ghosts

Remember Libra, Meta’s ambitious plan to enter the cryptocurrency market? Or Lasso, Meta’s ambitious attempt to outdo TikTok? Alongside projects like Shops, Meta’s ambitious plan to turn Instagram and Facebook into e-ommerce giants; its podcast plans; Facebook Portal and a Meta smartwatch to compete with the Apple Watch, they all failed.In pursuit of becoming the everything platform, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg has thrown a lot of stuff at the wall. Precious little of it has stuck, except for the headcount brought to work on…

Welcome to Startups Weekly, a nuanced take on this week’s startup news and trends by Senior Reporter and Equity co-host Natasha Mascarenhas. To get this in your inbox, subscribe here. “There’s more dry powder powder than ever before.” “There’s never been a better time to start a startup.” “Discipline is the new scale.” (OK, OK, I made that last one up, but didn’t you kind of believe it?). The tech industry loves generalizations — and don’t worry, I enjoy my fair share too — but as the downturn continues to play out,…

Image: ComixologyEisner Award-winning cartoonist Liniers has teamed up with Angelica del Campo for a new YA graphic novel about “ghosts, pirates, stolen treasure, seashells, swimming, and a young lighthouse keeper.” It’s titled The Ghosts of Wreckers Cove, has a Harriet the Spy-meets-Spirited Away vibe, and io9 is happy to showcase the first look.Here’s the summary: “To escape the city for the summer, sisters Cristina and Martha head to the coast of Maine where their father has rented a house for them near a famous, but…

When Shehan Karunatilaka woke in his hotel this morning after winning the Booker prize – becoming the first Sri Lankan novelist to do so since Michael Ondaatje won for The English Patient in 1992 – he had more than 300 unread WhatsApp messages, but also tweets from Sri Lanka’s president, the leader of the opposition and other politicians congratulating him. These were met by a furious response from Sri Lankans, who “piled back on them saying: ‘Stay away from this guy. He’s writing about YOU,’” Karunatilaka paraphrases…

I confess I am a philistine when it comes to classical music. It’s not that I don’t like it – I went through a period as a teenager in Southend when I drove around with Classic FM blaring out of the speakers of my battered Fiat Uno. But even this, to tell the truth, was mostly in performative contrast to the music that pumped out of the souped-up cars of the local wideboys. Occasionally, when I particularly enjoyed a piece, I would listen out for the name of the composer. It was usually Vaughan Williams. That’s as far as…

Image via Disney Disney has made some moves to its schedule, adding some things and removing others, including pushing back a movie based on The Haunted Mansion ride and removing a Star Wars movie from the calendar althogether. The Haunted Mansion ride movie was supposed to come out March 10 of next year, but it’ll be coming out on Aug. 11 instead, according to The Hollywood Reporter. The movie stars Rosario Dawson, Danny DeVito, Jamie Lee Curtis, and Jared Leto, among others. The plot is based around a mother,…

Since his death in 2017, Mark Fisher has reputationally ascended to the status of dissident national treasure. His work as a leftist cultural critic continues to inspire the young in particular – Fisher murals adorn Birkbeck University in London, where he used to teach – who have adopted him as one of their heroes. His books were not widely reviewed in his lifetime, however, and his influence has been a largely word-of-mouth phenomenon. Now his publisher, the tiny indie press Zero Books, is reissuing Fisher’s 2014 essay…

WandaVision episode 8 — out February 26 on Disney+ and Disney+ Hotstar — is, in some ways, the least necessary episode of the series. Narratively speaking, the Marvel Cinematic Universe series doesn't go anywhere in WandaVision episode 8. It's all devoted to the past, mostly that of Wanda Maximoff (Elizabeth Olsen) with some early sprinklings for our WandaVision villain Agatha Harkness (Kathryn Hahn) who revealed herself last week. And we get little new, in terms of details, from any of the flashbacks as Agatha forces…

Phasmophobia is getting a bit more scary, with an update set to bring two more ghosts to the horror game. In its latest development update published on Steam, Kinetic Games revealed that two more ghosts will be arriving in the game with the upcoming 0.6.2 update. The development update also contains some blurry text in an image that’s been transcribed by PC Gamer: “ constantly sense the living. You can run but you can’t hide require a lot of energy to form and will move very slowly.” The ghost names have not yet been…

Developed from a 2016 short, Matt Glass and Jordan Wayne Long’s post-US Civil War supernatural thriller isn’t just atmospheric and characterful, it’s an often shrewd allegory of the US self-image as the shining “city on a hill”. Thomas Hobson plays James McCune, a black doctor and war veteran nurturing physical and psychological wounds, who is summoned by his Uncle Matthew (Phil Morris) to a post in Norfolk, a walled town sequestered deep in the Ozark forest. When he arrives, he is shocked to encounter a biracial paradise…