Evil’s Michael Emerson on Working Opposite a Giant, Hairy, Five-Eyed Demon
According to Deadline, Skarsgård will also executive produce the show along with his fellow It film franchise creative team at Warner Bros. The show was inspired by the Stephen King novel It and was developed by the franchise’s director Andy Muschietti with producer Barbara Muschietti. They’re also joined by Chapter Two co-producer Jason Fuchs with the films’ other producers, Roy Lee and Dan Lin. Now with Skarsgård in the mix, we’re excited for more horror in the prequel series. Muschietti is set to direct four episodes out of the nine in the series order.
Recently, Bill Skarsgård starred in Boy Kills World and will be featured as Eric Draven in the upcoming The Crow reboot, while Andy Muschietti remained in the Warner Bros. family with The Flash. Needless to say, we are excited to see them team up again with more world-building and creepy killer clownery in the Stephen King universe. Their take on It has become the quintessential one garnering $1.17 billion worldwide. And in an age with ever-expanding mythologies, characters like Pennywise can keep floating on in horror infamy as long as he wants.
Comedians Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert have separately announced they’ll bring Stewart’s The Daily Show and Colbert’s The Late Show to Chicago during August’s Democratic National Convention.
For Stewart, it’s a return to the city with which he waged a pizza war against deep dish, endearing himself to New Yorkers before eventually accepting Lou Malnati’s olive branch and calling for a pizza armistice back in 2013.
Could Stewart’s forthcoming visit open old wounds? The terrain is different with Chicago embracing thin-crust, tavern-style pizza and somewhat shunning deep dish, casting it as a rare indulgence (even as backlash against the phrase “tavern style” is building). Now 11 years after his rant, Stewart’s likely to find local allies. Certainly, Marc Malnati, who appeared on The Daily Show in 2013 to serve Stewart his family’s pizza, is up to the task. The Stewart episode forged a marketing template for Malnati’s to solicit national attention, a strategy executed perfectly on multiple occasions. Pizza remains a popular topic for Stewart who just last week attacked presumptive GOP presidential candidate Donald Trump’s pizza etiquette.
Colbert enjoys a less confrontational relationship with Chicago, having lived in the city for a decade, attending Northwestern University in suburban Evanston, and performing with Second City. He also worked as a server at Scoozi, a Lettuce Entertain You Enterprises restaurant that closed in 2014 in River North. He’s called Chicago the best place he’s ever lived in and took joy in 2016 working as a Wrigley Field hot dog vendor, selling wieners during the Chicago Cubs’ World Series championship run. The Wieners Circle also got a shoutout in a 2010 segment on The Late Show. Last month, Colbert once again sank his teeth into the city’s encased meat discourse and talked about Chicago’s anti-ketchup philosophy, and Heinz’s odd ketchup stations: “Ketchup is for the children,” Colbert said during The Late Show’s episode on April 15.
The DNC, which takes place between August 19 and August 22, may provide some antics at Chicago’s restaurants. Maybe the two will hang out with the cast of The Bear or eat soul food with Chicago Sky rookie Angel Reese. Maybe they’ll grab a taco at Carnitas Uruapan. Hopefully, Stewart and Colbert will produce more tomfoolery and there’s less of the other stuff.
Van Lathan and Rachel Lindsay start the show by addressing the new theme song and reaction from our Thought Warriors (00:15). Then, they give their impressions of the bizarre new Drake-produced AI track (20:56), and the internet’s reaction to Stephen A. Smith’s comments on Donald Trump’s relatability (38:36). Later, they expand on the surprise that their birthday month falls during Confederate Heritage Month in Mississippi, and the reason behind its existence (1:18:34).
Hosts: Van Lathan and Rachel Lindsay Producer: Ashleigh Smith
Van Lathan and Rachel Lindsay react to Nick Saban’s retirement announcement (11:33) before discussing Stephen A. Smith going scorched earth on Jason Whitlock (22:28). Then, a conversation about Democratic criticism leading up to the election (43:50), and Kai Cenat echoes Christian concerns over Lil Nas X’s latest single (1:09:57).
Hosts: Van Lathan and Rachel Lindsay Producers: Donnie Beacham Jr. and Ashleigh Smith
Logan Paul, the YouTuber and wrestler has been saddled with a class-action lawsuit over “fraudulent actions” regarding his NFT game, CryptoZoo.
After a year of investigation, Stephen “Coffeezilla” Findeisen, a YouTuber who looks into fraudsters and fake gurus in the crypto space, discovered that Logan Paul’s CryptoZoo was something of a scam. CryptoZoo, a blockchain game that was supposed to function like passive income for Paul’s ardent fans and early investors, actually wound up being a rug pull for just about everyone involved because Paul’s team preemptively sold the in-game currency, zoo coins, before everyone else. Aside from some of the folks hired to work on CryptoZoo, who allegedly made thousands of dollars, others interested in the “game” lost hundreds if not thousands, according to Coffeezilla’s multi-part investigatory series.
Initially, Paul was furious with Coffeezilla’s year-long investigation, calling him the “Keemstar of crypto in finance” and threatening to sue him in a since-deleted YouTube video. Paul has walked that statement back, apologizing to his fans and Coffeezilla while also putting forth a three-step plan to “finish and deliver” CryptoZoo, which has been basically broken since its August 2021 launch. Now, as Coffeezilla tweeted on February 3, Paul has been hit with a class-action lawsuit.
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It’s a camera. For your car. The Ring Car Cam’s dual-facing HD cameras capture activity in and around your car in HD detail.
The plaintiff, a Texas police officer who poured about $3,000 of his own money into CryptoZoo in the hopes that it would yield big returns, filed the litigation in the city of Austin. According to the suit reviewed by Kotaku, the plaintiff is seeking damages north of $75,000 for “conspiracy to commit fraud,” “fraudulent misrepresentation,” “negligence,” “unjust enrichment,” and more. The plaintiff named everyone involved with the game’s creation, including Paul and former lead developer Eddie Ibanez. In the end, the plaintiff wants repayment for copious damages, from attorney’s fees and the costs of action to civil penalties and mental anguish.
Paul has not responded to the lawsuit at all since it was filed. However, he did make an appearance (and got injured) during WWE’s 2023 Royal Rumble event on January 28. His YouTube accounts, including his Impaulsive podcast, have been pretty quiet since February started. As all of this is going on, though, Paul’s likeness is slated to appear in developer Visual Concepts’ WWE 2K23when it comes out on March 17.
YouTuber and internet personality Logan Paul has found himself with a massive target on his forehead recently. Paul, who’s been on something of a redemption arc these last few years following the “suicide forest” fiasco in December 2017, is back in hot water after crypto investigator Stephen “Coffeezilla” Findeisen published a three-part video series looking into CryptoZoo, a blockchain “game” Paul once heavily promoted. There are just two glaring problems here: The game doesn’t exist yet, and Paul’s most ardent fans and early investors have lost hundreds of thousands of dollars in the process of supporting it.
Logan Paul, the older brother of boxer and media personality Jake Paul, is a YouTuber who began creating content on Vine in the early 2010s before migrating to Google’s video platform once Vine shuttered. He regularly uploads vlog-style videos in which he offers viewers a voyeuristic look into his daily life and the various shenanigans he engages in. While already a controversial figure during his early content creation days, Paul didn’t really draw the internet’s ire until December 2017 when he filmed a video in Japan’s Aokigahara Forest in which he and members of his crew filmed and interacted with a dead body in a manner many considered tasteless and inappropriate. (Aokigahara has a reputation for being a site of frequent suicides.)
This video and the subsequent reaction to it absolutely tanked Paul’s career for much of 2018. However, since then, Paul’s been rehabilitating his image as a media personality and professional wrestler, signing to WWE’s Raw while hosting a YouTube podcast that boasts over four million subscribers. Dude’s doing very well for himself. However, he’s the internet’s main character again following what appears to be his involvement in one of the biggest crypto scams that has been uncovered to date.
Coffeezilla
In a three-part video series totaling a little over an hour, Stephen “Coffeezilla” Findeisen—a YouTuber who “uncovers scams, fraudsters, and fake gurus that are preying on desperate people with deceptive advertising”—looked into CryptoZoo. What the hell is CryptoZoo? Well, as Paul explains it, it’s a “really fun game that earns you money.” According to the official website, which says the game is currently “undergoing upgrades to the core infrastructure of the ecosystem,” CryptoZoo is an “autonomous ecosystem that allows ZooKeepers to buy, sell, and trade exotic animals and hybrids.” Basically, it’s an NFT game in which players purchase zoo coins, CryptoZoo’s in-game currency, to buy egg NFTs that are hatched to become animals. Once hatched, you then breed those animals together to make hybrids and the rarer the hybrid, the higher the daily yield of zoo coins. Cash those out and boom, you’re pulling in money. In short, it’s structured to work like passive income.
Unfortunately, this “play-to-earn” NFT game filled with hand-made art—as Paul likes to heavily emphasize on his podcast Impaulsive—has never yet been playable, despite letting people sink tons of money into it. Coffeezilla discovered that, since CryptoZoo’s introduction in 2021, Paul stans have spent some $2.5 million on eggs alone, with the coin itself skyrocketing to a market cap of roughly $2 billion. Some folks Coffeezilla talked to shelled out tens, sometimes hundreds of thousands of dollars on CryptoZoo because they believed Paul was a “changed man” and he was creating a “safe place” for the everyperson to invest in cryptocurrency. Turns out they were wrong, at least on the second part, because now those people are out thousands of dollars.
Coffeezilla
Rob, or Helicopter Bob, one of the victims Coffeezilla video-chatted with, said he lost “just under $7,000 with CryptoZoo.” Helicopter Bob explained that the passive income, the project’s core mechanic, “never did [work] from the beginning and wasn’t even written into the contract where it showed you were actually yielding with Zoo.” He went on to say that “there was no way to claim your yield [and] there never was.” Basically, people were putting money into a system that was providing zero returns.
Worse yet, as an unnamed person told Coffeezilla in a separate video call, those who invested in CryptoZoo couldn’t even hatch the eggs they bought. “It’s just a picture,” the person said about the eggs. “There’s nothing I can do with it. It’s basically worth nothing whatsoever.” So, you’ve got diehard Paul fans pining to play a nonfunctioning game and losing money in the process. A game, mind you, that still doesn’t work to this day.
Coffeezilla
In Coffeezilla’s videos, we hear Paul explain certain issues with CryptoZoo’s development. Specifically, he says a “developer fled to Switzerland” with the source code and held it hostage for $1 million, and this is why the game’s been broken. But this developer, who Coffeezilla spoke to in the course of his investigation, claims that he hadn’t been paid at all for his work on CryptoZoo, despite bringing on a team of 30 engineers and burning $50,000 a week to build the NFT project. Another CryptoZoo developer Coffeezilla spoke with corroborated the claim, saying he also hadn’t been paid at all. Not only were Paul’s fans finding holes in their wallets after investing in CryptoZoo, but it appears that the people working on the project weren’t even being paid adequately or on time.
Kotaku reached out to Findeisen and Paul for comment.
Paul, for his part, has said that the report is “simply not true” and that, “when appropriate, all bad actors will be exposed, explained, & held fully accountable,” promising more details in his January 3 podcast. On December 26, Paul publicly invited Coffeezilla to appear on the Impaulsive podcast to hash everything out, though Coffeezilla responded by saying that he’d already invited Paul onto his show the day before. It remains to be seen whether or not anything will come to fruition from these exchanges.
