Inverse

When a video game company is looking to push sales of a game, the go-to option is no longer to show a presentation at an annual convention (RIP E3), to place a splashy poster at a retail store, or even to buy traditional online ads (though that is clearly part of the strategy). A lot of companies now are going straight to individual enthusiasts to push their games. In many cases, getting a large influencer to play a game is enough to have it trend for days. The “For You” page sitting at the top of your feed has become the new vanguard for determining which video games are fun to play. It’s a huge departure from a decade ago when companies would approach consumers via traditional forms of advertising. “Now creators are brands, and rather than creators trying to leverage a brand for financial gain or some promotion, I feel like that is reversed, where it’s brands that are often trying to leverage the power, influence, and relevancy of a creator, who are themselves their own brands,” Twitch’s chief marketing officer Rachel Delphin tells Inverse. “The streamer knows their community, they know their aesthetic, they know what’s going to resonate.” But the question is, do they know how to review games?

Happy November 5. Today we mark this "red-letter date in the history of science” (fiction) with a look back at a movie that redefined the time travel genre forever.

It’s a shame that a great movie like Juror #2 is being buried when it’s exactly what audiences are craving. It may be old-fashioned in its deliberate pacing and somewhat naive trust in the justice system, but it’s also old-fashioned in how it trusts its audience. It’s nice that they’re still making movies like this, though with Clint Eastwood potentially set to retire, they might not be making them for much longer.

Marvel has never exactly been at the forefront of LGBTQ representation. So far, every queer character has been more or less tokenized: a director cameo, a quick kiss, a character with two moms. So when the moment came in Agatha All Along, and Agatha and Rio finally kissed, only for Agatha to die immediately afterward, it may have given pause. At first glance, it looks like another representation misstep by Marvel, but it’s actually a clever subversion and takedown of the queer stories that preceded it.

The MCU is ... back? Disney just opened the floodgates and announced a slew of long-anticipated movies and shows, from 'Daredevil: Born Again' to 'Wonder Man' to 'Ironheart'. But will the more is more approach work this time?

Who else cleared the weekend for Black Ops 6? Who else is clearing this coming weekend for it too?

'Don't Move', the excellent new Netflix thriller is anxiety-inducing, to say the least. A grieving mother named Iris trusts the wrong stranger and gets injected with an unnamed paralytic agent that will render her immobile. The film follows her frantic attempt to outrun her captor as the drug debilitates her little by little. Frightening stuff. But for anyone who has thought hard on powerful anesthetics — the reality, for once, might be more frightening than the film. We dug into the science behind the frightening film, but didn't exactly leave less shaken.

Mark your calendars and get out your multipass! November 17 and 20, Luc Beson's sci-fi classic, 'The Fifth Element' is coming back to theaters. See you there.

Cognitive decline is the issue that this election cannot shake. The Stanford-Arizona State-Yale Election Panel (SAY24) has, from February and October 2024 shown that those saying that Trump is too old to be president rose to 44% from 35%, while the share saying he is not too old dropped to 46% from 53%. And yet, throughout voter skepticism and pundits playing armchair psychologists, the issue seems at once fair game to ask about an impossible thing to answer. Cognitive researchers could have told you that. “This is really an emerging area of research,” says Ana Daugherty, a cognitive neuroscientist specializing in aging at Wayne State University. “There's just so much that we still don't know.” What we do know is that there are many forms of cognitive decline and how it occurs is different for everyone. One person’s 50 might look a bit like another person’s 80 when it comes to working memory whereas it could be reversed when it comes to, say, problem-solving. “People are different,” Daugherty says. “It would be nice if it's a very straightforward process,” adds Jessica Damoiseaux, an associate professor in the Institute of Gerontology and the Department of Psychology at Wayne State University, “but it's just not like that.” So, there are a lot of unknowns (no doubt fueling partisan bickering), but we do know an incredible amount about the brain and how it develops (and, shall we say, unravels) throughout life. A look at the brain’s broad growth shows just how complicated decline is, how much more we need to learn about it, and how imperative this knowledge is. Taking a moment to think about our own brain's rise and decline can be good for our health — if not that of the body politic.

When talking with 'Venom: The Last Dance' director Kelly Marcel, we learned how the 'Venom' lobster scene — you know the one — came to be: "Their big breakthrough came in the form of one of?Venom’s?most iconic scenes:?the lobster tank. Originally, it was meant to be a simple scene where Hardy’s character shows up at a fancy restaurant and tells Michelle Williams he’s been infected by some sort of parasite. But when they arrived at the set, everything changed. “There was this big open space that had the wooden block in the center of the dining room,” Marcel recalls, “and Tom said, ‘What's that going to be?’ And they said, We're building a lobster tank for the set.’ And he was like, ‘Good, because I'm going to get in it.’” The prop guys seemed concerned, but Hardy and Marcel were off to the races."