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The Morning After: Monday, June 26th 2017

Reach your goals.

It's Monday morning, and we're talking about how tweets are now official presidential statements, the problem with the console wars and Snapchat Specs made for underwater.


The importance of cross-platform play.'Rocket League' will die without cross-console multiplayer

All online games eventually die. But the difference between the original version of World of Warcraft and, say, Call of Duty: Ghosts is that WoW was more of a service on an open system (PC). Players could gradually migrate to its annual expansions and still be a part of the overall population. When it comes to Rocket League, developer Psyonix's Jeremy Dunham has a way to fix these fractured player bases: opening up cross-platform multiplayer. "We're not trying to build six Rocket Leagues," he said. "We're not looking forward to when Rocket League 2 and 3 and 4 are coming out. Rocket League is the game we're gonna keep updating. It's important to us to keep that going, cross-generation, across multiple platforms, without sacrificing anything."


The White House claims Trump's tweets are an official response to a federal committee's inquiry.
In 2017, tweets are official presidential statements

Still not sure a tweet counts as an official response to a federal inquiry? Well, the White House has reaffirmed that it is. As reported by Reuters, the White House sent a letter to the House of Representatives Intelligence Committee claiming that a pair of Trump tweets on Thursday were the president's official word on the matter.


A university in the Netherlands is building a special cycling bridge.
A 3D-printed bridge using reinforced concrete

Researchers there have started manufacturing parts for a 3D-printed cycling bridge using reinforced concrete. When finished, it'll apparently be the first bridge to use 3D-printed reinforced concrete (but not the first 3D-printed bridge using other materials -- or even concrete itself.) There's an environmental impact, too: 3D printing will seriously cut down the CO2 emissions made by concrete-cement production. The 3D printer also offers more design freedom, fabricating shapes that are much harder to produce with a mold.


No, those 'healing stickers' aren't made of NASA tech.Ex-NASA scientist calls Goop's 'healing stickers' a load of BS

Gwyneth Paltrow's lifestyle website, Goop, tends to promote all kinds of nonsense. One of its latest recommendations, wearable stickers by a company called Body Vibes, is pretty hard to turn a blind eye to, though, because its creators claimed that it uses NASA technology. Goop wrote that the body stickers are capable of rebalancing "the energy frequency in our bodies," since they're made of the "same conductive carbon material NASA uses to line spacesuits" to "monitor an astronaut's vitals during wear." Except, as a NASA rep told Gizmodo, that's not true -- at all.


Snapchat teams up with cruise ship for underwater footage.
Custom Snapchat Specs can take snaps under the sea

Spectacles have made sharing marginally exciting videos on land via Snapchat easier. It also helps that you no longer need to hunt down a vending machine to snag a pair in the US. But a partnership between the social network and Royal Caribbean cruise lines will make it easy to capture footage under the sea. The SeaSeeker can record video for up to 30 minutes underwater, at depths up to 150 feet, making it perfect for scuba and free-diving.

But wait, there's more...