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It's been over 30 years since Bane broke the bat and made DC Comics history in the process. Coming around the same time as The Death of Superman , the moment the masked villain defeated Batman and shattered his back in the process forever changed the course of the character on the page and has become one of the most recognizable pieces of Bruce Wayne's lore, even to those who have never read the Knightfall storyline it came from. Christopher Nolan made it an iconic part of his superhero trilogy capper, The Dark Knight Rises , while everything from Robot Chicken to Rick and Morty has parodied the exact scene where Bane delivers the signature blow. Yet, only now is the saga where it originated from getting a proper adaptation for the screen.

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Cheats have been a foundational part of video games since the medium’s earliest days. At first, most of them were used as development tools to facilitate playtesting for the game’s creators. The most famous early example of this is the Konami Code , created for the NES port of the space shoot-’em-up Gradius in 1986. To get a full set of power-ups and make the game far easier than its arcade version, you’d simply press up, up, down, down, left, right, left, right, B, then A at the title screen. The cheat became more widely known after the 1988 release of Contra for the NES, where inputting the Konami Code gives you a whopping 30 extra lives.

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Bitcoin Magazine

U.S. Treasury Freezes $130 Million Iran-Linked IRGC Crypto Wallet, Tracks Ayatollah’s Assets

Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said on Fox News on Tuesday that the United States froze a crypto wallet linked to Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps worth $130 million, part of a campaign to track the assets of Iran’s supreme leader around the world.

“We are tracking these accounts all over the world,” Bessent said, in remarks that framed the Treasury work as one prong of an “economic fury” push against Tehran alongside a blockade. “We froze a crypto wallet linked to the IRGC the other day.”

He said investigators had “found the money man for the Ayatollah” and were tracing the holdings of Ali Khamenei, including properties he valued at more than $100 million. Bessent said the Treasury hopes to publish the addresses of those properties. He cast the seizures as a transfer of value to the American people and a squeeze on the regime.

Iran’s economy in ‘freefall’

Bessent also described a collapse in Iran’s economy. He said the rial sits at an all-time low against the dollar and called it in “freefall,” with an inflation rate he put “upwards of 180%.” His account tracks the rial slide that has pushed some Iranians toward bitcoin .

The comments extend a Treasury campaign that has run through the war between Iran, Israel, and the United States. The department has sanctioned Iran’s largest crypto exchange and said the U.S. has seized $1 billion of Iran’s crypto . Blockchain analysts have tied billions in on-chain flows to IRGC-linked wallets, with such wallets receiving more than $3 billion in 2025, a rise from over $2 billion the year before.

In a separate move, the stablecoin issuer Tether froze $344 million in USDT across two blockchain addresses tied to the IRGC, one of the largest single actions in the sequence.

Bitcoin’s design draws both sides of the fight. It settles without a correspondent bank or a reserve-currency issuer, a trait that lets Iran monetize oil access outside the dollar system and lets Treasury trace and freeze value on a public ledger.

The conflict has reshaped how crypto figures into the region. Since U.S. and Israeli strikes on Iran began, bitcoin use inside the country has surged as residents moved value out of the banking system.

Tehran, for its part, reportedly moved to accept bitcoin from tankers seeking passage through the Strait of Hormuz, a $1-per-barrel toll that turns its grip on the chokepoint into settlement revenue . The strait carries a fifth of the world’s oil.

The war has repriced bitcoin as well.

Treasury has not published documentation of the $130 million wallet freeze or the property addresses Bessent referenced. The inflation and currency figures came from his remarks rather than from Iranian data.

This post U.S. Treasury Freezes $130 Million Iran-Linked IRGC Crypto Wallet, Tracks Ayatollah’s Assets first appeared on Bitcoin Magazine and is written by Micah Zimmerman .

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Grants

The NSSC supports the Agency’s internal effort to create an environment conducive to streamlining and simplifying grants and cooperative agreements. The National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), through the establishment of the NSSC, has transitioned to a consolidated model for the award and administration of all Agency grants and cooperative agreements. The consolidation is designed to achieve efficient and effective service, improve data quality, standardize processes, leverage skills and investments, and provide economies of scale.

* Notice *

The Payment Management System (PMS) is currently experiencing issues affecting Federal Financial Report (FFR) generation. Impacted NASA grant recipients will not be considered noncompliant. NASA is working with PMS to resolve the issue. Updates will be posted here.

Grants Status Requests

To submit a request, visit NASA General Information Request Form and complete the form. You will receive an automated email with the most commonly requested grant status information.

Important Instructions:

Ensure you enter a valid email address , as replies will only be sent via email.

The confirmation email may take a few minutes to arrive in your inbox.

How to Fill Out the Form:

Category: Select “Procurement including Grants & Cooperative Agreements.”

Procurement Area: Choose “Grants/Agreements.”

Grants/Agreements Activity: Select “Grant Status.”

Required Information: Provide either a Grant Number , Purchase Requisition Number , or both.

Memorandum for NASA Grantee Community

Guidance Regarding OMB Memorandum M-25-14 and Recent Temporary Restraining Orders

Update on Diversity, Equity, Inclusion, and Accessibility (DEIA) Executive Orders – January 29, 2025

On January 23, 2025, NASA’s Office of Procurement (OP) released a memorandum for the NASA contractor and grant community regarding Executive Order “ Initial Rescission of Harmful Executive Orders and Actions ” and the Office of Personnel Management’s (OPM) memorandum “ Initial Guidance Regarding DEIA Executive Orders .”

Per OP’s memo, NASA grant and cooperative agreement recipients shall immediately cease and desist all DEIA activities required for their grant. This work may include but is not limited to: DEIA plan requirements, training, workshops, reporting, considerations for staffing, or any other direct or indirect grant activity related to DEIA. All grant recipients shall notify their cognizant Grant Officer if they identify requirements within their grants that are in violation of this guidance. Your Grant Officer’s contact information can be found on your NF 1687, Notice of Award for Grant and Cooperative Agreement (NOA).

Thank you for your work and partnership with NASA.

NASA Grant and Cooperative Agreement Terms and Conditions

In FY2025, NASA separated the Terms and Conditions from the GCAM to create a standalone document. This document outlines both the general and specific terms and conditions and applies to all awards issued under 2 CFR 1800 (NASA’s adoption of 2 CFR 200.)

NASA Grant and Cooperative Agreement Terms and Conditions – January 2026

Request for Supplemental Grant and Cooperative Agreement Actions

Administrative Supplement Requests Templates :

No Cost Extension (NCE) Request Form

Other Administrative Supplement Request Form

Principal Investigator (PI) Change Request Form

Period of Performance (POP) Change Form

Submit via email to NSSC-ADMIN-SUPPLEMENT REQUEST

PI Transfer Requests:

Submit via email to NSSC-Grants-PI-Transfer

NASA Insignia Guidelines

Grantees are strongly encouraged to use the NASA Insignia Format identified in the guidelines at NASA Insignia Guidelines for NASA Grantees . These guidelines aim to increase awareness of NASA’s mission activities via Grantee partnerships for a broader and more diverse population.

Payment Management System

NASA uses a service provider, currently the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) Payment Management System (PMS), to provide Federal funds to recipients. PMS will provide instructions to the recipients for registering and requesting funds through the system.

Routine Monitoring

NASA is responsible for routine post-award monitoring on all awards, regardless of the award’s risk determination. At a minimum, routine monitoring includes reviewing award recipients’ annual performance reports, semi-annual Federal Financial Report (FFR), and Transactions Testing Review.

Research Performance Progress Reports

All NASA award recipients must submit annual performance reports. Annual reports are due to NASA 60 days prior to the annual anniversary of the award’s POP start date (e.g., if the POP of an award is October 1 – September 30, the report would be due 60 days prior to October 1.)

Final Performance Reports : Submit via email to NSSC-CloseOut@mail.nasa.gov

Performance Reports : Submit via email to NSSC-Grant-Report@mail.nasa.gov

Federal Financial Reports (SF-425)

Recipients will submit their semi-annual FFRs in PMS:

Period 1 (October 1 – March 31): Due by April 30 each year.

Period 2 (April 1 – September 30): Due by October 30 of each year.

Final FFRs are due 120 days after the end of the POP

Additional information and training are available on the Payment Management System website at https://pms.psc.gov/ . The PMS help desk number is 1-877-614-5533.

Forms

Post-Award Certifications and Representations

NASA Biographical Sketch Form

Current and Pending Support (CPS) Form

NASA Pre-Award and Post-Award Disclosure Requirements

Regulations and Guidance

Regulations

Electronic Code of Federal Regulations

Title 2: Grants and Agreements

14 CFR 1274: Cooperative Agreements with Commercial Firms (Rescinded January 2021)

14 CFR 1275: Research Misconduct

Guidance

NASA Grant and Cooperative Agreement Manual (GCAM): NASA’s Grant Manual for Proposers and Recipients

The NASA Grant and Cooperative Agreement Manual (GCAM) provides pre and post award policy guidance to NASA proposers and award-managing personnel and award recipients to implement government-wide and NASA-specific regulations for applying for, awarding and administering grants and cooperative agreements with educational and non-profit organizations; State, local, and Indian tribal governments; and for-profit organizations.

NASA Grant Cooperative Agreement Manual (GCAM)

NASA Grant and Cooperative Agreement Terms and Conditions

In FY2025, NASA separated the Terms and Conditions from the GCAM to create a standalone document. This document outlines both the general and specific terms and conditions and applies to all awards issued under 2 CFR 1800 (NASA’s adoption of 2 CFR 200.)

Research Terms and Conditions (For Research Awards Issued Prior to October 1, 2024)

NASA implemented the Federal-wide research terms and conditions for all research and research-related grant and cooperative agreement awards issued under 2 CFR 1800 (NASA’s adoption of 2 CFR 200). The Research Terms and Conditions implement the requirements of the Uniform Guidance and includes three companion documents:

RTC Appendix A: Prior Approval Matrix, RTC Appendix B: Subaward Requirements, and RTC Appendix C: National Policy Requirements).

The Research Terms and Conditions and companion documents are accessible on the NSF website .

NASA Office of Inspector General

To file a complaint regarding denial of equal opportunity or discrimination based on race, color, national origin, sex, disability, or age; go to

https://oig.nasa.gov/hotline.html

1-800-424-9183

300 E Street, S.W. Suite 8V39

Washington, DC 20546-0001

NASA OIG Hotline

http://missionstem.nasa.gov/filing-a-complaint.html​​​​​​​

Resources

Grants.gov

NSSC Grants Payment Packag e

NASA Research Opportunities Online (NSPIRES)

System for Award Management (SAM)

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Low-agency people tend to believe in what I call the “myth of willpower,” the idea that virtue lies in exerting extreme effort to overcome obstacles. This is different from putting on a show of effort to impress others or to cover your ass. This is about truly believing that success attained without effort is actually bad, bordering on immoral. You can see this in the discourse around Ozempic and other weight-loss drugs, in the way some people insist on shaming those who “cheat” at weight loss instead of “earning” it via diet and exercise.

The alternative mentality looks like U.S. Navy officer William Sims. In the year 1900, he was serving abroad in Hong Kong and learned that a British captain had developed a new way of shooting from ships in rocky seas. It was much more accurate than the default way, which was to wait until the point in each wave where the ship happened to be tilted the right way, and then fire. The British captain instead had his sailors continuously adjust the gun. This might seem obvious in retrospect — you know, aiming the gun — but it required additional training and modifications to equipment. Sims recognized this method as superior and wrote several reports about it, which the officers above him ignored. So, he took a shortcut. He wrote a letter directly to President Roosevelt, who realized that Sims was correct. In 1902, Sims was appointed Inspector of Target Practice. He saw that the new system was implemented, and the U.S. Navy became much more effective in gun battles.

“Just write to the president” is the kind of shortcut that, in my experience, high-agency people are always looking for. They are never thinking, “I need to increase my hours of grinding hard work.” They’re thinking instead, “How can I get results faster by optimizing my effort?” I learned from those I know to try to accomplish goals with as little effort as possible, because there are endlessly good uses of my time. Spending less energy on a task when I can frees me to spend it on the next thing. This is another rendition of what is perhaps this book’s most important advice: Resist the seduction of artificial goals and go after what you want directly.

I’m not saying you should never work hard, and there is probably something vital about the human condition that you miss out on if you never experience the application of dogged endurance to an endeavor that can’t be accomplished in any other way. Training for narrowly difficult tasks that require mastery or conditioning — like playing Bach’s violin partitas or tackling the Alps — can force you to confront your physical and emotional limits in a way that’s both personality expanding and healthily humbling.

What I’m saying is that you should choose hard work if hard work is the desired result. If it’s not, and you can take a shortcut, take a fucking shortcut.

This is [a] lesson that was brought home to me by addiction. When you are addicted, you are fundamentally dealing with an unfair fight. The enemy substance has infiltrated your reward centers and eaten your joy until taking more of it is your only relief. Quitting would mean giving up the only thing you still love. But the thing you love is destroying you.

To have a hope of winning against addiction, you have to make the fight as easy as possible. If you’ve made addict friends, as many people do, you almost always have to cut them out of your life. You also have to change your environment, placing yourself as far as possible from stimuli that might trigger you to relapse, like a bar where you used to get wasted. The point is to eventually find a way to frictionlessly live without the substance, to the extent possible.

Having won this fight, I have zero compunctions about making my goals as easy to achieve as possible. For example, my body has made it clear that I need to do resistance training with weights, or I’ll wither up and go crazy. But I find the gym powerfully repellent — I don’t consider the scrutiny of scantily clad strangers motivating. So, I pay a trainer who comes to my house and berates me for not picking up the weights. Maybe I could demand more discipline of myself if I didn’t have a job that requires most of it. But given that I never managed to make time for exercise when I was a poker player, it seems unlikely. I feel more than fine about this shortcut because I am happier and healthier as a result.

Hiring a personal trainer is a fairly common shortcut. There are some lesser-known tactics I would also advocate. Here’s one.

Right-Sizing Your Task

Let’s say there’s a viewpoint you want to promote. Do you really need to write a 400-page treatise or a 10-part blog series to lay out every single argument in favor of your position? Or would a short, crisp manifesto do the job better? Perhaps you would get more credit from a certain group of intellectuals for writing the treatise. But maybe you’d have a larger effect on the world with the pamphlet.

Consider the example of philosopher James Carse. He wrote a sprawling book extolling his theory of reality and then lost the manuscript. A few years later, he sat down to summarize what he remembered. That effort became Finite and Infinite Games , and it’s become a cultural classic, probably because it’s not a cumbersome tome.

But it’s not always easy to tell when you’re doing things the hard way. (Weirdly, many philosophers think all of their words are necessary.) To get clear on this, I find it helpful to import some concepts from negotiation practice. In negotiation, the thing you claim to want from a negotiating partner is your “position,” but the thing you ultimately want is your “interest.” To use an example popularized by the classic book Getting to Yes , by Roger Fisher and William Ury, saying “I want all the oranges, I need them to make orange juice tomorrow,” is a position, but “orange juice tomorrow” is the underlying interest.

It’s almost always better to negotiate based on interests rather than positions, because your current position might not actually be the only (or best) way to achieve your interest. Perhaps the person lusting after your oranges just wants the zest to bake a cake, and if you know that, you can keep the juice while giving them the zest. Or they might be happy to drive to the store later to get some more oranges for juice if you agree to let them have the current bag now.

High achievers, like everyone else, vary in how much they can grind — but what is almost invariable is a commitment to cutting to the nub without much wasted effort.

The way to downsize a task is to apply this negotiation principle to yourself. It might be your position that you want to run a marathon. Cool, why? Is it because you want to improve your cardiovascular health? Well, interval training could be a lot more efficient. Is it because you want to impress your dad, who’s a runner? Perhaps a thoughtful gift would be better at facilitating that particular goal.

Teasing apart your real underlying interest from your position allows you to ask, “What is the simplest possible way I could get what I actually want?”

More than their penchant for hard work, it is this ruthless focus on achieving the real goal, as easily as possible, that distinguishes the high achievers I know. I think people who haven’t been around top performers in business sometimes imagine that they are busywork athletes who stare longer at spreadsheets and cram in more meetings than other people. High achievers, like everyone else, vary in how much they can grind — but what is almost invariable is a commitment to cutting to the nub without much wasted effort.

Some people hesitate to take shortcuts because they disdain the whole idea of taking the easy route. This position is something like: Life is about dealing with complex, thorny problems. If you take all the chores out of your life, all the strain and difficulty, some of the humanness goes out of your existence. We’re meant to weed the soil, to write the thank-you note, to have unnecessary conversations.

I absolutely agree with this. My vision of a good life isn’t one where I’m some sort of disembodied switchboard, just routing ideas and decisions around. However, I want to have a choice about the complexity I am spending time with. I want to use my brainpower to tackle the thorny problems that really inspire me, to play the role in the giant human ecosystem that I can play best while leaving others with their ideal labor.

Taking shortcuts is a way to skirt around problems, sure. You can also see it as a way to get to the problems you deserve faster.

This article Stop worshipping hard work — find smart shortcuts instead is featured on Big Think .

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Before The Studio was winning Emmys and Ted Lasso had viewers believing, Apple TV's standout comedy was the underrated British sitcom Trying . The streamer's first attempt at a more humorous project has continued humming along in the background since debuting in 2020, following young couple Nikki ( Esther Smith ) and Jason ( Rafe Spall ) on their complicated journey to having children, first through conception and then the arduous process of adoption. Each season of the heartwarming hit has only been met with further acclaim as the pair enter new phases of their lives, from finally welcoming kids into their home to navigating their tumultuous teenage years. Now in Season 5, there are no signs things are slowing down , with the show boasting an overall Rotten Tomatoes score of 96% and Collider's Tania Hussain calling it "one of the best-written, best-acted, and most emotionally rewarding comedies on television" in her 9/10 review of the new episodes.

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To this day, the now-stagnant Burnout series is still the prime example of an arcade racer that every other contemporary is compared to. Naturally, it's spurred on a bunch of imitators and spiritual successors over the years, especially after the decline of Criterion Games into a support studio at EA. Nowadays, instead of pioneering racing games, it's a "Battlefield Studio" .

One such spiritual successor was 2025's Wreckreation, created by Three Fields Entertainment, a small team of veterans, including from Criterion Games, making games since 1999. Unfortunately, Wreckreaction launched to mixed reviews, not quite reaching the heights of its inspiration.

But it's not the end of the team or the series. "We've made a double announcement today," the developer's latest statement on Patreon reads. "We're making a sequel to Wreckreation … It's built around aggression, pressure, risk, and of course consequence."

"Over the last six months we've been talking directly to players about what they want from a modern arcade driving game, and Wreckreation 2 is the result of those conversations," said studio head Fiona Sperry. "From handling and progression to events and world design, our community has already helped shape key aspects of the experience. We're building this game with the players, not just for them."

There's already a short announcement trailer for the game, showing off a bunch of unique cars (I'm a big fan of all the classic muscle), the arcade handling and, of course, plenty of crashouts inspired by Burnout. Cars go absolutely flying.

The second announcement is that the team has formed a new studio, When Tides Turn. "While Wreckreation began life at Three Fields Entertainment, we've reached a point where it makes sense for the project to have a new home, one that we own completely."

"Nothing has changed about the people making the game. It's still the same team, with the same passion and the same ambition to build the best open-world arcade racer we possibly can. This is simply the next step in our journey."

The developer will continue to post updates on Wreckreation 2 on its Patreon, and you can also sign up to playtest the game. There's no such thing as too much Burnout, so hopefully the Wreckreation sequel delivers where the first one didn't quite hit the mark.

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