Christina Applegate has been battling what she thought was multiple sclerosis since her diagnosis back in 2021. Now, she found out that she was misdiagnosed; she does not have MS, and whatever has been plaguing her remains a mystery. At first, that sounds like a horrible bit of doctoring by the medical professionals she’s been working with, but MS is a tricky thing to diagnose.

To be clear, it’s not like she’s been magically cured overnight just because she knows she doesn’t have MS. As she explained on her podcast “MeSsy,” she’s “back at square one” with the same debilitating health issues and no clue what’s causing it.

The fundamental issue with diagnosing MS is that no single, all-encompassing test exists. Doctors must follow a high-stakes neurological process of elimination. The autoimmune disease causes the body to attack its own nerve linings, which results in brain lesions, mobility loss, severe pain, blurred vision, numbness and tingling, bladder and bowel issues, muscle spasms; the list goes on and on… and just so happens to line up with a laundry list of other conditions including neuropathy and a variety of spinal issues.

To make things even trickier, many of these alternative ailments show up the same way on MRI: as a series of white spots.

Christina Applegate Says She Was Misdiagnosed With MS After Five Years of Treatment

Research has shown how easy it is to misdiagnose MS. A 2019 study found that about 18 percent of patients who were referred to specialist centers with an MS diagnosis didn’t actually have the disease at all. It wasn’t until 2024 that diagnostic guidelines began incorporating more advanced imaging techniques, such as searching for a “central vein sign,” a tiny blood vessel structure inside lesions that helps doctors differentiate MS from its lookalikes.

Women are statistically more likely to develop autoimmune conditions that are hard to diagnose, and that’s on top of the common and frustrating phenomenon of women having their physical symptoms brushed off as imagined, even by trained medical professionals. Without a single, unifying, definitive test to officially label someone as having MS, people like Applegate may find themselves spending years battling an illness it turns out they don’t even have.

The post Christina Applegate Doesn’t Have Multiple Sclerosis After All, and Doctors Still Don’t Know What’s Wrong appeared first on VICE.

It remains to be seen if people really want to watch vertical content on horizontal TV screens, but many filmmakers and creators were confident that their latest projects would play well at Alza - New York City's first microdrama film festival. Founded by former Tribeca Festival chief operating officer Pete Torres, Alza, which took place October 16th through 18th, was billed as a showcase for the "the creativity, innovation, and growing cultural impact of stories made for the vertical screen." The festival featured a selection of microdrama and film premieres as well as industry-focused panels with executives who all seemed to genuinely beli …

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Sources say more cuts could follow as the company looks to improve its finances.

Despite Meta saying it would stop creating new content for Supernatural, the beloved fitness VR game is back after spinning off to go its own way and is relaunching with an Early Access preview in the Meta Horizon Store. Thousands of "remastered" workouts and some new ones are available in the new app starting today, but more are on the way. As previously announced, the newly independent app also costs more, going from $9.99 per month to $20 per month or $200 per year.

Starting next week, Supernatural will get new workouts every week. The game's developers also write, "More back-catalog favorites will return in the weeks and months ahead, w …

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Apple is officially launching a rebrand of Apple Music. Following the appearance of a redesigned wordmark in a video and an updated app icon in an iOS 27.2 beta, Apple introduced the new "identity" for Apple Music today. There's a new logo, the updated wordmark, and a new sound composed by British producer Fred Again and Nest Acoustics.

In a video, Apple says that for the rebrand, the company "wanted sound to create the visuals," showing the music note logo and the wordmark underwater and how that water responded to sound. It's a pretty cool video, honestly, and I like seeing how the water morphs the logo and wordmark. The video is also one …

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Serato DJ for iOS is finally bringing the company's pro-level DJ suite to the iPhone and iPad. Until now, the company had only dipped its toes into mobile software, with apps like Pyro that basically just added some autofades between songs in a playlist. This is the first time most of the features of its flagship DJ app are available on a mobile device, even though competitors like Rekordbox and Algoriddim have had proper mobile DJ apps for some time.

If you're a DJ used to Serato on a laptop, the workflow should feel instantly familiar. You can even transfer your library directly from Serato DJ 5.0 on your laptop to your iOS device either …

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Spotify announced Wednesday the launch of its next-generation, fully native in-car app, built directly on Google's Android Automotive operating system. The standalone app, which is launching today in select Audi models, runs directly on the vehicle's infotainment hardware - eliminating the need for phone tethering, Bluetooth connections, or aux cables.

It's the clearest sign yet that Spotify is ready to move beyond Apple CarPlay and Android, popular phone projection systems that currently dominate the way most people consume media in their cars. And with 34 percent of Spotify's monthly active users and 77 percent of Premium subscribers stre …

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Netflix is making monetization a top priority amid reports of falling viewing time. As part of its third-quarter earnings report on Tuesday, Netflix lists improvements to monetization as one of its main focuses going forward, alongside efforts to boost entertainment value and leverage new technology.

The streaming giant doesn't say exactly how it plans to improve its monetization, but the company notes that these goals will help Netflix "create member value that lets us occasionally raise prices, and increase advertiser demand." Netflix also highlighted plans to push further into original titles, live events, and third-party programming as …

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After announcing plans to introduce its own streaming service last month, JustWatch, a popular guide and search engine for finding things to watch on existing platforms like Disney Plus and Netflix, launched JustWatch TV today. The new streaming service offers an ad-supported free subscription, an ad-free paid subscription, and movie rentals with content from 30 global partners.

The streaming service is accessible through JustWatch's existing mobile apps and its website and is currently available in 12 markets including the US, Canada, France, Italy, Australia, and the UK. Content providers include Bleecker Street, Cineverse, Fremantle, New …

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Arturia is adding to its Freak line of proudly weird digital synths with the MiniFreak 49. Under the hood, it's almost identical to the current MiniFreak, but it adds a number of more professional features and some interface improvements.

The most noticeable change is that, rather than the MiniFreak's 37 minikeys or the MicroFreak's 25 "key" touchplate, the MiniFreak 49 has (as you may have guessed) 49 full-sized, semi-weighted keys. Though it's somewhat disappointing that they feature only mono aftertouch instead of polyphonic aftertouch. It also trades the touchstrips of the other Freak instruments for proper aluminum pitch and mod wheel …

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JustWatch, the popular streaming search guide used by 50 million people, is launching its own streaming service, offering free, ad-supported movies and shows alongside a $3.99-per-month ad-free tier and movie rentals.

Toward the end of 1982’s Poltergeist, Diane Freeling (as portrayed by JoBeth Williams) slips and falls into an unfinished swimming pool, where she’s greeted by the skeletal remains of the people who were buried beneath her house:

Williams didn’t learn until after she filmed that scene that those were real human skeletons she was interacting with. As the actress later found out, it’s cheaper to rent the genuine article than to make fakes. 

And this wasn’t an isolated incident, either. Something similar happened with George A. Romero’s Dawn of the Dead a few years earlier—albeit accidentally. Makeup artist Tom Savini brought what he thought was a prop skeleton to the set and threw it into the background of a scene without a second thought. The bones were eventually sold to a store owner who discovered that they were the remains of a woman who’d been dead for at least a century.

But according to Craig Reardon, who worked on Poltergeist, it wasn’t exactly uncommon for filmmakers to intentionally utilize authentic skeletons as he did. An early example of this can be seen in the 1931 James Whale version of Frankenstein, when Fritz (Dwight Frye) is sent to steal a brain from a local university:

Oh yeah, and that goofy-looking pile of bones that pops up out of the acid vat at the end of House on Haunted Hill? Goofy-looking, sure, but very much real:

Even Mrs. Bates’s skull from Psycho was borrowed from a medical supply company. And that’s straight from the mouth of the guy who helped glue fake hair onto it: Jerry “Beaver” Mathers of Leave It to Beaver fame, of all people:

Suddenly old horror movies don’t seem so cheesy anymore, eh?

The post 5 Classic Horror Movies That Used Real Human Skeletons Instead of Props appeared first on VICE.

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Last week over 200 packages of graded trading cards being shipped back to their owners were stolen from a FedEx truck parked outside the headquarters of Professional Sports Authenticator (PSA) in Santa Ana, California, according to a report by The Athletic. PSA is one of the largest third-party sports and hobby card grading companies in the world and it reported to the Santa Ana Police Department that the majority of the stolen packages had an approximate value of over $963,000, but that amount could further increase as PSA continues the process of confirming exactly which cards included in the shipment were taken.

In a statement shared to …

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Spotify says it has removed more than 50 million songs considered AI-generated slop or spam from user recommendations over the past year. That's according to an announcement on Tuesday that says Spotify has also made changes to its recommendation system to highlight more music made by human artists.

"Our editors hold the same standard and don't program content identified as slop or spam," Spotify says. "Since we made these changes, we've seen a marked decrease in listener concerns about this content showing up in recommendations."

Though Spotify has stopped short of mandating labels on all AI tracks, it launched an "AI Persona" badge for …

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Wii Sports holds an important place in Nintendo's history. It's the best-selling piece of software the company has ever made, one that permeated culture in surprising ways, and its success helped rejuvenate Nintendo after a period of steady decline. It also kicked off one of the company's most important and unassuming franchises. While subsequent sports titles from Nintendo never sold quite as well as the original Wii Sports, they've become a fixture for each new console, much like a new Mario Kart or Pokémon. And now the Switch 2 has its own version, Nintendo Switch Sports Resort, and it's the best so far.

You'd be forgiven for not realizi …

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Final Fantasy is a lot different than it used to be. While many of the early Final Fantasy titles look and play similarly to each other, the series has since grown to encompass blockbuster games like Final Fantasy XVI and the gargantuan Final Fantasy VII Remake trilogy, which don't play much like the classics. But there's still an audience for retro RPGs and old-school Final Fantasy games, especially thanks to the HD-2D style that mixes gorgeous pixel art with detailed 3D graphics to great effect. Square Enix has made a bunch of HD-2D games already, like the remakes of early Dragon Quest titles, but this week, it's launching the first HD-2D …

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Spotify is enabling podcast creators to earn more money through the platform by providing their fans with a way to pay to access exclusive content. First announced in May, the new Memberships subscription feature is starting to roll out in 34 regions today, allowing podcasters to offer perks including additional content, early access, bonus episodes, and reduced ads behind a paywall.

Users can find Memberships on a podcast's Spotify page, with the ability to subscribe, pay, and access the exclusive benefits "in just a few taps," according to Spotify. Podcast creators can set their pricing options and bundle benefits across multiple subscrip …

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Spotify's new paid memberships let podcasters offer fans exclusive perks, including ad-free listening, early access, and bonus content, while keeping 90% of the revenue.

Richard Riehle, best known for his show-stealing role as Tom Smykowski in Office Space, has died. He was 78 years old.

As reported by multiple outlets, those close to Riehle confirmed he died on October 15 of natural causes.

Though his answer to the question: “What would you say…you do here?” is perhaps the most quotable of his career, Richard Riehle was a renowned character actor, appearing in hundreds of movies and TV shows over the course of nearly 50 years. Additionally, he performed twice on Broadway, first in Execution of Justice (1986) and then The Iceman Cometh (1999).

No matter your television preferences, you’ve likely seen Riehle in a favorite show. He appeared in everything from NCIS to Modern Family to The West Wing.

The role to which he returned most, however, was none other than Santa Claus. Richard Riehle played jolly old Saint Nick a total of eight times over the course of his career, including five movies, two TV shows, and a straight to TV film.

Riehle is survived by his wife, Jane Latham, and their four children.

The post ‘Office Space’ Star Richard Riehle Dies at 78 appeared first on VICE.

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Fed up with ads, tracking, and sluggish interfaces, some smart TV owners are turning to AI agents to strip away bloatware and take back control of their TVs.