The season finale of "Rick and Morty," the Internet Movie Database's fourth most-popular TV show of all-time, runs tonight. What started as a graphic parody of Back to the Future (minus the headache of time travel) is now a critically acclaimed series with a devoted fan base. It follows a prototypical mad scientist, Rick, and his grandson, Morty, on adventures in alternate universes. David Sims, of The AV Club, summed up the show's premise as "essentially--what if Doc Brown was a demented drunk? And what if Marty McFly was a lonely kid who got dragged around with him on terrifying and strange adventures through space and time?"

New Line Cinema's "It," now in its fourth week, returned to the top spot at the box office after temporarily being unseated by 20th Century Fox's spy sequel "Kingsman: The Golden Circle." Despite a 42% drop in earnings this week, the $35-million film, now the biggest September release ever (not adjusting for inflation), brought in $17.3 million for a cumulative total of $291.2 million in the U.S. and Canada and $553.1 million worldwide. The Stephen King adaptation, about a group of kids terrorized by an evil clown, was directed by Andy Muschietti and stars Bill Skarsgard ("Hemlock Grove") as Pennywise the Dancing Clown. "It" boasts a B rating on CinemaScore and an 85% "fresh" rating on review aggregation site Rotten Tomatoes. Universal Pictures' crime thriller "American Made," starring Tom Cruise, debuted in second place, earning $17 million this weekend, above analysts' expectations of $12 million to $15 million.

The Internet Archive recently announced a new service they've dubbed'Third Eye'. IA has a vast historical archive of TV news that they'll eventually process, but -- for now -- the more recent broadcasts from four channels are readily available. There's tons of information about the project on its main page where you can interactively work with the API if that's how you roll. Since my newsflash package already had a "news" theme and worked with the joint IA-GDELT project TV data, it seemed to be a good home for a Third Eye interface to live. You can read long-form details of the Third Eye service on their site.

Creativity, Inc. is one of the most insightful and thought-provoking books I have read. Ed Catmull recounts his personal experiences, and talks in depth about the processes he created that made Pixar one of the most successful companies in the business. I strongly encourage you to see the video interview below, where he describes the "Brain Trust." The key takeaway is that great stories are not written in a flash of inspiration, but are a result of an agile, iterative process. I couldn't help but notice the similarities to writing great software code within an agile framework.

File photo: This product image provided by Amazon shows the Amazon Echo. Yes, voice technology is amazing. You can ask your phone a question. You can talk to your speaker system and book an Uber. With the right setup, your voice can lock the doors, dim the lights and change the thermostat.

Part of the elemental appeal of zombie fiction is the permission it provides to imagine which household item, when pressed, you might use to stove in the face of a lunging, undead version of Mrs Brown from No 37. In the glare of such an apocalypse, familiar domestic items such as tea towels, cafetieres and loo brushes must be reappraised, their value now dependent on their ability to cause brain damage rather than efficiently dry a plate, deliver coffee, or clean the glum residue from a toilet bowl. Do you reach for the bread knife (rasping, noble), or the biro (intimate, cruel)? The 17-year-old film Battle Royale further elevated the premise. In the film a busload of high school students are gassed and delivered to a remote island.

Knowing that an AI wrote Sunspring makes the movie more fun to watch, especially once you know how the cast and crew put it together. Director Oscar Sharp made the movie for Sci-Fi London, an annual film festival that includes the 48-Hour Film Challenge, where contestants are given a set of prompts (mostly props and lines) that have to appear in a movie they make over the next two days. Sharp's longtime collaborator, Ross Goodwin, is an AI researcher at New York University, and he supplied the movie's AI writer, initially called Jetson. As the cast gathered around a tiny printer, Benjamin spat out the screenplay, complete with almost impossible stage directions like "He is standing in the stars and sitting on the floor." Then Sharp randomly assigned roles to the actors in the room.

Narrative screenplays follow a standardized format fortheir parts (e.g., stage direction, dialogue, etc.) including short descriptions for what, where, when, and howto film the events in the story (shot headings). We created a grammar based on the syntax of shot headings toextract this and other discourse elements for automatic screenplay annotation. We test our annotator on over a thousand raw screenplays from the IMSDb screenplay corpus and make the output available for narrative intelligence research.

This project aims to compose background music in real-time for tabletop role-playing games. To accomplish this goal, we propose a system called MTG that listens to players' speeches in order to recognize the context of the current scene and generate background music to match the scene. A speech recognition system is used to transcribe players' speeches to text and a supervised learning algorithm detects when scene transitions take place. In its current version, a scene transition occurs whenever the emotional state of the narrative changes. Moreover, the background music is not generated, but selected based on its emotion from a library of hand-authored pieces. As future work, we plan to generate the background music considering the current scene context and the probability of scene transition. We also consider to retrieve more information from the narrative to detect scene transitions, such as the scene's location and time of the day as well as actions taken by characters.

With each generation, the Apple Watch's purpose has seemed to shift. The first one demonstrated what Apple thought a wearable should be, and the second tried to be the perfect workout companion. When it came time to build the Series 3, though, Apple took everything it got right with the fitness-friendly Series 2, polished it up, and threw an LTE radio inside. And lo, the $399 Apple Watch Series 3 became the first of a new breed of Apple devices -- it straddles the line between smartwatch and phone, with a dash of iPod thrown in for good measure. For those who'd rather play it safe, Apple also built a $329 Series 3 with just GPS and no cellular connection.