Following the arrival of HBO Max, it appears that even HBO has decided that there are too many HBOs.

In an effort to streamline its app offerings, the premium cable channel will be axing HBO GO and renaming HBO Now as simply HBO. For the time being, this will bring the number of HBO apps down to two. And if you’re confused by all of this, don’t feel alone. We’ll do our best to explain what it means after this official statement from HBO:

Now that HBO Max has launched and is widely distributed, we… will be sunsetting our HBO GO service in the U.S. We intend to remove the HBO GO app from primary platforms as of July 31, 2020. Most customers who have traditionally used HBO GO to stream HBO programming are now able to do so via HBO Max, which offers access to all of HBO together with so much more. Additionally, the HBO NOW app and desktop experience will be rebranded to HBO. Existing HBO NOW subscribers will have access to HBO through the rebranded HBO app on platforms where it remains available and through play.hbo.com. HBO Max provides not only the robust offering of HBO but also a vast WarnerMedia library and acquired content and originals through a modern product.

So here’s what this all means (probably):

If you’re already an HBO Max subscriber and found a way to access the app, nothing has changed. You’re good to go.

If you’re an HBO Now subscriber that didn’t transition to HBO Max yet, the only change you’ll see is that the HBO Now app is now called HBO. Pretty painless.

If you’re an HBO Go user, hmm. While most cable providers have made a deal that will allow its HBO subscribers to use HBO Max, not all of them have, so it’s a good idea to check with your provider. However, if your provider does allow access to HBO Max (which you will have to use once the HBO Go app vanishes in July), you’ll need to find a device that can access the HBO Max app. As of this post, that does not include Roku or Amazon Fire TV, which are the most widely used streaming devices in America. But there is a chance that HBO Max will arrive on those devices by the end of July, and in the meantime, you can access HBO Max through an XBox One or PS4.

Naturally, there are a lot of confused people out there:

Nifa Kaniga stands alone on a street corner in 100-degree heat in his town of Dripping Springs, Texas, waiting for fellow townsfolk to stop by. From noon to sunset, around 7:00pm, according to CBS Austin, Kaniga answers questions about race and racism from his perspective as a Black man living in a mostly white and Hispanic community. (Dripping Springs has a population of less than 5,000 people, less than 1% of whom are Black.)

The 20-year-old holds a sign that says, “ASK ME ANYTHING. MAKE YOURSELF UNCOMFORTABLE.” He even offers sample questions, such as “Why is everything about race?” “Black lives matter or ALL lives matter?” and “Institutional racism exists?”

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“Many people have asked me, ‘What’s up with all lives matter versus black lives matter?’,” he told CBS Austin. “Nobody said only black lives matter or black lives matter more than white lives. We’re saying when black lives are taken unjustly and nothing is being done about it, it sends the sentiment that black lives don’t matter.”

Kaniga, who attends UT Dallas, said that he has experienced racism in the community and has concerns about the police. But he also feels that change will come if people are willing to listen to different perspectives and discuss the tough questions.

“It’s uncomfortable talking about race. It’s uncomfortable having to put yourself out here, but I mean that’s why I put on this sign, ‘make yourself uncomfortable,'” he said. “Because it is uncomfortable to talk about racial issues and political issues.”

He doesn’t expect everyone to talk to him, or for everyone who talks to him to agree with him. But the conversation is important.

“It’s easy to get mad, and it’s to be like, ‘Wow, you’re so wrong, you have no idea what you’re talking about’, but everybody has their opinion for a reason, and I think [it’s important] having empathy and just hearing their point of view,” he said.

Kaniga has begun using his Instagram account, which he’d previously used mainly for skateboarding pictures and videos, as a place to discuss these issues further. He has also put together a Google doc in which he shares some of the racial bias experiences he’s has living in New Jersey and Texas, and some notes about institutional racism, U.S. history, and white privilege.

While it’s a gift that Kaniga is inviting direct questions about his personal experiences with racism, not all Black Americans should be expected to do the same thing. Racism is painful, and for some, asking to share personal racism experiences is like asking to open a wound. Answering such questions isn’t just an intellectual exercise; it’s difficult emotional labor. And while white folks might find it helpful, it shouldn’t be expected (especially for free).

Thankfully, there are many Black authors, speakers, activists, and social media educators who have put loads of information out for non-Black folks to learn from. Some, such as Doyin Richards, offer occasional “Ask Me Anything” sessions. Others, such as Ally Henny, share daily free education on their social media pages with the opportunity to pay for more. Currently, the NYT non-fiction best seller list is filled with books on racism by Black authors, so people can learn while also compensating people for their work.

Hopefully, the people of Dripping Springs appreciate what Mr. Kaniga is offering and take him up on the offer to have these uncomfortable conversations. “We have to be uncomfortable if we want change,” he says. Indeed, when has change ever been comfortable?

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After further discussions with members of the players’ union, WNBA Commissioner Cathy Engelbert’s new plan to start the 2020 season now includes paying players 100 percent of their salaries, reported ESPN’s Mechelle Voepel. The news comes three days after The Next reported that many players were unhappy with the league’s original proposal, which stipulated that players would only get paid 60 percent of their normal salaries.

The current proposal is for the WNBA to hold a shortened 22-game regular season at IMG Academy in Bradenton, Florida beginning July 24. The 2020 season was set to start on May 15 and consists of 36 regular season games, but Engelbert was forced to suspend play in early April due to the global COVID-19 pandemic. The playoff format, which includes single-elimination first and second-round games and then five-game series for the semifinals and finals, will reportedly stay the same and end in October as usual if the shortened season is accepted.

The original proposal, which ESPN first reported on June 4, did not include details of COVID-19 testing procedures or housing. However, The Next’s Arielle Chambers reported that the original plan included boxed lunches and shared hotel rooms with no guests allowed, two issues that concerned players. Former Los Angeles Sparks GM Penny Toler also spoke out against the original proposal, arguing that players should get paid in full for the many risks and sacrifices they’d be taking in order to bring basketball back.

The WNBA’s most recent proposal is similar to the NWSL’s approved plan, which also includes guaranteed salaries, housing, and accommodations for player with children. The NWSL is set to be the first American sports league to return when its Challenge Cup kicks off June 27 in Utah.

Players will reportedly be able to opt out of the WNBA’s season, although those who choose to do so but are not certified as high-risk for COVID-19 will not get paid. In terms of testing protocol, Voepel reported that “players, coaches and team personnel would be tested for the coronavirus upon arrival to the site, and testing would continue throughout their stay.” Additionally, while players with children would be allowed to bring them to the bubble site, only players with at least five years’ experience would be able to bring a “plus-one” — a spouse or significant other — for the entire season, but a source told ESPN “they will need to pay for that person’s lodging, testing and meals, which could amount to approximately $4,000 per month.” Once the playoffs reach the semifinals, all players would be allowed to have a plus-one.

According to Voepel, the players will vote on the new proposal over the next two days and a formal announcement could come as soon as Monday.

WWE has had a working relationship with Philadephia-based indie promotion Evolve Wrestling for some time now. Back in the good old days when live wrestling events were still happening in front of live audiences, WWE would frequently let NXT Superstars go there for matches. Last summer, in fact, the WWE Network ran Evolve’s 10 Anniversary Show live, the first and, to date, only time the Network has featured an indie wrestling event like that. WWE has also been known to recruit a lot of talent from Evolve, including Austin Theory and Shotzi Blackheart, who were both featured in the aforementioned Anniversary event and have debuted for NXT in the year since (and already moved to Raw, in Theory’s case.

Today there are reports, courtesy of the Wrestling Observer Newsletter, that WWE may soon own Evolve outright. According to WON, Evolve is in serious financial trouble. Like other indie promotions, they had to cancel their planned Wrestlemania week shows that were expected to bring in a bunch of money, and that lack of income has been “catastrophic” for them. It sounds like things have only gotten worse since then, as the Pandemic has dragged on and there’ve yet to be anymore live shows, and now they’re considering selling “pretty much everything” to WWE, including their tape library.

So far, neither WWE nor Evolve has commented, but we’ll let you know if more comes out about this.

Most people grow up going to schools where people are of a similar social status. Lower-income people tend to grow up with people in the same situation and affluent people usually grow up around people who are rich as well.

But things can change dramatically in college. People who are from completely different sides of the socioeconomic spectrum attend class together and sometimes wind up sharing the same dorm room.

One student can be there on a scholarship and have a part-time job to make ends meet. The other may be on a massive allowance from their parents who pay full tuition without batting an eye.

What exacerbates the issue is that many people go through college being dirt poor. If they have a job, it’s often low-paying, they can’t work many hours and they aren’t old enough to have accumulated any wealth.

So seeing someone one of your peers wasting other people’s hard-earned money can be downright stupefying.

It can also seem highly immoral for some to have so much and not appreciate it when others are struggling to get by.

College is also a time when people begin to learn about income inequality and why it exists.

Freelance journalist Jake Bittle started a fun conversation of Twitter where people shared stories of some of the insanely rich kids they knew in college. Many of the responses came from people who went to the University of Chicago.

Bittle’s story started with seeing a girl open her laptop to revel a ton of money in her bank account while they were taking a class on Marxism. The tweet inspired people to share stories of the insanely rich kids they met in college and how some of them were terribly wasteful with their money.

(Jake has since deleted his original tweet.)

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Social distancing continues this weekend amid the global pandemic, and several new TV seasons are here for the binging. If nothing here suits your sensibilities, check out our guide to What You Should Watch On Streaming Right Now.

The King Of Staten Island (VOD) — Judd Apatow’s upcoming comedy starring Pete Davidson (in a role that takes inspiration from his pre-SNL life) comes straight to your living from from Universal Pictures. Both Davidson and Bill Burr are fantastic in this movie that also stars Marisa Tomei and Steve Buscemi.

Da 5 Bloods (Netflix film) — The New Joint from Spike Lee can be found nowhere else but the streaming giant. The movie looks to put an unusual twist on the standard war epic movie in a few ways. We’ve got a split timeline that flashes between the past with Chadwick Boseman’s character, a fallen squad leader, and the present, which sees four of his charges go back to Vietnam, where buried treasure taunts them, along with a quest for their leader’s remains.

Knives Out (Streaming on Amazon Prime) — Not only is Rian Johnson’s stellar, star-studded whodunnit streaming exclusively on Amazon Prime this month, but it’s also free to Prime users. This gem’s got Smug Chris Evans and many more delightfully eccentric players, and it builds to a masterful crescendo, so do pencil it into your schedule.

Artemis Fowl (Disney+ film) — Five years after Disney announced plans to adapt the Artemis Fowl book series, the 12-year-old genius comes to life, even if the film might be a muddled mess. Fowl descends from a family of criminal masterminds, and he must battle a fairy race that may have engineered the kidnapping of his father. Kenneth Branagh directs and Judy Dench narrates.

Crossing Swords (Hulu series) — This adult-oriented animal series (from Robot Chicken producers John Harvatine IV and Tom Root) pulls out the visual stops with some of the finest stop-motion animation techniques. Sadly, those beautifully crafted visuals get lost in a sea of gratuitous vulgarity.

F is for Family: Season 4 (Netflix series) — Comedian Bill Burr is having quite a weekend, and the latest season of his latest animated comedy series continues in the 1970s with the voices of Burr, Laura Dern, Justin Long, Sam Rockwell and more.

Jo Koy: In His Elements: (Netflix comedy special) — Koy heads to the Philippines in this special that celebrates his heritage with jokes about Manila’s culture and his experience as a Filipino-American.

Here’s the rest of this weekend’s notable programming:

Friday Night In with The Morgans (Friday, AMC 10:00 p.m.) — Jeffrey Dean Morgan and Hilarie Burton are back, hopefully with more insight into The Walking Dead.

Billions (Sunday, Showtime 9:00 p.m.) — Axe finds inspiration in unlikely sources while Wendy attempts to maneuver through some rocky situations, one involving Niko the artist, as Chuck’s attempting to exploit someone again for his own ends.

Quiz (Sunday, AMC 9:00 p.m.) — Part three puts a bow on this limited series, in which the Ingrams have been accused of a million-pound game show heist. As the jury learns, everything is not cut and dried.

Snowpiercer (Sunday, TNT 9:00 p.m.) — Melanie stages a trial for the train’s murderer while class tensions continue to come to a boil.

I Know This Much Is True (Sunday, HBO 9:00 p.m.) — Finally, Mark Ruffalo’s (well-acted) portrayal of two identical twins with a troubled, miserable relationship (between themselves and to the world) comes to an end.

Penny Dreadful: City of Angels (Sunday, Showtime 10:00 p.m.) — Linda receives an asylum visit, a dangerous outing goes down for Townsend and Kurt, and Frank gets down the business of terror.

Insecure (Sunday, HBO 10:00 p.m.) — Issa’s still searching for happiness in the season finale, and a distressing phone call arrives while Molly and Andrew have issues.

I May Destroy You (Sunday, HBO 10:30 p.m.) — Michaela Coel’s newest series is a fiery and fearless exploration of sexual consent. This week, Arabella starts to mull over that fateful night’s hazy events and pieces moments together with help from friends.

Along with visuals, audio, hardware, controllers, and literally every other attribute, a pivotal way video games have improved over the decades is in terms of accessibility and ease of use. The first home consoles took games out of arcades and brought them to people’s living rooms. Eventually, online shopping (and later digital downloads) made it so gamers didn’t even have to leave their homes to add new games to their libraries, a necessary luxury these days.

Now, it’s 2020, and Spotify and Apple Music have made streaming music easily the most convenient way to access your favorite songs. Netflix, Hulu, and similar platforms have done the same for TV and movies. It only makes sense to call for access to top-rate games to be as instant and effortless as this. While one can argue that video games do not fit into the streaming picture the same way as music and film, but at the moment, the answer to that question is still being written.

The idea behind playing a streaming game is easy to understand: In essence, instead of owning a beefy console or PC, players see live video of the game they’re playing over the cloud and send inputs in real time. The burden of processing power is placed on some server somewhere else, not the player’s hardware. In this reality, players don’t have to play at arcades, leave the house to buy new games, or even wait for downloads.

In the abstract, this is an alluring idea. With streaming video games, there’s no need to have up-to-date and potentially expensive technology in your home. As long as you have some sort of screen with a machine that can handle streaming video, you can play the latest big-time games and still achieve the best possible quality, both in terms of visuals and gameplay.

At least, this was what Google Stadia promised, but the platform hasn’t exactly made streaming video games the new way to play. Why not? Well, for starters, there’s Google’s flawed rollout strategy. The idea behind the platform, or at least one of its primary appeals, is to make streaming gaming accessible with tech people already had in their homes. Yet, when Stadia launched in November of 2019, it was only available via the $130 “Premiere” and “Founder’s Edition,” which came with a Stadia controller and a Chromecast Ultra. They only just made their free tier available in April, nearly five months after its launch.

So, instead of instant and convenient gameplay on equipment you already have, Stadia launched with a paywall and the need for proprietary equipment. That hasn’t exactly torn gamers away from the PS4 and Xbox One (more on consoles in a moment) they didn’t have any real issues with in the first place. Stadia didn’t offer a better experience, so why bother with it?

Additionally, Stadia is not a Netflix-style subscription service that gives players access to a huge library of games without an additional charge. That sort of thing is what consumers have come to expect now when they hear something called a “streaming” service. Players still have to buy individual games, and on launch, only a dozen games that many gamers already owned on other platforms were available. One only needs so many copies of Assassin’s Creed Odyssey.

While most reviewers have praised the overall quality of Stadia games played through an ethernet connection, most players will likely default to a less cumbersome Wi-Fi setup. At least in the near future, this is a problem: Ars Technica noted that when playing over Wi-Fi, they found the experience to be “inconsistent to the point of aggravation.” Home Wi-Fi speeds are already prone to dragging with phones, laptops, smart TVs, smart watches, door bells, refrigerators, blenders, juicers, and other devices hogging bandwidth. Imagine adding streaming games to that already-crowded internet usage environment, especially when many of us already struggle playing YouTube videos without buffering sometimes.

And for the most part for most folks, that’s just at 1080p: Stadia promises gameplay in 4K.The internet speeds and bandwidth people have in their homes now are only just starting to catch up to its gluttonous technological needs, and 4K video is a relatively new concept in terms of widespread adoption at a user level. It doesn’t feel like the platform is there yet for 4K video plus the real-time interactivity cloud gaming requires, a sentiment to which critics can attest.

Ultimately, Google failed to make their experimental new service easily accessible, immediately attractive, and properly functional. They introduced it poorly, and the tech isn’t ready. Therefore, Stadia has yet to become a household name. The same goes for its competitors, like GeForce Now, Shadow, and others you probably haven’t heard of.

That doesn’t mean they won’t ever be, though. After all, Nintendo was a company for 94 years before they released their first Mario game. Patience is, has often been noted, a virtue.

One competitor in this space that hasn’t been mentioned yet, though, is one that everybody knows: Sony. Their PlayStation 5 is set to launch in time for the holiday season, and it looks like the PS4 successor could radically change streaming gaming. Thursday’s PS5 reveal event didn’t address this, but in a report from last year, Sony CEO Jim Ryan described “a massively enhanced PlayStation community where enriched and shared PlayStation experiences can be seamlessly enjoyed independent of time and place — with or without a console.”

Additionally, Microsoft’s xCloud is on the way, so the cloud gaming platform could bring similar functionality and flexibility to the upcoming Xbox Series X and/or the Xbox ecosystem more broadly.

If these visions end up implemented as stated (or rather, as I’m interpreting them) in the new PlayStation and Xbox consoles, the next generation of gaming could offer the best of both the console and cloud-based worlds. Are you at home? Just play on your PlayStation/Xbox and don’t fret about the potential connectivity pitfalls of streaming. Elsewhere? Access your games library in a way that — in ideal conditions, at least — mirrors the experience of playing on console.

As Stadia has proven, though, big promises are easy to make. Similarly to the famous Seinfeld car rental incident, making a claim is effortless. It’s the keeping of the promise that’s the important part. So, how can Sony and Microsoft avoid the problems Google has faced?

I have a non-expert idea: Maybe a small portion of essential and regularly accessed game data is hosted locally, while the rest is delivered over the cloud, as a way of limiting what users need to store themselves. For the tech-aware, try thinking about it like the solid-state hybrid drives (SSHDs) that were popular a few years ago. Mechanical hard drives had big storage capacities, but were slow and on the way out. Meanwhile, solid-state drives (SSDs) were fast, but it cost multiple arms and legs to get one with any serious amount of storage. So, the SSHD was, as is obvious based on the name, a hybrid of the old and the new, and they were a wonderful resource to have during that transitional period.

Even if that idea doesn’t actually make sense on a technical level or isn’t applicable to streaming games, it illustrates the core of what I’m getting at: Maybe we’re diving straight into cloud gaming too quickly. Maybe console gaming and cloud gaming are two islands, and what we need now is a bridge. If that’s not the case, we don’t know everything about Sony and Microsoft’s cloud gaming solutions yet, so maybe they’ve figured something out that Google hasn’t, something they’ll be ready to show the world soon.

Regardless of which of these possible futures will be the one, for now, they are all just that: the future. That said, consumer technology feels really close to being ready for streaming gaming. At the very least, it appears to be a few months away, assuming that all the promises that have been made are fulfilled.

Until then, though, it seems Stadia, PS5, Xbox Series X, and the rest may be more of a preview of our gaming future than its arrival. Regardless, we’ve come a long way from the arcade.

While news coverage has been saturated with stories of protests and pandemics, some of the Trump administration’s recent actions have gone under the radar. At the beginning of Pride Month, the Trump administration effectively pushed to allow religious adoption agencies to discriminate against same-sex couples and deny them permission to adopt. Openly queer indie rocker Lucy Dacus fought back against the news by sharing her own adoption story.

The Department of Justice recently filed a briefing in the Supreme Court case Fulton v. City of Philadelphia that dates back to 2018, in which the City of Philadelphia ended a contract with Catholic Social Services upon learning they had discriminated against LGBTQ folks and refused to allow same-sex couples to adopt children. According to NBC News, the DOJ’s brief argued that “Philadelphia has impermissibly discriminated against religious exercise,” and that the city’s actions “reflect unconstitutional hostility toward Catholic Social Services’ religious beliefs.” The brief was also completely voluntary, as the federal government is not a party in the case.

Dacus spoke out against news of the briefing. Retweeting a pair of screenshots from an article that covered Trump’s attempted ban, Dacus said it’s not the first time he has tried to do this. “I’m adopted, my mom was adopted, & if I ever have a kid I’ll probably adopt them,” Dacus wrote. “My experience has been marked by love, generosity, & respect. Ofc gay people should be able to adopt.”

Check out Dacus’ statement above.