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While You Were Offline: New Year, New … You Gotta Be Kidding Me

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Even though the year is grinding to a close—this is the last While You Were Offline column of 2017!—nothing is slowing down on the internet, where former Pentagon officials are talking about possible alien life, Bitcoin is apparently collapsing, and some really impressively bad reviews are circulating for Netflix’s big holiday release. Talk about going […]

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The Most Devoted Cosplayers at This Year’s New York Comic Con

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Every comic book convention is full of highly engaged fans. People who aren't utterly consumed by pop culture don’t take time off work and sometimes travel hundreds of miles to go to panels dedicated to their favorite topics. But the truly dedicated of the bunch are always the cosplayers—the fans who not only made a […]

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People Can Put Your Face on Porn—and the Law Can't Help You

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The grosser parts of the internet have a new trick: Using machine learning and AI to swap celebrities’ faces onto porn performers’. The result? Fake celebrity porn seamless enough to be mistaken for the real thing. Early victims include Daisy Ridley, Gal Gadot, Scarlett Johansson, and Taylor Swift. Originally reported by Motherboard, this nasty trend […]

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It’s Going to Be Hard to Create a New Joker—Even for Martin Scorsese

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Few comic book movie villains, if any, are as beloved as the Joker. Or, at least, the most well known. He’s had three high-profile portrayals (and a Lego incarnation) in the past three decades—two of them downright iconic—and, unlike many comics-based baddies, he’s a character with character, a knowable personality whose motivations beyond “world domination, […]

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The Cast of Stranger Things: Fans of Stan Lee and R&B

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Judging by their habits on the Netflix show, you’d think the Stranger Things kids only had time for Dungeons & Dragons, bike-riding, saving their town from a Demogorgon, and feeding their peculiar Eggo obsessions. Turns out, that’s not the case at all. In the real world—aka Upside Down-free 2017—their down-time activities are decidedly more conventional: […]

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The Woman Who Gave You Journey Returns With a VR Fairy Tale

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"Not everything that happens in your life is good," Robin Hunicke says. "But everything that happens is a part of your story." We're sitting in a small apartment across the street from the LA Convention Center the week of E3 2017, talking about her new game, Luna. It's quiet and heartfelt, which should come as […]

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At Oculus' Developer Summit, VR Progress Is a Game of Inches

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Mark Zuckerberg didn’t waste much time when he walked onstage at the San Jose Convention Center on Wednesday morning to deliver the first keynote address at Oculus Connect, the virtual-reality company’s developer conference. "The future is built by the people who believe it can be better," he said, announcing that he and his team "want […]

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OK, We Need to Talk About Stranger Things 2 (and Especially Episode 7)

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(Spoiler alert: This story contains major plot points and spoilers regarding the second season of Netflix's Stranger Things.) If you’re like us—and if you’re reading this site, you probably are—you spent every minute this weekend that you weren’t working on your Halloween costume or playing Super Mario Odyssey binge-watching the latest installment of Stranger Things. […]

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While You Were Offline: James Comey Knows How to Make an Entrance

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Hey, buddy. How you doin’? Are your social feeds holding up? Last week was a crazy one. Between Wonder Woman thinkpieces and the strangest political spectacle in some time, life came at everyone a little faster than normal over the last few days. So if some things slipped through your particular mental cracks that's totally […]