Said del Toro in a statement about Boyega's casting: "I am very proud and happy to welcome John into a fantastic sandbox. The Pacific Rim universe will be reinforced with him as a leading man as it continues to be a multicultural, multi-layered world. ‘The World saving the world’ was our goal and I couldn’t think of a better man for the job." Fans of the original movie loved the way it developed complex, heart-breaking characters while never scrimping on the kaiju vs. jaeger action. Universal will release the sequel everywhere except China—but given that the first film was huge in that country, there will likely be a local distributor. Indeed, Pacific Rim's success was largely due to the global market. It was a film that translated well across every continent, and it made most of its money overseas.

Though del Toro will be working as a producer of the new film, the director will be award-winning screenwriter Steven S. DeKnight, known for helming several of the Spartacus series for Starz and for his work on Daredevil and Buffy the Vampire Slayer. DeKnight has also written for several comics, and he has a flair for combining white-hot action with meaty stories. The movie couldn't be in better hands.

(credit: Scott Beale)

It's easy to joke about the average shelf life of a major social media platform, especially one that hinges its reputation on young users. After all, this era has seen its share of MySpaces and Friendsters. In both cases, platform downfalls came after a change in the popularity guard, and new numbers unearthed on Thursday may point to another virtual torch-passing—this time between Twitter and Snapchat.

Citing "people familiar with the matter," Bloomberg reported that the Snapchat smartphone messaging service officially surpassed 150 million daily active users. That figure soundly beats Bloomberg's estimate of Twitter's 136 million daily users (derived from the service's publicly announced 310 monthly active users and Twitter's announced estimates of how many of those use the service on a daily basis).

In recent years, Snapchat's basic functionality—of auto-deleting messages and posts while connecting friends to photo and video feeds—has expanded. The service now boasts hugely popular auto-filter functions, which attach silly face-matched images to users' faces and eyes in much better fashion than what the Nintendo DSi introduced in its simple camera app back in 2009. These days even many professional publishing houses connect to the service to post frequent phone-video updates (if you're asking: ars_technica).

Use Tuna with Balloon Animal

Do you remember the first time you played your favorite game? For me, it was the NES version of Lucasfilm Games’ Maniac Mansion in the early ‘90s. The point-and-click adventure was brutally hard, and it would take me years of on-and-off play to figure the entire mansion out. But I’d never seen anything like it before, and I was immediately enthralled.

We can’t get back our first experience with beloved games, but for fans of old-school adventure games, there’s something close: Thimbleweed Park.

Successfully Kickstarted in 2014, Thimbleweed Park is a classic-style point-and-click adventure from Maniac Mansion creators and industry vets Ron Gilbert and Gary Winnick. These two didn’t just make some of the most memorable games of all time; they created the SCUMM engine used by LucasArts adventure games throughout the ‘90s, setting the stage for titles like Day of the Tentacle, Sam & Max Hit the Road, and Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis. Gilbert and Winnick recently showed off their new creation publicly and spoke to us a bit about the reaction so far.

Well what do you know? We were so busy playing and talking about Overwatch this week that we failed to note an important vaporware milestone on Tuesday. Just over ten years ago, on May 24, 2006, Valve first announced it was working on Half-Life 2: Episode 3, the final part "in a trilogy... that will conclude by Christmas 2007."

Back then, Valve even hinted at a standalone Episode 4, developed outside of Valve, which could be ready six to eight months after Episode 3. Pretty ambitious, eh?

Ten years... where does the time go? If you're Valve, it goes into a litany of broken timeline promises and continual stonewalling, as noted in this memorable video of quotes from Valve cofounder and Managing Director Gabe Newell regarding Episode 3 and the mythical Half-Life 3 (which was sort of first announced in 2007 but might as well be considered equally nonexistent at this point).

Sean Gallagher

The Stiletto crouches pierside at National Harbor. Forty feet wide and 80 feet long, the Stiletto is nearly three times the size of a World War II PT boat yet less than a third of the weight. Its pentamaran design makes it capable of handling (and plowing through) pretty much anything short of a gale—though turning head-on into the waves can be brutal.

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NATIONAL HARBOR, Md.—At this week's Navy League Sea-Air-Space exposition (an annual seapower conference and trade show for the Navy, Marines, and Coast Guard) Ars got a chance to board and tour a craft called the Stiletto. The Stilleto is prototype boat built for the Navy in 2006 that has become the military's on-call floating laboratory for rapid research and development of new sensors, weapons systems, and communications. With a carbon fiber hull, the Stiletto is light enough (45 tons, unloaded) to be craned onto a cargo ship for transport—but it can also carry 20 tons of cargo and tear through most sea states at high speeds.

Now operating from Joint Expeditionary Base Little Creek near Norfolk, Virginia, the Stiletto was originally intended to be part of a new Navy combat concept—groups of small, highly networked boats carrying sensors and weapons and working as a group to take on enemies in coastal, river, and shallow ocean waters. Built with special operations in mind, the Stiletto has a stealthy profile and a unique pentamaran hull that essentially acts as a surface effect hull at high speeds, allowing the craft to rise out of the water and reach speeds of 60 knots (69 miles an hour, or 110 kilometers per hour).

After being used in several exercises in the mid-2000s, the Stiletto was deployed to the Caribbean for counter-narcotics operations in 2008 with a joint Navy-Coast Guard team. Since then, it has served as a "maritime demonstration craft" operated by the Naval Surface Warfare Center Carderock, Combatant Craft Division. But it is funded directly by the Department of Defense's Office of Research, Test, Development and Evaluation (RDT&E). (Full disclosure: my last tour of service in the Navy was with "special boats," so the Stiletto is my 1990 self's technological dream.)