Kotaku Here’s How Modders Are Dressing Up Their Fallout 4 Characters
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Kotaku Here’s How Modders Are Dressing Up Their Fallout 4 Characters | Adequate Man Monopoly Tokens,
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Star Wars: Battlefront Finally Getting New DLC This Week
When Star Wars: Battlefront came out last November, both critics and players noted that the number of vehicles, maps and modes in the first-person shooter came off as a little underweight when compared to similar full-priced games. EA promised that there’d be more stuff to do and play in Battlefront but the additional offerings seem to be missing in action. After a long wait, news about what’s coming got announced today.
Star Wars: Battlefront
Like many big-publisher releases that come out nowadays, Battlefront’s post-launch content is tethered to a season pass. Spend the $50 on the season pass and you get early access to four expansion packs with a mix of new weapons, locations and hero characters. Further communications from EA hinted that a big update would come in January.
Today, the publisher is at long last announcing a new DLC update and outlining their plan for supporting Battlefront moving forward. A blog post from senior producer Sigurlina Ingvarsdottir details the free updates hitting over the next three months. This Wednesday, a January update is bringing more modes and new costumes for Luke Skywalker and Han Solo, based on the pair’s get-ups worn during the Battle of Hoth from The Empire Strikes Back:
- The Tatooine Survival map will now support the Blast, Droid Run, Drop Zone, Hero Hunt, and Heroes vs Villains multiplayer modes, and is called Raider Camp.
- New Hoth-themed outfits for Luke Skywalker and Han Solo, both of which will be available to all fans when they play as these two iconic characters on the Hoth – these were unlocked by our players for completing our Heroes’ Holiday community mission last month.
- We are giving players the ability to create Private Matches, which makes playing with friends even easier.
- The introduction of Daily Challenges and Community Events. These are designed to rally the Community around certain goals and objectives, giving players the chance to earn credits and unlocks even faster. We’ll have more news regarding Community Events and Daily Challenges in the days ahead.
- And of course, we are also including some overall balancing tweaks to both weapons and multiplayer modes.
The February update will bring a brand-new Hoth multiplayer map and a new Survival mission on Hoth. And for March, players get a new Endor multiplayer map and a Tatooine survival map.
Paid content add-ons start in March as well. The roll-out is as follows:
- Star Wars™ Battlefront™ Outer Rim (March 2016) - Fight among the factories of Sullust and battle within Jabba the Hutt’s palace on Tatooine
- Star Wars™ Battlefront™ Bespin (Summer 2016) - It’s hunt or be hunted in this action-packed experience set in the Cloud City of Bespin
- Star Wars™ Battlefront™ Death Star (Fall 2016) – That’s no moon! One of the most iconic locations in the Star Wars universe makes its debut in Star Wars Battlefront.
- Star Wars™ Battlefront™ Expansion Pack 4 – Title TBA (Early 2017) – We will have more details to share about this exciting new expansion pack in the coming months.
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You'll Want to Put These Fractured and Pixelated Character Posters on All Your Walls
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The 24 Most Insane Theories About Who Rey’s Parents Are
There are a few big mysteries in The Force Awakens. We’ve discussed one already (the identity of the First Order’s Supreme Leader Snoke
Spoilers for The Force Awakens, obviously.
1) Luke Skywalker
Luke! Obviously! The Star Wars movies have always been about the Skywalkers, so why would Rey—the star of the new trilogy—be some random girl? Fans of this extremely prevalent theory point out Rey’s giant, nascent Force powers, the strange looks Han and Leia give her when she’s introduced, and Luke’s tears upon her arrival. Opponents of the theory point out the same evidence, explaining that this solution is so obvious it can’t possibly be true. To be fair to the Luke-ists, Rey’s parentage was at least partially conceived by J.J. Abrams, who also chose Benedict Cumberbatch to play the most obvious character possible in Star Trek Into Darkness, and also seemingly thought he’d tricked the world. On the other hand, if Luke was willing to abandon his five-year-old daughter on a desert planet for any reason, the sequel trilogy has a much, much bigger problem.
2) Han and Leia
A lot of people really, really want Rey and Kylo Ren, née Ben Solo, to be related. They want the fight for the galaxy to come down to brother vs. sister. They need it. So their solution is that Han and Leia had another kid after Ben, and when Ben went crazy, they hid little Rey on Jakku to keep her safe—again, a planet full of criminals, scavengers, and limited food resources. This has the same problem as Luke, in that Leia and Han would have to be either severely terrible people or total idiots to abandon their child. Bonus point for Han, though, who apparently spent the last decade or so searching for his ship, the Millennium Falcon, but not his daughter.
3) Just Leia
A variation of the Han and Leia theory is that after Ben went crazy and her marriage with Han exploded like so many Death Stars, Leia comforted herself in the arms of a man, who is [insert Any Male Star Wars Character Except Luke here]. She had a baby, the baby was Rey, and Rey still got dropped off on Jakku because… Leia is the galaxy’s worst mother, apparently. Anyway, removing Han from the equation doesn’t make it any less horrible.
4) Obi-Wan Kenobi
This theory says that at some point, while he was fussing at Anakin about falling in love with Padmé because it was “against the Jedi Code” or some nonsense, he was busy impregnating at least one woman to carry on the Kenobi line (I’m not sure even Obi-Wan Kenobi is enough of a jerk to be that hypocritical). This naturally resulted in Rey, although no one can explain why Luke, Han, and Leia seem to know about this mysterious granddaughter, but didn’t care enough to, you know, look for her. Really, the best “evidence” for this theory is that Rey, like Obi-Wan, speaks with a British accent.
5) Random Jedi Luke Was Training
We know Luke was trying to rebuild the Jedi order, and we know it went very badly, thanks to Kylo and his Knights of Ren. He and his goth pals killed all the Jedi, which could have included two students that had fallen in love five years prior, had a kid, and that kid was then five years old when the tragedy happened. Alas, while the Luke-as-dad theory is too obvious, this is too dull—why would Abrams hide her parentage if it was just going to be two characters we’d never met or even heard of at all?
6) The Force
Does Star Wars need yet another virgin birth? Well, according to this theory it does, which suggests that the Force basically impregnated some poor lady like it knocked up Anakin’s mom Shmi, in order to bring some Balance to itself. Given how much the new movies supposedly want to hew away from the prequels, this seems an unlikely choice for Lucasfilm to make. Plus, if it were true, it would mean the Force was creating virgin births on a terrifyingly regular basis. At a certain point the Force becomes less of a miracle and more of a serial rapist.
7) Reincarnation of Anakin Skywalker
A less sexual-assault-y version of the Force theory says that Rey is in fact the reincarnation of Anakin Skywalker, reborn to help bring some balance to yadda yadda. If the Force was involved, it still means the Force is basically sticking babies in women without their consent; if it was just regular reincarnation, then it still doesn’t answer who her parents were. Most importantly, reincarnation is a pretty weird, major change to bring to the Star Wars mythology—which already holds that Jedi get to be part of the Force after they die. Is the Force just a waiting room for ghosts to hang out in? That’s dumb.
8) The Emperor
The Emperor is the culprit in many, many theories: sometimes he’s an actual grandfather or great-grandfather to Rey, all his evil Sith-y powers inherited by her; sometimes she’s a clone of the Emperor, presumably created by a variety of loyal Imperial mad scientists for years following Return of the Jedi.
9) Kylo Ren
Does someone believe that Kylo Ren, a.k.a. Ben Solo, is Rey’s father instead of just her cousin? You bet your bantha boots. While it makes a nice parallel with the Luke/Vader relationship of the original trilogy, it’s super, super creepy, as Lucasfilm has gone on the record stating that Rey is 19, and Kylo Ren is about 30. That would have Ben getting busy with somebody when he was merely 11—not utterly impossible, but utterly wrong—and something I am 100 percent confident Lucasfilm and Disney will avoid having to explain on–screen in their new Star Wars universe.
10) Supreme Leader Snoke
We’re at the point where crazy people are basically just naming whatever age-appropriate Star Wars characters they can think of. That includes the mysterious, giant leader of the First Order, who sired her, grew her in a vat, basically all the same options as the Emperor. Even if the real Snoke is human-sized (and man I hope he isn’t), that still doesn’t explain how Rey got to Jakku and why no one seems to be looking for her. Even if Snoke had no love for his child, he would have had her for a reason, probably as a weapon. He wouldn’t have had her dropped off on some random planet, and if she was somehow stolen, he (and Ren) would probably have been looking for her—or at least they’d be a lot more excited at the appearance of this mysterious, Force-powerful girl that shows up out of nowhere.
11) Captain Phasma
Yes, this theory exists. Captain Phasma, the silver Stormtrooper who won our hearts and then failed to do much during the movie itself. This conspiracy-ish theory is mainly based on this question: why include Phasma at all if she wasn’t Rey’s mom? The answer, of course, is because films get rewritten and edited and sometimes not every idea makes it fully on-screen. If you believe this theory, please try imagining a scenario in which Rey tells Captain Phasma she’s her daughter, and Phasma cares even a little bit.
12) Qui-Gon Jinn
Like basically all the other Jedi, some people believe that Qui-Gon Jinn of The Phantom Menace is the Jedi who decided to have sex, impregnate some poor woman, and then abandon them totally. What makes this theory so delightfully insane is that some people also believe that the woman Qui-Gon knocked up is Shmi, Anakin’s poor, enslaved mother, making her a Skywalker by another path. So by this theory, Qui-Gon had sex with Anakin’s mom—probably on the night they stayed over at his house, just before the pod race—and then still couldn’t be bothered to free her from her enslavement.
13) Boba Fett
Wait a minute… this makes perfect sense! Boba Fett was on Tattooine… Jakku is like Tattooine… Boba Fett escaped the Sarlacc… Boba Fett is awesome, so he probably sleeps around a lot! Look, at some point someone has basically believed Boba Fett was somehow responsible for everything that ever happened in the Star Wars universe. To be fair, George Lucas was also one of those people, hence the prequels. If nothing else, there’s no reason a child of Boba Fett would have Rey’s affinity for the Force.
14) Wedge Antilles
This is a male Star Wars character from the original trilogy. Until the new canon clearly states he’s suffering from male infertility, he will be considered a candidate, despite the fact that 1) Wedge has no Force powers, 2) mass audiences would not give the tiniest shit who Wedge is if they even remember he exists, which they don’t and 3) original Wedge actor Denis Lawson has stated he has zero desire to be in another Star Wars movie.
15) Count Dooku
Having spurned the Jedi order, Count Dooku could have been a major player in the Separatists swinging scene, eventually giving rise to Rey as a great-granddaughter. But there’s still the prequel issue and the fact that if Rey turns out to be related to a person who had his ass handed to him by a muppet on methamphetamines, it’s going to be vastly disappointing.
16) Mara Jade
So when all those rumors were flying about Luke being Rey’s dad, didn’t you wonder who the mother might be? Some people did, and of course their first choice is Mara Jade, arguably the biggest character from the previous Star Wars Expanded Universe, former assassin for the Emperor turned Jedi Master and Luke’s wife. To be perfectly honest, if Rey is Luke’s daughter, I wouldn’t put it past Abrams and the Lucasfilm crew to have given Luke a wife who was killed prior to TFA, almost certainly by the Knights of Ren. And given how they’ve been cherry-picking little bits of the Expanded Universe for the new SW canon, that wife could be named Mara Jade. But even if that happens, it will effectively be a new Mara Jade for mass audiences, not the hilariously badass, lightsaber-wielding Boba Fett x1000 that the original character was.
17) Darth Plagueis
If you don’t remember, this is the Sith Lord who trained Palpatine to take over the galaxy. He was only mentioned a couple of times in the prequels, but his experiments into life-after-death and avoiding death have led people to believe that he’s the one who nudged the Force into creating Anakin, and perhaps he did it again. Unfortunately, most details that support this theory come out of his biography, which was relegated to the old Expanded Universe even though it came out in 2012, many years after the in-canon Clone Wars cartoon had premiered. If Plagueis was the culprit, chances are Lucasfilm wouldn’t have gone out of their way to excise the book from the canon.
18) Shmi Skywalker and Cliegg Lars
Man, do people want Rey to be a Skywalker. They’re so desperate for this to be true that some of them are entertaining the idea that when Shmi remarried that hot piece of ass known as Cliegg Lars on Tatooine, the two had another kid who, uh, everybody forgot to mention when Anakin came by the homestead in Attack of the Clones. I know Shmi had just been captured by Tusken Raiders, and Anakin was in a bit of a mood when he brought her dead body back for burial, but he wasn’t officially evil then. The Lars would have had to be enormous assholes to hide Anakin’s stepbrother or sister from him, even regardless of the fact this is a hilariously awful candidate.
19) Clone of Anakin
“I have saved my father. He is finally at peace within the Force. I think I’ll fuck around with his DNA,” Luke Skywalker did not say following the events of Return of the Jedi.
20) Shara Bey
Shara Bey, star of the Shattered Empire comic, is a talented Rebel pilot and the mother of The Force Awakens star Poe Dameron. This isn’t enough for some people, though, so they’ve decided the comic-only character is also Rey’s mom, making her and Poe siblings, a relationship which would add absolutely nothing to either character. Also, please don’t tell them that Shara Bey died six years after the battle of Endor, while Rey was born around 12-13 years afterward; these people have enough to worry about.
21) Thane Kyrell and Ciena Ree
Lost Stars is a new Star Wars book for young adults, but it’s still pretty compelling—about two childhood friends who grow up together, join the Imperial Academy, fall in love, but then one defects to join the Rebels while the other stays within the Empire hoping to use its power for order and good. The book doesn’t say how the two actually end up, but obviously there’s a lot of power to the idea of a Rebel and an Imperial officer falling in love and having a kid who might save the galaxy. However, neither Thane nor Ciena have any kind of Force powers, and I am 100 percent positive that Lucasfilm will not depend on mass audiences reading a YA tie-in book to understand who Rey’s parents are.
22) Ezra Bridger
Male, penis, etc. Ezra, assuming he lives past the events of the Star Wars Rebels cartoon he’s part of, would be about 30 when Rey was born, so that matches up. He’s even got himself some Force powers. But the same problems apply: There’s no good reason for Ezra to abandon his child on a crappy planet like Jakku that we know of, and furthermore, I also doubt that Lucasfilm will rely on mass audiences watching a Disney XD cartoon to understand who Rey’s parents are, no matter how much they tie the show to the new canon.
23) Dr. Aphra
This is a Star Wars comic character with a womb, so, sure, why not. Why would she possibly be such a major character in Marvel’s new Star Wars comics if she wasn’t going to play a major role in the movies?! Because although there’s one official Star Wars universe, the movies will always take precedence. The first issue of the Star Wars comic had crazy sales at nearly a million copies sold (most of the non-#1 issues, and well as the Darth Vader comic that Aphra mainly appears in, usually sell well less than 200,000). You know how many The Force Awakens tickets have been sold so far? Over 100 million. Now, a lot of those are repeat business, so a conservative estimate of the number people who saw TFA would be 50 million. Now compare that to the 200,000 who might have seen Aphra in a Vader comic. Now repeat to yourself: Rey’s parents will not be characters who exist solely in tie-in material.
24) My Crazy Theory
Having spent the last several days mired in Rey madness, I would like the opportunity to posit my own crazy theory: That Rey doesn’t have parents, and that in fact she’s the result of an experiment—an evil experiment, perhaps by scientists who continued their work after the Emperor’s death, perhaps Snoke and/or the Knights of Ren, perhaps the Sith. Whoever was behind it, they wanted to create an ultimate Force-user, so they created a child from the greatest Force-user they had access to:
Luke. Specifically, Luke’s hand.
Think about it in the way that Star Wars science works—namely, it usually works in the way we think it should work, not how it really does. The Emperor’s body was absolutely annihilated when the Death Star blew up; Luke burned Vader’s body (and even if Vader’s mask remains I don’t see an Imperial CSI team scouring the ashes for Vader’s DNA). That leaves Luke as the only viable subject, and given that someone found Luke’s lightsaber from his climatic battle on Cloud City, it’s not unreasonable his severed hand would end up in the same place (and this also matches some of the weird rumors that dogged TFA before its release about Luke’s lightsaber, with hand still attached(!), playing an important role in the movie). These evil scientists—maybe sent by the Emperor himself, directly after ESB—grabbed both the lightsaber and the hand, and got to work. It took them years before they created a viable living subject using Luke’s hand, namely a young girl named Rey.
This would make Rey a Skywalker, but avoids 1) Luke having to have sex with some character we’ve never met and don’t care about and 2) also avoids the crazy virgin birth thing that Anakin did. During their continued fight against the Empire/First Order, it’s possible Luke and the others happened upon this lab and found and rescued 5-year-old Rey, at which point Luke would have tried to train her alongside Ben Solo. When Snoke heard about Rey through his secret apprentice, he orders Kylo and the Knights of Ren to either destroy the girl or bring her to him to turn to the Dark Side, in true Star Wars-style.
Ben, at 19 years old, is cruel enough to kill his fellow students as they try to protect Rey, but not quite far gone enough to murder a 5-year-old girl in cold blood, even if she is some kind of mega-weapon. However, Kylo also doesn’t want her as competition, or her exceeding him. His decision? To drop her off on some remote planet that no one would ever think to look for her,in the hands of some brute like Unkar Plutt, presumably never to be seen or heard from again. To me, this is the only way Rey’s abandonment works; it has to be by someone cruel, who that wants her out of the picture, but doesn’t want her necessarily dead.
So Luke, Han, and Leia don’t even know if the girl’s alive or dead, or if she is, whether she’s part of the First Order, or what. It’s effectively impossible to search for her. All Luke can do is put out part of a map in hopes that the Force will somehow guide it to her when she’s ready… and thus eventually guide her to him.
I fully admit my theory is as crazy as anyone else’s, although I’d like to think it fits the few facts we have… even if I’ve had to make up a lot of stuff to connect them. At any rate, it’s a hell of a lot more reasonable than Qui-Gon Jinn and Captain Phasma, dammit.
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A Bird Pees For 17 Seconds in the Full Trailer For The Angry Birds Movie
If you’re like me, when you heard that Sony was making a movie of Angry Birds, you weren’t surprised, you were confused. Of course making a movie based on an insanely popular game makes sense, but what’s the story outside of flying birds destroying pigs?
Turns out, not much, but it involves a lot of urine.
As seen above, the first full trailer for The Angry Birds Movie is here. The 3D animated film opens May 20 and along with the trailer comes a synopsis, which boils down to this. On an island of flightless birds, three outcasts—Red (Jason Sudeikis), Chuck (Josh Gad) and Bomb (Danny McBride)—team up to figure out the secret behind a group of mysterious, newly arrived green pigs. Hmm, I wonder if they’re good or if they’ll end up smashing into them.
To be honest, the trailer had me kind of interested until the end, where the three main characters watch a bird pee for a quarter of a minute. Obviously this is a juvenile movie ... but wow, that threw me for a loop. I just hope the movie doesn’t depend too much on potty humor when the game provides such a potentially dynamic blank slate for storytelling.
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Star Wars Outpost, A Cancelled LucasArts Game, Looked Way Better Than FarmVille
About a year before LucasArts shut down, the iconic studio cancelled a near-finished game called Star Wars Outpost. Today, we’ve learned a bit more about that game.
Developed by LucasArts’ Singapore studio—which at the time was also assisting on other games like Star Wars 1313 and even working on its own projects like an HD version of the adventure game Day of the Tentacle—Star Wars Outpost was planned for release on browsers and mobile platforms (iOS/Android). Although the game was never announced, it was nearly completed, according to several people who worked at LucasArts before it shut down in April of 2013.
I first reported on Outpost three years ago, when putting together our postmortem on the last years of LucasArts and how the studio was in decline long before Disney shut it down. Earlier this week, a tipster reached out with new details and art from the game, including the concept art above, which shows one of the eponymous outposts, a bustling city by the water. It also includes what would have been the game’s logo as well as a host of familiar Star Wars characters, like R2D2 and Luke Skywalker.
The tipster said that despite the game’s FarmVille-like appearance, Star Wars Outpost would have been heavy on strategy and inspired by the likes of Settlers of Catan and EVE Online.
Mockups like this one indicate that Outpost would have some sort of “bug your friend!” mechanic not unlike FarmVille and other Facebook games, which can be irritating. Those icons on the bottom would presumably represent the player’s in-game friends. Icons like that yellow star are also reminiscent of the “casual” games that drive many hardcore gamers nuts.
But our tipster insisted that Star Wars Outpost would have actually been more complex than people assumed, calling it a “very hardcore game.” Players would have been able to manage outposts, trade resources with other players, and choose whether to support the Rebels or the Empire while building a variety of settlements, the tipster said. Players would have also been able to betray one another for resources, which is a tad different than FarmVille.
The above concept art shows some of the structures that were envisioned for Outpost, including various mines, shipyards, and farms. Each of these ships and buildings could have appeared in an outpost, allowing the player to harvest resources and build weapons. The image also appears to show upgrade paths for several of these buildings. “It was a very deep game and always running like an MMO,” the tipster said. “We wanted players to really invest a lot [of] time.”
Players would have been able to seize control of outposts on various Star Wars planets including Tatooine, pictured in the concept art below:
This mockup, illustrating an outpost full of people and buildings, represents what a player’s settlement in Star Wars Outpost might have looked like. The art is really cool, although the developers likely would have had to struggle against players’ preconceived notions for what Facebook and mobile games can be. (If you’re curious: the game would have indeed had microtransactions, the tipster said. “There was no pay to win,” they added.)
Individual outposts would have been part of a larger struggle between the Rebels and the Empire, the tipster said. “Each side would control a balance of power where that side could start taking over the Galaxy. If your world was controlled by one of the sides, the supports gained bonuses to all their outputs.”
Back in 2011 and 2012, one of the big themes at LucasArts was interconnectivity. Before company executives started canceling projects like Outpost, they had a big plan to release multiple Star Wars games that were all connected in some way, according to several sources. Outpost, for example, would have been connected to the also unannounced (and cancelled) shooter Star Wars: First Assault
Right as they were getting ready to announce the game and launch a public beta, the tipster says the developers of Star Wars Outpost got a call: The game was cancelled. Some team members moved to other mobile games; others went on to help develop the ill-fated Star Wars 1313. Months later, they’d learn that Disney had made a deal to purchase Lucasfilm and LucasArts, and by April of 2013, the company was gone
You can reach the author of this post at jason@kotaku.com or on Twitter at @jasonschreier.
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Bryce Dallas Howard Answers Most Important Question of Jurassic World 2: Will She Wear Heels?
Of course Bryce Dallas Howard can’t talk about the Jurassic World sequel without addressing whether or not her character is going to be wearing high heels. That is literally the only thing that matters at this point.
Speaking to E!, Howard was asked what she could say about the sequel and was pretty tight-lipped, at least until she was asked if she hoped the white shoes made a comeback. Then she talked about her character Claire’s emotional journey, how her clothes had reflected that, and why all of that meant there would be no goddamn heels in the sequel:
No, no. They’re fine. That was part of Jurassic World. They served their purpose. Actually, to answer that question seriously, Claire is a different person now. You now, the person she is at the end of the movie is not the person she was in the beginning. Her armor of sorts was that white, pristine outfit with heels in a very corporate environment and stuff, and the chick at the end… totally different. So yeah… it better not be heels.
This has been your important Jurassic World 2 shoes update.
Image credit: Chuck Zlotnick/Universal Pictures.
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Paul Rudd and Stephen Hawking Face Off in a High-Stakes Game of Quantum Chess
What do you do if you’re Paul Rudd and itching to speak at a Caltech event about quantum mechanics? Challenge your arch-rival, Stephen Hawking, to a game of quantum chess, of course. The very future of the universe might be at stake.
Directed by Alex Winter (yep, Bill of Bill and Ted), the video below features not only Rudd and Hawking matching wits but also great voiceover by Keanu Reeves. It made its debut last night at One Entangled Evening, a special event to kick off a one-day conference on the future of quantum computing being held today at Caltech.
We won’t give anything way, but watching Rudd give himself a crash course in quantum mechanics to take on one of the greatest minds in physics in quantum chess—where the rules display all the weirdness of the subatomic realm—proves pretty entertaining. Heck, Rudd actually went subatomic in Ant Man, so he’s got some firsthand experience to draw upon.
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This Chicken-Obsessed Shining Short May Be the Weirdest Thing You'll Ever See
I just watched The Chickening and I’m not sure I’ll ever be the same again. Directed by Nick DenBoer and Davy Force, it’s a short version of Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining, if the movie was obsessed with, and inhabited by, human chicken hybrids.
Honestly, what more can you say than that? Talking is hard with your jaw on the floor.
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The Real Reason Behind This Week's Thor/Captain America Kiss Is Actually Quite Sad
Marvel had comics fans tongue-wagging way back when their solicitation for All-New, All Different Avengers #4 came with the gorgeous Alex Ross cover above, depicting Sam Wilson and Thor locked in a kiss. The issue is out today, and yes, the kiss is real—but it’s not really all that romantic. In fact, it’s all a bit tragic.
Spoilers ahead for All-New All Different Avengers #4, by Mark Waid, Mahmud Asrar, Dave McCaig, and Cory Petit.
The fourth issue of the All-New, All Different Avengers is all about the team settling in—they have a tatty new base
http://io9.gizmodo.com/the-avengers-n...
The threat is easily dealt with, but it’s also preceded by a sort of relish for battle not yet seen in this series from Thor. She eagerly anticipates Tony’s rallying cry of “Avengers, Assemble!”, flying off ahead of the group, and happily celebrates Spider-Man, Nova, and Ms. Marvel taking Cyclone down.
It is, as other people begin to notice, strange for the usually stoic goddess of thunder. And how does Thor react to people noticing her jovial mood? By snogging the living daylights out of Captain America.
So what does a Captain America taste like? Freedom? Bald Eagle? Pancakes? Let us know your thoughts in the comments.
But the kiss, despite being the big front cover tease, isn’t the most important moment for Thor in All-New, All-Different Avengers #4. It’s what she says immediately after the kiss, and if you’ve been following along with Jane Foster’s journey, quite poignant too:
The real reason behind Thor’s sudden relish for life and superheroism is because Jane Foster has cancer
http://kotaku.com/being-a-superh...
It’s a perfectly tragic motivation for the character—but also one that’s seemingly going to end with the discovery of this Thor’s identity in the Marvel universe for the first time. At the very end of the book, Tony starts pondering on Thor’s choice of words, and starts putting two and two together:
Time is slowly, sadly running out for Jane Foster. But time might be running out even more quickly for her secret life as Thor.
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Google Just Beat Facebook in Race to Artificial Intelligence Milestone
Artificial intelligence researchers at Google DeepMind are celebrating after reaching a major breakthrough that’s been pursued for more than 20 years: The team taught a computer program the ancient game of Go, which has long been considered the most challenging game for an an artificial intelligence to learn. Not only can the team’s program play Go, it’s actually very good at it.
The computer program AlphaGo was developed by Google DeepMind specifically with the task of beating professional human players in the ancient game. The group challenged the three-time European Go Champion Fan Hui to a series of matches, and for the first time ever, the software was able to beat a professional player in all five of the games played on a full-sized board. The team announced the breakthrough in a Nature article published today.
Coincidentally, just one day before the Google DeepMind team announced its scientific achievement, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg wrote a public Facebook post saying that his AI team is “getting close” to achieving the same exact thing. He wrote that “the researcher who works on this, Yuandong Tian, sits about 20 feet” from his desk, and added, “I love having our AI team right near me so I can learn from what they’re working on.”
Facebook’s competitor to Google’s AlphaGo is called Darkforest. Yuandong Tian published the name in November, when he submitted a paper to the International Conference on Learning and Representations.
Mark Zuckerberg posted this video illustrating Facebook’s research.
The history of Go dates back to ancient China, some 2,500 years ago. It’s played by placing black or white stones on a 19 x 19 grid. When a player surrounds any of his opponents pieces, they’re captured. The goal of the game is to control at least 50 percent of the board. The reason that it’s so difficult for computers to play is because there is an estimated 10 to the power of 700 possible variations of the game. By comparison, chess only has 10 to the power of 60 possible scenarios.
The breakthrough achieved by Google DeepMind is important for several reasons: Broadly speaking, it will impact the way that computers are able to search for a sequence of actions. That will help AI programs get from one place to another and navigate through logic. To the average person, that can mean a lot of different things because they’re often asking an artificial intelligence to get from one place to another by reasoning through a set of logic equations.
More specifically, things like facial-recognition processing and predictive search are the most easy advances to point to. Both Facebook and Google trade on the very ability to analyze data better than other companies, and ultimately, to create and sell products based on that analysis. The data is, to be more specific, who you are and everything you do.
Following this announcement, the Google DeepMind team has issued a challenge to the best player in the world, Lee Sedol of South Korea, who has long been considered the greatest player of the modern era. The match is scheduled to take place in March 2016.
The Sedol vs. AlphaGo match will have many similarities to the famous 1996 chess match between chess grandmaster Gary Kasparov and IBM’s Deep Blue computer. In that match, IBM’s Deep Blue artificial intelligence was the first to defeat a professional chess grandmaster. In the upcoming match between Sedol and AlphaGo, DeepMind’s artificial intelligence will have to sort through a much larger decision tree than IBM’s Deep Blue in addition to sorting through a higher number of moves. Keep going at it! This is some fun competition.
Top image via Flickr
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A First Look at the First Issue of Rivers of London: Night Witch
Late last year
http://io9.gizmodo.com/first-look-at-...
Rivers of London: Night Witch, a five part miniseries, will follow Peter Grant, a full-time cop/part-time wizard who works for a special branch of the London police force investigating supernatural crime, as he tracks down a powerful witch wanted by the Russian mob to aid in their crimes.
Aaronovitch will pen the series with his former Doctor Who colleague, ex-showrunner Andrew Cartmel, while Doctor Who comic artists Lee Sullivan and Luis Guerrero are on art duties. Here’s a sneak peek of the first few unlettered pages of issue one, making their debut here on io9, which features the aforementioned gangsters try to break out their unusual target.
Rivers of London: Night Witch #1 hits shelves in the US and the UK March 16, 2016.
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5 Live-Action Star Wars Shows Disney Should Be Making Right Now
Last week, we learned that Disney wasn’t making
Law & Order: Coruscant
In the Imperial criminal justice system, rebellion-based offenses are considered especially heinous. In Coruscant, the dedicated Stormtroopers who investigate these vicious felonies are members of an elite squad known as the Special Victim Elimination Unit. These are their stories.
Okay, that’s a joke, but the idea really isn’t. Star Wars spends a lot of time with heroes who, when they’re dealing with laws, are dealing with them on a galactic scale. Is there a uniform penal code for every Republic? What if you break the law on Naboo but it wasn’t illegal on your home planet? Or how about just the cogs in the wheel trying to keep people from thieving and murdering other people? Coruscant’s got a vibrant underbelly that would be just perfect for this. Plus, Law & Order’s been franchised out all over the world; why not a new galaxy?
Star Wars: Starfighter Command
I cannot express how many times I have yelled “Why don’t we have a Star Wars version of Top Gun yet?!” while drunk and angry at a bar. (Or my home. Or my office.) It seems like such a slam dunk to have a show about training pilots. I want living legend Wedge Antilles teaching a new generation how not to die in space. I really want to somehow make him say “Son, your ego is writing checks your body can’t cash.” I want squadrons of people signing up because of a poster of Poe Dameron and his tousled hair, only to find out they don’t have the right stuff and getting cut. I want egos and flight simulators and the sad droop of Admiral Ackbar’s barbels when he’s ordering something that will get a lot of newbies killed. OH MY GOD WHY DO WE SPEND SO MUCH TIME WITH JEDI. PILOTS. LET’S DO AN ENTIRE SHOW JUST ABOUT PILOTS.
Spies
Espionage gives a lot of avenues to dive deep into the Empire and the Republic at the same time. There isn’t a ton of moral ambiguity in the Star Wars movies— the Empire is evil, the Rebellion is goodz— but spies always introduce a grey area. You can have a deep-cover Rebellion agent who starts idealistic but grows more torn as she has to betray people for information. It lets us see regular Imperial citizens who are just trying to survive but also could end up Force-choked because of her. Or an Imperial who decides to become a double-agent and all the work he has to do to gain the trust of the Rebellion and not lose the trust of his superiors. Doing real espionage, no action, would also be a great way to distinguish this show from every other big franchise on TV.
A Satire
In my mind, it’s the space episode of NewsRadio, but every week. Te show had its news reader say this:
Tragedy struck today in Sector 9 as rebel terrorists blew up the Death Star killing thousands. The Rebel Alliance, a fringe group of Anti-Empire fanatics, has claimed responsibility for the terrorist act. Fortunately Lord Vader escaped without harm. Our hearts go out to the families of the victims.
Tell me you would not watch an entire show where people have to deliver the news of the Star Wars galaxy. On the Imperial side, you can watch propaganda being made. On the other, intrepid journalists hunt for the truth.
Droids Playing Sabaac
Bear with me, this makes sense in context. Droids Playing Sabaac would be an anthology show where a bunch of droids get together every week and tell stories about their various owners. You could tell any story this way, ranging from protocol droids working in the government to scut droids doing cleaning. Little slices of life from the Star Wars universe. No pressure to remember a long, overarching plot. Just fun vignettes every week.
Top image: James Whitbrook
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The Stop-Motion Animated Film Kubo and the Two Strings Looks So Freaking Awesome
Samurais, guitars, knights, magic—there’s so much cool in the new trailer for Kubo and the Two Strings. The latest film from the team at Laika (Coraline, ParaNorman) opens in August, and with each subsequent look
Directed by Travis Knight, Kubo opens on August 19. It tells the story of a young storyteller who accidentally summons an ancient evil and must defeat it while solving the mystery of his legendary samurai uncle. The voice cast is insane, and includes Art Parkinson, Matthew McConaughey, Charlize Theron, Rooney Mara, Ralph Fiennes and George Takei.
In addition to this second trailer, there are some new posters too
After this first trailer
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This Image Basically Sums Up All of Shadowhunters
Amid the many vapid delights of “Dead Man’s Party”—casual grave-robbing; a motorcycle modified to run on “demon energy;” a seduction scene that tries to make a guy with a mullet seem dreamy—this last-act tableaux might have been the episode’s finest moment.
Spoilers even though this show ain’t much for subtlety...
We have Jace and Alec arguing for the zillionth time over who they should trust, what course of action makes the most sense, Jace’s real intentions vis-à-vis Clary, etc. (Alec actually invokes the “I’m older than you, bro” line of reasoning while making his case). Then, there’s Clary and Simon; despite his propensity for swooning over every girl that gives him a sideways glance, his heart beats only for Clary. Here, she’s displaying her greatest talent, all that Shadowhunting be damned, by saying something like “I can’t live without you!” while simultaneously making it very clear Simon is now, and forever will be, strictly in the friend zone.
And finally, there’s Isabelle—the only member of this crew who isn’t distracted by stupid bullshit—taking care of some real business: reapplying her lip gloss.
Top image: ABC Family/John Medland
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This BB-8 Art Is Adorably Tragic
From the first moment we saw him, BB-8 rolled into our hearts like no droid ever has. His hilarious, crucial role in Star Wars: The Force Awakens worked to only deepen that love. Now, artist Alex Griendling is using that all against us.
Griendling has created a piece of art that uses two iconic “thumbs-ups” movie moments to link BB-8 with Terminator 2: Judgement Day. The piece is called “Hasta La Vista, BB!”
Griendling is selling this piece, which is an easily framable 5 x 5 inch print, in a timed edition through January 29th at 2pm CST. Here’s the link.
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What It Means To Be a Science Fiction Writer in the Early 21st Century
I believe that science fiction’s best days are ahead of it, because I have read a lot of science fiction. And if this genre has taught me anything, it’s optimism about human ingenuity—along with a belief that the unexpected is just around the corner. I’m not alone: Many people seem to feel like science fiction is healthier than ever.
Which is funny, when you consider that science fiction died in 2003, or maybe 2004.
Back when I was first trying to break in as a writer of science fiction and fantasy, it seemed like every big book-related convention was having a panel about “The Death of Science Fiction.” At these panels, authors and experts would lament all the trends that were destroying the genre that Mary Shelley, Hugo Gernsback and a host of authors had built.
The causes of science fiction’s impending death were many and varied, but they included a pervasive sense that reality had “caught up” to the things that Golden Age authors had written about in the 1940s. Either we’d already gotten the things we’d been promised (incredible computers, smart medicine, space travel) or we’d learned they were not coming any time soon (space colonies). And partly because the future had arrived or been superceded, literary authors were writing about science-fictional ideas, but this crossover appeared largely one-sided: Apart from Dick, Le Guin and a few others, science fiction authors did not feel they were getting embraced by fancy book critics. And publishing was changing, so that authors who didn’t write bestsellers (the “midlist”) were squeezed out. Those wire racks that sold cheap paperbacks in drug stores and groceries were going away.
But as someone who just published a new novel with science fiction (as well as fantasy) elements yesterday, I believe that the doomsaying was premature. And I feel like I’m not alone.
http://www.amazon.com/All-Birds-Char...
In fact, the process of writing All the Birds in the Sky left me convinced that science fiction has more to say about the present, and the future, than ever. And I’m optimistic about science fiction, in part, for the same reasons that these panels were warning about its demise back in the early 2000s.
Last week, while I was performing the disheartening task of writing the obituary for David G. Hartwell, the incredibly influential science fiction editor, I came across his introduction for an anthology called The Science Fiction Century. Back in 1996, Hartwell wrote: “The twentieth century is the science fiction century. By the middle of the 1990s, we are living in the world of the future described by genre science fiction of the 1930s and ‘40s and ‘50s, a world technologies we love and fear, sciences so increasingly complex and steeped in specialized diction and jargon that fewer and fewer of us understand science on what used to be called a ‘high school level.’” Science fiction, Hartwell wrote, is a literature for people who want to understand how things work.
Some 17 years later, Hartwell co-edited an anthology called Twenty-First Century Science Fiction with fellow Tor Books editor Patrick Nielsen Hayden. [Full disclosure: Nielsen Hayden is my editor.] In the intro to that volume, the editors write that science fiction, far from being consigned to the 20th century, is more influential (and more accepted by the literary establishment) than ever. In 2013, they write, SF “far from being marginal, is a firmly established part of the cultural landscape.”
http://www.amazon.com/Twenty-First-C...
So even if mid-twentieth century science fiction has, in some sense, “come true,” we are still in need of science fiction’s power to explain how things work, and speculate about how they could work. Even if we’re less captivated by imagining the wonders of tomorrow and more baffled by the complexity of the wonders of today, we still crave answers. And better questions.
So here are things I learned while writing All the Birds in the Sky, my novel about a mad scientist and a witch who grow up together, grow apart, come back together, try to save the world, and maybe possibly find love.
Getting past meta
First off, I found myself falling into a lot of unexamined tropes. I wrote about some of this over at John Scalzi’s blog yesterday, but in a nutshell, the idea of combining science fiction and fantasy immediately seemed like an opportunity to get kind of “meta” and throw together lots of plot elements from Harry Potter, Star Trek, and all sorts of other things. But the deeper I got into the story of the relationship between Laurence and Patricia, the less I wanted my book to be commenting on genre in a self-aware way. I wanted to find ways to make the genre elements feel “real” and connected to the world in my novel, so I could focus on the characters and their emotions.
And I think that in the early 21st century, we’re all hyper-aware of tropes and genre expectations, and that’s a double-edged sword. We’ve all gotten sucked down the rabbit hole of TVTropes and other such sites. This is great, in that it forces us to try harder to bring something fresh to our work, to use these tropes in a new way (or at least “lampshade” them.) But it also creates the danger that writing genre fiction will turn into being in an Aerosmith cover band in a dive bar where the ice hockey is also on the big-screen TV during your gig: You’re playing the greatest hits to a jaded, inattentive crowd.
There is a huge opportunity, in 2016, for authors (and creators of all kinds) to scrape off the accumulated layers of meta from old story ideas—and to come up with brand new story ideas as well. But you have to be willing to start from the position of hyper-awareness that all us TVTropes junkies have, and then put in the sweat-lodge time, figuring out what the essential truth of a trope is, and how it can feel like a real piece of history in the world you’re creating. This is incredibly tough, and I’m not at all claiming I pulled it off—just that I wrestled with it.
Also, optimism!
There is just a famished, intense desire for optimism out there. While I was writing All the Birds in the Sky, I also took part in the Hieroglyph anthology project that Arizona State University spearheaded, which came out of Neal Stephenson’s call for science fiction writers to offer more hopeful visions, more solutions, and more ideas for ways the future could be greater. (This doesn’t mean pretending massive problems don’t exist—as io9 founder Annalee Newitz proved with her optimistic book about our coming mass extinction, Scatter, Adapt and Remember, which came out while I was writing All the Birds. We’ll talk more about climate change in a moment.)
http://www.amazon.com/Scatter-Adapt-...
But people desperately want upbeat future scenarios that feel real and not pie-in-the-sky. The more connected to reality, and the more plausible, the better. But just being willing to believe in a decent future is a massively important act in the early 21st century.
In fact, one thing that’s changed since everyone started proclaiming the death of science fiction (I think it started in the late 1990s) is that most people seem to believe the world has gotten worse. There’s more political instability, the environment feels more perilous, people talk seriously about economic slowness being the new normal, and politics have gotten uglier and weirder. I believe the relevance of science fiction has trended upwards as the world has gone further down the tubes. (We’re also just more aware of the ways the world sucks, thanks to social media’s echo-chamber effect.)
Scientists actually talk to me
And meanwhile, another thing I discovered in the process of putting this book together was that scientists will just talk to random strangers who are writing science fiction. It was probably easier to get scientists to talk to me as a science fiction writer than as a journalist. I started taking advantage of this for some of my short fiction as well—I have some pretty hard science in some of the stories I’ve published in the past few years.
My impression is, scientists know that we’re confused and overwhelmed, and they are sincerely interested in communicating science to ordinary people. And they absolutely see science fiction books and stories as a vehicle for talking about, and hopefully even educating about, actual science in the middle of so much misrepresentation and misunderstanding. (Science fiction movies? Maybe not quite so much.) I used to be scared of bothering scientists with my dumb questions, but it’s amazing how open they often are to talking. (And there are actual programs for authors, like the Launchpad Workshop.)
The neutral zone
Meawhile, the line between the “near present” and the “near future” is where the action is. People used to talk about setting stories “15 minutes into the future,” meaning a world that is recognizably our world but includes a few futuristic inventions and changes here and there. But in 2016, how can you even tell the difference between the present and the immediate future? New devices and innovations are coming along all the time—imagine saying to someone in 2009, “Oh, I just got my DNA sequenced.”
So that ambiguity between the futuristic present and the near future is where the fun is. It’s a place that authors like William Gibson and Cory Doctorow have explored to great effect, but it’s still wide open territory, with a lot of great places to go. Writing All the Birds in the Sky, I wanted even the furthest future stuff to feel very much like the here and now, and sweated over anything that might be too dated. (While revising the book, I shed a tear at having to remove a part where Laurence, as a young boy, goes to a Radio Shack.)
For a while there, the fact that things are changing so quickly made a lot of science fiction authors nervous about tackling near-future settings. It seemed too risky: Your book could be outdated before it was even published. (I definitely had that worry about the “Caddies,” the next-generation handheld computers that everyone uses in the near-future parts of my story.) But I think that’s not a problem, it’s an opportunity, if you’re willing to play chicken. The ambiguity between “now” and “five minutes from now” is just super exciting and lets you comment on all the anxieties and insecurities of our hyper-technological, increasingly weird era.
And on a related note, publishing has changed again—the traditional book world seems to have stabilized somewhat, and science fiction book sales have rebounded. But meanwhile, as everyone from Andy Weir to Linda Nagata can attest, the e-book world has replaced that spinning rack at the drugstore, allowing authors to sell books cheaply and (maybe) claim a bigger share of public attention.
We’re scared, and science fiction can help
We still haven’t gotten to one of the reasons why everyone thought science fiction was on its death bed a dozen or 15 years ago: literary fiction was seen as encroaching on SF’s territory, without giving SF authors the respect they deserved. And now, I feel as though SF is getting more and more acceptance as the literature of our time—but meanwhile, literary fiction is increasingly apocalyptic. When you see an acclaimed new literary novel that plays with speculative ideas, it’s almost always about world-ending plagues, technology that kills us all, or straight-up zombies.
But I think a lot of people are getting tired of apocalypses that are unstoppable and just barely endurable. There is an apocalypse towards the end of my novel (and I’ve gotten some flak for having the “A” word associated with it!) but it’s more of a Buffy-style apocalypse. It’s an apocalypse that we can maybe do something about.
And I didn’t just include an apocalyptic scenario to raise the stakes in my book, but because I believe our fears about the future are grounded in real issues, and they’re worth addressing.
I was at an event a week or so ago, where Kim Stanley Robinson was talking about his belief that science fiction should address the reality of climate change. Because it’s our actual future, and if you claim to be writing even a semi-realistic vision of the world to come, you need to acknowledge this scientific consensus.
And yes, I was just saying that we need more can-do optimism—but here’s the thing: Writing about climate change can be an optimistic act. One reason to write about the potential disasters and nightmares of climate change is because you believe that humans can make smart choices. We can recognize when our own behavior is outrageously self-destructive, and try to fix it.
Back during the Cold War, pop culture served up tons of visions of nuclear war and other atomic apocalypses, from On the Beach to The Day After. And we’re only just now understanding how close we really came to having an actual global thermonuclear war in real life, on a few occasions. We were an itchy finger away from mass genocide. And here’s a crazy thought—even if all those books and movies about nuclear annihilation only made a slight difference in the mass consciousness, maybe it was enough. Maybe someone hesitated just a second longer to push that button because of On the Beach. We’ll never know, but it seems at least possible.
So I don’t doubt that pop culture can make a massive difference in the real world, and I am certain we can do this with climate change, widespread extinctions, and other environmental challenges.
And in general, we have a lot of fears, as a society, that science fiction has an opportunity to address. The very fact that we’ve spent so much time lately debating whether science fiction should include “message fic” about real-world issues proves that, yes, science fiction does have an opportunity to talk about real-world issues. Including racism, sexism and other atavistic hatreds, but also including our massive fears and insecurities as technology makes careers obsolete and creates problems that we couldn’t even imagine a decade ago. I reject the idea that science fiction cannot talk about anything real.
If anything, the more I write and read science fiction, the more I feel the 21st century, not the 20th, is the science fiction century. Now is when we’re discovering exoplanets by the score, coming to a greater understanding of human biology and inventing the first real practical robots. Now is also when we’re confronting weirdness and insanity on a scale that would make Philip K. Dick feel like a stenographer. We need science fiction more than ever, but we can also do more awesome things with it than ever before.
All images via NASA/Hubble Space Telescope
Charlie Jane Anders is the author of All The Birds in the Sky, out NOW from Tor Books. Here’s what people have been saying about it. Follow her on Twitter, and email her.
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A Spooky-Looking Dr. Jekyll Comes Knocking In New Penny Dreadful Teasers
The new season of Penny Dreadful doesn’t begin until May 1, but Showtime has dropped a couple of new teasers that hint at what’s to come. Unsurprisingly, it’s darker than dark. Vanessa, who narrates both clips, claims she’s not frightened of evil, Satan, and so forth anymore. But maybe she should be?
Both teasers offer glimpses of new characters, including an ominous-looking Dr. Jekyll (British actor Shazad Latif).
Here’s the season three synopsis for Penny Dreadful, which will also be getting its own comic book
This season on PENNY DREADFUL, Tony® Award-winning star Patti LuPone (American Horror Story), who guest starred last season as the Cut-Wife, returns as a series regular in the new role of Dr. Seward, an American therapist who treats Vanessa (Eva Green) with an unconventional new approach. Wes Studi (Hell On Wheels) joins as a series regular as Kaetenay, an intense, enigmatic Native American with a deep connection to Ethan (Josh Hartnett) who also becomes an ally to Sir Malcolm (Timothy Dalton). The third season also adds Robert Louis Stevenson’s Dr. Henry Jekyll (Shazad Latif). Other guest stars include Screen Actors Guild® Award nominee Christian Camargo (DEXTER®, The Hurt Locker) as Dr. Alexander Sweet, a zoologist who strikes up an unlikely friendship with Vanessa; Sam Barnett (2012, Jupiter Ascending) as Dr. Seward’s mysterious young secretary; and Jessica Barden (The Outcast, Far from the Madding Crowd) as Justine, a young acolyte to Lily (Billie Piper) and Dorian Gray (Reeve Carney), and Perdita Weeks (THE TUDORS), as Catriona Hartdegan, a scholar with expert knowledge of the supernatural. Simon Russell Beale returns as Dr. Ferdinand Lyle. Rory Kinnear (as The Creature) and Harry Treadaway (as Dr. Frankenstein) also star.
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Your Favorite Nickelodeon Characters Will Join Forces in One Epic, Childish Movie
Anyone who watched Nickelodeon growing up better take a seat. Jared Hess, the co-writer and director of Napoleon Dynamite, has just signed on to combine all of your favorite Nickelodeon characters in one massive, live-action animated hybrid movie.
It’ll be called NickToons and it’s described as Who Framed Roger Rabbit with Nickelodon characters. That means Rugrats, Ren and Stimpy, Rocko’s Modern Life, Aaahh!!! Real Monsters, Doug, Hey Arnold, and so many others will all be together on the big screen. Deadline broke the story and said “All [the characters] are part of the vast Nickelodeon character library over the past 25 years that can be exploited to frame an original story the studio hopes will spark a franchise.”
A quick note: the above image isn’t official, so not every character in that image is guaranteed to be in the movie.
Hess will co-write the film with his wife and frequent collaborator, Jarusha Hess, and it’ll be produced by Mary Parent, who did The Spongebob Squarepants Movie, Godzilla, The Revenant, Pacific Rim and Noah. Paramount will distribute.
Little is known about the story other than it’ll combine all of these characters in a new and original way. If anything, I’m a little bummed the movie is called just NickToons. Nickelodeon had so many great live action series’ too. Stuff like You Can’t Do That On Television, All That, Clarissa Explains It All, The Amanda Show, etc. Sure most of those people are too old now but if you’re going to make a Nickelodeon Avengers movie, the more the merrier.
[Deadline]
Image credit: Fanpop.
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Scientists Have Finally Found a Biological Process Behind Schizophrenia
Schizophrenia is a complex disease with elusive origins, but the mystery became much clearer today, when a landmark new study based on genetic analysis of nearly 65,000 individuals pinpointed a specific gene and biological process behind it.
The discovery injects new hope into the century-old quest to treat— and perhaps even cure—the debilitating psychiatric disorder. Roughly one percent of the population suffers from schizophrenia, a disease characterized by hallucinations, emotional withdrawal, and a declining cognitive function, beginning in adolescence or early adulthood. Despite decades of research, we’ve made very little progress treating schizophrenia, in part, because it’s been so difficult to nail down the cause.
“Since schizophrenia was first described over a century ago, its underlying biology has been a black box, in part because it has been virtually impossible to model the disorder in cells or animals” said Steven McCarroll, director of genetics at Stanley Center for Psychiatric Research. “The human genome is providing a powerful new way in to this disease.”
McCarroll would know, too. In 2014, he participated in a massive international collaboration which pinpointed more than 100 regions of the human genome carrying risk factors for schizophrenia. Now, in a paper that appears in Nature, McCarroll and his colleagues have revealed a specific gene and biological process underlying the strongest risk factor of all.
On the surface, the culprit behind schizophrenia sounds a bit odd. It’s a variant in the major histocompatibility complex (MHC)—a set of proteins that decorate the surface of your cells—that binds to foreign molecules and presents them to the immune system. But McCarroll’s new study, which looked at the DNA of nearly 29,000 individuals with schizophrenia and 36,000 without, showed that this particular MHC variant causes the expression of a gene known as C4 to go into overdrive.
And it so happens that C4 is present at neuronal synapses, the connections between neurons that transfer chemical and electrical signals in your brain. On a cellular level, too much C4 can reduce the number of synaptic connections, a process known as “synaptic pruning.” On a human-scale, this can lead to schizophrenia.
The findings represent a major breakthrough for neuroscience, but McCarroll and his colleagues see their discovery as the first step on a path toward new and more effective treatments.
“Because the molecular origins of psychiatric diseases are little-understood, efforts by pharmaceutical companies to pursue new therapeutics are few and far between,” said Bruce Cuthbert, acting director of the National Institute of Mental Health “This study changes the game.”
[Nature]
Follow the author @themadstone
Top: Imaging studies showed C4 (in green) located at the synapses of primary human neurons, via Heather de Rivera / McCarroll lab.
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