The story of Reginald Stonksman is one of failure. In a way, it was always meant to be.

When Dime was invited to play in the NBA 2K League Three for All Showdown, I thought it was a great opportunity for anyone on the staff that isn’t me to play some virtual basketball against some impressive competition. Basketball video games have always been a tough sell for me. Most of my sports sim experience ends a few generations ago — my favorite sports video games are NFL Quarterback Club 96, NHL 97 (Genesis), and NFL 2K2 (Dreamcast), in that order.

I write a lot about video games here these days, but for the most part my playing and reviewing excludes sports games. There just isn’t time to cover everything, and when you have a staff that’s willing to sim the Final Four with NCAA Basketball 10 you let them do their thing and edit lightly. The problem is, I have an XBox and many of them do not. As such, I was tasked with playing NBA 2K20 against professional athletes in the X Bracket along with my co-workers, Bill DiFilippo and Tony Xypteras. One problem: I had never actually played NBA 2K before.

Now this may seem like another instance in which an ignorant man assumes he could beat a female professional athlete simply on the superiority of his gender, but I promise you that is not the case here. We knew we were gonna get rinsed no matter how hard we tried. In a way, that was kind of the point. My job here would be to do the best I can and take the crash course of getting my digital ass kicked as a learning lesson of sorts.

In writing, you’re given a lot of chances to be wrong, pretty much all the time if you take them. Instead, the goal is learning how to avoid that as best you can and not put yourself in situations where you can look bad. This, unfortunately, was one of those situations where looking bad was the only option, and so I decided to have a bit of fun with it. Enter my created player, a vaguely Eastern European dandy named Reginald Stonksman, a 7’1 Paint Defender who obtained said title by working security at a Sherwin Williams.

Basically we needed a center and there’s something about a beefy boi lumbering up and down the court while a dope struggles to control them from a locked down apartment in downtown Boston. I did my best to max out my muse’s rebounding abilities and rim finishing skills and hit the courts to put a little work in to get used to, you know, the game I was about to play competitively in front of a streaming audience. Results, as they say, were mixed.

Bill, Tony, and I were scheduled to face Alexis Jones (Atlanta Dream), Allisha Gray (Dallas Wings), and Aerial Powers of the WNBA champion Washington Mystics. Suffice to say, they knew basketball and had some experience playing 2K. Our crew, meanwhile, didn’t have enough time to play more than a single Neighborhood matchup before assembling the squad and taking on Watch Us Work on Tuesday night. What we did have time to do, however, was coordinate outfits.

The broadcast made fun of us, but we noticed in playing our lone practice game that it was easier to pick out teammates if we wore similar colors. But the only thing we had that matched was the default brown shirt you start the game with, so we all made a very dumb-looking quick change before we took the court. It was basically the only thing that stood out about our games on the broadcast.

“Ryan is GoldenGoose, he’s in the orange shorts,” the official 2K stream said. “They look like the standard basketball shorts that you buy for a pickup game.”

This is, of course, exactly correct. And it delights me that this sentiment came across so clearly as it’s one of the few things I did well. Because the first game, to keep it short, did not go very well. On my first touch, I took three jerky steps in the lane, tried and failed to put up a shot, and then clanged one off the right side of the hoop. The ball went out of bounds. Our opponents immediately scored on the fastbreak, and the rout was on. We promptly got beaten like we stole something, 21-6, and things were looking bleak for Team Dime.

Some lessons were immediately learned: Reginald Stonksman was slow as hell and if I committed to rebounding like a 7’1 center should, we needed Tony or Bill to hang back and look for cherrypickers. Bill coached us up, recommended some changes, and we found a new court for a do-or-die Game 2. And this time, things actually did go better. We played better defense, moved the ball around a bit better and The Stonksman got some finishes inside. Tony and Bill hit shots on the outside. We were the ones pushing the tempo on turnovers and actually got to 10 first, but some of the same mistakes I had been making all game crept back up and, well, the better team won.

The more excited team, mind you, also won.

It was a predictable exit, but one that provided some valuable lessons. The first of which being that the default camera angle for Neighborhood games is difficult and I was too afraid to change it during play. It’s one of the many, many excuses I could break out to unsuccessfully cover for my own incompetence. But I will not do that. We got beat, I didn’t play particularly well, and I had a mess of fun.

If we had more time to play together things would certainly have gone better, but we showed improvement and, more importantly, everyone involved stayed inside and enjoyed interacting in a safe and reasonable way. And it actually sparked something inside me I hadn’t really anticipated. With a massive, visible failure already under my belt I actually want get better at 2K.

A few days later, once I changed the camera angle and switched out of the default brown shirt, I went back in. Bill and I took the court and kept getting worked by people who have put in far more hours than we had. But we endured, strategized a bit and the shots started to fall. After a few games, we found a third player that worked well with us and made some magic happen. I have to admit, finally getting that first win felt pretty good. And if we get another shot at things next year, we’ll be ready.

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Listen, at this point we’ve all been guilty of calling someone out of the blue on FaceTime!

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“That’s funny.”

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“Look at me. Who woulda thought?” —You, when you discover you can craft on like a pro 🎨

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Larry David has already done his part to encourage social distancing in a very public way, filming a video for the state of California that served as a coronavirus PSA for “idiots.” With that out of the way you might think the notorious homebody would simply hunker down with some good television and wait for things to blow over, but now we know at least one show he’s not watching.

In an interview with the New York Times’ Maureen Dowd that also, improbably, contains good webcam lighting advice, David confessed that he found the one Netflix show everyone’s streaming to be so “disturbing” he couldn’t watch it. That’s right, Larry David hates Tiger King.

The profile features a number of photos taken of David through the window of his home, which is a hilarious touch. And while it features a wide-ranging series of topics, when it came to what the Curb Your Enthusiasm creator was spending his time watching these days it was Netflix heavy and Joe Exotic lite.

Mr. David said he’s watching “Ozark” and “Unorthodox” on Netflix. He tried to watch America’s favorite distraction, “Tiger King,” but couldn’t get past the first episode. “I found it so disturbing,” he said. “The lions and the tigers just really scared the hell out of me. They were going to attack somebody. They were going to kill somebody. I didn’t want to see them attack and those people were just so insane, I couldn’t watch it.”

David’s missing out on quite a ride — one that may not be over just yet — but his excuse is certainly valid. The show does depict some pretty explicit animal abuse and some scary scenes in which the cats look primed to do real harm to those who feel they have things under control. For someone who is particularly not interested in big cats, watching folks get far too comfortable with them in private zoos certainly makes for a tough watch.

The good news is that David is far from bored at home, and the piece serves as a good distraction for the rest of us as well. For example, please enjoy this bon mot about cowboy etiquette, which seemingly came out of nowhere.

“I never could have lived in the Old West,” he added parenthetically. “I would have been completely paranoid about someone stealing my horse. No locks. You tie them to a post! How could you go into a saloon and enjoy yourself knowing your horse could get taken any moment? I would be so distracted. Constantly checking to see if he was still there.”

It’s good to know that Larry is doing well, even if he may not have exactly the same Netflix tastes as you do.

The NASCAR Pro Invitational Series on iRacing heads to Bristol Motor Speedway this week for its third race of this new virtual season amid the COVID-19 outbreak, and it’s the first short track race we’ll see drivers have to take on in their virtual cars.

The first two weeks have been resounding successes, with massive viewership on Fox Sports 1 (leading this week’s race to also be broadcast on Fox proper), as NASCAR has found a way to keep fans and drivers engaged when the season is suspended. The iRacing platform allows them to have realistic simulation races, with drivers having rigs at home with wheels and pedals and racing seats to feel like they are truly behind the wheel of their race car.

There are some significant differences, however, and for those that hadn’t been using iRacing much before this, the first two weeks have been a learning experience. Michael McDowell, driver of the 34 car for Front Row Motorsports, has been going through those growing pains, picking up a few laps led at Texas a week ago before a 14th place finish. Ahead of Sunday’s race at Bristol, McDowell spoke with Uproxx over the phone about the experience, why learning to drive without feel is the biggest challenge of all of this, and how he thinks the Bristol race is going to go.

How are you doing, how is the family doing, and how strange is it as someone who’s used to spending so many weeks on the road now being at home for weeks on end?

Yeah, first off everybody’s healthy and everyone’s doing well and that’s the most important thing. There are a lot of people that are going through a lot right now, so we’re thankful for our health. But, yeah, it’s definitely unique for us. We’re such creatures of habit of leaving Thursday, being at the racetrack Friday, Saturday, Sunday, and coming back and going to the shop, then doing it all over again. So this has definitely been a growing time and a learning time, but we’re thankful everyone’s healthy right now and doing our best to keep it that way.

What was your initial reaction when NASCAR came to you guys with this idea of doing the Pro Invitational Series with iRacing?

I thought it was a great idea and I was excited to do it. I wasn’t getting a chance to race anything else, so I was excited to get behind the wheel, but it was a bit of a scramble for me personally because I didn’t have a system and we didn’t have one at the shop. So it was a scramble. I had to borrow one the first week from David Gilliland and go to his shop while things were still kind of open. Then the following week I had to build a system I could bring home and start practicing on. It was a little bit of a scramble, but we’re all set up now and rollin pretty good. It’s been fun and a learning experience for sure. I feel like I’m getting better each week.

What’s your setup like now? I know some guys have some pretty elaborate rigs.

I think I’m in between the poor man level and one of the fancy rigs [laughs]. We were able to fab up a chassis at our shop and build it ourselves and order some pedals and wheels. So, it’s not like the top, top of the line, but I think we did a really good job given the time that we had. It turned out real nice and it’s been working pretty great.

You picked up a few laps led last week and had a better finish than Homestead. There’s the obvious that you’re in a virtual car, but what have you learned through two weeks and what are the biggest adjustments you’ve had to make to how things work in the virtual world?

I think the biggest thing is, in the virtual world you don’t have feel. So you’re doing all your cueing off your eyes and hands, and so, in the real race car you’ve got G-forces, your butt’s tellin you what’s going on and you just feel all the things. In the virtual world, you don’t, so you have to train your mind to respond to different cueing and you just gotta have seat time to do that. It’s not something you just figure out, you’ve got to put in the laps and it’s something that gets better and better as you go. But you can definitely see the guys that have experience and a lot of time in iRacing, they excel real well. I think some of us that were behind on that are starting to catch up a little bit, but it’s just seat time and when I say get a feel for it, it’s get a feel for something you don’t feel, which is tough.

It seems like guys are a bit more aggressive on the virtual track, given that there’s not the actual danger of wrecks and not multi-million dollar cars and points at stake. Have you noticed that and do you adjust your racing style to be a bit more aggressive or assertive?

You know what, it’s funny you say that, because even though we see more wrecks, I don’t think it’s because guys are being more aggressive. I think we are that aggressive in real life, I just think we have better control. You feel it and all those things. What I’ve seen is pretty normal. The restarts and starts and side-by-side racing, it’s pretty normal. The difference is, without the feel and without the seat time we don’t have the ability to get ourselves out of a bad mess. Also, too, when the cars crash or they bounce off the walls, they really bounce. In normal circumstance, if you spin and hit the wall you stay up against the wall, you don’t bounce back into the field and cause a big melee. So I think some of it is the virtual world, and some of it is we can’t save it when we put ourselves in a bad spot. We just don’t have the feel you need to have to do it.

Yeah, I’m sure in a real car if someone gets under you and gets you loose you feel it immediately, but on this you don’t really notice it until you’re 45 degrees to the track.

That’s exactly it. By the time you respond, it’s too late, you’re already in trouble.

This week y’all head to Bristol, which I cannot wait for. Knowing how this has all gone, how are you approaching this week where you know there will be plenty of contact and this being the first short track y’all are running on the iRacing platform?

Yeah, so this week I got a new partner on the 34 car with Celsius, so I got a new paint scheme and a new partner, so that’s fun to debut at Bristol. I’ve just been trying to put in a lot of seat time and practice time. We have a bunch of practice sessions pretty much going on all day long, but last night we did a little mock race with a handful of us and I think it went better than we all thought. Just like Bristol it’s a challenge to pass and just like Bristol you’ve got to move people out of the way, but I thought you could make a decent amount of contact without it spinning somebody out or destroying your car to the point where you can’t be competitive. I thought it was really good. Now, once we get 30 some-odd cars on there, we’ll see, but with 15 last night it was a good race and I’m looking forward to it.

You mention you’ve got a new sponsor on the car this week. What’s been the dialogue with your sponsors through all of this in what, as you mentioned earlier, has been a bit of a mad scramble?

I think more than anything it’s been the amount of people that are viewing these races on Fox and Fox Sports 1, online and all the different platforms. You know, it’s creating a decent amount of value for our partners. Last two weeks it was Love’s Travel Stops and this week it’s Celsius Energy, but it’s creating some opportunity to get some exposure when we’re not on the race track and not doing what we want to be doing. I think that’s good and I think it’s really helped fill the gap for us and feeling like we’re fulfilling our obligations to our partners when we really can’t do much else otherwise.

Before the Marvel Cinematic Universe was even a thing — heck, before X-Men and Spider-Man kicked off the current age of superhero blockbusters — Quentin Tarantino had his heart set on making a Luke Cage film. Though it never happened, the director revealed on a podcast that he had grand plans for one of his favorite comic book heroes and even had a specific actor in mind for the titular role.

The prolific writer/director appeared on Amy Schumer’s podcast (via The Guardian) and explained that he wanted to make a Luke Cage movie between his directorial debut Reservoir Dogs and Pulp Fiction. He also explained how that choice caused him to abandon the project after his friends constantly badgered him to choose a different lead.

“Growing up I was a big comic-book collector, and my two favourite [comic books] were Luke Cage: Hero for Hire, later Luke Cage: Power Man, and Shang-Chi: Master of Kung Fu.

“What dissuaded me … was my comic-geek friends talked me out of it,” Tarantino went on. “Because I had an idea that Larry Fishburne would’ve been the perfect guy to play Luke Cage. But all my friends were like, ‘It’s got to be Wesley Snipes.’ And I go, ‘Look, I like Wesley Snipes, but Larry Fishburne is practically Marlon Brando. I think Fish is the man.’ And they’re like, ‘Yeah, but he’d have to get in shape in a big way. Snipes is that way already!’ And I go, ‘F*ck that! That’s not that important! F*ck you, you ruined the whole damn thing!’”

In defense of Tarantino’s friends, Wesley Snipes would later land the role of Marvel’s Blade, which arguably set the stage for the onslaught of superhero films to come, so their judgment wasn’t too far off. Lawrence Fishburne did “get in shape in a big way,” however, and thoroughly proved his action star chops as Morpheus in The Matrix, so the Pulp Fiction director was definitely onto something.

Not to mention, he would’ve delivered a Luke Cage movie that featured the same knack for the Blaxpoitation genre that he showcased in both Jackie Brown and Django Unchained. But if you’re hoping Tarantino might still have a Marvel movie in him, don’t hold your breath. He’s still adamant that his next film will be his last, and it’s probably not going to be for the MCU.

(Via The Guardian)

After scuttling the premieres of Black Widow, Mulan, and several smaller titles due to the near-shuttering of the global box office, Disney recently unveiled its new release schedule, which for the most part, looks like a return to business as usual, only five to six months later than planned.

One title, however, was noticeably missing from Disney’s new slate: The New Mutants. While films like Artemis Fowl and Onward made quick jumps to Disney+ after having their theatrical runs aborted, the long-delayed mutant horror movie had no such luck. But despite X-Men fans pleading on social media for New Mutants to drop on Disney+ (or Hulu if the content isn’t suitable for the family-friendly streaming service) there appears to be a significant snag in making that happen. That snag? HBO.

Even after the Disney merger, HBO still holds the premium TV rights to all 20th Century Fox films as it has for the past 30 years. That deal would presumably include New Mutants and also explain why X-Men: Dark Phoenix recently debuted on HBO instead of one of the Disney-controlled streaming services. HBO fully expects Disney to make a play for the Fox library, however, when the current deal expires in 2022.

“You don’t have to be a genius to assume [Disney chairman/CEO] Bob [Iger] will take those Fox movies back into the Disney company.” former HBO CEO Richard Plepler told The Hollywood Reporter in 2018. “But there are other ways to skin the movie cat, and we will.”

As for releasing New Mutants on VOD, Den of Geek reports that situation is another can of worms involving a Gordian knot of contractual obligations that require the film to be released theatrically or face a round of renegotiations with the cast and director. There’s a reason fans think the movie is cursed.

After watching its release date get routinely delayed while still at Fox, New Mutants seemingly disappeared into the ether following the Disney merger and fans gave up hope on the film ever seeing the light of day. But in a surprise announcement in 2019, director Josh Boone revealed that Disney was letting him finish the film, and it came so close to making it into theaters. Boone and star Maisie Williams even did a promotional tour, and then just a few weeks shy of its April 3 release date, coronavirus collapsed the entire film industry. And now, to pour salt in the wound, the bruised and beaten mutant movie is trapped in a complicated streaming limbo that probably won’t be resolved anytime soon. Although, you have to admit, it’s very on brand.

(Via THR)