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Welp, the NFT market is reportedly “collapsing,” and an Elon Musk tweet may be a nail in the coffin. According to a new analysis that dropped this week, NFTs saw their astronomically priced sales plummet 92 percent since September 2021. That’s quite a drop, and not a good sign for the digital tokens that were being aggressively pursued by celebrities, musicians, and the video game industry.

Via The Independent:

Analysis by the website NonFungible, first cited by the Wall Street Journal, found that NFT sales fell to a daily average of 19,000 this week, compared to 225,000 seven months ago.

Active wallets, which are used to store NFTs, also dropped by 88 per cent. The article concluded: “The NFT market is collapsing.”

Following the report on the NFT collapse, Musk fired off a pithy response that could have a devastating effect on the tokens. “I dunno … seems kinda fungible,” Musk tweeted on Wednesday morning.

On Twitter, which Musk is in the final stages of purchasing, the Tesla CEO has repeatedly demonstrated his ability to severely affect crypto markets. In June of last year, he sent the price of Bitcoin plummeting and caused a run on, we kid you not, semen-themed cryptocurrencies. (“Cumrocket” was a particular favorite of the enigmatic billionaire.)

However, according to a recent report, a sizable portion of Musk’s Twitter following are actually spam bots. If the social media company were to fully and effectively them from the platform, Musk would reportedly lose nearly half of his followers. As for whether that would impact his ability to influence crypto markets with just a few words… well, who knows. But sorry about your apes.

(Via The Independent)

Mayans M.C. has done well to build its own brand of mayhem before really reeling in some former Sons Of Anarchy members for action. Not that the show hasn’t delivered several nods to the Kurt Sutter flagship series. Quite the contrary, for both Chucky and Potter delivered their vaguely unsettling presences early in the game before Potter got truly nasty again. Then Happy turned out to be the killer of EZ and Angel’s mother, and Chibs finally showed up in Season 3 to curse out everyone like a boss (which he is).

Who next? J.D. Pardo once told us (jokingly) that he’d love to see Jax somehow make a cameo, and of course, it’d have to be flashback or Zombie Jax mode for that to happen. Now that I’ve typed it out, I’d really like to see the undead Jax Teller riding past on his bike with a green screen in tow. However, there’s another popular (but moderately loathsome) SOA character who’s about to ride onto the scene. That’d be Tig, portrayed by the mustache-wielding Kim Coates, who’s coming this season.

This development arrives after speculation, which Coates confirmed on Twitter. “Please forgive me not to get back to the 2.5 million screams and quotes ( ok it wasn’t 2.5 mil but it was a lot 🙂 peace and love,” he wrote. “Bring a seat belt when Trager finally arrives.”

Of course, the first thing that popped into my head was this: if we’re gonna see Tig, then Walton Goggins’ Venus Van Dam could hopefully receive a shoutout. Is it too much to ask for a snippet of actual Goggins, too? My kingdom for that Southern drawl.

Though regularly cited and often slighted for his relentless hedonistic nature, Future has proven yet again that he’s just as committed to giving the people what they want in his new visual for the I Never Liked You standout record “Wait For U” featuring Drake and Tems. The Director X-lead video opens up with an introduction for viewers to the impending toxic king fairytale, set in medieval times. Future finds himself at odds with the queen after being betrayed by a knight played by 4YE’s Trey Richards, whose snitching leads him to later be killed by the 38-year-old.

Drake appears later in the video, embarking on his own journey to rescue a damsel from two villains. In the end, the woman he sought to rescue ends up saving him from an untimely death. While Tems is noticeably absent, the song’s producer ATL Jacob and rapper Strick both make cameo appearances.

I Never Liked You was released on April 29 under Freebandz and Epic Records. In addition to Drake and Tems, the album featured Kanye West, Gunna, Young Thug, EST Gee, Kodak Black, and later added Babyface Ray, Lil Baby, 42 Dugg, Lil Durk and Young Scooter on the six deluxe tracks released Monday (May 2).

Some artists covered here are Warner Music artists. Uproxx is an independent subsidiary of Warner Music Group.

Killing Eve has been a fan favorite since debuting in 2018 to critical acclaim, though the second half of the series was considerably less well-received. When the series ended last month, the shocking finale left many fans confused and even angry at the (spoiler alert) untimely death of the lead Villanelle, played by Jodie Comer.

While the books end in a less depressing manner, with a very genuine happily ever after, the fourth and final season of the show finally has the two main characters, Eve (played by Sandra Oh) and Villanelle, becoming romantically involved, just before Villanelle’s death. Oh is very aware of the backlash from the finale, and tried to explain it as best as she could. The former Grey’s Anatomy actress told Deadline that the initial plan was to kill off her character, instead of Villanelle.

Due to COVID production delays, the story was written and re-written. Oh says she and writer Laura Neal were chatting about “how we were going to end this,” when Oh suggested Eve be killed. “I was like, ‘You should kill my character.’ I thought that would be the strongest and the most interesting [ending].” It is the name of the show, after all. Instead, Comer’s character was the one who was killed.

“Eve was starting to get into, like, a nihilistic place, and we’re like, ‘Let’s just continue that line and go straight into it.” Oh explained. Eventually, the writers opted against it. “They came to me, and they said, ‘We can’t do it. We need to change it… Eve needs to live.’” So Eve lived, but Villanelle did not.

“We switched it around,” Oh says, insisting that Comer “was very much on board for that.” Though Comer was on board, many fans critiqued the ending for its tragic outcome after the last four seasons left them cheering for the duo to get together.

“Eve is the way into this world. She’s our everywoman,” Oh concluded. “So it’s kind of really super depressing if she dies.” It was going to be depressing either way, so maybe the actual murderer dying wasn’t the worst move?

Doctor Strange In the Multiverse of Madness is already making a sh*tload of money. Sorry, I am so tired and have nothing else left to say about the seemingly unending Marvel Cinematic Universe today. The film, directed by Sam Raimi who has brought some much-needed artistry to the franchise, has already made $27.2 million internationally according to a Variety box office report. The film, which opens in the United States on Friday, May 6, has been released in other countries including France, Japan, Germany, Italy and Korea. Per Variety, the strong international opening indicates a massive opening weekend domestically.

Variety reports that Doctor Strange In the Multiverse of Madness, which stars Benedict Cumberbatch, Elizabeth Olsen, Xochitl Gomez, and includes a bunch of cameos we’ll probably be hearing about on the internet all week, is “on track to secure a massive opening weekend internationally and domestically” with box office figures only 4% behind those of 2021’s Spider-Man: No Way Home.

All that to say: if the domestic opening of Doctor Strange In the Multiverse of Madness isn’t massive, it would be pretty embarrassing for theaters such as New York City’s AMC Empire in Times Square, which is literally playing the movie every fifteen minutes. It would also be pretty embarrassing for Marvel, which has built up to this film with multiple television shows and films including WandaVision, Loki, and Spider-Man: No Way Home.

Through two playoff games between the Dallas Mavericks and Phoenix Suns, superstar guard Luka Doncic has scored 80 points on 52 shots and dished out 15 assists. Meanwhile, the Mavericks’ secondary ball-handlers of Jalen Brunson and Spencer Dinwiddie have combined for 41 points on 46 shots and 11 assists, which is part of the reason Dallas finds itself in a 2-0 hole heading home for Game 3.

After Game 2, head coach Jason Kidd stressed the importance of his team’s complementary scorers establishing their footing and providing Doncic some help offensively.

“He had a great game, but no one else showed,” Kidd said. “We’ve got to get other guys shooting the ball better. We can’t win with just him out there scoring 30 a night — not at this time of the year.

“We’re playing the best team in the league, so we’ve got to get other guys going.”

Dallas raced out to a 60-point first half in Game 2, though struggled following intermission, when Phoenix outscored it, 71-49. Devin Booker and Chris Paul took over offensively, but the Mavericks’ offense didn’t offer any chance to keep pace with the Suns’ torrid shooting.

It goes without saying, but unless someone (or someones) can get going, the Mavericks will have an awfully hard time pulling off the already daunting task of knocking off Phoenix. Brunson, Dinwiddie, and the entire Dallas team will aim to turn things around when Game 3 tips off on Friday at 9:30 p.m. EST.

Man, as much as I’ve criticized Eminem for not getting with the times, I feel like I should apologize now. As it turns out, Em’s regressive positions are nothing compared to his longtime foe Benzino’s. The Boston rap totem could certainly be accused of living in the past, as he’s the only one holding onto the massive L Eminem handed him back in the noughties. The latest example of his sour grapes attitude toward basically everything about modern-day hip-hop is his reaction to Eminem’s recent induction into the Rock And Roll Hall Of Fame.

In a new string of tweets, Benzino claimed that the Rock Hall has “no respect for our culture” after including Eminem. Posting a screenshot of a recent tweet from Rolling Stone, he also wondered “Where’s Nas, Eric B and RAKIM, Kool Moe D, Epmd, Fearless Four, Fat Boyz [sic], Lauren Hill [sic], Little Kim[sic], OutKast and 100s other Black rappers?”

So, there are a couple of things happening here. One: Benzino, who used to “run” The Source, needs that edit button as much as anybody on Twitter. Two: While he makes a valid point in the second tweet, he’s gotta understand that he’s probably the last person who should be making it, since his position in this argument is tainted from the jump. Again, he’s had a longstanding, mostly one-sided vendetta against Eminem since before he was ousted at The Source, then got smoked in a rap battle against the Detroit MC by unanimous public opinion. This ain’t for him.

However, there is some truth to what he’s pointed out. That the Rock Hall chose to nominate and so thoroughly vote in Eminem before so many pioneers of the art form reeks of outsiders’ voyeurism, appropriation, and shallow understanding of the music and culture. It definitely looks very cockeyed in the context of, well, everything about America, but particularly this country’s prickly disposition toward Black folks and our creative contributions to mainstream pop culture.

But there’s no denying that Eminem’s had a huge impact since making his debut in 1998, selling more records than almost anybody else in the genre, redefining rap skills in the mainstream, and introducing practically an entire generation (of suburban white kids) to hip-hop, opening the door for successors like Jack Harlow, who recently had the No. 1 single in the country. Em was also an inspiration for big-name genre leaders like Kendrick Lamar and Tyler The Creator, which can’t be discounted. His run of mainstream relevancy has been much longer than influences like Rakim (sorry, it’s true), and the fact is, his next album will probably also go No. 1, no matter what critics say about his increasing creative stagnation.

Yeah, he probably got to have an advantage due to being white, but … This is America. If anything, that remains an indictment of the broader culture of excluding, ignoring, or erasing Black Americans’ contributions (to say nothing of Asian, Latino, or Indigenous ones). At least, now we’ve gotten him out of the way, opening the door to start recognizing rap’s real pioneers. Plus, there’s a Hip-Hop Hall Of Fame coming at some point, which will at least make up for some of the oversights by allowing the culture to recognize its own, without asking a bunch of guitar snobs to validate them.

Taylor Swift offered the first taste of her eventual 1989 (Taylor’s Version) album in March 2021, when she shared her rerecording of “Wildest Dreams” in a trailer for Spirit Untamed. Now, over a year later, she’s on her way back with another “Taylor’s Version” recording of a 1989 song, this time “This Love,” which was also premiered via a movie trailer.

Some of “This Love (Taylor’s Version)” popped up in a new trailer for The Summer I Turned Pretty. Swift shared the clip and wrote, “Thank you [Jenny Han] for debuting my version of This Love in the trailer for [The Summer I Turned Pretty]!! I’ve always been so proud of this song and I’m very [pleading face emojis] about this turn of events – This Love (Taylor’s Version) comes out tonight at m i d n i g h t!”

Swift previously said of the original song, “The last time I wrote a poem that ended up being a song, I was writing in my journal and I was writing about something that had happened in my life — it was about a year ago — and I just wrote this really really short poem, it said, ‘This love is good / this love is bad / this love is alive back from the dead / these hands had to let it go free / and this love came back to me,’ and I just wrote it down and closed the book and put it back on my night stand […] All of a sudden in my head, I just started hearing this melody happen, and then I realized that it was going to be a song.”

Check out Swift’s post above.

After getting stuck in traffic, Sydney Sweeney made her Met Gala debut this week. “What a dream night! honestly the most fun on a carpet I’ve ever had. thank you @toryburch for my first met and this incredible dress! still can’t believe this entire night was real,” the Euphoria actress wrote on Instagram. But while walking the red carpet, it appears that Sweeney was catcalled by “a male photographer or reporter.”

Sweeney was asked to “show us those boobs” by someone off camera, as pointed out in a viral TikTok (via Newsweek). “It’s just crazy to think that you can be at the height of your career and like the most respectable events in fashion, like the Met Gala, what an honor to be there — and you’re still gonna get sexually harassed on the red carpet in front of all of your peers and in front of tons of cameras,” TikTok user @saboomafu said.

It’s possible that the guy yelling may have been saying “show us those moves,” but BuzzFeed News reached out to the Met, which released a statement about the incident. “This was just brought to our attention — and we are neither clear if the allegation is accurate nor who the reporter may have been — yet surely we would not condone any of our guests being treated in this unprofessional manner,” it reads.

You can judge for yourself on TikTok.

The only one who’s allowed to comment on Sweeney’s body is her grandmother.

(Via Newsweek, BuzzFeed News, Page Six)

Despite its wholesome storylines, it seems like the hit 90’s sitcom Family Matters had a lot of behind-the-scenes drama. As evident in a recent episode of E! True Hollywood Story, there was a lot of tension on set once the breakout character of Steve Urkel became a hit star. Now, the leading lady from the series, Jo Marie Payton, is saying that the drama was a bit more intense than it seemed.

In an interview with Entertainment Tonight, the sitcom star, who played the loveable but stern Harriette Winslow (Urkel’s neighbor), revealed that breakout actor Jaleel White became a bit of a diva once he was upgraded to a main castmember. “There was one time he actually wanted to physically fight me,” Payton explained, recalling an episode from the later seasons.

“[There was a scene where] I said we can’t do that, standards and practices will not let that pass, it’s not gonna happen. He wanted to do it anyway… He was so mad, he started kicking and screaming and stuff.” Maybe that SNL parody wasn’t that far off?

It didn’t stop there– White then allegedly asked to “melee.” “I said, ‘What’s a melee?’ He said, ‘a fight.’ I turned around — if he wanna fight, I would,” Payton continued. “Darius [McCrary] grabbed me. I was gonna whip his behind.”

Despite the drama, Payton admits that the actor was young and naive, saying he was “just a kid” at the time. White would have been around 21 during this altercation.

She also says she has nothing but love for the rest of her cast. “I did love all of my Family Matters crew,” she added. “I’ve kept in touch with a lot of them, I see them on other shows… I love them all. We had incredible writers, I love them, and they know who my issue was with. It wasn’t with the entirety of them.”