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"In the face of overwhelming odds, I'm left with only one option: I'm going to have to science the s*** out of this." 

So spoke Mark Watney (Matt Damon), the title character in Ridley Scott's 2015 film "The Martian," easily one of the best films of its year. Written by Drew Goddard after the novel by Andy Weir, the film had a pretty simple thesis: Science, knowledge, and engineering know-how were not just superpowers, but could be the stuff of ripping entertainment. Most importantly, "The Martian" reveals that our most human quality — our good humor — will be our most vital survival tool. The film is gloriously propulsive and infectiously funny, despite being a desperate story of a man stranded on the surface of Mars. 

Watney, the mission's botanist, is left behind after a sandstorm forces his astronaut companions to leave, and he has to find ways to extend his air and water supply in his temporary habitat, grow food in the Martian dirt (he grows potatoes using the crew's own manure), and move about the planet's surface salvaging what supplies he can from other Martian missions (the film takes place in the near future, when such missions are common). It helps to have music, though woe to Watney for only having a playlist of 1970s disco hits to keep him company. 

If you're wondering how he eats and breathes and other science facts, then know NASA has that well in hand. Much of "The Martian" was based on real tech currently used or in development for actual space travel.

HERA

A trip to Mars would take many months, and any astronauts traveling there would have to learn to survive in an enclosed habitat — referred to as the Hab in "The Martian." NASA's current experimental habitat for potential use on the Martian surface is called the HERA (Human Exploration Research Analogue). Compared to the Hab in the movie, the HERA facility is an enormous hotel, featuring two floors(!), living quarters, a shower (it's called a hygiene module), and a greenhouse for growing food. 

While living on the module for weeks at a time, astronauts in training are not allowed outside (natch), and they have to complete the same mission tasks they would while on another planet. The HERA habitat has already been used for research related to the International Space Station, and it's useful not just for practical reasons (supply levels, ergonomics, etc.), but for behavioral ones as well. The psychology of being bound inside a small module on a distant planet for an extended period may take a toll on mental health, and living in the facility would gauge that. One would hope the astronauts would be given more music than a mere disco playlist. 

Food And Water

A mission to Mars could only bring so much food. Every pound on a space shuttle needs to be calculated and paid for, and the lighter one can make their mission, the better. Given that a Mars trip would take months, food would need to be produced on the planet's surface out of necessity. This means gardening (and no, NASA is not sending livestock to Mars). As mentioned above, Watney's food supply in "The Martian" was constructed with reclaimed water, potato seeds, and human waste. Not a great diet, but doable for the desperate situation. 

The ISS currently has a system in place called Veggie, a system where small plants are grown inside miniature "pillows" full of dirt and fertilizer and that produces edible plants on a limited basis. Veggie proved successful in 2014, though citizens on the ISS still rely on deliveries from Earth for most of their provisions. This isn't yet enough to feed a cadre of astronauts, but it's a darn promising start. 

Water is a trickier problem, as liquids behave much differently in low gravity than they do on Earth, and transporting a lot of them to Mars would be difficult and heavy. Culling drinkable water from the planet is also a bugaboo, as NASA missions have revealed only small deposits of ice and trace water vapor in the Martian atmosphere, and it's hard to tell how useful it might be to an astronaut. The ice at the Martian poles is mixed with frozen CO₂, making it unpalatable. Recycling human waste seems like the obvious answer, and NASA is working on complex filtration to make that happen. 

Air And Breathing In A Spacesuit

Air is easier to produce than you might think, and the ISS already has a pretty efficient system in place for generating breathable air called the Oxygen Generation System. Using electrolysis, the ISS can split water molecules into their base atoms (hydrogen and oxygen), releasing the breathable particles into the atmosphere, and shooting the hydrogen out into space. Some of the hydrogen is salvaged by something called the Sabatier system, which can fuse the carbon dioxide molecules breathed out by the astronauts with the rogue hydrogen produced by electrolysis and make water. 

The most prominent feature seen in "The Martian" is Watney's spacesuit, and NASA scientists have been working for years to find just the right balance of cloth and hard elements to balance protection with durability and comfort. NASA knows there is not going to be one universal spacesuit that will function for every job, so several versions would be needed. The current prototype of Martian spacesuit is called the Z-2, and it looks like something from a 1950s sci-fi movie. Which is cool. Next on the design docket is a spacesuit that can be left outside to avoid tracking Martian dust into the habitat. 

Ion Propulsion

In "The Martian," the central ship, the Ares 3, talks a lot about getting to Mars on ion propulsion. "Ion propulsion" may sound like a "Star Trek" conceit, but it is, in fact, a real way a ship can travel. Ions, as we all remember from fourth grade science class, are electrically charged particles, and in an ion propulsion engine, molecules of argon or xenon are charged, with the charged elements squeezed out the back boosters as enormous speeds. According to NASA, close to 200,000 mph. That sounds like a lot, but it's actually a very gentle push. Like "a gentle breeze," in NASA's words. 

However, given that the trip to Mars is 140 million miles, and acceleration can only increase over the course of the journey, such a breeze is all that would be needed to eventually get a spacecraft up to enormously fast speeds. What's more, a gentle "push" from an ion engine would be an ideal way to steer a craft without expending a lot of energy. The spacecraft Dawn used ion propulsion continuously for years to eventually orbit dwarf planet Ceres, located between Mars and Jupiter. 

While "The Martian" is not science fact, it's a kind of hard science fiction that is exhilarating to watch, and give viewers hope that humanity — with its know-how and ability to smirk — will persist in a positive direction.

Read this next: 20 Movies About Aliens That You Definitely Need To Watch

The post The Technology in The Martian is Being Created in Real Life appeared first on /Film.

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"Stranger Things 4" doesn't have an original thought in its head, and I say that in the most friendly way possible. I am not mocking the show for its unoriginality; I am merely stating it as fact. Indeed, I'd argue that if you pressed creators The Duffer Brothers on this, they'd freely concede that yes, the latest season of the big Netflix hit is probably the most derivative yet. It's also entertaining as hell; a summer blockbuster dressed up as an action-packed TV series. Everything is bigger this season; it's a sprawling, globe-trotting adventure that is constantly cutting between a huge cast of characters. And everything unfolding here feels both wildly exciting and eye-rollingly familiar. "Stranger Things" has always been about wearing its influences on its sleeve. Indeed, that's part of the show's power. Its frequent familiarity makes it feel more lived-in than it really is. By drawing on ideas and concepts solidified by folks like Stephen King and Steven Spielberg, "Stranger Things" is playing with, and preying on, our nostalgia. 

Once again, "Stranger Things" freely pulls from Spielberg and King, while also throwing in plenty of other references — or rip-offs, if you want to be crude — from other '80s (and sometimes '90s) pop entertainment. Wes Craven's "A Nightmare on Elm Street" is the biggest influence on the season, and the show doesn't even try to hide it. They have a character flat-out reference the film, and Freddy Krueger himself, Robert Englund, makes a cameo appearance. But the "Nightmare"-influenced story is just one part of a somewhat exhausting season. There are many balls up in the air here, and it's to the credit of the Duffers and their team that the show skillfully juggles them all with very few stumbles. Yes, we've seen almost all of what's happening here before in some other form, but darn it, it's still fun to watch. There's a breathlessness to the pacing as the season jumps around to various places and various groups of characters, all of whom are connected in one way or another. 

When we last left the show, super-powered Eleven (Millie Bobby Brown) had saved the day yet again, and lost her powers in the process. Her surrogate father Jim Hopper (David Harbour) was believed to be dead, but by now everyone knows that's not true — Hopper is alive, as the promotional material for the season has made abundantly clear. But he's in pretty bad shape, locked away in a Russian prison. Without someone to take care of her, Eleven has left Hawkins, Indiana, and moved to California with Joyce Byers (Winona Ryder), who is also mourning Hopper, and her sons Will (Noah Schnapp) and Jonathan (Charlie Heaton). Back in Hawkins, Eleven's boyfriend Mike (Finn Wolfhard) is now in high school with his friends Dustin (Gaten Matarazzo) and Lucas (Caleb McLaughlin). But the once tight-knit gang of friends has splintered a bit. Lucas is now on the basketball team and palling around with the popular kids. Mike and Dustin, meanwhile, have joined a new D&D group led by opinionated weirdo Eddie Munson (Joseph Quinn). Lucas has also drifted away from his former girlfriend, Max (Sadie Sink), who is going through a bout of major depression following the death of her troubled stepbrother Billy. Then there's Mike's older sister Nancy (Natalia Dyer), who feels herself growing apart from Jonathan, her boyfriend. And of course, babysitter and man of great hair Steve (Joe Keery) is still hanging around Hawkins, now with his constant (platonic) companion Robin (Maya Hawke). 

Of course, since this is "Stranger Things," strange(r) things begin to happen pretty quickly. Folks in Hawkins just can't catch a break. There's a new monster in town, the creepy Vecna, who is targeting teens in very Freddy Krueger-like ways. 

A Support Group For People Who Experience The Supernatural

Rather than stay firmly within Hawkins, "Stranger Things 4" gets to explore new locations. As a result, several different plot threads unfold. There's the scary stuff going on in Hawkins. Then there's Eleven dealing with her loss of powers in California while being bullied by some of the most sadistic high school kids in history. And then there's also the plotline involving Hopper in Russia, and the plan for Joyce and her new side-kick Murray (Brett Gelman) to hopefully rescue him. It's a lot to take in, and the show knows it. So much so that every episode this season is super-sized; not a single episode clocks in under an hour. You'd think longer episodes would give these many threads room to breathe, but "Stranger Things 4" is overloaded to exhaustion. We'll cut from one scene in Hawkins to another scene in Russia to another scene somewhere else, and then back again. It can get dizzying. 

A lack of originality should sink this season, especially with so much going on. And yet, I found myself thrilled by the break-neck speed at which the show throws one giant, lightning-paced scene after another our way. The characters almost never sit still; they're forever running, biking, fighting, or screaming. I imagine if events of this magnitude were really happening to a group of kids they'd all be certifiably insane by now, but these kids have been down this road before. They've butted heads with the supernatural three times already, so in some ways, all the madness of this season is business as usual. 

The original core group remains strong, although once again, the series sequesters Brown away from most of her co-stars. And yes, they all look older now, and at first, it's a little jarring to see these kids look so, well, grown-up. But that fades pretty quickly as we get swept up in the adventure. Harbour remains the show's MVP, and he goes through serious hell this season. But "Stranger Things" also has a knack for giving us new characters who don't seem out of place. Sink's Max felt a little off during her first season (season 2), but by season 3 she was an essential member of the team, and gets even more to do this season. Last season gave us Hawke's Robin, who became a fan favorite from the jump, similar to the way Lucas' hilarious, no-nonsense little sister Erica (Priah Ferguson) became a major character after a few scene-stealing moments. This time, we have new players like Eddie, the D&D group leader who seems completely obnoxious during his first scene, only to be revealed as a charming, funny guy. We also meet Argyle (Eduardo Franco). Franco's performance is funny, but the writing turns him into little more than Comic Relief Stoner Guy. 

What connects all these characters is their chance encounters with things that go bump in the night. In a way, the show has become a story about a support group for people who experience the supernatural. Every time a new season unleashes some new horror, the circle grows, with new members inducted into the club via their proximity to the weird and unexplained. And that's part of the show's charm, too — that all these outcasts and weirdos have found each other in the midst of all this chaos. 

A Summer Blockbuster

You could shrug all of this off by saying "Stranger Things 4" does little more than play the hits. And that's true; familiarity is essential to the show's DNA. And yet, it never feels tired or overdone. There's no sense of "Been there, done that." Yes, we've come across the thrills and chills here before in other forms, but that doesn't mean they don't still maintain their power. It helps that the cast is so charismatic, and the filmmaking is often so surprisingly strong — there's even a big one-take action scene thrown in, with characters scrambling through gunfire, that feels genuinely exciting and scary. 

The longer episodes never feel bloated, and the series actually has a little fun playing with our expectations. We're so trained to feel a show's runtime without looking at our watches, and when something big happens and then the screen cuts to black, that usually means the episode has ended. In a neat bit of trickery, "Stranger Things 4" fakes us out more than once. When an hour has gone by and we expect an episode to end, some big, crazy moment will happen and then the screen will indeed cut to black. "Ah, it's over!" we think — only for the show to then cut to a completely new scene, revealing that the episode isn't over after all. 

As fun as this all is, you can still see through the facade and spot the cracks in the foundation. The show takes a lot of lazy shortcuts, such as having characters instantly draw the correct conclusions in order to move on to the next scene as quickly as possible. And while suspension of disbelief is essential for a show like this that deals with the inexplicable, there are more than a few explanations here that don't hold water. On top of that, there are countless scenes set in dark locations that are nearly impossible to see. I know dark and shadowy spots are baked into a show of this nature, but damn it, we should still be able to see what's happening on the screen. 

None of this is enough to sink the show, though. "Stranger Things 4" is hitting familiar notes, but they still sound great. The series is a fine-tuned machine by now, designed to deliver a maximum amount of entertainment dressed up in the clothing of nostalgia. Season 4 will not convert anyone who has already given up on the show, but those still invested in the misadventures of the kids from Hawkins are going to have a blast. They used to play big, loud, sweet, fun entertainment like this at the multiplex on hot summer days, but now we'll have to settle for Netflix.

"Stranger Things 4" hits Netflix on May 27, 2022. Two additional final episodes will follow on July 1, 2022.

Read this next: /Film's Top 10 Movies Of 2021

The post Stranger Things 4 Review: A Derivative Summer Blockbuster that Still Entertains appeared first on /Film.

It was recently pointed out to me that a simple “hello world” style application built with Open Watcom C/C++ 1.9 does not run on Win32s version 1.30, even though the same executable runs just fine on Windows NT 3.51, Windows 95, or Windows 10.

More specifically, the program crashes rather early on Win32s. With the help of map files and source code, I established that the crash occurs in an internal function called __setenvp, which tries to dereference a null pointer stored in an internal variable _RWD_Envptr.

The _RWD_Envptr variable is filled in by the GetEnvironmentStrings API in the C runtime startup code. The GetEnvironmentStrings API call ends up importing GetEnvironmentStringsA from KERNEL32.DLL. And clearly GetEnvironmentStringsA is failing on Win32s, although it works just fine on NT and Win9x.

Further probing revealed that the GetEnvironmentStrings API has curious history. On Windows NT 3.1, there was only GetEnvironmentStrings (no A or W suffix). On all later Win32 implementations, starting with NT 3.5, there’s GetEnvironmentStringsA and GetEnvironmentStringsW, as well as FreeEnvironmentStringsA and FreeEnvironmentStringsW.

On NT 3.1, there was no FreeEnvironmentStrings, presumably because GetEnvironmentStrings returned a pointer to existing memory that couldn’t be freed (and would be freed at process termination anyway). On NT 3.5, GetEnvironmentStringsA converts the strings provided by GetEnvironmentStringsW and allocates memory for the converted strings, so there is something to free.

A quick experiment with Microsoft Visual Studio 4.0 showed that a test application does run on Win32s; reading MSVC 4.0 runtime source code also revealed that Microsoft calls GetEnvironmentStringsA and immediately terminates the process if GetEnvironmentStringsA fails. So… how can that work on Win32s?

Examining the EXE file produced by MSVC 4.0 revealed that it imports GetEnvironmentStrings and not GetEnvironmentStringsA. Changing the Open Watcom kernel32.lib import library to make GetEnvironmentStringsA an alias of GetEnvironmentStrings made the application work on Win32s. But why?

A closer look at W32SCOMB.DLL shipped with Win32s showed the cause of the odd Win32s behavior. Although W32SCOMB.DLL exports all of GetEnvironmentStrings, GetEnvironmentStringsA, and GetEnvironmentStringsW, the latter two are stubs which always fail, and only GetEnvironmentStrings with no suffix actually does something useful. That seems like a bug in Win32s—GetEnvironmentStringsA should have been an alias of GetEnvironmentStrings.

The mess was most likely caused by a design defect in Windows NT 3.1. The plain GetEnvironmentStrings function probably should never have existed, only GetEnvironmentStringsA and GetEnvironmentStringsW, as is the case with other APIs. Windows NT 3.5 corrected the oversight, but its KERNEL32.DLL still had to export the suffix-free GetEnvironmentStrings—otherwise almost all existing applications would have been broken.

Win32s tracked the development of Windows NT, therefore it implemented GetEnvironmentStrings, and initially only that. Win32s version 1.20 (1994) added GetEnvironmentStringsA and GetEnvironmentStringsW, but only as dummies. As mentioned above, making GetEnvironmentStringsA always fail was arguably wrong… but wasn’t noticed because Microsoft’s programs did not use GetEnvironmentStringsA.

At least up to and including MSVCRT40.DLL, Microsoft’s runtime DLLs only imported GetEnvironmentStrings. That also illustrates why any reasonable Win32 implementation needs to provide the GetEnvironmentStrings import and not just GetEnvironmentStringsA; if it didn’t, quite a few older applications would break because they need the suffix-free GetEnvironmentStrings.

Win32 SDK Details

As mentioned above, tweaking the kernel32.lib import library is one way to work around the problem with GetEnvironmentStringsA on Win32s. But that’s not what Microsoft’s SDK does.

Here is how WINBASE.H in the NT 3.5 SDK defined the then-new FreeEnvironmentStrings API:

WINBASEAPI BOOL WINAPI
FreeEnvironmentStringsA(LPSTR);

WINBASEAPI BOOL WINAPI
FreeEnvironmentStringsW(LPWSTR);

#ifdef UNICODE
#define FreeEnvironmentStrings  FreeEnvironmentStringsW
#else
#define FreeEnvironmentStrings  FreeEnvironmentStringsA
#endif // !UNICODE

That’s the usual way of dealing with Unicode APIs. Function prototypes have ‘A’ and ‘W’ suffix, and a suffix-less macro is defined to map to one or the other.

But that’s not how GetEnvironmentStrings was dealt with:

WINBASEAPI LPSTR WINAPI
GetEnvironmentStrings(VOID);

WINBASEAPI LPWSTR WINAPI
GetEnvironmentStringsW(VOID);

#ifdef UNICODE
#define GetEnvironmentStrings  GetEnvironmentStringsW
#else
#define GetEnvironmentStringsA  GetEnvironmentStrings
#endif // !UNICODE

The non-Unicode function prototype has no suffix, and the macro is “backwards”, mapping the ‘A’ function to the suffix-less original. Thus when the Microsoft runtime calls GetEnvironmentStringsA, the compiler ends up generating a call to GetEnvironmentStrings instead. This oddity persists to the present day and even Windows 10 SDK headers handle GetEnvironmentStrings the same way.

Moral of the story? Changing operating system APIs is a messy business.

Contrary to those shouting loudly on the internet, Google Stadia isn’t dead. And as I’ve written previously, it’s really rather good. In fact, the last post I published on Stadia provoked a lot of great discussion about the platform. There’s plenty to love and enjoy, but there are legitimate concerns and areas that could be improved.

The Stadia team knows this and again, contrary to opinion in some corners of the internet, is working very hard on making the platform better. Among the comments and discussions that came out of that last post, though, one point stuck and got me thinking.

It comes down to the business model. Very few deny how good the technology of Stadia is but Google’s business model for it doesn’t sit right. For some, the idea of buying games that only live in the cloud doesn’t appeal to them. That plus Google’s penchant for canceling products over the years does not incite any particular confidence in consumers. I can’t say I’m not worried about this, because I am a little. Nobody really knows what would happen. But thinking deeper, this model was possibly the wrong path to begin with and I think for Stadia to have a brighter future, selling games should potentially be off the table.

Stadia (Free, Google Play) →

Google Stadia is modeled like a traditional console

In the present day, Google Stadia and its games catalog are operated like any other games console or PC store. You rock up with your wallet, hand over some cash, and buy a game.

You can also pay a monthly fee for Stadia Pro which puts fresh titles in your library every month. Or so long as you remain a subscriber, it does. Stadia Pro is fantastic, with about 50 games players can claim at the time of writing. You don’t have that on PlayStation Plus or Xbox Games With Gold. Even the Epic Games Store and its weekly freebies fall behind on quantity.

The way Stadia, accounts, and Pro have been handled since launch hasn’t been the slickest operation, but it’s in a good place now. You don’t actually need a Stadia account anymore for some basic features or even to play some of the demos. But I think the best thing Google could do is double down on Stadia Pro and stop selling games entirely.

Stadia should move to an entirely subscription-based platform like its cloud competitors. If people don’t need to fork over money to “own” the games they want to play, it could relieve some of the negativity and worry that Google pulls the plug someday.

Amazon, Microsoft, and NVIDIA all have a better model

When you look at the respective business models, you could make an argument Stadia’s model is the worst. That’s because the current main competition from Amazon, Microsoft, and NVIDIA, all operate on a subscription model. Just like you subscribe to Netflix and binge on your favorite shows, you can subscribe to their services and binge on your favorite games.

NVIDIA GeForce Now is a little different, in so much as you can only play games through it that you’ve purchased on other stores, including Steam, Epic, and Ubisoft. In this case, there’s as close to no risk as any subscription service because you’re basically just renting a powerful PC in the cloud to get your own stuff. But Microsoft has a subscription for the cloud with Game Pass and Amazon operates a subscription model with Luna.

Luna is particularly interesting as the pricing is split down more like a television package than anything else. When signed up, you can choose different ‘channels’ to subscribe to, alongside a free rotation for Amazon Prime subscribers. If you only want kid’s games, for example, you can subscribe to the family channel.

Microsoft bundles its cloud gaming offering into Game Pass Ultimate at the moment, though that is starting to loosen up with the arrival of Fortnite for all to play. It isn’t every game in Game Pass, but there’s a large catalog and of course, you don’t have to buy any games to play them through the cloud.

Each of these leans into the subscription model, whereas on Stadia it just feels like a bonus. A necessary bonus.

Google should consider moving Stadia to subscription-only

Some of the work has already been done. Stadia Pro has a huge library, and with over 100 games in my personal Stadia account, most can be attributed to being available through Pro. If you play on Stadia, you need to have Stadia Pro lest ye never truly get the best from the platform. Ubisoft+ is also available through Stadia, providing access to all the publisher’s available titles for a monthly fee.

It sucks that everything in life is moving to a subscription, but that’s apparently what both, the businesses and the masses want. Given the trepidation many have over buying games from Google with that nagging feeling in the back of their mind that one day the plug will be pulled, it seems like it could be a good idea.

Reshaping the business model could potentially make it an easier sell to publishers as well. Microsoft seems to be doing well with Game Pass after all. When you have a pool of subscribers, there’s already a captive audience for new games added. The current Stadia Pro subscription is really good value, unlocking regular ‘free’ titles as well as 4K and HDR gaming. A small increase in the monthly charge or adding additional tiers I think would go down well with existing players and certainly attract those who are on the fence because they don’t want to spend $60 on a game on Stadia.

---

Will this ever happen? Who knows. Google remains committed to Stadia for the foreseeable future, but how long will that last if the player numbers don’t meet expectations? The Stadia community is much larger than many give it credit for, but something probably needs to change fundamentally with how the platform is operated if it’s going to have a bright future. Be that an idea like this, offering a subscription plan alongside purchasing such as Game Pass offers or cheaper access but serving ads. There’s a lot that Google could do with Stadia. How would you change it?

The post How I would make Google Stadia even better for the future appeared first on XDA.

It's hard to imagine, but at one point, Duke Nukem was one of the biggest video game properties on the planet. Looking at the series with modern eyes, Duke Nukem is a crass example of masculinity, replete with dated views of women and violence. — Read the rest

"62-year-old Val Kilmer was just 26 when he played Iceman in the 1986 movie Top Gun," remembers long-time Slashdot reader destinyland. But in 2015 Kilmer lost his voice to throat cancer, remembers Parade: In his 2020 memoir I'm Your Huckleberry, Kilmer joked that he has less of a frog in his throat and more of a "buffalo." He said, "Speaking, once my joy and lifeblood, has become an hourly struggle." Kilmer has teamed up with Sonantic, a U.K.-based software firm that uses artificial intelligence to copy voices for actors and production studios, to replicate his speech, using old recordings of his voice and existing footage. Kilmer elaborates on the process of finding his voice again through AI in a video posted to YouTube in August 2021. In his new AI-enhanced voice, which does indeed emulate the speech audiences are familiar with, Kilmer says: "People around me struggle to understand me when I'm talking, but despite all that, I still feel I'm the exact same person, still the same creative soul. A soul that dreams ideas and stories constantly. "But now I can express myself again, I can bring these dreams to you, and show you this part of myself once more. A part that was never truly gone, just hiding away." Kilmer's health struggles, his childhood tragedies and his ambitious career were recently documented in the acclaimed 2021 feature-length doc Val, now streaming on Amazon Prime Video. Top Gun: Maverick screened at the Cannes Film Festival to rapturous reviews, with thunderous fanfare including an air show. Though reports say audiences gave the action picture (currently sitting at a 97% on Rotten Tomatoes) a five-minute standing ovation, with audible responses throughout the picture, mainly at the groundbreaking stunt work, it's also been reported an audience-favorite scene is the "overwhelming" emotional response to the reunion of Tom Cruise and Kilmer.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Researchers have found a new material for use in cutting-edge processors that can conduct heat 150% more productively, proclaims the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. Heat development in processors is a significant issue for execution, and silicon can be excellent for insulating heat and hinder cooling. With new ultrathin silicon nanowire innovation applied, it is trusted that chips will become minimal, highly efficient, and remain cool from such a generally necessary change. The critical difference that has been tried is the utilization of isotopically decontaminated Silicon-28 (Si-28).

Can ultrathin silicon nanowire technology improve processor performance through better heat conduction?

Silicon is modest and plentiful yet an unfortunate conductor for heat. This issue is tiny computer chips with a considerable number of semiconductors timed at GHz speeds have plagued researchers for years. Regular silicon comprises three isotopes: silicon-28, silicon-29, and silicon-30. Silicon-28 is the most ordinarily bountiful, making up around 92% of standard silicon. In addition, it has for quite some time been realized that Si-28 is the best guide for heat conduction. Si-28 can lead to heat around 10% better than average silicon whenever cleansed. Notwithstanding, the benefit has been decided as not beneficial as of not long ago.

Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory researchers used pure Si-28 to create ultrathin nanowires to promote better heat conduction. The results were 150% better through properly conducting heat, surprising as the expectation was only between ten to twenty percent improvement.

Electron microscopy demonstrated that the Si-28 nanowires had a more flawless glassy finish, allowing them to not suffer from poor phonon confusion and escape in raw silicon nanowire thermal transmission. Additionally, a natural layer of SiO2 is initiated upon the nanowires, maintaining the phonons to transport heat efficiently.

The team testing the effects of using ultrathin silicon nanowire technology would like to experiment with more control instead of measuring the heat conduction located in the nanowires. However, the researchers have difficulty obtaining materials as they are not in rich abundance.

The findings by the team do pose an exciting look into the future of semiconductor technology to find more use in consumer-level machines.

Source: Berkley Lab

The post Ultrathin Silicon-28: The future of super-efficiency in CPUs? by Jason R. Wilson appeared first on Wccftech.

For the occasion of the Bethesda Publisher Sale, we asked a couple of our teammates at GOG about their favorite games from this publisher, and why they loved those titles, or what made them special to them. Below, you can read the second entry (the first one is here), from our QA Tester, Rostyslav Chystoserdov.

The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion happened to be the first TES game I’ve ever played and completely fell in love with. It came out when I was in sixth grade, had a potato PC, and no internet. Unsurprisingly, my PC couldn’t handle the game and it ran extremely badly, but a good friend of mine came to the rescue and found some tips on the Web on how to lower the graphics even below the available settings.

After tweaking the configuration parameters we managed to make the game playable and the result was “stunning”: the game had no trees, grass, shadows, or other visual effects (such as fire) and all dungeons were bright as day, but it still managed to blow my mind. A fascinating story, a spectacular setting, numerous well-written side quests, and one of the best soundtracks I’ve ever heard in any game to this day – that clearly was love at first sight.

It goes without saying that I spent a tremendous amount of time in Oblivion and highly recommend everyone to do the same thing, especially if their rig is better than my good old potato PC from 2006. Oh, and make sure to hear of the High Elves.

Until recent years, news coverage of Johnny Depp mostly focused on his abilities as a character actor and the staggering success of "The Pirates of the Caribbean" franchise. At the moment, Depp can only be seen in live streams of his defamation trial against Amber Heard, and the Disney franchise is on unstable ground. Instead of diving into the minefield of details in the court case, I'm here to focus on his portrayal of Captain Jack Sparrow, which, strangely enough, he testified about.

"Funny old world innit?"

For some fans of the series, Captain Jack is the reason they kept watching the countless sequels Disney churned out, and it's easy to understand why. From the moment he sails into town atop a sinking boat and swaggers onto the dock, it's clear this character isn't the stereotypical ruthless pirate from ancient tales, and that's what makes him interesting.

Originally, Disney wanted Captain Jack to be the hero that swoops in and saves the damsel in distress, but that's not who Depp imagined him to be. Depp's version of the character is a staggering, rum-guzzling, cartoonish criminal, who has been driven mad by the sun. Disney executives were confused by Depp's flamboyant performance — and even considered firing him.

'Making A Soup'

As Depp recalls in his testimony, he was first sent the "Pirate of the Caribbean" script back in 2002, and he thought it read like a typical Disney film:

"It had all the hallmarks of a Disney film, that is to say, a predictable three-act structure, and the character of Captain Jack was more of a swashbuckler type that would swing in shirtless and be the hero. I had quite different ideas about the character, so I incorporated my notes into the character, and brought that character to life, much to the chagrin of Disney initially."

Back in the early 2000s, Depp was the father of a toddler, and spent many hours watching old classic cartoons. He was inspired by Wile E. Coyote and Bugs Bunny's silliness and flamboyance, and the cartoon genre's ability to suspend disbelief to a ridiculous degree. He wanted Captain Jack to have these abilities and characteristics:

"For example, Wile E. Coyote gets a boulder dropped on his head and he's completely crushed, but they cut to the next scene and he's just got a little bandage on his head ... And nobody ever asked a question, whether you were 5 or 95, you didn't ask a question. 'Oh, Wile E. Coyote, of course he's still alive,' so I tried to incorporate these kinds of ideas into the character of Captain Jack Sparrow, so that I could try to push those parameters and control the suspension of disbelief to be able to control the character's actions, words, movements, and put them in a place where the things that he would do or say were so ... ludicrous ... So, for me, it was a way to stretch the parameters of a character and take a risk."

In the end, Depp decided Captain Jack should be a "soup" of Pepé Le Pew and Keith Richards, which raised a lot of skeptical eyebrows among Disney executives.

'They Couldn't Understand Captain Jack'

When filming began on "Pirates of the Caribbean," Disney was totally thrown by Depp's performance. They wanted a hero, but they got a staggering, slurring character with a silly run. The actor remembers getting a call from Disney's higher ups:

"I got a call from the upper echelon at Disney who were courageous enough to ask me, 'What the f*** are you doing?' And again, the questions came up, 'Is it drunk? Is it gay?' All I could say was, cause they set me up with a great line, I said, 'Well don't you know all my characters are gay?' I really expected to be fired, but I wasn't for some reason. They were actually gonna put subtitles under my character, they couldn't understand Captain Jack."

Disney can't be blamed for thinking Captain Jack is a strange character because he is, but they should have expected that when they hired Johnny Depp. It's like they forgot this man played Edward Scissorhands, who is possibly one of the strangest characters in a movie ever. Despite the execs' questions and confusion about the character, they must have warmed to Depp's version because they kept him on the project.

Audiences loved Captain Jack Sparrow's cartoonish nature, and "The Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl" earned $305 million domestically and spawned four successful sequels. Collectively, the films have earned Disney well over a billion dollars, but recent events might affect the franchises' future.

The End Of Captain Jack

In December of 2018, the current president of Disney, Sean Bailey, revealed to The Hollywood Reporter that "Pirates of the Caribbean 6" won't feature Captain Jack at all, explaining they wanted the film to have "new energy and vitality." It's not clear whether this is because of recent abuse allegations or because the "Pirates of the Caribbean" films have been decreasing in popularity with each sequel. Either way, Disney is going to attempt to continue the franchise without the mischievous Captain Jack.

Unlike Wile E. Coyote, this is a crushing boulder Captain Jack is not likely to survive.

Read this next: 14 Sequels That Truly Didn't Need To Happen

The post The Disney Brass Weren't Big Fans Of Johnny Depp's Pirates Of The Caribbean Performance appeared first on /Film.

HBO's "The Wire" recalibrated the way audiences engaged with TV drama, not just through its sly sociopolitical commentary dressed up as cop procedural, but in the ways that its characters amplified its themes. One of the stauncher characters on the cop side was Det. William "Bunk" Moreland, played by Wendell Pierce. As complex as any other player on the chessboard but just as singular, Bunk was as dedicated to the bottle as he was to his work.

Pierce told journalist Jonathan Abrams how he came to see origins of his character, who was based on Baltimore Police Department Det. Oscar "Rick" Requer, in the flesh during a shoot with Dominic West (who played Det. McNulty) during a scene like any other in the series, wherein a dead body acts as a scrawling statement on what Alan Sepinwall calls "the rotting state of the American city — and by extension, the broken condition of America itself." It was a season 1 episode surrounding the shooting death of maintenance man — and state witness — William Gant (Larry Hull). Pierce elaborated to Abrams:

"[Requer] pulled up in a Cadillac with his cigar going. I guess he was about 50 feet away and when he got out the car, looked across the street at me with squinted eyes, cocked his head to the side in disbelief in one look, almost as if to say, 'What the hell are you doing?' And got back in the car and drove off. I was terrified from that day forward and for five years, did not speak to the man. We'd pass messages here and there. 'How's it going?' 'Fine.' That's it. But I was terrified to get his opinion."

Later on, the opportunity arose for Pierce to meet his character's progenitor in person, and he couldn't pass it up.

Bunk, You Made Me Famous.

Despite the distant introductions, Wendell Pierce and his character's real-life counterpart, Oscar "Rick" Requer, eventually got on like peas and carrots. Requer had joined the Baltimore Police Department on patrol in 1964, eventually joining the Criminal Investigation Division and being featured alongside his unit in the demystifying 1991 book "Homicide: A Year on the Killing Streets," written by "The Wire" creator David Simon. The "Treme" actor learned of the real Bunk's upcoming retirement from the BPD, and he knew he had to be present. Pierce told Jonathan Abrams:

"I got all the information. I summoned all the courage I could summon to face my criticism, which I expected, and walked into the hall. There he was, 50 feet again away from me, squinting, looking at me, cocked head to the side. I walk up to him and he said, 'Bunk, you made me famous.' He burst out in a huge smile and laughing and greeted me as if I was the prodigal son going home. They immediately put me on the program. I had to give a speech at his retirement party and all. And since then, we've been more in touch now after 'The Wire' than before."

The same oral history makes it clear it wasn't Simon's aim to have the actors meet the men and women who inspired the roles they play. The showrunner felt that, "unless you're doing historical drama," it's best to let the actor stay sturdy in the character written for them, which can and does differ from the real deal. Watching Bunk's symphonic usage of profanity, that approach probably worked out for the best.

Read this next: The 15 Best Anthology TV Series Ranked

The post Meeting The Real-Life Bunk Left A Terrifying Impression On The Wire's Wendell Pierce appeared first on /Film.

"In the last six months, we observed a 254% increase in activity from a Linux trojan called XorDdos," writes the Microsoft 365 Defender Research Team. It's a trojan combining denial-of-service functionality with XOR-based encryption for communication. Microsoft calls it part of "the trend of malware increasingly targeting Linux-based operating systems, which are commonly deployed on cloud infrastructures and Internet of Things devices." And ZDNet describes the trojan "one of the most active Linux-based malware families of 2021, according to Crowdstrike." XorDdos conducts automated password-guessing attacks across thousands of Linux servers to find matching admin credentials used on Secure Shell (SSH) servers... Once credentials are gained, the botnet uses root privileges to install itself on a Linux device and uses XOR-based encryption to communicate with the attacker's command and control infrastructure. While DDoS attacks are a serious threat to system availability and are growing in size each year, Microsoft is worried about other capabilities of these botnets. "We found that devices first infected with XorDdos were later infected with additional malware such as the Tsunami backdoor, which further deploys the XMRig coin miner," Microsoft notes... Microsoft didn't see XorDdos directly installing and distributing the Tsunami backdoor, but its researchers think XorDdos is used as a vector for follow-on malicious activities... XorDdoS can perform multiple DDoS attack techniques, including SYN flood attacks, DNS attacks, and ACK flood attacks. Microsoft's team warns that the trojan's evasion capabilities "include obfuscating the malware's activities, evading rule-based detection mechanisms and hash-based malicious file lookup, as well as using anti-forensic techniques to break process tree-based analysis. "We observed in recent campaigns that XorDdos hides malicious activities from analysis by overwriting sensitive files with a null byte. It also includes various persistence mechanisms to support different Linux distributions."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The future of old EV batteries is driven by four Rs.

Chinese engineers will take the ideas of a research paper and turn it into the world's largest 3D-printed project. Popular Mechanics: Within two years, officials behind this project want to fully automate the unmanned construction of a 590-foot-tall dam on the Tibetan Plateau to build the Yangqu hydropower plant -- completely with robots. The paper, published last month in the Journal of Tsinghua University (Science and Technology), laid out the plans for the dam, as first reported in the South China Morning Post. Researchers from the State Key Laboratory of Hydroscience and Engineering at Tsinghua University in Beijing explain the backbone of automation for the planned Yellow River dam that will eventually offer nearly five billion kilowatt-hours of electricity annually. (It's worth noting that China's Three Gorges Dam -- a hydroelectric gravity dam spanning the Yangtze River -- is the world's largest power station in terms of energy output.) But it's hard to tell what's more ambitious: the fact that the researchers plan to turn a dam site into effectively a massive 3D-printing project, or that through every step of the process the project eliminates human workers as they go fully robotic. In the dam-"printing" process, machinery will deliver construction materials to the worksite -- the exact location needed, eliminating human error, they say -- and then unmanned bulldozers, pavers, and rollers will form the dam layer by layer. Sensors on the rollers will keep the artificial intelligence (AI) system informed about the firmness and stability of each of the 3D-printed layers until it reaches 590 feet in height, about the same height as the Shasta Dam in California and shorter than the Hoover Dam's 726 feet. With the largest existing 3D-printed structures rising about 20 feet tall -- from houses in China to an office building in Dubai -- the exploration of 3D-printed projects continues to expand. Already we've seen a 1,640-foot-long retention wall in China, housing and office buildings across the globe, and now the U.S. Army has plans for barracks at Fort Bliss in Texas.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

A free weekend is underway on Steam where you can play State of Decay 2: Juggernaut Edition, the Windows action/RPG from Undead Labs. This gives everyone the chance at surviving the zombie...

[link] [51 comments]

There are a lot of strong opinions about the "Star Wars" prequels. Some fondly remember them as the films they grew up on, while others have gone as far as to say George Lucas ruined the franchise. But how about trying this one on for size:  Lucas almost killed Natalie Portman's career.

Lucas seemed preoccupied with the all-digital visuals of the prequels, taking advantage of cutting-edge special effects at the turn of the century. According to StarWars.com, "Attack of the Clones" had more than 2,000 visual effects shots integrated into the film. However, all that digital technology disrupted the audio recording in "Attack of the Clones," causing the need for every single line of dialogue to be rerecorded.

While Lucas did push the digital filmmaking movement forward, he also forgot one big thing important to any film: believable dialogue. In the book "The Star Wars Archives: 1999-2005," Lucas admits that the dialogue between Anakin Skywalker (Hayden Christensen) and Queen Padmé Amidala (Natalie Portman) in "Attack of the Clones" was corny. He tries to justify the wooden dialogue between characters as "consistent with the 'Star Wars' style," forgetting how Mark Hamill purposely gave Luke Skywalker a character arc simply through the way he delivered his lines.

Poorly written dialogue, rerecorded audio, green screen sets, and new technology equaled poor performances by nearly all the prequel actors. So much so that Portman struggled to find work after the trilogy wrapped.

'Everyone Thought I Was A Horrible Actress'

From "No, I am your father" to "I love you ... I know," the original trilogy is loaded with memorable moments and quotable one-liners. Heck, even the droids are memorable ("I am C-3P0, human cyborg relations."). So, what the heck happened with the prequels? In "The Star Wars Archives: 1999-2005," George Lucas described it as "presented very honestly, it isn't tongue-in-cheek at all, and it's played to the hilt." Seriously, Lucas said this. I'm not sure he understands what the phrase "to the hilt" means in this galaxy.

Noted film critic Roger Ebert summed up the dialogue from the prequels best, specifically in his review for "Attack of the Clones": "But as someone who admired the freshness and energy of the earlier films, I was amazed, at the end of 'Episode II' to realize that I had not heard one line of quotable, memorable dialogue. They talk and talk and talk. And their talk is in a flat utilitarian style: They seem more like lawyers than the heroes of a romantic fantasy."

Natalie Portman talked to New York magazine about the damage her performance in the prequels did. Portman said:

"'Star Wars' had come out around the time of [the theatrical play] 'Seagull,' and everyone thought I was a horrible actress. I was in the biggest-grossing movie of the decade, and no director wanted to work with me."

But then a director from the 1970s American New Wave film movement stepped in and possibly saved her career.

From Ugly Duckling To Black Swan

Director Mike Nichols — perhaps best known for his 1967 film "The Graduate," for which he won an Oscar for Best Director — also knows a thing or two about acting. Before a lengthy career as a film director, Nichols was an improv comic (one-half of the influential Nichols and May act with Elaine May), stage actor, and theater director. His eye for talent was keen, casting an unknown Dustin Hoffman as the lead in "The Graduate." Nichols would later get a firsthand look at Portman's talents when directing her in the 2001 theatrical play "The Seagull."

So when Portman struggled to find work after "Star Wars," Nichols intervened. Portman explained to New York magazine how Nichols wrote a letter to "Cold Mountain" director Anthony Minghella, urging him to hire her. Portman was cast as a Civil War-era widowed mother, and the role could not have been more opposite from her stiff performance in "Star Wars."

The "Cold Mountain" role reignited Portman's career, leading to an Oscar nomination for Best Supporting Actress in Nichols' 2004 film "Closer" and an Academy Award for Best Actress in 2010's "Black Swan." Portman would discover she wasn't the only one Nichols saved. Portman later learned "One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest" director Milos Forman was granted asylum in the United States thanks to a letter from Nichols.

Although George Lucas remains a galaxy-sized force in Hollywood, creating the "Star Wars" universe and helping to launch the modern blockbuster era, he almost destroyed Portman's young career. Thankfully, Nichols had the vision to see Portman was ready to graduate far beyond what audiences saw in the "Star Wars" prequels.

Read this next: The 14 Best Star Wars Creatures Ranked

The post Natalie Portman Struggled to Find Work After the Star Wars Prequel Trilogy appeared first on /Film.

Cassandra Peterson opens her 2021 autobiography, "Yours Cruelly, Elvira: Memoirs of the Mistress of the Dark," with the story of how she became Elvira. The story goes, she was only a day into her marriage to Mark Pierson when she got a call from her friend Dawna — on her honeymoon in the Colorado Rockies — urging her to return to L.A. to audition for the part of a sassy horror hostess at the TV station KHJ. Peterson refused. She wasn't going to cut her vacation short. Her friend Dawna, the one alerting her to the audition, was persistent. When her honeymoon was over, miraculously, the part wasn't yet filled, and Peterson was able to go in to audition after all. She says that the script sucked, and she failed to come in costume as the casting call requested. But her quips and ad libs appealed to those in charge, and she landed the gig. That was in 1981. Peterson was 30. She has been Elvira ever since. 

Peterson's acting career stretches back far further than Elvira, however. Her autobiography also describes a horrible home life as a child, having to bear the wrath of an abusive mother, leading her to leave home at age 14, and signing a contract to perform in Vegas by age 17, dancing in a revue show called "Vive Les Girls!" Oh, and Peterson's pre-Elvira career took many interesting turns besides. She even toured with an Italian pop band called I Latins 80. 

Mixed in with all the dancing gigs and band tours were also a few feature films. The very first being none other than 1971's "Diamonds Are Forever," the James Bond movie wherein Sean Connery returned after George Lazenby played 007 in "On Her Majesty's Secret Service." 

Vive Les Girls!

The British website Horror Channel interviewed Peterson back in 2008, asking her about the experience. An extended portion of "Diamonds are Forever" takes place in Las Vegas, where James Bond is tracking down some illegal diamonds that are hidden inside a corpse. There's a standup comedian involved in the plot, as well as a femme fatale named Plenty O'Toole (Lana Wood) and another named Tiffany Case (Jill St. John). Look, the stories in most of the James Bond movies are typically opaque. The movies are driven by action set pieces, sex scenes, and exotic locales. 

To take advantage of the Las Vegas location, the producers of "Diamonds Are Forever" filmed some shows that were already being performed, and one of them happened to be "Vive Les Girls!" Peterson only appeared briefly, but it also led to her taking an additional gig as an extra. Peterson recalled:

"They actually filmed a scene of the show I appeared in Las Vegas, 'Vive Les Girls!' at the Dunes Hotel. I was on stage as a showgirl doing the show. I'm not even sure if I ended up in the final cut, but I did get to go to London later, worked a day on the film as an extra (think the scene was cut) but had a very memorable day at Pinewood Studios, seeing what goes on behind the scenes in a Bond film and having lunch in the commissary with Cubby Broccoli, Sean Connery, Michael Caine and Tony Curtis."

Peterson did not elucidate on talking to Caine or Curtis. But then, Peterson had met many famous people by that point in her career, including members of the Rat Pack. Peterson also would famously go on a date with Elvis Presley (no word yet as to whether or not that date will be dramatized in Baz Luhrmann's upcoming Elvis biopic). Additionally, when touring in Italy, she would land a dancing role in Federico Fellini's 1972 film "Roma," also playing a dancer. Peterson's first credited role was playing the role of Katya in Stephanie Rothman's sexploitation flick "The Working Girls," but of course, she will always be Elvira: Mistress of the Dark.

Read this next: Horror Roles That Changed Actors Forever

The post The Actress Behind Elvira Kicked Off Her Career With A James Bond Classic appeared first on /Film.

I recently had the chance to sample Bushmill’s second Rare Casks expression, a 29-year-old single malt Irish Whiskey finished in Pedro Ximenez Sherry casks. This stuff retails for a whopping $750, and it’s worth it. It was initially (triple) distilled in 1992 and aged in bourbon barrels until 2004, then transferred to…

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"Hereditary" might well be one of the most unsettling films of the last decade, but it's not always an easy one to follow. At first glance, it's a highly-strung family melodrama with a dark secret hiding beneath the surface.

And director Ari Aster goes to great lengths to keep that secret just out of sight.

"Hereditary" is the story of the Graham family, which is struggling with loss after the death of its unseen matriarch, Ellen Tapper Leigh (Kathleen Chalfant). There's very clearly something wrong here as the creeping tension engulfs the family, whether it's seen through eerie miniatures made by Annie (Toni Collette) or the outright weirdness of the family's youngest child, Charlie (Milly Shapiro).

The family melodrama begins to simmer and soon boils over. There's unresolved tension throughout the family -– Charlie was clearly grandma's favorite, while Annie paints a picture of a fractured family via her work. 

Then, there's Peter (Alex Wolff). Obviously struggling to fit in with his highly-strung family, Peter is an average teenager trying to find his feet. He's more into parties and smoking weed than looking after his younger sister, and when tragedy strikes, the family begins a descent into hell.

"The film is a horror film, it's unabashedly one, but as I was pitching it, I was describing it as a family tragedy that curdles into a nightmare," said writer and director Ari Aster.

And while that nightmare begins with the death of yet another family member, it turns out the answers were hiding in plain sight all along.

It's All About Paimon

By the time the final act comes around, "Hereditary" reveals its hand: It's all about Paimon.

A demon and one of the eight lords of hell, Paimon has been at the very core of the film right from the beginning. But who exactly is he? Paimon is a Goetic demon, often described as a king or high-ranking demon from hell. Aster found references to Paimon in a book called "The Lesser Key of Solomon" during his research and decided to go with it.

"The devil has been done to death," he said in a Reddit AMA. "Paimon was my favorite option that came up in my research."

When it comes to "Hereditary," it's Paimon who is summoned at the very end of the film, and it's revealed that Peter is his intended vessel -– a human host for Paimon to embody on Earth. That's right: After (metaphorically) going through hell and back, Peter is revealed to be the focus of the entire twisted story.

The death of his sister, his mother's breakdown, and everything that follows serves to wear him down emotionally. Only when Peter is at his lowest point can he become susceptible, and then he's used as a vessel for the demon Paimon.

It turns out that his grandmother manipulated their entire lives for this purpose. There are hints of this throughout the movie, but we'll get to that. Suffice to say that the grandmother's influence, and the cult she founded, can be felt all the way through the film.

A Demonic Seal Hiding In Plain Sight

Our first glimpse of Paimon's influence comes very early in "Hereditary." We just didn't know it at the time.

One of the film's first scenes depicts the funeral of the Graham family matriarch -– the sinister grandmother whose influence extends over all their lives. But she's more than just a granny who oversteps boundaries. She's actually the founder of a sinister cult who's controlling the family for its own nefarious ends.

And that's depicted by her oddly-shaped necklace.

That necklace is actually a sigil -– a demonic seal found in occult texts which represents the demon Paimon. Good old grandma is seen wearing one on her necklace, but the seal is found throughout the film, notably etched into the telegraph pole which decapitates poor Charlie.

The mid-17th century book "The Lesser Key of Soloman describes Paimon as "[appearing] in the form of a Man sitting upon a Dromedary [one-humped camel] with a Crown most glorious upon his head."

Of course, in the film's final scenes, we see Peter crowned by the Cult of Paimon, thus becoming the vessel for the demon itself. But the cult has been interfering with Peter and his family long before the film begins.

In fact, their influence can literally be seen throughout the family home.

The Writing's On The Wall

There's a moment during "Hereditary" when Annie finds obscure writing on the wall of Charlie's room, but doesn't really question it. In fact, she's later seen adding the word "Satony" to the model she's making.

And that's not the only bit of weird text you can find in the Graham family home.

If you look closely, you'll find the words "satony," "zazas," and "liftoach pandemonium" scrawled onto the walls and in hidden spots throughout the film. But what does it mean? In that same Reddit AMA, Aster explains what it's all about:

"Those are isolated pieces of an invocation spell that is suggested to be written all over the house. We only see three of these in the film, but there are many more (probably written behind furniture or otherwise hidden). 'Liftoach Pandemonium' has a special significance. It translates as 'Open Up Chaos (or Hell).'"

The word "satony" is frequently used in necromancy, while "zazas" seems to refer to a spirit frequently conjured by Ouija boards. Obviously, this is a strong hint about what's to come, with the Cult of Paimon (and presumably dear old granny) opening up the gates of hell to commune with their lord.

The clues were all there if you knew where to look. And it looks as though Peter wasn't the cult's first attempt to find a host for Paimon.

Annie's Brother Was The First Attempt

Annie also has a mysterious brother who is mentioned by name but never seen.

It's revealed that years before the events of "Hereditary," Annie's brother took his own life following a diagnosis of schizophrenia. That would have been tragic enough already -- except it's not entirely true.

At one point, Annie explains what happened:

"My older brother had schizophrenia and when he was 16, he hanged himself in my mother's bedroom and of course the suicide note blamed her, accusing her of putting people inside him."

It's an eerie confession, and while Annie seems oblivious to her mother's motives, it reveals what granny was up to the entire time. Clearly, she had attempted to use her own son as a vessel for the demon Paimon. And when that didn't work out, she moved on to find a new one.

Why didn't she try to use Annie as a vessel? Well, that's a little more complicated. You see, Paimon desires a male form, which is why the cult tries to use Annie's brother at first and then moves on to Annie's son, Peter.

But there was also another attempt in between...

Charlie Was Paimon, Too

Despite the demon's demand for a male host, it looks as though the Cult of Paimon grew restless.

After the failed attempt with Annie's brother, the Cult clearly turned its interest toward Peter, but there was a problem: Annie's husband Steve (Gabriel Byrne) wanted the family to have nothing to do with their grandmother.

"She lived in our house at the end before hospice," Annie revealed at group therapy. "We weren't even talking before that. I mean, we were and then we weren't. And then we were. She's completely manipulative. Until my husband finally enforced a no-contact rule, which lasted until I got pregnant with my daughter."

That's right -- Charlie was the catalyst for granny being allowed to return. And according to Annie, it wasn't long before she "got her hooks" into her.

"Charlie is the first successful host for Paimon," revealed Aster in an interview with Variety. "It's transferred from Charlie to Peter at the end. [It's Paimon] from the moment she's born. I mean, there's a girl that was displaced, but she was displaced from the very beginning."

Essentially, that means that it's Paimon inhabiting Charlie's body throughout "Hereditary" ... and that makes it far easier for the demon and its cult to manipulate Peter.

The poor boy never stood a chance. When the time came, it was Peter who was displaced to make way for the lord of hell. Thanks, grandma.

Read this next: How These Child Stars Feel About The Horror Movies That Put Them On The Map

The post Hereditary Ending Explained: All Hail Paimon appeared first on /Film.

Each and every Hitman 3 update offers a lot for players to sink their teeth into, from a new single-player mode at the start of the year to VR support in its Year 2 patch notes. The latest release is no different, as those with a compatible graphics card will now be able to see Hitman 3 in all its glory with ray tracing, Nvidia DLSS, and AMD FSR.

Enabling both ray traced reflections and shadows can be quite demanding, especially considering Hitman 3 is already up there in terms of power hungry games. Including Nvidia DLSS is a great move to boost fps on supported GPUs, but you'll only have access to the first generation of FidelityFX Super Resolution if you can't run team green's option, as AMD FSR 2.0 is unavailable here. It only released last week, though, so it might need more time in the oven if it is in the pipeline for Hitman 3.

Intel XeSS is also notably absent despite featuring the game prominently in its marketing campaign for its first-party upscaler. We expect it'll drop eventually and will likely match the timeline of Intel Arc Alchemist graphics cards, which have been delayed several times already.

RELATED LINKS: Best SSD for gaming, How to build a gaming PC, Best gaming CPU

One year before Oliver Stone pricked America's conscience with "Platoon," Sylvester Stallone used the Vietnam War as a backdrop for his unabashedly pulpy "Rambo: First Blood Part II." Conceived at the height of the POW/MIA dispute, which demanded a full accounting of all American soldiers who never returned home from the conflict, the film is both entertainingly exploitative and morally repugnant. It transforms the first movie's grievously traumatized John Rambo into a cartoonishly lethal one-man-army, and preys on the hopes of military families who at the time were clinging to dreams that their loved ones were still being held in bamboo cages somewhere in Southeast Asia. Stallone's intent might've been dubious, but it was right in line with the zeitgeist. Despite a raft of scathingly indignant reviews, "Rambo: First Blood Part II" was the second highest grossing movie of 1985. 

For some, the title character represented the stirring, hyper-macho apotheosis of the all-American hero who passed out of fashion when John Wayne bit the dust. For others, Rambo embodied a regressive jingoism that gradually manifested in a whole new series of military misadventures. For Stallone, the film gave voice to veterans' disillusionment not with the United States, but its citizenry's lack of ardor for the greatest country on Earth. This is the gist of Rambo's anguished closing sentiment. Where did Stallone get this notion, and does his protagonist's impassioned plea make a lick of sense given the film's ambiguity about the war? Let's unpack this sucker.

To Survive A War, You Gotta Become A War

At the outset of "Rambo: First Blood Part II," our hero is doing hard time in a labor camp as punishment for the events of the first movie when his former superior and only remaining ally, Colonel Trautman (Richard Crenna), drops by to dangle a presidential pardon. All Rambo has to do to earn his freedom is parachute into Vietnam, obtain photographic evidence of U.S. prisoners of war still being held in the country, and get airlifted out. Rambo accepts, but throws up an immediate red flag when he asks Trautman "Do we get to win this time?" Rather than reiterate that this is strictly a reconnaissance mission, Trautman replies, "This time it's up to you."

Rambo is promptly flown to a military base in Thailand, where the operation's treacherous manager, Roger Murdoch (Charles Napier), immediately throws cold water on the ex-Green Beret's inclination to resume the war. The only shooting is to be done via camera. What Rambo and Trautman fail to realize is that Murdoch's congressional overseers expect Rambo to find zero evidence of imprisoned U.S. soldiers; worse, they have no idea that Murdoch plans to leave the Medal of Honor winner to die in the unlikely event that he does put eyes on POWs. It's yet another weak-willed, bureaucratic betrayal of a patriot willing to die for his country. In other words, it's Vietnam all over again. What Murdock does not know is that Rambo is determined to win this time.

I Want What They Want

The bulk of "Rambo: First Blood Part II" is sensationally entertaining nonsense. Director George Pan Cosmatos, working with the insanely overqualified cinematographer Jack Cardiff (best known for lensing such cinematic landmarks as "A Matter of Life and Death," "Black Narcissus," and "The Red Shoes"), dazzle the viewer with muscular action set pieces, while Jerry Goldsmith's propulsive score gets the blood pumping something fierce. Rambo is captured and tortured by a couple of stock Russian baddies, who disastrously underestimate the warrior's capacity for bloodshed. They mess around, and they sho'nuff find out. Rambo avenges -- via explosive-tipped arrow -- the death of the river pirate (Julia Nickson) he'd abruptly fallen in love with, kills the Russians, returns with a clutch of POWs, delivers his aggrieved valedictory, and wanders off into the wilds of Thailand. Audience cheers. Credits roll.

It's tempting to shut off your brain and enjoy the ludicrously thrilling ride, but Stallone isn't one for mindlessness. He's a serious artist who invests each of his signature franchise films with a piece of his soul and/or mind. The "Rocky" films reflect his evolution as an artist and a man, while the "Rambo" movies express his political worldview. "First Blood" did not originate with Stallone (Clint Eastwood and Robert De Niro were in the early running for the lead role), but, once cast, he leveraged his "Rocky" star power to make the character his own. That film is a grounded, wholly uncontroversial tale of a combat-addled soldier who came home to disdain instead of a parade. And because all decent people, regardless of political affiliation, can agree that Vietnam vets got the rawest of deals after the war, we sympathize with and root for Rambo. The sequel, however, is a completely different beast. It's as adrenalized as "Rocky III," but thematically unsettled. This is why the final scene, while heartfelt, strikes a strangely discordant tone.

After settling his debts with the duplicitous Murdock, Rambo gets into a heated exchange with Trautman. The colonel is conflicted. In an earlier fracas with Murdock, he acknowledges the war was a mistake based on a lie, but, as a soldier, his duty is to bring every living American back home. If that requires a resumption of hostilities, so be it. Now that Rambo has carried out this mission, Trautman implores his protégé to return home as well. When Rambo resists, Trautman tells him that, while the war was wrong, he shouldn't hate his country for it. He then asks Rambo what he wants. Rambo explodes. "I want what they want, and every other guy who came over here and spilled his guts and gave everything he had wants! For our country to love us as much as we love it! That's what I want!"

A Rousing Corrective To A Needlessly Bloody Failure

In a wide-ranging 2006 Q&A, Stallone said, "I realize his speech at the end may have caused millions of viewers to burst veins in their eyeballs by rolling them excessively, but the sentiment stated was conveyed to me by many veterans." This may very well be true, but for many of the 2.2 million unfortunate sons who couldn't defer their way out of service, the Vietnam War was a reminder that the poorest Americans will always fight the misguided battles of the ruling class. Furthermore, these Americans will be forced to join a second fight on the homefront just to ensure their government lives up to its obligations. The failure of the Vietnam War, and the miserable treatment of the men who fought it, had nothing to do with insufficient love of country. Rather, it was a tragedy of blind, unquestioning affection by millions of patriots who knew they'd never be called to serve.

At the height of his Hollywood powers, and in the midst of the Reagan era, Stallone's commercial instincts were spot-on. The majority of the country was raring to flex its military muscle again and remind the world that the United States will always be the premiere superpower on the planet. But by creating a rousing corrective to a needlessly bloody failure, Stallone spun a new, equally pernicious lie, one that many Americans believe to this day. Rambo might've been invincible, but the true believers who enlisted to fight the Iraq War based on wholesale fabrication were not. The lessons of "Platoon" and the sobering films it inspired were, in the end, no match for the fantasy of "Rambo: First Blood Part II."

Read this next: Jackie Chan's 15 Greatest Fight Scenes Ranked

The post Rambo: First Blood Part II Ending Explained: The Bloody Legacy of a Blockbuster Lie appeared first on /Film.

The CW's upcoming "Supernatural" prequel series, "The Winchesters," is developing faster than fans anticipated, as a full-fledged trailer dropped yesterday, in which Dean Winchester returns as the narrator of his parents' story. Jensen Ackles, who is producing the series as well as reprising his role as Dean, has stoked hope for "Supernatural" fans by saying that there is always a way of bringing back fan-favorites from the original show (via TV Line):

"The great thing about this world is that nothing is off the table. We have ways of bringing back fan-favorite characters and the actors that played them. We also have ways of bringing back younger versions of those characters."

As "The Winchesters" revolves around the love story between John Winchester (Drake Rodger) and Mary Campbell (Meg Donnelly), the focus of the tale will be on the origins of demon hunting in the Winchester family, and how it took a toll on them. This premise obviously leaves the door open for the return of many characters seen in "Supernatural," including demons, entities, humans -- and, yes, angels.

The return of the Winchesters would mean greater insight into Dean (Ackles) and Sam's (Jared Padalecki) past, but also provide context to what "new mission" Dean is on, as seen in the trailer. Dean's presence cannot be placed on the timeline at the moment, as it is unclear as to when exactly he took over the mission to find out more about his family's legacy (though presumably it was at some point before the end of "Supernatural"). Apart from the past unraveling, there are also threats in the present, in which a secret organization is involved in shady, behind-the-scenes dealings.

The Return Of Castiel?

The return of fan-favorite characters could mean younger versions of beloved "Supernatural" characters popping up midway (or familiar faces, like that of Sam, could appear for an episode or two), or the appearance of ageless beings, such as the angel Castiel. Castiel has been an integral part of "Supernatural" ever since his arrival in season 4, and divine intervention has been an important plot point in terms of John and Mary's union. This naturally begs the question as to whether Castiel or any other angel — such as Michael, Raphael, or Metatron — could be making a comeback in the prequel series.

When TVLine asked Ackles whether angels will play a role in the prequel, the actor neither confirmed nor denied the assumption: "Ooh, that is a really good question, and TBD," the actor said. Well, that means anything could happen!

Here's the official synopsis for "The Winchesters:"

"Mary is 19 years old and has been fighting the forces of darkness since she was a child. After losing someone close to her, the hardened hunter considers quitting the family business — until her father's disappearance and the arrival of newcomer John forces her to lead a new team. John has recently returned from Vietnam. Selfless and clear-headed, he finds a new mission back home, where traces of his father's past lead him to a secret organization and a whole new war as a hunter."

"The Winchesters" is expected to premiere on The CW later in 2022.

Read this next: The 15 Best Horror TV Shows Of All Time

The post Jensen Ackles Says The Winchesters Can Bring Back Other Supernatural Characters appeared first on /Film.

Smart Mouth Productions announces post-production is complete on THEY WAIT IN THE DARK, the latest feature from celebrated indie horror film director/writer Patrick Rea (I Am Lisa, Arbor Demon, Nailbiter). Rea’s latest film was shot in the summer of 2021 entirely on location in the Kansas City area.

Director Rea brings his unique vision to the latest addition in his catalog. “I had always wanted to make a haunted house story, but I didn’t want to regurgitate the same plot that had been done a million times before to varying results. I wanted to come at this specific sub-genre of horror from a fresh angle,” explains Rea.

The supernatural/domestic thriller stars Sarah McGuire (The Stylist, I Am Lisa), Laurie Catherine Winkel (MacGyver, Father of the Bride), and introduces newcomers Patrick McGee and Paige Maria.

McGuire stars as Amy, a young woman on the run with her young son Adrian (McGee) from her abusive ex-girlfriend (Winkel). When the past rises up to haunt them they must confront the forces threatening them from both outside and in.

From Executive Producer Meagan Flynn, “What does our past mean for our future? Can the cycles of abuse be broken? And are the things that haunt us real or otherworldly or both? These are the questions Dark challenges us with.”

With sound design and score by Ben Benefield and special effects makeup from Jake Jackson, THEY WAIT IN THE DARK is currently open for sales and distribution inquiries

The post [News] THEY WAIT IN THE DARK Wraps Post-Production appeared first on Nightmarish Conjurings.

Ted Cruz said that $8 billion in economic aid to Ukraine is "crap."

"There's also in the bill about $8 billion dollars that goes to the government of Ukraine for economic assistance — I think that's crap," the Texas Senator spouted on his podcast. — Read the rest

Chris Hemsworth has a workout app called "Centr." People love it. It encourages its subscribers to follow the holistic approach to nutrition, fitness, and mind-body practice that Chris Hemsworth does. It makes being Chris Hemsworth aspirational and cements the actor as a muscular goal post for better living. This isn't an offshoot of the Hemsworth experience, but rather a core facet of his public-facing persona. Hemsworth is so singularly handsome, chiseled, and appealing that he was cast as Marvel Comics' God of Thunder in 2009 before anyone truly knew his name. That initial impression has both made and haunted his career. 

Hemsworth's time in Hollywood is a diptych: On the one hand, you have his Marvel Studios efforts and that company's journey to omnipresent monolith; on the other, there's a series of films by iconoclastic directors that aim to stretch contemporary cinema's limits. The former has been successful, the latter often misunderstood, much like Hemsworth himself. The Australian actor has distinguished himself as a performer who relishes testing his physical and emotional boundaries, surprising himself and audiences along the way. He is forever capable of growth and always improving. He is an artistic force of nature ... no wonder he's got an app. Here are the 14 best Chris Hemsworth movies, ranked.

In The Heart Of The Sea (2015)

It's easy to forget "In The Heart of The Sea" is a Ron Howard film. To be fair, it's hard to pinpoint what makes a Ron Howard movie singular. The "Happy Days" actor has carved out a resume as dense as it is diverse, one that includes trite romantic comedies ("The Dilemma"), underrated thrillers ("Ransom"), and stone-cold classics ("Apollo 13," "Willow"). He's also collaborated twice with Chris Hemsworth, and it pains me to report that "In The Heart of The Sea" is the lesser of their efforts.

"In The Heart of The Sea" adapts Nathanial Philbrick's 2000 book of the same name to plumb the depths of the real-life event that inspired Herman Melville's "Moby Dick." Accordingly, the movie is a minor marvel of old-school craft, visually splendid and rife with mounting dread. It's also terribly paced and riddled with cliches. There's little that Hemsworth, Cillian Murphy, Benjamin Walker, and a pre-Spider-Man Tom Holland can do with the thin material. This is a film that would play well in a bar on mute, its images impressive every time they were glimpsed at, its story best left at sea. It's easy to forget it's a movie at all. 

12 Strong (2018)

Chris Hemsworth, Michael Shannon, Michael Pena, and horse soldiers aren't the ingredients for a great movie. They should be, and that's the downfall of "12 Strong." On paper, director Nicolai Fuglsig's tale of a Special Forces team that rode steeds and took out the Taliban plays like dad-movie gangbusters. In practice, it's cliche-riddled. The script is overly jingoistic, and it's every line of dialogue is either over or undercooked. Those expecting greatness will be disappointed. 

That said, enter "12 Strong" with zero expectations and its pleasures are bountiful. The battle scenes are brisk and muscular, equally rooted in war film and Neo-Western flourishes. Hemsworth is good and sturdy as the Special Forces commander, but Shannon, Pena, and — the somehow still underrated — Trevante Rhodes ("Moonlight," "The Predator") are better. At the end of the day, "12 Strong" is solid, and given that Chris Hemsworth's filmography is a study in cinematic ups and downs, a simple but solid entry deserves some commendation.

Thor (2011)

"Thor" isn't the best Marvel movie, but it is the most important one. Consider: Tony Stark (Robert Downey Jr.), upon seeing Thor (Chris Hemsworth) for the first time, quips "Shakespeare in The Park? Doth mother know you weareth her drapes?" That only makes sense because of "Thor" as directed by Kenneth Branagh, a guy who loves Shakespeare so much he's brought six of his plays to the big screen. Branagh turns "Thor" into Groundlings-worthy theater. Its spectacle is mediocre, but its family drama is appropriately grandiose and exquisite. The sibling rivalry between Thor and Loki is far more Edgar and Edmund from "King Lear" than "Game Of Thrones." Their dynamic, one informed by admiration and jealousy alike, becomes a bedrock of the MCU's Infinity Saga, as do the themes of paternal legacy which play out between Odin and his sons. "Iron Man" makes the MCU fun, but " Thor" gives it weight.

It also gives the MCU Chris Hemsworth. A decade-plus on from "Thor," it's hard to overstate what Hemsworth accomplishes as the God of Thunder. He doesn't just give a star turn, he sets the template for 11-plus years of MCU star turns. Hemsworth was a global unknown when he got cast as Thor and the speed with which it made him a household name formed the blueprint for going A-list. Hemsworth would be better as Thor down the road, but he would never be more indelible.

Avengers: Infinity War (2018)

"Avengers: Infinity War" is improved by "Avengers: Endgame." It's almost impossible to separate the two. The epic swan song of Marvel's Infinity Saga is so packed with spectacle, payoffs, and bombastic popcorn cinema that it makes you believe Kevin Fiege planned every second of it. As a Chris Hemsworth showcase, "Infinity War" has few equals. From the opening moment when Thanos (Josh Brolin) chokes Loki (Tom Hiddleston) out before Thor's very eyes, the Russo Brothers' film asks Hemsworth to be an audience surrogate and bear the weight of devastating stakes. He does so and then some. Thor's arrival on the battlefield of Wakanda is an all-time Marvel moment, as is his attempted destruction of the stone-craving warlord from Titan.

That said, as a standalone effort "Infinity War" is subpar. It moves all its pieces onto the "Endgame" board with aplomb but rarely tells a compelling story. What works about the movie is everything that led up to it. The death of Gamora isn't ostensibly well-shot, but her loss is devastating because the "Guardians" films are classics. Even the most lasting moment of "Infinity War" ⁠— Thanos's snap blipping half the world's population and heroes into dust before the audience's eyes ⁠— hinges on audience familiarity. "Endgame" somehow doesn't fall into this trap so often. It's painful to admit that it and "Infinity War" aren't in balance (as all things should be), but there's no world in which they are, in this or any multiverse.

A Perfect Getaway (2009)

"A Perfect Getaway" is written and directed by David Twohy, the author of 1993's "The Fugitive" and Vin Diesel's "Riddick" trilogy. Those films are varying degrees of stone-faced, but they're not meta in the slightest. "A Perfect Getaway" is. The characters of "A Perfect Getaway" — from a self-proclaimed American Jedi played by Timothy Olyphant to Steve Zahn's upstart screenwriter — talk about what makes a good film tick, from red herrings to second act plot twists. They also discuss Nicolas Cage a lot.

If this sounds confusing, it's far smoother in execution than on paper. "A Perfect Getaway" takes three couples vacationing in Hawaii (Zahn and Milla Jovovich, Olyphant and Kiele Sanchez, Marly Shelton and Chris Hemsworth) and sticks them in the thick of a classic potboiler. A pair of newlyweds have been killed on the island. Every couple suspects every other couple and each has dark, ludicrous secrets. The film becomes increasingly convoluted but is charming front-to-back. This is largely thanks to Olyphant and Jovovich, who both tap into their characters' specific ids and spill them onto the screen through bold, Nick Cage-worthy choices. Hemsworth, for his part, workshops the icy cool aggression he would deploy with scientific precision later in his career. "A Perfect Getaway" isn't perfect, but it's a diverting trip worth booking at least once.

Extraction (2020)

There's a fight scene during the back half of "Extraction" where gun-for-hire Tyler Rake (Chris Hemsworth) fights a gang of mercenary street kids. The kids don't pull their punches, and neither does "Extraction." These youths get stabbed, slammed through car doors, and crushed by motorcycles. It's an awesome and deeply upsetting sequence. It's also a litmus test for your enjoyment of Sam Hargrave's gritty action film, which premiered to instant adulation on Netflix in 2020. In many ways, "Extraction" is the most successful Chris Hemsworth movie not produced by Marvel and the strongest expansion of his brand that isn't a workout app. 

Tyler Rake is cold-blooded and nihilistic to a fault. Rake doesn't kill his aggressors so much as man-handle them cruelly: one nameless bad guy is disposed of via, yes, a rake right through the eyes. "Extraction" is a lot! Hargrave gets on his wavelength, directing-wise, as the film was instantly notable for its one-take action sequences and cruel violence. It isn't much more than that. The script by Hemsworth's "Avengers: Infinity War" and "Endgame" directors The Russo Brothers is paper-thin at best. Any scene not involving combat of any sort falls flat, but combat is the movie's big-ticket item and "Extraction" makes no bones about it. Sometimes a filet mignon is too delicate ... sometimes you need a porterhouse. "Extraction" is rare-meat cinema, blood dripping from the bone. Take it or leave it. 

Ghostbusters (2016)

The internet loves to talk about "Ghostbusters." It discusses how the film's box office failure propped up a legion of toxic, close-minded fanboys. Those fanboys claim "Ghostbusters" is an affront to art-making decency. Paul Feig's funny movie gets lost in this chatter and it shouldn't. While 2016's "Ghostbusters" isn't 1984's "Ghostbusters," no film could be. Instead, it's a very funny movie starring four very funny women (Melissa McCarthy, Kate McKinnon, Kristin Wigg, and Leslie Jones) who cut their path through the archetypal territory. The set-pieces are good, the characters are better. For a film that's been so hotly debated, "Ghostbusters" feels like a hard movie to argue over or with. It's that charming.

Feig's film is immensely appealing in no small part thanks to Chris Hemsworth, who exudes maximum himbo energy as Kevin, the Ghostbusters' receptionist. Whether he's naming his dog "My cat" (Mike Hat) or auditioning his shirtless, saxophone-playing headshots for the crew, Kevin is as dull a bulb as he is adorable. He also becomes the film's bad guy for a stretch due to possession, allowing Hemsworth to flex both his acting and actual muscles. For a guy who's been touted as a movie star, Hemsworth is wonderfully relaxed and at home in a supporting role. He, unlike a large swathe of social media, knows this Ghostbuster team is worth backing.

Blackhat (2015)

Chris Hemsworth is, for all intents and purposes, a massive movie star, but outside of Marvel his movies have rarely been hits. These truths live in concert with one another, not giving a quarter. The Australian actor's success hasn't translated to the sort of films Marvel's success is making increasingly rare. That even applied to Michael Mann's "Blackhat," a film that should hold some appeal to audiences. Mann is a neo-noir master, his films and TV shows include pop culture staples ("Miami Vice," "Heat," "Ali") and films that blend blockbuster and art house ("Collateral"). Mann is exactly the sort of filmmaker Chris Hemsworth should work with, as his innate style is a bridge between the spheres the actor wishes to operate in. What's surprising about "Blackhat" is that it's a blockbuster built from inaccessible elements. 

"Blackhat" takes a steely-eyed look at technological collapse and the meltdown of financial systems. There are no heroes to swoop in and save the day here. There's a disinterested hacker named Hathaway (Hemsworth) and two government institutions already reeling from rampant cybercrime. This is just part of what makes "Blackhat" brilliant and misunderstood: it's a blockbuster that deliberately tests the building blocks of popcorn movies only to knock them down like the terrorists it antagonizes. There's no world in which it believes things are turning out well for humanity. Chaos is inevitable. The systems don't work. 

Bad Times At The El Royale (2018)

"Bad Times at the El Royale" failed as a "Cabin in the Woods" follow-up, but Drew Goddard's meta-horror blockbuster is nothing less than a game-changer. Asking the same filmmaker to comment on and transform another genre — let alone noir — is an impossible task. So if you haven't seen "Bad Times," some advice: forget who made it. If you don't know, never look it up. Focus, instead, on the star turn from Cynthia Ervio, who manages to give a naturalistic, tough-as-nails ingenue turn that's also worthy of a musical. Relish the intricate and occasionally shocking plotting. Most of all, enjoy Chris Hemsworth. Hemsworth's range has always been underrated, but he stretches every acting muscle as Billy Lee, the film's proverbial devil. Watching Hemsworth weaponizing his hotter-than-thou charms into a genuinely chilling cult leader is mesmerizing. He makes being charismatic and chiseled feel downright wrong. His performance is arguably the film's secret weapon.

Yet that's the "Bad Times at the El Royale" conundrum, in that it's a movie only built from secret weapons. Every one of its pleasures lingers more than lands, but they do linger. You need only look up the "Can't Hurry Love" sequence on YouTube to see it's been streamed more than 600,000 times for proof of this. Like the best noir, "Bad Times at The El Royale" lingers in the shadows of its audience's minds, of showier films, and of the movie which made its director famous. It's anything but a failure.

Thor: Ragnarok (2017)

"Thor: Ragnarok" is admired and remembered for its gonzo sense of humor, but let's get something clear: it's also the most radical Marvel movie. Taika Waititi is a self-proclaimed Polynesian Jewish filmmaker of Te Whānau-ā-Apanui Māori descent who, through "Ragnorok," tells a story about one culture burying another and how the solution isn't reintegration but burning it all up and starting over. You can't save the land when there's blood in the soil. That's a fiery idea at the core of a film that, memorably, features a character screaming "Piss off, space ghost!" and improvised monologues about Loki becoming a snake when he was eight. It's also what makes "Ragnarok" special. 

Waititi understands that comedy can be angry and joyous all at once. The line between yelling from joy and howling with rage is a thin one, and Waititi never tries to walk it. Instead, he hops from side to side, synching Hulk punching wolves to Led Zeppelin's "Immigrant Song" shortly after a stark act of mass slaughter. Thor loses an eye. Jeff Goldblum has an orgy spaceship. Every one of these elements belongs and is wonderful. If comic book films threaten to become more homogenous with every passing release, "Ragnarok" is a field guide to keeping them fresh. Sometimes you have to burn the rule book up and start again.

Avengers: Endgame (2019)

It's hard to critique "Avengers: Endgame," and even harder to think of it as a film. "Avengers: Endgame" is the end of Tchaikovsky's "1812 Overture" extended to a three-hour length. The Russo Brothers' final salvo of The Infinity Saga is all payoffs, so even its quiet is bombastic. If the movie isn't rewarding viewers who showed up for this *and* ABC's "Agent Carter," it's shaking the cynicism loose from IP-driven blockbusters. Many films try to recreate the childhood feeling of playing with toys in a sandbox, but "Avengers: Endgame" actually does it. It's a dizzying accomplishment and you're either onboard from the first frame or not.

It's also impossible to overstate how crucial Chris Hemsworth is to making "Endgame" work. There's been a lot of intelligent writing about the highs and problematic lows of Thor's arc here, but the latter isn't on Hemsworth in any way. He delivers a funny, focused, and quietly primal portrait of PTSD. If he didn't, those lows would be easier to ignore. His work (and every performance in "Avengers: Endgame," really) is a reminder that the MCU's not-so-secret weapon has been their performers. There's a reason it ends with their signatures. "Avengers: Endgame" is a cinematic curtain call. Here's hoping the encore's half as good.

Rush (2013)

For a film set in the 1970s, "Rush" is remarkably ahead of its time. Ron Howard's whip-smart and exhilarating sports film about the rivalry which fueled Formula 1 Racing's glory days is made from winning parts. It stars Chris Hemsworth and Daniel Brühl as rival drivers, the latter on the verge of his own Marvel-spurred stardom. In 2013 Formula 1 was a forgotten brand, but is now a global phenomenon thanks to an upstart class of incredible drivers and Netflix's "Drive To Survive" docudrama. The script comes courtesy of Oscar-nominee Peter Morgan, who previously made the great "Frost/Nixon" with Howard, so everything about "Rush" is geared to cross the finish line in style.

What's remarkable is that "Rush" cuts to the heart of why racing is compelling and why we watch sports. During the film's midsection, Niki Lauda (Brühl) is on his honeymoon and staring at the ocean after a deeply relaxing day. His wife Marlene (Alexandra Maria Lara) asks him what's wrong. Niki's response is wonderful and chilling: "Happiness is the enemy. It weakens you. Suddenly you have something to lose." Most sports movies steamroll their way to a moment of triumph. "Rush," asks why triumphs are necessary in the first place, and why seeing a car cross the finish line is cathartic and not calming. Humans need to see other humans striving and be reminded of their discontent, their dreams, and their desires. "Rush" is a sterling reminder.

Star Trek (2009)

Plenty of actors have foreshadowed their impending stardom through small roles. Alfred Molina infamously rubbed his fingers together before betraying Indiana Jones in "Raiders of The Lost Ark." Kevin Bacon screamed "Thank you, sir, may I have another?" during a legendary scene from "Animal House." Chris Hemsworth, in under five minutes, takes command of a Starfleet ship and hears his son born right before he passes. It's an incredible set of circumstances and Hemsworth is up to them.

In many ways, Hemsworth's work is emblematic of what makes J.J. Abrams' "Star Trek" so wonderful: its humanity. His first effort is anything but a gritty reboot or a glorified attempt to make an "old" franchise "cool." Instead, "Star Trek" hones in on what makes the original characters so endearing by highlighting grace notes which never got their due. Chekov's exuberance is expertly realized by the late Anton Yelchin. Chris Pine gets to the heart of the cocky but wounded and well-meaning daring that makes James T. Kirk the Captain he is. Eric Bana's Nero, crucially, is a villain with purpose, one whose arc provides the social commentary that's always been an artery of the Star Trek franchise's heart. "Star Trek" would've found new life with or without J.J. Abrams, but "with" yielded one of the century's more effortless popcorn blockbusters.

Cabin In The Woods (2011)

The "twist" movie was reborn in the wake of "The Sixth Sense." Bruce Willis being dead the whole time gave us "They called me Mr. Glass," the first reveal of Jigsaw, and the prestige of "The Prestige." For out money, though, the single greatest twist is the conceit that transforms Drew Goddard's "Cabin in the Woods" from a very good, pretty familiar horror film to a bonafide classic. "Woods" is a horror movie for people who love the reasons horror movies tick. It's a gateway picture for audiences that don't get it. If you were to beam it into space, there is a chance alien cultures would better understand humanity and then head Earth-ward to rent "The Shining," "Hellraiser," and so many more.

If it seems like I'm talking around the plot details of "Cabin in the Woods, " it's because they're best experienced blind with no context. Know that it's about five college students spending a weekend at someone's cabin when things go full horror movie. Then the twist occurs, and then the most surprising twist of all: the convention which transforms Goddard's movie reinforces the humanity of its core characters even as it becomes a love letter to the genre that doubles as an excellent examination of free will. Book a trip to this cabin as soon as possible.

The Avengers (2012)

The longer Marvel's monolithic cinematic experiment progresses, the more miraculous its best movies seem. For better and worse, Kevin Feige's brand is established now. Even a film like "Doctor Strange in The Multiverse of Madness," which is unmistakably the work of Sam Raimi, feels like Raimi Trojan Horsing an "Evil Dead" sequel smack dab into Phase Four. The MCU is trying to top and reinvent itself with every new entry to remain on top of Hollywood.

Not "The Avengers," though. "The Avengers" is hungry. Joss Whedon's movie wants to take classic conventions from comics, TV, and blockbuster cinema to make their sum a brand new number. No one was ready for what "The Avengers" added up to. Multiple studios and IP conglomerates have tried to replicate its arithmetic (RIP Dark Universe), but no one has. Its collisions of character and tone still feel fresh, a decade after the fact. It's an all-timer. "The Avengers" is also, not surprisingly, the film which truly makes Chris Hemsworth Thor. It sharpens the character's sense of humor, while the familial drama — less of the main attraction than it was in Braghnah's "Thor" — plays better in brief but meaningful snippets. If Hemsworth's first appearance made you believe the Norse God existed, "The Avengers" convinces you he's a superhero. It's truly miraculous.

Read this next: Every Sam Raimi Film Ranked

The post The 15 Best Chris Hemsworth Movies, Ranked appeared first on /Film.

As you may have seen, in the comment section of my previous two articles, a somewhat confused individual has left a number of rather lengthy comments. I had already encountered this individual in the comments section of some YouTube videos (also with an Amiga/oldskool/retro theme), and had already more or less given up on having a serious conversation with this person. It is apparent that this person views things from an entirely different perspective, and is not capable of being open to other perspectives, making any kind of conversation impossible, because you simply hit the brick wall of their preconceptions at every turn.

Having said that, it did trigger me to reflect on my own perspective, and as such it may be interesting to formalize what retro/oldskool programming is.

The hardware

Perhaps it’s good to first discuss the wider concept of ‘retro computing’. A dictionary definition of the term ‘retro’ is:

imitative of a style or fashion from the recent past.

This can be interpreted in multiple ways. If we are talking about the computers themselves, the hardware, then there is a class of ‘retro computing’ that imitates machines from the 70s and 80s, that ‘8-bit’ feeling. Examples are the PICO-8 Fantasy Console or the Colour Maximite. These machines did not actually exist back then, but try to capture the style and fashion of machines from that era.

A related class is that of for example the THEC64 Mini and THEA500 Mini. While these are also not exact copies of hardware from the era, they are actually made to be fully compatible with the software from the actual machines. They are basically emulators, in hardware form. Speaking of emulators, of course most machines from the 70s and 80s have been emulated in software, and I already shared my thoughts on this earlier.

Also related to that are peripherals made for older machines, such as the DreamBlaster S2P. These are not necessarily built with components that were available in the 70s and 80s, but they can be used with computers from that era.

In terms of hardware, my interests are focused on actual machines from the 70s and 80s. So actual ‘classic’ hardware, not ‘retro’ hardware; the PICO-8 and Colour Maximite fall outside the scope. I mostly focus on IBM PCs and compatibles, Commodore 64 and Amiga, as I grew up with these machines, and have years of hands-on experience with them.

My interests in emulation are in function of this: I may sometimes use emulation for convenience when developing, reverse-engineering and such. And I may sometimes modify emulators to fix bugs or add new features. I may also sometimes use some ‘retro’ peripherals that make the job easier, or are more readily available than actual ‘classic’ peripherals. Such as the DreamBlaster S2P, or an LCD monitor for example.

The software

My blog is mainly about developing software, and the only software you can develop is new software, so in that sense it is always ‘retro programming’: new software, but targeting machines from a specific bygone era.

There are also people who discuss actual software from the past, more from a user perspective. That can be interesting in and of itself, but that is not for me. I do occasionally discuss software from the past, and sometimes reverse-engineer it a bit, to study its internals and explain what it is doing. But usually the goal of this is to obtain knowledge that can be used for writing new software for that class of hardware.

Anyway, I believe I already said it before, when I started my ‘keeping it real‘ series: I went back to programming old computers because they pose very different programming challenges to modern machines. It’s interesting to think about programming differently from your daily work. Also, it’s interesting that these machines are ‘fixed targets’. A Commodore 64 is always a Commodore 64. It will never be faster, have more capabilities, or anything. It is what it is, and everyone knows what it can and cannot do. So it is interesting to take these fixed limitations and work within them, trying to push the machine as far as it can go.

Why the comments are barking up the wrong tree

Getting back to the comments on the previous articles, this person kept arguing about the capabilities of certain hardware, or lack thereof, and made all sorts of comparisons with other hardware. Within the perspective explained above, it should be obvious why this is irrelevant.

Since I consider the machine I develop for a ‘fixed target’, it is not relevant how good or bad it is. It’s the playground I chose, so these are the rules of the game that I have to work with. And the game is to try and push the machine as far as possible within these rules.

The machines I pick also tend to be fairly common off-the-shelf configurations. Machines exactly as how most people remember them. Machines as people bought and used them, and how software from the era targeted them.

Yes, there may have been esoteric hardware upgrades and such available, which may have made the machines better. But that is irrelevant, as I don’t have these, and do not intend to use them. I prefer the ‘stock’ machines as much as possible.

So I am not all that interested in endless arguments about what hardware was better. I am much more interested in what you can make certain hardware do, no matter how good or bad it may be.

Related to that, as I said, I like to use machines in configurations as how most people remember them. This person kept referencing very high-end and expensive hardware, and then made comparisons to the Amiga, which was in an entirely different price class. I mean, sure, you could assume a limitless budget, and create some kind of theoretical machine on paper, which at a given point in history combined the most advanced and powerful hardware available on the market. But that wouldn’t be a realistic target for what I do: retro programming.

I like to write code that actually works on real machines that most people either still have from when they were young, or which they can buy second-hand easily, because there’s a large supply of these machines at reasonable prices. And in many cases, the code will also work in emulators. If not, then the emulators need to be patched. I will not write my code around shortcomings of compilers. Real hardware will always be the litmus test.

An 18-year-old graduate student exploited a weakness in Indexed Finance's code and opened a legal conundrum that's still rocking the blockchain community. Then he disappeared. An excerpt from a report: On Oct. 14, in a house near Leeds, England, Laurence Day was sitting down to a dinner of fish and chips on his couch when his phone buzzed. The text was from a colleague who worked with him on Indexed Finance, a cryptocurrency platform that creates tokens representing baskets of other tokens -- like an index fund, but on the blockchain. The colleague had sent over a screenshot showing a recent trade, followed by a question mark. "If you didn't know what you were looking at, you might say, 'Nice-looking trade,'" Day says. But he knew enough to be alarmed: A user had bought up certain tokens at drastically deflated values, which shouldn't have been possible. Something was very wrong. Day jumped up, spilling his food on the floor, and ran into his bedroom to call Dillon Kellar, a co-founder of Indexed. Kellar was sitting in his mom's living room six time zones away near Austin, disassembling a DVD player so he could salvage one of its lasers. He picked up the phone to hear a breathless Day explaining that the platform had been attacked. "All I said was, 'What?'" Kellar recalls. They pulled out their laptops and dug into the platform's code, with the help of a handful of acquaintances and Day's cat, Finney (named after Bitcoin pioneer Hal Finney), who perched on his shoulder in support. Indexed was built on the Ethereum blockchain, a public ledger where transaction details are stored, which meant there was a record of the attack. It would take weeks to figure out precisely what had happened, but it appeared that the platform had been fooled into severely undervaluing tokens that belonged to its users and selling them to the attacker at an extreme discount. Altogether, the person or people responsible had made off with $16 million worth of assets. Kellar and Day stanched the bleeding and repaired the code enough to prevent further attacks, then turned to face the public-relations nightmare. On the platform's Discord and Telegram channels, token-holders traded theories and recriminations, in some cases blaming the team and demanding compensation. Kellar apologized on Twitter to Indexed's hundreds of users and took responsibility for the vulnerability he'd failed to detect. "I f---ed up," he wrote. The question now was who'd launched the attack and whether they'd return the funds. Most crypto exploits are assumed to be inside jobs until proven otherwise. "The default is going to be, 'Who did this, and why is it the devs?'" Day says. As he tried to sleep the morning after the attack, Day realized he hadn't heard from one particular collaborator. Weeks earlier, a coder going by the username "UmbralUpsilon" -- anonymity is standard in crypto communities -- had reached out to Day and Kellar on Discord, offering to create a bot that would make their platform more efficient. They agreed and sent over an initial fee. "We were hoping he might be a regular contributor," Kellar says. Given the extent of their chats, Day would have expected UmbralUpsilon to offer help or sympathy in the wake of the attack. Instead, nothing. Day pulled up their chat log and found that only his half of the conversation remained; UmbralUpsilon had deleted his messages and changed his username. "That got me out of bed like a shot," Day says.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.