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According to Twitter's well-worn origin story, the 140-character limit for tweets was born out of the now bygone restrictions of text messaging. The founders wanted Twitter to be used via SMS; at the time, messages were capped at 160 characters. (The extra 20 accommodated user names.) A few years after the company’s founding in 2006, […]

You stocked up on iTunes digital movies a decade ago because it was the only game in town. You’ve got a handful of favorites on Google Play, because at some point you switched to Android. And you stash some classics on Amazon Video, thanks to that one holiday blowout sale you couldn’t resist. As far […]

If it were up to Walt Disney, no one would ever leave his world. Like Howard Stark, a man whose identity the late animator's company now owns, he wanted to create massive, fantastical expos that showed off the possibilities of human innovation. Science fiction builds worlds with words and pictures; Walt Disney did it for […]

It’s not until two-thirds of the way through Significant Zero, his memoir of working in the videogame industry, that Walt Williams finally invokes the dreaded five-letter word: crunch. The term describes the moment when “game developer” ceases being a 9-5 job, and morphs into a haze of constant overtime, nights and weekends lost to endless […]

When the Justice League crew took the stage at Comic-Con International’s Hall H on Saturday—minus Henry Cavill, whose Superman is technically dead—they did so to a standing ovation, with the loudest screams reserved for Gal Gadot/Wonder Woman. But as the banter started and the footage rolled, there was one thing missing: their director. Joss Whedon, […]

Didja hear? The Han Solo standalone movie had quite the shakeup last week. With just a few weeks left to go before the end of principal filming, the directors of the flick were fired from the project and replaced a couple days later. Meanwhile, the director of Star Wars: Episode IX found himself the subject […]

“Innovation,” Jeff Bezos once said, “happens by gently lifting a grandfather and asking him for six different ideas.” Actually, that kudzu bit of biz-speak inspiration isn’t entirely attributable to the Amazon CEO. It’s the work of Botnik, a new AI-assisted humor application that scours various types of human-created, word-crowded content—from season-three Seinfeld scripts to Yelp […]

Last weekend's events in Charlottesville, Virginia, showed the ugliest face of white nationalism in the United States. That racism is a problem—in both its structural and personal forms—shouldn't surprise anyone. But even if you knew that virulent hate groups existed, they're fringe enough that most Americans have never spoken to their members. Aside from a […]

Click:map china guizhou province For more than 15 years, Andy Serkis has been Hollywood's go-to performance-capture guy, playing such digitally enhanced characters as Gollum in the Lord of the Rings series, Caesar in the recent Planet of the Apes films, and even King Kong himself. But the 53-year-old actor—whose directorial debut, Breathe, hit theaters earlier […]

It wouldn't be a Thursday on the internet if folks weren't irrationally upset over something. The latest installment? A bunch of dudes who are mad that Austin's Alamo Drafthouse is planning a women-only screening of Wonder Woman on June 6. It shouldn't really be a surprise, because if there's one thing men have proven themselves […]