Latest news with #TikTok-esque
Time of India
08-07-2025
- Entertainment
- Time of India
'What's up with her eye?': Tom Brady joins Labubu trend with daughter but fans are curious about something else
Tom Brady's Cute Labubu Photo Gets Derailed by Fans Wondering About His Daughter's Eye (File Photo/Tom Brady/Instagram) It's not every day you see Tom Brady hopping on TikTok-esque trends, but here we are. The 7-time Super Bowl champ was spotted spending some sweet one-on-one time with his daughter, and the two were twinning with matching Labubu plush toys, a trend that's been all over Instagram, TikTok, and plush collector feeds lately. In the photo, Brady casually dressed in a button-down and cap, while his daughter holds up the viral monkey-like figure that's recently become Gen Z's favorite emotional support character. Cute, wholesome, internet gold, right? Well… not quite. Because the internet is being the internet. Fans are obsessed with the Labubu but more curious about her left eye While some fans gushed over how 'normal dad' Tom looked, a different section of Twitter (or X) was more focused on something completely unrelated to Brady: his daughter's eye. Comments like 'What's up with her left eye?' and 'Something wrong with his daughter's eye?' started piling up under the post. The concern seemed to stem from how the lighting or maybe a blink made one eye appear darker or partially closed. Tom Brady Goes Full Girl Dad with Labubu. And just like that, a wholesome photo turned into a rabbit hole of conspiracy-level medical analysis. The Labubu plushie trend is blowing up and now Brady's in it For those not in the know, Labubu is part of the POP MART collectible series that's gone viral globally, think Beanie Babies but with Tim Burton vibes. Teens and adults alike are collecting them, posing with them, and treating them like kawaii comfort objects. Now, with Tom Brady unintentionally joining the plushie crew, the fandom might be expanding to NFL stans too. Who knew Brady would be repping soft-girl-core in 2025? Tom Brady gives 'girl dad' energy and the internet can't decide what to focus on While some were just happy to see Brady spending quality time with his daughter. Tom Brady's adorable Labubu photo was meant to melt hearts, and it did, sort of. Between fans being charmed by the father-daughter moment and others spiraling over an eye that probably just blinked, it's classic internet chaos. Either way, one thing's clear: Tom Brady's girl dad era is officially Labubu-approved. Also read - Offset says 'you can't get rid of me' after Cardi B deleted Stefon Diggs from Instagram Game On Season 1 continues with Mirabai Chanu's inspiring story. Watch Episode 2 here.
Business Insider
04-07-2025
- Business
- Business Insider
The Bulwark's top editor shares how the anti-Trump site tripled its subscriber base in a year — and why it's betting on YouTube
If President Donald Trump didn't exist, the staunchly anti-Trump news website The Bulwark might not either. But the president isn't solely responsible for The Bulwark's success. Instead, its top editor credits email newsletters, podcasts, and YouTube for its impressive growth in recent years. "We grew consistently, all the way through the Biden administration," Jonathan V. Last, editor of The Bulwark, said in an interview with Business Insider. "That's something I didn't expect." To be sure, Trump's resurgence has added fuel to the fire that Last and his colleagues were kindling. The Bulwark surpassed 100,000 paid subscribers on Substack in early July, which the company told BI is more than double its total in late October — just before the 2024 election. The Bulwark also now has 830,000 total subscribers, most of whom get its emails for free. The company said its total count has tripled in the last year and surpassed 500,000 a day after Trump retook office. YouTube is another key part of The Bulwark's growth. It crossed 1 million subscribers on the platform in mid-February, and that count rose 34% between then and early July, thanks to a healthy mix of short-form snippets and long-form videos. The news site uses YouTube Shorts, the platform's buzzy, TikTok-esque clips, as a foot in the door for newcomers. But long-form content of all kinds is crushing on YouTube, especially on TVs. The Bulwark's producers have taken note by making most of their videos at least 10 minutes long, and some run well over an hour. "We no longer think of podcast and video as separate," Last said. "We just think of it all as broadcast." The Bulwark was perfectly positioned for one of the wildest decades for news in the last century, complete with a pandemic, wars, and Trump's rise, fall, and rebound. "It's been a crazy eight years," Last said. "People have been forced to pay attention to the news in ways which are reasonably unique, at least in our lifetimes." Not just 'Never Trump' The Bulwark has gained much of its notoriety for its sharp criticism of Trump. But when asked who he's writing for, Last said he's not necessarily targeting a certain political group. "The target audience is people who take ideas seriously and aren't looking for confirmation bias and who think that the moment is important," Last said. He added: "I think of, honestly, our target audience as being indistinguishable from The Atlantic's." While Last said many Bulwark readers are largely on the center left to the center right, he added that the main common thread among his reader base is a distaste for authoritarianism. To Last, that's synonymous with an unease, or outright disgust, with Trump and many of his policies. "We're on a team, and the team is democracy," Last said. However, Last said The Bulwark doesn't have a vendetta against Trump. If the president enacts policies that Last and his colleagues like — such as Operation Warp Speed, which accelerated COVID-19 vaccine development during the pandemic — he said they'll gladly tout them. "We are not reflexively negative," Last said. "It's not like if Trump comes out and says that 'ice cream is good,' we have to say, 'ice cream is bad.'" Still, Last's readers know that he sees Trump as a serious threat to American democracy. "If I had described the events of 2020 to somebody in 2016, they would've said, 'You're crazy — that's "Trump Derangement Syndrome,"'" Last said. Critics may shrug off The Bulwark's warnings as alarmist, but Last insists he's not crying wolf. "The fact that people aren't freaked out by just the actual real things that have happened in front of our eyes is mostly a function of the pot being turned up while the frogs are in it," Last said. Straightforward and direct Authenticity sells in 2025, both in politics and media. Just look at the most popular podcasters, including Joe Rogan and Alex Cooper of "Call Her Daddy" fame. Audiences also crave honesty, Last said. That honesty and authenticity, combined with strongly held convictions, have become cornerstones of The Bulwark's popularity. "A lot of times, we'll sit around arguing with each other, and the argument will end with one of us going, 'Yeah, you guys are right. I got that wrong,'" Last said. Unlike traditional media organizations, The Bulwark is built on Substack. The newsletter hub has been a huge part of the news site's rapid growth, Last said, since readers of other writers can discover The Bulwark and subscribe in a single click. "Anything you can do to lower the friction just pays enormous dividends," Last said. By building its business around newsletters, The Bulwark reaches readers directly, without intermediaries like search engines or social media. Newsletters and podcasts can also build emotional connections. The Bulwark's publisher, Sarah Longwell, told Vanity Fair in May that "people feel like they are friends with us" since they hear their voices and can even reach their inboxes by replying to emails. This access makes The Bulwark feel fresher than newspapers or cable news channels, Last said. "That's the sort of thing that you often get from independent media operators, if you're a one-man band on Substack," Last said. "But it's, I think, not as common to see that at an institutional level." Putting MSNBC and CNN on notice Although The Bulwark has roughly doubled its paid reader base since the election, Last sees much more room to grow. The news site recently hired reporters to cover policy, immigration, and Congress, Last said. This can help The Bulwark add value through reporting, instead of just its opinions. But the biggest potential for growth is YouTube, Last said, given that its subscriber base can scale far faster on the world's biggest video platform than on Substack. The Bulwark could take its video strategy to the next level by producing shows in the style of traditional TV, Last said. He said his site is open to partnering with a streaming service, similar to The Daily Beast's deal with Netflix that was reported by Semafor. MSNBC and CNN have been a go-to spot for the anti-Trump TV news audience for years. Last suggested that The Bulwark is willing to encroach on their territory and beat them at their own game. "Cable news is dying," Last said. "All of the minutes of attention, which gets sucked up by CNN or Fox or whoever, those minutes are going to flow elsewhere. And I think that we should be a place where that attention goes." Legacy networks like MSNBC may be able to coexist with new media outfits like The Bulwark, especially since its writers regularly go on the left-leaning cable network. But regardless of who's pushing back against Trump, Last's hope is that American democracy is healthy. He doesn't want chaos, even if it can help his business, but he knows that's mostly out of his control. "Given the choice between having half of our audience, but living in a normal time, I would absolutely take that," Last said.
Yahoo
12-03-2025
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
The first all-new Katamari Damacy game in almost 8 years is trapped in Apple Arcade jail, and I can only hope it follows in Hello Kitty Island Adventure's footsteps to eventually escape
When you buy through links on our articles, Future and its syndication partners may earn a commission. Almost eight years since its last totally new game, Katamari Damacy is back with a fresh installment, but there's an unfortunate catch – it's been banished to Apple Arcade jail for the foreseeable future. Revealed today, Katamari Damacy Rolling LIVE is bringing back the beloved, classic gameplay consisting of "roll katamari into objects, create increasingly massive orb" that everyone has loved for over 20 years, except this time there's a modern twist, with the focus being on building the King of All Cosmos's livestreaming career. No, really – an Apple blog post announcing the game reveals that creating stars from rolled up stuff will "energize" his streams. It adds: "As users advance, comments from in-game fans appear, and the longer they play, the larger their audience grows." You can see this in action in the screenshots on its App Store page – TikTok-esque comments appear down the right side of the screen as you play, which say everything from "roll up more plz" to "I stan the King" and "why was this in my recommendations?" It's very silly, but I honestly love it – the fact that we've been waiting so long for a new game makes it all the more exciting, too. It was late 2017 when the last totally new game – the endless runner mobile title Amazing Katamari Damacy – released worldwide, and since then, we've only had a couple of remasters. However, this all makes the fact that Rolling LIVE is an Apple Arcade exclusive all the more unfortunate. Apple Arcade subscribers across Mac, iPhone, iPad and Apple TV will be able to play Katamari Damacy Rolling LIVE when it launches on April 3, but those on other platforms are all out of luck. With that being said, not all hope is lost. After all, Hello Kitty Island Adventure launched as an Apple Arcade exclusive in 2023 before it eventually made its way to Switch and PC earlier this year (and the lives of Sanrio fans everywhere are much better for it). With that in mind, hopefully the new Katamari game might just be taking a temporary pit stop here before rolling onto different platforms in the future. Be sure to keep up with everything releasing this year and beyond in our roundup of new games.
Yahoo
18-02-2025
- Business
- Yahoo
Amazon is replacing its TikTok-like Inspire with Rufus the AI bot
Amazon has shut down its TikTok-esque social shopping feed, Inspire, and will be replacing it with Rufus. By 'Rufus,' we mean the AI shopping chatbot, not the naked mole rat from Kim Possible. According to a report from The Information, Amazon users received a message from the online retail company saying that the Inspire feed was no longer available. The lightbulb icon that was used to access Inspire from the bottom of the Amazon app's home screen also disappeared. Kevin King, the founder of the Billion Dollar Sellers newsletter, posted a screenshot of the message on LinkedIn, which reads, 'Thank you for using Amazon Inspire to discover and shop new products on Amazon. Please note that Inspire is no longer available in the Amazon shopping app.' The Inspire feed, which Amazon launched in 2023, provided an endless scroll of shoppable videos and images of products sold on the site posted by content creators and customers to demonstrate the use of said products and give testimonials on them. It was especially useful for content creators and influencers, as they would earn commissions from people buying the products immediately after viewing their content as part of the Amazon Influencer Program. 'We regularly evaluate various features to better align with what customers tell us matters most, and as part of that, Inspire is no longer available,' an Amazon spokesperson said. While they didn't further explain the reason why Inspire was shut down, it can be implied that it didn't work as well as TikTok's Discover page in converting sales and compelling influencers to post content on there more frequently, as they can earn income elsewhere. However, they did redirect customers to other means of receiving product recommendations, including Rufus. Rufus is an AI shopping assistant that answers questions to customers in an effort to help them find the products that best suit their needs quicker. For example, you can ask 'Best gifts for gamers,' and it'll recommend gaming headsets, mice, chairs, and consoles. Rufus will then ask, 'Can you share a bit about their favorite games or genres? For example, 'They enjoy RPGs like Skyrim.'' You respond, 'They play JRPGs like Kingdom Hearts and Fire Emblem,' and it'll recommend merchandise based on the games mentioned or similar, such as a Funko Pop figure of a character from Ni no Kuni. Amazon shutting down Inspire coincides with the legal drama surrounding TikTok, which recently returned to the App Store and Google Play in the U.S. following a letter Attorney General Pam Bondi sent to Apple and Google assuring them they won't face any penalties related to the TikTok ban. The app was removed from both storefronts on January 18 as a result of a law that banned TikTok unless ByteDance sold it to an American company. Two days later, President Trump signed an executive order granting a 75-day stay on the ban while his administration figured out the best way forward. How long the TikTok app will stay on the app stores is unknown. With Inspire gone from Amazon, it may be a little difficult for influencers to earn money from the content they post on the site. Although, it's worth pointing out that Amazon Live, the live-streaming and live-shopping feature, is still active, so maybe not that hard.
