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R.I.P. Michael Madsen, prolific character actor and frequent Tarantino collaborator

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Michael Madsen, a prolific character actor best known for his frequent appearances in Quentin Tarantino films, died Thursday morning. The cause of death, his manager said  (per NBC News), was cardiac arrest. He was 67.

Madsen’s acting career began with a chance run-in. In 1980, his friend took him to see a production of Of Mice And Men at Chicago’s Steppenwolf Theatre Company, starring a young John Malkovich. In an interview with The Independent, Madsen recalls wandering into the wings where he found Malkovich taking off his makeup. Malkovich promised to send the young Madsen a brochure for acting classes and then actually followed up. A couple months later, Madsen himself was on stage in a different Steppenwolf production of the same play.

From there, he moved to Los Angeles, where he secured some bit roles in TV shows and films throughout the ’80s like WarGames (which he told The A.V. Club brought him to L.A. in the first place in a 2015 interview), as well as St. Elsewhere, Miami Vice, Cagney & Lacey, Quantum Leap, The Doors, and more. 

In 1991, he landed one of his first major parts, as Susan Sarandon’s boyfriend in Thelma & Louise. “There’s a nice little part for anytime that people think that I’ve been put in the corner as the guy with the cigarette and the gun,” he told The A.V. Club. “I can say, ‘Well, what about Thelma & Louise? I got to play a nice guy, a romantic guy, and a gentleman.’ I rarely get asked to do stuff like that, so I was happy.”

He was the guy with the cigarette and the gun in Reservoir Dogs, which followed in 1992. He had the chance to be an A-list star in the years following—a scheduling conflict kept him from playing Vincent Vega in Pulp Fiction, a role that eventually netted John Travolta an Oscar nomination—but he mostly stayed on the sidelines. “I’m not a publicity hound,” he told The Independent. “I don’t care about being on the cover of GQ or Vanity Fair. There was a time when I could have done that, but I didn’t have a publicist. And I think the studios decided I was some sort of renegade or malcontent.”

That doesn’t mean he didn’t have an incredibly fruitful career, however. Madsen went on to appear in three other Tarantino films—Kill Bill: Volume 2, The Hateful Eight, and Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, as well as Free Willy, Wyatt Earp, Donnie Brasco, Die Another Day, and many, many, others. “If a time machine existed, I would’ve liked to have played Doc Holliday. But it was fun. I just like to live in the present. Hey, I’m in The Hateful Eight. I’m a happy man!” he told The A.V. Club.

In a joint statement shared with USA Today, Madsen’s managers wrote, “In the last two years Michael Madsen has been doing some incredible work with independent film including upcoming feature films Resurrection Road, Concessions and Cookbook For Southern Housewives, and was really looking forward to this next chapter in his life.”

“Michael was also preparing to release a new book called Tears For My Father: Outlaw Thoughts And Poems,” they added. “Michael Madsen was one of Hollywood’s most iconic actors, who will be missed by many.”

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InShaneee
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How Kenny Omega’s AEW Wrestling Theme Came To Life

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Ahead of AEW: All In Texas, Little V Mills shares how he came up with “Battle Cry” as Omega’s wrassling anthem

The post How Kenny Omega’s AEW Wrestling Theme Came To Life appeared first on Aftermath.



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G/O Media sells Kotaku and says it's "winding down"

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[Note: The A.V. Club was owned by G/O Media from 2019 to 2024. The author of this article is a former member of The Onion Union.]

Earlier today, news broke that private equity profit generator G/O Media was doing video game journalism site Kotaku the favor of selling it, and the rest of us the favor of announcing that the company as a whole would soon be “winding down.” Kotaku will now be owned by Swiss tech news company Keleops, which bought Gizmodo from G/O back in 2024, around the time the media conglomerate was entering a period of serious de-conglomerating—selling off The TakeoutThe OnionDeadspin, and a small cadre of dyspeptic malcontents who would really like to tell you about the latest TV shows, music, video games, books, and films currently colonizing our brains in the span of about three months.

News of the sale, and G/O’s pending dissolution, managed to rate mention in The New York Times, which notes that company CEO Jim Spanfeller published an “epilogue” to G/O’s legacy on the company blog. To connoisseurs of the Spanfeller School Of Business Writing—previously confined to those lucky enough to wake up to periodic “State Of The Company” emails from him clogging up their inboxes—it’s a clear paragon of the form: Over-long, highly defensive, and largely concerned with the assigning of blame to proper parties (media unions, mostly) and away from the innocent (G/O Media CEO Jim Spanfeller).

Among other things, Spanfeller addresses that time the entire workforce of sports culture site Deadspin resigned in protest after being ordered to curtail its more wide-ranging focus “to cover just sports, sports related issues, as well as sports adjacent stories,” described in the blog as “the slightest of changes.” “That was perceived as beyond the pale by the legacy team and as such they left en masse.  An outcome that the management team certainly did not want.” (If you’d like another perspective on these events, you may enjoy the formerly-hosted-on-Deadspin “The Adults In The Room,” written by former Deadspin Editor-In-Chief Megan Greenwell, now the author of newly minted bestseller Bad Company: Private Equity And The Death Of The American Dream.) Still, the Deadspin story did have a happy ending: “In the end, we sold the site for more than we bought it for.”

Elsewhere in the article, Spanfeller addresses various other bugbears that have impacted his time in the manager’s chair, notably the hated specter of writers writing about the things they want to write about from positions of familiarity or expertise. (“Often now, the writer wants to choose topics and story angles to match their own specific world view.  A practice that often actually works against the very brand building that some would suggest supports such practices.”) But it’s not all doom and gloom: Spanfeller takes a moment to herald some of his big successes, too, like G/O’s innovative use of artificial intelligence to produce bold new experiments in online content, noting—in his blog post about his company no longer surviving or growing—that, “Innovation was always a constant, which was clearly a key reason for our survival and growth during these very trying times.”

The Times notes that G/O hasn’t completely powered down, as it’s still hunting around to find a buyer for Black culture and news site The Root. It’s also not clear what’s next for Spanfeller, whether he and his friends at Great Hills Partners will now seek out another set of sites to leave their lasting and undeniable impact on, or whether he might consider retiring, possibly to tend to a garden where he’d grow a variety of plants known for their properties in garnishing and flavoring food.



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Nintendo Locked Down the Switch 2's USB-C Port, Broke Third-Party Docking

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Two accessory manufacturers have told The Verge that Nintendo has intentionally locked down the Switch 2's USB-C port using a new encryption scheme, preventing compatibility with third-party docks and accessories. "I haven't yet found proof of that encryption chip myself -- but when I analyzed the USB-C PD traffic with a Power-Z tester, I could clearly see the new Nintendo Switch not behaving like a good USB citizen should," writes The Verge's Sean Hollister. From the report: If you've been wondering why there are basically no portable Switch 2 docks on the market, this is the reason. Even Jsaux, the company that built its reputation by beating the Steam Deck dock to market, tells us it's paused its plans to build a Switch 2 dock because of Nintendo's actions. It's not simply because the Switch 2 now requires more voltage, as was previously reported; it's that Nintendo has made things even more difficult this generation.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Has Xbox Considered Laying One Person Off Instead Of Thousands

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None of the people being laid off were responsible for the decisions that have led to these layoffs

The post Has Xbox Considered Laying One Person Off Instead Of Thousands appeared first on Aftermath.



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Crunchyroll ran embarrassingly bad ChatGPT subtitles on its new anime series

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A screenshot from Necronomico and the Cosmic Horror Show depicting a blue-haired girl in a white varsity jacket while shielding her eyes from light.

The subtitles for one of Crunchyroll's newest anime series make it pretty clear that the company is going all in on ChatGPT.

This week as viewers logged on to Crunchyroll to check out Studio Gokumi's Necronomico and the Cosmic Horror Show, many were surprised to see that the series' subtitles were filled with typos, grammatical errors, and explicit references to ChatGPT. The subtitles seemed very much like text that had been generated with AI and slapped onto Necronomico and the Cosmic Horror Show without first being reviewed and edited for accuracy.

Errors in subtitles aren't unheard of, but sentences like "Is gameorver. if you fall, you …

Read the full story at The Verge.

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