Amazon has shared the first trailer for its long-awaited adaptation of Robert Jordan’s Wheel of Time. If you’re a newcomer to the fantasy series, the clip sketches out the basics of the world the author created before his death in 2007. 

In the Wheel of Time, only women known as Aes Sedai can channel magic. A powerful sorceress named Moiraine (played by Gone Girl and Hostiles actor Rosamund Pike) comes across a small town called Two Rivers where she finds five young men and women. One of them she believes is the Dragon Reborn, an entity that could be either the savior or destroyer of humanity.

Amazon first announced it was working on a live-action adaptation of Robert Jordan’s 14-volume fantasy back in 2018, but like with the company’s other big-budget fantasy adaptation, filming was delayed by the COVID-19 pandemic. The first three episodes of the Wheel of Time will debut on Amazon Prime Video on Friday, November 19th, with new episodes to follow every week thereafter until December 24th when the season finale starts streaming.

How do you build on a filmography that includes disaster movies like The Day After Tomorrow and Independence Day? If you’re Roland Emmerich, the answer is, quite simply, to drop the Moon on the planet. In the first trailer for his latest film, Moonfall, Earth’s natural satellite has decided to do humanity a solid favor and put it out of its misery by crashing into its anchor.

You might think its title says almost everything you need to know about Moonfall, but, sorry, the end of the world is only part of the story here. According to the film’s official synopsis, a “mysterious force” is what sets the Moon on its collision course with Earth. It’s up to a NASA executive, former astronaut and conspiracy theorist — played by Halle Berry, Patrick Wilson and John Bradley, respectively — to save the world. “These unlikely heroes will mount an impossible last-ditch mission into space, leaving behind everyone they love, only to find out that our Moon is not what we think it is,” the film’s official summary says.

I’ll say it now. I hope it’s not aliens that are behind everything. Either way, Moonfall looks like it will be a fun and trashy way to spend an hour or two forgetting about all the real problems haunting humans at the moment. The film will debut in theaters on February 4th, 2022. We can't wait.

Fans of celeb-endorsed gadgets rejoice. Hollywood's busiest man Dwayne Johnson has found time to release another pair of workout headphones under the Project Rock line he created with Under Armor. The cans are essentially an updated version of the durable over-ears released in 2018. But, this is more of a trio than a tag team. Built by JBL, the new headphones' standout upgrades include adaptive noise cancelling and a promised 45-hour battery life. With speed charging, you can get a purported two hours of playback time in just five minutes. 

Like their predecessors, the over-ears are designed to be the ultimate gym buddy. The IPX4 rating means they can withstand your sweaty workouts. While UA provided the extra grip on the headband and supervent materials on the fast-drying cushions, which you can remove and hand wash. 

Under Armor

Johnson, meanwhile, finely tuned JBL's Charged Sound to his liking. Possibly, so he could listen to his workout playlist on Spotify or relive his atrocious gospel rap ditty, Pie. Just so you know who cooked these up, his Brahma Bull insignia his prominently placed on each ear cup. Additional audio tech includes two ambient modes that filter through external chatter and sounds. Google Assistant and Amazon Alexa are also on hand for when you need voice commands mid-workout.

UA Project Rock Over-Ear Training headphones are out now via JBL and Under Armor for $299.95.

This article contains mild spoilers for season two, episode three of 'Star Trek: Lower Decks.'

This week’s episode of Lower Decks, “We’ll Always Have Tom Paris,” manages to squeeze two references into its title: a season one The Next Generation installment called “We’ll Always Have Paris,” and the name of a main cast member of Star Trek: Voyager, Lieutenant Tom Eugene Paris. But aside from that clever bit of wordplay, the title also carries a deeper meaning: That as much as we’d like to forget about the more embarrassing moments of the Star Trek franchise, they still happened and they weren’t all bad. Even, and especially, Voyager.

CBS

Viewer reactions to Voyager have been rather polarized over the course of the 26 years since it premiered. Back in the ‘90s, many fans were excited to have a “real” Star Trek show again, one that took place on a ship that was constantly exploring, unlike the comparatively stationary political drama of Deep Space Nine. But clunky writing soured many people’s opinion on Voyager, and toward the end of its run the show was known more for Seven of Nine’s skintight outfits and its slate of guest stars of the week, including Jason Alexander and Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson.

After the show went off the air, the franchise stopped moving forward in its timeline, choosing to explore Starfleet’s founding in Enterprise and rebooting the entire universe completely with the 2009 Star Trek movie. While fans were thrown a bone with a brief cameo by Admiral Kathryn Janeway in the last TNG-era film, Nemesis, Voyager would essentially disappear from the Star Trek canon until the appearance of Seven of Nine in episode four of Picard.

Trae Patton

For fans of The Next Generation, Picard had its upsides: We got to see Troi and Riker as a family, and Data got a better sendoff into the afterlife. But for fans of Voyager, it was anything but positive, with the death of a supporting character and a rather grim existence for fan-favorite Seven of Nine.

Star Trek: Lower Decks rolls back the clock a little bit, as it takes place a year after the events of Nemesis, making it our first real view of the Star Trek universe’s immediate future after TNG, DS9 and Voyager. The Dominion War is over, Romulus is under a new regime and the crew of the USS Voyager are basically celebrities after seven years spent in the Delta Quadrant; Picard takes place nearly twenty years later, when the luster would have been gone.

Matt Kennedy

Here everything is just shiny and new and worthy of commemorative plates — a bit of a weird thing to exist in a post-scarcity culture, but this is a comedy series, after all. And in this week’s B-plot, Brad Boimler is looking to get one of his plates signed by a special guest to the USS Cerritos: Tom Paris. Or, as Brad refers to the former Voyager crew member, “Creator of Fairhaven, Captain Proton himself” as well as the first human to break the transwarp barrier. Straight off, that’s a reference to three of the goofiest, oddball and some say worst episodes of Star Trek: Voyager. And just in case you forgot what was so bad about the last one, Mariner asks “is he still a salamander?,” because that is a thing that happened in the episode “Threshold.”

Undeterred (and perhaps even encouraged) by the weirdness, Boimler is all hyped to meet his hero. Even after the ship’s system doesn’t recognize him and won’t let him through any doors, he takes to the Jefferies tubes to make his way to the bridge to meet Lt. Paris.

In a way, it feels like a metaphor for how the fandom feels about Star Trek: Voyager now. While everyone admits it had a lot of dumb moments, those actually made it more endearing. The famous line “there’s coffee in that nebula” would inspire astronaut Samantha Cristoforetti to bring a replica uniform with her and wear it on a mission back in 2015:

And who can forget the infamous “Tuvix” episode, where crew members Tuvok and Neelix were merged into one being thanks to a transporter accident? Though the resulting individual was healthy and happy, the decision was made to force him to split back into his component persons, inspiring the recent internet rallying cry “Janeway murdered Tuvix.” Even Janeway actor Kate Mulgrew entered the debate, responding to a tweet from Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. When you’ve got politicians involved it’s not really a fandom in-joke anymore.

Maybe it’s time to give Voyager a bit more credit. It’s not as good as TNG or DS9, but it still has its fair share of fans. I remember a time when it seemed like it was constantly running on Spike TV (now the Paramount Network), as opposed to Deep Space Nine, which is seldom rerun due to its serialized nature. Last year I sat down and rewatched the entire Star Trek franchise, including Voyager, and saw quite a few episodes I had missed the first time. I found myself enjoying some of it, cringing just as often, and eventually remembering why I had stopped watching the show for a while back when it aired. In general, I feel like the show’s biggest problem was missed potential, like the way the conflict between the Starfleet and Maquis crew members was quickly smoothed over, how it underutilized many of its cast, and why on earth did Harry Kim never get promoted.

CBS

However, it’s not the job of Lower Decks to explain or redeem Voyager. Boimler and Tom Paris are only the B-plot here, with the main drive of the episode being Tendi and Mariner’s mission to pick up a package for Doctor T’Ana as well as Rutherford’s quest to find out how a certain dead officer is alive again. The episode just asks us to consider what it would be like to be a Starfleet officer and hear about all of Voyager’s adventures in the Delta Quadrant. Weird and goofy? Yes. But honestly, they’re also pretty cool.

Kanye West is no stranger to dabbling with technology (he discussed a Teenage Engineering collaboration in 2019), but now there's a device you can buy for yourself. The rapper and electronics design firm Kano have introduced a Donda Stem Player that, as the name implies, lets you remix music from Kanye's upcoming album Donda (plus your own tunes) using song stems.

The puck-like gadget reportedly lets you isolate song parts and control aspects like bass, drums, samples and vocals. You can reportedly split "any" song into stems. We've asked Kano how this works, but it's unlikely that it will perfectly separate song elements — that's a difficult feat for a full-fledged PC, let alone something as portable as this.

The Stem Player also includes familiar tools including effects, four-channel audio mixing, live sampling and real-time loop and speed controls. You navigate much of the interface through four touch-sensitive "light sliders" with haptic feedback and customizable colors, and you can save and share your creations with othrs.

You can pipe audio through the built-in speaker, Bluetooth or a 3.5mm headphone jack through a variety of lossy and lossless formats (including AAC, AIFF, MP3 and WAV). You'll have just 8GB of storage to work with, though — minus the bundled Donda stems.

You can order the Stem Player now for $200. That's not a trivial outlay if you're eager to tinker with songs, but it's relatively affordable as far as electronic music-making devices go. Just be aware that it's really just one part of a larger creative toolset, not your ticket to stardom.

It's rare for a game's concept to hook me within a few seconds, but Twelve Minutes managed to do that way back in 2015. Before it gained an all-star cast including Daisy Ridley, James McAvoy and Willem Dafoe, it was an intriguing indie point-and-click adventure with a Groundhog's Day-esque time loop and a unique, top-down perspective. Its interactive narrative, combined with a wealth of cinematic influences, made it seem as if developer Luis Antonio was crafting something meant just for me.

That's pretty much how I felt at the beginning of the game. You play as a man who comes home to a small apartment. Your wife has some special news, which you celebrate over a romantic dinner. All of a sudden, a cop starts pounding on the door and accuses her of murder. Things go downhill fast, and in an instant you're right back to the beginning of the night. Your mission: Figure out what the hell is happening.

Sounds like a solid thriller, right? But after spending six hours with the game, I was furious. What started out as a fun mystery devolved into a repetitive slog. I was forced to abuse my seemingly lovely wife. Sometimes I had to watch her be repeatedly tortured by that sadistic cop. And I became a murderer myself, several times over. Making things even worse, my reward for that hellish journey was an array of twists so convoluted, so mind-numbingly dumb, I was angry about it for days. Say what you will about the works of M. Night Shyamalan, but at least his twists feel original. (And yes, I know those twists occur less often than you may think.)

I won't spoil where Twelve Minutes ultimately goes. And, to be honest, I'm hesitant to even point out that a story has twists at all. But for a mystery like this, I figure that's to be expected. All of this time looping detective work just has to lead to something truly dramatic! And it's clear that Luis Antonio genuinely wants to blow your mind. It's just a shame almost everything falls flat at the end.

That's not to say Twelve Minutes isn't worth playing. The game's early hours set up a fascinating mystery box. Your small apartment has a cramped kitchen and living space, a bathroom, a bathroom and a closet. That's it. Everything you need to complete the game is there (or gets there later). Some of those puzzle pieces feel organic, like the mugs that you can fill with water, or the large knife tempting you in the kitchen. Some of them, like the light switch that can electrocute people on cue, are hilariously convenient.

I realized Twelve Minutes was doing something special early on when it managed to work its way into my subconscious. I thought of new things to try during long walks and after sleeping on a particularly annoying problem. That's a sign that, for a while at least, I was genuinely invested in the story. It helps that Twelve Minutes also has some solid voice work, which goes a long way toward connecting you to the characters. You don't get a full look at anyone's face (even if you try to scope out the cop through your front door's peephole), so it's nice to have some human performances grounding the story. If you’ve got Xbox Game Pass, it’s worth checking out the game just to experience its first few hours.

After the novelty wears off, though, the game quickly takes a turn for the worse. Eventually, you'll have to complete a long series of tasks over and over until you figure out your next step. And sometimes that can mean doing the same five tasks dozens of times. Twelve Minutes gives you a few easy ways to speed things up, like a single dialog option that can prove you're actually going through a time loop and that she's genuinely in danger. But a few more narrative shortcuts would make the game's rough last act more tolerable.

One major moment gives you only a few seconds to show one character a specific item. It's easy to miss that's something you can even do. And even when I knew what I had to do, after looking up a few guides, I still failed to trigger the right interaction several times. At that point, the game began to feel less like a puzzle I needed to solve and more like a Saw trap that I needed to escape from.

Annapurna Interactive

I suppose these issues could be overlooked if Twelve Minutes had a better script, but even in that respect it fails. It's stronger toward the beginning, but like a J.J. Abrams story, it has no clear idea where to go at the end. Characters start to act in completely different ways, which is hard to swallow after seeing them in one light for several hours. A sympathetic turn for Dafoe's cop feels particularly out of place, after seeing multiple loops where he kills you and your wife, and that’s even after getting the MacGuffin he's looking for. You don't need to have an ACAB tattoo to call him a monster.

I wouldn't write off Twelve Minutes a bad game, but based on where the story goes, it’s ultimately disappointing. Luis Antonio and his team spent over seven years working on the game, and it's a shame to see my enthusiasm for it fall apart in six hours.

Netflix's live-action adaptation of classic anime Cowboy Bebop has been a long time coming, and the show finally has a release date. The 10-episode first season will start streaming on November 19th.

Although Netflix hasn't posted a trailer just yet, it provided a first proper look at Cowboy Bebop in a bunch of photos. The images show John Cho (Spike Spiegel), Mustafa Shakir (Jet Black) and Daniella Pineda (Faye Valentine) in character, as well as an adorable corgi.

Live-action adaptations of anime haven't typically been well-received (here's looking at you, Ghost in the Shell). There's pressure on Netflix to get this take on Cowboy Bebop right, but things are looking promising. The core cast looks great in the first batch of images, while some key creatives from the 1998 anime are involved. Legendary composer Yoko Kanno returns, while original director Shinichirō Watanabe consulted on the Netflix show.

Production started in 2019 but it was paused for eight months after Cho sustained a knee injury on the set. Filming eventually wrapped in March.

Netflix

Music publishers have been on a spending spree in recent years, buying the catalogs and copyrights for songs of famous musicians at a frantic pace. Last December, Universal Music Publishing Group bought up Bob Dylan’s entire discography in a deal estimated at more than $300 million. Similarly, Stevie Nicks sold an 80 percent share of her works to Primary Wave Music for an estimated $100 million that same month. But as all this money changes hands for the industry’s biggest stars, one songwriting startup has plans to open the firehose of music royalties to the everyman.

“You see these huge deals, like the Bob Dylan deal with the publishing rights and all this money,” Alex Mitchell, co-founder and CEO of Boomy told Engadget. “It started with a recognition that most people are going to be left out of that and it caused us to have a conversation about equity in the music industry, 'how do we fairly remunerate artists, what's the role of labels,' there's just chaos happening in the music industry right now.”

Mitchell realized that one major obstacle keeping amateur musicians from becoming published musicians was a technological one. Setting up a home recording studio is no small task, and teaching oneself how to navigate the hyper-granular control schemes of professional-grade DAWs (digital audio workstations) like Ableton Live or Pro Tools can take months, if not years, to fully master. But what if you had an AI-based co-writer to handle the heavy technical lifting instead, similar to what Tik Tok and Instagram do for their creators?

“We really started looking at what it takes to draw creativity out of somebody, what kind of tool can you put in their hands — where there's so much of the process that's semi- or fully-automated — that they can just add their own layer of humanity to it.” What they came up with was Boomy.

“There's already AI being used in studios and in the music creation process,” Mitchell said. “A great example of this is Ozone auto-mastering. They have used artificial intelligence to be able to create great mixes, put great final polish on tracks, things like that.”

“So what we've done is we've taken a lot of those concepts and we've rewritten this stuff from the ground up,” he continued. “[It’s] less to think about how people usually make music, and more in the context of, if somebody doesn't have any skills at all, how fast can we get them making some stuff that they think is pretty cool?”

The web-based app is, essentially, a one-button music studio. Users can compose wholly original songs in around 5 to 10 minutes simply by clicking Create Song from the homepage, selecting the desired style of beat — whether that’s rap, lo-fi, experimental or “global grooves” — and then fiddling with the composition and mix until they’re satisfied. That song can then be uploaded to any of 40-plus streaming and social platforms where the song’s author can earn royalties based on the number of times their song is played.

Embedded below is a loopable, meditative jingle I put together during the course of my research. Despite my inherent lack of rhythm and general disinterest in music production, I found this to be a rather relaxing and enjoyable experience. After choosing the underlying beat and waiting a half-minute for the AI to generate a mix, the production process largely involved just shuffling icons around to adjust the composition and fiddling with dropdown menus to the instrument sets until I got something that I liked and think vaguely resembles the Konami menu screen music I grew up with. The entire process took less than 10 minutes.

Unlike recurrent neural network analysis models such as OpenAI or Google’s Magenta which, for example, can analyze Michael Jackson songs to be able to recreate the King of Pop’s signature sound, Boomy is not trained on copyrighted works. This is due in part because of the highly-segmented nature of copyright law, which varies drastically between nations and territories, but also because of the black box nature of such systems. If the infinite monkey theorem is any barometer, there is always a chance (albeit tiny) that a system trained on Michael Jackson might randomly spit out a perfect recreation of “Thriller.” And that’s very bad for the system’s designer.

“If I'm a music publisher and I own the rights to Michael Jackson,” Mitchell said. “I'm going to look at that model I'm gonna say ‘great, you know what, that's all mine’… if you're making a copy of somebody else's work, even if it's transformed, you're probably going to owe some publishing on that.’”

Instead, the team is taking a bottom up approach, leveraging previous experience in A&R research to train its AI in building beats and compositions from scratch. “We have some really advanced algorithms that are doing automatic mixing, deciding what sound should go together — what are the features of those sounds, how do those fit together, what is the perceived loudness rate of those sounds,” Mitchell explained.

Those features grew from a brute-force development approach — putting together various combinations of beats and compositions, then presenting them to beta testers. “In our first iteration of our model had a 98-percent rejection rate, but a 2-percent stay rate,” he continued. “And in that 2 percent, over millions of sessions, we started saying, ‘okay, here are groups of features that go well together.’”

Mitchell doesn’t view Boomy simply as a music creation tool, but as a means to achieve “​​the ideal world that we want to create," one which would allow creators anywhere on the planet to register themselves as a co-writer of their work alongside Boomy at their local publishing rights organization. However, because copyright law varies from country to country, Boomy has established an alternative way to ensure that songwriters get paid for their creative works.

“So what we're saying here is, a real world example would be, we just built a music studio, we filled it with great equipment, and spent millions of dollars building the studio,” Mitchell told Engadget. “You can come in and use it for free, make whatever you want, and on your way out, we're assigning you to our label, and we're going to give you an 80 percent rev share on everything we collect from what you made in the studio.”

“The IP vests with us,” he continued, noting that Boomy has been used to create more than 3 million songs to date, “which actually makes us, ironically, the largest record label in the world.” For users who are either already established musicians or otherwise want to obtain sole ownership of their songs, ”they can submit a rights request, and we can basically either sell the copyright to them or come to some other arrangement.”

While Mitchell could not share exact figures with Engadget, he did estimate that in the two years since Boomy’s launch, the company has paid out “tens of thousands' ' of dollars in royalties to its user base.

Moving forward, Mitchell foresees Boomy’s UI to add more additional control features and composition inputs, “over the next several months, we're really gonna focus and double down on vocal, melody and top line,” he explained.

The company is also working on new methods to earn royalties for its users. “We’ve got a bunch of influencer groups lined up and we've been doing some stuff behind the scenes to place tracks into YouTube videos,” Mitchell continued. “If you're a creator, or if you've got a podcast, rather than go pay for music rights, why not get paid for the music that you're using?”

OnlyFans, the platform that allows creators to sell material directly to customers, will soon implement new restrictions on the publication of adult content. Starting in October, the company will ban the sale of sexually explicit content and depictions of sexual acts. The move does not cover all nudity, but says that specific rules will be outlined in an as-yet unpublished acceptable use policy. In a statement, OnlyFans said that the changes were prompted by “requests” made by its “banking partners and payout providers.” In short, the company’s arm has been twisted by the same big banks that have waged war on online sex work for years.

Big Business

The business can certainly attribute much of its success to enabling sex work and helping sex workers to get paid. Over the last two years, OnlyFans has grown from relative obscurity into a brand that is synonymous with adult content. Earlier this year, it boasted that its creators had earned more than $3 billion, and the platform was name-checked in a Beyoncé remix. It’s believed that the company, which had around 7 million users in 2019, has seen that figure reach closer to 130 million in recent months. And, on June 16th, Bloomberg reported that the site was looking to attract investors in order to raise more funding at a valuation of more than $1 billion.

It is clear, however, that a number of people who both create content for, and use, the site feel that the impending adult content ban is a betrayal. In a statement shared with Engadget, Isaac Hayes III, founder of Fanbase — a social media site that lets users sell their content — summed up the general sentiment rather neatly. Hayes said that the move was “disgraceful,” and that OnlyFans had “made billions off that user base.” He added that dumping sex workers after becoming a household name was “exactly what these platforms do. Discard the users who make it popular once they get what they want.” And in this case, it does seem as if the twin aims of securing more money from investors and retaining access to banking is what prompted the move. It’s a story that we’ve heard several times before.

Deja Vu

The most recent example, and one that we covered extensively at the time, was the cultivation and subsequent dumping of a sex work community on Patreon. Before 2017, the site had passionately and publicly courted sex workers, encouraging them to use its platform. In 2016, it loudly defied PayPal’s longstanding ban on payments to sex workers, allowing users to support content creators through its platform. At the time, Patreon even criticized PayPal’s lack of transparency, saying that its opaque policy “impacts the lives of Adult Content creators.”

This attitude did not, however, last very long. On September 15th, 2017, Patreon raised $60 million from investors, and updated its content policy a month later, seeming to repudiate the sex workers it had previously courted. In subsequent interviews, the updated policy was described as not a big deal, with the company pledging to work with creators to ensure compliance. The general notion was that Patreon would crack down on content that was illegal or otherwise nonconsensual.

A year later, however, and the site would further toughen its rules, saying that any and all adult content — including the famous erotic art project Four Chambers — was no longer permitted. (Four Chambers, the name of a British art-erotica collective led by artist Vex Ashley, was long held as the canary in the Patreon coal mine.) Patreon said that it had stepped up “proactive review of content [...] due to requirements from our payment partners.” In short, the same banks that Patreon had battled so loudly the year before had tied the site in knots, demanding it hunt out any and all content that could be considered adult.

It's worth noting that swerving away from sex work doesn't ensure the future prosperity of a business. In 2019, Patreon CEO Jack Conte told CNBC that its business model was not sustainable, and in April 2021, the Wall Street Journal said the site was still not profitable. Tumblr meanwhile, which under Engadget’s parent company mass-purged adult content from its site in 2018 but left a wide variety of neo Nazi content on its platform, saw its valuation fall from $1.1 billion in 2013 to just $3 million in 2019.

Tangled up in Paperwork

Back in April, MasterCard announced that it would further toughen the reporting requirements around adult content. John Verdeschi, Senior Vice President, wrote that banks using its network would need to “certify that the seller of adult content has effective controls in place to monitor, block and, where necessary, take down all illegal content.” This includes rules requiring platforms to keep a record of the identity of every performer shown, as well as who uploads the content. In addition, all content would need to be reviewed prior to release, and all platforms need to run a beefed-up complaints resolution process to take down illegal or non-consensual material within seven days.

As TechDirt wrote back then, as reasonable as these policies sound, they seem intentionally designed to block all adult content, not just the illegal stuff. As it explains, “the new policy [...] makes it impossible for streaming platforms to comply with the new rules. Since they’re not able to prescreen streamed content, they’re [sic] just going to start blocking anything that seems like it might lead to MasterCard pulling the plug.” Mary Moody tweeted, upon announcement of the policy change, that “OnlyFans, MyFreeCams & more are in danger.” As with Patreon, MasterCard's reporting requirements appear to be such a burden that companies would rather avoid the issue altogether than attempt to comply.

This isn’t a new story, however, and in 2015 Engadget laid out in detail how banks were systematically withdrawing access for adult content platforms. This isn’t just prohibitions on working with select adult content sites, but a blanket-ban that impacted individuals beyond their life in the sex industry. JPMorgan Chase shut down a number of bank accounts owned by adult performers, and refused banking services to a company that makes condoms. This crackdown had an disproportionate impact on individual accounts held by women and LGBTQ people.

The Right

This crackdown is part of a broader alliance between banks, lawmakers, right-wing pressure groups and religious extremists. As The New Republic explained late last year, these groups have been able to use the cover of sex trafficking to push an anti-porn, anti-sex agenda. The movement’s most successful victory was the passing of FOSTA-SESTA, a US law designed to tackle human trafficking by neutering the safe harbor provisions of Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act 1996. Despite contravening the first amendment, the move has not shut down many groups of human traffickers, but has closed safety services created for, and used by, sex workers, and even forced Barnes & Noble to purge its ebook store of erotica.

Naturally, OnlyFans became a clear target of those campaigners both because of its success and because it contradicted their narrative. By enabling individuals to sell their material to consumers without intermediaries, it was allowing people to make a living. You can also argue that sites like OnlyFans have enabled people otherwise excluded from the workforce — this report from Arousability explains that a person with chronic pain who can’t work a 9-to-5 job found that sex work offered them financial independence they couldn’t have found otherwise.

Alternatives

While creators wait for OnlyFans to detail just what content will be allowed, in its brave new world, many may wish to take their business elsewhere. There are a number of platforms that occupy a similar space in the market, including AVN Stars, FanCentro, Unlockd and AdultNode. Just For Fans, for instance, says that it is a sex worker owned-and-operated platform, and that it will welcome any and all creators that OnlyFans has “abandoned.” Similarly, a number of in-progress projects to build more sex-worker owned and operated platforms are currently underway.

It’s likely that this will be seen as another reason to switch to a blockchain and cryptocurrency-based system as a way of escaping the reach of big banking. There are several, including SpankCoin and Nafty, that offer sex workers the ability to sell content through their systems. And as more major platforms are picked off by a combination of payment processors and regulators, this space is going to grow. 

But there are inherent risks to switching, including currency fluctuations and the risk that a sex work-specific currency can still be excluded from mainstream exchanges. And then there’s the fact that if a platform gets big enough, it gets noticed — and targeted — by anti-sex advocates. Crypto can shore up the finances, but pressure can always be exerted on providers, hosts and platform owners wherever they may be. 

And that often forces creators to leap from platform to platform to keep one jump ahead of the people who want to strip them of their ability to make money. But every time they do so, they risk losing their user bases, and have to expend time and energy to recover the fans that they already had. Either way, until there is better political and corporate leadership who can handle the nuanced situation of online sex work, individuals will often be left with no choice but to keep moving, or sink.

One of the more exciting Star Wars projects in the immediate pipeline is Star Wars: Visions, the anime anthology series that's coming to Disney+ on September 22nd. Disney previously offered a behind-the-scenes look at the show, and now it has revealed the first trailer. You can watch the clip below in either the original Japanese with subtitles or an English dub.

The trailer is stunning, no matter the language in which you opt to watch it. The two-minute video full of Star Wars staples like lightsabers, Star Destroyers, Stormtroopers and droids, albeit with completely distinct visuals from other animated series like The Bad Batch.

Each of the nine Star Wars: Visions episodes has a unique style and an original story. Seven studios crafted the installments: Kamikaze Douga, Geno Studio (Twin Engine), Studio Colorido (Twin Engine), Trigger, Kinema Citrus, Science Saru and Production I.G. Trigger and Science Saru each made two episodes.

“Their stories showcase the full spectrum of bold storytelling found across Japanese animation; each told with a freshness and voice that expands our understanding of what a Star Wars story can be, and celebrates a galaxy that has been such an inspiration to so many visionary storytellers," James Waugh, executive producer and Lucasfilm vice president of franchise content and strategy, said.

Disney also announced the main Japanese and English voice casts for the series. Along with returning actors such as Temuera Morrison (Boba Fett), there are a host of well-known performers involved in the English dubs, including Lucy Liu, Joseph Gordon-Levitt, Neil Patrick Harris, Alison Brie, Simu Liu (star of the upcoming Marvel blockbuster Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings) and George Takei.

Given that George Lucas took inspiration from the films of Akira Kurosawa and Japanese culture when creating A New Hope, Visions will sort of take Star Wars back to its roots. In any case, the episodes should offer completely fresh perspectives on the Star Wars universe.