Month: July 2024

The Boys recently wrapped up its fourth season with a devastating finale, in which two Gen V characters, Cate (Maddie Phillips) and Sam (Asa Germann), helped round up the vigilante group as part of Homelander’s deputized Supes. This led to Sam easily holding back Kimiko (arguably prompting her first uttered words of the series) and might have paved the way for both Sam and Cate to join The Seven. Or not?

Thus far, The Boys showrunner and Gen V executive producer Eric Kripke hasn’t detailed whether Sam and Cate might still attend Godolkin University and remain on the spin off. The pair is, after all, known as the Guardians of Godolkin, so their return to “studies” might be obligatory for another year at minimum. Still, the more pressing question at the moment is this:

When Will Gen V Return With Season 2?

At present, Prime Video/Amazon has not publicized a release date. Kripke did recently speak with The Wrap and explained why that date is nebulous: “We are in production now. We’ve been in production for several weeks now, probably a month or two and I’m hoping that will be out next year.”

So, hopefully it will be 2025, which would fit in nicely with Karl Urban’s recent Instagram revelation that it would be “2 years” before The Boys returned with a fifth and final season:

Kripke further revealed of Gen V, “They’ve had their hardships obviously with the loss of Chance [Perdomo] but ultimately I think all fans of ‘The Boys’ are really going to love that second season and stay tuned on whether there’s more.” As previously detailed, the college-aged spin off underwent script rewrites following the accidental death of Chance Perdomo, and the show will handle the tragedy by having Perdomo’s character, Andre Anderson, die as well. We will find out more by 2025 for sure, and fingers crossed that a precise date surfaces soon.

The Los Angeles Lakers came into this summer with a clear need to upgrade their roster after another year in the Play-In and another playoff exit at the hands of the Denver Nuggets.

However, the decisions of a summer ago have come back to haunt them, and through three weeks of the NBA offseason, with the free agent pool dried up and the trade market at a standstill, this Lakers roster is worse than they were at this point a year ago. The optimistic viewpoint is that they will get better health than they did last season, as Gabe Vincent and Jarred Vanderbilt, two of their bigger signings, played a combined total of 40 games. The flip side of that coin, of course, is they got the healthiest combined season from their top stars since they’ve been together in L.A., as LeBron James and Anthony Davis appeared in 147 of a possible 164 games.

As of now, the Lakers have not made a single move of substance that will upgrade their regular rotation since Draft night when they selected Dalton Knecht in the first round (which, to be clear, was a terrific value selection at 17). Their lone signing was bringing back Max Christie on a 4-year, $32 million deal after he appeared in 67 games last year and averaged 4.2 points. In the meantime, they’ve seen Taurean Prince and Spencer Dinwiddie, who were their sixth and seventh leading scorers on a per game basis last year, leave to sign minimum deals with other contenders. It’s one thing to watch contributors leave for long-term deals or more money, but Lakers fans have grown extremely frustrated (and understandably so) watching the Lakers get worse while players leave for minimum money elsewhere — without any replacements they can even pretend are upgrades.

The Lakers find themselves in this position for a few reasons, one of which being their continued refusal to get truly involved on the trade market with their future draft picks. Rob Pelinka has not been willing to mortgage the Lakers long-term future for one more run, which is certainly understandable, but isn’t exactly inspiring for fans or the likes of LeBron James and Anthony Davis. Beyond that, they are dealing with the consequences of three failed bets they placed last year, which has clogged up their roster and kept them from getting into the top-end of the vet minimum market.

After signing Vincent and Vanderbilt a year ago, the Lakers chose to fill out their roster by offering two-year vet min deals with player options to Cam Reddish, Jaxson Hayes, and Christian Wood. The idea was that a couple of them would be solid contributors, providing more value than their minimum deals, which would mean they’d either return to L.A. on a value contract or decline their option and free up a roster spot. Instead, the Lakers rolled snake eyes on all three. Hayes played in 70 games, a byproduct of the Lakers extremely thin center rotation, but averaged just 4.3 points and 3.0 rebounds per game. Reddish played in 48 games, starting 26, but averaged just 5.4 points per game and shot 33.8 percent from three, ultimately falling out of Darvin Ham’s rotation. Wood averaged 6.9 points and 5.1 rebounds per game, but had his worst shooting season of his career (30.7 percent from three) and had his season end in late February with a knee injury that required surgery.

As a result, all three players picked up their player options to secure guaranteed money for this season, clogging up the Lakers roster and further choking out any avenues for minor upgrades to the rotation. Wood and Hayes will, once again, be the Lakers center depth behind Davis, and with Bronny James signing a full-time deal as a second round exception, the Lakers roster is full at 15 players. With there not being any apparent activity on the trade market, it certainly looks like this is the group JJ Redick will start his coaching career with.

It’s not the worst team in the league by any stretch, but in a loaded Western Conference, it’s hard to see how they make the necessary leap to get in the conversation at the top. A healthy Vanderbilt would certainly help their defense and provide some versatility in the frontcourt. The same can be said for Vincent in filling Dinwiddie’s spot in the backcourt rotation after he just never looked right after returning from injury late in the season. However, depth will be a concern again, as the center rotation behind Davis is suboptimal and it gets a bit dicey beyond their top three guards.

On top of all that, Redick has stated he wants the Lakers to up their three-point volume, but he just saw two of their five best shooters from a year ago leave in Prince and Russell. Knecht can potentially fill some of that void, but they now have just three players that were above league average (35.3 percent) from deep a year ago — James (41.0), Russell (41.5), and Reaves (36.7). That doesn’t bode particularly well for their new coach to be able to install the kind of offense he’s hoping to run, and how they navigate a dearth of shooting will once again be a theme for this Lakers team — a fairly consistent issue since their title run in 2020.

All of those factors point to another year of the Lakers battling it out in Play-In territory in the West. It’s not the worst fate a team can have, but it’s certainly not where a squad built around LeBron James and Anthony Davis wants to be. For anyone wondering how that can happen, you can simply look to a few failed rolls of the dice last year that now haunt their cap sheet, and a refusal to take another big swing.

Last Friday, July 19, Donald Glover retired Childish Gambino by releasing Bando Stone And The New World, billed as the final Childish Gambino album.

On Monday, July 22, Gambino’s official video for the Bando track “Lithonia” arrived.

The Jack Begert-directed video captures Gambino singing in a dark room about how “nobody gives a f*ck.” It seems like a relatively tame, grungy rock video for about 80 seconds. Then, it becomes obvious that everyone is teetering toward something drastic — tensions heightened so much sweat drips off their faces.

The truly shocking climax comes when Gambino gutturally screams and his eyes explode from his face. An onlooker’s face is covered in his blood, causing her to also scream wildly before he chases her through the woods.

Last week, Glover appeared on Hot Ones and explained why he’s leaving Childish Gambino behind.

“I always knew, like, Childish Gambino was like a character, on some level I wanted it to end,” he said. “I feel like the Childish Gambino character is almost like the boss from The Office. It’s like, yeah, that worked 10 years ago. It’s like, oh, it’s a little sad, but it’s also like, wow, the cycle kind of continues, which is great I think.”

Watch the “Lithonia” video above.

TV show and movie sex scenes aren’t as sexy as they look, at least for the actors. There’s bright lights, strangers holding cameras and boom mics, and as as Anne Hathaway once put it, “There is that revoltingly embarrassing moment when you have to take your clothes off in front of strangers.”

However, now that intimacy coordinators are mandatory on set, at least the performers can feel like they’re in a safe space. Emma Stone, for instance, praised the coordinator for Poor Things and said they have a “really beautiful relationship that I found extremely, extremely meaningful.” But what happens when it’s high school all over again, and a performer gets accidentally aroused?

“Here’s the thing. This isn’t actually very common,” intimacy coordinator Brooke M. Haney told Us Weekly. “We’re at work, right? With the lights bearing down, microphones, a couple of cameras in your face, director, DP [director of photography], and other necessary crew watching on monitors, it’s just not that sexy.” But, she continued, “sometimes bodies have physiological responses that are outside of our control. When that does happen, I tell the actor to do a few push-ups or some jumping jacks. That moves the blood to a different location and we’re all good.”

It happens. Henry Cavill had a “physiological response” while he was filming a sex scene on The Tudors. “It was very embarrassing,” he told Men’s Health back in 2015. “A girl had to be on top of me, she had spectacular breasts, and I hadn’t rearranged my — stuff into a harmless position. She’s basically rubbing herself all over me and, um, it got a bit hard.” Cavill apologized “profusely” for the incident, and called it “not acceptable.” No word on whether he did any push-ups afterwards, although if he did, it might have just have been Superman training.

(Via Us Weekly)

We hear a lot about the major generation categories—boomers, Gen X, millennials, Gen Z and the up-and-coming Gen Alpha. But there are folks who don’t quite fit into those boxes. These in-betweeners, sometimes called “cuspers,” are members of microgenerations that straddle two of the biggies.

“Xennial” is the nickname for those who fall on the cusp of Gen X and millennial, but there’s also a lesser-known microgeneration that straddles Gen X and baby boomers. The folks born from 1954 to 1965 are known as Generation Jones, and they’ve been thrust into the spotlight as people try to figure out what generation to consider 59-year-old Vice President Kamala Harris.

Like President Obama before her, Harris is a Gen Joneser—not exactly a classic baby boomer but not quite Gen X. Born in October 1964, Harris falls just a few months shy of official Gen X territory. But what exactly differentiates Gen Jones from the boomers and Gen Xers that flank it?

“Generation Jones” was coined by writer, television producer and social commentator Jonathan Pontell to describe the decade of Americans who grew up in the ’60s and ’70s. As Pontell wrote of Gen Jonesers in Politico:

“We fill the space between Woodstock and Lollapalooza, between the Paris student riots and the anti-globalisation protests, and between Dylan going electric and Nirvana going unplugged. Jonesers have a unique identity separate from Boomers and GenXers. An avalanche of attitudinal and behavioural data corroborates this distinction.”

Pontell describes Jonesers as “practical idealists” who were “forged in the fires of social upheaval while too young to play a part.” They are the younger siblings of the boomer civil rights and anti-war activists who grew up witnessing and being moved by the passion of those movements but being met with a fatigued culture by the time they themselves came of age. Sometimes, they’re described as the cool older siblings of Gen X. Unlike their older boomer counterparts, most Jonesers were not raised by WWII veteran fathers and were too young to be drafted into Vietnam, leaving them in between on military experience.

Gen Jones gets its name from the competitive “keeping up with the Joneses” spirit that spawned during their populous birth years, but also from the term “jonesin’,” meaning an intense craving, that they coined—a drug reference but also a reflection of the yearning to make a difference that their “unrequited idealism” left them with. According to Pontell, their competitiveness and identity as a “generation aching to act” may make Jonesers particularly effective leaders:

“What makes us Jonesers also makes us uniquely positioned to bring about a new era in international affairs. Our practical idealism was created by witnessing the often unrealistic idealism of the 1960s. And we weren’t engaged in that era’s ideological battles; we were children playing with toys while boomers argued over issues. Our non-ideological pragmatism allows us to resolve intra-boomer skirmishes and to bridge that volatile Boomer-GenXer divide. We can lead.”

Time will tell whether the United States will end up with another Generation Jones leader, but with President Biden withdrawing his candidacy, it has now become a distinct possibility.

— (@)

Of note in discussions over Kamala Harris’s generational status is the fact that generations aren’t just calculated by birth year but by a person’s cultural reality. Some have made the argument that Harris is culturally more Gen X than boomer, though there doesn’t seem to be any record of her claiming any particular generation as her own. However, a swath of Gen Z has staked their own claim on her as “brat”—a term singer Charli XCX thrust into the political arena with a post on X that read “kamala IS brat.” That may be nonsensical to most older folks, but for Gen Z, it’s a glowing endorsement from one of the top Gen Z musicians of the moment.

Kids’ bedrooms can be a source of contention in some households. Some kids are just naturally more tidy than others while some are more like little tornados leaving debris wherever they go refusing to clean it up. Parents can be on different wavelengths when it comes to how clean a child’s room should be.

You’ve got the parents who are huge proponents of simply closing the door. If you can’t see the mess, then the mess doesn’t exist. You’ve got some parents that do a weekly or monthly clean themselves in an attempt to save their sanity. Then you’ve got the ones that have daily room cleans as part of their child’s routine, but not everyone can or wants to be at that level.

Ariel B. recently posted a video asking parents to explain how they get their children to clean their rooms as she pans to her daughters’ rooms that are in complete disarray.

The exhausted mom starts off by explaining that motherhood is ghetto. In fact she surmises that the “hood” people are talking about when they say the hood is ghetto is indeed motherhood before asking how other parents are doing it.

“My daughters’ rooms are so nasty, everything you are ever looking for in your house is in them rooms,” Ariel says.

This frustration started when her kids couldn’t find their field trip shirts for summer camp, which prompted her to go in their rooms to investigate. She then shows everyone the room where the shirt was lost, exclaiming, “You couldn’t find Jesus in this room. You couldn’t find common sense, humility, any decent soul in this room.”

The room was strewn with clothes, toys and other things. Commenters not only pointed out the mannequin head looking distressed under the bed but related hard to what the mom was saying and supported her rant.

“The mannequin head laying under table looking stressed. Her face looks like it’s saying ‘help me,'” one person laughs.

“I’m closing the door. I have an almost 3 & 6 year old and I’m 37 weeks today…I close the door. It’s no way y’all messed the room up like this and expect me to clean it. So, when they get back from Florida, they can clean it themselves,” another says.

“You’re cracking me up! I can definitely relate to finding wrappers. I said 23 times don’t eat in your room. I’m not cleaning it,” another writes.

“That last part gets me crackin up every time I watch this. I watch this on the daily to remind myself it’s not just my kid,” one mom admits.

But if you watch closely as Ariel pans the messy bedrooms you’ll notice there’s something important missing from the bed frames…a mattress. One person inquired about the important missing item and the response is not only comical but makes so much sense.

“I flipped the mattress looking for the orange shirt after I stepped on a Barbie jeep and almost broke my neck,” Ariel explains before following up in another comment saying the mattress is in the hallway—it likely made it much easier to clean under the bed. And while the mom did receive some advice in the comments, it’s unclear if she will heed any.

Bill Gates sure is strict on how his children use the very technology he helped bring to the masses.

In a recent interview with the Mirror, the tech mogul said his children were not allowed to own their own cellphone until the age of 14. “We often set a time after which there is no screen time, and in their case that helps them get to sleep at a reasonable hour,” he said. Gates added that the children are not allowed to have cellphones at the table, but are allowed to use them for homework or studying.

The Gates children, now 20, 17 and 14, are all above the minimum age requirement to own a phone, but they are still banned from having any Apple products in the house—thanks to Gates’ longtime rivalry with Apple founder Steve Jobs.

While the parenting choice may seem harsh, the Gates may be onto something with delaying childhood smartphone ownership. According to the 2016 “Kids & Tech: The Evolution of Today’s Digital Natives” report, the average age that a child gets their first smartphone is now 10.3 years.

“I think that age is going to trend even younger, because parents are getting tired of handing their smartphones to their kids,” Stacy DeBroff, chief executive of Influence Central, told The New York Times.

James P. Steyer, chief executive of Common Sense Media, a nonprofit organization that reviews content and products for families, additionally told the Times that he too has one strict rule for his children when it comes to cellphones: They get one when they start high school and only when they’ve proven they have restraint. “No two kids are the same, and there’s no magic number,” he said. “A kid’s age is not as important as his or her own responsibility or maturity level.”

PBS Parents also provided a list of questions parents should answer before giving their child their first phone. Check out the entire list below:

• How independent are your kids?
• Do your children “need” to be in touch for safety reasons—or social ones?
• How responsible are they?
• Can they get behind the concept of limits for minutes talked and apps downloaded?
• Can they be trusted not to text during class, disturb others with their conversations, and to use the text, photo, and video functions responsibly (and not to embarrass or harass others)?
• Do they really need a smartphone that is also their music device, a portable movie and game player, and portal to the internet?
• Do they need something that gives their location information to their friends—and maybe some strangers, too—as some of the new apps allow?
• And do you want to add all the expenses of new data plans? (Try keeping your temper when they announce that their new smartphone got dropped in the toilet…)

This article originally appeared on 05.01.17

Mustard might be on the beat, but everyone from Charlie Wilson and Kirk Franklin to Future and Young Thug appears on the tracklist of the California producer’s upcoming album, Faith Of A Mustard Seed, which Mustard shared today on his social media. All the expected names are there; West Coast mainstays and frequent Mustard collaborators like BlueBucksClan, Blxst, Ella Mai, Roddy Ricch, Schoolboy Q, Ty Dolla Sign, and Vince Staples are included, but so are trap music hitmakers from places like Atlanta (Future, Quavo, and Young Thug), Florida (Kodak Black), Houston (Travis Scott), Louisiana (Rob49), the Midwest (42 Dugg and Lil Durk), and New York (A Boogie Wit Da Hoodie).

Young Thug’s appearance will constitute the incarcerated rapper’s fourth of 2024 after 21 Savage’s “Pop Ur Shit,” Kid Cudi’s “Rager Boyz,” and A Boogie Wit Da Hoodie’s “Let’s Go Away.” Travis Scott, meanwhile, appears on the previously released single “Parking Lot.” Mustard also said he’s going to be rapping himself on the album, so that could offer some unexpected surprises.

Check out the tracklist below.

Faith Of A Mustard Seed Tracklist:

1. “Show Me The Way” Feat. Kirk Franklin
2. “Up Now” Feat. Lil Yachty, BlueBucksClan & 42 Dugg
3. “Pressured Up” Feat. Vince Staples & Schoolboy Q
4. “One Of Them Ones” Feat. Quavo & Rob49
5. “Parking Lot” Feat. Travis Scott
6. “7 To 7”
7. “A Song For Mom” With Ty Dolla Sign, Charlie Wilson & Masego
8. “Worth A Heartbreak” Feat. Blxst & A Boogie Wit Da Hoodie
9. “Truth Is” Feat. Roddy Ricch
10. “Mines” With Ty Dolla Sign, Future & Charlie Wilson
11. “One Bad Decision” Feat. Ella Mai & Roddy Ricch
12. “Yak’s Prayer” Feat. Kodak Black
13. “Ghetto” Feat. Young Thug & Lil Durk
14. “Pray For Me”

Faith Of A Mustard Seed is out on 7/26 via 10 Summers Records and Interscope.

Madonna famously likes to do things her own way (in her own time) so it’s not enough to just simply ask her for rights to use one of her most iconic songs in a superhero movie. It might work for N*SYNC, but not the Queen of Pop.

Ryan Reynolds and Shawn Levy revealed how they were able to secure Madonna’s hit “Like A Prayer” for the highly-anticipated Deadpool & Wolverine. The song was first heard in the film’s trailer.

“It did involve a personal meeting with Madonna,” Director Shawn Levy revealed to SiriusXM. Reynolds then stepped into preface that this isn’t something that happens every day. “Also, let’s preface it with the fact that — Madonna doesn’t just license the song, and particularly that song has not been licensed,” he explained. “So it was a big deal to ask for it and certainly a bigger deal to use it… We went over and met with her and showed her how it was being used and where and why,” Reynolds said before saying it was “one of the great thrills of my life.”

Not only did Madonna approve the song, she also had some tips on exactly how the track should be used. Reynolds said, “She gave a great note. My God, she watched it and, I’m not kidding, she was like, ‘You need to do this, this, and this in this moment.’ And damn it, if she wasn’t like spot-on and right.” This inspired the crew to go in and re-edit footage. “We literally went into a new recording session within 48 hours to do this one note,” Levy said. “She had only one note, and it was a great note, and it made the sequence better.”

So the big question here is…why? Madonna doesn’t seem like the type to care too much about comic book movies, but it seems like she did this one for her son. Levy mentioned that Madonna’s son is “a big Deadpool fan,” and that that alone “was an advantage” that helped them secure the rights. Maybe she can get “Like A Virgin” into the next Spider-Man movie. Why not!

Deadpool & Wolverine hits theaters on July 26th.

In June, Netflix released a bevy of Emily In Paris promotional images, including this ^^^ exhibit, that made clear that Alfie (Lucien Laviscount) was not yet down for the count. This seems incredibly soapy, given that the third-season finale ended with more Alfie humiliation when Camille halted her wedding to Gabriel and mentioned that he and Emily are still smitten with each other. Of course, Camille is pregnant with Gabriel’s child, and man, Emily does not need to be going there. Still, you know that she will do so again, and Alfie is apparently still on the scene, too.

Why on earth hasn’t Alfie fled Paris? Your guess is as good as mine, and below, he is shown presumably boxing out his angst before he tells Emily, “I just need some more time.” (Notably, as well, Emily is seen wearing the above red-and-white striped suit while Samuel Arnold’s Julian tells Emily to stop meddling everywhere. Whoa.)

In other words, Alfie must show up in that scene, so dang it, they are going to become romantically involved again. Don’t do it, Alfie!

Why, exactly, does Alfie continue to torture himself this way? Surely, the show’s writers simply use his bad judgment as a tool to enforce the show’s enduring love quadrangle, but over the seasons, some interesting theories have developed. These do not seem like actual concoctions from the writer’s room, but that makes these hypotheticals no less entertaining. Theories are part of the fun of watching TV and hashing ideas out with Internet friends, after all, so no judgment there. And Alfie in particular seemed (especially early on) to be so poorly fleshed out as a character that people couldn’t resist hoping there was more to his motives than meets the eyes.

On Reddit, a relevant theory picked up some steam, even though a user submitted it as a “joke” while wondering if Alfie was actually hired by Camille’s mother to keep Emily away from Gabriel. They were totally (probably, maybe) kidding: “That’s all I think .. and he said that I’m a SPY as a Joke.. ofc not sent by government But Camille’s mother.” To which another user responded, “It’s a bit out there.”

End of story? Not quite. In a separate thread, another user felt more strongly on this theory perhaps being true:

“Maybe I’m just skeptical of everything and everyone. But something didn’t sit right with me. Obviously we know Camille’s mom had a plan to get Emily out of the picture. At what lengths would she ensure her daughter got the guy at the end and Emily was too distracted to notice.”

These theories, of course, run with the assumption that writers on Emily In Paris want to dive deep on these characters, but really, this is not that kind of show. It’s simply a fluffy, irresistible bingewatch, and nobody ever suffers consequences onscreen, especially not Emily. With that said, a newer thread predicted that Alfie was outta there:

“IMO, Alfie is getting the hell out of Paris, as far away from Emily as possible As he should. He had just barely admitted he stayed for Emily, after a whole previous season of making very explicitly clear and maturely that he wasn’t interested in being second fiddle to some other guy. Those were his parting words too to Emily-he’s nobody’s second choice. That’s powerful and I hope he stands by it.”

And as the above trailer shows, the guy isn’t done yet. Maybe he really is James Bond? Or perhaps that would be Emily in this fourth-season still:

Emily In Paris returns on August 15.