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In a funny example of esports becoming increasingly indistinguishable from regular sports, Razer used athlete endorsements as proof of how great its new Viper Ultimate Wireless Mouse is. After all, when there’s potentially thousands of dollars on the line, you absolutely need to trust that your mouse will line up that perfect headshot. So it takes a lot to shift that trust to a new device, even from a trusted brand like Razer.

My needs are nothing like that. I get paid to write about video games, not play them at a professional skill level. But after using it for a few days the Razer Viper still impressed me with how it makes wires basically irrelevant.

Razer tossed out a lot of snappy buzzwords to explain what makes using the Viper so smooth and seamless. And they are pretty cool explanations. Instead of a mechanical switch the 5G optical switch uses a laser beam for faster 20,000 DPI responses as well as less repeated physical wear and tear to keep up durability across 70 million clicks. The new Razer Blade 15 Advanced laptop (now available alongside a cute Quartz Pink base model) uses similar tech for its keyboard.

The “HyperSpeed” wireless technology claims to be 25 percent faster than the competition, with data packet transmission under 200. That and adaptive frequency eliminate lag even when near a bunch of other wireless devices. And other little hardware tricks include syncing your motion and calculating how you lift off and land to prevent nasty interruptions.

But what matters is the feel. Razer could show me all the graphs in the world, but what’s really convincing is just using the mouse for yourself. And again, while I’m no esports star, I definitely appreciated the bump up in quality. It’s almost too lightweight and responsive, suddenly the mouse cursor became a far more accurate representation of how jittery my hands can be. But you can adjust the sensitivity along with the button profiles. With tweaking, my aim definitely became better in PC shooters like Counter-Strike.

And in a little Pepsi Challenge I was doomed to fail, I couldn’t tell the difference between using the mouse wirelessly (up to 70 hours) or with its braided cable connected directly to the computer. Granted, I didn’t try that hard, but if you have to really scrutinize to tell the difference then Razer basically accomplished their goal.

At $150, the Razer Viper Ultimate Wireless Mouse definitely wants you to pay for this premium experience. But sometimes that’s worth it. The Razer Blade 15 Studio Edition costs $4,000 because its a real workstation for professional editing. With this mouse, your profession is just you being the best player you can be.

More on Geek.com:

• Finally, Razer Is Making a Gamer Toaster
• Geek Pick: Razer Blade Stealth Is an Ultraportable Dream Gaming PC
• Razer Raptor Is the Company’s First Gaming Monitor

It was only a matter of time before the hordes of reboot zombies besetting our great nation caught the epitome of 90s high school fluff in their gaping, drooling maws. CBS TV Studios has a pilot in the works for an hour-long drama based on the iconic film Clueless.

The project is from Will and Grace writers  Jordan Reddout and Gus Hickey, and the series is described by Deadline as:

…a Mean Girls meets Riverdale meets a Lizzo music video — is also set in high school. It is described as a baby pink and bisexual blue-tinted, tiny sunglasses-wearing, oat milk latté and Adderall-fueled look at what happens when the high school Queen Bee (Cher) disappears and her life-long number two (Dionne) steps into Cher’s vacant Air Jordans. How does Dionne deal with the pressures of being the new most popular girl in school, while also unraveling the mystery of what happened to her best friend, all in a setting that is uniquely 2020 LA?

Now, I love the idea of focusing on Dionne and not Cher. We need more black and WOC leads in general, but the rest of that summary makes me want to claw my eyes out at the trying way too hard of it all. Between Riverdale and The Politician and Gossip Girl and Euphoria don’t we have enough High Schoolers living more debaucherous lives than most adults can dream of?

Also! Clueless was a modern take on Emma by Jane Austen, a story of a sweet but misguided girl who likes to meddle in her friends’ love lives. If you want a property to re-imagine – do that!

I mean honestly, CBS, let this one stay dead. Especially given that a key studio looking at the project is The CW, which is owned in part by CBS. The CW already has Riverdale and Nancy Drew (and All American!) – this is not a big hole in their lineup that they need to fill. Clueless is a perfect, fun movie of its time. We don’t need to screw with it – especially because it already was a series (With Eugene Levy!) that I watched an embarrassing number of episodes of. I beg of you, TV Gods, spend money and time on literally anything else.

Anyway, here are some other, less brain-melting things we saw today.

• Nick Offerman is making Ron Swanson proud with his own limited edition Lagavulin whisky. (via Men’s Journal)
• Women reflecting on their post-baby bodies has me feeling things. (via Refinery29).
• Can Randy Rainbow take over CNN, please?
  

  🎶Giuliani…here you go again…lie, lie…how can we believe you..?🎶 pic.twitter.com/sDcpLCylhf

  — Randy Rainbow (@RandyRainbow) October 17, 2019

• The showrunner of Mayan M.C. has been fired for being, and I quote, “an abrasive dick.” (via The Hollywood Reporter)
• Saoirse Ronan and Timothée Chalamet looking pretty and talking Little Women. (via EW)
• Yes, Natalie. Yes.
  

  “The most powerful example we can set for the next generation would be for us to do that most human of things: Make mistakes, and then not follow the narrative of the doomed woman or the destroyed woman.

  Fuck up and thrive sisters.” —Natalie Portman #ShareHerJourney pic.twitter.com/yV3JCbUIv4

  — TIFF (@TIFF_NET) October 17, 2019

• Archaeologists in Egypt just found one of the biggest caches of sarcophagi – and mummies! – in years. This is awesome but don’t read any obsidian books around them. (via CNN)
• Here’s your guide to the history of Watchmen before it drops. (Via Vulture)
• Ever wonder what an Otter birthday looks like?
  

  Staff threw an otterly adorable birthday party for Lincoln and his furiends Juno and Uni Sushi! pic.twitter.com/ow44mn5nMw

  — Oregoth Boo (@OregonZoo) October 16, 2019

That’s it. Let’s pray to Castiel, angel of Thursdays, that the news for the rest of the week is free of cursed reboots.

(image: Paramount)

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Source: ABC Photo Archives / Getty

Y’all know what it is. We’re in the season of reboot, remake, retell and reimagine. While I can say I’m curious about many of the television and cinematic efforts, I think we can all agree that things are getting out of hand.

According to Shadow and Act, there’s a new Clueless reboot in the works, this one will be based on the life of the secondary but far more interesting Dionne—originally played by Stacey Dash.

Deadline described the series as follows.

“Written by Jordan Reddout and Gus Hickey, the new Clueless — Mean Girls meets Riverdale meets a Lizzo music video — also is set in high school. It is described as a baby pink and bisexual blue-tinted, tiny sunglasses-wearing, oat milk latté and Adderall-fueled look at what happens when the high school queen bee Cher disappears and her lifelong No. 2 Dionne steps into Cher’s vacant Air Jordans. How does Dionne deal with the pressures of being the new most popular girl in school, while also unraveling the mystery of what happened to her best friend, all in a setting that is uniquely 2020 L.A.?”

CBS TV Studios has the rights to the 1995 film. You may recall after the success of the film several members of the cast, including Dash and her on-screen boyfriend Donald Faison, went on to star in the subsequent series which aired on ABC and UPN for three seasons.

This is not the only Clueless project in the works. Tracy Y. Oliver, the writer behind Girls Trip, Little and the BET reboot of First Wives Club, is currently writing the script.

Zombieland was a runaway hit when it came out in 2009 – and not just because its main character, Columbus (Jesse Eisenberg), prioritized cardio above all else in the film’s post-apocalyptic environment. Writers Rhett Reese and Paul Wernick were not yet some of Hollywood’s most successful purveyors of slyly self-aware genre comedies (going on to write not one but two Deadpool films), but their aptitude for skewering the mundane details of everyday life while exploring big, broad fantasy concepts tapped right into a thriving appetite for zombie-themed stories while introducing four characters audiences would immediately relate to, laugh at, fall in love with, or do all three.

So when time came to revive that iconic quartet of Columbus, Tallahassee (Woody Harrelson), Wichita (Emma Stone) and Little Rock (Abigail Breslin) in Zombieland: Double Tap, Reese and Wernick worked closely with director Ruben Fleischer (Venom) and his stars to ensure that a second adventure lived up to its predecessor.

“More than anything, it was about making sure the voice was right,” Reese told Nerdist. “We did early drafts on the script that that had to be changed because of the passage of time. “But it was mostly about coming back and making it really feel like Zombieland. It’s near and dear to us and we kind of live and breathe those characters, so it was making sure it really felt like a Zombieland movie, not just not just an action movie tangentially related to Zombieland.”

Sony Pictures Entertainment

Much has changed in the real world since 2009, including Eisenberg and Stone’s respective ascension in Hollywood to movie stardom. But as the duo dove back into the world they created, they tried to focus more on fictional continuity than anything that has occurred in the intervening decade. “Those Woody Harrelsons and Jesse Eisenbergs tend to live in our head anyway, so it’s pretty easy to get into their heads again,” Reese admitted. Wernick added, “But in the world of Zombieland, time stopped in 2009. So in terms of how our characters interact and how we write them, while they’ve lived the last 10 years in Zombieland, life as we know it is still in 2009, so we’re frozen in time in that way.”

“But while Emma went off and became an Oscar winner and Jesse became a movie star and Woody continued to rule the universe, the dynamics of our actual characters haven’t changed,” he continued. “That is, they’ve evolved, but they haven’t had to keep current with what we know in 2019.”

Reese and Wernick’s pedigree has since become a commercial windfall for their collaborators, racking up one hit movie after another. But what continues to distinguish them from others who try to deconstruct genre conventions – or simply take the piss out of them – while retaining a palpable sense of emotional weight is what they consider their constant awareness of the rhythms of real life, stitched into the fictional scenarios they create for the characters that they love. “That tone is such a delicate balance of finding when to weave in and out of action and comedy and drama and heart,” Wernick said. “But real life is all of those things. One person’s life isn’t just a comedy or just drama; people experience all of the above all of the time throughout their day and week and year and life.”

“Interweaving those tones is a way to make a movie feel grounded because the audience is experiencing what they experience on a day to day basis.”

Sony Pictures Entertainment

Wernick also said that their insistence on wringing emotionality out of their stories is the key to their success, not just with Zombieland, but all of their projects. “The heart is our ‘secret sauce’,” he said. “We’re the funny guys we can make you laugh, but more than anything we want you to feel. And the story is more than anything about this family and about this family getting along, experiencing ordinary problems in extraordinary circumstances – those being zombies and you could turn a corner and die at any point in your day.”

Zombieland: Double Tap opens in theaters nationwide Friday, October 18, 2019.

All photos courtesy Sony Pictures Entertainment Inc.

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