Mashable Selects Look Up Mashable Voices Mashable's Best: E-readers, robovacs, laptops, earbuds, smart home and more Say More Safety Net Creator Hub Versus Gift Ideas For Everyone On Your List Switch Off Trending Now In My Bag All Series Today's will be easier if you've watched NFL football. As we've shared in previous hints stories, this is a version of the popular word game that seeks to test the knowledge of sports fans. Like the original, the game is all about finding the common threads between words. And just like, resets after midnight, and each new set of words gets trickier and trickier -- so we've served up some hints and tips to get you over the hurdle. If you just want to be told today's puzzle, you can jump to the end of this article for the latest solution.

Mashable Voices Mashable Selects Look Up Mashable's Best: E-readers, robovacs, laptops, earbuds, smart home and more Say More Safety Net Creator Hub Versus Gift Ideas For Everyone On Your List Switch Off Trending Now In My Bag All Series Here are some tips and tricks to help you find the answer to Wordle #1888. Can't get enough of Wordle? Today's answer should be easy to solve if you've been stuck in an overhanging fog. If you just want to be told today's word, you can jump to the bottom of this article for today's solution revealed. But if you'd rather solve it yourself, keep reading for some clues, tips, and strategies to assist you.

Mashable Selects Look Up Mashable's Best: E-readers, robovacs, laptops, earbuds, smart home and more Say More Safety Net Creator Hub Versus Gift Ideas For Everyone On Your List Switch Off Trending Now In My Bag VidCon with Mashable All Series Wattpad's alleged smut ban sends fan-fiction readers running to AO3 A policy clarification convinced readers that Wattpad had banned smut. AO3 users prepare for an influx. Olivia Tauber is the deputy editor of digital culture, covering creators, media, movies, beauty, and more. Based in New York, her work has appeared in The New York Times, Vanity Fair, The Cut, Teen Vogue, Complex, and Interview Magazine. She holds a Master's degree in Journalism from NYU and a Bachelor's from the University of Michigan.

Understanding when and why consumers engage with stories is crucial for content creators and platforms. While existing theories suggest that audience beliefs of what is going to happen should play an important role in engagement decisions, empirical work has mostly focused on developing techniques to directly extract features from actual content, rather than capturing forward-looking beliefs, due to the lack of a principled way to model such beliefs in unstructured narrative data. To complement existing feature extraction techniques, this paper introduces a novel framework that leverages large language models to model audience forward-looking beliefs about how stories might unfold. Our method generates multiple potential continuations for each story and extracts features related to expectations, uncertainty, and surprise using established content analysis techniques. Applying our method to over 30,000 book chapters from Wattpad, we demonstrate that our framework complements existing feature engineering techniques by amplifying their marginal explanatory power on average by 31%. The results reveal that different types of engagement-continuing to read, commenting, and voting-are driven by distinct combinations of current and anticipated content features. Our framework provides a novel way to study and explore how audience forward-looking beliefs shape their engagement with narrative media, with implications for marketing strategy in content-focused industries.

Intellectual property is the lifeblood of entertainment, and Hollywood badly needs a transfusion. Stuck recycling the same ideas and producing the same franchises, Hollywood is now looking to podcasts, news articles, and even songs and paintings to dredge up stories that could be hits with global audiences. Finding the right stories--and developing them into things that actually exist on screen--can be an arduous, money-draining process. One company thinks it has found an efficient new way to sift through millions of user-generated stories to find the next Hollywood hits: artificial intelligence. And, on occasion, it actually brings fans of those stories into the arcane process of developing them for the screen.

The best games of 2019 are a throwback. That appears to be Apple's take on things, anyway, as evidenced by at least some of the company's picks for the best apps and games for its hardware platforms. Consider Apple's choice for the "game trend of the year." App Store editors lumped a variety of apps into a category dubbed "Blockbusters Reborn," essentially fresh takes on familiar, and in some cases, decades' old franchises. You'll find "Mario Kart Tour" from Nintendo in this select grouping, along with "Minecraft Earth" (Mojang), "Pokémon Masters" (DeNA Co), "Assassin's Creed Rebellion" (Ubisoft), "Gears POP!" (Microsoft), "The Elder Scrolls: Blades" (Bethesda) and "Call of Duty: Mobile" (Activision Publishing).

Wattpad enables writers to create their own stories and share them with over 70 million users. Co-Founder and CEO Allen Lau explains to Anthony Lacavera how their Story DNA machine learning technology discovers and recommends the best content.

It is often written that technology isolates us. Too many opinion pieces blame our screens for the loss of human interaction. Virtual reality is painted as a false experience, ultimately empty of emotional connection. The truth is our gadgets are m...

"Bad Robot" is a Short Story about the accidental release of a super-efficient killing machine which threatens to set the entire world on fire. This story is part of a larger anthology series titled "The Apocolypse is Always Tomorrow" that I am curr...

The future of fan fiction is apparently linear TV. Wattpad, an online community of readers and writers, announced Tuesday that has partnered with Universal Cable Productions (UCP), a division of NBCUniversal Cable Entertainment. Under the new deal, UCP will produce a number of television projects derived from Wattpad content across multiple categories including: mystery/thriller, teen, science fiction, action and general fiction. "Wattpad data will help spot compelling stories with massive built-in audiences, and fans will influence the development process," head of Wattpad Studios Aron Levitz said in a statement. "There's no place for hunches and guesses when it comes to content development these days. Data- and community-driven entertainment is the future, and Wattpad Studios is leading the way."