ruins

A slow unsettling chillIn 2012, French series The Returned, or Les Revenants, introduced us to a small town in the mountains where the dead simply reappear as if no time has passed. It combined other spooky standards, such as creepy children, roads that circle back on themselves and serial killers, with only the occasional trip to the “lek poob” (the pub on the lake) to try to work out what the hell was going on. I am a fan of the good old-fashioned jump scare, but nothing really gets to me like the slow, unsettling chill…

With the iPhone 14 Pro and iPhone 14 Pro Max Apple gave us a wonderful gift, but I’m seeing some ungratefulness. I’m talking about the always-on screen, which brings the new iPhone alive in a way it never has been before. Yet, and I can’t believe I’m about to say this, there are quite a lot of people turning the feature off! By dismissively rejecting the iPhone 14 Pro’s always-on screen like this, you’re ruining the best thing about it. What’s so good about it? Andy Boxall/Digital Trends What’s so good about the…

Danny Ramadan, a Syrian-Canadian author, is a prominent advocate of LGBTQ+ and refugee rights. Like his debut, The Clothesline Swing, which won the Independent Publisher gold medal for LGBT+ fiction, The Foghorn Echoes explores the lives of gay men born into a repressive culture.The narrative is divided between Damascus and Vancouver. When teenage friends Hussam and Wassim fall in love in Syria in 2003, we guess it won’t end happily. They live in a society where homosexuality is criminalised and homophobia is rife.…

Image: Square-Enix CollectiblesWhen Square-Enix, one of the most famous games publishers in the world, announced that it was going to be delving into the world of NFTs—even as the world of NFTs crashed and burned around it—gamers were concerned about just how their games, everything from Final Fantasy to, uh, *checks notes* Various Daylife, could be affected. It turns out the first steps are infinitely stupider than possibly imagined.Square-Enix’s first tentative foray into NFTs has begun not with its games, but its…

Credit: Unsplash/CC0 Public Domain Extreme heat this year has triggered wildfires, drought and melting glaciers. Less expectedly, it's also revealed some weird and dark things about our past—shipwrecks, corpses, ghost villages, ornamental gardens and ancient cities. Here's a look at some of those discoveries. …

For all the slick Wear OS tricks and comprehensive fitness features that the Samsung Galaxy Watch 4 Classic offers, battery life is somewhat of a letdown. Even with an average day of usage involving continuous heart rate monitoring and GPS tracking for outdoor workouts, you will find yourself looking for the charging puck at the end of the day. Samsung ships a wireless charging puck in the retail package. But this one takes about two hours to fully juice up the 46mm variant of the Galaxy Watch 4 Classic. That’s a bit…

First things first, I know that no review can ever affect a juggernaut like Jurassic World Dominion. No matter what the critics of the world write about this film, it will end up a blockbuster, earning over half a billion dollars worldwide and further cementing Chris Pratt’s status as a bankable leading man. But that would not change the fact that Jurassic World Dominion is a tired, half-hearted attempted at creating nostalgia. It is a shallow, predictable film packaged as a visually-spectacular tentpole blockbuster. It…

Image: Sony Pictures/MarvelEarlier in the week, Sony announced their plans to bring their vampire/superhero-ish movie Morbius back into theaters this coming July. The film—which, in case you’ve forgotten, only came out like two months ago—starred Jared Leto as the titular Doctor Michael Morbius and was honestly nothing to write home about. Surely worse superhero movies exist, but better ones also do as well, and the box office reflected that pretty handily at the time. But the film’s become a meme on Twitter in recent…

Looking for a fun new Apple Arcade game to try out this weekend? Konami has you covered with Frogger and the Rumbling Ruins now available for download. Available for iPhone, iPad, Mac, and Apple TV, Frogger and the Rumbling Ruins is a new game that will see gamers fight their "way through puzzle-ridden ruins and unravel the mysteries of the Ancient Salientians." They'll be able to play through more than 100 stages filled with traps and enemies, and the whole thing is completely free of ads and in-app purchases because…

The tightening grip of climate change on our planet is revealing secrets buried for millennia.As waters and ice recede under warming conditions, the traces of people and civilizations long gone from the mortal realm emerge. In recent months, Iraq has been hit particularly hard, battered by extreme drought, with the Mosul reservoir shrinking as water is extracted to keep crops from drying.  Amid this crisis, the ruins of an ancient city, submerged for decades, are once again on dry land. Since the dam was created in the…