grace

There are many ways a festival curated by Grace Jones might have played out. Jones’s musical playground was the club, her crucible the disco era. When she began making waves in the early 80s, her music boasted a stern electronic undercurrent and no little funk. She covered too many artists to count.Her Meltdown festival lineup, on ice for two years, is as eclectic as Jones’s pedigree implies. It is, however, busy with up-and-coming talents rather than marquee acts (Solange had to pull out). Leading voices from the African…

Grace Jones appears on stage at the Royal Festival Hall in silhouette: a long, impossibly lean figure in an enormous hat, framed in an oblong of white light at the top of a flight of stairs. It could be an image from A One Man Show, the 1981 tour and subsequent “video album” that was the dernier cri in arty pop cool 40 years ago: a series of beautifully staged, strikingly lit vignettes with the besuited Jones a perfectly poised figure at their centre.As she descends the stairs to the strains of Nightclubbing, opening the…

You know the drill by now. A new gaming phone launches, it has trigger buttons, some kind of cooling tech, below-average cameras, and a gigantic body that makes for an unwieldy daily driver. The Black Shark 5 Pro uses some of the same formula, but it’s more graceful with the triggers and has a 108MP camera, as well as a cooling system that actually works. After gaming on this smartphone for three days now, I’m impressed with the sheer amount of functionality it offers. Impressive hardware across the board The…

(Image credit: Nvidia)Nvidia's expansion into designing and producing Arm-based CPUs was quite the shocking revelation when the company announced it last year, and the addition of the Hopper GPUs into the design upped the ante. Even though Nvidia has yet to ship the silicon, those efforts continue to pay off as the company announced that its Grace CPU Superchip and Grace Hopper Superchips would power two future supercomputers. The Department of Energy's (DOE) Los Alamos National Laboratory will deploy the flagship Venado…

On the Chain Reaction podcast this week, Lux Capital’s newest investor, Grace Isford, joined us to talk about the opaque but crucial world of web3 infrastructure. At Lux, Isford invests in the companies working behind the scenes to make sure crypto exchanges are secure and reliable enough to avoid being hacked. Before joining Lux this February, Isford was an investor at Canvas Ventures focused on enterprise software and fintech. A data infrastructure investment she worked on at Canvas revealed to her the opportunity…

Next week Dark Horse Comics will release Avatar: Adapt or Die #2. The latest issue of the series spinning out of James Cameron‘s blockbuster movie is written by Corinna Bechko, illustrated by Beni R. Lobel, colored by Wes Dzioba, and lettered by Michael Heisler, with a cover by Mark Molchan. Today The Beat has an exclusive preview of the issue, which finds the residents of Pandora in crisis in the face of a rapidly-spreading disease. Here’s how Dark Horse describes Avatar: Adapt or Die #2: A common childhood ailment is…

(Image credit: Nvidia)Nvidia's decision to build its own lineup of Arm-based server CPUs, dubbed the Grace CPU Superchip and the Grace Hopper Superchip, charted the company's course to building out full systems with its CPUs and GPUs in the same box. That initiative moved closer to reality today as Nvidia announced that several major server OEMs will offer dozens of reference systems based on its new Arm CPUs and Hopper GPUs in the first half of 2023.Nvidia tells us that these new systems, which we break down below, will…

A recurring motif anchors rapper Kendrick Lamar’s long-awaited fifth album – one that feels packed with meaning. The sound of tap dancing anchors this troubled and occasionally troubling double album, delayed by writer’s block and the pandemic. It is one that wrestles with the trauma of the Black experience as refracted through the lives of Lamar and his wider family: his partner and two children (who grace the cover cover), his mother, uncles, aunties and cousins.The staccato rhythms of the tap interludes are writ…