GoneTrending

As the 2021-22 NBA regular season approaches and training camp winds down across the league, we’ll be taking a look at the player on each team that holds the key to unlocking their potential. For the Philadelphia 76ers, the player in question is Matisse Thybulle.

In a broad sense, the level of uncertainty surrounding the 76ers is awe-inspiring. Philadelphia is operating in a bizarre situation with Ben Simmons, as the team’s second-best player was away from the team while holding out, only to return amid unusual circumstances. As such, Daryl Morey, Doc Rivers, and company can’t be positive on what, if anything, they will receive from Simmons on the floor. Given that Philadelphia is attempting to compete at the highest levels of the sport, that is largely an untenable position, and it places additional pressure on both Joel Embiid as the team’s unquestioned centerpiece and Philadelphia’s supporting cast.

Players like Tobias Harris, Seth Curry, and Tyrese Maxey will be asked to carry larger offensive loads if Simmons misses time, but his defensive presence would be sorely missed. Thybulle is the team’s best hope to replicate what Simmons traditionally provides defensively, as the 24-year-old wing is one of the NBA’s most disruptive ballhawks. Last season, Thybulle generated a 3.9 percent steal rate and a 4.9 block rate, producing 2.9 steals and 2.0 blocks per-36 minutes.

Those are off-the-charts figures that may not be fully replicable if Thybulle plays more minutes, but he was a 20-minute-per-game player across 65 regular season appearances. That isn’t the smallest of sample sizes and, if deployed more, Thybulle could legitimately enter All-Defense conversations at either guard or forward. Because Simmons is a tremendous defender in his own right, Thybulle’s impact will be needed in a big way, but he also has to hold up his end of the bargain on the other side of the court.

For now, Thybulle is one of the least potent offensive wings in the league. He attempted only 3.7 shots per game last season, converting at a 42 percent clip, and Thybulle is one of the shakier long-range marksman in the NBA. Across 300 three-point attempts in the NBA, Thybulle’s career three-point percentage (33 percent) isn’t fully disastrous. With that said, the combination of inaccuracy and low volume is tough to overcome, particularly on a team that plays through the post with Embiid as the offensive focal point.

It isn’t likely that Thybulle suddenly becomes an above-average, or even an average, offensive player in his third season. Still, the Sixers will need him to be able to stay on the floor to provide his trademark defensive pressure, and Rivers can only afford to keep him on the court for as long as Thybulle doesn’t submarine Philadelphia’s offense. Other players are more important to the team’s offensive development and/or the replication of Simmons’ contributions on that end, but Thybulle is truly an X-factor for the Sixers, both in the short and long-term.

Alyssa Milano has spent a lifetime smiling for the camera, but yesterday she experienced a new kind of photo shoot: the mug shot. Yesterday, at approximately 2:45 p.m. ET, the Who’s the Boss actress took to Twitter to share that she had just been arrested for advocating for voter rights outside of the White House, The Hill reported.

“I was just arrested for demanding the Biden Administration and the Senate to use their mandate to protect voting rights,” Milano tweeted, noting that “voting rights shouldn’t depend on where you live.”

According to The Hill, Milano “had been demonstrating with People for the American Way, a progressive nonprofit organization that advocates for equal rights and constitutional liberties.” Nearly two dozen other individuals were arrested alongside Milano during the same protest, including People for the American Way president Ben Jealous, who also tweeted about the incident. And shared several tweets from his fellow protestors.

Milano’s activism is not about to end there, however. On Thursday, she will appear before Congress in support of the Equal Rights Amendment. “The lack of Constitutional protections for anyone who is not a cisgender man is a blemish on the very idea of Americanism,” said Milano.

(Via The Hill)

Fortnite is one of the most popular games at the moment, so it’s only fitting that they incorporated one of the most popular pop stars. Ariana Grande, who recently performed a concert inside the game, was tapped to be a big part of their 2021 Halloween event, Fortnitemares.

The spooky event runs until November 2 and beckons fans to join Grande for a questline that positions her as “the galaxy’s greatest monster hunter.” According to the Verge, fans have the opportunity to defeat the Cube Queen, who has unleashed her strong warriors, the Caretakers, across the game to wreak havoc. Players will join a new version of the singer, Spacefarer Ariana Grande, as she hunts monsters and tries to stop the Cube Queen in her tracks. Once players find Grande’s location inside the game, they’ll be prompted to complete a series of quests that unlock some free goodies and weapons like gliders and pickaxes.

Along with making Grande the star of the show for their Fortnitemares game, Fortnite dropped a handful of exclusive skins that show Grande in different, futuristic outfits. Fans can play as one of Grande’s skins, which of course feature her signature high ponytail hairstyle.

Check out some of Grande’s new Fortnite skins above.

Florence Pugh is supportive when people want to dress up like her characters. She egged on Ariana Grande to buy her 33-pound flower dress from Midsommar (“DO IT! Halloween will never be the same”), and on Instagram, she gave instructions on how to be Yelena from Black Widow on October 31 after being left out of a window display.

“What the.. Apparently Yelena didn’t make the cut,” she wrote while posing in front of what appears to be a New York City costume store. “GUYS. I LITERALLY TALK ABOUT POCKETS IN NEARLY EVERY SCENE. Halloween= A LOT OF FREE SWEETIES. May I remind you that the vest has ‘A LOT OF HANDY POCKETS’.. Costume+vest+POCKETS= someone who came prepared. IT IS with great importance we understand how vital Yelena is for Halloween. Rant over, thanks for listening.”

When Florence Pugh said “Halloween= A LOT OF FREE SWEETIES,” I felt that.

Champion of Cosplay has a Yelena costume for $58.99 (plus shipping), but the description makes no mention of whether it comes with pockets. I couldn’t find any Black Widow costumes on the internet’s number one purveyor of horny costumes, Yandy, but that’s probably because it’s called something legally distinct, like Russian Girl Superhero.

I have question about the David Harbour mannequin’s sad excuse for a beard.

(Via Pop Crave)

Much like Barry Berkman, a.k.a. Barry Block—the actor/hitman character who has netted Bill Hader two Outstanding Lead Actor in a Comedy Series Emmys—Hader and his fellow Barry creators are always one step ahead. While they have yet to even finish filming the critically acclaimed series’ third season, let alone announce a premiere date for that, they’ve already finished writing season 4. Back in January, while still in lockdown, Collider reported how Hader had told Seth Meyers that he and his team had already written all of the show’s third and fourth seasons and were just “waiting to start shooting again.”

Fast-forward nine months and it seems that season 3 is very close to being in the can. When asked about how the new season was going in a conversation with Collider, Hader said, “It’s going really well. I mean, we have a month left of shooting. Everybody’s been great.” Unfortunately, Hader said he couldn’t give much in the way of details “because so much stuff happens” but he did share that he showed someone who has been a part of the show before and has a cameo in season 3 a still from the first episode, “and they were shocked… [T]hat was a fun reaction, so I’m interested to see what people think about it.”

Please say that the feral karate girl somehow comes back?!

Based on that timeframe, Collider is estimating an early 2022 premiere for Barry’s third season—which can’t come fast enough for fans of the dark comedy, which concluded its second season back in May 2019, months before the word “COVID” was dominating newspaper headlines. The good news is that because season 4 is already written, it could start shooting right away—as long as HBO renews the show, of course. But as HBO CCO Casey Bloys told Deadline back in February: “Typically, we don’t pick up things until they air but if I was betting on whether we would do more [Barry], I think that is a very safe bet.”

(Via Collider)

After facing a wave of controversy stemming from a recent whistleblower report that damningly lays bare the platform’s complicity in allowing misinformation and conspiracy theories to spread, plus that whole thing about attempting to lure children onto its Facebook Kids platform by essentially figuring out how to disrupt play dates, an embattled Facebook has announced that it will be rebranding itself later this week.

As part of the new initiative, CEO Mark Zuckerberg said Facebook will “effectively transition from people seeing us as primarily being a social media company to being a metaverse company.” As for what the heck that metaverse part means, the most likely answer is that Facebook will be leaning hard into its virtual and augmented reality applications, which caught the attention of Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey.

Never one to miss a chance to troll Facebook, Dorsey responded to a user who couldn’t help but notice a jarring similarity between Zuckerberg’s latest initiative and a classic sci-fi book, Snowcrash:

the word “metaverse” was coined by neal stephenson in the book “snowcrash” and it originally described a virtual world owned by corporations where end users were treated as citizens in a dystopian corporate dictatorship

what if neal was right

In a quote tweet, Dorsey wrote, “Narrator: He was.”

It was yet another move from the Twitter CEO who had some fun ribbing Facebook for its massive outage earlier in the month, which saw the platform go down for almost eight hours. Thanks to a DNS error, the Facebook domain was for sale, which prompted Dorsey to joke on Twitter: “How much?”

(Via Jack Dorsey on Twitter)

Sometimes I truly wonder what’s going through Steve Doocy’s mind when Brian Kilmeade starts to go off the rails during Fox and Friends‘ early-morning run. He’s often the (relative) voice of reason when compared to the hard-line conservative stances of co-hosts Ainsley Earhardt and Brian Kilmeade, but on Wednesday morning, Doocy sort-of stared off into the distance while the energizer bunnies on his left did their thing. Perhaps that was because they were being more absurd than usual, while taking time off from claiming that Christmas is ruined because “nobody wants to work anymore.”

Here’s what happened. Kilmeade started to lose it after Young Doocy (Peter, who is Steve’s kid) confronted White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki over why migrant children were being flown “in the middle of the night” to states including Florida and New York. Psaki pushed back, saying that these voyages were simply “earlier than you might like to take a flight.” And this led Kilmeade to fret over the alleged secrecy of it all, while Earhardt stopped referencing her “friends” long enough to interject, “the Taliban.”

Via Mediaite, Kilmeade previously declared (prior to the “Taliban” remark) that allowing migrant kids into the U.S. was a “go sign to Central and South America, Africa, Norway, whatever, to come to our country.” Notice how he added Norway? That appears to be a preemptively added detail, one that would insulate him from accusations of racially charged remarks, but Earhardt torpedoed that seeming attempt with two words.

Nonetheless, Kilmeade persisted. “You get in, you get flown through, you get a nice plane ride, you get put into a suburban community in America, light years better than your country.” He then insisted that migrants and refugees must be thinking, “Now is the time to sell the house and send our kids to another country.” Oh boy.

(Via Mediaite)

To kick off season two of the popular TV show Dave, a wonderful, tongue-in-cheek series that explores the life of David Burd, aka white rapper Lil Dicky, his crew heads to Korea to make a song with one of the country’s biggest stars — CL. After meeting the pop star during an award show appearance, Dave and his crew are a bit starstruck: “She looks like a Korean Beyonce,” exclaims GaTa, one of his closest collaborators. And although the overall tone of the series tends toward silly, GaTa’s estimation of CL is right on.

When it comes to K-pop, CL is one of the genre’s original icons, stepping into the spotlight at age 17 as the frontwoman for the girl-group 2NE1, and leading the collective to become one of the best selling girl-groups in the world with 66.5 million records sold. 2NE1 was part of the “second generation of K-pop stars,” following up the trailblazers in the ’90s, as today’s artists represent a new, third wave. As she gears up to release her official solo debut album, Alpha, this week, her longevity makes CL something of a bridge between the two eras.

2NE1 was a global force from 2009–2014, but after a two year hiatus, they officially broke up in 2016. During that time, CL began to establish her solo career, releasing the iconic debut “Hello Bitches” in 2015, and following it up in 2016 with the Wu Tang-sampling, reggae-tinged “Lifted” (complete with a cameo from Method Man himself in the Dave Meyers-directed video). Shortly after that, 2NE1 officially disbanded, but CL’s momentum was only building; “Lifted” made her the first solo female Korean artist to ever chart on the Billboard Hot 100, and only the third Korean artist ever to make an American chart appearance.

Obviously, in 2021, things are quite different with BTS racking up a No. 1 placement every time they drop a single. But CL was paving the way for the success of BTS, and back in 2016, seemed destined for the kind of commercial success the boy band and their army have accomplished. Instead, a long delay after her solo breakout had fans angrily tweeting #JusticeForCL at one point, angered over perceived label fumbling of the genre’s biggest female star. Things seemed to come to a head in 2019, three years after her momentum from “Lifted” had abated. CL unexpectedly announced she was leaving her long-time label, YG, and almost immediately released a left-field EP called In The Name Of Love as an independent artist.

Since K-pop artists are usually backed by rich, all-powerful label machines that help their music pop, this decision was a signal to everyone that CL was going to do things her way. The culmination of those efforts is Alpha, and though it was originally slated for release in the fall of 2020, the album was quickly pushed back to allow further fine-tuning, and likely to recalibrate live shows in light of pandemic-related delays. A few early tracks were released toward the end of 2020, the fashion-heavy, rap-sung “Post Up” that completely bricked, an insanely catchy haters rebuff, “HWA,” and the loved-up “5-Star.” Luckily, that first single doesn’t make the final cut for inclusion on Alpha , a wise choice.

Even as momentum was shifting back in the right direction for her debut album, CL was dealt another tough hand. At the top of the year she lost her mother to a heart attack, just before her own 30th birthday, and chose to mark the loss with a reflective, sad homage, “Wish You Were Here” released in February 2021. Taking a few months off after the song came out, instead, CL seemed to hit her stride this summer with the release of “Spicy,” a fiercely rapped Minaj-era banger that swaps speedy Korean verses for an English chorus: “She got the sauce and it’s spicy / You looking at the most fly Asians.” With frenetic EDM production and even an approximation of a drop, the song hit more of a mark than her late 2020 singles did.

Sharing a similar track in September, “Lover Like Me,” the swaggering tone for Alpha had officially been set — loud, brash, bold, and electric. “2020 was the beginning of my rebirth and rewriting my own story,” CL told Billboard earlier this year. “I can freely share different sides of me.” The album backs up this assertion with an eclectic mix of different styles and moods, even if it does tend more toward the bombastic style that defines those two 2021 singles. The range is there, though — album cut “Chuck” goes bouncier and more throwback, while another standout, “Paradise,” is an eerie trap song full of psychedelic flexes and slurred vocal effects reminiscent of Travis Scott. It might be the most modern rap track CL has ever done, and she sounds right at home in the post-Astroworld sound.

Alpha isn’t strictly big rap hooks, either; “5 Star” is joined by another slower track, “Xai,” an exploration of tropical house that shares DNA with the best of Major Lazer production. The piano-driven “Let It” is nostalgic of early 2000s pop, like if Vanessa Carlton learned how to jam a rap interlude into one of her catchiest tunes, and “Tie A Cherry” reminds me of the Selena Gomez and Gucci Mane collaboration, “Fetish” in the best way. Of course, unlike Selena, CL doesn’t need a rapper to guest — she handles both sections by herself. Despite the many high points, at times, the record drags. CL might be part of the bedrock for modern K-pop success, but her sound can feel stuck in the past. “My Way” hovers around the same BPM and siren-flecked sound as “Spicy,” but without any of the playfulness, and “Siren” is tepid R&B that could’ve been done by any number of mid-level artists playing in the shallow end of that genre’s pool.

Interestingly enough, one of the strongest songs from her new era is when she went lo-fi and vulnerable in remembrance of her mom. “Wish You Were Here” didn’t make the album, but it belongs alongside these tracks anyway, offering a welcome balance. Without the unrelenting insistence on domination, CL’s strengths were on full display — her absolutely beautiful singing voice, unexpected details like a shared family love for Stevie Wonder, and a canny ability to find new angles on done-to-death subjects like grief and love. The follow-ups to Alpha should focus on honing in on CL’s voice as an artist now, instead of endlessly emphasizing her well-established stature. Sometimes the best thing a successful artist can do is get quieter. Even alphas have a sensitive side.

Alpha is out now via Very Cherry. Get it here.

New York’s A Boogie Wit Da Hoodie and Capella Grey link up to offer some encouraging words in their new video for “Bestie,” the latest single released from the upcoming Culture Jam project curated by NBA star Kawhi Leonard. The video pretty prominently features basketball as well, focusing on its lead’s efforts to improve on-court, then following her as Capella picks her up from the park for a ride home and as she invites A Boogie over for a romantic date by the piano.

The first volume of the project, Culture Jam Vol. 1, is due this Friday, October 22, after months of hype from Kawhi and his Culture Jam crew. The NBA player described his effort to combine his two loves, music and basketball, as “something that could uplift our community.” To that end he told reporters during a May presser, “A portion of each stream is gonna go to the Mamba & Mambacita [Sports] Foundation.”

Kawhi previously shared a pair of tracks from the project: “Everything Different” by Rod Wave and YoungBoy Never Broke Again and “Waves” by Gunna and Polo G. In addition the project will feature other standouts like Lil Uzi Vert, NLE Choppa, Ty Dolla Sign, Wale, and Yung Bleu. The inaugural Culture Jam Sports And Music Festival is planned for November 21 at The Shrine in Los Angles featuring performances from Bluebucksclan, Cordae, and others. It will also stream live on Amazon Music’s Twitch channel.

Watch A Boogie Wit Da Hoodie and Capella Grey’s “Bestie” video above.

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

Petula Clark had a number one hit in 1965 with “Downtown,” a song that has since been covered by everyone from Frank Sinatra to Dolly Parton, from Yo La Tengo to former-Spice Girl Emma Bunton, from Winona Ryder in Girl, Interrupted to Anya Taylor-Joy in Last Night in Soho. The Queen’s Gambit star’s cover, which soundtracks the haunting trailer to Edgar Wright’s new film, has been released as a standalone music video.

Taylor-Joy actually performed two versions of “Downtown,” one that’s uptempo, the other downtempo (that’s the one with the music video). Pick the cover that most matches your mood — for instance, if you just watched The Witch, maybe stick with the downtempo.

“It’s not every day you’re asked to record several versions of an iconic song,” Taylor-Joy said about covering Petula Clark. “The sounds of the ’60s was what first made me fall in love with music so I was overjoyed when Edgar asked me to give it a go.”

Here’s more on Last Night in Soho:

In acclaimed director Edgar Wright’s psychological thriller, Eloise, an aspiring fashion designer, is mysteriously able to enter the 1960s where she encounters a dazzling wannabe singer, Sandie. But the glamour is not all it appears to be and the dreams of the past start to crack and splinter into something far darker.

You can listen to both versions below.