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Would you apply for a job with an advertised salary cap of $2 million dollars? What about a job with a potential base pay of $0.00? What if I told you that, apparently, they’re the same job.

Author Julie Powell, whose book Julie and Julia was turned into a hit 2009 movie starring Meryl Streep and Amy Adams, died of cardiac arrest on October 26 at the age of 49, according to a new report from the New York Times. But it’s Powell’s last tweet, sent the day before she died, that’s garnered a lot of attention…Read more...

Twitter is working on a new feature dubbed “Paywalled Video,” which would allow users to charge money for access to videos, according to a new report from the Washington Post. And while the Post waits eight paragraphs to state the obvious, using the kind of euphemisms you’d expect in a respectable newspaper, Gizmodo…Read more...

A Friday the 13th prequel show titled Crystal Lake is coming to Peacock, and now its showrunner, Bryan Fuller, is clearing up some misconceptions. In a new interview, Fuller explained that the show can, in fact, use anything from the Friday the 13th franchise because it’s a streaming series, not a movie. He also…Read more...

If you have one, go grab your copy of The Nightmare Before Christmas. No, it’s okay, we’ll wait. *Whistles a tune.* Back? Okay, look at the cover and tell us who directed the film. More than likely it says Tim Burton’s The Nightmare Before Christmas, right? Surely, Burton—the man behind Batman, Beetlejuice, Edward…Read more...

A 21-metric-ton core stage is poised to perform an uncontrolled re-entry into Earth’s atmosphere at 10:21 p.m. ET on November 4, give or take around 16 hours. Sadly, this marks the fourth time that a remnant from China’s Long March 5B rocket has threatened human lives and property.Read more...

“All governments lie,” the leftist journalist I.F. Stone once said. Stone wasn’t trying to be provocative, merely pointing out that there’s a pretty basic reason we have a free press in the United States: typically, the government is not a reliable narrator. Governments aren’t inherent liars; they just don’t always…Read more...

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President Joe Biden is apparently sick of watching oil companies rake in record profits while consumers pay big bucks at the pump. He threatened new windfall profit taxes against fossil fuel giants, and cautioned corporations to cease cashing in the war in Ukraine, in a Monday speech.

The fog was thick this morning at Kennedy Space Center in Florida, but that didn’t stop SpaceX from launching its rarely flown Falcon Heavy, nor did it prevent thrilling views of the spectacle.

When you sign up for Facebook, Instagram, or any other social media app, it typically asks you to upload your contacts. Doing so helps the app find and surface friends who have accounts, but there’s a tradeoff: your contacts often contain a trove of data about people who don’t use their apps.Read more...

October might be over, but spooky season lasts until Thanksgiving in my house. While people are returning from Big Bad Con and getting over their candy-induced sugar highs, I’ve been collecting TTRPGs like dice sets, and I’m thrilled to share some excellent picks from across the indie-verse.Read more...

One of the country’s most prominent academic centers that purports to “advance sustainability in animal agriculture” is almost entirely funded by industrial agriculture interests, new documents show. And the industry has used its connection to help push messaging around how beef isn’t that harmful to the planet.Read more...

World’s richest man and newfound Twitter owner Elon Musk said that Twitter’s current verification ecosystem is somehow akin to a medieval caste system, and that the best way to fix that is to allow anyone to be Twitter Verified, as long as you got $8 in your wallet.Read more...

Research out this week may one day complicate the standard advice given to pregnant people about drinking coffee. The study found that people with higher levels of caffeine consumption during their first trimester of pregnancy went on to have slightly shorter children on average than those with less caffeine in their…Read more...

Not only does Black Panther: Wakanda Forever bring back dozens of characters from the first film, and not only does it introduce an entire new world thanks to Namor and the Talocan, the film also introduces the star of one of Marvel’s next Disney+ shows: Ironheart.Read more...

My fear of and hatred for E.T., the horrible nutsack alien from Steven Spielberg’s supposedly charming 1982 film E.T.: The Extra-Terrestrial, has been well-documented on this site and others. So I may seem to be an odd choice to bring you the news that the animatronic model used in the film—specifically, the metal…Read more...

Polar bear conservation nonprofit Polar Bears International is currently tracking and filming polar bears near Churchill, Canada. The Arctic bears have gathered there to wait for sea ice to form at Hudson Bay, which will make it possible for them to hunt their favorite meal: seals.Read more...

We’ve got a huge crop of new books for November, whether you’re looking for space adventures, haunted forests, troublemaking royals, alien invaders, or post-apocalyptic tales of survival—plus new works from big-name authors like Chuck Wendig, N.K. Jemison, Brandon Sanderson, and more. Read on!

If you grew up in a covered 12-foot hole in the Earth, and only had a laptop running the latest version of the Stable Diffusion AI image generator, then you would believe that there was no such thing as a woman engineer.Read more...

The sequel to Disney’s live-action fairytale Enchanted arrives perfectly timed for festive family gatherings during the holidays. The Amy Adams and Patrick Dempsey-led Disenchanted looks to be not only a new chapter of the real world happily ever after, but another fun takedown of classic fairytale tropes. Watch the …Read more...

YouTube has partnered with a long list of streaming services to offer third-party subscriptions to U.S. users directly through its platform. More than 30 different streaming service memberships including Paramount+, Showtime, AMC+, Starz, IFC, Epix, Sundance Now, and Vix+ will now be purchase-able on YouTube’s site…Read more...

It’s never a bad time to be a fan of Lupita Nyong’o—an actor so powerful she won an Oscar for her feature debut in 2013's 12 Years a Slave, and went on to appear in the Star Wars sequels and Marvel’s Black Panther films. But fans of Nyong’o’s horror work are getting a special treat today, since she’s just been named…Read more...

There are a lot of dark corners out there on the web, and new data sheds some light on one of them: The amount of websites that accept cryptocurrency as a payment for child sexual abuse material has doubled nearly every year since 2018, according to the Internet Watch Foundation.

NASA’s CAPSTONE performed its fourth of six planned trajectory correction maneuvers on Thursday, October 27, setting the stage for the spacecraft’s arrival to an elliptical halo lunar orbit in less than two weeks.Read more...

As if we couldn’t be more excited for Agatha: Coven of Chaos—Marvel’s Disney+ series spinning off WandaVision’s excellently sinister, outrageously expressive breakout character played by Kathryn Hahn—we’ve now learned another fan-favorite actor is joining the cast: Joe Locke, star of Netflix’s hugely popular comic…Read more...

The Incal is a classic work of ‘80s comics sci-fi at its best, a blending of the masters that are Alejandro Jodorowsky and the legendary Moebius to deliver a universal adventure quite unlike anything seen before it. And now, Humanoids is ready to bring us back to the life of John DiFool—and io9 has a sneak peek inside.

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The Book of Boba Fett has long been closed but we’re still talking about all its surprises—you know, all of the things that had nothing to do with Boba Fett. Luke Skywalker, Grogu, the Mandalorian, Cad Bane, the Rancor, each warranted a huge moment on the show and now they’re about to join your toy shelf.Read more...

Elon Musk has taken over Twitter—most recently, dissolving the company’s board and naming himself CEO. And amid the transition, the platform has apparently limited its own ability to police misinformation, just in time for the U.S. midterm elections.

TikTok feels like a social media giant that is only getting bigger and bigger. With so many people on the app, bad agents could nefariously lurk on the platform with ease, but not for long—TikTok will now notify users when you save one of their videos.

Stargirl is no more. Somehow, Luc Besson’s Lucy is returning as a TV series. Severance season 2 has cast some major new mystery roles. Plus, what’s coming on Chucky, and get a bloody sneak peek at Evil Dead Rise. Spoilers get!

Google is just about ready to let Hangouts die its famously long death, and the company is asking users to not look back as they mosey on over to Google Chat. It’s the end of an era, of sorts, namely the wasted time the tech giant spent trying to make an all-in-one dedicated call and messaging app work within its vast…Read more...

Joel Simkhai revolutionized gay dating. Now he’s trying to do it again by cutting against the culture created by his success.

In Hangry: A Startup Journey, Grubhub founder Mike Evans explains the humble beginnings of what would become a massive food delivery empire. In the days before he helped launch said empire, Evans was a lot like the rest of us—hustling to get through another workday and wracking his brain to figure out how to feed…Read more...

Elon Musk, the billionaire who recently took Twitter private with a $44 billion acquisition, has told engineers at the social media company to look at resurrecting Vine, the video app purchased by Twitter in 2012 and shuttered just four years later, according to a report from Axios.Read more...

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Sure, it’s sorta weird having Halloween on a Monday since we just exited the last party weekend of spooky season. Maybe it’s time to veg out eating candy or handing it out to kids, but that doesn’t mean the fun has to be over.Read more...

Even those who don’t work in Hollywood understand the challenges of being in a visual effects-heavy movie or series, like reacting to characters or scenery that aren’t actually seen on set. But Marvel Entertainment recently shared a behind the scenes look at the making of She-Hulk: Attorney at Law, and what Tatiana…Read more...

About a decade ago, everyone was sure Ahsoka Tano was dead. Dead both on screen, with her show The Clone Wars all but canceled, and off-screen, because how could another Force user still be alive in the world of Star Wars?Read more...

Netflix is tripling down on its mission to be more than a streaming service. The platform and production company is also a burgeoning video game developer. On Monday, as an expansion of the company’s foray into gaming, Netflix announced it has acquired Spry Fox—a formerly independent game-maker based in Seattle. The…Read more...

Happy Halloween from your friend till the end Chucky, who is officially leading haunted house announcements for Halloween Horror Nights 2023. Inspired by the USA and Syfy hit series Chucky, the themed house will debut next fall at both Universal Studios Hollywood and at the Universal Studios Orlando Resort.Read more...

A NASA mission to explore one of the most intriguing objects in the asteroid belt is getting a second chance. The Psyche mission is now targeting a launch period in 2023 after missing its initial window this year due to development delays.Read more...

SpaceX is scheduled to launch a classified payload for the U.S. military on Tuesday morning with a Falcon Heavy—a giant rocket that hasn’t flown in three years. Launches of Falcon Heavy are quite spectacular, and you can catch the action live right here.Read more...

An antenna field in Alaska that’s spawned no shortage of conspiracy theories has been carrying out a series of experiments that include sending radio signals to the Moon and Jupiter and waiting for pings back.Read more...

Yahya Abdul-Mateen II is a multitalented performer—earning accolades for his work on the big and small screens, as well as the Broadway stage. But it sure seems like he has a soft spot for genre fare, and the star of Candyman, Aquaman, Watchmen, and The Matrix Resurrections (but not, alas, Furiosa) is adding another…Read more...

This story was originally published by Grist. You can subscribe to its weekly newsletter here.

A cohort of real estate developers and crypto bros have joined forces to create what earnestly sounds like one of the worst places I can imagine. It’s a—get this—“luxury crypto community,” composed of 60 properties on an island that will only be for sale via NFTs.

Welcome back to io9's monthly Nerd’s Watch, where we pare down the enormous lists of new films and television shows arriving on all your favorite streaming services into the sci-fi, fantasy, and horror titles we think you’ll like most.Read more...