Paramount Wants You to Spend Halloween Weekend With a Paranormal Activity Documentary

When the first Paranormal Activity came to theaters in 2009, it spawned its own franchise and revitalized the found footage genre of horror films. Then it got…not particularly great, hence the reboot Next of Kin. Coming out alongside it, Paramount’s released a documentary about the making of the entire series for…

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Fortnite Supercharged weekend makes a surprise return with extra XP

Epic Games has brought back its Supercharged power-leveling weekend for a second time in a row, giving players more than enough opportunities to rake in as much XP as possible. As with previous weeks, players will need to make sure they log in at some point during the power-leveling weekend to enable the Supercharged bonus. Fortnite‘s Supercharged weekend applies an … Continue reading

NASA delays SpaceX Crew-3 launch to November 3rd

You’ll have to wait a little bit longer to watch SpaceX’s third crewed NASA mission. NASA has delayed the launch of Crew-3 from early on Halloween to 1:10AM Eastern on November 3rd. The agency pinned the setback on “unfavorable” weather. There probably won’t be another delay, though, as officials are predicting an 80 percent chance of good weather for the new date. Live overage of the launch on NASA’s channel will start November 2nd at 8:45PM.

Crew-3 will bring NASA astronauts Raja Chari (the mission commander), Tom Marshburn and Kayla Barron to the International Space Station alongside the ESA’s Matthias Maurer. They’re expected to dock at 11PM Eastern on November 3rd and will stay until late April 2022.

Crewed SpaceX flights are still relatively rare. Crew-1 launched in November 2020, while Crew-2 didn’t lift off until April 2021. Crew-3 and the recent all-civilian Inspiration4 mission are steps toward making these occupied flights relatively routine — ideally, they’ll soon be as uneventful as SpaceX’s other flights.

Dune's Stephen McKinley Henderson Talks Jumping to Blockbusters and That Cool Parasol

Dune has a stacked cast of actors both established and on the rise, from Timothée Chalamet as supposed messiah Paul Atreides and Rebecca Ferguson as his mother Jessica to Jason Momoa as lovable warrior Duncan Idaho. But few of the film’s stars have the “oh, it’s that guy!” energy of character actor Stephen McKinley…

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Speed Of Texas Abortion Cases Has Few High Court Precedents

The Texas law bans abortion once cardiac activity is detected in the fetus.

Trump Wants Call Logs, Aide’s Notes Hidden From Jan. 6 Panel

Trump has sued to prevent the National Archives from transmitting those documents to the House committee investigating.

LA Sheriff Promises Vaccine Mandate Will Cause ‘Mass Exodus’ Of Cops

Los Angeles County Sheriff Alex Villanueva estimated that he’d lose 44% of his officers if he were to enforce the rule.

iFixit cut open Apple’s polishing cloth to see why it costs $19

Earlier this month, Apple unveiled one of its most unexpected products: a $19 polishing cloth featuring the Apple logo and the right texture for wiping fingerprints off your gadgets. The product is now on backorder with deliveries for new orders pushed to early-mid January. Why is the Apple polishing cloth so expensive? Perhaps iFixit’s latest teardown has an answer. READ: … Continue reading

2021 MacBook Pro teardown reveals easy-to-remove batteries

Apple may have given us a glimpse of what the new 14- and 16-inch MacBook Pros’ insides look like, but it had a surprise waiting for the folks at iFixit nonetheless. The iFixit team said removing batteries from recent MacBook Pros required “infinite patience, a bottle of isopropyl alcohol, and an optional bottle of human-friendly alcohol.” They expected the same from this generation of laptops but were pleasantly surprised by the presence of pull tabs instead when they tore down the new MacBook Pros.

The outer battery cells have noticeable pull tabs that you can, well, pull to detach them from their adhesive underneath. Even the central battery cells have pull tabs — they’re just harder to find inside the laptop chassis beneath the trackpad. iFixit was able able to confirm that the laptops will recognize and work with battery replacements just fine.

In addition, most of the laptops’ ports, except for the SD card reader and the HDMI port, are modular. That means they can be easily and cheaply replaced if they suddenly break or malfunction. Conversely, the laptops’ keyboard will still be hard to replace, but hey, at least the days of Apple’s butterfly keyboard are now over. You can watch iFixit’s teardown process in the video below, and it also has more photos of the laptops insides on its website if you want to have a better look at their components. iFixit also took apart Apple’s $19 polishing cloth, in case you’re wondering what makes it more expensive that its typical counterparts.

Roblox says its extra-long outage can't be blamed on Chipotle

It hasn’t been a good weekend for Roblox players. The Vergenotes that the gaming platform has been down since 7PM Eastern on October 28th (nearly two days as of this writing), with no resolution in sight. It’s not clear what prompted the failure beyond an “internal system issue,” but Roblox Corporation stressed that it wasn’t due to a Chipotle promo that launched just half an hour earlier. This wasn’t linked to “any specific experiences or partnerships,” Roblox explained.

The promo offers a total $1 million in free Chipotle burritos to players as part of a Halloween event. That could prompt a spike in activity on Roblox, but it’s not likely to disrupt a game with over 40 million daily users.

The outage certainly won’t help the platform, though. Over half of Roblox players are pre-teens, and its surge during the early pandemic helped fuel high-profile concerts and platform-exclusive games. Failures like this could easily anger kids (and their families) that spend much of their time in Roblox‘s virtual universe. While the downtime likely won’t hurt the platform’s long-term reputation, the company clearly can’t afford many incidents like this.