In 1987, Richard Greenhill, a British photographer who was fascinated by (but had no actual training in) robotics, decided he wanted to build a life-size humanoid that could do useful things, like carrying luggage. He was working at a startup called Intergalactic Robots, but he couldn’t convince anyone there to build such a machine, so he set about building one himself, in his attic.

To help with his project, he organized a weekly get-together of a dozen or so like-minded folks. Every Wednesday night, his wife, Sally, would make a big pot of spaghetti, and the group would tinker with components scavenged from old printers and picked up from junkyards. They called themselves the Shadow Group. They eventually constructed several different robots, but their main project was the two-legged Shadow Walker.

In 1987, photographer Richard Greenhill organized a weekly gathering of DIY enthusiasts to work on projects in his attic, including the Shadow Walker. Richard Greenhill and David Buckley

Greenhill’s friend David Buckley, a robotics and animatronics expert he’d met at Intergalactic, sketched out a rough design based on medical textbooks of human bone structure and muscle movement. The robot’s skeleton, made of maple, was greatly simplified—only one bone in the lower leg and a single wide toe on each foot. The ankle’s double-axis design allowed for two degrees of movement. The knee had no complicating kneecap.

Greenhill didn’t want the robot to use motors, so its movement was controlled using compressed air to extend and contract 28 “air-muscles”—his version of a McKibben muscle, invented in the 1950s to mimic musculature with pneumatics. The muscles were connected to the bones across eight joints (hips, knees, ankles, toes), which provided 12 degrees of freedom.

RELATED: The Short, Strange Life of the First Friendly Robot

The robot’s headless torso held the control valves, electronics, and computer interfaces. It stood 168 centimeters tall and 46 cm wide and weighed about 38 kilograms. The group managed to get the robot to stand up reliably and balance itself; it could even regain its center if pushed a little. But walking turned out to be more of a challenge.

Rich Walker joined the group as a teenager and began writing software to get the robot to stand. He was particularly interested in using neural networks to solve balancing problems, although he ran into a number of hardware obstacles, including the unreliability of the sensors and the valves, and the robot’s overall fragility. Over time, Walker and the team developed a standard library of routines to control the robot. Walker wrote a detailed description of the Shadow Walker in 1999, which is available on David Buckley’s website.

The 1st International Robot Olympics

By the time the Shadow Group began developing Shadow Walker, engineers in academia and industry had been working on robotics for several decades. The world’s first industrial robot, the Unimate, debuted in 1961, and in 1967 Donald Michie and others began building a series of Freddy robots to investigate machine intelligence. The IEEE created its first dedicated robotics organization in 1984 when it established the IEEE Robotics and Automation Council, which became the IEEE Robotics and Automation Society in 1987. Also in 1987, the nonprofit International Federation of Robotics was established to promote research, development, use, and cooperation in the field of robotics.

As Shadow Walker pushed the limits for a DIY humanoid robot, industrial humanoids were also gaining ground. In 1986, Honda began working on its experimental (E-series) and later the prototype (P-series) humanoid robots, finally unveiling the P2 in 1996. The P2 stood 183 cm tall and weighed 210 kg. It was the first humanoid capable of stable, autonomous walking. This work eventually led to the development of the groundbreaking ASIMO.

Greenhill’s friend, roboticist David Buckley, consulted medical textbooks to create Shadow Walker’s humanoid design.Richard Greenhill and David Buckley

In the late 1980s, the public was both fascinated and horrified by the potential of robots. Businesses saw robots as a way to increase productivity, while workers worried they would take their jobs. Children viewed them as wondrous toys, while people with disabilities embraced them as tools of liberation. Military experts hoped robots would fight wars without endangering human soldiers, while politicians pondered if robots might eventually get to vote. Philosophers thought robots could challenge our notions of intelligence (and stupidity), while the religious struggled with concerns about the human race in a robot-dominated future.

Shadow Walker’s simplified anatomy included only one bone in the lower leg and a single wide toe on each foot.Science Museum Group

Peter Mowforth, cofounder of the Turing Institute in Glasgow, noted these disparate visions for robots when he announced the 1st International Robot Olympics, to be held in 27 and 28 September 1990 and hosted by the Turing Institute and the University of Strathclyde. The Olympics would round up the world’s best robots and showcase them head-to-head.

Mowforth himself thought all of the competing visions of robots were overblown. Steeped in machine learning research and robotics development, he knew firsthand the limitations of the state of the art: Robots rarely worked as intended, easily broke down, and glitched over seemingly trivial problems. He envisioned the Robot Olympics as a testbed to assess what the latest generation of robots could and could not do.

At the 1990 Robot Olympics, held in Glasgow, Shadow Walker wore pants to conceal its pneumatic “air-muscles” from competitors.Adam Hart-Davis/Science Source

The call for participation was wide open. Instead of having predetermined categories of competition, the organizers opted to see who applied to compete and then group them based on their claimed capabilities. In addition to picking the winners of individual events, the judges would select an overall Olympic champion based on the quality of the hardware, the sophistication of behavior, and novelty. Other prizes were given for young competitors, technologies that showed commercial potential, and design. In the end, more than 50 robots were entered, from a mix of universities, industry, and hobbyist groups from Canada, France, India, Japan, Mexico, the Soviet Union, the United States, the United Kingdom, and Yugoslavia.

There were plenty of disappointments. Trolleyman, a golf-cart-like wheeled robot, suffered a power failure while carrying the opening Olympic torch through the streets of Glasgow. The pile rug in the arena tripped up many robots that had been trained only on flat, smooth floors. David Buckley later concluded that the events were too difficult, and that the Olympics didn’t push development forward.

Of course, there were winners. In a surprise triumph for vintage technology, the fully mechanical 19th-century Japanese Archer from the Museum of Automata in York, England, won gold in javelin, beating out competitors more than 100 years its junior. The overall Olympic Champion was Yamabico, Shoji Suzuki’s entry from the University of Tsukuba, in Japan, which won bronze in obstacle avoidance and gold in wall following, but was disqualified in the talking category for not speaking English.

The Shadow Group had high hopes for Shadow Walker. Unfortunately, though, it failed to take a step, and the biped race was won by the Cardiff University Biped. Shadow Walker now resides in the collections of the Science Museum in London.

The Legacy of Shadow Walker

In 1997, a paying customer in search of a robotic leg compelled the Shadow Group to get serious and become a registered company. Shadow Robot is now Britain’s oldest robotics company. Rich Walker, who had left the Shadow Group to earn a B.A. in mathematics and a diploma in computer science at the University of Cambridge, joined Shadow Robot in 1999 as technical director. Today he’s the director of the company.

Shadow Robot specializes in durable robot hands rather than walking robots. But the focus on hands is also a legacy of the Shadow Group. Walker remembers that the Shadow Group’s first humanoid hand in the late 1990s was impressive simply for being able to pick up a pint of beer (a smooth-sided, thin-walled glass). Today, Shadow Robot’s hands are testbeds for dexterity. Gone are the pneumatic muscles, replaced by actuators that move each finger with precision. The classic model contains 20 motors, allowing for abductive and adductive movement with 24 degrees of freedom.

Shadow Walker’s operator wore a data suit that captured his movements and allowed the robot to copy them.Richard Greenhill

In a recent blog post, Sejal Parsotomo, senior marketing executive at Shadow Robot, wrote that while humanoid robots are great for public relations, specialized dexterity is key for success: A robot that can walk into your factory may be impressive, but a robot that can reliably manipulate objects is transformative.

In its struggles to take more than a few steps, the Shadow Walker showed the inherent difficulty that robots had in mastering even low-level skills. In August 2025, Beijing hosted the World Humanoid Robot Games. Competing in sports such as gymnastics, soccer, and track events, as well as more “useful” tasks like hotel cleaning and sorting medicine, these robots could literally have run circles around the competitors in the first Robot Olympics 35 years earlier. And yet, there is still so much work needed in order for robots to navigate the human-built environment. Despite the astonishing progress, we’re still not all that close to actually useful humanoid robots.

Part of a continuing series looking at historical artifacts that embrace the boundless potential of technology.

An abridged version of this article appears in the June 2026 print issue as “Learning to Walk.”

Quentin Dupieux brought his first animated feature, called La Vertige, to the Directors’ Fortnight this year. It closed the section on May 21 and left audiences laughing at something that looked pulled straight from a 1998 console. The movie runs 67 minutes and puts its entire premise on display through the images themselves. Jacques heads to his friend Bruno’s place with big news. He has become convinced that everyday life takes place inside a computer simulation.

Every character on screen is made up of a few flat shapes with dull edges, a visual throwback to the early days of 3D gaming characters. Their movements felt rigid and purposefully mechanical, similar to those found in older open world games that required simple controls to function. Faces are slapped onto basic head shapes, with little expressiveness. It’s a look that is highly influenced by the age of GTA Vice City and other games from the time. Dupieux and a few others developed the entire thing inside Blender, with the help of five recent art school graduates. They used an iPhone and a cheap motion-capture tool to record the actors’ performances, which they then slapped onto the low-detail models without using any expensive rendering farms.

PlayStation®5 console – 1TB

• PlayStation 5 Console – 1TB, includes wireless controller, 1TBSSD, Disc Drive, 2 Horizontal Stand Feet, HDMI cable, AC power cord, USB cable, printed…
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The essential idea here is that those constraints are intentional, and they play an important role in the comedy. A baker arrives with an extra finger at the end of his hand. A character’s skeleton is revealed in the middle of a high-stress situation. A birth scenario glides over all of the things we’d expect to see. Each of these bugs simply sort of…happens, and every time you see one, it’s more confirmation that the system isn’t quite up to par. By the time the characters notice, we, the audience, have already seen all of the proof.

As the story progresses, we meet a new character, a researcher who tries to explain everything in more detail. Time passes in fits and starts, as relationships change, and one character reappears years later with a new digital style that nonetheless adheres to the same fundamental structure we’ve seen throughout. The entire film revolves on the central idea that what people say about their surroundings does not always correspond to what we see in the photographs.

Dupieux has spent years experimenting with how far you can push this bizarre idea. The fact that we’re all viewing from the same constrained vantage point, with the same boring, low-poly figures as our characters, actually adds weight. They don’t pretend to be anything other than what they are: simple structures that move, communicate, and occasionally break. The film will be released in French theaters on June 10th, while the rest of us will have to wait and see.

ai + ml

Red Hat engineer reckons the balance of risk has shifted, but core code stays off limits

A key Linux virtualization component, QEMU, is considering relaxing its blanket ban on AI-generated contributions to allow limited assistance from the bots.

The suggestion came from Paolo Bonzini, distinguished engineer at Red Hat and a maintainer of the KVM hypervisor. Bonzini’s suggestion is to allow AI assistance “where the ramifications of copyright violations are at least easy to revert and unlikely to spread.” Core code would remain off-limits “without prior agreement from a maintainer.”

QEMU’s current code provenance policy rejects anything that might include or derive from AI-generated content. “A blanket ban,” wrote Bonzini, “was easy to maintain while LLM output was rarely usable on its own, but as the tools improved an absolute prohibition has become harder to justify.”

The problem with code from AI assistants is its source – does the submitter have the legal right to contribute the code? Bonzini’s take is that while there remain concerns around copyright and licensing, “what has shifted is the balance of risk.”

How big is the risk? Not what it was, according to Bonzini. The engineer cited other projects that had accepted AI content without running into serious legal trouble, and organizations (including Red Hat) that reckoned the risk was acceptable.

That said, while Red Hat has an army of lawyers at its disposal, a project such as QEMU doesn’t have the same resources, hence the suggestion to keep AI-assisted code in areas (Bonzini gave examples, including small bug fixes and documentation) where it can be backed out.

The use of LLM output in contributions is a contentious one and has its fans and detractors. Projects such as OpenSlopware tracked free software and open source projects that used LLM-generated code or integrated AI technologies. One concern cited is what LLMs have been trained on and the risk that chunks of code produced by the technology might have licensing issues.

One solution is to disclose the use of AI in a contribution, although this might not be necessary where the use is trivial (Red Hat gave the example of autocompleting a variable name.)

Bonzini also suggested, “Introduce ‘AI-used-for:’ as a trailer to record where AI was used, and include other suggestions that help reviewers judge the result.”

“The standard is slightly different from the more usual ‘Assisted-by’, which doubles as a check that the author has read the policy.”

Although Bonzini noted, “use of AI does not relax any other contribution requirement,” the discussion indicates a recognition that blanket bans on AI assistance might not be the way forward and that a more nuanced approach is needed. ®

The PS5 is Sony’s not-so-secret weapon. It’s dominated the latest generation of console gaming (in part because Xbox self-destructed), but there’s no doubting Sony is top of the pile.

If someone could tell this to the Sony Home Cinema TV division.

Despite this upside and the advantage Sony has baked in, the TV division hasn’t jumped on board to cement it. In fact, its whole approach to gaming drives me loopy. I can’t see any direction to it, but worse than that, I can’t see any interest in gaming.

I thought Sony’s latest TVs, from the Bravia 2 II and 3 II, to its forward-looking RGB models in the Bravia 9 II and Bravia 7 II might change that. But I was a fool to think so.

No, this is not about HDMI 2.1

A little tangent, if I may, while I fire cannonball broadsides at others.

I don’t understand this obsession with TVs needing to have four HDMI 2.1 inputs. Whenever articles about Sony Bravia TVs and gaming crop up, it’s usually about the lack of HDMI 2.1 inputs.

Perhaps I’m dim and don’t understand the upside, but this seems to be the oddest hill to die on with regard to TVs. While LG and Samsung have supported four HDMI 2.1 inputs for several years now (thanks to developing their own chips that allow it), the actual need for the average customer to have four HDMI 2.1 ports on their TV seems remote. Two HDMI 2.1 inputs are more than fine.

It’s not as if, since the introduction of HDMI 2.1, there have been a variety of products that have supported it. There are sound systems with the eARC provision but some still support Dolby Atmos without support for HDMI 2.1. There are a few media streamers that support the standard and all the current gaming consoles do. Unless you want to throw in AV receivers/amplifiers into the mix, the variety of sources is not considerable.

There aren’t many devices that utilise 120Hz refresh rates either – even the Nintendo Switch 2 tops out at 4K/60Hz. There are no 4K Blu-ray players because they don’t even need to support 120Hz. The PS5 itself has about 100+ games that run at 120fps, but a considerable amount only do so at resolutions lower than 4K. You don’t need HDMI 2.1 for Dolby Vision or HDR10+ either.

Look at the gaming market and the PS5 has dominated as Xbox fell behind in sales. Microsoft has moved to publishing its own first-party games on other platforms, and cloud gaming is becoming more prevalent. Do you need two games consoles to plug in? Not any more.

So the whole obsession with four HDMI 2.1 and 120Hz seems to be exactly that. A large percentage of TV buyers won’t need HDMI 2.1 – they might not even know about it… so again. In this streaming age where viewers are tapping directly into apps, this is a weird criticism that keeps popping up over and over.

‘Ok for PlayStation 5’

Ok, back to the scheduled programming.

Sony TVs don’t care about the PS5… is a sensational headline I could probably use, but it wouldn’t exactly be true. Sony TVs do care about the PS5 – they just don’t seem to care very much.

Five years ago, Sony launched its Perfect for PlayStation 5 features. These are exclusive features only Sony Bravia XR TVs can unlock. The idea is that they automatically adjust and optimise the picture without requiring (much of) your input. It doesn’t do anything with sound, and it doesn’t really integrate into the interface of Bravia TVs.

The Auto Genre Picture Mode is a fancy way of describing ALLM (Auto Low Latency Mode). This is performed on the console itself, so rather turning on a PS5 and game mode being activated forever more until you turn off the console, as I understand it, the PS5 will call up game mode only for when you’re playing games.

As soon as you watch a film, TV series or UHD Blu-ray (on the console itself), it’ll switch back to Standard mode (or whatever your preferred picture mode is). Fair enough, but hardly exciting.

Auto HDR Tone Mapping is more interesting as it incorporates HDMI 2.1’s SBTM (Source-Based Tone Mapping). It takes information from the TV in terms of its HDR performance and the PS5 automatically calibrates its HDR output in response. Doesn’t matter whether you have super-bright Bravia TV or a low-brightness model – this feature can optimise the performance for your TV. Clever, and if there were any new 4K players that took advantage of the 2.1 spec, I’d love for them to add this feature.

The last feature is… 4K/120fps, which as I alluded to above, there aren’t many games that output at 4K/120fps. To call it a feature seems generous.

As you can see, there isn’t much to the Perfect for PlayStation 5 features that meets the eye. The SBTM feature you can do manually with other TVs during the setup/power-on of the PS5 with a new TV. There’s very little here that can’t be done in some way or other on models from other TV brands. Even more curious, these are the same set of features from five years ago. Sony has not added to or updated this list.

The PS5 has bulldozed through the gaming market but the Sony TV division seems like a truculent horse that doesn’t really want to follow in its wake. Given the competitive advantage, the Sony TV division has sat back rather than capitalised on it.

And it goes both ways. While several Bravia TVs support Dolby Vision Gaming, the PS5 still does not while its Xbox rivals do. This is a confusing state of affairs, not helped by the fact that when you go to the Perfect for PlayStation 5 website, you see none of the latest TVs listed as compatible. The page hasn’t been updated since 2022. That about sums up Sony’s interest at the moment.

Home Cinema Purist

I would go as far (and to be honest, it’s not very far) to say that the Sony TV division is indifferent to gaming. Its messaging about gaming has been low-key, and of all the Sony events I have attended in my time at Trusted Reviews, I think there’s been one that’s been focused on PlayStation, which was when it introduced its gaming headsets and monitors – and that had nothing to do with TVs.

It has never sought certification for AMD FreeSync or Nvidia G-Sync, despite Sony PlayStation dabbling with PC publishing for a few years. Although it is compatible with both through its support of VRR, it can’t take advantage of any further optimisation or features. You’re stuck with the basic HDMI VRR implementation and nothing more.

Furthermore, while other TV brands have been emphasising that their 42- and 48-inch OLEDs would be perfect as an alternative gaming screen, Sony has been quiet to the point of being reluctant to preach this about its own models.

In fact, Sony has only ever launched one 42-inch OLED and one 48-inch OLED, and both went on sale in 2022. There have been no new models of this size since. This is technology that’s about five years old.

Sony, LG and even Panasonic have launched multiple small OLEDs since, all with a greater and wider number of gaming features that cover PC and console. The input lag on their models has always been quicker than on Sony TVs. And though the A90K is still available four years on, the price is similar to what you’d pay for a 2026 model from another brand.

Why would I buy Sony in this context?

What drove this op-ed in the first place was the introduction of a new feature in the interface of the new Bravia RGB TVs in the My Cinema feature that optimises “picture and sound for film first viewing” – but it only does this for film viewing or TV. There’s no option to adjust the picture or even the sound features for gaming.

This seems bizarre, but Sony Bravia has always been a home cinema brand and isn’t going for this Jambalaya of different things to appeal to all types of people. Attending its home cinema event at Sony HQ in Weybridge and there were people from Sony Pictures Entertainment to amplify the message about its new TVs. I don’t think that would have happened on the PlayStation side.

It is still a missed opportunity (a massive one, I’d say), but Sony Bravia’s priorities lie in other areas, and it won’t sacrifice performance for gaming. I would have thought that making the PS5 a strong aspect of your TV brand’s appeal would have contributed to more sales – there are probably more LG OLEDs partnered with PS5s than there are Sony Bravias in this world, which, if true, boggles the mind.

I don’t see the course being corrected anytime soon. Imagine if Sony fully utilised the potential of its gaming side. That would be a powerful partnership indeed.

It was a helluva week or so.

Sonny Rollins, one of the last towering figures of modern jazz, left us at 95. Rob Base, who reminded an entire generation that it took two to make the room move, is gone at 59. And there I was, sitting through an early morning showing of The Mandalorian and Grogu, because apparently torture no longer has the decency to wait until after that first cup of Wawa coffee.

The cruel part? It reminded me that Hollywood used to know how to write great movies. Blake Edwards’ The Party, starring Peter Sellers as Hrundi V. Bakshi, is hardly a clean artifact by modern standards, but it understands timing, chaos, discomfort, and the slow-motion collapse of polite society better than most of what passes for franchise filmmaking today. Sellers walks into a Hollywood party and turns social awkwardness into a controlled demolition. No multiverse. No legacy cameo begging for applause. Just a comic actor with lethal timing and a room full of people too smug to realize the walls are already cracking.

Rollins understood space. Sellers understood timing. Rob Base understood momentum. The Mandalorian and Grogu understands that Disney paid a lot of money for Star Wars and will keep feeding the machine until the helmet falls off, the mystery is gone, and we are left wondering whether Pedro Pascal might have been better off leaving the bucket on.

The Saxophone Colossus Who Made Space Swing

The woman who will always have my heart does not love jazz.

I know.

Nobody’s perfect.

She once told me that aside from Chet Baker, it wasn’t really her thing. Ironic, perhaps, since I know a little something about broken men with talented fingers, pretty tone, and bad wiring.

She has impeccable taste in most things and more fight in her than people twice her size. But Rollins? Not happening. He was never going to be her pair of Golden Goose. For me, he was custom Red Wings: built for the long walk, scuffed in all the right places, and still standing when the pretty stuff falls apart.

Sonny Rollins was born Walter Theodore Rollins in Harlem in 1930 and became one of the defining tenor saxophonists in modern jazz. Not “important” in the decorative museum-wall sense. Important as in the room changed when he played. He came up around Thelonious Monk, Bud Powell, Miles Davis, Charlie Parker, Max Roach, and Clifford Brown, then carved out a sound that was muscular, searching, funny, fearless, and unmistakably his own.

The records that matter are not hard to find because they have been staring us in the face for decades: Saxophone Colossus, Tenor Madness, Way Out West, A Night at the Village Vanguard, Freedom Suite, and later The Bridge, after he famously stepped away and practiced on the Williamsburg Bridge like a man trying to wrestle the horn into telling the truth. Saxophone Colossus gave the world “St. Thomas.” Tenor Madness put Rollins and John Coltrane together. Way Out West proved he could stretch the form without losing the thread. Freedom Suite had spine, politics, and purpose before some artists discovered courage came with better press photos.

I own it all, but I have always been more attached to the early work. That is the Rollins I reach for first: hungry, huge-toned, restless, built for impact, and still loose enough to swing like he knew where the floorboards would give way.

If I had to pack one crate of records for the great gig in the sky — or some cabin in the woods with a sturdy bed, clean sheets, a lifetime supply of pho, and a vintage system that doesn’t hum like a dying refrigerator — Sonny Rollins is in that crate.

Peter Sellers Turned Hollywood Manners Into Controlled Demolition

Peter Sellers’ most iconic screen work is probably still Dr. Strangelove, where he played multiple roles and helped turn nuclear annihilation, Cold War paranoia, the Führer, the mineshaft gap, and male insecurity in uniform into one of the blackest comedies ever made. It remains terrifying because it is funny, and funny because the people in charge are exactly as deranged as we suspected.

But I would argue that Sellers may have been even better in Blake Edwards’ The Party. Edwards produced, co-wrote, and directed the 1968 film, with Sellers starring as a bungling Indian actor who is accidentally invited to a lavish Hollywood party instead of being fired.

Claudine Longet co-stars as Michèle Monet, and her recent death at 84 adds another shadow to the film this week. Longet’s soft, bossa nova-style presence — especially “Nothing to Lose” — gives The Party one of its strangest and most delicate pauses before the whole mansion starts coming apart.

That will sound odd to anyone who has not seen it, which is probably most people under the age of 50. The Party is an uncomfortable film. It is too strange, too slow-burning, too dependent on silence, timing, embarrassment, and social collapse to survive our current era of instant outrage and algorithmic stupidity.

You cannot discuss The Party honestly without stepping over the landmine: Peter Sellers, a British actor, plays Hrundi V. Bakshi, an Indian actor, in brownface. No varnish. No waiver. No “different time” excuse stapled to the forehead like a studio memo from 1968. It is there, and it should make you uncomfortable.

But that is not where the film stops.

The miracle is that Sellers somehow finds humanity, dignity, timing, and innocence inside a role that could have collapsed into cheap caricature before the first broken chair hit the floor. Bakshi is treated as the outsider, the mistake, the social infection inside a room full of polished Hollywood frauds. Yet he becomes the only person in the mansion who does not feel morally vacant. Everyone else has money, manners, crystal, booze, and imported furniture. He has decency. That is what makes the film sting.

Which is why The Party still matters. Not because it is clean. It isn’t. Not because every joke survives the trip intact. Some don’t. It matters because it is alive in ways most modern comedies are not. Sellers does not perform comedy so much as detonate it in slow motion. He enters a Hollywood party by mistake and turns the evening into a precision-guided disaster: one broken object, one awkward pause, one perfectly timed humiliation at a time.

We live in remarkably stupid times, so I can already imagine the bad-faith readings from every direction. Some would condemn the film without watching it. Others would defend it without thinking. Both sides would miss the point, which is usually how these things go now. The Party is not a safe movie. It is not a comfortable movie. It is a deeply flawed, deeply funny, strangely elegant Hollywood satire built around one of the greatest comic actors who ever lived.

The irony is that almost nobody I know has seen The Party, yet two very different women who left marks on my heart both had.

One arrived with biltong and a cultural passport that made most people look unfinished: British, Indian, South African, Jewish, and sharp enough to shave the edge off Table Mountain. The other was a fierce Space Princess with more decency and warmth than the binary suns, and an understanding of my love for great cinema that still feels rare.

That matters. Not because The Party needs a sentimental defense. It doesn’t. The film can defend itself, flaws and all. It matters because the people who understand why a movie like this still works tend to notice things others miss: timing, discomfort, elegance, cruelty, grace, and the tiny human moments hiding inside the wreckage. Sellers understood that. Edwards understood that. And somehow, so did they.

This Is the Way, Apparently, Into Franchise Exhaustion

The Mandalorian and Grogu feels less like a movie than four disjointed episodes of The Mandalorian welded together in a dark room by people who mistook continuity for storytelling.

Set in the mess between the fall of the Empire and the rise of the First Order, the film should have had real weight. That period is loaded with dramatic potential: Imperial warlords trying to hold the corpse together, the New Republic struggling to police a galaxy that has already been burned once, and a power vacuum big enough to swallow entire systems. Instead, Favreau and Filoni give us Hutts, callbacks, cameos, Zeb from Rebels, and Rotta the Hutt as if fan recognition is the same thing as narrative momentum. It isn’t. It is a receipt for time already spent elsewhere.

Whatever charm the series once had is gone here. The Force is barely a rumor. The Sith and the dark side are nowhere to be found. The Empire’s aftermath feels strangely undercooked, which is impressive considering this franchise has been dining out on that wreckage for almost fifty years. Even Ludwig Göransson’s musical identity from the original series feels poorly stitched into the action, less a pulse than a reminder that this used to have one.

And Mando? Anyone could have played him. Pedro Pascal’s delivery is so flat and drained of feeling that you start wondering if Anton Chigurh wandered into the armor and decided bounty hunting paid better than coin-tossing. “What’s it to you, Mando?” Apparently not much. The helmet should have stayed on, if only to preserve the illusion that there was a human being somewhere inside the suit.

The special effects are not up to the usual Lucasfilm standard, which is a problem when spectacle is doing this much of the unpaid labor. Sigourney Weaver gets stuck with dialogue so lifeless it makes the dinner scene in Alien sound like Noël Coward. That takes effort. Not good effort. But effort.

The larger problem is Favreau and Filoni. They clearly love Star Wars, but love is not a substitute for discipline, structure, or knowing when to stop waving action figures in front of the camera. Filoni’s cameos only make the problem louder. This is not Andor. This is not Rogue One. Those projects understood cost, sacrifice, politics, fear, and the machinery of empire. The Mandalorian and Grogu understands branding, helmet management, and the comforting sound of Disney feeding another familiar thing into the franchise grinder.

I felt a great disturbance in the Force. It was the sound of a movie mistaking Easter eggs for a spine.

Related Reading:

This robot has everything: near-perfect cleaning capabilities (including floors, walls, and waterline), a powerful battery with six hours of charge under the water, AI-powered debris detection, and a solid mobile app. It also has the ability to skim the surface of the pool. When finished cleaning, the AquaSense 2 Ultra floats, so collecting it is just a matter of grabbing it from the comfort of the deck. After a quick cleanup, drop the robot on the included charging stand to juice it back up, no cables required.

What’s not to like? Only two things, really. Monstrous cleaning ability requires a monstrous chassis, and to say the 29-pound Beatbot AquaSense 2 Ultra is unwieldy would be an understatement. Hauling this robot out of the water can be a chore, so work on your forearm curls if you plan to purchase one.

There’s also the price point: At around $3,000 it’s pretty much the most expensive battery-powered pool robot on the market, though plenty of competitors are at least in the ballpark. If your budget’s tighter, you can get most of the same coverage from Beatbot’s Sora 70, which sells for just $1,499.

Pool-Cleaning Robot With the Best Battery Life

The traditional way to use a pool robot is to keep it dry-docked and charging, then drop it into the pool only when you need it. Fish it out at the end of the run, clean the filter basket, and repeat.

An alternative may appeal to lazier pool owners: Drop the robot in the pool and leave it there for a week or two, let it run on a repeating schedule, then clean it out only when the battery is dead.

The trick with this strategy is that few pool robots have a battery big enough to allow for more than one or two thorough cleanings. But with its new M1-AI series, iGarden drops a massive 12,500 mAh battery into its sleek pool bot, allowing up to nine hours of running time in floor-only operation. (It can also do walls and waterline, of course, but that will eat up more of the juice.) The robot also includes cameras that use an AI-powered algorithm to actively scour for debris. In standard mode, the robot first follows an S-shaped path, then it fires up the cams to hunt down anything it missed, making for even more effective cleaning.

At its recent I/O developer conference, Google introduced Gemini Spark as an always-on agent that connects to your personal data, completes online tasks, and automates aspects of your daily interactions. It’s Google’s take on the viral OpenClaw agent that rocked Silicon Valley at the start of 2026. OpenClaw’s early adopters handed their entire lives over to an AI agent for messaging and scheduling automation—sometimes with bot-induced mishaps causing embarrassing results.

My first time using Gemini Spark had me wheezing with laughter. I gave Google’s new AI agent access to everything from my personal Gmail, Docs, and Calendar apps. (So long privacy.) Then, I sent an innocuous, one-sentence prompt, asking the bot for help planning a party for my upcoming birthday. Gemini Spark not only combed through my inbox and calendar to find the real reservation I made at a karaoke bar, it also generated a five-page itinerary complete with a guest list, venue rules, nearby dining spots, after-party bars, email invites, and theme ideas. The result was genuinely impressive and done in just a couple minutes, without me having to watch over the agent or leave my laptop cracked open.

The thing that really had me nervously giggling—for multiple reasons—was Gemini Spark’s AI-generated guest list. The agent scanned my emails and documents to come up with a list of potential friends, which I didn’t expect, and recommended 15 people to invite, the correct maximum that can fit this karaoke room. “Your travel history and emails identify [my partner’s name] as a close friend and frequent companion, making him a natural first addition,” read Gemini Spark’s explanation of why it put him at the top of the list.

After giving Google’s agent access to so much unfettered context about my life, essentially standing digitally naked in front of Gemini Spark and exposing myself to the whims of experimental software, I couldn’t get over the irony of it relegating my long-term, live-in boyfriend to just a “close friend and frequent companion.” What is this, the ’80s? I also quickly realized that I, the birthday boy, was not included on the guest list to my own party.

Google began rolling out Gemini Spark this week as a beta to subscribers of the company’s AI Ultra plan, which starts at $100 a month. The AI agent is located inside the Gemini chatbot as a new tab, and users can control it using both mobile and desktop devices. You don’t need an Android handset; it works on an iPhone, too.

Rather than the more familiar “prompts,” commands that you send to Spark are referred to as “tasks.” Spark can create calendar events and send emails—with your approval first—as well as operate a remote browser to roam the internet.

Screenshot by Reece Rogers; Courtesy of Google

Screenshot by Reece Rogers; Courtesy of Google

from the ignorance-and-fear dept

Last month the FCC quietly issued a public notice saying the Brendan Carr run agency was demanding that the TV Oversight Management Board (TVOMB) create new TV ratings to alert viewers to “transgender and gender non-binary programming” and “the discussion or promotion of gender identity themes” included in children’s programming.

You are to ignore that the FCC has no actual authority to even be proposing this. The TV Oversight Management Board is an independent, industry-created coalition that manages the TV ratings system without legal influence by the FCC.

The FCC’s justification for these demanded changes are based entirely on the false claims of a bunch of anonymous “parents” who may or may not even exist:

“Recently, parents have raised concerns that controversial gender identity issues are being
included or promoted in children’s programs without providing any disclosure or transparency to parents. Specifically, the industry guidelines that parents rely on are rating shows with transgender and gender non-binary programming as appropriate for children and young children, and doing so without providing this information to parents, thereby undermining the ability of parents to make informed choices for their families.”

Of course these issues have only been made “controversial” by Republicans, who have taken brutal and ignorant aim at a very small segment of the population in order to actively hurt marginalized people and divide, misinform, and disorient the electorate. Like gay marriage was during the George W. Bush administration, trans rights are an effective wedge issue that exploits public fear, bigotry, and ignorance to redirect public attention away from things like, say, historic levels of corruption.

The idea that media and tech companies are actively flooding the population with a bunch of dangerous “gender non-binary programming” aimed specifically at children is a popular Republican lie designed to agitate and mislead, but there’s no evidence to support the claim. Still it pops up a lot; like Josh Hawley’s false claim at a recent hearing that Netflix is pushing trans-heavy kids programming.

Understandably the proposal didn’t sit well with organizations like GLAAD, which pointed out that it’s grotesque, ignorant, and dangerous to conflate gender fluidity with obscenities, drug abuse, and violence:

“And the Public Notice does not state how a change in TV ratings will impact gay, lesbian, and bisexual characters and stories on TV. Applying warning labels to programs with transgender and nonbinary characters and stories incorrectly equates them to programming with coarse and crude language, sexual situations, or violence. 

This makes life harder for LGBTQ Americans. It sends a message that the FCC can pressure the TVOMB to add even more ratings that stigmatize other diverse groups.”

A broader coalition of 40+ public interest groups ranging from Free Press to Public Knowledge were equally disgusted by the proposal:

“This is Carr’s latest attempt to shut down speech and shift U.S. public discourse to please President Trump. Television-program ratings are wholly outside of the FCC’s control, and the use of this public-comment procedure to coerce change raises constitutional concerns. The FCC should abandon this contrived and morally repugnant exercise.”

Part of Carr’s actual job at the FCC is supposed to involve protecting the public from corporate power, whether it’s a telecom monopoly that leverages corruption to rip off broadband customers, to a cable company using sleazy fees to jack up the cost of TV service. Carr’s not interested in that. He’s repeatedly given large companies free reign to engage in whatever consumer abuses they see fit.

Carr likely figures that the more time the public spends freaking out about nonexistent trans kids’ programming, the less time they have to realize that he’s been captured by industry to the detriment of everyone.

Instead of doing his job, Carr’s obsessed with being a weird little zealot and authoritarian lapdog, whose post-FCC legacy, if he has one, will be one of ignorance, censorship, distraction, and fear.

Filed Under: brendan carr, bullying, censor, fcc, free speech, lgbtq, media, regulator, trans panic, trans rights, tv, tvomb

Companies: glaad

Running a galactic empire in Stellaris is an arduous task. One bad war, an economic spiral, or one neighbor with a suspiciously large fleet can turn a promising save into a slow-motion disaster. You may want to fix a mistake, or maybe even want to test a build. And sometimes, you just want to see what happens when your empire suddenly has more alloys than sense.

This is where Stellaris console commands come in. These cheats let you add resources, finish research, control empires, spawn ships, trigger events, or bend the galaxy in ways the normal game usually won’t allow.

There are a few things to know before you start. Console commands are mainly for the PC version of Stellaris, and the command console is available only outside Ironman mode. If you’re trying to earn achievements, cheats are not the way to do it, as they are treated as cheating for achievement purposes, which is exactly why Ironman blocks the console.

So here’s how to use Stellaris cheats, followed by the most useful console commands to try first.

How to enter Stellaris cheats

To use console commands in Stellaris, press the tilde key on your keyboard, usually the key above Tab and to the left of 1. On some keyboards, you may need to use Shift + Alt + C instead. Once the console opens, type or paste the command you want and press Enter.

If a command includes something in brackets, such as [amount], [empire ID], or [technology ID], you need to replace that with the value you want. Do not type the brackets unless the command specifically requires them. A lot of commands also need IDs. The easiest way to find those is with “debutooltip”.

After entering that command, hover over an empire, species, planet, fleet, or other game element to see more detailed ID information. This is a useful way to grab the specific IDs needed for more advanced commands.

Main Stellaris cheats

Event cheats

Galaxy cheats

Edict, building, and paragon cheats

Advanced gameplay and empire commands

Do Stellaris console commands work on PlayStation or Xbox?

No, not in the same way. The “console” in console commands refers to the PC command console, not PlayStation or Xbox hardware. So you should not expect to open the same command window and enter PC-style cheats.

Why won’t the console open?

There are a few likely reasons:

• You are playing in Ironman mode.
• You are using the wrong keyboard shortcut.
• Your keyboard layout uses a different key for the console.
• You are playing on a console version rather than PC.
• The game or launcher has input conflicts.

Try the tilde key first, then try Shift + Alt + C. Also, make sure the save is not in Ironman mode.