Month: February 2022

The Super Bowl brought us our first eye-popping teaser for Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power, Amazon Studio's prequel fantasy series. Until late last week, Amazon had kept pretty much every detail about the new series tightly under wraps. But the dam has now burst, beginning with a big Vanity Fair exclusive with first-look images and in-depth interviews. The article is also full of casting information.

(There are some spoilers for those unfamiliar with the LOTR mythology below.)

The idea of making a spinoff series from Peter Jackson's visionary Lord of the Rings film trilogy dates back to 2017, with Amazon Studios, Netflix, and HBO all vying for the rights. Amazon won out, in part because then-CEO Jeff Bezos was a major Tolkien fan. Amazon paid a whopping $250 million for the rights and committed to what is believed to be a five-season run. Hollywood insider gossip hints that the show could cost between $100 to $150 million per season, adding up to well over $1 billion for all five seasons.

Enlarge / Actress Reese Witherspoon during an interview on Thursday, December 17, 2021. (credit: NBC)

At 12:24 pm on January 11, the actor and entrepreneur Reese Witherspoon made a startling announcement to her 2.9 million Twitter followers. “In the (near) future, every person will have a parallel digital identity,” she wrote. “Avatars, crypto wallets, digital goods will be the norm. Are you planning for this?”

That final line struck a note of urgency. The metaverse is coming, was her message, and you haven’t packed your go bag yet?

Witherspoon’s tweet arrived amid a backlash against celebrities cheerleading the virtual world and pushing their fans into cyber currency. It was bad enough that for years we had been pummeled by crypto dudes for not diverting all of our cash reserves to bitcoin and HODLing no matter what. The Twitter history of “Bitcoin Billionaire” Tyler Winklevoss (who, with his twin bro, Cameron, has done very well since being punked by Mark Zuckerberg back at Harvard) is an endless barrage of FOMO pitches, delivered with the enigmatic faux-wisdom of a blockchain Buddha. “Because of bitcoin, the universe will never be the same,” he tweeted recently. Got that, God?

Enlarge / Cue Health's at-home molecular diagnostic test amplifies and detects viral RNA from the virus that causes COVID-19.

Plenty of things have changed in the two years since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic. For example, think about how many people now know the difference between a rapid antigen test and a nucleic acid amplification test. Whether it's for work, travel, or just peace of mind, a lot of us are a lot more familiar with having our nasal cavities poked than we used to be.

In fact, COVID diagnostics even invaded yesterday's Super Bowl with an advertisement for a small LED-equipped white box from a company called Cue Health. The company has developed a fast and accurate at-home diagnostic test, and thanks to a proctored mode, in which your test is supervised by a doctor, its results will be accepted for things like international travel.

For those who don't know their PCRs from their LFTs, here's a quick primer. A rapid antigen test (also sometimes called a lateral flow test) looks for certain proteins from the surface of the virus. These tests are relatively cheap to produce and easy to use. They're the kind that state and federal governments have made available to people for free.