A press release announcing Sethu’s casting says that she’s “set to take a trip through time and space as the Doctor’s new companion, alongside current companion Ruby Sunday, in season two of Doctor Who.” Season two is currently in production (it’s due in 2025), and the release was accompanied by photos of Gatwa, Gibson, and Sethu at a table read. So, maybe Gibson will be around longer than we thought?
Star Wars fans know Sethu from her role on another Disney+ series—Cinta Kaz on Andor—but it sounds like she’s just as excited to leap into another sci-fi realm. “I feel like the luckiest person in the world,” she said in the release. “It is such an honor to be a part of the Whoniverse, and I’m so grateful to the whole Doctor Who family— because that is what they are—for welcoming me with open arms and making me feel so at home. I couldn’t ask for a better team than Ncuti and Millie to be on this adventure with. This is SO much fun!”
Turns out Varada has some history with Doctor Who showrunner, executive producer, and writer Russell T Davies: they worked together on a BBC production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream. “It’s a joy to welcome her on board the TARDIS,” he said in the statement. “Right now in the studio, shooting for 2025, we’ve got Ncuti, Millie and Varada fighting side by side—we need all three, because the stakes are higher than ever!”
Ncuti Gatwa made his debut as the Fifteenth Doctor in Christmas special “The Church on Ruby Road;” his first season kicks off with two episodes May 10 on Disney+.
There’s exactly one Marvel Studios movie coming to theaters this year, but it’s one of the biggest to date. Deadpool & Wolverine is scheduled for release on July 26 and it won’t only be the first MCU film for Ryan Reynolds’ wisecracking killer, but also the MCU debut of Wolverine, played by Hugh Jackman.
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That alone already has fans excited and the number of people who watched the first trailer proved it again. Continuing the fun, Disney debuted new footage at CinemaCon 2024, and here’s what happened.
Wade Wilson grabs a staple gun, uses it to put on his wig, and says “Now let’s sell some certified pre-owned vehicles, motherfucker.” Smash cut to Wade in the back seat of a car with a family on a test drive. They ask him some questions but he keeps cursing and mentions he doesn’t have kids because he doesn’t have much vaginal sex. He’s bad at this.
Peter (Rob Delaney) apparently works there too and they talk in the locker room about how Wade may be a bad salesperson, but he can always go back to being a superhero. Wade explains that he’s done for good. This is the life he wants and if you “aim for the middle, you’ll never miss.” Peter shows him that he keeps an old Deadpool suit in his locker anyway.
Wade and Peter ride bikes home from work and Wade notices someone taking photos of them. The conversation continues about wanting to be superheroes again and Peter asks Wade if he’s just sad because it’s his birthday. He also mentions a very interesting piercing he’s just gotten.
Yes, it’s Wade’s birthday. He goes into his apartment and it’s a surprise party. There are all his friends from the first two movies: Negasonic, Colossus, Dopinder, Blind Al, and others. Wade goes around the room and catches up with everyone. One highlight of this is Wade and Al going back and forth with a ton of insults. She asks him if he wants to do some cocaine and he says that’s the one thing Kevin Feige said was off the table. She rattles off a bunch of different fake names and he says Feige knows them all. Finally she says, “Do you want to build a snowman?” To which he says, yes but I can’t.
Vanessa is also there and they are no longer together. She’s seeing someone from work though, and Wade is happy for her, though he’s not seeing anyone.
The group sings “Happy Birthday” and then Wade gives a heartfelt speech about how much he loves everyone in this room. He says that despite some tough years, he’s truly happy now because of them. He then goes on to blow out the candles… and the second he does, there’s a knock at the door.
You’ve seen some of this in the trailer. It’s the TVA. Wade assumes they’re a group of men who are there to have sex with him and he gets very dirty about what he wants them to do with all his holes. They then get fed up, knock him out, and put him through one of those TVA doors.
In the TVA, Mr. Paradox (Matthew McFayden) tells Wade that a) he soiled himself, and b) what the TVA does. “That’s a shit ton of exposition for a threequel,” Wade says. Mr. Paradox tells him he knows that Wade has been abusive of the timeline previously, with Cable’s time travel device, but that’s not why he’s there.
Apparently Wade has been chosen for a higher purpose. One that’s even unclear to the TVA. He needs to save the sacred timeline from a grisly fate at some point in the future. The two guys joke that it needs to be “Avenged.” That they’re going to “Marvel” at how “Cinematic” is. Wade says he wants it all, cameos, variants, the works.
They turn to the screen and on it is Steve Rogers as Captain America. Wade knows him and salutes the screen. “You’re no longer lost,” Mr. Paradox says, “You can now be a hero.” At this point, Wade notices a screen where Thor is holding a dying Deadpool and crying. “Why is Thor crying?” he asks. Wade isn’t supposed to see that though; that’s something that happens in the distant future.
Wade is all in and says he will return and help. He then turns to the camera, runs toward it, grabs it, shakes it and says “Suck it Fox! I’m going to Disneyland!” He also fellates the boom microphone a bit.
“Oh, there’s one more thing I need,” Wade says. It’s a costume. A TVA tailor makes him a brand new upgraded Deadpool costume, which comes together in a quick series of fast edits… which include more than a few of the tailor grabbing Wade’s crotch.
Wade loves the new costume, even if he has to tell them the tailor is a predator. He also mentions that his samurai swords are made out of adamantium. He jokes around that one of the TVA employees is eyeing him up and his underwear is getting tighter. The employee picks up the phone to call HR.
That leads into a montage of action scenes largely from the first trailer. Dog Pool running in slow motion. Lots of shooting. Wade in the back seat of a bloody car. And then, finally, we see him and Hugh Jackman’s Wolverine sitting together in a car.
“What’s with the suit?” Wade asks. “Do the X-Men make you wear it?” He comments he looks like he fights crime for the Los Angeles Rams, but Wolverine isn’t having it. “I’m just trying to bond a bit,” he says.
Directed by Shawn Levy, Deadpool & Wolverine stars Ryan Reynolds and Hugh Jackman. It opens July 26.
Update: the headline on the original post was updated to more accurately describe the length of the footage.
One of the most surprising, exciting pieces of movie news so far this year is that writer Alex Garland and director Danny Boyle are going back to the world of 28 Days Later. Over two decades since the groundbreaking original zombie film and 17 years since its follow-up, the pair are getting ready to make 28 Years Later.
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Speaking to Garland on the occasion of his latest film, Civil War, io9 asked him why now was the right time to go back to the franchise that launched his career.
“It was partly to do with the passage of time,” Garland told io9 over video chat. “It sounds dumb, but you get locked in. Originally I wrote 28 Days Later as almost like a gag. It was making a caption into the title. You know, ‘12 hours later,’ ‘The next day,’ except make it the title. And then you’re stuck with it. [Laughs] You got to live with the thing. And 28 Months Later would have seemed weird given the amount of time that had passed. And, 28 Weeks Later, someone had already done it. And so our last time frame, unless we start moving to centuries, was 28 years. And enough time had passed to justify that right.”
But, of course, there were a few other big factors beyond just the timing. “Danny was interested in doing it, the producers were interested in doing it, and I had an idea,” he said. “I had not really had an idea that I was interested in prior to that. It had been floated. We’d talk about it. Every five years or something it would get discussed, but I had no motivation to do it. I said, ‘Look, if someone else wants to do it, that’s fine, but I haven’t got anything.’ For some reason, that passage of time unlocked a particular concept in my head that the film then goes with, and so, suddenly it made sense. I said, ‘Okay, I think I’ve got an idea.’ And I wrote it as a script, and showed it to Danny and Andrew [Macdonald] and Peter [Rice] who are the producers, and they said, ‘Yeah, okay, let’s do it.’”
Plus, Garland confirmed that the overall idea is for the series to be a trilogy, if audiences turn up for it. “That was key to the idea was it was a story that couldn’t naturally fit in one film,” Garland said. “And there was a possibility— which we may not have the opportunity to do—but to do a proper trilogy. Not a sequence of sequels that are effectively replaying the first thing just in slightly different forms, but an actual true narrative. And we don’t know if we’ll be able to do it because that relates, in the end, to market forces. Films cost a lot of money. Even cheap films cost a lot of money. You know, people talk low-budget, but it’s a lot of money always. And so that depends on really whether people want to see future ones after we’ve made it.”
But, either way, 28 Years Later from Alex Garland and Danny Boyle is coming. And ultimately it’ll be coming… almost 28 years after the original too. No release date is set, but you have to guess 2025 or 2026, 23 or 24 years after the first film, is probably a good guess.
The trailers for Civil War, the latest film by Alex Garland, give the audience a very specific expectation of what they’re going to see. It looks like a film about a United States that is so divided politically, certain states have seceded and the country is at war. A scenario that’s, clearly, a fictionalized nightmare version of our present, where America’s Left and Right have turned to violence. And, in a way, Civil War is that. But it’s also not and that’s why it’s so damned fascinating and special.
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Written and directed by Garland (Ex Machina, Annihilation), Civil War is, indeed, about a United States that’s no longer united. A United States at war with itself, hence the title. But one of the main combatants in this war is the Western Forces, a group comprised of California and Texas. Now, everyone knows California and Texas are maybe the two most polar opposite states in our current political climate. So that’s the first clue Civil War isn’t a by-the-book, pro-left, anti-right Hollywood tale. It has an agenda, for sure, and that agenda is certainly more inclusive than not, but Garland very specifically makes it clear that his America is not our America. Thereby, no matter who is watching the movie or what they believe, they can very easily enjoy the story without bias.
In other words, the movie is as objective as possible which, not coincidentally, is also the primary ideology of the film’s main characters: a group of journalists. Kirsten Dunst plays Lee, a famous war photographer traveling the country with a fellow journalist named Joel, played by Wagner Moura. After documenting a terrifying, but all too common, act of violence in New York, Lee and Joel decide to take a trip to Washington D.C. to attempt to interview the president, played by Nick Offerman. Colleague Sammy (Stephen McKinley Henderson) thinks it’s a bad idea, but goes along for the ride anyway, and they also pick up Jessie (Cailee Spaeny), an aspiring photographer who sees Lee as a hero and mentor.
Spaney and Moura.Image: A24
And so the four journalists leave New York for D.C, which is usually an uneventful four or five-hour drive. In this world though, with everything happening across the country, it becomes a much longer, more arduous trip. Certain roads are blocked off. Other areas are not safe. And soon, the group realizes no matter which way they go, there is danger and terror at every turn.
Civil War is Alex Garland’s most mature movie to date. As he sets his characters off on this road trip, you can almost feel him not pushing the agenda one way or the other. An energy permeates the film, as if Garland wants to say something but is shaking and buzzing to hold it back. Much as the journalist heroes continue to preach objectivity and the importance of reporting the facts, no matter the circumstance, Garland too unfurls his narrative accordingly. Lee, Joel, and the crew approach each situation the same way: from a place of care and kindness. Sometimes that works, other times it doesn’t. Often, the most dangerous things we see aren’t in the center of the frame. A burning building here. A pile of bodies there. And while Joel and Lee’s distaste for the president certainly codes them as sympathetic to the WF, the film never really says what the WF stands for. We’re left to wonder, is it more Texas? Or more California?
That the film avoids ever defining the root of the conflict is one of the best things about the movie. Contrarily, one of the worst things is as the characters make the trek from New York to D.C. things can get a little repetitive. They drive, encounter an obstacle, learn something, and move on. Then they drive, encounter an obstacle, learn something, and move on again. The pattern repeats itself a few times and while each of those obstacles unfolds in a different, usually surprising way, some of the film’s momentum does falter following this structure.
Dunst and Spaeny. Image: A24
Where Civil War doesn’t falter is portraying intensity. Whenever the heroes encounter one of those obstacles, be it a booby-trapped gas station, hidden sniper, or a pink-sunglassed Jesse Plemons, the film’s tension always gets turned to 11. We are rarely sure what’s going to happen, and who is going to survive, primarily because of that objectivity. No one is treated like a hero or villain at the start. That changes scene to scene, of course, but the film, like the journalists, gives everyone an equal shot, which can be scary.
That can also make you question yourself, your biases, and more. Civil War is a film that challenges its audience to put themselves in the shoes of not just the main characters, but everyone. Partially that’s because everything in the movie seems so plausible that we see ourselves, our friends, and our neighbors in it. But it’s also because the performances are all so strong across the board that it’s easy to relate.
It feels like it’s been forever since we’ve seen Kirsten Dunst in a big, showy, starring role like this and watching Civil War, you have no idea why. Dunst gives a nuanced, powerful performance as Lee, a veteran so confident in herself that she’s almost carefree. That is until she meets Jessie. In Jessie, Lee sees a younger version of herself and it terrifies her. Lee knows Jessie, portrayed with lots of raw emotions by Spaeny, is dooming herself to danger. Choosing this life is probably the wrong thing for her. And so what should be a simple, mentor-mentee relationship is always strained. Lee sees too much of herself in Jessie, and Jessie doesn’t care.
Just another day. Image: A24
Their complex relationship, as well as the gravitas provided by Moura’s Joel and McKinley Henderson’s Sammy, come to a head in the film’s final act, which sees the team finally make it to Washington. Garland then unfurls a guttural, shocking, ground-level war in the heart of the nation’s capital, featuring views of national monuments and more that feel akin to 1996’s Independence Day. What happens in these scenes I won’t spoil, but it all builds to a final few minutes destined to be discussed and quoted for as long as movies exist. It’s that fantastic.
Ultimately, Civil War is a Rorschach test designed for maximum impact across political ideologies. You can watch it and view it however you’d like. Is not taking a side a bit of a cop-out? Should there have been a bit more of the story leaning left or right? I’d argue the fact it doesn’t have that is the authorship. Garland isn’t necessarily interested in changing anyone’s mind about anything. He wants any and everyone to consider themselves and what those differences could end up becoming. And hey, if playing it down the middle helps more people see it, that’s just a bonus.
After what feels like years of waiting—mostly, because it has been—we finally have our first extended look at Joker: Folie à Deux in action, bringing laughs, sorrow, and music to Todd Phillips’s vision of the Batman’s most legendary foe.
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It stars Joaquin Phoenix, reprising his Oscar-winning role of Arthur Fleck, now fully transformed into the clown prince of crime known as the Joker after the events of the 2019 film. Folie à Deux—which, in a surprising turn, is a jukebox musical—also introduces pop-sensation-turned-actress Lady Gaga as another iconic DC character in Harleen Quinzel, aka Harley Quinn.
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Joker: Folie à Deux also stars Zazie Beetz, returning from the first film alongside Leigh Gill and Sharon Washington, as well as Brendan Gleeson, Catherine Keener, Jacob Lofland, Steve Coogan, Ken Leung, and Harry Lawtey. It’s set to hit theaters on October 4.
Americans have wanted a federal privacy law for years but intensive lobbying by the tech industry and general incompetence by our federal legislators has repeatedly thwarted that desire. Well, in 2024, it’s possible that we may finally get a strong federal privacy law.
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I’ll say it again: It’s possible. It’s also technically possible that frogs could rain from the sky over lower Manhattan, coating New Yorkers in a spring shower of amphibious guts, but is that actually likely to happen?
The American Privacy Rights Act of 2024, recently introduced by Cathy McMorris Rodgers (R-WA) and Maria Cantwell (D-WA), would create basic digital privacy protections for Americans. The law, if enacted, would create a variety of protections and rights for consumers, including the ability to access, control, and delete information collected by companies.
While that may sound like a good thing, there’s one aspect of the legislation that privacy advocates seem concerned about. The proposed law would eliminate potentially stronger, state-level protections that currently exist. While privacy rights groups remain cautiously optimistic about the APRA’s potential, they are also wary of its proposed preemption of state laws. If the currently proposed regulations look strong, the legislative process is just beginning and there’s no telling what the federal law may look like after what is sure to be a long, combative policymaking process.
Here’s a quick look at what the legislation currently promises, and what privacy advocates are saying about it.
The right to access, control, and delete
The American Privacy Rights Act would create broad protections for Americans’ data, giving consumers the ability to access, control, and delete data covered by the legislation. The policy would give all Americans the power to request information from entities that have collected data about them. Businesses that fall under the law would need to comply with consumers’ requests within “specified timeframes,” the bill states. The bill allows certain exemptions from these mandates, including small businesses (which are defined as companies making “$40,000,000 or less in annual revenue” or that collect, process, retain, or transfer “the covered data of 200,000 or fewer individuals”), as well as governments, and “entities working on behalf of governments.”
Data minimization
The bill would also mandate something called “data minimization.” The idea here is to reduce the overall amount of information that companies can collect about web users. Bill backers say that companies covered by the legislative will not be able to “collect, process, retain, or transfer data beyond what is necessary, proportionate, or limited to provide or maintain a product or service requested by an individual, or provide a communication reasonably anticipated in the context of the relationship, or a permitted purpose.” Again, while that sounds good, the devil is in the details here, and it’s not totally clear yet what this sort of data minimization would look like in real life.
What is covered data?
The bill defines the data covered by the legislation as follows:
…information that identifies or is linked or reasonably linkable to an individual or device. It does not include de-identified data, employee data, publicly available information, inferences made from multiple sources of publicly available information that do not meet the definition of sensitive covered data and are not combined with covered data, and information in a library, archive, or museum collection subject to specific limitations.
Empowering the FTC
Enforcement of the law would take place at both the federal and state levels. Most notably, the Federal Trade Commission would be tasked with developing regulations and technical specifications for a “centralized mechanism for individuals to exercise” their opt-out rights, as well as other technical issues surrounding the execution of the legislation, the bill states. At the same time, the bill gives authority to “State attorneys general, chief consumer protection officers, and other officers of a State in Federal district court” to pursue enforcement actions against companies that violate the law.
Taking aim at the data broker industry
The bill also targets data brokers. Under the new legislation, the FTC would be mandated to establish a data broker registry that could be used by consumers to identify which companies are brokers and to opt out of data collection by those firms. All data brokers that collect data on more than 5,000 people would be forced to re-register with the federal registry every year. At the same time, brokers would also be forced to maintain their own websites that identify them as data brokers and include a tool for consumers to opt out.
Private right of action
A longstanding desire for privacy advocates has been a private right of action—which is a mechanism allowing individual consumers to sue companies that have violated their rights. A number of state privacy laws have failed to include this. Under the current version of the APRA, consumers would be given a private right of action, allowing them to file litigation against companies that have demonstrably violated their digital privacy rights.
Privacy advocates remain cautiously optimistic
Given years of inaction on privacy policy by federal regulators, state governments have passed a number of strong privacy laws over the past decade. Some of those laws, like California’s CCPA, have been quite strong. The newly proposed federal law openly acknowledges that it would eliminate “the existing patchwork of state comprehensive data privacy laws” and establish in its place “robust enforcement mechanisms to hold violators accountable.” The fact that the APRA would pre-empt state laws worries some privacy advocates who fear the potential for a watered-down federal law. The fact that the APRA may seem strong now doesn’t mean much, since it could easily be neutered by lobbyists during the legislative process.
Caitriona Fitzgerald, the deputy director at the Electronic Privacy Information Center, said that the federal law’s preemption of state-level regulation is only appropriate if it ends up being a strong law. “From our perspective—in an ideal world—it would not preempt state laws, it would allow states to pass stronger laws,” said Fitzgerald. “We recognize that compromise is necessary and that this is a big sticking point. If it’s going to preempt state laws, it needs to be stronger than existing state laws and regulations. We’re still evaluating the bill to determine whether that’s the case.”
Other privacy advocates, like the Surveillance Technology Oversight Project (STOP), expressed similar concerns. “The ADPPA does offer strong privacy protections, especially data minimization rules,” said STOP Communications Director Will Owen. “But the bill falls short by preempting states from taking even stronger action, should they so choose. Worst of all, the ADPPA preempts states from enforcing protections, leaving it solely up to the U.S. executive branch, which has been fickle in enforcing Americans’ privacy rights.”
Cody Venzke, senior policy counsel at the ACLU, said his organization remained “concerned this bill’s broad preemption of state laws will freeze our ability to respond to evolving challenges posed by technology.”
Tim Burton’sBeetlejuice introduced the blueprint for cinematic meta agents of chaos into pop culture long before Disney’s Genie from Aladdin or the MCU’s Deadpool and Loki. Without much of a mythology, save for some comparisons to trickster entities of folklore and classic lit like Puck from Shakespeare’s AMidsummer Night’s Dream, Betelgeuse—as his name is spelled in the film’s flashy neon sign—can be anything not beholden to a history.
First Fandoms: Emma McDonald
Michael Keaton’s original summoning of the character introduced Beetlejuice as an unreliable narrator, which is followed in every variant of him we’ve seen in television and on stage; he has powers we don’t quite understand and no one can control outside of saying his name three times before he can stop them. Keaton’s version of the character will seen again in this September’s Beetlejuice Beetlejuice—and though there’s always some trepidation awaiting a long-in-the-making sequel, here’s why we’re too not worried about what to expect from this one.
In the 1988 dark comedy about life as ghosts for the recently departed, Keaton shone as the larger-than-life poltergeist in a performance that helped make Burton’s wacky creation iconic. With stand-up gags and stop-motion buffoonery (some of which might not be so PC nowadays), the villain of his own movie almost stole the show from Winona Ryder’s teen goth dream Lydia and her ghostly found family after nearly getting rid of her living family (who may have deserved it). The film grossed $74,664,632 in North America, garnering its success in theaters and being embraced as a hit family film about death. It also primed Keaton to reunite with Burton for Batman.
Image: WB Entertainment
Beetlejuice’s jump in the line from the films into becoming a cultural staple was propelled by Beetlejuice, the animated series. The cartoon had a more family-friendly, looser interpretation of the plot introduced in the film. It got rid of the Maitlands and the questionable child-bride thread, and instead made Beetlejuice a lovable manic sidekick Lydia rehabilitates into more of an anti-hero. Their spooky cartoon adventures ran from 1989 to 1991 and it became a popular movie-to-show experiment, solidifying Beetlejuice’s place as a spooky pop-culture star.
His inclusion in the real world through his presence at Universal Studios theme parks continued to keep the Ghost with the Most in the zeitgeist through the ‘90s. Beetlejuice Graveyard Revue was my first introduction to the character before watching the film, which came out before I was born. The live theme park stage show was a monster mash of pop-rock music covers performed by the Universal Monsters and hosted by Beetlejuice; it debuted in the ‘90s but had updated iterations throughout the years. It was a genius move by Universal, crafting a formative theme park-experience that made such an impact on monster kids, goths, and normies—reframing Beetlejuice as the crypt keeper for a new generation but for silly spooky nonsense.
Full Final Performance of Beetlejuice Graveyard Revue at Universal Studios Florida
Because… why is he hosting a graveyard jukebox musical? What does it have to do with the movie? Why are the Universal Monsters there? Wait—no, they make sense, why is he (a Warner Bros. property) there? By the time he jumped out of the grave none of those questions mattered; he was back and badder than ever. Beetlejuice has been a Universal Studios character meet and greet staple ever since—even past the closing of his revue back in 2015. Most recently in 2021, Beetlejuice got a Halloween Horror Nights house at Universal Studios Orlando; it proved to be one of the annual event’s most popular attractions and showed that fans were still clamoring for more, even before Beetlejuice Beetlejuice was greenlit.
Image: Universal Studios Products and Experiences
Still another iteration of Beetlejuice came to life shortly before the pandemic. In 2019 a Broadway musical adaptation of the property hit the stage for a stint before returning in 2021 and heading out on a national tour. The show, starring Alex Brightman (who recently was featured as Richard Dreyfuss in the Jaws behind-the-scenes play The Shark is Broken), may appear at first to be merely a musical version of the film—however, if you’ve seen it, you know it’s much more than that. The book for the musical, written by Scott Brown and Anthony King, departs greatly from the film with a more cohesive storyline, centering Lydia’s journey through the grief of losing her mother (while her dad quickly remarries Delia), and the Maitlands’ grief at not being able to live long enough to have a family. Both give the story more to explore at depth—all while retaining the funhouse comedy romp that comes from dealing with death by means of Beetlejuice’s comedic chaos counseling. By the time the second act hits, it feels like such a completely different story from the movie in a good way, and if it happens to stop in your town on tour, don’t miss it.
Image: Matthew Murphy
Each variant of the Beetlejuice story down to its core is about the character’s freedom to fit into any medium with meta commentary about death—perhaps because since he’s dead, he exists outside reality. His presence makes sense of the unexplainable not by giving answers but by exploring the questions people have about life and death through a movie, cartoon, haunted house, and musical. Beetlejuice’s modus operandi is to not entirely change others, but to be changed by the situations he’s in—all while being his best hedonistic self and at most encouraging the living to live a little through the horrors of humanity. It’s why he and Lydia have become goth legends for the Hot Topic and Spirit Halloween crowds. Beetlejuice isn’t high-brow “cinema,” it’s about a guy who’s the executioner of gallows humor. And that is why we shouldn’t be too worried about Beetlejuice Beetlejuice: it’s not a legacy sequel that has a bar to reach, and I honestly think it might make fun of that concept in the best way. I’m just hoping for another good time, a new reason to laugh and not be afraid of death while seeing that Beetlejuice fella be up to no good again before getting exorcised back to his resting place… we know it’s not final.
If you were to make a list of people you’d expect to make a gritty, grounded, realistic, political thriller-slash-war movie, Alex Garland wouldn’t be on it. From his earliest work writing movies such as 28 Days Later and Sunshine to his directorial efforts such as Ex Machina and Annihilation, Garland has almost exclusively worked in sci-fi. So when his name pops up on a movie like Civil War, a cautionary action film about the political divide in the United States, it’s a bit of a head-scratcher. Garland gets that.
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“The reason I love sci-fi is because sci-fi has always permitted big ideas into it. It’s not embarrassed of big ideas,” Garland told io9 on video chat last week. “They exist in Forbidden Planet. They exist in Star Trek. There would be clear discussions or metaphors or literary analogies or whatever it happens to be. It was just allowed. And sci-fi audiences were kind of open-minded. They actually liked that… whereas if you did that in other genres, people would raise an eyebrow, like get a bit arch and a bit skeptical, in a sense… But [Civil War], if this was too sci-fi, it would reduce the texture of reality. And so it just didn’t feel appropriate. If I’d set it on a distant planet, yeah, it would have worked as an analogy, maybe, but it wouldn’t have the strength of the assertion.”
And so the sci-fi guy put that all aside and approached reality in his own, unique way. In Civil War, Garland presents a United States that is no longer united. The country has fractured into several different areas, many of which are now at war with one another. And while there is clearly DNA pulled from the current political climate, the film very specifically veers away from defining anything specifically. No one is right-wing, no one is left-wing, everyone just is, and that objectivity was not only a conscious choice in the writing, it echoes in his lead characters too.
Garland on set.Image: A24
“What I wanted the film to do was to function as a film in the same way as the reporters, which is just to show a sequence of events with a kind of studied neutrality,” he said. “Now, that doesn’t mean that it’s without bias, because a journalist reporting on something might have very strong feelings, and in fact, you could almost guarantee they would. So it’s just to do with how information is presented.”
Garland’s attempts at personifying and paying homage to objective, hard-nosed journalism even carried over to the choice of journalism depicted in the film. Though modern media is ruled by video, the main characters in Civil War are still photographers, a specific nod to the old-school way of doing things Garland wanted to pay tribute to.
“When you make a film, you try and make it work at different levels, and some of them are quite unconscious levels,” he said. “You hope it lands in an unconscious way but, in truth… [having the characters be photo journalists] reminds people of that old-fashioned form of photojournalism. Of that old-fashioned form of reporting when you had—in the 1960s and 1970s or whatever it was—these still photographers winding their camera. So it’s like a kind of trace memory.”
Photojournalism in full effect.Image: A24
Garland hopes when Civil War comes out, that it’ll be less of a trace memory for people and more of a gut shot. But he’s not exactly sure if that’ll happen. “It’s a dice roll,” he said. “You’re throwing this out into a polarized world where if you are not preaching to the choir that wants to be preached to, then they’ll get pissed off. Because that’s the counter. You want to hear your own biases reflected back at you.”
And from the guy who usually writes about running zombies, spaceships, AI, and alternate dimensions, it’s not doesn’t seem to be a reflection of him at all. Even though it is.
Civil War is in theaters Friday. We’ll have more from Garland later this week.
If you’ve been feeling especially stuffy and sneezy lately due to your pollen allergies, you’re not alone. Pollen seasons have been growing longer over the years in many parts of the world, the U.S. included. And while there may be several factors behind this trend, climate change is one of the largest culprits. Unfortunately, the situation is only expected to worsen from here on out.
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There are different types of pollen from plants and trees that become prevalent at different times of the year. But in much of the U.S., the prevalence of allergy-causing pollen is highest in spring, and Americans’ springtime allergies have become a noticeably larger hassle over time.
The main drivers of this increase in pollen are earlier and longer-lasting spring seasons. There are other reasons why a particular spring might arrive earlier than usual, such as the occasionally strong El Niño, but man-made climate change has played a major role in the long-term changes to the spring and pollen season.
A 2021 study found that the average pollen season in North America had increased by 20 days between 1990 and 2018, for instance. It also found that total springtime pollen counts had increased 21% during those same years. Both trends were correlated with warming temperatures, and the researchers estimated that climate change directly accounted for 50% of the extended spring days and 8% of the heavier pollen counts. “Our results reveal that anthropogenic climate change has already exacerbated pollen seasons in the past three decades with attendant deleterious effects on respiratory health,” the team wrote in their paper.
Not everything is climate change’s fault. Allergies in general have become more common over time—likely due to a combination of factors, such as increased antibiotic use or greater exposure to certain environmental toxins. It’s also possible that some parts of the world will not experience the same increase in seasonal allergies as others, depending on how climate change affects their local weather patterns. And, as mentioned earlier, other weather events like El Niño can have a large acute impact on an individual spring season, including this year.
But in the U.S. and much of Europe, climate change is predicted to make the pollen season even more of a nightmare in the years to come. Interestingly enough, it might not only be the warmer climate that’s to blame. A 2014 study found that increased carbon dioxide on its own induced greater amounts of pollen released by Timothy grass, one of the leading causes of seasonal allergies in the world.
So if you’re part of the unlucky quarter of Americans who have a seasonal allergy, get ready for plenty more bad allergy seasons in the years ahead.
“It is likely that climate change will have even more of an impact on pollen seasons and respiratory health in the near future,” William Anderegg, a biologist at the University of Utah and one of the authors of the 2021 study, told Gizmodo at the time.
Marvel’s Ultimate Universe always has an Avengers, and the newly reborn one is no different. In a few months, the team is returning with The Ultimates, the first real team book of the new Ultimate line. Written by Deniz Camp and drawn by Juan Frigeri, the new book sees Tony Stark gathering superheroes—both those fully-formed and ones who haven’t become their heroic selves yet—to bolster his ranks alongside Doom, Sif, and Captain America.
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Talking to ComicBook, Camp explained how his series will build upon the Ultimates foundation previously set by Mark Millar and Bryan Hitch’s original version. Instead of fighting extraterrestrial threats and terrorists around the world, they’re fugitives framed for the murder of thousands back in Ultimate Universe and Ultimate Invasion. Likening them to the Partisans of WWII, Camp called them “a resistance network in occupied territory. Their status as outlaws/terrorists means they are under constant threat.”
Stark’s big plan to build a resistance network of superheroes means every issue will be one-and-dones that introduce the new Ultimate version of a Marvel hero. Beyond Ant-Man and the Wasp for the inaugural issue, Camp isn’t saying who else is part of the roster, but he did note the team’s got an 18-month timetable to build their ranks and save the world from whatever the Maker and his Council have got cooking up with their own personal City. Complicating matters further is Tony himself: as a younger, “more idealistic” version of his 616 self, he’ll find himself pulled in opposite ends by Doom and Captain America.
Team friction will be a big part of the book, especially as the ranks grow. “[They’re] people with very different backgrounds, beliefs, and reasons for fighting, united by [a] common enemy,” continued Camp. In the way OG Ultimates was focused on post-9/11 paranoia, his and Frigeri’s version will look at “that nagging sense that everything’s gone wrong somehow, that things were supposed to be better than this. In that way the two Ultimates will feel very different, but I think (hope) ours is true to the spirit and the ambition of the original.”
Growth and “changing the world” is the Ultimates gameplan, one Camp said will make it very differernt from the primary Marvel universe. Given free reign, he’s most excited to have the chance to make something of his own inside the Marvel sandbox different from his previous contract work. “This feels a lot more like writing a creator owned book,” he said, “albeit one that is directly working with classic Marvel iconography and archetypes. I consider it a real responsibility, and I’m doing my best to live up to it.”
The Ultimates kicks off its debut issue on June 5.
The First Omenis a prequel to the classic 1976 film, set days leading up to the birth of Damian, who’s to be the Antichrist. Along with the actual birth of Damian himself, the film features another birthing scene, one that nearly got the film in trouble with the MPAA up to release.
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Early on in the film as she’s adjusting to life at the orphanage, beginner nun Margaret (Nell Tiger Free) sees a hallucination of a woman giving birth. During it, a demonic hand comes out of the woman’s birthing canal, in turn earning the film an NC-17 rating in the eyes of the ratings board. (A film getting that rating tends to kneecap its theatrical prospects.) The initial rating took director Arkasha Stevenson by surprisie, even more so when she realized what specifically about that scene led to the rating.
“[We have] this full frontal shot of the vagina and a hand starts to come through. It was just this…shot of the vagina that was getting flagged every single time,” she told TheWrap. Dealing with the MPAA’s hangups was “really frustrating,” even more so once they realized the scene would get approved if “the labia was no longer in focus.” That was a real Joker moment for Stevenson, who called it weird since “we have a lot of gore and violence. We have a demon phallus. […] I was like, ’What is going on?’ That just made me so upset that it gave me more fuel to keep fighting with them.”
Eventually, she settled on starting the shot with the hand coming through the vagina, when she said it’s “already violated.” In her eyes, conceding to the MPAA made for an even more graphic scene, since you see “the skin getting stretched and it feels much more painful.”
For her part, Free acknowledged filming that scene was split between actually working with the actor playing the “mother” and just looking at a red dot on a camera. It was only in the ADR phase that she got to see it “in all its sticky glory,” and she loved it. “I was cheering in the booth,” she laughed, “I was like, ‘Fuck yeah!’” In the context of the whole movie, she noted how First Omen “deals with very topical and very difficult things” despite its dark themes. “[We do] it in a way that we’re not trying to spoon-feed anything to you. We’re not trying to even enforce our opinions on you whatsoever.”
As for Stevenson? She was just glad the studio had her back during the whole ordeal. “[We have] a vagina in a Disney film, [and] that feels wonderful.”
After a few legal setbacks from Warner Bros., The People’s Joker has made its way to theaters this weekend in New York. The parody film sees director/writer Vera Drew as the Harlequin, a trans woman trying to make it in comedy after recently moving into a small town. With a number of other Batman villains also getting the parody treatment in the film, you can guess why WB would try to stomp it out—and why folks wanted it to get a fair shot at life.
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For Drew, the film is deeply personal and practically autobiographical. As a trans woman, she felt a connection to the actual Jokermovie in 2019. Along with Joaquin Phoenix’s outcast-turned-criminal Arthur Fleck, she found something relatable in the film being about “city structures and government systems [that] are completely failing. My family system failed me,” she told Variety. “My government is still failing me constantly, and for some reason, I still have to pay them taxes next month. I related to that core element of just wanting to make art and put myself out there. How can I do that in a system that is so rigidly gatekept and so much of it is just an arm of propaganda?”
Superheroes are “big, grand, bold, colorful archetypes,” and people already reflect themselves onto them. As a lifelong Batman fan, People’s Joker allowed Drew to tell her trans story, something she herself only really processed in 2019. In using comedy to explore some “false ideas” about herself, she eventually realized she “needed to process not only coming out as a trans woman in alternative comedy, but how this informed my identity.”
Drew was equally candid about the criticism that’s come her way over the last two years. There’ve been critiques—mainly from “well-intentioned allies”—asking if it’s a good time to have a queer villain headline a movie. As far as she’s concerned, she’s a villain already, so may as well accept it. “I’m villainized and politicized, and I’m turned into a symbol, just because of my identity,” she said. “Some people think that just because I was assigned a gender at birth that doesn’t match me, and then embraced that, I’m somehow a political activist or a symbol of their oppression. To me, I could only make a movie about a queer villain at this point in my life, because I’m completely villainized and my community is completely villainized. So it was important to me to do that.”
The People’s Joker is now in theaters, with more screenings opening up around the US in the coming weeks.
Ghostbusters: Frozen Empirehas a lot of characters it’s juggling, and one of the most important wasn’t even actually in the film’s marketing. That would be Melody, played by Gossip Girl’s Emily Alyn Lind, a 16-year-old who quickly strikes up a friendship with McKenna Grace’s Phoebe Spengler. The twist? She’s a ghost forced to stay on Earth until she finds a way to reunite with her family on the other side.
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In a recent Hollywood Reporter interview, Lind revealed that her ghost status was something even she didn’t know about until she’d locked down the role. Director Gil Kenan never explicitly said as such during their talks, and lines like “I get it. I’m like a hundred years old,” she just assumed that translated to Melody being an old soul. As for why it was kept secret, she reasoned it came from her character being “a different kind of ghost” for the series. Instead of being purely chaotic or malevolent, Melody’s “a ghost with a heart,” similar to Ghost Egon in Ghostbusters: Afterlife. “[She] has a full human relationship, so I think that there was a part of them that really wanted to catch people off guard in that sense.”
In the film, Melody’s stuck in limbo after her family died in a house fire she personally feels responsible for. Her choices in the film all stem from that survivor’s guilt, and Lind was frannk in saying she’s glad her character saw the error of her ways: for one thing, getting to team with the OG and new Ghostbusters at the end had her “so giddy,” and she loved sharing the screen with series veterans like Ernie Hudson and Annie Potts. But it also meant folks wouldn’t leave the theater calling for her head, “just like they’ve hated me in other films for fucking the story up.”
As for Melody and Phoebe’s friendship and all the subtext in the movie, Lind called their dynamic one of “two souls connecting.” While she acknowledged parts of it can be read as romantic—and that Phoebe wanted a closeness with someone—both characters are “still two kids in a lot of ways. They’re cut from the same cloth and ousiders in their own ways. […] And now they’re connecting on this grandiose level in two different dimensional planes, and they’re just trying to figure out this world together. I like that we didn’t define it as one thing or another. Sometimes, when people do that, it ruins it. It’s too concrete and absolute, and they’re so not absolute as characters.”
Ghostbusters: Frozen Empire is now playing in theaters.
Robledo discussed how the magic all comes together thanks to the Imagineers. “This is a milestone. It’s the first time we’ve seen these characters realized in three dimensions, and so much care is included from the finishing group into the hair, the texture of the hair and color of the hair, the materials themselves, and the fact that they can do this 18 hours a day, all day long is amazing,” he said. “ And that really is the credit of the care design from who’s going to build these things, be able to perform all day long.”
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 “A Pedra” by Endria Isa Richardson. You can read the story below or listen to the podcast.
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A Pedra
I believe that if we have any notion at all of what has generally been called human nature, it is because History, like a mirror, holds up for our contemplation, an image of ourselves.
—-Edgardo Rodríguez Juliá
Audio Recording, “Lydia and Ecco at Insight,” February 3, 2134
I didn’t run.
If the boy had not called to you, you would have run.
I would not have run.
mãe,
There are few moments that I remember with clarity. From those early days, I recall mostly a vast, pervading numbness. Profound dissociation. I remember Salt. I remember Hog.
At night, I would curl between them. With my eyes closed, I would try to see them as they were just in that moment. I would block out what I knew would be. I would see Salt’s ruddy cheeks and puffy brown hair. His shoulders, just beginning to broaden with muscle. His pale forearms already ropey from physical training. Hog’s deep brown eyes and chapped, gentle lips. The soft tufts of his hair brushing against my cheek as he moved about inside a dream.
You will never meet either of them. You will never meet our child. Your grandchild.
If I still couldn’t sleep, I would look for you. Of course I never found you. If you were in my future, I would have already known.
Once, I told Salt and Hog that I had known a mother. A home. What I thought was a family. They were thrown away by their parents, addicts like you, as infants. At school, we were not supposed to say, “thrown away.” We were supposed to say, “offered to the future.” But I am not at school any longer. So, they were thrown away by their parents, eaten by Kismet to mine the one true future. They assumed the same was true for me, until I told them that I lived with you until I was eleven. But ah, puberty, eh? The bitch. She came, and broke us. You could not handle me anymore. The aunties and uncles and cousins who had helped grow me, who had (I thought) loved me, raised their machetes and told you—-take care of her, or we will. I still remember the certainty of your voice when you said, “I will do it myself.” You took auntie’s blade. You marched me out of the only home I had ever known. You raised your hand to me, who had never known violence. You said, “Run, Lydia, meu coração, run.”
TIME, November 13, 2134
THE MAN BEHIND THE CURTAIN’S PLAN TO OPEN THE FUTURE
The story of Insight’s first year was one of relentless forward motion: an underground research facility constructed in an undisclosed location, patents filed for what Insight billed as “a safer alternative to the drug kite,” an “army corps of scientists” hired, trained, and housed entirely on campus. In the intervening years, however, both Insight and XO seemed to vanish.
This is the first appearance XO has made since then. During this interview, as in our last, XO does not share his image or voice. We meet virtually. His avatar is a slightly built Southeast Asian man clothed in a slim-cut dark blue velour tracksuit. Sunglasses veil his eyes. “I am not a terrorist,” he begins. He laughs, and it’s jarring. “I am interested in terror as a mind-, and therefore time- expanding substance.”
I ask him to clarify what he means.
“What can heightened emotions, like terror, teach us about the pliability of time? There are ancient wisdom traditions that suggest that when we confront the unimaginable, and for most people that is something horrifying, that is when we truly are free. Unlocking all futures, not only the ones that are palatable to us, requires absolute freedom.”
When I ask him to share the most horrible thing he has ever confronted, he confesses, in a moment of unexpected vulnerability. “My mother abandoned me when I was very young. Deep down, I had feared that separation my whole short life. Once it happened, I realized I no longer needed to fear anything. I could be free. I could suddenly imagine many possible futures for myself. My future no longer relied on something I could not control, another person’s presence or absence. I want that freedom for everybody.”
mãe,
This is how my story begins, if you can call it a beginning. With our plan to escape.
Many of us at school never made it past our first year. We overdosed on kite or any one of the other street drugs, or died because we couldn’t source clean drugs, or the bleak reality that our lives were completely fucking pointless drove us mad. If we made it far enough, we were placed. We tried, for some more years, not to kill ourselves or anyone else. Until then, it was best to find something, or someone, that could anchor us—-in one body, in one time—-and focus hard on that. Otherwise, we tried not to focus at all. Floated somewhere between present and future. Drank until we had to take a break from drinking. Drugged ourselves into the stratosphere. Fucked. Got angry. Messed around. Me and Hog had a serious fling. Then me and Salt. Then me, Salt, and Hog. As good a way to pass the time as any. Then Hog got called in for early placement, and came back quiet. After that, it was mostly me and Salt.
That was about when we decided to do something we had not seen ourselves do. Do you understand? We decided to cheat the future.
It cheated us instead.
The day Ecco came for me, I was hurrying through the main corridor back to Salt’s room. Someone called out to me from inside the Head’s office. I got ready to lie my way out of anything—-I swear, that half-full bucket of prune liquor me and Hog have brewing in the dormer is only for educational and scientific purposes—-but stopped short at the door.
The man standing in Head’s office was short. Only a few inches taller than me. And brown-skinned and wide. Good and stocky, a nice soft fatness wrapped around a solid frame. At the time, I probably thought he was attractive. There weren’t many of us blacks at the school. I was one. Hog was half of another. (Salt was Jewish. They were even more of a pariah).
At that point, I still believed that I knew everything. Will that sound arrogant to you? It’s not. It was brutal. I didn’t know facts and figures or theoretical physics. But I believed I knew everything of consequence that would ever happen to me.
(And to Hog.)
(And to Salt.)
(And to anyone who had, for training or for contract, required me to rip apart the fabric of time, extend my mind, like a finger, into its gap, shine my awareness . . . And see the bloody gems inside.)
We had not seen our plan. We hadn’t seen it fail, we hadn’t seen it work. We were desperate enough to try, anyway.
I had not seen this man, either. Not in time, and not in life. I should have known, then. I should have known to run, to grab Salt and Hog and run. But I was curious.
After a while, I asked, “Who are you?”
“Ecco,” he said, “It’s nice to finally meet you, Lydia.”
Many things happened, more or less in sequence immediately after that. There was the first explosion, and that also surprised me. You have to understand, surprise was not an experience I knew well until that point. Mostly, I already knew. Mostly, I had already seen. Not this. The bombs, improvised molotov cocktails, weren’t supposed to be lit for several more hours. I was supposed to light one, Salt and Hog would light two others. A good amount of chaos, running and screaming in the halls, ensued. Then, a blow to my head and darkness.
I woke. Later, elsewhere. I shouted (several times) from the pain in my head. No one came. I explored the room I had found myself in. It was blank, unrevealing, an infuriating beige-nothing. There was no bed, no furniture. There was no discernible door. The walls were soft, pliant. I seemed to be in some kind of sophisticated cage. It blocked me from seeing out of the present moment. I could not think, could not question. I could not rationalize. I curled up on the floor, and slept.
When I next woke up, Ecco was standing above me. He handed me pills—-pain, and what I assumed was kite. I asked him many questions. He answered three. It was 13 August 2133, so three days had passed since the explosions at school. I was at a research lab called Insight. And, he said, I had been brought there to liberate the future.
This began the next phase of my life. Ecco was my abductor, my captor, and later, my torturer. He was also the only person I saw, spoke to. I did, in those early days, feel something like sorrow for him. He would always begin our sessions with a series of “what if” questions: What if there were many, perhaps infinite, futures? What if there was a way to unlock time itself? What if we could move in time, not only see it stretched out, frozen, before us?
He called it running.
“You will run time, Lydia,” he told me. “Once you lose your fear.”
The First Hundred Years of Kinsight: From the Early 22nd Century to the Present, Chapter 3
By the time Insight Unlimited arose in the early 2130s, Kismet Corporation had already become the largest sole employer across the continents. In the Global North alone, Kismet contracted the services of at least 300,000 KIDS (Kismet Indentured Servants) in the first half of 2133, and was set to expand to half a million by 2134. Until Insight’s rise, the only challenges to Kismet came from fringe human rights organizations and activists sheltering in so-called “Dark Towns” (towns which had not converted to Kismet-time, and which often harbored absconded servants).
Challenges grew in later years. Over the course of the latter 22nd century, Insight would destabilize Kismet’s stranglehold on the global economy by seeking to control the company’s indentured workforce. Seers, trained to locate resources in the future, were highly valuable to Kismet. In later decades, Insight’s poaching and re-training of Seers gave rise to a new class of workers.1 Runners were able to directly collect advanced technology, materials, and intellectual property from as far as millennia into the future, and return with them to the corporation. It is estimated that nearly half of all early runners were lost on their travels. A small number of highly sensitive Seers would later work for Insight and their subsidiaries, providing a range of services that included the location and extraction of missing runners.
In the early 2100s, Insight began to seek control of those Seers whose unique skills they believed could disrupt Kismet’s control of the future. The wars between Insight and Kismet, waged largely between seers, runners, and dark towns, marked the beginning of a brutal century. However, the resulting liberation of trans-temporal commercial trade and merger of Insight and Kismet into Kinsight is inarguably among the greatest achievements of humankind.
mãe,
I remember the first time Ecco took the drug kite from me. I had not been fully without it since I arrived at school, nauseated and time-sick, barely able to stand. The third week I was at Insight, Ecco undosed me.
I remember bracing for the rock of nausea. It came.
Hog, prismed, leered at me from a thousand eyes. He shattered.
“Hog?” I asked.
Ecco stood once more across the room. “Ecco,” he said. “It’s nice to finally meet you, Lydia.”
“What do you want?” I asked. “What do you want from me anyway?”
I came, shuddering against Salt, and bit his shoulder.
“Lydia,” someone cried. “Sai daqui!”
I dropped from a tree in the dark, felt my arm crack. Screamed.
I screamed in the room.
I leaned over a toilet and vomited; flecks of bile and water hitting my cheeks.
I fingered a smooth, black knife.
I saw a brown face, like mine, but older. “Pedra,” I said.
“Yes, yes,” said Ecco, coaxing, caressing my cheek.
I found a brown hand in mine; clasped it. I let it pull me into darkness studded with bright crystal lozenges. Oblong mirrors, blinking on/off/on as the light in my mind caught their strange fractals.
“Mãe?” I called. “Mãe?”
Hog’s body fell to the mats.
Salt’s chest exploded.
Lozenges winked as I cast my mind about, seeking elsewhere. Inside of time, I saw futures. Not lozenges, not mirrors—-oh god, mamãe. How could I have thought they were mirrors. They opened. I was pulled forward, the nails of that hand digging in my flesh.
“Mãe? Mãe?”
I heard the boy’s voice behind me. I threw myself backwards, toward him.
Audio Recording: “Lydia and Ecco at Insight” November 3, 2134
Tell me about your mother.
The whore who sold me to Kismet?
“Papagaio come milho, periquito leva fama.”
I don’t know what that means.
I thought all you young people spoke Português. Eh? It means you are ungrateful to your mother. “Ao menino e ao borracho, põe-lhes Deus a mão por baixo.” God puts his hand under the boy and the young pigeon.
Easy for you to say, who will never fly. If I felt God’s hand beneath me, I would spit on it. “Pimenta nos olhos dos outros é refresco.” Pepper in the eye is a pleasure to you, eh?
Eh, não pimenta, mas pedra. Stone in the eye is a pleasure to me. Have you never tried to see her, Lydia? To understand why she abandoned you?
I have tried.
But you can’t?
No.
But you talk to her, when you are gone in your visions.
mãe,
The first time I was undosed from kite, I began to understand what Ecco meant with his talk of liberated futures. With his talk of running. I had been inside of some terrible material. I had felt the dark stuff move around me. Its currents were strong. I could feel some alive presence just beyond my skin tugging where it wanted me to go.
I think Ecco comes from that place. Or he came from that place. Something about him feels the way it felt. Empty. Hungry.
I tell him to run his futures by himself. He says I just need to discover the key to freedom. What will make me unafraid to enter the infinite future.
Sometimes I think he is just lonely.
Audio Recording: “Lydia and Ecco at Insight” March 3, 2135
Are you ready to try again today? To run?
I’d rather die.
Die then. Kill yourself.
I can’t. I don’t.
See if you can. See if you do.
I know how I end. I know how I continue. I know everything.
Everything. What arrogance. You didn’t even know me.
mãe,
I never named him. I call him meu caração, my little boy, meu amor. I have been able to survive here because of him.
It’s been five months since I last saw him. The first five months that I have been completely alone, in my life. I was already pregnant when Ecco took me from school. A child of Salt, or a child of Hog? I like to think, a child of both. I birthed him here, at Insight. Until August, they let him stay with me. We lived a strange, captive life, but we lived it together. Then Ecco took him. He said it was my own fault. My own choice.
I don’t move. I don’t speak. Ecco gives me more kite now, triple what I used to take. I close my eyes and fly. I see everything, all of time rippling beneath me like waves, diamond-studded, glinting, on, off, on.
But now I know. They are not mirrors, they are not diamonds. They are mouths.
That is the difference between seeing and running.
Sometimes, I let myself wonder whether Salt or Hog ever made it to you.
That was our whole, foolish plan. Run to you, mamãe, like little children, and beg you to shelter us as you could not shelter me before. When there is no one left, no hope, we always turn to our mothers, eh, no matter how angry we are.
I don’t think you will ever receive these little notes.
ecco tells me that the secret to running is losing your mother.
ecco tells me that if I want to find the boy, i’ll have to run him down myself.
i tell him that i have been trying.
something is not right
not right
i have started talking to myself, to hog, to salt, even to you. sometimes i wake as though from the middle of a dream, and i am talking to someone else—-but no one i know, or have known. i am the only one here. i am the only one here. i’ve been here for too long
too long
Audio Recording: “Lydia” April 2, 2135
What do you remember from your first days at Insight, Lydia?
I was dopesick. In pain. I hadn’t been without kite in years. I could barely stand. Couldn’t walk.
You were lost in many simultaneous futures, without the drug that stabilized your vision in the world and its one future.
Yes.
You saw me.
Yes.
And what did you think, that first time?
That you were my mother.
(Soft laughter.)
they took my eyes
they took my eyes
they took my eyes
Journal of Time and Sight, Vol. IV, Winter 2324
APPLYING ENUCLEATION TO ADDRESS THE PATHOPHYSIOLOGY OF HYPER-STEREOPSIC PARALYSIS IN KISMET-TRAINED SEERS
Interest in the procedure of enucleation (removal of the eyes) as an intervention gained prominence in the late 22nd century, after it was performed with some success by the liberatory research group, Insight Unlimited. Numerous studies have investigated the subject since the embargo against eye-removal was lifted in 2135.
At that point, the early Theory of Time Sight posited that children treated with the drug dimethylcathinone (“kite”) could be trained to see in four and possibly five, six, or seven dimensions. Davis and Shutter continued the theory, positing that time-paralysis (inability to move through time) exhibited in Kismet-trained Seers was a psychological, rather than physical, limitation. All children treated from an early age with dimethylcathinone should theoretically be capable of movement and not only sight. Hyper-reliance on world-sight, they hypothesized, might prohibit Seers from “flattening” time to one-dimension, a technique achieved by so-called “time runners.”
Following the use of double obsidian implants after eye-removal in one subject, L. Peres, research into the procedure was halted due to undisclosed complications.
The Los Angeles Times, August 10, 2135
TWO MEN SENTENCED IN TERRORIST PLOT AGAINST KISMET
Two men convicted of thirteen counts of murder in the first degree were handed six and three consecutive life sentences, respectively, this morning. The two men, Adam Hogkins, twenty-one, and Terrence Salz, nineteen, were convicted in July for their roles in aiding in the terrorist attacks on the Kismet Headquarters in Northern California in 2133, as part of a third-wing backlash over the use of “indentured servants” by the Kismet Corporation. The men, both students at the Kismet Training Academy, were found guilty of planning and providing material support for terrorist acts and illegal gang membership.
The trial was one in a series of cases that arose out of what authorities determined was a sprawling terrorist plot orchestrated by an activist organization known as “Quilombo Sombrio,” and carried out with the cooperation of one other student, Lydia Davis Peres, the daughter of a well-known Quilombo member. Peres has been missing since the attack on the Kismet Headquarters.
Normally relegated to one-time guerilla attacks, the incidents—-the bombing of a school and kidnapping of a student on August 10, 2133; the subsequent August 14th, 2133 bombings, and the largest escape of “indentured servants” at three Kismet locations—-underscore the growing threat of mainstream dissatisfaction with, and potential of violence toward, the company that “controls the future,” Kismet Unlimited.
Human rights groups decried the lack of evidence against either defendant in the July trial, and are petitioning for appeals. Judge Julius Johnson sentenced Mr. Salz to a minimum of ninety-six years in prison, and Mr. Hogkins to a minimum of 192 years in prison. The younger Mr. Salz was escorted out of the courtroom by the bailiff. Mr. Hogkins appeared to be transferred to another authority, representatives of whom waited outside of the courtroom. He was transported to an unknown location in an unmarked car.
Audio Recording: “Lydia and Ecco” August 15, 2135
Do you know what I have for you?
I can’t see.
Here. (forty-five-second interval.) Pick it up.
hnh. hnh. hnhh. hauh. Hau. Hau. Hau. Hauh. Haugh. How. How. Hough. Hog.
It is the head of your Hog.
(screaming)
i am the only one here. She is not the only one here.
Audio Recording: “Lydia and Ecco” (undated)
Who do you talk to at night? The boy?
I talk to Lydia.
You are Lydia.
No.
She wants to run, but she is still afraid. Why? (She still has hope, even after holding Hog’s head in her hands).
I whisper to Lydia in the dark. “Acalme-se.” Quiet yourself. I know our mother’s tongue. It passed to me along dark currents that human eyes will never see, human limbs will never wade through. (I have waded through the dry fields, rippled by dry wings that beat over sun-chapped skulls. I have waded through the salted sea currents. I have been worn away and dismantled. And still, I am).
“You cannot change the past, meu coração.” My heart. “Only accept with wonder what the future may make of you.”
“I know your voice,” she whispers.
I laugh. “Of course you know my voice.”
“Who are you? Who let you in?” Her hand gropes in darkness.
I take her hand in mine. I make quieting noises with my tongue. “I simply come,” I say. “I walk through walls.”
She feels my fingers with hers. I place her hand on my face, let her trace the ridges of my eyes. I do not let her flinch or pull back her hand when her fingers slip and touch my eyes. They are smooth as silk, and very cold. “See?” I tell her. “There is nothing to fear. It is just stone.”
“I hate it,” she says, as though she were a child.
“You fear it,” I say patiently, as though she were a child.
“It is not me.”
“It is us,” I tell her.
“I need to leave,” she says. I feel her stand.
“Leave.”
“I have a child,” she says.
“Find him.”
She searches inside of herself for a feeling that has always been solid certainty, and now is so much fog. She pulls on air, says, “I will not survive.”
“Look at me,” I tell her. I take her fingers again, bring them to my face. “And see that you survive.”
The São Francisco Times, October 10, 2135
KISMET STUDENTS FOUND
A police raid was led on the dark town known as Quilombo Sombrio early this morning, located in a northern area of the state that has been largely uninhabited since flooding in the late 21st century gutted the cities and towns nearby. “We were able to collaborate with a private company that had obtained intelligence about the coordinates of the town, located in the foothills of Cruz Sagrada. We have long had reason to believe that the town was harboring fugitives belonging to the Kismet Group. We were able to relocate a number of the missing students. There were some casualties on both sides.”
She asks me how.
“You think of yourself as a peça. The piece. The slave. But we call ourself a pedra, the stone. Time cuts us, we do not cut time. We submit to time, allow it to move us. It will move us toward him. Our filho de pedra. Our endless echo. He who will cross all futures to create me, and destroy you.”
Audio Recording: “Lydia and Ecco” September 30, 2135
Quilombo Sombrio.
Quilombo?
A dark town in the Northwest. That’s where we must go.
Why?
To find my mother.
I arrive at Quilombo after the police have gone, after the fires have burned themselves out. Ecco warned me that the town had been razed. The seers collected, taken back to Insight to readjust to the light of time after their years living in darkness. “It will be good for you,” he said.
I marvel at what is here, what has been here, evading time. Inside of me, Lydia remembers the trees. I touch a giant that towers to my left—-wide plates of bark, roughly threaded, that smelled like vanilla and sugar. I touch my arm and remember a break she had received, falling from a tree as a child.
I sense movement. Survivors, coming out from the forest to collect their dead. Amongst them, I know, is Lydia’s mother. I do not see her with my eyes. I see her within time. She floats to me on its black river.
“Mamãe de Lydia,” I say, holding out my hands.
Her fingers are rough and warm. She traces the ridges of my eyes.
“O que é que você fez?” What have you done?
“Survived,” I answer.
“O que eu fiz para você?” What have I done to you?
Lydia, the child, the slave, reaches to her. “Mamãe,” she yells, deep within my head. “Save me.”
She still does not know that I am the one who will save her.
Mamãe buckles and falls. Her hands grab at my face, my shoulders, my arms, my shirt.
I pull my knife from her ribs, and wipe its blood on the tree.
“You told me to run.”
I am no longer afraid. There is nothing to hold me anywhere.
The future beckons with all its glistening teeth. I turn my eyes (my stones) and see vents gaping open, closed, open, open, open. Until each is as wide as each, and running is only a matter of stepping from one open mouth to another.
I run.
and the thing that is inside me the thing iam inside of—-spins me like a pebble on its tongue—-swallows me whole (iam swallowed)—-iam in its one long throat—-it is the length of the universe—-i am passed by smooth muscle—-into its belly—-bright and white as the sun—-if i look too closely, i will die—-i am swallowed into the one true future—-burning—-but i who have no eyes cannot see—-and oh god, i cannot die
everything leads here, ecco, you have seen this noplace too—-knowing this, isee you—-not the you that moves outside of time; the you that is being eaten alive (unending, it does not end) by the future—-
isee you, meu filho, the one inever named, you and iboth know that there is nowhere to run—-
I open my eye. I see the Ecco who stands outside of time.
“Mamãe,” he says, and takes my hand.
He is no longer the sound, he is the echo. I am no longer the slave, I am the stone.
We have nothing, we are nothing, we can go everywhere.
Time moves us.
1. Research into the emergent phenomenon of runners found no biological basis for the tendency of Black children to become runners. Johnson, Edgar et al, “‘Running from Loneliness’: Assessing psychological trauma present in Kismet-trained time-runners.” 2156 November 11. Johnson posited running as a conditioned response to an underlying trauma disorder—a literal flight response.
About the Author
Endria Isa Richardson is a writer based in Oakland, California. Her essays have appeared in Black Warrior Review, Alpinist, and Bay Nature magazines, and her speculative fiction is in Lightspeed, Clarkesworld, FIYAH, Nightmare, and others. Her work has received notable mentions in Best American Essays and Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy, and the runner-up award from the Black Warrior Review nonfiction contest. Endria holds a JD from Stanford Law School, and is currently a PhD student in African American Studies at UC Berkeley.
Please visit LIGHTSPEED MAGAZINEto read more great science fiction and fantasy. This story first appeared in the April 2024 issue, which also features work by Mitchell Shanklin, Modupeoluwa Shelle, David Anaxagoras, David Marino, Susan Palwick, Vandana Singh, Rich Larson, and more. You can wait for this month’s contents to be serialized online, or you can buy the whole issue right now in convenient ebook format for just $3.99, or subscribe to the ebook edition here.
Elon Musk reinvented the blue checkmark Wednesday night, regressing to an old Twitter policy where anyone with a certain amount of status gets a check. Now, accounts with more than 2,500 verified subscriber followers automatically received a blue checkmark for free Thousands of influential X users were devastated to find out they’d been marked with Elon’s stamp of approval, so they ran to X to clarify they did not pay for this.
Mr. Tweet Fumbles Super Bowl Tweet
“Yo, Elon, take this blue check and scratch your t***t with the long end of it,” said David Simon, creator of the award-winning TV show, The Wire. “Does anyone out there know how to turn this f****r off?”
“What happened? I didn’t pay for this. I would NEVER pay for this,” said one user.
“I didn’t ask for a blue check,” said another. “I need to make this abundantly clear.”
The revival of free blue checkmarks comes over a year after Musk started asking users to pay for verification services in 2022. Users with less than 2,500 followers can still pay for premium features today, but it’ll cost you $8 a month and your dignity. As of Wednesday, X users with over 2,500 followers automatically get X Premium features, while users with over 5,000 followers get Premium Plus features.
The blue checkmark’s reputation was tarnished when Musk made it a paid feature. While Twitter’s verification used to be a status symbol, it quickly became a mark that you were writing Musk a monthly check for increased reach. That has, potentially, forever changed the internet’s association with the blue checkmark, so many popular users are racing to remove it.
“Twitter’s current lords & peasants system for who has or doesn’t have a blue checkmark is bullshit,” Musk said in 2022 when he made people start paying for verification. “Power to the people! Blue for $8/month.”
Users can still turn the blue checkmark off by simply navigating to the “profile customization” page within X’s settings. You’ll still get all those free features without any of the embarrassment.
This decision puts influential X users in an odd predicament. For one, some popular X users have been paying for premium features for the last two years. Now, they’re supposed to stop paying, simply because Elon decided this experiment wasn’t working out. Not to mention, the blue checkmark may not be the gift it once was.
So why the change? The free blue checkmarks and premium features could be a sign Musk is looking to increase engagement on X. Drastically more users will get access to features such as longer posts, bookmark folders, Musk’s AI chatbot Grok, and access to an ad revenue sharing program. It’s unclear exactly why Musk is reversing his stance on verification, but it’s the latest unexplained policy reversal on the confusing hellscape of X.
Can’t get enough of the Samsung Galaxy S24? The company’s latest phone release may be its most diverse offering yet, with major differences between the regular S24, S24+, and Ultra variants thanks to the most expensive version’s titanium frame. There’s a lot of information to parse, so we’re here to help make your buying decision a little easier.
This is the Coolest Galaxy S24 AI Feature That Few Are Talking About
How to Order the Samsung Galaxy S24
The Galaxy S24 series should be on stores starting Wednesday. You can nab it from Samsung’s website, Best Buy, or anywhere else where phones are sold.
Pretty much all U.S.-based carriers are offering S24 deals, though, as usual, it’s best to read the fine print before jumping onto a new plan for the sake of a phone. Xfinity and Comcast are telling their customers they can get up to $800 off on any of the S24 variations with trade-in, though that will depend on the age and state of their current device.
T-Mobile is advertising you can get some money off your bill with trade-in for a Galaxy S24+ or Ultra, though only if they’re on the Go5G Plus or Next plans. These are applied as bill credits going on the next two years. They can also get up to $800 off a S24 through their bills when adding a line on those plans. Remember, studying any of these plans’ cost benefits is best before jumping in.
Verizon offers 0% APR monthly payments on all the new Galaxy variants. In addition, those on Verizon Unlimited plans are being offered a trade-in on any Samsung phone model in any condition for a new Galaxy S24 or S24+. You could get some money off your monthly payments over time.
Meanwhile, AT&T is advertising credits on your bill when you trade-in for the S24+ and Ultra variants, or up to $800 off the regular S24 so long as you have the telecom company’s unlimited plan.
Samsung Galaxy S24 Specs and Price
Photo: Florence Ion / Gizmodo
Now for the important part, AKA what you should actually know about the latest Galaxy before slamming the buy button. The regular Galaxy S24 costs $800 for the 128 GB version and storage caps out at 256 GB. The S24+ is $1,000 with 256 GB and more storage up to 512 GB.
The regular S24 remains at the comfortable 6.2-inch screen size with its FHD+, 120 Hz display. The S24+ bumps up to 6.5 inches with a Quad HD+ display. It comes stocked with 8 GB of integrated memory and the new Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 processor, Qualcomm’s latest flagship chip. You can expect the usual camera array from the Samsung lineup, including a 50-MP main sensor, a 10-MP telephoto, and a 12-MP ultrawide. Don’t forget the 12-MP selfie camera up front. Otherwise, its looks, size, and weight are very reminiscent of last year’s Galaxy.
As for the Galaxy S24 Ultra, things are switched up a fair bit. This is the most expensive version of the company’s mainline phone, starting at $1,300 for 256 GB of internal memory. There are also options for 512 GB and 1 TB of storage.
The Ultra variant now costs $100 more than the S23 Ultra did last year, and that’s mostly due to the new titanium frame that’s supposed to be more durable than the previous aluminum. The Ultra’s 6.8-inch, 120 Hz flat display also sports Corning Gorilla Armor for screen protection and glare reduction. As far as the camera goes, its zoom function has been boosted with a 5x optical zoom lens on the 50 MP telephoto lens. That’s in addition to the 12-MP ultra-wide, 200-MP wide, and 10-MP telephoto with 3x zoom.
The titanium build hasn’t added much heft compared to the S23, but the S24 isn’t lighter either. It weighs just a little over .5 pounds and is still only .3 inches thick. The Ultra variant packs 12 GB of RAM and the Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 chip.
What Colors are Available for the S24?
Photo: Florence Ion / Gizmodo
Samsung really went back to matte for its color selection on the regular S24. The cheaper variations of Samsung’s latest smartphone, including the S24 and S24+, come in a deep purple Cobalt Violet and a muted Amber Yellow, alongside a dark and light gray in the form of Onyx Black and Marble Gray.
On the other hand, the S24 Ultra’s new titanium frame has made the colors of the cheaper phones a bit shinier, even with the same hues. The Ultra comes in Titanium Gray, Titanium Black (a variation of light and dark gray), Titanium Violet, and Titanium Yellow.
What Do We Think About the Galaxy S24 So Far?
Gizmodo’s own Florence Ion has been using the S24 Ultra extensively over the past few weeks, and she already has thoughts you can find here. Suffice it to say, the new $1,300 phone is a step up from last year’s model thanks to its titanium frame, better and brighter screen, and all the new generative AI software packed floor to ceiling inside Samsung’s latest phone. Its new zoom capabilities are also nothing to scoff at, thanks to the 5x zoom on the telephoto lens.
You can be sure we’re working on the full rundown of Samsung’s latest S24 slate, so stay tuned.
How Capable is the Galaxy S24’s AI?
Photo: Florence Ion / Gizmodo
Like the Google Pixel 8 before, Samsung wanted to mark its latest phone release as a true “AI phone.” Whatever that truly means, Samsung spent most of its time at its Galaxy Unpacked event talking up the new phone’s generative AI features.
Many of these new features are things we’ve seen before, but the Seoul-based tech giant is promoting them all in one place. As noted in our ongoing review, the Instant Slow-mo feature works quite well, which adds AI-generated frames in videos to add the slow-motion effect artificially. The Generative Edit, akin to Google’s Magic Eraser, also works well enough to remove objects from images and fill in the leftover space.
There’s also the much-advertised Circle to Search feature that’s also coming to Pixel 8 phones. When you hold down on the navigation bar, you can then use a swipe or circle gesture to highlight an image or text on the screen. The feature will then search for that image or text akin to how Google Lens works.
The AI images also come with a watermark and metadata tag made to identify an image of AI. Of course, you can modify an image’s metadata and crop out the watermark, so it’s not like Samsung is promising it will save the world from deepfakes. Hell, you can use Samsung’s own AI to remove the watermark added to modified images.
Plus, Samsung has effectively confirmed its AI might not stay free forever. Samsung’s head of mobile T.M. Roh said that the company is looking into paid premium AI features after the end of 2025. We still don’t know what that will look like, and apparently, neither does Samsung. It’s just something to note considering how AI seems to be the next big push for the mobile market.
How Durable is the Galaxy S24 Ultra?
Photo: Florence Ion / Gizmodo
It’s still early, and folks will need to put all the new phones through their paces. Still, we have a fair idea about how strong titanium can be in phones thanks to the iPhone 15 Pro. Whereas Apple’s premium device was lighter than its past Pro devices, the S24 Ultra variant and its new titanium shell are essentially the same as last year’s, likely due to some swapped internals. The Corning Gorilla Armor on the Ultra should also be stronger and more scratch-resistant than the Victus 2 shield on the regular S24.
Just because it’s now cloaked in a stronger material doesn’t mean you should eschew a case or screen protector. That said, the device may be a fair bit easy to repair should things go horribly wrong, at least based on the most recent S24 teardowns. Videos also show the new phone has expanded its cooling capacity with a larger vapor chamber, which will likely deal with greater heat from the Snapdragon 8 Gen 3.
Need help?
Need some help with your new Samsung smartphone? Check out our how-tos on turning off the pesky Samsung advertising you’ll inevitably encounter. And if you’re trading in a Samsung device for credit on a new one, factory reset it before you send it off. Or, if you’d rather save money on the last generation’s Galaxy series, the good news is that all that fancy new AI software is coming to older Samsung devices.
Mickey Mouse and Minnie Mouse at the Disneyland Hotel reopening celebration at Disneyland Paris on February 3, 2024. Photo: Kristy Sparow (Getty Images)
The atmosphere at Disney’s corporate offices must feel slightly lighter these days, between Disney World’s recent detente with Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, and news today that shareholders have voted against billionaire “activist investor” Nelson Peltz’s attempt to snag two seats on the company’s board.
She-Hulk: Attorney at Law Episode 9 Finale Review
As io9 previously explained, a behind-the-scenes situation that probably wouldn’t interest the average Disney fan suddenly became more headline-worthy when Peltz gave an interview to the Financial Times in which he complained about diversity in recent Disney Marvel projects, including last year’s The Marvels and the Oscar-winning smash hit Black Panther. “Why do I have to have a Marvel [movie] that’s all women?” the 81-year-old asked. “Not that I have anything against women, but why do I have to do that? Why can’t I have Marvels that are both? Why do I need an all-Black cast?” Not only was this attitude off-putting to fans, it also rubbed high-profile Disney shareholders the wrong way—including Star Wars creator George Lucas, who spoke out against Peltz’ proxy fight.
As the Hollywood Reporter updates, today’s annual shareholder meeting proved to be “a win for the Walt Disney Co. and CEO Bob Iger” as all of the company’s director nominees “have been elected by shareholders, rebuffing the activist investor Nelson Peltz, who had been running a high-profile campaign to put himself and former Disney CFO Jay Rasulo on the company’s board.”
Sources cited by the trade make it sound like the voting wasn’t exactly close, coming out decisively in favor of Team Iger. THR also has a statement from Iger, who sounds ready to put the Peltz situation in Disney’s rear-view mirror as quickly as possible: “I want to thank our shareholders for their trust and confidence in our Board and management. With the distracting proxy contest now behind us, we’re eager to focus 100% of our attention on our most important priorities: growth and value creation for our shareholders and creative excellence for our consumers.”
