"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.

Long-time Slashdot reader destinyland writes: Today sees an event celebrating the 50th anniversary of 1970s children's programming giants Sid & Marty Krofft. (Born in 1929, Sid Krofft will turn 93 in July). And reportedly Marty Krofft has now partnered with NFT producer Orange Comet "in a multiyear contract to release NFTs based on the often enigmatic and much-beloved television shows they have brought to us since 1969."

The first one commemorates Land of the Lost — dropping sometime after September.

Today I learned their big break in America came from making puppets for Dean Martin's show, followed by designing and directing the Banana Splits and a string of successful children's shows on Saturday mornings. ( Land of the Lost, H.R. Pufunstuf, Lidsville, Sigmund and the Sea Monsters...) Looking back, Krofft muses that even today somewhere in New York City, "some guy 50 years old, remembers the damn theme songs. Because there were only three networks, so basically every kid in America saw our shows." In the article Marty Krofft describes their style as "a nightmare and bizarre" — or, more pragmatically, as "Disney without a budget" (while crediting future Disney CEO Michael Eisner for being their mentor).

Yet the article adds that "They were nearly unstoppable with styrofoam, paint and cloth. In a digital universe of truly endless possibilities, there is no telling where they could take their stories."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from CNET: Jokes, sarcasm and humor require understanding the subtleties of language and human behavior. When a comedian says something sarcastic or controversial, usually the audience can discern the tone and know it's more of an exaggeration, something that's learned from years of human interaction. But PaLM, or Pathways Language Model, learned it without being explicitly trained on humor and the logic of jokes. After being fed two jokes, it was able to interpret them and spit out an explanation. In a blog post, Google shows how PaLM understands a novel joke not found on the internet.

Understanding dad jokes isn't the end goal for Alphabet, parent company to Google. The capability to parse the nuances of natural language and queries means that Google can get answers to complex questions faster and more accurately across more languages and peoples. This, in turn, can break down barriers and move humans away from communicating with machines through predetermined means and instead more seamlessly interact. This can include answering questions in one language by finding information in another or writing code to a program as a person is speaking into the model with a specific task.

PaLM is Google's largest AI model to date and trained on 540 billion parameters. It can generate code from text, answer a math word problem and explain a joke. It does this through chain-of-thought prompting, which can describe multi-step problems as a series of intermediate steps. On stage, Pichai described it as a teacher giving a step-by-step example to help a student understand how to solve a problem. If what Pichai said on stage is accurate, Google has essentially leapfrogged over Star Trek and 400 years of fictional AI development, as evidenced by the character Data, who never truly understood the subtleties of humor. More so, it seems that Google has caught up with TARS from the movie Interstellar, which takes place in the year 2090, an AI that was so adept at humor that Matthew McConaughey's character told it to tune it down.

Vangelis, the Greek composer and musician whose synth-driven work brought huge drama to film soundtracks including Blade Runner and Chariots of Fire, has died aged 79. The Guardian reports: Born Evangelos Odysseas Papathanassiou in 1943, Vangelis won an Oscar for his 1981 Chariots of Fire soundtrack. Its uplifting piano motif became world-renowned, and reached No 1 in the US charts, as did the accompanying soundtrack album. [...] Chariots of Fire became inextricable from Vangelis's timeless theme, and the music became synonymous with slow-motion sporting montages. "My music does not try to evoke emotions like joy, love, or pain from the audience. It just goes with the image, because I work in the moment," he later explained. His score to Blade Runner is equally celebrated for its evocation of a sinister future version of Los Angeles, where robots and humans live awkwardly alongside one another, through the use of long, malevolent synth notes; saxophones and lush ambient passages enhance the film's romantic and poignant moments. "It has turned out to be a very prophetic film -- we're living in a kind of Blade Runner world now," he said in 2005.

Later in the decade he scored the Palme d'Or-winning Costa-Gavras political drama Missing, starring Jack Lemmon; the Mel Gibson and Anthony Hopkins drama The Bounty; and the Mickey Rourke-starring Francesco. He worked again with the Blade Runner director, Ridley Scott, on 1992 film 1492: Conquest of Paradise, and elsewhere during the 1990s, soundtracked Roman Polanski's Bitter Moon and documentaries by Jacques Cousteau. [...] A fascination with outer space found voice in 2016's Rosetta, dedicated to the space probe of the same name, and Nasa appointed his 1993 piece Mythodea (which he claimed to have written in an hour) as the official music of the Mars Odyssey mission of 2001. His final album, 2021's Juno to Jupiter, was inspired by the Nasa probe Juno and featured recordings of its launch and the workings of the probe itself in outer space.

Netflix lost 200,000 subscribers last quarter and potentially two million this current period, according to a note to shareholders from last month. Now, new research highlights that the number of long-standing subscribers canceling Netflix rose precipitously in the past few years. 9to5Mac reports: The data provided by the research firm Antenna to The Information shows that people who had been subscribers for more than three years accounted for just 5% of total cancelations at the start of 2022, while it hit 13% in the first quarter of 2022: "Newbie subscribers, meantime, accounted for only 60% of cancellations in the quarter, down from 64% in the fourth quarter. Also in the first quarter, overall cancellations rose to 3.6 million people, compared with around 2.5 million in each of the preceding five quarters. Antenna says it draws its data from a panel of 5 million Americans who anonymously contribute their streaming subscriptions."

While Netflix is losing ground, the streaming market as a whole is gaining more subscribers, and Antenna's data suggest a connection between the price increase and Netflix's subscriber losses: "'Consumers vote with their wallets on a monthly basis, and now there are just more viable candidates on the ballot,' said Brendan Brady, media and entertainment lead at Antenna. Also, since many entertainment companies, like NBCUniversal and Disney, have pulled their shows off Netflix and put them on their own services, Netflix has had to rely more on its originals, which have been hit or miss, he said."

Napster has been acquired again, this time by two companies from the web3 sector: Hivemind and Algorand. "Dear friends, we are excited to share that we've taken Napster Group private, and to bring the iconic music brand to web3," wrote Hivemind founder Matt Zhang on LinkedIn. From a report: "Volatile market and uncertain times often bring exciting opportunities. At Hivemind, we believe in developing thesis and building enduring value. Music x Web3 is one of the most exciting spaces we've come across, and we are thrilled to work with Emmy Lovell and many talents to unlock value for the entire ecosystem and revolutionize how artists and fans enjoy music."

Lovell has been named interim CEO of Napster, with the former WMG exec stepping up from her previous role as chief strategy officer, having joined the company in April 2021 shortly after its last acquisition by music VR company MelodyVR. The newly-merged company then delisted from the AIM stock exchange in the UK as part of its plan to relaunch a hybrid music streaming / video / VR service later this year, and then go public again in the US. The new owners appear to be pivoting that strategy with a web3 focus. There will be plenty to unpack around these plans. For example, Hivemind and Algorand aren't the only companies involved: they have an 'investor consortium' that includes ATC Management, BH Digital and G20 Ventures.

According to Variety, a new series of "Black Mirror" is in the works at Netflix. From the report: It's been almost three years since Season 5 of the dystopian drama premiered on the streaming service in June 2019, but sources indicate that a new anthology series of "Black Mirror" is shaping up, and casting is now underway. While details about specific stories are being kept under lock and key, Variety understands that Season 6 will have more episodes than Season 5, which comprised of just three instalments and starred Andrew Scott, Anthony Mackie, Yahya Abdul-Mateen II, Topher Grace and Miley Cyrus. A source close to the production tells Variety that the latest season is even more cinematic in scope, with each installment being treated as an individual film. This is, of course, in line with recent seasons of "Black Mirror," for which episodes usually exceeded 60 minutes and had incredibly high production values.

Netflix is going live for the first time. From a report: Deadline understands that the streamer is exploring the launch of live streaming. It plans to roll out the capability, which Netflix confirmed was in the early stages of development, for its swathe of unscripted shows and stand-up specials. It would mean that Netflix would be able to use it for live voting for competition series and talent contests such as its upcoming dance competition series Dance 100 from The Circle producer Studio Lambert. Similarly, it could use it if it decides to bring back its Netflix Is A Joke festival. The live comedy event featured around 300 stand-up performances across LA including Dave Chappelle, Larry David and Pete Davidson. Many of the shows were being filmed with plans to air around 12 of them on the service. In future, it could potentially air shows live, albeit with a few seconds delay in case things get saucy.

Electronic Arts and Middle-earth Enterprises "announced on Monday an upcoming free mobile game called The Lord of the Rings: Heroes of Middle-earth," reports CNET: With the role-playing game, Lord of the Rings fans can look forward to experiencing the iconic universe in a whole new way.... The game will feature immersive storytelling with iconic plot lines, turn-based combat and a selection of characters from both The Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit to battle the evils of Middle-earth.

"The team is filled with fans of The Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit and each day they bring their tremendous passion and talents together to deliver an authentic experience for players," Malachi Boyle, vice president of mobile RPG for Electronic Arts, said in a statement. "The combination of high-fidelity graphics, cinematic animations, and stylized art immerses players in the fantasy of Middle-earth where they'll go head-to-head with their favorite characters."

The site GeekyTyrant is excited about Amazon's upcoming eight-episode series The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power — premiering September 2 and set in Middle-earth's "Second Age," thousands of years before the events of The Hobbit and The Lord Of The Rings.) With the film being set in a completely different age, I was expecting Middle-Earth to be very different than what we've seen in the past. As we've seen in the first trailer that was released, the show does has a similar visual style as Peter Jackson's films, but things are definitely going to be different.

During a recent interview with Empire, Rings Of Power concept artist John Howe, teased some of the surprises that are in store:

"This isn't the Middle-earth you remember. This is a world that's very vibrant. The elves are not hidden away in Mirkwood or lingering in Rivendell. They're busy constructing kingdoms. The dwarven kingdom of Moria is not an abandoned mine and the Grey Havens is not yet an abandoned city. I loved having the opportunity to explore that unseen history."

He went on to share that the series will finally explore the oceans of Middle-Earth and says that there will be a set of seafaring elves.
Or, as Amazon's press release puts it, The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power "will take viewers back to an era in which great powers were forged, kingdoms rose to glory and fell to ruin, unlikely heroes were tested, hope hung by the finest of threads, and the greatest villain that ever flowed from Tolkien's pen threatened to cover all the world in darkness...."

The Independent notes the show "has been in the works since 2017" — and that Prime Video bought the rights for $250m (£183m). And now Prime Video has even invited some JRR Tolkien fans to attent a preview screening of the show: [F]ans of Middle Earth were nervous ahead of sitting down to watch footage from the show — but those nerves soon made way for excitement, with fans praising the series as well as the showrunners, JD Payne and Patrick McKay.... Fan Dr Maggie Parke said that the showrunners "kept up with the best of us", stating: "Their passion & knowledge made me feel like they were one of us, they get it. I'm feeling very optimistic...!"
The newspaper quotes another preview attendee's conclusion that ""We, as Tolkien fans, are in good hands! Above and beyond, I was absolutely blown away. I cannot wait to see more — it's just beyond words."

"After they broke up four decades ago, ABBA famously refused all kinds of money for reunion ABBA-tars and performances," writes Rolling Stone.

"But a few years ago, British entrepreneur Simon Fuller pitched an idea that piqued the Swedish superstars' interest..." "We got sort of turned on by the thought that we could actually be onstage without us being there," ABBA singer-songwriter Benny Andersson says over Zoom.

The band, along with Fuller and their producers Ludvig Andersson (Benny Andersson's son) and Svana Gisla (music-video producer for the likes of Radiohead and Beyoncé), initially explored reproducing themselves by hologram technology, but that didn't pan out. They finally realized a grander dream: ABBA Voyage, the 196-show concert residency at newly built ABBA Arena in London's Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park that begins May 27. Made with help from George Lucas' Industrial Light & Magic, digital avatars (also known as ABBA-tars) embody the stars in their Seventies prime, performing a 22-song set alongside a flesh-and-blood backing band assembled by James Righton of the Klaxons and including U.K. singer Little Boots on keys....

The band and the team and ILM realized early on that an existing venue wasn't going to work for the residency. There are 1,000 visual-effects artists on ABBA Voyage, making it the biggest project ILM has done, according to Gisla (and this is the company behind Star Wars, Marvel, and Jurassic Park). The roof of ABBA Arena was reengineered three times to fit the complicated lighting system. Where many concerts might use only one lighting rig, this one uses 20.

There was a lot of work put into making the ABBA-tars — which, the band stresses, are not holograms, but digital versions of the members that look like real, physical performers. Not too long before the pandemic put things to a near-halt, the four members of ABBA met from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. each day, for four and half weeks straight, performing for 200 cameras and a crew of nearly 40 people while wearing motion-capture suits. They posted up in a sound studio within the Swedish Film Institute, playing all the songs they had carefully curated for their first show in 40 years. "It was really a pleasure for all of us," Andersson says.

Back in London, body doubles emulated the performances, but with a younger energy. "We are sort of merged together with our body doubles. Don't ask me how it works because I can't explain that," Andersson continues. "If you're 75, you don't jump around like you did when you were 34, so this is why this happened."
Producer Ludvig Andersson adds: "We hear often, 'This is the dawn of a new era in live entertainment.' I think that's an incorrect statement. I don't think it is. This is unique."

Whatever happened to those two pilots who attempted to swap planes in mid-air — skydiving from one to the other while the planes slowly tumbled toward the desert 65 miles southeast of Phoenix?

One pilot successfully reached the other plane — but the other pilot didn't, parachuting safely to the ground instead. "All of our safety protocols worked," the first pilot said triumphantly in a documentary streamed on Hulu. Er, but what about that second plane, slowly tumbling toward the ground without a pilot? It fell 14,000 feet, landing "nose first" (according to footage from a local newscast) — though its descent was also slowed by a parchute. (Both planes also had a specially-engineered braking system to slow their fall so the skydiving pilots could overtake them.) The stunt was sponsored by Red Bull.

Both pilots had previously conducted more than 20,000 skydives — "but there's a problem," that local newscast pointed out. "The FAA says it had denied Red Bull permission to attempt the plane swap because it would not be in the public's interest." So now both pilots — who'd had "commercial pilot certificates" from America's Federal Aviation Administration — have had their certificates revoked.

The Associated Press reports: In a May 10 emergency order, the FAA cites the two pilots, Luke Aikins and Andrew Farrington, and describes their actions as "careless and reckless." Aikins also faces a proposed $4,932 fine from the agency....

Aikins had petitioned for an exemption from the rule that pilots must be at the helm with safety belts fastened at all times. He argued the stunt would "be in the public interest because it would promote aviation in science, technology, engineering and math."

While both pilots must surrender their certificates immediately, there is an appeal process.
Aikins had shared a statement on Instagram after the stunt, saying he made the "personal decision to move forward with the plane swap" despite the lack of the FAA exemption.

"I regret not sharing this information with my team and those who supported me."

"I am now turning my attention to cooperatively working transparently with the regulatory authorities as we review the planning and execution."

Onkyo, one of the best-known Japanese manufacturers of home theater equipment, has "filed for bankruptcy at Osaka District Court on Friday, with total liabilities of around 3.1 billion yen ($24 million)," reports Nikkei Asia. The report is sparse on details but attributes the bankruptcy to a "market shift to streaming and smartphones."

In mid-2020, Onkyo USA Corporation ended a 45-year run as Onkyo's exclusive sales, marketing and distribution division for the Americas, according to Audioholics.

Onkyo has appeared in a few stories on Slashdot over the years. Our personal favorite was a story in 2003 about a new use of embedded Linux in Onkyo's home music server.

Disney added 7.9 million new subscribers to its Disney Plus streaming service during the first three months of 2022, the company announced (PDF) in its Q2 earnings report on Wednesday. The Verge reports: That brings the total to around 87.6 million worldwide, excluding the 50.1 million people subscribed to Disney Plus Hotstar internationally. In the US and Canada alone, Disney Plus now has 7.1 million more subscribers than it did a year ago, with 44.4 million. The company also said that the number of subscribers for all of its streaming offerings -- including Hulu and ESPN Plus -- had grown to over 205 million, an increase from the 196.4 million it reported in January.

Disney also reports that it's earning more per Disney Plus subscriber than it had been previously, at least in the US. Where its average monthly revenue per paid subscriber used to be $6.01, it's now sitting at $6.32. Disney says this is thanks to "an increase in retail pricing and a lower mix of wholesale subscribers." Despite this, Disney Plus is actually losing the company money at a greater clip than it was before. Disney says this is thanks to higher costs for production, advertising, and technology. Those costs seem unlikely to go down, and raising prices, like Netflix did, could cut off its subscriber growth. All that put together makes it obvious why Disney is looking at creating an ad-supported tier sooner rather than later.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Windows' Sound Recorder app has gone through a few iterations since its initial release in Windows 3.0 back in 1990, when it launched as a simple app that could only record 60 seconds of audio at a time. But the app vanished altogether in Windows 10, replaced by a totally new app called Voice Recorder, which can record and trim basic sound recordings and save them as m4a files. Sound Recorder is now making a comeback, and Microsoft is currently testing a revamped version for Windows Insiders in the Dev channel. The company announced the redesign in a blog post summarizing Windows 11's updates to built-in Windows apps.

The new Sound Recorder uses a two-column layout similar to Voice Recorder's, with playback and trimming controls to the right and a list of all the files you've recorded on the left. But it adds some old Sound Recorder features that disappeared from the app years ago, when it was boiled down to almost nothing in Windows Vista. The app has a waveform visualizer that appears during recording and playback, and you can once again choose to save or open files in multiple formats (including the default m4a, as well as mp3, wma, FLAC, and WAV). The new Sound Recorder can also adjust audio playback speed from 0.25x to 4 and set markers so you can easily jump from place to place within a large audio recording.

According to figures from trade group IAB and PwC, the podcast advertising business in the United States is expected to grow to an estimated $4.2 billion in 2024. Variety reports: The sector hit $1.45 billion in 2021, representing 72% annual growth, according to the report. In 2021, U.S. podcast advertising revenue grew twice as fast as the total internet advertising market, which was up 35% last year, according to the 2021 PwC/IAB Internet Advertising Revenue Report. Still, U.S. podcast advertising revenue is poised to continue double-digit growth, growing more than 100% over the next two years to an estimated $4.2 billion in 2024, per the report.

According to the latest IAB/PwC podcast report, three key factors are driving podcast ad revenue growth: the ongoing increase in listeners and content; increased use of automated ad tech, as ad revenue served via dynamic ad insertion (DAI) has almost doubled in two years to take 84% share in 2021 (versus ads embedded in podcast audio); and growth of ad spending in categories that historically had lower spend volumes like sports and true crime. "Everything right now is aligned to drive growth," said Chris Bruderle, IAB's VP of research and insights. "There's more engaging and diverse podcast content than ever, and that is translating into larger, more attractive audiences. But more than anything, podcasting has proven that it can deliver beyond direct-to-consumer advertising to support brand-building and drive business outcomes."

A special ESPN+ show Saturday brought back John McEnroe "to face his ultimate opponent. Himself." TechCrunch reports: The 45-minute film will showcase how the match was created using a combination of artificial intelligence and machine learning, plus five virtual avatars of John McEnroe from pivotal points of his career. The team at [technology/production company] Unit 9 spent a day with John in order to bring the vision to life via full-body scanning, motion capture and Unreal Engine MetaHuman technology (a cloud-based app that creates photorealistic digital humans). The avatar game system will be projected on a hologram particle screen and will be a simulation of gameplay with a system of ball launchers and ball return robots.

When McEnroe sends the ball over the net, the avatar responds to the direction of the real ball. As the avatar swings, a new ball is fired from the ball cannon and then flies through a smokescreen at a precise point in space to make it appear from the avatar's racket position.... Unit 9's team analyzed hours of footage from John's matches throughout his entire career and recorded hundreds of shots, strokes and movements. In total, they recorded 308 shots with over 259 loops and blends to really capture his footwork and well-known shot-making and volleying skills.

The best part about this is the team recorded numerous key phrases and statements so McEnroe could talk smack to his virtual self (and maybe even smash a couple of rackets).
As McEnroe himself pointed out to Forbes.... "I can't lose." But he also sounds like he enjoyed the experience: The most interesting recreation of his playing style to him is the 1979 version of him because professional tennis was all so new to him at the time. "That was the year I may have enjoyed the most on the circuit," he says, "I was just coming up, and on the way up and you are so excited and want to travel the world."

From there, he thinks the 1992 version of himself will offer the other end of his career, after having three kids. He knows that 1984 was the best year on tour, but "I have more interest in the young and old opposed to (1984)."
McEnroe also wanted the sport of tennis to get extra exposure — and that it would be good "If we have a way where we project something different and have some fun with it and peoples can laugh with it..."

Or, as AdWeek quotes McEnroe as saying, "Who wouldn't want an opportunity to literally be able to look back at where you started and celebrate how much you've grown and learned along the way?"

Doctor Who's newest incarnation has been announced. Replacing Jodie Whittaker — and becoming the 14th Doctor Who — is 29-year-old Netflix star Ncuti Gatwa. (In 2020 the Scottish branch of the British Academy of Film and Television Arts awarded him the prestigious "Best Actor in Television" award for work on the Netflix series Sex Education.) Fun fact: he also voiced the lead driver in Electronic Arts' racing videogame Grid Legends, according to Wikipedia.

In a BBC press release, he described himself as "a mix of deeply honoured, beyond excited and of course a little bit scared" to take over the long-running part of the TARDIS-traveling Time Lord, according to CNN.

"This role and show means so much to so many around the world, including myself, and each one of my incredibly talented predecessors has handled that unique responsibility and privilege with the utmost care. I will endeavour my utmost to do the same." "Doctor Who" showrunner Russell T Davies said in the press release: "Sometimes talent walks through the door and it's so bright and bold and brilliant, I just stand back in awe and thank my lucky stars.

"Ncuti dazzled us, seized hold of the Doctor and owned those TARDIS keys in seconds."

Gatwa joins the long-running sci-fi series — which follows an alien Time Lord who travels across space and time — ahead of its 60th anniversary in 2023.

"Comic book nerd Christmas has arrived," quips Mashable, noting this is the big 20th anniversary of Free Comic Book Day. Basically if you walk into your local comic book store on the first Saturday in May: they'll hand you some free comic books. Bleeding Cool points out that several stores are even having free signings from famous comic book artists and writers.

Although in 2017 NPR had this advice for visiting comics fans. "While you're there, buy something... The comics shops still have to pay for the 'free' FCBD books they stock, and they're counting on the increased foot traffic to lift sales."

The official site includes a comic-shop locator — but many of the comics are also available online as free downloads. (For example, as free ebooks in Amazon's Kindle store.) This year's free offerings include a special issue of a new Sleepy Hollow comic and a unique "yearbook" commemorating the 25th anniversary of Buffy the Vampire Slayer.

Other geek-friendly choices include:

• Doctor Who
• Avatar: the Last Airbender
• Sonic the Hedgehog
• Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles
• The Three Stooges
• Stranger Things
• Spider-Man and Venom
• Avengers/X-Men/Eternals: Judgment Day
• DC League of Super-Pets and Dark Crisis: Special Edition
• Winchester Mystery House: The Hundred Year Curse
• A graphic novel called The Guardian of Fukushima
• Clementine ("the next big thing from Robert Kirkman's The Walking Dead")

And in addition — and perhaps inevitably.... "A new dawn of Archie is upon us!"

Spotify co-founder Daniel Ek said on Friday that he's pouring $50 million into the music streaming service, driving its stock price up by more than 3% to a high of $108.98 per share during regular trading hours. From a report: The momentary rise, however, is a blip on the radar for Spotify, which has taken a beating this year -- in part over its recent, weaker-than-expected growth forecasts (just like plenty of other streaming and software firms). As for the reasoning behind Ek's purchase, the Spotify CEO wants you to know he believes. "I've always been vocal about my strong belief in Spotify and what we are building. So I am putting that belief into action this week by investing $50M in $SPOT. I believe our best days are ahead...," he said, adding that he didn't have to tell you about it, but wanted to.