Category: News

Nearly a year after it was first revealed last June, we’re finally getting some brand new Horizon Forbidden West information — and a lot of it too. On Thursday, May 27, Sony is hosting their next ‘State of Play’ livestream, and the focus is solely on the sequel to the 2017’s Horizon Zero Dawn, a game we still think you should clear you calendar for. According to game director Mathijs de Jonge, the presentation will last around 20 minutes, and feature “14 minutes of brand new in-game action featuring our heroic protagonist Aloy, all captured directly on PlayStation 5.”

For those unfamiliar with the series, the PlayStation exclusive titles follow a young woman named Aloy as she ventures across a far-future America, battling mechanical dinosaurs and uncovering the truth behind both her past and the world’s post-apocalyptic state. The first game in the series, Horizon Zero Dawn, was met with nearly universal acclaim upon release, with critics citing it’s lush open-world, fluid action, and the performance of voice actress Ashly Burch (who you might recognize as Rachel on Apple TV’s Mythic Quest) as major triumphs. Horizon Forbidden West, which is currently set to release sometime this year, directly continues Aloy’s story as she travels west to a new and dangerous frontier.

For those interested in watching, you can catch the next State of Play over on PlayStation’s Twitch and YouTube channels. The stream will being at 2 PM PT on May 27, and will run approximately 20 minutes. However, if you feel like pulling up a bit early, Guerrilla Games and Sony Interactive Entertainment have stated they will be kicking off the show with a “uniquely crafted countdown” starting at 9 AM PT.

Alright, listen. These hats, the new line of “Local Market” hats that will be released for Major League Baseball teams, you gotta see them, folks. They are not particularly good. The lede ends here, let’s dive in.

What are we doing here?

What are we DOING HERE?

COME ON.

Here is the thing with Major League Baseball hats: The ones that are usually the best are the ones that do not try to do too terrible much — think of the classic Yankees hat, or the blue and red Cubs hat, or the Red Sox hat that are just a base color and a big letter B. Most times that we get these kinds of unique releases, it ends up taking something good and adding way too much to it, either by doing some weird pattern design (an example!) or by adding so much unnecessary stuff that it takes away from what makes the hats great.

These are just a lot — I, a Yankee fan, do not need to own a hat that has a slice of pizza and a boombox on it — and if there is a silver lining, it’s that there appears to be a sense of solidarity in how uniformly strange all of these are. Well, that, and this seems like a pretty fun way to learn about area codes for teams in other markets.

When the owners of the Lucky Stop convenience store in Southwick, Massachusetts discovered a $1 million winning lottery ticket in a stack of discarded tickets, they could have kept it for themselves or given it to a friend or family member. Instead, they returned it to the woman who had bought it and accidentally tossed it aside—an act of integrity and honesty that both heartwarming and inspiring.

Lea Fiega bought a $30 Diamond Millions scratch-off ticket at the end of March, but she didn’t scratch the ticket fully. If she had, she would have noticed two matching numbers that indicated she had won $1 million.

“I was in a hurry, on lunch break, and just scratched it real quick, and looked at it, and it didn’t look like a winner, so I handed it over to them to throw away,” she told the Associated Press according to WACH News.

The ticket sat in a wastebasket of discarded tickets for 10 days, until the store owners looked through them before permanently throwing them away.

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“One evening, I was going through the tickets from the trash and found out that she didn’t scratch the number,” Abhi Shah, the son of the store owners told WWLP-TV. “I scratched the number and it was $1 million underneath the ticket.”

“I was a millionaire for a night,” Shah told CBS News. He began thinking of all the things he could do with the money.

But the family consulted together the next morning, even calling Shah’s grandparents in India for their input. Fiega was a regular customer at the store, and the Shahs knew that the ticket had belonged to her. They also knew that she obviously hadn’t meant to throw away a million dollars.

Shah told CBS News that his grandmother said, ‘Let’s not keep the ticket. It’s not right. Just give it back to them. If it’s in your luck, you will get it anyhow.'”

So that’s what they did. And boy was Fiega surprised when Abhi Shah showed up at her workplace.

“He came to my office and said ‘my mom and dad would like to see you,'” Fiega told WACH News. “I said ‘I’m working,’ and he said ‘no you have to come over.’ So I went over there and that’s when they told me. I was in total disbelief. I cried, I hugged them.”

Million-dollar lottery ticket returned to winner who mistakenly discarded it

www.youtube.com

Fiega had already felt incredibly lucky after she nearly died earlier this year after contracting COVID-19. Getting the news from her local convenience store that she had accidentally thrown away a million dollars and that the owners were returning it to her was nearly unbelievable.

“I mean, who does that? They’re great people. I am beyond blessed,” she said.

Fiega told WACH that she gave the family part of her winnings and that she’s saving the rest for retirement. The store owners also receive $10,000 from the state lottery commission for selling the winning ticket.

Other regular customers told CBS News that they were not surprised by the Shahs’ kindness and selflessness in returning the winning ticket.

“They’re just purely good people,” one customer said. “You can tell just by talking to them.”

Thank you, Shah family, for serving as an example of doing the right thing even when you don’t have to, and for giving us all a boost of faith in humanity.

Democratic congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, commonly known as AOC, has bravely revealed she is focusing on her mental health after living through the trauma of the January 6 insurrection at the U.S. Capitol building.

AOC’s admission that she is “doing therapy” to help her process the incident is powerful because it shows that even one of the country’s most prominent leaders needs to take time for their mental health.

We live in a world where people still face stigmatization for going to therapy, so for a person who is often the target of malicious attacks, to let her guard down is courageous. It’s also a great example for people everywhere. If one of the fiercest members of Congress needs time for her mental health, it has nothing to do with weakness.

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When hundreds of pro-Trump insurgents stormed the Capitol building, Ocasio-Cortez thought her life was in danger. “Wednesday was an extremely traumatizing event. And it was not an exaggeration to say that many members of the House were nearly assassinated,” she said after the event.

Several of the insurgents had guns, pipe bombs, Molotov cocktails, and zip ties to take hostages. Video from the attack shows attackers chanting “Hang Mike Pence!”

Garrett Miller, an insurgent from Richardson, Texas, made death threats during the attack on the Capitol tweeting, “Assassinate AOC.”

Ocasio-Cortez wasn’t in the Capitol building during the attack, but she sheltered in her office at the nearby Cannon House Office Building. At one point she hid in the bathroom and was startled when a police officer pounded on her office door asking, “Where is she? Where is she?”

AOC thought the man pounding on the door was an insurgent who came to hurt her.

“And I just thought to myself, ‘They got inside’ … I mean, I thought I was going to die,” Ocasio-Cortez said, according to People.

The 31-year-old Congresswoman told the LatinoUSA podcast that the January 6 insurrection was an incredibly scary moment for her and her coworkers. “You have this transition period of escalating violence, which really culminated on the 6th, for which was an extraordinarily traumatizing event that’s not really being discussed,” she said.

As a Congresswoman, Ocasio-Cortez is constantly reacting to the never-ending business of government, but after receiving some heartfelt advice, decided to take a break and pay attention to her mental health after five years of incredible stress.

“Oh yeah, I’m doing therapy but also I’ve just slowed down,” Ocasio-Cortez continued. “I think the Trump administration had a lot of us, especially Latino communities, in a very reactive mode.”

“After the 6th, I took some time and it was really [Rep.] Ayanna Pressley when I explained to her what happened to me, like the day of, because I ran to her office,” AOC explained. “And she was like, ‘You need to recognize trauma. And this is something that you went through, but we’re all going through. And it’s really important to pause after that, because that’s how you process it.'”

While Chris Hemsworth‘s Instagram has more recently been filled with super jacked photos as he films Thor: Love and Thunder, on Tuesday, the actor switched things up with a little fatherly disappointment. In what starts as an adorable photo of Hemsworth walking with his son while taking a break from filming the fourth Thor film, the insanely ripped dad revealed that their father-son chat didn’t go exactly as planned.

With the boy wearing a red cape just like the God of Thunder, Hemsworth asked him the “age old question” of what he wants to be when he grows up. Unfortunately, the Thor star didn’t get the answer he was looking for when the boy responded, “Superman,” which prompted Hemsworth to note that he’s lucky he has two other kids.

All of this is very cute and fun, sure, but if you happened to glance at his legs and notice that something seems a bit… off, don’t feel bad. You’re not alone. The actor’s brother, Luke Hemsworth, jumped into his younger sibling’s replies and asked what we’re all thinking: “Bro?! You’ve been skipping leg days again?!”

Of course, it could just be a weird camera angle, and we’re not about to question the Thunder God’s workout routine. Not when he’s packing those guns.

(Via Chris Hemsworth on Instagram)

The CW is turning Cartoon Network’s lovable The Powerpuff Girls into a live-action series starring Chloe Bennet as Blossom, Dove Cameron as Bubbles, and Yana Perrault as Buttercup. Also, Turk from Scrubs plays their father, Professor Utonium, which is excellent casting. But the show was curiously left out the network’s fall 2021 schedule. That’s because the Powerpuff pilot is being overhauled and reworked.

“The reason we do pilots is sometimes things miss. This was just a miss,” The CW chairman and CEO Mark Pedowitz said during upfront press call on Tuesday. “We believe in the cast completely, We believe in Diablo [Cody] and Heather [Regnier]… In this case, the pilot didn’t work.” He continued, “But because we see there’s enough elements in there, we wanted to give it another shot. So that’s why we didn’t want to go forward with what we had. Tonally, it might’ve felt a little too campy. It didn’t feel as rooted in reality as it might’ve felt. But again, you learn things when you test things out. And so in this case, we felt, let’s take a step back and go back to the drawing board.”

Pedowitz’s comments after the pilot script supposedly leaked. Deadline reports:

A portion of the Powerpuff script supposedly leaked on Twitter and gained some negative attention. The leaked snippets teased the disillusioned superheroes’ sex lives, “edgy” attitudes, and more. Pedowitz did not confirm the leak.

I’m not sure what the Powerpuff Girls being “rooted in reality” means. But if it involves Bubbles having a monologue about being “a weirdo,” the CW made the right call.

(Via Deadline)

J. Cole’s professional basketball career has been, for lack of a better term, pretty modest. As a player for Patriots Basketball Club in the inaugural season of the Basketball Africa League, Cole has scored five points in three games. He’s looked like, well, a person playing professional basketball for the first time, although he does certainly have some skill on the court.

The biggest thing Cole’s done is bring attention to the league, although for one player, that trade-off is not worth it. Terrell Stoglin, a guard for AS Salé who averages 31 points per game, certainly sees the benefit of “a lot of attention, and, I guess, money” coming in because of Cole, but generally thinks he is disrespecting the game.

Via ESPN:

“I think there’s a negative and a positive [to J. Cole’s presence],” Stoglin told ESPN. “The negative part of it is: I think he took someone’s job that deserves it.

“I live in a basketball world. I don’t live in a fan world. I know a lot of guys that had their careers stopped by COVID and they’re still home working out and training for an opportunity like this.

“For a guy who has so much money and has another career to just come here and average, like, one point a game and still get glorified is very disrespectful to the game. It’s disrespectful to the ones who sacrificed their whole lives for this.”

Patriots chief operating officer Haydee Ndayishimiye unsurprisingly disagrees with this assessment — “We made a basketball decision which can be justified by our performance so far,” she said — but it is fair to point out that someone who has put their life towards playing ball professionally lost out on an opportunity to someone who recently started pursuing a basketball career. Still, the only rule is it has to work, and the brain trust with Patriots seem to be happy with Cole’s performance on the floor.

Maybe the most impressive thing about Plan B, a teen sex comedy coming to Hulu this week, is how many different movies it manages to homage (if not directly rip off) at the same time. On one level, it’s like Can’t Hardly Wait, if it focused exclusively on Lauren Ambrose’s Denise Fleming, trying to find the morning after pill following her unexpected hook up with Seth Green’s tragic poseur Kenny Fisher. On another, it’s Booksmart if the leads weren’t caucasian, it’s Harold And Kumar except with girls, and it’s one of those sad slogs about two girls trying to get an abortion that hits the arthouse every few years, except a comedy.

Plan B, directed by Parks & Rec actress Natalie Morales in her first feature (with a script by Joshua Levy and Prathiksha Srinivasan) is maybe so busy riffing, ‘shipping, flipping, and gender-swapping other stories that it neglects to find its own. It ends up being pleasant enough and occasionally pretty funny but not quite a romp.

Kuhoo Verma and Victoria Moroles play Sunny and Lupe, horny Indian-American nerd and goth Mexican-American best friends in South Dakota. They both have conservative parents — Lupe, a single dad played by Jacob Vargas who makes her wipe off her black lipstick before she goes to school, and Sunny a single mom who barges in on Sunny while Sunny is double flicking herself to the sight of an anatomical penis drawing in a health textbook (kids do still this? can’t they watch amputee porn on their smart fridges now?). The drawing isn’t the only exposed penis in Plan B, whose unabashed raunch is by far its best quality. It’s also the only part of Plan B that doesn’t feel overly mannered.

Sunny has a crush on a lank-haired cardigan enthusiast named Hunter, played by Michael Provost, while Lupe pines for a musician who lives in a different town (you wouldn’t know them, they go to a different school). A disastrous sexual experience in a bathroom compounded by their town’s lack of a Planned Parenthood sends Sunny and Lupe on a wild-pill chase/journey of self-discovery that will test their friendship, bring old secrets to light, expose our nation’s unconscionable lack of healthcare for teen girls, and blah blah blah.

If it sounds like a slick pitch, it is. Plan B has a tendency to feel more like a series of great pitches than a movie in its own right. It obviously draws heavily from the Harold And Kumar playbook (Harold And Kumar screenwriters Hayden Schlossberg and Jon Hurwitz are even among Plan B‘s team of producers), which isn’t a terrible thing, but that movie, despite its occasional earnest elements about a Korean and Indian guy just trying to get along in a Caucasian world, was about two dopey stoners trying to get a burger. For all Plan B‘s aspirations of progressivism, we still seem to demand that our teen girl protagonists be not just goofy and dopey and stoned, but also clever and plucky and open-minded, committed to dismantling the patriarchy. Which tends to induce applause more than it does laughter. Plan B is occasionally really funny (Verma and Moroles have solid chemistry) and occasionally has a nice message, but it almost never does both at the same time (with creaky transitions between the two).

Some local color as more than just a backdrop probably would’ve gone a long way. Plan B is more specific in its pitch than in its execution. It’s set in South Dakota but you never really get a sense of South Dakota as more than “some conservative place,” or that the filmmakers know more about it than where it exists on a map.

Known-ish comedic actors show up for occasional kooky cameos, like Jay Chandrasekhar from Super Troopers as the Indian pharmacist and Edi Patterson, who’s so brilliant in The Righteous Gemstones, as the truck stop cashier. There’s an extended bit where one of the characters does bad drugs. Basically, all the scenes you could close your eyes and imagine being in a teen sex comedy are also in this one.

Still, a lot of Plan B‘s jokes about dicks, buttholes, bodily fluids, and toilets are pretty decent, including the one that ends the movie. It’s always nice to see a comedy nail its closer. What Plan B needed in order to truly sing was to get personal. Instead, it mostly offers a facsimile of it.

‘Plan B’ premieres May 28th on Hulu. Vince Mancini is on Twitter. You can access his archive of reviews here.

John Cena is apologizing after causing an international incident while promoting F9. During a Taiwanese broadcast, the wrestler turned actor referred to Tawain as a country, which sparked a major backlash in China as the People’s Republic does not recognize Taiwan as such. While speaking in Mandarian, Cena filmed a message on the popular Chinese social media platform Weibo, where he apologized to his Chinese fans as well as the entire nation.

“I’m sorry for my mistake,” Cena said. “I must say now, [it’s] very, very, very, very important [that] I love, and respect even more, China and the Chinese people.”

As for the comment that sparked the backlash, Cena was pumped to promote F9 debuting in eight international markets ahead of its opening in the U.S. next month, and he excitedly said, “Taiwan is the first country that can watch F9,” during a Taiwanese broadcast. While seemingly innocuous, the issue of Taiwan’s sovereignty is a powder keg when it comes to China. Via PEOPLE:

Taiwan has been a self-governed democratic island since the end of the Chinese Civil War over 70 years ago, but it’s still considered by Beijing as a territory claimed by the People’s Republic of China. Any suggestion of Taiwan’s independence is considered a major offense by China.

With the Chinese box office being an even more crucial revenue source as Hollywood films slowly return to theaters following a year of shutdowns and delays, it behooved Cena and Universal to apologize for the faux pas. Plus, F9 is Cena’s franchise debut, and he probably doesn’t want to be the guy that accidentally detonated the foreign box office for one of the biggest film series of all time.

(Via PEOPLE)

Mare of Easttown is zooming toward a conclusion and, presumably, answers to questions like “Who killed Erin McMenamin?” and “Why did they kill her?” and “Who was the father of her baby?” It looked for a second in the penultimate episode like the show had already provided these answers. After a whole season of looking shifty and just generally like a guy who is hiding a secret as heavy as “committed murder and dumped a body in the woods,” Billy Ross confessed and left for one last fishing trip with his brother, John.

Which was nice. And seemed to settle things. And Mare was in a car speeding toward the cabin without backup, because Mare is a loose cannon who plays by her own rules and was, just a few episodes ago, literally told to turn in her badge and gun when she was taken off the case by a cranky chief even though, dammit, she gets results. It looked like we were all one tense stand-off away from a conclusion.

But then.

Young Jess showed up at the police station after getting chased through Easttown by a very angry Dylan, her cohort in the raiding and alleged burning of Erin’s diaries. And then this happened.

All of which raised an important question, one that was not answered by the show before the credits started rolling: Who and/or what was in that picture, and why was whoever/whatever it is so important that the chief would immediately shout for someone to get Mare on the phone? It’s one last big twist in a show littered with them. And it’s killing me.

So, in an effort to get it out of my own brain if nothing else, here are a handful of possibilities of what could be depicted in that photograph. Some of them are legitimate theories. Others… less so.

Probably.

8. Something that implicates Lori somehow

I do not actually think Lori is involved in either the paternity-hiding fiasco or the murder, but it’s worth mentioning her right away for a few reasons:

• Every member of the Ross family seems to have some kind of secret or troubles they are carrying around like a sack of hoagies and I assume she is no different, and she was at the cabin for the reunion, and she might know something, and she, like every character on this show, gets really shifty when pressed with what appear to be simple questions
• There was that whole thing about the gun that killed Erin being an old police-issue weapon, like the one Mare’s father probably used, and Mare has an attic no one goes in anymore, and Lori seems like the kind of friend who would clean your attic after your troubled son committed suicide in it, so maybe there something there
• I needed a place to start this list before I get into the better possibilities

Moving on.

7. Richard doing something creepy

I’m sorry, but you cannot just go around casting Guy Pearce — GUY PEARCE — as some sort of famous one-hit-wonder author who now bounces from college to college as a lecturer and expect me to assume he doesn’t have an awful dark secret somewhere under that Professor Sweetheart exterior. Come on. What are we doing here? Come on.

And now he’s showing up with a hoagie gift basket and shrugging off Mare standing him up on his big day to go on a date with another guy? Come on. He’s just some extremely nice dude? No. No. I cannot square this information in my brain. I don’t think any character in television history has ever been more guilty of something on paper than “roving bachelor English professor played by Guy Pearce who shows up in a small town right around the time a teenage girl gets murdered.” This is outrageous. Come on.

Now, do I think Richard was actually involved in Erin’s murder? No. Probably not. Almost definitely not. There’s been nothing to imply that he was involved in any way and he probably has a slew of alibis. But that dude has secrets. He’s hiding something, somewhere. Like, I would not be surprised to learn that he’s in Easttown because he was run out of his last job due to unproven but very suspicious allegations involving former students and disappearances. Maybe there’s a whole string of missing teenage teens that lines up perfectly with various colleges he’s taught at. I don’t see how we can rule any of that out at this point.

I guess what I’m saying is this: A last-second twist revealing that Richard killed Erin would still only be the second wildest twist I can think of, just behind a roving bachelor English professor played by Guy Pearce who shows up in a small town bright around the time a teenage girl gets murdered somehow not being involved in the murder. I mean, again… come on.

6. This dog that was carrying a grocery bag

I swear to God this happened in the sixth episode, the one that just aired, smack between Lori and Mare talking about infidelity and John hauling a mattress into his dad’s house. I went back and checked again today just to be sure I wasn’t imagining it all. Nope. It was right there on the screen. And look at this guy! I choose to believe that bag contains two soft pretzels and a half-gallon jug of Wawa iced tea.

As to why the chief would want Mare to see it immediately, in the middle of a murder investigation, right as she’s thrusting herself into danger, I mean… I’m basically writing this entire article just to show it to you guys, so at the very least I would understand.

5. Proof that Brianna Delrasso orchestrated the entire thing like Keyser Soze

The overwhelming odds here point to Brianna Delrasso just being a screwed up teen who was playing Mean Girl to cover up whatever stuff she’s dealing with in her own life, and that her last-minute decision to tell the cops about Dylan not being in the house at 2 a.m. was an attempt to clear a guilty conscience, but still, consider:

• We saw her be a manipulative weirdo at the very beginning when she posed as someone else online to lure Erin to the woods for a videotaped ambush
• Admit it, you could totally see her walking out of that room after telling the truth about Dylan and breaking into a self-satisfied smirk about it all
• I kind of want her to be guilty of something?

I don’t know. The short version here is “I don’t trust her.”

I have watched that video maybe 800 times this week. I suspect you will too now. Anyway…

4. A picture of Dylan involved in something shady

So many questions about Dylan. Many of them will probably go unanswered and drive me nuts. Is he a sociopath or just your standard Delco dirtbag? What was he doing out at 2 a.m. the night Erin was killed? What kind of maniac makes up “I was driving around smoking weed” as his alibi right to the murder detectives’ faces? Why did he want to go burn the journals and why is he so threatened by Jess talking about it?

Further complicating matters is the thing where it was Erin’s picture and therefore has to be something she would keep hidden and stored away for her own reasons, not just “because it would wrap things up in a way that makes me happy,” although more shows should consider this when planning out their seasons. My working theory is that it’s a picture of the kid’s real father and Dylan has been blackmailing him. And that he’s both a sociopath and a Delco dirtbag. People can be two things.

3. An alien

The sliver of me that loves chaos and watching things burn would absolutely adore if the show hooked a hard left in the finale and just introduced extraterrestrial hijinks in like the last 20 minutes of the finale. It’s not that I think it would improve the show in any substantial way. It would do quite the opposite, actually. It would be awful, just the stupidest thing ever, and somehow the second show Jean Smart has appeared in that featured surprise aliens in the finale. The difference is that Fargo is weird enough to make it work.

No, the allure here is that people everywhere would be so, so mad about it and it would make me laugh very much. I recognize this is a character flaw I have. I’m not exactly proud of it. And yet, here it is at number three. I do not know why I am like this.

2. Billy with Erin

Too easy. Too convenient. Entirely too simple. Especially since Mare already suspects him. And he had that strange confession. No, this will not do at all. Let’s connect some other dots here. Like, for example, why Billy was so mad at John about John not ever facing consequences. And why John was so pushy about making Billy confess. And why John has that gun in the tackle box.

Hmm.

Hmmmmmm.

This brings us to…

1. John with Erin

It adds up. Kind of. It explains why the chief would be so desperate to get Mare on the phone right after seeing the picture. It explains why Billy was so cranky about John’s repeated infidelity. It explains the gun and the fishing trip, probably, if John was nervous about Billy cracking. I’m still not sure which one of them is the father and why Billy was covered with blood the night of the murder, although I have a number of suspicions. I feel like they’re both guilty of something and covering all of it up. And I’m still not sure exactly how Dylan was involved in it all but I’m sure he is somehow. Probably.

Maybe.

Unless he wasn’t.

But he was.

Unless…

Unless it was an alien.