Lax New Rules Will Make Kickstarter Huge—For Better or Worse

Illustration: bobaa22/Getty Images

Cyril Ebersweller says Kickstarter is about to get bigger.

On Monday, Kickstarter introduced a new, looser set of rules for launching projects on the popular crowdfunding site, and as someone who regularly donates funds to such projects, Ebersweller believes the rules will indeed lead to a broader range of Kickstarter campaigns and may spur larger donations as well. Those who were excluded from seeking funding on Kickstarter, says Eberweller, the founder of the hardware seed fund Haxlr8r, now have “a new avenue” to launch their campaigns.

Other longtime investors say the same thing, and this is almost certainly what Kickstarter aiming for. Facing increased competition from crowdfunding operations like Indiegogo–which is much more liberal in allowing a wide range of projects onto its site–Kickstarter is following suit. The new rules are simpler–they’re about half as long–but they also remove bans on certain types of campaigns, and they allow creators to launch campaigns without the approval from Kickstarter’s official community managers. Though it started out as a place mainly for funding books, films, music, and other art, it’s morphing into something that handles not only computer software but as a vast variety of other things, including the gamut of hardware devices.

‘This will allow project creators to move faster and will allow Kickstarter to handle more projects.’

Brady Forrest, a vice president at the hardware incubator Highway 1, is particularly bullish on the new “Launch Now” tool that lets creators bypass the site’s gatekeepers. “This will allow project creators to move faster and will allow Kickstarter to handle more projects at once,” he says. For Emile Petrone, CEO and founder of the hardware marketplace Tindie, this optional tool also just make more sense for certain projects. Successful Kickstarter project creators often know more about their target market than Kickstarter’s community managers, Patrone argues. “The reality is, they are not the ones who should be filtering who is going to be successful and who isn’t–just because it’s impossible for them to do,” says Petrone. “It’s like judging a baby and saying: ‘Well, is that going to be an NBA star?’”

Ebersweller is also excited about a new rule that lets hardware creators offer multiple devices as rewards to contributors, rather than just one. He calls this a “big game changer” that “will help tremendously.” These reward “bundles,” he stays, are attractive not only the average contributor but to prospective retail distributors, who can use Kickstarter bundles to much effectively test the market for a product. Further expanding the reach of its site, Kickstarter has also lifted bans on fundraising for tuition; websites and apps focused on e-commerce and social networking; real estate; bath, beauty and cosmetic products, eyewear, and electronic surveillance equipment.

The Kickerstarter possibilities are now much, much greater. But Petrone also warns that the site’s more lenient rules could lead to heartbreak for some creators, particularly the Launch Now tool. Many Kickstarter projects need more handholding, not less. The typically learn the hard lessons of manufacturing and logistics only after accepting money from customers, he says, and the result is often delays and angry backers.

But Kickstarter, he says, is more concerned with other things. “It would hurt their growth if they put the brakes on.”

Marvel Finds Doctor Strange Director, Loses Two More Ant-Man Directors

Image courtesy Marvel

The cinematic fortunes of Marvel Studios continue to be mixed when it comes to their forthcoming movies, with news surfacing this week showing that while the studio may have success in advance planning, it’s less effective at dealing with more immediate concerns.

Firstly, it was revealed that Sinister director Scott Derrickson will helm Doctor Strange , a project that has yet to be officially announced by Marvel. (Expect that official announcement to come at this year’s Comic-Con International in San Diego, where the studio traditionally unveils new projects.) Derrickson himself confirmed the news on Twitter after initial reports hit the internet.

Based on the character created by Stan Lee and Steve Ditko for 1963′s Strange Tales #110, the Doctor Strange movie has been long rumored, having been teased by Marvel Studios head Kevin Feige as being in development in past interviews. The choice of Derrickson—whose previous films include not only Sinister but also The Exorcism of Emily Rose—to direct suggests Marvel may be looking to use the supernatural superhero to move in a horror direction, similar to using Guardians of the Galaxy to push the studio towards science fiction and away from more obvious superhero fare.

But while the undated Strange has its director seemingly locked down, the same can’t be said for the floundering Ant-Man, which is still scheduled for release in July next year. Following the departure of Edgar Wright from the project, early reports cited Marvel talking to three possible replacements: Anchorman’s Adam McKay, Zombieland’s Ruben Fleischer, and Rawson Marshall Thurber of We’re The Millers fame. Since then, both McKay and Thurber have reportedly turned down offers, leaving only Fleischer in the running. So, that means the job is his by default, right…? Well, not exactly; reports have claimed that he wasn’t that into the possibility in the first place, preferring the possibility of making the equally-troubled Ghostbusters 3.

So where does that leave Ant-Man? The short answer is “in trouble.” The project isn’t just missing a director; sources have also said that the production’s heads of department also left when Wright departed, making it all that much less likely that the movie will meet its July 17, 2015 opening date. Will a new director be found quickly enough to make the deadline, or will the release date get shifted? More to the point, given the project’s troubled history, will a new director be found who’s willing to take on what’s beginning to look like a poisoned chalice of a movie? As with so many superhero stories, the story of Ant-Man remains to be continued.

Google Is Using Twitter Data Again, This Time for Disaster Alerts

Photo: Ariel Zambelich/WIRED

Google announced Tuesday that its public disaster alerts in Google Now, Search and Maps will include relevant Tweets. When Google issues a public alert via one of its products, as a weather or other natural disaster-related PSA, it will now include tweets that help give people more context about what’s happening in their own areas. This also seems to represent a small, but perhaps significant, step in bringing Twitter data back into Google products.

The announcement itself on Google+ was relatively minor. It simply noted where tweets may appear, and gave examples of the kinds of things they might be used for.

Starting today, you can find relevant data from Twitter on a subset of Google Public Alerts. We launched Public Alerts to provide updates from official sources, such as the National Weather Service, via Google Now, Search, and Google Maps. Now, some of the more extreme Public Alerts will include Tweets to help answer important questions: are schools closing? Are neighbors evacuating? What are people seeing on the front lines of a storm?

The low key announcement looks a bit like a rapprochement between Google and Twitter, or at least a tacit admission that their products work better together. Way back in 2011, the two companies couldn’t come to an agreement to let Google continue to use Twitter’s firehose data. The deal collapsed publicly in spectacular fashion, and Google subsequently shuttered Realtime Search.

Twitter declined to comment on the news, but a Google spokesperson tells Wired that the tweets are sourced via Twitter’s public API and not the “firehose,” or real-time data stream. Google also reiterated that for now, tweets are only going to be used in public alerts and crisis responses, and there are no plans to bring back Twitter-powered real-time search or to use Tweets in other ways.

Still, there are lots of interesting things about Tuesday’s announcement. The first is simply that Google is using tweets to power one of its products again, even if it doesn’t have immediate plans to expand that scope. It’s also curious to see that there aren’t any Facebook results in public alerts—perhaps explained by the strong partnership Facebook enjoys with Bing—although Google notes that it is looking at all sorts of other social products it can use. Finally, it seems like a tacit admission that there isn’t enough of a real-time conversation taking place on Google+ for it to be able to use that network as the sole source for public alerts.

In any case, it’s a nice move from Google. If its goal is to put truly timely information in front of people when they need it most, Twitter is the best place for that, new deal or not.

The Consensus on Climate Change [Greg Laden's Blog]

Sadly, a large percentage of Americans are under the impression that climate scientists do not agree on the reality of anthropogenic global warming (AGW). A lot of people are simply wrong about this. They think that there is a great deal of controversy among the scientists who study the Earth’s climate. But there isn’t. One way we know this is from a study done by John Cook, Dana Nuccitelli, Sarah A Green, Mark Richardson, Bärbel Winkler, Rob Painting, Robert Way, Peter Jacobs, and Andrew Skuce, called “Quantifying the consensus on anthropogenic global warming in the scientific literature”

In that study, the authors analyzed “the evolution of the scientific consensus on anthropogenic global warming (AGW) in the peer-reviewed scientific literature, examining 11,944 climate abstracts from 1991–2011 matching the topics ‘global climate change’ or ‘global warming’.” They learned that “66.4% of abstracts expressed no position on AGW, 32.6% endorsed AGW, 0.7% rejected AGW and 0.3% were uncertain about the cause of global warming.” Among the papers that expressed a scientific position on the topic, “97.1% endorsed the consensus position that humans are causing global warming.”

The study was actually a bit conservative, as in order to be counted as part of that ~3% not supporting the consensus position on AGW a paper did not really have to be fully against the idea. Also, since the study was done, the consensus has increased. I asked study author Dana Nuccitelli about more recent changes in consensus, and he told me, “The consensus is growing over time, and reached 98% in 2011 (the last year included in our survey). So by now the minimizers/deniers are probably in the 1-2% range in the peer-reviewed literature (contrary to the ‘crumbling consensus’ claims).”

The other day I was giving talks at a local high school, and between classes, found myself chatting with a science teacher who had just completed a module on climate change and AGW. She asked me, “Isn’t there now research that shows that the consensus isn’t really as high as previously thought? Or is that bogus? Sounds bogus to me.”

Yes. Bogus.

I’m not sure what research the teacher was referring to (it was just something she had heard about) but there is a paper just published in “Energy Policy” by economist Richard Tol, who as far as I can tell has been a naysayer of climate science for some time now. Tol’s abstract says:

A claim has been that 97% of the scientific literature endorses anthropogenic climate change… This claim, frequently repeated in debates about climate policy, does not stand. A trend in composition is mistaken for a trend in endorsement. Reported results are inconsistent and biased. The sample is not representative and contains many irrelevant papers. Overall, data quality is low. Cook’s validation test shows that the data are invalid. Data disclosure is incomplete so that key results cannot be reproduced or tested.

Nuccitelli has responded to Tol’s paper, in a post at Skeptical Science called “Richard Tol accidentally confirms the 97% global warming consensus.”

Concern Tol-ing

Tol is practicing a special kind of science denialism here, sometimes called “seeding doubt” or as I prefer it, “casting seeds of doubt on infertile ground.” In other contexts this is called “concern trolling” or the “You’re not helping” gambit. The first of two paragraphs of the Conclusion section of Tol’s paper reads (emphasis added),

The conclusions of Cook et al. are thus unfounded. There is no doubt in my mind that the literature on climate change overwhelmingly supports the hypothesis that climate change is caused by humans. I have very little reason to doubt that the consensus is indeed correct. Cook et al., however, failed to demonstrate this. Instead, they gave further cause to those who believe that climate researchers are secretive (as data were held back) and incompetent (as the analysis is flawed).

Let’s get straight that Cook et al is not flawed, despite Tol’s complaints.

Tol’s main complaint is in the coding of the abstracts. He claims that it is imperfect. Well, duh. This is, essentially, social science research, and coding of text is imperfect. Tol makes the claim that the imperfections, if corrected, might bring the consensus down to a dismal 91%. I’m pretty sure he’s wrong about that, but if he is right, we are not impressed.

Tol’s key point is that the papers that are coded as not making a claim include some that do. He then incorrectly calculates how many of of those, if coded “correctly” there would be, and using this, downgrades the consensus to 91%

Nuccitelli explains in detail, in his post, how Tol’s re-analysis is badly done (see the amazing graphic at the top of this post) (go read it) and notes:

In reality, as our response to Tol’s critique (accepted by Energy Policy but not yet published) shows, there simply aren’t very many peer-reviewed papers that minimize or reject human-caused global warming. Most of the papers that were reconciled ‘towards stronger rejection’ went from explicit to implicit endorsement, or from implicit endorsement to no position. For abstracts initially rated as ‘no position,’ 98% of the changes were to endorsement categories; only 2% were changed to rejections.

Nuccitelli also notes that a separate study indicates that Tol’s method is flawed in the sense that no matter what data are used, the consensus will be decreased as an artifact of the methodology. Nuccitelli notes “…by making this mistake, Tol effectively conjured approximately 300 papers rejecting or minimizing human-caused global warming out of thin air, with no evidence that those papers exist in reality. As a result, his consensus estimate falls apart under cursory examination.”

Amazingly, when the Consensus research team fixed Tol’s methodology but applied the same question about coding papers in the no-position category, and re-calculated the percent consensus, it went up by 0.1%. Also, as Nuccitelli points out the Cook et al paper is not alone, and there have been a number of other studies that show essentially the same level of consensus among papers and/or scientists.

So, the consensus is real and isn’t going away. As is also the case with Anthropogenic Global Warming.

What Hollywood Can Teach Us About Escaping the Dreaded Time Loop

Premise: The Enterprise collides with another ship near a distorted time-space continuum, creating a tear that sends them back to the start of the journey.

Onscreen loops: 5

The Escape: The crewmembers experience déjà vu—or “nIb-poH,” as Worf (Michael Dorn) calls it—prompting Data (Brent Spiner) to send a message to his next iteration, helping them avoid the initial collision.

Lesson Learned: Got a bad feeling about something? Always play some poker ask for help.

Where to Watch: CBS.com

Groundhog Day (1993)

Premise: Disgruntled weatherman Phil Connors (Bill Murray) heads to Punxsutawney, Pennsylvania to cover Groundhog Day—again, and again, and again…

Onscreen loops: 36

The Escape: Phil’s extrication is straight out of Kubler-Ross—denial, bargaining, grief, acceptance, seduction, saving people from puddles, and redemption. What, those aren’t the seven stages of grief?

Lesson Learned: Don’t play God, play Good Samaritan.

Where to Watch: Amazon, Google Play

Xena, Warrior Princess, “Been There, Done That” (1997)

Premise: A young couple, Hermia (Rebekah Davies) and Neron (Joseph Murray), hides their love because their families are feuding. After Hermia drinks a poison that will kill her the next day, Neron begs Cupid to never let the next day come, causing the loops. Xena (Lucy Lawless), naturally, comes to the rescue.

Onscreen loops: 14

The Escape: Xena finally discovers the lovers’ plot and uses her trusty chakram to knock the poison out of Hermia’s hand before dashing around town to end the hijinks from the feud. In other words, Romeo and Juliet would have a very different ending if only Xena were around.

Lesson Learned: There are limits to what you should do for love.

Where to Watch: Hulu Plus, Amazon

The X-Files, “Monday” (1999)

Premise: Mulder (David Duchovny) has a bad day that only gets worse when he and Scully (Gillian Anderson) get caught in a bank robbery with a robber who’s carrying a bomb. Even if neither of them faces the bomber, every time the bomb detonates, the day restarts.

Onscreen loops: 5

The Escape: Pam (Carrie Hamilton), the robber’s girlfriend and the only character with memory of each loop, gets shot trying to save Mulder. This prevents the bomber from detonating his device, and time from resetting the day.

Lesson Learned: Confronting the problem is often the only solution.

Where to Watch: Hulu Plus, Amazon

Stargate SG-1, “Window of Opportunity” (2000)

Premise: Alien archaeologist Malikai (Robin Mossley) tampers with a time machine after his wife dies. Instead of seeing her again, he accidentally causes a loop throughout several universes and zaps Teal’c (Christopher Judge) and O’Neill (Richard Dean Anderson), leaving them the only ones aware of the looping.

Onscreen loops: 22

The Escape: Because the time machine simultaneous activates 14 Stargates and cuts off the ionization of subspace therefore disrupting the normal flow of time—oh, forget it. Simply put, O’Neill convinces Malikai to stop fiddling with the time machine, and Malikai complies.

Lesson Learned: Nothing good comes from dwelling on the past.

Where to Watch: Amazon

Day Break (2006-2007)

Premise: Detective Brett Hopper (Taye Diggs) is framed for the murder of an assistant DA. He’s guilty until proven innocent by time looping the same 24 hours and tracking down new clues. But that’s not all: His girlfriend Rita (Moon Bloodgood) is the ex-wife of his former partner Chad (Adam Baldwin), his current partner Andrea (Victoria Battle) may have ties to the mob, and the Shadow Man (Jonathan Banks, a.k.a. Mike from Breaking Bad) is tracking his every move.

Onscreen loops: 48

The Escape: Hopper discovers everyone’s secrets and solves the case—sort of. This short-lived series just didn’t have enough time to tie up all loose ends. Maybe with one more loop…

Lesson Learned: The Shadow Man put it best: “For every decision, there’s a consequence.” So choose wisely.

Where to Watch: Hulu

Supernatural, “Mystery Spot” (2008)

Premise: “The Trickster,” a demigod that feeds off of mischief, returns to torment Sam (Jared Padalecki) and Dean (Jensen Ackles) by creating a loop that always ends in Dean’s gruesome death.

Onscreen loops: 11

The Escape: Sam tracks down and threatens the Trickster, who ends his temporal mayhem. (But the Winchester brothers are never out of danger—when Dean later dies anyway, Sam begs the Trickster to create one last loop.)

Lesson Learned: Fighting fate is easier than accepting it.

Where to Watch: Amazon

Triangle (2009)

Premise: In this mind-boggling horror-thriller, Jess (Melissa George) repeatedly causes the deaths of her friends—including one played by pre-Hunger Games Liam Hemsworth—when they reach a time-looping ghost ship in the Bermuda Triangle.

Onscreen Loops: 3

The Escape: There is none. Even after abandoning ship, Jess, who’s later revealed to be an abusive mother to her autistic son, ends up heading back on board. Karma wins this round.

Lesson Learned: Prepare for—and accept—the worst.

Where to Watch: YouTube, Google Play

Source Code (2011)

Premise: The U.S. military sends the consciousness of Capt. Colter Stevens (Jake Gyllenhaal) into a parallel reality through the shadowy government-run Source Code program. There, he repeats the final eight minutes of a doomed passenger train until he finds the bomber.

Onscreen loops: 9

The Escape: Stevens sacrifices himself, thereby permanently entering the alternate timeline and finding a way to save every passenger. Mission accomplished!

Lesson Learned: If you’re going to martyr yourself, fine—but do it for the greater good.

Where to Watch: YouTube, Google Play

Haven, “Audrey Parker’s Day Off” (2011)

Premise: A man’s “Trouble”—an ability that manifests under emotional stress—causes him to restart the day every time it doesn’t end the way he planned. Audrey (Emily Rose), immune to Troubles, is the only one who notices the looping.

Onscreen loops: 5

The Escape: Audrey stabilizes the man by helping him reconnect with his daughter, but he sacrifices himself after realizing his loops always end in someone’s death.

Lesson Learned: Don’t obsess over fixing your mistakes.

Where to Watch: YouTube, Amazon

Looper (2012)

Premise: Joe (Joseph Gordon-Levitt) kills criminals sent from the future, but hesitates when his older self (Bruce Willis) appears as his next target. Old Joe tries to change their past, and ends up leading both to Sara (Emily Blunt, in her first time-looping film), a rifle-toting protective mother, and her mysterious child.

Onscreen loops: 1

The Escape: When he realizes Old Joe will cause the events he wanted to prevent, Joe kills himself, erasing his future. Call it the Inverted Grandfather Paradox.

Lesson Learned: You can’t change your fate, but you can change the fate of others.

Where to Watch: Amazon, Google Play

Airbus Used Its Best Employees as Guinea Pigs for Its New Plane

Image: Airbus

For most people, a seven-hour flight that lands exactly where it departed from is a special kind of torture. But for nearly 250 Airbus employees, it was a reward for their hard work. Based on the photos, they were totally thrilled.

Airbus is most of the way through the long march to certification of the Airbus A350-XWB, the wide-body commercial jet it’s spent a decade working on. In the past year, four test planes have logged 1,600 hours. They’ve flown in extreme temperatures and at extreme altitudes and been hit with faux lightning strikes. An airframe built specifically for the purpose had its wings nearly broken in a machine that resembles a huge birdcage.

These tests prove the A350 is airworthy and safe, but they don’t reveal anything about how it feels to spend hours in the cabin, which is what really matters to the people who ultimately will use the planes.

Enter the guinea pigs.

Airbus selected about 250 of its very best employees (all of them recommended by their managers) to take a ride and share their thoughts. On Monday, the A350 took off from the Airbus assembly plant in Toulouse, France, flew over Oslo, and landed in Toulouse seven hours later.

The flight simulated a “real airline environment,” complete with a cabin crew borrowed from Air France. The passengers endured a standard boarding process and put their bags in the overhead bins (it’s not clear what they carried aboard. They received hot towels and were served what appears to be a good meal. On the entertainment systems, they played Sudoku, watched The Hobbit and The Big Bang Theory, and kept an eye on the flight map.

Afterward, they completed questionnaires, sharing their thoughts on everything from the in-flight entertainment system to how the storage bins worked. The crew reviewed the galleys, safety equipment, and their rest areas. The result was an airborne focus group that looked like a lot of fun. These people are rabid plane geeks, after all, and were the first passengers on an all-new airplane.

It was the first of two “Early Long Flights” planned this week; the second is a 12-hour overnight flight with a Lufthansa crew. Using employees as guinea pigs isn’t just a European thing. Boeing did the same while testing the 787-8 and 747-8.

The widebody A350 is the second commercial jet (after the Boeing 787 Dreamliner) made largely of composite material. That will make it 25% more fuel efficient than comparable older jets, Airbus says, a huge selling point for the cash-strapped airline industry. Airbus has taken 812 orders from 39 customers and expects to begin deliveries later this year.

Chemicals found that treat citrus greening in the lab

A University of Florida research team is cautiously optimistic after finding a possible treatment in the lab for citrus greening, a disease devastating Florida’s $9 billion citrus industry. It is the first step in a years-long process to bring a treatment to market.

Claudio Gonzalez and Graciela Lorca led the research team that examined three biochemical treatments: phloretin, hexestrol and benzbromarone.

The team sprayed greenhouse tree shoots separately with one of the three biochemicals and were successful in stopping the bacteria’s spread, particularly with benzbromarone, which halted the bacteria in 80 percent of the infected trees’ shoots. They expect to begin field experiments with this treatment later this year. Their research was published in late April by the online open access journal PLOS Pathogens.

Gonzalez and Lorca are UF associate professors in the microbiology and cell science department, part of UF’s Institute of Food and Agricultural Sciences. The team also works under the auspices of the UF Genetics Institute.

The researchers found that benzbromarone targets a specific protein, known as LdtR, in the citrus greening bacterium. When benzbromarone binds to LdtR, it inactivates the protein, which disrupts a cell wall remodeling process critical for the greening bacterium’s survival inside a citrus tree.

“As a consequence of the chemical treatment, several genes were not expressed and the bacteria were not able to survive inside the phloem of the plant where osmotic pressure from sugar is high,” said Fernando Pagliai, a co-author of the study and a UF graduate assistant. Phloem is the living tissue that carries organic nutrients to all parts of the plant.

Benzbromarone is typically used to treat gout in humans.

Citrus greening first enters the tree via a tiny bug, the Asian citrus psyllid, which sucks on leaf sap and leaves behind bacteria. The bacteria then move through the tree via the phloem. The disease starves the tree of nutrients, damages its roots and the tree produces fruits that are green and misshapen, unsuitable for sale as fresh fruit or for juice. Most infected trees die within a few years.

The disease has already affected millions of citrus trees in North America and could wipe out the industry in the next decade if a viable treatment is not found.

UF/IFAS researchers have attempted everything from trying to eradicate the psyllid to breeding citrus rootstock that shows better greening resistance. Current methods to control the spread of citrus greening include removing and destroying infected trees.

Florida growers say they desperate for a treatment that will work.

“Every grower I know is just hanging by their fingernails, hoping and praying for a new discovery for treatment,” said Ellis Hunt Jr. of Lake Wales, whose family has been in the citrus business since 1922.

Industry experts, though, say it could be five to seven years before a new active-ingredient product could be commercially available because of the amount of time field testing takes and government regulations.

Story Source:

The above story is based on materials provided by University of Florida . Note: Materials may be edited for content and length.

Chronicle Director to Helm New Standalone Star Wars Movie

Image: Alan Markfield/20th Century Fox

Add one more director to Lucasfilm’s burgeoning empire. The Disney subsidiary has just announced that Josh Trank, director of Chronicle and next year’s Fantastic Four reboot, has been signed to direct a stand-alone Star Wars movie—one of the studio’s planned slate that will be independent of J.J. Abrams’ Star Wars: Episode VII.

“The magic of the Star Wars Universe defined my entire childhood,” Trank said in a statement released by the studio. “The opportunity to expand on that experience for future generations is the most incredible dream of all time.”

Trank is the second director to be named for a stand-alone Star Wars project in recent weeks. Godzilla‘s Gareth Edwards, it was announced, will be directing one as well, to be written by The Book of Eli‘s Gary Whitta and released December 16, 2016. That movie was described by Lucasfilm as “the first stand-alone film” in the franchise.

Lucasfilm has not yet mentioned a time frame for the release of Trank’s movie.

WIRED Summer Binge-Watching Guide: True Blood

God, remember how weird Bill’s hair was in the beginning? Photo: John P. Johnson/HBO

True Blood has been with us for a long time, but in just a few short weeks, we start saying our goodbyes to the wild rapscallions of Bon Temps, Louisiana. For more than six years we’ve followed the misadventures of Sookie Stackhouse, the perky waitress who after hooking up with a vampire seems unable to avoid having to handle one supernatural hot mess after another. Honestly, our appetite for vampires/shape-shifters/Maenads/werewolves/whatever could support a few more seasons of the show, but better to bow out gracefully than to overstay a welcome.

But before we say goodbye there’s a lot to wrap up. What will become of Sook-eh and “Vampire” Bill Compton? What about Sookie’s friends: Lafayette, Sam, Eric, Pam, Jessica, and resting-bitch-face exemplar Tara? What about her cute/dumb brother Jason? Will Bon Temps even be standing by the end of the season? These characters have packed a lot of living into about two calendar years’ worth of story, and the show is an ever-entertaining newsletter from our really eccentric cousins down south. It’s horrified us, titillated us, made us laugh, and made sexposition a legitimate narrative device for HBO. Now it’s only right that we greet its end by going back to the beginning. Vamp up, everyone, because we’ve only got three weeks till the final season begins, and there’s much to cover.

True Blood Binge-Watching Guide

Number of Seasons:

6 (70 episodes)

Time Requirements:

2.5 weeks. Figure two episodes per weeknight, four or five each weekend day. Sure, that’s ambitious, but don’t you want to be ready for the Season 7 premiere on June 22?

Where to Get Your Fix:

HBO Go, Amazon Prime

Best Character to Follow:

Lafayette Reynolds is the most sensible, most hilarious, and often most believably tender character in the show. While basically everyone in the True Blood universe is guilty of something—everyone besides sweet, lovable, occasional doormat Hoyt, that is— they’re often either too depraved to care or are too busy fighting for their lives to take five for some deep-dive introspection. And who could blame them? Between Maenads and witches and werewolves and constant threat of apocalypse, one hardly has time to existentially better themselves, but that’s exactly what makes Lafayette so crucial: he recognizes he is a deeply flawed person, and often soars above surrounding characters as a result. He may be a supporting role, but he’s given the most dynamic development arc in the show. Lafayette’s behavior actually changes based on challenges he overcomes, which, as viewers, is really what we’re all striving to do on our best days IRL. At times in his life, he’s been a “hooker” (his words, not ours), a drug dealer, a con man and, by his own admission, a person of “poor moral character”—but through it all, he remained our moral center, our Virgil on this journey through mazes of supernatural and human depravity. If we got dropped down into the Hellmouth that is Bon Temps, Louisiana, there’s no one we’d rather have in our foxhole. Consider us glamoured, Lafayette.

Image via Tumblr

The Season You Can Skip:

Season 4 gets a little rocky. When Bill occupies positions of power, he actually gets pretty annoying, and since he’s moved up significantly in the vampire hierarchy at the start of this season, we get a lot of irritating moments. (Note: the How Much Bill Sucks Index continues to rise at a steady pace into Season 5 and much of Season 6 as well, but since this stands in direct contrast to the How Much We Love Eric Index, it cancels out to neutral. And as always, all problems can be solved with moar Pam.) Fiona Shaw’s brilliantly bat-shit performance as the medium and witch Marnie Stonebrook in Season 4 almost makes this season worth it, but whenever you hear “Hotshot” or see a werepanther, feel free to go re-up the chip bowl without pausing. We’re fully accustomed to crazy on True Blood—we welcome it, even—but this pointless insanity was just too much.

Seasons and Episodes You Can’t Skip:

Season 1: Episode 1, “Strange Love.” This show moves fast, and by the end of the first episode there’s already been a murder, graphic sex, and an introduction to 90 percent of the season’s most relevant characters and locations. Start off strong and keep charging, because this whole season plants seeds for concepts you won’t even know to care about until four seasons later when you find yourself going “Ohhhhh, that’s what they meant.” Stay sharp!

Season 2: Episodes 9 and 10, “I Will Rise Up” and “New World in My View.” This is a great season that builds on the first and only gets stronger, but these two eps are pivotal, with a few events that have far-reaching consequences in the show. We get to see a new side of sexy vampire Eric, a preview of just how powerful Sookie’s abilities are, and behold the peak crazy of Maryann and her band of familiars (aka the sex-crazed degenerate residents of Bon Temps).

Season 3: Episodes 10 and 12, “I Smell a Rat” and “Evil is Going On.” True Blood went three-for-three in its first seasons, with some of the show’s best characters of all appearing in this run. And once again it came on strong in the back end, these two episodes containing big reveals. Both bring information to light that majorly affects everything we will know, and everything we thought we had known, about our two primary characters: Sookie and Bill. If you think you’re starting to hate Bill a little, this will only push you farther along.

Season 4: Episode 12, “And When I Die.” This was an uneven slate of episodes for TB, but the finale really brought us back. There’s the return of some faces we once thought gone forever, and a farewell to others we’d grown fond of.

Season 5: Episodes 6 and 12, “Hopeless” and “Save Yourself.” We don’t want to spoil anything, so we’ll just say these are good and leave it at that.

Season 6: Episodes 6 and 9, “Don’t You Feel Me” and “Life Matters.” In its strongest season since S3, these are the standouts. Everything’s gone so deep at this point that explaining why would risk giving away too much, but but this season wins our Best Use of Pam Award hands down (and that’s the highest honor we have to bestow, so don’t miss a minute).

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Why You Should Binge:

What better time to find your next best small-screen obsession than right before it’s about to end? You get all the joy of good programming without the anxiety spike of knowing your favorite story is about to go off air for a year—an issue particularly acute with HBO shows and their 10-to-12-episode seasons. And while True Blood will be permanently going to ground after this summer, there will be a bloody reckoning before it does. And why shouldn’t there be? For 70 episodes we’ve been tossed around in a maelstrom of vampires, demons, witches, werewolves, vengeful gods; we’ve earned the most insane ending possible.

In fact, that’s what makes this show great. Even when it’s faltered, True Blood has always followed through on its silent promise to shock and entertain us. Yeah, the whole werewolves thing went nowhere fast, but just when we thought we’d seen it all, they gave us goddamn werepanthers. And for that, we are grateful. If Alan Ball, Mark Hudis, and Brian Buckner (all showrunners at various points) ever felt bashful about introducing potentially polarizing characters or creatures or grotesque acts, they never tipped their hand to the viewer. And sometimes when you watch TV, you just want to slip into an impossible universe and have fun for a while without care or consequence. That’s what True Blood does best, and for our purposes here, what makes its bingeability factor so high. When we need to take our vitamins, we’ll just sad-cram The Wire. (Don’t worry, we love it just like everyone else.)

Not that the show is devoid of substance. True Blood‘s first season drew strong parallels between the fictional struggle for vampire rights and the very real struggle for LGBT rights. When the show premiered in 2008, California was in the midst of a fight over Proposition 8, which sought to ban same-marriages across the state, and “God hates fangs!” sure sounded a lot like the toxic bile we heard spewing out of the Westborough Baptist Church. (If she were an even mildly politically active person, Sookie herself probably would have posed for a NOH8 portrait.) In November of that year, Prop 8 managed to pass (though was later repealed), and equality was denied to millions. Watching True Blood we were all confronted, in a most colorful way, with the absurdity of denying basic rights to our friends and neighbors. Each time someone yelled “Fang banger!” it was like looking at a cartoon of the real bigotry confronted on a daily basis by so many, and you hoped everyone watching this show with lots of hot sex and bitchin’ vampires and stuff would notice that being so openly hateful was actually a pretty stupid and obnoxious way to live.

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Though it backed off from the overt nature of Season 1′s activism, that current can still be clearly felt in the show, not least of all with its female characters. True Blood has given us strong women, crazy women, powerful women, evil women, weak women, women who are single mothers, women in leadership positions, and so on. Even if many of those characters have been so extreme they’ve bordered on parody, that’s just everybody in the world of True Blood—around here, it’s equal crazy pay for equal crazy work.

And for those just watching for the nudity, there’s plenty of skin time for all to enjoy.

Best Scene—Russell Edgington Makes His TV Debut:

There is no scene in all of True Blood with a better combination of serious consequences and serious entertainment value than this one. In a show defined by its excesses and gratuitous displays of gore, sex, and gore-sex (we’re looking at you, Bill and Lorena), it’s nice to see some of the show’s bawdier elements brought together with the elegant touch of a masterful actor. Russell Edgington (Denis O’Hare) is the vampire’s King of Mississippi. He’s almost 3,000 years old, which means he’s had a lot of time to form his views on human/vampire relations, and gentle, considerate Godric he ain’t. Edgington’s appearance on the nightly news (NSFW clip below) may have been unwelcome by that unfortunate anchor, but like the inhabitants of this fictional America clutching their pearls in fear of Vampire!, we couldn’t pull our eyes from the TV when it happened. All while the inimitable vampire PR maven Nan Flanagan looks on in horror. Best throw to the weather ever!

This Is Where Americans Planned to Spend the Nuclear Holocaust

President John F. Kennedy Atmoic Bomb Shelter and Command Post; Peanut Island, FL.

President John F. Kennedy Atmoic Bomb Shelter and Command Post; Peanut Island, FL.

Declassified Department of State Report. President John F. Kennedy Atmoic Bomb Shelter and Command Post; Peanut Island, FL.

Declassified Department of State Report. President John F. Kennedy Atmoic Bomb Shelter and Command Post; Peanut Island, FL.

Private Shelter; Dallas, TX

Private Shelter; Dallas, TX

Dallas Civil Defense Emergency Operations Center; Dallas, TX. Jacksonville Civil Defense Emergency Operations CEnter; Jacksonville, FL.

Dallas Civil Defense Emergency Operations Center; Dallas, TX. Jacksonville Civil Defense Emergency Operations CEnter; Jacksonville, FL.

Declassified CIA Information Report. President John F. Kennedy Atmoic Bomb Shelter and Command Post; Peanut Island, FL.

Declassified CIA Information Report. President John F. Kennedy Atmoic Bomb Shelter and Command Post; Peanut Island, FL.

Dallas Civil Defense Emergency Operations Center; Dallas, TX. President John F. Kennedy Atmoic Bomb Shelter and Command Post; Peanut Island, FL.

Dallas Civil Defense Emergency Operations Center; Dallas, TX. President John F. Kennedy Atmoic Bomb Shelter and Command Post; Peanut Island, FL.

Private Shelter; Dallas, TX.

Private Shelter; Dallas, TX.

AT&T Underground Coaxial Cable Station; Ft. Pierce, FL.

AT&T Underground Coaxial Cable Station; Ft. Pierce, FL.

Private Shelter; Dallas, TX.

Private Shelter; Dallas, TX.

Dallas Civil Defense Emergency Operations Center; Dallas, TX. Graph from ‘Theoretical Consquences of a Hypothetical Nuclear Bombing of the Dallas-Ft. Worth Area, 1963.’

Dallas Civil Defense Emergency Operations Center; Dallas, TX. Graph from ‘Theoretical Consquences of a Hypothetical Nuclear Bombing of the Dallas-Ft. Worth Area, 1963.’

AT&T Underground Coaxial Cable Station; Ft. Pierce, FL.

AT&T Underground Coaxial Cable Station; Ft. Pierce, FL.

Jacksonville Civil Defense Emergency Operations Center; Jacksonville, FL.

Jacksonville Civil Defense Emergency Operations Center; Jacksonville, FL.

Dallas Civil Defense Emergency Operations Center; Dallas, TX.

Dallas Civil Defense Emergency Operations Center; Dallas, TX.

Dallas Civil Defense Emergency Operations Center; Dallas, TX.

Dallas Civil Defense Emergency Operations Center; Dallas, TX.

AT&T Underground Coaxial Cable Station; Ft. Pierce, FL.

AT&T Underground Coaxial Cable Station; Ft. Pierce, FL.

Dallas Civil Defense Emergency Operations Center; Dallas, TX. Graph from ‘Theoretical Consquences of a Hypothetical Nuclear Bombing of the Dallas-Ft. Worth Area, 1963.’

Dallas Civil Defense Emergency Operations Center; Dallas, TX. Graph from ‘Theoretical Consquences of a Hypothetical Nuclear Bombing of the Dallas-Ft. Worth Area, 1963.’

For her ongoing series Fallout, Jeanine Michna-Bales has been photographing Cold-War ear nuclear shelters across the United States that would have protected people if the Cuban Missile Crisis had ended badly. The photos are a study in architecture, but also transport viewers back to a time when an all-out nuclear war felt like an imminent threat.

“What I’m really trying to do is use the photos to get at the psychology of the country during that time,” Michna-Bales says.

Michna-Bales chose fallout shelters related to the Cuban Missile Crisis because she lives in Dallas, and that was one of the cities that could have been under threat according to recently declassified documents. She shot her first shelter close to home, but has also traveled to cities like Jacksonville, Florida and even shot at President John F. Kennedy’s private atomic bomb shelter near his vacation home in Peanut Island, FL.

To find these old shelters, Michna-Bales combed though archives and old newspaper looking for things like maps that detailed where a city’s public shelters were located. She also contacted local emergency centers to see if they kept a database. Often times, even if she found an address, she’d show up and the shelter would be gone because the building had been torn down, repurposed, etc.

Some of the photos have Cold-War-era government documents or newspaper articles superimposed on top, like one that details what percentage of the population would die if a bomb exploded on the surface nearby. Everyone less than a mile away, it says, would perish. Up to 60 percent of the people within a three-mile radius would also fall victim. Only those who were at least three miles away stood a good chance of surviving.

“I want viewers to see the kind of information people were faced with back then,” she says.

Michna-Bales says the rooms became a sort of time warp. Some still have old furniture and even canned food lying around. While her photos can only hint at the feeling of dread and the uncertain future of civilization, she hopes people are transported back to how emotionally charged the time period was for those who lived through it.

“When you are in these spaces, it’s almost like you can feel the weight of the wold on your shoulders,” she says.