It’s official. Nearly four years after Netflix canceled Daredevil and the series more recently made its way over to Disney+, Disney confirmed it’s developing a new 18-episode live-action TV show starring the blind superhero. On Saturday, Marvel announced Daredevil: Born Againand shared that stars Charlie Cox and Vincent D’Onofrio would reprise their roles as Daredevil and Kingpin.
News that the company planned to revive Daredevil first came to light in May, with Variety reporting that Disney had hired Matt Corman and Chris Ord to write and produce the series. Disney currently plans to begin streaming Born Again sometime in the spring of 2024. Before then, Marvel fans can look forward to I Am Groot and She-Hulk: Attorney at Law arriving on Disney+. Both shows got new trailers during San Diego Comic-Con this weekend.
Details about Apple’s upcoming high-end variant of the Apple Watch Series 8 have been trickling out in recent weeks. According to a report Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman published at the start of the month, the wearable will feature the largest display Apple has ever shipped on a smartwatch. As a result, it may also include a new design.
In his most recent Power On newsletter, Gurman says the Apple Watch “Pro” will incorporate a fresh design. The company hasn’t redesigned its wearable line since it introduced the Series 4 in 2018. Gurman notes the new model will be “a good bit bigger” than Apple’s current Series 7 models to accommodate a screen that is seven percent larger. “It also won’t have those rumored flat sides,” he adds, noting the redesign will represent “an evolution of the current rectangular shape.”
Additionally, Apple will reportedly employ “a more durable formulation of titanium” for the casing that should make the smartwatch better suited for extreme sports. With a bigger battery and Apple’s long-rumored “Low Power Mode,” Gurman says the Apple Watch Pro could go multiple days on a single charge. It will also include the rumored body temperature sensor Apple is preparing for the entire Series 8 line.
A high-end Apple Watch is one of many products Apple is reportedly working on for the fall and beyond. Gurman previously said the company plans to release a “deluge” of devices over the next year. Among the more notable items the company has on the way includes a replacement for the original HomePod.
Nearly a decade after it propelled creator Lucas Pope to indie game stardom, “dystopian document thriller” Papers, Please is finally coming to phones. On Saturday, Pope took to Twitter to announce he’s bringing the game to Android and additional iOS devices next month. “‘Papers, Please’ but small. August 5th,” he said. Before Saturday’s announcement, the game had been available on iPads since 2014.
On Twitter, Pope said he spent about eight months developing the new port. Most of the work involved updating the user interface and making minor tweaks to make the game playable on smaller screens. “No zooming,” Pope said in response to one question about the UI. “My vision is terrible and I wanted the game to feel natural on a phone so the interface is built around that.”
For those hoping to play Papers, Please on PlayStation and Xbox, Pope had news to share on that topic too. “On track for a console release in 2031,” he joked. In a later tweet, Pope said the mobile version would be a standalone release, but if you already own the game on iPad, you’ll get access for free.
The arrival of Papers, Please on phones will allow a new audience to experience one of the most creative games of the past decade. In Papers, Please, you play as a border control agent for a Soviet Bloc-esque country known as Arstotzka. Gameplay primarily involves you checking the documentation of immigrants who want to enter Arstotzka and looking for discrepancies among all their entry forms. At almost every stage of its story experience, Papers, Please presents the player with moral dilemmas, asking them to consider how someone maintains their humanity in a job that is so frequently heartless.
China has successfully launched the second of three modules that will eventually make up its Tiangong space station. On Sunday at 2:22 PM local time (2:22 AM ET), the Wentian “Quest for the Heavens” module lifted off from the country’s Wenchang spaceport atop a Long March 5B rocket, Reuters reports. With the launch a “complete success,” Wentian is expected to rendezvous with the Tiangong space station later today.
At that point, the crew of China’s Shenzhou-14 mission will begin the work of linking Wentian with the Tianhe “Harmony of Heaves” module. The latter has been in space since orbital construction on Tiangong began in April 2021. Once Wentian is operational, it will serve as one of two laboratories that will form Tiangong’s eventual t-shaped structure. Once complete, the station will be about a fifth of the size of the International Space Station, with long-term accommodation for three astronauts.
In addition to including space and equipment for Chinese astronauts to carry out microgravity and life sciences research, Wentian features an airlock cabin that will serve as the main entry and exit point for future extravehicular activities out of Tiangong. The module also has temporary living quarters that will allow China to carry out crew handover missions. According to Space.com, the first such handover is planned for later this year. China plans to launch Tiangong’s final module in October. The country is exploring the possibility of allowing commercial space flights to visit Tiangong. It has also invited international space agencies to visit the station.
COVID-19 has fundamentally changed where we live and work, how we socialize, and what we do to earn a living. The pandemic, like past microbic and economic plagues, set off an exodus of well-heeled professionals out of cities to the suburbs, exo-burbs and beyond. But in an era where working from home has become easier than ever — among the privileged classes, at least — will the easing of COVID restrictions see a boomerang migration back to metro centers? Or, like catered corporate lunches and hugging coworkers, has the office, as both a place of business and a social institution, thankfully been made obsolete?
In his new book, Return of the Artisan, Grant McCracken explores how a post-war America gradually rediscovered its home-spun roots, sprouting amidst the sterile futurism of the 1950s, growing through the 1960s and '70s counterculture revolution, and blooming with the maker movement at the start of the 21st century. In the excerpt below, McCracken discusses the accelerating effect the COVID pandemic has had on America's rejection of "smart city" living and embrace of a more rural, artisanal lifestyle.
The arrival of COVID-19 in 2020 transformed the American economy and culture in many ways. It was manifestly bad for hotels, airlines, restaurants, anyone who supplied restaurants, performing arts, live music, gyms, and country fairs. It was (mostly) good for people who were selling online or could seize new opportunities there. (Etsy-based artisans were quick to bring face masks to market; at their height, masks made up a tenth of all Etsy sales.) To say COVID was a mixed blessing would be an understatement.
But in one way COVID was unambiguously good news for the artisanal movement. People began to flee the city for suburbs, exurbs, small towns, and the countryside. By some estimates, three hundred thousand people left New York City, heading to upstate New York and the far end of Long Island. Sometimes this meant merely activating summer homes. Sometimes it meant renting. Sometimes it meant purchase. For all, it meant giving up their treasured city, at least for a while.
Most of these people were not migrants.They had no intention of staying. After all, a real New Yorker scorned the idea of the “bridge and tunnel” world beyond the city.This was the world God created for suburbanites, “breeders,” the weak of head and heart, people without real cultural currency, those who choose to wallow in the wasteland of popular culture.
Bridge and tunnel is the world so heartlessly captured by Christopher Guest in Waiting for Guffman. In this “mockumentary,” Guest gives us a town called Blaine, Missouri, a place where everyone is a clueless hick except for one man, Corky St. Clair. Corky is in fact a total dunce. Corky has failed to make it on Broadway and returned to Blaine to start again. Poor Corky.When he realizes that Blaine too must betray him, he lashes out.
“And I’ll tell you why I can’t put up with you people: because you’re bastard people! That’s what you are! You’re just bastard people!”
In a culture where expressions of outrage are crafted for us by the best writers in Hollywood, “bastard people” seems a little ineffectual. This was Guest’s point exactly. In bridge and tunnel world, people aren’t really very good at anything. They can’t even manage convincing indignation.
The bridge and tunnel stereotype had long kept New Yorkers in place, in check, at home. Things could get very bad in the city—you could lose your job.You could fail to complete that novel or win that contract. But until you actually left the city, you were still a New Yorker, an insider. You were not yet Corky St. Clair.
The artisanal movement managed to shift this stereotype. It helped us see small towns and the countryside as a virtuous choice, instead of a Corky-scale failure.With the artisanal lens in place, the world outside of New York City became a more attractive place. Human scale, handmade, historical, authentic, kinder, gentler, less competitive. Quite suddenly, bridges and tunnels were less a source of shame than a method of escape.
...
Some people began to hear echoes of the 1970s and early ’80s, when the city suffered from so much unemployment and lawlessness that people began to leave, taking their taxes with them and pushing the city into a downward spiral. Fifty years later, New York City appeared poised for yet another fall. Three hundred thousand people left. Fewer people threatened a small tax base, fewer services, and more chaos. This would mean diminished police and fire support.This would mean more crime and chaos. This would mean more flight. A self-renewing cycle had been set in train.
New Yorkers are perpetual motion machines. And now that New York City was pushing (thanks to COVID and crime) and places like upstate New York were pulling (thanks to the artisanal revolution), departure felt like a compelling option.
What a gift for the revolution! Every small town got an infusion of people. In the early part of 2020, Litchfield, Connecticut, got two thousand newcomers in a period that would normally bring them sixty. Most came bearing the big salaries that can be made in a big city. And virtually all these people had been inducted into the artisanal movement while still living in the city, by the diasporic chefs doing Waters’s work there. They were newcomers, but not entirely unwitting when it came to local culture.
This is what every social movement dreams of. New recruits who are sophisticated and well-heeled. For people living in a subsistence economy, barely eking out an artisanal existence, this was water in the desert, manna from heaven. Restaurants flourished. CSAs finally passed their break-even point. Farmer’s markets filled to overflowing. Life was good, or at least better.
But, of course, there is always a tension.The newcomers might grasp the general idea of the artisanal mission, but some of the realities escaped them. They could be rude and clueless. In Winhall, Vermont, the locals were feeling a bit overwhelmed:
The post office ran out of available P.O. boxes in mid-June. Electricians and plumbers are booked until Christmas. Complaints about bears have quadrupled.And as far as the [town] dump is concerned, as [one town resident] put it,“the closest word I can tell you is sheer pandemonium.”
In the worst cases, the newcomers were driving real estate prices up and old-timers out. The irony was palpable. Writing from the small town of Kingston, New York, Sara B. Franklin warned of the “potential loss of people who’ve kept our community vibrantly diverse, not to mention alive and functioning.”
Still. The COVID moment brought together people with taste, money, and commitment with locals who had been making small towns and artisanal economies work for generations. Sometimes it worked; sometimes it didn’t. But generally speaking, the artisanal movement was massively augmented.
The key question was whether the newcomers would stay.And this depended on a series of smaller questions.Would they put down roots? Would they “take” to life outside the big city? Would their employers let them stay, or would they call everyone back to headquarters the moment it was safe to do so.
I did a research project on American families in the COVID era. Mothers were clear on whether they wanted to go back to work outside the home. For most, the answer was a resounding “no.” These women now had proof that they could work from home. And now that they were working from home, they looked back at the pre-COVID era with a sense of puzzlement.
“Why was it,”one of them asked me,“that we had to spend all that time commuting, all that time on our clothing and hair, all that time in the office with lots of empty engagements and pointless meetings? For what?” In the ensuing conversation, some women were prepared to entertain the suspicion that work had been a kind of “theater.”This had nothing to do with functionality or practicality. My respondents thought something else was going on. One of them said:
I think it must be men. Women can do lots of things at the same time. We can work at home.We can manage a family. It’s men who need to have a separate time and place to work.They need a box to work in. It’s also a question of ego. Men like to see cars in the parking lots.Why do women go into the office? They do it to satisfy male egos in the C suite.
But it was not just women who took this point of view. The New York Times talked to a guy who gave up his home in LA and bought a place in Vermont. Apparently, Jonny Hawton “finds it hard to conceive of returning to his old commuter lifestyle, which allowed him only an hour a day with his 1-year-old daughter.”
If someone told me I had to go back to do that tomorrow, I don’t know what I would do,” he said.“It’s almost like we were in a trance that everyone went along with. I used to see Millie for an hour a day. This whole crisis has kind of hit the reset button for a lot of people, made them question the things they sacrificed for work.
These folks will want to stay outside the city, and they are prepared to make extraordinary sacrifices to do so. The research told me that these women had used the time saved in the COVID era to change their families, to get to know their kids better, to build new relationships with their daughters, to restructure mealtime, and to give the family new centrality. At one point I thought I was looking at the possibility of the emergence of a more fully, more emphatically matrifocal family.
Paramount has shared a new trailer for the upcoming third season of Star Trek: Picard. And while we already knew Picard’s final adventure would reunite Patrick Stewart with most of the principal cast of The Next Generation, it’s still good to see some characters we haven’t seen in a while. The minute-long clip Paramount released during San Diego Comic-Con features voiceovers from nearly all of Picard’s season three cast, including LeVar Burton, Gates McFadden and Michael Dorn. It’s not much more than what Paramount had to offer back in April, but at least this time we get to see the former crew of the USS Enterprise in their new uniforms.
That’s not the only Star Trek news to come out of Comic-Con. Paramount also announced that season two of Strange New Worlds will feature a crossover episode with Lower Decks. Jonathan Frakes will direct the episode, which will feature a combination of live-action and animated footage. Tawny Newsome and Jack Quaid will also reprise their roles as the voices of Beckett Mariner and Brad Boimler. Season two of Strange New Worlds doesn’t have a release date yet, but Star Trek fans can look forward to watching a new season of Lower Decks starting on August 25th. On that note, Paramount also shared a new trailer for the animated show, which you can see below.
Uber has officially accepted responsibility for hiding a 2016 data breach that exposed the data of 57 million passengers and drivers. On Friday, the company entered into a non-prosecution agreement with the Federal Trade Commission (FTC), reports Reuters. As part of the deal, Uber admitted it failed to inform the agency of the cyberattack. It also agreed to cooperate in the prosecution of former chief security officer Joe Sullivan who was fired by the company shortly after the incident came to light.
Uber did not immediately respond to Engadget’s request for comment. The company first revealed the details of the data breach in 2017. Instead of sharing what it knew about the incident with the government and users, the company paid hackers $100,000 to the delete the information and stay quiet. “None of this should have happened, and I will not make excuses for it,” said Dara Khosrowshahi, Uber’s then recently appointed CEO, at the time of the disclosure. “While I can’t erase the past, I can commit on behalf of every Uber employee that we will learn from our mistakes.” In 2018, Uber paid $148 million to settle allegations by US state attorneys general the company was too slow to disclose the incident.
Ahead of the show’s August 10th debut, Marvel has shared the first trailer for “I Am Groot.” Shown off at San Diego Comic-Con, the clip features the loveable Groot up to his usual hijinks. We see the tiny humanoid tree dancing and trying on new outfits. At one point Groot even gets into a fight with an army of even smaller aliens only to resolve the conflict with a fart.
Adventure Timeanimator Kirsten Lepore wrote and directed I Am Groot, with Guardians of the Galaxy’s James Gunn serving as executive producer and Vin Diesel reprising his role as the voice of Groot. The show takes place before the events of the recently released Thor: Love and Thunder. All five episodes of the series will be available to watch through Disney+ on August 10th. According to ComicBook.com, I Am Groot will get an additional five episodes at a later date.
Less than two weeks into its soft launch, GameStop’s NFT marketplace is already courting controversy. Among the NFTs listed on the platform is an artwork called “Falling Man” that was spotted by Web3 is Going Great. There’s no mistaking it, the NFT references one of the most iconic photos of the early 21st century. “The Falling Man” is part of a series of images captured by Associated Press photojournalist Richard Drew on the morning of September 11th, 2001. Of the 2,753 people who died inside the World Trade Center and surrounding area that day, it’s estimated that at least 100 individuals fell to their death while the towers were still standing.
“This one probably fell from the MIR station,” says the NFT’s description, referencing Russia’s decommissioned space station. The artwork’s creator is selling two different versions of “Falling Man,” with the cheapest listed at 0.65 Ethereum or about $990. As Web3 is Going Great points out, GameStop operates a curated NFT marketplace. Artists must apply and pass a vetting process before they can list their tokens for sale. The company takes a 2.25 percent cut of sales. GameStop did not immediately respond to Engadget’s comment request.
GameStop's NFT platform is curated, meaning artists have to apply before they can list NFTs there.
The cheapest edition of this NFT is currently selling for 0.65 ETH ( $990). GameStop takes a 2.25% cut.
— web3 is going just great (@web3isgreat) July 23, 2022
Artistic theft is a major issue in the NFT space. On platforms like OpenSea where people can mint tokens for free, fake and plagiarized content abounds. While you could make the argument that “Falling Man” doesn’t fall into those categories and that artists should be free to reference past works and tragedies, it’s also true that this NFT trivializes the falling man’s fate, reducing his final moments into something to be sold for a profit.
For today only, Woot has discounted the Nintendo Switch Lite. With a 20 percent reduction, the $200 handheld is currently $160. That’s one of the best deals we’ve seen on the entry-level Switch. Note that the promotion is only available while supplies last. As of the writing of this story, the blue model is out of stock, leaving only the turquoise, yellow and coral ones available to purchase.
The Switch Lite is ideal for those who plan to use the console exclusively for handheld gaming since it doesn’t feature a TV output. Engadget awarded the system a score of 90 in 2019. It’s lighter and more comfortable to hold than the standard and OLED models thanks to a design that’s more compact and does away with detachable Joy-Cons. A proper d-pad also makes the Switch Lite better for playing 2D games. The display isn’t as vivid as the one on the OLED model, but it’s about as bright as the LCD screen on the standard variant. Even with the Switch Lite’s shortcomings, it’s a great system and one of the most affordable ways you can access Nintendo’s compelling library of first-party games.
