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Tech NewsCopyrightYouTube’s Copyright Filter Is Crushing Video Critique—And It’s Getting Worse
In July, Harry “hbomberguy” Brewis shared a video on his popular YouTube channel called “RWBY Is Disappointing, And Here’s Why.” The two-and-half-hour video — a sharp, detailed critique of the cartoon RWBY — was the result of a lot of work by Brewis and his producer, Kat Lo. It also took an extra week and … Continued
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io9The Decade Fandom Went Corporate
In the last twenty years, fandom and mass culture have basically merged. Fans and fandom spent the 2000s fighting for legitimacy and proving their combined worth. And corporations? Well, they spent the 2010s learning how to co-opt fandom to silence critics, manipulate press, and make even more money. For decades and decades, fandom wasn’t something … Continued
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io9When Fandom Is the Problem
“Fandom”—the participatory community that grows out of a piece of media—has come to dominate pop culture. Fandom is not simply being a fan of something. Fandom is performing being a fan by creating transformative works, collecting knowledge, cosplaying, attending conventions, and, ever-increasingly, being vocal online. Some of this has been really great for people seeking … Continued
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io9MoviesHow Fantastic Beasts Failed at Representation, and What J.K. Rowling Can Do About It
I come not to bury J.K. Rowling, but to praise her. Harry Potter was an honest to god phenomenon, impacting my generation in roughly the same way Star Wars did for the one before us. The world she created fascinated us and the fandom was deeply invested in the story. But in her rush to … Continued
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io9Farewell, io9, It’s Time for Me to Return to My Home Planet
Dearest io9ers, this is it: After many years and almost as many job titles, it is time for me to say goodbye. I started here as an intern in 2010, just out of college and with no idea what I wanted to do. The job market was bad, so after a while toiling in the … Continued
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io9
Dear Beloved Nerd Actors: No More Hamlets, Please
Listen, I give all the props in the world to genre fiction for its persistent casting of stage actors in its projects. That said, we need to have a talk about how, having catapulted to fame through one such franchise, everyone feels the need to go do Hamlet. Stop doing Hamlet. I call this the … Continued
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io9Television
Last Night’s Star Trek: Discovery Was a Great Climax to a Show We Never Got
The midseason finale of Star Trek: Discovery, “Into the Forest I Go,” finally got this show to the place it should have been all season. Of course, in the process, it had to jettison a lot of character development it has been working on—but since it was mostly stuff that was bad, I’m perfectly happy … Continued
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io9Books
Author Tamora Pierce on Straightforward, Inclusive Fantasy
Tamora Pierce is a prolific author of fantasy books, most of which feature young women as protagonists and many of which are set in her fictional land of Tortall. With Tortall: A Spy’s Guide out earlier this month, io9 spoke with the writer about details left out of the book, diversity in genre fiction, and … Continued
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io9MoviesWhat Star Wars History May Tell Us About Rian Johnson’s New Trilogy
Yesterday, the news dropped that Rian Johnson’s time in the Star Wars universe would not end with The Last Jedi. Instead, Disney CEO Bob Iger announced that Johnson would be working on a brand new trilogy of movies, separate from the main Saga films, that would “introduce new characters from a corner of the galaxy … Continued
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io9Television
Riverdale‘s Jughead Is a Shitty Writer
Riverdale is a delightful mess of a show. Absolutely none of it should work, and yet season one was a confounding combination of high school soap opera theatrics and over-the-top drama, the likes of which we’ve never seen before. And yet, right up there with Archie’s music career, is the bewildering choice to frame the … Continued
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io9Television
Star Trek: Discovery Riffs on an Original Series Episode With Muddled Results
Last night’s “Si Vis Pacem, Para Bellum” ended on a cliffhanger that sets up a big showdown for next week’s finale. Meanwhile, everyone, save Burnham, is wandering around acting suspicious as hell. And for some reason, the show seems like it’s doing its own version of a classic Klingon-Federation moment from the original series. The … Continued
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io9
‘By the Sheen of the Foam, I Beheld Two Skelingtons Sitting in Their Coffins’
Out on a walk by the beach at night, you look out into the sea and see… two skeletons surfing on their coffins. We haven’t done one in a while, but we’re bringing back the concept art writing prompt. We provide the image, you provide the writing. A few days late for Halloween are these … Continued
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io9Books
Looking Back at Han Solo’s Evil Twin, Lando’s Wife Hunt, and the Insane Corellian Trilogy Books
Hello, and welcome to another installment of “Oh god, why do I keep volunteering to re-read the worst Star Wars Expanded Universe novels, do I have some sort of Stockholm Syndrome?” I have picked Roger MacBride Allen’s Corellian Trilogy this time as it contains one of my all-time favorite twists. Now, if you’ve never read … Continued
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io9Television
io9 Is Stuck in a Time Loop of Explaining Star Trek: Discovery‘s Use of Harry Mudd
Harry Mudd (Rainn Wilson) reappeared this week in an episode that took a crack at one of scifi’s most venerable tropes: the time loop. In our livestream, we take a look at how well the show did with the opportunities presented by repeating the same 30 minutes over and over again (it’s pretty good!) as … Continued
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io9Television
Last Night Was Star Trek: Discovery‘s Best Episode
If you’ve been sitting around waiting for Discovery to find a balance between classic Trek storytelling and its commitment to serialized storytelling with a single main character, than “Magic to Make the Sanest Man Go Mad” is the best we’ve got so far. I will admit up front that I love a time loop episode. … Continued
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io9
What Change to Canon Do You Find the Most Infuriating?
Something that Star Trek: Discovery has thrown up, once again, is all the questions that surround canon. How much of it is really canon canon, how much can be fudged, etc. And so we ask: what change to canon did you hate the most? I don’t hate the War Doctor (John Hurt) as much as … Continued
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io9
The Most Mind-Boggling ‘Sexy’ Costumes of Halloween 2017
Halloween is one week away, and you know what that means: It’s time for the annual collection of utterly confusing Halloween costumes that are meant to be sexy, but are mostly just… confusing. Note: The criteria for inclusion on this list isn’t that the outfit is “slutty.” We’re not going for “all this skin shameful” … Continued
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io9Trailer FrenzyA Magic Wand Is a ‘Nuclear Bomb’ in the New Trailer for the Fantasy Cop Movie Bright
The goal of Netflix’s Bright is clearly to slam together the tropes of the buddy cop movie with those of fantasy. So we’ve got a veteran cop in Will Smith’s Officer Ward and a newbie and first Orc officer in Joel Edgerton’s Jakoby. And then they stumble onto a magic wand that causes real problems. … Continued
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io9Television
io9 Tries to Figure Out How Star Trek: Discovery Can Ever Sync Up With the Rest of Timeline
Episode six of Star Trek: Discovery brought back Spock’s dad Sarek in order to reveal more and more about the never-ending trauma of Burnham’s childhood. Speaking of trauma, Lorca also gets his past dissected and goes full sociopath to save his captaincy. In the livestream for “Lethe,” io9’s Katharine Trendacosta and Gizmodo’s Alex Cranz try … Continued
Katharine Trendacosta
Katharine Trendacosta's posts