Dance Magers

Saudi Arabia Beheaded 59 People So Far This Year, but Hardly Anyone Is Talking About It

The first time my team completed Destiny's Vault of Glass raid, it took us more than 10 hours. The second time, it took us 90 minutes.

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Syfy's going to adapt Joseph Mallozzi and Paul Mullie's graphic novel Dark Matter into a series. The pair, who worked with the network back in the Stargate days, will be back to executive produce the show.

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American defense contractor Lockheed Martin has issued a statement declaring it has made a technological breakthrough in developing a power source based on nuclear fusion. It's hoping to have a prototype ready in five years — and a small, functional unit ready by 2024.

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Notorious dictators may not be the people we typically associate with methamphetamine, but a report claims that, during World War II, Adolf Hitler regularly took methamphetamines for a variety of ailments, including the drug Pervitin, a precursor to crystal meth.

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The UK Has Voted to Recognize Palestine as a State

Rep. Lamar Smith (R-TX), the Chairman of the House Science Committee on Science, Space and Technology has repeatedly denounced the National Science Foundation for squandering taxpayer money on frivolous research. Now he's gone a step further, demanding personal political scrutiny of peer-reviewed research grants.

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Some airplane condensation trails, which conspiracy theorists believe are "chemtrails." Photo via Wikimedia Commons

The chemtrails conspiracy theory has been circulating for a while among the same sorts of people who believe that 9/11 was an inside job and celebrities are being controlled by the CIA. In brief, chemtrail enthusiasts think that those white trails of vapor you see pouring out of planes are actually nasty chemical or biological agents that governments are using to geo-engineer the weather, create a vast electromagnetic super-weapon, control the population, or—well, you get the idea. There's no science or proof whatsoever behind this, but plenty of people are still willing to entertain this vaguely supervillain-esque notion. 

Chris Bovey in Argentina

On October 1, Chris Bovey—a 41-year-old from Devon, England—thought he’d troll the chemtrails camp. During a flight from Buenos Aires to the UK, his plane had to make an emergency landing in São Paulo and dumped excess fuel to lighten the load. Since he had a window seat, Chris decided to film all the liquid being sprayed out of the wing next to him.

Touching down, he uploaded the video with a caption that suggested it could be evidence of chemtrails, hoping to mess with a couple of friends who he knew might fall for it. The video now has 1.1 million views, nearly 20,000 shares, and dozens of comments telling viewers to “wake the F up," or accusing naysayers of being “stupid paid shills."

He then claimed (falsely) that he’d been detained at Heathrow upon arrival, been interrogated by the authorities, and had his phone confiscated. That riled everyone up even more, with “conspiraloon” (Chris’s term) website NeonNettle.com picking up the story and reporting it as evidence of chemtrails.

The video Chris filmed from his seat

Mick West—editor of anti-conspiracy theory website Metabunk, which published an article explaining why Chris’s video was a hoax—explained the history of the chemtrails theory to me. “It started back in the late 1990s,” he said. “People just noticed contrails—the condensation trails behind planes—for the first time, and got this idea that a normal contrail shouldn’t persist for very long. So if anything lasted for more than a few minutes, it must be something being sprayed.”

While chemtrails advocates might accuse sheeple of believing everything their governments tell them, they themselves tend to believe a lot of the stuff their internet tells them. West thinks its the proliferation of unverified “evidence” online that’s led to this particular conspiracy theory remaining so popular. 

“People share things that look interesting without really looking into them, and they take the word of whoever’s posting it that it’s a real thing,” he said. “I knew from the start that it was some kind of hoax, but people want to have their worldview confirmed, so when they see something that seems to fit their worldview they jump on it.”

In Chris’s case, that involved being invited onto a radio show hosted by Richie Allen, a friend of David Icke—the man who claims we’re being ruled by a group of lizard overlords disguised as world leaders. On air, Chris admitted that the whole thing was a hoax and got into an argument with the host about the validity of the chemtrails theory.

Since then, Chris has been subject to a stream of “vulgar abuse” from pissed-off conspiracy theorists—which, admittedly, is completely his own fault. I gave him a call to find out how he was doing.

VICE: So I hear you’ve been receiving some pretty bad abuse since you duped these conspiracy theorists?
Chris Bovey: Yeah, I got some really foul messages. I got accused of being a government paid shill—so where’s my paycheck? The worst bit of abuse is on my Facebook page. I left it up there because it’s so insulting that it made the guy look like an idiot. It was about goat fucking and how I was going to get butt-fucked in prison.

Someone else said I was going to hell for breaking the First Commandment. I’m not religious; I don’t know what the First Commandment is. Maybe it’s, “Thou shalt not post fake chemtrail hoaxes.” [Note: it is actually, "Thou shalt have no other gods before me."] Other people were saying I’d been leaned on to change my story, saying that it was really a chemtrail-molecule dump.

Why do you think people were so quick to believe your video was evidence of chemtrails?
I think people want to believe it, and I think people are so distrusting of the government. It says a lot about our government that people are actually prepared to believe that they would do this. It’s a lack of basic scientific understanding. It doesn’t take much research—if you go onto contrailscience.com, you can quite easily see it explains why they’re formed.

A video claiming that easyJet wouldn't be able to sustain itself were it not being paid off to dump chemicals during flights.

Have people stopped claiming that the video is evidence of chemtrails now that you’ve come out and explained it?
Not at all. There are still people sharing it as we speak, saying “chemtrails” in all sorts of languages—some I don’t even recognize.

I’ve got a good 500 people who sent me friend requests, and I accepted them, but today I deleted them all because they kept on inviting me to "like" various strange pages. I knew these kinds of people existed—that’s why I posted it. But I absolutely didn’t realize how strongly these people believed this. With a few of them, I’ve tried to reason with them by sending evidence to explain why they are wrong, and they generally just called me a shill and blocked me.

How long have you been interested in chemtrails?
I remember seeing them as a little child when I was at primary school on the River Dart, where I grew up in South Devon. On the playground I used to look up in the air and notice that some planes had longer trails and wonder why. Of course, at that point I didn’t realize it was an Illuminati plot.

Why did you admit the video was a hoax and not keep it going?
At the time, I was getting a little bit uncomfortable with it, partly because I didn’t want my sane friends thinking I was an idiot. So it was an ideal opportunity to come clean and also a great opportunity to prank them.

Do you think there’s any evidence to support the chemtrail theory at all?
No, it’s just completely debunked. There’s zero evidence—zilch.

Follow Michael Allen on Twitter.

Texas Republican Senator Ted Cruz refuses to let his party stop talking about gay marriage. Photo via Flickr user Gage Skidmore

The American religious right has a lot of reasons to feel down these days. Every election year, for more than a decade, conservative Christian activists have come out from their megachurches and Appalachian tent revivals and strip-mall Bible studies to wage a culture war battle over the definition of marriage. They’ve spent millions of dollars, diligently called their neighbors, and knocked on doors, and on election days they loaded up their church vans to vote against gay marriage. And for a long time, they were winning: Between 1998 and 2012, voters in 30 states have passed constitutional amendments banning same-sex marriage, often by overwhelming margins.

Then, last Monday, all of that work was washed away, when the Supreme Court, unceremoniously and without explanation, declined to review lower-court rulings overturning gay-marriage bans in five states. The surprise decision, buried in an 81-page list of cases the court rejected, set off a gay-rights earthquake: By the end of the week, following the Ninth Circuit court’s decision Tuesday to strike down gay-marriage bans in Nevada and Idaho, gay marriage was effectively legal in 35 states.

It seems all but inevitable that the rest of the country will follow. While the Supreme Court could eventually take up the issue, it’s hard to imagine that the justices would turn back now. Politically, too, the issue has faded. According to recent polls, a majority of Americans—including 61 percent of Republicans between the ages of 18 and 29—now support gay marriage. In light of these numbers, most Republicans seem eager to drop the subject, fearing that the issue will have diminishing returns at the ballot box.

Unsurprisingly, religious conservatives don’t see it this way. They plan on fighting this culture war to the bitter end. Evangelical leaders I spoke to last week were already plotting new strategies to stem the tide of gay rights. And while their plans are still vague—most of them seemed to still be getting over the shock—their determination appears to guarantee a fiery debate over marriage and religious liberties as the GOP 2016 presidential primaries ramp up. So with that, here’s a look at what to expect from the Christian Right:

ELECT MORE CHRISTIANS
In the days since Monday’s decision, conservative groups have sprung into action, using the court’s decision to mobilize evangelical voters for the midterm elections and double down on electing Republican candidates who would continue to fight gay marriage. 

“This continues to be an issue that drives voters,” said Ralph Reed, a veteran evangelical strategist who heads the Faith and Freedom Coalition. “We’ve got it on every digital ad, on every voter guide… We’ve visited 137,000 churches in 27 states, and at each one, we’re telling them to care about gay marriage, to look at where the candidates stand on this issue.”

For Republican candidates—including (and perhaps especially) those running for president in 2016—“there will be no avoiding this issue,” he said.

Like most of the conservative leaders I spoke to, Reed is still not sure what kind of legislative or political avenues the Christian right will pursue to get around the federal marriage ruling. But he predicted that the lower court decisions to overturn state constitutional amendments banning gay marriage would spark a backlash among conservatives that would be “the marriage equivalent of the pro-life movement.”

“People voted on this issue—it is state constitutions that are being struck down,” Reed said. “I don’t think there is any way that you can redefine marriage for all 50 states without facing backlash.”

In some ways, this makes sense. In the last decade, the religious right has built up substantial amount of influence in the GOP due in large part to its ability to turn out evangelicals to cast ballots in favor of state ballot initiatives banning gay marriage—efforts that, more often than not, have helped Republicans get elected. Even as public support for gay rights grew, conservatives consistently showed up to vote on the marriage issue.

But the politics of gay rights are not what they were a decade ago, when George W. Bush’s reelection campaign used marriage as a wedge issue to help win in key swing states where constitutional same-sex marriage bans were on the ballot.

“We're done with this issue,” said Republican strategist Rick Wilson. “It doesn’t matter how you feel about the issue— this wasn't just a legal fight, it was a cultural fight and the cultural fight is in the rearview mirror.”

“There are parts of this coalition—people who have basically said they are going to make this part of the 2016 equation—making promises to the electorate that they can’t keep,” he added. “I advise [candidates] to fight on issues where we can win—issues where we don’t alienate enormous numbers of people, and give Democrats an excuse to scare voters.

“Math is a bitch. This issue is going to have diminishing returns going into 2014.”

NULLIFICATION
In a sign of the fundamental divides in the GOP, religious conservatives have actually made the opposite argument, warning that the party will lose elections if it abandons its conservative base by giving up on the marriage fight.

Former Arkansas governor Mike Huckabee, an evangelical favorite who seems to be genuinely rattled by the Supreme Court’s gay marriage dodge, laid out the argument in an interview on the American Family Association’s radio show Thursday, threatening to leave the Republican Party if its leaders didn’t start taking a hard line on gay marriage rights.

“I am utterly exasperated with Republicans and the so-called leadership of the Republicans who have abdicated on this issue when, if they continue this direction they guarantee they’re gonna lose every election in the future,” he said.  “Guarantee it.”

Rather than retreat, Huckabee, who ran for president in 2008 and is perennially “considering” a second campaign, has called for conservative governors to simply ignore the court rulings and continue enforcing their state gay marriage bans.

“It is shocking that many elected officials, attorneys, and judges think that a court ruling is the 'final word.' It most certainly is not,” Huckabee said in a statement. He added: “The courts can't make law. They can interpret it and even rule that a law is unconstitutional, but they have no power to create it or enforce it.”

Clearly, disregarding federal court rulings on gay marriage is a recipe for constitutional crisis (although Republicans in South Carolina and Kansas flirted with the idea last week). It’s easy to see this ending with the National Guard officiating mass gay weddings in occupied state rotundas and city halls. But social conservatives are more optimistic: They think that eventually, everyone would just ignore the court’s ruling.

“I think that history will ultimately look at this like the Dred Scott decision,” said Liberty Counsel founder Mat Staver, a leading Christian legal theorist. He was referring to the 1856 Supreme Court ruling that found black people could never be US citizens, which justified slavery in the South and indirectly caused the Civil War. 

Staver said he believes that, as with the Scott case, everyone will eventually disregard the court’s move on gay marriage. “I think this is going to come down to whether people take these decisions seriously,” he said. “If people lose confidence in the courts, the courts lose their power.”

A CONSTITUTIONAL AMENDMENT
Texas Republican Senator Ted Cruz, a Tea Party favorite who’s been very obvious about his 2016 presidential ambitions, has posed a slightly less aggressive strategy. While other GOP members of Congress tried to ignore the gay marriage tumult last week, Cruz issued a scathing statement criticizing the Supreme Court’s move and promising to introduce an amendment to the US Constitution that would prevent the government, including federal courts, from meddling with state marriage laws.

“The Supreme Court’s decision to let rulings by lower court judges stand that redefine marriage is both tragic and indefensible,” he said. “This is judicial activism at its worst. The Constitution entrusts state legislatures, elected by the People, to define marriage consistent with the values and mores of their citizens.”

IMPEACH FEDERAL JUDGES
For evangelical activists, the Supreme Court’s decision on gay marriage also underscored conservative frustration with judges who overturn laws passed by voters at the state level.

David Lane, a California-based operative who leads the evangelical American Renewal Project, said his group is planning to target judges who have ruled in favor of gay marriage, including those who issued the lower court rulings upheld by the Supreme Court on Monday.

“I want a fight over this,” he said. “I think the way to address it is to start removing these unelectable and unaccountable judges who are doing this to our country. They have no right to rule a free people. What they’re doing, it’s judicial anarchy.”

Lane added that evangelical activists are still figuring out how best to accomplish this—federal judges are appointed for life, and only 15 have ever been impeached—but said he is looking for a member of the House of Representatives to introduce an impeachment bill.

“The way we address this is we start removing unelected and unaccountable judges,” he said. “And then we remove the members of Congress who don’t vote to impeach them.”

FIND ANOTHER BATTLE TO FIGHT
Despite the outrage over the gay marriage rulings, many conservatives have, practically speaking at least, moved on, seizing on religious freedom as the next battleground in the culture wars and directing their energy toward passing legislation that would allow people to refuse services to gay people on religious grounds.

In Wisconsin, which fell under last week’s Supreme Court decision, opponents of gay marriage said that they have focused on warning people that, thanks to the decision, they may soon be forced to arrange bouquets for lesbian brides and bake cakes topped with two tiny grooms.

“The legal options [to fight gay marriage] are at this point exhausted for Wisconsin,” said Julaine Appling, president of Wisconsin Family Action. But, she added, “we've got bakers, we've got florists, we've got wedding venues—people where their individuals consciences are at odds with this quote-unquote ‘new right.’ So we’re working with businesses and churches, informing them that they could find themselves in, shall we say, interesting positions if they are challenged on their institutional beliefs on traditional marriage.”

In any state, churches, synagogues, and other places of worship are obviously free to perform marriages for whomever they choose. But’s it’s still not clear whether other religiously affiliated groups—such as schools, charities, and businesses—will have to accommodate same-sex weddings, particularly in the 29 states where gay people aren’t covered by anti-discrimination laws.

Lawmakers in Arizona and Kansas have already considered pieces of legislation that would let individuals and businesses deny services on religious grounds. Neither bill passed, but conservative activists and legal experts expect that other state legislatures will take up the issue in the wake of the federal court rulings on gay marriage. And they point to the Supreme Court’s decision in Burwell v. Hobby Lobby last year, which ruled that for-profit companies have the right to exercise religion, as evidence that, on this issue at least, the justices may come down on their side.

“We are very aware that individual conscience rights and religious freedoms are very much in jeopardy,” said Appling. “We’re going to be very aggressive in taking that message all over the state—to elected officials, to churches, to the citizens—to make sure that we give people the best legal protection for their religious freedoms.”

Follow Grace Wyler on Twitter.

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It’s 1 AM on a Saturday and I’m sober. I definitely don’t want to be, but I am. Sobriety at this hour is completely alien to me, as bizarre as the idea of being drunk at 8 AM, which is something, I shit you not, I’ve never done—despite the fact that everyone and my mother now sees me as the world’s largest lush.

I’m sober tonight because I wasn’t last night. Last night, I was shitfaced. My excuse? It was someone else’s birthday. A cavalcade of pals at the party I attended complimented me on the piece I recently wrote about my drinking problem, raising their glasses to meet mine. I accepted their kind words with the only grace I could muster in my highly altered, bleary-eyed state. I drank enough to brag about my junior high wrestling career. (I received a bronze medal for placing third in the state, but only because two other girls were in my weight class.) I drank more than enough.

I woke up at 3 PM today, ruined for the world, just like old times. I allowed myself to get fucked up because I did so in the context of a social gathering—my new rule is to never drink alone. But when surrounded by other warm-blooded mammals, I have permission to knock down a can (or eight) of shitty American macrobrew. Telling myself I can’t drink alone only means I stay up as late as humanly possible, imbibing in the presence of others. My new rule, as rules go, is fairly useless.

After an afternoon spent staring into the void and gathering my bearings, I performed comedy tonight and—wait for it—didn’t drink while doing so. It wasn’t that I wasn’t around alcohol. There was bourbon, my favorite, backstage. I chose, however, to ignore it, in spite of the fact that every fiber of my being screamed for it. It was free, for fuck’s sake! What was I, crazy? I couldn’t tell if my performance, normally “enhanced” by hooch, became sharper or more neutered without it. Realistically, it was better. Cogency, after all, makes communication easier.

Afterward, I went to another birthday party, located in a slightly la-di-da bar in Hollywood. Nursing my club soda, I patted myself on the back for not spending $8 on a cocktail. The smug satisfaction I took in saving money, though, was the only pleasure I experienced. With a blood alcohol content of .00, I found myself at a conversational loss. Eight dollars is a small price to pay for social comfort. I left early.

Since I’ve cut down on my drinking—all eight fucking days, or however long it’s been—my hydration level has increased substantially. I now chug water with the same aplomb I formerly reserved for bourbon. I mean, you’ve gotta drink something, right? My bladder is heavy. I slosh when I walk. It’s becoming a problem.

Photo by Jamie "Lee Curtis" Taete

I used to drink in order to fall asleep—my ex bequeathed me some pot to try instead. It doesn’t work. After smoking, I stay up late doing the same stupid things I did when I was drunk (watching Veruca Salt videos and episodes of MTV's True Life while chain-smoking cigarettes). I wake up groggy, just like I did when I drank. How the fuck do people function smoking that shit all the time? I know asking that question makes me a mediocre Californian, but still.

Sleeping is, indeed, an issue. But it’s always been an issue. I fall asleep, wake up, fall asleep, wake up, stay up. The ceaseless drone of my white noise machine echoes the ceaseless drone of the thoughts, fears, regrets, and to-do lists that keep me awake. When my mind isn’t altered, they’re even louder. Goody.

Exercise. Meditate. That’s what my friend Merrill told me to do to in order to squash the demons within that lead me to demon alcohol. She even gave me a mantra to repeat. It’s similar to hers, but not hers, because in order to obtain a mantra of one’s own, one must go to the Transcendental Meditation Center and pay some sort of shaman a hefty fee. I don’t make shaman money. The mantra she gave me is just a combination of two meaningless syllables (and by “meaningless syllables,” I mean “a meaningful word in a more enlightened language”). I decided I needed to create my own—and in English, damnit! I settled on “in, out.” That’s how babies are made, machinery is produced, clocks are punched, and lungs work. It’s the source of all life. In, out. In, out.

I laid on my bed with the covers over my head and repeated my self-appointed mantra. In, out. It’s normal for unrelated thoughts to drift into my mind, Merrill told me, but I needed to ignore them as best I could. I tried my best to stop thinking about who my ex was fucking, and if my mother feels proud of me, and so on and so forth. I made a pretty decent go of it—until my cat started violently attacking me through the covers. He wasn’t a thought, he was a cat. And unlike thoughts, he was impossible to ignore. I gave up, unenlightened.

I actually used the rowing machine I normally smoke cigarettes on to, y’know, row. Thirty-five minutes is what it takes to get enough endorphins, or whatever the fuck, going, Merrill told me, in order to make me feel good. I found the activity unbearably tedious, every moment felt 35 minutes long. I made it halfway to nirvana before giving up.

I asked my friend Karen why she stopped drinking. “The seizures,” she replied. Fair enough. That’s a wonderful reason to quit. I’ve never had a seizure because I drank, but I have watched an entire episode of Last Call with Carson Daly because I was too loaded to change the channel, so, really, who had it worse? (She did. She definitely did.)

People ask me why I decided to cut down. Because the way in which I was living, I tell them, was untenable. To this, I receive many a blank stare. I’ve also received many compliments on how well I seemingly held my liquor, which is like complimenting a heroin addict for hiding her track marks. The fact that I never made a Zelda Fitzgerald–esque show when I got loaded impressed people. (But I did, full disclosure, fall down a staircase once.)

Since I wrote about my drinking problem, I’ve received dozens of Iliad-length emails from people who also struggle with booze. Their problems, by and large, appear to be worse than mine, which makes me feel like a fraud. I’m not a fucking expert. I’m just a lush. I like responding to them, though—they make me feel less alone, in spite of the fact that I’m sitting by myself when I reply.

The piece I wrote wasn’t a cry for help—it was more a statement of fact. It wasn’t me being resigned, either, though my default mode is resignation. It was me giving up on giving up. Forcing myself to try.

Actually trying is as foreign as not being loaded. I hate it. I hate trying. But I’m used to hate. That’s what got me here.

Follow Megan Koester on Twitter.

This is the massive 5,700+ game video game and console collection being sold by eBayer reel.big.fish. It includes every retail Nintento, Super Nintendo, Game Boy, Game Boy Color, Virtual Boy, N64, Gamecube and Sega Master System game sold in North America, plus a ton of of Game Boy Advanced, Sega Genesis, Sega Game Gear, Atari 2600 and Turbografx-16. It includes almost every popular console and at least some games from the last 30 years. You can download a document of all the systems games included HERE or check out the auction page HERE. Some more details while I practice robbing banks in Grand Theft Auto V to afford the $164,000 pricetag.

5700+ games. Over 4000 from Nintendo. The majority from the golden age of gaming (1980's - 1990's) Multiple complete sets from Nintendo and Sega. Arguably every single retail (on store shelves) game released from Nintendo between 1985-2000 is represented here. That's just scratching the surface with many more from Sega, Atari, Playstation, Xbox and Turbografx. Including multiple systems (some modded), (every single N64 color variant) and custom hand built and painted shelves. Complete in Box Mario and Zelda sets.

There are a ton more pictures and a video of the collection after the jump, which I'm not ashamed to admit made me more than a little moist in the nether regions. That or I pissed myself. Either way, I need to remember to change my underwear and tape my penis to my leg before my dentist appointment at 11. Keep going for my dreamworld. Thanks to everyone who sent this, at least half of whom mentioned going halvsies. Oh sure, let me just dig up the make-believe $80K I buried in the backyard.

It's like some kind of Cthulhu Mythos creature. And it's real.

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I have written before about my admiration for Bill Maher. I think he is generally one of the funniest and most insightful commentators on American culture and politics, and I rarely miss his show on Friday night. Sometimes he goes south, as with his views on vaccination, and sometimes he goes for cheap jokes based on crude stereotypes, but I don’t require perfection out of the people I admire.

On last week’s show Maher got into it with Ben Affleck on the subject of Islam. Click here to see the video of the segment. Now, as much as I like Maher’s show, and as much as I think he does a good job of assembling interesting panels, I would also note that his show is not the place for deep, nuanced discussion. That was certainly on display last week. In the midst of all the shouting and crosstalk, and the loose (and completely unfair) charges of bigotry directed at Maher (and Sam Harris, who was also a guest on the show) there was an important point in dispute. Everyone agreed that there are a lot of bad, illiberal ideas being expressed in the Muslim world today. The question was whether those ideas represent the views of a tiny fringe minority (Affleck’s view), or whether they are mainstream to the point of being dominant (Maher’s view).

Since the segment aired, liberal pundits in particular have been harrumphing about it. On last night’s show, Chris Hayes tossed off the following:

Second of all, put me down on the Ben Affleck camp on this strongly.
I think to suggest that what is happening in the Muslim extreme form, some
of Muslim countries is representative of the views of all Muslim is gross
and racist. Or to obsess over what the particular problem with Islam is.

What`s also a bit gross is that these are five non-Muslim guys
sitting around talking about what the Muslims think. And from that
standpoint, it’s just a very weird conversation to have. If you just
changed the faith, everyone would immediately recognize it as bizarre or
offensive….

So, if you’re going to have this conversation about the Muslims are
this or the Muslims are that, or the Muslims believe X, Y and Z, then have
it with someone who actually practices the faith you`re talking about.
Like this conversation which I found a bit more enlightening.

I’m generally a fan of Chris Hayes, too, but on this one I must demur. There are two minor criticisms to be made here, and then a major one. The first minor one is that Maher and Harris were so unambiguous that they were not claiming that the most extreme forms of Islam are representative of Muslims generally, that it is rather unfair to portray them as though they had. The second minor point is that talking in broad generalizations about groups of people not represented in the discussion is pretty much what MSNBC, Hayes’ network, does all day. Perhaps Hayes should watch Chris Matthews’ show, for example, which comes on immediately before his. There he will find people speculating freely about what various American demographic groups are thinking, sometimes backed up by public opinion polls, but more often simply invented from whole cloth.

Now for the major point. Talking to Muslims about what they actually believe is precisely what public opinion pollsters have been doing for many years. The numbers that they have collected are not encouraging. At one point in the discussion Harris mentioned a poll showing that 78% of British Muslims believed that the publishers of the Danish cartoons should have been prosecuted. Affleck had no answer for that, and the conversation quickly moved on. Am I wrong to be worried by that number? Seventy-eight percent is a huge number, but apparently that’s the percentage, in England, that think it’s a crime to offend their religion.

As it happens, I have not been able to find that poll. So, if it turns out that Harris was remembering his numbers wrong I’ll be happy for the correction. I did, however, come across this massive study from Pew, in which tens of thousands of interviews were conducted in numerous Muslim countries over several years.

Among their findings is that support for sharia law is overwhelming in most Muslim countries. This includes 86% of Malaysia and 72% of Indonesia. I mention those two countries because Nicholas Kristof, also a guest on the show, pointed to those two as sparkling examples of progressive Muslim countries. Now, significant percentages of those majorities think sharia law should only apply to Muslims, and many reject the most draconian aspects of sharia law. Well and good. The fact remains that separation of church and state, which most liberals would consider an essential component of a free society, has little support in the Muslim world.

Very large percentages in all regions believe that women must always be obedient to their husbands. Opinions are more mixed on questions like whether a woman should be forced to wear a veil, whether a woman can initiate a divorce, and whether a daughter should be able to receive an inheritance as large as a son’s, but in no case are the percentages even close to where someone supportive of gender equality would want them to be.

Happily, support for suicide bombing is relatively low. A mere 40% of Muslims in the Palestinian territories say it is often or sometimes justified. The numbers in Afghanistan, Egypt, and Bangladesh are 39%, 29% and 26%. Significant majorities in all countries say it is never or rarely justified, though that “rarely” is still a cause for concern. Along these lines, be sure to have a look at the high percentages who favor stoning as the penalty for adultery, or execution as the penalty for apostasy.

There are also more encouraging numbers in the report, and it is worth wading through the whole thing. In most of the countries surveyed, for example, support for evolution is actually higher than it is among American Muslims. High percentages proclaim their respect for religious diversity and democracy.

But I wonder what that means in practice. Does it include the right to be critical of religion? Apparently not, to judge from the rather draconian blasphemy laws that prevail in much of the Muslim world. In how many Muslim countries could you have a discussion, on television, of the sort that Bill Maher and Ben Affleck engaged in?

One critical liberal value is that of freedom of expression. In how many Muslim countries does that exist? In how many Muslim countries would Ben Affleck be free to make the movies he wants to make, free of government restrictions and censorship? Yesterday I went to the gym wearing a t-shirt I bought at the American Atheists National Convention. No one cared. In which Muslim countries would that be my experience, and in which ones would wearing such a shirt be considered blasphemy? Or consider the response to the Danish cartoons. They led to riots all over the world, eventually claiming more than two hundred lives. Not angry letters to the editor, or peaceful protests, or boycotts of the paper. Riots. Leading to hundreds of deaths.

Or consider another simple example. There is currently a hit musical on Broadway called The Book of Mormon. It is about as scathing and vicious an attack on Mormonism as you could imagine. The Mormon Church responded to this by shrugging its shoulders and advertising in the playbill. Does anyone think prominent Muslim organizations would respond with such equanimity to far lesser slights?

On the show, Sam Harris described Islam as “the mother lode of bad ideas.” That was inartful. Sometimes Harris and Maher make life too easy for their opponents.

So how about this: The public opinion polls, and concrete events like the response to the Danish cartoons, make it clear that many bad ideas, including repressive treatment of women and homosexuals, severe restrictions on the freedom of expression and blasphemy, and the use of violence to resolve political disputes, have distressingly high levels of support in the Muslim world. These levels of support are sufficiently high that they cannot be dismissed as the ravings of a fringe minority. Indeed, in some cases support for these distinctly illiberal ideas is in a clear majority. Perhaps we should be worried about this.

Is that better? To me that all seems just unambiguously true. It also seems to me to be equivalent to what Maher and Harris were saying. I base that on having listened to what they actually did say, and on not listening solely to find excuses for labeling them as bigots and racists.

None of this implies in even the slightest way that all Muslims are culpable for the acts of a few, or that all Muslim countries are the same, or that Iran and Saudi Arabia should be taken as representative of Islam generally, or that unwise American interventions in the Middle East do not bear some responsibility for anti-Western attitudes in that region, or any of the other silly charges that get levelled against people who dare to criticize Islam. It’s just that it’s pretty hard to miss the very widespread tyranny and despotism among Muslim countries today, and it does not make you a bigot to notice it.

The CIA's museum, located at its headquarters in Langley, VA, is home to more than 28,000 items, including gadgets, weapons and espionage memorabilia. Usually, it's off limits to most non-CIA personnel—but a special arrangement allowed Smithsonian magazine to take a tour and photograph select exhibits.

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This stencil of a graceful, outstretched hand was discovered in a cave on an Indonesian island. And now we know that it's more than 39,900 years old. That makes it the oldest painting in the world, at least so far, and shows that humans in Asia developed symbolic expression at the same time as humans in Europe.

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These English teachers are in trouble. Photo via Kenner Police Department

Persuading teenagers to read for pleasure can be a real struggle. Books are admittedly less viscerally exciting than movies or television or sexting, and they require way more effort. In the age of immediacy, the temptation to look away from the page and check Snapchat is nearly insurmountable. The ability to sit and read a book is almost like a muscle: Use it or it will atrophy. That's why it's important to get teens into reading while they're young.

Part of the problem is clearly the subject matter of the tomes we foist upon teens. Reading lists in high school are typically made of pretty antiquated stuff, both out of deference to the hoary old canon and to a fear of offending parents. The result is that without an exceptional teacher, teens can get the idea that Shakespeare is a guy who uses old-fashioned words to tell stories that rely on way too many coincidences and Huck Finn is just a kid's book that's casually racist. Contemporary fiction is usually presented in the form of parent-approved young adult novels like Twilight or Hunger Games. Rarely do kids get the idea that literature can be rebellious or matter to their own lives.

What's needed, then, is a massive revamping of high school reading lists. The curriculum should be shaped by the kind of books that a cool older sibling might be into. Exposed at an early enough age, mainstream teenagers could totally get into authors like Teju Cole, Joan Didion, Raymond Carver, or Zadie Smith. We try to impart to kids that books are important when we should try to show them that books are fun. As long as there's enough sex and drugs to hold their interest, America's teens could go from being functional illiterates to pretentious quasi-intellectuals who quote Bret Easton Ellis and Hunter S. Thompson at every chance they get. (Hey, it's a start, and hopefully that's a phase they'll grow out of.)

Without a new reading list, English teachers should be encouraged to engage as much as possible with their students and relate to them—of course, they should stop way, way, short of having sex with the children placed in their charge.

But that's exactly what Shelley Dufresne, 32, and Rachel Respess, 24, two instructors at Destrehan High School, did with a 16-year-old boy in Destrehan, Louisiana. The teachers were arrested after having videotaped threesomes. Predictably, the tabloid media has picked up on this fracas with glee. (The student, incidentally, says the sex was consensual and apparently bragged about it to classmates. To complicate matters, the boy was just days away from the age of consent at the time of the incident.)

Because the teachers are women and the student is a boy, the story has ignited calls of reverse sexism in the internet's creepiest recesses. As one Reddit commenter put it, "i can't imagine the fury we'd here if it was male teachers, and the police chief called it 'poor judgment.' the feminists would be having a field day." Which, while poorly worded, is sort of a valid point—commenters saying things like "Best.Teachers.Ever" are treating this too lightly. Then again, the women are being charged with a felony, so it's not like this isn't being taken seriously.

Bottom line: Teachers should never, ever have sex with their students. It's actually not that hard to avoid!

Here’s the rest of this week in teens:

Teenagers are getting hurt playing football. Photo via Flickr user larrysphatpage

–Team sports have traditionally been seen as a good way to make friends, build camaraderie, and learn discipline, but it really is starting to feel like high school football needs to get toned down a bit. People can argue about the ethics of being an NFL fan all they want, but at least professional football is made up of adults who (in an ideal world, anyway) weighed out the long-term risk of head injuries against the short-term benefits of being rich and famous. As minors, high school students can't be responsible for making those life-altering choices, but they still face the same dangers. This past week alone, three students were killed playing America's favorite sport, most recently a Long Island student who died after colliding with a player from the other team. "It was a big hit," his coach told Newsday.

–One writer who's great for teens is Gabriel García Márquez. In his seminal novel One Hundred Years of Solitude, the character Rebeca famously has a compulsion to eat dirt and paint, sometimes to the point of vomiting. As a former paper eater (I didn't really swallow that much), I think I understand chewing on things as a nervous habit. Still, I can't help being totally grossed out by this photo of a nearly nine-pound hairball removed from the stomach of a girl in Kyrgyzstan. "Her stomach was so badly swollen from hair and bits of wool from the carpet that it literally just oozed out as soon as the wall of the stomach was cut,” the hospital’s senior professor of surgery said. Without the operation, according to doctors, the girl would have died.

–One of the unfortunate aspects of the internet is that teenage missteps are now saved forever for anyone to find, usually in the form of Facebook photos or Tumblr entries. (Seriously: The next time you meet an intimidatingly cool person, spend ten minutes googling them, and you'll almost definitely feel better about yourself.) For most people, this is never going to be a big issue, because no one cares about them enough to dig up their past. For teenage celebrities, though, it's going to be rough. Heir to the Fresh Prince throne Jaden Smith has spent the last year or so tweeting profoundly adolescent things like:

"It's Your Birthday" Mateo Said. I Didn't Respond. "Are You Not Excited To Be 15" He Asked. Reading My Book I Uttered "I Turned 15 Long Ago"

— Jaden Smith (@officialjaden) July 9, 2013

This week he out-teened himself. First, he offered up his best tweet yet:

"Hey Are You Jaden Can I Have A Picture With You" No Cause I'm Super Sad But We Can Sit And Talk.

— Jaden Smith (@officialjaden) September 29, 2014

Then he released his new song, "Blue Ocean." Taking its cue from Drake's "Marvin's Room," Paris Hilton's "Drunk Text," and a million Odd Future demo tapes, the song tells the story of his relationship with a girl he met at Coachella. She has a coke dealer and a boyfriend in a Misfits shirt, but that can't stop her and Jaden from connecting. There's some awkward rhyming, talk about magnets, sirens, and lots of people yelling "Jaden!" in the background, but words can't do it justice. Just listen.

–Does the man make the name, or does the name make the man? While it might seem ridiculous to suggest that our first names shape who we become, the fact is a 13-year-old named Blade just impaled himself while riding on the back of a four-wheeler. The accident happened at Ohio Mudfest, and Blade, not realizing that the injury was serious, pulled the stick out of his own stomach. He was then taken to a hospital, where doctors were forced to "remove and reconstruct more than six inches of his bowels, colon, and intestines." According to his mom, "He has to learn how to basically swallow all over again, and he's going to have to go on a special diet. They said that would probably be a lifelong thing." There's just no way that this would ever happen to a kid named Eugene—at the very worst, he'd move to Oregon. 

Follow Hanson O'Haver on Twitter.

When Noomi Rapace and the severed head of Michael Fassbeder resume their interstellar adventures in Prometheus 2, they can take comfort in the fact that they won't be bothered by any more xenomorphs. Ridley Scott says the sequel to his 2012 quasi-prequel to Alien will be completely devoid of Aliens. Yay?

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“A single day is enough to make us a little larger or, another time, a little smaller.” -Paul Klee

As the time passes for us all, and we age, so too does everything else in the Universe. For an object like a black hole, it has the potential to form, grow or shrink as we move forward.

The question, of course, that we might ask is how, and by how much? Is normal (baryonic) matter the only culprit, or can dark matter make a difference for this as well? And if so, under what circumstances, and can it teach us anything about dark matter in the process?

Come learn about the relationship between dark matter and black holes in this week’s Ask Ethan!

These are a bunch of shots and a couple videos of the Big Lebowski pinball machine prototypes that Dutch Pinball created to iron out the kinks before the machines finally go into production next year. As a pinball wizard (one of the few things in life I'm actually okay at), it looks like a really promising machine. Unfortunately, they cost $8,500, which definitely doesn't seem like the most moderately priced receptacle. Still, it does look like the kind of machine that could tie a room together. Are we good here? Cool. Mind if I do a J? Keep going for closeups, as well as a video of the game's attract mode and end-of-game score screens. More details and shots of the machine HERE. Thanks to me, for keeping up to date on developments in the pinball world.

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Everyone knows how to do a cannonball, or at least everyone who spent his summers splashing around in his local pool trying to impress girls. But does the world's easiest dive become a legitimate sport if you add a gang of German adrenaline junkies, a dose of acrobatic skills, and a 30-foot-high diving platform to it?

Splash diving is a freestyle discipline in which your task isn't to slice elegantly into the water without disturbing the surface but the opposite: the bigger the splash, the better.

It sounds easy, but it's not. Just like any other sport, splashing has its own established rules. To find out more, I got in touch with splash-diving champion and holder of several Guinness World Records, Christian Guth.

VICE: One could say you are one of the founders of the sport—how would you define splash diving?
Christian Guth: I have been practicing splash diving for a decade now, and it's still hard to define. The closest traditional sport to splash diving is probably Olympic diving, only we do it freestyle and splash on purpose.



How did the sport get started?
It all started with a bunch of friends hanging out at the local swimming pool in Bayreuth, trying to get the attention of some local ladies. We had a diving platform at our disposal, and we wanted to set ourselves apart from regular divers. One summer afternoon it crossed our minds to try a cannonball dive from the platform, and when we found out that it hurt much less than it seemed, we got hooked. We started adding different variations of somersaults and twists, and little by little we found out that it was not just a hobby—it could be a new discipline.

It really doesn't hurt?
Well, splash diving is like boxing. When you get in the ring for the first time and get hit with two well-aimed left hooks from the local champion, you will probably be crying about it for the rest of the week. But by your 20th match, you will probably know how to avoid the blow or to block it, and if you get hit you are better equipped to take it. It is the same with splash diving—with a bit of training you can get your body ready almost for anything.

Can you make a living out of splash diving?
For the first five or six years I didn't really, but it's been a couple of years now that I am trying to pay the bills with splash diving. I took a class in event management in order to combine a sport that I love with work, and I can now say that in the summer months I live like a king. In the winter, it is a bit trickier. From time to time I have to take a part-time job or freelance to be able to pay the rent.

How many splash divers do you think there are?
If I had to guess I would say something between 500 and 1,000, but you'd have to separate those who take part in competitions from those who just love splashing around at a local pool, without ever having heard it is actually a sport.

How do you score in splash diving? I suppose the amount of water you splash out is what matters.
Exactly, but it is not just about that. Even though it's a freestyle discipline, it is mandatory for every contestant to announce his or her dives in advance.

There are four dives: In the first one you are not allowed to perform any acrobatic figures, because it is all about the splash. Every other dive has its own degree of difficulty depending on the number of somersaults, twists, and positions. For example, a double somersault with half twist and a board position during the landing has a degree of difficulty of 2.7. This number is multiplied by the sum of marks from six judges. The highest and the lowest marks are discarded.

The judges assess three parts of the dive: takeoff, overall execution, and landing. For different freestyle elements (handstand, palm flip, or a grab) you get a different mark—from one to ten—from every judge. And of course, the more you splash the better. Points for each dive are added and the diver with the highest score wins. It is quite simple, really.

This is a video documenting the sad story of Dale Decker, a man who slipped a disc in his back in 2012 and now has 100 involuntary, and often debilitating, orgasms a day. And you thought that was your dream world.

Dale Decker is the first man to ever speak publicly about Persistent Genital Arousal Syndrome - a condition he developed in September 2012 when he slipped a disc in his back while getting out of a chair. On his way to the hospital he suffered his first five orgasms and has been given no respite from them since. The painful pelvic episodes have left him housebound and isolated through fear of suffering a public orgasm. Dale lives in Two Rivers, Wisconsin with his wife April and two sons Christian, 12 and Tayten, 11. While she does everything she can to support him, April, 33 is finding Dale's condition just as hard to live with as he is. The horrific condition has cost Dale many of his friends and the relationship he shares with his sons has also been affected. Despite suffering from a near constant erection Dale and April rarely have sex.

Not so funny now, is it? The video was actually pretty sad to watch. Granted I don't know too much about doctoring, but it sounds like they need to re-slip that disc back into place and turn Dale's boner switch off. That or remove it altogether and install it in my back. I don't really have any friends or family to embarrass and am cool with 100 orgasms a day. I already spend 23 hours a day home alone, the only real difference would be like, 15 orgasms. Keep going for the video. Thanks to Cimber, who agrees it's not about quantity, it's about quality.

Apparently McDonald's Hong Kong is rolling out a line of Justice League character themed meals. This is the Batman Diner Double Beef with Squeezy Cheesy Fries. That's right, SQUEEZY FRIES That burger looks pretty legit. I love egg on a burger. Actually, I love egg on just about everything. Same goes for mayo and ranch. Is that why I'm fat? Probably. Plus I eat Fruit Roll-Ups for breakfast. I had eight this morning. Keep going for a closeup of the Squeezy Cheesy Fries and their new Sparkling Green Apple Tea. You can read a review (with pictures) of a girl reviewing the fries and tea in real life HERE (that cheese looks GOOD). Thanks to Lord Harsh Ramchandani, who

Leopards often pounce on their unsuspecting prey from trees. But as a group of tourists visiting Botswana recently found out, these brazen felines are capable of launching their attacks from remarkable heights. Either that, or this leopard is completely nuts.

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Back when the Nintendo 64 was still known as the Ultra 64, Super Mario overlord Shigeru Miyamoto told the Japanese press: “We are going to make lots of weird games from now on.” And he wasn't lying.

Despite a comparative lack of product when compared with its competitors in the fifth-generation console wars, the N64’s seven-year lifespan offered many fascinating anomalies alongside the Zeldas, GoldenEye 007, and influx of Mario Party games. And in their own ways, all of the following titles were attempts to launch a gaming future that we now accept as the present—even if they were handled clumsily or marred by top-level corporate concerns.

As Nintendo inches towards fixing the reputation of the Wii U and forgetting a cataclysmic financial year, we look at a history of mismanaged N64 ambition.

HEY YOU, PIKACHU! (1998)

To this day, Nintendo has a cagey relationship with third-party developers. Its late president, Hiroshi Yamauchi, was notorious for charging outside companies license fees to create no more than five games a year. His business plan was meant to improve Nintendo’s quality of stock and give them the edge over their rivals. During the Sega-era console wars, this strategy allowed Nintendo to keep a stranglehold on third-party developers, but it also gave Yamauchi a dictatorial reputation. Speaking to Games Informer earlier this year, the author Blake J. Harris shared what these third-parties recalled: “Nintendo had you by the balls, and they knew it.”

These actions had long-lasting reverberations, and the company has since been trying to welcome these developers back into the fold. It may not be working. When the company suffered from the aforementioned fiscal disaster earlier this year, financial bodies pointed to the company’s lack of third-party support as a calamitous blunder. This comes with an extra dose of irony, with the Wii U leaving few outside developers interested in making games for the failing console. Ouch.

As the N64 rolled out in 1996 with little third-party support—a combination of sour grapes from jilted developers, overly complicated programming, and the rise of the CD format—Nintendo funded a development conglomerate with the HR company Recruit to fill the gap. The result was Marigul, an umbrella company that housed Nintendo’s personal third-party product line. At least that was the idea, with many of the Marigul games not crossing international waters, being hindered by delays, ultimately canceled or intended for the ill-fated 64DD add-on.

Despite Nintendo’s problems with other gaming companies, they had struck a goldmine in their own house—Game Freak’s series of Pokémon titles for the Game Boy were already undergoing a world takeover, which allowed for plenty of N64 tie-ins and a reason for the Transfer Pak (a Game Boy support app) to exist. One of the most ambitious Pokémon tie-in titles was Pikachu Anane, a.k.a. Hey You, Pikachu! in the West—a life-simulation game by the new developer Ambrella.

Hey You, Pikachu! gameplay

The hook behind Hey You, Pikachu! was that it allowed you to communicate with Nintendo’s latest mascot with a bulky microphone that attached to the N64 controller. This technology was called the Voice Recognition Unit (VRU) and was meant to recognize the human voice. You were able to talk to Pikachu and build a relationship with the digital sprite, taking on different tasks as its friend.

However, the game is mostly remembered as an example of Nintendo abandoning their most interesting technology, with Hey You, Pikachu! being only one of two titles that utilized the VRU. (The other was Densha de Go! 64, a train-driving simulation ported over from a popular arcade game concerning the country’s railways. Only in Japan.) It also ran into problems as Pokémon garnered worldwide attention, with international localization efforts taking longer than expected.

Despite receiving a Japanese release months before the Dreamcast’s similarly themed Seaman and a rise of console games reliant on voice-recognition software, Hey You, Pikachu! and the VRU soon lapsed quietly out of the public memory.

MORITA SHŌGI 64 (1998)

In the same year that Ambrella developed voice recognition, Nintendo was making moves into the online gaming market. But only in Japan. And via dial-up. With a board game.

Saikyō Habu Shōgi, released in 1996, was a virtual representation of shōgi, a strategy game colloquially known as “Japanese chess” that dates back to the 16th century. Developed by third-party journeymen SETA Corporation, it held the honor of being one of the N64’s Japanese launch titles alongside Super Mario 64 and Pilotwings 64, and featured as its “special guest” shōgi master Yoshiharu Habu.

Despite being available in the first days of the console, SETA’s arrival into fifth-generation gaming was a sales catastrophe, as you might expect of a game about Japanese chess, pushing only one copy per hundred N64s. In a 2009 blog for Wired, Chris Kohler found a retro videogame shop in Tokyo giving boxes of Saikyō Habu Shōgi away for free, unable to shift them for 50 yen each, or about 50 cents.

Nintendo’s SpaceWorld ’96 presentation

And yet—somehow—SETA had a sequel green-lit, which brings us to Morita Shōgi 64. Launched at Nintendo’s Japanese trade show Space World ’96, it was placed alongside the Rumble Pak and the 64DD add-on as an acknowledgement of the N64 as a forward-looking, evolving console. Morita Shōgi 64’s online capabilities were charmingly low-key: the bulging cartridge (one of the few to not have an Official Nintendo model number, fact fans) merely had a RJ-42 Modem Connection where players could place an ethernet cable that came with the game. Upon connecting to a server—most likely the Randnet server saved for the 64DD’s online roll-out—you could challenge players around Japan.

The result was a clumsy, if fascinating, choice to push into the online gaming age, something Nintendo appeared cautious about, particularly with the effort charged with setting up the Randnet network for the ill-fated 64DD. By the end of 1998, however, the 64DD was still unreleased and Sega’s Dreamcast was rolling out across Japan with a built-in modem.

TETRIS 64 (1998)

Judging from their gameography, SETA were an unremarkable company, developing Japan-only simulations like their shōgi titles and golf games like the GameCube’s Legend of Golfer. However, they were able to present innovative and downright odd takes on the N64’s technology: they developed the Aleck64 arcade hardware around the N64’s inner workings, releasing arcade-only games like creepy nudie title Vivid Dolls, and found a way to place a Bio Sensor into Tetris 64.

Famicom Dojo’s Vinnk comes across a Bio Sensor

The Bio Sensor is a fascinating anomaly in the N64’s lifespan, an accessory that would read the player’s heartbeat via an uncomfortable-looking clip attached to his/her earlobe. The faster the heart, the faster the blocks fell, and the harder the game became to play. It is an odd but fascinating concept for a gaming accessory, albeit one that Nintendo still can’t wrap their heads around to this day: the Wii Vitality Sensor, using sensory technology similar to the Bio Sensor, was announced in 2009 and canceled in 2013 after failing tests.

PERFECT DARK (2000)

Nintendo’s most loyal outside developer was Rare, the development house that had previously handled Super Nintendo hits Killer Instinct and Donkey Kong Country. In due time, the console's commercial prospects appeared to rest on their laurels. Enter Perfect Dark: meant to even the scales in the fifth-generation console wars, acting as Rare’s semi-sequel to GoldenEye 007, a progressive leap for the console, an ambitiously top-notch shooter that would move the entire genre forward.

Like many of Rare’s successes, it was hit by frequent delays. The first-person shooter had a lot riding on it as the console’s latest killer app. Sony’s PlayStation continued to control the market, believed to be the coolest console about. The Dreamcast was starting a run across the world, and despite its eventual ill fate for Sega, it was exciting to the casual gamer with its promises of online gaming and those long-awaited Sonic escapades in 3-D. Like every Nintendo console before and after it, the N64 was considered a kid’s machine and therefore sneered at by some adult gamers.

The delays were understandable—Rare’s track record was reason enough to trust that they were in control. Rome wasn’t built in a day, after all. Rare’s developers pushed the N64 to its limit with Perfect Dark, and it showed: The game demanded the console’s recently released 4MB Expansion Pak to get the most from it, and despite the help of additional memory, there was too much happening onscreen for fluid gameplay.

Perfect Dark gameplay

Yet the game’s PerfectHead application was one of the most intriguing ideas cooked up at Rare. After the success of GoldenEye 007’s multiplayer option—its flawless design arguably copied by almost every console shooter since—it was time for the company to revolutionize the medium again. Making use of the N64’s Transfer Pak, it allowed a player to apply photos of family and friends (taken with the Game Boy Camera add-on) onto playable multiplayer characters. It was revolutionary in that it would have been the first time a game let you shoot your mum's head off with a rocket launcher.

As an opportunity to shift Nintendo product, PerfectHead was savvy and somewhat ruthless—it handily offered a non-Pokémon Stadium reason for buying the Transfer Pak and gave legitimacy to the Game Boy Camera peripheral. As a glimpse into a more interactive future of console gaming, it was scintillating—players were now able to insert themselves into the game, occupying a digital space. Much of the game’s pre-release press excitedly focused on this feature; publications unrelated to gaming culture even registered their excitement at the face-mapping possibilities. SPIN magazine previewed the game in their December 1999 issue, flippantly talking about using the face-mapping options to cathartically “blow [jocks] off of buildings with lasers."

It was a joke that cut too close to the bone. Earlier that year in April, the students Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold went on a shooting spree at Columbine High School, killing 13 students before turning their guns on themselves. In a state of shock, the news media embarked on a witch hunt to find who and what to blame the slayings on. Bullying! Anti-depressants! Goths! The duo’s predilection for first-person shooters—particularly Doom, which Harris infamously programmed levels for—helped to turn video games into the focal point of outraged media outlets overnight.

In early 2000, the PerfectHead feature was quietly dropped from the final game. Ken Lobb, a Development Manager for Nintendo, claimed it was removed for “technical difficulties," saying that it would crash any time the player-made avatars entered play environments. However, in response, Gamespot reported that Rare removed the feature “to avoid controversy."

Despite the promise and hype surrounding PerfectHead, the feature remains inaccessible and has not been revived for any other Nintendo title—instead, the cartoonish Mii avatars and 2011’s 3DS port of The Sims 3 are the closest the company dares to come to PerfectHead. In 2006, Ubisoft’s Rainbow Six: Vegas would take on something similarly photo-based to the abandoned feature, this time free from the moral panic surrounding videogames and real-life crime.

NINTENDO’S FIRST TASTE OF FAILURE

The N64 boasted multiple killer games—Super Mario 64, The Legend Of Zelda: Ocarina of Time, GoldenEye 007 et al.—but it arguably represents the first time that Nintendo’s ambition began to turn to folly. The cartridge format cost too much to grab solid third-party support, while the much-ballyhooed 64DD arrived and whimpered away in the space of 14 months, and Sony gobbled up the market. The GameCube would follow, arguably becoming Nintendo’s first cult console merely by being overshadowed by its competitors, setting up the Wii as the company’s comeback story. And as for the Wii U, its slow start might not be its undoing, but it needs games, and it needs them fast.

Despite Nintendo’s rough-and-tumble record following the fifth-generation console wars, they have been responsible for some of the most innovative and downright weird approaches to console gaming. Their ongoing existence seems like a left brain/right brain struggle, with their savvy and business-minded corporate side flailing against their ingrained mad scientist. Years on, the N64’s failures fall somewhere between the amusing and the utterly crazy, but they also feel daring, admirable even. Miyamoto did warn us, of course—there was going to be a lot of weird games.

Follow Daniel Daniel Montesinos-Donaghy on Twitter.

17-year-old Daniel Simao dressed up as Slender Man. Photo courtesy of Daniel Simao.

“I chose the character cause he's tall, I'm tall, it's perfect for me,” says Daniel Simao. “I'm aware of the stabbing in America, but no, I didn't wear the costume cause of the incident, or any other supernatural events relating to Slender.”

“Slender” is slang for Slender Man, otherwise known as Slenderman or, in a curious example of internet shorthand, “Slendy.” If you're under the age of 30, up to date with memes, and a sucker for mildly sensationalist articles about horrific crimes committed by teenagers, you'll be familiar with the tall-legged dude who lurks in playgrounds and terrorizes folk with his blank, gawping face.

The story of Slender Man's origins is by now well-known: the “horror figure for the selfie age," as described by the New York Times, emerged during a Photoshop contest on a web forum called Something Awful. From there he found his way to Creepypasta, where a community of enthusiastic writers spun the original, skin-crawling idea into a trope that now echoes endlessly around the internet and beyond.

Sometimes the legend has bled into reality, as appeared to be the case when two 12-year-old girls from Wisconsin were accused of stabbing a classmate 19 times in order to please the Slender. One of the girls was recently deemed mentally unfit to stand trial. In Florida, another teen allegedly paid her respects to Slender Man by lighting her house on fire while her mother and sister slept inside. According to reports, she ran away with nothing but "water, cookies, knives, lighters, and flashlights" and later texted her mom—who, along with the sister, were unscathed—to ask if “any of u (got) hurt.”

Slender Man hanging with Sailor Moon and Sailor Mercury. Photo courtesy of Daniel Simao.

With such reports evoking a demented horror plot, it's hardly surprising Slender Man has captured the imagination of Tumblr types. He's also sparked several rounds of moral panic from schools, police, and other authority figures. “As a parent there's always something... They're trying to target our kids with,” one sheriff said, following the Florida incident. While most of the drama has unfolded up here in the States, the 17-year-old Simao, a cosplayer who has just graduated from high school, would not have been remiss to expect a little criticism for the Slender Man outfit he donned for Sydney's most recent Comic Con.

Yet he wasn't prepared for the backlash inspired by his Slendy shtick. He told me the trouble began when he was forced to leave a Q&A session with Stargate SG-1 star Chris Judge, who he'd visibly spooked with his lurking behavior. “Me and him had a bit of fun... Many people were laughing,” Daniel recalls.

When security asked him to leave the Q&A, he spent the next few hours roaming around the exhibition center, practicing his routine. He describes his behavior as “poking people softly, placing my hand on people's shoulder but taking it off immediately, and the occasional touching of the hair... In no circumstances did I inappropriately touch someone.” The event being Comic Con, many of his "subjects" were fellow cosplayers who would freak out before stopping to admire the seven-foot-tall teen's efforts. A volunteer and a few security guards had asked him “to stop touching people and invading their personal space,” but the warnings hadn't dented his day.

That was until about 1 PM, when a posse of four or five security guards surrounded him. “I didn't take that warning as a warning—it felt more like a threat,” he said. “It felt like, if you don't do as we say you'll have to deal with us. I'm only 17... Obviously by my height they thought I was early- to mid-20s.” A few hours later and after more defiant Slendy hijinks, a group of guards caught up with Daniel and escorted him outside the venue. News later emerged of several complaints concerning behavior deemed “inappropriate” by Comic Con organizers.

Facebook discussion around Daniel's removal from the event.

Event Director of Oz Comic Con, Bernadette Neumann, has confirmed that an attendee dressed as Slender Man was asked to leave the venue after management received a number of complaints. “While management did not witness every single incident, the fact a number of complaints were made indicated there was an issue which needed to be addressed straight away,” she said. “Oz Comic Con has a zero-tolerance policy on any form of harassment at these events. Anything that is reported to staff and security is immediately acted upon in the appropriate manner.”

Later, other cosplayers took to Facebook to vent their concern and bewilderment over Daniel's ordeal. In a typical response from a community besieged, perhaps unfairly, with accusations of seediness and irrelevance, many sprung angrily to the young cosplayer's defense. Others suggested the complaints were justified. “Your costume was great, but invading other attendees’ space consistently is just bad form,” wrote one contributor. “People aren't always comfortable with being touched by people they don't know, and clearly there were more people that weren't OK than (those that) were.”

According to Patrick Hamilton of Beyond Cosplay, the heated discussion is part of a wider debate concerning right and wrong behavior at places where cosplayers, generally an amiable bunch, like to hang out and enjoy their badass and often attention-grabbing costumes. There are always a few rotten apples, and smartphones and social media have exacerbated opportunities to be thoroughly creepy.

Daniel Simao at the event. Photo by Patrick Hamilton.

“Two guys were running around doing video interviews, getting girls to kiss them on the cheek—then they would turn around and catch them on the lips,” Patrick says of an incident at this year's Sydney Manga and Anime Show. “The police ended up getting involved, they went to [one of the guy's] house and he had to delete everything he filmed and make a YouTube apology. I don't think he was part of the scene, he'd just decided this was a way of making it big and it failed spectacularly—thankfully. It might work in America, but over here everyone's got their defenses up.”

Female attendees, unsurprisingly, are forced to be particularly careful, even around the tired old characters no one takes seriously anymore. James, an active Sydney-based cosplayer, describes an incident involving a dude at this year's Comic Con dressed as Freddy Krueger. “A friend of mine came to where we were standing and asked if she could stay with us,” James recalls. “She said Freddy was a bit frisky and would grab her whenever he saw her. She was very nervous and afraid he would find her again.”

This unnerving incident proves a figure like Krueger can still have an impact beyond its pop culture expiry date. Will Slender Man also persevere? Despite the high-profile cases of violence, and now the controversy at Sydney Comic Con, Patrick feels Slendy is really just as powerful and pathetic as “the new flavor of ice cream everyone's into. Every now and then there needs to be something fresh,” he says. “I don't think the character, in particular, generates its own evil. It's just a template for people to project their own issues onto. It's a blank slate... it's the same with the girl from The Ring, it's just hair over a blank face. I think there's something compelling about that.”

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I'm standing in front of a cave, my assault rifle drawn. I'm shooting at a steady stream of identical aliens. I do this for an hour, hoping an alien will drop a good enough item so I can finally feel okay about walking away. That moment never seems to come. That's Destiny.

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Cool shower curtain, did they perform the surgery in your bathtub or what? Florida native (didn't see that coming) entertainer Jasmine Tridevil (because apparently tits are devils) allegedly underwent plastic surgery to have a third breast added between her existing breasts, with the hopes of scoring a reality television show and not five extra minutes on stage at Bob's Boobie Bungalow like I expected. Dare to dream, Jasmine. No word where she managed to find a three-tit bikini top.

Tampa resident Tridevil, who recently celebrated her 21st birthday, says her parents have not taken the news of her transformation well. She said: "My mum ran out of the door. She won't talk to me. She won't let my sister talk to me. My dad... he really isn't happy. He is kind of ashamed of me but he accepted it." Tridevil says the surgery cost $20,000 and that included a "nipple" implant. She claims to have had an areole tattooed around the nipple after the surgery.

God willing, the extra breast is actually a convincing prosthetic and not real. Besides, what kind of doctor is willing to give a woman a third breast anyways? Not one that should still have a medical license, that's for sure. A nipple implant? WHERE DID THE EXTRA NIPPLE COME FROM? I have so many questions. Namely...Psst, doc -- what do you say, can I get a couple extra penises above and below my existing one? The freakshow said I was too weak to be the new strongman and I'm looking for an in. Keep going for a couple more shots and a sexy dance video...if you can call it that. Thanks to Rev Dr Dom, mango, Allyson, Tom, Alex, Blackntan, Josh and Thaylor H, at least half of which agreed topless pics will be necessary for proper evaluation.