🎾 Williams and Alcaraz: what the mixed draw signals

Serena Williams came back to tennis in June after four years away. She and Alcaraz have now received a wildcard into the US Open mixed doubles — 44 Grand Slams between them, the draw's marquee pairing.

Also in the field: Djokovic–Sabalenka, Rybakina–Fritz, Swiatek–Ruud. Doubles specialists, including Siniakova and Patten, go through qualifying.

The format was overhauled in 2024 — sets to four games, match tiebreak instead of a third set. Errani and Vavassori criticised the changes, then won the title and $1 million in prize money. The US Open is steadily building mixed doubles into a standalone product, per BBC Sport.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ydWMc8x_LDY

🏎️ Norris takes pole at Zandvoort

Lando Norris claimed pole for the Dutch Grand Prix, beating George Russell by 0.102 seconds as rain threatened late in qualifying — it never fully arrived.

Championship leader Kimi Antonelli qualified third, Piastri fourth. The Ferraris of Hamilton and Leclerc locked out row three. Verstappen starts seventh at his final home grand prix — Zandvoort leaves the calendar after this season. Liam Lawson, deputising for the injured Hadjar, took eighth, per BBC Sport.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l5ORxUVrhVQ

📌 Daily Recap · Aug 25

📚 Nearly two-thirds of Amazon's religious books are AI-generated
⚽ Hull City humbles Man United 2-0 on Premier League return
🤖 A humanoid robot just beat Usain Bolt's world record
🎾 Serena and Alcaraz team up for US Open mixed doubles
🏎️ Norris edges Russell by a blink to take Dutch GP pole

Someone you know definitely missed all of this — their loss, your forward button.

CHEATKOTT - Your Daily News

🪙 Crypto check
₿ BTC $78,970 📉 -2.2% (24h)
Ξ ETH $2,464 📉 -1.7% (24h)

😨/🤑 Fear & Greed: 65 — Greed

🐉 France and Saudi Arabia Are Building a Dragon Ball Z Theme Park Near Paris

Not a drill. Macron and Crown Prince MBS met in Paris, found out they both love Dragon Ball Z, and now a €6 billion park is going up near Cergy-Pontoise — 22,000 jobs, years of construction, no opening date yet.

Funding comes from Qiddiya, the Saudi entertainment fund already building the first DBZ park outside Riyadh: 500,000 square meters, anime locations, and a 70-meter Shenron statue. Paris gets park number two.

Given that Saudi Arabia has also bought into EA, grabbed 10% of Capcom, and taken over Evo in recent months, this is starting to look less like a fun idea and more like a strategy. IGN has the full story.

⚽ Norris takes the final Dutch GP win

So, quite a race. Verstappen goes into the wall on a damp track at the end of lap one — red flag, restart, chaos.

Antonelli leads after the restart, but Norris and McLaren play the strategy game perfectly across two stops, build a tyre offset, and then Norris passes both Antonelli and Hamilton in the same lap. Hamilton was actually running first at that point, just out of phase on his stops.

Late in the race Mercedes tell Russell to move over for Antonelli — he's not happy about it, Hamilton has a go at him from behind, but Russell holds on for third.

Alonso quietly comes home ninth on a one-stop strategy — first points for Aston Martin since Monaco. They're slowly getting there.

First race back after the summer break and it definitely didn't disappoint, per BBC Sport.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3OMLs3yI-KE

🎮 GTA VI: a symphony of patience and leaks

Thirteen years, two console generations, and Rockstar has now delayed the game twice — landing on November 19th, 2026, a full year past the originally promised fall 2025 window. Take-Two's CEO called preorders "unprecedented and astonishing." Modesty, apparently, is not in the budget.

While everyone waits for the August 27th extended look, a group called CyberLeek has been leaking footage: protagonist Jason Duval hits people with a wrench, flies a plane, and shoots the word "LEEK" into a wall. Subtle. Take-Two has already subpoenaed Microsoft and Discord to find them.

The game launches digital-only — $79.99 standard, $99.99 Ultimate, per The Verge. Thirteen years of development, zero discs, and leaks that became their own cultural event. Rockstar has turned waiting into a genre.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QdBZY2fkU-0

💸 Strategy is back in the green — and Saylor didn't drive it

840,447 BTC at an average of $75,385 spent most of the summer deeply underwater — the paper loss hit ~$13B in July. A five-day run past $78,000 flipped it: unrealized gain now sits at $2.53 billion, a $15.5B swing in six weeks.

The context matters. While Saylor publicly vowed never to sell, Strategy has offloaded 6,948 BTC for ~$432.5M since May — during the stretch when the price sat below the company's own cost basis. It did not buy the dip.

The rally traces back to Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, whose yield curve control moves appear to have redirected capital into Bitcoin ETFs — $1.92B in weekly inflows. MSTR closed at $119.25, still 67% below its $365.21 peak. This Bitcoin rally is happening without Saylor on the buy side, Decrypt notes.

📸 Pikachu says cheese

Polaroid and Pokémon have teamed up on a trio of instant cameras, each built around a classic design: a yellow Polaroid Now Gen 3 with a lightning-bolt strap for Pikachu, a pink-and-white Sylveon version with a ribbon-like band, and a red-and-white Pokéball edition. These aren't novelty toys — full-size prints, self-timer, tripod mount, and 15 film packs worth of battery life.

Each camera comes paired with matching themed film — Pikachu borders, Sylveon silhouettes, or a multi-Pokémon variety pack, depending on which you grab.

They're moving fast. IGN recommends checking Amazon, Pokémon Center, and Polaroid's own site before stock vanishes.

Instax had one job, and Pikachu just showed up to the interview.

📌 Daily Recap · Aug 26

🐉 France and Saudi Arabia are literally building DBZ land
⚽ Norris masters the strategy to win Dutch GP
🎮 GTA VI delayed again, now arriving November 2026
💸 Strategy's 840K Bitcoin stash swings to $2.5B profit
📸 Polaroid and Pokémon dropped instant cameras nobody asked for

Someone you know definitely missed all of this — their loss, your forward button.

CHEATKOTT - Your Daily News

🪙 Crypto check
₿ BTC $78,778 📉 -0.2% (24h)
Ξ ETH $2,491 📈 +1.1% (24h)

😨/🤑 Fear & Greed: 71 — Greed

🚀 SpaceX is planning a second Starbase — bigger than the first

$100 billion is the stated investment in Starbase Louisiana: Starship factories, launch pads, methane production and a deep-water port. SpaceX president Gwynne Shotwell presented the project in person in Abbeville, Louisiana.

The Texas Starbase covers just 350 acres and borders a public beach. Florida means sharing launch windows with five competing operators. Louisiana offers open land, methane access and ocean shipping — with no queue.

SpaceX's roadmap calls for dozens of Starship launches per day. Current infrastructure won't get there. The $100 billion is an intention, not a contract yet, per Ars Technica — but the scope is being designed for a cadence that doesn't exist yet.

🎮 The Witcher 3 Remastered arrives September 29 — free for existing owners

CD Projekt Red confirmed at Gamescom Opening Night Live that The Witcher 3 Remastered launches September 29 at no cost for owners on PC, PS5 and Xbox Series X/S.

The update brings reworked combat, a skill tree overhaul, armor transmog, cross-platform mod support and a full visual upgrade — ray-traced hair included. Both existing expansions are now bundled at no extra charge.

Switch 1 owners get the Switch 2-native version free. The game also hits Battle.net for the first time. Third expansion Songs of the Past is due in 2027; The Witcher 4, starring Ciri, targets 2028, per IGN.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SB3siHVCHpY

🎮 CD Projekt Red just wouldn't sit still

At Gamescom Opening Night Live, CDPR announced a remaster of The Witcher 3 — out September 29, free for existing owners. Switch players get a free Switch 2 upgrade too.

It's not just visuals: reworked skill tree, combat, camera, new finishers, smoother movement. On top of that, a new DLC called Songs of the Past is coming for a game that's already over a decade old, and a remake of the first Witcher is also in the works. The next real sequel is 2028 at the earliest, so the studio is keeping fans occupied in the meantime, as The Verge reports.

Plenty going on over there right now.

Engadget

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SB3siHVCHpY

🖥️ Apple's most powerful chip ever — in the same box as 2022

Quick context: last year's Mac Studio was a genuine mess — M4 Max on one end, M3 Ultra on the other, with the older-sounding M3 actually being more powerful. An M4 Ultra never existed. That's fixed now.

The new lineup:
🔸 M5 Max — 36GB memory, from $2,499
🔸 M5 Ultra — 96GB memory, 80-core GPU, 1.2TB/s bandwidth, from $5,499
🔸 512GB memory config — October, pricing TBD
🔸 Wi-Fi 7, Bluetooth 6, storage twice as fast

Ships September 22nd on macOS 27 Golden Gate. With the Mac Pro gone, the M5 Ultra is now Apple's absolute ceiling — according to The Verge. Same chassis since 2022. USB-A ports still on the back. Apparently "most powerful chip ever" and "we kept the old box" aren't mutually exclusive.

🤖 They shrunk an AI model in half and it got smarter

Multiverse Computing took OpenAI's GPT-OSS — 120 billion parameters — cut it to 60 billion, compressed memory to 4-bit, and the smaller version _outperformed_ the original on 7 of 9 benchmarks.

The trick: normally you teach the shrunken model using a halfway copy, which is already worse than the original. Their method, Quantization-Aware Healing, just points the small model at the full uncompressed original instead. That swap apparently makes all the difference.

The result uses a quarter of the memory — gap between a data center and a decent desktop. The model, Hypernova-60B, is free on Hugging Face, though the compression tool itself stays proprietary. Decrypt has more.

📌 Daily Recap · Aug 27

🚀 SpaceX's $100B Louisiana Starbase is alarmingly ambitious
🎮 Witcher 3 Remastered drops September 29, free for owners
🧙 CDPR gave Witcher 3 a full combat and skill overhaul
🖥️ Apple finally fixed its confusing Mac Studio chip situation
🤖 Halving an AI's size somehow made it smarter

Tag whoever spent today in meetings — they clearly needed this more than a fourth coffee

CHEATKOTT - Your Daily News

🪙 Crypto check
₿ BTC $79,705 📈 +1.2% (24h)
Ξ ETH $2,496 📈 +0.2% (24h)

😨/🤑 Fear & Greed: 73 — Greed

🧠 The price of the game

CTE — a degenerative brain disease from repeated head impacts, diagnosable only after death — has always been hard to measure for the obvious reason: the subjects aren't around to ask.

A new study in the British Medical Journal tracked 878 former NFL players who died between 2016 and 2021. Of the 235 who donated their brains, 215 tested positive for CTE. The upper-bound estimate across all deaths: 97.7%.

The Harvard-led team added an inconvenient detail: most of those hits happened in high school and college. The NFL just collected the damage — and already paid $1 billion to settle claims from over 5,000 former players in 2016.

The sport knew. The sport paid. The sport continued.

BBC Sport

🥊 Bella Mir upset by Apodaca on Contender Series

Bella Mir, daughter of former UFC heavyweight champion Frank Mir, entered Dana White's Contender Series as a heavy favourite. Alex Apodaca won by unanimous decision, all three judges scoring it 29–28.

Dana White addressed the odds after the fight.

"This sport's too crazy to be that big of an underdog"

Apodaca, 32, was awarded a UFC contract. Mir, 23, suffered the first loss of her professional MMA career in five fights.

Also on the card, Scotland's Sean Clancy Jr stopped American Gary Balletto in round two with unanswered ground strikes and earned a UFC contract of his own. Clancy, 23, is the Cage Warriors welterweight champion; his record moves to 9–0.

BBC Sport has the full report.

💸 OnlyFans by the numbers

Over ten years, the platform has paid creators more than $30 billion — $6.3 billion in the last fiscal year alone. The count of million-dollar earners now exceeds 5,000: a recognisable economic tier, not a handful of outliers.

Fenix International, the parent company, runs on 47 employees against $1.55 billion in revenue and 437 million registered accounts — a lean intermediary taking its 20% cut.

Ownership shifted in early 2026 after founder Leonid Radvinsky died at 43; his widow now controls Fenix, and a 16% stake sold to Architect Capital values the business at $3.15 billion. A string of Hollywood names joining the platform suggests the reputational barrier has quietly come down. According to Variety, OnlyFans has paid over £600 million in UK corporate taxes to date — a different standing with regulators than the platform had at launch.