Category Archives: Blog

There was never any doubt Cats was going to be bonkers. From the trailer drop that created the single funniest day on the internet in 2019 to the dazed, screeching post-premiere reactions earlier this week, the content has been glorious, and at no point has there been any suggestion that this movie will be anything but a fuzzy, face-melting horror show, covered painstakingly in digital fur technology.

But weirdly enough, a running theme through some of the first reviews is that its bonkersness at least has a lurid, irresistible charm, that it commits so hard that you can’t help but be sucked in, that criticising it at all misses the point, that it feels almost cruel to tear it to shreds because it believes in itself so much. Read more…

More about Review Roundup, Cats Movie, Entertainment, and Movies Tv Shows

Back in July, James Corden uttered a statement in a Cats featurette that’s been stuck in my mind ever since. 

“These are people, but they’re cats,” he says, looking slightly stunned, “and this is kind of blowing my mind.”

At the time, I remembered it because it sounded ridiculous: Yes, James, that is the premise of Cats. It’s called acting, and maybe you should learn about it if you’re planning to do it.

Having seen Cats now, though, I understand. These are people. But they are cats. And it completely blew my mind. 

Welcome to the journey

To call Cats a cinematic experience unlike any other does not do justice to precisely how mind-meltingly bizarre Cats is. To say it must be seen to be believed is to undersell just how hard it is to believe it even once you’ve seen itCats is a movie to make you feel sky-high even when you’re stone-cold sober, to push an otherwise even-keeled mind into Joker-like peals of hysterical random laughter.  Read more…

More about Cats, Taylor Swift, Entertainment, and Movies Tv Shows

Netflix has been saving something special for a rainy day. No, no, it’s not some sort of special unreleased episode of Strangers Things or Mindhunter. 

It’s international subscriber numbers.

According to Netflix, the streaming service had more than 47 million subscribers across Europe, Africa, and the Middle East at the end of Q3 2019. That’s double the amount of subscribers it had from those regions at the start of 2017. 

Netflix also has more than 29 million subscribers in Latin America and over 14 million in Asia for that same time period.

In total, Netflix currently has 158.3 million customers worldwide. Its non-US and Canada markets now make up more than half of its total subscriber base. As Deadline points out, 90 percent of its growth is from these markets outside of the U.S. Read more…

More about Netflix, Streaming Services, Subscribers, Disney, and Tech

From cheap plastic miniatures to extremely expensive replicas, Star Wars is a toy goldmine. Here are our favorites.  Read more…

More about Entertainment, Mashable Video, Star Wars, Star Wars Merchandise, and Star Wars The Rise Of Skywalker

“Terrifying, paranormal, and ungodly,” is how artist Nicolas Bruno describes the visceral hallucinations that he has every night due to a condition called sleep paralysis. Step by  step, he recreates his nightmares in photography using fire, water, swamps, and a broken bed or two.  Read more…

More about Photography, Mashable Video, Standalone Featured, Sleep Paralysis, and Mashable Originals

Created by engineer Daniel West, the Universal LEGO Sorter uses AI to recognize any Lego part and divide it into 18 sections. Read more…

More about Tech, Mashable Video, Artificial Intelligence, Ai, and Legos

Maybe some trees will get to see gender parity worldwide. 

A new report from the World Economic Forum finds that at the current rate of change, we’ll need to wait another hundred years before achieving global gender parity. 

The report, an annual analysis of gender gaps around the world, focuses on four main categories: educational attainment, health and survival, political empowerment, and economic participation. 

Based on the category, the timeline for gender parity deviates. Right now, for instance, “only a handful of countries” are approaching equality with respect to women’s economic participation. At current rates, we’ll need another 257 years to achieve equality in economic participation worldwide. (Around the world, just over half of adult women are in the labor market, according to the report’s authors.)  Read more…

More about Charity, Gender Equality, Global, Worldwide, and Gender Issues

Bing continues to surprise in all the wrong ways. 

The Microsoft search engine has long been the butt of jokes for its perceived failings as, you know, a search engine, but a new Stanford study suggests its true faults are significantly more troubling. Specifically, according to the report, Bing returns disinformation, conspiracy theories, and white supremacist content at an alarming rate. 

Bing’s popularity as a search engine has waxed and waned over the years, with its 2017 global market share of 9 percent declining to a solid 5.27 percent in more recent days. But don’t get it twisted, as 5 percent of global market share still represents a sizable chuck of users. And those users, note study authors Daniel Bush and Alex Zaheer, are being fed a disproportionate amount of crap.  Read more…

More about Google, Microsoft, Bing, Tech, and Big Tech Companies

An open letter from a medical testing company is never a good thing.

A Canadian company specializing in administering laboratory tests, LifeLabs, announced on Dec. 17 that it had been the victim of a data breach affecting up to 15 million customers. And yes, at least some of those patients’ test results were reportedly accessed by the unnamed culprits.

While a lot of questions still remain, what details we do have aren’t exactly reassuring. For example, LifeLabs claims it discovered the breach in October, but says it’s only notifying patients now in mid-December — after hiring outside security experts — because it wanted to make sure it understood the scope of the mess.  Read more…

More about Hackers, Data Breach, Tech, and Cybersecurity

As Facebook continues to ramp up its fact-checking operation, the company is turning to a new group to help it spot fake news before it goes viral: its users.

The social network has been testing a new fact checking program that uses part-time contractors, who don’t have professional fact-checking experience but who represent “diverse viewpoints,” to aid in its larger fact-checking effort. 

The plan, which is for now a “pilot program,” is notably different from Facebook’s current fact-checking operation, which relies on outside organizations like the Associated Press or factcheck.org. Instead of established news organizations, this pilot program will “leverage the Facebook community” to research potential fake news before it’s routed to professional fact checkers. Read more…

More about Tech, Facebook, Social Media Companies, Tech, and Social Media Companies