Jane Foster stands at the gates of Valhalla, having earned a warrior’s rest after making a sacrifice so worthy that even she, a mortal, had gained the respect of Asgard’s fallen heroes. But she waits a moment, turning from the gates of eternal paradise. All she can say is “I wasn’t ready to die.”
Sprawling vistas, snowcovered mountains, epic battles on horseback, villains made of deadly fire, creatures with large feet taking a leisurely stroll across the field. Yup, this is Lord of the Rings all right.
Standarden Bluetooth LE Audio har färdigställts och kommer föra med sig betydande förbättringar av ljud över Bluetooth. LE Audio är en samlingsterm för flera olika uppgraderingar.
Enkelt uttryckt kan LE Audio erbjuda mer energieffektiva hörlurar som låter bättre, samt nyheter likt möjligheten att ansluta flera hörlurar till samma ljudkälla. En väsentlig del av LE Audio är nya kodeken LC3 som kan sända ljud mer effektivt jämfört med dagens kodeks, vilket förbättrar ljudkvaliteten och minskar energiförbrukningen.
Betaversionen av Android 13 stödjer redan Bluetooth LE Audio, men i många fall kommer det behövas ny hårdvara för att dra fördel av tekniken. De första produkterna som är kompatibla med LE Audio förväntas landa innan årets slut.
The leaked and much-hyped Nothing Phone (1) has finally launched, and as expected, it’s not officially available in the states. It’s a bit of a bummer if you were looking for another Android phone option for the nearly $600 (£400) price range, especially since the Phone (1) has an impressive range of specifications.…
Yes. Do not, repeat not, do what I did, after having had a wisdom tooth out, and decide upon getting home in a very stoned-on-anesthetics kind of way that it would make an immense amount of sense for you to take an enormous knife and try to cut open a green coconut with it, with one mighty swipe.
It was about 12 years ago. I pretty much have sensation back in that finger now, and it only hurts when it rains.
I normally Google pictures of me on my phone just before I get a haircut and then point to the pictures and say “Can you do one like that?” (This is normally because by the time I get a haircut it looks like a mop.)
So yes. Absolutely okay especially if you have the sort of hair that isn’t straight and isn’t curly and is sort of wavy.
A Georgia roadside attraction that became such a beacon for online conspiracy theorists it got The History Channel to take crackpot shots at it, is now devastated after an unknown person or persons reportedly blew up part of the structure Wednesday morning.
Doctors in the UK say a man’s intense supplement regimen landed him in the hospital with vitamin D poisoning. In a new case report, they detail how their patient became sick soon after he started to take large doses of vitamins and minerals. Though vitamin D overdose is uncommon, the study authors say, cases seem to…
Guests aboard Disney Cruise’s newest ship The Wish will be the first to experience Avengers: Quantum Encounter, a Marvel Studios dinner theater show. In it, actors from the films virtually reprise their roles for an in-universe dining experience where cruisers get a curated, themed meal—and some banter over a key…
Amazons tyska webbutik visade tillfälligt priser för Nothing Phone 1, något som snappades upp av Reddit. Om priserna stämmer kostar modellen med 8GB RAM och 128GB lagring 470 euro.
De som vill ha 12GB arbetsminne och dubblera lagringsutrymmet till 256GB får betala 550 euro. Priserna är i linje med tidigare rykten om prissättningen, även om de förstås kan vara felaktiga. Att återförsäljare lägger upp produktsidor för telefoner i förtid är inte ovanligt.
Ett frågetecken i just det här fallet är dock att Nothing kommer använda ett inbjudningssystem. En kod behövs för att ens kunna beställa Phone 1, så vad gör enheten på Amazon? Kommer inbjudningssystemet att användas parallellt med traditionell återförsäljning i handeln?
Svaren kommer säkert 12 juli då telefonen presenteras.
They/them pronouns were not yet in use in 1996 to refer to a specific singular entity whose identity was known but didn’t exist within the context of gender.
We were still fighting the battle to use “they” as a singular ungendered pronoun at the time to refer to people whose identities were not known, rather than the grammatically obligatory “he”, regardless of gender. (“Everyone should use a tampon when he gets his period” was not a gender-expanding sentence but, more weirdly, a grammatically correct one back then.)
As to your question, I don’t know. I haven’t written Islington since 1996. I’ll find out if ever I write Islington again. Several Angels and Demons on Good Omens have collected “they” pronouns, which seem to work for them, while Desire in Sandman on TV has a they pronoun, because it’s more reflective of the multiplicity of Desire’s gender than the he/she/it pronoun they had in 1989.
New research suggests even more benefits for flu vaccination in older people. The study found that adults over 65 who received at least one flu shot were noticeably less likely to be diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease up to four years later. More research will be needed to confirm a cause-and-effect link and to figure…
There’s no word yet on if Obi-Wan Kenobi will return to Disney+ for more seasons, but apparently the stories are there. In a new interview, writer Stuart Beattie explained that the original plan for Obi-Wan Kenobi was to make three movies, and the story on the first season of the show was just part one.
One of the most popular tropes in genre television especially is the episode where the characters all act wildly out of character. Star Trek has indulged in this trope dozens of times before, though the reasons for the out-of-character behavior are legion: disease (the original series’ “The Naked Time,” TNG’s “The Naked Now”), weird telepathy (DS9‘s “Dramatis Personae”), an alternate timeline (the original series’ “Mirror, Mirror,” DS9’s “Crossover” and its followups, Enterprise’s “In a Mirror, Darkly,” Discovery’s “Despite Yourself” and its followups), biased historical records (Voyager’s “Living Witness”), holodeck shenanigans (DS9’s “Our Man Bashir,” Voyager’s “Bride of Chaotica!”). And now we get to add alien interference to the list…
In this particular instance, the setting is one we’ve seen before. Every time M’Benga rematerializes his dying daughter Rukiya from the transporter buffer, he reads to her from a YA fantasy story called The Elysian Kingdom.
The Enterprise has been exploring a nebula, and just as they’re about to leave, the ship is stopped from moving forward rather violently. M’Benga is called to the bridge to treat Ortegas, but when he arrives, he finds himself wearing the robes of King Ridley, the main character in The Elysian Kingdom. While M’Benga knows who he is and remembers his life as a twenty-third-century human, the same cannot be said of the others. The bridge has been altered partly to match King Ridley’s throne room, and both Pike and Ortegas have taken on the role of his chamberlain and Sir Adya, respectively.
For the bulk of the episode, M’Benga is forced into a Live-Action Role Play of The Elysian Kingdom on an Enterprise that has been altered just like the bridge. The corridors and layout are the same, but there are fantasy-land additions to every space. Number One (Zymera the Huntress), Spock (Castor, a wizard), La’An (a princess), Uhura (Neve, the queen of a rival nation), Chapel (a healer), Mitchell (Queen Neve’s chief soldier), and Hemmer (Pollux, another wizard, the twin brother of Spock’s wizard) all have roles to play, but the latter’s telepathy enables him to retain his own personality. (Why the also-telepathic Spock doesn’t is left as an exercise for the viewer.)
Image: CBS
Hemmer’s engineering skills enable M’Benga to eventually get to the truth, which is that aliens who live in the nebula have created this scenario. This gives us two other Trek tropes, the general one of beings of pure energy, which we’ve seen all over the franchise, and the specific one of those aliens taking a shine to human children and trying to help them (the original series’ “Charlie X,” TNG’s “The Bonding”). The aliens saw Rukiya in the transporter buffer, and are giving her her favorite story.
Getting there, though, is an exercise of pure self-indulgence, and I have to confess to loving the shit out of it, mainly because the actors are having so much fun role-playing. Some more than others, of course; Ethan Peck particularly seems to be enjoying playing Castor, the untrustworthy wizard who betrays King Ridley, while Rong Fu is very obviously enjoying a meatier role as a soldier than she gets saying “Aye, sir” a lot as Mitchell, and Melissa Navia and Rebecca Romijn both are fun as the two badasses.
But the most amazing work is done by Anson Mount and Christina Chong, who go completely sideways from their usual. The chamberlain is a coward, a fop, and a schmuck, and Mount plays his unapologetic cravenness with gusto. And man, is Chong having a blast being a pampered prig of a princess, who carries her little dog with her everywhere.
Image: CBS
Most of the episode is an excuse for the LARPing, but eventually, the real plot kicks in, and what prompts it is my favorite thing in the episode. What makes M’Benga realize that this isn’t just a re-creation of The Elysian Kingdom is when Zymera and Sir Adya hug, and make it clear that they’ve been lovers. In the book, Zymera and Adya have never even met. But Rukiya thinks they should be friends and lovers, and yes, the whole thing is Rukiya’s fanfic that she wrote in her head, and I adore the heck out of that.
In the end, the aliens take Rukiya with them, because they can remove her from her failing body and give her a life as an energy being with them. M’Benga’s whole thing was that he was hoping to find a cure somewhere out in space where there’s all kinds of crazy-ass shit, and it’s a very Trek solution for her cure to be the craziest of crazy-ass shit.
It’s a bittersweet solution for M’Benga, as Rukiya grows to adulthood in just a few seconds, thanks to the peculiar nature of the aliens. On the one hand, he’s missed her growing up. On the other hand, she did grow up, and her adult self is very happy and very grateful.
Interestingly, my assumption of what happened at the end of “Ghosts of Illyria” was wrong. I figured that Number One had to have set up the dedicated power source for the medical transporter with the knowledge of Pike and Hemmer. But in this episode it’s clear that Hemmer doesn’t even know that M’Benga has a daughter, much less one being stored in the transporter buffer.
Image: CBS
And indeed, Una is the one who talks to M’Benga about what’s happening to Rukiya, in parallel scenes at the beginning and end of the episode. Commander Chin-Riley has been criminally underused in the series so far (and yes, I will continue to complain about it as long as it remains true), but she’s well used here, both as M’Benga’s confidant and as Zymera the Huntress. In fact, I was expecting Number One to be Queen Neve, and I think giving that role to Uhura was a smarter move (though Celia Rose Gooding was comparatively stiff in the role). For one thing, it meant that both the king and the queen were played by Black actors, which I liked. I also liked that Ortegas was in the role of “Sir” Adya, and nobody batted an eyelash at that…
SNW is sometimes embracing the goofier style of plotlines from Trek history, and I’m down with this. I don’t need all the new Trek shows to dip into this well—for example, this sort of story wouldn’t really work on Discovery or Picard, whereas it’s pretty much all Lower Decks does—but I like that SNW goes for it sometimes.
I also appreciate that they’re not dragging the subplots out. I was worried we wouldn’t get any resolution on Rukiya at all this season, and we’ve got it with two episodes to spare!
They also finally give M’Benga a first name. To my disappointment, they went with “Joseph.” Rather than mine the tie-in fiction for his first name (successfully done with Sulu, Uhura, and Number One), which has given M’Benga the first names of Geoffrey (in Jean Lorrah’s The IDIC Epidemic) and Jabilo (in the Vanguard novel series), they went with Joseph. I would’ve rather it be Jabilo, but alas…
Keith R.A. DeCandido has three short stories out soon: “A Lovely View,” a tale of Zorro, in Zorro’s Exploits, edited by Audrey Parente, from Bold Venture Press; “What You Can Become Tomorrow,” a story that puts together author Mary Shelley, baseball player Josh Gibson, and NASA scientist Florence Johnson, in Three Time Travelers Walk Into…, edited by Michael A. Ventrella, from Fantastic Books; and “Smells Like Teen Spirit,” a Super City Cops story, in Tales of Capes and Cowls, edited by C.T. Phipps, from Crossroad Press.
Nothing Phone 1 kommer inledningsvis endast att säljas via ett inbjudningssystem. Det förra företaget Carl Pei var med och grundade, OnePlus, hade samma upplägg vid starten.
I en video från Nothing säger en marknadsförare att det är viktigt att folk från Nothings community får telefonen först. En annan anledning som anges för inbjudningssystemet är att Nothing inte kan tillverka miljontals exemplar som jättarna och att Phone 1 därför kommer ha begränsad tillgänglighet i början.
Pei uttalar sig också och säger att det tar tid att bygga upp ett stort lager: antingen kan de vänta tills det finns ett tillräckligt stort lager, eller börja sälja vartefter via inbjudningar. Nothing hade även problem med tillgängligheten för hörlurarna Ear 1 som snabbt sålde slut, och vill inte att samma sak ska hända för första telefonen.
Få intressenter gillar sannolikt upplägget, men det är så det blir. Ett rykte hävdar samtidigt att Nothing Phone 1 kommer erbjuda 5G-chippet Snapdragon 778G+ med 6nm tillverkningsteknik, samt 8GB RAM. Uppgiften kommer från ett Geekbench-resultat.
Tidigare rykten har hävdat att telefonen kör Snapdragon 7 Gen 1, vilket alltså inte verkar stämma.
