GameSpot • November 19 2025

TGA Performer, Fortnite Gamer D4vd Reportedly Identified As Murder Suspect

David Anthony Burke, who began his music career as D4vd after uploading Fortnite montages to YouTube with his own original songs in 2021, has reportedly been identified as a suspect in the murder of Celeste Rivas.According to TMZ, law enforcement said that despite there being no official paperwork classifying Burke as a suspect yet, "investigators are looking at [him] as a suspect." Those same investigators reportedly claimed they're viewing Rivas' death as a homicide while waiting on toxicology...

Kotaku • May 14 2022

Mass Shooting Apparently Planned On Discord, Streamed On Twitch, Investigated As Hate Crime [Updated] - Kotaku

Tragedy struck New York on May 14 as an 18-year-old white male shot and killed at least 10 people and wounded three others in the New York city of Buffalo, police said. The shooter, whose online username is reportedly “jimboboiii,” has been taken into custody after livestreaming the whole thing on the gaming platform Twitch, the company told Kotaku on Saturday evening. The shooter released a 180-page manifesto detailing his racist and anti-Semitic views, which he partially attributed to the cont...

Complex • October 9 2024

Florida Man ‘Lieutenant Dan’ Goes Viral Amid Hurricane Mi...

UPDATED 10/10, 2:19 p.m. ET: Lieutenant Dan, the Florida resident who refused to evacuate his boat in Tampa Bay, has survived Hurricane Milton’s landfall.Speaking with Kevin O'Donnell, a reporter at Fox 13, Malinowski stated that the experience was not as bad as he expected it to be.“Was it as bad as you thought?” O’Donnell asked, to which Malinowski replied “No.”See original story below.As Hurricane Milton approaches Florida’s coast, many residents are taking to social media to explain their ch...

GameSpot • September 24 2025

Former Pokemon Legal Chief "Wouldn't Touch" Homeland Security Video That Used Ash Ketchum

In response to the Department of Homeland Security's video using Ash Ketchum to promote ICE, The Pokemon Company's ex-legal chief said he "wouldn't touch" it, suggesting some possible reasons why the company might not pursue legal action.This week, Homeland Security posted a video to X of an arrest compilation. In between footage of ICE agents handcuffing people at their homes and in their cars are clips from the OG Pokemon TV series, with the famed "Gotta catch 'em all" theme playing in the bac...

The Establishment • January 29 2018

The Racist Undertones Of The ‘Urban Contemporary’ Grammys Category

Modified from Wikimedia
Back in 2013, Kelly Rowland and Nas presented the first Grammy Award for Best Urban Contemporary Album, designed to honor “artists whose music includes the more contemporary elements of R&B and may incorporate production elements found in urban pop, urban Euro-pop, urban rock, and urban alternative” and “albums containing at least 51 percent playing time of newly recorded contemporary vocal tracks derivative of R&B.”
Of all the nominees — Chris Brown’s Fortune, Frank Ocea...

Kotaku • February 28 2023

It’s About Damn Time Games ‘Git Gud’ At Black Hair - Kotaku

When you think of Black hair in games, what comes to mind? Maybe a clean set of cornrows? What about some dreadlocks? Or, and this is probably the most likely, do you think of an afro, a Caesar fade, or just a bald scalp? This litmus test is a conversation that’s been raging in the games industry for as long as games have featured playable protagonists and character creators. Even former Kotaku staffer Evan Narcisse took the discourse to task in his essay on the difficulties depicting Blackness...

The Establishment • August 2 2017

Dear Black Men: If You Want Long Hair, Have Long Hair

The clippers jolted to life, buzzing like a swarm of bees, waiting to shred through my short afro. “Hey, P, it’s time to cut them naps,” my brother yelled from the bathroom. Crying profusely, I sauntered to the bathroom, staggering, reluctant to get my hair cut. I plopped onto the chair and peered through salty rivulets of tears as black sheep wool fell from my head. “Why do I always have to get my hair cut?” I asked my brother. “Grandma said,” he replied militantly.
“Because you don’t take care...

Endless Mode • October 30 2025

The Importance Of Marcus Holloway: How Watch Dogs 2 Disrupts Norms Of Black Characters In Games

The first Black character I remember videogames introducing me to was Final Fantasy VII’s Barret Wallace. Built like a freight truck with a Gatling gun attached to his right arm, Barret was the first game character that I had a personal connection with. Later came Carl “CJ” Johnson, the protagonist of Rockstar’s Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas. I felt a similar attachment with CJ, a member of the Grove Street Families, one of the top gangs in Los Santos. Then there was Augustus Cole of the Gears o...

Sacramento News & Review • October 12 2016

SN&R • Opinions • Essay • ‘I’m going to die’ • Oct 13, 2016

It was 2:14 a.m. and I was restless, flipping through YouTube, when I came across a video titled “Police Admit To Killing Innocent Black Man.”

My heart sank and my blood slowly ran cold: the headline alone was unsettling, but I already knew what to expect. In the video, posted to the The Young Turks channel, an American political commentary web series, the hosts discussed how Los Angeles police had “accidentally killed” a black man while pursuing a carjacking suspect in late July. During the in...

Endless Mode • October 30 2025

Doomfist Is a Disappointing and Frustrating Jumble of Stereotypes

Regardless of how we perceive characters, black stereotypes extensively permeate media. From the Black Dude Dies First to the Black and Nerdy to the Sassy Black Woman, and everything in between, on-screen portrayals of black characters lean heavily on tropes that have been ingrained in media since its birth. Abhorrently disgusting and inherently wrong, these spurious portrayals paint black people in ways that are not reflective of the population. It’s discrimination feigned as fiction that was i...

Polygon • October 9 2017

The darker the skin, the harder the game: How South Park pretended to care about race

Matt Stone and Trey Parker’s South Park is no stranger to social commentary, and Ubisoft’s upcoming RPG South Park: The Fractured But Whole wants to be an interactive version of the show that uses video game tropes as another way to help the jokes land. The game’s difficulty slider changes the color of your skin, for instance. The lighter the complexion, the easier the game. The darker the complexion, the harder the game. If you want a greater challenge, you have to play as a black character....

Inquisitr News • February 3 2017

Mike Pence Honoring A White Man Is A Black History Month Party Foul [Opinion] - Inquisitr News

Wednesday marked February 1, and as such, also marked the beginning of the venerated Black History Month. A month dedicated to honoring and commemorating blackness and the strides in equality both the black population and America made over the decades, Black History Month is a time for paying respects to those who fought for equal rights for blacks and a time to celebrate being black amid a cultural system setup against that ethnic minority.
Many elected officials, celebrities, and common folk...

Kotaku • August 26 2022

Black Horror Game YouTuber CoryxKenshin Has Everyone Debating Platform Racism, Favoritism - Kotaku

YouTube’s Trending page is typically full of easy-going content like music videos, comedy sketches, and game trailers, along with popular creators like Mr. Beast and SSSniperWolf. However, on August 24, the number-one trending video was a callout against the platform itself, with accusations of racism or favoritism levied at Google’s video-sharing service. The commotion was all over the platform’s treatment of a gameplay video. The explosive claims have led other top creators, from moistcr1tikal...

Kotaku • July 17 2023

FBI Used Nintendo Switch To Locate Abducted Child [Update] - Kotaku

The FBI used a Nintendo Switch console to locate an abducted 15-year-old girl, who had been missing for 11 days back in August 2022, Forbes reports. In a horrendous case involving kidnap and sexual exploitation, a teenage girl was found and rescued only after she logged online with her Nintendo Switch. The unidentified Virginian teenager is a homebody, said family and friends, and unlikely to run away. However, she met a stranger—then 28-year-old Ethan Roberts—on the online chatting platform Ome...

Sacramento News & Review • October 31 2018

SN&R • Cannabis Guide • Reads • A dose of change • Nov 1, 2018

With California legalizing recreational marijuana in January, it’s no surprise that there would be new laws introduced with it. City and state laws now recognize that, with cannabis hitting the market legally, there are ways of studying its effects on individuals in the advent of the growing opioid epidemic.

The Center for Disease Control and Prevention found that more than 630,000 people died from drug overdoses between 1999 and 2016. And while several factors make the numbers difficult to cal...

Inquisitr News • July 19 2016

In A College Setting, Melania Trump Would Have Failed - Inquisitr News

Let’s go back in time for a moment. Michelle Obama, circa 2008 at the Democratic National Convention.
At such a pivotal time in the then-almost First Lady’s life, Mrs. Obama delivered a speech on August 25, 2008, at Denver, Colorado. (Wow. That’s the exact date when my fiancé and I started dating. Weird.) This speech, filled with more passion and vigor than many of my at-the-time high school classmates, aimed to inspire a plethora of demographics: blacks, women, mothers, an amalgam of all three...

GameSpot • September 17 2025

Florida Sets Its Lawsuit Sights On Porn Games

Florida has set its lasers to "sue" as the Sunshine State moves to attack porn games and their distributors in court.As reported by the Tallahassee Democrat, Florida's attorney general James Uthmeier filed two separate lawsuits against Lustyheroes.com and the parent company of Nutaku.net and SpiceVids.com. The dual suits allege that these websites have violated HB 3, the state law that went into effect in January and forced explicit websites to verify the ages of Florida users.According to Uthme...

Inquisitr News • December 17 2016

Tech Giants, The Largest Sharers Of Information, Need To Step Up To Combat Fake News - Inquisitr News

In case you forgot, Donald J. Trump — the xenophobic, Islamaphobic, sexist, racist, hatemongering, KKK-endorsed New York native and executive producer of Celebrity Apprentice — is our president-elect. (Don’t get your hopes up too much, but that could change on Dec. 19 when the U.S. Electoral College goes to vote for the president and the vice president .)
Since Trump began his presidential campaign in June of this year (it is worth noting that he announced his first presidential campaign...

Kotaku • March 4 2024

Destiny And Halo Composer Is Running For Congress - Kotaku

Video games and Washington politics are converging in a way you might not have had on your 2024 bingo card. Martin “Marty” O’Donnell, the composer behind Bungie’s Destiny and Halo games, has announced his campaign for the U.S. House of Representatives in Nevada’s third congressional district on March 3 as a Republican, challenging the current Democratic incumbent Susie Lee.O’Donnell declared his bid for the congressional seat on Twitter, in a post championing “the traditional family” and securin...

Kotaku • February 2 2023

The Truth Behind Those Wild TikTok Videos Meant To Hack Your Attention - Kotaku

If you spend any time on TikTok, you may have noticed that a certain kind of video collage is popping up all over your For You page. Maybe it has a clip of the adult cartoon Family Guy in there, or socialist Twitch streamer Hasan “Hasanabi” Piker talking about Black Lives Matter. But no matter the footage, it’s likely one of the other panels will be playing gameplay of mobile endless runner game Subway Surfers. And if you’re confused about what the hell is going on, well, great! Because I was, t...

Kotaku • May 26 2023

Twitch Star Amouranth Wants Her AI Chatbot To Put Trolls In Their Place - Kotaku

Artificial Intelligence is everywhere, from software like the language processor ChatGPT and the image generator DALL-E to AI chatbots—and now, even Twitch streamers are starting to take notice. Kaitlyn “Amouranth” Siragusa, one of the platform’s biggest stars with over 6.4 million followers, recently dropped her own artificial intelligence chatbot to “satisfy the needs” of fans, as she put it. She told Kotaku via Zoom that she hopes that AI Amouranth will teach social skills to minimize any sta...

Kotaku • April 22 2024

AI Adin Ross Tricks Fans Into Smashing Their Stuff - Kotaku

Controversial streamer Adin Ross has a rabid fanbase that’ll do anything for attention, including driving a car into a lake because…reasons. These dare streams of Ross’ tend to come with the promise of a carrot at the end of the proverbial stick, whether that comes in the form of expensive products or cold hard cash. Unfortunately, with the proliferation of artificial intelligence, a TikToker is capitalizing off Ross’ dare streams, using AI to pose as the popular Kick creator to troll his fanbas...

Kotaku • April 4 2023

YouTuber Shot After Trying To Prank Man In A Mall [Update] - Kotaku

A YouTuber was shot in the stomach on April 2 in a Virginia mall after attempting to play what he called a “simple practical joke” on a man. Tanner Cook is a member of the Classified Goons, a group that has been posting prank videos on YouTube since May 2022. Known as “just a couple of ‘bone heads,’” according to the group’s YouTube channel description, these pranksters have racked up millions of views across TikTok and YouTube for their typically silly and infantile jokes. One of the group’s mo...

Kotaku • February 7 2023

Twitch, YouTube Streamers Raise Big Funds For Syria-Turkey Earthquake Relief - Kotaku

Twitch isn’t just a place where artificial intelligence festers and drama proliferates. It’s also a useful organizational platform for raising awareness around and funds for various global causes, which is exactly what a handful of big-name streamers, like Ben “CohhCarnage” Cassell and Hasan “Hasanabi” Piker, are using it for in the wake of the calamitous earthquakes that have devastated Syria and Turkey in recent days.
The southwest Asian countries, Syria and Turkey, were decimated by two power...