Month: May 2023

Fans worried that Lil Durk would take a hard left into overtly positive messaging on his new album Almost Healed were relieved to learn that the operative word in the title was “Almost.” While lead single “All My Life” with J. Cole bore all the hallmarks of uplifting “conscious” rap — right down to a chorus of children singing its saccharine hook — and Alicia Keys played therapist on the album’s intro, Durk largely stuck to his guns for the rest of the new songs, so to speak.

Still, if anyone at all was dissatisfied with the outcome, his deluxe version of Almost Healed should lay those concerns to rest. On Twitter, Durk promised it would bear “The Voice vibes,” invoking the beloved 2020 album which launched the Chicago underground rap veteran to arena status.

And speaking of arena status, Durk certainly has a few of those venues on the schedule for his upcoming Sorry For The Dought Tour, which launches at the end of July and runs through early August. You can see the dates for that below.

7/28 – Tampa, FL @ MIDFLORIDA Credit Union Amphitheater
7/29 – Atlanta, GA @ Lakewood Amphitheatre (without Kodak Black and NLE Choppa)
7/30 – Charlotte, NC @ PNC Music Pavilion
8/1 – Virginia Beach, VA @ Veterans United Home Loans Amphitheater at Virginia Beach
8/3 – Camden, NJ @ Freedom Mortgage Pavilion
8/4 – Baltimore, MD @ CFG Bank Arena (without Kodak Black)
8/5 – Brooklyn, NY @ Barclays Center
8/6 – Boston, MA @ Xfinity Center
8/8 – Newark, NJ @ Prudential Center
8/9 – Toronto, ON @ Budweiser Stage (without Kodak Black)
8/11 – Chicago, IL @ United Center
8/13 – Indianapolis, IN @ Ruoff Music Center
8/15 – Detroit, MI @ Pine Knob Music Theatre
8/16 – Cleveland, OH @ Blossom Music Center
8/18 – St. Louis, MO @ Hollywood Casino Amphitheatre
8/19 – Kansas City, MO @ T-Mobile Center
8/21 – Houston, TX @ Toyota Center
8/22 – New Orleans, LA @ Smoothie King Center
8/23 – Austin, TX @ Moody Center
8/25 – Albuquerque, NM @ Isleta Amphitheater
8/26 – Denver, CO @ Ball Arena (without Kodak Black and NLE Choppa)
8/29 – Seattle, WA @ Climate Pledge Arena
8/30 – Portland, OR @ RV Inn Styles Resort Amphitheater
8/1 – Oakland, CA @ Oakland Arena
8/2 – San Diego, CA @ North Island Credit Union Amphitheatre (without Kodak Black and NLE Choppa)
8/6 – Los Angeles, CA @ Kia Forum
8/7 – Phoenix, AZ @ Talking Stick Resort Amphitheatre

Something that unfortunately comes with the territory of being a celebrity (especially a female one) is people having and sharing their opinions about your body. One person went as far as to suggest Pink, who gave birth to her two children, was born a biological male. Instead of getting mad, Pink (who’s currently making headlines for her recent naked photo) had a fun time brushing it off.

Pink shared the post on Twitter earlier this month. The image is a screenshot of a text from Pink to her husband, professional off-road truck racer Carey Hart. It starts with a low-resolution photo of Pink, wearing a bikini top and low-rise pants. The outfit shows off her toned abs and her Adonis belt, the V-shaped muscle in the pelvic region. Somebody added text on the photo that reads, “Women can not be born with Adonis belts,” adding below, “androgynous Pink.” Pink’s subsequent message to Hart reads, “Hey baby. I’ve been meaning to tell you something. Apparently you’re not willow and Jameson’s dad. I am.”

Pink wrote in her tweet, “I just found this out too, to be fair. I feel @hartluck had a right to know what the internet just told us. Apparently, I’m my kids father [exploding head emojis].”

Pink has addressed perceptions that she has a masculine appearance before. In a 2019 interview, she said of a conversation with her daughter, “[I said,] ‘When people make fun of me, that’s what they use. They say I look like a boy or I’m too masculine or I have too many opinions, my body is too strong.’ And I said to her, ‘Do you see me growing my hair?’ She said, ‘No, mama.’ I said, ‘Do you see me changing my body?’ ‘No, mama.’ ‘Do you see me changing the way I present myself to the world?’ ‘No, mama.’ ‘Do you see me selling out arenas all over the world?’ ‘Yes, mama.’ ‘OK! So, baby girl: We don’t change. We take the gravel and the shell and we make a pearl. And we help other people to change so they can see more kinds of beauty.’”

The Ted Lasso Power Rankings are a weekly analysis of who and/or what had the strongest performance in each episode. Most of the list will feature individual characters, although the committee does reserve the right to honor anything from animals to inanimate objects to laws of nature to general concepts. There are very few rules here.

Season 3, Episode 12 — “So Long, Farewell”

HONORABLE MENTION: Higgins (a good man who gets to keep his job); Dani Rojas and his two girlfriends (good for them); Zorro/Zoreaux (if you have to wear a mask, might as well be a cool one); Isaac (a tough but fair judge who can blast soccer balls straight through nets); Will Kitman (I choose to believe he’s being very territorial and bossy about his responsibilities now that Nate is back and working under him); The Sound of Music (probably a top-five musical about a family escaping Nazis through the power of song); Sassy (we could all use a friend like her, but only one); Mae (I hope she becomes best friends with Rebecca’s mom); Rebecca’s mom (need to see her skateboard); Sam (loved to see him score The Big Goal); Zava’s avocado farm (that was a big avocado); Colin (my heart grew three sizes when he smooched his boyfriend after the game); Various TedBecca ‘shippers (the misdirect in that opening scene has that corner of the internet VERY angry); Jason Sudeikis doin’ his lil “What’s Up With That?” dances (the man can move); the stewardess who called Ted an asshole (fun to picture that there’s a lady in this show’s universe out there telling everyone what a prick Ted is); Coach George (stood up to Rupert and got a little sunshine on his nutsack); Dr. Sharon (new patient, business is good); Henry Lasso (parents in the youth soccer league must be so pissed that one team just has a decorated professional coach on the sideline, like if Steve Kerr coached his daughter’s basketball team); Rupert (everything short of getting a bowl of soup dumped on his head); spaghetti bolognese (pretty good but I prefer lasagna)

10. (tie) Crying a little bit (LAST WEEK: Unranked)

Lots of crying this week. By just about everybody. The team at halftime, Nate, Rebecca and Ted a few times, even freaking Roy. Maybe me a little bit. Maybe. Impossible to know for certain. I’m a big strong man. I’m a big strong man who never cries during TV shows or movies. Everyone know th-…

NO YOU CRIED DURING A FINDING NEMO REWATCH A WHILE AGO.

SHUT UP.

HE FOUND HIS DAD.

LEAVE ME ALONE.

10. (tie) Barbara the CFO (LAST WEEK: Unranked)

A fascinating woman who loves numbers and violence equally. I would love to sit in a room with her while she watches The Accountant, the movie where Ben Affleck plays a CPA who is also an undercover assassin, the one that contains both a montage of actual accounting and multiple scenes where bad guys get shot in the head. I bet she would love it.

I don’t know what’s happening with this show going forward. It sure felt like an ending. And while the more probable spinoff is one I’ll discuss in a bit, let me state for the record that I would watch one where Barbara becomes a high-ranking executive for a UFC-type cage fighting league. Please consider this.

10. (tie) Nate (LAST WEEK: 8)

Nate is:

• Back with the team
• In a new role as the assistant kit man… or rather, the assistant TO the kit man, as a little Schrute shootout (Schrute-out?)
• Happy with Jade
• Tearing up a lot and hugging people and being kind of touched that the team is using his elaborate decoy play to score important goals

Full-circle situation here for Nate. I suspect this could rub some people the wrong way. There’s a subsection of viewers who wanted to see Nate get hit with a hammer for everything he did on his way out. And I do get that but… that was just never gonna happen. Not on this show. Everyone gets redeemed a little here. That’s just how the show works. Well, except for Rupert. He just dresses like Darth Vader — all black, flowing coat/cape — and loses another wife and his team and has a stadium full of people chant “WANKER” at him while he storms off in shame. That’s okay, though. It’s nice to have an obvious villain sometimes.

9. Ted (LAST WEEK: 6)

It’s nice that Ted is back home with his kid. I’m happy for him if that’s what he wants and if that’s going to help Henry, who is a sweet boy and deserves happiness. But also…

I mean…

It is weird. He was mostly happy in Richmond. He had friends who loved him and a great work environment and a whole community that had come to support him. He wasn’t having those panic attacks as often. Again, it’s weird. The show opened with him fleeing his actual family to go coach soccer in England and it ended with him fleeing his found family to go coach soccer back in America. I suppose there’s no good or right answer here. He was always going to be leaving someone behind somewhere. But he has made a positive impact on a lot of lives in the process.

I don’t know. A lot going on here. Let’s go ahead and leave him at number nine.

8. Jamie Tartt (LAST WEEK: 2)

Jamie:

• Made up with his dad
• Is friends with Roy now
• Also got into a fistfight with Roy over who would “get” to date Keeley, which backfired for obvious stupid reasons related to “maybe the girl you both like doesn’t want two goons punching each other over who wins her affection without actually checking to see if she has any affection for either of them”
• Scored a goal and helped score another with some hilarious acting
• Got in one last classic Jamie pronunciation with “guacamol-eh”

It’s a good thing Jamie and Roy had their fistfight after Trent finished the book. That would not have looked great out there in black-and-white ink.

7. An open bar with live band karaoke (LAST WEEK: Unranked)

This right here is a recipe for a good time. The Richmond team party is gonna be a blast. The only downside here — the reason it’s ranked at seven instead of in the top three — is because I will be haunted for the rest of my days about who sang what song at this party. I need to know. And now I need to know if one of them sang “Need to Know” by Marc Anthony. My guesses here:

• Beard sings a Black Sabbath song
• Keeley shows up with the crimped hair and bow from the other week and sings a Madonna song, maybe “Material Girl”
• Dani sings the theme song from Friends
• Rebecca and Ted duet on “Don’t Go Breakin’ My Heart”
• Will Kitman blows the roof of the place with a version of “Suspicious Minds” that features audience participation for the backing vocals
• Barbara sings a different Black Sabbath song and does it much better than Beard
• Isaac sings a surprisingly stirring version of “Didn’t We Almost Have It All” by Whitney Houston that leaves the crowd in tears

Let’s go do karaoke this weekend.

6. Keeley (LAST WEEK: Unranked)

Okay, two Keeley things. Maybe three…

NUMBER ONE: While the Roy-Jamie fight was weird, it was nice that Keeley got to make that face and let them know how stupid they were being.

NUMBER TWO: If there is a spinoff here, my money is on Keeley and Rebecca and maybe Higgins and Barbara running that women’s soccer team with the influx of cash from the sale, which, by my math — 49 percent of the suspected $2 billion valuation — comes out to about a billion smackeroos.

NUMBER THREE: It is not lost on me that both of my proposed spin-offs here feature Barbara in some capacity. There’s a simple reason for that: I love her.

5. Roy (LAST WEEK: 4)

Roy:

• Is a Diamond Dog now
• Is the coach of the team
• Started going to therapy to work on himself, which is nice and is also a reminder that Brett Goldstein co-created Shrinking, another good show about therapy

Lot going on with Roy. Most of it pretty solid, or at least on the way to being solid. He did kind of just stop wearing those fun colorful shirts after one week, though. I like those. Roy, please reconsider.

4. Having a cookout at the end where everybody shows up and eats grilled meats (LAST WEEK: Unranked)

It is not lost on me that both Ted Lasso and the Fast & Furious franchise tell stories about finding your own Family that end with a scene where everyone gets together for a big cookout at the end. This is very funny, to me, and maybe only just me, if only because these two entities could not be much more different in just about every other way. Also, I desperately need to see Vin Diesel play soccer now. And I need to see… oh, let’s say Will Kitman drive a neon Honda outfitted with NoS. Which he might do. You don’t know.

In conclusion, please picture Mae’s face if someone walked into her pub and ordered a Corona.

3. Rebecca (LAST WEEK: Unranked)

Rebecca:

• Has a billion dollars
• Has a new boyfriend
• Got to watch her crappy ex sulk away in shame with a crowd of people chanting mean things about him

These three things alone, even stripped of their context (some of which was a little weird, but still), rocket her into the top three.

2. Trent Crimm (LAST WEEK: Unranked)

ON ONE HAND: Trent has perfect hair and finished his book. And the book is absolutely LOADED with fascinating material. It’s easy to forget all of that because we’ve seen it all through the lens of the show, but… the general public inside the universe of this show is really not aware of about 95 percent of it. Yes, sure, the book seems to be a glowing portrait of Ted and the team and not exactly full of bombshells that cut prominent figures down to size, but still. Go back and look at everything this season and remember Trent was there for it all with a notepad in his hand. I really want to read this non-existent book. Or at least get a little Ted Lasso post-credits epilogue that shows him on the book tour with the public reaction to it.

ON THE OTHER HAND: Imagine how stressful it must be to write a book about people and then hand it to them and watch them read the things you wrote about them. Or to read the words someone else wrote about you after following you around for a year. No thank you to any of that. I would rather go live inside a deep hole.

ALSO: It’s pretty funny that the character named Ted Lasso on the show titled Ted Lasso told Trent to change the book’s title from The Lasso Way because “it’s not about me.” I don’t know if that was intentional or not but it did make me giggle a lot when I realized it.

1. Coach Beard (LAST WEEK: 1)

HIS FIRST NAME IS WILLIS

WILLIS BEARD

WILLIE BEARD

COACH WILLIE BEARD

IS JANE NOW JANE BEARD?

AFTER THEY GOT MARRIED?

WILLIE AND JANE BEARD?

QUESTION MARK

“As they say in the Bible, you’re screwed.” – Raylan Givens and his hat (which already got dusty on a Detroit street) and swagger are officially back.

As seen in the above trailer for Justified: City Primeval, those words come from Elmore Leonard’s arguably most beloved protagonist of all time, and we are blessed enough to soon see Timothy Olyphant return in his most infamous role as everyone’s favorite U.S. Marshal. Heck, even fugitives can’t stop themselves from gasping (as I recently discussed about an essential-rewatch episode of Justified) at the very sight of this cowboy out of water.

We’ve already heard about how this revival will begin about fifteen years after Raylan left Harlan County’s hollers. Yet now, he’s been plucked out of Miami in pursuit of the “new Boyd” (as previously described to Entertainment Weekly) — Clement Mansell, “a.k.a. The Oklahoma Wildman, a violent, sociopathic desperado who’s already slipped through the fingers of Detroit’s finest once.”

In the above trailer, we get a better look at Clement Mansell. He’s portrayed by Boyd Holbrook, who knows a thing or two about self-assured swagger from a lawman’s POV through his Narcos tenure and has also been celebrated for his performance as The Corinthian in Netflix’s recent The Sandman TV adaptation. Holbrook has shown himself to be capable of charismatic and layered performances, and we’ll soon see what he’s got here.

Let’s take a few guesses at how Mansell might fare against quick-draw Raylan Givens from these trailer screencaps. Granted, these are wild stabs in the dark because this is a sliced-and-diced selection of moments from the season — such is the nature of a trailer — but let’s do this anyway. Does this guy seem like the “new Boyd,” and how screwed is he?

First up, the guy apparently wears tighty whities, which negates any attempt to look tough, even while wielding a firearm. Also, I have to wonder about the symbolic nature of the bird tattoos on his chest. Does he legit have the Oklahoma state bird, the scissor-tailed flycatcher, on his chest? It looks that way (?), but don’t take my word for it. Still, we’re not seeing a swastika like Boyd sported, which is always a plus for any human being. However, Mansell may have signed his own death certificate with this move:

That would be Willa Givens, the 15-year-old daughter of Winona and Raylan, who looks to be enjoying the act of making her dad feel uncomfortable after their road trip got cancelled. (Willa is played by Timothy Olyphant’s real-life daughter, Vivian, in what amounts to a sweet summer job.) After Mansell moves to put his arm around Willa, Raylan looks as furious as I’ve ever seen him. In fact, there might be a little Seth Bullock in him now. Clearly, he wants to rip Mansell’s head off right there in the middle of the restaurant, but even Raylan can’t get that extralegal without being, you know, justified.

I can’t even begin to guess how Mansell will fully measure up as a villain until watching the show, but I will say that these two hints do not bode well for him. As well, producers have hinted that even though Raylan made it out of Harlan alive, he might not leave Detroit alive. This seems like an unthinkable outcome, but Raylan will be about five years from mandatory retirement age for U.S. Marshals when City Primeval picks up. Would he be capable of retiring, at all, and would he rather go out doing what he loves?

Surely, Raylan will want to live for his daughter. Yet if he has to die, I’d be pretty upset if it’s all down to Tighty-Whitey Man, but who knows?

Based on what I’ve seen here, Clement Mansell should be much more worried than he appears to be. However, Raylan might want to watch out for Mansell’s attorney, for whom (as the trailer and below description suggest) his judgment might be clouded. (On the plus side, hey, Raylan takes his shirt off, but he also loses the hat, which could remove his Marshal superpowers.)

From the official FX description of this revival:

A chance encounter on a desolate Florida highway sends him to Detroit. There he crosses paths with Clement Mansell, aka The Oklahoma Wildman, a violent, sociopathic desperado who’s already slipped through the fingers of Detroit’s finest once and aims to do so again. Mansell’s lawyer, formidable Motor City native Carolyn Wilder, has every intention of representing her client, even as she finds herself caught in between cop and criminal, with her own game afoot as well. These three characters set out on a collision course in classic Elmore Leonard fashion, to see who makes it out of the City Primeval alive.

Justified: City Primeval premieres on July 18 for viewers at home. This will follow the world debut on June 1-4 at Austin’s ATX TV Festival.

Tyler The Creator officially unveiled the return of Camp Flog Gnaw, his previously annual music festival in California.

It marks the first return since 2019 and is now being held at Dodger Stadium. Given the demand for the truly popular event, many fans might be wondering how to get tickets and once they try to, how much it might set them back financially.

While fans are currently able to register for the opportunity to buy tickets on June 2, there are also three price tiers for passes.

The first, a 2-day General Admission, starts at $335 plus additional fees. It keeps the standard experience of a music festival but does include access to the carnival rides that would be on the grounds. However, these prices are currently for the advance sale — leading to the likely chance that they will increase in cost for those who purchase outside of the presale.

The 2-Day VIP pass starts at $595 and contains more exclusive private benefits. The next step up is the Super VIP weekend pass, with an advance cost of $1,495 and a merch package included, along with even extra special perks.

Finally, there is an option to upgrade to add-on carnival game tickets for $150, as none of the three tiers of tickets have it included.

Find more information on the Camp Flog Gnaw tickets here.

Robert De Niro is one of the best actors of his generation, starring in all of your dad’s favorite films and a few that you love too (like 2019’s Joker!). He is so good, that in order to promote his latest film About My Father, he decided to go full-on method acting and became a father to his seventh child earlier this year. That’s the type of dedication that so many great Italian-American men strive to achieve. Perhaps if he actually went forward with actually de-aging himself in real life then The Irishman would have had better luck at the box office. This is obviously a joke, for it did well enough.

But even though his kid probably wasn’t a part of his role preparation, De Niro really is starring in the film, which was released this past Memorial Day weekend. De Niro stars as a father trying to reconnect with his son, played by Sebastian Maniscalco, who is gearing up to propose to his girlfriend. The movie also features Kim Catrall, Leslie Bibb, and David Rasche.

Even though the movie isn’t available online yet, it will probably make its way on the internet soon enough. Like other Lionsgate films this year, it’s likely that the movie will be available for purchase or rent on demand about three weeks after its initial release. About My Father will probably end up on Amazon or YouTube by the end of June or early July.

While it’s not clear which (if any) streaming service will snag up the film, other Lionsgate movies have ended up on Hulu or Peacock, so we will hopefully get answers soon. Until then, you can watch The Irishman on Netflix.

While most politicians would love to hear praise from the constituents or know that they’re doing well, Lauren Boebert isn’t a fan. During a recent appearance on Steve Bannon‘s War Room podcast, Boebert revealed that she prefers getting angry phone calls from the people in her district.

The conversation started when Boebert encouraged people to call their member of congress and tell them to vote “no” on the debt ceiling deal that Speaker of the House Kevin McCarthy reached with President Joe Biden over the weekend. (Boebert’s former BFF Marjorie Taylor Greene is all for the deal for some extra added drama.) Boebert admitted to Bannon that she actually does answer her phone sometimes, but she gets bummed out when it’s a happy call.

Via Raw Story:

A chuckling Boebert then lamented that “I kind of get sad when it’s the positive ones. I was like, man, I was looking forward to a fight here. And uh, you know, I’m like, oh, this is a real one.”

Bannon observed, “You, you like fighting. You’re from Colorado.”

Of course, Boebert should have no shortage of angry constituents to yell at over the phone. She’s recently been warning Colorado residents in her district to not hold drag storytimes, and wouldn’t you know it, they’re still doing them anyway.

(Via Raw Story)

Despite putting out record-breaking singles and selling out arenas on world tours, Lizzo can’t escape negativity — particularly within the dumpster fire that is social media. Today (May 31), she expressed frustration over the fact that while she’s accomplished so much by way of her artistry, some people can only seem to focus on her weight.

One Twitter user shared a picture of Lizzo, saying, “How is Lizzo still THIS fat when she’s constantly moving this much on stage?! I wonder what she must be eating.”

Lizzo caught wind of the tweet and instantly shut the user down.

“I JUST logged on and the app and this is the type of sh*t I see about me on a daily basis,” she said. “It’s really starting to make me hate the world. Then someone in the comments said I eat ‘lots of fast food’ I LITERALLY STOPPED EATING FAST FOOD YEARS AGO…I’m tired of explaining myself all the time and I just wanna get on this app w/out seeing my name in some bullsh*t. Yall speak on sh*t y’all know NOTHING ABOUT and I’m starting to get heated.”

In follow-up tweets, she expressed that while she does receive much support from fans, the vitriol she gets ruins the social media experience for her.

“The Love definitely do not outweigh the Hate on social media… all because I’m fat???? This is CRAZY,” she said.

Understandably, she expressed the desire to live a more private life, away from the public.

“Y’all don’t know how close I be to giving up on everyone and quitting and enjoying my money and my man on a F*CKING FARM…,” she said.

Fans shared support with Lizzo and encouraged not to search her own name on social media. Lizzo then shared that while she actually does not ever search her name, she simply cannot get past the algorithm.

“I literally NEVER search my name this stuff just comes up on my TL & my FYP it’s wild. I swear I just wanna look at dance videos and science news and this sh*t comes in every day…,” she said.

Over the years, Lizzo had maintained a message of body-positivity and self-love in her music. She reiterated this in follow-up tweets, one of which read, “BEING FAT ISNT MY ‘BRAND’ BEING FAT IS WHAT MY BODY LOOKS THAT. THATS IT. THATS ALL. My ‘brand’ is FEEL GOOD MUSIC. My ‘brand’ is CHAMPIONING ALL PEOPLE. My ‘brand’ is BLACK GIRL LIBERATION.”

This comes shortly after Lizzo set her Twitter account to private recently. She also noted that the current landscape of pop music seems to be emulating sounds she created years before they became mainstream.

“I’ve always led w my TALENT…,” she said. “But when I dropped Good As Hell feel good music was ‘corny.’ When I dropped Juice disco pop wasn’t ‘for them.’ When I was body positive in 2016 being body positive was ‘pandering’ Now everybody on that wave and I’m still sh*t on?! man f*ck y’all.”

Lizzo is currently on the final week of her Special 2our, which she will conclude on Friday (June 2) at Acrisure Arena in Palm Dessert, California.

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

Every parent knows that sometimes their kids, especially teenagers, can say things in the heat of the moment they don’t really mean. But the mother at the center of this story took her teenage son’s outburst seriously and turned it into an opportunity to teach him a lesson. The question is, did she go too far to make a point?

A 35-year-old mom wanted to learn if she had been too hard on her 14-year-old son, so she shared her story on Reddit’s AITA subforum (we’ve abbreviated the forum’s name to avoid printing foul language). AITA is where people vote on whether the poster was right or wrong in how they handled a situation.

“Lately, he has been acting out a little at home and school, so I decided to sit him down to try and figure out what was happening,” the mother wrote in a post that received over 800 comments. She said that the boy had been cursing out his parents as well as his teacher.

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“He is my only child, and his dad and I are still together. I tried to sit him down and ask why he was acting out…but he wouldn’t budge,” the mother wrote. “I asked him whether there were any issues going on at school because if there was, I would be more than happy to help him.”

But all the boy could muster was that “all 14-year-olds should act out a little.”

When the mother pressed her child for an answer, he blurted, “My life would be better if I didn’t have a mother.”

The mother was immensely hurt by her son’s words, so she decided to show him whether his life was, in fact, better without her around and she went on strike.

Spoiler alert: His life wasn’t better.

That night, the mom made dinner for herself and her husband. “When my son smelt food, he came downstairs and asked where his was,” the mom wrote. “I responded, ‘I made dinner for myself and your dad. Since life is easier without a mom, there’s some heatable food in the freezer.’”

The next day when he got up for breakfast, there was none to be found. “Where’s my breakfast?” the son asked. “Your mother would normally do that for you,” the mom responded. “But if life is easier without one, you’ll need to prepare your own breakfast. Also, take the bus to and from school.”

After “a few swears,” the teen made cereal and hopped on the school bus. The mother believes the teen may have complained about his mother’s strike to her mother-in-law, who called her, saying that she was “a horrible mother” who was “starving my child” and “being petty.”

To see if she did the right thing by going on strike, the mom posted her story to AITA, and the commenters overwhelmingly said that she was right in the situation.

“It’s not like you actually deprived him of anything,” Shrimp-34 wrote in the most popular post on the thread. “He still had access to food and a way to get to school. It was definitely petty, but he wasn’t harmed in any way, and maybe sometimes you have to fight fire with fire?”

“He isn’t being starved, he’s 14, he can feed himself,” bahahahahahhhaha wrote in a post that received over 2,300 upvotes. “He isn’t being kept home from school, he’s 14, he can take the bus. [You would be wrong] if you kept this going for weeks, but doing it for a couple of days to help him realize all the things you do for him and appreciate them better is actually a really good life lesson—and its natural consequences. He doesn’t want a mom? You are letting him have his wish.”

A few commenters thought the mother should have taken the high road.

“I know it’s hard, but you can’t take that stuff personally and then retaliate like a teenager,” Turbulent_Cow2355 wrote. “You have to model the behavior that you want to see in your kids, and that means taking the higher road, even when don’t want to. You are being petty. Don’t teach your child that pettiness is a good idea for conflict resolution.”

The good news is that the mother and son were able to patch things up, and the teen’s realization helped him avoid further trouble.

“My son had a half day, so I texted him asking if he would like me to pick him up or the bus,” the mom wrote in a story update. “He texted back, saying he wanted me to get him. So I did. In the car, he immediately apologized for what he said, and he said that his friends were acting out, so he wanted to fit in. His friends got suspended today for something they did, and they wanted my son to join. My son did not, and he said he was sorry for how he was acting. I also apologized for my actions.”

By now, everyone has heard of gentle parenting. Even if you’re not quite sure what it is, you’ve heard the phrase. Parents that use this style of parenting set boundaries with their children but with thorough explanations and a focus on healthy emotional development. One dad decided to spin the gentle parenting trend by implementing “gentle parenting with malicious intent” for his older children.

You may be wondering how one gentle parents with malicious intent. No worries, the dad uploaded a now-viral clip to TikTok, where it has over 4 million views, to explain. In the clip, “Ginger Jack” has the camera on himself as he talks to his kids about completing their chores without attitudes…and that’s where the twist comes in.

“New rule. Whenever one of you starts giving me attitude, I’m going to start hitting on mom,” the dad says before speaking to his partner. “Hey there. sugar. How you doing, baby girl? How do you feel about another child? I could rub your ankles real good.” He then makes what can only be described as an attempt at a sexy cat noise.

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Ginger Jack’s children were having none of it. You could hear them in the background groaning in disgust over their dad’s exaggerated advances toward their mom. His wife also sounded a bit embarrassed by his antics, but that didn’t stop him from adding new rules to avoid the sight of two parents loving each other.

Eww. Gross. At least that’s what most kids think once they reach a certain age. Parents are only supposed to be two adults that live in your house, whose babies were dropped off by a stork with a really strong neck.

This method of gentle parenting with malicious intent was a hit for everyone but his children, who could be heard protesting off-screen with every kissing noise they heard. He wasn’t actually kissing their mom, just kissing the air, but the idea of parents kissing was enough to set off their gross-o-meter. People in the comments thoroughly enjoyed his shenanigans and some confessed they would also listen if the consequences were parental affection.

“At that point, I’d deep clean the house, my soul and this Godforsaken world,” one person wrote, complete with three crying emojis.

“As a 34-year-old, this would absolutely still work on me,” another wrote, ending it with a sweating emoji.

“Since I’m single can you call and flirt with me to get mine to clean,” one woman asked.

“Now we see why the Addams family is so well-behaved,” someone commented.

Maybe Gomez was onto something with all of his excessive hand kissing. The secret to parenting has been right in front of our eyes this entire time, and we just didn’t know it. Watch his brilliant execution of gentle parenting with malicious intent below.

@bbebard

Ultimate #dadmoves #gentleparenting #Comedy