GoneTrending

Joe Rogan’s been pretty quiet this week ahead of a few changes: (1) The Joe Rogan Experience moving to Spotify on September 1; (2) The host himself moving to Texas. Still, his words about Twitter (during a recent episode with guests Whitney Cummings and Annie Lederman) are making the rounds. He remains moderately active on the social media platform by linking his “satanic” Instagram posts and retweeting stories, but he’s not diving into arguments in that realm. And as it turns out, Rogan thinks that Twitter’s pretty “toxic” and that it’s days are numbered.

“I think Twitter’s gonna be like Blockbuster video. I think we’re gonna look back, ‘You remember when we used to communicate through Twitter? Like, oh my God, it was so toxic. Everybody was so mean,” the podcast host declared.

He’s not wrong at all about the level of vitriol that gets churned up on Twitter on a minute-by-minute basis, and he might be correct because, really, who’s using MySpace these days? Even though Twitter’s been hanging on for over a decade, plenty of people have to take regular breaks from all the negativity on the platform. New social media platforms will continue to surface, and one of them might grab enough people away from the urge to tweet. Rogan agrees and looks at Blockbusters’s demise (due to the rise of streaming) as an example.

“We’re going to hit some new thing, next, that is going to read each other’s minds… It’s going to make this seem like nonsense,” Rogan said. “There is no empathy in these conversations and that’s a big part of the problem.”

Yep, Joe Rogan’s looking for some empathy in this world, and there’s not too much to be found on Twitter. There might be some left in the the last Blockbuster, though, since it’s an Airbnb and looks pretty cozy these days.

Dua Lipa dropped her highly-anticipated sophomore record Future Nostalgia at the onset of the lockdown. While the singer managed to share a handful of videos ahead of quarantine, Lipa is now asking fans to get directly involved in her next “Levitating” visual with a new contest.

Announcing the casting call on social media, Lipa described the TikTok contest’s entry rules:

“Hey guys! I’m so excited to tell you that I’m working on a music video for ‘Levitating,’ and I want you to be a part of it! Whether it’s choreography, makeup, animation, it starts on TikTok. Take part in the #DuaVideo challenge and you or your work could be featured in the official music video. I can’t wait to see what you come up with.”

Ahead of putting out the call for contributors, Dua Lipa tapped DJ Blessed Madonna to serve up a remix of “Levitating” featuring icons Madonna and Missy Elliot. The remix is just one of the singles off the singer’s upcoming Club Future Nostalgia record, out Friday, which also boasts collaborations from the likes of Mark Ronson and Gwen Stefani.

See Dua Lipa’s casting call above and find the contest’s terms and conditions here.

Club Future Nostalgia is out 8/28 via Warner. Pre-order it here.

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

The Boston Celtics and the Toronto Raptors are slated to square off in a highly-anticipated conference semifinal series. Game 1 is currently scheduled to tip off on Thursday evening, but according to a report by Marc Spears of ESPN, players on both teams have met to discuss a potential boycott of the game.

Spears brings word that players discussed taking some sort of serious measure following the police shooting of Jacob Blake, a 29-year-old Black man who was shot multiple times in the back by police officers as he was getting into his car, where his three children were seated. Blake, whose lawyers say he was attempting to de-escalate an incident when the police arrived, is currently paralyzed from the waist down, and it is not expected that he will be able to walk again.

As Spears reports, the players are putting every potential option on the table, and the expectations that they will discuss next steps on Wednesday night.

Raptors coach Nick Nurse confirmed both elements of this reporting on Wednesday afternoon, adding that some players have discussed leaving the Bubble to go home.

More broadly speaking, Chris Haynes of Yahoo Sports reports that the NBPA, including president Chris Paul and vice president Andre Iguodala, are part of discussions about what players can do in response to the incident.

A number of players have spoken out in recent days about the morale around the Bubble following Blake’s shooting. While it is unclear who was part of the conversations that occurred between the two teams, Boston’s Jaylen Brown and Marcus Smart and Toronto’s Norman Powell and Fred VanVleet were candid in media sessions about the situation, saying that the current plan to keep social justice in the public discourse with the hopes of spurring societal change while in the Bubble has been unsuccessful.

Nas’ record King’s Disease dropped last week and the veteran rapper has been reminiscing on his early career in promotional interviews. Nas recently recalled his final conversation with Tupac was over a diss track. Now, the rapper reminisces on the time he was supposed to record a verse for Notorious B.I.G., but hit a major roadblock.

In a recent interview with The Breakfast Club, Nas gave an explanation as to why his Biggie collaboration never saw the light of day:

“I got too high. I was in the studio and Big was rolling up some of that Chocolate from Brooklyn and he didn’t warn me. I was zonked out, yo. There’s pictures of that session out there. I think, yeah, we were supposed to do a couple of songs. I was going to remix some stuff for Ready To Die. One of them I did was ‘Gimme The Loot.’”

Charlamagne Tha God was incredulous at Nas’ story: “And you got too high to get on ‘Gimme The Loot.’ Why not come back the next day?” Nas replied, “Still high.”

The rapper continued that, back in the day, it was difficult to line things up. “Man, that smoke. We were smokers and still are, still am,” Nas said. “Things happened, I lived far out in Manhattan and at the time, coming to the city was like a mission. It was hard to get me to move, man.”

Elsewhere in the interview, Nas addressed the fact his release dates always seem to line up with Jay-Z’s: “Yo, bro that’s a hell of coincidence; that’s some confidence for you!” he said. “I think things just happen; just synergy, you know? Jay would know better than me.”

Watch a clip of Nas’ The Breakfast Club interview above.

King’s Disease is out now via Mass Appeal. Get it here.

Ammonite, director Francis Lee’s follow-up to his acclaimed God’s Own Country, stars Kate Winslet as a famous fossil finder (an FFF, if you will) who develops a romantic relationship with a shy married woman played by Saoirse Ronan. If longing gazes on a constantly-overcast British seashore gets you going, this is the movie for you! It’s the first time Winslet and Ronan have worked together, and they brought their nominated-for-a-combined-11-Oscars talent to self-choreographing one of the film’s sex scenes.

“Saoirse and I choreographed the scene ourselves,” Winslet told the Hollywood Reporter. “It’s definitely not like eating a sandwich. I just think Saoirse and I, we just felt really safe. Francis was naturally very nervous. And I said to him, ‘Listen, let us work it out.’ And we did. ‘We’ll start here. We’ll do this with the kissing, boobs, you go down there, then you do this, then you climb up here.’ I mean, we marked out the beats of the scene so that we were anchored in something that just supported the narrative. I felt the proudest I’ve ever felt doing a love scene on Ammonite. And by far the least self-conscious.”

I dunno about you, Kate Winslet, but “you go down there, then you do this, then you climb up here” is how I eat a sandwich. Anyway, there are countless horror stories about the things male directors have made actresses do in sex scenes, so Winslet and Ronan choreographing the scene to make them feel most at ease is a welcome change of pace.

(Via the Hollywood Reporter)

The Indiana Pacers are in the market for a new head coach. According to the statement released by the team, Nate McMillan, who has been at the helm of the franchise since 2016, has been relieved of his duties. The news comes following the team’s sweep at the hands of the Miami Heat in the NBA’s Orlando Bubble.

While McMillan has had plenty of regular season success during his time in Nap Town, accruing a 183-136 record during his time in charge, the team has struggled to make much noise in the playoffs. While Indiana has made it to the postseason all four years that he has been the coach, it has failed to make it out of the first round. Outside of one series in which they pushed LeBron James and the Cleveland Cavaliers to seven games, every other postseason appearance has ended in a sweep.

Adrian Wojnarowski of ESPN beings a bit of interesting news about where the team could look next. According to Woj’s reporting, the Pacers have an eye on the situation in Houston, where Rockets coach Mike D’Antoni does not have a contract beyond this year.

The next year is a big one for the Pacers franchise. All-Star guard Victor Oladipio can become an unrestricted free agent at the conclusion of the 2020-21 campaign. There is no word on whether that impacted the team’s decision to move on from McMillan, although it had been previously mention that rumblings about his job security have swirled “all season long.”

It’s not uncommon to discover that an entertainment star has some connections in the industry that helped them get to where they are, whether that be family or somebody else close to them. Saweetie had that sort of contact: Gabrielle Union is her cousin. Saweetie says, though, that she wanted to achieve success on her own, so she refused help from the actress.

Saweetie explained the situation, saying during a recent Desus & Mero interview:

“They were all kind of upset at me because they heard ‘My Type’ and was like, ‘We didn’t know you was doing music. What you doin’ over there?’ But me, I have so much pride. I believe in being self-made and trying to figure things out on my own. I appreciated that they reached out and was like, ‘We see what you’re doing. Our friends keep talking about you. We see you and if you need our help, please let us know.’ So I appreciate the support, but for me, like, I’ve always been self-motivated. So, instead of asking for help, I just wanted to see if I could do it on my own.”

Watch the interview above.

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

Paul George struggled through the first four games of the Los Angeles Clippers’ playoff slate in the NBA’s Orlando Bubble. He broke out of that slump in a big way on Tuesday night, scoring 35 points and looking like the All-Star he is as the Clippers throttled the Dallas Mavericks and moved one game away from advancing to the conference semifinals.

After the game, George opened up about what has caused him to struggle. As he explained to Jared Greenberg of TNT, George found himself in a “bad” and “dark place” while he’s been in the Bubble, but believes he has made it to the other side of that.

“Whatever it was, I mean, the Bubble got the best of me,” George said. “I was just in a dark place, I really wasn’t here, I checked out. These past couple games, it was difficult. But shoutout to people who stood behind me, that was in my corner. The positivity, my teammates, my family, friends, everybody, thanks to everybody that reached out to me. I was just in a bad place, and I found my way. I’m back. And I look forward to the rest of this run.”

There was plenty of talk after Game 4 that something was up with George, but it was unclear exactly what was going on. During his postgame media availability, he expanded on this, commenting on how he was struggling with his mental health.

“I underestimated mental health, honestly,” George said. “I had anxiety, a little bit of depression. Just being locked in here, I just wasn’t there, I checked out. Games 2, 3, 4, I wasn’t there, I felt like I wasn’t there.”

George mentioned conversations he had with the team’s psychiatrist that played a role in his “energy” and “spirit” changing, while Clippers coach Doc Rivers explained that the team made it a point to rally around him to help get him out of his funk.

“PG and I sat in my room after the game,” Rivers said. “We just had a long talk, not all about basketball, really. Several players did it. Guys were knocking on his door.”

A few players have discussed how hard it can be staying in the Bubble, a heavily-controlled and regulated environment in which they’re away from their families and friends and there’s no escape from playing basketball. George deserves a ton of credit — as would anyone who is being this open about how mental health can impact anyone — for being this clear about what’s being going on, particularly because it can be brutally difficult to normalize having conversations about anxiety and depression.

Conservative culture critics are continuing to try to make an example of Cardi B, even though they really should have learned their lesson by now. The latest is former Congressional candidate and podcast host DeAnna Lorraine, who decided to make an odd comparison while watching the Republican National Convention last night.

“America needs far more women like Melania Trump and far less like Cardi B,” Lorraine opined, parroting pundits like California Congressional candidate James P. Bradley and Fox News host Tucker Carlson, who seem to be really, really invested in Cardi’s new song, “WAP” — after discovering it “accidentally,” of course.

Cardi, who never lets these sorts of insults slide for too long, batted back with a succinct reminder that the gap between herself and the former model is actually pretty slim. “Didn’t she used to sell that Wap?” Cardi questioned. While that’s perhaps an exaggeration — all evidence suggests that Mrs. Trump was only ever a nude model before dating Donald Trump in 2000 and marrying him in 2004 — Cardi’s next tweet made the comparison less of a contrast and more of a parallel. “This pic giving me ‘Yeah, you f*ckin wit some wet ass pussy’ vibes,” she wrote, sharing a photo from one of Melania’s aforementioned nude photoshoots.

Of course, the more she’s harangued by Republicans hoping to use her as an avatar of America’s moral decay, the more attention and success “WAP” receives. It just spent its second week at No. 1 on the Hot 100 and spawned a theme-appropriate merch line selling T-shirts, sweats, raincoats, and umbrellas emblazoned with the song’s title. Maybe taking down Cardi is like “draining the swamp” — you know, saying one thing while totally doing the opposite.

Cardi B is a Warner Music artist. Uproxx is an independent subsidiary of Warner Music Group.

Netflix’s The Witcher (which proved to be better than it had any right to be) is rolling film again on Season 2. Yes, really, and Henry Cavill recently posted an unflattering photo of himself as proof, and the good news is that a ton of fresh The Witcher content will eventually arrive. Given the success of the video games, books, and the show’s first season, Netflix has officially turned it into a franchise; so, we’ll see a live-action prequel series called The Witcher: Blood Origin and an animated, feature length movie called Nightmare of the Wolf. Before those happen, fans can also get a satisfying dose of Geralt of Rivia with an upcoming 32-minute special called Making The Witcher.

Above, Netflix has dropped a trailer for the special, which promises “the secrets behind the saga.” Front and center, the video dives into the climactic first-episode fight scene between Geralt and Renfri (Emma Appleton). As one might imagine, their flawless swashbuckling did not come effortlessly, and Cavill even ditches the Geralt wig to concentrate on nailing his moves. It was worth it, and as Cavill reveals in this video, the exhilarating scene that only lasted two minutes involved a full ten days of training. (And that’s after he basically held a sword in his hand for months on end, just to get used to the feel.)

Naturally, the special should show us how Lauren Schmidt Hissrich wove three separate storylines — those of Geralt, Yennifer, and Yiri — together. The first season didn’t do so in a completely seamless manner, but the second season won’t be jumping around as much (especially since Geralt and Yiri finally crossed paths in the season finale), which should be a relief to anyone who grew slightly confused while watching.

Making The Witcher is streaming on Netflix now.