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March 13, 2020
21:55
‘Beyond Blue’ Will Make You Care About Earth’s Oceans
» ‎ Geek.com

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We actually know more about the surface of the moon and Mars than we do our very own oceans. Even in 2020, our knowledge of this strange environment where life originated remains paltry. It’s difficult getting people interested in the ocean, especially since most humans never actually get to experience it. Thankfully, we have video games that can give us a greater appreciation for such an incredible place. In this case, E-Line Media’s Beyond Blue.

For those who may not know, E-Line is an indie game developer. The studio got on many people’s radar thanks to its 2014 title, Never Alone. The atmospheric platformer centered on an Alaskan native and featured many aspects of that culture. It even went so far as to have mini-documentaries that spotlighted what life is like for Alaskan native communities. Never Alone reached over four million gamers worldwide thanks in large part to its reverence for the source material.

It is because of Never Alone that the BBC reached out to E-Line, as CEO and co-founder, Michael Angst, explains.

“We got a call from the BBC who had played Never Alone while they were in the process of making one of their high-end nature series called Blue Planet 2,” says Angst. “They invited us to do a fictional game about the ocean. We met the scientists that helped the BBC make Blue Planet 2 and we also got access to all of the footage shot over the multi-year production for the series. We used that both as reference for the game as well as for creating mini-documentaries, that you unlock while playing the game. That was really the genesis of Beyond Blue.”

Beyond Blue is a narrative adventure game. While the main draw is exploring the deep ocean, players will get pulled in by the emotional journey of its protagonist: Mirai.

“It’s part story, part open exploration,” said Angst. “It’s not exactly an open world but you can swim around and find creatures and collect information on them. You play the game through the eyes of a young female scientist, Mirai, who is supported by two other scientists. It tells the story of what the ocean might be like and what might be important to both scientists and our planet in 10 to 15 years, which is where the game is set.

“The goal is trying to balance exploration and collection with a narrative. We put a lot of work into the art quality. A lot of work into the feel and the movement of the creatures. We also spent a lot of time with scientists trying to have a simple story but one that could get at both the human element as well as some of the science of the ocean.”

One of the scientists is oceanographer Dr. Samantha Joye. Dr. Joye was involved with the “Deep” episode of Blue Planet 2 and led one of the filming expeditions to the Gulf of Mexico. It was through her involvement with the BBC that she met the E-Line folks. Though she had never played a video game before, she was more than eager to work on Beyond Blue.

“I was not familiar with Never Alone so the first thing I did when they contacted me was to play it,” says Dr. Joye. “That was enough to convince me that this style of game had the potential for making a big impact. Not just getting people to play a game but teaching them about the ocean and hopefully inspiring some to become either ocean explorers or ocean advocates. Hopefully, everyone who plays will become an ocean advocate. It’s an opportunity to reach an audience in a very unique way and have a big impact. This game has a lot of potential to change the way people think about and see the deep ocean. It’s been fantastic to be a part of that.”

E-Line, along with Dr. Joye, made sure Beyond Blue was a true representation of the ocean. This includes not only the environment but the animals that inhabit it.

“All the creatures are based on real-world creatures,” says Angst. “We made a significant attempt to get their models and their movement to be very representative of the creatures. The behaviors and the kind of things you study about the creatures are of real interest to scientists. What we’re going for is something that, if a scientist looked at it, would say was very representative. Not just of why a particular creature is important, but why that creature moves and is interesting to people.

“We put a lot of effort into what the creatures represent, why we chose particular creatures and tried to have a diversity of intelligence. We tried to show some relatedness between the creatures. And we tried to show their social and cultural aspects; not just how fast they swim or watching a shark rip things apart all the time.

“I would say it’s a quieter story. A gentler story. It’s a little more about the connectivity between creatures and humans than it is necessarily getting down to the food tree or food web.”

“A lot of my role was making sure the stories were grounded in science and keeping it true to our knowledge base so that everything is foundational and factual and actually correct and we’re not talking out of our rear ends,” says Dr. Joye. “We made sure everything is balanced and reasonable. I think that makes compelling storytelling and gameplay but it also means that what you’re learning are actual environmental lessons that are relevant for today’s world and our future world.”

Beyond Blue takes place 10 to 15 years in the future. Though it is a video game, E-Line resisted the urge to inject fantastical technology into it. However, it did include one piece of tech that is still experimental at best.

“All the technology represented in the game is technology that we have right now,” says Angst. “In most cases, we’re looking at its miniaturization or its utilization in a much less friction-full way. For instance, we have scanning and being able to get lots of different visual elements of a creature. This includes audio elements, chemical signatures, and biological signatures. We have a drone shaped like a manta ray go around the creature and scan in. Every dimension of that sensing technology currently exists in some devices. We just put them all on one drone and have it as a gameplay mechanic.

“I would say the one place we took the biggest leap, from a technological perspective, is where Mirai can take her sub and where she can take her suit. We came up with a suit that has advanced breathing techniques that allow her to go deep down. We hint at some materials that would allow her not to get crushed at extreme depths. It’s based on relatively loose science. This was something we discussed with the scientists; whether to go to these deep places as the diver or go in a sub with a drone camera. They pushed us hard to put the person in the game even though that might be a leap from a technical perspective. Seeing the scale of a human against these creatures, feeling like you’re there physically and witnessing it directly, feeling vulnerable, brought an element to the game that we thought was special.”

“They stayed very true to what we know,” says Dr. Joye. “One thing we didn’t want to do was get into a position where we were speculating or being hyperbolic or over-playing some point. We wanted to make sure everything was actual and real and very firmly grounded and rooted in science. That’s very important because it gives the game a level of credibility and realism that we wanted to capture and provide to the players. For me, that was really important because I want what people learn and take from this to be factually accurate.

“The only thing that was a bit of a stretch was liquid breathing. There were actually trials for that in the ’70s but it didn’t go anywhere. There are problems with it. It’s unlikely but it’s not impossible, I suppose. In the game, it was important for Mirai to be in the system as a scuba diver. We didn’t want to have her in a mini-sub. That’s not really a concession. That was to make it something really different. If I could dive into the deep ocean in some kind of a single bodysuit, I would do it because I think you would get a feel for the system that you couldn’t any other way. So that’s why it was done that way.”

At the time of this writing, humans are damaging the ocean because of our industrious society. This is something that won’t end soon; especially during the time Beyond Blue takes place. Dr. Joye explains how they extrapolated what the oceans will be like in the near future.

“A lot of the thinking around that evolved from what I’ve witnessed myself in the past 15 years. For example, 20 plus years ago when I was doing my Master’s thesis, I worked in the Bahamas on San Salvador island. Back then, the corals were very different than they are now. You’ve had so many bleaching incidents and storm damage–it’s just not the same. It’s not the same system. So you extrapolate that into the future.

“When I started working in the deep ocean 20 years ago you would occasionally come upon some human refuse. Once I came upon a refrigerator. I’ve come upon many lawn chairs or a can or a bottle. Now what you see is plastic.

“A lot of the change over time is based on what we’ve actually witnessed. We’ve seen this transition from A to B. What’s the transition from B to C going to be in the next 15 years? It was based on observations of change in the system that we’ve already seen and assuming it’s not going to get worse but stays on that trajectory. That may not be a safe assumption. It may get worse instead of staying on the same trajectory.”

It’s clear Beyond Blue is going for something different and meaningful. While it is still an enjoyable video game experience, Angst and Boyes hope it touches people on a deeper level and gets them to think more about our oceans.

“The ocean is a wonderful, beautiful, mysterious place that also serves a critical function to our planet,” says Angst. “We want you to feel moved by the personal story and the wonder of it and come away feeling enough emotion that you care a little more about the health of our planet and the ocean.”

“There are butterfly effects that we might not be able to predict right now that are going to come into play down the road,” says Dr. Joye. “I think it makes the player aware of human impacts on this part of the world that we don’t see or think about most of the time. It makes us realize there are problems that need to be recognized, identified, managed, and dealt with. We can make a difference by taking action and doing our part.

“The ocean sustains us. We are all integrally connected to the ocean whether we realize it or not. I think this game makes that connection for the player. I hope it empowers them to get involved and learn more about how they can make a difference for the future sustainability of the oceans. I think it will because it touches a nerve. It is impactful in a way that few types of entertainment are. E-line will live up to their motto ‘games for change’ with this one because I think it will inspire a lot of people to get involved and make a difference and probably create more than a few young explorers in training.”

Beyond Blue will release on Steam, PS4, and Xbox One sometime this year.
15:02
Survive ‘Nioh 2’ With These 10 Helpful Tips
» ‎ Geek.com

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Today sees the release of the highly-anticipated Nioh 2. Team Ninja’s answer to Dark Souls is one of the toughest games of 2020. It is so challenging that it makes FromSoftware’s infamous franchise seem like it’s on easy mode. That’s not hyperbole on my part. Nioh 2 will kick your butt without a hint of mercy or compassion. Given the insane difficulty, this isn’t a game for everyone. Only the most committed (and masochistic) gamers need apply. But no matter how bad-ass you think you are, you are not ready for the horrors in store for you.

To help ease you into Nioh 2, we’ve listed 10 tips every beginner should know. Note that this knowledge won’t help you master the game overnight. You’ll still need practice and patience to persevere. With that said, these tips will give you an edge and keep you (mostly) alive during the early hours.
Choose your weapons wisely

Nioh 2 features a wide variety of weapons. Every weapon controls and feels different, making it hard to choose the right one for you. If you’re brand-new to the series, it’s best to go with a weapon like an ax that hits hard and a weapon like a katana or a dagger for faster (albeit weaker) hits. You can always go to the training ground (covered below) to see which weapons suit your playstyle best.
Train, train, train
There is an almost overwhelming amount of combat techniques to use, even from the beginning. Sure, you can learn the basics by continuously dying. Or you can train somewhere safe. The training ground is an option under Dojo (selectable from the starting point on the world map). Here, you can try out all the moves you’ve unlocked against a myriad of foes. This is also an ideal spot for mastering your stances and demonic abilities. Don’t be afraid to visit the training ground often to keep your skills sharp.
Stand your ground
Your character can assume three different stances. A low stance facilitates quick attacks and fast dodging. It is perfect for dispatching small enemies and for quickly dodging attacks. Mid stance is the one you’ll use most of the time. It works great against most enemies and provides a perfect balance between offense and defense. Lastly, high stance utilizes hard attacks that break past enemy Ki. This stance provides little defense and a missed attack can leave you wide open. Mastering the different stances is essential.
Manage your Ki
Performing most actions (attacking, dodging, running) depletes Ki. If you’re not careful, you’ll find yourself winded during the most inopportune moment. Because of that, you’ll want to be mindful of your Ki at all times.

White light leaks out of your character whenever you attack. Pressing R1 concentrates this energy, thus recovering your Ki via a Ki Pulse. You’ve successfully performed a Ki Pulse when a circle of light bursts from you. It’s possible to gain a significant amount of Ki depending on your timing. I don’t need to tell you how important it is to maintain a healthy amount of Ki, especially during boss fights.

Performing a Ki Pulse isn’t always easy. A great alternative is the Running Water skill found in the Samurai branch of the skill tree. Instead of performing a pulse by pressing R1, you do so by dodging. Each weapon stance has its own version of Running Water, so be sure to snatch them all. Using this technique along with the normal Ki Pulse ensures you never run out of Ki at the wrong time.
Yokai abilities and Soul Cores

New to Nioh 2 are Yokai abilities. Releasing a Yokai Burst can stop and counter enemies surrounded by a red aura. The trick is performing a burst just as the enemy strikes. If performed successfully, you’ll deal massive damage and leave your foe open to continued attacks. You get three Yokai (in the form of spirit animals) from the jump and each has its own Yokai Burst window. Try them all out and see which one you like best.

Stronger foes drop Soul Cores, which you can use to perform special Yokai attacks. Soul Core attacks correspond to the enemy that drops them. For example, an ape-like creature you fight early on gives you the ability to fling a spear at enemies. Upon getting a Soul Core, it’s best to get to the nearest shrine to purify it. Should you die in transit, you’ll lose the Soul Core unless you’re able to retrieve your Guardian Grave. You can fuse Soul Cores of the same type to make them stronger. Try to collect as many cores as you can and experiment with their abilities.
The Dark Realm
Early in the game, you’ll find an area enveloped in Yokai energy. This Dark Realm presents a unique challenge for the player. For starters, one’s stamina regeneration is severely hampered. Enemies are tougher, and you cannot access any Shrines within. It is also possible for yokai to drag you into the Dark Realm.

The only way to escape the Dark Realm is defeating the yokai that dragged you in or the one who rules the area. If you see a yokai surrounded by red flowers, that’s your target. But as I mentioned before, enemies here are no push-overs. Thankfully, you can use your own yokai abilities much more efficiently here. This serves as a way to even the odds against the deadlier foes you’ll encounter.
Visit Shrines

Shrines are safe havens from the hellish world around you. They provide a number of useful functions, including replenishing your items, restoring your health, and acting as a respawn point. You can also use amrita (obtained from killing enemies) at Shrines to level up your character’s core attributes, receive blessings from Kodama spirits, and summon players to help you. The main drawback of using Shrines is that doing so resurrects all regular enemies you’ve defeated. This isn’t a bad thing, as we’ll see in the next tip.
Grind on
You will die and die often. Thankfully, you can use the game’s own systems to your advantage. Specifically, the aforementioned Shrines.

Since enemies return whenever you use a Shrine, you can repeatedly fight them and grind for amrita. Do this long enough and you’ll amass plenty of amrita for leveling. While this may sound like cheating, it’s a perfectly viable option to help you move forward to the next Shrine and grind spot. Yes, fighting the same foes over and over again can get tiresome, but the results speak for themselves. Want to stay alive longer? Get used to grinding.
Skill tree
Nioh 2 features a robust skill tree. At a glance, it is easy to get overwhelmed by all the options available. The best approach is to decide what kind of character you want to build early on. Do you want to face foes with katanas and spears or do you want to attack using deadly magic? The choice is yours. You’ll eventually get to completely respec your character if you feel you’ve gone down the wrong path. This is great, but don’t become over-reliant on respec-ing since it costs 10,000 gold each time. You’ll gain a lot of experience points, especially if you level grind early on. If you do things correctly, you’ll have created a truly formidable demon slayer.
Share the suffering
You don’t have to face the terrors before you alone. You can call for help two different ways. One is by resurrecting NPC allies at blue Benevolent Graves. Using ochoko cups, you can also call in up to two other players at Shrines. The NPC mostly serves as a distraction that keeps enemies from focusing all their aggression on you. Player-controlled characters are much more useful since they’re actual people. Allies remain at your side until either you or they die.

Bloody Graves are the opposite of Benevolent Graves. By interacting with these red markers, you’ll summon a formidable opponent. What’s the advantage of taking on a spirit that’s potentially harder than a boss? The sweet loot they drop. Stronger weapons and better armor are always good to have. With that said, it’s best to tread carefully when interacting with Bloody Graves. After all, you may lose hours of hard work if you fall in battle.
13:35
Senators Want to Ban TikTok From All Government Devices
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(via TikTok)
China-owned TikTok has taken the world by storm, but not everyone admires the app.

U.S. Sens. Josh Hawley (R-Mo.) and Rick Scott (R-Fla.) this week introduced legislation banning all federal employees from using TikTok on government devices.

Due, they said, to cybersecurity concerns and possible spying by the Chinese government.

“TikTok is owned by a Chinese company that includes Chinese Community Party members on its board, and it is required by law to share user data with Beijing,” according to Hawley.

“The company even admitted it collects user data while their app is running in the background,” including shared messages and pictures, keystrokes, and location data, he said in a statement.

If passed, the bill would prohibit certain individuals from downloading or using TikTok on any device issued by the United States or a government corporation.

(Investigations, cybersecurity research activities, enforcement and disciplinary actions, or intelligence activities are exempt.)

“The use of apps like TikTok by federal employees on government devices is a risk to our networks and a threat to our national security,” Scott said.

“We should all be very concerned about the threat of Communist China,” he continued, “and I hope my colleagues will join me to implement this ban immediately and protect our national security.”

The Transportation Security Administration reportedly forbid employees from using TikTok to create social media posts.

Citing “concerns for the security of a federal agency” and “potentially the flying public,” Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) last month called out the TSA for still operating the social network.

Schumer previously flagged TikTok’s security risks—namely its collection and handling of user data—in an October letter to the intelligence community. The Department of Defence, State Department, and Department of Homeland Security responded by barring the app from government devices.

“As many of our federal agencies have already recognized,” Hawley pointed out, “TikTok is a major security risk to the United States, and it has no place on government devices.”

TikTok did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

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12:51
ACLU Sues For Government Facial Recognition Records
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(via geralt/Pixabay)
The American Civil Liberties Union and New York Civil Liberties Union are challenging federal law enforcement’s use of facial recognition surveillance tech.

A lawsuit was filed Thursday against the U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS), Customs and Border Protection (CBP), Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), and Transportation Security Administration (TSA).

The agencies reportedly failed to comply with requests filed under the Freedom of Information Act.

So the ACLU is asking a federal court to order each department to turn over records concerning facial surveillance and biometric data.

“Unlike other ways of verifying a person’s identity, face recognition technology can enable persistent government surveillance on a massive scale,” Ashley Gorski, staff attorney with the ACLU’s National Security Project, said in a statement.

As of June 2019, CBP scanned the mugs of more than 20 million travelers entering and exiting the United States, according to an ACLU blog post. Several major airlines and the TSA have also partnered with Border Protection on face surveillance initiatives.

“The public has a right to know when, where, and how the government is using face recognition,” she continued. “And what safeguards, if any, are in place to protect our rights.”

The lawsuit is part of the ACLU’s ongoing efforts to bring facial surveillance technology under democratic control.

A number of cities and municipalities across the country have already passed or are considering bans on law enforcement’s use of face recognition software, according to the nonprofit.

“That we even need to go to court to pry out this information further demonstrates why we should be wary of weak industry proposals and why lawmakers urgently need to halt … use of this technology,” Gorski said. “There can be no meaningful oversight or accountability with such excessive, undemocratic secrecy.”

CBP, ICE, and TSA declined to comment on the pending litigation; Homeland Security did not immediately respond to Geek’s request for comment.

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11:53
ExoMars Rover Launch Delayed Until 2022 For More Testing
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An artist's impression of the ExoMars rover on the surface of Mars (via European Space Agency)
Europe and Russia’s second ExoMars mission to study the Red Planet has been delayed until 2022.

A joint project team concluded that additional testing is needed to ensure the spacecraft is fit for its Mars adventure.

“We have made a difficult but well-weighed decision to postpone the launch,” Roscosmos Space Corporation Director General Dmitry Rogozin said in a statement.

“It is driven primarily by the need to maximize the robustness of all ExoMars systems,” he said. “As well as force majeure circumstances related to exacerbation of the epidemiological situation in Europe which have left our experts practically no possibility to proceed with travels to partner industries.”

In other words, COVID-19 has scuppered their plans.

Still, much progress has been made, including hardware integration, instrument testing, and system qualification.

“I am confident that the steps that we and our European colleagues are taking to ensure mission success will be justified and will unquestionably bring solely positive results for the mission implementation,” Rogozin said.

The ExoMars rover, named after female DNA pioneer Rosalind Franklin, was scheduled to launch this July. A new timeline places its send off between August and October 2020.

There are only two relatively short windows (10 days each) every two years during which Mars can be reached from Earth.

“We want to make ourselves 100 percent sure of a successful mission,” according to European Space Agency Director General Jan Wörner.

“We are very much satisfied [with] the work that has gone into making a unique project a reality,” he continued, “and we have a solid body of knowledge to complete the remaining work as quickly as possible.”

The project’s primary goal is to search for signs of past life on Mars and better understand the history of water on the planet.

ExoMars will be the first mission to search for signs of life at depths up to 6.5 feet below the Martian surface—where biological signatures may be well preserved.

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11:15
LEGO, Nintendo Bring Super Mario to Life in Brick-Building Game
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LEGO Group and Nintendo partner to take legendary brick-building to a new level (via LEGO/Nintendo)
Nintendo and LEGO go together like Mario and Luigi.

So it’s no surprise that the two mega makers have joined forces to create an IRL take on the classic Super Mario platform adventure.

Neither a video game nor a traditional brick-based set, the upcoming LEGO Super Mario features an interactive plumber who races against the clock, collects coins, and faces big bads.

“We are very excited to bring Mario into the physical world through interactive and social LEGO play,” according to Julia Goldin, chief marketing officer and executive vice president of the LEGO Group.

A match made in a child’s imagination, it’s a wonder the companies haven’t teamed up before.

“With this experience we will help millions of kids with love for Mario to engage and play in a completely new way, where they are in control of creating and playing games with their favorite character,” Goldin said.

“By seamlessly incorporating the latest digital technology,” she continued, “LEGO Super Mario is a highly social, interactive, and collaborative experience for kids.”

The fact that LEGO is marketing this product primarily to children is their first mistake: I know a number of grown adults who would happily spend afternoons constructing an IRL Mario landscape, crushing Goombas, and avoiding fire pits.

“I have always liked LEGO products and how they help children use their imagination to play,” Takashi Tezuka, executive officer and game producer at Nintendo, said in a statement.

“The new product we created together with the LEGO Group seeks to combine two different styles of play,” he continued. “One where you freely build the world of Mario and the other where you play with Mario in the very world that you have created.”

LEGO Super Mario is expected to launch later this year. There is no word yet on pricing.

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March 12, 2020
17:31
‘Star Trek: Picard’ Season 1 Episode 8 Recap: The Collective Returns
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Jeri Ryan as Seven of Nine - Photo Cr: Matt Kennedy/CBS
It’s amazing how a single cameo can make Star Trek: Picard feel like The Next Generation never ended. After Riker’s fantastic appearance last week, all I want is to watch more Star Trek. This episode is a stark contrast to last week’s idyllic setting though. As great as Riker’s retirement looks, things aren’t so peaceful elsewhere on the show. Cornered in the Queen cell, Elnor put out a distress call to Seven of Nine. She arrives just in time too. As a squad of Romulan soldiers momentarily blind him before attacking, it looks like a fight he might lose. Just before the soldiers kill Elnor, Seven of Nine makes her grand entrance, taking them all down. How did this character get so much cooler between Voyager and now? Not that I’m complaining.

Turns out that’s nothing compared to what comes later. As they head into the Queen cell, Seven of Nine steals the Borg cube. Which, as a former Borg, she’s able to do. As soon as she does that, the cube starts repairing itself, much to the dismay of Narissa. What Seven has to do next is a little dicier. She finds that the cube is full of Borg who haven’t been revived yet. They’ve been cut off from the collective, but haven’t regained their consciousness. She could use them to create her own localized collective, but she’s afraid she wouldn’t want to let them go afterwards. That she would become the new Borg Queen. Narissa forces her hand though, when she starts slaughtering XBs. Seven plugs into the Borg cube and awakens all the remaining Borg. I have to say, watching her eyes go black and green and hearing “We are the Borg” was actually scary.

Evan Evagora as Elnor; Jeri Ryan as Seven of Nine – Photo Cr: Matt Kennedy/CBS

Narissa ejects most of the newly awakened Borg into space, but it looks like she didn’t account for all of them. As the Romulans prepare to leave the cube and head to Soji’s home planet, the remaining Borg systematically take out her guards. Narissa manages to phaser a few of them, but they overwelm her and tear her apart. It looks like something out of a zombie movie. I guess that’s what happens when Seven’s angry. There’s a brief moment where we’re not sure if Seven will actually give up the power. Elnor even thinks she’ll assimilate him. The Borg says that Annika still has work to do and releases her. I like that bit of tension, and I wish it lasted longer. Star Trek is at its most interesting when it’s about someone struggling with great power. There’s a little bit of that here, but it’s solved too quickly. Oh well, I guess the episode had enough going on as it is.

Meanwhile, back on the ship, Raffi’s figured out most of what was going on with Jurati. That she killed Bruce Maddox and put herself in a coma to destroy the tracker inside her. Unfortunately, Raffi thinks that means Jurati’s a Romulan spy. I mean, that’s what she’s being used as, but she doesn’t know that. It’s all too much for Rios, who freaks out seeing Soji aboard his ship. Picard asks for a secure channel to Starfleet and a course to Deep Space 12. He needs a squadron with him if he’s going up against the Tal Shiar. Rios says he’ll take them to DS12, but that’s as far as he goes. He’s quitting.

Santiago Cabrera as Cristobal Rios; Isa Briones as Soji; Michelle Hurd as Raffi – Photo Cr: Matt Kennedy/CBS

This sends Raffi on a ship-wide search to find out what exactly is going on with Rios. He locked himself in his quarters and left his ship’s AIs in charge of everything. They’re all modeled after Rios, but each with their own ridiculous accent and personality. They also have random bits of memory deleted. Like Rios was trying to forget something. He did a sloppy job though, as each one remembers a little piece of something. Still not enough to tell Raffi everything, but enough that she can start to put it together. It’s a fun, comedic bit in the middle of the episode, and as soon as it’s over we see why it was there. The show was preparing us for the infodump to follow.

Yes, we’re about to go to Soji’s homeworld next week, so Picard realized it needed to get us all up to speed now. It turns out the incident that ended in Rios’ discharge from Starfleet involved two synthetics. One of whom looked exactly like Soji. They were from the planet Maddox escaped to after the ban. Rios’ captain welcomed them in, but after a call from Commodore Oh, killed them both and then himself. That’s what drove Rios into depression.

Santiago Cabrera as Crist–bal Rios; Michelle Hurd as Raffi; Sir Patrick Stewart as Jean-Luc Picard; Alison Pill as Agnes Jurati; Isa Briones as Soji – Photo Cr: Trae Patton/CBS

From there, the rest of the crew pieces together the whole story behind the Synth ban. The Tal Shiar found a warning that Synth life would eventually create a destroyer. An android that surpassed human ability. That android would bring about the destruction of their world. The Tal Shair took that warning seriously, forming the Zhat Vash to hunt down synthetic life. To do that, a half-Vulcan, half-Romulan named Oh infiltrated Starfleet. Then, they carried out the attack on Mars to force Starfleet to outlaw all synthetic life. The attack was a Romulan opperation. I loved this scene. Yes, it was all people sitting around vomiting exposition, but it was done well. People sitting around monologuing at one another is compelling TV when the actors are all this good. Picard even gets in some words of wisdom as he always does. One single person can’t possibly be the destroyer. The true destroyer is fear. Yeah, that’s the kind of philosophizing I expect from the Captain of the Enterprise-D.

This episode wasn’t the action-packed thriller I was expecting after last week’s trip to Riker’s place. It didn’t need to be, though. Picard finally answered questions we’ve had since episode one. And it found a fun, engrossing way to do it. The show has a fantastic cast, and they all got to flex their muscles here. I didn’t realize it, but this is what I was hoping for from Star Trek: Picard from the beginning: A bunch of great actors doing their job very well. Next week, we head to Soji’s home planet. After their conversation, Soji decides she needs to warn the people there, and they don’t have time to wait around DS12 for a squadron to escort them. That’s going to make the mission much more dangerous, but where would the fun be if it wasn’t?

Star Trek: Picard streams Thursdays on CBS All Access.

Previously on Star Trek: Picard:
16:21
Tom Hanks, Rita Wilson Test Positive For COVID-19
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Tom Hanks and Rita Wilson, at the 26th Annual Screen Actors Guild Awards in January 2020 (via David Fisher/Shutterstock)
America’s sweethearts Tom Hanks and Rita Wilson tested positive for coronavirus.

The actor announced their diagnoses via Instagram, posting an image of a discarded glove in a hazmat bin (continuing his long-running motif of abandoned accessories).

Writing from Australia, where Hanks is filming Baz Luhrmann’s Elvis Presley movie, he said the pair “felt a bit tired, like we had colds, and some body aches.”

“Rita had some chills that came and went. Slight fevers, too,” the photo caption said. “To play things right, as is needed in the world right now, we were tested for the coronavirus, and were found to be positive.

“Well, now. What to do next? The medical officials have protocols that must be followed. We Hanks will be tested, observed, and isolated for as long as public health and safety requires,” he continued. “Not much more to it than a one-day-at-a-time approach, no?”

Shooting for Luhrmann’s as-yet-unnamed biopic began early this year, with Hanks as Col. Tom Parker, the iconic manager of Elvis Presley, played by Austin Butler.

In a statement to The Hollywood Reporter, a Warner Bros. spokesperson confirmed preproduction of the film has been halted since a “company member … who tested positive for COVID-19 is currently receiving treatment.”

Wilson, meanwhile, has been performing songs from her new album “Halfway to Home” across Australia; she sang at Brisbane’s Emporium Hotel on March 5, and made her Sydney Opera House debut over the weekend.

She previously postponed a series of concerts with Sugarland’s Kristian Bush on U.S. military bases in South Korea.

Don’t worry, though: Hanks and Wilson are “not trippin'” about this whole ordeal.

Son Chet Hanks took to social media on Wednesday to confirm the news and thank his followers for their concern.

“Yeah, it’s true my parents got coronavirus. Crazy,” a shirtless Chet said in his video message. “I just got off the phone with them. They both are fine. They’re not even that sick. They’re not worried about it. They’re not trippin’, but they’re going through the necessary health precautions, obviously.

Tom Hanks’ eldest son, Colin, also tweeted an update this week.

[https:]] pic.twitter.com/MNgSv5J702

— Colin Hanks (@ColinHanks) March 12, 2020

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15:56
‘Nancy Drew’ Season 1 Episode 16 Recap: Just Took a DNA Test
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Kennedy McMann as Nancy and Riley Smith as Ryan -- Photo: The CW
On an especially scary night in the real world, what better time could there be for a Nancy Drew ghost story? It’s Nancy’s dad’s hearing today, which of course is the perfect time for an evil spirit to send her an omen. For now, she has to ignore that and search for evidence exonerating her dad. Her lab tech friend is in town to examine Lucy’s bones, and Nancy herself is going through Lucy’s old case files. She calls Lucy for help with an exasperated plea. Lucy obliges and points her toward’s the pantry. Nancy called on a jump scare for help. It’s a nice bit of horror-comedy to begin the episode. And hey, it leads to an intriguing new clue. The murder weapon was one of her mom’s favorite steak knives. That means that foreign female DNA found with Lucy’s remains could be Nancy’s mother’s.

With that, Nancy joins the investigation at The Claw. They don’t get much time to examine the bones, though. The cops show up with a warrant to investigate the place. Ace and the lab tech try to escape out the back, but there are cop cars there too. They have to hide in the walk-in. No chance the cops will want to search that, right? This episode doesn’t go all the way into farce, but there are definitely elements there. The show does it well. Maybe it should add a little comedy every once in a while. The lighter tone of these scenes adds a welcome balance to Nancy’s murder mystery.

Alex Saxon as Ace, Maddison Jaizani as Bess and Kennedy McMann as Nancy — Photo: The CW

Speaking of, Nancy figures out that Ryan didn’t write the last email sent to Lucy. Ryan normally used single spaces after periods, while that email used double spaces. You know, like an old person would do. Nancy finds Ryan, asking him to help her figure out what really happened that night. She doesn’t think he killed Lucy anymore, but his dad’s not looking so clean. Ryan reveals their usual meeting spot was actually an ice cream shop. They check it out, and find that nothing’s changed in 20 years. Including the girl working the counter. She remembers Lucy coming there on the day she died. She had won Sea Queen, but looked depressed. She kept writing in a journal, and looking for someone. When she left, a car started tailing her. Ryan’s dad’s car.

So this is the part of the murder mystery where every clue just leads Nancy to someone else, who leads her to someone else. Ryan’s dad says he just gave Lucy a ride home and told her to stay away from his son. At her home, he saw Karen. The same one now in jail for trying to kill Ryan. Karen was the last person to see Lucy alive. Nancy questions Karen, who says she switched the ballot boxes to get Lucy elected Sea Queen. She thought it would cheer her up, but it only started rumors that Lucy had slept her way to winning. This town has always had a problem with slut shaming, it seems. Karen is the only person who actually gives Nancy a useful piece of evidence. When she arrived home, she had her journal with her. She left home without it, but no one could ever find it.

Tunji Kasim as Nick, Scott Wolf as Carson Drew, Alex Saxon as Ace and Maddison Jaizani as Bess — Photo: The CW

Nancy and Ryan search Lucy’s old house, and the ghost immediately gets more hostile. For some reason, she really doesn’t want Nancy finding her journal. Nancy persists anyway, despite some real scary aggressive ghost business happening inside the house. Ryan wants to leave after Lucy screams and throws a curtain at them, but Nancy searches further in. She finds a hole in the wall, covered up by wallpaper. Lucy’s journal is inside. She reads the final entry and at once has the evidence to exonerate her dad and knows why Lucy didn’t want her finding it. She runs to the courtroom to read the evidence at her dad’s trial. Lucy had stolen the knife from the Drews’ house and went to the cliff to kill herself.

Carson Drew is exonerated, but the mystery isn’t over yet. Lucy is still haunting Nancy and she doesn’t know why. That is until her DNA test gets back. The show doesn’t tell us the results just yet. Instead, Nancy confronts her dad to get the full story. It turns out the night of the Sea Queen Festival, he and his wife got a desperate call from Lucy. They met her at the cliff to find that she was giving birth. The state of her bones indicated a recent childbirth as well. That’s why Lucy wanted Nancy to find them. Carson used the steak knife to cut the umbilical cord, and Lucy asked them to make sure their baby was taken care of. Then, as they took the baby, they turned their backs for a second, and Lucy went over the cliff. Whether she slipped or jumped, they don’t know. And yes, by now, you’ve definitely figured out who that baby was. Nancy is the daughter of Ryan Hudson and Lucy Sable.

Leah Lewis as George and Tunji Kasim as Nick — Photo: Kailey Schwerman/The CW

So that’s a big bombshell to leave us with for the next three weeks. The show’s two biggest mysteries are solved, and there’s still just under a quarter of a season left to go. Just because the mystery’s solved doesn’t mean the story’s over. What’s Ryan going to do when he finds out he has a daughter? And that Nancy’s her? Then there’s the new detective taking charge of the Horseshoe Bay police department. He’s especially suspicious of the crew at the Claw now that he’s found a piece of skull in the kitchen. I’m guessing he’s not going to buy the explanation of “An evil spirit gave it to us.” And of course, there’s Nick and George. After an episode of bickering and nervous sexual tension, they finally kissed. They’re adorable together and I love them. They’re part of what makes Nancy Drew work so well. The show combines a good mystery with the most addictive ingredients of trashy teen drama. There’s no more mystery (for now) but I’m hooked nonetheless. I need to see what happens in three weeks.

Nancy Drew airs Wednesdays at 9 p.m. on The CW.

Previously on Nancy Drew:
15:35
Scientists Discover Smallest-Ever Dinosaur Preserved in Amber
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Close up of Oculudentavis in Amber (via Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County)
Someone call Guinness: The world’s smallest dinosaur has been found preserved in Burmese amber from Myanmar.

Trapped around 99 million years ago, the delicate skull—tinier even than the smallest living bird—belongs to a new species, Oculudentavis khaungraae, or “eye-tooth-bird.”

Nicknamed “The Cretaceous Terror of Insects,” Oculudentavis refers to the creature’s unusual features: large eyes and loads of teeth, suggesting that despite its size, the bird was a diurnal predator.

“Animals that become very small have to deal with specific problems, like how to fit all sensory organs into a very small head, or how to maintain body heat,” according to lead study author Jingmai O’Connor.

This process, called miniaturization, commonly occurs in isolated environments, most famously islands—like the one this 99-million-year-old Burmese amber is thought to have come from.

Unfortunately, the new specimen consists of only a skull, making it difficult to understand how Oculudentavis is related to other animals. Some features are similar to dinosaurs, while others are more like advanced birds.

“It’s the weirdest fossil I’ve ever been lucky enough to study,” O’Connor, a senior professor with the Chinese Academy of Sciences and research associate at LA’s Natural History Museum (NHM), said in a statement. “I just love how natural selection ends up producing such bizarre forms.

“We are also super lucky this fossil survived to be discovered 99 million years later,” she continued. “Just goes to show the extraordinary circumstances that all need to be just right for fossils to make it into human hands.”

Skull reconstruction of Oculudentavis (via Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County)

Eight specimens of ancient dinosaur birds were previously found in amber, all smaller than traditional fossils preserved in rock.

The petrified tree resin is a unique preservational mode, capturing otherwise unfossilizable parts of ecosystems for discovery centuries later.

“This discovery highlights how ancient amber has the ability to provide information about organisms that are otherwise absent in the fossil record,” Luis Chiappe, senior vice president of research and collections at NHM, explained. “This is particularly the case for tiny animals that lived in trees.”

Tiny animals like Oculudentavis khaungraae, whose full name honors Khaung Ra, who donated the specimen to the Hupoge Amber Museum in China.

A paper describing the hummingbird-sized dinosaur was published this week in the journal Nature.

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14:30
‘Riverdale’ Season 4 Episode 16 Recap: Just One More Question
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Cole Sprouse as Jughead Jones -- Photo:Bettina Strauss/The CW
Here it is. Riverdale decided to answer the season’s biggest mysteries this week to make way for next month’s big musical episode. As we learned last week, Jughead is actually alive, which means the show has a lot of explaining to do. And that’s exactly what it does. This episode opens with a lengthy bit of narration from Jughead, explaining who knew what and when. It turns out Jellybean figured it out almost immediately, and Betty told FP just before organizing the search party. Hermosa figured out that the story wasn’t as cut and dry as it seemed, but thought Betty and Veronica killed Jughead so they could be together. She’s wrong of course, but I would be so here for that story. Is there a comic or fanfic where that happens? I need to see it now.

As Jughead wraps up his explanation, the show can’t help but give us one final tease. Just as he’s about to tell us what Hermosa dug up on Donna at the end of last week’s episode, Betty interrupts him. I guess reveals like that need to happen later in the episode. For now, Jughead and Betty need to lay it all out for the Stonewall kids. They interrupt a discussion on Crime and Punishment, which even Jughead points out is a little on the nose. Betty locks the door and Jughead goes over everything he’s learned this entire season. We got ourselves a bottle episode, kids. At least for the first two thirds.

Doralyn Mui as Joan Berkeley, Cole Sprouse as Jughead Jones and Lili Reinhart as Betty Cooper — Photo:Bettina Strauss/The CW

Jughead begins with the events of Halloween, when he was drugged, put in a coffin and returned to find Moose gone. It turns out Mr. Chipping was responsible for Moose’s fast exit. Chipping recruited Moose to the school to play football. Then, around Halloween, Chipping pushed Moose to join the Army. Jughead figures out Chipping was saving Moose from murder. From there, Jughead moves onto Chipping’s suicide. It turns out it wasn’t, as Jughead originally thought, pressure from DuPont to keep the origin of the Baxter Brothers books a secret. Nor was it Donna’s story about an affair. It was guilt. As Betty points out the Stonewall Four all disappeared at the same time that a new ghostwriter took over the Baxter Brothers series. The challenge each time was to devise a perfect murder. Jughead realized that really meant committing the perfect murder. Chipping killed someone to get the contract. Though he’d saved Moose from becoming the next victim, the guilt still got to him.

Betty and Jughead continue to explain the events directly after his apparent death. It fills in some, but not all the gaps. The three friends all performed CPR on Jughead, bringing him back to life. He requested no hospital, which is what prompted Betty to ask for Charles’ help. After that, he spent three days in an FBI hospital, unconscious. The cleaning of the scene and clothes-burning was in case Jughead didn’t make it. Alright, I can mostly wrap my head around this explanation, it doesn’t fix every inconsistency. Betty’s memory hypnosis and her controlling Archie and Veronica’s actions don’t have any motivation behind them. Now, it’s clear she just did those things because the story required her to.

Sarah Desjardins as Donna Sweet, Cole Sprouse as Jughead Jones and Malcolm Stewart as Francis Dupont — Photo:Bettina Strauss/The CW

Finally, Jughead starts wrapping up, and brings everything back to Mr. DuPont. Not only did he orchestrate (though not technically commit) the murders of four Stonewall students, he also murdered the other members of his original writer’s group. They all knew the Baxter Brothers series was stolen. They were going to expose DuPont, but they all died in convenient accidents. That’s when FP, Charles and Jughead’s grandfather all show up. It turns out when Forsythe the First walked out on his family, he did it because he knew DuPont was coming for him. He spent as much time as he could tracking down evidence against DuPont. And he found it. Or at least enough of it for Charles to make an arrest. He doesn’t get to though, because DuPont throws himself out the window in a suicide that mirror’s Mr. Chippings. We got some serious fireworks this week.

After that, it’s just a matter of sorting out who did what. Charles tries everything he can to dig up some dirt on Donna, but nothing sticks. Even though Donna was manipulating Joan, she has diplomatic immunity. The FBI has no leverage as long as she leaves the country and doesn’t come back. Charles offers to drop Brett’s charges of recording illegal sex tapes of students and only keep the attempted murder charge if he turns over all of his tapes. He threatens to release Betty and Jughead’s tape if he doesn’t get a sweeter deal. Charles leaves the room, and lets FP and Jughead beat some sense into him with brass knuckles. It’s been a while since we saw this side of Jughead. I’ve missed it.

Skeet Ulrich as FP Jones and Lili Reinhart as Betty Cooper — Photo:Bettina Strauss/The CW

Oddly enough though, there isn’t enough to drag Donna into an arrest yet. And for some reason, the dirt Hermosa dug up on her didn’t come into play in Jughead’s presentation. Turns out Betty was saving it. She confronts Donna as she’s packing up to head to a different school. The publishing company turned the Baxter Brothers books over to her, and they’re relaunching them as a new Tracy True series. Betty reveals what Hermosa found. Donna’s grandmother was one of the women in DuPont’s writing group, and he murdered her. Betty figures Donna planned all of this, including Jughead’s perfect murder, to take control of the Baxter Brothers series and ruin DuPont. Betty’s close, but not quite. Donna, with nothing to hide now, tells Betty that her grandmother invented Tracy True, which DuPont also stole. She didn’t want revenge. She wanted her grandmother’s creation back.

It’s hard not to feel like the mystery kind of petered out at the end there. We got a big splashy moment with DuPont’s suicide, but we don’t get the catharsis of seeing people pay for Jughead’s death. Betty just offers Donna an ultimatum: Abandon the Baxter Brothers/Tracy True contract or Betty will make Hermosa’s findings public. That will tie Donna back to Jughead’s attempted murder and give the cops a motive. That’s all the resolution we get for now. It feels a bit anticlimactic. This is what the entire season built up to and it ends with two people talking about a revelation that, compared to everything Riverdale’s done before, isn’t all that shocking. I guess it’s important to remember that the season isn’t over. There’s plenty of chances for this all to come back. And we still haven’t figured out what happened to Jonathan.

Lili Reinhart as Betty Cooper, Camila Mendes as Veronica Lodge and KJ Apa as Archie Andrews — Photo:Bettina Strauss/The CW

The mystery of Jughead’s murder is solved though, and despite the resolution feeling half done, the episode itself was a lot of fun. Cole Sprouse hams up Jughead’s explanation so well, and the writing of it all is paced so perfectly, that I was glued to the screen the entire time. I couldn’t wait for every commercial break to be over so I could learn what else Jughead and Betty had figured out. It’s a fun way to end a mystery, even if it didn’t totally stick the landing.

Riverdale is off for the next three weeks, which means this is my final Riverdale recap. I won’t be able to see the rest of the season through here on Geek. I’ll definitely be watching, though. After Archie, Jughead, Betty and Veronica all vowed to graduate together, Kevin forced them all to sign up for his variety show. That’s right, when Riverdale comes back in April, we’re going to get the now-annual musical episode. This year, it’s Hedwig and the Angry Inch. Oh boy. If last year’s Heathers is any indication this is going to be a glorious trainwreck. And I’ll be able to enjoy it while drinking. Heavily.

Riverdale airs Wednesdays at 8 p.m. on The CW.

Previously on Riverdale:
13:45
It Rains Iron On Only One Side of This Exoplanet
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This illustration shows a night-side view of the exoplanet WASP-76b (via ESO/M. Kornmesser)
Even the sturdiest umbrella wouldn’t withstand the rain on exoplanet WASP-76b.

Researchers using the European Southern Observatory’s Very Large Telescope (VLT) have observed an extreme world where it appears to bucket down iron.

“One could say that this planet gets rainy in the evening, except it rains iron,” lead study author David Ehrenreich, a professor at the University of Geneva, said in a statement.

The phenomenon, described in a paper published this week by the journal Nature, occurs because the planet, known as WASP-76b, only ever shows one face—the “day side”—to its parent star. The opposite “night side” remains in perpetual darkness.

Located some 640 light-years away in the constellation Pisces, the giant’s ultra-hot day side reaches temperatures above 4,350 °F—so hot that molecules separate into atoms and metals like iron evaporate into the atmosphere.

This comic-book-style illustration by Swiss graphic novelist Frederik Peeters shows a close-up view of the evening border of the exoplanet WASP-76b (via Frederik Peeters)

“A fraction of this iron is injected into the night side owing to the planet’s rotation and atmospheric winds,” astrophysicist Maria Rosa Zapatero Osorio, chair of the ESPRESSO science team, explained. “There, the iron encounters much cooler environments, condenses, and rains down.”

WASP-76b also has distinct day-night chemistry, according to the study.

Employing the new ESPRESSO instrument on ESO’s VLT in the Chilean Atacama Desert, astronomers identified chemical variations for the first time on an ultra-hot gas giant.

Specifically, they detected a strong signature of iron vapor at the evening border that separates the planet’s two hemispheres.

“Surprisingly, however, we do not see the iron vapor in the morning,” Ehrenreich said, likely because “it is raining iron on the night side of this extreme exoplanet.”

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12:41
WHO Officially Delcares COVID-19 a Pandemic
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COVID-19 has been officially declared a pandemic (via Alexandra_Koch/Pixabay)
The World Health Organization has officially declared COVID-19 a pandemic.

To date, nearly 125,000 coronavirus cases have been reported from 118 countries; more than 4,000 people have lost their lives to the infectious disease.

“We are deeply concerned both by the alarming levels of spread and severity, and by the alarming levels of inaction,” WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said on Wednesday.

“We have therefore made the assessment that COVID-19 can be characterized as a pandemic,” he announced.

The term, which refers to a disease epidemic that has spread across a large region (think Bubonic Plague, smallpox, tuberculosis, HIV/AIDS), is not to be thrown around carelessly.

“It is a word that, if misused, can cause unreasonable fear,” Tedros explained, “or unjustifiable acceptance that the fight is over, leading to unnecessary suffering and death.”

🚨 BREAKING 🚨

"We have therefore made the assessment that #COVID19 can be characterized as a pandemic"-@DrTedros #coronavirus pic.twitter.com/JqdsM2051A

— World Health Organization (WHO) (@WHO) March 11, 2020

WHO made its evaluation based on two main factors: Speed and scale of transmission, and lack of political commitment needed to control the virus.

“Let me be clear,” Tedros said. “Describing this as a pandemic does not mean that countries should give up. The idea that countries should shift from containment to mitigation is wrong and dangerous.”

On the contrary, this is a controllable pandemic—one that requires nations to “strike a fine balance between protecting health, preventing economic and social disruption, and respecting human rights.”

“We cannot say this loudly enough, or clearly enough, or often enough,” he continued. “All countries can still change the course of this pandemic.”

The Director-General doesn’t want people to focus too much on one daunting expression, though.

“Let me give you some other words that matter much more, and that are much more actionable,” he said. “Prevention. Preparedness. Public health. Political leadership.

“And most of all, people,” Tedros added. We’re in this together, to do the right things with calm and protect the citizens of the world. It’s doable.”

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March 11, 2020
15:30
Review: ‘The Division 2: Warlords of New York’ Revitalizes the Series
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The Division 2 started off great when it launched in March of last year. I even called it the only looter shooter worth playing. While that was true for a while, a succession of gear-nerfing patches and so-so narrative-driven DLCs marred the experience. Knowing the fanbase’s dissatisfaction, Massive Entertainment returned to the proverbial drawing board to craft something players could get behind. As such, we now have Warlords of New York. This expansion succeeds at invigorating the franchise thanks to a new setting and user-friendly progression system. This is exactly what The Division 2 needed.

As I went over in my preview, The Division 2: Warlords of New York brings the series back to The Big Apple. The story centers on Aaron Keener, a rogue agent who appeared in the first game. He, along with four other rogues, have locked down lower Manhattan and turned it into their own little kingdom. Keener’s ultimate goal is to disrupt efforts to restore the old order and establish something new (with himself in charge, naturally). As a Division agent, it is your job to infiltrate lower Manhattan and stop Keener’s plans.

Though this is Manhattan, players will not revisit any of the first game’s locations. This makes the setting both familiar and new. The big difference between this Manhattan and that of the first game is the time of year. Snow and ice have given way to plant-covered streets and buildings. As with the core game’s Washington D.C. location, nature is slowly reclaiming its dominion. The summertime setting also helps keep the expansion within the timeframe of The Division 2. Considering how crazy the real-life New York City becomes during the summer, the setting seems fitting.

Getting to Keener means taking down his four rogue agents who have each taken over different neighborhoods. There’s a nice variety of levels that weren’t present in the first game. One mission has you fighting on an oil tanker while another has you blasting bad guys in an excavation site. Every level also has some mild puzzles for players to solve. While finding levers or shooting fuse boxes in order to advance may sound annoying, it prevents missions from becoming complete shooting galleries. Multiple pathways and hidden items keep things fresh upon subsequent replays. Overall, these are some of the series’ best maps.

The four rogue agent targets have unique weapons and abilities never before seen in the series. One agent has a holographic emitter that creates virtual clones of himself. Another has a deadly accurate sticky bomb launcher. Because of their weapons, boss battles are a highlight. Even better, you can actually use these new weapons after taking out a boss. This gives Warlords of New York a bit of a Mega Man vibe. All of the weapons come in handy out in the field and work wonders against the other bosses.

Another Mega Man-like feature is tackling bosses in any order you desire. This is great for making the expansion feel more open-ended. With that said, there is no true advantage to this design choice. The basic plot unfolds the same no matter how you decide to tackle missions. It’s just nice to have the option.

The leveling system is now completely overhauled. Instead of having a total gear level (which tops out at 515), your character and their gear now only has a standard level. Once you hit the new level 40 ceiling, things open up considerably. You can now take attributes from different gear pieces and store them in the recalibration library. After that, you can add the stored attributes to your weapons and armor. This enables players to make a character build suited to their specific playstyle. Even when you reach level 40, you’ll still gain XP which you can use to continue making your character and weapons stronger.

While long-time players will hate having all their hard-earned customized gear from Washington D.C. turn useless, the new leveling system is a godsend. At a glance, it is easy to see what gear and attributes will suit you best. A lot of the guesswork no longer exists. This means players can customize their character and gear faster and more efficiently. At the same time, the system retains a nice level of depth for those who really want to dive in and tinker with numbers and values. It won’t take long before you see noticeable character improvements. Hitting level 40 isn’t a grind.

Warlords is only the beginning. The following weeks and months will see a steady stream of content that will keep fans satisfied (and away from other shooters). There will be new rogue agents to fight, new gear to test out, and even a brand new Raid. While we can’t say how successful this will all be, it’s good knowing Massive is sticking around for the long haul.

Warlords of New York is a great expansion. The lower Manhattan setting is fantastic and combines the best aspects of The Division 1 and 2. Each of the new bosses provides a satisfying challenge and their dropped weapons are fun to use. The fact we’ll see continual updates via Seasons leaves us wondering what’s coming next. I thought my time with The Division 2 had ended but it looks like it’ll eat up another 100 hours of my life this year. Considering how awesome Warlords of New York is, I have little to complain about. Let’s just hope Massive Entertainment can keep the momentum going.
15:04
Study: Hotels Benefit From Cannabis Legalization
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Photo Credit: Rick Proctor / Unsplash
Cannabis isn’t just for stoners: The legalization of recreational marijuana may mean a boon for the hospitality industry.

Researcher John O’Neill found that, after legalizing pot, Denver, Colo., saw roughly $130 million new hotel revenues.

A Schedule 1 drug at the U.S. federal level, cannabis is prohibited even in medical use.

But no such protections exist for recreation: The production, sale, and consumption of pot is allowed in 11 states, two territories, and the District of Columbia; it has been decriminalized in another 15 states and one territory.

And with more states mulling approval, O’Neill believes his findings “could be useful to government officials and business owners” considering changing the legislation.

O’Neill, a professor of hospitality management at Penn State, chose to focus his work on Denver, where recreational marijuana use was legalized in 2014. No other area provides a longer study period, he said, praising the capital city’s substantial, possibly generalizable, sample from which to draw results.

A Penn State researcher found that recreational marijuana legalization positively affected hotel revenues in Denver (via Alex Person/Unsplash)

Using hotel data from STR (formerly Smith Travel Research) combined with geo-coordinates and opening dates of recreational marijuana dispensaries in the area, O’Neill examined the drug’s effects on hotel performance.

“I found that recreational marijuana legalization positively affected hotel revenues in Denver, totaling approximately $130 million in new hotel revenues,” he said.

Unsurprisingly, visitation to Denver increased in 2014, boasting 9 percent growth in occupied hotel rooms—higher than any other year O’Neill studied.

The sudden influx of marijuana tourism meant area hotels could charge higher prices for rooms, resulting in a positive economic impact. Notably, pay-offs were more pronounced in cheaper accommodations than upmarket lodging.

Those benefits, however, were short-lived: After about a year, revenue rates returned to normal.

“[Denver’s] growth after legalizing recreational marijuana was above and beyond what would have been otherwise expected,” O’Neill explained.

“Its growth was greater than comparable cities, such as Albuquerque, Austin, and Salt Lake City [and] was greater than national averages,” he continued. “I believe the difference in hotel revenues was due to the legalization of recreational marijuana in Denver.”

O’Neill’s findings appeared in the latest issue of the Journal of Real Estate Literature.

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14:00
The History Of Human-Passing Robots
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The third season of Westworld premieres this week, as HBO’s dystopian future show moves out of the amusement park to the outside world. But the core theme remains the same: robots, designed to look exactly like humans, grapple with the ethics of artificial life and programming. When Czech writer Karel Čapek invented the term “robot” in 1920, a full century ago, he was wrestling with similar concepts – his play R.U.R. that introduced the term was about artificial people created to serve humans that eventually turned on them. With a hundred years of science fiction to pore through, we wanted to trace the development of robots that pass for human through a few key creations.

“Evidence”
Of all the legends of science fiction, Isaac Asimov did more than almost anybody to examine the myriad ramifications of mechanical life. His 1946 short story “Evidence” is a great place to start. In it, a young politician named Stephen Byerley is confronted by the accusation that he is actually a robot, barred from running for office. His opponent attempts to prove it, trying to force the man to violate one of the Three Laws of Robotics, but Byerley remains one step ahead of him, always able to plant some doubt in witnesses. It’s a very clever and compelling story about how telling the difference without impinging on civil rights is a slippery slope to walk.

Astro Boy
Osamu Tezuka was one of the greatest factories of ideas the manga world has ever seen, churning out a never-ending stream of classics throughout his four-decade career. Tetsuwan Atom, known in the West as Astro Boy, premiered in 1952. The titular character was a humanoid robot built in the shape of a young boy by Dr. Tenma. Astro is different from many of the other robots in his world because he is capable of human emotions, making him a devoted ally to humanity fighting evil with myriad robotic abilities, including a set of machine guns housed in his buttcheeks.

The Vision
First appearing in the pages of The Avengers in 1968, the “synthezoid” known as the Vision changed the way robots would be portrayed in comics. While his crimson skin and pupil-less eyes won’t pass for an ordinary Joe, it was what was inside the android Avenger that made him different from yout average robot. Created by the villainous Ultron to battle Hank Pym and his team, the Vision breaks free of his control and goes on to become one of the most valuable members of the Avengers. His romance with the mutant Scarlet Witch allowed Marvel to touch on complex topics like prejudice and free will throughout the 1970s, and the character still stars in interesting comics today.

The Stepford Wives
This 1975 black comedy classic probed just how difficult it could be to tell a real person from a fake one, even if it’s the love of your life. In the suburban town of Stepford, all of the women are beautiful and devoted to their husbands. When a new couple from New York moves in, the wife quickly discovers that she doesn’t fit in. That’s because the Stepford wives are all robots, brought in by the local Men’s Association to replace their flawed, aging human originals. It was a clever commentary on the ongoing Women’s Lib movement that showed the soul-destroying conformity of the nuclear family.

Blade Runner
Ridley Scott’s 1982 sci-fi classic was one of the first pop culture hits to really delve into the narrowing gap between man and machine. Rick Deckard is an ex-cop hired to hunt down malfunctioning “replicants,” artificial people built with extraordinary capabilities to work in the inhumane conditions of off-world colonies. Replicants are so nearly indistinguishable from humans that a complex test to measure their emotional response to a series of questions is the only non-violent way to tell the difference, and as Deckard tracks his prey he finds out that they want the same things we do. The inherent ambiguity of whether Deckard himself is a replicant or not has occupied fans for nearly forty years.

Star Trek The Next Generation
The crew of the Enterprise has always prided itself on diversity, but in the 1987 reboot of Gene Roddenberry’s space-spanning series they added an artificial intelligence to the mix. Lt. Commander Data was a humanoid android discovered by Starfleet as the last survivor of a catastrophic attack on the Omicron Theta colony. His origins were a mystery until we learn that he was built by Doctor Noonien Soong as part of his research. Data’s struggle with human fallibility and eventual addition of an “emotion chip” allowed him to develop his character even further throughout the franchise.

A.I.
After Stanley Kubrick passed away, Steven Spielberg took the helm of his final project. 2001’s A.I. postulated a world where the world’s population has been drastically reduced. We meet David, an artificial little boy who is given to a family whose son has been placed in suspended animation for a disease that has no known cure. When the real child is thawed out, David begins to feel emotions he wasn’t designed for and is abandoned by his new family. What follows is a quest for love and acceptance that makes you question the real difference between man and machine, and where the line can truly be drawn.

Battlestar Galactica
The original late 70s Galactica was tolerable space opera, but 2003’s reboot series transformed the source material into one of the most compelling sci-fi shows to ever hit the airwaves. After humans develop the mechanical race of Cylons to serve their every need, the artificial life eventually rebels and declares war. Although the majority of Cylons are metallic workers and soldiers, thirteen of them are created in human guises. Those sleepers might not even know that they are Cylons until activated. Although initially the Cylons fought to free themselves from bondage, by the time of the new series their struggle has evolved into a religious crusade, convinced that humans are flawed creations and need to be wiped from the universe.

Westworld
Michael Crichton’s original novel (and the 1973 film that was based on it) were humanoid in appearance but that was about as far as it went – even when the Gunslinger and his cohorts malfunction, they’re not motivated by developing emotions, just warped programming. The series goes way deeper, though, with the artificial men and women in the Delos theme park being spurred by co-founder Robert Ford to achieve sentience on their own. The whole point of the experience is to allow people to do things to other “humans” that they would not be allowed to do in the real world, up to and including killing them, so it’s only natural that things would eventually go awry. Each season digs deeper into the moral and ethical questions around building AI that feels, and the third is guaranteed to blow a few minds along the way.
13:45
New Insect Species With ‘Wacky Fashion Sense’ Named After Lady Gaga
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The insect now known as Kaikaia gaga represents a new genus and species of treehopper (via L. Brian Stauffer/University of Illinois)
If Lady Gaga were an insect, she’d be a treehopper.

Which is why a University of Illinois graduate student named a newly discovered species after the performer.

Part of the family Membracidae, treehoppers are the “wackiest, most astonishing bugs most people have never heard of,” according to Brendan Morris, who studies entomology at Illinois.

They sport bizarre-yet-striking lumps and bumps, suck on plant juices, sing to each other by vibrating stems, and are an important food source for other forest creatures.

“I love outrageous forms and colors,” Morris said in a statement. “It blows my mind that a group that is roughly 40 million years old has so much diversity of form—diversity, I would argue, that we don’t see in any other family of insects.”

To draw attention to the little known arthropods, Morris christened a newfound treehopper species Kaikaia gaga, in honor of the mercurial singer-songwriter.

Brendan Morris named a new genus and species of treehopper after musical artist Lady Gaga (via L. Brian Stauffer/University of Illinois)

“They’ve got these crazy horns, they have this wacky fashion sense about them,” he said of the bug—which also represents a new genus of treehopper. “They’re unlike anything you’ve ever seen before.”

K. gaga was found nearly 30 years ago in a tropical forest near the Pacific coast of Nicaragua.

She (yes, the insect if female) is one of about 1,000 specimens Morris borrowed from the Carnegie Museum of Natural History in Pittsburgh as part of his research.

The bug’s features, when examined closely, differentiate it from other treehoppers: Though horned like many of her kin, K. gaga‘s leg hairs distinguished it from other tribes.

On top of that, she boasts a “totally differently” shaped face, and genitalia that look more like treehoppers from the Caribbean or Old World group Beaufortianini—a strange observation, considering the insects are believed to have originated in the Americas.

Read more about Kaikaia gaga in a paper published by the journal Zootaxa.

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12:35
NASA Upgrades ISS System That Turns Urine Into Drinking Water
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International Space Station (Photo Credit: NASA)
The International Space Station urine distillation system is getting an upgrade.

NASA this week delivered enhanced life-support hardware to the floating laboratory—including a redesigned water recovery device to better handle the boiling of urea during purification.

Astronauts living and working aboard the ISS subside on filtered liquid made from colleagues’ sweat, exhaled breath, and piss. As much as 80 percent of water on the space station is recycled.

Recovered liquid must meet stringent purity standards before it can be used to support crew, spacewalk, or payload activities.

The process is fairly straightforward: Wastewater is sent through a series of filtering materials and chemical reactions for purification, checked by electrical sensors in the systems, and sent to a storage tank.

Unacceptable water gets reprocessed until it satisfies the criteria.

The @Space_Station's water recovery system, which recycles condensation, sweat — and urine — is getting a much-appreciated upgrade >> [https:]] pic.twitter.com/vz1Az9R9nS

— NASA Marshall (@NASA_Marshall) March 10, 2020

Weak points in the urine processor assembly, however, have been an ongoing concern for the long-term reliability of the hardware.

“One of the most important things we’ve learned in the last 12 years of the hardware’s orbital operation is that the hardware is vulnerable in its steam environment,” according to Jennifer Pruitt, Environmental Control and Life Support System (ECLSS) urine processor assembly project manager.

“We took those lessons learned and upgraded our urine distillation assembly to create a more reliable system equipped to travel to the Moon, Mars, and beyond,” she said in a statement.

An upgraded version includes a new toothed belt drive system, bearing seals, Teflon spacer, and liquid level sensor (whatever those are)—all of which aid in controlling the hardware’s steam and fluid environment to provide the cleanest-possible water.

“Improving the efficiency and reliability of the current system will diminish the need for an excess of spare parts on board,” Pruitt explained. “With less maintenance required, the crew can focus on the science at hand.”

The hardware, completed two months ahead of schedule, was shipped Monday aboard SpaceX’s 20th resupply mission.

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11:30
Uber Resumes Autonomous Vehicle Testing in San Francisco
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Photo Credit: Uber
Uber has resumed autonomous vehicle testing in San Francisco two years after a fatal accident in Arizona.

The California Department of Motor Vehicles last month reinstated Uber’s permit to test self-driving cars in public.

Two retrofitted Volvo XC90 SUVs hit the road this week, operating with safety drivers during daylight hours only.

Testing is set to last a few weeks, and will not pick up any passengers, according to The Verge.

“We are excited to resume autonomous testing in Uber’s home city this week,” a company spokesperson told Geek.com. “Our testing area will be limited in scope to start, but we look forward to scaling up our efforts in the months ahead and learning from the difficult but informative road conditions that the Bay Area has to offer.”

Starting today, two of our self-driving vehicles will begin autonomy testing in our home city of San Francisco. It's great to be back! [https:]]

— UberATG (@UberATG) March 10, 2020

Uber launched its autonomous vehicle program in San Francisco in late 2016, but a week later was shut down by the California DMV. So the ride-hailing service moved to Arizona, where its self-driving cars were able to pick up passengers.

The March 2018 death of Elaine Herzberg in Tempe by an autonomous Uber car, however, resulted in the temporary termination of self-driving vehicle tests.

Nine months later, after receiving local approval, Uber restarted trials—only during daylight hours and at slower speeds—in Pittsburgh and Toronto.

Uber’s self-driving cars also operate in Dallas and Washington, D.C.

Since the Arizona crash, the company has revised its operator roles, installed an in-car camera system, and improved vehicle software, according to the San Francisco Examiner.

More on Geek.com:
Editor’s Note: This article was updated on March 13 with comment from Uber.
4:24
‘The Flash’ Season 6 Episode 14 Recap: Hello Again and Goodbye
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Keiynan Lonsdale as Wally West and Grant Gustin as Barry Allen -- Photo: The CW
A few superhero faces have been missing on The Flash, recently. Cisco went away to research supervillains, I guess. Ralph is off chasing Sue Dearbon after she got the better of him. And this season’s Wells kind of just comes in and out. This week’s episode fixes a few of those, at least. Cisco comes back, and it looks like he definitely enjoyed his time off. What’s even more exciting though, is that Wally West is back! The episode opens with a helicopter rusting and falling apart. Caitlin and Kamilla think Barry’s already on it, but he’s still at S.T.A.R. Labs. There’s another speedster in town. Man, first Grodd comes back and now Wally West? This show gets me.

Wally isn’t here just to catch up with family, though. Like Barry, the Speed Force has been acting weird for him. For Barry, it’s been sudden loss of speed, and his accelerated healing not working like it’s supposed to. For Wally, he can feel the Speed Force fading in his head. Wally asks Iris if Barry’s told her anything, and she lets slip that Barry had an incident with the Speed Force back in December. Of course, she’s referring to the Bloodwork fight, when Barry chose to let Ramsey take control and attacked the manifestation of the Speed Force. When Wally brings Barry into the Speed Force, it tells Barry that it is dying because of something he did. Wally takes that to mean the Ramsey incident, and storms off on Barry instead of talking it out like rational humans. I guess we’re bringing back the show’s bad habits along with its good characters.

Victoria Park as Kamilla and Carlos Valdes as Cisco Ramon — Photo: Colin Bentley/The CW

Barry goes back into the Speed Force with Gideon’s help and finds out she wasn’t referring to the Ramsey fight. Barry’s actions in Crisis led to the Speed Force’s death. When he used the Specter’s energy to enter the Speed Force, the energy corrupted it. Barry saved the universe because of that choice, but now he might lose his speed. I guess we should have expected that this was next after “Crisis on Infinite Earths.” In the comics, speedsters lose their connection to the Speed Force or are otherwise forced to exist without it. It was only a matter of time before the show tried out one of these stories.

It’s a cool direction for the season to go, but my problem with it is that the episode doesn’t give it enough time. The Speed Force dying is a major event, and it doesn’t feel like the biggest thing that happens in this episode. I get that this is going to be an ongoing story for the next few weeks. The way it was handled though, it got enough time to feel like we should be getting something more, but not enough for it to have any real impact just yet.

Grant Gustin as The Flash and Keiynan Lonsdale as Kid Flash — Photo: Colin Bentley/The CW

It also takes away from what’s otherwise a really good villain of the week. See, the helicopter attack at the beginning of the episode wasn’t random. A Russian thief named Turtle (Or Turtle 2, since she’s from another pre-Crisis Earth), is tracking down her old gang. Seems like they lived lavishly, while she went away. The show doesn’t spend a ton of time on her motives or backstory, but it doesn’t need to. She can store and manipulate potential energy, creating little bubbles of frozen time. If she traps someone (or something) in a bubble, she can rapidly age them. That’s what happens to the helicopter, and that’s what happens to the socialite, who ends up mummified on the floor of CC Jitters.

We get an awesome fight in the middle of CCPD though, when Turtle 2 shows up to kill another member of her old gang. The Flash and Kid Flash team up for the first time in years, and it immediately brings a smile to my face. Yes, the episode is crowded, and the resolution is rushed, but Wally and Barry fighting together will never not bring me joy. And hey, Joe got in on the action too. After Jesse L. Martin’s break from the show for health reasons, and a whole lot of episodes where he couldn’t do much more than sit and talk, it was a welcome surprise to see him land the final blow on a supervillain.

Danielle Panabaker as Caitlin Snow — Photo: Colin Bentley/The CW

In addition to all of that, the Nash Wells story decided to show itself. After weeks of Nash seeing ghostly figures of other Wellses, he tries to go to Cisco for help. Cisco though, is too busy trying to figure out how to stop Turtle 2, and blows him off. He only agrees to help after Caitlin gives him a talking to. Because we’re back to the can-I-talk-to-you cycle. It’s too late, though. By the time Cisco finds him, Eobard Thawn has taken over Nash’s body. He attacks Cisco, but is surprised to find out he doesn’t have any powers in his new body. He still comes close to killing Cisco anyway, but Cecile senses the hate through the door, and tasers Nash/Thawne until he’s unconscious.

At first I thought this story would be an unnecessary addition to an already overstuffed episode. But Thawne’s return and imprisonment becomes important to the death of the Speed Force. As Thawne taunts Barry and promises to kill his friends and family, he also gloats about building his own Speed Force. That gives Barry an idea. If Thawne did it, why can’t he? That’s how he’ll get his powers back. That’s a real interesting direction for the show to go. If it follows the comics at all, Barry probably won’t reach quite the speeds he was able to before. He’ll be slightly more vulnerable, and there’s a lot of story potential there. As rushed as some of these storylines were this week, they set up a lot of cool stuff for the weeks to come.

Candice Patton as Iris West – Allen — Photo: Colin Bentley/The CW

That’s what makes the episode work despite the flaws. There was too much going on at once, but all of it was exciting. I can’t complain much about too many stories if they’re all still pretty good. And hey, by consolidating Nash, Thawne and the Speed Force’s death into one single story by the end, future episodes could be slightly more focused. Even Mirror Iris finally got something going by the end. Until now, she’s just acted vaguely suspicious with no discernible goal. By the end of the episode, Kamila discovers that photos of her look like reflective glass. Unfortunately, she can’t tell anyone about that. Mirror Iris finds her and shoots her with a mirror gun. I hope she’s OK. Hopefully it just sent her inside the Mirror with Iris and Eva. Iris needs someone on her side in there.

This will be the last time I write about The Flash. My final post for Geek will be next week, but this is it for this series. I’ve been covering this show for three and a half years, and it’s hard to say goodbye. Especially in the middle of the season. Of all the shows I’ve recapped over the years, The Flash has meant the most to me. He’s my favorite superhero, and through all its ups and downs, I’ve loved this incarnation of him. My Flash fandom is part of what got me this gig in the first place. If you’re one of the people who read these recaps regularly, I just wanted to say thanks. And hey, next week, I’ll get to enjoy the new episode as a fan. So it’d better be good.

The Flash airs Tuesdays at 8 p.m. on The CW.

Previously on The Flash:
March 09, 2020
18:57
11 Must-Read Valiant Comics Stories
» ‎ Geek.com

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This week sees a long-awaited superhero universe finally make its way to the big screen with Bloodshot, starring Vin Diesel as a trained killer who gets his blood infused with self-repairing nanobots that allow him to recover from nearly any injury. Bloodshot is a representative of Valiant, an upstart comics company founded in the early 1990s by Marvel refugees and revived by a new slate of creators in 2012. They’ve won a devoted cadre of fans with intelligent, unique superhero stories with high-end art. If you’re looking to dip into the Valiant universe for the first time, here are a few great places to start.

XO Manowar: Soldier, General, Emperor
Matt Kindt is one of the architects of the modern Valiant universe, with great runs on numerous titles. One of his best came over his 26 issues on X) Manowar. If you’re not familiar with the character, he’s an interesting one. Aric of Dacia was a Visigoth barbarian abducted by aliens who managed to free himself and abscond with an incredibly powerful battlesuit. Kindt took over the series with artist Tomas Giorello and established a new status quo for Aric – burned out by conflict, trying to live in peace on an alien planet but realizing that violence is sometimes unavoidable. These three arcs filled a year of his book and flow together brilliantly.

Solar: Man Of The Atom
The original Valiant lineup had some superstar artists, but the top get was the masterful Barry Windsor-Smith, who helmed the 1991 reboot of Gold Key character Dr. Solar. In a metafictional twist, physicist Phil Seleski was a fan of the fictional hero, and when he was exposed to a breached reactor gained nearly godlike powers. This is very obviously a post-Watchmen story of the ethical ramifications of infinite power, but writer Jim Shooter managed to keep it interesting by splitting Phil and Solar into divergent identities. Beautiful art and a clever, well-paced story make this some of the best of 1990s Valiant.

Divinity
The first title from Valiant’s modern reboot that wasn’t based on the company’s existing properties, Divinity showed that they’re not just running on fumes. Abram Adams was a Russian cosmonaut lost in space for 55 years. When he returns to Earth, he’s been forever changed by his experiences, granted incredible power over space and time. When he uses his abilities to grant wishes, it brings the myriad superpowered forces of the Valiant world together to stop him before he destabilizes the world’s economy. This excellent four-issue limited series does what the company excels at: telling a rich, mature, and clever superhero story that examines the concept from a new angle.

Rai: Welcome To New Japan
One of the best of the 2016 reboots, the updated Rai series is a heady blend of cyberpunk and samurai action. Rai is essentially the living immune system of his entire country, which was ejected from the Earth’s surface to now hover in geosynchronous orbit. The benevolent artificial intelligence “Father” controls everything that happens in New Japan, but things start to go south when the first murder in a thousand years happens there and Rai is dispatched to investigate. Really nice art by Clayton Crain helps sell this new introduction to the character.

Faith: Hollywood & Vine
A smart publisher is always looking to expand their market share by reaching out to new audiences, and Valiant captured a wave of press attention in 2016 by giving Faith her own series. Written by Jody Houser, it sees Faith moving to Los Angeles to strike out on her own as a superhero while working a day job at a Buzzfeed-like content farm aggregating cat videos. The book uses a pair of artists, Francis Portela and Marguerite Sauvage, to illustrate the dual nature of our heroine’s existence as she discovers a plot to kidnap other superpowered beings and a pending alien invasion.

Unity
Jim Shooter was the brain behind Secret Wars, which ushered in the modern era of the endless line-wide crossover, so it’s not surprising that he would eventually unleash one at Valiant. 1992’s Unity, though, was executed brilliantly and spurred a new wave of fan interest in the Valiant line. They released the first issue absolutely free to hook readers, and the story did the rest. When we discover that the accident that created Solar also changed another person, Dr. Erica Pierce, giving her the same godlike powers. Instead of becoming a superhero, she sets out to work behind the scenes to fuse the infinity of time to create a perfect, soulless utopia. The assembled heroes of past, present and future come together to stop her.

Archer & Armstrong: The Michelangelo Code
Another one of the “odd couple” books that Valiant does so well, this one is both funny and action-packed. Obadiah Archer has been raised by birth by a murderous sect to fulfill his destiny and kill the Anti-Christ. When he meets nigh-immortal Sumerian Aram, he thinks the time is at hand, only to find out that his whole upbringing was a lie, as the group was seeking the power of the mysterious Boon that granted Aram eternal life. Great character interactions between the two leads make this one of Valiant’s most immediately approachable book, as even though it’s soaked in conspiracies and lore it moves along at a brisk pace.

Harbinger Wars
Crossovers can be the bane of modern comic book readers, but Valiant has developed a reputation for keeping them tightly plotted, swiftly moving and, most importantly, consequential. One of the most important stories in the fictional universe is the struggle between Toyo Harada and the U.S. government for control of the superhuman telekinetic children known as Harbingers. This series kicks off when Bloodshot frees a group of them from a paramilitary camp, setting off a desperate struggle between the two camps to bring the powerful children in line. At just four issues, this doesn’t waste a lot of time in getting to great action and memorable character beats.

Magnus: Robot Fighter: Steel Nation
One of the most popular Gold Key characters that Valiant picked up for their first wave was Magnus, a tunic-wearing badass who hunted down rogue androids in the far future. As rebooted by Shooter, Magnus lives in a North America served by fifteen billion robots who have taken over nearly all industry. But more and more of them seem to be going rogue and rebelling against their masters, and when a charismatic droid organizes them into a covert army, things go south very fast. It’s a remarkably prescient study of what “sentience” means, housed within a cracking action comic.

Harbinger: Omega Rising
Living among us in the Valiant universe are “psiots,” people with incredible latent powers just waiting to be awakened. Harbinger Foundation head Toyo Harada, a powerful psiot himself, is seeking them out and bringing them together to consolidate control. When he learns about Peter Stanchek, a teenage psychic with the ability to activate others, it brings the pair on a collision course. Peter is an extremely unlikeable protagonist who has not come to terms with the moral ramifications of his abilities, painting this entire story in shades of gray as it unfolds.

The Valiant
Probably the best crossover of the company’s modern era, spectacular art by the gifted Paolo Rivera is one of the huge draws to this book. The Eternal Warrior has one task on this planet: protect the Geomancers from an equally immortal enemy. Only one problem: Gilad has never succeeded, and each time a Geomancer is slain the world is driven into a new dark age. In modern times, the Valiant universe’s heroes come together to fight off the threat, as a new and untrained Geomancer must face her darkest fears and triumph over them or else all will be lost.
15:56
Website Pairs Hand-Washing Tips With Lyrics From Your Favorite Song
» ‎ Geek.com

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(via Jacqueline Macou/Pixabay)
Even coronavirus can be funny. Just ask the internet.

A teenage developer from the UK created a tool that generates hand-washing instructions accompanied by the song of your choice.

Using the National Health Service’s how-to poster and Genius’s library of lyrics, 17-year-old William Gibson built your next digital distraction.

So happy everyone is enjoying Wash Your Lyrics! Came up with the idea after seeing someone create a @100gecs poster on Saturday night and I wanted to create by own but I'm too lazy to use Photoshop 🥴

— William (@neoncloth) March 9, 2020

Type a song and artist into WashYourLyrics.com, and the site automatically produces a chart featuring the first verse of classic titles like “All Star” by Smash Mouth, “Yesterday” from The Beatles, or “Lose Yourself” by Eminem.

(My first instinct was to enter “Copacabana” by Barry Manilow.)

Wash your hands to ‘Copacabana’ (via WashYourLyrics.com)

Washing your hands regularly is the best—and easiest—way to protect yourself and others against the spread of COVID-19.

As a rule of thumb, you should scrub for at least 20 seconds: the time it takes to sing the “Happy Birthday” song twice in a row.

But belting “Happy birthday to you! Happy birthday to you!” to yourself in the mirror of a public restroom is weird and, frankly, maddening.

The internet has, of course, provided several alternatives, including the chorus of “Landslide” (Fleetwood Mac), “Love On Top” (Beyonce), “Raspberry Beret” (Prince), “Jolene” (Dolly Parton), “Africa” (Toto), and “Truth Hurts” (Lizzo).

Or, if you paid enough attention in high school English, try reciting Lady Macbeth’s “Out, damned spot!” monologue.

For some real inspiration, though, you can download and print the posters generated by Gibson’s site to hang above sinks at home or in the office. (Your colleagues would surely pay more attention to personal hygiene if they were singing Taylor Swift’s “Blank Space” in their head.)

To be fair, most of the verses quoted on WashYourLyrics.com—if sung in time, as they were written and recorded—will far exceed the recommended 20 seconds.

But a little extra scrubbing never hurt anyone.

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14:48
Marvel’s Final ‘Black Widow’ Trailer Is Back in the USSR
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Spoiler warning for the highest-grossing movie of all-time but not even death can stop the Black Widow. After the climactic events of Avengers: Endgame, Natasha Romanoff is finally getting the big-screen origin story that maybe would’ve made more sense like eight years ago. But better late than never.

Check out the final trailer for Marvel’s Black Widow.

Scarlett Johansson is obviously the star (and now producer) of the prequel. Set between Captain America: Civil War and Avengers: Infinity War, Natasha is more alone than ever as a fugitive on the run following the breakup of her surrogate Avengers family. So she turns to her older secret Russian family from her Black Widow assassin training days.

That family includes Florence Pugh as Yelena Belova, Natasha’s younger sister widely suspected to take up the MCU Black Widow mantle in later movies. We’ve also got David Harbour as Red Guardian, a wildly out of shape old Soviet answer to Captain America. Rachel Weisz makes a brief appearance as mentor Melina Vostokoff. And action scenes offer brief glimpses of versatile villain Taskmaster.

Like the morally ambiguous super spy herself, it seems like the Black Widow movie could go in one of two ways. It can either secretly setup a lot of new plotlines and mysteries for later spy-heavy Marvel movies to uncover. Or it can wrap up the unfinished business that is giving the first lady of the Avengers her due. We’ll find out when the movie releases next May. In the meantime, check out this Black Widow poster and learn more about Natasha’s fate in Endgame.
14:47
Netflix Celebrates International Women’s Day With Curated Collection
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'Stranger Things' star Millie Bobby Brown is one of 55 women who helped curated Netflix's 'Because She Watched' collection (via Tina Rowden/Netflix)
Sunday’s International Women’s Day celebrations rang out across the world—and the internet.

In honor of the annual event, Netflix and UN Women launched a special collection of streaming content curated by female creators from behind and in front of the camera.

The library of TV shows, documentaries, and films is available all year via Netflix.com/BecauseSheWatched, or by searching “Because She Watched” on the platform.

Each title is handpicked by international actresses, directors, writers, producers, and critics, including Milly Bobby Brown (Stranger Things), Logan Browning (Dear White People), Lauren Morelli (Orange Is the New Black), Lana Condor (To All the Boys I’ve Loved Before), Salma Hayek, Yalitza Aparicio (Roma), Mindy Kaling (The Mindy Project), Laurie Nunn (Sex Education), and Sophia Loren.

“Having a world where everyone is truly represented is about true democracy. And truly seeing ourselves allows us to envision endless possibilities for ourselves and each other,” according to Orange Is the New Black star Laverne Cox.

The Netflix original, helmed by Jenji Kohan, was the first project that made Cox feel “genuinely empowered as a woman thanks to the women at the helm of the show.”

“This show created a space and platform for me as a black openly trans woman that created space for other openly trans women of all races to be truly seen in the depth of our humanity,” said Cox, who added Brené Brown documentary The Call to Courage to the list.

Not every choice is an overtly feminist one: Esther Acebo opted for Chef’s Table, Hanna Ardéhn went for Silence of the Lambs, and Lynn Fainchtein selected 2001: A Space Odyssey.

But if you’re looking for strong female characters, you can find inspiration in picks like Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt, Scandal, Grace and Frankie, Dead to Me, Miss Americana, Chewing Gum, Wonder Woman, Russian Doll, and Knock Down the House.

“This collaboration is about taking on the challenges of telling women’s stories and showing women in all their diversity,” UN Women Deputy Executive Director Anita Bhatia said in a statement.

“It’s about making visible the invisible,” she continued. “And proving that only by fully representing and including women on screen, behind-the-camera, and in our narratives overall, society will truly flourish.”

Users can also choose from various “Because She Watched” profile icons to celebrate their favorite female characters from the collection.

More on Geek.com:
The complete list of the 55 women who curated “Because She Watched” for Netflix:

Alejandra Azcárate (Colombia): Vis a Vis

Alice Wu (United States): Frances Ha

Andrea Barata Ribeiro (Brazil): Sex Education

Anna Winger (Germany): Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt

Ava DuVernay (United States): A Wrinkle in Time

Barbara Lopez (Mexico): Scandal

Beren Saat (Turkey): Bird Box

Bruna Mascarenhas (Brazil): Quien Te Cantará

Cecilia Suárez (Mexico): Marriage Story

Chris Nee (United States): Orange is the New Black

Christian Serratos (United States): The Goop Lab

Cindy Bishop (Thailand): Anne with an E

Elena Fortes (Mexico): Atlantique

Esther Acebo (Spain): Chef’s Table: Bo Songvisava

Fadily Camara (France): How to Get Away with Murder

Fanny Herrero (France): Je Parle Toute Seule

Fatimah Abu Bakar (Malaysia): Babies

Francesca Comencini (Italy): What Happened, Miss Simone?

Giovanna Ewbank (Brazil): The Most Beautiful Thing

Hanna Ardéhn (Sweden): Silence of the Lambs

Hazar Erguclu (Turkey): House of Cards

Hend Sabry (Egypt): Joan Didion: The Center Will Not Hold

Ida Elise Broch (Norway): RuPaul’s Drag Race

Janet Mock (United States): Paris Is Burning

Joyce Cheng (Hong Kong): Queer Eye

Juliana Vicente (Brazil): When They See Us

Kemi Adetiba (Nigeria): King of Boys

Kiara Advani (India): Lust Stories

Lali Espósito (Argentina): Notting Hill

Lana Condor (United States): Grace and Frankie

Lauren Morelli (United States) Julie & Julia

Laurie Nunn (England): The Keepers

Laverne Cox (United States): Brené Brown: The Call to Courage

Liz Garbus (United States): She’s Gotta Have It

Logan Browning (United States): Someone Great

Lynn Fainchtein (Mexico): 2001: Space Odyssey

Marcela Benjumea (Colombia): Dead to Me

Mercedes Morán (Argentina): Aquarius

Mika Ninagawa (Japan): In the Realm of the Senses

Millie Bobby Brown (United Kingdom): Miss Americana

Mina El Hammani (Spain): ¿Qué Co#o Está Pasando?

Mindy Kaling (United States): Chewing Gum

Mira Lesmana (Indonesia): ROMA

Mithila Palkar (India): Hannah Gadsby’s Nanette

Nahnatchka Khan (United States): Young Adult

Ngô Thanh Vân (Vietnam): Wonder Woman

Nosipho Dumisa (South Africa): Gravity

Pathy Dejesus (Brazil): Raising Dion

Paulina Garcia (Chile): Deux Jours, Une Nuit

Petra Costa (Brazil): Feminists: What Were They Thinking?

Salma Hayek (Mexico): Unbelievable

Sandi Tan (Singapore): Russian Doll

Shefali Shah (India): Delhi Crime

Sophia Loren (Italy): The Crown

Yalitza Aparicio (Mexico): Knock Down the House
14:23
‘Batwoman’ Season 1 Episode 14 Recap: Telling Women to Smile
» ‎ Geek.com

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Ruby Rose as Kate Kane/Batwoman and Meagan Tandy as Sophie Moore -- Photo: Katie Yu/The CW
The beginning of Batwoman’s first season was heavy on the story. It was all about Batwoman vs. Alice vs. The Crows. Alice still figures heavily into the plot of most episodes, but the show is more comfortable with her not being the main bad guy each week. It’s introducing more minor villains to Gotham City and a superhero TV show needs that. A movie can do the one villain at a time thing. A full season of TV needs the variety. So in the last episode, we had a vampire and this one starts with… oh, that’s messed up. We open with a flashback to 2011. A girl applies makeup, but sees only a distorted frown looking back. She breaks the glass and carves a smile into her face. It’s definitely a creepy image for the show to come back on.

In the present, Batwoman isn’t yet aware of the supervillain heading her way. She’s more concerned about her rooftop makeout with Sophie. Both she and Sophie can’t keep from smiling the next morning. Interestingly, when Mary tries to discern whether or not Sophie knows who Batwoman is, Sophie seems more sure now that Kate isn’t Batwoman. Does that mean Kate’s gotten better since military school? Luke encourages Kate to break things off lest someone she cares about gets targeted. Kate makes it about halfway through the breakup when Sophie kisses her. Even that doesn’t last long though, because Sophie’s mom shows up for a surprise visit. Kate’s love life can’t catch a break.

Ruby Rose as Kate Kane/Batwoman and Meagan Tandy as Sophie Moore — Photo: Katie Yu/The CW

She’ll have to put the Sophie situation on hold for now though, because there’s a slasher in town. The girl we saw at the beginning of the episode is attacking models and slashing smiles into their faces. Kate asks Mary if she knows anything the victims had in common, and it turns out they all share the same plastic surgeon. And what a coincidence, it’s Ethan Campbell, the guy who got Jacob Kane out of jail and is also secretly Mouse’s face-stealing father. As Batwoman, Kate sends Sophie to ask Campbell some questions. At his office, she figures out that the slasher is probably giving the models the same injuries she has. Campbell now remembers that he once treated a girl with those injuries: A teenager who’d carved a smile into her own face. Her name is Duela Dent. (Harvey’s niece, apparently. Interestingly, he’s still referred to as a beloved ADA. I guess this version of Gotham never found out about the whole Two Face thing.)

The Campbell connection, of course, brings Alice into the story. It’s all a little too convenient. She’s lamenting her sparse obituary, and comes across a story about Dr. Campbell and Duela. She figures out that Campbell is Mouse’s father and that he must be the one who kidnapped Mouse. She decides to use Duela to get to Campbell, and raids Mary’s clinic for supplies. This is where I start to get a little wary of what the show’s doing with Mary’s story. Alice reveals that she gave her blood to save Mary’s life as a message to Batwoman. Mary has known Kate is Batwoman since the last episode, but Kate hasn’t told her yet. When Mary asks Alice if she knows, Alice says she does and taunts Mary over it. So it looks like they’re setting up the whole birth-sister vs. step sister again. Alice knows Kate is Batwoman, and Kate won’t trust Mary with that knowledge. We’ve already seen the higher-stakes version of this beef. And the alt-Beth arc was supposed to resolve it. Kate made a choice, and she chose good Beth (and Mary by extension). If we’re getting back to this why-not-me story for Mary, what was the point of any of that?

Rachel Skarsten as Alice — Photo: Bettina Strauss/The CW

On the bright side, at least the actual villain storyline this week was good. It’s comic book-y as hell, but that’s what I want these CW superhero shows to be. Batwoman and Sophie team up to track down Duela, and they make a great team. They have different resources at their disposal, and they can pool their information to figure out where Duela will strike next. They find the next target: an old classmate of Duela’s who has since changed her name and face entirely. They track her to a makeup factory where Batwoman really benefits from having a sidekick. There’s no need to juggle helping the victim and fighting the bad guy. Sophie fights Duela and Batwoman saves the girl, who is slowly being lowered into a giant vat of acid. Now that’s a classic Batman villain move, and it’s so cool to see this show use it without a hint of irony. That silver age comic book stuff can be great if you just let it be.

Even the way Duela tied into Alice’s story was satisfying in the end. Batwoman and Sophie leave Duela tied up for the Gotham Police to deal with. Alice gets there first, though. She makes a deal with Duela to get revenge on Dr. Campbell. We don’t get the details right away, but they become clear soon enough. At first, it looks like Alice helped Duela escape. As the police investigate further though, they find her. She looks up with them and she’s missing her face. Alice took her face to get into Campbell’s office. I know this isn’t the first face-removal we’ve seen on this show, but seeing the full bloody result is an image that will stick with me. The CW doesn’t usually get this gory, so it has an impact when it does.

Jeryl Prescott as Diane Moore and Meagan Tandy as Sophie Moore — Photo: Katie Yu/The CW

Meanwhile, Batwoman lays out the realities of her situation to Sophie. That once the mask comes off, she’s a real person. Not a superhero or a symbol. That means they’d be in a real relationship with all the baggage that comes with it. Laid all out like that, Sophie isn’t sure she wants it. They part ways with Sophie going home to think about some things. Relationship or no, she decides to come out to her mother. It doesn’t go well. Her mother is visibly disappointed, and it’s a hard scene to watch. I feel like this scene was just as important as Batwoman’s public reveal earlier this season. Not every coming out story is a happy one with a glossy magazine cover. Sometimes the people you love will let you down. Now we have to see what Sophie does now that she’s decided to be honest with herself and those around her.

Jacob Kane could certainly use that honesty right about now. His was the most disappointing story of the hour. This episode tried to do a little too much with it’s runtime and this story got the short end of the stick. It’s trying to build a storyline that’ll be explored in future episodes, but it doesn’t ever get to any sort of hook. There’s no breakthrough or development to make us excited for what happens next. Jacob hears that the conviction in Lucius Fox’s murder (that’s some heavy exposition to just dump on us in a throwaway line, by the way) may have been coerced. He finds some suspicious payments to cops known to be corrupt. Meanwhile, the agent who handled that case is telling him to ignore it. That’s all we get. It’s enough to make us feel like something big should happen, but the story fizzles out before anything does. It feels like we got a half-finished arc.

Ultimately though, this was an enjoyable episode of Batwoman. Despite some story problems and troubling character regressions, this was an exciting villain-of-the-week episode with a classic comic book feel. It’s amazing what a good villain can do for an episode. The Alice storyline made me interested in what’s going to happen to Mouse for the first time ever too. When Alice demands to know what Campbell did with Mouse, he laughs. The show cuts to Mouse tied to a chair, forced to inhale a tankful of Fear Toxin. Are we getting Scarecrow out of this? I’d be OK with that.

Batwoman airs Sundays at 8 p.m. on The CW.

Previously on Batwoman:
14:00
25 Years Ago, ‘Chrono Trigger’ Brought RPGs To The Next Level
» ‎ Geek.com

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In the beginning, Japanese role-playing games were pretty close to their Western brethren – inspired by classic titles like Wizardry, they let players roll up their own characters along a spread of archetypes and engage in fairly narrative-light dungeon crawling.

But soon enough, Japan would develop their own style, one that put the player in control of pre-determined characters with rich backstories and complex narratives, where the swoop of the plot unfolding was the main motivator through the game. The undisputed leader of that revolution was Squaresoft. The early Final Fantasy games were very Western, but by the third installment the company had started pushing towards a new .

In 1995, that philosophy would manifest itself in one of the all-time greats of the 16-bit era, a Super Nintendo role-playing game that would push the envelope of what the genre was capable of, introducing a number of features that we now can’t imagine living without. 25 years later, let’s revisit Chrono Trigger and see how this masterpiece came to be.

Turn Back Time
The three heads of the Chrono Trigger project were referred to internally as the “Dream Team” at Square. Hironobu Sakaguchi, the creator of Final Fantasy, was the lead designer, Dragon Quest‘s Yuji Hori was the writer and the visuals were done by superstar manga artist Akira Toriyama. The three took a trip to the United States to preview upcoming graphics technology and bonded over a desire to make a game that “no one had done before.”

They got producer Kazuhiko Aoki on board and Square assigned them a team in excess of fifty people, a large group for games of the era. The company originally wanted to squeeze the project into the Seiken Densetsu series – best known here as Secret of Mana – and release it on the Super Famicom Disk Drive. When that peripheral was canned by Nintendo, the team refocused and redesigned what they had to deliver on a cartridge instead.

What they came up with was a grand, sweeping narrative that all took place in a single geographic location – the Kingdom of Guardia – but across seven different eras in time. Changes made in the past affect the future, with hero Crono and his friends working to prevent the malevolent spaceborn entity Lavos from causing an apocalypse in 2300 AD that will destroy all life on the planet.

Fight Forever
Random battles are the beating heart of every console RPG, the way designers add playtime in between plot beats. Unfortunately, in many games these fights can seem like simple padding, reduced to repetitive button presses to attack with little to no strategy. Square knew that if players were spending the majority of their gaming time in fights, they needed to make them more visually and mechanically interesting.

Final Fantasy VI had introduced Active Time Battle, which replaced the traditional turn-based method with something a little more granular – allies and foes each had meters that filled in real time, and only were able to act when they were completely full. This added a dimension of timing to each conflict, as speedy, weaker characters would get the opportunity to move more often than slower tanks.

Chrono Trigger refined that idea even further with ATB 2.0. Now the spatial dimension was also in play. Instead of arraying the player’s party and their enemies in two parallel lines on the battlefield, Chrono and his friends could now move freely around the space. Enemies could as well. The game’s special attacks, known as “Techs,” had areas and zones of effect, with some striking everyone in a circle’s radius and others affecting enemies in a line. Instead of simply selecting skills from a menu, battles became a dance of constantly-evolving strategies, keeping them feeling fresh throughout the game’s playtime.

In addition, your characters could team up for Double and Triple Techs, powerful attacks that required everybody’s ATB gauge to be full but could swiftly turn the tide of battle. There were so many choices to be made in each fight, but they were all intuitive and well explained, so it never felt overwhelming.

Adding action-based mechanics to RPG combat had been done before, but Chrono Trigger was a master class in balancing deep tactical decisions with real-time positioning. It would inspire a myriad of imitators as traditional ATB systems would slowly fade in favor of more robust alternatives. Square’s 2016 I Am Setsuna is the most notable, featuring a battle mode that was extremely reminiscent of Chrono Trigger‘s.

The Ends
Japanese role-playing games, by their highly constructed nature, end up being very linear. Either the player’s party falls in battle before they accomplish their quest, or they make it to the end for a final boss battle and a grand wrap-up of the story. But Chrono Trigger pushed the envelope there as well. The game’s time-twisting nature and plethora of player choice and secrets to discover gave it a wide narrative space, and director Masato Kato came up with a bold idea on how to best exploit it.

As big as the team was, they didn’t have the manpower or cartridge memory to build in a truly branching narrative path for Chrono Trigger. Instead, they made it so the game could be “completed” at a variety of points in the narrative progression, with varying final confrontations and additional scenes based on that choice. All told, Chrono Trigger has thirteen different finales the player can obtain, from the worst – Lavos destroys civilization in 2300 AD – to the best.

In testing, Kato discovered that players expressed a desire to go through the story again and make different choices, aware that they could bring the story to a different conclusion. So the team introduced another innovative feature in “New Game Plus.” After completing their journey, gamers could start from the beginning, but keep all of the swag and abilities you collected in the last playthrough. This allowed them to zip through the early game and even access content that they could never see the first time through.

Since then, multiple endings and New Game + modes have become tropes in the JRPG genre. Given the incredible length of time it takes to complete some of these titles, allowing players to go into battles at maximum power lets them still make all the meaningful choices but greatly reduce the padding. And when you’re trying to see all of a game’s endings, which can change based on multiple actions taken throughout the story, it’s the most elegant yet immersive solution.

Ripples Through Time
Chrono Trigger was a critical and commercial success, selling millions in Japan and over a quarter million in the States, which was spectacular for a RPG. But the Super Nintendo was nearing the end of its lifespan, so no official sequel was planned for the platform. Instead, the company made a few oddball spin-off games for the Satellaview system and had a team ramp up to put something together for the next generation of systems. Square signed a deal with Sony, who were implementing a CD-ROM based architecture as opposed to Nintendo, who chose to stick with cartridges.

That team, headed by producer Tetsuya Takahashi and featuring writer Masato Kato and composer Yatsunori Mitsuda created… Xenogears. Although Square thought that the group was working on Chrono Trigger 2, Takahashi had his own designs for a new fictional universe. The development of that game could be a whole article in itself, but there are definitely chunks of Chrono Trigger DNA in the final product, with the more action-based battle system and complex plotline. After development on that game was completed, Square took Kato and teamed him with producer Hiromichi Tanaka to make an official Chrono sequel.

In 1999, Square released Chrono Cross for the PlayStation. This long-awaited game took inspiration from Kato’s Radical Dreamers for the Satellaview as well as the original game to create an experience that felt fresh and new while still keeping the spirit and innovation of the original. Instead of letting you criss-cross through time periods, protagonist Serge jumped back and forth between parallel worlds to recruit a staggering 45 possible party members. The game was critically lauded, and in 2001 the company registered a trademark for Chrono Break, but the future refused to change that game never materialized.

Squaresoft’s fertile period of 16-bit innovation is still looked back on as one of the golden ages of video games, with a string of undisputed classics expanding ideas of what RPGs could play like. It’s impossible to imagine the genre without Chrono Trigger, and there’s no time like the present to go back and play it again.
13:01
Bill Gates’ Foundation To Provide Coronavirus Home Testing Kits
» ‎ Geek.com

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COVID-19 (via Johns Hopkins Medicine)
A project funded by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation (BMGF) will provide at-home coronavirus testing kits to the people of Seattle.

Folks worried they may be infected with COVID-19 can simply swab their nose and return the sample for analysis.

Results, expected within two days, are shared with local health officials, who will notify those who test positive, according to a report by The Seattle Times.

Infected patients can answer questions online about their movements and contacts, making it easier to locate other possible cases, identify hot spots, and track the virus’ spread.

Most importantly, at-home tests will reduce the need for sick people to visit a doctor’s office, lowering the chance of exposing others.

There is no clear timeline for the project launch, the Times said, citing software upgrades and other finishing touches ahead of an expected “crush” of requests.

“Although there’s a lot to be worked out, this has enormous potential to turn the tide of the epidemic,” Scott Dowell, leader of coronavirus response to the Gates Foundation, told the newspaper.

Known for fighting disease and epidemics worldwide, the BMGF has (so far) committed more than $100 million to the global coronavirus response effort—including $5 million for the greater Seattle region.

Since the first U.S. case of novel coronavirus was detected in Washington early this year, the state has emerged as an epicenter of viral activity.

The King County public health center has officially confirmed 71 cases (including members of Amazon and Facebook’s workforces) and 15 deaths, as of Saturday. But estimates put the actual number of infections in the area around 600.

“The COVID-19 epidemic reminds us that infectious disease respects no boundaries, and no community is immune to the threat of a global pandemic,” Gates Foundation CEO Mark Suzman said in a statement.

“We can, however, take steps to mitigate [its impact] in Seattle and around the world,” he continued. “And we are ready to support these efforts here in our home community.”

Identified in December, novel coronavirus was linked to a wholesale animal and fish market in Wuhan. Symptoms include fever, cough, and trouble breathing (which are also handily associated with chest infection, bronchitis, pneumonia, and a number of other diagnoses).

More on Geek.com:
11:56
Twitter Slaps First ‘Manipulated Media’ Tag on Edited Biden Video
» ‎ Geek.com

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Tweeter-in-Chief Donald Trump (via CNN)
Twitter wasted no time putting its new misinformation labels to use.

A video created by White House social media director Dan Scavino and retweeted by Donald Trump has been tagged as “manipulated media.”

The clip, which shows Democratic candidate Joe Biden appearing to endorse Trump, was in fact trimmed at an opportune moment.

“Excuse me. We can only re-elect Donald Trump,” the presidential hopeful says in Scavino’s video.

But there is more to Biden’s quote—taken from a recent speech in Kansas City, Mo.: He goes on to say, “We can only re-elect Donald Trump if in fact we get engaged in this circular firing squad here. It’s gotta be a positive campaign.”

As of press time, the Scavino’s post has been retweeted 24,500 times and earned more than 75,000 likes.

Just in: Twitter applied its new manipulated media label for the first time to a deceptively edited video of Joe Biden. It was shared by White House social media director Dan Scavino, and retweeted by the president. pic.twitter.com/PggcCwMNkx

— Cat Zakrzewski (@Cat_Zakrzewski) March 8, 2020

The label, which began appearing to users on Sunday night, only shows up on timelines, not in searches. (Because I don’t follow either Scavino or Trump, a search for their tweets came up clean, with no warning.)

A company spokesperson told the Washington Post that it’s working on a fix.

This marks the first time Twitter has used its “manipulated media” tag since launching the label on March 5.

The new decree states that no one shall “deceptively share synthetic or manipulated media that are likely to cause harm.”

Twitter also reserves the right to label posts containing such material, “to help people understand [its] authenticity and to provide additional context.”

Criteria for the labeling or removing of tweets includes:
- Has it been substantially edited to add or erase visual or auditory information?
- Can the context in which it is shared result in confusion, misunderstanding, or suggestion of deliberate intent to deceive?
- Does it feature threats to physical safety, privacy, or the ability of someone to freely express themselves?
And while Scavino claims the video was “not manipulated,” it was certainly “deceptively edited,” which violates Twitter’s rule.

You’d be hard-pressed to argue that the pruned clip didn’t erase auditory information, or that its sharing wouldn’t result in misunderstanding.

The same video was shared to Facebook without any flags about the modified content.

The social network in January began cracking down on manipulated media, promising to remove “misleading” content edited in ways an average user can not easily spot.

That policy, however, does not cover all doctored videos: Content deemed parody or satire is excused, as are clips edited solely to omit or change the order of words.

“Facebook’s malfeasance when it comes to trafficking in blatantly false information is a national crisis in this respect,” Biden’s campaign manager Greg Schultz said in a statement, published by The New York Times.

More on Geek.com:
March 08, 2020
23:06
Play These Nintendo Switch Games in 2020
» ‎ Geek.com

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In the first three years of its life, the Nintendo Switch has proven to be quite the success, building up a library of great games and convincing folks that a console/handheld hybrid is something they need in their gaming lives. But 2020 will be the system’s biggest challenge yet as rivals Sony and Microsoft are both launching their next-gen consoles, the PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X, at the end of this year. While you can’t take those consoles on the go, the difference in sheer power will be hard to ignore, even if the rumored Switch Pro ever does to fruition.

Still, hardware only exists as a portal to quality software, which the Switch definitely still has going into 2020. While you wait for the big hitters (Animal Crossing!) here are some nifty smaller Nintendo Switch games to play right now.
Afterparty
We already offered some initial impressions on Afterparty, the latest snarky narrative-driven adventure game from Night School. But in a twist of dark irony, this game about about dying, going to Hell, and trying to out party Satan wound up being the last new indie Nintendo Switch game we got to try out before the imminent closure of this very website. So pick your drink of choice, a wonderful mechanic for altering your drunk personality to your liking, and pour one out for Geek.com.
Samurai Shodown
Samurai Shodown is the same excellent fighting game revival we played last year, just a little blurrier but no less brutal on Nintendo Switch. The massive amount of damage a simple single sword strike can inflict means every action needs to be quickly yet carefully considered. The various weapon-specific systems (parrying, disarming, picking your sword back up) also add a unique feel compared to the Street Fighter clones of the world. You can command a dog. And the sheer comeback potential of the multiple super moves sends salt potential off the charts.
Vitamin Connection
Vitamin Connection is maybe the closest thing the Switch will get to Affordable Space Adventures, a niche indie Wii U game I hoped would one day be saved. Players control helpful vitamins curing various humans in a co-op cartoon take on Fantastic Voyage. Emphasis on co-op. While you can technically play alone, Vitamin Connection really wants you to coordinate with a friend, divvying up duties like firing the laser and angling the ship through tight corridors. I quite liked these shooter segments. They turn each human body into a little on-rails open map to explore. However, they’re broken up by minigames that are frequently more frustrating than fun. The sheer charm of WayForward’s art direction and music goes a long way toward getting you to let the medicine go down.
Metro Redux
Metro Redux (a collection containing Metro: 2033 and Metro: Last Light) is maybe the most Russian video game I’ve ever played that’s technically in English. Based on a series of novels you play as an armed citizen of an underground society trying to survive in the nuclear hellscape. That means not only dealing with monsters on the surface but also human politics below. The worldbuilding is fantastic, backed up by beautifully bleak visuals for rusty tunnels or snowy abandoned buildings. You realize why it takes so long to load on Switch. The encounters themselves, while more linear compared to the recent Metro: Exodus, at times recall the greatness of a Half-Life campaign. But the commitment to survival gameplay is something I appreciate more than I enjoy. Using bullets as currency, managing limited flashlight batteries, and swapping air mask filters feels totally appropriate for the setting. I just didn’t feel like actually suffering through it for very long.
Darksiders: Genesis
I was totally ready to dismiss Darksiders: Genesis as a cheap Diablo clone, another theft from a franchise that has no shame taking from the greats. But while Darksiders: Genesis does ask you to crawl through dungeons and score loot, it’s way closer to its traditional third-person action-adventure big brethren than an RPG. You still have elaborate combos systems, only now melee and projectile attacks are split across the two co-op characters. You still solve Zelda-esque environmental puzzles. And instead of feeling pared back, the levels are impressively huge. Almost too huge considering how aimless they can often feel. As for the story, while it’s nice to finally have a sense of all four horsemen, ten years later it still feels like the actual plot of this franchise is just constantly getting delayed.
Bloodroots
Bloodroots is another top-down, lightning-fast murder spree clearly descended from Hotline Miami. I like to call these “cocaine action” games. Instead of the glitzy grime of urban Florida, your carnage takes place across rustic, vaguely medieval fantasy/Weird West landscapes. Your weapons are more primitive, too. In fact, they usually break after just a few hits and the combat rhythm revolves around quickly finding a replacement. Fortunately, you have a lot of creative choices, not just axes and swords but wagon wheels and harpoon guns. Each weapon has its own unique finisher, too. This genre lends itself to uneven difficulty spikes, but Bloodroots gives players a fair amount of accessibility options to negate this. Using different weapons for different kinds of platforming also forces your brain to think about more than just killing.
Warface
I think Warface is an incredible actual name for a video game. Unfortunately, that’s the most interesting thing this free-to-play military shooter has going for it. Sure it’s impressive to see the famously taxing CryEngine running pretty well on a tablet. But here it’s used to deliver generic shooting action multiplayer we’ve already seen for years. Even the guns, which do feel pretty great, are tainted by the vague pay-to-win elements for the best equipment. That said, I at least felt like there was a lot I could experience before having to pay.
Two Point Hospital
Two Point Hospital is the spiritual successor to (and comes from the creators of) a little old PC management sim called Theme Hospital. But even if you’ve never played that, or have no idea what it is, just imagine Roller Coaster Tycoon but for hospitals and you’re set. And that premise is more fun than it sounds. Part of it comes from a nice sense of humor, taking the piss out of the potential life and death stakes. “Diseases” make patients spew verbal diarrhea or delude themselves into becoming mock rock stars. Sure they might die and haunt you, but you can just hire a janitor with ghost-busting tech. The easygoing atmosphere makes it easy to sink into the surprisingly intuitive management systems and interface for a console game. Hiring staff, arranging rooms, and staying profitable is shockingly easy. It helps that your hospital can only get so big, meaning things never get as unwieldy or overwhelming as a full-blown city-planning game. And the campaign breaks up the tech tree into discreet goals to accomplish in very reasonably sized chunks. It doesn’t make me sick!
Kunai
There’s just nothing like a good gaming grappling hook, and Kunai’s centerpiece is a pair of great gaming grappling hooks. Metroidvania’s live or die based on how fun they make the otherwise intolerable act of backtracking. And swinging through the skies like a 2D pixelated Spider-Man, gracefully transitioning to sword and shuriken combat, makes Kunai just one of the best feeling 2D sidescrollers I’ve played in a while. And the level design mostly presents you with clever challenges to overcome with that moveset. The art style might be too minimal for its own good though, perhaps because most of the attention went to the mechanics. The post-apocalyptic world of living computers is a cute conceit but could use just a little more personality.
Kentucky Route Zero
After nearly a decade in development, the episodic interactive exploration of America’s decline reaches an appropriately magical realist end. We already told you why we feel Kentucky Route Zero is the perfect game for the 20th century. Just know that, even with a very mood art style and sound design, this is largely a game about following plot through text and offering your own take on that text. It’s definitely something to be admired, but maybe not something all will enjoy.
The Dark Crystal: Age of Resistance Tactics
I feel like this game is pitching itself to Dark Crystal fans who may not play strategy games, but I’m a strategy game fan who has yet to watch a single minute of Dark Crystal. Still, even though I don’t know the specifics of this Jim Henson puppets, the overall fantasy vibe works fine. Not being a fan of the franchise also probably makes the shortcomings of the game more clear. You gather a fairly large cast of characters but can only bring a fraction of them into battle. So you really have to pay attention to who you level up. And the flexibility of the job system gives you plenty of options to explore within characters. But even when I did have to think about, say environmental tactics, I mostly slept walk through battles in this generic and weirdly sluggish version of a game I’ve played many better versions of in the past.
Knights and Bikes
After playing through Knights and Bikes, my opinions ultimately didn’t change that much from when I first checked out the game at GDC two years ago. The veteran Media Molecule talent pull off a fantastic tactile art style for representing 1980s British childhood. It’s cool that this is a game about kids that also seems like it’s appropriate for kids. But as a result the actual gameplay feels so thin as to be almost nonexistent, biking to different areas and occasionally smashing stuff while waiting to trigger the next story beat. It’s so adorable that I actively feel bad ultimately being so bored, but it is what it is.
Thronebreaker: The Witcher Tales
Thronebreaker feels like what would happen when CD Projekt Red puts their considerable writing talent and love of epic scope to what might as well be a mobile game spin-off. It takes the Gwent card game from The Witcher and expands it into the combat system powering a lengthy illustrated RPG campaign. The tale of the exiled Queen Meve, complete with voice acting, feels as compelling as any Witcher sidequest. And you can even skip battles to keep the plot moving. I ended up doing that a lot because even without the rest of The Witcher III to distract me I still don’t like Gwent. Slay The Spire taught me I’m not immune to the addictive joys of amassing a powerful deck. It’s just that even successful strategies in Gwent feel indirect and unsatisfying. If you like Gwent though, this is by far the best way to shoot it directly into your veins.
Tokyo Mirage Sessions #FE Encore
As much as I’ve championed Wii U games coming to Switch, just so that more people have a chance to actually play them, these ports have offered little to me personally as a fan of that doomed system. However, Tokyo Mirage Sessions is one of the few Wii U games I originally skipped. Probably because the intensely anime flavor of the Fire Emblem/Shin Megami Tensei crossover seemed too much to bear.

But you know what, for a game literally about Japanese pop stars fighting demons in Shibuya through the power of performance, this game is more stylish than annoying. Like a catchy song, the battle system is simple yet quick and addictive, encouraging you to chain together complementary attacks for combos that can wipe out all foes in one move. Powering through the main storyline is similarly streamlined compared to a typical bloated JRPG. You can tackle a dungeon in a single session or two and there are only a handful of them. The limited amount of Fire Emblem content does feel like a Kingdom Hearts-esque grift, but there’s a similar strategy in deploying your different party members and their different weapons. At least the new Joker costume can make this feel like Persona 5 on Switch.
Oddworld: Stranger’s Wrath HD
For whatever reason, the original Oddworld: Strangers Wrath was the game that almost got me to buy an original Xbox. Just something about this grizzled sasquatch cowboy and his critter ammunition really spoke to me as a kid. Playing the game now, it’s definitely a game from 2005. But it’s a good game from that era! Even if there’s not that much difference between shooting bees and skunks versus shooting bullets and smoke bombs, wouldn’t you rather shoot bees? The different strengths of each weapon make bounty hunting feel like actual hunting. And the themes of nature versus industry Oddworld has always embraced feel especially appropriate in a Western setting.
Super Crush K.O.
The team behind the excellent early Switch game Graceful Explosion Machine takes that same immaculate approach to arcade action and applies it to the beat ‘em up genre. Switching between your various attacks, from high-flying uppercuts to twisting ground kicks, feels like playing Bayonetta or Devil May Cry but in 2D. You even have a gun for extending combos, something I’ve never gotten a handle on in action games until now. Don’t let the soft pastel colors fool you. Besting the enemy hordes is a tall order. And yet the fluid, juggling nature of the combat, which really asks you to consider the whole playfield, makes perfect runs feel tantalizingly possible.
Stories Untold
Stories Untold is an anthology of short story-based horror games revolving around manipulating spooky old tech. And like most anthologies some are better than others. The standout for me is the first game, which is really just a text adventure with added production value. Like expensive podcasts, it makes an ancient storytelling form feel fresh again. Unfortunately, as the analog interfaces get more complex, I found myself more removed from the subtle terror and just annoyed at the fiddling knobs.
It came from space and ate our brains!
How about that title? This is a pretty straightforward top-down shooter. But I appreciated little touches like surprisingly moody lighting for the otherwise simple voxel look or how much it commits to the vague survival horror elements. Playing alone, you’re quickly overwhelmed and upgrades like gun mods or land mines are a must. Levels do tend to drag, however, perhaps because they’re more tuned to co-op play.
Skellboy
Skellboy sounds like what I would call Sans when trying to annoy Undertale fans. But he’s actually the star of this little action-RPG. As a skeleton, you can swap various parts of your body with limbs harvested from foes. This leads to some Kirby-esque on-the-fly power-swapping as well as some light puzzle-solving as you change your look to reach new areas. It’s all a very cool idea, as is the game’s indie Octopath Travler art style which projects chunky sprites onto the 3D world and its cleverly connected zones. But for whatever reason, maybe technical performance, the act of actually playing Skellboy just never felt as smooth as I would’ve hoped. Thankfully, a day-one patch has addressed this.
Speedrunners
More arcade racing games where you are running on foot please. Speedrunners doesn’t have the nifty color-swapping gimmick of Runbow, but it has similar local competitive thrills and vaguely the same visual style. Between the complexity of the looping sidescrolling maps and your variety of tools, it feels like there’s never just one sure way to make it through a stretch the fastest. Swing across the ceiling with your grapple hook? Slide under boxes? Unleash a power-up? Wall jumps? And the way the field of view shrinks to take out stragglers is a great, almost battle royale way of forcing matches to a conclusion.
March 06, 2020
15:00
The 11 Best Human-Hunting Movies
» ‎ Geek.com

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Hunting is one of those topics that inspires a visceral reaction in people. Either you’re the sort who can’t stand the idea of gunning down defenseless animals for sport, or you believe that humanity got to the top of the food chain for a reason and we can do whatever we need to to stay there, there aren’t many neutral parties in this argument. But what if… what if we weren’t on top of the food chain? What if humans were prey, not predators? Hollywood’s been playing with this idea since 1932’s The Most Dangerous Game, and plenty of directors have taken a crack at the concept. As we celebrate the return of the once-shelved controversy The Hunt, let’s program a virtual film festival of our favorite movies where humanity is the prey. Before you say anything, yes, we left The Hunger Games out on purpose. Let’s pursue more exciting prey, shall we?
A Quiet Place
Here’s a great place to start: with an extraterrestrial race that’s just better at hunting than we are. A Quiet Place posits an alien race that is basically indestructible to human munitions and hunts by sound. They’ve already decimated the planet’s population when the movie starts, leaving scattered bands of survivors creeping silently through the wreckage trying to hold on for one more day. The film follows a family of four contending with the beasts as the mother gives birth – not typically something you can do without making a little noise. It’s a tense and fun thriller even if the ending feels a little hokey.

Battle Royale
The participants in Kinji Fukasaku’s exploitation classic aren’t hunting each other because they want to – they’re just junior high schoolers marooned on an island and forced to battle to the death by the Japanese government. If you’ve played Fortnite you probably recognize the premise, and this was a cult hit that inspired a ton of imitators. The original is still one of the best, combining tense sequences of stalking, relentlessly brutal combat, and a performance by Takeshi Kitano as the class’s teacher. It mixes extremely dark humor in to create a unique and transgressive movie.

Punishment Park
One of the lesser-known films on this list, 1971 mockumentary Punishment Park is worth digging up for the brutal and unsparing way it presents its central concept – a group of anti-war protesters are loosed into the California desert with no water or food and pursued by police officers and National Guardsmen as a training exercise. If the protesters reach the end of the course in three days, they will be freed. If captured, they face prison sentences. Combining alternate history and tense survival, much of the dialogue was improvised by the actors which make the whole production even more realistic.

The 10th Victim
This oddball 1965 Italian sci-fi flick takes a popular human-hunting concept – the murder game show – and runs with it. In the future, violent individuals participate in “The Big Hunt,” a televised competition where they need to survive ten rounds – five as the hunter, and five as the prey. If they do, they retire in wealth and luxury. If they don’t – well, they die. Ursula Andress stars as a huntress about to get her tenth kill, only to run into Marcello Mastroianni as her target. The duo plays a wild New Wave game of cat and mouse before a remarkable downer climax, even for the genre.

The Naked Prey
The oldest film on this list, 1965’s The Naked Prey is a fascinating film. Cornel Wilde stars as an unnamed safari guide who runs afoul of an African tribe that kills his clients strips him naked and turns him loose on the savannah to be hunted down. Wilde both produced and directed the movie as well, so every ordeal he suffers through on screen is his own damn fault. The movie stood apart from its contemporaries with a unique soundtrack of authentic African tribal chants and very little dialogue. The racial politics of this one are a little dated in the 21st century, but the intensity of the pursuit is timeless.

Surviving The Game
Before Ice-T was a Law & Order staple, he kicked off his acting career in Ernest Dickerson’s 1994 human hunting flick. He plays a homeless man who gets hired as a hunting guide by a businessman who flies him out to the mountains and then informs him that he’s not the guide – he’s the prey. Pursued by a number of rich sociopaths who shelled out $50,000 for the opportunity to kill another human being, Ice has to take them out armed with just a pack of cigarettes and his fists. It’s a little silly at times but solid performances and cinematography that works way harder than the movie deserves make Surviving The Game worth watching.

Fortress
This 1985 Aussie flick is inspired by Lord of the Flies but pulls some interesting twists along the way. When a primary school teacher and her class are abducted by a quartet of masked thugs and trapped in a cave, it kicks off a remarkably violent and unsparing chase through the backcountry as the kids learn some skills that they typically don’t teach you in school. When the group sets in at a rocky outcropping – the titular fortress – for a siege, things ramp up in a very satisfying and brutal way. HBO brought this over to the States early in the network’s life, so that’s where most of us saw it.

Hard Target
Legendary Hong Kong action director John Woo clashed with star Jean-Claude Van Damme while making his first Hollywood film, but Hard Target still holds up. A mulleted Muscles from Brussels stars as merchant seaman Chance Boudreaux. He gets caught up in a young lady’s quest to find her missing father and learns that he was abducted by businessman Emil Fouchon who likes to hunt people for sport. Woo’s first cut of this flick was so violent that it received an NC-17 rating and he had to trim it down seven times to get it to an R. It’s a gleefully meaty action movie that might not be up to the director’s best but still delivers.

Deliverance
City slickers in the wilderness is a premise that’s been played for both laughs and drama, but John Boorman’s 1972 Deliverance remains the pinnacle of the genre. When a group of Atlanta men hit a remote Georgia river, they come into contact with a group of hillbillies with bad intentions. One of the mountain men dies, and the other one disappears into the woods bent on revenge. What follows is a tense and unsettling chase down the river, where the survivors know that their pursuer could come from anywhere and use his knowledge of the area to take them out. It’s an iconic movie with some truly tremendous performances.

Slave Girls From Beyond Infinity
Sometimes you just want to eat the biggest chunk of cheese you can find, and this 1987 sleaze classic certainly fits the bill. After nubile female prisoners Daria and Tisa break out of their space prison, they crash their stolen shuttle on a planet with one inhabitant: the mysterious Zed, who lures unsuspecting travelers there to hunt them for sport and mounts their severed heads on the wall of his trophy room. With clunky robots, softcore humping and leather bikinis everywhere, this is a trashy take on the formula that was actually brought up before Congress as an example of inappropriate content on cable TV.

Predator
80s action doesn’t get much better than this, with Arnold Schwarzenegger and Jesse Ventura as elite military rescue team members who get surprised in South America by an extraterrestrial hunter. This one really hits all the sweet spots – the single Predator is outnumbered and outgunned, but his stealth tech and experience lets him pick off his foes one by one as they struggle to figure out what is happening. The final slugfest between Arnold and the beast is one of the most macho moments in cinematic history, as they discard their weapons and go toe-to-toe until the explosive climax. None of the sequels ever reached this level of badassitude, but we have high hopes for the new one.
14:26
Review: ‘Corruption 2099’ Is the Love Child of ‘Metal Gear Solid’ and ‘XCOM’
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Outside of Valkyria Chronicles, I’m not really into tactical role-playing games. Don’t get me wrong, I can appreciate titles like XCOM that require players to use their brains over twitchy trigger fingers. At the same time, I usually don’t have the requisite patience for these types of experiences. Even Final Fantasy Tactics is too much. While I’m not the target audience for tactical RPGs, Corruption 2029 is good at what it does. If nothing else, it serves as a solid introduction to the genre thanks to its no-frills gameplay.

Corruption 2029 takes place in the near future (i.e. 2029) where a new American civil war tore the country apart. The two main factions — the NAC (New American Council) and the UPA (United Peoples of America.) — wage endless battles to control what’s left of the country. The factions fight using humanoid drones controlled far from the battlefield. As the player, you command three UPA “soldiers” whose job is to disrupt NAC operations through sabotage or straight-up skirmishes.

If the premise sounds familiar, that’s because it is. Near-future wastelands are a well-worn staple in gaming, especially these days. This is understandable given the current state of the country. While that’s interesting, it doesn’t save the story from feeling generic. But I can’t fault the stale narrative too much since it isn’t the main selling point here.

The gameplay is equal parts tactics and stealth. The basic loop involves entering a location, scouting it while cloaked, picking off weak targets, then hunkering down when the main force reveals itself. Though the two gameplay styles seem disparate, they work surprisingly well together.

As a fan of the Metal Gear Solid series, I quite enjoy sneaking around enemy bases and learning their patterns. Stealth also provides a great opportunity to steal useful items like health packs and grenades. Although I didn’t get a chance to do it, it’s possible to complete some missions without enemies spotting you. Those who try to finish objectives purely in stealth will find it a satisfying challenge.

Battles start when you engage the enemy or when they’ve located you. It’s best to find a good cover spot before fights break out. There is plenty of detritus littering any given battlefield; giving you plenty of places to conceal yourself. Each of your three units has two moves for their respective turns. They can shoot enemies, reload weapons, move to another location, or hunker down. You can also set units to shoot foes that move past them with the “overwatch” command. If a unit goes down, you can revive them with a health pack before they die.

Like I said before, you need a lot of patience when playing Corruption 2029. I died whenever I tried to brute force my way through missions. When I played tactically, I completed objectives rather handily. In fact, it felt awesome finishing missions by relying on my instincts and using the grey matter inside my skull.

The simplicity of missions is both a strength and a weakness. Since you only have a few available commands, you’re free to focus on the task at hand without having to consider many variables. All that’s required is positioning units correctly and taking out lower priority foes before moving on to bigger threats. With that said, since engagements are so straightforward, there isn’t a lot of wiggle room to employ unique strategies. For all intents and purposes, Corruption 2029 is a “meat-and-potatoes” tactics game. I have no issue with that, but I can see how purists may scoff at this.

Though engagements play out mostly the same, you can spice things up by building customized units. Every mission and sidequest rewards players with upgrades and enhancements. You can then add different attributes to soldiers in the loadout menu. I equipped a unit with a sniper rifle with a long-range buff and had them take out foes from afar. I gave one soldier an assault rifle for mid-range battles and another a shotgun that dealt extra damage at close range. Setting up my units in this fashion allowed me to handle most situations. This aspect gives what would otherwise be a no-frills experience some variety.

Corruption 2029 is a good-looking game but it won’t blow you away. The problem lies with the repetitive battlefields you find yourself in. After a while, it becomes hard differentiating one destroyed forest or urban settlement from another. On one hand, this serves to lay the focus on purely on gameplay. On the other hand, it makes for a drab visual experience.

If I came off too harsh in this review, please know that was unintentional. I think Corruption 2029 is a solidly made game. It deftly combines stealth and tactics; something few titles can claim. There’s also a great deal of satisfaction derived from seeing carefully planned strategies come together. Fans of the genre will doubtless enjoy what the game has to offer. Considering its $19.99 price on the Epic Games Store, Corruption 2029 is worth trying for those who are curious.
13:19
Earn $1,000 to Binge Watch 15 Hours of ‘The Office’
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Michael Scott (Steve Carell), Jim Halpert (John Krasinski), and Dwight Schrute (Rainn Wilson) in 'The Office' (via NBC)
The American version of The Office turns 15 this month, and to celebrate, USDish is offering someone $1,000 to binge watch the sitcom.

One lucky fan will have nine days to watch 15 hours of the mockumentary (roughly 45 episodes—or five 20-minute installments per day).

It’s not all fun and games, though: As part of the coveted gig, you’ll need to take meticulous notes on the common tropes that occur in each episode.

For instance, how many times does Stanley roll his eyes at the camera? And how often does Phyllis talk about Bob Vance from Vance Refrigeration?

USDish is offering one lucky fan $1,000 (via USDish)

“The goal is to help us understand how often sitcoms repeat popular tropes,” according to USDish. “We’ll provide you with general guidelines to track your experience, but in true Kelly Kapoor fashion, we also want you to share your unfiltered opinions and reactions on social media.”

If you’re as obsessed with The Office as Michael is with Ryan, apply online by Monday, March 16 at 7 p.m. ET to earn more than $1,000 cold hard cash.

Other benefits include themed swag (which may or may not involve a Dundie award, “World’s Best Boss” mug, Jell-O, and a stapler) as well as a Netflix gift card*.

Add a video submission to boost your chances.

The competition is open only to U.S. residents aged 18 or older; you do not need to be a USDish customer to apply. A winner will be notified within five days of the closing date.

Are you obsessed with “The Office”? (via USDish)

In October, DISH Network offered one (un)lucky fan $1,300 to watch 13 films based on Stephen King’s most spine-chilling novels.

To help log details (What’s your heart rate during scary scenes? Which movie is your favorite or least favorite? Are you watching alone or sharing the popcorn with a friend?), the company issued a survival kit—including a Fitbit activity tracker.

* Ironic, considering The Office will ditch Netflix in 2021 for exclusive play on NBCUniversal’s upcoming streaming service.

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12:17
Alexa Can Now Send Traffic Updates To Your Phone
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Speechcons (via Amazon)
Alexa quietly gained a handful of new features last month, including severe weather alerts and the ability to send traffic details to your phone.

In a February roundup, published on Wednesday, Amazon announced fresh functions like NBA highlights (available only on screened devices) and up-to-date information on the 2020 U.S. presidential election.
Daily Commute
Ask Alexa to share the latest about your daily commute, traffic conditions, or directions to a destination, then say “Alexa, send that to my phone.”

The digital secretary will confirm and forward a notification to the connected handset. All you have to do is start the route guidance.
Severe Weather
Get set up by asking Alexa to “tell me when there’s a severe weather alert.” The speaker will then notify you ahead of any local warning.
NBA Video Highlights
Folks with an Alexa-enabled device with a screen can now watch video highlights from NBA games.

Say “Alexa, play the Lakers highlights” to access clips from the team’s most recent game. Or, ask Alexa to “play the NBA highlights” for all the latest news.
Election Updates
Alexa can help customers stay tuned into the 2020 U.S. presidential election by sharing information on the latest polls, candidate positions, debates, and more.

Simply say “Alexa, what’s my election update?” or “Alexa, what happened in the last debate?”
“Hey Google, Serenade Me One More Time”
Google Assistant users, meanwhile, have been warned: John Legend’s velvety voice cameo will expire on March 23.

The singer’s silky smooth vocals debuted in April 2019, available in the US on any device with Google Assistant—including Google Home Hub and Android or iOS smartphones.

Simply tell your gadget to “talk like a Legend,” then sit back and relax to the sound of Legend’s dulcet tones as he makes jokes or answers questions like “What’s the temperature outside?” or “Why is the sky blue?”

You can even get a bit cheeky with the EGOT winner by asking, “Hey Google, who is Chrissy Teigen?” or “Hey Google, are we just ordinary people?” Or, for the ultimate treat, try “Hey Google, serenade me.”

Talk fast, though, because Legend’s lilting words are only available for another two weeks.

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11:34
Twitter Bans Hate Speech Based on Age, Disability, Disease
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(via Twitter)
Twitter is cracking down on hateful language that dehumanizes users based on age, disability, or disease.

The latter, of course, is a timely addition amidst the spread of COVID-19, which has inspired malicious and racist remarks.

Tweets that break this new rule but were posted before Thursday will need to be deleted, but won’t result in account suspension. Moving forward, however, perpetrators can expect the full punishment.

This move comes eight months after the social network banned bullying on the basis of religion.

“We are continuing to learn as we expand to additional categories,” according to the Twitter Safety blog. “We also realize we don’t have all the answers.”

Tweets like these must be removed when reported (via Twitter)

Which is why the company developed a global panel of experts to “help us think about how we should address dehumanizing speech around more complex categories like race, ethnicity, and national origin.”

“This group,” Twitter said, “will help us understand the tricky nuances, important regional and historical context, and ultimately help us answer questions.”

Social media can be a scary place for anyone who isn’t a straight white man.

Early this year, Twitter announced it’s testing a new feature that allows users to set limits on who can reply to their tweets—another step toward curbing online abuse.

Distracting, irrelevant, and offensive comments can quickly derail important discussions. But don’t get mad, get even—by burying unwanted remarks using Twitter’s option to hide replies.

The function is available globally on iOS, Android, Twitter Lite, and twitter.com.

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10:59
Meet Perseverance: Mars 2020 Rover Named By Teen
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A laser-etched nameplate secured to the arm of NASA's Mars Perseverance rover serves as a rock and debris shield to protect a flexible electrical cable (via NASA/JPL-Caltech)
NASA’s Mars 2020 rover has a new name: Perseverance.

Virginia seventh-grader Alexander Mather won the agency’s “Name the Rover” essay contest, beating 28,000 other entries.

The title was announced Thursday by Thomas Zurbuchen, associate administrator of the Science Mission Directorate, during a celebration at Lake Braddock Secondary School in Burke, Va.

“Alex’s entry captured the spirit of exploration,” Zurbuchen said in a statement. “Like every exploration mission before, our rover is going to face challenges, and it’s going to make amazing discoveries.

“It’s already surmounted many obstacles to get us to the point where we are today—processing for launch,” he added.

Call me Perseverance.

I'm headed for Mars: driven to search for signs of ancient life, test new tech to help future human explorers, and collect the first rock samples for future return to Earth.

Follow me. Let's go. [https:]] #Mars2020

— NASA's Perseverance Mars Rover (@NASAPersevere) March 5, 2020

Perseverance is the latest in a long line of Red Planet rovers to be named by school children: from Sojourner in 1997 to the Spirit and Opportunity rovers that landed on Mars in 2004, to Curiosity, which has been exploring the fourth planet from the Sun since 2012.

Each moniker was selected following a nationwide contest.

The competition to christen NASA’s Mars 2020 rover began in August; some 4,700 volunteer judges reviewed submissions to narrow the pool to 155 semifinalists.

Once whittled down to nine finalists, the public had five days to vote for their favorites—submitted to the National Aeronautics and Space Administration for consideration.

Until recently, Mather was more interested in video games than space, according to NASA. But during a 2018 visit to Space Camp in Alabama—where he first glimpsed a Saturn V rocket—the 13-year-old became a “bona fide space enthusiast.”

“This was a chance to help the agency that put humans on the Moon and will soon do it again,” he said of the naming contest. “This Mars rover will help pave the way for human presence there, and I wanted to try and help in any way I could. Refusal of the challenge was not an option.”

Spoken like a true teenager.

Along with forever being associated with the mission, Mather and his family are invited to Cape Canaveral Air Force Station in Florida this summer to watch the rover launch.

Thomas Zurbuchen (left) and Lori Glaze (right) congratulate Alexander Mather (center), who won a contest to name the next Mars rover (via NASA)

NASA is also acknowledging the contributions of those semifinalists whose entries did not win: All 155 proposed names and essays have been stenciled onto a silicon chip—in lines of text smaller than one-thousandth the width of a human hair—to be flown to Mars aboard the rover.

“They came so far, and their expressive submissions helped make this naming contest the biggest and best in NASA history,” according to Lori Glaze, director of NASA’s Planetary Science Division. “So we decided to send them a little farther—314 million miles farther.”

Perseverance is currently undergoing final assembly and checkout at the Kennedy Space Center. It is scheduled to land at Mars’ Jezero Crater on Feb. 18, 2021.

“Alex and his classmates are the Artemis Generation, and they’re going to be taking the next steps into space that lead to Mars,” Zurbuchen said. “That inspiring work will always require perseverance. We can’t wait to see that nameplate on Mars.”

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0:26
‘Seven Deadly Sins: Grand Cross’ Faithfully Recreates the Beloved Anime on Mobile Devices
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Thanks to its presence on Netflix, Seven Deadly Sins is one of the most well-known anime in North America. The anime is also big in its country of origin: Japan, where it has an equally popular mobile game. Developed by Netmarble, Seven Deadly Sins: Grand Cross finally makes its way to the West. Fans of the anime will appreciate the game’s painstaking authenticity to the source material. Those unfamiliar with the show will appreciate its simple to learn but difficult to master card battle mechanics.

Seven Deadly Sins: Grand Cross recreates the first two seasons of the anime, only with 3D graphics and cutscenes. Fans of the anime will get to relieve key moments, along with brand-new storylines exclusive to the game. Players control Meliodas and his assortment of colorful allies as they attempt to bring down a corrupt kingdom. This won’t be easy as the antagonistic Holy Knights will do everything in their power to stop the heroes.

If you’ve played card battle games in the past then Grand Cross’ mechanics will feel familiar. You control a team composed of four characters. Three of these are main characters while the fourth serves as a backup should one of your mains fall. To stay true to the anime storyline, certain fights require specific characters.

Every character has three cards assigned to them. There are attack, debuff, and stance cards. You start with seven cards out of a pool of nine. If you have two of the same card type next to each other, they combine and become a 2-star card. You can also manually move cards to create 2-stars, though this takes one move. You can skip moves if you desire or hit reset and start over.

As you progress, you’ll meet new characters you can use in battles. Most characters start at R or SR tier. Main characters like Elizabeth Liones are automatically SRs. The next tier is SSR. You gain these characters from summon boxes. You can open these boxes with the requisite amount of diamonds, which you earn by completing main missions, daily missions, or simply by logging in each day.

Once you have an SSR hero, you can evolve them to the highest tier: UR. Using tokens gained after battles, you can upgrade a character’s ultimate move. You can also level heroes up by giving them enhanced potions. It’s possible to equip items that augment stats. This includes different outfits, weapon skins, and hairstyles. Players will find a deep level of customization. This will allow them to create the perfect teams for the right occasions.

This version of Grand Cross contains all the content previously released in Japan and Asian markets. From the jump, North American players will have access to hours upon hours worth of material. This includes multiplayer in the form of co-op and 3v3 PVP matches. Since the game uses global servers, there should always be someone out there to play with or challenge. Players can also expect regular updates, including events that can earn them higher-tier items and characters.

Your mileage may vary depending on your predilection for card battle games, titles based on anime, or mobile games in general. As someone who isn’t exactly fond of any of these, I actually found Grand Cross an enjoyable experience. I’m not familiar with the anime but I like the art style and smooth animations. The over-the-top super moves are awesome and the card battle mechanics are intuitive and fun. Seven Deadly Sins: Grand Cross isn’t something I normally play but it is a well-crafted game. If you’re into the anime, RPGs, or card battle games, you should definitely give this one a shot.

Seven Deadly Sins: Grand Cross is now available on the Apple App Store and the Google Play Store.
0:23
‘Star Trek: Picard’ Season 1 Episode 7 Recap: Make It Dough, Number One
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Sir Patrick Stewart as Jean-Luc Picard; Jonathan Frakes as Riker - Photo Cr: Aaron Epstein/CBS
It finally happened. Star Trek: Picard gave us the cameo we’ve been waiting for since the first episode. And even here, it made us wait. Picard and Soji are on the run after he helped her escape from the Artifact. He asked the ship to meet him at a faraway planet. There’s only one problem with that plan. There’s a traitor on board. We didn’t go much into it during the last episode, but you’ll remember that after the team successfully rescued Dr. Maddox, Dr. Jurati killed him. She said she was doing it because she knew something. Well, this week we get some clarification on that. The episode opens on a flashback of Commander Oh meeting with Dr. Jurati. After Jurati’s first two meetings with Picard, Oh asked her what they were about. We find out Jurati is part of Picard’s crew on Oh’s request. Oh mind-melded with her and showed her a world where Synthetics were allowed to exist. It apparently led to Earth’s destruction.

I like any Star Trek that plays with the idea of Vulcans operating entirely on logic. Ideally, it should make them immune to fear. It should prevent them from making assumptions like that, but it doesn’t. Many people have this idea in their heads that logic is infallible. That as long as you operate on logic and not emotion, you’ll always be in the right. That’s rarely the case, though. Thinking logically can lead you to the wrong conclusion, especially if you start from an assumption, as appears to be the case here. In any case. Commander Oh is convinced that the existence of any androids will lead to Earth’s destruction. And so she’s sent Jurati on a secret murder mission aboard Picard’s ship.

Michelle Hurd as Raffi Musiker; Alison Pill as Agnes Jurati – Photo Cr: Trae Patton/CBS ©2019 CBS Interactive, Inc. All Rights Reserved.

She’s acting super suspicious, too. At first, the Romulans hold the ship in a tracking beam. She suggests that they tell the Romulans Picard’s not with them. Implying that they should just leave Picard and Soji to the Romulans while they make their escape. When the Romulans let them go, intending to follow them to Picard’s location, Rios warps in one direction and stops, planning to set his real course after Narek overshoots him. Jurati starts freaking out, yelling that they should go back to Earth and let someone else find the synth. Real strange, coming from a scientist who’s supposedly wanted to meet an android her whole life. Raffi replicates some cake and chocolate milk to calm her down, and Jurati starts crying. When Rios comes in to report that Narek is still shadowing them, she throws up. Strangely, the hospitality AI doesn’t show up to deal with the vomit. Wonder what happened to him.

Also suspicious is how Narek is able to keep tracking them. Rios comes to the wrong conclusion initially, thinking someone placed a tracker on Raffi. He finds it suspicious that she was ready to leave the ship forever, but ended up staying. He expresses that concern to Jurati though, who immediately puts everything together. The Romulans are monitoring the tracking device Oh gave her. I don’t know if she’s put together that Commander Oh isn’t entirely on the up and up, but she knows she’s being used. She injects herself with a neurotoxin and goes into a coma. Rios doesn’t understand why yet, but it makes her signal disappear from Narek’s map.

Sir Patrick Stewart as Jean-Luc Picard; Jonathan Frakes as William Riker; Marina Sirtis as Deanna Troi; – Photo Cr: Trae Patton/CBS ©2019 CBS Interactive, Inc. All Rights Reserved.

The real meat of this episode though, involves where Picard ran off to. He and Soji find themselves in the middle of a very pretty forest on a remote planet. A young girl greets them with a bow and arrow, but Picard appears to know her. As they walk through the woods and approach a house, we see Deanna Troi. Yep, this week’s Star Trek: The Next Generation guest stars are Counselor Troi and Commander Riker. Of course when Picard’s in trouble, he’d head straight to his most trusted friend in the universe.

Maybe I should be more skeptical of Picard going back to TNG nostalgia over and over, but it works. They don’t feel like cheap nostalgia plays. They’re always motivated by the story, and they move it forward. These aren’t mere cameos, they are full, necessary components of Picard’s journey. It helps that Patrick Stewart and Jonathan Frakes haven’t lost a step in the years since we’ve seen them on screen together. They have that same easy friendship that’s always been there. Picard and Riker are both much older than when we last saw them. Riker is a retired family man making pizza in his backyard. Still though, even when they’re not fighting space battles, they compliment and bring out the best in each other.

Sir Patrick Stewart as Jean-Luc Picard; Isa Briones as Soji – Photo Cr: Trae Patton/CBS

They need to. Soji still doesn’t trust this whole situation. She just got done with one guy pretending to love her to gain her trust, so she’s not ready to open up to this crazy old man who whisked her across the galaxy. The fact that everyone’s nice to her doesn’t help either. It just makes her more suspicious. Picard doesn’t handle it well. He thinks her concerns are ridiculous and lets it show. It’s only after Troi tells him what she’s going through that he takes a different approach. I do wish we’d seen more of how Picard gains Soji’s trust here. By the end, he doesn’t have it completely, but Riker and Troi’s daughter convinces her to open up a little. I feel like we could have used more character growth here. Picard has never been good with children. That was one of his defining characteristics in TNG. But Riker points out that he’s essentially dealing with a teenager now. He has to learn. Picard agrees, I just wish we saw a little more action on his part this episode.

This week’s Picard was decidedly slower than last week’s action-packed episode. That’s OK though. After the stress of the Borg cube, both we and Picard needed a breather. It wasn’t completely devoid of action, though. Besides all the intrigue with Jurati, we caught up with Elnor on the Borg cube. Things didn’t turn out very well there after Hugh helped Picard escape. The Romulan Tal Shiar came in and started killing reclaimed Borg to try and get Hugh to talk. She leaves Hugh alive because he’s protected by the Federation. That is until they find him plotting to use the Queen’s chamber against the Romulans. That is a treaty violation, and allows Narissa to kill Hugh while fighting with Elnor. I guess single-episode TNG characters are this series’ red shirts.

Between the action, and the genuine, heartwarming connection between Picard and his old first officer, Star Trek: Picard turned in another strong episode. It took a while, but this series has become a worthy sequel to the TNG movies. It looks like the breather is over, though. This episode ended with Elnor getting inside the queen’s chamber and sending out a distress signal. We’re in for a big Romulan space battle next week.

Star Trek: Picard streams Thursdays on CBS All Access.

Previously on Star Trek: Picard:
0:18
‘Riverdale’ Season 4 Episode 15 Recap: I Knew It!
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Lili Reinhart as Betty and Madchen Amick as Alice -- Photo: Dean Buscher/The CW
Riverdale’s done a lot of ridiculous things over the last three or so years. We’ve had incest, Dungeons and Dragons cults, multiple musical episodes and a bear attack. Nothing has ever made me guffaw quite like how this episode began. And I mean with an audible “efffffff yooooouuuu, Riverdale.” This week’s episode opened with an epigraph. “Life isn’t an Agatha Christie novel, it’s a lot messier.” The quote is attributed to Jughead, with his birth and death day below his name. I’m actually impressed by the boldness of the pretension here. It’s just so unashamedly up its own ass. And the quote is such perfectly bad writing. The kind of thing I’m sure I would have thought was super deep when I was 16. It sucks so much. I hate it. I love it.

After that hilarious intro, the show rushes through its next big plot points as fast as it can. Betty gets a call from Yale. There’s been an unexpected opening, and they looked at her application again. She’s in. It doesn’t take her long to figure out this is because of Jughead’s death. Betty stops by Stonewall to pick up Jughead’s stuff. That’s where Brett shows up to imply her tears are fake. I guess now we know the context of that flash-forward. Irked by Brett’s comment, Betty passes Donna’s room and has an idea. She calls in an anonymous tip FP, telling him Donna has something belonging to Jughead. He gets a warrant, and finds Jughead’s tie pin in her desk. Did Betty plant it there, or did Donna actually have that? It’s unclear, but that’s not important right now. Faced with evidence against her, Donna tells FP that she and Brett saw Betty and her friends standing over Jughead’s body.

KJ Apa as Archie and Molly Ringwald as Mary — Photo: Dean Buscher/The CW

FP is a terrible cop, by the way. He doesn’t look for corroborating evidence, he seems to just believe the last thing someone told him. (Maybe this is why they typically don’t let cops investigate cases involving their own families.) He arrests Betty, Archie and Veronica, which we now know is something Betty anticipated. She sees it as a desperate move, and a sign that they’re getting sloppy. She might have a point. FP questions all of them (and displays a stunning lack of familiarity with the Fifth Amendment), but has to let them go when the rock Betty swapped out gets back from forensics. It was, of course, covered in stage blood. That’s a curve Donna didn’t see coming. She and Brett even say they saw Jonathan smear it in Jughead’s blood. The conversation’s in private, but now we know for sure that Betty didn’t kill her boyfriend.

Donna even draws what appears to be the wrong conclusion. She calls Betty and says she’s figured out their scheme: Jughead is actually alive. Betty had him play dead for… reasons! That’s gotta be it. Betty convinces FP to hold a wake to put that idea to rest. Or possibly to draw the Stonewall kids out. This is one of those situations where it’s fun not knowing exactly what’s going on. The story of this season is now full of possibilities. Every action has at least two conflicting possible motives, and it’s fun guessing which it could be. In this case, it certainly makes the Stonewall kids make a big public scene. They show up at the wake and start grilling Jellybean about the last time she saw Jughead. Betty asks Donna to leave, but she tells Brett to open the casket. That gets them kicked out of the wake real quick.

Skeet Ulrich as FP Jones — Photo: Dean Buscher/The CW

Their antics start a rumor that Jughead is still alive, though. It travels around the school, and really seems to take a toll on Betty. She confides in Archie one night at Pop’s. Cheryl Blossom overhears their conversation because she’s been watching over/stalking Betty as part of a shockingly insensitive suicide watch. She then sets up a memorial at Jughead’s locker, causing Betty to seek comfort in Archie’s arms and lips in the music room. Cheryl sends the photo all around school and shows it to Veronica, who confronts Archie and Betty for all to see in the common room. The whole thing feels oddly scripted. Like, Riverdale’s acting and writing isn’t perfect, but this felt intentionally bad. It was.

It turns out the entire Varchie breakup and Barchie get-together was a ploy. The entire goal was to quell rumors that Jughead is secretly alive. Most of the town just accepts it. If Jughead was alive, he wouldn’t stay hidden while his girlfriend hooks up with his best friend. Donna does more investigating, tracking Betty from Pop’s to the sex bunker in the woods. She thinks she’s going to catch Betty with Jughead, but she catches Betty making out with Archie. Donna still isn’t convinced, but Brett tells her to chill. Jughead’s dead, and they’re going to pin it on Betty. Betty, it seems, has successfully gaslit Donna, and it might be the one case where you’re kind of cheering it on. Because again, this is all an act. Betty and Archie are pretending to be dating to convince everyone that Jughead is dead. Archie and Veronica are still together and Jughead, big reveal here, is still alive…

YEAHHHHHH! CALLED! IT! Jughead wasn’t dead. There was no way he was dead. I saw through this game from the beginning! Seriously, this was a fun, satisfying reveal, and sometimes it feels really good to find out you were on the same page as the show the whole time. I also love how everything this episode ties into Betty’s plot. These past few Riverdale episodes have been exceptionally focused. This is what the show’s been building to all season, and it’s not wasting a single scene. This was a tight, fun episode and every little detail went toward making this as satisfying a payoff as possible.

Mark Consuelos as Hiram Lodge and Camila Mendes as Veronica — Photo: Dean Buscher/The CW

That said, there are still huge holes in the overall story. One particularly good episode doesn’t fix some major leaps in logic that the show will eventually have to explain. If Jughead was dead the whole time, why did Betty need to swap out the rock? Why let it be found in the forest to begin with? And why didn’t anyone notice that Jughead was alive when they found his body? Was FP in on this really? Because that’s still unclear. Hopefully we’ll get some answers next week. We’re in for another big reveal in any case, it looks like. Veronica asked Hermosa to do some digging into the Stonewall kids. She agreed because… the show needed her to I guess. (Seriously, their relationship hasn’t earned nearly this level of confidence yet.) Either way, she comes back with information about Donna that’s apparently a real bombshell. Veronica brings it to Betty and Jughead, who tapes it up on his wall. It apparently is the key to exposing the Stonewall kids. So of course we don’t get to see it.

Despite some gigantic unanswered questions, on it’s own, this was a strong, exciting and absolutely bonkers episode of Riverdale. Not that it was perfect. One particularly annoying detail came at the end as we see both Archie and Betty thinking about their kiss and sending flirty texts to one another. No. No, no, no. You already did this drama as a fake-out, doing it again for real would be impossibly lame. Look, I couldn’t care less about Varchie, but the show really made Bughead work. Yes, I would love it if Jughead was asexual like in the comics, but the show has built this version of Jughead into his own character and made me really invested in his relationship with Betty. If Bughead is no more, I will cut someone.

Still though, this episode accomplished something pretty impressive. Not only itpull off the big reveal well, it didn’t take away from the excitement of the season. Jughead may be alive, but it appears there may be a real murder after all. When Brett and Donna were arguing about whether Jughead was alive, Donna mentioned something implied that Jonathan was dead too. Did they actually commit a murder to cover up the one they think they committed? It’ll definitely be interesting to see that all come out next week.

Riverdale airs Wednesdays at 8 p.m. on The CW

Previously on Riverdale:
0:17
‘Nancy Drew’ Season 1 Episode 15 Recap: It’s Always a Karen
» ‎ Geek.com

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Miles Gaston Villanueva as Owen and Kennedy McMann as Nancy -- Photo: Jeff Weddell/The CW
The mystery on Nancy Drew is getting intense. Last week, we found out the identity of Tiffany Hudson’s killer, but he hasn’t been caught yet. Lucy Sable’s brother, Joshua, was the culprit. When Nancy confronted him about it, he tried to kill her and seemingly electrocuted himself. As they found out in a security video this week though, he wasn’t dead. He untangled himself from the wires and fled the scene. So one mystery is solved, but a killer is on the loose and Nancy is no closer to solving Lucy Sable’s murder. That’s a problem, since her dad is going to trial for that murder tomorrow.

Nancy goes to the police station to discuss her dad’s case with Karen. At this point, Ryan Hudson is still her number one suspect in Lucy’s murder. The big question she has to answer right now is whether Ryan’s alibi for the night checks out. Was he really at prep school like he said he was? On Karen’s advice, Nancy tracks down a biotech CEO who was a dorm-mate of Ryan’s. She talks to him along with Owen Marvin, who insists on coming with her because he’s so worried. Call me paranoid, but I still don’t fully trust this guy. He’s been helpful in the past, but I’m keeping an eye on him for the rest of the season. Here though, it’s fun to watch them help each other sleuth. They interview the CEO and find out that Ryan and Lucy had a big fight one night and she dumped him. Sometime after that, he did in fact sneak off campus and may have been gone long enough to get back to Maine.

Leah Lewis as George, Maddison Jaizani as Bess, Miles Gaston Villanueva as Owen and Kennedy McMann as Nancy — Photo: Jeff Weddell/The CW

As interesting and ghost-filled as that mystery is though, Nick pulls Nancy away from it as soon as she gets back to Horseshoe Bay. Normally, that’d be really frustrating, but the other mystery of the episode is really interesting too. Nick and Ace have been researching how Joshua got the rare poison, in hopes that it could lead to his whereabouts. Though it’s the same poison that serial killer Claire used, he never would have had access to it. Their only lead is that the refrigerator in the evidence locker was broken at one point, and the poison had to be temporarily moved. Nancy tracks down the work order for the refrigerator and finds that Karen’s the one who signed it.

Nancy, Ace, and Nick break into the evidence locker to see if the poison’s been tampered with. There, they find a full vial with a suspiciously new label. When Karen catches Nancy in the evidence locker, Nancy lays out all her cards. Karen swapped the poison with water. She can tell because the meniscus curves downward instead of upward. That’s… surprisingly not total bullshit. Well done, show. Karen tries to arrest Nancy before she can say anymore, but Ace drinks the vial, scaring his dad to death in the process. Having proven that the vial is a fake, Nancy questions Karen. It turns out Karen forgot to erase all video from Joshua’s garage. There’s one in particular where they can clearly see her telling Joshua that she gave him the poison for Ryan. She blamed Ryan for Lucy’s death, and was moved to act when she saw him horn in on George. Her heart’s in the right place, but accessory to murder is still a crime.

Alex Saxon as Ace, Tunji Kasim as Nick and Kennedy McMann as Nancy — Photo: Jeff Weddell/The CW

I’m glad that mystery turned out to be so much fun, because the one we started with just kind of fizzled out. We’ve already solved one of the two big mysteries of the season, and there are still six episodes to go. I guess the show had to pump the brakes on Lucy Sable’s murder, because the gang stops all detective work and performs a spirit contacting ritual instead. Because that’s what we tune into Nancy Drew to see. To the show’s credit, it’s a well-done, scary sequence that sets up more horror material for future episodes.

Lucy’s ghost has been showing Nancy images of teeth falling out and bones all episode. Nancy figures out she needs to find Lucy’s bones. Clearly, the only way to do that is to call on an ancient ocean spirit. They follow a ritual they find in an old book at the historical society involving a seaweed wreath and drops of blood in the water. It works. Lucy’s bones appear before them in the bay. Ace and Nick scoop them up into a cooler, but the ritual isn’t over yet. Nancy has to look at the water in a mirror to find out what the toll is. She looks in the mirror and sees Owen with blood dripping down his face. Suddenly, Owen can’t move. He sinks into the ocean and nobody can pull him up. It’s only when Nancy breaks the wreath that he can move freely.

Maddison Jaizani as Bess, Alex Saxon as Ace, Miles Gaston Villanueva as Owen, Kennedy McMann as Nancy, Tunji Kasim as Nick and Leah Lewis as George — Photo: Jeff Weddell/The CW

The problem the show just set up is obvious. An ocean spirit did them a favor and they didn’t hold up their end of the bargain. Nancy still has the bones, but it looks like she’ll have to deal with another angry ghost. The rest of the episode plays up the relationship storylines because the show kind of forgot about them until now. George and Nick still have an awkward attraction as she nervously invites him to sleep on her couch. For her part, Nancy heads back to Owen’s place and the two finally have sex. Now, I’m less sure that he’ll turn out to be a murderer, but either way, he might not be long for this world. When Nancy returns home the next morning, she starts choking on something. She pukes up seawater into the sink, and then pulls a seaweed wreath out of her throat. Well, that’s an unsettling image to leave us with.

This week’s Nancy Drew had a little bit of everything, but the ghost stuff definitely wasn’t as good as it has been in the past. Maybe the gimmick is getting a little old at this point, but I prefer the ghosts when they pop out for brief scares or lead to Nancy finding clues herself. Here, the gang finds a convenient old ritual that just gives Nancy exactly what she needs. It feels like a cop out. It’s just a boring way to get the story to the next step. I’m hoping the pissed off ghost makes up for that. Nancy trying to solve Lucy’s murder and free her father while dealing with an angry spirit should hopefully make for a good episode next week.

Nancy Drew airs Wednesdays at 9 p.m. on The CW

Previously on Nancy Drew:
March 05, 2020
15:25
Watch: Alex Trebek Survived One Year of Pancreatic Cancer
» ‎ Geek.com

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A one-year update from Alex Trebek (via Jeopardy!/YouTube)
It’s been a year since Jeopardy! host Alex Trebek announced his stage-four pancreatic cancer diagnosis.

And, having beat the unfavorable odds (a first-year survival rate of 18 percent), the ever-optimistic TV personality is celebrating with fans.

In a short video published to YouTube this week, the 79-year-old admitted the last 12 months haven’t always been easy.

“There were some good days, but a lot of not-so-good days,” he said. “I joked with friends that the cancer won’t kill me, the chemo treatments will.”

In September, Trebek revealed that, despite making good progress, he had to undergo another round of chemotherapy due to “curves and unexpected events” in treatment.

“There were moments of great pain; days when certain bodily functions no longer functions,” he said. “And sudden, massive attacks of great depression that made me wonder if it really was worth fighting on.”

It’s hard to hear such words from the perky presenter.

But, in true Trebek style, he brushed those feelings aside and focused instead on the support of his wife, other cancer patients, and his hordes of fans.

Following an initial outpouring of encouragement from folks like Pat Sajak and contestants Ken Jennings and Ana Navarro-Cárdenas, Trebek’s disease took a backseat to Jeopardy!, which he’s continued hosting well into his 35th year.

So it came as a bit of a shock when Tournament of Champions contestant Dhruv Gaur chose to honor the emcee with a costly message.

Instead of attempting to solve the Final Jeopardy puzzle late last year, Gaur wrote “We [love] you, Alex!”

Trebek read the answer as usual, barely pausing to swallow the lump in his throat.”

“That’s very kind of you, thank you,” he said, taking a breath. “Cost you $1,995. You’re left with five bucks. OK.”

Even his oncologist is keen to keep the presenter around.

“He said, ‘Alex, even though the two-year survival rate is only 7 percent,’ he was certain that one year from now, the two of us would be sitting in his office, celebrating my second anniversary of survival.”

Fingers crossed.

Trebek ended his health update with a message of hope: one that everybody—cancer patient or not—can learn from.

“If I… No, if we—because so many of us are involved in this same situation—if we take it just one day at a time, with a positive attitude, anything is possible.”

Pancreatic cancer—the fourth most common cause of death in the US due to cancer—emerges when cells in the digestive organ begin to grow out of control.

There are several types of the disease, involving the endocrine and exocrine tissue. It’s still unclear from which sort Trebek suffers.

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14:06
These High-Tech Contact Lenses Correct Color Blindness
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Left: the original scenario; middle: how the scene would look to a person with deuteranomaly; right: the scene viewed with deuteranomaly and corrected with contact lenses (via Sharon Karepov/Tel Aviv University)
High-tech contact lenses could help counteract color blindness, according to new research from Tel Aviv University.

A pair of scientists in Israel have incorporated ultra-thin optical devices known as metasurfaces into off-the-shelf contacts to correct deuteranomaly—a sub-type of red-green color blindness.

“Problems with distinguishing red from green interrupt simple daily routines such as deciding whether a banana is ripe,” researcher Sharon Karepov said in a statement. “Our contact lenses … create a customized, compact, and durable way to address these deficiencies.”

In individuals with this condition, the eye’s green-sensitive cones are malfunctioning, making it difficult to discriminate between small differences in hues of red, orange, yellow, and green.

And while scientists have known for decades how to fix the frustration, they’ve never quite worked out a comfortable or compact solution.

“Glasses based on this correction concept are commercially available,” Karepov explained. They are, however, “significantly bulkier” than contact lenses.

So, researchers turned to metasurfaces: artificially fabricated thin films designed with specific optical properties. Made of nanoscale gold ellipses, they can be engineered to achieve specific effects on the light transmitted through them.

The team even found a way to get metasurfaces—typically created on flat surfaces—onto a curved contact lens.

The added metasurfaces improved color perception up to a factor of 10, and all but restored lost visual contrast.

“Because the proposed optical element is ultrathin and can be embedded into any rigid contact lens,” Karepov said, “both deuteranomaly and other vision disorders such as refractive errors can be treated within a single contact lens.”

A full report was published recently in The Optical Society (OSA) journal Optics Letters.

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13:09
Facebook Gives WHO Free Ads to Counter Coronavirus Misinformation
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(via Macau Photo Agency/Unsplash)
Facebook is giving the World Health Organization “as many free ads as they need” to help curb fake news about COVID-19.

“We’re focused on making sure everyone can access credible and accurate information,” CEO Mark Zuckerberg wrote in an announcement.

“This is critical in any emergency,” he said, “but it’s especially important when there are precautions you can take to reduce the risk of infection.”

Search “coronavirus” on Facebook, and a pop-up will direct you to the World Health Organization or your local health authority for the latest information.

In countries where the WHO has reported person-to-person transmission, additional information will also be presented in your News Feed.

“Given the developing situation, we’re working with national ministries of health and organizations like the WHO, CDC, and UNICEF to help them get out timely, accurate information on the coronavirus,” according to Zuckerberg.

Facebook last month banned misleading ads about the novel coronavirus—which, to date, has claimed more than 3,200 lives globally.

A new policy prohibits advertising on the social network that creates a sense of urgency around COVID-19, like implying a limited supply or guaranteeing a cure or prevention.

“It’s important that everyone has a place to share their experiences and talk about the outbreak, but as our community standards make clear, it’s not [OK] to share something that puts people in danger,” Zuckerberg said.

WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus responded to Wednesday’s post, thanking the social media firm and other companies “making robust contributions to the global fight against COVID-19.”

“To stop the new coronavirus from spreading, it is essential that users of social media, search platforms, and digital devices have easy access to evidence-based advice, in their languages, and be spared dangerous falsehoods,” Tedros wrote.

“There’s no time like the present for the digital world to show solidarity and create innovative solutions to promote health and keep the world safe,” he added.

The Facebook-WHO partnership was revealed just one day before news broke that a contractor in Facebook’s Stadium East office in Seattle has been diagnosed with the deadly virus.

“We’ve notified our employees and are following the advice of public health officials to prioritize everyone’s health and safety,” a company spokesperson told Bloomberg.

Amazon on Wednesday confirmed the first case of novel coronavirus among its U.S. workforce: also a Seattle-based staffer.

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12:19
Twitter Tests Stories-Esque Self-Destructing ‘Fleets’
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(Photo Credit: geralt / Pixabay)
There is no force in technology greater than FOMO: Twitter is the latest platform to dip its toe into ephemeral content.

The social network this week began testing Stories-esque “Fleets” in Brazil.

A new way to “have conversations initiated with your fleeting thoughts,” the unfortunately named feature allows users to post ideas and opinions that disappear after 24 hours.

No retweets, likes, or public comments allowed.

“In an initial survey, people told us that, once the Fleets are gone, they are more comfortable sharing … everyday thoughts,” product manager Mo Al Adham wrote in a translated blog entry.

Alô alô, testando…
Estamos experimentando uma nova forma de você "pensar alto" no Twitter, sem curtidas, Retweets ou comentários públicos. O nome disso é Fleets. Quer saber do melhor? Eles desaparecem depois de 24 horas. pic.twitter.com/TZEG76zjsA

— Twitter Brasil (@TwitterBrasil) March 4, 2020

Like tweets, Fleets are based primarily on text. But, like Instagram Stories, they can also include photos, videos, and GIFs. Users can reply to a Fleet by sending a direct message.

The copycat function displays posts atop the home page, providing easy access for followers.

“We hope that those people who are not usually comfortable with tweeting use Fleets to talk about the reflections that come to their head,” Al Adham said.

Based on a trial run in Brazil—”one of the countries where people talk the most on Twitter”—the company will decide whether to make this feature available to everyone.

Test drivers are encouraged to share their thoughts using the hashtag #FleetsFeedback.

I expect most commentary will relate to the regrettable title “Fleets,” which would be a terrible name even if it weren’t already a popular enema product.

yes we know what fleets means. thanks – gay intern

— Twitter Comms (@TwitterComms) March 4, 2020

LinkedIn, meanwhile, has taken a decidedly less controversial approach to Snapchat-style Stories.

On Monday, the site announced internal analysis of here-today-gone-tomorrow posts, in hopes of turning water-cooler moments into professional networking opportunities.

If all goes well, the tool will roll out to members “in the coming months.”

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March 04, 2020
18:00
The Best Original ‘Amazing Stories’ Episodes
» ‎ Geek.com

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Everything old is new again, and after the Twilight Zone reboot helmed by Jordan Peele, another cult classic anthology TV series is back this week. Amazing Stories had a serious pedigree when it premiered on NBC in 1985. Steven Spielberg, probably the biggest name in Hollywood, was tapped as executive producer, and individual shows were directed by luminaries like Spielberg, Clint Eastwood, Martin Scorsese, Robert Zemeckis, and more. The series lasted just two seasons, as it never scored huge ratings against its budget, but it obviously meant enough to Spielberg that it’s coming back on Apple TV+. To get ready for the new series, here are our picks for the eleven best stories from the 80s original.

The Eternal Mind
In the 1980s, the concept of digitizing your mind was almost unknown, so this episode is way ahead of the sci-fi curve. Jeffrey Combs stars as a scientist who is terminally ill and frantically struggling to finish his grand project – a man-machine interface that will allow his consciousness to live on after his body dies. Of course, he’s successful, but his new digital life isn’t quite what he imagined it to be. This is a clever, progressive, and touching episode that still feels fresh and new in 2020.

Mirror, Mirror
Scorsese’s sole Amazing Stories outing is one of the most psychologically harrowing installments of the series. Sam Waterston plays a horror writer who is bored by all the scary stuff he writes about. But when he sees a mysterious reflection in his mirror at home, it introduces an element of true terror into his life. With each reflection he gazes into, the deformed stalker there grows closer and closer. Mirror, Mirror is great because it’s just relentless – you barely have time to catch your breath before we move on to the next scare, and the ending is vicious and legitimately terrifying.

Family Dog
Before Brad Bird found fame at Pixar, he helmed the only animated episode of Amazing Stories. “Family Dog” saw Bird, who had been fired from Disney a few years back for advocating that the company take more risks, deliver his take on a classic family sitcom. The Binsfords live in a nondescript suburb with their harried hound, who the show revolves around. Three short narratives compose this episode, with the third – where the dog fails to protect the house from burglars – the best. Family Dog is interesting on its own merits and beautifully animated, but what makes it really compelling is that it debuted just months before the first Simpsons segment on the Tracey Ullman Show, a series that it has myriad commonalities with.

Mummy Daddy
A classic setup for these kind of tales involves an ordinary Joe who is trapped in a messy situation that takes a supernatural twist. This early episode is a great example – Tom Harrison is an actor playing a mummy in a horror flick, but he needs to leave the set when his pregnant wife goes into labor. Unfortunately, he doesn’t have time to get out of costume and makeup, and the town they’re filming in has an urban legend about the walking dead coming back to haunt them. The townsfolk turn out in force to bedevil our poor protagonist as he tries to meet his new kid, and they’re eventually joined by a real mummy just to make things even more frantic.

Go To The Head Of The Class
Robert Zemeckis, Bob Gale, and Christopher Lloyd re-unite after Back To The Future for this very Twilight Zone-esque episode. Lloyd plays an overbearing, pretentions English professor who butts heads with a horror-obsessed student. When the kid discovers a curse recorded backwards on a heavy metal album (and how 80s is that?), things start to go wildly out of control. Heads get severed, zombie bodies lurch about, and everybody gets what they deserved – sort of. Extremely fun Stan Winston special effects are the cherry on top of this zany horror romp.

Gather Ye Acorns
Unlike other anthology shows, Amazing Stories didn’t shy away from straight-up fantasy concepts, and “Gather Ye Acorns” is one of the most famous examples. A post-Return of the Jedi Mark Hamill stars as Jonathan Quick, who has just graduated from high school in the 1930s and, instead of pursuing a career, just wants to buy a nice car and chill out for a little bit. His mindset has been informed by the advice of a tree troll he met as a child, who told him not to work hard because “the world needs more dreamers.” However, as we go forward in time we learn that maybe the creature didn’t have the best intentions for young Mr. Quick – or did he? We won’t spoil the ending, but it’ll certainly resonate for us geeks.

The Mission
Spielberg directed this double-length episode set during World War II. Belly gunner Jonathan is a bomber crew’s lucky charm, but superstition holds that it’s cursed for anybody to go up for the 24th time. When their plane is damaged in a dogfight, he gets trapped in his compartment with the landing gear damaged, so the plane can’t land without killing him. Running out of fuel, the crew frantically tries to find a solution. The ending of this one is remarkably divisive – we won’t spoil it here, but depending on your state of mind you’ll find it either incredibly charming or ludicrously silly. The great performances and intense atmosphere make “The Mission” well worth seeking out.

Remote Control Man
The overall tone of Amazing Stories was all over the place, whipping from serious drama to screwball comedy from episode to episode. One of our favorites from the second category is “Remote Control Man,” directed by Bob Clark. Great character actor Sydney Lassick played one of his best roles, as a henpecked husband who finds solace in the television. When his wife throws out his beloved set, he gets a new TV with some… unusual features. It’s able to zap people from the screen into reality, so he swiftly replaces his wife with a pageant model and his awful kids with… Face from The A-Team and Gary Coleman. It’s dated, ludicrous, and very silly but also something that no other show on TV would even attempt.

The Doll
From a story by horror legend Richard Matheson, “The Doll” won John Lithgow an Emmy for his performance as John Walters, a lonely bachelor who has never been able to connect with people. He stops in to a dollmaker’s shop to buy a birthday present for his niece, but when she rejects the doll he doesn’t take it back for a refund, but instead keeps it in his house. He names it “Mary” and starts talking to it, eating meals with it and more. This could be – and sometimes seems like it’s going to be – a setup for a nasty psychological horror twist, but one thing that made Amazing Stories so unique was its ability to get sweet and sentimental instead, which this one definitely does.

The Amazing Falsworth
One of the all-time great episodes, “The Amazing Falsworth” stars Gregory Hines as a stage magician with a mind-reading nightclub act where he tells people things about themselves while blindfolded. The twist is that he actually can pick up people’s thoughts, which is great for the gig but bad for his sanity. During one show, a serial killer is in the audience and Falsworth picks up on his homicidal deeds – but can’t identify him in real life, because he was blindfolded. Eventually, he convinces a detective to help him and the pair track the killer to his home for a hell of a twist ending.

No Day At The Beach
Shot in gorgeous black and white, this World War II story is one of the series’ most affecting. A boatload of American soldiers are on their way to Normandy to fight the Nazis, and their nerves are starting to wear on them in the boat. Director Lesli Linka Glatter excels with this story, which is significantly more down to earth than the rest of the series. When the butt of the platoon’s jokes finds himself having to save the day on the battlefield, it presents a clever character study bolstered by lovely visuals and some solid, understated performances, including a pre-fame Charlie Sheen.
15:01
Review: ‘Pokemon Mystery Dungeon: Rescue Team DX’ Is a Storybook Remake
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I’m in maybe the most pro-Pokemon mood I’ve ever been in since the initial craze dominated my 90s childhood. The live-action Detective Pikachu movie was a revelation. Pokemon Sword and Shield rewarded my long break from the franchise by actually offering some meaningful gameplay growth thanks to the power of the Nintendo Switch. I actually tracked down a used copy of Pokemon Black to bring back some legacy monsters into Pokemon Home and mix things up before the Sword and Shield expansion pass.

So I found myself being more charitable than ever going into Pokemon Mystery Dungeon: Rescue Team DX. And I have nothing really bad to say about the game. I just wanted to pat it on its cute little head and then go spend my day doing something else.

Unlike previous DX Nintendo Switch games, which have largely been Wii U ports, this is actually a remake of the first two Pokemon Mystery Dungeon games that launched in the early 200s on Game Boy Advance and Nintendo DS. These games are older than Pokemon Diamond and Pearl. That’s a cool overlooked era of Nintendo handheld gaming to pull from for Switch remakes.

And remake it they did. Mystery Dungeon may not garner as many headlines as last year’s gorgeous remake of Link’s Awakening, but the visual overhaul is similarly substantial. The game takes place in a village of nothing but Pokemon and is presented through this warm and soothing watercolor storybook filter. It looks like a lovechild of Okami and Winnie the Pooh and it’s just absolutely delightful. It arguably looks better, or at least more consistent, than Sword and Shield.

The gentle style is also your first major clue that Mystery Dungeon is intended for a younger audience, younger even than the core Pokemon RPGs. With no violent trainer battles, the modest rustic Pokemon village feels much friendlier and more fantastical. You play as a human turned into a Pokemon, determined by a personality test, and you don’t even have to be that bothered by the transformation if you don’t want to. I’m a Mudkip. The biggest danger in this world is Pokemon simply getting lost in the various environments. And as the Rescue Team it’s your job to rescue them.

That brings us to the gameplay, the area where I have by far the fewest thoughts. Pokemon Mystery Dungeon is a roguelike and in some cases an extremely old-school example of the resurgent genre. Level layouts constantly change. Whenever you move or perform an action the enemies do so in turn. And death can wipe out an entire run, unless if you’re willing to wait for some real-life friends to rescue you online.

But whereas today’s roguelikes use their randomization to highlight some unique mechanic, here you just walk around various grids spamming the attack button. If it weren’t for various meters to manage like health, hunger, and power points for moves, I would’ve used the automatic option even more. Outside of dungeons you can take different jobs and recruit new teammates to bring into battle. But the actual bulk of the experience, seemingly by design, just doesn’t warrant that much thought. Ironically, I can’t even get invested enough to be that bothered by death.

That’s okay though! It’s the same reason it’s okay for Goodnight Moon to not have the prose density of Moby Dick. Everything has a proper audience, including Pokemon Mystery Dungeon: Rescue Team DX.
14:35
Baby Yoda Joins ‘Star Wars Battlefront II’ in New Mod
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Despite a rocky launch riddled with bugs and microtransaction controversies, EA’s Star Wars: Battlefront II has kept plugging along, fixing enough issues and adding enough heroes to become a respectable sort of Star Wars Smash Bros. It’s got Luke, it’s got Leia, it’s got both old and young Han, and it has more than a handful of obscure characters like Bossk and the Clone Commandos from cult classic FPS Star Wars: Republic Commando. A new update early last month even added BB-8 and a First Order equivalent, BB-9E, to the roster. And now, thanks to a clever fan mod, you can now play as Baby Yoda in Battlefront II as well.

Coming to us from user nanobuds, the Baby Yoda mod replaces BB-8’s skin with one for Baby Yoda, sitting back in his spherical bassinet. It’s a pretty clever take, and one that fits better than the more obvious answer of replacing the skin on Battlefront II’s Yoda hero. I’m not sure I could take the site of my favorite infant doing fifty flips a minute and chopping folks in half with a lightsaber.

Still, that’s not to say Baby Yoda is completely in character here. Because he’s just a visual overhaul for BB-8, that means he’s equipped with BB-8’s moveset instead of one developed just for him. And while seeing his bassinet rolling around on the ground part is plenty believable, it’s a little hard to see my boy going around using BB-8’s shock prod weapon to essentially force lightning people. I guess there is that scene in Mandalorian where he starts to force choke Cara Dune, though…

If you don’t mind that more badass take on Baby Yoda, you’ll be happy to know that BB-8 is currently pretty high on Battlefront II’s tier list according to top commentators like YouTuber SammyBoii, meaning that Baby Yoda should have no problem taking on literal Sith Lords, at least with the right team. That cable spin ability is especially impressive.

You can download the Baby Yoda mod over on nanobuds’ nexusmods account. If you’re looking for something more official, meanwhile, Battlefront II’s recently released “Age of Rebellion” update has also added playable Ewoks to all rebellion-era game modes, as well as an Imperial spy unit called the ISB agent.
13:48
Pornhub Premieres First Non-Adult Film
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"Shakedown" (via Leilah Weinraub)
Adult entertainment site Pornhub is expanding its repertoire with the premiere of Shakedown—its first non-erotic film.

The documentary by conceptual artist Leilah Weinraub is screening this month via pornhub.com/art/shakedown.

“Shakedown explores themes of race, class, currency, and identity through the lens of Weinraub’s boundary-breaking vision,” Corey Price, vice president of Pornhub, said in a statement.

“We’re investing in celebrating artists and visionaries like Leilah and in sharing diverse narratives of human pleasure and sexuality,” he continued. “We are so excited to share her work with a wider public audience for the very first time.”

An experimental film, Shakedown (not to be confused with the 1988 crime action movie starring Peter Weller and Sam Elliott) chronicles an early-aughts underground Los Angeles black lesbian owned-and-operated strip club.

Not that unlike Pornhub’s usual portfolio. Just with fewer penises, I’d imagine.

Weinraub reportedly chose the pornography website as a partner for the movie’s online release “with the intention that the film be seen and made openly accessible to a wide audience” before its placement in an arts institution.

The dedicated screening page also features a series of live chats with Weinraub, meant to simulate the experience of watching Shakedown together—even when you’re alone.

“There’s a cool opportunity right now to present films in the art space, there’s more openness to diversity and content, and a different sort of storytelling,” Weinraub told Variety.

The film is scheduled for release this spring on Dis.Art and Criterion Channel, and over the summer via Le Cinema Club, Boiler Room, and iTunes.

It has previously screened at the 2017 Whitney Biennial, 68th Berlin International Film Festival, Tate Modern, MoMA PS1, and Weinraub’s first solo show at Gavin Brown’s Enterprise in New York.

“This film is part of a larger general commitment Pornhub has to supporting the arts. We want to be seen as a platform that artists and creators can use,” according to brand director Alex Klein, as reported by Variety. “For us, premiering a feature-length film is a first. We’re very excited about it.”

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13:44
Amazon Confirms Seattle Employee Has Coronavirus
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Photo Credit: Christian Wiediger / Unsplash
Amazon has confirmed the first case of novel coronavirus among its U.S. workforce.

The infected employee, according to Bloomberg, left work last month “due to an illness.” Amazon was informed Tuesday that the person had contracted COVID-19.

Co-workers in contact with the staffer—at Amazon’s South Lake Union office complex in Seattle—have been notified.

“We’re supporting the affected employee who is in quarantine,” the firm told Geek.com in an email.

Two Amazon employees in Milan, Italy, also contracted the virus.

Like so many of its industry counterparts, Amazon is taking great precautions to avoid spreading the disease.

The tech titan is limiting nonessential travel within the US and cancelling warehouse tours, and has begun conducting job interviews virtually, avoiding in-person contact when possible.

The first U.S. case of novel coronavirus was detected in January: A Washington state man in his 30s, recently returned from Wuhan, China, where the outbreak is believed to have originated.

Seattle, the state’s largest city and home of Amazon HQ, has become COVID-19 ground zero in the US: More than 20 people have been infected, and eight have died in the wider King County area, Bloomberg reported, citing the local department of health.

Firefighters and emergency responders who transported infected patients are now in quarantine; some schools have closed for sterilization and stores are running low on hand sanitizer and face masks.

Identified in December, novel coronavirus was linked to a wholesale animal and fish market in Wuhan, the largest city in central China. Symptoms include fever, cough, and trouble breathing (which are also handily associated with chest infection, bronchitis, pneumonia, and a number of other diagnoses).

To date, there have been more than 92,000 infections and 3,160 deaths attributed to the virus, Bloomberg said.

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13:00
Amazon Revs Up Same-Day Delivery Speeds
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Amazon delivery (via Julie Clopper/Shutterstock)
Amazon is speeding up its Same-Day Delivery program.

Prime members in Dallas, Orlando, Philadelphia, and Phoenix can now receive items within hours of placing an order.

Need a new charging cable before catching a flight this afternoon? Forgot to buy a birthday gift for tomorrow’s Frozen-themed party? Looking for a last-minute costume ahead of tonight’s murder-mystery party?

As many as 3 million products sitewide are marked “Today by”—meaning they are available for delivery throughout the day.

“All with the goal of giving Prime members the most convenient shopping experience in retail while saving them time and money,” according to Jon Alexander, director and general manager of Amazon’s worldwide same-day delivery experience.

New Same-Day Delivery schedule (via Amazon)

Purchases made as late as midnight will arrive on your doorstep by the morning—sometime between 4:30 and 8 a.m. (as noted on the product detail page and again at checkout).

“Making so many daily deliveries across such a large selection of products isn’t an easy job,” Alexander wrote in a blog announcement. “We’re able to do so by storing need-it-today items in brand new facilities we built even closer to customers.

The first-of-their-kind buildings serve as mini-fulfillment centers, optimized for faster click-to-delivery speeds—and lower carbon emissions.

“This is because these new facilities are in close proximity to customers, reducing the need for aircraft transport and generally decreasing the distance drivers have to travel to deliver packages to our customers,” Alexander explained.

Same-Day Delivery is free to Prime members on qualifying orders over $35, or $2.99 for delivery on orders under $35.

There is no word on when, or if, the feature will roll out to other U.S. cities.

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February 06, 2020
22:00
Monitor Hack Steals PC Data Through Brightness
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Credit: Pixabay
I remember a few years ago when I wrote this story about using imperceptible whisper audio to hack digital voice assistants like Siri and Alexa I thought this was the craziest, scariest, low-budget cyberpunk thing I had ever seen. But if crazy sound hijacking wasn’t wild enough, how about this crazy visual hijacking?

As reported by Hacker News, cybersecurity researchers at Ben Gurion University in Israel have developed a way to steal data through the brightness of a PC monitor. Check it out!

By infecting the target PC with the right malware, the monitor then subtly shifts the brightness of the LCD monitor. You can’t see it, but the hacker’s camera can. And by recording the information communicated through those changes in brightness, the hacker can then steal whatever sensitive data they want from the PC. It’s like a Lite-Brite for spies.

The good news is this hack requires so much prior setup that no scammer is going to just randomly do it to you out of nowhere. While it’s true this hack works even on “air-gapped” computers not connected to the internet, you still have to get the malware on there somehow like through a conscious physical USB drive. This is more of an exercise in what’s possible rather than what’s viable. But it’s still nuts that this is even possible.

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21:00
The Long Strange Journey Of ‘Locke & Key’
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Development hell is a fate that way too many geek culture projects find themselves in, as the initial excitement of a creative project dulls over time as the money just doesn’t come through. The vast majority of efforts that find themselves in limbo forever, much to our chagrin. But every once in a while, Houdini-like, a long-awaited project finally claws its way to life. This week sees the debut of one such project, the TV adaptation of indie comic hit Locke & Key, which started production ten whole years ago.

The Unlocking
Locke & Key was the first comic book venture by horror writer Joe Hill. Since then, the son of Stephen King has cemented his legacy as one of the modern era’s most dependable scare-men, with his own line at DC and numerous other adaptations, including NOS4A2 over at AMC. But your first love is often your most powerful, and Locke & Key holds a powerful spell on its fanbase.

Here’s the gist: there’s a old house, called Keyhouse, in a small Massachusetts town. Inside Keyhouse is a door to another realm, populated by horrific demons. When it was first opened, a group of the creatures came through, only to be transmuted into a substance called “whispering iron.” That iron was made into an assortment of keys, each of which carries an occult power.

When the Locke family moves back there after their father is murdered, each of them interacts with Keyhouse in a different way. And the magic of the place means that once you turn eighteen, you forget everything about it and it just becomes another spooky old house. But a strange young woman trapped in a well has plans for Keyhouse and the people living there.

First Tumbler
Dimension Films optioned the series shortly after the first issue was published. They obviously saw big things coming for Hill and the franchise. Dimension’s initial intention was to make a feature film around the property, but they couldn’t get any momentum and the rights reverted to Hill after the option period ended.

Dreamworks was next up at bat. They brought the duo of Alex Kurtzman and Roberto Orci, at the time best known for scripting the first two Transformers films, on board to shepherd the story. Then a real big name signed on – Steven Spielberg attached as a producer, and the target changed to TV. A budget was set, actors were cast and Fox not only gave the OK for a pilot to be filmed, but announced they would go straight to series production. That pilot drew directly from the book’s first arc, with boy bander Jesse McCartney cast as Tyler Locke.

Shot in the winter, the test episode covered a lot of ground, with Hill at the time saying that the entire run of comics published up to that date could only fill 8 episodes of the show, so the writers would need to come up with their own ideas and storylines. Music video director Mark Romanek directed the pilot, but when it was time for the network to make the schedule, Locke & Key was nowhere to be found. The best theory is that the network was also debuting J.J. Abrams’ supernatural mystery Alcatraz and felt that having two similar shows would cut into the audience of both. There was some brief talk of running it as a mini-series instead, but that came to naught.

We were at the San Diego Comic-Con in 2011 when the pilot was shown to the public for the first time, but we didn’t get to see it. The lines were insanely long, and everybody who made it inside raved. Even though Fox passed, other networks like SyFy looked to be interested. And then… nothing. The actors all went on to other roles, and it looked like the doors of Keyhouse would remain closed forever.

Dead Bolt
When a pilot doesn’t get picked up, it’s hard to wash the stigma off. Hill and artist Gabriel Rodriguez continued to tell Keyhouse’s stories in the pages of the comics, with the story of the Lockes ending in 2013, followed by a series of one-shots over the next few years.

2014 saw Universal Pictures pick up the option for a trilogy of films, seeing them as low-budget horror numbers. That didn’t last terribly long, as advocates at the studio resigned and left Locke & Key without anybody to push for it. Once again, the rights reverted to Hill, who found his commercial profile rising as a horror talent in his own right.

2016 saw Hill take another grab at the brass ring. This time, he would pair with David Alpert and Rick Jacobs of Skybound Entertainment, two men who had experience bringing comics to the screen with the Walking Dead franchise. Hill was set to write a new take on the property for TV, with the intent of having a solid script developed before it’s shopped to both broadcast and cable.

The next year sees the script come to completion and Hill, partnered with publisher IDW, take it to numerous networks. But a sea change in the way we watch TV broadened the potential homes for the Lockes. So Locke & Key found itself with a second chance at life, this time at Hulu. Lost‘s Carlton Cuse and Doctor Strange director Scott Derrickson were brought in as producers, and the whole rigmarole started all over again.

Aron Eli Coleite was brought in to head a writer’s room with Cuse, a new cast was hired and a second pilot was filmed. By this time, Derrickson had left and been replaced by a pre-It Andy Muschietti. Rumors from inside Hulu had that pilot testing very well, but the streaming service shockingly passed on it, reportedly on the word of newly-installed CEO Randy Freer. Hulu had paid to keep the writer’s room open after pilot filming, and seven additional episodes were written but never shot. IDW and Hill took that pilot and hit the road once more for yet another round of pitching.

Master Of Unlocking
Finally, Locke & Key found a forever home at Netflix. The company had found success with horror in the past, but they wanted something a little different this time. When EP Meredith Averill came on, the whole tone of the series was recalibrated. Hulu had pushed hard into the horror angle of the property, but the team took another look at what they’d written and tossed it to start from scratch along a direction that Netflix preferred.

The Locke & Key that finally made it to television is much more fantasy-driven, pushing towards the Stranger Things audience (and away from The Haunting Of Hill House, which Averill also worked on). A big part of the series is the Locke kids coming to terms with the powers of the keys as well as the choices their parents made, and that kind of universal coming of age story tests big across multiple audience demographics.

In addition, through the dozen years that Locke & Key has been locked away, Hill has been coming up with new ideas and concepts for the universe. The premiere episode introduces two completely new keys that never appeared in the comics, and although the ten episodes hit familiar plot points, they do so in tweaked and unexpected ways. Whether the series will be a hit or not is impossible to say, especially since Netflix loves to keep their audience numbers locked away, pardon the pun, but it’s a testament to the power of the comic’s original ideas that so many people pushed it across the finish line.
20:13
Dan Houser Leaving Rockstar Makes Us Wonder About ‘Grand Theft Auto VI’
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It takes a lot of hardworking folks to make a video game, especially the absolutely massive open-world games that Rockstar makes. But for better or worse, inevitably most people associate those huge teams with a handful of faces, and for Rockstar those are the faces of co-founders the Houser brothers. However, we recently learned that one of those faces, Dan Houser, is leaving the company. And while we don’t want to jump to conclusions, that does make us wonder about the future of the studio, especially a hypothetical Grand Theft Auto VI.

News of Dan’s departure came with a recent Take-Two SEC report. It’s treated with a matter of fact quality that at least suggests the publisher isn’t too worried. Dan has been on break ever since the launch of Red Dead Redemption 2 over a year ago. Now that break is just becoming a full-time retirement from Rockstar.

Although this may be shocking news to hear at first it’s not too surprising once you think about it. Sam might arguably be the more famous brother (he was played by Daniel Radcliffe after all) Dan Houser’s deep influence on Rockstar is undeniable. He’s co-written nearly every Grand Theft Auto game going back to its early top-down days and his writing credits also include Bully, Max Payne 3, and the original Red Dead Redemption. If you’re looking to go out on top, there aren’t many higher peaks in video games than those.

At the very least, as far as high-profile Rockstar departures go, we don’t expect this one to be nearly as nasty as the lawsuit filed by jilted GTA designer Leslie Benzies.

Grand Theft Auto V continues to have unreal success on this generation of consoles, but that was technically a last-gen port. Red Dead 2 was Rockstar’s only game built for the ground up for PlayStation 4 and Xbox One. With the PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X right around the corner, tens of millions of people are waiting to see open-world urban crime sprees on the most powerful consoles yet.

But what will GTA VI even be? Sam Houser sticking around should mean Rockstar will still feel at least somewhat like itself. The real question is should Rockstar even bother with a big new single-player game despite the fact the real reason GTA V burns up monthly sales charts seven years after release, outselling the much newer Red Dead 2 even, is the multiplayer of Grand Theft Auto Online?

Rockstar announces whatever it wants whenever it wants. We could see GTA VI tomorrow or four years from now. And we’ll definitely still get it no matter what. Enjoy your riches, Dan!
17:43
With ‘Doctor Strange 2,’ Marvel Better Stay the Hell Out of Sam Raimi’s Way
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Tobey Maguire, Sam Raimi, and Kirsten Dunst as Mary Jane make that money.
Like clockwork, Marvel recently fired one of its directors most likely for daring to try and have his own artistic voice in this Disney machine. The first Doctor Strange isn’t a great movie by any means, but Scott Derrickson clearly cared a lot about making the character’s mind-bending magic work on screen and filtered it through his own horror background. So yeah it’s a bummer to see him get booted from Doctor Strange: In The Multiverse of Madness because Marvel cares more about WandaVision crossovers or whatever. Rachel McAdams already bounced.

However, if a recent report on Variety is to be believed, I will go absolutely ballistic if Marvel pulls this same stunt with the potential replacement director. If Sam Raimi is really directing Doctor Strange 2, Marvel better stay the hell out of his way.

Sam Raimi is an inspired choice for basically any movie, and that includes a Doctor Strange sequel. Of course the director of one of the most visually inventive horror movies of all-time, Evil Dead, can tackle a subject as trippy as Doctor Strange. Of course the director of the reigning champ of Marvel superhero movies, Spider-Man 2, can bring that same magnificence to another 1960s Steve Ditko co-creation. Benedict Cumberbatch seems down for some Bruce Campbell shenanigans.

Raimi’s talent isn’t in question here. But Marvel’s meddling is. Not to say things couldn’t go well. Raimi’s most recent movie was 2013’s Oz: The Great and Powerful, a big Disney blockbuster. And you would hope that Kevin Feige, who saw Raimi’s work up close and personal as an executive producer on the Spider-Man trilogy, would know that nonsense from the studio was the only reason Spider-Man 3 wasn’t quite as spectacular as the others.

But Doctor Strange: In the Multiverse of Madness is coming in only a little over a year, May 2021. So we’re totally afraid Marvel could pressure Raimi to just make the movie Marvel wants to get it ready in time. And if that’s the case why even hire Raimi in the first place? I’m just saying if Doctor Strange is really going into the multiverse, one of those multiverses better feature some Tobey Maguire. The MCU already brought back J.K. Simmons.
16:48
Even Sakurai Thinks ‘Smash Bros.’ Has Too Many ‘Fire Emblem’ Characters
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A few days we got the final character of the first wave of DLC characters for Super Smash Bros. Ultimate: Byleth from Fire Emblem: Three Houses. This isn’t the last new fighter coming to the game. Six more are in the works for a second wave Fighter’s Pass. However, that only slightly muted the disappointment from getting yet another blue-haired generic sword-wielding anime Fire Emblem character in a roster that’s already chock full of them.

It’s not just whining fans who feel that way. Smash Bros. mastermind Masahiro Sakurai himself agrees there are too many Fire Emblem characters in his own game!

Sakurai-san does admit that there are too many FE characters & sword users in Smash [https:]] pic.twitter.com/SxC2jlXJ75

— 黒凧 BlackKite (@bk2128) February 5, 2020

Of course, Smash Bros. isn’t Sakurai’s game. It’s Nintendo’s mascot mash-up. And in his latest Famitsu column, Sakurai reminds us that Nintendo made the decisions for new characters and that he was just following orders. Alongside unexpected legacy characters like Banjo-Kazooie and the Hero from Dragon Quest, Nintendo wanted to advertise a contemporary game. So that’s how we got saddled with the star of the (excellent) Fire Emblem game Nintendo wants you to buy right now.

Sakurai also explains various other challenges with the character. Since Three Houses wasn’t yet finished during development he had to play prototypes and wrap his head around the branching story. He eventually settled on using the Hero’s Relics as a way to diversify Byleth’s moveset with spear, bow, and axe attacks in addition to the sword. It’s good stuff, Byleth is ultimately pretty fun to play. But again for the people in the back, NO MORE FIRE EMBLEM CHARACTERS IN SMASH BROS!

Super Smash Bros. Ultimate is available now. Read our review of this majestic video game pageant. And for more check out cool Switch games to play that aren’t Smash Bros., because those definitely exist.

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16:30
‘Riverdale’ Season 4 Episode 12 Recap: Tickling, Lies and Videotape
» ‎ Geek.com

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Lucy Hale as Katy Keene and Camila Mendes as Veronica -- Photo: David Giesbrecht/The CW
Hey, did you know a new Riverdale spinoff series starts this week? Because The CW wants to make absolutely sure you know. Not only does it pop up a little ad in the corner every few minutes, it also dedicates a significant chunk of this week’s Riverdale to introducing the spinoff. I’m talking, of course, about Katy Keene, the New York-based soap opera that Riverdale shuttled Josie off to. I’m sad we’re not going to hear anymore Josie and the Pussycats songs on Riverdale, but it’s not like the show ever wanted to do anything interesting with her.

Josie doesn’t make an appearance in this episode, which acts as an introduction to Katy Keene. Veronica heads to New York City for an interview with a recruiter from Barnard College. Her parents also have business there, which looks like it’s going to be a thing for about two seconds. Then the episode forgets them almost entirely. Instead, Veronica runs into Katy and the two catch up. Katy takes Veronica shopping and we get an idea of what her show will look like. Basically, a much richer-looking Riverdale, but with fashion and music instead of murder. Eh, pass.

Lucy Hale as Katy Keene and Camila Mendes as Veronica — Photo: David Giesbrecht/The CW

Veronica nails her interview, which we don’t see, despite going out to a drag dive bar with Katy the night before, which we also don’t see. This story is only here to introduce us to Katy and entice us to watch the premiere. While they’re catching up, Katy tells Veronica about how her mom got sick and died. The news causes Veronica to rethink her relationship with her parents. She asks them to help move her into her Barnard dorm, and starts using the last name Lodge again. So are we just done with the whole rum war story? Or are we picking it back up next week? I’m confused.

It’s weird to throw such a deescalation into one of the season’s ongoing stories. We’re halfway through the season, this is when the ridiculousness should be ramping up, not dropping. This isn’t the only story that goes through somewhat of a deescalation, either. Jughead’s duel turns out to be much more structured than last week’s episode promised, and Betty’s investigation made shockingly little progress. I guess the show realized they only had a month before Jughead’s apparent death, so they had to reset everything back a few steps so they could build in that direction. That’s the only explanation I can think of. The Stonewall prep storylines went off in their own direction to the point where I was having a hard time seeing how it would link back up with the rest of the show. So maybe that was the goal this episode. If it allows for more focused episodes, that’s not a bad thing.

Sean Depner as Bret — Photo: Dean Buscher/The CW

Jughead’s duel with Brett turns out to be a three-round competition than any battle to the death. I knew they weren’t going to kill Jughead just yet (if they really are at all), but I was hoping it would escalate the story a little bit. Instead, it’s just a contest that goes for three scenes and then ends without an obvious path forward. Brett and Jughead each pick a contest, then the rest of the society picks a tiebreaker. Brett picks fencing, Jughead picks bare-knuckle boxing and the tiebreaker is a chess match. Jughead chooses Donna as his second. She trains him in fencing, but Brett still wins that match. Then Jughead knocks Brett out in one punch in the boxing match. This whole time, Jughead’s classmates start shoulder checking him in the hallway. Donna explains they’re insecure about what it means if a scholarship kid beats someone they have more in common with. She’s strangely nice and supportive, considering what Betty finds later.

While Jughead is having his duel, Betty does more investigating into Brett and Mr. Chipping’s death, with the help of her mother. Her investigation gets sidetracked immediately when Moose tells her that Brett blackmailed him with a sextape. Betty realizes he must have tapes of everyone, including her and Jughead. She and her mother decide they have to get that back. After getting caught going through his stuff in the dorm room, Betty guesses he must keep the tapes in the Quill and Skull’s meeting room. She sneaks in there during the chess match and finds a whole bunch of VHS tapes with peoples’ names on them. (What is with this town and people still having VCRs ready to go?) A silent alarm goes off and Brett asks for a recess in the game so he can investigate. He catches Betty again, and explains that the tapes are of the Quill and Skull initiation confessions. He kicks Betty out of the basement, and resumes the game, which Jughead throws to show he’s proud to not be anything like Brett. Not sure how losing does that, but OK.

Madchen Amick as Alice Cooper and Lili Reinhart as Betty — Photo: Dean Buscher/The CW

The more important development is that Betty managed to sneak out Donna’s tape. On it, she sees that Donna’s confession to get into Quill and Skull was the exact same, word for word, as what she had told Betty about her affair with Mr. Chipping. Only it was about another teacher who never existed. Betty surmises it’s a lie that Donna has told many times. Brett may be an ass, but Donna could be the real brains behind all the psychological torture at Stonewall. That’s an interesting development, but it doesn’t give the story anywhere to go. It’s just suggesting that another person might actually be the bad guy when that doesn’t meaningfully change the story at all. So the duel led to nothing, and Betty’s investigation turned up a reveal that doesn’t actually mean much yet. Why does every story feel like a step backwards?

The show even brought Nick St. Claire back for no reason. He shows up at Cheryl and Veronica’s secret Maple Club and Toni serves him without knowing who he is. Cheryl sees him and has a PTSD flashback to the night he almost raped her. I appreciate the show taking the time to explain to its audience what a PTSD trigger is, but the story didn’t have any reason to be here. Why bring this character back? Didn’t Josie and Veronica stomp the crap out of him when they saved Cheryl? Didn’t Hiram arrange for him to get run off the road? There just wasn’t a real need for justice to be served again at this point. I mean, I guess it was funny. Toni drugs him and he ends up in one of Kevin’s tickle porn videos. Oh right, he’s doing clothed tickle videos now. It was a funny bit of comeuppance, I guess, but it didn’t feel necessary at all. Whenever the episode cut back to this story, I kept wondering why we were spending time on this guy at all.

That combined with all the lowering of stakes made for a letdown of a Riverdale episode. I mean, you know something’s wrong when Archie has the most interesting story of the night. An old military buddy of Uncle Frank’s shows up and seems friendly enough until he tries to kill Frank. Turns out Frank worked for a paramilitary contractor after the war, and the company sent this guy to silence their old unit. Archie and Frank work with FP to get the guy arrested, but he breaks out of jail and goes after Archie. He nearly kills Archie at the school, but Frank knocks him out and the feds show up to arrest him. Honestly, this was the only good story to come out of last night’s Riverdale. We got an exciting action-thriller out of nowhere. Again though, it still doesn’t look like it’ll lead to anything. That’s the story of this week’s episode: Even when it’s at its best, to never feels like any of it really matters.

Riverdale airs Wednesdays at 8 p.m. on The CW

Previously on Riverdale:
16:00
New General Grievous Cosplay Lets You Become a Cyborg…For $2,700
» ‎ Geek.com

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General Grievous is a bit of an anomaly in the Star Wars universe. He’s a cyborg years before Darth Vader, yet his cybernetics outclass anything we see the Sith Lord equipped with (yes, I know that there are explanations for this). He’s also introduced very quickly in the final prequel trilogy film and dispatched with almost as much efficiency, as if he only existed to give Obi-Wan something to do. That’s a shame, because his design is just…cool, and side material like both the Clone Wars mini-series and the Clone Wars TV show have taken that as justification to retroactively create a character around it. Unfortunately, part of what gives Grievous his cool factor is the inhuman impossibility of his movement, meaning that he sits at a crossroads of being a very attractive character to cosplay, and a very difficult character to cosplay.

That is, until Wicked Armor stepped onto the scene. Established in 2008, Robert Rodgers’ cosplay shop has been making bespoke, high-quality Star Wars cosplay since, with an Etsy shop offering to-order costumes of characters like Kylo Ren, Darth Revan, and the Republic’s Clone Commandos. However, since February 2, a new star has taken the Wicked Armors cosplay spotlight, earning over 1,000,000 views so far on Facebook alone. That, of course, being the droid general himself.

General Grievous Costume

#wickedarmor #starwarscosplay #501st #generalgrievou [https:]

Posted by Wicked Armor on Sunday, February 2, 2020

Though Wicked Armors has made Grievous cosplay before, their latest version really captures Grievous’ unique movement, mainly by focusing on more accurately recreating his near-constant hunch and reverse ankle walk. The shop achieves this effect through clever trickery that actually hides the cosplayer in Grievous’ cape, and turns the outward-facing Grievous body into more of a puppet. Articulation points include the arms and the individual fingers, as well as the head, which turns in sync with a headband worn by the cosplayer.

It’s a neat effect, and this updated costume sells it well enough that it wouldn’t look out of place at Disneyland. Even when it’s not being worn, Wicked Armors suggests displaying it, since the Grievous puppet is all one piece. It’s no wonder, then, that the shop is now building a mailing list to start selling it…for a whopping $2,700.

Were the price a bit closer to their $375.00 Revan costume, I’d consider it. My partner is a big Grievous fan, and a model collector to boot. If you have that kind of money, or dedication to the…prequel era…to go for it, though, then be my guest.

Do note, though, that the costume only has two arms for now. However, the shop comments in the item’s listing that a version with four arms might be coming in the future.
15:35
‘Doctor Who’: Captain Jack Meets River Song in New Audio Adventure
» ‎ Geek.com

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John Barrowman returns as the irrepressible Captain Jack Harkness in three full-cast audio adventures from Big Finish (via Big Finish)
One of the most-requested Doctor Who collaborations is finally happening—in audio form.

River Song and Jack Harkness cross paths for the first time in their wibbly wobbly timelines for three new audio adventures from Big Finish.

“The Lives of Captain Jack” Vol. 3, set for release next month, is available to pre-order as a download for £19.99 ($25.92) exclusively from the Big Finish website.

“Alex Kingston and I have talked about this for years,” John Barrowman, who made a surprise cameo in that recent Doctor Who episode, said of the team-up. “We knew that the fanbase always wanted River and Jack to meet, or to cross timelines, and we just never knew when it would happen.”

“I’ve always imagined that, when River’s not on adventures with the Doctor, she’s somewhere having fun with Captain Jack,” Kingston said, conjuring the best soirées one could imagine. “I’ve always had that at the back of my head.”

Though not the televised meet-cute fans have probably imagined, the pair join Camille Coduri as Jackie Tyler in what sounds like an intrepid audio adventure.

The third installment in Captain Jack’s chronicles features a trio of stories
- “Crush” by Guy Adams: Jack takes Jackie on a luxury cruise in space
- “Mighty & Despair” by Tim Foley: Two travellers visit a distant planet in the far future, looking for a mythical hero
- “R&J” by James Goss: Jack and River may be going to the chapel of love
“It’s like Jack is the male River and River is the female Jack,” Barrowman mused. “There are all sorts of comparisons in their behaviors and how they react; the verve and vivacious passion they have for solving problems; getting to the heart of the action and adventure; the determination to get what they want, but also the sadness behind both of their eyes.”

Professor Song and Captain Jack have gone toe-to-toe with the Doctor (in their various manifestations), bringing heart, sass, and a bit of romance to the TARDIS.

And while their Whovian characters never crossed paths, the actors (who share a March birthday) both appear in The CW’s Arrow action crime series, based on DC Comics’ Green Arrow.

Missed Doctor Who episode six? Check out our recap of “Praxeus.”

Doctor Who airs Sundays at 8 p.m. ET on BBC America.

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15:30
‘Nancy Drew’ Season 1 Episode 13 Recap: What Could Have Been
» ‎ Geek.com

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Pictured (L-R): Kennedy McMann as Nancy and Leah Lewis as George -- Photo: Jack Rowand/The CW
The characters of Nancy Drew have all had their lives derailed somehow. George was forced to be the only adult in her home, with the only place she had any control being the restaurant she manages. Nick did time for manslaughter, and his only mentor and benefactor was murdered at the beginning of the season. Bess lived out of her van while trying to find proof of her ties to a wealthy family. Now that she’s got that, she struggles with the expectations they put on her. And Nancy’s mother’s death basically put adulthood on pause for her. All of them, except for Ace who’s apparently living the stoner dream, know their lives could be so much better if things were just a little bit different.

Nancy gets to see exactly how different in this week’s episode. Picking up right after last week’s cliffhanger, we see Nancy in the dreamworld where her mother’s still alive and everything’s perfect. She’s visiting home from college, and her dad asks her to help out with a case. One of his wealthy clients just bought a house and there are some strange things wrong with it. His client: A nice young man named Ned Nickerson. She meets Nick at the Claw and asks him about his house. The conversation doesn’t get too far before George runs up and hugs her. They’re best friends in this world. Meanwhile, Bess is still living in her van, but by choice. She’s an Instagram influencer now.

Kennedy McMann as Nancy — Photo: Jack Rowand/The CW

But Nancy, always on the lookout for clues, notices that nothing seems right. The fire alarm goes off in the restaurant, but there’s no smoke. She starts piecing together the inconsistencies, and it comes to her. None of this is real. She’s actually passed out in the Whisper Room in an abandoned wing of the town mental hospital. No one quite believes her, but Nick at least thinks its strange when she tells him the location of the mental hospital. It’s the house he just bought.

Even though the episode largely takes place inside Nancy’s head, it still gives us a fun mystery. Nancy looks over Nick’s house, and quickly finds that the strange noises he’s hearing are just his old radiator and pipes. Then, she finds a strange door in the attic. It’s the door to the Whisper Room. Nancy is suddenly convinced that she has to get inside to wake up. The problem is Nick doesn’t have the key. And when he tries to find it, a strange ghostly figure with burned hands appears and rushes toward Nancy. The ghost stuff works really well in this episode. There’s a lot of it here, but the episode picks its moments well. It’s always tied to something happening in the story, and they’re used to provide jump-scare catharsis in scenes that are effective and creepy on their own.

Alex Saxon as Ace, Leah Lewis as George, Tunji Kasim as Nick and Madison Jaizani as Bess — Photo: Jack Rowand/The CW

Nancy and Nick decide to ask the person who sold the house about the room. That person is, of course, Ryan Hudson. Ryan is a good guy in this world. After Nancy exposed his family as a bunch of shady criminals, he turned them in and is now devoting his time and money to charitable efforts. And Tiffany’s still alive. It turns out he had that room locked and Nancy hid the key somewhere, giving him cryptic clues to follow in case anyone needed to open it again. It feels like a classic Nancy Drew mystery, which is why the episode is so much fun. It hits all the right notes, and is a great example of what the show can be at its best.

Nancy figures out that the clues refer to gravestones, meaning she hid the key in the graveyard somewhere. Of course she did. Before she can go find it though, she faces some serious temptation. In this world, her mom finds out she’s completely cancer free. All her tests came back negative. Later that night, Nick comes over and the two have the same chemistry they do in the real world. As it starts to rain outside, Nick convinces her to put off the graveyard hunt and bone in front of the fireplace instead.

Tunji Kasim as Nick and Kennedy McMann as Nancy — Photo: Jeff Weddell/The CW

Nancy finds it hard to leave this perfect world, but her friends in the real one are able to get a message to her. They’ve made it back inside the asylum and found her lying on the floor in the demonic-looking Whisper Room. They can’t carry her out, because whatever force is keeping her unconscious starts to kill her faster when they try. All they can do talk to her, which rain down in her house on blue envelopes. That’s enough to convince Nancy that she has to find the key. Her perfect world friends help her search, and she eventually figures out that they’re inside a hollow oak try. Nancy grabs it, but the burned ghostly hands reach out and grab her. Her friends pull her away with the key, but it’s a pretty scary scene anyway.

The key and the strange door turn out to be a giant red herring, though. Maybe it was something to keep Nancy occupied, to keep her from figuring out the real exit. All that’s behind that door is an empty attic room. It’s not until she talks with her mom that she remembers a conversation they had when she was a nervous little girl. She made her mom draw her a map to heaven so they could find each other if Nancy’s move ever died. Nancy finds the map behind the newspaper article about the first mystery she solved. It’s a constellation. Following the glow-in-the-dark stars on her ceiling, she finds a closet. That was the exit the whole time. Her mom suddenly appears behind her and offers her one more chance to stay. Nancy says she raised her to always look for the truth. Even though it would be nice, she can’t stay here. She steps into the closet and wakes up back in the Whisper Room surrounded by her real friends. And she has they key-card she came for.

Sinead Curry as Tiffany — Photo: Jack Rowand/The CW

This is the last episode of Nancy Drew we’ll have for a couple weeks, and at this point, I was so worried the show would end on a cliffhanger. I was pleasantly surprised to find the show had answers for every question it raised. In the dream world, her dad was volunteering at the historical society. She checks out the logo and finds that elements from the symbol on the key-card she found in the Whisper Room are hidden inside it. When she visits the historical society, she finds the caretaker’s hands are burned just like the ghost’s in the dreamworld. The key-card, it turns out, opens a lockbox belonging to Tiffany Hudson. The door in the dream world was a dead end, but the mystery still contained useful clues. It’s a cool way to make a dream sequence matter.

Inside the lockbox, Nancy finds a video Tiffany recorded three days before she was poisoned. In it, she’s being haunted by the ghost of Lucy Sable. The ghost even appears behind her as she speaks, and it’s the scariest she’s ever been. Tiffany says the ghost has been haunting her ever since she found… Then the video cuts off. Nancy’s suspicions are confirmed. Tiffany found something revealing the circumstances surrounding Lucy’s death. Whatever it was, it was important. Well, now I’m extra excited for the show to come back.

With Nancy Drew taking a short break, this was the perfect episode to leave us on. It found a way to have Nancy solve a fun, self-contained mystery that still had an effect on the larger story. IT made an episode-length dream sequence matter. Most importantly, it made the ghosts truly scary. Nancy Drew has definitely improved since its first few episodes, and it’s been getting consistently better ever since it came back from the midseason break. Finally, the main mysteries have enough going on to carry the show. I just want to find out what happens next.

Nancy Drew airs Wednesdays at 9 p.m. on The CW

Previously on Nancy Drew:
15:17
‘Star Trek: Picard’ Season 1 Episode 3 Recap: Almost Engaging
» ‎ Geek.com

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Michelle Hurd as Raffi; Patrick Stewart as Picard of the the CBS All Access series STAR TREK: PICARD. Photo Cr: Trae Patton/CBS
We’re three episodes into the first season of Star Trek: Picard and we’re only just now leaving Earth. That’s nearly a third of the way through the season, and it hasn’t quite managed to get off the ground. After an exciting pilot gave way to a slow, talk-heavy second episode, the series returned this week with more of the same. We get scene after scene of characters sitting around talking about things that sound very important, but don’t mean anything to us yet. These last two episodes have been so busy setting up the rest of the season, they forgot to put in anything to look at while they do.

Except, that is, for Patrick Stewart’s acting, which remains some of the best on TV. He’s still a joy to watch, and I’ll happily listen to him talk about anything, whether I understand it or not. That’s a good thing in this episode, which isn’t all that interested in having us understand much of anything. There are lots of long conversations filled with jargon and references that lead nowhere except to the next scene. Picard and Raffi, who we met at the very end of last week’s episode, have a lot of back and forth that doesn’t reveal much that we don’t already know. The only relevant information is that she knows a pilot she can put Picard in contact with.

Michelle Hurd as Raffi; Patrick Stewart as Picard of the the CBS All Access series STAR TREK: PICARD. Photo Cr: Trae Patton/CBS

I was glad that the episode gave us more backstory about their relationship. They worked together on the Romulan evacuation. When Starfleet pulled out after the Mars attack, she helped Picard come up with a plan to continue the evacuation. Unfortunately, all her reason fell on frightened, uncaring ears. Picard threatened to resign and they called his bluff. After that, Raffi was fired. Picard went to his French winery, and Raffi ended up in the desert cycling through various stages of complication. It’s safe to say she harbors some bitterness about how things went down. This backstory is the smartest part of the episode. It shows us exactly what’s changed since Star Trek: The Next Generation. It gets us invested in there relationship. At the end of the episode when she shows up on the ship, we’re just as happy as Picard is to see her.

Really, the final moment of the episode is the reason we’re all here. It’s what the show has been building to for about three hours now. And once we get there, it’s everything we wanted it to be. Picard standing aboard his ship, telling his pilot to “Engage!” I live for that moment. As soon as it happened, I thought man, I’m such a sucker. Star Trek: Picard just showed me two of the most boring episodes of Star Trek I’ve ever seen. And I sat through all of… well, most of Enterprise. But all it takes is a few seconds of Captain Jean Luc Picard pointing at the screen and saying the thing, and I’m squealing like the fanboy I’ve always been. It really shouldn’t work as well as it does.

Alison Pill as Jurati; Santiago Cabrera as Rios; Patrick Stewart as Picard; Michelle Hurd of the the CBS All Access series STAR TREK: PICARD. Photo Cr: Trae Patton/CBS

To be fair, not all of the episode before that moment was bad. Aside from the Raffi backstory, we meet the pilot of the ship, Cris Rios. He’s a pilot who takes on all kinds of jobs, no questions asked. His doctor hologram even points out that Picard is the most morally good person he’s worked for in a long time. That strikes a nerve with Rios. Before he was a mercenary, as Picard deduces, he was in Starfleet. That’s why his ship is organized the way it is and so well-taken-care-of. And like Picard, there’s a reason he’s no longer in Starfleet. His story is much sadder, though. We don’t get the full picture, but he mentions that the last time he worked with a Starfleet captain anything like Picard, the captain’s brains ended up on the bulkhead. Clearly the mission went real bad, and Rios still suffers from the trauma. Not that he lets anyone but his hologram doctor see that. Rios is a cool, complex character, and I can’t wait to see how he and Picard interact. He might turn out to be the energy and the driving force (sorry) that the show needs.

Then there’s Dr. Jurati, who shows up at Picard’s house after a surprise visit from Commander Oh. At the time, she told Oh everything about Picard’s visits, but realized that was probably a mistake. She fled to Picard’s chateau to join up with him. Just in time too, because she arrived just as Romulan assassins were attacking the place. She blasts the final one away, ending a fight scene that really wasn’t working that well. I’m sorry, Stewart was never an action hero, and he’s even less of one now. Fight scenes like this really only remind us of that fact. Remember how The Wrath of Khan built the movie around a big ship battle because Ricardo Montalban couldn’t move around much anymore? Maybe Picard should take a page out of their book.

Jonathan Del Arco as Hugh; Isa Briones as Soji of the the CBS All Access series STAR TREK: PICARD. Photo Cr: Trae Patton/CBS

While all this was going on, we got scenes featuring Soji on the Borg cube. I was waiting the entire episode for them to tell me something, anything, about why she was working there and what the Romulans wanted with her. That never came. Instead we got long jargon-filled scenes in which things were said that might be important at some point in the future, but for now sound meaningless. She’s trying to help rehabilitate the formerly assimilated Romulans, and she interviews one of them who used to be an anthropologist. She gets as far as them using mythology to reclaim their connection to their former selves, but that’s all we get. The show tries to make a big ominous deal out of the old Romulan woman calling her The Destroyer at the same time as Picard’s captive assassin does. We know it’s going to be important in the future, but for now it’s just another proper noun to keep track of. Not the best way to build mystery, guys.

Star Trek: Picard went another week focusing entirely on set-up while giving us very little to grab onto right now. It was slow and full of drawn-out exposition, but at least the ending was good. Not only is Picard finally in space, but he’s surrounded by interesting people. I’m actually excited to see what happens now that they’re all trapped on a ship together. And Soji’s stuff managed to pack some interesting information too. She realizes she knows a lot more than she reasonably should, for one. I wonder if that means she’ll figure out what she is soon. Also, we see her call her mother. This is the second time Soji and Dahj’s mother has appeared, and both times, she’s acted super suspicious. In the pilot, she was a little too eager to send Dahj back to Picard. Here, she insists Dahj is fine and just got a new puppy. Who is she really, and why is she lying? Now that the show is finally in a new place with interesting things going on, I just hope it doesn’t waste any more time next week.

Star Trek: Picard streams Thursdays on CBS All Access

Previously on Star Trek: Picard:
- Star Trek: Picard Season 1 Episode 2 recap
- Star Trek: Picard Series Premiere recap
15:00
The Most Amazing LEGO Projects Ever Made
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This week, FOX is debuting a new reality competition that was essentially made for us: LEGO Masters, where pairs of brick-building experts compete to put together the most impressive structures under tight time limits and other restrictions. If you’re not as deep in the LEGO fandom as we are, you might be wondering how that could possibly be entertaining. Read on, friend: construction artisans have used the iconic toy to build things that absolutely boggle the mind. To celebrate the premiere, here are ten of the most amazing LEGO projects ever made.
X-Wing
When the geniuses at the Czech Republic’s LEGO Model Shop in Kladno finished their take on the iconic Star Wars fighter in 2013, it became the largest LEGO project ever built. Using a flabbergasting 5,335,200 bricks, this is a 1:1 scale model of the X-Wing, large enough to comfortably seat a human being and a repair droid. At 43 feet long with a 44 foot wingspan, this isn’t the kind of project you can just undertake in your living room. It took a team of 32 builders nearly four months to complete the ship, which also boasts engines that light up and make noise.
Titanic
One of the youngest LEGO masters on this list, Brynjar Karl Birgisson constructed this massive take on one of the most famous sea vessels of all time at the age of 10. Birgisson, who has autism, took on the project as a way to improve his self-esteem, and when he completed the boat it measured a whopping 26 feet long and five feet high at its top. The boat gave the boy a way to connect with others and come out of his shell, and before he began it he was nearly non-verbal. Having to talk to others about it built his confidence and even resulted in him giving a TED talk.
World’s Tallest Tower
One record that teams around the globe have been competing over for decades is a simple one: how high into the sky can you make a LEGO structure that stands without any additional support? There are many factors to take into account, from wind to brick detachment, but the current champion is flabbergastingly big. Built in 2017 in Tel Aviv, the 118 foot tall spire uses half a million bricks and was built to honor a deceased 8 year old boy who loved building with them. The structure was assembled in sections on the ground and then fitted together.
Life-Size 2004 Volvo XC60
Building a life-sized LEGO model car as a prank seems to be pretty extra, but the end result was very impressive. In 2004, employees at Legoland California had general manager Peter Ronchetti’s 2004 Volvo towed out of its spot and replaced it with an exact replica of the vehicle, made from 201,076 bricks and weighing in at nearly three thousand pounds. Unfortunately for Peter, his new all-plastic ride didn’t actually drive under its own power, but thankfully he got his real car back shortly afterwards.
Aircraft Carrier
One of the most functionally amazing LEGO builds we’ve ever seen, this scale replica of the U.S.S. Harry Truman is the work of German enthusiast Malle Hawking. Stretching over sixteen feet long and four feet tall, this model weighs in in excess of 350 pounds and took Hawking a full year to design and assemble. The boat has numerous special features, including working elevators, a slingshot launch system, and LED lights in several locations. Probably most astoundingly, the model was built with sufficient displacement that it can actually float in water.
T. Rex Skeleton
Artist Nathan Sawaya could dominate this whole article just by himself. He’s one of the most prolific and ambitious LEGO builders, with dozens of incredible projects in his portfolio. Some of them have even made their way into the Guinness Book, like this actual-sized Tyrannosaurus Rex skeleton. Made from 80,020 individual bricks, this took him an entire summer to conceptualize and build. It stretches twenty feet from nose to tip of tail, as big as a juvenile specimen.
The Mythbusters Million-Brick Ball
If you say one thing about Adam Savage and Jamie Hyneman, it’s that they always commit to the bit. When the day came on Mythbusters to build a million-brick LEGO ball to try and duplicate a 2008 video made to promote LEGO Indiana Jones, they went whole hog, constructing an insanely heavy, massive orb of plastic bricks and then tipping it down a steep hill to see if it would bounce and roll without shattering like in the commercial. Spoilers: it didn’t, but it was still a hell of a lot of fun to watch the thing explode.
Obama’s Inauguration
There are tons of super-cool architectural renderings in LEGO, but this one makes the list for how full of life and energy it was. Built in 2009 to commemorate the swearing in of President Barack Obama, it could be seen at Legoland California until Memorial Day of that year. In addition to the grand swell of the Capitol Building behind the new President, the assemblage featured over a thousand brick caricatures of the attending politicians and dignitaries, including the Clintons, Bushes and even Oprah Winfrey. They even made a line of LEGO people standing in line for the porta-potties.
Super Awesome Micro Project
We showed you a life-sized LEGO car earlier on, but this one is a little different, because you can drive it. The Super Awesome Micro Project, developed by Aussie Steve Sammartino and Romanian Raul Oaida, does incorporate some non-LEGO pieces in addition to its half a million bricks, but it’s for a good cause. Using a compressed air tank, the unusual vehicle can hit the road at speeds of up to 19 miles per hour. It took 20 months for the whole thing to be completed, and the crown jewel has to be the insane all-LEGO engine, which boasts a whopping 256-piston radial design.
A Fully Functioning House
James May, the English TV host best known for Top Gear, is a bit of an engineering nut. So in 2009 he worked with LEGO to construct an entire house out of bricks for his Toy Stories program. And when we say house, we mean a real house. The company ponied up a flabbergasting 3.3 million bricks and May and a crew of builders shaped them into a human-scale structure that boasted working plumbing, beds and more. Unfortunately, plans to move the house to Legoland fell through, and it couldn’t stay in the Surrey vineyard it was placed in, so the LEGO house had to be demolished.
14:56
Scientists Shed Light on Firefly Extinction Threats
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A firefly illuminating on a basil leaf (via Radim Schreiber)
Humans are killing fireflies.

(And I don’t mean kids who capture the insects in jars without poking holes in the lid.)

Habitat loss, pesticide use, and artificial light are the three most serious threats to lightning bugs, according to a Tufts University-led team of biologists.

The family Lampyridae are actually soft-bodied beetles known for their use of bioluminescence during twilight to attract mates or prey. The widespread and economically important insect group boasts more than 2,000 different species spread across the globe.

But they are being steadily picked off—no thanks to us.

In a recent survey of 350 firefly experts—the results of which were published this week by the journal BioScience—researchers sound a warning bell about the insects’ bleak future.

“Lots of wildlife species are declining because their habitat is shrinking,” explained. “So it wasn’t a huge surprise that habitat loss was considered the biggest threat.”

The team was surprised, however, to find that light pollution is the second most serious hazard for fireflies.

Artificial light at night has grown exponentially during the last century.

And in addition to disrupting natural biorhythms—including our own—light pollution can mess with firefly mating rituals: Bright lights are distracting and confusing to wee bugs looking for bioluminescent love.

Synchronous fireflies in the Great Smoky Mountains National Park (via Radim Schreiber)

Add to that the widespread agricultural use of insecticides (particularly in the United States), and fireflies don’t really stand a chance.

“We really need better long-term data about firefly population trends,” Lewis admitted. “This is a place where citizen science efforts like Massachusetts Audubon’s Firefly Watch project can really help.”

Based on these risk factors, researchers can predict which species will be most vulnerable.

The flightless females of the Appalachian blue ghost firefly, for instance, “can’t just pick up and move somewhere else,” study co-author J. Michael Reed, a biology professor at Tufts, said.

Scientists remain optimistic about the arthropods’ future, despite all evidence to the contrary.

“Here in the US, we’re fortunate to have some robust species like the Big Dipper fireflies,” Lewis said. “Those guys can survive pretty much anywhere—and they’re beautiful, too.”

Study authors focus on four primary goals: preserve suitable habitat, control light pollution, reduce insecticide use, and develop guidelines for sustainable tourism.

The benefits of such actions should also have a knock-on effect for other species and ecosystems.

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13:33
NASA’s Record-Breaking Astronaut Christina Koch Returns Home
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NASA astronaut Christina Koch during a January 2020 spacewalk (via NASA)
Record-breaking NASA astronaut Christina Koch returns to Earth today after almost a year in space.

Having lived and worked aboard the International Space Station for a whopping 328 days, she now holds the title of longest single spaceflight by a woman.

(On Dec. 28, 2019, she surpassed the previous record of 288, set by NASA’s Peggy Whitson, whose three long-duration space missions together lasted 665 days.)

Koch’s mission spanned three expeditions (59, 60, and 61), and helped scientists gather data for future trips to the Moon and Mars.

She participated in more than 210 investigations, researching microgravity on Mizuna mustard greens, combustion, bioprinting, kidney diseases, and how the human body adjusts to weightlessness, isolation, radiation, and the stress of long-duration spaceflight.

I’m going to miss this bunch. Thank you, space family. #Expedition61 pic.twitter.com/pteShj231d

— Christina H Koch (@Astro_Christina) February 5, 2020

One of her most memorable experiments, according to NASA, was the Microgravity Crystals investigation, which involved crystalizing a membrane protein integral to tumor growth.

Study results may support the development of more effective cancer treatments, with fewer side effects.

Koch made history in October when she and fellow NASA grad Jessica Meir completed the first (and second, and third) all-female spacewalk.

“We caught each other’s eye and we knew that we were really honored with this opportunity to inspire so many,” she said of the momentous occasion. “Just hearing our voices talk to Mission Control, knowing two female voices had never been on the loops, solving those problems together outside—it was a really special feeling.”

This week, Koch joined European Space Agency astronaut Luca Parmitano and Russian cosmonaut Alexander Skvortsov on the journey home.

NASA astronaut Christina Koch collects and packs Mizuna mustard greens (via NASA)

But after nearly a year adjusting to life in microgravity, the trio will need to acclimate to the weight of Earth.

“I’ve forgotten how much things weigh, how much effort it takes to move just my arms and legs in opposition to gravity,” Koch said.

But weight won’t be her biggest issue.

“I think the most physically shocking readjustment will be balance,” she explained.

Without gravity pulling the body down, the mind stops listening to the inner ear and instead relies solely on visual cues. It can take a couple of days after landing for the brain to recalibrate.

Returning astronauts face plenty of other challenges, including learning to sleep on a stationary bed, use a knife and fork, and make sartorial and dietary choices again.

“For the last several years, in training and on orbit, my schedule has been prescribed, minute-by-minute, my food limited, clothes chosen months in advance,” Koch said. “Shopping in a grocery or department store seems like a daunting task.”

There are perks, too, though. Like fresh air, sunshine, the sound of the surf crashing on the beach. Sweet smells. And a real hot shower.

“I cannot wait to feel and hear Earth again,” Koch said.

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12:07
ALMA Captures Stunning Image of Stellar Fight
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This ALMA image shows the outcome of a stellar fight (via ESO/NAOJ/NRAO, Olofsson et al.)
Ever wonder what happens when stars get into a fight?

The Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA) captured a striking image of a gas cloud produced by a confrontation between two stellar objects.

Like humans, stars change with age and ultimately die.

Unlike humans, though, this change occurs through a phase where, having burned all the hydrogen in its core, the orb swells into a bright red giant star, which will eventually shed its outer layers, leaving behind only its core: a hot and dense white dwarf.

For star system HD101584, the “death process,” according to study leader Hans Olofsson, was essentially sped up as the red giant grew large enough to swallow its lower-mass partner.

In response, the smaller star spiralled toward the giant’s core. But instead of colliding, it triggered an outburst, leaving the large star’s gas layers dramatically scattered and its core exposed.

As a deadly blow to the already defeated gas layers, jets of gas blasted through the previously ejected material, forming those beautiful blue and red blobs you see in the nebula.

There is a silver lining to this stellar fight (aside from the kaleidoscopic photos): The discovery can help astronomers better understand the final evolution of stars like our Sun.

“Currently, we can describe the death processes common to many Sun-like stars, but we cannot explain why or exactly how they happen,” co-author Sofia Ramstedt, of Sweden’s Uppsala University, said in a statement.

“HD101584 gives us important clues to solve this puzzle,” she continued. “With detailed images of the environment of HD101584, we can make the connection between the giant star it was before and the stellar remnant it will soon become.”

ALMA and APEX (the European Southern Observatory’s Atacama Pathfinder Experiment) played a crucial role in enabling the team to prove the gas cloud.

“This stunning image of the circumstellar environment of HD101584 would not have been possible without the exquisite sensitivity and angular resolution provided by ALMA,” ESO’s Elizabeth Humphreys boasted.

For now, the two stars at the center of this complex nebula are too close together and too far away for study. ESO’s Extremely Large Telescope, under construction in Chile’s Atacama Desert, will allow astronomers a closer look at the feuding pair.

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11:24
Ford’s Emoji Jacket Lets Cyclists Communicate With Ease
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Ford's Emoji Jacket helps people to 'Share The Road' (via Ford)
I’m not a confident-enough cyclist to ride my bike anywhere other than a quiet park or deserted neighborhood.

Busy city streets are definitely out of the question.

Each year, some 2,000 bicycle riders are killed on Europe’s roads, based on the EU Commission’s Traffic Safety Basic Facts.

But Ford may have a solution.

As part of its Share The Road campaign, the vehicle maker concocted a prototype Emoji Jacket.

“Emojis have become a fundamental part of how we use language,” Tilburg University professor Neil Cohn said in a statement. “Whether used to convey facial expressions, humor, or sarcasm, they have become integral to our ability to express ourselves and quickly.

“This jacket,” he explained, “allows riders to express their feelings and creates an important emotional link between them and other road users.”

The one-of-a-kind creation was designed, according to Ford Europe, “to show how tensions could be eased by enabling riders to more easily and more clearly show drivers what their intentions are—and how they are feeling.”

The branded jacket features a large LED mesh panel on the back, boldly displaying symbols including three emojis (happy face, angry face, neutral face), two arrows (left and right), and a hazard signal.

A wireless remote is mounted on the bicycle’s handlebars (via Ford)

Users activate each icon via a wireless remote mounted to their bike’s handlebars.

“We are now living—and driving—in a world where communication is crucial,” Emmanuel Lubrani, part of Ford Europe’s Share The Road team, said. “But all too often between drivers and cyclists this just comes down to the beeping of a horn or a rude gesture.

“The Emoji Jacket uses a universally understood means of communication to show one way in which tensions could be eased,” he added.

There is no word on whether the high-tech duds will be mass produced.

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4:48
Finally, Chris Rock Is Rebooting ‘Saw’
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Last year we learned that beloved comedian Chris Rock was rebooting beloved torture porn horror movie series Saw. And now we’ve got the first trailer for Spiral: From The Book of Saw, from veteran Saw director Darren Lynn Bousman. The movie promises the same sadistic games we all know and love. But now with Chris Rock! And Sam Jackson! Sure!

A new game begins. Introducing #Spiral: From The Book Of Saw – In theaters May 15. pic.twitter.com/GpotY31A4h

— Spiral (@Saw) February 5, 2020

Not only was Jordan Peele’s Get Out a great movie but it was a great movie with messages that are actually being understood and absorbed by most viewers. Concepts like “The Sunken Place” and the creepy racism of rich white liberals are vital for our current political moment. And another message Hollywood has taken from Get Out? There’s money to be made by allowing a famous Black comedian to try his hand at the horror genre.

At least, that’s the only way to explain this news story. The Saw franchise is being rebooted, courtesy of Chris Rock.

The first Saw is an important little horror movie. It helped cement gritty and raw torture porn as the genre’s preferred style for the mid-2000s, and that creepy puppet is totally a new slasher movie icon. It was directed by James Wan, who just turned Aquaman into a movie worth a billion dollars, so it was made with craft. And personally I loved how crazy and elaborate its lore eventually got with so many characters and their soap opera drama relationships to each other. How many secret evil apprentices did the dude have after he died?

However, like many cheap horror franchises, Saw bled out because of too much repetition. The original series ended with Saw 3D in 2010. The 2017 reboot Jigsaw was okay but no one seemed to care. So now it’s time to apparently let Chris Rock take a crack at it. Rock will executive produce the film and helped come up with the (hopefully more political) story. Lionsgate is comparing this to how Eddie Murphy reinvented the buddy cop genre. Sure! It worked for The First Purge.

Spiral starring Chris Rock releases May 2020. For more on Black horror movies check out this new Shudder documentary Horror Noire and read our questions and answers for Jordan Peele’s Us.
4:40
PlayStation 5 vs. Xbox Series X: Everything We Know About Next-Gen Consoles
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Eventually we’ll know all there is to know about the two next-gen consoles slated for this holiday, the PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X. But in the meantime gamers are hungry for just the tiniest morsel of new information. The new official PlayStation 5 website Sony just launched doesn’t actually have more new information. But signing up for their newsletter will let you know when that information arrives. Surely, greatness awaits, and soon!

Like we said, with new consoles coming later this year, players are naturally going to get desperate for every scrap of information they can find. You might not think that details about the specific ports (that’s hardware ports, not ports of old games) on the box are that interesting. But they’re interesting enough that enterprising 3D printers have tried to fake them.

This prototype Xbox Series X chassis appears to be the real deal though. Posted by NeoGAF user CurryPanda, and reported by Thurrott, we can see a standard array of USB-A ports, Ethernet, optical audio, power ports, and plenty of ventilation. What we don’t see is a second HDMI port, further proof that Microsoft has abandoned the weird TV set-top box aspirations that hobbled the Xbox One. Here’s hoping even more exciting news is on the way. But keep reading for everything else we currently know about next-gen consoles.

@IdleSloth1984 @blueisviolet @XcloudTimdog pic.twitter.com/qmVlhTTaqi

— Doug – XBOX SERIES X (@Doug_DragoX) January 22, 2020

Without a box to house it and a real name to call it, a new video game console is pretty much just a list of specs. But at the 2019 Game Awards the hypothetical Project Scarlett became the tangible Xbox Series X, the next console from Microsoft. This tall black box boy looks like a high-end gaming PC tower, which just screams powers. Fortunately, you can also use it horizontally for a better fit in your home. More details are sure to come before the launch next holiday, but we did learn Xbox Series X will be compatible with Xbox One accessories, save files, and thousands of games across all four generations of Xbox. Plus they’re making another Hellblade!

Once again in an exclusive interview with Wired, Sony revealed more information about the upcoming fifth, next-generation PlayStation, including an official confirmation of the name “PlayStation 5.” The console is coming holiday 2020 and developers are already working with the hardware and its unique features.

Those features include hardware-based ray tracing, improved SSD performance for booting and loading and streaming, and a new USB-C controller with HD Rumble-esque haptic feedback including trigger that push back. On the software side, the new user interface makes it easy to socialize with friends online.

For more on what to expect from both next-gen consoles, keep reading.

As excited as we are for many of the video games we saw at E3 2019 (especially from Nintendo) there’s no denying that the show was lighter than usual this year. And there’s a good reason for that. Everyone is preparing for the next-generation of consoles and waiting to announce new games specifically for those machines. Microsoft came out and revealed the next Xbox, Project Scarlett coming in holiday 2020. And while Sony skipped E3 this year, we have to imagine the already-teased PlayStation 5 is launching around that same time.

There’s still a lot to learn about this upcoming console generation in the next year and a half. Price, launch games, official names. But we’re not totally in the dark anymore either. So right now here’s everything we know about the PlayStation 5 vs. the Xbox Project Scarlett.
Specs
Sony and Microsoft have both been fairly forthcoming about detailing the specs of their upcoming machines. Perhaps to assure players that this will truly be a next generation instead of another half-step like Xbox One X and PlayStation 4 Pro.

Project Scarlett is powered by new Zen 2 and Navi AMD processors, sports high bandwidth GDDR6 memory, reduces load times through next-gen SSDs, and supports buzzworthy performance features like ray-tracing, 8K, and 120FPS. Microsoft says it’s four times as powerful as Xbox One X.

The PlayStation 5, according to Sony’s interview with Wired, has a third generation AMD Ryzen chip, eight-core 7nm Zen 2 that allows for 3D audio. The custom Radeon Navi GPU supports ray-tracing and 8K resolutions. The SSDs are also custom for higher bandwidth compared to consumer PCs.

We’ll have to see how both consoles work in action before making a judgment, and really it’s the games that matter, but early developer rumors now suggest the PlayStation 5 is the more capable console technically.
Games
So far the only confirmed game for either of these systems is Halo: Infinite coming as a Project Scarlett launch title in holiday 2020. But we can take some educated guesses as to what else we can expect. Forza 8 seems like a no-brainer for showing off the graphical power of a new Xbox, and there’s been too much smoke around the Fable reboot for that to be totally fake.

Meanwhile on PlayStation, Death Stranding is already confirmed for launch on PlayStation 4 this November. It’s also very likely that The Last of Us Part 2 is coming next February. That just leaves Ghost of Tsushima as the Sony exclusive heavy hitter without a vague release window. So will it shift to PlayStation 5? And will Guerilla top their Killzone sequel launch title with a Horizon sequel launch title?

Finally, the biggest third party games we officially know about that are most likely next-gen exclusives are the next two Bethesda RPGs Starfield and Elder Scrolls 6. We would’ve said Cyberpunk 2077 as well but that did just get a release date for next April. Turns out current-gen machines are still strong enough for Keanu Reeves.
Backwards Compatibility
Thankfully, both consoles are making backwards compatibility (at least with the previous generation) a priority. Tens of millions of people bought a PlayStation 4 and/or Xbox One along with countless games. All of those games should work on the new machines and may even perform better. That applies to accessories as well, even PlayStation VR headsets on PlayStation 5. And yes this means Project Scarlett will have a disc drive. But we’re also hoping that the power of these machines will allow for older systems to be emulated more easily.
Extra Features
Sony wowed reporters by showing how PlayStation 5 SSDs could dramatically reduce load times in PlayStation 4 games. Spider-Man rapidly swung through New York City without waiting for a skyscraper to pop in. And it sounds like Sony wants to make load times non-existent in the next generation. Beyond that though all we can assume right now for extra features is continued support for PlayStation Network.

Microsoft we have a clearer picture of if only because the company is clearly more interested in its online services than hardware at this point. Expect to take full advantage of an Xbox Game Pass subscription on Project Scarlett. And you won’t just be downloading games. You’ll be streaming them wherever you are through Project xCloud. Heck, at this point we wouldn’t be shocked if there’s a way to directly connect Project Scarlett to a Nintendo Switch.
4:22
Jon Favreau Reveals ‘The Mandalorian’ Season 2 Release Date
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'The Mandalorian' Season 2 is coming to Disney+ in fall 2020. (Photo Credit: Lucasfilm Ltd.)
The Mandalorian is coming back in 2020. Jon Favreau confirmed that the hit Star Wars spin-off series will return to Disney+ next fall. “Season 2 of The Mandalorian coming Fall 2020,” Favreau wrote on Twitter Dec. 26. And in a recent earnings call Disney CEO Bob Iger made that window a little more specific. The second of many additional Mandalorian seasons launches this October. Meanwhile, Marvel Disney+ shows, which recently got first look Super Bowl trailers, received new release windows as well. Falcon and the Winter Soldier is slated for this August while WandaVision arrives in December.

Season 2 of #TheMandalorian coming Fall 2020 pic.twitter.com/8VQYLDMQ0V

— Jon Favreau (@Jon_Favreau) December 27, 2019

Favreau’s update also included a picture of a Gamorrean, a creature that appeared on Star Wars: Episode VI – Return of the Jedi, CBS News reported.

Details about The Mandalorian Season 2 have not been revealed yet, however, fans can expect to see more of Baby Yoda, also known as “The Child” who took over social media overnight.

Favreau’s announcement comes on the heels of The Mandalorian Season 1 finale, which aired yesterday.

The Mandalorian is available to stream on Disney+.

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February 05, 2020
18:00
Hands-On: ‘Disintegration’ Might Be 2020’s First Multiplayer Sleeper Hit
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Disintegration is one of many multiplayer-focused games releasing this year. What sets it apart from the rest is the way it blends FPS and RTS elements. While not revolutionary, it’s good to see developer V1 Interactive injecting some originality into the multiplayer space. I participated in both last week’s closed and open betas. I had zero expectations going in, which helped me dive into Disintegration without preconceptions. What I found was a game with the potential to be one of 2020’s sleeper hits.

The beta contained two multiplayer-only modes: Retrieval and Zone Control. Retrieval consists of two rounds where one team tries to deliver a payload to a drop off point while the other team defends. Teams switch places between rounds. Zone Control has teams controlling three points on the map. This mode plays out like similar zone control modes in other multiplayer games. Though there were only two modes to play in the beta, it gave me a good feel for what Disintegration has to offer.

Disintegration takes place in a devastated far-future world where humanity has integrated with robots to survive. A war soon breaks out between those who want to force integration and those who oppose them. I got that backstory from the game’s press release. The actual beta has no plot to speak of. That’s all well and good considering the beta exists to stress-test servers. Still, it makes me curious to play through the full campaign to find out more about this post-apocalyptic world.

Players navigate battlefields on vehicles called “GravCycles.” These hover-bicycles allow for smooth traversal over and above the ground. The beta had seven different squads to pick from; each with their own specific type of GravCycle. Every GravCycle controls the same for the most part. The difference lies with their weapon types. One GravCycle variant will have machine guns while others come with sniper rifles, shotguns, and more. Some secondary weapons let players release electric pulses or sticky bombs. Since you can switch teams after you’re “disintegrated” (i.e. when you die), it’s good to experiment to see which GravCycle type suits your playstyle.

A small army of robots follows players and helps them fight the opposing team. Some squads focus on offense while others are more defensive. Visually, they have a style all their own. You’ll see teams composed of robotic clowns, knights, punks, and sports fanatics. Squad members automatically follow you but you can also command them to strike specific targets and to interact with the environment. For example, during Retrieval, it is your troops that carry the payload. Players can also have their troops unleash special moves. Tossing grenades or slow-motion fields can help in a pinch. You can be as hands-off or hands-on as you want when it comes to controlling troops.

I can’t say I found either of the two available maps fun to look at or play on. One map was a giant landfill littered with massive spaceships and robot parts. Another was a destroyed city. Neither was visually interesting. They reminded me of the “brown and grey” games that came out during the beginning of last gen. The maps are functional though, and easy to explore. I was never confused about where I needed to go. I would just wish the maps were as imaginative as the team types.

No matter which mode I played, matches were brisk and fairly exciting. Because the maps were (relatively) small and contained, my team and I made our way to objectives at a quick pace. This kept things from ever becoming stale. Running into other player-controlled GravCycles was always exhilarating because you never knew who would take out the other first. The beta did become monotonous after extended play sessions. I’m sure the full release will alleviate this by having more maps and modes for players to check out. But when Disintegration clicks, it’s a blast (pun intended).

Aside from my issues with the mundane maps, the only major problem is how weak weapons feel. Whether I’m spraying lead with a machine gun or precisely hitting foes with sniper rounds, nothing feels impactful. The fact it takes so long to take down enemies exacerbates this feeling. Making the weapons have more “oomph” would go a long way toward making the game feel more visceral and intense.

Gripes aside, I enjoyed playing Disintegration. Flying around and attacking from a GravCycle is a great concept. It’s like controlling a fast-moving mech. Not only do each of the variants provide players with different attacks, they also add a nice layer of verticality to both traversal and combat situations. I’m eager to play through the campaign of the final game, along with seeing more modes, maps, and squads. V1 has something special in their hands. If they can work out some of the kinks I outlined, expect Disintegration to attract a sizable audience. We’ll see what happens when the game releases on PC, PS4, and Xbox One sometime this year.
16:24
Alexa Skill Invites KFC Canada Customers to Chat with Colonel Sanders
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Finger-lickin' good (via mikegi/Pixabay)
KFC Canada introduced a new Amazon Alexa skill that lets customers chat all things chicken with Colonel Sanders himself.

In partnership with Amazon Web Services, the fast food chain used artificial intelligence service Amazon Polly to recreate the iconic voice of KFC founder Colonel Harland Sanders.

So whether you want to share a 12-piece bucket with friends and family or dine solo on a crispy chicken sandwich, just ask Alexa and the Colonel will deliver.

(Actually, a despondent KFC employee will deliver. But you can cling to that silver-fox-in-a-string-bow-tie fantasy for as long as you want.)

“We are excited to be one of the first brands to adopt the Amazon Polly enhanced text-to-speech voice technology to create a seamless and distinctively KFC re-ordering experience for our fans,” Jason Cassidy, marketing director of KFC Canada, said in a statement.

“The Colonel was passionate about his fried chicken,” he continued. “And this new skill makes reordering your favorite KFC menu items easier than ever, but in a fun and memorable way.”

In 2017, KFC Canada launched the “Chicken Talk” ability, which lets Alexa feed fans chicken jokes, poultry pick-up lines, random chicken thoughts, and even a Colonel Quiz game.

“We’re pleased to have worked with KFC Canada to cook up this unique experience for their customers to interact with Alexa-enabled devices through the voice of Colonel Sanders,” according to Matt Wood, vice president of artificial intelligence at AWS.

“We extended Amazon Polly, an artificial intelligence cloud service which creates life-like speech, to incorporate a spicy Southern accent and speech patterns that are consistent with the world-famous persona of Colonel Sanders,” he explained.

Enable the function by visiting the Alexa skills store or Alexa app and searching “KFC.”

When you’re feeling hungry, say, “Alexa, ask KFC Canada to reorder.” Then, while you wait for the food to arrive, test your chicken knowledge and play games with the Colonel by requesting that “talk chicken to me.”

“We think KFC customers will agree: the Colonel never sounded so finger-lickin’ good,” Wood said.

There is no word on if or when the feature will roll out to the rest of North America.

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January 17, 2020
22:00
What’s It Like to Wear A 3D-Printed Sneaker?
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Adidas' Alphaedge 4D sneaker takes footwear to the future. (Photo: Adidas / Twitter)
What does a shoe with a sole 3D-printed from a base of light and oxygen feel like on your feet? The short answer: a little heavier than you might expect, but pretty good. The long answer is way more interesting though, I promise.

One of the great sneaker innovations of the last decade was adidas’ innovations in 3D printing. Using a process called Carbon Digital Light Synthesis, they pioneered the adidas 4D line, a series of shoes with soles printed using a process primarily based on light and oxygen particles to create pliable, sturdy shoe soles that are designed to best aid in human performance.

The tech first launched in April of 2017 in tight, limited quantities that restricted accessibility. Since then though, it’s expanded, adorning dozens of adidas sneakers and becoming far more accessible to the public.

Traditional shoe soles of just about any kind are created with injection molding. Carbon Digital Light Synthesis does away with the process entirely, instead opting for an elaborate building process that went through 50 different designs before being settled on – the current process allowing for the sole’s performance to be tested early on in the design phase, which eliminates the need for prototypes.

When speaking with sneaker publication High Snobiety, adidas explained that, “It is a photochemical process. It works by projecting light through an oxygen-permeable window into a reservoir of UV-curable resin.

Informed by a data-driven process.#ALPHAEDGE 4D is available now: [https:]] pic.twitter.com/NSVgUcLZ9L

— adidas Running (@adidasrunning) November 17, 2018

As a sequence of UV images are projected, the part solidifies and the build platform rises. Oxygen inhibits the photochemical reaction so that there is always a thin, liquid interface of uncured resin between the window and the printing part.” What sets this tech apart from traditional 3D printing is that UV-curable resin – traditional 3D printing uses plastics, which are stiffer and more difficult to mold.

So what’s the end result? What’s it like wearing a shoe that has been 3D-printed using light and oxygen? Recently I got the chance to try out the adidas Alphaedge 4D and, well, it’s like I said: a little heavier than you might expect. Given that adidas’ most popular sneaker innovation of the last decade has been Boost foam, you’d expect a comparable lightness, right?

Boost is famous for being ultra lightweight and responsive. Wearing it makes you realize just how heavy every other shoe you’ve ever worn is. It’s cushy and pliable, making for one of the most comfortable shoes on the market today. Given this, wouldn’t a heavier shoe feel like something of a downgrade?

Born from liquid. Sculpted by light. Perfected by oxygen.
This is what happens when sport meets Silicon Valley.

ALPHAEDGE 4D, available at [https:]] #ALPHAEDGE #ADIDAS4D pic.twitter.com/p6SNkqfJTU

— adidas (@adidas) May 31, 2019

Not necessarily. Yes, these 4D soles have a bit more heft to them than something like an Ultra Boost. But the weight serves a purpose, the first being durability. It might not feel like running on a pillow the way that Ultra Boosts do when you first put them on, but the support is unreal.

The printed webbing absorbs and redistributes shock and movement as your foot strides, seeming to respond to individual muscles and each part of your foot accordingly. It also, in the world of professional sports, allows for maximum customizability. The structure of the webbing can easily be altered in the design process (again, without the need for creating prototypes) to suit the needs of the athlete in question.

Cut sharper, push further.

Shop men and women ALPHAEDGE 4D or visit select retailers worldwide: [https:]] #ALPHAEDGE #adidas4D pic.twitter.com/Yn1vvoJkIw

— adidas (@adidas) November 17, 2018

It doesn’t hurt that the shoe’s upper is comprised of an ultra-lightweight knitted material similar to that of the Ultra Boost or the Nike Epic React Flyknit. The obvious benefit is that it doesn’t add any unnecessary weight to the shoe, though it’s perhaps more important to note that knit uppers cradle your foot far better than most materials. It locks your foot down into the sole and conforms to the shape and contour in order to maximize the shoe’s performance as well as that of your body.

I’m not going to lie – it takes a little while to get used to. There’s a peculiar sensation to the 4D soles that isn’t quite like anything I’ve ever felt in a shoe before. It’s like walking on a bed of super-light springs. Once you’ve gotten used to the peculiar sensation and the strange weightiness of it though, you won’t want to take it off. This tech marks such a leap forward into the future of sneakers that it honestly makes sense that you might not initially be prepared for the sensation of wearing them. How can you be prepared for lacing the future onto your feet?

You can pick a pair of adidas’s 4D sneakers for yourself over at their website.

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21:00
Top Movie and TV Trailers of the Week: ‘Morbius,’ ‘Westworld,’ and More
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'Morbius,' which stars Jared Leto, is coming to theaters on July 31, 2020.
TGIF. While you’re planning for the long weekend ahead, we’ve rounded up the top movie and TV trailers that you may have missed during the week.

Jared Leto goes full vampire in Sony Pictures’ Morbius, while HBO’s Westworld teases a chilling, high-tech future. From Netflix’s Chilling Adventures of Sabrina to Marvel Studios’ Black Widow, here are the top movies and TV shows to keep on your radar.
Westworld
There is a global war brewing in Westworld Season 3, which is set in the near-ish future. The show, which returns on March 15, is bringing back Evan Rachel Wood and Thandie Newton, while Breaking Bad’s Aaron Paul is joining the star-studded cast.
Black Widow
Natasha Romanova is done running from her past, and Black Widow tells a little more about her chaotic backstory. The movie, which stars Scarlett Johansson as the heroic maven, hits theaters May 1.
Penny Dreadful: City of Angels
Set in 1938 Los Angeles, Penny Dreadful: City of Angels brings together the supernatural and community tensions into a thrilling series. Game of Thrones’ Natalie Dormer plays a shape-shifting demon in Penny Dreadful: City of Angels, which premieres on Showtime April 26.
Morbius
Jared Leto plays a biochemist-turned-vampire in the thrilling film Morbius, which hits theaters on July 31. Vowing to cure himself from a rare blood disease, Michael Morbius conducts a controversial experiment with not-so-great results. Can he stop the monster inside?
Insecure
Insecure is coming back for Season 4 this year: The comedy series, which stars Issa Rae and Yvonne Orji, may put their characters’ friendship to the test, as they navigate dating and other life milestones.
The Stranger
A picture-perfect family is turned upside down in The Stranger, which is coming to Netflix on Jan. 30: When a husband is approached by a woman he doesn’t know, he finds out that his wife is living a secret life. After tragedy strikes, he must find out what happened to the woman he loved.
Bloodshot
What does it mean to be a human weapon? Bloodshot, which stars Vin Diesel, puts this question to work, as a wounded soldier is given a second chance to be a killing machine. Can he get his life back? This movie hits theaters on March 13.
Chilling Adventures of Sabrina
Sabrina Spellman goes from cheerleader to super-witch in Chilling Adventures of Sabrina Season 3. The series, which returns to Netflix on Jan. 24, follows Spellman’s quest to claim the throne and save Greendale.

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20:40
Watch These Movies Before ‘Bad Boys For Life’
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Finally, now in January 2020, there’s a new Bad Boys movie. Bad Boys For Life reunites Will Smith and Martin Lawrence as hotshot Miami cops, even if they’re now old enough to be grandfathers. Sure! 90s nostalgia and legacy revivals are huge right now. So let’s watch a third Bad Boys movie.

Watch these movies before Bad Boys For Life.

Bad Boys 2
You should probably watch the first Bad Boys, but you should definitely watch Bad Boys 2. Michael Bay’s epic action insanity basically smashes multiple movies into one for a two and half hour buddy cop comedy epic with so many explosions and shifts in tone that you’ll feel like you’re on the drugs the cops are trying to contain.
Pain and Gain
Speaking of Michael Bay, while he has directed many bad movies, I’ll never say he’s a bad director. That’s because it takes a true artist to direct Pain and Gain, a true story of bodybuilders turned criminals. Bay’s trademark hot, slick, glistening patriotism here becomes a brutal tool of satire for the rotting grifting heart of the American Dream.

Martin Lawrence on SNL
Martin Lawrence proved himself to be a real bad boy when we delivered a Saturday Night Live monologue so vulgar he was banned from the show. The full clip has been washed clean from the internet, but you can track down a transcript easy enough.
The Beach Bum
Harmony Korine’s blissed-out The Beach Bum is a one-man show powered by Matthew McConaughey’s zen poet Moondog. But Martin Lawrence’s cameo as a Vietnam veteran dolphin tour guide Captain Wack is so powerful and pure that we hope he gets his own Renaissance.
Aladdin
We’re pretty sure we hallucinated Will Smith turning into a blue CGI genie in one of last year’s ill-advised Disney live-action remakes. But leave a comment if you also shared this delusion.
Snowfall
Instead of Michael Bay, Bad Boys For Life is directed by Belgium duo Adil El Arbi and Bilall Fallah. In America the pair might be best known for directing several episodes of Snowfall, the 1980s LA crack epidemic drama co-created by the late John Singleton. After Bad Boys though their next project is Beverly Hills Cop 4.
LA’s Finest
Did you know there’s an extended Bad Boys universe? In Bad Boys 2 Gabrielle Union plays Syd Burnett, a detective and sister of Martin Lawrence’s character. And last year she started starring in a spin-off, LA’s Finest, where she partners up with Jessica Alba’s Detective Lieutenant Nancy McKenna. And it’s the first original show for Spectrum. Sure!
17:48
‘Smash Bros.’ Byleth and ‘Mortal Kombat’ Joker Are Your Next Fighting Game Clowns
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Super Smash Bros. Ultimate and Mortal Kombat 11 are two of the best and biggest fighting games out right now. A huge part of their appeal comes from their wacky casts of characters, casts that are only getting larger and more packed with crossovers thanks to ongoing DLC. We recently saw gameplay for two new characters coming to these games in just a few days. And they both make us laugh, albeit for different reasons.

Let’s start with Smash Bros. because it’s maybe the funniest. Soon after launch we were promised five additional DLC characters in the Fighters Pass. And the first four were all pretty awesome and surprising third-party guest picks. Joker from Persona 5, the Hero from Dragon Quest, Banjo and Kazooie, and Fatal Fury’s Terry Bogard. However, that streak came to an end when the fifth fighter was revealed: Professor Byleth from Fire Emblem: Three Houses. Another anime swordsman. The eighth Fire Emblem character. The fifth one with blue hair. What a joke.

Still, I can’t get so mad. Fire Emblem: Three Houses was my runner-up game of the year so of course I’m stoked to battle at Garreg Mach Monastery and listen to that music. Byleth’s colors reflect different house leaders and characters (although not the new students of the hidden fourth DLC house). And their moveset mixes things up with a sacred lance, axe, and bow alongside the chain sword.

Besides, other more creative characters like Altair and Ravings Rabbids at least got some Mii costume love. There’s even a dope Sans-esque Cuphead costume complete with jazz music. But man, if any of the six upcoming fighters of the next DLC wave are from Fire Emblem we revolt. Sakurai thinks he’s got jokes with that binary code tease. He better learn how to say “DOOM” with his fingers next.

You know who else knows about revolts? It’s Batman villain and Oscar darling The Joker. We already knew the clown who loves crime was coming to Mortal Kombat 11. But now we have a gameplay trailer showing what kind of hilarious brutality the character is capable of free from softer rating of Injustice. They even fixed his face! Here’s hoping for a Joaquin Phoenix skin.
Buy Super Smash Bros. Ultimate

Buy Mortal Kombat 11
16:36
Every Video Game Got Delayed This Week
» ‎ Geek.com

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2020 has just started and it already promises to be a crazy year for video games. That’s what happens when two brand new consoles, the PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X, are slated for the end of the year. But before that hardware even arrives, publishers are keen to get out that their last wave of big games that squeeze every last drop out of these current boxes.

With time running out, tons of huge titles are slated to launch right on top of each other. Doom Eternal got delayed to the exact same day as Animal Crossing: New Horizons. And the not-so surprising remake of Resident Evil 3 is soon after that. The lineup was getting stacked to the point of daunting, which is why we’re honestly more relieved than disappointed about the various game delays that got announced this week.

After a lifetime of baiting fans with the promise of a next-gen Final Fantasy VII remake, pushing the game back from March 3 to April 10 honestly isn’t so bad. The similarly long-gestating Final Fantasy XV got a similar final delay. And besides, this is just the first episode. Fans of this game are going to have to get used to waiting.

Square Enix also delayed its biggest game from its Western studios. Marvel’s Avengers was previously slated for the summer blockbuster slot of May. But now we won’t be able to play as these bootleg superheroes in this melee-focused Destiny clone until September. Here’s hoping they fix the faces.

The most heartbreaking, if unsurprising, delay into September is Cyberpunk 2077. Originally planned for April, CD Projekt Red needs more time to perfect its Keanu Reeves paradise. And that’s not even counting the multiplayer not coming until, like, 2022. Witcher 3 was also delayed and that turned out pretty okay. In fact, we suspect the extra sales of Witcher 3 following the Switch port and Netflix popularity helped make this Cyberpunk delay possible.

And speaking of cyberpunk, Iron Man VR seems like one of the most promising combinations of franchise and technology based on our hands-on demo. Marvel’s virtual reality high-tech superhero adventure was supposed to release in February. But now it’s flying away from Half-Life: Alyx VR and into the vacant May slot Avengers left behind. At least we can play as one of Earth’s Mightiest Heroes.
16:28
NBC’s Peacock Is Coming for Your Budget-Friendly Streaming Needs
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Peacock, NBC's new streaming service, will be available starting April 15. (Photo Credit: Peacock / Twitter)
Move over, Netflix: Peacock, NBC’s new streaming service, arrives later this year and it’s offering a variety of subscription tiers for your binge-watching budget.

NBCUniversal showed off Peacock to investors on Thursday, revealing launch date details and its eye-catching Peacock Free option, which offers free (yes, free) TV shows and movies to stream.

The streaming market is already crowded (hello Hulu, Disney+, and CBS All Access), but Peacock does have some key advantages over competitors. We break down all the information for you here.
When Is Peacock Launching in the US?
Peacock is launching is the U.S. on April 15 for Flex and Comcast X1 customers. Cox cable and Comcast subscribers will also get free access to one of Peacock’s premium subscription tiers. (More on that below…)

Not subscribing to any of the services above? You’ll have to wait until July 15 to access streaming content on Peacock.
How Much Will It Cost?

Timeless shows and movies. Exclusive originals. Plus timely news, sports and pop culture. Perch here for a sneak peek of it all and make sure you sign up for updates at [https:]] . Weâ€™re Free as a Bird! #PeacockTV pic.twitter.com/36nHvYQFa2

â€” Peacock (@peacockTV) January 16, 2020

One benefit of Peacock is all the pricing options: You can watch content for free and there’s an affordable tier of subscriptions available for those who don’t want to deal with ads.

There are three types of subscriptions available: Peacock Free, which offers some programming without a fee, a complete version with ads that’s free for Comcast customers and $4.99 per month for non-customers, and Peacock Premium, a $10 per month option that’s ad-free and open to anyone interested in the service.
Peacock Free
With more than 7,500 hours of programming, Peacock Free gives you next day access to classic series, curated daily news, sports broadcasts, and popular movies.Â You will have to deal with ads, but having the option to not pay for a subscription is a steal, especially since other services can cost $6 or more per month.
Peacock Premium
Even though Peacock Free is the most affordable streaming option, Peacock Premium comes with additional perks, including early access to popular late-night shows and live sports.

Don’t want to wait until 11:35 p.m. ET to watch The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon? Peacock Premium will allow you to watch the show at 8 p.m. ET earlier in the day, so you can eat dinner, catch up on celebrity gossip, and head to bed at a reasonable time.

Sports programming is another plus: Unlike other subscription services, Peacock Premium will let you watch live games. Non-televised soccer games will be available to watch starting in August, so you can cheer on your favorite team from the comfort of your own couch.

For more information on Peacock’s streaming content and availability, head over to the services’ website. If you want to explore non-cable entertainment, check out our streaming TV services roundup here.

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