Category: News

Of the three main console giants — Nintendo, Xbox, and PlayStation — Nintendo has the largest library of IPs. There are obvious names like Mario, Zelda, and Pokémon, but there’s an even larger library beyond them, like Fire Emblem, Kirby, and Metroid. Of all the IPs mentioned, most of them receive a pretty consistent release of new games for fans to enjoy except for Metroid.

The Metroid franchise and Nintendo have an awkward history. Metroid‘s influence on gaming as a whole is obvious — an entire genre, Metroidvania, was named partially after it. Some of the most beloved Nintendo games ever, Metroid Prime and Super Metroid, are part of that franchise. However, multiple times fans have seen Metroid get ignored in favor of other Nintendo IPs when it comes to new games. The reasoning for this has never been clear, but a history of inconsistent sales numbers appears to be the culprit.

When a brand new Metroid game, Metroid Dread, was released on Nintendo Switch back in October, fans made it very clear to Nintendo that they want to see the IP get a little more love. More than 850,000 copies sold in October, which earned praise from Nintendo of America President Doug Bowser in an interview with the Washington Post.

There’s some good news for Metroid fans, too: “Metroid Dread” sold 854,000 copies in October, which Bowser said is the best launch in series history. That Nintendo is proud enough to announce these numbers bodes well for the franchise, which has had a shaky sales history.

When Metroid Dread was announced back at E3 it was honestly shocking, not only because it was a Metroid game, but it was the first 2D Metroid release since Metroid Fusion back in 2002. Until Dread was announced, all Metroid fans really had to get excited about was a remake of Metroid II: Return of Samus for the 3DS and the news that Metroid Prime 4 will come at some point. Dread is the first new Metroid game since Metroid: Other M in 2010.

Now that Dread has done incredibly well, fans of the series may finally be able to breathe a little easier. As long as games continue to sell, there shouldn’t be a reason for the IP to go into hiatus like it has done multiple times in the past.

As part of Friday’s Disney+ event, the streaming service has unveiled the new trailer for Chris Hemsworth‘s upcoming National Geographic series Limitless. The six-part series will send the super jacked Marvel star across the globe where he will learn to literally fight the effects of aging. Sure, Hemsworth plays an immortal lightning god on the big screen, but it’s an entirely different pursuit to brave the elements in pursuit of a longer life. Judging by the trailer, Hemsworth is up to the challenge, and if his body wasn’t already in peak physical shape before, it will be now.

Here’s the official synopsis:

Chris Hemsworth embarks on an epic mission to transform himself by training for six extraordinary challenges, showing how to fight aging at every stage of life – and in doing so discovers how we can all live healthier, smarter and longer lives. Each episode will tackle a different way we can live better for longer: regenerating damage, maximizing strength, building resilience, shocking the body, supercharging memory and confronting mortality. Hemsworth will meet leading longevity scientists who believe that the key to staying young lies in rooting out and reversing the ravages of time before they take hold, and learn secrets from superhumans who demonstrate the mind-blowing extent of human potential.

Limitless with Chris Hemsworth will start streaming on Disney+ in 2022.

Maturation is a crucial step in the process of making whiskey. Time spent resting in oak allows the transfer of sugars from the wood into the spirit that helps create many of the flavors in whiskey. It is a lot more complicated and scientific than that but that’s the gist. While yeast, grains, and water are all crucial components to making a great whiskey, the color and sometimes the most dominant flavors can come from the judicious use of toasted and charred oak.

The help us better understand how barrel-aging and finishing works, we reached out to Andrea Wilson, the Master of Maturation for Michter’s. Wilson’s job is vast but very specific. She manages barrel specifications, barrel procurement, heat cycling and temperature monitoring during aging, tracks maturation of barrels, oversees whiskey filtration in preparation for bottling, and innovation in aging. Naturally, you don’t just walk onto a job like that without some serious credentials. After getting a master’s in Chemical Engineering, Wilson spent years at Diageo working as their Director of Distillation and Maturation for all of North America and also worked as their Director of Whiskey Strategy for North American operations.

All of that is to say that Wilson knows the craft of whiskey deeper than 99.99 percent of people on this planet. We jumped on a call with Wilson last week to talk about the release of the much-sought-after 20-Year Michter’s Bourbon that just dropped. The conversation ended up being about maturation, finishing, and how the company actually gets their whiskey from the barrel into the bottle. Hopefully, it’ll illuminate how whiskey is aged and how Michter’s gets such beautiful whiskey into the bottle.

What does it mean to be a Master of Maturation? What’s your day-to-day like?

I actually look after wood selection and wood preparations such as the natural seasoning and air-drying protocols that we have for toasting and charring levels with our specific temperatures. I validate the quality with our toasting and charring temperatures and make sure that they meet our quality standards. I’m responsible for looking after the barrels and deciding — with our Master Distiller — when they are ready to be pulled for whatever products we’re working on that day. I also work on the storage program in terms of the design and construction of our warehouses. I work with great architects and engineers in our community to help us with those designs and that covers everything from air movement, temperature, and humidity to the actual materials for construction.

I also host people and provide great hospitality and educate them on the brand.

That’s a lot. Something that’s become very popular again is the toast barrel finish. Can you walk us through what that process is like?

Yeah, the Toasted Barrel series has been very popular for Michters. It’s a very fun project for us to do. So we have the Toasted Bourbon, Toasted Barrel Strength Rye, and the Toasted Sour Mash. But let’s look at the bourbon.

So what we do is we take our Kentucky straight bourbon after it’s been aged from five to seven years. We take it out of the barrel and then we take that liquid and we put it back into a toasted-only barrel for a period of time.

Now, the first time that we did this, it was aged in that second barrel for only 28 days. We had all agreed that we weren’t going to tell anyone and then Willie Pratt — who was our Master Distiller at the time — went out and told everybody. We thought it would be something that we would have some ability to adjust in the future, either with how long we leave it in the barrel or otherwise. Since then, we’ve stopped disclosing how long it spends in the second barrel. But I can tell you that it’s only in that second barrel for a short period of time still.

What the finish really does is that it helps people get an understanding of the power of the toasting process, and how it can really influence the flavor profile of the product. It’s a beautiful expression. And even though the bourbon expressions are the same five to seven-year whiskeys, once you put them in those toasted barrels, you’re going to clearly see a difference in a short amount of time. Plus, the toast profiles may change due to the natural air drying time, and then that might change the time that the bourbon sits in that second toasted barrel.

Let’s take a step back and look at how your choose barrels for releases. How much of an idea do you have of which barrels might go into this year’s 20-year release or the next Sour Mash? How does that selection process work?

Well, different products have different processes that go along with them. So the 20-year is a beautiful product where we’ve aged barrels for over 20 years. We tasted through them. We bring those casks forward and we say, “These are actually really brilliant. They’re really beautiful, and we are ready to use them for a release.”

What are you looking for when you’re tasting through them?

We are rating them on everything from the aromatics to the complexity of the product, the texture of the product, the color, the finish, the overall dynamic experience across your palate. Those are the kinds of things that we’re looking at. We are a very quality-focused company.

So we want people to have a really exceptional experience when they experience our products whether it’s our bourbon, our ryes, anything out of our toasted series, or any of the special release expressions like the 20-year. We want people to have a “wow!” moment. We want them to know that this is something really special that took years to develop.

All of our barrels are like children. We’re looking after all of them. We’re giving them the freedom to do their magic and have their beautiful reactions, but we want to create the conditions for them to have the highest rate of success possible. We don’t just stick barrels in a warehouse and leave them there, and then come back over 20 years later, and hope for the best. We’re actually searching through them over time to ensure we have the highest probability of success.

And if we do have something that reaches a point where maybe it’s starting to take on some characters that we know and if we leave it there it’s not going to be great, then we’ll go ahead and take it out of wood. We’ll stop the aging on it by putting it in stainless steel drums. We’re going to hold it so we can use it for something later versus leaving it in wood and it taking on too much tannin or wood character where it becomes unusable for us.

What are red flags in a barrel that tell you something’s off?

There are several different components. One of them will be like a tannic component, which is going to resonate as either woody or astringent. And while tannin is great for wine because it provides beautiful structure, it doesn’t have the same role to play in whisky. So we’re going to watch for those kinds of compounds.

We’re going to look for things that are deviances from our profile. So for example, glycol is a compound in wood that provides beautiful smoky qualities. But too much smoke may not be consistent with the profile of Michters. And if there’s too much glycol, that could mean that something might have been slightly off in the toasting process.

So we need to watch for those kinds of things. Wood is a living species. We work with our cooperages very closely to monitor the toasting accuracy and the quality of the barrels when they come in. We have to check to make sure we’re getting the right toasting data, the right char data that matches what we requested to our specifications. We’re can do all of that work but sometimes a barrel is just a barrel … and it comes from an original tree. And while we’re all human beings, we’re all different, right? And so there can be little nuances of flavor where we’re like, “Wow, what is going on here?” And it can be beautiful.

But our batches are really small and because we do such a lot of single barrel products, it makes it difficult to project those kinds of things. So we have to watch for them. And if we do find is something that’s really beautiful, then we can figure out what to do with it and how to harness that beauty.

But then if it’s something that is too far out, that’s astringent or bitter, or off, or just something that’s not consistent with our character, then we may have to send that a different route. Which, unfortunately, might be sending it for repurposing as something like fuel ethanol.

Yeah. You can’t win every single one, right? So, let’s look at how the whiskey gets from the barrels that actually make it through selection and into the bottle.

First, we’re going to evaluate the cask before they ever get to the dump floor. We’re looking at them and making sure that they meet readiness to go to the dump floor. The barrels will get pulled and they’ll go to the processing department. Processing then will begin dumping the liquid. They will evaluate the liquid while dumping to make sure that it is consistent with what they’ve been told they’re receiving and that it matches the quality standards that we’ve shared with them.

They test taste and smell everything. It’s a bit like our processing department is like a bunch of chefs in there. They’re going to make sure that we’re not just relying on chemistry or the science of it. They actually want to taste it and make sure that it meets what they believe are the Michter standards before it goes to the bottling line.

They’re also going to be checking the color. They check solids content. They’re going to be checking proof. Once they’ve identified it’s good, then they’re going to send it through custom chill filtration.

Walk us through that process because it gets slagged off a lot.

Essentially, there are a lot of people who may or may not believe in chill filtration, but it is a fundamental part of what we do here at Michters. So there are a lot of changes in the whiskey in the barrel that is directly related to storage in wood. Such as the development of various esters, or acids, that drive tremendous complexity into the product. We’ve developed a custom chill filtration process for each different type and different age of whiskey we bottle. We use this process to really highlight what that whiskey has to offer, and that helps us avoid the dominance of certain characteristics that we don’t want to dominate that flavor profile.

I usually try to say to people that it’s not about adding or taking away from the whiskey. It’s about striving to create an exciting and dynamic experience for the consumer, that has a defined beginning, middle, and end. Anytime you filter anything, you can impact color, flavor, aroma, texture. So it’s important to understand the whiskey that took years to develop in the barrel and that’s why we don’t want to leave it to chance. We want to skillfully determine how to best showcase certain characteristics in the whiskey instead of just allowing it to be overwhelmed by dominant characteristics.

Right.

For me, it’s like having a room of ten people. If nine of them are speaking loud and one person is speaking softly, you may not hear what that one person has to say. But what they have to say might be really important. So if you adjust the noise level, then you get to hear what everybody is saying. That’s my analogy for custom chill filtration. We don’t filter our whiskeys or bourbons or ryes all the same way because we want to respect them. But we want to highlight what took years to develop in that barrel.

As someone who’s got such a deep knowledge of wood and maturation, what surprises you still?

I think what surprises me and continues to surprise me is that even though you work with wood for such a long time, it continues to evolve. I’m so happy that there’s so much respect for oak. You know there are over 400 species of oak actually? And the spirits industry is really only accessing about 16 of them.

Interesting.

I’m excited to see what happens as people continue to work with different oak species. What they can impart to the whiskey can be quite amazing. I mean, obviously, there’s so much discussion about yeast. Everybody’s always talking about yeast…

I’m guilty of that for sure!

But I think that barrel extractives have as much of a significance in the influence of your final product. And I think that in a lot of ways we’re only just touching the surface of how to really leverage oak. You know and it brings so much joy to work with the wood because it’s almost like the wood is begging you to pull these extractives out of it so that you can really showcase what that beautiful tree is able to impart to the whiskey.

Disney+ has officially revealed the first look at its highly-anticipated Obi-Wan Kenobi series, which brings back Ewan McGregor‘s fan-favorite portrayal of the classic Jedi. Set just after the climactic events of Star Wars: Revenge of the Sith, the series directed by Deborah Chow, who cut her teeth on The Mandalorian, follows Obi-Wan as he begins his new life on Tatooine where he’s tasked with a very important mission: Protect Luke Skywalker.

As the sizzle reel shows, Obi-Wan’s mission will not be easy. Chow reveals that the galaxy is in turmoil following the rise of the Galactic Empire, and “Jedi hunters” are on the prowl for any remaining members of the now-destroyed Order. This point is emphasized by concept art of an Inquisitor, who are Sith-like individuals tasked by Darth Vader to hunt the Jedi. (Fast & Furious star Sung Kang is rumored to be one such hunter.)

Naturally, Darth Vader’s shadow looms large over everything, and the sizzle reel confirms that Hayden Christensen will be reprising his role as the newly-christened Dark Lord of the Sith.

While the sizzle reel was primarily concept art, there was a notable moment of live footage featuring Christensen’s lightsaber training for his return as Vader.

As McGregor coyly quips, fans are sure to enjoy the two actors taking “another swing at each other” as the Obi-Wan Kenobi series clearly builds towards an epic rematch between the former master and apprentice. The two are shown fighting in a new piece of concept art, and once again, they can’t seem to resist duking it out in some fiery location.

Click here to watch the Obi-Wan Kenobi sizzle reel exclusively on Disney+.

(Via Disney+)

The Rundown is a weekly column that highlights some of the biggest, weirdest, and most notable events of the week in entertainment. The number of items could vary, as could the subject matter. It will not always make a ton of sense. Some items might not even be about entertainment, to be honest, or from this week. The important thing is that it’s Friday, and we are here to have some fun.

ITEM NUMBER ONE — Look at this guy

There are a lot of things I like about Succession. I like watching the rich dweebs tear each other apart. I like watching Brian Cox growl profanity at every person who tiptoes within earshot. I like watching Cousin Greg be the most awkward boy in the entire world every single moment he’s on-screen. But I think my favorite thing is the specificity.

There are examples galore here, the little things the show does that make the characters more than caricature, that explain them better than any long monologue could. Things like Greg asking Logan for a rum and Coke when they sat down for the type of meeting where people drink scotch. Things like Kendall Roy having a child whose first name is Iverson. Things like, to get the point I’m wandering toward, Adrien Brody showing up in the third season as a billionaire investor and looking like this.

Look at this guy. Look at the layers he’s wearing. We’ve got a shirt and a hoodie and a vest and a scarf and a beanie on top of it all. All for a hike from his mansion to his private beach for a meal of various expensive shellfish that they barely ate before turning around and hiking back. Have you ever seen anything so perfect? He’s dressed like he’s hiking Everest. The scarf is what put me over the top. I didn’t notice it at first glance. But there it is, wrapped around his neck, under the hoodie and vest, because why wouldn’t this guy just wear everything at once? It’s such a beautiful rich dipshit move. He woke up in a $50 million home and dressed up like a lumberjack to eat lobster with other billionaires. I’m so proud of everyone involved in every part of this decision.

What do you think his closet looks like? Because I have an image in my head, crystal clear. It’s actually two closets. The first one is full of suits and tuxedos and various formal attire. The second one is down in his basement, near thousands of dollars of fishing and hunting gear he’s never used. There’s a raft on the floor that has never been inflated. And this closet is just full of vests. Dozens of them. In every color. Multiples of some because he forgot he already had them. There are hoodies and beanies and massive outdoorsy sweaters on the other side, like a Chris Evans in Knives Out situation. Some of them cost as much as your first car. And he goes down there and just starts throwing items of clothing on until he starts swearing right there, indoors. And then he wraps a scarf around it all. And then he’s ready.

It all raises an important question, one related to the thing that happened later where he got them lost on the way home (the shortcut that takes longer), where Logan had a health issue that will happen to old sedentary bears who hibernate in an office all day (mixed metaphor, work with me). The question is this: Is this character stupid or evil?

My first instinct was evil, that he set up the whole wandering hike to test Logan’s health and strength as a leader. I wrote it all up that way in my next-day Report Card post. But then…

Then I saw the scarf. With the hoodie and the vest and the beanie.

And I started wondering…

Maybe he’s just a big old idiot. Maybe he was being sincere about the shortcut taking longer sometimes. Maybe he’s just another rich doofus like everyone else on the show, just one who’s dressed like he’s going to fish for crab in Alaska for no reason as all.

Either way, he’s perfect for the show. I love him. I hope he shows up next week wearing more layers. Throw a fur-lined parka on over everything. Put on mittens. Just do it all.

ITEM NUMBER TWO — God bless television’s sweet awkward princes

Joe Pera Talks With You came back on Sunday night. This is good news for a lot of reasons, but mostly it is good news for me because I like it a lot. We’ve discussed this before, plenty of times, but still. The first two 11-minute episodes were about buying a recliner and building a fire. These are perfect topics for episodes of Joe Pera Talks With You because they are both somehow about nothing and everything. It’s a whole thing. Not everyone will like this show, with its deliberate pace and off-center style, but the people who do like it will really, really like it. I love shows like that.

Anyway, he was on Late Night With Seth Meyers to promote both the new season of his show and his new book, which has a title that is worth watching the video for even if that was the only thing in the video. It wasn’t, though. He also showed Seth a pitch for another show he had been tinkering with back when Adult Swim greenlit this one. The pitch is, to be clear, incredible. It’s got PT Cruisers and Mini Coopers and PT Anderson and Bradley Cooper and a character named, I promise, Supreme Court Justice Keith Asshole. I would have adored this show. I adore his current show, too, and am fine with the way things worked out, but I would have been fine with this other version, for certain. It’s like a version of Sliding Doors where I’m just happy in both. It would make for a boring movie but a pleasant existence.

While I’m on the subject of awkward dudes who make shows that are simple on the surface but contain enough depth to fit a submarine, How To With John Wilson is coming back, too. Look, here’s a trailer.

It is also so good and off-center and moves at its own deliberate pace. And I adore it, too. The first season is on HBO Max right now. I recommend you dive into a first watch or a re-watch before season two starts. I recommend this because it’s good and I want you to watch cool stuff that I like too, but also because HBO released the episode titles for season two and I am really excited.

Season 2, Episode 1: “How To Invest in Real Estate”
Season 2, Episode 2: “How To Appreciate Wine”
Season 2, Episode 3: “How To Find a Spot”
Season 2, Episode 4: “How To Throw Out Your Batteries”
Season 2, Episode 5: “How To Remember Your Dreams”
Season 2, Episode 6: “How To Be Spontaneous”

I cannot wait to find out what “How To Find a Spot” means. And to learn how to find a spot. And to go find one. And to be in that spot I found. It’s service journalism he’s doing here, really.

Joe Pera and John Wilson. Good dudes.

ITEM NUMBER THREE — I must know everything about Salma Hayek’s haunted London Mansion

The last time we discussed Salma Hayek it was because she told an interviewer about her fancy wine-drinking pet owl and, like, to be extremely clear, “famous actress Salma Hayek told an interviewer about her fancy wine-drinking pet owl” is pretty much why this weekly column exists. Because I need to talk about that kind of thing somewhere, with someone, and it’s easier to do it this way than to run around and tell each of you individually in person. It’s an efficiency thing, mostly. I’d spend so much money on gas.

Which brings us to another story about Salma Hayek and the reason this column exists: She went on Ellen this week and revealed that her London mansion is haunted. You are welcome to watch the video and hear her talk about her haunted London mansion. I’ve watched it three times this week. Here are the highlights:

• Salma Hayek’s staff at her London mansion started quitting because lights were going off and doors were closing on their own, leading people to believe there were ghosts
• Salma Hayek’s husband, French billionaire François-Henri Pinault, thought it was all “nonsense,” but she went ahead and called in an expert to get the ghosts to leave
• Let’s go ahead and quote Salma Hayek here: “Oh my goodness. So he came…and he starts going through the house and is like, ‘Yeah there’s an old lady here and a child’ and this and that. Everybody’s like freaking out even more. It’s worse because he found like 20 [ghosts].”
• One of the 20 ghosts the exorcist found was a nun who had “good vibes” and the exorcist would not get rid of the nun because Salma Hayek only tasked her with “getting rid of the bad vibes,” which is maybe the greatest thing I’ve ever heard

Between the haunted mansion and the fancy wine-drinking owl and principled vibe-detecting exorcist, Salma Hayek is basically living in a real-life Muppet movie. This is fascinating to me in ways I’m going to have trouble articulating. It’s just… yeah, fascinating. I’m going to need someone to interview Salma Hayek every three or four weeks for the next year or two, just to see what else she has to share. Nothing could surprise me at this point.

ITEM NUMBER FOUR — It is kind of hilarious that It’s Always Sunny is making legitimate television history now

This is the trailer for the upcoming 15th season of It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia, which is one of those things that seems normal to type until you actually stop and look at it. Fifteen seasons! That is so many seasons! It is so many seasons, in fact, that it will break the record for longest-running live-action comedy that was previously held by The Adventures of Ozzie & Harriet.

This is funny in two distinct ways: One, because this goofball show about Philly bar goons is making legitimate television history; two, because, and I’ve been thinking about this a lot, I do not think there is a more different show in existence show for them to be taking this record from. This is pretty much the only set of circumstances you could come up with where they’d even be in the same sentence. I’ll stop now, for you, but please know my brain will keep cranking on this for hours.

Here’s the blurb from the press release about the new season:

Like a fine Irish whiskey, Sunny’s distinct flavor has gotten richer and intensified through the years. First barreled in 2005, the show has become a landmark for dark comedy and American satire, uniting the most devoted of fans from all over the country and abroad, and this monumental 15th season is truly one to crack open and celebrate. Continuing to deliver some of the hardest laughs on television while tackling society’s most pressing issues, Sunny turns its fearless focus both outward and inward: to a national and international level but also to a deeply personal level. This is a season that sees The Gang try to exploit pandemic aid, sidestep cancel culture, evade criminal justice, reflect on their origins, and reconcile their identities and homeland roots.

I am vibrating with excitement about seeing these bozos in another country. And the rest of it, too. There’s a lot of smart stuff hidden in here, and there has been for a long time. It’s got a Simpsons-y feel to it that way, mixing the insightful with the deeply stupid. It makes me happy. I’m glad it’s back and I’m glad it’s setting records, in part because it deserves all the accolades it gets and in part because of the thing I said about it all being hilarious to me.

And while I’m on the subject of Always Sunny and things that are hilarious to me…

I don’t want to say this is a perfect tweet because I’ve seen this tweet by Sylvester Stallone, but I will say it’s pretty damn close.

ITEM NUMBER FIVE — It brings me great pleasure to report that Jack McBrayer has discovered vodka

Jack McBrayer is a sweet man who was delightful on 30 Rock and has a new show about being solid/nice called Hello, Jack. He’s out doing press for the latter, although he could just keep doing press for the former for all I care (see above), and as part of that press, he swung by The AV Club for an interview. It’s a fun interview for a lot of reasons, but mostly because of, well, this…

Did you pick up any new skills, hobbies, or get into something you hadn’t before during quarantine?

JM: I have to be honest with you. I had never really tried vodka before 2020. Now I drink it readily. [Laughs.] Especially during the summer I was like, “Oh, vodka kind of goes with anything.” So I was having a vodka-lemonade. I was having vodka-Kool-Aid. I’m a grown man who would make my own Kool-Aid to have a vodka-Kool-Aid by the pool. I was like, “Yep. I have figured life out. I cracked the code.”

This is perfect. I have nothing to add. Nor should I. Nothing I type into this box can possibly top the mental image of Jack McBrayer, months into a global pandemic, mixing up a Kool-Aid and vodka in his kitchen and saying, “Well that is wonderful.” So let’s just leave it there.

READER MAIL

If you have questions about television, movies, food, local news, weather, or whatever you want, shoot them to me on Twitter or at [email protected] (put “RUNDOWN” in the subject line). I am the first writer to ever answer reader mail in a column. Do not look up this last part.

From Derek:

I just want you to know that I saw Vin Diesel’s Instagram post where he called The Rock his “little brother” and my first instinct was “I need to make sure Brian has seen this.” We don’t even know each other. We’ve never met. But this was still so important to me that it jumped into my brain before any other thought. So… thank you? You’re welcome? Both?

Either way, I’m so happy for you.

Derek, thank you. It delights me to no end that you felt this way. You weren’t the only one, either. I wrote last week about how much their feud fueled me personally and then Vin posted this and so many people sent it to me. In so many forms. I got emails and tweets and DMs and text messages and someone I saw in person asked me if I’d seen it before we even got through our hellos. It makes me feel great about what I’m doing out here. This is not sarcasm. I love it.

The only awkward thing is that many of these texts/tweets/DMs came in while I was killing some time in a Panera before an appointment, just grabbing a smoothie and a cookie and chilling at a table. I kid you not that I was sitting there at a table, by myself, looking at my phone and openly giggling. It’s a weird thing to be doing for any of us, giggling out loud at a table in a fast-casual lunch/bakery spot, but it’s especially funny for me because of the thing where I’m in a wheelchair and the people sitting near me had to process, like, all of that. They were trying so hard not to stare. It was adorable.

So thank you Derek and everyone else who sent it and Vin Diesel and The Rock. And I’m sorry to the people in the Panera who didn’t know what to do about it all.

AND NOW, THE NEWS

To Puerto Rico!

With necks craned and eyes shielded from the sun, dozens of people gathered Wednesday around a towering eucalyptus tree in the heart of Puerto Rico’s bustling capital for a most unusual sight: a rhesus macaque monkey on the loose.

MONKEY ON THE LOOSE

“Give it some lunch to make it come down!” one man yelled.

“It’s too fat to come down!” retorted a woman nearby.

“Oh my gosh, it must be scared,” chimed in a third person.

LEAVE HIM ALONE

I’m sorry. This is unprofessional. I should add context. The short version is that there’s a monkey in a tree and no one knows where he came from or how he got there and LEAVE HIM ALONE HE’S A GOOD BOY.

Ugh. I’m a terrible journalist. Let’s leave this to the real one writing this story, who went and interviewed a local animal expert about it all.

He went to the scene with doubts, but there it was: a juvenile male rhesus macaque, which is native to south, central and southeast Asia.

“This is not normal,” Marcano said on Wednesday as he observed workers from his agency place a ladder between the tree and the rooftop of a nearby apartment and filled a cage with water, oranges and bananas to lure the monkey.

I SAID TO LEAVE HIM ALONE

HE’S FINE

MAYBE HE LIKES IT UP THERE

But the monkey refused to budge further, moving up and down the tree at times to the delight of the crowd below that included students, security guards and waiters.

“Look! Look! It’s moving! There it goes! There it goes!” yelled one woman as she pointed upward.

GOOD

Picture and videos of the monkey filled social media, with the animal drawing ever-more attention while staunchly staying in the tree.

“I feel bad for it, honestly,” said Stephen Hoppe, a 34-year-old business owner who shot a video of the monkey. “I imagine it’s terrified. … Everyone is wondering where it came from.”

I need a 10-episode Netflix docuseries about this. It’ll be better than Tiger King. Let John C. Reilly narrate. Or, even better, send him to the scene. Him and Jack Black. Send them both and let them host and interview people. This paragraph started as a joke but now I could not be more serious. Listen to me.

One of the most highly-anticipated titles of the year is Grand Theft Auto: The Trilogy – The Definitive Edition. Rockstar’s remaster of the PS2 trilogy was expected to be one of the best selling games this year, not only because of GTA‘s immense popularity, but because of the wide range of platforms it was going to be released on.

On November 11, launch day arrived and something really odd happened: The PC version of the GTA trilogy went missing. While the game can currently be played on home consoles, PC players can’t find the game anywhere. This includes people who pre-ordered the game, because not only has GTA itself disappeared from places like Steam, but Rockstar’s launcher is also currently not working. Anyone trying to play a Rockstar game on PC right now, such as GTA Online or Red Dead Redemption, can’t get on to play.

Right now, the official word is that the launcher is down for maintenance, but this “maintenance” has been going on since Thursday.

Maintenance is necessary sometimes for servers and launchers, and the stress of a wave of people going online all at once to play a game can cause some of these to crash, but delisting the game from stores is not part of normal maintenance. For starters, nobody schedules maintenance the same day as the launch of a hugely-anticipated title. Not only that, but Rockstar would never let a cash cow like GTA Online be unplayable this long. All of this is very weird and tells us something has gone wrong, but what that something is can only be guessed because Rockstar has stayed quiet outside of one update indicating they’re aware of how long the maintenance is currently taking.

While the games are likely doing incredibly well on home consoles, this is an absolute disaster of a PC launch for Rockstar.

Three songs into Teartracks, the effervescent new record from pop prodigy Banoffee, there’s a moment of deeply vulnerable, despairing honesty: “I’ll never get to f*ck anyone / The way I know how to, with you.” And then, as if in an attempt to shake off her blues, the beat kicks in. The interplay between high and low emotion on “Never Get To F*ck Any1” — the choice to pair bad times with bass drops — is a bit of a calling card for the Australian artist. Banoffee, born Martha Brown, has spent a half-decade in the music industry carving out a space in pop music that is both confessional and captivating.

First, her adventures in avant-pop took her to the legendary late hyperpop pioneer SOPHIE, then to an international Taylor Swift tour as a backup singer for Charli XCX. Brown has the Swiftian instinct for spinning individual anger into collective pop catharsis. Her 2020 full-length debut, Look At Us Now, Dad, turned the private details of her life — being stranded at a Chevron, struggling with malaria and subsequent fibromyalgia, searching for meaning after a breakup — into glistening, crystalline electronic pop. On her 2021 follow-up, she leans into her unflinching honesty, pushing her sound further into the digital diva ballads she hinted at in her first record.

It can be a bit of a risk to release an album without an over-the-top, all-out club banger, which is notably absent from the careful melodies of Teartracks. But as Brown, speaking over the phone from Melbourne, describes it, there wasn’t really a more marketable option: “I just had to be honest with myself, and not make it about if I’m going to make money, but as more of an emotional release.” She knows that outside of breakup scenes in sad movies, there isn’t a huge selling point for the mass marketing of her heartbreak; she sees the record as better suited for far more intimate settings: “I think that a lot of these songs are about having a cry in your car,” she says. “I love a lot of the crazy-sounding music that’s coming into the pop world. But this record wasn’t that.”

In many ways, the record in question was shaped by Brown’s physical surroundings: After spending the past few years in Los Angeles, studio-hopping, she returned to her home in Melbourne when the first pandemic restrictions took hold in early March 2020. The decision wasn’t so much a choice, as a necessary step taken for her own self-preservation. In addition to her concerns about being available to help in case her parents fell ill, she also faced the financial hurdles of being a working artist in the U.S. “As a musician who’s not from America, I wasn’t eligible for any of the unemployment benefits,” she recalls. “When all my work was canceled, I realized that there was no way I was going to be able to stay in my apartment. So it was just a necessity to get home where I could get help from the [Australian] government.”

To Brown, her return home was essential to the shape of her new album. “This record couldn’t have been made anywhere else because it’s really a topical record about what happened here,” she says. “Being in Melbourne in these very intense lockdowns meant that I had no choice but to stay at home and write.” And, she added with a slight laugh, “If I was in LA, maybe I wouldn’t have had to write a breakup album. You just never know what the sliding door moment would have been.”

Teartracks is an album that feels both grander and more intimate than Banoffee’s previous work. The record is brimming with the kind of contemplative, serious drama not often found in contemporary pop, like the solo piano at the center of the potent closer “Tears.” But there isn’t, despite titles like “I Hate It” and “Idiot,” a simple kiss-off to her ex on this breakup record. Unlike the excellent “Tennis Fan” on her previous record, the lyrics here don’t place blame on one person over another in the dissolution of their relationship. “I didn’t want to write a ‘f*ck you’ record. Because although that’s really satisfying, a lot of the time that it’s not reality. Most of the time, there’s two people going through something really hard when you break up. And I just wanted this to be more adult in that way, to acknowledge that you can be in pain and not write about the other person being wrong or a bad person.”

The shift between the ecstatic love of America and the isolated quarantine of Australia is perhaps best embodied by the transition between opener “Tapioca Cheeks,” with its shuffling percussion and effusive, autotuned chorus (“Everything you say/ makes me love you more”), and “Enough,” driven by a smoldering guitar and just the lightest touch of vocal processing. “Tapioca Cheeks” was the only Teartracks song recorded in a proper studio setting just prior to her return to Melbourne. Created with PC Music signees Planet 1999, the song came together remarkably quickly — it was a “15-minute track,” by Brown’s estimation.

She embarked on a wholly new creative process when she returned to Melbourne, building songs from stems sent over email, a method that both slowed the album’s production and led to emotional breakthroughs in her writing. “It definitely challenged me as a producer,” Brown said. “I’m quite a messy producer who really relies on collaborators. I couldn’t do that.” But virtual collaboration also seemed to remove some of the pressures of the studio, allowing her to track vocals without judgment. “When I wrote ‘Enough,’ I was in a really bad place,” she explains. “The original vocal for that is very teary, and I just couldn’t really face working on it any longer. I sent it to Charles [of Planet 1999], and it was really raw. You could tell that I was crying on the take, but it was okay, because I was just sending an email. I could work on something that I knew would be special because of its vulnerability, without the confrontation of having a bunch of people in the room staring at me while I lose my shit.”

Banoffee, from this vantage point, seems like an artist without a city to call her own. The isolation of Melbourne, while a fruitful ground for her lyrical experiments, ultimately slowed down the production process — the record’s release date was pushed back from October to early November, and Brown was still finalizing tracks for Teartracks when we spoke just a few weeks before its arrival. But at the same time, Los Angeles seemed to leave her feeling exhausted and cynical of the industry. So where does an artist like Banoffee find home? “I think I’ve learnt that there isn’t one,” she posited. “I’ve been looking around for the ideal place for everything that will make the perfect writing environment. And I think I’ve just realized, especially through this record, that it’s more about being in a place within yourself.” On Teartracks, Brown has crafted a gorgeous, complex place to call home.

While Martin Scorsese has shown his appreciation for Tony Bennett’s pipes by featuring a few of his tunes in his movies, most prominently using “Rags to Riches” in Goodfellas, it turns out that Bennett’s got a bit of a problem with Scorsese’s movies—at least according to Lady Gaga.

Marty’s name came up during a post-screening Q&A of the new Ridley Scott movie House of Gucci, in which Gaga plays Italian socialite Patrizia Reggiani, the ex-wife of Gucci heir Maurizio Gucci, whom she hired a hitman to kill. According to The Hollywood Reporter, Gaga—who reportedly spoke in an Italian accent for nine months straight while working on the movie—talked about how important it was to her to portray Reggiani as a fully fleshed-out character, and not just some “caricature” of an Italian woman. Which is when she then dropped the bombshell that:

“[Tony] famously talks about his distaste for Marty Scorsese’s films. How much he dislikes the way that Italians are portrayed in crime. Tony does not fully talk to me about this right now [because of] the state that he’s in [with Alzheimer’s], which is probably best for me, but I’ve tried to explain it to him.”

Though Gaga says Bennett “famously” talks about his disdain for Scorsese’s movies, it’s the first most people are hearing about this. And it might even come as a surprise to Scorsese himself, who back in August took time away from shooting his latest film to record a 95th birthday greeting for Bennett, in which he sent the crooner “love from Oklahoma,” and told him he’d see him soon. The video was posted to Bennett’ Facebook page with the caption: “What a day, and what a night! 95 feels great with the love from friends like Martin Scorsese. Thank you for this video. #happy95tony #igetakickoutofyou”

(Via The Hollywood Reporter)

Rudy Giuliani visited the right-wing news network Newsmax on Thursday to try and gaslight the entire country with claims that the January 6th insurrection on Capitol Hill was all an “exaggeration.”

Giuliani, who’s currently being sued for billions by Dominion for spreading totally baseless voter fraud theories during the 2020 Presidential Election, told host Rob Schmitt that the current House Committee investigation into the attack on Congress earlier this year is just part of the Democrats plan to overthrow Donald Trump.

“This is really a coup that they carried right through to their exaggeration of Jan. 6, which they’re still carrying on, keeping those people in prison the way you would in a fascist country,” Giuliani said. He also went after Democratic Rep. Adam Schiff, who has said he believes there is direct evidence that Trump worked with the Russians to secure a win during the 2016 Presidential Election.

“Why doesn’t anyone ask him who are those two people and that piece of paper that he said had direct evidence of Donald Trump being involved in Russian collusion? I’d like to see that piece of paper,” Giuliani ranted. “If he can’t produce it and there are no people, maybe they should throw him out of the Congress because he’s a damn liar. He also is a traitor, because to make a charge like that against a president hurts the United States of America.”

You know what else hurts the United States of America? Having a sitting president incite violence against members of Congress all because he lost an election. Giuliani is still a person of interest in the investigation into the Jan. 6th insurrection — which did happen, by the way — so it makes sense that he’d want to downplay the attack, which left hundreds injured and five dead, including a Capitol police officer. Four more officers who responded to the attack that day committed suicide in the months that followed.

That’s not an exaggeration, it’s a fact, something that Giuliani probably isn’t too familiar with after his years of service under Trump’s regime.

(Via Newsmax)

NASCAR wants nothing to do with the “Let’s Go Brandon,” and Lauren Boebert can’t be happy about that, given how awfully proud she was of her post-Halloween costume, a “Let’s Go Brandon” dress (for which she called the catchphrase/slur a “movement”). All of this followed NBC Sports reporter Kelli Stavast (while interviewing NASCAR driver Brandon Brown) mistaking a crowd chanting “f*ck Joe Biden” for “Let’s Go Brandon.” Boebert and the far-right enjoy this this so very much, and now, Boebert is seriously upset at Peloton because, I guess, she really would like the “freedom” to use the catchphrase as a username?

It’s very strange stuff, and of course, both NASCAR and Peloton, as private companies, are free to ban the use of any username in association with their brands and respective terms of service. Well, Boebert wants everyone to know how irked she is, so (naturally) she expressed her grievances on Twitter. “Peloton has blocked anyone from putting ‘Let’s Go Brandon’ in their usernames as they work out,” she wrote. “YouTube hides ALL dislikes as almost every Biden video has more dislikes than likes. Sorry, America hates the guy and you can’t cover it up!”

Her concerns have been echoed by Fox News, which has relayed complaints that an “error message” pops up for username use or when users want to use the term as a hashtag. Apparently, the users are steamed because Black Lives Matter-associated hashtags aren’t banned, and of course, people want to make this a controversy, much like when the far-right attacked Biden for using a Peloton in the White House. With all of the true injustices in this world, it’s kind-of amazing that people are upset over, uh, “Let’s Go Brandon” and private companies that can shut down political speech as desired.