Bridget

Call it a "public safety staycation."

That's the wonderful way Jon Stewart labeled the ongoing battle between the New York Police Department and the "socialist Sasquatch" running the city, Mayor Bill de Blasio. 

On Thursday's Daily Show, Stewart examined the department's recent work slowdown, which has seen low-level crimes, such as parking summonses, drop 93% compared with the same time last year. The city's overall crime level has dropped to a nearly 50-year low, so you would think that would help relations. 

"But, in fact, just as we've reached cruising altitude, the police have decided to switch the engines off," he said referring to the work stopped. 

"Slowdowns sound so negative negative. More of a really public safety staycation, if you will. Explains the NYPD's new motto: Just chill and reflect." 

So, what can you do in the new New York? Lots of things, as correspondent Jason Jones discovered. Read More

"Pan y Rosas!" (Máximo Gonzáles, 2010 - Mexico/Argentina)

Nicky Bay is a Singapore-based photographer who captures the beauty and diversity of insects in Singapore’s rainforests through macro photography. He made 46 trips out into the wild in 2014, capturing tens of thousands of photographs and sharing thousands of photos online.

His images are captured using a custom rig and kit of his own making. The main elements are: a Nikon D800, Tamron 90mm f/2.8, Nikkor 200mm f/4, Sigma 15mm f/2.8, extension tubes, a close up filter, 3 Nikon SB-R200 with softboxes and diffusers, and a number of other accessories. Here’s what the rig looks like:

Here are some of Bay’s favorite photographs from 2014:

You can find more of Bay’s work and adventures on his website, Flickr, and Facebook pages.

(via Colossal)

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Image credits: Photographs by Nicky Bay and used with permission

Good ambient music has the remarkable quality of making everything you experience while listening to it seem more important. You can just clip your toenails, or you can put on Aphex Twin's "Rhubarb" and elevate clipping your toenails to the realm of transcendental spiritual experience. Minimalist composer Sean McCann's work tends to have a similar effect.

This track, "Charade," is off his upcoming album for the Root Strata label, titled Ten Impressions for Piano & Strings. The record took four years to complete and it's fascinating to hear McCann's approach towards sound shift constantly throughout. This song is pleasant, ethereal, and spacey, so put it on while you clean your room and pretend you're in the final scene of a Darren Aronofsky movie, except without the heroin.

Preorder the record on Root Strata here.

Rolling Stone recently caught up Marilyn Manson, and wrote a long, weird profile about the now middle-aged singer. There are a lot of fun facts in it: Manson loves grape soda, goes to the gym a lot, and is afraid of bathtubs. Also, he’s a never nude.

Right in the first paragraph, when describing his ideal conditions for lovemaking:

“First, no lights shall be on. ‘I’m just really shy, despite what you’d imagine,’ he says. Second, no underwear shall be slipped farther down than his ankles. ‘I have a phobia that the house is going to catch fire, and I don’t want to be naked,’ he says.”

A never nude, if you don’t know, is a very real condition (also known as “gymnophobia“) popularized by “Arrested Development,” in which a person is unable to be naked for a variety of different reasons.

So: Manson is a never nude. And while he claims it’s out of fear of being unprepared for a fire, it seems more likely that—though he will never admit it—it’s actually in case that bald guy from the New Radicals finally shows up at his mansion to kick his ass in.

[h/t Dlisted | Image: Metal Injection]

We can put those long-standing rumors of a Netflix prequel series to the 2001 cult hit “Wet Hot American Summer” to rest because confirmation is finally here. After years of trying to get this off the ground, Deadline reports that David Wain is set to produce an 8-episode limited series based on the beloved movie set on the last day of a Jewish summer camp in 1981. Wain co-created the series with fellow “State” and “Wet Hot American Summer” alum Michael Showalter. We don’t have a premiere date to mark in our Trapper Keepers just yet, but the fact that almost the entire cast is returning to the series is exciting enough as is.

According to Deadline, the following stars from the original film are set to make an appearance:

Elizabeth Banks, H. Jon Benjamin, Michael Ian Black, Bradley Cooper, Judah Friedlander, Janeane Garofalo, Nina Hellman, Ken Marino, Zak Orth, David Hyde Pierce, Joe LoTruglio, Christopher Meloni, A.D. Miles, Marguerite Moreau, Amy Poehler, Paul Rudd, Marisa Ryan, Molly Shannon, Michael Showalter and Kevin Sussman.

Naturally, Paul Rudd will probably look like he’s been frozen in time since the original movie’s release. It’s also cool to see stars like Bradley Cooper revisit the role he played before becoming a mega-movie star and David O. Russell darling.

This is the second time Netflix is revitalizing a cult title since the streaming service picked up Arrested Development. Let’s hope this time around is better received.

To tide us all over, here’s a look back at Paul Rudd in all his petulant teen glory.

[Deadline]

Hacker collective Anonymous is vowing to avenge those killed in Wednesday's massacre at the French satirical newspaper Charlie Hebdo by promising to take jihadist websites and social media accounts offline in the coming days.

In a disturbing video posted Thursday to its YouTube account, a person draped in the group's trademark Guy Fawkes mask says, in a distorted voice, that the hacktivist group is "declaring war against you, the terrorists" in French. Read More

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ALICE ROOSEVELT WAS HARDCORE. “She was known as a rule-breaker in an era when women were under great pressure to conform. The American public noticed many of her exploits. She smoked cigarettes in public, swore at officials, rode in cars with men, stayed out late partying, kept a pet snake named Emily Spinach (Emily as in her spinster aunt and Spinach for its green color) in the White House, and was seen placing bets with a bookie. 

So what I’m reading here is, she was a Roosevelt?

Well I have a new hero.

Her whole wikipedia article is gold

"When her father was governor of New York, he and his wife proposed that Alice attend a conservative school for girls in New York City. Pulling out all the stops, Alice wrote, ‘If you send me I will humiliate you. I will do something that will shame you. I tell you I will.’"

"Her father took office in 1901 following the assassination of President William McKinley, Jr. in Buffalo (an event that she greeted with "sheer rapture.")"

“During the cruise to Japan, Alice jumped into the ship’s pool fully clothed, and coaxed a congressman to join her in the water. (Years later Bobby Kennedy would chide her about the incident, saying it was outrageous for the time, to which the by-then-octogenarian Alice replied that it would only have been outrageous had she removed her clothes.”

"She was dressed in a blue wedding dress and dramatically cut the wedding cake with a sword (borrowed from a military aide attending the reception)"

"When it came time for the Roosevelt family to move out of the White House, Alice buried a Voodoo doll of the new First Lady, Nellie Taft, in the front yard."

"Later, the Taft White House banned her from her former residence—the first but not the last administration to do so. During Woodrow Wilson’s administration (from which she was banned in 1916 for a bawdy joke at Wilson’s expense)…"

"As an example of her attitudes on race, in 1965 her African-American chauffeur and one of her best friends, Turner, was driving Alice to an appointment. During the trip, he pulled out in front of a taxi, and the driver got out and demanded to know of him, "What do you think you’re doing, you black bastard?" Turner took the insult calmly, but Alice did not and told the taxi driver, "He’s taking me to my destination, you white son of a bitch!"

“To Senator Joseph McCarthy, who had jokingly remarked at a party “Here’s my blind date. I am going to call you Alice”, she sarcastically said “Senator McCarthy, you are not going to call me Alice. The trashman and the policeman on my block call me Alice, but you may not.”

Using your turn signal would also be a good idea.

Park bench plaque recently installed.

Anyone who listens to pop radio regularly has probably been hit with this realization at one point or another – a ton of pop music sounds very similar. It seems like grandpa logic, but a growing body of research confirms what we all suspect: Pop music is actually getting more and more homogeneous. And now, thanks to a new study, they know why.

A new study, surveying more than 500,000 albums, shows simplicity sells best across all music genres. As something becomes popular, it necessarily dumbs down and becomes more formulaic. So if you're wondering why the top 10 features two Meghan Trainor songs that sound exactly the same and two Taylor Swift songs that sound exactly the same, scientists think they finally have the answer.

Source: YouTubeThe study: In a recent study, researchers from the Medical University of Vienna in Austria studied 15 genres and 374 subgenres. Read More

Robots are helping us do a lot these days but as an adult who had far too many needle experiences in her childhood, I’m certainly wishing this one was invented sooner. Say hello to MEDi.

MEDi, short for Medicine and Engineering Designing Intelligence, has come a long way since trying out Tai Chi back in 2012. The robot, part of a project led by Tanya Beran, a professor of community health sciences at the University of Calgary in Alberta, was created to comfort children through medical procedures. Watch it at work:

Can I get one just to hang out with? It seems pretty cool.

Yahoo writes:

Beran headed a study that observed 57 children of varying ages. Each was randomly assigned a vaccination session with a nurse, who used the same standard procedures to dispense the medication. In some of those sessions, MEDi used cognitive-behavioral strategies to assuage the children as they got the shot. Afterward, children, parents, and nurses filled out surveys to estimate the pain and distress of the whole shebang. 

The study, published in the June 2013 issue of Vaccine, found that those kids who had MEDi by their sides during the procedure reported much less pain than their robot-less counterparts.

“It’s going to introduce himself and build a rapport. It’ll tell them what to expect,” Mark Williams, a MEDi rep, told Yahoo Tech. “But once they get involved in the medical procedure itself, it’ll tell them what they should be doing, how they should be breathing, and how they should be coping. It’s choreographed along with the medical procedure itself, so he’s giving the right advice, he’s watching them and responding to their actions during the procedure itself.”

MEDi, which is now available for hospitals to purchase, comes with facial recognition technology (it will remember a child who’s in for frequent visits), can speak 20 different languages, and is able to adapt to the particular situation it’s put in. But it will cost a pretty penny. Yahoo writes, “Though MEDi’s body — made by Aldebaran Robotics — retails for $9,000, the applications required for him to aid in medical procedures bring that total to anywhere from $15,000 to $30,000, depending on what the staff wants him to do.”

In my opinion, it’s worth it. The piece goes on to note Beran is still working on MEDi “so that he has routines for procedures that parents aren’t always alloweed to be in the room for. These range from blood transfers to surgery to chemotherapy.”

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For the last three years, the Representation Project, a nonprofit organization that aims to expose the problematic ways we depict women and men in the media, has done a round-up highlighting some of the most sexist moments in media this year.

The video, Demand Better Media in 2015, takes stock of the best and worst moments of the past year with the goal of pushing for better representation in the months ahead.



Some of the successes touted in the video include Laverne Cox gracing the cover of Time Magazine, Mo'ne Davis pitching her way to stardom on the cover of Sports Illustrated, Emma Watson's speech at the UN, Beyoncé dancing in front of the word "feminist" at the VMAs and Shonda Rhimes bringing complex female characters' milkshake to the yard. 



Unfortunately, for every feminist success there are many more sexist setbacks. Read More

What would you do if you came across a fat stack of cash while doing urban exploration photography? That’s what happened to Dave of Freaktography last year.

On one afternoon in January 2014, Dave got off work early and decided to pay a visit to a badly decaying abandoned house that he had heard about from a friend. The “house was special from the many antiques and artifacts found throughout,” he says.

Here are some photos showing what he saw when he arrived. There were old possessions scattered in many of the rooms:

After exploring the house, Dave went back down to the kitchen. As he was about to shoot the following shot, he noticed something by the corner of a mattress.

Looking closer, he found a yellow home hardware bag that was filled with rolls of cash. Upon taking the rolls out and counting through it, Dave found that it was a stash of nearly $7,000 in old US and Canadian currency:

Many of the bundles had papers with amounts and dates from the 1960s and 1970s.

Dave operates by the well known urban exploration principle, “take nothing but pictures, leave nothing but footprints.” He and his friend decided to try and find the rightful owner of the money. After doing some research into the property’s owner, they found a number to call.

The woman who picked up the phone turned out to be the granddaughter of the home’s previous inhabitants. Dave writes,

We gave her the money, every penny (my friend made sure she knew, not a dollar had been held back), she started to cry – overwhelmed by this random act of kindness, and by the emotions she feels being back at this house. We didn’t pry or ask about family history, we offered a few hugs and just took in the moment. We posed with her for a photo, at her request, and after many many “Thank You” hugs we went on our way.

They later learned that the money was likely collected over decades by the woman’s grandparents from a fruit stand they owned.

Dave has since posted his entire set of photos from the house on Facebook along with the story of his find. The album is titled, “House of Treasures.” You can find more of Dave’s urban exploration photography on his website.

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Image credits: Photographs by Dave/Freaktography and used with permission

I don't know if I'm hungry or turned on right now and it's such a weird mix of feelings to experience at the same time. The close up shots of this Chocolate Framboise Mille-Feuille is borderline explicit and yet it's just food being whisked and dolloped, whipped and dripped around. It's artful pornography you can eat.

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This article originally appeared on VICE UK

Today, in journalism, the anniversary is king. With the present (and future) a difficult and terrifying place, even the most insignificant milestone can give us a chance to escape into the warm embrace of the past in the name of having something to write about.

Of course, it's not only journalists reaping the rewards of the throwback tactic; everyone's complicit. Film companies crank out anniversary edition DVDs and Blu-rays; record labels plug re-mastered copies of seminal albums; governments and political interest groups use emotive dates to recruit and convert.

With that in mind, I thought I'd save you a little reading time this year by telling you how things are going to pan out anniversary feature-wise in 2015.

JANUARY

12th: Bereft of any obvious nice round number Nirvana or Kurt anniversaries to really go to town on this year, the 25th anniversary of Kurt and Courtney meeting at the Satyricon club in Portland will have to do. Resourceful hacks unearth eyewitnesses (Krist Novoselic). Courtney Love's mental health is discussed. The phrase "fateful night" never goes unused.

24th: It's been 50 years since roaring wartime orator/talking dog Winston Churchill rode his Spitfire off to the great Gentleman's Club in the sky, which means that, with the exception of one Guardian piece, Britain's "greatest leader" (Telegraph, Times, et al) is lauded by the country's media. A functional alcoholic, author, and wearer of finely tailored clothing, the feature opportunities range across the spectrum, from "Drink like Winston" lifestyle pieces to "Get the Churchill look" spreads. All features are recycled in the summer for the 75th anniversary of his appointment as prime minister.

31st: What better way to follow up last year's great big World War I centenary love-in than by celebrating the centenary of the first large-scale use of gas as a weapon?

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Images via/via/via

FEBRUARY

2nd: On the 25th anniversary of Nelson Mandela's release from prison, the great and the good of the Western world line up to write about the "Nelson I knew." Bob Geldof releases a star-studded version of the Specials' hit "Nelson Mandela," a song he has mysteriously acquired the rights to. The profits are dedicated to making sure Africa will always be there to serve the philanthropic needs of the West.

6th: The 70th anniversary of Bob Marley's birth sees food features on where to eat jerk chicken competing with long reads on the truth and fire of the reggae great. Island Records founder Chris Blackwell shares the same tried and tested stories about how well he and Bob got on and reminds everyone that, despite what they might have heard, he definitely didn't rip Bob off. Bunny Wailer's increasingly worrying state of mind is ignored, though the Marley family's decision to sell the rights to "Marley Natural," the world's first cannabis brand, to three rich white Americans definitely isn't. Pop stars who only ever listened to Legend talk about what an "inspiration" Bob was to them.

27th: If Russell Brand hasn't been trending consistently since the beginning of the year, the first anniversary of the The Trews gives everyone an excuse to post some videos of him having a good old barney with Fox News.

MARCH

2nd: To mark the 50th anniversary of the release of The Sound of Music, the BBC sends Julie Andrews back to Austria to relive the experience of making the film. The resulting documentary is unexpectedly harrowing. Von Trapp-themed fashion pieces are everywhere. Serious film critics make the case for its enduring cultural significance and the "lost Europe" that was once defined by serenity and calm.

5th: The third anniversary of Kony 2012. Joseph Kony is still at large. Invisible Children founder Jason Russell gives a "raw" interview to a serious newspaper in which he talks "honestly and emotionally" about his problems with drink, drugs, and Christianity.

15th: Thirty years ago, Symbolics.com became the first ever registered website, and this anniversary gives everyone a chance to let you know all about Symbolics.com (this takes two sentences) before talking about how wonderful/terrible the internet is (this takes thousands of words, hundreds of gifs, and lots of bad intros about cats).

15th: Fourth anniversary of the beginning of the Syrian Civil War. It will never end. The Western media tries to work out which group of bad guys is the most bad. They settle, as usual, for Islamic State.

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Images via/via/via

APRIL

4th: Third anniversary of the birth of Grumpy Cat. If he's dead, think pieces speculating on whether the internet was his real killer are penned, alongside a well-stocked photo gallery of the little grumpykins in action. If he's alive, just the photos.

25th: "They died so we could live," intones the Telegraph, marking the 100th anniversary of the horrors of Gallipoli. The Mail celebrates Anzac Day and the "unbreakable bond between the Queen and her subjects."

Pictures of the young Mel Gibson in the film Gallipoli provide the internet with an endless stream of "You won't believe how hot Mel Gibson was when he was younger" listicles. "Remember Gibson as a handsome young man, not as a drooling racist," we are told. The film's anti-imperial message is conveniently ignored.

MAY

5th: Two days before this year's election, the 10th anniversary of Tony Blair's third election triumph prompts a series of pieces about how unelectable Ed Miliband is. Ed's latest piece of weirdness (something will have replaced the staring or the bacon sandwich by then) will be contrasted to the oily, people-pleasing smoothness of King Blair.

JUNE

13th: The 150th anniversary of WB Yeats' birth encourages a bunch of journalists who don't read contemporary poetry to write about how bad contemporary poetry is. Quotes from the great Irishman's poems are extracted and funneled into lists broken up by generic pictures of his homeland.

18th: The 200th anniversary of the Battle of Waterloo is marked by a series of re-enactments. Most of the coverage un-ironically celebrates our thrashing of the cheese-eating surrender monkey frogs.

19th: Eight hundred years on from the signing of the Magna Carta, Britain's enduring commitment to human rights/the demands of small groups of rich men is celebrated by one and all. Politicians from all sides fight for column inches in which to proclaim their love of Britain, freedom and great scrolls of parchment. Stephen Fry bemoans the lack of decent Latin readers left in the country. None of the writers will have ever read the hallowed document.

But have we capitulated to the bankers in the same way King John capitulated to the feudal barons, only with less reason and less benefit, some commentators ask?

(Similar sentiments will also be expressed for the 750th anniversary of parliament earlier in the year, in which the use of "Westminster" as a term of abuse evocative of a hive of pedophiles will be discussed.)

29th: The one-year anniversary of Isis's rebranding as "Islamic State" and their announcement of the formation of a caliphate. The group wins a media award for most covered organization. Media outlets compete over who has the scariest, most piratical pictures of IS fighters.

JULY

7th: Ten years since the 7/7 bombings in London, the media, backed up by the government, talk darkly of the probability of something similar happening again. New anti-terrorism measures are announced. New types of terrorist are written about. Fear spreads. The 9/11 NeverForget hashtag is co-opted.

14th: To celebrate the first ascent of the Matterhorn 150 years ago, music sites host Mousse T's "Horny '98," which has been re-released with a video of people mouthing the lyrics while pretending to fuck the Swiss mountain.

29th: The 125th anniversary of Vincent Van Gogh's death. Countless features ask whether you have to be mad to be a genius. Someone goes too far and publishes a guide to chopping your own ear off.

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AUGUST

4th: The 55th anniversary of Psycho. Not the frame-by-frame remake, alas, but the original Hitchcock version. Every weekend supplement carries a large feature on the film. Will it ever be bettered, critics ask? No, they dutifully answer.

6th: On the 70th anniversary of the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, most of the Western media solemnly recounts the horror of what happened before insisting that America would never do anything like that again. A number of outlets disagree and publish polemics reminding everyone that America continues to be a bastard abroad. Those who already think this read the polemics, agree with them, get angry and then feel hopeless.

7th: "The Riots—what have we learned?" asks every single broadsheet on the fourth anniversary of the shooting of Mark Duggan. News channels interview "real Londoners" and ex-cops talk about how Duggan was really just a gangster who had it coming. Ferguson analogies are made. Russell Brand does something.

22nd: Twenty years on from Rancid's "seminal" album ...and out Come the Wolves, music sites analyze the phenomenon of pop-punk and ask if the album was the genre's highpoint. They conclude that no, the highpoint was probably something Green Day did.

30th: Rolling Stone, Q, and Mojo all dedicate entire issues to the 50th anniversary of Bob Dylan's Highway 61 Revisited. New Yorker publishes a 36-page piece entitled "In Search of Highway 61." Middle-aged white men line up to discuss the genius of old raspy voice.

SEPTEMBER

1st: The fifth anniversary of Wiley joining Twitter lets everyone compile some of his greatest Tweets and watch the traffic roll in.

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OCTOBER

20th: The Lord of the Rings turns 60 and the cast of the films are brought together to wearily recount the three decades they spent in New Zealand making them.

25th: Six hundred years since Agincourt. British thesps are forced to record a version of Shakespeare's Henry V.

27th: A year after British troops left Afghanistan, the government, backed by much of the media, continues to insist that Britain "won" the war. Evidence to the contrary is largely ignored, but Afghanistan's "inability to govern itself" is noted. Perhaps we should go back because they don't understand democracy? A Tony Blair opinion piece agrees.

NOVEMBER

1st: The 40th anniversary of the release of Kraftwerk's Radio-Activity leads to a series of long think-pieces that will sit in a few tabs in your browser for weeks before you finally admit you're never going to read them.

4th: The 40th anniversary of the Sex Pistols' first gig. Punk was "a clarion call for the working man" says the Observer. NME's cover story heralds the "most radical band ever to spit into the audience." In a Britain that was on its knees, the Pistols were a blast of fresh air. John Lydon gives some grumpy, no-nonsense interviews.

24th: "It's been 20 years since the release of GoldenEye, but Pierce Brosnan hasn't changed a bit," purr a collection of lifestyle magazines.

DECEMBER

12th: The 100th anniversary of Frank Sinatra's birth allows for some gossip-heavy biographies of the crooner, while Ronan Farrow's parentage is questioned. A series of "The woman he loved" pieces, all about different women, are published.

25th: Anniversary of Jesus' birth overshadowed by coverage of football, weather conditions, and presents. Vicars complain. The light dies.

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Way back in the cloistered days of Line Out, I once posted the genius that was The Greatest Hits of Billy Joel all played at once—an amazing stretch of noise that makes Billy Joel's pop hits very enjoyable. Well, turns out someone did the same thing with Ramones, the first Ramones LP!! Goddamn, this album is the perfect candidate for gettin' goofy, and, of course, the "track" clocks in at less than three minutes.

Gosh, I couldn't be happier about this kinda stupid silly noise; it's like some kind of ridculous psychedelic static.

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It's a new year, and many of us are trying to eat more healthfully. To spare you the insane, highly restrictive, and mostly unsustainable detox diets and juice cleanses that abound at this virtuous time, we designed a week-long menu here at Vox with the help of nutritional consultants Matt Fitzgerald and Yoni Freedhoff.

Our main goal with the Anti-Detox Diet, as you can probably guess from the name, was not to perpetuate pseudoscientific health claims like gluten phobia or impose impossible food rules. Instead, we delivered delicious, enjoyable, and achievable eating suggestions.

The diet is easy: every recipe uses fewer than six ingredients and only takes a few minutes to make. The diet is also based on facts most everyone can agree on: we can stand to eat more vegetables, fruits, and whole food, and less added sugar and processed food.

Today, we checked in with readers in a Facebook chat to learn about how they're finding the Anti-Detox Diet.

The main questions we heard were, "What do I do after the week is over?" and "Where can I find more healthy and easy recipes?"

Here are a few awesome resources we find helpful. Some even have nutrition information for their foods and allow you to search by dietary requirements.

1) 101 Cookbooks

2) BBC Goodfood

3) Epicurious

4) Guardian recipe finder

5) Naturally Ella

6) Mayo Clinic Healthy Recipes

7) Racing Weight cookbook

8) Runner's World Healthy Recipes

9) Save with Jamie

10) Serious Eats' Food Lab

If there are others you love, email me at julia.belluz@vox.com or tweet me @JuliaofToronto and we'll try to add them to the list.

The first full business week of 2015 is steadily coming to a close, and things are already starting to gain momentum in the world of Zombie-based games. Earlier today, we caught wind of the Steam Anime Sale going down this weekend, and we end the day talking about the lot of zombies games, and the potential best Super Bowl commercial that’s inbound in several weeks. Go ahead and get your favorite beverage ready: it’s time for another edition of Gaming Daily.

Bud Light get’s Super Bowl ready with this life-size Pac-Man maze.

A massive maze-like structure appeared in the LA Fashion District yesterday, courtesy of the esteemed brewing establishment Bud Light. It looks like for the sake of an immensely impressive Super Bowl commercial, the beer company manufactured a life size Pac-Man maze, complete with life-size ghosts and pac-dots. The national audience will more than likely be rather entertained by this commercial for the scale of this stunt alone, but I could only imagine how ecstatic Pac-Man Jones is about the choice in game.

The Super Bowl commercial is titled “Coin” and features a man being alerted via a beer bottle message to go outside. Upon reaching where no gamer has gone before, he’s greeted by a gigantic coin. Upon inserting the coin into a giant slot, a giant Pac-Man game commences, thus giving us one of the top Super Bowl commercials of the year. Have we really gotten to this point: where we’re anticipating the Super Bowl commercials more so than the actual game? Unless the Green Bay Packers are playing, in my case, absolutely.

Dying Light shows off Evolve-like 4v1 mode.

While Turtle Rock Studios decided to take what they learned from their success making zombie-based games and apply it to a fresh new concept absent of the undead, the folks at Techland decided to expand on the genre they already made their staple in, making Dying Light basically a much more polished and robust take on the open-world post-apocalyptic foundation they laid with Dead Island. That said, the new “Be The Zombie” component that’s being touted in the video above looks like a ton of fun, and should definitely fill the void– at least as far as zombies go– that exited the gaming world with the Left 4 Dead series.

Dying Light is scheduled to hit stores January 27, 2015, and should do rather well since it’s release window isn’t too cluttered. Let’s see if Techland can was the filthly test of Dead Island: Riptide out of our mouths with this one.

Zombie Army Trilogy is heading to next-gen consoles.

You guessed it: more zombie stuff! One of the most enjoyable parts of the Sniper Elite series has always been the zombie component. In fact, the zombie expansions were so good for this series, that they became their own standalone titles. Today, Sniper Eilte deveopler Rebellion announced Zombie Army Trilogy for the PS4, Xbox One and PC. Due out in “early 2015,” the trilogy will feature Sniper Elite: Nazi Zombie Army, the stand-alone expansion from Sniper Elite V2, and a brand spanking new third installment to the series.

Zombie Army Trilogy will also include 15 missions spread across three campaigns, with five horde maps that all feature four player cooperative play. The game is available for pre-order on Steam right now for $45, and a special “loyalty discount” will be offered to those who own the first two games.

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That about wraps it for Thursday’s Gaming Daily. Always keep it parked here on Nerdist for all of the juicy video game developments, and to chat about our beloved medium, I’m only one tweet away: @Malik4play.

The Olympics of the future may come to one of the United States' oldest cities.

NPR reports that Boston has beaten out Los Angeles, San Francisco and Washington, D.C. as the United States' nomination for the 2024 Summer Olympic and Paralympic Games.

"This selection is in recognition of our city's talent, diversity and global leadership," Boston Mayor Marty Walsh said, reports NPR. "Our goal is to host Olympic and Paralympic Games that are innovative, walkable and hospitable to all. Read More

Back in 2006, The Stranger republished four of the controversial Danish Muhammad cartoons.

We weren't alone. Scores of newspapers and magazines around the world republished the Danish cartoons—including many here in the United States, from the Daily Illini, a student newspaper (whose editor was fired), to Harper's, which was yanked from stores in Canada. The satirical French magazine Charlie Hebdo also republished the Danish cartoons, as was mentioned in numerous reports yesterday. The fact that we republished them too is something I should've mentioned on Slog yesterday—you know, after we slapped that big "JE SUIS CHARLIE" banner up at the top of our blog. But I didn't mention it. It wasn't that I regretted our decision to republish the Danish cartoons. I just wasn't in a rush to remind people that we had. Because I was afraid.

Rachel Maddow is afraid, too. On her show last night, she described dozens of controversial Charlie Hebdo covers and displayed an image of each cover as she described it—until she began to describe Charlie Hebdo covers that had Muhammad on them, like the edition that had been "guest edited" by Muhammad ("One Hundred Lashes if You Don't Die Laughing!"), at which point she stopped showing covers. The New York Times is afraid, too. The paper ran photos of two Charlie Hebdo covers in their national edition today: one with a cartoon depicting "immigration critics," another with a cartoon depicting French president François Hollande—but they didn't show any Charlie Hebdo covers with Muhammad on them or any of the Muhammad cartoons that had appeared in its pages. (The NYT's public editor explains the decision: The images "[crossed the] line between gratuitous insult and satire," according to the paper's executive editor. On the cover of today's paper: a photo of a cop being shot in the head—that didn't cross any lines.) CNN hasn't shown the Charlie Hebdo covers either. They're afraid, too.

I was thinking about how afraid everyone is when I heard the Associated Press had yanked all images of Andres Serrano's 1987 work Piss Christ from their website and archives. Before we knew how many people had died in the attack yesterday—before we learned that one of the victims (the one shown on the cover of the New York Times) was a Muslim cop—right-wing news outlets, bloggers, and Twitterers were condemning the AP's supposed hypocrisy and anti-Christian bigotry. Slate:

The Associated Press is among the numerous news outlets that have been self-censoring images of the Charlie Hebdo cartoons that may have provoked Wednesday's deadly Paris attack. In a statement, the news organization said that such censorship is standard policy: "None of the images distributed by AP showed cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad. It’s been our policy for years that we refrain from moving deliberately provocative images." The conservative Washington Examiner publication then pointed out that the AP nonetheless continued to carry an image of Andres Serrano's 1987 "Piss Christ" photograph—which is certainly provocative, having been the subject of massive controversy in the United States, and which was actually vandalized by Catholic protesters when it was on display in 2011 in, as it happens, France.

All images of Piss Christ have since been scrubbed from AP's website—they're all gone, including legitimately newsworthy photos of a vandalized Piss Christ. In an attempt to explain the memoryholing of Piss Christ, the AP says they've "revised and reviewed our policies since 1989." The implication: Piss Christ should've been removed from the AP's website years ago and its presence until yesterday afternoon was an oversight. (Perhaps the AP will send the Washington Examiner a thank-you note for bringing this matter to their attention.) The AP's explanation is complete and total bullshit. They didn't pull down those images of Piss Christ because they were "deliberately provocative." The AP pulled them down because they're afraid.

Here's what the AP should've said to Christian conservatives screaming about Piss Christ and double standards: "Yeah, we blurred out those Charlie Hebdo cartoons because we're afraid of them. We didn't do the same to Piss Christ because we're not afraid of you."

The fact that cartoonists, publishers, editors, photographers, artists, comedians, and satirists aren't afraid of "you"—the fact that they're not afraid to mock Christ, Christians, Christianity—is something that Christians, conservative and otherwise, should be proud of. It's something they're usually proud of. It's something Christian conservatives frequently boast about: "Hey, you don't see us resorting to violence when someone mocks our savior the way they resort to violence when someone mocks their prophet."

Here are two (Holly and Robert) boasting yesterday:

Christian conservatives want to have it both ways: They want credit for not reacting violently when their sacred symbols, holy texts, imaginary friends, etc. are mocked while also wanting the same deference—the same kid-glove, blurred-image treatment—that violent Muslim extremists have "won" for their sacred symbols, holy texts, imaginary friends, etc. But you can't have it both ways. You can't claim to be better than "they" are because you can take a joke while at the same time demanding that people stop joking about you. You can't hold up their attempts to eradicate art (and artists) that offend them as proof that they're hopelessly backwards while at the same time demanding the disappearance of art (and artists) that offend you.

Caroline Wyatt, religious affairs correspondent for the BBC, had this to say yesterday:

In the heart of Europe in 2015, the killing of cartoonists and journalists for allegedly insulting God still comes as a shock, despite the rising number of such attacks in recent years. In rational, post-Enlightenment Europe, religion has long since been relegated to a safe space, with Judaism and Christianity the safe targets of satire in secular western societies. Not so Islam.

It is a credit to Judaism and Christianity that both are safe targets of satire in Western societies. Islam is not a safe target. While the vast majority of Muslims are peaceful—and while some Christians are not—a relatively tiny but also terrifying minority of the world's 1.6 billion Muslims thinks the punishment for an offensive cartoon should be death. And an even smaller percentage of that percentage is willing to carry out those death sentences. And that's why the AP blurs them out and the NYT won't publish them and CNN won't show them and I was reluctant to remind readers that we had published some nine years ago. Fear.

Again: Christians can't be angry that they aren't shown the same deference that Muslims are—a deference born of fear—while at the same time demanding credit for not resorting to violence the same way Muslims extremists do. A cartoonist can mock Christianity and get away with it; a cartoonist can't mock Islam and get away with it. That is a credit to Christianity and Christians. (A credit to modern Christians, anyway.)

The AP couldn't bring itself to admit a humiliating truth—fear was the reason they blurred those images of Muhammad—and it has now established a stupid and dangerous precedent: In the future, the AP will "refrain from moving deliberately provocative images" and they will delete "deliberately provocative" images from their archives. And who determines what images (or stories?) are deliberatively provocative as opposed to unintentionally provocative or just plain old provocative or not provocative at all? Who gets to play the censor?

Anyone with a gun or grievance—which means anyone at all.

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During Bill Cosby’s performance on Thursday night in London, Ontario, a woman walked out after the comedian made a self-referential rape joke.

National Post reporter Richard Warnica was on site at the event, and his Twitter feed will give you a sense of how the volume has been cranked up by protesters (compared to their showing at Cosby’s Wednesday night performance in a neighboring city) and that an overall contempt toward the alleged rapist is building at live performances.

Warnica noted that the audience had “lots of gaps” but was “far from empty.” And, during the not-sold out show, a woman in the audience — it is not clear whether she was a planted heckler or just an attendee — got up from her seat to walk up the aisle. Cosby stopped his performance to ask the woman where she was headed. Her response was that she was getting up to get a drink. She then asked Cosby if he would like for her to bring him one.

“I already have one,” Cosby responded while holding a bottle of water. “You have to be careful about drinking around me.”

The audience gasped as the woman exited the building. Then, other portions of the crowd erupted in a perverse combo of cheers and applause.

[Mediaite | National Post | @RichardWarnica]

If you could tell Ryan Reynolds to do anything, what would it be?

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A 17-year-old Connecticut girl suffering from Hodgkin's lymphoma has been court-ordered to undergo chemotherapy, despite the fact that she doesn't want the treatment and has the support of her mother to refuse it. After the teen refused the drugs, her mother says she was removed from their home. She's now hospitalized, under guard, and has had her cellphone confiscated.

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Thinkspace’s 10 Year Anniversary Show, “La Familia.”

Opening this Saturday, January 10th at Thinkspace Gallery in Los Angeles, California is their 10 year anniversary show, “La Familia.”  The show features 100 artists, all with new work, from the Thinkspace roster to celebrate 10 years of history with the iconic gallery.  A show not to be missed.  (Artists above: Joao Ruas, Dan Lydersen, Sarah Joncas and Marco Mazzoni.)