“As a nurse or a doctor, at least you’re getting paid a decent amount of money to risk your life,” one hospital clerical worker earning $15 an hour told BuzzFeed News.
Using misleading Facebook pages and deceptive ads, ZestAds sold coronavirus masks at wildly inflated prices.
“I want to see them considering the beauty industry as a real industry worth saving,” said Mercedes Ortiz-Olivieri, who owns a salon in Washington DC.
The two parties are miles apart on what to do in the next wave of coronavirus relief. Republicans say they do not expect anything to pass for a long time.
Welcome to this week’s Wednesday Night Wars open discussion thread. This week it’s an AEW Dynamite featuring the long awaited clash of titans between Chris Jericho and Suge D, aka PINEAPPLE PETE, going up against an episode of NXT that includes a Tag Team Championship match and D-X making a “major announcement.” The announcement: suck it.
On tonight’s cards:
AEW Dynamite
- Match of the Century: Chris Jericho vs. Pineapple Pete
- Hikaru Shida vs. Penelope Ford vs. Kris Statlander vs. Dr. Britt Baker DMD
- Kenny Omega and Matt Hardy vs. Santana and Ortiz
- The Exalted One Mr. Brodie Lee vs. Christopher Daniels
- MJF’s return match
- appearances from Lance Archer, Jake Roberts, and Jon Moxley
NXT
- D-Generation arrive, presumably on a jeep they’re calling a tank, to make a “major announcement” about NXT
- Finn Bálor vs. Cameron Grimes
- NXT Tag Team Championship Match: Matt Riddle and Timothy Thatcher (c) vs. Imperium
- Rhea Ripley has something to say!
As always, +1 your favorite comments from tonight’s open thread and if we get enough comments, we’ll include 10 of the best in tomorrow’s Best and Worst of NXT and AEW reports. Make sure you flip the comments by selecting “newest” in the drop down menu under discussion, and enjoy the show!
Cate Blanchett doesn’t have a huge role in the Lord of the Rings trilogy; all told, we only get a handful of minutes with her elf-royal Galadriel. But it turns out we almost had if not more Galadriel then at least more Blanchett. The two-time Oscar-winner went on Marc Maron’s WTF podcast, as caught by IndieWire, and as usual, her host was able to get some never-heard goods out of his guest. Among them: That she almost also played a dwarf.
Blanchett spoke about her too brief stint on the New Zealand set of Peter Jackson’s beloved J.R.R. Tolkien adaptation, which she enjoyed so much she didn’t want to leave. Indeed, she begged Jackson and his collaborator/wife Fran Walsh to give her a secret cameo, in which she would appear not only as a dwarf but a male dwarf.
“There’s not too many chicks in the Tolkien universe,” Blanchett told Maron. “I loved it so much and I did say to Peter and Fran, they were doing a banquet scene with a whole lot of dwarves. I always wanted to play the bearded lady, so I asked them, ‘Could I be your hairy wife woman when you pan across the banquet table of dwarves?’ Of course I couldn’t because the timing shifted. But it takes them forever. For me, Galadriel it was just three weeks.”
Blanchett’s Galadriel makes her biggest appearances in the first film, 2001’s The Fellowship of the Ring, and her appearances in The Two Towers and The Return of the King are comparatively brief. It’s a shame it didn’t work out, but at least she got to play a man on-screen a few years later, earning yet another Oscar nomination for playing ’60s electric Bob Dylan in Todd Haynes’ I’m Not There. So at least we got that.
(Via WTF Podcast & IndieWire)
Epic dropped some big news on Wednesday, as the company announced that it has a new edition of the Unreal Engine on the way and the potential is pretty spectacular. Unreal Engine 5 will release alongside the new console generation, giving the PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X the potential to make games that look and play like nothing we’ve ever seen.
The point of the demo was to show what Unreal Engine 5 is capable of. They released a nine-minute video showing someone travel through what appears to be a long lost city in a desert world. The effects are spectacular, the lighting is perfect, and the cinematography is breathtaking.
The video is incredible and the potential of what Unreal Engine 5 can do should have video game fans everywhere excited. The problem is that this code is also probably not actually what games will look like when the new consoles finally release.
Demo code is infamous for being created for the demo alone. This showcase was meant to show what Unreal Engine 5 will be able to do at its peak, but it’s also being shown in a short cinematic format. Who knows how it will respond once you start letting players get involved and running off the beaten path laid before them or crashing into things they’re not supposed to crash into.
This does not mean that the developers are lying or trying to pull a fast one on the consumer. They wanted to show us the Unreal Engine 5 at its peak, and that’s what they did. It’s amazing that we got to see what it has the potential to be. I’m hopeful that one day we will see games that look exactly like this, but it’s important to take it all with a grain of salt. This is what video games can one day become, it does not mean that’s what they currently are.
For those in need of a quick crash course, an engine for video games is the base for a lot of games. While developers can take that engine and go in all kinds of artistic directions, having a base engine gives devs the ability to develop games quicker. Instead of starting from scratch, they already have something to build off of. This saves time, effort, and money. It already takes long enough to make a game, building your own engine from scratch will make it take even longer.
So what Epic does is they create an engine, the Unreal Engine 5, and sell it to development companies so they can build off of it and make their own games. What’s awesome about this is once it gets in the hand of developers they can really do whatever they want with it — games like Fortnite, Outer Worlds, Final Fantast VII: Remake, and Gears 5 used Unreal Engine 4.
No two games look the same despite all using the same engine. That’s why these new engines are always so exciting. It’s a chance for developers to make even more games and be even more creative. Even if none of these games ever look like the demo, you can be confident that we’re going to get some visually remarkable games in the future.