This ecstatically awesome portrait of Mister Spock riding a winged unicorn over a star-spangled rainbow was created by Brooklyn-based artist and illustrator Tim O’Brien for an issue of Men’s Health. As soon as we saw it we felt better about pretty much everything. We also love the fact that, despite the fantastic circumstances, the expression on Spock’s face is as stoic as ever.
A man suspected of murdering his neighbor — who he believed to be a vampire — is claiming that for the past 20 years he has actually been a werewolf. He’s also pleading insanity, if you hadn’t already assumed that part.
Mark Andrews, 51, of Atascadero, CA, allegedly shot his neighbor, and also allegedly transforms into an unspeakable howling beast whenever a full moon reveals itself in a clear night sky.
“[He believes] he transforms into a werewolf,” explained Carolyn Murphy, a forensic psychologist who interviewed him. “[He] holds the spirit of the wolf.”
Andrews was reportedly not taking his medications at the time of the murder. Police dispute claims that he’s schizophrenic, saying that the defendant was seemingly stable only three months ago, but they’re not doctors so there’s no real reason to believe them.
Whether or not he’s delusional, or if this is yet another chapter in the three thousand year old werewolf and vampire war is unclear.
Last year, Korg set out to recreate the Arp Odyssey, a legendary synth that went out of production back in 1981. How does the result sound? Pretty darn good!
Who hasn't stumbled across an episode of This Old House or New Yankee Workshop on a lazy Saturday afternoon and dreamed of being as skilled a woodworker as Norm Abram?
On Tuesday, the long-awaited Robin Thicke trial officially began. A jury will decide whether his song "Blurred Lines" ripped off Marvin Gaye's "Got to Give It Up." But the jury is looking at plagiarism, when in fact the real crime here is appropriation. The song is as much a cultural theft as it is a literal one.
Robin Thicke and Miley Cyrus' VMA performance was the spark that ignited the still-raging discussion of cultural appropriation in music. After the racially charged performance, Vulture music critic Jody Rosen wrote, "As Cyrus stalked the stage, mugging and twerking, and paused to spank and simulate analingus upon the ass of a thickly set African-American backup dancer, her act tipped over into what we may as well just call racism."
The act of cultural appropriation carries racial, colonial and socioeconomic implications, and "appropriation" is negative by definition: taking something without asking. Read More
On Sunday at the Oscars, John Legend and Common's performance of their award-winning duet "Glory" stunned the audience with its harrowing power. It won best original song, and their rendition inspired tears and moving headlines across the Internet. While most of these articles praised the "brutal, brilliant strength" of the song and the performance's "powerful imagery," most of them missed a vital detail that Aliza Worthington at the Broad Side caught.
In Legend and Common's interracial backing choir, the majority of the apparently white members stay visibly silent throughout the performance. Read More
What if you woke up one day and all the things that looked red to you before going to sleep suddenly looked green, with the entire color spectrum shifted accordingly?
Welcome to the "inverted spectrum argument," a critical piece of philosophical lore (dating back to John Locke, more widely known for his theory of natural rights) with implications for the meaning of human consciousness and, of course, that problematic dress that set the internet ablaze Thursday night.
Qualia
The thought experiment is meant to prove that there is such a thing as what something looks like that is separate from the question of what it is. An identical .JPG file, for example, can look one way to some of us and another way to others. These things — the blackness you see or the goldness I see — are called qualia (quale is the singular) in the philosophical literature.
One common line of argument about qualia is that their existence and importance shows that crucial matters of consciousness cannot be reduced to a mere biophysical understanding of how the brain operates. In his famous 1974 essay "What Is It Like To Be a Bat," Thomas Nagel asks us to consider the qualia induced by navigating the world via echolocation. We can, through physical examination, come to understand a great deal about bats. But we cannot understand what it feels like to be a bat:
We describe bat sonar as a form of three-dimensional forward perception; we believe that bats feel some versions of pain, fear, hunger, and lust, and that they have other, more familiar types of perception besides sonar. But we believe that these experiences also have in each case a specific subjective character, which it is beyond our ability to conceive.
This is more or less why the dress dispute was so vehement and so captivating. I can look at the photo of the dress. And I can image a black and blue dress. But I can't understand what it's like to see that very dress as a black and blue dress. Common sense indicates that the disagreement must have to do with screen brightness settings or background color or monitor tilt — some physical property of the image. When it turns out that two people can look at an identical image on an identical screen and see different things, it seems like someone has gone insane.
Mind and body
To many philosophers, these qualia issues demonstrate that the conscious human mind cannot be reduced to the physical and biological processes of the brain. Other philosophers dispute this (it is philosophy after all) and propose various theories to reconcile the presumption that the whole world is physical with the lived reality of subjective experience and qualia.
Another approach entirely was taken by Tufts University professor Daniel Dennett in his 1988 article "Quining Qualia". It's a pun based on the name of W.V.O. Quine, a philosopher from the previous generation who was widely known for vehemently denying the existence of many things posited by common sense. Dennett's argument is that, despite their distinguished lineage in the philosophical literature, nobody can give a consistent account of what qualia are. It's easy to get freshman philosophy students to believe in them with a couple of thought experiments, but they're not a normal word of everyday language because they're really just a flight of fancy philosophers dreamed up to deny the truth of materialism. Normal people would just go to church and talk about souls.
The fault is in our eyes
The fact that nobody yet seems to have devised a conclusive account of how the dress puzzle arose inspires speculations about qualia and consciousness. But the direction that investigations are going in tends to suggest a more Dennett-style approach. Our eyes contain many different rods and cones that perceive light and color, and even though human eyes are all broadly similar, a whole range of factors are going to lead one person's set of rods and cones to differ from another person's.
Through some miraculous happenstance, this particular washed-out photo of dress seems to have hit onto a dividing line where one large fraction of the population sees it one way and another large fraction sees it another way. But just because people see things differently doesn't mean there's no physicalist explanation of that fact. Things that look blurry to me seem sharp to people with 20/20 vision, and that's because of the shape of my eyeball. Until someone explains in detail exactly what physical differences lead some people to see the gold parts of the dress as black, we're going to keep arguing with each other.
But it's extremely likely that an explanation will be forthcoming. It's not so much that our subjective experiences are incomprehensible to one another, but our eyes just function very slightly differently in a way that happens to be relevant to the perception of one viral photo.
That doesn't mean the consciousness argument will be solved in Nagel's favor, of course, since he still has the bats to fall back on. The awful thing about philosophy is that unlike internet riddles, its big problems never get resolved.
We may patronizingly praise and fawn over our clever pooches when they correctly engage in that particularly tasking game of fetch, but dogs have got more going on in their little noggins than we give them credit for.
Inflammation is a highly complex process that can occur when the immune system needs to attack what it perceives as a threat, or if there is an injury that needs to be repaired. This generally involves swelling due to extra fluid bringing in cellular reinforcements and increased temperature to help kill pathogens.
In what may be the biggest case of mass hysteria ever experienced in the history of the internet, everyone in the planet speculated tonight about what's the color of a stupid dress. Some people even claimed it changed color.* Others looked for Photoshop analysis or scientific explanations. None of that matters. Here is the real color.
guys please help me - is this dress white and gold, or blue and black? Me and my friends can’t agree and we are freaking the fuck out
So I just looked at this like, it’s blue and black obviously and all my friends were like no it’s blue and gold. Now I’m super confused, what is eyesight?
I see it as white and gold. My friend right here sees it as blue and black. I CANT HANDLE THIS
if that’s not gold my entire life has been a lie
I am seeing Blue and Black, how are people seeing it different? Is there some sort of mind sorcery happening here?! :o
Omg im seeing blue and black but my friend is telling me white and gold… SCIENCE SIDE OF TUMBLR PLEASE EXPLAIN
Your eyes have retinas, the things that let you interpret color. There’s rods, round things, and cones that stick out, which is what gives your eye a textured appearance in the colored part. The “cones” see color. The “rods” see shade, like black, white and grey. Cones only work when enough light passes through. So while I see the fabric as white, someone else may see it as blue because my cones aren’t responding to the dim lighting. My rods see it as a shade (white). There’s three cones, small, medium and large. They are blue sensitive, green sensitive, and red sensitive. As for the black bit (which I see as gold), it’s called additive mixing. Blue, green and red are the main colors for additive mixing. This is where it gets really tricky. Subtractive mixing, such as with paint, means the more colors you add the murkier it gets until it’s black. ADDITIVE mixing, when you add the three colors eyes see best, red, green and blue, (not to be confused with primary colors red, blue and yellow) it makes pure white.
—Blue and Black: In conclusion, your retina’s cones are more high functioning, and this results in your eyes doing subtractive mixing.
—White and Gold: our eyes don’t work well in dim light so our retinas rods see white, and this makes them less light sensitive, causing additive mixing, (that of green and red), to make gold.
**** UPDATE
to prove this theory I turned my phone brightness from the lowest to highest and saw it switching from white and gold (at the lowest) to light blue and darker gold (at the highest) meaning people that see blue and black are more sensitive to light (better eyesight and not looking at the sun like your moms told you)
According to Porn MD, “hentai” is the fourth most searched porn term in the world—in other words, approximately everybody alive has seen anime characters grinding. That also means that I can say with a pretty decent amount of certainty that you, dear readers, have seen some. It’s alright, friends; you’re safe here.
But what is hentai, exactly? The term itself is pretty loosely defined in Japanese as anything sexual and perverse, but in the West it has come to mean just one thing: hella nasty anime pornopgraphy. There is another term, “ecchi,” which essentially means “naughty.” Most ecchi manga and anime are sexual, but feature little if any actual nudity; tons of panties and ludicrously proportioned bosoms, mind you, but usually no tentacle penetration. In Japan, hentai and ecchi, much like anime in general, are far more popular than their live action counterparts. The hentai industry is massive, and more mainstream than porn is in the West. Rather than the seedy sex shops you might find in America, hentai is often found alongside popular anime like Naruto and Dragonball.
For all of its mainstream appeal, though, hentai is anything but inclusive; in fact, it’s pretty damn sexist. I mean, obviously pornography leans toward misogyny as a rule, but Western porn has seen a growing trend of feminism and sex-positivity in recent years. In doing research for this article, I was hard-pressed to find anything that was even vaguely respectful in Japanese porn—but more on that later.
Hentai has a reputation for being, let’s say, super yucky. The infamous octopus porn is prolific, largely due to the fact that – unlike penises, which are censored by law in Japanese porn – tentacles can be displayed in their full, veiny glory. Fear, pain, and subjugation are remarkably common elements as well, often as a driving force for the story.
Now, I am not necessarily against the existence of these genres, not wholesale at least; extreme bondage erotica can be a safe way to fulfill fantasies, and whatever makes you splooshy is totally fine as long as it’s safe and consensual—but that’s the key. It has to be consensual. The issue is that women in hentai always seem to be scared, never having any control, nor enjoying themselves in any way. Even in yaoi, the only type of hentai written for women specifically, two beautiful men usually fall into very specific feminine and masculine roles—and, once again, rape is incredibly common.
The simple fact is that most Japanese porn, whether it’s animated, illustrated or live-action—and as part of a largely patriarchal culture—is focused on male pleasure. Women are typically treated as objects whose enjoyment doesn’t matter. Even when the sex is consensual, there is a constant sense a sense of shame and embarrassment, and the girls are frequently seen frowning—often with tears collecting at the corners of their eyes.
Regardless of this generality, I theorized, there must be some more respectful hentai somewhere! To answer that, I turned to the internet.
The most obvious search, “sex-positive hentai,” yielded no real results. I moved on to Tumblr, thinking that if any community had some inclusive Japanese animated porn, it would be there. The first result was for a Tumblr titled “F**k Yeah Hentai!” with the tagline “Hentai, because girls are doing it wrong.”
After doing some more digging, I decided to put Tumblr back on the shelf for a while, because it was making me sad.
I then turned to Fakku.Net, which is apparently the industry leader of hentai sites—or least, they host more hentai than any one person could view in their lifetime. If you’ve ever looked at a porn website with no erotic intent, you know how ridiculous it can look, and how overwhelming it is. I couldn’t feasibly just skim through hundreds of hentai in hopes of finding something less problematic, never mind the psychological ramifications. I needed to narrow my search.
I found a list of Hentai Genres; everything from “pantsu to kao” (panties on face), to “Onara” (fart fetish), but I didn’t find anything which could be considered inclusive or respectful. In desperation, I Googled terms like “Nice Hentai” and “Sweet Hentai,” but all I got was results like “Nice Hentai Babe Tied And Grabbed” and “Sweet Hentai Teen F***d.” In other words, I was getting nowhere fast.
After hours of searching, I discovered the very small sub-genre called “vanilla hentai,” which essentially means hentai without rape, tentacles, feces, or anything else that’s too far outside of “the norm.” There is probably something to be said about the fact that non-rape is a subgenre, but whatever; I was finally getting somewhere!
I tracked down a meager list of vanilla hentai and set to work.
The first show I watched was called Women at Work. It’s about a teenage boy who gets dumped for not being manly enough, so he joins a construction crew, and bangs all of its female employees.
I definitely wouldn’t classify it as sexual assault-y, but I’m not sure I’d classify it as respectful either. Most of the woman do enjoy the sex, but there is some definite homophobia. Also, the one woman who actually looks strong enough to realistically work in construction is made out to be incredibly masculine for comedic effect.
Elven Bride started out somewhat promising: a human and an elf fall in love and decide to get married despite racial tension. Alright. We then find out that elf-vaginas are too small for human boners, so he goes on a quest for a magical lube secreted by Harpies in hopes that he can get all up in there. He meets a harpy who rapes him and becomes pregnant.
Godammit, next.
Anyone you can do… I can do Better! is about a teenaged boy who becomes the private tutor of a dumb but hot girl with huge boobs. Obviously he doinks her, as well as her even more well-endowed mother. That’s about it; this one had decidedly less dialog than the previous two. Nobody got raped, so that’s a win. Kind of.
Princess Lover seemed pretty promising at first, mostly because the animation was the best I’d seen in my search, but it got weird quick. It started out with some pretty unhealthy portrayals of domination, and pretty soon there was pee everywhere.
On and on, I subjected myself to innumerable scenes of ludicrous anime sex in search of something that was even kind of okay. I didn’t find it; all I found was reinforcements of the stereotypes.
Look, you’re smart people, I know that the simple act of watching hentai won’t turn you into yet another cog in the misogyny engine. Like I said before, whatever turns you on is totally okay, and there are perfectly level-headed feminists out there who like to get it going to animated porn—especially since no real women are harmed in the process of creating hentai.
Me personally? I’d love to find hentai where the women don’t hate everything about what’s happening to them; where normal, healthy, and consensual adult intimacy can progress without shame and regret. For now, I guess I’ll stick to Smut Peddler.
A Christian singer of a classic soul band who licensed his music to 'Fifty Shades of Grey' had no idea that the film was based off of a sex-filled, BDSM book. [ more › ]
why? seriously what the fuck have any of us done to deserve this? what have they done to deserve outlasting any and all reality stars?
The Kardashians aren't going away any time soon. The brood has just signed a four year deal with E! that will keep them in teetering heels, expensive face creams and hair extensions until the next gang of high school seniors graduate from college. Happy Black History Month.
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Someone stole Lupita Nyong'o's Oscars dress right out of her hotel room in West Hollywood earlier this week. [ more › ]
A Christian singer of a classic soul band who licensed his music to 'Fifty Shades of Grey' had no idea that the film was based off of a sex-filled, BDSM book. [ more › ]
Tickets for this day-long desert music fest with Warpaint, RJD2 and Failure start at $55. [ more › ]
Some guy decided to randomly put cones on the 101 Freeway in Hollywood today. [ 
