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Charli XCX has long been a fan of collaborations with PC Music members, so it’s no surprise that her and label boss A.G. Cook have been working on a remix together. The “Xcxoplex” remix is a revision of the track “Xxoplex,” and obviously a play on Charli’s name, but might also be a roundabout shout out to the LA venue, the Echoplex? Either way, their track is part of a larger project called Apple Vs 7G, a remix album Cook is putting together of previous material from 2020 — not a bad way to recycle songs from a year without live shows.

The album features tons of other artists like Caroline Polachek, Boys Noize, No Rome and plenty more. Listen to “Xcxoplex” above and check out the full tracklist for the project below. It comes out May 28 via PC Music.

1. “Oh Yeah” (Caroline Polachek Remix)
2. “Xcxoplex” [Feat. Charli XCX]
3. “Beautiful Superstar” (EASYFUN Remix)
4. “Being Harsh” (Oklou Cover)
5. “H2O2” [ft. Denzel Himself]
6. “2021” (umru Remix)
7. “The Darkness” (Remix) [Feat. Sarah Bonito and Hannah Diamond]
8. “Lil Song” (Unplugged) (With jonny gorgeous)
9. “Stargon” (Boys Noize Remix)
10. “Lifeline” (Ö Remix)
11. “Alright” (Dream Mix)
12. “Airhead” (Doss Remix)
13. “Gold Leaf” (GRRL Remix)
14. “Today” (Dream Mix)
15. “The Darkness” (Eartheater Remix)
16. “Windows” (No Rome Remix)
17. “Drink Blood” (caro18. “Beautiful Superstar” (Baauer Remix)
19. “Airhead” (Ö & Canblaster Remix)
20. “Soft Landing” (Max Tundra Remix)
21. “Gold Leaf” (Supersaw Edit)

Kate Winslet’s accent has been the early focal point of conversations around Mare Of Easttown, the HBO show set in Philadelphia starring the Titanic actress. We know just how much work she put into perfecting the Eastern Pennsylvania vocal cues, sure, but now we also know that she understands what really matters in the Keystone State: the gas station where you prefer to eat your meals.

Winslet is apparently a huge Wawa fan, adding a big star to the ranks of its supporters in the ceaseless hoagie battle between Sheetz and Wawa in the mid-Atlantic region of America. While the battle is never-ending, you basically have to have an opinion on the fight if you live in Pennsylvania. Which is why Winslet had to figure things out for herself in order to sort out her detective character.

As the Huffington Post detailed, Winslet spoke about Wawa on The Los Angeles Times podcast The Envelope about getting ready to play her character on the show. It was that prep, which also involved subscribing to a Delaware County newspaper, that got her fascinated with Wawa in the first place.

The British actor said that she decided to subscribe to the Delco Times, Delaware County’s daily newspaper, to better understand her character. And one thing she noticed while reading it every day was that there were a whole lot of articles mentioning Wawa, a beloved gas station-convenience store-fast food chain headquartered in ― where else ― the town of Wawa, in Delaware County.

Winslet quickly found herself incredibly intrigued.

“It almost felt like a mythical place … Wawa,” she told the podcast, adding: “By the time I got there, I was like, ‘It’s real!’ Walking into a Wawa ultimately felt like, it was kind of an honor, in a funny way, because to me that was the heart of Delco. So to finally walk through the door of a Wawa; I don’t know why I felt like, ‘Oh, yes, I’m here, I belong. This is where it’s at. Wawa.’”

It’s a feeling many people can relate to when it comes to regional chain stores, so it’s extremely charming to hear that Winslet was also sucked in by the hype. And it won’t do anything to put the debate to rest, but getting Kate Winslet on your side has to feel good for Wawa fanatics in the eternal struggle.

[via HuffPo]

After releasing her own incredible new album earlier this year, the emotionally-intense Little Oblivions, Julien Baker showed up on an unexpected collaboration today. Teaming with the hardcore veterans F*cked Up for the latest installment of their Zodiac series, today’s release Year Of The Horse follows up 2017’s Year Of The Snake and 2006’s Year Of The Dog.

Today’s four-part release includes four “acts” with guest vocalists like Baker, Matt Berninger of The National, and additional vocals from the band’s frontman Damian Abraham, along with drummer Jonah Flaco, Eidolon, Tuka Mohammed and Maegan Brooks Mills. Across all four acts the release is a lengthy one hour and 34 minutes, though Baker and Berninger’s contributions are mostly confined to the fourth act. Interestingly enough, Baker and Berninger have themselves collaborated in the past, so perhaps it was The National singer who brought Julien into the project.

The band shared a bit about the fourth act on Twitter today in a thread, and Julien retweeted the initial description, a subtle way of letting fans know she’s involved. “This has been our song of motherhood, stewardship and sacrifice,” the band wrote. “Of the old roots of addition and evil that try to hold us down. Of strength and transcendence, about the struggle to rise above the dust clouds and to bring up others with us as we climb.” Later they thanked Julien explicitly for her “otherworldly coda to the finale.”

You can listen to Year Of The Horse in its entirety on Bandcamp, act four is embedded below.

The New Orleans Pelicans will be without the services of Zion Williamson for an undefined amount of time. The team announced on Friday afternoon that the star second-year big man/guard hybrid suffered a fractured ring finger in his dominant left hand, and as a result, he’ll be on the shelf indefinitely.

Pelicans general manager spoke out after the news was announced, saying that the injury came as a result of the way teams are ultra-physical in how they play defense against the former Duke standout, particularly when he gets close to the rim.

The timing of Williamson’s injury could not be any worse for New Orleans. The team is currently 1.5 games back of the sliding San Antonio Spurs for the 10-seed in the Western Conference, which would earn them a berth in the inaugural play-in tournament. While it is obviously not impossible for them to make up that gap, losing Williamson makes it far more difficult, especially considering that Brandon Ingram is dealing with an ankle sprain that will hold him out of action on Friday against the Philadelphia 76ers.

Williamson has been magnificent during his sophomore campaign, taking control of the Pelicans offense and looking like a superstar in the process. On the year, the former No. 1 overall pick is averaging 27 points, 7.2 rebounds, and 3.7 assists in 33.2 minutes per game while connecting on 61.1 percent of his attempts from the field.

Belgian police collected over 22,000 firearms and decided to do something useful with them by melting them back into usable metal. After being rendered, the guns were turned into 60 tons of recycled steel.

Around half of the guns were handed in by owners from across the country, many of them had inherited guns and didn’t want them anymore. The other half were old guns used by the police.

Belgium melts more than 22,000 guns into recycled steel

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The guns were melted down by steel giant ArcelorMittal at a plant in Ghent. The covert operation took three days. This is the third time the Belgian government and the steel company have partnered to meltdown firearms.

“The result is impressive: 22,457 firearms have disappeared from our society,” Carina van Cauter, the governor of East Flanders province, said in a statement. “It is obviously positive for the security of our citizens that these weapons are no longer in use.”

Multiple studies show that van Cauter is right, the fewer the guns, the safer the people. This belief counters the notion held by many Americans that an armed society is a safer one.

A famous study from the late 1980s and 1990s by Arthur Kellermann, now dean of the F. Edward Hébert School of Medicine at the Uniformed Services University of the Health Sciences, studied 444 people who had been murdered in their homes.

“They found that a gun in the home was associated with a nearly threefold increase in the odds that someone would be killed at home by a family member or intimate acquaintance,” Melinda Wenner Moyer writes in Scientific American.

Over 30 subsequent studies have confirmed the findings.

via Tony Website / Flickr

“There is really uniform data to support the statement that access to firearms is associated with an increased risk of firearm-related death and injury,” Garen Wintemute, a physician and noted gun violence researcher at the University of California, concludes.

One reason that owning a gun makes people less safe is that it raises the chances of a situation escalating. “The fact that you have a gun may mean that you do things you shouldn’t be doing: you take chances you shouldn’t otherwise take; you go to places where it’s really not safe, but you feel safe,” says David Hemenway, director of the Harvard Injury Control Research Center.

So the added risk of owning a firearm may override the positive benefits of self-protection.

Belgium is home to restrictive gun laws. The country prohibits fully automatic weapons and only allows automatic weapons in certain situations. People can only own handguns if they get expressed permission from the government. The only guns not restricted by the state are long guns.

It’s estimated that only 5% of Belgium citizens own a gun. The country’s rate of homicides caused by firearms is 0.7 per 100,000 deaths.

However, in contrast with America, Belgium is much safer. In the U.S. the rate is much higher, with an average of 4.4. homicide deaths by firearm per 100,000 people. In the U.S. there are an estimated 400 million guns. How many tons of steel could that create?

Live music and entertainment has been necessarily put on hold during the advent of the coronavirus, where close proximity and large crowds are too risky as “super spreader” events to be legally happening. But now that vaccine rollout has begun, the booking behemoth has made it clear that next year, live events and live music will be back in full force. On a call with investors yesterday, May 6, Consequence reports that Live Nation CEO Michael Rapino let concerned parties know that the bookings for 2022 have already doubled the pre-pandemic rate in 2019.

“We are already seeing confirmed major tour dates for 2022 up double digits from the same time pre-pandemic in 2019 for 2020,” Rapino said. “Many of these artists will have multi-year tours, spanning the U.S., Europe and often either Asia or Latin America, setting us up for a strong multi-year growth run. Around the world, people are showing the need to get out and socialize once again which reinforces our expectation that a return to concerts will be the logical progression as vaccines are readily available to everyone who wants to get one.”

Particularly in the US, the interest in tours has skyrocketed due to increased vaccine availability, and Rapino said he expects other markets will react similarly. “This is generally already the case in the U.S. where we are confidently planning our reopenings, particularly for outdoor shows, and we expect many of our other major markets will follow this summer,” Rapino continued.

Finally, he noted that large scale events like festivals are slated to resume this summer.

The NBA, in an attempt to make more games matter for more teams at the end of the regular season, instituted a play-in tournament to determine the 7 and 8 seeds in both conferences this year. It’s drawn some scorn from players and other folks around the league — LeBron James, in particular, is not a fan — but an issue popping up is that people just don’t seem to totally get how the whole thing works.

The fine folks at Inside the NBA tried to remedy this by having Charles Barkley do a full breakdown of the tournament. The problem that they ran into is that Chuck (probably correctly!) deduced that the teams that end up in the 7 and 8 seeds don’t have much of a chance to go on a sustained run, so instead, he just kept calling them losers while struggling to figure out if he should use his hands or a laser pointer.

This ends with a hallmark of most Inside the NBA conversations about stuff: At one point, the topic changed to something completely different when Barkley asked the fellas about their takes on “cryptocoin.” Admittedly, this did a horrific job of explaining things (despite the fact that Ernie Johnson was trying his best), but at least it was good television.

Elon Musk’s Saturday Night Live hosting gig has been, to say the least, widely discussed. Some have expressed frustration that one of the richest men in the world will be given a platform after spreading coronavirus misinformation or, perhaps, just generally never showing a capacity for comedy.

Some on the SNL staff reportedly expressed frustration about the host as well, which spurned an entirely different brand of outrage that rippled across the Internet. But others, however, are extremely excited about Musk hosting the NBC comedy show. Namely, people who are really into cryptocurrency and want Musk to mention things like Dogecoin on air.

According to a CNN report, many crypto investors are actually pinning their hopes on Musk taking part in a sketch that involves Dogecoin or some other cryptocurrency that could cause the value of the currency to soar. In fact, just the news that he would host SNL has already made prices rise to near-record levels.

“Musk will undoubtedly have a sketch on cryptocurrencies that will probably go viral for days and further motivate his army of followers to try to send Dogecoin to the moon,” wrote Ed Moya, a senior market analyst with online trading firm Oanda.

Last week, Musk dubbed himself the “dogefather” in a brief tweet promoting his SNL appearance. The coin shot up more than 30%.

It’s certainly a dream for the cryptocurrency evangelicals who earnestly follow Musk’s tweets and the memes he steals from others to fuel the currency’s value. But actually weighing this a bit critically makes it far less of a sure thing.

Musk does get to play a role in what the show airs as far as sketches, if he has good ideas, but the only thing he has control over with any certainty is the show’s opening monologue and closing credits. The cold open rarely has the show’s host in it, for example, and hosts that don’t have the requisite juice to play parts in multiple sketches often get sidelined while the cast does the heavy lifting. It’s also important to note that SNL has already covered cryptocurrency and NFTs with an Eminem parody sketch, which makes it less likely they’d retread that ground after doing so just a few weeks ago.

And then there’s perhaps the biggest obstacle to making investors happy here: making cryptocurrency actually funny. While it is certainly in Musk’s best interest to joke about crypto — and he’s certainly been willing to bend rules for comedy’s sake in the past — sketches have to get past a fairly rigorous process of workshopping in the writer’s room and also making it past rehearsals and actually into the show’s 90 minutes.

Will a sketch cut for time and posted online later be enough to see Dogecoin actually cross the one dollar mark and make investors happy? That’s tough to say. But we definitely know what a big portion of the audience Musk will bring to the show wants to see. It just may be more for profit than comedy.

[via CNN]

There are a lot of Resident Evil games, and with that comes a lot of history, lore, and absolutely bonkers science-fiction. Fortunately, Capcom has spent the last few years making digesting the series a bit easier, creating remakes of both the second and third entries in the series as well as giving new players a great entry point into the series with Resident Evil 7: Biohazard. Even more fortunately, everything you might need to know before going into Resident Evil Village, the newest game in the series, you can learn from these games and this helpful explainer, of course. As a heads up, this article will include spoilers for the previous games, particularly Resident Evil 7: Biohazard. However, if you’ve already played it, or are simply just eager to jump into Village, here’s a refresher.

First things first, it’s important to know Resident Evil 7: Biohazard marked a significant shift in the series by changing perspective in two different ways. Not only is Biohazard is the first first-person Resident Evil game, which significantly increased the “scary” factor of the series and reduced the action-adventure elements, it’s the first one where you play as a pretty normal guy — Ethan Winters.

Ethan Winters is the protagonist of Resident Evil 7: Biohazard and returns to the series in Village. Prior to 2014, Ethan lived a normal life with his wife, Mia. However, in 2014, Mia left of a business trip, got stranded in a hurricane, and was presumably lost at sea. In 2017, Ethan received an alarming email from Mia simply asking him to pick her up from the Baker ranch in Dulvey Parish, Louisiana. Naturally, Ethan set off at once, so eager he didn’t even think to inform the authorities his wife had returned from the grave. If he had, he would have been informed the area was being heavily investigated after several missing persons reports.

Once Ethan gets to the ranch and enters the nightmarish liar of the Baker family, he learns quite a bit about his wife Mia. It turns out, Mia lied to Ethan about her career and has been working as a researcher for The Connections, a crime syndicate specializing in bio-weaponry, and it gets worse: thanks to her team, an E-type bio-weapon known as Eveline is on the loose. While Eveline takes on the form of a ten-year old girl, she has supernatural abilities that allow her to create fatal mold and control people she comes into physical contact with.

While Eveline was kept stable under Mia’s care for some time, the violent hurricane caused her to snap and rebel against everyone except Mia, who she had begun to love like a mother. While she kills several of the crew members on board, Eveline merely injects Mia with mold, in hopes of preserving her life and forcing Mia to be her to act as her mother. When the pair are knocked off the ship and wash ashore at the Baker family ranch, Eveline comes to before Mia can warn the family of her gifts, and takes control over everyone at the ranch other than the Baker family’s daughter, Zoe, who is immune to her mind control and but remains trapped with her twisted family.

A lot happens over the course of Biohazard, but what’s important to know is that Ethan and his wife are ultimately rescued by Chris Redfield, one of Resident Evil’s most iconic characters. Around since the series beginning, Chris is one of the main protagonists of the first Resident Evil game, the older brother to Resident Evil 2‘s Claire, and is currently working for the Bioterrorism Security Assessment Alliance. However, while Chris has always been a “good guy,” all of that is called into question in the Resident Evil Village trailer.

Resident Evil Village takes place four years after the events of Biohazard, and Ethan and Mia are now new parents to a daughter named Rose. However, the two seemingly cannot escape their past and are once again dragged into quite the horror show, but this time the horror starts with none other than Chris, who allegedly murders Mia and kidnaps Rose. In Resident Evil Village, Ethan sets off on a quest for his daughter and the truth, and the great news is you can join him and see what happens next today.

Resident Evil Village is available now on PlayStation 4, PlayStation 5, Xbox One, Xbox Series X and Series S, Google Stadia, and PC.

Electric vehicles are no longer lofty, futuristic goals—they’re here and they’re growing in popularity. There are currently more than 650,000 battery-powered and hybrid electric cars on the road in California alone and that number is only expected to grow, both in the state and across the United States as a whole. In fact, according to industry analysts, sales of electric cars and SUVs are expected to hit record levels in 2021.

Shifting to electric vehicles and using more renewable energy sources is believed to be a big step towards creating a better world for all. Some companies such as General Motors are beginning to pave this path. EVs don’t emit tailpipe emissions, which can disproportionately affect the health of poorer neighborhoods and people of color.

Electric cars have historically had a big problem: they’re known as rich people’s cars, aka luxury vehicles that for a lot of people are simply too expensive to buy. It’s expensive to buy a new car—any new car—and the average sticker price of an electric car is $19,000 higher than an average gasoline-powered vehicle. So even though you can generally recoup this upfront cost over time because EVs can be cheaper to operate with no fueling and lower maintenance costs, people just can’t come up with the money upfront. To change this, though, GM is helping combat costs through a joint venture with LG Energy Solutions to reduce battery cell costs which may help make the vehicles more affordable to new buyers.

Of course, there were other barriers that have made owning electric cars inaccessible and inequitable in the past, contributing to their image as rich people cars, but this too is rapidly changing thanks to new developments.

One of those barriers was that EVs were also seen as too inconvenient to own in certain neighborhoods, especially in poorer neighborhoods or cities where most people rent apartments. This was partly due to range. EVs haven’t traditionally driven as far as their gasoline counterparts before requiring a “fill-up”—aka a charge. In fact, the industry average for EVs is a range of around 250 miles, though some can go a little further. This is especially a problem if you need to drive a lot, need to commute long distances, or you don’t own a garage.

This leads us into barrier number two: EV chargers are not always easy to find and they’re not equitably distributed across the United States. For example, if you don’t have a garage—as is the case for most city dwellers— you’re reliant on public charging stations, and there simply aren’t enough (yet) in cities such as New York. And when they are available, they tend to be in high-income communities. For example, in California, low-income communities have the fewest total EV chargers per capita, while high-income communities have the most.

There’s good news though: companies like General Motors are taking huge strides to help make EVs more accessible to everyone by investing $27 billion into electric and autonomous vehicles over the next five years, with specific investment in their new Ultium battery technology, which is capable of charging fast, running long, and fitting every type of vehicle, from crossovers and sedans to SUVs and trucks.

The new Ultium batteries are made up of large, pouch-style cells that can be stacked horizontally or vertically, allowing them to optimize energy storage and layout so they can be used in different-sized vehicles. They will also be capable of powering an EV with a GM estimated range of up to 450 miles on a full charge — which is way more than the current industry average of 250 miles—though of course range will vary depending on temperature, terrain, battery age, vehicle model, the load it’s carrying, and maintenance.

In addition, General Motors is working with EVgo to triple the size of the country’s largest public fast-charging network by adding more than 2,700 new fast-charging stalls in the US by the end of 2025 so that more people can charge their vehicles without issue. (Even better, all of these new chargers will be powered entirely by renewable energy.)

Once EVs become more available and more practical to own and use, they can become more accessible to everyone, no matter where they live. It’s going to take a lot to make a better world; but with corporations and individuals all doing our part, we have a fighting chance.