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Three long years have gone by since Kacey Musgraves released her fourth album, Golden Hour. That somewhat changed on Thursday when the singer appeared on Dr. Maya Shankar’s podcast,

Clint Eastwood is 91 years young, yet he’s more prolific than filmmakers a third his age. Even at his advanced age, he cranks about one a year. He was even filming during the pandemic. The result is Cry Macho, the 39th movie he’s directed in 50 years. It’s also the second since 2018’s The Mule to feature him driving around, with at least some time in Mexico. And as per the trailer, it very well might blow Pete Davidson and John Mulaney’s mind, much as The Mule did not so long ago.

The ad finds the erstwhile Man with No Name once again donning a cowboy hat, playing a former rodeo star who, like his horticulturalist in The Mule, has fallen on hard times. Desperate, he takes a job from an old friend (Dwight Yoakum), which involves fetching his son (Eduardo Minett) from Mexico and bringing him home. It looks like there’s plenty of reluctant bonding, grizzled aphorisms, even a rooster named Macho.

It also looks like yet another chance for Eastwood to ruminate on his long career. Eastwood won his first Best Picture Oscar for 1991’s Unforgiven, which found him wrestling with his violent screen image. Three decades later it appears he’s still doing it. “I’ll tell you something: This macho thing is overrated,” Eastwood’s character tells his young charge. “Just people trying to being macho to show they’ve got grit. That’s about all they end up with.”

There’s also jokes, including a double entendre at trailer’s end so saucy we can’t print it here. But what would you expect from a legendary actor and filmmaker who, in The Mule, gave himself not one but two threesomes?

You can watch the trailer in the video above. Cry Macho — and, almost needless to say, great title — arrives in theaters and on HBO Max on Sept. 17.

The University of Texas and the University of Oklahoma are heading to the SEC in the near future, with word breaking earlier this summer that both historic football powerhouses will be leaving the Big 12 by 2025 (if not sooner). That move sent shockwaves through the landscape of college sports, particularly through the lens of football, and that included visions of a super-league in the Southeast that housed the majority of top programs in the country. In recent years, though, Oklahoma has far surpassed Texas in terms of on-field accomplishments, and college football legend Steve Spurrier served up a reminder of that reality this week.

Spurrier, while appearing with Paul Finebaum on the SEC Network, delivered his opinion on the move. His thoughts began with surprise, to the point of thinking it was simply a rumor, but Spurrier went on to take something of a shot at Texas for their recent scuffles.

“Texas, they struggle to win the Big 12. I guess they’ve only won it twice in I don’t know how many years,” Spurrier said. “It made sense for them. If you’re going to struggle in the Big 12, you might as well struggle in the SEC. Can’t do any worse.”

Spurrier isn’t exactly wrong about Texas, as their brand has been larger than their effectiveness recently. It would be fair to note that the Longhorns do have a massive operating budget, a fertile recruiting base and a tremendous infrastructure, though, and they could be turning the ship around under Steve Sarkisian’s leadership. Still, Spurrier’s answer seemed to indicate that he views Oklahoma quite a bit differently than Texas when evaluating from the perspective of the SEC.

Spurrier said Oklahoma and its fans are “looking forward to the challenge” and that OU has a “rich football tradition.” That could also be true of Texas, mind you, but this is a something of a “Welcome to the SEC” moment for Texas in that Spurrier likes to make news with his unbridled opinions across the conference.

Toward the end of June, a clip from Netflix’s This Is Pop made its way to social media. in it, T-Pain detailed a past conversation he had with Usher where the Confessions singer allegedly told him that he “really f*cked up music for real singers” as a result of his auto-tune style.

T-Pain added that the conversation “started a four-year depression for me,” but he also insisted that he still has “love and respect” for Usher despite his comments. Nearly two months later, Usher offered a response to that conversation being made public during a profile with Billboard.

“I’m happy that T-Pain said something,” the singer said to Billboard’s Gail Mitchell. “I’m not sure if it was before or after our actual conversation, after I heard what was said. It was very hurtful to know that he had experienced that kind of hardship in life.” Responding to T-Pain’s claim that the conversation led to his depression, Usher said, “I wouldn’t wish that on any person.”

“Private conversations for me have always been intended to uplift,” Usher added. “But when or if people get pieces of it, they can always have some other interpretation. But we’ve spoken since and we’re good.”

The conversation with Billboard came after Usher launched his Las Vegas residency. He previously spoke about the string of shows and somewhat revealed what fans can expect when they attend.

“I want you to guess,” he said. “I want to keep you bubbling with anticipation until I have dropped the first record and you hear the first moment. When the lights go down and you feel the energy. I promise the classics and also new stuff.”

You can read Usher’s full profile with Billboard here.

When first starting up Death’s Door there’s an assumption that it’s going to be like every other hack and slash indie game out there. Those games typically feature overwhelming waves of enemies, a slow upgrade system, and increasingly-difficult bosses with more challenging patterns as time goes on. In some ways that is what this game is, but while other games’ entire hook is from that idea it’s the details around the mechanics of Death’s Door that make it unique and worthy of all the praise it’s receiving in recent days.

The only requirement in all of Death’s Door is to follow the path that the player is meant to walk on. There’s a story in this game and the story itself is intriguing enough, but how the player advances that story is entirely up to them. This little bit of player choice creates a game where everyone will approach scenarios differently and it makes those experiences unique. It also sets itself up to be one of those games that will be a great speedrun someday.

The Player Chooses How Powerful They Want To Become

When the average player starts up Death’s Door they’re likely to slash their way through every enemy they encounter, gain experience in the form of soul points, and eventually use those points to level up all of their stats. That is one way to play Death’s Door and it is completely viable, but it is arguably one of the more challenging ways to experience the game. Enemies are tough early on, and only grow more challenging as you progress, and some of the combat scenarios feel impossible to overcome. They’re also, interestingly, not required.

The big hook of Death’s Door is that, outside of main set piece moments, these combat scenarios are really nothing more than a way to grind out extra experience. Enemies respawn every time the player goes back to the hub world, or upon death, but progress always remains. The game actively encourages pushing forward instead of trying to slay what’s in front of you, and the only gain from combat is to become more powerful. Of course, becoming more powerful is one heck of a hook so abandoning combat altogether is likely not recommended unless you’re attempting a challenge run. Essentially, though, the player can choose how much combat they want to do. Experience is plentiful without fighting in every combat scenario so choosing when to progress is key to moving forward.

This gives playthroughs of Death’s Door infinite possibilities. Want to fight everything and become the most powerful reaper ever? Do it. Want to skate past enemies, move the story along, and only fight when necessary? That’s an option, too. The only limit placed on the player is story beats. Beyond that? Go nuts.

Death’s Door Is Going To Be An Amazing Speedrun Someday

Death’s Door feels like a speedrunner’s dream. Optimizing a run-through of the game to shave off the perfect amount of time is all about optimizing, and that’s what Death’s Door is built to allow. The game blatantly tells the player to be quick in their first 30 minutes.

Decisions like choosing when the right time to fight or run away, what exact skill to upgrade, and where is the best place to plant one of the finite healing seeds can add or take away time from a playthrough. While most of these decisions don’t have too much impact on the regular player, because of the ability to grind out experience or just keep dying until progress is made, it can make or break a challenge run. Specifically for speedrunners.

There are so many different options in how to approach a run and the game actively encourages experimentation. This variety is going to create a lot of really fun speedruns early on, because players are still learning how to best optimize the game. Eventually though they’ll have this down to a science, but progress is already being made in a big way. The game came out on July 20 and according to Speedrun.com there’s already someone with a time below one hour. Meanwhile, the developers at Acid Nerve say an average playthrough should take 8-10 hours. It wouldn’t be surprising to see someone have this down to half an hour at some point.

Speedrun or not, Death’s Door is a great game

Whether someone is trying to speedrun the game or not, Death’s Door is a great game worthy of everyone’s time. There’s a reason everyone who’s played it can’t stop talking about it and as more people get their hands on the game that chorus is only going to get louder. Don’t let Death’s Door slip under the radar, because we’re gonna hear it popping up a lot in December when Game of The Year discussions start.

Lil Durk has faced a lot of turmoil in his career, especially in recent months. Last November, the Chicago native suffered the loss of rapper and close friend King Von who he affectionately referred to as “twin.” Months later, death would once again affect the rapper as his brother, DThang, was shot and killed outside a club in their hometown. While Durk was not directly involved in these situations, the rapper is taking steps to avoid conflict in the future as a result of his music.

The rapper took to Twitter to share an announcement with fans on Thursday.

“I’m not mentioning the dead in my songs no more or performing songs with they name in it,” he wrote before signing off on the message as Big Smurk. It arrives two days after Durk shared a couple of tweets that reflected on the people he recently lost in his life. “Why every time somebody die they love you but when you here they don’t care …… love me now not later,” he wrote in the first post. In a second tweet, he added, “Von left us Dthang left us and I was lost.”

His messages come after Durk and his girlfriend, India Cox, reportedly exchanged gunfire with an unspecified amount of individuals who broke into their Atlanta home. While Durk and Cox were listed as victims on a police report for the incident, neither were injured in the matter.

You can read his tweets in the posts above.

Schitt’s Creek will never truly go away, as the show will (hopefully!) remain rewatchable on streaming services for years to come. But the creators of the feel-good family comedy want to give fans one last parting gift.

Word came on Thursday that father-son team Eugene and Dan Levy had put together a Schitt’s Creek coffee table book. According to TV Insider, it’s set to be a farewell of sorts to fans of the show, as its title is the same as the emotional special the show put together to discuss its rise in popularity ahead of its final season.

Best Wishes, Warmest Regards: The Story of Schitt’s Creek is officially set to arrive this October, more than a year after Pop TV’s Emmy-winning comedy bid viewers farewell. The Schitt’s Creek tie-in book penned by the Levys is described as a coffee-table keepsake.

Released Tuesday, October 26, the publication will be available in hardcover ($40) and e-book ($16.99) formats. If the title seems familiar, that’s no coincidence as it was also used for the show’s televised farewell special.

The book is set to include character profiles of the cast, lots of photos, and some new details about the memorable moments from the show’s six seasons on air. There are also, of course, lots of wig images as well.

Other characters are also profiled and among other highlights are Moira’s endorsement of Herb Ertlinger Winery, Patrick and David’s first kiss, the Christmas Episode, and everything in between. Illustrated catalogues of David’s signature sweaters and Moira’s wigs will also feature in the must-have book.

For those still binging the show on streaming services, having a coffee table book to page through will be a great addition to the experience. But it doesn’t give them what they really want: another season (or a movie).

Few game genres lead players to spend more time on menu screens than sports games. The menus are where a lot of people have the most fun as they reconstruct rosters, create custom players, or create chaos with rule changes. The playing space is merely the playground for what takes place in the menus. The people who play sports games like this are also the ones who typically choose to mute the soundtrack of the game. After hearing the same songs constantly it becomes grating and they’d rather deal with silence than listen to the same tracks over and over again.

That is among one of the many reasons that pushed the NBA 2K series to begin expanding its library of songs. From 30 songs to over 100, NBA 2K has been making an effort to change how people feel a sports soundtrack should sound. However, their efforts at creating a soundtrack isn’t just expanding the list of songs and calling it a day. They know how many people put hundreds of hours into 2K all over the world, with many of those spent on menu screens and wandering The Neighborhood, which provides an opportunity. That is an audience they can expose to new music and a lot of their efforts with the last couple of 2K games, including the upcoming NBA 2K22, has been introducing lesser-known artists to their games. From up-and-comers to international stars, 2K wants their game to be a place where someone can discover their next favorite artist.

“We really wanted to shift the focus to being a platform for music discovery.” David Kelley, soundtrack curator for NBA 2K22 said to Uproxx. “And along with that looking to introduce not only new and up-and-coming artists from the US. But also around the world really kind of turn an eye towards the global soundtrack, the game is global and our audience is growing globally. So we really wanted to kind of focus on not only up-and-coming artists, but artists you may never have heard before, artists that [are] new and exciting and fresh for our community but also from the international community as well and really going global with the soundtrack.”

2K’s goal of going global and staying fresh with the soundtrack is very different from how the average sports game chooses to approach its soundtracks. The biggest sports titles in the world typically focus on bringing in established names and songs that people will be familiar with. There isn’t really anything wrong with this approach, because sticking to what’s known will cover the widest net of players, but in the modern age, it doesn’t bring anything to the player that they can’t do on their own. Most players have the ability to check out a top 40 or find trending artists on their own. They can also just play their own playlists through headphones, their phone, or over their speakers. Video games are always about adapting across the board and that’s what 2K wants to do with how it’s handling the soundtrack.

“There’s a huge community, a huge audience, [and we] wanted to engage people where they’re at.” said Kelley. “Instead of spoon feeding them things that are easy to find. You open Spotify [and] there’s 40 songs immediately in your attention that they want you to listen to. We want to try to take our curation a step beyond that, and a step further, and really get into those realms where we think our community would be interested in.”

Of course, it’s one thing to say that your goal is to offer new music to your fans, but it’s another to act on it. Beyond that, the process of getting people to actually listen to that music, is a whole different thing altogether. The way 2K is going about putting this new music in front of their players is actually the same solution to another problem sports games have — constant content updates.

Sports games are notorious for being a $60-$70 game that is played for a month, put down, and then never picked up again. Sure the hardcore players will play all the way until the next game, but the large majority will eventually fall off. The only way to keep these people coming back is to consistently have something new to check out. A new game mode, roster updates, or events where they can get new gear for their player. So why not have something like that with music too? 2K20 and 2K21 featured a constantly updating soundtrack, but now that 2K is introducing “First Friday’s” for when those updates are pushed through, it turns it into an event players feel worthy of tuning in for.

“Now, we’re really trying to engage in a conversation in real-time with our community about. Here’s the music. You were going to be hearing from us,” Kelley said. “What should we be hearing from you? [The] contest that we did last year and the year before that was specifically, reaching out to our community to have them send us music really engaging in an [engagement] effort on the part of the NBA 2K to find new artists from our community that we can put on our soundtrack…We’re really looking to rather than leverage prestige big name artists, you know, as a pure marketing piece, the soundtrack for us really becomes a discussion with our community and really kind of an engagement piece about, who are you listening to? Who should we be putting on and then who do we think they should be listening to and putting on?”

So many companies talk about their community, how much they care about it, and how much they want to do for it. Those comments from developers are always genuine because it really is the community of these games that pushes developers forward with their work, but it’s rare to find times where the community can directly talk back to the developers and actually have an impact on what is going into the game. When that happens it creates a bond with the game where the players feel like they’re a part of it. A lot of the 2K community can see their own fingers on the soundtrack of the franchise, which is a cool experience that not many games offer, and creating unique experiences like that is why players keep coming back every year.

On Thursday, Rand Paul took a break from his usual gig, which is getting schooled by Dr. Anthony Fauci during Senate hearings over his ignorance of immunology. Instead of humiliating himself in front of a fellow doctor who’s far better at medicine than he is, he went solo, spouting arguably the most bizarre COVID theory yet, which is saying something.

The Kentucky Senator, famous for his perm and for getting the snot beaten out of him by his neighbor, was on Fox News for a conversation about whether vaccines should be mandatory. (See if you can guess where Paul stands.) He shifted the chat to other places, though, which took the current Republican line about surging COVID cases among conservatives — which they have been desperately trying to blame on immigrants, of course — and taking it in new and fanciful directions.

“They’re taking kids from down at the border who may have it, and they’re plucking them up and putting them all over the United States, as if they’re wishing to seed the country with a new variant,” he said, adding, “It’s an awful thing to do.”

Paul did have something nice to say about vaccines, though — all while attempting to slam Democrats, who’ve been urging conservatives to get them since they became widely available earlier in the year. “For those who are saying, ‘I won’t go to a restaurant unless we force everyone to be vaccinated’: If you’re vaccinated, you are overwhelmingly safe from hospitalization and death,” he said. “Mind your own business.”

So to recap: Even a guy who believes in a deranged and baseless conspiracy theory about Democrats infecting unvaccinated areas of the country with evil immigrant kids thinks the vaccines are effective ways to combat a disease that’s become more transmissible than ever. If even Rand Paul thinks they’re good, then you should get one.

(Via The Independent)

The Milwaukee Bucks have had to do some retooling of their roster after winning a championship, but will return the vast majority of their core pieces to try and repeat in 2022. Their Big 3 are all locked in long term and they managed an absolute steal by getting Bobby Portis back at a significant discount.

The lone departures have been PJ Tucker, who is headed to Miami on a deal that apparently made the Bucks balk at to the dismay of their fans, and Jeff Teague. Replacing Tucker will be far more difficult given his defensive presence, and it seems likely the Bucks will hope they can rely more on Portis initially and possibly try to address that void on the buyout market (where they are regularly active). To replace Teague, Milwaukee turned to an old friend in former Buck, George Hill, who just got waived by the Sixers.

According to Shams Charania, Hill will be signing with the Bucks on a 2-year, $8 million deal that will help bolster their point guard rotation behind Jrue Holiday, which was arguably the weakest part of their roster during their title run, particularly while they were without Donte DiVincenzo.

Hill was a relative non-factor for the Sixers last postseason and it remains to be seen what all he still has left to contribute in the playoffs, but he is someone who you can rely on for quality regular season minutes, at the very least, as an excellent shooter and hope that translates to postseason performance as well. Given Milwaukee’s long season and Holiday playing the Olympics as well, having someone to eat more regular season minutes that can keep the team afloat while Holiday is on the bench will be very important for Milwaukee next season.