As the run up to the final season of Stranger Things begins in full swing, the advertising campaign is as well.. the latest PR information being revealed by the Duffer Brothers is not filled with spoilers but instead a steady stream of pro Linda Hamilton news..
“She’s hyper-intelligent and intimidating,” Matt Duffer told Empire of the character Dr. Kay, a government agent hunting down Millie Bobby Brown’s Eleven, in their new Stranger Things Season 5 issue.
And it looks like she’s probably going to be using those smarts to, quite frankly, kick some ass. “She’s a scientist but if she needs to, she can get into a fight and shoot a gun,” Matt added.
More..
And it looks like she’s probably going to be using those smarts to, quite frankly, kick some ass. “She’s a scientist but if she needs to, she can get into a fight and shoot a gun,” Matt added.
Capitalizing on the Stranger Things finale is Empire Online’s other conviction..
They are revealing 5 print covers–you can order yours from them directly since newstands don’t really carry news weeklies anymore..
There was some more sad information for true fans of the Eddie Munson character from the show..
Perhaps this is an example of an anti-spoiler..
The Duffer brothers on whether EddieMunson will return for Stranger Things 5 “He’s dead, Joe is so busy anyway, that everyone should know he’s not coming back. He’s shot like five movies since! When the hell has he got time to come and shoot Stranger Things? No, sadly, RIP.”
So all those hyped of rumors that spread online were.. untrue? Unless the Duffers are pulling a fast one.. Munson fans will continue hoping for a triumphant return until the end..
Demolition crews on Monday began tearing down part of the White House to build President Donald Trump’s long-desired ballroom despite his pledge that construction of the $250 million addition wouldn’t “interfere” with the existing building.
Construction teams were demolishing a portion ofthe East Wing, with a backhoe ripping through the structure, according to a photo shared with The Washington Post and two people who witnessed the activity and spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe it.
A cluster of people, including members of the Secret Service, stood on the steps of the Treasury Department to watch the construction unfold, said one of the people. Sounds of construction were also audible on the White House campus, although the project was not easily visible to the public given fencing on the grounds.
The White House said the demolition will not effect any structural integrity of the rest of the building..
The Administration said the project will be completed by 2029..
The East Wing of the White House will be modernized at the same time as the ballroom is constructed. BBC News described the proposed interior as being “lavish … including chandeliers and ornate columns”.
So, a funny thing happened at 3 o’clock in the morning last night.
I’ve been scrolling social media today and seeing a strange pattern — a lot of people say they suddenly woke up around that exact time. Some say their Alexa beeped weirdly or just stopped working. Others can’t explain why they woke up, only that something felt off.
Coincidence? Maybe. But that’s also right around the moment when the big internet outage began.
Across the globe, Amazon Web Services went dark — and when AWS goes down, so does a huge chunk of the modern world. Social apps, gaming platforms, even Roku and Fortnite were hit. Slowly but surely, things have come back online… but no one seems completely sure why it happened.
And then came a new twist.
China has accused the United States of launching a “major cyberattack” against its National Time Service Center, claiming it could have disrupted communications, financial systems, and even the power grid. In a statement posted on WeChat, China’s Ministry of State Security said it had “irrefutable evidence” that the NSA exploited a security flaw in a foreign phone brand’s messaging service to steal sensitive data.
Now, there’s speculation tonight that what we experienced here — this mysterious outage — might have been retaliation.
No official explanations. Just silence, glitches, and a lot of people wide awake at 3 a.m.
Maybe it’s nothing. Maybe it’s something. But for now… there’s no sleep till Beijing.
These days, when the internet goes down — it really goes down.
In the early hours of Monday morning, Amazon Web Services (AWS) — the backbone of much of the modern web — experienced a major outage, knocking out a long list of high-profile sites and services.
AWS reported what it called an “operational issue” impacting “multiple services,” and confirmed that engineers were “working on multiple parallel paths to accelerate recovery.” At one point, over 70 AWS services were affected — a reminder of just how deeply this single company is embedded in the infrastructure that keeps our world online.
By 3:35 a.m. PDT, AWS announced the issue had been “fully mitigated,” saying most systems were now running normally.
Still, it’s hard not to think about how fragile our digital lives have become. When one company sneezes, half the internet catches a cold.
It’s been about a year since the New Jersey drone phenomenon first lit up our skies — and our imaginations.
Remember how it dominated headlines? Those bright lights hovering silently above the Garden State and beyond had everyone speculating. Was it an alien invasion? A secret military test? A government conspiracy right above our heads?
But there was also another theory — that we were being gaslit. That the whole thing was a trick, a setup, a staged mystery designed to stir up confusion.
Well, now, you can decide for yourself whether we were fooled… or if we just witnessed a different kind of invasion — not from outer space, but from private contractors.
At the Army’s UAS and Launched Effects Summit at Fort Rucker this past August, a private company allegedly took credit for the chaos. According to a source who spoke to The New York Post, the company held a live demonstration of a manned aerial craft that stunned the audience with its strange design and otherworldly flight movements.
And then came the bombshell:
> “You remember that big UFO scare in New Jersey last year? Well, that was us,” one of the contractor’s employees reportedly told a small group after the demo.
So was the New Jersey “UFO invasion” a real mystery from the skies — or just a marketing stunt that spiraled out of control?
Every year, when you sort through your children’s Halloween candy, you’re doing it for two reasons. First, probably to steal the best ones before they notice. But second, because you’ve heard the stories: knives in apples, poisoned chocolate bars, and cyanide-laced sweets handed out by strangers.
Guess what? Here is the tough news to consider… It’s not really true and there may be no real logical requirement to keep doing this.. (though we all still will )
There is some history on the origin for this candy fear..
Another high profile case made headlines in 1964, when a 47-year-old mother from Greenlawn, N.Y., named Helen Pfeil handed out bags of treats containing arsenic-laced ant traps, metal mesh scrubbing pads and dog biscuits.
But the real fear began with one man, in Texas, nearly fifty years ago.
The night he came home
On Halloween night 1974, a father named Ronald Clark O’Bryan, later called “The Candyman” by major media that loves naming killers for pop culture and sales purposes, laced powdered candy with cyanide. He was also called the The Pixy Stix Killer but that name didn’t seem to stick …
O’Bryan didn’t lace candy to poison his neighborhood in Pasadena, Texas. He did it to kill his own 8-year-old son, Timothy, for life-insurance money.
That is the horrid truth behind this urban legend.. It was real in a sense, but it was disgustingly personal for O’Bryan.
O’Bryan, a 30-year-old optician from nearby Deer Park, joined his children and neighbors for trick-or-treating. One house was dark; no one answered the door, so the kids moved on. O’Bryan lagged behind for show, then caught up holding five giant Pixy Stix, about 21 inches long, sealed with staples. They were tampered with– by him.
He explained to the children they were lucky: The “rich neighbors” were handing out expensive treats. Each child got one. Later, he gave one to his five-year-old daughter and another to a ten-year-old boy from his church.
That night, Timothy ate a few spoonfuls of the powdered candy, complained it tasted bitter, and collapsed. Within minutes he was dead.. he was poisoned by his own father.
The Investigation
O’Bryan claimed a mysterious neighbor had handed him the candy. But the man he blamed, Courtney Melvin, was at work as an air-traffic controller on duty that night and he had more than 200 coworkers confirming his alibi to law enforcement.
Detectives soon learned O’Bryan’s life was a complete train wreck. He was more than $100,000 in debt, behind on his mortgage and car payments, suspected of theft at work, and had held 21 jobs in 10 years. In the months before Halloween, he quietly took out life-insurance policies totaling up to $60,000 to $100,000 on his children!
At trial, witnesses testified that O’Bryan had asked about buying cyanide and even discussed lethal doses. His sister-in-law told the court that at Timothy’s funeral, he spoke excitedly about collecting insurance money and taking a vacation.
Prosecutor Mike Hinton told jurors: that the only inescapable conclusion you can draw is that this man killed his own child for money.
The case seemed as air tight as people can desire.
It took the jury 46 minutes to find O’Bryan guilty.
The Candyman’s Final Trick
O’Bryan maintained his innocence for nearly a decade. On March 31, 1984, he was executed by lethal injection. His final meal: steak, French fries, peas, corn, salad, rolls, iced tea, and for desert a Boston cream pie.
Outside the prison, protesters wearing Halloween masks chanted “Trick or Treat!”
It was both macabre theater and a grim bookend to the legend he had created.
The root of fear
O’Bryan’s crime transformed Halloween. Parents no longer saw candy as harmless; they saw potential danger. In the years that followed, rumors spread nationwide .. tainted treats, razor blades in apples, needles in chocolate bars.
By the 1980s, police and hospitals offered X-ray screenings for candy. Families examined every wrapper under bright kitchen lights.
To this day, continued stories occur each Halloween season in which people report tampering of candy to cops.. such as this from 2015 in Kennett Square PA, when parents complained to police about needles in treats.. which turned out to be a hoax.
The Legacy
The Candyman’s story became the template for America’s Halloween anxiety. It was a true crime that birthed a thousand false ones..
Every October, parents still dump candy onto the dining-room table, sifting through it like forensic scientists. It’s ritual now, a strange inheritance from 1970s.
Because even though the candy isn’t poisoned, the fear still is there..
According to Professor Joel Best, there have been approximately 80 reports of sharp objects inserted into Halloween treats since 1959. The great majority of those reports turned out to be hoaxes
Don’t feel guilty about checking the candy.. you know, just in case.
And while you’re looking through, maybe just throw away those candy corns that ruin teeth and don’t taste good anyway.
This is an amazing moment in crime spree history.. Robbers dressed as construction workers just stole priceless relics from history.. IN BROAD DAYLIGHT!
A manhunt is under way after thieves broke into the Louvre and stole “priceless” jewellery that once belonged to Napoleon Bonaparte’s family.
The gang entered the Apollo Gallery in broad daylight shortly after 9.30am, once the gallery had opened to the public, and stole nine items including a necklace, a brooch and a tiara.
The masked criminals arrived on high-powered scooters and reportedly gained access to a part of the building where construction was taking place after using a van-mounted extendable ladder to enter on the Seine River side of the museum.
They then forced open a window, smashed display cases, grabbed the jewellery and left.
Laurent Nuñez, France’s interior minister, called it a “major robbery by a team that had done scouting” and said that jewellery stolen from the museum on Sunday was “priceless”.
And it all took reportedly 7 minutes for it all to occur…
The Black Phone 2 took the top spot at the weekend box office, marking a much-needed success for Blumhouse Productions. After a series of stumbles, this sequel proves that horror — when done with grit and style — still packs a punch with audiences.
The movie is connecting with several demographics, from teens to longtime fans of the first film. It’s eerie, tense, and grounded — the kind of horror Blumhouse built its reputation on.
According to The Hollywood Reporter, Scott Derrickson’s The Black Phone 2 delivered horror maestro Jason Blum a major win, opening to a better-than-expected $26.5 million domestically from 3,411 theaters and $15.5 million from 72 international markets, for a global debut of $42 million.
Not bad for a film made on a relatively modest $30 million budget.
The movie’s debut follows a string of misses for the Universal-based banner — including the pricey flop M3GAN 2.0 earlier this year — making this victory especially sweet for Blumhouse.
If the studio can keep the momentum going, the next big win could come from Five Nights at Freddy’s Part Two, which already has massive fan anticipation building online.
For now, though, The Black Phone 2 is ringing loud and clear — and audiences are answering.
So it’s October, it’s that creepy time of year. Bear with us on this one. We have written tons about malls over the years, the death of the mall.. and now we are writing about the birth of something new: A #Mallworld that people all over the real world are saying they have mapped out in their dreams…
x x x
At the time this is written, we are drenching our minds in the ‘creepy time of year’ stories.. Sometimes the creepy lasts all year..
Algorithms have given us a bit more hairs on arms raised up with this.. there’s something called Mall World.. Not sure if you .. or quite the opposite maybe you’ve had dreams about this place. Lots of others say they they.
We will give you the bird’s eye view of this interesting paranormal tale that people have suddenly been weaving online. It has been brewing under the surface of social media platforms for a while. While it reads like a Creepypasta, this one seems to have allies that call it true and people are saying, unless fiction, they have actually walked the floors of MallWorld..
It began to really evolve a few months ago.. and now a TikTok user has drawn it!
WELCOME TO MALLWORLD. DON’T FORGET TO WIPE YOUR FEET
A hand-drawn “Mall World” map has been circulating from TikTok creators who claim recurring dreams of the same sprawling complex. One widely shared version was posted by a creator Tiltonica whose map (featuring labeled zones like a non-functional highway and “incoming tsunami”) was re-uploaded and discussed in r/TheMallWorld on Reddit, triggering a wave of “I’ve seen this place too” replies.
Other TikTokers and users of other socials have posted their own long-running Mall World dream accounts. A recent roundup noted the sudden spike in posts and stitched videos comparing similar dream landmarks.
Lately, with people either loving the tale and wanting in, or people genuinely believing they are experiencing this mass dream hallucination, there are plans online between people to try meeting up and talking to each other in Mall World–and many who are saying they are doing it already!
Some people claim that those who visit Mall World were the same who were in the famous Gate program in the 1980s and 90s for gifted students in schools across America..
She is also selling her hand drawn Mall World map for $3 a pop..
OPENING THE GATES TO MALLWORLD
GATE stands for “Gifted and Talented Education,” a catch-all label for United States school services that boast they will accelerate or enrich curricula for students who test in roughly the top percentiles… GATE grew out of mid-late 20th-century pushes to serve advanced learners.. think the 1972 federal Marland Report, the 1983 reform manifesto A Nation at Risk, and the 1988 Jacob K. Javits Act, which framed gifted education as mainstream schooling and not a covert CIA or Department of Energy project. Experts will tell us, that despite what people collectively claim, there is no evidence connecting GATE to any nefarious alphabet agency mind control tests.. BUT…. popular comparisons to Stranger Things draw instead on real, but separate, Cold-War history like CIA projects MKULTRA and the Army’s “Gateway Process” memo about altered-state training… documents that are declassified but unrelated to K-12 gifted classes. (And if you’re into this stuff, you may like our CIA reading room )
Others say it was just an education mission and a mundane government operation.. And if it was not, what was the government trying to do? Create super soldiers? Future scientists? CIA operatives? Black Ops? Psychological warfare? Remote viewing? Crushing a Coke can with a brain? Certainly the government never tried any of that.. Oh wait.. Maybe check our that CIA reading room for sure..
Well, enter the Mall World where, it is claimed, those same people who were in this GATE are suddenly being thrust into the dream world about this liminal space with no exit.. A place with elaborate storefronts and a hospital and toiletries, and all these different endless rooms think the back rooms, but just with more things in them.
The dive we did on this was deep–so much so that we were confronted by several accounts that put so much faith in Mall World, there was even debate to whether it was good or Satanic to be comfortable being there..
It does not matter if YOU believe Mall World exists.. people do.
We consider ourselves skeptics–not skeptics for the sake of just denying things for fun, but instead asking hard questions and looking at evidence of claims..
In this case of Mall World, it is a narrative now being claimed by so many–but are they feeding off of each other, and using the map from Tiltonica as a jumping off point to take the story where they want regardless of truth?
Your dreams are your own .. and you often remembers pieces of them, and sometimes nothing at all. It is open for perception and false memory as well.
I myself have never been to Mall World in my dream.. I have had dreams where I explored places in my own home or schools that don’t exist in real life. But no dream.. no musack.. no empty stores. As we have lamented, we miss the real malls of our waking life..
But is there some other theory here that can work? Carl Jung had a theory that mass consciousness dreams that can tap into the collective unconscious, a shared reservoir of universal human experiences, symbols, and archetypes, rather than being solely personal…
This could all be just a huge mass awakening–or people are having fun with Mall World and it is just a big new Internet fiction tale.
But when you read something like this REDDIT comment, you will realize that it not only is considered true by many writing these posts, but they are also angry that that Tilton video and Mall World concept is going as mainstream as it is..
Nobody should go follow that Creator on tiktok. She just made a video saying how she doesn’t care if it goes mainstream and ruins it for everybody and she doesn’t care if the community crashes and burns.
As said before.. whether you believe in this or not, it doesn’t matter. Others do. And they are mapping out a new world that exists only when they sleep..
The iconic filming location that served as the home to Jonathan, Joyce and Will Byers in the “Stranger Things” series is now available to rent on Airbnb.
Located in Fayetteville, just 15 minutes from Atlanta, the house offers an eerie ambiance with meticulously recreated details reminiscent of Hawkins circa 1983. Fans will recognize the facade from early episodes, featuring flickering lights and cryptic wall messages.
It would be the MOST AMAZING place to watch the newest season of STRANGER THINGS.. but I would guess it is booked.
Here is a made for advertising video.. scripted but still.. cool views from inside the house.
