Summer 2016 has turned into the summer of J.K. Rowling’s wizarding world. Not only did fans get a new installment in the beloved Harry Potter book series in July thanks to Harry Potter and the Cursed Child, the famed British author has been prepping for the fall release of the film Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them. On top of that, Pottermore announced Wednesday that it is releasing three new ebooks written by Rowling on September 6.
The series of ebook shorts is called Pottermore Presents, and it is described as “bite-sized” tales that “dig deep into the Harry Potter stories.” Some parts will be familiar to devoted Pottermore readers, but much of the magical material will be new for everyone. The ebooks all center around Hogwarts, from the school’s ghosts to its students and staff.
Individually, the titles of the three ebooks are Hogwarts: An Incomplete and Unreliable Guide; Short Stories from Hogwarts of Power, Political and Pesky Poltergeists; and Short Stories from Hogwarts of Heroism, Hardship and Dangerous Hobbies. Readers will learn more about already familiar characters like Professors McGonagall and Slughorn, and the stories will also reveal new information about the castle itself, Azkaban, the second wizarding war, and more.
New stories from the wizarding world are always welcome, especially because any of them could gain a life of its own. After all, Rowling’s latest protagonist, Newt Scamander, started out as the author of one of Harry’s Hogwarts textbooks, but he got his own tome, and now his adventures are headed to the big screen.
The Pottermore Twitter account showed off the ebook covers in a tweet today. They are designed by Miraphora Mina and Eduardo Lima, a graphic design duo known as MinaLima.
We’re thrilled to announce Pottermore Presents, a trio of eBooks published in September: https://t.co/ybfduo594d pic.twitter.com/7t10kHY5g8
— Pottermore (@pottermore) August 17, 2016
Rowling’s three new ebooks will be released in multiple languages on multiple platforms, including Pottermore, on September 6.
China just gave Hollywood a cautionary tale about AI filmmaking. Sanxingdui: Future Past, billed as the country's first fully AI-generated movie, hit theaters on October 23 and bombed at the box office.
According to Futurism, the film's reported $1.5 million production budget landed on more than 10,000 screens. Yet it pulled in only about $181,000, averaging roughly $20 per screen, making the budget difficult to recover.
Some of the best shots in Grok Imagine’s AI-made Odyssey don’t contain actors. Ancient landscapes stretch into the distance. Close-ups of grimy hands suggest people who have touched something rougher than a keyboard. For a few seconds, the illusion holds.
https://twitter.com/imagine/status/2113712964419063911
YouTube videos could soon look better without eating quite so much data, right? Thankfully, the platform plans to introduce a new video format called AV2 on its web player in early 2027, promising more efficient streaming and potentially fewer playback hiccups on slower internet connections. The big headline is a roughly 30% improvement in compression efficiency over AV1, YouTube's existing video format. That doesn't guarantee every video will use 30% less data, but it could make streaming a little easier on both internet connections and data allowances.
What is AV2, and why should viewers care?