Valve Index sales saw a tremendous surge in the final quarter of 2019 following the announcement of Half-Life: Alyx, the first installment in the Half-Life series in 13 years. While the VR-only Half-Life: Alyx is not technically the Half-Life 3 gamers have been praying for since Half-Life 2’s cliffhanger ending, the game is still reportedly the same length as its predecessor. Half-Life: Alyx’s trailer received over 10 million views in the first 24 hours following its release, clearly illustrating fans of the series have not lost interest in the franchise over the years....

Birds of Prey (and the Fantabulous Emancipation of One Harley Quinn)’s title change was done to help improve the film’s ticket sales. Despite riding waves of positive buzz into theaters and receiving excellent reviews, the latest entry in the DCEU stumbled out of the gates at the box office. Birds of Prey posted the lowest opening weekend for any DC adaptation since 2010, grossing just $33 million domestically. Even for a film that had modest expectations coming in, that turn of events was concerning and left people wondering what exactly went wrong....

Sirius Black is one of the iconic characters of Harry Potter. Although he’s not the main character and is only actually featured in three books out of seven (or four, if you count his sort-of ghost appearance), he played a driving force in the story. Prisoner of Azkaban, especially, was all about him. Most of his life, however, took place before the books even began, which means certain things about Sirius are often missed and forgotten....

Warwick Davis has expressed an interest in appearing in the Fantastic Beasts films, which would make him one of the few actors to appear in both Wizarding World movie franchises. Davis played multiple roles in the Harry Potter movies, as he appeared as both Professor Filius Flitwick and Griphook the goblin, taking over the role from Verne Troyer when he was recast in the last Harry Potter movie. The first Fantastic Beasts movie was set seventy years before the events of Harry Potter, which means many of the series’ principle players have yet to be born....

This gag has been around for years, but if you haven’t seen it yet, it’s worth a download. It’s created by Sysinternals co-founder and Microsoft software architect Mark Russinovich. If you don’t know his name, you’ve probably used one of his free Windows utilities at some point. A couple examples are Autoruns, Coreinfo and one of my personal favorites — Disk2VHD. Install BlueScreen Download the BlueScreen Screen Saver, created by Mark Russinovich (link below) and extract the zip file to a convenient location on your system....

The sequel Godzilla: King of the Monsters has found another key cast member, in the form of Aisha Hinds. Legendary’s 2014 Godzilla reboot began a wave of modern-day takes on classic monster movie characters, something that continued again in Kong: Skull Island this year. Both films were met with mostly positive reviews, and they were slightly divisive in their own right as well, as Warner Bros. and Legendary work together towards a Godzilla vs Kong crossover film....

Goldman Sachs has offered up some early details on its Apple Card investments this week. In regulatory fillings, the bank indicated that thus far, it has extended $10 billion in credit lines to Apple Card customers. The filings show that of the $10 billion in credit lines, customers ended the month of September with a total of $736 million in loan balances. To offset the launch of Apple Card, Goldman halted its unsecured personal loan business....

Early last week, Apple discontinued the white plastic MacBook, which had been an education-only item since mid-2011, but is continuing to sell the product to education institutions while supplies last. The remaining supplies are being sold for $899, and sources say that Apple’s white MacBook inventory for educational institutions is still rather high. While white MacBooks for education are a thing of the past, Apple is not giving up on education: they are launching two new MacBook Airs for schools programs today....

One day before Apple’s big iPad event tomorrow, Google has just unveiled its latest Nexus devices alongside official announcements for Android 5.0 Lollipop and more. With Apple expected to launch new iPad Air and possibly iPad mini models tomorrow, Google today announced the Nexus 9, an 8.9-inch HTC-made tablet with brushed metal bezels and a gold (Best!, duh) color option not unlike that expected for the new iPad Air tomorrow. The tablet also features a keyboard folio that attaches magnetically to the device....

Google has just rolled out a nice update to its recently released Hangouts app for iOS. Version 1.1.1 of the app now includes the ability to send and click on URLs within the app, support for inviting friends to Hangouts via SMS, and much more. Also included in the updated app is official support for iOS 6.0, new in-app sounds for when you receive a message, and other improvements and performance enhancements....

Google officially announced today a rebranding of its wearable platform from Android Wear to Wear OS. The company says the shift “better reflects our technology, vision, and most important of all—the people who wear our watches.” Along with this news is some interesting data on how a subset of users on Google’s wearable platform are also iPhone users. Google notes in its blog post on the matter that last year, 1/3 of Android Wear users were doing so with an iPhone....

Today composing text for blogs, articles and basic internet-based texting has become a cakewalk. We have many helpful editing tools in the form of plugins that take care of our spellings, grammar, choice of words, etc. Not everyone is perfect in English and it’s okay. However, we cannot allow this excuse to mess up our articles, write-ups, etc. Though all languages are beautiful, when it comes to content, English takes the front-seat....

When you play Grounded for the first time, you will complete the initial story and meet a robot named BURG.L. This robot is your friend and throughout the game, it will function as a mission giver for you. Now the game is in its initial stage so there are not many story missions that you will play, but there will be a bunch of daily tasks that BURG.L will hand out to you....

Marvel Studios Guardians of the Galaxy was a runaway success when it hit theater screens in 2014, but the film was a huge risk. Even many die-hard comic book fans had no clue who the Guardians were. In at least one way, that turned out to be an asset for director and co-writer James Gunn (Super), who was able to heavily adapt the property without widespread ire of fans. The film version of the team is definitely odd, but their classic comic iterations are arguably even odder....

In the world of science fiction cinema, you can find everything from Star Wars to Annihilation across two categories of sci-fi storytelling known as hard sci-fi and soft-sci-fi. Though these two terms were originally coined in the 1950s as ways of categorizing literature, they’ve managed to be as useful expressions for cinematic discourse. The category of hard sci-fi pertains to science fiction tales that are more grounded in reality with science that either exists or could conceivably exist in the near future....

For most of us highly imaginative folks, we’ve secretly fantasized once or twice about what it would be like to date a fictional character. In fact, most of us Harry Potter fans would even go so far as to say some of our first crushes were developed from the characters in these books and in the films. Some of the Gryffindor characters are totally boyfriend material while others simply aren’t. Here are the most BF-worthy characters in Gryffindor, ranked....

It’s fair to say that the recent revival of Gilmore Girls was a success. The batch of new episodes generated a huge buzz, garnered a heap of big media headlines and the viewership for the Netflix original A Year in the Life even managed to surpass Marvel’s Luke Cage. Delivering four feature-length 90-minute episodes to fans, the world of Stars Hollow was brought to life once more after almost a decade away from the small screen....

Glee’s main focus as a television show was on the New Directions Glee Club overcoming the obstacles in front of them. Overcoming the adversity thrown at them from naysayers made the show extremely popular. It was also their portrayal of high school students in a relatable manner which made fans continue to tune in. Being able to depict real-life situations in a proper manner on television is important in getting fans to truly fall in love with a show....

Godzilla: King of the Monsters may have quietly introduced one of the most important locations in Godzilla lore to the MonsterVerse - albeit with a different name - since it would seem that Kong’s home, Skull Island, is the MonsterVerse’s take on Toho’s Monster Island. Skull Island first appeared in the original King Kong movie, all the way back in 1933. The island is inhabited by natives, and of course, King Kong himself....

Popular iOS PDF app, GoodReader, is out with a major update today for its 10th anniversary. The new release brings a brand new UI and PDF viewer, a continuous scrolling mode, 256-bit encryption, Split View support on iPad, Apple Pencil 2 support, Secure Photocopy redaction, and much more. GoodReader shared the news about the major iOS update in a press release on its 10th anniversary today: Here’s are some of the changes users will first notice with GoodReader 5....