It is damn near impossible to explain the joy that comes from watching Who’s Out There, a documentary on aliens made by NASA in 1975 starring real scientists, regular people, and then Orson Welles, pontificating into the camera. I cannot emphasize this enough: Spend half an hour watching this.
It starts off strong with its Doctor Who-esque credits sequence. Then Welles talks about becoming friends with H.G. Wells after his infamous War of the Worlds radio play. Then they interview people who had been scared by the broadcast.
It gets barely more normal as it goes on. Once Carl Sagan showed up, my head exploded. Even though a lot of this “documentary” is just Welles monologuing, it’s worth it just to hear his voice. Watch it once and then take the mind-addling substance of your choice and watch it again.
Last month, the world celebrated as physicists confirmed the existence of gravitational waves, proving Einstein right for the umpteenth time. But if you were looking to get in on the glory that comes with catching a spacetime ripple, now’s your chance. This week, scientists began enlisting ordinary plebs like us to help make the next gravitational wave discovery.
All you need to do is download a screensaver. The project, called Einstein@home, takes advantage of your computer’s idle time to scour through troves of data collected by the Laser Interferometer Gravitational Wave Observatory (LIGO) between September and January. That’s the same recent LIGO run responsible for the world’s first—and rather spectacular—gravitational wave signal, of a pair of heavyweight black holes colliding 1.3 billion light years away.
Physicists aren’t expecting to see another big, dramatic wave in this batch of data. But they’re very interested in pulling out fainter signals, such as those produced when a pair of neutron stars spin about each other very quickly. These signals take more computational time to tease out, and the best way to find them is to enlist a bunch of computers with nothing better to do.
If you’ve been waiting for a deal on Huawei’s excellent-but-expensive Android Wear smart watch, Amazon’s taking about $100 off the usual prices of several different models today. Just note that this is a Gold Box deal, so don’t waste any time locking in your order. [Huawei Watch, $270-$320]
We love USB battery packs, and we love Bluetooth speakers, so you can only imagine how we feel about the JBL Charge 2, which combines both into a single product. Today only, you can pick one up for $80 in red or white, matching the best price we’ve ever seen. [JBL Charge 2 - Red, $80. Also available in white]
Vacuuming is a miserable enough experience without dealing with a cord and all the tangles, trips, and accidental unplugs that come with it, so invest in these cordless 20V Hoover vacuums, marked down to all-time low prices today.
The hand vac is obviously perfect for furniture and your car, while the 2-in-1 upgright includes a hand vac, but also a wheeled base so it can act as your one true vacuum cleaner.
If you hurry, here’s a rare opportunity to save 20% on PSN credit. While you can frequently find better deals on full games from other retailers, this would be a great deal if you like to buy DLC. [2x $50 PSN Gift Cards, $80. Add two to cart and use code CMADNESS10]
$18 for a rechargeable Cree LED flashlight would be a pretty good deal under any circumstances, but this one includes a seatbelt cutter, window hammer, and even a 10,400mAh USB battery charger. Plus, it includes IPX6 waterproofing, meaning you could even take it for a swim. [Suaoki 4-in-1 Rechargeable 10,400mAh Cree Led Flashlight, $18 with code SUAOKIA1]
Today you can grab a Fitbit Aria smart scale on Newegg Flash for an all-time low $58, as long as you don’t mind a refurb. The Aria will give you your weight, BMI, and body fat % and of course sync them to your Fitbit app to track changes over time. [Refurb Fitbit Aria Wi-Fi Weight/Body Fat/BMI Digital Smart Scale, $58]
If you’re curious about the Fitbit ecosystem, you’d be hard pressed to find a better entry price than $45 for a Fitbit Flex. It’s a refurb, but you’re still saving more than $30 off its current price on Amazon. [Refurb Fitbit Flex, $45]
Sewing is one of those things everyone should at least try to learn, and Amazon’s top-selling sewing machine is marked down to just $115 today as part of a Gold Box deal.
If buying a movie ticket in your town on Fandango costs more than $8 (including Fandango’s convenience fee), you stand to save money with this deal from Groupon. [Two Fandango Movie Tickets, $16. $26 maximum value.]
You can probably live without this aluminum phone stand on your desk or nightstand, but for $3, why would you want to? [Ecandy Solid Aluminum Desktop Smartphone Stand, $3 with code 6GZKNB8B]
Simplehuman dominated the nominations in our recent kitchen trash cans Kinja Co-Op, and Amazon’s running rare discounts on several different models today, plus a handful of soap dispensers and kitchen accessories to match.
Simplehuman sales are pretty rare, so if you’ve had one of these on your wishlist, I wouldn’t hesistate. Head over to this post to see the full list of deals.
USB ports are requisite inclusions on most surge protectors these days, but these Bestek models go the extra mile by including Quick Charge 2.0 support as well. The six-outlet one would be perfect for your desk at the office, while the two-outlet model looks idea for travel.
Nothing will ever make your cat love you, but if you buy her this heated cat bed, she might at least tolerate you. It only uses 4 watts of power, which means you can leave it on all day while you’re at work, and only pay a few extra pennies per month in electricity. We’ve seen this on sale a few times before, but it usually sells out fairly quickly. [K&H Thermo-Kitty Heated Cat Bed, $21]
The next wave of discounted Nintendo Selects Wii U and 3DS titles come out later this week, but if you’re a Prime member and you preorder from Amazon, you can save an additional 20%. Discount shown at checkout.
Warm weather is on the horizon, which means it’s nearly iced coffee season. This $17 Takeya can brew four servings of the good stuff in your refrigerator overnight, and boasts a solid 4.4 star review average on Amazon. [Takeya Cold Brew Iced Coffee Maker, 1-Quart, $17]
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Ben Edlund’s blue-suited hero the Tick, previously seen on TV in both animated and live-action form, is returning to the latter format thanks to Amazon, which just ordered a pilot for a new version. But original star Patrick Warburton, who’s got another full-time TV gig at the moment, won’t be a part of it.
Creator Edlund will write and executive produce the new show, along with returning cohort Barry Josephson. As for the cast, so far we know Vinyl’s Griffin Newman will play the Tick’s sidekick Arthur Everest, with Valorie Curry (House of Lies, Veronica Mars) as Arthur’s sister, Dot.
Here’s what Deadline, which broke the story of the Amazon pilot, reported about the plot:
In the new incarnation, the blue suit-wearing Tick is recovering from a memory loss. He ends up re-teaming with Arthur to fight evil. Newman’s Arthur, played in the Fox series by David Burke, had been labeled as a schizophrenic because of his statements that evil plans to rule the city, and no one believes him until he runs into Tick. Curry’s Dot Everest is a nurse who loves her brother Arthur to death and worries about him.
So, the burning question: Who’ll step into Warburton’s shoes and play the Tick? Casting is apparently underway. Spoon!
On March 11, 2011 one of the strongest earthquakes ever recorded was epicentered off the coast of Japan. But most of the devastation—including many of the over 15,000 deaths—was due not to the shaking but to the powerful tsunami waves that traveled up to six miles inland.
Five years later, many of these communities still face a long road to recovery. Entire towns were obliterated in a matter of minutes resulting in over 200,000 Japanese residents who were forced to relocate, either temporarily or permanently. That meant many places had to endure years of debris clearance before a single new building could go up. You can see the progress—or sometimes, lack of—in these sets of photos: the first was taken in the days after the tsunami, the second in 2016. Use the sliders to navigate.
Entire buildings were toppled by the waves in Onagawa. After spending years clearing the debris, workers are now busy raising the ground level several feet. Trucks bringing fill dirt are a familiar site along the coast.
A ship relocated by the tsunami sat in a residential part of Kesennuma for two years. Many destroyed buildings have been cleared by 2016 although road repairs are still underway.
A bridge mangled by the waves in Kesennuma was cleared by a bulldozer in the days after the tsunami but a year later still had not been fully repaired. Basic infrastructure like new power and phone lines also finally started to go up by 2016.
Although some buildings survived the tsunami’s wave in Minamisanriku, many were ultimately demolished due to structural problems. Any one-story buildings left needed to be modified to include an emergency shelter from future tsunamis. In the 2016 photo you can see a yellow second story was added to a surviving building.
Photos by AP Photo/David Guttenfelder and Eugene Hoshiko
BB-8 encounters a NASA robot on a tour of Jet Propulsion Lab in Pasadena. All photos: NASA/Jet Propulsion Laboratory/Caltech.
Not so long ago, in our very own Milky Way galaxy, a plucky little droid named BB-8 roamed the hallowed halls of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, rubbing elbows with its robotic brethren. Happily, a photographer was on hand to capture this moment for posterity.
Have visitor’s badge, ready to tour!First, a stop-off at the clean room where real NASA robots are made.Photo op with JPL’s disaster relief robot, RoboSimian.Selfie with the test double for NASA’s Curiosity Mars Rover.
Okay, so you’ve watched the Civil War trailer a bunch of times to see that Spider-Man shot. You’ve probably seen it in all its animated-gif glory in our trailer breakdown, too. But Disney and Marvel have released a high-resolution picture of Peter Parker’s grand debut in the Marvel Cinematic universe to give us all an even better look.
(Pro tip: don’t forget to click the little magnifying glass in the top left of the image to see it in all its high-resolution glory!)
There’s actually a remarkable number of things you take in, considering how traditional this new costume seems. The basketball-esque texture people disliked of the Spider-Man and Amazing Spider-Man suits is still there, but much finer, giving it a shinier look. Meahwhile, the isty-bitsy spider logo is very in line with Todd McFarlane’s style of Spider-Man. The little black clips all around his waist (maybe to hold canisters of web fluid?), and the black bits of armor on the arms.
But honestly, it’s the eyes that are the most interesting part of this new suit. Those moving black-and-white eyes, right out of the pages of a comic. Amazingly, this high-res shot actually shows us how they’re meant to realistically “work.”
These aren’t your Deadpool-style CGI eyes, although the effect is likely enhanced by CG trickery. The white area increases and decreases in size by an intricate series of different shutters opening or closing, just like a camera’s aperture. It’s maybe a weirdly over-elaborate way to bring a comic book staple to the big screen, but we can’t argue with the results. Between Spidey in Civil War and Deadpool, you have to wonder if 2016 is secretly the year of animated superhero eyes in movies? All these years of inarticulate masks seem rather silly in comparison.
What do you think of Spider-Man’s new cinematic look? Let us know in the comments.
Even if you don’t know the Dire Straits song “Walk of Life” by name you’ll recognize it immediately when you hear it. Fun fact: It’s the perfect song to end any movie.
At least that’s the contention of the Walk of Life Project, the brainchild of Peter Salomone, a freelance video editor and writer. And I’m inclined to agree with him. Slap “Walk of Life” to the end of any movie and it immediately becomes 400 percent better. That’s just science.
I think Dr. Strangelove might be my favorite. It’s so perfectly timed:
But there are plenty of other contenders for perfection, like Mad Max: Fury Road:
So how did this project come to be?
“My friend joked that ‘Walk of Life’ would be the perfect funeral song,” Salomone told me over email. “So then I just sort of melded that idea with my love of movie endings.”
“I tried a few (Star Wars, 2001, and The Matrix) and I was surprised at how well they synced up,” he added. “I didn’t re-edit the movie clips visually. I just found a good starting point for the song and the rest just fell into place,” said Salomone.
Fell in place, indeed. Salomone’s edit of 12 Monkeysis another piece of perfection:
This is honestly the funniest thing I’ve seen in a long, long time. And there are so many more on the Walk of Life Project’s page.
“I’ve been working on it for two months, but I’ve been thinking about it for two years,” Salomone tells me. “I’d like to do more since people seem to enjoy it but my doctor says I need to take a break.”
Once you finish binging Daredevil season 2 later this month, you won’t have to wait too long for the next Marvel Netflix series. Luke Cage himself, Mike Colter, announced his show will debut on September 30.
Watching the trailers, reading the interviews, there’s no doubt that Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice is going to be a dark movie. Both literally dark, as lots of it takes place at night, and tonally dark, in that it’ll deal with some deep issues. But the film’s writer says things aren’t going to stay that way.
Speaking to the Wall Street Journal, writer Chris Terrio talked about the differences in the films. Terrio, the Oscar-winning writer of Argo, wrote the latest draft of Batman v Superman as well as Justice League Part One and said the following about the films.
“I expect Justice League will be tonally not quite as dark as Batman v Superman,” Terrio said. “From that point of view, I felt compelled to go back and try to lift us and myself into a different tonal place because I think when you write a darker film, sometimes you want to redeem it all a bit.”
The writer also refers to Batman v Superman as the “Empire Strikes Back” of a series of films that started with Man of Steel and will end with Justice League Part One. “The middle film tends to be the darkest one.” he said. “I do think from Man of Steel through Justice League, it is one saga really.”
Oddly though, Terrio said that while he wrote Part One of the two-part Justice League movie, he may not come back for the second. “I have written Justice League Part One, but I won’t necessarily write Part Two,” he said. “This has been the most rigorous intellectual exercise I’ve had in my writing life.”
Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice opens March 25. Justice League Part One starts shooting soon, and is aimed for a release on November 17, 2017.
Mishell Baker’s debut urban fantasy Borderline, out now, includes a female character who makes a lot of “unrelatable” choices. Are people finally ready for female characters who are just as edgy as Walter White or Han Solo? Baker has been surprised by people’s reactions.
Anti-heroes. They’re brilliant but infuriating. They break the rules. They say what they want without considering others. They have important goals and won’t let anyone stand in their way. And more often than not, they’re men.
The anti-hero has become a dominant character type in the last decade, particularly on TV, which of all media may be the most responsive barometer of public opinion. TV anti-heroes range from the coolly unfeeling (Don Draper on “Mad Men”) to the socially maladjusted (Sherlock Holmes, Dr. House, the other Sherlock Holmes) to the downright murderous (Tony Soprano, Walter White, Dexter Morgan, Frank Underwood, etc.). Viewers forgive and even sympathize with these men, but for much of pop culture’s history the same leeway was not given to women.
When I started writing Borderline, I figured it would be a tough sell. Greg House could get away with limping around making thoughtless wisecracks while solving intractable mysteries, but Millie Roper just seemed to have “too much wrong with her” in ways that beta readers found difficult to articulate. Frustrated, I set the book aside for the better part of a year before I was finally able to find the exact rough edges I needed to file off her to make her acceptable without destroying the core of who she was. But even the softened version of her is difficult to take:
I was only half listening to him; I could still hear Gloria’s raised voice from downstairs, and it twisted my stomach into a knot. I wanted to get away from it, but where was there to go?
“Everybody has a price,” Teo said without looking at me.
“Yeah?” I forced my attention away from the confrontation downstairs. “What’s yours?”
“That depends. For what?”
“Oh, I dunno. An hour in a cheap motel.”
He shot me a look. “With you? Not enough money in the world.”
He said something after that, but I didn’t hear it. It was as though a glass capsule of boiling acid broke inside my head. Before I knew what I was doing, my cane swung in a swift arc and struck the side of Teo’s head.
Audiences often forgive a man for throwing a sucker punch at an ally in a moment of stress, but female leads have not traditionally been allowed to be as abrasive as their male counterparts, let alone violent. Buffy Summers and Sydney Bristow were as tough as any guy on TV, but they were always decent, trustworthy, and loyal to their core group of friends. There has always been an unspoken understanding that the same sort of character-defining pain, rage, and ugliness that make a male character fascinating are unacceptable in a female character because they preclude her from being a safe object of desire. Meanwhile few viewers ever asked if Walter White was desirable; that wasn’t the point.
I was not by far the first to butt heads with this double standard. One memorable trailblazer in TV was actress Katee Sackhoff as Kara Thrace, a.k.a Starbuck, in the reimagined 2004 Battlestar Galactica. During the buildup to the series, Sackhoff was on the receiving end of hostility, boos, and even death threats because she’d dared to reinvent their beloved (male) maverick as a woman. Partially in response to this bullying, Sackhoff dialed the badass factor up to eleven in her performance. Kara drank, smoked, swore, fought her superior officers, cheated on her boyfriend, and worse. In the end audiences adored her for it, proving that a Y chromosome was not, perhaps, a prerequisite to sympathy for a complex and troubled character.
Still, at the time I finished Borderline, I hadn’t yet seen enough deeply messed-up female leads to feel confident that there was any future in what I was writing. But something amazing was already happening, and my agent must have felt it on the wind, because my book found representation in late 2013, right around the same time that the female anti-hero finally exploded.
The rise of new viewing platforms has contributed to the rise of the bad girl, simply by removing the production and distribution bottlenecks that necessitated conservatism in media gatekeepers. Netflix first gave us Orange is the New Black, featuring an entire prison full of flawed, multidimensional women, and then more recently Marvel’s Jessica Jones. Jessica Jones represents the subversion of two tropes—the noir detective and the comic-book superhero—in one deeply conflicted woman. Meanwhile, Amazon’s on-demand distribution did wonders for the popularity of BBC America’s Orphan Black, a show where a single actress explores the variety that can be found in female characters ranging from the uptight soccer mom to the crazed serial killer.
The major networks are starting to get the message as well. In 2015, Taraji Henson won a cartload of awards including a Golden Globe for her portrayal of Loretha “Cookie” Lyon on Fox’s Empire. Just out of prison for drug-dealing, Cookie makes racist comments about one son’s boyfriend and beats the snot out of another son with a broom—and yet still fascinates audiences and makes them root for her as she fights to get back what’s hers.
It’s not surprising, then, that the backlash I was expecting upon the release of Borderline never came. Those of us who write damaged women owe a lot to television, which has both responded to and shaped the taste of a public that consumes many other types of media. It’s up to us to keep these pioneers in mind and bring them up whenever the remnants of the old guard try to tell us what audiences will and won’t accept.
Just like men, women have the right to be ugly. Women have the right to be emotionally unavailable. Women have the right to make terrible decisions. Slowly, audiences are becoming sophisticated enough to understand this. So long as we follow the example of those first male anti-heroes and give our audience something to latch on to - intelligence, humor, suffering, skill, loyalty - a hot mess of a female lead is not an artistic failure. Whether she’s doomed to failure in her own life however... well, that’s for us to know and our audiences to find out.
Syfy’s been on a roll lately with the book adaptations—especially The Expanse. Next month, the cable channel is rolling out a TV show based on Whitley Strieber’s Alien Hunter books, called Hunters. And here’s a much closer look, thanks to some high-res photos, exclusively at io9.
Hunters has a pretty neat pedigree: Not only is it based on Strieber’s original books, but it’s produced by Natalie Chaidez (12 Monkeys, Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles). And it’s executive produced by Gale Anne Hurd (The Walking Dead, The Terminator). Thus far, this new show looks like it’s taking a pretty literal approach to reimagining the War on Terror with alien terrorists, which could be interesting in the middle of this intense election.
Below are some more high-res images from the show, plus a new poster. Hunters premieres on Syfy on April 11.
When you’re writing science fiction, getting to hear from actual scientists can be worth its weight in gold. So if you’ve got some free time in late July, you should absolutely apply for The Schrödinger Sessions II: Science for Science Fiction. Scientists from the Joint Quantum Institute spend three days schooling you about “phenomena like superposition, entanglement, and quantum information.”
A mysterious—and possibly mythical—monster menaces a pair of brothers, and their good-looking friends, in the Australian outback. That’s all we know about Red Billabong, an in-the-works horror thriller from director Luke Sparke. But as huge fans of creature features, that’s enough to get us excited.
Sparke was in Los Angeles this week from his native Australia, and we caught up with him to talk about his upcoming release.
io9: We’ve only seen the trailer so far. What is Red Billabong all about?
Luke Sparke:Red Billabong is a really fun action adventure flick that intertwines Australian mythology and indigenous themes for one roller coaster ride. We’re keeping a lot of it under wraps for a reason.
What stage are you at in production, when do you think it will be finished, and how will it be distributed (particularly in the US)?
We’re on the final post production stretch in sound and music, and continuing the creature VFX. We’ll probably have the VFX fully done just a week or two out from release, to give the guys as long as they can. Pinnacle Films will be helping release it across Australian cinemas, and our sales agent will be showing the whole film off at Cannes for American buyers, then we can lock a release date.
Were you always a fan of creature features? What are some of your favorite monster movies, and did any of them influence your work on Red Billabong?
Steven Spielberg, James Cameron, and more recently J.J. Abrams are my idols, so I guess when you’re really passionate about something it does drip into your own work. Jurassic Park was a big influence on this one. Part of it is me wanting to make a mature “Amblin Film”: what if the kids in Spielberg’s ’80s films were a little older? It allows for swearing, sex, etc., but [we’re also] keeping it about family, brothers, and old relationships.
What are the challenges, and also advantages, of making a creature feature in the 21st century? How important are CGI and special effects to the film?
I’m a huge fan of practical effects, and tried to use them wherever I could. The sets we built were full 360 degrees, especially the large caves that we can quickly see in the trailer. They were awesome to walk around in but really hard to get right—the crew did a really good job getting them just right and making the alive. Apart from “him” everything was shot in camera.
CGI is a tool to be used, and we aim to use it well. Once we had the design sketches of the creature I knew we could never do it practically—so we built parts of him for close ups, and had our VFX team on set for the wide shots. Once we’re at the end of the film—and there’s crazy stunt sequences going on all around him—he’s all CGI. You just have to find the right balance with VFX so you don’t overindulge yourself, and make sure it’s there to tell the story.
We only get a glimpse of the monster in the trailer. What are its scare tactics? How does it take down its victims? What’s motivating it? Will we root for it, or the human protagonists (or both)?
All of that is a spoiler! But I’ll give it a go. We worked on his look for a long time, making sure he fits in with his surroundings of the Australian bush so he could stalk victims without being seen. Played with a lot of sound—not just his, but what do the other Australian animals do when he’s around? Small things that may go unnoticed, but are there.
The red eyes on the poster do have a lot to do with his design but also his motivation. I took ideas from the mythology and also a few crazy stories I’ve heard firsthand from guys in the dark outback. But in the end, he’s just a big guy doing his thing and the characters just fall into this mythology story. There are other forces at work pulling the strings ... ones that might be human. To use the quote from this week’s 10 Cloverfield Lane, “Monsters come in many forms.”
I’m a huge fan of horror movies from Australia: Wolf Creek, Rogue, The Babadook, etc. What do you think sets these works apart from horror films made in other parts of the world, and how does Red Billabong fit into the tradition?
I think they are made just matter-of-factly. There’s no hamming it up most of the time. We’ve tried to do the same thing but look at things a little differently—the cast don’t ham up the Aussie accent, they just talk as they do, which is more metropolitan. And I’ve definitely infused some Spielberg influences in there, which will be a slight departure for an Aussie film.
Red Billabong will probably be the first Australian film that uses a fully CGI original creature as one of the “leads,” and it’s one of the most action packed Australian films this year—both of which were something I actually never set out to do, but it’s a little daunting to have that on our shoulders. I’m really happy with the final cut. And being a massive film buff growing up, I hope that if I’ve made a film I enjoy, hopefully a few others will too!
Between pay inequality, ageism, limited opportunities, and a laundry list of other problems, being a woman in Hollywood sucks. Thanks to Casting Call The Project, now we know the never ending shit-storm of abuse starts before these actors even set foot on set.
In the video, several actors read actual casting calls for female roles, which range from tone deaf (“Nerdy type of girl; nevertheless she has a boyfriend who loves her”) to utterly offensive (“Her cleavage is her best feature”) and borderline threatening (“Just so you know, you aren’t being exploited—the director gets naked in all of his films so you won’t be alone”). Jesus, it’s 2016 people. How is this still something anyone thinks is acceptable?
Blessedly, comments on the video are disabled, so at least we’re spared having to read through MRAs explain a “woman’s place” on set.
TV shows that explore what happened after more famous stories are all the rage, especially on channels owned by Disney. Now After, a TV sequel to Sleeping Beauty, is set to join them on Freeform, the channel formerly known as ABC Family. Can After and Star-Crossedshare a night, please?
The show is going to be based on Rhiannon Thomas’ 2015 book A Wicked Thing, and will be adapted by Tom Lynch (The Secret World of Alex Mack). He’ll be writing with Adam Lash and Cori Uchida (Heroes: Reborn) to tell the tale of Aurora, a princess who wakes up 100 years in the future.
Honestly, just following Aurora dealing with everyone she knows being dead and having the marry this dude she just met would be fascinating. But this story also has Aurora taking her kingdom back as a warrior, which I’m also into seeing on the small screen. Of course, small screen does mean an ABC Fam—uh, Freeform budget. So we’ll see.
Justin Lin’s Star Trek Beyond is coming in a few shorts months, but news just broke of reshoots as well as the addition of a new cast member. Deadline reports Shohreh Aghdashloo (24, The Expanse) has been added to the cast as the High Command of the Federation.
We spoke about the film with Lin several months ago and he sounded very confident about the direction it was going. However, this news suggests something was not working when people finally watched the whole thing together. The good news is, if there was a problem, these reshoots are happening to fix it. In theory, they’ll improve the movie... though it is a bit worry some for a new actress to come onto a project this late. If Aghdashloo’s character is a wholly new addition, it could be anything from a quick fix to something more radical.
Aghdashloo herself, though, is simply an amazing actress. She first hit with American audiences on 24, was nominated for an Oscar for House of Sand and Fog, won an Emmy for House of Saddam, and has even been in a big genre movie before. She played Dr. Kavita Rao in X-Men: The Last Stand. Recently, she was seen on Grimm and is currently on SyFy’s The Expanse.
Star Trek Beyond is still scheduled for release on July 22.
Staminus Communications, a hosting provider that specializes in DDoS protection, was the target of a massive hack that exposed sensitive customer data, including credit card information. One of the company’s clients is the Ku Klux Klan, so there’s that.
The hack isn’t a huge surprise, though it’s a remarkably embarrassing turn of events for Staminus. It’s not out of the ordinary for anti-DDoS sites to become fodder for hackers, as they often host unsavory clients. Staminus, for example, plays host to the www.kkk.com, which is obviously a website run by the Ku Klux Klan. (It was still down as of Friday afternoon.) According to Forbes, data from the KKK and “related sites” was also included in the data dump—which, again, is not uncommon.
The company acknowledged that there was a problem—though it didn’t specify a data breach—in a message posted to Twitter on Thursday morning:
The company’s website, as well as those of its entire network, remained down through Thursday evening, and at least a few of its clients’ webpages were still unavailable as of Friday afternoon.
The service outage, however, is now the least of the company’s problems. Multiple outlets had previously reported that Staminus was also the target of a major data breach, and on Friday, the company confirmed it had been hacked. Its homepage was updated with the following statement from CEO Matt Mahvi—emphasis ours:
To follow up on our communication from yesterday evening regarding the system outage, we can now confirm the issue was a result of an unauthorized intrusion into our network. As a result of this intrusion, our systems were temporarily taken offline and customer information was exposed. Upon discovering this attack, Staminus took immediate action including launching an investigation into the attack, notifying law enforcement and restoring our systems.
Based on the initial investigation, we believe that usernames, hashed passwords, customer record information, including name and contact information, and payment card data were exposed. It is important to note that we do not collect Social Security numbers or tax IDs.
While the investigation continues, we have and will continue to put additional measures into place to harden our security to help prevent a future attack. While the exposed passwords were protected with a cryptographic hash, we also strongly recommend that customers change their Staminus password.
I fully recognize that our customers put their trust in Staminus and, while we believe that the issue has been contained, we are continuing to take the appropriate steps needed to safeguard our clients’ information and enhance our data security policies.
We will provide updates, as appropriate, as the investigation continues.
The customer information was reportedly exposed on Thursday after hackers posted a data dump online.
According to the security blog Krebs on Security, the data was posted in e-zine format with the title “Fuck ‘em all.” It reportedly included download links for databases belonging to both Staminus and Intreppid, a Staminus-powered host that protects against gaming-focused DDoS attacks. Forbes reported that the breach included at least 15 gigabytes worth of data.
Ars Technica reported that the data dump also included a note from the hackers titled “Tips when running a security company,” which included the following highlights:
—Use one root password for all the boxes
—Expose PDU’s [power distribution units in server racks] to WAN with telnet auth
—Never patch, upgrade or audit the stack
—Disregard PDO [PHP Data Objects] as inconvenient
—Hedge entire business on security theatre
—Store full credit card info in plaintext
—Write all code with wreckless [sic] abandon
Meanwhile, Staminus has advised its users to “change their Staminus password” while the company investigates.
Fans were not pleased about the major death in last week’s episode of The 100. (Neither were we.) And since then, they’ve been furiously working not just to declare their displeasure—but to make the show itself pay a heavy price.
Spoilers for last week’s episode ahead...
Thanks to Twitter fans have more access to creators and decision makers than ever before, and also more ability to organize a massive campaign in a hurry. Fans of The 100 quickly showed how angry they were, by targeting creator Jason Rothenberg. In just 24 hours, he lost more than 10,000 followers, and his numbers have continued a steady (albeit smaller) decline since.
Ouch.
But Twitter, as a metric of audience engagement is relatively new—and officially, no one really gives a hoot if a showrunner’s follower count plummets after an unpopular story move.
Which was why 100 fans took a different tack last night. They tuned out the show, and focused on getting their competing hashtag, #LGBTFansDeserveBetter, trending. The hashtag was selected because the character who was killed off was one of the few explicitly queer characters on the show.
The hashtag did trend, and The 100 did not crack Nielsen’s Top 5 shows, as measured via Twitter. More importantly, The 100 suffered its worst ratings all season. Only 1.25 million people watched, as compared the week before when 1.39 million viewers tuned in.
It might not be fair to chalk this dip entirely up to fandom wrath—numbers were down across the board, with even The Big Bang Theory scoring its lowest numbers of the season. But when your show already has a tiny audience, antagonizing a large chunk of them might not go so well for you.
Netflix’s animated Voltron reboot just took a step in the right directon. Lauren Montgomery and Joaquim Dos Santos have been named as the showrunners for Voltron: Legendary Defender, both known for their work on Avatar: The Last Airbender and its sequel, The Legend of Korra.
If you’re going to hire two people to run a cartoon, picking folks who worked on two of the best, most beloved series of recent memory is not a bad idea. Dos Santos was a director and producer for both Avatar series, while Montgomery was a producer and storyboard artist for Korra (although she also did storyboard work for the excellent Avengers: Earth Mightiest Heroes and Young Justice cartoons).
There’s still no other info regarding the show, so it’s still a huge unknown (made up of five, smaller unknowns). But suffice it to say the series looks like it’s in pretty good robot lion jaws hands.
