Local golf and country club finds unique way to honor veteransWINK Neighborhood Watch: Defrauding, drug trafficking and first-degree murder
FORT MYERS Local golf and country club finds unique way to honor veterans A country club in Fort Myers celebrated Veterans Day by holding an event where nearly a thousand golf balls were dropped from a helicopter.
WINK Neighborhood Watch: Defrauding, drug trafficking and first-degree murder This week’s segment of WINK Neighborhood Watch features defrauding a Dollar General, illegal drug trafficking into jail and first-degree murder via fentanyl.
NAPLES 1 dead, suspect arrested in Naples shooting A suspect is in custody after a shooting left one person dead in Naples.
CAPE CORAL Cape Coral Pkwy closed after minivan, tanker collision A white minivan collided with a tanker truck Sunday morning on Cape Coral Parkway West at Chiquita Boulevard South.
SOUTHWEST FLORIDA Highs in the upper 80s again today with a few showers possible The Weather Authority says another warm day is in store across Southwest Florida.
Lee County begins to clear trash pile on San Carlos Island The trash pile that accumulated on San Carlos Island after hurricanes Debby, Helene and Milton is now being cleared by Lee County.
FORT MYERS 1 dead after crash on Colonial Blvd According to the Fort Myers Police Department, one person is dead after a crash on Colonial Blvd at around 7:30 p.m.
SANIBEL Air quality concerns keep Sanibel School temporarily closed The Sanibel School will remain temporarily closed following indoor air quality (IAQ) tests that did not meet the standards required for safe occupancy.
CAPE CORAL Cape Coral honors Veterans Day with annual parade Veterans Day is a couple of days away, but why wait until then to celebrate our veterans here in southwest Florida?
southwest florida Warm Veterans Day weekend ahead with a stray shower possible The Weather Authority is tracking pleasant but warm weather with temperatures above normal into the afternoon.
NORTH FORT MYERS 66-year-old North Fort Myers man to attempt planking world record A 66-year-old North Fort Myers Man will attempt the world record for being the oldest person to perform a plank.
Understanding the federal agencies involved in Alfie Oakes’ investigation All eyes are on Alfie Oakes after federal agents raided two of his properties on Thursday, the Oakes farm’s packing warehouse and his north Naples home.
21 SWFL teams heading to high school football playoffs 21 high school football teams in Southwest Florida are playoff bound. Check out the breakdown of the bracket to see who your team is playing.
FGCU FGCU men’s soccer player honors late childhood friend FGCU men’s soccer player Sebastian Soriano’s outlook on the game changed when his childhood friend and teammate passed away.
CAPE CORAL School bus blows through stop sign in Cape Coral A school bus driver in Cape Coral ignores the rules of the road. A concerned parent caught video of the bus on camera.
FORT MYERS Local golf and country club finds unique way to honor veterans A country club in Fort Myers celebrated Veterans Day by holding an event where nearly a thousand golf balls were dropped from a helicopter.
WINK Neighborhood Watch: Defrauding, drug trafficking and first-degree murder This week’s segment of WINK Neighborhood Watch features defrauding a Dollar General, illegal drug trafficking into jail and first-degree murder via fentanyl.
NAPLES 1 dead, suspect arrested in Naples shooting A suspect is in custody after a shooting left one person dead in Naples.
CAPE CORAL Cape Coral Pkwy closed after minivan, tanker collision A white minivan collided with a tanker truck Sunday morning on Cape Coral Parkway West at Chiquita Boulevard South.
SOUTHWEST FLORIDA Highs in the upper 80s again today with a few showers possible The Weather Authority says another warm day is in store across Southwest Florida.
Lee County begins to clear trash pile on San Carlos Island The trash pile that accumulated on San Carlos Island after hurricanes Debby, Helene and Milton is now being cleared by Lee County.
FORT MYERS 1 dead after crash on Colonial Blvd According to the Fort Myers Police Department, one person is dead after a crash on Colonial Blvd at around 7:30 p.m.
SANIBEL Air quality concerns keep Sanibel School temporarily closed The Sanibel School will remain temporarily closed following indoor air quality (IAQ) tests that did not meet the standards required for safe occupancy.
CAPE CORAL Cape Coral honors Veterans Day with annual parade Veterans Day is a couple of days away, but why wait until then to celebrate our veterans here in southwest Florida?
southwest florida Warm Veterans Day weekend ahead with a stray shower possible The Weather Authority is tracking pleasant but warm weather with temperatures above normal into the afternoon.
NORTH FORT MYERS 66-year-old North Fort Myers man to attempt planking world record A 66-year-old North Fort Myers Man will attempt the world record for being the oldest person to perform a plank.
Understanding the federal agencies involved in Alfie Oakes’ investigation All eyes are on Alfie Oakes after federal agents raided two of his properties on Thursday, the Oakes farm’s packing warehouse and his north Naples home.
21 SWFL teams heading to high school football playoffs 21 high school football teams in Southwest Florida are playoff bound. Check out the breakdown of the bracket to see who your team is playing.
FGCU FGCU men’s soccer player honors late childhood friend FGCU men’s soccer player Sebastian Soriano’s outlook on the game changed when his childhood friend and teammate passed away.
CAPE CORAL School bus blows through stop sign in Cape Coral A school bus driver in Cape Coral ignores the rules of the road. A concerned parent caught video of the bus on camera.
In this image taken from video 13-year-old named Willis Gibson reacts after playing a game of Tetris. Gibson, who in late December became the first player to officially “beat” the original Nintendo version of the game. By breaking it, of course. Technically, Gibson – aka “blue scuti” in the gaming world – made it to what gamers call a “kill screen,” a point where the Tetris code glitches, crashing the game. CREDIT: WILLIS GIBSON VIA AP) The falling-block video game Tetris has met its match in 13-year-old Willis Gibson, who has become the first player to officially “beat” the original Nintendo version of the game — by breaking it. Technically, Willis — aka “blue scuti” in the gaming world — made it to what gamers call a “kill screen,” a point where the Tetris code glitches, crashing the game. That might not sound like much of a victory to anyone thinking that only high scores count, but it’s a highly coveted achievement in the world of video games, where records involve pushing hardware and software to their limits. And beyond. It’s also a very big deal for players of Tetris, which many had long considered unbeatable. That’s partly because the game doesn’t have a scripted ending; those four-block shapes just keep falling no matter how good you get at stacking them into disappearing rows. Top players continued to find ways to extend their winning streaks by staying in the game to reach higher and higher levels, but in the end, the game beat them all. Until, that is, Willis managed on Dec. 21 to trigger a kill screen on Level 157, which the gaming world takes as a victory over the game — something along the lines of pushing the software past its own limits. The makers of Tetris agree. “Congratulations to ‘blue scuti’ for achieving this extraordinary accomplishment, a feat that defies all preconceived limits of this legendary game,” Tetris CEO Maya Rogers said in a statement. Rogers noted that Tetris will celebrate its 40th anniversary this year and called Willis’ victory a “monumental achievement.” It’s been a very long road. Early on, “the Tetris scene people didn’t even know how to get to these higher levels,” said David Macdonald, a gaming YouTuber who has chronicled the gaming industry for years. “They were just stuck in the 20s and 30s because they just didn’t know techniques to get any further.” Level 29 posed an especially tough roadblock because the blocks began falling more quickly than the in-game controller could respond. Eventually players found ways to make progress, as Macdonald chronicled in his detailed video on Willis victory. In 2011, one got to Level 30 using a technique called “hypertapping,” in which a player could rhythmically vibrate their fingers to move the game controller faster than the game’s built-in speed. That technique took players to level 35 by 2018, after which they hit a wall. The next big thing came in 2020 when a gamer combined a multifinger technique originally used on arcade video games with a finger positioned on the bottom of the controller to push it against another finger on the top. Called “rolling,” this much speedier approach helped one player reach Level 95 in 2022. Then other obstacles arose. Because the original Tetris developers had never counted on players pushing the game’s limits so aggressively, bizarre quirks began to crop up at higher levels. One particularly difficult issue arose with the game’s color palette, which traditionally cycled through 10 easily distinguished patterns. Starting at level 138, though, random color combinations began to appear — some of which made it much harder to distinguish the blocks from the game’s black background. Two particularly devilish patterns — one a dim combination of dark blues and greens later dubbed “Dusk,” the other composed of black, gray and white blocks called “Charcoal” — proved taxing for players. When combined with the strain of increasingly longer games, which could run 40 minutes or more, progress slowed again. It took a Tetris-playing AI program dubbed StackRabbit to break that logjam by helping map out just where players might happen across a glitch resulting in a kill screen, and finally beat the game. StackRabbit, which managed to make it all the way to Level 237 before crashing the game, ran on a modified version of Tetris, so its achievements aren’t strictly comparable to those of human players. And its findings weren’t immediately applicable to the human-played game, either. But its runs clearly demonstrated that game-ending glitches could be triggered by very specific events, such as which block pieces were in play or how many lines a player cleared at once. That let human players take over the task of mapping all possible scenarios that could cause such crashes in the original game. These typically resulted when the game’s decade-old code lost its place and began reading its next instructions from the wrong location, generally resulting in garbage input. A massive effort spurred by StackRabbit’s experience eventually led to the compilation of a large spreadsheet that detailed which game levels and which specific conditions were most likely to lead to a crash. That’s what compelled Willis to make his run for the record. Yet even he appeared shocked when he crashed the game at Level 157. In his livestream video, he appears to hyperventilate before barely gasping “Oh my God” several times, clutching his temples and worrying that he might be passing out. After cupping his hands over his mouth in an apparent attempt to regulate his breathing, he finally exclaims, “I can’t feel my fingers.”