Until recently, DC desperately avoided any sort of acknowledgement of the classic 1960s Batman TV show. Not only did it not represent who Batman was now—a layered, gritty character—it was viewed as an embarrassment. That is, until Warner Bros. got the rights to merchandise the series, and DC gave us one of the most joyful Batman comics in history.

Joyful really is the best way to describe Batman ‘66, the digital run of which ended last week with a loving homage to the show’s original opening titles, ahead of the book’s final end next month. After decades of shunning this camp classic, it was like a fountain of pent-up adoration for the series was released.

From the get go, Batman ‘66 wholly embraced the wacky, weird, and colorful world of Adam West’s Batman and just completely ran with it. Jeff Parker’s, Lee Allred and Len Wein’s scripts nailed the style of writing on the show, bouncing between catchphrase and bizarre logical leaps as often as the series did itself, or totally recapturing Adam West’s hallmark intonation.

The rotating house of artists and colorists—Jose Garcia-Lopez, Rubén Procopio, Joe Quinones, Mike Allred, Sandy Jarrell, Jordie Bellaire, Laura Allred and so many, many more—fully embraced the show’s pop-art look and delivered a punchy, bright, and vivid series that flitted between classic comic book homages, the aforementioned pop-art, and right down to recreations of the slight color shifting blue haze of an old TV set. Page after page, a never-ending love letter to the series.

And what made it such a delight to read was that at no point did Batman ‘66 ever really mock itself. It never took the easy way out of acknowledging that yes, it was campy, and goofy, and just playing along. There was never a meta-textual embarrassment of being so wholly like this insane, cheesy show—its love of the original series was truly earnest.

There’s something about the wide-eyed innocence of its love, the truthfulness of it all, that made Batman ‘66 such a delight to read chapter after chapter of. You could feel the excitement of it oozing from every page, electric and infectious. In the vast sea of Batman comics—many of which are fantastic in their own right—that joy stood out, such a radically different interpretation of a familiar character, and was proud to do so.

But Batman ‘66’s success didn’t just rely on recreating the TV show’s aesthetic and tone, week in, week out. It used its medium to the fullest extent to expand and create the ideal version of the show. The scale was so much bigger, with Batman trekking across the world for adventures in Japan, plus massive action sequences that the budget of a 1960s TV show, even a wildly popular one as Batman was, could never afford. It embraced the madness and gave it a scope to create truly brilliant capers. I mean, hell, this is the series that gave Batman an atomic-powered giant Bat-Robot, for crying out loud.

Batman ‘66 took the charm and delight of the TV show and added so much of its own that it became more than just an adaptation, but a loving continuation of what made the original series so delightful—both figuratively in its additions, and sometimes literally, as is the case when Len Wein adapted an unused script by Harlan Ellison that would’ve introduced Two Face to the show, and turned it into an adventure packed with setpieces and events that would’ve never have appeared on the television show. The show may be responsible for a lot of Batman ‘66’s inherent charm, but the comic constantly one-upped itself to transform itself into an idealized version of it at its very best, instead of being content to stick as a simple homage.

That willingness to also go further also applied to the comic’s villains. Batman ‘66 layered the universe of the show by not just using the classic TV villains—like Cesar Romero’s Joker, the Julie Newmar and Eartha Kitt Catwomen, Burgess Meredith’s Penguin, and so many more—but by running rampant through decades of Batman’s gallery of rogues that had emerged since the show was on air. Just as the scope of the stories had grown in the comics, the depth of its universe had, too: We got 1960s versions of Bane, of Harley Quinn, of the previously-mentioned Two Face. Even more-obscure classic villains like Lord Death Man (actually created for a May 1966 issue of Batman, but most famous for his appearance in Jiro Kuwata’s Bat-Manga) or Clayface got their moments to shine.

And brilliantly, Batman ‘66 didn’t just smash these characters into its world and expect them to fit—it gave them new origins, new reasons to be part of this world that ultimately made their transitions into the villains we know and recognise all the more delightful. Harley Quinn’s original psychiatrist persona Harleen Quinzel (called Holly Quinn in Batman ‘66) appeared in several early stories related to the Joker’s incarceration before she eventually became Harley , nearly 2 years after her first appearances. Killer Croc started out as a henchman of King Tut before his transformation. The deft manner in which the series managed to bridge itself between the world of the show and the world of the comics that came after it wasn’t just fun, but evolved the TV show into a whole, absurd, and endlessly delightful universe.

If you’ve ever had a soft spot in your Bat-Heart for the classic Batman show, Batman ‘66 is essential reading, and not just because it’s good for the soul. In many ways, it perhaps supersedes the TV show as the ultimate realization of the concept: and in doing so, and by expanding that universe in the only way comic books can, it gave us a definitive interpretation of Bat-canon like no other Batman book could.

A cache of over 4,000 silver and bronze coins dating back to ancient Rome has been discovered by a Swiss farmer. Buried some 1,700 years ago, it’s one of the largest treasures of its kind ever found in Switzerland.

As The Guardian reports, the trove of coins collectively weighs 33 pounds, or 15 kilograms. They were found on a spot of land that has never been developed.

The farmer found the cache while trying to rid his cherry orchard of a molehill.

The coins, which are in remarkably great shape, were found in Ueken, which is located in northern Switzerland. A coin expert says their excellent condition likely means they were removed from circulation soon after being minted.

The coins have been dated to the period stretching from the time of Emperor Aurelian (270-275 AD) to the rule of Maximian (286-305 AD). The most recent coins were minted back in 294 AD.

More from The Guardian:

The coins’ excellent condition indicated that the owner systematically stashed them away shortly after they were made, the archaeologists said. For some reason that person had buried them shortly after 294 and never retrieved them. Some of the coins, made mainly of bronze but with a 5% silver content (an unusually high amount), were buried in small leather pouches.

The exact purchasing value of the money is not known, but they probably represented about a year or two of wages. According to Swiss law, the coins “belong to the public,” so at best the farmer will get a finder’s fee. As for the fate of the coins, they’re set to be put on display at Switzerland’s Vindonissa Museum, in Brugg, Aargau.

[ Guardian | National Post ]

Email the author at george@gizmodo.com and follow him at @dvorsky. All images: AFP/Kantons Archaeologie Aargau

Wow. PlayMID’s Porta Estel·lar is a trully stunning visual light show inside an old airplane fuselage. It mimics the concept of interstellar travel, “from departure and takeoff to the sighting of comets, planets, galaxies and alien worlds, until finally returning safe to earth.” Watch it, it’s a total trip (in every sense of the word).

SPLOID is delicious brain candy. Follow us on Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube.

So you’ve probably seen that viral video showing cats having the bejeezus scared out of them by a particularly snake-like vegetable: the lowly cucumber. Hilarious, right? Sure—if you’re a human. As a veterinary technician points out, this trending activity could cause lasting psychological problems for your feline companion.

The video, posted to YouTube on November 10, has already amassed nearly 1.5 million hits.

For you cat owners out there, I’m sure the temptation to try this at home is a very powerful one. But as Lara Chan of the Calgary Cat Clinic told CBC News, some cats are quite delicate, and this sudden shock could cause long-term problems:

Chan said the long, skinny shape of the vegetable scares the cats because they instinctively think it’s a snake — even if they’ve never seen a snake before.

“It’s that self-preservation,” she said. “We get quite fixated on cats being predators. But cats are also prey animals, they’re quite small. So they could fall victim to a snake.”

If you’ve already played this prank on your cat, Chan said, you may have inadvertently made them afraid of cucumbers — forever.

“You’re terrifying them. They’re reacting like this because they’re worried that something is going to hurt them. And you’re doing this in their house where you want them to be safe and secure.”

This trick, says Chan, may instill a long-standing, irrational fear of cucumbers in cats, which means owners would have to keep them away from the lowly vegetable for the rest of their lives. Sounds silly and trite, but it’s important that your cat feels safe in its own home environment, and that you don’t abuse your cat with this brain-hack.

Email the author at george@gizmodo.com and follow him at @dvorsky. Top image by Youtube/MrFunnyMals

The theme song of the eight-part Adventure Time miniseries that just concluded, “Stakes,” is called “Everything Stays,” and it’s about how things remain where you left them. Sort of a fitting theme for a series about change and how everything goes in cycles.

Spoilers ahead...

“Stakes” is basically about Marceline the Vampire Queen deciding she doesn’t want to be a vampire any more—so she gets her friend (and possible girlfriend) Princess Bubblegum to remove her vampire essence. Unfortunately, this leads to all the most powerful vampires that Marceline killed back in the day coming back. We learn about how and why Marceline rid the world of vampires, as she hunts them down one by one. And Marceline sort of makes peace with her past, sort of.

This is very much a miniseries about the illusion of change—at the end of it, Marceline is a vampire again, and Princess Bubblegum even appears to regain her throne in the Candy Kingdom (after having been deposed by the King of Ooo at the start of the season.) Everything is back where it started—but the characters have been changed by their experiences.

This is a brand new song by Rebecca Sugar, who wrote all the best songs on Adventure Time (and crafted a lot of the best episodes) before she went off to start Steven Universe.

And speaking of which—there is so much insane gorgeous imagery in this episode, including a ton of really fantastic dream sequences. This show is really pushing its limits in terms of pure visual artistry.

So the theme of change, and the illusion of change, is really at the heart of what this miniseries is about. After Marceline has staked all the other ancient uber-vamps that have come back in the wake of her cure, she faces the Vampire King, who wants to convince her that he’s changed and no longer wants to be a vampire in this new world. And they talk about how she’s lived 1,000 years, and has seen that the same events repeat, over and over, because nobody else lives long enough to stand back and see the pattern the way she can. So the Vampire King wants to break the cycle in which he dies and she becomes a vampire again—by subjecting himself to the same de-vamping process that Princess Bubblegum subjected Marceline to previously.

Amazingly—and in a bold move—the Vampire King isn’t lying, or pulling some kind of trick, which is something that almost any other TV show would have defaulted to. (Looking at you, Doctor Who, with your “Davros is repentant” schtick.) In fact, for a moment, it seems as though Marceline and the Vampire King have actually managed to change their destinies. The Vampire King has turned into a cute lion, and Marceline managed to stay human. Of course, it can’t last, because of Princess Bubblegum’s perennial habit of delegating every important task to a candy minion who’s either incompetent or secretly evil, or both. (In this case, Peppermint Butler, who spills the Vampire King’s vamp essence and unleashes an evil dark cloud monster.)

And meanwhile, we’re learning about Marceline’s origins, which continue to get more fascinating the deeper we delve into them.

Basically, Marceline became a vampire-hunter after she was left alone by Simon, who was on his way to becoming the Ice King. It’s yet another heart-rending scene between Simon and Marcy, in which the Ice King flees from Marceline because he knows he’s losing his mind and he wants to protect her. “But how can you protect me if you’re not here?” she asks. She finds an old man who looks sort of like Simon, but it’s just a random human who sees her staking a vamp and is scared of her. So she decides the way she can honor Simon and wait for his return is by killing off all the other vamps. Eventually, she even joins up with a band of human survivors who are trying to escape the fallout of the Mushroom War.

And that’s how she finally faces the Vampire King and gets turned into a vampire, in the process of killing him.

The stuff with Simon comes full circle at the end—Marceline is despondent after her attempts to free herself from the vampire curse have led to a giant black cloud attacking the countryside. She no longer believes there’s any point in trying to make a difference, because things will always turn out the same way no matter what. Until Simon shows up and tells her that she’s right, and the best thing to do is run away and hide—because she and Simon are cockroaches, or rats, they survive no matter what.

So Marcy realizes that she’s doing to her friends the same thing that Simon did to her, which started this whole mess. But also that the notion of change being an illusion is sort of an artifact of surviving at all costs. And she goes and takes the vampire essence back inside herself—but things have changed. She’s more in touch with her feelings again, and she’s grown up. And she hints that she and Princess Bubblegum may have a long future together, in a sweet scene.

And yay for the King of Ooo getting his just desserts (pun intended) from the Candy Kingdom. Fuck that guy.

There’s been a certain amount of Adventure Time fatigue among some of my friends lately—a sense that the show is still beautiful-looking and fascinating, but the story isn’t moving forward any more. It’s sort of stuck in a holding pattern, since Finn met his dad. But the storyline where Princess Bubblegum lost her throne felt like a really interesting direction, since it all came out of the Cosmic Owl screwing around in her dreams, and I’m interested to see where the show goes next. Plus, this miniseries really feels like a rejoinder to the people who complain the show isn’t moving fast enough with its plots—maybe change isn’t permanent or dramatic on this show, but at least the characters are never the same at the end of each revolution of the wheel. And it does feel like they’re growing up, slowly.

Charlie Jane Anders is the author of All The Birds in the Sky, coming in January from Tor Books.Follow her on Twitter, and email her.

Thanks to Game of Thrones and The Hunger Games, the world knows that Natalie Dormer is fantastic. She’s becoming a bigger star by the day, and now she’s the lead in a supernatural thriller called The Forest, based on an actual place.

That place is Aokigahara Forest, set at the base of Mount Fuji in Japan. Some refer to it as “The Suicide Forest” because of the huge amount of people who go into the area and kill themselves. In the film, directed by Jason Zada, Dormer plays a woman who goes into the forest to find her missing sister. Which, of course, is not a good idea.

The Forest opens January 8 and the trailer is below. It’s ultra creepy, and gets extra high marks for the terrifying use of a Viewmaster.

Contact the author at germain@io9.com.

Rockstars are go! For the 50th anniversary of the puppet adventure show Thunderbirds, Pulp frontman Jarvis Cocker is joining Portishead’s Adrian Utley and Goldfrapp’s Will Gregory for a ginormous tribute concert on Dec. 1.

Contact the author at charliejane@io9.com.

In early 2016, astronomers will be looking at a specific part of the sky, knowing with near certainty that a supernova will appear. How is it possible to predict such events? The answer has to do with an effect known as gravitational lensing.

Technically, the 2016 supernova is a “replay” of the supernova Refsdal, first observed by astronomers in November 2014. They observed four different visual instances of it. The light from this massive stellar explosion appeared in multiple parts of the sky because a huge galaxy cluster, MACS J1149+2223, was directly in front of it.

An illustration of gravitational lensing. But instead of a galaxy, imagine a supernova. (Image: Public domain)

Logically, the supernova should be obscured by the galaxy cluster. But the cluster’s tremendous gravitational forces are bending space-time around it. The effect, known as gravitational lensing, essentially turns the cluster into a gigantic magnifying glass.

A visualization of gravitational lensing (Credit: ESA/YouTube)

Together, the formation of the four supernova images is known as an Einstein Cross. Astronomers have seen this sort of thing before in the form of duplicated images of galaxies, but this is the first time it has ever been seen in a supernova.

Supernova Refsdal. The top circle shows the position of the Supernova as it was seen in 1995. The bottom circle shows the galaxy which lensed the Refsdal Supernova four times. The circle in the middle shows the predicted position of the reappearing Supernova in early 2016. (Image and caption credit Hubble/NASA/ESA)

The four images of the supernova are now fading away as the explosion simmers down—but astronomers are anticipating a replay of Refsdal early next year. As noted in a Hubble Space Telescope release,

The supernova images do not arrive on Earth at the same time because, for each image produced, the light takes a different route. For some of these routes, the light takes longer to reach us than for others.

So, by using various models of the cluster acting as a lens, the astronomers have created a set of predictions for when it’ll appear again. Their best guess is some time during the first third of 2016. The Hubble team will be ready.

[ Hubble Space Telescope ]

Email the author at george@gizmodo.com and follow him at @dvorsky. Top image by NASA, ESA, S. Rodney (John Hopkins University, USA) and the FrontierSN team; T. Treu (University of California Los Angeles, USA), P. Kelly (University of California Berkeley, USA) and the GLASS team; J. Lotz (STScI) and the Frontier Fields team; M. Postman (STScI) and the CLASH team; and Z. Levay (STScI)

Way back in September, our very own Esther Inglis-Arkell found a recipe for condoms from 1844. It was only two paragraphs long, so we thought, how hard can it be? Really hard, it turns out. Also gross and potentially dangerous.

Here’s the recipe:

Take the caecum of the sheep; soak it first in water, turn it on both sides, then repeat the operation in a weak ley of soda, which must be changed every four or five hours for five or six successive times; then remove the mucus membrane with the nail; sulphur, wash in clean water, and then in soap and water; rinse, inflate, and dry.

Next cut it to the required length and attach a piece of ribbon to the open end. Used to prevent infection or pregnancy. The different qualities consist of extra pains being taken in the above process, and in polishing, scenting, &c.

We got the sheep caecums from a butcher. Soaked in lye for a good long while, used a butter knife instead of a nail, and used a very dilute solution of Potassium metabisulfite instead of sulphur. Also, we put ours on a banana, which we’re betting the 1844 makers didn’t do.

Contact the author at katharine@io9.com.

Kotaku Trying To Sit In Video Games For The First Time | Gizmodo This Is How We Know a Supernova Is Coming in 2016 | Gawker Student Movements Carry on Tradition of Arguing With Themselves | Lifehacker Give the Perfect Handmade Gift with These DIY Projects

Tim Doyle’s work is always amazing, but he outdid himself with two variations on art starring Marceline for Galerie F and Cartoon Network’s Adventure Time miniseries.

You can see more of Doyle’s work on his site and buy it at his store. These particular pieces are at Galerie F.

Contact the author at katharine@io9.com.

The Apple is one of the most legendary cult movies of all time—this disco dystopia, in which a singing duo from Saskatchewan get perverted by the Satanic music industry, is a legendary study in excess. But Nigel Lithgoe, the film’s choreographer, really believed he would get an Oscar.

http://www.amazon.com/The-Apple-Cath...

These days, Lithgoe is best known as the producer of American Idol and So You Think You Can Dance, the latter of which he also judges. But he recently gave an in-depth interview to Yahoo! Music about the film, in which he reminisces about the fact at the time in Berlin, you could buy hard drugs over the counter, and all the dancers were on heavy drugs. “It was like herding cats.” He also reflects on the film’s legacy:

I mean, it’s laughable now. And it’s fun to make fun of it. But at the time, it was really, really depressing on some days. Very, very stressful. It was not such a pleasant process, making that film. It wasn’t pleasant memories, let’s just put it that way.

We didn’t really like the script. I mean, we really didn’t. But the music we thought was terrific at the time. Certainly the use of strings and the real violins and everything was just terrific and felt very inspiring to me.

All That Jazz came out the same year and went to the Cannes Film Festival with The Apple, and All That Jazz was actually in the Cannes competition. And I kept thinking, ‘My God, am I really going to have to go up onstage in Hollywood and apologize to Bob Fosse for picking up the Oscar for Best Choreography?’ I was so dumb – because they don’t even do an Oscar for choreography.

Edited to add: The choreography in this movie is kind of insane, and does in fact deserve an Oscar, even though the movie in general is a disaster.

There’s tons more at the link, and it’s well worth reading. [Yahoo! Music]

Contact the author at charliejane@io9.com and follow her on Twitter @Charliejane

There’s gold in them thar asteroids—if only we could find it. Well, and get to it, extract it, and haul it back to Earth. You know, details. But that first part just got easier, thanks to a clever new sensor designed to sniff out gold, platinum, and even diamond inside asteroids.

The sensor, technically a “gamma ray spectroscope” stuffed inside a CubeSat satellite, was developed by researchers at Vanderbilt University and published last month by the International Society for Optics and Photonics. To get even more science fictional on us, the space gold sensor uses a newly discovered crystal composed of europium-doped strontium iodide (that’s SrI₂ with a dash of Eu), which apparently does a bang-up job detecting the high-energy gamma rays emitted by asteroids.

A strontium iodide crystal that can be used to fabricate gamma ray spectrometers. Image Credit: Burger Lab / Fisk University

Why do we care about those? Gamma rays, which form when cosmic rays slam into asteroids, smashing up atoms in the top layers, are like a cosmic fingerprint. The intensity and wavelength of gamma rays emissions allows scientists to work out the composition of a rock, including concentrations of iron, oxygen, magnesium, silicon, and, most importantly, precious metals and crystals.

“Space missions to the Moon, Mars, Mercury and the asteroid Vesta among others have included low-resolution spectrometers, but it has taken months of observation time and great expense to map their elemental surface compositions from orbit,” study co-author Keivan Stassun said in a statement. “With our proposed system it should be possible to measure sub-surface elemental abundances accurately, and to do it much more cheaply.”

That’s good news, because everything about asteroid mining, from building the equipment to launching it to hauling a giant space boulder back to Earth, is going to be hella expensive. Then again, some people (billionaires) see asteroid mining as an investment that’ll pay off big in the long-run. And it’s not hard to figure out why. All the platinum humans have ever dredged from the ground could fit inside a small apartment. A single, baby-class asteroid might contain more. The first people to stick a flag in that rock might stand to become the richest human beings alive.

Prototype of a CubeSat version of the gamma-ray spec that would whizz by asteroids, searching for veins of gold and platinum. Image Credit: Burger Lab / Fisk University

Especially given this other timely bit of news: last week, the Senate Commerce, Science and Transportation Committee passed H.R. 2262, a bill which “establishes a legal right to resources U.S. citizens obtain from asteroids consistent with current law and international obligations.” In other words, you find that lucky asteroid with your gamma-ray-strontium-crystal-space-gold detector, it’s yours by law.

[Vanderbilt News | Space Policy Online]

Follow the author @themadstone

Internet cafes started as coffee shops where you could check email. But over the years, people turned them into dens for sharing pirated music, hotspots for video game addiction, and even temporary housing.

How Internet Cafes Were Born

In the February 17, 1993 edition of the Washington Post, writer John Boudreau filed a story from San Francisco headlined “A Cuppa and a Computer: Coffeehouse Cyberpunks Seek Love and the Meaning of Life.”

Boudreau described how the bohemian cafes that birthed SF’s Beatnik scene had morphed into 20 nondescript coffee houses full of low tables with inlaid keyboards, where computers connected visitors to other coffee houses scattered in San Francisco and Berkeley. These places were part of a new communications network called SF Net, which provided an online (and real life) forum that connected everyone from “twenty-something slackers” to “physicists,” who rocked screen names like Warlock Scar and Ultra Crab. It was an era when the internet was still being described as an “electronic bulletin board.”

What did people do on SF Net? They flirted, they waxed existential, posted short stories, and role-played fake personas (the Post story mentions one regular who appeared as a 14th-century Pope).

SF Net was founded a year-and-a-half earlier, in 1991, by a 35-year-old San Franciscan named Wayne Gregori. At that time, the network serviced 900 regulars in the Bay Area—half of which were home subscribers, and half logged on at coffee houses, which charged fifty cents for eight minutes of computer use. They also provided plastic keyboard covers to shield keys from spilled cups of Joe.

“This is the best example of cyberspace,” Gregori told the Post. “There’s something so spiritual about getting to know someone only through words. It’s like a living novel, a drama that plays itself out 24 hours a day. You can really get lost in this thing.”

Three years later, in 1994, a designer named Ivan Pope over in the UK refined the internet cafe concept. He proposed a cafe that centered on internet access (that allowed people to browse art), as opposed to regular coffee shops that offered it as just an extra amenity. It was part of a commission for an art event called “Towards the Aesthetics of the Future” at the Institute of Contemporary Art (ICA) in London.

Soon after—in the same era as dial-up connections and flying toaster screensavers—the world’s first internet cafe opened in the British capital. Called Cyberia, its goal was to give everyday folks access to a desktop computer and the World Wide Web for a small hourly fee. Business boomed, and the model attracted the attention of rich CEOs.

Five years later, in 1999, then-CEO of European budget airline easyJet launched the first chain of internet cafes in the UK, and the world. It was called easyEverything: The Internet Shop. The flagship store across from Victoria Station in central London was 10,000 square feet and packed in 400 screens for $1.60 an hour internet access.

The idea was eventually exported to New York’s Times Square in 2000, but by then, the idea of going someplace to simply get online was already getting outdated and quaint. The internet was something you could access from home; it was evolving. And internet cafes got a whole lot weirder.

The easyEverything internet cafe in Times Square was the Guinness-certified world’s largest, with 800 PC terminals. It’s seen here on November 28, 2000. Photo by Chris Hondros/Newsmakers via Getty

A Place for Pirates

Flannel-wearing 90s hipsters got Internet cafes off the ground, but internet pirates jonesing for free movies and music took the establishment to a whole new level. At the turn of the millennium—around the same time Napster became popular—sharing music online did, too. And people in pursuit of illicit MP3s started filling internet cafes again.

In the early 2000s, easyJet’s internet cafe chain held a promotion that allowed customers to copy a CD’s worth of music from the internet for a measly £5. Surprise, surprise, record labels were none to pleased: Sony Music, Universal Music, and EMI launched an 18-month legal battle, and emerged victorious. In January 2003, easyJet was found guilty of copyright infringement.

Mexico also saw a spate of piracy in its internet cafes. As far back as 2000, CDs of pirated software were sold on the streets (“Everybody comes here,” one vendor told Wired. “We get little kids buying Dragonball and old ladies buying Encarta 2000.”) This led to cops raiding internet cafes, burning CDs, and checking software on all computers and demanding to see original receipts of any Microsoft programs on the machines.

Pirating was harder to track a decade or more ago, especially at internet cafes in developing nations: In 2006, a third of Mexicans used internet cafes to get on the internet, and with several people using the same computer every day, being able to bust the actual pirate was not easy.

But things were different in Australia. In 2008, a massive raid of a Sydney internet cafe by the Australian Federal Police left the establishment with an $82,000 fine, 40 charges of copyright infringement, court costs, and forfeit of 60 computer terminals and three servers. Those 60 terminals had contained a staggering 8 terabytes of stolen music, movies, and TV. (For some context, the Hubble Space Telescope collect 45 terabytes of galactic photos in 20 years.) The company pleaded guilty to all charges.

Nowadays, pirating penalties are much stiffer. In Australia, there’s a set of laws in place that warn internet cafes that individuals caught pirating over the establishment’s network can face fines of over $60,000.

You may think that piracy scandals would’ve been the nail of the internet cafe coffin. Far from it, actually. Because gradually, the purpose of internet cafes evolved from simply checking email or hopping online. Today internet cafes have evolved again, becoming cultural institutions in several countries.

The Rise of the Game Den

Demand for internet connectivity began to rise globally, but most people didn’t have internet access at home. This began driving the demand for internet cafes from West to East. In 2011, there were over 350,000 internet cafes across Asia. In countries like China and South Korea, a specific, new clientele took internet cafe revenue to those astronomical heights: gamers.

In 2011, gaming in Asian internet cafes generated $19 billion in revenue, according to a study from marketing firm Pearl Research that looked at five East and South Asian countries. It’s the same study that found that customers in Korea headed to internet cafes exclusively to play massively multiplayer online games, despite the fact that 82 percent of Korean households in 2011 owned a PC.

How’d the craze kick off? Nearly two decades ago, Blizzard Entertainment released StarCraft, a military scifi strategy game, and it took Korea by storm. Suddenly, thousands of people wanted access to PCs optimized for playing games. The market answered with internet cafes built for just for gaming—or “PC bangs,” as they’re known in Korea. Even if patrons owned computers at home, the ones at PC bangs are more souped-up and better equipped for online gaming.

PC bangs are still in full force today, with over 22,000 reported in 2007. Patrons spend a buck an hour for the all-you-can-play, high-speed bandwidth, powerful hardware, and snacks for purchase. Gaming addiction is also a problem, with work and school falling by the wayside as gamers spend all their time and money at PC bangs. In 2011, Korea implemented a controversial curfew that mandated customers under 16 were not allowed in internet cafes from midnight to 6 a.m.

Internet cafes took off elsewhere in East Asia, too. In China, they saw explosive growth in popularity in the ‘90s and early 2000s for the same reason they did in Korea: Young men flocked to play online games. Then, in 2002, a group of teen boys burned down an internet cafe in Beijing and tragically killed 24. Since that time, the government began regulating these establishments heavily.

Young Chinese zone out in front of video games on June 11, 2005 in Wuhan, China. At that time, there were 2,000 internet cafes in Wuhan alone, and cost seven cents to play overnight. Credit: Cancan Chu/Getty Images

Meanwhile, across the pond in Japan, internet cafes are a much more private experience. You can rent out a private cubicle-booth with your own computer, comfy chair, and have access to all-you-can-drink sodas, snacks, a vast manga library, and tons of other amenities. Unfortunately, they’re so comfortable and convenient, that over the last decade, some customers have settled in—and don’t want to leave.

Bloomberg reported that in 2007, Japan’s Ministry of Health, Labor and Welfare said that 60,900 people spent a night in an internet cafe, and that 5,400 were living in them full time. To be clear, staying overnight in a Japanese internet cafe is actually something you can do—many cafes offer a quiet sleeping area, and some include small beds inside the booth with your computer. But these aren’t overnight guests; they’re part of a relatively new group called “net cafe refugees.”

These so-called “refugees” can spend around $15 a night for a place to sleep that’s cheaper than a hotel or monthly rent for an apartment. Net cafes have turned into temporary housing for cash-strapped singles (or for couples, who can rent a two-person booth).

Internet cafes seem to be spots for all sorts of bizarre news: Earlier this year, one man died in a Taiwanese internet cafe after gaming for three days straight. Also this year, a 26-year-old woman in China gave birth while in an internet cafe toilet cubicle.

And yet, despite the piles of gaming revenue and the cheap housing, internet cafes are on the decline in Asia. Over the last six years, increased government regulation in China, at least, has seen a whopping 130,000 internet cafes shut down. The reason? Officials claim that these places are corrupting users 18 and under.

Still, there’s another reason internet cafes are shuttering: Mobile phones.

But They’re Not Dead Yet

Silicon Valley companies like Microsoft and Google and Apple are clamoring to get “the next billion” online. By that, they mean the billions of humans who live in developing nations where internet access is spotty at best. Previously, internet cafes were the solution. But now, that’s changing.

In Nigeria, for example, the number of active mobile web subscriptions tripled from around 30 million in March 2013 to 90 million in February 2015. With all those people accessing the internet on web-connected phones, the need for internet cafes in emerging markets started to dwindle.

As a result, internet cafes are shuttering across the world. Quartz reports that the number of internet cafes has dropped in Thailand, India, Rwanda, and even in wealthier countries like China and Korea.

But considering internet cafes’ complicated past, it makes sense that their future could be complicated too.

Despite more people owning web-connected mobile phones globally, internet cafes still get developing nations online—like this one in Jakarta, seen here in 2015. Credit: AP Photo/Tatan Syuflana

Earlier this year, police reported that in Colorado, a new wave of internet cafes started popping up in order to skirt local gambling laws. Five have been shut down since April, but two have since reopened. Some of them have unmarked store fronts, or advertise “certified skill games.” Colorado law prohibits slot machines and other forms of gambling that aren’t “games of skill” like poker.

This new wave of internet cafes have a tawdry reputation that might be the only way future internet users will know them. Today’s online gambling rooms are far cry from the Bay Area cappuccino spots filled with Nirvana-era cyberpunks posting to electronic bulletin boards, musing about infinity.

That said, internet cafes are also being used for less depressing purposes. Last month, NPR reported on a Pakistani lawyer whose side enterprise is opening pop-up internet cafes for Middle Eastern refugees all over Europe. Along borders and high-traffic routes throughout Europe, he’s set up basic cafes where people can practice English, order hot meals, buy phone cards or communicate with loved ones on Skype.

As the internet changes, so does the way we use it. Internet cafes may never completely die. Even in the face of cheap mobile phones and free wifi at Starbucks, people could still use buildings dedicated for internet use for a variety of purposes, from sketchy and shady, to something that is actually humanitarian.

Contact the author at bryan@gizmodo.com, or follow him on Twitter.

Top image: Cancan Chu/Getty Images

The moment when you discover what Starship Troopers is really about is one of the great eureka moments in the life of any young movie dork. I’ve got vivid memories of staggering out of a suburban multiplex in 1997 and sputtering, “What the fuck was that?” To my teenage self, it was basically Saved by the Bell plus giant alien bugs cutting people in half. And since I liked the spectacle of giant-monster-related carnage, I wasn’t even mad. I was just confounded. Like: Why were all the human characters so stupid? Could it be possible that a movie so big and expensive could also be so blindingly, knowingly dumb? And how is someone going to make a grand-scale blockbuster with Doogie Howser, MD as the most famous person in the cast. (Neil Patrick Harris was still unequivocally Doogie at that point; he would remain Doogie until the first Harold and Kumar flick. Look, 1997 was a long time ago.) And when someone told me, months later, that the movie was really about fascism and militarism, I absolutely thought that person was full of shit. But that’s exactly what it is. Starship Troopers may be the greatest joke ever played on the American moviegoing public.

The demented genius filmmaker Paul Verhoeven grew up in the Nazi-occupied Netherlands, an experience he’d explore more straightforwardly when he went back to the Netherlands and made the great 2007 WWII melodrama Black Book after his Hollywood career ended. When he started work on Starship Troopers, it was supposed to be a sci-fi movie called Bug Hunt at Outpost Nine, and I think we can all agree that that’s a superior name. But someone explained to the execs in charge that Bug Hunt, with its interplanetary war against giant insects, had a lot in common with Robert Heinlin’s right-wing 1959 sci-fi novel Starship Troopers. So they bought the rights and changed a few things so that Bug Hunt would now be an adaptation, sort of like how Die Hard With a Vengeance was a generic thriller rewritten to be about John McClane. But when Verhoeven tried to read the book, he claims that it made him “bored and depressed,” and he never finished it. So the director here had a whole lot of contempt for the movie he was supposed to be making, and that contempt comes through very, very clearly in the finished product.

When we first meet the movie’s shiny, plasticine teenage heroes, they’re in history class, studying “the failure of democracy”—and you might not notice at first, since you’re watching Denise Richards and the hilarious slab of meat Casper Van Diem flirting on their proto-iPads. They live in Buenos Aires, and they all have Spanish names, but they’re all as white as day. Van Diem plays some sort of futuristic arena football that involves doing lots of wire-controlled flips. Neil Patrick Harris has a pet ferret named Cyrano who he psychically controls. In science class, these kids banter while dissecting giant bugs in a truly disgusting classroom scene that plays like something Troma might’ve made if they ever had the budget. Based on everything in these early scenes, it’s amazing that we could ever see this movie as anything other than a dark, fucked-up comedy. But studio action movies in the ’90s were so routinely stupid—remember, this was the year of the Matthew Broderick Godzilla remake—that it all seemed halfway plausible.

Along the way, the movie features futuristic newsreel footage that straight-up quotes Nazi propaganda films. Kids fight over guns! The government advertises public executions on prime-time TV! Newscasters talk about the need to straight-up destroy star systems occupied by the enemy “bugs” because they could present a threat! It’s clear that the humans struck first. There’s a drill sergeant character who goes way beyond the standard movie stereotype, actually intentionally maiming the soldiers he’s treating. I don’t know how teenage me missed all these obvious-in-retrospect clues, but I don’t have to feel too bad about it, since most of the critics who reviewed Starship Troopers at the time also had no idea what the movie was doing.

About halfway through, the movie abruptly switches up styles and becomes a long, grisly series of battle scenes on bug-controlled desert planets. Giant bugs dive out of the sky to chop off heads. They breath fire and slowly immolate bodies. Cameras pan lovingly over entire fields of dismembered corpses. A closing spaceship door cuts a woman in half. Michael Ironside sticks his mechanical fingers into a head wound, and then gravely looks up and declares, “They sucked his brains out.” These scenes are way more gnarly and brutal than what you’d see in virtually any Hollywood studio movie of the time—or, come to think of it, of any time. And the movie shows these scenes of awful death on a mass scale without ever changing its whole high-space-adventure tone. When characters die, their friends furrow their brows, maybe say a few words of goodbye, and then it’s off to kill more bugs.

And it helps the movie’s repeat watchability that, judged on pure action-movie merits, those bug-battle scenes are extremely fucking good. It shouldn’t be a surprise. Verhoeven had, after all, directed Robocop and Total Recall, two of the greatest and nastiest action movies of all time. This was the beginning of the whole CGI-movie-spectacle era, and we’ve learned, in the years since, how hard it is to show humans fighting computer cartoons and make them look like they exist in the same universe. But even working with relatively primitive technology, Verhoeven pretty much pulled it off. The movie’s spaceships look like trash, but the bugs themselves have aged pretty well—especially the truly disgusting ones, like the brain bug, with its vaginal-opening mouth and its brain-sucking spike. And as with every Verhoeven movie, the movie is stocked with all these scarily vivid faces— nobody has ever gotten more mileage from Jake Busey’s teeth. And it’s even more fun to watch now that you’ll recognize some of those faces: Dean Norris! Amy Smart! Carver from The Wire!

But then, the movie had to be fun to watch. For its satire to have any bite at all, it had to succeed on pure action-movie terms, and it did. Verhoeven wasn’t the type of satirist to put up blinking arrows that made everything he did obvious. Instead, he disguised his nasty poison pill of a movie as a particularly perverse piece of American blockbuster entertainment. He used Hollywood’s machinery to make Hollywood look unconscionably stupid. And 18 years later, the most amazing thing about Starship Troopers is that it ever had a chance to exist.

Tom Breihan is the senior editor at Stereogum; he’s written for Pitchfork, the Village Voice, GQ, Grantland, and the Classical. He lives in Charlottesville, Va. He is tall, and on Twitter.

Netflix Instant doesn’t have to feel like a depleted Blockbuster in 1990, where you spend half an hour browsing hopeless straight-to-video thrillers before saying “fuck it” and loading up another Archer. Streaming services can be an absolute treasure trove, particularly if you like action movies, and especially if you like foreign action movies. Every week in this space, we’ll highlight a new one. You can read previous installments over here.

Evangelist Aimee Semple McPherson became a superstar after founding her church in 1923 Los Angeles; her Foursquare Gospel teachings still have millions of followers today. But she made her mark on history beyond religion, too—by mysteriously vanishing for five weeks at the height of her fame.

It happened in May 1926, when the 36-year-old had already been a bona fide celebrity for years. And it had been a hard road to get to that point—her early life had been anything but easy.

Born in Canada, she’d married Irish Pentecostal preacher Robert Semple after meeting him at a revival when she was just 17. They’d been married only two years when Robert died after coming down with malaria and dysentery while the couple was on a missionary trip to Hong Kong. Aimee—a 19-year-old pregnant widow—headed back to America to live with her mother. In New York, she gave birth to a daughter and met the man who’d be her second husband, and the father of her son: Harold McPherson.

That marriage lasted slightly longer, but ended in divorce, and Aimee was single again by the time she was 23. She married again much later in life, but it was after she’d split with McPherson that her ascent to nationally-known religious icon really began.

According to her official biography on the Foursquare website, God told Aimee to head to Los Angeles in 1918. In 1922, she became the first woman to preach on the radio. An alleged faith healer with a talent for speaking in tongues, she presented her sermons with a theatricality that audiences found irresistible. By 1923, she had built Angelus Temple, a prototype “megachurch” which had a capacity of over 5,000—and, the Foursquare bio notes, it was always packed whenever Sister Aimee took the stage. She had hit the big time in LA, right at the moment that “movie star” was also becoming a career descriptor; she may not have been an actor in the conventional sense, but Aimee was certainly at home in the spotlight.

Here’s a clip of Sister Aimee holding forth on Prohibition:

But even the most glowing write-ups about Sister Aimee pause to include those bizarre five weeks in 1926. Where did she go? The faithful held fast to her version of the story: she was kidnapped. Here’s how her Foursquare bio explains it.

On May 18, while working on a sermon at Ocean Beach, Sister Aimee decided to go swimming. When she came out of the water a couple asked her to accompany them to their car to pray for their dying baby who was in the back seat. This was not unusual; Sister Aimee made herself available to minister to people whenever and wherever she was called to do so. Upon leaning into the back seat she was pushed to the floor and sedated as the car drove off. A taxi driver saw the kidnapping as it happened and later told the authorities.

Most everyone believed that Sister Aimee had actually drowned however, and when ransom letters came in from the kidnappers, the letters were thrown away because her family thought she was dead! For three weeks Sister Aimee was kept in the Los Angeles area, and then, in mid-June, the kidnappers moved her to a small shack in an isolated canyon in Mexico just south of Douglas, Arizona. When the kidnappers left her alone but bound with rope for several hours while they drove off to buy supplies, she escaped and walked through the night to Douglas where she was entered into the hospital.

At the time of her disappearance, she was as popular as Princess Diana was during her life. And her followers were just as devoted as Diana’s; one man actually drowned during the search, believing he’d spotted her body in the waves (it was actually a dead seal). A rescue diver also died during the search.

Others, however, were not so convinced by this tale. One Sister Aimee expert shared a different version of the story with the BBC:

Biographer Matthew Sutton believes she had run away with her sound engineer - a married man called Kenneth Ormiston, who also disappeared at the same time. “I’m 99% confident that she had an affair,” he says.

“I suspect she ran away with Ormiston then ultimately after a month reading the newspapers and seeing what was happening she decided to make this dramatic return. The kidnapping story was the best means she came up with for doing it.”

She would have read in the papers that—in addition to those who assumed she was dead—there were Sister Aimee sightings everywhere. Finally, on that fateful day in Douglas, the real Sister Aimee was found. Her return to Los Angeles attracted an adoring crowd estimated at 50,000, but as the Smithsonian notes, she also attracted her share of skeptics:

Within two weeks, McPherson voluntarily appeared before a grand jury as newspapers continued to trumpet accusations of fraud, accompanied by witness “spottings” in Northern California. Gaining the most traction was a story that centered on the fact that Kenneth Ormiston, a married engineer at the Christian radio station KFSG (owned by McPherson’s church) disappeared just when McPherson did. The two worked together on McPherson’s regular broadcasts. Police were dispatched to a cottage in Carmel-by-the-Sea, where Ormiston had been seen with an unidentified woman during McPherson’s disappearance. (Ormiston admitted to having an adulterous affair at the time of McPherson’s disappearance, but denied that the stranger known as “Mrs. X” was her.) After dusting the cottage for fingerprints, however, police found none that matched the evangelist’s.

The headlines, gossip and innuendo continued throughout the fall, until a judge determined that there was enough evidence to proceed with the charges of conspiracy and obstruction of justice against McPherson. A jury trial was scheduled for January the following year. However, [LA district attorney Asa Keyes] had begun to determine that some of his witnesses were unreliable, and he decided to drop the charges.

It was a scandal of Jim and Tammy Faye Bakker proportions (probably even bigger). Notably, nobody was ever a suspect in, or charged with, her kidnapping, and the notoriety made her even more well-known than she was before. Though her celebrity status eventually faded as time passed, her ministry continued to grow, and she had a few more minor scandals along the way, including a 1931 “nervous breakdown” that her own mother (with whom she feuded for years, along with her own daughter) suspected was actually downtime needed to recover from a facelift; later that year, she married her third husband, but they soon divorced. In 1937, she was “sued for slander” by one of her assistant pastors, who settled for just $2,000 of the over $1 million she was asking for.

Sister Aimee died just one year after the below photo was taken, days short of her 54th birthday, in 1944. According to her obituary in the Los Angeles Times, she was found in an Oakland hotel room by her son; the pair was in town to help dedicate a new church, but she never got to deliver her keynote speech: “The Story of My Life.”

At first, it was suspected she’d succumbed to a heart attack, but an autopsy revealed she’d overdosed on sedatives, apparently an accident.

From top: Aimee Semple McPherson in London, England, April 18, 1928; McPherson during Sunday night service at Angelus Temple, in Los Angeles, June 14, 1943. (Both AP Photo)

If you get to see the brand-new novel Illuminae on the big screen at some point, thank Brad Pitt. His company Plan B just bought the rights to adapt the unique sci-fi story into a movie.

Written by Amie Kaufman and Jay Kristoff, Illuminae is about a hacker and her ex-boyfriend who uncover “a conspiracy surrounding an intergalactic war that has them dealing with an enemy race, rogue artificial intelligence and a deadly virus.” It was released in October, hit the New York Times Best-Sellers list and has been almost universally praised.

Much like another genre book Pitt’s company bought, World War Z, Illuminae tells its story in a very unique way. The whole thing is told through almost a scrap book of information put together by the characters, including lists, text conversations, blueprints and more. How, if at all, that element makes it into a movie, that’s whoever they hire to write the film’s problem.

http://www.amazon.com/Illuminae-File...

[The Hollywood Reporter]

Contact the author at germain@io9.com.

“In a family headed by a tyrannical father, the younger daughter will regain her freedom on her birthday.” It’s a simple synopsis, but Blood Ties, the dark fantasy film it describes, packs a lot of detail and nuance into just under four dialogue-free minutes, thanks to some gorgeously dreamy animation.

Blood Ties is directed by Sophie Kavouridis, Manon Lazzari, Marion Louw, Simon Pannetrat, and Thomas Ricquier.

[Via Geek Art Gallery]

The GIF above, created by NASA, may leave you wondering why our government is building a planetary shield. Something you’re not telling us, NASA? According to the space agency, NASA’s shield plan has nothing to do with intergalactic threats—it’s protection against a danger on the ground. The space agency wants to build a global network of fire-monitoring satellites.

In light of recent events, namely, the Summer of Fire and Drought and Heat and More Fire, it’s not a bad idea. One of the main challenges facing fire-prone countries—look at Indonesia right now—is that blazes start in remote areas, often going undetected for hours or days, by which time, they’ve gotten really big and difficult to contain. FireSat could help.

Developed by the Jet Propulsion laboratory, the proposed fire-monitoring network would consist of over 200 space-based thermal imaging sensors with the sole purpose of rapidly locating fires around the globe and alerting the appropriate authorities.

According to NASA, FireSat would be able to sniff out fires—as well as other heat sources, like explosions—that are at least 35 to 50 feet wide, within 15 minutes from the time they begin. Once it spots a fire, the satellite swarm would keep some of its eyes trained on the blaze, capturing a low-res image approximately every minute, along with the fires’ latitude and longitude coordinates. Within three minutes of detection, FireSat would be able to notify emergency responders in the area. This sounds like an awesome idea.

FireSat has been in the works since 2011, but actualizing the concept at a reasonable cost has only become possible in the past few years, thanks to advances in commercial microelectronics like CubeSats. The plan is to have a fully operational deflector shield—sorry, fire monitoring system—by June of 2018.

[NASA]

Follow the author @themadstone

Nature is filled with repeating patterns. Take this image of dried-up riverbeds in Oman, which could just as easily be the subterranean root structure of a giant tree, or the threadlike tendrils of a fungal mycelia network, or a microscopic collection of neurons.

NASA astronaut Kjell Lindgren captured this stunning photograph from the International Space Station on November 11th.