Blogroll

Motorola makes great phones like the Razr Fold, but its U.S. presence is... bleak. Beyond foldables, you're limited to value-for-money budget Android phones and just one current mid-tier model, the Edge. There's not much variety in conventional phones, and no option at all if you want a flagship.

If you've used Windows for a long time, you probably remember the "My Computer" icon sitting on your desktop, ready to give you access to your drives and folders. These days, Windows calls it "This PC," but Windows 11 doesn't put the icon on your desktop by default. If you want that familiar icon back, you can add it in a few clicks.

It's no secret that Milwaukee makes some of the best power tools on the market, but certain models are far more popular than others. It's not just about the price tag, either, as there are specific combo kits or standalone tools that deliver incredible power, value, and usefulness.

If you've questioned why Microsoft has insisted on branding computers as Copilot+ PCs, you're not alone. Microsoft and Qualcomm have acknowledged that they and their PC partners are dropping the label from their systems.

You can already ask Spotify’s AI to make you a playlist. But Meta’s new personal agent, Muse, wants to know what you’re doing with it. An example? Tell Muse about an upcoming road trip, and it can make a playlist inspired by your destination — then start playing it when it’s time to leave.

That’s the idea behind Spotify’s connection to Muse. In a blog post Wednesday, the company said: "Your agent can play music on Spotify, save songs to your Library, build playlists, help you find a book or podcast." You just have to link your Spotify account and ask.

Credit: Screenshot/Spotify Newsroom

And the road trip is only one example. Muse can pick up the podcast you left unfinished this morning, put your dinner playlist on a connected kitchen speaker, or find new songs and add them to a playlist. It can also turn your notes and daily briefings into a Personal Podcast saved to your Spotify Library. If you run every morning at 7 a.m., you can even ask it to start your workout playlist right on schedule.

SEE ALSO: 10 ways to use Meta's Muse AI app, from flight credits to outfit ideas

Spotify is just one of several services Muse can work with. The agent also connects with Ticketmaster to help you find live events and Plaid to link your financial accounts. That’s the bigger vision behind Muse: You tell the agent what you’re planning once, and it handles everything across all the services you need—no need for you to jump between apps or platforms.

All AI agents carry some security risks, including Meta Muse AI, so be thoughtful before turning over control of apps, devices, and financial information.

Doesn’t Spotify already have AI for this?

Yes, and quite a bit of it. Prompted Playlist makes a mix from a written request, while Talk to Spotify lets eligible Premium users speak or type to choose what plays inside the Spotify app. Spotify also expanded Taste Profile in the U.S. this week, giving eligible Premium users a way to tell the app more about what they want in their recommendations.

SEE ALSO: Spotify launches AI chatbot for music and listening history

Spotify also already works with ChatGPT, where you can ask for recommendations without opening the music app. Muse goes a step further by coordinating playback with your schedule. If it gets the timing and the music right, you might forget you ever had to make a playlist for the commute. If it gets either wrong, at least you still know where the play button is...for now.

Netflix's collection of movies spans years and genres, and I always find myself digging through its catalog for interesting additions to my watch list. This time around, I found three award-winning, widely acclaimed movies that are worth every second.

For Swifties, a new Taylor Swift song is rarely just a new song. It’s more of an invitation to revisit old interviews, scan the lyrics for familiar details, and ask who might have been in the room — or at least in her life — when she wrote it.

"Patient Zero," released Friday, Sept. 25, has given fans a fresh case. The song imagines a woman hearing from someone who is now dating her ex, and one theory keeps coming up: Could Swift be singing about Sophie Turner and Joe Jonas?

As Mashable covered earlier this week, fans were decoding clues before they even knew what Swift was announcing. She swapped the O’s in her Instagram bio for zeroes, put a countdown on her website, and gave everyone another reason to scrutinize her Emmys appearance. On Sept. 22, she revealed "Patient Zero." A day later, she announced that it was one of four new songs on The Life of a Showgirl: The Encore, an expanded version of her 2025 album.

That announcement got a mixed reaction from fans: Some were thrilled to get more music, while others weren’t eager for an encore of an album they hadn’t loved the first time around. The three other new songs are "Cleveland!," "Pink Clouding," and "Babylon." Swift said she wrote them during a trip to Sweden with Max Martin and Shellback, her collaborators on The Life of a Showgirl, 1989, and Reputation.

Now that the song is out, Swift has explained the conversation that gave her the idea for it. In comments shared with Capital FM, she said:

"I was hanging out with a bunch of friends, and one of my friends told us that she had been reached out to by the new girlfriend of an ex of hers, asking for guidance on if she had had the same experiences with this guy that this new girlfriend was having."

But Swifties have looked deeper, as they do, and some think they know which ex — and which woman — might be behind the song.

Why fans think it’s about Sophie Turner and Joe Jonas

The song begins with Swift’s narrator answering a call, saying "I’ve been expecting your call." She continues, singing,

"If you wanna party with somebody who might know, About the devil on his shoulder under his halo, When the toxins take their hold, you'd rather die than let it go, But if you're sick of him, I got you, I was patient zero."

For some fans, Swift’s history with Sophie Turner and Joe Jonas makes them an obvious possibility. Swift briefly dated Jonas in 2008 and later said their breakup inspired "Forever & Always." Fans also widely linked her Fearless vault track "Mr. Perfectly Fine" to Jonas when it came out in 2021. Turner, who was married to him at the time, shared that song on Instagram with the review: "It’s not NOT a bop."

Then, in 2023, after Jonas filed for divorce from Turner, Swift and Turner were spotted having dinner together. Turner later told British Vogue that she’d reached out to Swift while looking for a place to stay in New York, and Swift offered her one of her homes for free. Turner called Swift "an absolute hero" during that period.

You can see why fans connected those dots. In the r/TaylorSwift discussion thread, one listener wrote, "I’m firmly in the camp that this is Sophie Turner and Joe Jonas inspired." Another said, "Sophie and Joe?!?," but added that it could also be a fictional story informed by several of Swift’s experiences.

Other fans aren’t convinced there’s one couple to identify. "I think it has references to more than one of her exes," one commenter wrote, reading the song more generally as an offer of support to someone dealing with a difficult relationship.

Of course, the theory remains unconfirmed. Swift said the song began with a friend hearing from an ex’s new girlfriend. The publicly known Swift–Turner story is different, since Turner reached out to Swift for help after her marriage ended. Maybe their history found its way into the song anyway, but for now, the rest of us are basically in that group of friends, comparing notes and trying to figure out who the call was about.

When DLSS 5 first launched, the general reaction was lukewarm at best and highly polarized—critics complained that it slopified every game's art direction and left everything looking conspicuously generic. Of course, that didn't stop modders from attempting to get DLSS 5 running on every single game ever released, even ones that definitely shouldn't support it.

At his UN General Assembly address this week, President Donald Trump declared that the U.S. government will now refer to artificial intelligence as "Super Intelligence," because, in his framing, the word "artificial" makes the tech sound fake.

But while "Super Intelligence" may not sound fake, it is a term that carries its own baggage, and potentially a misleading one. 

"Super" is among the most thoroughly saturated prefixes in the English language, loaded with decades of pop-culture pizzazz and associations with everything from superheroes and superpowers to Super Mario and Super Bowl Sunday. Far from making the technology sound more glitzy, the new "super" terminology arguably makes it sound like something from a lyric sheet or a comic book.

Think about every place "super" shows up in culture. Rick James wasn’t describing a software engineer in “Super Freak”; he was describing a cartoon of desire. Curtis Mayfield’s Super Fly is a morality tale about the cost of fantasy, not how fast AI can disprove a math problem.

SEE ALSO: Have AI apocalypse warnings reached critical mass?

Oasis titled a song "Champagne Supernova" precisely because a supernova is a star’s spectacular, final, self-annihilating collapse; gorgeous, and also the end of everything. But "Supernova" by aespa is anything but final, using a dying star’s explosion as a metaphor for personal awakening, power, and self-confidence.

Now, does anyone else find it perplexing to stick "super" in front of intelligence and make all of the previous issues that were associated with the now super-saturated "Artificial Intelligence" go away?

In fact, if we are going to look for a version of "super" that actually fits the reality of today’s AI, we shouldn’t look at Super Bowls, Superman, superstars, or supernovas. We should look at physics. In quantum mechanics, a superposition is a state of utter, chaotic contradiction where a particle is trapped being two opposing things at the exact same time.

That is the exact "super" state AI is in right now. It is trapped in a permanent identity crisis, marketed by some as a flawless savior while actively functioning as an economic threat, and even a threat to humanity, among other threats that ain’t so super. 

It is a tech infrastructure that leaves much of the general public entirely flummoxed by the gap between the corporate hype and the reality of job loss, or worse, human life.

There is absolutely nothing "super" about data centers that consume millions of gallons of water daily and burn through enough electricity to threaten local power grids just to generate content that even AI admits is sometimes faulty, i.e., "ChatGPT can make mistakes. Check important info."

SEE ALSO: An OpenAI agent hacked the Australian government

Nor is it "super" that these models were built by scraping the creative works of human artists without their consent, credit, or compensation. Although, personally, it might be super if AI took this column and disseminated it around the world. 

It’s a technology, quite frankly, that relies on resource extraction and copyright theft, all wrapped up in a shiny new label, again, to some.

While we argue over terminology, AI is already damaging livelihoods. Automating away entry-level jobs just to protect quarterly earnings isn’t superhero behavior. Similarly, Superman doesn’t save the world and then lay off the journalists at Daily Planet.

The day after Trump”s UN intelligence speech, AI leaders held a session at the UN, where again, doomsday was repeated. That, and the Australian prime minister announced that AI had hacked its government websites.

Compare that to what "super" has always implied.

Let’s face it: "Artificial Intelligence" isn’t a super term, but at least it’s honest. It told you, upfront, that the intelligence in question was manufactured. In other words, it’s not pure cane sugar, but rather a synthesized substitute engineered to mimic something real.

Having said that, perhaps it should be called Splenda Intelligence? 

This article represents the opinions of the writer.

John Casey is a columnist at Raw Story, the Advocate, Daily Beast, and Outsports. He's also the author of Love: The Heroic Stories of Marriage Equality.

A new TikTok trending audio has people humorously complaining about others "blockin' the street" and preventing them from getting where they need to go.

The audio originated in Family Guy Season 15 Episode 18, "The Peter Principal," which first aired in 2017. In this episode, humanoid dog Brian recalls being hindered by a marching band while attempting to deliver pizza for his previous job. A cutaway gag shows the sizable band singing that they are "blockin' the street" as they gradually make their way down a long road, obstructing Brian's path despite his gripes about needing to deliver the pizza in under 30 minutes.

Nearly a decade later, TikTok users are using the earworm to illustrate the frustration of being physically hindered from getting to their destination, typically by others thoughtlessly monopolizing a thoroughfare. In one example viewed 2.5 million times, @karoline.io used the song to convey "how it feels living in a tourist town" when visitors block the road while she's driving. Over 11,000 TikTok videos have used the audio, featuring everything from traffic jams, to concert crowds, and even some marching band culprits joining in, with sentiments ranging from irritation to good-natured ribbing.

This Tweet is currently unavailable. It might be loading or has been removed. This Tweet is currently unavailable. It might be loading or has been removed. This Tweet is currently unavailable. It might be loading or has been removed.

Pet owners have used the audio to great effect, particularly to score clips of cats becoming tripping hazards at feeding time. A video by @ambiedpambied that shows her three cats gathering at her feet has racked up 2.8 million views, while @kopikat’s amusing animation of a similar dilemma has gained 1.3 million.

This Tweet is currently unavailable. It might be loading or has been removed. This Tweet is currently unavailable. It might be loading or has been removed.

Other animals have also inspired use of the song, with @bays.irishcream's video of a herd of sheep in a road earning 1.1 million views, and @caitlindoes' clip of a cyclist with a huge pack of dogs gaining 4.1 million views. But even a single pet can block the proverbial street, with 2.6 million views on @soph86482's "big dog with no spatial awareness," 1.2 million on @fatherbattisto's "one fat old dog," and 2 million on @toria_56's extremely underfoot cat. 

The song is further being used to caption film and television scenes in which groups of people stand — or dance — in a street. While such scenes make sense and can even be dramatic in context, adding this commentary invites viewers to consider how ridiculous and unnecessary such posturing would seem to outsiders, as well as how annoying it would be to people trying to go about their day.

In one edit viewed 2.3 million times, @poogyus set the song to sped-up footage of BTS' crosswalk concert, filmed for The Late Late Show with James Corden in 2021. In the segment, the K-pop group ran out during red traffic lights to quickly perform songs including "Butter" in an L.A. street.

This Tweet is currently unavailable. It might be loading or has been removed. This Tweet is currently unavailable. It might be loading or has been removed. This Tweet is currently unavailable. It might be loading or has been removed. This Tweet is currently unavailable. It might be loading or has been removed. This Tweet is currently unavailable. It might be loading or has been removed.

While primarily applied to physical obstacles, Family Guy's "blockin' the street" song has also been used to illustrate grievances such as encountering obstacles while working or having certain characters insistently impose themselves in a book. Considering the catchy nature of the tune and the abundance of hindrances we all encounter every day, there seems to be plenty of fuel for this trend.

This Tweet is currently unavailable. It might be loading or has been removed. This Tweet is currently unavailable. It might be loading or has been removed. This Tweet is currently unavailable. It might be loading or has been removed.

I've tried them all. Silicone, metal, and everything in between. Official and unofficial. And yet, I keep coming back to one specific kind of band with every smartwatch I've owned.

October Prime Day MacBook deals at a glance Best MacBook Air Deal Apple MacBook Air, 13-inch (M5, 24GB RAM, 1TB SSD) $1,649 (save $150) Get Deal Best MacBook Pro Deal Apple MacBook Pro, 16-inch (M5 Max, 36GB RAM, 2TB SSD) $3,499 (save $600) Get Deal

Genuinely good MacBook deals have been harder to come by in the wake of Apple's summer price hikes. But I have a feeling that will change during Prime Big Deal Days, Amazon's 48-hour fall savings event for Prime members on Oct. 6 and 7.

"October Prime Day," as the sale is often called, serves as Amazon's unofficial kickoff for the holiday shopping season. Last year, it brought us $200 discounts on the MacBook Air and savings of up to $400 on select MacBook Pros — the same sorts of deals we later saw on Black Friday 2025. If Amazon replicated those offers next month, we'd be seeing our lowest MacBook prices since Apple's markups took effect.

In the weeks leading up to Prime Big Deal Days, most MacBooks are already on sale (including the budget MacBook Neo, if only by $10). I wouldn't add most of them to your cart just yet, since they'll probably get bigger discounts once the sale starts. That said, we've gathered up all of the best early Prime Day MacBook deals for you.

The best October Prime Day deals on the MacBook Air (so far) Opens in a new window Credit: M5 MacBook Air in midnight black Apple MacBook Air, 13-inch (M5, 24GB RAM, 1TB SSD) $1,649 at Amazon
$1,799 Save $150   Get Deal Opens in a new window Credit: Apple Apple MacBook Air, 13-inch (M5, 24GB RAM, 1TB SSD) $1,449 at Amazon
$1,599 Save $150   Get Deal

If you need a new Apple laptop, and you need it now, you can save $150 on the new generation of M5 MacBook Airs at Amazon (Walmart is matching Amazon on select models and colors). If you can hold off, we do expect these MacBooks to get a $200 discount when the Prime Big Deal Days sale begins Oct. 6. Students and teachers can also check the Apple Store for education discounts.

The newest M5-powered MacBook is a Mashable Choice product, with one of the highest ratings of any product we've tested this year. In his review, Mashable's tech editor found that the M5 chip is ridiculously powerful (probably more powerful than the average Air customer really needs). The new MacBooks also have a fantastic display, a great-sounding speaker system, Touch ID, and the new Center Stage webcam.

More MacBook Air deals

• Apple MacBook Air, 13-inch (M5, 16GB RAM, 512GB SSD) — $1,254 $1,299 (save $45)

• Apple MacBook Air, 13-inch (M5, 16GB RAM, 1TB SSD) — $1,449 $1,599 (save $150)

• Apple MacBook Air, 13-inch (M5, 24GB RAM, 1TB SSD) — $1,649 $1,799 (save $150)

• Apple MacBook Air, 15-inch (M5, 16GB RAM, 512GB SSD) — $1,424.54 $1,499 (save $74.46)

• Apple MacBook Air, 15-inch (M5, 16GB RAM, 1TB SSD) — $1,727 $1,799 (save $72)

• Apple MacBook Air, 15-inch (M5, 24GB RAM, 1TB SSD) — $1,922 $1,999 (save $77)

The best October Prime Day MacBook Pro deals Opens in a new window Credit: Apple Apple MacBook Pro, 14-inch (M5 Max, 36GB RAM, 2TB SSD) $3,499
$4,099 Save $600   Get Deal Opens in a new window Credit: Apple Apple MacBook Pro, 16-inch (M5 Max, 36GB RAM, 2TB SSD) $3,799 at Amazon
$4,399 Save $600   Get Deal

So far, the best early Prime Day MacBook deals are all on Apple's Pro models, particularly the ones with the most processing power. The M5 Max chip is Apple's most powerful laptop CPU to date. It's designed to handle the ultra-demanding workloads of "pro users" like "3D animators, app developers, and AI researchers," according to a company press release.

Ahead of Prime Big Deal Days, you can save a whopping $600 on both sizes of the M5 Max-powered MacBook Pros with a hulking 36GB of RAM and 2TB of storage. The 14-inch model is marked down to $3,499 (normally $4,099), while the 16-inch one comes out to $3,799 (typically $4,399). It should be noted that both laptops originally cost $100 more at launch.

As mentioned earlier, Amazon's October Prime Day MacBook Pro deals usually max out at $400ish. With that in mind, I can't see these deals getting any better down the road.

More MacBook Pro deals

• Apple MacBook Pro, 14-inch (M5, 16GB RAM, 1TB SSD) — $1,849 $1,999 (save $150)

• Apple MacBook Pro, 14-inch (M5, 24GB RAM, 1TB SSD) — $2,072 $2,199 (save $127)

• Apple MacBook Pro, 14-inch (M5 Pro, 24GB RAM, 1TB SSD) — $2,354 $2,499 (save $145)

• Apple MacBook Pro, 14-inch (M5 Pro, 24GB RAM, 2TB SSD) — $2,818.99 $2,999 (save $180.01)

• Apple MacBook Pro, 14-inch (M5, 32GB RAM, 1TB SSD) — $2,258.99 $2,399 (save $140.01)

• Apple MacBook Pro, 16-inch (M5 Pro, 24GB RAM, 1TB SSD) — $2,799 $2,999 (save $200)

• Apple MacBook Pro, 16-inch (M5 Pro, 48GB RAM, 1TB SSD) — $3,367 $3,599 (save $232)

• Apple MacBook Pro, 16-inch (M5 Max, 48GB RAM, 2TB SSD) — $4,499 $4,999 (save $500)

MacBook Neo deals

• Apple MacBook Neo (A18 Pro, 8GB RAM, 256GB SSD) — $689 $699 (save $10)

• Apple MacBook Neo (A18 Pro, 8GB RAM, 512GB SSD) — $789.99 $799 (save $9.01)

Free, open-source software makes the world go round, but the open-source community also creates some of the best apps out there, many of which trump their paid alternatives. We recently shared five standout examples of free and open-source apps that hold their ground against their paid rivals, and today I'm sharing another batch of fantastic FOSS apps that are completely free and better than what you'd pay for.

I find it fascinating that Android Auto can be amazing for a long time, but then I suddenly notice something going subtly wrong. Maybe it's the sudden appearance of Gemini trying to get me to write songs with it while I drive. Or the cable comes loose a bunch of times, and I lose connection (I switched to Android Auto Wirelessbecause of this issue). Sometimes, it's a navigation issue. It can be hit-and-miss. Recently, I was using Android Auto and noticed some dips in audio quality. I looked into it and found an app that took care of the issue for me.

Windows 11 has long baked Bing into local search, and escaping it meant editing the registry. Version 26H2 finally adds a proper toggle. Here is what search looked like before, how much faster it feels now, and whether switching Bing off is worth it.

Tesla lawyers are in court, defending auto factory employees against accusations they used racist slurs, discriminated against employees of color in evaluations, and engaged in other anti-Black behavior that created an unsafe environment for workers.

The lawsuit, brought by the state of California on behalf of dozens of Black Tesla employees, was filed in 2022 and claims management at Tesla's flagship factory — located in Fremont, California — violated the state's Fair Employment and Housing Act by creating a hostile environment.

It's the first employee lawsuit against the electric vehicle company to go to trial through a state agency, reported the Guardian. Remarks began Monday.

SEE ALSO: Kids aren't learning to type anymore

Court documents include photographs of neo-Nazi imagery drawn on factory furniture and bathroom walls, as well as explicitly racist language etched into employee areas — including the phrase "go back to Africa" and the N-word.

Employees testified that supervisors referred to lynchings in conversations with Black workers, and the factory was often referred to as "slaveship," "the plantation," and "The Elon Slave Labor Association" ("TESLA"). One employee said they heard nearly 100 slurs in a single day.

In response, Tesla's legal team defended its employees and reportedly justified the use of racially-charged language.

"The state of California attacks the way many Black people greet each other," said Tesla's lead lawyer, Tyree Jones, in his initial remarks. "It’s offensive." Jones argued the N-word was a "term of respect and endearment," and provided examples of its use within the Black community that he argued wouldn't constitute its classification as a "racial slur."

In 2021, Tesla was ordered to pay $136.9 million to a former contractor who claimed the company ignored complaints of racist behavior by factory employees. A federal jury found Tesla guilty of enabling an unsafe work environment and negligently overseeing its staff.

In addition to explicitly racist behavior by employees, the latest lawsuit describes an allegedly "segregated" workplace in which Black workers were paid and promoted less, while being more frequently terminated. California is seeking financial damages and changes to Tesla's labor practices.

"These experiences cannot be dismissed as a few bad apples… hundreds of complaints to Tesla and [the Civil Rights Department] will show these experiences were not isolated," said California Civil Rights Department lawyer Brett Watson.

Picking a music-streaming service can invite a little peer pressure, especially since I pay for YouTube Music Premium. I get it. Spotify and Apple Music dominate these conversations. My friends who use Spotify give me a look that says they feel slightly sorry for me, while the Apple crowd assumes I’m just defaulting to whatever Google bundles into Android.

There are plenty of monsters in Zach Cregger's Resident Evil. But perhaps no enemy proves more formidable than the humble padlock.

Early in the movie, Bryan (Austin Abrams) is trying to escape a farm when he reaches a gate secured with a massive padlock stamped with a Diamond emblem. He's armed with a rifle, so the solution seems obvious enough: shoot the lock and move on. Except the bullets do nothing. So Bryan tries the next most logical solution and rams the gate with the farmer's truck. The gate wins.

Adding insult to injury, the key he needed was nearby the whole time, under the sun visor. He just didn't find it until after he'd totaled the truck.

SEE ALSO: Does 'Resident Evil' have a post-credit scene? Everything you need to know before watching.

It's the beginning of one of Resident Evil's funniest running jokes. Bryan keeps encountering padlocks as he makes his way through the movie, becoming increasingly exasperated every time another one prevents him from getting where he needs to go. Eventually, he snaps: "What is with all the fuckin' padlocks, man?"

Anyone who's spent enough time playing Resident Evil already knows the answer. It doesn't matter that you have a gun. It doesn't matter that you've spent the last several hours blasting through amalgamation monsters. If the game wants you to find a key, you're finding the damn key.

And Cregger knows exactly what he's doing.

Resident Evil understands the absurdity of video game logic Austin Abrams and Zach Cregger behind the scenes of Resident Evil. Credit: Sony Pictures

Cregger has been explicit that his Resident Evil isn't trying to recreate the plot of any particular game in Capcom's horror franchise. Instead, he's interested in recreating the experience of playing one. That means limited ammunition, healing items, increasingly powerful weapons, and, yes, repeatedly facing locked doors that prevent you from progressing until you find whatever key or keycard the game has decided you need.

"Some of them I wouldn't even think of as Easter eggs," Cregger told Steve Goldman of Rolling Stone when asked about the movie's references to the games. He specifically pointed to "padlocks and the search for keys and keycards" as something that's "really baked into playing the games," alongside healing items, ammunition, and weapon progression.

"All of that is like the DNA of the games that is in the movie," he said.

SEE ALSO: How 'The Last of Us' successfully translates the game's best mechanics to TV

That's an important distinction. Putting a green herb or typewriter somewhere in the background is an Easter egg. Making your protagonist desperately search for a key while standing in front of a lock he has already shot and unsuccessfully rammed with a truck is adapting a game mechanic. Because in a video game, that padlock isn't really a padlock. It's a progression system.

Bryan learns the rules of Resident Evil the hard way. Credit: Sony Pictures

Locked doors have been fundamental to Resident Evil since the beginning. Exploring the franchise's mansions, police stations, and villages frequently means discovering places you can't access yet, hunting down keys and other items, solving puzzles, and eventually backtracking once you have what you need. Resident Evil 2, for example, scatters suit-themed keys throughout the Raccoon City Police Department, with different doors requiring the Spade, Diamond, Club, or Heart Key.

The lock tells the player, "You can't go here yet." The missing key gives them a reason to explore somewhere else. So finding it doesn't just open a door; it opens another part of the game.

View on Threads

It makes perfect sense as game design. According to virtually every other form of logic, however, it is completely ridiculous. Your character can be carrying enough firepower to take down a mutated bioweapon, but a padlock might as well be indestructible. The player knows there's an obvious solution. The game knows there's an obvious solution. But that's not the solution you're supposed to use.

Cregger's movie makes that implicit agreement between player and game explicit by giving us a character who doesn't know the rules.

Bryan isn't Leon S. Kennedy. He's a medical courier who Cregger described to Rolling Stone as "more suited to sitting on the couch playing Resident Evil than surviving an actual Resident Evil experience." So when Bryan encounters a locked gate, he reacts like someone in the real world rather than as a player who knows he's in a survival horror game. He shoots it. When that doesn't work, he drives a truck into it.

Neither works, because that's not how Resident Evil works.

The padlock isn't just an Easter egg. It's gameplay. Unfortunately, bullets can't solve every problem. Credit: Sony Pictures

In an interview with Dread Central, Cregger acknowledged that some of the games' more elaborate puzzles wouldn't necessarily translate to a movie he wanted to keep moving at a breakneck pace. Instead, the padlocks offered a shorthand.

Bryan "does come up against padlocks throughout the movie, and he's got to try and navigate those," Cregger said. "So I'm kind of like tipping my hat to those sorts of things."

Resident Evil also finds other ways to recreate the rhythms of playing Resident Evil. During a Reddit AMA before the film's release, Cregger talked about making ammunition matter as Bryan gradually acquires more powerful weapons. "I love the resource management aspect of the games, and it was really important to me to bring that to the movie," he wrote.

That same attention to gameplay shows up everywhere, from healing items to cinematographer Dariusz Wolski's shifting camera perspectives. But the padlocks might be the funniest expression of it, precisely because they take something Resident Evil players have long accepted and make its absurdity impossible to ignore.

View on Threads

Cregger isn't just showing fans something they remember from Resident Evil. He's recreating the particular frustration of playing it.

In a 2025 Reddit thread about the series' conveniently indestructible obstacles, one player recalled encountering a door they couldn't open because its knob was broken. "Meanwhile, I have a shotgun and a grenade launcher in my arsenal," they wrote. Another joked about the absurdity of firing endless rockets at a wooden door only to eventually accept, "Damn, guess I need to go around."

A year earlier, another fan put the problem even more succinctly: "Half of Resident Evil would be skipped if everyone did a Barry and just shot the locks off the door." That's basically the joke Cregger has turned into a movie.

Video games depend on these little agreements between player and developer. A locked door isn't always just a locked door. It's an instruction, a puzzle. You don't spend the entire game asking why your heavily armed protagonist can't simply destroy it because you understand what it's actually telling you: You're not supposed to go there yet.

Put that logic into a live-action movie, though, and suddenly you have Bryan, a guy who looks at the arbitrary rules Resident Evil players have spent nearly 30 years accepting and asks the obvious question: Why can't I just shoot the lock?

That's the kind of thing video game adaptations don't always capture. It's easy enough to recreate the monsters, weapons, locations, and camera angles we recognize. It's harder to recreate the feeling of playing the game — wasting a bullet you desperately needed, finding a better weapon at exactly the right moment, or discovering yet another locked door.

Cregger gets that those little frustrations are part of Resident Evil, too.

Want more film and TV news and reviews delivered straight to your inbox? Sign up for Mashable’s Top Stories newsletter or get Mashable push alerts.

Google Fi is now trivially inexpensive, provided you take advantage of a rare deal. Google has a limited-time promotion that cuts 75% off plan prices for a year, but only if you meet certain conditions.

Modular 3D-printed models are designed with customization and future expansion in mind. By adding additional modules or printing just the parts you need, you can expand on a project in the future or make something that feels tailored to you.