Tag Archives: story

How New Tales From the Borderlands’ story will be like ‘4D chess’

To hear Lin Joyce, the head writer of Gearbox Software’s forthcoming New Tales From the Borderlands, explain it, the job players will be doing with her characters is “like a kind of 4D chess,” just applied to narrative role-playing.

That means players will be inhabiting the personae of three characters, making decisions and reactions that players believe are appropriate for them. Then, they’ll also be tasked with reacting to these decisions they made when they’re in command of another member of this protagonist trio.

Those reactions aren’t “good” or “bad” in and of themselves; Joyce says that any hard failures, where a player makes the wrong decision, are limited to some quick-time events elsewhere in the game. For the dialogue — which includes reading body language and facial expressions from full performance capture — players may branch their narrative with a gut call for what they’d do in that moment, or they can try to piece together a multi-character relationship that takes into account the things they’ve done and said before.

“So, what I might think I would do as Anu,” — one of the new heroes, Joyce explained — “might be true to Anu, but it might make Octavio mad. Then, I’m also playing as Octavio.”

Octavio is the streetwise and cynical counterpart to his altruistic sister. “So, how am I now going to respond to these things as Octavio?” Joyce said. “There’s a lot of interplay there, and it’s also up to you. Do you maintain — like, are you nurturing the group, or not? So there’s lots of, again, 4D chess happening.” To be clear, the player is not in control of the character-switching. That might be done moment-to-moment (as opposed to chapter-to-chapter), but the game is in charge there.

A conceptual rendering of L1OU13, an assassin robot players will encounter during New Tales From the Borderlands.
Image: Gearbox Software/2K Games

New Tales From the Borderlands launches in what could be a pivotal year for the franchise overall. Already, Gearbox Software’s shooter series has been adapted in the well-received Tiny Tina’s Wonderlands, which launched in late March, and which has performed so well that Gearbox boss Randy Pitchford told investors (of parent company Embracer Group) the studio “clearly” considers it a “new franchise unto itself.”

The door is open, one assumes, for New Tales From the Borderlands’ approach to narrative-driven design and open-ended storytelling to make it more than a spinoff. Gearbox, though it licensed the Borderlands universe and characters, took the Tales From the Borderlands IP back from original developer Telltale Games when that studio closed its doors in 2018.

Joyce, a Ph.D. in interactive narrative systems (with subordinate degrees in English), was brought aboard Gearbox in 2020 and is now its head writer. Gearbox, she said, wanted to extend the core experience that made Tales From the Borderlands successful, while also loosening it from what had been a rigid engine with limited points of interaction. Make no mistake, the story was job one.

A storyboard from development of Gearbox Software’s New Tales From the Borderlands. (Click to expand to see in larger detail.) It shows branching outcomes of a decision within the story, some with hard failure states.
Image: Gearbox Software/2K Games

“The directive was, Hey, we have this IP now; can we do something about it?” Joyce said. “On my side, we just look at what could we do to make that, like, a version 2.0 of the old Telltale game.” That included building New Tales From the Borderlands in Unreal Engine 4, as opposed to a more bespoke point-and-click setup. It involved performance capture, which freed Joyce to write with a little more nuance and less exposition, certainly without the textual callouts from Tales From the Borderlands that reminded players they’d said something an NPC was likely to remember.

“We had a lot of conversations where we looked at, philosophically, like even if these are the same tools, how are we using them differently?” Joyce said. “So, not every QTE is what we would call a hard fail; there is an opportunity for the story to continue there. We call those soft fails. That’s not something we’ve really seen before. There are other things where we present you with a choice, or the possibility for an action, and you might not want to take that action. The right action might be inaction.”

New Tales From the Borderlands will also have other interactive elements to deepen the gameplay experience, so players aren’t just getting a talk-fest or a scavenger hunt for some detail on the screen — two areas where the Telltale games, for all their acclaim, often broke down. Pierre-Luc Foisy, New Tales’ lead gameplay designer, said the three protagonists, Anu, Octavio, and their friend Fran, all have devices that should highlight their personalities. Fran operates a “gadget-packed hover chair”; Octavio has a smartwatch, for example; Anu’s wearable computing is a set of Tech Glasses.

Foisy said that will blend with the writing and the acting to give players a tipoff to whether they’ve made the right call or a choice that’s going to make things harder on themselves. “It will be less robotic, and more human emotion, so you can understand, OK, here, if I do this QTE — it doesn’t feel in character. It doesn’t feel like the right choice,” Foisy said.

This concept sketch of a sewer environment references the escape scene from the storyboards above.
Image: Gearbox Software/2K Games

New Tales From the Borderlands will also stand apart from the main series because it isn’t set on some postapocalyptic, resource-exploited world, or orbiting vessels doing the exploiting. It’s on Promethea, where the arms company Maliwan invaded during 2019’s Borderlands 3. Joyce said Promethea was chosen early on in the story drafting as the setting for New Tales, and the decision to use three playable protagonists was made to give players a fuller picture of a more complex setting.

“Although they share a goal, they do not share the same motivating forces or personalities,” Joyce said. “So that meant that we could play with their group dynamic more, and group dynamics are pretty central to this story and how it develops.”

New Tales From the Borderlands launches Oct. 21 on Nintendo Switch, PlayStation 4, PlayStation 5, Windows PC, Xbox One, and Xbox Series X.

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Why does time go forwards, not backwards?

In Germany, 1865, the physicist Rudolf Clausius stated that heat cannot pass from a cold body to a hot one, if nothing else around them changes. Clausius came up with the concept he called “entropy” to measure this behaviour of heat – another way of saying heat never flows from a cold body to a hot one is to say “entropy only ever increases, never decreases” (see box Entropy and the Rise of Disorder).

As Rovelli stresses in The Order of Time, this is the only basic law of physics that can tell apart the past from the future. A ball can roll down a hill or be kicked back to its summit, but heat can’t flow from cold to hot.

To illustrate, Rovelli picks up his pen and drops it from one hand to the other. “The reason this stops in my hand is that it has some energy, and then the energy is turned into heat and it warms up my hand. And the friction stops the bouncing. Otherwise, if there was no heat, this would bounce forever, and I would not distinguish the past from the future.”

So far, so straightforward. That is, until you start to consider what heat is on a molecular level. The difference between hot things and cold things is how agitated their molecules are – in a hot steam engine, water molecules are very excited, careening around and colliding into each other rapidly. The very same water molecules are less agitated when they coalesce as condensation on a windowpane.

Here’s the problem: when you zoom in to the level of, say, one water molecule colliding and bouncing off another, the arrow of time disappears. If you watched a microscopic video of that collision and then you rewound it, it wouldn’t be obvious which way was forwards and which backwards. At the very smallest scale, the phenomenon that produces heat – collisions of molecules – is time-symmetric.

This means that the arrow of time from past to future only emerges when you take a step back from the microscopic world to the macroscopic – something first appreciated by the Austrian physicist-philosopher Ludwig Boltzmann.

“So the direction of time comes from the fact that we look at big things, we don’t look at the details,” says Rovelli. “From this step, from the fundamental microscopic vision of the world to the coarse-grained, the approximate description of the macroscopic world – this is where the direction of time comes in.

“It’s not that the world is fundamentally oriented in space and time,” Rovelli says. It’s that when we look around, we see a direction in which medium-sized, everyday things have more entropy – the ripened apple fallen from the tree, the shuffled pack of cards.

While entropy does seem to be inextricably bound up with the arrow of time, it feels a bit surprising – perhaps even disconcerting – that the one law of physics that has a strong directionality of time built into it loses this directionality when you look at very small things.

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I broke the story of Jeffrey Dahmer in 1991. Here’s what the new Netflix series got wrong

The new Jeffrey Dahmer series by Netflix sacrificed accuracy for the sake of drama, according to the journalist who first broke the sensational story over three decades ago.

Anne E Schwartz told The Independent that the filmmakers behind Monster: The Jeffrey Dahmer Story took “artistic license” with many key details, saying the series “does not bear a great deal of resemblance to the facts of the case”.

“When people are watching Ryan Murphy’s Netflix series and saying ‘Oh my God this is terrible’. I want to tell them it didn’t necessarily turn out that way,” she said.

Ms Schwartz was working as a crime reporter for the Milwaukee Journal in 1991 when she received a call from a police source to say they had found a human head and body parts inside a city apartment.

Rushing to the scene, Ms Schwartz said she arrived to find just a few police officers there, and entered the Oxford Apartments building for a closer look.

“I walked up to Dahmer’s apartment, and I kind of stuck my head in, because you’re a journalist, you want to know,” she told The Independent.

“I guess the thing that was strange was that it didn’t look strange.”

She said officers slowly began to understand the magnitude of the crime scene as they discovered polaroids that Dahmer had taken of his victims in various stages of dismemberment.

“They didn’t know what they were finding,” she said.

“I was a crime reporter for five years so I know what it smells like when you walk into a building with a dead body or a decomposing body. This was not that. This was a very chemical smell.”

Monster: The Jeffrey Dahmer Story trailer

Anne E. Schwartz broke the Jeffrey Dahmer story while working as a crime reporter in Milwaukee and has written two bestselling books on the murders

(Courtesy of Anne E. Schwartz)

Ms Schwartz, who went on to work in communications for the Milwaukee Police Department and Wisconsin Department of Justice, said the depiction of city police officers as racist and homophobic was incorrect.

“I’ve spent a lot of time with them, interviewing the people who were at the scene. Again this is a dramatisation, but at a time when it is not exactly easy for law enforcement to get trust and buy in from the community, it’s not a very helpful representation.”

In the Netflix series, Glenda Cleveland, who tried to alert police to Dahmer’s killing spree, is portrayed as living in a neighbouring apartment. In reality, Ms Cleveland, who died in 2011, lived in a separate building.

“In the first five minutes of the first episode you have Glenda Cleveland knocking on his door. None of that ever happened,” says Ms Schwartz.

“I had trouble with buy-in, because I knew that was not accurate. But people are not watching it that way, they’re watching it for entertainment.”

After publishing a bestseller about the case in 1991, The Man Who Could Not Kill Enough, Ms Schwartz said she received a phone call from Dahmer in the newsroom of a TV station she was working to complain.

Several psychiatrists who had interviewed Dahmer told Ms Schwartz that his behaviour could be attributed to his parents.

“He hated that. For someone who didn’t show any emotion or seem to care about anything, he was very protective about his parents, especially his mother,” she told The Independent.

The phone call was “very quick, and very to the point”.

“He had no inflection in his voice. He was so vanilla, he was so flat. There was nothing. He just said no one was responsible for what I did expect me.”

Evan Peters portrays Jeffrey Dahmer in theanew Netflix series Monster: The Jeffrey Dahmer Story

(SER BAFFO/NETFLIX)

Monster: The True Story of Jeffrey Dahmer’s Murders is an updated version of Anne E. Schwartz’s 1991 bestselling book

(Union Square Publishing)

Ms Schwartz said that Dahmer was very “crafty” in the way he selected his victims. He would speak to them at length in bars and on the street to prey on men who were on the margins of society, and whose disappearance wouldn’t raise any alarm bells.

This, along with his grisly body disposal techniques, helped him get away with murdering 17 boys and men before his crimes were discovered.

Plus, victims of crime in the gay community in Milwaukee in the 1980s and early ‘90s rarely reported offences to police for fear of being outed to family or employers, she said.

After the murders attracted national and international attention, people would regularly turn up at Oxford Apartments looking for souvenirs.

When Dahmer’s apartment building was razed the year some tried to take bricks and pieces of dirt, and the lot remains vacant and surrounded by high fencing to this day.

While the Dahmer series has smashed Netflix’s Week 1 record for most hours viewed, Ms Schwartz says Milwaukee is “absolutely done with hearing about the case”.

“People in Milwaukee think this is a horrible blemish on the city, they don’t want people to think about it.”

Last year, Ms Schwartz wrote an updated version of the 1991 book, and reinterviewed the principal characters to garner their thoughts 30 years on.

Her new book that came out last October, Monster: The True Story of the Jeffrey Dahmer Murders.

* Monster: The True Story of the Jeffrey Dahmer Murders was released through Union Square Publishing and is available on Amazon.

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Neonatal sepsis: the new threat posed by superbugs

“This makes the need for disinfection and maintaining a protocol that ensures a clean, hygienic environment exceedingly important,” says Sankar. However, basic soap and water are lacking in half the healthcare facilities across the globe, according to a WHO/UNICEF report released in  in 2022, contributing to the risk of infections in mothers and newborns.

Other simple measures can help prevent infection in healthcare settings, such as wearing sterile gowns in intensive care units, swabbing and cleaning surfaces and equipment, and disinfecting the skin of the newborn before administering injections or drips. But it requires training and adequate staffing to implement them, alongside teaching good hygiene practices to parents, says Shahidullah.

Bangladesh is also aiming to encourage more women to give birth in hospitals – which despite their own superbug struggles, tend to be the safer option. Almost half of Bangladeshi women still give birth at home, which comes with a higher risk of contracting infections. In Nepal, neonatal sepsis was found to be higher among babies born to mothers who did not attend antenatal check-ups, again highlighting the importance of support for prospective parents.

Ultimately, tackling the drug resistance crisis will require a broad range of tools, experts say. 

“For more widespread change, we need to consider antimicrobial resistance as a socio-political challenge and not just a medical one,” says Abdul Ghafur, a consultant in infectious diseases at the Apollo Cancer Institute in the Southern Indian city of Chennai. Together with other Indian doctors, he is also a vocal campaigner on fighting the superbug threat. “Proper sanitation at home, in healthcare institutions and in communities is key to dealing with neonatal sepsis aggravated by [antimicrobial resistance] and to prevent re-infection in children.”   

Finding new antibiotics should be seen as an immediate priority: “Covid has shown us that India can be the pharmacy of the world, and develop state-of-the-art drugs,” he says.

Ghafur suggests focusing on developing tests to identify the source of the infection as quickly as possible. “A rapid diagnostic test could help doctors zero in on the right antibiotic to prescribe within an hour, which could significantly lower the risk of death. New antibiotics and vaccines can be developed for bacteria that are now resistant to existing antibiotics,” he says. In his view this should be a global effort, with governments working together with private companies.

For families like Mukta’s, who lost her son to sepsis, these advances come too late. But tackling the antibiotics crisis, and the infection risk around birth, could help others give their babies a safe start – and help doctors protect and save those in their care.

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‘Bridgerton’ Spinoff Photos, News — Queen Charlotte Prequel Story

Ahead of this weekend’s Tudum global fan event, Netflix has released a first look at its upcoming Bridgerton prequel spinoff.

Queen Charlotte: A Bridgerton Story, as the offshoot is titled, is centered on the titular royal’s rise to prominence and power, telling the story of how the young Queen’s marriage to King George sparked both a great love story and a societal shift, “creating the world of the Ton inherited by the characters in Bridgerton.”

Shonda Rhimes herself will serve as showrunner on the series and executive-produce alongside director Tom Verica and longtime producing partner Betsy Beers.

India Amarteifi, whose previous TV credits include Disney Channel’s The Evermoor Chronicles and the British-French crime drama The Tunnel, will fill the title role of the younger Queen Charlotte. (Check out the full, first photo down below.)

The series’ cast also includes Bridgerton‘s Golda Rosheuvel, Adjoa Andoh and Ruth Gemmell, reprising their roles as the older Queen Charlotte, Lady Danbury and Lady Bridgerton; Corey Mylchreest (The Sandman‘s Adonis) as Young King George; Michelle Fairley (Game of Thrones) as Princess Augusta; and newcomer Arsema Thomas as Young Agatha Danbury.

Additional cast includes Sam Clemmett as Young Brimsley (the Queen’s righthand man), Bridgerton‘s Hugh Sachs as Older Brimsely, Cyril Nri (Devils) as Lord Danbury, Tunji Kasim (Nancy Drew) as Adolphus, Richard Cunningham (Grantchester) as Lord Bute, Rob Maloney (Coronation Street) as the Royal Doctor and Freddie Dennis as Reynolds.

Scroll down below for a first photo from Queen Charlotte: A Bridgerton Story, plus a fun video in which Golda Rosheuvel and Adjoa Andoh give India Amarteifi a royal welcome.



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The “super-deep” royal diamonds revealing Earth’s secrets

Smith – a senior research scientist at GIA – was examining the diamond for inclusions, chemical hitchhikers from the interior of our planet that can reveal how the crystal formed, and under what conditions. But working with high-value diamonds is a tricky business – ordinarily, it’s impossible for researchers to get their hands on the largest specimens. They’re sometimes flown around the world to visit potential customers – alas, never scientists.

Maya Kopylova, a professor of mineral exploration at the University of British Columbia, says getting samples of any diamonds is hard, and most of the diamonds she works with would have otherwise been thrown away. “Researchers have to have a good relationship with companies and they will never give you valuable samples,” she says. “So, they will never give us diamonds that are 6mm (0.2 inches) in size or larger.”

Even then, acquiring them is convoluted and expensive – first, Kopylova has to visit the high-security facilities where diamonds are sorted and identify the specimens she’d like to study. Once the acquisition has been approved, then comes the paperwork – all diamonds must travel with a Kimberley Process certificate, which proves its provenance and helps to prevent conflict or “blood” diamonds from entering the market.

However, Smith’s situation is different. At GIA, he has access to one of the largest collections of diamonds on the planet – millions of gems that have been sent there to be valued, so that they can be insured or sold. “If you want to see something rare and unusual, this is the perfect place to go because there are diamonds coming through here all the time,” says Smith. “Every few days, you might get to borrow a diamond for maybe a few hours, maybe a day or two and study it.”

A few years earlier, this is exactly what Smith had done. Together with an international team of scientists, he casually requisitioned 53 of the largest, clearest and most expensive available – including some from the same mine as the Cullinan diamond – and took them back to his laboratory to view under a microscope.

What Smith found was revolutionary. Nearly three-quarters of the Clippir diamonds contained tiny pockets, or “inclusions” of metal that had avoided rusting – not something you’d find in ordinary ones – while the remaining 15 contained a kind of garnet which only forms within the Earth’s mantle, the layer above its molten core.

Together, these inclusions provide chemical clues that the diamonds could only have formed no fewer than 360km (224 miles) and no more than 750km (466 miles) underfoot. In this Goldilocks zone, it’s deep enough to explain the metal inclusions that hadn’t been exposed to oxygen, which is abundant higher up, and it’s not so deep that the garnet rocks would have broken down under the immense pressures of the lower mantle. Ordinary diamonds, meanwhile, originate below the crust, just 150-200km (93-124 miles) down.  

For his 2020 study – together with Wuyi Wang, who is vice presedent of research & development at GIA – Smith analysed the 124-carat diamond and found that it formed at the deeper end of the possible range – at least 660km (410 miles) below the Earth’s surface.

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Jeffrey Dahmer: The true story behind Ryan Murphy’s serial killer series on Netflix

Netflix’s newest addition to its true crime canon is a thriller from Ryan Murphy, who explores the case of one of America’s most notorious serial killers: Jeffrey Dahmer.

Monster: The Jeffrey Dahmer Story stars Mare of Easttown actor Evan Peters as the man also known as the “Milwaukee Cannibal” or the “Milwaukee Monster”, who committed the murder and dismemberment of 17 men and boys between 1978 and 1991.

Here are the key points to know about the true story behind the show…

**Warning: this article contains upsetting content***

Dahmer’s background

Dahmer was born in 1960, in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, to a teletype machine instructor and a chemist.

There are conflicting reports on whether Dahmer was neglected as a child or if he was doted upon, but there appears to be no doubt he was from a broken home. His mother suffered from depression and attempted suicide, and his father was away studying for much of his childhood. Dahmer’s parents eventually got divorced when he was 18.

Dahmer was a quiet child, who underwent double hernia surgery at the age of three,. The family moved to Ohio when Dahmer was about six, and his younger brother David was born.

Dahmer was interested in dead animals, specifically animal bones, from an early age – something thought to have begun when he saw his father removing animal bones from beneath their home. He began to collect insects and the skeletons of small animals, such as squirrels, and preserve them in jars of formaldehyde. His father showed him how to bleach and preserve animal bones, and Dahmer started to collect road kill so he could dissect them and add more bones to his collection.

At high school, Dahmer was an outcast. He drank heavily and called alcohol his “medicine” to classmates. While it was thought by teachers that he had good academic potential, his grades were average. Having previously been quiet, he started throwing fake fits and mocking people with cerebral palsy.

In his early teens, Dahmer had a brief relationship with another teenage boy, but he did not tell his parents he was gay. He later admitted he fantacised about dominating a submissive male partner, and that these fantasies had started to involve dissection.

(AFP via Getty Images)

Dahmer’s crimes

Dahmer committed his first murder three weeks after he graduated from high school in 1978. One day in June, he picked up 18-year-old hitchhiker Steven Mark Hicks, lured him to his house for a “few beers”, and bludgeoned him with a dumbbell. Dahmer then strangled Hicks to death, stripped him, masturbated, dissected the body and buried the remains in a shallow grave in his back garden. He later dug up the body so he could dissolve it in acid and crush and scatter the bones.

Shortly afterwards, Dahmer joined the US army for a few years. He continued to drink heavily. In 1981, he was discharged, and in the mid-Eighties, back in Milwaukee, he started to frequent gay bathhouses where he sedated men and assaulted them. In the late Eighties he committed his second murder, this time of a man he brought back to a hotel. He then started to carry out assaults and murders in his grandmother’s home.

Dahmer’s grandmother asked him to move out, largely because of his drinking, his habit of bringing young men back late at night and the foul smells coming from both the basement and the garage – where Dahmer would store and dispose of his victims. He moved out into an apartment in Milwaukee and the murders and dismemberments continued into the Nineties.

Many of his later murders involved necrophilia, cannibalism, and the permanent preservation of the skeleton.

Evan Peters as Dahmer in ‘Monster’

(COURTESY OF NETFLIX)

Dahmer’s conviction

Despite having been arrested numerous times in his life, once for groping a young boy, authorities only discovered Dahmer’s murderous activities when he was arrested after one of his victims escaped in 1991. Running down a Milwaukee street with a pair of handcuffs dangling from one wrist, Tracy Edwards told police that Dahmer was trying to kill him.

On that day, in Dahmer’s apartment, police found body parts and severed heads in his fridge, freezer, filing cabinet and kettle.

In 1992, Dahmer was jailed for life. He was unable to convince the jury that his cannibalism and necrophilia were the result of madness, despite being diagnosed with borderline personality disorder, schizotypal personality disorder and a psychotic disorder. He was given 15 consecutive life sentences and told he would never be eligible for parole.

His trial included some of the most gruesome evidence ever heard in a US courtroom. In his statement to the court, Dahmer said: “I never wanted freedom. Frankly, I wanted death for myself. I knew I was sick or evil or both.

“Doctors have told me about my sickness and now I have some peace. I know how much harm I have caused. I feel so bad for what I did to those poor families.”

Dahmer was later sentenced to a 16th term of life imprisonment for an additional homicide committed in Ohio in 1978.

Dahmer’s death

On 28 November, 1994, Dahmer was beaten to death by Christopher Scarver, a fellow inmate at the Columbia Correctional Institution in Portage, Wisconsin.

More than 20 years after the incident, Scarver spoke out for the first time about why he killed Dahmer.

Scarver said that he fatally struck Dahmer twice over the head with a metal bar after growing unnerved by the killer, who he claimed would fashion severed limbs out of prison food and drizzle them with packets of ketchup as blood.

“He would put them in places where people would be,” Scarver told The New York Post.

“He crossed the line with some people – prisoners, prison staff. Some people who are in prison are repentant – but he was not one of them.”

Monster: The Jeffrey Dahmer Story arrives on Netflix on 22 September.

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The Ezra Miller story keeps getting darker and sadder

Ezra Miller
Photo: Neilson Barnard (Getty Images)

No one likes seeing Ezra Miller’s name in a headline these days. The beleaguered star of the Fantastic Beasts franchise and DC’s upcoming The Flash, Miller has been the subject of intense confusion, scorn, and worry in recent years, beginning with the 2020 allegation and accompanying video that he choked a woman at a bar in Iceland. However, as detailed in a recent Vanity Fair exposé, the story only gets darker from there.

The allegations against Miller (who uses they/them pronouns) include emotional and physical abuse, child endangerment, the grooming of a teen Native American activist, and what Vanity Fair calls a “Messiah delusion,” referring to themself as Jesus and the devil. Last month, Miller gave their only comment on the growing list of indiscretions and allegations, saying they were “suffering from complex mental health issues and have begun ongoing treatment.” But, according to one of Miller’s reps, the notion that The Flash was at risk served as a “wake-up call.”

However, while the actor is reportedly working with Warner Bros. on additional scenes for the long-delayed DC franchise lynchpin, others in Miller’s orbit don’t sound satisfied. The parents of Takoa Iron Eyes, a nonbinary teenage environmental activist that met Miller when they were 12, have filed one of two protection orders against Miller, accusing him of “grooming, brainwashing, and emotionally abusing the teenager.” A Massachusetts mother requested the other, “claiming that Miller’s interest in her own nonbinary 12-year-old made her and the child uncomfortable in incidents between February and June of this year.”

Miller’s relationship with Iron Eyes escalated concerns when they left for Hawaii, where Miller was arrested in March. Vanity Fair reports:

“There was this intensely controlling behavior of Tokata which, at first, I thought was for Tokata’s own good because they were unstable,” says someone who witnessed it. But their perspective changed when Iron Eyes’s parents petitioned for the protective order, claiming that Miller used “violence, intimidation, threat of violence, fear, paranoia, delusions, and drugs to hold sway over a young adolescent Tokata.

Then there’s “The Farm.” According to previous reports, Miller stole away to a “gun-ridden” Vermont farm with Iron Eyes and a 25-year-old mother named Ana and her three kids. The mother was part of another Miller controversy as she was a member of a polygamous family that Miller and Iron Eyes met and stayed with in Hawaii. Two weeks after Miller and Iron Eyes were invited to live with the family, the pair absconded with Ana and the children for Vermont. Again, the farm was described as not a family-friendly location. According to two longtime friends of Miller, the property had “guns everywhere,” including “a flame thrower and all these huge AK-47s lying around.” Another friend said the youngest child on the property picked up a bullet and put it in her mouth.

It’s at the farm where allegations of Miller running a cult come from. Apparently, there’s an altar at the farmhome to bullets, weed, sage, and Flash figurines.” Miller “makes women put their cell phones on the altar when they come in, and other offerings,” said one source.

The full report goes into greater detail, delving into allegations of drug abuse, the weaponization of their gender identity, and what could come next for Ezra Miller.

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True story behind ‘The Silent Twins’ movie with Letitia Wright

They were identical twins, two black girls in a white world with a bond so fiercely strong, nobody else could get in. Now, their fascinating — and troubling — story is about to hit the big screen.

“It definitely messed with my head,” Letitia Wright told The Post of shooting her new movie “The Silent Twins,” opening in theaters Friday.

When June and Jennifer Gibbons were born, it was clear to their parents early on that something was unique about them. Or, more accurately, between them. 

“They started talking late and when they finally did speak, their words came out garbled. They chirped and squeaked, enunciating the wrong syllables,” Marjorie Wallace, author of the 1986 book “The Silent Twins,” told NPR in 2015. “No one else could understand them. It was like they were speaking a foreign language. They both moved in sort of synchronicity.”

Wright (“Black Panther”) and Tamara Lawrance (“Kindred”) star in “The Silent Twins,” the stranger-than-fiction story of the Gibbons twins; they play a grown June and Jennifer in director Agnieszka Smoczynska’s telling of their perplexing life story, adapted from Wallace’s book.

Twins Jennifer (left) and June Gibbons with journalist Marjorie Wallace, author of “The Silent Twins.”
PA Images via Getty Images

Jennifer and June’s parents were from Barbados, and the twins were born in 1963 on a British military base in Yemen, where their father was stationed. In the early 1970s, the family settled in Wales, where the girls were the only black children in their elementary school.

The bullying they experienced seemed to increase their bond and unwillingness to communicate with others, earning the girls the nickname “the silent twins.”

“Though the family spoke English at home, young June and Jennifer Gibbons began to speak another language, believed to be a sped-up version of Bajan Creole,” the site All That’s Interesting reported.

As the film shows, June and Jennifer would talk animatedly to each other until another person came into the room, then fall passive and quiet with their heads down.

“Their silence was a protest towards racism — systemic racism that they experienced as children they couldn’t fully understand,” Wright told The Post.

Leah Mondesir-Simmonds (left) and Eva-Arianna Baxter play the Gibbons sisters at an early age in “The Silent Twins,” out Friday.
Focus Features

The twins’ bond, though inseparable, was not always a loving one.

According to Wallace’s book, Jennifer once tried to strangle June with the cord of a radio, while June once tried to drown Jennifer after they rivaled for the attention of some boys.

The girls isolated themselves more and more as they got older, receding into their own world, eventually turning to criminal behavior. In 1981, they burned down a tractor dealership, which subsequently caused the injury of a fireman; soon afterward, they were caught vandalizing and trying to set fire to a technical college.

In 1982, the teenaged twins had been arrested and sentenced to Broadmoor, a British maximum-security facility for those pronounced “criminally insane.” In the years leading up to the arrest, they had dropped out of school, holing up in their room to speak in their shared language and to write. They filled countless notebooks with their stories and bought a typewriter so they could submit their work to magazines.

Tamara Lawrance (left) and Letitia Wright bring the troubling story of June and Jennifer Gibbons to the big screen in “The Silent Twins,” in theaters Friday.
Focus Features
Tamara Lawrance (left) and Letitia Wright share an unusual bond in “The Silent Twins.”
Lukasz Bak/Focus Features

“If they were born in this time, they would be New York Times best-selling authors and prodigies,” Wright said.

The movie brings their fantastical, melancholy writing to life in stop-motion animation sequences.

Wallace heard about the twins from a journalism colleague and began to visit them at Broadmoor.

To her surprise, she forged a friendship with them by telling them their parents had let her read their notebooks. They broke their silence to ask if she liked their writings and told her they dreamed of becoming writers. But the things they had written, she found, included furious screeds about their own relationship. Wallace shared one excerpt from Jennifer with NPR:

“We have become fatal enemies in each other’s eyes,” the twins wrote. “We feel the irritating deadly rays come out of our bodies, stinging each other’s skin. I say to myself, can I get rid of my own shadow — impossible or not possible? Without my shadow, would I die? Without my shadow, would I gain life, be free or left to die?”

Marjorie Wallace with the Gibbons twins during a visit to Broadmoor in 1993.
PA Images via Getty Images

Wallace, one of the only people June and Jennifer would talk to, ended up reporting extensively on the behavior that allegedly spooked the Broadmoor staff. The twins would alternate which one of them would eat food while the other one went hungry. For a time they were separated, and staff would discover that both girls, though kept in cells far apart from one another, were motionless, frozen in the exact same position.

Wright said re-enacting the young women’s time at Broadmoor was the most challenging part of the shoot.

“It was really hard for us to do those things every day, but I dedicated myself to it alongside Tamara, because that was the truth of the experience, and I wanted people to see,” she said. “So, yeah, it messed with me, but I gave myself to be a vessel. When you see this film, you will see what they went through.”  

A poster for “The Silent Twins,” starring Tamara Lawrance (left) and Letitia Wright. The film tells the true story of June and Jennifer Gibbons.
Focus Features

Finally, the twins were eligible for transfer to a different hospital, one that would allow them to be eligible for parole. Before they left, they met with Wallace. Jennifer told her, “Marjorie, I’m going to have to die.” The journalist nervously laughed this off, but the twin insisted, telling her the two of them had made the decision together.

As a bus left Broadmoor with the twins in it, Jennifer reportedly fell onto June’s shoulder, and slipped into a coma. The 29-year-old was declared dead later that day, found to have swelling around her heart.

“The doctors at the Caswell Clinic deduced that the medications given to the girls at Broadmoor must have provoked Jennifer’s immune system — though they also noted that June was given the same medications and was in perfect health upon arriving,” All That’s Interesting reported. 

After her initial shock at Jennifer’s death, June reportedly flourished, coming out of her shell. She is alive today, living in West Wales and is a writer. “The Pepsi-Cola Addict” — a novel she wrote when she and Jennifer were 16 and was initially printed by a vanity press — is due to be published next year. 

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‘God of War: Ragnarok’ has a new story trailer and limited-edition PS5 controller

It’s been awhile since Sony teased us with the next installment in Kratos’ story. Earlier this year, a first look at God of War: Ragnarok showed us a father and son on a search for Tyr, the God of War of the Norse mythology. In the new trailer revealed during the September State of Play event, they have apparently found him, as he questions their motives, their quest and what they even know of so-called Godhood.

It’s a trailer that teases a complex story that seemingly has Kratos following his son’s lead this time around. Together, they will determine if they are bound by fate and prophecy, or make their own destiny — all while marching through a parade of stunning visuals and fast-paced combat while wielding familiar weapons like the Blades of Chaos and Leviathan Axe.

Between the story hints and action, the trailer definitely teases what looks like a worthy successor to 2018’s God of War — but if that’s not enough to convince you to pick up the game when it launches on November 9th, Sony is hoping a special limited-edition controller might do the trick. The God of War Ragnarok DualSense wireless controller is a blue and white affair decorated with a wolf and bear. The two-toned design is so subtle, you probably wouldn’t even recognize it as a God of War tie in at a glance. On the other hand, it’s not obnoxiously ugly, either.

God of War: Ragnarok, and its limited-edition gamepad, are both available on November 9th. Pre-orders for the controller open on September 27.

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