Technology

We didn’t go to the movies much this year, but the movies still came to us. While the convenience of home viewing can’t match the experience of watching a spectacle in the dark with others, the other joy of movies — talking about them — is easier than ever, thanks to our connected world. And 2020’s pandemic sidelined a lot of big blockbusters, leaving smaller, more interesting movies to take center stage. As silver linings go, this one isn’t that bad. Here, in no particular order, are ten incredible movies from a year where movies still rallied to offer experiences that were provocative, compelling, and fun. The Assistant One of the best films made in response to the crimes of Harvey Weinstein and the subsequent #MeToo movement, The Assistant follows an assistant (Julia Garner) who works a...

In the early days of despair, I looked at Spotify and decided that everything sounded bad. All songs were boring, and I was sick of everything. What that really meant was I was sick of myself. But by the summer, I’d found the solve: ambient music. The best music I heard this year was barely music at all. The notion of “ambient music” is pretentious, sure, but the concept is simple. If most music is centered around some alchemy of melody and rhythm, ambient music eschews that for whatever else: tones, moods, atmosphere. I’ve listened to Peel by Nairobi-based artist KMRU roughly once a day since I first heard it in July. Like most music in the genre, the album is concerned with timbre and texture — a lot of shapeless, ambiguous noise that slowly escalates and envelopes you. (Or, if you are m...

I broke ground on my Animal Crossing: New Horizons island, Honkland, just three days before the UK’s Prime Minister Boris Johnson announced that the country was going into lockdown. I’d pitched up my tent, and I was just about to deliver a pile of materials to Timmy Nook to help him build the island’s general store. I was enjoying my first Animal Crossing, but I hadn’t quite hit that point of “getting it” just yet. The menus were slow to navigate, and I wasn’t really sure what I was working toward. Mining the most material out of each of my island rocks involved a convoluted process of digging two holes and then hitting them repeatedly over the course of several seconds. Picking fruit involved first shaking a tree and then picking up each piece individually. It felt deliberately inefficien...

Early one morning, a week after the pandemic started, chef and food writer J. Kenji López-Alt strapped a GoPro to his head and filmed himself making breakfast. In the video, you can see López-Alt rummaging through his fridge, slicing and frying bacon, and peeling a bit of egg off a pan to give to his excited dog. There’s no recipe beneath the video, no voice-over instructions detailing what we’re seeing — it’s just a guy in a kitchen making breakfast. Videos like these became both much-needed entertainment and valuable educational resources early in the pandemic, as a world of people realized they would be stuck at home indefinitely with their own (not necessarily stunning) cooking, and a little extra time to put into it. Food and drink streams surged in popularity on Twitch, doubling in h...

9to5Mac’s Michael Steeber noticed a interesting coincidence today: the company has temporarily closed every single retail store in California, many more across the US, both stores in Mexico, both stores in Brazil, and is about to close 16 additional stores across the UK. As Steeber points out, that’s nearly 100 stores if we include ones it closed in Germany and the Netherlands last week, leaving nearly a fifth of the company’s locations now closed worldwide. I checked Apple’s complete list of stores to confirm, and sure enough: every California store, all four in Tennessee, all three in Utah, all four in Minnesota, two in Oklahoma, and the stores in Portland, Oregon; Anchorage, Alaska; Omaha, Nebraska; and Albuquerque, New Mexico are all closed this upcoming week — as well as the 16 additi...

“Alexa, play the Queen’s Christmas Day message” will soon be a thing — even if you don’t live in the UK. Starting December 25th at 3PM GMT (or 10AM ET, 7AM PT), that phrase will deliver the Queen’s traditional Christmas Day broadcast, according to The Guardian. If you’re curious what the Queen’s message might contain, you can check out transcripts of all her previous Christmas Broadcasts (going back to 1952!) at The Royal Household’s website. No doubt this one will spend some time on the COVID-19 pandemic, whose latest variant is currently forcing London to impose its harshest lockdown yet, but perhaps it’ll be a bit of an escape from the harsh reality, too. Amazon seems to think it might be: “After a challenging year, millions of people from across the Commonwealth will be eagerly awaitin...

As a lowly Wired Magazine intern, one of my first assignments was reviewing 2007’s The Simpsons Game: a groundbreaking self-referential parody of the entire gaming industry that, sadly, suffered from as nearly as many tropes as it lampooned. But it turns out Fox had been interested in a three-dimensional Simpsons game long before that — one that could have appeared on the Sega Dreamcast if things had worked out. Today, the DreamcasticChannel on YouTube (via Kotaku) is showcasing an unreleased tech demo from the year 2000 for a title tentatively called “The Simpsons: Bug Squad!” It’s from the long-defunct Red Lemon Studios, and it’s remarkable how much the game’s cel-shaded graphics look like the show. Apparently, a Dreamcast-Talk forum user by the name of sreak found this demo just sitting...

Is your internet service provider charging you every month for the cable modem or router that you purchased with your own money? Or, perhaps, have you never bothered to buy those items because you couldn’t escape the fee? That fee will be illegal starting Sunday, December 20th, and you should tell your ISP that you’ll no longer tolerate it, threaten to sue, and/or take advantage of any binding arbitration clause it may have with you. Last year, Congress passed a law that should have fixed this ridiculous loophole as of June 20th, 2020 — and though the FCC managed to extend the deadline six months by spinning up some bullshit about how cable companies didn’t have the resources to stop charging you money, the law should take full effect tomorrow. Do note that the actual text of the law still...

Antivirus will be taking a break over the holidays. We’ll be back on January 9th. When healthcare workers started administering the first shots of the Pfizer/BioNTech vaccine in the US this week, they noticed something strange. There was an extra dose lingering at the bottom of the small glass vial. “They initially thought that they had incorrectly done it because there was so much left in the vial after they pulled up the five doses,” Erin Fox, Senior Pharmacy Director at the University of Utah told The New York Times. “They sent us a picture and were like, can we use the extra?” On Wednesday, the Food and Drug Administration announced on Twitter that yes, the pharmacists can use the extra. They can use every single full dose in a vial, but, the FDA added, they can’t cobble together a dos...

For the second time in two months, Apple is putting one of the companies it hires to build the iPhone on notice for violating labor laws. Reuters, Bloomberg and others are reporting that Apple has put Taiwanese manufacturing giant Wistron on “probation” — meaning it won’t receive any new business from Apple until it sorts things out — after the supplier was found exploiting workers at a plant in India. The reason we’re hearing about this at all is rather incredible: on December 12th, some 2,000 workers decided to protest unpaid wages by rioting at one of Wistron’s offices, smashing up the lobby and overturning vehicles. There’s video: It now turns out that the workers’ complaints were legitimate: Wistron is admitting as much, and the local government found serious labor violations in its p...

“We have it totally under control. It’s one person coming in from China. We have it under control. It’s going to be just fine.” — President Donald Trump on COVID-19, January 22nd, 2020. “The Coronavirus is very much under control in the USA.” — Trump on COVID-19, February 24th. “It’s incredible. But it’s something that we have tremendous control over.” — Trump on COVID-19, March 15th. Here’s Trump today, on the massive SolarWinds hack that targeted federal agencies and could have exposed 425 of the companies on the Fortune 500: “I have been fully briefed and everything is well under control.” You don’t say. Here are a few perspectives on the SolarWinds hack from entities that do not currently have negative credibility: Do not conflate voting system security and SolarWinds. The proof is in ...

If you read my previous post, you might have noticed a brand-new Twitter label on Trump’s latest wildly misleading tweet: “Election officials have certified Joe Biden as the winner of the U.S. Presidential election.” Yes, Twitter is now calling the election for Joe Biden on Trump’s own tweets. Twitter tells us it’s simply an update to its existing label, designed to “reflect the latest information.” But there’s a staggering difference between this label and Twitter’s previous one, which simply said “Multiple sources called this election differently.” That left room for doubt. Now that the Electoral College has voted, Twitter not only accepting the result, but using it to visibly challenge the president’s ongoing lie that he won the election. You can see the first new example below. Will th...