Category: Trending

Uproxx placed Blxst’s four-song EP Just For Clarity 2 among the Best New Hip-Hop released the week of March 10, writing, “Is California rhythmic crooner Blxst a rapper or a singer? And once again, the answer remains: Who cares? His upbeat ruminations on love, lust, and loyalty work equally well through either lens.”

The video for “Passionate” featuring Roddy Ricch, one of the EP’s four tracks, arrived on Thursday (April 6) and features all of the above.

Roddy begins by singing about being “too passionate” and reminiscing about “days we wasn’t having sh*t” from the hard-earned perspective of wealth.

“I been too passionate / but when I ride the ‘Rari I ain’t ever gon’ fasten sh*t,” Ricch raps while surrounded by luxury sports cars outside of a mansion at night. “And when my b*tch inside it, she don’t like when I go fast and sh*t / Motor in the hood sound just like a dragon, b*tch / And I put that on my momma / I ain’t gone raise a bastard son / He ain’t gon’ have to pick up sticks, he ain’t gon’ have the drum  / He’ll know his daddy had a motherf*ckin’ platinum run.”

Footage of a Blxst live performance splices across the screen before Blxst starts his verse overlooking a vast landscape under blue skies and sun, correlating with “This ain’t overnight / I woke up with no ceiling / I made a vision come to life, I’m Cole Bennett.”

Just For Clarity 2 was rounded out by “Keep Calling” with Larry June, “Call My Bluff,” and “Ghetto Cinderella” featuring Mustard and Terrace Martin.

Watch the “Passionate” video above.

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

Everyone (except Metallica’s accountant) is still mourning the death of Eddie Munson, the breakout character from Stranger Things season four played by Joseph Quinn. That’s no excuse for asking the actor who “killed” him on the show for an apology, but people grieve in different ways, I suppose.

It’s unlikely that Eddie will return in season five, except for maybe in a flashback, but that hasn’t stopped viewers from reading too much into tweets from the Stranger Things writers’ room Twitter account. They shared two photos of Quinn as Eddie, one in which he’s “feelin’ it,” and another where he’s not.

While it has not been confirmed nor denied whether the beloved character will be making an appearance in season five, fans have already begun speculating ways in which the character – who was killed off last season – could make an appearance in the new episodes.

Here are the tweets:

Let’s see how they’re going over with fans:

When asked at London Comic Con last month about a possible return in season five, Quinn said, “I mean, they’re shooting soon! I don’t know… I’d love to be – I died. I think it’s probably unlikely. That’s my honest answer.” Oh well. At least we’ll always Doja Cat trying to slide into his DMs.

Stranger Things is expected to return to Netflix in 2025.

(Via NME)

A popular science communicator named Massimo shared an optical illusion on Twitter on April 4, and the baffling image earned over 4.4 million views. At first, the photograph looks like the Earth, set against a starry night sky.

It’s reminiscent of the Universal Pictures logo or a shot that one would see in a “Star Wars” film right before two ships go speeding by while blasting each other with laser fire. However, the Earth in the photo is not a planet, and the stars in the night sky aren’t stars at all.

“This photo is (another) example of how optical illusions mess with your mind,” Massimo captioned the photo. “First you see a picture of the Earth from space and then…”

u201cThis photo is (another) example of how optical illusions mess with your mind. nnFirst you see a picture of the Earth from space and then…u201d

— Massimo (@Massimo)
1680626883

“Then what?” Meningloos tweeted

“A cityscape,” Christopher Kyle Fletcher responded.

If you are reading this on a smartphone and you rotate it, you’ll notice that what looked like stars is a skyline with a few tall buildings. What appeared to be the Earth is actually clouds sometime around sunset or sunrise.

Meg0365 corrected the photo, and it all makes sense.

u201c@Rainmaker1973 Nice one!u201d

— Massimo (@Massimo)
1680626883

The tweet is a compelling example of how our minds can play tricks on us and that our first impression of something may be incorrect.

“This highlights the two different processing speeds of the brain, a ‘quick’ answer is thrown out as soon as possible, a slower but more accurate answer is presented once the brain has performed more comparisons and details. Some go through life only accepting the quick responses,” Colin Angus wrote.

Taking photos of your child can be frustrating. They need to do everything that kids don’t like to do: sit still, pay attention and look directly at the camera. It’s also tough to get a natural smile. When many kids take photos, they twist their faces into a grimace like Matthew Perry on “Friends.”

That’s why nearly 300,000 people liked a Tweet from children’s author Adam Perry. He shared side-by-side photos of his 5-year-old son to show how his smile improved dramatically after he said the magic word—and it isn’t cheese.

“My son when I tell him to smile vs when I yell out ‘poop!’” Perry wrote on Twitter.

Perry is the author of The “Thieving Collectors of Fine Children’s Books,” “The Magicians of Elephant County” and “The Big Book of Horrendous Diseases.”

u201cMy son when I tell him to smile vs when I yell out u201cpoop!u201du201d

— Adam Perry (@Adam Perry)
1663196747

The writer explained the origin of his fantastic discovery to Good Morning America. “We always take pictures on the first day [of school] and we were in a bit of a hurry and having a hard time getting good pictures,” Perry said. “My son always has the funniest smile when he’s trying too hard. I learned at some point that if I just yelled out ‘POOP’ and snapped the picture quick, it always worked out way better. In this case, it was a pretty dramatic comparison, so I thought I’d share it.”

Perry couldn’t believe how quickly the tweet took off.

“I expected 5 to 10 people to like it. Then it kept climbing…and climbing…it’s now at 297k likes. Then it went first page on Reddit and viral on Instagram and Facebook,” Perry told Good Morning America.

The tweet inspired countless parents to share their magic words to get their kids to smile in photos.

“Our family phrase for smiling in pics isn’t ‘cheese’; it’s ‘cat butt,'” John Horton wrote.

“My kid likes me to say ‘fart, poop, dootie’ – bc it is the ‘curse’ word stream in Boss Baby and it makes her laugh,” Marie replied.

USAF Lady Vet 410 FMS shared some wisdom for the ages in the thread: Never tell a child to smile.

“I was a school photographer for years. Elementary age kids were great. Chicken lips, stinky feet & turkey toes would produce the most natural smiles. Never tell a little kid to ‘smile’ if you want a natural expression. Beautiful pic by the way!” she added.

Perry is over the moon that his tip has helped parents with a problem that so many face. “They’re like, I tried it and it worked!'” Perry told Today.com. “Also, it doesn’t just work with kids. Adults are doing it too to make each other laugh in pictures.”

Perry’s son was also excited to have his moment in the sun.

“He is very excited to be in his words—famous—” Perry shared. “He had a little article and his picture in the local paper. He’s having his 15 minutes a little early and thinks it’s all very cool.”

Disney’s live-action remake of “The Little Mermaid” is sure to have songs that 90s kids have known by heart since childhood. However they might find that certain lyrics are a tad different than what they’re accustomed to in those sing-a-longs.

Prolific composer Alan Menken, who wrote the iconic tunes for quintessential Disney movies like “Beauty and the Beast,” “Aladdin,” and, yes, “The Little Mermaid,” revealed in an interview with Vanity Fair that the songs “Kiss the Girl” and “Poor Unfortunate Soul” would be undergoing slight tweaks for the upcoming remake.

In case the lyrics don’t hold a spot rent-free in your mind, here’s a Disney sing-along for “Kiss the Girl,” when Prince Eric and a voiceless Ariel go on a romantic boat ride together:

Though Menken didn’t specify which lyrics are being changed, he did suggest that the songs were being revised to incorporate a more modern take on consent. “People have gotten very sensitive about the idea that [Prince Eric] would, in any way, force himself on [Ariel],” he told Variety.

Similarly, in “Poor Unfortunate Souls,” the sea witch Ursula tells Ariel that “on land it’s much preferred…for ladies not to say a word,” adding that men aren’t “impressed with conversation” and that a woman who “holds her tongue” is the one who “gets a man.”

Granted, as Menken noted, this song is a moment in which Ursula, the story’s villain, is doing an obviously villainous thing by trying to manipulate Ariel into giving up her voice (both literally and figuratively). But he felt that as previously written the song “might make young girls somehow feel that they shouldn’t speak out of turn.”

Menken’s planned tweaks reflect a growing trend. Only last year in 2022, both Beyonce and Lizzo immediately changed lyrics to their songs after receiving backlash that the lyrics contained “ableist slurs.” And music isn’t the only faction of pop culture to undergo changes in an effort to reflect more current perspectives. Earlier in 2023, the language in Roald Dahl classics like “Charlie and The Chocolate Factory” and “James and The Giant Peach” was modified to what some felt were overzealous extremes, swapping out gendered words like “mother” and “father” for gender-neutral words like “family,” for instance.

Regardless of whether these changes fall under the “completely necessary” category or “cancel culture run amok,” it is interesting to notice this emerging real-time interaction between creators and consumers. Art is so often a reflection of the times, and this kind of rejiggering of how we use language specifically is also telling of the current state we are in as a society. Clearly, we are in the midst of figuring things out—what exactly is consciously creating vs. adhering to censorship—and it’s very much a work in progress.

No matter how long you’ve skied or snowboarded or how much of an expert you are, there’s one nemesis on the mountain that poses an underappreciated threat—the tree well.

People may think the main danger of skiing through trees is the risk of running into one. But falling into a tree well is a less obvious, but still potentially deadly risk due to the possibility of snow immersion suffocation (SIS). Essentially, the area around the base of a tree creates snow conditions that are quite different than those out in the open. Air pockets in the snow combined with water vapor rising from the tree base turns the snow into a quicksand-like texture that is nearly impossible to escape from—the more you struggle, the deeper in you fall. Skiers and snowboarders die every year from SIS due to falling into tree wells and not being found in time.

That could easily have been snowboarder Ian Steger’s fate in March 2023 if not for the eagle eye and quick thinking of backcountry skier Francis Zuber.

Zuber had just begun a backcountry ski run with a buddy on Mount Baker in Washington State when a flash of red caught the corner of his eye. Zuber’s GoPro footage shows him stopping and turning to see a colorful snowboard upside-down next to a tree.

“I knew there was somebody attached to it, and obviously they were still alive,” Zuber told Vancouver’s City News. “I shout out to the guy…he can’t hear me, he’s five and a half to six feet into the snow at that point.” Zuber knew he had to work fast.

As the video shows him struggling to make his way back toward the tree through the deep snow, we can hear him muttering expletives to himself and calling out to the snowboarder. At first, we can’t see how Steger is positioned, but as Zuber gets closer and starts digging, it becomes clear that the snowboarder is completely upside-down, with his face buried deep in the snow.

Watch the harrowing GoPro footage Zuber shared on YouTube:

[Warning: This video contains strong language.]

Zuber told the CBC that they estimated Steger had been buried between five and seven minutes, “probably at either a third or just the halfway point of his possible survival time in there,” when he found him. Zuber said Steger hadn’t been snowboarding alone—he was with a group of three other riders who were carrying safety equipment including shovels, beacons and two-way radios—but as we could see in Zuber’s GoPro, getting back up a mountain when you realize someone in your group isn’t behind you anymore is no small or quick task.

Steger and Zuber have since become friends since the March 3 rescue and have even gone skiing together on Mount Baker.

Steger told the CBC he just wants to “enjoy being alive.” Indeed, after a close-call experience like that, every moment you have would feel like a gift.

There are obviously families where all of the children are the same sex, no matter how many times they tried to get the opposite. It’s probably how the labels “boy mom” and “girl mom” came about. But one family in Michigan took the “boy mom” label to a different level because, for multiple generations, no one gave birth to a girl.

It sounds completely made up. So made up, in fact, that when Andrew Clark told his then-girlfriend Carolyn that his family didn’t have any girls, she didn’t believe him, even going as far as to confirm this story with his parents.

“I asked his parents to confirm that information and they’re like, ‘Oh yeah, no, we haven’t had a girl in our direct line.’ He’s had uncles and cousins that have had girls but in his lineage, there has not been a girl,” Carolyn told “Good Morning America.”

Turns out Andrew wasn’t joking. No baby girls had been born in his direct line since 1885. Don’t stress the math, it’s 138 years. One. Hundred. Thirty. Eight. Years. That seems unreal and a little like maybe they should donate their DNA to science to figure out how exactly something that remarkable happened.

But that 138-year streak came to a beautiful end when Carolyn became pregnant with their daughter, Audrey, after the couple experienced a miscarriage in 2021. The family held a gender reveal party where cookies were filled with colored icing to reveal the baby’s sex. The family gathered around all likely expecting blue to be the color of the day, but the Clarks had a surprise.

“Everyone was just screaming and jumping in disbelief, honestly,” Carolyn told ABC 13 On Your Side.

The long-awaited sweet baby girl was born on March 17, 2023, and boy…or should I say girl, is her family lucky.

Watch the unbelievable story below:

The Dallas Mavericks‘ 127-125 loss to the Golden State Warriors last month featured a bit of controversy, as the Mavericks protested the result of the game due to an incident late in the third quarter that led to Golden State scoring an easy two points. As it turns out, their efforts to show that they were “deprived of a fair opportunity to win the game” came up short.

The league announced on Thursday afternoon that the Mavericks’ protest of the game was denied. In a statement sent out by the NBA, it was pointed out that there were “nearly 14 minutes remaining in the game” at the time the incident happened, and that Dallas “took the lead twice in the final four minutes.” And despite public statements from Mark Cuban that indicated otherwise in the immediate aftermath of the game, “in its written submission in support of the protest, Dallas agrees that the referee signaled possession to Golden State.”

During a media availability on Wednesday evening, Cuban expressed that he was “very confident” the NBA would say the Mavericks were correct to protest the game, even if he did not think the league would determine the end of the game needed to be replayed.

More than a few times I’ve declared Jedi are boring. They are. This is the inherent problem with the Prequels is that the main characters are all either stoic people with magical powers who think emotions are bad, or people who want to become stoic people with magical powers who think emotions are bad. Now look, I have no problem with individual Jedi. In the original Star Wars, Ben Kenobi is a great character. Though, he doesn’t really identify as a Jedi anymore, going as far to say he was “once a Jedi Knight.” Though the rules about what Jedi even were in the first movie are vague and certainly not what they are in the world of Star Wars now. It seemed to lean more into being part of an army than a way of life. And if there no longer was an army, you were no longer a member. And it wasn’t clear if Jedi had any powers at all, frankly, other than some slight of hand and deception. Anyway, my point is, when you get a bunch of Jedi together, that’s when things get boring.

I’ve always leaned more into the ragtag randomness of the Star Wars galaxy that we see in the Original Trilogy and, to an extent, in movies like Rogue One and Solo. And, for a good while, what we saw in The Mandalorian. Just stories about people without magical powers trying to make their way in this galaxy.

This is why I enjoyed this week’s episode of The Mandalorian so much. Bryce Dallas Howard’s episodes always seem to have an affinity for the stuff I enjoy from this galaxy as opposed to lore. The whole episode was a side-quest, but that’s the way The Mandalorian used to be, all side-quests. Hey if The Mandalorian wants what the Jawas have, you need to get this egg for them. To get the egg, The Mandalorian will have to kill the Mudhorn. Good fun! And this week, Din Djarin and Bo Katan met with their new pals, Jack Black and Lizzo, who were willing to help, but had a little favor to ask first about some malfunctioning droids, which sent the pait from task to task as they tried to solve this mystery. And we even got to hear Christopher Lloyd screaming about what a great visionary Count Dooku was. You know what? More good fun!

But this season has really gotten embedded into the lore of the Mandalorians. And, at first, I gave it a chance. Maybe their lore is interesting. Well, so far, it’s not all that interesting. To the point I don’t care. The Original Trilogy version of Boba Fett takes a lot of modern criticism for getting a lot of attention for not doing all that much. But at the time of The Empire Strikes Back, that’s what made him fascinating. He was just a bounty hunter. His name is never even said in Empire and is just kind of mumbled by Han Solo in Return of the Jedi where if you don’t know that’s what he’s saying, there’s not much chance it can be deciphered. But Fett could be anything. Which made Fett interesting. Well, it turns out when you get a bunch of characters together who all look like Boba Fett, it stops getting all that interesting.

Madalorians, as a collective, might be more boring than Jedi. I don’t care about their religion, which is all they seem to talk about. When they train, it looks like some sort of SPECTRE lair getting ready to take on 007. And yeah, it’s annoying I can’t see their faces because I am someone who enjoys watching actors act and all I’m watching is … actually I have no idea who I’m watching because who knows who is in the costume on a week-to-week basis. After watching Pedro Pascal in The Last of Us, my goodness I just want to watch this man act. I have no idea what his contract is with Lucasfilm, but if I were Lucasfilm, I’d want to have this guy front and center of every episode, not just his voice. But the show is going the opposite direction where Din has recommitted to never taking his helmet off. Great. One of the most charismatic actors working today and we don’t get to see him. (I assume there was an overlap between his work on The Last of Us and The Mandalorian and all of this wound up being a workaround, but it’s still baffling.)

I find myself openly rooting against this plan to bring all The Mandalorians back together and reclaim Mandalore, which I’m not sure is the desired intent. But episodes like this week’s remind me why I still enjoy watching this show so much. And what I loved about it from the start. Just this loner, making his way through the galaxy. But now we get to hang out with hundreds of Mandalorians and they are about as interesting as all the Jedi hanging out together. I wish the Mandalorians would tell Din to take a hike so he can take his helmet off and go make some money collecting bounties.

You can contact Mike Ryan directly on Twitter.

On July 21st, many Americans will have to make a tough choice: one ticket to Greta Gerwig’s cinematic event Barbie or one ticket to Christopher Nolan’s extremely long biopic, Oppenheimer? There is one clear answer here… sorry to Cillian Murphy, but you can catch him on the 22nd if you want.

The long-awaited Barbie movie is almost upon us, and now is the time to get to know what you’re in for. Margot Robbie will star as the infamous doll, with Ryan Gosling as her companion Ken, and a slew of other Barbies and Kens. You too can be a Barbie! If you’re into that. Here is what we know so far.

Cast

One of the most appealing factors of the Barbie movie is the stacked cast which consists of acting veterans, newcomers, and Michael Cera as Allan. Alongside Robbie and Gosling as Barbie and Ken, the movie also stars numerous other iterations of Barbie, portrayed by Dua Lipa, Emma Mackey, Alexandra Shipp, Kate McKinnon, Hari Nef, Nicola Coughlan. Meanwhile, the Kens will consist of Simu Liu, Kingsley Ben-Adir, Ncuti Gatwa and Scott Evans. Rounding out the cast is Helen Mirren as the narrator and Will Ferrell as a Mattel CEO.

Plot

Despite all of the buzz, the plot details for the movie are still pretty sparse. We know that Barbie lives in her world with other Barbies, and she will go on some sort of adventure with Ken in the “real world,” but not much beyond that has been revealed.

Trailer

The star-studded trailer dropped this week, featuring few plot details but a whole lot of pink!

Release Date

Barbie will rollerskate into theaters on July 21st, 2023.

(Via Variety)