Category: News

A great pathetic man once said, “The butter’s too cold! The butter’s all f*cked! You f*ckwads, there’s dinner rolls ripping out there as we speak!”

That quote doesn’t apply to anything; I just miss Succession, that’s all.

The last new episode of the Emmy-winning series aired in October 2019, and while production for season three was set to begin in April, filming was put on hold due to COVID-19. Creator Jesse Armstrong hoped to resume by Christmas, but according to Alan Ruck, who plays butter-screamer Connor, the Roys will be back in business by Thanksgiving. “We’re going to start in New York right around the middle of November,” he told People TV’s Couch Surfing. That’s excellent news for the Conheads out there.

Ruck was also asked to name the biggest thing he’s learned from making Succession. “Apparently, [the rich] don’t wear overcoats,” he answered. “They don’t wear warm clothing, because they go right from the helicopter into the limousine, so the most they’ll wear is a suit jacket. They don’t wear any overclothes or any gloves or any hats, or any warm weather gear, unless they’re hunting or something.” Who needs to go outside to hunt when you’ve got a perfectly good boar on the floor indoors?

(Via Entertainment Weekly)

Even before the election results started coming in on Tuesday, experts had anticipated that Black voters would turn out in record numbers across the United States this year. That was a key issue for democrats in 2016 as Black voter turnout declined for the first time in nearly 20 years.

Trump’s policies and rhetoric during his White House tenure have been one of the main factors to Black voters exercising their rights — with the vast majority of those votes going to democratic nominee Joe Biden — but it was also thanks to a major push from LeBron James and other star athletes, who banded together in recent months as part of the More Than A Vote initiative.

More Than A Vote was designed to help educate the public about voter suppression tactics against minority groups in America and help historically-disenfranchised groups understand their rights and get registered. As Joe Biden continued to take the lead in the key states necessary to secure the election on Friday morning, LeBron took a moment to praise voters in those states for doing their part to make history.

The state of Georgia has turned out to be one of the biggest surprises this election cycle, as Biden has been able to overcome his deficit there and appears to be on track to take those electoral votes, although it could take some time for that to be confirmed. That’s thanks in large part to former Georgia House minority leader Stacey Abrams, who has helped more than 800,000 new voters through the New Georgia Project and other voting rights initiatives in the state. LeBron added a special shout-out to Abrams on Friday morning as well.

The NBA, as part of the social justice initiative it instituted in the wake of the work stoppage, secured agreements to use team-owned arenas as voting sights in this election. Once the tallies are all in, it’ll be interested to see just how much of an impact that made on the outcome as well.

Donald Glover is good at music. His Childish Gambino albums have all charted highly and he earned a No. 1 single in 2018 with “This Is America.” If you ask him, though, he’s not the best rapper out there. In fact, he doesn’t even think he’s the best rapper in his family.

This afternoon, Glover made a rare appearance on his Twitter account to talk about the viral “Get Your Booty To The Poll” PSA that generated some attention online recently, revealing that he nearly played a part in it. He also mentioned his brother Stephen Glover in the same tweet, in which he wrote, “also, Angela Barnes Gomes (‘atlanta’ alum) made those ‘get ur booty to the polls’ yall love/hated so much. she asked me to rap on it, but @Steve_G_Lover is a better rapper…so [shrugging emoji].”

These days, Stephen Glover is best known for his work writing on Atlanta, but he started making music when he was 17 years old and has dropped a handful of projects since 2011. Meanwhile, Donald Glover is fresh off the release of his latest Gambino album, 3.15.20, which he released, as the title suggests, on March 15 of this year. He also recently suggested that he like has more Gambino material coming up at some point.

In one of the most unexpected turns of the 2020 election, Georgia has become a battleground state. It was speculated from pre-election polling to be a close race there, but of course we’re all well aware that polls can be wrong. However, the previously reliably red state flipped blue overnight as votes in several Democrat-leaning counties were tallied, including Clayton county—home to the late senator and civil rights icon John Lewis.

Lewis was one of the “big six” leaders of the civil rights movement of the 1960s. In his 20s, he organized sit-ins, marched beside Martin Luther King, Jr., and was arrested at least 40 times in the battle for racial equality. State troopers and “deputized” white men beat him so badly they fractured his skull during the march from Selma to Montgomery on March 7, 1965.

That march was for voting rights, a cause close to Lewis’s heart his entire career. His early activism was instrumental in getting the Voting Rights Act passed, and he spent the rest of his long and storied life defending the right for all Americans of all races to have their voices heard at the ballot box.

Lewis, who passed away in July of this year, in the midst of the largest racial justice movement since the civil rights era, left an essay to be published after his death. In it, he reiterated the need for Americans to exercise and protect their right to vote:

“Ordinary people with extraordinary vision can redeem the soul of America by getting in what I call good trouble, necessary trouble. Voting and participating in the democratic process are key. The vote is the most powerful nonviolent change agent you have in a democratic society. You must use it because it is not guaranteed. You can lose it.”

As we witness a sitting president attempt to delegitimize our election and actively seek, with claims of fraud and illegality, to toss out votes being counted in areas with heavy Black populations, we’re watching that warning play out right in front of us.

So it’s incredibly fitting that the votes pushing Georgia toward Joe Biden and away from Donald Trump are the votes from the county Lewis called home. He worked hard to enfranchise voters there. He paved the way for Stacey Abrams to do the same. He spent his life fighting for just this moment, where the voices of people whose votes have been suppressed in dozens of ways throughout U.S. history make themselves heard loud and clear.

People are taking to social media to give a well-deserved nod to Lewis.

If this cartoon doesn’t get you, oof.

And let’s not forget this bit of poetic justice.

The race in Georgia is close, and there are still outstanding ballots to be counted. It may or may not end up making the difference in the election, especially as Biden’s lead in Pennsylvania continues to grow. But if Biden does end up winning Georgia, he will be the first Democratic presidential candidate to take the state since 1992. And it will be a victory directly due to the tireless efforts of Mr. John Lewis and the votes of those he helped bring to the polls.

As the 2020 presidential election begins to wind down, and Democratic nominee Joe Biden‘s lead grows over President Donald Trump in the electoral college, mainstream media is having a bit of a reckoning with itself.

After dedicating so much coverage to Trump — his false claims, his controversial statements, his antagonizing comments inciting violence among his supporters — a handful of networks and publications have started censoring the president in an effort to ensure a peaceful transition of power should Biden win. Quite a few networks refused to air the president’s speech claiming voter fraud in states like Michigan, Minnesota, and Pennsylvania. CNN aired the speech, but Jake Tapper, who’s consistently delivered tough but fair commentary on Trump over the years, is urging one network in particular to, well, do their job if Trump loses.

During CNN’s live election coverage on Friday morning, Tapper made an impassioned plea to his fellow journalists at Fox News, insisting that fair and honest coverage of this vote isn’t just a matter of “good manners” but of “life and death.”

“I don’t normally talk about any competing network,” Tapper said. “But the Murdochs, and the people at Fox, have an obligation to put their country above their profits. It is very important that people make it very clear that this election, there is no credible evidence that we have seen of widespread fraud. By all accounts, Joe Biden is on the precipice of becoming the next president, fair and square. And people who have the privilege of sitting in seats like we’re sitting in now have the obligation to convey that to their viewers so that there is a peaceful transition of power, and so that there isn’t violence.”

He’s talking of course about the president (and his staff) taking to social media to stir suspicion over national voting practices. Trump’s seen his early lead in states like Pennsylvania and Georgia disappear as mail-in ballots continue to be counted. Those mail-in ballots are heavily skewing Democrat, in part because Trump urged his own base to vote in person, not by mail. Now that those mail-in votes are coming into play, Trump and his supporters are hoping to cast doubt on their legitimacy — though he can’t seem to decide whether he wants to “Stop the count” or “Stop the fraud.”

Every credible news organization (including at least some Fox News anchors), as well as elected representatives in these big swing states, has flat-out denied that any kind of voting fraud is happening. But Tapper is still looking at Fox News, the president’s favorite channel, demanding that they practice responsible journalism instead of giving this political temper tantrum any more credence.

Given that, statistically, voter fraud happens so infrequently it probably couldn’t affect this presidential race — and given that the Trump campaign has yet to prove any instance of that despite drafting quite a few court petitions, it’s safe to say this is the last gasp before Trump’s dream of a second term dies out.

Roblox is a multi-player gaming platform that’s been around since the early 2000s, but most of the world discovered it earlier this year after a global pandemic and national lockdowns forced us all indoors, spurring us to find new forms of connection. A quick Google search will explain how this particular gaming verse works – gamer-created content on servers able to host large swaths of players from around the world that appeals to users looking for more inventive, niche-style play, a majority of whom are under the age of 18. That Google search will also reveal that adults – parents, older siblings, millennials looking for entry-level gaming avenues – are just cluing into how popular this massive online world is with the next generation.

From NY Times articles on how it’s become the online sandbox for “tweens” to op-eds on how its use as a kind of digital babysitter for parents who prefer to spend their time doomsday scrolling on Twitter, the general consensus is this: Roblox, with its 150 million global users spending billions of hours gaming, is the internet’s equivalent of a schoolyard playground where only the cool kids can congregate.

Of course, that’s not the whole story of Roblox. It’s not even why the platform, which started as a way for physics students to model in-class experiments, is, for some, a prototype for what the future of gaming could look like. Instead, Roblox’s appeal and its influence in the Metaverse – a new kind of “human co-experience” its pushing that combines gaming, social media, and entertainment – is how committed it seems to ushering in a new kind of gamer, one that takes control over the content they interact with, in a refreshingly empowering way.

Forget “choose your own adventure,” Roblox is allowing passionate gamers to make their own adventure. That’s the real appeal of the platform.

At least it is for young developers like Mimi_Dev, whose debut game “Dance Your Blox Off” currently has over 90 million plays.

“I’ve been creative since I was young, so making games was just another form of art for me,” Dev tells UPROXX.

She had been drawn to juggernaut style competitive gaming when she first logged onto Roblox in 2013 looking for a digital space to house her 3D projects. She was a gamer, sure, but she didn’t play any titles on the platform until years later. What interested her about Roblox was how easy it would be to take this idea she’d been mulling – a virtual dance studio – and transform it into a socially-interactive experience, complete with props, purchasable costumes, and team-up capabilities.

And she’s not alone. While Roblox launched with a handful of games for users to play, the company has since shifted its user experience goals. They see themselves as a facilitator rather than a generator of content.

“People really enjoy building their own worlds and inviting their friends to play in them,” Tami Bhaumik, VP of Marketing and Digital Civility at Roblox, says. “[That] user-generated content (UGC) [is] our secret sauce.”

She’s talking about games like “Jailbreak,” an amusing role-playing game where inmates must escape prison life and outrun the cops that has had over 3 billion plays since it was released. Or “MeepCity,” another brightly colored role-playing arena where users are invited to hang out, customize animal-like creatures called Meeps, build homes, sell goods, and complete tasks for money or Robux, that they can then spend buying merch.

“There are thousands of different sub-communities on Roblox: war, anime, fashion, trading, FPS, etc. It’s easy to find a community that you fit in with,” explains Laine London, a 23-year-old male creator from Canada who was first introduced to the Roblox platform by his younger cousin. London’s “Book Of Monsters” has over 30 million plays, but unlike Dev, he didn’t arrive on the platform with the intention of crafting his own gaming experience.

“[A] big part of my motivation was the games I played regularly had some bugs,” London adds, “weren’t being updated much, and I had a lot of ideas of my own I wanted to add, so I wanted to recreate them.”

Roblox simply provided the tools for him to do that.

“I didn’t know how to code,” London says. “I don’t think I would have gotten far without all the backend Roblox provides like the servers and the physics engine.”

He’s talking about the Roblox Studio, which offers tutorials and step-by-step processes for everything from understanding Lua, the programming language used to build games on the platform, to GUI animations, sound effects, cross-platform development, and more. The Developer Hub is designed to make creation – whether you’re an experienced coder or a first-time player – easy, accessible, and universal. It’s that lack of gatekeeping, that invitation to engage with content, that’s turning Roblox into something more than just a space for multi-player fun – it’s becoming an incubator for emerging talent and an example of what opening up the world of game creation can mean for the next generation of play.

According to Roblox, nearly 30 percent of users reported that they started learning to code and build their own games during the pandemic. “We saw students recreating physical environments that they miss like their university campus, virtual graduations and birthday parties in the past few months,” Bhaumik says, explaining that the introduction of private servers that allow users to invite specific players and friends into these worlds made them all the more popular.

It’s also started to affect the kinds of players the platform is welcoming.

“We are actually seeing that 17+ is our fastest growing audience at the moment,” Bhaumik explains, citing the company’s push to enhance avatars and features to attract players looking for visually sophisticated content and the platform’s translator tools that allow for multi-language gameplay as big drivers of new traffic. “We envision Roblox [as] this universal connector that can bring people of all generations together through play. The ability to meet, play, learn, watch, work with anyone, anywhere, anytime—independent of what language they speak or what country they are in—is extremely powerful.”

That global audience of gamers of all ages craving variety in content is what drew Toya, an Israeli game development studio that’s focused on female-oriented games and transforming the gaming experience for girls around the world, to the platform. Toya’s launched several successful titles on Roblox, crediting the studio’s ability to provide organic exposure and test and optimize games in real-time as some of its most attractive features.

“Once you become part of the creators, you are also part of the community,” Toya CEO Anat Shperling says. “The creators are the community, and the community members are also the creators. That is the beauty of the platform. We feel like [Roblox] has real potential to enable experimentation with new approaches to game design and user experience.”

There’s still more work to do on the platform. Dev thinks graphics and visuals could be better and London would like to see Roblox expand its audience to reach young adults his own age. But the DNA of Roblox, this idea that if you dream it, you can create it, play it, and get others to play it too, feels like a strong foundation for the future of gaming – one that sees players, not just major publishers setting trends and directing gaming’s new course.

“It’s a once in a lifetime opportunity to serve and empower a brilliant community, [to] reimagine what gameplay can look like,” Shperling says. And that’s the real gamechanger.

Emerging Chicago rap star King Von was reported dead at 26 this morning after an altercation at an Atlanta lounge escalated to gunfire, leaving three dead and three injured according to the Atlanta Journal-Constitution. While Von wasn’t a household name yet, he held a similar place of esteem to Pop Smoke, another rapper who was gunned down this year just as he was beginning to break through to the mainstream.

Among the rap peers and fans who chimed in were Chi-Town compatriots such as Chance The Rapper, Calboy, Dreezy, Joey Purp, and Queen Key, producers like Kenny Beats and Tay Keith, and admirers from across the world of hip-hop and R&B, including DVSN, Jacquees, Lil Yachty, YG, and more.

Von — whose real name was Dayvon Bennett — was signed to Lil Durk’s Only The Family Entertainment. 2020 was a turnaround year for the 26-year-old rapper, who’d been in and out of prison since his teen years and was awaiting trial along with Durk for a February 2019 incident where both rappers were alleged to have robbed and shot a man outside an Atlanta drive-in. Von experienced the biggest boost to his popularity earlier this year with the release of his Levon James mixtape and had just released his debut album Welcome To O-Block last week. His singles “Took Her To The O,” “Why He Told,” and “How It Go” were emerging hits throughout the year as he gained momentum in garnering fans from across the hip-hop spectrum.

See more reactions from hip-hop below.

For the past three days, most of the world has been waiting to find out the outcome of the presidential election, as several key states continue to count the mail-in ballots that will ultimately determine who will be the next President of the United States. That outcome has become increasingly clearer over the past 24 hours as Democratic nominee Joe Biden has taken the lead in states that would put him over the necessary 270 electoral votes needed to win.

As votes continued to trickle in on Thursday night, Biden was able to maintain a somewhat narrow lead in Arizona, but gradually overcame deficits in both Pennsylvania and Georgia. If they hold steady, those two states would give him the presidency.

Pennsylvania’s 20 electoral votes would’ve been enough by themselves to push Biden over the edge, and after taking a lead in the state on Friday morning, Biden supporters around Philly started to celebrate. Count Sixers star Ben Simmons among those, as he tweeted out this image that was a call-back to disparaging Trump remarks about the city during the presidential debates.

When speaking about poll workers in Philadelphia, Trump made baseless claims about “bad things” happening in Philly, with the implication that there was some kind of impropriety involved. Folks in Philly, of course, wasted no time before turning it into a meme, and now Simmons has joined the fun as the city figured heavily in helping Biden take the lead in the commonwealth.

News outlets have been reluctant to declare Biden the official winner, as there are still outstanding ballots to be counted in several states, but the trend over the past two days has held true, and the former vice president continues to expand his lead, much to the delight of the Sixers’ star.

In a quick turnaround after facing criticism from the disability community, Anne Hathaway has offered a lengthy and heartfelt apology for her performance as the Grand High Witch in The Witches. In the film, the character’s true witch form is revealed to have only three fingers on each hand, which prompted activists to call out Warner Bros. over this slight to those with limb differences, particularly children, and Hathaway agrees with their criticism. The actress teamed up with the Lucky Fin Project to shed light on the power of inclusion and promise to do better when it comes to aesthetic choices for her roles. Via Hathaway’s Instagram:

As someone who really believes in inclusivity and really, really detests cruelty, I owe you all an apology for the pain caused. I am sorry. I did not connect limb difference with the GHW when the look of the character was brought to me; if I had, I assure you this never would have happened.

I particularly want to say I’m sorry to kids with limb differences: now that I know better I promise I’ll do better. And I owe a special apology to everyone who loves you as fiercely as I love my own kids: I’m sorry I let your family down.

You can see Hathaway’s full statement below:

Hathaway’s apology arrives just two days after Warner Bros. responded to the growing backlash. The studio said it was “deeply saddened” to learn that the film upset the disability community, and that “it was never the intention for viewers to feel that the fantastical, non-human creatures were meant to represent them.”

(Via Anne Hathaway on Instagram)

Few athletes or celebrities have worked harder than LeBron James this election with his work re-enfranchising people of color across the country to get them out to vote in record numbers. So it’s not a surprise that James took a bit of a victory lap now that Donald Trump, of whom James is clearly no fan, is on the precipice of losing the presidency to Joe Biden.

We didn’t hear a peep from James most of the week, but when he came out of his silence, he made it worth the wait. Responding to a Twitter follower who sent him a clip from Bad Boys of Martin Lawrence, which you can watch below, James celebrated Black turnout in battleground states that Trump won in 2016 for flipping to Biden.

“My people voted they asses off,” James replied.

Speaking specifically of Georgia and Pennsylvania — two states that, as of this writing, have not been officially called but have been trending towards Biden in the last few days — James gave them a Twitter salute.

While exit polls are notoriously tricky and this year’s batch are even more difficult to pin down, it looks like Biden is on track to win Black voters by around 75 percentage points, with young Black folks in particular turning out in larger numbers. In an election in which millions of people are involved, it’s hard to trace any element back to one particular factor, but James’ More Than A Vote campaign and his continued involvement in educating and turning out Black voters has to be treated seriously.