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News Dune: Prophecy Max’s Dune: Prophecy Is Basically an Origin Story for the Bene Gesserit Sisters dune it for themselves By Molly Templeton | Published on May 15, 2024 Screenshot: Max Comment 0 Share New Share Screenshot: Max First, the confusing bit: Yes, this show was previously called Dune: The Sisterhood. It was called this for years, in fact, and as a title it made sense, not least because the Dune prequel series is based on, or at least inspired by, the novel Sisterhood of Dune by Brian Herbert and Kevin J. Anderson. But now it is Dune: Prophecy, and it is somewhat hard not to suspect that the Max powers-that-be didn’t want “sisterhood” on their Dune series, even though said series is largely about the women of the Bene Gesserit. At any rate, the show stars an incredible lineup of actors that includes Emily Watson, Olivia Williams, Mark Strong, Jihae, Tabu, Charithra Chandran, Jessica Barden, Emma Canning, and Yerin Ha. The series’ logline says only: From the expansive universe of Dune, created by acclaimed author Frank Herbert, and 10,000 years before the ascension of Paul Atreides, Dune: Prophecy follows two Harkonnen sisters as they combat forces that threaten the future of humankind and establish the fabled sect that will become known as the Bene Gesserit. Dune: Prophecy has had a somewhat tumultuous journey to a screen near you. In 2019, the series’ original showrunner, Jon Spaihts, left the project in order to write Dune: Part Two. In the summer of 2021, Diane Ademu-John came on board as the new showrunner—but later that year she too departed, leaving co-showrunner Alison Schapker flying solo. In March 2023, one of the show’s original stars, Shirley Henderson, also left, along with director Johan Renck. Ademu-John still has credit for developing the series, and is an executive producer. But that is a lot of turmoil for a spinoff show with just six episodes. That said, any series starring Emily Watson as a scheming Harkonnen and Reverend Mother Superior is worth watching. “Sisterhood above all,” she says, ominously, while looking quite conniving. No premiere date has been announced, but Dune: Prophecy arrives this fall.[end-mark] The post Max’s <i>Dune: Prophecy</i> Is Basically an Origin Story for the Bene Gesserit appeared first on Reactor.

News Wicked This Year’s Wicked Is Only Part One of Two, But the Trailer Shows Most of the Story Something is not the same. By Molly Templeton | Published on May 15, 2024 Screenshot: Universal Pictures Comment 0 Share New Share Screenshot: Universal Pictures It is hard to know where to start with the blockbuster musical film adaptation of Wicked, which is based on the blockbuster Broadway musical, which is based on Gregory Maguire’s very different and beloved book. But the thing that bothers me most, in this second look at the film, is how much it makes me think of the unfortunate Oz the Great and Powerful, a movie which had almost nothing going for it. It’s the un-reality of it all, the sense that no one actually lives in this world. It’s all just an elaborate set, which is fine for a live musical, which requires a whole different level of suspension of disbelief. But this is a movie and it ought to look like an immersive world. Instead we have a nonsense train and flying monkeys that look like they escaped from the latest Planet of the War of the World of the Apes film. Being a movie, it has movie stars. Despite the fact that Wicked is, ostensibly, the story of the Wicked Witch of the West, this trailer is notably more interested in Ariana Grande as Glinda, said Wicked Witch’s reluctant college roommate. Grande seems outmatched, though, by the sheer chemistry of Cynthia Erivo as Elphaba, the green girl herself. They are opposites, and they’ll become best friends, but something is off in their pairing, despite how endearing the two performers are when they appear together in the real world. As the synopsis—which you don’t really need, as the story is all right there in the trailer—says: The two meet as students at Shiz University in the fantastical Land of Oz and forge an unlikely but profound friendship. Following an encounter with The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, their friendship reaches a crossroads and their lives take very different paths. Glinda’s unflinching desire for popularity sees her seduced by power, while Elphaba’s determination to remain true to herself, and to those around her, will have unexpected and shocking consequences on her future. Their extraordinary adventures in Oz will ultimately see them fulfill their destinies as Glinda the Good and the Wicked Witch of the West. The rest of the cast includes Michelle Yeoh as Madame Morrible; Jeff Goldblum as the Wizard; and Jonathan Bailey as Fiyero, a prince whose story goes one way in the novel and a whole ‘nother way in the musical. Jon M. Chu (In the Heights) directs, and the film has the same writing team as the musical—book writer Winnie Holzman and composer and lyricist Stephen Schwartz (who has written two new songs for Part Two). Wicked, the first part, which you 100% know is going to end with “Defying Gravity,” is in theaters November 27th.[end-mark] The post This Year’s <i>Wicked</i> Is Only Part One of Two, But the Trailer Shows Most of the Story appeared first on Reactor.

Books A.S. Byatt Myth, Fantasy, and Lives Shaped by Stories in the Work of A.S. Byatt The fantastical elements are always there in Byatt’s fiction, underpinning the fabric of the story and guiding the fates of her characters… By Jonathan Thornton | Published on May 15, 2024 Comment 0 Share New Share “In this misty land the borderline between myth, legend and fact is not decisive, my father says, as a stone arch might be between this world and another, but more like a series of moving veils or woven webs between one room and another.” —Possession, p. 400 When A.S. Byatt passed away in November last year, the world lost a great fantasist as well as a Booker Prize-winning author. Whilst Byatt’s literary fiction might appear to be as far from traditional fantasy as possible, scratch the surface of almost any of her novels or disconcertingly strange short stories and you find an imagination suffused with myths and legends, alive to the possibility of the fantastic. Byatt was obsessed with myths, particularly Norse mythology, and the fantastical otherworld of fairy that haunted the Romantics, because these are very old stories that humans have told and retold to each other for thousands of years, and Byatt was interested in the peculiar and transcendent magic of storytelling. The fantastical elements in a Byatt story may not necessarily cross over into the diegetic world of the main narrative—although they frequently do, especially in her short stories—but they are always there, underpinning the fabric of the story and subtly guiding and shaping the interior lives and the fates of the characters. I’m going to talk about how Byatt’s unique approach to the fantastic, looking at her most famous work, the Booker Prize-winning novel Possession: A Romance (1990), her reimagining of the Norse myths in Ragnarok: The End of the Gods (2011) and her short fiction. Possession is a novel concerned with the multiple meanings of its title, supernatural and otherwise. On the most basic level of story, it’s a literary thriller about Roland Mitchell, a struggling academic who discovers some handwritten letters by (fictional) Romantic poet Randolph Henry Ash which imply a tempestuous relationship between Ash and fellow (also fictional) Romantic poet Christabel LaMotte, something that could completely recontextualize the world of academic study surrounding these two poets. Mitchell and Maud Bailey, Mitchell’s counterpart in LaMotte studies, must work together to follow a series of clues to uncover the truth about the two poets’ romantic tryst before their rivals can swoop in. As such, it’s concerned with the strange possessiveness academics feel over their research subjects, as well as the often-thorny issue of who owns the rights to an artist’s personal correspondence generations after their death. But Possession is a complex puzzle-box of a book, and it’s unwise to assume anything flows only in the one direction. Just as the academics fight over possession of Ash and LaMotte’s effects and their own sense of ownership of the poets’ work, so they find their own lives overwritten and overwhelmed by the passion and vision of these two long-dead poets. Byatt masterfully creates a polyphony of voices in her novel, interspersing modern sections describing Roland and Maud’s exploits with diary entries and letters from Randolph, Christabel, and their friends and relatives, as well as both poets’ poetry. None of this would work if Byatt were not a master of voice, effortlessly able to capture the interior voices of her characters as well as convincingly portraying the elemental magic and fire of the Romantic’s poetry. Incredibly, Byatt is able to do just that, creating poems that engage with nature and mythology in the same way as the Romantics whilst demonstrating how the poets’ real-life experiences of love and loss are transmuted into art via their incredible talent and imaginations. Possession expertly mixes all of these contrasting records of lives and experiences, read and reread across centuries, building up to an impressive sculpture of narrative which only the novel’s reader is able to piece together and appreciate as a magnificent whole. So what does this have to do with fantasy and the fantastic? For those like Randolph and Christabel, who live in a world of their own imagination, or those like Roland and Maude, who spend their life exploring someone else’s imagination, the answer is: everything. Both Randolph and Christabel’s work is rich in allusion, and both become fixated on the legends of Ys, the mythical sunken city of Brittany, and Melusina, the woman/water spirit who is part fish. Both of these images, that of a city’s doomed inhabitants at the mercy of forces far greater than themselves, and of a woman who has a terrible secret that she must keep from her lover, become central to both poets’ imaginations and writings. Randolph and Christabel’s relationship is fraught by practical difficulties and guilt, as Randolph is already married, and Christabel lives with her friend and possible lover Blanche Glover, and fiercely protects her private life, painfully aware of the restrictions placed on her behavior as a woman in 1800s England. The images of Ys and Melusina recur in both Randolph and Christabel’s poems, where they symbolize different things. Byatt expertly shows us how myths and legends resonate through the artist’s private life and provide them with a language and a medium through which to transmute their experiences into art. As well as providing the context and the expression of the poets’ tempestuous affair, there is a sense in which their lives are being shaped by the stories and legends. This is reflected again in the way in which the poets’ lives and the poets’ art influences and shapes Roland and Maude’s romantic relationship so many years later, infusing the lives of these repressed and introverted scholars with the passion and intensity of Randolph and Christabel’s romance. Of course, being keenly observant and aware of the way narratives work, Roland and Maude can’t help but be a little bit aware of this process happening to them: Somewhere in the locked-away letters, Ash had referred to the plot or fate which seemed to hold or drive the dead lovers. Roland thought, partly with precise postmodernist pleasure, and partly with a real element of superstitious dread, that he and Maud were being driven by a plot or fate that seemed, at least possibly, to be not their plot or fate but that of those others. (504) Throughout Possession, narrative and imagination have an inexorable influence over the novel’s characters, influencing each other across media and centuries, to the extent that stories themselves seem to have more agency than any of the characters. The fantastic has a similarly oblique but profound role in Ragnarok. The book is simultaneously a retelling of the Nordic myths and a reflection on why these stories retain such power over the human imagination. The myths are told in parallel with the story of a young girl during World War II, who discovers the myths through a copy of Asgard and the Gods at a time when the world around her is making less and less sense. The child seems to be largely based on Byatt herself, and in her own experiences growing up during the war and reading the Norse myths. This creates a feeling of deeply personal connection between the book, the reader, and its meta-subject matter. Byatt tells of the gods with lyrical prose, drawing them unavoidably toward the inevitable destruction of all things waiting at the end of the world. But we also get to see how these stories have a direct effect on her young mind, how they help her make sense of the world, how they inspire in her a desire to write and imagine her own stories: The picture gave the child an intense, uncanny pleasure. She knew, but could not have said, that it was the precise degree of formlessness in the nevertheless scrupulously depicted rocks that was so satisfactory. The reading eye must do the work to make them live, and so it did, again and again, never the same life twice, as the artist had intended. She had noticed that a bush, or a log, seen from a distance on her meadow-walk, could briefly be a crouching, snarling dog, or a trailing branch could be a snake, complete with shining eyes and flickering forked tongue.This way of looking was where the gods and giants came from.The stone giants made her want to write.They filled the world with an alarming energy and power. (10) For Byatt, the myths connect us to the primal self who sees goblins and monsters in the dark. The harsh, unforgiving nature of the Norse gods is directly contrasted with the Christian God the child learns about at church—there is something about the unknowable, inhuman arrogance and violence of the Norse gods that make them feel more real to her than the forgiving, benevolent New Testament deity, something that connects directly to the world of Grimms’ fairy tales. These are stories that warn of unseen menaces in the night, and so open up spaces where the imagination can roam free. The Norse myths give the child a context within which to frame the unfathomable and seemingly unending horrors of the war, as London is bombed and she is evacuated to the countryside. The elemental violence of the Norse myths finds a resonance in the horror and destruction. This way of seeing and understanding the world stays with the child, as we follow her into adulthood where the world is under threat of environmental collapse. Environmental catastrophe becomes reflected in the death of the world tree Yggdrasil, a terrible fate brought about by our own hubris as we poison the very planet that gives us life. Thus, mythology for Byatt not only opens a door for one to connect with one’s own primal imagination, it provides us with an ever-evolving and relevant language for encountering and processing the immensity of existence, those things that are so much larger than human life and understanding, however it manifests in our current age. Once again, it is stories, and in particular myths and legends, that have the true agency here. The importance of stories and the fantastic can also be seen throughout Byatt’s wonderful short stories, many of which are collected in Medusa’s Ankles (2021). Byatt tends to allow the fantastical and the supernatural to encroach more directly on her short fiction than in her novels, but they share with her longer work her intricate construction and her fascination with the ways in which storytelling shape our lives. “The Djinn in the Nightingale’s Eye,” which won the 1998 Mythopoeic Fantasy Award for Adult Literature, is a remarkable piece of fiction that uses nested stories and the register of the tales of the Arabian Nights to tell a quintessential story about stories—a professor of narratology visits a conference in Ankara, trades stories with colleagues and tour guides, and eventually finds herself falling in love with a djinn. Once again there is a sense in which the stories the characters tell wind up shaping their own lives. As one of the professor’s friends remarks in one of the many nested stories that unfold: It is as though our dreams were watching us and directing our lives with external vigour whilst we simply enact their pleasures passively, in a swoon. (184)   The short story form allows Byatt to effortlessly show off her range whilst playing with form. The Romantics are never far from Byatt’s stories—“A Lamia in the Cévennes” imagines an encounter between an artist and Keats’ Lamia in a swimming pool in the French countryside, whilst “Precipice-Encurled” sets a series of framed narratives around the poet Robert Browning, the real-life model for Possession’s Randolph Henry Ash. “Dragon’s Breath” and “Cold” read like meta-takes on fairy tales, using the reader’s familiarity with the form to subvert expectations. “Doll’s Eyes” is a straight-up horror story, whilst “The July Ghost” is a melancholy take on the ghost story, with loss itself doing the haunting. There are even touches of the Weird in places, as in the masterful “A Stone Woman,” which sees its central character undergoing a lithic transformation into a troll. Throughout them all is the sense that stories happen when the unexpected, whether it be the supernatural or an unfamiliar character seizing the reigns of the narrative, irrupts into the mundane, and that stories come about to help us understand these disturbances. Byatt’s unusual and complex approach to genre means that very little of her work sits easily under the banner of fantasy, but she spent her life exploring the magical hold that stories have over all of our lives. Her novel The Children’s Book (2009) draws on the lives of E. Nesbit and J. M. Barrie to tell a story about a family shaped by Olive Wellwood’s decision to write children’s books, whilst even her realist Quartet, beginning with The Virgin in The Garden (1978), is obsessed with how words and terminology shape our reality. Adventurous readers will find in her work a wealth of imagination and a deep appreciation of mythology and the fantastic. Her intricately constructed novels and stories poke holes in their own fictionality, creating a delightfully uncanny sense of unease. But it is Byatt’s love for the fantastic and her unwavering exploration of how fantastical stories shape our lives that make her work resonate so meaningfully with fantasy, and hint at exciting new ways for the bold to approach the fantastic.[end-mark] The post Myth, Fantasy, and Lives Shaped by Stories in the Work of A.S. Byatt appeared first on Reactor.

Soldiering through the levels is fun in Diablo 4, albeit tiresome if you’ve done it multiple times. Fortunately, the Helltide changes in Diablo 4 Season 4 make leveling up a breeze. Let me show you how to level up in record-breaking time. How to level up fast in Diablo 4 Season 4 One of the most impactful changes to Diablo 4 this season, aside from fast travel crashes, is the Helltide changes. Helltides are now accessible at any World Tier and are always active bar the short cooldown when the area moves. We used to use other methods to level up quickly, but Helltides provide a steady source of enemies we can use instead. The enemy density in Helltides is so high they are hands-down the best place to level up. Gear also drops at a decent rate, so you can chase Helltides through the entire leveling process if you wish. To level up fast in Diablo 4, I recommend playing on World Tier 1 with a brand new character and heading straight to a Helltide. You can fight enemies ...

There are 17 characters (known as resonators) in Wuthering Waves that we’ll get to draw and play with. Each of them are fully voiced, with a great cast of voice actors, both English and Japanese. All voice actors for Wuthering Waves The information I have about the voice actors for the characters in Wuthering Waves have come from leaks and the X pages of the game itself. However, not all information is public, so unfortunately this is an incomplete list. Many of the voice actors have been announced or found out, however, so you should be able to recognise a few. As more information becomes public, I’ll update the following information. As it stands, this list is the most up-to-date I could find. Image: Kuro games CharacterEnglish Voice ActorJapanese Voice ActorRover (male)Chase BrownToshiki MatsudaRover (female)Jane JacksonInori MinaseLinyinNaomi McdonaldAmi KoshimizuLingyanAleksander VaradianNatsuki HanaeJiyanAlex JordanYuki OnoTaoqi Clare Louis ConnollyHin...

Playing through Diablo 4 Season 4 sees a whole ton of new items and gear coming in from the open-handed but needy Iron Wolves. However, sometimes it is best to hold off collecting Iron Wolf rewards until you have reached a higher level, triggering higher-level Diablo 4 items. Should you wait to open Iron Wolf rewards? What this really comes down to is the change in how Diablo 4 plays and the loot system works. The Iron Wolf rewards are indicative of this, and you’re going to be absolutely rolling in loot throughout Diablo 4 Season 4. So, open and unlock all the Iron Wolf rewards as you get them, including the Unique Caches. Diablo 4 Season 4 has been dubbed Loot Reborn for a good reason. You needn’t worry about opening things like caches and rewards too early because, before long, you’ll have more loot than you know what to do with. Within a few hours of playtime, I had more uniques and was scrapping things for their aspects constantly. Image: Blizzard ...

I won’t often choose to pick up a puzzle game unless I am playing alongside a friend. However, it’s games like this that remind me that I should give them more of a chance. Lorelei and the Laser Eyes is stylish, a little funny, and certainly satisfying if you have the patience. A slow starter While playing Lorelei and The Laser Eyes for review, I have to admit that it took my brain more than a minute to get warmed up to the process. It had been a long time since I had played a puzzle game like this, and I don’t even do crosswords or sudoku in my spare time. I hardly have a brain prepared for cryptics. However, after an hour or so of playtime, things started to come together. I began to understand how the game was trying to fool me with the way it constructed its brain teasers. It was at this point that Lorelei and The Laser Eyes started to become fun, and I really got into the swing of things. Screenshot: PC Invasion Lorelei and The Laser Eyes isn̵...

In every Bethesda title, there comes a time where you must haul your valuables and junk to vendors to sell for some sweet money, and Starfield is no exception. However, your carry capacity and available vendor funds can stifle this process. How to increase vendor credits in Starfield In previous Bethesda titles, there are ways to get around the available vendor credits. By investing in the store or through bartering, there have been a way to make their available funds more manageable. In Starfield, however, these systems aren’t in play. Despite the ludicrous prices of their goods, each vendor only seems to have a handful of cash available at a time. Screenshot by PC Invasion Unfortunately, this problem persists although the update addressed many quality of life irritations, vendor credits remains tedious. All you can do is wait 48 in-game hours for a vendor to get more credits. You’ll have to rinse and repeat this process, or keep hitting different vendors to...

Inflation ticked down slightly year-over-year in April but still remained high as rising prices continue to take a toll on average Americans’ finances, according to the latest Bureau of Labor Statistics release on Tuesday. The consumer price index, a broad measure of the prices of everyday goods, increased 3.4% on an annual basis in April and 0.3% month-over-month, compared to 3.5% in March, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Core CPI, which excludes the volatile categories of energy and food, remained higher, rising 3.6% year-over-year in April, compared to 3.8% in February. The average for hourly earnings relative to inflation fell 0.2% from March to April and 0.4% when the number of hours worked is considered, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. For the year ending in April, real average earnings increased by just 0.5%. Inflation peaked at 9% under President Joe Biden in June 2022 after rising from just 1.4% year-over-year in January 2021 and has since failed to drop below 3%. The producer price index for final demand, which measures wholesale inflation before it reaches consumers, surged by 0.5% in April, totaling 2.2% year-over-year. An increase in the producer price index rate could indicate that more inflationary pressure is working its way down to consumers and that prices will continue to rise. The Federal Reserve has set its federal funds rate to a range of 5.25% and 5.50% in an attempt to slow the rate of inflation, the highest level in 23 years. A majority of investors do not anticipate a rate cut until the Fed’s September meeting as inflation remains elevated, according to the CME Group’s FedWatch Tool. August came early to DC today: it's hot and sticky inflation in producer prices w/ PPI up 0.5% M/M for Apr and 2.2% Y/Y – that's the fastest annual increase since Apr '23……inflation is NOT dead; it's getting worse: pic.twitter.com/QXsIjmWfNO— E.J. Antoni, Ph.D. (@RealEJAntoni) May 14, 2024 Gross domestic product growth slowed in the first quarter of 2024 to just 1.6%, stoking fears that the economy is in a period of stagflation marked by low economic growth and high inflation. The labor market slowed in April, adding just 175,000 new jobs in the month compared to 303,000 in the previous month. Research group The Conference Board projects that labor market growth will slow even further in the second half of 2024. High inflation is increasingly weighing on Biden’s presidential election prospects, with around 49% of voters surveyed by the Financial Times and the University of Michigan’s Ross School of Business saying that the president’s policies have hurt the economy. Around 80% of those surveyed listed inflation as one of their top three biggest financial stressors. Biden has sought in recent months to blame inflation on companies marking up prices at a time of economic fluctuation in a show of corporate greed. Recent research released by the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco disproved this explanation by showing that corporate markups in the recent inflation spike are no different than at other times of economic recovery. Originally published by the Daily Caller News Foundation The post Inflation Stays Uncomfortably High as Rising Prices Continue to Squeeze Americans appeared first on The Daily Signal.