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March 20, 2019 | Story | No Comments
Hey, tiger. Long week, huh? Between the Jeff Bezos vs. National Enquirer dustup and the acting attorney general of the United States testifying before Congress, there's been a lot of back and forth. But last week also saw the premiere of Ariana Grande's new video and a cat that miraculously came back to life after […]
March 20, 2019 | Story | No Comments
I know it's an old movie (and it was an even older book before that), but I want to look at the physics of the special submarine drive in The Hunt for Red October. In the story, the Russians build a so-called "caterpillar drive" using hydro-magneto power instead of the traditional propeller. This new drive […]
March 20, 2019 | Story | No Comments
Games get announced, games get cancelled, players get mad. As Lion King fans might say, it's the circle of hype—and it's well-represented in this edition of Replay. Controversies, kiboshes, and the oddly high risk associated with surprise game unveilings. In other words, just a normal week. Blizzard Announces a Diablo Mobile Game, Making Everyone Furious […]
March 20, 2019 | Story | No Comments
San Francisco, land of unrestrained tech wealth and the attendant hoodies and $29 loaves of bread, just said whoa whoa whoa to delivery robots. The SF Board of Supervisors voted on Tuesday, December 5 to severely restrict the machines, which roll on sidewalks and autonomously dodge obstacles like dogs and buskers. Now startups will have […]
March 20, 2019 | Story | No Comments
YouTube’s thirteenth year has proved just as confusing, mercurial, and pimply as any human teenager's. But unlike the usual adolescent, YouTube isn’t actually a hormone-addled child, it’s the most popular social media platform in the United States. Its problems reflect and contribute to our culture like a big, scandalous, Tide Pod-and-condom-slurping ouroboros. So it’s fitting […]
March 20, 2019 | Story | No Comments
I have not quite finished Shadow of the Tomb Raider, the latest in Crystal Dynamics' rebooted saga of videogame icon Lara Croft. I'm not sure I want to, either. Following the violent archaeologist on a quest to a hidden city with the lofty goal of stopping an ancient apocalypse, Shadow of the Tomb Raider is […]
March 20, 2019 | Story | No Comments
Driving in a busy city, you have to get good at scrutinizing the body language of pedestrians. Your foot hovers somewhere between the gas and the brake, waiting for your brain to triangulate their intent: Is that one trying to cross the street, or just waiting for the bus? Still, a whole lot of the […]
March 20, 2019 | Story | No Comments
Skrulls have been many things in the Marvel Comics over the past 60 years: superhero impersonators, religious extremists disguised as humans, canon fodder in any number of Avengers brawls. In their first appearance, they were even cattle, made bovine by Reed Richards in Fantastic Four #2. (This ended poorly for them in the absurdist 1995 […]
March 20, 2019 | Story | No Comments
Like most people, you’ve probably watched Get Out at least once. Maybe twice. But the best way to see Get Out is with Jordan Peele sitting right next to you. Last spring, long before Get Out's eventual Oscar win, the movie was released on home video with a commentary track from its writer-director. A decade […]
March 20, 2019 | Story | No Comments
Information from space has historically been the province of the rich and powerful. Big Earth-observing satellites can cost hundreds of millions of dollars to build and launch, and the price of their data scales accordingly. Scrappy scientific upstarts have, for a while, been building smallsats to get orbital data on the cheap. And while a […]