Month: March 2024

Jordan Poole disappointed everyone in attendance for Wednesday night’s game between the Washington Wizards and the Orlando Magic. Ok, that’s a bit hyperbolic, but late in the first quarter, Poole had the chance to do something very funny and passed up the opportunity, instead making a far more sensible play despite the egging on of the crowd and his teammates on the bench.

Poole caught a pass in transition despite Cole Anthony attempting to break it up. Anthony did, however, look like he caused the Wizards’ guard to lose his balance and possession of the ball, and by the time he was able to get his bearings about him, Poole was sitting inside the three-point line with the basketball in his hands. No one was near him, so the crowd started getting antsy and Poole really looked like he wanted to shoot. Instead, he passed it to Bilal Coulibaly, who scored.

I must implore you to turn your attention to Washington’s bench, as everyone on it thought that Poole was going to let it fly while he was sitting down. Everyone — myself included, to be clear — wanted to see him shoot this, but if there’s a silver lining for all of them, it’s that the Wizards got something out of this possession.

It’s been two-and-a-half since an accidental shooting on the set of the Western Rust took the life of cinematographer Halyna Hutchins. Since then what happened that day has been a mystery. But on Wednesday there was some form of closure.

Per The New York Times, a jury has found armorer Hannah Gutierrez-Reed guilty of involuntary manslaughter. She now faces up to 18 months in prison. A sentencing date has not yet been set.

As the set’s armorer, Gutierrez-Reed was responsible for checking the safety of the firearms. She was supposed to load one gun with inert cartridges. Alas, a live round made it in. The gun was then fired during rehearsal by actor-producer Alec Baldwin, hitting both Hutchins and director Joel Souza, who was wounded.

Gutierrez-Reed repeatedly denied any wrongdoing. She never took the stand during her trial.

During the trial, which lasted two weeks, prosecutors argued that Guiterrez-Reed — who had been relatively inexperienced as an armorer and who’d already incurred the wrath of Nicolas Cage on another set — had a pattern of negligence on the film’s set. Crew members testified to her conduct, saying she had done things like keep a messy and disorganized prop cart, where weapons and ammunition are kept. She also sometimes failed to take weapons away from actors as soon as cut was called.

The jury, who reached a verdict after two-and-a-half hours of deliberation, concluded that it was Gutierrez-Reed’s job to check for live rounds in the prop weapons.

Throughout the trial, Gutierrez-Reed’s lawyers put the blame on the production, who allegedly rushed through filming and cut corners. Indeed, one experienced armorer had turned down the job because of what they saw as “massive red flags.”

Baldwin is still facing his own trial for involuntary manslaughter, which is scheduled for July.

(Via NYT)

While One Directioners are tracking potential parallels between Harry Styles and Nicholas Galitzine’s The Idea Of You character, Zayn Malik is making it easy for them: His forthcoming album is about Zayn, written by Zayn. The 31-year-old wiped his Instagram and then posted a teaser video co-starring his (or someone’s) adorable dog.

“I think the intention behind this album fully is for the listener to get, you know, more insight on me personally as a human being — my ambitions, my fears — and for them to have a connection with that,” Malik said in the video, which shows footage of him with his dog. “And that’s why it’s so raw. You know, it’s just me writing this. I didn’t want anybody else to be in between me and the music, and the music and the people listening to it.”

A snippet of an unreleased song is also heard, in which he sings, “If I told you ‘I love you,’ would you say that it’s f*cked up?” The video is punctuated by a logo that looks like some sort of staircase.

Last week, Rolling Stone exclusively confirmed that Malik co-produced the album with nine-time Grammy winner Dave Cobb, a Nashville-based producer who’s worked with the likes of Brandi Carlile, Chris Stapleton, and Lady Gaga.

“In working with Cobb — one of Nashville’s most accomplished and in-demand producers — Malik will explore new sonic territory and lean into pairing his unmistakable vocals with live instrumentation,” Rolling Stone relayed. “The soulful singer-songwriter had spent several years writing the album at his home in rural Pennsylvania before enlisting Cobb’s help as a co-producer. There’s no release date or title yet, but the album will be Malik’s first on new label, Mercury Records.”

Malik’s most recent album, Nobody Is Listening, was released in January 2021. He and his ex, Gigi Hadid, welcomed their daughter in September 2020, and Malik told Alex Cooper on the Call Her Daddy podcast that his daughter will have a presence on his next record.

“I don’t think people are really going to expect — like, it’s a different sound for me, and it’s got some more narrative going on,” Malik said during the July 2023 episode. “Like, real-life experiences and stuff. So, yeah, my daughter’s mentioned in there a couple of times.”

Today’s GOP sure loves a chaos candidate. Back in 2022, one MAGA candidate after another, each with the full backing of Donald Trump, flamed out spectacularly. Kari Lake, Herschel Walker, Doug Mastroiano, Dr. Oz — all came dangerously close to being in government. (Sadly, J.D. Vance did squeak through.) Alas, somehow the magnets understander is back on top and even crushing Joe Biden in polls. So you know what that means? Time to go back to more unelectable candidates with a long history of spouting deranged beliefs — like, for instance, the Republican candidate for North Carolina’s governor.

That candidate is Mark Robinson, the state’s lieutenant governor, and he has a long, well-documented history of saying jaw-dropping stuff — about LGBTQIA+ people (who he called “filth”), about feminists, about trans people, even about Holocaust denial. Now, in a newly unearthed clip, he can be heard saying he’d “absolutely” go back to the days when women couldn’t vote.

https://twitter.com/AccountableGOP/status/1765520359397150833

Per HuffPost, at an event in 2020 hosted by the Republican Women of Pitt County, Robinson talked about someone asking Candace Owens a hypothetical question about which version of American she, as a Black woman, would think would make America great again: one where “Black people were swinging from cheap trees” or one where women couldn’t vote. The correct answer, of course, is neither, and it’s supposed to raise awareness about the extremes of the MAGA mindset.

Robinson, though, decided he’d answer that hypothetical anyway.

“I would say to him if I was standing in front of him I absolutely want to go back to the America where women couldn’t vote,” he said. “You know why? Because in those days we had people who fought for real social change, and they were called Republicans.”

Even for a modern day far right candidate it’s kind of an insane thing to say! There’s the part about him enthusiastically throwing women under the bus — in front of women, no less. And what’s going on with the explanation? Is he saying women not being able to vote would motivate Republicans to effect social change? Because social change is not Republicans’ bag these days, unless by “social change” you mean trying to erase women’s reproductive rights entirely.

Anyway, good job, North Carolina Republicans, for voting for someone who could easily alienate every women in the state. And, of course, he could still win anyway.

(Via HuffPost)

There’s no denying that we live in a digital world, even our money is mostly digital. So much so that the Girl Scouts have started accepting payments through ApplePay and Venmo because very few people carry cash on them and even fewer carry a checkbook. But it’s not just our money living in some digital matrix, it’s our information too.

Everything from our health records to our social lives and news are all uploaded and stored digitally. There’s a popular saying when teaching people about the consequences of what they post online, “the internet is forever.” But is it? Sure teens and young adults shouldn’t post inappropriate things online because it can come back to haunt them, but with larger platforms collapsing, it’s got people thinking.

Where are our documents going to go if someone stops paying for the server? Where does our news go if the now digital newspaper company shutters its doors ceasing to pay archival fees? The disappearance of digital information even hits us on a a more personal level when a relative dies and they suddenly we’re unable to find the memories stored on that person’s social media account.

Samantha Sophia wrote on threads, “I recently heard that there is a possibility we could know more about the 1980s than the 2020s because of how much is now documented primarily digitally & on privately owned platforms. We’ve already had at least one major digital news platform shut down and all its articles deleted from the internet. Imagine a far future with minimal context about the pandemic, recent elections, global conflicts, and human rights violations. Great Grandchildren with little access to your photos & stories.”

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The digital news platform Samantha is referring to is the closing of Vice Media’s Vice.com branch which told many stories in ways that engaged younger audiences. The company is also attempting to sell its publishing business Refinery 29, according to Forbes. Of course Vice isn’t the only digital media company that faced hardship and closed down, Buzz Feed News and Jezebel have also shut down.

This isn’t the first time people have been concerned about all of our information being shifted over to digital platforms. In 2014 the BBC published an article raising concerns titled, “The decaying web and our disappearing history.” Within the article, a study is linked written by two computer scientists, Hany SalahEldeen and Michael L Nelson where they tracked historical news events via Twitter to see how much of the historical information would be preserved.

“The findings were striking: one year after an event, on average, about 11% of the online content referenced by social media had been lost and just 20% archived. What’s equally striking, moreover, is the steady continuation of this trend over time. After two and a half years, 27% had been lost and 41% archived,” the BBC remarks.

This may not seem important because it’s social media after all, but think about how much history has been documented on social media. Research papers, medical journals, even many local newspapers are all online, which wouldn’t be an issue if sites didn’t shut down. There’s also the issue of things becoming obsolete quickly. Sure, we currently just pop on the computer to look something up but 20 years ago we were kicking people off the phone so we could AskJeeves a question. 20 years before that we were using the card catalog at the local library. What will another 20 years in the future look like?

Just as it’s difficult to find a capable mechanic to work on an antique car, it may be even harder in the future when trying to figure out our “cloud” system after it becomes obsolete. In 2017 an article was published explaining that banks can’t find coders that can read code created 60 plus years ago in which these financial institutions run. At the writing of that article more than three trillion dollars passed through banks using the java code written in 1959 and as you can imagine, the folks who wrote that code and know how to fix it are retired.

Banks still have to run and while COBOL, the java code used to make this institutions tick is taught a a few universities, there isn’t enough interest. This means people’s great grandpas are having to get called into work to fix code from before the internet was a household word.

Banks relying on coders in their late 70s is a prime example of how things can be lost in the future due to things becoming outdated, but a pressing concern is deletion. Social media companies are privately owned so any historic event uploaded means it’s subject to an algorithm that may say it violates community guidelines causing it to disappear. Entire accounts can be removed from social media including all of the content shared. Even ebooks are only lent to purchasers until the licensing agreement expires, so maybe it’s time we rethink how we store our information.

There will always be a record of what happened in the 80s and before because things were physically written down. Encyclopedias were abundant and were an actual physical set of books, but Encyclopedia Britannica has been fully online since 2016.

Remember floppy discs? Our kids don’t, and computers don’t even come with a spot to insert one anymore. But there are external hard drives, printing pictures, downloading videos to DVD and buying the hard copy of books. While this won’t stop the possible threat of history being removed from the web, it may help you hold on to your personal history for future generations.

(WARNING: Spoilers for the most recent Love Is Blind episode will be found below.)

The show’s sixth season Love Is Blind took its talents to Charlotte, North Carolina with the hopes of proving that love is blind. Personally, I believe that love not only has 20/20 vision, but it also has a third eye that is extremely open and season six proved that to be the case and then some. Five couples — Kenneth & Brittany, Laura & Jeramey, Clay & AD, Jimmy & Chelsea, and Amy & Johnny — made it out of the pods and to a honeymoon getaway, but only four were intact by the time they returned home to Charlotte. Four couples quickly dropped to just two by the time the Love Is Blind season six weddings were set to begin. Out of those two, just one got married: Amy & Johnny. So where are they now?

Are Amy & Johnny From Love Is Blind Season 6 Still Together?

Love Is Blind season six was shot around a year ago which means ample time has passed since the weddings and breakups that happened through the season’s 12 episodes. Netflix requires cast members to be tight-lipped about events that took place during their season until the episode and reunion episodes airs. With all that in mind, we’d like to this that Amy and Johnny have enjoyed a happy marriage in the time since season six ended. Nonetheless, the season six reunion will be released on Netflix on March 13 at 9 pm EST/6 pm PST, so it’s just a matter of days until we get an update from Amy and Johnny as well as the other prominent cast members from season six.

‘Love Is Blind’ season 6, episode 12 is now available to stream on Netflix.

Jerrod Carmichael has been busy. In the wake of his hit special Rathaniel, the comic has hosted the Golden Globes, where he managed to almost (but not) piss off Rihanna, and appear opposite Emma Stone in Poor Things. He’s also found time to make a reality show about his life, and based on the new trailer it looks like a mix of yuks and emotion.

Carmichael’s reality show is called, simply, Jerrod Carmichael Reality Show, and it finds him, as he puts it, trying to “self-Truman Show” himself, i.e., make sure cameras are catching his 24/7. So what does Carmichael get up to? For one thing he has a boyfriend, having come out with the release of Rathaniel. He’s also spending time with his parents, who are very religious and, well, are struggling a bit with their son’s newish sexual identity.

At one point in the trailer, Carmichael’s mom prays for God to “take the desire from my son to be with a male.” She then tells him she loves him, which leaves an unresponsive Carmichael awkwardly smiling. The trailer ends with him rattling off some gay terminology to his dad: bears, twinks, twonks, etc.

You can watch the trailer for Jerrod Carmichael Reality Show in the video above. New episodes start airing weekly starting March 29 on HBO at 11pm.

When Community began, Joel McHale’s Jeff had his eyes on Gillian Jacobs’ Britta, the two set up as a classic will-they-or-won’t-they maybe-couple. As the show aged, though, it moved away from sitcom cliché. The Jeff-Britta business fell into the background, with the show too cool to pair off its main ensemble. Still, there was some romantic tension between Jeff and someone else: Alison Brie’s Annie. When the long-promised Community movie gets made — if it gets made — that relationship might go further.

In a new chat with Palm Spring Life, Brie opened about the movie, which she hopes will feature some more Jeff-Annie action. “Some of my favorite parts of the show were shooting scenes with Jeff and Annie and the romantic push and pull there, so I hope there would be some of that in the movie,” she said. She added, “But you never know.”

Lately both McHale and Donald Glover, the group’s resident Troy, have seemed extremely optimistic about the Community movie happening. There’s a completed script, they say, and they seem sure it will start filming this year. Brie, though, is a bit more skeptical. She says she’s in the dark about where it is, apart from spotting headlines about it happening, and she’s unsure if the gang’s schedules can align.

“We’re all excited to do it. Everybody wants to do it,” Brie said. “It’s just, even when we were shooting the show, Gillian used to say that getting all the cast together was like herding cats, and I feel like that’s what it’s going to be like [making the movie].”

In other words, don’t assume that the Community movie will happen this year, or next, or ever. But keep your fingers crossed.

(Via Palm Spring Life)

It took more years than originally planned for Rick Grimes to reappear in AMC’s The Walking Dead franchise, but Andrew Lincoln and Danai Guirira must have had a blast while reuniting (and moaning more than walkers) on The Ones Who Live, even if their characters go through it on a daily basis. Someone who did not have a blast, however, would be Jon Bernthal during the filming of an early scene in the zombie franchise’s history.

Granted, this little tidbit isn’t brand new, but Entertainment Weekly has gone a little social-media wild by resurfacing some fun quotes from a 2017 interview, in which Lincoln revealed how he frightened the holy hell out of The Punisher star by driving erratically on the wrong side of the street: “Jon Bernthal is not a man that gets scared often. And after about the third take, he just went, ‘Andy, Andy, please slow down.’”

If only we could see that happen in a blooper reel. Additionally, if you ever wondered how much they bothered with makeup on the series, which shot in and around Hotlanta, Georgia, the answer would be “not really.” They initially tried, however, according to Lincoln:

“I remember just dripping in sweat and everybody seeing the rushes apparently, and it just looked like we were in a shower. So the execs from AMC came down and said, ‘Where’s the makeup?’ And they all came in suits. And within about three minutes they just went, ‘Okay, there’s no makeup on this show. It’s too hot.’”

Very glamorous stuff, obviously, but I do appreciate nobody looking like they’re taking glamour shots in any of the spin offs, either. Heck, if they ever brushed Norman Reedus’ hair, that would have been cause to riot. With that said, there’s plenty more Andrew Lincoln quotes at EW, and you can catch new episodes of The Walking Dead: The Ones Who Live on Sunday nights.

Thanks to the internet and social media, aspiring entertainers can create opportunities for themselves they might not have gotten otherwise. The latest example is breakout singer 4Batz, whose song “Act II: Date @ 8” went viral on TikTok, giving the relative newcomer a Billboard Hot 100 hit. Even better for 4Batz, the single came to the attention of some pretty heavy hitters, with Drake and Kanye West both commenting on the song and the latter calling 4Batz one of his favorite artists. Meanwhile, Drake shared an Instagram post that seemed to suggest he and 4Batz were collaborating on a remix.

Now, it looks like we have confirmation of the remix along with a release date, thanks to a 4Batz post on Twitter. In the accompanying video, Drake and 4Batz huddle with some friends in what looks like an empty arena — perhaps one of the more recent stops on Drake’s Big As The What? Tour — listening to Drake’s new verse from a phone and getting pretty hyped up about it. The release date is also right around the corner; the song is due to hit streaming this Friday (March 8) according to 4Batz, who also added the pre-save link to his bio. You can check that out here.