After five seasons, one Christmas special and one innovative interactive movie, Black Mirror has grown into one of the biggest shows on Netflix since the streaming platform nabbed the rights from UK television network Channel 4 for season three onwards. The show, created by Charlie Brooker and producer Annabel Jones, is a modern take on classic anthology shows like The Twilight Zone, examining...
1 February was a sad day for a number of reasons. Not only did it mark the 10th anniversary of the Space shuttle Columbia disaster, but it’s also the day that Regretsy stopped publishing new material and became an archive. If you aren’t already familiar with Regretsy, it’s a blog that highlights some of the most ridiculous items listed on peer-to-peer ecommerce site Etsy. Created by April...
On April 16, 2013, a day after three people lost their lives when terrorists detonated two homemade bombs during the annual Boston Marathon, a new subreddit was created. “Find Boston Bombers” was a place for Redditors to attempt to identify the culprits of the attack – a crowdsourced investigation that gained momentum when the FBI published photos of suspects two days later. What happened next is...
In the genres of things that didn’t exist before the internet age, photos and videos tagged as “oddly satisfying” are up there with both the exceptionally weird, and overwhelmingly wonderful. A term born out of reddit as an attempt to describe the inexplicably pleasing quality that watching some mundane thing could rouse in its viewer, oddly satisfying videos encompass everything from watching...
When it launched in 2013, Reddit’s r/LastImages community was a place for people to document the final photographs taken of celebrities, prominent figures and even historical objects like the Titanic. But over time, it has morphed into something else entirely. Now it’s a place where people post the last photos taken of their loved ones before they died, and since the Covid-19 pandemic began, it’s...
Kiara is a financial dominatrix from Michigan. Her clients get a thrill from the power-play relationship and from relinquishing all control to her – both financial and otherwise – from acting as the ‘sub’ to her ‘domme’. Before the pandemic, she made most of her earnings through ‘cash meets’. “I’d usually take money out of a sub’s wallet, maybe say something humiliating, and walk away,” she says...
On Friday, July 29, an auctioneer at Sotheby’s in New York brought the hammer down on a piece of sporting history: a flying volley by the Barcelona icon Johann Cruyff in a game against Atletico Madrid in December 1973. Moments like these used to exist largely in collective memory, handed down in “I was there” anecdotes, maybe dredged up for a YouTube highlights reel or a talking head documentary...
John Musker and Ron Clements are animation legends. Having trained at Disney in the 70s under the studio’s “Nine Old Men” supervising animators, the pair helped usher in a second golden age in the 90s, directing hits including Aladdin and The Little Mermaid. With the studio again buzzing off the success of Frozen and Zootopia, they’re back. Moana, out December 2, takes inspiration from the...
For years, retro gaming primarily lurked in the game world’s seedy underbelly. Although some dedicated advocates of classic titles sought out original hardware, most players did not. After all, it was far easier to launch a videogame ROM or disk image on a PC, hacked handheld or smartphone than battle with increasingly rare, failure-prone consoles and computers of old. There had been attempts at...
This article was taken from the August 2014 issue of Wired magazine. Be the first to read Wired’s articles in print before they’re posted online, and get your hands on loads of additional content by subscribing online. Thought WWII super-soldiers and interdimensional Norse gods were tough to track? Guardians of the Galaxy, out on August 1, introduces the Marvel cosmic universe — that’s more than...