With True Detective Season 4, writer and director Issa López isn’t shying away from The Thing comparisons. In fact, with the supernatural horror-tinged season of the crime anthology show, she’s embracing it.

“The Thing is a huge [inspiration], and I’m not shy about it,” López tells Inverse ahead of the show’s January premiere. “I’m super proud about it.”

López even plants an explicit reference to The Thing in the first episode of True Detective: Night Country. As Jodie Foster’s chief of police Liz Danvers inspects the Tsalal Arctic Research Station after all of its researchers mysteriously go missing, a copy of the 1982 John Carpenter horror classic is on a shelf behind her. In a handful of instances, López even re-creates shots from The Thing.

“There’s one shot of [Kali Reis’ character] Navarro that is absolutely the iconic shot of The Thing,” López says. “You cannot do anything that is a tense, tense survival whodunit with horror elements that doesn’t reference The Thing. I think that it’s one of the masterpieces of horror cinema.”

A whole lot of gaming hardware announcements were squeezed into 2023. Sony’s PlayStation Portal handheld, an updated Playstation 5, and multiple handheld PCs, to name a few. So CES 2024 finds the industry in a bit of a downswing.

While there’s always new gaming laptops and accessories, the big kids at the gaming table tend to use their own events to announce their own devices. Microsoft isn’t going to announce a new Xbox in Las Vegas. Don’t expect a Nintendo Switch 2, either.

That leaves the attention that is at the Consumer Electronics Show for the niche, weird, and decidedly enthusiast hardware. Giant screens, experimental sensory accessories, and the option for RGB lights just about everywhere. Luckily enough, CES 2024 still has all of those things in spades.