Dune won six Academy Awards tonight — the most of any movie — at this year's Oscar's ceremony, taking home Oscars for its cinematography, visual effects, film editing, original score, production design, and "achievement in sound."

But the movie's Oscar-winning crew were surprised there was no Oscar nomination for the film's director, Denis Villeneuve, reports IndieWire: "I was very confused when Denis was not nominated for directing. It's as if the film directed itself and all of these craft categories magically did great work," sound designer/supervising sound editor Theo Green said. "Seeing the sweep that Dune is having tonight makes me very proud for Denis."

Green and other below-the-line winners painted a production picture where Villeneuve orchestrated a kind of cross-department collaboration that allowed each craftsperson's work to shine and work in concert with every other piece. Re-recording mixer Ron Bartlett said it all started with Villeneuve's deep study of the book. "It's better than the sum of its parts," Fraser said. "We are the culmination of Denis Villeneuve's combined group effort to make a movie, and that's what I'm most proud of." Several winners also called out editor Joe Walker as a key piece of the creation of Dune.
Besides the six Oscars it won, Dune had also been nominated for four other awards, including Best Picture.

Tonight's ceremony featured a tribute to 60 years of James Bond movies — and the franchise's most recent film also won the "Best Song" Oscar (for the song "No Time to Die" by Billie Eilish). This marks the third consecutive time that a James Bond movie's theme song has gone on to win the "Best Song" award.

And Apple TV+ became the first streaming service to ever win the prestigious Best Picture award for their movie CODA. NBC News calls this "a major moment for a film industry that has been dramatically transformed by the rise of direct-to-consumer streaming platforms and the growing popularity of at-home entertainment." (The film also won Oscars for best adapted screenplay and for best supporting actor.) In the days before the Oscars telecast, the best picture race came to be seen as a proxy battle between Apple and Netflix, the streaming giant that has been angling for Hollywood's marquee prize for at least the last half-decade, spending heavily on splashy promotional campaigns. Netflix was a double best picture contender this year, recognized for Jane Campion's haunting Western The Power of the Dog and Adam McKay's doomsday satire Don't Look Up.

In 1983 the annual revenue at the electronics chain Crazy Eddie was roughly $134 million (or about $372 million today), remembers The Hustle. The next year they'd sold $44 million just in computers and games — and eventually grew to 43 stores. The company's stock ticker symbol was CRZY.

"There was just one major problem," the article notes. "Crazy Eddie had been lying about its numbers since its inception — and the higher the stock soared the further founder Eddie Antar went to maintain the illusion."

It's a colorful story from the early days of home PC sales. Antar's uncle hid up to $3.5 million in cash in a false ceiling at Antar's father's house, according to The Hustle. "Eddie Antar kept close tabs, usually calling his uncle twice a day to see how much money they were skimming.... The skimming strategy allowed Antar to not only hoard cash but also evade sales taxes. His employees were also paid off the books so Crazy Eddie could avoid payroll taxes." "Money was always in the house," said Debbie Rosen Antar, Antar's first wife, to investigators in the late 1980s. "And if I needed it and I asked him, he would say, 'Go underneath the bed and take what you need....'"

Why would a company built on a family fraud go public? Somebody told Antar he could keep making millions skimming cash, but he could make tens of millions if the company traded on the stock market. Strangely, Crazy Eddie's fraudulent history gave it an advantage. To provide the illusion of quickly increasing profits ahead of the IPO, the Antars simply reduced the amount of cash they were skimming. With millions more on the ledger instead of in the family's pockets, the company's profits looked more impressive.

As a public company, Crazy Eddie then made up for its inability to skim cash by initiating new fraud streams.

- The company embellished its inventories by millions of dollars to appear better-stocked and better positioned for profits.

- The Antar family laundered profits it had previously skimmed — and deposited in foreign bank accounts — back into the company to inflate revenues....

In November 1987, a hostile investment group led by Houston entrepreneur Elias Zinn pounced, purchasing Crazy Eddie. As Antar's cousin later recounted, Antar thought the sale would at least give them an opportunity to pin the fraud on the new owners. But Zinn immediately discovered $45 million of listed inventory was missing. Stores soon closed, and the company went bankrupt in 1989.
Two disgruntled ex-employees then brought fraud allegations to America's stock-regulating agency, the article reports, while the FBI "started sniffing around, too." Crazy Eddie fled the country, using forged passports to escape to Tel Aviv, Zurich, São Paulo, and the Cayman Islands. But he was eventually arrested in Israel, sentenced to 12.5 years in prison, and ordered to repay investors $121 million (though he apparently served only seven).

But Crazy Eddie also became a cultural phenomenon -- sort of. In the 1984 movie Splash, Darryl Hannah's character even watches a Crazy Eddie TV ad. The Hustle's article also includes photos of a Crazy Eddie stock certificate — and an actual "Wanted" poster issued the next year by the U.S. Marshalls office.

Yet just four years before his death in 2016, Antar — a high school dropout — was telling an interviewer from The Record that "I changed the business...."

As viewership drops for Hollywood's annual Academy Awards ceremony, "Everyone has a theory about the decline..." argues an opinion piece in the New York Times.

"My favored theory is that the Oscars are declining because the movies they were made to showcase have been slowly disappearing." When the nominees were announced in February, nine of the 10 had made less than $40 million in domestic box office. The only exception, "Dune," barely exceeded $100 million domestically, making it the 13th-highest-grossing movie of 2021. All told, the 10 nominees together have earned barely one-fourth as much at the domestic box office as "Spider-Man: No Way Home." Even when Hollywood tries to conjure the old magic, in other words, the public isn't there for it anymore.... Sure, non-superhero-movie box office totals will bounce back in 2022, and next year's best picture nominees will probably earn a little more in theaters. Within the larger arc of Hollywood history, though, this is the time to call it: We aren't just watching the decline of the Oscars; we're watching the End of the Movies....

[W]hat looks finished is The Movies — big-screen entertainment as the central American popular art form, the key engine of American celebrity, the main aspirational space of American actors and storytellers, a pop-culture church with its own icons and scriptures and rites of adult initiation.... The internet, the laptop and the iPhone personalized entertainment and delivered it more immediately, in a way that also widened Hollywood's potential audience — but habituated people to small screens, isolated viewing and intermittent watching, the opposite of the cinema's communalism. Special effects opened spectacular (if sometimes antiseptic-seeming) vistas and enabled long-unfilmable stories to reach big screens. But the effects-driven blockbuster, more than its 1980s antecedents, empowered a fandom culture that offered built-in audiences to studios, but at the price of subordinating traditional aspects of cinema to the demands of the Jedi religion or the Marvel cult. And all these shifts encouraged and were encouraged by a more general teenage-ification of Western culture, the extension of adolescent tastes and entertainment habits deeper into whatever adulthood means today....

Under these pressures, much of what the movies did in American culture, even 20 years ago, is essentially unimaginable today. The internet has replaced the multiplex as a zone of adult initiation. There's no way for a few hit movies to supply a cultural lingua franca, given the sheer range of entertainment options and the repetitive and derivative nature of the movies that draw the largest audiences. The possibility of a movie star as a transcendent or iconic figure, too, seems increasingly dated. Superhero franchises can make an actor famous, but often only as a disposable servant of the brand. The genres that used to establish a strong identification between actor and audience — the non-superhero action movie, the historical epic, the broad comedy, the meet-cute romance — have all rapidly declined...

[T]he caliber of instantly available TV entertainment exceeds anything on cable 20 years ago. But these productions are still a different kind of thing from The Movies as they were — because of their reduced cultural influence, the relative smallness of their stars, their lost communal power, but above all because stories told for smaller screens cede certain artistic powers in advance.
The article argues that episodic TV also cedes the Movies' power of an-entire-story-in-one-go condensation. ("This power is why the greatest movies feel more complete than almost any long-form television.") And it ultimately suggests that like opera or ballet, these grand old movies need "encouragement and patronage, to educate people into loves that earlier eras took for granted," and maybe even "an emphasis on making the encounter with great cinema a part of a liberal arts education. "

In 2014 one lone film-maker had even argued that Ben Stiller's spectacular-yet-thoughtful Secret Life of Walter Mitty "might be the last of a dying breed."

Long-time Slashdot reader theodp writes: Thirty five years after Andy Warhol's death, the NY Times reports on a new wave of Warhol-Mania as the famed pop artist is currently the subject of a Netflix documentary series (The Andy Warhol Diaries), an exhibition at the Brooklyn Museum and multiple theatrical works. The documentary revisits the 1985 launch of the Commodore Amiga, where Warhol demonstrated the Amiga's then-unparalleled graphical power by 'painting' Blondie lead singer Debbie Harry's portrait. Even as the flood-filling goes bad, Warhol does his best to put on a brave public face ("This is kind of pretty. Oh, it's beautiful."), but reveals his true thoughts in his demo day diary entry.

"The day started off with dread as I woke up from my dreams and thought about my live appearance for Commodore computers," Warhol recalls in the documentary (in an AI-generated voice). "And how nothing is worth all this worrying, to wake up and feel so terrified. Commodore wants me to be a spokesman. It's a $3,000 machine that's like the Apple thing, but can do 100 times more. The whole day was spent being nervous and telling myself that if I could just get good at stuff like this, then I could make money that way, and I wouldn't have to paint. The drawing came out terrible. And I called it a masterpiece. It was a real mess.

"I said I wanted to be Walt Disney and that if I'd had this machine ten years ago, I could have made it."

Five NFT versions of Warhol's recovered Amiga artwork were sold for $3,377,500 last May to benefit the Andy Warhol Foundation.

Apple argued in court papers this week that appeals filings by Epic Games don't point to legal errors by a US District Court judge who ruled last year that the iPhone maker hadn't violated antitrust laws with its App Store. Instead, Apple cited the many times the judge said Epic had "failed to demonstrate," "failed to show" and "failed to prove" the facts of its case. From a report: "On the facts and the law, the court correctly decided every issue presented in Epic's appeal," Apple lawyers wrote in the company's filing. They repeated earlier arguments that Epic is attempting to fundamentally change the App Store. "While these appeals are both important and complex, resolving the issues should not be difficult: Applying settled precedent to the adjudicated facts requires ruling for Apple across the board." Apple's 135-page filing is the latest in the legal battle it's been fighting with Epic since August 2020. On the surface, the two companies are battling over who gets how much when consumers spend money on the App Store. Apple is fighting to maintain control of its App Store, which has become such a key feature of its iPhones that the company's ads saying "there's an app for that" are referenced in crossword puzzles and on the trivia TV show Jeopardy.

Over the past couple of years, though, Apple's runaway success with its App Store has been challenged. Epic, which makes the hit online battle game Fortnite, argued that Apple should loosen its control. In emails, court filings and public statements, Epic has said Apple should allow alternative app stores onto the iPhone and iPad, something it currently doesn't allow. Epic also says Apple should free developers to use alternative payment processors in their apps, rather than Apple's current rule requiring they use only its App Store, through which Apple takes a cut of in-app purchases on its devices.

An anonymous reader shares a report: Last year, the Google TV app user interface was completely redesigned and transformed into a hub for browsing movies and shows from your favorite streaming apps all in one place. It now appears that more changes are coming to the platform as Google has announced that in May 2022, movies or TV shows will no longer be available in the Google Play store. Instead, the Google TV app will be the official home for buying, renting, and watching movies and shows on your Android device. Other apps, games, and books will continue to live on the store. On Google TV, the experience of using Google Play Movies & TV will still be the same and users will get access to the latest new releases, rentals, and deals. When taking a look at the new Google TV app, customers will see a Shop tab where they can find all the titles that the tech giant offers.

YouTube is the latest company to offer free shows TV with ads. The video giant says you'll now be able to stream nearly 4,000 episodes of TV for free, as long as you're also willing to watch ads during the show. From a report: Shows available include Hell's Kitchen, Andromeda, and Heartland, and you'll be able to watch them in the US on the web, mobile devices, and "most connected TVs via the YouTube TV app," YouTube says in a blog post. With the new free TV shows, YouTube is taking on a number of major competitors. One is over-the-air television -- by offering free TV on demand, YouTube is likely hoping that you'll see what's available on its platform instead of channel surfing to see what else might be on. And there are already many options for streaming ad-supported TV for free, including Tubi, Xumo, Plex, Roku, and offerings from Vizio, and Samsung -- just to name a few -- so YouTube is late to the game.

Roku device owners will soon have a whole host of new personalization features, including all-new Photo Streams, with the Roku OS 11. From a report: Firstly, when Roku OS 11 rolls out to users in the weeks ahead, they'll be able to change their screensaver to display their own photography or images with Photo Streams. Not only will Photo Streams allow users to display photos from their desktop or mobile device on Roku, but users will also be able to share Streams with other Roku device owners as well. Once a Stream is shared, other Roku owners will be able to add to it, allowing everyone to collaborate on a shared album. Roku OS 11 will also introduce a new "what to watch on Roku" menu, a personally curated hub added to the home screen menu that will suggest popular and recently released TV and movies.

New submitter Dru Nemeton shares a report from 9to5Mac: Apple's new Studio Display officially hit the market on Friday, and we continue to learn new tidbits about what exactly's inside the machine. While Apple touted that the Studio Display is powered by an A13 Bionic inside, we've since learned that the Studio Display also features 64GB of onboard storage, because who knows why... [...] as first spotted by Khaos Tian on Twitter, the Studio Display also apparently features 64GB of onboard storage. Yes, 64GB: double the storage in the entry-level Apple TV 4K and the same amount of storage in the entry-level iPad Air 5. Also worth noting: the Apple TV 4K is powered by the A12 Bionic chip, so the Studio Display has it beat on that front as well. Apple hasn't offered any explanation for why the Studio Display features 64GB of onboard storage. It appears that less than 2GB of that storage is actually being used as of right now.

One unexciting possibility is that the A13 Bionic chip used inside the Studio Display is literally the exact same A13 Bionic chip that was first shipped in the iPhone 11. As you might remember, the iPhone 11 came with 64GB of storage in its entry-level configuration, meaning Apple likely produced millions of A13 Bionic chips with 64GB of onboard storage. What do you think? Will Apple ever tap into the A13 Bionic chip and 64GB storage inside the Studio Display for something more interesting?

Variety takes a long look at Halo, the new nine-episode TV show on Paramount+ adapting "Microsoft's crown jewel Xbox franchise": When the show premieres on March 24, it will be the culmination of 17 years of false starts and dogged striving, including a Peter Jackson-produced feature film that fell apart in the 2000s, more than six years of development by Amblin Television in the 2010s, and a pandemic-split production in Hungary for the nine-episode first season that lasted nearly two years....

On June 6, 2005, in a stunt that instantly became the stuff of Hollywood legend, Microsoft sent a small platoon of actors dressed in full Master Chief armor to the major film studios (other than Sony Pictures, naturally). They were armed with a "Halo" screenplay written by Alex Garland and take-it-or-leave-it deal terms heavily weighted in the company's favor. The result was a movie co-financed by Universal and 20th Century Fox and produced by Peter Jackson, who hired up-and-coming director Neill Blomkamp to make his feature debut with the film. According to Jamie Russell's book "Generation Xbox: How Video Games Invaded Hollywood," Microsoft was an uneasy and at times overbearing creative partner, and the project ultimately fell apart in October 2006. (Blomkamp and Jackson instead made 2009's "District 9," which was nominated for four Oscars, including best picture.)

By 2011, Microsoft had parted ways with Halo's original developer, Bungie, and created an in-house studio, 343 Industries, to keep the franchise alive. As part of that effort, veteran Microsoft executive Kiki Wolfkill began exploring anew how to expand the game into a live-action adaptation — or, in Wolfkill's words, "linear entertainment...." Don Mattrick, then the head of Microsoft's Xbox unit, called his friend Steven Spielberg, himself a passionate gamer and a Halo fan. Soon after, 343's executives found themselves pitching Amblin Television presidents Justin Falvey and Darryl Frank. "They asked for permission to get in before we came into the room, and they covered a large conference table with the canon of Halo," says Falvey. That canon — a vast science fiction saga that spans hundreds of millennia and involves ancient aliens who created colossal, ring-shaped structures called the Halo Array — comes as much from dozens of tie-in novels, comic books and exhaustive guides and encyclopedias as from the games themselves. "It was aisles deep," Falvey recalls. "It was incredible."

Everyone who spoke with Variety, actually, cited Halo's expansive mythology as the factor that differentiated the series from other video game fare and made it so attractive as source material for event-size television.... [W]hen Kyle Killen ("Lone Star") came on board as showrunner in 2018, he hit upon a shrewd narrative path that embraces the video game DNA: Master Chief starts as a complete cypher, engineered to be so devoid of individuality that he literally has no sense of taste, and the rest of the season slowly fills out the void. "We're going to tell a story about a man discovering his own humanity," says Kane, who joined the show as co-showrunner in 2019. "In so doing, he's invited the audience to discover that guy's humanity too."

Eventually, Levine says, "we got the script to the place where we said, 'You know, this is a deep dive into character. What are the costs of turning human beings into killing machines...?'"

Kane estimates he wrote upwards of 265 drafts of the first nine episodes, balancing everything from the needs of the expansive production to story notes from 343 and Spielberg to the desire to fold in as much from the Halo mythology as possible.
The article calls the show the strong argument yet from Paramount+ "that it belongs at the big kids table with Netflix, Disney Plus, Amazon Prime Video and HBO Max."

The article notes Paramount+ already has five ongoing Star Trek series (including Discovery and Picard). And Variety also reported earlier that South Park will stream exclusively on Paramount+ starting in 2025, joining the streaming service's 14 exclusive South Park "specials" (hour-long episodes like 2021's "South Park: Post COVID").

Amazon has closed its $8.5 billion acquisition of MGM, the companies said Thursday. From a report: The pact was first announced in May and has been winding its way through the regulatory process. Per Amazon, "The storied, nearly century-old studio -- with more than 4,000 film titles, 17,000 TV episodes, 180 Academy Awards, and 100 Emmy Awards -- will complement Prime Video and Amazon Studios' work in delivering a diverse offering of entertainment choices to customers." The completion of the transaction comes two days after the Amazon-MGM deal received clearance from the European Union's antitrust regulator, which "unconditionally" approved Amazon's proposed acquisition of MGM, in part because "MGM's content cannot be considered as must-have." The European Commission, in its antitrust review, found that the overlaps between the Amazon and MGM businesses are "limited."

Ever since Russia invaded Ukraine, the fate of the International Space Station, which has 15 partner nations and is the crown jewel of unity in space between NASA and Russia, has been up in the air (figuratively, of course). What we do know is that there are no plans to abandon NASA astronaut Mark Vande Hei on the space station, despite a number of stories claiming otherwise. "Vande Hei is scheduled to return to Earth in a Soyuz capsule at the end of this month, landing in Kazakhstan," reports Ars Technica. "NASA officials are expected to be there to greet him and bring him back to the United States." Ars Technica sets the record straight and explains where these Russian "threats" originated: The source of this "news" appears to be a video published more than a week ago by a Kremlin-aligned publication, RIA Novosti. Roscosmos TV provided footage for the video, but in sharing it acknowledged that the video was a "joke." Now, this is an exceptionally poor joke given the tensions on Earth, but it is important to understand that sharing a video a week ago does not mean Russia is threatening to leave Vande Hei behind. Nothing has changed since the video was posted. Since the beginning of this crisis, NASA officials have said operations with Russian colleagues working on the space station have proceeded nominally. "Operations have not changed at all," one NASA source confirmed Friday. On Monday, NASA's manager of the International Space Program, Joel Montalbano, is scheduled to speak at a news conference about upcoming spacewalks. He likely will say something similar.

Additionally, Vande Hei could not be abandoned. At present there are three other Americans living on board the International Space Station -- Raja Chari, Kayla Barron, and Thomas Marshburn. There is also an allied astronaut, Matthias Maurer, from Germany. NASA has its own transportation to and from the station, so Vande Hei can be assured of a safe ride home whenever NASA wants. The status of the ISS partnership is subject to change, of course. It could do so quite quickly. Russia is doing horrible things in Ukraine, and the Western world has responded with harsh sanctions. No one really knows whether Vladimir Putin will decide to end Russian participation in the International Space Station. Certainly, making it appear to a domestic audience that he was stranding a NASA astronaut in space might make him look "strong" to some Russian people. But there are simply no indications this will happen.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Consumer Reports wants the Federal Communications Commission to take a closer look at whether Internet service providers are complying with a US law that prohibits them from charging hardware rental fees when customers use their own equipment. In a filing submitted to the FCC this week, Consumer Reports said it asked members about their Internet bills and got over 350 responses, with some suggesting violations of either the letter or spirit of the law. "Some contain allegations that the law is being violated, whereas others state the new statute is being respected. Many more stories suggest that ISPs dissuade consumers from using their own equipment, typically by refusing to troubleshoot any service disruptions if consumers opt not to rent the ISP's devices. Such practices result in de facto situations where consumers feel pressured or forced to rent equipment that they would prefer to own instead," Consumer Reports told the FCC.

Consumer Reports' filing came in response to the FCC asking for public comment on the implementation of the Television Viewer Protection Act (TVPA), which took effect in December 2020. In addition to price-transparency rules for TV service, the law prohibited TV and broadband providers from charging rental or lease fees when "the provider has not provided the equipment to the consumer; or the consumer has returned the equipment to the provider." All the comments collected by Consumer Reports are available here. The FCC filing includes examples of complaints about AT&T, Comcast, Verizon, Charter Spectrum, Frontier, Windstream, and Cox, though the complaints weren't all about rental fees.

In its call for public input, the FCC asked for comment on "the extent to which (if at all) subject entities continue to assess charges for equipment that are expressly prohibited by the statute." [...] Consumer Reports said its questions for members were "designed to measure whether or not ISPs were in compliance... and also to solicit consumer opinion on whether or not it was difficult to use consumer-owned equipment versus renting those devices from the provider. Notably, neither of the two cable industry trade associations mentioned this issue in any detail in their comments filed last month at the Commission." Consumer Reports said that some of the responses "suggest the statute is not being complied with as vigorously as Congress intended... These allegations merit further investigation by the Commission." Consumer Reports offered to share contact information for the customers with the FCC so it can investigate further.

Social media posts debunking purported Ukrainian disinformation are themselves fake. That doesn't stop them from being featured on Russian state TV. ProPublica: Researchers at Clemson University's Media Forensics Hub and ProPublica identified more than a dozen videos that purport to debunk apparently nonexistent Ukrainian fakes. The videos have racked up more than 1 million views across pro-Russian channels on the messaging app Telegram, and have garnered thousands of likes and retweets on Twitter. A screenshot from one of the fake debunking videos was broadcast on Russian state TV, while another was spread by an official Russian government Twitter account.

The goal of the videos is to inject a sense of doubt among Russian-language audiences as they encounter real images of wrecked Russian military vehicles and the destruction caused by missile and artillery strikes in Ukraine, according to Patrick Warren, an associate professor at Clemson who co-leads the Media Forensics Hub. "The reason that it's so effective is because you don't actually have to convince someone that it's true. It's sufficient to make people uncertain as to what they should trust," said Warren, who has conducted extensive research into Russian internet trolling and disinformation campaigns. "In a sense they are convincing the viewer that it would be possible for a Ukrainian propaganda bureau to do this sort of thing."

A new profile of Jack Thompson, the notorious anti-violent video game crusader of the mid-2000s. The Verge: When the video game industry is valued at $300 billion, a Halo TV series trailer is occupying prime real estate during the AFC Championship, and a GTA facsimile like Free Guy is one of the top-grossing films of the year, it is clear that Jack Thompson lost the fight. For those who don't remember, Thompson was the attorney who led the charge against violent video games and helped morph a fringe topic into a dominant wedge issue of the mid-2000s. He has since vanished from the public eye as the outrage ran dry, and everyone moved on. [...] Thankfully, Jack Thompson was kind enough to answer his phone on a sunny Friday afternoon in South Florida. It only took a few minutes for him to unleash a salvo of takes, forever cocked and loaded for anyone willing to listen. He asserts an association between the rise of crime in New York City to Take-Two, the publisher behind Grand Theft Auto. After all, he explained, Take-Two is headquartered in Manhattan. Thompson is never going to betray his heart, for better or worse.

"Americans are famous for moving on," he told me. "We have the attention span of a mosquito. Churchill said that when most people stumble across the truth, they pick themselves up, dust themselves off, and move on as if nothing happened. What pissed people off about me is that I didn't do that. I'm 70. I'm still here. I haven't died yet." [...] Thompson anticipates a reckoning. Someday, he says, the defense team in a murder trial is going to argue that their client was revved into a frenzy due to, in part, an inveterate video game habit. The jury will buy it, and the suspect will escape the death penalty. At last, all of Thompson's warnings come home to roost, and the real villains -- Tommy Vercetti, Niko Bellic, and Carl Johnson -- will be unmasked for all to see. It's hard for me to even conceptualize the scenario that Thompson describes, but I suppose that anyone still committed to dismantling Grand Theft Auto in 2022 must engage in some degree of magical thinking. "It's going to work, and that's going to get people's attention," said Thompson. "People are going to freak out. They're going to say, 'Wait a minute, somebody can kill somebody and only be convicted of manslaughter by virtue of a video game defense?' ... [they'll want to] do something about the games and their distribution."

Apple has announced the Mac Studio, a desktop system that looks like the Mac Mini on the outside but packs a lot more power on the inside. The Mac Studio features both Apple's M1 Max chip as well as a new, even more powerful processor, the M1 Ultra. It looks a bit similar to the Mac Mini, but Apple claims that the new device will be faster than even its top-of-the-line Mac Pro. From a report: The chassis is 7.7 inches by 3.7 inches; Apple claims it "fits perfectly under most displays" and will remain quiet under heavy workloads. The rear includes four Thunderbolt 4 ports as well as a 10Gb Ethernet port, two USB-A ports, an HDMI, and an audio jack. It supports Wi-Fi 6 and Bluetooth 5.0. The front includes two USB-C ports (10 Gbps on M1 Max systems, 40 Gbps/Thunderbolt 4 on M1 Ultra systems) and an SD card slot. The Mac Studio can support up to four Pro Display XDRs and a 4K TV, Apple says. Apple claims that the Mac Studio with M1 Max will deliver 50 percent faster CPU performance than a Mac Pro with a 16-core Xeon and 2.5 times faster CPU performance than a 27-inch iMac with a 10-core Core i9. The M1 Ultra configuration purportedly has 3.8 times faster CPU performance than that 27-inch iMac and is up to 90 percent faster than the 16-core Mac Pro. The Mac Studio with M1 Max will start at $1,999, and M1 Ultra models will start at $3,999. The studio display is $1,599.

According to Deadline, Prime Video is turning PlayStation's mythology-themed game franchise God of War into a live-action TV series. From the report: I hear the series adaptation comes from The Expanse creators/executive producers Mark Fergus and Hawk Ostby and The Wheel of Time executive producer/showrunner Rafe Judkins as well as Sony Pictures Television and PlayStation Productions, which collaborate on all TV series based on PlayStation games. This would mark the latest big deal for a TV series based on a popular video game title in a red-hot streaming marketplace for gaming IP. Peacock just landed another SPT/PlayStation property, Twisted Metal, with a series order and Anthony Mackie starring. HBO has coming up the high-profile PlayStation game-based series The Last of Us, starring Pedro Pascal and Bella Ramsey. Netflix has a Resident Evil TV series in the works, while Paramount+ is about to debut Halo.
[...]
The God of War franchise from Sony's Santa Monica Studio spans a total of seven games across four PlayStation consoles. The action game series launched in 2005 on the PlayStation 2, with the first God of War. At the center is ex-Spartan warrior Kratos and his perilous journey to exact revenge on the Ares, the Greek God of War, after killing his loved ones under the deity's influence. After becoming the ruthless God of War himself, Kratos finds himself constantly looking for a chance to change his fate. Following several titles on various PlayStation consoles including the PS3 and the handheld PSP, Santa Monica Studio brought new life to the franchise with the 2018 game on the PlayStation 4. In it, Kratos comes to the Norse wilds where he gets a second chance at fatherhood with his son Atreus. The installment a slew of honors at the 2018 Game Awards, including Game of the Year. An eighth God of War installment, God of War: Ragnorok, is in the works for PlayStation 4 and PlayStation 5 and is set to drop this year.

A year and a half later, Amazon's Luna cloud gaming service has formally launched in the U.S. for Android, iOS, Chrome OS, macOS and Windows. Engadget reports: The core Luna+ service with over 100 games will normally cost $10 per month, with the kid-friendly Family Channel and Ubisoft+ Channels available for a respective $6 and $18 per month. Amazon hopes to reel in newcomers by dropping the monthly fees of Luna+ and the Family channel to $6 and $3 for anyone who signs up during March. Existing users just have to maintain their subscriptions to lock in that pricing.

The official debut comes alongside some new channels. A Prime Gaming channel, as the name implies, gives Amazon Prime members a free, rotating mix of games. The March selection will include titles like Devil May Cry 5 and Flashback. Pay $5 per month for the Retro Channel and you'll get Capcom and SNK classics like Street Fighter II Hyper Fighting and Metal Slug 3, while a similar outlay for the Jackbox Games Channel provides access to all eight Jackbox Party Pack titles. Luna's latest update also makes it simpler to stream gameplay from a Fire TV device, Mac or Windows PC on Twitch.

Sony Pictures Entertainment is consolidating its anime businesses under the Crunchyroll banner to better compete in the growing streaming market for Japanese animation. From a report: The company is adding hundreds of hours of programming and dozens of titles, including "Cowboy Bebop," to the Crunchyroll streaming service that were previously available through its Funimation outlet, the company said Tuesday. Culver City-based Sony Pictures, the film and TV entertainment arm of Tokyo electronics giant Sony Corp., made a big bet on the anime market last year when it bought streaming service Crunchyroll from AT&T for $1.175 billion. The problem was that Sony then had two subscription streamers focused on the market for Japanese animation. Fans had to subscribe to both Crunchyroll and Funimation to get everything they wanted, in addition to Netflix and other services, said Colin Decker, who runs Sony's anime businesses.