Before I saw Dragon Ball on VHS tapes in American flea markets and airing on Toonami, I saw it on TV in Guatemala, crowding around a tiny set with distant cousins I barely knew, in a language I had little command of. I learned to say Goku in Spanish before...
House of the Dragon’s epic dragon battle hinged on the details
Designing a full-grown dragon hasn’t changed much since the final seasons of Game of Thrones, but pulling off a dance with dragons? A completely different and vastly more complicated story, says the VFX team behind House of the Dragon season 2. Sunday night’s fourth episode brought the feud between the...
Corsair’s warehouse workers make pennies compared to CEO’s millions — and now they’re fighting back
When a PlayStation 5 controller comes down the assembly line at Corsair’s Duluth, Georgia, warehouse, it’s disassembled to make way for new parts carefully installed by SCUF Gaming’s assembly team. SCUF’s bespoke PS5 controllers start at $200 and go up from there, upgrading Sony’s standard DualSense design with new grips,...
There’s ‘an awful lot of Shakespeare’ in Baldur’s Gate 3’s Dark Urge
Neil Roberts is a great many things in the world of acting. He’s an accomplished soap opera actor in the U.K., a villain in the classic series Charmed, a performer on countless radio dramas, and a stage actor, and he’s been in a lot of stuff going back over three...
Studio Ponoc wants its anime to change the world — and escape Studio Ghibli’s shadow
When Studio Ponoc premiered its first feature-length animated film, 2017’s Mary and the Witch’s Flower, audiences and critics alike championed Ponoc as the successor to Japan’s famed Studio Ghibli, which at the time seemed to be on a potentially permanent hiatus. With the studio’s latest film, The Imaginary, Ponoc is...
World of Warcraft’s most notorious bug inspired this cursed piece of modern art
It looks like something out of an eldritch fantasy horror, perhaps a Diablo game: a modestly sized chest covered in sharp, bony extrusions, gnarled ligaments, and twisted veins, all rendered in a pale, ghostly, fleshlike color. It’s repulsively organic, but also has an occult, ceremonial air. In fact, this cursed...
Emma Stone gave Poor Things an unexpected happy ending, says director Yorgos Lanthimos
It’s been a year of arresting lead performances in movies, perhaps none more so than Emma Stone’s in Yorgos Lanthimos’ Poor Things. The movie is a lot: a surreal, ornately designed, provocative fantasia set in an alternate Victorian Europe. It features, among other memorable characters, a mad scientist who belches...
Star Trek’s first-ever musical episode divided the Strange New Worlds cast
Throwing an hour of light comedy into the middle of a 10-episode arc with galactic-level stakes could derail an entire season, but Star Trek: Strange New Worlds dances gracefully from week to week between courtroom drama, time-travel romance, and its latest wild swing: a musical episode. In “Subspace Rhapsody,” the...
The Legend of Zelda is everywhere in modern music
Whether it’s sound effects from Super Mario Bros. and Street Fighter popping up in Charli XCX and Flying Lotus songs, or hip-hop producers flipping samples from Donkey Kong and Chrono Trigger to make beats for Drake and Wiz Khalifa, the influence of video games on modern music is hard to...
What can modern TCGs learn from the long-dead Dune: Collectible Card Game?
Trading card games aren’t just popular with players. They’re also incredibly popular with executives, as they can be lucrative for publishers and distributors alike. Magic: The Gathering became a $1 billion brand for Hasbro in 2023, which went quite a long way to improving its bottom line, if we’re being...