Hasta La Gadget!

The folks at Mojang have announced today that Minecraft is getting a new mini game for free on consoles. It’s the first of a number of mini games that will be released for Minecraft, these mini games have been designed to allow players to compete under “cool and crazy” set of rules with little fuss. The first free mini game for Minecraft on consoles is called Battle.

Mojang describes Battle as a “last-minecrafter-standing deathmatch,” players will compete against each other for survival, racing to snatch weapons and resources from chests, keep hunger pangs at bay and dance over each other’s unique perils.

This particular mini game has been developed specifically for console players and couch-based competition, and it supports up to four players in splitscreen and eight players online either through the in-game matchmaking system or by invitation.

Players won’t need to craft anything in this mini game as the focus has been kept on combat and tactical thinking, players can easily loot inventories and equip armour with one tap of a button.

Mojang has confirmed that Battle will be available in June to Minecraft: Console Edition players. It comes with three “incredibly deadly” maps while in the future Mojang will release more map packs for $2.99 each. A trailer detailing the new mini game will be released soon.

Minecraft Gets A Free Battle Mini Game On Consoles , original content from Ubergizmo. Read our Copyrights and terms of use.

Dish unveiled the HopperGO portable DVR earlier this year in January at the International Consumer Electronics Show, at that time the company had said that this product would be released later this year. Almost five months after it was first announced, the HopperGo portable DVR is finally available for purchase. It has an internal hard drive which can be filled with movies and TV shows recorded using several of Dish’s set-top boxes.

The HopperGo portable DVR has 64GB of internal storage. It can be loaded with content recorded using a Hopper 2, Hopper 3 or Hopper with Sling set-top box.

It doesn’t require any internet to function as the HopperGo creates its own private network. Up to five iOS and Android devices can connect to it to access content using the Dish Anywhere application.

There is one caveat that customers should keep in mind and that’s the battery life. It’s a portable product after all. On a single charge, the HopperGo can provide up to four hours of video playback, so that’s not exactly enough to bingewatch your favorite TV show on a long haul flight.

Starting today, Dish subscribers can purchase the portable HopperGo DVR for $99, there’s no need to pay monthly fees for this device.

HopperGo Portable DVR By Dish Available Now , original content from Ubergizmo. Read our Copyrights and terms of use.

(Photos: Porter Magazine, EBONY, Teen Vogue)

By Abi Ishola

It’s true-the face of the young, celebrated, modern-day black feminist is light skinned, or biracial. Think Amandla Stenberg, Willow Smith, and Zendaya Coleman. It’s also true that it’s been the the aesthetic of popular black feminists in the past. Think Angela Davis and bell hooks.

This point was rehashed on the Son of Baldwin Facebook page. The post highlighted a series of tweets from Pax Jones, the woman who launched the Unfair and Lovely photo series addressing colorism with her classmates from Sri Lanka. According to Jones:

First Tweet:

“I love Amandla & Zendaya, but are we going to acknowledge that the face of young black feminism is the light skinned, biracial aesthetic?”

Second Tweet:

“Dark gurls have always spoken up, but don’t get onto vogue & receive praise for being opinionated. If ur dark, ur just ‘mad’.”

Third Tweet:

“Until yall acknowledge ur privilege, I don’t care to hear another light skin black gurl with curly hair talk about how hard being a BW is.”

Fourth Tweet:

“Your experience is not shared w/dark women, yet you’re given the platform to represent all of us. No. Tired.”

As we unpack all of the baggage brought on by colorism, this is clearly an issue that deserves to be dissected. Let’s start by acknowledging the fact that Stenberg and Coleman are smart and savvy young women doing important work. They have embraced their blackness and they use their platforms to educate the masses on how black people, particularly black women, are dehumanized, devalued, abused, and discarded by society. Neither have had to leave the comfort of their homes to do this work. They raise their voices via social media, then subsequently through larger avenues in the form of Oprah Super Soul Sessions, interviews, and magazine cover stories.

But what we also know to be true is that dark (or darker) skinned women not only exist within this movement, they helped to strengthen it in ways that often go unacknowledged or underreported by the mainstream. Alicia Garza, Opal Tometi, and Patrisse Cullors, the founders of Black Lives Matter come to mind. Yes they have received recognition, and yes, they are older than Coleman and Stenberg, but their level of recognition barely scratches the surface in comparison. In fact, some seek to discredit their ability to claim that they are founders of the movement they started. I was slightly shocked when I was at an event recently and I heard someone say, “I wonder who started Black Lives Matter.” It’s a question that’s become somewhat common despite their televised award show appearances and international travels delivering speeches on the movement.

To be fair, women like Coleman and Stenberg have show biz recognition that supports their popularity as activists. And as they appear in major films and television shows and walk the most coveted red carpets, the mainstream reminds them of their blackness regardless of the privileges they enjoy. Amandla got a taste of this after she was cast in the Hunger Games, which upset white fans of the trilogy who felt a black girl wasn’t a fit for the role. On first discovering her call to activism, she told Teen Vogue:

“It was when I was 12 and I got cast in The Hunger Games, and people called me the N-word and said that the death of my character, Rue, would be less sad because I was black. That was the first moment I realized being black was such a crucial part of my identity in terms of the way that I was perceived and how it would affect any line of work that I wanted to pursue. I often find myself in situations where I am the token black person. It can feel like this enormous weight.”

Ironically, Stenberg’s mainstream recognition as an activist likely comes as a result of her appearance in such a major film project, which is largely a privilege reserved for black women who are biracial or fair skinned. In other words, they have to fight to defend their blackness within the mainstream, but their level of blackness still affords them the ability to move in spaces many dark skinned women have to work twice as hard to enter into, therefore the popular black feminist aesthetic has become a reflection of the black female position in Hollywood.

For those who wish to brush this issue aside and write it off as yet another way for people to pit black people against one another and overlook the real “enemy,” understand that this is another layer of the human need for representation. Wouldn’t it be beautiful if snapshots of modern-day black feminists are as colorful as we are as a people?

Where is Keke Palmer’s Teen Vogue cover story discussing the joys and difficulties of coming out as sexually fluid? Her body of work should be enough to grant her such recognition. Can we get a Super Soul Session featuring Reagan Gomez on how she’s been successfully using social media for years to discuss feminism, womanism, and LGBTQ rights?

So here’s a question brought on by Pax Jones’ Tweets: should light skinned black women begin to acknowledge their own privileges and how it’s afforded them the ability to become the poster girls of the modern-day black feminist movement? Wouldn’t that be an important piece in discussing the dehumanization of black women? Or is celebrating ones blackness deemed more revolutionary when the message comes from someone with lighter skin? We sure hope not.

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Ten years ago I took a shank to X-Men: The Last Stand, a sequel I found so disagreeable that I likened it to “studio-mandated seppuku” (which might have been a bit hyperbolic in hindsight). On the other hand, two years ago I was quite effusive in my praise of X-Men: Days of Future Past, which I called the very best of the Fox series. So, if we’re using those two entries as the benchmarks, the goalposts of what to expect from these things, then X-Men: Apocalypse, the ninth film based on Marvel Comics’ line of comic books, falls somewhere in the middle: neither as bad as the the worst, nor as good as the best. It’s just…fine.

Lacking the “All Mutants Unite!” marketing hook that Days of Future past employed to bring together two generations of X-casts (scaling new box office heights in the process), Apocalypse settles back into the “rebooted” timeline begun in 2011’s terrific X-Men: First Class, content to fill the gap between one entry and the next without really leaving a mark of its own. Like the just-okay The Wolverine three years ago, it’s entirely adequate at keeping the franchise fires lit for Fox (lest the rights revert to Disney/Marvel), while coasting on whatever goodwill audiences have built up over the series’ long life.

Beginning with a prologue in ancient Egypt that feels like a cross between 1994’s StarGate and the Mummy movies, we’re introduced to the titular baddie, an immortal mutant also called En Sabah Nur, who transfers his powers, countenance, and consciousness into a youthful new body (Oscar Isaac) when an insurrection by his followers puts him into suspended animation for several millennia. From there, we jump to the present — or rather, the mid-’80s, ten years after the White House showdown that closed out Days of Future Past.

With the existence of mutants now known to the public, Professor Charles Xavier (James McAvoy), along with Hank McCoy, a.k.a. Beast (Nicholas Hoult), has opened his “School for Gifted Youngsters.” Among his students are Scott Summers (Tye Sheridan), who will one day become Cyclops (and gets more to do in this one movie than the character’s every prior appearance put together), and Jean Grey (the terrifically cast Sophie Turner), who will one day become…uh, Jean Grey. Meanwhile, Xavier’s former friend Erik Lensherr, a.k.a. Magneto (Michael Fassbender) has chosen a life of anonymity and begun a family (let’s see how long that lasts…).

However, when the Apocalypse is wakened from his slumber in Egypt and seeks to reshape the Earth in his image, Xavier must reconnect not only with Lensherr, but also with his foster sister Raven Darkholme, a.k.a. Mystique (Jennifer Lawrence). The shape-shifter, whose prominence as the Most Important Mutant Ever has grown in direct proportion to Lawrence’s own outsized box office footprint, has spent the interim between sequels smuggling mutants to safety, in the process becoming a sort of “mutant pride” urban legend to young muties the world over thanks to revealing her blue-skinned self to the world ten years earlier.

As the various heroes and villains criss-cross the globe, we’re introduced in rapid succession to fan favorites Psylocke (Olivia Munn), Nightcrawler (Kodi Smit-McPhee), Archangel (Ben Hardy), and Storm (Alexandra Shipp), and reintroduced to Moira MacTaggert (Rose Byrne) and Alex Summers (Lucas Till), both of whom had prominent roles in First Class. All the X-Men, new and old, get fun beats to play (especially Evan Peters’ Quicksilver, back for his sophomore appearance, who gets a showstopper of a number that I guarantee will have you humming Eurythmics the rest of the day), but things start to feel a little overstuffed after awhile.

And while I have a certain amount of familiarity with — and fondness for — these characters (one bit of fan-service had me grinning ear-to-ear), I can’t imagine how it’ll feel to someone coming in cold. Granted, at this stage in a long-running franchise, I’m not sure how many newbies will suddenly jump in for the ninth go. The audience is pretty much baked into the cake by now. But regardless, even for the longtime fans, this should all be riveting stuff given the life-or-death stakes that are in play, but despite a threat that’s supposedly so dire, there’s just something very ho-hum about the whole thing. Then again, perhaps it’s unavoidable that this is where we’ve ended up.

When the first X-Men debuted in 2000, before Spider-Man, before the Marvel Cinematic Universe, it was pretty much the only game in town. But sixteen years later, Apocalypse is the fourth superhero movie to hit theaters in five months. And mere weeks after Captain America: Civil War pretty much mastered the superhero jam, mere months after Deadpool thoroughly took the piss out of the X-Men brand from the inside, it’s easy to feel some of that superhero fatigue coming on as we settle in to watch various super-powered folks tossing haymakers at each other while elaborate CGI effects move hither and thither in the background.

Part of the problem here is Apocalypse himself. Now, this is tough for me to say, as one of the dings against these films has been their unwillingness to stay truer to their comic book roots (as evidenced by the snicker-snort “Would you prefer yellow spandex?” line in the 2000 original). But the comic genre has moved far enough along that what would once have been anathema is no longer so, which makes it perhaps the perfect moment to introduce the very comic book-y Apocalypse into the movies. But Oscar Isaac is also done no favors by writer/producer Simon Kinberg’s script, which leaves his powers ill-defined, and his personality more somnambulant than seductive.

And it’s not just Isaac who suffers at the script’s hands. Fassbender, so magnetic (sorry) in the previous installments, feels adrift here, his presence more the result of a dreaded sequel-clause in his contract than any compelling story reason. McAvoy, on the other hand, continues to be a terrific Xavier, and the newcomers playing the classic characters make enough of a strong mark that I look forward to seeing them continue in their roles. That’s actually the biggest difference between my general apathy with Apocalypse and my active dislike of The Last Stand in ’06: The series has been around long enough that it can survive an occasional middling entry.

Based on a coy one-liner he slips into this, one assumes The Last Stand‘s negative impact remains a sore spot for Bryan Singer, who chose instead to direct Superman Returns that year (whoops). Still, since returning as a producer on First Class, Singer has become one of the brand’s main minders. And indeed, if anyone deserves credit for these movies’ success and longevity, it’s him. However, while the last few entries were a triumphant return to form for a franchise that stumbled badly with both X3 and 2009’s X-Men Origins: Wolverine, X-Men: Apocalypse is a step in the wrong direction. Luckily there’ll be plenty of opportunities to make up for it. C

For more movie talk, including my exclusive interview with Kate Beckinsale about her new movie Love & Friendship, catch the latest episode of the MovieFilm Podcast at this link or via the embed below:

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When to Jump is a curated community featuring the ideas and stories of people who have made the decision to leave something comfortable and chase a passion.

When I was accepted into college and chose to follow the pre-med track, it seemed as though I had made it to what should have been the victory. I come from a single-parent, low-income home. I worked against the odds in order to become “successful.” Now I was going to be the first Ivy-league educated person in my family – and a doctor on top of that. I knew that the path to becoming an MD was brutally challenging but it was tried and tested and I convinced myself that it was for me. It was a noble profession that truly helped other people and it was something that would make my family proud. That was enough, right?

I ended up staying in the pre-med track for three and a half years. By my senior year, I had completed every course requirement, with just one left. I had three medically-related internships under my belt and many volunteer hours to my name. I had spent a countless amount of time studying, pulling all-nighters and working in the science labs. I was preparing to take the Medical College Admission Test (MCAT). I was almost at the collegiate finish line.

But I was also miserable.

It was never in my heart to become a doctor. In my core, I knew that I was swimming upstream. I chose not to listen to that inner voice for years. I wore myself down following this path – I was often physically sick and mentally exhausted. I treaded water through much of the pre-med track, partly because of the inherent difficulty, of course, but mostly because my heart just wasn’t in it.

Prior to college, I attended a performing arts school in middle and high school. During college, I wrote independent blogs and was part of my school’s slam poetry team. I loved music, fashion, entertainment and pop culture throughout my entire life and I was always connecting with people and living in the spotlight. Why wasn’t I building my career based on being authentic to who I was?

During late fall of my senior year, I finally listened to my inner voice. There was something so clear that I knew I should be doing instead. A passion inside of me that was waiting to be chased. I was terrified of disappointing my friends and family, but I couldn’t hold back any longer. I had to listen. And that’s when I made my jump.

I abandoned my plans to apply to medical school. Beyond simply switching studies, I was leaving what I was “supposed” to do. Everything that had been laid out was now crumbling.

And yet I was free. I entered the entertainment industry armed with a degree in neuroscience and little else. I moved to New York after graduation, took several unpaid internships and started from the bottom again.

It hasn’t been smooth. But few jumps are. I still ebb and flow between struggling and succeeding as I continue to build my career but my belief in my jump remains constant. Taking a leap of faith on yourself and making a jump doesn’t mean resenting or regretting where you came from. Our past experiences shape who we are and each day presents a new opportunity to change your life.

One of the most important things I’ve learned through my experience is the importance of doing what’s right for you and following your own path. If you’re doing one thing but truly want to be doing something else, then listen to that feeling and begin a path toward that something else. I believe that we can all create careers based on being authentic to who we are.

So I ask, who will you allow yourself to be? What unearthed passions lie within you? How will your change your life? What is your jump?

When to Jump is a curated community featuring the ideas and stories of people who have made the decision to leave something comfortable and chase a passion. You can follow When to Jump on Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter. For more stories like this one, sign up for the When to Jump newsletter here. (Note: The When to Jump newsletter is not managed by The Huffington Post.)

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