Snob

By Pauli Poisuo  Published: January 22nd, 2014  As we have discussed before, your brain likes nothing better than sabotaging your life in myriad tiny, bullshit ways. It's not content to be a jerk all by itself, either; the control sponge behind your face is constantly conspiring to make its entire

Quentin Tarantino made headlines earlier this month talking about plans for his next genre-bending opus, a western called “The Hateful Eight.” Except late Tuesday he announced via Deadline that he’s canceling the film altogether after the script leaked.

“I finished a script, a first draft, and I didn’t mean to shoot it until next winter, a year from now. I gave it to six people, and apparently it’s gotten out today.”

He continues the rant in with characteristic finger-pointing ire:

I gave it to three actors: Michael Madsen, Bruce Dern, Tim Roth. The one I know didn’t do this is Tim Roth. One of the others let their agent read it, and that agent has now passed it on to everyone in Hollywood. I don’t know how these fucking agents work, but I’m not making this next. I’m going to publish it, and that’s it for now. I give it out to six people, and if I can’t trust them to that degree, then I have no desire to make it. I’ll publish it. I’m done. I’ll move on to the next thing. I’ve got 10 more where that came from.

Given the fevered reception for Quentin Tarantino’s last two movies “Inglorious Basterds” and “Django Unchained,” expectations are through the roof for his next film. Christoph Waltz scored Oscars for Best Supporting Actor in both of them, and he was to return in “The Hateful Eight.”

“I’m very, very depressed,” Tarantino said. “I finished a script, a first draft, and I didn’t mean to shoot it until next winter, a year from now. I gave it to six people, and apparently it’s gotten out today.”

In an interview with GQ a few years back Tarantino said he wouldn’t make films past the age of 55, because he never wanted to be old and out of touch as an artist. Given Tarantino’s mania I’m sure he really does have 10 more ideas where “The Hateful Eight” came from. But let’s hope he has the manic energy to finish the script and get shooting. Because he’s just hit his peak on his last couple films, and he’s running out of years.

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The 2014 Oscar nominations for best song are: Happy- Pharrell Williams (Despicable Me 2), The Moon Song- Karen O (Her), Ordinary Love- U2 (Mandela: Long Walk to Freedom), Let It Go- Idina Menzel (Frozen), and Alone Yet Not Alone- Joni Earekson Tada (Alone Yet Not Alone) -- wait, what?

Never heard of this movie? Released to eleven theaters for a one-week run in September 2013, Alone Yet Not Alone is based on a novel by Tracy Leininger. Set in the American Colonial era, the story follows a young blonde girl kidnapped by Native Americans, who finds comfort in her Christian faith and later escapes to be reunited with her family. (From the School Library Journal review: "What could have been an interesting story of survival is diminished by the book's simplistic tone and lack of nuance. The settlers are beautiful and compassionate, while many Indians are unattractive, cruel, and troubled because they don't believe in one god. The depiction of them is beyond biased and there is no attempt to provide any historical background or explanation for their actions. It will be difficult to find an audience for this book.") Rob of the blog Newspaper Rock gives a more detailed background on the story, while Adrienne K. at Native Appropriations asks bluntly "They give out Oscars for racism now?"

The film has interesting ties to Christian Dominionism, a philosophy that calls for a Christian theocracy in the US, much like the fictional Republic of Gilead. Tracy Leininger is the daughter of right-wing kingmaker James Leininger, and has close ties with Vision Forum. VF was a prominent Christian dominionist organization until its closure in late 2013 after leader Doug Phillips admitted to a long-term affair. The film is a production of Vision Forum, while many of the actors in the film were heavily involved in Vision Forum, including stay-at-home daughter Lourdes Torres and Phillips' own children Joshua and Jubilee. It may not be a surprise that Vision Forum and Dominionism at large espouses racism-- a key figure in the movement [note: sketchy racist site] is R.J. Rushdoony, who called for the reinstitution of slavery.

So why was the theme song "Alone Yet Not Alone" nominated for an Oscar, when popular artists Taylor Swift, Coldplay, Beyonce and Jay-Z were overlooked? Well, composer Bruce Broughton is a former governor of the Academy of Television Arts and Sciences and served as the Chairman of the Music Branch of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences from 2003-2012. Even with this pedigree, the song was ignored by the Academy-- until Broughton called in his connections. Said an unnamed artist spurned for a nomination "I can't figure any of this shit out."

"In August 2013, a bunch of performers in adult entertainment got together to talk about our industry and said: "Shit's fucked up. The shit in question is more fucked up than it was a few years ago. Someone ought to do something." Rather than wait for someone to become an actual person who will fix things, we collectively pulled on our grown-up pants and decided to do something ourselves. Thus began the organisation called the Adult Performer Advocacy Committee." Porn actor Stoya writes about APAC and her personal guidelines for sexual consent in New Statesman; APAC has also filmed a video wherein working porn professionals explain the need-to-knows for people interested in entering the industry.

A Guide To American Football. [2:48 Video] Superbowl Sunday is fast approaching. If you do not know the rules of American Football, here is a chance to learn.

1. Butt panties

I love butts. I don’t know if you’ve been on Tumblr lately, but the female ass is definitely having a moment right now. However these panties, no. First of all they are extremely bulky so you would never wear them under something. You would have to excuse yourself and change into them and then be like “here’s my butt.” Lingerie is awesome, but the best lingerie is sexy and feminine, leaving something to the imagination rather than a jokey item that announces your private area and that it’s time to have sex right now–becuase you aren’t going to be able to do anything else in these panties. The fit has to be completely perfect for this silhouette to work, which is an ordering online nightmare to begin with, and also means you can’t really move around in them.

2. Men’s fishnet g-string

I will say that I’m not a fan of male thongs. However, I know that this is sexy to people and more power to them. However, fishnet on your sweaty genital area is not chic. Fishnet is not breathable. And from the looks of this pic, it is not real fishnet, which can make up for being sweaty (in a Monet way) by having the effect of lace, showing some, but not too much. This is like Finnick Odair fishnet, which is like weirdly rugged and tight in some places and loose in others, which destroys the coy purpose of using that fabric. It’s just like, here’s my junk with some material over it! Also, points off for selling a male product without using a male model.

3. Homemade kegal ball

What is sexier than thinking about a woman sitting around her craft table in her suburban home working on her DIY sex toy line for Etsy? Basically, every conceivable thing that isn’t what I just described.

4. Chocolate Penis crocheted sex toy with Harness

This isn’t intended for penetration, so it is literally a crocheted penis doll the creator intends for you to bring to parties? Oh, ok. Also, don’t say chocolate unless you mean the edible kind. I am hungry now.

5. The creepiest dildo ever

I can just imagine announcing to my boyfriend that I got us a new sex toy. The mischievous smile on his face, running to the bedroom to see what it is. And then the look of horror when he sees this sculpted dildo made to look like a person wearing a horrifying bunny costume. I’m not sure when or how our sex life would resume after that.

6. Twee sex toy container

If you want to be cool and have sex toys but then simultaneously announce to your partner that you are, in fact, uptight and type A, this is the product for you.

7. A photo print of two Barbies getting it on

From the product description:

We love Barbie dolls– we love Valentine’s Day– we love the two together.

This is an original 4 x 6 inch print of Barbie dolls gone bad, gone wrong, and beyond the limits of plastic doll passion! The perfect addition to any card or flower arrangement!

So there you go, they say it’s the perfect addition to *any* card or flower arrangement. Inquire as to whether you can buy in bulk.

8. Homemade (vegan, gluten-free) lube

In this day and age there’s no reason your vagina shouldn’t be gluten-free. Gluten-free is sexy. In fact, as I am approaching orgasm I prefer my partner to whisper “vegan, gluten-free” in my ear.

9. Haute Couture Condom

Man, the world really is behind in production of “I love sex” jewelry. This beautiful, handmade blue condom pendant with attached “I love sex” mini plaque will have the suitors lining up. Wear it in the club! Force a blushing bride to wear it at her bachelorette party! Give it as a gag gift to your office secretary!

10. Soap

Only on Etsy is DIY soap considered a sexy product.

El presidente del Consello da Cultura Galega insiste en que la capital gallega «no es consciente» de la figura del arzobispo compostelano

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I feel like a title should clue you in to the contents of the article, but I’m going to be as clear and literal as my words allow:

This is an article describing in extremely explicit terms aspects and frustrations of anal sex, including those that involve feces. Specifically, those elements of anal sex that I have rarely to never heard anyone talk about outside of the confines of extreme privacy, due to their uncomfortable nature.

I won’t be euphemistic.

This is your last warning.

Women often don’t like anal sex because they’re not prepared for it.



I have noticed in male-female relationships that there are two things Boyfriend Zero has fucked up for everyone: oral sex and anal sex. Oral sex is really easy to fix; anal sex isn’t. Convincing a woman to have anal sex is hard to begin with, and after endless goading they finally try it and it’s horrible because some idiot doesn’t know what he’s doing. No one will touch her asshole again for years.

Are you understanding the gravity of what I’m saying? Sophocles could have written this shit.

At some point there should be an ass-tribunal for these men and their crimes against sodomy. So here is a code: if you can’t take your own dick up your ass, you have no business putting it in anyone else’s. This applies even if you’re “straight.” Oh, you haven’t shoved anything up your butt yet? Then don’t shove something up a girl’s butt. Take it up the ass first to see how it feels, you fucking pussy. Once you’re confident that you could take your own dick, then you’re ready to convince a girl to do it. Until then, shut the fuck up.

Here are some more questions to ask yourself: can you stick a 6” dildo (or dick, but dildos are de facto dicks) up your ass period? For how many pumps before it’s unbearable? Can you insert and re-insert without pain, like you’d need to be able to do if you were being fucked?

Some women think that if they can simply get their boyfriend’s dick in then that’s sufficient. It’s not even close. Try this: 80% or less of the largest thing you can insert is what you can enjoyably have anal sex with. If you’re taking your boyfriend’s dick in your ass and your boyfriend’s dick is simultaneously the largest thing you’ve had inserted into your rectum, it’s probably going to feel like shit. If he’s 5”, you should be able to take 7” for a few pumps without dying. (I’m assuming length correlates with girth to simplify things.)

This is, how I imagine, most conversations about anal sex go:


guy: hey let’s try anal sex

girl: no


~ice age of convincing~


girl: okay fine once

guy: awesome

(Let’s assume this woman isn’t like the woman in Tucker Max’s anal sex story who doesn’t empty her ass and shits all over him.)

guy: *gets astroglide*

guy: *inserts a couple of fingers*

guy: okay I’m ready *inserts dick*

girl: holy fucking shit ow I don’t like anal

guy: :(

And anal is ruined forever.

Her asshole is unavailable to every subsequent boyfriend. Fuck that guy.

Here is how a realistic conversation about anal sex should go:


girl: I want to do anal (immediately it’s established that this is a fictional example)

guy: Harry-Potter-finding-Ollivanders-wand light shining down on existence


girl: *buys a small dildo*

girl: *buys a medium dildo*

girl: *buys a larger dildo*

(one month goes by of using these on the daily, working upward in size)

girl: okay I can use the large one now

And they had anal sex, and it felt really good, and everyone was happy and no one wrote in the comment section about how much they hate it.

It’s very difficult to convince someone that their previous attempt at anal sex was wrong. I mean, it probably was, but look: I can take a 9-inch dildo up my butt, because I’m an adult and I solve my own problems. But I didn’t start out that way. My index finger felt enormous at first. Virtually everyone I know who does this has used a hairbrush handle as a transition between their fingers and a cock. And eventually, you can start using a cock. Just not right away. It’ll take about a month of regular sticking-shit-up-your-ass. And once you get to the point where a regular-sized penis doesn’t feel big, it will feel really good. You have to believe.

But the moral of this story is that I believed in myself. If you believe in yourself, you can take a huge dick up your butt too.

If you’re going to take a dick in your ass, you have to take an enormous shit before you do it and finger out every remaining bit of feces after that.



I’m not exaggerating. You need to shit out every bit of feces from your rectum. Your ass needs to be completely empty. This seems like it would be intuitive, but a surprisingly large number of people do not do this. If I’m about to fuck someone in the ass and I feel a hard, dry, unreleased log of feces against the tip of my dick (this is an unmistakable feeling) I will simply stop there. We can have vaginal sex, or, if you’re a guy, I can get on top of you, because at least I am a responsible person who empties their rectum at the possibility of sodomy. But I’m not going to get that shit against my dick.

You probably read the second part correctly, by the way: you should get in a shower, grab some kind of petroleum jelly or lubricant or whatever, and finger out every remaining bit of feces from your rectum. Use a hook motion with your finger if you have to. But simply taking a huge shit will not expunge tiny fecal remnants. You need to get everything.

If you’ve never had anal sex before, you can probably deduce that spontaneous anal sex almost doesn’t exist. It can, but a lot of lucky things have to happen. Namely, you (or your partner) would have to be the kind of person who gives themselves an enema on a daily basis on the off-chance you meet someone you want to exchange asshole bacteria with. Then, you’d need to carry lubricant around with you, and be stretched-out enough that you could lubricate in a hurry without pain to your rectum. I have never met anyone dedicated enough to assfucking who actually does this.

There’s more to painlessness than “use lots of lube.”

Every anal guide ever says “use lots of lube.” No shit. Assholes don’t naturally lubricate themselves like vaginas do. But what I think most people take from this is that you should put a shit-ton of Astroglide on your dick and you’re solid.

That’s not how assholes work, asshole. The rectum is lubricated progressively. So for each insertion, more lubricant will spread throughout the rectal walls, but it’s not something you can do in one pump. If you’re sticking something in your ass or someone else’s ass, you will need to lubricate that thing, stick it in once, pull it out, obnoxiously re-lubricate it, stick it in again, obnoxiously re-lubricate it, stick it in again, obnoxiously re-lubricate it, and by the 4th or 5th time whoever’s ass this is should be sufficiently lubricated internally.

Any person who lubricates their dick once and sticks it inside of you without re-lubricating is a fucking idiot and an idiot at fucking. Don’t sleep with them.

Men are really horny after they take a huge shit.

You’ve probably heard that the “prostate is the male g-spot” and this is essentially true. The most intense orgasms I’ve had have been this way. However, what you might not know about men (unless you are one) is that enormous bowel movements press against the prostate and by the end of it, you’ve had enough prostate stimulation to make you want to fuck and badly.

This is my personal experience with this, but I’ve always found that there are three ‘waves’ to prostate stimulation: there is the first initial stimulation of purging all the feces from your ass. There is the second stimulation of actually inserting something in your ass. Then, if you wait for about fifteen or twenty minutes and do it again, the prostate is especially sensitive and the third wave is euphoria. It’s resulted in some of the most intense orgasms I’ve ever experienced. Full-body spasms, which seem like the kind of experience reserved for women when they talk about their most intense g-spot orgasms.

Think about the implications of what this means when bisexual or homosexual men go around looking to have casual sex with other men, and specifically at gay clubs known for this. A solid fraction of these men have not only made sure that their bowels are empty prior to going, but because of that they’re considerably more horny than they would be had they just been looking for pussy in a straight club.

There’s a good chance that this thought has never entered your brain, but that’s why I’m here. Also, if you’re a straight or bisexual woman, a great time to hound a man for sex is about 30 to 60 minutes after he’s taken a huge shit.

If you’re fucking a woman in her vagina, you can massage your dick through her asshole.

To this day, I have not heard anyone talk about this, nor have I seen it happen in porn. But maybe it’s time we broached the subject: if you’re a guy and her asshole is stretched out enough to take your penis, you can definitely insert a couple of fingers into her ass while you’re fucking her vagina. At the very least, you can insert two thumbs. And when you do this, you can actually push your fingers against her rectal wall and massage your dick as you’re thrusting into her vagina.

I don’t normally consider myself a genius, but when I first discovered this I felt like Leibniz developing Calculus.

To their credit, women already do the reverse of this: if they’re taking a shit and it’s too big, they can use their fingers to push the shit out through their vagina. Admittedly this is really cool, but I’ve been without this advantage for so long that if I suddenly woke up and had it I’d feel like my defecatory accomplishments were flushed down the toilet.

CLEAN YOUR ASSHOLE.

Sure, I have read guides that say that washing your asshole with soap and water dries it out. And in my defense, I’m not saying you need to straight up grab a bar of soap and rub it on your anus. But it is fucking disgusting to think about eating someone’s asshole who has not soaped it. If you know someone is going to be coming in contact with your ass, soap up your hand and wash your anus with it beforehand. (Besides, if you’re about to have anal sex with lube, it would logically follow that your anus is not going to be dry for long.)

Not surprisingly, the women I have slept with who had the most disgusting anuses were consistently women who (A) were scared of anal sex and (B) did not clean their assholes because they were repulsed by them. Yeah, I’d think anal sex was disgusting too if all assholes looked like yours. Am I entitled if I don’t want to see dried chunks of feces hanging off of a woman’s anus when I’m 69ing her? I really don’t think this is an excessive request.

Also, if you’re a guy and aren’t meticulous about this already, there’s a strong chance you have hair around your asshole. Hair holds bacteria and feces and you probably have more of it on your ass than women do, so if you’re going to be doing anything with your ass, then clean extra-carefully. Arguably you should shave the hair around your asshole entirely, but this is considerably more time-consuming than merely shaving your dick and balls, so I understand if it’s not your preferred course of action.

Stop freaking out; your ass isn’t going to die.

I showed a draft of this article to a friend and she protested that she didn’t want to stretch her asshole out, that she has a great asshole as it is. To her credit, she does. But look: you naturally take the equivalent of a dick out of your ass when you take a shit. So after that, you’re already stretched out. I’m doubting that you’re walking around freaking out after you take a huge shit because your asshole is permanently fucked up. You understand on some level that it doesn’t work that way. And, yeah, you’re much more loose when you’ve just expunged feces from your ass and your rectum is lubricated with Astroglide, but then that’s why you’re not walking around like that all the time. The rectum’s default state is dry and very tight. You will not alter this state much.

Really, the only thing that changes when you can take a very large dildo up your ass is that maybe you might not feel like you’re going to die when you take a monster shit. Otherwise, your rectum is going to be pretty much the same. According to a scientific penis percentile chart, the top 1% of girth begins at 6 inches in circumference and the top 0.01 % at 6.75. Considering that 6.5” to 7” is on the upper end of doable for me and I’ve never had problems with my butt, I doubt you’d notice any rectal problems until you got to something bigger than 8” in circumference, which is like one-in-a-million level of girth. The only people I know for a fact who have experienced issues due to stretching are people who make enormous insertion videos where they stick things like footballs and liters of coke in their ass, and those things surpass 9” or even 10” in circumference.

Ask yourself: are you sticking a liter of coke in your ass? If not, then chill out.

Stop freaking out in general.

This isn’t really a key instruction so much as a request, but I wrote this article with frank language because many people I know are uncomfortable talking about anal sex, and it doesn’t have to be that way.

The level of frankness I’ve used here is the level of frankness with which you should be able to discuss anal sex, yet I’ve hardly known anyone who speaks openly about it. In general, it’s an uncomfortable subject. An asshole is “down there”, a dump is “number two”, the rectum is “the wrong hole”, and so on. No one should have to tiptoe around a statement like “I want to fuck you in the ass.” If you have to walk on eggshells when discussing anal sex, you can’t fully appreciate it with the person you’re shielding.

As far as I’m concerned, trying anal sex is like trying sushi. Lots of people have; it’s not a big deal in the 21st-century. We shouldn’t act like it is, because if everyone is still scared of it, there is substantially less chance that many people will do it right. Truly, the quirks of assfucking should be something you’re able to talk about, openly, with the same freedom that you’d use to talk about shaving your pubes. That’s a pretty touchy subject on its own, but no one gets their balls in a knot like they do when talking about anal.

And anyway, let’s be real: you just clicked on a 2500-word article about anal, where you were warned from the title onward what you’d be getting into. If you’ve read down to this point you’re beyond claiming some imaginary high ground, so don’t get butthurt about assfucking.



But really, clean your asshole.

En aninovo do 1969, Monica Searle foi diagnosticada cunha rara e agresiva forma de cancer de mama. A quimioterapia -experimental de aquela- era un asunto de fe. Despois de cada tratamento, o seu marido Ronald debuxaba a Mónica unha destas Señoras Toupa, “para animar as temidas sesións de quimioterapia e evocar o ditoso futuro que estaba por vir”. A idea da Señora Toupa veu despois de que a parella descubrira unha enorme adega na casa decrépita que eles mercaran no sur de Francia. Nunca pensadas para seren publicadas, estas viñetas tan íntimas exhalan optimismo contaxioso e e esperanza…

Isto é amor.

Monica morreu o pasado verán, case corenta anos despois da súa diagnose de cancro, e Ronald Searle uniuse á súa namorada esta última semana con 91 anos.

Texto orixinal: Austin Kleon para Brain Pickings.

E aquí está o fermoso libro con todas as ilustracións.

Solicitan la elaboración de un informe sobre contaminación ambiental

Illustrations: Sam Taylor

Twenty years ago last month, a new sitcom debuted. Originally titled Insomnia Cafe, it was supposed to catch some of the heat that Seinfeld had generated, some of that post-Woody Allen, New York-y neurotic humor about relationships and everyday life. But the original pitch that was sent to NBC revealed it to be a very different kind of show:

"This show is about six people in their 20s who hang out at this coffee house. An after hours insomnia café. It’s about sex, love, relationship, careers… a time in your life when everything is possible, which is really exciting and really scary. It’s about searching for love and commitment and security… and a fear of love and commitment and security. And it’s about friendship, because when you’re young and single and in the city, your friends are your family."

Unlike Seinfeld and just about every other sitcom before it, with their misfit ensembles of slob dads, nagging moms, drunk priests, stoner sons, and pervert neighbors, Friends was to be the first aspirational sitcom. A comedy where the primary cast were young, good-looking metropolitans without drinking problems or STDs. 

Playing on our desires to be just like those kinds of people, it was a resounding success. In the resulting years, Friends became an international phenomenon. The characters' New York dating language entered the 90s pop-lexicon in a way that Bart Simpson's "eat my shorts" never could. In fact, could the strange syntax of Chandler's jokes BE any more subtly woven into the natural speech patterns of almost every Westerner aged 20 to 40? Everyone knew about "the Rachel," and Matt LeBlanc was in a really great movie about a baseball-playing monkey. It's ridiculous how much influence this decade-long romantic comedy had.

Now, don't get it twisted; Friends is a decent show. It's engaging, comforting, and totally watchable. It doesn't seem believable that the final episode of it aired a decade ago this month. But in its seemingly inescapable and interminable second life of re-runs, Friends has also had a negative impact on our generation. It has turned us into dicks, basically. Here's why:

The Characters Are so Middle-Aged
Alright, so sitcoms have never been about "cool" people (unless you count Barley). Yes, George Costanza's clothes might have inadvertently paved the way for the Wavey Garms generation, but Seinfeld was about Larry David, and Larry David has never exactly been Iggy Pop. The characters in Seinfeld were much the same as any other sitcom character, ever—people who worry too much and don't really see the point of staying up late.

The difference here is that the people in Seinfeld are meant to be dysfunctional and weird, but in Friends they're supposed to be sexy, young urbanites. And yet there's an episode where they all lose their shit about going to see Hootie & the Blowfish. It's indicative of the fact that the writers of Friends had no interest in reflecting the times. Instead, they gave the characters a cosy, middle-aged take on modern culture that just doesn't gel. The characters live in New York in the mid-90s, the time of The Tunnel, the Club Kids, and the Wu-Tang Clan. Yet these 20-somethings who work in fashion, TV, and trendy restaurants are culturally confined to radio rock, Die Hard, and a few gags about Chandler being into musicals. I've never met anyone my age with so little involvement in the world around them.

They almost never go to clubs, they never talk about Tarantino movies, or rap, or Björk. Even our parents did that. Although Phoebe does get very excited about meeting Sting. Why? It's hard to say if it's bad writing or some kind of conscious effort to make the characters as middle of the road as possible.

All that in mind, would you say it was Kurt Cobain's death, Thatcher's criminal justice bill, and/or the internet that killed mass alternative youth culture dead in the 90s? Or was it Friends?

The Ridiculous Housing Situations
Besides Chandler and Ross, the other friends couldn’t have earned more than $15,000 a year between them. Joey was an out-of-work actor, Monica a part-time chef, Rachel a coffee shop barista/aspiring fashionista, and Phoebe a part-time masseuse, which is 100 percent the least profitable career I can imagine. The fact that any of them had panoramic Manhattan skyline views with shabby-chic furnishings and La-Z-Boy sofas is totally ridiculous.

The story goes that Monica inherited her apartment, which doesn’t really explain why none of the money went to her brother, Ross. If we're really digging out the backstory, I guess Joey could possibly have been on benefits. Either way, how did they afford it? Because it's aspirational bullshit with no grounding in the modern world.

The carefree, 15th-floor lifestyle they stood for, which came to define so many people’s aspirations in the late 90s and early 00s, never came true for the rest of us. How could it? The whole thing had been conceived and executed 2,800 miles away from Manhattan at the Warner Bros studios in California, where a lifestyle is something that stagehands can move around on wheels.

Men Are Pathetic; Women Are Bitches
Friends didn't paint its characters' sex lives in a very appealing light. Ross and Chandler were frustrated and unwilling semi-celibates, while Joey seemed to believe that game-playing was the only way of getting women into bed. On the other hand, Rachel, Monica, and Phoebe’s relentless umming and ah-ing over the respective merits of this guy's 'ceps and that guy's chat-up lines seemed to compound that idea that dating was far from a natural process. Why so neurotic? Friends was the show that turned fucking into bureaucracy.

For some reason, Match.com and all the other dating sites now feel it necessary to discuss first-date etiquette on public ads. (Apart from uniformdating.com, which I still don't really understand—shouts to you for retaining the mysteries of love with your weird USP, guys.) Too many young, city-dwelling women spend their lives drinking wine endlessly, and bitching about inadequate shows of "romance" from guys who—heaven forbid—take them on dates to a pizza parlor. Far too many young, city-dwelling men seem to have become cynical to the very idea of love, morphing into an army of Joeys who lack the charm that comes from being a TV character with a redemptive script and Matt LeBlanc's idiotic smile.

Friends, in its innocent desire to bump up viewing figures, sold us a reductive idea of gender identity that has somehow stuck with us until the present day.

Joey Tribbiani Was the World's First Pick-Up Artist
On that subject, have any of you ladies ever been hit on by a dude in a tight T-shirt and a funny hat at the supermarket, or the gym, or a coffee shop, or anywhere at all? You've got Joey Tribbiani to blame. Joey might have been a great TV character—and maybe the most "real" of the bunch—but something about his hyper-confident public chirping routines was so believable that it inspired a generation of home-grown lotharios to test the limits of harassment law themselves. Still, I guess it's better than what Chandler was put through. 

It Birthed the Coffee-Shop Dicks
Jokes about people drinking types of coffee with funny names are now even more dull than the people they're aimed at, and Friends is responsible for both of these social problems. Fair enough: when it was first shown, coffee shops must have seemed kind of sophisticated and glamorous. Unlike bars or greasy diners, they are a place for both work and fun, somewhere you could talk to your buddies without old frat boys shouting at TV screens. Now that you can get a decent espresso at the airport or McDonald's, they've lost some of that exoticism.

However, the coffee-shop dicks remain. Staying longer and longer than before due to Wi-Fi and the widening of the market. Still dramatically sighing at kids who make noise, still talking about job interviews, still reading the same books, and still failing to finish the same terrible, terrible screenplays. 

Everyone Knows a Tedious "Ross and Rachel" Now
This is truly Friends's gravest legacy.

Once upon a time, humans lived quite happily within the simple classifications of "single," "together," "married" or "divorced." Unless you were a savage, or French. That was until Ross and Rachel came along with their "we were on a break" chat, giving people free reign to participate in all kinds of romantic ambiguity.

Cue a generation endlessly texting back and forth about "where things are going," sleeping with each other’s best friends on the grounds that they were "just seeing each other," and generally being as noncommittal and hurtful as possible. I’m not saying we should all be married with kids by the time we’re 25—and yeah, to a certain extent romantic ambiguity can be fun—but perhaps if we’d stuck to the idea that a boyfriend is a boyfriend and a girlfriend is a girlfriend, we could have saved ourselves a whole lot of heartbreak and texts.

Friends's attitude toward relationships wasn't bohemian or liberated, it was just annoying. There were no grand theories at play on what a relationship should actually mean; the happenings were just symptomatic of selfishness and self-obsession. "On a break" never really meant anything, besides the fact that one person wanted to break up and didn’t have the heart to admit it to the other. The Ross-and-Rachel saga legitimized something that should have been disregarded as dumb from the very start, birthing a generation of kids talking all kinds of pseudo-psychological relationship garble at each other for over a decade.

Follow Clive (@thugclive) and Nathalie (@NROlah) on Twitter.

Illustrations by Sam Taylor. Follow him on Twitter @sptsam or visit his website at samtaylorillustrator.com.

Image by Cei Willis

Amy Harmon isn't stupid. When the NYT correspondent wrote a feature explaining that a Hawaiian campaign to ban GM crops was about as scientific as the plot of Santa Claus Conquers the Martians, she probably expected a bit of blowback. Probably the kindest thing you can say about anti-GM protesters is that they rarely allow their ignorance to restrain their outraged righteousness. So an article that, in the words of one blogger, “shows what happens when you actually look for facts instead of being a dumbshit activist with an agenda who rejects the facts in favor of a political worldview,” was not going to make its way through the idiotsphere unscathed.

Even so, the response from campaign group Food Democracy was remarkable. They chose to Photoshop Harmon’s head onto the body of a woman in a leopard-skin swimsuit, strolling hand-in-hand with the CEO of biotech corporation Monsanto on a tropical beach. It was sexist, childish, and a demonstration that if you put the most sophisticated tools in the world in the hands of idiots you will still end up with garbage. “Evil bitchweed” and variations of “cunt” were among the gentler comments left beneath it on their Facebook page—others talked darkly of force-feeding crops to her family.

Another Amy, Amy Wallace, encountered similar levels of vitriol from the anti-vaccine movement after writing about the non-existent link between vaccines and autism. As Wallace recounted this weekend, “In online comments and over email, I was called a prostitute and the C-word. JB Handley, a critic of childhood vaccination … sent me an essay titled, 'Paul Offit Rapes (intellectually) Amy Wallace and Wired Magazine'. In it, he implied that my subject had slipped me a date-rape drug.”

Male journalists writing about controversial subjects get plenty of abuse, too—an irked Christian once suggested I should be decapitated—but as Wallace remarked, the sexualized, "you’re a whore" tone taken with women seems rather different, and the levels of abuse in a typical case reach far greater heights.

One of the great myths about online abuse is that it’s pretty much the same for men and women. Recent research by writer Meg Baber found that men believe, on average, that they receive about the same level of abuse and harassment online as women do. In reality, there is no evidence to support this, and a growing amount that suggests women receive far more.

In a recent, notorious case, a male Reddit user created a fake OKCupid profile posing as a woman, and lasted two hours before the creepy messages frightened him away.

While there’s a lack of large-scale research in this area, the studies that have been done have produced similar results—researchers at the University of Maryland, for example, found that female usernames in chat rooms received an average of 163 malicious private messages per day, against just half a dozen for men. They were overwhelmingly targeted by male, human users (rather than bots) and often sexually explicit.

Support group Working to Halt Online Abuse receives three times as many complaints from women as men; while Pew Research surveys suggest 42 percent of women who sign up to online dating services receive bothersome messages compared to 17 percent of men. Pew also found that 5 percent of women have been put in physical danger by incidents online.

A second great myth is that this is a question of "trolling." That word has been so abused by commentators in recent years that it now means everything from being argumentative to sending death threats. Coupled with the fact that—as Helen Lewis pointed out recently—much of the abuse leveled at women is simply unquotable in newspapers or on pre-watershed TV, we have a situation where most of the people expressing an opinion on online abuse have no real clue what it’s actually like.

In reality, we’re talking about straightforward abuse. Amanda Hess recently provided a sample:

“To Alyssa Royse, a sex and relationships blogger, for saying that she hated The Dark Knight: “you are clearly retarded, i hope someone shoots then rapes you.” To Kathy Sierra, a technology writer, for blogging about software, coding and design: “i hope someone slits your throat and cums down your gob.” To Lindy West, a writer at the women’s website Jezebel, for critiquing a comedian’s rape joke: “I just want to rape her with a traffic cone.” To Rebecca Watson, an atheist commentator, for blogging about sexism in the skeptic community: “If I lived in Boston I’d put a bullet in your brain.” To Catherine Mayer, a journalist at TIME Magazine, for no particular reason: “A BOMB HAS BEEN PLACED OUTSIDE YOUR HOME. IT WILL GO OFF AT EXACTLY 10:47 PM ON A TIMER AND TRIGGER DESTROYING EVERYTHING.”

Then there’s Caroline Criado-Perez, who committed the crime of suggesting it would be nice if more women could feature on Britain’s bank notes: “I remember the man who told me I’d never track him down, only feel his cock while he was raping me,” she told Helen Lewis; “the man who told me he would pistol-whip me over and over until I lost consciousness, while my children watched and then burn my flesh; the man who told me he had a sniper rifle aimed directly at my head and did I have any last words, fugly piece of shit? I remember the man who told me to put both hands on his cock and stroke it till he came on my eyeballs or he would slit my throat; the man who told me I would be dead and gone that night, and that I should kiss my pussy goodbye, as a group of them would 'break it irreparably'; the man who told me a group of them would mutilate my genitals with scissors and set my house on fire while I begged to die.”

Many pages have been written about the social and legal aspects of this problem, but there has been far less discussion about how this relates to public health, or technology. The people doing this are not generally among life’s winners. They are typically younger men, often with some form of mental health issue, looking for attention or some sense of self-worth through notoriety.

Some are clearly obsessive. One individual, a London-based man calling himself "ElevatorGate," has created an online archive of more than 15,000 Storify posts, watching his targets—mostly women—all day, and meticulously documenting their online conversations. In the last few years he has created dozens of accounts on Twitter, Storify and WordPress, at one point even blogging in support of the convicted rapist and ex-pro soccer player Ched Evans, pointing readers to an internet forum where his victim was named.

Over time, a community of misfits and misogynists rallied to his cause, constructing a sort of childish fantasy around his pseudonym—he became a "brave hero," challenging the dark forces of women. What resulted, as in so many cases of long-term abuse, was a self-reinforcing cycle of attention seeking and approval. And then something changed: what started as an irritation (I was originally one of his targets) became increasingly pitiful. Here was a grown man with the entire world at his fingertips, yet cruelly unable to interact with it in any constructive way; lost in his own fantasy, flinging rude words at women he had never met.

Until now, the focus has been very much on the victims of internet abuse, but nagging questions remain unanswered—to what extent are the abusers also victims? Are there some people for whom social media just isn’t healthy? Indeed, are there entire communities of people essentially reinforcing and enabling each others’ problems in a collective downward spiral?

And then there’s the technology, the complex web of services and APIs layered on top of the World Wide Web. Abuse against women online has been endemic since the early days of the internet, but it’s only really come to mainstream attention in the era of Twitter. In part, this is because online conversation is far more central to our culture now, but it’s also a result of new features and innovations in online services. Twitter abuse is far more visible, and more easily directed at high-profile individuals, than misogyny in an AOL chat room. It’s also more likely to escalate, thanks to the brevity of messages and the capacity for anyone to wade into any conversation, bringing their followers with them.

Many of these services seem almost designed for stalkers. In 2014, anyone with basic computer skills can create an anonymous email account, use that to generate accounts on WordPress, Twitter, Storify and other services and generate abusive content on an industrial scale. More sophisticated abusers can employ simple scripting or services like If This Then That to automate elements of their workflow, or route their activities through Tor.

Once you reframe abuse as a technological problem, you realize just how little services like Twitter have actually done to protect their users. Contrary to popular belief, it is impossible to block someone on Twitter—all you can do is block particular accounts. There are no levels of privacy between "protected account" and "totally open to everyone." Worse, Twitter doesn’t scale—people with tens of thousands of followers face an unmanageable cacophony of feedback, while those targeted by a mob have little option but to retreat until the storm dies down.

You might say that Twitter doesn’t really matter in the grand scheme of things. It’s just one service, and if people don’t like it they can go elsewhere. The same could be said about chat rooms. And if you don’t like the comments on your blog posts, well, you can switch them off. That misses the point, though. No one public space is particularly important in itself, and if one is closed, it isn’t some existential threat to modern democracy; but when the same people keep being driven out of more and more spaces, at some point we need to take a stand.

This should matter to Twitter and other online services for commercial reasons too, because history has shown what happens to services that fail to create a pleasant environment for their users. Back in 2005, the Pew Internet and American Life Project discovered that participation in online chats and discussion groups had fallen by more than a third in the space of a few years. The dramatic decline was almost entirely due to women leaving the services; which “coincided with increased awareness of and sensitivity to worrisome behavior in chat rooms.“ Already, people are taking conversations they would have had on Twitter to other forums, citing near-hysterical responses to even the mildest of topics. It wouldn’t take much to turn the site into a modern-day AltaVista.

Follow Martin on Twitter: @mjrobbins

A imagem que vedes acima ilustra a primeira página dum códice conservado no arquivo da catedral de Compostela, o conhecido como Tumbo B. Nele compilam-se toda unha série de documentos e privilégios referentes à Santa Apostólica e Metropolitana Igreja (SAMI) de Santiago, lá polo primeiro tércio do século XIV por orde do Arcebispo Dom Berenguel de Landoira.

Umha das características mais relevantes da imagem em questom é que se trata da primeira representaçom iconográfica na que o Santiago Cavaleiro aparece com os cadáveres dos seus inimigos aos seus pés. Mas o engraçado é que esses cadáveres nom correspondem a mouros, senom a compostelanos insurrectos.

O porqué de representar ao Apóstolo Santiago matando a habitantes da sua própria cidade está nas “ligeiras” dificuldades polas que passou D. Berenguel de Landoira à hora de tomar posse do cargo. Nomeado arcebispo no 1317, nom puido entrar na cidade até 1320 devido à resistência do concelho a reconhecer-lhe o direito de senhorio.

Após muitas luitas D. Berenguel rematou por convocar aos representantes da cidade a umha reuniom no Castelo da Rocha Forte que tivo lugar o 16 de Setembro de 1320. Segundo se recolhe nos “Feitos de Dom Berenguel de Landoira” (umha crónica da época escrita coa saníssima intençom de favorecer a imagem do arcebispo) a reuniom nom foi bem, especialmente para os representantes da cidade.

Ante a incapacidade de chegar a um acordo o arcebispo optou por retirar-se das negociaçons, feito que foi seguido dumha intervençom milagreira do Santo Apóstolo ajudado, isso si, polos homes de armas da garda episcopal que passarom a coitelo aos delegados municipais.

É precisamente a intervençom apostólica no massacre do Castelo da Rocha o que se representa neste desenho.  

Una violenta historia de mafia,venganza y amor en New York.

Nueva York, 1931. La ley seca ha conseguido que la Mafia campe a sus anchas. En una modesta panadería de Little Italy, el pequeño Anthony Poucet ve morir a sus padres bajo las ráfagas de unas ametralladoras. Un desgraciado accidente durante un ajuste de cuentas entre traficantes de alcohol.

Pero Anthony está dispuesto a vengarse, y conseguirá desencadenar una terrible guerra entre grupos mafiosos. Una cruzada sangrienta que lo arrastrará hasta encontrarse con el mismísimo Al Capone . Violencia, odio, traición y venganza se mezclan en una cruda historia mafiosa con todos los ingredientes del género.


Idioma: Español.
Editorial: Norma
Guion:  Damien Marie
Dibujo: Karl T
Escaneadores: Sisco (CRG)
Archivos: 1 Tomo (197 Paginas)  
Formato: CBR.
Tamaño: 110 MB





Descarga:

• La Cocina del Infierno

Before the comic book world had The Dark Knight and Watchmen, 1982 gave us a revolutionary, revamped Marvelman in the pages of Warrior #1—a character that a few years later achieved more fame and acclaim under his new name of Miracleman, courtesy of American publisher Eclipse Comics.

Before the rage of ultra-realism, sex, violence and rock ’n’ roll were in all mainstream superhero storytelling, writer Alan Moore and a group of committed artists did it first and better with Miracleman, a forerunner to the dramatic possibilities that an entire industry would attempt to force onto all their heroes. This uprising was the first time that an established superhero character was pushed to its fullest dramatic possibilities, and then some. Here was a costumed heroic comic character ready to give the entire world peace, a true utopia unlike any ever seen in the art form. Subsequently, a young Neil Gaiman and Mark Buckingham would pick up the torch and continue to beautifully explore the ramifications of said bliss.

Now that it appears Marvel Comics has settled the copyright nightmare that have kept these stories out-of-print for over a decade, a new generation is ready to discover perhaps the greatest superhero novella ever told.

[Kimota!]

The original Marvelman was a character invented not by divine inspiration, but by practical necessity. Back in the early 1950s, Len Miller and Son (an independent British publishing outfit in the ’50s and ’60s) produced all sorts of comics in a variety of genres, many of which were American reprints with some new filler content. The most popular of all Miller’s titles were the ones featuring the adventures of Captain Marvel, Captain Marvel Jr., Mary Marvel and The Marvel Family. All of this content and the characters therein were licensed from Fawcett Publications, U.S.A. But trouble was brewing back in the States; Fawcett was locked in a court battle with National Publications/ DC Comics, when the latter claimed copyright infringement in that Captain Marvel was too similar to their Superman property. By 1953, Fawcett agreed to terms retiring the entire Captain Marvel family, settling with DC Comics for $400,000.

Across the pond, Len Miller was perplexed with the scenario that the days of his most lucrative titles were seemingly coming to an end. In desperation, he made a phone call to Mick Anglo (an editorial packager of content for comics and magazines) for an answer to his dilemma.

All throughout the ’50s, Mick Anglo (born Michael Anglowitz) ran a small studio that gave employment to many hungry and lowly paid writers and artists (mostly ex-servicemen) in modest Gower Street, London. He was an independent operator who had provided cover art and content for Len Miller’s company, amongst other clients. Anglo’s solution to Miller’s problem was simply to not reinvent the wheel, but give the readers what they wanted under a different guise. As Anglo told me in 2001, “Yes, it was my creation except everything is based on somebody else: a bit of this and a bit of that. With Superman, he’s always wearing this fancy cloak with a big ’S’ on his chest, very intricate really. I thought that was too hard to emulate, so I tried to create something that was easy to draw and easy to market. I did away with the cloak so that I didn’t have to draw the cloak, which was awkward to draw, and played with a gravity belt, and they could do anything without all these little gimmicks.”

Without missing a beat (or a week), effective January 31st, 1954, the final British issues of Captain Marvel and Captain Marvel Jr., respectively, featured an editor’s letter announcing the retirement of the former heroes and the imminent arrival of the brand new Marvelman (a.k.a Mickey Moran) and Young Marvelman (a.k.a. Dicky Dauntless), in the very next issue—members of the Captain Marvel fan clubs were automatically rolled over to the brand new Marvelman fan clubs.

Let’s face it: Marvelman wasn’t at all unlike his predecessor. He was a young newsboy who could transform into an adult-sized superhero with a magic word; he was just as powerful as Captain Marvel; he basically had all his traits; he even had a new diminutive evil thorn named Gargunza, who could have easily been Dr. Sivana’s lost brother. Any differences were purely superficial. Unlike the darker features of Captains Marvel and Marvel Jr., the doppelganger and his junior counterpart were blond and blue-eyed. And instead of a Mary Marvel clone, a child hero named Kid Marvelman (a.k.a. Johnny Bates) was later introduced in the pages of Marvelman #102. Despite these minor changes, young British readers were apparently naïve enough to embrace the new characters, because Marvelman and his related titles would remain a constant for nine years!

The original Marvelman comics were produced hastily in a studio environment; the only goal was to get the books done rapidly and move on to the next paying assignment—most artists were paid only one pound for a full page of art. A lot of times the story, art and lettering suffered from the hectic time-crunch; many of the early Marvelman stories are fairly straightforward, derivative and workman-like in substance. The very best of the vintage Marvelman stories had a nice, whimsical feel that invited children to devour them; many of the finest tales were illustrated by an up-and-coming Don Lawrence (of Trigan Empire fame). With the rare exception of a few specials, these weekly British comics were black-and-white publications on very shabby paper that kids could buy for mere pennies, because essentially this work was strictly child’s fare material that never pretended to be high art or anything else.

What made Marvelman a remarkable phenomenon was the fact that he was England’s first truly successful superhero. Unlike us Americans (yesterday or today), post-World War II British comics readers have always enjoyed a bit more variety in their funny books. Basically, the superhero genre was left to America.

By 1960, Mick Anglo departed the title, the book’s sales were in a downfall, and there was no influx of new stories. Ultimately, Marvelman and Young Marvelman would uneventfully cease publication in 1963. It appeared that the characters would simply fade into obscurity… Then came the ’80s.

Back in 1981, fate played a major hand in the comeback of a dormant British comic book superhero character named Marvelman. Former Marvel UK editor Dez Skinn was tired of doing all the heavy editorial lifting for others when he decided to branch out and start a new company called Quality Communications. With his rolodex and publishing experience, he took a chance on himself and started Warrior, a comics anthology magazine that somewhat followed the content tempo of Marvel UK’s comic magazine format.

But, more importantly, Quality shared copyright ownership with its young pool of British creators. As Warrior was revving up, Skinn began to entertain the idea that it would be beneficial for the magazine to have a known character featured within. In his eyes, there was no better character than “the only British comic superhero,” rebuilt and modernized for an audience only vaguely familiar with the name from comics lore. The bigger question then became: Who would helm this revival?

Around this time, an up and coming writer named Alan Moore was just beginning to make some waves on the UK comics scene with his short stories for 2000AD, the leading British comics anthology. But it was within their May 1981 newsletter that the Society of Strip Illustrators (a one-time organization for British comics creators) asked a group of writers about their comics goals and aspirations. Moore answered the questionnaire by expressing his wish for the maturation of comics storytelling, and with a call for more autonomy for its creators. But he cleverly closed his statement with the following thought, “My greatest personal hope is that someone will revive Marvelman and I’ll get to write it. KIMOTA!”

Whether it was via writer Steve Moore’s (a mutual acquaintance) recommendation, or Skinn reading that newsletter himself, Alan Moore was given the opportunity to pitch his spec for the character. Upon reading the story, Skinn was so impressed with the excellent substance, style and voice of that script that he knew immediately he had found his Marvelman writer. Moore’s vision was to modernize the character and ground him dramatically in reality. This would be his first long-form comics opus, a revisionist superheroic take that was bold and experimental. 

About the genesis for his take on Marvelman, Moore explained to me that what sparked his treatment was the classic Mad strip titled “Superduperman” (in issue #4), written by the legendary Harvey Kurtzman and illustrated by the incomparable Wally Wood. Moore said, “The way that Harvey Kurtzman used to make his superhero parodies so funny was to take a superhero and then apply sort of real world logic to a kind of inherently absurd superhero situation, and that was what made his stuff so funny. It struck me that if you just turn the dial to the same degree in the other direction by applying real life logic to a superhero, you could make something that was very funny, but you could also, with a turn of the screw, make something that was quite startling, sort of dramatic and powerful… I could see possibilities there that didn’t seem as if they had been explored with any of the other superheroes around at that time.”

Even in 1981, the question of who actually owned the rights to the original Marvelman was a bit of pickle. Len Miller and Son (the original publisher of the Marvelman empire and apparent copyright holder) was no more. Publisher Dez Skinn got in touch with Marvelman creator Mick Anglo about his intentions to revive the character—because he intended to make the original 1950s material cannon to the revival, and even reprint some of the old Anglo Studio output. Anglo remembered, “He (Dez) contacted me and he wanted to revive it, and I said go ahead and do what you like as far as I was concerned.”

When Warrior made its debut in March of 1982, Marvelman’s return was just as an abstruse figure on the cover. Alongside Moore and David Lloyd’s “V For Vendetta” (another strip in the anthology), the readers responded enthusiastically to the realistic Marvelman revision and the artistic tour de force of Garry Leach, who redesigned the character and illustrated the initial chapters—subsequent stories would be illustrated by the talents of  Alan Davis and John Ridgway. The superhero quickly became the magazine’s anchor. But the output of Marvelman stories ceased with issue #21, after a falling out between Moore and artist Alan Davis—the story came to a sudden halt midway into the second storyline, now known as “The Red King Syndrome.” For Alan Moore, his work for Warrior cemented his career and led to DC Comics offering him the keys to Swamp Thing, and the rest, as they say, is history.

Warrior, in the meantime, despite winning critical and fan acclaim—and despite the camaraderie and independent spirit amongst the book’s creators—came to an end. After twenty-six issues, the magazine could financially endure no more. Sales had never been such to make it a viable force, and despite being shareholders of the rights to their stories, the creators of these works could not survive on the low page rates that the magazine offered, said to be significantly lower than its competitors. 

Another tougher obstacle that Warrior faced was an intimidating “cease and desist” letter from a British law firm on behalf of their client, Marvel Comics. Basically, Marvel felt that the name “Marvelman” infringed on their company’s trademark—never mind the fact that Marvelman first bore the name back in the Fifties, when Marvel Comics was called Atlas Comics. This last bit of revisionist history served to only thicken the plot for Marvelman’s fate in the UK. Luckily, Dez Skinn was already hard at work on bringing Marvelman and other Warrior strips to America, the land where everyone gets a second chance!

---

George Khoury is the author of Kimota!: The Miracleman Companion: The Definitive Edition.

The article originally appeared in two parts on Tor.com in July 2010.

People love to complain about how technology is ruining our social skills and putting distance between us and generally starving us of human connection to the point that eventually, we might cease being human at all.

And I hear that. I really do, but in bitching about all of that, we’re missing the real damage that the Internet & All Its Friends have done to our social interations:

It’s turning us into dating pussies. This needs to stop.

Think about it: Between being able to interact on social media, we’re able to passively, safely, excusably show interest in each other without venturing too much of a personal risk. We’re sitting safely behind our computers Liking each other’s statuses, knowing that those gestures can easily be interpreted as romantic interest or can just as easily be dismissed as simply “No, I just actually liked what you posted. Don’t read into it.”

Every interaction online carries an ambiguous message behind it. To a different degree, texting and emailing do the same thing – without facial expressions, voice inflection, body language, and all the paralanguage that gives actual meaning to our words and actions,

And all of this, we know it. Even if we don’t consciously think about it, we are completely aware of the ambiguous nature of how we connect through technology. And we do it because it’s safe. It’s a way to gauge how interested someone might be in us before really putting ourselves out there in a blatant way. If we detect that maybe they don’t want to see us naked, we can always retreat and switch directions and pretend that all of our digital interactions were completely benign and platonic, all while easily keeping our pride protected and our feelings intact.

It’s not always terrible to do this. I think we all kinda love that technology gives us at least the option to take the temperature of a new connection with someone before taking dangerous emotional risks. The problem is when we get addicted to the safety of mixed digital messages and stop choosing to take a real life risk ever.

___________________________________________________

I recently ran into a guy I went to college with. We were at a mutual friend’s birthday, and had not seen each other since graduation, which was almost 2 years ago. Having shared the same major, we lived somewhat parallel lives for those 4 years; never really close friends, but always consistently friendly, and often we had found ourselves at the same parties and school events. As we were talking that night, having the standard catch-up conversation – how are you? What have you been up to? What kind of work are you doing? Do you still hang out with Casey? – and, as these conversations always do, it eventually got to our love lives.

He asked if I was seeing anyone. I responded that I wasn’t, that I had broken up with someone a while back and had been focusing on work and friends and myself, etc. – the shit you say when someone asks you if you’re seeing anyone and you want to make the fact that you’re not sound like a totally healthy, totally intentional choice. So far, there was nothing at all remarkable about our exchange. These were the things you say to a former acquaintance when you run into them and feel like your past relationship was just substantial enough that you are obligated to give them a few minutes of your time.

But then he got a look. Such a fleeting, subtle change of expression that if I had blinked, I wouldn’t have seen it at all. But I did, and having had just enough glasses of wine that night, I called him on it, playfully: “What what that look?”

He hesitated. I saw him immediately start to deny that there had been a look at all, to dismiss my good-natured accusation of unexplored subtext, but just as quickly, I saw him abandon that plan and opt for honesty instead.

“Honestly?” he said, “Honestly, I guess that look was me kinda kicking myself for never asking you out. I always wanted to.”

There was that great atmosphere to the conversation where, for some reason, it felt like we could be super casual and open about this. Like it didn’t matter anymore, and we would probably not see each other after tonight, so why the hell not analyze our almost non-existent relationship from years ago?

“Well, why didn’t you?” I asked, as I started to remember that there had been a period where our digital communication…escalated. You know how it goes – we became Facebook friends, and at first, he just Liked things I posted every now and then. And then he started leaving whole comments. Once or twice, I think he went so far as to post interesting articles about things that he believed I would like based on his limited knowledge of who I was. I recalled that he had sent me a funny picture – something really very smart and witty that I can’t remember now – late one night, and I had forgotten to respond because I was on vacation at the time, and never really cared much about social media anyway. Slowly, the interactions stopped. We graduated soon after and that was that.

“You just didn’t seem that interested, I guess.”

___________________________________________________

Here’s the frustrating thing about this conversation, and the realization of how things had played out in his mind back then: I liked him perfectly fine. He was cute, we had things and friends in common. It would have make sense for him to ask me out. I would’ve been flattered. I would have said yes. But he never asked. And what he believed were attempts to assess my level of interest – completely basic social media interactions – were utterly lost on me. And that’s the problem with using technology for the purpose of figuring out how someone feels about you, or trying to communicate how you feel about them: It’s such a sterile form of engagement. There is absolutely no way to know if the person on the receiving end will understand the message you are truly trying to send, and there’s no way for them to know exactly what you mean to say.

In this case, it’s not like I lost sleep thinking about what might’ve been. I don’t think this was some epic love story we missed out on. But who knows – maybe it was. The really disappointing thing is not some acute sense of personal loss about a shot with this guy – it’s the small pang of regret that we missed our chance because of unnecessarily mixed messages, and a lack of bravery on his part to just ask me out or express his interest in a clear, old-fashioned, in-person, human way. At least then, we would’ve had a fair chance to genuinely know what was what.

The disappointment I felt after running into that guy wasn’t so much about him – it was about the knowledge that this shit is happening all the time. Social media and texting and email and all of it, has us all trained to retreat to the comfortable safety of impersonal communication. Can we just be done with this already? Can we just use technology for exchanges that don’t need all the human nuance that flirting requires and just go back to having to deal with butterflies and nerves and doubt and working up the courage to tell someone how nice you think they are? Because I don’t think you can skip over that stuff. I think if you want the reward on the other side – the possibility that that person feels the same way about you, or at least could one day feel that way – you have to take the risk. There is no cheating it. And in an effort to skip over the scary parts of having feelings, we’re sometimes missing out on the actualization of the feelings themselves. Maybe it’s just me, but I don’t think being safe is better than indulging in the messy, amazing process of actually feeling things.

Technology is great, and has a great many useful applications. But I’m calling it: When it comes to our hearts, we need to get the fuck off the internet. We need to stop texting and start calling. We need to stop calling and start showing up. We must stop Liking someone’s status when what we mean is, “I like you.” When it comes to having the most important human interactions – whether those are between friends, family members, lovers, or possible loves – we scale back and take those moments back to their basic, raw, perfect, un-digitized, terrifying, wonderful form. We could be missing out on a lot if we don’t. 

more food here.

In Europe, churches that were established over a thousand years ago are still being used. It's all well and good to want to be buried in the church cemetery when your time comes, but there's only so much space. That's why in many older churches, graves are opened after a certain number of years so the space can be re-used. Then there are mass burials that are made necessary by epidemics, in which many bodies are buried together, with their anonymous bones retrieved much later.

The bones, which are all that's left at that point, are interred somewhere else where they take up less space. Some places have extensive catacombs for bone storage; other churches use them as interior decoration! And why not- they have to go somewhere, and they remind parishioners of their mortality. Get a look at ten such churches, from Italy to Austria, from Portugal to Poland, at Scribol.

(Image credit: Merlin)

Olivia Mears is an artist known for her inventive costumes, such as her dress inspired by the website Imgur. You may also remember that Mears once went to Taco Bell dressed as the Disney princess Belle. Now she's taken her love for that restaurant even further.

The dress pictured above was her entry for a contest held by Taco Bell. It's made of 130 taco wrappers and 12 sauce packets from that restaurant. It's lovely! May I suggest accessorizing it with a hat that looks like a bottle of Pepto-Bismol?

(via)

More funny cat stuff you should probably check out:
Texts From My Cat
Worst Pictures of Men and Cats Ever
Cats Wearing Tights

A guerra de Marrocos tivo unha importancia extraordinaria para as comunidades labregas. Milleiros de mozos campesiños morreron na loita colonial contra os rifeños. Aparte do sangue derramado, a experiencia para os sobrevivintes tivo moita importancia para modelar a cosmovisión da xente nosa.

The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation explains 3 Myths that Block Progress for the Poor in their 2014 annual letter.

Myth One: Poor countries are doomed to stay poor

Myth Two: Foreign aid is a big waste

Myth Three: Saving lives leads to overpopulation

Cardiología y Digestivo recogieron las placas del BIC 2013, promovido por la Universidad Rey Juan Carlos y la Gaceta Médica