Welcome to The Manual Redesign

By Cator Sparks Published December 21, 2019

Dear Manual Men,

You may have noticed a few changes around The Manual lately—and for good reason. We listened to our readers’ comments and opinions and have used that feedback as the basis for our entirely redesigned site. We hope you like the fresh, modern look of the page that we feel reflects the style and aesthetic of a modern man living, working, and playing in this hectic 21^st century.

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We’ve lightened the color scheme to bring you a brighter and more user-friendly experience, drawing attention to each article with a clear, image and a catchy title. As a result, we hope your browsing on The Manual becomes one of the easiest and favorite parts of your day.

Beyond our crisp new look, we’ve also done some refiguring under the hood which should make your reading and perusing experience simpler, easier, and much more visually appealing. We’re piggybacking on our brother site, Digital Trends’ platform and we couldn’t be happier.

All the features you see on Digital Trends will eventually find their way to The Manual, including interactivity and fully-formed gallery posts, so we can do away with the long scroll. We hope this reconfiguration will also help reduce loading speed time, letting you get to the information you want to read faster and more efficiently.

We also listened to your feedback about content and have made the editorial decision to both increase our content in general and improve the quality of the content we produce. Expect more interviews, how-to’s, and longform pieces in the coming weeks and months. We will still produce our regular features such as New Music Monday, Feel-Good Fridays, and fashion and product round-ups, but we thought it might be fun to try out the whole journalism thing. Let us know how we are doing by emailed us at support@themanual.com.

-Cator Sparks
Editor-in-Chief

P.S.- We just posted our 5,000th post!

Former Digital Trends Contributor

Cator Sparks was the Editor-in-Chief of The Manual from its launch in 2012 until 2018. Previously, Cator was covering…

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The best sci-fi shows streaming right now

From Lost to The Twilight Zone, these are the best sci-fi shows ever made

The cast of Lost.

Sci-fi television has been around since the earliest days of the medium, and it's evolved along with the rest of television. In every era, though, there have been great sci-fi shows that remind us of how well the genre can fit on television.

Great science fiction can reflect on the world we know, even as it expands our understanding of what's possible. Regardless of exactly what these shows are about, though, each of them tells their story in gripping fashion, taking full advantage of what TV is capable of.

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‘The Brutalist’ director Brady Corbet says he’s made no money promoting the film

The director said that he makes more directing commercials than he does making movies.

Adrien Brody in The Brutalist

It can be wonderful to get nominated for a bunch of awards, but The Brutalist director Brady Corbet said that it's not exactly a profitable one. In an interview on WTF with Marc Maron, Corbet said that he hadn't actually made any money promoting the movie.

“This is the first time I’ve made any money in years,” Corbet said, saying that his first real paycheck in a long time came from directing three advertisements in Portugal. “Both my partner and I made zero dollars on the last two films we made. Yes, actually zero. So we had to just live off of a paycheck from three years ago and obviously, the timing during an awards campaign and travel every two or three days was less than ideal, but it was an opportunity that landed in my lap, and I jumped at it.”

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John Malkovich said that he rejected Marvel movies prior to ‘Fantastic Four’ over low pay

He explained that Marvel movies took a lot of time, and he wanted to be paid accordingly.

John Malkovich in Fantastic Four

Over the course of its 15 years of existence, Marvel has lured a number of surprising actors into its orbit. We live in a world where Angelina Jolie and Harry Styles have both appeared in Marvel projects (actually the same one).

John Malkovich was one of the last Marvel holdouts, but that's changing with The Fantastic Four: First Steps. In an interview with GQ, Malkovich explained that he had been approached to do Marvel projects in the past, but had always turned them down.
“The reason I didn’t do them had nothing to do with any artistic considerations whatsoever,” Malkovich explained. “I didn’t like the deals they made, at all.”
He explained that he simply wanted more money to work through the conditions required to make a movie on this scale.
“These films are quite grueling to make…. If you’re going to hang from a crane in front of a green screen for six months, pay me. You don’t want to pay me, it’s cool, but then I don’t want to do it, because I’d rather be onstage, or be directing a play, or doing something else," he continued.
Malkovich is, perhaps unsurprisingly, playing villain Ivan Kragoff, also known as Red Ghost in the film. He explained that working on the movie was actually like stage work in some respects. "It’s not that dissimilar to doing theater,” he said, “You imagine a bunch of stuff that isn’t there and do your little play.”