The second season of Fallout - Prime Video's mega-hit based on the popular video game series - has landed. Set in a post-apocalyptic future where Earth has been ravaged by nuclear war, the first series was a commercial and critical hit, impressing long-time fans and viewers who'd never played before. Its surprising success had a huge impact on Bethesda Softworks, the developer of its source material, bringing back lapsed players and creating new ones along the way. Key creatives from the company have told BBC Newsbeat about working with the show's producers, and what the success of the programme means for the future of the games. The first season of Fallout arrived at a turning point for Hollywood video game adaptations.

Imagining a future where smart glasses allow'AI slop' to be avoided "Wearing the unsmart glasses created an entirely un-augmented reality " By the mid-2020s, the world was becoming swamped with "AI slop". Whether images, video, music, emails, ads, speeches or TV shows, many people's interactions were with asinine content generated by artificial intelligence. Sometimes the experience was fun and relatively harmless, but often it was tedious and brain-sapping . At worst, it could be dangerously misleading . Even engagements with other people became suspect - who knew if the person on the phone was real or not?

One of the most perfect things about the original Alien is its fiendish simplicity. Driven in part by technical limitations, the movie largely confines its glistening monster to the shadows, and keeps the reasons for its existence similarly obscured. Driven purely by the instinct to drive and reproduce, the xenomorph--a designation the creature didn't even acquire until the second movie in the series--is both a perfect killing machine and the ultimate plot device. It not only requires no explanation but allows none, because the alien's very nature means that no one who might be in a position to pass on information about it survives to do so. Simplicity, however, is not really Noah Hawley's thing.

For a 10-day period the summer of 2006, in between handing in my resignation at my first job on a games magazine and returning to Scotland to start university, I did almost nothing except eat, sleep and play The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion on my Xbox 360. I hauled my TV from the living room of my small, unpleasantly warm flatshare into my bedroom so I could play uninterrupted; it was all I could think about. My character was a Khajiit thief, a kind of manky lion in black-leather armour with excellent pickpocketing skills. One afternoon, I decided to see whether I could steal every single object in the smallish town of Bravil, and got caught by the guards a couple of hours in. I did a runner, dropping a trail of random plates, cheese wheels and doublets in my wake, and the guards pursued me all the way to the other side of the map, where they finally got entangled with a bear who helpfully killed them for me.

It sometimes happens that a random British TV show will suddenly shoot to enormous, worldwide acclaim without a big publicity campaign to push it there, instead driven primarily by word of mouth. The best example of this is 2024's Baby Reindeer, which became a hit and sparked real-life twists and turns to rival those within the series itself. The latest example, Adolescence, has seen success on a different scale, though. The four-part drama, about a 13-year-old boy named Jamie who is arrested for murdering a girl at his school, became one of Netflix's most popular series of all time--beating out Stranger Things Season 3--within just the first 17 days of its release. Why is everyone watching this show?

Squid Game is not a subtle show. It is impossible to misinterpret its very obvious message that the games are bad, and people should NOT be driven to such desperation by a merciless capitalist system that they will murder each other for rich people's entertainment. I would not be the first to point out that there is some conflict in the fact that we, the viewers, are watching all these competitors get killed for our entertainment, but still: despite the violence, despite the shock value, there is no ambiguity around the narrative intention. In this spin-off video game from Netflix, by contrast, the games are not bad. They are supposed to be fun.

My godson, Michael, is a playful, energetic 15-year-old, with a deep love of Star Wars, a wry smile, and an IQ in the low 70s. His learning disabilities and autism have made his journey a hard one. His parents, like so many others, sometimes rely on screens to reduce stress and keep him occupied. They monitor the apps and websites he uses, but things are not always as they initially appear. When Michael asked them to approve installing Linky AI, a quick review didn't reveal anything alarming, just a cartoonish platform to pass the time.

The survival horror indie hit Pacific Drive is getting turned into a TV show, according to a report by Variety. Director James Wan, who is best known for Saw and Aquaman, has scooped up the rights to the game, though that's about all we know. There's no casting news yet, or even information as to which streamer or network it will premiere on. It's time to play the waiting game. Pacific Drive is certainly a unique take on the survival horror genre.

This paper presents an improved framework for character-aware audio-visual subtitling in TV shows. Our approach integrates speech recognition, speaker diarisation, and character recognition, utilising both audio and visual cues. This holistic solution addresses what is said, when it's said, and who is speaking, providing a more comprehensive and accurate character-aware subtitling for TV shows. Our approach brings improvements on two fronts: first, we show that audio-visual synchronisation can be used to pick out the talking face amongst others present in a video clip, and assign an identity to the corresponding speech segment. This audio-visual approach improves recognition accuracy and yield over current methods. Second, we show that the speaker of short segments can be determined by using the temporal context of the dialogue within a scene. We propose an approach using local voice embeddings of the audio, and large language model reasoning on the text transcription. This overcomes a limitation of existing methods that they are unable to accurately assign speakers to short temporal segments. We validate the method on a dataset with 12 TV shows, demonstrating superior performance in speaker diarisation and character recognition accuracy compared to existing approaches. Project page : https://www.robots.ox.ac.uk/~vgg/research/llr-context/

In this article, we propose and apply a method to compare adaptations of the same story across different media. We tackle this task by modelling such adaptations through character networks. We compare them by leveraging two concepts at the core of storytelling: the characters involved, and the dynamics of the story. We propose several methods to match characters between media and compare their position in the networks; and perform narrative matching, i.e. match the sequences of narrative units that constitute the plots. We apply these methods to the novel series \textit{A Song of Ice and Fire}, by G.R.R. Martin, and its comics and TV show adaptations. Our results show that interactions between characters are not sufficient to properly match individual characters between adaptations, but that using some additional information such as character affiliation or gender significantly improves the performance. On the contrary, character interactions convey enough information to perform narrative matching, and allow us to detect the divergence between the original novels and its TV show adaptation.