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IGN has revealed a series of photos from the new Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power, this time showing off the “new and unimproved” Orcs of this age. And for once, worse is actually better here.

In an interview with Jamie Wilson, head of the prosthetics department on The Rings of Power, and Lindsey Weber, an executive producer for the series, we get more details on how the forces of evil will operate in this period of Tolkien’s vast fantasy saga. “We spent a lot of time talking about what it would mean to be an Orc in the Second Age. It felt appropriate that their look would be different, part of a wilder, more raw, Second Age, Middle-earth, closer to where the First Age ends.” Weber said, describing the more desiccated, haunted look of the orcs that we see in the preview images that IGN has been given. “As we meet them, they’re not yet organized into armies, they’re a little more scattered and they’ve been scavenging. So it’s just a different time in their total story.”

Wilson is what’s known as a “Sevener” on set. This means that he’s worked on all the filmed Lord of the Rings productions: the original Peter Jackson trilogy, the Hobbit trilogy, and now The Rings of Power. He’s been around these specific prosthetics and makeup for decades, and has spent a lot of time thinking about how orcs look on screen… and how to make them look that way.

“Time has changed a lot,” Wilson told IGN. “You go back 20 years and we used a basically foam latex, which is like a porous-y kind of rubbery, spongy material with a smooth or whatever textured surface. It was great at the time.”

He mentions that silicon was only in use during the original trilogy towards the end, when they were able to make some pieces for John Rhys-Davies as Gimli. Times, he said, have changed dramatically. “All the ears, noses, Orcs pieces are all made in encapsulated silicon, which is basically two layers of silicon with a moveable piece of silicon in the middle, so when it’s applied to the actor’s face, they can move and it works,” he explained. “It also gets the same temperature as their skin. And you can see the translucency and then you gently paint on the top of it, a bit like doing makeup on a human rather than having to seal and heavily paint like we did in the old days.”

Both Wilson and Weber also noted that while the prosthetics and practical makeup are incredibly advanced, there is still a lot of CGI in Rings of Power. The show, Weber explains, is simply not reliant on it to make the orcs look good—a lot of the digital enhancements will occur in larger ensemble shots. Close up, you’ll get to see the orcs in all their garish, practically-designed glory.

Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power debuts September 2 on Prime Video.

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Want more io9 news? Check out when to expect the latest Marvel and Star Wars releases, what’s next for the DC Universe on film and TV, and everything you need to know about House of the Dragon and Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power.

by Dean Rieck

As of Monday, June 13, 2022, it is legal for "qualifying adults" to carry a concealed handgun in Ohio without a license.

Attorney General Dave Yost has issued an updated manual summarizing Ohio’s concealed carry laws and explaining the two ways you may now carry in the state, with or without a license.

Click here to view or download the manual as a PDF.

Whether you plan to carry with a license or without one, I highly recommend you read this manual, which covers a number of important topics, including:

• Two Ways to Carry Concealed
• A Crucial Difference Between CHL Holders and Permitless Carriers
• Other Changes in Ohio’s Concealed-Carry Law
• Training and Educational Requirements for a Concealed-Handgun License
• Special Considerations for Members of the Armed Forces
• Forbidden-Carry Zones
• Transporting in Motor Vehicles
• Traffic Stops and Other Law Enforcement Encounters
• Private Property and the Workplace
• Reciprocity
• Open Carry
• Deadly Force
• Criminal Issues
• Civil Liability
• Self-Defense
• No Duty to Retreat
• Castle Doctrine
• Burden of Proof
• Defense of Others
• Defense of Property
• Dispute Resolution

In addition to reading this manual, I urge you to take a concealed carry class from an experienced and competent instructor, even if you do not plan to apply for a license. It is vital that you are familiar with Ohio self-defense law to help you make better decisions and act legally.

You can search for classes on OhioGunClass.org, a website we host for instructors in Ohio.

Dean Rieck is Executive Director of Buckeye Firearms Association, a former competitive shooter, NRA Patron Member, #1 NRA Recruiter for 2013, business owner and partner with Second Call Defense.

Developers, deliberately or unknowingly, build their coding standards in the process of project development. A coding standard is a style that is applied to your whole codebase to shape a coding discipline and make the codebase more consistent and readable.

Why is it so important to implement a coding style?

The first and foremost essential factor is related to the discipline of coding. Shaping discipline and creating a coding style makes it easier not only just to understand the existing code but also makes it easier to develop the codebase further.

On top of that, discipline with the coding style is also crucial for effective collaboration within the development team. This attitude makes teamwork much more straightforward and efficient. Besides, that way, the new developers will be able to comprehend the code easily. It will also help developers not to get upset with individual code style preferences. 

However, we should also note that maintaining the coding standards with bare hands might be a highly complex task requiring time and effort. Therefore, there is a Linter concept in almost every programming language. With this article, we will dig down to understand Linting and how you can apply it to your Laravel Project by using PHP CS Fixer. So let’s get started.

What is Linter?

Linter is a common tool that helps us develop a specific coding style and find errors. 

In most cases, Linters are used in conjunction with the IDE. Linters are activated once a specific event fires and suggest a correction. You can also run Linter using a CLI to highlight and/or fix the errors in your codebase.

Does PHP have a Linter?

The short answer is Yes. 

Nowadays, Laravel is the most popular framework in the PHP world. However, Laravel itself frequently uses the components of the other very popular framework – Symfony. The founder of Symfony, Fabien Potencier, created a PHP Linter called CS Fixer. So let’s talk more about it. 

How Can we Install CS Fixer in the Laravel Project?

There are several ways to install CS Fixer:

• Install globally using Composer
• Install globally without using Composer
• Install per project, using the Composer

In the following example, we will discuss how we can set up PHP CS Fixer in a per-project approach and connect it to VSCode and PHPStorm. Connecting to the other IDEs is a similar process.

First of all, we need to go to our Laravel project in the terminal and install PHP CS Fixer with Composer by running the following command:

composer require friendsofphp/php-cs-fixer --dev

Then if we see executable files in our project /vendor/bin directory we will see that one of them is php-cs-fixer. 

If we run this command in the root folder of our project:

./vendor/bin/php-cs-fixer

We will see that CSFixer has been installed successfully and will display the following:

We made sure that PHP CS Fixer really works 🙏

CS Fixer in the VSCode

Let’s move to the VSCode.

First, we will need to install the appropriate extension for CS Fixer in VSCode.

Pay attention to the fact that the author of this extension should be Junstyle.

Then we should create a .vscode folder in our project and a settings.json file in it where we will set configurations:

There are three things we need to configure:

• Run PHP Formatter on save 
• Tell VSCode the address of php-cs-fixer (/vendor/bin/php-cs-fixer) executable
• Tell from where the php-cs-fixer configuration file should be read

Consequently, JSON configuration will look like this:

The only thing left is to create a .php-cs-fixer.php file in the root folder. We can set up formatting rules with that configuration file. Here is an example rule configuration file we use for some of our projects: PHP CS Fixer Config File.

CS Fixer in the PHPStorm

Open the desired project in PHPStorm and go into the PHPStorm settings:

Then we should find the Quality Tools under PHP; this is where the PHP CS Fixer section should be:

Click the button with the three points and point out our CS Fixer binary file address which is located in the vendor/bin folder:

Click Validate and make sure that everything works fine.

Then we should move to CS Fixer Inspection and set several parameters:

We should mark PHP CS Fixer validation. Severity should be set to Error, and we should choose Custom in the Ruleset. This means that we need to give PHP CS Fixer our rule file which defines how our codebase should be formatted.

Before we configure which file should be used as a Ruleset by PHPStorm, we should create a .php-cs-fixer.php file in our Root folder. Here is an example configuration file we use for some of our projects: PHP CS Fixer Config File.

Then we should navigate to Inspections and find our newly created configuration file in PHPStorm:

Then we can save our configuration, which means that PHPStorm will already start analyzing our codebase and format it according to our ruleset.

However, this is still not enough. For the development process to be smooth, it would be better for PHP CS Fixer to make autocorrections. This is why we need to add the File Watcher.

For this we should navigate to File Watchers in the PHPStorm settings.

Now we should choose Custom in Templates and write a new Watcher configuration.

Name: PHP CS Fixer

File Type: PHP

Program: [Your Project Path]/vendor/bin/php-cs-fixer

Arguments: fix –config=$ProjectFileDir$/.php-cs-fixer.php –cache-file=$ProjectFileDir$/.php-cs-fixer.cache $FileDir$/$FileName$

Also, we should turn off the first two checkboxes in the Advanced Options:

Click the OK button, and the Watcher File will be added. 

After that, our codebase will be auto-formatted using PHP CS Fixer every time we save the files.

The first time you CMD+S, PHPStorm will alert you to approve running the Watcher.

Click Trust Project and Run once you see the Alert box.

And that’s it 😉