Author: Ben Bowman

Video editing is an underappreciated skill. They say when it’s done well, you don’t notice it. And when it’s done badly, it leaves you confused and disoriented.

Here’s an example of bad editing:

But when editing is done right, it elevates the images to an artform, telling a story in a new way. Imagine you’re an editor working for Cinemax in 2005. When you’re not daydreaming about working for HBO, you’re tasked with coming up with a trailer to promote the movie channel’s offerings. And that’s when this editor stepped up and knocked it out of the park.

Just imagine how good a 13-year-old trailer from a second-tier cable channel needs to be to get more than 47,000 upvotes on Reddit. And many of these movies are notoriously bad: “Catwoman,” “Elektra,” “Alien vs. Predator,” “Taxi.” You have to imagine the editor was thankful for “Spider-Man 2.” In the end, these seamless cuts, great music, and playful sense of humor combine to make a 100-second masterpiece.

If you enjoyed this, be sure to check out the creator’s YouTube channel. There’s so much more editing goodness within.

Spoilers ahead! Tread lightly!

“Game of Thrones” season 8 roars back to HBO on January 4, 2019. It’s been a long, long wait to see how this song of fire and ice will come to a close and we just got a major spoiler, courtesy of an unusual source.

Here’s your last chance. Click away to something more benign if you don’t want to be spoiled. Here’s a video to give you a little buffer before you get a message from the three-eyed raven.

Still with us? Here we go. The spoilers involve the fate of the one-handed wonder, Jaime Lannister. Last we saw Jaime, he was arguing with Queen Cersei to send their armies to fight the White Walkers approaching from the north. He told her that if the White Walkers win the fight, they’ll swoop down to King’s Landing and slaughter Team Lannister. And if the Targaryen-Snow-Stark team wins the war, they’ll also slaughter the Lannisters for failing to join the anti-zombie effort.

Cersei was like, “Nah. We’ve got the Iron Bank willing to fund a mercenary army and Team Greyjoy is still with us and I’m pretty sure we can kill those dragons or burn the zombies. Let ’em fight without us.”

Jaime was beside himself. And Cersei, pregnant with another of her brother’s babies, let Jaime walk away.

So what will season 8 hold for the man with the golden hand?

The answer lies in a lawsuit. Nikolaj Coster-Waldau, who plays Jaime, is fighting a legal battle against his former manager. As the court battle unfolded, documents revealed that Coster-Waldau will appear in all six episodes in the final “Game of Thrones” season.

It had been rumored that Jaime might die mid-season, but if he appears in all six episodes, that pretty much kills that rumor. That said, there is a possibility Jaime could die and still appear. Let’s say the Night King gets his hands on Jaime and turn him into an undead frost monster. It worked on Dany’s dragon, Viserion!

So while some people think it’s an open-and-shut case of Jaime riding off into the sunset, there is a chance he could die and fight for the White Walkers. Or maybe he dies in the final episode. Or maybe he dies and appears in later episodes as a ghost or flashback.

The most likely scenario has him fighting to the death with Tormund for the honor of Brienne’s hand.

And Brienne will walk away from the victor because Brienne has no use for those fools. Is it 2019 yet?

If you’re a movie director looking for an actor who can deliver a “Wow,” you get Owen Wilson. And even if your script doesn’t call for a “Wow,” it’s likely Wilson will toss one in. It’s his thing.

Anyway, a YouTube channel called Owenergy just posted a supercut of every “Wow” Owen Wilson has said on film since 1996. That’s 21 years of wows.

The final tally is 102 wows. That averages out to nearly five wows per year.

We’d react to that, but we simply don’t have the vocabulary.

The internet has set a high bar for huge moments in our lives. Prom proposals, marriage proposals, and pregnancy announcements no longer involve the mere delivery of good news. No. You’ve got to get on Pinterest and sift through thousands of similar ideas until you come up with something original.

For one expectant mom, the moment of her baby’s gender reveal is the most touching thing we’ve seen in a looooong time. According to the woman’s daughter, she didn’t want to know the gender of her next baby unless she could find out in a creative way.

The baby’s dad delivered: assembling old audio clips of the woman’s dead father to share the news. Take a listen and keep the Kleenex handy…

my mom is pregnant and didn’t want to know the gender unless my dad found a creative way of letting her know… so he put together clips of my granddad’s voice (who passed away a year ago) to announce it to her :’) ? pic.twitter.com/wYV2GMDHeW

— ana ❄️ (@anaxyoung) August 23, 2018

Although it’s a little hard to hear, it’s a girl. And with a father like that, it sounds like that young lady is going to have a great life ahead of her. Congratulations to this family!

Hey. How’s it going? Rough day? Job grinding you down? Bills piling up? Maybe just watch the South Korean Taekwondo Team destroy these boards. It’ll take less time than your standard commercial break.

That’s just insane the precision of the South Korean Taekwondo Team and their epic martial arts skills. AMAZING! ???? #taekwondo #martialarts pic.twitter.com/9DZH7AtyRa

— Jack Phan (@JackPhan) August 22, 2018

Who let Neo out of the Matrix? Did Thanos wipe out all these dudes? Because if not, he is toast. I mean, come on.

Anyway, you can go back to your day now. And when you see an obstacle, just leap 40 feet into the air and smash it in half.

Time magazine’s latest cover is burning up social media today. The magazine features an illustration of President Trump up to his neck in a flooded Oval Office.

But some have noticed that the striking illustration is actually the third in a series:

On February 27, 2017, the cover featured Trump facing a storm with the caption “Nothing to See Here.” On April 23, 2018, Trump is sitting in the exact same spot with water up to his elbows and the caption “Stormy.” Today, he’s “In Deep.”

Artist Tim O’Brien debated whether to have Trump sitting in the same spot for the third cover. “I felt that it was too comical or perhaps morbid to see him sitting there. But to have him at the top suggests he’s still fighting despite the deepening issues.”

O’Brien didn’t expect this to become a series. “When I painted the ‘Nothing to See Here’ cover art, like many, I assumed the level of chaos could not last,” he said. Nevertheless, he persisted.

On Twitter, Time has been sharing animated versions of its covers.

TIME’s new cover: Trump is in trouble. Here's how much worse it could get https://t.co/IgjeHWr2cD pic.twitter.com/hnUc7Njbxu

— TIME (@TIME) August 23, 2018

This is the first time in Time’s 95-year history it’s done three variants of the same cover. If Trump’s troubles continue and the waters rise further, where do we go from here? Perhaps a modified version of Nirvana’s “Nevermind” cover?

Here we are now. Entertain us.

As you scroll through Instagram, you’ll see Kardashians, vacation pics, and more Kardashians. But if you follow the New York Public Library, you’ll also see some of the greatest stories ever written. They call them Insta Novels.

The library made their first post today: “Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland” by Lewis Carroll. Coming soon, you’ll also be able to read “The Yellow Wallpaper,” a short story by Charlotte Perkins Gilman and Franz Kafka’s “The Metamorphosis.”

To read the stories, go to the library’s account and look for the highlights section under the bio. The library’s blog explains the rest:

Rest your thumb on lower right part of the screen to hold the page, and lift your thumb to turn the page. (The lower right thumb holder is designed to double as a flip book: if you lift your thumb and let the pages flip, you’ll see an animation.)

Join us down the rabbit hole. Alice's Adventures in Wonderland is now available on Insta Novels. To start reading, check the @nypl Highlights for Part 1 (Part 2 available tomorrow). #InstaNovels

A post shared by The New York Public Library (@nypl) on Aug 22, 2018 at 4:18am PDT

The NYPL’s Insta Novels come one day after we learned that 1 in 3 American high school seniors didn’t read any books for pleasure in 2016.  So if a library can wedge some reading between the Kardashians, it’s a worthy effort.

Welp, here we go. The legendary graphic novel “Watchmen” is being turned into a TV series by HBO. Here’s how they dropped the news on Twitter:

Nothing ever ends. #WatchmenHBO #DamonLindelof pic.twitter.com/ioJU0dQipw

— HBO (@HBO) August 17, 2018

Will this thing be any good? The 2009 Zack Snyder film seemed pretty awful at the time, but it holds up better than expected (minus the “Hallelujah” scene because… eeesh). At the time, fans complained that the ending didn’t include a certain giant space squid, but the film’s ending probably works better for people who haven’t had hours to pour into a graphic novel. It also included Dr. Manhattan’s naked penis, so, ya know, there’s that.

Of additional concern is HBO’s choice of showrunner: Damon Lindelof. He famously bonked the ending of “Lost.” And although people said good things about “The Leftovers,” that show was so much of a mess, we bailed midway through the first season.

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The “Watchmen” graphic novel was a clockwork masterpiece of storytelling, character, and tone. It was a murder-mystery whodunnit, a contemplation on violence, a Rubik’s Cube of moral complexity, and a rare piece of art that examined the demons that could be lurking inside our favorite superheroes. Can any TV show live up to that?

The HBO cast includes Regina King, Jeremy Irons, Don Johnson, Tim Blake Nelson, Louis Gossett Jr., Yahya Abdul-Mateen II, Adelaide Clemens, Andrew Howard, Tom Mison, Frances Fisher, Jacob Ming-Trent, Sara Vickers, Dylan Schombing, Lily Rose Smith, and Adelynn Spoon.

The series will debut in 2019. We hope it will be awesome. We need something to occupy us after “Game of Thrones” ends.

Every so often, miracles happen. Aretha Franklin was a miracle.

We’re used to the world working one way. We have a voice. We can sing. We’ve heard lots of other people sing: our friends, our grandparents, those famous people on the radio. Music is the performance of notes written on paper. “Happy Birthday.” “Take Me Out to the Ballgame.” A night of drunken karaoke. That’s the way the world works for most of us.

But Aretha was different. The notes on the page were simply the starting point on a journey to something otherworldly. She approached a song as a dangling thread, and when she grabbed on and pulled, you found it was connected to an undiscovered part of your soul.

Watch as she performs “A Natural Woman” at the Kennedy Center Honors in 2015. Carole King wrote that song. She heard it in her head before anyone else. She’s heard it covered a million times. She knows what it means. She knows what that song aspired to be. Yet when Aretha performs it, she takes the original idea and elevates it to such truth, the author is left in awe.

You’ll also notice President Obama wiping a tear from his eyes. The President later explained, “American history wells up when Aretha sings. That’s why, when she sits down at a piano and sings ‘A Natural Woman,’ she can move me to tears—the same way that Ray Charles’s version of ‘America the Beautiful’ will always be in my view the most patriotic piece of music ever performed—because it captures the fullness of the American experience, the view from the bottom as well as the top, the good and the bad, and the possibility of synthesis, reconciliation, transcendence.”

Even “transcendence” feels inadequate to describe her talent. Revolutionary? Genius? Inspiring? Words fall short when trying to capture her. Thankfully, when words fail, we have music. Aretha was music. Aretha was truth. Aretha was the Queen.

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