Articles by William Chan
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Spider-Noir Hits 90% on Rotten Tomatoes: Nicolas Cage's 1930s Marvel Series Grounds Science in Venom Research
Spider-Noir review: Nicolas Cage's eight-episode Prime Video series set in Depression-era New York earns 90% on Rotten Tomatoes across 40 pre-premiere reviews. Critics praise the dual black-and-white/color viewing format and the show's surprisingly real spider-venom neuroscience. Global premiere May 27.
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Rick and Morty Season 9 Episode 1: Gödel Incompleteness and Russell's Paradox as Plot Weapons
Rick and Morty Season 9 Episode 1 encodes three real scientific frameworks as plot mechanics: the Everett many-worlds interpretation powers the Omega Device, Russell's Paradox drives The Collective's defeat, and Gödel-Chaitin incompleteness theory explains Rick's blueprint gambit — all in one premiere. Adult Swim's human-made season explained.
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Assassination Classroom: CERN Can't Build Koro-sensei's Cells, But His Pedagogy Is Peer-Reviewed
Koro-sensei is back in Japanese theaters, and he brought his antimatter biology with him. Assassination Classroom: Our Time (Minna no Jikan), the first new theatrical entry in the franchise since 2016, opened in Japan on March 20, 2026, as the third and final installment of the anime's 10th-anniversary project.
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86: Eighty-Six Called Autonomous War Before the UN Did: Crunchyroll's Removal Forces Audiobook Reckoning
Asato Asato published the first volume of 86: Eighty-Six in 2017, nearly a decade before the United Nations set a hard deadline to regulate autonomous weapons. What those readers are gaining access to is not just a war story. It is a novel that predicted, with structural precision, the exact policy crisis the world is now trying to solve.
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Doraemon's Undersea Gadget Lands Vietnam Today: Liquid Breathing Now in Human Trials
Directed by Tetsuo Yajima from a screenplay by Isao Murayama, the 102-minute film opened in Japan on February 27, 2026 — the first Doraemon theatrical film to debut outside March — and held the top spot at the Japanese box office for six consecutive weekends.
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Bungie Confirms Third Layoff Wave as Destiny 3 Sits Ungreenlighted, Destiny 2 Ends June 9
Sony-owned Bungie is preparing a significant new round of layoffs, Bloomberg's Jason Schreier reported on May 21, 2026 — the same day the studio announced that Destiny 2 will receive its final live-service content update on June 9, ending nearly a decade of continuous development.
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Disclosure Day: Koepp's 42 Drafts Solved Spielberg's Hardest Script Problem in 50 Years of Alien Films
Three weeks before Disclosure Day opens in theaters, screenwriter David Koepp revealed in a new Vanity Fair profile published today, May 22, 2026, that the Steven Spielberg sci-fi thriller required a personal record 42 drafts across three years before Spielberg approved the final script.
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Vought Rising Trailer Drops After Boys Season 5 Finale: Compound V Gene Therapy Holds Up
The 1950s-set prequel stars Jensen Ackles as the young soldier who will become Soldier Boy and Aya Cash returning as Clara Vought, the character later revealed in The Boys as the Nazi-origin supe known as Stormfront. Showrunner Paul Grellong describes the series as a "twisted murder mystery" about the origins of Vought International.
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China's AI Short Drama Boom Hit Industrial Scale: 470 Titles a Day, Faces Stolen, Jobs Gone
China's short drama industry generated 470 AI-produced titles every single day in January 2026, and by March, roughly 50,000 AI-native episodes had hit Douyin in a single month — the first time in history that generative video has been deployed as a mass commercial production system.
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WONDERfools on Netflix Runs on Real Biology: Chemical Reprogramming, Not Quantum Entanglement, Powers Its Superpowers
Six days after Netflix dropped all eight episodes of The WONDERfools simultaneously on May 15, 2026, the South Korean superhero series has reached No. 6 on the platform's global non-English Top 10, logged 2.7 million views in its first three days, and topped charts in Thailand and the Philippines.
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10th Crunchyroll Anime Awards Stream Saturday: Dandadan Leads Again, The Weeknd Presents
Anime's biggest annual night arrives Saturday, May 23, when Crunchyroll hosts the 10th annual Anime Awards live from the Grand Prince Hotel New Takanawa in Tokyo — and for the second consecutive year, Science SARU's sci-fi horror series Dandadan sits atop the nomination count, this time with 20 nods across 32 competitive categories.
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Netflix's The Boroughs Drains Retirees' Brain Fluid for Immortality: New Science Says That's How Sleep Cleans Brain
All eight episodes of The Boroughs dropped on Netflix today, May 21, 2026, and the show's central horror device — spider-like monsters crawling through underground tunnels at night to siphon cerebrospinal fluid from sleeping retirees — turns out to be significantly less fictional than it sounds.
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Six One Indie Showcase 2026: 61 Free-to-Try Games, Steam Demos Open Through May 25
The eighth Six One Indie Showcase aired live today, May 21, 2026, delivering 61 independent games — including world premieres and exclusive first looks — across a 93-minute broadcast that streams free on IGN, GameSpot, and the Six One Indie YouTube channel.
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Warhorse Studios Confirms Middle-earth RPG: Kingdom Come's Gritty Open-World Formula Targets Tolkien
On May 20, 2026, Warhorse Studios posted a two-line message on X that sent the gaming world into a frenzy: an open-world RPG set in Tolkien's Middle-earth, and a new entry in the Kingdom Come franchise, both in active development at the Prague studio.
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PSN Goes Down Four Times in 90 Days: Sony Still Silent as Plus Subscribers Absorb the Cost
Sony's PlayStation Network went down again Thursday afternoon, marking the fourth documented outage in 90 days for a service whose subscribers pay up to $159.99 a year — with no compensation announced for any of the 2026 disruptions and no official explanation for any of them.
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Platform Decay Hits NYT Bestseller: Murderbot's Governor Module Mirrors Unsolved AI Alignment Problem
Martha Wells' Platform Decay, the eighth installment in the Murderbot Diaries series, debuted May 5 as a New York Times, USA Today, and National Indie Bestseller — and landed in the middle of a live technical debate it has been dramatizing since 2017.
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Na Hong-jin's Hope Storms Cannes: Xenobiology Gives Korea's Alien Creature Thriller Its Unkillable Monsters
Three days into the 79th Cannes Film Festival, the competition's first potential blockbuster arrived without warning and without apology. Na Hong-jin's Hope (호프), a 160-minute Korean sci-fi creature thriller set near the fortified border between the two Koreas, premiered May 17 to a seven-minute standing ovation and immediately became the most discussed film at this year's festival.
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The Boys Finale Kill-Switch Virus Mirrors CRISPR Bioweapon Category U.S. Intelligence Called WMD-Level Risk
The series finale of The Boys, "Blood and Bone," began streaming on Prime Video today, May 20, 2026, capping a seven-season run in which showrunner Eric Kripke used a superhero satire to dramatize one of the most consequential real questions in modern biotechnology.
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Sheep in the Box Premieres at Cannes as Commercial Griefbot AI Reaches Bereaved Families
Sheep in the Box, the new science fiction drama from Palme d'Or winner Hirokazu Kore-eda, screened in competition at the 79th Cannes Film Festival on May 16 to a 3.5-minute standing ovation and mixed reviews, positioning it as one of the more divisive entries in this year's competition.
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Gundam Wing Returns as Orbital Metal Printing and Brain Implants Move From Fiction to Working Hardware
Bandai Namco Filmworks producer Naohiro Ogata told a live audience on May 15, 2026, that Mobile Suit Gundam Wing — the mecha anime that introduced millions of Western viewers to the franchise when Cartoon Network aired it in 2000 — is getting new animation.
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Ryan Gosling's Project Hail Mary Now on Digital: Alien Microbe at Center Has More Real Biology Than You'd Expect
Project Hail Mary, the hard sci-fi blockbuster starring Ryan Gosling, became available to rent and buy on digital platforms including Prime Video, Apple TV, and Fandango at Home on May 12, 2026 — and as of this week it tops Amazon's global premium video-on-demand chart in more than a dozen countries.
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Snowball Earth Episode 7 Bets Humanity's Survival on Language — Here Is the Real Science Behind the Series' Cryogenian Premise
Episode 7 of the hard sci-fi mecha anime Snowball Earth aired on NTV in Japan on May 15, 2026, and landed on Crunchyroll three days ago. In it, mecha pilot Tetsuo Yabusame — pinned down by Hercules, a centaur-form kaiju emerging from beneath the frozen surface — makes his first deliberate attempt to communicate with another living being rather than simply destroying it.
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Ghost Ship's Deep Rock Galactic: Rogue Core Enters Early Access Today — With 18-Month Build Window Still Ahead
Copenhagen-based Ghost Ship Games launches Deep Rock Galactic: Rogue Core into Steam Early Access today, May 20, 2026, at 18:00 CEST — but prospective buyers should understand what "Early Access" means before clicking purchase: Ghost Ship estimates the game will spend 18 to 24 more months in development before it is content-complete.
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ZA/UM's Zero Parades Opens $39.99 on May 21: Reviewers Call Disco Elysium Successor Despite New Creative Team
Zero Parades: For Dead Spies, the first major release from ZA/UM since 2019's Disco Elysium, arrives this Thursday, May 21, for $39.99 on PC — and launch-day reviews suggest the studio has produced one of the most mechanically ambitious narrative RPGs in years, even without the original creative team behind its predecessor.
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Subnautica 2: 2 Million Sold, Patch Roadmap Out — Performance and EULA Caveats for Early Buyers
Unknown Worlds Entertainment's underwater survival sequel sold two million copies within its first 12 hours on sale after entering Early Access on May 14, placing it among the largest Early Access debuts in Steam history.
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Blade Runner 2099 Heads to 2027 as Lab-Grown Brain Tissue Learns and No Western Law Covers It
The Blade Runner 2099 limited series has slipped from a 2026 premiere to 2027, confirmed by the official press release issued on May 11, 2026, in which Alcon Entertainment — the studio holding the Blade Runner intellectual property — stated the show is "currently in post-production" and set to premiere on Amazon Prime in 2027.
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The Mandalorian and Grogu Depicts Real Ion Propulsion: NASA's Psyche Used at Mars Two Days Before LA Premiere
The Mandalorian & Grogu arrived at the TCL Chinese Theatre in Los Angeles on May 14, 2026 — the night before NASA's Psyche spacecraft executed a gravity-assist flyby of Mars using a xenon-fueled ion thruster of exactly the type the franchise has depicted for years.
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Star City Uses the Soviet N1's 30-Engine Collapse to Ask What SpaceX's Starship Still Has to Prove
Apple TV+'s alternate-history universe expands on May 29 with Star City, an eight-episode limited series set entirely inside the Soviet space program during the 1970s, after the alternate-timeline moment in which the USSR became the first nation to land a human on the Moon.
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Ghost in the Shell July 7: Neuralink Scales Up, Researchers Document BCI Cyberattacks
Science SARU released the third and final trailer for its Ghost in the Shell reboot on May 11, 2026, confirming a July 7 global premiere on Amazon Prime Video — a date every Prime subscriber should mark, because the show adapting Masamune Shirow's 1989 manga arrives at the precise moment that manga's most contested technologies have become real, regulated, and in some cases legally contested.
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Facepunch's s&box Update Demotes AI Thumbnails — But Legitimate Creators Risk Being Caught in the Net
Facepunch Studios founder Garry Newman shipped a tool on May 13 that reduces the discovery ranking of s&box games whose thumbnail images moderators identify as AI-generated — the studio's first concrete infrastructure response to the AI-content flood that pushed the platform's Steam rating to "Mixed" on its April 28 launch day.
