Author Archives: Carol Edwards

Mariah Carey doesn’t do anything without flair, and her attempt at the viral bottle cap challenge is no exception. 

The challenge has seen some pretty wild tries at removing bottle caps, but nothing compares to the queen of all that is extra’s stab at it. Dressed in a glittering corset, Carey started off the challenge with some faux martial arts moves. Then, she hit her signature high note with a shriek so piercing, the glass bottle’s cap went flying off. 

It’s an extremely Mariah Carey move — you could even say she popped off.

Obviously, her fans were here for it. 

More about Viral Videos, Mariah Carey, Bottle Cap Challenge, Culture, and Web Culture

The long weekend is almost over and the crowds have spoken — Spider-Man: Far From Home is a hit.

You have to squint pretty hard to see any broken records, but across six days Sony Pictures’ collaboration with Marvel Studios raked in an estimated U.S. box office haul of $185.1 million. The three-day, Friday-through-Sunday weekend accounts for $93.6 million of that figure (per current estimates).

That three-day weekend total is the second-best ever for the July Fourth weekend, after Transformers: Dark of the Moon ($97.9 million). It also edges Spider-Man 2 (as in the second Tobey Maguire movie) out of that same record’s #2 position — it made $88.2 million. Read more…

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Now isn’t the time for live-action Disney fatigue, since the teaser for 2020’s Mulan is here to stir up your excitement once more. Based on the Chinese legends that led to 1999’s animated Mulan, the live-action adaptation stars Yifei Liu in the titular role.

The teaser tells a familiar story: Mulan’s family takes her to a matchmaker, who expresses all the desirable qualities that a good wife must have. Mulan may or may not have those qualities, but we know what they don’t: That she is, above all, a fierce warrior. The film also stars Rogue One‘s Donnie Yen, Jason Scott Lee, Yoson An, Gong Li, Jet Li, and more. Read more…

More about Entertainment, Movies, Disney, Trailer, and Mulan

Major spoilers follow for Spider-Man: Far From Home. 

Spider-Man: Far From Home has no shortage of twists and turns, but it saves one of its biggest shocks for the very end: J.K. Simmons reprising his role of J. Jonah Jameson from the Sam Raimi Spider-Man trilogy. 

At the screening I attended, the moment elicited gasps from the audience. But behind the scenes, producer Kevin Feige revealed, the casting was a long time coming.  

“To bring to life a new version of J. Jonah Jameson was pretty exciting, and was a plan, at least a dream, that we’ve had from the very beginning of working with Sony on the MCU Spider-Man,” he said on a call with Mashable. Read more…

More about J.K. Simmons, Spider Man Far From Home, Entertainment, and Movies Tv Shows

Divisiveness has defined much of 2019. Most of it makes you want to curl up in the fetal position and die. But every so often a disagreement rises above the usual fighting to give us the gift of a feud.

A feud is not a fight. Feuds are petty, often passive aggressive, and waged over little to nothing of actual import. Sometimes feuds can lead to all-out legal battles (see Katy Perry v. Nuns). But the art of a great feud requires a certain subtle spite, layers of shade, and a sustained commitment to triviality.

The best feuds are an escape from the necessary and tiring battles being waged for human decency around the world. They allow us to forget civility for a minute and just go off, bitch!!! Read more…

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Smoking is on the rise – at least it is on TV, according to a report from Truth Initiative, which has been tracking on-screen depictions of smoking and found a drastic increase between 2018 and 2019. 

The number one offender? Netflix. The streaming giant has depicted a whopping 866 instances of smoking so far in 2019, compared with 299 the previous year.

Truth Initiative estimates that around 28 million young people watched this content (though Netflix, as always, rarely releases numbers). Although most millennials and Gen Z kids were taught from a young age that smoking kills, seeing it that consistently and not in an explicitly negative light can have damaging effects. Read more…

More about Netflix, Research, Smoking, Stranger Things, and Entertainment

This post contains spoilers for Season 3 of Stranger Things

Our tears have not even dried yet after the devastating revelation that our beloved Sheriff Hopper died sacrificing himself in the Stranger Things Season 3 finale. 

But fans are already on the case with convincing theories about why he’s actually, probably, definitely still alive. The writers themselves even appear to have purposefully left that door open, with a conspicuous mention of an “American” prisoner at the Russian facility in the end credits scene.

But there are more subtle hints, too. And redditors are desperately scrounging for all of them to help us all remain in the denial phase of this grieving process. Read more…

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We can see which tabs are playing audio and we can mute the tab (or the entire site). But soon, it’s looking like Chrome users will get yet another measure of control over their browser’s audiovisual experience.

A new Global Media Controls (GMC) feature has been switched on in Chrome Canary, Google’s first line of defense for testing out changes and updates for the widely used web browser. The Canary update appears to have first been spotted by ZDNet.

The “GMC” thing is basically just a fancy name for on-demand Play/Pause controls. In its current form — yes, this could all change before it goes live for real — the button appears right in your toolbar, the same place you find icons for extensions like LastPass, just to the right of the URL bar. Read more…

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SPOILER ALERT If you haven’t watched all of Stranger Things 3 yet, don’t read any further than the ARG spoiler warning below if you want to avoid a major story detail for Season 3.

Stranger Things always made it feel like grand adventures and big mysteries were everywhere and that anyone could solve them, even a rag tag team of misfit kids living in small-town suburbia.

But Season 3 is making that even realer, with an augmented reality game (ARG) that fans are still actively unraveling on July 6, two days after the season premiered, with clues and codes hidden throughout the real world. You can join through July 10 to help crack the daily puzzles part of the larger conspiracy. Read more…

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Outer space is vast and full of darkness. But there is beauty to be found all throughout, as Hubble constantly reminds us.

Take this newly shared image of NGC 972, a spiral galaxy discovered by German-British astronomer William Herschel in 1784. It’s not our closest neighbor, at around 70 million light-years away, but it sure takes a good photo.

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