Snob

Fai xa unhas semanas, El Progreso informaba de que investigadores de Aberdeen estudan os restos da presenza viquinga na zona da Mariña.

Un equipo de investigadores da Universidade de Aberdeen, en Escocia instalouse na comarca para estudar os restos do paso dos vinkingos por esta zona. Segundo explicou Irene García Losquiño, a investigadora que está a desenvolver un proxecto sobre a presenza dos viquingos na península Ibérica, non esperaban atopar tantos vestixios: «Contabamos con atopar algo, pero non tanto, ademais non hai constancia a nivel internacional e nacional da cantidade de restos que hai aquí».

Xa fai uns meses El País recollia o achado de restos vikingos que a marea deixou ao descuberto na praia de San Román no Vicedo, concretamente no sitio arqueolóxico dos Moutillós, na Mariña Lucense. Atopáronse enorme pedras que fan pensar en tamén grandes embarcacións. Usarian estas pedras, de até 200 Kg de peso para manter estable a embarcación no percorrido por alta mar, cando ian sen carga, e das que se desfarian ao chegar a terra xa que o espazo ocupado polas pedras sería substituido por outro tipo de mercadorias. Ademais cabe destacar a multiple presenza de topónimos de orixe nórdico que hai na zona como pode ser o propio "Moutillós" (Mout-illós), unha variante de "Mota", ou "Mouta" en galego.



Pretendian facer de Galiza unha segunda Normandía para logo espallarse pola Península, de feito chegaron a rebautizar con palabras escandinavas diversos lugares da nosa xeografía. A primeira noticia da chegada de vikingos as costas galegas data do 844, chegaron uns 150 barcos e saquearon algunhas aldeas do norte e foron rexeitados por Ramiro I de Asturias na costa da Coruña. As viaxes sudedéronse até a invasión do 1014, da que se cumpren mil anos, unha das últimas e máis importantes na que os normandos asolaron Tui e chegaron a Ourense polo Miño.

Hoxe discútese si en realidade os Moutillós é un asentamento normando, ou se as intencións que tiñan eran as de saquear, conclusión que pode sacarse por ese viaxe de embarcaións con pedras e logo con mercadorias, especialmente o ouro, de feito en textos nórdicos da idade Media e significativa a presenza da expresión: “Non quixera eu iso nin por todo o ouro da Galiza”.



Estamos ante o que sería o único asentamento destas características na Península, e que a día de hoxe segue sen protección.

Spanish is one of the most beautiful languages in existence. If you speak Spanish, you can agree that not only is it the language of love, it is the language of creative cursing and expression. If you want to sound more like a local on your next trip to Spain, try incorporating the following expressions into your conversation (the English equivalent is listed below).

These idiomatic expressions are in Castilian Spanish, meaning from Spain. They may or may not make sense in Latin American countries.

1) Tomar el pelo.

Literally: “Take someone’s hair.”
English equivalent: To make fun of, poke fun at, or pull someone’s leg.
Example: “Mis hermanos siempre me toman el pelo.”
Translation: “My brothers always take my hair.”

2) Poner los cuernos.

Literally: “Put the horns on.”
English equivalent: To cheat on, to be unfaithful.
Example: “El ex novio de mi hermana le puso los cuernos.”
Translation: “My sister’s ex put the horns on her.”

3) Tener mucha cara.

Literally: “Have a lot of face.”
English equivalent: To have nerve.
Example: “Hace falta tener mucha cara para hacer lo que hizo el ayer noche durante la fiesta!”
Translation: “You need a lot of face to be able to do what he did last night at the party!”

4) Ponerse las pilas.

Literally: “To put your batteries in.”
English equivalent: To get yourself together, get a move on, get your sh*t together. This expression was believed to be originally used in Colombia. The idea of having a “low battery,” and therefore being unable to complete a task, is used in various languages.
Example: Ponte las pilas! Vas a suspender el examen!
Translation: “Put your batteries in! You’re going to fail the exam!”

5) Tener mala leche.

Literally: “To have bad milk.”
English equivalent: To be mean, unkind, bitchy. The origin of this expression dates back to medieval times, where noble women often gave their newborns to women of lower classes so that they could be breastfed. Women of the upper classes didn’t want to be bothered with this task. The “host mothers” were usually of Jewish or Moorish origin and therefore thought to “have bad milk” that would be passed on to the child. The expression was generally used as an insult.
Example: La profesora de ingles tiene muy mala leche.
Translation: “The English teacher has really bad milk.”

Illustrations by Stephen Maurice Graham

It’s 1997, and I’m searching for the fabled "Lara Croft naked patch" on the internet. It is sometime around the era of when it took about 60 years to download anything online, and the screech of the modem made your ears bleed. After about 30 years of downloading, and with blood running down my neck, I finally see outside my 12-year-old body and think, What the fuck are you doing? In a few years you will have the body of a woman and your boobs won’t look like the pyramids at Giza, either. You can just look at your own real goddamn tits. This is a thing for those boys at school to guffaw at and be like, "gross." The internet is a wonderful place for self-discovery.

This was probably the first time I was aware that sexual content was available on the internet, because I understood in a sort of nebulous way that Lara Croft was supposed to be connected to sex. Whatever it was that I was downloading turned out to be a bunch of porn and not anything remotely related to Tomb Raider, unless you are making a very specific euphemism. The look of dismay that was on my tiny face is something I wish someone had taken a photo of. Now, I look at the pictures of 1997 Lara Croft naked and polygonal, and I can’t understand why anyone would bother. It seems like an obstacle to jerking off.

Thankfully, we’ve gotten a little better at this shit as time’s gone by.

1978–1981: PLAYER IMAGINATION FOR PLAYER MASTURBATION

Early on in gaming history, graphics were rather difficult to do on computers. This meant that the text-parser dungeon ruled supreme in the beginning. The erotic capabilities of text were certainly taken advantage of in the early days of the "video" game. Back then, in the primordial soup, something called MUDsex was born: cybersex that takes place in a real-time RPG world.

Like choose-your-own-adventure text games, Multi-User Dungeons (MUDs) still occupy a small niche of the internet. Yet in 1978, Roy Trubshaw probably had no idea that his MACRO-10-based roleplaying MUD game would open up a whole new way to roleplay fantasy elf-banging. MUDs enabled players to type out sexual role-play in character. Even if it wasn’t totally anonymous, it wasn’t as awkward as playing Dungeons & Dragons and looking Bob in the eyes while you describe attempts to do the notorious PIV on his level-10 hobbit mage.

This was progress! As game development icon Brenda Romero once said to Joystiq, “The easiest way to incorporate sex into a game without raising flags is to add a chat interface and allow multiple people to play the game.” People could even develop feelings of affection for their virtual sexual partners, which may still have a stigma attached to it (World of Warcraft players who "marry" each other are still subject to internet ridicule). But the determination of human beings to express themselves by virtualfucking is a truly wondrous and (occasionally) inspiring thing.

Today, you can still find texty MUDsexers over at Achaea, although online trollgarden Encyclopedia Dramatica makes it sound like this is a terrible crime. Even though they both have jerking off to trolls in common.

People usually cite the 1981 text game Softporn Adventure for the Apple II as being one of the first games that was actually about sex. Looking at the cover for the game is quite enough to make sex look like the dullest thing in the world. The women seem a bit sleepy. The waiter in the picture is wondering how long he can stay serving drinks in (?) the Jacuzzi without his balls shriveling to the size of raisins.

Softporn Adventure is considered the blueprint for the now infamous 1987 graphical adventure game Leisure Suit Larry in the Land of the Lounge Lizards. A parser game where you type two-word instructions to the computer as to your next actions, Softporn Adventure swings between scatology (you can drown in sewage just by flushing a toilet) and rape jokes, the sort that a teenager might make: “She takes a pill… her nipples start to stand up! Wow!! She's breathing heavily… I hope she rapes me!!” Sure, bro.

Both Softporn Adventure and Leisure Suit Larry take you on a sleazefest night out during which you marry a woman who ties you up and steals your money, sleep with a hooker, and "fall in love" with a woman who becomes enamored with you after you give her some fruit. (My fruit-loving nature is oft talked about among the male types.) It isn’t meant to be representative of reality (though writer Charles Benton has said that it was inspired by his personal experience), and it revels in it. However, there’s little sexual content in it, and everything is played for schoolboy jokes.

In comparing Leisure Suit Larry and Softporn Adventure, though, the first-person voice implying the player’s direct involvement makes Softporn Adventure’s story more titillating. And the text leaving the imagery to the imagination makes it somehow sexier.

Leisure Suit Larry suffers from graphics. Most games with sexual content suffer unsexiness via graphics. Every time you try to show sexualized images of bodies in games, it either is too inept or does not match the player’s idea of what a sexual body or situation looks like. If you describe in textual format how an encounter happens, the player can imagine a scenario or person that is attractive between the descriptions, making even the shittiest sex scene somewhat titillating. This probably goes some way to explaining the survival of MUDsex. It’s why people call phone sex lines. It’s about the power of language. It’s why people describe their actions in bed to each other. Sex is often in the head, not in the image.

Having said that, Leisure Suit Larry doesn’t actually try: The actual act of sex is "censored," and the gags (comedy-wise) are what’s important. People often say Leisure Suit Larry wasn’t actually about sex, and they were right: the veneer of it, the image of it, the idea of it, and the shit jokes sold it. And in the end, the commercial success was what mattered. Larry went on to have many successors.

1982–1998: MOSTLY WOMEN WHO ARE NAKED AND STATIONARY, UNLESS YOU ARE JAPANESE. IF YOU ARE JAPANESE, YOU MIGHT BE OK

Very few sex games, or games that include sex, are actually about sex, although Koei’s 1982 game Night Life was sold in Japan as an attempt to help married people figure out their sex life and featured the aptly named chapter "Let’s Fuck!!" Night Life included some nice silhouettes of some popular heterosexual bedroom gymnastics. The faceless people in the drawings serve more as a kind of catalogue of ways heterosexual people can fail to pleasure each other than as a turn-on, although I can’t be sure that in that era people weren’t orgasming at the fact their computer could beep "Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star" after hours of programming.

Koei, along with companies such as Enix, Square, and Nihon Falcom helped create the early demand for what are now known as "eroge" games, or Japanese erotic games, many of which can be incredibly narratively complex. Many eroge games have helped grow the popularity of the visual novel genre considerably, and are currently generally good about catering to almost every sexual taste, even if the themes can be dark and violent on occasion. Dōkyūsei in 1992 was a landmark title and known for being the first dating simulation game. It follows the adventures of a boy who pursues a girl, but is somewhat… distracted by other girls on the way. This provided a template for many other eroge games to follow.

The Portuguese game Paradise Cafe came out in 1985 for the ZX Spectrum. It was a hideously racist and sexist game about paying women to suck your John Thomas. Also notable is that this was actually a lot more sexually graphic than any other game at the time and featured uncensored pixelated labia and yellow erect penises. The game’s undeniable low point is when a black pimp rapes you for being unable to pay for your fellatio. I would rather have dinner with Piers Morgan than ever play it again.

Most games with "erotic content" are just games that include depictions of women with little to no clothes on, which apparently is enough to have people (mostly men) cum in their pants violently. These titles include Bubble Bath Babes on the NES, Strip Fighter 2 on TurboGrafx-16, The Yakyuken Special on Sega Saturn, Miss World ‘96 (Nude), and other games that Seanbaby mentions in Electronic Gaming Monthly issue 162.

Now blessed with YouTube, the average gamer can look up videos of these and reassure themselves that they would have enjoyed the "erotic content" as much as they might enjoy the "eroticism" of Custer’s Revenge on the Atari 2600, which co-opts a nation’s genocidal shame to portray the unsexiest video game boner in history. WHO THOUGHT GENOCIDE AND RAPE WOULD MAKE A GOOD BACKDROP FOR A GAME? And Custer probably got his dick stuck in a cactus in the process. WHY?

Richard Eter’s 1998 adventure game Fuck Quest is a parody of the original Leisure Suit Larry, in that you go from screen to screen collecting things so that you can fuck a lady. However, Fuck Quest actually climaxes (hurr) with the player lowering a giant disembodied penis in and out of a woman’s orifices until "fireworks" appear on screen, and a silly amount of beeping happens from your certainly overpowered computer, simulating at best what it would be like if a BBC Micro tried to bang its own floppy disk drive.

Fuck Quest is so outlandish that I find it curiously charming: Every screen is childishly drawn in Microsoft Paint, the "House ‘O Porn" sex shop is an architectural feat resembling lopsided tits, and the player has to fool his prey by wearing a Brad Pitt mask to bed. My adventures with it are here on Rock Paper Shotgun. There is also a sequel to the game, Fuck Quest 2: Romancing the Bone, which I haven’t played, but the title alone deserves a trophy.

2000–PRESENT: SOPHISTICATED BIG-BUDGET GAMES WITH RUDIMENTARY SEXUAL EXPRESSION

There’s a dearth of big-budget games that even include sex, never mind those that directly center upon the business of extreme cuddling, and so far the history I’ve presented has been woefully centerd upon the heterosexual male experience. Japan catered better to gay and sometimes even lesbian sexual experiences through eroge visual novels, but the West has typically lacked any enthusiasm for making sexual content in games that cater to non-heterosexual fantasies. However, as big-budget games have widened their appeal and become more sophisticated, they have also become better—if not exactly the best—at representing gay or non-heterosexual experiences.

Ah, yes, The Sims! Everyone’s favorite virtual doll’s house, in which you may place your carefully conditioned virtual housemates into a swimming pool, delete the steps, and watch them drown with the same evil glee you get when you are with your boyfriend in Topshop and you "accidentally" scare the shit out of him by wandering into the maternity section.

The Sims is a series of lucrative video game soap operas distributed by Electronic Arts, a perennial crowd pleaser now working on its fourth edition. In it you can create little virtual AI people and play house. They can fall in love and have sex (known in Sim parlance as "Woohoo"). The actual act of genital joy in The Sims is blurred out for the kids, but in massively multiplayer online life simulator Second Life, almost a sister game to The Sims but without the placid AI, you can buy yourself some genitals and go some extremely shady places if you are brave enough.

In the early days of The Sims, I created a horrorshow of a house in which the likenesses of all my roommates coexisted, resulting in gay love triangles, my boyfriend making out with the other roommate’s girlfriend, and my character attempting to sleep with everyone in the house. My Sim eventually died of hunger because I was too busy trying to get my pissed off-ginger boyfriend back into bed. If there’s anything The Sims taught me it is "Break fast before breaking bed." Or, you know. Death.

Sims are technically bisexual, in that depending on player preference, Sims can be interested in either men or women, conditioned in their preferences by play. This is not the way my personal sexuality works, but it allows for a pleasant fluidity in the way that Sims relate to one another. In The Sims 2, each Sim is created with a slight preference either way. Later with The Sims 2: Nightlife, you get "chemistry" that can rule how much Sims are attracted to one another, where Sims can have two things that are a "turn-on" and one that is a "turn-off," such as beards, "stink," vampires, or—for some reason—logic. The gayer you want your characters, the gayer they get. The more hetero you feel, the more hetero you can make your fuckpuppets.

Erotic frisson is created by making Sims romance one another. The human drama that takes place in your little doll house is thrilling in a Rear Window sort of way. Kieron Gillen wrote particularly definitively on the subject in 2007:

While sex is only a relatively small part of The Sims—crucially, your Sim can meet and form relationships with other Sims—it’s the dark heart that underlies everything. It’s not the engine of the game, but the romantic potential is its fuel, driving it onwards. Perhaps appropriately. The Sims simulates life and life’s nothing but a mass of social fabric wrapped tightly around that spark of attraction.

In light of this, it seems odd that though many big-budget games are obsessed with portraying simulations of ourselves in fantasy worlds, we still face a particular dearth of uncensored sex, or even interesting romance systems that lead to light petting, outside of Japan. This is partly due to puritanical attitudes of media. When, in 2005, Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas had some leftover assets of an unfinished "Hot Coffee" (clumsy-sex-via-controller-bashing) minigame left in the code, a patch that could be downloaded to access the broken thing was made. The patch was brought to the official rating board’s attention and the whole of America seemed to go aflame. This seemed from the outside to be partly due to the fact that America’s right-wingers already disdained the globe’s best-selling male crime world, and partly due to the fact that few in government quite understood what a "patch" meant.

They also didn’t really know how fucking annoying video games are to modify. As I learned with the Nude Raider patch, a porn video or magazine would have been purloined with more ease. Comparatively, hours spent trying to download/get the Hot Coffee modification to work just to get a blurry mannequin with no genitals to flap about a bit seems a lot like a flagrant waste of Stoya time.

In any case, Hot Coffee was not the only thing that made right-wing America’s rage alarm go off. The EA-published game Mass Effect, a slick space opera role-playing game, taking narrative tips from Star Trek among other things, was targeted by conservative-leaning Fox News in 2008. Fox claimed that in Mass Effect there was “full digital nudity,” players had the opportunity to “engage in graphic sex,” and that it was “being marketed to kids and teenagers,” all of which were false statements. Cutscenes featuring profiles of characters together with no full frontal or explicit nudity are triggered in Mass Effect had sexual images similar to those used in primetime television. The game was rated Mature—appropriate for players 17 and older.

Fox News, Mass Effect Sex Debate Video

Incidentally, the Fox News piece also included the caption "SE'XBOX?", which at the time made me laugh so hard I hurled my uterus up through my mouth onto the floor and a nearby cat ate it.

The joke was on Fox, as usual. By Mass Effect 3, the space opera not only included woman-on-woman sex scenes, but man-on-man sex scenes, too. As Charlie Brooker’s excellent article on the matter touts: "Some people are gay in space. Get over it."

POSSIBLE 2002 MISUSE OF PERIPHERALS

Of course, some games aren’t entirely meant to be sexy, but get co-opted by enterprising consumers for sexualisatory purposes. Tetsuya Mizuguchi, developer of the psychedelic music game Rez, said to Eurogamer that when he made a big release (ahem) of the game in 2002 bundled with a "Trance Vibrator" that he certainly did not mean the vibrating peripheral to be used… down there. Instead, he said, “I like to feel the vibration by the foot.”

Jane at Game Girl Advance clasped the vibrator to her crotch and wrote down her thoughts on the so-called "foot" massager. She seemed to very much enjoy the sensation of the vibrator intensifying its vibration to the beat of the music. My own personal sources say the vibrator is somewhat "weak" for a sex toy, but nonetheless pleasurable.

Today’s hypnotic music-based game odysseys such as Luxuria Superbia and SoundSelf are ripe for such peripheral exploitation. Both have erotic, synaesthetic undercurrents. Surely someone out there could DIY us up some sort of rubbery vibratory controller-friend for them? Could we just mod a Wii controller or something?

SEX OUTSIDE THE WORLD OF CAPITALISM

The state of sex in video games is incredibly healthy in a way it has never been before, if you look less at the big-budget games and look for the smaller, more artistic options. Tools for making some kinds of games are inexpensive or free now, and games can be distributed quickly, easily and at little cost over the internet. These games are often not subject to vetting for "family friendly" material, such as games on consoles are.

Games such as Love Hotel, a free game that resembles SimTower, are available if you wish to indulge at playing a love hotel manager enticing couples for a few hours of the no-pants-dance.

The Copenhagen Game Collective made the Dark Room Sex Game, which is played with Wii remotes or a keyboard and uses audio and haptic cues to have players correspond to a rhythm. The speed increases until your peripheral reaches "climax."

Text games have made a recent comeback thanks to the free hypertext engine, Twine. Anna Anthropy made Encyclopaedia Fuckme and Sex Cops Of Tickle City. Merritt Kopas recently made a game about consensual violence in the bedroom, Consensual Torture Simulator.

My own game, Sacrilege, about taking home men from a club, is a short journey through intense sexual relationships as a matter of emotional terrorism.

Nina Freeman made the adorable How Do You Do It about her teen sexuality.

Ute by Lea Schönfelder is a game about the constraints of society on women as sexual beings. It concerns you attempting to have rhythmic sex bumps with every single man on the map.

And there’s the granddaddy of all online sex games: Sepe’s Cumshot.

SEX-MOBILE

Ledoliel is an iPhone game that is essentially like a grown-up, bizarre fantasy Tamagotchi simulator. It is a "dating toy," where your strange little being is a puzzle that often has strangely mature or suggestive needs and desires.

Sext Adventure is a game by Kara Stone and Nadine Lessio in which you use your phone to sext a bot that will then lead you down a narrative path of erotic dick pics, steamy messages, and even money shots. However, each strand of story has a different emotional journey. It’s not just a game about eroticism, but relationships and how they progress.

TODAY AND THE FUTURE: JAPAN FINALLY MAKES PERIPHERALS USEFUL

In the Year of Our Lord 2013, we finally did it. We finally did it! We made an erotic game that shipped with a cock controller. With the Ju-C Air peripheral you stick your dick into the dang thing and it masturbates the player while also providing in-game feedback. It also has an analog stick, an action button, and a left and right click on the shaft. It comes with the erotic sex game Custom Maid 3D. By shoving your dick in and out at various speeds, you can have your maid of choice respond to your magic wand. You can even make the virtual maid wear a pirate hat while you do it! A PIRATE HAT.

And in 2014… they made Custom Maid 3D available with Oculus Rift. Virtual-reality maid-boning has finally come true. We’re living in The Matrix! We’re in an Asimov book! WE HAVE SUPERSEDED NEUROMANCER. Gods be praised, we can all now go home and fuck a video game.

Unless you don’t have a penis. You can’t come. The future is not for you.

Follow Cara Ellison on Twitter and Stephen Maurice Graham on Tumblr.

The town of Noiva do Cordeiro, Brazil set up something of an idyllic rural matriarchy after it adopted a “no males” allowed policy–shortly after it was founded in the 1890s by a woman who was excommunicated by the church after she was accused of being an adulterer.

Although the 600 young woman who populate the town are otherwise content with being in charge, they do lament the fact that they don’t have access to available men to date and/or marry.

However, finding suitors when men are essentially banished from the town is a challenge. According to The Mirror, men that marry into the matriarchy must work outside of the town and are only allowed to return on the weekends. Also, sons are required to move away once they turn 18.

23-year-old Nelma Fernandes told The Mirror,”Here, the only men we single girls meet are either married or related to us, everyone is a cousin. I haven’t kissed a man for a long time. We all dream of falling in love and getting married. But we like living here and don’t want to have to leave the town to find a husband.”

Although the town’s appeal for eligible men to come visit might sound like fodder for an entire issue of Penthouse Forum, guys should know that they’ll definitely be living under the women’s rules before they go ahead and book that plane ticket. Although there are entire porn empires built upon the fantasy of having 600 attractive young Brazilian women to choose from, the reality probably isn’t going to be the “kid in a candy store” experience most men may be imagining. However, that might be a small sacrifice given that Brazilian women are known for not being particularly hard to look at.

For over the 50 years, the town was run by a puritanical pastor after snaked his way into the community by marrying a resident and then founding a church which imposed draconian rules involving drinking, contraception and even how the ladies wore their hair. When he died in 1995, the town’s residents decided that they had enough with patriarchy.

49-year-old Rosalee Fernandes told The Mirror “We have God in our hearts. But we don’t think we need to go to church, get married in front of a priest or baptize our children. These are rules made up by men.”

Go on, girl.

According to Ms. Fernandes “There are lots of things that women do better than men. Our town is prettier, more organized, and far more harmonious than if men were in charge. When problems or disputes arise, we resolve them in a woman’s way, trying to find consensus rather than conflict.”

As for what they do for fun, Fernandes says that “The whole town came together recently to help buy a huge widescreen TV for our community center so we can all watch soap operas together. And there’s always time to stop and gossip, try on each other’s clothes and do each other’s hair and nails.”

Given how she is selling the female camaraderie as one giant slumber party, we’re surprised she forgot to mention the all the sexy, sexy pillow fights that women can’t get enough of when they gather in groups larger than 2.

Given the fact that 600 sex-starved, hot Brazilians begging for male visitors sounds like every teenaged boy’s fantasy come to life, there’s always the possibility that this is some kind of nefarious death trap. In that case, at least the marks will most likely die happy.

source: The Mirror

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Researchers believe a giant panda in captivity in China has faked a pregnancy in order to secure better food and care for herself—a feat way more impressive than any actual birthing she could possibly have done.

Six-year-old giant panda Ai Hin lives at a breeding center in Sichuan province. She was supposed to hold the world’s first-ever live-broadcast panda birth. For some reason filming panda births and uploading them to the internet has become a well-worn web tradition—last year a Washington D.C. panda’s birth made the rounds online—but this was to set a record as the first live-streaming panda birth.

But two months into her pregnancy researchers made an unexpected discovery—Ai Hin was not actually pregnant. She was a big old faker.

Independent notes that while phantom pregnancies “aren’t unheard of in pandas,” researchers at this center believe Ai Hin was actually manipulating the system (exhibiting “learned behavior”) to get better better treatment.

“After showing prenatal signs, the ‘mothers-to-be’ are moved into single rooms with air conditioning and around-the-clock care,” Wu Kongju at Kongju told Xinhua. “They also receive more buns, fruits and bamboo, so some clever pandas have used this to their advantage to improve their quality of life.”

Maxing and relaxing. Basically Ai Hin has been living exactly like Bill O’Reilly imagines every single mother on welfare lives.

Giant pandas are highly endangered—less than 2,000 exist in the world today (about 1,600 in the wild and 300 in captivity). So let’s hope Ai Hin and one of her mates get busy soon.

David Chase finally answers the question he wants fans to quit asking. (Agita warning: spoilers. Whaddya, nuts? )

Martha P. Nochimson: "The cut to black brought to American television the sense of an ending that produces wonder instead of the tying-up of loose ends that characterizes the tradition of the formulaic series. Tony's decisive win over his enemy in the New York mob, Phil Leotardo, is the final user-friendly event in Chase's gangster story that gratifies the desire to be conclusive, and it would have been the finale of a less compelling gangster story. The cut to black is the moment when Castaneda and the American Romantics rise to the surface and the gangster story slips through our fingers and vanishes."

Spoiler alerts below.

The fate of Tony Soprano has been discussed to no end. Even when contributing editor Steve King and myself performed some kind of version of dueling blog posts back in the spring (his, mine) on the subject, commenters gave us hell. “OF COURSE TONY SOPRANO DIED, YOU TWO NUMBNUTS” was the essential gist of the mob’s vitriol:

Granted, these geniuses have a point. First off, I am a total hack. There’s no debating that one. Secondly, the series finale of “The Sopranos” aired on June 10, 2007–so it was slightly self-indulgent of Steve and myself to strike up the argument at such a random time seven years later. Although, given a recent post on Vox by film critic Martha P. Nochimson, maybe not.

“I had been talking with Chase for a few years when I finally asked him whether Tony was dead,” Nochimson wrote on Wednesday. “We were in a tiny coffee shop, when, in the middle of a low-key chat about a writing problem I was having, I popped the question. Chase startled me by turning toward me and saying with sudden, explosive anger, ‘Why are we talking about this?’ I answered, ‘I’m just curious.’ And then, for whatever reason, he told me.”

And then, Nochimson darted to the machine and ostensibly cracked whatever her writing problem may have been. (A scoop like this one would do that for anyone, I’d think.) But, to Nochimson’s credit, she does elaborate on how Chase’s thin answer (“No … no, he isn’t”) hardly solves anything. But nothing needed to be solved. It’s a dumb question to begin with, and one that’s been asked and addressed by fans and filmmakers, respectively, since the dawn of DVD extras.

On the director’s commentary of “25th Hour”–or it might have been during the press tour, what hack can remember?– Spike Lee talks about how it’s not important for him to reveal what happened to drug dealer Monty Brogan (Ed Norton), that “we’re adults” and we can decide and figure it out on our own. This was Chase’s approach to “The Sopranos” ending but taking it a step further: Figure it out on your own, and then realize it doesn’t matter.

source: Vox

A big old penis with legs jizzing into an eyeball, circa second century AD. Image via Wikicommons

Last month, archaeologists on the Greek island of Ithaca found a couple of dicks etched into a cliff face at the Bay of Vathy. The dongs, as well as an inscription on another rock written in ancient Greek that read “Nikasitimos was here mounting Timiona,” are estimated to be 2,500 years old. The press scrambled to label it among the world’s oldest and most fascinating erotic archaeological finds, but that’s not quite true. Erotica is everywhere in the historical record, and archaeologists have come across sexual displays and descriptions far older and more fascinating than this. What made this particular finding unique was that—in addition to what the scribbles taught them about literacy during the time of Acropolis—the archaeologists were happy to talk about sex, and willing to acknowledge that the inscriptions suggested gay sex wasn’t just an upper-class affair practiced in limited social settings. Academics have only very recently become comfortable discussing sexual aspects of history, and many still avoid it. That's unfortunate, because there's a whole lot of ancient, instructive, and revolutionarily important smut out there.

The Venus of Willendorf, source of countless historian boners, circa 25000 BC. Image via Wikicommons.

Not counting the stylized and lumpy Venus of Willendorf and her female nude counterparts, the oldest archaeological find on sexuality may be a small figurine of a male bending over a further bent female, both with recognizable genitalia, aged 7,200 years and found in Germany in 2005. But that’s hardly an isolated find. Anywhere you go in the world, from possible pansexual orgies on cave walls in Xinjiang in Central Asia, to pocket-size clay tablets of 4,000-year-old Mesopotamians engaged in doggy, anal, and possibly a stylized form of buzzed-out fellatio, to Ramesses’s Playboy scroll from about 3,000 years ago, the ancient world was full of fuckin’. Any reading man throughout recorded history has been confronted with the bawdy and naughty thoughts of his predecessors, from the lewd and crude in Boccaccio to Chaucer to Sappho to Shakespeare, from The Perfumed Garden to The Plum in the Golden Vase, to the roots of Japanese tentacle porn in Japanese woodblock shunga prints. History is undeniably porny, yet many of us tend to think of it as austere and scrubbed clean.

The key to our image of a clean and starched history is largely a result of a mixture of active destruction and strategic ignorance. Although there was no real systematic (or at least no thorough, well-defined, and long lasting) suppression of dirty materials before the invention of the term “pornography” and development of anti-obscenity laws around 1857 with the British Obscene Publications Act, our ancestors made every effort to stomp out whacking material in their own times using a Justice Stewart Potter–style know-it-when-you-see-it approach. In the 1520s, the church arrested an Italian engraver for printing a pamphlet on better sex positions, and in 1748 the first English-language porn novel, Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure, also known as Fanny Hill, faced staunch censure.

But some historical works, like the tawdry lines from Roman authors such as Juvenal or the dirty doodles in the margins of medieval monks’ books of hours, were already established parts of historical traditions and widely dispersed. “Of course,” writes the late Walter Kendrick, author of The Secret Museum and still a seminal authority on the history of porn and its suppression, “they could not be destroyed... Any relic of the ancient world possessed, merely thanks to its survival, a value that overrode the nature of the relic itself.”

Depiction of Greek men getting sexy with one another, circa 475 BC. Found in the Tomb of the Diver. Image via Wikicommons

By the end of the 18th century, however, many English speakers had accepted the Edward Gibbons Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire idea that depravity crumbled the West’s ideological and cultural ancestors, so evidence of or engagement with that licentious imagery was considered more dangerous than ever. So, just as history started to expand its audience thanks to the advent of mass printing and the expansion of education, a massive project to whitewash it kicked into gear. In one famous case, academics found it unseemly to deal with an insult in the Roman author Catullus’s Carmen 16, roughly rendered “I will bugger you and I will fuck your mouths, / Aurelius, you pathic, and you queer, Furius.” So instead, until 1970, no one even tried to offer a translation, often just deleting the line from manuscripts and claiming that the poem was a fragment, the rest of which was lost to time. It took just as long for scholars to admit that the Turin Papyrus, a 3,000-year-old Egyptian scroll, had an erotic segment showing a great orgy of actions, known by scholars in the 1820s, but kept a secret until the 1970s. Perhaps most egregiously, a number of 18th-century editors committed something known as bowdlerization, the deletion of crude elements, on Shakespeare and other classic authors, at times rewriting whole scenes to work around the absent sexual jokes. As recently as the mid 20th century, the translators of Sufi poet Jalal al Din Muhammad Rumi’s now immensely popular Mathnawi decided to leave the naughtier poems in Latin. Rumi’s stories of donkey-fucking noblewomen and servants and impotent Caliphs remained unavailable to English readers until 1990, when Coleman Barks finally translated 47 omitted poems and published them as Delicious Laughter: Rambunctious Teaching Stories from the Mathnawi.

Pan Copulating with Goat, circa first century AD. Image via Wikicommons

Around the same time, scholars were grappling with the lasciviousness of classical art, too. While excavating Pompeii in the mid 18th century, high society types discovered a vast array of graphic-to-hardcore murals, statues of fauns fucking goats, and a particularly amusing depiction of a gladiator wrestling his own cock transfigured into a raging beast. Unable to destroy the effigies, the Franco-Italian nobles in control of the region created the proto-moral category of pornography and tucked the artwork away in locked rooms in the local museum, later known as the Secret Museum, where only a handful of individuals deemed proper and prepared were allowed to access them. The secret museum idea caught on, and throughout the 19th-century museums around the world started forming their own secret wings and rooms to blot out their more graphic collections from the public eye.

Still, the preservation of these tawdry tableaus for study meant that the secret keepers were obligated to release images of their collections for those unable to visit. Many prefaced their works with introductions warning the reader of the explicit contents within, and enjoined them to be serious and detached critics, to try to desexualize the figures with aggressive theory. Others attempted to protect the young, female, and poorly educated by fogging out the genitals in sexual scenes, or turning them into odd geometric shapes, in their reproductions of the images.

Periodic attempts were made by revolutionaries and libertines to undo the redactions and ferretting of contemporary scholars. In a fit of liberalism, Giuseppe Garibaldi threw open the doors of Naples’ Secret Museum to usher in a new, united, free Italy in the 1860s. Meanwhile Sir Richard Burton attempted in 1883 to introduce the Kama Sutra to the West. But ultimately the more squeamish won out again and again. “Until the 1990s,” explains Roman sexuality-in-art expert Professor John Clarke of the University of Texas–Austen, “academics avoided working on ‘obscene’ Greek and Roman texts or ‘pornographic’ painting and sculpture, letting hack writers publish sensational and highly inaccurate picture books.”

A flying dick with a dick for a tail, circa first century AD. Photo via Wikicommons

What changed, Clarke goes on to explain, was the slow development of a very recent academic consensus that the past ought to be considered on its own terms, and by its own rules. “Well into the 20th century,” wrote Kendrick in The Secret Museum, “…the emphasis fell on the opposite side,” encouraging people to evaluate art in terms of their own social mores. But now it’s agreed that we can analyze the social importance of sexual items in history, distancing ourselves from our current notions and perceptions of them. “Moments of sexual shame,” wrote Barks in Delicious Laughter explaining his views on the eroticism in the Sufi poetry he was translating, “erections and their sudden droopings, a clitoral urgency that admits no limit, the mean impulse to play a sexual trick on one’s mate—these are recognizable behaviors and Rumi does not so much judge them as hold them up for a lens.” It was this spirit that, in 2000, finally saw the Secret Museum of Naples opened to the general public, permanently.

But even in this new age of theoretical openness to sexuality in history, practice often falls far short. “Once I discovered how underworked this topic was in academe,” says Clarke, “I had no qualms about pursuing it. I did of course have tenure and a chair at the point. I remember discussing with [a colleague] how difficult it was for her to get her first job with a dissertation on Roman sexual humor.” Often, it seems, academics (if not moved by subtle personal prejudices or cautions) just fear what the wider public might think.

In 1991, the Biblical Archaeology Review had a minor crisis about whether to publish photos of a ceramic oil lamp depicting a couple fucking, and polled their readership about what to do. They decided to print the image on a page with perforation so those who didn’t want to see it could remove it, and even then a few readers still canceled their subscriptions. And of course the tendency of newspapers to run headlines like “The Earliest Pornography” and “Prehistoric Pin Up,” about the 2009 excavation of a Neolithic female nude a la the Venus of Willendorf, but 10,000 years older, scares off some scholars who would prefer to avoid sensationalism.

Some guy in Pompeii getting a beej. Image via Apricity 

More than all of this, though, it’s just hard for most people to take what we now deem pornography seriously as an academic discipline. “It’s hard to justify to people that, ‘hey, I need money to go watch porn,’” says University of California Berkeley Fellow Matthew Kirschenbaum, who currently teaches a course on contemporary pornography called “Critical Sex Studies and Pornography. He’s one of many academics across America trying to study modern forms of erotica, and says that many feel the need to dress modern pornography up in theory or history to give it a little legitimacy. The study of modern pornography is, to Kirschenbaum, important because it’s a massive and influential modern industry that, while flying under the radar, can affect the way we talk and think about important issues like STDs and, of course, sexuality. But for many it’s hard to hack past the awkwardness of studying something that might turn them on, whether historical or modern, and then to deal with public perception and entrenched moral values before getting down to the social import or historical relevance of erotica.

There are bastions of scholars who are more than comfortable talking about and dispassionately studying sexuality. And with every day we get to chip away at a bit more of the taboos that make something like the announcement of a find of Greek erotic graffiti so headline snatching and provocative. But, at the end of the day, says Kirschenbaum, “it can get awkward showing someone in a class your favorite porn.” That applies often to historical erotica as well. So while we’re no longer actively redacting and hiding our sexual pasts, it’s still odd to see that history, openly discussed, can still make academia squirm.

Illustration by Jonathan Tune

Unlike the last person who wrote about D&D for VICE, I have no sordid tales to tell of being caught by a bully in flagrante dragono—for the uninitiated, that’s playing Dungeons & Dragons—in the school library. That’s because D&D wasn’t part of my life when I was a teenage girl in the suburbs. But a lot of people (6 million of them, in fact) are fighting made-up dragons in made-up dungeons with made-up fantasy alter egos. As Giaco Furino recently reported, “Dungeons & Dragons Is Officially Cool Again,” and it is not only cool but inclusive. Did you know that not just neckbeards play D&D, but so do hip guys like Mick Jagger and Vin Diesel and your local male American Apparel employee?

But there’s more to the story than neckbeards and testosterone-rich celebs. A lot of women play D&D (which occasionally means encountering rapey dungeon masters) and more of us every day are picking up our first 20-sided die. It’s no small thing, and worth celebrating: the newest version of the game has—no joke—caught up with third-wave feminism.

Dungeons & Dragons has come a long way since 1977, when your horny geek friends could consult the “Harlot Table,” a set of statistics used to score some in-game sex with “wanton wenches” or “slovenly trolls.” And just in case ladies back then had any doubt about being able to match up to their male counterparts (no), female-identified characters’ strength scores were capped below men’s. In fact, just a few years ago, some lucky (read: doomed) woman’s husband-to-be posted a craigslist ad for a topless woman to be the Dungeon Master at a D&D-themed bachelor party. Sign me up, asshole.

But gradually, and sometimes awkwardly, Dungeons & Dragons has become exponentially more female-friendly. The newest version of the game, which hit stores on August 19, debuted a sensibly armored black woman, plates covering all her vital organs, as its example of the “human” race option. No chainmail bikinis here. To wit, women throughout the pages of the Player’s Handbook exhibit more varied body types and skin colors than ever. Coming from a franchise whose art director wrote a piece (apparently since removed) justifying hyper-sexualized female bodies in fantasy art, this is noteworthy. And these illustrations are just the face of deeper changes made to entice more women to play.

More strikingly, the new Player’s Handbook explicitly talks about the gender binary and gender fluidity. “Think about how your character does or does not conform to the broader culture’s expectations of sex, gender, and sexual behavior,” it reads. “You don’t need to be confined to binary notions of sex and gender . . . You could also play a female character who presents herself as a man, a man who feels trapped in a female’s body, or a bearded female dwarf who hates being mistaken for a male.” So D&D players are being pushed to think critically about gender as a historical construct at the same time they’re deciding whether to be “Quarion the elvaan druid” or “Havilar the dragonborn sorcerer.” Dungeons & Dragons is a game that hinges on the collective process of imagination, and now we’re being asked to summon a world that doesn’t share in our dominant heteronormative paradigms. This, friends, is cool.

One could argue that just because the D&D tomes give a shout-out to the third-wave notion that gender is a historical construct, the actual culture around the game hasn’t necessarily caught up. Lisa Renke, who works in theater and has played the game for 14 years, tells me that she’s had to deal with her fair share of sexism throughout her time gaming. The dungeon crawlers at her high school were unwelcoming, and years later, she still had problems fitting in: “Sometimes I was the only woman in a room with 30 guys. I also had a few uncomfortable moments declining men who wanted to take me back to their apartments to teach me how to make a better character.” Terry Romero, a cookbook author who has been playing since 1988, relayed a similar story of heinous sexism at the table. Once, the guy running her D&D game “deliberately kept forcing my character to trip, fall, or be pushed down by monsters the entire game with a not-so-subtle rape context. I played for less than an hour before walking away,” she says.

But gaming communities are finding ways to ensure less-than-creepy play among the genders. The Twenty-Sided Store, a gaming spot located in Brooklyn that hosts Dungeons & Dragons sessions, has a strict code of conduct forbidding “slights against intelligence, gender, sexual orientation, race, etc.” You will actually get kicked out if you’re a douchebag, and no one’s gonna fist-bump you for making lewd comments to some made-up elf queen.The Twenty-Sided Store has even adopted the “X-Card” practice, which allows a player to hold up a card—without explanation—if something disagreeable goes down.

Lauren Bilanko, a co-owner of the store, says that the gender makeup of people who come in to play D&D is about 60 percent male and 40 percent female.

Nicole Kuprienko, a graphic designer who started running D&D games more recently, says she’s rarely experienced sexism while role-playing. The majority of women I interviewed agree, suggesting that women (and female-identified individuals) are having less trouble than ever contributing to the D&D community, and generally face less overt misogyny and harassment.  

The reason for this evolution in D&D culture is actually pretty simple. A two-year play-testing period, open to anyone who had opinions about the game, preceded the newest version’s release. Jeremy Crawford, lead designer and managing editor for Dungeons & Dragons at its parent company Wizards of the Coast, highlighted the fact that the design team made a concerted effort to boost inclusiveness. Asked to comment, he told me, “There has often been a perception that such games are for straight white men. One of our goals for the new edition of D&D has been to make it as welcoming as possible to its large, diverse audience: people of different races, ages, gender identities, and sexual orientations. D&D is for anyone who wants to gather with their friends to weave tales of heroic adventure. Our team wants there to be no barriers to that, and for our text and art to imply no barriers...It's hard to have that sense of identification or interest if a character is marginalized or objectified.”

His point is underscored by the fact that the newest version of the game credits women as contributors to its design more than any previous one: About 26 percent are female, as opposed to 20 percent in the last version and 12 percent in the one before that. It’s also telling that three-quarters of D&D’s branding and marketing team is now female.

Maybe you’re still wondering why women would even want to sit around in some sweaty basement pretending to slay orcs. From a female perspective, what’s the deal with pretending you’re some gallant knight or evil sorceress? Katherine Cross, a sociologist and PhD student at CUNY who studies gender in role-playing, says that her D&D characters “were always the kind of characters that were lacking in major television shows—someone who was not reduced to her sexuality. For a lot of women, role-playing gives us an opportunity to author our own visions of power.” While white men have had a myriad of heroic characters to emulate and improve upon over the centuries, women are often starved of these role models. Lord of the Rings arguably includes no heroic female characters, and I’m not so sure Xena: Warrior Princess was particularly representative of girls I knew.

Besides, women tend to grow up learning how to adjust our faces and outfits to express ourselves. Role-playing isn’t much of a leap from there. That being said, I don't really need to rationalize why women role-play—it's fun to kick it with your friends and, in collaboration, craft a fantasy.

But maybe it’s not such a big deal that D&D is becoming more inclusive. It could just be symptomatic of how far we’ve come since 1977, when third-wave feminism didn’t even exist. Lauren Bilanko, owner of the Twenty-Sided Store, points out that “It’s not just the gaming community. We’re seeing more people be present to their surroundings, be aware of how their actions affect society.” She's right, even if we still have a long way to go. At this point, I’m glad that when I walk into a gaming store, no one asks if got lost on the way to the mall.

Follow Cecilia D'Anastasio on Twitter.

What if men took birth control pills?

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Up is down! Black is white! Cats are… well, they’re not dogs, but they definitely aren’t cats either, apparently.

This year marks the fortieth anniversary of the character Hello Kitty, who was first created by Sanrio in 1974 and came to the United States two years later. To mark the occasion, the world’s first ever Hello Kitty Con will be held in the Museum of Contemporary Art at Downtown LA’s Little Tokyo district; the Japanese American National Museum will also be holding a retrospective exhibit in mid October full of Hello Kitty themed art and merchandise.

But according to University of Hawaii Anthropolgist Christine R. Yano, who wrote a book last year about the adorable cartoon creature (Pink Globalization: Hello Kitty’s Trek Across the Pacific), we’re all getting something wrong when we talk about Hello Kitty; namely, that she is a cat. She’s not. She is a girl.

The LA Times reports:

You read that right. When Yano was preparing her written texts for the exhibit at the Japanese American National Museum, she says she described Hello Kitty as a cat. “I was corrected — very firmly,” she says. “That’s one correction Sanrio made for my script for the show. Hello Kitty is not a cat. She’s a cartoon character. She is a little girl. She is a friend. But she is not a cat. She’s never depicted on all fours. She walks and sits like a two-legged creature. She does have a pet cat of her own, however, and it’s called Charmmy Kitty.”

Even weirder? Despite her synonymous association with modern Japanese pop culture and fashion, she’s also British. Her official character bio lists her full name as Kitty White, and she lives in London with her parents, George and Martha, as well as her twin sister Mimmy.

Yano explains that when Sanrio first created Kitty in the ’70s, Japanese culture at the time “loved the idea of Britain. It represented the quintessential idealized childhood, almost like a white picket fence. So the biography was created exactly for the tastes of that time.”

Great, everything we know is a lie. Someone better go tell Avril Lavigne she made even more of a fool of herself last year than we all thought.

(via LA Times)

Previously in Hello… Person

• Hello Kitty Asks, “Are You Sarah Connor?”
• “Super-Alloy” Hello Kitty Mecha Will Out-Cute Everything [Video]
• Hello Kitty Melon Solves The Problem Of Your Fruit Not Being Adorable Enough

Churchill y las naranjas de España

STALIN: Es necesario examinar la cuestión del régimen de España. Nosotros los rusos consideramos que el presente régimen de Franco en España fue impuesto por Alemania e Italia y que entraña grave peligro para las naciones unidas amantes de la libertad. Opinamos que será bueno crear condiciones tales que el pueblo español pueda establecer el régimen que elija.

CHURCHILL: Estamos debatiendo aún las cuestiones que incluir en la agenda. Convengo que la cuestión de España debería ser comprendida en ella.

el día 19 de Julio cuando el tema de España estaba en la orden del día.

TRUMAN: Does the Generalissimo wish to speak on the question?Desea el generalísimo hablar sobre la cuestión.

STALIN: Se han distribuido copias de la propuesta. No tengo nada que añadir a lo que allí se expresa.

CHURCHILL: Señor presidente, el gobierno británico siente odio contra Franco y su gobierno. Donde veo alguna dificultad en adoptar el borrador propuesto por el Generalissimo es su punto primero que trata de la ruptura de toda relación con el gobierno de Franco, que es el gobierno de España. Creo que, considerando que los españoles son orgullosos y más bien sensibles, semejante medida causaría el efecto de unir a los españoles en torno de Franco, en vez de apartarlos de él. […] Por lo que toca a los países que han sido liberados en el curso de la guerra, no podemos permitir que se establezca en ellos un régimen fascista o tipo Franco. Pero aquí tenemos un país que no tomó parte en la guerra, y por eso es por lo que soy contrario a interferir en sus asuntos internos. El gobierno de su Majestad necesitará debatir muy detenidamente esta cuestión antes de decidir romper relaciones con España.

TRUMAN: No tengo ninguna simpatía al régimen de Franco, pero no deseo tomar parte en una guerra civil española. Ya estoy harto de guerra en Europa. Nos alegraríamos mucho de reconocer otro gobierno en España en vez del gobierno de Franco, pero pienso que es una cuestión que ha de resolver la propia España.

STALIN: ¿Es decir que no habrá cambios en España? […] No estoy proponiendo ninguna intervención militar, ni que desencadenemos una guerra civil en España. Deseo solamente que el pueblo español sepa que nosotros, los dirigentes de la Europa democrática, adoptamos una actitud negativa respecto al régimen de Franco. A menos que lo declaremos así, el pueblo español tendrá motivo para pensar que no somos contrarios al régimen de Franco. Podrán decir que, dado que hemos dejado en paz al régimen de Franco, esto significa que lo apoyamos. La gente entenderá que hemos aprobado, o dado nuestra bendición tácita, al régimen de Franco. Esto constituye un grave cargo contra nosotros. No me agrada estar entre los acusados.

CHURCHILL: Ustedes ya no tiene relaciones diplomáticas con el gobierno español y nadie podrá acusarle de lo que dice.

STALIN: Pero lo que si tengo es el derecho y la posibilidad de plantear la cuestión y resolverla. Todo el mundo cree que los tres grandes pueden resolver estas cuestiones. Yo soy uno de los tres grandes ¿Es que no tengo derecho a decir nada sobre lo que está pasando en España acerca del régimen de Franco y el grave peligro que representa para el conjunto de Europa? Cometeríamos una grave falta si ignorásemos esta cuestión y no dijéramos nada sobre ella.

CHURCHILL: Todo gobierno es dueño de expresar sus ideas por su cuenta. Nosotros tenemos antiguas relaciones comerciales con España, que nos proporciona naranjas, vino y otros productos a cambio de nuestras propias mercancías. Si nuestra intervención no diera los frutos deseados, yo no querría que este comercio padeciera daño. Pero, al propio tiempo, comprendo totalmente a actitud adoptada por el Generalissimo Stalin. Franco tuvo el valor de enviar su división azul a Rusia, y entiendo muy bien la posición rusa. España, empero, no nos ha hecho nada a nosotros, ni siquiera cuando podía hacerlo en la bahía de Algeciras. Nadie duda que el Generalissimo Stalin odia a Franco y opino que la mayoría de los británicos comparte su pensar. Sólo deseo subrayar que nosotros no hemos sido perjudicados por él por ningún concepto.

STALIN: No es cuestión de perjuicios. Por lo demás, creo que Inglaterra también ha sido perjudicada por el régimen de Franco. Durante mucho tiempo, España puso su costa a la disposición de Hitler para que la usasen sus submarinos. Puede usted decir, por tanto, ha sufrido daños causados por el régimen de Franco en una forma u otra. Pero no deseo que este asunto se valore desde el punto de vista de algún perjuicio. Lo que importa no es la división azul, sino el hecho de que el régimen de Franco es una amenza grave para Europa. Por eso es por lo que creo que se debe hacer algo contra ese régimen. Si no es adecuada la rotura de relaciones diplomáticas, no insistiré en ella. Pueden encontrarse otros medios. Sólo tenemos que decir que no simpatizamos con el régimen de Franco y que consideramos justa la exigencia de democracia por parte del pueblo español; sólo tenemos que indicarlo y no quedará nada del régimen de Franco. Yo se lo aseguro. Propongo que los ministros de asuntos exteriores debatan si se puede encontrar otra forma más suave o flexible para hacer patente que las grandes potencias no apoyan al régimen de Franco.

TRUMAN: Me parece bien. Convengo en pasar el asunto a los ministros de asuntos exteriores.

CHURCHILL: Debo oponerme a esto. Creo que este es un asunto que debe ser resuelto en esta reunión.

STALIN: Claro que lo resolveremos aquí, pero que los ministros puedan examinarlo antes.

TRUMAN: Yo tampoco me opongo a pasar el tema a los ministros para su examen preliminar.

CHURCHILL: No lo considero conveniente, porque es un asunto de principios, es decir, de interferencia en los asuntos internos de otros países.

STALIN: Esto no es un asunto interno. El régimen de Franco es una amenaza internacional.

CHURCHILL: Todo el mundo puede decir esto del régimen de cualquier otro páis.

STALIN: No, no hay ningún régimen en país alguno como el de España. No queda régimen como ése en país alguno de Europa.

CHURCHILL: Portugal también podría ser condenado por tener un régimen dictatorial.

STALIN: El régimen de Franco fue instaurado desde el exterior, por medio de la intervención de Hitler. Franco se comporta de manera provocadora y da asilo a nazis. Yo no planteo ningún problema acerca de Portugal.

(…)

United States Department of State / Foreign relations of the United States : diplomatic papers : the Conference of Berlin (the Potsdam Conference), 1945, Volume I (1945)
General questions, pp. 283-316 (parte dedicada a España desde la p-301)

Agustín Hernández recorre el transitado paseo fluvial del Sarela

El caldo de negocio lo saboreaban muy nítidamente, con cebolla y cilantro, dos desarrolladores mexicanos llamados Héctor Douglas y Guillermo Villarreal: «9 de cada 10 mexicanos consume tacos por lo menos 10 veces al mes, y existen más de 3.000 tipos de tacos distribuidos en todo el territorio nacional», desvelan el rizoma de su proyecto.

Su filosofía es tan simple como contundente: si a México le gustan tanto los tacos, ellos serán quienes les pongan las cosas fáciles para encontrarlos.  La aplicación Taqueando (disponible para Android a partir del 15 de septiembre) que presentaron en la última edición de The App Date México ha querido tener en cuenta el gusto por este manjar doblado de sus conciudadanos, y pone al alcance del celular un mapa de la oferta taquera en México.

«En total cada usuario tiene acceso a 35.000 taquerías, que son muchas taquerías», cuentan el alcance de su desarrollo culinario, «y podrá saber cuáles son las favoritas para el público, y también las preferidas de sus amigos». Su app incluso desvela en qué momento los amigos están echándole salsas al pastor sin avisarte.

«Para la cantidad de tacos que se comen aquí, veíamos un servicio necesario para el público el poder localizar cuáles son los establecimientos más cercanos», esgrimían en su presentación. «Y además ofrecemos posibilidades como nominar taquerías para que participen en tours donde se vivirá la experiencia de taquear junto a personajes públicos».

Mucho más allá de clichés, a los habitantes de México les gustan muchos los tacos. Los creadores de la app pensaron que hacía falta un GPS que siguiera de cerca el olor de las tortillas que todos quieren tener a mano.

 

The post Nadie se quedará sin tacos con esta app appeared first on Yorokobu.

Una historia de samurais pura y dura, situada en el olvidado Japón de mediados del siglo XVIII en la provincia de Satsuma. Una época en la que los samurais se encuentran algo fuera de lugar sin batallas que librar donde mostrar sus habilidades, y en la que se han visto relegados a trabajos ordinarios como la alfarería o la carpintería, dedicando su tiempo libre a un ritual consistente en perseguir y aniquilar a criminales a caballo, con la promesa de la libertad si sobreviven a la prueba.

Será uno de esos criminales, un samurai caído en desgracia, el que sobrevivirá y pondrá a prueba el sistema. El maestro Hiroshi Hirata nos presenta una historia brutal excelentemente narrada con un realismo que nos introduce en la trama del mismo modo en que lo puedan hacer las películas de Kurosawa, en un manga que logra trasladarnos a una época de represión, de luchas de castas y de frustración por los lejanos tiempos pasados, al más puro estilo del Lobo Solitario y su cachorro de Kazuo Koike y Goseki Kojima.

Venganza y lucha de clases en un Japón feudal cuyas castas de samurais intentan encontrar su lugar y adaptarse a un nuevo modo de vida, con soldados fuera de lugar sin guerras que librar. Una historia de honor y tradiciones narrada perfectamente por el detallista pincel de Hirata.  (Sinopsis sacada de listadomanga.es)

Idioma: Español.
Editorial: Dolmen
Guion: Hiroshi Hirata 
Dibujo: Hiroshi Hirata 
Tradumaquetadores: etsaibat, Calpeando [CRG] 
Archivos: 5 Tomos - Sobre 265 Paginas x Tomo.
Formato: CBR 
Tamaño: 1.02 Gb



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• Satsuma Gishiden

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Fantasy Sword originally appeared on MyConfinedSpace NSFW on August 27, 2014.

1. For Calling Your Ex- “Martha”- 1973

In this song, Tom calls his ex lover … 40 years after they broke up. He finds out that Martha has been married and has kids now. (gross)  He admits that he was a douche and professes his love…. and basically confesses she is still fap material.  It’s a great song.

2. For the (strip) Club – “Pasties and a G String” – 1976

Tom offers to have his rent raised if this stripper lady will take off all her clothes. Is she his landlord who is also a stripper with a heart of gold?… I think so.  Tom also gets as hard as “Chinese Algebra” when the stripper/landlord crawls on her belly and “shakes like jelly”. I’m not sure if Chinese Algebra is harder than regular algebra, but either way, maths is terrible.

3. For the Holidays  - “Christmas Card from a Hooker in Minneapolis” -  1978

Who doesn’t love Christmas Cards? This particular Christmas card comes to a john named Charlie from a long lost hooker friend. She waxes nostalgic about doing drugs back in the day and lets Charlie know what she has been up to. Which consists of meeting a nice man who plays a trombone and takes her out dancing on Saturday nights. There’s a twist at the end of this song and I don’t do spoilers on things pre 1980. 

4. For Blaming Someone or Something Else for Your Crippling Addiction – “The Piano Has Been Drinking” -  1977

In this romantic song, Tom Waits blames his piano for being intoxicated. This is typical addict behavior. I usually blame my iPhone for my donut problem.  This song will give you some great pointers on avoidance.

5. For Selling your Shit on Craigslist  “Step Right Up” – 1976

This song will help you masterfully get rid of all your shit on Craigslist. Tom Waits  can basically sell ice to Eskimos. In this song, his magic product: Removes embarrassing stains from contour sheets (we know what that means… winky face), that’s right and it entertains visiting relatives (the worst), it turns a sandwich into a banquet (Is it a sandwich banquet? I’m there!) Tired of being the life of the party? (Yes.) Change your shorts, change your life, change into a nine-year-old Hindu boy, get rid of your wife (A sex AND race change? Sure! Sign me up!)

6. For When You Get Shot, But Want to Look Cool – “Romeo is Bleeding” – 1978

Romeo: has a cigarette, leans against a car, laughs, and sings along with the radio, all while having a grievous chest wound from getting shot.  Instead of seeking medical help, Romeo, decides to play it cool and go see a movie. God, I hope he didn’t waste his time with Transformers: Age of Extinction.

Runner’s up: For When You Need to Tell Someone Their House is on Fire  - Jockey Full of Burbon – 1985

It was a battle that raged for nearly a half-hour. A 56-year-old Indian woman — armed with only farm tools — is now recovering in hospital after killing a leopard that attacked her.

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Watch the @femfreq #TropesvsWomen vids. Even if u think u get it, the sheer tonnage makes misogyny seem newly appalling.

— Joss Whedon (@josswhedon) August 27, 2014

I watched a bunch of women get sliced up in video games and now I’m watching it on my twitter feed. @femfreq is just truth-telling. Deal. — Joss Whedon (@josswhedon) August 27, 2014

A new Tropes Vs. Women in Video Games installment hit the web on Monday, and with it came the requisite (in the oh-of-course sense, not the this-should-actually-happen sense) wave of backlash against creator Anita Sarkeesian. If you’re one of those people who gives Sarkeesian hell because “she’s just listing things you could find on Wikipedia!,” Joss Whedon thinks you’re missing the point. Which you are. Laying problematic issues of sexism in video games out for all to see is the stated purpose of the series.

Are you following The Mary Sue on Twitter, Facebook, Tumblr, Pinterest, & Google +?

Ex-leftist David Horowitz speaks at the Conservative Political Action Conference. Photo via Mark Taylor

In a scene near the beginning of David Burr Gerard’s acclaimed debut novel Short Century, journalist Arthur Hunt attends the assassination-by-drone-strike of "Little Brother," a dictator in a Muslim-African country referred to only as REDACTED. A 1960s leftist-turned-warmongering scribe, Hunt is invited to press the "kill" button by Sheila, a CIA source who has just given him an erection.

“The very model of the modern moral warrior, every inch of her," he recounts. "I imagined lifting her up on to her control panel, spreading her legs, and pushing her clit into the button before impaling her on the joystick, all while I readied my sleepy dick.”

The obliteration of Little Brother ends up taking out a burqa-clad civilian, but Hunt gives the collateral damage a feminist spin, congratulating himself for freeing other, still-breathing women in burqas from the grasp of tyranny. His support for imperial bloodletting doesn’t simply emerge from the humanitarian depths of his soul, however: he’s seeking atonement for a past incestuous relationship with his sister.

It may be a novel, but it's more than just fiction.

The collaborative clutching of the joystick by representatives of the state and the press corps is acutely symbolic of the contemporary panorama in the US, where military destruction conceived of in a gendered, sexualized manner is somehow thought capable of bringing about gender equality and sexual liberation in targeted nations.

WWI propaganda poster. Photo via Wikimedia Commons 

Take one particularly egregious case: New York Times foreign affairs columnist Thomas Friedman, a partner in incestuous relationships with corporations, banks, and other bellicose entities whose bidding he routinely does in exchange for wealth and fame. Friedman’s CV features one of the filthiest instances of war boosting by the press in recorded history. A few months into the Iraq War in 2003, he appeared on Charlie Rose’s television show to announce his discovery of the real reason for the war, which was to burst the “terrorism bubble” that had emerged in “that part of the world” and had made itself known on 9/11.

Clasping his metaphorical joystick, Friedman outlined a strategy for dealing with a country that had nothing to do with that date: “What they needed to see was American boys and girls going house to house from Basra to Baghdad, um, and basically saying: ‘Which part of this sentence don’t you understand? You don’t think, you know, we care about our open society; you think this bubble fantasy, we’re just gonna let it grow? Well. Suck. On. This.’”

The precise role of the American girls in the collective Iraqi blowjob was never explained, but the emphasis on America as an equal opportunity destroyer ties back to Hunt’s promotion of the CIA's Sheila as the vanguard of civilization. Because we’re so fancy, with our democracy and women’s rights and all, the thinking goes, the Arab world is lucky to be on the receiving end of our civilizing destruction.

In other venues of the War on Terror, meanwhile, co-ed military house calls from Kabul to Kandahar have offered similar learning experiences for the natives. According to Friedman, POWs at Bagram Air Base were treated to a “mind-bending experience” in which they went from “being in Al Qaeda, living, as James Michener put it, ‘in this cruel land of recurring ugliness, where only men were seen,’ and then suddenly being guarded by a woman with blond locks spilling out from under her helmet and an M16 hanging from her side.”

Not only do modern women rock the blond lock-M16 combination, they also kill. In 2002, Friedman summarized the contents of an Atlantic Monthly article about a female F-15 bombardier who drops a 500-pound explosive onto a Taliban truck caravan: “As the caravan is vaporized, the F-15 pilot shouts down at the Taliban—as if they could hear him from 20,000 feet—‘You have just been killed by a girl.’”

One can debate whether 20,000 feet or vaporization constitutes a greater impediment to hearing. But it’s pretty clear that gendered taunts by trigger-happy pilots and the journalists who quote them do little in the way of dismantling traditional gender barriers. In other words, because the supposedly female-empowering bomb-dropping perpetuates rather than overturns the stereotype of women as the weaker sex, the vaporized Taliban might be forgiven for missing the moral of the story.

Christopher Hitchens (left) with Twitter user @RichardDawkins. Photo via Wikimedia Commons

The late Christopher Hitchens—an ex-leftist whose seduction by war appears to have been closely replicated by Hunt’s character—became another champion of the notion that bombs set you free, predictably describing Afghanistan as the place “where American women pilots kill the men who enslave women.”

As author Richard Seymour has noted, Hitchens penned the following prescient analysis in 1985, long before his conversion: “To be able to bray that 'as a liberal, I say bomb the shit out of them,' is to have achieved that eye-catching, versatile marketability that is so beloved of editors and talk-show hosts. As a life-long socialist, I say don't let's bomb the shit out of them. See what I mean? It lacks the sex appeal, somehow.”

Perhaps it’s no surprise that he also acknowledged “the relationship between sex and cruelty.”

As these men tell it, war is all about women. The fictional Hunt contends that war is a fight “for the right of women not to be raped by the sons of a dictator”—that all across the Middle East, “the sexual revolution would arrive by tank”—while the all-too-real Friedman is convinced that the ladies of the region are begging for rescue. (The proof? A Saudi woman once purportedly emailed him: “I dream of having all my rights as a human being. Saudi women need your pen, Mr. Friedman.”)

We could laugh, but advocating war as liberation has real, negative consequences for women—not to mention other living and non-living things. After all, what is imperial war if not the mass rape of nations and cultures? Within the general context of indiscriminate violation, individual rape cases also abound; in fact, war and rape pretty much go together like bees and honey. The epidemic of rape in the US military confirms that the inhabitants of nations under attack are not the only ones eligible for penetration, and creates more problems for proponents of the military-as-bastion-of-equality model.

The question remains: why are some people so turned on by war? For many of the same reasons rape is still, in certain (creepy) quarters, seen as arousing. Both exercises have to do, obviously, with the violent subjugation of the “other,” which inspires feelings of power and domination. But it’s all quote pathetic, particularly in the age of drone warfare. The military and CIA personnel performing operations are so far removed from the scene of death and destruction that the people who get off on drone strikes can almost be said to be having a doubly vicarious experience. It’s kind of like getting off watching someone in a movie watch porn.

In the meantime, one can’t help but wonder if pro-war ejaculations in the press don’t stem in some cases from fears of inadequacy in bed, which are resolved via the appropriation of the US war machine as honorary genitalia. And the appropriators are in luck, because we’ll be fucking the world for the foreseeable future.

Follow Belén Fernández on Twitter.

Johnny Ryan's semi-popular comic book saga Prison Pit is an animated movie now, so everyone should immediately go buy and watch it. Johnny's been doing comics for VICE for the last 34 years, so we are morally obligated to promote any project he has a hand in.

It's exciting to watch Johnny's horrible monster-men wiggle around the screen and murder one another in the most awful ways that the most awful man on the planet could devise! The first chapter is on YouTube, so take a look:

Here's a little interview I did with Johnny Ryan, whom I hate very much. He hates me too. See just how much in this interview.

VICE: Why animate Prison Pit? If it's so great, then won't an animated adaptation just be a lesser accomplishment?
Johnny Ryan: I was concerned about adapting it into a color cartoon, but the guys at 6 Point really fucking nailed it. I think in some ways it's better than the book.

How specifically is the Prison Pit movie better than the book? 
There are a few scenes that I think are more effective in the animation. The one where the guys are falling down the tube at the beginning, the vag-maggot scene, the revelation of the cock, etc. Also the music is amazing. Hive Mind did a spectacular job.

Does the world no longer need the Prison Pit book now that we have the cartoon?
The world needs more Prison Pit, not less.

How involved were you in making this thing?
They took the book and used it as the storyboard. And they had me involved all along the way giving notes, and input, etc.

You have a pretty all-star voice cast for this movie. Was there anyone who was hard to get for this? Was everyone involved already a fan?
I think the only cast member that knew me beforehand was Blake. I knew he was perfect to play Jizzra the jerkoff monster. He's a great actor, and he jumped off a roof.

Did Blake jump off a roof to help with Prison Pit, or was it related to some other thing.
He jumped off the roof of a 666-story building and screamed "PRISON PIT" and landed in a dumptruck full of werewolf corpses. He broke every bone in his dick. That's his level of commitment to this project.

I noticed that the colors are significantly darker than the colors you typically use in comics. Tell me about that decision.
Prison Pit is an entity that lives separate from my previous AYC or VICE work in most aspects, including color.

Is the plan to animate the entire Prison Pit series?
If there's enough support, the plan is to keep going.

How many different voices did you consider for CF?
I think there were like two or three. I thought we would have to audition wrestlers or death metal singers—I didn't think we'd find a regular actor who could pull it off. But when they sent me James Adomian's audition, I thought he would be perfect. That guy's a fucking maniac behind the mic.

Is there any possibility of seeing your other comics turned into animated things? Loady, Blecky, Boobs Pooter?
Only if someone with a bunch of money and an animation studio asks me.

Do you feel happy now that you're rich and famous?
I will only be happy when you finally tie your balls to the space shuttle and fly directly into a champagne supernova in the sky.

You don't like me very much, do you Johnny? Why is that?
You suck.

What could I do to make you like me?
Die.

Have you gotten a cease-and-desist from Superjail! yet?
Have you noticed how your sister is a WAY better artist than you? Why do you think that is?

Can we talk outside of the interview for a second? Don't bring up my sister. Her career has totally eclipsed mine and no part of me is at all OK with that. 
Don't bring up Superjail!

How would Cannibal Fuckface kill me if he got the chance?
He would suck your cock till you died.

Is it possible to kill CF? Is he immortal?
We'll find out in book six.

What was CF's mother like? Was his dad at all like him? Was he born by conventional human means?
This sounds like a good opportunity for Prison Pit fan fic.

Who would win, CF or Lobo, and what would that fight be like? CF or Wolverine? CF or Bloodwulf? CF or Deadpool? CF or Marv from Sin City? CF or Hellboy? CF or Scott Pilgrim? CF or Boobs Pooter? CF or Workaholics? CF or Greg Mishka? CF or the Undertaker? CF or Worf?
No matter who wins, we lose.

Go to the Prison Pit site to get the movie or some other junk. Go to Fantagraphics to buy the comic. 

Ay Sol, nos deja tocadísimos siempre ver en acción a esta preciosidad. Qué elegancia más natural, tiene algo de sofisticado y algo de espontáneo que nos enamora muchísimo. Una chica amateur que está en el top del porno español, ¿cómo sería verla en un entorno profesional? Y no decimos con esto que FAKings no lo sea, conste.

FAKings – Sol

FÓLLATELOS
¡Y Sol se folló a un fan!
Definitivamente en FAKings
somos EL PORNO DEL PUEBLO.

Escena del 26/08/2014

Así ha bautizado su sesión nuestro DJ invitado, Francisco Santelices. Una selección de cartuchos a cargo de algunos de los más grandes músicos que ha dado la música negra en los años 50 y 60, todos negros por supuesto. Playlist; Jimmy Smith (Theme from any number can win), Ray Charles (I got a woman), Professor Longhair (Mardi Grass in New Orleans), Bo Diddley (Who do you love?), Screamin’ Jay Hawkins (Do you really love me baby?), Chuck Berry (Brown eyed handsome man), Little Richard (Tutti frutti), James Brown (Shout and shimmy), Sam Cooke (Somebody have mercy), Otis Redding (Things go better with…), Ike and Tina Turner (Goodbye so long), Nina Simone (I’m going back home), Aretha Franklyn (Come back baby), Erma Franklyn (Piece of my heart) y Clifton Chenier (Coming back home).