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A 32-year-old restaurant owner has aspirations to be “one of the largest Black-owned hospitality groups in the South,” with several eateries opening up before the end of 2023; he is well on his way!

According to NOLA.com, Larry Morrow, the owner of New Orleans’ French Quarter restaurant, Sun Chong, plans to open six places by the end of this year. But he is not stopping there, as he has more expansive plans for 2024.

Sun Chong, located in the French Quarter at 240 Decatur Street, is named for his 69-year-old maternal grandmother. Morrow says that many of her Korean recipes are used on the menu at the restaurant.

He credits his business acumen to family, specifically his grandmother and mother.

“My mom’s an entrepreneur,” he states. “My grandmother’s an entrepreneur. I have strong women in my life, and that’s made me strong, too.”

Morrow told AfroTech that he started as an entrepreneur when he produced entertainment industry events under his moniker, Larry Morrow Events. He was recently featured on “Earn Your Leisure,” where he talked about some lessons he learned up to this point in his career.

At 22, he opened Larry’s Poboys & Wings. Although it lasted only a short time, that business taught him some things that helped him avoid the mistakes from the first opening.

“Learning from when I was 22, it helped prepare for when I opened up Morrow’s,” Morrow said. “I knew I needed more reserves, and I was just mentally in a better place. I was much more mature than 22 years old.

“I opened up Morrow’s, it was like a line out the door, and I’m like, ‘Oh sh-t, we on to something.”

Now, Morrow says that he has conceptualized five different restaurants and a club. Along with the burgeoning restaurants, he is also involved in real estate. He bought his first property with $39,000 in cash, so we will be seeing more of Morrow in the near and distant future.

With the new Loki season two trailer, Marvel fans spotted a reference to a very obscure character from the pages of Marvel Comics—the murderous and monstrous Zaniac. It looks like he’ll be taking on Loki and Sylvie at some point during the series, probably during the 1970s. But who is this long-forgotten Marvel baddie? Here’s the comic book history of the killer called Zaniac.

Zaniac is a villain that first appeared in Thor #319, back in 1982. Created by writer Doug Moench and artist Keith Pollard, this wild villain is a relatively obscure one from the God of Thunder’s pantheon of bad guys. While most of Thor’s main villains are other mythological beings, occasionally, he fights a more Earth-bound villain like Zaniac. Although, Zaniac’s powers came from otherworldly forces. So god or not, he was definitely more than a mere human.

Who Is Zaniac in Marvel Comics?

In the late 19th century, Dormammu, Lord of the Dark Dimension and mortal enemy of Doctor Strange, exiled an entity to Earth to possess a mortal human to be his agent of chaos. This being attached itself to a deformed and shunned man named Tom Malverne, a man harboring bitter resentment for the way the world treated him. With the power of this entity within him, Malverne went on a murderous rampage in 1888 London, where he butchered five women. He became the serial killer we know as Jack the Ripper. Once the person it possessed died, the entity continued to possess as the decades went on.

Also, this is the basic idea for the original Star Trek episode “Wolf in the Fold.”

Zaniac Fights Thor

This brings us to the modern day. A movie star by the name of Brad Wolfe was filming a slasher movie at the University of Chicago, which was where many early experiments for the Manhattan Project took place. While in costume as the film’s slasher villain, the Zaniac, Wolfe found himself trapped in a nuclear explosion. A pyrotechnics accident on set triggered residual radiation from the Manhattan Project experiments of the 1940s, causing this explosion. Wolfe gained incredible super strength and could create energy knives with a thought. Clad in the killer’s movie costume, he became the Zaniac.

The Entity drove Wolfe to madness; it also amplified Wolfe’s already inherent misogyny. He began to act out the movie’s plotlines. He kidnapped Shawna Lynde, a friend of Thor’s alter-ego Dr. Donald Blake. Thor saved Shawna from Zaniac, but Zaniac got away. He then attempted to act out the movie’s ending in real life, which involved murdering dozens of innocent women. Victims he called his “pretty pretties”. Luckily, Thor ended Zaniac’s plans. Zaniac only appeared a few more times, and Marvel killed him off in 1986’s Thor #372, a story where the Time Variance Authority appears.

How Could Zaniac Tie into Loki Season Two?

Judging from the second trailer for Loki season two, we are getting this obscure Thor villain in the MCU. Not only do we see a movie marquee and several posters for the movie Zaniac, which shows a movie monster in the character’s traditional bright yellow skin, but we see actor Rafael Casal, who is probably playing movie star Brad Wolfe in the film. We don’t know if the MCU version will be an entity from the Dark Dimension, but there’s no reason not to tie it into Doctor Strange mythology. Especially as Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness ended with Strange and Clea headed for the Dark Dimension. Fans have been asking for more connections between MCU projects, and maybe this is it. We’ll find out on October 6, when Loki season two premieres on Disney+.

The post Who Is Zaniac, the Thor Villain Appearing in LOKI Season 2? appeared first on Nerdist.

We spoke to Stern Pinball’s Marketing and Social Media man, Anthony Mazzuca, who demo’d their new pinball machine for us.  Behold the glory of VENOM!  As you will learn in the following conversation, the machine has several innovations, including the ability to save your game stats via a QR code and continue where you left off the next time you log in. It’s sort of a video game/pinball hybrid. You can even play as different Venom hosts with different advantages. The game is a ton of fun to play as well, as we found out ourselves when we started playing and couldn’t stop as we leveled up and made Carnage angrier and angrier.

In the second conversation, we discussed the Foo Fighters pinball machine, which has a cool Easter Egg of Stern Pinball, Inc.’s company founder, Gary Stern. Players can choose a Foo song to listen to as the band goes on tour and encounters foo to fight. It’s a blast to play, especially with the video representation of the band playing and battling across the U.S.

To learn more about these incredible machines check out their website here

The post  Stern Pinball’s Show Off New Pinball Machines at San Diego Comic Con appeared first on The Nerd Element.

In 2019, after working under an internship with Square Co-founder Jim McKelvey, a now 23-year-old man found what he wanted to do with his life.

According to AfroTech, Pryce Adade-Yebesi, the co-founder of Utopia Labs, was trying to figure out where to make the most impact on the lives of his people. Initially, he thought having a political career would be his calling, and he could make a difference. But something else made more sense.

“A lot of the areas that my mom took us to were areas that were very impoverished,” Adade-Yebesi said. “I saw that growing up, and for a while, I wanted to engage with politics, in government, but I started to see that it wasn’t quite the avenue in which I wanted to make an impact, and so I was interested in business and the potential things that I could build or make there.”

The fintech space was holding a door open for him to enter. Working at Square allowed him to learn that “fintech can change lives,” and he knew he wanted to “build something like Square one day.'”

Two years later, in 2021, he and his co-founders, Kaito Cunningham, Jason Chong, and Alexander Wu, laid the foundation for what bloomed into Utopia Labs. The company ended up being a startup intersecting traditional financing and cryptocurrency.

Adade-Yebesi and Utopia Labs are working toward the world accepting a “new internet economy.” Utopia Labs is entrenched in this by engaging services such as crypto payments and crypto treasury management.

“Our vision is to create a new internet economy. When value can pass so easily without so many middlemen and fragmented settlement systems, we have so many new opportunities to raise funds for causes people care about, start projects with people from all over the world that might end up being fantastic and powerful mechanisms for impact, but also can become billion-dollar companies,” Adade-Yebesi said. “Crypto enables so many interesting and novel ways of coordination and also just fixes so many of our fragmented value transfer systems and settlement systems across the world.”

This may reflect a better use for Adade-Yebesi and his talent than the world of politics.