Month: November 2023

Spotify takes the headlines every year when users receive their annual Wrapped stats. However, considering Apple Music dropped their “Replay” lists for users a few days ago that display essentially the exact same stats, it has created a divide between those who swear allegiance to their chosen streaming path. On social media, users have been not holding back on the memes either.

One user, who was on Apple Music’s side it seems, compared the platform to HBO. And Spotify, well, was Netflix.

Another stepped in to support Spotify, using the Real Housewives Of Atlanta video reaction, where Kandi notoriously accuses Porsha of making things up. “People are really on here trying to say Apple Music is better than Spotify,” they captioned.

Spotify users also felt that the Apple Music crowd, since they already got their Replays earlier this week, shouldn’t be posting their recaps today. This is the Wrapped’s to shine.

And then there are those who, for some reason, don’t have Apple Music or Spotify — but they do have YouTube Music or another streaming service in 2023. They feel even more left in the dust of the conversation.

Continue scrolling to enjoy some more memes about the Apple Music Replay versus Spotify Wrapped debate.

Beyoncé should be celebrating the impending release of her new Renaissance film, which hits theaters on December 1, but instead, she’s once again dealing with malicious rumors about her being propagated by gossip blogs. The rumor in this case is that the “Break My Soul” singer has been lightening her skin in photos, with some sources even going so far as accusing her of bleaching her skin.

The rumors got so bad that Beyoncé’s mother Tina Knowles addressed them on Instagram, calling the people who believe or promote them “losers” and “bozos.” So, why do people think that Beyoncé bleaches her skin? Although the rumor goes back quite a bit (since at least 2011, when this South African site posted the question), the latest round began when Beyoncé posted a photo of herself from the Renaissance movie premiere in LA on her “silver carpet,” wearing an appropriately shiny gown and a platinum wig.

Now, anyone who knows anything about photography (which should be all of us, considering we’re all walking around with $1,000-dollar digital cameras in our pockets… and yet) knows that lighting (including flashes), camera settings (such as exposure timing), backgrounds, and even wardrobe can affect the way photos turn out. In this case, you’ve got a powerful flash to capture a wide variety of skin tones, including the very dark ones of the biggest Beyoncé fans expected to be in attendance, with a reflective surrounding (the sliver carpet and background), and even reflective clothing all throwing a lot of light around.

This combined, with Beyoncé’s naturally lighter skin shade (something this writer can relate to) means that the final product accented the highlights already present, making the superstar look ghostly and ethereal — an effect she might well have been going for, considering the “Alien Superstar” theme of her wardrobe. For what it’s worth, Uproxx’s editor Phil shared one of his photos from the event with the team on Slack and he could have passed for a mustached Casper the Friendly Ghost, so logically, the same would happen to Beyoncé.

As for why this rumor has persisted for so long, similar instances have seen a lot of variation in images of Beyoncé online, from advertisers retouching her image to the differences between photographers and settings for magazine shoots (which prompted Beyoncé to begin using her own team in a lot of cases). She’s also a global superstar whose music touches cultures where skin-lightening products are tragically still considered a beauty standard. Unfortunately, some folks on the internet are always going to look for the most dramatic (or meanest) explanation, rather than the one that makes the most sense, so there are some rather ungenerous interpretations out there. As always, consider the source before sharing.

Now that sports gambling is legal in most states, it has become a huge part of sports television (to the delight of some and dismay of many others). No longer do sports commentators have to make winking references to the spread or total, hoping the general public is unaware, and instead can talk freely about gambling if they so choose.

On ESPN’s First Take, Chris “Mad Dog” Russo has gotten real loose talking about his gambling, once nearly doxxing his bookie — Fat Rob — on air while laying out his weekend plans to pop a gummie and put 10 dimes on Colorado. On Wednesday, Mad Dog joined the program to vent about losing a big parlay after the Jaguars and Texans failed to go over the total of 48.5, listing off all of the missed scoring opportunities as any jilted gambler would.

However, after getting that off of his chest, Stephen A. Smith couldn’t help but ask him the question every friend of a degenerate wants to ask, but is usually too afraid to: “How much have you lost this season?” Mad Dog then let the panel of Stephen A., Molly Qerim, and Marcus Spears guess, and said it was somewhere in between Molly’s guess of $50,000 and Marcus’ guess of $100,000 — but not as high as SAS’s $150,000 guess.

Given Mad Dog said he planned on betting $10,000 on Colorado against Oregon (who beat them by a million and covered easily) and he is apparently throwing together five-leg parlays regularly, I’m honestly a little surprised the loss figure isn’t more than this. He does not seem like he is a particularly good gambler and also seems to be heaving some large figures on games, so being in the $75,000 down range honestly is better than I expected. Still, that’s a lot of money to lose in a less than a season of football betting (with a lot of weeks left in the NFL) and hopefully folks haven’t been tailing Mad Dog’s picks this year if he’s handing any out on his radio show. On the other hand, Fat Rob’s family can probably thank Mad Dog for the nice gifts this holiday season.

MGMT is back with another trippy tune. Today (November 29), the duo has shared their new song, “Bubblegum Dog,” along with its nostalgic video.

In the video, the duo, comprised of Andrew VanWyngarden and Ben Goldwasser, escape from a mysterious, you guessed it, “bubblegum dog.” As they make their psychedelic escape, the two pay homage iconic ’90s rock videos. Some of the more prominent references include Smashing Pumpkins’ “Today,” Stone Temple Pilots’ “Vasoline,” and Red Hot Chili Peppers’ “Under The Bridge.”

“Bubblegum Dog” is the latest from MGMT’s upcoming album, Loss Of Life — which marks their first since departing from Columbia Records, and fifth overall. The album, which was produced alongside Patrick Wimberly, will arrive early next year, and will feature a collaboration with Christine And The Queens.

“All joking aside (never!), we are very proud of this album and the fact that it was a relatively painless birth after a lengthy gestation period, and are happy to be releasing this baby into the world with Mom + Pop,” said MGMT of the album in a statement. “Musically speaking, we are running at around 20% adult contemporary and no more than this, please.”

You can see the video for “Bubblegum Dog” above.

Loss Of Life is out 2/23/2024 via Mom+Pop. Find more information here.

Nothing can ever fully prepare you for being an adult. Once you leave childhood behind, the responsibilities, let-downs and setbacks come at you fast. It’s tiring and expensive, and there’s no easy-to-follow roadmap for happiness and success.

A Reddit user named u/Frequent-Pilot5243 asked the online forum, “What’s an adult problem nobody prepared you for?” and there were a lot of profound answers that get to the heart of the disappointing side of being an adult.

One theme that ran through many responses is the feeling of being set adrift. When you’re a kid, the world is laid out as a series of accomplishments. You learn to walk, you figure out how to use the bathroom, you start school, you finish school, maybe you go to college, and so on.

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However, once we’re out of the school system and out from under our parents’ roofs, there is a vast, complicated world out there and it takes a long time to learn how it works. The tough thing is that if you don’t get a good head start, you can spend the rest of your life playing catch-up.

Then, you hit middle age and realize that life is short and time is only moving faster.

Adulthood also blindsides a lot of people because we realize that many adults are simply children who grew older. The adult world is a lot more like high school than a teenager could ever imagine.

The Reddit thread may seem a bit depressing at first, but there are a lot of great lessons that younger people can take to heart. The posts will also make older people feel a lot better because they can totally relate.

Being an adult is hard, exhausting and expensive. But we’re all in this together and by sharing the lessons we’ve learned we can help lighten each other’s load just a bit.

Here are 21 of the most powerful responses to the question: “What is an adult problem nobody prepared you for?”

1. Lack of purpose

“Lack of purpose. All your young life you are given purpose of passing exams and learning, then all of a sudden you are thrown into the world and told to find your own meaning,” — Captain_Snow.

2. No bed time

“You can stay up as late as you want. But you shouldn’t,” — geek-fit

3. Friendships

“Where did all my friends go?” — I_Love_Small_Breasts

Most of them are at the same place as you are … Probably wondering the same thing,” — Blackdraon003

4. Bodily changes

“I’m closer to fifty than forty, would have been nice to be better prepared for some of the ways your body starts to change at this point that don’t normally get talked about. For instance your teeth will start to shift from general aging of your gums,” — dayburner.

5. People don’t change

“Didnt know that other adults have the emotional intelligence of teenagers and its almost impossible to deal with logically,” — Super-Progress-6386

6. Money

“$5K is a lot to owe, but not a lot to have,” — Upper-Job5130

7. Our parents age, too

“Handling the decline and death of your parents,” – Agave666

8. Free time

“Not having a lot of free-time or time by myself,” — detective_kiara

9. No goals

“Not having a pre-defined goal once I was out of college. Growing up my goals were set for me: get through elementary school! then middle school! Then high school, and get into college and get a degree, then get a job, and then…? Vague “advance in your career, buy a house, find a spouse, have a kid or multiple, then retire.” At 22 I had no idea how to break that down more granularly,” — FreehandBirdlime

10. Constant upkeep

“Life is all about maintenance. Your body, your house, your relationships, everything requires constant never ending maintenance,” — IHateEditedBGMusic

11. Exhaustion

“Being able to do so many things because I’m an adult but too tired to do any of them,” — London82

12. Loneliness

“Being an adult feels extremely lonely,” — Bluebloop0

13. Dinner

“Having to make dinner every. Fucking. Day,” — EndlesslyUnfinished

14. Time changes

“The more life you’ve lived, the faster time seems to go,” — FadedQuill

15. You’re responsibile, even if you didn’t mean it

“You are held to account for bad behaviour for which you are negligent even if you had no intention to cause harm. As a lawyer, I see this all the time. People don’t think they’re responsible for mistakes. You are,” — grishamlaw

16. Work is like high school

“The intricacies of workplace politics,” — Steve_Lobsen writes. “

“When you’re in school, you think that you won’t have to deal with gossiping and bullying once you leave school. Unfortunately, that is not true,” — lady_laughs_too_much

17. Nowhere to turn

“How easy it is to feel stuck in a bad situation (job, relationship, etc) just because the cost and effort of getting out can seem daunting. And sometimes you just have to accept a figurative bowl full of shit because you can’t afford to blow up your life,” — movieguy95453

18. The happiness question

“Figuring out what makes you happy. Everyone keeps trying to get you to do things you’re good at, or that makes you money, but never to pursue what you enjoy,” — eternalwanderer5

19. Constant cleaning

“The kitchen is always dirty. You’ll clean it at least three times every day,” — cewnc

20. Life costs money

“One adult problem nobody prepared me for is how expensive everything is. I always thought that as an adult I would be able to afford the things I wanted, but it turns out that’s not always the case! I’ve had to learn how to budget and save up for the things I want, and it’s been a difficult process,” — Dull_Dog_8126

21. Keeping above water

“All of it together. I was relatively warned about how high rent is, car bills and repairs, how buying healthy food is expensive as hell but important for your health, how to exercise and save what you can, my parents did their best to fill in my knowledge about taxes and healthcare and insurance that my schooling missed, about driving and cleaning a household, about setting boundaries at work but working hard and getting ahead if you can, about charity and what it means to take care of a pet and others, about being a good partner if you were lucky enough to have one, about how dark and messed up the world is when you just read the news and what all that means to me and my community… I was reasonably warned about all of it.

“No one could have ever prepared me for how hard doing all of it at the same time and keeping your head above that water would actually be,” — ThatNoNameWriter

This article originally appeared on 01.28.22

If there’s one thing a determined parent will do, it’s make sure their kid is getting their needs met. Even if that means they have to reinvent the wheel to do it. Rachel Griffin Accurso, or as parents across TikTok and YouTube know her, Ms. Rachel, found herself without any real options for additional resources to help her toddler who was diagnosed with a speech delay.

Accurso was looking for a developmentally appropriate show for her son but she wasn’t having any luck. That’s when she decided to take her teaching degree and get to work on creating her own show. It became a family business when she teamed up with her husband, Broadway composer Aron Accurso, who has been there every step of the way. He’s even in the episodes singing along.

“Songs for Littles” has infiltrated homes across America. If you have a toddler and internet access, you’ve likely heard of it. The show has more than a billion views on YouTube. Yes, that’s billion, with a “B.” Ms. Rachel also has more than 19 million likes on TikTok and has speech pathologists everywhere singing her praises.

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Accurso is intentional with all of her videos, doing close-ups on her mouth when introducing new words and pausing to “hear” responses from her viewers after asking a question. In her interview with Today, Accurso admitted, “A lot of things I teach are things I wish I had known for my son.” She explained that everything she does is backed by research and is recorded in her small apartment in front of a green screen.

Parents on TikTok often upload videos thanking Accurso or showing off the skill their child learned from watching her show. The journalist who interviewed “Ms. Rachel” for Today even got to record an episode of “Songs for Littles” with her.

Check out the cute video below:

This article originally appeared on 01.10.23

Living permanently on a cruise ship seems like a dream of the uber-wealthy. You spend your days lounging on the deck by the pool or touring an exotic location. Nights are spent dancing in the nightclub or enjoying live entertainment.

You no longer have to worry about traffic, cooking or laundry. Your life has become all-inclusive as long as you’re on board.

At Upworthy, we’ve shared the stories of a handful of people who’ve been able to spend their lives on a permanent cruise because they’ve figured out how to do so affordably. Or, at least, at about the same cost of living on land.

Insider recently featured the fantastic story of Ryan Gutridge, who spends about 300 nights a year living on Royal Caribbean’s Freedom of the Seas. He only leaves the ship for a few weeks a year during the holidays.

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Gutridge works in IT as an engineer for a cloud solution provider and can do his full-time job right from the ship. “I do meetings in the morning and afternoons, but I can also go to lunch and socialize or meet people at the gym,” he tells Insider. “I’ve even met people that I stay in contact with and that have come back and cruised on this ship with me multiple times since.”

— (@)

Gutridge says that living and working on a cruise ship has improved his mental health. “Working from home was isolating. I don’t have kids or pets, so it’s easy to become somewhat introverted, but cruising has really helped and made me a lot more social,” he says.

So, how does he afford life on a permanent vacation?

“I have a spreadsheet that automatically records all my expenses, which helps. I also set a budget every year,” he says. “This year, my base fare budget is about $30,000, and last year when I started really looking at the numbers and evaluating how much base fare I paid to be on a ship for 300 nights, I found it was almost neck-and-neck with what I paid for rent and trash service for an apartment in Fort Lauderdale, Florida.”

Currently, the average price for a one-bedroom apartment in Fort Lauderdale is $2,088 which would cost Gutridge about $25,000 a year.

Gutridge believes that the key to living on the ship affordably is loyalty programs. He’s actually spending less in 2023 than he did in 2022, even though he’s spent more time cruising.

“Now, because I cruise so often with Royal Caribbean, I’ve moved up in its loyalty program. My drinks and internet are free. If people are going to do something like what I do, I recommend trying different brands because they all offer something different. But once you commit to one, you should stick to it so you reach those loyalty levels,” he says.

When he’s not on the ship, he makes doctor and dentist appointments and spends time with his friends. Then, it’s back on the high seas, where he has a routine. Monday through Friday, he works, eats healthy, and goes to the gym. On the weekends he’ll let loose and have a few drinks.

If the ship arrives at a location he enjoys, he’ll take a PTO day from work and go sightseeing.

Eventually, Gutridge wants to get rid of his apartment and sell his car, so his primary residence is a Royal Caribbean ship. “I have a strong relationship with the crew on this ship,” he says. “It’s become a big family, and I don’t want to rebuild those relationships on another ship — I joke that I have 1,300 roommates.”

This article originally appeared on 9.1.23

Sometimes stories comes along that seem too far-fetched or remarkable to be real. The entire Ripley’s Believe it or Not? franchise is built on such stories, the ones that defy logic and reason and yet have been proven to be true.

One of those stories has recently resurfaced and it has us all scrunching our brows and questioning how it could possibly be: The tale of two twins named Jim.

According to People, Jim Lewis and Jim Springer were identical twins born in 1940 to a 15-year-old mother, but they were separated and put up for adoption a few weeks later. The fact that their respective adoptive parents named them both James (and called them Jim for short) would be a weird enough coincidence by itself, but that’s only the beginning of the uncanny parallels in their lives.

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As kids, both Jims were good at math and woodworking, but struggled with spelling. Both initially went into similar careers, one as a security guard and one as a deputy sheriff. Such similarities could be explained by the men sharing the same DNA, but there are far more specific parallels that are simply unexplainable.

They both had a beloved childhood dog named Toy and a brother named Larry. They both married women named Linda, got divorced, then got remarried to women named Betty. It’s hard to see how these coincidences even fit into the nature vs. nurture question at all. It’s just too strange.

But there’s more.

Both men had identical smoking and drinking habits, both were habitual nail biters, and both started getting a distinct kind of tension headache at age 18. They both drove a Chevrolet and vacationed at the same beach in Florida, despite living in Ohio.

They even both named their sons the same name with just one letter difference—James Alan and James Allan.

The Jims first met in 1979 when they were 39 years old, after one of them decided to pursue finding the other through the court system. Their unique story caught the attention of researchers at the University of Minnesota, who were studying genetic influence on humans by analyzing twins who had been reared apart.

One of those researchers, Dr. Thomas Bouchard Jr., found the twins’ similarities as jaw-dropping as the rest of us.

“If someone else brought this material to me and said: ‘This is what I’ve got,’ I’d say I didn’t believe it,” he said, according to the New York Times. “The probability of two people independently being given the same name is not that rare. But when you start to compound the coincidences, they become highly unlikely very quickly. In fact, I’m flabbergasted by some of the similarities.”

The Jim twins were even invited to The Johnny Carson Show, which you can see here:

Having identical twins raised separately was an ideal case study, considering the ever popular nature vs. nurture question, but the bizarre similarities between the two Jims even baffled the experts. Personality traits, shared interests and the like can be chocked up to genetics to some degree. But marrying women with the same name, not once, but twice? Where’s the genetic explanation for that?

Of course, there were some differences between the two men as well. They styled their hair differently, one was more of a talker while the other was more of a writer, and one of them got married a third time to a woman named Sandy. Still, those differences hardly make up for the similarities. (Seriously, a dog named Toy?)

The Jim twins helped contribute to modern genetic research in a unique way in that they lived during a fairly narrow window of time in which genetics was being studied in earnest and in which adoption agencies would break up sets of identical twins for adoption (which is no longer the case). But they also remind us that there are mysteries in this world that science can’t even begin to try to solve.

Hopefully, people will keep trying, though, because we definitely need an explanation for the Linda-then-Betty marriage thing.

Once you finally discover what Gen Zers mean when they exclaim “Slay!” every third sentence, Gen Alpha has arrived to make you feel even older. Gen Alpha is the official title for those born between 2010 and 2023, and the most senior have just become teenagers.

In a new TikTok video seen over 5.4 million times, Nicole Pellegrino, a Millennial-aged director of TikTok strategy for a media company, attempts to communicate with her Gen Alpha sister Simone, and bestie, using slang that she has no idea is “out.”

“I can’t say, like, ‘That’s a slay’?” Pellegrino asks.

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“It’s not even funny how ‘out’ slay is,” Simone replies.

WARNING: Video has adult language.

@nicolepellegrin0

Why did noone tell me slay is out #genalpha #genalphatok #genalphaslang

In the video, Pellegrino is most confused by the term GYAT (which not everyone agrees is an acronym). “What on Earth is a GYAT? A yacht?” Pellegrino asked. The Gen Alpha girls couldn’t believe that she had no idea what the acronym meant.

According to the girls, GYAT is a way to compliment someone who has a nice butt. It stands for Girl Your A** Is Thick. “If you have a BBL or if your butt shakes when you walk, that’s when you would yell GYAT at somebody,” Simone clarified.

The language lesson caught many older people off guard who weren’t ready for another generation to crop up and confuse them. “I’m still trying to learn all the Gen Z slang and now there’s Gen Alpha slang too. Man, I am so old!” Jwoo991 wrote in the comments. “Why are Gen Alpha like fully formed beings? I thought they were still babies,” India added.

@nicolepellegrin0

Replying to @hollymadison Gen Alpha’s out here using Siri to write essays 😹 #genalpha #genalphaslang

By now most everyone has heard of the Mandela effect where collectively a large group of people believe something that wasn’t true. Some of the most famous ones are the Berenstein Bears actually being the Berenstain Bears and Jiffy peanut butter really being Jif peanut butter.

The reason it’s called the Mandela effect is due to the widespread collective “memory” of the famous South African activist Nelson Mandela dying in prison in the 1980s. He never died in prison, he was released and continued his activism until his death in 2013 but that’s not how people remember it.

Over the past few years the Mandela effect of “Shazaam,” a movie starring the comedian Sinbad that actually never existed. Sinbad exists but not the movie that many 90s kids fully remember watching never did. There is no evidence of the existence of this movie and even the star of the movie denies he starred in the non-existent film.

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But people who grew up in the 90s insist it did, some even believing Sinbad’s denial to be a joke or a conspiracy that includes the government stripping the globe of the VHS tapes. Other people accept that the movie didn’t exist but don’t fully believe it because of the distinct memories they have of watching it as a child. So how is it possible that hundreds of thousands of people between the ages of 35 and 45 remember details of this movie?

There are some theories that make sense but the best one comes from Sinbad himself when he too was trying to figure out why people so firmly believe they saw him in “Shazaam.” Sinbad’s best guess is that he hosted an all night movie marathon wearing a turban dressed like Sinbad, the sailor. This was during the same time frame as the movie “Kazaam” starring basketball legend Shaquille O’neal, who played a genie. So the theory is that our brains mushed the two together, which would explain why people are spelling Shazaam with two As.

Another theory proposed by a Reddit user is that people are remembering Sinbad playing in a movie called “Aliens for Breakfast” which has a very similar storyline as “Kazaam.” Both movies came out around the same time so if you piece those two movies together and throw in that Sinbad was in fact wearing a turban around the same time frame, it’s the perfect recipe for a false collective memory.

It also doesn’t help that in 2017, Sinbad collaborated with College Humor to pull the ultimate April Fool’s prank–creating a scene from “Shazaam.” People briefly felt vindicated before the joke was revealed but due to the internet being forever, the fake scene is still available, which has people using it as proof the movie existed, disregarding that no other evidence supports the claim.

The argument of the existence of this false memory just won’t go away and recently popped back up sending the internet back into a meltdown.

“I watched the movie!! I know it happened I can even remember certain scenes lol,” one person writes.

“I don’t care what anyone says I KNOW HE WAS THE FIRST SHAZAAM #Sinbad. I can vividly remember watching him play SHAZAAM,” a commenter declares.

“The thing that doesn’t make sense to me is how do we all have the same false memory. It can’t be explained,” someone inquires.

By the way, there is no movie from the 90s called Shazaam but there is a movie by the same name minus an “a” that was released in 2019 with a different actor and different premise. But that won’t stop people being fully committed to believing Sinbad once played a genie and is simply playing a long running prank on a whole demographic of people.