Both Canada and the United States have deep-seated affordability problems, but only the former is doing anything substantial about it. Forthcoming housing cooperatives at 2444 Eglinton Avenue in Toronto, and in Upper Hammonds Plains, Nova Scotia, are helping put a dent in Canada’s affordable housing shortage. Vancouver’s home prices today are close to $1 million, and rental prices in Toronto are equally astronomical. To buck this trend, Canada’s Co-operative Housing Development Program (CHDP) unlocked $1.5 billion in federal financing to support new cooperative housing. This is all happening as part of Canada’s National Housing Strategy, a $115 billion plan to boost affordability.  “In Toronto, the housing crisis is as severe as it’s ever been,” UT Daniels professor Keisha St. Louis-McBurnie, a Toronto-based urban planner at Monumental, told AN.  “We’ve seen real growth in housing encampments, especially during COVID-19,” St. Louis-McBurnie said. “There’s been very limited new transitional and supportive housing across [Toronto]. Households are getting priced out of the market, including professional middle-income ones. Folks who are low-income that require the most housing support are not able to access new affordable housing, especially in consideration to what’s getting built in Toronto.” A Brutalist housing co-op on Eglinton Avenue in Toronto (Ken Lund/Flickr/CC BY 2.0) Claire Weisz’s office, WXY, as of this year has locations in New York and Toronto. Weisz recently spoke at the Canadian Club Toronto, in a round table moderated by Alex Bozikovic, about urbanism. “Huge troves of affordable housing in New York has, in recent years, been taken from people who can’t afford down payments on co-ops,” Weisz told AN. “We’ve sacrificed so much. Some organizations have tried to stop this, but without policy support from the city, it’s really in vain.” “My big worry is that right now, like Toronto, New York is starting to be like the rest of the U.S. and rely on developer-led for-profits, versus not-for-profits,” Weisz added. “There needs to be a reawakening of not-for-profit development coalitions.” “The Co-operative Housing Sector is Booming” The Canadian National Housing Strategy’s longterm goal is to build 156,000 affordable units and repair over 298,000 existing ones. Housing cooperatives are getting built all over Canada as part of the program, from British Columbia, Ontario, and Nova Scotia. Planning departments are prioritizing the needs of First Nations communities and Black Canadians to help rectify past injustices. This is happening as rent prices skyrocket, and Toronto’s skyline is populated with new landmarks by Frank Gehry, Studio Gang, BIG, and others. Cooperative housing was first built in Canada in the 1930s. Regent Park in Toronto was the country’s first public housing campus, finished in 1949. This legacy continued through the 1960s and ’70s, when radical co-ops like Rochdale College and Neill-Wycik were built for University of Toronto students. Willow Park Housing Co-op (1966) went up in Winnipeg thanks to CHF Canada, a joint initiative by the Canadian Labour Congress and the Co-operative Union of Canada. The New Democratic Party (NDP) constructed abundant cooperative housing in Vancouver. Milton Park got built in Montreal in the 1980s. Between 1973 and 1993, CHF Canada built a total 92,000 cooperatively-owned units. (This history was captured by Leslie Coles in Under Construction: A History of Co-operative Housing in Canada.) All this momentum was brought to a halt during successive Brian Mulroney and Jean Chrétien Premierships, however, when government support for supportive housing was cut, much like what was happening in the U.S. at that time under the Clinton administration with the Faircloth Amendment. Regent Park’s original architecture was demolished in 2005 as part of the Regent Park Revitalization Plan, and replaced with a private, mixed-income community. (Kevin Costain/Wikimedia Commons /CC BY 2.0) A regime of state-imposed austerity ensued, leading up to the affordability crisis both Canada and the U.S. have today. Unlike the United States, however, Canada seems to have learned from its past mistakes. Thanks to Canada’s Co-operative Housing Development Program, eight co-ops are getting built right now. Toronto Mayor Olivia Chow has prioritized new affordable housing construction and land trusts, and is doing much to fight gentrification. BC Builds is an initiative helping fast track cooperative housing in Vancouver City Council. “Since the 1990s there’s been a shift in liberal to conservative and neoliberal federal governments,” St. Louis-McBurnie said. “This resulted in reduced public investment in significant social programs, including public and not-for-profit housing. These successive governments devolved responsibility for funding affordable housing to provincial governments across the country, Ontario in particular. Places like Regent Park now have a public-private partnership model, meaning it’s now on the private market. Alexandra Park is going through a similar privatization process.” “But now, there’s interest in alternatives” to market rate development St. Louis-McBurnie affirmed, “and the co-operative housing sector is booming.” Provinces and cities are also implementing “communal land trust models to support the scaling and retaining of assets,” she said. “They’re trying to figure out ways for bringing independently-owned co-ops into the land trust model.” Housing as Human Right The largest co-op underway in Canada today is 2444 Eglinton Avenue by Henriquez Partners and Claude Cormier + Associés. The Toronto development will yield 918 homes, including 612 affordable, rent-geared-to-income (RGI) units. Retail offerings will be sited at the base level. From afar, 2444 Eglinton Avenue will stand out thanks to its polychromatic porthole windows. Further afield in Perth, Ontario, 38 new cooperative units will be built. Farther east in Upper Hammonds Plains, Nova Scotia, a co-operative housing development will yield 136 row house units primarily for Black Canadians. That project is happening through a partnership between the Upper Hammonds Plains Community Land Trust and the Upper Hammonds Plains Housing Co-operative. Curtis Whiley, a sixth-generation African Nova Scotian, is steering the housing cooperative project in Upper Hammonds. Meanwhile in New Minas, Nova Scotia, there will be 32 more cooperative homes. Rendering of 2444 Eglinton Avenue Co-ops (Courtesy Henriquez Partners) Africville was a close-knit Black community in Halifax located on Treat 1 territory destroyed by the City of Halifax in the 1960s. Today, land trusts like the one in Nova Scotia are effective means for establishing housing secure communities of color. The Toronto Chinatown Land Trust likewise empowers people to stay in place, an outfit helmed by Chiyi Tam who is a planner and UT Daniels faculty member. “We have not seen any investment like this, I would say, in terms of housing development almost exclusively for Black communities in Canada’s history,” St. Louis-McBurnie said. Hogan’s Alley’s Black community was displaced by the Vancouver government to make way for the Georgia and Dunsmuir viaducts in 1971. Now, members of the NDP and Hogan’s Alley Society—a Black-led, not-for-profit developer of Afrocentric affordable housing—are working together to shore up Black land stewardship in the old neighborhood and help rectify the past injustice. “Transferring land over to the Hogan Alley land trust will allow for the Black community to return and for greater autonomy in housing construction,” St. Louis-McBurnie added. “What If We Built a New Co-op City in Brooklyn?” Federal spending was allocated in the Biden administration’s Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act, or the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law, to dismantle highways that ripped through inner cities and destroyed African American neighborhoods, like I-81 in Syracuse, New York. But this week, House GOP members moved to cancel the I-81 highway removal project. The Trump administration’s proposed 2026 national budget has slashed spending on projects that “fall outside [the President’s] new priorities” and “promote radical equity policies,” the White House said. Is it possible for architects, politicians, and planners in the U.S. to replicate Canada’s success given the current political climate?  It seems, for now, it would have to happen with aggressive leadership at the city and state levels—trade unions and nonprofits would also have to step up. This is already taking place, for instance, at Penn South, a sprawling Mitchell-Lama housing cooperative in Manhattan by the United Housing Foundation (UHF). Today, Bernheimer Architecture (BA) and the AFL-CIO Housing Investment Trust are helping upgrade the handsome midcentury campus. Penn South’s rehabilitation is in conjunction with BA, the AFL-CIO, and the New York State Energy Research and Development Authority (NYSERDA). “Penn South is a very unique campus, and its needs are different from most other campuses in New York City,” Andy Bernheimer told AN. “NYSERDA is helping us inform design and construction moving forward, which will entail reskinning the buildings and making them more energy efficient.” Co-op City is situated on a sprawling 320-acre site in the north Bronx. (Zara Pfeifer) Co-op City shopping plaza (Zara Pfeifer) In New York today, mayoral candidates are increasingly interested in revisiting the Mitchell-Lama Program’s success, a UHF campaign that built 135,000 cooperative housing units between 1955 and 1978, like Penn South and the Bronx’s Co-op City, another historic campus by Herman Jessor. In Albany, New York State elected officials have proposed a new Social Housing Development Authority, which would allocate government spending toward public housing, co-ops, and land trusts to battle gentrification. “I don’t think there’s enough money to simply restart a program like Mitchell-Lama, as far as I can tell,” Weisz told AN. “But if you look at all of the older Mitchell-Lamas flipping to the market, it’s clear we need to preserve the ones that are left, and there needs to be a new generation of co-ops. All over the city, when people have to pay market rates instead of mortgages, they’re rent burdened.” Homes for Living is a new book by Jonathan Tarleton that speaks to the tumultuous privatization of New York’s cooperative housing stock, a burgeoning problem. “Maybe there’s a way to build a funding and oversight mechanism for existing co-ops worried about going under water, and for households to sign up for a program that helps them to stay in [Mitchell-Lama],” Weisz elaborated. “Maybe there could even be a program for rental apartments to get into that program?” WXY is currently working on a Mitchell-Lama campus in the Bronx, Stevenson Commons, together with Habitat for Humanity. The goal is to maintain Stevenson Common’s affordability with rent-stabilized flats at very low rates. Parking lots at Stevenson Commons were rezoned to allow for new housing, which helps maintain affordability, while new public spaces and tennis clubs were added. There will be incentives to help seniors age in place, and for multigenerational households. Rochdale Village in Queens (Zara Pfeifer) Weisz sees opportunities to finance cooperative housing with ulterior means, like capital raised from Habitat for Humanity, but also congestion pricing. “We should be using new lines and TOD to actually support neighborhoods and co-ops, and people that are ultimately the ones who stay and support neighborhoods,” she said. “Why not subsidize co-op structures? The only way to do that is if there’s city-owned land, because, otherwise, the land cost is so expensive, you have to develop it at market rate.” “There’s a lot of city sites that have been identified for housing,” Weisz noted. “There’s all sorts of sites in the city’s hands right beside the Manhattan Bridge, for instance, or along the BQE. All of those sites could become new co-ops. What if we built a new Co-op City in Brooklyn?” Source: https://www.archpaper.com/2025/05/canada-cooperative-housing/ #the #canadian #government #building #housing #cooperatives #again #can #follow #suit

With each passing generation, technology enjoyers around the world breathlessly await the arrival of a new id Software game. While the id of today is far removed from its origins, the mission remains the same - to produce beautiful, state of the art visuals at blistering frame-rates. The studio's latest work is no exception. Doom: The Dark Ages marks the arrival of id Tech 8 and with it, a massive slate of impressive tech arrives. From its reliance on ray tracing to its robust physics simulation and brand new materials system, all the through to massive scale battles boasting sublime physics and animation, this is a phenomenal technical showcase and a fantastic game. One of the things I really appreciate about modern id Software games is the studio's willingness to experiment and pivot. While the fundamentals of Doom: The Dark Ages are largely similar - shoot, pummel and otherwise vanquish demon hoards - the way in which this is achieved varies dramatically. Doom Eternal is a very different game compared to the 2016 reboot and this is also true of Doom: The Dark Ages, which shifts to much larger, open areas with higher enemy counts and very different mechanics. It is this desire to change the formula that helps drive the underlying technology. Fundamentally, id Tech 8 was designed to enable this particular game very specifically - which means it needed to support larger maps, more on-screen enemies and major changes to the way everything is lit. When it comes to major changes from id Tech 7, the most impactful arguably stems from its shift to fully ray traced lighting, but beyond the obvious, ray tracing is used for other techniques and to improve the development experience. Similar to Indiana Jones and the Great Circle, the headline feature is ray traced global illumination. This allows for light sources to directly and indirectly light the surrounding space, creating beautiful, realistic and natural results. Unlike Eternal, The Dark Ages features a lot of soft lighting from the often dark skies above rather than high intensity electric lights everywhere. With the generous assistance of id Software, Digital Foundry is able to take you behind the scenes of the id Tech 8 engine technology.Watch on YouTube Doom: The Dark Ages uses an irradiance cache in probe volumes. Before ray traced lighting like this, developers would often pre-calculate these results through pre-computing or 'baking'. This technique meant that world lighting was more static and the actual iteration and build times were much slower. This is one of the most important shifts for the team. Speaking with Billy Khan, Director of Engine Technology at id Software, he noted that ray tracing essentially allowed them to shift to a What You See is What You Get model or WISIWYG. This means that when using id Studio, artists can adjust lighting directly in the editor and see the results instantly: something that would previously require baking to even preview, so it saves a lot of time, allowing the team to work at a much larger scale. When played on the PC, players can also take advantage of ray traced specular reflections much like Doom Eternal. The result is good but the game features a much higher concentration of very rough materials so it's less noticeable compared to Doom Eternal's shiny wonderland of pain. In addition, ray tracing is used for impact effects and footsteps. The idea here is that by leveraging RT, it's possible to more realistically blend the material with the decals to create something that feels bespoke for every situation. For hit impacts, RT helps determine the most accurate positioning when rendering these decals on models. Fully ray-marched volumetrics are also part of the mix. From the clouds to the fog and more, the game now leans heavily on ray-marched effects to lend the game a thicker atmosphere. This technique isn't new, but it's still rather uncommon yet produces tremendous results. When it comes to these volumetric effects, artists can essentially paint and manipulate them in real-time. Artists can create fast-moving clouds, variable cloud cover and shapes and generally just generate beautiful and interesting visual results. The large open outdoor areas basically necessitated a move towards a more robust system like this and it does work well. Doom: The Dark Ages uses an irradiance cache in probe volumes (top left) with the balance of the images showing how the RT effects look when enabled and disabled. As with all the shots on this page, click on the images for higher resolution versions. | Image credit: id Software While on the subject of lighting and shadow, Doom: The Dark Ages also makes use of two other depth enhancing features - SSDO for ambient occlusion and parallax occlusion mapping. Both of these increase surface depth and complexity. While the RTGI solution is very effective, it still has precision limitations which necessitate the use of a screen-space solution but SSDO in this case is used both in direct and indirect situations with shadows applied in the correct direction per local light sources making it far more effective overall. Speaking of parallax effects, this brings us to the game's extremely robust and flexible materials system. Firstly, designers can now combine up to eight bespoke physically-based material layers on a single surface. This allows artists to create more complex surfaces while avoiding tiling and keeping the memory footprint in check. One of the key benefits is how damage to these surfaces reveals underlying materials - if you unload on a wall, for instance, the underlying structural material is revealed and chunky, parallax occlusion mapping helps create the impression of actual damage to the surface. This can also be used in situations where shooting the mud blasts away at its surface causing more water to fill in, erxpanding the size of the puddles. Basically, surfaces are inherently reactive to your actions that go beyond a traditional decal system - the combination of more advanced decals and material composition layers adds a lot to the presentation. Physics also receive a significant upgrade - it's a complex collection of systems that work in tandem to massively improve interactivity. My favourite addition is the inclusion of breakable objects - and these are featured all over the game, from railings that smash apart when you walk through them, buildings and structures that realistically collapse in pieces as you engage with them and scenery that reacts to your movements. It's all here and it's very precise. Shoot individual chunks and pieces of an object and it breaks just as you'd expect before collapsing under its own weight. At its core, id worked closely with Havok to deliver the tooling for use in id Studio. The team focused on perfecting a powerful rigid body collision system while minimising object inner-penetration and exhibiting realistic weight and mass. These objects needed to properly behave amidst the chaotic combat loop while remaining performant. It's not just about the rendering. Doom: The Dark Ages' physics enhancements create memorable moments of destruction. | Image credit: Digital Foundry But there's a lot more to Doom: The Dark Ages. Firstly, there's the weather and wind systems which are extremely robust. The wind system controls things like vegetation animation - wind direction and speed are taken into account across foliage. Using fluid simulation, the game also features more complex secondary motions. For instance, if you fire an explosive weapon near a patch of grass, the explosion causes the foliage to react. Cloth simulation is also in the game so flags, the Slayer's cloak and more are all included in the wind simulation. The idea was to create a cohesive wind system that made the world feel alive and consistent across the board. When coupling this with the atmospheric effects, fog volumes and weather, I'd say that id Software achieved its goal. The very first stage takes place during a rainstorm and everything works in tandem to create something that feels unbelievably intense and beautiful. Of course, this needed to extend across the entire environment, so id also introduced a new water surface simulation which allows proper ripples and reactions in bodies of water. I'm a sucker for effects like this - it's nothing new but it's always wonderful to see. The key here is that all these systems allowed the team to create environments that feel dramatically different than what has come before. The prior two games were all about high contrast and bright lights but RT - in combination with the other technologies - allows id to pursue a more subdued, darker tone without the usual visual limitations, and it's all depicted at a much larger scale. In Doom Eternal, Super Gore Nest was the most geometrically dense map from its original campaign but with The Dark Ages, there are maps featuring upwards of ten times more detail. These maps are broken up into multiple sectors and a single sector can offer as much geometric detail as the entirety of Super Gore Nest. Doom: The Dark Ages delivers the same kind of enemy hordes that the 2D-sprite based originals had - but augmented with remarkable physics, dismemberment and animation. | Image credit: Digital Foundry Prior to launch, I pondered if id had shifted towards a virtualised geometry system along the lines of Unreal Engine's Nanite but it turns out that's not actually the case. Rather, the studio has simply expanded the number of LODs, improved blending between them, honed their scene-culling systems and basically focused first on pixel quality above all else. To that end, pop-in can still be observed at times but most of the scenery appears extremely stable while running fast. In addition, grass rendering is also offloaded entirely to the GPU and tessellated according to camera proximity. In practice, I found that pop-in issues were mostly not noticeable outside of specific vegetation issues or the occasional distant texture. Since we're talking about these large, complex maps, another key improvement is the addition of a proper data streaming system. Prior id Tech games needed to store the map in memory upon loading - but now everything is broken up into a multitude of sectors which means less data is needed in RAM when loading into a mission. As a result, the loading times stand as among the fastest I've seen this gen. It's so fast that I almost question the inclusion of loading screens at all. This has gameplay implications too - it means that when you die, the time to continue is ultra short making you want to keep trying which is key for high difficulty settings. Next up, let's talk about the enemies. There are multiple elements in play that make for some beautifully responsive animation, hit reactions and behaviour. That starts with the individual animations: characters move with proper weight, shifting that weight as they change direction - and the way they storm the battlefield in huge numbers feels amazing. In addition, as you kill them, the way they stumble, fall and blow away is very satisfying, highlighting excellent secondary animation. This also highlights the new gore system. As you fire on foes, flesh breaks away in a shower of blood, leaving exposed bone and sinew below the surface. On top of all this, the engine is now capable of supporting many more on-screen enemies at once. This is the first modern Doom game that manages to get close to capturing the original games in terms of sheer enemy numbers. The shift to polygon graphics put massive limitations on this in the past but no longer. To see this content please enable targeting cookies. The new approach to cutscenes is worth showcasing. Yes, id has included more story sequences in Doom. On paper, this sounds like an ill-advised idea but in reality, I really enjoyed them. I'll leave you to judge the narrative itself but the quality of the cutscenes represents a gigantic leap forward from prior id Software titles. Character models, lighting, camera effects, colour grading and more are all set up beautifully. To accomplish this, id developed a more robust cinematics editing tool allowing artists to dial in every pixel with excruciating detail. Due to the real-time nature of RT lighting, the team could essentially light each scene as if it were a movie set. Thankfully, as far as pacing is concerned, these scenes tend to play only at the start and end of a mission and serve as a nice breather. So, I've concentrated on the technology but the fact is that I'm a huge fan of Doom old and new - and I've got lots to say about the new game itself. It's an interesting one as, fundamentally, it is a very different experience compared to the last two entries. The whole stand and fight approach means the flow of combat differs as you're ultimately less mobile - but that doesn't mean you don't have a lot of movement options. While it's a little slow at first, once you have full access to your arsenal, the game really takes off. In fact, there are aspects here that remind me of bullet hell shooters. There are projectiles, of course, but also elements like shield-wielding foes that come in groups - you'll quickly learn that taking them out involves slamming your shield into theirs after unloading a few rounds and then they blow up. It's all about comboing your attacks together to take out larger groups faster. As before, Doom still has you identifying threats and tackling them appropriately, it's just that the way you deal with these threats has changed. Furthermore, the glory kill system is radically changed - most attacks do not actually take control from you as they did before. Our exploration of the id Tech 8 engine used the PC version to show the features at their highest - current - fidelity (path tracing is still to come!) but the console versions are great too, as you'll see here in Oliver Mackenzie's PS5, PS5 Pro and Xbox Series coverage.Watch on YouTube That said, having just played through Doom Eternal again in Nightmare mode while going for 100 percent completion, I still haven't decided yet if I will enjoy The Dark Ages as much as its predecessor. Once I finish a nightmare run, I can judge it - and for me, that's the ultimate test. Looking back, I was critical of Doom Eternal when I previewed The Dark Ages, but returning to the game and powering through the nightmare mode, it reminded me just how good it is. For now, I would say that Doom: The Dark Ages is at least on par in terms of quality, just different. Honestly, while playing the game, I couldn't help but think of adjacent games in Doom's past such as Heretic from Raven or even the original Quake. It has a dark fantasy ambience to the point that it feels like it could have been a sequel to one of those games as well. Still, overall, having replayed several of its missions multiple times, I'm fairly certain that this is going to occupy a similar space to other id Software classics. The moment you take over the Slayer, it's immediately clear that it feels better than nearly every other shooter on the market - the controls feel virtually flawless. I'm very happy with Doom: The Dark Ages overall and I'm pleased to see that id Tech is still delivering. While 60 fps has become much more common this generation, it's still amazing to see a game doing so much high-end rendering and physics while filling its gigantic stages with hordes of enemies while at the same time delivering a superb high frame-rate experience. As you might imagine, I highly recommend it - but we still haven't shared everything we want to about this defining game: we'll be back soon with a PC performance review, an interview with the developers and a look at the path tracing upgrade as soon as that becomes available. Source: https://www.eurogamer.net/digitalfoundry-2025-doom-the-dark-ages-id-softwares-new-tech-is-a-defining-moment-for-this-generation #doom #the #dark #ages #software039s #latest #defining #moment #for #current #generation #technology

“Wherever I go, the wind follows. And the wind smells like rain.” If those words came from the mouth of Humphrey Bogart or Edward G. Robinson in a crime flick from the 1930s or ’40s, they would sound like the cry of a tortured soul, living in the dregs of society. But because they come from the mouth of Nicolas Cage in the movie Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse, they sound like melodramatic jokes, just as silly as anything said by the Looney Tunes-esque Spider-Ham, voiced by John Mulaney. And Cage is now reprising his role as Spider-Man Noir for the upcoming series Spider-Noir. But as the show’s first teaser reveals, the live-action Amazon MGM series has done away with the goofy tone of the movie that preceded it. Presented in black and white, the show is all moody visuals and implications of violence, in which a morally conflicted Spider-Man, still in his fedora and trench coat, does battle with the 1930s criminal underworld. As surprising as this shift may be to those who love the Spider-Verse movies, Spider-Noir is drawing its inspiration from the comics, and that’s a good thing. Marvel’s Great Depression The first issue of the 2008-2009 miniseries Spider-Man: Noir, written by David Hine and Fabrice Sapolsky and illustrated by Carmine Di Giandomenico, sees the police busting into the offices of Daily Bugle editor J. Jonah Jameson, only to find Spider-Man standing over him. Images such as this are well-known to fans of the wallcrawler, but this one is different. It’s not just that this scene takes place in 1933, nearly 30 full years before Spider-Man makes his first appearance in Amazing Fantasy #15. It’s also that Jameson has been shot to death and Spider-Man, dressed in a black trench coat (no fedora here), is holding the gun. Of course Spidey didn’t do it, and the series follows his investigation into Jameson’s murder. But the very shock of the image does underscore the tone of Spider-Man: Noir. Gone is the quippy Spidey, with his relationship problems and lovable hard-luck. In its place is a Spidey who dwells on the edges of society. He’s still Peter Parker, but he now lives among the downtrodden who lost everything in the Great Depression, listening to the socialist speeches delivered by his Aunt May, reimagined here as an Emma Goldman-type figure. Surprising as that description sounds, it follows the original appeal of Marvel Comics, described by Stan Lee as taking place in “the world outside your window.” 1933 was a period of great social change, with the excesses of the Roaring ’20s still enjoyed by some while others were consumed by the ravages of the stock market crash. Hitler has just become the German Chancellor, but a mistrust of the institutions that had failed them and a general nativism and xenophobia kept most Americans from seeing yet another world war on the horizon. Instead most Americans turned their attention to more immediate enemies, which include the upper classes who wanted to cling to Gilded Age power (and the institutions who supported them), as well as immigrants who continue to make their way to the U.S. All of those tensions inform Spider-Man: Noir, making for a more morally complex story than one would expect. The teenage Peter Parker is still the pure-hearted kid we know and love, but the general cynicism of the world gives him no clear moral standing as he fights Norman Osborn, aka the Goblin, and his thugs. Seriously Dark The Spider-Man Noir of Into the Spider-Verse played more like a parody of a film noir, which literally translates to “black film,” as coined by French critics analyzing moody American crime pictures of the 1940s and ’50s made in the wake of this era. In those films, the hero was a a hardboiled cynic, a la the detectives in The Big Heat or The Maltese Falcon. But in Spider-Verse, he’s a buffoon to be laughed at for his melodrama and inability to understand color. It’s a good joke, but not the sort of thing that can sustain an entire television series. So it’s a good thing that Spider-Noir seems to be taking its cues from the comics instead of the movie. Granted, though, that some things need to be changed. Even if Spidey remains masked, Cage sounds every bit like the 61-year-old he is, and no amount of digital de-aging will make him into the young teen from the comics. Thus he can’t quite be the same innocent he was in the comics, nor can he have a firebrand Aunt May. She and Ben would be long gone by the time sexagenarian Spidey is working. However, she could still have been a leftist, perhaps a union organizer or suffragist. More than a matter of political preference, though, the depiction of Spider-Noir’s Aunt May matters because the series cannot be a bunch of winking nods at movies and literature of the ’30s and ’40s. That worked for maybe 10 minutes of screen time in Spider-Verse, but it won’t hold a series—in part because modern audiences don’t know enough about film noir to get the reference. Instead it needs to be a story grounded in a type of reality, especially because it has a fantasy character at the center. Spider-Man: Noir and its sequel miniseries The Eye of the Beholder are a great model for the show and, if this first teaser is any indication, the model that Spider-Noir intends to follow. Spider-Noir will stream on MGM+ in 2026. Source: https://www.denofgeek.com/tv/spider-noir-teaser-retains-the-spirit-of-the-marvel-comics/ #spidernoir #teaser #retains #the #spirit #marvel #comics

FX has announced the release dates for three of its most anticipated shows of 2025: The Bear season 4, Alien: Earth, and The Lowdown. Chaos returns to the kitchen in The Bear season 4, which premieres on Wednesday, June 25. All 10 episodes will stream on Hulu at 8 p.m. ET/5 p.m. PT. The series streams on Disney+ internationally. Recommended Videos The Bear stars Jeremy Allen White as Carmen “Carmy” Berzatto, Ayo Edebiri as Sydney Adamu, Ebon Moss-Bachrach as Richard “Richie” Jerimovich, Abby Elliott as Natalie “Sugar” Berzatto, Lionel Boyce as Marcus Brooks, Liza Colón-Zayas as Tina Marrero, and Matty Matheson as Neil Fak. Oliver Platt (“Cicero”) and Molly Gordon (“Claire”) will appear in recurring roles. Related Created by Christopher Storer, The Bear season 4 finds the chefs ready to take the Bear to the next level. “With new challenges around every corner, the team must adapt, adjust, and overcome,” the season four synopsis reads. FX/Hulu The xenomorph heads to our planet in Alien: Earth, Noah Hawley’s sci-fi TV show set in the Alien universe. Alien: Earth‘s two-episode premiere airs on Hulu at 8 p.m. ET/5 p.m. PT and on FX at 8 p.m. ET/PT on August 12. The series will also stream on Disney+ internationally. One new episode will premiere each of the following Tuesdays. Set in the year 2120, Alien: Earth follows the aftermath of the USCSS Maginot crash-landing on Earth. Wendy (Sydney Chandler), a robot with human consciousness, and a group of soldiers make a discovery that puts them face-to-face with “the planet’s greatest threat.” Besides Chandler, Alien: Earth stars Timothy Olyphant as Kirsh, Alex Lawther as Hermit, Samuel Blenkin as Boy Kavalier, Babou Ceesay as Morrow, Adrian Edmondson as Atom Eins, David Rysdahl as Arthur Sylvia, Essie Davis as Dame Sylvia, Lily Newmark as Nibs, Erana James as Curly, Adarsh Gourav as Slightly, Jonathan Ajayi as Smee, Kit Young as Tootles, Diêm Camille as Siberian, Moe Bar-El as Rashidi, and Sandra Yi Sencindiver as Yutani. Hawley executive produces alongside Alien maestro Ridley Scott, David W. Zucker, Joseph Iberti, Dana Gonzales, and Clayton Krueger. Finally, Reservation Dogs co-creator Sterlin Harjo returns to FX with a noir series, The Lowdown. The series stars Ethan Hawke as journalist Lee Raybon, “a self-proclaimed Tulsa ‘truthstorian’ whose obsession with the truth is always getting him into trouble.” The Lowdown‘s two-episode premiere airs on FX at 9 p.m. ET/PT on Tuesday, September 23. The rest of the eight episodes will premiere weekly over the next six Tuesdays. Episodes will stream on Hulu the following day. The Lowdown will eventually stream on Disney+ internationally. Source: https://www.digitaltrends.com/movies/the-bear-alien-earth-lowdown-fx-release-dates/ #announces #release #dates #for #three #2025s #most #anticipated #shows

Your home should be the place where you feel the most relaxed, but you might be in need of some privacy fence ideas if your exposed backyard is making it hard to truly unwind. “Privacy fencing, either along a property line or around a specific area in your garden, creates a sense of sanctuary, seclusion, and peacefulness,” says Janice Parker, a landscape architect based in Greenwich, Connecticut. “A garden should, at its best, connect us to nature, and this is simpler to do when you can relax in a peaceful setting. Hidden areas, made with privacy screening, create a sense of mystery, as you do not see all of the garden at once. Mystery makes a great garden!”Luckily, clever retaining wall ideas and privacy fence ideas (some are even DIY landscaping designs) can ensure your backyard is the secluded oasis you want it to be. “A privacy fence does all the work of a typical fence—indicating boundaries and keeping people and animals in or out—while also blocking views into the yard,” says Kevin Lenhart, a landscape designer and design director at Yardzen, one of the nation’s largest online landscape platforms.Here, a guide to building backyard landscaping and a privacy fence—whether you use a pergola or a trellis—to keep onlookers out and a peace of mind in.Are privacy fences a good idea?“From an ecological and natural point of view, privacy fences are the least desirable element in the landscape,” says Jonathan Fargion, a landscape designer based in New York City. This doesn’t mean privacy fences are necessarily a bad idea, just that there are a few considerations to take into account before getting started.Privacy fences cut the land into lots, which can be problematic for the bugs, insects, and other wildlife that live there. “As a rule of thumb, fences should be at least two inches off the ground to let critters the freedom to move between properties,” Fargion explains. In general, he says privacy fences make the most sense on small properties, like town house gardens. For larger yards, he suggests making use of natural greenery, like trees, to keep unwanted eyes from infiltrating your space.How tall can I make my privacy fence?Fences that are six feet tall should block most views from the ground level. “I’d advise not going any taller than you have to, both to save on expenses and to limit the shrinking, enclosing effect fences can have on a space,” Lenhart says. If you do need extra height, he suggests adding 12 to 18 inches of lattice on the top of a fence, which will add privacy while minimizing the visual impact of a taller fence. If you opt for a natural privacy hedge, these can be much taller and often go up to 12 feet.What is the best type of privacy fence?The best privacy fence will depend on each homeowner’s goals for the fence and their yard. “By necessity, privacy fences must obscure sight lines,” Lenhart says. For this reason, many privacy fences are made from solid wood and designed to be completely opaque. If the goal is to have complete seclusion, something solid without any gaps would likely be the best choice. Source: https://www.architecturaldigest.com/gallery/privacy-fence-ideas #privacy #fence #ideas #stylishly #seclude #your #outdoor #sanctuary

It’s been 25 years since the original Final Destination film hit screens and began terrorizing audiences with its deeply memorable (and memeable) Rube Goldberg-like murder tableaus, which get more and more intricate and anxiety-inducing as the franchise goes on. Yet it’s somehow been 14 years since the last entry into the series—the campy, fun, and sort-of-prequel Final Destination 5—and with the appetite for inventive horror as ravenous as ever, and chaos all around us in 2025, we seem perfectly primed for another entry into the series.  Final Destination: Bloodlines thus begins like every other installment in the series: with a terrible disaster. Intriguingly though, this time it’s one that happened decades before the events of the majority of the film. It is in this context we meet Iris (Brec Bassinger), a young woman who after being proposed to on the top of the immense Skyview Tower defies Death with a horrific premonition that allows her to save the lives of hundreds of people who would have fallen and been burnt alive had Iris not alerted the would-be victims.  These setpieces are iconic— like the generation-traumatizing log truck in Final Destination 2 or Mary Elizabeth Winstead versus a rollercoaster in the third installment—so the first new one in 14 years is highly anticipated to say the least. And Bloodlines delivers, as the aesthetically pleasing practical set adds an epic scope to the opening and it manages to feature one of the film’s most horrifying moments that will send shivers up the spines of even the hardiest audience member.  It’s an opening that showcases the love and care that directors Zach Lipovsky and Adam Stein channel throughout the film, with easter eggs aplenty, deep cut references, and some expansive new lore that impacts characters both old and new. Afterward the film pivots to the still-kicking legacy sequel/requel trend and recenters itself around a new family. Thanks to the return of Tony Todd and an expansion of his fan-favorite character William Bludworth, there’s connective tissue to the past. The directors weave that near seamlessly in with the central plot which follows Iris’ family in the modern day as Death finally catches up with them. Our would-be final girl is Stefani (Kaitlyn Santa Juana) who has been dreaming about Iris’ premonition and immediately throws herself into solving the gory family mystery that has presented itself. Along for the ride is her brother Charlie (Teo Briones) and the pair have great chemistry, working as leads that you can actually root for.  Along with a new cast of soon-to-be dead family members the film also introduces Iris’ long relationship with Death. Here we get an expansion in our understanding of Death, who has an almost playfully antagonistic relationship with the woman who managed to escape its grasp all those decades ago. Some of the movie’s best and most unique scenes come from the push and pull between the pair, and Gabrielle Rose’s brilliant performance as the older Iris.  Bloodlines also acts as a send off to legendary Candyman star and genre movie icon, Todd, who has been the sinewy heart of every entry into the Final Destination Todd gives his all, creating a rare and powerful heartfelt moment in the midst of the carnage. And Lipovsky and Stein bring that carnage to life beautifully. There are deaths here that will go down as some of the most terrifying in franchise history, as well as some of its biggest laughs. It’s a balance that makes the movie a perfect popcorn flick that you just have to see on the big screen. After all, if someone is going to get (SPOILER) by a (SPOILER) in their (SPOILER), don’t you want to see that and every other gruesome death as big as possible?   Speaking of big screens, the film was shot for IMAX, and the directors have a ton of fun playing with the ratio and what it can tell us about how deep into the peril we and the characters are. Likewise it features a big ensemble cast, meaning we get more death and destruction and casting director Tiffany Mak deserves a big shout out, as the chemistry is strong. We also get some instant new franchise classic characters like Erik (Richard Harmon), Stefani and Charlie’s burnout cousin who works at a sharps-filled tattoo shop. Why yes that setting will become important later in  a sequence that left my audience gagging in the best possible way.  Final Destination has always been one of the best horror franchises and this is a return that will not only please old fans but will also introduce and terrorize an entirely new audience into discovering these absolutely wild movies that are still going strong 25 years after the first entry. Thanks to an array of talent behind the screen—including Scream VI’s Guy Busick and the MCU Spider-Man’s Jon Watts—this is a witty, hilarious, and grotesque start to the summer blockbuster season.  Final Destination: Bloodlines is out in theaters on May 16. Learn more about Den of Geek’s review process and why you can trust our recommendations here. Join our mailing list Get the best of Den of Geek delivered right to your inbox! Source: https://www.denofgeek.com/movies/final-destination-bloodlines-review/ #final #destination #bloodlines #review #deaths #welcome #return

After having released Senua’s Saga: Hellblade 2, developer Ninja Theory is now seemingly working on an entirely new project. As caught by ResetEra user Bishop89, a post on the studio’s official Instagram account shows off the team working together, looking at a blurred-out screen that might just be a tease for the studio’s next game. While not much in the way of details can be gleaned from the picture, the blurry screen does indicate that the new project would have a more vibrant colour palatte than what we saw from Senua’s Saga: Hellblade 2, which largely kept to darker, moodier colours to better exemplifies its core themes and violent story. With the release of this picture, speculation has begun in the comments section of the Instagram post, with fans of the studio guessing that the tease might be for anything from a return to classic action adventure games from Ninja Theory’s history like Heavenly Sword and Enslaved: Odyssey to the West, to even some wild theories like a follow-up to 2013’s DmC: Devil May Cry, which featured an entirely new take on Capcom’s stylish combat franchise. It is worth noting that, right as Senua’s Saga: Hellblade 2 was about to come out, rumours started circulating that the next project by Ninja Theory had already been greenlit. Unfortunately, no official announcement has been made yet from either Ninja Theory or Microsoft. In the meantime, more recent rumours indicate that the studio might also be working on porting Senua’s Saga: Hellblade 2 over to the PS5. The game, originally released on PC and Xbox Series X/S, would join other Xbox titles like Sea of Thieves and Indiana Jones and the Great Circle in expanding its audience by coming out on Sony’s console. Ninja Theory is also reportedly working on another title, dubbed Project: MARA. The game is slated to be an experimental horror game that has an emphasis on photorealistic visuals, and “real-world and grounded representation of mental terror.” No new details about Project: MARA have been revealed since 2021, however. In the meantime, check out our review of Senua’s Saga: Hellblade 2. Source: https://gamingbolt.com/senuas-saga-hellblade-2-developer-might-have-teased-next-project-with-blurry-photo #ninja #theory #may #have #teased #next #project #with #blurry #photo