Apple has released the first trailer for its movie Tetris, which tells the extraordinary true story of the struggle between Western publishers, Nintendo, and the Soviet Union itself for the rights to Alexey Pajitnov's classic puzzle game. Polygon reports: Taron Egerton plays Henk Rogers, the gaming entrepreneur who was instrumental in discovering Tetris and securing the console gaming rights, thus enabling its release on Nintendo's then-revolutionary Game Boy handheld. To do so, he had to negotiate directly with the Soviet regime, since Communist law dictated that the game belonged to the people of the Soviet Union (read: the government) rather than Pajitnov himself. All sorts of Cold War skullduggery ensued.

It's an incredible tale that forms the centerpiece of David Sheff's classic book Game Over, which chronicles Nintendo's early rise. The film, directed by Jon S. Baird, seems to take a pretty broad approach to the material, drenching it in '80s pop needle drops, car chases (for some reason), retro game effects reminiscent of the dreadful Adam Sandler vehicle Pixels, and Egerton tearing up as he describes "the perfect game." [...] Tetris will stream on Apple TV Plus from March 31.

Despite the absence of cryptocurrency ads, this year's Super Bowl still managed some geek-friendly advertisements. There was even a riff on "the classic intro from the Super Mario Bros. Super Show, the live-action series that ran from 1989-1991," according to Kotaku: the infamous Mario Rap, which advertised Mario's plumbing business (and in its 2023 version featured the URL for a website).

[T]hat website is indeed up and running, and is everything you would hope it would be from a struggling small business servicing the Brooklyn and Queens areas. There's excessive animation, broken image links, a careers page (still under construction, sadly) and even a novelty mouse cursor.
Kotaku's article includes both versions of the rap, along with reactions from Twitter. (Apparently the phone number in the advertisement really works).

There were also several ads from major tech companies. Google purchased a long ad touting their Pixel phone's ability to remove people from photos (starring Amy Schumer, Doja Cat, and Giannis Antetokounmpo), while Workday drew attention to its enterprise-grade finance and HR software with an ad in which actual rock stars like Ozzy Osbourne, Joan Jett, blues player Gary Clark and members of KISS all urged the software's corporate users to stop calling themselves "rock stars".

Other tech-company ads aired from E*Trade, SquareSpace, and a star-studded Uber One ad in which rapper Puff Daddy auditions singers for their new jingle.

There were also the obligatory celebrity reunions — like Snoop Dogg and Martha Stewart, or the actors from Breaking Bad. But for comic book geeks, a trailer for D.C.'s new movie The Flash included a surprise appearance by Batman — play by both Ben Affleck and by a 71-year-old Michael Keaton, a full 34 years after Keaton played the caped crusader in Tim Burton's 1989 movie Batman. "Worlds collide in The Flash when Barry uses his superpowers to travel back in time in order to change the events of the past," according to a press release cited by People. James Gunn, director of Guardians of the Galaxy and new co-CEO of DC Studios, recently said, according to Deadline, that The Flash "is probably one of the greatest superhero movies ever made." He added that the film's storyline "resets everything" for the franchise.
The last Blockbuster video rental store in America played its own advertising prank during the Super Bowl. They announced their own ad which could only be viewed on their Instagram feed during halftime -- or in person at their store in Bend, Oregon. But, as CNN points out, "the store is also renting VHS copies of it for $2."

And for those geeks concerned about the drawbacks of climate change-fighting vehicles, RAM trucks ran an ad about "Premature Electrification" — for consumers excited about electric vehicles but "lacking the confidence about getting and being able to keep a charge." (Although a disclaimer printed at the bottom of the ad warned "Get excited, but not too excited. Pre-production model shown. Availability in the U.S. expected late 2024. Range lengthening technology to come later.")

In J.R.R. Tolkein's The Two Towers, it's in Elrond's home city of Rivendell that Frodo chooses to destroy the ring of power.

And now Lego has created "a truly grand plastic-brick re-creation," reports CNET — costing $500 (£430, AU$800): The stronghold of the elves is a magical place, a sensation Lego managed to encapsulate in 6,167 pieces of plastic stretching 29.5 inches (75 centimeters) wide. "We know many of our fans have been anticipating a set like this for a long time — but a great Lego The Lord of the Rings set is never late, it arrives precisely when it means to!" said Lego design master Mike Psaiki in a statement Tuesday.

The colorful set is based on the design from the Peter Jackson movies. Lego's vision of Rivendell includes Frodo's bedroom, Elrond's study and the Council Ring where you can assemble the Fellowship. The rest of the set features an elven tower and a gazebo, river and bridge.... The set comes with a large cast of 15 minifigure characters, including Gandalf, Frodo, Samwise, Merry, Pippin, Legolas, Gimli and, of course, Elrond.

A Spider-Man Noir live-action series is in the works at Amazon, Variety has learned exclusively. From the report: The untitled series will follow an older, grizzled superhero in 1930s New York City. An individual with knowledge of the project says that the show will be set in its own universe and the main character will not be Peter Parker. [...] Oren Uziel will serve as writer and executive producer on the Spider-Man Noir show. Uziel developed the show along with "Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse" producers Phil Lord and Christopher Miller and former Sony boss Amy Pascal, who all executive produce. Pascal executive produces via Pascal Pictures. Sony Pictures Television is the studio, with Lord and Miller currently under an overall deal there.

The Spider-Man Noir comics originally debuted in 2009 as part of the Marvel Noir universe. That version of the iconic superhero lives in New York during the Great Depression. He is bitten by a spider hidden inside a stolen artifact, causing him to have visions of a spider-god who grants him superpowers. The character has previously appeared onscreen in the animated series "Ultimate Spider-Man" with Milo Ventimiglia providing his voice, while Nicolas Cage voiced the character in "Into the Spider-Verse." The Amazon show will be the first live-action iteration of Spider-Man Noir.

Film data researcher Stepehen on his blog: David Wilkinson got in touch yesterday asking for advice on his new crowdfunding campaign. One of the topics he wanted to chat about was the 'cost' of offering a "Thanks" credit to his backers. This involves awarding someone who backs the film a credit on the movie under the "With Thanks" section. This name check would appear at the end of the movie and, crucially, on IMDb. On the face of it, there is no cost to offering an almost infinite number of these as it would just be a case of a longer end credit crawl and IMDb doesn't charge for listing credits.

However, David brought up an anecdote from his time as a distributor. In conversations with fellow film sales professionals, the topic of 'how to spot a bad movie' came up. One participant said that they regard having too many 'With Thanks' credits as a red flag. The others agreed and added that the number of producers listed on a movie was similarly useful in spotting a bad film. These are just the kind of industry beliefs that I love to test. This week I'm going to tackle the 'With Thanks' credits and then next week I'll turn to producing credits. I gathered data on 8,096 movies released in US cinemas between 2000-19 (i.e. pre-pandemic), taking note of their number of credited/thanked individuals, their IMDb score (to stand in for audience views) and Metascore (to sample the views of critics). Conclusion: "A simple and pleasing result. The industry belief that having more than the average number of people thanked in the credits means the movie is bad is flat-out wrong."

Ryan Graves, former Lt. U.S. Navy and F/A-18F pilot who was the first active-duty fighter pilot to come forward publicly about regular sightings of UAP, says more data is needed about unidentified anomalous phenomena (UAP). "We should encourage pilots and other witnesses to come forward and keep the pressure on Congress to prioritize UAP as a matter of national security," writes Graves in an opinion piece for The Hill. An anonymous Slashdot reader shares an excerpt from his report: As a former U.S. Navy F/A-18 fighter pilot who witnessed unidentified anomalous phenomena (UAP) on a regular basis, let me be clear. The U.S. government, former presidents, members of Congress of both political parties and directors of national intelligence are trying to tell the American public the same uncomfortable truth I shared: Objects demonstrating extreme capabilities routinely fly over our military facilities and training ranges. We don't know what they are, and we are unable to mitigate their presence. The Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI) last week published its second ever report on UAP activity. While the unclassified version is brief, its findings are sobering. Over the past year, the government has collected hundreds of new reports of enigmatic objects from military pilots and sensor systems that cannot be identified and "represent a hazard to flight safety." The report also preserves last year's review of the 26-year reporting period that some UAP may represent advanced technology, noting "unusual flight characteristics or performance capabilities."

Mysteriously, no UAP reports have been confirmed to be foreign so far. However, just this past week, a Chinese surveillance balloon shut down air traffic across the United States. How are we supposed to make sense of hundreds of reports of UAP that violate restricted airspace uncontested and interfere with both civilian and military pilots? Here is the hard truth. We don't know. UAP are a national security problem, and we urgently need more data.

Why don't we have more data? Stigma. I know the fear of stigma is a major problem because I was the first active-duty fighter pilot to come forward publicly about regular sightings of UAP, and it was not easy. There has been little support or incentive for aircrew to speak publicly on this topic. There was no upside to reporting hard-to-explain sightings within the chain of command, let alone doing so publicly. For pilots to feel comfortable, it will require a culture shift inside organizations and in society at large. I have seen for myself on radar and talked with the pilots who have experienced near misses with mysterious objects off the Eastern Seaboard that have triggered unsafe evasive actions and mandatory safety reports. There were 50 or 60 people who flew with me in 2014-2015 and could tell you they saw UAP every day. Yet only one other pilot has confirmed this publicly. I spoke out publicly in 2019, at great risk personally and professionally, because nothing was being done. The ODNI report itself notes that concentrated efforts to reduce stigma have been a major reason for the increase in reports this year. To get the data and analyze it scientifically, we must uproot the lingering cultural stigma of tin foil hats and "UFOs" from the 1950s that stops pilots from reporting the phenomena and scientists from studying it. Last September, the U.S. Navy said that all of the government's UFO videos are classified information and releasing any additional UFO videos would "harm national security."

In 2003 a 20-year-old Ryan North began writing new dialogue, three days a week, for the exact same set of six drawings of talking dinosaurs. And twenty years later, he's still doing it!

Interestingly, North found the original six drawings on a clip-art CD. So honoring this strange milestone, he's created a special edition in which the online comic strip finally continues beyond its sixth frame: I fired up a virtual machine running Windows XP which ITSELF was tweaking its settings to run Windows 95, which ITSELF was running the Windows 3.1 software I first used in the last few days of January to make myself a comics layout, and started playing around. (Incidentally, the comic's still laid out in MS Paint, but the version that came with XP...

After 20 years I'm allowed to change the images BRIEFLY. And only once!!
While readers laugh along with T-Rex, Utahraptor and Dromiceiomimus, North is experiencing this milestone as "incredible," while also adding "I'm so grateful for everyone who reads my work." Writing Dinosaur Comics has led to so many amazing things - not just meeting readers, not just seeing plush versions of T-Rex go up to the edge of space or to Antarctica... [Y]ou can trace a direct line between me sending an upload command to my FTP client in 2003 and everything I've done since, and if you told me back then that "hey, the Dinosaur Comics guy is going to write Star Trek comics and adopt Vonnegut into comics too and write bestselling (and non-fiction!) guides to both time travel and taking over the world and, oh, let's say be the new writer for the Fantastic Four AND MORE" I would've said "What?! I would like to be the Dinosaur Comics guy, thank you so much."
Looking back to 2003, North also reflects that "The world of online comics is very different from how it was when I started." [T]here's been a huge shift towards social media - functioning effectively as an aggregator - and a huge shift away from people actually visiting websites. But I love websites, and I think they give us the healthiest, most free version of the web, and I hope 20 years from now the only way to connect with other people won't be through a corporate or algorithmically-mediated platform.
And he adds that he hopes he'll still be writing the comic on its 40th anniversary in the year 2043.

To celebrate this year's "Public Domain Day," the Internet Archive "asked people to submit short films highlighting anything that was going to be made available in the Public Domain in 2023." For the contest, vintage images and sounds were woven into creative films of 2-3 minutes. Many of the films were abstract while others educational, they all showcased the possibility when public domain materials are made openly available and accessible for download. "The Internet Archive has spent 24 years collecting and archiving content from around the world...now is the time to see what people can do with it," said Amir Saber Esfahani, director of special arts projects at the Internet Archive.
The counsel from Creative Commons helped judged all 47 entries, with winners finally chosen "based on creativity, technique, engagement, and variety of 1927 content."

The winning entries include "The Public Domain Race," a montage of newly-uncopyrighted 1927 film clips and cartoons. And the honorable mentions include short films showing, among other things, 2023 filmmaker Sam Dody serenading a lovestruck silent film star from 1927 — and the story of why Mae West once spent eight days in jail.

But the big first-place prize of $1,500 went to Gnats Gonzales for reciting a poem that was emblazoned over the artwork and title pages of 1927 works that have finally entered the public domain. "... Let not kings nor selective texts decide what is known among you. Ignore the temptation of hippocampal decay. Plunge into the dark depths. And feel the warmth of mortal creation at its purest."

That last quote appears over a 1927 movie poster showing a woman smashing pies into the face of Oliver Hardy.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Motherboard: Netflix created an anime that uses AI-generated artwork to paint its backgrounds -- and people on social media are pissed. In a tweet, Netflix Japan claimed that the project, a short called he Dog & The Boy uses AI generated art in response to labor shortages in the anime industry. "As an experimental effort to help the anime industry, which has a labor shortage, we used image generation technology for the background images of all three-minute video cuts!" the streaming platform wrote in a tweet.

The tweet drew instant criticism and outrage from commenters who felt that Netflix was using AI to avoid paying human artists. This has been a central tension since image-generation AI took off last year, as many artists see the tools as unethical -- due to being trained on masses of human-made art scraped from the internet -- and cudgels to further cut costs and devalue workers. Netflix Japan's claim that the AI was used to fill a supposed labor gap hit the bullseye on these widespread concerns. According to a press release, the short film was created by Netflix Anime Creators Base -- a Tokyo-based hub the company created to bolster its anime output with new tools and methods -- in collaboration with Rinna Inc., an AI-generated artwork company, and production company WIT Studio, which produced the first three seasons of Attack on Titan. "Demand for new anime productions has skyrocketed in recent years, but the industry has long been fraught with labor abuses and poor wages," notes Motherboard's Samantha Cole. "In 2017, an illustrator died while working, allegedly of a stress-induced heart attack and stroke; in 2021, the reported salary of low-rung anime illustrators was as little as $200 a month, forcing some to reconsider the career as a sustainable way to earn a living while having a life outside work, buying a home, or supporting children.

"Even top animators reportedly earn just $1,400 to $3,800 a month -- as the anime industry itself boomed during the pandemic amid a renewed interest in at-home streaming. In 2021, the industry hit an all-time revenue high of $18.4 billion."

Spotify packed on 10 million Premium customers in the last three months of 2022 to stand at 205 million, topping its previous guidance. Variety reports: The growth of its paid subs, up 14% year over year, was "aided by promotional intake and household plans," the company said. Overall, the streamer gained 33 million total monthly active users in the fourth quarter -- a record high -- to reach 489 million (free and paid), up 20% year over year. Amid signs of a flagging economy, Spotify posted 3.17 billion euros in revenue, up 18% from the year-earlier period an in-line with guidance, and a net loss of 270 million euros (versus a net loss of 39 million euros in Q4 2021). Operating loss of 231 million euros for Q4 was better than its projection of -300 million euros.

"We ended 2022 with strong Q4 performance as nearly all of our [key performance indicators] surpassed guidance," Spotify said in its quarterly shareholder deck. The company said revenue growth, excluding the impact of changes in foreign currency exchange rates, was ahead of expectations. Meanwhile, Spotify's ad-supported revenue in Q4 grew 14% year over year, to 449 million euros, led by podcasting gains in the mid-30% range. The company's gross margin for the quarter was 25.3%, slightly above guidance "primarily as a result of lower-than-expected spend on new podcast content investments" as well as "broad-based music favorability." Spotify last week cut 6% of its headcount, laying off about 600 employees. On the earnings call Tuesday, CEO Daniel Ek admitted that he had "overinvested" in Spotify's business, requiring the company to cut jobs.

"I still believe it was the right call to invest, and I would do it again," the CEO said. "But things change, and the macro-environment has changed significantly in the last year. And in hindsight, I probably got a little carried away and overinvested relative to the uncertainty we saw shaping up in the market."

A Welsh branch of McDonald's has started playing classical music and rationing wi-fi in a bid to deter anti-social behavior. The BBC reports: The fast-food restaurant has taken action after incidents at its Wrexham branch and elsewhere in the city which led to police issuing dispersal orders. North Wales Police said a group of 20 to 30 youngsters had caused "upset" but progress had been made recently. McDonald's said it was committed to being a good neighbor in the area. [...] McDonald's said: "We are aware of anti-social behavior affecting the wider area, and have introduced a number of measures in our Wrexham restaurant to support the police in tackling this issue. These include playing classical music from 17:00 GMT and turning off the wi-fi at certain points in the evening."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Motherboard: Four pixelated cartoon characters talk to each other about coffee, Amazon deliveries, and veganism as they stand apart in a decorated NYC apartment. There is one woman and three men who seem to be the animated versions of Seinfeld's main characters, Elaine, Jerry, George, and Kramer. But unlike Seinfeld, these characters are set in a modern-era NYC, and their voices and bodies look and sound robotic. That's because "Nothing, Forever" is a live-streaming show that's almost entirely generated by algorithms. It's been streaming non-stop on Twitch since December 14. [...] Skyler Hartle, the co-creator of "Nothing, Forever," told Motherboard that the show was created as a parody to Seinfeld. "The actual impetus for this was it originally started its life as this weird, very, off-center kind of nonsensical, surreal art project," Hartle said. "But then we kind of worked over the years to bring it to this new place. And then, of course, generative media and generative AI just kind of took off in a crazy way over the past couple of years."

Hartle and his co-creator, Brian Habersberger, used a combination of machine learning, generative algorithms, and cloud services to build the show. Hartle told Motherboard that the dialogue is powered by OpenAI's GPT-3 language model and that there is very little human moderation of the stream, outside of GPT-3's built-in moderation filters. "Aside from the artwork and the laugh track you'll hear, everything else is generative, including: dialogue, speech, direction (camera cuts, character focus, shot length, scene length, etc), character movement, and music," one of the creators wrote in a Reddit comment. [...] Hartle also said that unlike most television shows, "Nothing, Forever" is able to change based on people's feedback that is received through the Twitch stream chat. "The show can effectively change and the narrative actually evolves based on the audience. One of the major factors that we're thinking about is how do we get people involved in crafting the narrative so it becomes their own," he said. "As generative media gets better, we have this notion that at any point, you're gonna be able to turn on the future equivalent of Netflix and watch a show perpetually, nonstop as much as you want. You don't just have seven seasons of a show, you have seven hundred, or infinite seasons of a show that has fresh content whenever you want it. And so that became one of our grounding pillars," Hartle said. "Our grounding principle was, can we create a show that can generate entertaining content forever? Because that's truly where we see the future emerging towards. Our goal with the next iterations or next shows that we release is to actually trade a show that is like Netflix-level quality."

Netflix has confirmed that its live-action take on One Piece will be streaming in 2023. The Verge reports: That's about all we know so far; Netflix didn't give a specific date, though the company did show off a new poster for its adaptation of Eiichiro Oda's long-running pirate manga / anime. The adaptation was first announced back in 2020 and will be led by showrunners Matt Owens and Steven Maeda. The main cast includes the likes of Inaki Godoy as Luffy (who you can see the back of in the new poster), Mackenyu as Zoro, Emily Rudd as Nami, Jacob Romero Gibson as Usopp, and Taz Skylar as Sanji. The Verge notes that One Piece "follows some less-than-impressive live-action anime adaptations from Netflix, including a Death Note film and a Cowboy Bebop series that was canceled after one season."

Avatar: The Way of Water "has passed Star Wars: The Force Awakens as the fourth highest-grossing movie of all time," reports Variety: Director James Cameron's sci-fi epic has now earned $2.075 billion at the global box office. Star Wars: The Force Awakens, another sci-fi sequel released long after previous installments, finished its theatrical run with $2.064 billion after hitting theaters in December 2015.

With this latest box office milestone, Cameron now has three of the top four highest-grossing movies in history — the original Avatar is still the champion [with $2.92 billion], while Titanic sits in third place [with $2.2 billion].

[The second-highest grossing film of all time is Avengers: Endgame with $2.79 billion.] Avatar: The Way of Water has quickly moved up in the record books, surpassing Spider-Man: No Way Home ($1.92 billion) on Jan. 18 and Avengers: Infinity War ($2.05 billion) shortly after on Jan. 26....

A third "Avatar" entry has already been set for release in December 2024 and there are plans for a fourth and fifth to continue the intergenerational saga
Some context from The A.V. Club: The highlight of that big pile of planetary currency being a massive $229 million turnout in China, where it's one of the first Disney movies to play in the country's lucrative markets in some time.

As it happens, James Cameron told GQ back in November, ahead of his sequel's release, that his "fucking expensive" movie would have to post these kinds of numbers to be anything other than a loss for the studio. "You have to be the third or fourth highest-grossing film in history," he noted at the time. "That's your threshold. That's your break even."
Wikipedia points out that when box office figures are adjusted for inflation, the highest-grossing film of all time is still the 1939 Civil War drama Gone with the Wind. And the next top-grossing films of all-time?

• The original Avatar
• Titanic
• The original Star Wars (1977)
• Avengers: Endgame
• The Sound of Music (1965)
• E.T. the Extra Terrestrial (1982)
• The Ten Commandments (1956)
• Doctor Zhivago (1965)
• Star Wars: the Force Awakens

Amazon is developing a TV series based on the Tomb Raider video game franchise with scripts written by Phoebe Waller-Bridge, according to The Hollywood Reporter. The Verge reports: Details are light on this new Tomb Raider series, but THR says that while Waller-Bridge will serve as a writer and executive producer, she won't be starring in the show. The show is apparently still in the development stages, so we probably shouldn't expect to see it anytime soon. This new series could be another potentially big video game franchise adaptation for Amazon, which announced in December that it would be making a God of War TV show. But it also marks a further investment from Amazon into the Tomb Raider franchise, as the company will also be publishing the next Tomb Raider game from Crystal Dynamics. Amazon didn't immediately reply to a request for comment.

An impressive new AI system from Google can generate music in any genre given a text description. But the company, fearing the risks, has no immediate plans to release it. From a report: Called MusicLM, Google's certainly isn't the first generative AI system for song. There's been other attempts, including Riffusion, an AI that composes music by visualizing it, as well as Dance Diffusion, Google's own AudioML and OpenAI's Jukebox. But owing to technical limitations and limited training data, none have been able to produce songs particularly complex in composition or high-fidelity. MusicLM is perhaps the first that can.

Detailed in an academic paper, MusicLM was trained on a data set of 280,000 hours of music to learn to generate coherent songs for descriptions of -- as the creators put it -- "significant complexity" (e.g. "enchanting jazz song with a memorable saxophone solo and a solo singer" or "Berlin '90s techno with a low bass and strong kick." Its songs, remarkably, sound something like a human artist might compose, albeit not necessarily as inventive or musically cohesive. [...] That's not to suggest MusicLM's flawless -- far from it, truthfully. Some of the samples have a distorted quality to them, an unavoidable side effect of the training process. And while MusicLM can technically generate vocals, including choral harmonies, they leave a lot to be desired. Still, the Google researchers note the many ethical challenges posed by a system like MusicLM, including a tendency to incorporate copyrighted material from training data into the generated songs.

If it's still too early to declare platform-exclusive podcast deals dead as we move into 2023, it's becoming ever clearer that this business model is likely not long for this world. From a report: Spotify in particular has spent the past few years building up its arsenal of exclusive podcast content, shelling out more than $1 billion to acquire studios, lock down popular shows and secure marquee names. Those include podcasting behemoth Joe Rogan, former Presidential couple the Obamas (through their Higher Ground media company) and even the Duke and Duchess of Sussex. But the tide is turning as we enter what many observers project to be a difficult year for the podcasting industry. As in the streaming video space, the major audio players are reportedly reining in their spending amid economic pressures, bringing the booming market of the last several years toward a close.

[...] For one thing, as the digital ad market continues to sag in the months ahead, competition for podcast ad dollars is going to intensify further -- bad news for any creator whose show is limited to a single platform. Despite exponential growth in the number of shows available to listeners -- on Spotify alone, that number grew from around 700,000 at the end of 2019 to 4.7 million in September 2022, per company reports -- the podcast ad market, while still growing, has not expanded nearly as rapidly. Spotify's U.S. podcast ad revenue is projected to steadily increase by about 40 percent year-over-year through 2024, far down from the explosive growth rates of 2020 and 2021 as its podcast operations expanded.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Motherboard, written by Katie Way: MILF Manor is a reality TV show made to be dissected on the internet. Everything, from its ripped-from-30-Rock title to the Oedipal set-up of mothers and their sons thrown into the same "dating pool," is so patently outrageous that it boomerangs back into normalcy -- of course these mothers need to participate in a blindfolded contest to identify their sons by their abs alone. But MILF Manor's most understated quirk is the one that sticks out to me: There's no tanned, vaguely handsome man with veneers and a dress shirt directing the festivities. Instead, contestants receive alerts and directions via text, on iPhones in magenta cases that seem to be provided by the producers. Like more and more reality TV competition shows, there's no actual host.

By my estimation, Netflix's The Circle kicked the trend off in 2020. Its contestants, who compete to create the most lovable social media presence in physical isolation, receive prompts and challenges from a big-screen TV in their living quarters. Pressure Cooker, a more recent offering from the streaming giant, is a cooking competition show where the host is replaced by a kitchen ticket printer: Competitions receive challenge instructions and the results of game-ending votes in the same way chefs take orders from their diners. The Button, a YouTube speed dating series by the production company Cut, goes a step further with the introduction of a large talking button that cracks jokes and prompts daters to ask each other cringe-worthy questions until one of them presses it, ending the date and sending in another option.

Why axe the role of host when it's been a staple of the formula for so long? It could be a sign of the recession. Reality TV competition shows are famously among the cheapest television to produce, but if I've learned anything about business, it's that executives have never met a corner they're not dying to cut. It could also be that the role of reality TV host is not attracting the same iconic cultural figures it once was, when the subgenre exploded in popularity in the early 2000s. [...] At the core, though, I believe there's something more insidious at play: Robots are once again stealing jobs from red-blooded human workers. Only this time, instead of factory linemen or fast food cashiers, these laborers are C-List comedians and guys who are incredibly symmetrical but not quite hot. (Again, Jeff Probst, I am not talking about you!) Sure, I know machine intelligence doesn't experience emotion -- yet! -- and I know that all of these robo-hosts are likely operated by producers -- for now! But isn't toying with people in a high-stress, high-stakes situation, the exact job description of a reality competition host, the absolute dream gig for a robot? Seems a little too perfect. "Experts already predict that AI and machine learning could replace people working as couriers, investment analysts, and customer service representatives," concludes Way. "Adding reality competition show hosts to that list means the creep into our cultural landscape has already started, which is a distinctly scary thought, in my book. Our flesh is weak, our MILFs are fragile, and we are so, so vulnerable to the clinical calculations of our machine overlords -- uh, I mean, hosts."

Will moviegoers ever get superhero fatigue? Marvel boss Kevin Feige doesn't buy it, saying on a new podcast interview that there are 80 years of "groundbreaking" stories told in the Marvel comics that they can adapt into "different genres." From a report: "I've been at Marvel Studios for over 22 years, and most of us here at Marvel Studios have been around a decade or longer together," Feige said on "The Movie Business Podcast," hosted by Jason E. Squire, an author and professor at the USC School of Cinematic Arts. "From probably my second year at Marvel, people were asking, 'Well, how long is this going to last? Is this fad of comic book movies going to end?'"

Feige continued, "I didn't really understand the question. Because to me, it was akin to saying after 'Gone With the Wind,' 'Well, how many more movies can be made off of novels? Do you think the audience will sour on movies being adapted from books?' You would never ask that because there's an inherent understanding among most people that a book can be anything. A novel can have any type of story whatsoever. So it all depends on what story you're translating. Non-comic readers don't understand that it's the same thing in comics." Referencing the rich catalog of Marvel comics, which date back to 1939, Feige said there are countless stories for the studio to adapt in various genres.

"One of the most beloved sci-fi novels of the 21st century finally has been adapted for television to huge acclaim," writes Esquire, "and it's out now." Their article includes embedded videos of Tencent Video's live-action adaptation of Three-Body Problem, which is streaming free on YouTube with English subtitles. "They're already getting great reviews online, with an 8.7 IMDb score for the adaptation that is being acclaimed for its faithfulness to the original bestselling novel."

Long-time Slashdot reader gordm writes: The YouTube playlist offers the first 4 episodes (of a 30 episode series) for free, although the videos include Chinese ads.... Be sure your YouTube subtitles are turned on.

I've only watched episode one and noted the most unpleasant reaction I had during my first-read of the book is front-loaded into episode one of the show... that is, it is suggested GMO and advanced technologies are a blight upon humanity. I kept reading, and I'm glad I did. But for any viewers put off by that moment, and not knowing what Three-Body Problem is about... that moment pays off later.
Esquire calls the original book "not only the most successful Chinese science fiction novel of the century so far, but likely the most successful and acclaimed science fiction series in the world since 2000, winning the Hugo Award and the Nebula Award for Best Novel..."

Netflix says its own adaptation of Three-Body Problem will also be released before the end of 2023.