Episodes 10 of Andor brought the Star Wars series’ riveting prison arc to a close on DisneyPlus last Wednesday, revealing new depths to the Empire’s totalitarian cruelty. It forced future rebel hero Cassian Andor (Diego Luna) to forge alliances and rally his fellow inmates to help with his risky escape plan.

Beyond those walls, the regime is also tightening its grip on the galaxy in an attempt to choke all hopes of rebellion. Ambitious Imperial Dedra Meero (Denise Gough) is happy to enforce its rules, but rebels like Mon Mothma (Genevieve O’Reilly) and Luthen Rael (Stellan Skarsgård) are working to bring the Empire crashing down.

So there’s plenty of exciting intrigue and espionage happening, and that’s exactly what you’d expect from the creator and showrunner Tony Gilroy. He wrote the first four Bourne movies but is perhaps best known for writing and directing Michael Clayton. The intense 2007 legal thriller was nominated for seven Oscars, with Tilda Swinton taking home the award for best supporting actress.

He also co-authored Rogue One, the 2016 Star Wars spinoff that introduced the morally questionable Cassian to a galaxy far, far away. Andor, which is nearing the end of its 12-episode first season and will return for a second season leading directly into Rogue One, dives into his past and the

Amazon’s lineup of Echo Show smart displays adds a touchscreen to the voice-controlled Alexa experience, and that visual approach to smart home assistance makes for a much better experience when you’re asking for a weather forecast or a recipe to follow along with, or if you want to place a quick video call to a loved one or a co-worker. If you’ve been looking to add one to your smart home setup, then your timing couldn’t be better.

Among them is the first-gen Echo Show 8, from 2019. As the name suggests, the marquee feature is an 8-inch HD touchscreen, but we also appreciated the decent sound and camera quality, along with the inclusion of a physical privacy shutter that covers the camera lens when you aren’t using it. Originally priced at $130, the first-gen Echo Show 8 is available now for just $55, which is half of what Amazon usually asks for it these days. That’s an outstanding value for an Editors’ Choice-winning smart display.

So what are you missing by going with the first-gen Echo Show 8 instead of the second-gen follow-up? Not much, honestly. Along with a faster processor, the primary upgrade with last year’s second-gen Echo Show 8 is a much-higher megapixel camera that Amazon uses to artificially pan and zoom to follow you within the frame if you’re moving around during a video call. It’s neat, but it’s not a must-have. Same goes for the second-gen display’s built-in Zigbee radio for connecting lights and locks

Disney heroines tend to have a certain body type, small and slender, which is why a short film called Reflect is gaining attention for featuring a plus-size lead overcoming body image issues.

The short, which was released in September as part of a series of experimental short films called Short Circuit, stars ballerina Bianca, who goes on a fantasy journey through a shattered mirror in her ballet studio when classmates arrive and she starts feeling self-conscious about how she looks. The world she enters threatens to ruin the good time she was having dancing on her own, until she composes herself and keeps on dancing.

Reflect’s director Hillary Bradfield, speaking in an interview at the start of the short, said the idea came for the film came from her own body positivity philosophy. While she usually feels body positive in principle, on a personal level it can be harder to maintain self-acceptance.

“When people watch the short, I hope they can feel more positively about themselves and how they look and feel OK about the tough parts of the journey,” Bradfield said. According to IMDB, Bradfield has worked on Disney movies like Encanto and Frozen 2. The Disney Plus page describes Short Circuit as being a program where anyone in the studio can

Pokemon Go’s final Spotlight Hour event of October was set to feature the surprise debut of a new Pokemonbut a newly discovered bug has scuppered those plans.

As players in other regions discovered on Tuesday, the dark-type Pokemon Zorua briefly appeared in Pokemon Go for the first time during the game’s Shuppet Spotlight Hour event. The new fox Pokemon would disguise itself as the player’s buddy Pokemon, but this has caused issues within the game.

“Trainers, we are aware of a bug where Zorua, a Pokemon with a planned surprise encounter during October 25th’s Shuppet Spotlight Hour, retains stats such as the height, CP, and attacks of the Pokemon it originally took on the form of,” game developer Niantic tweeted.

As a result of this bug, Zorua’s debut has been pulled from other regions. The Shuppet Spotlight Hour event will continue as originally scheduled, but without the chance to get Zorua.

There’s no word yet on when Zorua will appear again in Pokemon Go, but the game is in the midst of its annual Halloween eventswhich has introduced Mega Banette along with shiny versions of Noibat and Galarian Yamask. The second part of the Halloween event kicks off Oct. 27 and adds new costumed versions of several older Pokemon, including Vulpix,

Crypto entities ranging from major exchanges to small projects are on the road to state regulation. Whether it comes through the Securities and Exchange Commission or the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, many actors in the space are looking for concrete future guidance on how to build compliant businesses in an emerging sector while navigating rules built for traditional finance.

And, while crypto founders and investors know regulation is inevitable, they’re also looking to find the sweetest deal possible as they try to influence policymakers. It’s a challenging balance — enough regulation to protect retail investors from a hostile environment but not so much that it stifles the crypto sector’s growth and future innovation in the space.

This regulatory tug-of-war is just one reason why we’re thrilled that Katherine Dowling, general counsel and chief compliance officer at Bitwise Asset Management; Sarah Shtylman, partner at Perkins Coie; and Justin Slaughter, policy director at Paradigm, will join us for a session called, “Is Crypto Regulation Ready” at TC Sessions: Crypto in Miami on November 17.

We’ll discuss whether or not there’s been an increase in institutional adoption and how the regulatory framework might impact adoption going forward. Given the frustration over the lack of clarity in regulatory guidance, we’ll ask Dowling, Shtylman and Slaughter how legal crypto firms and counsels advise clients to navigate the present landscape while still operating in a compliant way.

Dowling brings a unique perspective to the table, having experience working both in private equity firms and as a