The following contains spoilers for Star Trek: Picard, Season Three, Episode Two: “Disengage.”

Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan is a 1982 movie that arguably saved Star Trek as a going concern. It was a cheap movie, but writer-director Nicholas Meyer made thriftiness a virtue, building a paranoid submarine thriller out of steely glances and jousting phone calls. Despite having no love of Trek, Meyer painted a broad sweep of an older Jim Kirk, his life, death and rebirth with the help of a son he never knew he had. It’s a sumptuous movie, full of smart dialogue and characterisation, with a drum-tight plot and great acting, not just a great Star Trek film, but a great film, period. And sometimes, I feel that its critical and commercial success was so big that it’s been to Star Trek’s overall detriment.

Whenever the creative well runs dry, Trek runs back to old comforts, and the Next Generation movies were perpetually looking for its own Khan. First Contact flipped the Moby Dick narrative, making Picard the Ahab against the Borg’s white whale. Insurrection borrowed the setting of Khan’s climatic finale, while Nemesis borrowed its plot beats; a wounded ship only saved by the heroic sacrifice of each series’ Tin Man character. Into Darkness then winkingly inverted those same plot beats, with Kirk nobly “dying” in place of his best friend.

Picard’s been telegraphing its intentions from the get-go, dropping every nod to fans about where we’d wind up. The Bennett-era movie callbacks remain en vogue here, and to my memory this is the first use of the Blaster Beam, or a soundalike, in a streaming era soundtrack. Much like all of the other nods, we’re watching a cargo cult being assembled in real time, boldly serving us up something we’ve only seen, oooh, four or five times at this point. So: Wounded hero ship facing off against a more powerful enemy? Check. Inside a nebula that’s disrupting normal starship functions? Check. With our lead suddenly presented with the news he has a son he never knew about? Check check check.

This week, Picard and Riker make it to the Helios to find Beverley in her stasis pod, guarded by her son, Jack. He’s a rakish Englishman who has already spoken two whole words in French while negotiating with a corrupt Fenris Ranger. After being rescued by the Titan, Riker starts hinting about the younger Crusher’s parentage, as if being the world’s most English Frenchman is a genetic trait. It isn’t long before Crusher is outed as an intergalactic con man and fugitive, and Shaw has him sent to the brig. He also, after several hours of allowing her to remain on the bridge giving orders to people, dismisses Seven for indulging two people we keep being told are “legends” and “heroes.”

There’s plenty of furrowed brows as Picard initially refuses to consider that he might have a son, and at no point does anyone suggest running a paternity test. You might expect it would be easy enough to whip out a tricorder or hypospray, or even the transporter records, and find the truth. But, you know, that would be too efficient, so we’re left with Picard and Jack facing off in the brig. Now, credit where due, Patrick Stewart and Ed Speelers sell the hell out of this scene, the first that feels in any way real so far.

All the while, the Titan is menaced by Amanda Plummer’s villain, who we know is evil because she’s smoking on the bridge of her ship, the Shrike, indoors! I wonder if this, too, is another nod to those older films given Plummer’s father faced off against Kirk in The Undiscovered Country. Maybe this is why I’m so out of step with so much of the (positive) critical consensus around this run. I find this raiding of Star Trek’s own text and paratext to be insular and repetitive, with it more interested in placating disaffected fanboys than telling a story with a point of view. If you want strange new worlds, new life forms and new civilizations, you’ll need to watch the show set 142 years earlier.

Then there’s Raffi. Last week, she uncovered that some nefarious type had stolen some deep tech from Aperture Science Starfleet. At the end of that episode, a Starfleet recruitment building big enough to fill the donut hole in Apple Park gets Portal-ed into dust, killing (just) 117 people. Now, looking to make amends for her, uh, failure? She’s looking into local crims in order to find out who exactly was responsible for the seemingly-unwarranted attack.

Now, this is the plot beat I alluded to in my preview, when Raffi, who is in recovery, is forced to do drugs in order to prove she’s not an undercover agent. The portentous music and Michelle Hurd’s acting sells the notion this isn’t a great idea, but Raffi’s committed to the cause. But while she’s incapacitated, her handler comes in to rescue everyone with some good, old-fashioned Mek’leth carnage. I couldn't help but feel a punch in the air when Worf popped up in all his glory, but the tonal jump doesn't sit well with me. 

You could be wondering why the Federation Ambassador to the Klingon Empire is doing covert intelligence work. But, by the end of the Next Generation movies, it was clear that Worf would just show up for a visit whenever the plot required. And even I’m not going to harp on about this too much, because it is never a chore to watch Michael Dorn do his work. As EW’s Darren Franich said in his definitive Star Trek essay series, “Michael Dorn knew Worf only got cooler when the show made him look goofy.” As goofy as he is here, he’s still Worf, and you just wish that Paramount had greenlit a Worf show three years ago instead.

I had hoped this episode, for its laggy table-laying, may be looking for a way to attack a well worn but fundamentally strong Star Trek trope. That being if it’s right and proper to hand over a potentially-innocent man to frontier justice, and if not, why not? There’s plenty of angles for the argument given the many shades of gray that most people can now comprehend. After all, the Titan is outside Federation space, and so you can’t, or shouldn’t, impose your values on those beyond your worldview. That can be countered by someone saying that natural justice is, or should be a universal virtue. And that these debates must sit side-by-side with the notion that the needs of the many (the 500-plus souls on the USS Titan) outweigh the needs of the few, or the (Jack Crusher) one. You could even have the supposedly “right” argument, the one aping Spock’s famous aphorism, espoused by the character most seen as an asshole, too. But no.

Unfortunately, Picard remains bad for all of the same reasons that pretty much every other Khan copy is bad: It has almost nothing to say. In fact, this episode seems to hinge on every person in the narrative suddenly becoming incapable of doing even the basic parts of their jobs. Since when would a security officer not search a prisoner for hidden technology before putting them in the brig? Since when would a ship at Red Alert be taken by surprise when a hostile vessel in front of them starts attacking? And why did nobody have the presence of mind to run a paternity test, which surely at this point in history could be done with the ship’s internal sensors? Not to mention, why didn’t Jack just tell the security guard he’d like to hand himself over rather than knocking him out? Maybe so we could have a few more moments of tension before the Titan chooses to make a break for the nebula and we roll the credits.

You may think I’m banging on unnecessarily about The Wrath of Khan but I think it’s justified here. If the production team weren’t looking to invite comparisons to a vastly superior project then they were unwise to take so many of its plot beats as its own. I mean, in Wrath of Khan, Kirk has sixty seconds to find a way to even things up between the wounded Enterprise and the Reliant. And he does so with a little bit of theatrics, some ingenuity, and by showing that he was a little cleverer than anybody gave him credit for being. When this version of Picard is placed in the same situation but given a whole hour to come up with something, what does he do? He marks time on the bridge while the younger actors with plausible-looking stunt performers can do the now obligatory punch fight so that the audience at home doesn’t start getting bored.

Early on in Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania, our hero Scott Lang (Paul Rudd) and his daughter Cassie (Kathryn Newton) are warped into a quantum-level universe. It’s filled with alien biology and vistas that wouldn't be out of place on distant planets. But while that sounds like the perfect setup for a fun sci-fi romp, I never bought it. And, unfortunately, the actors didn't appear to buy it either. The backgrounds looked like psychedelic screensavers, and, similar to the Star Wars prequels, there was an uncanny disconnect between the live humans and their mostly digital surroundings.

I found the aesthetic so viscerally ugly, it made me fear for the future of the Marvel Cinematic Universe, and for anything else made with ILM's StageCraft technology (AKA “the volume”). That realization surprised me, since I've mostly enjoyed how that tech helped make The Mandalorian's unique worlds come alive. The volume is a series of enormous LED walls that can display real time footage. Together with interactive lighting, it makes actors seem like they’re actually walking around artificial environments. Another plus? It also helps the lighting look far more realistic, something that was particularly noticeable on Mando's polished armor.

So what the hell happened to Quantumania? Its artificiality seems partially intentional, as it's trying to evoke pulp fantasy and even a bit of Star Wars. But somewhere along the line, director Peyton Reed forgot to ground its fantastical visuals with anything resembling human emotion. When Ant-Man, his daughter, or their tiny-tech compatriots, Hank Pym (Michael Douglass) and Janet Van Dyne (Michelle Pfeiffer), enter the Quantum Realm, there's little room for awe and wonder. Sure, they occasionally quip about something weird: buildings that move! An alien intrigued by body holes! But we quickly move onto a rote sci-fi tale of rebellion against an evil conqueror (in this case it's Kang, played by Jonathan Majors.)

Vulture’s Bilge Ebiri, who calls the film “a cry for help,” succinctly describes why Quantumania falls flat: “The action is tired, the universe unconvincing, and nobody on screen looks like they want to be there. They don’t even look like they know where there is.”

Marvel

Clearly, we can't blame”the volume” for all of the film's faults, it's just another tool in a director's kit. In an interview with Collider, Reed said that he wasn't sure if the technology would work out for Quantumania, but eventually he found it to be "great for certain environments, but not necessarily right for other ones." He later added "There are limitations to it [the volume], and we push that system to its limit on this movie... What works so well in Mandalorian is they have a lot of lead time, because they're doing a whole series, to invest and create these environments, and on the schedule we were on, it's not always right for that situation."

Several anonymous VFX workers told Vulturethat Quantumania’s hectic production schedule was one reason its computer generated worlds fall so flat. The higher-profile Black Panther sequel, Wakanda Forever, was a higher priority for Marvel (no surprise when that first movie made over $1.3 billion globally) when it came to VFX work. And there were apparently late-stage changes to Quantumania that led to some rushed work – though it’s worth noting that isn’t unusual for a major Marvel film.

“Making big pivots late in the game has consequences, and there is a constant scramble from the VFX houses to keep up,” a former VFX worker told Engadget. (They requested anonymity due to confidentiality agreements around their work.] “And near the end, it's almost always a disaster. Lots of miracles. Lots of clever solutions, not based on heightening the art, but just being able to do a week’s worth of work in 24 hours.”

While watching Quantumania, I couldn't help but compare it to Avatar: The Way of Water, another big-budget science fiction epic that brings us to another alien, almost completely computer-generated world. That film goes even further than Ant-Man, since almost every scene involves actors playing CG Na’vi characters, one or two humans and elaborate sets. But I never once doubted the reality of The Way of Water.

You could tell that director James Cameron has actually been thinking about the world of Pandora for over a decade, so he has a strong vision of how the Na'vi are supposed to interact with their animal companions, or how a soulless corporation may view a pristine planet as a way to make more revenue. With Quantumania, there's no clear sense of why that sub-atomic universe is special, or why Kang may want to rule it. We might as well be watching a lesser Star Wars movie.

Marvel

Perhaps that's why the volume rubbed me the wrong way this time around. When you have a stronger grasp of character and story, as The Mandalorian (mostly) demonstrated, it can help to make the entire experience feel more epic. But if your narrative is dull and unfocused, the volume can easily heighten its flaws. There's room to do something truly special with the idea of a sub-atomic universe, the sort of thing screenwriter Jeff Loveness frequently did on Rick and Morty.

In the end, though, Quantumania feels like an episode of that show stretched out to two hours, and molded to fit the plot machinations of the MCU. Any enjoyment I had while watching it was instantly warped to the quantum realm when it was over.

More than six years following the most recent entry in the series, Firaxis has confirmed it’s working on a new Civilization game. The studio didn’t share many details about the new title, but it did say that Ed Beach is the creative director of the project. Beach has more than 15 years of experience working on the franchise, including, most recently, as lead designer of Civilization VI.

Firaxis parent company Take-Two Interactive shared the news this week in a press release announcing a handful of staffing changes at the studio (via Eurogamer). Studio head Steve Martin is leaving Firaxis after serving nearly 17 years as the company’s president, a position he inherited from Firaxis co-founder Jeff Briggs in 2006. Heather Hazen, previously the studio’s chief operating officer, is taking over the day-to-day operations of Firaxis.

“I’m thrilled to have this opportunity to carry on the studio’s storied legacy, beginning with the announcement that Firaxis is in development on the next iteration of the legendary Civilization franchise,” Hazen said. “I’m lucky to be working with some of the best developers in our industry, and we have plans to take the Civilization franchise to exciting new heights for our millions of players around the world.”

On Friday, Firaxis also announced the departure of Jake Solomon. After 23 years, the designer, who was one of the studio’s best-known employees thanks to his work on the XCOM franchise and Marvel’s Midnight Suns, is leaving to pursue new opportunities. "I loved designing tactical turn-based games, but it's time for other, smarter people to push that space forward,” Solomon said on Twitter. “My brain is on fire with a new dream. Time to go chase it."

Some of us are destined to lead successful lives thanks to the circumstances of our birth. Some of us, like attorney Bruce Jackson, are destined to lead such lives in spite them. Raised in New York's Amsterdam housing projects and subjected to the daily brutalities of growing up a black man in America, Jackson's story is ultimately one of tempered success. Sure he went on to study at Georgetown Law before representing some of the biggest names in hip hop — LL Cool J, Heavy D, the Lost Boyz and Mr. Cheeks, SWV, Busta Rhymes — and working 15 years as Microsoft's associate general counsel. But at the end of the day, he is still a black man living in America, with all the baggage that comes with it.

In his autobiography, Never Far from Home (out now from Atria), Jackson recounts the challenges he has faced in life, of which there are no shortage: from being falsely accused of robbery at age 10 to witnessing the murder of his friend at 15 to spending a night in lockup as an adult for the crime of driving his own car; the shock of navigating Microsoft's lillywhite workforce following years spent in the entertainment industry, and the end of a loving marriage brought low by his demanding work. While Jackson's story is ultimately one of triumph, Never Far from Home reveals a hollowness, a betrayal, of the American Dream that people of Bill Gates' (and this writer's) complexion will likely never have to experience. In the excerpt below, Jackson recalls his decision to leave a Napster-ravaged music industry to the clammy embrace of Seattle and the Pacific Northwest. 

Atria Books

Excerpted from Never Far From Home My Journey from Brooklyn to Hip Hop, Microsoft, and the Law by Bruce Jackson. Published by Atria Books, an imprint of Simon & Schuster. Copyright © 2023 by Bruce Jackson. All rights reserved.

“We gotta figure out a way to stop this.”

In the late 1990s, the digital revolution pushed the music business into a state of flux. And here was Tony Dofat, sitting in my office, apoplectic, talking about how to stop Napster and other platforms from taking the legs out from under the traditional recording industry.

I shook my head. “If they’re already doing it, then it’s too late. Cat’s out of the bag. I don’t care if you start suing people, you’re never going back to the old model. It’s over.”

In fact, lawsuits, spearheaded by Metallica and others, the chosen mode of defense in those early days of the digital music onslaught, only served to embolden consumers and publicize their cause. Free music for everyone! won the day.

These were terrifying times for artists and industry executives alike. A decades-old business model had been built on the premise that recorded music was a salable commodity.

Artists would put out a record and then embark on a promotional tour to support that record. A significant portion of a musician’s income (and the income of the label that supported the artist) was derived from the sale of a physical product: recorded albums (or singles), either in vinyl, cassette, or compact disc. Suddenly, that model was flipped on its head... and still is. Artists earn a comparative pittance from downloads or streams, and most of their revenue is derived from touring, or from monetizing social media accounts whose numbers are bolstered by a song’s popularity. (Publicly, Spotify has stated that it pays artists between $.003 and $.005 per stream. Translation: 250 streams will result in revenue of approximately one dollar for the recording artist.)

Thus, the music itself has been turned primarily into a marketing tool used to entice listeners to the product: concert and festival tickets, and a social media advertising platform. It is a much tougher and leaner business model. Additionally, it is a model that changed the notion that record labels and producers needed only one decent track around which they could build an entire album. This happened all the time in the vinyl era: an artist came up with a hit single, an album was quickly assembled, often with filler that did not meet the standard established by the single. Streaming platforms changed all of that. Consumers today seek out only the individual songs they like, and do it for a fraction of what they used to spend on albums. Ten bucks a month gets you access to thousands of songs on Spotify or Pandora or Apple Music roughly the same amount a single album cost in the pre-streaming era. For consumers, it has been a landmark victory (except for the part about artists not being able to create art if they can’t feed themselves); for artists and record labels, it has been a catastrophic blow.

For everyone connected to the music business, it was a shock to the system. For me, it was provocation to consider what I wanted to do with the next phase of my career. In early 2000, I received a call from a corporate recruiter about a position with Microsoft, which was looking for an in-house counsel with a background in entertainment law — specifically, to work in the company’s burgeoning digital media division. The job would entail working with content providers and negotiating deals in which they would agree to make their content — music, movies, television shows, books — available to consumers via Microsoft’s Windows Media Player. In a sense, I would still be in the entertainment business; I would be spending a lot of time working with the same recording industry executives with whom I had built prior relationships.

But there were downsides, as well. For one thing, I was recently married, with a one-year-old baby and a stepson, living in a nice place in the New York City suburbs. I wasn’t eager to leave them—or my other daughters—three thousand miles behind while I moved to Microsoft’s headquarters in the Pacific Northwest. From an experience standpoint, though, it was almost too good an offer to turn down.

Deeply conflicted and at a crossroads in my career, I solicited advice from friends and colleagues, including, most notably, Clarence Avant. If I had to name one person who has been the most important mentor in my life, it would be Clarence, “the Black Godfather.” In an extraordinary life that now spans almost ninety years, Clarence has been among the most influential men in Black culture, music, politics, and civil rights. It’s no surprise that Netflix’s documentary on Clarence featured interviews with not just a who’s who of music and entertainment industry superstars, but also former US presidents Barack Obama and Bill Clinton.

In the early 1990s, Clarence became chairman of the board of Motown Records. As lofty a title as that might be, it denotes only a fraction of the wisdom and power he wielded. When the offer came down from Microsoft, I consulted with Clarence. Would I be making a mistake, I wondered, by leaving the music business and walking away from a firm I had started? Clarence talked me through the pros and cons, but in the end, he offered a steely assessment, in a way that only Clarence could.

“Son, take your ass to Microsoft, and get some of that stock.”

Extrapolations, a drama series focusing on the near-future impacts of climate change, is coming to Apple TV+ next month. The streaming service has released the first trailer, which shows off a cast stuffed full of big names. Among the stars featured in the show are Meryl Streep, Sienna Miller, Kit Harington, Daveed Diggs, Edward Norton, Yara Shahidi, Matthew Rhys, Gemma Chan, David Schwimmer, Keri Russell, Marion Cotillard, Forest Whitaker, Tobey Maguire and Murray Bartlett (who was most recently seen in The Last of Us).

The eight-episode series showcases "interwoven stories about love, work, faith and family," Apple says. Extrapolations depicts how people from around the planet are adapting (or perhaps not) to the effects of climate change. It covers a several-decade span in the middle of the 21st century, by which time humans have landed on Mars.

Given the cast and the visual effects-packed trailer, it's clear Apple has spared little expense on this series. The clip shows a future version of Manhattan protected by sea walls and hints at technology that might allow humans to "thrive" in a world further wracked by climate change.

Contagion writer and An Inconvenient Truth producer Scott Z. Burns created the show. The first three episodes of Extrapolations will premiere on Apple TV+ on March 17th, with the remaining five arriving on a weekly basis.

America's first astronauts from the 1960s were all pulled from the highest ranks of the nation's military. As such, NASA's first few classes tended to conform to a rather specific demographic theme — white, male, flattop haircut you could set a watch too. By the mid-70's however, the space agency had gotten with the times and opened up the spacewalking profession to more than former Air Force and Navy test pilots. 

In The New Guys, author Meredith Bagby follows the exploits of NASA's Astronaut class of 1978 — "Class 8," America's first women, African Americans, Asian American, and gay person to fly to space — from the team's selection through their mastering of cutting-edge technologies aboard the Space Shuttle and their history-making orbital missions. In the excerpt below, Class 8 receives a brutal introduction to the dangers that await them. 

Harper Collins Publishing

From The New Guys by Meredith Bagby. Copyright © 2023 by Meredith Bagby. Reprinted courtesy of William Morrow, an imprint of HarperCollins Publishers.

Johnson Space Center, Houston. July 1978

“Hey! We’ve got a fire in the cockpit!” a man screamed, then his voice cut out. Within seconds, another desperate voice cut through the static.

“We’ve got a bad fire . . . !” the second man shouted in pain.

“We’re burning up . . . !!!” a third howled.

Then the transmission faded into nothing but static.

In one of the many tiered seats in Mission Control, Ron McNair and his new classmates listened to a recording of the Apollo 1 fire. During a preflight test on January 27, 1967, astronauts Gus Grissom, Ed White, and Roger Chaffee had burned alive. Even though over a decade had passed since the accident, the pain and fear of the astronauts who perished was palpable to the room of new recruits.

The instructor surveyed the faces of the astronaut candidates. Are you sure you’re ready for this? The audio was a wake-up call, especially for those like Ron who had not served in the military and had never had a job with life-and-death consequences. If this reality was too much for any of them to accept, the instructor suggested, now was the time to go. No one budged.

A few weeks earlier, as Ron moved his family across the country from left-leaning Malibu, California, to the Lone Star State, the summer sizzled. Disco hits from the Bee Gees’, “Night Fever” and “Stayin’ Alive,” blared from the radio. Billboards advertised the new Hollywood blockbuster Grease, starring John Travolta and Olivia Newton-John. In the nation’s capital, almost a hundred thousand demonstrators marched in support of the Equal Rights Amendment—at the time, the largest march for women’s rights in US history. Muhammad Ali was on the verge of making history at the Louisiana Superdome, becoming the first man to win the World Heavyweight title three times in a row.

When Ron and his wife, Cheryl, arrived in Houston, they found a little starter apartment before moving to Clear Lake along with the Onizukas and the Gregorys. Everyone that had kids—or planned to—wanted a lawn for football and a cul-de-sac for bike riding. The neighborhood’s proximity to the middle and high schools made it the obvious choice for families. Single astronauts like Sally Ride, Kathy Sullivan, and Steve Hawley settled into apartments right outside Johnson’s back gate with a short commute, volleyball court, and communal barbecue pit.

On the Monday after the July 4th holiday, Ron drove through the gates of Johnson Space Center for his first day of work. Looking up from his baffling acronym-filled schedule, Ron spotted a few of his classmates and followed them to Building 4, the home of Johnson’s Flight Crew Operations. Everyone was rushing to the Monday morning all-hands meeting, a staple of the Astronaut Office since the Mercury days.

Standing watch from their office doors, Sylvia Salinas, Mary Lopez, and Estella Hernandez Gillette, all in their twenties, took in the excitement as the new astronauts stormed the hallways. The Hispanic American administrative staff — working in and around the Astronaut Office — came to be known as the Mexican Mafia. As the liaisons for George Abbey and John Young, Sylvia and Mary, and later Estella, ran the show behind scenes, making sure things went smoothly in the Astronaut Office. Up until then, the astronauts they worked for were military men, older in age and more conventional in style; they did not fraternize with support staff. Now, “kids like them” were rolling in. The arrival of Astronaut Class 8 was like a breath of fresh air.

A large conference table surrounded by two rings of chairs dominated Room 3025, the locus of the Monday meeting. Assuming the first ring was reserved for administrators and senior astronauts, Ron took a seat in the back row, as did the rest of his class. Everyone, that is, except the blond, mustachioed Rick Hauck, a US Navy commander who by military standards was the most senior-ranking pilot of their class. Hauck took a seat at the table. Some in the room gasped. Others eyed him with suspicion. Wow, he must either be a fool or the most confident bastard among us. Maybe both. Either way he made an impression.

Like Hauck, the fifteen fighter pilots in Ron’s class had plenty of swagger and bravado, and mixed easily with the veteran astronauts. The old guys, twenty-eight in all, including moonwalkers John Young and Alan Bean, whom Ron met during interview week, filled the inner circle. Among them were astronauts still itching for their first trip to space, like Bob “Crip” Crippen, the baby of the group at forty years old, and Richard “Dick” Truly, both career military pilots who had flown for both the Navy and Air Force. These yet-to-fly guys were caught between programs, too late for Apollo and—so far—too early for the shuttle. Crippen and Truly were part of Astronaut Group 7, who had been transferred to NASA after the cancellation of the Manned Orbiting Laboratory (MOL), a classified Cold War military project developed to acquire surveillance images from space. After a decade at the agency, the former MOL astronauts had only ever flown a desk.

Everyone here wanted a ticket to space, but the ten interesting people would be setting historical precedent, breaking barriers that in the past restricted people like them from space travel. Of the six women in the room, one would be the first American woman in space. While the Soviets had flown the first female astronaut, Valentina Tereshkova—being the first American woman in space would earn a prominent place in the annals of history. In 1978, no Black person had flown to space. Ron, along with Guy Bluford, and Fred Gregory would compete to be the first, while Ellison Onizuka would almost certainly be the first Asian American to fly. Guy and Fred, both Vietnam vets, and El, an Air Force test pilot, all spoke the military language of the old guys. Ron was an outsider even among outsiders.

John Young, chief of the Astronaut Office, began the meeting, mumbling “a few forgettable words of welcome” while staring at his shoes. Though he had braved the depths of space four times, on both Apollo and Gemini, Young had not conquered public speaking. Compact, with a jockey’s build, Young was a handsome Navy devil with big ears and an aw-shucks demeanor that belied how truly meticulous he was. He preferred solving thorny engineering problems, to dealing with management issues, and yet here he was as head of the Astronaut Office. He explained to the new class that they were not yet astronauts; they were still astronaut candidates, or “AsCans” for short. Only after two years of training would they earn the title astronaut and a silver pin to mark the achievement.

Inspired by Navy and Air Force aviator badges, the pin depicted a trio of rays merged atop a shining star and encircled by a halo denoting orbital flight. The silver pin meant you were flight-ready, but the gold pin meant you had flown to space. That’s when you make it. Young then left the group with a bit of sage advice: “Don’t talk about nothing you know nothing about.” Got it. So basically, keep our mouths shut.

As the old guys left the room, they once-overed the new guys. Quite simply, the old guys were a different generation. They were veterans, test pilots, and guys who had never worked with women or civilian graduate students. Underneath their pique was also perhaps a tinge of fear. The line to ride the bird just got a whole lot longer; maybe they would miss their chance altogether.

Who are these guys anyway? Hell, half of them are civilians, wet behind the ears, fresh off their mother’s teat. They traded in high grades and accolades, not in life-or-death. The old guys shook their heads. Those Fucking New Guys. “The Fucking New Guy,” a military term for the newest grunt in the unit, seemed to suit Astronaut Class 8 perfectly. So was born the official class nickname: TFNG. In polite company, the TFNGs referred to themselves as “Thirty-Five New Guys,” but everyone knew what the term really meant.

After the meeting, secretary Sylvia Salinas handed the New Guys their official NASA portraits and asked them to create signatures for the auto-pen machine. The agency would print thousands of autographed photos. Do thousands of people want our autograph? Ron wondered. It’s astronaut insurance, a veteran astronaut quipped. If you die, your family will have something to sell. The joke did not get any laughs.

Amazon is moving forward with a live-action Spider-Man Noir series, according toVariety. It will reportedly focus on “an older, grizzled superhero in 1930s New York City” — one that isn’t Peter Parker.

Spider-Man Noir is an alternate version of the web-slinging hero, first seen in the 2009 Marvel comic series of the same name. The comic version was set in 1933, as a freshly bitten Spidey navigates New York City’s Depression-era criminal underworld. The character, who exists in a separate universe from the mainline Spider-Man stories, also appeared in the 2018 film Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse, voiced by Nicolas Cage. The report doesn’t mention whether Cage will be involved in the new project, but the actor has said he wasn’t asked to return for the upcoming animated sequel, Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse.

Marvel

The as-yet-untitled series will be Amazon’s second project based on Sony-controlled Marvel superheroes after the upcoming Silk: Spider Society. Oren Uziel will write and executive-produce the show; Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse alumni Phil Lord, Christopher Miller and Amy Pascal share executive-producing credits.

Sony controls the film rights to Spider-Man and supporting characters like Venom, Carnage, Vulture, Black Cat and others. In addition, it works with Marvel Studios on the current MCU film franchise starring Tom Holland.

There was a time when HQ Trivia was on everyone's lips, and millions of people were playing it in hopes of winning some money from its prize pot. Then the trivia show app was beset by one problem after another until it fell off the radar, lost its audience and shut down. CNN announced last year that it ordered a documentary that'll tell the game show's story, with the promise of launching it in 2023. Now CNN Films, the news channel's motion picture division, has released a trailer for the documentary entitled Glitch: The Rise & Fall of HQ Trivia, which is scheduled to premiere on CNN on March 5th at 9PM ET/PT.

During the height of its popularity, HQ Trivia ran two games a day, and users could win part of the prize pot by answering several questions correctly in a row. It was hosted by Scott Rogowsky, though celebrities like The Rock and Kelly Clarkson would sometimes serve as guest hosts. In 2018, however, its controversial co-founder Colin Kroll passed away, and then Rogowsky left reportedly after having a disagreement with management over another hosting job he took. 

According to TechCrunch, more than half of HQ Trivia's staff also signed a petition to remove CEO Rus Yusupov, accusing him of mismanaging the startup. Yusupov then reportedly fired some of the people who led the petition before the company shut down following a failed acquisition in 2020. The trivia app quickly came back thanks to a new investor, but it only ran games once a week with a prize pot of $1,500. Today, the app is suspended in limbo and hasn't had a game since November 2022. 

The CNN documentary will be told through the point of view of Rogowsky, along with other insiders from the company. Based on what Salima Koroma, the docu's director said, we're in for an entertaining ride: "HQ Trivia was supposed to ‘revolutionize television’. But what happens when the people who are running it—'the smartest guys in the room’— don’t actually know what they’re doing? The CEOs who make the Vines and the WeWorks and the Twitters are hailed as the rockstars of our age. But a lot of them are simply emperors with no clothes on. It’s kind of absurd. And I wanted that absurdity to be felt all throughout the film."

Pay TV subscribers can stream the documentary when it premieres through CNN's website, its mobile apps and CNNgo. It will also be available for on demand streaming starting on March 6th.

A few days ago, speech AI startup ElevenLabs launched a beta version of its platform that gives users the power to create entirely new synthetic voices for text-to-speech audio or to clone somebody's voice. Well, it only took the internet a few days to start using the latter for vile purposes. The company has revealed on Twitter that it's seeing an "increasing number of voice cloning misuse cases" and that it's thinking of a way to address the problem by "implementing additional safeguards."

While ElevenLabs didn't elaborate on what it meant by "misuse cases," Motherboard found 4chan posts with clips featuring generated voices that sound like celebrities reading or saying something questionable. One clip, for instance, reportedly featured a voice that sounded like Emma Watson reading a part of Mein Kampf. Users also posted voice clips that feature homophobic, transphobic, violent and racist sentiments. It's not entirely clear if all the clips used ElevenLab's technology, but a post with a wide collection of the voice files on 4chan included a link to the startup's platform. 

Perhaps this emergence of "deepfake" audio clips shouldn't come as a surprise, seeing as a few years ago, we'd seen a similar phenomenon take place. Advances in AI and machine learning had led to a rise in deepfake videos, specifically deepfake pornography, wherein existing pornographic materials are altered to use the faces of celebrities. And, yes, people used Emma Watson's face for some of those videos. 

ElevenLabs is now gathering feedback on how to prevent users from abusing its technology. At the moment, its current ideas include adding more layers to its account verification to enable voice cloning, such as requiring users to enter payment info or an ID. It's also considering having users verify copyright ownership of the voice they want to clone, such as getting them to submit a sample with prompted text. Finally, the company is thinking of dropping its Voice Lab tool altogether and having users submit voice cloning requests that it has to manually verify. 

Hollywood may be taking another stab at a Tomb Raider production, but this time for the small screen. The Hollywood Reportersources say Amazon is creating a Tomb Raider TV series for Prime Video, with Phoebe Waller-Bridge (of Fleabag fame) set to be an executive producer and write the script. It's not certain who would star, but we wouldn't count on movie stars Angelina Jolie or Alicia Vikander reprising the role of Lara Croft. The show is reportedly still in the development stage.

We've asked Amazon for comment. A collaboration like this wouldn't be surprising, at least. Amazon is publishing the next Tomb Raider game, and Waller-Bridge previously struck a three-year deal with Amazon that includes projects like the novel adaptation Sign Here. Sources for The Reporter claim Amazon was "aggressive" in pursuing a deal renewal late last year.

The rumor comes as game-based TV shows have their moment in the spotlight. HBO's The Last of Us has already been successful enough to get a second season. Sony, meanwhile, is prepping God of War, Gran Turismo and Horizon titles for Netflix and Prime Video. A Tomb Raider series would bolster Amazon's game-themed catalog and help it compete against rivals like Netflix, which already has hits like the League of Legends offshoot Arcane.

Amazon also hasn't been shy about chasing after potential blockbusters. The company reportedly spent $1 billion on The Lord of Rings: The Rings of Power, for instance. While a Tomb Raider show isn't likely to be as lavish, Waller-Bridge's involvement suggests Amazon is eager for a hit. Amazon struggled to breach the top streaming charts last year — this might give it better ammunition against Netflix successes like Stranger Things.