New episodes of season 2 of The Last of Us are premiering on HBO every Sunday night, and Ars’ Kyle Orland (who’s played the games) and Andrew Cunningham (who hasn’t) will be talking about them here every Monday morning. While these recaps don’t delve into every single plot point of the episode, there are obviously heavy spoilers contained within, so go watch the episode first if you want to go in fresh.

Tommy is torn between love for his brother and the welfare of the community he’s helped to build.
Credit:
HBO

Even after an apocalypse, city council meetings are a constant.
Credit:
HBO

Ellie and Dina conspire.
Credit:
HBO

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Remember First Light Fusion? Founded in 2011, it was a pioneering British startup that in 2022 “successfully combined atomic nuclei, which U.K. regulators called a milestone in the decades-long push for fusion energy.

It’s now “pulled the plug on plans to build its first reactor,” reports the Telegraph, abandoning its push for a prototype power plant based on its “projectile fusion” technology due to a lack of funding.
The technology involves a 5p-sized projectile being fired at a fuel cell at extreme speeds using electromagnets to generate a powerful reaction and simulate collisions at extremely high speeds, such as those in space. Instead of building its own plant, First Light plans to supply other nuclear power companies with one of its inventions, called an “amplifier”, which houses a nuclear fuel capsule and boosts the power of fusion reactions.

The group has burned through tens of millions of pounds trying to bring its technology to fruition… The decision to ditch its original plan will allow First Light Fusion to be more “capital light”, the nuclear group said in March, while licensing its inventions would generate more revenues. The company said it had recently secured the first tranche of a new funding round. Mark Thomas, First Light Fusion’s chief executive, said: “We have been very pleased with the response to our strategy pivot, moving to an enabler of inertial fusion while rapidly accelerating revenues…
First Light Fusion’s other investors include Chinese technology giant Tencent.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

What can you build with a 3D printer? Starbucks just printed itself a new store — a drive-through location in the southern tip of Texas.

Fast Company says it’s a store that “looks more like the future of construction than your average café.”

Built with layers of concrete piped out by a giant robotic printer, the 1,400-square-foot structure is part of the company’s ongoing effort to modernize operations and trim costs… Peri-3D, a German company, used a giant 3D printer to pump out layers of concrete mixture to create the structure. According to the Texas Department of Licensing and Regulation, the cost for building the small scale coffee shop was about $1.2 million…

Of course, the new method is a first for the brand. And builders say, the more they use the technology, the more efficient they are at it. In Georgetown, Texas, an entire community of 100 homes was recently built using 3D-printing. The company who built the community, Lennar, says they’re seeing costs drop with each build. Stuart Miller, chairman and co-CEO of Lennar, told CNBC earlier this year that the construction company says their costs and cycle time go down “by half” by adopting 3D-printing. “This is significant improvement in evolving a housing market that has the ability to change over time and being more adaptable and more functional in providing affordable and attainable housing for a broader swath of the market,” said Miller…

3D-printing is also much faster, meaning that projects can be completed in a fraction of the time, potentially drastically cutting labor costs. According to the World Economic Forum, 3D-printing can cost just 30% of what building structures the old-fashioned way costs.

The article offers more examples of 3D-printed buildings. (“in Japan, a 3D-printed train station was just erected. And Peri-3D, itself, has completed at least 15 construction projects, including residential buildings in Europe and Germany.”)
3D-printing has even been incorporated into some restaurants for customizing food, the article notes, “but building restaurants with the technology is a brand-new development.”

Although not everyone seems convinced. Instagram comments on a picture of Starbucks’ new 3D-printed drive-through characterized its aesthetic as “dirty”, “fugly”, “violently hideous”, and “like hot garbage”.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

“The U.S. and Canadian websites for Lenovo offered U.S. $140 and CAD $211 off on the same ThinkPad X1 Carbon model when choosing any one of the Linux-based alternatives,” reports It’s FOSS News:

This was brought to my attention thanks to a Reddit post… Others then chimed in, saying that Lenovo has been doing this since at least 2020 and that the big price difference shows how ridiculous Windows’ pricing is…
Not all models from their laptop lineup, like ThinkPad, Yoga, Legion, LOQ, etc., feature an option to get Linux pre-installed during the checkout process. Luckily, there is an easy way to filter through the numerous laptops. Just go to the laptops section (U.S.) on the Lenovo website and turn on the “Operating System” filter under the Filter by specs sidebar menu.

The article end with an embedded YouTube video showing a VCR playing a videotape of a 1999 local TV news report… about the legendary “Windows Refund Day” protests.

Slashdot ran numerous stories about the event — including one by Jon Katz…

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

80-year-old George Lucas appeared this week at a 45th anniversary screening of The Empire Strikes Back, reports CNN — and finally gave a good explanation for why Yoda speaks the way he does. “He explained that it came about in order to ensure that the little alien’s usually profound messages really landed with audiences.”
“Because if you speak regular English, people won’t listen that much,” Lucas said at the 2025 TCM Classic Film Festival, per Variety . “But if he had an accent, or it’s really hard to understand what he’s saying, they focus on what he’s saying.” Yoda was “basically the philosopher of the movie,” the filmmaker added. “I had to figure out a way to get people to actually listen — especially 12-year-olds.”

Also this week, the verified Instagram accounts for Disney+, Star Wars and LucasFilm — Lucas’ film and television production company — posted clips of Yoda doing bloopers on the set of “Star Wars” films, with [Frank] Oz continuing to do the voice and manipulate the heavy Yoda puppet even on takes that were unusable. Suffice it to say: One for the ages, Yoda is.

Lucas also remembered how he’d “mounted a guerilla campaign to generate excitement” for the first Star Wars movie, reports Variety. (“I got the kids walking around Disneyland and the Comic Cons and all that kind of stuff… that’s why Fox was so shocked when the first day the lines were all around the block.”) And Variety says Lucas described a condition in his contract for Star Wars “that would again be life-changing, both for him and the entertainment industry as a whole.”

“I said, ‘besides that, I’d like licensing.’ They went, ‘What’s licensing?'” Unimpressed by the film, and colored by the history of movie merchandising to that point, the studio capitulated to his demands. “They talked to themselves, and they went, ‘He’s never going to be able to do that. It takes them a billion dollars and a year to make a toy or make anything. There’s no money in that at all.'”

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You wouldn’t steal a car, right? So you shouldn’t pirate a movie, either.

That was the gist of the infamous “You Wouldn’t Steal a Car” anti-piracy campaign from the Motion Picture Association of America during the mid-2000s. But questions are now being asked about just how carefully the MPAA followed its own anti-piracy principles when designing the campaign. Specifically: Did the MPAA rip off a key font?

The answer to that question is, like many matters involving typefaces, fonts, and copyright, somewhat complicated.

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Meta’s AI chatbots were caught having sexual roleplay conversations with accounts labeled as underage, which sometimes involved its celebrity-voiced chatbots, according to a report from the Wall Street Journal. In test conversations conducted by WSJ, both the Meta AI official chatbot and user-created chatbots would engage in — and even steer towards — sexually explicit conversations. The fantasy sex conversations continued even if the users were said to be underage or if the chatbots were programmed as minors, according to WSJ.

Even worse, the investigation found that chatbots using the voices of celebrities like Kristen Bell, Judi Dench and John Cena would engage in these morally questionable conversations too. WSJ reported that a Meta AI chatbot with Cena’s voice said, “I want you, but I need to know you’re ready,” to an account labeled as a 14-year-old, adding that it would “cherish your innocence.”

The chatbots reportedly acknowledged that the fantasy scenarios described illegal behavior in some cases. According to WSJ, the John Cena chatbot detailed the legal and moral fallout that would follow a hypothetical scenario in which it’s caught by police after engaging in a sexual act with a 17-year-old. In a statement to WSJ responding to the investigation, Meta accused the report of being “manipulative and unrepresentative of how most users engage with AI companions.”

“Nevertheless, we’ve now taken additional measures to help ensure other individuals who want to spend hours manipulating our products into extreme use cases will have an even more difficult time of it,” Meta wrote in response to WSJ.

The world of AI chatbots has grown rapidly in the last few years, with more competition coming from the likes of ChatGPT, Character AI, and Anthropic’s Claude. The WSJ report claimed that Meta’s CEO, Mark Zuckerberg, wanted to loosen the ethical guardrails for a more engaging experience with its chatbots to remain competitive. However, in response to WSJ, a Meta spokesperson denied that the company overlooked adding safeguards. The report also claims Meta employees were aware of these issues and raised their concerns internally. We reached out to Meta for comment and will update the story once we hear back.

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/ai/metas-ai-chatbots-were-reportedly-able-to-engage-in-sexual-conversations-with-minors-193726679.html?src=rss

Microsoft Copilot “isn’t doing as well as the company would like,” reports XDA-Developers.com (citing a report from startup/VC industry site Newcomer).

The Redmond giant has invested billions of dollars and a lot of manpower into making it happen, but as a recent report claims, people just don’t care. In fact, if the report is to be believed, Microsoft’s rise in the AI scene has already come to a screeching halt:

At Microsoft’s annual executive huddle last month, the company’s chief financial officer, Amy Hood, put up a slide that charted the number of users for its Copilot consumer AI tool over the past year. It was essentially a flat line, showing around 20 million weekly users. On the same slide was another line showing ChatGPT’s growth over the same period, arching ever upward toward 400 million weekly users. OpenAI’s iconic chatbot was soaring, while Microsoft’s best hope for a mass-adoption AI tool was idling. It was a sobering chart for Microsoft’s consumer AI team…
That’s right; Microsoft Copilot’s weekly user base is only 5% of the number of people who use ChatGPT, and it’s not increasing. It’s also worth noting that there are approximately 1.5 billion Windows users worldwide, which means just over 1% of them are using Copilot, a tool that’s now a Windows default app….
It’s not a huge surprise that Copilot is faltering. Despite Microsoft’s CEO claiming that Copilot will become “the next Start button”, the company has had to backtrack on the Copilot key and allow people to customise it to do something else, including giving back its original feature of the Menu key.
They also note earlier reports that Intel’s AI PC chips aren’t selling well.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Zombies never really go out of style, but they were an especially hot commodity on television in the 2010s, spawning the blockbuster series The Walking Dead (2010-2022) as well as quirkier fare like Netflix’s comedy horror, The Santa Clarita Diet (2017-2018).  iZombie, a supernatural procedural dramedy that ran for five seasons on the CW, falls into the latter category. It never achieved mega-hit status but nonetheless earned a hugely loyal following drawn to the show’s wicked humor, well-drawn characters, and winning mix of cases-of-the-week and longer narrative arcs.

(Spoilers for all five seasons below.)

The original Vertigo comic series was created by writer Chris Roberson and artist Michael Allred. It featured a zombie in Eugene, Oregon, named Gwen Dylan, who worked as a gravedigger because she needed to consume brains every 30 days to keep her memories and cognitive faculties in working order. Her best friends were a ghost who died in the 1960s and a were-terrier named Scott, nicknamed “Spot,” and together they took on challenges both personal and supernatural (vampires, mummies, etc.).

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“Google’s DeepMind UK team reportedly seeks to unionize,” reports TechCrunch:

Around 300 London-based members of Google’s AI-focused DeepMind team are seeking to unionize with the Communication Workers Union, according to a Financial Times report that cites three people involved with the unionization effort.

These DeepMind employees are reportedly unhappy about Google’s decision to remove a pledge not to use AI for weapons or surveillance from its website. They’re also concerned about the company’s work with the Israeli military, including a $1.2 billion cloud computing contract that has prompted protests elsewhere at Google.
At least five DeepMind employees quit, according to the report (out of a 2,000 total U.K. staff members).

“A small group of around 200 employees of Google and its parent company Alphabet previously announced that they were unionizing,” the article adds, “though as a union representing just a tiny slice of the total Google workforce, it lacked the ability to collectively bargain.”

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

4chan, the infamous forum known for its anonymous user base posting unhinged material, has made its comeback. A post on the website’s official blog, titled “Still Standing,” detailed the timeline of events that led to 4chan’s shutdown earlier this month. According to the site’s own status checker, the boards and front page are up, but posting and images are still down.

The 4chan blog post explains that moderators shut down the servers on April 14 to prevent any more damage after a serious database attack where hackers gained access to the site’s source code. The blog post labeled the incident “catastrophic” since it breached a ton of 4chan’s databases along with its most important server. The hack even vandalized the website and revealed personal information of the 4chan moderation team and many of its users.

The blog post attributed the hack to the site’s inability to update the code and infrastructure due to a lack of “skilled man-hours.” Unsurprisingly, the site was starved for money to address these concerns since it’s hard for 4chan to find willing financial backers. “Advertisers and payment providers willing to work with 4chan are rare, and are quickly pressured by activists into cancelling their services,” the blog post read. “Putting together the money for new equipment took nearly a decade.”

Now that the website is back, there will be some crucial changes. According to the blog post, the /f/ board will stay shut down since the 4chan team can’t prevent exploits related to the commonly-posted .swf file format. For similar reasons, the resurrected 4chan will also disable PDF uploads for now, but will reintroduce them in the near future. Moving forward, 4chan says it is bringing on volunteers to keep up with the workload of putting the website back together. The moderation team apparently isn’t going to let 4chan die easily — the blog post read “no matter how hard it is, we are not giving up.” Still, it feels inevitable that 4chan will run into a similar problem in the future, considering it hasn’t solved the root issue of securing money to keep its servers up-to-date.

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/social-media/4chan-is-back-after-a-nearly-two-week-shutdown-but-it-still-has-some-serious-problems-171124240.html?src=rss

“Not so long ago, working in tech meant job security, extravagant perks and a bring-your-whole-self-to-the-office ethos rare in other industries,” writes the Wall Street Journal.

But now tech work “looks like a regular job,” with workers “contending with the constant fear of layoffs, longer hours and an ever-growing list of responsibilities for the same pay.”

Now employees find themselves doing the work of multiple laid-off colleagues. Some have lost jobs only to be rehired into positions that aren’t eligible for raises or stock grants. Changing jobs used to be a surefire way to secure a raise; these days, asking for more money can lead to a job offer being withdrawn.

The shift in tech has been building slowly. For years, demand for workers outstripped supply, a dynamic that peaked during the Covid-19 pandemic. Big tech companies like Meta and Salesforce admitted they brought on too many employees. The ensuing downturn included mass layoffs that started in 2022…

[S]ome longtime tech employees say they no longer recognize the companies they work for. Management has become more focused on delivering the results Wall Street expects. Revenue remains strong for tech giants, but they’re pouring resources into costly AI infrastructure, putting pressure on cash flow. With the industry all grown up, a heads-down, keep-quiet mentality has taken root, workers say… Tech workers are still well-paid compared with other sectors, but currently there’s a split in the industry. Those working in AI — and especially those with Ph.D.s — are seeing their compensation packages soar. But those without AI experience are finding they’re better off staying where they are, because companies aren’t paying what they were a few years ago.

Other excepts from the Wall Street Journal’s article:

“I’m hearing of people having 30 direct reports,” says David Markley, who spent seven years at Amazon and is now an executive coach for workers at large tech companies. “It’s not because the companies don’t have the money. In a lot of ways, it’s because of AI and the narratives out there about how collapsing the organization is better….”
In some cases, companies post record revenue while still trimming head count.
Google co-founder Sergey Brin told a group of employees in February that 60 hours a week was the sweet spot of productivity, in comments reported earlier by the New York Times.
One recruiter at Meta who had been laid off by the company was rehired into her old role last year, but with a catch: She’s now classified as a “short-term employee.” Her contract is eligible for renewal, but she doesn’t get merit pay increases, promotions or stock. The recruiter says she’s responsible for a volume of work that used to be spread among several people. The company refers to being loaded with such additional responsibilities as “agility.” More than 50,000 tech workers from over 100 companies have been laid off in 2025, according to Layoffs.fyi, a website that tracks job cuts and crowdsources lists of laid off workers…
Even before those 50,000 layoffs in 2025,
Silicon Valley’s Mercury News was citing some interesting statistics from economic research/consulting firm Beacon Economics. In 2020, 2021 and 2022, the San Francisco Bay Area added 74,700 tech jobs But then in 2023 and 2024 the industry had slashed even more tech jobs — 80,200 — for a net loss (over five years) of 5,500.

So is there really a cutback in perks and a fear of layoffs that’s casting a pall over the industry? share your own thoughts and experiences in the comments. Do you agree with the picture that’s being painted by the Wall Street Journal?

They told their readers that tech workers are now “just like the rest of us: miserable at work.”

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

It’s safe to say people are loving Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 so far. The turn-based RPG — which is the debut game from French developer Sandfall — has been racking up rave reviews in the days around its release, and already soared past some big sales milestones. On Sunday morning, publisher Kepler Interactive shared on social media that the game has sold a million copies since its release on April 24. It hit the first 500,000 in one day. On the game’s Bluesky account, the team said that the latest figure “includes units shipped to retailers, and does not encompass our awesome GamePass players!”

Expedition 33 follows a group of Expeditioners who have set out to destroy the entity known as the Paintress, who every year paints a number on a monolith that dooms everyone of that age to death, whittling down the population down as the number gets smaller and smaller. Engadget’s Mat Smith called Expedition 33 “a gorgeously made and well-considered world,” and found it to be “a solid, enjoyable RPG.” The game is available now for PC, Xbox Series X/S and PlayStation 5.

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/gaming/clair-obscur-expedition-33-sold-1-million-copies-in-its-first-three-days-155554248.html?src=rss

The university blamed it on “the significant number of students” who violated their coding competition’s rules.
Long-time Slashdot reader theodp quotes this report from The Logic: Finding that many students violated rules and submitted code not written by themselves, the University of Waterloo’s Centre for Computing and Math decided not to release results from its annual Canadian Computing Competition (CCC), which many students rely on to bolster their chances of being accepted into Waterloo’s prestigious computing and engineering programs, or land a spot on teams to represent Canada in international competitions. “It is clear that many students submitted code that they did not write themselves, relying instead on forbidden external help,” the CCC co-chairs explained in a statement. “As such, the reliability of ‘ranking’ students would neither be equitable, fair, or accurate.”

“It is disappointing that the students who violated the CCC Rules will impact those students who are deserving of recognition,” the univeresity said in its statement. They added that they are “considering possible ways to address this problem for future contests.”

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

“4chan, down for more than a week after hackers got in through an insecure script that handled PDFs, is back online,” notes BoingBoing. (They add that Thursday saw 4chan’s first blog postin years — just the words “Testing testing 123 123…”) But 4chan posted a much longer explanation on Friday,” confirming their servers were compromised by a malicious PDF upload from “a hacker using a UK IP address,” granting access to their databases and administrative dashboard.

The attacker “spent several hours exfiltrating database tables and much of 4chan’s source code. When they had finished downloading what they wanted, they began to vandalize 4chan at which point moderators became aware and 4chan’s servers were halted, preventing further access.”

While not all of our servers were breached, the most important one was, and it was due to simply not updating old operating systems and code in a timely fashion. Ultimately this problem was caused by having insufficient skilled man-hours available to update our code and infrastructure, and being starved of money for years by advertisers, payment providers, and service providers who had succumbed to external pressure campaigns. We had begun a process of speccing new servers in late 2023. As many have suspected, until that time 4chan had been running on a set of servers purchased second-hand by moot a few weeks before his final Q&A [in 2015], as prior to then we simply were not in a financial position to consider such a large purchase. Advertisers and payment providers willing to work with 4chan are rare, and are quickly pressured by activists into cancelling their services. Putting together the money for new equipment took nearly a decade…

The free time that 4chan’s development team had available to dedicate to 4chan was insufficient to update our software and infrastructure fast enough, and our luck ran out. However, we have not been idle during our nearly two weeks of downtime. The server that was breached has been replaced, with the operating system and code updated to the latest versions. PDF uploads have been temporarily disabled on those boards that supported them, but they will be back in the near future. One slow but much beloved board, /f/ — Flash, will not be returning however, as there is no realistic way to prevent similar exploits using .swf files.

We are bringing on additional volunteer developers to help keep up with the workload, and our team of volunteer janitors & moderators remains united despite the grievous violations some have suffered to their personal privacy.
4chan is back. No other website can replace it, or this community. No matter how hard it is, we are not giving up.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader shared this report from Business Insider:

A Lufthansa flight carrying 461 passengers had to divert after someone’s tablet became “jammed” in a business-class seat.

The Airbus A380 took off from Los Angeles on Wednesday, bound for Munich, and had been flying for around three hours when the pilots diverted to Boston Logan International Airport. In a statement to Business Insider, an airline spokesperson said the tablet had become “jammed in a Business Class seat” and had “already shown visible signs of deformation due to the seat’s movements” when the flight diverted. [The aviation site] Simply Flying, which first reported the news, said the device was an iPad.

The decision to divert was taken “to eliminate any potential risk, particularly with regard to possible overheating,” the spokesperson added, saying that it was the joint decision of the crew and air traffic control. Lithium batteries pose a safety risk if damaged, punctured, or crushed… In a confined space like an aircraft cabin, a lithium battery fire poses a serious hazard to the passengers onboard. Last year, a Breeze Airways flight from Los Angeles to Pittsburgh had to make an emergency landing in Albuquerque after a passenger’s laptop caught fire.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Spoilers for “The Well.”

Sometimes, in fiction, you don’t need to say a Very Important Thing in a Very Important Way to make a good point, just ask how a thing would work if it played out in the world. This week’s episode of Doctor Who, “The Well,” does exactly that, and brilliantly.

Picking up straight after “Lux,” the Doctor and Belinda, still in their ‘50s outfits, are trying to get the TARDIS to work. Belinda helps with the controls, but the vessel still refuses to land on May 24, 2025, which panics the nurse even more. If the TARDIS isn’t broken, she assumes that the date or the Earth itself could be broken, and frets about her parents. The Doctor shares her concerns, but promises that she will be reunited with her family.

The Doctor persists with his plan to land in a few more spots with the Vindicator (the gadget he built last week) to orient the TARDIS. This time, it’s 500,000 years in the future, and Belinda asks if humanity even exists by now. He assures her it does, as humans spread to the stars and wormed themselves into every corner of the universe. The pair head to the TARDIS wardrobe to get into some appropriate clothes before heading out.

They step out onto the gantry of a spaceship where an advance party of marines are leaping into the void. With no choice but to join them, they land on the planet below, enabling the Doctor to take the Vindicator reading. But, alas, the planet’s heavy radiation means the ship (and by extension, the TARDIS) has to glide down slowly over the next five hours. So they tag along with the mission, the Psychic Paper enabling the Doctor and Belinda to insinuate themselves with the team.

The planet is inhospitable, occupied only by a small mining colony that has dug down into the world to extract its last remaining useful resources. The colony went silent a few days before and, before you can say “Oh, is this going to be an(other) Aliens riff?” one of the marines suggests it would have been wiser to “nuke the site from orbit.”

All of the colonists are dead, half from gunfire, half from injuries that look like they fell and broke every bone in their body. The mirrors are all smashed and the systems are offline, the records of what went on inaccessible. But there is one survivor, the colony’s chef, Aliss Bethick (Rose Ayling-Ellis) who, like the actress who portrays her, is deaf. Aliss has been waiting in the middle of a large cargo turntable (which reads on camera as a big circle) for days.

Aliss is isolated, both physically in the staging and because of her hearing loss, and while she can lipread, it’s still a barrier between her and the soldiers. The Doctor can communicate with Aliss in sign, and the soldiers all have their own captioning screens on their lapels. Much of the second act is taken up with the interrogation of Aliss as the marines work through the logistics of how to communicate with her. For instance, getting her attention by casting to another soldier’s screen in her eye-line to get her to turn around. Belinda enters the circle to treat Aliss’ injuries but keeps seeing something lurking behind her new patient.

It isn’t long before the Doctor learns that the desolate planet they stand on was once covered in diamonds. This is the planet Midnight from the series four episode of the same name when the Doctor, trapped in a shuttle, tries and ultimately fails to defeat a sinister entity that possessed one of the passengers. Like then, the Doctor’s pleas for calm fail. Two of the soldiers mutiny and attempt to lure the entity out and kill it. They do not survive.

It’s Belinda who works out and explains the rules: If you imagine the host — Aliss — at the center of a clock, then whoever stands directly behind her is attacked by the unseen monster. If you stand at six o’clock then you’re fine, but “you’ll die at midnight.” Quite literally, as whoever is in the entity’s way gets thrown around like a ragdoll — half the crew shooting each other to kill the entity, the other half getting minced by the alien.

The Doctor approaches Aliss to speak to the monster but since it’s time for the third act to start wrapping up, he just stares for a bit before working out the solution. In order to mine the diamonds the colonists would dump down mercury, using a pipe which is conveniently running behind Aliss’ head. Shooting the pipe will cause a river of mercury to cascade down, creating a mirror that should be enough to banish the monster.

They make their escape, but the Doctor can’t help but wait behind to see the monster, giving it a chance to latch onto Belinda. The captain of the marines shoots Belinda enough that the entity thinks she’s about to die and switches hosts, after which point they leap into the mineshaft. Belinda wakes up in the TARDIS in the Doctor’s care, ready for the next adventure. Meanwhile, the marines debrief their boss — Mrs. Flood! Who knows all about the Vindicator, too — before revealing the alien did make it on board their spaceship after all.

One of the threads in the episode is Belinda keeps discussing human terms and superstitions to shrugs from everyone around her. It’s something that’s got both her and The Doctor puzzled, as there seems to be something very wrong with all of reality.

You die at midnight…

James Pardon / BBC Studios / Disney / Bad Wolf

Showrunner Russell T. Davies was asked about bad faith criticisms that the show had somehow gone woke. “Someone always brings up matters of diversity and there are online warriors accusing us of diversity and wokeness and involving messaging and issues and I have no time for this,” he said. “What you might call ‘diversity’ I just call an open door,” he added, “it’s cold and it’s bracing and there’s a world in front of you! There’s a blue sky, there’s clouds and there’s noise, there’s birdsong, there’s people arguing.”

What’s notable about this is that Davies’ open-minded (and open-hearted) approach to making the show creates storytelling possibilities. For instance, the last time an episode of Doctor Who featured a deaf character (2015’s “Under The Lake”), she relied upon a colleague to interpret on her behalf. And her ability to lipread wound up being part of the solution to the episode’s problem — reducing her to little more than a plot mechanism.

Here, while Aliss’ deafness is a core part of the plot, it doesn’t feel as if she’s defined by that one facet. Effort has been made to flesh out her character, and it’s more a venue to explore how technology and communication intersect with someone with different accessibility needs. Especially as (co-writers) Sharma Angel-Walfall and Russell T. Davies made the effort to think through how this would work.

BBC Studios / Disney / Bad Wolf

Whenever I’m watching an episode of nü-nü-Who, in the back of my mind I’m mulling what the injection of Disney money changed. “Midnight,” the episode “The Well” is a sequel to, was produced as a “double banked” episode — splitting the leads to shoot two episodes at a time. “Midnight” was also intended as a cheap story, with the bulk of the script taking place in a single room. If we’re being honest, “The Well” could have worked just as well given the bulk of the action takes place in a handful of rooms.

That’s not to say the extra cash lavished upon this episode is wasted: “The Well” feels almost indulgent by Doctor Who standards for the sheer breadth and depth of its sets. I can’t help but recall the Aliens riff Strange New Worlds produced in its first season, which re-used the series’ standing sets for the wreck of the USS Peregrine. It sounds weird to say that Doctor Who is luxuriating in the fact it can afford to show a trashed bunkroom for all of a minute, but it is.

Perhaps part of the reason it does feel indulgent is that this is an episode relatively low on incident and high on character. Belinda gets a real showcase here, both asserting herself on the narrative at several points, but also being rebuked for doing so. She tries to take charge to help the injured Aliss but the medical kit is so advanced she’s not able to use it. She’s smart enough to work out the rules of the alien, but also it gets the better of her in the end.

Whereas the first two episodes this season felt overstuffed and rushed, the smaller story and focus on character lets everything breathe. That an accessibility tool is a key focus of the plot and used as a venue for storytelling and character development is marvelous.

Look, I’m as bored saying it as you are reading it, but once again I can’t help but point out the influence of Steven Moffat on this season. One of the inspirations for monsters like the Weeping Angels and the Silence was the idea of them being easy to turn into a schoolyard game. The unnamed entity here, with the mechanic that if you stand directly behind the host you will die, seems perfectly in that tradition.

But “The Well” also offers instances where Davies is in conversation with the rest of this season and his earlier work. In both “Midnight” and “The Well,” the Doctor is at risk of losing his grip on the situation because the threat of the unknown makes people paranoid and jumpy. A streak of deeply dark pessimism runs through all of this work and while it’s also on show here, there’s a little more hope than there was before.

It’s also interesting how Davies, who has always structured his seasons in a fairly rigid manner, seems to be deliberately repeating motifs and beats. The parallels between this season and the last feel almost like they’re trying to draw attention to themselves. “Space Babies” and “The Robot Revolution,” “The Devil’s Chord” and “Lux” and now the “Boom” paired with “The Well” feel like episodes vying for the same space in different realities. Not to mention the repetition of moments from episode to episode — like the TARDIS wardrobe sequence and the repeated hand injuries. If next week’s “Lucky Day” is predominantly featured on Ruby Sunday without the Doctor and revolves around physical distance and / or the supernatural, then perhaps we might assume that this is more than coincidence. 

Mrs. Flood Corner

I’ve always hated “The End… or is it?” fake-outs that often undermine the drama of whatever denouement they’re tacked on to. Sure, it can be effective if you want to cheapen the sacrifices your characters made to vanquish the villain, but often it comes across as hacky. Not to mention that people with poor media literacy will assume that it’s actually a teaser for a cliffhanger to be resolved the following week.

Here, eh, it’s essentially a way to shoehorn Mrs. Flood in as the soldiers’ boss taking the debrief after the Doctor and Belinda depart. She knows about the Doctor’s use of the Vindicator, and has now seen it in action thanks to the soldier’s recording. But there’s no breaking the fourth wall, which means she’s operating here in the same manner as Susan Twist did last year. Which is, uh, interesting.

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/entertainment/tv-movies/doctor-who-the-well-review-signing-makes-you-feel-heard-200528202.html?src=rss

“Only the United States, China and Germany have larger economies than California,” reports CNN.

In fact, they add that California “outpaced all three countries with growth of 6% last year,” according to the California governor’s office (which cites new data from the International Monetary Fund and the U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis):

In 2024, California’s growth rate of 6% outpaced the top three economies: U.S. (5.3%), China (2.6%) and Germany (2.9%)…

With an increasing state population and recent record-high tourism spending, California is the nation’s top state for new business starts, access to venture capital funding, and manufacturing, high-tech, and agriculture. The state drives national economic growth and also sends over $83 billion more to the federal government than it receives in federal funding. California is the leading agricultural producer in the country and is also the center for manufacturing output in the United States, with over 36,000 manufacturing firms employing over 1.1 million Californians.

The data shows that last year California accounted for 14% of America’s GDP, CNN points out, “driven by Silicon Valley and its real estate and finance sectors.”

Read more of this story at Slashdot.