Alecbugg

As we speak, wealthy wannabes with cash to burn are being subjected to the horrors of folding chairs and plain cheese sandwiches at Fyre Festival. Pitched as an upscale experience in the Bahamas full of yachts and hot models in bikinis, guests—who paid between $1,000 to $12,000 for tickets alone, and up to $250,000 for yacht packages—instead arrived to find the Spirit Airlines version of a music festival, with repurposed FEMA relief tents standing in for villas, attendees stranded at the airport, and, worst of all, no beer. As word began to spread of the economy-class conditions on Twitter and Reddit, Blink-182 dropped out, and organizers postponed the festival and offered refunds to guests who weren’t able to physically make it to the island.

Now, festival co-organizer Ja Rule has issued a statement on Twitter (via Pitchfork), saying his immediate concern is getting festival-goers ...

King Arthur: Legend Of The Sword checks so many boxes on the blockbuster to-do list: There are big names (Charlie Hunnam and Jude Law), magic and spectacle, and of course, monstrous elephants. Guy Ritchie’s adaptation of the legend sees Hunnam take on the role of Arthur, the real heir to the throne that Vortigern’s (Law) languidly draped himself across. Their fight for power will draw out the aforementioned magic, rampaging elephants, and some more great headgear for Law.

Hunnam said his training for the role involved throwing 1,000 punches a day, but you won’t have to perform such an arduous task for your chance to catch the action on screen. The A.V. Club is giving away free passes to an advance screening of King Arthur: Legend Of The Sword on Monday, May 8 at 7p.m., at the Showplace ICON at Roosevelt Collection theater. Just ...

Go Super Saiyan over these fresh Dragon Ball Z memes. 

Submitted by:

This Sunday’s episode of The Simpsons sounds fairly rote—Bart does a bad thing then gets punished, with possibly hilarious results. There’s even a celebrity voice cameo, as Absolutely Fabulous’ Jennifer Saunders will lend her vodka-lined pipes to some character within that tale. Ahead of all that been-there-done-that, The Simpsons will air a couch gag that spans the show’s 600-plus episode history, that all starts with a Big Bang Theory-inspired riff:

In less than 20 seconds, you can relive all your favorite Simpsons episodes, from “Bart Sells His Soul” to “E-I-EI-(Annoyed Grunt).” But don’t let that efficiency prevent you from hanging around for “Looking For Mr. Goodbart,” which airs Sunday at 8 p.m. Eastern.

Ever since Peter Capaldi announced he’d be handing over the key to the TARDIS after Doctor Who season 10, the rumor mills have been cranking out all manner of speculation on who would replace him as The Doctor. Various reports have indicated that Love Actually’s Kris Marshall was in the running, as well as Buffy The Vampire Slayer’s Anthony Stewart Head. And, in a somewhat less expected move, The IT Crowd’s Richard Ayoade was also reportedly under consideration to play the Time Lord. But Nerdist claimed to have reason to think the casting of the 13th Doctor will break even more boundaries.

According to Nerdist’s unnamed sources, Chewing Gum creator Michaela Coel is the frontrunner to take on the role after Capaldi departs at the end of the current season. The comedy is one of Netflix’s few black-led shows, and Coel commands the screen ...

Despite it having been released less than a year ago, Passengers was a hyped, big-budget sci-fi romance starring Jennifer Lawrence and Chris Pratt that you probably don’t remember. It currently sits at a 31% not-so-fresh rating on Rotten Tomatoes and was widely considered a box office flop (though it fared better overseas).

The story is this: Jim (Chris Pratt) and Aurora (Jennifer Lawrence) are ensconced in hibernation pods on a 120-year journey to another planet. Jim’s pod malfunctions, waking him up 90 years too early, and after a year of wandering around alone he causes the same to happen to Aurora’s pod, thus allowing him to have a (beautiful, female) companion. It’s creepy by any measure, but the film’s approach to it is bizarre. Our take, which aligned with many others, was that “the effect of Passengers is to turn frothy sci-fi romance into an ...

Joe Wadlington is currently “writing a book about guys who don’t text back,” but he might be better off writing about guys who managed the most horrifically placed chain restaurants in the world. On a recent date, he discovered that his potential paramour used to be the general manager for the Olive Garden restaurant in Times Square, a restaurant that operates much differently than its contemporaries and attracts a much different crowd.

He used the date as a means to gather as much information as possible about the restaurant and shared his findings in this Twitter thread. It spans many tweets, but here’s a selection of our favorite revelations.

It's a brave and wildly unpredictable world when you manage to take the headphones off and tune in for a little bit. 

Submitted by:

Welcome to the third installment in our Game In Progress review of Persona 5. You can see the rest of our coverage here. This installment goes up through the end of the fourth Palace, but it contains no huge spoilers aside from the nature of those Palaces and some confidant relationships.

Last weekend I baked a cake. It came out—well, it was inedible, and I threw it all away on Sunday, but the point is that I did it. I walked to the store, bought the ingredients, came home, mixed them, let it cool, then iced it. I baked it!

However, aside from that, what I did the past week was play Persona 5. I played it when I got home from work and hours after I would’ve normally gone to bed; I played it when I woke up on Saturday and throughout halftime during NBA playoff games ...

Uber’s been thirsty for some good press lately, what with the ride-sharing juggernaut’s unsavory business practices—from the spying to the sexism to its own CEO’s general douchiness—coming to light. They’ll be grateful, then, for the little bit of ingenuity displayed by a Durham, North Carolina Uber driver, who appears to keep a functioning NES Classic (a rare revival of the original console) in his back seat.

The picture was posted to Reddit by user Okdiv and depicts them playing the original The Legend Of Zelda, though the NES Classic comes loaded with what Okdiv described as a “ton of games.” Uber could earn back some goodwill by putting one in every back seat, but, alas, there just simply aren’t enough Nintendo Classics out there.

This morning, Kendrick Lamar released Damn., a 55-minute stretch of Love Below funk, Compton bounce, and characteristically dense ruminations on fame, fate, and violence in America. It’ll give rap nerds bars to parse for months to come, and some of these beats are going to pop up on mixtapes for years. And yet, as is quickly becoming a trend, people are clamoring for a secret immediate follow-up. There’s an elaborate theory brewing, and, while compelling, it is probably total horseshit.

The theory, popularized in an all-caps Reddit post titled “SECOND ALBUM COMING ON EASTER. THIS IS ACTUALLY NOT A BAMBOOZLE GUYS” goes as follows: Kendrick dies on the album’s intro and on the final track sets out to die again, making the record a sort of cycle of death. Today is also Good Friday, on which the crucifixion of Jesus is commemorated in the Christian church. TDE ...

If you’ve had the pleasure of reading one of Haruki Murakami’s novels, you’re likely aware of his deep love of music. In the sometimes unsettling and always intriguing worlds the author creates, his characters are well-versed in musical knowledge and appreciation, dropping little factoids for the reader’s enjoyment while eloquently describing their favorite songs better than most music journalists. Sound fragments from the surrounding world or from some far-off memory are inseparable from the thought processes of his characters, to the point where those thoughts start to echo the syncopated rhythms of the album he’s no doubt listening to while he writes.

That album, whether it be jazz, rock, folk, or classical, would likely be pulled from Murakami’s collection of 10,000 records that line the wall of his office and lend him inspiration while he works. Thanks to the knowledge curators at Open ...

Ensuring that it doesn’t get left behind in the ”stories about affluent white folks struggling with daddy issues” arms race, Netflix has announced that it’s picking up Noah Baumbach’s latest film for its online streaming library. Baumbach recently finished work on Meyerowitz Stories (New and Selected), which sees Ben Stiller, Emma Thompson, and Netflix favorite Adam Sandler wrestling with the impact of their father, Dustin Hoffman, on their lives. Meyerowitz Stories is being bandied about as a potential entrant at this year’s Cannes. Given Netflix’s ongoing efforts to get its movies recognized by theaters and award shows, despite their streaming-specific origins, it’ll be a prominent feather in the company’s cap if it does.

[via Deadline]

Over the years, Doctor Who fans have been treated to a number of multiple-Doctor storylines where more than one incarnation of the old Time Lord teamed up to defeat some enormous threat. Outside of some books, comics, and audio dramas, though, there has never really been a Doctor Who story where multiple versions of his Time Lord nemesis The Master have teamed up. That’s apparently going to change soon, as the BBC itself has confirmed that John Simm will be reprising his role as The Master this season alongside current Master Michelle Gomez.

Simm last appeared as The Master in “The End Of Time,” the final story for David Tennant’s Doctor, and he was vanquished pretty definitively in that adventure. By the next time The Master popped up, he had regenerated into Michelle Gomez’s Missy, and she was facing off against Peter Capaldi’s Doctor. Any other ...