Author: Press Room
Every few months someone asks me for a Roman epic recommendation, and my answer’s always the same. Skip the movies. Watch Rome — not the city, the HBO series, two seasons between 2005 and 2007 before it got canceled right as it was hitting its stride. It’s streaming on HBO Max now, and nothing else on television has come as close to making ancient Rome feel like somewhere people actually lived and argued and died, instead of a marble backdrop for a sword fight. If it were a motion picture, it would have made our list of sword and sandal…
Post-apocalyptic shows are a dime a dozen nowadays. From the remaining The Walking Dead spin-offs to The Last of Us, Fallout, Silo, and others, the concept of the end of the world and some massive event taking out humanity as we know it is a popular theme. Every show has its own take on the genre: some lean into a virus, others focus on survival in underground bunkers, and some even add a sci-fi slant. One of the most interesting new shows of this kind bends genres in ways others haven’t. But it’s also not so much about the actual…
I keep coming back to Orphan Black, and every time I try to explain why, I end up sounding like I’m describing three different shows stapled together. That’s the point. The BBC America series ran from 2013 to 2017, and if you’ve never watched it, or if it’s been long enough that the details have gone fuzzy, it’s currently sitting on Netflix right next to the crazy The Last House, waiting to wreck your sleep schedule for a week. The premise sounds almost quaint by 2026 standards, honestly. A grifter watches a woman who looks exactly like her jump in…
Stephen King is one of the most adapted authors of all time. Whether the adaptations are actually better than the source material (The Shining, The Mist) or worse (Cujo, The Dark Tower), you don’t need to have read one of his books to be familiar with his work. There are plenty of Stephen King adaptations available to watch on Netflix, but the very best doesn’t fall within his preferred genre: horror. Instead, it’s a time travel thriller with a historical bent. What happened on 11.22.63? A boomer’s savior fantasy come to life 11.22.63 is adapted from King’s novel 11/22/63, with…
Summary Best Beachside Reads offers free indie novels, novellas, short stories and excerpts—available until Sept 30 2026. Pick from fantasy, romance, speculative and many subgenres to discover new indie favorites for free. Download EPUB or PDF directly; Kindle users can use Send to Kindle or email to convert and sync. The bestselling authors from the Coastal Magic Convention have kicked off their annual ‘Best Beachside Reads’ event. It’s a great way to enjoy the last days of summer with a free new book. Book lovers can pick from a handpicked collection of free full novels, short stories, novellas, and book…
I used my TV’s built-in speakers for years before taking the leap and building a Dolby Atmos home theater. I started off small, buying affordable bookshelf speakers in JBL’s Stage2 lineup. From there, I added floorstanding speakers, up-firing Dolby Atmos height speakers, and a center channel. I threw in an Edifier T5 subwoofer I already had from a previous setup, and two years later, I had a functional Dolby Atmos home theater. I learned a lot along the way, and made a few mistakes in the process. If you’re ready to start building a Dolby Atmos home theater of your…
The sometimes-problematic Roku remote disappeared for most of a week. Not dead batteries, not wedged in the couch cushions where I’d already checked — actually gone, the kind of gone where you look in the same three spots four times each and it still isn’t there. Rather than dig through a junk drawer for AAA batteries and a remote I still couldn’t find, I pulled up the Roku app on my phone, mostly just to buy time until it turned up. It turned up eventually, days later. By then, I’d stumbled into enough of what the app actually does that…
The Song of Ice and Fire books by George R.R. Martin (adapted by HBO as Game of Thrones) are distinguished by their vast cast of characters, their uncommon level of detail, and by a willingness to kill characters most fantasy epics would let survive. They’ve gotten a reputation for being gritty, realistic, and dark. When and if Martin ever finishes writing The Winds of Winter, fans will get more of that. In the meantime, they may have to look elsewhere. A Song of Ice and Fire is hardly the only series to indulge in the darker side of fantasy. The…
In the early 2000s, then proto-tech bro Mark Zuckerberg created FaceMash, a website used to rank women on a university campus. He later claimed it was a hilarious prank rather than a privacy-obliterating sexist piece of garbage. Fortunately for the world, he soon took it down. Unfortunately for the world, Facebook rose from its ashes. There was less overt sexism in his fledgling social network. But as it grew to dominate the space, Zuckerberg’s monster stomped any semblance of privacy into the ground. So it should probably come as no surprise that when Meta (the company formerly known as Facebook…
When I bought my first set of bookshelf speakers, the modest Edifier R1700BTs, I specifically sought out a pair that could be easily linked with a subwoofer. The speakers have a built-in subwoofer output and a digital-signal processor that routes frequencies under 140Hz to a connected sub. I eventually added the Edifier T5 subwoofer to the R1700BTs, which significantly improved low-end performance. That sub stayed with me as I built a new Dolby Atmos home theater system — until I realized it was doing more harm than good. Subwoofers aren’t inherently bad, even for two-channel music playback. In fact, with…