Instead of relying on CGI and headsets, the metaverse could one day be rendered through our dreams and catalysed by machines — This is exactly the question posed by Joakim Vindenes, PhD candidate in virtual reality (VR) at the University of Bergen, in Norway. In an essay published in 2021, the researcher suggested that lucid dreams (that is, the ability to consciously control what happens in your dream) were better than VR…

And it begs the question whether portraying a drug addict or alcoholic would be as shocking to us today as it is seeing someone killing themselves through the overly consumption of something necessary to life. — Warning: a few spoilers ahead. When the movie The Whale was announced, there was all the commotion around the coming back of Brendan Fraser after all those years of neglect. The reason why this once Hollywoodian favorite was absent from the silver screen for so long is that in 2003…

With pop song covers, military beats, and a stage turned into a battlefield of light and noise, Laibach has been fooling us for almost half a century only to be whatever we want them to be — In 2011, I presented Kunst ist Krieg. Industrial music and martial discourse )(in Portuguese) as my final work for my bachelor’s degree in journalism. In this research, I tried to understand why so many industrial music bands adopted a military and bellicist approach to their art. …

Relic uses the ambiance and metaphors of the genre to help viewers organize the chaos of trauma — I recently found a piece that discussed how some horror movies turn the naked body of old women into monstrous representations. This is what happens in movies such as X, but also The Shining or The Barbarian. …

Dealing with emerging and thus often not scientifically backed techniques, biohacking could be both a means of emancipation and a trap when coopted by charlatans — Popularized in the United States in 2005, the biohacker movement is associated with the experimentation of biomedical technologies outside the scientific and corporate contexts. …

Part of the Guillermo del Toro’s Cabinet of Curiosities series, the episode has an open and ambiguous ending that makes it a proper horror flick. — Disclaimer: Spoilers ahead! Released just in time for Halloween, Guillermo del Toro’s Cabinet of Curiosities is a horror anthology TV series streaming on Netflix. Among its eight episodes, there’s The Outside. …

Considered one of the most dangerous views in contemporaneity, longtermism might sound ambitious when you forget that humans are not the center of the world. — A while ago, the essay Understanding “longtermism”: Why this suddenly influential philosophy is so toxic brought up the concept of “longtermism”, a philosophy that invites people to think things in the long term, with a bigger picture, about the potential of humanity. …

Here is your chance to be a hag in the woods with your cats and cozy wandering home — Maybe us millennials cannot buy our own homes IRL, but in Reka you inherit the wandering, chicken-legged house of Baba Yaga so you can travel the world and improve your sorcery skills. While the game is still in development, the studio Emberstorm is already sharing tickets to the hype train…

New film addresses environmental crisis and the role of art in a dystopian near future — After almost a decade of silence, David Cronenberg is back to the movie theaters with the release of Crimes of the future. The title is not only curious for its literal meaning, but the Canadian director has actually released a short film with the same name back in 1970. …