level. The early idea was to make the tree huge so players could platform across the branches. Getting it to work took a lot of iteration. "We wanted the experience to be fun, the navigation to feel intuitive, and we wanted the frame to look as close to the painting as possible," she says. The team simplified where they had to, but kept the main branch structure matching the painting.

The quest designer and environment artists worked closely together, and after all that testing, the team reached a conclusion about the top-right branch. They wanted it in the shot, but a second giant tree "would make the composition feel too busy and take away from the poetic quality of the scene." Hence the branch in the sky.

Lu says the team wanted to keep two things true to the source. One was Van Gogh's subjects. His focus on workers and farmers shows "Van Gogh's interests and attention as an artist," she says, which is why the farmer stays in the environment for Le Moulin de la Galette.

The other was the history. Lu worked closely with the design and art teams to keep the experience faithful to the historical material while still feeling interactive and respectful of the real events. "We didn't want to add a character or create a story that would change what actually happened in Van Gogh's life," she says.

That's why players enter the experience "spirit-shaded" rather than as their usual selves. "We wanted to communicate that players are not actually meeting or interacting with Van Gogh. They are stepping into his world and witnessing parts of his life, but they remain separate from the historical events."

The team took liberties with Van Gogh's inner life. Nobody can know exactly what he felt while painting, so they read his letters to his brothers and friends and made their own interpretations from that research.

Sky has very little dialogue, and the team used that limit creatively, telling Vincent's story through symbolism, which Lu says "helps enhance the meaning of an object." In the game, sunflowers represent hope and love, and Theo's island, built as his gallery, has a safe with sunflowers in it. Crows stand for the darker parts of Vincent's life. A crow attack represents the scene of his death by suicide. "This was a heavy incident, and we wanted to approach it in a more abstract way and make it less triggering for our players," she says. The team also wanted to keep things artistic and beautiful, and avoid some overly violent scenes.

Two ways to play Vincent's story

The bigger design problem was how to make the story interactive without altering it. A big part of Lu's role was working with the team to work out how players could take part in Vincent's story without changing historical events. If players just watched, she says, "that would become a movie, not an interactive game." The team settled on two roles: the postman and the brush.

As the postman, players read the letters between Vincent and Theo and feel the emotional and financial support Theo gave. The delivery sequences change with the period of Vincent's life. In Arles, you deliver a letter on a river, a peaceful and beautiful experience meant to evoke the peace and joy of that period. In Saint-Rémy, the delivery happens in a dark space, and players have to go against the wind and find their way out to evoke a harder time.

As the brush, players become the brush in Vincent's hands. They might complete an element of a sketch, colour a painting in from black and white, or turn an ordinary texture into a brushstroke texture. Players are helping him finish the paintings, Lu says, "while still staying true to the history."

The letters

Reading the correspondence surprised the team, even though they already knew Theo backed Vincent. Vincent "really liked writing letters," Lu says, and wasn't shy about asking Theo for money, with lines like "I hope you will be able to send money soon."

Van Gogh is estimated to have written and received more than 2,000 letters, but he wasn't good at keeping them. Many of the surviving ones are from Vincent to Theo, partly because Theo kept them carefully. Only around 40 of Theo's letters to Vincent survive, which makes those especially meaningful to the team. Lu, who has recently become interested in the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator, says it made her feel Vincent is probably a P type and Theo a J type.

Those few letters are encouraging because Vincent wasn't well recognised in his lifetime, and Theo told him his paintings were beautiful and urged him to keep going. One line stayed with the team: "the courage for work is far from abandoning you." "It's really touching to me and the team as well," Lu says, and the words inspired the finale. An early blockout of the finale worked so well that the team kept its pace and feel until the end of production.

Making Starry Night

Lu names Starry Night as the scene where the translation worked best (perhaps because it's actually more scientifically accurate than we think), and the team saved it for the finale. Players fly into the sky and, along with millions of others, light it up to form the painting. "So you become part of the beauty that you are witnessing," she says.

She credits the visuals, narrative, interaction and music working together, and says the stars and moon look amazing. It's an emotional scene for her. "I tear up for Vincent, such a talented artist who died at such a young age," she says, but she's also glad he had Theo and Johanna, and finds it striking to see so many players there and so many people recognising his work.

"There are so many different emotions wrapped into this masterpiece, Starry Night," she says. "I feel the art and design worked perfectly here."

Lu added two points, starting with production. Sky usually releases seasonal quests gradually, with something new every week or two, and a full season often needs two versions to complete. For Dear Van Gogh, the team delivered everything in a single version for the first time. The idea came from creative director Jenova Chen, and Lu says she believed in it and took ownership of making it work.

The problem was that "our existing workflow wasn't really designed to deliver an entire season within a single version." She worked with the teams to split production into smaller milestones, create more overlap between them and change how resources and dependencies were planned, so more of the experience could be built in parallel. She also tracked the schedule closely to address bottlenecks early. The result was a different way of producing a season, and a more efficient way of managing what she calls "a much more interconnected experience within a tighter timeline."

The team felt the format suited the story. Van Gogh's life is emotional, and they wanted that to flow from one period to the next rather than make players wait two weeks between chapters. Players could take it in one sitting, "almost like watching a movie," or go at their own pace. Lu says most players responded positively, and quest completion was higher than in previous seasons.

Bringing Johanna van Gogh-Bonger to life

Her second addition was about Johanna van Gogh-Bonger, Theo's wife, whom Lu says she knew little about before the project. Theo died roughly six months after Vincent, leaving Johanna to raise their 11-month-old baby alone. She recognised and valued Vincent's work, as Theo had, and spent decades bringing it to the public. She also edited and published the letters between the brothers "so that people living today, like us, can get a glimpse into what the great artist was thinking and feeling back then." "She's one of the reasons we know Vincent van Gogh today," Lu says.

In the game, Johanna stays in the gallery and guides players through the stages of Vincent's life. At the end, players stand with her and witness the success she helped create. "We wanted her to be more than just a historical figure in the background," Lu says.

Lu says Johanna "has really inspired me, and I have so much respect for her," and that she admires her, as a woman herself, for her commitment, for recognising the value of Vincent's work ahead of her time, for her love for her family and for her perseverance. Learning about her, Lu says, showed her "there was another remarkable story behind Van Gogh's legacy, and I'm really glad we were able to bring a little bit of that story into the project."

Children of the Sky: Van Gogh Season is available now for Android, iPhone, Switch, PlayStation and PC (Steam).

“I am passionate about both stylised and realistic art, so I like making stuff of all sorts,” he says. That shows in the four examples he's chosen to share with us to showcase his work, for which he uses Blender, ZBrush and Substance 3D Painter (see our guides to the best 3D modelling software and the best laptops for 3D modelling).

Mermaid reimagined

“For this, I wanted to make my own mermaid design. My approach was mixing real-world references with key elements that make up a mermaid.”

Bubbly

“This little guy is my own design. The idea was to mix a couple of animals and come up with a ‘sidekick-like’ character for an animated feature.”

Metroid Stylised

“A stylised adaptation of Samus from Metroid. I wanted to explore making a suit that fits a human body and therefore could look a bit more functional.”

Realistic Stitch

“My take on one of my favourite characters of all time. It was also a great opportunity to make a complex character and push everything I’d learnt so far.”

You can see more of Juan's work on his ArtStation profile.

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Back in June, I wrote about Alpes 2030's Winter Olympics logo, whose radiating lines converge into a glowing point. Lovely. Two months later, Vermont's hand-lettered wordmark smuggled a range of peaks into its 'm'. They join some memorable recent releases, including the NHL's Utah Mammoth and a newly mountainous Mountain Dew from 2025.

None of these designs, I should clarify, are at all alike. But whenever I see a designer reach for a mountain, it reminds me exactly why this symbol has such a hold on me.

A simple symbol

Part of the appeal is sheer simplicity. Yet for a shape that's little more than a triangle, it carries a huge amount of weight and meaning. The ideas of permanence, aspiration, adventure, reaching the top, are all nestled within its three sides.

No wonder, then, that the mountain has a long history of popping up in logos. The North Face's quarter-circle is an abstract homage to Half Dome in Yosemite. Patagonia's jagged, colourful skyline is modelled on Mount Fitz Roy in the southern Andes. Coors Light's mountain is Wilson Peak in Telluride, Colorado.

Paramount's star-ringed peak was reputedly inspired by Ben Lomond in Utah, where founder W.W. Hodkinson grew up. And Prudential has been selling financial stability via the Rock of Gibraltar for well over a century. (Yes, technically that's a massive rock rather than a mountain, but we all know what we mean).

Why specificity lands

By the way, have you noticed something? None of these mountains are generic, they're all specific. And for me, that's where the real magic lies.

The most famed example of this is Toblerone. For decades, its logo featured the Matterhorn, with a bear hidden in the negative space; a nod to Bern, "City of Bears". But then in 2023, the company moving some production out of Switzerland, and Swiss rules restrict the use of national symbols on products not made there. So the logo had to change.

As a result, the famous peak has been swapped for a more generic mountain. The new design is fine, but sadly, it's quite generic. Toblerone will no doubt coast on deep-rooted brand awareness for many years to come, but in the long term? I think it's a problem.

Why this matters

Those recent logos I mentioned earlier understood that lesson. The Utah Mammoth's primary logo, for instance, is wonderfully specific. The Wasatch Mountain Range and snow-capped peaks form the beast's crown, with the shape of Utah subtly embedded in the mountain silhouette.

Vermont's wordmark works in a similar way, just more loosely. The moon in its 'o' rises over Camel's Hump, a real peak you can go and stand beneath on any autumn evening. Meanwhile, Mountain Dew, after 15 years as 'Mtn Dew', has leaned into its heritage with a mountain backdrop that calls to mind 20th century travel posters.

Alpes 2030 is an exception, to be fair: as I noted at the time, this abstract logo could represent almost any peak on Earth. But even here, the colour palette pulls it back to a real place, with its pinks and reds drawn from the alpenglow that washes over the Alps at sunrise and sunset.

Why does this matter? I think it's because, in a world of AI generation, a mountain is one of the most tangible things you can put in a logo.

You can't fake the Wasatch Range. It's just there, and it's been there for a very long time. As the Japanese saying goes, kuni yaburete sanga ari – "the country may have fallen, but the mountains and rivers remain."

While Haaland has since parted ways with his iconic do, it remains a signature part of his identity. Certainly one of the more unconventional celebrity brands, it's clear the footballer is keen to protect his image from unwanted advertising.

The dispute centres around a Norwegian Air campaign which saw the airline posting a cheeky social post with the star's signature man bun photoshopped on a plane. Hopping on this year's FIFA World Cup Haaland hype, the image was accompanied by the caption “We’ve never looked more Norwegian."

Despite the virality of his image during this summer's World Cup, Haaland's team claimed the lighthearted social post unlawfully exploited his likeness, identity, and visual branding.

According to Norwegian newspaper Verdens Gang, Eivind Hammer Myhre, duty media officer at Norwegian Airlines, said, "It is unfortunate that cheers of support were met with a lawsuit, but we hope for a sensible dialogue so that in the future we too will be allowed to continue supporting our shared sporting heroes."

For more design dispute news, take a look at why New Balance sued this rival athletics brand or check out how Louis Vuitton won this logo battle despite fiery backlash.

The name chosen for this unique astronomical phenomenon? Skydance – probably the least-recognised of all the brands the combined company owns.

The use of Titanic to open the launch video above feels like a strangely ominous choice. Only time will tell whether Skydance is an unsinkable giant.

For now, if it was hoping for a round of applause for the showreel, it should remember that people don't generally like monopolies. By showing how many big media and entertainment brands and IPs it's just brought under one roof, it's making people realise why there was so much controversy over the merger. "It's like Thanos collecting the infinity stones," one person comments on X.

The branding is doing the same thing. The new corporation's name comes from co-CEO David Ellison's former production company Skydance Media (formerly Skydance Productions). It's using the same logo too.

Skydance Media bought and was then reverse absorbed into Paramount a year ago to create Paramount Skydance. There's also Skydance Animation, which is behind the Ray Gunn movie coming to Netflix.

The logic is that it's a neutral name that avoids an awful mashup (ParaBros?), won't upset Warner Bros or Paramount shareholders and won't diminish either brand. The individual studios will keep their own identities, as will brands like HBO, DC and CNN, much like how Pixar and Marvel continue to exist within Disney.

Skydance's name came from Ellison's personal interest in aviation. Its first movie was 2006's Flyboys, in which Ellison, a licensed pilot, played a pilot. Bestowing this name on the newly combined company gives the merger the feel of a vanity project, like Elon Musk renaming Twitter as X after his spurned idea for an online bank.

That brings a risk. Emarketer analyst Ross Benes pointed out to Reuters: "The name is ego-driven. It reminds everyone that the most iconic Hollywood brands answer to Ellison and it is his company who won out". It also means that audiences have a visible culprit to call out over anything they don't like.

Ultimately, opposition isn't so much about the name but the concerns about consolidation, job cuts, debt, media independence and the increased concentration of ownership. The company's size has people comparing it to Skynet from the Terminator franchise. And guess who owns the rights to that.

This is a great value mid-range FDM printer that's suitable for beginners but provides the versatility to grow your craft. It offers native multicolour printing and larger print sizes than cheaper beginner-friendly 3D printers, reducing the chance of quickly outgrowing the machine.

The deal is part of Amazons' Early Big Deal Days. You'' need to be an Amazon Prime member, but you can sign up for a 30-day free Prime trial (you can always cancel within the month to avoid any subscription cost if you don't want the other benefits).

If you're not sure which type of machine is best for you, see our guide to the best 3D printers based on our own reviews.

• Browse 3D printer deals at Amazon

The best multicolour 3D printer for beginners?

There are two main families of 3D printers: resin and FDM.

For most beginners, FDM is the way to go. It's easier and safer to handle, has lower running costs, less clean up, and you can get larger print sizes for your money. The exception would be if you really need the extra detail that resin 3D printing can provide for miniatures like tabletop gaming figurines or small, detailed jewellery (see the two big Anycubic resin 3D printer deals at Amazon).

The Kobra X isn't the cheapest 3D printer for beginners, but we think it may work out as a better long-term investment for those who think they're going stick with the hobby and possibly develop professionally. A newcomer can start with it, but it's advanced enough that most users won't outgrow it quickly.

Auto levelling, app control and AI monitoring make it easy to use, while the native 4-colour printing – expandable to 19 – mixed-material capabilities and large build volume mean you can grow into the hobby without having to upgrade your machine a year or so down the line.

I'll start with the case, because I can't decide whether I like it, and it's the most divisive design aspect of Nothing's new earphones. The Headphone (1) Pro ships in a hard shell that wraps around the earcups and leaves the headband exposed, so it works as a carry case and a kind of handbag for your head. It's far smaller than the old one, closer to a large pill box, with loops for a strap, and there's a TPU lining inside. The footprint is a real improvement, as the original Headphone (1) came in a square, soft-touch PU leather case that matched the slightly 1980s industrial look of the headphones themselves, and I miss it. Nothing deserves credit for taking a risk here, but I keep looking at the new one and seeing a handbag.

The Headphone (1) Pro feels heavier than the original, though it isn't: 327g against 329g. What I'm really seeing is the chunkier construction and everything packed inside. Because there's a lot in here: a 40mm dynamic driver handles bass, a 13 x 8mm precision driver covers the mids, and a small solid-state xMEMS driver does the treble. Add ten microphones for ANC and calls, Bluetooth 6.1, LDAC, 24-bit/192kHz lossless over USB-C, head-tracked spatial audio and adaptive ANC rated to 46dB, and this is clearly a different class from Nothing's budget Headphone (a).

The new Headphone (1) Pro is both an everyday ANC earphone and a more serious listening tool, so the real question is: who is it for, and why should you upgrade?

Nothing Headphone (1) Pro takes a risk

The look is mostly unchanged, which is good news if, like me, you've bought into Nothing's bitty, retro-industrial design, here riffing on cassette tape and 1990s game console design. The transparent cups and exposed mechanical details return, with new depth: the layered tech behind the glass windows represents the three drivers powering the audio. It's bold and graphic and develops the ideas behind the original Headphone (1) nicely.

Back too, the rocker paddle for track selection and control and the roller switch for volume are still here. I use the previous model, the Headphone (1), daily, so I know how good those controls are, and it's a relief to have something your thumb can find without poking at a touch panel (though there is one slight niggle, the paddle is at just the perfect position to snag when leaning into a seat, meaning you're liable to nudge it).

Comfort is much the same for me, even with the extra heft. Nothing says the dual-layer cushions are 50% softer, the headband is 10% wider with 12% more padding, and I can feel it as I push them over my head, and immediately note the fit works better with glasses. I've worn them for long sessions without getting hot or feeling clamped, so the improvements are, for once, as good as the marketing blurb.

The sound is where the Headphone (1) Pro justifies its name, and while it's hard to pin down if Nothing's claim that its new bass driver has 15% more punch and 26% more sensitivity than the one in the Headphone (1) is accurate, in use the sound quality certainly feels improved. Splitting the frequency range across three drivers shows that, in busy tracks and quiet ones alike, it impresses. The bass has more authority without turning into a dead-end thump, vocals have more texture, and the top end has room to breathe. I pressed play on Jay Buchanan's Weapons of Beauty, and these lonesome desert poems found a new depth, a bolder, more rounded elegance that made the yearning sweep from Morrison to Cohen hit even harder. Just lovely.

Flat EQ is the feature that interested me most because it's the 'pro' technical aspect in the name. A physical switch on the earcup removes Nothing's added processing and gives you a neutral profile tuned with Metropolis Studios – the famed London recording studio that's hosted Queen, Yes, and Oasis – for reviewing tracks, comparing mixes and making critical listening decisions. Because it's a switch rather than an app preset, you can flip between normal listening and the flatter profile in a second. If you make music, edit video or just want to hear a recording with less interpretation, this is genuinely useful.

There's a trade-off, of course, and so turning on Flat EQ disables Transparency Mode, Spatial Audio and the EQ. That makes sense for a neutral mode, but you're stripping things away rather than adding another profile. For me, it's the strongest argument for buying the Headphone (1) Pro, particularly if you are, as the name suggests, a 'pro' working in audio daily and need that neutral sound.

For everyone else, the main features we all need from a good pair of headphones have been improved – ANC is particularly good, thanks to the ten-microphone setup, a new silicone sound seal and the 46dB claim. Transparency mode keeps voices sounding natural, making for a good office experience. While Nothing is new in this space, having made its name with the Nothing Phones, it's now getting close to matching the noise-cancelling of the big names like Sony, Apple and Bose.

Battery life is where Headphone (1) Pro drops slightly, as it manages 30 hours with ANC on, down from 35 on the Headphone (1), plus 68 hours with ANC off and 28 with LDAC and ANC both running. That five-hour gap doesn't really matter in practice. Thirty hours covers a long-haul flight door to door, and on an 11-hour flight with engine drone and screaming children around me, I want comfort, isolation and good sound, and the Headphone (1) Pro delivers all three.

Should you buy Headphone (1) Pro?

Price is the sticking point with the Headphone (1) Pro, as at £349 it's in serious premium territory. Having used them, I have no doubt about the improvements in sound and ANC, and Flat EQ is a feature pros and audiophiles will find invaluable; it's typically easy to implement, and Nothing-like, but the extra cost puts a question mark over tech that should be a no-brainer.

Why? If you're new to Nothing's headphones, I think the Headphone (1) Pro is an easy recommendation: the design and controls, strong ANC, capable three-driver sound, and a Flat EQ mode with a real reason to exist. If you already own a Headphone (1), the decision is harder. I can hear the improvements: the ANC is better, and Flat EQ has a clear use, but the original Headphone (1) is still a very good pair of headphones for the price, and the Headphone (1) Pro hasn't made those feel dated. The extra hardware makes sense for audiophiles, music obsessives and creatives who will use Flat EQ. Everyone else should think twice, especially if you already have a Headphone (1) on the desk.

As for the case, I'd still take the old one back, and I still wish the headband were covered, not least because that would mean there's room for the charging and audio cables, but I'd rather Nothing occasionally ship a strange hard-shell handbag than another anonymous black zip-up case that could have come from anyone. And that, in many ways, is Headphone (1) Pro in a nutshell: I'd rather it exists and asks questions, takes a risk, than not.

PSSR brings lower-resolution game graphics up to the standard of a high-definition 4K picture. It makes older games look sharper and more detailed... but $300 sharper? Now PS5 owners have at least one reason to be less envious. AI upscaling is coming to the standard PS5, making it clearly still one of the best game consoles.

The base PS5 isn't getting PSSR but a new tier of AI upscaling called QSSR: Quick Spectral Super Resolution.

For now, it's been added in patches for two games: Marvel's Wolverine and Ghost of Yotei (see the comparisons below).

How is PS5 AI upscaling possible on the standard console?

Sony Interactive Entertainment principal engineer of graphics R&D, Daniel Craig notes on the PlayStation Blog that the computational approach of PSSR, which analyses game images pixel by pixel and uses AI to upscale them with more detail and stability, was impossible to bring to the standard PS5.

QSSR was made possible by two innovations: a "streamlined neural network architecture" and "a hand-tuned implementation that maximizes performance on PS5". Together these work to provide "some notable improvements to both image detail and image stability".

Note that this is not the same kind of AI tech as Nvidia's DLSS 5, which has caused such a storm over how it appears to actually change a game's assets, lighting and the appearances of characters. PSSR and QSSR sharpen existing visuals without changing their basic appearance.

Mike Fitzgerald, head of technology at Insomniac Games, says that "QSSR adds more pixel-level clarity and stability to our environments, bringing out extra detail amidst the busy streets of Madripoor, the dense alleyways of Shinjuku, and many other areas across Logan’s epic journey".

It remains to be seen how soon QSSR will be adopted by other developers and to what extent it will be applied to the PS5's back catalogue, but for now PS5 owners can be optimistic that they no longer have cause to be too envious of the Pro.

People aren't going to forgive Sony for its decision to kill physical discs, but it's very welcome to see a manufacturer upgrade the features of a previous console almost six years after release when a newer, more expensive successor is already on the market.

Star Wars Galactic Racer bucks an unwanted trend. Over the decades, Star Wars games have earned a reputation for inconsistency: for every Knights Of The Old Republic or Rogue Squadron 2: Rogue Leader, franchise superfans have also endured the mediocrity of games like Kinect Star Wars or The Clone Wars: Republic Heroes. Two factors explain that inconsistency: the enduring appeal of the Star Wars universe (recently expanded with several TV series) brings a steady stream of not always well-conceived games, and the sheer size and scope of that universe can overwhelm developers.

In that context, Star Wars Galactic Racer developer Fuse Games – a new British studio run by ex-luminaries of Criterion, Burnout, and Need for Speed fame – has taken a sensible approach by limiting its take on Star Wars to one particular scene from George Lucas’s vast universe: speeder and pod racing.

In Star Wars Galactic Racer, you play the role of Shade, a retired racer now scraping a living as a glorified courier, but drawn back into the Galactic Racer series by its organiser, Darius Pax, annoyed at how his much-loved spectacle has been hijacked by Kestar Bool, an insufferably entitled (and annoyingly quick) plutocrat whose family has essentially subjugated the planet from which he and Shade both hail.

Choose your speeder

That backstory provides plenty of friction and jeopardy in Galactic Racer’s single-player campaign, while interaction with the other characters involved in the Galactic Racer circus adds a surprising amount of depth and interest to the rollercoaster ride of first qualifying for and then competing in the Galactic Racer series.

Before jumping in, I had to make plenty of decisions, the primary one being which speeder to pilot. There are three types: Landspeeders, Speeder Bikes and Skim Speeders. The former are all-rounders: solid, with decent handling and, in their base state, not much comparative speed. The Speeder bikes are fast, narrow (which comes in handy in tight spaces) and manoeuvrable, but also delicate. The Skim Speeders are fast but handle twitchily; they tilt so one edge digs in as a pivot for tight turns, whereas the Landspeeders and Speeder Bikes can be made to drift in twisty situations.

No Star Wars racing game, of course, would be complete without Pod-racers, and they do feature in Galactic Racer, albeit in carefully controlled conditions, given that they are much faster and much more fragile than the Speeders. Timeline-wise, Galactic Racer takes place after the Empire has fallen, and Sebulba, the pod-racer featured in Phantom Menace, is in the game, albeit as something of a down-on-his-luck has-been, owed money by Kestar Bool. You have to race and beat him in a Speeder, but you also cleverly get to play through his memories of pod-racing. In which you will no doubt admire Star Wars Galactic Racer’s spectacular, Burnout-style slow-motion renderings of huge wipeouts.

Pimp that Speeder

For the single-player campaign, I chose the Landspeeder, mainly for its handling and robustness (an important factor in Galactic Racer), and soon learned how to go about upping its attributes to make it faster and better suited to my playstyle: a crucial element of the game brought about by the campaign’s very clever structure.

For each multi-planet chunk of the campaign, I could choose a different path, taking in a multitude of races and activities. Beyond the basic Races, which carry little jeopardy (though you will lose your race-series entry ticket if you crash too many times), there are Eliminators, where last-placed competitors are eliminated at regular intervals, and you must finish in the top three. To add variety, Races could take place over various laps or as point-to-points.

Then there were Field Tests, in which I was set various different tasks in unfamiliar machinery – Nik Skandaro, for example, was all about getting me to perform takedowns, while Soren Zaks was obsessed with making me use the ramjet: a speed-booster which blew up if redlined for too long. I also found many mystery encounters with random positive or negative outcomes, such as rendering upgrades cheaper, earning me more money, or losing either upgrades or my one triggerable ability.

Abilities, favours, ramjets and afterburners

Each racing run was all about upgrading my speeder as much as possible, which I could do in several ways. Like the ramjet, all the speeders had an afterburner, which gave a shorter speed burst; like every aspect of my speeder, it could be upgraded by winning and buying parts.

Parts could also develop faults, bringing specific debuffs, though they could be repaired the next time the Galactic racer circus moved to a new planet. Favours, meanwhile, provided useful perks, such as increasing the number of crashes I could sustain in a race or adding extra Galactic Racer entry-tokens. At the end of each planetary series of races, I could catch up with my mechanic, the four-armed, simianesque, Scouse-accented Hibi, to spend the money I had earned from races, from my chosen backers and from the side-bets I could make with my fellow racers.

Surprisingly structured and coherent campaign

That all sounds complicated, and it was at first, but it soon settled into a system I could game, setting up my Landspeeder to prevail in the tricky but invariably epic races that each long season culminated in.

The campaign structure, in which I progressed from planet to planet yet could choose my own route, was exemplary, with a roguelike feel amplified by the odd spanner thrown into the works, such as the ever-infuriating Kestar Bool once taking away my ability for the crucial end-of-tour eliminator. The abilities I could employ (with long cooldowns) were hugely varied – ranging from short autopilot periods (useful for negotiating twisty bits) to concussion mines and shields.

Even when I dropped the ball in the final race of the tour and had to start a new one, I felt rewarded rather than punished, as I could start the next one with upgraded vehicle attributes and Favours. And all the encounters with Star Wars characters along the way added a sense of narrative to what is a racing game – a genre not renowned for its narrative.

Multiplayer and arcade modes

Star Wars Galactic Racer’s 12-player, drop-in multiplayer (with any gaps filled by bots) was great, too: wisely, it felt like a compressed version of the campaign, with five races leading up to the season decider on Derven Acos, a planet pretty much dedicated to speeder racing. Multiple online runs let me level up and eventually unlock my favourite abilities, and the racing, while fierce, didn’t feel dominated by specific players. Indeed, taking down the most fancied competitors added extra satisfaction.

Galactic Racer also has an Arcade mode, where I worked through a vast store of scenarios, setting times my online friends could try to beat across a wide range of machinery. It served as a pretty voluminous store of extra activities when I wanted to explore beyond the campaign without committing to a full six-race multiplayer series.

Fuse Games' attention to Star Wars' detailed lore is magnificent. For example, the planets are mostly familiar from the films and spin-offs, and their distinctive natures play into the racing. There’s Jakku, the desert graveyard for Imperial Star Destroyers, which provides all manner of jagged metallic obstacles to avoid. On the frozen Ando Prime, I found my steering would freeze if I didn’t drive through heating tunnels, and on the industrially ravaged Sentinel I discovered that too much time spent skimming over chemical pools would corrode my speeder and cause it to disintegrate.

Galactic Racer doesn’t get involved in any of the political elements of the various Star Wars adaptations – it tends towards the whimsical end of the spectrum, but I did encounter plenty of priggish ex-Imperial types and more bearable ex-rebellion luminaries. And Galactic Racer looks fabulous: its meticulously authentic environments are rendered in high fidelity that mirrors the films, populated by beings and vehicles that could only exist in the Star Wars universe. Countless tiny touches will delight even the most obsessive Star Wars fans.

Is Star Wars Galactic Racer worth playing?

Overall, Star Wars Galactic Racer is by far the best Star Wars game released in recent years, almost certainly the best Star Wars racing game ever and is right up there with the best ever Star Wars games, full stop. It feels right from the moment it begins and is really fun to play, with just the right amount of forgiveness for players whose driving skills aren’t preternatural, a campaign with unexpected narrative depth, and multiplayer that embraces all skill levels.

Which is quite a triumph for the first game from a start-up developer. Although it feels like the game a bunch of racing specialists always wanted to make, it also feels like a labour of love for all things Star Wars. Anyone who considers themselves a proper Star Wars fan would do well to check it out.

While the AI-powered information hub has been criticised for its thin sources and alleged bias, the new design marks a slick new era for the platform – but looks aren't everything. Despite its new logo design and improved UX, I still hold my reservations as to whether Elon's AI will ever replace the internet backbone, Wikipedia.

Grokipedia v0.3 features a swanky new script font logo and new and improved evolutions to its homepage and live edits page. Fashioned to resemble a library, it features interactive 3D book covers, a "Most read" section with a shelf of trending topics, and "Latest edits" made by contributors (and vetted by Grok).

The article pages have received some minor tweaks, with more minimalist side tables displaying key information. While the UX design has a more fluid feel, it's essentially a copy of Wikipedia's layout. (No points for originality there, sadly.)

Grokipedia was born in late October 2025, created with AI-cloned Wikipedia pages. Its v0.2 update arrived in November, only to be halted earlier this year after the platform halted autonomous AI edits and the review of user-submitted suggestions.

For more Elon news, check out the hard-hitting ad campaign that throws shade at Musk, Bezos and Zuckerberg or take a look at the new SpaceXAI logo, which looks surprisingly familiar.

Here's an example that gets the balance just right. It's hypnotic, even beautiful, but a little bit unsettling too. Fabric appears to tear itself apart and then self-heal, stitching itself back together. And it wasn't AI generated; it was made in Houdini (see our guide to the best 3D modelling software).

Ruye, a 3D artist and motion designer based in Spain, used Vellum, Houdini's fast physics system for simulating soft-body effects like cloth, hair and deformable objects. The fabric is geometry, while the frayed threads are curves, and the piece was rendered using Octane.

The animation makes it feel like an eye is breaking through the fabric. There's something about the texture that's troubling, sitting between the look of frayed denim and something more flesh-like and alive.

It's particularly impressive how the tears stitch themselves back. The artist resimmed mulitple times to create the perfect timing on how the last strands curl back into place.

As some of those commenting have noted, it feels organic rather than procedural, as if the fabric were a living creature. I can imagine this effect being used in a sci-fi story about alien creatures – or it could be perfect textile for giving Bruce Banne clothes that can adapt when he becomes Hulk.

If you're inspired, see our guide to the best laptops for animation.

"The main inspiration for the setting was the Czechoslovakian movie called Mysterious Castle in the Carpathians, and if you see the movie, you will see it has all the grotesqueness and weirdness that's in Inkblood," art director Natálie Konečná tells me. She had already been experimenting with brush styles while studying graphic design at university, which would come to define Inkblood's hand-drawn look.

The game's cutout-style animation, made in TVPaint and Photoshop, was something animator Ivan Štrobl came up with, though he admits it took time to implement. "There are definitely things we needed to change that were just too complex for me to animate," he explains. "Since the art style is really complex, it has a lot of shading. It's stylised, but at points it can feel a little bit realistic. But once we prepare the line art version of the animation, we figure out the pose of a hand, this expression of a face, and then I just take them and try to animate them mostly by cutout."

Having studied in Zlín, the Czech Republic's hub for film and animation, Štrobl also cites many inherent Czech influences in his work, including Czech illustrator Miroslav Šašek and animator Karel Zeman (the latter known for making fantasy films that combed live-action footage with animation). These influences clearly come through in Inkblood, even though it uses only 2D art and isn't just a flat point-and-click game.

"There is always a representation of something, like a magpie that is pointing at an item and picking up an object," says Konečná. "All the UI in the game is built-in; there's no extra layer; everything has to feel tactile."

As part of its unusual premise, you play as an inquisitor investigating a series of bizarre deaths by riding between locations in a carriage, with a map of the world displayed on your coachman's back. However, for reasons not exactly explained, you cannot leave your carriage (though it certainly says something about the oppressive bureaucratic Inquisition you belong to, or perhaps more likely working for against your will). This restriction also shapes how the world looks: when you arrive at a location, what you see comes from the three perspectives of the carriage's windows.

"There are no doors in the carriage, so you are a prisoner," Konečná laughs. "You don't speak with any characters outside; they put letters through. It has to feel like you are isolated in the carriage and you're just a passive viewer, but it also has to feel like a first-person camera, even though it's 2D."

Each of the five locations you visit (and their different window perspectives) was also designed to feel unique, whether through the weather depicted or the lighting used, with a soft parallax effect that creates the illusion of space.

"One thing to make the environment feel alive was creating a shader that basically imitates the Line Boiling effect on all the assets," Štrobl adds. "That was actually a recent addition. We figured out how to do it in After Effects and then had to figure out how to do it in Unity!"

The art gains further depth from the investigative tools you use to interact with the environments, which are themselves based on early-20th-century technologies like a camera used to take photos and compile clues.

The most unique investigative tool is a magnifying glass that lets you see into the past, an effect Konečná describes as cheap to produce but complicated to implement. "You just put two layers, present and past, and we just rework them, so one is at night, and the other is in the morning, for example," she explains. "There is a lot of layering in general in Inkblood, and I feel 2D games have to have a strong pipeline and baseline for this kind of layering."

Inkblood is coming soon to PC, and you can try a free demo on Steam

Meet the Freckle phone. Essentially a kids' version of humble dumbphones, the simple device blocks all the stress-inducing nasties like social media, browsers and app stores, aiming to be a companion for adventure, rather than a brain-rotting burden.

Built to withstand the sometimes chaotic lives of younglings, the square-shaped phone features a 3.1-inch screen and the company's own ClayOS software. While it can't be used for browsing and scrolling, it offers a number of functional features like basic maps, contactless payment and a walkie-talkie mode for chatting with other Freckle owners nearby. (Why do I sort of want one?)

At its core, Freckle is a machine manufactured for adventure. Its Quest feature sets fun tasks for kids to complete, like finding types of flowers, encouraging them to get outside, and parents can even set custom options. With an AI-powered 'Discovery Camera' that explains what it sees, kids also benefit from learning as they explore.

As a 00s baby who grew up right on the turn of the digital age, I look back fondly at my screen-free early years. While this smartech-free reality is getting harder to replicate for future generations, the Freckle phone feels like a ray of promise amid the endless churn of concerning news stories that speak of the new antisocial, scroll-obsessed generation.

Kids are growing up fast; they don't want to feel smothered by surveilled smartphones or worse, left behind with no phone at all. Part of me wishes the Freckle phone didn't need to exist, but with the situation out of my hands, it seems like a hopeful solution.

Looking for other dumbphone options? Check these out below.

Here, Bente talks us through her process creating a piece of art, which includes a good deal of spontaneity and feeling. For her work, Bente uses Photoshop and a Wacom tablet (see our guides to the best drawing tablets and the best digital art software).

Bente Schlick on her art process

I don’t have a plan in my head for what I want to create. I have ideas. At some point I just start, and I’m looking at references and stuff, and then doing a little sketch and I’ll start with the colours.

I’m not thinking too much when I start. I’m just doing it. If I’m thinking too much, then I can’t work. My head is like somewhere else when I’m painting: it’s escaped to work on fantasy images. Maybe I’ll like the image and I finish it, or maybe I won’t like it and I will put it aside. I don’t think I ever like my work when it’s finished.

You can see more of Bente's work on her website.

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Bourgeois took these words from a passage in her diary and embroidered them onto a handkerchief that belonged to her late husband, so you get a tiny, soft, very domestic bit of cloth carrying one of the blackest jokes in modern art. These days you can create something similar on the best Cricut machines, but here the original dates from 1996, and in 2007 Tate Modern put out a numbered edition of 1,000 in each of red, blue and pink to go with her retrospective, which goes a long way to explaining why you've probably seen the line on a tote bag or a gallery gift shop shelf without ever knowing where it came from.

The joke works because of how she lived with her material. Her art grew out of a complicated and often traumatic childhood, and she spent decades turning that into work that could hold hope and fear, guilt and repair, tension and release all at once, so a sentence that says hell and wonderful in the same breath is pretty much her whole practice squeezed onto a hanky. Museums tend to read it as ambivalence and black humour, and I think that's right, since she never says the hell wasn't hell and never takes back the wonderful.

What I like about it as a line for anyone making things is that it has no attached lesson. Most of us want a rough patch to turn into something useful before we'll admit to it, and many inspirational messages in our Quote of the Day series have stories with a moral, leading to projects with a neat title, and Bourgeois just says it was wonderful, deadpan, and leaves you to work out what she means.

So if you're making something out of a bad year and it hasn't resolved into anything yet, that's fine, and the gag you can finally crack about it in the margin of a sketchbook is a perfectly good place to start.

Best Louise Bourgeois books:

Mark Wahlberg, Amanda Seyfried, and Seth MacFarlane all reprise their movie roles, but the voices aren't the only element that will feel familiar. For some people, the animation style is creating a sense of deja vu due to how much it looks like Seth's previous hit animation series, making Ted himself look very different from the realism of the 3D animated bear we know.

Seth has created or co-created several adult animated series: Family Guy, following the Griffin family in Rhode Island, American Dad!, The Cleveland Show (a spin-off from Family Guy), and the web series Seth MacFarlane's Cavalcade of Cartoon Comedy.

Ted: the Animated Series doesn't break new ground in terms of its animation style. It's "basically Family Guy again for the fifth time", someone complains in the comments on YouTube. It's "Family Guy with Ted as the lead character" someone else reckons.

But that's a bit like saying AC/DC's Power Up is High Voltage for the fifteenth time. Yes, but when you've found a house formula that works, why change it? From a marketing perspective, looking somewhat like Family Guy is arguably a feature rather than a flaw.

Seth has a recognisable style shaped by masters like Tex Avery, Chuck Jones and Matt Groening. Characters have simple clean shapes and strong silhouettes, making them easy to recognise and animate.

Restrained facial expressions and economical movement contrast with absurd situations and put the focus on the dialogue and humour, which is what the series is about.

The problem some people have with an animated Ted is that they see the realism of the bear's portrayal in the movies as part of the comedy and charm. But Ted was conceived decades ago as an animated television concept. I think it's going to be interesting to see it finally appear in the medium originally intended.

And with Family Guy increasingly constrained by network television standards, an animated Ted on streaming could potentially be more unfiltered, adult-oriented and experimental than the long-running Fox series.

Ted: The Animated Series premieres on Peacock with an initial batch of eight episodes from 17 December.

If you're inspired, see our guide to the best laptops for animation.

Both of these are resin printers that we rate highly for different use cases. The P1 Max is a large-format production workhorse with a massive build volume and a 4:3 aspect ratio, while the Photon Mono M7 Pro provides speed and detail for smaller models.

Both of these offers are part of Amazons' Early Big Deal Days, and you need to be an Amazon Prime member to get the discounts, but you can sign up for a 30-day free Prime trial (you can always cancel later before the subscription starts if you don't want the other benefits).

If you're not sure what type of machine to go for, see our guide to the best 3D printers based on our own reviews.

• Browse 3D printer deals at Amazon

The most recent to make headlines was the illustrious "Raincoat Pikachu", which went for a whopping $8.4 million at auction. With over 30 years of Pokémon character design, it's safe to say the franchise has reached the ultimate pop culture icon status and doesn't look to be slowing down anytime soon.

The 10 Gem Mint copy of the 2015 Pokémon Japanese XY Promo Art Academy Fujishima Pikachu (a.k.a. raincoat Pikachu) attracted 64 bids in total on Fanatics Collect before selling for a mighty $8.4 million USD, including buyer’s premium. Featuring an adorable red raincoat-clad Pikachu grinning under an umbrella, the cute stormy scene has a wonderful charm to it, but you might notice it has a certain... hand-drawn look to it. Turns out, that's what makes it so valuable.

Raincoat Pikachu was created by artist Y. Fujishima, winner of the 'Dress-Up Pikachu' category as part of a worldwide Pokémon Art Academy competition. His prize? 100 officially printed copies of his custom card. Despite not carrying the same polish as other rare cards, Fujishima's design is now the second most valuable in the world, second to Logan Paul's PSA 10 Pikachu Illustrator Pokémon card, which sold for a record-breaking $16.5 million earlier this year.

Despite Raincoat Pikachu's wholesome origins, it's still perplexing how a single card can sell for millions, but given the previous popularity of NFTs and cryptocurrencies, I'm at least grateful we've returned to physical media. For more Pokémon news, check out the new Pokémon X Polaroid cameras or take a look at how Pokémon is fighting back against AI slop.

Since 1915, the Vauxhall griffin has been depicted holding a flag featuring the letter 'V'. But this 13th iteration of the logo has, for the first time, done away with the flag, whilst reducing the griffin to a flatter and more angular form.

“The Griffin emblem is instantly recognisable, with Vauxhalls seen on almost every street in Britain," Mark Adams, design vice president at Vauxhall, said in a press release. “Having adorned our vehicles in different forms for more than 120 years, we wanted to retain its essential elements while streamlining it for the next generation of electrified vehicles. As the Griffin is now illuminated on the front of our latest models, this simpler design also makes it clearer and easier to identify."

The new logo is set to start appearing on new Vauxhall vehicles in 2027.

From BMW to Rolls-Royce, we've seen no shortage of new car emblems in the 2020s. For the best of the best, take a look at the best car logos of all time.