Sometimes opening in media res has some real storytelling value. The goal of just about any story is to get people interested in continuing it. Given that the beginnings of stories are often expository and not particularly exciting, who could forgive a storyteller for wanting to jump right into the thick of the action and then fill in the blanks of what came before Well, in the case of CBS All Access’s The Stand, I can blame producer/director Josh Boone and showrunner Benjamin Cavell for wanting to jump right in and I will do just that....

New reality series The Traitors involves getting a group of strangers to form judgmental cliques, gossip behind each other’s backs and make accusations of wrongdoing, so yes, it’s a bit ‘shooting fish in a barrel’. Did the BBC even need to hire a castle? Set up cameras in the break room of any given workplace and you’ll get largely the same footage, give or take occasional scenes of giant wicker deer on fire as part of the tasks this lot also have to do to build their up-to-£120,000 prize fund....

So while The Wheel of Time is not exactly about the Aes Sedai, the hero’s journey would be impossible without them. “In our world, they function very much like the Catholic Church might have in medieval Europe,” showrunner Rafe Judkins says. “They are not the presidents of countries or the queens of countries, but they are the people who sit at the center of political power in the world and pull the strings of the world from the White Tower, the place where the Aes Sedai are based....

Yet the film starts not on chuckles or kisses; instead it opens with Christian Bale’s forlorn and forgotten Gorr, an alien of nondescript origin who’s been left to suffer by his gods. Taika Waititi, who returns as co-writer and director after Thor: Ragnarok (and winning an Oscar for Jojo Rabbit), still sprinkles in a few of his usual glib one-liners when Bale’s proverbial Job meets his maker, a deity of scathing indifference....

Titans Episode 2 This is more like it. My spoiler free review of Titans was based on my impressions from the first three episodes. A significant portion of the awkwardness I pointed out in there came from the first episode, which does an awful lot of telling and what it shows, often reinforces some of the unfavorable impressions fans got from the trailer (I still maintain that the “fuck Batman” moment, when taken in context, is terrific)....

All authors go through a process of drafting and redrafting, and this can involve making quite drastic changes to their stories. Usually all we get as readers are occasional tidbits in interviews (Arthur Weasley was to be killed off in The Order of the Phoenix!) but in the case of JRR Tolkien’s works, we have much, much more information. Tolkien’s son Christopher gathered and published enormous amounts of his father’s unpublished work, including a lot of drafts and notes Tolkien made in the course of his writing....

Breaking Dawn is the final book in the Twilight quadrilogy, closing out the “romantic” love story between Bella Swan and Edward Cullen. After years of Bella thirsting for Edward’s marblesque manhood, they consummate their wedding, resulting in a pregnancy. Vampires in this universe have only one bodily fluid, venom, which is basically vampire blood, pheromones, and a toxin that will cause immense pain that immobilizes prey, who turn into vampires themselves if they aren’t killed....

Martin bought an island in a tropical paradise, and turned it into a sonic Shangri-La. In 1979, he built AIR Studios Montserrat, a recording studio equipped with more than just state-of-the-art technology and the most pristine equipment. The studio had an atmosphere, and Under the Volcano does a fantastic job airing it. The documentary does it primarily through the music. We hear the difference in tone when someone goes through the trouble of allowing space between notes....

It’s easy to judge someone even as they sit right next to you. Young Jason Wilson (Evan Alex) is tempted to do just that in the final seconds of Jordan Peele’s Us. By his side in a car headed south is his mother Adelaide (a ferocious Lupita Nyong’o), who went into the bowels of hell to retrieve him like a maternal Orpheus with the good sense to not look back....

They are the ones who will use it, and hence, your software must meet their expectations. Through user acceptance testing, you can achieve that. It will help determine whether the software works as per the requirements while detecting imperfections. It will also cater to wonderful user experiences. So, if you want to know more about UAT, read on. What do you mean by UAT? Unit Acceptance Testing (UAT) is a phase of a software development lifecycle where the client or user tests the software to determine whether or not the software performs, behaves or is built according to their requirements....

Vikings Season 5 Episode 13 “We are all at the mercy of circumstances beyond our control.” It’s time for something momentous to happen on Vikings, and tonight’s episode carefully arranges its character pieces, setting into motion potential game changing scenarios in Wessex, Kattegat, and Iceland. And in the aftermath of last week’s brutal murders of Cuthred and Margrethe, “A New God” presents one ruler making the best of a difficult situation while another begins a further descent into darkness....

VPNs (Virtual Private Networks) have been helping businesses with secure access for linking branches, remote workers, and third parties for more than 25 years. However, network and communication requirements are continually evolving, and sophisticated cybersecurity threats are becoming more common. What’s more, research shows that 55 percent of companies now have workers who are often remote, 50 percent of company data is stored on the cloud, and dangers are just as likely to be inside the perimeter as outside....

Walker Episode 3 Walker’s “Duke” takes too long to get to the point of the episode, aka that his undercover flame is in town. That leaves us believing that Walker is just being overdramatic for about 10 minutes before the realization hits that he’s doing it to protect his family. All of it is to protect his family. And the fact that no one trusts him is infuriating but realistic at the same time....

In the bigger picture, Web 3.0 is all about data and its management. We live in an age of information, and as the volume of data expands, so does the need to manage it. You have heard about Blockchain before, and the phrase Decentralized Web. And you also will have heard about people wanting to take power away from companies like Google, and even Facebook — which has had a fair share of privacy-related problems in recent years....

Luckily, Welcome to Chippendales is a more satisfying meal for the most part. Following up his success with Pam & Tommy on Hulu, creator Robert Siegel is back at it on the streamer with a new tale of greed and strife based on the book Deadly Dance: The Chippendales Murders by K. Scot Macdonald and Patrick MontesDeOca, and he brings together yet another stellar cast for this fresh-but-murky American crime story following the rise and fall of Chippendales creator Banerjee, who struck gold with the male stripping club sensation before letting his own paranoia, envy, and egotism ruin everything....

Welcome to the Blumhouse Trailers With their announcement of the Welcome to the Blumhouse collection, the studios wasted no time whetting appetites with a teaser trailer. Watch it, along with the newly-released individual trailers for the first four films, just below. On another note, fans of 1990s MTV-rotated alternative rock (and a certain Masters of the Universe-mocking meme video,) undoubtedly did a double-take at the song featured in the trailer. That’s because said song happens to be a dark re-imagining of 4 Non Blondes’ 1993 hit, “What’s Up,” by genre-transcendent Canadian artist FJØRA....

Westworld Season 2 Episode 8 Last week, I drew some pushback for asserting that old William should have been retired to that great arcade in the sky after he took a bullet to the stomach. While modern medicine (never mind medicine of the future) could treat the wound, there aren’t exactly any 21st century doctors running to his aid. Rather he was left for the crows and should have provided them with a fine feast in the George R....

Riot games is an American video game publisher and developer. Prior to Valorant, it published games like League of Legends, Legends of Runeterra, and much more. Before Valorant’s release, it was codenamed and announced as Project A. The game was first launched in a closed beta stage on April 7, 2020, with a limited number of players allowed to play. The game caught a lot of attention with popular twitch streamers like Hiko, ShahZaM, Shroud, and much more grinding through the Valorant ranks....

But when news hit that Dakota Johnson is set to star in a movie about Madame Web? That’s the kind of news that has you pause for a moment before asking, “Really? Are you sure?” Maybe I’m wrong. Maybe somebody out there did a backflip over this news. The rest of us are just scratching our heads, because…what in the world? To rewind, this all stems back from the time in-between Marvel’s Avengers doing crazy good box office and Sony’s Amazing Spider-Man 2 doing mediocre box office....

You can execute DQL queries in two ways : –