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2026 has been a big year for Game of Thrones fans, who have been treated to not one, but two official releases from the beloved fantasy franchise. Widely hailed as creator George R.R. Martin ’s favorite Game of Thrones project, the first new release of the year came all the way back in January with the premiere of A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms . Consisting of only six thirty-minute episodes, the show felt like classic Game of Thrones scaled down to a much more intimate tale, which worked well enough to score a Season 2 renewal and confirmed 2027 return. Following just a few weeks ago was the highly anticipated third season of House of the Dragon , which is firing on all cylinders through its first three episodes.

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There's a relatively high chance Valve co-founder Gabe Newell and Hollywood director James Cameron are at least friendly. How do I know? They both partake in the hilariously ridiculous rich person hobby of investing in submarines.

One of the central figures behind Half-Life and Steam , Newell is already a relatively big player in ocean exploration, since he owns Inkfish, a research firm dedicated to learning about the ocean depths. He footed the bill on a new vessel known as RV6000, a 100-meter-sized project that recently started construction at a shipyard in Romania, and now he's taking his investment even further

Per Boat International , RV6000 is being put together by Vard, a Norwegian company, and once the outer hull is finished in Romania, it'll be sent to another shipyard in Norway to be finished. It's a state-of-the-art undertaking, described as "one of the most modern research vessels the world has seen" by Vard.

Here's the kicker: it's being handled by Oceanco, a manufacturer of high-end boats and the like Newell actually acquired himself last year. Let it never be said he does anything in half measures. He's following in the footsteps of James Cameron, who famously became infatuated by oceanic research while making 1997's Titanic, and is now a bona fide and highly qualified expert in the area.

The RV6000 costs €200 million (around $228 million) and now Newell's greenlit a second wave of investment, to the sum of €700,000,000 – or just shy of $800,000,000 – for the RV11000. This hulking mass comes to a total size of 162-meters, and it's expressly designed to go farther than most other deep sea vessels ever could.

The RV11000 will be able to hold 130 crew, and it's expected to follow the same pipeline as the RV6000. The latter should be finished in 2028, whereas the former is projected to be operational in 2030. Think of them when you're convincing your friend to buy a Half-Life bundle for $1 in the next Steam sale.

Uh-oh, the Steam Machine is having its own Xbox 360 "Red Ring of Death" moment, and Valve's lightbar codes point towards GPU failure.