Wednesday, October 8, 2025

What a week it's been for Swifties.

The much-anticipated drop of The Life of a Showgirl has sparked everything from glowing praise to utter confusion.

Listening parties took place around the world, and a behind-the-scenes film on the album's creation hit cinemas, giving fans a closer look at the making of the music.

With 12 songs in total, super fans wasted no time ranking their favourites. One track, 'Wood', raised a few eyebrows - though Swift insisted it started from an innocent place.

Another song, 'Actually Romantic', caught attention online and sparked social media feud rumours with British pop icon Charli XCX. 

And once the initial frenzy began to settle, fans shifted focus to something unexpected – claims that AI was used in the visuals promoting the album, sparking yet another debate online.

No matter where you stand, one thing's for sure – The Life of a Showgirl has everyone talking.

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Donald Trump says Diddy asked him for a presidential pardon following sentencing

Diddy was sentenced on Friday to four-years and two-months

Pro-Trump influencers are now trying to distance themselves from the controversial president

Uh oh... 

*Contains spoilers for Monster: The Ed Gein Story*

The latest instalment of Ryan Murphy's Monster series on Netflix focuses on the abhorrent crimes and twisted mind of Ed Gein, who became a notorious grave digger and butcher in the 1900s - and everyone is hooked.

The grizzly dramatisation flicks between Gein's life, which sees him become infatuated with his ultra-religious mother following her death (which prompts him to begin his grave-digging quest), and the making of Alfred Hitchcock's Psycho, a film inspired by Gein's crimes.

Throughout the eight-episode series, we see Gein (played by Charlie Hunnam), go on a slaying spree and dismember his victims, before using their limbs and skin to create household objects, from chairs, to bowls that he eats from each day.

We also see his bizarre romance with wannabe crime scene photographer, Adeline Watkins unfold, who is curious by Gein's awkward personality, but comes face-to-face with his dark secret when she uncovers the corpse of 'Mother' in a bedroom.

"Who was the monster? This poor boy who was abused his whole life then left in total isolation, suffering from undiagnosed mental illness?" co-creator of the show, Hunnam asks Tudum. "Or the legion of people who sensationalized his life for entertainment and arguably darkened the American psyche and the global psyche in the process?"

Whichever side of the argument you're on, we can all mutually agree that it makes for a rather disturbing watch.

Read more here

Experts think they may have uncovered what the first ever animal on Earth looked like after ancient chemical signals were found.

For as long as scientists have understood evolution, the debate over what the first ever animal looked like has waged on. Some theories suggest it would have been something like a modern common sea sponge, while others argue that comb jellies are the original animal ancestors.

Now, new research from a team at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) has turned the dial in favour of sponges, thanks to evidence from chemicals which suggests the animals first emerged over 541 million years ago in the Neoproterozoic era.

The researchers had to rely on chemical information due to the lack of fossils, as both jellies and sponges lack the material (think bones and cartilage) that often make up fossils.

For this reason, experts had to look in soil and sediment for chemical signs that provided evidence towards their theory about sea sponges.

"We don't know exactly what these organisms would have looked like back then, but they absolutely would have lived in the ocean, they would have been soft-bodied, and we presume they didn't have a silica skeleton," MIT geobiologist Roger Summons explained.

It was Summons who was also involved in a piece of 2009 research that found a swathe of fossil evidence of sponge-like sterols located within Marinoan rock from Oman.

The C30 sterols are rare and found in organisms such as marine sponges and algae, suggesting that sponges were one of the earliest complex organisms.

The highest rated games of the year for 2025 so far have been shared on social media and gamers do not agree with what critics have as number one.

Culture Crave posted a graphic showing the top 12 rated new releases from this year according to MetaCritic scores. In the top spot is Hades II, closely followed by Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 and Blue Prince.

But the user score shows a very different picture.

According to that, Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 is by far and away in the top spot with 9.7, with Donkey Kong Bananza and Sonic Racing: CrossWorlds sitting some way together behind that in joint second on 9.1.

In fact, according to the user score, Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 is the best game of all time, sitting well above a cluster of games rated 9.3.

The MetaCritic scores were recently posted into the Gaming Subreddit and gamers have been having their say in the comments.

One user noted: "MONSTER TRAIN 2 IN TOP 12 LESGOOOO!!!!!!"

Another commented: "Insane games and insane year for gaming. I wish I had more time to go over all of them."

Find out more here

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