Latest news with #Dystopia
Time of India
4 days ago
- Entertainment
- Time of India
Megadeth announces final album and farewell tour, Dave Mustaine reflects on 40-year legacy, calls it the 'hardest part'
Thrash metal legends Megadeth have announced their retirement, set to conclude with a final album and a farewell tour in 2026. After four decades of a trailblazing career, frontman and co-founder Dave Mustaine shared an emotional message, reflecting on the band's legacy and the "hardest part" of saying goodbye to their millions of fans. This final chapter promises to be a global celebration of their enduring influence on heavy metal. Here's a closer look at this development. Megadeth announces retirement The band has announced their retirement after 40 years in the industry, according to Variety, but the title of their next studio album is still unknown. 'It is confirmed that the next Megadeth studio album will be the last. 40 years of metal forged in steel, ending in fire,' the band's mascot, Vic Rattlehead, stated in a YouTube video titled 'The End is Near.' Dave Mustaine on the farewell to Megadeth Dave Mustaine, the band's frontman, says he wants to leave on his "own terms" while the group is still successful. According to Variety, Mustaine stated in his statement, "I have traveled the world and made millions upon millions of fans, and the hardest part of all of this is saying goodbye to them." Among other things, British heavy metal bands Raven and Venom, Black Sabbath, and UFO were major influences on Megadeth. by Taboola by Taboola Sponsored Links Sponsored Links Promoted Links Promoted Links You May Like The 5 Books Warren Buffett Recommends You To Read in 2025 Blinkist: Warren Buffett's Reading List Undo More than 254,000 copies of their 1985 debut album were sold in the United States. The Cyber Army was asked to prepare for a "global farewell tour" by the band's mascot, Vic Rattlehead, as they were saying goodbye. Megadeth received numerous honors, including a Grammy in 2017 for the Dystopia title track. Dave Mustaine boasted about "starting a revolution" while reflecting on the memories Megadeth has created. Megadeth "changed the guitar world and how it's played," according to him. Dave Mustaine has performed with Metallica and MD. 45 in addition to Megadeth. "The bands I played in have influenced the world," Mustaine continued. "I love you all for it." Over the years, Megadeth's lineup has evolved, but today it consists of Mustaine, guitarist Teemu Mäntysaari, bassist James LoMenzo, and drummer Dirk Verbeuren. "Get the latest news updates on Times of India, including reviews of the movie Coolie and War 2 ."
Hindustan Times
4 days ago
- Entertainment
- Hindustan Times
Megadeth confirms final album and farewell tour, Dave Mustaine opens up on the ‘hardest part'
Megadeth, the thrash metal band in business since 1983, officially announced that they are retiring after their forthcoming album and tour in 2026, per Variety. In addition to a sentimental note from Dave Mustaine, co-founder and frontman of the band, Megadeth broke the news on YouTube. Megadeth announces farewell tour and last album.(X/@Megadeth) While the name of the forthcoming studio album has not been revealed, the band has confirmed the 'end of their career' after over four decades in the business. 'It is confirmed that the next Megadeth studio album will be the last. 40 years of metal forged in steel, ending in fire,' Vic Rattlehead, the mascot of the band, said in a YouTube video titled The End is Near. Dave Mustaine on Megadeth's farewell Frontman Dave Mustaine says he wants to go out on his 'own terms' while the band is still on top. 'I have travelled the world and have made millions upon millions of fans, and the hardest part of all of this is saying goodbye to them,' Mustaine said in his statement, per Variety. Megadeth was highly inspired by UFO, Black Sabbath, and British heavy metal bands like Raven and Venom, among others. Their debut album in 1985 sold over 254,000 copies in the US. As the band was now saying goodbye, its mascot, Vic Rattlehead, asked the Cyber Army to gear up for a 'global farewell tour." Also read: Taylor Swift says 'Showgirl' album reflects joy of recent tour Among other accolades, Megadeth won a Grammy in 2017 for the title track of Dystopia. Looking back at the memories Megadeth has created, Dave Mustaine boasted of 'starting a revolution'. He said Megadeth 'changed the guitar world and how it's played." Other than Megadeth, Dave Mustaine has played for Metallica and MD. 45. Speaking of which, Mustaine added: 'The bands I played in have influenced the world. I love you all for it.' Megadeth's lineup has changed over the years, and the current lineup includes Mustaine, bassist James LoMenzo, guitarist Teemu Mäntysaari, and drummer Dirk Verbeuren. FAQs: What are Megadeth fans called? The Megadeth fans are called the Cyber Army. Did Megadeth win a Grammy? Yes, Megadeth won a Grammy in 2017. What is the Megadeth mascot called? The Megadeth mascot is called Vic Rattlehead. What is the name of Megadeth's forthcoming album? Megadeth has yet to officially confirm the name of its forthcoming album.
USA Today
4 days ago
- Entertainment
- USA Today
Megadeth announces final album, farewell tour: 'Forged in steel, ending in fire'
The end is near for Megadeth. Band founder, singer and guitarist Dave Mustaine announced – via his skeletal alter ego Vic Rattlehead – the rockers' forthcoming album will be Megadeth's last. 'Forty years of metal, forged in steel, ending in fire,' Rattlehead says in an apocalyptic-themed video. 'You've heard the warning. Now, prepare yourselves and meet me on the frontlines.' Megadeth will also embark on a global farewell tour in 2026 and Mustaine is prepping a new memoir. Details and dates on all will be announced in the coming months. 'There's so many musicians that have come to the end of their career, whether accidental or intentional,' Mustaine says in an announcement about Megadeth's finale. 'Most of them don't get to go out on their own terms on top, and that's where I'm at in my life right now. I have traveled the world and have made millions upon millions of fans and the hardest part of all of this is saying goodbye to them.' Mustaine, 63, has been the only consistent member of the band since forming it in 1983 in California. Throughout its tenure, Megadeth – along with Metallica (in which he previously served as lead guitarist), Slayer, Iron Maiden and Anthrax – brought metal to the masses. The band has sold more than 50 million albums worldwide and in 2017 scored a Grammy Award for best metal performance ('Dystopia'). Megadeth's most recent album, 'The Sick, the Dying … and the Dead!' arrived in 2022, three years after Mustaine was diagnosed with throat cancer. The combination of his illness and the COVID-19 pandemic prompted the delay. The album hit No. 1 on the Billboard charts for hard rock, rock and alternative albums. Along with Mustaine, Megadeth currently includes drummer Dirk Verbeuren, guitarist Teemu Mäntysaari and bassist James LoMenzo. Mustaine took a philosophical view of ending his musical career, saying in the announcement, 'Don't be mad, don't be sad, be happy for us all, come celebrate with me these next few years. We have done something together that's truly wonderful and will probably never happen again. We started a musical style, we started a revolution, we changed the guitar world and how it's played, and we changed the world.'
Washington Post
17-07-2025
- Politics
- Washington Post
Neil Postman's ‘Amusing Ourselves to Death' at 40: Truer than ever
Ryan Zickgraf is a columnist for UnHerd, from which this op-ed was adapted. It's now almost a reflex: An election is held, and someone pushes the big, red Death of Democracy panic button. When Donald Trump won in 2016, liberals saw a gold-plated Adolf Hitler in a red baseball cap. Then Joe Biden took over and conservatives warned of Joseph Stalin or Pol Pot reborn, an America where your kids would be forced to go to gay camp and pray to RuPaul before lunch. (They're panicking again with Zohran Mamdani in New York's mayoral race.) Now, we have Trump redux. The hysterias flip, but the impulse stays the same: to imagine top-down tyranny as a looming catastrophe. Neil Postman would know better. Forty years ago, the cultural critic wrote 'Amusing Ourselves to Death,' a pessimistic yet prescient polemic worth revisiting in the age of algorithm-driven political hysteria. Postman, who died in 2003, predicted that America wasn't trending toward existence under the boot of totalitarianism, as in George Orwell's '1984,' but drifting through the languorous haze of a feel-good dystopia that instead resembled Aldous Huxley's 'Brave New World.' Postman was right. Democracy was not in danger of being overthrown, but overentertained. He saw 'that it is not necessary to conceal anything from a public insensible to contradiction and narcotized by technological diversions.' Postman was, in fact, observing his own obsolescence. In the near future, books and literacy, serious social criticism, maybe even democracy itself, would become afterthoughts in a world mediated through screens, because those mediums turned everything into triviality. If he were alive in 2025, Postman would not be surprised to see that our version of Huxley's addictive Soma drug comes in the virtual variety: TikTok's infinite scroll, cryptocurrency speculation and content streams designed to blur time and lull us into a flow state. Every flick of the thumb offers a micro-hit of novelty, outrage or reward. Karl Marx called religion the opiate of the masses, but we killed God and began worshiping the murder weapon instead. Trump is perfect for this Postmanian moment. He's a one-person digital diversion who doesn't even try to conceal anything — he haphazardly posts to social media war threats and private conversations with world leaders while friends and enemies alike hang on his every word, however nonsensical or contradictory. Although he has authoritarian tendencies, he's ironically too wrapped up in his own media representations to be an effective dictator. If he were to transform into one, many people might be unaware — not because of a censorship clampdown but because they'd be too distracted by other push notifications. To be fair, there's plenty of dissent in the streets, but it's the paper-thin kind that's designed to be shareable online. These protests don't hint at emerging mass movements; they mask the lack of them. The great majority of Jan. 6 protesters weren't trying to stage a coup: Once they breached the U.S. Capitol, they opted to take selfies, not power. Last month, millions took to the streets in 'No Kings' marches that seemed designed to wrest attention from President Attention and little else. Meanwhile, there's a more profound crisis that nobody's marching about: the collapse of faith in anything — not in leaders, not in institutions and barely any faith in friends, family or community. It's the self-flattering effect of our me-first libertarian ideals and the user-centric technology that surrounds us. In America, there are no kings but no subjects, either. We are each kings unto ourselves. To Postman, this transformation had everything to do with media theory. In the 1960s, theorist Marshall McLuhan famously declared, 'The medium is the message,' arguing that the dominant form of media of each era alters human perception and social organization. Postman agreed, but with a twist: He thought a better formulation would be 'the medium is the metaphor.' In other words, each dominant medium supplies the underlying metaphors by which a society understands reality. As such, the printing press changed how people thought and democratized knowledge. A print-first culture, the argument goes, created the apex of human civilization, producing citizens capable of participating in rational-critical debate — because the medium itself encourages habits of logic, nuance and focus. Television, by contrast, is a visual medium governed by the logic of spectacle and attention for its own sake. It prioritizes immediacy, novelty and emotional impact. It flattens complexity into sensation. In Postman's view, once television became the dominant cultural form, it didn't just reshape entertainment, it reshaped everything. Politics, religion, education, journalism — all began to conform to the imperatives of show business. A sermon became indistinguishable from a TV commercial. A newscast adopted the rhythms of a sitcom. A presidential debate turned into a pageant of postures and sound bites. The result was a shift in epistemology: A society once anchored in reasoned argument had become entirely unserious and stuck in an all-consuming present tense. Four decades on, Postman's cultural diagnosis feels not just accurate but almost restrained. Where television reduced discourse to entertainment, social media reduces it to performance and dopamine loops. The metaphor of our age is no longer the flickering image but the scroll — and the scroll, unlike the TV show, never ends. Each social media platform brings with it a new grammar of cognition. The written word still defines X, but in a way that favors brevity and snark. TikTok rewards emotion and mimicry. Instagram curates identity through visual branding. YouTube teaches us to talk quickly and passionately, and AI interfaces such as ChatGPT threaten to flatten language into plausible-sounding filler that imitates thought without demanding it. In Postman's time, one could still imagine a crisis of democracy rooted in shared spectacles — a Walter Cronkite broadcast, a presidential debate, a televised trial. Today, there is no common stage. The media environment is hyper-personalized and designed to flatter every user with the illusion of centrality. This is what Postman warned about when he lamented the loss of 'the epistemology' of the 'typographic mind' — a culture where ideas could be built, revised, tested and transmitted in a coherent, cumulative way. What we have now is a hallucinated collective monologue, where everyone talks and no one listens. But maybe not forever. Unlike in Postman's time, there are signs that a counterrevolution is brewing. Curiously, it is Gen Z — the first generation raised entirely under the internet's Eye of Sauron — that now appears most divided over it. Among them, two distinct tribes are forming. The first are the true children of the algorithm: grown-up iPad kids whose earliest memories involve the 'black mirror' of screens and who now, as young adults, continue to live mediated lives. Their social life is dominated by apps, with their identities shaped by filters, likes and short-form video confessionals. They date less, drink less, drive less and often prefer the cocoon of home to the messy intimacy of in-person relationships. They are also, not coincidentally, the loneliest cohort in modern American history. Their daily lives are saturated with stimuli but starved of substance. Unlike their millennial predecessors, whose optimism was eventually battered into nihilism, many of these young people seem to have skipped straight to resignation. And yet, within the same generational cohort, a surprising rebellion is emerging. A second group of Gen Z, equally fluent in the mechanics of digital life, is choosing to abstain from it — deleting social media, abandoning optimization and seeking instead the solidity of old things. They knit. They golf. They go to church. They lift heavy weights and read heavy books. They abandoned dating apps and swapped TikTok for running or pickleball clubs. Part of it feels like aesthetic irony or a nostalgic affectation, yes, but there are hints of a scattered and half-formed countercultural movement. In New York, members of a high school Luddite Club are now in college and are attracting converts to tech-free living. On TikTok, paradoxically, videos under the #Deinfluencing tag go viral by encouraging people to stop buying things. Catholicism, Orthodox Christianity and other faiths strong on ritual are seeing quiet revivals, especially among young men. The average age of the liturgy-heavy church I attend is mid-to-late 20s, and a group of friendly Gen Zers in my neighborhood successfully persuaded me to join an old-style, in-person social club. Some of these tech refugees cite a yearning for moral clarity or traditional values; others cite a desire for structure, beauty and meaning, all of which are notably absent online. Even the secular version of this backlash appears in odd places: in the preference for physical media, the resurgence of film cameras, the rise of 'quiet luxury' over hyper-branding, and the revival of slow, analog hobbies once left for dead. Call it post-irony or post-digital asceticism, but the impulse is the same. This rebellion, fractured and flickering, is one of the few encouraging signs in a culture otherwise largely anesthetized by its tools. Unlike the millennial generation — which largely absorbed technology as destiny, first in its techno-utopian promises, later in its gigified disappointments — these Gen Z refuseniks are not trying to reform the system. They're walking away from it. That's why the 'No Kings' rallies often look like the world's largest retiree convention. This new group's politics, to the extent that it has any, are not oriented toward revolution or regulation, but toward restraint, retreat and restoration. They want silence. They want limits. And if there is any hope of clawing back a shared reality from the hall of mirrors that is the modern internet, it might lie with them. We can only hope. Post Opinions wants to know: How do you feel about your relationship to screens? If you changed your habits, how did you do it?
Geek Culture
02-07-2025
- Entertainment
- Geek Culture
Glen Powell Hits His Stride In Edgar Wright's 'The Running Man' Trailer
Glen Powell is running for his life in the debut trailer for Edgar Wright's The Running Man , a film that already looks to have more fidelity to the 1982 Stephen King novel than the 1987 Arnold Schwarzenegger-led adaptation. The Running Man takes place in a near-future dystopian society, where The Running Man is a top-rated game show in which contestants, called Runners, have to survive 30 days while being hunted by professional hitmen to earn a cash reward. An unemployed Ben Richards (Glen Powell, Hit Man ), blacklisted from employment and desperately in need of money for his daughter's treatment, is enticed by the show's producer, Dan Killian (Josh Brolin, Avengers: Endgame ), to participate in the show. As the entire nation watches his every move and his life is threatened every step of the way, Richards desperately attempts to survive long enough for a shot at the enormous cash prize that awaits. The fast-paced and electrifying trailer reflects the same kinetic signature style that Wright exhibited in 2010's Scott Pilgrim vs. The World and 2017's Baby Driver, and audiences can likely look forward to him bringing the same rhythm to The Running Man . Glen Powell also displays a combination of grit, guts and manic defiant energy in a series of scenes that only add to the dynamism of the trailer. The trailer also features Colman Domingo ( Euphoria ) as game show host, Bobby Thompson, Lee Pace ( The Battle of the Five Armies ) as lead Hunter Evan McCone, and Michael Cera ( Superbad ), reported by Entertainment Weekly to be playing Elton Parrakis, a shy but inventive man who aids Richards. Arnold Schwarzenegger in The Running Man (1987) In a blink-and-you-will-miss-it shot, Wright's The Running Man trailer manages to pay homage to the original Schwarzenegger classic, featuring a young Schwarzenegger on a stack of 100-dollar American banknotes. Despite that, this iteration of The Running Man bears little resemblance to its 1987 namesake. In The Running Man (1987), Schwarzenegger plays Captain Ben Richards, a framed and incarcerated cop recruited by the game show The Running Man, where criminals earn their freedom by surviving as Runners against Stalkers who would hunt them down. Whether you enjoyed the 1987 iteration or prefer something more faithful to the source material, like Wright's new adaptation has been promised to be, The Running Man (2025) is set to draw both new and returning fans when it hits the ground running in theatres on 7 November 2025. Conversation with Ting Wei is like chatting with a weird AI bot programmed only with One Piece lore and theories, sitcom quotes and other miscellaneous pop culture references. When he's not sleeping, he's highly likely reading manga. In fact, the only thing he reads more than manga is the Bible, and it's honestly pretty close. Arnold Schwarzenegger edgar wright Glen Powell Stephen King The Running Man
