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Ladies and gents, the final UPROXX Sessions performance of 2021 is here. Since we’ve spent so much of the year highlighting LA’s underground scene at our LA-based studios, it’s only right that we close out the year with one last veteran LA artist: The underrated Niko G4 of Dom Kennedy‘s OPM crew. In typical OPM fashion, Niko comes through with a mellow performance of his laid-back September single, “Never Change,” vowing to “always keep it player” — the overarching theme of his July 2020 project, pLAyer 4ever.

His first full-length since 2017’s Roll The Dice 2, pLAyer 4ever features appearances from the Bay Area rising star Larry June, Niko’s fellow LA native Mani Coolin, and, of course, OPM general Dom Kennedy. This year, Niko followed up with another full-length record, Winners Tape, tapping OPM family Dom and Jay 305, as well as LA G-Funk revivalist G Perico, Texas producer Troy Noka, and San Diego firestarter Rob Stone. With Niko’s increased activity, it looks like Dom isn’t the only member of his crew feeling revitalized in recent years.

Check out Niko’s groovy performance of “Never Change” above.

UPROXX Sessions is Uproxx’s performance show featuring the hottest up-and-coming acts you should keep an eye on. Featuring creative direction from LA promotion collective, Ham On Everything, and taking place on our “bathroom” set designed and painted by Julian Gross, UPROXX Sessions is a showcase of some of our favorite performers, who just might soon be yours, too.

This year was a huge year for vinyl records, far bigger than anything the industry has seen in the last three decades. Billboard reports that 2.11 million vinyl records were sold between December 17 – 23, the most since MRC Data began tracking music sales in 1991. It also marked the first time that vinyl sales crossed the two million mark in this period. This comes after the Recording Industry Association Of America (RIAA) reported last month that vinyl sales accumulated $467 million in sales by mid-2021. This more than doubles the $207 million in sales that were generated halfway into 2020 while opening the door for a billion-dollar year in the vinyl record industry.

There are plenty of reasons for this jump in vinyl sales, with most having to do with consumers increasing interest in the novelty and vintage item that’s still connected to today’s music. This interest is catered to by record stores all over the country as well as the annual Record Store Day campaign. While big artists like Adele, Taylor Swift, Billie Eilish, Olivia Rodrigo, and more are responsible for a heavy percentage of vinyl sales, the companies that go above and beyond with their consumers also played a large part in this. Stores that seek to do more than sell vinyl, and instead, build themselves as staples in their communities will always have old customers coming back while piquing the interest of new ones.

Plenty of stores across the country do this, but there’s a specific uniqueness and communal aspect that’s present in Black-owned record stores. So here are six Black-owned record stores across the country that helped to give vinyl sales its biggest year in decades.

Moodies Records (Bronx, NY)

The Bronx’s Moodies Records remains a cultural stamp in New York. From its inception in 1982, late founder Earl Moodie provided a limitless collection of vinyl records with a focus on reggae, dancehall, rocksteady, and other Jamaican music. This past fall, Earl Moodie passed away at 69 years old after being sick for a few years. “There was not a sad day to him,” a longtime customer said to Brooklyn News 12 about the late Moodie and his store. “If you went in there sad, he would give you that light. I don’t know how he did it, but he was such an inspirational person.”

Brittany’s Record Shop (Cleveland, OH)

Brittany’s Record Shop will pretty much give a decent selection from multiple genres to pick from. Whether it’s hip-hop, reggae, soul, or jazz, you’ll find it at the Cleveland, OH shop. Their selections get more specific with crates dedicated to Brazilian, Latin, and Afro-funk. However, selling records is just half the job for Brittany Benton. She handpicks every vinyl in the store and helps guide shoppers to new sounds — consider her the Spotify of vinyl records. “When I can make a recommendation that really sticks,” she says in an interview with Cleveland’s Spectrum News, “it definitely validates me, because I know I’m doing the right thing.” Brittany’s Record Shop is temporarily closed at the moment, but a reopening is planned for some point in 2022.

JB’s Record Lounge (Atlanta, GA)

Many of the biggest records in the music world today come from artists based in Atlanta. Whether it’s rappers (Lil Baby), singers (Summer Walker), or pop stars (Lil Nas X), the city has something for you. It’s also the home of JB’s Record Lounge which is far more than you’re typical record store. The company started as a quarterly crate-digging party in owner Jonathan Blanchard’s basement. What began as a collection of 1,000 records quickly grew to 13,000 records leaving all while maintaining the liveliness and community bonding that helped it grow. It also allowed Blanchard to carry a bold claim about his business. “I also will be carrying some of the best vinyl this side of the Mississippi,” he said in a GoFundMe video according to The Atlanta Journal-Constitution.

Out Of The Past Collectibles (Austin, TX)

Charlie Joe and Marie Henderson are the proud owners of Austin, TX’s Out Of The Past Collectibles store, and they have been since its opening 35 years ago back in 1986. It boasts a massive collection of ​​jazz, blues, soul, pop, old and new school R&B, and hip-hop vinyl that span the store’s ten rooms, filled with over a million items. Out Of The Past Collectibles isn’t just limited to vinyl though. They also carry antiques, CDs, DVDs, cassette tapes, 8-tracks, and more. Long story short, as their listing on Visit Austin’s website reads, “If we don’t have it, you don’t need it!”

Fivespace (San Diego, CA)

If you happen to live or find yourself on the West Coast and want to get lost in a collection of hip-hop vinyl, San Diego’s Fivespace has just what you’re looking for. Cassettes and select vintage clothing can also be found at the North Park location as the store aims to cater to “consumers interested in vintage design and music products.” During an interview with SD Voyager, owner Sir Frederick promised that a chat with him or the other owners of Fivepsace will result in “a whole new world of styles, artists, and genres to discover that are tailored to your individual tastes.”

Offbeat (Jackson, MS)

In a few years, Phillip Rollins (aka DJ Young Venom) will celebrate the tenth anniversary of his Jackson, MS record store Offbeat. Since its opening in 2014, Offbeat has grown into a home for new and old releases, reissues, and used records that buyers can sift through and choose. A collection of collectibles, pins, apparel, and more can also be found at Offbeat. For Rollins, the store is a visual representation of his goal to “create a space that would have a lasting effect on the state of Mississippi,” and the store’s website reads. Influenced by art from all unconventional aspects of the world, Rollins is doing a great job of highlighting the overlooked corners that his store helps to bring attention to.

Not only did Ava Max experience the difficulty of promoting her debut album Heaven & Hell during lockdown, but she also unfortunately caught COVID in 2020. While Max made a full recovery, the singer said she did have one very unfortunate side effect of the virus: hair loss. Thankfully, a year later, her hair is finally growing back.

The singer revealed the status of her hair growth in a video posted to her Instagram Stories. “Baby hairs Comin THRU,” she wrote. “Also so so happy my hair is growing back (I lost a lot of hair when I had COVID).”

The CDC hasn’t confirmed hair loss as a side effect of contracting COVID. But hair loss, or hair shedding, can be a side effect of having a high fever, which many experience with COVID. Furthermore, stress can be a major contributing factor to hair shedding, which may be the case with those who came down with COVID.

Hair loss is always an unwelcome occurrence, but it is particularly unfortunate for someone like Max whose haircut is part of her brand. The singer is known for her lopsided hairdo affectionately named the Max Cut (it’s long on one side and bobbed on the other), which actually was the result of a happy accident. One day, the singer decided to chop off her locks while she was simultaneously baking cookies. The cookies started burning in the oven when she had only cut half her hair, but decided to stick with the style. Since, the Max Cut has since become a metaphor for empowerment the freedom of self-expression she preaches in her music.

Watch Max document her new hair growth above.

Ava Max is a Warner Music artist. Uproxx is an independent subsidiary of Warner Music Group.

Reviews are as synonymous with video games as double jumps and health packs at this point. They’re an essential part of the gaming ecosystem — good reviews can be crucial for a major release’s chances of breaking even, while a positive review can pluck one of the endless array of indie games out of obscurity and into the mainstream. But some reviews are simply more important than others for a specific population of gamers, especially when it comes to the work of DAGERSystem and the legion of disabled gamers who rely on the site’s reviews.

For a significant portion of the gaming population, the ability to even play a game properly isn’t something that can be found on the box or in a traditional review. Gamers with fine motor impairment or other disabilities need to know what options a game may have to accommodate their unique circumstances before they pick up a controller. It’s an area Josh Straub aimed to fill with DAGERS when he founded the website in 2012.

Intended to be a consumer protection site, Straub’s DAGERSystem reviewed games with a specific goal in mind: inform disabled gamers before they buy a game about whether that title is playable with impairments. Originally intended as a rating system similar to the ESA, the site largely provides reviews of games that focus on playability for disabled gamers. While many gamers don’t need to tinker with game settings too much, for some, having playability features can actually make a play-through possible in the first place. Whether it’s visual changes to help colorblind gamers or flexible goals in a game to help impaired gamers better navigate challenges, there are numerous ways to make games for a broad array of gamers of different abilities and limitations.

“The three broad principles I go off of are the three Fs of accessibility: flexibility, forgiveness, and fun,” Straub tells Uproxx. “Flexibility is how much of the experience can be tailored to my needs as a player.”

Straub explains that there’s no hard-and-fast list of features games need to be more accessible. But the principles can apply to anything from puzzle games, to sports sims, to first-person shooters. In a shooter, for example, Straub gravitates toward titles that let him use a shotgun because it “minimizes the challenges” that come from his own motor impairment due to cerebral palsy. That flexibility — and even options like button remapping or adjustable text sizes — seem like small tweaks but can help more gamers get a fuller experience from a title.

Straub studied the medical benefits of gaming for the disabled in college, and as he pursued his Masters and PhD, he started DAGERSystem to keep his writing skills sharp. But the site grew over the years, and along with others like CanIPlayThat have become part of a vibrant community advocating for more play options for disabled gamers.

In September, DAGER debuted the Accessible Games Database, an ever-growing searchable collection of information about games and their accessibility options. The Database is in its early stages, but cataloging the visual, auditory, and fine motor tweaks of titles like Assassin’s Creed Valhalla is something most reviews of the AAA title simply never cover.

Straub stresses that progress is being made in gaming, albeit as slow as the notorious development pace of many sprawling AAA titles that take years to transform from idea to execution. DAGER’s most recent Diamond Award — given out annually to a game advancing the range of accessibility options in gaming — went to Naughty Dog’s The Last Of Us Part II. And it’s not just because Straub himself worked on the game as a consultant: The title had more than 70 accessibility features, a far cry from the award’s origins as meeting a “reasonable standard” of accessibility, which usually just meant the game could be played at all.

“The terrain has changed drastically from mere playability being a standard that we’re trying to reach to now a features-based approach,” Straub says. That approach doesn’t come without buy-in from the people that make games, of course. But it’s clearly possible to make a Game of the Year candidate extremely accessible to a wide audience.

In recent years Straub’s for-profit consulting work has seen him work closely with several different studios to help programmers and game directors build more accessible games. The process, he says, often starts with largely the same reckoning period regardless of the project.

“If they have no awareness of accessibility, the very first thing they do is respond emotionally,” Straub says. “Either they get angry with themselves for not seeing this ahead of time or they get profoundly sad. I had a senior producer at PlayStation tell me that after he met me, he felt like he had wasted the first 30 years of his career.”

Straub calls that kind of drastic response “very common” because of the emotions involved with game development in general. But after the hyperbole fades, he says, things get “really interesting.”

“It’s actually really, really fun because then they start brainstorming,” Straub says. “The first thing they do is they jump headfirst into the literature and into best practices and they come up with ideas. I haven’t had to really drag anyone kicking and screaming into accessibility.”

Straub admits not everyone in the industry has embraced accessibility. Certain titles or studios make waves in the community for not addressing concerns or considering gamers hoping for more play options. Many of the simplest accessibility options center on overall difficulty. Straub noted disabled gamers enter fail states more often than others, so the ability to save more frequently and not need to backtrack as much after dying in a game makes it more playable, not to mention far less frustrating. But not every game maker wants to implement different levels of difficulty or appeal to a wider audience than they had previously considered.

“I will be the first one to tell you that games thrive off of diversity, and part of that diversity is the diversity of challenge,” Straub says. “And the diversity of challenge will necessitate that some games will be less accessible than others.”

That diversity, however, is what makes the Database essential for so many. And Straub and the community that relies on it are eager to see its catalog continue to grow as developers approach the process of making games — and who is playing them — with fresh eyes.

“One of the things we say around these offices is if accessibility is too expensive or too hard you’re doing it wrong because real accessibility is not about universal design — universal design is a myth,” Straub says. “Real accessibility is about understanding your limitations as a studio and working within those limitations — and the limitations of your creative vision — to create an experience that as many people as possible can enjoy.”

WARNING: Spoilers for Spider-Man: No Way Home below.

In the mid-credits scene for Spider-Man: No Way Home, Tom Hardy’s Eddie Brock is seen getting drunk at a bar in Mexico, which confirms that the end-credits scene for Venom: Let There Be Carnage did, in fact, show Eddie/Venom being pulled into the Marvel Cinematic Universe. However, there stay wouldn’t be long. As Doctor Strange issues the film’s final spell that erases all memory of Peter Parker, Eddie/Venom are sent back to their home universe, which appears to be the same one as Morbius, but not the MCU, which is causing all kinds of confusion because, apparently, there’s some sort of Spider-Man bouncing around there. As for which one? Who the heck knows?

Anyway, one of the big questions is why would Tom Hardy’s Eddie/Venom be pulled into the MCU in the first place by Doctor Strange’s initial spell considering they had no connection to Spider-Man at this point. Here’s what No Way Home screenwriters Erik Sommers and Chris McKenna told Variety:

Speaking of biting, the screenwriters say that including Eddie Brock and his alien symbiote Venom in the film’s final battle was “definitely discussed.” The pair confirmed that Watts directed the post-credits tag on “Venom: Let There Be Carnage,” which showed Brock zapped into the MCU. But Brock was ultimately relegated to the “No Way Home” post-credits scene instead. As for how a character who had never met any Peter Parker, let alone Spider-Man, could be pulled into the MCU by a spell specifically drawing people who had to know Peter Parker was Spider-Man? “The idea is that the symbiote has knowledge of other universes. Buried in his brain is some knowledge of that connection,” McKenna said.

So basically Venom has in-depth knowledge of the multiverse. Neat. As for the pressing question of whether or not Ted Lasso‘s Danny Rojas is the MCU’s Venom, sadly, the screenwriters offered no hints on that one, but fingers crossed.

(Via Variety)

This week’s Ghislaine Maxwell guilty verdict (for helping the late Jeffrey Epstein recruit and abuse underage girls) has led to some awkward takes. That includes rootin’ tootin’ Rep. Lauren Boebert demanding more justice against those linked to Epstein (she was likely thinking of Bill Clinton but didn’t mention Donald Trump’s Epstein association). Among the others implicated in unsealed court documents would be former O.J. Dream Team member Alan Dershowitz.

Dershowitz hasn’t taken kindly to revelations about that association. He even sued Netflix for $80 million (while claiming defamation) over the Jeffrey Epstein: Filthy Rich documentary’s noting of allegations that he had sex with Virginia Guiffre, the Epstein survivor who accused Epstein and Maxwell of grooming her at age 17 “to have sex with Epstein, Dershowitz, and other powerful men as part of a sex-trafficking ring.” For his part, Dershowitz insisted that the accusations are “categorically false,” but to complicate matters, he reportedly “helped negotiate a non-prosecution agreement” for Epstein’s case, which only led to a 13-month sentence.

So, there’s no universe where Dershowitz could be considered an “impartial analyst,” which led to an enormous mess when the BBC decided to welcome “constitutional lawyer” Dershowitz about the Maxwell guilty verdict. And in response, the BBC scrambled by issuing a statement:

“Last night’s interview with Alan Dershowitz after the Ghislaine Maxwell verdict did not meet the BBC’s editorial standards, as Mr. Dershowitz was not a suitable person to interview as an impartial analyst, and we did not make the relevant background clear to our audience. We will look into how this happened.”

Yikes. To say the very least, it’s a terrible look for the BBC to interview Dershowitz, who has been accused of sexual abuse by an Epstein survivor, as an impartial expert on Epstein’s right-hand gal. People are disgusted and calling the move “grotesque” and “unfathomable,” among other things. The also-accused Prince Andrew came up in people’s speculation of how this oversight happened.

And this tweet might sum the matter up best: “What next… Freddy Kruger invited on to discuss teenage knife crime?”

Just days after being violently attacked by his wife, who spent the Christmas holiday in jail, InfoWars founder Alex Jones is all broken up about a different relationship: The end of his bromance with Donald Trump.

Nearly two weeks ago, the former president was booed by his once-loyal followers in Dallas when he admitted that he had received a COVID booster. While, in the moment, he tried to play it off like it was just a “very tiny group” of people who were aghast at his newly pro-vaxx status, the roar of disapproval grew as word spread that President Drinkbleach had rolled over and believed science over baseless conspiracy theories. Chief, or at least loudest, among these voices was Jones, who spent Christmas Day railing against Trump, who he decided was either “completely ignorant… or one of the most evil men who ever lived.” (Can “both” be an option?)

Several days later, Jones was still yelling about Trump’s betrayal, which he took as a personal affront.

Now, as Mediaite reports, it appears as if Jones has reached the fifth and final stage of grief: acceptance. As a result, he’s now offering to spill all the dirty details he knows about Trump. According to Mediaite:

In his latest show, the InfoWars chief said “we all wish Trump would do the right thing,” but then he claimed to have “the inside baseball on Trump. He doesn’t know what’s going on.” After suggesting “we need to move on” from Trump, Jones suggested that he’ll get Trump’s attention if he decides to “dish all the dirt” he has on the ex-president.

“Maybe I should just dish all the dirt. You know what? I am going to dish it all on Trump next hour,” Jones said. “It’s not to hurt Trump, it’s so people can know how pathetic he is when you think he is playing 4D chess, going to save you and he’s not! He’s not a bad guy, but he doesn’t know what he’s doing.”

While it all sounds a bit like a ransom demand, who knows what Jones may or may not know about the former POTUS. To be continued…

(Via Mediaite)

This article originally appeared on 07.24.15

These are called “anti-homeless spikes.” They’re about as friendly as they sound.

Photo courtesy of CC BY-ND, Immo Klink and Marco Godoy.

As you may have guessed, they’re intended to deter people who are homeless from sitting or sleeping on that concrete step. And yeah, they’re pretty awful.

The spikes are a prime example of how cities design spaces to keep homeless people away.

Not all concrete steps have spikes on them, but outdoor seating in cities like Montreal and Tokyo have been sneakily designed to prevent people from resting too comfortably for too long.

This guy sawing through a bench was part of a 2006 protest in Toulouse, France, where public seating intentionally included armrests to prevent people from lying down.

Of course, these designs do nothing to fight the cause or problem of homelessness. They’re just a way of saying to homeless people, “Go somewhere else. We don’t want to look at you,” basically.

One particular set of spikes was outside a former night club in London. And a local group got sick of staring at them.

Leah Borromeo is part of the art collective “Space, Not Spikes” — a group that’s fed up with what she describes as “hostile architecture.“

“Spikes do nothing more than shoo the realities of poverty and inequality away from your backyard — so you don’t have to see it or confront what you can do to make things more equal,” Borromeo told Upworthy. “And that is really selfish.”

“Our moral compass is skewed if we think things like this are acceptable.”

“Space, Not Spikes” reclaimed the spiked area by covering it with bedding, pillows, and a bookshelf stocked with reading material.

The move by Space, Not Spikes has caused quite a stir in London and around the world. The simple but impactful idea even garnered support from music artist Ellie Goulding.

“That was amazing, wasn’t it?” Borromeo said of Goulding’s shout-out on Instagram.

“[The project has] definitely touched a nerve and I think it is because, as a whole, humans will still look out for each other,” Borromeo told Upworthy. “Capitalism and greed conditions us to look out for ourselves and negate the welfare of others, but ultimately, I think we’re actually really kind.”

“We need to call out injustice and hypocrisy when we see it.”

These spikes may be in London, but the U.S. definitely has its fair share of anti-homeless sentiment, too.

Spikes are pretty obvious — they’re a visual reminder of a problem many cities are trying to ignore. But what we can’t see on the street is the rise of anti-homeless laws that have cropped up from sea to shining sea.

Legislation that targets homeless people — like bans on panhandling and prohibiting people from sleeping in cars — has increased significantly in recent years.

For instance, a report by the National Law Center on Homelessness & Poverty that analyzed 187 American cities found that there’s been a 43% hike in citywide bans on sitting or lying down in certain spaces since 2011.

Thankfully, groups like “Space, Not Spikes” are out there changing hearts and minds. But they need our help.

The group created a video to complement its work and Borromeo’s hoping its positive underlying message will motivate people to do better.

“[The world] won’t always be happy-clappy because positive social change needs constructive conflict and debate,” she explained. “But we need to call out injustice and hypocrisy when we see it.”

Check out their video below:

This article originally appeared on 11.04.15

Photographer James Balog and his crew were hanging out near a glacier when their camera captured something extraordinary.

They were in Greenland, gathering footage from the time-lapse they’d positioned all around the Arctic Circle for the last several years.

They were also there to shoot scenes for a documentary. And while they were hoping to capture some cool moments on camera, no one expected a huge chunk of a glacier to snap clean off and slide into the ocean right in front of their eyes.

It was the largest such event ever filmed.

For nearly an hour and 15 minutes, Balog and his crew stood by and watched as a piece of ice the size of lower Manhattan — but with ice-equivalent buildings that were two to three times taller than that — simply melted away.

As far as anyone knows, this was an unprecedented geological catastrophe and they caught the entire thing on tape. It won’t be the last time something like this happens either.

But once upon a time, Balog was openly skeptical about that “global warming” thing.

Balog had a reputation since the early 1980s as a conservationist and environmental photographer. And for nearly 20 years, he’d scoffed at the climate change heralds shouting, “The sky is falling! The sky is falling!”

“I didn’t think that humans were capable of changing the basic physics and chemistry of this entire, huge planet. It didn’t seem probable, it didn’t seem possible,” he explained in the 2012 documentary film “Chasing Ice.”

There was too much margin of error in the computer simulations, too many other pressing problems to address about our beautiful planet. As far as he was concerned, these melodramatic doomsayers were distracting from the real issues.

That was then.

In fact, it wasn’t until 2005 that Balog became a believer.

He was sent on a photo expedition of the Arctic by National Geographic, and that first northern trip was more than enough to see the damage for himself.

“It was about actual tangible physical evidence that was preserved in the ice cores of Greenland and Antarctica,” he said in a 2012 interview with ThinkProgress. “That was really the smoking gun showing how far outside normal, natural variation the world has become. And that’s when I started to really get the message that this was something consequential and serious and needed to be dealt with.”

Some of that evidence may have been the fact that more Arctic landmass has melted away in the last 20 years than the previous 10,000 years.

Here’s the entire video of the crumbling glacier.

This rare footage has gone on record as the largest glacier calving event ever captured on film, by the 2016 Guiness Book of World Records. On May 28, 2008, …

This article originally appeared on 09.13.17

Embarrassing stains on your T-shirt, sniffing someone’s bum to check if they have pooped, the first time having sex post-giving birth — as a new mom, your life turns upside-down.

Illustrator Ingebritt ter Veld and Corinne de Vries, who works for Hippe-Birth Cards, a webshop for birth announcements, had babies shortly after one another.

In the series “#ThingsOnlyMomsKnow” Ingebritt and Corinne depict the reality of motherhood — with all the painful, funny, and loving moments not always talked about.

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1. Pee-regnant.

All illustrations by Ingebritt ter Veld. Reprinted here with permission.

2. How (not) to sleep.

3. Cry baby.

4. The new things that scare you…

5. …and the new things that give you the creeps.

6. Being a new mom can get a little … disgusting.

7. And every mom has experienced these postpartum horror stories.

8. There are many, many memorable firsts.

9. Getting to know your post-baby body is an adventure.

10. Pumping ain’t for wimps.

11. You become very comfortable with spit-up. Very comfortable.

12. Your body, mind, and most importantly, heart, will expand in ways you didn’t know possible.

This story first appeared on Hippe Birth Cards and is reprinted here with permission.