Month: June 2021

In a move that we surprisingly haven’t seen more of yet, one of the MAGA rioters who stormed the U.S. Capitol building on January 6 is calling on Donald Trump to pay his legal fees. The failed insurrection occurred during a “Stop the Steal” rally attended by the former president who told his throng of supporters to “fight like hell” moments before they marched to the Capitol in an attempt to stop the certification of the 2020 election and do God knows what to Vice President Mike Pence, Nancy Pelosi, and other members of Congress.

In a video posted outside an Austin, Texas courthouse where he was hit with charges for the January 6 attack, Zvonimir Jurlina referred to himself as a “political prisoner” and pleaded with Trump to pay his legal fees. “I’d like to say to Donald Trump, please pay for my legal fees!” Jurlina said. “This all happened because of you, okay? I didn’t do nothing wrong.”

While Jurlina does have a compelling argument that Trump instigated the assault on the Capitol building, it’s going to be hard for him to pin all of his actions on the former president. According to Reuters reporter Jan Wolfe, Jurlina was caught on camera announcing his plans to steal media equipment, which he’s being charged with. “Yo, I guess we should loot now, right?” Jurlina was filmed saying. “This is pretty expensive equipment. I’m thinking maybe I should just grab it up and then go to a pawn shop.”

(Via Jan Wolfe on Twitter, Raw Story)

There was an immediate sense of excitement when The Elder Scrolls VI was first unveiled to fans during E3 2018. There hasn’t been a new Elder Scrolls game since Skyrim came out in 2011. Some fans would argue that The Elder Scrolls Online in 2014 should count, but while that game is a perfectly fine MMO, it isn’t the kind of experience that the many people who loved Skyrim were seeking. Those folks wanted a new mainline Elder Scrolls game, and the reveal meant one was on the way.

At least that’s what everyone was hoping for. It’s been three years since that E3 and nothing of note about The Elder Scrolls VI has been unveiled to the public. That’s probably because when the title card for the game was unveiled it didn’t actually indicate the game was in development. It was just a sign to fans that a new title was indeed on the way. In an interview with The Telegraph, Bethesda designer, producer, and director Todd Howard commented on the status of The Elder Scrolls VI.

“It’s good to think of The Elder Scrolls VI as still being in a design [phase]… but we’re checking the tech: ‘Is this going to handle the things we want to do in that game?’ Every game will have some new suites of technology so Elder Scrolls VI will have some additions on to Creation Engine 2 that that game is going to require.”

Let’s start with the positives: A new engine for Elder Scrolls is exciting information, and anyone that wants to get a first glimpse at it can see the engine in action by playing the upcoming Starfield. Elder Scrolls is a franchise that has been in desperate need of a new engine for quite some time. While the glitches in Skyrim were fun and something everyone could meme, that same engine became a frustrating glitch fest in later Bethesda titles such as Fallout 4 and Fallout 76. A new engine should vastly improve Elder Scrolls for the better.

All of that out of the way now, it’s going to be incredibly frustrating to fans to find out that the announcement made in 2018 really was nothing more than a title card. If the game is only in the design phase right now, as Howard says, then that means we’re years away from an actual release. When are we going to get The Elder Scrolls VI? No time soon. Sorry Elder Scrolls fans, hopefully, Starfield is good.

Indie-rocker Lucy Dacus returned to CBS This Morning over the weekend, where she made her first national television appearance three years ago. She played three new tracks from the album, “Brando,” “VBS,” and “Hot And Heavy,” after talking about her unique approach to songwriting.

“Everything I make I have to do in the periphery of my awareness,” Dacus told host Anthony Mason. “I think, to be really honest, I have to be not-fully paying attention […] It has to escape my brain.”

The thoughtful 26-year-old went on to describe the kinds of activities best-suited for eliciting brilliance: washing the dishes, taking a walk, knitting. “When I do chores around the house, I feel like I write a lot,” Dacus said. But it’s more than that. The quality of the songs improves when her mind is slightly distracted. “My most popular songs took like 10 to 15 minutes [to write],” she said.

When Mason asked how she remembers it all, he seems surprised to know that Dacus said she does it the old-fashioned way: singing or repeating the line over and over until she gets her hands on a scrap of paper. Dacus added that because she never studied songwriting in an official, academic capacity, she’s stumbled into her process by what feels right to her. She surmises that there’s something valuable in having to repeat those lines, because — instinctually or not — she’s making subtle tweaks to it along the way. On the other hand, Dacus noted, “voice memos are pretty clutch.”

Dacus will hit the road to promote Home Video this September and October in North America, with openers including Bartees Strange, Bachelor, and Shamir.

Watch the full CBS interview above, and check out Dacus and her band performing “Brando,” “VBS,” and “Hot and Heavy” below.

Conservative radio host — and frequent Geraldo Rivera sparrer — Dan Bongino isn’t afraid to show his undying love and support for Donald Trump. So it wasn’t wholly surprising that he used his platform to rail against Stripe and PayPal after the companies announced that they were banning the Trump campaign from using their payment platforms for campaign donations following the former president’s obvious role in instigating the January 6th attack on the Capitol. Now, taking a page out of his idol’s book, Bongino has decided to fleece the pockets of Trump’s supporters by launching Alignpay, his very own payment platform which, according to the website is — get this — “powered by freedom” and “engineered to cancel ‘cancel culture.’”

What the f*ck does that even mean? Surely this isn’t some kind of Trump disciple-hatched grift, right? Right?!

We can’t say Bongino didn’t warn us. In April, the NYPD officer-turned-Secret Service Agent-turned Trump Zombie told The Washington Post that he was planning to create a “parallel media economy” to cater to the frequently silenced robots who believe every conspiracy theory that Trump and his equally crackers cronies throw out into the world. “Creating a parallel media economy is not a good idea — it’s a necessary idea,” Bongino told The Washington Post. “I want to be crystal clear, and that distinction has gotta be… lucid in your heart.”

Alignpay is, of course, just the latest way that the MAGA crowd is further extricating itself from reality and creating an alternate universe where sites like Facebook and Twitter don’t exist, where Trump is just minutes away from being “reinstated” as president and where people really, really want to read some bonkers “blog” penned by the former president.

Then again, Alignpay is “powered by freedom,” so what could possibly go wrong?

(Via Forbes)

For more than 200 years, the United States Capitol has stood as the physical embodiment of American democracy at work. But just as times change, so too do symbols. And even before the violent insurrection that took place at the Capitol on January 6th changed the way we look at the structure and what it stands for, issues were raised about some of the monuments inside of it. Specifically, the dozen-plus tributes to historical figures whose legacies have come under closer scrutiny due to their racist beliefs and actions. While white supremacy would seem to rank up there right alongside violent homicidal tendencies as beliefs we could all agree are bad, a number of Republicans proved otherwise.

On Tuesday, according to The New York Times:

The chamber voted 285 to 120 to approve the legislation, which aims to banish the likenesses of Chief Justice Roger B. Taney, Jefferson Davis, and roughly a dozen other figures associated with the Confederacy or white supremacist causes. Sixty-seven Republicans, including the party’s top leader, joined with every Democrat who voted to support the changes, but a majority of the party stood against it.

“We can’t change history, but we can certainly make it clear that which we honor and that which we do not honor,” said Representative Steny H. Hoyer, Democrat of Maryland and the majority leader, who helped write the bill. “Symbols of hate and division have no place in the halls of Congress.”

Tell that to the 120 Republicans who voted against the removal of the Capitol Building’s confederate statues and apparently no problem with symbols of intolerance watching over the very building in which American democracy is meted out. Two of the most contentious pieces are life-sized statues of Jefferson Davis, president of the Confederate States of America (seen above), and former vice president and slavery advocate John C. Calhoun of South Carolina.

“His contribution to the national discourse was in defense of slavery — that’s why he’s here,” number three-ranking Democrat Rep. James E. Clyburn, who hails from South Carolina, said of the Calhoun statue. “Why should we be celebrating a defense of slavery? My message to South Carolina: Come get that statue and put it where it ought to be. If you want it here in this Capitol, we’re going to put it in the basement, in a closet somewhere.”

Speaking of racists: This isn’t the bill’s first go-around. Last summer, it also passed the House, but then-Senate majority leader Mitch McConnell and a cadre of GOPers blocked it from moving forward. The bill’s next stop will again be in the Senate.

(Via The New York Times)

Following the release of Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, Bruce Lee’s daughter was outspoken about the way her famous father was depicted in the film.

“I understand they want to make the Brad Pitt character this super bad-ass who could beat up Bruce Lee. But they didn’t need to treat him in the way that white Hollywood did when he was alive,” Shannon Lee said. “What I’m interested in is raising the consciousness of who Bruce Lee was as a human being and how he lived his life. All of that was flushed down the toilet in this portrayal, and made my father into this arrogant punching bag.” Lee’s widow, Linda Lee Cadwell, also took issue with the film. “I thought the character was like a caricature of himself and made him look stupid, silly, and made to be insultingly ‘Chinesey.’ It strayed so far from the truth of who he was,” she said.

When writer and director Quentin Tarantino defended the “arrogant” way Lee was portrayed in Once Upon a Time, Shannon replied, “Shut up.”

The saga was brought up again by Joe Rogan on his podcast, The Joe Rogan Experience, where he asked Tarantino about the controversy. “Where I’m coming from is… I can understand his daughter having a problem with it, it’s her f*cking father! I get that. But anybody else? Go suck a d*ck. And the thing about it, though, is even if you just look at it, it’s obvious Cliff tricked him. That’s how he was able to do it, he tricked him.”

The important thing to remember is, nobody beats the sh*t out of Bruce.

You can watch the Rogan interview above.

The lead-up to Ed Sheeran’s new single “Bad Habits” teased his vampiric transformation, which was finally revealed when the video for the song dropped. That was fun while it lasted, because now, Sheeran has gone full cowboy.

The singer is in the midst of his week-long residency on The Late Late Show, and for a segment on last night’s episode, he and James Corden decided to head to a ranch to get some cowboy training. They met up with a more experienced cowboy and after getting some appropriate outfits, they started at the bottom (in more ways than one) by racing to see who could shovel more horse manure.

“This job is literally horsesh*t,” Sheeran declared while shoveling manure. Corden joked that he can’t wait to hear what song their poop-wrangling experience inspires, which prompted Sheeran to quip, “I’m in love with the shape of poo.”

The pair had more cowboy adventures from there, but elsewhere on the show, Sheeran dug back into his archives and performed “The A Team,” a highlight from his 2011 debut album +.

Watch Sheeran do cowboy stuff and perform “The A Team” above.

Ed Sheeran is a Warner Music artist. Uproxx is an independent subsidiary of Warner Music Group.

Lil Yachty tightened up his raps and artistry to kick off 2020 and it earned him an impressive run that’s continued through today. From the release of his Lil Boat 3 project and its deluxe reissue to the arrival of his Michigan Boy Boat mixtape, the Atlantan rapper has been firing on all cylinders as of late. Yachty continues his streak of releases, but not without switching things up a bit. For his latest single, “Love Music,” the rapper ditches the hard-hitting raps and confident bars for a pensive effort that finds him focused on love and looking within for the feelings that reside in his heart.

The rapper’s new single comes after he dropped the Michigan Boy Boa mixtape back in April. The project was created to spotlight rappers from Michigan’s Detroit and Flint areas which include Sada Baby, Tee Grizzley, YN Jay, Babyface Ray, Louie Ray, and Icewear Vezzo who all appeared throughout the project’s 14 songs. He later teamed up with Icewear Vezzo and Rio Da Yung OG in a greyscale video for “Plastic.”

Elsewhere, Yachty is set to appear in the second season of Lil Dicky’s FX show, Dave, which kicked off earlier this month. He and Bhad Bhabie also invested in the new dating app, Lox Club, that was created for Jewish people with “ridiculously high standards.”

You can listen to “Love Music” in the video above.

Sada Baby is a Warner Music artist. Uproxx is an independent subsidiary of Warner Music Group.

The Pittsburgh Foundation’s Mac Miller Fund is planning to help out a sizeable group of artists thanks to a special round of grants. The fund, which was established in 2018 by the family of the late rapper, will award 75 artists who are Black, Indigenous, or people of color with $1,000 grants. Applications are open now through July 23 through the foundation’s website and are available to Pennsylvanian artists who live in the Allegheny, Armstrong, Beaver, Butler, Fayette, Greene, Indiana, Mercer, Lawrence, Somerset, Venango, Washington, and Westmoreland counties. The grants will also be practice-based, allowing the recipients to use the awards on whatever they chose.

“The BIPOC Artist Micro-Grant program is a way for the foundation to carry forward Mac Miller’s creative and artistic legacy and his family’s vision for helping artists, particularly younger artists, recognize their full potential,” Kelly Uranker, vice president of the Pittsburgh Foundation’s Center for Philanthropy, said in a statement.

The announcement comes more than two years after the Mac Miller Fund awarded its first two recipients with $50,000 grants. The winners were from the Hope Academy of Music And The Arts, an after-school arts education outreach program at East Liberty Presbyterian Church, and MusiCares, a California-based charity of the National Academy of Recording Arts and Sciences.

You can read more about the grants on the Pittsburgh Foundation’s website here.

Mac Miller is a Warner Music artist. Uproxx is an independent subsidiary of Warner Music Group.

The Atlanta Hawks, despite Trae Young being sidelined with a foot injury, obliterated the Milwaukee Bucks in Game 4 of the Eastern Conference Finals on Tuesday night. Powered by productive evenings from a number of players — including Young’s replacement in the starting lineup, Lou Williams — Atlanta picked up a 110-88 win to even up the series, 2-2.

The story of the night for Atlanta was how a collective effort lifted them to victory in the absence of Young. Two players, Williams (a game-high 21 points) and Bogdan Bogdanovic (20) scored at least 20, while another four — Clint Capela (15), Kevin Huerter (15), Cam Reddish (12), and Danilo Gallinari (10) — scored at least 10. Williams, in particular, could not have filled his role any better, taking shots as they came in the offense and going 7-for-9 from the field and making two of his three attempts from deep with eight assists and five rebounds.

Still, no Young led to one of the most well-balanced performances that we have seen from a team all postseason.

The exclamation point came from Capela. While not exactly known for his offensive game, the big fella was being harassed by Brook Lopez as the shot clock wound down. His only option was to fall out of bounds and hoist up a prayer, which was answered.

As for Milwaukee, next to no one had a night to remember. Jrue Holiday led them with 19 points and nine assists, while Khris Middleton scored 16 with eight rebounds, five assists, and two steals. But the scoring came on both players going 6-for-17 from the field.

Perhaps things would have been different if Giannis Antetokounmpo did not go down. The former league MVP had 14 points, eight rebounds, and three assists on 7-for-10 shooting, but early in the third quarter, he went down with what the team called a hyperextended left knee injury. Similar to Young, it is unclear if Antetokounmpo will be able to take the floor again in the series.

Game 5 of the Eastern Conference Finals will take place on Thursday night. The game is scheduled to tip off at 8:30 p.m. EST on TNT from Fiserv Forum in Milwaukee.