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Florence Priscilla (Lady Norman) on her scooter. c. 1916

Starz recently announced that the hotly-anticipated Season 3 premiere of Outlander will hit our screens in September — an agonizingly long wait, considering that we got our last glimpse of Claire (Caitriona Balfe) and Jamie (Sam Heughan) way back in July 2016.

But anything worth having is worth waiting for, and that's especially true of Outlander Season 3, which will explore that very theme, as Claire and Jamie must defy the odds and find a way to reunite after decades apart.  

Here's everything we know about Outlander Season 3 so far:

THE PLOT:

Fans of Diana Gabaldon's beloved series of novels know that Season 3 is based on the third book in her Outlander saga, Voyager — a rip-roaring adventure that spans multiple years and countries.

Here's how Starz describes the new season: The story picks up right after Claire travels through the stones to return to her life in 1948. Now pregnant with Jamie’s child, she struggles with the fallout of her sudden reappearance and its effect on her marriage to her first husband, Frank (Tobias Menzies).

Meanwhile, in the 18th century, Jamie suffers from the aftermath of his doomed last stand at the historic battle of Culloden, as well as the loss of Claire. As the years pass, Jamie and Claire attempt to make a life apart from one another, each haunted by the memory of their lost love. The budding possibility that Claire can return to Jamie in the past breathes new hope into Claire’s heart… as well as new doubt.

Separated by continents and centuries, Claire and Jamie must find their way back to each other. As always, adversity, mystery, and adventure await them on the path to reunion. And the question remains: When they find each other, will they be the same people who parted at the standing stones, all those years ago?

That means we'll jump back to the Battle of Culloden and its aftermath to see what became of Jamie (since Claire spent decades assuming that he had died in that infamous clash), his men, and Black Jack Randall (Menzies). We'll also spend some time with Claire, Frank and Bree (Sophie Skelton) throughout Bree's childhood.

The show has a lot of ground to cover before we catch up to Claire and her headstrong daughter in 1968, where the Season 2 finale ended with Claire contemplating the possibility of traveling back through time to find Jamie after 20 years apart.

THE CAST:

In addition to Balfe, Heughan, Menzies and Skelton, we'll see a number of other familiar faces returning for the new season, including Richard Rankin as Roger Wakefield, Laura Donnelly as Jenny Fraser Murray, Steven Cree as Ian Murray and Romann Berrux as Fergus, to name a few (but definitely not all).

The show has also been busy casting some new additions for the upcoming year, including an older version of Fergus, played by Cesar Domboy.

He's not the only character getting a makeover: Australian actor David Berry has been cast in the pivotal role of Lord John Grey, a character we encountered in Season 2 as a naive (but honorable) young British solider who attempted to defend Claire's honor from the Scottish barbarians John assumed were holding her captive before the Battle of Prestonpans.

When we encounter him again, Lord John will be all grown up, and he'll be sticking around for a while. Here's how Starz describes him: "He's a steadfast and honorable British subject, torn between a finely-honed sense of familial duty and a strong moral compass of right and wrong. He is boyishly handsome with an upper class rearing — the consummate gentleman. However, a scandal from his past has relegated Lord John to an undesirable position as governor of a desolate prison in Northern Scotland."

Following his introduction in Voyager, Lord John has earned his own loyal fanbase over the years, and Gabaldon has written a series of novels and novellas centered around the dreamy and upstanding soldier. So if Starz and Sony are ever in the market for an Outlander spinoff at some point, Berry might have plenty of career security ahead.

Among the other newcomers for Season 3 are John Bell as Young Ian Murray, Jamie's adventurous nephew; Wil Johnson as Joe Abernathy, Claire's closest friend and coworker, whom she meets during medical school; Gary Young as Mr. Willoughby, a Chinese man with a deep knowledge of Eastern medicine who befriends Jamie; Lauren Lyle as Marsali, the 18-year-old, high-spirited daughter of Laoghaire (Nell Hudson); Hannah James and Tanya Reynolds as Geneva and Isobel Dunsany, two privileged young noblewomen who cross paths with Jamie; and Charlie Hiett as Thomas Leonard, the inexperienced, by-the-book de facto captain of the British Naval ship Artemis.

THE LOCATIONS:

Hiett is playing the captain of a ship, so it's not a spoiler to note that some of Season 3 will take place on the high seas, which probably won't sit well with Jamie, since we all know how he feels about boats...

Showrunner Ronald D. Moore was already expressing his enthusiasm for the show's nautical turn back when he was promoting Season 2: "I can't wait to get out to sea ... The technology now, between real ships like what they have in Black Sails and CG, it’s now developed to a place where you can believe it," he told CinemaBlend. "Now you can really realize on a television budget what Pirates of the Caribbean was doing 8-10 years ago. Now, we can actually do better CG than that on the television front."

Undoubtedly the biggest change for Outlander Season 3 is that in its final five episodes, the series will shift its production from Scotland, which has been the show's home for its first two seasons, to Cape Town, South Africa. There, it will utilize the sets and ships previously used on Starz's Black Sails to adapt Gabaldon's elaborate sea voyage scenes, with the balmy new location standing in for the Caribbean.

THE DETAILS:

Season 3 of Outlander will be 13 episodes in length, and will air on Starz in September, with a specific airdate yet to be announced.

Four new writers have also been drafted to join Moore, Matt Roberts, Toni Graphia and Anne Kenney for Season 3: Joy Blake, Karen Campbell, Shannon Goss and Luke Schelhaas.

Because the season will be jumping around in time to cover various periods in Claire and Jamie's years apart, we'll see the duo transform from their twenties to their forties over the course of the season — subtle but noticeable shifts which will no doubt showcase the incredible work of the hair, makeup and costume departments, as well as the consistently compelling performances of Balfe and Heughan (who are long overdue for some awards recognition).

Production on the season began in September 2016 and will conclude in June 2017, Starz confirms, and the show will make a triumphant appearance at San Diego Comic-Con this July to give fans a preview of what they can expect when Outlander returns to our screens this fall. So close and yet so far!

THE FUTURE:

The "droughtlander" may seem endless now, but the gargantuan effort involved in shifting an entire production to a new continent can't be overstated, especially when Voyager is such an ambitious and sprawling novel, which takes its characters through an evolution that few shows would dare to tackle. You can't rush perfection, after all.

The good news is, Outlander has already been renewed for Season 4 in addition to Season 3, meaning that we're guaranteed another dose of Starz and Sony's time-traveling epic in the next year or two. Season 4, based on Drums of Autumn, will bring the show to the halfway point of Gabaldon's currently published Outlander novels, but the prolific author is already at work on a ninth installment and sees no end in sight yet.

The takeaway? We can look forward to plenty more adventures from Claire and Jamie on the page and the screen for years to come — and doesn't that make the dry spell a little more tolerable?

The world’s largest waterslide is coming to Malaysia and it looks really epic — Mashable

Read more at Mashable

— by Sukbhir Cheema: Currently, the world’s longest water slide is at New Jersey and it measures 605 metres.

But it might not be the longest for long because Malaysia will be setting a new world record when its water slide is complete.

Measuring at 1,140 metres and located at 78 metres above the sea, the slide at Escape Theme Park in Penang will take thrill seekers a…

Curator’s Note:  With all the spying being done nowadays on the public including all our phone conversations being recorded, our internet usage tracked and recorded, public cameras and microphones, this gadgets of this type may one day be a necessity for having an actual private conversation…but that day hasn’t quite come yet and it looks ridiculous.

From Mashable:

BY FREIA LOBO

Now you can keep your conversations private, annoy your coworkers and look like Bane — all at once.

The gadget that makes it all happen is called Hushme. It bills itself as the “world’s first voice mask for mobile phones.” This absurd-looking contraption is designed to help you keep your conversations private when you’re in a public space.

The founders were inspired to create Hushme when having lunch with friends at a small and quiet café. A girl sitting near them used earphones to make a Skype call, which made her talk louder and attract attention. She felt awkward and decided to cut off her conversation. 

This gave the founders an idea: What if she could’ve had that quick private call without bothering anyone nearby? They worked with ARTKB, a product development bureau, to make a prototype and presented it at CES this year.

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