Month: May 2020

Enlarge / Nathan (Robbie Amell) is impressed with the digital afterlife service so far on Upload, now streaming on Amazon Prime. (credit: YouTube/Amazon Studios)

A cocky tech-bro discovers that living forever in a digital afterlife isn't quite the paradise he'd envisioned in Upload, a new comedy series from Amazon Prime Video. When the trailer first dropped in March, I pointed out the strong The Good Place vibes, which set a very high bar for any new comedy dealing with the afterlife. Fortunately, Upload is a sheer delight in its own right: smart, funny, warm-hearted, and perfectly paced, trading in The Good Place's witty takes on moral philosophy for more of an emphasis on class-based social hierarchies.

(Some spoilers below.)

Series creator Greg Daniels—best known for his work on The Office, Parks and Recreation, and King of the Hill—purportedly came up with the concept many years ago while working as a staff writer on Saturday Night Live, although Amazon didn't green-light the pilot until 2017, ordering a full ten-episode series the following year. It's definitely got something of that Parks and Recreation vibe. Per the official premise: "In the near future, people who are near death can be 'uploaded' into virtual reality environments. Cash-strapped Nora works customer service for the luxurious 'Lakeview' digital afterlife. When party-boy/coder Nathan's car crashes, his girlfriend uploads him into Nora's VR world."

Enlarge / Fire up Amazon Prime in a browser, and here's the landing page for the platform's partnership with SXSW.

When Austin, Texas, Mayor Steve Adler took to the podium on March 6 and effectively prevented South by Southwest from happening with a new city health order, the longtime film and music festival simply became the first of what would be many COVID-19-related live-event cancellations. Given the late-breaking nature of this one—SXSW was scheduled to start the week after, on March 13—organizers suddenly had to scramble. And when it came to the film portion, SXSW officially settled on transitioning to an entirely digital experience.

Partnering with entities like Mailchimp (shorts-only) and Amazon (any film willing), any project selected for the festival was invited to become available digitally for a limited time so all that hard work could still find an audience this spring. The resulting Amazon initiative started this past week and runs through Wednesday, May 6, no Prime subscription required.

Ultimately... the selection feels a little lacking. Major studio films like Judd Apatow's The King of Staten Island declined in favor of forging their own path (that one will go straight to VOD this summer with a theatrical run out of the question), and smaller but compelling movies like the arcade-documentary Insert Coin have kept the rights to their debuts for now in the hopes that a festival season will still exist later in 2020 (since a good debut there can help facilitate lucrative distribution deals and theatrical runs if all goes according to plan). As more film festivals face this reality—Tribeca is already digital, Canada's Fantasia Festival just announced its intention to do the same—hopefully the industry warms up to the idea.

Enlarge / Sagrada on Steam.

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

Sagrada is one of the best dice-drafting games on the market. It makes excellent use of the inherent randomness of dice while still providing copious opportunities for strategic thinking and long-term planning. It’s also a visually appealing game, easy to learn but displaying more depth the more you play it—especially by making players think about how early choices may restrict their options later. And it’s about building stained-glass windows. Delightful.

These days, there’s a digital version of Sagrada out from Dire Wolf Digital, maker of several of the best digital board game adaptations on the market (including 2019’s Raiders of the North Sea and Yellow & Yangtze, which were both on my list of the best board game apps of 2019).