Month: September 2022

You know when you’re growing up and your school has a talent show, getting the usual talents such as juggling, dancing, or maybe even singing? Then you always get that one kid who brings out an instrument and plays it so bad that you’re honestly not sure if it’s supposed to be a joke or not.

Anyway, that’s the same kind of energy that Trombone Champ gives off. It is a game where you get to take some of the greatest, and most iconic, musical tracks ever and play them on a Trombone horribly. It’s a rhythm game where if you play on time with the notes you get loud fart like trombone sounds in response. If you do not do it on time you still get fart like trombone sounds, but now they sound worst and a giant NASTY appears on screen.

Is this game a joke? It’s hard to tell, because maybe that’s just how the Trombone sounds when playing these specific sounds. However, with how hard you are going to laugh while watching the trailer or playing the game it’s hard to not think it’s a joke. The official press kit from the developers of the game, Holy Wow studios, had this to say about the game.

Trombone Champ is the world’s first trombone-based rhythm music game. Unlike most music games, you can freely play any note at any time. You’re not just following along with the music, you’re actually playing the music! Play over 20 songs, collect all 50 Tromboner Cards, and discover the secrets of the Trombiverse!

Trombone Champ is currently available on Steam for $15 for anyone who’s interested in experiencing for themselves what is without a doubt the biggest surprise game of the year.

Tems has had a massively successful last few years. She’s appeared on WizKid’s global sensation “Essence,” collaborated with Drake on “Fountains” from Certified Lover Boy and “Wait For U” from Future’s I Never Liked You, and put in an appearance on “Move,” alongside Grace Jones, from Beyoncé’s Renaissance. Despite all this, the Nigerian artist remains down to earth and hopes to show how she’s adjusting to her fame in her upcoming music, as she explained in a recent interview with GQ‘s Simran Hans.

Tems was very humble about her experiences working with the aforementioned artists. “Everybody I said I would work with, I’ve worked with. Wiz, Drake,” she said. “Every single person.” While many new artists may look to regularly remind listeners of their musical co-signs, Tems told Hans that she has been working on new music about “finding balance and finding your feet in a new life.” Hans added, “She is trying to find peace through the chaos of her new existence.”

Said chaos has to do with being away from home. Tems told Hans that she hadn’t been to her home city of Lagos since the new year began. “I miss everything. I miss the food. I miss my family, I miss my mum. I miss the atmosphere,” she said, adding that she’s been so busy that she doesn’t have time for romance.

As the “Free Mind” artist wraps up her tour, she’ll take a break in London, where she moved as a baby, while she finishes up her upcoming debut studio album.

Check out the full GQ interview here.

On Wednesday, Vladimir Putin was so desperate to save his disastrous war with Ukraine that he took it to a new, more terrifying level: He threatened to use nukes. But he also had another desperate plan up his sleeve: He announced he was calling in hundreds of thousands of reservists to go up against Ukraine’s perhaps surprisingly aggressive forces. Many of them don’t want to go, as witness a certain popular Google search.

As per Newsweek, after Putin’s announcement, a certain phrase was popular on Russia’s search engines: “how to break an arm at home.” To put it into perspective, Google Trends rank search terms from zero to 100 over any given amount of time. Before Putin’s speech, the phrase had a zero. After it, it had a 38.

Indeed, in the last couple months, the war has been going so bad for Russian forces that soldiers, desperate to not be killed for a war that seemed increasingly misguided, have been grievously injuring themselves. Those that aren’t threatening to hurt themselves are threatening to blow up commanders.

Not only are reservists potentially looking for ways to get out of a likely suicide mission, but Russia has seen a mass exodus of people hoping to get away from an out-of-control regime. Meanwhile, instead of condemning Putin’s nuclear threats, former president — and fan of his initial invasion, anyway — Donald Trump is amplifying it while moaning about how he’s no longer in office.

(Via Newsweek)

True art connoisseurs can rejoice. After centuries of not having an art show dedicated to Nicolas Cage‘s love for cats, there’s finally an art show dedicated to Nicolas Cage’s love for cats. According to Yahoo Entertainment, CatCon founder Susan Michals will launch Uncaged: The Unbearable Weight of Genius Cat Art at this year’s convention at the Pasadena Convention Center. The event, which runs October 1-2, will feature 7 pieces inspired by Cage, his movies, and his feline affinity. You’ll have to whip out your checkbook quick with so few pieces, with price tags running between $500 and $3,000.

“You never know what to expect with Nicolas Cage,” Michals said. “And that’s very much the same to me in the personality of a cat. Dogs, they’re trained — they love you, love you, love you, love you, love you — will do whatever you want. Cats can be apathetic and then loving within a 10-second time period. You can rub my stomach but… not that spot.” Michals went on to explain this was the perfect way to celebrate a cat-loving actor who also acts like a cat by curating a career based on whims.

Cage will probably not be there in person; Michals hasn’t formally asked him, and he and wife Riko Shibata just welcomed a baby to this weird planet just a few weeks ago. But who cares? Even if Cage isn’t there in the flesh, he’ll be there in spirit. Yahoo Entertainment has a good look at some of the pieces, including a truly horrific vision called “Catstor Troy.”

Art has officially peaked.

(via Yahoo Entertainment)

Sarah Jones’ sex-work-focused show “Sell/Buy/Date” opened on Broadway in 2016 to massive critical acclaim, with Time Out calling it a “one-woman orgy of provocative ideas.” With Meryl Streep executive producing, Jones has converted the stage show into a film that blends documentary sections with scripted sketches featuring characters created and played by the Tony-winning Jones. All of them, presumably, are learning about the sex industry. The movie, which hit SXSW earlier this year to more positive praise, also includes interviews with Rosario Dawson, Bryan Cranston, and Ilana Glazer. It will be in theaters October 14th and VOD November 8th.

The trailer is…weird. Watching it, it’s unclear that the movie has been made yet, because they keep talking about making the movie. It also sells the movie as being about the movie somehow — an extension of a stage show, but not the stage show, concerned primarily about the controversy the stage show caused without explaining what the controversy was supposed to be.

Throw in some wacky characters, and it’s the ninth circle of profound confusion.

For those not wanting to research, the stage show involved Jones spending three years interviewing sex workers and others involved in the industry, and the controversy stems from sex workers who are critical of Jones’ show. That criticism continued when the production was announced, with backlash strong enough that Laverne Cox backed out of being an executive producer. The backlash has also has apparently made its way into the film itself, and this trailer really wants to preemptively strike against future criticism. Sell/Buy/Date may be great, but the trailer has big “eventually you do plan to have dinosaurs on your dinosaur tour” energy.

The fun never stops for Donald Trump, and on Wednesday his towering pile of problems got even taller. Amidst the ongoing Justice Department investigation into his absconding with highly classified government documents, the former president was also hit with this: he’s getting sued by the New York State attorney general’s office. It was huge news, but one network did their best to give it the bare minimum of coverage.

Letitia James, whose investigation into the Trump Organization was launched in 2020, held a press conference in the late morning, revealing her office was launching a massive fraud lawsuit against not only Trump and his business, but also his adult children. (Not Tiffany, of course.) To its (slight) credit, Fox News at least began to air the press conference. But it didn’t take long for them to cut the hell out of there.

Anchor Harris Faulkner was quick to jump in, with James only just getting into specifics. What’s more, she did her best to undermine it. “Some of this is really inside baseball unless it’s your tax dollars in New York,” Faulkner told viewers. “And some may even accuse it of being political because we’re 48 days before the midterm elections.” She then added, without explanation: “And both presidents, the current and the past, are certainly being looked at to help candidates out.”

Faulker promised her network was “certainly going to cover” the lawsuit as it evolves, but after a mere 40 seconds of discussing it she said, “Let’s move on.” And so they did. By contrast, CNN and MSNBC not only carried the full 35-minute conference, but made the lawsuit their day’s top story.

As for Trump, he put his attention elsewhere: on amplifying — but not condemning — Vladimir Putin’s threat to launch nuclear weapons.

(Via The Daily Beast)

Cardi B has seen massive success in her short music career, so it’s a big deal anytime she collaborates with an upcoming artist. It appears her next major collaboration will be coming soon, in the form of a team-up with GloRilla on a track titled “Tomorrow 2.”

In a tweet from earlier Wednesday, the “Bodak Yellow” artist posted a photo with GloRilla and various other women dancing on an apartment stoop. The words “Tomorrow 2,” “GloRilla” and “Cardi B” were laid over top of them. Cardi’s caption read “Tomorrow 2 ft Me.”

GloRilla expressed her excitement for the song in her own tweet, confirming that it will release this upcoming Friday.

The original “Tomorrow” was a solo effort from GloRilla, appearing on CMG The Label’s compilation album Gangsta Art. GloRilla was signed by the label this summer on the heels of her successful track “FNF (Let’s Go),” which later received a remix featuring Latto and JT, one-half of the City Girls.

As for Cardi B, she has had a pretty active 2022, sharing “Hot Sh*t,” featuring Kanye West and Lil Durk, and appearing on B-Lovee’s “Shake It,” plus the extended version of Summer Walker’s “No Love” also featuring SZA.

Check out Cardi B and GloRilla’s tweets promoting the “Tomorrow” remix above.

“Tomorrow” is out 9/23 via CMG and Interscope Records. Pre-order it here.

Cardi B is a Warner Music artist. Uproxx is an independent subsidiary of Warner Music Group.

Watchers of The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon know that he’s not one to shy away from weird ideas or whatever happens to be popular at the moment — remember that time he pumped up NFTs? So when it was announced that he would be hosting a show within Fortnite, it honestly wasn’t as shocking as you might think.

Not only has Fortnite already played host to huge events like concerts for Ariana Grande, but by the game’s design, it’s the perfect place to host a collaboration between a talk show and a video game. This is the same game where you can currently find Goku fighting Iron Man while a giant banana person named Peely does the griddy with LeBron James. A virtual New York based on The Tonight Show seems pretty tame in comparison.

What is a little odd is the reasoning for why this event was held. As we said, doing collaborations with Fortnite is a pretty regular thing. According to the official press release, they’re doing this because they wanted to get involved in the “metaverse.” It also is apparently not an official collaboration with Epic Games, so they must have used the in-game creation tool to make it themselves.

While Fortnite is definitely not the metaverse, it probably is the closest thing we have to how it usually gets described right now. So, does this mean that The Tonight Show is now going to start hosting its show within the metaverse forever and we’re all going to have to watch and attend it through virtual screens? Probably not, but it’s pretty neat that you can get such a high level of detail inside the Fortnite creator tool.

Amy Berg‘s 4-part HBO series The Case Against Adnan Syed is about to have a fifth part. The Oscar-nominated, crime-focused documentarian has spent nearly a year in Maryland filming the follow-up episode during Adnan Syed’s trial, and will certainly have more to cover now that his conviction for the murder of Min Hae Lee has been overturned. Berg was there in the courtroom when Baltimore City Circuit Judge Melissa Phinn announced the ruling.

While the docuseries may have explored all facets of the case for and against his guilt, the real-life trial also directly referenced evidence uncovered by the series, which will now, like a mirror reflecting another mirror, potentially explore its own role in the process of Syed going free.

“We knew the end of The Case Against Adnan Syed was not the end of this story, and we’ve been closely following every twist and turn in the case since the series premiered in March 2019,” Berg explained in a press release. “It’s gratifying to see many of the questions and issues probed in the original episodes come to bear on the events of this week.”

Syed was originally convicted and sentenced in 2000, the Serial podcast took up the question of his guilt in 2014 (for better and worse), and it seemed like he would stay in prison when the Supreme Court rejected his request for a new trial in 2019. Yet, Baltimore prosecutors filed a motion September 15, 2022, arguing that the original prosecutors had mishandled evidence, and their case was strong enough that Syed was out of prison only four days later. Hopefully this new entry in The Case Against Adnan Syed will offer a fuller picture of what might be the end of a story the world became obsessed with back during the Obama administration.

Birthday parties are usually a good time for everyone involved, but sometimes things can get a little rowdy or you can have a few crabby neighbors that are upset their invite got lost in the mail. Either way, someone calls the police to complain about noise hoping the event will be disbanded or at the very least, partygoers will quiet down. That’s exactly what led to Greensboro police officers making their way to a 15-year-old’s quinceanera, but instead of breaking it up, they joined in on the fun.

If you’re not sure what a quinceanera is, no problem. It’s a milestone 15th birthday celebration for girls in Latino communities to mark their transition from girlhood to womanhood. The celebration is usually a big deal that involves beautiful gowns, a fancy venue, lots of delicious food and upbeat music. It wouldn’t be surprising if the music and celebratory joy emanating from a girl’s quinceanera would grab the attention of a few neighbors. But when officers came to check on the noise levels, they were invited into the party and just couldn’t refuse.

The three officers appeared to have enjoyed themselves and got a free meal to hold them over to the end of their shift. According to Greensboro Police Department’s Facebook page, the officers also handed out stickers and took a picture with the birthday girl. While this noise complaint could have gone much differently, it’s nice to see that the officers chose to celebrate with the family instead.

People in the comments of the Facebook post couldn’t get enough of the officers’ good deed. Joyce Marie said, “Thank you officers Matthews, King and Johnson! That is an awesome way to build community and the family and especially that young girl will never forget it.”

Kelly Jo Netter commented, “Now that’s community policing! These officers turned this into a positive experience for the residents involved. Thank you!”

There are hundreds of comments praising the officers, like Becca La Fea’s that read, “This is a very specially event in our culture. They were probably super honored to have you guys seated there. You guys are great!!!”

While there were some comments saying the party shouldn’t have been loud, the comments section was mostly positive. Plenty of birthday wishes for the teen were laced throughout the comments, but mostly people were happy to see community policing in action. Getting to know the people in the neighborhood that you’re enforcing laws in has had positive effects for communities and officers.

It’s clear that these officers had no intention of ruining this teenager’s special day, and while the noise complaint may have gone unresolved, they gave the family something to smile about. Hopefully the neighbors weren’t too upset and came to understand the significance of the day for the girl and her family.

The Greensboro Police Department had one message for the teen and it was to wish her a happy birthday and we are wishing her the same. It looks like an amazing time was had by all.