In our house I am the master of channels.  I am the one who unsubscribes from services we’re not watching, re-subscribes to services when there is something for us, and makes sure we don’t get signed up until a show we’re interested in has a full season available.

A mere four years ago we were at a point that felt almost like a renaissance of streaming content… we were all stuck inside and in need of something to do and streaming channels were there to deliver.  And then we got a vaccine, decided the pandemic was over, and realized that maybe we didn’t need a subscription to 17 different streaming services.

Netflix

Meanwhile, all the players who got into the streaming service game, having been lulled by the seemingly effortless success of Netflix, found themselves in a bit of a bind as they found this was not a cheap and easy path to riches even as people began trimming back on their subscription count.  This led to the need to raise prices, which drove even more people to dump their offering.

Still, the strong will prevail and, after some closures and a series of mergers… there are still probably too damn many channels.  More than we can afford to subscribe to continuously, so this is where we are at.

After more of four years of peaks and valleys and industry strife, these are the channels we end up watching.

The Long Haul Keepers

These are the services which we remain subscribed to pretty much always.  They have, on some level, a reason or a proven value to keep them around.

• Netflix

This is the one service we subscribe to continuously and watch most regularly, and it is largely because they throw more content at us than any two or three other services combined.  Sure, a lot of it is garbage, and most of it isn’t for us, but every Friday night they have a selection of content added to their service to choose from.

Add in that they drop a full season at a time so you can binge to your heart’s content and that they have probably one of the best apps by most measures, and you can see why I never bother to put Netflix on the bench.

Finally, their app works.  It is fast, responsive, comprehensible, and doesn’t assume I can read the tiny title card from across the room.  It also skips the “previously” section if I just watched the previous episode and lets me skip the beginning and end credits successfully.

That said, they just announced that they are cancelling my $12 a month plan and enrolling me in a $7 a month plan with ads.  Netflix promises it will just be a couple of ads at the beginning of some programming, but we’ll have to see how it goes.  The other alternative is $18 a month for no ads, and then we’re getting into the “you need to prove your value every month” zone of streaming services.

• Amazon Prime Video

I think it is just called Prime Video honestly, but I always put “Amazon” in there to remind myself that this is part of our Amazon Prime subscription, which is something we keep even when we’re not watching any of their shows.

So, technically, it is the other service we subscribe to continuously, but if my annual Prime member ship was just for it, I would cancel it in a heartbeat.  But I get other benefits from my Prime membership that make it worthwhile, so technically we subscribe to Prime Video.

The problem is that while they occasionally pull off something good… the recent Fallout series is a “prime” example… there otherwise isn’t a lot of new content there, and much of what is new isn’t very good.  If you missed some straight-to-video bad science fiction film, Prime is apparently where they all end up.

It is also very much in the business of bait and switch, where they will get a series from another service like Starz or MGM+ and show you a season… or, in one case, the first season MINUS the final episode… the prompt you to subscribe to that service… through them, of course, so they get a cut… which does not make me happy.  I have gone off and subscribed due to this at times, though I always go directly to that service, like Starz, and contract with them direction so Prime does not get a cut.

This is, in part, out of spite, but also because the Prime Video app isn’t great.  It is not the worst, but it is at best mid-pack.  It is slow, it can be hard to see, browsing for shows is not great, and it is really hit and miss about whether it will let you skip the “previously” or opening credits and just hates when you try to skip the end credits to start another show.  This is likely, in part, to them just showing a lot of content from other services, which they put the minimal effort into adapting to their app.

Finally, despite paying for access to Prime, if I don’t want to get ads during shows, I have to pay extra.  This, as you might expect, irks me and I will not pay their ransom.  The only upside to this is that they don’t show ads on all content, though amusingly some content an ad comes up to tell you the video will be ad free thanks to a specific sponsor, for who an ad then plays.

TL:DR – Not great, but comes with a package I never cancel.

• Apple TV+

Apple is in an interesting niche in that it is just cheap enough and the content is high enough quality that I don’t rush to cancel our subscription.  There isn’t a lot of new content, and they are still wed to the “let’s stretch out people’s subscription time by showing one episode a week because maybe, this time, we’ll have the next Game of Thrones and everybody will need a full week to discuss the show” routine, which I find irksome.

Our house rule is we don’t start watching anything until it is six episodes in.

The app is also not the best.  When you have something selected on scree it makes that item about 5% larger than it was when not selected, so I often have to move the selection a couple of times to see what has focus on screen.  It is a pain in the ass to just go watch the next episode if you stopped at the start of the credits last time you watched a series.  It wants to resume from exactly where you left off unless you fish around in the app to fine the page for the full series that has the episode list.

But the app does at least run pretty well for us.  I will give it that.

And, like I said, there isn’t a ton of new content.  It is the Anti-Netflix, which just throws a constant stream of new content at you.  So we spend a lot more time watching Netflix because we’ll take a chance on an episode or two of something new or watch some potentially bad movie on a Friday night because the commitment feels low and there are many other options if we bail.

• KQED Television

I almost forgot about this.  I give public television a regular monthly payment which gives me access to their regular lineup of shows and whatever they import from the UK via Masterpiece Theater.  We used to have half a dozen public television channels in the SF Bay area that each had their own varied content.  They all got scooped up by KQED in San Francisco over the years.  We almost never watch this these days, unless I want to go back and re-visit one of the Ken Burns documentaries, but technically we’re continuously subscribed.  At least when you stream you are not interrupted by pledge drives every few months.

• Xfinity Stream

Also, I should mention this because, due to the fact that Comcast is our only internet provider option and that they make sure that internet bundles are cheaper if you include cable TV, we still have cable TV at our house.  But on the rare occasion when we want to watch it, we watch it using the app on our Roku Stick.  And, live TV with ads… this is how animals watch TV, right?  Just sitting there and being force to watch whatever is “on” at that very moment?  How did we survive this?

The Frequent Recurring Subscriptions

These are the services that we are often subscribed to, but which get turned off now and then when we run out of content.

• Disney+

I will echo what I have heard many other say, which is if I still had pre-teen children in the house, I would never unsubscribe from Disney+.  It is also the one stop shop for all things Star Wars and the MCU and the entire 35 year life of The Simpsons.

But our daughter is now a college graduate and my nostalgia for the Disney catalog and the other properties they own isn’t all that strong.  So we’re willing to unsub from this one when we’re done with whatever the latest Star Wars series is.  And, because Disney+ is still locked into the “one episode a week” ploy to get people to string out their subscription for an extra month or two, we don’t subscribe until a season is set.

The app itself is pretty good.  It does group up content well enough and is responsive and doesn’t crash on our Roku stick.

• Hulu

Some very decent original content.  Will subscribe when a new season of something is out.  They do adhere to the “one episode a week” thing, so I wait until seasons are complete.  They do also get Fox and FX stuff, and at one point I watched literally all of the available episodes of Bob’s Burgers while also watching all available episodes of Archer, both of which feature H. Jon Benjamin voicing the lead role, which was quite a trip.

The app is okay, though it isn’t well organized.  They like to put the “continue watching” piece of the UI way down the main page and prefer to promote their new stuff, so you really have to bookmark the things you like and go to your personal page to get what you want out of the app.

• Starz

One of the relics of the premium cable channel era, somewhere down the list from HBO and Showtime, its once niche with us is the period piece dramas like The White Queen, The Spanish Princess, and The Serpent Queen get us to subscribe for a while.  They also feature a lot of movies, but everybody has a lot of movies and they are almost never the ones I am in the mood for at any given moment, so somehow that rarely works out.

• Paramount+

We originally came here to watch Yellowstone then found that this is where all of the Star Trek content lives as well as having a cross programming agreement with Showtime, so there is kind of a lot here.  However, we can get a bit burnt out on it as well.  We’ll watch a few seasons of this or that then stop watching for a while, at which point I will turn off the subscription.  But we do return.

• AMC+

This is the channel for all things Walking Dead, which my wife is still into because of the soap opera-like drama.  As I noted previously, after a season or two of zombies, people really became the main enemy, while zombies would only show up when the plot demanded.  Decent channel, not too expensive, and AMC has quite a bit of original content.  When something pops up we’ll subscribe for a while.

The At Need Only Channels

These are the services that we only subscribe to for very specific reasons, then cancel ones we’re done.

• Max

You would think they would be better at this whole streaming things, having been in on that business since the HBO Go app, their first cut at streaming, launched back in 2010.  Then again, the whole thing hasn’t been the same since the end of Game of Thrones.

The old HBO business model was to get people subscribed based on a few prestige series and maybe first access to films that had recently left the theaters, which worked well enough in the age of cable TV and the early days of streaming.  Now films don’t see to be the draw they once were, there are a ton of competitors, and they haven’t quite hit another big winner.

I mean, they can get a show like Succession that gets a lot of awards, but I think Netflix puts out a show about once a month that gets as many or more viewers, and a hit on Netflix will get 5-10x the viewers.

And at one time we would stay subscribed to HBO for years at a stretch.  Now, however, with the consolidation under the Max brand and the removal of back seasons of some shows, and other shows entirely, and their lack of anything really new and good… we went back last to watch season 4 of True Detective and it was okay, but I cancelled the service once we were done

• Peacock

This was an okay service the first few times we have subscribed, and they did a credible job with the Olympics recently.  I mean, I cannot blame them directly for NBC cutting away from the opening ceremonies to watch the US team standing around waiting to get on their boat.  I know the French are… uniquely French I guess… but they’re still more interesting that Snoop Dogg trying to engage random strangers in conversation or Kelly Clarkson repeating “Oooh, look at that” over and over.  And past that, if you wanted to watch very specific competitions, they let you.  So maybe the most accessible Olympics when it came to video.

But beyond the Olympics it has been degrading as a service.  They are going hard on ad revenue with a cheap subscription.  The problem is that I am fully willing to buy the more expensive ad free option, but they now show you the version of the content that has been cut up for ad injection… without the ads.  What this means is that every so often the show pauses for nearly a full second while the server apparently has to decided on the fly whether or not an ad gets played or not, then moves on when the result comes back negative.

That doesn’t sound bad, until you learn just how many ads Peacock thinks they should inject into 30 minutes of television.  It quickly becomes annoying out of all proportion to the actual duration of the interruption.  It isn’t completely unwatchable, but it just pulls me out of the show and makes my brain think, “Oh, here is another place where they would have put an add had I not given then an extra $8 for a month of service.”

Also, “ad free” did not apply to Olympic coverage, and I am still salty about that.

The Odd Outsiders

Services we have tried once and haven’t really felt the need to return to.

• Acorn & Britbox

I am lumping these two together because they share the same problem, which is the US view of British television after having been raised on US public television cherry picking the very best and putting it on in front of us via Masterpiece Theater.  We think everything produced in the UK is sophisticated and urbane, performed by actors who are veterans of the Royal Shakespeare Company, with performances delivered in that very specific BBC news reader accent, written by over educated graduates of Cambridge and Oxford, which holds a mirror up to life while making historical and literary references that mean we have to keep Wikipedia to hand in order to keep up.

Some of us grew up on a diet of things like I, Claudius and House of Cards and Monty Python and it skewed our perception.

So a pair of channels filled to the brim with British television content seems like heaven.

The problem is that Upstairs, Downstairs or Downton Abby are not the prototypical British programming, the pinnacle to which the island strives; Benny Hill is.  And even that is a huge cut above the average.  There are a lot of simply unwatchable, predictable, crap shows on Acorn and Britbox.

Finding that for every Prime Suspect there are a dozen dreadful police procedurals out there, often hampered for US audiences with incomprehensible UK regional accents and slang, is enough to burst the myth of British television superiority.  You’re just as bad as us at this TV thing and it is a miracle when you can build a season of television on even three hours of actual content.  At least in the US when we crank out mediocre content, we get 8, 10, 16, even 22 episodes out the door.

I’ll go back to letting US public television cherry picking for me, thank you.

So yeah, we’ve been through both of these channels and found that the good stuff we’ve seen already elsewhere and the rest… is usually not the good stuff.

• MGM+

We subscribed to this because of a Prime Video bait and switch with the show Monsieur Spade.  They had some content worth watching, but not enough to keep us subscribed and, lacking another screw job from Amazon, there isn’t anything there we’re dying to watch.  I think all the Bond films are available there… but I also have them all on DVD so I am excused from every having to watch them because there are just right there, I could watch them any time I want.

• Tubi

Technically not a subscription service but a free ad supported venue, one of my nieces that works in Hollywood… I have two such nieces… was working as a producer here so we gave it a try.  Oh man, ads suck, and injected ads suck at least 3x as much because if they don’t have enough ad buys, they will just show you the same damn ad two or three times back to back.

If the future is ad supported, they need to work on that.  It is awful.  Anyway, my niece has another job so I do not feel the need to engage with Tubi anymore.

Conclusions

We wished for a bright future of on demand entertainment where we could select and watch anything we wanted.  But we wished on the monkey’s paw, and as the finger curled down, we were given a patchwork landscape of competing services, shifting content availability, and difficult UIs.

I think the biggest problem is just know what there is out there to watch.  My least favorite thing these days is to sit down on the couch and have my wife ask, “So what should we watch?”  This portends me using the remote to scroll through large sections of half a dozen services to find something that looks good.

This, btw, is why Netflix wins so often for us.  They at least always have something new, something we’re willing to invest at least a bit of time into.  And after about fifteen minutes of my wife vetoing this or that I’m ready to just put anything on so I can stop this futile quest for content.

Using the Roku for streaming helps, as it will search all channels and services for programming and find it.  But you have to know what you are looking for.  If you are doing the streaming equivalent of channel surfing on a Friday night there are just too many places to look.

I know we don’t want to go back to half a dozen channels where you watched what was on or nothing at all, but there was a simplicity to it and a limited scope where you could glance at the TV listings and just decide to read a book or go play a video game.

So what are you watching these days?  Which channel scratches your itch?  And is there any decent new science fiction shows out there?  Is Orphan Black: Echoes any good?  Might have to re-up AMC+ if it is.

Lucasfilm has decided not to renew The Acolyte for a second season, according to Deadline and Variety. Fans won't get to see how the show was supposed to end and won't get to know how the plotlines its creator, Leslye Headland (Russian Doll), teased at the end of the first season would unravel. Engadget Senior Editor Devindra Hardawar called The Acolyte "Star Wars at its best" in his review, discussed how unique its premise was, and drew parallels between the series and Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon. 

Deadline says the show had a strong start and garnered 4.8 million views in the first day it became available for streaming, reaching 11.1 million views after five days. However, viewership fell in the coming weeks, and its finale was reportedly the poorest performing finale for a Star Wars series. 

The Acolyte was a mystery-thriller story featuring a former Jedi trainee played by Amandla Stenberg, who's suspected of committing a series of crimes. Her former Jedi Master played by Lee Jung-jae (Squid Game) now has to find her to get to the bottom of things. Manny Jacinto, who played the smuggler Qimir, gained a lot of attention online due to this shirtless scenes. It was revealed in the later episodes that he plays a bigger role in the story, and viewers were even supposed to learn his real name in the next season. 

The show is still available to watch on Disney+ for those who don't mind not getting closure for its story. 

Friday Night Videos was a weekly dose of music videos for those without cable and, therefore, no MTV. I hadn't thought about it in years until this episode from 1984, complete with commercials, popped up on YouTube. It is pure 80s nostalgia with Tracey Ullman, who I honestly forgot had a music career, Rockwell, whose Somebody's Watching Me video still creeps me out, a "brand new video by John Cougar Mellencamp," and a talking head of Freddie Mercury smoking like a chimney in an intro to the Radio Gaga video. — Read the rest

The post Friday Night Videos is a blast from the past appeared first on Boing Boing.

Phil Donahue, the presenter, writer, producer and and host of The Phil Donahue Show, is dead at 88. The longtime TV presence was famed for many achievements off and on-screen.

Donahue became a household name in the daytime talk show space in November 1967 when The Phil Donahue Show premiered on a local news network in Dayton, Ohio.

— Read the rest

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The Borderlands movie made a global box office total of $16.5 million during its opening weekend.

As reported by Variety, the film had a production budget of $115 million alongside marketing and distribution costs of $30 million. The adaptation made $8.8 million in the US box office, which amounts to 6% of what it cost to make.

According to studio sources, 60% of the movie's production costs were covered by international presale tickets.

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Enlarge / We have doubts that any amount of Force powers will bring the show back. (credit: YouTube/Disney+)

In news that will delight some and disappoint others, Disney has canceled Star Wars series The Acolyte after just one season, Deadline Hollywood reports. The eight-episode series got off to a fairly strong start, with mostly positive reviews and solid ratings, albeit lower than prior Star Wars series. But it couldn't maintain and build upon that early momentum, and given the production costs, it's not especially surprising that Disney pulled the plug.

The Acolyte arguably wrapped up its major narrative arc pretty neatly in the season finale, but it also took pains to set the stage for a possible sophomore season. In this streaming age, no series is ever guaranteed renewal. Still, it would have been nice to see what showrunner Leslye Headland had planned; when given the chance, many shows hit their stride on those second-season outings.

(Spoilers for the series below. We'll give you another heads-up when we get to major spoilers.)

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HBO has released the first teaser for The Last of Us season two and while short, it offers clues as to what we can expect when the series debuts in 2025. It starts off with Joel (Pedro Pascal) in conversation with a new character played by Catherine O'Hara (seemingly his therapist), reckoning with his past actions. "Did you hurt her?" she asks. "I saved her," he replies. 

On top of O'Hara's unknown role, we see other characters for the first time including Kaitlyn Dever's Abby, Jeffrey Wright reprising his video game voice role as Isaac, and Dina, played by Isabela Merced. Meanwhile, Joel's brother Tommy (Gabriel Luna) and Ellie (Bella Ramsey) appear briefly in some intense action scenes.

As revealed last year, showrunners Craig Mazin and Neil Druckmann decided to split the events from The Last of Us Part II video game into two seasons, since the story was far more complex than the original. The second season will be just seven episodes to create a natural break, while the third season will be "significantly larger," they said. 

The original series mostly followed the events of the game, with some smart deviations and changes. Expect more of the same for season two, though the teaser already shows one significant divergence. In the game, Joel only confesses the events that occurred at the hospital to his brother, but here, he's telling O'Hara's character. 

The teaser appeared as part of HBO's Coming to Max trailer, along with previews for The Penguin, Dune: Prophecy, It: Welcome to Derry, and our first peek at A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms, the next Game of Thrones spinoff. 

Warner Bros. Discovery is shuttering Boomerang, a streaming service dedicated to classic cartoons, according to The Hollywood Reporter. The platform started as a digital cable channel back in 2000 before expanding to a streaming platform in 2017.

Boomerang will officially cease operations on September 30, giving subscribers around two months to quickly binge every Looney Tunes, Tom and Jerry and Scooby-Doo cartoon. However, some content will be folded into Max. The linear channel will continue to operate via cable and satellite providers, reaching an estimated 26 million homes.

Additionally, Boomerang subscribers will be grandfathered into Max’s ad-free tier “with no change” to the subscription price “until further notice,” according to an email sent to users. That’s a dang good deal, as Boomerang costs $6 per month and Max’s ad-free plan currently costs $17 per month.

Max

Max, however, is already home to much of the same programming as Boomerang. This includes Looney Tunes shorts, several Scooby-Doo shows, Tom and Jerry and The Flintstones, among others. It’s also home to the entire catalog of Cartoon Network shows and plenty of DC animated series, like Harley Quinn.

The company hasn’t specified which shows and movies would be making the move to Max, simply telling subscribers that “some Boomerang content may not be available” after September 30.

Boomerang isn’t the only cartoon-adjacent streaming platform on the chopping block. Kid-friendly Noggin shut down earlier this year after layoffs at parent company Paramount Global. On the upside, Disney+ has plenty of cartoons, given the pedigree, and the same goes for Netflix and Prime Video.

The author behind A Song of Fire and Iceis busy finishing the final two volumes in that acclaimed fantasy series, but not so busy that he doesn’t have time to tease audiences about all of the new Game of Thrones spin-offs currently being made for TV. By George R.R. Martin’s count there are seven in the works,…

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Warner Bros. Discovery is shuttering Boomerang, a streaming service dedicated to classic cartoons, according to The Hollywood Reporter. The platform started as a digital cable channel back in 2000 before expanding to a streaming platform in 2017.

Boomerang will officially cease operations on September 30, giving subscribers around two months to quickly binge every Looney Tunes, Tom and Jerry and Scooby-Doo cartoon. However, some content will be folded into Max. The linear channel will continue to operate via cable and satellite providers, reaching an estimated 26 million homes.

Additionally, Boomerang subscribers will be grandfathered into Max’s ad-free tier “with no change” to the subscription price “until further notice,” according to an email sent to users. That’s a dang good deal, as Boomerang costs $6 per month and Max’s ad-free plan currently costs $17 per month.

Max

Max, however, is already home to much of the same programming as Boomerang. This includes Looney Tunes shorts, several Scooby-Doo shows, Tom and Jerry and The Flintstones, among others. It’s also home to the entire catalog of Cartoon Network shows and plenty of DC animated series, like Harley Quinn.

The company hasn’t specified which shows and movies would be making the move to Max, simply telling subscribers that “some Boomerang content may not be available” after September 30.

Boomerang isn’t the only cartoon-adjacent streaming platform on the chopping block. Kid-friendly Noggin shut down earlier this year after layoffs at parent company Paramount Global. On the upside, Disney+ has plenty of cartoons, given the pedigree, and the same goes for Netflix and Prime Video.

ESPN, Fox and Warner Bros. Discovery announced in February that they would jointly launch a sports-focused streaming service, and today they've shared some pertinent details. Subscriptions to the Venu service will cost $43 a month. The platform will have three broad categories of content: live games and events, on-demand sports programming and talk content such as studio shows. Venu will launch at an unspecified time this fall.

The linear networks included in Venu are ESPN, ESPN2, ESPNU, SECN, ACCN, ESPNEWS, ABC, FOX, FS1, FS2, BTN, TNT, TBS, truTV and ESPN+. Viewers will have access to lots of major events across the world of athletics. The World Series of Major League Baseball, the four Grand Slams of tennis, the Stanley Cup finals for the National Hockey League, and a wide spread of college athletics will all be represented in Venu's programming.

When people sign up at the launch price, that monthly cost will be locked in for twelve months. Considering how often we see prices going up in the streaming landscape, it's safe to assume that $43 won't be the fee indefinitely.

Watching sports is a fragmented and expensive activity today. Different leagues might have media rights deals with multiple different networks and streaming platforms, meaning fans have to check carefully where to find their favorite teams each night. Having so many providers together under one umbrella would streamline the experience, especially for people who like to follow multiple sports. But the joint effort has drawn criticism. FuboTV filed a lawsuit after the initial announcement, claiming the new streaming package would violate antitrust practices.

Thousands of video game actors went on strike on July 26 for the first time since 2017. The fight is over AI protections and other issues in contract negotiations with some of the biggest studios and publishers, and will halt work from SAG-AFTRA members on future projects, as well as possibly keep them from promotion…

Read more...

Young Americans have subtitles on all the time for reasons only weakly-grasped by their elders, but the older generations are following suit for more concrete reasons: they watch a lot of British television but don't understand what anyone is saying.

If you paused a few times to catch lines in Netflix's "Baby Reindeer," "Peaky Blinders" or "Bodkin," or Paramount+'s "Sexy Beast," rest assured, you are not alone.

— Read the rest

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In Pluto, a sci-fi murder-mystery anime streaming on Netflix, a serial killer targets the world's most advanced robots. The mystery deepens as the killer starts pursuing human activists advocating robot rights. The investigation falls into the hands of Europol Inspector Gesicht, a robot who finds himself among the potential targets.

The absence of human DNA at the crime scenes forces Gesicht to confront a disturbing possibility: Could an AI, programmed to never harm humans, be orchestrating the killings? If robots are responsible, the balance between humans and robots could be threatened, potentially ending their peaceful coexistence.

A prequel to the 1960s series Astro Boy, this animedelves into a world where robots are virtually indistinguishable from people. They not only mimic human appearance and behavior; they enjoy rights once thought to be uniquely human, such as marriage and adoption. Beneath this technological achievement lies an unforeseen evolution: Their AI is starting to experience human emotions—suffering, hatred, love—coupled with the ability to doubt and make mistakes.

Pluto challenges viewers to reconsider the essence of humanity. If robots can have human behaviors and emotions, what truly distinguishes them from us?

The post Review: An Anime Murder Mystery With an AI Twist appeared first on Reason.com.

The following article discusses spoilers for the first season of X-Men ‘97.

I was excited about the return of the ‘90s Saturday morning cartoon version of the X-Men. Still, I wasn’t sure Marvel, under the auspices of Disney, could deliver on the flavor of the original while also making a modern show that older fans, now adults in their 30s and 40s, could enjoy. And X-Men '97 is a total play on our nostalgia, which makes it even odder that it delivers. And is better than the original in pretty much every way.

And of all the Marvel baubles that needed some affection, the X-Men arguably needed it most. The ten-episode run managed to cram in so many plotlines, cameos, comic sagas, villains, plot twists and even deaths that, at times, it was hard to process everything — but I utterly loved how relentless it all was. X-Men ‘97 goes hard, especially if you’re already an obsessive fan.

When Marvel first launched an all-you-can-read comic book app, I went in hard on the X-Men back catalog, especially stories by Chris Claremont and Grant Morrison, two of my favorite writers. X-Men ’97 mines a lot of my favorite characters and stories. Magneto is put on trial, and begins a (brief?) redemption arc, Jean Grey turns out to be a clone, and the cartoon crammed a roughly-year-long comic arc, Inferno, into a single episode. Other arcs either included wholesale, or with some riffs, include Lifedeath, Fatal Attractions, Motendo, Operation: Zero Tolerance and more.

The highlight of this first season (a second is already underway) has to be the crushing episode 5, where the mutant nation of Genosha is devastated by a high-powered sentinel mothership… thing. Just before the attack destroys mutant adults, mutant children and eventually even an X-man, Cable, the time-traveling son of Scott Summers and Jean’s clone. (See: Inferno, mentioned above) reappears to stop the attack. But he fails again and his mother dies.

Magneto is left helpless as mutants are slaughtered and he’s forced to relive the genocide he suffered as a child. Eventually, Gambit sacrifices himself and lights up the entire robot with his mutant ability. This is after Rogue reignites a romance with Magento, changes her mind, and decides to be with Gambit. As I said, each episode is a lot.

I may be alone in this, but I still prefer the older series’ animation style and look. A cartoon can look a little scrappy, in my opinion —or maybe I’m just 39 and also not a Disney executive. The majority of the action scenes are great, too. Cyclops is finally not done dirty and gets to thrive in fights. There are some great combination attacks comparable to the iconic fastball special.

Sometimes, the show can feel a bit too “anime” (And I love anime, don’t at me!), where the ridiculous scale of the fight removed a lot of my interest in it. Cool, Bastian has metal wings in the final episode. Yes, yes, very cool. But didn’t one of his super sentinel underlings wipe the floor with the X-Men mid-series? And did we need the Phoenix to reappear (again!) so that Jean can save her 50-something son from the future? Probably not.

But, it’s the X-Men. It wouldn’t be the X-Men without this kind of nonsense.

I also adored the attention to detail. How Storm changed back to her original comic-book attire, Rogue transitioned to her green and white look, Magneto wore the same black-and-white costume while on trial, just like the original comic book. X-Men '97 doesn’t miss the chance to sprinkle in other Marvel characters, too. Captain America pops up a few times, we spot an out-of-costume Spider-Man, with Mary Jane Watson, watching the fall of Asteroid M. The Silver Samurai, who got his own episode in the original series, stares on as Tokyo loses power due to Magneto’s attack on the whole of Earth.

In other episodes, an aged Polaris, Rachel Grey and more mutants briefly appear in a vision of the future. The series is bursting at the seams with references, easter eggs and surprises. Did you know that Bastian is briefly, obliquely, on-screen during the horrific attack on Genosha, long before he’s revealed as the X-Men’s primary antagonist? Well, he is. It’s a show that’s ripe for debate and discussion in an era of Reddit, Discord and YouTube reactions.

Marvel Studios President Kevin Feige stipulated that both the cast and the music had to return for the project to happen. I’m glad it did and I’m glad the theme song still slaps.

What happens when you ask AI to solve your problems? "Deep Learning," the fourth episode of South Park's 26th season, tries to answer that question in a meta way. It's an episode about ChatGPT whose ending was also written by ChatGPT.

The story begins with the boys, as many schoolkids now do, using generative AI software to help with homework assignments. Meanwhile, Stan begins using ChatGPT to text his girlfriend Wendy. While their unsuspecting teacher Mr. Garrison swoons over AI-generated texts from his husband, he also secretly uses AI to grade the boys' papers.

The episode pokes fun at the social norms developing around artificial intelligence: Everyone fudges their work a little, but they're all supposed to pretend that no one does. But if too many people rely on AI all the time, then the house of cards falls apart. Once South Park Elementary catches wind that some students are using ChatGPT, the school administration tries to ferret out the cheaters with a shaman. The results are about as accurate as real-life AI detection software.

Breaking the fourth wall, Stan asks ChatGPT to fix the boys' dilemma. And ChatGPT does it by producing an ending that feels like, well, a South Park episode written by AI. It's formulaic and it feels off, but it's just coherent enough to do the job.

The post Review: <i>South Park</i>'s Take on ChatGPT appeared first on Reason.com.

"Wow!!!!" "Congrats!" "Next step: New York Times crossword puzzle!"

I began receiving such texts on Friday, after achieving the modern-day equivalent of immortality: I became a clue on Jeopardy!.

The category was "Points of View," and the clue was this: "Lenore Skenazy, who wrote of letting her 9-year-old right the NYC subway alone, moved this term from raising chickens to raising kids."

If you can't guess the answer, there's a clue at the top of this article.

So, how does one become a Jeopardy! clue? It's easy: Just let your kid do something the world considers dangerous, then write a column about why the world is wrong. Then write some more columns about it, appear on every possible talk show in defense of yourself, and then graciously accept the nickname "America's Worst Mom."

Then, start a blog about the issue and give it a catchy name, manage to trademark said name (shout out to Dale Cendali, America's top intellectual property lawyer and my dear friend from college), and write a book with the same title. Next, you have to speak at about a million schools, as well as corporate behemoths like Microsoft and DreamWorks. Perhaps most importantly, write to Matt Welch at Reason, out of the blue, and propose yourself as a columnist.

In fact, I recently rediscovered that first letter to Reason, which began:

Hi Matt!

Looking over all the topics on the Reason blog—ever fascinating—I see one that's not covered much: Parenting. And yet looking at parenting is how I found you and the whole Libertarian movement.

I was angry to learn about parents who'd been arrested for letting their kids wait in the car, or walk to the pizza parlor, or play in the park. I couldn't believe some daycare workers had to check in on sleeping babies every 15 minutes to record their sleep positions. I heard from teachers who had to fill out hazardous materials reports for each different brand of baby wipe and dish soap in their classrooms. And I still don't understand the drop-side crib recall — or so many of the CPSC's crusades (like this one against a sandal with a flower on it). And of course I hear about pretty much every Zero Tolerance travesty in this country, often days before the mainstream media gloms on. And that's not to mention all the so-called "safety precautions" set in motion after Sandy Hook, or the insane and arcane background checks now required of school volunteers. (I wrote about those in Monday's Wall Street Journal.)

So if you want to be on Jeopardy!—Jeopardy! Masters, actually—and have the contestant answer the clue correctly, just dedicate about 16 years to one specific topic and all its strange and infuriating ramifications, become the world's leading expert on the topic, and write for Reason!

The post How Free-Range Kids Became an Answer on <em>Jeopardy!</em> appeared first on Reason.com.

When Sister Simone (Betty Gilpin) loses her convent, she vows revenge against the entity responsible: a powerful AI known as Mrs. Davis, which guides most people's daily lives by doling out rewards for those who make good choices via a smartphone app. This delightfully weird premise animates the Peacock series Mrs. Davis, co-created by Damon Lindelof, best known for his work on Lost, the puzzle-box drama from the 2000s.

When confronted, Mrs. Davis offers Simone a deal. If the nun can complete a quest to find the Holy Grail—algorithms love clichés, after all—Mrs. Davis promises to shut herself down. The show unspools into a madcap adventure involving a Vatican conspiracy, a guy named Arthur Schrödinger (yes, he has a cat), a Super Bowl ad for sneakers, and a metaphysical falafel shop run by Simone's husband. Mrs. Davis manages to be unique despite having a plot constructed almost entirely of storytelling tropes that are, in some cases, thousands of years old.

And in some cases, just a couple of decades old. Mrs. Davis winks at Lindelof's Lost past—in just the first episode, someone is rescued from a deserted island, a secret hatch is discovered, and two characters debate whether they should push a button that may or may not cause dire consequences. As in Lost, Lindelof piles on layers of symbolism, then forces his characters (and audience) to figure out the difference between a sincere religious experience, a red herring, and a trap. Mrs. Davis tests the limits of science and faith, while once again intertwining coincidence and fate.

If any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, the show asks, then is any sufficiently advanced algorithm inevitably going to mirror humanity's conception of God?

The post Review: <i>Mrs. Davis</i> Tests the Limits of Science and Faith appeared first on Reason.com.

It’s never good to recommend a comedy by saying it makes you weep, but somehow Bluey, a comedy for kids, feels more real and more truthful than anything else on TV. I see so much of myself in Bandit’s triumphs and failures as he tries to parent his two daughters. I nod along to all of his unsuccessful parenting tactics that, I’ll admit, I’ve also tried on my own two kids. And then, at the end of so many episodes, I’ll realize that the front of my t-shirt is wet with tears because I've been crying.

There can’t be many people unfamiliar with Bluey, the biggest kids’ TV series on the planet, if not the biggest series overall. Each seven-minute episode is a slice-of-life sitcom about the Heelers, a family of anthropomorphic dogs living in Brisbane, Australia. Bluey and her younger sister Bingo live with parents Bandit and Chilli. The show started out focused on the playtimes the kids would have with each other or their parents. But it quickly sprawled out to create a rich world in the vein of The Simpsons, with a whole city’s worth of storylines. It can now regularly relegate the Heelers to the background to focus on the show’s deep cast of characters.

It closed out its third season with last Sunday's “The Sign,” a (comparatively) epic 28-minute episode and this week with “Surprise,” a sweet little postscript. The former’s long running time was described as a dry-run for any potential Bluey movie, wrapping up a number of the show’s storylines. It focuses on a wedding taking place at the Heeler’s home in the shadow of the family’s plan to relocate to another city. I won’t spoil too much beyond saying “The Sign” is a story about the bigness of change and how that affects parents and kids alike. Much of it focused on Bandit’s decision to move for a better-paid job and the way that impacted Chilli and the two girls. It’s a complicated issue, especially because it highlights that parents often just want to do what’s best for the kids.

Ludo Studio

“Surprise,” meanwhile, focuses more on the mundane struggle of Bandit trying to play two different games with his daughters at the same time. Much as Bluey wants to be just seven minutes of silly fun, it can’t quite help but be honest about the emotional and physical labor of parenting. All Bandit wants to do is sit down and watch sport on the TV but his daughters won’t allow him that luxury. He’s chased around the house, forced to pretend to teach a tennis ball to ride a bike and then pelted with ping pong balls fired from a toy launcher. (Bluey’s happy to highlight how often Bandit will get hit in the groin as a consequence of whatever game the girls are playing.)

The payoff to all of that effort comes in the final half minute of the episode, which is when I started sobbing. As much as it may be pitched as a palate cleanser after the scale and emotional heft of the previous episode, the final moments offer a real (if pleasant) punch to the gut. I can’t help but feel plenty of parallels in Bluey’s life and that of my own (similarly-aged) daughter, and feel a lot of kinship with Bandit as well. If I’m one one-hundredth as good a parent as this silly cartoon dog who often gets it wrong, then I’ll feel like I’ve done a good job.

There’s been speculation that this third season may be the end for Bluey. Bloomberg reported the uncertainty around creator Joe Brumm’s future with the show, although producer Sam Moor has said it will continue in some form. Any delay would also risk that the child actors – who remain anonymous for their own safety — will age out of being able to play their roles. But in many ways, Bluey can’t not continue given the show is now a multi-billion dollar cash cow for the BBC, which owns a big chunk of the show’s rights.

I don’t want to say goodbye to Bluey and the Heelers, and I’d prefer they kept the cast as-is and let them grow up alongside Bandit and Chilli. That, to me, would be an honest thing to do, rather than indulging in the fakery that dogs so many TV shows which face this problem. But if they have to go, I’ll choose to remember Bluey’s three perfect seasons through the highs and lows of parenting.

Netflix has renewed The Witcher for a fifth season, but the company says that will bring the series to an end. The final season will be shot back-to-back with the fourth season, which has just started production. The two seasons will cover the events of the last three books in the series: Baptism of Fire, The Tower of the Swallow and Lady of the Lake. The show is a direct adaptation of Andrzej Sapkowski’s novels, but it does occasionally take inspiration from CD Projekt Red's game adaptations (and vice versa).

The fourth season will mark a significant change for The Witcher, as Liam Hemsworth is replacing Henry Cavill in the lead role. This time around, Geralt of Rivia will find a new family in the Hanza, who will help him track down Yennefer and Ciri after the trio is separated. New cast members who are joining for the fourth season include Laurence Fishburne, Sharlto Copley and James Purefoy.

The first model for the original Star Trek (1966-1969) spaceship, the Enterprise, had been missing since 1979, but recently appeared on an eBay listing. Fans and experts immediately noticed, and once it was authenticated as genuine, was returned to the son of the Gene Roddenberry, the show's creator. — Read the rest

The post The original model for Star Trek's U.S.S. Enterprise emerges after being lost for over 40 years appeared first on Boing Boing.

Enlarge / A Day octopus (Octopus cyanea) named Scarlet parachutes her web over a coral head while Dr. Alex Schnell observes. (credit: National Geographic/Disney/Craig Parry)

With Earth Day fast approaching once again, it's time for another new documentary from National Geographic and Disney+: Secrets of the Octopus. It's the third in what has become a series, starting with the remarkable 2021 documentary Secrets of the Whales (narrated by Sigourney Weaver) and 2023's Secrets of the Elephants (Natalie Portman as narrator). James Cameron served as producer on all three.

Secrets of the Octopus is narrated by Paul Rudd. Per the official synopsis:

Octopuses are like aliens on Earth: three hearts, blue blood and the ability to squeeze through a space the size of their eyeballs. But there is so much more to these weird and wonderful animals. Intelligent enough to use tools or transform their bodies to mimic other animals and even communicate with different species, the secrets of the octopus are more extraordinary than we ever imagined.

Each of the three episodes focuses on a specific unique feature of these fascinating creatures: "Shapeshifters," "Masterminds," and "Social Networks." The animals were filmed in their natural habitats over 200 days, and all that stunning footage is accompanied by thoughtful commentary by featured scientists. One of those scientists is Dr. Alex Schnell, a native Australian and self-described storyteller who has worked at Macquarie University, the University of Cambridge, and the Marine Biological Laboratory, among other institutions. Her research focuses on the intelligence of marine animals, particularly cuttlefish and octopuses.

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Netflix has renewed The Witcher for a fifth season, but the company says that will bring the series to an end. The final season will be shot back-to-back with the fourth season, which has just started production. The two seasons will cover the events of the last three books in the series: Baptism of Fire, The Tower of the Swallow and Lady of the Lake. The show is a direct adaptation of Andrzej Sapkowski’s novels, but it does occasionally take inspiration from CD Projekt Red's game adaptations (and vice versa).

The fourth season will mark a significant change for The Witcher, as Liam Hemsworth is replacing Henry Cavill in the lead role. This time around, Geralt of Rivia will find a new family in the Hanza, who will help him track down Yennefer and Ciri after the trio is separated. New cast members who are joining for the fourth season include Laurence Fishburne, Sharlto Copley and James Purefoy.

Rep. Jim Banks (R–Ind.) announced yesterday that he will introduce a bill to defund National Public Radio (NPR). Marsha Blackburn (R–Tenn.) has said she hopes to do the same in the Senate. We live in strange times, anything can happen in politics, and there may be no faster route to looking like a fool than to issue a prediction. With that throat-clearing out of the way: No, of course Congress isn't about to defund NPR.

This latest wave of Defund NPR! sentiment follows an article by Uri Berliner in The Free Press, in which the NPR editor and reporter—make that former NPR editor and reporter, since he has since resigned—argues that the network "lost America's trust" by shutting out opinions disfavored by the center-left hivemind. I think Berliner's piece wavers between claiming too much (it would have been more accurate, though probably less SEO-friendly, to replace "lost America's trust" with "saw its niche grow somewhat smaller") and claiming too little (it ends with a plea not to defund public radio, since Berliner believes there's "a need for a public institution where stories are told and viewpoints exchanged in good faith"). But at this point the specifics of his essay are almost beside the point, since the debate it has unleashed goes far beyond what the article says. The proof is that people have been using it as a springboard to call for cutting off NPR's federal dollars even though Berliner goes out of his way to stress that that's not the result he wants.

And now the anger has spread, with NPR CEO Katherine Maher under fire for her history of left-wing tweeting. The troops are ready for battle. So why don't I expect Congress to stop the funds?

For three reasons. The first is the obvious one: The Democrats control the White House, and there aren't enough Republicans in Congress to override a veto, so at the very least this is unlikely to become law before 2025. A second reason is that it's difficult to devise a bill that cuts off NPR while leaving the rest of the public-broadcasting ecosystem alone. As the network's defenders never tire of pointing out, NPR doesn't get much direct support from the federally funded Corporation for Public Broadcasting (CPB). It gets far more money from its member stations, which NPR does not own, and which receive their own cash from the CPB (and, frequently, from other government sources, since many of them are run by state universities).

This shell game isn't an insurmountable problem, but it's the sort of thing that has tripped up legislators before. Last year, for example, Rep. Ronny Jackson (R–Texas) introduced a bill to prevent federal funds from flowing "directly or indirectly" to NPR, its TV cousin PBS, or "any successor organization." Well, how do you define "successor organization"? There are already several public radio networks out there, some of them pretty old. If the Morning Edition team drops its NPR affiliation and starts distributing the show through Public Radio Exchange, are they in the clear?

The easiest way around such tangles, of course, would be to write legislation that doesn't try to single out NPR and instead just cuts off the Corporation for Public Broadcasting entirely. That would keep the money from moving. But it also leads us to the third and biggest reason I don't think a defunding bill will get anywhere anytime soon: No matter how much it huffs and puffs, most of the GOP has no serious interest in defunding public broadcasting.

Yes, there are a few Republican officeholders who would rather see an openly liberal NPR that supports itself than a "balanced" system that relies on tax dollars. I'd bet a libertarian-leaning legislator like Rep. Thomas Massie (R–Ky.) would vote for that. But Massie is an outlier. If history has taught us nothing else, it's that the most powerful Republican officials aren't usually bothered by the idea that Americans are being forced to subsidize views they dislike. They just want the subsidies to go in a different direction.

Why do I say that? Because we've seen this process play out again and again, and it always ends pretty much the same way. In 1971, President Richard Nixon proposed a "return to localism" that would have effectively overthrown the crew running PBS, and a year later he vetoed a CPB appropriations bill; then PBS canned most of the programs that the president didn't like, the CPB brought a bunch of White House–friendly figures onto its board, and the president signed a budget increase. In 1994, House Speaker Newt Gingrich (R–Ga.) suggested that he might "zero out" the CPB's money; the chief long-term result was that several conservatives got public TV gigs. In 2005, a House subcommittee actually voted to cut the CPB budget by 25 percent and wipe out the rest over the following few years; that time things ended with a former chair of the Republican National Committee becoming chair of the CPB—which landed a higher appropriation, not a lower one. I could list more examples, but I've already written that article more than once and I don't want to write it again. Suffice to say that the CPB invariably survives these battles, that its federal support almost always increases, and that its rare budget cuts don't last long.

And—here's where we come back to Uri Berliner's article—one reason this keeps happening is because the attack so often comes down to the idea that NPR and PBS are unbalanced. That's true, of course: The big public-broadcasting operations have always tilted toward the dominant views of the social milieu that produces them, and Berliner is surely correct that this has intensified at NPR in the years since Donald Trump was elected president. But when bias is your chief complaint, you give the folks who run the networks an easy out. They would almost always prefer to gesture toward balance with some hires or fires than to see their money axed.

Is there a way around that? I think there is, but it would take a different approach to the fight. Instead of a narrowly partisan battle, bring together an alliance of people (mostly on the right) who are sick of subsidizing opinions they dislike and people (mostly on the left) who are sick of seeing those subsidies used as an excuse to insert the government into broadcasters' editorial choices. Adopt a plan to transform the CPB from a semi-governmental body into a fully independent nonprofit, bringing the federal role in noncommercial broadcasting to an end.

There was serious talk of doing this right after the Gingrich attacks shook up the broadcasters. In 1995, the New York Daily News even reported that a CPB spokesman had "confirmed that all the groups agreed on the need to establish an independent trust fund that eventually could replace federal funding." Then the CPB's subsidies started creeping upwards again and the idea moved back to the edges of the political spectrum. So a push like this has failed once before. But the partisan approach has failed to detach these operations from the government far more times than that. It can be hard to assemble a transpartisan alliance, but sometimes it's the only thing that can get the job done.

And yes, it's possible to bring people around on these issues. Back when I spent a lot of time covering the radical Pacifica radio network, I often encountered leftists who saw the CPB as a back door for government influence and felt they'd be better off without it. On the other side of the spectrum, after I wrote a blog post on this subject in 2011 I got a couple of emails from Ken Tomlinson, who had chaired the CPB for two years under President George W. Bush. Tomlinson had gone after public broadcasting for being unbalanced, a crusade that led to a lot of reshuffling of the system but no reduction in its federal support. He didn't care for how I had characterized his efforts, but he was friendly, and he seemed to have come around to the idea that the underlying problem was the purse strings, not the bias. "Bottom line, get tax money out of CPB," he told me. "Not just NPR. CPB."

Maybe someday we'll get there. But if Banks and Blackburn manage to pull it off this year, I'll eat an NPR tote bag.

The post Another Day, Another Doomed Plan To Defund NPR appeared first on Reason.com.

Adapted from a best-selling manga series and a classic 1990s anime, Rurouni Kenshin follows the journey of Himura Kenshin, a legendary assassin who vows never to kill again. But beneath the surface of a show about a samurai's adventures, this new anime is a snapshot of a nation in flux.

Set in 1878 in the aftermath of the Meiji Restoration, Rurouni Kenshin vividly illustrates Japan's transition from feudalism to modernity and the challenges that came with it. Kenshin's past is intertwined with this transition: He fought to dismantle an oppressive caste system and a military dictatorship that isolated Japan from the world for centuries. But the new era is marred by government corruption and moral ambiguity. Kenshin is left disillusioned by his efforts and burdened by the lives he took. He becomes a rurouni, a wandering samurai without a master, protecting those in need.

Kenshin's adversaries are initially driven by hatred of change. Yet as the tale unfolds, they are transformed, ultimately embracing the promise of technological progress.

Rurouni Kenshin weaves these hefty themes deftly into its characters' backstories and provides plenty of epic sword fights. It's no surprise that for nearly three decades, different versions of this tale of redemption have captivated audiences worldwide.

The post Review: An Anime Reboot About Japan's Transition From Feudalism appeared first on Reason.com.

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Season five of showrunner Noah Hawley's TV version of Fargo tells a violence-filled story exploring domestic abuse, PTSD, the concept of debt (on multiple levels), and the purpose and efficacy of the institutions of marriage and police.

Its villain is designed to cause discomfort for libertarians: Sheriff Roy Tillman (Jon Hamm), who self-identifies as a libertarian and a constitutionalist, and does seem to adhere to a certain peculiar right-wing belief in the county sheriff as the main source of authority. The only libertarianish qualities he evinces are a contempt for the FBI and the ability to recite a few silly, pointless laws. But the writers seem to want his stated ideology to add spice to the audience's dislike of him for being an abusing, murdering, and corrupt bully laundering his own rage and sin through a twisted vision of God.

In one scene, Tillman says he'd rather see orphans fight each other for sport than help them, and another character accuses him of being like a baby—crying for freedom with no responsibility. The whole thing is reminiscent of when on old college pal thinks he is totally crushing libertarianism with a masterful Facebook post.

If Tillman becomes smart quality TV fans' go-to image of libertarians, replacing the weirdly obsessed but well-meaning Ron Swanson of Parks and Recreation, it will be a shame. But hopefully a smart viewer will know, when Tillman calls on the spirit of western resisters of federal power such as Ammon Bundy and LaVoy Finicum, that it's no part of any proven public record that either man ever did anything a hundredth as evil as Tillman does in pretty much every episode.

The post Review: <i>Fargo</i>'s Self-Identified Libertarian Is No Libertarian appeared first on Reason.com.

Last night, Stephen Colbert criticized the Supreme Court's decision to delay Donald Trump's January 6 insurrection trial by agreeing to hear his immunity claim. Colbert declared February 29 to be Trump Day, "that one magical day you can do anything you want because no laws apply, evidently, according to the Supreme Court" due to the court's decision to hear Trump's immunity defense, which will cause a significant delay in the trial. — Read the rest

The post Stephen Colbert – corrupt Supreme Court is now "null and void" appeared first on Boing Boing.

For four seasons, Apple TV+'s For All Mankind has presented an alternate history of the space race, starting in a world where Russia, not America, put the first person on the moon. That single incident creates a domino effect on history: In the first season, set in the 1960s and '70s, the United States allows women into the NASA pilot program. In the 1980s, both America and Russia build small manned bases on the moon. By the 1990s, American and Russian space programs are competing not only with each other but with private space tourism efforts, including a massive orbital hotel.

In the fourth season, set in 2003, the U.S., Russia, a private space exploration company, and North Korea have set up a joint settlement on Mars. But tensions run high when the workers revolt, staging a strike just as an asteroid ripe for mining drifts through the solar system. There are black market operations and an illegal speakeasy, high-stakes geopolitical negotiations, and deadly outer-space operations. The show presents space exploration, under whatever national or corporate aegis, as risky, difficult—and gloriously necessary for the growth of humanity.

The post Review: <i>For All Mankind</i> Offers an Alternate History of Moon Exploration appeared first on Reason.com.

YouTube "dominates" TV streaming, reports Nielsen, the ratings-tracking people, though the data shows Netflix close behind and no company has even 10 percent of the market.

Nielsen today released its January report on viewing usage across linear TV and streaming, which revealed that YouTube is once again the overall top streaming service in the U.S.,

— Read the rest

The post YouTube, Netflix lead TV streaming appeared first on Boing Boing.

Fraudster George Santos is suing Jimmy Kimmel and the Walt Disney Company for fraud, demanding $750,000 in damages. The disgraced ex-Congressman is upset that Kimmel ordered Cameo videos from Santos using ridiculous scripts that Santos fell for and broadcast them on TV. — Read the rest

The post "I am currently embroiled in what may be the most preposterous lawsuit of all time" — Jimmy Kimmel teases George Santos for suing him (video) appeared first on Boing Boing.

I’ve been following the press and social media coverage of Apple’s pricey new Vision Pro Augmented Reality headset, which now totals hundreds of stories and thousands of comments and I’ve noticed one idea missing from all of them: what would Steve (Jobs) say?  Steve would call the Vision Pro a “hobby,” just as he did with the original Apple TV.

You know I’m correct about this.

And the fact that Apple hasn’t gone for the H-word and no other writers are suggesting it is the topic of this column, not the Vision Pro, itself.

It would appear that nobody at Apple has the balls to call the Vision Pro a hobby, which is to say it is not expected to make a profit for the time being, which is obviously the case. Instead people like me speculate how the Vision Pro will possibly make money? It won’t.

Nor does it have to.

There’s that scene in Citizen Kane where Kane the young tycoon is accused of losing $1 million per year on his newspaper and it’s remarked that he could only continue to do so for another 60 years.

Apple’s Vision Pro business is less than a rounding error on Cupertino’s balance sheet. Its success or failure doesn’t matter to Apple’s success, nor should it matter to Apple investors. I’m not saying there can’t be good reasons to sell Apple shares, but if you sold because of the Vision Pro you made a mistake.

Which is why I wish Apple had been honest and called it a hobby. Maybe they are hoping it isn’t a hobby, but that would be a mistake. The Vision Pro’s trajectory is clear to me. It will lose money for years until it finds a vertical market where the price doesn’t matter. Along the way two important effects will also have happened: 1) third-party developers will fall in love with the Vision Pro and make good applications for it, and; 2) eventually Moore’s Law — and Moore’s Law alone — will drive down the Vision Pro’s price enough for some later version to be declared an overnight success.

Apple’s unstated strategy here is obvious. Just look at the company’s previous hobby — Apple TV — which eventually broke even and then begat Apple TV+, a completely separate and different business that needed such a hardware platform to succeed. Along the way Apple TV and the broad success of streaming video on actual televisions helped Apple as a whole to sell production computers and copies of Final Cut Pro, enabling the very different video market of today.

Apple TV was worth doing and so — probably — will be the Vision Pro. But if it isn’t successful that means nothing to Apple’s eventual legacy. So for the moment, it’s just something to write about.

But why did Apple choose not to call the Vision Pro a hobby? That decision was entirely Tim Cook’s, because only the CEO can designate a product to be a hobby. Someone has to take responsibility and when it has an even a minuscule effect on earnings, that someone is the CEO.

So why did Tim Cook decide against calling the Vision Pro a hobby? It’s not that Tim didn’t know the truth. It’s that Tim Cook isn’t Steve Jobs.

This is me simultaneously saying that Tim Cook didn’t have the balls to call the Vision Pro a hobby but at the same time explaining that the decision was meant, in a way, as a compliment to Steve, who remains the company’s visionary, even in death.

That’s touching, Tim, but it’s time for that attitude to change at Apple or the next iPod/iMac/iPad/iPhone will never come.