| Will Wordle remain free after the New York Times buyout? | by Keith Stuart Feb 2, 2022 | Will the hit game imminently be locked behind a paywall or stay as it is? What about ads? The NYT’s head of games explains the plan In a month of spectacular video game industry buyouts, symbolised by Microsoft’s incredible $68bn swoop for Activision Blizzard, there is one purchase that has sent paroxysms of fear across the planet. On Monday, the New York Times revealed that it had bought the viral megahit Wordle for a “low seven figure sum”. The web-based word puzzle, which launched in October, was originally intended as a gift from software engineer Josh Wardle to his partner. But it has become a viral sensation, amassing an audience of millions – and key to its appeal is the fact that it’s free, with no ads. So what does a big newspaper like the New York Times want with a game like Wordle, and what happens next? Continue reading... | | | | 'The whole launch show is a pre-record': we watched BBC Three's return to TV – so you didn't have to | by Scott Bryan Feb 2, 2022 | Constant trailers, Netflix stars and sensitive documentaries about queer people in the Traveller community: how did the youth channel fare on its return to television? “BBC Three gets going at 7pm.” I don’t know about you, but seeing those words back on the screen last night – as the channel returned to TV again after six years of being digital-only – provided waves of nostalgia. When I was a teenager, turning on BBC Three just before 7pm and seeing those words was a daily ritual. Snog Marry Avoid? Celebdaq? The time S Club 7 walked out of Liquid News as their PR interrupted Claudia Winkleman’s line of questioning? I was there. A good part of my youth was spent in front of BBC Three. But does it still work to watch it in the traditional way? After all, we are now in the age of streaming, when half the shows are already available to watch on iPlayer. Only one way to find out: watch the entire evening of their launch night programming. Continue reading... | | | A Number review – Lennie James and Paapa Essiedu scintillate as father and sons | by Arifa Akbar Feb 2, 2022 | Old Vic theatre, London The powerhouse duo’s effortless chemistry and emotional realism brings Caryl Churchill’s cloning tragedy blazing into new life ‘They’ve taken your cells,” says a father to his son in a near-future dystopia where the latter has been cloned in an apparently unauthorised “batch”. So begins Caryl Churchill’s 2002 play, using the concept of cloning to explore identity, inheritance and what makes us uniquely ourselves, written at a time when ethical debates on Dolly the sheep raged. Like Polly Findlay’s 2020 revival at the Bridge theatre, it presents the story of a father (Lennie James) and three versions of his son (Paapa Essiedu) as a noirish thriller with shifting realities. Es Devlin’s set is a Scandi style living space soaked in blood-red light. There are stark bursts of white lighting, too, (designed by Tim Lutkin), flashing as if to blind us, while unnervingly quick costume changes by Essiedu really do create the illusion of more than one version of him. Continue reading... | | | The Tinder Swindler review – the gobsmacking true story of an internet con artist | by Rebecca Nicholson Feb 2, 2022 | This gripping Netflix documentary about a jet-setting, internet-dating scammer is both astonishing and full of compassion for his female victims Several of the participants in The Tinder Swindler (Netflix) describe the extraordinary events relayed in the documentary as like being in a film. One woman talks about being romanced by a man she met on the dating app. He called himself Simon Leviev. Their first date started at a five-star hotel and extended to a spontaneous trip on a private jet. Another woman (and there are many women), further down the line, says she feels as if she is in “a horror movie”. Given the show’s title, it isn’t too much of a giveaway to reveal that Leviev, who claimed to be the son of a billionaire diamond dealer, was not the wealthy, suave suitor he made himself out to be online, but a convicted conman named Shimon Hayut. Audiences love nothing more than a scam, from the podcast Sweet Bobby to the fascinating case of the “fake heiress” Anna Delvey. This slots neatly into the pantheon. It is a pacy, gripping feature-length film that lays everything out with precision and offers plenty of compassion for the victims. Continue reading... | | | Roland Emmerich's Moonfall premiere party turned disaster into opportunity | by Stuart Heritage Feb 2, 2022 | The Independence Day director is known for bombast, but scaling back his new film’s celebrations because of Omicron and holding the party in his back yard was low-key impressive Roland Emmerich does disasters better than anyone else alive. This is a man who thrives on outrageous worst-case scenarios. The world being attacked by aliens. The world being attacked by giant lizards. The world being destroyed by climate change. The world being destroyed by climate change but in a slightly different way and with John Cusack inexplicably as the action hero. If you want a disaster to be bigger and more elaborate than anything you could possibly imagine, you need Emmerich in your corner. However, some disasters are worse than others. And this is why Emmerich just had to have the premiere party for his new film at his house. Continue reading... | | | Masters of heaviness Rolo Tomassi: 'I've never expected music to offer me a living' | by Matt Mills Feb 2, 2022 | Nearly two decades into their career and recording around their day jobs, the South Yorkshire-born band have made a genre-defying masterpiece – but they remain an enigma If you’ve seen the 1997 crime drama LA Confidential, you’re already familiar with the cryptic words Rolo Tomassi. It’s the name that the film’s protagonist – idealistic policeman Ed Exley, played by Guy Pearce – gives to the faceless criminal that murdered his father. “No one even knew who he was,” the detective divulges to his stoic sergeant. “I just made the name up to give him some personality.” A similar mystery hangs like noirish fog around the band of the same name. On a musical level, they’re unclassifiable; arguably the most inventive heavy band currently working in the UK, who have made a masterpiece nearly two decades into their career. New album Where Myth Becomes Memory flits between seemingly incompatible genres: opening track Almost Always commences with shoegaze guitars, framing the silken singing of lead vocalist Eva Korman, then follow-up Cloaked plummets into a twisted metal riff as Korman snarls and screams. Post-rock, hardcore punk, piano pop and synth music all ensue before the LP has struck its final chord. Continue reading... | | | Top 10 cooks in fiction | Annabel Abbs | by Annabel Abbs Feb 2, 2022 | From PG Wodehouse’s ‘peerless’ Anatole to John Lanchester’s merciless Tarquin Winot, a novelist chooses her favourite kitchen creations Creating a fictional cook in prose is challenging: using plain, monochrome text the writer must bring to life the richly flavoured and perfumed world in which her cook resides. But when successful, the fictional cook is a force to be reckoned with, often springing off the page in a delicious, seductive frenzy of tastebud-tickling drama. When I began researching my novel, I was lucky enough to have original source material. The Language of Food tells the story of food writer, Eliza Acton, who left two beautifully written cookery books and a poetry collection. I also had shelves of cookery books and foodie memoirs. But, while often crammed with mouth-watering descriptions of meals, these books were less about plot and character. And so, finally, I turned to fiction, scouring libraries and bookshops for fictional cooks and chefs. Continue reading... | | | Walking With Ghosts review – Gabriel Byrne's trip down Dublin's memory lanes | by Chris Wiegand Feb 2, 2022 | Gaiety theatre, Dublin The actor adapts his impressionistic memoir for the stage, giving life to the characters he observed as a boy in the ‘theatre of the street’ Gabriel Byrne’s 2020 book Walking With Ghosts covers common territory for an actor’s memoir, recalling entranced first trips to the cinema, personal encounters with heavyweight movie stars and waiting in the wings on Broadway. Its arc, too, is familiar: rags to riches to ruinous addiction – in this case to alcohol at the height of his 90s fame. What sets the book apart is Byrne’s evocative and elegiac, often sensuous prose, particularly when detailing his childhood and what his father called the “theatre of the street” unfolding daily in his Dublin neighbourhood. This theatrical performance based on the memoir brings Byrne back to the Dublin stage for the first time since 1978, when he appeared at the Gaiety in Brendan Behan’s Borstal Boy. Behan himself passes through – seen on a bus by four-year-old Byrne – and Byrne also imitates his idol, Richard Burton, who he starred alongside in a TV miniseries about Wagner. Continue reading... | | | Dear Mr Joyce: an essay by Edna O'Brien | by Edna O'Brien Feb 2, 2022 | As Ulysses turns 100, O’Brien tries to pin down what its extraordinary author was really like Was he garrulous? Did he wear a topcoat? Did he hanker after renown? Such questions we ask ourselves about the deceased great, trying in our forlorn way to identify with them, some point of contact, some malady, some caprice that brings us and them closer. Such questions are not satisfactorily answered in works of fiction, writers being by necessity conjurors, ex-lovers are unreliable, friends overreaching, enemies bilious, so the closest we can get to a legendary figure is from letters. Letters are like the lines on a face, testimonial. In this case they are the access to the man that encased the mind, which housed the genius of James Joyce. In his youth he was suspicious, contemptuous, unaccommodating. He saw his countrymen as being made up of yahoos, adulterous priests and sly deceitful women. He classed it as “the venereal condition of the Irish”. Like the wild geese he had a mind to go elsewhere. He wanted to be continentalised. He liked the vineyards. He had a dream of Paris, and a craze for languages. In literature his heroes were Cardinal Newman and Henrik Ibsen. To Ibsen he wrote, “Your work on Earth draws to a close and you are near the silence. It is growing dark for you.” He was 19 at that time. Young men do not usually know such things unless there is already on them the shadow of their future. There was on him. He descended into blindness. He was beset by glaucoma, cataract, iris complaint, dissolution of the retina. He is said to have had 25 eye operations. His nerves were like the twitterings of wrens. His brain pandemoniacal as he resorted to aspirin, iodine, scopolamine. Continue reading... | | | | |
No comments:
Post a Comment