Xbox Game Pass Core subscribers will get access to a small selection of the games available with the regular/higher tiers of Game Pass, starting with more than 25 games, including:
- Among Us
- Descenders
- Dishonored 2
- Doom Eternal
- Fable Anniversary
- Fallout 4
- Fallout 76
- Forza Horizon 4
- Gears 5
- Grounded
- Halo 5: Guardians
- Halo Wars 2
- Hellblade: Senua's Sacrifice
- Human Fall Flat
- Inside
- Ori and the Will of the Wisps
- Psychonauts 2
- State of Decay 2
- The Elder Scrolls Online: Tamriel Unlimited
Games you've already acquired from Games with Gold will still be available as long as you've got Xbox Game Pass Core.
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Do we think anyone will actually agree to publishing their fuel prices online to be compared with others'? I highly doubt it.
The dilemma
I grew up with loving parents and had a happy childhood, but am beginning to realise that a persistently low sense of self-esteem may now be hampering my life.
Growing up, I had a fractious relationship with my older brother, who I think resented me for being the academically gifted child of the family. Constant rejection and ridicule by him left me feeling frustrated at times. In my last few years at school I felt bullied by a group that I tried (and failed) to become a part of. I didn’t even like them. They constantly made fun of me under the guise of “banter”.
I’m now a postgraduate student and have studied at top universities, but am troubled that my life choices are conditioned by a need to prove myself, possibly stemming from a deep-rooted sense of insecurity. At school, I based my self-worth on academic success. At university, I developed an obsession with the gym and an eating disorder. I felt that if I had a perfect physique, I would be more popular.
I care excessively about what impression I’m making and can’t bear the thought of displeasing people. How can I stop caring what other people think?
Philippa’s answer
You are living your life by externally referencing. This means your actions are guided by what you imagine other people think of you. Your challenge is to become more internally referenced, which means you can make choices guided by the experience of how things feel to you. Go with what feels good, not with what you think would look good to others.
Older children often feel displaced by a younger one and instead of berating their parents for producing another child, they take out their frustration on their younger sibling. The roles of victim and persecutor become habits and the youngest can feel that if only they could get it right for their big brother everything would be fine, but they never can. When we are children, the relationships we have become templates for our subsequent relationships as teenagers and adults.
You describe your relationship with your brother as one of rejection and ridicule. He represented what being “in” looked like, and you felt “out” and were desperate to be accepted so you could be “in”. You sought similar dynamics when at school. This is what our psyches do with unfinished business – we unconsciously seek out a similar dynamic in the world that we experienced at home to try to finish that unfinished business – . It’s as if we tell ourselves, this time I’ll get them to accept me. But what happens is the same pattern repeats itself, in your case ridicule and rejection. We crave control over these dysfunctional relationships, which is impossible.
Eating disorders often develop because, unlike relationships, what goes into your body is something you can apply complete control over. Realistically we know that the perfect gym body doesn’t make us more popular. We see people every day with all sorts of body shapes who are comfortable in their own skin and happily take their acceptability for granted. They feel comfortable without having to emphasise that they went to “top” universities or that they have the perfect physique. I think you know all this, but I’m spelling it out anyway to help you to separate from what may be a toxic belief system that holds you back.
Become interested in your feelings and when you recognise that you want to impress, or that you feel left out, congratulate yourself for spotting the feeling and not acting on it. Tell yourself, this is the old big brother dynamic rearing its head and it belongs in the past, not the present. It takes practice. You were impressed by your big brother, by the banter group at school and the trouble is you want others to be impressed by you in the same way. Let go of this. You don’t need to impress anyone. You are good enough exactly as you are. We are not necessarily accepted by people because we impress them and, in fact, if we try too hard to do that, we are more likely to be rejected. You don’t have to say “top” university, you can be proud of what you have achieved, but without being competitive. That would be bringing in that old dynamic of sibling rivalry once more.
We do care about what people think about us. We want friendly colleagues and close friends – it matters. People will want to be around you because they feel seen by you and you can get on each other’s wavelengths, not because you are impressive. So let go of impressing and think more about relating. Worthiness is not about being a top academic, it is about being a caring, curious human being and your work is something you do – it isn’t you. There’s far more to you than that.
Be who you really are, rather than who you think you ought to be, Mr Perfect. The former is real and the latter is fake – and people pick up on that. Let go of trying to control how others see you, enjoy the give and take of relationships and leave the past in the past.
Last year, all of literature’s big prizes went to small publishers. In a risk‑averse climate, edgy debuts and ‘tricky-to-sell’ foreign titles have found a home at the likes of Fitzcarraldo Editions and Sort Of Books – and the gamble has paid off.
This summer, some of Britpop’s biggest bands are back on the road.
Pulp are headlining festivals across Europe; and Blur played two triumphant nights at Wembley Stadium - a venue they never envisioned playing, even at the height of their fame in the 1990s.
By coincidence, the bands have reformed as Britpop celebrates its 30th anniversary.
You don’t need to have been there and bought the bucket hat to know the songs: Parklife, Common People, Supersonic, Connection, Girl From Mars, Animal Nitrate.
The movement was often framed as a push back against the dreary self-seriousness of US grunge, with bands drawing consciously on the tradition of melodic, guitar-based British pop established by the Beatles, and spicing it up with elements of glam and punk rock.
The term Britpop was coined by journalist Stuart Maconie in a long polemic about the state of guitar music in the April 1993 issue of Select magazine.
Styled as an angry letter to Nirvana frontman Kurt Cobain, Maconie wrote: "Enough is enough! Yanks go home! And take your miserable grungewear and your self-obsessed slacker bands with you.
“We don’t want plaid. We want crimplene, glamour, wit, and irony. It’s time to bring on the Home Guard. These, Kurt, are the boys who will stop your little game: Suede, Saint Etienne, Pulp, Denim and the Auteurs. Bands with pride!”
It was a rallying call, for sure, but the movement didn’t burst into life straight away - perhaps because, in addition to Britpop, Maconie insisted on calling these bands “The Crimplenests”.
Suede were first out of the traps, releasing their searing debut album in 1993, all glam guitars and sexual androgyny.
But the scene really came together a year later. In the space of two weeks, Blur released Parklife, Oasis put out their debut single, Supersonic, and Pulp issued their breakthrough album His ‘N’ Hers.
For the next few years, indie bands ruled the charts like they never had before. By 1996, all five of the best album nominees at the Brit Awards had a connection to the scene.
Oasis won with their blockbuster second album, What’s The Story (Morning Glory), but the competition was just as worthy - Pulp’s Different Class, Blur’s The Great Escape, Paul Weller’s Stanley Road and Radiohead’s The Bends (Radiohead always sat slightly apart from Britpop, partly because they spent so much time touring in the US, their eyes on a much bigger prize than the British charts).
That same year, the Blur v Oasis chart battle made the BBC News, in an era where rock music only got on to the bulletins if someone had died; and two million people applied for tickets to see Oasis play at Knebworth.
Britpop dominated the musical landscape so definitively that bands felt bulletproof.
“I suppose I felt like I could walk out into traffic and cars would bounce off me,” recalled Blur’s Graham Coxon. “I probably tried it.”
Then, almost as soon as it arrived, Britpop fizzled out.
In a new BBC Sounds series, The Rise And Fall of Britpop, Jarvis Cocker explains where it all went wrong.
“[Britpop] had this euphoria of thinking, 'Yeah, we’re the snotty kids and we’re finally getting to go centre stage,” he says.
"Then everybody was drinking too much and getting a hangover - and then, of course, people don’t want to buy records by hungover people.
"Then the Spice Girls and Robbie Williams appeared and they did some of the same things, but without the grumpiness.
“The record-buying public - and I don’t blame them at all - just thought, all right, let’s get rid of these misery guts. And so that was the end of it.”
His analysis bears weight. As Britpop matured, a sense of ennui and depression kicked in.
Pulp’s own This Is Hardcore was written about mid-life oblivion and the inevitability of death. Blur’s self-titled 1997 album favoured lo-fi American guitar sounds over the colour-by-numbers vibrancy of Tracy Jacks and Country House. Oasis’s Be Here Now was, in Noel Gallagher’s own words, “the sound of a bunch of guys, on coke, in the studio, not giving an [expletive].”
“Broken bands make broken records,” says Steve Lamacq, who co-hosts the Britpop series with Jo Whiley, recreating their influential partnership on Radio 1’s Evening Session in the 1990s.
The broadcaster recalls the experience of Elastica, whose debut album was released on Deceptive - a label he set up in 1993,
"They were like the Backstreet Kids of pop really, they were cheeky and sarcastic and cool and very credible. And their debut album was one of the best records of that era.
"But from day one, they were always in demand. Everybody wanted a piece of them. They become one of the very few British bands to find some sort of success in the States. Then you fast forward two years and they are absolutely knackered, mentally and physically.
“There was no let-up and at that point, they were probably running on adrenaline. And when the adrenaline ran out, they were fuelled by anything that might keep them going. And I think in short, it just, it stops being fun, really. But even when it stops being fun, the demands on you, they don’t stop.”
He details how sessions for the band’s second album were “painfully slow” with members failing to turn up for recording sessions, often for weeks at a time.
When the record arrived, it was called The Menace - and the material was infinitely darker and more haunting than the bubblegum brightness of their debut.
“I really felt for them,” says Lamacq, "because despite all the people who were trying to direct them, they got absolutely lost.
“And they weren’t the only ones because that level of success, and its subsequent pressures led to this rash of, if not cynical records, then albums that bare the soul of people who’d been in the music industry washing machine, and felt like they were being hung out to dry.”
Damon Albarn found himself in a similar position.
“I had a sort of a strange episode when I was walking under the the A12,” he says on the podcast. "Suddenly it looks like everything you’ve ever dreamed of is going to come true and I had a real… call it a panic attack or something like that.
“That reverberated for many years really. It was quite difficult thing to live with, especially as everything ramped up. I found it difficult, if I’m honest.”
For many of its biggest stars. then, the Britpop party was over. But Whiley says the movement had an important legacy.
“There genuinely weren’t many female bands [around] but I think the women who were there made a lasting impact on other girls who were listening to the radio and realising that they could actually get themselves a guitar, they could begin to make music… and I think that’s really, really important.”
Whiley says it would be impossible to replicate Britpop today, as the music industry is too fractured to coalesce around any one particular sound.
“The whole model has completely changed and record labels lost a lot of control, so maybe it was the last hurrah.”
But speaking on the podcast, Noel Gallagher says Britpop “was kind of absorbed back into the system” and recycled by the major record labels.
"After what became known as Britpop, you end up with bands like Busted with the Les Paul [guitars] and all that.
“They’re kind of rocking, they kind of play their own instruments, but it’s just pure trash pop music.”
This summer, some of Britpop's biggest bands are back on the road.
Pulp are headlining festivals across Europe; and Blur played two triumphant nights at Wembley Stadium - a venue they never envisioned playing, even at the height of their fame in the 1990s.
By coincidence, the bands have reformed as Britpop celebrates its 30th anniversary.
You don't need to have been there and bought the bucket hat to know the songs: Parklife, Common People, Supersonic, Connection, Girl From Mars, Animal Nitrate.
The movement was often framed as a push back against the dreary self-seriousness of US grunge, with bands drawing consciously on the tradition of melodic, guitar-based British pop established by the Beatles, and spicing it up with elements of glam and punk rock.
The term Britpop was coined by journalist Stuart Maconie in a long polemic about the state of guitar music in the April 1993 issue of Select magazine.
Styled as an angry letter to Nirvana frontman Kurt Cobain, Maconie wrote: "Enough is enough! Yanks go home! And take your miserable grungewear and your self-obsessed slacker bands with you.
"We don't want plaid. We want crimplene, glamour, wit, and irony. It's time to bring on the Home Guard. These, Kurt, are the boys who will stop your little game: Suede, Saint Etienne, Pulp, Denim and the Auteurs. Bands with pride!"
It was a rallying call, for sure, but the movement didn't burst into life straight away - perhaps because, in addition to Britpop, Maconie insisted on calling these bands "The Crimplenests".
Suede were first out of the traps, releasing their searing debut album in 1993, all glam guitars and sexual androgyny.
But the scene really came together a year later. In the space of two weeks, Blur released Parklife, Oasis put out their debut single, Supersonic, and Pulp issued their breakthrough album His 'N' Hers.
For the next few years, indie bands ruled the charts like they never had before. By 1996, all five of the best album nominees at the Brit Awards had a connection to the scene.
Oasis won with their blockbuster second album, What's The Story (Morning Glory), but the competition was just as worthy - Pulp's Different Class, Blur's The Great Escape, Paul Weller's Stanley Road and Radiohead's The Bends (Radiohead always sat slightly apart from Britpop, partly because they spent so much time touring in the US, their eyes on a much bigger prize than the British charts).
That same year, the Blur v Oasis chart battle made the BBC News, in an era where rock music only got on to the bulletins if someone had died; and two million people applied for tickets to see Oasis play at Knebworth.
Britpop dominated the musical landscape so definitively that bands felt bulletproof.
"I suppose I felt like I could walk out into traffic and cars would bounce off me," recalled Blur's Graham Coxon. "I probably tried it."
Then, almost as soon as it arrived, Britpop fizzled out.
In a new BBC Sounds series, The Rise And Fall of Britpop, Jarvis Cocker explains where it all went wrong.
"[Britpop] had this euphoria of thinking, 'Yeah, we're the snotty kids and we're finally getting to go centre stage," he says.
"Then everybody was drinking too much and getting a hangover - and then, of course, people don't want to buy records by hungover people.
"Then the Spice Girls and Robbie Williams appeared and they did some of the same things, but without the grumpiness.
"The record-buying public - and I don't blame them at all - just thought, all right, let's get rid of these misery guts. And so that was the end of it."
His analysis bears weight. As Britpop matured, a sense of ennui and depression kicked in.
Pulp's own This Is Hardcore was written about mid-life oblivion and the inevitability of death. Blur's self-titled 1997 album favoured lo-fi American guitar sounds over the colour-by-numbers vibrancy of Tracy Jacks and Country House. Oasis's Be Here Now was, in Noel Gallagher's own words, "the sound of a bunch of guys, on coke, in the studio, not giving an [expletive]."
"Broken bands make broken records," says Steve Lamacq, who co-hosts the Britpop series with Jo Whiley, recreating their influential partnership on Radio 1's Evening Session in the 1990s.
The broadcaster recalls the experience of Elastica, whose debut album was released on Deceptive - a label he set up in 1993,
"They were like the Backstreet Kids of pop really, they were cheeky and sarcastic and cool and very credible. And their debut album was one of the best records of that era.
"But from day one, they were always in demand. Everybody wanted a piece of them. They become one of the very few British bands to find some sort of success in the States. Then you fast forward two years and they are absolutely knackered, mentally and physically.
"There was no let-up and at that point, they were probably running on adrenaline. And when the adrenaline ran out, they were fuelled by anything that might keep them going. And I think in short, it just, it stops being fun, really. But even when it stops being fun, the demands on you, they don't stop."
He details how sessions for the band's second album were "painfully slow" with members failing to turn up for recording sessions, often for weeks at a time.
When the record arrived, it was called The Menace - and the material was infinitely darker and more haunting than the bubblegum brightness of their debut.
"I really felt for them," says Lamacq, "because despite all the people who were trying to direct them, they got absolutely lost.
"And they weren't the only ones because that level of success, and its subsequent pressures led to this rash of, if not cynical records, then albums that bare the soul of people who'd been in the music industry washing machine, and felt like they were being hung out to dry."
Damon Albarn found himself in a similar position.
"I had a sort of a strange episode when I was walking under the the A12," he says on the podcast. "Suddenly it looks like everything you've ever dreamed of is going to come true and I had a real... call it a panic attack or something like that.
"That reverberated for many years really. It was quite difficult thing to live with, especially as everything ramped up. I found it difficult, if I'm honest."
For many of its biggest stars. then, the Britpop party was over. But Whiley says the movement had an important legacy.
"There genuinely weren't many female bands [around] but I think the women who were there made a lasting impact on other girls who were listening to the radio and realising that they could actually get themselves a guitar, they could begin to make music... and I think that's really, really important."
Whiley says it would be impossible to replicate Britpop today, as the music industry is too fractured to coalesce around any one particular sound.
"The whole model has completely changed and record labels lost a lot of control, so maybe it was the last hurrah."
But speaking on the podcast, Noel Gallagher says Britpop "was kind of absorbed back into the system" and recycled by the major record labels.
"After what became known as Britpop, you end up with bands like Busted with the Les Paul [guitars] and all that.
"They're kind of rocking, they kind of play their own instruments, but it's just pure trash pop music."
Unhappy with the speed at which human workers prep avocados, Chipotle has introduced a robot to get the guacamole going.
The fittingly named Autocado (sigh) won't do all the work, however. It's an avocado prep machine that can cut, core and peel an avocado without the need for human hands but the rest of the mashing and seasoning process will continue to fall to Chipotle employees.
As anyone who's made guacamole can tell you, getting the good stuff out of an alligator pear is definitely where most of the prep time is spent, and Chipotle said its new prototype could halve that labor investment. Chipotle said the entire process of making a batch of guacamole takes approximately 50 minutes, but didn't specify how much of that time is spent prepping individual fruit.
Chipotle isn't calling it automation, however - it insists Autocado is a "cobot," or collaborative robot, that'll allow employees to focus on more important tasks. "The intensive labor of cutting, coring, and scooping avocados could be relieved with Autocado, but we still maintain the essential culinary experience of hand mashing and hand preparing the guacamole to our exacting standards," said Chipotle Chief Customer and Technology Officer Curt Garner.
Autocado, made by food industry automation company Vebu in partnership with Chipotle, can reportedly handle up to 25 lbs (11.3 kg) of avocados in a load. The machine moves and preps avocados, one at a time, depositing fruit in a stainless steel bowl, with peels and cores being dumped into collection bins.
Vebu said it eventually wants Autocado outfitted with machine learning and sensors that can evaluate the quality of each avocado in a bid to quantify waste reduction and improve efficiency. To be clear, these capabilities are planned for future Autocado iterations, meaning humans are hopefully still responsible for quality checks on the avocados before loading them into the machine.
Want some robo chips to go with that auto guac?
Autocado isn't the only way Chipotle is waging war on time sunk into appetizer prep. Early last year the company announced "Chippy," a machine that "integrates culinary traditions with artificial intelligence to make tortilla chips," the company said.
Unlike Autocado, Chippy handles the entire chip-making process from masa to final seasoning and is even designed to replicate human inconsistency in salting and lime distribution. "To ensure we didn't lose the humanity behind our culinary experience, we trained Chippy extensively to ensure the output mirrored our current product, delivering some subtle variations in flavor that our guests expect," said Chipotle VP of Culinary, Nevielle Panthaky.
Chipotle has since integrated Chippy into one of its restaurants in Fountain Valley, CA, where testing is ongoing.
So, will saving half the prep time translate to free or reduced-price guac when or if Autocado gets beyond the prototype stage? Sorry: The company told The Register that it intends to maintain the same pricing for the green stuff.
As for whether it plans to fully automate the guac process, à la Chippy, Chipotle told us that "maintain[ing] the culinary experience" is essential, and as such it'll continue to hand mash its guacamole "to our exact standards."
But all it took in 2022, to go back to Panthaky's description of Chippy last year, was the right AI "to ensure we didn't lose the humanity behind our culinary [chip] experience." By that measure, Autocado could certainly evolve given the right code.
Chipotle told us it sees additional uses of automation in other food prep areas, as well as dish washing, which are two areas it said store employees have expressed interest in. The company also sees future roles for AI assisting managers by, for example, calculating how much food the store actually needs to prep for a day to cut down on waste.
Unhappy with the speed at which human workers prep avocados, Chipotle has introduced a robot to get the guacamole going.
The fittingly named Autocado (sigh) won't do all the work, however. It's an avocado prep machine that can cut, core and peel an avocado without the need for human hands but the rest of the mashing and seasoning process will continue to fall to Chipotle employees.
As anyone who's made guacamole can tell you, getting the good stuff out of an alligator pear is definitely where most of the prep time is spent, and Chipotle said its new prototype could halve that labor investment. Chipotle said the entire process of making a batch of guacamole takes approximately 50 minutes, but didn't specify how much of that time is spent prepping individual fruit.
Chipotle isn't calling it automation, however - it insists Autocado is a "cobot," or collaborative robot, that'll allow employees to focus on more important tasks. "The intensive labor of cutting, coring, and scooping avocados could be relieved with Autocado, but we still maintain the essential culinary experience of hand mashing and hand preparing the guacamole to our exacting standards," said Chipotle Chief Customer and Technology Officer Curt Garner.
Autocado, made by food industry automation company Vebu in partnership with Chipotle, can reportedly handle up to 25 lbs (11.3 kg) of avocados in a load. The machine moves and preps avocados, one at a time, depositing fruit in a stainless steel bowl, with peels and cores being dumped into collection bins.
Vebu said it eventually wants Autocado outfitted with machine learning and sensors that can evaluate the quality of each avocado in a bid to quantify waste reduction and improve efficiency. To be clear, these capabilities are planned for future Autocado iterations, meaning humans are hopefully still responsible for quality checks on the avocados before loading them into the machine.
Want some robo chips to go with that auto guac?
Autocado isn't the only way Chipotle is waging war on time sunk into appetizer prep. Early last year the company announced "Chippy," a machine that "integrates culinary traditions with artificial intelligence to make tortilla chips," the company said.
Unlike Autocado, Chippy handles the entire chip-making process from masa to final seasoning and is even designed to replicate human inconsistency in salting and lime distribution. "To ensure we didn't lose the humanity behind our culinary experience, we trained Chippy extensively to ensure the output mirrored our current product, delivering some subtle variations in flavor that our guests expect," said Chipotle VP of Culinary, Nevielle Panthaky.
Chipotle has since integrated Chippy into one of its restaurants in Fountain Valley, CA, where testing is ongoing.
So, will saving half the prep time translate to free or reduced-price guac when or if Autocado gets beyond the prototype stage? Sorry: The company told The Register that it intends to maintain the same pricing for the green stuff.
As for whether it plans to fully automate the guac process, à la Chippy, Chipotle told us that "maintain[ing] the culinary experience" is essential, and as such it'll continue to hand mash its guacamole "to our exact standards."
But all it took in 2022, to go back to Panthaky's description of Chippy last year, was the right AI "to ensure we didn't lose the humanity behind our culinary [chip] experience." By that measure, Autocado could certainly evolve given the right code.
Chipotle told us it sees additional uses of automation in other food prep areas, as well as dish washing, which are two areas it said store employees have expressed interest in. The company also sees future roles for AI assisting managers by, for example, calculating how much food the store actually needs to prep for a day to cut down on waste.
Something a bit different for this community. How do you feel about this kind of extravagance? Would you do it if money wasn't an issue? Do your frugal values run too deep to ever pay such prices?