TL;DR: A lifetime license for Microsoft Office Professional 2021 bundled with Windows 11 Pro is on sale for $44.97 (reg. $418.99) through Feb. 22 at 11:59 p.m. PT.

Microsoft Office remains a fundamental software for work and school, but subscription fees aren’t for everyone. For those who prefer a one-and-done approach, this bundle pairs a lifetime license for Microsoft Office Professional 2021 with Windows 11 Pro for $44.97 (reg. $418.99) through Feb. 22 at 11:59 p.m. PT.

Office 2021 Professional delivers the core suite that remains central to many daily routines: Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook, OneNote, Publisher, Access, and Teams. These are full desktop versions, which are ideal for those who want offline access and a traditional layout. The familiar ribbon interface streamlines document creation and analysis, offering customization for layouts, fonts, and formatting. For those who don’t need cloud-first tools, Office 2021’s setup is a practical advantage.

The bundle’s other half is Windows 11 Pro, Microsoft’s current professional-grade operating system. Along with a streamlined design, it offers productivity and security features like BitLocker encryption, Windows Sandbox, Hyper-V virtualization, and advanced account controls. Copilot, Microsoft’s AI assistant, is also integrated — ready to summarize web pages, generate drafts, answer questions, or change settings from the taskbar.

This is a one-time purchase, not a Microsoft 365 subscription, so it does not include ongoing feature updates or cloud storage perks. Hardware requirements are modest — 4GB of RAM and 64GB of storage — but users should still check compatibility before upgrading.

This deal is well-suited for professionals, students, or small-business owners who prefer to own their software and skip subscription extras. If you fall into that group, $44.97 is a stellar price for securing both Office tools and Windows 11 Pro with no recurring fees. For those weighing their options, this bundle offers value and simplicity in one purchase. Get it today at this low price until Feb. 22 at 11:59 p.m. PT.

StackSocial prices subject to change.

By Robert Scucci
| Published 7 seconds ago

If you grew up in the 90s playing first-person shooters on MS-DOS, you probably have fond memories of sneaking in sessions of Duke Nukem 3D. While we never had gaming consoles in my household, my parents had no qualms about me playing PC games like Doom, Quake, and Wolfenstein. For reasons I will never fully understand, Super Mario Bros. was forbidden fare, but blasting space demons and zombies with rocket launchers and mowing down Nazis with machine guns was considered a perfectly acceptable way to spend a rainy afternoon.

I think the real reason was that my parents did not want to spend money on a console when we already had a perfectly good computer sitting in the family room. In retrospect, I kind of respect that decision. It meant I had access to adventure puzzle games like The Seventh Guest and Myst, along with the above-mentioned shooters that were absolutely not meant for kids my age.

In 1996, Duke Nukem 3D was everywhere, and I remember watching my dad get hooked on it one weekend in his office. I could hear explosions and laughter through the door, which naturally made me curious. That was my introduction to a game that was wildly inappropriate for a kid, but I was lucky enough to have parents who let me watch R-rated action movies as long as we talked about why certain behaviors on screen were not meant to be copied in real life.

That brings me to the real heart of this article. Why, in the year 2026, do we still not have a Duke Nukem movie? The property feels tailor-made for an R-rated action comedy. It is violent, self-aware, and ridiculous. There are strippers and aliens, pigs dressed as cops, lizard troopers, and catchphrases pulled straight from films like Aliens, Dirty Harry, They Live, Jaws, and Pulp Fiction. Duke Nukem 3D is routinely cited as one of the greatest video games ever made, and the franchise reportedly generated well over a billion dollars by the early 2000s. A faithful adaptation would go absolutely gangbusters.

A Simple Yet Effective Action Hero

A movie based on the Duke Nukem character would not be difficult to pull off because the story is intentionally lean. Duke arrives in Los Angeles aboard his space cruiser, ready for a much-needed vacation. His ship gets shot down by aliens who have invaded and taken over the city, and he is understandably irritated about having to clean up their mess. Armed with his Mighty Foot and an arsenal that includes shotguns, triple-barrelled chain guns, grenade launchers, and pipe bombs, Duke tears through Assault Troopers, Pig Cops, Battlelord Sentries, and Enforcers.

What truly sets Duke Nukem 3D apart from its contemporaries is how interactive the environments are. Duke crawls through air vents, blows apart buildings by hitting detonation switches that are just laying around willy-nilly, kicks fire hydrants and drinks from water fountains to power up, and even tips strippers for a quick show before getting back to work. It is juvenile, excessive, and completely unapologetic. When Duke says he is here to kick ass and chew bubblegum, a quote attributed to Roddy Piper in They Live!, he means it.

The amount of controversy the game attracted from special interest groups over its content is exactly why Duke Nukem would thrive as an R-rated action comedy today. With the right creative team attached, the tone does not need to be reinvented or overhauled at all.

Attempts Have Been Made

There has never been a shortage of interest in bringing Duke Nukem to the big screen. As early as 2001, when the franchise was riding high, Threshold Entertainment attempted to get a feature film off the ground, but it never made it out of development. Another effort surfaced in 2008 from Max Payne producer Scott Faye, though that version stalled just as quickly.

The closest we came to a Duke Nukem movie was in 2018, when Paramount Pictures and Platinum Dunes were having discussions with John Cena to take on the lead role. It was a near-perfect casting choice, but the rights were in transition at the time, and the project was quietly shelved.

The most recent development came in 2022, when Legendary Entertainment announced that it had acquired the rights to produce a Duke Nukem film, with Cobra Kai creators Josh Heald and Jon Hurwitz attached. Since then, updates have been scarce, which unfortunately feels par for the course for this franchise.

If it takes another five years for anything concrete to happen, so be it. I just hope Cena is still able to step into the role. Projects like Ricky Stanicky have already proven that his comedic timing is a perfect match for a character like Duke Nukem. The image of him kicking a fire hydrant for health before tossing a pipe bomb into a movie theater and getting frisky with the ladies deserves to exist outside of my imagination.

What this movie needs is simple. Enemies that respawn endlessly, one-liners delivered without restraint, and waves of identical henchmen getting obliterated as Duke reluctantly fights his way back to vacation. This does not need to be high art. It needs to be an ultra-violent alien invasion, solved by the coolest video game character to ever appear on a computer screen.

By Jonathan Klotz
| Published 34 seconds ago

Reboots and remakes aren’t a new Hollywood trend. For decades, studios have been digging into their archives to revive old IP for a new generation.  It worked with Battlestar Galactica, but a few years later, Universal attempted the same formula: a TV movie, then a launch of the new, darker, grittier series with Knight Rider.

The deliberately cheesy ’80s series that turned David Hasselhoff into an international star stalled at the starting line when it returned in 2008. Not even a mid-season rework could save the series, which is now mostly forgotten, while the original remains a fan favorite.

A K.I.T.T. For A New Generation

The 2008 series replaces Hasselhoff’s Michael Knight with his son, Michael Tracuer, adopting the name Knight after the first episode (played by Justin Bruening, now a Hallmark movie regular), and Val Kilmer voices K.I.T.T. The two are working for the U.S. government under the watchful eye of FBI Agent Carrie Rivai (Sydney Poitier) and NSA Agent Alex Torres (Yancey Arias), at least for the first dozen episodes before the reboot hits and the pair end up working for the revived Foundation for Law and Government (FLAG). This time around, K.I.T.T. is powered by nanotechnology, and the series attempted to tell overarching storylines digging into both Mike’s forgotten past and the return of K.I.T.T.’s archenemy, K.A.R.R. 

As with most network procedurals, the overarching storylines came into play during the opening and closing of most episodes, with the bulk of the runtime an adventure of the week. Mike goes undercover to foil assassination plots, has to drive over 100 MPH to keep a bomb from exploding, goes undercover to prevent an assassination, races a terrorist, and you’re starting to get the picture. To Universal’s credit, they put a hefty budget behind the Knight Rider reboot, with every episode featuring great shots of K.I.T.T., but in 2008, no one could get excited over the return of a show that was mostly known for being a punchline. 

Once he finally appears, K.A.R.R. was voiced by Peter Cullen, most famous as the voice of Transformers’ Optimus Prime, which is a little ironic as the reboot series decided to turn K.I.T.T. into a transformer. Taking advantage of the nanomachine concept and an increased special effects budget, K.I.T.T. would shift forms into “attack mode” and even “turbo boost,” resulting in exterior modifications to the Ford Mustang Shelby GT500. It was the right type of updating from the original’s “Super Pursuit Mode” but overshadowed by every other misguided attempt to modernize the series.

No One Cares About Michael Knight’s Love Life

Knight Rider was so ignored that NBC dropped the series from 22 to 17 episodes, and dropping the extended cast halfway through to focus more on Michael and K.I.T.T. proved to be too little, too late. The TV movie pilot brought in 12 million viewers, but by going darker, it alienated fans of the original, and everyone else realized the goofy concept didn’t work in the 21st century. If the studio had embraced the inherent absurdity of a superpowered car used to perform clandestine government missions, it could have been a weekly Fast and Furious adventure. 

Universal tried to replicate Knight Rider in 1985, while the original was still airing, with Street Hawk by turning the car into a motorcycle, but as Torque proved, that never works. The success of the Battlestar Galactica reboot has never been duplicated, no matter how many times studios try. Instead of attempting to make something new and different, we’re subjected to more NCIS spin-offs, more updated revivals that miss the entire point of the original (looking at you, Charmed), and another Dexter sequel series.

Knight Rider 2008 attempted to do something different by shifting its missions and featuring a larger, more diverse cast. In the process, it forgot that what made the original a fan favorite was the relationship between Michael and K.I.T.T., not Michael’s love life, and especially not by forcing a love triangle into the story. Back in 2008, giving fans a campy show that winks at the audience would have been new and original; instead, they got another “modern” update, and Universal had to handle another early cancellation.