And, as you can see, it's quite accurate. Microsoft built How Old Do I Look?--a free browser application that guesses how old you are and your gender from a photo.

It's having a bit of trouble with my avatar.

It says that Aragorn, the King of Gondor, is 35 when he was well into his 80s during the War of the Ring. So although TechCrunch speaks highly of the program, I think that it still needs work.

Try it with your own photos. Does it work for you?

-via Joe Carter

Los Vengadores vuelven a las pantallas de cine, y también a esta columna. El éxito de los films de Marvel inspiraron casi de inmediato varios subproductos a cargo de los sospechosos habituales: Asylum y Tom Cat (Nu Image aún no se han atrevido). La obsesión con aprovechar el tirón de los personajes originales ha creado una curiosa situación: todos los Vengadores principales tienen su correspondiente copia. ¡En algunos casos más de una!

Y a pesar de que estos mockbusters son lo mínimo que se despacha, cínicas producciones que nacen para ser vapuleadas por internet, hay que reconocer que son capaces de presentar alguna idea interesante que nunca veremos en las originales. Aquí os presento estas copias oportunistas: solo podemos soñar con que, efectivamente, los veamos juntos algún día en unos “Revanchadores” de pura mierda cicatera.

El Capitán Batalla

Año: 2013

Argumento: Sam, el nieto de un héroe de los años 40, el Capitán Batalla, es herido en la guerra del golfo. Para salvarle, le inyectan un suero experimental que le otorga poderes. Cuando vuelve a su hogar, se encuentra al país dominado por los neo-nazis, así que decide adoptar la legendaria identidad de su abuelo para luchar contra el mal.

¡Eh, que es diferente! Aquí es el Capi el que lleva el parche. Y casi que ya.

Por qué nos flipa: Es una castaña pilonga, pero apunta una posibilidad bien chula: el Capi en una realidad paralela donde ganan los nazis. Y ojito, que el personaje de cómic existió de verdad: está en dominio público y cualquiera puede hacer un film sobre él.

Iron Hero

Año: 2008

Argumento: Un doctor trabaja en crear una especie de armadura invencible. Cuando descubre que su mecenas es un mafioso que pretende usarlo para el mal, decide entregárselo a su joven aprendiz, puro de corazón, para que destruya a los malvados.

¡Eh, que es diferente! Ejem… en realidad el traje es una especie de cosplay cutrón (cospobre, que dirían los brasileños). Pero hey: ¡el que va dentro no es millonario! Con eso vale, ¿no?

Por qué nos flipa: Sale Reggie, el entrañable heladero que lucha contra el mal de las películas de Phantasma. Y casi que ya, porque esta es LA MÁS INSUFRIBLE DE TODAS.

El Todopoderoso Thor

Año: 2011

Procedencia: EEUU

Argumento: A Thor, garrulo dios del trueno, le roban el martillo y el tío va por ahí machacando malos en la tierra a ver si se lo devuelven.

¡Eh, que es diferente! Es el mismo Dios del trueno, habla como él, es rubio (y no pelirrojo) como el de Marvel. Pero va con pieles, más al lo vikingo.

Por qué nos flipa: al igual que en los films de Thor, es Loki, su malvado Hermano, el que roba la función. Richard Grieco era un ídolo teen y aquí, totalmente demacrado, hace de un Dios de la mentira… ¡clavadito a Riuk de Death Note! ¿No os molaría un crossover, con Thanos consiguiendo no ya el guantelete del infinito, sino el cuaderno de la muerte?

El asombroso Balumba

Año: 2013

Argumento: un científico descubre una fórmula para mutar en un monstruo con una fuerza enorme. Un malvado millonario que vive en un castillo quiere hacerse con la fórmula y secuestra a su novia. Perseguido por la policía y el ejército el asombroso Balumba tendrá que salvar a su chica y derrotar a su enemigo.

¡Eh, que es diferente! El bicho no es verde: ¡es violeta!

Por qué nos flipa: Con un presupuesto de menos de 10.000 euros y realizada en su integridad a base de cromas, su autor consiguió terminarla a base de usar imágenes de librerías y demos de programas 3D, utilizando los ordenadores del trabajo durante los fines de semana. Soy MEGAFAN de esta maravillosa y desastrosa película, totalmente única e irrepetible.

Bonus Track con un cruce loquísimo de personajes

Thunderstorm

Año: 2011

Argumento: Un culto malvado pretende traer a nuestro mundo a la diosa de la muerte. Thor decide tomar cartas en el asunto y confiere sus poderes a uno de sus descendientes mortales para que luche contra los malvados cultistas. El será… ¡Thunderstorm!

¡Eh, que es diferente! La manera en que los poderes del Dios del Trueno se manifiestan en el mortal es.. ¡creando una armadura como la de el hombre de hierro! ¡ES IRON THOR!

Por qué nos flipa: joder, es que es Iron Man con los poderes de Thor. ¡Como no nos va a flipar, aunque sea un poco! Queremos ver al Capitán América llevando la armadura de Iron Man y blandiendo el martillo de Thor, ahí to junto. Esta mierda nos da esperanzas de que algún día suceda.

The post Ya llegan Los Vengadores… del cine chungo appeared first on CINEMANÍA.

Victoria Fernández tipped us off that she has some work to share with your eyeballs over on her Tumblr and website.

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Imagen vía Flickr

Supongo que todo el mundo lo sabe, todo el mundo ha llegado a deducirlo menos yo. Joder, no lo tenía del todo claro, ¿vale? No es que sea un gasto excesivo, realmente podría llegar a permitírmelo si no me gastara tanto dinero en pollos de granja ecológica y discos con envíos desde Estados Unidos. Podría ahorrar un poco de dinero, podría tener internet en casa si en vez de hacerme un "Jackie" me hiciera un simple wiskola con Cutty Sark o Dyc, pero no sería lo mismo. A estas alturas de la historia de la humanidad internet es barato, casi NOS OBLIGAN a tenerlo. Forma parte de una enorme conspiración para tenernos controlados, por eso los precios son tan populares. Aun así, uno —en la vida— tiene preferencias. Uno tiene que saber lo que quiere y lo que puede permitirse. De todas las cosas que decidí sacrificar en mi hogar —sartenes decentes, un televisor, cucharas pequeñas, agua caliente...—, una de ellas fue la conexión a internet. Que le den por el culo, "ya tengo internet en el trabajo" pensé. "Además me irá bien para disfrutar de otras cosas de la vida. No entrar en espirales de rondetas de Facebook o agujeros negros de Youtube. Podré trabajar en casa con mis cosas. Aprovechar el tiempo. Tiempo sano". Menuda mierda. No hagáis caso a todos esos que os dicen que se vive bien sin internet, no es verdad. Vivir sin red es una mierda. Por suerte tengo el móvil con conexión, esto es lo que me está manteniendo con vida. Pero consultar internet a través de una pantalla pequeña es una tortura, ese pequeño rosetón rectangular por el que entra la preciosa luz del sol y entraña tonos coloridos maravillosos resulta INSUFICIENTE. Internet es demasiado grande e inabarcable como para observarlo desde una mirilla de puerta.

Hay varios momentos en la vida de una persona en los que internet es completamente necesario y no acepta sucedáneos. Sacrifica LO QUE SEA pero ponte internet en el hogar. Deja de comer si hace falta, es mejor estar hambriento que desconectado.

Masturbarse

Está claro que este tenía que ser el primer punto. Internet en el hogar es sobre todo esto, una herramienta masturbatoria. Hace unas semanas en VICE sacamos este artículo que hablaba sobre la maldición de masturbarse exclusivamente con Youporn y de la belleza de "tocarse" con la mente —utilizar la imaginación y todo eso— y sacar de ello una experiencia sensorial nueva. Bueno, el artículo era cojonudo y conecté con él perfectamente pero qué coño, a veces uno se hace noodles rápidos cuando tiene hambre y no tiene ni tiempo ni ganas de cocinar de la misma forma que no puede permitirse convertir su casa en el gran templo de la masturbación intelectual y tiene que conformarse con una cosa rápida ya que en 20 minutos uno tiene que ir a recoger a la hija al colegio. Internet, en estos casos, es nuestro amigo indispensable. No me malinterpretéis, no es solamente una cuestión de tiempo, internet es una fuente infinita de maná sexual, tildarlo de "cutre" u "ordinario" significa que no estás navegando por los sitios correctos.

Contacto con la gente

Antaño se usaba la llamada telefónica. Ahora, como las amistades también son más débiles, esto parece algo excesivo. La comunicación ha pasado a ser textual y si no dispones de un aparato con internet para comunicarte con tus "colegas" estás perdido. Te vas a perder conciertos, cenas, citas con fines sexuales y noches de cubatas. Llevas meses sin entender por qué la gente "ya no sale". Sí que lo hacen pero simplemente lo hacen sin ti. Si no existes en internet no existes en la realidad. Irás desapareciendo poco a poco de las mentes de tus amigos hasta convertirte en un espectro. Un día uno de ellos dirá algo así como "¿os acordáis de ese tipo que a veces meaba en barras de discoteca?" y nadie sabrá de quién coño habla. En fin, ya no eres nada, has desaparecido y nadie ha ido a tu entierro. Ni siquiera tuviste un entierro. Eres tan patético que ni siquiera has tenido que morirte para que te olviden.

Empezar a "hacer cosas"

Primero crees que sin internet en el hogar podrás hacer un montón de cosas. "Hace tiempo que quiero hacer unos collages". "Voy a restaurar muebles de los setenta". Este tipo de mierdas. Poco a poco te das cuenta de que lo único que sabes hacer bien es darle a "Me gusta" a las cosas que hace la otra gente. Que te guste algo no significa que seas capaz de hacerlo. Que conectes con la literatura de Carver no significa que puedas escribir como Carver. Ya me seguís. Esta es la gran verdad de la vida: tus gustos no son tu virtud. Internet va muy bien para distraerte de esa idea de que no vales para nada, de que solamente eres un cuerpo con ideas dentro que un día morirá.

Cultura

La base del consumo de cultura en este país se encuentra en internet. El leecher es el nuevo connoisseur. Internet te proporciona el seguimiento a tiempo real de series, películas, música, cómics, literatura y lo que sea. Sin la cascada celestial de información en red estás condenado a tener que comprar o coger prestados objetos de cultura. Como el dinero es escaso, nunca podrás igualar a esos que no necesitan dinero para tenerlo todo. Te has quedado atrás, no sigues las series y esto significa que ya no puedes formar parte de ciertas conversaciones, de ciertos círculos sociales. Te conviertes en "el que no tiene internet", el que no SABE. No puedes seguir el ritmo de producción de la realidad. A veces te quedas parado delante de tu estantería, repleta de libros, y lloras pensando en la insignificancia real de todos estos pequeños volúmenes. Lo que tú creías que era todo, resulta no ser nada.

Internet

¿Qué pasa cuando realmente necesitas internet cuando no tienes internet en casa? Yo qué sé, tienes que mandar muy urgentemente un PDF a tu abogada antes de tener PROBLEMAS REALES con tu exmujer. Hay casos en los que el procesador de tu smartphone no es suficiente y necesitas una máquina de verdad, una máquina con pelotas, una máquina con internet. En estos casos tienes que acceder a otro mundo, un mundo nuevo donde toda la gente lleva gorras de béisbol y tiene la cara triste: los locutorios. Estos sitios ofrecen cápsulas de internet y con 50 céntimos tienes el mundo a tus pies. Minutos de gloria, minutos para solucionar problemas y volver a conectar con tus viejos amigos y amantes. Son un pequeño oasis de salvación en el doloroso devenir del que no tiene conexión en casa. El ambiente es deprimente y normalmente los teclados y sillas están destrozados. Pero, ¿sabes qué? De algún modo conectas con toda esta gente, con todos estos perdedores que una vez decidieron no tener internet en casa y que siguen luchando, cada día, contra el orden natural de las cosas. Es difícil subir el río a contracorriente, pero ahí arriba, ahí dónde nace el líquido frío y cristalino, es donde los salmones dan vida a una nueva generación.

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micdotcom:

Watch: Cecily Strong absolutely destroyed at the White House Correspondents Dinner. Seriously, the whole thing is incredible. 

whew, feels good to finally get that off my chest. i wrote it as one of my essay answers and i failed that midterm, so i just never brought it up again

nice to talk about things i’ve been holding back on

NEW MORNING RUSH

Once more unto the rush with another episode of our morning radio program! This one has it all, for sufficient definitions of “all.” Does yours include an examination of Dr. Oz’s credentials, an energy drinks quiz, and a voicemail from the god of lightning? Merriam-Webster’s does! So does this week’s show!

Detroit's historic Masonic Temple reeked of pot, sweat, flat soda, and Speed Stick deodorant on the night of February 21. The funk of the juggalo had choked the air of a venue that—thanks to its gold ceilings and red carpets—looked like it should have been hosting a performance of Swan Lake instead of white rappers in clown makeup.

There's always a twisted tent-revival vibe to Insane Clown Posse's shows, but Juggalo Day was another beast altogether. This year, the free annual hometown show, which is put on to collect canned goods for a collection of food banks, resembled Blade's bloodbath rave, if you exchanged the fake blood for Faygo Moon Mist. Rapturous ICP fans writhed together in their soda sacrament, yelping "whoop whoop," while Violent J, Shaggy 2 Dope, and their brood of cryptic clown dancers ran circles around the stage with the kind of swagger you can only learn in America's worst public schools.

To people outside of the culture, the scene at Juggalo Day was an embarrassment at best, and dangerous at worst. The FBI currently classifies juggalos as a national gang. And after 26 years of releasing albums and going on international tours, ICP is just as divisive today as they were when the now-defunct Blender magazine named them the worst band in history. Even though the juggalo family has never been bigger or stronger, there is little appreciation for the artistry behind their music or the supportive nature of the culture they created. And so, they soldier on, making music for their hordes of obsessed fans outside of the mainstream.

As such, the group quietly released their latest album, The Marvelous Missing Link: The Lost Version, this week. And despite it breaking the top 10 of the iTunes hip-hop albums chart, there were no reviews on Pitchfork.com or short profiles in the last pages of the New Yorker. When the band gets any press at all, it's usually terrible and diminutive. Every legitimate rap critic I asked to talk about ICP refused to comment for this story because the band was, in one writer's words, "irrelevant." Not to mention, nearly every news outlet—including this one—has sent a reporter down to events like Juggalo Day to gawk at the freaks and depict the band and its followers as imbeciles.

However, I wasn't in the thralls of the sticky bacchanalia at Juggalo Day. I was backstage with ICP's small (by rap standards) entourage of family and friends. And from there, the scene didn't look like a bunch of rabid fans hailing dufuses who extol the pleasures of soda pop. Instead, it looked like clockwork. Roadies moved on and off the stage in synchronized fashion, covering hot lights from soda splashes and wheeling in new props and effects. Backup clowns tapped in and tapped out, like tag-team wrestlers, all based on a strict, timed script. It was like these Midwestern knuckleheads were putting on a twisted version of Miss Saigon.

"It's just all based on cues that [Violent J and Shaggy 2 Dope] set," a backup clown said.

"We're performing, so they gotta know when to come out, when to leave, when to hit the floor, when to throw Faygo—all in unison," Violent J said to me. "[It's just] like the Backstreet Boys."

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For a pivotal show like Juggalo Day, ICP and their clown crew do grueling practices every day of the week before the show, on a soundstage in a warehouse located in Farmington Hills, Michigan. They rehearse costumes changes, choreograph dance moves, practice entrance cues, and work on their Faygo-spraying technique. It's like a carnivalesque take on the strict, rehearsal regimen Motown artists went through in the 60s at Hitsville USA, which is only about ten minutes from where Violent J and Shaggy first formed ICP.

ICP's intense work ethic and preparation have been essential to their ascension from a second-tier Detroit rap group into the leaders of their own subculture—a feat accomplished by virtually no other group in popular American music, save for maybe the Grateful Dead.

Being a juggalo has become a way of life for tens of thousands of Americans who feel disenfranchised for one reason or another. As one dreadlocked juggalette I met at Juggalo Day named Sarah told me, ICP is for "Kids who just don't fit in at other places... It's family. It makes you feel good... You can be yourself."

The lifestyle juggalos lead isn't just about memorizing the macabre lyrics from the group's dozens of albums. It's about watching the group's feature films so many times you know every word, and supporting all the other face-painted acts on their Psychopathic Records label, which has been estimated to pull in more than $10 million annually. It's about drinking Faygo soda until you've increased your risk for diabetes. It's about attending events like Juggalo Day and the Gathering of the Juggalos, where a reported tens of thousands of people come together every year for four days to allegedly throw poop on Tila Tequila, watch a little person give disabled veterans lap dances, and sing along to classic ICP songs like "Please Don't Hate Me (Eminem's Mom)." (Sample lyric: "Please don't hate me, but I been fucking your mom loose lately.")

The latest effort by ICP is the two-part record The Marvelous Missing Link: The Lost Version, which revolves around faith, because according to what Violent J told me, living life without faith is like "living with sunglasses on with a shade of depression. No matter what the weather is like, it's always gloomy and shitty."

That's a weird sentiment to come from a group known for making "inappropriate" music so offensive they were dropped from their second major record label contract in the late 90s. But then again, I've always known that there was more to ICP than what meets the eye, which is why I made my way to Detroit, the birthplace of the juggalo, to uncover how they've become one of pop culture's most reviled and successful phenomena.

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Downtown Detroit looks like Baghdad with snow. Windowless six-story buildings litter the landscape. Local restaurants employ security guards with bulletproof vests. And police helicopters circle the city's skies like vultures, night and day, as the sound of sirens constantly ring out in the distance.

And yet, ICP are staunchly optimistic for their city. When I first met the duo at Psychopathic Records headquarters in Farmington Hills, which is 22 miles northwest of Downtown, they kept reassuring me that Motor City was on "the come-up," a notion that became increasingly hard for me to understand. I found myself constantly thinking, If this is what it looks like when it's on the rise, what the hell did it look like during their childhood?

Shaggy 2 Dope and Violent J, whose real names are Joseph "Joey" Utsler and Joseph Bruce, grew up together in several low-income neighborhoods outside Detroit in the 70s. This was an era of the city's sharp economic decline, with rampant white flight to the suburbs and crucial institutions like Motown and manufacturing plants leaving the city for more lucrative locales. Violent crime in the inner city was also reaching an all-time high, with more than 1,000 annual homicides throughout most of the decade. This level of oppressive violence was a part of J and Shaggy's everyday life, even as kids. In his memoir, Behind the Paint, Violent J recounts seeing a naked woman "[running] out of a house with her hands tied" as he walked to school. That woman, he claims, had just been raped.

The memoir also paints the troubles Violent J was having at home. In a chapter called "Life with Satan," he describes how his stepfather, whom he refers to by the fake name "Lester the Molester," would grab his penis when he was just a young boy.

(Violent J was unavailable to comment on the topic of his childhood abuse. Psychopathic Records' publicist told me via email to "please refer to Violent J's autobiography Behind the Paint concerning his views on this particular topic... Many names have been changed for legal purposes, but Jumpsteady [Violent J's brother] can verify that everything described in the book is truthful.")

Violent J also remembers his stepfather's two grandsons coming over from time to time. One day, according to Violent J, one of the grandsons said, "Let's have sex," and ordered him to strip off his clothes and lie down on his stomach. At that point, Violent J didn't even know what sex was. He says he refused, left the room, and told his brother, Jumpsteady. According to the book, Jumpsteady chased the grandsons out of the house.

"Now that I'm a grown-ass, old-ass man, things are much different," Violent J writes. "If I ever run into [my stepfather]'s tired frame again, I'll kill [him]."

Later, as a teen, he says in the book, his friend walked him to the back of an abandoned house. The friend took out his cock and told Violent J to suck it. Violent J says he started crying and then saw a log. He went down, as if he was about to suck his cock, and then picked up the log, threw it at him, and ran.

"Memories like [this] can haunt you for a lifetime," he writes. "I realize that everybody out there has horrible memories of their own. I'm not alone in this. I think it's best for people to tell other ninjas about their horrible memories, because in time, that horrible memory of yours might turn into a funny story, and that makes it much easier to deal with. "

Obviously, this is a mantra that goes deep into a lot of ICP's work, considering their countless humorous songs about killing pedophiles. And although his youth featured abuse, it's clear that J holds fond memories of his childhood, especially once he became best friends with Shaggy in elementary school. Their friendship was the one constant thing they had at a time when both their families struggled to make ends meet.

There are a lot of juggalos out there who grew up by themselves in those conditions, and it was hard. It wasn't easy until they discovered [ICP]. —Violent J

They related to each other because they were so damn poor and didn't have real father figures in the home. The lack of male presence in the house especially affected Shaggy, who fell into drinking and drug use at an early age partially because there was no one around strong enough to stop him.

"Couldn't nobody take it. I was a drunk," Shaggy told Howard Stern in 2006 about how bad his drinking eventually became after ICP exploded. "I still get into fights. Only problem with [sobriety] is now I remember the fights."

As poor kids, they both only owned one shirt and two pairs of pants, which made them unpopular with classmates. Other kids clowned them constantly for being poor and treated them like "scrubs." Then, one day, they decided enough was enough. In middle school, they started to embrace the "scrub life" and made it a style choice, calling themselves "the floobs."

"We can make it cool to have nothing," Violent J decided. He and Shaggy started to flaunt. When they rode their shitty bikes down the street, they'd scream, "We're the floobs!" It was a scene probably not too dissimilar from the way I saw juggalos defiantly yell "Family!" at Juggalo Day, pronouncing their unity as proud scum bags.

Making something out of nothing would become an essential theme of ICP's music and the culture around it. Eventually, they'd go on to write songs about Payless shoes as if they were Margiela sneakers and pen love odes to overweight women like they were Rihanna. "A lot of fat chicks appreciated that," Violent J joked to me, but he sees ICP's mission as a very serious one. "There are a lot of juggalos out there who grew up by themselves in those conditions, and it was hard," he said. "It wasn't easy until they discovered [ICP]."

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Every juggalo I met at Juggalo Day echoed this statement. When they're telling their stories of first identifying as a juggalo, they sound like gay men talking about coming out of the closet. You don't become a Juggalo; you're born one. Before ICP made them aware that they were part of the juggalo family, they felt like outcasts. They were too fat, too ugly, and too poor to even hang with the punks or the comic-book nerds. Juggalo culture gave them an identity, while also transforming the stigmas of their scrub-life into something to be proud of. Or, as Violent J put it, "Now everybody's a floob."

In their late teens, the floobs became an actual gang—the Inner City Posse. They "were all losers so far in our lives, and the whole gang thing kind of gave us an excuse to be losers," as Violent J put it in his memoir. Where most gangs cook crack or run prostitution rings, they just did "horrible things," like hitting hookers on the face with bricks. But the gang also acted like bloodthirsty Robin Hoods. "I hated the rich," Violent J wrote in Behind the Paint. "We'd drive around Birmingham and just beat the shit out of rich kids."

Violent J was too busy making mayhem in the streets to take rap seriously. It wasn't until he went to jail for 90 days when he was 18 for attempting to steal a car that he started really writing rhymes. When he got out, he decided to stay out of trouble and devote himself to his music. He recorded a tape called Enter the Ghetto Zone, calling himself Violent J for the first time. Shaggy loved it and started rapping with him.

Everybody on the Detroit rap scene started to develop gimmicks. Kid Rock dressed as a cowboy. Esham said he worshiped Satan. And ICP painted their faces like clowns.

The duo spent hours recording songs, handing out flyers, and begging record store owners to sell their albums. They loved the work, and Violent J hoped to become as musically accomplished as his idols like Michael Jackson and Brian Wilson, who "worked on his shit so hard he went crazy." However, this work ethic came with a price: "It meant sacrificing tons of shit that normal 19-, 20-, 21-year-old kids do like going out clubbing, hollering at chicks, and partying," Shaggy said.

The earliest incarnation of the Inner City Posse mainly rapped about goofing off. It wasn't until Violent J and Shaggy heard the Houston, Texas, rap group the Geto Boys, in the late 80s, that they got interested in making music that was equally inspired by both gangster shit and horror films. By the early 90s, many Detroit rappers were penning rhymes about street life, so everybody on the scene started to develop gimmicks to make a name for themselves. Kid Rock dressed as a cowboy. Esham said he worshiped Satan. And ICP painted their faces like clowns.

Violent J claims that he got the idea to put on clown makeup from God.

"The Dark Carnival came into our life and started delivering ideas. It didn't make sense at first, but we were like, let's do it—and we did it," Shaggy told me.

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Its meaning has evolved over the years, but generally speaking, the Dark Carnival is the universe in which Insane Clown Posse's mythos is based. More specifically, as Violent J told Rolling Stone, it's about "the killing of racist people and the killing of pedophiles." In that sense, it's an allegory for doling out judgment, a kind of purgatory-themed amusement park where the bourgeois and the oppressors and the predators finally get what's coming to them.

"In our music, we express a lot of anger. A lot of the anger we express is still very real. It's just easier to say it on your record, and it's amplified on our records," Violent J told me. "If we talk about killing a pedophile, that comes from somewhere. That's real anger. We wish we could kill a pedophile, so we do it on the albums."

You can see this play out in their songs, such 1997's "Piggy Pie" and 2010's "To Catch a Predator," which is a revenge fantasy about torturing and decapitating a pedophile. In the realm of the Dark Carnival, it's people like this who have to go.

"Maybe it won't look exactly like it did in my vision, but something out there is coming, and it is going to consume all those whose souls are not pure," J writes in his memoir.

Those who do the judging and killing within the Dark Carnival are a cadre of extremely violent fictional characters. They have ominous names like the Great Milenko and the Ringmaster, are depicted with sinister faces, and all possess their own unique powers. Each character is represented by his or her own "joker card," which serves as the cover for each character's eponymous concept album in the ICP catalog. ICP completed their first deck of joker cards in 2004. There are six cards in a deck. Now, the group is on its second deck, of which the newly released The Marvelous Missing Link: Lost/Found Era is the third installment.

"Usually, the message [of] the joker card is second to the entertainment and it's a hidden message," Violent J said to me. However, "The message [of The Marvelous Missing Link] is right in your face: Find hope."

"No rapper out, I don't give a shit who it is, could do what [ICP] did. They created a movement." —DJ Paul

At this point, a concept like hope being the center of an ICP album isn't too unheard of. In 2001, after leaving Island Records to release music on their own label, Psychopathic Records, they dropped The Wraith: Shangri-La, the first album of the final card of the first joker deck. The album's final track, "Thy Unveiling," shocked outsiders and even longtime fans with the final stanza of its opening verse:

"When we speak of Shangri-La, what you think we mean? / Truth is we follow God, we've always been behind him. / The Carnival is God, and may all Juggalos find him!"

Some Juggalos felt duped: Had ICP been religious all along? Although the Guardian and other outlets have called the group Christian, ICP says this is false. They simply wanted to bring a deeper message to their music and tell the juggalos, their fellow floobs, there was hope even in the apocalypse. The shock factor also helped keep their name out there.

"We're the opposite of a band like U2, who can say, 'We're gonna take a couple years and regroup, guys.' We can't do that shit. We're underground," Violent J said to me. "We're constantly trying to stay relevant—constantly struggling to make noise that will cause people to look our way. It's hard when you're underground and you don't have hits on the radio and shit."

The gamble paid off. Today, Psychopathic Records is a full-blown business and ICP is a mainstay of the American cultural landscape. On the Billboard independent album charts, they have sold more number-one indie albums than the Yeah Yeah Yeahs or the White Stripes. The band has also continued to gain new fans. At Juggalo Day, I even met second-generation juggalos who were raised by juggalo parents.

"As far as rappers, I don't think rappers even stand a chance to give their opinion on ICP because ICP is kicking all of their ass," Three 6 Mafia founder and hip-hop legend DJ Paul told me. "No rapper out, I don't give a shit who it is, could do what they did. They created a movement. [The Gathering of the Juggalos] has people sleeping in their cars or in the grass for three days straight. I can't think of another rapper who can do that. You gotta have more than some good songs and sold a [few] million records to do that. [They had a] a genius plan."

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ICP runs the Psychopathic Records operation from a two-story brick building in Farmington Hills, a suburb outside Detroit. It's their own demented take on Hittsville, USA.

Smoking an e-cig, Shaggy took me on a tour of the office with Violent J. In an office downstairs, they've pasted fan photos on the "Karma Wall."

"Every picture, there's something behind it," Shaggy said. "There are pictures of some normal-ass shit—people's high school photos, baby photos—but there's super entertaining things in the mix. It's not up there if it didn't mean something to somebody here."

Upstairs are offices for Psychopathic Records CEO Bill Dail, whom ICP met when they were kids, and Jumpsteady, Violent J's brother. Dail holds down the fort while the group tours and records. And Jumpsteady helps get out important messages to the juggalo family. "Jugalos love and trust the word of Jumpsteady," Violent J said.

Violent J and Shaggy have built Psychopathic to run on family values, which is incredible considering their home lives as children were so dysfunctional. They hire family members or old friends, and both rappers bring their kids and wives on tour, making pit stops at Chuck E Cheese to entertain them. Their years of raging and fucking "thousands, thousands" of women are long behind them—in fact, Shaggy's sober.

"[Being sober] doesn't make a difference in touring because we never really had the type of tours where we're balls-out rock stars," Shaggy said to me. "Nowadays it's just not as appealing as it used to be. We get done with a show and we're fucking tired."

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To preserve their legacy, they've converted one conference room into a storage space containing all of their keepsakes and mementos. Silver metal shelves and clothes racks contain 25 years of ICP history: fake police outfits, zombie masks, monk robes, an ape costume—the list goes on and on. The room leads to a staircase that takes you down to a huge warehouse where they store the merch they sell online. Where most bands sell shitty shirts, ICP's merch runs the gamut from T-shirts to clothes that resemble high-end streetwear. It's only a matter of time before a downtown store like V-Files appropriates their panties that say "Psycho Bitch" or the purple jumpers that say "Faygo" on the back.

The heart and soul of the building, however, has nothing to do with e-commerce or clothes—it's their recording studio, "the Lotus Pod." It's in this wood-paneled studio where they've recorded most of their masterpieces.

"[The Lotus Pod] is the mecca of Psychopathic Records," Violent J said to me.

"The ground zero of where all the magic is produced," Shaggy 2 Dope continued for him. "This is where the noise comes from—right here in this building."

On the walls I saw the result of this noise—a framed gold record of The Amazing Jeckel Brothers and platinum plaque for The Great Milenko. These accomplishments and their family fortress in Farmington are a far cry from the group's broken and battered childhood as poor misbegotten kids rummaging around the gritty streets of Motor City. The plaque represents all the tireless hard work they've channeled into their art.

"It's more like a lifestyle than a workaholic," Shaggy added. "It's kind of like work is our life."

And they want this year's next two albums, The Missing Link: Lost and The Missing Link: Found, to continue to teach the juggalo community how to hope for a better future.

And who better to spread that message than Violent J and Shaggy 2 Dope? After all, before the floobs, before The Great Milenko, before the Gathering, before Faygo became white-trash holy water, they were just two poor kids banding together together to overcome the perils of gang-ridden Detroit and the trauma of abuse.

"Who can knock something like [hope]? Who could diss something that provides hope for people?" Violent J asked me. "And so that's what we're talking about, man—have hope in your life."

Follow Mitchell Sunderland and Amy Lombard on Twitter.

clickholeofficial:

An Oral History Of Radiohead’s ‘OK Computer’

Thom Yorke: From the beginning, my goal was to make an album that would get us all sent to jail for the rest of our lives.

Ed O’Brien: Thom’s problem with Pablo Honey and The Bends was that neither of those albums had resulted in jail time for the band. I don’t know why he wanted us all to go to jail, but he was very insistent that we should all spend 20 to 30 years in jail to be considered a real band.

Philip Selway: We wanted to record [the album] in a Best Buy in order to be close to computers, but they kept kicking us out, so we eventually moved into our own studio in Oxfordshire.

Jonny Greenwood: We love recording there because we’re allowed to chew gum inside the booth. Radiohead is a big gum band. We love gum.

Thom Yorke: Gum is the impossible meal. It’s illegal to swallow, so you have to always be chewing it. A fabulous crime is that I actually swallow my gum all the time. I swallow 20 pieces of gum on “The Tourist,” and you wouldn’t even know it because I’m so fast.

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La entrada Enebro : algo más allá de un cóctel de Ginebra y Tónica aparece primero en El blog de Andrés Madrigal.

tittily:

crewdlydrawn:

art-is-blind:

thefisherqueen:

osointricate:

Tips for living alone

Buy a bat (I have my old color guard rifle) or similar. Keep it in your room/near your bed.

Get a lock for your bedroom door.

If you’re moving into a new place, change the locks….

¿¿Pero qué es todo esto?? ESTAR SOLO NO ES PELIGROSO. No va a pasarte nada estando en casa. No va a pasarte nada estando en la calle. NADIE TE ESTÁ ATACANDO. No sé en qué lugares vivís, pero el resto de las personas en general no se dedican a espiarte, perseguirte y atacarte en cuanto tienen la mínima oportinidad.

Que hay que llevarse el teléfono al baño por si tienes un accidente. No me he resbalado en la ducha en veinte años. Los vecinos me han visto a través de la ventana comiendo, trabajando y cortando verduras sin ropa y ni ha pasado nada extraño ni desde luego han intentado venir a mi casa a acabar con mi vida. He caminado sola por todo tipo de calles, algunas nada recomendables, y jamás, nunca, nadie, me ha agarrado del brazo.

Dejad de hacer como que todo es peligroso. Ese tipo de pensamiento, ya que os gusta tanto el autodiagnóstico de cualquier tipo de complicación mental, es patológico y se corresponde a un problema. Y, todavía más, DEJAD DE HACER COMO QUE ESTAR SÓLO ES UNA DESGRACIA A COMPENSAR CONSTANTEMENTE. No pasa nada. Absolutamente nada. No vais a morir.

Y NO TENGÁIS ARMAS, ni nada parecido. Ni una aplicación para revisar las predicciones meteorológicas constántemente, qué cojones os creéis, ¿que va a haber de repente un tornado? SED CONSCIENTES DE DÓNDE Y CUÁNDO VIVÍS, de verdad, que no dejo de repetirlo, no hay NADA más valioso que eso y parece que lo que más os gusta es ignorarlo.

In the video above, Baptist pastor Win Worley preaches against popular roleplaying game Dungeons & Dragons, and prays to free his congregation from occult demons.

[via christiannightmares.tumblr.com]

We’re used to seeing a wide variety of instruments, from the tiny piccolo to the grand piano, but every now and then, someone designs an instrument so magnificent or unusual that it takes a while to wrap our brains around them. So what do they sound like? And how exactly do you play them?

Read more...

Let porn star Levi Michaels help you take the “job” out of rim job. Educationally NSFW.

Will Varner / BuzzFeed

Will Varner / BuzzFeed

Will Varner / BuzzFeed

Will Varner / BuzzFeed

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WE NEED TO KNOW.

Meet Boo, the world's cutest dog.

Via upic.me

❤️❤️❤️

Boo is the world's. cutest. dog. He has 16 million likes on Facebook, which is 5% of the population in the US. He has two books, his own stuffed animal, and a Wikipedia page.

But have you ever really thought about Boo?

Is Boo really that special?

What if Boo is an asshole?

Or worse, what if Boo is just a Pomeranian with a really good haircut?

Is Boo just Buddy with a good haircut?

Picasa / Via chroniclebooks.com

Buddy is Boo's photobombing sidekick, and he's got a full blow-out.

It turns out that Boo and Buddy are Pomeranians. The dogs have the same coloring, the same eyes, and even the same smile.

If you gave Buddy a haircut, would he look like Boo?

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Photo via Flickr user Lindsay

Tattoos say everything you need to know about the society that births them—and America is witnessing an epidemic of bad ones. There are no numbers to back this up, probably because no one has thought to do this sort of survey, but it definitely feels like there are more terrible tattoos than ever. Everywhere you look, people are sporting clichéd branding, dumb quotes, exes' names (remember "Winona Forever"?), phrases mistranslated into foreign languages, and in one strange case, random buzzwords inked all over a guy's face.

In an effort to shed some light on why people keep getting barbed wire biceps and butterfly tramp stamps, I talked to Dr. Kirby Farrell, a University of Massachusetts professor specializing in anthropology, psychology, and history as it relates to human behavior. His latest book, Berserk Style in American Culture, discusses the vocabulary of post-trauma culture in American society.

VICE: What's your interest in bad tattoos?
Kirby Farrell: I'm interested mostly in what you'd call "the anthropology of self-esteem and identity." So I'm thinking of tattoos as a method people use to try to feel significant in the world. I do a lot of work with Ernest Becker—did you ever hear about a book he did? I think he won a Pulitzer Prize for it, called The Denial of Death.

Yes, I've heard of it.
Well, his basic argument is that we're unique among the animals because we're burdened with an awareness of the future, futility, death, and so on. We're constantly devising defenses. Culture is a defense against feeling overwhelmed or futile or doomed. Cultures are full of values and beauties that can make you feel as if your life is significant and has lasting meaning even though you know it's going to be limited. So you could say that tattoos are cultural expressions of of heroism or individuality.

So how does that translate in to an epidemic of bad tattoos?
I guess a lot of people would say they'd get a tattoo as a memorial to remember somebody or some event. For example, getting song lyrics as a tattoo. The phrases, of course, turn out to be unbelievably suffocating clichés. So they're urging you to be a strong individual by imitating all the other animals who are out there putting clichés on their skin.

So where do those two paths cross where, on one hand, people want to do something that brings out their sense of significance and self expression but end up doing the exact opposite by getting what we'd consider a "bad tattoo," or a "clichéd tattoo"?
I think the fantasy of being special and unique and important and heroic, which we've been talking about, is complicated by living in a culture that celebrates those values. We're constantly bombing other countries in order to preserve our "freedom," which presumably means individuality. But at the same time, our culture is intensely conformist. You have businesses constantly trying to imprint a brand on the public awareness. So, for example, if you're tattooing some nitwit cliché from a pop tune, like "I'll love you forever," or "Don't be an imitator" or something, in effect you're branding yourself with industrial entertainment, because rock groups, as we know, are basically money-making machines, fronted by models, funded by the entertainment industry.

So, why would people do that?
One answer is that we're incredibly social animals. You have to keep in mind that the self is not a thing. It's an event. When you're in deep sleep, the self doesn't really exist. The neurochemistry for being a self is not there. So from this point of view, we feel most real when other people are affirming us, and reassuring us, and reinforcing our identity. In all the social rituals you go through, like saying "Hi, how are you? Fine, how are you?" You don't really expect to hear any personal information. It's really just a confirmation that you both exist and acknowledge each other. So in a way, tattoos function in that sort of fashion. They bring attention to you and make you feel real, even if the attention is making you feel like a member of a huge group. A tattoo tells you that you are one of, as it were, a tribe of tattooed folks that are really beautiful and significant. You may even share symbols with somebody else! And at the same time, because of the branding phenomenon, it makes you feel like you're smarter than the next guy who doesn't know enough to buy your particular product, or your particular fashion.

"Culture is constantly tempting us with fantasies of uniqueness and heroism."

It sounds like you're saying that culture, itself, is cliché. So in trying to emulate social culture, we get these bad tattoos.
Culture is constantly tempting us with fantasies of uniqueness and heroism. You're tempted to buy something like a new BMW because it promises to makes you feel heroic on the street. You stand out from the crowd. The crowd—they're just ordinary people, they're gonna die someday and be forgotten. But everybody's looking at you, you're in the spotlight, you're the hero. And at the same time, if you adjust the perspective slightly, they're making ordinary people feel OK to be hero worshippers. You're invited to identify and admire the rich, the heroic, the prestigious, and if you admire them, it becomes "my music" or "my hairdo" or "my products." In effect, you share in the glamour with the fetishistic power of the thing you admire.

So then you're saying it's like getting tricked into a social hero worship movement.
Well, whether or not you're being "tricked" probably depends on how you feel about the validity of clichés and belonging. Like if you want to tattoo yourself with a line from your favorite song, almost certainly you're feeling a kind of emotional excitement and admiration for that song. A kind of warm, romantic ecstasy. You hear people say, "It has special meaning for me." It's a kind of emotional halo that's around this object.

Why is that feeling significant to our self identity?
I think largely people are frightened about the future and cling to some familiar ritual, some familiar tagline, some familiar cliché that you find meaningful. It's kind of like a safety blanket to give your life meaning at a period when maybe your morale is under pressure or you're really excited about something good. But the point is, in either event, the cliché doesn't seem to be a cliché. It seems to have some kind of special meaning.

Related: VICE hangs out with Scottish tattoo artist Valerie Vargas.

OK, changing the subject a little: Tattooing has been around for thousands of years, we're even finding early humans with tattoos. Do you think there is something inherent to human nature that makes us want to tattoo ourselves?
Sure. The cadaver that was found frozen and preserved in the Alps, which I think is about 5,000 years old—he's in a museum in Italy, you can drop by and say hello—the latest research shows that his body has quite a few tattoos on his skin. They tend to be abstract designs. Based on their locations, it's been hypothesized that they were there to distract from uncomfortable physical things like arthritis. Or possibly, that they have some kind of magical significance. If you think about it, from a certain point of view, as all of our behavior tends to be very magical in some ways. Imaging that there's some special power in your symbols, in your tagline, in your brand, that somehow elevates your mood, makes you feel stronger, more capable, better about yourself.

Do you think that's something inherent to humanity?
Sure. As people, we are regularly on the edge of an existential panic. Becker said that if you were to see the world realistically; just how vulnerable and totally insignificant you are, in terms of the cosmos, you'd go crazy. So you constantly need stories that build up your self esteem and make you feel significant, which is, of course, what culture provides.

And so bad tattoos are a representation of that self defense mechanism.
Yes, exactly. Its physical and artistic representations of values you can identify with. We're in this world now where there's a kind of recurring, sudden racism that we haven't really seen since the 1960s or even since the Civil War. Working conditions are extremely punishing, demanding, and depersonalizing for folks on the bottom. You don't really feel entitled to your own identity. So people feel especially pressured to try to find their own magical reinforcement for things that the culture is not really helping you much with. You see money and injury and death and guilt while people want to feel safe and feel like they're in charge of the world in terms of personal self-esteem and well being.

A lot of tattoos seem shortsighted. How do people rationalize the permanence of a tattoo in relation to their own mortality?
A lot of people, especially when they're young, imagine that they're going to be young forever. After all, if the magic that we're talking about in culture really works, then you can feel invincible and immortal, so to speak. And its kind of cliché that teenagers imagine that they're going to live forever; that's why they take crazy risks and do drugs and so on. They can't imagine that they're gonna grow up and look differently than the cultural ideal. You never have to worry about being sick or infirm or in trouble. You never have to worry about being older and having to come to terms with diminishing prospect, diminishing powers, diminishing fantasies.

Do you think that is a reaction to fear or that is an actual obliviousness because of a lack of age?
Well, wouldn't you guess it's both?

I suppose so.
That you're afraid but you don't want to admit you're afraid because it could damage your fragile morale. A damaged morale makes you less effective, less secure, less productive, etc. So you just deny that you're afraid. Probably the basic mechanism of culture is to pretend that everything is just rosy and you're not afraid.

But we are afraid.
Yeah, absolutely. You're dealing with a moment in which people seem to be so hungry for self-esteem and approval and confidence that they're willing to say and do really bizarre, or silly things, because it makes them feel different. It makes them feel unique and significant and alive.

You can find Kirby Farrell's latest book, The Psychology of Abandon: Berserk Style in American Culture, here.

Follow Jules Suzdaltzev on Twitter.

#Dalealdébil

Does Not Commute [Free] is a game that has looked appealing and intriguing since the day I got to see it in motion. Mediocre posted a teaser video of it, then they demoed the game to us at GDChttp://toucharcade.com/2015/03/06/gdc-2015-does-not-commute/, and it was one of my favorites there. The concept was super-fun to play with, and somehow, Does Not Commute got even better from there. The tweaked some of the things from the original GDC version, and made this an absolute must-have.

The gist of the game is that you're driving an unstoppable car from point A to point B. The problem is that you're then driving another car that drives in the same time frame as the first car, and you must avoid crashing into that vehicle. This keeps going and going until you have a whole chaotic traffic pattern going on, and you're compensating for your crazy driving to get out of your own way from ten cars ago. Oh, and each car has its own weight, speed, and handling, so you have to adjust to that as well.

If you do crash, you just go slower, but you also have a time limit to deal with. You can rewind to when you started, with a one-second time penalty. To also help out, you can use one of three boosts: armor, speed, or traction. Each gives you a benefit, but also comes with its own drawback. For example, the speed boost makes your car have much worse traction. But sometimes, these boosts can help you get your car there in one piece...or in less time.

The game is about making it to the end of the game with time left, and the bonus time icons that add time to your counter are key pickups. You have to work to collect some of them. Many are just in spots where you need to take not-so-obvious or or dangerous routes. Sometimes, they're hidden in spots that aren't visible in plain sight. These are the ones that can be frustrating to pick up, because you might not be aware of them at first, leaving you wondering "where did the missing time go?" But once you realize where they are, the system winds up being kind of brilliant. The hidden ones force you to explore the level, and pay attention to the routes you're taking, and where things might be. One hidden bonus caused me to reexamine the routes I used in a level, realizing there was a jump I could make to possibly save some time. The level design is clever in that way.

Does Not Commute is a game of reactions, as much as it a game of plotting and strategy, because once you find a good route to take, you have to make it in one piece! The game offers simple controls to play with. You just use left-and-right thumb taps to control steering, and that's it. Each car has a different weight and speed to it, and the game does a great job at making each car feel individual.

The game does use the same free-to-play system that Mediocre's previous game Smash Hit [Free] uses. You can theoretically beat the entire game without paying, but you have to pay $1.99 to unlock checkpoints. So, the game winds up giving you a fair system: you can play as long as you want without paying, but if you want the game to give you a hand, you gotta pay up. Though, practicing from the beginning and from earlier levels is something you'll need to do so you can advance, as the key to the game is preserving time.

This is where Smash Hit's checkpoint system, also seen in some Jeff Minter games, comes in. You get the greatest amount of time left based on where you hit a certain checkpoint. Each crash where you have to rewind and lose a second? That's time you can't get back. So, later levels become easier if you go back to previous levels and play them, trying to minimize mistakes. This is how progress in Does Not Commute works: you play to advance, but you go back to practice, to get those precious seconds back that you once lost through crashes or rewinds.

Thankfully, the game introduces a killer feature after the first few levels which helps out a ton: practice mode. This isn't available at first, and perhaps for good reason: this trains you to react to hazards, and learn from the get-go to try and not leave crazy routes for you to try and avoid later. It does really improve the game once you do unlock it, because it means that you aren't just going in blind. You can avoid the big mistakes, crashes, and whatnot, that cause you to lose time and opportunities at getting big time boosts. You have to learn how to play the game, and once you do, then the game gives you these improved tools.

What Does Not Commute does well is to balance out the chaos of its concept with skillful play. The boosts go a long way toward making that possible, as they allow you to impact the game, and never feel stuck. There's many routes, usually, and sometimes you just have to be smart to look for a path that's not so obvious. Or maybe use the speed boost to your advantage to avoid a massive collision. The controls are responsive, too, so I never felt like it was the game's fault that I was messing up, it was my own failings.

The theme of the game is somewhat humorous no matter what, because hey, there's something funny about crashing into your own bad driving. But the little plot snippets that explain who each driver is and why they're going where they are, with the running plot points with each one's repeat appearance, adds a lot to the game's character. Also, they wind up serving as nice little reminders, perhaps, that a certain car will drive a certain way, and another will not. They're this subtle little thing, but the impact is massive toward making the game feel special and endearing

The practice mode can kind of drive you to madness if you're a perfectionist, but I'm glad it's there. It's helped me be a better player. And that's the thing: this is the kind of game that I want to play again and again, to practice until I'm fantastic at it. I want to re-do early levels to be better later on. Does Not Commute demands it, as you need enough leftover time to make it from one drive to another, but it's rather rewarding to do so. This game makes it feel good to do well at it.

What you get here is a game that straddles that balance between challenge and frustration, has a player-friendly free model to it, and is amusing and charming to boot. Definitely download Does Not Commute, whatever you do.

Dogs with Garlands

It’s never too late to dive straight into the series.

BBC

BBC

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[youtube src='//www.youtube.com/embed/RFinNxS5KN4' width='640' height='360']

The Jurassic Park movies have answered a lot of questions about dinosaurs: They move in herds, but they sneeze on each other. They'll eat you while you're pooping, but bust out some gymnastics while they're attacking and they'll run for the hills. Yet despite this wealth of knowledge, Spielberg and his paleontology consultants left out one glaring question at the front of everyone's minds: What's up with their dicks?

Will Jurassic World, with its new director, Colin Trevorrow, answer the question? Probably not. Hollywood counts on a PG-13 rating to guarantee boffo ticket sales, so some parts of dinosaurs' private lives will never make it to the big screen. That means for vital information on things like dicks, we have to turn to the second best place to learn about dinosaurs: science.

I contacted Dr. Sarah Werning, postdoctoral research fellow at Stony Brook University, who works in the fields of paleontology and evolutionary biology. She's something of an expert on dinosaur fuckin', so I gave her a call to find out what kind of heat dinosaurs were packing, as well as if they had anything weird going on down there like ducks.

VICE: Hi, Sarah. First and foremost, which dinosaur had the biggest dick?
Sarah Werning: That's a big mystery. The problem is that there aren't any fossilized dinosaur wangs. Or, we haven't found any yet. That's partly because most penises in the animal kingdom don't have a bony component. It's usually more of a liquid inflation system, so it starts out limp, and blood gets pumped into it. We have no reason to think dinosaurs would be an animal that had any bones down there.

Right, but different species had different characteristics. So we can make some educated guesses, right?
Well, in most species you'll have the male mounting the female. But there are lots of dinosaurs that had big spikes and stuff all over their backs. It's hard to think about how the hell you're going to mount something that's covered in spikes. From a practical standpoint it seems difficult. So what turtles did is they moved their cloacas [single holes for urine, feces, and reproduction] way back, not just to the base of their tails, but kind of onto their tails. So we know that the male cloaca is even further back, closer to the tip of the tail, so it can kind of curl around.

So does that mean the penis would have to be bigger to compensate for the cloaca's location?
No that's so the male can curl its tail under the shell to get closer to the female turtle's cloaca. I don't know if dinosaurs would have something like that. But there has to be some way of accommodating the fact that stegosaurus is covered in plates. Most dinosaurs don't have something sticking out of their backs.

Related: Watch our documentary about some impressive human penises.

So it's stegosaurus? Stegosaurus wins?
No. We would have to be much more speculative than that.

What would that speculation be based on?
What we do with things we can't observe in dinosaurs, or any extinct animals, is we look for their closest living relatives. The last remnants of the living dinosaur lineage are the birds. Outside of birds, the closest cousins are crocodiles and alligators, and they have really different genitals.

OK. What can we learn from birds and reptiles then, just in general?
Dinosaurs are a specialized type of reptile. So when I say "reptile," I mean that in the sense that it includes birds and dinosaurs. If you look at lizards and snakes, they have penises, but they look different from mammals' penises. If you look at turtles, they have penises. All the distant cousins have them. Some of the oldest lineages of birds, things like ostriches, emus... the big, flightless birds. But most birds don't even have penises. They don't have anything at all in terms of an organ that protrudes out of their body and shoots sperm into the female.

Are you suggesting that dinosaurs didn't have penises at all?
If all the distant cousins had them, and some of the bird groups that we think are some of the first to split off have them, then the ones that are in between—dinosaurs—they probably had them too.

What are some known penises we can use for reference?
Reptiles do penises a number of different ways. Snakes and lizards have kind of a two-headed penis that inverts. When they're feeling amorous they pump blood into it, and it sort of ejects out of their body. Crocodiles have a permanently erect penis hanging out inside of their body, waiting to be ejected at a moment's notice. They've got ejector muscles with a super-fast trigger that can push that thing out.

That's incredible! Please tell me dinosaurs had those.
It could be, but crocodiles and alligators are the only animals that have anything like that setup. Although I admit it'd be pretty amazing if they did. If you think about the sizes involved, and how fast they'd have to eject those things. Most animals with penises don't have permanent erections tucked inside a little pocket, though.

So that wouldn't be a standard dinosaur penis, then?
There's no such thing as a generic, standard-looking penis. Most of them get erect by pumping fluid into their penis like a giant water balloon. All the birds with penises do it that way, so it'd be pretty weird if dinosaurs evolved this very odd way of doing boners, and then for their descendants to go back the other way. Birds that have penises kinda have a flap of skin on the inside that they'll put lymph into, and that'll kind of eject it out. Some ducks have super-long corkscrew penises that shoot out so fast you need a high-speed camera to capture them unfurling. That's not my work, but some scientists at some point filmed that.

So you're saying even if there's a dick, it's not dangling down all the time?
Penises aren't hanging around on the outside in animals that have cloacas. Most animals, including platypuses and kangaroos, which are mammals, have a cloaca, and their penises are either deflated or tucked away inside a cloaca, and when it's time, it'll pop out of the cloaca, and they'll try and get it into the female's cloaca. Birds that don't have penises try and make their cloacas line up, male and female, and squirt the sperm in. That's called a cloacal kiss.

But how likely is a "cloacal kiss" for dinosaurs?
The cloaca's in a pretty inconvenient spot if you have to line them up, back underneath the base of the tail. Probably the fact that birds are able to fly makes the cloacal kiss a lot easier, because they can use their wings to help get into position.

A close relationship to birds doesn't seem like it bodes well for their penises. Is there anything else that separates dinosaurs from birds in terms of sex?
One thing that's interesting about dinosaurs: We were able to figure out how old they were when they hit puberty. Most birds grow to full size, wait a while, and then start reproducing, but all the dinosaurs we found medullary bone in, they seem to hit puberty pretty early on in life, while they were going through their big growth spurt. You know how we hit puberty right at the start of our big growth spurt? It's the same deal in dinosaurs.

Oh, cool, so they had awkward teenage years like us.
They have to deal with puberty on top of changing shape rapidly. So yes.

So crazy duck corkscrew penises and weird gator ejector-penises aside, what kinds of penises do animals with cloacas have?
Birds are the living dinosaurs, and most birds with penises have a pretty small, cone-shaped penis—a boring penis, as penises go. It inflates the normal way, with fluid. I don't know if you can find a picture of an ostrich penis online...

Looks a little like a tongue. OK. So that's pretty likely, huh?
Size and shape? Who knows. But you're asking if it's penis-in-cloaca sex? That's probably how it would work in dinosaurs.

But then again, lots of them have little spikes and bumps, and all sorts of weird things coming off the ends of their penises that might help them anchor onto the female better, or help get sperm in more efficiently. So whatever you want to imagine dinosaur penises looked like, let your imagination go.

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He said he’d be here at 8 PM sharp, so where the hell is he?! There can only be a billion horrendous explanations so it’s about time for you to completely lose perspective on your relationship. Here are some of the most terrifying reasons your man is between 0.1 and 5 minutes late:

1. He’s asleep, dreaming of another woman.

2. He’s gay.

3. He’s sick with something gross, that he caught at a strip club.

4. He’s killing and eating a squirrel, just for fun!

5. He’s a time traveller and he’s cheating on you right now with his beautiful frontier wife.

6. He’s burning down your house with his cheating dick.

7. He’s a time traveller and he’s cheating before he releases a dossier that will undermine the notion of democracy throughout the free world and separate him from you forever.

8. He doesn’t like your hair vlog and is ripping on it right now with friends at an internet café.

9. The wall of flowers he wanted to surprise you with, Kanye-style, is too big to fit through the restaurant door (this one is good!!!).

10. It didn’t fit through the door so he spent the last hour peeing on it.

11. He heard about that dog you accidentally shot.

12. He saw you sitting here but left because he didn’t like your hair.

13. He felt judged by your eight friends who came to judge him at your birthday drinks last week.

14. God hates you.

15. Nicholas Sparks lied to you.

17. Your Dad never loved you. Why should this guy?

18. He seemed to agree that you were looking less toned the last time he saw you.

19. He meant it when he said he wasn’t looking for a relationship.

20. He’s flying to Syria to join ISIS.

21. He’s heading to Syria to join ISIS in the resistance movement against you when you were in your raver phase.

22. He’s dead.

23. You’re dead.

24. Oh shit, there he is! Hi Greg I missed you!!!!!

Maybe you should get things in perspective. It’s only been five minutes, and he’s probably just waiting for his friend to get here so there’s someone to film your reaction when he proposes to you through the medium of musical theatre, right in front of all these doubters! Yes, it’s definitely that. You are okay!

Ways To Lose All Perspective When He’s Five Minutes Late is a post from: Reductress

Why Facebook Hates Me

I don’t use Facebook in the way that Facebook would like me to use it, and so it punishes me. I’m easy to find there, I would think, but I have less than fifty “friends” — some are actual friends, some are acquaintances or fellow-travellers — and my posts are locked to “friends of friends.” I don’t post or comment often. Therefore, Facebook doesn’t know what to do with me. Sometimes it hides my…

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