Chess is as fun as it is ancient, but if you want to get in on all the knight and rook action, the sheer number of chess playsets might be intimidating. With that in mind, we’ve gathered together some of the more interesting, colorful, and collectible geeky chess sets for your perusal. Sure, there’s nothing wrong with your traditional black and white handcrafted wooden chess set. If you’re going to be geeky about a new thing, however, you might as well bring some of your older geeky interests to it as well....

The Texas-born actor first became well known to TV audiences thanks to a handful of superhero adjacent roles in the early 2000s. First he portrayed super soldier Alec McDowell a.k.a. X5-494 on Fox’s ahead-of-its-time Dark Angel and then acted opposite none other than Superman as Lana Lang’s love interest Jason Teague on Smallville. He would go on to voice Jason Todd in animated film Batman: Under the Red Hood and the Dark Knight himself in Batman: The Long Halloween....

Samit Basu didn’t expect for The City Inside to connect with audiences outside of his home country of India. “When I was writing it, it was so local to me,” says the 42-year-old author, when we talk from different sides of the planet via Zoom. His “anti-dystopian” novel, out today, is set in a near-future Delhi where corporate and government entities track everything you do and the attention economy has found even more invasive, thorough ways to commandeer our lives....

In a Reddit AMA, Cage said, “I think many of the choices I’ve made have been inspired by film stars from the silent era, as well as cultural expression of performance like Kabuki and some of the Golden Age actors like [James] Cagney, so I don’t know how to say I’ve done something new because those elements are always on my mind.” What you may call a “crazy Cage performance” is just an expressionist interpretation inspired equally by Kabuki theater and Douglas Fairbanks, okay?...

When independent developer Studio MDHR released Cuphead in 2017, gamers all over the world were astounded by the daring art style and fluid gameplay the title offered. Controlling the titular Cuphead and his brother Mugman, players became entranced in a world where they could control a 1930s cartoon that doubled as a video game. Many of the trademark animation techniques of the decade are imitated in the game, namely the rubber hose style....

The Expanse Season 2 Episodes 1 & 2 As long as the hiatus may have seemed, it didn’t take long for The Expanse to answer some of the key questions left over from season 1, but the results may leave viewers unsettled by the end of the two-hour premiere. And that’s likely the point. Much of the promotional material for season 2 urged fans to “pick a side,” and the different political powers in the solar system are locking horns almost right from the start....

Bucky is an interesting part of Marvel history. He predates most characters in the MCU, created during World War II in Cap’s very first appearance by Joe Simon and Jack Kirby as a blatant Robin knockoff. When Captain America was thawed out and joined the Avengers, it was established that Bucky died in an explosion. It was mandated that Bucky would never come back. He was as permanently dead as Ben Parker and Gwen Stacy....

The Flash Season 8 Episode 12 The Flash returns from a week off to pick up the pieces in the wake of one of its biggest cliffhangers in recent memory: the revelation that the mysterious Black Flame isn’t, in fact, Ronnie Raymond resurrected and returned, but Deathstorm, a monstrous being that feeds on grief and seems more than a little obsessed with his widow Caitlin. Though Deathstorm clearly comes from the same long line of colorful, outlandish comic book villains Team Flash has often been tasked with facing, this story is, at its heart, one about very real and recognizable emotions: Love, grief, loss, the idea that some part of us will always miss those who aren’t with us anymore, no matter long they may have been gone....

The Flash Season 5 Episode 9 It’s pretty crazy that an episode of The Flash that started with John Wesley Shipp wearing his classic 1990 Flash TV series costume actually managed to get better from there. It’s even crazier that it wasn’t the most extreme piece of Mike-specific fan service that the episode pulled off. And the craziest thing of all is just how damn good “Elseworlds Part 1” is. OK, maybe it’s not that crazy....

Producer Kip Ohman first had the idea of remaking The Fly in the early 1980s, recruiting screenwriter Charles Edward Pogue to write the script. The pair brought Pogue’s script to 20th Century Fox, which was initially enthusiastic about the project, but the studio was unhappy with Pogue’s work and declined to move forward. Ohman eventually convinced the studio to distribute the film if he could get outside financing for it, which he got through producers Stuart Cornfeld and, improbably, Mel Brooks (who had also financed David Lynch’s screen version of The Elephant Man six years earlier)....

“You bourgeois Negroes are too happy with your scraps to know what’s at stake here,” Malcolm says, demanding Sam take advantage of this elusive thing called celebrity and speak up for all those voices who never got a mic. Yet to Cooke—an artist with his own record label that keeps the rights of Black music in Black hands—this is the height of hypocrisy. “Everybody talks about how they want a piece of the pie,” Sam counters....

Praise the gods of Asgard! The Last Kingdom has been officially renewed for season five. 10 brand new episodes will be on their way to Netflix, based on the next two books in Bernard Cornwell’s Saxon Stories saga. As is fitting as most of their lord and master/mortal enemy, Uhtred was the one to announce the good news to the cast. In the video below shared on the official @TheLastKingdom Twitter account, see Alexander Dreymon letting his fellow castmembers know that the series would ride again....

The Magicians Season 4 Episode 12 When The Magicians gets something right, it really nails it. Here, what really works is the thematic concept that growing and evolving doesn’t mean shedding the past, and this idea appears across multiple storylines in “The Secret Sea” with impressive universality. Margo doesn’t have to give up her bitch persona just because she cares for Josh, and Quentin doesn’t have stop loving Fillory just because he’s seen its dark side....

But is that really the case? The impressive live-action debut of animated icon Ahsoka Tano earlier in the season invited a debate on Jedi powers. It’s a topic that was recently reignited, thanks to comments from executive producer Dave Filoni. The recent premiere of Disney+ documentary series Disney Gallery: The Mandalorian Season 2, Episode 2 has proven profoundly revelatory about the technological magic that brought a Return of the Jedi-era Mark Hamill back onscreen in 2020 as Luke Skywalker for The Mandalorian “Chapter 16: The Rescue....

EDITOR’S NOTE: From Mike Cecchini This one’s on me. While the realities of running a site like this often mean we have to cover spoilers when we see people are looking for answers, the way we went about this one was wrong. As a result, we’ve spoiled The Mandalorian ending for many of you. This certainly wasn’t done out of malice, or even greed, but I was careless and ultimately it was thoughtless....

That’s not the only nugget of info that Odenkirk gave Deadline in regard to Better Call Saul season 6. In a phone interview, Odenkirk told fans to expect a combustible final batch of episodes. “I can’t wait for the fireworks, really,” Odenkirk said about the upcoming season, which is expected to feature more episodes than the usual 10. “Our show is a bit of a slow burn over the past few years, and [series creators Vince Gilligan and Peter Gould] build up....

However, for a film as twisty as Psycho—wherein the lead character dies in a shower after the 47-minute mark—Hitchcock didn’t want anyone to miss the sheer shock of his chiller’s narrative. It changed the way American audiences went to the movies forever. All of which is an extended way of saying this: Do not come into the middle of Zach Cregger’s Barbarian, the most shocking horror movie of the year… and now, one you can watch from the comfort of your own home on HBO Max....

Resident Alien season 2 has seen its fair share of game-changing events, from the birth of an alien baby to the revelation that Harry is actually the mysterious being known as Goliath who has journeyed back in time trying to change his own future. But despite several shocking developments, our disguised hero has not actually been in all that much danger from a personal perspective. Sure, there’s been a fairly consistent threat from various aliens that want to destroy Earth or eradicate all of humanity—we even met a member of the infamous probe-obsessed Grays in last week’s installment (memorably voiced by none other than George Takei)....

How did Sauron manipulate the other races of Middle-earth into forging the Rings of Power? What does the Dwarves discovering mithril have to do with the future of the Elves? Who are the people who lived in the Southlands before it became Mordor? What was the life of a Hobbit like before they settled in the Shire? These are the questions the first season of The Rings of Power is interested in answering, all while creating a cohesive throughline between the events of the Second Age and the Tolkien stories we know well from the pages of The Lord of the Rings....

The Simpsons Season 32 Episode 18 The Simpsons Season 32 episode 17 ” Burger Kings,” continues to charbroil Springfield mythology into tasty nuggets of classic comedy. With so much grease built up over the years, the cooks are unafraid to refry old dishes as new cuisine. This season has seen quite a few instances where old storylines are transformed into surprisingly fresh installments. In spite of all outward evidence, and the best testing indicates, Mr....