UrLogicFails

Halloween is easily one of my favorite holidays and the costuming is no small aspect of that to me.

I know for some, costuming is a lot of fun and so a costume is chosen very carefully, and for others costuming is an obligation and not much thought is put into it. But even if you don't care much about the costume, sometimes a lot of thought is still put into make the costume as convenient as possible.

So I would like to ask what you are going as for Halloween this year, and your reasons for it

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Mr. Stewart and Apple executives decided to part ways in recent days, two of the people said. Members of the show’s staff were informed about its end on Thursday. Taping of episodes for the third season was scheduled to begin within a couple of weeks, one of the people said.

Mr. Stewart told members of his staff on Thursday that potential show topics related to China and artificial intelligence were causing concern among Apple executives, a person with knowledge of the meeting said. As the 2024 presidential campaign begins to heat up, there was potential for further creative disagreements, one of the people said.

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Two major names in the creature feature business, Gary Dauberman and James Wan’s Atomic Monster banner, known for their collaborations on the hit Annabelle horror movies, have teamed up to remake the 1990s cartoon as a live-action series for Disney+.

Dauberman will write, executive produce and showrun the series with Atomic Monster, the company run by Wan and Michael Clear, joining the executive producing ranks.

Dauberman wrote Annabelle, Annabelle: Creation and Annabelle Comes Homes, which were produced by Atomic Monster and are an integral part of Wan’s The Conjuring Universe, the highest-grossing horror franchise of all time. He also penned Conjuring spinoff The Nun.

The partnership has been fruitful not only because of the box office success, but also professionally, as Dauberman moved from behind the typewriter to behind the camera, making his directorial debut Annabelle Comes Home.

And the two also worked together on Swamp Thing, the short-lived series based on the DC character that streamed on the now-defunct DC Universe platform.

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Sir Michael Caine is retiring from acting.

The 90-year-old actor confirmed his retirement — which comes after the Oct. 6 release of his latest, and now final, film The Great Escaper — in a new radio interview on Saturday.

"I keep saying I'm going to retire. Well, I am now,” Caine told BBC Radio 4’s Today show.

"I've figured, I've had a picture where I've played the lead and it's got incredible reviews. The only parts I’m likely to get now are old men,” the acting legend explained. “…And I thought, well I might as well leave with all this — what have I got to do to beat this?”

Caine’s retirement announcement comes after he hinted at retiring in an interview with The Telegraph last month, where he discussed his new role in The Great Escaper, his age and said he was "sort of" retired.

Caine shared during his latest BBC Radio 4 interview that he believes it’s important old age is portrayed in movies, offering that as part of the reason he has kept acting up until now.

When asked if he would ever return to acting, Caine replied, “No. There’ll be writing. I’ll write another book sometime because I so enjoyed writing.”

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Party’s over. Apple TV+ has pulled the plug on its murder mystery comedy series “The Afterparty” after two seasons, Variety has confirmed.

“We would love to do a Season 3, not only because we have lots of great ideas, but also because that would mean that the AMPTP would have given a fair deal to the writers and we could all be back to work,” Miller told Variety, speaking as a producer in an interview discussing the Season 2 finale amid the WGA strike.

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Silicon Valley has bet big on generative AI but it’s not totally clear whether that bet will pay off. A new report from the Wall Street Journal claims that, despite the endless hype around large language models and the automated platforms they power, tech companies are struggling to turn a profit when it comes to AI.

Microsoft, which has bet big on the generative AI boom with billions invested in its partner OpenAI, has been losing money on one of its major AI platforms. Github Copilot, which launched in 2021, was designed to automate some parts of a coder’s workflow and, while immensely popular with its user base, has been a huge “money loser,” the Journal reports. The problem is that users pay $10 a month subscription fee for Copilot but, according to a source interviewed by the Journal, Microsoft lost an average of $20 per user during the first few months of this year. Some users cost the company an average loss of over $80 per month, the source told the paper.

OpenAI’s ChatGPT, for instance, has seen an ever declining user base while its operating costs remain incredibly high. A report from the Washington Post in June claimed that chatbots like ChatGPT lose money pretty much every time a customer uses them.

AI platforms are notoriously expensive to operate. Platforms like ChatGPT and DALL-E burn through an enormous amount of computing power and companies are struggling to figure out how to reduce that footprint. At the same time, the infrastructure to run AI systems—like powerful, high-priced AI computer chips—can be quite expensive. The cloud capacity necessary to train algorithms and run AI systems, meanwhile, is also expanding at a frightening rate. All of this energy consumption also means that AI is about as environmentally unfriendly as you can get.

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Marvel quietly let go of head writers Chris Ord and Matt Corman and also released the directors for the remainder of the season as part of a significant creative reboot of the series, The Hollywood Reporter has learned. The studio is now on the hunt for new writers and directors for the project

Through it all, the company eschewed the traditional TV-making model. It didn’t commission pilots but instead shot entire $150 million-plus seasons of TV on the fly. It didn’t hire showrunners, but instead depended on film executives to run its series. And as Marvel does for its movies, it relied on postproduction and reshoots to fix what wasn’t working.

The show is Marvel’s first to feature a hero who already had a successful series on Netflix, running three seasons. But sources say that Corman and Ord crafted a legal procedural that did not resemble the Netflix version, known for its action and violence. Cox didn’t even show up in costume until the fourth episode. Marvel, after greenlighting the concept, found itself needing to rethink the original intention of the show.

Daredevil is far from the first Marvel series to undergo drastic behind-the-scenes changes. Those who work with Marvel on the TV side have complained of a lack of central vision that has, according to sources, begun to afflict the studio’s shows with creative differences and tension. “TV is a writer-driven medium,” says one insider familiar with the Marvel process. “Marvel is a Marvel-driven medium.”

On the Oscar Isaac starrer Moon Knight, show creator and writer Jeremy Slater quit and director Mohamed Diab took the reins. Jessica Gao developed and wrote She-Hulk: Attorney at Law but was sidelined once director Kat Coiro came on board. Production was challenging, with COVID hitting cast and crew, and Gao was brought back to oversee postproduction, a typical showrunner duty, but it’s the rare Marvel head writer who has such oversight.

Even though the company does not have a writers-first approach to TV, directors could feel short-changed as well. “The whole ‘fix it in post’ attitude makes it feel like a director doesn’t matter sometimes,” says one person familiar with the process.

Details are murky, but what happened next, in the summer of 2022, debilitated the production as factions became entrenched and leaders vied for supremacy during Secret Invasion’s preproduction in London. “It was weeks of people not getting along, and it erupted,” says an insider. Marvel declined to directly comment on the matter.

The company dispatched Jonathan Schwartz, a senior executive and member of Marvel’s creative steering committee known as The Parliament, to get Secret Invasion back on track when it was falling behind schedule and on the verge of losing some actors because of other commitments.

By early September, a good portion of the Invasion team had been replaced, with new line producers, unit production managers and assistant directors. And Bezucha, who was supposed to direct three episodes, left the show because of new scheduling conflicts. The Marvel executive overseeing the show, Chris Gary, was reassigned and, according to sources, is expected to depart Marvel when his contract is up at the end of the year.

The studio also plans on having full-time TV execs, rather than having executives straddle both television and film.

It also is revamping its development process. Showrunners will write pilots and show bibles. The days of Marvel shooting an entire series, from She-Hulk to Secret Invasion, then looking at what’s working and what’s not, are done.

the studio plans on leaning into the idea of multiseason serialized TV, stepping away from the limited-series format that has defined it. Marvel wants to create shows that run several seasons, where characters can take time to develop relationships with the audience rather than feeling as if they are there as a setup for a big crossover event.

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As the sheer quantity of clothing available to the average American has grown over the past few decades, everything feels at least a little bit flimsier than it used to.

The most obvious indication of these changes is printed on a garment’s fiber-content tag. Knits used to be made entirely from natural fibers. These fibers usually came from shearing sheep, goats, alpacas, and other animals. Sometimes, plant-derived fibers such as cotton or linen were blended in. Now, according to Imran Islam, a textile-science professor and knit expert at the Fashion Institute of Technology in New York, the overwhelming majority of yarn used in mass-market knitwear is blended with some type of plastic.

Knits made with synthetic fiber are cheaper to produce. They can be spun up in astronomical quantities to meet the sudden whims of clothing manufacturers—there’s no waiting for whole flocks of sheep to get fluffy enough to hand shear. They also usually can be tossed in your washing machine with everything else. But by virtually every measure, synthetic fabrics are far inferior. They pill quickly, sometimes look fake, shed microplastics, and don’t perform as well as wool when worn. Sweaters are functional garments, not just fashionable ones. Wool keeps its wearer warm without steaming them like a baked potato wrapped in foil. Its fibers are hygroscopic and hydrophobic, which means they draw moisture to their center and leave the surface dry. A wool sweater can absorb a lot of water from the air around it before it feels wet or cold to the touch

A significant amount of polyamide or acrylic is now common in sweaters with four-digit price tags. A $3,200 Gucci “wool cardigan,” for example, is actually half polyamide when you read the fine print. Cheaper materials have crept into the fashion industry’s output gradually, as more and more customers have become inured to them. In the beginning, these changes were motivated primarily by the price pressures of fast fashion, Islam said: As low-end brands have created global networks that pump out extremely cheap, disposable clothing, more premium brands have attempted to keep up with the frenetic pace while still maximizing profits, which means cutting costs and cutting corners. Islam estimates that a pound of sheep’s wool as a raw material might cost from $1.50 to $2. A pound of cashmere might cost anywhere from $10 to $15. A pound of acrylic, meanwhile, can be had for less than $1.

This race to the bottom had been going on for years, but it accelerated considerably in 2005, Sofi Thanhauser, the author of Worn: A People’s History of Clothing, told me. That year was the end of the Multifiber Arrangement, a trade agreement that had for three decades capped imports of textile products and yarn into the United States, Canada, and the European Union from developing countries. Once Western retailers no longer had meaningful restrictions on where they could source their garments from, many of them went shopping for the cheapest inventory possible.

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There were 600 original scripted shows airing on broadcast, cable and streaming in 2022 alone. That it was already hard enough to list the 50 best shows of last year is a luxury problem. We’re living through the greatest era of television content ever, and that’s fantastic, but it makes listing very challenging. It’s likely that we excluded at least five of your favorite shows ever. We apologize.

We had to start with parameters. We agreed that any show that had episodes airing after Dec. 31, 1999, was eligible for consideration, even if that show first premiered in the 20th century. That meant, for example, that The Sopranos was eligible, but only for the five seasons that aired from 2000 on. Buffy the Vampire Slayer was eligible, but it lost three and a half seasons. You get the idea.

The next parameter was harder to set and entailed more bickering. We decided that while the volume of available international television has expanded exponentially in the streaming era, it’s hard to feel like we’ve seen a representative output of, say, the Korean TV industry. To avoid claiming authority based on such a limited sample, we decided to restrict the list to English-language options. (That said, we collectively urge everybody to watch HBO’s My Brilliant Friend.)

Honorable mentions (in alphabetical order): America to Me, Arrested Development, Bob’s Burgers, The Good Wife, The Great British Bake-Off, Happy Valley, Harley Quinn, It’s a Sin, Justified, The Office (U.S.), Sense8, Somebody Somewhere, This Country, Up, Watchmen

The list of 50 was as follows:

• 50. 'Sex and the City' (HBO, 1998-2004)
• 49. 'Avatar: The Last Airbender' (Nickelodeon, 2005-2008)
• 48. 'South Side' (Comedy Central and Max, 2019-2022)
• 47. 'Vida' (Starz, 2018-2020)
• 46. 'The Underground Railroad' (Amazon Prime, 2021)
• 45. 'The Crown' (Netflix, 2016-present)
• 44. 'The Leftovers' (HBO, 2014-2017)
• 43. 'Anthony Bourdain: Parts Unknown' (CNN, 2013-2018)
• 42. 'Station Eleven' (HBO Max, 2021)
• 41. 'Beef' (Netflix, 2023)
• 40. 'Insecure' (HBO, 2016-2021)
• 39. 'The Deuce' (HBO, 2017-2019)
• 38. 'Band of Brothers' (HBO, 2001)
• 37. 'Crazy Ex-Girlfriend' (The CW, 2015-2018)
• 36. 'The Shield' (FX, 2002-2008)
• 35. 'Chernobyl' (HBO, 2019)
• 34. 'Jane the Virgin' (The CW, 2014-2019)
• 33. 'Orange Is the New Black' (Netflix, 2013-2019)
• 32. 'Veep' (HBO, 2012-2019)
• 31. 'Fleabag' (BBC Three and Amazon Prime Video, 2016-2019)
• 30. 'Game of Thrones' (HBO, 2011-2019)
• 29. 'Broad City' (Comedy Central, 2014-2019)
• 28. 'How To With John Wilson' (HBO, 2020-2023)
• 27. 'Parks and Recreation' (NBC, 2009-2015)
• 26. 'Battlestar Galactica' (Sci-Fi/Syfy, 2003-2009)
• 25. 'Review' (Comedy Central, 2014-2017)
• 24. 'I May Destroy You' (BBC One and HBO, 2020)
• 23. 'Survivor' (CBS, 2000-present)
• 22. 'Better Things' (FX, 2016-2022)
• 21. 'Deadwood' (HBO, 2004-2006)
• 20. 'Peep Show' (2003-2015, Channel 4)
• 19. 'Rectify' (SundanceTV, 2013-2016)
• 18. 'Friday Night Lights' (NBC and The 101 Network, 2006-2011)
• 17. 'Halt and Catch Fire' (AMC, 2014-2017)
• 16. 'Breaking Bad' (AMC, 2008-2013)
• 15. 'Atlanta' (FX, 2016-2022)
• 14. 'Enlightened' (HBO, 2011-2013)
• 13. '30 for 30' (ESPN, 2009-present)
• 12. 'The Americans' (FX, 2013-2018)
• 11. 'The Daily Show' (Comedy Central, 1996-present)
• 10. 'BoJack Horseman' (Netflix, 2014-2020)
• 9. 'Freaks and Geeks' (NBC, 1999-2000)
• 8. 'Girls' (HBO, 2012-2017)
• 7. 'Better Call Saul' (AMC, 2015-2022)
• 6. 'Reservation Dogs' (FX/Hulu, 2021-2023)
• 5. 'The Wire' (HBO, 2002-2008)
• 4. '30 Rock' (NBC, 2006-2013)
• 3. 'Succession' (HBO, 2018-2023)
• 2. 'The Sopranos' (HBO, 1999-2007)
• 1. 'Mad Men' (AMC, 2007-2015)

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Comic Roy Wood Jr. says he will not return to his position as a correspondent on Comedy Central's The Daily Show when the show resumes new episodes later this month, ending a job he first started eight years ago.

The reason: Since he hasn't been offered the job as permanent host of the show, Wood wants some time to figure out his next act.

Wood says he doesn't know if his name is under consideration for the top job and he has already informed Comedy Central of his intention not to return. ("What could they really say?" he adds when asked how the cable channel responded. [They're] not going to give me the job just to keep me.") But if Comedy Central offered him the permanent host job now, the comic says he would still consider it.

The show began presenting a succession of guest hosts starting in January after South African comic Trevor Noah left the job

According to figures provided by Comedy Central in April, Wood had the second-best ratings of the show's first 11 guest hosts, second only to Al Franken and beating Minhaj.

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The news comes after Laci Mosley, who starred in the update of the beloved Nickelodeon series, posted “It’s canceled babes” on X (formerly Twitter) in response to a fan wondering about the show’s future.

“iCarly will not be returning for a fourth season on Paramount+,” a spokesperson for the streamer said in a statement. “The series had a great three-season run and delivered on what fans really wanted to see with Carly and Freddie finally getting together. We want to thank the entire cast, the writers, directors and producers along with the whole crew for their dedication, creativity and talent.”

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In early April 2024, online play and other functionality that uses online communication will end for Nintendo 3DS* and Wii U software. This also includes online co-operative play, internet rankings, and data distribution.

We will announce a specific end date and time at a later date.

Please note that if an event occurs that would make it difficult to continue online services for Nintendo 3DS and Wii U software, we may have to discontinue services earlier than planned.

• This includes software exclusive to New Nintendo 3DS