Month: June 2021

Earlier today, the official Battlefield Twitter account announced plans to reveal the newest entry in the Battlefield series next week. The big reveal is set to begin June 9 at 7 AM PT, and will formally announce the sixth mainline game in developer DICE’s popular wartime saga — which could simply be called Battlefield based on the assets we’ve seen so far. The game is scheduled for release this holiday season on both Sony and Xbox’s next-generation consoles and PC.

This announcement comes days after Eurogamer first reported on some leaked Battlefield 6 footage making it’s way on to Reddit. Based on the footage shown, it appears the next entry in the Battlefield series might just be set in either modern times or the not-so-distant future, something the series hasn’t done since 2013. This shift in perspective is big news for Battlefield, and could be a very welcome change after Battlefield V‘s fairly stale take on the series.

EA itself teased Battlefield 6 in a blog post shared earlier this year, which stated the upcoming game has the “biggest team ever on a Battlefield game” and takes “everything we love about Battlefield . . . to the next level.” According to the post, this means we can expect “Epic scale. All-out military warfare. Crazy, unexpected moments. Game-changing destruction,” and “massive battles, packed with more players and mayhem than ever before.”

Get excited!

The chances to actually get on a plane and go to some parts of Europe this summer are increasing rapidly. Yesterday, the European Union set a deadline for its 27 members to “relax” travel restrictions for fully vaccinated travelers. The crux of this is based on all 27 member states adopting and implementing a digital COVID passport app by the first of July.

The EU is recommending that a fully vaccinated person (two weeks out from their final dose) should be able to travel to and around EU countries without restrictions. EU president Ursula von der Leyen tweeted that “Europeans should enjoy a safe and relaxing summer. As vaccination progresses, we propose to gradually ease travel measures in a coordinated way with our common tool: the EU digital covid certificate.”

The idea behind the EU implementing “the EU digital certificate” would be the freedom to travel between EU’s 27 countries without having to quarantine. In theory, that would also make it possible for you to go to, say, Brussels, Amsterdam, and Cologne without having to fill in COVID forms at the Belgian, Dutch, and German borders. Instead, you’ll have an app or printed piece of paper with a QR code that’ll have your vaccine dose and dates (and/or PCR test) information already uploaded.

This comes after countries like Spain, Greece, and Iceland opened their borders to fully vaccinated travelers. And that’s where it’s worth adding one caveat. Each EU country can do what they want when it comes to opening and closing their borders, implementing internal lockdowns, quarantines for arrivals, and so forth. Case in point, France and Germany have just restricted most travel from the U.K. due to serious concerns gripping the continent over the Indian variant of the disease spreading like wildfire this summer. At the same time, both Spain and Portugal announced they would allow all travelers from the U.K. to arrive even without a test, much less a vaccine. That means if things go badly in Spain and Portugal, places like France and Germany could close their borders to them, etc.

All of this is to say, that there’s never going to be a magic bullet that “reopens” the 27 countries in the European Union, much less the whole continent. But today’s news certain indicates travel will be less restricted by July 1 than previously expected.

Following up on his standout 2020 debut album Live Forever, Bartees Strange has shared a comforting visual to his gleaming track “Flagey God.” The black-and-white video not only highlights the thumping tune, but it also announces his anticipated 2021 tour.

Directed by Drew Horen and Lauren H. Adams, the “Flagey God” video evokes the disorienting energy of the club’s dance floor and depicts the musician soul-searching various locations. In a statement about the song, Bartees Strange says, “In my spare time, I make beats all the time. It’s honestly more fun than writing with guitars sometimes. ‘Flagey God’ came from a really natural and comfortable place for me musically, despite its moodiness thematically.”

The musician adds that he wrote “Flagey God” after feeling comfortably anonymous in Flagey Square, Brussles: “No one knew me there. I was super lost in my life at the time and confused about what to do next, but in Flagey, I felt like I was capable of anything… A Flagey God.”

Watch Bartees Stranges’ “Flagey God” video above and find his US and European 2021 tour dates below.

09/11 — Chicago, IL @ Pitchfork Festival
09/24 — Flushing, NY @ Governors Ball
09/30 — Vancouver, BC @ Hollywood Theatre *
10/01 — Portland, OR @ Wonder Ballroom *
10/02 — Seattle, WA @ Neptune Theatre *
10/05 — Salt Lake City, UT @ The Urban Lounge *
10/06 — Denver, CO @ Bluebird Theatre *
10/08 — Iowa City, IA @ Englert Theatre *
10/09 — Minneapolis, MN @ First Avenue *
10/12 — Columbus, OH @ Newport Music Hall *
10/14 — Toronto, ON @ The Opera House *
10/15 — Montreal, QC @ L’Asataral *
10/16 — Boston, MA @ House Of Blues *
10/18 — South Burlington, VT @ Higher Ground *
10/22 — Washington, DC @ 9:30 Club *
10/29 — San Francisco, CA @ Outside Lands
11/03 — Reykjavik, Iceland @ Iceland Airwaves
11/07 — Munich, Germany @ Milla Club
11/08 — Berlin, Germany @ Badehaus
11/10 — Koln, Germany @ Helios 37
11/12 — Cardiff, UK @ Club Ifor Bach
11/13 — Glasgow, UK @ The Hug and Pint
11/14 — Manchester, UK @ YES
11/16 — Leeds, UK @ Brudenell Community Room
11/17 — London, UK @ Powerhaus
11/21 — Brussels, Belgum @ Witloof Bar
11/22 — Amsterdam, Netherlands @ Paradiso Up

* with Lucy Dacus

Live Forever is out now via Memory Music. Get it here.

The Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles have just met their greatest foe yet: taxes. According to a report from The New York Times, Viacom, which owns the rights to the Turtles along with Transformers and a slew of other intellectual property, is under intense scrutiny after a Dutch non-profit alleged that the media conglomerate has been going to great lengths to avoiding paying the U.S. government billions in taxes by using a convoluted loophole where it attributed revenue from the blockbuster franchises to foreign entities.

As the Times explains, a former Viacom employee sued for “retaliatory firing” after she objected to the practice in 2016, but both parties eventually settled and sealed the terms of the agreement. However, details of the lawsuit have now been made public, which paints a picture of the alleged tax scheme:

In the suit, the executive accused Viacom of “hatching a plan to attribute” the revenue from the popular franchise “Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles” to the Netherlands for tax advantages. While the rights to the franchise are owned by a Dutch entity, “all of the business concerning those rights took place in New York,” the suit read. “The sole purpose of transferring the licensing rights to the Netherlands company was to avoid the U.S. tax burden,” the suit added.

The study noted that Viacom transferred its intellectual property rights to a subsidiary in Britain in 2015 while keeping the Dutch entities (operating as a subbranch of the British unit) as the jumping-off point for selling foreign rights.

The transfer — essentially a sale from one Viacom subsidiary to another — created a tax benefit, the study said. The transaction was worth $1.8 billion, according to company records cited by the study, a sum it can amortize over many years.

We’re guessing Leo, Mikey, Don, and Raph would never willingly take part in such a scheme that fails to live up to the values and principles of the cowabunga lifestyle.

(Via The New York Times)

Every year, Heaven Hill releases three versions of their Larceny Barrel Proof bourbon whiskey. These whiskey drops have become some of the most awarded and beloved wheated bourbon releases of the year. Larceny is also a wheated bourbon that you can actually afford for day-to-day sipping and mixing — a hell of a perk in an industry where hype can cause prices to skyrocket.

Today, we’re reviewing the latest edition of Larceny’s Barrel Proof, labeled B521. That’s the “b” or second release of the year that was bottled in May (“5”) of 2021.

You should be able to find this release on shelves very soon, but you might only be able to find them in Kentucky at close to the MSRP. These are limited releases of a very popular whiskey. Prices will inch up the further away from the Ohio Valley you get.

Larceny Barrel Proof B521

ABV: 60.5%

Average Price: $50 MSRP, $70 retail

The Whiskey:

These barrel blends from Heaven Hill are meant to highlight the precise quality of the distillery’s prowess from grain to bottle. This small batch of wheated bourbon is derived from barrels between six and eight years old. The juice then goes right into the bottle with no cutting or filtering, allowing the masterful craft to shine through in every sip.

Tasting Notes:

This has a mellow nose that ebbs and flows between soft maple syrup cut with cinnamon sticks, a light touch of brioche, new leather gloves, and bruised apples. It offers a warm rollercoaster ride through figgy puddings touched with burnt sugars, dried fruits and nuts, holiday spices, and a brandy butter silkiness. The taste has a hint of almond or walnut shell on the end that marries to a dry mouthfeel, vanilla, and a touch of tobacco chewiness.

The warmth lingers pretty long but never overpowers and almost becomes halfway between fizzy and buzzing as it fades, leaving you with a woody, bourbon vibe and a very late wet straw note.

The Bottle:

These Larceny bottles are pretty straightforward. They’re sort of shaped like a glass lock with a keyhole label. It’s a unique bottle for sure and a great name, but not a bespoke decanter or anything like that.

Bottom Line:

I liked this a lot more than I thought I would. The ABVs are definitely there but feel less intrusive than the Elijah Craig Barrel Proof. It’s a full-fledged bourbon experience from the nose to the long finish that’s definitely worth checking out this year.

Rating:

90/100 — this is a really solid barrel proof that’s very sippable (even neat) and definitely affordable.

Dwayne Johnson is a very large man. But the football player who became a wrestler who became a king of scorpions who became one of the most bankable movie stars in the world is only getting larger. Or at least his tree-trunk legs are.

In an Instagram post about his training process for Black Adam, Johnson wrote, “Late night training. Big week for #BlackAdam shooting my ‘champion’ scenes with my shirt off and showing my body. Been working extremely hard dieting, training and conditioning unlike any other role of my entire career.” He then explained how he’s getting in shape for the DC superhero movie.

Manipulating water, sodium, cardio but also having to push and pull real iron to have dense, dry, detailed muscle. It’s a real science that takes months and months to dial it all in with my strength & conditioning coach @daverienzi who keeps a very watchful eye, constantly fine tuning our strategy daily.

The Rock can be seen wearing his Iron Paradise shirt (the name of his gym) in the workout photo below; there’s also a ubiquitous American flag in the background and Brahma Bull hat on his head. The bull started as a tattoo, but it’s become “a symbol of strength, resilience, heart, power, and defiance to so many people around the world,” he once wrote. If you think that’s maybe overstating a tattoo’s influence, try telling that to this guy.

(Via Instagram/The Rock)

It seems like BTS is always making some sort of history. In fact, their latest single, “Butter,” just broke a handful of Guinness World Records a few days ago. Now that this week’s Billboard Hot 100 chart is out (after a one-day delay thanks to Memorial Day), BTS have further cemented themselves in music history. On the chart dated June 5, “Butter” debuts at No. 1, meaning the single is now their whopping fourth No. 1 song in just the past nine months. In fact, “Butter” topping the chart comes exactly nine months after their first No. 1 single, “Dynamite,” did on the chart dated September 5, 2020.

With “Butter,” BTS has achieved the quickest journey to four No. 1 singles among groups since the Jackson 5 in 1970. Furthermore, BTS is now just one of a handful of artists to achieve their first four No. 1 singles in under a year. The list they join includes The Beatles, The Supremes, Justin Timberlake, the Jackson 5, Mariah Carey, and Paula Abdul.

BTS isn’t the only artist making waves on this week’s Hot 100, though: Rodrigo has three songs in the top 10, with “Good 4 U” at No. 2, “Deja Vu” at No. 3, and “Traitor” at No. 9. This makes Rodrigo the first artist ever to have three songs from a debut album concurrently in the top 10.

Now here’s something you don’t see every day.

On Memorial Day, security footage caught an incredible encounter between a mama bear with her two cubs and a human mama bear with her four dogs. Don’t try this at home, kids.

Surveillance video shows Hailey Morinico, 17, intervening when a brown bear began swatting at the family’s four dogs from atop a brick wall in the yard of their Bradbury, California home. The video, which was shared on TikTok by Hailey’s cousin (@bakedlikepie) with music for effect, has been viewed more than 47 million times on TikTok alone, in addition to going viral on Twitter.

And if you want to see the raw footage without the hilarious “Oh No” music:

Hailey explained in follow-up video that her family lives in a mountainous area and that bears wandering into their yard isn’t a rare occurrence, especially in the summer. However, the shoving of the bear off the wall was unusual.

At first, when Hailey heard the dogs barking, she thought they were barking at another dog or a squirrel or something. When she went out to the yard to tell them to stop, she saw the bear leaning over the wall trying to pick up the youngest of the family’s four dogs. Hailey said that her first instinct was to push the bear, which is exactly what she did.

It’s common knowledge that you don’t mess with a mama bear, and it’s unclear whether Hailey noticed the two cubs that were on the wall just before the confrontation. She is fortunate that she was not attacked by the bear herself. She said she didn’t have to push it very hard to make it lose its balance, perhaps because she took it by surprise while it was distracted by the dogs.

Hailey ended up with a sprained finger and a scraped knee, but she and the dogs are both fine following the incident.

“My daughter is a hero,” Hailey’s mother Citlally told McClatchy News. “My daughter literally made eye contact with death and pushed it off a ledge.”

This is one of those stories that no one would believe if it hadn’t been caught on film. “She ran up and shoved the mama bear right off the wall!” Yeah, right. Oh, you mean she literally did exactly that? Okay then.

Lessons learned: Humans, don’t mess with mama bears. And bears, don’t mess around with Hailey.

The mark of a truly historic moment in the NBA is that it only needs to be referred to by one phrase. LeBron holds a few of those moments, namely The Block, which will conjure memories of him chasing down Andre Iguodala during the 2016 NBA Finals to pin his layup off the backboard, with the soundtrack of Mike Breen yelling “blocked by James!” seared into the memories of every NBA fan.

On a more dubious note, James also holds one of the rare off-court moments that lives in infamy with The Decision. It’s been more than a decade since James sat in front of Jim Gray and kids from the Boys & Girls Club to announce he would be leaving Cleveland and “taking my talents to South Beach,” representing the brief shift into a villain role for LeBron. It was one of the few PR missteps of James’ career, and a benign one at that when you look back on it a decade later.

In the moment, it created a massive uproar and launched a thousand columns, few more aggressive than that of Bill Simmons, then at ESPN. In that column, Simmons blamed “the lack of a father figure” in LeBron’s life, an incredibly gross assessment of how James dared to announce his free agency choice in a made for TV special that benefitted a local charity. That line is still why James’ agent Rich Paul, who left CAA and launched Klutch Sports shortly after The Decision, won’t speak with Simmons as he explained in a recent New Yorker profile on the super agent.

“I blame the people around him. I blame the lack of a father figure in his life,” Bill Simmons, then a leading columnist at ESPN, wrote. “I blame us for feeding his narcissism to the point that he referred to himself in the third person five times in forty-five minutes. I blame local and national writers (including myself) for apparently not doing a good enough job explaining to athletes like LeBron what sports mean to us, and how it IS a marriage, for better and worse, and that we’re much more attached to these players and teams than they realize.”

Paul saw this as condescension and worse. “That’s why I don’t speak to Bill Simmons,” he said. “A lot of that has to do with race, too. He wouldn’t have said that about Larry Bird. He wouldn’t have said that about J. J. Redick. You get what I am saying? ‘The Decision’ ten years ago is the norm today. It’s what everyone wants to do. Kids won’t even decide where they go to college without it being a big production, and Bill Simmons says some shit like that.”

For how derided it is, there’s no doubt of the impact of The Decision, both in the process and in the event itself, across the sports landscape. It opened the player empowerment era of the NBA in full, one that has frustrated GMs and team owners, but opened doors for stars to have more say in where they play and how teams are run to ensure they’re putting full investment into winning. On top of that, James joining Paul at Klutch shortly after led to only more hand-wringing and racist commentary, as the word “posse” was regularly used to describe James’ circle that he had created and many posited that he was setting himself up to fail — with the opposite ending up becoming true as James’ business venture’s and Paul’s agency have both taken off in the decade since.

The full piece offers interesting insight into everything from Paul’s role in Anthony Davis’ departure from New Orleans to the frustration of GMs with how Paul has helped expand the player empowerment movement. Through it all, Paul is unapologetic about doing what he must to get his clients what they want and where they want, calling out the differences in how he (and his clients) are discussed for doing so compared to others.

Since releasing her debut 2019 album Cheap Queen, King Princess has continuously positioned herself as force to be reckoned with. Last year, the singer expanded her catalog with her dancefloor-ready track “Only Time Makes It Human” and the masochistic number “Pain.” Now returning for her first new track of the year, King Princess kicks off Pride Month with the atmospheric tune “House Burn Down.”

The new single opens with hallow guitar tones and King Princess’ earnest vocal delivery as she sings of the pitfalls of an addictive relationship. The driving track was originally performed live during a run of shows in 2018. It quickly became a fan-favorite, with her listeners pressuring her to officially release the song. The studio version of the track was co-produced by Mark Ronson and features drums from Fabrizio Moretti and bass from Nikolai Fraiture, the latter two both of The Strokes.

Along with sharing the new track, King Princess officially announces her Heartbreak Odyssey livestream to hold fans over until she’s able to perform live again. The virtual event kicks off June 17 and will see King Princess performing her track “Holy” for the first time, as well as new singles like “Only Time Makes It Human” and “Pain.”

Listen to King Princess’ “House Burn Down” above and grab tickets to her Heartbreak Odyssey livestream here.