Pop Culture
Sonic the Hedgehog Creator Yuji Naka Arrested for Insider Trading
Yuji Naka, the legendary Sega designer who co-created Sonic the Hedgehog, has been arrested in Japan and charged with insider trading, FNN reports (via Kotaku). Naka, 57, was one of three video game creatives caught in a Tokyo District Public Prosecutors Office sweep. Law enforcement officials allege that in 2020, while Naka worked at Dragon Quest developer Square Enix, he bought stock in a studio called Aiming right before it was announced as the home of a new Dragon Quest game, Tact. Naka is accused of buying 10,000 Aiming shares for ¥2.8 million, or about $20,000. Taisuke Sazaki, a veteran of Final Fantasy and Kingdom Hearts games, is accused of buying shares worth around $188,000, and another employee, Fumiaki Suzuki, allegedly purchase...
Consequence Shop’s Black Friday/Cyber Monday Deals Start Now With up to 50% Off
Halloween is behind us and Thanksgiving is right ahead, which means it’s time to get that early holiday season shopping underway. We’re making it easier than ever to check all those names off your list by giving you the best deals at the Consequence Shop during our Black Friday/Cyber Monday extended sale. From November 18th through the 28th, we’re offering up to 50% off select items storewide! Get our biggest discount of the year — a full 50% off — on Flower Lab CBD products like our line of tinctures (including the new high strength varieties), balms, capsules, and KOAST blueberry gummies. For the music lovers in your world, we’re also offering half off select GWAR Bud of Gods products and accessories (hoodies, long-sleeve tees, rolling papers, and card grinders), as well as our entire Fe...
CNN Reporters No Longer Allowed to Drink During New Year’s Eve Coverage
Watching reporters get drunk on New Year’s Eve is easily the best part about television coverage of the holiday, but you probably can’t look forward to an inebriated rant from Don Lemon this year. As Variety reports, CNN has ordered its correspondents to lay off the drinking while they work on this year’s New Year’s Eve. Besides Lemon — who got his ear pierced during his post-12:30 a.m. block of the show in 2016 and assured viewers last year that he was a “grown ass man” who didn’t care about his haters — Anderson Cooper and Andy Cohen take the cake for the network’s Most Likely to Go Viral employees. Cooper and Cohen have hosted CNN’s New Year’s Eve coverage since 2002 and 2018 respectively, and the dynamic between their friendship tends to be exacerbated by alcohol, from Cohen ranting ab...
Shanghai Officials Lock Disney Resort Guests Inside Park as Part of Zero-COVID Policy
Shanghai officials locked down the Shanghai Disney Resort on October 31st, refusing to allow theme park guests to leave until they had tested negative for COVID-19. As Reuters and Deadline report, the strict measures stemmed from China’s controversial zero-COVID policy. Officials said they were spurred to action after a 31-year-old woman who had visited the park in recent days tested positive for COVID-19. At 11:39 a.m. on Monday, they closed the gates to the main theme park and all surrounding grounds. According to unverified videos on social media, crowds of resort guests rushed towards the entrance to avoid the lockdown, only to find the gates already closed. Advertisement Related Video Those in the park were allowed to continue going on rides until testing concluded by 8:30 p.m. t...
Pope Francis Tells Nuns and Priests to Cool It with the Porn
Warning against the dangers of having “temptation in hand,” Pope Francis has urged nuns and priests to stop watching porn. According to the BBC, Francis was answering a question about digital and social media when he turned to the subject of explicit pornography. His Holiness called it “a vice that so many people have… even priests and nuns.” Francis has taken small steps to update the Catholic Church’s sexual mores, encouraging some forms of family planning and saying that followers don’t need to breed like “rabbits.” But the Church teaches that pornography is an affront to chastity. “The pure heart, the one that Jesus receives every day, cannot receive this pornographic information,” Francis said. Advertisement Related Video “The devil enters from there,” he added, ur...
Kennedy Descendent Who Dated Taylor Swift Says He Fought in Ukraine
Conor Kennedy, Senator Bobby Kennedy’s grandson whose fling with Taylor Swift reportedly inspired songs on Red, says that he served in Ukraine’s International Legion and helped fight against Russia. “Like many people, I was deeply moved by what I saw happening in Ukraine over the past year,” Kennedy said in a social medium statement last week. “I wanted to help. When I heard about Ukraine’s International Legion, I knew I was going, and I went to the embassy to enlist the next day.” He added that “I wasn’t a great shot, but I could carry heavy things and learned fast. I was also willing to die there. So they soon agreed to send me to the northeastern front,” an area that includes the hotly-contested Donbas region where much of the fighting has taken place. Advertise...
Spooky Season Merch Now Available at Consequence Shop
Spooky Season is in full swing. Here at Consequence, we’ve embraced Halloween by rolling out a new line of themed t-shirts and sweatshirts in the Consequence Shop. Up first is the solution to costume anxiety — for anyone who might get stressed about finding the perfect Halloween fit, or nailing the balance between casual but festive but not too over the top, our latest tee is for you. Spooky eyes? Check. Skeleton nose? Check. Creepy smile? Check. It’s a look that (literally) says “This Is My Halloween Costume,” in just one simple, comfortable, funny shirt! And it gets better: Our Halloween T-shirt collection is printed on 100% recycled fabric that has never been re-dyed. That means not only are you getting a fun and easy costume, you’re saving landfills from being filled with usable materi...
Elon Musk Thinks Grimes Might Be a Simulation That “Exists in His Cerebral Cortex”
Elon Musk thought his ex-partner Grimes might be a simulation that “exists in his cerebral cortex.” She revealed the theory to journalist Devin Gordon, who shared it on the new BBC docuseries, The Elon Musk Show. “She [Grimes] told me repeatedly that Musk has this theory of her that she’s not real,” Gordon told the BBC (via Cosmopolitan). “That she’s a simulation who was created by him and exists in his cerebral cortex as sort of the perfect companion to him. Which sounds a little crazy and maybe even a little creepy, except, she agrees with it. She said she does feel like this simulation which was perfectly created for him.” He added, “Her interests are all the same as his and her music is very technologically oriented,” explaining that they “both made a similar nerdy joke about a sc...
James Corden Banned from New York Restaurant for “Extremely Nasty” Behavior
James Corden has played host regularly on The Late Late Show for years, but it seems like he has a lot to learn about being a good guest before exiting the program in 2023. On Monday, the outgoing late-night television anchor was publicly banned from the upscale New York restaurant Balthazar by owner Keith McNally, who labeled Corden “the most abusive customer” via Instagram. The acclaimed restaurateur began the post by calling Corden “a tiny Cretin of a man” and shared two manager reports of alleged instances of his poor treatment of restaurant staff. The first alleges Corden was “extremely nasty” to a restaurant manager and told them “‘Get us another round of drinks this second. And also take care of all of our drinks so far. This way I write any nasty reviews in yelp [sic] or anything l...
eBay Pulls Jeffrey Dahmer Costumes for Violating Violence Policy
Digital auction house eBay is pulling every Jeffrey Dahmer costume it finds for violating the violence and violent criminals policy, a spokesperson told TMZ. The site has seen increased interest in Dahmer-inspired glasses, shirts, wigs, and other costume elements following Netflix’s hit miniseries — and this really is the full title — Dahmer — Monster: The Jeffrey Dahmer Story. But selling such items, even as a costume, is against eBay’s user agreement. The violence and violent criminals policy prohibits, among other things, “Items closely associated with or that benefit violent felons, their acts, or crime scenes within the past 100 years.” Costumes of the infamous serial killer fall into the “closely associated” category; the sales can’t benefit Dahmer, who was beaten to ...
Jury Orders Alex Jones to Pay Nearly $1 Billion for Sandy Hook Lies
Alex Jones is a huckster, a conspiracy theorist, one of the worst people ever to work in media (and that’s saying something), and, perhaps soon, a negative billionaire. A Connecticut jury ruled on October 12th that the InfoWars founder must pay out $965 million for defamation after he spent a decade spreading lies about the 2012 school shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary. As reported by Reuters, CNN, Variety, and more, the case had 15 plaintiffs, including family members of eight victims of the shooting, plus a former FBI agent. Jones has repeatedly and falsely claimed that the shooting never happened — that 28 people, including 20 children didn’t die — and that anyone claiming otherwise was a paid actor for a government plot to unlawfully confiscate American’s guns. Jones called the ma...
The Best Amazon Prime Early Access Deals for Music and Entertainment Lovers
Prime Day: The Revenge. Just three months after enticing users with its Prime Day deals, Amazon is back with another site-wide sale dubbed the Prime Early Access Sale. Think of it like a pre-Black Friday discount extravaganza, giving Prime members a chance to check things off their holiday gift list well in advance. The sale is set for October 11th and 12th, and yes, you will need to be a member of Amazon Prime to access these deals. The good news is you can sign up for a free 30-day trial to get around that little requirement. Of course, the big question is: What sort of deals can you actually score during the Prime Early Access Sale? Well, to save you some clicking, we’ve rounded up the best deals for music and entertainment lovers we could find. Here are 10 items pop culture heads can g...
