Gizmodo

There isn’t a franchise that feels in constant strife as much as Star Wars. What success and acclaim projects like The Mandalorian receive almost get drowned out by endless debates about everything else in George Lucas’ space opera. Character development, semi-sequels, the validity of CGI, you name it - there’s always…Read more...

Let me start this off by saying that I am not a designer. I have no problem admitting that my eyes are not nearly as well trained as those of the very qualified and brilliant people who work in this area. Nonetheless, I think I can speak for more than one person when I say that I really don’t see much of a difference…Read more...

Cast your mind back to the ancient dystopian days of 2016, reader, and you may recall that at one point, Sony planned to have its hilarious Jump Street reboot series cross over with Men in Black. Flashforward 6 years, and the film MIB 23, which would’ve also effectively served as 23 Jump Street, has sadly not happened…Read more...

Apple TV+ is slowly but surely building a solid resume of good shows worth the subscription price, and Shining Girls looks to be like another original series to check out. Apple revealed the first trailer and release date for the upcoming thriller series, and it’s a little stranger than you’d maybe expect.

In recent weeks, the spotlight on Joe Rogan, host of the popular Joe Rogan Experience podcast on Spotify, has only grown brighter and hotter. After receiving a storm of criticism for promoting covid-19 vaccine misinformation on his podcast, all eyes are now on Rogan again after videos of him repeatedly using the…Read more...

It ended up being something of a busy week, which means you may have missed some of our Morning Spoilers. Have no fear, because we’ve got this video for some of the biggest stories this week that closed out January and began February. And as always, you can read new Morning Spoilers every weekday on io9!Read more...

After enjoying a lockdown-fueled peak during the pandemic, Peloton is now spinning out of control. Product recalls, plummeting stock prices, a major decline in demand and its bike’s dangerous cameos in not one, but two primetime TV shows have wiped roughly $40 billion from its market value in the last year.Read more...

Because there’s no escaping creeps on the Internet, Meta (formerly known as Facebook) has launched a new “Personal Boundary” feature for its virtual reality platforms to combat harassment.Read more...

Since he first swung into the Marvel movies in 2016 with Captain America: Civil War, Tom Holland’s had a fairly busy life. Not only has he been caught up in various Marvel movies and animated flicks, but he’s also about to don the half-tucked shirt of Naughty Dog’s Nathan Drake for Uncharted. That’s a lot of work for…Read more...

Longtime fans of adult swim and specifically The Boondocks were dealt a hard blow earlier in the week. The much publicized revival for the beloved animated series, announced for HBO Max , has been canned.

When the creators of Critical Role set out to make an animated adaptation in Legend of Vox Machina, they wanted to keep the show true to its source material. The challenge wasn’t just to keep the characters the same (they mostly are) but also to keep true to their combat: to put it another way, Critical Role can get…Read more...

The critical and commercial success of Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse isn’t just leading to another follow up, it’s helping one of its directors get their next big project off the ground. While co-director Peter Ramsey is still on hand for both Across the Spider-Verse and its 2023 sequel as an executive producer,…Read more...

Paleontologists and locals familiar with a fossil site in Moab, Utah claim that a backhoe drove over dinosaur footprints and other animal trackways, damaging or destroying them. The Utah Bureau of Land Management, which is responsible for protecting Mill Canyon Track Site, has said that its recent dismantling of a…Read more...

Every year, Apple hosts a handful of product launch events to announce new devices, and 2022 is shaping up to be no different. According to Bloomberg, the company’s first such event will be “on or near” March 8, which tracks—Apple usually announces new devices in the spring, and its events tend to be on Tuesdays.…Read more...

Editor’s note: This article contains discussions of suicide. If you or someone you know is having a crisis, please call the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline at 1-800-273-8255 or text the Crisis Text Line at 741-741.

Stadia may not have blossomed into the cloud gaming service that Google had hoped, but the technology behind it may live on by powering other services.

You’d be forgiven if you thought that the Olympics had just happened—the delayed summer Olympics, postponed from 2020 due to the pandemic, were on a mere six months ago!

Spotify pulled down at least 70 episodes of The Joe Rogan Experience from its archives on Friday. However, the disappeared episodes don’t have much to do with the platform’s ongoing controversy over covid-19 misinformation.

Welcome back to Toy Aisle, io9's regular round up of the latest and greatest in all things merch. This week, Lego dusts off its spring line up with Star Wars, Marvel, cool cars, and... Elvis Presley? Meanwhile, Hasbro gets retro with the Ghostbusters, and The Boys heads to the Figma lineup. Check it out!

We first heard an ethereal, sinister whisper that a live-action Goosebumps TV series might be coming to haunt us back in 2020. But now that whisper has become a piercing scream of utter terror, such as one might make when menaced by a sentient ventriloquist’s dummy, which shrieks, “That live-action Goosebumps TV…Read more...

For some, artificial intelligence represents nothing more than one tool among many aimed at increasing productivity and maximizing economic output. For others though, AI looks like more of a destination, a couple of words pointing to a tectonic shift in global society capable of ripping the ground out from under…Read more...

Why is Facebook struggling? Clearly, it’s not that the site itself is garbage, or that its parent company Meta’s pivot to the “metaverse” positions its future on a buzzword, or even that it’s racked up enough scandals that it spends more money on lobbyists than Exxon or Phillip Morris.

An expedition departing for Antarctica this coming weekend is seeking to uncover the lost ship of famed British explorer Ernest Shackleton. The crew will attempt to succeed where so many others have failed.

Gettr, the MAGA-minded social media platform that recently saw a big spike in membership, seems to be on a mission to get hacked. Or at least, that’s what you’d be led to believe by the company’s reported decision to fire pretty much everybody in charge of making sure the company doesn’t get hacked.

It’s almost surreal that after years and years of joking about it, the most recent Fast and Furious movie, F9, actually sent characters to space. Seriously, io9 and the rest of the internet has been joking about the conceit forever. Then it happened. And it was hilarious, wonderful, and perfect. Now, the moment has…Read more...

Pennsylvania is dealing with a potentially serious tick problem. Environmental officials have recently warned the public that a population of ticks in the state appear to be carrying incredibly high levels of a rare but potentially deadly tickborne virus. They’re now preparing to contain and further study these ticks,…Read more...

Star Wars is perpetually a mystery in search of answers. We all have questions about it, from what its biggest reveals mean, to narrative thoughts, to questions of character. The Book of Boba Fett is, of course, no exception... and while we’ve already had several questions about its latest chapter, one massive query…Read more...

If you’ve been watching Peacemaker, you know the titular, anti-heroic douchebag has been having a rough time of it lately. If you haven’t been watching Peacemaker, good news—you don’t really need any context to enjoy this incredible moment from yesterday’s episode, “Murn After Reading.”

Good news/bad news, Orville fans: Hulu has released a new sneak peek at the long-on-hiatus sci-fi series’ third season... as well as the news that instead of arriving in March, it’ll now begin streaming in June. Fortunately, the peek is a juicy one and will almost make you forget about the latest delay. Check it out!Read more...

New research this week affirms the grim reality of medical crowdfunding. The study found that few GoFundMe campaigns over a five-year span raised enough money to meet their goals. And those started by people living in areas with higher levels of medical debt, uninsurance, and low income raised less money than others…Read more...

Residents of a town just north of Dallas, Texas were awoken in the middle of a cold night this week to what sounded like a volley of gunshots outside their home. When they finally made their way outdoors, the residents learned those shocking sounds didn’t actually originate from firearms but were rather the result of…Read more...

A major milestone has been achieved in the deployment of the James Webb Space Telescope, with an onboard instrument detecting its first photons from a distant star. This means engineers can now begin the three-month process of aligning the space telescope’s 18 mirrors.

It’s not much of a hot take to say that director Roland Emmerich’s continual attempts to return to the disaster movie genre after 1996’s Independence Day have produced diminishing returns. But it’s tough to imagine a cinematic apocalypse that’s less epic than Moonfall, in which even the film’s characters can’t be…Read more...

Toilet paper is one of the last things you’d assume the grocery store would ever run out of, but back in early 2020, at the start of the pandemic (some 15 years ago, according to my brain) TP rationing was suddenly a thing. The dire bathroom situation has improved, but for anyone still wanting to carefully ration…Read more...

Renfield starts filming, and adds one more member to its cast. HBO’s Last of Us series will tweak the chronology of the games slightly. We’re getting at least two seasons of Halo. Plus, what’s next on Riverdale, Batwoman, and Legends of Tomorrow, and a new look at the next Peacemaker. To me, my spoilers!

How much do you love and/or rely on Amazon? Is it enough to put a giant Alexa screen on your wall?

The world is changing, and oh, how the tables have turned. On Thursday, Snap showed up behemoth-sized rival Meta, formerly known as Facebook, by reporting a profit for the first time as a public company. Meta, on the other hand, experienced the worst crash in stock market history, losing $251 billion in value in one…Read more...

As surveillance controversies have raged in connection with Israeli spyware vendor NSO Group, another, lesser known spyware firm from Israel has also apparently been helping hack iPhones all over the world.Read more...

io9 is proud to present fiction from LIGHTSPEED MAGAZINE. Once a month, we feature a story from LIGHTSPEED’s current issue. This month’s selection is “Plausible Realities, Improbable Dreams” by Isabel J. Kim. You can read the story below or listen to the podcast on LIGHTSPEED’s website. Enjoy!

As one of, if not often the, primary protagonists of Star Wars, the saga at large has often existed in various forms to ask one single question, with a thousand answers: who is Luke Skywalker? Farm boy, pilot, Jedi, teacher, learner, master, legend, Luke has been so many things across his life, in so many stories,…Read more...

If you rely on Amazon Prime to get necessities delivered to your door (or just for a hit of serotonin), we’ve got some bad news: Soon you’ll be paying more for the convenience. Amazon is raising the price to $139 from $119, the company announced in its fourth-quarter earnings statement.

In the grand tradition of JLApe: Guerilla Warfare, the superheroes of the Justice League are about to make another transcendent transformation. In a title so good I’m kind of shocked it took someone this long to think of it, Jurassic League—starring the superheroes as anthropomorphic dinosaurs—is about to rock the…Read more...

An apparently successful weapons test on Sunday included a camera mounted onto the warhead of a North Korean intermediate-range ballistic missile. The new photos of Earth from space seem pleasant enough, but they’re meant to convey a message about the country’s growing military power and reach.

Star Trek: Prodigy almost seems to have left us again as quickly as it returned at the start of the year, but that doesn’t mean that the latest animated series in the franchise is made of lighter stuff. If anything, it just went out having finally delivered a truly fascinating premise for the series... and some very…Read more...

Clearview AI, the shady face recognition firm which claims to have landed contracts with federal, state, and local cops across the country, has landed a roughly $50,000 deal with the U.S. military for augmented reality glasses.

Yet another thunderous crypto theft has descended from the heavens, predictably threatening to bankrupt everyone involved. The aptly named Wormhole, a DeFi cross-chain protocol, announced Wednesday that it had been the victim of a previously unknown exploit, the likes of which allowed a hacker to suck some $325…Read more...

Watching Wayne’s World in 2022 is like riding a time machine that’s going backwards and forwards at the same time. Going one way, it’s a picture perfect snapshot of the early 1990s. The music, clothes, references, attitude, all of it is as 1992 as you can imagine. And yet, looking in the other direction, it’s ahead of…Read more...

At a Glance on Android presents contextual information on a phone’s home and lock screens, so users can quickly view relevant details without sifting through apps. In its current state, At a Glance contains basic info like current weather conditions and calendar alerts, but it appears Google at one point had much…Read more...

It’s official. A second Scream 2 is coming to a theater near you. Paramount and Spyglass just announced that the directing and writing teams behind the brand new Scream are all returning for a sequel. That’ll make it the sixth Scream movie overall, but also a sequel to a film just called Scream so who the heck knows…Read more...

If you’re not totally sold on the United States Postal Service’s new, flattened duck-shaped, gas-powered monstrosity of a mail truck, you’re not alone. The Biden administration on Wednesday made a last-minute plea to halt the USPS’ fleet, claiming the new trucks’ laughably poor fuel efficiency would further worsen the…Read more...