When he’s not fleeing his constituents for Cancún or helping inspire violent Trump supporters to overturn democracy, Ted Cruz can be found annoying people on Twitter and then getting owned. No one likes him, not even the star of his favorite movie. On Saturday he was at it again, using social media to agitate an already agitated situation: the band of anti-vaxx truckers cruising around the nation, protesting mandates. And of course, it only ended up with Cruz getting owned.
On Friday, the mayor of Vancouver, Kennedy Stewart, released a statement made a simple request of the truckers, who were planning a protest in the city: “As the Mayor of a city with an over 95 per cent vaccination rate, my message to the convoy is this: Vancouver doesn’t want you here. Make your point and then go home.”
Mayor says “Vancouver doesn’t want” truck drivers there.
But Cruz wasn’t moved by the call for public health measures. Indeed, he seemed to want to make it worse. “Mayor says “Vancouver doesn’t want” truck drivers there,” he tweeted. “Folks might feel differently with empty shelves.”
Is it strange for an American politician, even one born in Canada, to joke about citizens in another country to go hungry? You betcha. His tweet did not go unnoticed by Stewart himself, who clapped back by pointing out his grim hope was impossible anyway.
Can someone tell @tedcruz our store shelves are fine thanks to the 90% of Canadian truckers who are fully vaccinated.
“Can someone tell @tedcruz our store shelves are fine thanks to the 90% of Canadian truckers who are fully vaccinated. Too busy high-fiving all the awesome folks in #Vancouver that are helping push back against the #hateconvoy.”
It’s not the first time in the last few days that Cruz was humiliated on Twitter. Late last week he was dragged for daring to make a Cancún joke as his constituents once again found themselves without power during a winter storm.
Over the last few years, Schoolboy Q has grown to love the game of golf. It’s something he spoke about heavily during the release of his fifth album, Crash Talk. Back in 2020, he appeared in a trailer for the game PGA Tour 2K21 alongside WWE Superstar The Miz, PGA Tour cover athlete Justin Thomas, and Christopher McDonald (aka Shooter McGavin from the Adam Sandler comedy Happy Gilmore). Fast forward to the present and Schoolboy Q has been enjoying his time as a participant in the 2022 AT&T Pebble Beach Pro-Am in California. During his time there, the rapper was asked how golf has impacted him.
“Coming where I come from, the life that I had, I never thought about playing golf, and I got into it and it changed my mental,” he said. “It let me learn myself as a person, like this is why certain things in my life are going bad or why certain things are going good because of the attitude thing, you get what I’m saying? It fixed my attitude in life, it fixed a lot of things about me in life.”
Schoolboy added, “Life is a golf game — some good shots, some bad shots. But most importantly, keep going you never know. Don’t give up because you’re in the sand on your fourth shot, you might chip it in. It just taught me a lot about life.”
You can watch Schoolboy Q speak about his connection to golf in the video above.
The Brooklyn Nets are in freefall right now, having lost seven straight games to slide to 29-23, just a half-game above the No. 7 seeded Raptors. Their losing streak has come with Kevin Durant sidelined with a knee sprain, Kyrie Irving still in and out of the lineup as a part-time player only playing on the road, and James Harden battling a hamstring issue that has kept him out four of the last six games (including Sunday night’s upcoming game against Denver he’s been ruled out of).
On top of injury issues, there’s apparent discontent with the current situation in Brooklyn from Harden, who reportedly isn’t thrilled with Irving’s part-time status or the fact that he is once again finding himself having to carry the bulk of the creative load on a team he figured to share the spotlight on with two other stars. That has led to growing buzz about the potential for Harden to leave the Nets this summer when he’s able to become a free agent, and even some murmurs that he could be had at the trade deadline should the 76ers, known to covet the star, offer Brooklyn a sizable trade package with Ben Simmons as the focal point.
On Sunday, prior to their game against the Nuggets, Steve Nash offered a public rebuttal to those rumors, telling reporters in his pregame availability that Harden has confirmed to Nash that he wants to be in Brooklyn, and Nash offered as firm an on the record response to trade rumors as you can get.
Reporter: “It sounded like you guys are not trading James Harden.”
Now, there isn’t a world in which Nash would stand before reporters and tell them they’re going to trade Harden at this point, but it’s notable that he says this four days before the deadline, pouring cold water on Philly’s dream of nabbing the star during the season. It still feels most likely that Harden’s situation gets interesting this summer and that he, at the very least, explores his options outside of the Nets in free agency, which maybe leads to a sign-and-trade situation.
While Harden may not be on the block, the Nets do figure to be active this week in trying to upgrade the roster, both in the immediate to try and keep things afloat until Durant comes back and even for when their stars are all at full strength, as there’s serious uncertainty about Joe Harris’ availability going forward this season.
Jackass Forever has made a lot of people happy, especially those who enjoy watching middle-aged men repeatedly destroy their genitals. But one group that’s not pleased is PETA, aka the People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals. As the stunt-filled fourquel dominates the box office, the animal rights group put out a statement condemning the film for its numerous stunts involving bulls, snakes, scorpions, and more.
As per Deadline, PETA singled out a number of scenes for condemnation. One involves Steve-O provoking honeybees into stinging his penis. Another finds a scorpion attacking new team member Rachel Wolfson. There were more:
Objections included scenes that include a spider being provoked into biting an actor’s chest, a turtle being harassed and goaded until the animal bites an actor’s testicles, a captive snake harangued and provoked into biting a person’s nose, a tarantula trapped in a tube between two participants’ faces, and a bull deliberately agitated into charging Knoxville, reportedly leaving him with a brain hemorrhage, among other injuries.
“If Steve-O and Johnny Knoxville want to make a career out of nasty little boy fantasies, they’re entitled to, as long as they don’t stress, harm, poke, prod, scare, or bother animals who are used as living props for their idiocy,” said PETA SVP Lisa Lange in a statement. They even accused the filmmakers of breaking state animal protection laws. “PETA is reminding city and county prosecutors that no one is above the law and that while the rest of the world wants to save bees and recognizes animals as sentient individuals, these jackasses exploit and abuse them for fun.”
For the past couple of days, Kanye West has been very vocal on social media about the issues he’s having with Kim Kardashian. The rapper criticized his ex-wife for letting their daughter North West, use TikTok against his wishes. He also claimed that she wouldn’t let him bring their kids to a basketball game in Chicago. Kim only responded to the former claim, saying that West’s constant attacks against her are more harmful to North than TikTok. After he received some support from far right pundit Candace Owens, Kanye returned to Instagram to get some more things off his chest.
West shared a pair of Instagram posts that expanded on his stance against TikTok and voiced his frustration with not being able to see his children. In one post, which featured a screenshot of a text from Kanye that reads, “Send me Kim’s number,” he claims that Kim accused him of “putting a hit out on her” among other things.
YESTERDAY KIM ACCUSED ME OF PUTTING A HIT OUT ON HER, SO LET ME GET THIS STRAIGHT. I BEG TO GO TO MY DAUGHTERS PARTY AND IM ACCUSED OF BEING ON DRUGS. THEN I GO PLAY WITH MY SON AND I TAKE MY AKIRA GRAPHIC NOVELS AND IM ACCUSED OF STEALING. NOW IM BEING ACCUSED OF PUTTING A HIT ON HER. THESE IDEAS CAN ACTUALLY GET SOMEONE LOCKED UP. THEY PLAY LIKE THAT WITH BLACK MENS LIVES [WHETHER] IT’S GETTING THEM FREE OR GETTING THEM LOCKED UP. IM NOT PLAYING ABOUT MY BLACK CHILDREN ANYMORE.
The second post that West shared displayed a pair of text message screenshots, allegedly between Kanye and one of Kim Kardashian’s cousins, who attempted to offer him advice since they’re a single parent as well. However, it doesn’t go over well with Kanye, as he reveals in the post’s caption.
THIS IS AN EXAMPLE OF KIM’S COUSIN AGREEING WITH ME ABOUT TIK TOK THEN PROCEEDING TO ASK ME FOR SOME YEEZYS AFTERWARDS. HER OTHER COUSIN KARA CALLED ME SAYING SHE AGREED WITH ME THEN SAID SHE WOULD SPEAK OUT PUBLICLY WHICH SHE NEVER DID THEN SHE SUGGESTED I TAKE MEDICATION. MY DAD DIDNT HAVE MONEY OR A [PUBLIC] VOICE WHEN MY MOM DESTROYED ME AND HIS RELATIONSHIP. I DO THIS IS FOR EVERY PARENT ON EITHER SIDE [WHOSE] KIDS FUTURES ARE BEING ONE SIDEDLY CONTROLLED. I DONT EVEN HAVE THE RIGHT TO GET ANGRY AS A FATHER WITHOUT BEING CALLED [ERRATIC]. I GAVE THAT FAMILY THE CULTURE, IF THEY AS A WHOLE UNIT KEEP PLAYING GAMES WITH ME I WILL TAKE THAT CULTURE BACK. A FATHER SHOULD NEVER HAVE TO BEG FOR THE LOCATION OF THEIR CHILDREN
A lot of Republicans — most recently Marco Rubio — are unwilling to put the blame for the Jan. 6 riot on Donald Trump. Chris Christie isn’t one of them. The former New Jersey governor (who has his own share of problems) turned on Trump back before it was cool (for Republicans, anyway). He torched him shortly after he lost re-election and he’s been torching him ever since, revealing things like the heartless way he treated him after they both caught COVID. And on Sunday, shortly after his party deemed the Capitol attack as “legitimate political discourse,” Christie didn’t mince words.
.@GovChristie says Jan. 6 “was a riot that was incited by Donald Trump” in an effort to intimidate then-Vice Pres. Pence and Congress.
During an appearance on ABC’s This Week, Christie was asked about Mike Pence daring to say Trump was “wrong” to think he could reject the 2020 election results on that fateful day. Christie said he didn’t “know why it took him so long” to publicly admit doing so wasn’t in his power anyway. He then turned his attention on the former president.
“Let’s face it. Let’s call it what it is. Jan. 6 was a riot that was incited by Donald Trump in an effort to intimidate Mike Pence and the Congress into doing exactly what he said in his own words last week: Overturn the election,” Christie responded.
Christie, who sometimes stood awkwardly by Trump’s side throughout his lone term in office, was referring to a recent glorified press release the 45th president sent last week, in which he straight-up admitted that he wanted Pence to “overturn the election.”
“He actually told the truth by accident,” Christie said. “He wanted the election to be overturned.”
Will others in the GOP follow suit? Given that the party responded to Trump’s confession by censuring the only two Republican lawmakers on the House select committee investigating the events of Jan. 6 and again downplaying its severity, probably not.
Joe Rogan has not had a great couple weeks, and it’s all thanks to Neil Young. After the legendary rocker demanded Spotify delete his music from their coffers due to the COVID misinformation spread on Rogan’s podcast, others followed suit. He was even called an “asshole” by Sharon Stone. But Rogan received some support. Jon Stewart came to his defense. So did Dwayne Johnson, who called Rogan’s apology “perfectly articulated.” But now the wrestler-turned-actor is easing off on his defense.
On Friday, a video went viral showing multiple instances where Rogan used the N-word. It was enough to pile more controversy on the podcaster, who’s long said whatever he wanted, without fear of meaningful repercussion, even ignoring hundreds of scientists begging him (and Spotify) to stop. And when Johnson learned about the video, he was nonplussed.
Dear @donwinslow Thank you so much for this I hear you as well as everyone here 100% I was not aware of his N word use prior to my comments, but now I’ve become educated to his complete narrative. Learning moment for me.
“I hear you as well as everyone here 100%,” Johnson tweeted after author Don Winslow directed him to the inciting video. “I was not aware of his N word use prior to my comments, but now I’ve become educated to his complete narrative. Learning moment for me.”
It wasn’t an official, complete reversal, but it’s clear Johnson was backing off of his previous “perfectly articulated” comments.
Shortly after the supercut went viral, Rogan released his second apology video in a week. He said he didn’t mean it in a racist way; he was merely discussing the word and thought it was fine for him to not censor it. Meanwhile, Spotify has removed dozens of Joe Rogan Experience episodes, though they did not explain whether it was due to COVID misinformation, him dropping the N-word or both.
Either Sifu is incredibly challenging or I’m just incredibly bad at it. There are moments when everything clicks and the martial arts movie-inspired action feels like a dream. The player will float through enemies, parrying them and countering with a precision that only a true martial arts master is capable of. There’s a scene very early in the game where the player enters into an enclosed hallway with a series of enemies, and it is set up perfectly to seamlessly fight through them in one continuous combo. It feels amazing and is one of the high points of the early game.
That’s when Sifu feels at its best. When this isn’t happening, the player is instead being overwhelmed by common enemies, getting obliterated by bosses, and watching their age increase upon every death. This all feels by design. The game wants you to fail. It wants you to take these challenges head-on and get better. Learn the combos. Get the parries. Die. A lot. Anyone who sticks it out is going to eventually have that moment where it clicks and the entire game feels like the hallway sequence. The question every player is going to ask themselves is if they’re willing to put up with so much failure to reach that point.
Sifu/Sloclap
What is Sifu?
The main gimmick of Sifu is that every time the player dies, they get older. They’re able to spring back to life immediately upon death, sometimes with a few upgrades, and get right back to combat. This seamless transition is good and keeps death from feeling like it will slow down combat, which is necessary in a game where the core mechanic is built on death. Every 10 years, the player will get a damage upgrade to make combos hurt more, but they lose a little bit of health as the frailty of age begins to take hold. The ebb and flow here is that the more the player dies, the faster they age, but if they defeat enemies, then the aging process will be slower. The game rewards the player for playing well.
As for why the player is going through buildings in a fictional China and battling powerful bosses, it’s a story of revenge. The player watched as a former martial arts student and his gang of followers killed the player’s father before his very eyes. You are then killed, only to revive one year older and completely unharmed. At 20 years old, the player will embark on a journey to defeat everyone who was responsible for his father’s death.
Why You Should Play Sifu
Seamless combat
It looks and feels like a martial arts movie
A good challenge
Sifu is going to challenge anyone that tries to take it on. Some of the highest thrills in this game come after overcoming a challenging boss or sequence without dying. That gradual sense of improvement creates a sense of accomplishment in every play-through, and when the combat clicks, it feels exactly the way the game has been advertised. It has managed to make death, something that is considered a failure in every other game, feel like just another step towards improvement. Of course, the ultimate goal every player will eventually have is to get through the entire game with no deaths at all. It’s possible, but only those who have truly mastered the game will reach that point. Thankfully, the journey to mastering it is fun.
Why You Should Not Play Sifu
The grind
The story is only okay
Failure isn’t always fun
Some players want a game to punch them back. They want a game that will make it so every inch forward must be earned. Sifu is not the most challenging game ever made, but it’s going to require a level of commitment to mastering the controls that not everyone is going to enjoy. Sifu does not ease the player in. There’s one tutorial level and from that point on it’s sink or swim. Players who sink may stop playing before they even beat the first or second boss of the game. Without a difficulty level, there’s no way for this game to get easier other than mastering it. It would be one thing if the revenge plot had more to it, but it’s a very basic martial arts movie plot. This isn’t a bad thing, but it’s not going to be a reason for players to push through.
Sifu/Sloclap
Our Take
Sifu wants you to fail, but it does so because it wants to see you improve. If you’re okay with banging your head into a wall until everything clicks, then the combat is going to be worth it. This game is fun and, at its best, it has some of the most exhilarating combat we’ve seen in an action game, but the path there isn’t going to be for everyone.
A code for the PlayStation 5 version of Sifu was provided to us for review purposes.
Erick Dampier spent 16 seasons in the NBA, mostly with the Warriors and Mavericks, averaging 7.4 points and 7.1 rebounds per game across his lengthy career. The 7-footer was a steady presence in the paint for his teams for well over a decade, and it appears he might not be the only Erick Dampier to make a name for himself in the world of basketball.
His son, Erick Dampier Jr., is in sixth grade and is already 6’5, which provides some rather hysterical visuals when he’s playing with peers of the same age. The younger Dampier apparently plays up during the travel seasons in the spring/summer but plays with his age group in the winter and the result is, well, this.
The #1 6th grader in the country 6’5″ Point guard Erick Dampier throwing it down. He has 24pts, 21 rebs, 3 asts, 3 blks in FIRST HALF!!! pic.twitter.com/3j5y0sMpQ4
I really enjoy the kid who runs to do a jumping shoulder bump with Dampier, who never leaves the ground for it. This genuinely looks like those videos of when an NBA player hosts a kids camp and ends up playing a few games with the campers and goes all out, swatting shots and dunking all over the kids to their delight, except this is a kid the same age as them and it cannot be nearly as enjoyable for the other team. Eventually they’ll have a hell of a story to tell about the time they had to play against Dampier when he was a full 18 inches taller than them and he ran up a halftime stat line of 24 points and 21 rebounds.
Have Luke Skywalker and Boba Fett got the band back together? For three decades, Mark Hamill took a good long break from playing Luke Skywalker. He wasn’t entirely out of the Star Wars-verse: He voiced Darth Bane on the teens show Clone Wars. (Hamill has enjoyed a prolific and acclaimed second life as a voice actor. His Joker, starting with Batman: The Animated Series, is up there with the best.) But it wasn’t until 2015’s The Force Awakens that he returned as the character that made his name, though it would take till The Last Jedi that he actually uttered a line. Now Hamill’s Luke Skywalker regularly returns to the franchise, even popping up on an episode of The Mandalorian, the show about a Boba Fett-like bounty hunter.
But does Hamill bring Luke Skywalker back for The Book of Boba Fett, the hot new Disney+ show about one of the series’ most beloved side characters?
The answer is: Yep, in the show’s sixth episode. And it’s not the older, grizzled, bitter yet still heroic version of Luke you saw in The Last Jedi. The Book of Boba Fett takes place shortly after the events of Return of the Jedi, so you get younger, virile, and still optimistic Luke Skywalker. Thanks to the kind of CGI that produced younger Robert De Niro, Al Pacino, and Joe Pesci in Martin Scorsese’s The Irishman, we get 70-year-old Hamill as a young man, training Grogu, aka Baby Yoda. He even gets to chat a bit with Rosario Dawson’s Ahsoka.
De-aging CGI has become commonplace in movies and shows, but if his voice sounds weird, that’s because it is. As reported by /Film, Hamill’s voice is never actually heard. Instead, audio wizards used cutting edge tech to create his dialogue whole cloth using archival recordings and algorithms — which is definitely not the kind of tech that could lead to real-world trouble.
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