Month: June 2021

Somehow we’re already halfway through 2021 and the latest episode of Culture Quick Bites is here to remind you of that fact with host AJ Lodge and guest co-host Irene Walton recapping some of this year’s most fascinating bits of bite-sized pop-culture milestones — try saying that five times fast — before previewing the “fully vaccinated summer” we’re all about to have. So if you’re still laughing at those Suez Canal shipping container memes but you’re also curious about the recently announced summer music festival lineup; if you want to geek out over all of the comic book movies and TV shows we watched from home but you’re also interested in heading to a theater to catch Vin Diesel drift in space while belting a Lin Manuel-Miranda penned musical number — wow, do we have a show for you!

Okay fine, we just made up that dream crossover event, but hey, it’s 2021. Anything goes.

Our hosts are also hyped for the return of Tom Hiddleston’s Loki in Marvel’s latest Disney+ series which promises to deliver a bunch of weird time-travel shenanigans — and an impressively suave silver mustache courtesy of Owen Wilson. And we can’t forget about the NBA Playoffs, aka the perfect opportunity for Irene and AJ to remind us of LeBron James’ Oscar-worthy performance in the 2015 hit comedy, Trainwreck. But mostly, we’re just here for the glow-up of AJ’s personal hero and the one-true Dunkin Donuts mascot, Ben Sadfleck.

Check out the latest episode of Culture Quick Bites for more.

If you’ve ever donated to a cause but worried that your contribution wasn’t really enough to drive real change, you’re not alone. As one person, it can be tough to feel like you’re making a
real difference, especially if you don’t have a lot to donate or if times are tough (aka there’s a worldwide pandemic going on.)

That’s why, for years, the idea of philanthropy felt a little bit like a rich person’s thing: if you had millions, you could donate and make change. The rest of us were just tossing pennies into a cup without really doing much.

But that’s a problem: the priorities of a wealthy few don’t represent the priorities of many, which means that good causes are often left underfunded, leading to a lack of meaningful action.

The thing is: it doesn’t have to be like this. We can
all make a difference, especially if we pool our money together.

Enter: Giving Circles. These are when groups of people with shared values come together to drive change. They do it by pooling their time and money together, then deciding as a circle where it should go. That way, they can cause a real targeted change in one place quickly in a very people-powered way by giving what they can, whether that’s volunteer hours, money, or a mix of both. Best of all, Giving Circles are a social experience — you get to work together as a community to make sure you do the most good you can.

In other words, giving circles are a way to democratize philanthropy, making it more accessible regardless of your age, income, gender, or race.

That’s why this year, The Elevate Prize, a nonprofit founded in 2019, is launching a
new pop-up “Giving Circle” program so that problem solvers, budding philanthropists, and anyone that wants to do good can come together and drive real impact at a large scale. And you can do it all in just 90 minutes.

All you have to do is join one of the Elevate Giving Circles online. Learn about organizations doing good for the world, then pool your money together, and as a group, direct it where you think that donation could make the most difference.

But that’s not all: every single donation made is matched by the Elevate Prize Foundation — basically guaranteeing that you double your impact for good. The theme for the first cycle is education, and Elevate Giving will match up to $75,000 in total donations for each cycle.

Ready to get involved?
Elevate Giving experiences start June 26th, so sign up now for your spot to make a difference. There’s no minimum fee to join either — so get involved no matter what you have to give. Now that’s philanthropy for all.

If you’re a cryptocurrency investor and a fan of Donald Trump, you might want to sit down for this one. On Monday morning, the former president caused the price of Bitcoin to fall after criticizing the digital currency and demanding that it be extremely regulated to prevent it from competing with the U.S. dollar.

Trump made the remarks during a wide-ranging interview with Fox Business Network’s Varney & Co. where he flat out called Bitcoin a scam after being asked if he’d ever invest in crypto. “Bitcoin, it just seems like a scam,” Trump said. “I don’t like it because it’s another currency competing against the dollar … I want the dollar to be the currency of the world. That’s what I’ve always said.”

He also said that the government regulations on crypto should be “very very high.” Following the interview, Forbes reported that Bitcoin prices experienced yet another dip:

Trump’s comments appeared to drive a dip in Bitcoin’s value as its price fell by over 1.3% (from $36,472 to $35,973) in the hour after the interview.

Trump has voiced his concerns with Bitcoin before. In 2019, he revealed that he’s not a fan of cryptocurrency after it’s price fell roughly $10,000. It also marks a tumultuous time for Bitcoin, which recently saw Elon Musk announce he was “breaking up” with crypto. However, while Musk distancing himself from Bitcoin caused the price to dip, it also caused a run on semen-based coins because the crypto market will never not be weird as hell.

But while the run on ejaculatory-themed coins was funny at the time, Musk’s seeming manipulation of the Bitcoin market has put him in the crosshairs of Anonymous, which called out the Tesla CEO for his “clear disregard for the average working person.” This, in a way, puts Donald Trump and Anonymous on the same side? Have we mentioned crypto is weird?

(Via Fox News, Forbes)

In the era of battle royale games, it can be difficult to make one that stands out from the crowd. Everything is a battle royale now from, the classic shooters like Call of Duty, to the less conventional like Tetris or Mario. So when it was announced that Bomberman would be getting its own 64 player battle royale there wasn’t a huge surprise. It made sense, to be honest. Bomberman has always been chaotic and adding more players into the mix only lends itself to that chaotic nature.

Super Bomberman R Online is similar, but not the same, as Super Bomberman R that came out back in 2017. Except, Super Bomberman R Online is free to play and available for download on Steam, Switch, Xbox, and PlayStation. Super Bomberman R is still a standalone game that can be purchased for about $40 for anyone interested in a more classic Bomberman experience. This may be what some fans of the series want to do because while Super Bomberman R Online is a fun enough game, the shallow nature of it will leave most players wanting more.

Gameplay is simple enough. Four players are dropped onto a classic Bomberman map with blocks and power ups, and their goal is to eliminate each other with bombs. Each player has two lives, so if they get caught in a flurry of bombs, and are unable to escape, they’ll at least get a second chance. Some players upon death will also drop a heart that gives a player an extra life when it’s picked up. Extremely valuable in a game like this, because if someone even grazes an explosion that’s a loss of life. It’s all very standard Bomberman gameplay. Where it starts to get different is the battle royale aspects.

All 64 players are spread across multiple maps. In traditional Bomberman, if players take too long it will start shrinking the map forcing everyone to get closer until a winner is decided. In Super Bomberman R Online players are instead forced to move to different maps. Forcing everyone closer to each other and there’s no limit to how many players can be on a map together. It can be two all alone or it can be a chaotic mess of eight people trying to gain control. This might sound like the play is to just survive until the end and let the map do your dirty work for you. That is certainly a strategy, but if anyone successfully clears out a map before the time limit then powerups pour into the map for the player to pick up. There’s far more incentive to eliminate players than there is to play the waiting game. That is Bomberman at its best. Players running around in a chaos of bombs and power-ups trying to outsmart the other one. Except now it’s 64 people all trying to survive to the end. It’s a really fun game that can be extremely addicting, often creating that “just one more match” feeling.

Unfortunately, the good times will not last forever. The game came out on May 26 and it is really lacking in extra features. There are the typical free-to-play extras like costumes and skins, which actually work really well in this game because every character is unique. They all have their own stats and some of the special characters have special power-ups. Konami even dips into their history with Contra, Silent Hill, and Metal Gear Solid characters all making an appearance as bombers. Unfortunately, most of these skins are hidden behind a paywall as premium characters. There is a game pass that players can steadily unlock skins, music, and other collectibles with by playing the game but that is not recommended, because getting into games is unnecessarily challenging.

A game like this is at its best when the player can jump into games quickly, but the servers struggle to do this. There have been times where a game has been started after only a minute of setup, but there are times where it has taken five minutes. There was one particular time where it took multiple minutes to get the game started, and then the game froze for a few minutes with everyone standing in place waiting for the server to let us play. On average, it can take two to three minutes for a game to start once a match has been found and searches can only be started from the main menu.

The best part of any battle royale game is how quickly the player can jump into another game. For something as fast-paced as Bomberman is, a player’s match can be over as soon as five minutes. They then have to go back to the main menu, start a new search, and wait the standard three minutes for the game to begin. This leaves the player spending more time in menus than playing the game, and while premium players can set up their own private matches, there just isn’t enough in the main game to justify waiting around that long. That feeling of “Just one more” is instead replaced with “Do I want to wait to die early again.”

Super Bomberman R Online is an inoffensive game, but while fans of the Bomberman series will love it, most people are going to be frustrated by the lack of features and long wait times between matches. Which is disappointing because this feels like it had the potential to be a really fun game.

Jensen Ackles is the king of incremental teases when it comes to his The Boys third-season character, Soldier Boy, and each reveal is proving to be surprisingly significant. He first showed off fresh-out-of-quarantine photo, which revealed a heavily unkempt beard, which put him at odds with the character’s clean-shaven look in the comics. Showrunner Eric Kripke later confirmed that Ackles’ mountain-man look would stay for the series, which is an interesting twist on a character who’s a twist on the sometimes-bearded (at least, as portrayed by Chris Evans) Captain America.

The Supernatural star recently showed off a video of him getting jacked (and feeling exhausted) while training for camera time. And over the weekend, he tweeted a photo of Soldier Boy’s shield (“Every dent, every scratch, every mark tells a story. A story that ends with me, winning,” read the caption) while promising a full reveal on Monday.

Well, as promised, here’s Amazon’s tweeted reveal with another clever play on words: “He’s the f’n Captain now, America.”

In case you’d like to scroll on Soldier Boy, here’s the full-length version via Amazon:

In a press release, costume designer Laura Jean Shannon declared, “Soldier Boy is the original bad ass. Our goal was to highlight a bygone era of overt masculinity and grit. With that pedigree we dove headfirst into baking in an all-American quality grounded in a military soldier’s practicality with a heavy dose of old school cowboy swagger.” She added, “We knew that the actor had to have Steve McQueen looks and chops with a John Wayne attitude, luckily Jensen Ackles embodies all of that.” Kripke noted, “And if you think the photos are cool, just wait till you see Jensen in action. It’s one of my very favorite suits. Also, now you can quit clogging my Twitter notifications with demands to see it.”

The Boys knows how to ratchet up the excitement factor, so here’s to hoping for more reveals on that “Herogasm” episode. Also, it’s still worth crossing fingers for more Supernatural cast members hopping on the Vought International train, maybe not for the next season, but possibly in the future? Jim Beaver has already appeared as Robert Singer, and no one (and I mean no one) will be mad to see Jeffrey Dean Morgan. He’ll end his The Walking Dead run soon, so why the heck not?

The Boys Season 3 has been shooting all year. Fingers crossed for a late 2021 release.

Megan Thee Stallion‘s been on a break but it looks like she’s coming back just in time for the return of Hot Girl Summer. After posting a tweet proclaiming her alter ego “Tina Snow is back” yesterday, the Houston Hottie followed up today with the pre-save link to her first post-Good News single, “Thot Sh*t,” which arrives this Friday, June 11.

Meg spent the last two months on a social media hiatus, calling it a “period of regeneration” in a tweet announcing the break. “Due to the demands of the Hot Girl lifestyle has now entered a period of regeneration to prepare for what’s next,” the announcement read. “In her absence; mgmt will manage all social posting on behalf of Thee Hot Girl Coach. Meg herself followed up, adding, “I’ll be back when it’s time.”

It seems that she used the time off to recalibrate. Although she’s become a chart-topping superstar since the release of her Tina Snow mixtape in 2018, some fans have grumbled that EPs like Fever and her debut album Good News, although spawning a number of hits, haven’t had the same energy as her breakout tape. Hopefully, by returning to the alter ego that first endeared her to fans, she can get back on the right track.

Meanwhile, despite her time spent “away,” there’s still been plenty of Stallion news, as she appeared in DJ Khaled’s “I Did It” video, led the 2021 BET Awards nominations, and landed a number of festival roster spots, including Governor’s Ball in New York, Bottlerock in California’s Napa Valley, and Barcelona’s Primavera Sound.

Megan Thee Stallion is a Warner Music artist. Uproxx is an independent subsidiary of Warner Music Group.

Back in 2019, Ubisoft unveiled the latest developing title in the Tom Clancy Rainbow Six series. The game, Rainbow Six Quarantine, had a horror like reveal trailer and left fans intrigued about what the game may be like. Based on the name, something about a mysterious infection seemed likely.

Of course, a lot has happened since then and Ubisoft recently got ahead of something that would have been a little awkward had they stayed the course with the original name. Quarantine has now been changed to Extraction and Ubisoft teased Rainbow Six Extraction for their upcoming E3 event, Ubisoft Forward.

Early signs indicate a game that is going to be similar to the popular Rainbow Six Siege game. A multiplayer, class-based shooter where players work together to extract or defend hostages, defuse a bomb, etc. However, considering the game’s original name and the mysterious infection elements of the game it’s not like the original name wasn’t fitting. They just didn’t predict how the world was going to change in 2020 and entering into 2021.

Changing the name was a good call at the end of the day. Rainbow Six games are celebrated for being fun gameplay experiences and nobody is going to want to play a game called “quarantine” after the year we just had.

The God of Mischief is back and he’s been burdened with the glorious purpose of continuing Marvel’s streak of streaming domination. With Tom Hiddleston once again suiting up as the tortured Asgardian villain-turned-almost-hero, there’s been non-stop speculation from fans as to what kind of misadventures this version of Loki Laufeyson might get into when Disney+ grants him his own time-traveling TV series on June 9th.

The trickster god is an admitted pathological liar and chronic ne’er do well, so it’s almost impossible to predict what he’ll do — and more importantly, why he’ll do it — when he’s forced to team up with the Time Variance Authority to correct some anomalies his “rebirth” probably caused. (Remember: we’re working with the “old Loki” here whose plot to destroy New York City and rule Midgard failed pretty spectacularly early in the Avengers’ run.) But luckily, there are plenty of clues to be found in the comics that might better prep us for the mayhem and multi-verse pandemonium that’s undoubtedly in store. We’ve sifted through some of the character’s biggest comic book story arcs to see what the future might hold for Marvel’s favorite Rock of Ages cosplayer.

Loki: Agent of Asgard

One of the more visionary reworkings of the Marvel villain to date, author Al Ewing’s time-hopping espionage thriller seems like the obvious source material for much of the action we’ve seen so far in trailers for the upcoming Disney+ series. In Agent of Asgard, Loki accepts a mission from the All-Mother to protect Midgard. With each good deed done, one of his previous crimes is erased. The comic is basically an excuse to force Loki to confront past versions of himself in order to become a better, more virtuous being which feels aligned with visuals we’ve seen from the show’s previews. Fans have already theorized that alternate versions of the shape-shifting charlatan might pop up in the series (Sophia Di Martino, blink twice if you’re the real Lady Loki!), and the Asgardian’s back-and-forth friendship with Owen Wilson’s Agent Mobius channels his partnership with a human in the comics named Verity Willis who could always tell when she was being lied to. One especially powerful call back is a scene in the trailer that seems to reference a metaphorical space in the comic storyline where he’s forced to confront past versions of himself in order to defeat a truly evil future iteration, eventually renaming himself as Loki, God of Stories. It’s a mind-bending ride but it would nicely set up a second season — one that’s already been greenlit by Disney+ — and really, would you expect anything less from the MCU’s biggest drama queen?

Vote Loki

Again, there are some fairly obvious references to this four-part comic book series written by Christopher Hastings that seem to be beating us over the head in the show’s trailer. His shredded three-piece suit, his political pin, a horde of Viking supporters that unexpectedly turn on him. If Loki is making a run for President of the United States as he did in Hastings’ satirical arc, it’s obviously not going well. More than likely this is just another version of Loki that the current time anomaly must “fix” but we’d be lying if we said we weren’t hyped to see the silver-tongued deity woo the masses with his political prowess.

The Fantastic Four And The Time Variance Authority

Technically the Time Variance Authority was first introduced in a Thor storyline but we didn’t really learn about this bureaucratic organization tasked with balancing multiple universe timelines until Issue 353 in Volume 1 of the Fantastic Four comics. That’s when Wilson’s Agent Mobius was first introduced as the team found themselves on trial for crimes against synchronicity. It’s here we learn about the Minutemen — agents of the TVA that are both human and machine — and the Null-Time Zone, a place existing outside time that serves as the TVA’s home base. It’s a safe bet that most of the backstory of the TVA and Mobius will come from these early Fantastic Four outings.

Avengers #23

This Stan Lee creation marks the first mention of Ravonna Lexus Renslayer, the character Gugu Mbatha-Raw is reported to be playing in the Disney+ series. Now, the Ravonna here is markedly different from Mbatha-Raw’s antagonistic time judge, but it can’t be a coincidence that the showrunners named her after a royal, superhuman being with ties to Kang the Conqueror. We know that Jonathan Majors has been cast to play the legendary villain in next year’s Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania, another Marvel entry dealing with the multiverse, so it stands to reason that he might be introduced at some point in Loki and his unrequited romance with Renslayer would be the perfect preview. We know that Loki will lead into Doctor Strange’s multiverse adventures, why not Ant-Man’s as well?

Secret Wars: The Last Days of Loki

A few months after the events of Agents of Asgard, Loki returns under his new moniker as the “God of Stories,” a changed being. Sort of. He’s still devious and untrustworthy, but he seems to be intent on destroying a genocidal version of himself named King Loki who’s conquered Earth and seeks to destroy Asgard, if not the entire Multiverse itself. Plenty of fans have speculated that Lady Loki — a version of the character first introduced in an Avengers: Disassembled storyline — might be the “greater threat” the TVA has enlisted Loki’s help in fighting but we think there’s a strong possibility the main villain of the series might be King Loki. He’s an adversary that only Loki can really hope to beat, which explains why instead of the TVA deleting the Asgardian from the timeline altogether — something they might normally do — they’re content to work with him to bring down an even worse version of the character. The King Loki storyline also feels like the kind of insular arc that could give Loki the kind of meatier, meaningful journey he deserves while keeping the main MCU timeline relatively intact.

Whether any of these storylines come to fruition or these predictions pan out, Loki is shaping up to follow in WandaVision’s footsteps, giving us the kind of weird AF interpretation of a fan-favorite MCU figure we’ve been missing from our own timeline for quite some time.

There are only 13 more episodes of Better Call Saul. That’s 13 episodes left to answer how Saul Goodman becomes Gene the Cinnabon man, when Gus Fring becomes a drug kingpin, and what happens to Kim Wexler. That’s the biggest question entering the final season, not only because she’s one of the best characters on TV, but also because she’s never mentioned on Breaking Bad. Is she dead? Have she and Saul gone their separate ways? Is she sipping Mai Tais on a tropical island while her ex is teaching addicts how to launder money in a New Mexico strip mall? Even Bob Odenkirk isn’t sure.

“I really truly don’t,” he told the Guardian when asked about the ending. “I try not to find out those things. I like being surprised just like a viewer of the story. I have my own theories, but they’re just basically fan theories.” Odenkirk, who previously said that viewers shouldn’t assume that Kim is dead, offered one of his own about Ms. Wexler’s fate:

“I don’t think she dies,” he says. “I think she’s in Albuquerque, and she’s still practicing law. He’s still crossing paths with her. To me, that would fuel his desire to be on billboards everywhere, because he wants her to see him.”

If that’s what happens, that Kim’s still living in Albuquerque during the events of Breaking Bad and Saul’s still pining for her, there’s no way that he hasn’t left a mixtape on her front porch (track one is “Ain’t No Sunshine”). It’s somehow the most depressing theory, even more than her dying. We’ll find out next year when Better Call Saul returns.

(Via Guardian)

Virginia Burton, 48, has over eight years and five months of sobriety under her belt and that’s the longest stretch she’s gone without using. She was first introduced to marijuana at the age of six and by the age of 15 was a “full-blown addict.”

She was incarcerated three times, twice with her mother.

She desperately wanted to stop, but couldn’t do it on her own. But finally, she found sobriety after getting arrested. “If not for the police, I wouldn’t be where I am today. They gave me an opportunity to change my life when they arrested me,” she wrote on Facebook. “On my own, I wouldn’t have stopped.”

“I honestly thought I’d die on a park bench with a needle in my arm or by gunshot to the head,” she wrote. “I would’ve never in a million years thought my life would look the way it does today.”

However, things have changed.

A photo she shared on Facebook is going viral for showing the dramatic change she’s gone through. The photo on the left is of her strung out on heroin and cocaine in 2005. The right, Burton after recently graduating with a political science degree from Washington State.

“How’s that for motivation?” she captioned the photo.

Last year, as a junior, she was awarded the prestigious Truman Scholarship which recognizes future leaders driven to make change at the policy level.

An avid mountaineer, she told the University of Washington that she tackles each task in life like she approaches a summit.

“Making the decision to return to school so late in life was a challenge for me,” she said. “I thought I might be too old to start my life over again and that learning might be harder than I imagined. I decided that I would tackle each challenge I faced with the same drive I tackle mountains. There is no excuse to stop moving forward. If I want to reach the summit, I must keep climbing.”

Burton hopes her miraculous transformation will show people that anything is possible. “Stop selling yourself short,” she wrote. “You don’t know what tomorrow might bring so you might consider starting today.”

Recovery Talk with Ginny Burton

www.youtube.com

“If you would have told me that my life would look like it does today eight and a half years ago, I would have called you a liar,” Burton told 10 TV’s Bryant Somerville.

Burton hopes her transformation will show people that even in the direst of situations it is possible to turn one’s life around.

“I want people to know that there is hope,” she wrote on Facebook. “No one is disposable. You don’t have to die in addiction. You can stop using, lose the desire, and find a new way to live. There are so many of us out here willing to help.”

The post has clearly done its job. It’s been seen by people as far as the Middle East, Switzerland, and Spain, and her inbox has been filled with countless messages from people thanking her for her hope and perseverance.

“I can’t tell you how grateful I am to share my life out loud,” she wrote.

Burton is looking forward to changing more lives by pursuing a master’s degree at the Evans School of Public Policy in Seattle so that she can help change the prison system. Since 2011, she has worked as a volunteer with the Post Prison education program which works to support former prisoners.

Her long-term goals are to realize her childhood dream of becoming a lawyer, run for elected office, and to restructure prison time. Given how she’s approached life for the past eight years, I wouldn’t bet against her.