Steve Dyer

1. Daenerys will be introduced to no fewer than twenty new characters, each more critical to the plot than the last. Aggravated over the complicated new names and the glacial pace of her storyline, Daenerys will fly off on Drogon across the narrow sea and burn everyone in Westeros alive. Dany will then sit atop a throne of charred skulls, eating raw meat, giving the finger to the Lord of Light.

2. Sansa will destroy Littlefinger’s reputation and leave him penniless and alone. She will then retake Winterfell and will sit as the Wolf in the North. She will redeem her entire family and shame all those who stood against the Starks. She will rebuild.  She will do this without ever personally wielding a sword, but through diplomacy, intelligence, and grace. People will continue to log onto Tumblr to talk about how much they hate her, how she is super lame, whiny, and is totally “not a strong female character.”

3. Jon Snow will discover through a series of dramatic revelations that he is his own mother.

4. Osha and Rickon will travel to the island Skagos where they will be introduced to no fewer than 20 new characters, each more critical to the plot than the last. They will continue to be irrelevant themselves.

5. Jon Snow, Young Griff, and Daenerys will come together to form a giant Azor Ahai, Power Rangers style, with an elaborate transformation sequence. Dany will be the head and arms, Young Griff the torso and legs, and Jon the useless breastplate.

6. Winter won’t come. Ha ha, no. It totally will.

7. Even Hodor will become unnerved on his quest with Bran. After a few months he will throw his hands up and stand, saying, “OK, screw this, screw the trees, screw the ravens, screw you guys, this sucks. I didn’t even want to come out here in the first place, but you guys had to be all ‘ooh Hodor, carry me Hodor.’ ‘Help me Hodor!’ ‘Hodor Hodor Hodor!’ Can you even say anything else?! Well. Screw that. I’m out. Hodor.”

8. Victarion Greyjoy is Azor Ahai reborn. He will have almost taken Volantis when a child points out his “weird lookin’ arm.” Weeping, he will retreat to the sea and lock himself in his cabin for days. His crew will tire of listening to the Cure and abandon him. The Lord of Light will look the other direction, shielding his face so no one can see him.

9. Tommen Baratheon’s cat, Ser Pounce, is Azor Ahai reborn.

10. Everyone in Dorne will slowly back away from the unfolding shit up north, all “Wow, OK guys, good luck with that.”

11. Tyrion will make some jokes that will go over his companion’s heads.

12. Podrick Payne is Azor Ahai reborn. Everyone in the realm just kind of looks at each other like, “What?”

13. For years, scholars will argue the merits of the schticky, 74-page “Abby Normal” homage when Cersei unveils her new champion, Robert Strong.

14. Brienne will die horribly. Jaime will feel sad for five seconds and then any lessons he’s learned will escape him immediately. He will have sex in front of her corpse.

15. Samwell Tarly will finally find his courage. Samwell Tarly will then die, horribly.

16. Arya Stark will find Gendry. Arya Stark and Gendry will then die, horribly.

17. Davos Seaworth will die, horribly.

18. That one character you like will die, horribly.

19. Littlefinger will not die horribly.

20. Nymeria the wolf is actually Azor Ahai reborn. She will eat everyone who hasn’t already died horribly and take the Iron Throne for herself.

21. King’s Landing will become infested with wolves under Nymeria’s rule. Wolf-Littlefinger will run a wolf-brothel and Wolf-Varys will know what Wolf-Stannis had for breakfast two weeks ago (a rabbit.)

22. Ser Pounce will be spared due to his bravery and charm, and will sit next to Nymeria on a comfy blanket set in a golden sunbeam.

23. The Others will march on what is now known as Wolf’s Landing, see Nymeria and her Wolf Army, be like, “Oh shit,” and run the fuck away.

24. The final book in the series, A Dream of Spring, will not actually be published in your lifetime.

Read more Popular A Song of Ice And Fire Fan Theories at The Toast.

A pundit rarely gets vindication quite as quickly as this. When Olympic star Tom Daley recently told the world he was bisexual, Ann Friedman declared that he was an icon for a newly and increasingly fluid male sexuality:

Daley also elicited a more specific sort of disapproval from certain fans — biphobia, the Advocate called it. These were the people who assumed Daley was gay but unable to fully admit it, or unwilling to relinquish the privileges of being straight … Traditional definitions of masculinity — which tend to go hand in hand with homophobia — are going through a real shake-up. More hetero men are tentatively admitting that they’re turned on by certain sex acts associated with gay men. And Daley’s ambiguous coming-out had some mainstream sports sites sounding like a Gender Studies 101 classroom. “In truth, there should be no need for him to declare his sexuality,” wrote a blogger at BleacherReport. This is progress.

I don’t doubt that male bisexuality is real, if rare. But I wasn’t buying it in the case of Daley:

Let me place a bet with Friedman: Daley will never have a sexual relationship with a woman again, because his assertion that he still fancies girls is a classic bridging mechanism to ease the transition to his real sexual identity. I know this because I did it too.

Maybe we’ll check back in in a few years’ time, and see which one of us has turned out to be right.

Friedman mocked this as impossibly vague (and she had a point) so I revised, even as I was raked over the coals by readers:

Let me rephrase my bet with Friedman. Check in in ten years’ time.

Five months later, ta-da! Tom Daley confirms he is totally gay. As I predicted. As I – and any gay man not saturated with pomo nonsense – knew. Again: this doesn’t mean that there aren’t bisexual men out there. But it does mean there’s gaydar. And Ann Friedman ain’t got none.

(Photo: Tom Daley by Clive Rose/Getty Images)

meanplastic:

THE ENEMY

Gloriously funny.

yungbussy:

ppl in africa are dying

chocolate-sideburns-of-love:

naughty-chekov:

i’m sorry for my entire life

It’s the last panel that really makes this post.

Adam Levitin writes:

The IRS ruled that Bitcoin and other virtual currencies are property, not currency.  This means that they are subject to capital gains taxation.  And that means that Bitcoins are not fungible.  The price at which a particular Bitcoin was acquired (and this is traceable) determines the capital gains on that particular Bitcoin when spent.  If I spend Bitcoin A, which I bought at $10, but is now worth $400, I’ve got a very different tax treatment than if I spend Bitcoin B, which I bought at $390. (Poor Satoshi–he’s got a lot more capital gains than most…)  This means Bitcoins are not fungible, and that makes it unworkable as a currency.  If I have to figure out which particular Bitcoin in my wallet I want to spend and what the tax treatment will be, Bitcoin just doesn’t work as a commercial medium of exchange.  Bitcoin still works as a speculative medium, but Bitcoin’s claim has always been to being more than the latest iteration of the trading sardines–it aspired to be a commercial medium.  I don’t see that happening now.

The article is here.

avianawareness:

THEY JUST KEEP GETTING BETTER

I’ve been reading Ta-Nehisi Coates for many years now. He was a former colleague of mine at the Atlantic (where he still writes) and, in my view, has one of the best blogs on the web. Jon Chait, for his part, is the sharpest liberal writer of his generation – a devastating critic of the right’s blind spots and a merciless stylist. You know this, of course, as their work has enriched the Dish for years. So when they engage in a high-level debate about a deeply important question, you want to sit up and notice.

So if you haven’t, catch up on the full debate they have been having. It’s a sign that in an age of sponsored content, newspapers as ad agencies, sharing rather than reading, and quizzes rather than arguments, the blogosphere is still invaluable at its best. Here’s TNC’s original post, Chait’s response, and then TNC’s rebuttal. Chait’s final take is here. The debate is about the role of culture in perpetuating some of the profound problems afflicting black America. Are these problems fundamentally caused by racism, by the logic of white supremacy … or have they become their own independent impediment to black advancement?

I have to say that TNC has shifted my understanding of black America more than any other writer. His passion is supercharged by his scholarship. I come with some disadvantages because I was not born in America and did not grow up here. It has taken me three decades to really grasp the racial resonances that come so easily to the native-born and to see them penetrate the decades and centuries. I was way too naive about the legacy of slavery and segregation, and way too ahistorical in engaging the problem. No conservative, properly speaking, should doubt the power of history:

Society is indeed a contract … As the ends of such a partnership cannot be obtained in many generations, it becomes a partnership not only between those who are living, but between those who are living, those who are dead, and those who are to be born.

That classic statement by Burke kept occurring to me while watching Twelve Years A Slave.

How can I have a “partnership” with proud, defiant and violent slave-holders? How on earth could an African-American? And yet that is where we are. America can no more shrug off its early existence as a genocidal gulag for African-Americans than it can ignore its first existence as a British colony. And a central part of that partnership with the past has been what TNC rightly calls white supremacy.

But it seems to me that in this debate, TNC is almost willfully blind to the truth that historical legacies can create self-sustaining cultures of poverty that have a life of their own. And I think Chait is equally too pessimistic about the ability of people to transcend the circumstances into which they were born. There comes a point at which any community, which has been historically suppressed and vilified, simply has to believe that the future has potential. That’s certainly how I see the gay community in my lifetime. You can acknowledge the psychic toll of homophobia and heterosexual supremacy all you want, but it won’t help people overcome it. In fact, you run the risk of so emphasizing the crushing burden of the past you entrench the very sense of helplessness that perpetuates the problem.

Which is why TNC’s recent turn toward profound gloom seems – no, is – out of place. Blacks and Hispanics are more hopeful about the future than whites, as Chait notes. By the middle of this century, whites will be in a minority in this country. The potential for America to transform itself again through the arc of history is real. Burke’s social contract, after all, was not just with the past. It was with the future as well, with the black America yet to be born.

Here is a disturbing video of makeup and hair artists transforming a human woman into Marge Simpson. Watch it in case you need to stay awake for several days straight or something. (via HuffPo)

Previously: two monks invent medieval art.

MONK #1: hey how big are most eyes
MONK #2: like on the human face?
MONK #1: oh yes for sure the eyes people have on their faces

MONK #2: oh man
at least half the size of the face
it's actually crazy how much of your face is just eyes

definitely at least half
MONK #1: thanks
MONK #2: no problem

Read more Two Orthodox Monks Invent Byzantine Art at The Toast.

From Tuesday, March 25th through Friday, March 28th, Comedy Central will be taping its Half Hour standup specials at The Royale in Boston, and the network has made tickets available for free. If you're in the area, you can find show tickets (two shows nightly at 7:15pm and 9:15pm; 6:45pm and 8:45pm on Friday) by visiting The Black List's website, where you can look up show info for all the comedians featured, including Ron Funches, Fortune Feimster, Mark Normand, Kurt Braunohler, Michael Che, and more.

Dan Selcke introduces a new graphing tool:

Arguing the merits and demerits of a favorite TV show is an exercise plagued with uncertainty. What some viewers see as a well-developed, three-dimensional character, others may see as a grating waste of space, and one person’s daring plot twist is another person’s nonsensical cop-out.

With Graph TV, this is no longer a problem. The website, created by software engineer Kevin Wu, looks up the IMDB user ratings for every episode of a given TV show and turns them into points on simple graphs that show the ebb and flow of public opinion over the course of a series. Each season of the show is coded with a different color, so users can see, for example, which seasons of Dexter received more praise as they went on and which ones tumbled down the Y-axis faster than an Olympic bobsled team with nothing left to lose.

The Walking Dead‘s inconsistency is charted below:

oh my god o.o

According to Deadline, real-life husband and wife Chris Pratt and Anna Faris have found a co-starring vehicle together in the upcoming Fox comedy Vacation Friends, a film by sibling writing team Tom and Tim Mullen with Hot Tub Time Machine's Steve Pink onboard to direct. Vacation Friends is described as "What About Bob? with a couple" and follows Pratt and Faris as "a crazy wild couple that bonds with a straight laced couple on vacation in Mexico. They have a great time, and then want to rekindle the fun. Once the other couple gets back to their normal life, it’s not nearly the same kind of fun and their vacation friends won’t go away." The other couple has yet to be cast, but the film could begin shooting by late 2014. This makes a busy year for Pratt between Guardians of the Galaxy and his starring role in Jurassic World, while Faris currently stars on Chuck Lorre's CBS series Mom.

spiderwater:

Pizza Planet Truck

“Two by two by two [cocks gun]…by .22.”

“Looks like somebody’s…all washed up.”

“A storm is coming that will drown the world.”
“What are we going to do?”
“We’re going to build a boat.”

“The Lord said we needed two of every type of animal on the ark, but we’ve already got a jackass.”

“Forget about it. It’s water under the bridge.”
“Not anymore. It’s water over the bridge now.”

“You act like he walks on water.”
“Not walks. Floats.”

“Listen, God might have promised never to destroy the world again [cocks gun]…but I didn’t.”

“Looks like you’re up Shit Creek, and I just sold my last paddle.”

“Whatever [pushes Tubal-Cain over the side into a raging torrent]…floats your boat.”

“I’m with you, come hell or high water.”
“There’s no or about it, friend. They’re [cocks gun]…both coming.”

“We’re going to have to throw out an awful lot of babies with this bathwater.”

“Rainbow? Not on my watch. [cocks gun]“

Read more Dialogue I Desperately Pray Will Be Featured in Darren Aronofsky’s Noah at The Toast.

juliavickerman:

This aired on ABC.

omglobitsalex:

THESE ARE SO GREAT

source: http://perel.tumblr.com/

Tumblr Gets Deep (22 Pics)

llamalamu:

take that, a-hole

The great Billy Joel was a guest on The Tonight Show last night, and count on Jimmy Fallon to not only sing "The Lion Sleeps Tonight" with him at the desk, but sing with him in a four-part harmony using a handy iPad looping app. Just more proof that Fallon can do anything.

So I am getting married in May (to some jerk, you have not heard of her) and I need to buy a shirt. I have some shirts, yes, but they are not wedding shirts. I need to debut a shirt at my wedding. And I like to look nice, dang it, so something a teeny bit fashion forward sounds like the way to go! Unfortunately every retailer of shirt has not gotten the message because literally all I can find is the following nonsense. These are all from REGULAR STORES:

Do you know what is extravagant? Animal print. So what if we had EVERY ANIMAL on the shirt? Yes, good idea. A veritable noah’s ark, but on a shirt for a man to wear! Outside, where anyone can see. Also, what if it were red? Yeah, like animal blood! Perfect.

If you look at this shirt for a while and let your eyes unfocus, you can actually see a lil boat! Wow

for the man who has everything and still wants to become a human picnic

this would work pretty well for my Power Rangers: WILD FORCE-themed wedding but that girl did NOT pan out

finally, “tribal” bullshit but for men! misandry has been defeated, congrats everyone

I am 95% sure my uncle has a tie with this print on it

For the man that wants to look like he was standing in the wrong place when some very speedy house painters came by

this would be a very nice way to look exactly like “Rowdy” Roddy Piper and Harley Quinn had a kid, so it’s actually pretty neat

so boring! Get your shit together, designers, I’m snoozin’ over here!

oh nevermind! found it.

Read more I Demand to Know What is Going On With Men’s Shirts These Days at The Toast.

CNN’s Don Lemon is just trying to top himself, we guess. On Sunday, he wondered if maybe something supernatural had happened to Malaysia Airlines flight MH 370, since why not? And then by Wednesday, he was just throwing questions from Twitter at a panel of experts, because again, this is how science works: take any damn guess that someone came up with while baked and remembering old TV shows, and ask a scientist. And so Lemon asked former U.S. Department of Transportation Inspector General Mary Schiavo, with a Serious Journalism look on his face, if maybe there was some merit to tweeted questions about the Bermuda Triangle, Lost, The Twilight Zone, or the airliner maybe vanishing into a black hole.

“That’s what people are saying,” Lemon said. “I know it’s preposterous — but is it preposterous you think, Mary?”

Why is anyone making fun of Don Lemon for this? After all, he knows it’s preposterous…but doesn’t it make sense to double-check with a former transportation investigator, just to be on the safe side? You never know, maybe she has some expertise with black-hole-caused crashes that wasn’t previously known.

So tell us, former inspector general Mary Schiavo, is it preposterous to think a black hole is behind all this?

“Well, it is. A small black hole would suck in our entire universe so we know it’s not that,” Schiavo said. “The Bermuda Triangle is often weather. And ‘Lost’ is a TV show. So I think — I always like things for which there’s data history, crunch the numbers. So for me those aren’t there.”

“But I think it’s wonderful that the whole world is trying to help with their theories and I absolutely love their theories,” she added.

OK, maybe “wonderful” isn’t the word we’d use; we bet the Wonkettariat can come up with a whole bunch of better adjectives. Also, we’re not sure we agree with her a hundred percent on her police work, there, since a “small black hole” wouldn’t “suck in our entire universe.” Our universe has plenty of black holes, probably one at the center of every galaxy, so an itty-bitty one would merely suck in everything in our immediate galactic neighborhood, if that makes you feel any better.

If the possible debris sighted near Australia turns out to be the actual wreckage of the plane, the black hole theory will not be disproved, of course — there’s every possibility that any wreckage is just what was ejected from the alternate-universe version of the airliner that flew through a wormhole in their universe and emerged into ours.

Also, we don’t feel too bad for Ms. Schiavo being a little wrong about matter-devouring singularities, seeing as how the one inside Don Lemon’s skull was probably the first she’d ever encountered.

[TPM / CBS]

Follow Doktor Zoom on Twitter. He knows a few other people who are superdense astronomical bodies

by Patrick Appel

Megan Neal summarizes a study on the spread of fake news through Facebook:

[A] team of researchers at Northeastern University, led by Walter Quattrociocchi, decided to study how it is that erroneous information jumps the credibility fence and becomes widely believed to be true. Their theory, published on the arXiv preprint server last week and unearthed by MIT Technology Review, is that it has something to do with the kind of people who read “alternative” news, because they’re generally mistrustful of the mainstream media. …

Logically enough, the folks who were more prone to reading alternative websites (defined as “pages which disseminate controversial information, most often lacking supporting evidence and sometimes contradictory of the official news”) were also more likely to buy into a conspiracy theory. The thinking goes that those radical readers are A) ​less adept at parsing accurate information and B) already skeptical of mainstream journalism, and looking for an different take.

Relatedly, Mary Elizabeth Williams flags a “a new study from the University of Chicago that reveals that nearly half of all Americans believe medical conspiracy theories”:

The findings, published this week in JAMA Internal Medicine, are culled from a study of 1,351 adults who were polled about their beliefs on six popular theories: “The CIA deliberately infected large numbers of African Americans with HIV under the guise of a hepatitis inoculation program,” “Doctors and government still want to vaccinate children even though they know these vaccines cause autism and other psychological disorders,” “The FDA is deliberately preventing the public from getting natural cures for cancer and other disorders because of pressure from drug companies,” “Health officials know that cell phones cause cancer but are doing nothing to stop it because large corporations won’t let them,” “Public water fluoridation is really just a secret way for chemical companies to dump the dangerous byproducts of phosphate mines into the environment,” and “The global dissemination of genetically modified foods by Monsanto is part of a secret program launched by the Rockefeller and Ford foundation to shrink the world’s population.” As the study’s authors write, “49% of Americans agree with at least one medical conspiracy theory and 18% agree with three or more.”

Cass Sunstein lists reasons individuals believe in conspiracy theories:

Here’s an excellent predictor of whether people will accept a particular conspiracy theory: Do they accept other conspiracy theories? If you tend to think that the Apollo moon landings were faked, you are more likely to believe that the U.S. was behind the 9/11 attacks. (With a little introspection, many of us know, almost immediately, whether we are inclined to accept conspiracy theories.)

Remarkably, people who accept one conspiracy theory tend to accept another conspiracy theory that is logically inconsistent with it. People who believe that Princess Diana faked her own death are more likely to think that she was murdered. People who believe that Osama bin Laden was already dead when U.S. forces invaded his compound are more likely to believe that he is still alive.

The second set of explanations points to the close relationship between conspiracy theories and social networks, especially close-knit or isolated ones. Few of us have personal or direct knowledge about the causes of some terrible event — a missing plane, a terrorist attack, an assassination, an outbreak of disease. If one person within a network insists that a conspiracy was at work, others within that network might well believe it.