culture

Trump admin defiles even the “out of office” email auto-reply

culture, out of office message, Trump, website / Kelly Newman / October 3, 2025

Well—not “Democrats,” exactly, but “Democrat Senators.” The use of the noun “Democrat” as an adjective (e.g., “the Democrat Party”) is a long-standing and deliberate right-wing refusal to call the opposition by its name. (If you visit the Democrats’ website, the very first words below the site header are “We are the Democratic Party”; the party is run by the “Democratic National Committee.”) Petty? Sure! But that’s a feature, not a bug.

Similar out-of-office suggestions have been made to employees at the Small Business Administration and the Department of Health and Human Services. Such messages appear to be violations of the Hatch Act, which prohibits partisan speech from most executive branch employees while they are on duty, since these people represent and work for all Americans.

The Office of Special Counsel, which is supposed to prosecute violations of the Hatch Act, notes in a training flyer that most executive branch workers “may not engage in political activity—i.e., activity directed at the success or failure of a political party.”

Employees may also not “use any e-mail account or social media to distribute, send, or forward content that advocates for or against a partisan political party.”

When asked about its suggested out-of-office message blaming Democrats, the Department of Health and Human Services told CNN that yes, it had suggested this—but added that this was okay because the partisan message was accurate.

“Employees were instructed to use out-of-office messages that reflect the truth: Democrats have shut the government down,” the agency said.

Truly, as even a sitting Supreme Court justice has noted, the “rule of law” has now become “Calvinball.”

Websites, too

Department websites have also gotten in on the partisan action. The Department of Housing and Urban Development’s site now loads with a large floating box atop the page, which reads, “The Radical Left in Congress shut down the government.” When you close the box, you see atop the main page itself an eye-searingly red banner that says… the same thing. Thanks, I think we got it!

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Trailer for del Toro’s Frankenstein is pure macabre mythology

culture, film trailers, frankenstein, Guillermo del Toro, netflix, Trailers / Beth Washington / October 1, 2025

Per the official synopsis:

Oscar-winning director Guillermo del Toro adapts Mary Shelley’s classic tale of Victor Frankenstein, a brilliant but egotistical scientist who brings a creature to life in a monstrous experiment that ultimately leads to the undoing of both the creator and his tragic creation.

In addition to Isaac, the cast includes Jacob Elordi as the Creature; Mia Goth as Elizabeth Lavenza, who is engaged to Victor’s young brother William, played by William Kammerer; Lars Mikkelsen as Captain Anderson; Christoph Waltz as Heinrich Harlander, uncle to Elizabeth and wealthy financer of Victor’s experiments; Charles Dance as Victor’s father Leopold; Lauren Collins as Victor’s late mother Claire; David Bradley as the blind man; Sofia Galasso as the little girl; Ralph Ineson as Professor Krempe; and Burn Gorman as Fritz.

The trailer looks every bit as mythically epic and visually lavish as del Toro said he wanted for his version. “I remember pieces, the Creature says in a voiceover as footage plays out. “Memories of different men. Then I saw it. Your name. Victor Frankenstein. My creator. I demand a single grace from you. If you are not to award me love, then I will indulge in rage.”

We see lavish balls, Victor’s Gothic laboratory, a ship trapped in Arctic ice, and lots and lots of consuming fire—everything one could want in a Frankenstein movie from a master of macabre mythologies.

Frankenstein hits theaters on October 17, 2025. It will start streaming on Netflix on November 7.

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The AI slop drops right from the top, as Trump posts vulgar deepfake of opponents

AI, culture, deepfake, Trump / Kelly Newman / October 1, 2025

AI poses an obvious danger to the millennia-long human fight to find the truth. Large language model “hallucinations,” vocal deepfakes, and now increased use of video deepfakes have all had a blurring effect on facts, letting bad actors around the globe brush off even recorded events as mere “fake news.”

The danger is perhaps most acute in the political realm, where deepfake audio and video can make any politician say or appear to do anything. In such a climate, our most senior elected officials have a special duty to model truth-seeking behavior and responsible AI use.

But what’s the fun in that, when you can just blow up negotiations over a budget impasse by posting a deepfake video of your political opponents calling themselves “a bunch of woke pieces of shit” while mariachi music plays in the background? Oh—and did I mention the fake mustache? Or the CGI sombrero?

On Monday night, the president of the United States, a man with access to the greatest intelligence-gathering operation in the world, posted to his Truth Social account a 35-second AI-generated video filled with crude insults, racial overtones, and bizarre conspiracy theories. The video targeted two Democratic leaders who had recently been meeting with Trump over a possible agreement to fund the government; I would have thought this kind of video was a pretty poor way to get people to agree with you, but, apparently, AI-generated insults are the real “art of the deal.”

In the clip, a deepfake version of Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-NY) utters a surreal monologue as his colleague Rep. Hakeem Jeffries (D-N.Y.) looks on… in a sombrero.

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Fortnite disables Peacemaker emote that might resemble a swastika

culture, epic games, gaming, Peacemaker / Shannon Garcia / September 29, 2025

If you watch this for a full hour, leave a comment to receive absolutely no prize.

Epic Games has disabled a Fortnite emote based on the HBO show Peacemaker after the latest episode cast the dancing animation in a potentially different light.

The remainder of this post contains spoilers for Season 2 of Peacemaker.

The “Peaceful Hips” emote, which was first introduced to the game on September 15, mirrors the dance motions that John Cena’s character Christopher Smith makes during the opening credits sequence for the show’s second season. In the dance and the emote (which can be applied to any character in-game), the dancer briefly flails their arms at opposing right angles before shaking their hips seductively.

Some are seeing the dance in a different light after the sixth episode of the show’s second season, “Ignorance is Chris,” which revealed that the alternate universe featured throughout the season has been controlled by swastika-brandishing Nazis. With that knowledge front of mind, the arm movements in the dance emote could be seen as a winking reference to the arms of a swastika.

“[In] season 2 there’s a lot more of the story of the season in the intro, [in] the first season there wasn’t as much of a reference to the story,” choreographer Charissa Barton said in a video interview posted by Warner Bros. last month.

The opening dance sequence to Season 2 of Peacemaker.

The arm motions mean what?

Fans have been picking up on hints of the show’s eventual Nazi-related reveal (including from that opening dance) as the second season has aired over recent weeks. But the confirmation of the link in Sunday’s episode had Epic quickly re-evaluating the emote by Sunday night.

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Why LA Comic Con thought making an AI-powered Stan Lee hologram was a good idea

AI, culture, LA comic con, marvel comic, Stan Lee / 9u50fv / September 27, 2025

Trust us, it’ll be marvel-ous

“I suppose if we do it and thousands of fans… don’t like it, we’ll stop doing it.”

Excelsior, true beliers! Credit: Proto Hologram

Late last week, The Hollywood Reporter ran a story about an “AI Stan Lee hologram” that would be appearing at the LA Comic Con this weekend. Nearly seven years after the famous Marvel Comics creator’s death at the age of 95, fans will be able to pay $15 to $20 this weekend to chat with a life-sized, AI-powered avatar of Lee in an enclosed booth at the show.

The instant response from many fans and media outlets to the idea was not kind, to say the least. A writer for TheGamer called the very idea “demonic” and said we need to “kill it with fire before it’s too late.” The AV Club urged its readers not to pay to see “the anguished digital ghost of a beloved comic book creator, repurposed as a trap for chumps!” Reactions on a popular Reddit thread ranged from calling it “incredibly disrespectful” and “in bad taste” to “ghoulish” and “so fucked up,” with very little that was more receptive to the concept.

But Chris DeMoulin, the CEO of the parent company behind LA Comic Con, urged critics to come see the AI-powered hologram for themselves before rushing to judgment. “We’re not afraid of people seeing it and we’re not afraid of criticism,” he told Ars. “I’m just a fan of informed criticism, and I think most of what’s been out there so far has not really been informed.”

“It’s unfortunate that a few people have really negative things to say about it, sight unseen, just the level of it being a concept,” DeMoulin continued. “It’s not perfect. I’m not sure something like this can ever be perfect. But I think what you strive to do is feed enough information into it and test it enough so that the experience it creates for the fans is one that feels genuine.”

“It’s going to have to be really good or we’re all going to say no”

This isn’t the first time LA Comic Con has featured an interactive hologram (which for the Stan Lee experience means a life-sized volumetric screen-in-a-box that can show different views from different angles). Starting in 2019, the convention used similar technology to feature Boffo the Bear, a 7-foot-tall animated blue ursid who served as the MC for a live talent show featuring famous voice acting talent. But Boffo was powered by a real-time motion-captured improv performance from actor Mark DeCarlo rather than automated artificial intelligence.

A live mo-capped version of Boffo the Bear hosts a panel with voice actors at LA Comic Con.

In the years since Boffo’s introduction at the con, DeMoulin said he’s kept up with the team behind that hologram and “saw the leaps and bounds that they were making in improving the technology, improving the interactivity.” Now, he said, it’s possible to create an AI-powered version that ingests “all of the actual comments that people made during their life” to craft an interactive hologram that “is not literally quoting the person, but everything it was saying was based on things that person actually said.”

DeMoulin said he called Bob Sabouni, who manages the Stan Lee Legacy brand, to pitch the AI Stan Lee avatar as “kind of an entry point into people asking questions about the Marvel universe, the stories, the characters he created.” Sabouni agreed to the idea, DeMoulin said, but added that “it’s gonna have to be really good or we’re all going to say no.”

With that somewhat conditional approval, DeMoulin reached out to Proto Hologram, the company that had developed the Boffo the Bear experience years earlier. Proto, in turn, reached out to Hyperreal, a company that describes itself as “powering ownership, control, performance, and monetization of identity across digital ecosystems” to help develop the AI model that would power the Lee avatar.

A promotional video from Proto Holograms shows off the kind of volumetric box that the AI-powered Stan Lee avatar will appear in.

Hyperreal CEO and Chief Architect Remington Scott tells Ars that the company “leverages a customized ecosystem of cutting-edge AI technologies” to create “bespoke” and “custom-crafted” AI versions of celebrities. To do that for Stan Lee, DeMoulin said they trained a model on decades of content he had left behind, from tapes of dozens of convention panels he had appeared on to written and spoken content gathered by the managers of the Stan Lee Universe brand.

Scott said Hyperreal “can’t share specific technical details” of the models or training techniques they use to power these recreations. But Scott added that this training project is “particularly meaningful, [because] Stan Lee had actually begun digitizing himself while he was alive, with the vision of creating a digital double so his fans could interact with him on a larger scale.”

After incurring costs of “tens of thousands into six figures” of dollars, DeMoulin said he was finally able to test the Lee hologram about a month ago. That first version still needed some tweaks to get the look and feel of Lee’s delivery just right, though.

“Stan had a considered way of speaking… he would pause, he had certain catch phrases that when he used them he would say them in a certain way,” DeMoulin said. “So it took a while to get to the hologram to be able to say all that in a way that [Sabouni] and I and others that work with Stan felt like, ‘Yeah, that’s actually starting to sound more like him.’”

“The only words that are gonna be in Stan’s mouth are Stan’s words”

Anyone who is familiar with LLMs and their tendency to confabulate might be worried about the potential for an AI Lee avatar to go off-script or make things up in front of a live audience. And while DeMoulin said he was concerned about that going in, those concerns have faded as he and others who worked with Lee in his lifetime have spent hours throwing “hundreds and hundreds and hundreds” of questions at the hologram “to sort of see where the sensitivities on it are.”

“The only words that are gonna be in Stan’s mouth are Stan’s words,” DeMoulin said. “Just because I haven’t personally seen [the model hallucinate] doesn’t mean that it’s impossible, but that hasn’t been my experience.”

The living version of Stan Lee appeared at the Wizard World convention in 2018, shortly before his death. Credit: Getty Images

While a moderator at the convention will be on hand to repeat fan questions into a microphone (to avoid ambient crowd noise from the showfloor), DeMoulin said there won’t be any human filtering on what fans are allowed to ask the Lee avatar in the 15- to 20-minute group Q&A sessions. Instead, DeMoulin said the team has set up a system of “content governors” so that, for instance, “if you ask Stan what he thought of the last presidential election he’s gonna say ‘That’s not what we’re here to talk about. We’re here to talk about the Marvel universe.'”

For topics that are Marvel-related, though, the AI avatar won’t shy away from controversy, DeMoulin said. If you ask the avatar about Jack Kirby, for instance, DeMoulin said it will address the “honest disagreements about characters or storylines, which are gonna happen in any creative enterprise,” while also saying that “‘I have nothing but respect for him,’ which is I think largely what Stan would have said if he was asked that question.”

Hyperreal’s Scott said the company’s approach to training digital avatars on verified content “ensures responses stay true to Stan’s documented perspectives and values.” And DeMoulin said the model is perfectly willing to say when it doesn’t know the answer to an appropriate question. In early testing, for instance, the avatar couldn’t answer a question about the Merry Marvel Marching Society, DeMoulin said, because that wasn’t part of its training data. After a subsequent update, the new model provided a relevant answer to the same question, he said.

“We are not trying to bring Stan back from the dead”

Throughout our talk, DeMoulin repeatedly stressed that their AI hologram wasn’t intended to serve as a replacement for the living version of Lee. “We want to make sure that people understand that we are not trying to bring Stan back from the dead,” he said. “We’re not trying to say that this is Stan, and we’re not trying to put words in his mouth, and this avatar is not gonna start doing commercials to advertise other people’s products.”

DeMoulin said he sees the Lee avatar as a kind of futuristic guide to a library of Marvel information and trivia, presented with a fun and familiar face. “In the introduction, the avatar will say, ‘I’m here as a result of the latest developments in technology, which allow me to be a holographic representation of Stan to answer your questions about Marvel and trivia’ and this, that, and the other thing,” DeMoulin said

Still, DeMoulin said he understands why the idea of using even a stylized version of Lee’s likeness in this manner could rub some fans the wrong way. “When a new technology comes out, it just feels wrong to them, and I respect the fact that this feels wrong to people,” he said. “I totally agree that something like this–not just for Stan but for anyone, any celebrity alive or dead–could be put into this technology and used in a way that would be exploitative and unfortunate.”

Fans like these, seen at LA Comic Con 2022, will be the final arbiters of whether the AI-powered Stan Lee avatar is respectful or not. Credit: Getty Images

That’s why DeMoulin said he and the others behind the AI-powered Lee feel a responsibility “to make sure that if we were going to do this, we never got anywhere close to that.” Moreover, he said he’s “disappointed that people would be so negative about something they’ve not seen. … It’s not that I think that their point of view is invalid. What I think is invalid is having a wildly negative point of view about something that you haven’t actually seen.”

Scott said concerns about respect for the actual human celebrity are why they “partner exclusively with authorized estates and rights holders like Stan Lee Universe.” The “premium, authenticated digital identities” created by Hyperreal’s system are “not replacing artists” but “creating respectful digital extensions that honor their legacy,” Scott said.

Once fans actually see the AI-powered Lee avatar in person, DeMoulin said he’s confident they’ll see the team behind the convention is “trying to do it in a way that will actually be delightful and very much be consistent with Stan’s legacy… We clearly have to set our sights on doing this right, and doing it right means getting people that knew and loved the guy and worked with him during his career to give us input, and then putting it in front of enough fans to know if we’re doing it in a way that lives up to his standards.”

And if he’s wrong about the expected reception? “I suppose if we do it and thousands of fans interact with [it] and they don’t like it, we’ll stop doing it,” he said. “I saw firsthand the impact that Stan had in that [convention] environment, so I think we have a team of people together that love and respect that and are trying to do something which will continue that. And if it turns out, for some reason, this isn’t that, we won’t do it.”

Kyle Orland has been the Senior Gaming Editor at Ars Technica since 2012, writing primarily about the business, tech, and culture behind video games. He has journalism and computer science degrees from University of Maryland. He once wrote a whole book about Minesweeper.

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Felony charges after South Carolina high school filled with “fart spray”… for weeks

culture, fart spray, South Carolina / Beth Washington / September 26, 2025

Let’s dig into the science of stink.

As a boy, I once owned a whoopee cushion. I thought it was hilarious; my aging and extremely “proper” great aunt—God rest her soul—did not, and at one Thanksgiving dinner, she let me know. Chastened, I never used a whoopee cushion again. Nor, as the decades passed, did I think much more about the possible humor value of fake farts.

Until this week, when I came across the strange case of Alexander Paul Robertson Lewis, who has been charged with a felony in South Carolina for—and let me quote from the official police press release here—using “an Internet-acquired spray designed to imitate fecal odor.”

The nanny state run amok? The criminalization of fun? Authorities who Just Can’t Take A Joke?

Not exactly.

The gas leak that wasn’t

The 32-year-old Lewis worked as a teacher’s assistant at the West Florence High School in Florence County, South Carolina. His duties did not, of course, include spraying anything “designed to imitate fecal odor” into the air. But according to police, Lewis was responsible for “creating a foul smell” at the school—not once, but for weeks. It was so dire that multiple students needed medical attention.

The school’s administration suspected a gas leak at first. According to local news reports, in mid-August, the school sent an email to parents letting them know that “gas is only used in our school for heating, in the kitchen for food preparation, and in a few of the science labs. Excluding the kitchen, we have turned off all gas to the building as a precaution. This has allowed us to rule out a gas leak as the source of the odor.”

The district brought in plumbers to inspect “all lines above the ceilings as well as the propane tank lines for potential gas leaks.” It brought in the local gas utility to test for leaks in “hallways, classrooms, rooftops, science labs, propane tanks, natural gas meters, and floor drains in bathrooms.” It hired an environmental consultant to do air quality testing. None of these inspections turned up anything untoward.

Over the next weeks, parents and students began to complain vociferously about getting sick at school. One student told local station WPDE that “every time I go to my second block class, I walk up the stairwell and immediately, teachers are covering their noses and their mouths, coughing because of the smell.” Another said, “I got physically sick the other day because of the smell. I feel like I’m going to pass out because I get so lightheaded and so dizzy.”

Parents said that they were taking their children for doctors’ visits, worried about possible carbon monoxide exposure or about asthma-related difficulties. One parent wrote in a Facebook comment about the whole saga, “My daughter passed out and [was] rushed to the ER.”

An angry mom showed up to a September school board meeting and ripped into the district for its lack of responsiveness. “There has been an ongoing smell for the past two, three weeks now,” she said. “My son has asthma. This is triggering his asthma… I had to take him to the doctor twice… He’s had to use his inhaler multiple times a day.”

The school continued to search for answers. According to WMBF News, the district ultimately had “five different entities test for gas, opening several walls, and checking sewer lines.”

In the end, though, it may come down to some guy wielding a truly noxious amount of “fart spray.”

On September 20, police arrested Lewis for using the spray “on multiple occasions and over time resulting in a disruption of the school,” which spent $55,000 trying to track down the problem.

Such events are uncommon but not unknown. In 2023, for instance, two people in San Antonio, Texas, were arrested and charged with felonies after a similar “senior prank.” In that case, according to local accounts, “The stench was so bad that the school was evacuated twice in an attempt to find the source, while seven students were taken to the hospital for further care after complaining of headaches and nausea.”

Crazy. But why the severe reactions?

Mug shot for Alexander Paul Robertson Lewis — Alexander Paul Robertson Lewis. Credit: Florence County Sheriff

Safe stink?

One can go on Amazon and find many of these products, and they often advertise themselves as being “non-toxic.” A product called “Wet Farts” claims, for instance, that “Our fart spray extra strong prank is made with non-toxic and non-flammable ingredients that are totally safe and effective.” (Though it does note that Wet Farts will “bombard your victims with a stinky wet cloud of fart that will make their face grimace and their eyes water.”)

But even “non-toxic” products can cause reactions, especially in susceptible populations like asthma sufferers. Many of these fart products don’t publish their ingredient lists, although some have put out Safety Data Sheets (SDS). Before we look at those, though, let’s back up and consider something a bit more basic to see how it compares.

Simple “stink bombs” often rely on ammonium sulfide, which, when exposed to air, generates hydrogen sulfide. This smells strongly of rotten eggs. The National Institutes of Health describes ammonium sulfide as a “colorless to yellow liquid, with an odor of rotten eggs or ammonia,” which can “slowly react with water to generate flammable and toxic hydrogen sulfide gas.” The compound “may be irritating to skin, eyes, and mucous membranes and may cause illness from skin absorption.”

Stink bombs may also use mercaptans such as methyl mercaptan, which is added to odorless natural gas to make it smell. (It is also present in bad breath.)

But this kind of thing is amateur hour. Sulfides and mercaptans alone aren’t enough to capture the ripe aroma of fully baked flatulence. So truly noxious fart sprays often contain secret ingredient blends that are difficult to evaluate. “Liquid Ass” has a published SDS that notes the product is a yellowish “turbid liquid” that is 90-plus percent water; the rest is a “mixture of proprietary natural ingredients.”

Exposure to Liquid Ass, especially in large quantities, can cause “irritation” to the skin and eyes, while eye splashes “may cause temporary pain and blurred vision.” Ingesting the stuff can “cause headaches, gastritis, [and] intoxication,” while breathing it “may cause irritation to the mucous membranes of the upper respiratory tract.” Still, exposure should “cause irritation with only minor residual injury.”

The makers of Liquid Ass claim that the hydrogen sulfide released by garden-variety stink bombs can, even at moderate levels, cause real problems for people. By contrast, they say that Liquid Ass “has been tested to be safe” and that its SDS notes: “No hazardous ingredients known to be present.”

Or the discerning prankster might consider the Jue-Fish Toxic Bomb Super Fart! gift set. It’s perfect to use when “meeting with friends” or even “dealing with villains.”

While it “smells like the worst smell in the world,” the ingredients are “very safe.” These include:

water
capsaicin [responsible for the “heat” in hot peppers; also used in pepper spray/tear gas]
piperine [gives black and white pepper their pungency]
mustard extract
fermented soybeans [natto, a Japanese food made from fermented soybean, is described as being “notorious for its strong, distinctive smell, often compared to dirty socks or ammonia”]
fermented Houttuynia cordata [a plant known as “fish mint” or “fish leaf,” with “an unusual taste from its volatile oil decanoyl acetaldehyde (3-oxododecanal), a taste that is often described as “fishy”]

The point is that the ingredients in “fart sprays” can vary widely, may not be fully disclosed, and may never have been tested for toxicity in the combination present in the bottle. Even when “non-toxic,” they may cause problems for some people.

(One of the best parts of working at Ars Technica is seeing experts emerge from the woodwork to enlighten us about all sorts of fascinating topics in the comments; I trust that the chemists here can shed even more light on the “science of stink”—and on why it might cause strong reactions.)

Still—it’s pretty amazing that one teacher’s assistant was allegedly able to create such a serious situation for an entire high school. Just how much of this stuff could one person spray?

We may learn more over the coming months when Lewis has to return to court. He is currently free on a $9,090 bond.

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Pennywise gets an origin story in Welcome to Derry trailer

culture, HBO, IT franchise, Pennywise, prequels, stephen king, streaming television, Trailers / Shannon Garcia / September 24, 2025

Director Andy Muschietti’s two-film adaptation of Stephen King’s bestselling horror novel IT racked up over $1 billion at the box office worldwide. Now Muschietti is back with a nine-episode prequel series for HBO, IT: Welcome to Derry, exploring the origins of Pennywise the Clown (Bill Skarsgård), the ancient evil that terrorized the fictional town every 27 years. And now we have an official trailer a month before the prequel’s October debut.

(Some spoilers below for IT and IT: Chapter Two.)

As previously reported, set in 1989, IT essentially adapted half of King’s original novel, telling the story of a group of misfit kids calling themselves “The Losers Club.” The kids discover their small town of Derry is home to an ancient, trans-dimensional evil that awakens every 27 years to prey mostly on children by taking the form of an evil clown named Pennywise. Bill (Jaeden Lieberher) loses his little brother, Georgie, to Pennywise, and the group decides to take on Pennywise and drive him into early hibernation, where he will hopefully starve. But Beverly (Sophia Lillis) has a vision warning that Pennywise will return on schedule in 27 years, and they must be ready to fight him anew.

IT: Chapter Two revisited our protagonists 27 years later, as they all returned to Derry as adults for a reunion of sorts, taking on the killer clown in a final battle—eventually emerging victorious but not without a few casualties. The two films covered much of the novel’s material but omitted several key flashback passages drawn from Mike’s interviews with older residents of Derry as he investigated the town’s sinister history.

One event that did make it into IT: Chapter Two was the burning down of the Black Spot—a nightclub Mike’s (Chosen Jacobs and Isaiah Mustafa) father, Will, opened—by local white supremacists. That tragedy will also appear in Welcome to Derry. The series is set in 1962, although Muschietti said earlier this year that there are plans for three seasons, with subsequent settings in 1935 and 1908, respectively. That’s consistent with Pennywise’s 27-year cycle, and as Muschietti said, “There’s a reason why the story is told backwards.”

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Our fave Star Wars duo is back in Mandalorian and Grogu teaser

culture, film trailers, Lucasfilm, star wars, Trailers / 9u50fv / September 22, 2025

Disney CEO Bob Iger has been under fire for several days now for pulling Jimmy Kimmel Live off the air “indefinitely,” with Disney+’s cancellation page actually crashing a couple of times from all the traffic as people rushed to make their displeasure known. So what better time for the studio to release the first teaser trailer for The Mandalorian and Grogu, a feature film spinoff from its megahit Star Wars series The Mandalorian? Grogu and Mando, together again on an exciting space adventure, will certainly be a crowd-pleaser.

Grogu (aka Baby Yoda) won viewers’ hearts from the moment he first appeared onscreen in the first season of The Mandalorian, and the relationship between the little green creature and his father-figure bounty hunter has only gotten stronger. With the 2023 Hollywood strikes delaying production on S4 of the series, director Jon Favreau got the green light to make this spinoff film.

Per the official logline:

The evil Empire has fallen, and Imperial warlords remain scattered throughout the galaxy. As the fledgling New Republic works to protect everything the Rebellion fought for, they have enlisted the help of legendary Mandalorian bounty hunter Din Djarin (Pedro Pascal) and his young apprentice Grogu.

In addition to Pascal, the cast includes Sigourney Weaver as Ward, a veteran pilot, colonel, and leader of the New Republic’s Adelphi Rangers. Jeremy Allen White plays Rotta the Hutt (son of Jabba, first introduced in 2008’s The Clone Wars), Jonny Coyne reprises his Mandalorian S3 role as an Imperial warlord leading a surviving faction of the Galactic Empire, and we can expect to see Garazeb (“Seb”) Orrelios from the Star Wars Rebels animated series, too. And yes, that’s a shiny new version of Mando’s ship (destroyed in S2).

Our fave Star Wars duo is back in Mandalorian and Grogu teaser Read More »

Oklahoma’s big “TV nudes” scandal was… a Jackie Chan movie on a Samsung streaming service

culture, Oklahoma, Ryan waters, samsung, smart tvs / Shannon Garcia / September 20, 2025

News 4 watched the movie and confirmed it contains several scenes that match the description given by board members, including one where a group of fully nude women [!] work inside a factory [!!] packaging cocaine [!!!], some wearing only lab coats [!!!!].

Another scene shows a fully nude woman giving a man a massage, eventually moving under the table while the dialogue strongly suggests sexual activity.

But why was The Protector showing on a TV in a state office building at all? Investigators came to find out that the Samsung smart TV in question—recently installed in the office—had been set up in such a way that it defaulted to showing Samsung TV Plus Channel 1204, the “Movie Hub Action.” (You can see Samsung’s full list of TV Plus streaming channels here.) And at the time of the state board meeting, Movie Hub Action was streaming The Protector. How and why the TV was turned on or switched to this streaming channel isn’t clear, but the whole thing appears to be an absolutely bizarre accident.

As part of this important investigation, the sheriff’s office then took clips from The Protector to the board members who complained. According to the Oklahoma Voice, “The board members, Becky Carson and Ryan Deatherage, confirmed to the Sheriff’s Office that the movie was consistent with what they saw on the TV.”

Photo of the TV. — Behold! The actual TV from the incident. Credit: Alias

Hooking smart TVs up to the Internet looks increasingly like a bad idea, though not usually for the reason found in this case. TV manufacturers have taken what should have been a useful feature and turned it into a way to spy on what you’re watching and to push ads to your TV.

Now you can add “showing naked, cocaine-packaging factory workers to Oklahoma Board of Education members” to the list of grievances.

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“Get off the iPad!” warns air traffic control as Spirit flight nears Air Force One

1 iPadOS, Air Force one, ATC, culture, ipad / Beth Washington / September 19, 2025

A minute later, the controller reached out with contact information for the Boston-area air traffic control center that would handle the Spirit plane’s descent and landing. (134.0 is the frequency for DXR 19, the control group which handles traffic coming out of the New York metro area and heading into Boston.)

“Spirit 1300: Boston Center, 134.0.”

After no immediate response, the controller chastised the pilots again.

“I gotta talk to you twice every time,” he said, then repeated: “Boston 134.0.”

When Spirit 1300 finally acknowledged the frequency, the controller got in one final dig before passing them on.

“Pay attention!” he said. “Get off the iPad!”

We have no idea if the Spirit pilots were actually distracted by an iPad, of course, but tablets have been essential to pilots for years. As far back as 2019, a trade publication noted that, “in aviation, iPads are to pilots what cellphones are to drivers. While many of us learned how to fly without an iPad, we now can’t imagine flying without it. It has become our source of weather data, our flight planner, our notam checker, our weight and balance calculator, and our map—all in one. While it has the power to make us radically more informed, organized, and safer, iPads, like cellphones, have considerable drawbacks when not used thoughtfully.”

The Spirit plane landed safely in Boston.

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Trailer for Anaconda meta-reboot leans into the laughs

Anaconda, creature features, culture, Entertainment, film, film trailers, Jack Black, paul rudd, Sony Pictures, Trailers / Kelly Newman / September 17, 2025

Sony Pictures has dropped a trailer for its upcoming horror comedy, Anaconda, a meta-reboot of the 1997 campy cult classic—and frankly, it looks like a lot of fun. Starring Paul Rudd and Jack Black, the film will arrive in theaters on Christmas Day.

(Spoilers for the 1997 film below.)

The original Anaconda was your basic B-movie creature feature, only with an all-star cast and better production values. The plot revolved around a documentary film crew (Jennifer Lopez, Ice Cube, Eric Stoltz, Jonathan Hyde, and Owen Wilson) who travel to the Amazon in search of a long-lost Indigenous tribe. They take on a stranded Paraguayan snake hunter named Serone (Jon Voight, affecting a hilariously bad foreign accent), who strong-arms them into helping him hunt down a 25-foot green anaconda. He wants to capture the animal alive, thinking he can sell it for over $1 million.

The snake has other ideas, chowing down on the boat’s skipper and the crew’s sound engineer and still hungry for more. The remaining crew’s efforts to survive are hampered by Serone, who still wants the snake alive and even kills one of the crew members himself. So it’s really a form of justice when he’s eaten by a 40-foot queen anaconda at the film’s end.

Anaconda wasn’t well-received by critics, but it made a decent showing at the box office, grossing about $136 million globally. It has since become a cult classic, one of those “so bad it’s good” offerings. It was even nominated for six Razzie Awards, including for Worst Screen Couple (Voight and the animatronic anaconda).

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New Amelia Earhart bio delves into her unconventional marriage

Amelia Earhart, american history, aviation, aviation history, books, culture / 9u50fv / September 17, 2025

more than a marriage of convenience

Author Laurie Gwen Shapiro chats with Ars about her latest book, The Aviator and the Showman.

Amelia Earhart. Credit: Public domain

Famed aviator Amelia Earhart has captured our imaginations for nearly a century, particularly her disappearance in 1937 during an attempt to become the first female pilot to circumnavigate the globe. Earhart was a complicated woman, highly skilled as a pilot yet with a tendency toward carelessness. And her marriage to a flamboyant publisher with a flair for marketing may have encouraged that carelessness and contributed to her untimely demise, according to a fascinating new book, The Aviator and the Showman: Amelia Earhart, George Putnam, and the Marriage that Made an American Icon.

Author Laurie Gwen Shapiro is a longtime Earhart fan. A documentary filmmaker and journalist, she first read about Earhart in a short biography distributed by Scholastic Books. “I got a little obsessed with her when I was younger,” Shapiro told Ars. The fascination faded as she got older and launched her own career. But she rediscovered her passion for Earhart while writing her 2018 book, The Stowaway, about a young man who stowed away on Admiral Richard Byrd‘s first voyage to Antarctica. The marketing mastermind behind the boy’s journey and his subsequent (ghost-written) memoir was publisher George Palmer Putnam, Earhart’s eventual husband.

The fact that Earhart started out as Putnam’s mistress contradicted Shapiro’s early squeaky-clean image of Earhart and drove her to delve deeper into the life of this extraordinary woman. “I was less interested in how she died than how she lived,” said Shapiro. “Was she a good pilot? Was she a good, kind person? Was this a real marriage? The mystery of Amelia Earhart is not how she died, but how she lived.”

There have been numerous Earhart biographies, but Shapiro accessed some relatively new source material, most notably a good 200 hours of tapes that had become available via the Smithsonian’s Amelia Earhart Project, including interviews with Earhart’s sister, Muriel. “I took an extra six months on my book just so that I could listen to all of them,” said Shapiro. She also scoured archival material at the University of New Hampshire concerning Putnam’s close associate, Hilton Railey; at Purdue University; and at Harvard’s Radcliffe Institute, along with numerous in-person interviews—including several with authors of prior Earhart biographies.

Shapiro’s breezy account of Earhart’s early life includes a few new details, particularly about the aviator’s relationship with an early benefactor (Shapiro calls him Earhart’s “sugar daddy”) in California: a 63-year-old billboard magnate named Thomas Humphrey Bennett Varney. Varney wanted to marry her, but she ended up accepting the proposal of a young chemical engineer from Boston, Samuel Chapman. “Amelia could have had a very different life,” said Shapiro. “She could have gone to Marblehead, Massachusetts, where [Chapman] had a house, and become part of the yacht set and she still would have had an interesting life. But I don’t think that was the life Amelia Earhart wanted, even if that meant she had a shorter life.”

Shapiro doesn’t neglect Putnam’s story, describing him as the “PT Barnum of publishing.” The family publishing company, G.P. Putnam and Sons, was founded in 1838 by his grandfather, and by the late 1920s, the ambitious young George was among several possible successors jockeying for position to replace his uncle, George Haven Putnam. He had his own ambitions, determined to bring what he viewed as a stodgy company fully into the 20th century.

Putnam published Charles Lindbergh‘s blockbuster memoir, We, in 1927 and followed that early success with a series of rather lurid adventure memoirs chronicling the exploits of “boy explorers.” The boys didn’t always survive their adventures, with one perishing from a snake bite and another drowning in a Bolivian flood. But the books were commercial successes, so Putnam kept cranking them out.

After Lindbergh’s historic crossing, Putnam was eager to tap into the public’s thirst for aviation stories. It wouldn’t be especially newsworthy to have another man make the same flight. But a woman? Putnam liked that idea, and a wealthy benefactor, steel heiress Amy Phipps Guest, provided financial support for the feat—really more of a publicity stunt, since Putnam’s plan, as always, was to publish a scintillating memoir of the journey. During the Jazz Age, newspapers routinely paid for exclusive rights to these kinds of stories in exchange for glowing coverage, per Shapiro. In this case, The New York Times did not initially want to sponsor a woman for a trans-Atlantic flight, but Putnam’s connections won them over.

Love at first sight

Earhart, then a social worker living in Boston, interviewed to be part of the three-person crew making that historic 1928 trans-Atlantic flight, and Putnam quickly spotted her potential to be his new adventure heroine. Railey later recalled that, at least for Putnam—whose marriage to Crayola heiress Dorothy Binney was floundering—it was love at first sight.

At the time, Earhart was still engaged to Chapman, and George was still married to Binney, but nonetheless, he “relentlessly pursued” Earhart. Earhart ended her engagement to Chapman in November 1928. “There’s a tape in the Smithsonian archives that talks about his wife coming in and catching them in sexual relations,” said Shapiro. “But [Binney] was having an affair, too, with a young man named George Weymouth [her son’s tutor]. This is the Jazz Age, anything goes. Amelia wanted to be able to achieve her dreams. Who are we to say a woman can’t marry a man who can give her a path to being wealthy?”

The successful 1928 flight earned Earhart the moniker “Lady Lindy.” Putnam showered his mistress with fur coats, sporty cars, and other luxurious trappings—although as her manager, he still kept 10 percent of her earnings. That life of luxury fell apart in October 1929 with the onset of the Great Depression, and Putnam found himself scrambling financially after being pushed out of the family publishing company.

Earhart and Putnam in 1931. Public domain

After his rather messy divorce from Binney, Putnam married Earhart in 1931. Earhart held decidedly unconventional views on marriage for that era: They held separate bank accounts, and she kept her maiden name, viewing the marriage as a “partnership” with “dual control,” and insisting in a letter to Putnam on their wedding day that she would not require fidelity. “I may have to keep some place where I can go to be myself, now and then, for I cannot guarantee to endure at all times the confinement of even an attractive cage,” she wrote.

Since money was tight, Putnam encouraged Earhart to go on the lecture circuit. Earhart would execute a stunt flight, write a book about it, and then go on a lecture tour. “This is an actual marriage,” said Shapiro. “It might have started out more romantically, but at a certain point, they needed each other in a partnership to survive. We don’t have fairy tale connections. Sometimes we have a hot romance that turns into a partnership and then cycles back into intense closeness and mental separation. I think that was the case with Amelia and George.”

Then came Earhart’s fateful final fight. The night before her scheduled departure, a nervous Earhart wanted to wait, but Putnam already had plans in the works for yet another flight, financed through sponsorship deals. And he wanted to get the resulting book about the current pending flight out in time for Christmas. He convinced her to take off as planned. Her navigator, Fred Noonan, was good at his job, but he was a heavy drinker, so he came cheap. That decision was one of several that would prove costly.

Shapiro describes this flight as being “plagued with mechanical issues from the start, underprepared and over-hyped, a feat of marketing more than a feat of engineering.” And she does not absolve Earhart from blame. “She refused to learn Morse code,” said Shapiro. “She refused to hear that trying to land on Howland Island was almost a suicide mission. It’s almost certain that she ran out of gas. Amelia was a very good person, a decent flyer, and beyond brave. She brought up women and championed feminism when other technically more gifted women pilots were going for solo records and had no time for their peers. She aided the aviation industry during the Great Depression as a likable ambassador of the air.”

However, Shapiro believes that Earhart’s marriage to Putnam amplified her incautious impulses, with tragic consequences on her final flight. “Is it George’s fault, or is it Amelia’s fault? I don’t think that’s fair to say,” she said. In many ways, the two complemented each other. Like Putnam, Earhart had great ambition, and her marriage to Putnam enabled her to achieve her goals.

The flip side is that they also brought out each other’s less positive attributes. “They were both aware of the risks involved in what they were doing,” Shapiro said. “But I also tried to show that there was a pattern of both of them taking extraordinary risks without really worrying about critical details. Yes, there is tremendous bravery in [undertaking] all these flights, but bravery is not always enough when charisma trumps caution—and when the showman insists the show must go on.”

Jennifer is a senior writer at Ars Technica with a particular focus on where science meets culture, covering everything from physics and related interdisciplinary topics to her favorite films and TV series. Jennifer lives in Baltimore with her spouse, physicist Sean M. Carroll, and their two cats, Ariel and Caliban.

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