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  • Players Are Turning the ‘Echoes’ in ‘The Legend of Zelda: Echoes of Wisdom’ Into Cheat Codes

    Players Are Turning the ‘Echoes’ in ‘The Legend of Zelda: Echoes of Wisdom’ Into Cheat Codes

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    On top of a table, Princess Zelda magically binds herself to a green machine pouring gusts of wind. She goes zooming across the screen instantly as the air blasts the table forward as well as any jet engine. “Table go vroom-vroom” reads the caption—just a small taste of what an inventive player can do in The Legend of Zelda: Echoes of Wisdom, the latest in the series from Nintendo.

    Echoes of Wisdom is all about finding new ways to use the world’s items. It relies on Zelda’s ability to copy enemies and objects and repurpose them as needed. In the early days of its creation, developers explored different ways the game could be played. That included the ability to edit dungeons by copying and pasting objects like doors or candles, allowing players to essentially create their own gameplay—and their own cheats.

    When series producer Eiji Aonuma had the chance to test it, however, he had a different take. “While it’s fun to create your own dungeon and let other people play it,” he said in a recent Ask the Developer post on Nintendo’s site, “it’s also not so bad to place items that can be copied and pasted in the game field, and create gameplay where they can be used to fight enemies.”

    So no, Echoes of Wisdom is no dungeon-builder. Like The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom, however, its ability to create makeshift solutions and items means players are quickly finding unusual ways to traverse the world and conquer its many levels. In some cases, by using items in ways so outlandish it seems like they shouldn’t exist.

    One of Echoes of Wisdom’s most useful items is also its plainest: a simple, brown-framed bed. Players have quickly latched onto beds as a go-to for getting around—stack a couple and they make a great bridge or a ladder. Dispense one in a fight and Zelda can nap to recover health while summoned monsters fight on her behalf. In one particularly inspired example, a player put Zelda on top of a bed and summoned an enemy to create wind gusts that made the bed fly. Tables are just as useful, especially when you want to barricade a couple of guards into their own prison.

    On Reddit, players are sharing creations that have allowed them to bypass both gated-off areas and the laws of gravity. One worked out how to create different variations of flying machines, no bed needed, by binding together a crow, a rock, and an enemy that creates wind gusts. In the game’s water temple, which requires players to slowly raise the water level to reach the top, one enterprising adventurer figured out how to skip that whole mess by carefully stacking water blocks—echoes that create a contained cube of water Zelda can swim through—to head straight up.

    As creative as these workarounds are, they also play directly into Nintendo’s hands. While echoes may feel like a nerfing of the Tears mechanics that let gamers build flame-throwing phalluses, Nintendo still wanted to empower them to be “mischievous.” As director Tomomi Sano has said, the point is for players to find ways to use echoes that “are so ingenious it almost feels like cheating.”

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  • HBO Almost Cut the Industry Season Finale’s Most Shocking Scene

    HBO Almost Cut the Industry Season Finale’s Most Shocking Scene

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    In the volatile universe of Industry, all debts must be paid.

    In Sunday night’s season three finale, “Infinite Largesse,” no one understood that better than Rishi (Sagar Radia), whose gambling addiction finally caught up with him.

    (Spoiler alert: The following includes spoilers for Industry’s third season finale.)

    Rishi, for the uninitiated, spent much of the last season falling deeper and deeper into debt. As the finale concluded, Industry gave him one of the revelation-packed episode’s biggest twists when his bookie, Vinay, showed up and killed Rishi’s wife over £600,000 in unpaid gambling debts. It was the kind of gut-wrenching moment that has made HBO Sunday-night appointment TV—and, according to cocreators Mickey Down and Konrad Kay, HBO almost nixed it.

    “There was a conversation about Rishi’s wife’s death, which HBO balked at,” Kay says.

    Early on, as Down and Kay outlined season 3, they knew they wanted to do a Rishi episode, which fans were treated to in episode 4, “White Mischief.” Shot as a kind of homage to Uncut Gems, it was there viewers got a taste of the real Rishi, who, it turned out, was a gambler with a dangerous appetite for risk, drugs, and women.

    “We first wrote it with a bow at the end of it,” Down says. “He gets out of his position, he’s saved by the market. He then gets his wife to pay back his debt and then he makes his phone call, doubling down on it. We really didn’t think we were going to return to this. We thought, OK, are we going to show the repercussions of this in some way?”

    But HBO saw the potential in it and advised the creators to return to Rishi later in the season. “They said, we have to show what happens to him.” It presented a unique challenge for Down and Kay. “How can you actually show that there are consequences to your actions in this world and that you can’t just talk your way out of everything?”

    When they landed on the idea that it would be Diana, Rishi’s wife, who ultimately paid for Rishi’s financial misfortunes, HBO pushed back. But Down and Kay knew better.

    “At the script stage, HBO wanted to get rid of it,” Kay says. “Then we said, look, let us shoot it and show it to you. And we shot it and cut it and showed it to them. And they were like, ‘This is fantastic.’ We got very few notes. What you see in the season finale is pretty close to the first cut of that episode.”

    Originally, the scene played out differently. “We were like, what if the guy shot Rishi?” Down continues. “Personally, and practically, we wanted Rishi in season four. But it’s more heartbreaking that his wife, who is a victim of all of this, is the person that bears the brunt. And those are consequences that he then has to live with.”

    But by killing Diana, Down and Kay felt it would provide the perfect setup for next season. (HBO renewed Industry after WIRED’s interview with the showrunners.)

    Their instincts proved right. As the finale aired on Sunday, reaction online was swift, with fans posting Succession-esque responses to the show’s many turns of fortune.

    “Industry is so good because they just keep moving forward. Mickey and Konrad are completely unafraid to put characters on paths they can’t easily undo for the sake of plot convenience. this is peak storytelling,” @lesliezye posted on X following the finale.

    Added @cinnaMENA, “From Rishi’s sad bachelor pad scene to Yasmin’s country house breakdown I—I have emotional whiplash.”

    For Down and Kay, it was all about elevating the storyline into new heights. “That core is shaken when something sort of seismic happens,” Down says of his scheming characters. “And your wife being shot in front of you to settle the gambling debt is a seismic thing, which means that Rishi in season four will be a totally different character than he was in season three and before.”



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  • How a 15-Year-Old Gamer Became the Patron Saint of the Internet

    How a 15-Year-Old Gamer Became the Patron Saint of the Internet

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    After being named a “Servant of God” in 2013, Acutis reached the second rung on the ladder to sainthood when he was venerated by Pope Francis in 2018. His body was exhumed and brought to a tomb in Assisi where he still lies today, dressed in his trademark ’90s teenager garb. “It’s a beautiful thing that for the first time in history you can see a saint dressed in jeans, sneakers, and a sweatshirt. That’s a great message,” Father Carlos Acácio Gonçalves Ferreira, the shrine’s rector, said at the time. A Franciscan monk based at the tomb, noted that “many young people” were visiting.

    Next, Acutis and his followers needed a literal miracle—one he had performed himself. “It has to be something which can’t be scientifically explained, so proving this is difficult. For example, this might require doctors to confirm that they can’t explain how a healing has occurred,” Hutchings says. In 2013 a woman in Brazil claimed that praying to Acutis had helped heal her son’s pancreatic defect. In 2020 Pope Francis authenticated the miracle and Acutis was beatified, culminating in a ceremony celebrating his virtuous life. “According to Google Trends, more people were searching for information about Carlo Acutis than about the Pope,” Mares notes.

    Then, in May 2024, a second miracle was recognized, involving the healing of a 21-year-old girl from Costa Rica injured in a bike accident. In 2022, her mother had knelt at Acutis’ grave and prayed for his help. Her daughter then miraculously resumed breathing without support and made a full recovery. The Pope approved Acutis’ canonization in July—with an official ceremony set for 2025.

    It’s rare for a saint to be so young and unheard of, and still reach this lofty status so soon after their death. “It is remarkable that Carlo Acutis will be canonized so close to the date that he was born. For context, of the 912 saints canonized by Pope Francis, the next most recent birth date was in 1926,” Mares says. It makes him the first ever millennial saint and, as some Catholics have put it, “God’s influencer” and the “patron saint of the internet.”

    Meanwhile, the cult of Carlos Acutis is continuing to spread across the world. Relics, including a piece of the sheet that shrouded his corpse, a fragment of one of his sweatshirts, and his actual heart, have toured internationally, recently coming to the UK for the New Dawn Catholic Pilgrimage. Online, you can buy Carlo Acutis figurines, rosary beads, posters, and commemorative keychains. In North Lanarkshire, Scotland, a life-size statue of Acutis has been erected at Carfin Grotto, and there’s a stained-glass window in Wiltshire to attract young churchgoers.

    There’s even a comic book telling his story, and a VR experience offering players a chance to step into Acutis’ sneakers. And, for Catholics who are unable to pay their respects in person, his tomb can be visited (and donated to) virtually through an always-on livestream.

    The Church doesn’t pick saints—campaigns start with the Catholic community—but Acutis’ popularity meshes with its desire for a young role model. It also highlights the Church’s embrace of tech. “The Pope has been making an annual lecture about communications technology for 58 years,” says Hutchings. “It absolutely makes sense for Catholics to look for a saint of the internet who represents the godly and faithful use of technology.”

    There is, of course, still a stigma surrounding the internet’s potential for blasphemous behavior. “The Pope has warned that today’s digital age constantly tempts young people to ‘self-absorption, isolation, and empty pleasure,’” Mares says. And some devout Catholics are still struggling with temptation. “With technology changing at such a rapid pace today, many Christians are still grappling with how best to live out their faith in the world of laptops, cell phones, and social media,” Mares says.

    But the Pope also called the internet a “gift from God” in 2014, and he recognizes its potential for spreading the word of Christ—it just depends on how it is applied. And in the case of Acutis, tech was used in a pious way. “Acutis used the new technology in exactly the way that the Church wants to see it used: to promote commitment to Catholic teaching, virtuous living, and devotion to the rituals of the local church,” Hutchings explains. The Church will hope that the relatable “saint in sneakers” who watched cartoons and surfed the web will resonate with a community looking for an idol.

    This article first appeared in the November/December 2024 edition of WIRED UK magazine.

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  • The Stan Accounts That Keep Posting Through Brazil’s Ban on X

    The Stan Accounts That Keep Posting Through Brazil’s Ban on X

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    For weeks, some 40 million Brazilian X users have been beholden to the whims of Elon Musk and the country’s government. Back in April, Supreme Court judge Alexandre de Moraes opened an inquiry into the social network after Musk snubbed a court order asking the company to block accounts that backed former right-wing president Jair Bolsonaro and allegedly spread hate speech and misinformation.

    On August 30, Brazil’s top court suspended X, giving internet service providers five days to comply and causing fan accounts to send up flares alerting their followers that they’d be going quiet.

    During the blackout, several fan accounts and other Brazilians on X tried to bring their followers over to platforms like Instagram, Threads, and Bluesky, the latter seeing a 2 million user jump in the days after the ban went into effect, bringing its total users to around 8 million. Tumblr, long a hub for fan activity, also saw a 350 percent increase in users, according to a report in TechCrunch. But many users found it hard to rebuild the followings they had on X.

    “It’s undeniable that, for many businesses, the suspension of X has affected the way they communicate with customers,” says Brazilian journalist Raphael Tsavkko Garcia. (His work has appeared in WIRED.) “The same goes for artists and influencers who have seen an important platform for promotion disappear overnight.”

    Those who couldn’t transfer all of their followers from X to other platforms still vowed to maintain the new accounts they migrated to. Izadora Vasconcelos, who is behind Miley Cyrus Brasil, an account with more than 93,000 followers, says that “while X is under a businessman who thinks he is bigger than the laws of a country,” she and the other admins on the account will “keep Bluesky and X, at least for a while. So we don’t have to start from scratch again.”

    While the platform has been down, fans also lost access to their archives and all the work they’d put into curating them, Driessen notes, memory-holing “valuable pieces of pop cultural history” in the process. Even the accounts that have been able to continue posting sporadically still aren’t available for fans within the country who want to scroll through their old posts.

    On September 18, when X briefly rerouted internet traffic to get around Brazil’s roadblocks, fans rejoiced. “I know it’s just a silly app, but it’s where I [feel] safe,” wrote Thaís Garcia, the person behind the Taylor Swift account @thalovestay. “I’m not in a good place mentally, and these past week was horrible without having here to distract myself.”

    The reprieve was short-lived, but on September 20 X’s lawyers told the Supreme Court they’d found a legal representative for Brazil, a step toward getting the platform turned back on in the country. The company is now reportedly complying with some of Brazil’s other requests in hopes that the X ban will be lifted, perhaps as early as next week.

    Once that happens, and it seems like it will, Brazilian stans and their international followers will be able to access the full breadth of the communities they built on Musk’s platform—even those who have already moved on.

    Amaral notes that because many of the fan accounts are linked to more progressive artists, some of them may be reluctant to return to X due to the lack of moderation. “We know that for many fandoms, being part of a minority (whether in terms of gender, race, etc.) is a key aspect of their identity,” she adds. There is a symbiotic relationship between politics and pop culture, and “after this sort of Ragnarok for Brazilian fan accounts/fan culture,” Amaral says, many of the folks behind the accounts will have to consider whether they want to return.

    Even before X’s suspension, Beyoncé Brasil’s administrators had been working on revising and building out their website. It’s been nice to have something that’s “100 percent ours,” Silveira says. “I would say [the X account is] like a photo album: It’s good to revisit it, but we won’t die if we don’t have it.”

    Gabriel Leão contributed reporting from São Paulo.

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  • Soon After the Deadly Hezbollah Pager Explosions, This AI-Generated Podcast Went Up

    Soon After the Deadly Hezbollah Pager Explosions, This AI-Generated Podcast Went Up

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    While the idea of a quick-turnaround, generously AI-generated podcast might sound terrifying to some fans and creators, other players in the industry see it as an inevitability. Oskar Serrander, who describes his AI-meets-podcasting studio Wondercraft as “Canva for audio,” says that he views AI as a way to help creatives “produce at the speed of culture.” While he admits there are limits to AI, like the way the technology typically draws from past ideas rather than creating new concepts, he admires the way it might lower the barrier to entry for some brands or creators.

    Serrander notes there are fewer podcast creators than there are OnlyFans creators. Meanwhile, there are millions of YouTube channels, and “then you’ve got TikTok and other social media channels and all those creators” competing for people’s attention. AI, he says, may lead to the “democratization of podcasts,” ultimately resulting in what he thinks could be a more interesting—and profitable—industry.

    Granted, that’s not how those deeply invested in the art of podcasting see it. Jason Saldanha, chief operating officer of the nonprofit digital radio distribution company PRX, says that the creators he has worked with seem wary of AI, in part because they believe that “the real power of the medium is the host-audience relationship.” (Disclosure: PRX distributes podcasts for WIRED’s parent company, Condé Nast.)

    While it’s certainly tempting to use AI to translate a podcast into 20 languages and just put it out into the world, it pushes the boundaries of a work’s authenticity. “The most successful podcasts have a one-to-one relationship with their audiences, like the audiences believe they’re interacting with those people in the same room or working with them to solve some problem together,” Saldanha says. Tapping an AI voice to read the news of the day or even create a brand-new tale related to the news of the day might seem tempting to those looking to make a buck podcasting, but in the long run he thinks it’s a losing game.

    “The vast majority of audio companies are run by former radio executives who, in the ’90s, ran ad loads that were close to 50 percent of the content on the air,” Saldanha explains. “That created a moment where audiences were like, ‘This is too many ads. I need an alternative,’ so they went to Napster and then Spotify.”

    Now that those executives are working in digital audio, Saldanha says, they’re applying the same tactics, looking to monetize podcasts to the hilt. Doing that while also adding more podcasts to the market will devalue a premium form of content, putting the entire podcast industry in danger.

    “These kinds of companies are flooding the market with content to get the lowest level of engagement, and that’s fine as a strategy, but it’s not a long-term strategy,” Saldanha says. “It’s gross and it’s bad, and, ultimately, you’re cutting off your nose just to make an extra dollar.”

    Caloroga Shark doesn’t see it that way. For Francis, AI should be part of a mix of tools podcast makers use to stand out in a crowded field. Listeners “will decide which shows are worthy of staying power, whether they use AI or not,” he says. Pager Protocol may or may not be in that mix.

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  • The Shade Room Founder Is Ready to Dial Down the Shade

    The Shade Room Founder Is Ready to Dial Down the Shade

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    Angie Nwandu launched The Shade Room in 2014 as a side hustle. Today, that side hustle—which grew from an Instagram-only celebrity tabloid into a media company with a 40-person staff—reaches 29 million social media obsessives by tapping into their wolfish appetite for drama.

    The Shade Room pioneered a unique, if somewhat innovative, brand of digital media, merging elements of fan culture around the machine of celebrity news (Shade Room regulars are called Roomies). More than your run-of-the-mill gossip rag or news aggregator, TSR evolved into an information hub for “the culture,” Nwandu says, “but also a reflection of it and voice for it. We’re known as a megaphone.”

    The primary focus of the platform is the fragile world of Black celebrity. Want to know who NFL quarterback Jalen Hurts got engaged to or why Naomi Campbell has beef with Rihanna? Maybe you are wondering why a Louisville woman claims Kanye West “telegraphically” told her to allegedly steal a vehicle with a child inside? TSR has you covered.

    I recently phoned Nwandu to chat about the controversial influence of The Shade Room and the legacy she wants to leave behind. The platform has slowly branched into different coverage areas—politics, investigative reporting, spirituality—and she says that’s all part of a larger plan to eventually move beyond celebrity gossip, which she describes as “tiring.”

    Nwandu hasn’t gotten there yet. The week we spoke, music mogul Diddy was arrested after a grand jury indicted him on charges including sex trafficking and racketeering conspiracy (he pleaded not guilty), so we also talked about that—and Nwandu was an open book.

    JASON PARHAM: The Shade Room was a pioneer of social media-centric celebrity news on Instagram. Today there are hundreds of accounts that do what you do. How does that feel?

    ANGIE NWANDU: Nobody ever gives this nod to The Shade Room but we served up a blueprint that was able to be replicated. I’m friends with Shawn McKenzie [founder of The Spiritual Word] and Jason Lee [founder of Hollywood Unlocked], and we’ve had conversations. I had talks with both of them where I shared tips and advice. I’m happy to see that our blueprint was able to inspire other Black media companies who are thriving in their own right. To see the success of all these platforms is amazing to me. I’m actually really proud of that because who doesn’t want to start something that creates a ripple effect?

    The Shade Room has never shied away from controversy but I imagine there are editorial guidelines that you follow. What won’t you post?

    If I say which stories, it would defeat the purpose now. I will say, what we don’t do is out people. A lot of people send us very salacious stories where they are outing people. That’s something that we stay away from. In the beginning we were kinda wild, but generally that is something we have avoided. I’ve seen the damage in what it does to people who are not ready to step out in that way. We have tried to move away from invasion of privacy in certain areas.

    But is it not called The Shade Room for a reason?

    We’re trying to change what we post and move towards positivity. We used to post clapbacks all day long and we have eased off of that. It’s been hard because our name is The Shade Room—like, if Diddy goes to jail, we have to get that up. But there’s a lot we won’t post. It’s been a dance, for sure.



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  • Moo Deng Is More Than a Meme

    Moo Deng Is More Than a Meme

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    Everyone, it seems, wants a piece of Moo Deng. The baby pygmy hippo is barely two months old and already famous. So beloved on TikTok, Instagram, and X is Moo Deng that workers at Khao Kheow Open Zoo, the place in Thailand where she was born, are doing all they can to keep up with her fans’ appetite for more. They post videos, photos, updates. They also welcome thousands of visitors a day and find themselves having to defend Moo Deng when tourists throw shells at her while she’s just trying to chill.

    Moo Deng, a name that means “bouncy pig,” has probably been all over your timeline lately—on Sephora makeup tutorials, on X’s main feed. She was born in July and in the past few weeks has become the Internet’s New Favorite Animal. A tradition almost as old as the internet itself, Favorite Animals—Maru, any of the dogs on the shiba inu puppy cam, those two llamas who just happened to run free the same day everyone was trying to decide what color The Dress was—come into the public consciousness seemingly out of nowhere. Some, like Doge, stick around; others disappear, or simply outgrow their cuteness, within a matter of weeks.

    All of which makes capitalizing on their fame a matter of some urgency. It seems heartless to think of animals this way, but if their owners don’t, someone else will. Perhaps that’s why zoo director Narongwit Chodchoi told the Associated Press this week that the zoo has begun the process of trying to trademark and patent the hippo to avoid her likeness getting used by anyone else—a smart move considering Moo Deng mugs, T-shirts, and other merch are already popping up online. Income from these efforts, Chodcho told the wire service, could “support activities that will make the animals’ lives better.”

    Moo Deng might need it. Fandom is getting a bit out of control these days. As pop stars like Chappell Roan have amassed online and offline fame, they’ve also had to use their platforms to ask for space from boundary-less fans and stalkers. Social media celebs like Drew Afualo, on whose podcast Roan appeared to talk about the subject, also tell stories of being approached in public by people who simply know them from the internet.

    It may seem odd to compare them to Favorite Animals, but the ways in which people feel entitled to their time aren’t that far apart. Everyone wants something for the ’gram, even if that something is a living being with its own sense of agency. One of Moo Deng’s most popular TikToks has 34 million views, and zoo staff have had to limit her visiting time to five minutes on Saturdays and Sundays to keep too many people from trying to get content of their own.

    Trademark protections may be the best way for Moo Deng’s caretakers to ensure others don’t cash in on her viral fame. When Jools Lebron made efforts to trademark her “very demure, very mindful” meme, one of the hurdles that emerged was that it’s hard to claim ownership of a phrase. As Kate Miltner, a lecturer in data, AI, and society at the University of Sheffield’s Information School, told me at the time, memes with audiovisual elements, like Nyan Cat or Grumpy Cat, are easier to register. “People will invariably try to make money off of viral or memetic content, as we’ve seen time and again,” Miltner says when asked about trademarking the baby hippo, adding that the Cincinnati Zoo has already done this with Fiona the Hippo. “It’s smart of the Khao Kheow Open Zoo to (at least try to) ensure that they’re the ones that do so.”



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  • Reddit’s ‘Celebrity Number Six’ Win Was Almost a Catastrophe—Thanks to AI

    Reddit’s ‘Celebrity Number Six’ Win Was Almost a Catastrophe—Thanks to AI

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    Take, for example, the other recently solved internet mystery: The source of the song that became known as “Everyone Knows That.” After nearly three years of online investigative work, a pair of Redditors found the song—titled “Ulterior Motives”—after hearing a similar song in an adult movie clip on YouTube and watching literal hours of porn that had possibly been scored by the songwriters credited on that clip.

    During the hunt there had been speculation that the song was AI-generated or part of some stunt. If the detectives had gotten too distracted by that, or if someone had tried to use AI to “solve” the mystery by just making a similar track, those two never would have gotten to watch all that porn. They probably just would’ve gotten embroiled in scores of online fights.

    The Monitor is a weekly column devoted to everything happening in the WIRED world of culture, from movies to memes, TV to TikTok.

    Celebrity Number Six and “Everyone Knows That” are mysteries that, however slightly, predate the current generative AI boom, and as such seem to have avoided at least some of the fallout. While both investigations definitely exhibited the kind of caution necessary when determining the authenticity of anything online, their narrative arcs show the ways in which the internet is now even more untrustworthy than it used to be. This is far more true in the case of C6 than “Everyone Knows That,” but it’s hard to imagine any new mystery that pops up in their wake having fewer disagreements about what is real and what came from AI.

    When the Times reached out to Sardá, she noted that she’d been trying to enjoy her new fame. (She’s on TikTok now.) She said she was happy that people had gone to such lengths to find her, but also concerned about “how far this could go” and how much it would change her life. There was one thing, though, that seemed to give her comfort: “I can always hide.”

    Loose Threads:

    Cat memes are infiltrating the US election. Bear with me, because pretty much all of these threads are going to be about cats. The first one involves a baseless conspiracy that began floating around this week on social media that Haitian immigrants in Springfield, Ohio were eating cats (as well as ducks and geese). Ohio senator J.D. Vance referenced the conspiracy on X, and the platform’s owner, Elon Musk, posted several images of cats (and ducks) with captions like “Save them!” Texas senator Ted Cruz posted a meme-style image macro of a pair of embracing kittens with the text “Please vote for Trump so the Haitian immigrants don’t eat us.” It was accompanied by three cry-laughing emojis. Over on the Republican House Judiciary Committee’s X account, there was a seemingly AI-generated image of Trump holding a duck and kitten in what appears to be a lake.

    Cat memes hit the debate floor. The cat-eating conspiracy got an even bigger platform on Tuesday night when, during Trump’s debate with Vice President Kamala Harris, he said, “They’re eating the dogs. They’re eating the cats.” The audio quickly migrated to TikTok where it was placed next to images of people’s pets. Memes of Alf, the alien sitcom star who famously always wanted to eat the family feline, also took off.

    Taylor Swift (and her cat) endorse Kamala Harris. Lest you think the cat chat stopped there, it didn’t. Mere moments after the debate ended, Taylor Swift grabbed her phone (presumably) and typed out an Instagram post that both decried AI misinformation and endorsed Kamala Harris. Swift signed it “Childless Cat Lady.” In the photo, she’s holding a cat. As of this writing, the post has more than 10 million likes. Musk seemingly responded to Swift’s endorsement by writing on X, “Fine Taylor … you win … I will give you a child and guard your cats with my life.” He followed that up a few hours later with “Toxoplasma gondii is a danger to our democracy,” essentially saying that a parasite that is carried by cats—and can make animals like mice not afraid of cats—could reshape the government in America.

    Kendrick Lamar dropped a new song on Instagram. After causing a major ruckus online by announcing that he’d perform the Super Bowl halftime show next year, Kendrick Lamar dropped a new track. Listen to it here.



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  • The End of ‘Brat Summer’ Doesn’t Mean What You Think

    The End of ‘Brat Summer’ Doesn’t Mean What You Think

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    Charli XCX said it, so it must be true: Brat Summer is over. In a tweet so echoey it got several news hits, the club rat/pop girl said goodbye to the season that may come to define her career—and America’s political future. It was September 2, 87 days after Charli released the album Brat and 43 days after she declared that Vice President Kamala Harris “IS brat.” Normally, the fall, spooky end-of-summer vibes don’t really start until, like, the end of the month, but being online has always been a surefire way to warp one’s sense of time.

    This year, though, that warp comes at warp speed. As Bethy Squires pointed out at Vulture this week, the internet seems to be “starting spooky season early.” Perhaps Demure Autumn didn’t give people enough of what they needed; maybe everyone just wants to get in a lot of Halloween before everyone has to start preparing for the holidays on October 1(ish). A few TikTokkers are advocating for a fall dedicated to Magdelena Bay’s album Imaginal Disk.

    More than that, though, I’d say this all has something to do with the fact that being extremely online means observing one’s own calendar, one slightly aligned with the Gregorian one but with its own set of holidays and traditions.

    You already know them: Galentine’s Day, Beyoncé’s birthday (which was just honored on Wednesday), that time in spring when everyone starts posting “It’s gonna be May” with an image macro of Justin Timberlake’s grinning mug. Right now, perhaps a bit early, Spooktober and a new Pumpkin Spice Latte/PSL Season is upon us. Like many others, that last one, similar to National Doughnut Day, is one that while perhaps not entirely the product of a corporate marketing whiz, is definitely one that benefits Starbucks. #Brands like hopping on #trends. Now, when they know there’s a surefire way to be a part of something, like Pride Month, they put it on a calendar and roll out a whole campaign.

    This is perhaps how things got here in the first place. Everyone from Gen Z TikTokers to the Dunkin’ social media manager needs to know when to get on the trend and when to get off. Presumably this is why the Kamala HQ X account has already removed its Brat Green hue. As my colleague Leah Feiger discussed with writer Hunter Harris a few weeks back, as the US gets closer to Election Day in November, the pop culture moment around Harris will likely shift back to a more political one.

    The Monitor is a weekly column devoted to everything happening in the WIRED world of culture, from movies to memes, TV to TikTok.



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  • How the Cyber-Thriller ‘Red Rooms’ Became a Cult Classic Before It Was Ever Released

    How the Cyber-Thriller ‘Red Rooms’ Became a Cult Classic Before It Was Ever Released

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    Digital piracy often gets a bad rap. Maybe it’s memories of those old “You wouldn’t steal a car” pre-roll ads that were a fixture in theaters. Maybe it’s the word “piracy.” But recent research suggests that uploading, downloading, and swapping movies illegally isn’t necessarily an impediment to a given title’s bottom line. One study found that word of mouth generated by illegal sharing of movies can actually increase box-office revenues. And for cinephiles who may be cut off (either financially or geographically) for the indie or art-house cinemas, piracy can prove essential—or at least a necessary evil. As Andy Chatterley, CEO of research firm Muso, told WIRED earlier this year, “The thing about piracy is, it’s really just people wanting to consume content. They’re not doing it for the act of piracy; they’re being driven by marketing on other things that drive legal consumption.”

    Smaller films like Red Rooms often find audiences in such less-than-legal circles. Lucas Tavares, 23, lives in a small town in Brazil. He obsessively follows film coverage on social media platforms like X and Letterboxd. Red Rooms first came to his attention over a year ago, when it premiered at the Karlovy Vary International Film Festival in the Czech Republic. A few weeks later, he was able to scrounge a copy online. “Where I live,” he says, “it’s very hard to see smaller movies, and independent movies, especially if they are not American blockbusters. So I rely on torrents a lot.”

    For Henry Meeks, a 29-year old school teacher in Philadelphia, torrents and online piracy channels became essential during the Covid-19 lockdowns. With cinemas shuttered and film production all but halted, many cinephiles took the opportunity to dig deeper into older, harder-to-find films. “What I love about piracy,” Meeks says, “is that there’s tons of movies that have fallen out of distribution. There’s no Blu-ray. So it’s a really good archival practice. Stuff that I really can’t find anywhere, even if I wanted to buy it, is kept alive on those websites.”

    When Meeks heard some buzz about Red Rooms, he downloaded it and immediately shared it with friends on Plex: the freeware streaming-media service that allows users to amass and share collections of private media. This curation distinguishes private servers like Plex from the bigger, aboveground streaming services with their algorithmic recommendation systems. “Netflix and Amazon Prime have more movies than you could ever see,” Meeks says. “But it’s not really curated by a human.”

    Plante seems a little ambivalent about his movie’s success online. While he is embracing his movie leaking, he notes that building this sort of word of mouth was very much “not a strategy.” He says the film’s French-Canadian distributor insisted on dropping Red Rooms’ on Canadian video-on-demand services shortly after its theatrical premiere. “I told him that the day after it’s on iTunes in Canada, it’s going to be on freaking PirateBay,” he says, referring to the popular BitTorrent client.

    Of course, not everyone has the ability, or inclination, to download MP4 or AVI files of relatively obscure French-Canadian cyber-thrillers. Plante is confident the film’s upcoming wide release in US cinemas, on September 6, will help expand his movie’s niche, cultish appeal. Smaller movies like this tend to have a long life, moving through the international film festival circuit to bigger bookings in cinemas and to home video. Gray-web peer-to-peer file-sharing websites are just one place people can find the film.

    Still, Plante finds it totally appropriate that his movie about the internet’s underbelly has found an audience among people who wade in those same waters.“It’s a very online, very geeky film,” he says. “Of course people are going to torrent it.”

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