Category: News

Recently, Republicans have been demonstrating their love of freedom in unusual ways: by not letting teachers and students discuss LBTQIA+ issues and by banning books. There have even book burnings. But there’s one tome they won’t be able to reduce to ashes.

As per The Hill, Penguin Random House is releasing a limited edition of The Handmaid’s Tale, Margaret Atwood’s classic novel about a theocratic/patriarchal dystopia in which women have been stripped of even basic human rights. The new edition is made of fireproof materials, including a “black Cinefoil dust jacket, white heat shield foil pages, section sewn with nickel wire, a phenolic hard cover, stainless steel head and tail bands and a Kapton high temperature adhesive.”

With all that, it can withstand heat up to a whopping 2,600 degrees Fahrenheit.

The unburnable Handmaid’s Tale won’t be available in your local Barnes & Noble. Instead it will be up for auction at Sotheby’s New York, with proceeds going to the advocacy group PEN America, which defends free expression.

Atwood’s novel, first published in 1985, has been a target of book banning for ages. It’s attracted new interest in the last five years, partly because of its acclaimed (and still-going) Hulu TV adaptation, which premiered in the early days of the Trump administration. Since then, the “red maiden” costume worn by its protagonist has become a popular one to wear at protests. There was even a “sexy” version of the get-up that wound up being pulled, in part due to copyright infringement.

You can watch a video about the new edition, which includes the sight of Atwood herself trying — and failing — to torch her most famous work with a blowtorch.

(Via The Hill)

Who could have expected this? It seems as though a phishing scam has caused actor/writer/former Buffy werewolf Seth Green to lose out on his Bored Ape NFT. To make matters even worse, Green has been developing a TV show based on the ape (really!) which he can’t seem to release now, because he technically no longer owns the IP. Whoops!

This past weekend, Green was at VeeCon, which is an NFT convention that was held in real life in a half-empty stadium. Green gave a sneak peek of the show called White Horse Tavern which was slated to star Fred, the ape. Yeah, the NFT has a name, it’s a whole thing, and the trailer does in fact feature an Imagine Dragons song from 2012.

But now the future of the show is uncertain after the ape was stolen. “I bought that ape in July 2021, and have spent the last several months developing and exploiting the IP to make it into the star of this show.” Green said at the con. “Then days before — his name is Fred by the way — days before he’s set to make his world debut, he’s literally kidnapped.” Green has since been Tweeting at the scammer trying to get his fictional ape back, but it doesn’t seem to be so easy.

And then there’s always legal action, which one would think would be a no-brainer.

Go ahead, take a minute to soak in “the promise of the ape community.” It’s okay, we understand.

According to Buzzfeed News, the hackers have already sold two of the NFTs that were stolen from Green: the Bored Ape for over $200k and one of the Mutant ones for $42k. Because of how new NFT copyright law is, the situation doesn’t look good for Green. OpenSea, the NFT marketplace where Green’s NFTs were stolen, already has three pending lawsuits from similar phishing accounts. It’s unclear what will happen to the TV show, but here’s to hoping Imagine Dragon’s got their royalty check early.

Green has previously worked with NFT King Steve Aoki for their NFT shenanigans. He is now allegedly working with the FBI to get his little monkey back. Predictably, people on social media are taking turns dragging Green for the events.

Maybe just cast real actors in your show next time! They can’t be stolen legally.

(Spoilers for Netflix’s Stranger Things will obviously be found below.)

Stranger Things fans have waited three years to return to Hawkins, Indiana and plenty has happened in that long and painful interim. The cast has grown up, the episodes have reached cinematic run times, and the story about a group of misfits saving their cursed town from Demogorgons, Mindflayers, and Russian scientists has expanded. A long hiatus and more plot threads than a Marvel multiverse movie mean there are likely some characters and storylines audiences have probably forgotten about over the years.

Look, we don’t judge, but we do want you to be prepared for season four, which is why we’ve crafted this handy guide to refresh your memory when it comes to the biggest plot points and character arcs last seen hanging off the proverbial cliff in season three. Here’s where we left Hawkins, and where things might be headed next.

Back to the Beginning

Over the course of three seasons, Stranger Things immersed us in a nostalgic sci-fi trip back to the ’80s, complete with government experiments and Goonies references, and monsters. So many monsters. The show’s central focus was on a group of preteens called The Party which was made up of Will Byers (Noah Schnapp), Lucas Sinclair (Caleb McLaughlin), Mike Wheeler (Finn Wolfhard), and Dustin Henderson (Gaten Matarazzo). When Will went missing, Mike met Eleven (Millie Bobby Brown), a young girl with incredible powers who may have been responsible for creating a rift between our world and its evil twin, a place called The Upside Down. As the kids searched for their friends, the adults in town, Joyce Byers (Winona Ryder) and Jim Hopper (David Harbour) did their own digging. Eventually, Will returned safe — though deeply traumatized — and Eleven was able to close the crack temporarily. Following seasons proved though that The Upside Down and its many horrors were weirdly drawn to Hawkins, which meant The Party (which added both El and new girl Max Mayfield, played by Sadie Sink, to its roster in season two) seemed to always be tasked with saving the day.

Summer Lovin’ and the Starcourt Mall

The show kicked off its third season by leaning into not one but two teenage rights of passage: summer hookups and mall hangouts. Eleven and Mike were navigating their relationship while trying to manage Hopper’s protective instincts as her adopted dad while Max and Lucas also started dating. Dustin returned from summer camp with a girlfriend too — and a long-range DIY radio that proved surprisingly helpful later in the season — while poor Will was left alone, wondering why none of his friends wanted to play Dungeons & Dragons anymore. Hawkins also got a brand new mall, filled with Jazzercise studios and extinct retail shops like Radio Shack. It was, for all intents and purposes, a simpler time. A happier time.

The Mindflayer

Of course, this is Hawkins we’re talking about so the season’s big bad reared its ugly head early on and it chose Billy Hargrove (Dacre Montgomery), Max’s arrogant and abusive stepbrother as its havoc-wreaking avatar. The Mindflayer manipulated the thin veil between our world and The Upside Down to possess Billy and other residents in town, consuming them in order to feed a gnarly-looking creature the kids would face off against at the end of season three. Eventually, Eleven was able to “rescue” Billy (who’d already killed plenty of people by that point) and the show’s resident bad boy decided to sacrifice himself to save the group in a showdown at the Starcourt Mall.

The Scoops Troop

But monsters weren’t the only threat using Hawkins’ most popular hangout spot as a base of operations, the Russians were camped out there too. At the beginning of season three, Russian scientists were seemingly frustrated by failed experiments concerning The Upside Down. When an intimidatingly large laser couldn’t create a portal in their homeland, they came to Hawkins to re-open the tear between the two worlds. Why? We’re still not entirely sure, but it may have something to do with the military’s hope that Demogorgons and all of the other terrifying creatures inhabiting The Upside Down could be harnessed as weapons by whoever controls that world. Unfortunately for them, the Russians weren’t as clever as a group of bored teenagers motivated by free ice cream and unsolvable puzzles. In season three, the Scoops Troop, which was named after the mall’s ice cream shop where babysitting hunk Steve Harrington (Joe Keery) worked with newcomer Robin Buckley (Maya Hawke) banded together to decode a Russian transmission Dustin accidentally picked up on his supercharged walkie-talkie. They recruited Lucas’ younger sister Erica (Priah Ferguson) to help, eventually discovering the Russians had built a bunker deep beneath the mall where they were blasting through the wall between our world and its opposite.

The Grownups

Magnetic anomalies and Russian bodyguards lingering around Hawkins Town Hall alerted Hopper and Joyce to the weird sh*t going down in town too, but it took the adults a while longer to clue into the larger conspiracy. First, they had to kidnap a naïve, slushie-loving scientist named Alexei (R.I.P.) and recruit help from their old friend, private investigator Murray Bauman (Brett Gelman). Eventually, they returned to the Starcourt Mall, and, while the children battled the Mindflayer, Joyce blew up the Russian’s operation (literally) with Hopper trapped too close to the laser to avoid the fallout.

Where They Are Now

Stranger Things ended its third season by scattering its cast to the four winds, which is just a dramatic way of saying some kids went to California and some stayed in Hawkins. Dr. Owens, the clueless-yet-well-meaning government guy from season two popped up to help relocate The Byers family who apparently decided Will had been terrorized by The Upside Down long enough. With Hopper gone, El went with them, assuming a new identity as Jane Hopper and attempting to start fresh after losing her superpowers in the fight against the Mindflayer. Though Jonathan and Will seem to be thriving on the West Coast, El looks like she’s having a tough time adjusting to handling school bullies without her abilities. Meanwhile, in Hawkins, Nancy’s heading the school newspaper, Lucas is trying to get in with the jocks by joining the school’s basketball team, Dustin and Mike have joined the Hellfire Club (a DnD group the rest of the town believes to be low-key Satanists) Max is mourning the loss of her stepbrother, and Robin and Steve are working at a video rental shop.

Based on trailers for season four, the group will face off against another fantasy-inspired villain named Vecna who’s into an even more terrifying form of demonic possession than the Mindflayer and who may have his sights set on Max. And, all the way around the world in Kamchatka, Russia, a believed-to-be-dead Hopper is planning his escape from a Siberian prison, likely with help from Joyce and Murray.

So, now you’re all caught up.

Netflix’s ‘Stranger Things’ returns on May 27.

Florence Pugh is denying rumors that she’s dating Will Poulter after photos of the two actors on a beach in Ibiza were published by the Daily Mail. While the two are both recent additions to the Marvel Cinematic Universe, Pugh wants to make it clear that they are not additions to one another’s love lives.

In a new post shared on her Instagram Stories, Pugh sets the record straight that she and Poulter are not dating, which the Daily Mail did not insinuate in writing. In fact, it stated that Pugh is still dating Zach Braff. However, what the Mail allegedly did do is run deceptively edited photos, which Pugh called out in her Instagram Stories by showing the original shots and highlighting the discrepancies.

Via FilmDaze on Twitter:

Ooookay. Man. This is getting a little silly now. No, Will Poulter and I are not dating. We went to the beach with our friends, who are always about half a metre away from us in every picture, but have been cleverly cut out/framed out so that it looks otherwise. You can LITERALLY see my best friend in the corner of so many shots and Archie’s arms at the sides.

I understand that the nature of this job is that you sometimes get your privacy bulldozed by paprazzi, but to fabricate this stuff actually does more damage than good. Thanks for saying we look sexy.. doesn’t mean we’re doing the sexy.

Pugh ended her statement by saying anyone who speculates about her relationship at Braff’s expense is engaged in “bullying.”

“On another note, a very important note. There’s no need to drag people through this,” Pugh wrote. “Regardless of your opinion on who I should or shouldn’t be with, at the end of the day if you’re complimenting someone by trolling another person.. you’re just bullying. There’s literally no need to be horrible online- no need.”

(Via Florence Pugh on Instagram)

Fox News host Tucker Carlson’s been busy as usual lately. He’s been theatrically backpedalling on “replacement theory,” claiming not to know what it is despite discussing it for quite some time. His pants are apparently now also on fire after catching wind of what former Fox News reporter Carl Cameron really thinks about him, and yup, he might be a little bit distracted. Too distracted, perhaps, to notice that his Twitter account’s bio may have been rewritten without his knowledge.

Has Tucker Carlson been hacked? Thor Benson, a writer for The Daily Beast and The Atlantic, asked this question while noticing that Tucker’s Twitter bio now claims that he’s “Fully Vaccinated” and identifies as binary while preferring the “They/Theirs” pronouns.

Now, Tucker has made it pretty clear that he’s not vaccinated against Covid and doesn’t intend to change that status. As for the pronouns, well, he’s either messing with people, or someone’s messing with they/theirs. But good for Tucker, maybe? Who knows, but as journalist Aaron Rupar pointed out, the “bio suddenly reflects inclusion and human empathy, therefore he must’ve been hacked.”

Heroes and capes comin’ at ya from the WUTangKids account.

From there, the jokes were almost too easy. “Tucker Carlson comes out as non-binary (2022)” is surely not happening, but people are sure having fun with this.

Of course, there will be naysayers. Newsmax correspondent Alex Salvi claims that Tucker’s bio’s been like this for a few weeks, although that still doesn’t explain the “why” of the situation.

Perhaps Tucker will weigh in tonight on the air. Oh boy.

The internet is all Baby Yoda this and Baby Yoda that, but where’s the love for Baby Colin Robinson from What We Do in the Shadows? I mean, sure, maybe he didn’t have the cutest introduction after blasting out of adult Colin Robinson’s corpse, and he looks creepy with an adult’s face on a baby’s body. But energy vampire tykes need love, too. In season four of the terrific vampire comedy, that love (?) will be provided by Laszlo.

FX shared the plot summary for the upcoming season of What We Do in the Shadows with Bloody Disgusting, and it confirms that Baby Colin Robinson will be back. “Laszlo struggles with the question of nature versus nurture as he tries raising Baby Colin to be anything other than an energy vampire,” it reads. “And even Guillermo finds himself on a powerful emotional track that touches on his love for his family, and for others.”

Also, Nadja will open “the hottest vampire nightclub in the Tri-State Area,” while “Nandor’s eternal search for love finally yields results.” I hope whoever it is loves Nandor as much as Nandor loves yelling “bazinga!” Here’s more:

With such terrifying locations as the secret supernatural Night Market, the Jersey Pine Barrens, and a wedding altar, and with more strange beasts, surprising guest stars, and tap dancing than ever, season four of What We Do in the Shadows continues to make the case for blood and comedy. And this time with just a touch of home renovation.

If it turns out that Baby Colin is the Jersey Devil, I will not be surprised. Delighted, but not surprised. What We Do in the Shadows returns to FX on July 12.

(Via Bloody Disgusting)

The Golden State Warriors took a 3-0 series lead on the Dallas Mavericks on Sunday night with a dominant performance on the road, effectively snuffing out the Mavs’ hopes of reaching the NBA Finals.

The NBA has never seen a team come back from a 3-0 deficit to win a series, as teams to win the first three games of a seven-game series are a perfect 146-0. The Warriors do, of course, hold the unfortunate distinction of being the only team to lose an NBA Finals after going up 3-1, but this is just not a hill anyone has ever successfully climbed and few would expect the Mavs to be the team to do it.

However, there is at least one person with an upsetting amount of confidence in Dallas to comeback from 3-0 down, as a bettor at Caesars Sportsbook has laid down $50,000 on the Mavs +3000 to win the series.

Listen, in a situation where teams are 0-146 all-time, 30-1 odds are not good enough to make this bet worthwhile at any amount, much less $50,000. I would assume this person also has a heavy investment in the Warriors to win the West from earlier this season and is taking a chance to hedge but even so, this feels incredibly dumb.

We here at Dime don’t like to see people light money on fire, so we have come up with an incomplete list of things you could do that would be a better use of $50,000.

• Donate it to an organization that helps people
• Buy two base model Honda Civics
• Put a down payment on a new house
• Buy 50,000 spicy potato tacos from Taco Bell
• Pay for the Mavs bench to stand up and celebrate for an entire game
• Put one (1) tank of gas in each of your new Civics
• Bet it all on black
• Bet it all on red
• Play (at least) five hands of blackjack with Charles Barkley
• Take the entire Mavs team to an all-inclusive resort in Cancun after they are eliminated
• Buy 50 Rex Grossman Cameo videos for Bears/Gators fans in your life
• Buy Seth Green’s stolen NFT apes
• Invest in literally anything other than ape pictures that are easily stolen via phishing scams
• Help your favorite school sign a 3-star linebacker
• Pay someone to be your personal assistant and tell you not to bet on stuff like this

This is just a start, but we are happy to work with you to come up with even more things to do with $50,000.

Last year, Taylor Swift set a major record, when Red (Taylor’s Version) sold 114,000 copies on vinyl in the week ending November 18, 2021. That was the biggest vinyl sales week for an album since Luminate (formerly MRC Data) began tracking sales in 1991. Now, though, there’s a new record-holder, as Billboard reports Harry Styles’ new album Harry’s House has eclipsed 146,000 copies in the US in its opening week.

Especially noteworthy is the fact that Harry’s House only just came out a few days ago, on May 20: The album claimed the record in just three days of sales (through May 22) and it will presumably add to its total over the next few days.

Next week will be when the new No. 1 album on the Billboard 200 chart is revealed, but this achievement is a forceful indication that Harry’s House will indeed debut on top. If it does manage to dethrone Kendrick Lamar’s Mr. Morale & The Big Steppers and take the top spot, it’ll be Styles’ third consecutive No. 1 album in the US and also his third to debut in the peak position.

Elsewhere, the past few days have been up and down for Styles: Mick Jagger took some shots at him and Styles is fresh off delivering a rocking Wet Leg cover.

David Letterman’s Netflix show, My Next Guest Needs No Introduction, premiered its fourth season last Friday, tapping musical guests Cardi B and Billie Eilish, actors Ryan Reynolds and Julia Louis-Dreyfus, and NBA star Kevin Durant for in-depth conversations and hilarious shenanigans. One guest who straddles the line between actor, musician, and even athlete is Will Smith (y’all saw that episode of Fresh Prince Of Bel-Air where Will is his school’s basketball star), who discusses the audition for his game-changing sitcom, going to therapy, and his rap origins.

Emerging in the late ’80s as one-half of the often-comedic rap duo DJ Jazzy Jeff And The Fresh Prince, Smith rose to stardom behind such wholesome hits as “A Nightmare On My Street.” However, as rap had begun to take a turn into harder-edged fare, the Grammy winners were often ridiculed for being “soft,” something that Smith has admitted in the past weighed on him. When Dave asks whether Will and Jeff felt any pressure to change lanes, Will offers that while he didn’t feel any pressure to change, he disliked that characterization.

“I hated that, being called soft,” he says. “The origin of my style and why I pursued it in that way [is] when I was about 12, my grandmother, she found my first rap book… I couldn’t even curse well. It was like, ‘Shit ass damn/Will, you the man.’ Not even good cursing. My grandmother found my rap book and wrote a letter in [the] front of my book and said, ‘Dear Willard, truly intelligent people do not have to use words like these to express themselves. Please show the world that you’re as smart as we think you are. Love, Gigi.’ And that was the reason I never cursed in any of my records.”

You can check out the full episode here.

As Donald Trump maintains his threat to run for president again in 2024, he has yet to back down from his false claim that Joe Biden stole the 2020 election. It was the impetus for his meltdown in the middle of an otherwise friendly interview with Piers Morgan, and it’s a ledge that Trump is refusing to back away from even as conservative voices plead with him to knock it off.

One such voice is Fox Business host Stuart Varney, who conducted a phone interview with Trump on Tuesday morning where he tried to convince the former president that voters are tired of hearing his Big Lie. To the surprise of no one, Trump refused to listen to reason. Instead, he argued that everyone should really “study” the 2020 election and make sure it doesn’t “happen again.” Via Mediaite:

VARNEY: I’m getting the sense that the voters just don’t want to go back to a chaotic situation or a toxic situation or a really — you know, a negative situation. They want to be positive. They want to look forward to the future and be positive.

TRUMP: Well, I understand that, Stuart. So, somebody robs the jewelry store of all the jewelry, you should just let them be alone, right? Just say, OK, he got away with it. You know, I just — I disagree with that. And a lot of people in the party disagree with that, Stuart.

Varney’s attempt to talk Trump out of pushing his Big Lie arrived on the same morning that Kellyanne Conway stopped by The View and point-blank said that Joe Biden won the election. However, while she still wishes Trump won, she understands that he’s been pumped up by advisors who lied to him that he’d win in a “landslide” and never prepared him for the possibility that he could lose. Clearly, they pumped Trump up a little too much because it’s over a year later, and he’s still refusing to let the whole thing go despite mountains of evidence and legal rulings proving that Biden won.

(Via Mediaite)