Chris Hardwick's Blog, page 2347

Seth Rogen Took to Tinder to Find Love For a Stranger

Whether you’re looking for love or something more… casual, Tinder has become one of the premiere, or at least most convenient, destinations. At the very least, it can be fun to go on and see the nearby people you could meet. Seth Rogen is a happily married man, but doesn’t mean he shouldn’t get to have fun. To take adultery out of the picture, Rogen took over a Vanity Fair staffer’s phone and swiped away in an effort to find love for the young lady.

The experience was up and down. During one stretch, Rogen encountered a string of guys he described thusly: “Douche face; douche face; not cool; weird picture; square head; nah, fam.” He also had some less-than-kind words for Dee (pictured above): “That’s a weird… It’s so, like, I’m sorry Dee, but who in their right mind puts this picture up? This is it? It’s so crazy.”

But there were some high points: Rogen summarized the experience by saying, “We found you a very nice clown, he seemed very handsome and nice, and you have a conversation going.” He also deduced that you can keep a Tinder conversation going even if you just continually respond, “Nah fam.”

Celebrities have sort of been flocking to Tinder lately: Eric André and Hannibal Buress, also for Vanity Fair, recently swapped phones and swiped their way through people, asking for their credit card numbers and other casual first date-type information. Check out both videos, and maybe use them as a how-not-to-do-it example.

Would you let someone random take over your Tinder account? Let us know in the comments below.

Featured image: Vanity Fair

Everything You Know About the World (Map) Is Wrong!

EVERYTHING YOU KNOW IS WRONG! Well, sort of. Actually, not really. You’re probably right on par with everyone else. But how often do you get an opportunity to write such a hyperbolic headline and opening sentence? It had to be done. However, when it comes to maps, a lot of us are probably way off in how we think the world actually looks. And I’m not talking all the nut-jobs who buy into the whole flat Earth conspiracy nonsense. I’m talking pretty much every map and globe you’ve ever looked at. They’re all wrong.

OK, so “wrong” is too strong a word because what we’ve known to be the truth is accurate for how it’s drawn. What most of us are accustomed to when we look at a map is something called the Mercator projection which has been pretty much the gold standard in cartography for centuries. Some may be surprised to know that, in actuality, what we know to be “the world” (based on this projection) is wildly off when it comes to the sizes of countries. Which is why we just love the video above by YouTube’s RealLifeLore for breaking it down for us.

After its creation by Gerardus Mercator in 1569, his namesake projection became the standard map used for nautical travel because it – using math far too advanced for my feeble mind to handle right now – basically made setting a course and sticking to it a whole lot easier. The trade-off for a map like this is that in order for courses to be straight, the rest of the world had to be skewed more than a little bit. This resulted in adjusting the size of everything on it which meant things closer to the poles got larger and things closer to the equator got smaller. Oh geez, where are my manners? Let’s just have The West Wing explain things.

As mentioned and demonstrated in RealLifeLore’s video, you can visit thetruesize.com and play around with the accurate proportions of countries. And for you cartography buffs out there, there’s also this fantastic Vsauce video from 2013 that digs into an incredible amount of map resources and is sure to blow your mind.

What’s your favorite map projection? The Mercator? The Gall-Peters? Gnomonic? Let’s discuss in the comments below!

Image: Wikimedia Commons Daniel R. Strebe 15 August 2011

Steve from STRANGER THINGS Is in a Great Psych Rock Band

Remember that brief moment in Stranger Things episode five (“The Flea and the Acrobat”) when Steve (aka Joe Keery) sang a bit of Bob Seger’s “Old Time Rock & Roll”? My first thought: bet this guy’s in a band. Turns out he is!

Keery is, in fact, the drummer (not the singer, as I’d imagined) for the band Post Animal, a super chill psych rock quartet from Chicago. As Vulture points out, Post Animal sound a lot like Tame Impala. They have that faraway, almost subaqueous EQ to their sound, almost as if their music is being funneled in from the Upside Down.

Post Animal Perform the Most Curious Water Activities by Post Animal

Their sound is a bit more experimental than their Australian contemporaries, though, so Tame Impala offshoot, Pond, is probably a better comparison. And some of their guitar-heavy material is more Brit rock than Aussie haze. Temples, the best new band in Britain according to people like The Smiths‘ Johnny Marr and Oasis‘ Noel Gallagher, is a good reference point there. And there’s even some heaving, Black Sabbath-esque moments buried in there. That’s all to say, it’s good stuff!

Keery isn’t the only musically inclined Stranger Things cast member, either. Millie Bobby Brown (Eleven) has got a fierce set of pipes. And Finn Wolfhard (Mike) recently took to Twitter with a mean partial cover of Nirvana‘s “Lithium.” Could a Stranger Things supergroup be in order? Demogorgon would be a badass band name. Just saying.

For now, though, Post Animal already have four releases to their name, so head over to their Bandcamp page and check them out. Then let us know what you think of their sound in the comments below.

Does the Upside Down really exist?

Image: Netflix

Did THE WALKING DEAD Just Basically Confirm [SPOILER] Lives?

All summer long, we’ve been wondering who died on The Walking Dead during the closing moments of season six. Somebody clearly met their end, courtesy of “Lucille,” Negan’s barbwire bat. Earlier this week, AMC fanned the flames of speculation with a clip clearly meant to make viewers worry about the fate of one of their favorite characters. And we’re investigating the evidence on today’s Nerdist News!

Please note: there are some speculative spoilers in the post below—you’ve been warned!

Nerdist News host and BattleBots apocalypse survivor Jessica Chobot has good news for all of you Daryl Dixon fanboys and fangirls. We think this clip proves without a shadow of a doubt that Norman Reedus‘ mega-popular character is 100% safe from the grim reaper…at least for now. We’ve all heard the “if Daryl dies, we riot,” online chants. It’s not like AMC doesn’t know what they have with Reedus and his fanbase, after all, they gave him his own reality show!

The clip in question doesn’t feature Daryl at all, but it does show a known thief (and a definite jerk) named Dwight, wearing Daryl’s signature angel wing vest and riding his hog. Not cool, bro. But when you think about it, this clip was the perfect way to temporarily fool fans into thinking that Daryl is getting killed off. (Red herrings for everyone!) Daryl was created for the TV show, so he doesn’t necessarily have to be around for any upcoming storylines based on the comic.

Only we’re not buying it!

What is serious? Daryl is gonna hand down one hell of a beating on Dwight when he finally gets his hands on him. If Reedus ever decides to leave this show, we expect that he’ll get better send off than a bat to the head!

What do you think this preview scene means? Did Daryl survive Negan’s wrath? Let’s discuss in the comment section below!

Will Ferrell and John C. Reilly Will Play SHERLOCK HOLMES and JOHN WATSON

Some things just go together: peanut butter and jelly, fire and ice, Sherlock and Holmes, Will Ferrell and John C. Reilly. Thankfully, it seems, those latter two combinations are joining up in spectacular force to bring us the outlandishly comedic take on Sir Arthur Conan Doyle‘s classic characters we had no idea we needed until just now. That’s right: Ferrell is your new Sherlock Holmes—and Reilly his Watson—in a new take Sony has so far dubbed Holmes & Watson.

Inspired by an as-yet-unnamed Sherlock Holmes story (or perhaps stories—but mum’s still the word for now), the film will see Reilly and Ferrell reunite following their Step Brothers stint on Etan Cohen’s second directorial effort, according to Deadline. Cohen was previously a writer on films like Idiocracy, Tropic Thunder, Men in Black 3, and Get Hard (his first time at the helm). Originally, the script was set to star Ferrell alongside Sacha Baron Cohen (but he had to drop out for unknown reasons).

Nerdist has reached out for comment and/or confirmation but has not heard back at the time of publication. We will update this story as we learn more.

So now we’ve got what promises to be a very silly and irreverent take on Holmes and his buddy Doc Watson, to live alongside Guy Ritchie‘s Sherlock Holmes (which stars Robert Downey, Jr. and Jude Law as the aforementioned duo), the CBS series Elementary (with Jonny Lee Miller and Lucy Liu), and that little-known BBC iteration with Benedict Cumberbatch and Martin Freeman. You may have heard of it; it’s called Sherlock?

Somebody get all parties involved in a room, STAT. I smell a sketch afoot, so it’s time to release the hound of the Laughskervilles (oh god I’m so sorry for that)!

Of course if you want more details about that other interpretation of Sherlock:

What do you think of this far sillier adaptation of the Sir Arthur Conan Doyle characters? Let us know in the comments below!

Image: Sony

Alicia Lutes is the Managing Editor of Nerdist, creator/co-host of Fangirling, and a regular user of famed website, Twitter dot com.

98% of Surveyed Scientists Say Chemtrails Are Not Real

A new joint study from Standford’s Carnegie Institution for Science, the University of California Irvine, and the nonprofit, Near Zero, reports that 76 out of 77 atmospheric chemists and geochemists say that “chemtrails” are not real. So the next time somebody brings them up, you can halt your Herculean eye roll, and just point them in the direction of the paper, which was recently published here, in Environmental Research Letters.

To be fair, the study, which comes via EurekAlert, didn’t directly conduct tests on the atmosphere, but did survey those 77 scientists who specialize in the Earth and its atmosphere, and 98.7% of them reported that there is absolutely no evidence of such a scheme.

If you’re unfamiliar with “chemtrails,” they are—according to a popular conspiracy theory—atmosphere-altering or downright malevolent chemicals that are sprayed, intentionally, from the world’s average aircrafts into the air on a daily basis. If you’re wondering why somebody, anybody, would do this, the essential claim is that the chemicals could alter specific people’s behavior or their environment negatively.

Now the biggest problem with the theory is that those “chemtrails” can be explained extremely easily. Why do we see white trails behind aircraft? Because—everybody together now—science!

The white trails behind an aircraft, according to science, which demands skeptical study and verification (oh science, you beautiful, beautiful method for understanding the world), shows that those white trails are not chemical trails, but rather condensation trails, or “contrails.”

Contrails occur because of the differences in air temperature planes cause, due to either the aerodynamics of their wings or the exhaust from their engines. Basically, if air passes over a plane’s wing—an airfoil—it depressurizes, cools down, and condenses into a cloud trail behind said wing. Or, in the case of an engine, extremely hot, humid air exits the engine, and condenses upon contact with the very cold ambient air. These contrails last much longer because the ambient air at high altitudes is so cold. A great video on the physics of contrails is available below from YouTuber Boldmethod:

Another conspiracy theory bites the dust, although it’s doubtful anybody who believes in chemtrails will believe these scientists. But can’t we spend all that brain power on more important theories? Like whether or not Lady Stoneheart will appear in season seven of Game of Thrones, or y’know… WHO SHOT FIRST?

Now who’s going to shoot first in the comments section below? Tell us what you think about this conspiracy theory, and how much you love science.

Chemtrails may not exist, but Upside Down from Stranger Things just might. Find out more below!

Images: Fedor Leukhin/Wikimedia

The POKEMON Live Action Film Selects Its Writers

The sudden meteoric success of Pokémon Go has put the Nintendo franchise — which just had its 20th anniversary — back in the cultural lexicon in a major way. I, for example, have started playing Pokémon Yellow which I never even did at the time. (P.S. it’s super fun.) It seemed only natural for a live-action movie version of the critter-catching property to go into production, and on Tuesday, Variety reported that the project is close to nabbing a couple of screenwriters, ones with a ton of nerd cred and goodwill to boot.

In the article, Variety is reporting that screenwriters Nicole Perlman and Alex Hirsch are in negotiations with Legendary Pictures to write the movie, based on the game Great Detective Pikachu, following the studio’s acquisition of the film rights to Pokémon last month. The game came out in Japan in February and will be coming out in the rest of the world at some point. A departure from the bulk of the series, and certainly from the animated series and films that have come before it, Great Detective Pikachu follows a peculiar Pikachu who isn’t as nimble or strong as most of its kind, but is highly intelligent and can speak, which also makes it a great crime-solver, deerstalker hat and everything.

Both Perlman and Hirsch have an impressive pedigree coming in to this project; Perlman wrote the initial script for Guardians of the Galaxy and is working on a number of high-profile projects including Captain Marvel, Black Widow, and Labyrinth. Hirsch, meanwhile, is the creator of the terrific and intricate animated series Gravity Falls which ran for 70 episodes between 2012 and 2016. If anybody can tackle the Pokémon realm, it’s probably these two.

The movie is set to go into production some time in 2017.

What do you think about the writers who might bring Great Detective Pikachu to non-animated life? Let us know in the comments below!

Nerdist Industries is a subsidiary of Legendary Digital Networks

The next Pokemon movie should be a Pokemon Go romance story:

Image: Nintendo

Kyle Anderson is the Associate Editor for Nerdist and currently has a sweet level 31 Pikachu in his party. Follow him on Twitter!

Finally, a Way to Make Your Own FREDDY KRUEGER Glove

Remember that super creepy (but also cool as hell) opening title sequence in Wes Craven’s original A Nightmare on Elm Street? The one that showed Freddy Krueger making his infamous bladed glove in that dirty, dingy boiler room? Well, you can now re-create that very scene in your own basement at home using some common household items.

Having a badass-looking razor glove would totally give you the leg up on having the best Freddy Krueger costume around, because a homemade glove is way, way cooler than one of those cheap looking, mass produced store bought ones they sell at Halloween in your local big box stores every year.

Speaking of Halloween, in Southern California we have not one, but two Halloween conventions in the summer here: Scare LA in Pasadena and Midsummer Scream in Long Beach. And it was at the most recent Midsummer Scream that host Vinny Logozio recorded an episode of his DIY Prop Shop YouTube series, where he showed horror fans how to make a proper looking Freddy Krueger razor glove.

This is one DIY prop that isn’t going to break the bank to make either, as basically all you really need is a regular old gardening glove, some cladding for the finger joints, and some spray-painted plastic for the knives (assuming you don’t want to get arrested by bringing real knives to a convention).

Of course, once you get a proper glove going, you’ll need a really good make up for a truly amazing Freddy costume, but that’s a whole other video tutorial. In the meantime, be sure to check out the latest episode of DIY Prop Shop above.

Was this video just the thing you were looking for in helping you create your perfect Freddy costume? Let us know in the comments down below.

Image: New Line Cinema

Jude Law Plays a Legendary Demon in a Series of Japanese Pepsi Ads

We can always count on Japan for some of the craziest and most epic advertisements on television. One of the latest commercials from Pepsi Japan lives up to that reputation with a stylized live-action short that chronicles Jude Law‘s transformation from a man into a demon.

Via Rocket News 24, Pepsi Japan’s ad is the fifth in a series about the mythical Japanese hero, Momotarō (a.k.a Peach Boy), who was literally born out of a peach before growing up to become a great warrior. The first four ads in the series focused on the origins of Momotarō and the heartbreaking backstories of his talking animal companions as they prepare to confront the demon island, Onigashima. And that’s where Law comes in. He’s portraying Onigashima as a tragic figure in this spotlight commercial.

Unless you can read Japanese, those subtitles are going to give you some trouble. But according to Rocket News 24, the gist of it is that Onigashima was once a mighty warrior who was beloved by his people. To overcome a fearsome foe, Onigashima gave up his mortality and revealed just how powerful he really was. The people became frightened and they turned on Onigashima before locking him away deep within the island. His pain and anger triggered a startling metamorphosis, which left him as something truly monstrous. Now, it’s up to Shun Oguri’s Momotarō to defeat Law’s Onigashima, as they come face-to-face in the closing moments of this ad.

It’s not clear if Law’s appearance is a one-off, or if he’ll be back for the next installment. For all we know, Momotarō will be taking on the CGI Onigashima. Either way, we’re dying to see more. The tagline for these ads is “Defeat those stronger than you,” and it’s a pretty fitting expression for this tale!

And if you want to check out the full saga up to now, here’s a big ol’ thing of ’em.

What did you think about Law’s turn as a demon from Japanese folklore? Let us know in the comment section below!

Image: Pepsi Japan

Burger King’s Whopperito Leaves Us Craving a Burger and Burrito (Review)

“It” might be there, somewhere, buried deep beneath an unevenly distributed pile of ground beef, pickles, queso sauce, and tortilla. What is “it” though? That would be the reason for Burger King‘s new burger/burrito hybrid, the limited time Whopperito ($2.99), to exist. Unfortunately, when we ate one we couldn’t find it.

Let’s break this down, like a perfectly good Whopper ruined and jammed into a flour tortilla.

Official Description: “The Whopperito is made with flame-grilled 100% beef and seasoned with a special blend of Tex-Mex spices. It is then stuffed with a creamy queso sauce, diced onions, juicy tomatoes, pickles and crisp lettuce all wrapped in a warm flour tortilla.”

Unofficial Description: Something a “not-as-clever-as-he-thinks-he-is” teenager, left alone for the weekend for the first time in his life, came up with using leftovers in the fridge and a lack of understanding about how to season food.

Does It Look Like The Promo Picture: Of course not.

Two bites in. You couldn’t see (or taste) much of the queso sauce.

Taste: Blah. It’s not that it tastes bad, but for something made with Tex-Mex spices you’d expect a lot more kick. And we don’t even mean for normal Tex-Mex fare–this is pretty safe for a mass-produced fast food product.

The meat was okay, but not as tasty as an actual Whopper, which makes it more disappointing than it might be otherwise. The queso sauce was even milder, hardly qualifying as queso-flavored. It really just fills the role of “indeterminate cheese sauce we need so this isn’t dry.”

The middle section all too briefly brought all the elements together.

The pickles and tomatoes were good–the best bites of the whole thing involved them–but strangely it needed way more of each. I can’t believe I am writing this, but this has too much beef in it. Most bites were just tortilla and crumbled hamburger. The queso mostly ended up towards the bottom half as I held it (which didn’t take that long to eat), making each bite inconsistent (though in fairness that goes for most actual burritos too).

I could see the onions in it, but I couldn’t taste them, and while the lettuce didn’t harm the sandwich (it added some much needed texture, actually) it obviously did not add any flavor either.

The queso sauce wasn’t great, but we still needed more of it throughout.

Best Part: The definite highlight and star of the whole thing is the soft flour tortilla, which wouldn’t have been out of place at an authentic Mexican restaurant. There was plenty of it too, creating some nice folds, the kind that give you those great, thick tortilla bites.

Is it Filling?: Yes, which isn’t surprising because it has a ton of protein (29 grams). I didn’t have fries or anything else with it and I was full by the end. That’s why “too much meat” isn’t an awful criticism.

Can I Eat This In My Car?: Not while driving. It requires two hands if you want to guarantee it won’t fall apart (toward the end). Since it comes wrapped like a regular burger you can’t easily fold down the aluminum foil the way you would a normal burrito. Mine came slightly torn when I unwrapped it, but it still held together well, and I didn’t spill much of it while eating. The tortilla abides.

Even though it started like this, somehow it all held together.

Should I Eat This: You might want to try it out of curiosity, and for three bucks you won’t be hungry anymore, which is nice, but you aren’t missing out on much if you pass on this one. It’s not even weird, it’s just kind of stupid. It’s definitely not a burrito–the whole time I felt like it was missing rice and beans–but it’s definitely not a burger, or even all that burger-like because it is crumbled beef and it is spiced differently. It’s just a thing that doesn’t make any sense and can’t stand on its own as something new. If you want to enjoy some empty calories at Burger King (570 calories, 26 grams of fat, and 1110 grams of sodium for this) you are way better off with any of their normal items.

Would I Eat This Drunk?: Yes of course, that’s a ridiculous question.

Final Verdict: Do a Whopper/burrito bang bang instead and don’t bother with the Whopperito. It doesn’t fulfill either craving and it will just leave you confused about why it even exists in the first place.

Have you tried the Whopperito yet? What did you think of it? Tell us in the comments below.

Featured Image: Burger King