"Next time Amazon hypes its Prime Days savings, remember this: The prices during the sale aren't always better," writes a Washington Post technology columnist. "I've got the receipts to prove it." I would have saved, on average, almost nothing during Amazon's recent fall "Prime Big Deal Days" — and for some big-ticket purchases, I would have actually paid amore. For the sale that took place Oct. 7 and 8, my family went in prepared. We had a shopping list with prices we'd been tracking... A TV stand he'd been watching jumped 38 percent to $379, from $275 on Oct. 2. Same story for a few other big-ticket items on his list — another console went up from $219.99 to $299. Those products weren't listed as "big deals" on the site, but we certainly didn't expect their prices to spike during Prime Days. And in other cases, Amazon marketed discounts that turned out to be the exact price it had charged in recent weeks. One example: an Oral-B electric toothbrush was listed as 39 percent off, but actually the same price as in August... Other consumer advocates have warned one common trick is for Amazon to feature artificially inflated "before" prices to make discounts appear larger than they are. Ahead of Amazon's 2017 Prime Day, the nonprofit Consumer Watchdog reported that 61 percent of reference prices on Amazon were higher than any price the company had charged for those items in the prior 90 days... I found products listed as Prime Day discounts that cost the same as I'd paid less than a month earlier. For example, a pack of coronavirus tests I bought on Sept. 12 was the same price on Oct. 8, but listed as "39 percent off." Amazon said I'd gotten a particularly good deal in September, and the Prime Big Deal Days price offers "meaningful savings compared to the typical price customers have paid on Amazon over the last 90 days...." To actually get a good deal on Amazon, go in with a plan. I use a free website called CamelCamelCamel, which tracks Amazon's historical prices. You can see what's really a discount — and set alerts when prices drop to your target. The reporter checked every non-grocery purchase they'd made on Amazon for six months. Purchasing the same products on Amazon's "Big Deal Days" would have brought savings of just 0.6%. "And that doesn't include the $139 annual fee to be a member of Amazon Prime."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Marvel Studios has dropped the first teaser for Wonder Man, an eight-episode miniseries slated for a January release, ahead of its panel at New York Comic Con this weekend.

Part of the MCU's Phase Six, the miniseries was created by Destin Daniel Cretton (Shang-Chi and the Legend of Five Rings) and Andrew Guest (Hawkeye), with Guest serving as showrunner. It has been in development since 2022.

The comic book version of the character is the son of a rich industrialist who inherits the family munitions factory but is being crushed by the competition: Stark Industries. Baron Zemo (Falcon and the Winter Soldier) then recruits him to infiltrate and betray the Avengers, giving him super powers ("ionic energy") via a special serum. He eventually becomes a superhero and Avengers ally, helping them take on Doctor Doom, among other exploits. Since we know Doctor Doom is the Big Bad of the upcoming two new Avengers movies, a Wonder Man miniseries makes sense.

In the new miniseries, Yahya Abdul-Mateen II stars as Simon Williams, aka Wonder Man, an actor and stunt person with actual superpowers who decides to audition for the lead role in a superhero TV series—a reboot of an earlier Wonder Man incarnation. Demetrius Grosse plays Simon's brother, Eric, aka Grim Reaper; Ed Harris plays Simon's agent, Neal Saroyan; and Arian Moayed plays P. Clearly, an agent with the Department of Damage Control. Lauren Glazier, Josh Gad, Byron Bowers, Bechir Sylvain, and Manny McCord will also appear in as-yet-undisclosed roles

Rounding out the cast is Ben Kingsley, reprising his MCU role as failed actor Trevor Slattery. You may recall Slattery from 2013's Iron Man 3, hired by the villain of that film to pretend to be the leader of an international terrorist organization called the Ten Rings. Slattery showed up again in 2021's Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings, rehabilitated after a stint in prison; he helped the titular Shang-Chi (Simu Liu) on his journey to the mythical village of Ta Lo. We only get a brief glimpse of him in the teaser, getting his makeup done for a shoot, so it's unclear whether he'll be a hero or villain or perhaps neutral comic relief this time around.

The one-minute teaser leans into the meta-humor with gusto. It opens with an online interview with Von Kovak (Zlatko Buric), fictional in-universe director of the Wonder Man reboot, who drones on about "superhero fatigue" while insisting that his project will reinvent the superhero genre. Simon was a huge fan of the original Wonder Man—we catch a glimpse of young Simon in a theater with his dad as a cheesy scene involving Wonder Man battling laser-armed soldiers plays on the screen. So naturally he's thrilled about the reboot, especially since it's in the early days of development and Kovak has not yet begun casting. Clearly, this is his big break, as an actor, stuntman, and superhero.

Wonder Man will debut on Disney+ in January 2026.

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P Craig Russell

Cards Against Humanity, the often-vulgar card game, has launched a limited edition of its namesake product without any instructions and with a detailed explanation of each joke, "why it’s funny, and any relevant social, political, or historical context."

Why? Because, produced in this form, "Cards Against Humanity Explains the Joke" is not a game at all, which would be subject to tariffs as the cards are produced overseas. Instead, the product is "information material" and thus not sanctionable under the law Trump has been using—and CAH says it has obtained a ruling to this effect from Customs and Border Patrol.

"What if DHS Secretary and Dog Murderer Kristi Noem gets mad and decides that Cards Against Humanity Explains the Joke is not informational material?" the company asks in an FAQ about the new edition. (If you don't follow US politics, Noem really did kill her dog Cricket.) Answer: "She can fuck right off, because we got a binding ruling from Trump’s own government that confirms this product is informational and 100% exempt from his stupid tariffs."

Pre-orders for the $25 product end on October 15, and it will allegedly never be reprinted. All profits will be donated to the American Library Association "to fight censorship."

This is the way

Now, I would never claim that Cards Against Humanity is a particularly highbrow form of entertainment; for instance, the website promoting the new edition opens with "Trump is Going to Fuck Christmas" in giant white letters. (That headline refers to Trump's tariffs... I hope.)

"This holiday season, give your loved ones the gift of knowledge, give America’s libraries the gift of cash, and don’t give Donald Trump a fucking cent," the site says.

Some of the cards and their explanations are more literate than you might expect. For instance, English majors and poetry lovers may recognize the source of this quotation, found on one of the game's cards, as the final lines of T.S. Eliot's "The Hollow Men":

This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends
Not with a bang but a whimper.

Cards Against Humanity mucks this up a bit by printing the final line as "Not with a bang, but with _____________" (extra comma, extra "with"). Ouch. But it redeems itself slightly by adding a nice note about the time and context of the composition, noting that the "humor comes from a juxtaposition of the poem's grandiloquent language with Cards Against Humanity's often crude, low-brow jokes." Hopefully, it inspires at least a few people who have never before heard the name "T.S. Eliot" to read some of his verse.

(If you want to give it a go, the greatest hits are probably "The Waste Land," "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock," "The Hollow Men," "Journey of the Magi," "Ash Wednesday," and Eliot's long late masterpiece "The Four Quartets." Eliot is also responsible for the poems that served as the basis of the musical "Cats," which eventually became a feature film featuring human performers who at one point in development had feline buttholes. According to reports from inside the production, "The job of editing out all of the buttholes was ultimately left to one crew member who was hired specifically to excise unintended buttholes." Eliot would have hated everything about this sentence.)

CAH has done this sort of thing before. In 2017, the company bought a small plot of land in Texas on the US/Mexico border to "make it as time-consuming and expensive as possible for Trump to build his wall." In 2024, CAH sued SpaceX, saying that the rocket company had moved construction equipment onto CAH's Texas land without permission.

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