In his memoir, If Chins Could Kill, Campbell describes a moment so bizarre it sounds made up. After a particularly intense scene filmed in a graveyard, he was running down a hill when he tripped, badly twisting his ankle. This wasn’t the usual minor injury you get on a movie set; he was in genuine, debilitating pain, as he writes:
Clint Eastwood directed and wrote the screenplay for The Mule, which is based on a real story published in The New York Times about the Sinaloa Cartel and an elderly drug courier. Released in December 2018, the film followed Eastwood and Bradley Cooper’s successful collaboration on American Sniper, which received six Academy Award nominations. The Mule was well-received by critics and earned $174.8 million worldwide on a $50 million budget.
Remember when prediction markets were just for betting on elections and sports? Cute. By 2025, they’d evolved into a multibillion-dollar ecosystem, cozying up to Wall Street, media giants, and even crypto infrastructure. 🌐💸
In the early 1980s, Nintendo was facing bankruptcy and urgently needed a hit product. Luckily, they had a promising young designer named Shigeru Miyamoto, who created Donkey Kong. Originally intended to utilize a surplus of unsold Radar Scope arcade machines, the game quickly became something much bigger. Donkey Kong was a huge success, earning hundreds of millions of dollars in its first two years and rescuing Nintendo. But its impact went beyond just financial success; Donkey Kong was a groundbreaking game that established many of the design principles still used in games today.
Although fantasy and science fiction are the most popular anime genres, especially for shows aimed at young men (shonen) and older men (seinen), there’s a lot more to discover. Historical anime, often blended with other genres, are surprisingly influential and create captivating stories set in the past. While these shows don’t always stick to historical facts, they offer unique and detailed world-building you don’t often find in modern anime. Here’s a list of some excellent historical anime that every fan should check out.
Batman is known for always having backup plans, but his enemies have repeatedly used those very plans against the Justice League. Some of his most dangerous foes, like the AI system Brother Eye (which was manipulated by Maxwell Lord and Lex Luthor), actually came about because of his careful preparation. However, the biggest failure of Batman’s planning wasn’t when a villain discovered it – it was when a friend did.
![The protocol distills a target [latex]\rho_{R}(p)[/latex] state from an initial state [latex]\rho_{AB}^{\<i>}[/latex] via an optimized channel, demonstrating that output fidelity and successful distillation probability are directly influenced by the parameter </i>p* within the target state itself.](https://arxiv.org/html/2512.21310v1/fidelity-prob_one_example.png)
New research demonstrates a powerful optimization framework for enhancing entanglement distillation, even when dealing with noisy or weakly connected quantum systems.
As the Marvel Cinematic Universe expands, it’s important to remember the compelling characters who only appeared briefly in a single movie or show. These characters made a strong first impression, and it would be great to see them return. No matter what new stories the MCU tells, these often-forgotten characters deserve another chance to shine.
If you’re an HBO Max subscriber, you have until December 31st to watch the horror film It Follows. Written and directed by David Robert Mitchell, the movie follows Jay, who after a sexual encounter, finds herself haunted by a terrifying, shape-shifting entity. She’s forced to find a way to break the curse and escape its relentless pursuit.
Square Enix’s Chrono Cross faced a similar situation when it came out on PlayStation in 1999, four years after the release of Chrono Trigger, a role-playing game considered by many to be one of the greatest ever made. While Chrono Cross was initially well-received and later reintroduced to a new audience with Chrono Cross: The Radical Dreamers Edition, it still sparked debate among fans. The game was often compared to Chrono Trigger instead of being appreciated on its own merits, and this connection shaped how people viewed it and the entire Chrono series.