Sad news from long-time Slashdot reader NormalVisual: Synthtopia reports that Dave Smith, founder of the legendary synthesizer manufacturer Sequential Circuits and creator of the MIDI (Musical Instrument Digital Interface) standard, died this past Wednesday.

Some of Smith's notable creations include the Prophet 5, one of the first commercially available digitally-controlled polyphonic analog synthesizers, and the Prophet-600, the first available device to offer MIDI...

Smith, who held degrees in both computer science and electronic engineering from UC Berkeley, was scheduled to appear at this year's National Association of Music Merchant (NAMM), but died suddenly. No cause of death has yet been released.
Smith's Wikipedia entry calls his 1977 Prophet 5 "the world's first microprocessor-based musical instrument" and a crucial step forward as a programmable synthesizer.

And this week Billboad magazine hailed Smith as "a key figure in the development of synth technology in the 1970s and 1980s." With Sequential (originally known as Sequential Circuits), Smith released various sequencers and programmers to be used with the Moog and ARP synthesizers prevalent at the time, before designing his own release: the Prophet-5, first polyphonic synth with programmable memory, to allow sounds to be stored and re-accessed at any time. The Prophet-5 quickly became the gold standard in its field, used in the recording both of epochal '80s blockbuster LPs like Michael Jackson's Thriller and Madonna's Like a Virgin and envelope-pushing scores for era composers like John Carpenter and Vangelis....

Smith's greatest legacy might be the introduction of MIDI to synth technology... Smith's invention (along with Roland pioneer Ikutaro Kakehashi and Sequential engineer Chet Wood) of MIDI allowed unprecedented levels of synchronization and communication between different instruments, computers and other recording equipment, which was previously incredibly difficult to achieve — particularly between equipment designed by separate manufacturers. The innovation of MIDI helped facilitate the explosion of forward-thinking programming and creativity throughout the industry of the '80s, essentially making the future of pop music accessible to all.

Smith would also develop the world's first computer synthesizer as president of Seer Systems in the '90s, and launched the company Dave Smith Instruments, an instruments manufacturer, in 2002. He has won many lifetime awards for his work in the field of musical technology, including a Technical Grammy for MIDI's creation in 2013 (an honor he shared with Kakehashi).

French officials are continuing their centuries-long battle to preserve the purity of the language, overhauling the rules on using English video game jargon. From a report: While some expressions find obvious translations -- "pro-gamer" becomes "joueur professionnel" -- others seem a more strained, as "streamer" is transformed into "joueur-animateur en direct." The culture ministry, which is involved in the process, told AFP the video game sector was rife with anglicisms that could act as "a barrier to understanding" for non-gamers. France regularly issues dire warnings of the debasement of its language from across the Channel, or more recently the Atlantic. Government officials must replace words such as "e-sports" and "streaming" with approved French versions, the new rule says.

Would you drink a glass of Klingon Blood Wine? Or Cardassian Kanar Red Blend? Maybe you'd prefer the Andorian Blue Premium Chardonnay, or the United Federation of Planets Special Reserve Sauvignon Blanc...

Star Trek wines — a collaboration between CBS Consumer Products and Wines That Rock — has now added those four new flavors to their original two (which Ars Technica described as "far better than we expected, although very much over-priced.") So Ars hosted a wine tasting including the new wines, with their six testers joining "Q himself — aka actor John de Lancie." Also taste-testing was The Orville writer Andre Bormanis (a former science advisor for Star Trek: The Next Generation, Deep Space Nine, Voyager and Enterprise).

"Wine assessments were anonymous, in keeping with the gathering's super-casual vibe. And the wine was purchased out of pocket, not gifted for promotional purposes."

They'd tried this once before in 2019. Their three-year mission? To explore strange new wines... Next up: A Bordeaux blend from Chateau Picard (although the label claims it's a 2386 vintage to keep the conceit going): 85 percent cabernet and 15 percent merlot. As I noted [in 2019], this is a bona fide winery, with a centuries-old vineyard in the St.-Estephe region. It just so happens that Jean-Luc Picard's family has long run a fictional vineyard of the same name, albeit in the Burgundy region rather than Bordeaux — it features prominently in Picard. The real winery agreed to collaborate on a special edition of their cru bourgeois vintage for the Star Trek collection.

The Bordeaux blend also came out on top with the 2022 tasting crew, who declared it "perfectly quaffable" and "surprisingly good." The wine is light and dry, "easy on the palate," with "a clean finish," and fairly well balanced. It's almost as if Bordeaux wine makers have had centuries of experience to draw upon. This was the only bottle the tasting crew polished off completely.

Alas, the four new varieties in the Star Trek wine collection fall far, far short of their predecessors....

I will give the Star Trek Wine folks props for creative bottle design, especially the corkscrew shape of the Cardassian blend. The broad consensus was that the Klingon Blood Wine is trying to be a pinot noir and falling short; it's basically a very fruity California cabernet, with perhaps a hint of pepper. "Whoever supplied this blood ate nothing but fruit salad the week prior," one taster noted, with another simply writing, "Way too sweet." The most generous assessment was that it is "drinkable but not extraordinary...."

With the evergreen caveat that taste in wine is highly subjective, here's our recommendation. Stick with the original two bottles for your Star Trek wine, or save yourself some money and get something comparable for a fraction of the price — unless, of course, you're really keen to collect the whole set of unusual bottle designs. Or you're a Cardassian who loves really sweet wine.
Meanwhile, William Shatner himself is raising money for charity by auctioning off a bottle of "James T. Kirk" whiskey — the actual prop used on Star Trek: Picard. "The bottle does not contain real Bourbon just a colored liquid," its description notes — but the bottle has actually been autographed by 91-year-old Shatner.

CNET reviews Obi-Wan Kenobi, the new six-episode miniseries premiering today on Disney+ It's a question that's vexed Star Wars fans for decades: How did the bad guys not find Luke Skywalker when he was literally hiding in his father's old home? New Disney Plus miniseries Obi-Wan Kenobi, streaming now, will reveal the answer. But the real question is, can a minor continuity error actually be stretched out to create an entire TV series worth your time?

And is there really a compelling story to be told when you already know how it turns out?

Thankfully, on the strength of the first two episodes — both available to stream on Disney Plus today, followed by further installments each Wednesday — the answer appears to be yes. Obi-Wan Kenobi (the show) is an assured, pacey and exciting new series with a great cast, from creators who know how to use familiar elements — and, crucially, how to hold some back — in a story that is, most importantly, character-driven....

With blaster battles and bounty hunter droids and sneering Imperials, it's all satisfyingly Star Wars, with some nifty worldbuilding like battered drug dealers and a poignant cameo that stops Obi-Wan in his tracks. On top of that are fun new characters — look out for Flea from the Red Hot Chilli Peppers, plus Kumail Nanjiani clearly having the time of his life — combined with compelling conflicts for the characters we know.

It turns out even when you think he's a beaten man, Obi-Wan Kenobi still has a few tricks up his sleeve.
CNET describes Kenobi's character — played again by Ewan McGregor — as "hugely compelling.... a broken war veteran who not only lost a surrogate son but also saw his whole civilization fall to darkness," in a series set just before the original Star Wars movie (Episode 4: A New Hope) — so, just after Revenge of the Sith.

"More than any recent Star Wars shows, it's built from Star Wars at its best (the original film) and Star Wars at its worst (the overblown, computer-effects-blighted prequel trilogy)."

An anonymous reader shares a report: With the 2020 release of the Xbox Series X and PlayStation 5, we've started to see the era of console games that finally make full use of TVs capable of 4K resolutions (i.e., "Ultra HD" 3840x2160 pixels) that have become increasingly popular in the marketplace. Now, though, at least one TV manufacturer is already planning to support 8K-capable consoles (i.e., 7680x4320 resolution) that it thinks could launch in the next year or two.

Polish gaming site PPL reports on a recent public presentation by Chinese TV and electronics maker TCL. Tucked away in a slide during that presentation is a road map for what TCL sees as "Gen 9.5" consoles coming in 2023 or '24. Those supposed consoles -- which the slide dubs the PS5 Pro and "New Xbox Series S/X" -- will be capable of pushing output at 8K resolution and up to 120 frames per second, according to TCL's slide.

Industry trade group the National Cable Television Cooperative (NCTC) could be dropping the "cable" moniker as it eyes a potential name change. Fierce Video reports: A trademark application filed by NCTC on May 17 shows one proposal for a new name: National Content & Technology Cooperative. An NCTC spokesperson confirmed to Fierce that the organization will be changing its name, but said it is considering a large number of options and hasn't yet settled on a final decision. The spokesperson noted it's taking time to register potential names, but some of the other choices on the table include simply "NCTC," "NCTC Online" or even sticking with its current brand of the National Cable Television Cooperative. [...] According to the application, it appears NCTC is also considering losing the image of a coaxial cable that's currently featured in its logo.

So why the potential shift away from cable? One factor could be that the industry has clearly changed since NCTC formed in 1984, with cable operators in recent years deemphasizing traditional video offerings. The "Cable Television" part of the group's name is becoming less accurate over time, said Brett Sappington, VP of Interpret. "Broadband, not television, is the cash cow for the cable industry," he told Fierce Video. "Many of the organization's members are actually moving away from offering their own video service and are, instead, focusing on broadband bundled with streaming services." [...] Along with industry changes come some shifts in perception as well. "Cable TV doesn't necessarily have a positive connotation today," Sappington noted. "In fact, many online TV services such as Sling TV or FuboTV emphasize why consumers should 'drop cable' and go with their services instead," he continued.

Researchers may have pinpointed the source of a famous supposed alien broadcast discovered nearly a half century ago. Space.com reports: The prominent and still-mysterious Wow! Signal, which briefly blared in a radio telescope the night of Aug. 15, 1977, may have come from a sun-like star located 1,800 light-years away in the constellation Sagittarius. "The Wow! Signal is considered the best SETI (or the search for extraterrestrial intelligence) candidate radio signal that we have picked up with our telescopes," Alberto Caballero, an amateur astronomer, told Live Science. [...] The Wow! Signal most likely came from some kind of natural event and not aliens, Caballero told Live Science, though astronomers have ruled out a few possible origins like a passing comet. Still, Caballero noted that in our infrequent attempts to say hello to E.T., humans have mostly produced one-time broadcasts, such as the Arecibo message sent toward the globular star cluster M13 in 1974. The Wow! Signal may have been something similar, he added.

Knowing that the Big Ear telescope's two receivers were pointing in the direction of the constellation Sagittarius on the night of the Wow! Signal, Caballero decided to search through a catalog of stars from the European Space Agency's Gaia satellite to look for possible candidates. "I found specifically one sun-like star," he said, an object designated 2MASS 19281982-2640123 about 1,800 light-years away that has a temperature, diameter and luminosity almost identical to our own stellar companion. Caballero's findings appeared May 6 in the International Journal of Astrobiology. "I think this is perfectly worth doing because we want to point our instruments in the direction of things we think are interesting," Rebecca Charbonneau, a historian who studies SETI at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics and who wasn't involved in the work, told Live Science. "There are billions of stars in the galaxy, and we have to figure out some way to narrow them down," she added.

But she wonders if looking for only sun-like stars is too limiting. "Why not just look at a bunch of stars?" she asked.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from TorrentFreak: The ordeal of three people, who edited major movies down to 10 minutes and then uploaded those summaries to YouTube, is not over yet. After being arrested and found guilty in a criminal court last year, they now face action in the civil courts. A total of 13 companies including Toei, Kadokawa, Nikkatsu, and Fuji, say they are entitled to at least $3.9 million in copyright damages. [...] Clear indications of how seriously the anti-piracy groups and media companies are taking this action were on display after the lawsuit was filed last week. A press conference was held in Tokyo with a representative of CODA and three attorneys present to answer questions on the case.

Those present, including CODA director Takero Goto, highlighted that the three defendants committed criminal acts when they uploaded the movie edits and then profited from advertising revenue. The civil action aims to underline those convictions with a strong message that rightsholders will not allow people to free-ride on creators' content without facing significant financial consequences. The overall message is one of deterrence coupled with the reaffirmation of copyright law, Goto said.

More than one in 10 cases of coronary heart disease could be prevented if people reduced their TV viewing to less than an hour a day, research suggests. From a report: Coronary heart disease occurs when fatty material builds up inside the coronary arteries causing them to narrow, reducing the heart's blood supply. Researchers say cutting down on time spent in front of the TV could lower the risk of developing the disease. "Reducing time spent watching TV should be recognised as a key behavioural target for prevention of coronary heart disease, irrespective of genetic susceptibility and traditional risk markers," said Dr Youngwon Kim, an assistant professor at the University of Hong Kong and an author of the research.

While the team did not look at what was behind the association, Kim said previous studies had found excessive TV viewing time is associated with adverse levels of cholesterol and glucose in the body. "Unfavourable levels of these cardiometabolic risk markers may then lead to increased risk of developing coronary heart disease," he said. Writing in the journal BMC Medicine, Kim and colleagues report how they used data from 373,026 white British people aged 40-69 who were part of an endeavour known as the UK Biobank study.

"62-year-old Val Kilmer was just 26 when he played Iceman in the 1986 movie Top Gun," remembers long-time Slashdot reader destinyland.

But in 2015 Kilmer lost his voice to throat cancer, remembers Parade: In his 2020 memoir I'm Your Huckleberry, Kilmer joked that he has less of a frog in his throat and more of a "buffalo." He said, "Speaking, once my joy and lifeblood, has become an hourly struggle."

Kilmer has teamed up with Sonantic, a U.K.-based software firm that uses artificial intelligence to copy voices for actors and production studios, to replicate his speech, using old recordings of his voice and existing footage. Kilmer elaborates on the process of finding his voice again through AI in a video posted to YouTube in August 2021. In his new AI-enhanced voice, which does indeed emulate the speech audiences are familiar with, Kilmer says: "People around me struggle to understand me when I'm talking, but despite all that, I still feel I'm the exact same person, still the same creative soul. A soul that dreams ideas and stories constantly.

"But now I can express myself again, I can bring these dreams to you, and show you this part of myself once more. A part that was never truly gone, just hiding away."

Kilmer's health struggles, his childhood tragedies and his ambitious career were recently documented in the acclaimed 2021 feature-length doc Val, now streaming on Amazon Prime Video. Top Gun: Maverick screened at the Cannes Film Festival to rapturous reviews, with thunderous fanfare including an air show. Though reports say audiences gave the action picture (currently sitting at a 97% on Rotten Tomatoes) a five-minute standing ovation, with audible responses throughout the picture, mainly at the groundbreaking stunt work, it's also been reported an audience-favorite scene is the "overwhelming" emotional response to the reunion of Tom Cruise and Kilmer.

Long-time Slashdot reader destinyland writes: Today sees an event celebrating the 50th anniversary of 1970s children's programming giants Sid & Marty Krofft. (Born in 1929, Sid Krofft will turn 93 in July). And reportedly Marty Krofft has now partnered with NFT producer Orange Comet "in a multiyear contract to release NFTs based on the often enigmatic and much-beloved television shows they have brought to us since 1969."

The first one commemorates Land of the Lost — dropping sometime after September.

Today I learned their big break in America came from making puppets for Dean Martin's show, followed by designing and directing the Banana Splits and a string of successful children's shows on Saturday mornings. ( Land of the Lost, H.R. Pufunstuf, Lidsville, Sigmund and the Sea Monsters...) Looking back, Krofft muses that even today somewhere in New York City, "some guy 50 years old, remembers the damn theme songs. Because there were only three networks, so basically every kid in America saw our shows." In the article Marty Krofft describes their style as "a nightmare and bizarre" — or, more pragmatically, as "Disney without a budget" (while crediting future Disney CEO Michael Eisner for being their mentor).

Yet the article adds that "They were nearly unstoppable with styrofoam, paint and cloth. In a digital universe of truly endless possibilities, there is no telling where they could take their stories."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from CNET: Jokes, sarcasm and humor require understanding the subtleties of language and human behavior. When a comedian says something sarcastic or controversial, usually the audience can discern the tone and know it's more of an exaggeration, something that's learned from years of human interaction. But PaLM, or Pathways Language Model, learned it without being explicitly trained on humor and the logic of jokes. After being fed two jokes, it was able to interpret them and spit out an explanation. In a blog post, Google shows how PaLM understands a novel joke not found on the internet.

Understanding dad jokes isn't the end goal for Alphabet, parent company to Google. The capability to parse the nuances of natural language and queries means that Google can get answers to complex questions faster and more accurately across more languages and peoples. This, in turn, can break down barriers and move humans away from communicating with machines through predetermined means and instead more seamlessly interact. This can include answering questions in one language by finding information in another or writing code to a program as a person is speaking into the model with a specific task.

PaLM is Google's largest AI model to date and trained on 540 billion parameters. It can generate code from text, answer a math word problem and explain a joke. It does this through chain-of-thought prompting, which can describe multi-step problems as a series of intermediate steps. On stage, Pichai described it as a teacher giving a step-by-step example to help a student understand how to solve a problem. If what Pichai said on stage is accurate, Google has essentially leapfrogged over Star Trek and 400 years of fictional AI development, as evidenced by the character Data, who never truly understood the subtleties of humor. More so, it seems that Google has caught up with TARS from the movie Interstellar, which takes place in the year 2090, an AI that was so adept at humor that Matthew McConaughey's character told it to tune it down.

Vangelis, the Greek composer and musician whose synth-driven work brought huge drama to film soundtracks including Blade Runner and Chariots of Fire, has died aged 79. The Guardian reports: Born Evangelos Odysseas Papathanassiou in 1943, Vangelis won an Oscar for his 1981 Chariots of Fire soundtrack. Its uplifting piano motif became world-renowned, and reached No 1 in the US charts, as did the accompanying soundtrack album. [...] Chariots of Fire became inextricable from Vangelis's timeless theme, and the music became synonymous with slow-motion sporting montages. "My music does not try to evoke emotions like joy, love, or pain from the audience. It just goes with the image, because I work in the moment," he later explained. His score to Blade Runner is equally celebrated for its evocation of a sinister future version of Los Angeles, where robots and humans live awkwardly alongside one another, through the use of long, malevolent synth notes; saxophones and lush ambient passages enhance the film's romantic and poignant moments. "It has turned out to be a very prophetic film -- we're living in a kind of Blade Runner world now," he said in 2005.

Later in the decade he scored the Palme d'Or-winning Costa-Gavras political drama Missing, starring Jack Lemmon; the Mel Gibson and Anthony Hopkins drama The Bounty; and the Mickey Rourke-starring Francesco. He worked again with the Blade Runner director, Ridley Scott, on 1992 film 1492: Conquest of Paradise, and elsewhere during the 1990s, soundtracked Roman Polanski's Bitter Moon and documentaries by Jacques Cousteau. [...] A fascination with outer space found voice in 2016's Rosetta, dedicated to the space probe of the same name, and Nasa appointed his 1993 piece Mythodea (which he claimed to have written in an hour) as the official music of the Mars Odyssey mission of 2001. His final album, 2021's Juno to Jupiter, was inspired by the Nasa probe Juno and featured recordings of its launch and the workings of the probe itself in outer space.

Netflix lost 200,000 subscribers last quarter and potentially two million this current period, according to a note to shareholders from last month. Now, new research highlights that the number of long-standing subscribers canceling Netflix rose precipitously in the past few years. 9to5Mac reports: The data provided by the research firm Antenna to The Information shows that people who had been subscribers for more than three years accounted for just 5% of total cancelations at the start of 2022, while it hit 13% in the first quarter of 2022: "Newbie subscribers, meantime, accounted for only 60% of cancellations in the quarter, down from 64% in the fourth quarter. Also in the first quarter, overall cancellations rose to 3.6 million people, compared with around 2.5 million in each of the preceding five quarters. Antenna says it draws its data from a panel of 5 million Americans who anonymously contribute their streaming subscriptions."

While Netflix is losing ground, the streaming market as a whole is gaining more subscribers, and Antenna's data suggest a connection between the price increase and Netflix's subscriber losses: "'Consumers vote with their wallets on a monthly basis, and now there are just more viable candidates on the ballot,' said Brendan Brady, media and entertainment lead at Antenna. Also, since many entertainment companies, like NBCUniversal and Disney, have pulled their shows off Netflix and put them on their own services, Netflix has had to rely more on its originals, which have been hit or miss, he said."

Napster has been acquired again, this time by two companies from the web3 sector: Hivemind and Algorand. "Dear friends, we are excited to share that we've taken Napster Group private, and to bring the iconic music brand to web3," wrote Hivemind founder Matt Zhang on LinkedIn. From a report: "Volatile market and uncertain times often bring exciting opportunities. At Hivemind, we believe in developing thesis and building enduring value. Music x Web3 is one of the most exciting spaces we've come across, and we are thrilled to work with Emmy Lovell and many talents to unlock value for the entire ecosystem and revolutionize how artists and fans enjoy music."

Lovell has been named interim CEO of Napster, with the former WMG exec stepping up from her previous role as chief strategy officer, having joined the company in April 2021 shortly after its last acquisition by music VR company MelodyVR. The newly-merged company then delisted from the AIM stock exchange in the UK as part of its plan to relaunch a hybrid music streaming / video / VR service later this year, and then go public again in the US. The new owners appear to be pivoting that strategy with a web3 focus. There will be plenty to unpack around these plans. For example, Hivemind and Algorand aren't the only companies involved: they have an 'investor consortium' that includes ATC Management, BH Digital and G20 Ventures.

According to Variety, a new series of "Black Mirror" is in the works at Netflix. From the report: It's been almost three years since Season 5 of the dystopian drama premiered on the streaming service in June 2019, but sources indicate that a new anthology series of "Black Mirror" is shaping up, and casting is now underway. While details about specific stories are being kept under lock and key, Variety understands that Season 6 will have more episodes than Season 5, which comprised of just three instalments and starred Andrew Scott, Anthony Mackie, Yahya Abdul-Mateen II, Topher Grace and Miley Cyrus. A source close to the production tells Variety that the latest season is even more cinematic in scope, with each installment being treated as an individual film. This is, of course, in line with recent seasons of "Black Mirror," for which episodes usually exceeded 60 minutes and had incredibly high production values.

Netflix is going live for the first time. From a report: Deadline understands that the streamer is exploring the launch of live streaming. It plans to roll out the capability, which Netflix confirmed was in the early stages of development, for its swathe of unscripted shows and stand-up specials. It would mean that Netflix would be able to use it for live voting for competition series and talent contests such as its upcoming dance competition series Dance 100 from The Circle producer Studio Lambert. Similarly, it could use it if it decides to bring back its Netflix Is A Joke festival. The live comedy event featured around 300 stand-up performances across LA including Dave Chappelle, Larry David and Pete Davidson. Many of the shows were being filmed with plans to air around 12 of them on the service. In future, it could potentially air shows live, albeit with a few seconds delay in case things get saucy.

Electronic Arts and Middle-earth Enterprises "announced on Monday an upcoming free mobile game called The Lord of the Rings: Heroes of Middle-earth," reports CNET: With the role-playing game, Lord of the Rings fans can look forward to experiencing the iconic universe in a whole new way.... The game will feature immersive storytelling with iconic plot lines, turn-based combat and a selection of characters from both The Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit to battle the evils of Middle-earth.

"The team is filled with fans of The Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit and each day they bring their tremendous passion and talents together to deliver an authentic experience for players," Malachi Boyle, vice president of mobile RPG for Electronic Arts, said in a statement. "The combination of high-fidelity graphics, cinematic animations, and stylized art immerses players in the fantasy of Middle-earth where they'll go head-to-head with their favorite characters."

The site GeekyTyrant is excited about Amazon's upcoming eight-episode series The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power — premiering September 2 and set in Middle-earth's "Second Age," thousands of years before the events of The Hobbit and The Lord Of The Rings.) With the film being set in a completely different age, I was expecting Middle-Earth to be very different than what we've seen in the past. As we've seen in the first trailer that was released, the show does has a similar visual style as Peter Jackson's films, but things are definitely going to be different.

During a recent interview with Empire, Rings Of Power concept artist John Howe, teased some of the surprises that are in store:

"This isn't the Middle-earth you remember. This is a world that's very vibrant. The elves are not hidden away in Mirkwood or lingering in Rivendell. They're busy constructing kingdoms. The dwarven kingdom of Moria is not an abandoned mine and the Grey Havens is not yet an abandoned city. I loved having the opportunity to explore that unseen history."

He went on to share that the series will finally explore the oceans of Middle-Earth and says that there will be a set of seafaring elves.
Or, as Amazon's press release puts it, The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power "will take viewers back to an era in which great powers were forged, kingdoms rose to glory and fell to ruin, unlikely heroes were tested, hope hung by the finest of threads, and the greatest villain that ever flowed from Tolkien's pen threatened to cover all the world in darkness...."

The Independent notes the show "has been in the works since 2017" — and that Prime Video bought the rights for $250m (£183m). And now Prime Video has even invited some JRR Tolkien fans to attent a preview screening of the show: [F]ans of Middle Earth were nervous ahead of sitting down to watch footage from the show — but those nerves soon made way for excitement, with fans praising the series as well as the showrunners, JD Payne and Patrick McKay.... Fan Dr Maggie Parke said that the showrunners "kept up with the best of us", stating: "Their passion & knowledge made me feel like they were one of us, they get it. I'm feeling very optimistic...!"
The newspaper quotes another preview attendee's conclusion that ""We, as Tolkien fans, are in good hands! Above and beyond, I was absolutely blown away. I cannot wait to see more — it's just beyond words."

"After they broke up four decades ago, ABBA famously refused all kinds of money for reunion ABBA-tars and performances," writes Rolling Stone.

"But a few years ago, British entrepreneur Simon Fuller pitched an idea that piqued the Swedish superstars' interest..." "We got sort of turned on by the thought that we could actually be onstage without us being there," ABBA singer-songwriter Benny Andersson says over Zoom.

The band, along with Fuller and their producers Ludvig Andersson (Benny Andersson's son) and Svana Gisla (music-video producer for the likes of Radiohead and Beyoncé), initially explored reproducing themselves by hologram technology, but that didn't pan out. They finally realized a grander dream: ABBA Voyage, the 196-show concert residency at newly built ABBA Arena in London's Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park that begins May 27. Made with help from George Lucas' Industrial Light & Magic, digital avatars (also known as ABBA-tars) embody the stars in their Seventies prime, performing a 22-song set alongside a flesh-and-blood backing band assembled by James Righton of the Klaxons and including U.K. singer Little Boots on keys....

The band and the team and ILM realized early on that an existing venue wasn't going to work for the residency. There are 1,000 visual-effects artists on ABBA Voyage, making it the biggest project ILM has done, according to Gisla (and this is the company behind Star Wars, Marvel, and Jurassic Park). The roof of ABBA Arena was reengineered three times to fit the complicated lighting system. Where many concerts might use only one lighting rig, this one uses 20.

There was a lot of work put into making the ABBA-tars — which, the band stresses, are not holograms, but digital versions of the members that look like real, physical performers. Not too long before the pandemic put things to a near-halt, the four members of ABBA met from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. each day, for four and half weeks straight, performing for 200 cameras and a crew of nearly 40 people while wearing motion-capture suits. They posted up in a sound studio within the Swedish Film Institute, playing all the songs they had carefully curated for their first show in 40 years. "It was really a pleasure for all of us," Andersson says.

Back in London, body doubles emulated the performances, but with a younger energy. "We are sort of merged together with our body doubles. Don't ask me how it works because I can't explain that," Andersson continues. "If you're 75, you don't jump around like you did when you were 34, so this is why this happened."
Producer Ludvig Andersson adds: "We hear often, 'This is the dawn of a new era in live entertainment.' I think that's an incorrect statement. I don't think it is. This is unique."