Today, Disney+ launched its ad-supported tier, "Disney+ Basic," at $7.99/month. The plan is currently only available in the U.S. and will become available in other countries sometime next year. TechCrunch reports: Netflix has its work cut out for it if it wants to compete successfully with Disney+'s new ad-supported tier. For instance, Disney+ Basic not only lets viewers stream high-quality video, including Full HD, HDR10, 4K Ultra HD, Dolby Vision and Expanded Aspect Ratio with IMAX Enhanced, but it also lets subscribers stream on up to four supported devices simultaneously. Plus, the ad plan includes Disney+'s full content catalog. Netflix's ad-supported plan, on the other hand, only supports 720p HD video quality, subscribers can only stream on one device at the same time and around 5% to 10% of Netflix's content library is missing due to licensing restrictions.

Neither Disney+ Basic nor Netflix's "Basic with ads" plan allows offline viewing or downloads. Other features not included in the Disney+ Basic plan at launch are GroupWatch, SharePlay and Dolby Atmos. A Disney spokesperson told TechCrunch that the company hopes to support this in the future, but the exact timing is unknown. Ads will range from 15 to 30 or 45 seconds long, the spokesperson added. As we previously reported, Disney+ is limiting the total ad load to an average of four minutes of commercials an hour. Preschool content has zero ads. "Today's launch marks a milestone moment for Disney+ and puts consumer choice at the forefront. With these new ad-supported offerings, we're able to deliver greater flexibility for consumers to enjoy the full breadth and depth of incredible storytelling from The Walt Disney Company," Michael Paull, president of Direct to Consumer, said in a statement.

Apple on Tuesday announced Apple Music Sing, a karaoke experience that will be built right into the Apple Music app. The Verge reports: With Apple Music Sing, you'll be able to follow along with Apple Music's real-time lyrics and adjust the volume of the vocals so that you can better hear your singing voice. There are a few features designed to make it easier to sing with others, too. Background vocals can appear independently of main vocals, according to Apple, and there will be a duet view as well if you want to sing along with a friend. Apple will have more than 50 "dedicated companion playlists" featuring karaoke-ready songs that you can pick from. Apple Music Sing is launching "later this month" for Apple Music subscribers.

The release candidate for Winamp version 5.9.1 builds on the groundwork laid by August's 5.9 update to fix some bugs and add new features to the reanimated music player. "Most of these are straightforward updates or improvements to existing features, but because it's 2022, one of the only new features is support for music NFTs," reports Ars Technica. From the report: "Winamp's latest version lets music fans link their Metamask wallet via Brave, Chrome, or Firefox to Winamp. It then connects their favorite music NFTs to their tried-and-true player," the company said in a press release provided to Ars. "Winamp supports audio and video files distributed under both the ERC-721 and ERC-1155 standards, and is launching this new feature for Ethereum and Polygon/Matic protocols." To directly display websites needed to download these NFT playlists, according to the release notes, would require an updated rendering engine for Winamp's in-app browser, which is currently based on Internet Explorer 10.

There's still plenty here for legacy Winamp fans to like, and it's nice to see that all the modernization work done in the 5.9 update is paying off in the form of faster updates. Among many other fixes, the new release includes a "memory footprint reduction," a bandwidth increase for streamed music, an update to OpenSSL 3.0.5, and a few other updates for the underlying codecs and other software that Winamp uses to do its thing. As for the NFT support, Winamp developer Eddy Richman (who goes by the handle "DJ Egg" on the Winamp forums) wrote that people who don't want it can remove it, either during the install process or after Winamp is installed.

"The Perl Advent Calendar has come a long way since it's first year in 2000," says an announcement on Reddit. But in fact the online world now has many daily advent calendars aimed at programmers — offering tips about their favorite language or coding challenges.

• The HTMHell site — which bills itself as "a collection of bad practices in HTML, copied from real websites" — decided to try publishing 24 original articles for their 2022 HTMHell Advent Calendar. Elsewhere on the way there's the Web Performance Calendar, promising daily articles for speed geeks. And the 24 Days in December blog comes to life every year with new blog posts for PHP users.

• The JVM Advent Calendar brings a new article daily about a JVM-related topic. And there's also a C# Advent calendar promising two new blog posts about C# every day up to (and including) December 25th.

• The Perl Advent Calendar offers fun stories about Perl tools averting December catastrophes up at the North Pole. (Day One's story — "Silent Mite" — described Santa's troubles building software for a ninja robot alien toy, since its embedded hardware support contract prohibited unwarrantied third-party code, requiring a full code rewrite using Perl's standard library.) Other stories so far this December include "Santa is on GitHub" and "northpole.cgi"

• The code quality/security software company SonarSource has a new 2022 edition of their Code Security Advent Calendar — their seventh consecutive year — promising "daily challenges until December 24th. Get ready to fill your bag of security tricks!" (According to a blog post the challenges are being announced on Twitter and on Mastadon.

• Just as the Perl community spawned another language named Perl 6 — now called Raku — there's also a Raku-themed advent calendar. (It's now at a new URL, though it's been running since 2009.) Day Three's post tells the story of Santa and the Rakupod Wranglers.

• "24 Pull Requests" dares participants to make 24 pull requests before December 24th. (The site's tagline is "giving back to open source for the holidays.") Over the years tens of thousands of developers (and organizations) have participated — and this year they're also encouraging organizers to hold hack events.

• The Advent of JavaScript and Advent of CSS sites promise 24 puzzles delivered by email (though you'll have to pay if you also want them to email you the solutions!)

• TryHackMe.com has its own set of darily cybersecurity puzzles (and even a few prizes).

• For 2022 Oslo-based Bekk Consulting (a "strategic internet consulting company") is offering an advent calendar of their own. A blog post says its their sixth annual edition, and promises "new original articles, podcasts, tutorials, listicles and videos every day up until Christmas Eve... all written and produced by us - developers, designers, project managers, agile coaches, management consultants, specialists and generalists."

Whether you participate or not, the creation of programming-themed advent calendar sites is a long-standing tradition among geeks, dating back more than two decades. (Last year Smashing magazine tried to compile an exhaustive list of the various sites serving all the different developer communities.)

But no list would be complete without mentioning Advent of Code. This year's programming puzzles involve everything from feeding Santa's reindeer and loading Santa's sleigh. The site's About page describes it as "an Advent calendar of small programming puzzles for a variety of skill sets and skill levels that can be solved in any programming language you like."

Now in its eighth year, the site's daily two-part programmig puzzles have a massive online following. This year's Day One puzzle was solved by 178,628 participants...

Around 2009 Slashdot was abuzz about how over-the-air broadcasting in North America was switching to a new standard called DTV. (Fun fact: North America and South America have two entirely different broadcast TV standards — both of which are different from the DVB-T standard used in Europe/Africa/Australia.) But 2022 ends with us already talking about DTV's successor in North America: the new broadcast standard NextGen TV.

This time the new standard isn't mandatory for TV stations, CNET points out — and it won't affect cable, satellite or streaming TV. But now even if you're not paying for a streaming TV service, another article points out, in most major American cities "an inexpensive antenna is all you'll need to get get ABC, CBS, Fox, NBC and PBS stations" — and often with a better picture quality: NextGen TV, formerly known as ATSC 3.0, is continuing to roll out across the U.S. It's already widely available, with stations throughout the country broadcasting in the new standard. There are many new TVs with compatible tuners plus several stand-alone tuners to add NextGen to just about any TV. As the name suggests, NextGen TV is the next generation of over-the-air broadcasts, replacing or supplementing the free HD broadcasts we've had for over two decades. NextGen not only improves on HDTV, but adds the potential for new features like free over-the-air 4K and HDR, though those aren't yet widely available.

Even so, the image quality with NextGen is likely better than what you're used to from streaming or even cable/satellite. If you already have an antenna and watch HD broadcasts, the reception you get with NextGen might be better, too.... Because of how it works, you'll likely get better reception if you're far from the TV tower.

The short version is: NextGen is free over-the-air television with potentially more channels and better image quality than older over-the-air broadcasts.
U.S. broadcast companies have also created a site at WatchNextGenTV.com showing options for purchasing a compatible new TV. That site also features a video touting NextGen TV's "brilliant colors and a sharper picture with a wider range of contrast" and its Dolby audio system (with "immersive, movie theatre-quality sound" with enhancements for voice and dialogue "so you get all of the story.") And in the video there's also examples of upcoming interactive features like on-screen quizzes, voting, and shopping, as well as the ability to select multiple camera angles or different audio tracks.

"One potential downside? ATSC 3.0 will also let broadcasters track your viewing habits," CNet reported earlier this year, calling the data "information that can be used for targeted advertising, just like companies such as Facebook and Google use today...

"Ads specific to your viewing habits, income level and even ethnicity (presumed by your neighborhood, for example) could get slotted in by your local station.... but here's the thing: If your TV is connected to the internet, it's already tracking you. Pretty much every app, streaming service, smart TV and cable or satellite box all track your usage to a greater or lesser extent."

But on the plus side... NextGen TV is IP-based, so in practice it can be moved around your home just like any internet content can right now. For example, you connect an antenna to a tuner box inside your home, but that box is not connected to your TV at all. Instead, it's connected to your router. This means anything with access to your network can have access to over-the-air TV, be it your TV, your phone, your tablet or even a streaming device like Apple TV....

This also means it's possible we'll see mobile devices with built-in tuners, so you can watch live TV while you're out and about, like you can with Netflix and YouTube now. How willing phone companies will be to put tuners in their phones remains to be seen, however. You don't see a lot of phones that can get radio broadcasts now, even though such a thing is easy to implement.
But whatever you think — it's already here. By August NextGen TV was already reaching half of America's population, according to a press release from a U.S. broadcaster's coalition. That press release also bragged that 40% of consumers had actually heard of NextGen TV — "up 25% from last year among those in markets where it is available."

The writers of Rogue One: A Star Wars Story "had an idea for a sequel that would have been even darker and more morally ambiguous," writes Screen Rant: Rogue One told the story of how the Rebel Alliance gained access to the Death Star plans, and further explored the sacrifices that needed to be made to defeat the Empire. Famously, the movie led straight into the events of Star Wars: A New Hope, and most of its main characters died, so there was never any true hope for a direct Rogue One sequel. However, the writers of Rogue One did once discuss an idea for a thematic sequel that would have delved into the moral ambiguity of the Rebellion.

Co-writers Gary Whitta and Chris Weitz conceptualized a Rogue One sequel show that would have involved a "Mossad-style Rebel team" tracking down fleeing Imperial war criminals after the fall of the Empire. This would have been an interesting continuation of Rogue One's narrative; a Star Wars show in which the darker side of the Rebel victory could be explored. In that scenario, the Rebels would have had to fight on the offensive, not defensively, reversing the war's dynamic entirely. The show could have explored how far the Rebels were willing to go to hold onto their hard-won freedom, and whether it mirrored anything the Empire did to hang onto its dictatorship.
At the time Lucasfilm was experimenting with "one-and-done stories within blockbuster movies," the article point sout. But Solo: A Star Wars Story "was unable to replicate the same winning formula" as Rogue One. "After that, the ideas for Star Wars' anthology movies fizzled out, essentially replaced with Star Wars TV once Disney+ launched in 2019."

And in an earlier article, Screen Rant points out that The Mandalorian "has already filled in the story gaps that the Rogue One writers were looking to explore. That series dug deep into the criminal underbelly of the post-Empire galaxy and how the remaining imperial loyalists chose to spend their time."

You can read the news in Military Times magazine. "Coming just after the 25th anniversary of the release of the cult classic Starship Troopers (November 1997), Offworld Industries and Sony Pictures Consumer Projects are bringing the fight against the Arachnids to a computer near you."

An official announcement and gameplay teaser were released for the upcoming game this week. "Starship Troopers: Extermination is a co-op FPS that puts you on the far-off front lines of an all-out battle against the Bugs!" explains its page on Steam. "Squad up, grab your rifle, and do your part as an elite Deep Space Vanguard Trooper set to take back planets claimed by the Arachnid threat!"

The page says an "Early Access" launch is planned for 2023: In Starship Troopers: Extermination, our vision is to show a galactic war between the Federation and the Arachnid Empire. After our initial launch and throughout the course of Early Access development, players will get to engage with exciting new updates that expand upon the in-game universe, and provide feedback through the Steam Community Hub that our developers can take into consideration.... [W]e will be sharing an exciting and robust roadmap with content already planned for 2023. Throughout Early Access we will provide players with more weapons, an updated class leveling system as well as progression achievements and unlockable skins for both weapons and armor. Additionally we will be adding vehicles special call in attacks including massive Orbital Strikes to help during missions. On the enemy side we will be adding more bugs, flying enemies, and boss battles that require complex player coordination to accomplish.

As we progress in development, our goal is to then begin ongoing planetary battles where the player can explore new items and enemies introduced in previous updates as an epic war breaks out. This transition adds a new world as we head to the completion of Early Access. The intent throughout Early Access is to convey that this part of our development cycle is the beginning of the war and the battle will only increase in complexity and ferocity as we move to full release.

Starship Troopers: Extermination is expected to be in Early Access for approximately 1 year. The full version of Starship Troopers: Extermination will span multiple worlds to liberate them from the Arachnid Threat. This will include additional weapons, enemies types, class progression upgrades, community events, and encounters. The player will have a more diverse roster of customization options allowing them to tailor their Troopers to fit their playstyle and experience." Starship Troopers: Extermination will launch with a massive map on Planet Valaka. Up to twelve players can team up to complete side and main missions before escaping to the extraction zone. We'll have more to share closer to the Early Access launch in 2023!

We plan to work closely with the community on Steam's Community Hub and in the official Starship Troopers: Extermination Discord as we add features, tune gameplay, and develop new content.
"Starship Troopers is in a league of its own when it comes to 90s science fiction films," writes Boing Boing's Devin Nealy. "Despite serving as an adaptation of the Robert A. Heinlein book, Starship Troopers forges a unique identity through its striking visuals and deft use of satire."

Noting the two "pretty weak" straight-to-video sequels (and two more CGI-animated films), Nealy argues that "Until the franchise finds a creative team that can properly capture the essence of the first film, a video game might be the best option for the series."

Prime Video has supplanted Netflix as the No. 1 subscription streaming outlet in the U.S. in an annual ranking compiled by research firm Parks Associates. Deadline reports: The company didn't disclose its methodology for how it isolates the number of Prime Video subscribers, a metric long cloaked in secrecy due to Amazon's general reluctance to disclose statistics about its Prime business. Still, Parks has been a reputable tracker of the streaming space for more than a decade. For many years in the 2010s, its rankings looked consistent, with the former "Big 3" of Netflix, Prime Video and Hulu sharing the top three spots, always with Netflix at the top. Today, the rankings are much more fragmented given how many new players have entered the scene. The list reflects total subscribers through September 2022, via the OTT Video Market Tracker, a Parks offering described by the firm as "an exhaustive analysis of market trends and profiles of the nearly 100 over-the-top video service providers in the U.S. and Canada."

Amazon said last year it has more than 200 million Prime members, with Prime Video among the program's benefits. Several weeks ago, the company also recently said The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power has been viewed by more than 100 million Prime subscribers worldwide. [...] Netflix, meanwhile, has hit a plateau in the U.S., even shedding a small amount of subscribers over recent quarters. The company reported 73.4 million subscribers in the U.S. and Canada as of September 30, up 100,000 from the previous quarter but below levels in 2021 and earlier this year.

On a global basis, of course, Netflix continues to lead the field with a bit more than 223 million subscribers. Disney has been hot on its heels, with Disney+ now at 164.2 million and the company overall reaching 235.7 million across Disney+, Hulu and ESPN+. The rest of the 2022 chart looks relatively similar to the 2021 edition, though NBCUniversal's Peacock broke through to take the No. 10 spot as Showtime dropped out of the picture.

Streaming giant plans global expansion of program that helped make 'Don't Look Up' less serious. From a report: Before Netflix's 2021 release of "Don't Look Up," a small group of its U.S. subscribers previewed the film and told the streaming giant that the movie came across as too serious, according to people familiar with the matter. The film's creators used that feedback to dial up the comedic element of the film and make it appeal to a broader audience, the people said. While the film received lukewarm reviews among critics, "Don't Look Up" was nominated for four Academy Awards and broke a Netflix record for weekly viewing hours of a film, a record it still holds. Netflix is now planning to expand its group of previewers beyond its current base of 2,000-plus subscribers to include tens of thousands of users around the world early next year, people familiar with those plans said.

Netflix is working to ensure that every dollar spent on content yields the highest level of member attention and engagement across its 223 million-strong subscriber base globally, and comes as streamers more heavily scrutinize content spending and focus more on profitability. Netflix this year suffered two consecutive quarters of subscriber losses and has told Wall Street it expects to keep its spending on new shows and movies to about $17 billion annually for the next few years. The company returned to subscriber growth in the third quarter.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Reuters: Scientists have long pursued a deeper understanding of wormholes and now appear to be making progress. Researchers announced on Wednesday that they forged two miniscule simulated black holes -- those extraordinarily dense celestial objects with gravity so powerful that not even light can escape -- in a quantum computer and transmitted a message between them through what amounted to a tunnel in space-time. It was a "baby wormhole," according to Caltech physicist Maria Spiropulu, a co-author of the research published in the journal Nature. But scientists are a long way from being able to send people or other living beings through such a portal, she said.

"Experimentally, for me, I will tell you that it's very, very far away. People come to me and they ask me, 'Can you put your dog in the wormhole?' So, no," Spiropulu told reporters during a video briefing. "...That's a huge leap." [...] Spiropulu said the researchers found a quantum system that exhibits key properties of a gravitational wormhole but was small enough to implement on existing quantum hardware. The researchers said no rupture of space and time was created in physical space in the experiment, though a traversable wormhole appeared to have emerged based on quantum information teleported using quantum codes on the quantum processor. "There's a difference between something being possible in principle and possible in reality," added physicist and study co-author Joseph Lykken of Fermilab, America's particle physics and accelerator laboratory. "So don't hold your breath about sending your dog through the wormhole. But you have to start somewhere. And I think to me it's just exciting that we're able to get our hands on this at all."

"It looks like a duck, it walks like a duck, it quacks like a duck. So that's what we can say at this point -- that we have something that in terms of the properties we look at, it looks like a wormhole," Lykken said.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Techdirt: The "cord cutting" phenomenon the cable and broadcast sector long denied or downplayed simply shows no sign of slowing down. According to the latest data by Leichtman Research, the top U.S. pay TV companies lost another 785,000 subscribers last quarter as younger Americans continue to shift to streaming video, over the air antennas, or free services like TikTok and YouTube. While alternative pay TV services (streaming on demand and live streaming) services saw a 701,000 subscriber jump during the third quarter, traditional cable companies lost an estimated 981,674 subscribers depart for greener pastures. Phone companies (AT&T, Verizon) and traditional satellite TV companies (DirecTV, Dish) lost 701,000 paying subscribers during the quarter.

Leichtman's analysis never really answers why consumers continue to flee traditional cable (high prices, bloated channel bundles, bullshit fees, comically terrible customer service), instead only focusing on the fact that this was the third best quarter for streaming services in history: "Spurred by a strong quarter from Internet-delivered vMVPD services, pay-TV net losses of about 785,000 in 3Q 2022 were more modest than in the first two quarters of the year," said Bruce Leichtman, president and principal analyst for Leichtman Research Group, Inc. "Not including YouTube TV, which does not regularly report subscriber totals, vMVPDs had nearly 900,000 net additions in the quarter. This was the third most quarterly net adds ever for the top publicly reporting vMVPD services."

Netflix's trailblazing DVD-by-mail rental service has been relegated as a relic in the age of video streaming, but there is still a steady -- albeit shrinking -- audience of diehards who are happily paying to receive those discs in the iconic red-and-white envelopes. From a report: Netflix declined to comment for this story but during a 2018 media event, co-founder and co-CEO of Netflix Reed Hastings suggested the DVD-by-mail service might close around 2023. When -- not if -- it happens, Netflix will shut down a service that has shipped more than 5 billion discs across the U.S. since its inception nearly a quarter century ago. And it will echo the downfall of the thousands of Blockbuster video rental stores that closed because they couldn't counter the threat posed by Netflix's DVD-by-mail alternative.

Shortly before breakup from video streaming, the DVD-by-mail service boasted more than 16 million subscribers, a number that has now dwindled to an estimated 1.5 million subscribers, all in the U.S., based on calculations drawn from Netflix's limited disclosures of the service in its quarterly reports. Netflix's video streaming service now boasts 223 million worldwide subscribers, including 74 million in the U.S. and Canada. "The DVD-by-mail business has bequeathed the Netflix that everyone now knows and watches today," Marc Randolph, Netflix's original CEO, said during an interview at a coffee shop located across the street from the post office in Santa Cruz, California.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: The Comcast "Broadcast TV" fee that isn't included in the company's advertised prices is rising again, tacking as much as $27 onto the monthly bills of cable TV users. Comcast's Broadcast TV and Regional Sports Network fees combined could add nearly $40 to a customer's monthly TV bill after next month's price hikes, all while Comcast advertises much lower prices than people actually pay. "Comcast has started notifying customers and municipalities that it plans to raise video and Internet prices next month, including a whopping $7.35 a month increase for the Broadcast TV fee in one town," a TV Answer Man article said on Saturday. The $7.35-per-month increase is in Taunton, Massachusetts, where Comcast said the Broadcast TV fee will rise from $18.65 to $26.

The Broadcast TV fee is rising from $24.95 a month to $27.25 a month starting on December 20 in Sandown, New Hampshire, a letter (PDF) from Comcast to town government officials said. In Sandown, the Regional Sports Network fee is rising from $11.85 to $12. The TV Answer Man report also said several towns in Michigan were "alerted that the Broadcast Fee will rise from $14.80 to $20.70 a month while the monthly Regional Sports fee will go from $9.50 to $10.15." These are just a few examples as Comcast is raising prices nationwide.

The Broadcast TV charges added to customer bills vary by region. Comcast says the fees are based on the amounts that "broadcast stations charge us to carry them on our cable systems." It's true that Comcast has to pay retransmission consent fees to carry the stations, even though stations can be accessed for free over the air with an antenna. But the sneaky manner in which Comcast and other cable companies pass those costs on to customers can lead to bill shock and unexpected price increases. Comcast's advertised prices do not include the Broadcast TV or the Regional Sports Network fees even though these fees account for a large portion of customers' actual monthly bills. On Comcast's ordering website, the base prices are listed along with a message stating that Broadcast TV and Regional Sports fees are "extra" and that the price is "subject to change." The Broadcast TV and Regional Sports fees also aren't included in how Comcast calculates promotional pricing and thus can be raised even when a customer's promotional rate hasn't expired. Comcast says it's also raising the base prices of monthly service plans, saying the average increase nationwide is 3.8 percent.

Comcast's statement on the price increases blamed the rising cost of video programming but said the overall increases are lower than the most recent inflation rate: "TV networks and other video programmers continue to raise their prices, with broadcast television and sports being the biggest drivers of increases in customers' bills. We're continuing to work hard to manage these costs for our customers while investing in our broadband network to provide the best, most reliable Internet service in the country and to give our customers more low-cost choices in video and connectivity so they can find a package that fits their lifestyle and budget. Our national average increase of 3.8 percent is about half of the most recent rate of inflation."

Some people turn on closed captions because they like how it helps them understand the plotlines of shows and movies, and multitask in front of the tube. Others turn them on because they can't hear what actors are saying. That doesn't always mean they are hard of hearing. From a report: Muddled audio is the top reason why more people are watching video with on-screen text, according to a May survey commissioned by language-teaching app Preply. As more video-production studios embrace advanced audio formats for at-home content, not every device can keep up. Plenty of viewers can't keep up, either.

"If you have people talking or shouting during the adventure scenes, the explode-y sounds are way higher than the dialogue," said Melanie Brooks, a 43-year-old professional musician in Boston. Catching some of the lines in her favorite fantasy and adventure TV series is hard without captions, she added. People tend to blame their flat-screen TVs for bad sound. The tube TVs of decades past had front-facing speakers that sent audio toward you, while new, super-thin models have speakers that are behind the screen or point downward, bouncing sound away from you. But your TV is just one of the culprits. The rest of the problem lies within virtually every other step of the audio process, from a studio's production choices to the device used to watch the content, said Richard Nevens, senior director of audio-hardware product management at Avid Technology, which specializes in audio- and video-editing tools.

Sound mixers combine all the sound in the video, including dialogue, music and background noises, into the audio we hear when we watch movies and shows. The professionals have advanced audio capabilities at their disposal, but they might not translate clearly on devices that aren't built to support state-of-the-art audio, Mr. Nevens said. For this reason, a movie designed to sound great in a giant theater might not sound the same on your smartphone -- or your TV.

James Cameron once got himself onto the list for a potential visit to the International Space Station. It's just one of several surprising scientific achievements buried deep inside GQ's massive 7,000-word profile: After James Cameron's Avatar came out in 2009 and made $2.7 billion, the director found the deepest point that exists in all of earth's oceans and, in time, he dove to it. When Cameron reached the bottom of the Mariana Trench, a couple of hundred miles off the southwest coast of Guam, in March 2012, he became the first person in history to descend the 6.8-mile distance solo, and one of only a few people to ever go that deep....

It would be fair to call him the father of the modern action movie, which he helped invent with his debut, The Terminator, and then reinvent with his second, Aliens; it would be accurate to add that he has directed two of the three top-grossing films in history, in Avatar (number one) and Titanic (number three). But he is also a scientist — a camera he helped design served as the model for one that is currently on Mars, attached to the Mars rover — and an adventurer, and not in the dilettante billionaire sense; when Cameron sets out to do something, it gets done. "The man was born with an explorer's instincts and capacity," Daniel Goldin, the former head of NASA, told me....

The original Avatar... required the invention of dozens of new technologies, from the cameras Cameron shot with to the digital effects he used to transform human actors into animated creatures to the language those creatures spoke in the film. For [his upcoming Avatar sequel] The Way of Water, Cameron told me, he and his team started all over again. They needed new cameras that could shoot underwater and a motion-capture system that could collect separate shots from above and below water and integrate them into a unified virtual image; they needed new algorithms, new AI, to translate what Cameron shot into what you see....

Among other things, Cameron said, The Way of Water would be a friendly but pointed rebuke to the comic book blockbusters that now war with Cameron's films at the top of the box office lists: "I was consciously thinking to myself, Okay, all these superheroes, they never have kids. They never really have to deal with the real things that hold you down and give you feet of clay in the real world." Sigourney Weaver, who starred in the first Avatar as a human scientist and returns for The Way of Water as a Na'vi teenager, told me that the parallels between the life of the director and the life of his characters were far from accidental: "Jim loves his family so much, and I feel that love in our film. It's as personal a film as he's ever made."
Another interesting detail from the article: Cameron and his wife became vegetarians over a decade ago, built their own pea-protein facility in Saskatchewan, and though they later sold it Cameron says he "pretty much" loves farming and pea protein as much as movies. And he once suggested re-branding the word vegan as "futurevore," since "We're eating the way people will eat in the future. We're just doing it early."

But in a 29-minute video interview, Cameron also fondly discusses his earlier ground-breaking films, even as GQ's writer notes their new trajectory. "It is a curious fact that Cameron has directed only two feature films in the last 25 years — and perhaps more curious that both are Avatar installments, and perhaps even more curious that the next three films he hopes to direct are also Avatar sequels....

"Cameron told me he'd already shot all of a third Avatar, and the first act of a fourth. There is a script for a fifth and an intention to make it, as long as the business of Avatar holds up between now and then. It seems entirely possible — maybe even probable — that Cameron will never make another non-Avatar film again."

"People just seem to really enjoy coming together to pretend fake things are real," writes the Guardian.

"Thousands of Tumblr users have been making posters, soundtracks, drawings and fan fiction for a 1973 Scorsese film starring Robert De Niro — but it never existed." Released in 1973, the little-seen Scorsese flick starred Robert De Niro as Goncharov, "a former discotheque owner who comes to Naples after the fall of the Soviet Union" with the goal of becoming a mob boss. Harvey Keitel plays the eye-patched Andrey (or Andrei) "The Banker" Daddano; Gene Hackman plays Valery Michailov; Al Pacino appears as Mario Ambrosini and Cybill Shepherd plays Goncharov's wife, Katya. Apparently, it was really good and was added to the Criterion Collection.

And you've never heard of it because it doesn't actually exist....

A few years ago, a Tumblr user posted a photo of some "knockoff boots" they had ordered online that had a very strange tag on the tongue: "The greatest mafia movie ever made. Martin Scorsese presents GONCHAROV. Domenico Proccacci production. A film by Matteo JWHJ0715. About the Naples Mafia." This mostly went ignored until 2020, when another Tumblr user reblogged a comment made on the original post, reading: "this idiot hasn't seen goncharov...."

The internet works in mysterious ways; earlier this month, Tumblr user beelzeebub made a fake poster for the film, tens of thousands of people were suddenly sharing it and lo: a new Scorsese film was born... [L]ike all of the best jokes, people have really committed to the bit. There's the film's poster, which has the tagline "greatest mafia movie (n)ever made". A music teacher in Indiana composed a theme song for Goncharov, inspired by The Godfather. There is also a cash-in video game, with an accompanying soundtrack, and a fake VHS.

"Academics" wrote essays analysing the film, which were published in (fake) film journals. A representative for the movie reviewing platform Letterboxd even told the New York Times that they had had to remove multiple reviews for the film that had been submitted by users.

For the last thirteen years the Free Software Foundation has published its Ethical Tech Giving Guide, notes a recent FSF blog post. "The right to determine what a device you've purchased does or doesn't do is something too valuable to lose."

Or, as they put it in the guide: It's time to reclaim our freedom from the abuse of multinational corporations, who use proprietary software and malicious "antifeatures" to keep us powerless, dependent, and surveilled by the devices that we use. There's no time at which it's more important to turn these unfortunate facts into positive action than the holiday season.

The gifts that we recommend here might not be making headlines, but they're the rare exception to the apparent rule that devices should mistreat their users.
For technical users, the guide recommends pairing the FSF-sponsored Replicant, a fully-free distribution of Android, with the F-Droid app repository, which has hundreds of applications including Syncthing, Tor, Minetest, and Termux.

They also praise the X200 laptop, "one of the few home user devices that's able to run fully free software from top to bottom." With easy-to-repair hardware, it's the laptop most frequently used in the FSF's own office — just one of several freedom-respecting devices from Vikings. And there's shout-outs to MNT's Reform laptop, products from PINE64 and Purism, plus a freedom-respecting VPN, and a mini wifi adapter .

The guide even recommends places to buy DRM-free ebooks, including No Starch Press, Smashwords, Leanpub, Standard Ebooks, Nantucket E-Books, Libreture (which also offers a storage solution). Meanwhile for print books, there's the Gnu Press Shop

And it also recommends sources for DRM-free music (including Bandcamp, Emusic, the Smithsonian Institute's Folkways, the classic punk label Dischord, HDTracks, and Mutopia).

And it also tells you where to find free (as in freedom) films...

Despite Apple Music supporting lossless streaming, wireless AirPods only support lossy Bluetooth codecs. Apple engineer Esge Andersen tells WhatHiFi that's not really an issue: "We want to push the sound quality forward, and we can do that with a lot of other elements. We don't think that the codec currently is the limitation of audio quality on Bluetooth products."

Netflix agreed to some exclusive theatrical distribution for "Glass Onion" and "Matilda the Musical," but it's not clear exhibitors will get much more. From a report: "Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery," the much-anticipated follow-up to the 2019 sleeper hit directed by Rian Johnson, was supposed to be the moment Netflix crossed the Rubicon. Rather than give the film a perfunctory theatrical release -- a strategy designed to ensure most viewers ultimately watch a movie on the streaming service -- Netflix, in a first, would give the film a traditional, exclusive run in a large number of cinemas. It didn't happen.

After much back and forth, and contrary to the wishes of some Netflix employees and Mr. Johnson, a theatrical release for "Glass Onion" that at one point some people inside the company hoped would reach up to 2,000 screens ended up at 638 in the United States. The movie, which was released on Wednesday and has received positive reviews, will run in theaters for just one week before becoming available on Netflix on Dec. 23. What was supposed to be the moment to prove the value of theaters to the streaming giant will not come to pass. Yet the company is also involved in another intriguing theatrical experiment this weekend, one that could end up providing Netflix with even more valuable feedback.

On Friday, "Matilda the Musical," financed and produced by Netflix, will open on more than 1,500 screens in 670 locations across the United Kingdom and Ireland. The movie, starring Emma Thompson as the villainous Miss Trunchbull, will be released and promoted by Sony Pictures, which, in a unique one-picture deal, licensed the rights to Netflix on the condition that Sony could hold onto the United Kingdom for a theatrical release. ("Matilda," which is based on a stage musical that itself is based on a children's book by Roald Dahl, is beloved in the United Kingdom. The musical has been running in London's West End since 2011.) "It will be a good example of what could be done," said Tim Richards, founder and chief executive of Vue International, a London-based exhibitor with theaters in countries including the United Kingdom, Denmark, Germany and Italy. âoeIf there was ever a film made for the big screen, it's 'Matilda.'"

Cinemas stocks got a boost Wednesday after a report said Amazon plans to spend $1 billion a year on theatrical film releases. CNBC reports: The tech company plans to make between 12 and 15 movies for movie theaters each year, Bloomberg reported, citing people familiar with the matter. A smaller number of films will be produced in 2023 as Amazon builds up its output, the report said. Cinemark jumped 11% on the news, with IMAX up 7% and AMC up 5%.