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Devo, one of the most unique and influential bands to emerge from the late 1970s, formed with a vision of merging biting social commentary with pioneering new wave soundscapes. The band originated in Akron, Ohio, in 1973, founded by art students and friends Mark Mothersbaugh and Gerald Casale. At the core of Devo’s identity was the concept of “de-evolution,” a satirical theory suggesting that society was regressing rather than advancing. This theme became central to their music and performance style, setting Devo apart from the punk and rock movements of the time. The original lineup included Mothersbaugh on vocals and The post Top 10 Devo Songs appeared first on ClassicRockHistory.com.

A team of MIT graduates has invented a commercial device that will give an alternative to sleeping pills for those who struggle to sleep. It’s a minimally disruptive headband that looks like something that would be sold at an Apple Store. Technically speaking it’s an electroencephalogram (EEG) that sends audio waves into the brain to […] The post Device from MIT Startup Helps People Fall Asleep–Putting Your Mind on ‘Do Not Disturb’ appeared first on Good News Network.

News The Land of Nod A24 Picks Up Skinamarink Creator’s Next Movie, The Land of Nod We might have an inkling about the plot By Vanessa Armstrong | Published on October 28, 2024 Credit: BayView Entertainment Comment 0 Share New Share Credit: BayView Entertainment Kyle Edward Ball, the writer and director behind the 2023 horror film Skinamarink, has signed on with A24 for his next movie. According to Variety, the film is titled The Land of Nod, and Ball will once again write and direct. The project comes after the critical and commercial success of Skinamarink, which Ball made for only $15,000 but garnered over $2 million at the box office. In it, two young children are trapped in their house where all the doors and windows and parental figures have vanished, replaced by a stalking, malevolent presence. You can get the vibes of the movie from the image above, which captures the desperate fear that seeps through the entire film. While we don’t have any details on the plot of Nod, Ball told Variety in a 2022 interview that he was mulling over two ideas at the time: a story inspired by the legend of the Pied Piper and one about three people who see the same house in a dream. There’s no confirmation on whether either of those stories turned into The Land of Nod, but if I had to choose one given the title, I’d go for the spooky house people see in their dreams. The project is still in its early days, so no news yet on when it will go into production or end up on screens across the globe. Given the unsettling nature of Skinamarink, however, the movie is likely to be a disturbing one.[end-mark] The post A24 Picks Up <i>Skinamarink</i> Creator’s Next Movie, <i>The Land of Nod</i> appeared first on Reactor.

Movies & TV The Penguin “You deserve your shot” — The Penguin’s “Gold Summit” An excellent hour of television, that proves The Penguin is more than “just” a crime story… By Keith R.A. DeCandido | Published on October 28, 2024 Credit: Macall Polay/HBO Comment 0 Share New Share Credit: Macall Polay/HBO The Penguin’s MO from his very first appearance in the lead story of 1941’s Detective Comics #58 (“One of the Most Perfect Frame-Ups” by Batman’s creators Bill Finger & Bob Kane) was that he was a planner. After stealing a valuable painting in broad daylight as a calling card, the crime boss of Gotham, known simply as “The Boss,” hires Penguin to plan crimes for him. However, The Boss tries to short Penguin for his cut, and in response Penguin shoots him and takes over the gang. He also gets Batman off his back temporarily by framing the caped crusader for a crime and then breaking him out after he’s arrested to make it look like Bats is his accomplice. I have seen several complaints online about The Penguin, saying it’s “just” a crime story that has nothing to do with the comics. Those complaints are borne of not really paying close attention. Yes, many of the trappings of the comics character are missing—he isn’t wearing the top hat and monocle or smoking a cigarette from a holder or wearing a tuxedo—but the essence of the character is the same as it was in 1941: he’s a brilliant planner, and one who will frame his enemies and double-cross his allies. All of that is on copious display in The Penguin, starting with the very beginning of “After Hours” when he shot this story’s equivalent of The Boss, Alberto Falcone. However, the other aspect of “One of the Most Perfect Frame-Ups” that show-runner Lauren LeFranc (who is a longtime comics reader) has kept is the foe who keeps Penguin on his toes. In the absence of Batman, we have Sofia Falcone, herself a character of more recent vintage, and who is proving to be a powerful force in her own right. (One of my only frustrations with The Penguin is one that’s not really its fault, but rather an issue I have with far too many of Warner Bros.’ DC TV adaptations of late: stuff that takes place deep within the Batman mythos, but without any Batman in it. This goes back to the short-lived Birds of Prey TV series in 2002, and had continued with more recent shows ranging from Pennyworth to Powerless to Batwoman—and by extension, the entirety of the Arrow-verse—to Gotham. Titans would’ve been on that list, too, in its first season, but they actually had Bats show up in season two… The Penguin is carrying on in that tiresome tradition, without nary even a mention of the guy in the bat suit.) Plot-wise, we have Penguin getting a foothold on the drug trade with Bliss. He had the two buckets of mushrooms he liberated from the Maronis when he killed Nadia and Taj Maroni in “Homecoming” last week. He’s been able to grow more in the abandoned trolley tunnels and create some supply for the demand for Bliss. He’s also been serving as the connect for several different gangs, working as anonymously and secretly as possible, the flipping great wodges of cash they’re all making buying silence. Meanwhile, Sofia and Sal Maroni are now allies. Maroni’s a fugitive, still, so he has to lay low, but they have one ally in the Triads, who won’t deal with Penguin. Sofia and Maroni are also determined to find Penguin and make him pay for his various misdeeds toward them—in Sofia’s case, killing her brother, not to mention his role in her unjustified incarceration in Arkham; in Maroni’s, killing his wife and kid. To that end, they go to his long-abandoned apartment in the hopes of finding something he cares about that they can leverage. What they find is Eve—whom Sofia knows was his alleged alibi for killing Alberto. Credit: Macall Polay/HBO All the above is plot, and it’s important, but it’s not the heart of this most excellent episode: it’s the individual scenes, any one of which is absolutely brilliant both in and out of context, and which all add up to a great hour of television. We’ve got Maroni cooking a late-night meal for Sofia, which is an incredibly touching scene. Sofia was abandoned by her family, and then she killed them all, and Maroni had his family taken away from him. The two wind up with a rather sweet father-daughter bond, beautifully encapsulated by the simple act of the father cooking a meal. It’s a recipe his wife taught him, one his son loved, and he shares it with her. Yes, the bond it solidifies is one of vengeance and crime and death, but it’s still very touching for all that. Clancy Brown and Cristin Milioti play it very low-key and effectively. We’ve got Penguin coming home to the apartment in Crown Point, which still has no power, to find his mother freezing in a cold bathtub, because she doesn’t have the wherewithal to get out herself. Penguin helps her out and Francis pleads with her son to kill her if she gets so far gone, she doesn’t know who she is anymore. Penguin is unwilling at first, but his mother talks him into the potential euthanasia. He then helps her up and gets her dressed and puts makeup on her, quietly and effectively allowing her to get back the dignity that being caught freezing in the tub—and her illness—took away from her. (Later Penguin laments to Vic that the doctors for all their knowledge don’t even entirely know what she has. They thought it was Parkinson’s, then Alzheimer’s, and now they’ve diagnosed it as Lewy Body Dementia, the latter of which Penguin had never even heard of before.) We’ve got two scenes between Vic and Squid, the local small-time criminal for whom Vic was trying to steal Penguin’s rims back in “After Hours,” and about whom he was nervous when they returned to Crown Point last week. Squid knows something’s going on, and he wants in. Vic tries to buy him off, but Squid won’t tolerate that. He knows that Penguin’s up to something, and he threatens to go to the Maronis. At which point, Vic feels he has no choice but to shoot him. It is, of course, horrible. Vic’s never killed anyone, and he shoots Squid in the throat, so it’s a wet, sticky, messy, gurgly death, making it a million times worse for Vic to have to watch. He’s crossed a line now, and it disgusts and revolts him. This is the dark side of the choice he made when he didn’t leave town with Graciela in “Bliss.” And then we have the magnificent coda to this: Penguin comforts Vic by saying, “It gets easier.” Which is no comfort at all—it just means he’s going to, like Macbeth, wade so far into blood that going back is as difficult as continuing onward. We’ve got the titular Gold Summit, where Penguin gathers the leaders of the various Gotham gangs—Blacks, Latinos, Irish, Triads, etc.—and proposes an alliance among all of them. The gangs are reluctant, particularly since Sofia and Maroni have already killed a couple of the Sullivan gang’s dealers for selling Bliss. Plus, the Triad leader (François Chau) views Penguin as a betrayer. But, in a brilliant bit of oratory written by Nick Towne and performed by Colin Farrell, Penguin convinces them. He reminds Sullivan that the Maronis and the Falcones made all their money off their labor while living in a mansion across the bridge—the bridge built by Sullivan’s ancestors. From the very beginning, we’ve seen that Penguin knows who everyone is working for him, by name. He talks to the other gang leaders as people, and the thing he brings to the meeting is a cooler full of cans of beer that he passes around to everyone. They’ll be stronger working together. They’ll have each others’ backs. The alliance is then symbolized by each leader opening his can, a beautifully effective working-class symbol of their coming together, nicely directed by Kevin Bray. After all, it doesn’t get more blue-collar than a can of beer… Credit: Macall Polay/HBO And then we’ve got the pièce de résistance: Sofia tries to locate Eve, and finds her efforts stymied, as none of the working girls will give her up. Then one finally does—but it turns out that Eve told her to, so they could get it over with. Sofia arrives in Eve’s apartment to find the latter in a sweatshirt and yoga pants, her natural dark hair tied up sloppily, the first time we’ve seen Eve out of “uniform.” The two bond over their mutual past saying things to make men happy, though for Eve it’s still her present. Eve also knows that Sofia’s going to kill her, and asks only that the Hangman not kill her girls. Sofia is appalled to realize that Eve still thinks she’s the Hangman when Penguin knows damn well that she isn’t. Sofia also knows that Eve is Penguin’s alibi for killing her brother, which is another reason why Eve expects to die at her hand. But Sofia is impressed both with the fact that none of Eve’s girls gave her up until explicitly told to and that Eve is now doing everything she can to protect her girls from the Hangman, even at the cost of her own life. Sofia doesn’t have anyone like that in her life—and she never did, which is why she spent a decade in Arkham and why the rest of her family is now dead by her hand. Knowing that Penguin betrayed her by never telling her that Sofia isn’t really the Hangman, Eve tells Sofia that he’s in Crown Point. “You deserve your shot,” she tells her, which is in many ways the theme of the episode (along with the refrain of people having each others’ backs). Sofia promises not to say where she got the info. The entire scene is a tour de force between Milioti and Carmen Ejogo as two women who have been forced into submissive roles by the men around them, but who have managed to thrive as best they can within those limitations. The gut punch, though, comes at the very end. Penguin is able to get the power back in Crown Point by the simple expediency of physically threatening a corrupt city councilman who used to be in Carmine Falcone’s pocket. When the power comes back, Vic and Francis are both home, and the two of them dance to “Glow Worm” by the Mills Brothers. First off, the start of that is perfectly played by Deirdre O’Connell and director Bray, as we think that Francis is crawling out of bed and shaking due to her illness, but the shaking is her trying to dance. After a few seconds, we see Vic dancing with her and it’s absolutely joyous. At which point we pull back to see Sofia standing in the hallway with a gun. It’s been clear all along that very few people know that Francis is still alive, and none of that number includes anyone (besides Vic) involved in Penguin’s business in Gotham. In fact, Penguin specifically said to Sofia at Alberto’s funeral in “Inside Man” that his mother was dead. So Sofia’s knowing that she’s alive is, um, not a good thing for the title character. The consequence to that, however, are left for next week, as Sofia watching Vic and Francis dance is how this truly magnificent episode rather brutally ends.[end-mark] The post “You deserve your shot” — <i>The Penguin</i>’s “Gold Summit” appeared first on Reactor.

Excerpts Horror Read an Excerpt From Mikaella Clements and Onjuli Datta’s Feast While You Can A strange and sexy horror novel of queer love in a small town. By Mikaella Clements and Onjuli Datta | Published on October 28, 2024 Comment 0 Share New Share We’re thrilled to share an excerpt from Feast While You Can, a queer romantic horror novel by Mikaella Clements and Onjuli Datta—out on October 29th from Grand Central Publishing. Angelina Sicco was born and raised in Cadenze, an ugly little mountain town that’s dead most of the year. Determined to be content with her lot in life, she walks her mongrel dog, attends her brother’s heavy metal concerts, holds court in the local dive bar, and does everything she can to bait hot, queer women to her sleepy, conservative hometown. But on the night of a family party, Angelina runs into the sternly handsome Jagvi, who’s back in town for a spell. Upon Jagvi’s arrival, an ancient evil is awakened, and a monstrous force infiltrates Angelina’s life. Only Jagvi’s touch repels it—the final trigger for a secret, passionate romance. But this monster feasts on all the passion, heartbreak and mess that makes up a life, and Angelina Sicco’s life has never looked tastier. What will Angelina do to protect her future? And what will it cost her? An introductory note from authors Mikaella Clements and Onjuli Datta: This is the third chapter of our new novel, Feast While You Can. Angelina Sicco has had a nasty surprise at her family party: her brother Patrick’s ex-girlfriend Jagvi (an outsider, a fellow lesbian, a thorn in Angelina’s side) is back in town. But even Jagvi’s scornful, discomforting presence isn’t enough to stop Angelina and her cousins from heading down to the cave on her uncle’s property where all the best family legends are told. We’re pleased to invite you to join them. Just watch your step. III It was a lovely cave. Pitted walls of rock soared up to the high ceiling, and generations of Sicco graffiti scarred the lower stones. Higher up, out of reach, were paintings by artists unknown, of ancient eyes layered with smoke from centuries of campfires. The occasional glimpse of a sword, the line of a richly embroidered robe. The cave lay under Franco’s corner of the mountains, just before the land tapered into a ravine. It was an unofficial haunt for the younger generations, their own den where they could moan about their elders and take whatever there was to be taken and drink the rest. One time Angelina and Jethro had spent a whole night out there, sharing stolen oxy and shaking with cold in the cave mouth with the stars wheeling before them. Another night Patrick drank too much and fell asleep while everyone else was still talking, then sleepwalked over to their campfire and pissed into it. At the back of the cave lay a neat line of stones, barely calf high, placed more as a sign than any genuine barrier. Beyond them stretched the pit. It yawned down, deeper than anyone could tell. Little children were kept away, and adults stopped going once their eyesight began to fade. Sicco teenagers sometimes sat on the edge with their hearts catching in their throats. If they dangled their legs into the pit, there was an acknowledged touch, a curious stroke along the arch of the foot, and then a nudge like a knuckle pressing up against the sole, turning them back. The air stayed fresh in the cave despite its small mouth, and even a little light seemed to fill it with warmth and honey. The Siccos were proud of it and so kept it to themselves, as they did with all their favorite things. “My pa said he hid out here for a week,” one of the cousins insisted. “Said he barricaded the entry with rocks and left a little nook for his rifle’s muzzle.” “How’d he eat, then, dummy?” Angelina said. Several of the cousins gave her stubborn looks: Sicco family legends were not to be questioned. Despite a fair amount of petty theft and violence, it had been generations since the cops took much interest in the Siccos, so stories like their great-great-great-grandfather’s standoff in the cave over a crate of stolen morphine had taken on mythic dimensions. Nowadays there wasn’t even a police department in Cadenze. The boys in blue were outsourced from Myrna, showing up occasionally to bust meth houses or search for runaways. Like everyone in her town, Angelina distrusted them and steered clear of all federal uniforms. Even the fortnightly garbage collectors made her hackles rise. “He’d left supplies up here,” tried Cousin Eugene, a teenager with yellow hair and a glass eye. “Just in case.” “I heard he took some of the morphine,” another suggested. “Kept his appetite down.” “And his shooting straight,” Patrick said, exchanging a grimace with Angelina. The two of them had been raised with Caro’s disdain for her forefathers’ exploits. The once-in-a-generation daughters were the significant members of the Sicco clan, Caro had explained, dropping a conciliatory kiss on Patrick’s head. The men were just there to support their lone and courageous women. Thanks, Ma, Patrick had said, his face tight like he knew it was true and felt all its weight. Angelina was fifteen then, and she and Patrick had been living on their own for two years. “You two only like the really gruesome stories,” Jethro complained. “Nothing too gruesome!” Angelina said. “But Beloved Great-Whatever-Paw-Paw just seems tame when you think about the Myrna kid killer. Or the thing in the pit.” “That’s not about our pit,” Patrick said comfortably. “No matter how much you want it to be.” “It could be our pit!” “The thing in the pit is on the other side of town,” another cousin said. “Under the Pepper Grinder.” “I heard it was back Maudoro way, not even in Cadenze.” “Wait,” one of the girlfriends said, frowning. “What’s the thing in the pit?” Whoops of delight through the cave, and a mild argument sprang up as to who should tell the story. Patrick won, eager to take the stage, perhaps because of Jagvi’s presence. Buy the Book Feast While You Can Mikaella Clements and Onjuli Datta Buy Book Feast While You Can Mikaella Clements and Onjuli Datta Buy this book from: AmazonBarnes and NobleiBooksIndieBoundTarget Patrick always looked best when he was performing. He dabbled as a front man for fledgling local rock bands, and he liked to lose himself in the set, his long, dark hair released from its customary ponytail and swarming around him while he snarled into a microphone. At home he was quieter, more thoughtful. He could be a stickler for rules and followed a constant duty to behave well, as if some absent authority were always hovering over his shoulder. He hated to be late for work and couldn’t leave a parking ticket unpaid for more than a day, his mouth thinning as he worried over some new favor their mother had asked of him. But he changed when there was a crowd before him. Shoulders squared, expressive hands. His jaw sloped slightly toward the left, and paired with his deep-set eyes, it gave him a devil-may-care attitude that looked excellent on a band poster or amid the boys at happy hour or now, in the yellow lantern light of the cave, telling the story of the thing in the pit. He leaned forward with his beer held high. “Okay, so,” he said, “once there was and once there wasn’t a monster that lived in the mountains. This monster wasn’t like the wolves, who ate flesh, or the bats, who drank blood. This monster came down into town once in a while to eat a whole life.” A chorus of protest: already he wasn’t telling it right, he’d already missed— “It’s my version!” Patrick maintained. “You can have your turn telling it later. So. The monster hounded the town. Fathers woke up with no sons where an heir used to be, just an empty bed and a wardrobe full of clothes with no memories of the person who wore them. Men appeared at their weddings only to find their girls didn’t exist, even though the church was filled with flowers and the priest was waiting to be paid. That’s the thing about this monster. It’s not hungry for your death, it’s hungry for your life.” “No, no,” Eugene said, shaking his head. “See, this is why your version doesn’t make sense. It doesn’t eat your life. It eats your future.” “Same difference,” Patrick said. “Actually, it’s not,” said another cousin, Matthew, a community college teacher about a decade older than the rest of them, clearly only here for the weed. He took a lordly toke from the joint circling the crowd. “Your version ends with death, and death is fast. It’s just another moment in your life. The last moment, but still a moment, and often a short one. The legend says that’s not enough sustenance for the thing in the pit. It wants the future that could have been yours, and it eats every morsel.” “Futures,” Eugene corrected. “Because you could do all kinds of things, you know, like maybe you marry this girl or maybe that one, and that changes your life. And maybe you become a priest or maybe you become a farmer, and that changes your life, too. And the thing from the pit eats all of those lives, all that potential, and that’s how it gets full enough to sleep for as long as it does. And in the meantime, you’re not dead and gone to heaven or the grave, you’re being consumed, forever, it licks every trace of you out of the world, until no one even remembers your name.” “Eugene’s getting way too excited about this,” Jethro said. “Yeah,” Angelina said, starting to giggle with him, “tell us more about being consumed—” “You guys are ruining the story with all this technical bullshit,” Patrick complained. “You wanna hear what happened or not?” General laughter and agreement that yes, they did. “One day, the monster’s walking down the road when it sees a girl with a tasty-looking life. Or future, whatever, it can tell she’s young and pretty and it wants to eat her.” “Eat every possible version of her,” Eugene cut in, “every kid she might have, every song she might sing—” “Every guy she might fuck,” someone interrupted. Even Patrick laughed this time. “Yeah, exactly. It wants to take all of that away until she’s just a shell without a past, or a future. Worse than being a corpse. But then her husband steps in.” Angelina added, “And he’s like, What was that about her fucking other guys?” “Thanks, Nini,” Patrick said. “No, the husband steps in and says the monster can eat him instead. He can’t bear to live in a world where his wife never existed. It’s a noble sacrifice. The monster agrees, probably the man’s life is even richer food than his wife’s. So it’s about to sit down to eat, when the wife says, ‘Wait, you shouldn’t eat him on the side of the road, you don’t want people gawking at you or interrupting. I know a cave further down the hill, why don’t we go there together and then you can eat.’ And the monster agrees.” “Classic mistake,” Jethro muttered to Angelina, who snickered into her palm. “And when they get to the cave, the monster’s already gnashing its teeth”— Patrick bared his canines—“when the wife says, ‘Oh, but it’s so cold here at the mouth of the cave, why don’t we go further back, where it will be warm.’” “Women always have to be warm,” somebody grumbled, and the others shushed him. “So they go to the back of the cave. And the monster’s really ready to eat now, it’s starving. But they’ve delayed for so long that the sun is setting, and it’s so low that the light is coming into the cave. So the wife says, ‘I can see that the light is bothering you, why don’t you move back a little further?’ ” He widened his eyes in mock-feminine innocence. “And the monster takes one more step back and falls straight down into the pit.” He clapped his hands, loud enough that the sound bounced around the cave’s steep walls. One of the girlfriends yelped. The rest of the party cheered, in part for Patrick’s storytelling and in part for their own pit, the star of the show. Angelina said, “In Caro’s version, the wife pushes the monster in herself.” “That’s the feminist version,” Jethro said. He wagged his finger at Angelina. “Don’t you get too carried away with that kind of talk, young lady.” Angelina laughed. “Too late. I’ve been indoctrinated.” Jethro made the sign of the cross. “Then may God have mercy on your soul.” “But did it die, when she pushed it in?” Eugene’s little girlfriend asked. She twisted to stare behind her. “Or is it still down there in the pit?” Eugene hugged her close. “It might not even have been this pit. There’s plenty of holes in the caves around here. The biggest one was in a cave that fell in years ago, during the Second World War. I heard there was a whole family hiding inside when it collapsed.” “That could have been the inspiration for the whole story,” Matthew said. Behind his back, Jethro caught Angelina’s eye and mimed shooting himself. “I always thought the way the thing eats futures is like a war, isn’t it? You have all these grand plans for your life and your family and your country, and then the war arrives and takes it all.” “The story’s older than the war,” Gemma objected. “My great-great-grandpa used to tell it to my grandpa. Gramps said that when he got to the bit about the pit, he’d open his mouth and smack his gums at Gramps and say that when you got old, the monster pulled out all your teeth and found somewhere deep inside you to hide.” “Ewwwww,” Angelina said, delighted. “So it’s still not the Sicco pit,” Jagvi said. “Our pit looks the type, though, doesn’t it,” Patrick said, nudging her. Quiet as the family turned to look back at the line of stones, the dark chasm gaping beyond. “Ughhhhh,” Eugene’s girlfriend said. “I hate ghost stories. We need a protector.” She snuggled in closer against Eugene. “Men don’t work,” Matthew said, voice solemn. “Didn’t you hear? It eats men’s futures up.” He considered. “There’s legends about animals resisting it.” “Oh my god, where’s Your Dog?” Jethro asked Angelina, and the cousins cracked up. “My Dog would be fucking useless,” Angelina said. “If she met a monster, she’d roll over for it to scratch her belly.” “Where is she?” Jethro asked. “I left her up at the house,” Angelina said. “Haunted or not, she’d run straight into the pit. Forget about the monster eating lives, I can’t let it eat my damn dog.” “San Rocco wouldn’t let it,” Jethro said. “Nonna told me once that the stupider a dog is, the more San Rocco protects it. Idiots go straight to heaven.” “No wonder he’s Cadenze’s patron,” Patrick said. It was a mean joke, made for Jagvi’s benefit. Angelina gave him a derisive look, and he stuck his chin out, stubborn. “My mama used to say that the thing in the pit was San Rocco’s dog,” Eugene put in. “And that he’d send it to chase children home if they stayed out too late.” “My mama used to say that the thing in the pit was the saint who lived in Cadenze before San Rocco claimed it,” Jethro said. “And all its love and care for the town had twisted to hate because we don’t remember it.” A few of the cousins turned inquiring looks on Angelina and Patrick. Jethro and Eugene’s mamas, though respected Cadenze matrons, were not Sicco blood; only Angelina’s mama could make the final, definitive call. Angelina shrugged. “There’s a million versions of it.” “They all mean the same thing in the end,” Jagvi put in. Angelina startled, surprised that Jagvi cared enough to have an opinion. “This town swallows up options.” The mood in the cave soured. Angelina’s cousins considered the outsider with distrust. Jagvi didn’t seem to notice, leaning back on her palms, eyes on Angelina like it was still just the two of them. But Patrick laughed. “You’ve always hated the thing in the pit. You prefer the Bloody Doctor,” he added, referring to the myth of a Cadenze physician who had gone crazy and run into the hills, preying on unsuspecting hikers to practice his rusty surgery skills. Patrick’s hand folded around Jagvi’s head like a big cap, tousling her hair. “Something you can punch.” A bottle of wine reached Angelina, and she took a swig, considering her brother. If you threw something into the pit at the back of their cave, you could wait forever and never hear it land. Patrick had a similar pit inside himself, and it was where he kept his love for Jagvi. No matter how many times she messed up, Patrick never stopped forgiving her. The wine hit Angelina’s throat harshly. “The thing in the pit too frightening for you, Jag?” Jagvi answered her directly, untroubled. “It frightened me a lot when I was a kid, yeah. When I was six, one of the other kids in my class told me that Cadenze was haunted by the thing in the pit and once it had eaten your soul, you just walked around like a zombie, all eaten up. And even if I thought people were normal, they’d actually be gone. He said maybe it had eaten my dad.” “Kids are so creepy,” Patrick said. “The pit is creepy,” Jagvi said. “Kids get it.” “Maybe you just need to get to know it,” Angelina said, standing and taking another swig from the bottle before she handed it on. “Now that you’re on your big welcome home tour.” “I’m not sure a Sicco family party counts as a tour,” Jagvi said, but she watched Angelina closely. As Angelina wandered over toward the pit, she thought she even saw Jagvi tense. “No? Well, let’s invite someone else,” she said, and cupped her hands around her mouth, stooping to the deep black of the pit. For a moment the depth was dizzying, and then Angelina got her balance. She called down into the drop, her voice bouncing. “Yoo-hoo! Jag’s home! Wanna come say hello?” “You’re gonna kill yourself leaning over that,” Jagvi said. Angelina kicked one of the rocks gathered at the pit, knocking it over the edge. Her thirteen cousins and their respective girlfriends fell silent, listening to it clatter and fall, until the sound faded beyond their reach. No one spoke. Then Angelina turned and shrugged. “Guess it’s not one of your fans.” Her cousins laughed, and Patrick shook his head, rolling his eyes. Jagvi slouched against his shoulder, exuding the indulgent air of someone allowing a child to act out at a party. It was the same condescending energy that Angelina had loathed her entire adult life, and it should have thrown her into the usual mix of embarrassment and annoyance. Instead she felt pleased. Good Joke, said the pit. Thanks, thought Angelina. Excerpted from Feast While You Can, copyright © 2024 by Mikaella Clements and Onjuli Datta. The post Read an Excerpt From Mikaella Clements and Onjuli Datta’s <i>Feast While You Can</i> appeared first on Reactor.

DAILY CALLER NEWS FOUNDATION—Democratic heavyweights Kamala Harris, Tim Walz, and Chuck Schumer are all indicating that they will try to weaken or kill the Senate filibuster if their party wins big on Election Day. Harris and Walz, who are at the top of the Democratic ticket for the 2024 election cycle, have each indicated they believe the filibuster needs to go, while Schumer suggested in August that he would move to eliminate it if Democrats can secure a Senate majority. The filibuster is a key Senate rule that requires 60 votes to pass most major legislation rather than a simple majority of 51, frustrating slim majorities looking to pass transformative laws by narrow margins. Rep. Mondaire Jones (D-NY): "You will not stop us from passing [gun control]. If the filibuster obstructs us, we will abolish it. If the Supreme Court objects, we will expand it." What happened to “defending democracy”? pic.twitter.com/wivfbkqPAo— Daily Caller (@DailyCaller) June 2, 2022 Most recently, Walz suggested that he and Democratic New York Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez are on the same page when it comes to getting rid of the filibuster while the pair played video games on a Sunday livestream. “I don’t know where you stand, but I’m going to guess you and I are probably the same on the filibuster,” Walz said during the stream. “Oh yeah, we have got to get rid of that thing,” Ocasio-Cortez said in response. Walz also endorsed abolishing the Electoral College during an October fundraiser with California Gov. Gavin Newsom, a Democrat, though the Harris campaign subsequently attempted to clean up his comments by saying they are not representative of the campaign’s positions. In September, Harris said she supports eliminating the filibuster in order to codify Roe v. Wade’s protections for abortion access. “I think we should eliminate the filibuster for Roe,” Harris said. “And get us to the point where 51 votes would be what we need to actually put back in law the protections for reproductive freedom and for the ability of every person and every woman to make decisions about their own body and not have their government tell them what to do.” Schumer, who helms the Democratic caucus in the Senate, has also suggested that he would take aim at the filibuster if his party is able to land a majority on Election Day. Senate Democrats tried to kill the filibuster in the first half of President Joe Biden’s term in office to pass the massive “Build Back Better” plan, but then-Democratic Sens. Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona and Joe Manchin of West Virginia held out against that effort despite immense pressure from activists. Eventually, Democrats managed to pass the Inflation Reduction Act—Biden’s signature climate bill and a pared-down version of the Build Back Better plan—without a single GOP vote by using the budget reconciliation process. “We got it up to 48, but, of course, Sinema and Manchin voted no; that’s why we couldn’t change the rules. Well, they’re both gone,” Schumer told reporters during the Democratic National Convention in August, NBC News reported. “Ruben Gallego is for it, and we have 51. So even losing Manchin, we still have 50.” Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell has warned that eliminating the filibuster would allow Democrats to add two new states to the country that would reliably elect Democratic senators who would then enable the party to pursue major agenda items that are currently out of reach. If Democrats can sufficiently weaken or eliminate the filibuster, “they’ll admit the District of Columbia and Puerto Rico as two new states—that’s four Democratic senators in perpetuity—and then they’ll go after the Supreme Court,” McConnell told The Owensboro Times in August. Notably, the late former Democratic Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid ended the filibuster for judicial nominations in 2013 to help get former President Barack Obama’s blocked nominees though the Senate, but that decision also helped pave the way for former President Donald Trump to appoint three justices to the Supreme Court during his term in office, according to CNN. The Harris-Walz campaign and Schumer’s office did not respond immediately to requests for comment. Originally published by the Daily Caller News Foundation The post Harris, Walz, Schumer Gear Up to Nuke Filibuster If Dems Win Big appeared first on The Daily Signal.

FIRST ON THE DAILY SIGNAL—An FBI agent who investigated multiple Jan. 6 cases contributed more than $7,000 to Democrat candidates and causes, including President Joe Biden’s 2020 race, campaign finance records show. FBI Special Agent Clarke G. Burns also donated six times to The Lincoln Project, a political action committee that opposes Donald Trump, who lost the presidency that year to Biden. Burns, who works in the FBI’s Washington Field Office, has written numerous affidavits in cases related to the Capitol riot of Jan. 6, 2021, and the arrests of defendants who were there. Democrats have blamed Trump for what happened that day as a joint session of Congress met to certify Biden’s victory over Trump in the November 2020 election. “In my duties as a Special Agent, I investigate domestic terrorism violations and other threats of violent crime. Currently, I am tasked with investigating criminal activity in and around the Capitol grounds on January 6, 2021,” Burns wrote in an affidavit about one arrested suspect. “As a Special Agent, I am authorized by law or by a Government agency to engage in or supervise the prevention, detention, investigation, or prosecution of a violation of federal criminal law,” Burns continued. Burns has made 152 political donations totaling $7,137.28, mostly through the ActBlue fundraising platform, The Heritage Foundation’s Oversight Project found. Nine of Burns’ donations, totaling $950, were to Biden’s 2020 campaign for president. Burns also contributed to the 2020 primary presidential campaign of Pete Buttigieg, former mayor of South Bend, Indiana, who became Biden’s transportation secretary. The FBI agent made six donations totaling $1,000 to The Lincoln Project, the anti-Trump PAC. He made one of the donations four days after the events of Jan. 6, Heritage’s Oversight Project discovered. Burns also made several donations to Democratic congressional candidates. With several political contributions, Burns listed his employer as “USG,” meaning the U.S. government. But he recorded his job as “fact finder,” making no mention of the FBI. Federal Election Commission records identify a Democratic donor named Clarke Burns who is employed by the U.S. government, or “USG,” and lives in Northern Virginia just outside the nation’s capital. In several contributions, his occupation was listed as a “factfinder.” Kyle Seraphin, a former FBI colleague, said he used to see Burns in a park in Northern Virginia close to the address for Burns listed by the FEC. The Daily Signal was unable to contact Burns to ask for comment after attempting to reach the FBI agent by email, phone, and the messaging app Signal. An FBI spokesperson, who didn’t want his name used, responded to The Daily Signal inquiry about Burns by noting what the federal Hatch Act prohibits and allows. The Hatch Act is a law that bans federal government employees from engaging in political activity using work time or resources. “While we don’t comment on employees’ First Amendment protected activities, they must still adhere to the Hatch Act,” the FBI spokesperson told The Daily Signal. The spokesperson noted that FBI employees fall under a “further restricted” category that extends beyond using government time or resources to engage in politics. That means FBI employees are restricted from campaigning for or against candidates and from engaging in political activity in concert with a political party, a candidate for partisan political office, or a partisan political group. However, the U.S. Office of Special Counsel, an independent agency that enforces the Hatch Act, notes that further restricted employees are allowed to “contribute money to political campaigns, political parties, or partisan political groups,” “attend political fundraising functions,” and “attend political rallies and meetings.” One case in which Burns was involved was that of Owen Shroyer, host of “War Room” on the InfoWars website. Newsweek reported in 2021: “On Aug. 19, FBI special agent Clarke Burns filed criminal charges against Shroyer. The charges are for knowingly entering or remaining on restricted grounds without lawful authority as well as disorderly conduct on Capitol grounds.” Another case Burns reportedly pursued was that of Brandon Prenzlin, a former employee of the advocacy group FreedomWorks who was charged with a misdemeanor for allegedly entering the Capitol illegally on Jan. 6, although he stayed only briefly. Burns signed an affidavit related to Prenzlin’s case. Politico reported: “Prenzlin was present in the Capitol for less than four minutes on Jan. 6, according to an affidavit from FBI Special Agent Clarke Burns used to get a warrant for the conservative activist’s arrest.” Burns reportedly was involved in the case of Florida resident Brian Preller, who was arrested in Vermont on a felony charge of civil disorder and two misdemeanors for entering and remaining in a restricted building. The Vermont news site VT Digger reported: “According to an affidavit written by FBI special agent Clarke Burns, Preller ‘participated in at least one attempt by rioters to force their way through into the Capital [sic] through the line of police officers.’ More than 2,000 people stormed the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, in an attempt to prevent Congress from certifying Joe Biden’s presidential victory.” The post Democrat-Donating FBI Agent Hunted Jan. 6 Protest Cases appeared first on The Daily Signal.

If you're tired of censorship and dystopian threats against civil liberties, subscribe to Reclaim The Net. With a striking example of digital gatekeeping, YouTube’s search algorithm is steering users toward mainstream media clips rather than the full-length interview of Donald Trump on Joe Rogan’s popular podcast. This phenomenon raises concerns about access to unmediated information and the role of tech giants in shaping political narratives. Joe Rogan, known for his in-depth, unfiltered interviews, hosted former President Donald Trump in a session that promised to bypass the traditional media’s framing and go directly to the audience. However, those searching for this complete dialogue on YouTube—a platform that hosts Rogan’s full episodes—find themselves navigating through a barrage of mainstream media excerpts instead. When Reclaim The Net tried the search in a private browser tab, it’s even showing a video of Beyoncé at a Harris rally, which is nothing to do with what was searched for. YouTube’s algorithm, designed to prioritize “authoritative” sources, appears to be favoring clips from major news outlets over the podcast’s own channel. This appears to be the algorithm working as YouTube intended during election season. In a recent blog post on how YouTube was preparing for the 2024 election,  Leslie Miller, VP of Government Affairs & Public Policy for YouTube said “our systems recommend election news and information from authoritative sources and display information panels at the top of search results and below videos to provide further context.” These mainstream media clips often lack the full context of the conversation, providing snippets that can be shaped to fit specific narratives. During an election season, the implications of such selective visibility are profound. This approach contradicts the very purpose of platforms like Rogan’s, which aim to provide an unedited, comprehensive view of conversations, enabling viewers to hear directly from individuals without the intermediate filter of news editors. The reliance on traditional news clips over full interviews also highlights the ongoing tension between new media channels, which offer a direct line to vast audiences, and established media, which continue to wield significant influence over public discourse. If you're tired of censorship and dystopian threats against civil liberties, subscribe to Reclaim The Net. The post YouTube’s Search Steers Users Away From Full Joe Rogan Donald Trump Interview, Toward Mainstream Media Clips appeared first on Reclaim The Net.