Ever since Respawn’s ambitious new Star Wars game was announced back in 2016, fans have been desperate to discover everything that they can about the newest addition to the ever-sprawling canon. At Star Wars: Celebration, we got our first look at Star Wars Jedi: Fallen Order, as well as the backstory and motivations of protagonist Cal Kestis (Gotham’s Cameron Monaghan.) On Saturday morning at EA Play, the first event of this year’s E3 Expo, we got our biggest look yet with almost 15 minutes of incredible gameplay that gave us a huge insight into the upcoming game.

If you’re reading this then you probably know all about Star Wars: Jedi Fallen Order, but in case you’re just discovering the game, it is a single-player action adventure game that takes place in the wake of Order 66 and the events of Star Wars: Episode III – Revenge of the Sith during a time where the Jedi are being hunted down and systematically murdered.  You play as Cal Kestis, a Jedi on the run, who takes on the Empire with the aid of his Force powers and some unexpected allies. “Three hours after the game starts, Cal has built himself up, he’s no longer a lowly padawan but he’s not a Jedi,” according to the livestream.



The live gameplay demo took us to the wartorn Wookiee planet of Kashyyk as Cal teams up with Saw Gerrera, the radical rebel from Rogue One, who sends the young Jedi on a mission to save the Wookiees who have been enslaved by the Empire and forced to cut down wroshyr trees the resin to create “a powerful compound.” We saw a variety of Force powers, ranging from opening doors to creating bridges by pushing over obstacles to Force pushing enemies into one another. It’s a Star Wars game, so there’s also some satisfying lightsaber action with Cal wielding his own blue blade to slice through unsuspecting stormtroopers and Kashyyk’s “multilayered deathtrap” ecosystem.

There are plenty of deep-cut Star Wars references featured in the gameplay demo, including a sequence in which Cal is battling snarling Wyyyschokk, giant Kashyykian spiders that first featured in the Jedi Academy series, before being brought into contemporary canon in The Force Awakens novelization. We also got our best look yet at the newly created Purge Troopers who are under the control of the Inquisitors and Second Sister, one of the game’s major villains who you might recognize from the Star Wars comics. Clad in black armor, these intimidating enemies wield massive quarterstaffs that emanate a sinister purple energy at either end. However, the most exciting inclusion of all is Cal’s droid bud BD-1, who rides on his back like a little robot Yoda and can help provide important environmental information and hack into Imperial technology to help you navigate your surroundings.

The creators were quick to explain that the game is completely canon and the characters “will live in other places.” It seems like the game won’t give the usual choice from Star Wars games of being able to choose the light side or the dark but that doesn’t necessarily mean that you’ll be light… as Cal is doing a whole lot of killing in the sequence we saw.

We will continue to report on Star Wars Jedi: Fallen Order as the story develops. The game will release on PlayStation 4, Xbox One, and Windows PC on November 15, 2019. Be sure to stay tuned to Nerdist all week long for the latest stories coming out of this year’s E3.

Images: EA, Lucasfilm

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Jonas Salk. Nikola Tesla. Marie Curie. Alexander Fleming. Thomas Edison. These are some of the individuals whose discoveries changed the world forever, making life better for all mankind. Among them stands another, someone whose name has been lost to time despite serving no less an important role in our planet’s history: they found a way to make eating cake for breakfast acceptable. We speak of the person who made donuts a breakfast staple. (As well as a lunch, dinner, and “any time of day snack” staple.) In honor of them and National Doughnut Day, here is the definitive and indisputably accurate ranking of the twelve best types of donuts.

Note: Number 13 was the donut you think should have made the list. Yup, that specific donut you’re furious didn’t make it juuuust missed. Like it was cut by that person in the office who keeps slicing all the donuts into way too small pieces so everyone can “share” instead of anyone being happy.

12. Powdered



Powdered sugar makes everything better, except for your shirt and face. No one would ever turn down a powdered donut, nor should they (especially mini ones which are far more enjoyable than their normal sized brethren), but they cause quite a mess. We don’t need to look like Tony Montana at eight in the morning.

11. Strawberry Frosted

Probably the most “childish” donut thanks to its unnatural pink color (frequently accompanied by sprinkles), you can look like a big goober eating one. Sooooo what? It’s like eating a round cupcake, and no one would side-eye you for that just because it was pink. Sometimes you just want something super sweet and delicious, no matter your age, and if you think you’re too good for a strawberry frosted donut you were probably a hall monitor.

10. Jelly

Our first huge surprise is that one of the most iconic donuts of them all, a staple of every donut shop and a must-have member of any dozen purchased for an office, the jelly donut comes in at only number ten. It’s not an indictment on the quality of the donut, easily the best (and only truly good) jam-filled donut, but rather that it’s not better than any donut above it based on its merits and not its reputation. Plus it’s often the victim of over and under filling, because the perfect ratio of filling-to-donut is hard to master, and its floor is lower than its ceiling is high.

9. Blueberry Glazed

A regular blueberry donut is fine. It’s fine. But a glazed version is the only way to go. It’s crispy yet soft, sweet yet….well it’s still really sweet even with the fruit. It’s not like the blueberries make it especially healthy, but we’re not worried about things like “calories” or “living a long life” when we’re digging through a box of donuts.

8. Chocolate Frosted



It’s chocolate icing on a donut. What else do you need, not just in a donut but in life?

7. Old Fashioned

If someone served you a plain cake you’d have them arrested, and yet a crispy, delicious old fashioned donut is wonderful all on its own. It’s also all we want sometimes for one very specific reason – it’s perfect for dunking in coffee or milk. Without icing or frosting they aren’t as sweet as other donuts obviously, but sometimes that’s exactly what you want, and if you get one that’s especially light and fluffy it’s fantastic even without dunking it in anything.

6. Maple Frosted

The most “mature” of the frosted donut family, the maple donut is still just as sweet and wonderful as all the others icings. That said, it’s also a flavor you don’t get a chance to enjoy as often (unless you live in Canada or a tree in Vermont). You run into vanilla, chocolate, and strawberry icing all the damn time, but maple isn’t as ubiquitous despite being delicious, which is another reason it’s the best frosted donut. It fills a desperate dessert-need in our life.

5. French Cruller

The most distinct doughnut in terms of texture. The French cruller (which is glazed and far, far superior to a boring old plain cruller) is crunchy on the outside and flaky on the inside. A real delight for the senses. It’s also one of the most satisfying to dunk in milk. All of that plus its unbeatable taste mean I might actually have ranked it too low.

4. Apple Fritter



It’s almost like someone said, “People might think a doughnut made with apples won’t taste good, so slather it in icing and make it look enormous and messy so they know it isn’t.” That captures the beauty of this chewy delight.

3. Glazed

The true baseline test of any donut shop’s worth is the glazed donut. Its beauty lies in its simplicity. It’s a soft, light donut dipped in a honey glaze, that if done correctly will have you asking important personal questions like, “How many donuts can I eat before I’m a bad person?” and “Could I afford all new pants?” A glazed donut is nearly a perfect food. Nearly.

2. Chocolate Glazed

It’s a glazed donut, but with chocolate. Now that’s perfection.

1. Boston Kreme



Soft and sweet, like a warm hug in your mouth, a Boston Kreme combines chocolate icing and a pudding filling. This is everything a doughnut can be all wrapped up into one treat. The only issue is that some donut shops overfill it, and others under fill it. We do prefer consistency in our consistency. It’s still number one though, because the ideal Boston Kreme, made to perfection with the right ratio of icing, donut, and filling, is the best you can have.

And thanks to one anonymous hero, the best part is you can have doughnuts for breakfast.

Featured Image: Baking a Moment/YouTube

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Written by: Anique Coney

The Last O.G. is a tale of what happens when street hustlers are forced into retirement and learn how to get their grown-man on.

This hilarious raw comedy is a TBS original, co-created and co-executive produced by Jordan Peele and Tracy Morgan.

The show really hits home for me, as it takes place in my hometown of Brooklyn, New York. I moved to Atlanta about 12 years ago, and I do not get to visit home as often as I would like. The longest that I have ever gone without visiting was about 3 years. When I finally went back for a visit, I could not believe how much everything had changed in such a short amount of time. Gentrification has definitely made Brooklyn a much different place than the Brooklyn that I remember from my youth. As Tracy Morgan’s character emerges from prison after 15 years, not only does he have to adjust to being in the free world again, he also has to adjust to the new Brooklyn as well as finding out he’s a father. 

Last season (the first season), we were introduced to Tracy’s character, Tray — a drug dealer who went to prison for 15 years. Unbeknownst to him, his girlfriend was pregnant with twins at the time of his arrest. Wanting to give her twins a normal life and protect them from the truth, Shannon/Shay (Tiffany Haddish) never told Tray about her pregnancy or about his children, nor did she tell the children about Tray. Upon his release from prison, Tray goes looking for Shay to pick up where they left off, but he learns that, while she is still living in Brooklyn, she has a completely new life now.

Shay is not the around-the-way girl that Tray remembers. She is now super successful and living with her white husband (Josh) who has been raising Tracy’s children as his own. Initially, Tray is not feeling anything about the situation and does whatever he can to be a part of his children’s lives — and hilarity ensues. His old-school, hard-knock way of doing things often clashes with the new-school (and often somewhat spoiled) ways that the children are used to. Despite everyone’s reservations, Tray eventually begins to win over the twins and even Josh. Begrudgingly, even Shay becomes supportive of Tray and his new life. 

In the Season 2 premiere, it really hits Tray that he missed 15 years of raising his children. While at the halfway house where he lives, the other guys beam with pride about being there when their children were born and being involved in the birth. Tray immediately goes to Shay and Josh’s house and asks Shay if she has video of the birth of the twins. Tray is visibly emotional and desperate just to get glimpses of his children’s early years and milestones. Shay agrees to look for pictures, videos, and other mementos in the basement, while commenting that her pregnancy was not an easy time in her life. We witness an emotional moment when Shay has a flashback to a time when she tried to visit Tray in prison to tell him that she was pregnant. However, she loses her nerve after getting off the visitor’s bus to the prison when a little girl walks up to her and asks, “Is your daddy in timeout like my daddy?”

Shay continues to remember her early years with the twins and being a struggling single mom (Josh did not come into her life until the twins were four years old). In addition to the regular struggles of single motherhood, Shay has been trying to build a relationship with her own mother, who has struggled with drug addiction throughout most of Shay’s life. Unfortunately, this was a very common problem in 1980–1990s Brooklyn during the crack epidemic. In the present, we see Tray and Shay go to her storage unit to find the VHS tape of the twins being born. They finally find the tape, but they do not have VCR. Shay again flashes back and recalls that her mother stole her VCR for money to buy drugs. 

Tray and Shay share an emotional moment when they finally watch the video and Tray thanks Shay for being so strong and giving birth to their children alone. Shay further reflects on her climb from the bottom to the top: getting into college, meeting her future husband, and building the life that she now has. We gain a better understanding of Shay — truly a rose that grew from concrete. 

Although The Last O.G. is a hilarious show, it uses its platform to bring attention to social matters in a way that only Tracy Morgan’s homespun, street philosophy can achieve. Season 2 touches on topics such as racism, drug addiction, the many challenges of prisoner re-entry, why it is/is not okay for white people to use the N-word, and so much more. We watch the blossoming bromance between Tray and Josh, the rebuilding of a friendship between Tray and Shay, and Tray’s growth as a father. We are introduced to Tray’s mother (Anna Maria Horsford) who appears to be reluctant to believe that her son has turned his life around. We see the head of the halfway house (Cedric the Entertainer) encourage and support Tray’s dreams and goals, while still roasting him every chance he gets. The show also provides a great bit of nostalgia for all the ’80s and ’90s babies. With a solid and hilarious cast, relatable present-day issues and the perfect blend of street wisdom and family togetherness, The Last O.G. is what TV has been missing.

Anique Coney is a Brooklyn-born writer with a talent for profanity and sharing unsolicited advice, often at the same time. A proud mom, blerd, and introvert, you can find her in the A…or on Twitter (@bodgabetty).

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Just like the start of a horror movie, it was just past midnight on April 26, 1986, when reactor No. 4 at Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant began the meltdown that would result in a full-on nuclear explosion.

Until the growing threat of climate change, the Chernobyl catastrophe was the world’s worst man-made disaster on a social, cultural, and environmental level in spite of the fact that the official death toll released by the Soviet government remains at an unrealistic 31. Craig Mazin’s Chernobyl and its five episodes of creeping dread could not have come at a better modern socio-cultural and political moment as the US administration continues to taunt North Korea over their nuclear aspirations and an unhinged wannabe-autocrat holds the codes to America’s own nuclear arsenal.

I had just celebrated my seventh birthday earlier that month when the news of the Chernobyl disaster broke through the Soviet cloud of disinformation and appeared on international networks. I was already a baby horror fan, watching films like An American Werewolf in London and Alien long before I should have been, so this real-life horror story grabbed my attention immediately. But none of the grown-ups would talk to me about it. For the next couple years, and especially after a move to Pakistan — one of Russia’s allies — that had me going to school with many Russian diplomats’ kids I was obsessed with Chernobyl. As we learn in Mazin’s dramatization of the events, actual truth about the incident was not making it out past the USSR’s borders. So I read books about nuclear power, apocalyptic novels like Stephen King’s The Stand and microfiche opinion pieces about what happened in Chernobyl and what it must have been like for all the people who had been removed from the exclusion zone. And those who had been forced to stay behind for the cleanup. I researched results of the nuclear bombs dropped over Nagasaki and Hiroshima as well. Yes, I was and remain a very strange and nerdy girl.

But even having read so much about these events, nothing prepared me for the visual brutality of watching it all play out in Chernobyl. The rupture of nature and humanity as it bumped up against the USSR’s restrictive state socialism was often physically painful to watch. The bodies ravaged by radiation poisoning gave The Walking Dead a run for its gruesome money, and the stomach-churning scenes of children playing in the ashes of the nuclear explosion as the reactor glows in the distance was almost too much to take. And that was just the first two episodes of Chernobyl. By episode four, with the “animal control” duty and the “biorobots” (aka humans) devastation I’ve actually been ruined for horror. I have seen some terrible things, but absolutely nothing compares with these five+ hours of Mazin’s dark vision.

And Chernobyl paints a social and political picture that is sadly far deeper than the horrific event itself. Because the USSR had positioned itself as the ultimate Communist state, their propaganda machines went straight to work undermining the reality of the situation. When nuclear physicist Valery Legasov (Jared Harris) is conscripted to assist with the cleanup, he is told that asking questions about why this happened is un-patriotic. Since nearby Pripyat was the poster city for Communist excellence, the man in charge of cleanup Boris Shcherbina (Stellan Skarsgard) says, “The official position of The State is that a global nuclear catastrophe is not possible in the Soviet Union.” Their misinformation attempted to bend the truth to their desired narrative. But as always, the truth eventually prevailed. It just took decades for it to happen.

Arguably one of the most striking things about Chernobyl is its sly call-out of the current American political regime through the lens of the fallen Soviet Republic. The irony isn’t lost on anyone that the forbear of the country who meddled in an American election in 2016 would be made up of the very kinds of incompetent and self-serving people we see in power in America today. The USSR’s anti-intellectualism platform demoted qualified and educated civil servants and replaced them with everyday Vladimirs whose only credentials were that they had been chosen to follow orders. This intelligence gap is exposed time and time again as Legasov and his comrades try to clean up the planet-altering mess made by people who were incapable of admitting they didn’t know what they were doing. Due to this gross negligence, the human and environmental toll was astronomical. Chernobyl still has dangerous levels of radiation present, all these decades later.

In the show the character of Belarusian nuclear physicist Ulana Khomyuk (Emily Watson) is actually a composite of Legasov’s team, a fact revealed in the closing titles of this gripping miniseries. Since there were several women on the team, I really appreciated the composite character being a woman too.

Watching Watson, Skarsgard, and Harris in their scenes together sometimes felt like a play. It was often too close to real, which only made the reality of the Chernobyl disaster more dramatic. The supporting cast as well put their all into these brutal performances. There was not even an extra who was remotely out of character. They attacked this story with the same kind of grim resolve the real folks would have done all those years ago. When I said I’ve never seen anything like this, I mean it down to the last people we see on screen. Mazin and his crew did something truly exceptional here. Elemental real-life disaster horror turned into a work of detailed art.

Chernobyl is the reminder we all need of why studying history and the humanities is so vital to human survival and civilization. Otherwise history continues to repeat itself. This is a narrative about what happens when mediocre, unintelligent, unqualified, power-hungry and anti-intellectual men rise to leadership roles they don’t deserve by a long shot. Sound familiar? We have a new scourge of right-wing extremists in the West who also pride themselves on their anti-intellectualism. And wealthy conservatives who encourage this ethos. Because the proletariat — the everyday Joes —  will make different decisions when they are ignorant of choices or lack critical thinking skills. They are far easier to manipulate, rob, and incite to violence if it doesn’t occur to them to question or speak back to power. Chernobyl is a terrifying vision of the things that petty people will do to stay in power at whatever human cost it might be.

Over 600,000 conscripted men were sent to Chernobyl to assist in the cleanup. It’s chilling that the Soviet Union made no records of these men’s fates, even though we well know that they all died before their time. Sooner or later. And it took Legasov’s suicide to release the tapes of his memoirs, which finally prompted the USSR to fix the original problem in all the reactors in the USSR that had caused the blast in Chernobyl’s reactor No. 4. More than two years after the event itself. Party over country. Crew expendable.

In his closing statements at the show trial of the men where blame was ultimately placed, Legasov says:

“We’re on dangerous ground right now. Because of our secrets and our lies. They’re practically what defines us. When the truth offends, we lie and lie until we can no longer remember it is even there. It is still there. Every lie we tell incurs a debt to the truth. Sooner or later that debt is paid.”

Seeing the parallels between what happened in Chernobyl through Mazin’s show — even though he has taken some creative liberties in the narrative — and the slow-motion disaster we’re seeing unfold under the current American political regime, I pray to the old gods and the new every day that Legasov via Jared Harris is right. The world cannot survive another Chernobyl. More importantly, we shouldn’t have to.

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