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22 Aug 11:55

The History of Sadomasochism Is Strange, Dark, and Occasionally Sweet

by Eric Spitznagel

There's a BDSM club just a few blocks from my apartment in Chicago. I usually drive past it without giving it a second glance, even though the clientele are less than shy. It's not unusual to see guys dressed like extras in a bondage video, waiting at the bus stop outside like it's no big deal they've got a ball gag hanging from their wrist like a purse. It's all just part of the scenery of a big city.

But since reading A Lover's Pinch: A Cultural History of Sadomasochism, a new book by journalist Peter Tupper, I’ve had a newfound curiosity about this community. Whenever I’m sitting at a red light near the BDSM club and I see a guy in full leather loitering outside, I want to roll down my window and ask if he knows how much his lifestyle choices are thanks to some really dirty Christians.

The history of BDSM has been a bumpy one, and until recently no historian has managed to connect all the dots. Mostly because the lion’s share has happened in secret, behind closed doors (and occasionally in dungeons). There’s not a lot of public record for the first master/slave relationship, or at least the first “consensual” one. (You will never read another history book that contains as many uses of the adjective “consensual.”)

It’s a difficult topic to write about if you’re at all sympathetic with modern BDSM—and Tupper, who’s the co-founder of Metro Vancouver Kink, a non-profit for the local sadomasochism community, clearly is. Because the origins of this lifestyle aren’t always pretty. There were a lot of self-flagellating clerics, and dehumanizing slave owners, and kinky Nazis. Nobody the reader would be all that inclined to root for. Tupper was tasked with putting this horrible backstory into context with modern BDSM, to show how the ideas originated in some dark places but have become so much less creepy and more consensual—there’s that word again—over time.

I called Tupper to talk about the good, the bad, and the occasionally sweet in the long and weird history of sadomasochism.

The title, A Lover’s Pinch, feels a little tame given the subject matter. There's a whole hell of a lot more happening here than just pinching.
Yeah, yeah, I know.

You mention the importance of maintaining eye contact while fisting on the first freaking page.
Sure. I had a lot of problems with the title. Way back when I started working on the book, it was called Beauty and Darkness. When I was shopping the manuscript around, I called it The Marriage of Heaven and Hell. That was a William Blake reference.

I still think Eye Contact While Fisting might’ve been the way to go.
Maybe. I like A Lover's Pinch. It’s a Shakespeare quote, which always adds a hint of class.

It helps if you’re trying to reach a mainstream audience.
That was the challenge. I'm in the odd position of being in the intersection of two niches, which is history and kink. I want to appeal to people who enjoy both things. Someone once said that the simplest, most fundamental form of kink is tickling.

We’ve all done it.
Kids do it to each other all the time. It feels innocent, and it's something where you squirm and jump around and laugh. It's aggressive but not really. It's playful aggression. I think that’s a way of letting people who are vanilla start to understand what kink is all about.

There are lots of villains in your book. But you have an almost impossible task as a writer, because you have to write about them through a sympathetic 2018 filter.
How do you mean?

It’s not like a history book about Hitler, where we all agree, "This guy was fucking awful.” You’re writing about the history that brought us to modern BDSM, which is something you ostensibly think is a healthy, alternative lifestyle community.
I do, yeah.

And it started with guys like Marquis de Sade, who were not exactly good sexual role models. He wasn’t somebody who asked his partners, “Are you okay with this? What’s your safe word?”
No, that wasn’t a priority for him.

But you’re still trying to look at how he paved the way for what BDSM would become, which isn’t nearly as non-consensual and icky.
I tried to make a point of saying, yes, this is awkward and ugly and uncomfortable. But it’s important to understand where BDSM came from, and where it comes from is not always pretty. If you look at modern science fiction, you have to look at guys like HP Lovecraft, and HP Lovecraft was a raving racist.

The worst kind of racist.
The history of BDSM is filled with really ugly stories, like American slavery and the Holocaust, which were filtered and transmuted into fantasy. I know there are people in the kink world who absolutely hate the idea of Nazi fetishists, for example.

Especially these days. Nazi role-playing is a hard thing to be okay with.
But there are people who say it's no more or less valid than any other kind of play. A lot of people don't like to use the term master/slave. Or they think the whole harem fantasy has become kitsch. I can sympathize with those points of view, with people who think it's trivializing or disrespecting. It’s a logical way to respond to this kind of historical trauma.

Was there anything you discovered when doing research for this book that surprised you, where you thought, ‘I did not think that had any connection to BDSM culture?’
All the time. I found these weird connections to Harriet Stowe’s Uncle Tom's Cabin that I did not anticipate.

An anti-slavery novel is not something that most of us associate with "Oh yeah, lots of erotic stuff in there for the spank bank."
Not at all!


More from VICE:


So what are we missing?
Harriet was very careful about not including anything that was terribly salacious. But when it came out in the mid-19th century, it became this massive, multimedia juggernaut, with all these authorized and unauthorized adaptations and merchandise. People were squeezing in all these other things that were completely at odds with her original vision. You have Sam Beeton, the British publisher, traveling to meet with Stowe about getting the rights to publish the book in England and showing her the plates from one of the unauthorized additions and it was a much more sexed up image then she ever would have included in her own work.

Sexed up how?
It was an illustration of a black man beating a bare breasted woman in chains while another man watched.

Well yes, that’s a little more sexed up than I remember Uncle Tom’s Cabin .
This kind of thing turned up a lot. You look at the writings of early sexologists like Freud, discussing how patients were inspired by Uncle Tom's Cabin and other abolitionist media. Stories like this keep going through cycles of reinterpretation and re-fantasizing and turning into things that differ pretty strongly from their origin point. It's like that old game of telephone where you whisper something to your friend and it works its way around the circle and by the time it got back to you it’s incomprehensible.

“Oh, my polemical treatise on the injustice of slavery is now about how you like to get tied up and spanked.”
Right. That’s how it gets re-interpreted. It’s like those Ilsa movies in the '70s starring Dyanne Thorne.

She Wolf of the SS!
It's supposed to be horrifying but it’s also titillating.

Probably the biggest gift of your book is reminding me that I haven’t watched Ilsa, She Wolf of the SS since I was a stoned college student, and I really should watch it again.
You’re welcome.

It's a very confusing movie if you think of it in a broader context than just a campy sexploitation movie about a Nazi dominatrix with big boobs.
It's very strange. They go to the lengths of putting this pseudo-documentary introduction on it, and yet it's this ridiculously over-the-top thing. What's interesting is that even though Ilsa is killed at the end of each movie, she somehow comes back in, what is it, three more sequels?

Yes. They’re all excellent.
And each time she’s working for a completely different political entity.

She runs a harem, a gulag, and a psychiatric hospital.
You watched them all?

I’m trying to be a responsible journalist.
She's this archetype of the monstrous, castrating, sexually voracious woman who can get attached to any political system regardless of whether it makes any particular sense.

But she’s a Nazi.
Yes.

Which is not something any sane person is supposed to think of as arousing.

The circuits of fear and the circuits of arousal are very closely linked. We're seeing this taboo of the sexually aggressive, sexually domineering woman. At the end, she's sort of the monster who must be killed to restore order to the hierarchy of gender and politics. But she keeps coming back. She comes back in, what did you say?

Three sequels.

I guess you can't keep an evil fascist dominatrix down.

There’s one story in your book that stood out for me, and it didn’t have any Nazi imagery or allusions to race-based slavery or anything else that would make it difficult to find the sex appeal in 2018. It’s just the story of a man and a woman and her dirty, dirty chimney.
Arthur Munby.

Pretend I never read the book. Tell me what’s so fascinating about this guy named Munby.
Munby was a 19th century gentleman and minor poet, and he was utterly fascinated by working-class women. The female ideal at this time was about being delicate and not working. But Munby was attracted to the opposite. He wanted women who were big and dirty and did hard manual labor. He wanted a women who had calluses. One of them was a woman he met named Hannah Cullwick. She was a servant woman and she fit his type perfectly. They began this covert master-slave relationship.

But she wasn’t technically his slave, right?
No. This was happening while there were real slaves toiling away in America, but she was just a domestic servant earning a paycheck. They both kept diaries so we know in considerable detail the extent of their relationship. It lasted for years and they even secretly married and lived together, both as master and slave and husband and wife. They built this little fantasy world all to themselves, in private, and it gave them a great deal of pleasure.

It wasn’t even about their physical interactions, right? He just got turned on reading about her back-breaking labor.
That’s right. She would write these very detailed descriptions of the amount of work she did, like 16-hour work days, sweeping out chimneys and things.

The chimney letter is fascinating. She writes about getting naked before climbing into the chimney, where she gets ridiculously filthy and there’s “a lot o' soot and it was soft and warm.” I mean come on!
Right?

Read that with a Dick Van Dyke Cockney accent and it’s like the best/worst Penthouse letter ever written.
It really is. This is the same era when some magazines in Victorian England were publishing firsts-person letters about tight-laced corsets and flagellation and forced crossdressing and things like that. This is the beginning of that culture.

Part of the reason I love Munby so much is that, from my vanilla perspective, the whole master-slave relationship is hard to wrap my head around.
It’s too much?

It just comes with a lot of cultural baggage. Maybe it’s just the word “slave.” It makes me uncomfortable. But Munby-
He’s a different story.

It’s weirdly sweet. He doesn't like pornography, he’s uncomfortable with overt sexuality. He just wants a working-class woman whose demeaning work he can sexualize from afar, and he finds someone who loves being admired from afar for her demeaning work.
It’s a fascinating relationship. And from a historian’s perspective, it’s a miracle that we have so many details. Mumby could have destroyed his journals. He considered doing that at certain points in his life. But luckily for us, he left them for prosperity.

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22 Aug 11:49

The Hugo Awards just made history, and defied alt-right extremists in the process

by Aja Romano

N.K. Jemisin’s third consecutive win in the Hugo Awards repudiates extremist voters who’ve spent years trying to keep her from winning.

The first-ever threepeat of the Hugo Awards — the prestigious, long-running fantasy awards handed out annually at WorldCon — just issued a giant rejection of right-wing gatekeeping in the struggle to diversify the world of science fiction and fantasy writing.

N.K. Jemisin’s groundbreaking fantasy series the Broken Earth trilogy has won critical acclaim, been optioned for development as a TV series, and received numerous accolades from the sci-fi and fantasy community. And on August 19, it achieved yet another milestone when Jemisin became the first author in the Hugos’ 65-year history to win back-to-back awards for every book in a trilogy. Jemisin won the award for Best Novel three years in a row, starting with The Fifth Season in 2016, The Obelisk Gate in 2017, and now The Stone Sky in 2018.

In an acceptance speech that’s being hailed as one of the best ever made at the Hugos, Jemisin defiantly raised a “rocket-shaped finger” (a reference to the rocket-ship design of the massive Hugo statue) to the racist rhetoric that positions the recognition of her work as being about identity politics rather than her own talent.

“It’s been a hard year, hasn’t it,” she began. “A hard few years, a hard century. For some of us, things have always been hard. I wrote the Broken Earth trilogy to speak to that struggle, and what it takes to live, let alone thrive, in a world that seems determined to break you — a world of people who constantly question your competence, your relevance, your very existence.”

Jemisin knows all too well of what she speaks. Her Hugo threepeat isn’t just a win for her writing and for fans of her work — it’s a decisive statement made by the community in response to ongoing efforts to silence writers like Jemisin.

The Hugos are voted on by WorldCon members rather than by committee, and thus they’re generally seen as a barometer of changing trends and evolving conversations within sci-fi/fantasy (SFF) culture. By voting for Jemisin’s trilogy three years running, the speculative fiction community has effectively repudiated a years-long campaign, mounted by an alt-right subculture within its midst, to combat the recent rise to prominence of women and other marginalized voices in the SFF space.

Jemisin’s Hugo threepeat is part of a years-long push for diversity in fantasy and science fiction

To understand how we got here, we need to travel back in time to 2009, when a yearlong series of conversations within the SFF community, known as Racefail, created a broader understanding of white colonialism’s overwhelming dominance within sci-fi/fantasy narratives. Occurring mainly online, but continued offline throughout various conventions (and arguably still ongoing today), the conversations around Racefail resulted in an emerging awareness of the need to not only embrace the writing of women and people of color, but also to make the community a safer space for all writers.

Jemisin’s debut novel, A Hundred Thousand Kingdoms, was published the following year in 2010. Jemisin credited Racefail and “the increased awareness of the SFF zeitgeist re race issues” both for her book’s enthusiastic reception, and for making her feel more comfortable as a minority voice within the community.

Ever since Racefail, the push to diversify the speculative fiction genre has been loud and growing. Specific diversity initiatives within the community have led to everything from the anthology magazine series Destroy Science Fiction to the rise of new publishers expressly dedicated to diversity, like the popular publishing branch of the Book Smugglers blog.

This trend toward progressive narratives and diverse representation isn’t exclusive to SFF culture, of course; in conjunction with the rise of progressive voices on social media, geek communities including sci-fi, comics, and gaming have seen broad pushes over the last decade to end gatekeeping and be more welcoming to fans and creators of all kinds.

But as we’ve also seen, these pushes for social change have led to backlash tinged with racism and misogyny — most notably through Gamergate, the unfortunate 2014 movement that essentially underpinned the rise of the alt-right, codified harassment campaigns against women and people of color for years, and helped give rise to the ideological polarization of the internet.

And within the world of SFF specifically, this backlash amplified two disruptive subgroups who’ve been attempting to game the Hugo Awards for years.

Since Gamergate, an alt-right contingent of the SFF community has been trying to elbow progressive writers out of the Hugos

Diversifying the pool of established SFF authors hasn’t been smooth sailing. In 2013, a writer named Theodore Beale, a.k.a. “Vox Day,” was banned from the professional Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers Association (SFWA) after making posts referring to Jemisin as a “half-savage.” That same year, a writer named Larry Correia made a blog post in which he complained that his “unabashed pulp action that isn’t heavy handed message fic” wasn’t getting any Hugo nominations, and suggested that his audience game the awards by nominating him en masse.

Also in 2013, ongoing controversy broke out over what was widely perceived within the community to be repeated instances of sexism from the official magazine of the SFWA. The controversy led to the resignation of an SFWA editor, and was quickly followed in early 2014 by complaints from men in the community who weren’t happy with the changing cultural standards — in essence, less pandering to the straight male gaze, and more politically oriented fiction — due to the sudden rise to prominence of women and marginalized writers around them.

In one such thread of complaints under the topic heading “Culture Wars,” a publishing professional named Sean Fodera stated, “I think there’s a battle worth fighting.”

Fodera’s words would go on to be prophetic. Emboldened by Gamergate’s methods, the disgruntled Correia created a set of disruptive collectives known as the “Sad Puppies,” who began fomenting discord within the SFF community in 2015. They were quickly joined by the even more extremist “Rabid Puppies,” led by Vox Day, who has become an acknowledged figure within the alt-right movement since his SFWA banning.

Their targets? The Hugos.

The Hugo awards are voted on by WorldCon members, and anyone can become a WorldCon member, which effectively makes Hugos voting crowdsourced. This meant that the Puppy contingent saw the Hugos as capable of being gamed — and they were right.

Beginning in 2015, both the Sad Puppies and the Rabid Puppies mounted regressive “traditional” voting blocs among Hugo members. The idea was to unite conservative voters in voting for single Puppy-approved authors, against the profusion of diverse names on the expanded Hugo nominees lists. The first year they attempted the voting bloc, the Sad Puppies and the Rabid Puppies nominated a combined total of 127 nominees, and landed 107 of them on the initial Hugo ballot. The blocs got a boost from being supported by the conservative news site Breitbart, which praised the Puppy movement — sometimes referred to as Puppygate — as a blow against “political correctness.”

For the most part, the Puppies have only galvanized SFF culture’s progressive shift

In part, the voting blocs were created out of a sincere wish to honor good writers who were perceived as being conservative-leaning, and who were seen by the Puppies as being in danger of losing deserved critical acclaim due to the push to diversify the awards.

But, paradoxically, they were also created in part to make the Hugo awards look like a joke.

As part of this latter goal, in 2016 the Rabid Puppies successfully nominated erotic fantasy author Chuck Tingle to its voting bloc of recommended authors for his short novella Space Raptor Butt Invasion. The joke, if you can’t tell from the title, is that Tingle’s work is notoriously mystifying, verging somewhere between absurdist surrealism and stream-of-consciousness badfic; it’s anthropomorphic porn as if written by someone with disjointed, half-formed thoughts and limited powers of expression.

The joke backfired, however, when Tingle turned out to be completely savvy in gaming the Puppies right back: he made a website celebrating his Hugo nomination by directing audiences to several of the women writers the Puppies intended to take down, and even joined forces with Gamergate enemy No. 1, game developer Zoe Quinn, who agreed to accept the award on his behalf if he won.

Tingle didn’t win, but his approach to sabotaging the Puppies’ game has proved to be the main method of combating the Puppies over the last four years. The harder they pushed to nominate “traditional” writers, the more the community responded by supporting minority voices. At times, this has even included authors the Puppies attempted to boost: Multiple writers, horrified at being lauded by the Puppies, chose to withdraw their names from nomination in response. In 2015, in response to some categories where the Puppies had managed to commandeer every nominee, Hugo voters by overwhelming majority simply selected “No Award” instead.

In succeeding years, the Puppies continued to generate bad press, but they gained even less traction over the awards themselves. This year, the most prominent awards all went to women. And Jemisin, the same author subjected to racist mudslinging by Rabid Puppy leader Vox Day, took the prize for Best Novel every year she came up for eligibility during the Puppies’ period of agitation.

“I look to science fiction and fantasy as the aspirational drive of the zeitgeist,” Jemisin said in her acceptance speech. “We creators are the engineers of possibility. And as this genre finally, however grudgingly, acknowledges that the dreams of the marginalized matter and that all of us have a future, so will go the world. (Soon, I hope.)”

For now, at least, it appears that the SFF world has firmly positioned itself on the side of the marginalized, and against a vocal minority attempting to silence them — and their much-needed visions for the future of science fiction and fantasy.

22 Aug 10:03

El Ministerio de Cultura podría revisar la bajada del IVA si los exhibidores no reducen el precio de las entradas de cine

by Víctor López G.

José Guirao

Hace unos días pudimos confirmar lo que muchos sospechamos cuando se anunció que el IVA aplicado sobre las entradas de cine bajaría del 21% a un razonable 10%: las gran mayoría de salas de cine, lejos de aplicar la rebaja lógica que debería haber acompañado al reajuste del impuesto, han subido los precios un 8,8%, lo cual supondrá un extra en sus ingresos de más de 50 millones de euros anuales.

Aunque el Instituto Nacional de Estadística haya realizado un estudio que lo confirma, y un informe de FACUA afirme que siete de cada diez salas de cine españolas no han aplicado correctamente la reducción del IVA a sus entradas, hoy el ministro de Cultura y Deporte José Guirao se ha mostrado escéptico al respecto en unas declaraciones en las que puntualiza que "no está de acuerdo" con las cifras extraídas de los análisis de ambas instituciones.

Admission 2974645 1280

Guirao ha añadido que, según los datos que maneja el gobierno, un 50% de las salas han aplicado la rebaja del IVA —porcentaje que considera insuficiente— y que, de no aumentar el el número de exhibidores que disminuyan el precio de las entradas, el cambio del porcentaje de impuestos sobre el cine podría ser "una medida que hay que plantearse revisar".

Ante la falta de respuesta tras intentar comunicarse con el del Ministerio de Cultura, en el medio online ElDiario.es han decidido ponerse en contacto con el departamento jurídico de FACUA, desde donde lamentan que la rebaja de impuestos no se haya traducido en una mejora para el bolsillo del consumidor, sino en un impulso en los ingresos de los exhibidores; añadiendo que la práctica no es ilegal —aunque sí de dudosa ética— y que preparan un nuevo informe del que esperan que ayude a que el ministro "tome cartas en el asunto".

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La noticia El Ministerio de Cultura podría revisar la bajada del IVA si los exhibidores no reducen el precio de las entradas de cine fue publicada originalmente en Espinof por Víctor López G. .

21 Aug 00:50

Cando unha división artificial rachou os territorios históricos do antigo Reino de Galicia

by Redacción

A Galicia de hoxe non é como a Galicia de hai cen anos. Cambiaron moitas cousas pero, sobre todo, a súa morfoloxía administrativa. Hai...

O artigo Cando unha división artificial rachou os territorios históricos do antigo Reino de Galicia publicouse primeiro en Historia de Galicia.

21 Aug 00:49

2018 Hugo Award Winners Announced

by press@theouthousers.com (Tim Midura)
2018 Hugo Award Winners Announced

Among the winners are Wonder Woman and Monstress.

Source: The Hugo Awards

The Hugo Awards took place at the 76th World Science Fiction Convention on August 19, 2018 in San Jose, California. The awards celebrate the best science fiction or fantasy works and achievements of the previous year.

The full list of winners and nominees are below.

 

Best Novel

  • The Stone Sky, by N.K. Jemisin (Orbit)
  • The Collapsing Empire, by John Scalzi (Tor)
  • New York 2140, by Kim Stanley Robinson (Orbit)
  • Provenance, by Ann Leckie (Orbit)
  • Raven Stratagem, by Yoon Ha Lee (Solaris)
  • Six Wakes, by Mur Lafferty (Orbit)

 

Best Novella

  • All Systems Red, by Martha Wells (Tor.com Publishing)
  • "And Then There Were (N-One)," by Sarah Pinsker (Uncanny, March/April 2017)
  • Binti: Home, by Nnedi Okorafor (Tor.com Publishing)
  • The Black Tides of Heaven, by JY Yang (Tor.com Publishing)
  • Down Among the Sticks and Bones, by Seanan McGuire (Tor.Com Publishing)
  • River of Teeth, by Sarah Gailey (Tor.com Publishing)

 

Best Novelette

  • "The Secret Life of Bots," by Suzanne Palmer (Clarkesworld, September 2017)
  • "Children of Thorns, Children of Water," by Aliette de Bodard (Uncanny, July-August 2017)
  • "Extracurricular Activities," by Yoon Ha Lee (Tor.com, February 15, 2017)
  • "A Series of Steaks," by Vina Jie-Min Prasad (Clarkesworld, January 2017)
  • "Small Changes Over Long Periods of Time," by K.M. Szpara (Uncanny, May/June 2017)
  • "Wind Will Rove," by Sarah Pinsker (Asimov's, September/October 2017)

 

Best Short Story

  • "Welcome to your Authentic Indian Experience™," by Rebecca Roanhorse (Apex, August 2017)
  • "Carnival Nine," by Caroline M. Yoachim (Beneath Ceaseless Skies, May 2017)
  • "Clearly Lettered in a Mostly Steady Hand," by Fran Wilde (Uncanny, September 2017)
  • "Fandom for Robots," by Vina Jie-Min Prasad (Uncanny, September/October 2017)
  • "The Martian Obelisk," by Linda Nagata (Tor.com, July 19, 2017)
  • "Sun, Moon, Dust" by Ursula Vernon, (Uncanny, May/June 2017)


Best Series

  • World of the Five Gods, by Lois McMaster Bujold (Harper Voyager / Spectrum Literary Agency)
  • The Books of the Raksura, by Martha Wells (Night Shade)
  • The Divine Cities, by Robert Jackson Bennett (Broadway US / Jo Fletcher Books UK)
  • InCryptid, by Seanan McGuire (DAW)
  • The Memoirs of Lady Trent, by Marie Brennan (Tor US / Titan UK)
  • The Stormlight Archive, by Brandon Sanderson (Tor US / Gollancz UK)


Best Related Work

  • No Time to Spare: Thinking About What Matters, by Ursula K. Le Guin (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt)
  • Crash Override: How Gamergate (Nearly) Destroyed My Life, and How We Can Win the Fight Against Online Hate, by Zoë Quinn (PublicAffairs)
  • Iain M. Banks (Modern Masters of Science Fiction), by Paul Kincaid (University of Illinois Press)
  • A Lit Fuse: The Provocative Life of Harlan Ellison, by Nat Segaloff (NESFA Press)
  • Luminescent Threads: Connections to Octavia E. Butler, edited by Alexandra Pierce, and Mimi Mondal (Twelfth Planet Press)
  • Sleeping with Monsters: Readings and Reactions in Science Fiction and Fantasy, by Liz Bourke (Aqueduct Press)


Best Graphic Story

  • Monstress, Volume 2: The Blood, written by Marjorie M. Liu, illustrated by Sana Takeda (Image Comics)
  • Bitch Planet, Volume 2: President Bitch, written by Kelly Sue DeConnick, illustrated by Valentine De Landro and Taki Soma, colored by Kelly Fitzpatrick, lettered by Clayton Cowles (Image Comics)
  • Black Bolt, Volume 1: Hard Time, written by Saladin Ahmed, illustrated by Christian Ward, lettered by Clayton Cowles (Marvel)
  • My Favorite Thing is Monsters, written and illustrated by Emil Ferris (Fantagraphics)
  • Paper Girls, Volume 3, written by Brian K. Vaughan, illustrated by Cliff Chiang, colored by Matthew Wilson, lettered by Jared Fletcher (Image Comics)
  • Saga, Volume 7, written by Brian K. Vaughan, illustrated by Fiona Staples (Image Comics)


Best Dramatic Presentation, Long Form

  • Wonder Woman, screenplay by Allan Heinberg, story by Zack Snyder & Allan Heinberg and Jason Fuchs, directed by Patty Jenkins (DC Films / Warner Brothers)
  • Blade Runner 2049, written by Hampton Fancher and Michael Green, directed by Denis Villeneuve (Alcon Entertainment / Bud Yorkin Productions / Torridon Films / Columbia Pictures)
  • Get Out, written and directed by Jordan Peele (Blumhouse Productions / Monkeypaw Productions / QC Entertainment)
  • The Shape of Water, written by Guillermo del Toro and Vanessa Taylor, directed by Guillermo del Toro (TSG Entertainment / Double Dare You / Fox Searchlight Pictures)
  • Star Wars: The Last Jedi, written and directed by Rian Johnson (Lucasfilm, Ltd.)
  • Thor: Ragnarok, written by Eric Pearson, Craig Kyle, and Christopher Yost; directed by Taika Waititi (Marvel Studios)


Best Dramatic Presentation, Short Form

  • The Good Place: "The Trolley Problem," written by Josh Siegal and Dylan Morgan, directed by Dean Holland (Fremulon / 3 Arts Entertainment / Universal Television)
  • Black Mirror: "USS Callister," written by William Bridges and Charlie Brooker, directed by Toby Haynes (House of Tomorrow)
  • "The Deep" [song], by Clipping (Daveed Diggs, William Hutson, Jonathan Snipes)
  • Doctor Who: "Twice Upon a Time," written by Steven Moffat, directed by Rachel Talalay (BBC Cymru Wales)
  • The Good Place: "Michael's Gambit," written and directed by Michael Schur (Fremulon / 3 Arts Entertainment / Universal Television)
  • Star Trek: Discovery: "Magic to Make the Sanest Man Go Mad," written by Aron Eli Coleite & Jesse Alexander, directed by David M. Barrett (CBS Television Studios)


Best Editor, Short Form

  • Lynne M. Thomas & Michael Damian Thomas
  • John Joseph Adams
  • Neil Clarke
  • Lee Harris
  • Jonathan Strahan
  • Sheila Williams


Best Editor, Long Form

  • Sheila E. Gilbert
  • Joe Monti
  • Diana M. Pho
  • Devi Pillai
  • Miriam Weinberg
  • Navah Wolfe


Best Professional Artist

  • Sana Takeda
  • Galen Dara
  • Kathleen Jennings
  • Bastien Lecouffe Deharme
  • Victo Ngai
  • John Picacio


Best Semiprozine

  • Uncanny Magazine, edited by Lynne M. Thomas & Michael Damian Thomas, Michi Trota, and Julia Rios; podcast produced by Erika Ensign & Steven Schapansky
  • Beneath Ceaseless Skies, editor-in-chief and publisher Scott H. Andrews
  • The Book Smugglers, edited by Ana Grilo and Thea James
  • Escape Pod, edited by Mur Lafferty, S.B. Divya, and Norm Sherman, with assistant editor Benjamin C. Kinney
  • Fireside Magazine, edited by Brian White and Julia Rios; managing editor Elsa Sjunneson-Henry; special feature editor Mikki Kendall; publisher & art director Pablo Defendini
  • Strange Horizons, edited by Kate Dollarhyde, Gautam Bhatia, A.J. Odasso, Lila Garrott, Heather McDougal, Ciro Faienza, Tahlia Day, Vanessa Rose Phin, and the Strange Horizons staff


Best Fanzine

  • File 770, edited by Mike Glyer
  • Galactic Journey, edited by Gideon Marcus
  • Journey Planet, edited by Team Journey Planet
  • nerds of a feather, flock together, edited by The G, Vance Kotrla, and Joe Sherry
  • Rocket Stack Rank, edited by Greg Hullender and Eric Wong
  • SF Bluestocking, edited by Bridget McKinney


Best Fancast

  • Ditch Diggers, presented by Mur Lafferty and Matt Wallace
  • The Coode Street Podcast, presented by Jonathan Strahan and Gary K. Wolfe
  • Fangirl Happy Hour, presented by Ana Grilo and Renay William
  • Galactic Suburbia, presented by Alisa Krasnostein, Alexandra Pierce, and Tansy Rayner Roberts; produced by Andrew Finch
  • Sword and Laser, presented by Veronica Belmont and Tom Merritt
  • Verity!, presented by Deborah Stanish, Erika Ensign, Katrina Griffiths, L.M. Myles, Lynne M. Thomas, and Tansy Rayner Roberts


Best Fan Writer

  • Sarah Gailey
  • Camestros Felapton
  • Mike Glyer
  • Foz Meadows
  • Charles Payseur
  • Bogi Takács


Best Fan Artist

  • Geneva Benton
  • Grace P. Fong
  • Maya Hahto
  • Likhain (M. Sereno)
  • Spring Schoenhuth
  • Steve Stiles


There are two other Awards administered by Worldcon 76 that are not Hugo Awards:

Award for Best Young Adult Book

  • Akata Warrior, by Nnedi Okorafor (Viking)
  • The Art of Starving, by Sam J. Miller (HarperTeen)
  • The Book of Dust: La Belle Sauvage, by Philip Pullman (Knopf)
  • In Other Lands, by Sarah Rees Brennan (Big Mouth House)
  • A Skinful of Shadows, by Frances Hardinge (Macmillan UK / Harry N. Abrams US)
  • Summer in Orcus, written by T. Kingfisher (Ursula Vernon), illustrated by Lauren Henderson (Sofawolf Press)


John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer

  • Rebecca Roanhorse
  • Katherine Arden
  • Sarah Kuhn
  • Jeannette Ng
  • Vina Jie-Min Prasad
  • Rivers Solomon


Written or Contributed by Tim Midura


20 Aug 23:56

One in Five Men Feel Sad After They Have Sex, Study Finds

by Justin Lehmiller, PhD

If you've ever had sex, odds are that you've felt pretty good afterwards: Sex frequently creates a lingering feeling of contentment, often referred to as “afterglow” effect. In fact, research has found that these positive feelings can persist for up to two full days.

Not everyone’s post-sex experiences, however, are quite so rosy. Some people experience a range of negative emotions, including tearfulness, sadness, and irritability. This occurs inexplicably following what is otherwise consensual and satisfying sex. This phenomenon, known as postcoital dysmorphia, has increasingly been discussed by researchers and therapists over the last decade.

Research has found that nearly half of women report having experienced it at least once before. In addition, as many as ten percent say they’ve experienced it in the past month, while two percent say it’s something that happens to them regularly. Women who experience postcoital dysphoria tend to have more psychological distress and sexual dysfunctions; in addition, they are statistically more likely to have been sexually victimized.

It has long been thought that men experience postcoital dysphoria, too; but until now, no research has examined this phenomenon in men. A new study finds that not only does postcoital dysphoria exist in men, but men might even be more likely to experience it recurrently than women.

In the study, 1,208 men completed an online survey about their post-sex experiences. Participants came from all over the world, they ranged in age from 18-81 (the average age was 37), and the vast majority (84 percent) said they were currently involved in some type of sexual relationship.

To determine whether participants had experienced postcoital dysphoria, they were asked whether they had “experienced inexplicable tearfulness, sadness, or irritability following consensual sexual activity” at any point in their lives, as well as during the past four weeks specifically. They were also asked questions about both previous and current psychological distress, past experiences with sexual abuse, as well as any current sexual problems they were facing.


More from Tonic:


It turned out that 41 percent of men reported having experienced postcoital dysphoria at some point before. This is in line with previous studies finding that 46 percent of women have experienced it, too.

When it came to recent experiences with postcoital dysphoria, 20 percent of men said it happened to them in the past month. Moreover, nearly 4.5 percent of men said they had experienced it most or all of the times they’ve had sex for their entire lives. When compared to the aforementioned numbers among women, these findings suggest that men may be more likely to have both recent and recurrent experiences with postcoital dysphoria.

Consistent with previous research on women, men were more likely to report postcoital dysphoria to the extent that they had elevated levels of recent psychological distress, current sexual difficulties (especially problems related to low desire and orgasm), as well as a history of child sexual abuse. Gay men reported more frequent experiences with postcoital dysphoria than heterosexual men.

It’s important to note that this study wasn’t based on a representative sample of men; therefore, we can’t say with certainty what the prevalence of postcoital dysphoria is among guys or draw firm conclusions about how it compares to women. What these findings do tell us, though, is that postcoital dysphoria is indeed real and it seems to affect a lot of guys.

More research is needed to understand the potential causes of postcoital dysphoria; however, this study suggests that one contributing factor is likely to be our current psychological state, which may dictate the emotional response we’re likely to have following sex. Experiencing sexual abuse in childhood may also impact how we experience sex later in life, but it’s important to note that the association observed in this study was very small. Child sexual abuse may therefore play some role in postcoital dysphoria, but it really doesn’t seem to be the driving factor.

The authors of this study suggest that because postcoital dysphoria is something that most guys will experience only infrequently—if it happens to them at all, and “it may therefore represent normal variation within the human experience of the resolution phase.” In other words, it’s not something that should be pathologized and, in most cases, probably isn’t a source of concern—it’s really only likely to represent a problem when it occurs frequently and becomes a source of major distress or contributes to relationship problems.

More than anything, the results of this research add to a growing body of literature suggesting that men’s experiences with sex and orgasm are far more diverse and complex than previously assumed.

Justin Lehmiller, PhD, is a research fellow at The Kinsey Institute and author of the blog Sex and Psychology. His latest book is Tell Me What You Want: The Science of Sexual Desire and How It Can Help You Improve Your Sex Life. Follow him on Twitter @JustinLehmiller.

This article originally appeared on Tonic.

20 Aug 23:54

This Girl Conned Dozens of Dudes into Going on a Mass Tinder Date with Her

by Drew Schwartz

Aside from being a sad, demoralizing hellscape, Tinder is festering with liars and cheats, from rich dudes who pay other people to flirt for them to serial dine-and-dash daters. There's a weird combination of relative anonymity, blind hope, and desperation at play on the dating app that makes it ripe for deception—something one young woman in New York took full advantage of this weekend, pulling off the greatest goddamn scam in the history of online dating.

According to New York Magazine, Natasha Aponte planted the seed—or, rather, dozens of seeds—for her scheme about a month ago, when she matched with a boatload of dudes on Tinder, and gave them all the same spiel. As one man who claims he was duped by her tells it, her message went a little something like this:

She apparently dropped off the grid for a few weeks, then resurfaced, asking every dude she messaged if they wanted to meet at Union Square in New York City to catch a DJ set and get a drink—which, ostensibly, would've been a one-on-one date. When they showed up at around 6 PM on Sunday to link with her, they found themselves in a sea of guys who'd all matched with Aponte on Tinder. They just didn't know it yet.

In footage from Sunday's mass meet-up, you can see dozens of dudes awkwardly standing around a DJ playing a set on a stage. After a good 35 minutes, Aponte sashayed onto the platform and let her dozens of "dates" know what the hell was going on:

"Do you have what it takes to compete against everyone here to win a date with me?" Aponte called out to the crowd, eliciting chants of "bullshit" and "shut the fuck up" from a few disgruntled dudes. But most of the guys stuck around, only to be told, quality by quality, things that would disqualify them from taking her out. While two "referees" combed through the crowd, Aponte announced that she wouldn't date anyone who "is a tourist or doesn't live in this country," is "named Jimmy," is "looking just to hook up," or is "under 5'10"." Oh, also, "no beer bellies, no long beards, no bald guys, no khakis, no Toms."

Once she'd cut the number of candidates down through a series of "eliminations," she apparently made the men who hadn't been axed sprint and do pushups, then put them all in a line and swiped left and right on them IRL, a man who claims he was conned told New York Magazine. And you thought romance was dead!

It's unclear if anyone emerged victorious on Sunday, or whether Aponte actually agreed to go on a date with the dude who came out on top. According to New York Magazine, the whole thing was a little fishy: Aponte has since made her Instagram private, gone dark on social media, and—when they hit her up to ask about the scam—directed them to Rob Bliss Creative, a viral video agency.

Sure, this might have all just been a scheme to achieve viral glory, but it was a damn fine one. If nothing else, it was worth it for this tweet alone:

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Follow Drew Schwartz on Twitter.

20 Aug 23:51

Alan Moore Returns to Comics to Raise Money for Survivors of the Grenfell Tower Fire

by Princess Weekes

People gather on the steps after the Grenfell Tower National Memorial Service at St Paul's Cathedral in London, to mark the six month anniversary of the Grenfell Tower fire. PRESS ASSOCIATION Photo. Picture date: Thursday December 14, 2017. See PA story MEMORIAL Grenfell. Photo credit should read: Gareth Fuller/PA Wire

While I roll my eyes and sigh whenever I see something about Watchmen or V for Vendetta, that usually has nothing to do with the source material or the man behind the comics themselves, Alan Moore. Nothing but respect for my chaotic neutral genius.

However, there are people who read Moore’s books and the point goes so far over their head that I’m forced to adjust my geek girl classes and ask “Did you really read Watchman?” From the people who think Rorschach is a hero and take Moore’s writing in Watchmen to be a sign of his feelings for comics, in general, it can be hard to see the split between the creator and those who gather around him.

Yet when Moore shows who he is, there is no doubt that he is far, far from Rorschach.

Moore said he was “pretty much done” with comics two years ago, but came out of retirement to shame Boris Johnson over the Grenfell Tower fire. For those who don’t recall, the fire took place just over a year ago in London in a 24-story apartment complex called Grenfell Tower.

The fire is said to have been caused by a malfunctioning fridge on the fourth floor, that spread quickly because of the poor infostructure of the building. The fire caused 72 deaths, over 70 others were injured, and it left the 223 people who escaped totally unmoored. It is considered the worst UK residential fire since the Second World War.

The deaths included many children and the demographics of the people living in Grenfell Tower were majority working class and ethnically diverse, with many families from Moroccan and Somali backgrounds, according to the New York Times.

Here is Moore’s contribution:

(image: Image Comics)

An illustrated poem, his comic, “If Einstein’s Right …”, touches on fragmentary moments from different lives and features a mug-shot image of Boris Johnson.

“That same year a Bullingdon club clown / swears that he’ll leave fire services alone, / Then, three years later, cuts them to the bone, / Says, ‘Get stuffed’ as ten stations are closed down,” writes Moore. “And twenty-seven engines fade from view. / He also shall endure forevermore. / His treacheries caught in time’s amber, for / Disgrace and shame are both eternal, too.”

The illustrations were done by Melinda Gebbie, Moore’s wife and a feminist comics artist and writer, in her own right.

24 Panels is, according to Kieron Gillen, the curator of the project, a “spiritual sequel” to 24 Stories. Like 24 Stories, all proceeds will go the Trauma Response Network, which works to support PTSD survivors, especially those affected by Grenfell.

“It didn’t just end there. With such a huge disaster, there’s a very long tail emotionally,” said Gillen in The Guardian. “The thing about a disaster like Grenfell is we see the images and we are very aware of the enormous immediate physical harm. What we don’t often think about is the shadow, as in how long it lasts, how people live with it forever. That’s why the work of people like the Trauma Response Network is so important and needs to be funded.”

(via The Guardian, image: WPA Pool/Getty Images)

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20 Aug 23:45

Stop calling teenagers millennials

by Todd VanDerWerff
Five people who are decidedly not millennials.

“Millennial” has become a meaningless generational label. It’s time to find a new one for a whole new group of young people!

If you had to name the generation that Parkland, Florida, high school students turned gun control activists Emma Gonzalez and David Hogg belong to, which would it be? Baby boomers? Generation X? Millennials?

What about the various middle schoolers of Netflix’s hit show Stranger Things? Or the high schoolers of The CW’s Riverdale? (This last question is a trick, since like most teens on TV, the actors on Riverdale are older than their characters.)

How would you classify somebody who just turned 30? Or somebody who just turned 40? What generation would you place them in?

On one hand, this is a silly question. By definition, generations are big, broad cohorts; the US government defines the baby boom, for example, as the 18-year span from 1946 to 1964. That means it encompasses both Donald Trump (born in 1946) and Barack Obama (born in 1961), who don’t just have different politics but sometimes seem to have different frames of reference for the world entirely.

Now, giving a broad name to a generation is far too often just a way to revamp marketing to teens and 20-somethings by pretending that every new wave of them is subtly different from the last, as anybody who saw magazine cover stories about the laziness of Gen Xers reheated to describe millennials over the past 10 years could tell you. And trend pieces too often use these generational theories as a way to assign personal agency to things that happen as natural functions of changes in economics and history. Or, put another way, millennials aren’t killing mayonnaise, or country clubs, or chain restaurants. The twin tidal waves of a diversifying US population and rampant income inequality are.

On the other hand, the more that people seem to define “millennials” as “anybody younger than a baby boomer,” the more irritating I find the lackadaisical application of the term. Generations might be broad-based, but they’re not that broad-based. We don’t need a hard-and-fast definition of the term “millennial,” but whatever it’s supposed to signify loses all meaning when we apply it willy-nilly to everybody from 40-somethings to teenagers.

So let’s dig into where the term comes from, what it means, and who isn’t one. And maybe we’ll name this upcoming generation along the way.

Millennials, explained

2018 Time 100 Gala - Cocktails Jemal Countess/Getty Images for Time
The Parkland student activists probably aren’t millennials either.

Broadly speaking, millennials are most people in their 20s and 30s right now. There are a few edge cases here and there, mostly people in their late 30s or early 20s, and mostly depending on which definition of the term you’re using, but by and large, if you want to call a 25-year-old or a 35-year-old a millennial, go nuts.

There’s no single accepted set of years that bind the “millennial generation,” beyond a vague sense that they should have been somewhere in the process of growing up when the clock struck 12 and 1999 rolled over into 2000. (Insert pedantic disclaimer about how the millennium actually started in 2001 here.) A handful of definitions place the beginning of the generation as early as 1977 (meaning it would include 41-year-olds), but most place it somewhere in the first three years of the 1980s, with the endpoint falling somewhere in the mid-1990s.

The US government, holding with its 18-year generation policy, defines the millennial generation as people born between 1982 and 2000. But a variety of surveys by polling firms have defined the generation’s starting year as 1980 or 1981, with its concluding year sometime between 1994 and 1996. Meanwhile, when CBS aired a season of Survivor dubbed Millennials vs. Gen. X, it defined millennials as people born between 1984 and 1997 — and if you can’t trust Survivor, who can you trust?

The term was coined in 1987, to describe a generation of children who were as numerous in number as their baby boom parents. And while there were several attempts to dub the generation “Generation Y” or “the echo boomers,” the term millennial stuck, probably because it instantly defined the generation by its place in history, with the new millennium approaching, as opposed to its relative contrast to other generations. (We’ll come back to this in a moment.)

Some have attempted to subdivide the generation between people who came of age in the wake of 9/11 and those who came of age in the wake of the 2008 economic crash. Others have attempted to define subsets of the generation based on the rise of various forms of technology. Still others have attempted to break out the people born between 1977 and 1983 as their own micro-generation, since they fit uneasily into both Generation X and the millennial generation.

But all of that is neither here nor there. What I’m really trying to get at is that we need to stop saying millennials when we’re talking about people who are currently teenagers.

Millennials were mostly born in the ’80s and ’90s, which means that the vast majority of teens today — basically everybody under 18, even by the most lenient definitions of “millennial” — aren’t millennials. They’re their own thing. (Similarly, when writer Sandy Hingston defined 1976-born author Drew Magary as one of the millennials killing mayonnaise in her Philly magazine article on the topic, she was probably wrong too.)

The simplest reason “millennial” has come to define “everybody younger than a baby boomer” for so many people is that it’s easy shorthand. On top of that, Generation X is comparatively small when stacked up against both the baby boom and the millennials, as well as more evenly split, politically, than the heavily left-leaning millennials and right-leaning baby boomers. All of that makes it absurdly tempting to frame most American conflicts as a war between the baby boom and the millennials.

But that framing is about to become a lot less useful as the generation after millennials starts to enter adulthood.

Whatever comes after the millennials, explained

2017 Billboard Music Awards Presented by Virginia Black - Red Carpet Isaac Brekken/Getty Images for Virginia Black
Sadly, Logan Paul probably is a millennial. But his core audience is the generation under millennials.

One of the reasons it’s easy to define today’s teens, or even today’s kids, as millennials is that they haven’t really started asserting their consumer preferences in ways that will be obvious to the broader American marketplace.

We know they watch a lot of YouTube and are absurdly tech-savvy. It seems like their politics might be even more left-leaning than their older siblings in the millennial generation (unless they’ll be wildly reactionary and right-leaning). But they’re also young enough that when some of their pop culture crosses over into the mainstream — as when YouTube prankster Logan Paul wound up in hot water for showing the dead body of someone who died by suicide on his channel — it’s understandably easy for most people older than 25 to wrinkle their brows and say, “What the fuck is going onnn?!”

But as these youths grow older, they’re entering most valuable consumer demographics out there — their 20s and 30s. Advertisers will start targeting them, journalists will start trying to define them, and suddenly we’ll be at the dawn of a whole new era where we worry about how the Kids Today are changing everything, because aging keeps happening, babies keep being born, and death is inevitable. (Alive on this planet right now is a 3-year-old who will someday write a smug magazine cover story about how the generation just below hers doesn’t have its priorities in order.)

The larger point here is that until these young people really start making their preferences known, we’re not going to have a handy generational label to slap on them. Generation Z won’t work because, again, it’s difficult to define a new generation by terms better applied to an old one (and also because Generation Y never took hold). Similarly, the briefly floated “perennials” — which technically refers to all people of all ages who embrace a younger mindset, but sure Jan dot gif — won’t work because it sounds too much like “millennials.” I keep trying to make “Generation YouTube” happen, but tying a whole generation to a specific piece of technology is probably a bad idea too.

But there are already people trying to come up with a solution to this very problem. I talk to a lot of people in the TV industry, and those who work for networks aimed at kids have been thinking about how to attract these younger viewers for more than a decade now. And when I spoke to some folks at Cartoon Network a few years ago for a different story, they used a term that, I think, defines this new generation just about perfectly.

Cartoon Network has come to define the generation just entering college and the workplace in terms of what might be the most defining element of its relationship to technology. Having grown up with multiple screens, these kids are really, really, really good at dividing their attention among multiple sources. They can be looking at a phone, watching a TV, poking away at homework, and listening to a parent tell them to take out the trash all at the same time, while mostly keeping all of that information straight.

As such, the network dubbed this generation the “plurals.”

I like that term both because it describes something fundamental about the post-millennial generation — a love of lots of different sources of information streaming at once — and because it sounds a little like a post-apocalyptic street gang. (I would also accept “the multiples,” if you think “plurals” sounds too sinister.) But you know what? If nobody else does and collectively decides to call them “the teenyboppers” or “the scourge” or “the last generation ever,” that’s fine too. Just stop. Calling teenagers. Millennials.

And please, please, please stop calling newborn babies plurals. They are the augments, and everybody knows this. Thanks.

20 Aug 17:39

Danny DeVito, Premio Donostia en la 66 edición del Festival de San Sebastián

by M.M.

El padre de Matilda, el Pingüino, el maestro de ceremonias circense de 'Big Fish', el guionista-terrorista de 'Wiener-Dog': Danny DeVito (Neptune, Nueva Jersey, 1944) ha puesto rostro a más de un centenar de personajes desde que en 1970 hizo un pequeño papel en el drama 'Sueños de cristal'. Casi medio siglo de carrera que le ha valido el próximo Premio Donostia del Festival Internacional de Cine de San Sebastián, que entre el 21 y el 29 de septiembre celebrará su edición número 66. DeVito recogerá el galardón el sábado 22 en una gala en el Palacio Kursaal —el centro neurálgico del certamen vasco— según ha informado este lunes la organización de Zinemaldia.

El actor, productor y director estadounidense, que además presentará en el Festival la película de animación 'Smallfoot', ganó un Globo de Oro en 1980 por su papel de Louie De Palma en la serie 'Taxi', creada por James L. Brooks (guionista de 'Los Simpson' y 'Mejor... imposible') y ha estado nominado en seis ocasiones a los premios de la Asociación de la Prensa Extranjera en Hollywood y en una a los Oscar, en este último caso por su labor de producción en 'Erin Brockovich'.

En sus casi 50 años de carrera, DeVito ha trabajado con directores como Milos Forman, Brian de Palma, Robert Zemeckis, Barry Levinson, Tim Burton, Francis Ford Coppola, Sofia Coppola y Todd Solondz, y ha compaginado papeles en grandes superproducciones con apariciones en películas de corte independiente. Como director, destaca su trabajo en 'La guerra de los Rose' (1989) —en la que Kathleen Turner y Michael Douglas firmaban el divorcio a guantazos—, 'Hoffa. un pulso al poder' (1992) —sobre la historia del sindicalista Jimmy Hoffa y sus tejemanejes con la mafia— y 'Matilda' (1996), la adaptación al cine del clásico moderno de Roald Dahl.

Danny DeVito en una imagen de 'Batman vuelve' (1992). (Warner)

DeVito fue actor por casualidad, como contó en una entrevista de la televisión de los Emmy. Nada más salir del instituto, no se planteaba ir a la universidad por no contar con "las notas necesarias". "Mi hermana tenía un salón de belleza en Los Ángeles, tenía un negocio pequeño y acogedor en el que trabajaban ella y dos amigas. Y un día me dijo: 'Danny, ¿por qué no vienes a trabajar para mí?'". El último trabajo que había tenido había sido cortando el césped, pero el joven accedió tras las presiones de su hermana, su madre y sus tías y se inscribió en la academia de belleza Wilfred, donde consiguió el título para poder ejercer en el gabinete de su hermana.

Allí trabajó durante dos años hasta que, buscando a alguien que le enseñara nuevas técnicas de maquillaje, encontró a una especialista que trabajaba en la Academia Americana de Arte Dramático en Madison Avenue. "Le dije lo que quería. Ella me dijo que estaba en el medio del curso, que todavía le queda todo un semestre por delante. 'Si quieres inscribirte en la Academia de Arte Dramático, puedo enseñarte maquillaje por las noches. Pero no puedo enseñarte a no ser que seas tú el que viene a la escuela y no te dejarán venir a las clases a no ser que te inscribas como alumno', me dijo. Y así me convertí en actor".

Danny DeVito y Arnold Schwarzenegger en 'Los gemelos golpean dos veces'.

Después de salir de la Academia de Arte Dramático en 1966, DeVito, a pesar de su corta estatura (1,47), consiguió ir encadenando papeles tanto en cine como en televisión y decidió utilizar su buen olfato para descubrir también, como productor, nuevos talentos. Pocos saben que él fue quien compró los derechos de 'Pulp Fiction' (1994) y ayudó a Tarantino a sacar su película adelante. "Yo no había visto a Quentin ni dirigir ni actuar. Ni siquiera había visto 'Reservoir Dogs' cuando compré su siguiente proyecto, que ni siquiera estaba escrito", desveló en una entrevista con 'The Guardian' en 2012. "Fue sólo por él: me gustaba la forma de la que hablaba del proyecto. El tío estaba tan seguro. Me parecía hasta una cosa sencilla de hacer".

A sus 74 años, DeVito tiene varios proyectos en marcha: entre ellos, una nueva colaboración con Tim Burton, que ha contado con el actor para interpretar de nuevo al dueño de un circo en 'Dumbo', y 'Triplets' la secuela de 'Los gemelos golpean dos veces', la comedia que protagonizó junto a Arnold Schwarzenegger en 1988, en la que volverá a coincidir con el austríaco y en la que se les unirá Eddie Murphy.

19 Aug 21:34

Portugal proves that austerity doesn't work

by Cory Doctorow

Economists like Alberto Alesina and Silvia Ardagna reshaped the world when their theories of "expansionary austerity" were put into effect after the 2008 crisis: the idea that governments could "increase taxes, cut spending, and grow strongly" was powerfully tempting to the world's leaders, who saw in them a way to pull out of a recessionary spiral without limiting the number of yachts the oligarchs they depended on could afford. (more…)

19 Aug 21:34

Revisiting Bisexuality in Chasing Amy

by Princess Weekes

Joey Lauren Adams in Chasing Amy (1997)

Bisexual representation has been on the rise, more so with female bisexuality than male, but it is showing up more and more in movies and especially television.

When I was coming to terms with my own bisexuality there were a lot of “problematic” movies and films with bisexual characters that I’d been prepared for, like Maureen from Rent*. I think when it comes to representation of sexuality, especially in stories not written by someone of that sexual orientation, there are times when the author can either miss the mark or accidentally make something really profound. The latter is how I feel about Kevin Smith’s 1997 movie Chasing Amy.

Chasing Amy was Kevin Smith’s third film after Clerks and Mallrats, and takes place in the “View Askewniverse” that also includes the Jay and Silent Bob joints and one of my favorite movies, Dogma.

Amy is about a male comic book artist named Holden McNeil, played by Ben Affleck, who falls in love with a “lesbian” comic book writer named Alyssa Jones (Joey Lauren Adams). Holden’s best friend Banky Edwards (Jason Lee) is also a comic book artist (inker/colorist—not a tracer) and you find out about him being gay at the end of the movie.

I’d heard about the discourse about Chasing Amy before I’d ever seen the movie. While I enjoy Kevin Smith movies, I didn’t get into them properly until college, so when I was made aware of the issues that lesbians have with the movie Chasing Amy, I was prepared to be like “okay this is gonna be a problem,” which is why it was very jarring when I found myself deeply relating to Alyssa Jones.

Now to be clear, I respect and understand why Alyssa is a character that many lesbians and other queer women find offensive. The myth that all a woman needs is ‘good dick’ and they will be ‘cured’ of their homosexuality is a harmful and deeply problematic stereotype that still hasn’t gone away. That being said, looking at Alyssa from a bisexual perspective, she hits on a lot of things that bisexual women still have to deal with when navigating partners.

Holden’s infatuation with Alyssa is instant—he feels they have a connection, and is disappointed when he finds out she is a lesbian. He spends a lot of their earlier conversations trying to deconstruct female/female sex, asking if she’s still a virgin and having to unpack what it means to be a “virgin.” Is it the loss of the hymen (you can lose it without sex)? Or penetration (penetration doesn’t always mean a penis or phallic object)? Holden’s answers are, as Alyssa puts it, “completely naive and infantile.”

Because he doesn’t see sex between women as “real sex” when they engage in a relationship, Holden sort of views Alyssa as a virgin and takes a sort of special power in the fact that she hasn’t been with any other man. That’s why he is so distraught when he finds out that Alyssa has had sex with dudes, including a threesome with two men.

Alyssa is hurt by Holden’s slut-shaming of her for her past, but also confused as to why he has no problem with her “sleeping with half the women in New York City” but has a problem with her having been experimental ten years ago in high school. He wants Alyssa to be an image of the perfect woman and minimizes her same-sex relationships, while making a big deal about her relationships with.

There are men who view bisexual women as attainable lesbians. Slightly kinky, open to threesomes with two women, and someone who they can lust after women with, but ignore the side of them that is attracted to men. The type of guys who don’t consider it cheating when their girlfriend sleeps with another girl, but it is cheating with another guy. They may see themselves as open-minded, but all it proves is that, like Holden, they have a naive and infantile view of female sexuality.

When Holden comes to pick up Alyssa, a woman in a bra basically calls Holden out on his “tactic” of thinking that if he’s the “right man” he can fix Alyssa’s lesbianism.

You’ve got it in your head that Alyssa’s not really into chicks—that she just hasn’t met the right man. And you believe you’re it. That is so cute. You’re going to treat her right, fuck her like a stud, and “straight-jacket” her back from the land of the lost. And the sad truth is that you’ll accomplish none of that and wind up as either an even more bitter misogynist or a reverse fag-hag.

All of what she is saying is valid, and while she is being placed in an antagonistic position versus Holden, this is a mentality that lesbian women have come face-to-face with for most of their lives. For Alyssa, her getting involved with a man again is not just a new relationship: “I can’t just get into a relationship with you without throwing my whole fucking world into upheaval.”

What she means is the loss of her community of fellow queer women. For them this will be a betrayal and it is reflected in the scene where she tells her lesbian friends that she is dating Holden and they all leave, and Tory says “Another one bites the dust.”

A lot of people view bisexuality as a split 50/50 attraction and there are a lot of dated definitions about bisexuality that I don’t think quite cut it, but from most bisexual women I speak to their attraction isn’t to gender, it is to people. However, many bisexual women I’ve spoken to talk about how they often end up dating men because it’s “easier.” Not easier in terms of homophobia, but because sometimes lesbians will say they are not “queer enough” or dismiss their attraction to women as less valid because they are also attracted to men. Plus the fear that they will, eventually, leave their female partners for male partners.

Of course, not all lesbians feel this way, but it is a part of many bisexual women’s experience, and there is a reason why terms like “gold-star lesbian” exist. So I understand, especially in the 90s, why a woman who mostly finds herself dating women and never really finds herself being attracted to dudes as often would be like “I’m just gonna call myself a lesbian—that’s easier and people understand what that means.”

Alyssa Jones’ story is in many ways a perfect encapsulation of biphobia in both straight and queer communitie,s and while I think Kevin Smith is a good and thoughtful writer when he tries, I think it is mostly by accident.

One of the things that made me love Smith’s work is how he is able to show men’s toxicity around women’s sexuality. Clerks does this really well in the “37 dicks” scene.

Chasing Amy is really about a straight man coming to terms with his own insecurity and weakness when it comes to female sexuality. He allows his ego to stop him from being in a loving relationship. Alyssa is a way for his character to go on that journey and it really only happens because Smith is not concerned with making a gay movie about representation, he’s making a movie about male fragility.

That distance allows him to go into these things in a way that I think we in the LGBTQ community aren’t really trying to do right now. We are so in need of representation, that it came sometimes seem like a losing game to try and now discuss infighting amongst ourselves. Even when biphobia does come up, it is never really broken down on both sides. grown-ish tried to do it but flopped when it came to dealing with male bisexuality.

Chasing Amy is still a really problematic film, because how could it not be, but that doesn’t make it valueless. For me, Chasing Amy reminded me of how hard it was for me to come out as bisexual because I didn’t know I had a choice between being a lesbian and being heterosexual. I thought I had to pick. Bisexuality was me saying I’m not closing myself off to the possibility of love regardless of sex/gender. I just want a person who will play Magic: The Gathering with me and doesn’t mind that I am weird.

*For the record, I think that Maureen is a fun character and if Joanne is so jealous she shouldn’t be with her.

(image: Miramax)

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19 Aug 21:14

The Chapo Trap House Guys Think the Problem Isn't Russia, It's Republicans

by Justin Caffier

A few years ago, no one could have predicted that socialism would seem to many young people like a viable political movement or that the country would be consumed by the question of whether there's a tape of the president saying the N-word. So sure, why can't the Chapo Trap House guys be acutal celebrity pundits with a book and everything? In just two years, New York-based friends Matt Christman, Felix Biederman, Amber A'Lee Frost, Will Menaker, and Virgil Texas (the last of whom has written for VICE) have grown their Simpsons jokes and rant-filled roundtable chats into an enormous platform for lefty conversations. If Pod Save America, the inescapable liberal talk show hosted by former Obama staffers, represents the respectable wing of the Resistance, Chapo represents the angrier, fringier, and more uncompromising part of the left, the part that gets insulted when you call them Democrats.

Having conquered the podcasting world—their 22,000 Patreon subscribers donate more than $100,000 to them per month—the Chapo co-hosts have branched out into books with The Chapo Guide to Revolution: A Manifesto Against Logic, Facts, and Reason, written with help from occasional show producer Brendan James (another former VICE and VICE News contributor). The book, which comes out next week, delves into the ugliness of America's past, present, and future political landscapes, with chapters skewering both parties, the legacy press, and the country's abusive relationship with capitalism. It also contains vicious caricatures of liberal and conservative archetypes, an Aaron Sorkin manga, and a "Chapo KidZone." But amid all the jokes and 'toons, the book does lay out a compelling case for curb-stomping capitalism, which they claim has failed all but the ultra-wealthy.

I recently got on a call with Menaker, Christman, and Texas to talk about the book and what it would take for socialism to take off in the US.

VICE: A common argument in left-wing circles is that we should solve racism or other issues first before tackling economic inequality. How do you respond to that?
Matt Christman: I'd like to hear anyone's actual plan for solving racism. Every person I've ever heard make that argument, literally none of them have an actual answer. None of them have even a close to a suggestion of how to do that other than, I don't know, have people that read the right op-eds or something. Protesting against racism is good, but it should be part of a broader attack against all elements of oppression in this country.

Virgil Texas: Racism in this society is mediated by capitalism to an extent that's it's greater than most other societies, so I would say that redistributive economics would go a long way towards hacking racism at its roots.

Will Menaker: Racism and white supremacy is so embedded into the culture and politics of this country, it's very hard to say. Even though de jure legal racism has been attacked successfully, what is now described as “systemic racism” hasn’t, or it’s metastasized in ways you might expect to replace formal legal forms of racism. All of this is my way of saying I don't know if a nationalized healthcare system or, to quote Hillary Clinton, “breaking up the big banks" that caused the financial crash of 2008 will cure the racism in the hearts of individual people in this country. It probably won't. However, it's still the right thing to do and should be pursued vigorously, regardless.



There’s a through-line in your book and podcast of disgust or disappointment toward the average American voter, whether it’s because they're racist or because they're stupid. So how does one make socialism a big-tent movement? Are there certain voters who are too far gone and not worth fighting for?
Christman: At this point in time, anyone who supports Trump. Anyone who in 2018 says, "Yes, this is our guy, he's good to me." I think that their commitment to just being awful as a political project is far too strong to have any kind of meaningful engagement

Texas: Yes, you've identified yourself as the actual enemy of all good and decent human beings.

Menaker: We say in the book: would a theoretical Trump voter or Republican voter out there vote for something different if there were a political party or a message against the economic domination of everyday American life? Perhaps. The only way we can find out is to make that case and advance that agenda. But this idea that you can have a political ideology or have a politics without enemies I think is foolish. I think these people have to be dealt with—I don't mean like catered to or reached out to. I think they need to be neutralized as much as possible or made as much of a non-factor, politically, because I don't think having a livable or decent future is possible should they get what they want out of politics or government.

Citizen Kek, Liberty Babe, and Bow-Tie Dipshit conservative caricatures from the book by Eli Valley

Was there anything else planned for the book but cut because it just couldn’t fit in?
Menaker: The one that comes to mind is we had some parodies of newspaper comic strips [in the chapter on media] that didn't make the cut because of legal reasons.

Texas: Dilbert threatened to sue.

Christman: Apparently the estate of Beetle Bailey didn't want to see him shooting kids at Kent State.

Texas: It was just the lawyers that had the problems with them. Cowards. Damn suits.

Corporate Feminist, Epic-Rant Dad, and Wine Mom liberal caricatures from the book by Eli Valley

Speaking of things that have happened since the book’s been printed, you guys frequently dismiss liberals who are obsessed with the notion of Russian interference in the 2016 election. As more news emerges that indicates that that actually happened, are you open to walking back some of that rhetoric?
Texas: I've heard it's said by people that Russians hacked voting machines to make Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez win her primary, and I believe polls done show a majority of Democrats still believe that Hillary had won the election, but Russia actually hacked the voting machines. That's hysteria and that's what we're talking about. Brainless hysteria and scaremongering.

Menaker: Look, I'm all in favor of any investigation into Trump and his criminal malfeasance, of which I'm sure there is ample opportunity for. And if he is prosecuted or impeached because of that, great. However, this doesn't solve our essential political problem. I think these are liberals who do not want to face up to their own failure, both out of the Clinton campaign and the eight years of Obama, and they have decided to play detective. I'm sure there is some truth to [Russian interference]. I just take it at face value that Trump is a deeply corrupt person, who I'm sure is compromised by Russian oligarchs or criminals to some degree.

I don’t think I've seen any systematic or real reporting or evidence that Russia flipped the election one way or the other for Trump any more than, let's say, actual voter repression in this country did. I feel like many people are having this scales-coming-from-their-eyes "how could this happen in America” moment 20 years too late. George W. Bush absolutely stole the 2000 election. There's evidence for that. If the recount were allowed to have continued, Al Gore would have won Florida. We know that. The Supreme Court appointed him president, and then 9/11 happened and the Iraq war.

Texas: The problem isn't some nefarious foreign power. The call is coming from inside the house. The problem is the Republican party. The problem is conservatives. The Republican party and conservatism needs to be destroyed, root and stem.

Menaker: Also, any Democrat who is counter-establishment or even slightly progressive or to the left is now considered “a tool of Putin,” a puppet. They're trying to split the Democratic vote and anything that might be politically useful to the Democrats that might help them change things in this country is being tarred as some intelligence op.

How do you prevent this sentiment from turning into nihilism? How do you still stay engaged and active?
Texas: I think it's the other way around. Watching this stuff and getting obsessed with this stuff is a recipe for total paralysis. You just become totally engrossed in the story and that's all you care about. It’s a daily soap opera.

Menaker: My stories.

Texas: Politics is getting outside of that self-reinforcing spectacle where the norms are brutally enforced and where different concepts are not spoken of. It’s trying to fucking break out of that conversation and talk to other people in your life who are experiencing day-to-day degradation of late capitalism and try to find ways to together fight against them. That's actually engaging in politics. Staring at the TV and waiting for some indictment to come down that will never be there or watching Rachel Maddow put names on a fucking chalkboard, that's not politics.

Menaker: There's nothing politically effective that you do by yourself. Watching TV, listening to a podcast, tweeting, that's all just entertainment. That's all just a game that we all like to play, myself included.

What works is other people, a mass of other people organizing and solidarity. I think that's how you avoid going insane or becoming a nihilist by staying in tune with other people who believe as you do and trying to work together for our betterment as a society.

Texas: No. The way you prevent becoming a nihilist is by buying the book.

This interview has been edited for clarity and length.

Follow Justin Caffier on Twitter.

19 Aug 21:05

The 13th Anniversary of "They're Taking the Hobbits to Isengard!"

Cac

13 years ago, this music video remix was uploaded to the internet humor site Albino Blacksheep, featuring various scenes from the 2002 fantasy film The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers along with the character Legolas repeating the line "They're taking the hobbits to Isengard!"

19 Aug 21:00

Fantasy Novel Not Holding Back On Criticisms Of Dwarvish Culture

by The Onion on Entertainment, shared by The Onion to The Onion

FORSYTH, IL—Characterizing the reclusive subterranean race of diminutive miners right off the bat as “possessed of a fiery demeanor most unpleasant” from its opening pages, fantasy novel The Mage’s Shadow was not holding back on its criticisms of dwarvish culture in the least, readers confirmed Thursday. “For a whole…

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19 Aug 20:30

¿Este año no hay Felipop?

by Marta Corral
Jamie Fifthring & The Coffee Breakers estarán abriendo el festival de Limodre (foto: Juanpa Ameneiros)

Jamie Fifthring & The Coffee Breakers estarán abriendo el festival de Limodre (foto: Juanpa Ameneiros)

M. C. | Ferrol | Jueves 16 agosto 2018 | 11:39

Cuando la primera quincena de agosto daba sus últimos coletazos, entre los colegas se repetía una y otra vez la misma frase: “¿este año no hay Felipop?”. Lo cierto es que el festival de Limodre nunca había defraudado y nos había regalado grandes momentos para la historia, pero este año nos tenía despistados.

Se cumplen 20 años de esta cita selecta y el guión ha dado un giro inesperado. La mayor parte de los fundadores del Felipop han decidido continuar al pie del cañón, pero hacerlo bajo una nueva marca: Felicia POP Festival. También han tomado la decisión de mudarse a octubre, al fin de semana del 12 y 13.

Advierten desde su página de Facebook que el cambio “non debe ser motivo de preocupación, nin de tristeza, nin moito menos de resentimento ou mal humor. Cambia o nome, un pouco, pero non cambia para nada a esencia”. Así que tranquilos, habrá bailoteo en el corazón de Fene también este año.

Programación

La otra gran novedad de este año es que todas las actuaciones del festival son gratuitas. El viernes 21 de septiembre se presentará el cartel en Casa Ardá y el viernes 12 echará a andar el evento con los conciertos de Jamie Fifthring & The Coffee Breakers, Bang 74 y Aula 11. Después seguirán las pinchadas en un after “ata que corpo e alma se separen”, advierten.

Ya el sábado 13 habrá sesión vermú con pinchos y música en directo. Por la noche le tocará el turno a The Primitives, Mujeres, Bonzos y Los Retrovisores. Al finalizar, pinchada de nuevo. Para los más duros, el domingo tal y como manda la tradición, se pondrá el broche de oro al festival con un concierto en Casa Ardá.

19 Aug 20:28

KFC ya anuncia su desembarco en A Gándara

by Salgado
KFC se instalará en A Gándara (foto: Ferrol360)

KFC se instalará en A Gándara (foto: Ferrol360)

FERROL360 | Lunes 20 agosto 2018 | 00:00

Una de las vallas publicitarias de grandes dimensiones existentes en el polígono anuncia la próxima apertura de la cadena KFC. La franquicia reina del pollo frito estrenará en A Gándara el que será su tercer local en Galicia tras los operativos en A Coruña y Santiago de Compostela.

La entrada en funcionamiento de las instalaciones, que la firma detalla como emplazadas «frente al centro comercial», coincide con la reciente demolición de las que ocupó históricamente la empresa Persianas Garcal. Estratégicamente ubicado en la confluencia del acceso a Alcampo y Dolce Vita Odeón, ese espacio luce ahora vacío a la espera de su nuevo ocupante.

19 Aug 20:18

'Gremlins 2', la película que advirtió al mundo de lo que estaba por venir

by Kiko Vega

'Gremlins 2', la película que advirtió al mundo de lo que estaba por venir

El 15 de junio de 1990, Warner Bros, Amblin, Joe Dante y la horda de criaturas más disparatada de la historia del cine, perdían la batalla por el dominio de la taquilla norteamericana ante las fuerzas del orden, blanco e inmaculado, del agente ‘Dick Tracy’ perpetrado por Warren Beatty, un tipo con bastante menos capacidad de expresión que el bueno de Gizmo.

‘Gremlins 2’ fue un fracaso en toda regla, recaudando a duras penas una cuarta parte de lo que sumó su antecesora unos años antes, y los factores que contribuyeron a ese fracaso son de lo más variado: cambio de época, espíritu desmadrado y un aparente encadenado de sketches con apeas trama no la hicieron un producto apetecible.

Otra razón por la que fue recibida con tanto rechazo pudo ser, por qué no, lo acertada que resultó en su ácida mirada hacia los Estados Unidos, las corporaciones sin piedad y el futuro que aguardaba a América y, por lo tanto, al mundo.

Donde dije Clamp digo Trump

Donald Trump. Daniel Clamp. Gemelos separados al nacer, con una parecida predisposición por el dominio global y a los que la estupidez trató de manera diferente. El real, el actual presidente de los Estados Unidos, no aprendió nunca la lección y jamás dará su brazo a torcer.

Por su parte, “el bueno” de Daniel Clamp, responsable del colapso mogwai en la gran manzana, termina por resultar tan carismático que, con el premiso de Chris Columbus (creador de los personajes originales) y de Charlie Haas (guionista de la secuela), acabará por encontrar a su media naranja, una atractiva y ambiciosa oficinista en apuros que respondía al nombre de Marla, igual que la mujer que se convertiría en esposa de Trump entre 1993 y 1999

Gremlins 2 Clamp 3

Dante y su equipo creativo no tuvieron demasiadas dificultades para clavar el narcisismo del futuro presidente de los Estados Unidos, al que dotaron de su propia red de noticias, edificios y logotipo con un mundo tan aplastado por su garra que casi resultaba terraplanista.

Con apenas unos esbozos de realidad, 'Gremlins 2' comenzaba a diseñar el futuro de una nación casi treinta años antes de que sucediera lo inimaginable. Como decía Charlie Haas, “Trump fue un emblema de lo que estaba pasando durante los años 80 y 90, todo codicia, dinero y grosería. Pero por entonces aún parecía algo inofensivo”.

Ya lo dijo el propio Dante: "Gremlins 2 fue la primera película anti-trump en la historia del cine estadounidense, ¡aunque mi Trump era más comprensivo que el real!".

Tecnología Gremlin

Uno de los puntos fuertes de la secuela del clásico navideño es su moraleja, cada vez más vigente: en manos irresponsables, la tecnología puede volverse monstruosa. ‘Gremlins 2’ convertía a la ciudad de Nueva York en zona cero piramidal en medio de ninguna parte, donde los taxistas solo están interesados en llevarte al aeropuerto y con ese faro de la hipocresía y la extinción global del Clamp Center como luz que guía al Apocalipsis.

Gremlins 2 Clamp 5

Un sitio donde en lugar de utilizar la tecnología para hacer más sencilla la vida en el planeta ocurre justo lo contrario. El edificio es tan “inteligente” que ya no queda rastro de humanidad. Sus trabajadores son meros códigos de barras que, por momentos, nos sitúan casi en el Holocausto.

Y el edificio Clamp tiene mucho de laboratorio de guerra. Podríamos decir que es un laboratorio de guerra. El lugar, dirigido por el mismísimo Conde Drácula y un equipo de racionalmente crueles científicos, es una infatigable fábrica de maldad y riesgos globales que terminará jugando en su contra cuando, curiosamente, una tropa de monstruos irracionales se apodere del edificio.

Gremlins 2 vegetal

En la reciente ‘Aniquilación’ hay una secuencia donde uno de los personajes sufre un incidente no muy alejado del monstruoso e inolvidable “Gremlin vegetal”, una muestra más de hasta donde llegaría, sin ir más lejos, Monsanto, otra de esas diabólicas corporaciones que están arrasando el planeta. Sí, en la película de Joe Dante es mucho más original e impactante.

Conexión en directo con la violencia

Otro apunte premonitorio y genial es su capacidad para observar por dónde irían los tiros de los medios de comunicación del futuro. En la extraordinaria ‘Nightcrawler’, veíamos la dura realidad del freelance psicópata, un monstruo capaz de alterar la escena del crimen con tal de conseguir el prime time.

En la película de Joe Dante la violencia es puro cartoon, pero no duda en cargar con la cámara al hombro para retratarla en directo a todo un país, tal y como se encargarán de hacer todas las cadenas nacionales durante los siguientes treinta años: la basura vende, y si es en directo, vende más. La cobertura al fin del mundo vende mucho.

Además del descubrimiento del éxito en la televisión, la cadena de televisión de ‘Gremlins 2: La nueva generación”, también tiene en su parrilla programas de cocina en directo en su propio canal de cocina. ¿Te suena?

"Divertido, pero de ningún modo civilizado". Esta es la declaración principal del monstruo inteligente que mata a otro en directo, en antena, solo por la diversión. También es el lema de ‘Gremlins 2: La nueva generación', y por supuesto el de toda la industria moderna del entretenimiento. Total, esa violencia de caricatura (o no) solo forma parte del espectáculo.

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Primeros detalles de 'Gremlins: Secrets of the Mogwai', la precuela animada del clásico de Joe Dante

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La noticia 'Gremlins 2', la película que advirtió al mundo de lo que estaba por venir fue publicada originalmente en Espinof por Kiko Vega .

16 Aug 11:00

Las mil maneras de mierda de llamar a tu pareja en España

by Ana Iris Simón

El día que vimos el capítulo de Madrileños por el mundo en el que "Tania acroyoga" no deja de mencionar a "La Paqui", la cámara que la acompaña por Sidney, mi novio dejó de llamarme Ana Iris y pasó a llamarme Paqui. La movida ha llegado a tal punto que hasta su compañero de piso, que probablemente desconozca el origen del apelativo, también me llama así.

Me consuelo pensando que podría ser peor. Podría llamarme bebé. O peor aún, podría escribirme WhatsApps en los que se refiriera a mí como "BB". Y eso me lleva a preguntarme por qué últimamente tanta gente llama a otra gente bebé, si cuando los traperos empezaron a usarlo (como Yung Beef en Rosas Azules o en Infierno o Bad Gyal en Jacaranda) nos dejó de recordar a Aless Gibaja. ¿Por qué ponerle sobrenombres ridículos a la gente a la que queremos, especialmente si esa gente es nuestra pareja?

Imaginaos a Marco Antonio llamando "canija" a Cleopatra o a Lauren Bacall refiiéndose a Humprey Bogart como "gordi". Vale, seguramente lo hicieran. Porque al final todos, tarde o temprano, acabamos cediendo a ese deseo humano tan primario de hacer sentir especial al otro, muy probablemente a fin de sentirnos especiales nosotros también.

Una lista en orden ascendente de apelativos cariñosos, de los que menos rabia dan a los que más sería de gran utilidad para saber al menos por cuál decantarnos, cuál da menos vergüenza ajena. Y esa fue nuestra intención inicial con este artículo, pero la relatividad y las grandes diferencias en la percepción, la cognición y la interpretación humana lo hicieron imposible. Por eso y porque al final las palabras que elegimos nos definen los hemos clasificado, simplemente, en bloques.

LOS QUE SOLO PUEDES DECIR SI HAS SIDO JOVEN EN LOS 80

Chato/a

Chati

Chatungo/a

Chulo/a

Churri

Chuli

Chorbo/a

(*)No sabemos qué extraña relación guarda la -ch con la década.

LOS CAPITALISTAS

Joya

Tesoro

Diamantito

RELATIVOS AL TAMAÑO Y LA FIGURA

Canijo/a

Pequeño/a

Peque

Enano/a

Pitufo/a

Flaco/a

Chiquitín/a

Grandullón/a

Gordo/a y todas sus variables, a saber:

Gordito/a

Gordi/a

Gordis

LOS DE POLÍGLOTA

Amore

Coraçao

Darling

Baby

Honey

Love

Mon chéri

Bambino/a

LOS QUE PUEDES DECIR SOLO SI YA TIENES NIETOS

Ricura

Prenda

Dulzura

LOS QUE TE HACEN MERECEDOR DE UNA HOSTIA

Culete

Bolita

Muñeco/a

Cuqui

Chispita

Pocholito

Todos los relativos a productos alimenticios, a saber:

Chocolatito

Pastelito

Bizcochito

Galletita

Bombón

Calabacita

Caramelito

Bollito

Quesito

DEL REINO ANIMAL Y VEGETAL

Monete

Bicho

Tigre

Gatito/a

Pajarito/a

Pollito

Renacuajo/a

Gusanito/a

Pulguita

Ratón/a

Ratita

Palomita

Florecilla

Cachorro/a

Cachorrito/a

Pichón/a

RELATIVOS O PERTENECIENTES A LA REALEZA

Rey/reina

Princesa/ príncipe

Corinna mía

BACK TO BASICS

A

Amor y todas sus variables, a saber:

Amor mío

Amorcete

Amorcito

B

Bonito

C

Caraguapa

Cariño y todas sus variables:

Cari

Cariñín

Cariñete

Cariño mío

Chiqui

Cielo

Corazón

Cosa

Cosi


Cosita

Cuchi

Cuchufleta

D

Divo/a

Duendecillo

Dulzura

E

Encanto

M

Mama

Mami

Mi amor

Mi niño/a

Moreno/a

Musa

P

Papa

Papi

Pelusilla

Pichurri

Pichurrín

R

Rubio/a

S

Sabrosura

Sol

Solete

V

Vida (también válido con el posesivo -mi)

Por favor, comentad vuestras aportaciones en los comentarios de más abajo. Ups, perdón, que ya no se pueden publicar comentarios en VICE, mejor dejadlos en Instagram o en Facebook, pues.





16 Aug 10:55

Todos quieren visitar el castillo de Moeche

by Marta Corral

FERROL360 | Miércoles 15 agosto 2018 | 11:01

El castillo de Moeche, la joya patrimonial del municipio, va camino de superar este 2018 todos los registros de visitas. Solamente de enero a julio accedieron a él 2.300 personas, un 37 % más que en el mismo periodo del año pasado.

Este incremento, explican desde el Gobierno, viene dado por la ampliación de horarios de atención al público, la organización de eventos culturales dentro de sus murallas o las facilidades de acceso que se le dan a los propios vecinos.

Las personas que más visitan la fortaleza proceden de las comarcas y el resto de Galicia, seguidas de visitantes de León, Asturias y O Bierzo.

“Queremos que o castelo sexa un espazo vivo, non só un monumento que debamos preservar”, dice la alcaldesa, Beatriz Bascoy, añadiendo que el Concello “apostou por mantelo aberto máis horas e máis días da semana, fomentando tamén as visitas da poboación local mediante a entrega dunha tarxeta de acceso libre que a veciñanza de Moeche pode solicitar no Concello e ila renovando cada ano”.

Horarios

Hasta el 30 de septiembre el castillo estará abierto los martes de 15:30 a 19:30 horas, mientras que los miércoles, jueves y viernes lo hará de 12:00 a 14:00 horas y de 17:00 a 20:00. Los fines de semana y festivos abre media hora antes en horario de mañana y de tarde.

Las entradas para menores de 6 años y empadronados en Moeche son gratis, la entrada de más de 12 años sin carné joven es de 2,50 euros, y la de jubilados o niños de 6 a 12 años es de 1,50 euros. Con carné joven cuesta 2 euros.

Este sábado, eso sí, al celebrarse el Festival Irmandiño, el castillo estará abierto durante todo el día gratis para todas las personas que quieran verlo.

13 Aug 15:07

‘Aborto Criminal’: la peli más rancia y vergonzante del cine español

by José Viruete

¿Es relevante una exploitation española de 1973 en pleno año 2018? Pues viendo como el parlamente argentino sigue sin legalizar el aborto, sí. En algún momento hemos pensado que quizá los políticos del país han visto este película de sinvergüenza de Ignacio F. Quino, toda una oda a los peligros, físicos y morales, del aborto. La frase del cartel indica la mentalidad rancia que preside este film: la que fornique tendrá que parir. El movimiento Incel esta tardando en descubrir esta joya.

La película comienza destacando su calificación de “Especial Interés”, una distinción que daba el gobierno de Franco para resaltar films con efectos moralizadores: su director supo agradar al regimen. La publicidad del film incluía frases como “en todas las clases sociales un problema: el aborto”, “abortar es asesinar” o mi favorito: “con todo su contenido de vicio y corrupción”. Con esto nos hacemos una idea de por dónde irán los tiros…

El protagonista principal del film es el inspector Roland: nombre extranjero que aleja el film de España. Porque en España estas cosas no podían pasar, claro. Interpretado por un joven Máximo Valverde con un RIDICULÍSIMO bigotillo, Roland tiene un gran misterio entre manos: una mujer medio muerta aparece de repente en la calle. La investigación pronto apunta a una red clandestina de abortos, llevada por unos desalmados.

El caso más dramático es el de Ana (Emma Cohen / Caponata), la chica que descubre Roland, cuya historia vamos recomponiendo poco a poco a lo largo del film. La chica tiene una affaire con un hombre casado que resulta en un embarazo. La pobre se maldice por idiota e imbécil, aunque el caballero está más que dispuesto a hacerse cargo del pequeño. Pero Ana rechaza al tipo que al engañó, se vuelve loca por la experiencia y decide suicidarse.

El caso más ridículo es el de Menchu, una supuesta moderna / hippie que fornica con miembros de una pandilla ridícula con bombines en plan La naranja mecánica. Igual Iquino se pensó que la juventud era realmente así… Menchu tiene malas compañías, fuma (incluso un porro), mira pornografía y tiene sexo prematrimonial. Normal que acabe mal.

Si no tenéis bastante con todo esto, aún tenemos otros dos casos: una prostituta que se enamora de un chulo y una mujer casada que resulta tener un amante. Todas optan por interrumpir el embarazo, cosa que nunca haría una mujer como Dios manda. O caso todas, que una acaba viendo la luz gracias a su fe en Dios…

El inspector Roland sigue todos los casos hasta que consigue localizar a estos desalmados. Por supuesto, los abortistas están vinculados con una red de prostitución y son una panda de gente sin corazón, avariciosos y sin la más mínima empatía ni humanidad. Los abortos son siempre practicados en condiciones infrahumanas y terminan con las chicas muertas… Pero claro, si no hubieran sido unas golfas, no habrían acabado así.

El film es un cacao tremendo que buscando escandalizar a la sociedad del momento lo que consigue es aturullar al espectador. Los casos de las cuatro mujeres, flashbacks y la investigación del inspector se entremezclan de manera atropellada y confusa. La idea es que la peli fuera un no parar, siempre con el drama a tope: cuernos, asesinatos, violaciones, y que representara todas las clases sociales. Jóvenes ricas, obreras, casadas y putas: el aborto es esa plaga del siglo XX que afecta a todos por igual.

El uso de música clásica (de nuevo, imitando a La naranja mecánica) para ilustrar una exploitation con mensaje ultra-conservador hace todo aún más gracioso y delirante. Por no hablar de las canciones pop que ilustran el film, que destacan que aquí Led Zeppelin aún nos quedaba lejos y a la gente lo que le gustaba era Nino Bravo y Camilo Sesto, a pesar de mostrar ese tipo de hippies raros en plan El asesino de muñecas. El discurso es tan conservador como sensacionalista, y unido a la siempre nefasta dirección de Iquino da peli mediocre, risible y tremendamente machista. Era España en 1973, y su director contaba con 63 años. Tampoco se le podría pedir más. El movimiento incel está tardando en convertirla en peli de culto.

Iquino no tenía mayor intención que la de aprovechar un escándalo de moda, el de las chicas que iban a Londres a abortar, y apuntarse a la única opción que le iba a dar el régimen. Después, en democracia optó por otro enfoque haciendo pelis eróticas con lesbianas o ejemplos de “violación y venganza” con Los violadores del amanecer, abrazando lo de “contra la violación, castración”. ¿Mensaje? Pues a mí me da que el único que lo único que perseguía era forrarse y poco más.

La propia Emma Cohen comentó que, aunque le asqueaba la crítica al aborto libre, pensó que la película serviría como advertencia. ¿Contra el aborto? No, contra esas clínicas clandestinas con pocas garantías: “pensaba que, en el fondo, podía ser un mensaje para que la que quisiera abortar fuese a Londres o a Holanda a hacerlo, porque si lo hacía en España corría el riesgo de morir, como mi personaje”. Desde luego, tendría muchísima coña que alguna mujer tomara esa decisión tras ver una peli como esta.

The post ‘Aborto Criminal’: la peli más rancia y vergonzante del cine español appeared first on CINEMANÍA.

12 Aug 15:20

Piqueta para las viejas naves de Koipe

Las obras de la estación de buses acaban con una céntrica muestra de feísmo

12 Aug 15:19

Galiza apanda coa factura das grandes eléctricas

by X.M.Piñeiro
Galiza, malia ser excedentaria, vai pagar o recibo da luz máis caro do Estado para compensar as eléctricas polos impostos autonómicos que pagaron. Cada galega e galego desembolsará 16 euros fronte aos 30 céntimos por madrileña e madrileño...
12 Aug 15:18

A selección galega feminina, campioa de Europa de fútbol gaélico

by Redacción
Impúxose a Francia após forzar a prórroga e acabar facéndose co Euro2018. A selección masculina, subcampioa europea. Perdeu na final contra o combinado galo.
12 Aug 15:16

Matar a la Bruja Avería. Así rompió el PSOE 'La bola de cristal'

by Carlos Prieto

Se abre el telón y aparece una muñeca con malas pulgas -la Bruja Avería- a la que le salen cables y circuitos por todas partes. “¡Por Orticón, Saticón y Vidicón! Nadie sabe cómo detener la inflación”. “¡Ergios, watios y turbinas! produzco crisis y ruinas”, amenazaba Avería blandiendo un rayo letal. Si no hacías lo que ella quería, arruinaba tu negocio y te hacía explotar en mil pedazos. Así se las gastaban Los Electroduendes, una de las secciones más icónicas de ‘La bola de cristal’. O los títeres de cachiporra de toda la vida llevados a una nueva dimensión: parecía solo un divertimento inocente, pero era la lucha de clases explicada a los niños.

'La bola de cristal' se emitió los sábados por la mañana entre 1984 y 1988. Era un programa infantil, pero su objetivo declarado era tratar a los niños como adultos; por ello, no es raro que jóvenes y maduros acabaran enganchados a un programa que pulverizó sus previsiones de audiencia (de 100.000 espectadores a 5 millones).

Dirigido por Lolo Rico, surgió fruto de un momento cultural muy determinado: la primera legislatura del PSOE. ‘La bola de cristal’ se sirvió de la estética de la Movida (Alaska y Javier Gurruchaga ejercían de maestros de ceremonias; Loquillo, Santiago Auserón y Kiko Veneno también tuvieron su rol) para proponer una heterodoxa mezcla de marxismo pop, odas a la Ilustración y a la lectura y humor absurdo. ‘La bola’ se rió de casi todo el mundo -de la parte más frívola de la Movida a Thatcher y Felipe González- pero no a todo el mundo le hizo la misma gracia. Aunque ahora es considerado uno de los mejores programas de la historia de TVE, se canceló de mala manera -verano de 1988, hace ahora 30 años- y sus últimos meses fueron tortuosos, por los desencuentros entre el equipo de ‘La bola’, la dirección de TVE y el PSOE.

En efecto, el cierre de ‘La bola’ funciona como metáfora de la involución cultural del felipismo: según avanzaban los ochenta, la relación entre los padres de la Bruja Avería y los sucesivos directores de TVE -José María Calviño, Pilar Miró y Luis Solana- se fue haciendo más y más tensa… hasta que todo saltó por los aires.

Hablamos con cuatro miembros del equipo de ‘La bola de cristal’ sobre la fontanería política que llevó a RTVE a matar a la Bruja Avería.

La era Calviño (1984-1986)

Carlos Fernández Liria, guionista: “Los primeros años fueron tranquilos porque a nadie se le ocurrió mirar lo que estaba ocurriendo en un programa que se consideraba infantil y que se emitía el sábado por la mañana. Eso nos permitió hacer duras críticas sobre el papel político que estaba cumpliendo el PSOE en sus primeras legislaturas y que nosotros considerábamos una traición en toda regla a sus votantes y a las clases trabajadoras. Los cuatro guionistas que había en el programa puede decirse que éramos de extrema izquierda en esos momentos. Y el PSOE estaba aplicando los programas neoliberales de Margaret Thatcher y Ronald Reagan, haciendo una monstruosa reconversión industrial. Santiago Alba en sus guiones de Los Electroduendes convirtió al ministro de interior Barrionuevo en Barriovaudios, a Narcís Serra en Narciso Radar y así sucesivamente”.

Santiago Alba Rico, guionista: “Los dos primeros años fueron tranquilos o, más exactamente, de entera libertad. Calviño nunca intervino en los contenidos del programa”.

Carlos Fernández Liria: “Hubo algunas quejas, sobre todo de la embajada estadounidense y la embajada de Irán (Jomeini era intocable). Pero, en general, pasamos desapercibidos. Hubo un escritor malhumorado llamado Xavier Domingo, creo, que puso el grito en el cielo, cuando un día vio el programa por casualidad y se llevó las manos a la cabeza: nos acusó de estar contando ‘El capital’ de Marx en la tele (y era verdad), de estar apoyando a los gobiernos sandinistas y a las guerrillas latinoamericanas, y de estar diciendo todo el tiempo barbaridades de corte comunista contra el gobierno del PSOE. De todos modos, el programa siguió, había recibido ya muchos premios y tenía mucha fama, gracias entre otras cosas a las canciones de la Movida”.

La era Miró (1986-1988)

Matilde Fernández Jarrín, realizadora y subdirectora: “Pilar Miró no era muy consciente al principio de lo que era ‘La bola de cristal’. Lo más gracioso es que su hijo pequeño, Gonzalo, era fan nuestro, y se pasaba a veces por el rodaje. Sospechamos que todo empezó a ir mal el día que Pilar se levantó un sábado por la mañana en su casa, vio a su hijo viendo ‘La bola’, se sentó un rato a ver qué era aquello… y se le quedaron los ojos como platos [risas]”.

Francisco Quintanar, documentalista y realizador: “Pilar Miró cambió la dirección de programas infantiles. Dos nuevos productores ejecutivos comenzaron a hacer seguimiento del programa, cosa que nadie ajeno a 'La bola' había hecho hasta entonces: Lolo Rico tenía total autonomía sobre los contenidos. Lo que más les preocupaba eran Los Electroduendes: que si no eran exactamente para niños, que si criticaban a los políticos… esas cosas. Las presiones para que los programas infantiles no se metieran donde supuestamente no debían fueron en aumento. Quizá fue el principio del fin de ‘La bola de cristal’”.

Matilde Fernández Jarrín: “La dirección de programas infantiles empotró a uno de los suyos en la sala de montaje. Era un tío majísimo, eh, pero la situación empezó a ser insoportable: me sugería todo el rato cosas para cortar. Nunca nos había pasado. Todo eso me empezó a echar para atrás, llevaba varios años trabajando con libertad absoluta y no estaba de humor para aguantar aquello. Fue el inicio de un desgaste que acabó con mi salida del programa pocos meses antes de su final”.

Santiago Alba Rico: El PSOE jugó dos papeles: permitió el programa en 1984 y suspendió su emisión en 1988, con Pilar Miró como directora de TVE. Bajo su dirección el PSOE trató de controlar más el contenido de ‘La bola’, muy crítico con el propio Felipe González, pero también con la política de EEUU, cuya embajada llegó a protestar en una ocasión. Pilar Miró nos hacía llegar notas internas llamando la atención sobre aspectos de los guiones que no le gustaban y ‘regañándonos’, por así decirlo, por su carácter ferozmente satírico frente al gobierno. No le gustaba -recuerdo- que dobláramos discursos o intervenciones de Felipe González con propósito satírico y burlón”.

Matilde Fernández Jarrín: “Lo que hizo Pilar Miró fue censura pura y dura. Nos decía: no hay que meterse con Reagan, no hay que meterse con Thatcher, no hay que meterse con Felipe González. Pero, oye, ¿y entonces con quién nos metemos? [risas] Hay que entender que Pilar Miró era muy fan de Felipe González, sentía auténtica devoción por él. A ver, no es que la televisión pública fuera el paraíso con Calviño, también había control de los informativos, pero los programas culturales contaban con bastante autonomía, de ‘La bola de cristal’ a ‘La edad de oro’, lo que le venía bien a Calviño para vender que nunca había habido tanta libertad en RTVE como durante su mandato”.

Presión relativa

El programa musical ‘La edad de oro’ (1983/1985) protagonizó sonados escándalos esos años, su directora (Paloma Chamorro) acabó procesada y en los tribunales, y sufrió la ira de la derecha conservadora. No puede decirse lo mismo de ‘La bola de cristal’: más allá de unos cuantos artículos escandalizados por el “marxismo infantil” de Los Electroduendes, no sufrió ninguna campaña masiva en contra. No se puede alegar, por tanto, que el PSOE metiera mano a ‘La bola de cristal’ acosado por la oposición política. Más bien hubo un exceso de celo, según Fernández Jarrín, realizadora tanto de ‘La edad de oro’ como de ‘La bola’:

Matilde Fernández Jarrín: “Con ‘La bola’ no hubo ni de lejos la presión de ‘La edad de oro’. Creo que los padres dejaban a sus hijos viendo la tele los sábados por la mañana y nadie se entera muy bien de qué era aquello. Pasábamos bastante desapercibidos. No hubo una obsesión especial de la derecha con el programa. El problema no fue la derecha, sino Pilar Miró y su fascinación con Felipe González. Era un programa de humor que trataba a los niños como adultos, no había por qué ponerse tan nerviosos”.

El pacto

La gota que colmó la paciencia de Lolo Rico -directora de ‘La bola’- fue la purga de un sketch sobre el pijerío de la enseñanza privada en España. El director de programas de RTVE, José Antonio Abellán, dijo que no se podía emitir. Rico le pidió que le diera la orden por escrito, pero “jamás llegó”. Lo cuenta Rico en sus memorias:

“Decidí no decir nada a nadie, y al terminar el visionado del programa de todos los viernes me marché a casa. Dormí mal y, algo inhabitual en mí, la hora de inicio del programa me encontró sentada frente al televisor. Nunca lo hacía porque me angustiaba verlo al mismo tiempo que los espectadores, cuando los fallos eran ya irreparables. Aquel sábado fue una excepción: quería comprobar si habían sido cortadas sin mi autorización las imágenes censuradas. Era más importante de lo que puede parecer; a Paloma Chamorro, años antes, cuando dirigía ‘La edad de oro’, la demandaron por considerar inapropiadas unas escenas de tipo religioso que aparecieron en su programa. José María Calviño, entonces director general de RTVE, se eximió de toda responsabilidad alegando que los contenidos de los programas correspondían a sus directores y que nadie más que ellos tenían derecho a intervenir. Siendo así, tampoco ‘La bola de cristal’ debía meter nadie la tijera sin que yo lo hubiera permitido. Pero se hizo. El director de programas nunca dio una explicación. Pilar Miró no admitió mi dimisión cuando la puse sobre su mesa. Por fin, ante mi negativa a continuar en la dirección del programa, se llegó a un acuerdo”, escribe Rico.

Treinta años después, no es posible conocer la versión de los antiguos responsables de TVE sobre el fin de ‘La bola de cristal’: Pilar Miró, José Antonio Abellán, director de programas, y Blanca Álvarez, directora de infantiles, están muertos.

Según Lolo Rico, el pacto alcanzado con RTVE consistió en lo siguiente: 1) Rico continuaría de directora de ‘La bola de cristal’ hasta el final de curso para dar tiempo a TVE a buscar una sustituta. 2) A cambio, TVE ofreció al equipo de ‘La bola de cristal’ hacerse cargo de la adaptación de ‘Spitting Image’, marionetas satíricas salvajes que hacían furor en Inglaterra. La versión española se llamaría ‘Los pepones’.

“Cuando José Antonio Abellán ofreció ese cambalache de ‘Bola’ por ‘Pepones’, a todos nos gustó la idea y estuvimos unos meses trabajando en ella. Escogimos los personajes, encargamos los diseños y vigilamos la elaboración de los muñecos”, cuenta Rico en su biografía.

Pero RTVE acabaría dinamitando este acuerdo por diversos motivos. No hubo nuevos episodios de ‘La bola’ tras la salida de Rico. Lo de ‘Los pepones’, por su parte, acabó como el rosario de la aurora…

La era Solana (1989/1990)

Poco después de dejar de emitirse 'La bola', Pilar Miró dimitió acosada por un pequeño escándalo: la compra de unos vestidos de protocolo a cargo de TVE que, según la oposición, Miró vestía en sus ratos libres. Su sustituto al frente de TVE fue Luis Solana, pata negra del PSOE, hermano de Javier Solana, diputado durante la Transición y presidente de Telefónica tras el triunfo socialista en 1982. Pues bien: fue llegar Luis Solana a RTVE y activarse un inexorable mecanismo que acabaría con ‘Los pepones’ … y con el equipo de ‘La bola de cristal’ al completo. Se había acabado el 'jiji-jaja'.

En marzo de 1989, Luis Solana fue al Congreso -comisión de control- como nuevo presidente de RTVE. Ante la sorpresa general, Solana cargó contra un programa de la casa -’Los pepones’- que aún estaba en preproducción. Los muñecos, según él, “sobrepasan la sátira y bordean la agresión personal”, según recogió ABC.

Una estupefacta Lolo Rico solicitó reunirse con el director de RTVE, pero Solana alegó tener la agenda completa... permanentemente. Ante la imposibilidad de reunirse con él, Rico presentó su dimisión, pidió una excedencia en TVE y publicó una carta (sin respuesta) que había enviado a Solana.

"Como usted sabe, se me comunicó que la producción de ‘Los pepones’ se retrasaba hasta después de las elecciones generales, fecha en la que habría un ambiente político más distendido. Consideré que, como director general de RTVE, estaba usted en su derecho a poner o quitar de su programación lo que le pareciera oportuno coincidiera o no con mi criterio. Sin embargo, hay un hecho que por mi propia dignidad profesional y la de mi equipo me preocupa considerablemente: sus opiniones ante el Congreso de los Diputados", escribió la directora de ‘La bola de cristal’.

Rico no solo creía que Solana había descalificado el programa en sede parlamentaria, sino también que había mentido: "Debe tratarse de un malentendido, puesto que el programa nunca ha existido; no ha habido más cintas que una prueba de cámara realizada con los muñecos de Isabel Pantoja y Plácido Domingo interpretando una canción. ¿A quién agredimos? ¿En qué cintas? ¿Con qué muñecos? ¿Con qué guiones? Por más que medito no logro encontrar una respuesta", añadió.

La directora renunció a su puesto porque, según ella, no se podía realizar un programa piloto “sin un clima mínimo de libertad”. Lolo Rico -que llevaba 20 años en la casa y había escrito o dirigido programas infantiles emblemáticos como ‘La cometa blanca’, ‘Un globo, dos globos, tres globos’ y ‘La bola de cristal’, pasó a estar en la lista negra de RTVE.

Días después, Jorge Berlanga -escritor, crítico e hijo de Luis García Berlanga- publicó en ‘ABC’ una columna en la que criticaba la defenestración de Rico: “Hay que reconocerle a TVE el mérito de haber mantenido desde hace años un alto tono en las matinales de los sábados con imaginativos programas juveniles que suelen dar una alta medida de modernidad, habilidad para el entretenimiento y agilidad con conocimiento pleno de las posibilidades del medio televisivo… como la inolvidable ‘Bola de cristal’ de Lolo Rico, condenada también en la actualidad al ostracismo por ir por delante de la maquinaria pesada de la moral nacional”.

Todos a la calle

Carlos Fernández Liria: “Nos vino muy mal que Pilar Miró dimitiera a causa del escándalo de los vestidos esos... Fue Luis Solana el que liquidó al equipo de ‘La bola de cristal’, que, para entonces, había recibido el encargo de hacer ‘Los pepones’. Solana suprimió el proyecto y montó un escándalo monumental que se vivió como una auténtica censura. Los guionistas nos quedamos sin trabajo”.

Francisco Quintanar: “Lo de ‘Los pepones’ fue una liquidación en toda regla. Cuando estábamos en plena preproducción, Miró dimitió y entró Luis Solana. La nueva dirección volvió a dar el visto bueno al programa, pero un buen día Solana apareció por el Congreso y cargó sin más contra ‘Los pepones’. Nadie iba a burlarse de los políticos y de las autoridades españolas mientras él fuera el director de RTVE, vino a decir”.

Carlos Fernández Liria: “Nos reíamos de todos los políticos, no solo de Felipe González, pero es que a Luis Solana no le hizo gracia la idea de que se hicieran los ‘Spitting Image’ en España con nuestro equipo. Santiago Alba Rico y yo nos habíamos metido públicamente con Solana (en artículos y ensayos). Yo creo que nos odiaba y sencillamente acabó con el asunto”.

Francisco Quintanar: “Solana fue el brazo ejecutor, pero esas decisiones nunca las toma una sola persona. El contexto es relevante: son los meses en los que aumenta el control en los informativos de TVE, tras entrar María Antonia Iglesias. El PSOE estaba de los nervios por los primeros casos de corrupción. En el partido no tenían ninguna gana de que vinieran unos muñecos a reírse de ellos. Se había acabado la fiesta”.

Santiago Alba Rico: “La suspensión de ‘La bola’ coincidió, de forma a mi juicio reveladora, con la ley de las televisiones privadas y, por lo tanto, con el cambio en el modelo de la televisión pública”.

Un año después de la suspensión de ‘Los pepones’, se estrenó una versión afeitada y purgada (sin guionistas de ‘La bola de cristal’) del programa llamada ‘Los Muñegotes’. Pasó sin pena ni gloria.

Luis Solana duró poco más de un año al frente de RTVE, pero según una irónica columna de Vázquez Montalbán, se fue a casa con el trabajo hecho: “Consuélate, oh Solana, que te has ido al paro, de momento, con la conciencia del deber casi cumplido: el PSOE casi conserva la mayoría absoluta”. Todo en orden, circulen, aquí no ha pasado nada. ¡Ergios, watios y turbinas! produzco crisis y ruinas.

12 Aug 15:11

Why Nintendo Will Never Defeat Retro Gamers

by Andy

The past few weeks have been pretty bad for fans of the retro gaming scene. Following action by Nintendo, two ROM platforms shut down in response to a lawsuit and another, EmuParadise, voluntarily stopped providing game downloads.

While these events have probably resulted in congratulations being shared among colleagues back in Kyoto, few gamers will join in the celebrations. Quite simply, most don’t understand why the company chooses to be so aggressively protective.

For the purposes of this discussion, let’s work on the assumption that distributing and obtaining ROMs in order to play retro games is the same as any other kind of piracy. It breaches the rights of gaming companies and can result in a copyright lawsuit, like the one leveled at LoveROMS.com and LoveRETRO.co.

Now let’s view this from the position of the average retro gamer. Obtaining ROMs, in order to play retro games, does no harm. The titles themselves are often decades old, run on obsolete hardware, and have already covered their costs a thousand times over.

With all that in mind and considering many gamers are currently buying new games, they’ll be wondering what the hell the problem is and why gaming companies are being such assholes?

It is this disconnect, between the positions of gaming companies and fans of their historical creations, that causes so much confusion. Surely, if gaming companies like Nintendo or former arcade giants like Taito or Namco want to exploit their catalogs, they would already be doing so with comprehensive game packs and devices?

Of course, over the years this has happened to a limited extent, with games companies digging into back catalogs to create products like the NES Classic and Atari Flashback, but these barely scratch the surface of what is already available unofficially.

It cannot be denied that Nintendo has produced some of the greatest games of all time, with titles such as Super Mario 64 guaranteed a spot in history for being both ground-breaking and absolutely magical. But despite its incredible ability to manipulate players’ emotions in ways other developers never have, Nintendo seems to underestimate the emotions experienced by retro gamers every time they play.

This week, when EmuParadise ceased offering downloads, site founder MasJ revealed some of the touching stories emulator fans have shared over the years.

“We’ve had emails from soldiers at war saying that the only way they got through their days was to be lost in the retro games that they played from when they were children,” he wrote.

“We’ve got emails from brothers who have lost their siblings to cancer and were able to find solace in playing the games they once did as children. There are countless stories like these.”

As these examples show, classic games from many years ago have the ability to trigger waves of nostalgia that can be beautifully overwhelming. From associating a particular title with a specific time and place in personal history to stirring memories of long-since disappeared yet cherished friendships, the emotions are like nothing else in the gaming world.

“When we experience nostalgia we tend to feel happier, have higher self-esteem, feel closer to loved ones and feel that life has more meaning. And on a physical level, nostalgia literally makes us feel warmer,” explained psychology lecturer Erica Hepper, Ph.D. in a 2013 interview.

One has to understand the power of this emotional attachment to appreciate why retro gamers are so passionate about their pastime. Retro games provide a fix that no modern game – despite their technical brilliance – will be able to provide for another 10 or 20 years, until they too become old and soaked with distant memories.

Retro games are able to transport players back in time, from stolen moments in high school to the arcades that first exposed many of us to video games themselves. From the moment they view the intoxicating attract mode on the brilliant Hyperspin, they’re transported back. And when that first coin hits the virtual slot of any number of emulators, nirvana has truly arrived.

It is this shared appreciation of the beauty of retro gaming that holds communities like the one found at EmuParadise together. While the site no longer offers ROMs, its members have entire libraries of games at their disposal and nothing short of Nintendo physically turning up at their homes will stop them from enjoying them.

“People absolutely love and adore these games. They are a part of their personality, their childhood, their culture,” MasJ told TF. “These tiles are also a part of our shared human history. People will find a way to get their game on.”

More importantly, perhaps, those players will also share their ROMs with whomever they like which, according to experts, seems more likely when nostalgia is involved.

“In strongly nostalgic states, individuals are shown to be more likely to commit to volunteering or other expressions of altruism,” a 2014 piece in the Guardian notes.

“In group situations, those with induced nostalgia not only tend to feel more closely bonded with the group but also more willing to form intimate associations with strangers and to be freer in their thinking.”

This sounds like the perfect breeding ground for ROM sharing but it’s just a small taste of what drives communities like EmuParadise. It’s also important to note that the mindset behind ROM ‘piracy’ is unlike that commonly associated with movies, TV shows or music.

While the latter are largely available to potential purchasers, most ROMs only exist in unofficial form. There is no way of paying games companies for the pleasure of playing most of them since they’re simply not for sale and especially not in the required all-you-can-eat format.

“Unfortunately the video game industry is quite fragmented so unless the big publishers get on board, a Netflix-style system is nigh impossible,” MasJ says.

“However, the industry and the technology at this point in time is mature enough and consumers are also primed to pay for something of this sort. The only thing left to do is build it. I’m pretty sure either Nintendo, or Sega, or anyone else would be successful if they tried to do it.”

This glaring lack of legal alternatives means that most ‘black market’ retro gamers don’t think they’re committing a crime, which is a huge stumbling block for enforcement. When there is no respect or support for the law, people have few qualms about breaking it. Indeed, due to the massive time invested in retro gamers’ ROM collections, prising ROMs from players’ cold, dead hands might be the only forceful solution to this problem.

So with three major sites now out of the ROM equation and no sensible legal options available, is it now ‘Game Over’ for retro gamers? Will they walk away defeated or will more resources appear to fill in the gaps?

“I don’t think ROMs will be harder to find,” MasJ predicts.

“Perhaps it’ll take a while for another reliable resource to come up and become popular but the bottom line is that people want to play these games. So if you don’t offer than any legal way to do it, they’ll figure out another way.”

Unfortunately for companies like Nintendo, retro gamers have grown accustomed to everlasting credits and it won’t be long before the familiar yet depressing minor key tones associated with character death transform into the chirpy and optimistic tones heralding “Ready Player One”.

Source: TF, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing, torrent sites and more. We also have VPN reviews, discounts, offers and coupons.

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Del VHS al riesgo de desaparición: así sobrevive el último videoclub de Ferrol

by Salgado
Marifé Carreras regenta J&M, el último videoclub de Ferrol (foto: Mero Barral / 13fotos para Ferrol360)

Marifé Carreras regenta J&M, el último videoclub de Ferrol (foto: Mero Barral / 13fotos para Ferrol360)

RAÚL SALGADO / MERO BARRAL | Ferrol | Viernes 10 agosto 2018 | 20:45

Lejos del bullicio de cualquier arteria comercial o centro de ocio. Allí reside el que resiste. El único videoclub que sigue latiendo en Ferrol está en el tramo final de la calle Río Castro, a unos metros de la plaza de Rosalía de Castro. En una manzana de sombra, casi sin comercios que la abriguen. Es J&M.

Pleno verano, acceder a su amplio local es todo un hallazgo. Un regreso al pasado para los que teníamos el carné de socio de alguno de los pioneros. Y que vimos surgir aquellas tiendas de despacho de cintas vía máquina, prólogo muy lejano de los vending que hoy afloran por doquier con lo inimaginable en sus entrañas.

Marifé Carreras aguanta el tipo de la mano de su hijo. «Vamos tirando», replica a pie de mostrador. Lideró el proyecto junto a su marido, ahora jubilado del astillero. Un horario extenso demuestra que no será por falta de servicio. De lunes a domingo, hasta las once de la noche.

Marifé Carreras regenta J&M, el último videoclub de Ferrol (foto: Mero Barral / 13fotos para Ferrol360)

Marifé Carreras regenta J&M, el último videoclub de Ferrol (foto: Mero Barral / 13fotos para Ferrol360)

Con los inconvenientes de algún que otro vacío legal, como los relativos a aquellos que no devuelven lo adquirido, o un particular cóctel de elementos adversos que ponen en riesgo todo un sector. Nacidos en 2000, lo que ahora encaran no tiene «nada que ver» con aquellos buenos inicios. Eso sí, este tipo de consumo «ya empezaba a ir a menos».

Se acumulan las sensaciones en una charla que se hace apasionante con los minutos, piensas en cómo ha cambiado nuestra manera de ver cine. O el simple hecho de que nos hayamos alejado de él para entregarnos a otros divertimentos menos exigentes con nuestras mentes. Han hecho mella «pirateo y descargas», pero también «la crisis» y los manteros.

Los precios siguen siendo prácticamente simbólicos, con novedades por 1,50 euros al día por semana y unos céntimos más por dos jornadas en fin de semana. Hay promociones de dos al precio de una. Lo cierto es que van apareciendo unos cuantos clientes mientras hablamos con Marifé. Devuelven, buscan o compran golosinas, expuestas en un importante lateral.

Marifé Carreras regenta J&M, el último videoclub de Ferrol (foto: Mero Barral / 13fotos para Ferrol360)

Marifé Carreras regenta J&M, el último videoclub de Ferrol (foto: Mero Barral / 13fotos para Ferrol360)

Añade la responsable del bajo, que adquirieron en su momento, que tampoco han ayudado las nuevas operadoras audiovisuales, que brindan rapidez frente a la calma del cine clásico. Su fondo llegó a atesorar 9.000 películas, de las que no quedan rastros en el caso del VHS primigenio.

Todo se ha visto alterado, hasta los juegos de consola, en constante evolución frente a unos importes de alquiler que son los «mismos desde que abrimos». Carreras justifica el declive por el hecho de que mucha «gente se ha ido de Ferrol; joven, muchísima». Sin embargo, acaban volviendo, aunque sea en vacaciones, e irrumpen de nuevo por allí, pero ya es todo distinto.

Una debacle de alcance estatal que se ha cobrado 15.000 empleos en cuestión de pocos años y que en Ferrol hizo saltar de una veintena a un solo videoclub casi en el mismo período. Ya hay menos títulos antiguos, pero «todas las semanas hay nuevas». Tardan menos que antes, de hecho, en llegar a la venta.

Marifé Carreras regenta J&M, el último videoclub de Ferrol (foto: Mero Barral / 13fotos para Ferrol360)

Marifé Carreras regenta J&M, el último videoclub de Ferrol (foto: Mero Barral / 13fotos para Ferrol360)

Ese séptimo arte de palomitas es el más demandado, pero la fórmula del J&M «tiende a desaparecer». «Llegamos a tener dos empleadas; el IVA aquí no baja, del 16 al 18 y del 18 al 21 %», resalta Marifé, que deja claro que el «cine es cultura; ayuda, ninguna».

Una actividad abandonada a su suerte en la cual «pago el 21 % del alquiler, pero la película no la he amortizado». Y en caso de que te «lleven la película no hay seguro ni nada que cubra». Por si acaso, se armaron con una «máquina para reparar» las que vuelven defectuosas.

La titular no se atreve a concretar horizontes temporales para una reconversión eternamente esperada: «Los hábitos han cambiado, las redes sociales han quitado bastante». También se notan los vaivenes de clientela en función de «vacaciones o fútbol, mueven muchísimo».

Marifé Carreras regenta J&M, el último videoclub de Ferrol (foto: Mero Barral / 13fotos para Ferrol360)

Marifé Carreras regenta J&M, el último videoclub de Ferrol (foto: Mero Barral / 13fotos para Ferrol360)

Eso sí, Marifé Carreras se reivindica: «Es barato, escoges película y la pagas cuando quieres; 1,50 euros, tiene más calidad que el pirateo». Aporta, además, la elección de idioma que no proporciona la «competencia desleal, la que abunda». «Llegamos a tener más de 9.000 socios», desvela; llegaron o tienen, ya que bajas como tales no constan.

Parte de su receta ante el temporal, que nunca «hemos gastado más de lo que hemos ganado»; por contra, pese a que se adecúan a los nuevos tiempos, hay más ejemplos de inclemencias. Tienen, es uno de ellos, «películas en 3D, pero la gente no cuenta con televisores» adaptados.

Quizá no sea necesaria excesiva publicidad en uno de los que ya figura entre los más antiguos de España: «Lo que más funciona es el boca a boca, J&M lo conoce todo Ferrol».

JM


ÁLBUM: J&M, el último videoclub de Ferrol; pincha en la imagen superior para abrir la galería

El problema puede residir, en cambio, en una masa crítica menguante, en una población que ha relegado a secundarias ciertas prácticas antes indiscutibles, aunque las puertas del último videoclub de Ferrol siguen sonriendo a la llegada de cada visitante. «Aguantaremos hasta el final».

(Fotos: Mero Barral© / 13fotos – 2018. TODOS LOS DERECHOS RESERVADOS.)