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The contest, which is held each year around Halloween, is not your typical gourd fest. Over the years, pumpkins have been turned into anything from underwater creatures to flying saucers. This year, the “Apollo Lunar Jack-o’-Lander” and “Lucy’s Chocolate Factory” teams won the competition and you can watch all their efforts below.
First prize went to the “Apollo Lunar Jack-o’-Lander,” which was a tribute to Apollo 11’s 50th anniversary. The team built the landing sequence with a pulley system, where they lowered the lunar surface-bound pumpkin onto a screen playing real Apollo audio and footage. Smoke from a fog machine came out from under the spacecraft, creating a milestone moment in the spirit of Halloween.
Coming into second place was “Lucy’s Chocolate Factory,” which was a life-size re-creation of a memorable I Love Lucy episode called “Job Switching.” The team created a pumpkin-headed Lucy standing in front of a conveyor belt filled with candy.
Other cool gourd artwork included a Europa lander drilling through the moon’s ice and an adorable pumpkin transformed into Disney’s Nemo.
Check the cupboards at my house at any given time and you’ll probably find a couple bottles of Sriracha. Its signature spiciness works well with all kinds of different dishes.
You can put Sriracha on just about anything. Apparently some people think that Sriracha’s usefulness doesn’t end with adding a little zing to food. Some thought, for example, that it’s a good way to smuggle drugs.
Those people thought wrong, as it turns out. Police in New South Wales, Australia discovered a massive shipment of methamphetamine that criminals tried to sneak into Australia inside bottles of the chili sauce.
All told, authorities seized around 400 kilograms of meth. The total street value of the contraband was just over $208 million.
Officials with the Australian Border Force discovered the illicit contents through routine testing. It’s believed that the shipment was on its way to a major drug lab in the greater Sydney area where the methamphetamine was to be extracted.
Why… why did you have to pollute that delicious hot sauce?!?
Police say the Sriracha shipment was the work of a major drug syndicate that they’ve been tracking for quite some time. Three men were arrested as part of the operation earlier this month and a fourth was picked up today.
As far as the smuggling tactic goes, this sort of thing isn’t new. Criminals have tried all sorts of crazy ways to avoid the long arm of the law in Australia (and pretty much everywhere else on the globe). Previous busts have uncovered large quantities of meth stashed inside the tires of heavy duty trucks and construction vehicles, industrial equipment, shipments of toilets, snow globes, and even extension cords.
Stateside, Customs officials have found drugs packed into a woman’s breast implants, hidden under the seat of a wheelchair, stuffed inside a Wiipad (somebody had to be buying them, right?), and even baked into crayons. As one police officer put it, “if you can imagine it, someone’s already done it.”
It’s Halloween night, and that means kids everywhere will be heading out to trick-or-treat. Most of those treats will be handed over or plucked from a bowl, but not at the house of one highly-skilled Lego builder.
That’s because Jason Allemann decided to create the amazing contraption you see here. It’s a Halloween vending machine! All a trick-or-treater has to do is tap one of the buttons on the base and the machine springs into action.
When activated, one of four motors (one for each row) whirs and conveyors guide the candy bars forward until gravity takes over and they drop into the Lego beast’s delightfully ferocious mouth.
Behind the scenes you’ll find a Mindstorms EV3 unit and motor running the show. It doesn’t have a very heavy workload in this particular build. Each button is attached to a lift arm.
When a button is pressed, the far end of the lift arm activates a touch sensor. That tells the EV3 to activate the motor in the corresponding row and deliver the selected treat.
Jason also coded in a 2-second delay. That brief pause prevents button mashing from causing problems because only the first press will trigger a dispenser motor. It also makes it slightly more burdensome for overzealous types to empty the machine before anyone else gets a crack at the candy.
When it does come time to reload, the process is simple enough. The spider and the skeletal thumb need to be shifted out of the way and there’s a USB cable to disconnect (it sends power from the EV3 to a LED light bar). After that the lid lifts right off and a fresh supply of candy can be stuffed into the conveyors.
The expectations thrust onto Star Wars Jedi: Fallen Order are absolutely unfair. It’s EA’s first big Star Wars game since the disastrous and borderline illegal Battlefront II. It’s Respawn’s first single-player campaign since the masterful Titanfall 2 and the team’s other project for this year after the smash hit Apex Legends. And alongside The Rise of Skywalker in theaters and The Mandalorian on Disney+, it comes at a time when perhaps folks are finally ready to be finished with Star Wars.
But then I heard a Yaddle joke during my demo and thought to myself, “Star Wars Jedi: Fallen Order is going to be just fine.”
Despite moving from Titanfall’s Source Engine to Unreal Engine 4, Fallen Order is still immediately a beautiful digital recreation of the Star Wars galaxy in the tumultuous period of the Empire’s ascent. While customizing your poncho for the hilariously dull playable Padawan Cal Kestis might sound like a joke, they’re slick looking ponchos. Don’t worry, you can customize lightsabers, too. And just walking around your ship The Mantis, talking to alien crewmates and Debra Wilson, totally has that “used future” vibe the franchise has pioneered. It may not be quite as stunning as Battlefront II’s visuals, but that campaign was also stiff in how it retrofitted a first-person shooter into a third-person action-adventure.
Fallen Order is far more playable as a character action game. When you first set foot on whichever planet you’ve chosen to go to, and you do have choices, you’re free to explore with all the abilities available to you. Before even encountering enemies just getting around the landscape was a challenge in and of itself. Run along walls, freeze spinning platforms with the Force, illuminate dark caves with your lightsaber, slide down ice tubes, jump across ropes.
Early demos had us fearing these sequences would all be very painfully scripted, like the barely interactive Uncharted. But while there is some slight funneling, you’ll soon discover each planet is actually a densely constructed and almost nonlinear maze. Often times completing a platforming sequence just opens up a meditation spot to heal (and respawn enemies) or a shortcut to reduce backtracking. Backtracking, in a Star Wars game.
It might be a stretch to call Fallen Order a Metroidvania and an open-world game, but the intricacy of the early level design is at least as satisfyingly multilayered, complex, and brain-teasing as the new Tomb Raider games. Between this and Gears 5 and Doom 2016, it’s nice to see AAA single-player game campaigns that do something beyond one-track cinematic spectacle. There’s even a wireframe map straight out of Metroid Prime.
And these are just the opening bits. Soon I found myself deep inside an ancient Jedi Temple that is essentially a Zelda dungeon. There are puzzles with a shared theme, in this case manipulating metal balls with the wind. There are secrets to find that upgrade your health, like heart containers. And there’s even a new ability that changes the way you consider the whole space.
As Cal overcomes his trauma he remembers his Jedi abilities like just shoving stuff with Force push. While the pacing of the two games are very different, the creative use of Force abilities in your environment has a lot of Titanfall 2 (or Half-Life 2 before it) energy. Slam your way through walls or freeze a sphere in place and push it in another direction. The developers, PR rep, and I actually got stumped during one of these puzzles, if you’re still worried about the game being too linear.
Force powers also come in handy during combat, the other major part of the game. Star Wars Jedi: Fallen Order is trying to thread a really tricky needle. How do you make lightsaber combat meaningful without nerfing its power? The designers figured out an interesting solution, but you can feel the tension of the design straining against this bind. Fallen Order has a kind of Dark Souls-lite melee fighting system (like the new Assassin’s Creed games) focused on blocking and parrying and breaking stances of Stormtroopers that all happen to have anti-Jedi electric sticks. Once you’ve made an opening then lightsabers kill in one hit. But you have to make that opening.
It’s tough! I got hit a lot even while doing cool stuff like reflecting back laser blaster bolts. The wild swings between “I don’t feel like I’m even doing any damage” to “Oh I killed him” were kind of jarring. Like I said, Force powers also mix things up. I pushed a bazooka missile back at a frozen guy to make a previously mouthy foe just not exist anymore. You also level up skill points to unlock new moves like dashing strikes and higher stamina. But you have to kill enough enemies with the fundamental swordplay to earn experience as well as recharge the Force. And the whole time I never quite got a handle on whether I was supposed to be more methodical or more swashbuckling in my approach, which I guess is a classic Jedi dilemma. We’ll see for sure in the final game.
Star Wars Jedi: Fallen Order releases November 15 for PC, Xbox One, and PlayStation 4. For more on Star Wars learn how the dream of Star Wars and Game Thrones fell apart and check out these Star Wars Adidas sneakers.
Emilia Clarke revealed the 'Game of Thrones' coffee cup culprit on 'The Tonight Show.' (Photo Credit: The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon / YouTube)
Remember that infamous coffee cup that annoyed Game of Thrones fans? Emilia Clarke finally revealed who may have left their drink in a Season 8 scene…and it was not the Mother of Dragons.
Clarke addressed the controversy on The Tonight Show and jokingly explained how she wasn’t happy with everyone blaming her for the incident, Entertainment Weekly reported. To clear things up, Clarke disclosed the identity of who she thinks is the culprit: Conleth Hill, who played Lord Varys in Game of Thrones.
“Here’s the truth,” Clarke told host Jimmy Fallon on Wednesday night. “We had like a party before the Emmys recently, and Conleth [Hill], who plays [Lord] Varys, who’s sitting next to me in that scene, he pulls me aside and he’s like, ‘Emilia, I’ve got to tell you something. I’ve got to tell you something, love. The coffee cup was mine!’ It was his! It was Conleth’s coffee cup. He said so.”
Shots fired! Sophie Turner blames Kit Harrington for #GameofThrones coffee cup gaffe — ‘Kit is lazy and I think he would have done that … It was Kit. It was a hundred percent Kit’ 😂
Clarke also went into detail about why Hill didn’t confess his mistake earlier on.
“He’s like, ‘I think so, I’m sorry darling, I didn’t want to say anything because it seemed [like] the heat was very much on you,’” she said. “And I was like, ‘What?!’”
Clarke hinted that she thinks he did it, because no one to this day knows who actually is to blame. “He might have been drunk, but he said it.”
Facebook today announced it has filed suit in California against a domain registrar OnlineNIC and its proxy service ID Shield for registering domain names that pretend to be associated with Facebook, like www-facebook-login.com or facebook-mails.com, for example. Facebook says these domains are intentionally designed to mislead and confuse end users, who believe they’re interacting with Facebook.
These fake domains are also often associated with malicious activity, like phishing.
While some who register such domains hope to eventually sell them back to Facebook at a marked up price, earning a profit, others have worse intentions. And with the launch of Facebook’s own cryptocurrency, Libra, a number of new domain cybersquatters have emerged. Facebook was recently able to take down some of these, like facebooktoken.org and ico-facebook.org, one of which had already started collecting personal information from visitors by falsely touting a Facebook ICO.
Facebooks’ new lawsuit, however, focuses specifically on OnlineNIC, which Facebook says has a history of allowing cybersquatters to register domains with its privacy/proxy service, ID Shield. The suit alleges that the registered domains, like hackingfacebook.net, are being used for malicious activity, including “phishing and hosting websites that purported to sell hacking tools.”
The suit also references some 20 other domain names that are confusingly similar to Facebook and Instagram trademarks, it says.
OnlineNIC has been sued before for allowing this sort of activity, including by Verizon, Yahoo, Microsoft, and others. In the case of Verizon (disclosure: TechCrunch parent), OnlineNIC was found liable for registering over 600 domain names similar to Verizon’s trademark, and the courts awarded $33.15 million in damages as a result, Facebook’s filing states.
Facebook is asking for a permanent injunction against OnlineNIC’s activity as well as damages.
The company says it took this issue to the courts because OnlineNIC has not been responsive to its concerns. Facebook today proactively reports instances of abuse with domain name registrars and their privacy/proxy services, and often works with them to take down malicious domains. But the issue is widespread — there are tens of millions of domain names registered through these services today. Some of these businesses are not reputable, however. Some, like OnlineNIC, will not investigate or even respond to Facebook’s abuse reports.
The news of the lawsuit was previously reported by Cnet and other domain name news sources, based on courthouse filings.
Attorney David J. Steele, who previously won the $33 million judgement for Verizon, is representing Facebook in the case.
“By mentioning our apps and services in the domain names, OnlineNIC and ID Shield intended to make them appear legitimate and confuse people. This activity is known as cybersquatting and OnlineNIC has a history of this behavior,” writes Facebook, in an announcement. “This lawsuit is one more step in our ongoing efforts to protect people’s safety and privacy,” it says.
OnlineNIC has been asked for comment and we’ll update if it responds.
The Daily Crunch is TechCrunch’s roundup of our biggest and most important stories. If you’d like to get this delivered to your inbox every day at around 9am Pacific, you can subscribe here.
Arguing that “internet political ads present entirely new challenges to civic discourse,” CEO Jack Dorsey announced that Twitter will be banning all political advertising — albeit with “a few exceptions” like voter registration.
Not only is this a decisive move by Twitter, but it also could increase pressure on Facebook to follow suit, or at least take steps in this direction.
Apple’s iPhone sales still make up over half of its quarterly revenues, but they are slowly shrinking in importance as other divisions in the company pick up speed.
More earnings news: Despite ongoing public relations crises, Facebook kept growing in Q3 2019, demonstrating that media backlash does not necessarily equate to poor business performance.
Hundreds of people who have taken the driver’s license test in Dehradun (the capital of the Indian state of Uttarakhand) in recent weeks haven’t had to sit next to an instructor. Instead, their cars were affixed with a smartphone that was running HAMS, an AI project developed by a Microsoft Research team.
Good news for our friends at Crunchbase, which got its start as a part of TechCrunch before being spun off into a separate business several years ago. CEO Jager McConnell also says the site currently has tens of thousands of paying subscribers.
The relationship between new management at G/O Media (formerly Gizmodo Media Group/Gawker Media) and editorial staff seems to have been deteriorating for months. This week, it turned into a full-on revolt over auto-play ads and especially a directive that Deadspin writers must stick to sports.
As we gear up for our Disrupt Berlin conference in December, we check in with top VCs on the types of startups that they’re looking to back right now. (Extra Crunch membership required.)
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'The Witcher' is coming to Netflix on Dec. 20. (Photo Credit: Netflix)
A mutant created by magic rises in Netflix’s new fantasy series The Witcher.
Netflix gave fans a brief preview of the series, which stars Justice League’sHenry Cavill, in a thrilling trailer on Thursday. Based on the popular book series and video game of the same name, The Witcher follows Geralt of Rivia, a genetically-modified man who has supernatural powers and is trained to slay monsters.
Considered an outcast, Geralt of Rivia roams the universe hunting deadly creatures. When he’s tasked to protect a princess, he has to make the choice to run from destiny or embrace it.
But, what if humans are actually more evil than the monsters themselves?
The Witcher, which also stars Anya Chalotra and Freya Allan, premieres on Netflix Dec. 20.
An infrared image from NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope shows a blazing "Jack-o'-lantern Nebula." (Photo Credit: NASA / JPL - Caltech)
Halloween is here and NASA’s Spitzer Space Telescope observed a strange “cosmic pumpkin” in the Milky Way galaxy.
A giant star, which is roughly 15 to 20 times heavier than the sun and known as an O-type star, could be to blame for this celestial jack-o’-lantern. Findings from a study published in the Astrophysical Journal suggest that the strong outflow of particles and gas from the star most likely swept the surrounding dust and gas outward, creating the nebula we see above.
It takes more than a candle to light this cosmic pumpkin. 🎃 In this image from @NASASpitzer, a massive star in the center of a cloud of dust and gas creates what researchers have nicknamed the “Jack-o-lantern Nebula.” Look closer: https://t.co/fL1pT4vdJOpic.twitter.com/4p9qB6rc3k
The Spitzer Space Telescope can detect infrared light and it noticed the star in the middle of the “ghoulish gourd,” which is why the authors gave it the spooky nickname.
Three wavelengths of infrared light make up the colorful image of the nebula above. Green and red hues show light emitted mainly by dust radiating at various temperatures, and the combination of green and red results in yellow hues. Blue tones represent a wavelength mostly emitted by stars and some heated regions of the nebula, while white regions depict where the objects are illuminated in all three colors. Right in the heart of a red dust shell near the center of the region is the O-type star, which appears as a white spot.
A high-contract version of the same image brings out all the different wavelengths and combined, the green and red wavelengths create an orange hue, which is why the cloud of gas and dust carved out by an enormous star has a pumpkin-like color.
The study analyzed a region located in the outer region of the Milky Way galaxy. Infrared light was used by researchers to count the young stars in different stages of early development. Researchers also counted protostars, also known as infant stars that are still shielded by dense dust clouds. When the tallies of young stars are put together with tallies of adult stars in these regions, the data will enable scientists to determine if the rates of planet and star formation in the galaxy’s outer regions differ from those in middle and inner regions.
Horror is fun. Even when it is pretty scary, it is fun. The physiological response our bodies have when exposed to fright is a trip and if experiencing that doesn’t scare you away from the genre at large, odds are that even when you’re hiding your eyes behind your hands, you’re having a good time. It’s a beautiful alchemy and when you think about it, it’s kind of amazing that horror filmmakers pull it off as regularly as they do.
It’s tough to articulate just how I feel about Ti West’s 2014 horror film The Sacrament. I am very glad that I took the time to watch it and the craft behind the film is truly second to none, even in this era of so-called “elevated horror.” It’s ruthless in its effectiveness and manages to spin a fresh take out of both a stagnant medium (found footage) and a subject matter (cults) done to death in horror at large. It is, having distance from it, one of the great horror accomplishments of the decade.
It’s also the one horror film that I like that I’ll also never watch again for as long as I live.
If you haven’t seen The Sacrament, don’t read another word of this column. It’s the sort of horror film best experienced cold. If you need to know something before you see it, this should do: The Sacrament is a mockumentary about a group of VICE reporters investigating a commune established by a new religious movement (some might say a cult) in remote Africa. It covers the weekend they spend there. That’s it. That’s all you need. Don’t watch a trailer, don’t read a review, don’t even look at the poster.
Photo Credit: Magnet Releasing
Those who have seen it would attest to this. Knowing anything more about the film risks spoiling the twists and turns it takes you on, which is not so much to say that it’s a film full of shocking plot upheavals or surprises so much as it is a film based on subject matter you may find yourself surprised to find familiar. Much of the horror works because of the way this reveals itself, the way it slowly begins to dawn on you what’s going on in this story and the ensuing inescapability of it all.
Because The Sacrament is, and I cannot stress enough that if you read any further you’ll be delving into serious spoiler territory…
More or less a fictionalized retelling of the Jonestown massacre.
There’s a good chance you’re already familiar with the details of Jonestown, the events of which are infamous to the point that they’ve infiltrated cultural consciousness in ways you may not even realize (if you’ve ever wondered where the phrase “drinking the Kool-Aid” in reference to blind allegiance, this is the answer). But unless you’re a cult or true crime fanatic, you may not know the details. Jonestown, like the Kennedy assassination or Pearl Harbor, is the sort of tragedy that comes with an infamy that distills everything about it down to a couple of key points. The facts are readily available for anyone who wants them, but for the most part, folks are fine with knowing that there was a cult led by a man named Jim Jones and one day he convinced them all to commit a mass suicide by way of poisoned Kool-Aid.
When something becomes that infamous its horror often becomes an abstraction, buried beneath memes and cultural references and lousy lightly-fictionalized adaptations like Michael Bay’s Pearl Harbor that often bend the truth or twist facts to suit a narrative.
Photo Credit: Magnet Releasing
The Sacrament, rather than take this approach, aims to fictionalize the events of Jonestown so deftly that you don’t know you’re watching a movie about the tragedy until it’s unfolding in front of you. It operates from an intimate level, showing us the world of the commune and the people in it through the eyes of newcomers. Through them we get to know the commune’s eventual victims intimately, as we do the filmmakers themselves. When the events we associate with Jonestown begin to play out onscreen, we can feel the proverbial knife go in, and in the film’s most horrific scene, West slowly twists it, setting your every nerve aflame.
West is a master of slow-burn horror, as evidenced by his 2009 breakout hit The House of the Devil and its follow-up, the wry haunted hotel flick The Innkeepers. Both display a stellar understanding of tension, tone, and pacing and prioritize building character over cheap jump scares.
He brings this approach to The Sacrament as well. As soon as Sam, Jake, and Patrick (the reporters covering the story) arrive at Eden Parrish, we know something is amiss. It, like The Wicker Man before it and Midsommar after, thrives in showing us moments and micro-interactions that clearly foreshadow tragedy and function on the idea that our characters are too polite (or too dedicated to making their film) to leave. We know what fate has in store for them from the jump, and the beauty of the film is that you get the vibe that they might, too. They’re just afraid to say so.
Photo Credit: Magnet Releasing
Eventually the inevitable happens – the cult leader (who simply goes by “Father”) sets a mass ritualistic suicide into motion and chaos breaks out as our filmmakers try to both save however many lives they can and escape with their own. Patrick, who has traveled with Sam and Jake to the commune to find his sister Caroline, ends up being held hostage by Caroline herself. Her devotion to Father remains absolute and the film’s most disturbing moment plays out from there.
There’s very little to describe. It’s disturbingly simple. She forces her brother to participate in the ritual suicide by injecting him with cynaide. We see this play out in full in a single extensive take from a camera left on a table. You know it’s coming. You know he’s not leaving the room alive. You can’t stop it from happening and can’t help but watch, utterly transfixed in terror as Patrick’s sister sticks a needle in his arm and holds him as he twitches and foams at the mouth, dying a slow and painful death inflicted on him by the family member he came here to rescue. Shortly after, she takes her own life, having suffered a full mental collapse.
The Sacrament’s scariest moment works as well as it does not only because of how real it feels, but because of how closely tied it is to truth. When you allow yourself to be frightened by a haunted house movie or repulsed by a particularly gory SFX shot, you’re doing so under the suspension of disbelief. You know it’s not real. You’re allowing yourself to be fooled. I think it’s that measured distance between fiction and reality that allows even the most unsettling of horror set pieces to be fun.
Watching The Sacrament is different. Patrick and Caroline may not be real, but the events in which they’re participating are, and you’re experiencing them through the (literal and figurative) lens of a found footage film, by nature a format designed to feign intimacy as convincingly as possible. It feels like seeing something you’re not meant to see, private horrors made public when they should have stayed locked away. It is a masterclass of a horror set piece, one that you can appreciate and even enjoy for its merits, but will likely never want to revisit. It is, all in all, the only time a horror film has felt too real – after all, it is.
DeepMind engineers developed an AI to beat StarCraft pros (via DeepMind)
There’s no stopping Google’s DeepMind AI. Earlier this year the artificial intelligence platform recently shut out two professional StarCraft players in a 5-0 defeat. And now a report on The Verge says DeepMind is better than 99.8 of all human players. That last 0.2 percent will be our last hope against the war tactics of the AI uprising. In the meantime, we bet Blizzard would love for DeepMind’s brain power to figure out the solution to its ongoing Hong Kong troubles.
Considered one of the most challenging real-time strategy (RTS) games, Blizzard’s StarCraft is also one of the longest-played esports of all time.
The game debuted at E3 in 1996, followed by the StarCraft II franchise: StarCraft II: Wings of Liberty (2010), StarCraft II: Heart of the Swarm (2013), and StarCraft II: Legacy of the Void (2015).
The AlphaStar agent during a match against TLO (via DeepMind)
“Although there have been significant successes in video games,” the DeepMind team wrote in a blog post, “until now, AI techniques have struggled to cope with the complexity of StarCraft.”
Enter AlphaStar, a deep neural network trained directly from raw game data via supervised learning and reinforcement learning.
Receiving data from anonymized human games released by Blizzard, AlphaStar determined, through imitation, the basic micro and macro strategies used by players.
Additional artificial adversaries were then added to the DeepMind league, each learning from games against other competitors and developing counter-strategies.
“We believe that this advanced model will help with many other challenges in machine learning research that involve long-term sequence modelling and large output spaces such as translation, language modelling, and visual representations,” DeepMind said.
The AlphaStar league ran for 14 days, with each agent experiencing up to 200 years of real-time StarCraft play. Every strategy discovered over those two weeks was then mixed together to create the ultimate operator.
In a series of test matches held in December, AlphaStar beat Team Liquid’s Grzegorz “MaNa” Komincz—one of the world’s strongest professional StarCraft players—and Dario “TLO” Wünsch.
“I was surprised by how strong the agent was,” TLO, a top professional Zerg player and GrandMaster level Protoss player, said in a statement. “AlphaStar takes well-known strategies and turns them on their head. The agent demonstrated strategies I hadn’t thought of before, which means there may still be new ways of playing the game that we haven’t fully explored yet.”
The distribution of AlphaStar’s APMs in its matches against MaNa and TLO and the total delay between observations and actions (via DeepMind)
Despite moving at a significantly slower pace than the pros—an average of 280 actions per minute (APM)—the AI’s maneuvers are probably more precise.
“I was impressed to see AlphaStar pull off advanced moves and different strategies across almost every game, using a very human style of gameplay I wouldn’t have expected,” MaNa, one of the world’s strongest StarCraft II players, said.
“I’ve realized how much my gameplay relies on forcing mistakes and being able to exploit human reactions, so this has put the game in a whole new light for me,” he added. “We’re all excited to see what comes next.”
Last month, more than a year after DeepMind introduced its first self-taught, world champion algorithm, CEO Demis Hassabis & Co. revealed the full evaluation of AlphaZero, published in the journalScience.
Kennedy McMann as Nancy and Tunji Kasim as Nick -- Photo: Dean Buscher/The CW
Who needs a Halloween episode when spooky is Nancy Drew’s whole aesthetic? There’s a new suspect in the Tiffany Hudson murder and she’s sleeping over at Nancy Drew’s house. Nancy now knows Bess was lying about living with her aunt, likely lying about being a wealthy socialite, and has Tiffany’s diamond ring for some reason. It’s not looking good. That’s not even the creepiest thing happening in the Drew house that night. Lights and electronics keep turning off and on for no reason. When Nancy and Bess go to check, the TV flips on and plays the video of Tiffany’s murder. When it finishes playing, the TV breaks. You know you’re having a rough night when sleeping next to a murder suspect is like the third creepiest thing that happens.
The night passes though, and Nancy’s dad delivers some interesting news. The private coroner the Hudson family brought in finished inspecting Tiffany. She found that Tiffany died of natural causes. On the bright side, that means Nancy and her friends are all cleared of murder. Of course, Nancy doesn’t believe those results for a second. Those girl detective instincts aren’t going to let her give this one up. Her first stop is the Marvin house, where she casually drops Bess’ name to the family landscaper. He’s been working for the family for years and has never heard of Bess.
We learn a whole lot about Bess this episode. It certainly looks like she’s being targeted by some vengeful spirit. When she ducks into the walk-in at work to try on a ring, something in the ventilation shaft attacks her. When Nancy and George come check on her, she tells them she found the ring on the ground in the parking lot. By the time she found out whose it was, they were all under investigation for murder. Also, Nancy peeks inside her locker and finds a British passport. Bess has been lying about her identity the whole time.
Before they can really discuss what’s going on with that though, George calls a Claw team meeting. Her mother, a medium, is there to give everyone a brief lesson on ghosts. According to her, a new ghost doesn’t know they’re dead. That’s why they lash out at people like Bess wearing their things. It’s still unclear how much of the supernatural stuff is actually real. The show keeps one foot in the supernatural and one in the logical. For now, it’s charming. I am going to want some answers before the series is over, though. In any case, the crew decides to return the ring to Tiffany’s body. And the best time to do that will be her memorial service.
George offers to do it as an apology for sleeping with Tiffany’s husband. Just as she’s about to put the ring on the dead body’s finger, Ryan and his father enter the room. George manages to hide beneath the coffin, and hears something interesting. Ryan’s father says Ryan didn’t care much about her life when she was alive. Nothing incriminating, but still suspicious. The two men leave, and George is able to return the ring undetected. The weirdness at the funeral doesn’t end there, though. Tiffany’s sister plays the recording of her 911 call. She doesn’t believe the natural causes diagnosis either. And she thinks it’s real suspicious that in Tiffany and Ryan’s prenup, he only got her money if she died of natural causes. The only question now, is Ryan a murderer or just an opportunistic asshole.
The episode is pretty much over at this point, but it still has 20 minutes of runtime to fill. You can really feel the stretch here, and it’s not pretty. Nancy and her dad have a talk about her mom, and she finally sits down at her mom’s grave to talk to her. It’s a big emotional moment that the episode didn’t really build up to. It feels out of place with everything else that’s going on. Like the show just said, “well, they’re at the cemetery anyway, might as well get the mom grieving scene out of the way.” Nancy is crying through this scene and I really wish it made me feel anything, but it’s just not working for me.
Kennedy McMann as Nancy and Scott Wolf as Carson — Photo: Dean Buscher/The CW
Nancy finds out about Bess’ whole backstory at the funeral too. She came from a poor neighborhood in London. When times were tough, her mom would tell her they were descended from a rich family called the Marvins. Now that she’s an adult, she tracked them here to find out if that’s true. It’s an interesting enough motivation, and it gives us some non-murder mystery drama to look forward to.
It isn’t until the episode’s final minutes that it starts to pick things back up again. Nancy studies the video of the moments before Tiffany’s death closely. Right before she dies, a ghostly face appears in the distortion. It’s the most scared this show has made me. As Nancy studies the distorted face, it cracks her laptop screen in the exact shape of the town map. And the center of the crack is Nancy’s old high school. It doesn’t lead to much for now. Nancy just finds evidence that Karen and Lucy Sable knew each other very well, despite Karen saying they weren’t really friends. So yeah, suspicious, but doesn’t feel like the biggest deal just yet.
Adam Beach as Chief McGinnis and Alvina August as Karen — Photo: Dean Buscher/The CW
Nancy Drew didn’t really have a Halloween episode, but it didn’t really need one. There’s enough ghosts and horror already. This was honestly one of the weaker episodes so far. Any immediate mysteries are explained quickly, and don’t give us any new information. Tiffany’s sister also trying to solve her murder could be interesting, but it doesn’t really go beyond that here. Much of the episode felt like it was padding, just trying to get us to what happens at the end.
I will say though, that end is effectively creepy. While Nancy is poking around the school and Ned finds evidence that someone has been snooping around his safe, George is having a ghost encounter. Earlier, when she apologized to Tiffany’s grave, a ghostly mist swirled around her. Now, in the parking lot where Tiffany was killed, we see it knock her over. The last thing we see is George repeating Tiffany’s last words. Halloween may be this week, but we might be in for an extra-supernatural edition next week.
Camila Mendes as Veronica, KJ Apa as Archie and Eli Goree as Munroe -- Photo: Jack Rowand/The CW
The special Halloween episode of Riverdale opens with the biggest twist in the show’s history: Bette still has a VCR in her house. Not only that, so does everyone else in Riverdale. And they all were sent creepy videos of the outside of their houses. Veronica watches hers hooked up to a modern HDTV. And the stalker was kind enough to find a VHS tape that does anamorphic widescreen. In an age where it’s never been easier to send creepy videos to people, leaving VHS tapes on front porches is just a weird choice.
Old-school Airdrops aren’t the only creepy thing happening in town. Jughead’s literature class is having a Halloween-themed meeting where they all bring their favorite horror stories. Brett sneers at Jughead for bringing H.P. Lovecraft, while he brought Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Raven.” Look, I know Riverdale is trying to use this to show Jughead as an interesting and cool outsider who really knows what’s up here. But Lovecraft? Look, I get it. I went through a Lovecraft phase, too. But even then, I knew I probably shouldn’t hold him up as some great master. Especially when I got to the story that features his cat… who definitely shouldn’t be named. Lovecraft was kind of the worst, guys.
Cody Kearsley as Moose and Cole Sprouse as Jughead — Photo: Diyah Pera/The CW
The episode keeps the cast largely separate so a few of them can have their own personal horror movie homage. Jughead’s classmates tell him about four students that disappeared mysteriously, bating him into researching them. They knock him out with some spiked coffee and Jughead wakes up trapped inside a coffin with only a Zippo lighter. No matter how much he screams and bangs on the lid, no one comes to get him. “Buried” isn’t the first movie that comes to mind when I think Halloween, but I’ll give Riverdale one thing. They picked a damn effective plot to borrow. Even if it is just doing the thing, the claustrophobic shots give me chills all the same. The next morning, their teacher lets Jughead out. Brett and his friends insist it’s some kind of hazing ritual. Jughead thinks differently though after he gets back to his room. Moose is gone.
Betty, meanwhile, is having the worst Halloween too and not just because her boyfriend’s not there. Despite being dressed as Laurie Strode from Halloween, her horror movie tribute is much more When a Stranger Calls. First, she has to relive all her trauma as every trick-or-treater is dressed as either the Black Hood or the Gargoyle King. That can’t be fun. Then she starts getting calls from someone claiming to be her father. She knows that can’t be true, she saw him die. Charles arrives hoping to spend Halloween with some family, and traces the call for her. It’s coming from Shady Grove, where Polly is undergoing treatment for her Farm brainwashing. Betty calls Polly to tell her off, but Polly doesn’t appear to know what she’s talking about. Is this the beginning of a new plot point or will this just be forgotten completely?
Lili Reinhart as Betty — Photo: Jack Rowand/The CW
Cheryl and Toni are dealing with what appears to be a haunted doll. After discovering Jason’s corpse in the chapel, Toni makes Cheryl re-bury it. She must have the patience of a saint. I know personally, keeping a sibling’s dead body in the basement is a relationship ender. And if that didn’t do it, suddenly talking to a doll that looks like said dead sibling definitely would. Toni throws it away and it reappears in the chapel. Total Chucky/Talking Tina situation.
Cheryl convinces Toni to hold a seance. Or play a game of Ouija. Same thing, really. Throughout the game, it becomes increasingly clear that this is all a ploy to get Jason’s corpse back into the house. Cheryl has been gaslighting Toni with the doll, so she’ll agree to let her keep a dead body in the basement. And she agrees to it! Oddly enough, the doll keeps showing up even after Jason’s back. Nana Rose says it’s the spirit of the lost triplet, whom Cheryl ate in the womb. Cool… Seriously Toni, get out! And Cheryl, get therapy.
Vanessa Morgan as Toni, Madelaine Petsch as Cheryl and Barbara Wallace as Nana Rose — Photo: Diyah Pera/The CW
Veronica has the scariest story of the evening. As she’s about to close up shop, a diner comes in asking for food. He’s a little creepy, but Veronica lets her guard down when he tells her about his family. It all sounds great until Veronica hears on the news about an escaped serial killer called The Family Man. He makes his victims cook for him before murdering them. Was this story necessary? Probably not. But it was exactly the scare I wanted from Riverdale tonight. The man chases Veronica down into the speakeasy, but she’s not some horror movie victim. She fills a giant cup with alcohol and hides in the dark. When the killer gets close, she lights the cup on fire and dumps it on him. That’s how you act when you’re in a slasher flick.
Each of those three stories felt like perfect Halloween treats. They built upon what this season was already doing to give us three scary shorts on night before the holiday. They were so well done, the rest of the episode was kind of a disappointment by comparison. Archie’s story involved hosting a Halloween party for kids at his community center. He deals with some gang members who threaten them with guns, while a guy who wants out of the gang hides inside. The show does nothing with this premise. Archie calls FP and waits out the situation. The guy hiding out inside tries to go confront the gang members and gets shot, but with so many better stories going on this episode, it’s really hard to care. I will say though, seeing Archie in a Pureheart the Powerful superhero suit is a fun nod to the comics.
Camila Mendes as Veronica — Photo: Jack Rowand/The CW
The cut to the next morning felt super awkward. The stories all reach a climax, and we just cut to the next morning. In each case, it feels like we rush to a conclusion. It does lead to an interesting twist in Betty’s story, though. As she and Jughead tell each other about their crazy nights, we see that Charles is listening in on her conversations. Is he actually behind the strange calls? Is he really even FBI. He was suspicious since the beginning, but now every scene with him is going to feel uneasy. Now that the cult’s gone, that is just the tension this season needs. Oh, and if that wasn’t enough, the episode flashes forward right at the end. To FP and Betty identifying Jughead’s body. What happens between now and then?!
Even though three of the stories clearly outshone the rest, this was pretty much exactly what I wanted from Riverdale this week. We got a collection of scary stories from a show that likes to steep in horror movie homages all year round. It was a fun treat and it even moved the season’s main story along a bit. And we still never got an answer as to who was sending those VHS tapes. I’m gonna guess that’s more than a Lost Highway reference. Riverdale has a new mystery to creep us out all season long.
Apple Arcade has been around for a little over a month now, just enough time to fully get used to a world where there are once again tons of cool mobile games to play that don’t try to constantly scam you with free-to-play monetization.
It’s almost too good to be true. Between the sheer number of intriguing games and ease of dabbling all over the place with the subscription model, I’ve played a bunch of Apple Arcade games on the shiny new iPhone 11 Pro, but not for nearly as much time as I would have liked. And I suspect that’s the case for most players coming off of the free trial wondering if they should pay for a few more months.
So with the context that these are not comprehensive at all, here are a bunch of tiny reviews of big Apple Arcade games.
Mutazione is like Night in the Woods was also a chill version of Annihilation, and folks who know what all of those words mean will dig it.
Redout: Space Assault is pretty but I didn’t like this series when it was fake F-Zero, and I still don’t like it as fake Star Fox.
Lego Brawls has all the colorful, wacky, fast-paced fun of slamming toys together. It also has about as much strategy, which is to say almost none.
Shantae and the Seven Sirens continues the journey of the half-genie hero and her cheesecake friends, finally combining modern illustrated graphics with the classic nonlinear structure. Just play with a controller.
Assemble With Care takes tasks as mundane as unpacking a suitcase or fixing a tape recorder and fills them with the gentle intimate puzzle-solving fun you’d expect from the (disappointingly anti-union) makers of Monument Valley.
Mini Motorways lets you draw your own roads to solve traffic jams across the world, but hardcore fans say it’s a step backwards from Mini Metro.
Frogger in Toy Town adds a bizarre amount of realistic physics to one of the most famously rigid and grid-based game designs in history. It looks really nice, though.
ChuChu Rocket! Universe doesn’t change my lukewarm opinion on the Sega Dreamcast, but the 3D spatial puzzles are clever enough that I’m glad this series made a comeback.
Grindstone is already cool enough as a block-matching puzzle where you sometimes worry about the blocks biting back. But it’s the satisfying carnage of your beefy fantasy hero just chopping through those monsters that put this one over the top.
Card of Darkness has the pleasing aesthetic and unexpected remixes of familiar but elegant deep strategy systems and number mechanics that we’ve come to expect from Zach Gage.
Rayman Mini is basically a pocket version of those gorgeous Rayman platformers from a few years ago, and it’s a fine substitute if you can’t get the real thing.
Cat Quest II feels like more of the same, an accessible yet surprisingly deep and addictive action RPG starring cats. This time you can play with a friend.
Whereas the original Oceanhorn ripped off The Wind Waker, Oceanhorn II has its hungry eyes set on Breath of the Wild. However, the overall structure is still closer to a traditional 3D Legend of Zelda game, and still quite ambitious and beautiful for a mobile adventure.
Speed Demons has incredible style and crunchy car destruction that made me pine for Burnout. But the top-down perspective just can’t provide the sense of speed I’m looking for from a racing game.
Hot Lava opens with this awesomely elaborate parody of 1980s eco-themed action cartoons designed to sell toys. It goes on and on, with a full storyline and emotional arcs for its characters. It’s honestly way better than the game itself, which is a first-person platformer that’s about as awkward as “Mirror’s Edge with touch controls” sounds.
Manifold Garden has been in the works for years and years. When you play it you get why. Traveling through this impossible geometry feels like an effortless dream. But pulling off those trippy puzzles was surely a stressful nightmare.
EarthNight is essentially an automatic runner, occasionally broken up by bits where you fall from the sky. But the art is so distinct, the music so fresh, and the motion so freeing and fluid, that you can’t help but get swept up into it.
In a world where pinball-inspired games are getting increasingly abstract, The Pinball Wizard is relatively straightforward. Each dungeon floor is a pretty traditional table, it’s just full of monsters you defeat by physically bouncing the adorable wizard into them.
Neo Cab presents a barely futuristic world where you are the last human driver competing against automated rideshare services, while also trying to find your missing friend. And you can monitor your exact emotional state when picking dialogue. It’s really engrossing. I just can’t get behind being a taxi driver that talks to customers this much, something I never want in real life.
What the Golf? makes you question the limits of what a golf game can even be. Is it just about hitting a ball into a hole? What about hitting a hole into another hole? What about hitting a whole pile of balls? What about hitting your club with another club? The answers to these questions are more are waiting.
Exit the Gungeon is more than just a great name for a sequel. It maintains the original’s ability to marry simple 2D arenas with surprisingly nuanced and action-packed gunfight mechanics. In this case, the touch screen actually makes firefights a lot easier.
Twitter founder and CEO Jack Dorsey announced abruptly — though the timing was certainly not accidental — that the platform would soon disallow any and all political advertising. This is the right thing to do, but it’s also going to be hard as hell for a lot of reasons. As usual in tech and politics, no good deed goes unpunished.
Malicious actors state-sponsored and otherwise have and will continue to attempt to influence the outcome of U.S. elections via online means including political ads and astroturfing. Banning such ads outright is an obvious, if rather heavy-handed solution — but given that online platforms seem to have made little progress on more targeted measures, it’s the only one realistically available to deploy now.
“Not allowing for paid disinformation is one of the most basic, ethical decisions a company can make,” wrote Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) in a tweet following the news. “If a company cannot or does not wish to run basic fact-checking on paid political advertising, then they should not run paid political ads at all.”
One of the reasons Facebook has avoided restricting political ads and content is that by doing so it establishes itself as the de facto arbiter between “appropriate” and “inappropriate,” and the fractal-complex landscape that creates across thousands of cultures, languages, and events. Don’t cry for Mark Zuckerberg, though — this is a monster of his own creation. He should have retired when I suggested it.
But Twitter’s decision to use a sledgehammer rather than a scalpel doesn’t remove the inherent difficulties in the process. Twitter is just submitting itself for a different kind of punishment. Because instead of being the arbiter of what is appropriate, it will be the arbiter of what is political.
This is slightly less fraught than Facebook’s task, but Twitter will not be able to avoid accusations — perhaps even true ones — of partisanship and bias.
For instance, the fundamental decision to disallow political advertising seems pretty straightforward and nonpartisan. Incumbents rely on traditional media more and progressives tend to be younger and more social media–savvy. So is this taking away a tool suited to left-leaning challengers? But incumbents tend to have bigger budgets and their spend on social media has been increasing, so could this be considered a way to curb that trend? Who this affects and how is not a clear-cut fact but something campaigns and pundits will squabble about endlessly.
Or consider the announcement Dorsey made right off the bat that “ads in support of voter registration will still be allowed.” Voter registration is a good nonpartisan goal, right? In fact it’s something many conservative lawmakers have consistently opposed, because unregistered voters, for a multitude of reasons, skew toward the liberal side. So this too will be considered a partisan act.
Twitter will put out official guidelines in a few weeks, but it’s hard to see how they can be satisfactory. Will industry groups be able to promote tweets about how their new factory is thriving because of a government grant? Will an advocacy organization be able to promote a tweet about a serious situation on the border? Will news outlets be able to promote a story about the election? What about a profile of a single candidate? What about an op-ed on an issue?
The difference between patrolling the interior of the politics world, and patrolling its borders, so to speak, may appear significant — but it’s really just a different kind of trouble. Twitter is entering a world of pain.
But at least it’s moving forward. It’s the right decision, even if it’s a hard one and could hit the bottom line pretty hard (not that Twitter has ever cared about that). The decision to do this while Facebook is dismantling its credibility with a series of craven, self-interested actions is a canny one. Even if Twitter fails to get this right, it can at least say it’s trying.
And lastly it should be said that it also happens to be a good choice for users and voters, a rare exception to the parade of user-hostile decisions coming out of the big tech and media companies. Going into an election year, we can use all the good news we can get.
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