Gizmodo

I never thought I would see a good Dungeons & Dragons movie in my lifetime. When Honor Among Thieves comes out next year, I still might not have. But the movie has earned my goodwill, and that’s because it has an Owlbear in it.

Imagine buying something, then being told it’s worth more than what you paid for it. That’s how real estate works, right? At least, that’s how my millennial brain has interpreted it thus far. Maybe I shouldn’t have spent all my money on avocado toast! Anyway, price increases aren’t something we typically expect to…Read more...

Given the current onslaught of ‘80s nostalgia (bolstered by Stranger Things and elevated by “sure, why not?” occurrences like the ALF revival), it only makes sense that one of the coolest characters of the era—artificial intelligence personality Max Headroom—would be angling for a return.Read more...

As record-breaking temperatures have pummeled much of the country this summer, another heat-related menace is causing trouble: flash droughts.

A local shipping authority recently found a 375-year-old shipwreck nearly 36 feet beneath the surface of the Trave River in northern Germany. A team of researchers spent eight months studying the wreck, determining that 150 barrels of cargo went down with the Hanseatic ship.Read more...

Spanish police have arrested two former government contractors, accusing them of a stomach-churning assault on the nation’s system for monitoring for dangerous levels of nuclear radiation. The alleged cybercriminals were once the people charged with maintaining and repairing that very detection network.

If you’re still not over the loss of Iron Man in Avengers: Endgame, bust out the tissues before reading any further. Apparently we are now entering the phase where Marvel Studios is just going to make us cry, if the Black Panther: Wakanda Forever trailer is any indication.Read more...

It’s the end of a dirty era in Hawaii. The state’s last-ever coal shipment arrived in Oahu on Wednesday, bound for the last remaining coal-fired power plant, which is due to shut down in September.Read more...

Intel could really use a few bucks from the recently passed (by Congress, at least) $280 billion CHIPS and Science ACT. The U.S. chipmaker shocked investors on Thursday, revealing it lost nearly $500 million in Q2, its first quarterly loss in years. The company cited weakened demand for PC components and downturns in…Read more...

Babel Finance, the Hong Kong-based crypto lender, apparently had other designs when its worldwide user base handed over their crypto to the company than just borrowing and lending. It seems to have been doing what everyone else does with crypto, rapidly speculating and trying to make “line go up.” Of course, all that…Read more...

One of the dangers of going viral when you’re a pop culture reporter is that occasionally, sometimes, every now and then, your editor will ask you to start an open channel based on a silly tweet you shot off at midnight after reading a fanfic so devastating that you read it twice in two days. This is especially true…Read more...

Las Vegas was the center of some intense flooding last night as locations across the Strip and beyond were inundated after a torrent of rain battered the city. This is the second major flooding event the U.S. experienced this week after major flooding hit St. Louis on Tuesday.

Good news for PC gaming fans eager to play laying down! Valve has announced it will be able to fulfill the demand for the Steam Deck, its handheld gaming console, sooner than initially estimated.

Kenya’s national cohesion watchdog threatened to suspend Facebook from the country Friday if it doesn’t mitigate hate speech ahead of the country’s general elections next month. The regulator has given the company one week to remediate the problem, which included Facebook’s approval of ads advocating for ethnic…Read more...

Probably the biggest news to hit the haunt world lately is that global superstar the Weeknd has officially announced a Horror Nights House at Universal Studios Orlando and Universal Studios Hollywood for their annual haunt events.Read more...

Apple’s next version of iOS is now available to the public as a downloadable beta. You can enroll your iPhone into the program to try iOS 16 before everyone else. The software is still in development, so you’ll have to approach it more patiently than an average build of iOS and take some of its bugs in stride. But the…Read more...

The core stage of a Long March 5B rocket is hours away from performing an uncontrolled reentry and crashing onto the planet’s surface. Here’s the latest on this unfolding event.Read more...

Tonight’s drawing in the Mega Millions multi-state lottery has an estimated jackpot of $1.1 billion. It’s only the third time in the game’s 20-year history that the jackpot has surpassed a billion dollars (or $648.2 million, if you take the cash option). A player who buys a single ticket with randomly selected numbers…Read more...

Do you remember net neutrlaity? It may seem like ancient history now, but there was a time when regulators actually came together to put in place guardrails preventing greedy telecoms from segregating internet access to the highest bidders. Then Trump and Ajit Pai happened. Now, nearly five years after the Federal…Read more...

A group of ill-equipped kids is forced to come together and battle unthinkable evil. It’s a sentence that describes two films that were released within two weeks of each other 35 years ago: Joel Schumacher’s The Lost Boys on July 31, 1987, and Fred Dekker’s The Monster Squad on August 14, 1987.Read more...

It looks like there won’t be a hot booster summer this year. The Food and Drug Administration is reportedly abandoning immediate plans to sanction a second covid-19 booster shot for people under 50, according to the New York Times. Instead, the agency is set to speed along the release of upgraded boosters so that they…Read more...

In Spike Lee’s Do the Right Thing, a summer heat wave descends on Brooklyn, pushing neighbors into the streets and stirring up boiling resentments. The heat is less of an environmental setting and more of a character unto itself.Read more...

In a world of seemingly endless monthly subscription services—Hello Fresh’s meal kits, Patreon’s content creator support, and BarkBox’s dog toys, for example—Twitter has also been getting in on the fun with “Twitter Blue,” a monthly subscription service with extra features that just jacked up its price.

When Rise of the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles began airing in 2018, longtime shellheads were wary—it was a show that at first largely traded goofy, short-form teen antics for serious stories, a bold design aesthetic, and a radical re-interpretation of the franchise’s usual lore, and it shook up the series in a big…Read more...

We love the Analogue Pocket, but the retro gaming handheld didn’t launch with its entire feature set. Instead, features like a wikipedia-esque library mode, more comprehensive save states, and the easy offloading of Game Boy Camera pictures were pushed off for an eventual 1.1 release. Well, now that release is…Read more...

Guess who came riding along with the passage of $52 billion in incentives to manufacture semiconductors? Congress came in like a cowboy riding a rocket (think Dr. Strangelove), waving their new bill in the air that includes funding and provisions for NASA to continue its dreams of leaving bootprints on the surface of…Read more...

In a cryptically-worded Instagram post from Jason Momoa, the Aquaman actor has seemignly revealed that Ben Affleck’s return as Batman is going to happen a lot sooner than The Flash.

Space launches, specifically morning space launches, are causing spectacular shining clouds to appear in new places, according to recent research published in the journal Advancing Earth and Space Science.Read more...

Get a look at Dan Harmon’s next animated series. The Thing on the Doorstep is getting a new adaptation. Los Espookys makes its grand return. Plus, a glimpse at Riverdale’s season finale. To me, my spoilers!

At least 16 people are dead in Eastern Kentucky after heavy rains pounded the state on Thursday, flooding roads and towns and forcing rescuers to save people stranded on rooftops and in trees.

The V/H/S found-footage horror anthology series experienced a shot of adrenaline last year with V/H/S/94, which despite being the fourth film in the main franchise was probably its best-received entry to date. Shudder hopes to keep the freaky magic going with V/H/S/99, a new installment set in guess which year.Read more...

As we head into Phase 5 of the Marvel Cinematic Universe, we’re looking back on Marvel Studios’ choices for how it has represented motherhood throughout its run of heroes and villains. And if you thought Disney had a bad track record with dead moms—well, Marvel may be even worse. Are they justified, or is there an…Read more...

Season three of DC animated series Harley Quinn is now streaming on HBO Max, and showrunners Justin Halpen and Patrick Schumacker sat down with the AV Club to catch up fans on what to expect—or, in the case of a certain romance thankfully left in Harley’s past, what not to expect.Read more...

In a video released today, Game of Thrones author George R.R. Martin has revealed that he has contracted covid-19 during his time at San Diego Comic-Con, which was planned as part of a larger West Coast trip that was supposed to include attending the premiere of House of the Dragon. Instead, the author has cancelled…Read more...

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New research claims that Hong Kong’s covid-19 contact tracing app has a host of security problems that could expose sensitive user data. The city’s response: We don’t know what you guys are talking about.Read more...

Rise of the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, the most recent television iteration of the world’s favorite terrapin heroes, generated a lot of buzz, from its initial announcement all the way through its two seasons on Nickelodeon. While the show did receive an arguably satisfying conclusion in 2020, it was later announced…Read more...

io9 is pleased to announce that Erewhon Books has acquired Womb City, the novel debut of Lambda finalist and Nommo Award-winner Tlotlo Tsamaase, who uses both xe/xem and she/her pronouns. Tsamaase is a Motswana writer currently living in Botswana. Xer novella, The Silence of the Wilting Skin, garnered a massive…Read more...

The history of AI computing in recent decades follows a somewhat familiar script: brief bursts of industry-shifting breakthroughs followed by months or years of smaller incremental change with a fair share of controversy peppered in between. Today’s one of those watershed moments.

Attention all classic controller lovers, your favorite classic Nintendo and Sega controllers, which refer to the Switch specific NES, SNES, Sega Genesis/ Mega Drive, and N64 controllers, are now supported by Steam (and thus your PC). This comes after Steam announced a slew of updates and patch notes yesterday, with …Read more...

Less than a day after Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg elicited outrage by saying that more than 30% of users’ Instagram feeds would consist of AI-recommended content from people they don’t follow by next year, the photo-sharing app’s head honcho said the company would stop updates in an effort to staunch the flood of…Read more...

Several news publishers are going to be out millions of dollars as Meta is now saying, in a very subdued way, there’s no place for dedicated news systems on its ever-more algorithmically based social platforms.Read more...

While OG Orphan Black star Tatiana Maslany is busy getting big and green for Marvel’s She-Hulk on Disney+, the next chapter of AMC’s clone-fascinated series has announced its star, and she happens to have her own Marvel connections: it’s Jessica Jones’ Krysten Ritter.Read more...

Quick-thinking users have spotted a strange list on AMD’s resource page (since removed) that shed light on the names of its 7000 series CPUs. As first noticed by Videocardz on Wednesday, AMD’s list contained SKUs for its upcoming 7000 series processors, including the Ryzen 9 7950X, Ryzen 9 7900x, Ryzen 7 7700X, and…Read more...

Just eight episodes remain in the Locke family saga, and fans of Locke & Key don’t have long to wait: the third and final season arrives on Netflix August 10, bringing what the streamer calls “the most dangerous threat yet” to menace not just the residents of Keyhouse, but all of Matheson and beyond. Check out the new…Read more...

Dating these days feels impossible, ask anyone, and breaking up is so hard for some that “ghosting”—ignoring someone’s calls and texts when you’ve lost interest—has become the norm. But a politician in the Philippines is trying to make the act of ghosting an “emotional offense.”

It’s been 13 years since authors Margaret Weis and Tracy Hickman wrote a Dragonlance novel, based on the Dungeons & Dragons game setting whose tone they largely defined. That changes in August when their new book Dragons of Deceit, the first in the Dragonlance Destinies trilogy, is published starring the fan-favorite…Read more...

Arriving a year after the first Apple AirPods, the original Google Pixel Buds were some of the worst wireless earbuds we’ve ever tested: and they weren’t even truly wireless. Five years later, the new Pixel Buds Pro, which finally introduce active noise cancelling to Google’s wireless headphones, are the completely…Read more...

A bacteria endemic to tropical areas that causes life-threatening infection has just been detected within the soil and waters of the continental U.S. for the first time. On Wednesday, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported that they recently isolated Burkholderia pseudomallei bacteria in southern…Read more...

Have you ever thought, “I’m about to tweet, but that’s not enough self-expression. I need to tell the internet how I really feel?” If so, you’re in luck—maybe. As long as your true inner feelings align with the options in Twitter’s new status feature, which is currently in testing. The concept was hinted at in a leak…Read more...