Repression was survival for Jane Schoenbrun. In their tidy, suburban enclave of Ardsley, New York, television was where they went to escape from the margins of reality. It was the 1990s, a golden age of TV. Supernatural dramas Twin Peaks and The X-Files were appointment viewing, and Schoenbrun was obsessed …
Read More »There’s Nothing Revolutionary About ‘Morning After the Revolution’
In Morning After the Revolution: Dispatches From the Wrong Side of History, media entrepreneur and journalist Nellie Bowles fashions herself as a dissident chafing against orthodoxies in pursuit of truth. Despite her efforts, this posturing achieves a different effect: Bowles has produced a book hewing so wholly to her own …
Read More »'Hades II' Proves Lightning Can Strike Twice
It feels foolish to expect a lot from Hades II. Supergiant Games' first Greek-mythology-inspired roguelike was so delightfully weird it seemed unbeatable. It wasn't. After several hours spent playing the game, which was released in Early Access last week, I can report that Hades II isn't as good as its …
Read More »I Am Once Again Asking Our Tech Overlords to Watch the Whole Movie
Today OpenAI announced GPT-4o, a new AI model that will be available to free and paid users alike. Among its many upgrades—faster response times, enhanced memory capabilities, better parsing of images—is a conversational voice that tries its level best to sound like a real live human. It laughs, it jokes, …
Read More »Playing ‘Hades II’? Here Are 8 Tips to Get You Started
Hades II is a witchy roguelike that Supergiant Games somewhat surprise-dropped on Steam earlier this week. Unlike the first Hades, where gamers play as the underworld’s prince, fighting his way out of the depths of hell, Hades II hands the weapons over to the underworld’s princess, Melinoë, who must fight …
Read More »Disney and Warner Bros. Discovery Just Reinvented Cable
Said it before, will say it again: Streaming is just cable TV now. So much so that the services created to give cord-cutters the content they want have now resorted to reinventing the wheel. To wit: On Wednesday, Disney and Warner Bros. Discovery announced a new partnership, one that will …
Read More »Why the Voices of Black Twitter Were Worth Saving
The fear was reasonable. It was a fear I also carried. Uncertainty about whether or not I should tell this story now, and whether or not it was right to air what many consider family secrets, crept into the back of my mind. But I knew it deserved to be …
Read More »It’s Possible to Hack 'Tetris' From Inside the Game Itself
Earlier this year, we shared the story of how a classic NES Tetris player hit the game's "kill screen" for the first time, activating a crash after an incredible 40-minute, 1,511-line performance. Now, some players are using that kill screen—and some complicated memory manipulation it enables—to code new behaviors into …
Read More »Met Gala Deepfakes Are Flooding Social Media
This story originally appeared on WIRED Italia, and has been translated from Italian. The Met Gala is undoubtedly one of the most anticipated events of the year, but this time the music and entertainment celebrities who graced its red carpet had some competition for the public's attention: generative AI deepfakes. …
Read More »RIP ‘Red vs. Blue.’ Machinima Is Gone—but Its Legacy Is Everywhere
Red vs. Blue is officially over. On Tuesday, Warner Bros. Discovery released Red vs. Blue: Restoration, the final installment in the long-running saga that was once at the forefront of a whole new form of entertainment: web videos created from in-game footage. Machinima signaled a new world where that footage—of …
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