Month: November 2019

Enlarge / Mickey Rourke played tough guy Marv in the 2005 film, Sin City, and its 2014 sequel, Sin City: A Dame to Kill For. (credit: YouTube/Miramax)

We're getting a TV adaptation of Sin City, Frank Miller's series of neo-noir comics inspired by crime pulp fiction, Deadline Hollywood reports. Miller just inked a deal with Legendary Television for the project, and apparently a similar agreement is close to completion with Robert Rodriguez, who collaborated with Miller on the film adaptions of the comic series in 2005 and 2014. The agreement comes with a first season guarantee, pending a partnership with one of the major networks or streaming platforms. Given that Miller wants the series to rate a hard "R," streaming seems the most likely option.

Miller cut his teeth in the 1980s on Marvel Comics' Daredevil series and DC Comics' The Dark Knight Returns. A longtime fan of film noir, especially the films of James Cagney and Humphrey Bogart, Miller wanted to bring that same tone to Sin City, an anthology of stories set in the fictional Western town of Basin City (aka Sin City). The series art was noteworthy for its unique aesthetic, drawn almost entirely in black-and-white, with occasional bright splashes of color (red, yellow, blue, or pink) to highlight certain characters. And Miller drew on classic pulp fiction for the writing as well.

Almost every inhabitant of Sin City is corrupt, from the police department to the wealthy Roark family dynasty, with different factions carving out niches in the overall hierarchy. Miller has said he wanted it to be "a world out of balance, where virtue is defined by individuals in difficult situations, not by an overwhelming sense of goodness that was somehow governed by this godlike Comics Code." So we get stories, or "yarns," about one man's brutal rampage to avenge his lover's killer; gang warfares; and the hunt for a disfigured serial killer targeting young women. The yarns aren't necessarily connected, but they all take place in the same fictional world, and various characters recur in different stories.

Enlarge / Gettin' ready for some two-hour civ building. (credit: Dan Thurot)

Welcome to Ars Cardboard, our weekend look at tabletop games! Check out our complete board gaming coverage at cardboard.arstechnica.com.

As a longtime player of cardboard civilization games, I’m always looking for titles that break the mold. From the moment it was revealed, Jamey Stegmaier’s Tapestry looked like it might fit the bill. With its pre-painted buildings, non-historical civilizations, and the hieroglyphic script that runs the perimeter of the board, it seemed to promise a civilization game that wasn’t quite like any other.

And, well, it certainly delivers on that front. Tapestry is indeed unlike most of its civ-game peers.

Enlarge (credit: Getty Images / Aurich Lawson)

The first episode of audio-obsessed podcast Reasonably Sound that made me stop and think was an early entry called "Whisper Quiet." As my introduction to Autonomous Sensory Meridian Response (ASMR), and the specific auditory cues related to its reported physical reactions, I felt like someone had taken the top off my head, rummaged around in my brain, and found something overlooked inside that was suddenly useful. And not just in an ASMR sense, though the sample clips of Bob Ross hit all the right notes for that, as did host Mike Rugnetta getting into the spirit of ASMR by whispering the end credits.

Reasonably Sound is a podcast about audio and about the historical and cultural context of particular sounds and sonic experiences. In his episode about ASMR, Rugnetta not only introduces his audiences to what ASMR is, but he also contextualizes the rise of ASMR culture on YouTube within the broader history of communication technology, starting with an AT&T advertising campaign from the 1970s promoting long-distance calls as a medium for emotional intimacy. He also digs into the jargon of ASMR culture, comparing the pleasant "triggers" found in ASMR videos to the more serious triggers of trauma responses.

Research into the causes of ASMR didn't start being published in earnest until 2015, months after the release of "Whisper Quiet," so Rugnetta tells Ars Technica he's skeptical of the phenomenon’s existence. But, real or imagined, he acknowledges ASMR's memetic status and delights in exploring the cultural context that produced it.

Enlarge / Given how messy a typical physics lab is, CERN is just as likely to lose the animator it intends to store. (credit: Maximilien Brice, Julien Ordan/CERN)

Matter, despite being omnipresent here on Earth, is a bit of a mystery. Most of the matter in the Universe comes in the form of dark matter, which doesn't seem to have significant interactions with light or other matter. Meanwhile, the more familiar form of matter shouldn't be here at all. It should have been created in equal amounts to antimatter, allowing the two to annihilate each other following the Big Bang.

Physicists have found a few ways of breaking the matter/antimatter symmetry, but they aren't sufficient to account for matter's vast predominance. So, there are lots of ideas floating around to handle it, and some of them are even testable. One of the more intriguing categories of solution links the two big problems with matter: tying the prevalence of matter to the existence of a specific dark matter particle.

Now, scientists have made some antimatter in a lab and used that to test one of these ideas. The test came up blank, putting limits on the possible link between dark matter and antimatter's absence.