1/2 of the Dudley Boyz

Just a man trying to live for the better

[Best Movie Moments 🍿 @BestMovieMom]

Will Smith was paid 5 million dollars for Men in Black (1997). Sonnenfeld blocked the Battery Park sequence over an entire afternoon to nail the lighting on his red jacket against the lower Manhattan skyline. The wardrobe choice was Smith’s own pitch.

[Anish Moonka @anishmoonka]

Michael Jackson and Quincy Jones listened to 800 songs to find 9. Then Quincy threw out 4 of those 9 and went back into the studio. Beat It, Human Nature, P.Y.T., and The Lady in My Life were emergency replacements for songs that were not good enough.

They spent four months just listening. Quincy and Rod Temperton sat in a Los Angeles studio in 1982, going through song after song after song from every songwriter they could pull a favor from. Most got cut after a few seconds. Of the 800, they only ended up recording around 30 with Michael actually singing. Of those 30, only 9 made the final list. And then Quincy listened to the finished album, decided 4 of his own picks were not strong enough, and pulled them. The four songs he replaced them with became some of the most famous in pop music history. The four he cut went on to become hits for other artists.

Recording those replacements almost broke the team. During the Beat It sessions, Quincy had three studios running at the same time. Eddie Van Halen was in one of them laying down his guitar solo for free. He had thought the call from Quincy was a prank his friends were pulling on him. Michael was in the next room, singing a vocal part through a cardboard tube. Engineers were mixing in the third studio. They worked five days and five nights with no sleep. At one point the speakers overloaded and caught fire. Quincy later told the BBC they had to carry engineers out of the studio on stretchers. Musicians too. Greg Phillinganes, the keyboard player on the album, said there was a moment where everyone thought it was finished, that they had nothing left to give, and Quincy was still standing there saying "It is not there yet" while Michael, almost falling apart, kept asking what they were supposed to do now.

They finally finished mixing in early November. Then they sat down to play the master back, and the album sounded weak. They had crammed too much music onto a normal vinyl record, and the grooves had to be cut so narrow that the punch was gone. So they cut a verse from "The Lady in My Life," shortened the famous 29-second intro of "Billie Jean" that Quincy had been trying to drop the entire time, and remixed almost the whole album from scratch. One song a day. Eight straight days. The only track they left alone was "The Girl Is Mine" because it was already on the radio. The final mix wrapped on November 8, 1982. The album came out 21 days later.

The wolves you hear at the start of the song "Thriller" are Michael. The engineer set up tape recorders in a barn overnight to catch his own dog howling, and the dog never made a sound. So Michael did the howls in the booth himself. Some of the background vocals on the same track were sung in the studio's shower stall. Vincent Price did his entire spoken-word horror section in three takes, and the verses he was reading had been written by Rod Temperton in a taxi on the way to the studio that same morning. Michael never wrote his songs on paper. He recorded them on a small handheld tape recorder and then sang them back from memory in the studio.

The album ended up selling around 70 million copies. It won 8 Grammys, sat at number one for 37 weeks, and produced 7 Top 10 hits out of 9 songs. At its peak it was moving a million copies a week. But all of that came after the work was done. The work itself was 800 demos, 30 recordings, 4 last-minute saves, three studios running until the speakers caught fire, and a producer who refused to put out something he did not believe in even when it meant pulling his own album apart twice. Nine tracks because they could not find more that were good enough.

[Anish Moonka @anishmoonka]

Sony spent up to $400 million making a single video game. It sold 25,000 copies in 14 days before Sony pulled it from sale. Cost per copy sold: about $16,000. The studio shut down two months later. The executive who warned them had already been fired for saying no.

The game was Concord. The executive was Shuhei Yoshida, who ran Sony's in-house game studios for 11 years and helped ship some of the biggest PlayStation hits ever: God of War, The Last of Us, Uncharted, Ghost of Tsushima. These are games you buy once and finish. Sony made billions on that model. Spider-Man alone generated $315 million in digital sales. The Last of Us 2 pulled nearly $250 million. God of War Ragnarok sold 15 million copies, with $279 million from digital downloads alone.

Then in 2019, a new CEO took over PlayStation. Jim Ryan wanted Sony's studios to stop making those kinds of games and chase a different model: live service. Live service is Fortnite's model: games designed to keep you playing and paying forever, earning money through endless small purchases instead of one-time sales. Ryan told his team to ship 12 of these by 2025.

Yoshida refused. Ryan removed him from running the studios and gave him a choice: take a smaller role working with indie developers or leave the company. Yoshida took the role and stayed at Sony for another six years. At an industry event in Australia last weekend, he finally said plainly that Ryan fired him from running the studios for refusing to do the 'ridiculous things' Ryan had demanded.

Of those 12 live service games, 8 were cancelled before they ever came out. Naughty Dog killed a Last of Us multiplayer game in late 2023. Bend Studio's sci-fi game died in January 2025. Twisted Metal and a London fantasy game were both scrapped in early 2024, and the London studio was closed. Insomniac's Spider-Man multiplayer was abandoned. A God of War live service game was cancelled, then the studio making it (Bluepoint) was shut down this past February. A Destiny spin-off was scrapped. Deviation Games, a studio Sony had partnered with, was shut down before shipping anything.

Only one of the 12 actually worked. Helldivers 2 was a big hit. But the studio that made it, Arrowhead, isn't owned by Sony, and they've already said they won't partner with Sony on their next game.

The total damage under Ryan: $3.7 billion spent buying Bungie (the studio behind Destiny), up to $400 million written off on Concord, and roughly 1,500 jobs lost across studios that got shut down. The PS5 generation is now short on the kind of games that built PlayStation in the first place.

Yoshida was pushed out in 2019 for saying no to one strategy. Five years and a few billion dollars later, Sony's current CEO says the new plan is to 'fail early and fail cheaply.'

[yzyupdates @yzyupdates]

Ye originally wanted Lauryn Hill on “All Falls Down” in 2004 as it interpolates her song “Mystery of Iniquity,” but he couldn’t get the sample cleared at the time

Two decades later he brings her out to perform it together for the first time in front of a sold-out crowd of 80,000 fans 🔥🔥🔥

LEGENDARY 🤯

[Mark Gadala-Maria @markgadala]

This is wild.

143 million people thought they were catching Pokémon. They were actually building one of the largest real-world visual datasets in AI history.

Niantic just disclosed that photos and AR scans collected through Pokémon Go have produced a dataset of over 30 billion real-world images. The company is now using that data to power visual navigation AI for delivery robots.

Players didn't just walk around with their phones. They scanned landmarks, storefronts, parks, and sidewalks from every angle, at every time of day, in lighting and weather conditions that staged photography would never capture. They documented the physical world at a scale no mapping company with a fleet of vehicles could have replicated on the same timeline or budget.

Niantic collected this systematically, data point by data point, across eight years, while users thought the only thing at stake was catching a rare Charizard.

The most valuable AI training datasets in the world aren't being assembled in data centers. They're being built by people who have no idea they're building them.

[Ballislife.com @Ballislife]

4 Minutes of POINT GOD CP3 embarrassing defenders!

[1/2 of the Dudley Boyz @DocHolidaye]

@ChipGotIt_ @NFL @Panthers

[Re:animated @ReanimatedYT]

Alright y'all, a little late, but another FREE Nintendo OLED Switch giveaway! Yes it is international!

1. Like and retweet
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Drawing ends August 6th at 6PM EDT!! Good luck everyone!

[🤫🤫 @myburnaaccounts]

Justice for Travis Rudolph. This man lost his professional football career because Dominique Jones set him up to be killed, but he’s on trial for murder for killing one of the men that showed up to his home at 1 am.

[ThrowbackHoops @ThrowbackHoops]

Still one of the greatest alley-oops, ever! (2001)

[Everything Georgia @GAFollowers]

Someone spotted Andre 3000 walking and playing his Mayan Double Flute in Tokyo, Japan.

[SLAM @SLAMonline]

Stats and accolades are cool, but this clip represents Melo's impact. ❤️

[Roots of Combat @RootsOfCombat]

17 yr old Mike Tyson sparring pro boxer Jimmy Clark 👀

[Billionaire Mindset @billimindst]

First, you change your thinking, then you change your life.

[Richard Jefferson @Rjeff24]

Hardest I've laughed all week...
@TheRealJRSmith @hoopology_tw

Who should I do this with next?

[Zoltium @ZoltiumHQ]

15 Hard Truths of Psychology and Life:

1.

[𝙀𝙭𝙪𝙡𝙖𝙣𝙨𝙞𝙨 @Exulansista]

Croatia

[Billionaire Mindset @billimindst]

You either take risks, or you lose chances.

[Chad Johnson @ochocinco]

My sons 21st birthday is today & he’s sleeping, y’all think he will like this❔