Category Archives: Blog

Golden Globe nominations were announced this morning. Cue the “Oh shit, I haven’t seen any of these,” scramble.

Luckily, a good handful of them are available on the streaming services you probably already have: The Irishman, Marriage Story, and The Crown are all Netflix originals, HBO gets you Big Little Lies and Succession, Fleabag and The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel are on Amazon Prime, and Rocketman can be rented for $4.99 on YouTube. Finding them is the easy part — the only other thing you need is a 4K TV to experience these award-worthy films in the way the directors intended.

Just when remnants of Cyber Week TV deals were dying down, we’re met with a new wave of Green Monday TV deals in time for the holidays, award season, and winter sports. Some quick highlights: Save $800 on a 2019 65-inch Q60R TV from Samsung (that’s its Black Friday price) plus get a 65-inch TCL TV for $500. Read more…

More about Streaming, 4k Tv, Vizio, Mashable Shopping, and Tech

Volcanologist Erik Klemetti has turned down opportunities to visit White Island, the New Zealand volcano that erupted Monday afternoon and killed at least five tourists.

That’s because White Island, also known as Whakaari, is the top of an explosive volcano, and Klemetti didn’t like the risk. (The rest of the volcano is submerged under the sea.) Whakaari is similar to the imposing Cascade volcanoes on the western coast of the U.S., which are liable to erupt violently, sometimes with relatively little notice.

“You need to be conscious that there could be an unexpected explosion,” said Klemetti, who is an associate professor in the Department of Geosciences at Denison University. “And if you’re caught near it, you could be out of luck.” Read more…

More about Science, Nature, New Zealand, Volcanoes, and Science

Nothing ever ends, right?

We’re one episode and one hour away from the moment when credits roll on the Episode 9 season finale of HBO’s Watchmen. Though it’s fair to wonder what time really means after the events of Episode 8. 

“Nothing ever ends” is a quote from the comic and the show, and it signifies the important thing to always keep in mind about Watchmen: We’re watching a linear story unfold, but every single moment of that story is shaped in the writer’s room by the events that both precede and follow it.

For its first four episodes, Watchmen told a relatively chronological story set in the (alternate) present. The four episodes that followed, culminating in Sunday’s eighth chapter, “A God Walks Into Abar,” turned the notion of time on its head. But while the show leapt all around in time, we viewers at home experienced the story in the only way it makes sense, irrespective of where the in-universe calendar might fall from one moment to the next. Read more…

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Veteran actor and singer René Auberjonois has died of metastatic lung cancer at his Los Angeles home on Dec. 8. Auberjonois’ son Rèmy-Luc confirmed the news to The Associate Press on Sunday. He was 79.

Auberjonois was a well-respected and admired actor, having worked in the industry for over four decades. After studying theatre at Carnegie-Mellon University, Auberjonois performed with various theatre companies before landing his first Broadway role in 1968. His career quickly took off, the actor winning a Tony the next year for his role in as Sebastian Baye in Coco, opposite Katharine Hepburn. Read more…

More about Obituaries, Star Trek Deep Space Nine, Rene Auberjonois, Entertainment, and Celebrities

South Park jokes often very pointedly come at someone’s expense. But a throwaway joke from the Season 23 episode that aired Tuesday, Dec 3 had an unintended victim for a change.

A real person from Fairway, Colo. got bombarded with hundreds of calls from fans misdialing a number advertised as co-creator Trey Parker’s during the episode titled “Basic Cable.” The number appeared in an in-universe commercial urging streaming services to call and buy the rights to a variety of fake spin-off shows like “PC Babies” and “The Scott Malkinson Show.”

More about Entertainment, Twitter, Culture, South Park, and Trey Parker

There’s been a lot of (understandable) hand-wringing around deepfakes, but consider this: What if you could swap your face onto your cat’s body? Not so apocalyptic anymore, right?

It looks like that’s the pitch for Snapchat Cameo. You can use it to superimpose a face over another face in your Snaps, creating a sort of low-rent deepfake GIF or video clip.

While the upcoming feature hasn’t technically been revealed, some Snapchat users in France got to access it a bit early on Sunday. TechCrunch then confirmed with Snapchat that Cameo exists, and it’s undergoing limited testing in international markets. Read more…

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He’s been saying it for years: Bernie Sanders is one of the most meme-able presidential candidates of our time. 

Just one week into December and he’s already announced a radical plan to bring everyone high-speed internet. Now, the presidential hopeful is contributing to web culture in the form of a fantastic meme, seemingly adding his voice to the chorus of supporters demanding hungry felines get a fair shot because “cats can have little a salami.”

When you visit the goldmine of a URL www.cancatshavealittlesalami.com, you’ll find Sanders’ latest policy plan to tackle the issue of systemic wealth inequality plaguing our country. Read more…

More about Politics, Cats, Culture, Bernie Sanders, and Meme

It’s been a long, patience-testing road for Wonder Woman fans. The movie’s sequel was originally slated for Nov. 2019, but it eventually got pushed back to June 2020 due to Warner Bros.’ desire for another summer release.

Still, they say good things come to those who wait, and we finally have some footage! The trailer for Wonder Woman 1984, which sees the alliterative Amazonian facing off against Cheetah during the Cold War, is every bit as epic as we could have hoped.

Is it June yet? Read more…

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Claremont United Methodist Church transformed its Christmas nativity scene into a powerful statement about family separation by caging their figures of Jesus, Mary, and Joseph and releasing a theological statement on the United States’ treatment of refugees. 

A Facebook post by Senior Minister Karen Clark Ristine includes a picture of the nativity and the aforementioned statement, which encourages onlookers to “consider the most well-known refugee family in the world.” The statement continues:

Clark Ristine also wrote that the church building contains a second set of Jesus, Mary, and Joseph figures depicting the family’s reunion. Read more…

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Caroll Spinney, the beloved and renowned puppeteer who brought the original Big Bird and Oscar the Grouch to life on Sesame Street for nearly 50 years, died on Dec. 8 at the age of 85. 

According to a statement from his colleagues, Spinney left this world in his Connecticut home after a long battle with the muscle disease Dystonia. He leaves behind an enduring legacy of kindness, with his loving world view having helped shape Sesame Street into the unmistakable force for good it remains to this day.

“His enormous talent and outsized heart were perfectly suited to playing the larger-than-life yellow bird who brought joy to generations of children and countless fans of all ages around the world, and his lovably cantankerous grouch gave us all permission to be cranky once in a while,” the statement reads. Read more…

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