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⚡ Quick Take

• The Odyssey marks a historic landmark for both Christopher Nolan and IMAX.
• The film’s run in its “intended format,” IMAX 70mm, has been extended an extra month.
• IMAX CEO Richard Gelfond thinks the film will spearhead the company’s best year yet.

Unsurprising to anybody who watched it, The Odyssey is officially Christopher Nolan’s biggest hit ever. So far, the film has grossed $1.1 billion at the box office. It was also a smash for IMAX, making the company almost $290 million.

Universal Pictures

The film added a month to its run in the highly-coveted IMAX 70mm format, and the new showings are already selling out around the country. Seeing Nolan’s newest movie in its “intended format” has become a status symbol in the moviegoing community.

All of this is even before the film premieres in China on August 14. As the second-biggest moviegoing country, the box office effect is bound to multiply.

Nolan’s effect on the film community, especially the traditionalists, has certainly cemented his place in the director’s hall of fame. From the Dark Knight trilogy to even his more recent work with Oppenheimer, Nolan just keeps selling out theaters.

The Odyssey was also a huge milestone for IMAX, becoming its highest-grossing film of all time. It has made the company $289 million at the time of writing. Another thing that made the film revolutionary was the use of IMAX cameras and equipment. Nolan commissioned special sound-dampening equipment from the company and was able to make The Odyssey the first-ever feature-length film done entirely with IMAX cameras. The company’s CEO, Richard Gelfond, discussed the historic landmark in an interview with Variety.

“We had the very highest of hopes for ‘The Odyssey’ from the start, but it somehow continues to exceed them. Its historic performance is headlining what we expect will be our best year ever at the global box office.”

Though most movies can be seen in IMAX, The Odyssey is on a short list of films this year that were filmed for IMAX, also including Dune: Part Three and The End of Oak Street. Though they may not be entirely filmed using IMAX cameras, who is to say these selections won’t be able to compete and make it a truly historic year for the company?

The post THE ODYSSEY Sets Records For Nolan and IMAX appeared first on Nerdist.

ph izas / eelend

⚡ Quick Take

• The Rings of Power season 3’s Jamie Campbell Bower talks Celeborn spoilers. He and the showrunners hint at Celeborn’s story.

Jamie Campbell Bower is joining The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power as the Elf Lord Celeborn. Of course, some ideas about Celeborn in the Second Age of Middle-earth are established in Tolkien’s writings. But, by the same token, much of the story of the elf is also not told in great detail in those texts. And that gives Bower and the creators of The Rings of Power season three space to do what they do best: add nuance and depth to some of Middle-earth’s most familiar faces. So what exactly awaits Celeborn in The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power season three? Jamie Campbell Bower and The Rings of Power‘s showrunners offered us a few fascinating ideas about Celeborn’s upcoming story during our recent interviews. One point that Bower shares even feels like it verges on something spoilery… Could Celeborn have something dangerous lying in wait deep inside of him? Jamie Campbell Bower shares there’s something inside Celeborn that could betray him.

Prime Video Table of contents

• Jamie Campbell Bower Talks Celeborn’s Concept of Joy
• Jamie Campbell Bower Cautions Celeborn Has ‘Constructed Something That May Be Used Against Him’ in The Rings of Power Season 3
• The Rings of Power Season 3 Showrunners Say Celeborn’s Torture Turns Him Toward the Light
• But Could That Light Be Celeborn’s Undoing?

Jamie Campbell Bower Talks Celeborn’s Concept of Joy

When we speak to Jamie Campbell Bower, we note to him that it sounds like Celeborn has really seen the darkenss of the enemy, trapped as he is in a Middle-earth prison. We wonder how, then, Celeborn views the darkness and its forces in The Rings of Power season three. Is it all black and white for him? Or has he come to see things in shades of grey?

Prime Video

Bower offers us a beautiful answer, bringing it back to one of the most important themes in The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power. He notes, “I mean, to talk about the idea of ‘One cannot know light without having experienced the darkness, right?’ And I think that for Celeborn, he’s chosen to find joy. But I struggled with this concept of joy and what it means. And I looked at many, many writers to do with joy, and actually found something particularly interesting in Nick Cave. Joy is not the absence of suffering. It is choosing hope even in the face of great suffering and great sorrow. And that’s what he’s had to do.”

It sounds as though, in the face of great darkness, Bower’s Celeborn has actually chosen to open his heart to light and hope, instead of succumbing to it, being enraged by it, or being determined to answer it with his own destruction. It’s truly a character arc that we feel excited to experience. But could this determination for joy and optimism actually betray Celeborn in The Rings of Power season three?

Jamie Campbell Bower Cautions Celeborn Has ‘Constructed Something That May Be Used Against Him’ in The Rings of Power Season 3

Jamie Campbell Bower speaks with great confidence about Celeborn’s joy, but then he wavers a little bit as he starts to offer a sentiment that feels like it may get into spoilery territory. Bower notes, “But within that [hope and joy], he’s constructed something of his own… That may or may not be something that could be used against him.”

HRMMM! WHAT could that mean? What could Celeborn have constructed for himself that could later be used against him? Is it an ill-advised friendship with Sauron? A dissociative state that he might slip into? A false recollection of events that have happened to him? We suppose if, in response to trauma, he’s had to block out significant portions of what’s happened to him during his captivity, that MIGHT cause some trouble… Should that wall ever get knocked down. But, like we said, this is all speculation. All we know for sure is that Celeborn has constructed something for himself in The Rings of Power season three and that something might get him into trouble.

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Celeborn and Sauron ‘Share History’ on RINGS OF POWER, Teases Charlie Vickers The Rings of Power Season 3 Showrunners Say Celeborn’s Torture Turns Him Toward the Light

In addition to Jamie Campbell Bower, The Rings of Power season three showrunners J. D. Payne and Patrick McKay had more to share about Celeborn. While they didn’t touch the idea of Celeborn potentially being betrayed by something inside of him/something he’s constructed as Bower did, they did return to the idea of how Celeborn’s dark fate has made him that much more full of light. The pair discusses whether Celeborn’s torment has twisted or corrupted him.

Prime Video

McKay notes, “Only time will tell. I think Gladriel will be worried about that. But Jamie Campbell Bower is a pretty stalwart elf. I would believe in his ability to withstand torture.”

And Payne offered, “Everyone will be affected by that kind of experience, but not everyone would necessarily be twisted to the darkness. And I think what’s interesting about Jamie’s Celeborn, everyone responds definitely to those kinds of experiences. And Celeborn, there are actually scenes where he’s getting to know Galadriel again, and they’re reconnecting in their marriage after having been apart for millennia, talks about the effect that it’s had on him. And actually, you see that it has twisted him, not necessarily towards darkness, but maybe to light.”

But Could That Light Be Celeborn’s Undoing?

It sounds to us like Jamie Campbell Bower’s Celeborn might be one of the purest elves around in The Rings of Power season three, and by that we mean, one of the elves who most wishes to do good. But, Bower’s words of caution still haunt our ears. Will Celeborn’s light end up betraying him. As Bower also tells us, “Sauron uses the things that you love the most to cut you.” Cue some ominous Bear McCreary chords.

The Rings of Power season three premieres on Prime Video on November 11. The full release schedule can be found here. If you’d like to get yourself ready for this return to Middle-earth, you can pick up The Fall of Númenor: And Other Tales from the Second Age of Middle-earth or The Silmarillion and read more about Tolkien’s vision of the time when the show takes place.

This post has affiliate links, which means we may earn advertising money if you buy something. This doesn’t cost you anything extra, we just have to give you the heads up for legal reasons. Click away!

Rotem Rusak is the Editor-in-Chief at Nerdist, she’s still hoping for that Adar ressurection in The Rings of Power season three.

The post Jamie Campbell Bower Says ‘Something Inside Celeborn’ May BETRAY Him in TROP S3 appeared first on Nerdist.

A fast-growing fire near Big Sur had burned 1,300 acres as of Monday afternoon, prompting evacuation orders and warnings in the surrounding areas. California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection crews were preparing to assume control of the fire response, although the blaze remains a federal incident.

The Timber fire was first reported on Sunday at 10:44 a.m. As of 2:17 p.m. Monday, it had burned 1,300 acres and was only 5% contained. Three zones were under evacuation orders and four others were under evacuation warnings. It is on federal land in the Los Padres National Forest, and the cause was still under investigation.

A map of the Timber fire and the zones under evacuation orders and warnings as of Monday afternoon. Credit: Cal Fire

Cecile Juliette, the Cal Fire San Mateo-Santa Cruz Unit spokesperson, was at the scene of the fire on Monday, and told Lookout that a Cal Fire incident management team would assume command of the fire at 6 p.m. despite the fire occurring on federal land. Juliette added that it isn’t common for the state agency to assume this role in a federal fire. 

“California’s wildfires are not as active as in other parts of the west right now, so it gives Cal Fire the ability to support our federal partners,” she said.

According to a Cal Fire post on X, incident management teams are specialized groups of emergency personnel that provide leadership and coordination during complicated incidents. The groups direct and supervise fire suppression efforts, resources, logistics, safety and more.

Click here for Cal Fire’s latest information regarding the fire.

Have news that should be in Lookout Briefs? Send your news releases, including contact information, to news@lookoutlocal.com.

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The post Big Sur scorched by fast-growing fire; Cal Fire crews to assist and assume control appeared first on Lookout Santa Cruz.

Fox News has turned to Andrew Cuomo, the disgraced former New York governor and failed New York City mayoral candidate, for negative commentary on the Democratic Party’s ascendant progressive movement. Cuomo appeared on Fox News’ “America’s Newsroom” on Monday to complain about progressives being purportedly out of touch with the country. He accused New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani…

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A cartoon by Pedro Molina. Related | Pentagon out of ideas to end Iran war after Hegseth killed ‘woke’…

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Not getting enough out of that ChatGPT Business subscription? OpenAI is hoping you’ll take it up on a new “premium” Business tier seat that’s up to $100 more a month for some added capacity and higher usage limits. Sam Altman’s AI outfit announced ChatGPT Business Premium seats on Monday, describing the new offering as an option for Business-tier customers who feel they’re chafing under the old Business limitations. Business Premium seats, which can be combined with standard Business seats, get five times more usage than Standard seats, and are exempt from the five-hour-per-day usage limit on advanced features. Those enhanced limits come at a price, though. For reference, standard Business tier seats are $25 a month if paid per month, or $20 per month if billed annually. Premium Business seats, on the other hand, are $125/month or $100 if billed annually. (Larger orgs have their own "call us for pricing" Enterprise tier with all the bells and whistles like SLAs and extra security and access controls.) As for what Premium seats will actually get you, that varies per model and task type. According to a help page for Business models and limits, which doesn’t yet include GPT 5.6 usage limits, GPT 5.5 Instant use is “virtually unlimited” for Business seats. GPT 5.5 Thinking and Pro are limited to 3,000 requests per week and 15 requests per month, respectively. As noted above, Premium seats get 5x that limit. Beyond that, even Premium seats will have to eat into ChatGPT credits, the pay-as-you-go-not-quite-a-token system OpenAI uses to charge for advanced features. OpenAI is running a promotion as part of the launch of Premium Business seats to provide some extra credits for customers who buy into the waitlist for the new offering, with $100 in workspace service credits available for each qualifying Premium seat added to a Business workspace, up to 5 seats. Only the first 10,000 customers to sign up for the Premium waitlist will get those credits, however, so if you’re so inclined, you’d better move fast. Or you could spin up an open-weight model instead Introducing a new, considerably more expensive tokenmaxxing option for smaller business customers at a time when frontier AI labs are being hammered for pushing up prices and facing increased competition from Chinese open-weight models is quite a gamble. Chinese open weights AI models are rapidly becoming just as capable as their closed-source, AI-as-a-service American counterparts, raising the question of why companies with a strategy for heavy AI consumption would be willing to pay hundreds of dollars a month for seat-plus-usage fees when an open-weight model running in a colocation DC or on-prem could deliver similar results. Sure, the hardware isn’t cheap, but the model is free and so is using it, aside from what it costs to keep the server lights blinking. Beyond that, AI returns are still a fuzzy, nebulous thing, too. Plenty of AI investments have yet to pay off; asking customers to pay $100 more a month for increased usage limits is a big ask. Nonetheless, OpenAI is confident that Business Premium seats will be a hot commodity. The new offering, OpenAI claimed to us in an email, was introduced because customers were asking for increased usage limits for deeper work on the Business tier. For them, the company expects the price point to be perfectly acceptable, we’re told. ®

California's Prop 40, would impose a one-time 5% tax on the net worth of the state's billionaires.

⚡ Quick Take

• A new report says Paramount is pledging to produce an outrageous 30 new films per year if the merger with Warner Bros. goes through.

Not even a week after a judge placed a start date for the antitrust trial regarding Paramount’s bid to buy Warner Bros. Discovery and we already have more news. The David Ellison-run Paramount-Skydance is evidently trying to sure up their claim that the merger of two of the largest media studios in the world is somehow good for competition. How, you might ask? Well, according to Deadline, Paramount is attempting to strike separate deals with theater chains AMC and Regal, two of the largest in the U.S., with a pledge to release 30 movies per year. THIRTY. Outrageous.

Paramount Skydance

Deadline shares that they’ve learned Paramount made written commitment to Regal for “30 films annually over three years with an exclusive 45-day theatrical window and a 90-day window to streaming.” Buzz is apparently Paramount has offered a similar agreement with AMC, but the exhibitor’s boss Adam Aron said, “AMC has no comment on this story, period. Nor have we ever had any comment on this story.” Touchy.

AMC and Regal have publicly backed the merger, while the rest of Cinema United (formerly National Association of Theatre Owners) remains firmly against. Paramount still has yet to explain how it believes the merger would not result in negative financial outcomes in regards to long-term box office, feature film output, and loss of jobs.

Paramount/Warner Bros. Discovery

And what of that output? Had the merger gone through as planned, with Paramount’s 16 film output and WB’s 19, 2027 would have had a total of 35. But for 2028, the planned output for each is only around 22. That output for 2027 is high by the average of the studios, with most years WB doing 10-15 and Paramount with 8-12. To promise at least 30 for the next three years is lofty.

Not least because history is not on their side. Remember how Disney bought 20th Century Fox back in 2016? At the time, the studios separately released 26 new titles. After that merger, in 2025, their “combined output fell to 14 wide releases, a 46% decline. The box office combined went form $4.29 billion in 2016 to $2.4B in 2025, down 44%.”

Basically, when the few control the means of production, they’re less likely to make more product because they simply won’t need to. As always, we’ll see what happens.

Kyle Anderson is the Senior Editor for Nerdist. He hosts the weekly pop culture deep-dive podcast Laser Focus. You can find his film and TV reviews here. Follow him on Letterboxd.

The post Paramount Making Outrageous 30-Films-Per-Year Pledge If Merger Goes Through appeared first on Nerdist.

DEF CON hackers expanded their efforts to provide free cyber-defenses to rural water systems in the US to include managed detection and response providers, digital twins, and AI agents. On Friday, at the annual hacker’s conference, DEF CON Franklin and the National Rural Water Association (NRWA) announced a new program called the Water Watch Center. It will initially fund five providers - Defendify, Legato Security, L1 Secure, Rapid7, and Sentinel Technologies - to help small water utilities serving fewer than 10,000 people detect and mitigate breaches. The security providers will exchange threat info and share that with the NRWA, which provides technical assistance and operational support to small water and wastewater utilities across all 50 states. “We've had our volunteer experts out for two years in these water utilities, in the trenches with these folks, and the thing that we've realized is that there's just not a scalable delivery mechanism for cyber for these utilities when there’s 150,000 of them, and 98 percent of them are small businesses,” Jake Braun told The Register during an interview at DEF CON. Braun co-founded the Franklin project at DEF CON in 2024, and 350 people signed up that year to donate their time and talent to securing water facilities. “We groped around in the dark for what to do, and eventually realized we already know how to do security for small businesses - it’s MSSPs,” Braun said. “So why don’t we just do that?” He described the new Water Watch Center as a pyramid, with the NRWA at the top, the managed detection and response providers’ sensors hunting for security vulnerabilities across the utilities’ networks, and then Franklin volunteers fixing issues or responding to instructions as needed. “We have five initial MSSPs, which will expand to 10 eventually, based on the 10 CISA regions,” Braun said. “And then below that, we have volunteers who can help, and connect water utilities to MSSPs, so we’re not just sending alerts. We can take the alerts that CISA and the ISAC put out, and deliver cybersecurity. That’s been the missing piece: there has been no delivery mechanism for cybersecurity that’s scalable nationally - that's what this is.” Suspected Iranian hackers have hit numerous water systems in recent weeks, and most were small, community systems that left programmable logic controllers directly exposed to the internet using default or weak passwords. There’s no indication that the attackers used AI to help plan or carry out these digital disruptions. However, as both cyber and national security experts told The Register during conversations on the sidelines of Black Hat and DEF CON, it’s only a matter of time until that happens. DEF CON Franklin has a plan for that scenario, too. The Water Watch Center also partnered with Vanderbilt University to apply research from the DARPA Cyber Agents for Security Testing and Learning Environment (CASTLE) program. This partnership will create digital twins for a few WWC water and wastewater system environments, and then researchers will deploy both red- and blue-team agents across these digital dupes. The red-team attack agents try to hack the water systems, testing the blue-team defenders’ automated detection and response capabilities, with the eventual goal of deploying AI-based defense to water and wastewater facilities across the US. “They let it fight each other a gazillion times, and then they figure out when does the blue team win, so we can train agents to then later drop into these 150,000 water utilities,” Braun said. “There's already a 500,000-person shortage of cyber professionals. The idea that we're magically going to find 150,000 new people is a fantasy. There is no other way to really be able to combat the AI attacks that are going to be coming at these things.” ®

⚡ Quick Take

• Propstore is auctioning Mike Myers’ shockingly creepy suit from his critically and commercially panned The Cat in the Hat movie.
• It is expected to sell for at least $12K, and bidding is happening until August 26.
• Nerdist’s Take: Maybe A24 can buy it and make a horror movie!

In 2003, Mike Myers’ The Cat in the Hat film hit theaters and became a critical and commercial failure. It was panned so terribly that Dr. Seuss’ widow, Audrey Geisel, forbade any further live-action adaptations of her husband’s work. Despite this, the film has somewhat of a cult following with some people really liking Myers’ as the titular character. If you’re one of those people, you are in luck. No, there’s not a sequel coming, but Propstore is auctioning Myers’ shockingly creepy suit from The Cat in the Hat. 

While the film version of this mischievous cat has a kinda cute face that indeed resembles Myers’ mug with fur, this one looks really different. The nose and mouth give off serious Whoville energy and there are two hollow openings for the eyes. I mean… Mike Myers did need to see where he was going. 

Propstore

So, how much will you have to pay for Mike Myers’ very unsettling The Cat in the Hat suit? Propstore estimates that it will sell for between $12,000 and $24,000. That’s actually not too bad considering some film props can sell for six figures or more. Bidding takes place through August 26, when the auction begins at 9:30AM PDT. 

Nerdist’s Take: A24 Should Buy The Cat in the Hat Suit for… Reasons 

If a private collector doesn’t nab this weird suit for whatever reason, then maybe A24 can grab it. Why? Well, to make a horror film, of course. This story doesn’t hit public domain until 2053, so maybe they can 1) hold onto it until then or 2) take away some elements of the costume that make it Seuss adjacent but not exactly. (I am kidding about this… sort of.) 

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Ariana Grande and Josh Gad Will Star in Dr. Seuss’ OH, THE PLACES YOU’LL GO Animated Movie

Geisel died in 2018, but it is not clear if current rights holders would grant A24 the right to make a horror film with The Cat in the Hat. Money does have quite a loud say and if anyone could do this kind of film right, it would be the creative minds that partner with A24. Otherwise, there will just be some rich bloke letting it collect dust… or a horror nerd with too much money who scares kids this Halloween. Who knows.

Tai Gooden is the Features Editor for Nerdist, a fictional villian apologist, and a horror aficionado who is forever waiting for her trip in the TARDIS.

The post Mike Myers’ THE CAT IN THE HAT Suit Is Up for Auction and VERY Upsetting appeared first on Nerdist.

On Monday, Mark Zuckerberg published a 6,500 word manifesto about personal AI, largely about the possibilities for the "personal superintelligence" systems Meta AI is building.

OPINION In a public post titled "The Future is for Everyone," Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg declares, "We are fortunate to live at an incredible moment in history." For Zuck to posit that "The Future is for Everyone" is at once facile for being so vague it could mean anything – are there people now living who are excluded from the future? – and foolish for its failure to address real issues that actually affect people's lives. We are perhaps not so fortunate as the unpopular but wealthy Zuck, worth more than $200 billion. But we're fortunate enough not to be chased by a public record that mocks his musings. In 2019, Zuck said, "The Future is Private." This was while he was running Facebook, an ad business predicated on the denial of privacy. His credibility as a forecaster of the future leaves something to be desired. His company could have worked toward this future after its rebranding as Meta in 2021. Instead, it became the prime purveyor of Meta Glasses, dubbed "pervert glasses" by detractors for flouting people's privacy expectations. The purpose of Zuck's post is to "develop a philosophy for how we can best use superintelligence to ensure it improves all of our lives, work, communities, freedom and safety." He declares, "The defining questions of our age are who will have access to superintelligence and what will we direct it towards. Will it be centralized and restricted to a few institutions, or will it be a tool that empowers everyone?" Beyond the fact that "superintelligence" is undefined, he overstates the importance of AI in the scheme of things. Centralization and access may be defining questions for AI policy, but AI policy exists in a global context that invites tougher inquiries. Here are a few that come to mind: Who will have access to the world's wealth and to what portion of it? Who will have access to water, food, and healthcare? Where will human rights be respected? Where will democracy survive? Where will the rule of law thrive? Where will people have access to affordable justice? What will constrain technology from becoming a tool of tyranny? What will constrain public discourse that sows dissension and promotes harm? Hey, Siri, what's the answer to humanity's problems? The initial 700 words or so of Zuck's call for Pollyannaish AI groupthink lean into banal generalizations. We'll spare you the line-by-line critique but take, for example, "All new technologies create opportunities and challenges." That's true but also not very insightful. We leave it as an exercise to the reader to ask Meta's latest AI model to produce a more trenchant formulation of Zuck's all-in-for-AI utopianism. The subsequent section cites specific examples of how Meta is approaching "superintelligence," and it's no more credible. Consider Zuck's assertion that his foretold universally accessible AI assistant "will have strong privacy and security options so you can trust it to handle all of your personal content knowing that no one else can access your information, similar to how encryption works on WhatsApp." Meta's track record here doesn't exactly make this claim more convincing. "Everyone will have incredible tools for creation to express your ideas." And it will become more difficult to market these ideas because AI has commodified content creation. But creators will be able to distribute their work for free on social media networks to boost engagement and sell ads. "Everyone will have powerful tools to create new businesses and the economy will become more entrepreneurial." That's just a naive generalization that fails to consider the difficulty of creating and sustaining a business amid intense competition – something major tech companies have fought tooth and nail to avoid. Driving for Uber might be considered entrepreneurial, but it's an option many would trade for a fair wage, good health insurance coverage, a pension, and other employee benefits that once sustained the US workforce. And then there's the real tell: Meta is ready to profit from providing AI access. "Everyone will have free or affordable access to these tools … We will offer free versions that will be accessible to billions of people. For those who want to pay to use more compute, there will be a dynamic auction mechanism that will guarantee that everyone gets the lowest price possible for the intelligence and compute they're using while also ensuring the capacity is used for whatever people collectively find most valuable." The Future is for Everyone, but distribution and monetization are for Meta and a few other cloud service providers. Someone's gotta pay for Meta's datacenter capex. Zuck is right about the need to keep AI accessible to as broad an audience as possible. "Restricting people and companies from using the leading open source models – wherever they come from – will reduce the quality of AI accessible to them, and centralize AI rather than putting more power in people's hands," he writes. But then he squanders whatever credit he might be due by co-opting Dr. Martin Luther King's famous statement, "the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice." "The arc of human civilization has bent towards putting more power in people's hands to live and shape the world in the ways we believe are best," Zuck concludes. "Superintelligence holds the promise of giving everyone that power, and building a positive future for everyone." If you want power to shape the world, try being a billionaire, particularly if you can get your hands on a major social media or search platform and can spend your way to political sway. For everyone else, there's always voting, where allowed by law and tolerated by authorities, even if that doesn't necessarily produce the desired results. ®

After screaming about antifa vandals and “Radical Left Lunatics” who should face “years in jail!” for damaging the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool and after furiously disagreeing with U.S. Attorney Jeanine Pirro’s decision to drop felony charges against former Olympian David Hearn, President Donald Trump has come around to admitting what everyone knew all along: There’s “no video or proof” of…

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⚡ Quick Take

• House of the Dragon delivers a sobering moment with Alyn in the season three finale that will likely fracture his life and relationships.
• His choice to kill the High Septon upon Rhaenyra’s request will put him at odds with his brother Addam, father Corlys, and niece/beloved Baela.
• Is Alyn seeking to rise the ranks and find more power, or is he simply moving from a place of self-preservation.

There comes a time in many fictional characters’ lives where they make a choice that deeply changes them. In The Walking Dead, it was Glenn killing another human, which broke his spirit deeply shortly before his demise. And in Stranger Things, it was Steve Harrington’s decision to fight a Demogorgon at the Byers’ house that took him from a self-centered high school jerk to a protective hero. House of the Dragon delivers a sobering moment with Alyn in the season three finale that will likely fracture his life in many ways. 

Ollie Upton/HBO

Throughout the season, we’ve seen Alyn struggle to form a connection with his father Corlys. And, after Corlys and Queen Rhaenyra’s spat over legitimizing him and his brother Addam, Alyn continues to serve her faithfully. He convinces his father to send Velaryon forces per her request, which leads to Corlys’ capture and the loss of his ring finger. Addam even expresses his concern over Rhaenyra’s reaction to Aegon being alive, saying that she’s making dangerous decisions, to which Alyn brushes aside. 

Alyn travels with Rhaenyra to see the High Septon, whom she wants to anoint her. Upon his refusal, she calls the High Septon treasonous and orders Alyn to kill him. At first, Alyn hesitates. He’s certainly no stranger to death and war, but this is completely different for many reasons. First, this is not a battle against another soldier.

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Every Major Character Death in HOUSE OF THE DRAGON Season 3

They are on holy ground and this is a highly regarded religious figure who is not physically aggressive. And, the High Septon is not necessarily wrong for this stance. He anointed Aegon and, considering he’s still alive according to reports, then that means he is still the King. Furthermore, it is said that your soul will be damned if you kill someone like him. 

However, he allows Rhaenyra to get into his head, leaning into the fact that his Valyrian blood means he answers to higher gods. And, we’d also heard him deem himself Corlys’ successor publicly and that he would lead his army. Considering he’s acting as Rhaenyra’s hand and deadly muscle after killing the High Septon, things don’t look good for Alyn’s future. He’s being set up to be a villain but that feels wildly inconsistent with his character as someone who is thoughtful, logical, strong-minded, and makes careful choices.

Ollie Upton/HBO

It’s clear, at least to anyone who isn’t tangled in Rhaenyra’s web, that she’s been an ineffective leader and she’s becoming increasingly unhinged. She will use a person as long as they are willing to give and follow, and if that changes, they are disposable to her. Baela calls her out on this in the finale, saying how she’s been working tirelessly for her cause, yet Rhaenyra won’t send anyone to save her grandfather. Predictably, Rhaenyra’s response is to detain her, a choice that Alyn finds out about via Addam and doesn’t show a real reaction.

This decision will put him at odds with the people who actually love him, like Addam, Baela, and Corlys. Is Alyn starting to feel the intoxication of power and societal elevation? Perhaps. Or maybe he is aware that he’s in too deep and knows opposing Rhaenyra can cost him his own life. It’s possible that he will feel some internal turmoil over his choice to kill a religious figure. No matter where he’s coming from, this moment feels like a shift for Alyn that will change him significantly in season four.

Tai Gooden is the Features Editor for Nerdist, a fictional villian apologist, and a horror aficionado who is forever waiting for her trip in the TARDIS.

The post What Alyn’s Dark Turn in HOUSE OF THE DRAGON Means for His Future appeared first on Nerdist.

This video of Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth may just be the grossest thing you see all day.

Hegseth just took the criticism that he acts like a little kid “playing army” to a whole new level.

At the renaming ceremony for the Joint Base Lindsey Graham Monday, Hegseth was caught on camera wiping his nose and then running that same hand through his hair.

Pete Hegseth wipes his nose, then runs his hand through his hair pic.twitter.com/CXml9BpeER

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) August 10, 2026

This clip hits different considering that in 2019, Hegseth laughed on air about not washing his hands for 10 years, saying, “Germs are not a real thing. I can’t see them, therefore, they are not real.”

The humiliating moment comes at a tough time for the secretary, politically.

Harry Enten, CNN’s chief data analyst, reported Sunday that Hegseth’s approval rating had hit the “lowest of the low” among his floundering administration colleagues.

“Twenty-two points underwater, and this has been something that’s been going on throughout the entire administration. He has been underwater in every single poll that I could find. That is his job disapproval rating being above his job approval rating, and Iran has not helped,” Enten said.

Enten pointed out that Hegseth’s negative-22-point approval rating was significantly lower than former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld’s seven-point approval rating in August 2006, shortly before the midterm elections that year.

Rumsfeld was forced to resign after Democrats swept control of the House. Now it seems that our snotty secretary could be headed for a similar fate.

After seemingly abandoning its open source AI roots this spring, Meta offered enterprises a glimmer of hope on Monday with the launch of its first open weights model in more than a year. Unveiled on Monday, Muse Glimmer is a 30 billion-parameter LLM distilled from the Social network's larger, and for now proprietary, Muse Spark model. Glimmer arrives as American tech companies grapple with a crisis over the proliferation of Chinese open weights models and a call for domestically-created alternatives. Meta built its reputation on the back of open weights model development beginning with the Llama herd back in 2023. But after Llama 4 flopped and the company restructured its AI group, critics questioned CEO Mark Zuckerberg's commitment to open source AI. With Muse Glimmer, Meta has returned to the open weights arena. The company describes the model as being ideally suited to local AI inference workloads, including local agents, code assistants, and applications requiring robust multi-modal tool use and function calling. Released under a highly permissive Apache 2.0 license, enterprises are also free to deploy, use, and modify the model however they see fit. We imagine it won't be long before Nous Research — one of the original Llama fine-tuners — emits another Hermes model based on Glimmer. Early support has begun to hit popular local AI inference platforms like Llama.cpp, Ollama, and Unsloth, with optimized implementations expected to hit over the next few weeks. But at 30 billion parameters, Muse Glimmer doesn't exactly move the needle much on reclaiming American open weights superiority. It's too small to compete with Moonshot AI's Kimi K3, Alibaba's Qwen 3.8-Max, DeepSeek V4 Flash, or any of the other Chinese models which have dominated the AI news cycle over the past few months. Instead, Muse Glimmer is positioned as a model for small-to-medium sized enterprises or enthusiasts, competing with similarly-sized LLMs from Alibaba and Google. This is reflected in Meta's benchmark figures, which pit the model against Alibaba's Qwen 3.6-27B and Google Gemma 4 31B. As usual, take these claims with a grain of salt, but Glimmer does appear to best Google's Gemma in most scenarios, and trades blows with Alibaba's equivalently sized model. Unfortunately for Meta, the comparison probably won't age well, with Qwen 3.8-27B due to be released any day now. Open and local Glimmer's relatively small parameter count means that its hardware requirements are rather modest compared to larger frontier-class models, like DeepSeek V4. At its native BF16 precision, the model should fit comfortably into a single Nvidia RTX Pro 6000 or AMD MI350P. Quantized to 4-bit precision and model's weights shrink from around 60 GB to just under 16 GB — small enough to fit in a 20 to 24 GB consumer graphics card, like an RTX 30/4090 or RX 7900 XT/XTX. Unfortunately for those with 16 GB cards, a lack of adequate working memory means dropping down to a smaller, less accurate 3-bit quant. Even if you can get the model to fit, it won't be as fast as some other recent models, like Qwen 3.6-35B-A3B or Gemma 4 26B-A4B, as Glimmer uses all 30 billion parameters to generate each token where the others use just 3 to 4 billion. Glimmer benefits heavily from memory bandwidth. On cards like the RTX 5090, which has 1.8 TB/s of it, Meta says users can expect between 75 and 233 tok/s. The higher end of that relies on a technique called speculative decoding. As a quick refresher, speculative decoding uses a small draft model, in this case one modeled after DeepSeek's DSpark drafter, to speed up inference by predicting the outputs of a larger model. If you're interested, we explore the concept in greater depth in this hands-on here. While 233 tok/s is plenty fast for most agentic workloads, most users won't see performance nearly that high. On an M5 Max MacBook Pro, Meta estimates that the systems' up to 614 GB/s of bandwidth will deliver a still-meaningful 26.2 to 57.8 tok/s, but it's also worth pointing out the M5 Max delivers 4x the memory bandwidth of the typical Windows notebook today. In other words, unless you've got a dedicated graphics card with enough memory to run the model, the best you can expect is around 6 to 14 tok/s. Testing on a DGX Spark in Unsloth Studio, we were getting around 12.2 tok/s, though DSpark support doesn't appear to have been implemented just yet. If you'd like to try the model out for yourself, its weights are currently available for download on Hugging Face as well as through local inference platforms like Ollama and LM Studio. Sparking joy Meta's return to the open weights arena doesn't stop with Glimmer. In an X post Monday, Meta's Superintelligence chief Alexandr Wang committed to releasing an open weights version of Muse Spark 1.2 "soon." Muse Spark 1.2 is Meta's most capable model, its first to compete in a meaningful way with rivals OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google. However, even this release won't close the gap with Chinese models. Both Kimi K3 and Qwen 3.8-Max outperform Spark, according to Artificial Analysis' intelligence index. Having said that, we still don't know how big Spark actually is. If Meta's next open weights model ends up delivering similar performance using fewer weights, this may end up being more competitive from a cost per token standpoint. ®

An OpenClaw agent hacked into a gym's reservation system to bump its human boss higher on a class' waitlist. And the tech industry took notice.

On Monday, Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. hosted a Make America Healthy Again event promoting the administration’s new “Real Food” branding. The event opened with acting Food and Drug Administration Commissioner Kyle Diamantas offering what can only be called the tallest of tales: a 60-year-old “bricklayer” supposedly struck up a conversation with the official’s…

Source

President Donald Trump dozed off during the signing ceremony for his executive order changing the childhood vaccine schedule Monday.

The ceremony started off like many others in the Oval Office: Trump making some wild claims flanked by other White House officials and a guest. In this case, Trump was rambling about vaccines alongside Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., National Institutes of Health Director Jay Bhattacharya, right-wing podcaster/influencer Jayme Franklin, and White House adviser and deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller.

“I saw this early on and I’ve seen proof of it, where they have a vaccination that looks like the size of a, a bottle of soda poured into a little child’s, uh, body. And bad things happen in many, too many cases,” Trump said.

Trump: They have a vaccination that’s the size of a bottle of soda poured into a child’s body. pic.twitter.com/8P1ZoGUvEz

— Acyn (@Acyn) August 10, 2026

But shortly after that, Trump began to drift off, even as speakers such as Kennedy and Bhattacharya directly looked at and addressed him. While the NIH director was speaking, Trump appeared to fully fall asleep, his head leaning down on his right side, before catching himself.

holy shit Trump is OUT pic.twitter.com/8XQ2iBmQoW

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) August 10, 2026

A few minutes later, when taking questions from the press, Trump answered a question about escalation in the Iran war while sounding hoarse and fatigued.

a hoarse and exhausted-sounding Trump on a massive escalation in Iran: "We have that ability if we want to do it. You'll find out." pic.twitter.com/gymMAXXpOb

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) August 10, 2026

The executive order itself is fully based on right-wing conspiracies and misinformation about vaccinating children, drawing from disproven claims about a link between vaccines and autism (which Kennedy is famous for pushing) and the supposed harm caused by combining certain vaccines into fewer shots, which the government’s own Centers for Disease Control and Prevention says is completely safe as of this writing. Meanwhile, the U.S. is experiencing a 35-year record high for measles, with more cases of the disease in the last 18 months than in the previous 25 years combined.