Just a few months removed from his and Conway The Machine’s Lulu EP, The Alchemist has apparently linked up with another gritty street rapper for a second joint project this year. Sharp-eyed Twitter users used to Shazam to backtrace a few snippets played by rapper Freddie Gibbs during a recent Instagram Live session to determine that the tracks hailed from an upcoming project apparently called Alfredo — Alchemist and Freddie’s names jammed together. Screenshots posted to Twitter depict an album cover that mirrors the iconic logo from the Godfather series, with Freddie’s hand holding a marionette control bar and the strings replaced by the titular Italian noodles.

The Shazam rabbit hole suggested that features on the project would include Conway’s Griselda records compatriot Benny The Butcher, Conway himself, coke rap maestro Rick Ross, and Tyler The Creator.

Freddie Gibbs has shown a penchant for collaborating on full projects with one producer. His Piñata and Bandana albums with Madlib have become fan favorites, while he previously worked with The Alchemist on their joint tape Fetti, which also featured Curren$y. While there’s no solid information on Alfredo‘s release, Freddie did “like” several tweets about the album and tweeted that something would come out on Friday.

Stay tuned and check out the preview of Alfredo above.

Tawny Newsome is no stranger to holding her own alongside high-profile (and extremely funny) co-stars like Hank Azaria (in Brockmire) and, now, the likes of Steve Carell and John Malkovich. Her latest gig happens to be Netflix’s Space Force, the much-anticipated reteaming of The Office‘s Carell and creator Greg Daniels that is nearly upon us. The show launches on May 29 and features Tawny as Angela Ali, a helicopter pilot for the sixth branch of the U.S. Armed Services. Let’s just say (without giving too much away) that both Angela and the actress who plays her, who’s steadily becoming a comedic force in her own right, are ready for liftoff.

Tawny recently took some time to participate in our vaunted twenty questions questionnaire series.

1. You walk into a bar. What do you order from the bartender?

Oh damn, the second we are allowed in a bar again, I’m going straight back to my Midwest college roots and doing a bourbon neat with a just-below-room-temp Miller High Life.

2. Who’s your favorite person to follow on Twitter and/or Instagram?
Jaboukie!

3. What’s currently waiting for you on your DVR or in your streaming queue?

The last episode of Homeland. I can’t bring myself to watch it. I need to believe Carrie and Saul are still out there, running around, doing spy stuff, and falling for the wrong lovers. I need to!

4. It’s your last meal — what are you going out with?

If it’s natural causes, I want something fancy like a pâté and a crisp white wine. (She died how she lived.) Freak accident? Gimme everything from Taco Bell. (Life is chaos and death should be a party.) If I’m murdered, a big cajun-style crab boil. (You wanna kill me, you’re gonna have to deal with a nasty ocean mess.)

5. What websites do you visit on a regular basis?
Outbound Collective for adventure planning, Minimalist Baker for recipes.

6. What’s the most frequently played song on your mobile device?

This is a wild one but, right now, it’s “Hold the Line” by Toto. I’ve been playing a lot of drums lately (hell yeah, quarantine). This is a nice, quick one to practice to.

7. If you could go back and give your 18-year-old self one piece of advice what would it be?

Get a full-length mirror, you absolute clown.

8. What’s the last thing you Googled?

The chords to Chaka Kahn’s “Ain’t Nobody.”

9. Dogs or cats?

Cat if it’s mine. Dog if it’s someone else’s.

10. Best concert of your life was…?

Stevie Wonder at United Center. Songs in the Key of Life. He did the album front to back. It was transcendent.

11. What book are you most likely to give as a gift?

Whichever one I JUST finished and won’t shut up about, but will 100% forget months later when you tell me you’re finally reading it.

12. What’s the nicest thing anyone has ever done for you?

My husband does so many sweet, thoughtful things for me every day that it’s very hard to pick just one. So it would really be a pile of his tiny, sweet gestures. Like “Gave me the last tortilla” and “Held my hand on every airplane ever” and “Called Verizon” etc.

13. South Park or Family Guy?

I mean, sure.

14. You have an entire day to do whatever you want. What would you do?

Morning hike someplace remote and weird, then a Korean spa ($20 gets you half a day of bohemian luxury, plus there’s lunch!), and dinner someplace with oysters.

15. What movie can you not resist watching if it’s on?
Housesitter. Can’t resist Goldie Hawn, can’t resist tales about harmless con artists. It hits all the marks.

16. The sports team or teams you’re most passionate about?

This is a trap, and I won’t be fooled so easily.

17. Where did you eat the best meal of your life?

The French Laundry. BOUGIE ALERT. Sorry. I know. I took my Dad for his 60th Birthday, and it cost as much as my Chicago rent at the time, but it was very worth it.

18. The last movie you saw in a theater?
Cats! And I kinda hope it stays that way

19. Who was your first celebrity crush?

Alexander Siddiq. Deep Space Nine‘s dreamy Dr. Bashir had my heart from a young age.

20. What would you cook if Nic Cage were coming to your house for dinner?

Okay, we are gonna throw a pizza in the oven and open some mediocre wine. I don’t have time to flex my culinary skills, we gotta get to the bottom of WHY Nic is in my home. We all will need answers here, and I will need to focus. The coq au vin can wait.

PREVIOUSLY: Rory Scovel

Elmo has been a Sesame Street star for decades, but after all this time, there are still things in show business the fuzzy red monster hasn’t done. Now, though, he has crossed one off his list: He is the host of The Not-Too-Late Show With Elmo, a new late-night (but again, not too late) talk show on HBO Max. The series started streaming yesterday, and Elmo already has some all-star musical performances in the books.

Lil Nas X stopped by the program to cover the timeless classic “Elmo’s Song” alongside the song’s namesake. For the second half of the song, Elmo bestowed the ultimate honor upon his guest by re-branding the tune “Lil Nas X’s Song.” Also appearing on the show was Kacey Musgraves, who took the stage and busted out a lovely acoustic rendition of “Rubber Duckie”

Ahead of the show’s premiere, Sesame Street shared a preview of the first episode, which featured the Jonas Brothers on as guests. Elmo came in hot with the hard-hitting questions, beginning the interview by asking the brothers to make goofy faces. Nick, Joe, and Kevin also stuck around to sing a song about brushing your teeth.

Watch clips from The Not-Too-Late Show With Elmo above and below.

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The most infamous disaster in gaming history has inspired pop culture and sparked an excavation in New Mexico to prove it wasn’t an urban legend. The failures of 1982’s E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial on the Atari 2600 are legendary: the game was a buggy disaster that mostly entailed falling into and crawling out of an endless string of holes. The movie tie-in was such a bust that thousands of unsold copies ended up in a landfill and became an infamous lesson in failure. It’s also something unlikely to ever happen again in an industry where no game is truly unfixable.

In an industry more crowded than ever, modern video games are often released as works in progress. Even the most well-made and crowd-pleasing game may contain small bugs and require updates. These patches fix problems and add new experiences to the game that create added value. And while they open the door for frustrating add-on cost with DLC and microtransactions, in the right hands it’s a system prevents outright disasters like E.T. from ever happening again.

That doesn’t mean gaming is without disappointing titles. Bad games still hit the market and highly-anticipated titles can still miss the mark. But those failures can sometimes be mitigated, and given time some games have risen to the level many hoped they’d reach when their first looks caused reason for excitement in the first place. The clearest example of a game that underwhelmed after sky-high expectations was No Man’s Sky, which was released in 2016 to a decidedly lukewarm reaction amid a mountain of hype and anticipation. The 2013 reveal trailer promised to be real footage from the game, which populated its vast planets and ecosystems as entirely procedural.

No Man’s Sky promised a universe of 18 quintillion planets filled with diverse wildlife and secrets to uncover. The hype was so big after its E3 trailer that Hello Games got death threats when the game was delayed a few months. And the actual release, though reviewed positively by some, largely disappointed. Multiplayer was put on the shelf for years, one of many features missing from the initial pitch. The vast universe of the game felt sparse and empty, and once you got over the visuals of random planets and creatures, there just wasn’t a whole lot to do.

For many who spent $60 on release day, buyer’s remorse was instantaneous. To this day the hype and marketing has negatively impacted the reputation of a game that’s changed considerably in the nearly four years since its release. In that time, Hello Games has rolled out many of its initial promises and then some. I bought it in September 2019 for $20 and got more than my money’s worth. The game is sprawling and expansive — earlier that month, it put out its Beyond update. Players can now grow “living ships” out of eggs and take part in multiple narrative arcs, with both solo and multiplayer missions.

It’s far from perfect, and can tend to be grindy and sparse in moments. Even now, it still has its bugs and quirks — the animation can be janky and I’ve had some freezes and save glitches that have frustratingly lost me a few hours of play — but it’s a title that also has missions and objectives actually worth losing. If you were to take the product for what it is, not knowing its reputation for initial failure, you’d be more than satisfied by the title it’s become. It just took years of development, much of it coming after the gamers who gave it a try because of its initial hype largely came away disappointed. For those that might give it a try when it hits Xbox Game Pass in June, they might have a completely different reaction to it than they would have on PC in 2016.

For games that struggled out of the gate, getting those users back is a difficult challenge. This spring saw a major expansion to Fallout 76, another title that made more news for what it lacked than what it was. Billed as four times bigger than Fallout 4, Bethesda braced fans for “spectacular” issues that were inevitable with a MMORPG version of Fallout. And the issues did come, along with some more basic complaints that Fallout 76: Wastelanders aimed to remedy.

Fallout 76 was an attempt at making a very different kind of Fallout game, though it came with the traditional catchy music and marketing of major Fallout release full of promise. But what Bethesda learned is that gamers wanted things they were used to getting from those games: namely, non-player characters to flesh out the lore and feel of a world. Without those elements, the game’s bugs and issues were even more apparent in a much more barren post-apocalyptic landscape. And so Wastelanders brings with it a raft of new NPCs that have “returned” to the West Virginia gamers first explored and found full of dangerous creatures and robots but completely devoid of living NPCs.

“With Wastelanders we got to take the bold vision of the original game and fill it in so it’s closer to the game that a lot of our fans wanted all along,” said Jeff Gardiner, project lead for Wastelanders at Bethesda. “Hopefully we did it in such a way that the people that already love it have reasons to enjoy it even more.”

If you’ve already played through hours of Fallout 76, the Wastelanders update now adds a Miscellaneous mission back at Vault 76 where you encounter treasure hunters looking for something in the still-sealed vault. From there, the NPC-filled mission fills out. And if you’re giving 76 a try for the first time with Wastelanders, your journey in the game begins by encountering these NPCs seconds after you emerge, as if they’ve always been there.

“We layered them in organically,” said Ferret Baudoin, lead designer of Fallout 76. “A year has passed and the world has changed with the arrival of outsiders adding another layer of history and interest to Appalchia.”

Much has been made of the problems gamers have found in Fallout 76 in its first year, but those that worked on it said the community that’s formed around the game — even if it tends to dive into the absurd — has a direct impact on whether improvements actually get made in a title.

“I know I’m going to sound corny, but we’re blessed,” Baudoin said, noting the active community in Fallout 76 despite its rough first year. “They’re dedicated, passionate, and have built a real community. Their feedback made a world of difference and has made Wastelanders shine all the brighter.”

Other developers say the key element in a game improving well after its release date is fan support, even if they’re not entirely satisfied with the result, because it’s likely the feeling is mutual.

“Hopefully your team cares and wants to make that adjustment to support those fans,” said Blake Low, a senior environment artist at V1 Interactive. Low’s team is working to release a first person shooter called Disintegration this summer, but he’s a Bungie alum that’s worked on Halo titles and Destiny 2, which has seen its own raft of updates and expansions in the years since its 2017 release. Many of those came after fan outcry over the life of the game, something that comes with the territory when it comes to modern titles.

“That’s something we’re trying to do right now. Be out there, be listening and continue that post-launch. And see what fans want,” Low said of Disintegration. “We’re not really talking about any DLC plans but we know we’re going to support the game post-launch. and it’s really based on what the fans want. So it is definitely important that the team cares. It makes the fans care more, too.”

Another V1 employee compared games like No Man’s Sky and Anthem — which will also see its core gameplay entirely reworked after a much-hyped but overall disappointing launch — to ET, but with a key difference. Unlike the Atari game forever trapped by its source code, the modern disappointments can always find second life after launch. As long, of course, as gamers are willing to return to give the game another chance.

Tom Cruise will (whenever movies start filming again) win his unofficial Hollywood space race with the Fast and Furious franchise to make the first narrative feature filmed in outer space. He’ll do so by reteaming with director Doug Liman (Edge of Tomorrow, American Made) to film on the International Space station with NASA’s blessing. The project will also be a partnership with SpaceX CEO Elon Musk, and who knows when this will actually happen, given that Cruise is currently entrenched within Mission: Impossible franchise productions. However, NASA administrator Jim Bridenstine has opened up on his hopes for the space-filmed movie, and he may be onto something.

Bridenstein spoke on camera ahead of Wednesday’s now-delayed SpaceX Demo-2 mission, as transcribed by the New York Post from within hours of footage. In short, the NASA chief revealed that his own career was inspired by Cruise’s Top Gun performance, and he hopes that the space-set film will inspire the next Elon Musk:

“I don’t admit this very often… but I was inspired to become a Navy pilot because when I was in elementary school, I watched the movie Top Gun… The question is, ‘Can Tom Cruise make a new movie that inspires the next generation Elon Musk?’ And if he can do that, then we’re all for it. NASA is all in.”

Sure, a next-gen Elon Musk might bring more bizarre baby names into the world, but the innovative soul that comes along with that would be priceless. Speaking of which, the SpaceX Crew Dragon launch has been rescheduled for Saturday. If it gets off the ground, the mission will make history with NASA astronauts onboard, so let’s hope for a safe liftoff, as well as for Tom Cruise movies to start shooting again soon.

(Via NASA & New York Post)

All over the country this week, citizens have mourned and protested the death of 46-year-old George Floyd, who was killed by Minnesota police when an officer knelt on his neck despite his pleas that he couldn’t breathe. Now, however, the world has even more reason to mourn Floyd’s death, as The Houston Chronicle revealed in its report on the incident that the Houston native was formerly a member of one of the city’s most storied hip-hop groups: DJ Screw’s Screwed Up Click.

The Houston-based group was instrumental in the creation of the “chopped-and-screwed” style of extremely slowed down music that prevails in rap music to this day. The group also included members such as Big Moe, Big Pokey, Fat Pat, Lil Flip, Lil Keke, Trae Tha Truth, and Z-Ro, having a lasting influence over the region’s rap scene that can be heard in the music of well-known affiliates like Devin The Dude and UGK.

“Sittin On Top Of The World,” one of the crew’s standout regional hits, has been making the rounds on social media and Reddit in response to Floyd’s death according to Billboard. You can play the song above. Floyd was also briefly a member of Presidential Playas, releasing the album Block Party in 2000.

Read the full Houston Chronicle report here.

Sometimes, yes, it’s nice to watch a nice movie about nice people just trying to make their way in this world. Though, as director Nisha Ganatra (whose last film, Late Night, was a Sundance sensation) explains, the antagonist in The High Note (which will be available to purchase for streaming this Friday) is the institutionalized norms of the music industry itself. There’s no fiend twirling a mustache trying to sabotage anyone. Even the corporate suits with bad ideas in this movie are, in the end, trying to be helpful. The problem is the system.

Dakota Johnson plays Maggie, a personal assistant to the legendary Grace Davis (Tracee Ellis Ross). Maggie wants to be a producer, but is quickly learning about the obstacles set in place to make sure that doesn’t happen. Grace Davis is a world-renowned recording artist, but the record executives aren’t really keen on hearing about her new material (as she points out in the movie, only one black woman over 40 has ever had a number one song) and is pushing her to do a residency in Las Vegas. But, deep down, the heart of this movie is about people trying to do their best when the deck is stacked against them.

Oh, and then Bull Pullman shows up. And as Ganatra explains, she’s a big fan of Bill Pullman.

This movie seems just like, mostly, a bunch of nice people trying to make their way.

I mean, I always liked these big movies, these big studio films that just make you feel uplifted. You can follow your dreams and everything’s going to work out for you. I just feel people don’t make movies like that anymore. I don’t know if we got cynical as a culture, but I just really, always loved to feel really great when I leave the movie theater. It just appealed to me in that way that I haven’t seen in a long time.

And then Bill Pullman shows up, making everything better.

That is one of my favorite things. Everybody has that same feeling when Bill Pullman shows up. Everyone’s like, “Oh, yeah, everything’s going to be okay.” I love that was his voice on the radio all along. Because I think people kind of know it in the back of their heads, but then when they see him, there’s that feeling of relief and satisfaction. It’s also because you’ve been hearing his voice in the movie, and you just didn’t know. You know?

Was that a surprise to you? How much people love Bill Pullman?

No, because I’m so into Bill Pullman.

Okay, good.

I wasn’t surprised! Because I think everybody loves Bill Pullman. So as soon as we heard he was available, everybody universally agreed that it should be his part.

Okay, so you went to Bill Pullman and you said, “We have to have Bill Pullman in this movie.”

Yes. For sure. Because it was kind of like, who do buy as the radio DJ dad? Who also is fueled by he was a good dad, makes a good person, and was kind of cool, and a little edgier in his years and now is still kind of cool, but just sort of settled down a bit. It was kind of a very specific thing. And also who has a good radio voice?

Last week when Trump posted that stupid Independence Day video on Twitter, Bill Pullman came out against it. And I love that he did that.

Yeah. I feel so many actors play it safe politically, and they shouldn’t: artists are political temperature takers and aligners of our society. Artists are the ones who are supposed to speak out and get arrested, and go to jail, and right the moral wrongs that have been done, and at least call attention to them. I loved it when he did that. I just thought, yes! Yeah! I’ve been missing that. Where are the people who aren’t afraid of losing followers, but are just like, no, this is wrong. And I’m calling it out?

Like the Michael Jordan “Republicans buy shoes, too” line that was discussed in the recent documentary about him.

I haven’t seen Jordan doc, but that sounds a devastating moment. Oh my god, no.

He says it was a joke.

It’s like when John Waters said, “Don’t buy a house. Because as soon as you buy a house, you’ve got a mortgage. And as soon as you have to pay a mortgage, you start compromising.”

Is it difficult to make a movie without a true antagonist? Even Grace Davis, she has her moments, but seems like a nice person.

Well, I guess to me the villain was the limitations of the music industry itself. Grace is wholly confident and capable and doesn’t question herself or apologize for herself, but the industry is deeming her irrelevant. And I think that’s the villain: sexism and ageism. And so I felt like I was always fighting that as the villain in the arc, but that I wasn’t interested in a story where women were not working together and helping each other. And I love that in this movie they’re each other’s allies, even when they’re sort of getting on each other’s nerves, but they don’t work to hold the other one back. Each is the other one’s biggest supporter, and that is a really important message that needs to be put out there because so many times we’re told this myth of this idea that there’s only room at the table for one woman.

I think the older generation of women, who gave that incredible groundbreaking work to help us all get in, bought into that myth a little bit in front of them. And I think now it’s sort of being exposed that that was a myth all along. And nobody had to believe that, that there’s room at the table for everyone. And in fact, if you try to get more women at the table, it makes your job and your experience more satisfying all around, and everybody can rise together rather than fearing that another person coming in is direct competition for you.

‘The High Note’ will be available via VOD this weekend. You can contact Mike Ryan directly on Twitter.

For the 12th year in a row, and 17 out of the last 18, CBS is the most-watched network on television. Game of Thrones, The Walking Dead, and Better Call Saul get all the internet attention, but in the real world, where your grandparents reside, the titans of TV are NCIS (15.3 million viewers/episode), FBI (12.5 million), and Young Sheldon (11.4 million). The Big Bang Theory spin-off is the top-rated comedy, while a show you, a young person, actually watched, The Good Place, is down at #100 with 3.5 million.

The top 10 goes:

1. NFL Sunday Night Football (NBC) 19.9 million
2. NCIS (CBS) 15.3 milion
3. NFL Thursday Night Football (Fox/NFL Network) 15 million
4. NFL Monday Night Football (ESPN) 12.7 million
5. FBI (CBS) 12.5 million
6. Blue Bloods (CBS) 11.9 million
7. Chicago Fire (NBC) 11.6 million
8. This Is Us (NBC) 11.5 million
9. Young Sheldon (CBS) 11.4 million
10. Chicago PD (NBC) 11.2 million

(That’s by total viewers. If you sort by the key 18-to-49 demographic, it’s football in the top three spots, followed by The Masked Singer, The Last Dance, This Is Us, The Bachelor, Grey’s Anatomy, 9-1-1, Chicago P.D., and The Walking Dead. Slightly better?)

Here’s a fun game: how many of the 100 most-watched shows on TV do you watch? Not including football, and with all due respect to the anonymously popular God Friended Me, Bob Hearts Abishola, Bluff City Law, Curse of Oak Island, and Council of Dads (have you heard of Council of Dads? I have not), I’m at six. Someone remind me to binge all of NCIS: New Orleans (#22), so I have something to talk about with my family this Thanksgiving. I draw the line at Ellen’s Game of Games (#72), though.

And if you sort by network:

1. CBS (7,676,000; down 14%)
2. NBC (6,628,000; down 9%)
3. Fox (6,391,000; up 17%)
4. ABC (5,458,000; down 3%)
5. Univision (1,461,000; up 6%)
6. Ion (1,282,000; down 2%)
7. Telemundo (1,107,000; down 8%)
8. The CW (1,040,000; down 22%)
9. Me TV (740,000; up 5%)
10. Unimas (523,000; up 40%)

Shoutout to Me TV, the home of “classic television,” including The Andy Griffith Show, The Flintstones, and Petticoat Junction. I hope Gomer Pyle slaughters Young Sheldon in the ratings for the 2020-2021 season. For the full ratings list, click here.

Lil Yachty kicked off March with one of the year’s finest music videos so far, for “Oprah’s Bank Account.” The clip featured him as an Oprah-like talk show host interviewing Drake and DaBaby, and it served as a teaser of the guests that would end up appearing on the tracklist for the since-announced Lil Boat 3. The album is set to drop tomorrow, and ahead of that, he has shared the full tracklist.

The 19-song effort of course features “Oprah’s Bank Account,” and there are plenty of other guest spots on top of that. “T.D” is particularly loaded, as it features ASAP Rocky, Tyler The Creator, and Tierra Whack. Elwhere on the album, Future, Mike Will Made-It, Draft Day, Lil Keed, Lil Durk, and Young Thug can be found.

Check out the full Lil Boat 3 tracklist below.

1. “Top Down”
2. “Wock In Stock”
3. “Split/Whole Time”
4. “T.D” Feat. ASAP Rocky, Tyler The Creator, and Tierra Whack
5. “Pardon Me” Feat. Future and Mike Will Made-It
6. “Demon Time” Feat. Draft Day
7. “Black Jesus”
8. “From Down Bad”
9. “Love Jones”
10. “Can’t Go”
11. “Oprah’s Bank Account” Feat. Drake and DaBaby
12. “Range Rover Sports Truck” Feat. Lil Keed
13. “Lemon Head”
14. “Don’t Forget”
15. “Up There Music”
16. “Westside”
17. “Till The Morning” Feat. Lil Durk and Young Thug
18. “Whew’ Chile”
19. “Concrete Boys”