Annapurna Interactive is embarking on a new mission. According to a report from Bloomberg, the studio's entire video game team has resigned following a dispute with owner Megan Ellison. In recent years, the team has produced popular and award-winning titles Stray, Outer Wilds, Neon White, What Remains Of Edith Finch, Sayonara Wild Hearts, and more.

According to Bloomberg, Annapurna Interactive's (now former) president Nathan Gary had been in talks with Annapurna Pictures owner Megan Ellison (the daughter of billionaire Larry Ellison) to spin-off the gaming studio into its own separate entity. Ellison apparently backed out of those negotiations, however, leading Gary and a few other executives to resign. They were shortly followed by the rest of the imprint's staff.

"All 25 members of the Annapurna Interactive team collectively resigned," Gary and his group said in a joint statement to Bloomberg. "This was one of the hardest decisions we have ever had to make and we did not take this action lightly."

A spokesperson for the parent company confirmed that Ellison and Gary failed to reach an agreement, which led to the mass exodus. "Our top priority is continuing to support our developer and publishing partners during this transition," Ellison said in her own statement. “We’re committed to not only our existing slate of games but also expanding our presence in the interactive space as we continue to look for opportunities to take a more integrated approach to linear and interactive storytelling across film and TV, gaming, and theater."

That means fans of Stray and its dedicated meow button can rest easy knowing that the previously announced movie adaptation is likely still on the table. Annapurna's spokesperson also confirmed to Bloomberg that all existing games and projects will remain under its control. Hypothetically, anticipated games like Blade Runner 2033: Labyrinth and Wanderstop should also be fine. According to multiple sources, new video game arm president Hector Sanchez has told developers that the company will honor existing contracts and replace the staff who left. Sanchez recently rejoined the company after co-founding Annapurna Interactive with Gary in 2016. He worked at Epic Games in the interim. 

Annapurna's studio arm is also staying busy. Last year, they released the Oscar-nominated animated film Nimona, and this year, if nothing else, they have Nightbitch to look forward to.

Keurig made “inaccurate statements” about the recyclability of its single-use coffee pods, according to the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC). The company agreed to a cease and desist order and to pay a $1.5 million civil penalty to settle the charges.

It’s a helpful reminder that many corporate recycling claims can be misleading. Certain types of plastic are harder to recycle than others. Even if something is supposedly recyclable, it can end up in the trash if the type of plastic is not accepted by a municipal recycling program.

The charges against Keurig Dr Pepper Inc. stem from its 2019 and 2020 annual reports, which said that the company tested and “validate[d] that [K-Cup pods] can be effectively recycled.” But the company failed to disclose information about key challenges with recycling the pods, the SEC said in its announcement this week:

Keurig did not disclose that two of the largest recycling companies in the United States had expressed significant concerns to Keurig regarding the commercial feasibility of curbside recycling of K-Cup pods at that time and indicated that they did not presently intend to accept them for recycling. In fiscal year 2019, sales of K-Cup pods comprised a significant percentage of net sales of Keurig’s coffee systems business segment, and research earlier conducted by a Keurig subsidiary indicated that environmental concerns were a significant factor that certain consumers considered, among others, when deciding whether to purchase a Keurig brewing system.

The company neither confirms nor denies any wrongdoing by agreeing to pay the settlement, the SEC says. As of Friday morning, Keurig’s website still says its K-Cup pods have been recyclable since the end of 2020. Before 2020, many of the pods were made with No. 7 plastic, considered a “catch-all” designation for difficult-to-recycle materials, according to Consumer Reports.

Now Keurig says the pods are made with No. 5 plastic or polypropylene, which is also commonly used for yogurt containers and straws. It’s still considered more difficult to recycle than Plastic No. 1, or PET, used in water and other beverage bottles.

In 2022, Greenpeace surveyed all 375 residential material recycling facilities operating in the US and found that 52 percent of them accepted tubs and containers made of plastic No. 5. But only one of them accepted coffee pods, the survey found. Some brands have their own programs, however, that allow customers to ship them their used pods or drop them off at store locations for recycling.

“We are working with individual municipalities and recycling operators to help increase explicit acceptance of K-Cup pods where they already accept polypropylene,” Laren Marra, director of corporate communications at Keurig Dr Pepper, said in an emailed statement. With regard to the SEC charges, Marren writes, “We are pleased to have reached an agreement that fully resolves this matter.”

Update September 13th: This post has been updated with a response from Keurig Dr. Pepper.

"Dan in the van is the man to can"

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Facebook has admitted that it scrapes the public photos, posts and other data of Australian adult users to train its AI models and provides no opt-out option, even though it allows people in the European Union to refuse consent. From a report: Meta's global privacy director Melinda Claybaugh was pressed at an inquiry as to whether the social media giant was hoovering up the data of all Australians in order to build its generative artificial intelligence tools, and initially rejected that claim. Labor senator Tony Sheldon asked whether Meta had used Australian posts from as far back as 2007 to feed its AI products, to which Ms Claybaugh responded "we have not done that". But that was quickly challenged by Greens senator David Shoebridge. Shoebridge: "The truth of the matter is that unless you have consciously set those posts to private since 2007, Meta has just decided that you will scrape all of the photos and all of the texts from every public post on Instagram or Facebook since 2007, unless there was a conscious decision to set them on private. That's the reality, isn't it? Claybaugh: "Correct." Ms Claybaugh added that accounts of people under 18 were not scraped, but when asked by Senator Sheldon whether public photos of his own children on his account would be scraped, Ms Claybaugh acknowledged they would.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

For decades, there wasn't a better, more reliably nasty talk-show guest than Mr. Warmth himself, Don Rickles. His whole act, whether on a Las Vegas stage or a talk show, was predicated on the notion that he could (and would) say anything about anyone, no matter their gender, race, or religion, and it would somehow manage to be hilarious even though it was also scabrously offensive. Since his passing in 2017, there has been a splintering of talk shows across broadcast and cable, and only one guest has ably and consistently taken Rickles' torch: Martin Short. 

Although Short has had a career rejuvenation thanks to the funny, whip-smart series Only Murders In The Building, which is in the middle of its fourth season, the actor has been a mainstay on late-night shows since the '80s, with some of his best jabs airing on Late Night With Conan O’Brien and Conan. In spirit, Short's snide remarks to O’Brien are similar to what Rickles said to Johnny Carson, mocking, among other things, the host's pale skin. “You make Mike Pence look like a character in Black Panther,” he once chided, his secret weapon (that thousand-watt smile and grin belying all of the scathing one-liners) always at the ready. (If anything, Short’s spritely air only made his knocks on O’Brien that much funnier.)

Some of the punchlines that Short unleashes on late-night TV are not unlike the ones his Only Murders character Oliver throws at Steve Martin's Charles, many of which boil down to, yes, Martin's paleness. And as was the case with Rickles, the iffier the subject, the funnier the joke, although Short is averse to going to the well of racially tinged zingers. Instead, Short gets creatively personal. He was one of Conan’s final TBS interviews, and on that occasion, he calmly asked, “Who’s your last guest? I assume it’s Jay Leno?” before acting aggrieved that he may have offended the gasping crowd. (O’Brien, unsurprisingly, laughed heartily at the reference and quickly slipped into his well-worn, high-pitched impression of Leno, complete with head waggle.)  

Really, the key difference between Rickles and Short is the latter's sneaky little smile, which can be so disarming as to make audiences all the more shocked when he roasts a host like O’Brien or Stephen Colbert. And some of that surprise could be generational. Whereas audiences of the Johnny Carson era knew immediately what was about to happen when Don Rickles stalked out onstage (that he'd invariably lay into Carson, Ed McMahon, whichever guest was on the couch, or anyone, really), younger crowds can sometimes be a bit more baffled by Short’s nonstop jabbing. In one of Short’s appearances on Conan, he noted that one commenter on YouTube took offense to his roasts, not realizing that O’Brien is an incredibly receptive audience and a real-life friend who's very much enjoying the jokes.

One of the network-TV bright spots this past summer was when Short took over as guest host for a week on Jimmy Kimmel Live! Though he appeared as himself for most of the run, he gave the last night over to his talk-show persona, the outlandish parody of a Hollywood-junket journalist, Jiminy Glick. (In an interview with GQ, Short said The Kids In The Hall's Dave Foley remarked that Glick's celebrity put-downs allowed Short to be “actually as mean as [he is] in real life.”) For Kimmel, Glick sat with Bill Hader, who spent most of the interview laughing so hard that he cried, with non-sequitur questions about Willie Mays’ recent passing and the word “lisp” breaking his fellow SNL alum. 

Short also pulls the curtain back a bit more than Rickles. In that aforementioned YouTube bit on Conan, he admitted that he was reading comments in the middle of the night because he’s “needy and desperate.” Which is all to say that part of  what makes Short’s roasts more palatable to a modern audience is that he is more than willing to turn the target on himself. During his live shows with Martin, one of which was filmed for Netflix's Steve Martin And Martin Short: An Evening You Will Forget For The Rest Of Your Life, he does drop bombs (“Working with Steve is like the movie Deliverance: It’s all fun and games until the banjo comes out”), but he's also able to laugh at his own career. In one one of the pair's standard back-and-forths, he asked Martin what the he'd be doing if he wasn’t a comic legend. The response? “Probably what you’re doing.”

In a way, Short feels like an essential talk-show throwback, as he brings a type of insults-spiked energy and old-Hollywood fascination that has begun to feel sadly out of step. If you find yourself in a YouTube rabbit hole of classic late-night clips, you may stumble upon some of the Carson-era stalwarts like Rickles and the late-great Bob Newhart (the two of whom were best friends, as fate would have it) telling old war stories about their days in the business to Conan, Colbert, Kimmel, and Jimmy Fallon. Similarly, Short has been pulling out his own Hollywood stories for years, as in a mid-2000s spot on Late Night With Conan O’Brien where he recounted a tale about infuriating Lucille Ball in the early 1980s (roughly around the same time that Short’s fellow SCTV writers playfully mocked Milton Berle while accepting an Emmy). What Short does so effectively on these talk shows is straddle the line between the old and the new, just as he and Martin do with co-star Selena Gomez on Only Murders.

The days when people’s lives could be dominated by a particularly memorable talk-show spot have pretty much fallen by the wayside, partially because there are too many options from which to choose. But certain guests promise the closest we can get to old-school, late-night appointment television, and Short is the cream of that crop. If Primetime Glick, which ran on Comedy Central in the early aughts, was just too pure for this world, at least we can rest assured that Short will occasionally grace the couch and kill it for ten minutes every so often, gleefully savaging big names to their faces just like in the good ol' days.     

James Earl Jones, the illustrious actor and EGOT recipient with a winding list of credits as distinctive as his iconic voice, has died. Per Deadline, Jones’ reps confirmed that the actor died this morning at his home in Dutchess County, New York. He was 93 years old. 

Jones was born on January 17, 1931 in Arkabutla, Mississippi to Ruth and Robert Earl Jones. Soon after James Earl was born, Robert left the family to pursue a career in boxing and later, acting. When Ruth left to search for substantial work, James Earl moved to Michigan to live with his maternal grandparents. At only five years old, the transition was so traumatic that the young boy developed a severe stutter. Because of this, he refused to speak and remained functionally mute until high school. Jones credited his English teacher, who discovered his proficiency in poetry, for helping him find his voice.

Jones enrolled in the University of Michigan to study medicine. He also joined the Reserve Officer Training Corps, where he ultimately decided that becoming a doctor was not his true calling. He pivoted to theater by studying at the University of Michigan School of Music, Theatre & Dance, intending to bide his time until his presumed deployment to Korea to fight in the war. The change would lead him to take a part-time job as a stagehand at the Ramsdell Theatre in Manistee, Michigan. After graduating from the University of Michigan in 1955, he began acting and stage managing at the theater, earning his first of many Shakespearean roles, including starring turns in Othello and King Lear. Jones soon moved to New York, where he studied at the American Theatre Wing and worked as a janitor to support himself. 

After years of performing on stage and a handful of TV roles, Jones earned his first movie role in 1964 when he played  Lt. Lothar Zogg in Dr. Strangelove Or: How I Learned To Stop Worrying And Love The Bomb. He would play alongside Richard Burton, Elizabeth Taylor, and Alec Guinness in The Comedians. As his film career began to take off, he returned to the stage in 1967 as the star of Howard Sackler's Pulitzer-winning play The Great White Hope, where he portrayed boxer Jack Johnson. Jones’ performance earned him many high-profile fans, including Muhammed Ali, who identified deeply with the story of a boxer navigating the Jim Crow era to become the first Black heavyweight boxing champion. Two years later, Jones won the Tony Award for Best Actor In A Play. This would mark the beginning of his indelible stint on Broadway, with starring roles in The Iceman Cometh and the stage adaptation of  John Steinbeck's novella, Of Mice and Men.

In film, Jones’ deep, irreplicable voice inextricably linked him to some of the most immovable franchises in the industry. In 1977, the actor began his journey with Star Wars as the voice of Darth Vader. By choice, he would not be credited for his role until the series’ third installment, Return of the Jedi. (He was eventually credited for A New Hope and The Empire Strikes Back in a 1997  “Special Edition” re-release.) His voice would define another pop culture figure in the 1994 animated Disney classic, The Lion King. Jones’ regal timbre was fit for Mufasa, King of the Pride Lands, betraying a wisdom that would guide the film despite his brief appearance. Jones reprised the role 25 years later in the live-action remake, starring Donald Glover. 

In TV, Jones made his mark in acclaimed works like Roots: The Next Generations and Under One Roof,  for which he was nominated for an Emmy for his role as Neb Langston. In 1990, he would lead the series Gabriel's Fire, which led him to an Emmy win. Jones often made for a delightful guest on many beloved series, including (but not limited to), 3rd Rock From The Sun, Will & Grace, and  Lois & Clark: The New Adventures of Superman. For The Simpsons, Jones narrated Edgar Allen Poe’s The Raven for the show’s first installment of Treehouse Of Horror.  

Of course, Jones’ impact in film, stage, and television extends far beyond his voice. With over 180 screen credits alone, his commanding presence added a level of prestige to any moment and shaped characters that would remain relevant for generations. His final role was in 2021’s Coming 2 America, a sequel to the Eddie Murphy starrer Coming To America. Jones played Jaffe Joffer, King of Zamunda and Akeem’s (Murphy) overprotective father in both productions. Though many actors with a similarly impressive portfolio might attribute their fortune to maintaining a particular sense of taste, Jones considered himself a journeyman, simply collecting the roles that felt right to him in the moment, whether they included cell phone commercials or a chance to be a king. "Denzel Washington, Sidney Poitier, Robert Redford, Tom Cruise: those guys have well-planned careers,” Jones told The Guardian in 2009. “I'm just on a journey. Wherever I run across a job, I say, 'OK, I'll do that.'"  For many, Jones stands as a symbol of perseverance, an example of how we are all far greater than our trauma. He is survived by his son, Flynn.