Gulag

Stranger Things was one of the biggest genre shows that's production was caught in the coronavirus pandemic, halting its shoot in back in March right as things began to kick off on the Netflix hit's fourth season. Now the '80s-set sci-fi series, which left fans with a cliffhanger featuring the fate…

Illustration by Nigel Buchanan The secret operation got underway late last year. A small army of researchers were told to fan out across China, to cities big and small, to collect documents and videotape the activities of the prime target. The organizers had a hunch that Luckin Coffee, China’s fast-growing…

The Battle Royale genre is no easy place for a newcomer to venture into. Immensely popular games like Fortnite, PUBG, and Apex Legends were already ruling the roost. At first glance, it looked like there was no place for another big player(read, title) in the genre. However, that expectation was…

David Harbour teases Stranger Things 4 will reveal a "big, huge" piece of Jim Hopper's backstory as "pay off" from a Season 2 episode where Hopper's adopted daughter Eleven (Millie Bobby Brown) uncovered boxes marked "New York" and "Vietnam." Season 2 episode 4, "Will the Wise," hinted at a secret…

As Donald Trump has made abundantly clear during his time in office, there’s a 90-95% chance he’s demanded senior advisers pass a law that allows only flattering press coverage of the president, the penalty for which would be up to 10 years in prison or death. “The Enemy of the…

I get it. No one enjoys having their freedom constrained. No one likes being told where they can go and what they can do. Ya know why? Because humans are fundamentally social creatures. We are not, contrary to popular American belief, merely rugged individuals. If we were, we wouldn’t mind…

by Hilbert Hagedoorn on: 05/04/2020 09:01 AM | source: | 10 comment(s) It has been exclusive for PlayStation 4, but Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 Remastered is available for PC through Battle.net. It features a top-down remastering. It features physics-based rendering, better textures and animations, and much more. Classic missions…

Bones of tortured prisoners. Kolyma Gulag, USSR.NOTE: This post largely reprints last year's Victims of Communism Day post, with relatively minor modifications, including the link between the repressive nature of the Chinese Communist Party regime, and its attempts to cover up coronavirus crisis, which may have resulted in its spread…

In an exclusive essay for the Quietus, philosopher and musicologist Lawrence Kramer, author of The Hum of the World (2019), meditates on music and listening on lockdown It is hard in the midst of a relentless pandemic not to question the value of one’s customary preoccupations, very much including both…

UN torture expert Nils Melzer drafted a report on psychological torture after previewing a new film on its modern origins. The documentary shows how a well-respected Scottish psychiatrist was covertly funded by the CIA to experiment on his patients in Canada.Stephen Bennett's documentary Eminent Monsters: A Manual for Modern Torture examines the…