Month: January 2023

The Florida Gators no longer have a quarterback recruit in their 2023 recruiting class. According to a report by Alex Scarborough of ESPN, Jaden Rashada, a 4-star recruit who flipped to the Gators after previously being committed to the Miami Hurricanes, has been released from his national letter of intent following a saga involving a $13 million NIL deal falling through.

It had previously been reported that Rashada wanted out of his LOI over issues with the NIL package he was supposed to receive, and that he did not enroll at the university as he had previously intended. The Associated Press brought word that problems popped up with the third-party group that is tasked with NIL efforts at the university.

“Rashada’s decision came after the Gator Collective — an independent fundraising group that’s loosely tied to the university and pays student-athletes for use of their name, image and likeness — failed to honor a four-year deal worth more than $13 million, according to a person familiar with the situation,” via the AP.

According to his 247Sports Composite rating, Rashada is the No. 59 recruit in the nation in the class of 2023 and the No. 7 quarterback prospect. Beyond Florida and Miami, the California native took official visits to LSU, Ole Miss, and Texas A+M.

He isn’t called “Almighty Gnar” for no reason. Before 43 B’s signee, Lil Gnar, made a splash in the music scene thanks to collaborations with Rico Nasty, Trippie Redd, Ski Mask the Slump God, and more, the Atlanta-based rapper was a thriving fashion designer.

His clothing brand, GNARCOTIC, worn by Future, Chris Brown, and Lil Uzi Vert, to name a few, features his love for skateboard culture and his passion for visual art expressed through his numerous tattoos. Lil Gnar’s unique fashion senses paved the way for his entry into music, so he’s giving out free game to his fellow musicians and fans to find their style.

Musicians are often at the forefront of most of the biggest fashion trends, but to avoid ending up on the worst-dressed list for any red-carpet appearance, Lil Gnar stopped by the Uproxx Studio to give us his top five fashion rules to live by. Our favorite of the rules, be comfortable both mentally and physically. As Lil Gnar says, “don’t try to put that sh*t too hard where you’re feeling funny and walking funny.”

Outside of Gnarcotic Rules, catch Lil Gnar and his stylist drip in his recent UPROXX Sessions performance.

You can watch Lil Gnar’s Gnarcotic Rules for Uproxx Music above.

Some artists covered here are Warner Music artists. Uproxx is an independent subsidiary of Warner Music Group.

Timotheé Chalamet might seem like he is busy all the time due to the fact that he is always walking around without a shirt, but he just seems to thrive that way. Yes, he wrapped up Dune Part 2 and has been promoting Bones and All, but there is something he doesn’t have but he really wants (besides a shirt) and that’s a hit AppleTV show, it seems. Chalamet stars in a new ad for the streamer in which he learns all about the different types of content that are available to AppleTV users and suddenly get jealous that he doesn’t have that on his resume.

Despite the fact that Chalamet thinks that society as we know it is over, the boy still wants to get some honest work, which must be why he is starring in a commercial about getting work. So he technically was already hired by Apple… right? Just don’t think about it too much.

While scrolling through the app, Chalamet proclaims, “Severance is weird… I can do weird,” he says, seemingly forgetting that his movie Wonka is already in the works. Then he sees an ad for Blackbird and decides, “I guess I could do prison,” seemingly forgetting he was already in an episode of Law & Order. Maybe he should venture into animation?

The actor also gets to reunite over FaceTime with his buddy and Dune co-star Jason Momoa, who says “at this point, who doesn’t [have an Apple show]?” This man has two AppleTV shows, in case you weren’t aware.

The main takeaway here is that we have seen this before when Jon Hamm pulled the same stunt last year, and was subsequently cast in The Morning Show. So look forward to that casting announcement about Chalamet joining Ted Lasso at any moment now.

(Via Variety)

Jared Kushner looks like the kind of “man” who could be knocked over by a light wind or a loud fart. But he wants you to know that he can throw down with the best of ‘em — including his gigantic orange father-in-law.

As Mediaite reports, Kushner spoke to Chris Whipple, author of the new book The Fight of His Life: Inside Joe Biden’s White House, about the “knock-down, drag-out screaming matches” he had with Donald Trump. Which suggests that Kushner has never been in an actual fight if he believes that yelling at someone could ever be described as “knock-down” and/or “drag-out.”

Still, Mr. Tough Guy said he wasn’t afraid to go head-to-head with Trump, especially when it came to the presidential loser’s plan to claim there was voter fraud. As Alex Griffing writes for Mediaite, here’s how it all went down:

“With all due respect, I’m not going to like what you are doing, and you’re going to be screaming at me,” Kushner reportedly told Trump while debating with him about the debunked claims of voter fraud.

“Look, when you’re out of here, a lot of people will scatter,” Kushner reportedly yelled at Trump, according to Whipple. “I’m with you until you hit the dirt — so you may want to listen to what I’m saying,” Kushner added.

Whipple also reports that Kushner warned Trump that some of his election lawyers like Rudy Giuliani and Sidney Powell were taking him “on a funky ride.”

Isn’t A Funky Ride one of the cover bands that declined to perform at Trump’s inauguration?

(Via Mediaite)

Beyoncé fans are seemingly losing their patience with their Queen Bey thanks to the delayed visuals for her latest album Renaissance. Still, the Grammy Award record holder hopes a new Ivy Park x Adidas collection will hold them over.

The entertainer’s latest line, Park Trail, will feature gender-neutral performance apparel pieces, including sequined jackets, faux fur coats, canvas tracksuits, performance tights, hoodies, sweaters, and sweatshirts in forest green, lime green, cream white, indigo orange, purple and camouflage print. In a statement released by the company, they describe the line as a “trail-blazing expression of performance wear inspired by the resilience of the outdoors, the spirit of the streets, and the possibilities of the future.”

The collection will be available in Adidas stores and online beginning February 9 and select retailers globally on February 10. In a promotional campaign to announce the line, rapper Offset and his son Cody will make an appearance, as well as Ice Spice, Devon Aoki, and more. However, it is rumored that Beyoncé will not make an appearance in the visual campaign.

In addition to the clothing item featured in the line, Ivy Park x Adidas has added another shoe (in two color blocks) to its growing footwear line. The latest classic basketball shoe pays homage to the late Kobe Bryant’s sneaker design, made popular in the late ’90s and early 2000s.⁠ The Ivy Park x Adidas Top Ten 2000 retails for $200.⁠

Ivy Park x Adidas’ Park Trail line will be available on adidas.com beginning February 9 and in select Adidas stores globally on February 10.

With three spinoffs arriving soon and one about to end, The Walking Dead universe is seeing a resurrection on streaming. This might sound like an unexpected development if one considers that the franchise’s flagship series ended in late November. However, a few reasons exist for this new wave of interest in the Walkers. Season 11 of The Walking Dead arrived on Netflix on January 6. That’s excellent timing for the buckets of news announced by AMC during the past few weeks. The audience seems primed, given that the show’s now sitting in the Global Top 10 (with 17.94 million hours watched in one week) of English-language series.

What’s coming: the franchise’s first spinoff, Fear The Walking Dead, has been confirmed to end with an eighth season that launches in May. That series actually did hit a lag but managed to hit a real stride after putting villains first a few years ago. The World Beyond came and went during the duration, but the upcoming spinoffs carry more promise because, obviously, they star some already beloved characters from the universe.

Soon enough, the full plan should gel and reveal exactly what’s been going on with Rick Grimes since Andrew Lincoln ended up with the helicopter people. Grimes will appear in a team-up series with Michonne (which is speculated to take place in Philly), and Daryl Dixon will show us his Parisian adventures. Maybe he’ll even find a stale baguette to accompany his crossbow. As well, unlikely partners Negan and Maggie will head to Manhattan for The Walking Dead: Dead City, where some extra-disgusting zombies are apparently waiting in the subways.

In other words and as our own Dustin Rowles previously noted, there’s going to be no shortage of The Walking Dead content coming our way. It just took a little longer than previously imagined to get there.

Sarah Snook is already coming out of Sundance strong. The Succession star just saw her indie horror film, Run Rabbit Run, get picked up by Netflix, which will premiere it later this year. The film played Thursday night at the film festival, and clearly, the streaming giant liked what it saw. Plus, having an award-winning TV actor from a wildly popular prestige series in the mix like Snook probably didn’t hurt.

Here’s the detail on the horror indie that was shot in Snook’s home country of Australia. Via Variety:

Snook plays a fertility doctor who firmly believes in life and death, but when she notices her young daughter behaving strangely, she must challenge her own values and confront a ghost from her past.

“Succession” star Snook stars alongside Lily LaTorre, Damon Herriman and Greta Scacchi in the movie directed by Daina Reed, who has helmed TV episodes including “The Shining Girls” and “The Handmaid’s Tale.”

As for when Succession fans can see Snook reprise her critically-acclaimed role as Shiv Roy, the HBO drama will reportedly return for Season 4 sometime in 2023. Early speculation is that viewers can watch the Roy kids battle their father Logan (Brian Cox) and his ruthless decision to sell the family’s massive media empire to tech giant Lukas Matsson (Alexander Skarsgård) in the spring. A teaser trailer for the fourth season showed the children in outright war with their father who outsmarted their takeover bid thanks to a little help from a surprising source close to Snook’s character. So, between that and this news about her indie horror movie, it looks like 2023 is shaping up pretty nicely for Sarah Snook.

(Via Variety)

Gloria Groove celebrated her birthday this week with one of her most explosive releases. On Wednesday (January 18), the Brazilian drag pop star released the music video for “Proibidona” featuring Anitta and Valesca Popozuda.

“Proibidona” is one of the songs from Groove’s upcoming album Futuro Fluxo. She puts a futuristic spin on the funk carioca genre, which is also known as Brazilian funk. Groove teamed up with two women in Brazil who have helped globalize the genre, Anitta and Popozuda. In the sexy funk banger, Groove and her collaborators sing about living their best lives with X-rated lyrics in Portuguese. The song’s title translate to “Forbidden” in English.

“The song is a partnership with Anitta and Valesca Popozuda, mainly celebrating the history of these women in funk and the aesthetics they helped to create,” Groove said in a statement.

Earlier this week, Groove performed “Proibidona” for the first time at Anitta’s Ensaios Da Anitta event in São Paulo. Anitta and Popozuda joined Groove for the fierce performance. The theme of Anitta’s pre-Carnival event was “Warriors,” so the three artists looked like they were ready for battle. The official video is of that full performance in all its spectacular glory.

Next month, Anitta will find out if she wins Best New Artist at the 2023 Grammy Awards. She recently revealed that her next album will explore her Brazilian funk roots.

Some artists covered here are Warner Music artists. Uproxx is an independent subsidiary of Warner Music Group.

Aaron Gordon is perhaps the most high-profile runner-up in the history of the Dunk Contest. Gordon has put forth two of the best efforts in the competition’s history but came up short both times — in 2016, Gordon battled against Zach LaVine, and in 2020, Gordon competed against Derrick Jones Jr. and lost. That second one, in particular, was pretty controversial, and led to Gordon expressing that he would never participate in the event again.

As it turns out, Gordon is open to doing the Dunk Contest again, but it comes on one condition. In an interview with Rohan Nadkarni of Sports Illustrated, Gordon doesn’t want Saturday night to be his only busy evening during All-Star weekend.

“If I’m in the All-Star Game, I’ll do the dunk contest,” Gordon told SI.

Gordon’s push to make the All-Star Game is warranted, as he has been a crucial piece for a Denver Nuggets squad that sits atop the Western Conference at this point in the campaign. Gordon is averaging 16.5 points, 6.8 rebounds, and 2.6 assists in 29.9 minutes per game this year and is connecting on a career-best 58.8 percent of his shots from the field and 37.6 percent of his attempts from three.

The Dunk Contest field is already shaping up to be awfully competitive this year, as high-flying rookie Shaedon Sharpe of the Portland Trail Blazers is a confirmed participant while reports indicate KJ Martin of the Houston Rockets and Mac McClung, the first G League participant in the event’s history, will also be in the event.

Labeled by the New York Times as the “hottest technology in the tech industry,” it’s no wonder why Microsoft is planning to invest an additional Ten Billion Dollars into OpenAI’s groundbreaking GPT Chat Bot. But what is GPT technology? Short for “generative pre-trained transformer,” it’s essentially an AI assistant that’s studied everything and will provide answers to any written request you make. The newest version, Chat GPT, has been trained on billions of text samples before 2021 and, based on what you ask, it can transform that into what it predicts to be useful results in text.

More often than not, the prediction is… pretty damn solid. Its results sound like they’ve been written by a human, and the huge variety of requests you can make is what makes this technology so fascinating.

Feedback from users have been mixed. Some think it’s a neat toy, while other believe it’s the biggest bombshell in history, but everyone agrees its damn impressive. To try it out, all you have to do is look up OpenAI, click try, signup for free with an email, and you’re ready to explore.

It’s important to note: Since its release at the end of November, so many people have signed up and are using it every day (millions) the site often pauses for them to scale. Whether or not it’s running at the particular time you want to try is now a game of chance. If it doesn’t work, just have a go later. While at the moment it’s free, soon there will be a paywall. Basically, everyone’s getting their first hit for free.

Assuming you catch it when it’s running, here are just a few examples of ways you can use Chat GPT.

Brainstorming:

Say goodbye to writer’s block. With access to a parameter count of over 170 billion, this is the perfect tool to spin the wheel for potential ideas. Since Chat GPT has absolutely no shame, it will rattle off bizarre idea after bizarre idea if you continue asking. Sometimes there’s brilliance.

Let’s take this impending scenario: What to do for that special someone on Valentine’s Day?

Collaboration is the key to unlocking Chat GPT’s true power. The more specific you are with questions, and the further you engage with its answers, the better. Let’s see what happens when we ask it to explain option three further: A “breakup” themed dinner.

There’s a chance Chat GPT didn’t come up with this idea, but even so, it’s intriguing. Instead of having to manually dig through articles for ideas, you can now just type it up and Chat GPT will fetch information and personally repackage it (copyright on that seems murky, which is one of the concerns about this product in the first place). It’s also kinda funny that Chat GPT realizes this could be hit or miss.

Learning:

Essentially, any question can be answered by Chat GPT (not ones like “what am I wearing?”). You might say, “So what? Google does the exact same thing.” While that may be true, you can’t ask google to explain or summarize things in a simpler or more creative way. Let’s try this very dry question, “what is tort reform?”

Alright, if you skipped that, I don’t blame you. In summary, accurate, but… kinda dense. Now watch what happens when you ask it to rephrase it for a ten-year-old.

So, I wanted to know what Tort Reform was. So what? Sue me. Chat GPT doesn’t care.

Essentially, you can turn this tech into your own personalized teacher. Imagine how much better at math or science kids can be if their teacher is able to explain it in a way that makes sense to them? Like a ten-year-old, like a surfer, like Snoop Dog, like a supervillain, the possibilities are endless.

This can be applied to your daily life to understand literally anything you want to learn more about. And while there may be some thorny ethical issues about replacing teachers and tutors with AI, Google does the same essential thing in a less user-friendly way.

Translating:

This is a language processing model, and if you thought it was just working with English, think again Dorothy…

It might be too early to declare that Google Translate is dunzo, but the number one search engine is probably sweating bullets as Microsoft pumps billions into this.

Coding:

I’ll go out on a limb and say most people don’t know how to code. But we’re looking at a future where the barrier to make computer magic happen might simply be the ability to write a sentence. This code below went on for much longer, but here’s just an idea of what its response looks like.

Many coders have pointed out GPT’s script is often buggy. But if you’re just starting out, this is a great tool to accelerate learning and problem shoot. Also, as more versions come out, it’s possible the sword of coding will be available to all us simpletons.

Writing Tedious Letters:

While deep down you know it’s the right thing to do, writing a thank you letter can be a pain in the neck. If you really can’t muster the will, Chat GPT’s more than happy to bare the burden.

Now, if you really want to show you care and are thankful for a wedding gift, it’s not the worst idea in the world to add that human connection. But sometimes in life, you just need to get the ball rolling however you can, like for a job application.

Venting/Advice:

On a more serious note, life can often deliver a huge plate of misery. It’s therapeutic to just have someone or something to listen to you vent. What if you’re all alone? Chat GPT has zero judgment and will offer you logical advice and support based on swaths of self-help text. It might be just AI, but if you don’t feel like you have a lot of outlets, Chat GPT could be a very practical solution.

Exploring Recipes:

Another useful way to use Chat GPT is to quickly find new recipes. If you want to go ham, you can narrow its parameters to specific ingredients, ask for step-by-step cooking procedures, and even find recipes with a specific calorie or protein count. Like earlier, instead of searching through mountains of articles and cookbooks, Chat GPT will simply lay it out.

There are endless ways to use this technology, so try it out and explore what’s possible. Soon, folks will be paying top dollar for this super assistant. Whether we like it or not, for now, all we can do is try to figure out how this can aid us in our quest to lead more productive and fulfilling lives.