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There is a distinct difference between songs that are simply sad and those that delve into the depths of true gloom. While sadness captures a fleeting emotional moment, gloominess adds a pervasive sense of impending doom, a feeling that the world itself is unraveling. The songs on this list embody that bleak, apocalyptic edge, where sorrow is not just experienced but magnified by the weight of a collapsing universe. To showcase the universal reach of gloom, we’ve pulled from a wide array of musical styles, demonstrating that this feeling transcends genres and speaks to the shared human condition. Starting with The post 10 Most Gloomiest Songs Of All Time appeared first on ClassicRockHistory.com.

A program that has seen French language teachers working in American immersion schools in the state of Louisiana has been extended another 4 years. Organized by the Council for the Development of French in Louisiana (CODOFIL), the southern city has enjoyed the fruits of the partnership for nearly 60 years and every scholastic year invites […] The post Since 1968 French Teachers Have Come to Louisiana Classrooms to Preserve French Language Through Immersion appeared first on Good News Network.

News Creature Commandos Creature Commandos’ New Trailer Leans Hard on Cartoon Violence Must be the season of the witch, right, James Gunn? By Molly Templeton | Published on October 22, 2024 Screenshot: DC Studios Comment 0 Share New Share Screenshot: DC Studios Even if this trailer didn’t make it clear that Creature Commandos comes from the mind of James Gunn, you’d know. You’d know because of the somehow predictable song choice, which feels apt but sort of too apt, and you’d know because of the reveling in (literal, here) cartoon violence. And then there’s the Weasel, who feels like the next logical step from Rocket Raccoon. You get the gist: It’s an extremely James Gunn situation. Human shish kabob? Unlikely team-up? Biting statements about the government’s willingness to use people to further its goals? Check, check, check. Creature Commandos, as the logline says, “tracks a secret team of incarcerated monsters recruited for missions deemed too dangerous for humans. When all else fails… they’re your last, worst option.” It seems like Indira Varma’s The Bride might be the team leader here, which is cool, though the way her walk is animated makes me give this show some serious side-eye. She’s joined by Doctor Phosphorus (Alan Tudyk), The Weasel (Sean Gunn), Nina Mazursky (Zoe Chao), and G.I. Robot (Sean Gunn again). The Witcher’s Anya Chalotra voices antagonist Circe; Maria Bakalova (Bodies Bodies Bodies) is Princess Ilana; David Harbour (Stranger Things) is Frankenstein; Frank Grillo is Rick Flag Sr.; and, of course, Viola Davis returns as Amanda Waller, and Steve Agee as Economos. Creature Commandos is DC Studios’ first entry in “Gods and Monsters,” the name for the new chapter in the DCU. It all starts December 5th on Max.[end-mark] The post <i>Creature Commandos</i>’ New Trailer Leans Hard on Cartoon Violence appeared first on Reactor.

News Interior Chinatown Hulu’s Interior Chinatown Adaptation Looks Fantastic Author Charles Yu created the adaptation of his novel By Molly Templeton | Published on October 22, 2024 Comment 0 Share New Share If I have one complaint about the trailer for Hulu’s Interior Chinatown—the series adaptation created by author Charles Yu—it’s that I worry it is keeping its cards a little too close to the chest. It’s a tough line to walk, hinting at the story’s inventive angles without giving everything away. But what we do see here is perfect. Interior Chinatown is the story of Willis Wu, and the summary gives a little more context to the delightfully unsettling aspects of the trailer: Based on Charles Yu’s award-winning book of the same name, the show follows the story of Willis Wu, a background character trapped in a police procedural called Black & White. Relegated to the background, Willis goes through the motions of his on-screen job, waiting tables, dreaming about a world beyond Chinatown and aspiring to be the lead of his own story. When Willis inadvertently becomes a witness to a crime, he begins to unravel a criminal web in Chinatown, while discovering his own family’s buried history and what it feels like to be in the spotlight. The trailer begins by sticking with the seemingly typical—Willis (Jimmy O. Yang) meeting detective Lana Lee (Chloe Bennett) and being drawn into a murder investigation that might involve his brother. But there’s so much more going on—levels hinted at by the more surreal moments that creep into the trailer’s two minutes. This past summer, Yu spoke a bit about how the show isn’t the book, and there may be some surprises; at a press event, he discussed thinking of the show as inspired by the book, and the effort to “stay true to what made you want to tell this story […] and to make a new story that ultimately is surprising for people, whether or not they read the book.” Interior Chinatown also stars Ronny Chieng, Lisa Gilroy, Sullivan Jones, Archie Kao, and Diana Lin. Despite the fact that it clearly deserves the prestige-TV weekly release schedule—let us have time to discuss and appreciate! Let the story breathe!—it arrives on Hulu in an all-episode dump on November 19th. The pilot episode is directed by Taika Waititi.[end-mark] The post Hulu’s <i>Interior Chinatown</i> Adaptation Looks Fantastic appeared first on Reactor.

Featured Essays The Outer Limits How Harlan Ellison’s Outer Limits Episode Told a Vast Story in a Confined Space It’s been 60 years since this episode graced television screens for the very first time By Don Kaye | Published on October 22, 2024 Credit: ABC Comment 0 Share New Share Credit: ABC It was 60 years ago (October 17, 1964, to be exact) that the ABC-TV sci-fi anthology series The Outer Limits premiered “Demon with a Glass Hand,” the fifth episode of the show’s second—and as it turned out, final—season. Directed by Byron Haskin (The War of the Worlds) from a teleplay by Harlan Ellison, “Demon” starred Robert Culp as Trent, a mysterious man with no memory who is tasked with preserving not just all human knowledge but the human race itself from a hostile alien race called the Kyben. Trent is from 1,000 years in the future, when the Kyben brutally conquer Earth in 19 days, only for all of humanity to disappear overnight as a deadly radioactive plague renders the planet uninhabitable. Trent retreats into the past through a Kyben “time mirror,” with the aliens in hot pursuit and the answers to all his questions—where is the human race hidden? Why has he been chosen to protect them?—locked in the fingers of the computerized glass hand attached to his left arm. But three of those fingers are in the hands of the Kyben, and Trent must retrieve them to learn his purpose and humankind’s destiny. Despite being produced during The Outer Limits’ checkered and shortened second season—after creator Leslie Stevens and showrunner Joseph Stefano had both departed the series—“Demon with a Glass Hand” is widely considered the finest episode of this often-groundbreaking anthology series. Winner of the 1965 Writers Guild Award for Outstanding Script for a Television Anthology, “Demon” is a tightly-constructed, expertly-paced, brilliantly shot hour of sci-fi television that stands tall among the many pioneering works of sci-fi cinema flourishing in the genre around the same time. It’s a moody, stark, kinetic masterpiece with an often stunning, noirish visual palette (courtesy of Haskin and DP Kenneth Peach) and physicality that The Outer Limits was sometimes lacking, either thanks to crunched budgets or static direction. But in the case of this episode—which encompasses a cosmic storyline that spans 1,000 years and includes what’s implied to be a large-scale, devastating alien invasion of Earth—the show was able to corral its increasingly meager resources to create an atmospheric tale that captured the vastness of the story being told while staging it in surprisingly claustrophobic, intimate terms. Ellison’s initial concept for “Demon with a Glass Hand” was meant to be large-scale in nature, like many of his short stories: he intended to have Trent chased across the country by the Kyben, who have adapted themselves to resemble humans. According to David J. Schow’s definitive book The Outer Limits Companion, Ellison described his original idea as his “homage to North by Northwest” before turning in a treatment that instead confined the action largely to one sprawling, unnamed city. Credit: ABC But even that version of the story—in which the main character (then called Mr. Fish) battles the Kyben through abandoned buildings, sewer tunnels, an amusement pier, and finally a length of railroad track outside the city limits—was too expensive to meet the budget demands imposed on The Outer Limits by the ABC network, which was already looking to cancel the show due to its relatively low ratings.  In his book (co-written with Herbert F. Solow) Inside Star Trek: The Real Story, Robert H. Justman—at the time assistant director on The Outer Limits—said he told Ellison that the show couldn’t be filmed as he envisioned it: “’We can’t afford to make this episode, Harlan,’” Justman recalled saying. “’The front office wants to junk the show, but I convinced them to hold off because I’ve got an idea about how you can salvage it.’” (Justman would face a similar scenario with Ellison three years later, when he was associate producer on Star Trek: The Original Series, over the budget for “The City on the Edge of Forever.”) Justman’s idea involved a downtown Los Angeles landmark known as the Bradbury Building. The edifice was named after real estate magnate Lewis Bradbury (not Ray, sadly), who had it constructed in 1893. To this day, the building’s open, fifty-foot-tall court, baroque iron railings, marble floors, and open cage elevators are still a tourist destination, especially for fans of Ridley Scott’s 1982 classic Blade Runner, which used the Bradbury for its climax. Justman convinced Ellison to retool his script so that the Kyben’s wide-ranging pursuit of Trent became vertical, contained to the one single building (called the Dixon in the script) surrounded by a Kyben-imposed “force bubble.” “It was a very important lesson to me,” Ellison acknowledged to David Schow. “You could make the action more intense by enclosing it, and providing no escape.” More intriguingly, changing the contours of the chase also provided a metaphor for Trent’s own journey toward illumination: after a brief prologue in which he interrogates a Kyben before tearing off the medallion that holds him in the present—thus whisking him painfully and fatally back into the future—Trent slips into the basement of the building where the Kyben and their time mirror are based. Trent makes his way up through the building from there, killing Kyben as he goes, gradually collecting the missing fingers, gaining more knowledge, and even finding an ally—a poor garment worker named Consuelo Biros (Arlene Martel, later to play Spock’s intended wife, T’Pring, on the ST: TOS episode “Amok Time”) who happens to be working late when the Kyben seal off the building. By the time Trent and Consuelo reach the top of the building—with Trent having destroyed the time mirror, killed all the Kyben, and retrieved all the fingers—his memories, as well as the memories of the hand, are complete. And the answers are not easy ones to hear: Trent is not a man but a robot, with all of humanity—70 billion souls—transcribed onto a single piece of wire embedded in his chest. His mission is to wait 1,200 years (1,000 until the Kyben invasion, then an additional 200 for the Kyben-annihilating plague to dissipate from the Earth) and unpack the entire human race again after the danger has passed. His vigil will be unimaginably long… and lonely. It’s a poignant ending, made all the more forceful by the fact that this concentrated battle for the literal survival of the human species all takes place in this one dark, empty office building, fought by a robot, a woman, and a handful of alien beings, enclosed in a narrow labyrinth of staircases, offices, and storage areas. Trent’s journey up from darkness to light doesn’t bring him any relief or joy, as he faces an ocean of time all by himself—even the one person with whom he begins to make a connection, Consuelo, rejects him when she learns the truth of his existence. Credit: ABC The compact, vertical nature of the story’s twin pursuits—Trent’s hunt for the answers and the Kyben’s pursuit of him—is also mirrored by the incredibly small composition of the ultimate prize. All of humanity is broken down to electrical components and stored on a single piece of wire; it may sound implausible even now, but think of how much you store on a typical iPhone—or more specifically, the tiny components inside the device that provide that storage. Is it that far-fetched to imagine storing an entire population in the same way? Of course, even as (for the early 1960s) a forward-thinking network TV production, “Demon with a Glass Hand” is not without its faults. Although it’s established that the Kyben have changed their form to resemble humans, their black-ringed eyes, skullcaps, and black bodysuits don’t do much to reflect the threat they pose to the human race. In a few shots, the lighting makes them resemble reanimated corpses—an idea that might have been interesting to run with. In addition, for such advanced beings, they carry standard guns and shout to each other across the Dixon’s central court, not the best way to communicate when you’re trying to capture a fugitive hidden in the building. The medallions around their necks, fully visible, are also easy to yank off, making the Kyben relatively effortless to dispatch. But the show’s biggest problem is Consuelo. Ellison’s original conception of a Black woman was nixed by the network, so he made her Latina instead. Even that was watered down by the programming heads, with her last name of “Losada” swapped out for the more ethnically vague “Biros.” Martel’s portrayal of her is sensitive and compassionate—a spiritual woman repulsed by violence because of the violence done to her by her late husband—but she doesn’t escape the standard trope of being there to merely support Trent and, as was often the case on network TV, fall in love with him within hours of meeting him. Even her empathetic nature is somewhat undercut by the ending, when the shocked Consuelo ditches the heartbroken Trent like an overheating mobile phone when she learns he’s an android. Those issues aside, “Demon with a Glass Hand” remains a masterclass in telling a large-scale story in very intimate fashion. Ellison’s take on the “Eternal Man” has mythic connotations that have long fascinated many writers, including Ellison himself, who set several other stories in the universe of the Earth-Kyba war and hinted for many years that he planned to write a direct sequel to the original episode. In 2014, it was even announced that director Scott Derrickson (Doctor Strange, The Black Phone) was going to adapt “Demon” as an Outer Limits feature film, which never came to fruition. Perhaps it’s just as well: “Demon with a Glass Hand” works so well because of its low-fi, self-contained nature, and because its mythic struggle takes place in a space less than the size of a city block. Its metaphor for the passage from unawareness to knowledge remains apt, and Trent’s realization that his ultimate purpose will leave him in a friendless, joyless, twilight half-existence for more than a millennium is one of the more haunting endings you’ll ever see on vintage network TV. Climbing upward from the dark into the light of knowledge can often come with a terrible price.[end-mark] The post How Harlan Ellison’s <i>Outer Limits</i> Episode Told a Vast Story in a Confined Space appeared first on Reactor.

As various conflicts abroad drain America’s weapons stockpiles, Camden, Arkansas, has emerged as the epicenter of a defense manufacturing boom currently reshaping global power dynamics. Arkansas’ role in next-generation missile production doesn’t just boost the economy. It revolutionizes how America defends itself and its allies, as evidenced by the new Precision Strike Missiles rolling out of Lockheed Martin’s Camden facility. This wave of missile production is crucial for the necessary reinvigorating of the defense industrial base and in making sure that America’s military has what it needs to defend American interests. President John F. Kennedy once said, “Our arms must be mighty, ready for instant action.” Yet, America’s defense production has faltered and now struggles to meet the demands of modern conflicts. The Precision Strike Missile program is a key step toward revitalizing the defense industrial base, especially as the U.S. faces increasing challenges abroad—not least from the economic rise and rapid military buildup of the People’s Republic of China. The Precision Strike Missile is a next-generation, long-range weapon system designed to accurately hit targets from the ground. It will replace older systems such as the legacy Army Tactical Missile System. Compared to its predecessors, the Precision Strike Missile provides a significantly improved range and precision essential for more effective targeting. Production of this sort of long-range missile is only possible due to America’s withdrawal from the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty with Russia. For decades, the United States was unable to build this kind of conventional missile due to the treaty, even as China engaged in a massive buildup of similar missiles. Now, the U.S. Army is fielding these missiles and deploying them to places such as the Philippines to deter China from launching an attack on U.S. forces in the Indo-Pacific.   However, the all-time-high demand for these long-range missiles signals something else: America’s stockpiles are dwindling faster than they can be replenished. Thus, increasing production in rural areas is critical. In war games simulating a conflict in the Taiwan Strait, for example, the U.S. depletes its supply of long-range missiles within the first week. The increased Precision Strike Missile production in Camden proposed in this year’s National Defense Authorization Act is a step in the right direction, but defense industry leaders have continuously warned Congress it will take years to replace America’s weapons supply. The U.S. defense industrial base has been atrophying, lacking the readiness and capacity to keep up with global threats, especially as China undergoes what now retired Adm. John Aquilino described as “the most extensive and rapid buildup since World War II.” Recent successes, like the Precision Strike Missile demonstration that hit a moving target at sea during a Pacific exercise, have helped boost confidence in military advancements and reenergize the defense industrial base in Arkansas, where state leaders have been working hard to attract defense contractors. Sen. Tom Cotton, R-Ark., for one, has continuously called for increased munitions production to resupply stockpiles drained by the wars in Ukraine and elsewhere. Cotton remarked, “the United States’ stockpile of munitions is dangerously low. We must reinvest not only in the munitions critical for the defense of America, but also in a workforce that can build these weapons to ensure our military’s readiness.” At the opening of Camden’s new missile plant this year, Gov. Sarah Huckabee Sanders stated that the “world is a whole lot less secure than it used to be,” adding: “But very simply, [Camden’s] facility makes our country and our world safer.” These efforts, combined with almost $83 million in funding, have ensured defense giants like Lockheed Martin and Raytheon continue investing heavily in the state. The influx in defense spending also brings new life to rural areas often viewed as distant from America’s core defense framework. The impact can also be felt far beyond the city limits of Camden. The Precision Strike Missile program has even attracted the attention of international allies. Australia, for example, committed $70 million to partner in its development. This sort of international collaboration both enhances global security and puts Arkansas in the spotlight when it comes to defense manufacturing.  America’s ability to ramp up missile production in places like Camden is a strategic advantage that helps ensure the security of both America and our allies. For all the excitement around this missile’s potential, however, the broader issue remains: America’s defense industrial base must evolve to match the scale of the threats it faces. It’s currently insufficient to meet the national security challenges facing the United States.   America will need to increase missile production through long-term investment in places such as Camden if we are to revitalize our defense industrial base and ensure a secure and prosperous America The post Why Arkansas’ Missile Production Matters to National Security appeared first on The Daily Signal.

Fast food restaurants regularly add new and bold items to their menus that we can't get enough of. McDonald's Szechuan sauce, Burger King's cheesy tots, and Taco Bell's Waffle Taco are just a few examples of some of the best fast food items that were ever created, and then tragically discontinued. One day, we hope to see these again. While McDonald's still serves the baked version... Source