Month: October 2020

There’s nothing funny about Proud Boys, a white nationalist group that the Southern Poverty Law Center has referred to as an “alt-right fight club,” but it is objectively hilarious that the organization is named after a cut song from Disney’s Aladdin. And that the organization is furious that the #ProudBoys hashtag is being co-opted by gay men.

#ProudBoys was trending on Twitter over the weekend, days after Donald Trump refused to condemn the group during a presidential debate with Joe Biden (instead, he told them to “stand back and stand by”). That’s not why the hashtag was being used, however. “The hashtag trended in North America throughout Sunday with gay Twitter users sharing images of themselves, their spouses and other gay people,” according to Forbes.

Star Trek actor George Takei wrote, “Brad and I are #ProudBoys, legally married for 12 years now. And we’re proud of all of the gay folks who have stepped up to reclaim our pride in this campaign. Our community and allies answered hate with love, and what could be better than that,” while Queer Eye‘s Bobby Berk shared a picture with his husband, adding, “Look at these cute lil #ProudBoys (#retweet and make this hashtag about love, not hate).” Even the Canadian Armed Forces in the U.S. got involved.

Naturally, and hilariously, the Proud Boys are not pleased.

The Proud Boys took none too kindly to this, filling up [social media network used by the alt-right] Parler with the type of hateful messages that got them kicked off Twitter in the first place. Much of the action was carried out by the Proud Boys’ official account on the app, which has 60,000 followers. Enrique Tarrio, the Proud Boys’ chairman, said in a separate Parler post that the left was attempting to turn the group’s name into “a slur” and that the gay pride campaign with #proudboys was an attempt “to drown out the voices of our supporters.” In an effort to ridicule Takei, another Parler post was a meme of the actor holding up the OK sign, a gesture white supremacists use to identify themselves to each other. The image isn’t meant to suggest Takei is a white supremacist. (He’s not.) It’s a statement that the Proud Boys can — and will — use his image to carry out their own propaganda.

Oh my.

Also, the song the “western chauvinists” are named after? It was written by a gay man.

(Via Forbes)

Remember growing up playing Mario Bros. with your friends and having debates over who was the best at the game? Maybe you had competitions to figure it out, racing to see who got through the most levels in a single life, etc. Of course, there was only so much you could do with the original Mario and it’s four levels in eight worlds. All the same every time, with no real way to mix it up.

It is now 2020 and as such, that means there needs to be a Battle Royale for everything. Clearly inspired by the popularity of Tetris 99, Nintendo has taken their first major hit, Super Mario Bros. and turned it into a non-traditional Battle Royale called Mario 35. The concept is, like every Battle Royale, very simple. Whoever is the last one standing wins. If this had been released four years ago it may have been met with greater fanfare, but with a Battle Royale for everything, it’s hard to feel more than just curiosity about the title. It also doesn’t help that someone beat Nintendo to the punch here about a year ago when someone created this exact concept in a web browser game. They were met with a DMCA takedown notice.

That odd backstory aside, there is a definite curiosity here. What happens when you stick 35 people into a Mario style Battle Royale to see who comes out on top? While you might hope for lightning in a bottle, in reality, you get a lot of missed potential.

Mario 35 is a lot like Tetris 99. You go through a pre-determined set of Mario levels stomping on goombas, kicking turtle shells, getting power up Mushrooms, and shooting fireballs until you’re the last Mario standing. The way it’s similar to Tetris 99 is that as you play you are surrounded by the other 35 Marios and you can “attack” them. You do this by defeating enemies on your screen which will then send them all to the screens you have targeted. You can send just about any kind of enemy to your opponents from Goombas, to Pirannah Plants, and Bowser himself.

This does create some fun opportunities to gang up on a single person and send a bunch of enemies their way all at once, but be careful doing that cause they can destroy them all and send them right back at you. Unfortunately, while this is one of Mario 35‘s best aspects, it’s also one of the less interesting ones. It is funny when you send a Bowser at someone, and the thought of them having to work their way through three Bowsers is a funny one, but it can at times feel largely ineffective.

In Tetris 99 when you sent junk to someone else’s screen you were messing up their builds they were working with. They were having to change strategies on the fly and quickly. In Mario 35 it’s just another enemy that you can power through with a fireball and you can take your time doing so. This doesn’t mean that an overwhelming amount of enemies can’t lead to your death, they did so plenty for me, but more often than not I personally ended up dying due to my own mistakes rather than ones caused by other players.

This also made matches feel a little too long. When you reach the final 10 players it becomes a war of attrition as there are fewer enemies to send after one another. It just kinda turns into everyone playing standard Mario. Not a bad thing, but a little less exciting without the chaos of the earlier portions of the round.

To Nintendo’s credit, they seem to acknowledge that matches can grow stale and have a “Special Battle” section that offers unique circumstances to try and keep things fresh. Players can start off with a mushroom or have less clock on their timer than usual in this. It’s a nice mix up and should keep bringing players back. There are of course daily challenges as well so even after you’ve unlocked every level, all the icons, and become the best Mario 35 player in the world there will always be something to keep you coming back. As long as you still have an interest in the game.

Length of interest will be what decides just how popular Mario 35 becomes. The idea isn’t particularly new and outside of the Battle Royale modes, there isn’t much to offer players to keep coming back. If they lose interest they’re going to fall off fast. Nintendo will need to provide a lot of support for this game to avoid it quickly falling out of the collective consciousness of gamers.

At the end of the day, Mario 35 is a fairly entertaining game but it needs more to really push it over the top. It is free on the Nintendo eShop so there’s nothing to stop you from trying it out. Give it a go, especially if you’re a Mario fan. Maybe you’ll fall in love with it. There’s just no guarantee the good times will last longer than a week.

Despite public-facing support of President Donald Trump’s questionable photo ops while he’s being treated for COVID-19 at Walter Reed hospital, Trump’s family is reportedly divided over his erratic behavior. Donald Trump Jr. appears to be the most concerned, and the situation reached a head following the president’s impromptu motorcade on Sunday, which led to pointed criticisms about endangering the lives of Secret Service agents and raised questions about the president’s mental stability. According to Vanity Fair, Trump Jr. has been attempting to enlist his siblings in an intervention, but his pitch is going as expected.

“Don Jr. has said he wants to stage an intervention, but Jared and Ivanka keep telling Trump how great he’s doing,” a source said. Don Jr. is said to be reluctant to confront his father alone. “Don said, ‘I’m not going to be the only one to tell him he’s acting crazy,’” the source added.

As you can see, the President’s children spent the weekend cheerleading Trump’s attempt to downplay the severity of his condition despite being hospitalized. Here’s Ivanka calling the president “relentless” as he signs stacks of blank paper in a Saturday photo op.

And here’s Eric cheering on the motorcade that left Trump Jr. “deeply upset” by his father’s actions.

However, Vanity Fair reports that all three children are “united” that the president’s Monday morning tweetstorm is cause for concern. After Trump fired off more than a dozen all-caps tweets with such phrases as “SPACE FORCE. VOTE!” and “LAW & ORDER. VOTE!” the hashtag #RoidRage quickly started trending on Twitter, much to the dismay of his family. “They’re all worried,” a source said. “They’ve tried to get him to stop tweeting.”

(Via Vanity Fair)

Political tensions are always high during an election year, but they are especially so after an extremely stressful year involving a pandemic, months of civil unrest, and a political leader prodding his base with conspiracy theories and dog-whistle calls for violence against anyone who disagrees with him. Those calls are apparently being answered as well, as a recent event over the weekend showed when a Donald Trump supporter was arrested after sucker-punching another man for loudly playing Compton rapper YG’s “FDT” outside a Buc-ee’s in Denton, Texas.

TMZ got a hold of a video of the incident, during which the Trump fan, Jason Lata, yelling at the YG fan to “turn it off” before suddenly decking the other man. The man who was punched visited a hospital, but told TMZ he was “fine.” Meanwhile, Lata was arrested for assault causing bodily injury on Saturday night, with bail set at $15,000.

Incidentally, Trump opponents have been working to abolish cash bail so there’s another layer of irony on top of this bizarre incident. Meanwhile, YG’s 2016 hit featuring Nipsey Hussle continues to be a lightning rod for controversy and viral incidents. YG pointed out in 2017 that he was one of the first artists to publicly speak out against the former game show host and even once kicked multiple fans offstage for not singing along. Meanwhile, conservative pundits tried to criticize the song shortly after Nipsey Hussle’s death, confusing the two rappers for each other. Meanwhile, YG has since moved on from calling out Trump to calling out the police with “FTP.”

Watch the video of the YG-fueled fight here.

The Los Angeles Lakers are still in command of the NBA Finals, holding a 2-1 series lead over the Miami Heat, but with Goran Dragic and Bam Adebayo still out on Sunday, they had a tremendous opportunity to put Miami in a 3-0 hole and all but wrap up a championship.

Instead, they struggled to find any sort of rhythm in Game 3 on offense as Miami made some great adjustments on the defensive end, and the Lakers succumbed to the will of Jimmy Butler when the Heat had the ball. Butler finished with 40 points, 13 assists, and 10 rebounds, marking the first time a LeBron opponent had out-scored, out-rebounded, and out-assisted him all in the same game in the NBA Finals.

Butler was nothing short of sensational, but given who the Heat had available on Sunday, it was a bit surprising at just how willing the Lakers were to give him the matchups he wanted throughout the game — particularly when guarded by LeBron James.

In the Nuggets series, LeBron James took it upon himself late in the series to pick up Jamal Murray towards the end of games on defense and the result was Denver’s star guard finding it difficult to create quality looks. In Game 3, James appeared to be ready to do the same in the fourth quarter, but with the Lakers going small, James and the rest of the team were far too willing to provide Butler with his preferred matchup with immediate switches whenever Jae Crowder or Tyler Herro came to set a weak screen for him.

Anthony Slater of The Athletic cut together four such possessions in the fourth quarter that led to eight crucial Butler points to keep the Lakers at arm’s length.

It’s something that’s plagued teams all postseason, a willingness to let superstars hunt their preferred matchups due to a refusal to adapt their ultra-switching schemes to the situation at hand. However, what made the Lakers approach so frustrating is that they, of all teams, should know the dangers of this, as LeBron James is the most aggressive player in the league at hunting mismatches by calling for weak on-ball screens from perimeter players.

That James would simply cede the Butler assignment to Kentavious Caldwell-Pope, Markieff Morris, or Kyle Kuzma, defenders Butler clearly wanted to target and had great success against, is simply unacceptable in this situation. In some instances, such as the third clip, a screen never even happens, with James just walking off of the Butler assignment as Crowder walks through the area to leave Jimmy with Morris.

L.A. had cut the Miami lead to as few as four in the fourth quarter, but allowed Butler to take over down the stretch in large part due to their willingness to give him the matchups he wanted. The Heat certainly put pressure on the Lakers defense by deploying a lineup with Herro, Duncan Robinson, and Kelly Olynyk down the stretch, as all three of those players are more than capable as three-point shooters and as such you have to try staying attached to them. That means, when they come to set a screen, you can’t hard double Butler and risk leaving them wide open.

Still, no one else on the floor was a significant on-ball threat — Herro certainly has shown a knack for making big shots, but at 6-for-18 on the night, you’d certainly prefer the rookie trying to create over Butler — and yet they didn’t even try to get the ball out of Jimmy’s hands by refusing him switches onto smaller or slower defenders.

On top of that, Butler isn’t a threat as a shooter from deep, and you’re far better served by him hoisting a three or a long two off the dribble than allowing him to get downhill and to his spots, either in the short mid-range or at the rim where he’s elite at drawing fouls. As such, it should be an easy call to just go under a screen — especially screens as soft as what the Heat were setting late — and stay with Butler, allowing the other defender to lock and trail through the action.

Instead, the Lakers played into Butler’s hands in a way we usually see teams fall for the same trap on the other end for LeBron, whether out of pride or exhaustion or some combination of the two. Now, we’ll wait to see if the Lakers make an adjustment for their late game defense after their first taste of the Heat’s real crunch time offense when they have the lead.

With the Heat possibly getting Bam Adebayo and/or Goran Dragic back for Game 4, that task would get even more complicated, but one lesson the Lakers should learn is certain: Don’t simply give Jimmy Butler what he wants.

Tom Cruise leaps off buildings and dangles off the side of helicopters all the time. Don’t forget all all that running as well, so what does Tom think of standing and/or lounging atop a speeding train? In comparison, it doesn’t seem like a challenge to him. The Mission: Impossible 7 production wrapped its Norway leg of filming this weekend, according to director Chris McQuarrie, and now they’re moving onto Rome. Before that happens, though, Cruise and crew members hopped aboard the aforementioned train, and people witnessed it just, you know, happening. In response, a relaxed-looking Cruise (who was taking a breather in a semi-reclined position) smiled and waved.

You know this had to land on TikTok. The people loved it.

At one point, Tom was also standing atop the train with absolutely no sense of fear. I guess when one’s climbed the side of the Burj Khalifa, this is just another day at work. Here’s another video from an Instagram user.

In a more muted take, here’s McQuarrie’s tech-y version on Instagram, which notes that the production is done wreaking action-havoc in Norway and swapping countries.

So, after the upcoming Tom Cruise franchise picture that does everything but send him to space shut down production (due to you know what) earlier this year, it looks like everything is going swimmingly. That’s a good thing, considering that Cruise personally called Norway’s culture minister before igniting a local controversy involving cruise ships. This followed a bridge kerfuffle and a stunt gone wrong, but Paramount Pictures must be breathing a sigh of relief because it’s all happening (again) for real.

Mission: Impossible 7 is scheduled for a November 19, 2021 release.

The Fargo Frozen Five is Uproxx’s weekly collection of thoughts, observations, and goofball screencaps from each new episode the FX limited series’ fourth season. We do not guarantee that there will be five items every week. There could be four, or six, or a dozen. Who knows? This show doesn’t follow the rules. We shouldn’t have to either.

EPISODE 3 — “Raddoppiarlo” (or, “Chekhov’s Pie”)

5. Chekhov’s Gun is a famous storytelling principle that goes something like this: If you introduce a gun early in the proceedings, someone needs to fire it by the end. It works with almost anything, too, not just guns. Show the audience something consequential, be sure to pay it off. A weapon, a leaky gutter, a car with an engine that doesn’t always start, some creepy woods off in the distance. Or, if you prefer, a pie filled with all sorts of chemical agents intended to wreak havoc on the bowels, which brings us to poor Swanee Capps, who just wanted to be an outlaw.

Unfortunately for her (and for anyone within, say, 8-10 feet of her, and especially anyone trapped in a coffin with her), she ate about half of the pie Oraetta made for Ethelrida, right out of the dish, plates be damned. The result was as predictable as it was funny: vicious stomach rumbles followed by gurgling gas followed by projectile vomit, a substantial amount of which ended up on the pile of money they were in the process of stealing from Loy Cannon’s newly acquired slaughterhouse. One imagines Chekhov’s Poisoned Pie will lead us to Chekhov’s Puke Covered Pilfered Cash. We have not seen the last of that gross loot sack.

It will also lead to a whole heap of other issues. Cannon’s gang thinks the order may have come from the Faddas. The Faddas are still sore about the original slaughterhouse coup and have a wild animal with a teeny tiny mustache introducing anarchy everywhere he goes. A U.S. Marshal in tracking our outlaws and seems on the precipice of uncovering each individual part of this one piece at a time. Things are about to get very serious, very soon. And for the second week in a row, a lot of it can be traced back to serious gastrointestinal issues. What a fun show.

4b. Gaetano is trouble in about a million ways, many of them delightful. Watch him sit in his brother’s Boss Chair, caressing the armrests and rolling his head into the cushion, looking very much like a guy who wants to stay there permanently. Listen to him give a half-drunken speech about the warrior history of the Fadda family as he orders an unsanctioned hit on the elder, jazz-loving Cannon son. Look at his eyeballs as they struggle to remain in their sockets at each stage of the action. The man is a powder keg ready to blow at any moment. I love him so much. He’s been on screen maybe 16 minutes total in the first three episodes and I’m already fully prepared to sign on for a full-on Gaetano In Italy prequel experience.

4a. But seriously, go back and rewatch the scene where he orders the hit over drinks. Every motion he makes is exaggerated something like 200 percent. He’s like a stage actor from 150 years ago, before microphones, just doing everything as huge as possible so the people way in the back don’t feel cheated out of their money. It says a lot that this show is stacked full of big names who are spouting off the wittiest lines you’ve ever heard and my favorite part of the episode was some guy wordlessly taking a shot of alcohol with the energy of a bull who just saw a nice little china shop and thought “Maybe I’ll check it out.”

3. It was a relatively quiet week for Oraetta Mayflower, or at least as quiet a week as one can have when one gets a new job at a fancy hospital, manually stimulates the groin of a crime boss with such efficiency that he finishes just as she’s wrapping up the first verse of “The Battle Hymn of the Republic” (good luck hearing that with seeing Jason Schwartzman’s face from now on), and possibly kicks off a Kansas City gang war by accident with the help of laxative-filled baked goods.

But yeah, other than that, pretty quiet. I suspect, should any of the parties involved survive long enough to get us there, that Doctor Harvard will not have a very fun birthday after eating those macaroons.

2b. Maybe I’m just a big fluffy pushover, maybe I’m just a simple man who likes simple things, maybe I’m just a rube for nostalgia (Rube Nostalgia = solid Fargo name), but I am really tickled to see Timothy Olyphant wearing a cowboy hat and delivering snappy one-liners again. It is a little different now that he’s a carrot-chomping Mormon from Utah instead of a trigger-happy heathen from Kentucky, and yes, this is where we bring up lines like “You blaspheme more than any man I’ve ever met, and I’ve been to Cleveland” and “makes more sense to me than clam chowder.” I’m not sure the last one even makes sense because, like, can you even get decent clam chowder in Utah? That doesn’t sound good. It sounds kind of like a threat, actually, like something someone would say to an underlying who was flouting the rules. “You start flying straight, buster, or so help me god you’ll be eating clam chowder in Utah for the rest of your career.” Something to think about, I guess.

2a. Big shouts to the lawman Dick “Deafy” Wickware was meeting with, in part for being a ridiculous person and in part for pointing out the “cockeyed names” of the fugitives they’re chasing.

Between one character this week acknowledging all the strange names and the banker last week named Wink who spent an entire scene winking at the camera, this season is a very short walk from my beloved Gaetano leaning out through the television screen like a character in a horror movie to stare at you with his bulging eyeballs while you eat your cereal. I respect it.

1. Let’s just list a few things we know, for certain, right now, without making any assertions or assumptions:

• There is a character in season four of Fargo named Rabbi Milligan
• Rabbi Milligan is part of the Kansas City mafia, despite being Irish, because his Irish mobster father traded him twice — once to a Hebrew gang (hence, Rabbi) and once to the Italians, who he helped to double-cross his biological father
• Rabbi Milligan is currently the guardian of the youngest Cannon son, a Black child who was also traded in an underworld negotiating tactic
• This current season of Fargo is set in Kansas City in 1950
• The second season of Fargo is set in 1979
• In the second season of Fargo, a Black mafia hitman from Kansas City is sent to North Dakota to kill a member of the Gerhardt crime family
• The Black Kansas City mafia hitman is named Mike Milligan

Again, let’s not run around making assumptions here. It’s too early for that and, frankly, I’m enjoying the ride too much to ruin it with overthinking things that may or may not happen. But let’s also say that, if you wanted to do something like that, the timeline doesn’t exactly not match-up in a way that implies the youngest Cannon son ends up betraying his father and becoming a member of the Kansas City mafia and changing his name to “Mike Milligan” to honor the man who actually ended up raising him.

But again, I’m not going to do that. Not yet.

After the success of the Travis Scott meal, it only makes sense that McDonald’s would continue to collaborate with the hottest stars in music today. No genre is expanding its foothold on the public consciousness like Reggaeton and no artist has been more successful as an ambassador of the style than J Balvin, making him the perfect choice to receive his own spin on the McDonald’s menu. The J Balvin meal, like the Travis Scott meal, is based on the star’s go-to order: a Big Mac without pickles, medium fries with ketchup, and an Oreo McFlurry.

In an interview with Complex, Balvin explained the deal, saying, “I grew up with McDonald’s. I wasn’t born in the States, but since I was a kid, I was eating McDonald’s meals. When I had my very first chance to go to the States, it was like a dream to me, coming from Colombia to my first time having a McDonald’s meal. It’s those types of moments that connect with me as a child. And when they called me saying that they wanted to work with me, I immediately said yes because it connects with me and my childhood. I’ve always been a big fan. It’s crazy to have your own meal.”

The J Balvin meal will become available when the Travis Scott promotion ends.

Check out the commercial for the new meal above.

There’s only one episode of season 2 of The Boys left, and judging by the teaser for the season finale, it’s all hitting the fan.

After the brain-splattering final moments of the penultimate episode, “Butcher, Baker, Candlestick Maker,” The Boys prepare to hit back with the only option they have left in their battle with the Supes: Kill everyone. Although, it appears that they’ll be primarily focused on Aya Cash’s Stormfront, the latest addition to The Seven, as she pulls Antony Starr’s Homelander deeper and deeper into her secret Nazi agenda.

While Butcher — who is now vowing to “kill everyone” — has always had it in for the terrifyingly powerful Homelander, this time it’s even more personal after the all-American Supe took the son of Butcher’s estranged wife, Rebecca. Adding even more chaos to the mix is the last shot of the teaser, which shows something very strange happening to Homelander’s eyes. Did Stormfront inject him with a new version of Compound V? Is the invincible psychopath mutating into something even more dangerous? It’s definitely a new surprise for viewers of the show.

You can see the teaser for The Boys Season 2 finale below:

While The Boys has never shied away from a high body count, showrunner Eric Kripke recently revealed that he does regret one of the deaths in the second to last episode: Shawn Ashmore’s Lamplighter. Via TVLine:

“We wrote all that before we cast Shawn, and once we cast Shawn and we saw how good he was and how soulful and weary and, in a weird way, sympathetic he made Lamplighter, I really regretted that we were killing him,” Kripke admits with a laugh. “If I could go back and do it again, knowing that I had Shawn and what he did with that character, I would have kept him alive for longer. But that was what that character was arced for from the beginning.”

The Boys Season 2 finale starts streaming Friday on Amazon Prime Video.

(Via The Boys on Twitter)

NBA players have been adamant throughout the restarted season about keeping focus on issues beyond the basketball court that impact their communities. Players have committed time, money, and resources to fighting for racial and social justice, calling for leaders to bring about systemic change in policing and racist policies, such as voter suppression, that disproportionately targets and disenfranchise Black Americans.

During the pandemic, they’ve also helped to provide meals and resources to thousands of families across the country as unemployment rates skyrocket and uncertainty about where the next meal will come from has become a major concern for millions. On Monday, the league announced the five players who have earned the NBA Cares Community Assist Award this season for their work off the court, with the league and Kaiser Permanente donating $10,000 on their behalf to a charitable cause of their choosing.

Harrison Barnes, Jaylen Brown, George Hill, Chris Paul, and Dwight Powell are the five recipients of the award this year, honoring their work in the community in a year in which those efforts have been incredibly important. All five have provided donations to support local efforts to provide food to those in need during the pandemic and also have been driving voices in the call for social justice and an end to systemic racism, working with their teams and making individual efforts to support various organizations in the fight for racial justice.

The five $10,000 donations will go to the African American Policy Forum (Barnes), 7uice Foundation (Brown), Represent Justice (Hill), Chris Paul Family Foundation (Paul), and Champions of Discovery (Powell).