Happy 27th(!) birthday to Quake II. This is another chance to thank id for creating it, and another chance to thank all the parties involved in the 2023 update that makes the game easily playable on modern systems, in case you want to play it to celebrate the occasion.

So it appears the often hapless New York Mets have landed Juan Soto, the plumb free agent of this baseball off-season. On the one hand, getting a superstar at the age of 26 (much less taking him from the Yankees) giving up no resources other than cash is a great move for a cash-rich team. But as much as I bemoaned the team's poverty when that was at issue, paying out the richest contract in the history of sports (15 years, $765 million) doesn't feel like a real point of pride. Baseball's lack of any sort of hard salary cap combined with the miserly profit-sharing between the haves and have-nots has led to New York and Los Angeles being able to toss so much more money around than the smaller-market teams that it's uncompetitive. This has always been the case in baseball, but I think it's becoming more of a problem as salaries escalate and these income gaps become even wider. This doesn't seem great for the sport in the long-term, but this is how they've been doing things for about 150 years now, so what do I know?

Big Budget Round-up
Thanks Ant, Neutronbeam, and Max.

Stories
Thanks RedEye9.

• A Montana Hospital Let Dr. Thomas Weiner Continue Practicing Despite Concerns — ProPublica.
• An airline is investigating after a crew member recorded video of 2 passengers engaged in 'intimate acts' - Yahoo! News.

Science

• Scientists Issue Warning About Perfumes - Futurism.
• 'It explains why our ability to focus has gone to hell'- Screens are assaulting our Stone Age brains with more information than we can handle - LiveScience.

Media

• Gladiator II- The Musical - SNL. SNL goes AI.

The Funnies

• Savage Chickens.