Most opinion-based shows don’t stop to share legal notes. Tell that to “The View.” Reading legal notices has become the norm on the far-Left showcase. “The View” featured four such notes on November 22 alone, all related to President-Elect Donald Trump’s cabinet picks. The show shared similar notes earlier in the week to avoid potential lawsuits. NEW: The View host Sunny Hostin fumes as she is forced to read a legal note just minutes after presenting the Matt Gaetz allegations as a “fact.” Hostin: They discussed the fact that once [Gaetz] finds out that she's 17, he stops having s*x with her. Hostin 3 min later: Matt… pic.twitter.com/USvYjnWqKZ — Collin Rugg (@CollinRugg) November 20, 2024 That’s just one week in the life of Trump 2.0. And it only scratches the surface of the show’s Trump Derangement Syndrome. Can this show survive? Will ABC see its continued existence as a ticking legal time bomb? The legal nightmare is part of “The View’s” existential crisis. Co-hosts like Whoopi Goldberg have become increasingly unhinged. The Oscar winner predicted Trump would separate interracial families in his second term, a farcical notion on many levels. Need we remind Goldberg that Vice President-Elect J.D. Vance is married to a woman of color? Goldberg also said Elon Musk is the real Vice President-elect, not Vance. Plus, she incorrectly attacked a New York-based bakery, alleging it treated her poorly for political reasons. The bakery owners quickly responded, explaining the shop has had ongoing mechanical issues with an old boiler. The service delay had nothing to do with her politics. Goldberg has yet to respond. Could this be another legal threat awaiting the show? The show’s radicalism extends beyond political debates. Goldberg and co-host Sunny Hostin recently suggested shunning family members who voted for Trump. The meltdown on The View continues. Hosts Sunny Hostin and Whoopi Goldberg tell viewers to NOT see their family over Thanksgiving if they voted for Donald Trump. These people are insane. pic.twitter.com/og9dTPnIym — Tucker Carlson Network ?? Fan Account (@TCNetworkFans) November 13, 2024 President-Elect Trump hasn’t uttered the oath of office yet, and “The View” is in crisis mode. What happens after Jan. 20, 2025? A look at the big picture spells more trouble for “The View.” A report suggested the show’s producers are scrambling to add a pro-Trump voice to the panel. That’s unlikely, but it suggests “The View” understands the gravity of Trump’s re-election win. The former and future president expanded his electoral base and increased minority support on Election Day. Dismiss him at your broadcast peril. Meanwhile, other far-Left outlets are scrambling for survival as Trump’s second term nears. CNN and MSNBC are suffering ratings drops post-Election Day. MSNBC will be sold off by Comcast in the coming months, with the network’s biggest names forced to take drastic pay cuts. CNN is vowing to fire some of its A-list talent to keep the lights on. Outlets like The Washington Post are losing subscribers and vowing to reach out to right-leaning readers. “The View” may be feeling similar pressure. Plus, what happens when a few months pass and the dystopian predictions uttered by Goldberg and co. don’t come to pass? Will viewers flee the show a la “Morning Joe?” The venerable MSNBC showcase is hemorrhaging viewers after co-hosts Joe Scarborough and Mika Brzezinski met with President-Elect Trump. Weeks earlier, they described Trump as a threat to democracy, and worse. MSNBC’s Joe Scarborough and Mika went to Mar-a-Lago to meet with Trump and agreed to “reset” their relationship. Once again… Democrats never actually thought Trump was Hitler or a fascist dictator. If you were propagandized, it’s ok. You got played.pic.twitter.com/Y7WnIWPbI6 — Geiger Capital (@Geiger_Capital) November 18, 2024 “The View” still could survive in the new Age of Trump. One scenario? An adult takes charge of the show. The hosts are told to back up their opinions with facts, not fever dreams. Two new co-hosts are added to the lineup, sober-minded souls who bring gravitas to the banter. The other? ABC may see it as less an empowerment platform and more like a three-ring circus. No one took “The Morton Downey, Jr. Show” or “The Jerry Springer Show” seriously. Is “The View” headed in that direction? The show may lose some of its A-list guests if it leans harder in this tabloid direction. That day-to-day insanity may become a ratings draw of a different kind. Some conservatives may “hate watch” the program to see how unglued the hosts become. Others may savor the cross-talk and unprofessional banter. It’s like the WWE without the singlets. Hearts and minds won’t change a whit, but the show will soldier on. It’s a sad future for what show creator Barbara Walters envisioned back in 1997.  At least the legal-note barrage will stop.

No one should be surprised that Joe Biden lied when he said he would not pardon his corrupt son Hunter before wandering out of office. As much as journalists want to pretend this is just a Dear Old Dad rescue scenario, Hunter Biden enriched most of the Biden clan in his foreign influence-peddling projects, including Joe and Jill. No one’s surprised that Biden would commit this outrage and then fly to Africa to get out of the earshot of reporters. His entire presidency seemed designed to avoid reporters, and never mind that about 95 percent of them are Biden voters. The surprising occurrence was people on the Left complaining now that Donald Trump has been re-elected that the Hunter pardon ruins all their talking points about nobody being above the law. It “muddies the water” of their anti-Trump crusades. How did these supposedly smart people figure this scandal was going to end? New York Times White House reporter Peter Baker wrote the pardon would “make it harder for Democrats to defend the integrity of the Justice Department and stand against Mr. Trump’s unapologetic plans to use it for political purposes.” At this late and ridiculous juncture, Baker and other journalists are still engaged in the fiction that the Biden Justice Department wasn’t used for political purposes, and certainly not like Trump, who wants “retribution.” Just start with the Biden Justice Department’s oppressively overwrought prosecution of the January 6 riot at the Capitol. More than 1,000 Americans have been convicted (a large chunk of them in plea deals), and about 350 trials are still pending. Almost four years later, the FBI is still hunting down suspects. It’s easy to categorize this aggression as “retribution” for challenging Biden’s election certification. Take 72-year-old “Praying Grandma” Rebecca Lavrenz, who’s now serving six months of home confinement in Colorado after being found guilty in August of this year. Her “crime”? Lavrenz watched other rioters breach barricades and overrun a police line on the Capitol’s Rotunda steps, prosecutors said.  She then spent approximately ten minutes inside the Capitol. Prosecutors sought ten months behind bars. Ten months for ten minutes. Anyone who doesn’t think this sounds ridiculously overwrought probably watches MSNBC 12 hours a day. This is the kind of “January 6 criminal” that the leftists are already protesting might be pardoned by Donald Trump next year. How does Grandma compare to Hunter Biden’s tax evasion and gun crimes?   The Justice Department started investigating Hunter Biden in 2018 (but nobody reported it). The FBI kept Hunter Biden’s laptop under wraps to protect the Bidens. Under Biden, they kept slow-walking the case. CNN senior legal analyst Elle Honig called the delay “preposterous” in 2023. He said “five years? That’s a five-week investigation.” Biden’s Justice Department tried to toss the whole case in the trash can (like Hunter Biden’s gun) with a plea deal in 2023. Only a federal judge stopped that outrage, which led inescapably to the pardon outrage. But Biden screamed in his pardon memo that all this delay and attempted deconstruction was a Hunter persecution. Give us all a break. All the reporters who lecture us about the perils of disinformation and misinformation ruining democracy are the same ones who still pretend that the Biden Justice Department is the pristine antonym of a partisan agency. To use their own formulation, “there is no evidence” that either the Justice Department or their pom-pom squad in the press have acted in a nonpartisan manner during the Biden presidency. The Hunter pardon doesn’t muddy the waters. The leftist press have been churning mud into the waters this whole time. 

It looks as though AMD’s next-gen Radeon cards could offer a huge step up for gamers in performance. Reports suggest that the rumored next-gen flagship AMD Radeon RX 8800 XT graphics card might even match the Nvidia GeForce RTX 4080 in ray tracing performance. If this proves to be true, it would be a big win for AMD, which recently announced it was abandoning high-end Radeon GPUs entirely. Plans or not, a card that can level with an RTX 4080 is a powerful one indeed, and could upend the best graphics card market with a genuine competitor after years of Nvidia's near-total dominance. Continue reading New AMD Radeon RX 8800 XT gaming GPU matches Nvidia GeForce RTX 4080, says leak MORE FROM PCGAMESN: Ryzen 7 7800X3D review, Best gaming CPU, Radeon RX 7800 XT review

The Elder Scrolls Online can be a little stingy when it comes to giving away new mounts, motifs, and other customization outfits. Outside of new expansions, you’re hard-pressed to get all that exciting content without having to head over to the store. Well, in the holiday spirit of giving, the new ESO Frosty Fun Golden Pursuits are showering us with Crown Crates, a creepy mount, and even a new weapon style. Be quick though, as these are limited-time freebies. Continue reading ESO’s Frosty Fun event whips up new 14 rewards, but you don’t have long MORE FROM PCGAMESN: Best MMORPGs, Best fantasy games, Best single-player MMOs

Over the years, there has been a constant debate about what period is actually considered the "golden era" of gaming. Some believe it to be the 1980s, when arcades started to become popular, while others believe the eighth generation of consoles is the golden era.

Image: Microsoft Microsoft has poured cold water on any hopes of lower hardware requirements for Windows 11. With Windows 10 end of support approaching in October 2025, the software giant now says that its Trusted Platform Module (TPM) 2.0 requirement for Windows 11 is “non-negotiable.” In a blog post entitled “TPM 2.0 – a necessity for a secure and future-proof Windows 11,” Microsoft makes it very clear that it won’t lower Windows 11’s strict hardware requirements to encourage people to upgrade from Windows 10. TPM was a surprise requirement for Windows 11 when it was first announced in 2021, and now practically every modern PC ships with support for TPM 2.0. It’s a hardware-level chip or firmware capability that helps encrypt or decrypt data, confirm digital signatures, and assist with any other cryptographic operations. “TPM 2.0 plays a crucial role in enhancing identity and data protection on Windows devices, as well as maintaining the integrity of your system,” says Steven Hosking, a senior product manager at Microsoft. “TPM 2.0 also helps future-proof Windows 11. One way it does so is by helping to protect sensitive information as more AI capabilities come to physical, cloud, and server architecture.” Microsoft details how TPM integrates with new security features in Windows 11 like Credential Guard and Windows Hello for Business, as well as BitLocker disk encryption. TPM 2.0 also helps support Secure Boot, a key technology that secures the boot process from any unauthorized changes. Hosking says Microsoft has implemented TPM 2.0 “as a non-negotiable standard for the future of Windows,” so there’s no going back on the hardware requirements here. Microsoft also requires that Windows 11 devices are capable of virtualization-based security and hypervisor-protected code integrity (HVCI), which means Windows 11 is only supported on CPUs released from 2018 onward. Despite the requirements, there have been several workarounds over the years to allow Windows 11 to run on unsupported hardware. Microsoft didn’t apply a hardware-compliance check initially for virtualized versions of Windows 11, but the company has been gradually locking down the upgrade and setup process in recent years — especially with the 24H2 update. The improved compatibility checks with 24H2 have forced tools like Flyby11 to leverage a feature of the Windows 11 setup that uses a Windows Server variant of the installation to bypass the hardware compatibility checks. Businesses can also use Microsoft’s official Windows 11 LTSC 2024 release, which makes TPM an optional requirement but still enforces a list of compatible CPUs. Microsoft is now trying to convince Windows 10 users to buy a new PC with full-screen prompts. The latest prompts follow warnings about the Windows 10 end of support date earlier this year. Microsoft has used similar prompts like this in the past, with the company pushing Windows 10 upgrades for Windows 7 and Windows 8.1 users.

Image: Square Enix Fantasian was an easy game to recommend when it launched in 2021. Developed by Final Fantasy creator Hironobu Sakaguchi’s Mistwalker studio, Fantasian was an approachable old-school roleplaying game that had a lot of clever ideas, along with an adorable aesthetic thanks to its world made out of hand-crafted dioramas. There was just one problem: it was exclusive to Apple Arcade, so anyone who wasn’t a subscriber missed out. Now, that has finally changed as the game launches this week on PC, PlayStation, Xbox, and the Switch. The new port is called Fantasian Neo Dimension, but it’s mostly identical to the Apple Arcade version, aside from the very welcome addition of voice acting. (In a nice bit of circular storytelling, Neo Dimension is being published by Final Fantasy maker Square Enix.) In many ways, Fantasian is classic Final Fantasy in all but name. It stars a hero named Leo, who — with the help of a tough princess, a mysterious magic wielder, and a grizzled ship captain — gets pulled into a quest that spans multiple realms, as they attempt to thwart a mechanical infestation led by a tall, dark, and dangerous villain. There’s plenty that Final Fantasy fans will recognize: the amnesiac lead character, the playful love triangle, a world that blends fantasy and sci-fi, similar spells and items, and a beautiful soundtrack from famed composer Nobuo Uematsu. Hell, there’s even a character named Sid. The basis of Fantasian is Sakaguchi and his team working with the framework they know but building on top of it in interesting ways. So you’re left with a rock-solid RPG that makes some nice tweaks to the formula. The most obvious difference is the visual style, which is like a hand-crafted take on the old prerendered backgrounds from PlayStation-era Final Fantasy. It lends the game a very tactile aesthetic, and it’s surprisingly flexible; there are warm and cozy forests and cabins but also cold mechanical areas made of metal and old circuit boards. And while the game has its origins on mobile, it still looks sharp and clear on console. I’ve been replaying it on the Switch, and the only issue has been the occasionally long load time before a battle. Fantasian also makes some tweaks to the turn-based RPG formula that make it both more approachable and less frustrating. The first is a fun twist on combat that lets you aim many of your attacks, which can be incredibly satisfying when you line things up just right and hit a whole bunch of enemies in one shot. Even more useful is the awkwardly named feature Dimengeon — a portmanteau of dungeon and dimension — which takes the sting out of random battles. When you have it switched on, those pesky monsters are zapped to another dimension, where you can battle them at your leisure. The twist is that they accumulate. So when the device fills up and you have to finally fight them, you can get into a battle against a whole bunch of bad guys at once. These fights have a strategic, almost puzzle-like feel. Those seemingly subtle tweaks are more than enough to make Fantasian an easy recommendation if you’re looking for a classic RPG. Much like the recent remake of Dragon Quest III, a large part of the appeal of Fantasian is how traditional it is, while smoothing out the rough edges that can make the genre feel clunky and tedious. And as Final Fantasy itself continues to expand in different ways, Fantasian is a comforting look back at how things used to be. Fantasian Neo Dimension launches on December 5th on PC, PlayStation, Xbox, and the Switch.

The secretary bird photograph was among the winners of the 2024 Royal Society Publishing Photography Prize.

A bacterial infection that rarely occurs in the United States hit a woman in Maryland after she cleaned her home aquarium.