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I want to discuss accessibility because it is the most important thing for making websites. Other A List Apart articles give you innovation and insight. This article will give you homework. These are just my personal views, but they’re pretty good.

I want to start off with a couple of statements, and you will agree:

1. Designers are good people. I have never heard a designer say, “I don’t care if somebody can’t read this text”, “Not my fault if somebody can’t use this device”, or “Who cares if this is confusing?”
2. Some designs exclude people. You have seen people unable to read the text on a website or app that somebody designed. You’ve seen people unable to use a physical device that somebody has designed. You’ve seen people utterly bamboozled while trying to use a service that somebody designed.

So what?

The first question is, “Is this life-or-death stuff?” The answer is, “Yes.” In my favorite essay, This Is All There Is, Aral Balkan makes the point that pretty much everything that we design can affect life events and death events. Aral gives the example of how even a straightforward bus timetable app can affect life and death events, if we design it badly:

• somebody might miss a life event, such as their daughter’s fifth birthday party; or
• somebody might miss a death event, such as the chance to say goodbye to a dying grandmother.

The next—and frustrating—question is, “Why do some designs still exclude people?” After all, we know that:

• not everybody can see perfectly;
• not everybody can hear perfectly;
• not everybody thinks the same way; and
• not everybody moves the same way.

I think the answer is that there’s too much to recall. Consider, if you will, the wide variety of topics that A List Apart articles cover. Designers are expected to remember all of that guidance, plus all of the accessibility guidance, plus so much more. It is too much.

Recognizing accessibility issues while designing

I’d like to point toward one possible solution, starting from Jakob Nielsen’s 10 Usability Heuristics for User Interface Design. These are from the mid-1990s, and—although there’s a good chance that you, gentle reader, are a lot younger than that—please bear with me. 

Seeing as the problem is that there’s too much to recall, I want to look at heuristic № 6, “Recognition rather than Recall.” Jakob Nielsen said that for users, information required to use the design should be visible or easily retrievable when needed. I suggest we tweak that to make life easier for designers. Let’s say that the information required to produce the design should be visible or easily retrievable when needed. In other words, let’s make it easier to recognise accessibility issues while we’re designing.

How are we going to do that? I really like the book A Web for Everyone—Designing Accessible User Experiences by Sarah Horton and Whitney Quesenbery. I really like this book not only because it includes a quote from me—actually two quotes, but I don’t like to boast—but because it includes personas that are perfect for helping us to recognise accessibility issues. That’s the good news. The even better news is that these personas are available now for free on the companion website to the book What Every Engineer Should Know About Digital Accessibility, again by Sarah Horton, with David Sloan this time.

Meet your users

I’m going to introduce you to these personas now:

• Vishnu, an engineer and global citizen with low vision says, “I want to be on the same level as everyone else”, “If I can adjust my screen, I can read comfortably”, and, “Translating in my head is easier with simpler sentences.”
• Trevor, a high school student with autism, says, “I like consistent, familiar places on the web”, “When I can learn the pattern, I can find my way”, and, “Reading is hard for me”.
• Steven, a deaf graphic artist and American Sign Language speaker, says, “My only disability is that everyone doesn’t sign”, and, “Without captions, it’s meaningless to me”.
• Maria, a bilingual community health worker, says, “I love this. It’s all here … when I can find it”, “When a site is confusing, I just leave”—fair enough, Maria!—and, “When I hear and see it, health information makes more sense”.
• Lea, an editor living with fatigue and pain, says, “No one gets that this really is a disability”, “Don’t make me work so hard”—please do not bombard this lady with drop-down lists—and, “Links at the top of the page make navigation easier for me”.
• Jacob, a blind paralegal and a bit of a geek, says, “The right technology lets me do anything”, and “This makes it possible to do my job”.
• Emily, who has cerebral palsy and is living independently, says, “I want to do everything for myself”, “Simpler screens are easier screens”—hell yeah, Emily!—and, “Tell me what I need in advance”.
• Carol, a grandmother with macular degeneration which affects her sight, says, “My grandkids are dragging me into the world of technology”, “I don’t understand what the screen is saying”, and, “Why can’t the text be just a little bit larger?”

I want to throw one more persona at you now, because, well, A List Apart readers are overachievers. One of my favorite authors, Cennydd Bowles—who literally wrote the book on Future Ethics—says to create Personas Non Grata. In other words, every time we design something, we have to think about what a bad guy could do with that thing, and whom that might affect.

To actually use these personas while designing, I like what Eric Meyer and Sara Wachter-Boettcher in Design for Real Life call the Designated Dissenter: for each project that you work on, one of your teams should be responsible for asking, “Will this work for Vishnu?”, “How’s Trevor going to get on with this?”, and so on. 

Then, once you’ve used the personas to recognise the accessibility issues, you can look up the guidelines for whichever platforms you’re designing for: 

• Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 2.2
• Accessibility designing — Material Design 3
• Accessibility — Windows apps
• Accessibility | Apple Developer Documentation
• Check your interface for accessibility (Ubuntu)

Your mission, should you choose to accept it

I told you in the introduction of this article that I would give you homework. You thought I was joking. So, here’s your homework: I want you to grab the personas from the Know About Accessibility website, and use them throughout every design project to help you recognise accessibility issues while you work—and reclaim design for everyone.

NOTE: This article is based on “Recognise,” my five-minute presentation from Interaction Design Association (IxDA) Dublin’s Defuse (Design for Use) event in 2025.

Every language app in your pocket inherited a teaching method built for Latin. Understanding why that happened is a more useful design lesson than anything the apps themselves will teach you.

In 1788, Prussia introduced the Abitur, a standardized national examination required for entry into universities and the civil service. To pass it, students needed to demonstrate measurable, gradable knowledge. The system needed to teach language to large classrooms, produce consistent outcomes, and do it with one teacher and thirty students. The educators responsible for designing this system reached for the only teaching template they had, one that had been used in European schools for two centuries: the method developed to teach Latin.

Latin, by 1788, was a dead language. Nobody needed to speak it. The scholars who studied it were reading Cicero and Virgil, not conducting conversations. The method built around it, memorizing grammar rules, constructing translations, analyzing written texts, reflected that reality exactly. Oral skills were irrelevant. Comprehension of written form was everything. The method was not designed to produce speakers. It was designed to produce readers of texts in a language nobody spoke.

When Prussia applied this template to French and German, living languages spoken by living people, the premise did not change. Johann Valentin Meidinger’s textbook Praktische Französische Grammatik, published in 1804, ran to 37 editions across Europe by 1857. Karl Plotz formalized the approach into what became the dominant model for teaching modern languages across Europe and eventually the United States, where it became known simply as the Prussian Method [1]. Each institution that adopted it trained teachers in it, who trained students who became teachers. The constraint that created the method, how do you grade language at scale with limited resources, became invisible inside the method itself. What remained was the assumption: language is a body of rules to be learned consciously and measured. It was a design decision dressed up, over time, as a pedagogical truth.

The observation that should have ended it

There are people in the world who cannot read or write a language and speak it fluently. There are children who hold full conversations years before they can read a single word. There are immigrants who arrive in a country knowing nothing of its language and come out, years later, speaking it naturally, not because they studied it, but because they lived inside it. Literacy and fluency are separate things produced by entirely separate mechanisms. The Grammar-Translation method, as it became known, assumed they were the same thing. That assumption was inherited from a method designed for a language nobody needed to speak, and it was wrong the moment it was applied to a language people actually used.

The evidence against it accumulated slowly. In the mid to late nineteenth century, reformers including François Gouin in France and Maximilian Berlitz in the United States argued independently that language should be taught the way it is actually acquired, through immersive exposure to real communication in the target language, not through analysis of its rules. Berlitz built an entire school network around this principle. The reformers were correct. They were also largely ignored by mainstream education systems, because the Grammar-Translation method had one decisive advantage that direct immersion did not: it could be graded.

In 1982, the linguist Stephen Krashen gave the argument its most formal articulation in what he called the Monitor Model of second language acquisition. His distinction was precise: language acquisition, the unconscious process through which children absorb their native language and through which adults succeed in immersive environments, is categorically different from language learning, the conscious study of grammar rules and vocabulary that classrooms deliver [2]. Acquisition produces fluency. Learning, at best, produces the ability to pass a test. The evidence supporting this distinction, and the observation that immersive exposure to real native-speaker communication is the mechanism that produces genuine fluency, has only grown since.

I went to Brazil without a word of Portuguese and came out speaking it. I studied French in a classroom for years and cannot hold a conversation in French today. This is not an unusual experience. It is the expected outcome, and it has been the expected outcome for as long as we have had formal language education.

The same decision, made again in a different medium

Prussian educators faced the question: How do you deliver language learning at scale, measure progress, and retain users over time? The answer it arrived at was structurally identical to the one arrived at in 1788. Duolingo gamified the grammar drill into a streak. Anki formalized the translation exercise into a spaced-repetition flashcard. Babbel organized grammar lessons into structured modules. The interfaces were new. The underlying assumption, that language is a thing you study rather than an environment you inhabit, was not.

This was not a failure of design skill. The products that emerged from these decisions are, in many respects, genuinely well-crafted. Duolingo’s retention mechanics are sophisticated. Anki’s spaced repetition is grounded in real cognitive science. They are excellent at what they actually do. The problem is what they actually do: produce measurable engagement with a proxy for language rather than the conditions that produce language itself. A streak is measurable. A vocabulary score is measurable. The moment a user walks out of an app and holds a real conversation in another language, that happens in the world, outside the product, and cannot be instrumented.

When the outcome a user needs is difficult to measure directly, the design process tends to reach for something that can be measured. The proxy becomes the goal. The interface optimizes for it. The gap between what the product delivers and what the user actually needed grows. This is not a pattern unique to language learning. It is a pattern that repeats across product categories whenever a design constraint—the need to measure, the need to scale, the need to produce a grade—gets built into a system so deeply that it stops being visible as a constraint and starts being mistaken for a truth about the problem itself.

What happens when the constraint changes

The constraint that made the Grammar-Translation method necessary in 1788 was real and rational. One teacher. Thirty students. A standardized exam. You cannot grade a conversation at scale. You can grade a translation exercise. The method was not chosen because it produced fluency. It was chosen because it produced a score.

That constraint no longer exists in the same form. Technology has made it possible to deliver immersive, real-time conversation practice to anyone with a smartphone, at a cost that continues to fall. The design problem is no longer how to make language learning gradable at scale. It is how to make the conditions of genuine language acquisition accessible to people who cannot move to another country or afford a native-speaker tutor.

The products that are now closest to solving the actual problem are not the ones that invented a new pedagogy. They are the ones that removed the access barrier to an old one. Praktika builds AI conversation partners with distinct personalities, regional dialects, and cultural context, replicating the specificity of a real native speaker rather than a generic language-learning voice. Langua clones native speaker voices so that the interaction feels like a real conversation rather than a lesson. Rosetta Stone’s foundational methodology, image association in the target language with no translation, was built on the same insight Berlitz arrived at in the nineteenth century: language is acquired through immersive exposure, not through analysis of its rules [3]. A 2025 meta-analysis of 31 studies found that AI conversation tools produced a statistically significant improvement in language learning outcomes, a result that no amount of flashcard optimization has consistently matched [4].

None of these products invented a new theory of language acquisition. They translated an existing one into something more people could reach.

The design question this leaves

The Grammar-Translation method persisted not because educators were wrong about design, but because a design decision made under a specific constraint became, over two centuries, indistinguishable from the thing itself. The constraint, how do you grade language at scale, was forgotten. The method it produced was inherited as if it were a description of how language works, passed from Prussia to Europe to America to the App Store, from the grammar drill to the streak.

Every time a design team optimizes for a metric because the actual outcome is hard to measure, they are making a version of the same decision. It is often the right decision given real constraints. The question worth asking is whether the constraint that made it necessary still exists, or whether it has simply become invisible inside the system it originally produced.

Before reaching for what can be measured, it is worth asking what the user actually needs to do, and what stopped them from doing it before. Sometimes the answer is a new solution. More often it is an old one that was always out of reach.

After The Matrix Resurrections debuted to an underwhelming box office and middling reviews in 2021, it became clear in the aftermath that the blockbuster franchise’s studio, Warner Bros., wanted a reset, with trades reporting that director Lana Wachowski would stay on as an executive producer of a proposed fifth Matrix movie but essentially hand off […]

The post The Wachowskis May Decide the Fate of The Matrix 5 appeared first on Den of Geek.

So over the long Labor Day weekend in the U.S.—a three-day respite that unofficially marks the end of summer with excursions to the beach or mountains, or at least hot dogs on the grill—President  Donald Trump took to his personal social media app, Truth Social. Quite a lot. And among the President of the United States’ many wordy, often bombastic posts was what appeared to be an announcement for the honest-to-Palpatine uniforms intended for the burgeoning U.S. Space Force.

Complete with collar insignias, shoulder details, and hues that come in the monochrome selection of “space gray,” “midnight black,” and “silver gray,” the attire looks nearly like the spitting image of Imperial officers from Star Wars movies, not to mention a litany of other sci-fi characters deliberately modeled on a mode of fashionable dress in Germany between the years 1933 and 1945.

And if you think we’re joking about Nazi influences running rampant in the image shared by Mr. Trump, please consider he or his team admitted to taking exactly such (in)direct influence. In the same infographic with all the other details is a small section labeled “Design Inspiration.” Apparently the whole aesthetic is informed “by the discipline and functionality of the Starship Trooper uniform.”

Oh, dear.

For those uninitiated in the minutiae of increasingly obscure Gen-X and millennial pop culture, Starship Troopers was an exceedingly arch 1997 adaptation (and some would say outright betrayal) of Robert A. Heinlein’s 1959 sci-fi novel of the same name. Directed by Dutch provocateur and cynic Paul Verhoeven, the movie cast pinup-ready TV and rising Hollywood teen talent like Casper Van Dien (One Life to Live), Denise Richards (Melrose Place), and Neil Patrick Harris (Doogie Howser, M.D.) as bright, attractive, fresh-faced American youths who spout patriotic platitudes with the usual heavy-handed delivery of a ‘90s primetime soap. Or a 1930s propaganda film.

That was by design.

“We really, really tried to get away from the novel, because we felt that the novel was fascistic and militaristic,” Verhoeven was quoted by IndieWire as saying in 2016. “Our philosophy was really different [from Heinlein’s book],we wanted to do a double story, a really wonderful adventure story about these young boys and girls fighting, but we also wanted to show that these people are really, in their heart, without knowing it, are on their way to fascism.”

The effect comes through in the film with the good-looking people dying by the thousands as they’re sent on starships far away to fight an alien race of “bugs” that are blamed for a meteor striking planet Earth. (The evidence is deliberately vague and suspiciously scant.) There the kids are fed into what they happily refer to as “the grinder” of war while posing in ‘90s-flavored riffs on Leni Riefenstahl iconography. And in case this was missed by anyone, Harris’ intelligence officer wears the form-fitting, Nazi-infused regalia of a tight black uniform and its oh, so crisp, cleanly midnight-black, long leather trench coat.

According to actor Michael Ironside, even while making the film Verhoeven apparently mused he might be “too subtle for the American consciousness.” Paul, it would seem you weren’t whistling, “The Deutchlandlied.”

While Starship Troopers’ parody of hyper-nationalism and jingoistic valor is played with a tongue firmly in its cheek, it would seem many generations of viewers who grew up with it—or were already in their 50s in 1997—apparently missed the metaphor completely; this, despite the attire of the “good guys” in the movie looking conspicuously like the Third Reich, or at least the bad guys in Star Wars who were modeled on the same Triumph of the Will iconography. (Just wait until the president discovers where the word “stormtrooper” comes from!)

Yet somehow the architects of the growing U.S. Space force over at the Department of Defense and their orange-hued executive in the White House somehow missed these parallels while explicitly designing the Space Force after this? Maybe.

I’m not so sure since even Verhoeven had the good taste to not include the peaked cap of SS officers on Neil Patrick Harris. Sometimes, even to a satirist, a design can be a little too Nazi for a joke, much less a real-life military division.

The post Do We Really Need to Explain the Nazis Metaphor in Starship Troopers, Mr. Trump? appeared first on Den of Geek.

The finished movie is usually what stays with us, but the people making it saw something completely different. Between takes, actors were joking around, enormous sets looked surprisingly ordinary, and terrifying creatures turned out to be people in costumes standing under studio lights. Behind the scenes photographs capture those moments when the illusion disappears for a second and everyone looks like they are simply making a movie. Some show famous actors having fun between takes, while others reveal just how much work went into creating a scene that looked effortless on screen. These photos offer a glimpse at the lighter side of some of the most memorable movies ever made.

The post 15 Fun Photos Taken From Behind the Scenes of Your Favorite Movies appeared first on Den of Geek.

So over the long Labor Day weekend in the U.S.—a three-day respite that unofficially marks the end of summer with excursions to the beach or mountains, or at least hot dogs on the grill—President  Donald Trump took to his personal social media app, Truth Social. Quite a lot. And among the President of the United States’ many wordy, often bombastic posts was what appeared to be an announcement for the honest-to-Palpatine uniforms intended for the burgeoning U.S. Space Force.

Complete with collar insignias, shoulder details, and hues that come in the monochrome selection of “space gray,” “midnight black,” and “silver gray,” the attire looks nearly like the spitting image of Imperial officers from Star Wars movies, not to mention a litany of other sci-fi characters deliberately modeled on a mode of fashionable dress in Germany between the years 1933 and 1945.

And if you think we’re joking about Nazi influences running rampant in the image shared by Mr. Trump, please consider he or his team admitted to taking exactly such (in)direct influence. In the same infographic with all the other details is a small section labeled “Design Inspiration.” Apparently the whole aesthetic is informed “by the discipline and functionality of the Starship Trooper uniform.”

Oh, dear.

For those uninitiated in the minutiae of increasingly obscure Gen-X and millennial pop culture, Starship Troopers was an exceedingly arch 1997 adaptation (and some would say outright betrayal) of Robert A. Heinlein’s 1959 sci-fi novel of the same name. Directed by Dutch provocateur and cynic Paul Verhoeven, the movie cast pinup-ready TV and rising Hollywood teen talent like Casper Van Dien (One Life to Live), Denise Richards (Melrose Place), and Neil Patrick Harris (Doogie Howser, M.D.) as bright, attractive, fresh-faced American youths who spout patriotic platitudes with the usual heavy-handed delivery of a ‘90s primetime soap. Or a 1930s propaganda film.

That was by design.

“We really, really tried to get away from the novel, because we felt that the novel was fascistic and militaristic,” Verhoeven was quoted by IndieWire as saying in 2016. “Our philosophy was really different [from Heinlein’s book],we wanted to do a double story, a really wonderful adventure story about these young boys and girls fighting, but we also wanted to show that these people are really, in their heart, without knowing it, are on their way to fascism.”

The effect comes through in the film with the good-looking people dying by the thousands as they’re sent on starships far away to fight an alien race of “bugs” that are blamed for a meteor striking planet Earth. (The evidence is deliberately vague and suspiciously scant.) There the kids are fed into what they happily refer to as “the grinder” of war while posing in ‘90s-flavored riffs on Leni Riefenstahl iconography. And in case this was missed by anyone, Harris’ intelligence officer wears the form-fitting, Nazi-infused regalia of a tight black uniform and its oh, so crisp, cleanly midnight-black, long leather trench coat.

According to actor Michael Ironside, even while making the film Verhoeven apparently mused he might be “too subtle for the American consciousness.” Paul, it would seem you weren’t whistling, “The Deutchlandlied.”

While Starship Troopers’ parody of hyper-nationalism and jingoistic valor is played with a tongue firmly in its cheek, it would seem many generations of viewers who grew up with it—or were already in their 50s in 1997—apparently missed the metaphor completely; this, despite the attire of the “good guys” in the movie looking conspicuously like the Third Reich, or at least the bad guys in Star Wars who were modeled on the same Triumph of the Will iconography. (Just wait until the president discovers where the word “stormtrooper” comes from!)

Yet somehow the architects of the growing U.S. Space force over at the Department of Defense and their orange-hued executive in the White House somehow missed these parallels while explicitly designing the Space Force after this? Maybe.

I’m not so sure since even Verhoeven had the good taste to not include the peaked cap of SS officers on Neil Patrick Harris. Sometimes, even to a satirist, a design can be a little too Nazi for a joke, much less a real-life military division.

The post Do We Really Need to Explain the Nazis Metaphor in Starship Troopers, Mr. Trump? appeared first on Den of Geek.

There is a strange idea that major accomplishments are supposed to arrive on a schedule. Start a career when you are young, reach your peak somewhere in the middle, and spend the later years taking it easy. Plenty of people have ignored that timeline completely. Some found success in fields they barely pursued until retirement age, while others kept pushing themselves long after most people would have been happy to call it a career. Their achievements include graduating from college, publishing bestselling books, making art, returning to space, and tackling physical challenges that would be daunting at any age. Here are 15 people who didn’t let age stop them from accomplishing great things.

The post 15 People Who Didn’t Let Age Stop Them from Accomplishing Great Things appeared first on Den of Geek.

So over the long Labor Day weekend in the U.S.—a three-day respite that unofficially marks the end of summer with excursions to the beach or mountains, or at least hot dogs on the grill—President  Donald Trump took to his personal social media app, Truth Social. Quite a lot. And among the President of the United States’ many wordy, often bombastic posts was what appeared to be an announcement for the honest-to-Palpatine uniforms intended for the burgeoning U.S. Space Force.

Complete with collar insignias, shoulder details, and hues that come in the monochrome selection of “space gray,” “midnight black,” and “silver gray,” the attire looks nearly like the spitting image of Imperial officers from Star Wars movies, not to mention a litany of other sci-fi characters deliberately modeled on a mode of fashionable dress in Germany between the years 1933 and 1945.

And if you think we’re joking about Nazi influences running rampant in the image shared by Mr. Trump, please consider he or his team admitted to taking exactly such (in)direct influence. In the same infographic with all the other details is a small section labeled “Design Inspiration.” Apparently the whole aesthetic is informed “by the discipline and functionality of the Starship Trooper uniform.”

Oh, dear.

For those uninitiated in the minutiae of increasingly obscure Gen-X and millennial pop culture, Starship Troopers was an exceedingly arch 1997 adaptation (and some would say outright betrayal) of Robert A. Heinlein’s 1959 sci-fi novel of the same name. Directed by Dutch provocateur and cynic Paul Verhoeven, the movie cast pinup-ready TV and rising Hollywood teen talent like Casper Van Dien (One Life to Live), Denise Richards (Melrose Place), and Neil Patrick Harris (Doogie Howser, M.D.) as bright, attractive, fresh-faced American youths who spout patriotic platitudes with the usual heavy-handed delivery of a ‘90s primetime soap. Or a 1930s propaganda film.

That was by design.

“We really, really tried to get away from the novel, because we felt that the novel was fascistic and militaristic,” Verhoeven was quoted by IndieWire as saying in 2016. “Our philosophy was really different [from Heinlein’s book],we wanted to do a double story, a really wonderful adventure story about these young boys and girls fighting, but we also wanted to show that these people are really, in their heart, without knowing it, are on their way to fascism.”

The effect comes through in the film with the good-looking people dying by the thousands as they’re sent on starships far away to fight an alien race of “bugs” that are blamed for a meteor striking planet Earth. (The evidence is deliberately vague and suspiciously scant.) There the kids are fed into what they happily refer to as “the grinder” of war while posing in ‘90s-flavored riffs on Leni Riefenstahl iconography. And in case this was missed by anyone, Harris’ intelligence officer wears the form-fitting, Nazi-infused regalia of a tight black uniform and its oh, so crisp, cleanly midnight-black, long leather trench coat.

According to actor Michael Ironside, even while making the film Verhoeven apparently mused he might be “too subtle for the American consciousness.” Paul, it would seem you weren’t whistling, “The Deutchlandlied.”

While Starship Troopers’ parody of hyper-nationalism and jingoistic valor is played with a tongue firmly in its cheek, it would seem many generations of viewers who grew up with it—or were already in their 50s in 1997—apparently missed the metaphor completely; this, despite the attire of the “good guys” in the movie looking conspicuously like the Third Reich, or at least the bad guys in Star Wars who were modeled on the same Triumph of the Will iconography. (Just wait until the president discovers where the word “stormtrooper” comes from!)

Yet somehow the architects of the growing U.S. Space force over at the Department of Defense and their orange-hued executive in the White House somehow missed these parallels while explicitly designing the Space Force after this? Maybe.

I’m not so sure since even Verhoeven had the good taste to not include the peaked cap of SS officers on Neil Patrick Harris. Sometimes, even to a satirist, a design can be a little too Nazi for a joke, much less a real-life military division.

The post Do We Really Need to Explain the Nazis Metaphor in Starship Troopers, Mr. Trump? appeared first on Den of Geek.

A season finale can get away with leaving a few unanswered questions when everyone assumes another batch of episodes is coming. The problem starts when a network or streaming service has other plans. Some shows have introduced new characters, revealed alternate realities, put their heroes in serious danger, or completely changed everything viewers thought they knew, only to get canceled before explaining any of it. In a few especially painful cases, the writers even ended the episode with an explicit promise that the story would continue. Instead, audiences were left waiting for a next season that never arrived. Here are 15 TV shows that got cancelled off the back of a massive cliffhanger.

The post 15 TV Shows That Got Cancelled Off the Back of a Massive Cliffhanger appeared first on Den of Geek.

So over the long Labor Day weekend in the U.S.—a three-day respite that unofficially marks the end of summer with excursions to the beach or mountains, or at least hot dogs on the grill—President  Donald Trump took to his personal social media app, Truth Social. Quite a lot. And among the President of the United States’ many wordy, often bombastic posts was what appeared to be an announcement for the honest-to-Palpatine uniforms intended for the burgeoning U.S. Space Force.

Complete with collar insignias, shoulder details, and hues that come in the monochrome selection of “space gray,” “midnight black,” and “silver gray,” the attire looks nearly like the spitting image of Imperial officers from Star Wars movies, not to mention a litany of other sci-fi characters deliberately modeled on a mode of fashionable dress in Germany between the years 1933 and 1945.

And if you think we’re joking about Nazi influences running rampant in the image shared by Mr. Trump, please consider he or his team admitted to taking exactly such (in)direct influence. In the same infographic with all the other details is a small section labeled “Design Inspiration.” Apparently the whole aesthetic is informed “by the discipline and functionality of the Starship Trooper uniform.”

Oh, dear.

For those uninitiated in the minutiae of increasingly obscure Gen-X and millennial pop culture, Starship Troopers was an exceedingly arch 1997 adaptation (and some would say outright betrayal) of Robert A. Heinlein’s 1959 sci-fi novel of the same name. Directed by Dutch provocateur and cynic Paul Verhoeven, the movie cast pinup-ready TV and rising Hollywood teen talent like Casper Van Dien (One Life to Live), Denise Richards (Melrose Place), and Neil Patrick Harris (Doogie Howser, M.D.) as bright, attractive, fresh-faced American youths who spout patriotic platitudes with the usual heavy-handed delivery of a ‘90s primetime soap. Or a 1930s propaganda film.

That was by design.

“We really, really tried to get away from the novel, because we felt that the novel was fascistic and militaristic,” Verhoeven was quoted by IndieWire as saying in 2016. “Our philosophy was really different [from Heinlein’s book],we wanted to do a double story, a really wonderful adventure story about these young boys and girls fighting, but we also wanted to show that these people are really, in their heart, without knowing it, are on their way to fascism.”

The effect comes through in the film with the good-looking people dying by the thousands as they’re sent on starships far away to fight an alien race of “bugs” that are blamed for a meteor striking planet Earth. (The evidence is deliberately vague and suspiciously scant.) There the kids are fed into what they happily refer to as “the grinder” of war while posing in ‘90s-flavored riffs on Leni Riefenstahl iconography. And in case this was missed by anyone, Harris’ intelligence officer wears the form-fitting, Nazi-infused regalia of a tight black uniform and its oh, so crisp, cleanly midnight-black, long leather trench coat.

According to actor Michael Ironside, even while making the film Verhoeven apparently mused he might be “too subtle for the American consciousness.” Paul, it would seem you weren’t whistling, “The Deutchlandlied.”

While Starship Troopers’ parody of hyper-nationalism and jingoistic valor is played with a tongue firmly in its cheek, it would seem many generations of viewers who grew up with it—or were already in their 50s in 1997—apparently missed the metaphor completely; this, despite the attire of the “good guys” in the movie looking conspicuously like the Third Reich, or at least the bad guys in Star Wars who were modeled on the same Triumph of the Will iconography. (Just wait until the president discovers where the word “stormtrooper” comes from!)

Yet somehow the architects of the growing U.S. Space force over at the Department of Defense and their orange-hued executive in the White House somehow missed these parallels while explicitly designing the Space Force after this? Maybe.

I’m not so sure since even Verhoeven had the good taste to not include the peaked cap of SS officers on Neil Patrick Harris. Sometimes, even to a satirist, a design can be a little too Nazi for a joke, much less a real-life military division.

The post Do We Really Need to Explain the Nazis Metaphor in Starship Troopers, Mr. Trump? appeared first on Den of Geek.

In the current streaming landscape, there’s no such thing as a sure thing. Even an Emmy-winning Spider-Man series with a 92% Rotten Tomatoes score can get canceled after just one season, as proven by last week’s confirmation of Spider-Noir’s disappointing fate on Prime Video. If star Nicolas Cage is upset by the Spider-Noir news, he […]

The post Spider-Noir Is Canceled, But Nicolas Cage Isn’t Complaining appeared first on Den of Geek.

So over the long Labor Day weekend in the U.S.—a three-day respite that unofficially marks the end of summer with excursions to the beach or mountains, or at least hot dogs on the grill—President  Donald Trump took to his personal social media app, Truth Social. Quite a lot. And among the President of the United States’ many wordy, often bombastic posts was what appeared to be an announcement for the honest-to-Palpatine uniforms intended for the burgeoning U.S. Space Force.

Complete with collar insignias, shoulder details, and hues that come in the monochrome selection of “space gray,” “midnight black,” and “silver gray,” the attire looks nearly like the spitting image of Imperial officers from Star Wars movies, not to mention a litany of other sci-fi characters deliberately modeled on a mode of fashionable dress in Germany between the years 1933 and 1945.

And if you think we’re joking about Nazi influences running rampant in the image shared by Mr. Trump, please consider he or his team admitted to taking exactly such (in)direct influence. In the same infographic with all the other details is a small section labeled “Design Inspiration.” Apparently the whole aesthetic is informed “by the discipline and functionality of the Starship Trooper uniform.”

Oh, dear.

For those uninitiated in the minutiae of increasingly obscure Gen-X and millennial pop culture, Starship Troopers was an exceedingly arch 1997 adaptation (and some would say outright betrayal) of Robert A. Heinlein’s 1959 sci-fi novel of the same name. Directed by Dutch provocateur and cynic Paul Verhoeven, the movie cast pinup-ready TV and rising Hollywood teen talent like Casper Van Dien (One Life to Live), Denise Richards (Melrose Place), and Neil Patrick Harris (Doogie Howser, M.D.) as bright, attractive, fresh-faced American youths who spout patriotic platitudes with the usual heavy-handed delivery of a ‘90s primetime soap. Or a 1930s propaganda film.

That was by design.

“We really, really tried to get away from the novel, because we felt that the novel was fascistic and militaristic,” Verhoeven was quoted by IndieWire as saying in 2016. “Our philosophy was really different [from Heinlein’s book],we wanted to do a double story, a really wonderful adventure story about these young boys and girls fighting, but we also wanted to show that these people are really, in their heart, without knowing it, are on their way to fascism.”

The effect comes through in the film with the good-looking people dying by the thousands as they’re sent on starships far away to fight an alien race of “bugs” that are blamed for a meteor striking planet Earth. (The evidence is deliberately vague and suspiciously scant.) There the kids are fed into what they happily refer to as “the grinder” of war while posing in ‘90s-flavored riffs on Leni Riefenstahl iconography. And in case this was missed by anyone, Harris’ intelligence officer wears the form-fitting, Nazi-infused regalia of a tight black uniform and its oh, so crisp, cleanly midnight-black, long leather trench coat.

According to actor Michael Ironside, even while making the film Verhoeven apparently mused he might be “too subtle for the American consciousness.” Paul, it would seem you weren’t whistling, “The Deutchlandlied.”

While Starship Troopers’ parody of hyper-nationalism and jingoistic valor is played with a tongue firmly in its cheek, it would seem many generations of viewers who grew up with it—or were already in their 50s in 1997—apparently missed the metaphor completely; this, despite the attire of the “good guys” in the movie looking conspicuously like the Third Reich, or at least the bad guys in Star Wars who were modeled on the same Triumph of the Will iconography. (Just wait until the president discovers where the word “stormtrooper” comes from!)

Yet somehow the architects of the growing U.S. Space force over at the Department of Defense and their orange-hued executive in the White House somehow missed these parallels while explicitly designing the Space Force after this? Maybe.

I’m not so sure since even Verhoeven had the good taste to not include the peaked cap of SS officers on Neil Patrick Harris. Sometimes, even to a satirist, a design can be a little too Nazi for a joke, much less a real-life military division.

The post Do We Really Need to Explain the Nazis Metaphor in Starship Troopers, Mr. Trump? appeared first on Den of Geek.

Not everything that vanishes gets a proper goodbye. Plenty of things that once felt completely ordinary simply became less common year after year, until suddenly it was strange to see someone using them at all. Technology explains some of it, but changing habits, new laws, and different ways of shopping, traveling, and communicating played a part too. Nobody held a farewell ceremony for the phone book or mourned the last handwritten set of driving directions. We just found easier alternatives and moved on, often without noticing what we had stopped doing. Looking back, some of these routines now feel surprisingly distant. Here are 15 things that quietly disappeared from everyday life.

The post 15 Things That Quietly Disappeared From Everyday Life appeared first on Den of Geek.

So over the long Labor Day weekend in the U.S.—a three-day respite that unofficially marks the end of summer with excursions to the beach or mountains, or at least hot dogs on the grill—President  Donald Trump took to his personal social media app, Truth Social. Quite a lot. And among the President of the United States’ many wordy, often bombastic posts was what appeared to be an announcement for the honest-to-Palpatine uniforms intended for the burgeoning U.S. Space Force.

Complete with collar insignias, shoulder details, and hues that come in the monochrome selection of “space gray,” “midnight black,” and “silver gray,” the attire looks nearly like the spitting image of Imperial officers from Star Wars movies, not to mention a litany of other sci-fi characters deliberately modeled on a mode of fashionable dress in Germany between the years 1933 and 1945.

And if you think we’re joking about Nazi influences running rampant in the image shared by Mr. Trump, please consider he or his team admitted to taking exactly such (in)direct influence. In the same infographic with all the other details is a small section labeled “Design Inspiration.” Apparently the whole aesthetic is informed “by the discipline and functionality of the Starship Trooper uniform.”

Oh, dear.

For those uninitiated in the minutiae of increasingly obscure Gen-X and millennial pop culture, Starship Troopers was an exceedingly arch 1997 adaptation (and some would say outright betrayal) of Robert A. Heinlein’s 1959 sci-fi novel of the same name. Directed by Dutch provocateur and cynic Paul Verhoeven, the movie cast pinup-ready TV and rising Hollywood teen talent like Casper Van Dien (One Life to Live), Denise Richards (Melrose Place), and Neil Patrick Harris (Doogie Howser, M.D.) as bright, attractive, fresh-faced American youths who spout patriotic platitudes with the usual heavy-handed delivery of a ‘90s primetime soap. Or a 1930s propaganda film.

That was by design.

“We really, really tried to get away from the novel, because we felt that the novel was fascistic and militaristic,” Verhoeven was quoted by IndieWire as saying in 2016. “Our philosophy was really different [from Heinlein’s book],we wanted to do a double story, a really wonderful adventure story about these young boys and girls fighting, but we also wanted to show that these people are really, in their heart, without knowing it, are on their way to fascism.”

The effect comes through in the film with the good-looking people dying by the thousands as they’re sent on starships far away to fight an alien race of “bugs” that are blamed for a meteor striking planet Earth. (The evidence is deliberately vague and suspiciously scant.) There the kids are fed into what they happily refer to as “the grinder” of war while posing in ‘90s-flavored riffs on Leni Riefenstahl iconography. And in case this was missed by anyone, Harris’ intelligence officer wears the form-fitting, Nazi-infused regalia of a tight black uniform and its oh, so crisp, cleanly midnight-black, long leather trench coat.

According to actor Michael Ironside, even while making the film Verhoeven apparently mused he might be “too subtle for the American consciousness.” Paul, it would seem you weren’t whistling, “The Deutchlandlied.”

While Starship Troopers’ parody of hyper-nationalism and jingoistic valor is played with a tongue firmly in its cheek, it would seem many generations of viewers who grew up with it—or were already in their 50s in 1997—apparently missed the metaphor completely; this, despite the attire of the “good guys” in the movie looking conspicuously like the Third Reich, or at least the bad guys in Star Wars who were modeled on the same Triumph of the Will iconography. (Just wait until the president discovers where the word “stormtrooper” comes from!)

Yet somehow the architects of the growing U.S. Space force over at the Department of Defense and their orange-hued executive in the White House somehow missed these parallels while explicitly designing the Space Force after this? Maybe.

I’m not so sure since even Verhoeven had the good taste to not include the peaked cap of SS officers on Neil Patrick Harris. Sometimes, even to a satirist, a design can be a little too Nazi for a joke, much less a real-life military division.

The post Do We Really Need to Explain the Nazis Metaphor in Starship Troopers, Mr. Trump? appeared first on Den of Geek.

Some products seem so perfectly suited to their jobs that it is hard to imagine anyone ever using them for something else. Their inventors, however, did not always have the final use in mind. A children’s toy started out cleaning dirty walls, a familiar household spray was developed for aerospace equipment, and one of the most recognizable tissues was originally sold as a beauty product. Sometimes consumers discovered a better use themselves, while other inventions simply failed at their original jobs and found unexpected second lives. A few of those detours eventually created products far more successful than anyone initially planned. Here are 15 products that were invented for a completely different purpose.

The post 15 Products That Were Invented for a Completely Different Purpose appeared first on Den of Geek.

So over the long Labor Day weekend in the U.S.—a three-day respite that unofficially marks the end of summer with excursions to the beach or mountains, or at least hot dogs on the grill—President  Donald Trump took to his personal social media app, Truth Social. Quite a lot. And among the President of the United States’ many wordy, often bombastic posts was what appeared to be an announcement for the honest-to-Palpatine uniforms intended for the burgeoning U.S. Space Force.

Complete with collar insignias, shoulder details, and hues that come in the monochrome selection of “space gray,” “midnight black,” and “silver gray,” the attire looks nearly like the spitting image of Imperial officers from Star Wars movies, not to mention a litany of other sci-fi characters deliberately modeled on a mode of fashionable dress in Germany between the years 1933 and 1945.

And if you think we’re joking about Nazi influences running rampant in the image shared by Mr. Trump, please consider he or his team admitted to taking exactly such (in)direct influence. In the same infographic with all the other details is a small section labeled “Design Inspiration.” Apparently the whole aesthetic is informed “by the discipline and functionality of the Starship Trooper uniform.”

Oh, dear.

For those uninitiated in the minutiae of increasingly obscure Gen-X and millennial pop culture, Starship Troopers was an exceedingly arch 1997 adaptation (and some would say outright betrayal) of Robert A. Heinlein’s 1959 sci-fi novel of the same name. Directed by Dutch provocateur and cynic Paul Verhoeven, the movie cast pinup-ready TV and rising Hollywood teen talent like Casper Van Dien (One Life to Live), Denise Richards (Melrose Place), and Neil Patrick Harris (Doogie Howser, M.D.) as bright, attractive, fresh-faced American youths who spout patriotic platitudes with the usual heavy-handed delivery of a ‘90s primetime soap. Or a 1930s propaganda film.

That was by design.

“We really, really tried to get away from the novel, because we felt that the novel was fascistic and militaristic,” Verhoeven was quoted by IndieWire as saying in 2016. “Our philosophy was really different [from Heinlein’s book],we wanted to do a double story, a really wonderful adventure story about these young boys and girls fighting, but we also wanted to show that these people are really, in their heart, without knowing it, are on their way to fascism.”

The effect comes through in the film with the good-looking people dying by the thousands as they’re sent on starships far away to fight an alien race of “bugs” that are blamed for a meteor striking planet Earth. (The evidence is deliberately vague and suspiciously scant.) There the kids are fed into what they happily refer to as “the grinder” of war while posing in ‘90s-flavored riffs on Leni Riefenstahl iconography. And in case this was missed by anyone, Harris’ intelligence officer wears the form-fitting, Nazi-infused regalia of a tight black uniform and its oh, so crisp, cleanly midnight-black, long leather trench coat.

According to actor Michael Ironside, even while making the film Verhoeven apparently mused he might be “too subtle for the American consciousness.” Paul, it would seem you weren’t whistling, “The Deutchlandlied.”

While Starship Troopers’ parody of hyper-nationalism and jingoistic valor is played with a tongue firmly in its cheek, it would seem many generations of viewers who grew up with it—or were already in their 50s in 1997—apparently missed the metaphor completely; this, despite the attire of the “good guys” in the movie looking conspicuously like the Third Reich, or at least the bad guys in Star Wars who were modeled on the same Triumph of the Will iconography. (Just wait until the president discovers where the word “stormtrooper” comes from!)

Yet somehow the architects of the growing U.S. Space force over at the Department of Defense and their orange-hued executive in the White House somehow missed these parallels while explicitly designing the Space Force after this? Maybe.

I’m not so sure since even Verhoeven had the good taste to not include the peaked cap of SS officers on Neil Patrick Harris. Sometimes, even to a satirist, a design can be a little too Nazi for a joke, much less a real-life military division.

The post Do We Really Need to Explain the Nazis Metaphor in Starship Troopers, Mr. Trump? appeared first on Den of Geek.

Carry the Darkness recalls a time and place that should be intimately familiar for its writer-director. After all, Douglas Forrester shot much of the film literally in the small Maryland community he grew up in, which while hundreds of miles from West Memphis, Arkansas was nonetheless gripped by the same fears in the 1990s: teenagers […]

The post Revisiting ‘90s Era Satanic Panic in Carry the Darkness appeared first on Den of Geek.

So over the long Labor Day weekend in the U.S.—a three-day respite that unofficially marks the end of summer with excursions to the beach or mountains, or at least hot dogs on the grill—President  Donald Trump took to his personal social media app, Truth Social. Quite a lot. And among the President of the United States’ many wordy, often bombastic posts was what appeared to be an announcement for the honest-to-Palpatine uniforms intended for the burgeoning U.S. Space Force.

Complete with collar insignias, shoulder details, and hues that come in the monochrome selection of “space gray,” “midnight black,” and “silver gray,” the attire looks nearly like the spitting image of Imperial officers from Star Wars movies, not to mention a litany of other sci-fi characters deliberately modeled on a mode of fashionable dress in Germany between the years 1933 and 1945.

And if you think we’re joking about Nazi influences running rampant in the image shared by Mr. Trump, please consider he or his team admitted to taking exactly such (in)direct influence. In the same infographic with all the other details is a small section labeled “Design Inspiration.” Apparently the whole aesthetic is informed “by the discipline and functionality of the Starship Trooper uniform.”

Oh, dear.

For those uninitiated in the minutiae of increasingly obscure Gen-X and millennial pop culture, Starship Troopers was an exceedingly arch 1997 adaptation (and some would say outright betrayal) of Robert A. Heinlein’s 1959 sci-fi novel of the same name. Directed by Dutch provocateur and cynic Paul Verhoeven, the movie cast pinup-ready TV and rising Hollywood teen talent like Casper Van Dien (One Life to Live), Denise Richards (Melrose Place), and Neil Patrick Harris (Doogie Howser, M.D.) as bright, attractive, fresh-faced American youths who spout patriotic platitudes with the usual heavy-handed delivery of a ‘90s primetime soap. Or a 1930s propaganda film.

That was by design.

“We really, really tried to get away from the novel, because we felt that the novel was fascistic and militaristic,” Verhoeven was quoted by IndieWire as saying in 2016. “Our philosophy was really different [from Heinlein’s book],we wanted to do a double story, a really wonderful adventure story about these young boys and girls fighting, but we also wanted to show that these people are really, in their heart, without knowing it, are on their way to fascism.”

The effect comes through in the film with the good-looking people dying by the thousands as they’re sent on starships far away to fight an alien race of “bugs” that are blamed for a meteor striking planet Earth. (The evidence is deliberately vague and suspiciously scant.) There the kids are fed into what they happily refer to as “the grinder” of war while posing in ‘90s-flavored riffs on Leni Riefenstahl iconography. And in case this was missed by anyone, Harris’ intelligence officer wears the form-fitting, Nazi-infused regalia of a tight black uniform and its oh, so crisp, cleanly midnight-black, long leather trench coat.

According to actor Michael Ironside, even while making the film Verhoeven apparently mused he might be “too subtle for the American consciousness.” Paul, it would seem you weren’t whistling, “The Deutchlandlied.”

While Starship Troopers’ parody of hyper-nationalism and jingoistic valor is played with a tongue firmly in its cheek, it would seem many generations of viewers who grew up with it—or were already in their 50s in 1997—apparently missed the metaphor completely; this, despite the attire of the “good guys” in the movie looking conspicuously like the Third Reich, or at least the bad guys in Star Wars who were modeled on the same Triumph of the Will iconography. (Just wait until the president discovers where the word “stormtrooper” comes from!)

Yet somehow the architects of the growing U.S. Space force over at the Department of Defense and their orange-hued executive in the White House somehow missed these parallels while explicitly designing the Space Force after this? Maybe.

I’m not so sure since even Verhoeven had the good taste to not include the peaked cap of SS officers on Neil Patrick Harris. Sometimes, even to a satirist, a design can be a little too Nazi for a joke, much less a real-life military division.

The post Do We Really Need to Explain the Nazis Metaphor in Starship Troopers, Mr. Trump? appeared first on Den of Geek.