Category: Viral

The Blizzard umbrella of Activision Blizzard is historically a company with a small library of games. Since 1994, Blizzard has only produced 17 games, and since 2000, Blizzard has only made games for Diablo, Warcraft, Starcraft, Overwatch, Hearthstone, and Heroes of the Storm. All of this is to say that it’s rare for Blizzard to dive into a new IP.

That’s why the sudden, and rather quiet, announcement that Blizzard will create a new unnamed survival game got people excited. Not only is this apparently a new IP from Blizzard, but it’s one that was announced with very little fanfare, which is odd for a studio with the pedigree of Blizzard.

As we can see in the blog post released by the company, this primarily seems to be an attempt to recruit talent to join the project.

Blizzard is embarking on our next quest. We are going on a journey to a whole new universe, home to a brand-new survival game for PC and console. A place full of heroes we have yet to meet, stories yet to be told, and adventures yet to be lived. A vast realm of possibility, waiting to be explored.

…

Do you like survival games? Do you want to join a collaborative team of experienced developers at the early stage of a new project in a new world…and help write the next chapter in Blizzard’s story?

It feels a little unusual for a game to advertise to potential employees in this way, but there are few better ways to get the word out on a game in development than an official tease or announcement like this. Once it’s out there, it can, in theory, use the excitement it generates to bring people on board. It also has the added bonus of enticing fans with a tease of what’s to come.

It’s important to remember that we have no idea how deep into development this game is — it’s being teased with an “unannounced” title. The title of the game doesn’t really matter until it releases, and maybe it’s just something the company really wants to keep under wraps, but traditionally, studios have an official name for a game when it’s closer to release. Until we get a release date, we’re not going to anticipate this game coming out anytime soon.

Mimi Cave makes her feature directorial debut this week with Fresh, a comedic-horror movie with a killer hook, that’s goofy and fun but just clever enough to make it work.

Fresh, premiering at Sundance this week in advance of a Hulu release in March, stars Daisy Edgar-Jones as Noah*, a 20-something Portlander slogging through the worst of app-based dating. We meet Noah just before her first date with Chad, who texts her beforehand to remind her bring money because the restaurant is cash-only, then proceeds to spill Chinese food on his scarf. Then one day Noah meets Steve (Sebastian Stan), who seems perfect. Maybe too perfect.

The reveal of Steve’s big secret takes up the bulk of the movie, and you could probably piece it together if you wanted to, but I wouldn’t feel right spoiling it here. Fresh, written by Lauren Kahn, formerly an assistant to Adam McKay, isn’t the first movie ever to use elements of the fantastic to depict the horrors of dating, but it’s rare in the way it never overplays the metaphor or tries to be didactic. Fresh always feels like it’s telling a story, never like it’s delivering a message. It’s also a sublime combination of exuberant schlock and subtle detail, a broad, splattery romp that still rewards the viewer for paying close attention.

Edgar-Jones, previously best known as one of the bookish sex teens in Normal People, is solid as the relatable heroine, even if I desperately wanted to push her bangs out of her eyes the entire movie. Do bad bangs make her more relatable? Oh well, at least she isn’t falling down. Sebastian Stan ends up being a fitting match, joining the pantheon of actors who look like they’ve never run before while playing a handsome doctor with the haircut of a 10-year-old boy. But hey, it is set in the Pacific Northwest, after all, where the adults all dress like smart toddlers.

Fresh premiered in Sundance’s Midnight category, dedicated to all things goofy, gory, horrific, and fantastical, but Fresh is the rare midnight movie that seems above all balanced. It’s silly without being stupid, smart without being dull, and broad without being corny. It’s a hell of a feature debut for Mimi Cave and a solid sophomore effort for Lauryn Kahn.

‘Fresh’ is currently playing at the Sundance Film Festival. It’s set for release via Hulu on March 4th. Vince Mancini is on Twitter. You can access his archive of reviews here.

*IMDB lists this character as “Noa,” but I imagined it as “Noah” for an entire film and I prefer my own mental image to this oddly-spelled, post-facto imposition.

Jake Gyllenhaal sure likes heist movies about moving vehicles. The acclaimed actor’s next big movie is Ambulance, which pairs him with Michael Bay for a heist movie involving, yes, an ambulance. Clearly, Gyllenhaal likes this specific genre because he’s doing another one, this one called Cut & Run, which is [drumroll] about a speedboat heist.

This news comes from The Hollywood Reporter, and this is what the logline is: “A group of thieves using high-powered speedboats to rob superyachts steal the wrong thing from the wrong group of people.” Just to underline and bold this: It is a thriller not only about thieves who steal things with “high-powered” speedboats, but they also like to rob “superyachts.”

When Cut & Run arrives, it will join a growing genre of aquatic vehicle movies, including the docudrama about the big boat that spent days stuck in the Suez Canal, to the fascination of social media. That’s not to mention Speed Kills, which also concerned speedboats and which starred John Travolta as a champagne-loving baddie.

This news about Jake Gyllenhaal doing a movie involving the water comes a few months after he revealed details about some of his unusual bathing habits to a reporter, admitting, “More and more I find bathing to be less necessary, at times.” When his comments inspired social media backlash, he tried to clarify what he meant, saying, “I’ve never been accused of being smelly. It’s fine. Of course, I bathe.”

(Via THR)

Critically-acclaimed comedy series The Righteous Gemstones has just returned for its second season on January 9th and has already been renewed for another season. HBO announced their comedy series will return for another season, after the second season finishes airing on February 27th. The all-star comedy cast features Danny McBride, Adam Devine, Edi Patterson, John Goodman, Cassidy Freeman, Tony Cavalero, Tim Baltz, Skyler Gisondo, Greg Alan Williams, Walton Goggins, Jennifer Nettles, and more. Jason Schwartzman and Eric Andre also joined the cast for season two.

Executive Vice President of HBO Amy Gravitt confirmed the news, saying “After a season of literal fire and brimstone, blood, sand, and rollerblading, who wouldn’t come back for more?” says Gravitt. “The Gemstone family makes us laugh like nobody else.”

No guest stars have been announced for the third season yet, but if snagging Joe Jonas for the season two premiere means anything, they can only go up from here.

The show follows a world-famous yes slightly dysfunctional televangelist family, led by Eli Gemstone, played by John Goodman. He and his children, Jesse (McBride), Judy (Patterson) and Kelvin (DeVine), work to expand their network of megachurches while threatening smaller churches.

Uproxx spoke to McBride and Patterson ahead of the season two premiere, saying The Righteous Gemstones is “the richest world [he and his creative cohorts David Gordon Green and Jody Hill] have explored.”

Donald Trump may have a talent for getting people to play along with his duplicitous schemes—see: Rudy Giuliani and The Big Lie—but his track record for keeping those people on his side and loyal to the tales they’ve spun and half-truths they’ve told on his behalf is pretty abysmal. The latest one-time MAGA stooge to turn their back on the former president looks to be William Barr.

On Monday, CNN’s Anderson Cooper reported that Barr, the former Attorney General under Trump, has already had a “preliminary” discussion with the January 6th sub-committee. Whereas Barr has reportedly claimed that he doesn’t know much because he was no longer working under Trump at the time of the insurrection, “the fact is he was on the job up until the 23rd of December,” Cooper said, “by which time the former president’s pressure campaign on the Justice Department to cast doubt on the election had already been underway for several weeks.”

Cooper brought on New York Times White House correspondent Maggie Haberman to shed some further light on the situation. In addition to confirming that Barr could play a significant role in getting to the bottom of exactly what part Trump played in the events that led to the Capitol riots, she noted that “It’s also important that he’s voluntarily speaking to them. There has been such resistance from people who are still close to the former president to being involved with this committee at all.” Which begged the question: Do Barr and Trump still have any sort of relationship?

According to Haberman, as Raw Story noted:

“They don’t have a relationship now. They haven’t had a relationship in quite some time I think that, you know, there are things that the former president accomplished that I think that the former attorney general, you know, supported and certainly was against, as Jonathan said. He was not in favor of the Mueller investigation. That’s part of why the former president brought him in, to end that moment in time. There were things they agreed on. There were a number of things they didn’t agree on over time. That began, you know, frankly, long before Election Day. Their relationship is nonexistent now.”

You can watch the full clip below.

(Via Raw Story)

For seven out of The Office’s nine seasons, Steve Carell’s Michael Scott lorded over John Krasinski’s Jim Halpert, often annoying him, but ultimately leaving Dunder Mifflin on his good side. Now the tables have turned. As per Deadline, Krasinski — who’s added “hot shot film director of popular movies” to his CV in the last few years — has assembled what he call his “dream cast” for his next directorial effort. And among those actors is no less than Carell himself.

The movie is called simply If, and while details are scant, Deadline describes it as a “child’s journey to rediscover their imagination.” That doesn’t make it sound much like an absurdist comedy, but with Carell on board, it’s an Office reunion nonetheless. (Krasinski has so far shied away from rounding up his many fellow Office alumni for the four movies he’s directed so far. Rashida Jones did have a small role in his debut, the David Foster Wallace adaptation Brief Interviews with Hideous Men, while Randall Park — who played Steve, Jim’s prank replacement in one episode, found his way into his indie comedy The Hollars.)

But what of the rest of Krasinski’s dream cast? The others include Ryan Reynolds, Brits Phoebe Waller-Bridge and Fiona Shaw, kids Alan Kim (Minari) and Cailey Fleming (The Walking Dead), plus no less than legend Louis Gossett Jr.

Krasinski’s If has a release date of November 17, 2023.

(Via Deadline)

After Nipsey Hussle‘s death in 2019, the Los Angeles Police Department denied that he was the target of an investigation into the neighborhood of his Marathon Clothing store. The investigation was aimed at trying to curb gang violence in the Central LA area around the store, but representatives for the LAPD said that Nipsey wasn’t being investigated.

However, in a new episode of Guardian‘s Today In Focus podcast, the initiative, called the LASER (Los Angeles Strategic Extraction and Restoration) program, Nipsey’s brother, Samiel Asghedom (aka Blacc Sam) revealed that many of those anti-gang efforts centered on the Marathon store, despite the positive work the rapper had committed to. “The agenda was, ‘Whatever they’re doing over there, crush it,” he said.

Meanwhile, law professor Andrew Ferguson described the program, explaining its title as a “metaphor that they were going to, like laser surgery, remove the tumors, the bad actors from the community” via “predictive policing technology.” According to Los Angeles Times, the program used data to identify “anchor points” were more officers could be concentrated. In 2019, the program was ended by the LAPD after community criticism, with a spokesperson saying, “We discontinued LASER because we want to reassess the data. It was inconsistent. We’re pulling back.”

Listen to the full episode below.

The pandemic has been hard on everyone, but there are certain groups of people who have faced particularly intense challenges these past two years. Healthcare workers? For sure. Teachers? Definitely. Parents? Um, yes.

Moms specifically? Yesssss.

It’s hard to describe how hard navigating the pandemic with kids has been. Figuring out childcare when schools and daycare centers shut down, managing kids’ remote or hybrid schooling, constantly making decisions about what’s safe and what’s not, dealing with the inconsistency and chaos of it all, weighing risks with who is vaccinated and who isn’t—none of it has been easy. Many parents are also raising kids with mental, emotional, behavioral or physical challenges that have only been made harder by pandemic life.

COVID-19 has forced us to give up and/or alter the systems we rely on to keep our lives running smoothly, and because moms tend to take on the lion’s share of child-rearing and logistical household management, we’ve felt those changes intensely. And at this point, heading into the third year of pandemic uncertainty, we’re exhausted. Wiped out. So done.

That’s why when editor Lucy Huber shared that her online moms group had invited everyone to an empty field to scream, it resonated with so many:

If you’re wondering what things are like for parents right now, someone in my online moms group invited everyone to a Facebook event that is just going to an empty field and screaming and a LOT of people RSVPed yes.

— Lucy Huber (@Lucy Huber)
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Some days we just want to scream because it feels like we can’t do anything else. We need to vent somewhere, let out some of this tension and frustration and exhaustion we’re carrying around, and we don’t want to take it out on our families. The idea of getting together with other moms who get that feeling is incredibly appealing.

The group Huber mentioned actually did this, gathering at a high school in the Boston area on the evening of January 13. Around 20 moms showed up and participated in a group scream session led by licensed therapist Sarah Harmon, according to GMA.

Looks cathartic, doesn’t it?

The idea of a primal scream isn’t exactly new. In fact, The New York Times set up a “primal scream” hotline for parents to call and scream or cry or vent about anything they feel like getting off their chest. The hotline number is 212-556-3800, and you can let it all out for a full minute.

“Any of our readers or anyone who is not a reader can call to scream, laugh, cry,” said the Times’ editor at large Jessica Bennett, according to WCBS Newsradio. “We’ve been hearing for months now about how women have been disproportionately affected in the pandemic and we’ve been hearing about parents who are struggling to manage work and child care.”

Anyone can utilize the primal scream hotline, but most of those who have called in have been women. Shocker.

Ironically, Huber herself wasn’t able to attend the in-person scream session because she had to put her toddler to bed. That’s how it is, and part of why the scream space is needed in the first place. Even under normal circumstances, mothers need an occasional space to vent. In pandemic times? Absolutely vital.

Really, anyone could probably benefit from finding a place to scream right now, whether it’s to the air in the middle of an empty field, into a pillow in a closet or to a random someone on the end of a newspaper’s hotline. Times are hard, folks. Let it out, let it out, let it out.

After a recent trip to the pediatrician, Vondy was ready to give her insurance company the ol’ what for, after being told her son’s birthday was February 25.

“Per my words: ‘my son’s birthday is the 26th. I’m his mother. I know his birthday,’” Vondy affirmed. Emphatically so.

@thevondyfam How’s your day going? #momfail #mombrain #parenting101 #sahm ♬ original sound – Emily Vondy

A quick scroll through Facebook to find the original birth date announcement proved the correct birthdate was, in fact, the 25th. Whoops.

“For two years I’ve been celebrating his birthday on the 26th!” exclaimed Vondy.

To make matters worse, Vondy revealed this was her middle child. My, my, how stereotypes manifest themselves.

She then shouted “I love my kids! They may not have their birthday celebration on the correct day but they celebrate it the next!” She then hilariously tried to sign off with a quick “Merry Christmas,” only to realize “Christmas is over!”

We get it, Vondy. What is time, anyway?

Parents and children alike delivered comments nearly as entertaining as the video itself:

If you enjoy Vondy’s ultra silly charm (that definitely gives off Amy Poehler vibes, no?), you’re in luck. Her channel is full of truly delightful videos that capture parenting life in a real, yet comical way.

I mean, just look at her music video promoting the meal delivery service Home Chef, complete with a “no prep two step.”

@thevondyfam #ad They had me at “oven ready” 💙 use code VONDY90 for $90 off. Link in Bio #hookedonhomechef ♬ original sound – Emily Vondy

Or her Target rap that no one asked for but everyone needs.

@thevondyfam My official application to be sponsored by target 😅 #momcontent #target #targetfinds #momcomedy ♬ original sound – Emily Vondy

Or eating a large pizza less than half an hour after giving birth.

@thevondyfam #answer to @Leo | IG: leocaballes THE BEST pizza I’ve ever eaten. #laboranddelivery #birthstory #birthcenterbirth ♬ original sound – Emily Vondy

Yes, mama. Treat yo’ self.

Now, if you’ll excuse me, I’m off to go check my birth certificate to see if I’ve been living a lie.

When visions align, partnerships become powerful catalysts for change.

Grammy award winning musician Macklemore (Ben Haggerty), a long-time advocate for recovery, has teamed up with CLEAN Cause, a beverage company dedicated to helping individuals find freedom from substance abuse.

CLEAN Cause donates 50% of its net profits (or 5% net revenues, whichever is greater) to fund sober living scholarships.

This type of financial support helps rebuild stability, something that’s crucial during the recovery process. And as the second ranking yerba mate beverage company, that’s no small sum.

Nearly 3,000 scholarships have already been financially backed, amounting to close to $1.5 million.

See on Instagram

Stepping into the role of CLEAN Cause’s new creative director, Haggerty will lend not only his artistic vision, but his own personal mission to raise awareness.

CLEAN Cause’s first bit of content with the Macklemore stamp will be a touching series aptly titled “Drink To This,” where real people share their unique (and yet universal) stories of recovery.

Though the series has not dropped yet, you can get a taste for it in the video below:

In the video, we see people raise a glass (or can, rather) to things both simple and profound, and often taken for granted: family, health, peace of mind, second chances and healing, to name a few.

And of course, there’s a heartfelt nod to the clarity of sobriety. All set to Haggerty’s distinctly soulful piano music.

The real triumph of this piece is that we see the road to recovery does not have to be a bleak, arduous task. And it is not reserved for the lucky few.

The people in this video come in all shapes and sizes. But one defining trait is shared: They all carry a sort of heroic grace, the kind only possessed by those who truly journeyed through darkness into light.

That kind of transformation is nothing short of inspiring.

The video ends with voice of Macklemore saying:

“To anyone in recovery … to anyone who loves someone in recovery … to anyone who needs recovery … to anyone, anywhere, on the road to recovery … to anyone who wants to help those in recovery … drink to this.”

It’s simple, powerful and moving. And I cannot wait to see more.

In a recent press release, Haggerty shared his own motivations behind the partnership:

“I chose to align with and endorse a Brand that is at the forefront of creating awareness for addiction and actively supporting the recovery community. As Creative Director and a new investor of the already impactful brand, I am excited to combine my creative passions with a great product in an effort to save lives. Together, our goal is to inspire and educate individuals on addiction and support those who are in recovery.”

See on Instagram

The famed rapper has been candid about his own journey with substance abuse, not only through his music, but in interviews as well. He even recently opened up about a relapse during the pandemic on an episode of Dax Shepard’s podcast, “Armchair Expert.”

Haggerty is not an isolated case of relapse. The American Medical Association reports that every state in the U.S. has had an increase in overdoses and drug-related deaths since the beginning of the pandemic. Addiction is already closely linked with loneliness, only to be exacerbated by stresses of the pandemic. Now more than ever, hope, support and empowerment are vital, making this new collaboration incredibly timely.

If you are wanting to help support CLEAN Cause, you can find their beverages at multiple retailers.

And if you’re currently in recovery and seeking support, you can apply for a scholarship here.